This will be a long-form text in three parts. It was written by request of Soz, for a donation of 50 EURMTL. The work took nearly a full month. For ordinary questions with attached donations, this is indecently long, but I recall that back when Bitarch didn’t yet publish on my channel himself but commissioned me to write long-reads, the pace was comparable. Unfortunately, I struggle to keep large concepts in my head, so as the volume of the task increases, the working time increases in a clearly non-linear proportion: a couple of days for a Telegram-format post, a month for a long-read, a year and a half for an 84-page book…
The task from the client was formulated not very clearly, but it amounted to creating and presenting a conciliatory narrative for the Montelibero community, which is currently experiencing internal friction due to differences in approaches to achieving the movement’s goals.
It seemed appropriate to me to expand the topic slightly, but not so much that the final recipes would be inapplicable to the specific community.
Part 1. Why don’t libertarians like contracts?
There is an opinion that libertarians adore contracts and almost pray to them. This is not true. Libertarians, for the most part, have a fairly ordinary system of values, and therefore they do not like contracts. What they love, like all normal people, is an atmosphere of openness and mutual trust. Anyone who claims otherwise most likely loved it once too, but their trust was betrayed.
What is trust? It is the conviction that the counterparty will sincerely defend your interests, and if they conflict with his own, he will still try to take yours into account as much as possible, and if necessary, occasionally compromise his own. Openness, on the other hand, means that the counterparties provide full and reliable information about their interests and other facts related to the subject of interaction. How could one not love this?
This is precisely why libertarians prefer to gather in communities. In a circle of people sharing common values, trust is usually higher, and if these values are libertarian, then—especially in business matters—mutual trust may, to an outsider, even border on naivety.
A contract, however, is a product of mutual distrust. Please state exactly what you will demand from me and what you are ready to give me in return, and what tools we have to compel each other to comply with what is written. And further clarify the meaning of the terms, so that it doesn’t emerge in court that you meant something completely different from what you hinted to me…
It’s not that libertarians completely neglect contracts when making deals among themselves, but usually it is just a brief summary of a chat conversation, purely so as not to forget: I borrow so much, for such a term, at such a rate, payments in equal monthly installments on the first of the month. The higher the trust, the more nuances are left out.
Trust in deals and the ability to rely on people to defend your interests is a huge treasure, as it reduces transaction costs to a negligible minimum, and thus ensures maximum market efficiency. But this treasure, unfortunately, is very fragile.
Trust can be destroyed by a fraudster. This is a very banal risk, and it is partially mitigated by simple tenure in the community. The longer a fraudster is forced to maintain an impeccable reputation to gain trust, the larger the deal he needs to scam the counterparty and ultimately still end up in profit.
But trust can also be destroyed by a pedant. Someone who, in a libertarian community, will demand as detailed a contract as possible, and then start insisting that it be followed to the letter—is a repulsive counterparty. He literally positions himself as an outsider, saying that you are all suspicious types ready to scam anyone at the first opportunity. Therefore, here are ten pages of fine print in tooth-grinding legal jargon, now let’s go get it notarized, and here we have a state court specified, and here is the penalty for delay, and so on and so forth.
Therefore, libertarian communities tend to reject both fraudsters and nitpickers, striving to preserve the innocent simplicity of trust-based relationships. But consistent rejection also requires conscious and unpleasant effort. A fraudster can be charming, and if he hasn’t personally scammed you, there is a temptation to continue being friendly with him. A pedant can be a strong professional, and this provides an incentive to tolerate him despite all the discomfort of communication.
Therefore, in real libertarian communities, complete ostracism is rare. Usually, a community member who causes repulsion is simply pushed to the periphery. There, he can either reshape his behavior and over time return closer to the core, or remain in the vague status of a partial outcast, or leave the community of his own volition. So, libertarian communities are quite resilient to problems with individual people, and these do not have a noticeable impact on the atmosphere of trust. However, another phenomenon is far more dangerous. A split.
Part 2. Why don’t libertarians like corporations?
There is an opinion that the world of victorious libertarianism is a war of corporations. Having read the first part, it is easy to conclude that this is also not true. But it is not that simple.
Communities whose members share libertarian values are capable of having a very high level of internal trust. However, libertarian communities usually have not only values but also goals. Their members do not like the outside world, where freedom is quite poor, and they strive to somehow combine the efforts of community members to influence the outside world and make it freer. This noble aspiration, alas, is capable of leading to rather sad results.
In order to turn a community into a movement—that is, to prompt community members to achieve a certain goal—this goal must be either quickly and verifiably achievable, even at the cost of serious effort (for example, a movement to abolish some repressive law), or easily broken down into stages that obviously bring one closer to the final goal (for example, a movement for EU accession, for which there is a checklist of requirements).
However, it may turn out that the goal looks tempting but suffers from a lack of specificity in implementation (for example, making Montenegro a free country). In this case, several movements may arise around the goal, differing in their ideas of exactly how this goal is achieved. For example, part of the community decides to focus on political transformations in Montenegro, and another part on building an economy independent of the state. And another part declares that it does not wish to adhere to the proposed goal and is satisfied simply living in accordance with its values (that is, remaining just a community).
The situation is exacerbated if certain activities of the movement appear from the outside not only as not bringing it closer to the declared goal, but as completely contradicting it. For example, if the goal is a free society, then any regulations of communications and business relations can easily be declared as contradicting the final goal, even if they perform an important tactical task of lowering the heat of conflict in a dispute or improving coordination in a working group.
Add to this the natural isolation of participants of one movement from participants of another movement—and soon we will inevitably see that the level of trust between several movements within one community has decreased, despite the continuing unity of basic values.
This isolation is further strengthened if a movement is formalized into a corporation. What was simply the coordination of people united by a goal has become management procedures, delegation of authority, setting tasks for working groups, accounting and control—in short, the methods familiar to all of us for making an activity more efficient.
Against the backdrop of such complication of the primary community, those who try to return to the happy past, criticizing the present, are perceived as gloomy retrogrades denying any movement toward the goal.
Thus, a relatively homogeneous community cannot move in a coordinated way toward any complex goal. But with the appearance of structures for achieving complex goals, it, firstly, still cannot move anywhere entirely in a coordinated manner, and secondly, it also loses the atmosphere of trust. What is to be done?
Part 3. How can libertarians maintain a balance of trust and efficiency?
It is quite easy to determine from the outside how great the internal unity of aspirations is in a community. If they argue about fundamental questions, then there is no unity. It is simply a discussion platform, a community united by the value of discussion as such, not its subject. If, however, disputes are over trifles, it means that agreement on basic things was reached long ago; it isn’t even discussed. This does not, however, make disputes over minor details less ridiculous and potentially less destructive.
The devil begins with the foam on the lips of an angel who has entered the fight for a holy right cause. The best path to a community split is animal seriousness in trifles (recall the pedant from the first part). Subconsciously understanding the certain comicality of their position, the disputant in a polemical frenzy begins to accuse opponents of violating basic value principles. Thereby making it clear that they perceive opponents as strangers who somehow ended up in the community.
Therefore, the first rule for a libertarian community that does not want splits is: everyone here is a libertarian. That is, they agree among themselves regarding the basic principles of their ideology.
The second rule develops the first: do not demand ideological purity from others. One can call oneself not just a libertarian, but an agorist. One can gather a bunch of agorists around oneself. But claiming to other libertarians that, for instance, you are not agorists and therefore are latent etatists is a bad idea.
The third rule generalizes the second: excessive detailing is harmful. The more detailed some description, some contract, some charter, or some rules are worked out, the more likely it is that reality will not fit the description, rules will be violated, and the charter will be interpreted based on immediate benefit. A good document is brief, evocative, and strives to capture precisely the spirit of what one wanted to express.
The fourth rule develops the third: an alliance is better than a merger. If a certain group can exist autonomously—let it exist. If it faces a task that it cannot handle on its own, let it enter into an alliance with other groups. If, instead of solving the task, the groups start merging into a single organization to solve the task, all the momentum will be spent on arranging the merger process.
The fifth rule is an antithesis to the fourth: do not judge what is better for others. If, for example, some groups have already merged into something that seems unnaturally large, there is no need to panic and declare war on them. Either they are fine with it, or they will eventually split up on their own. It is better to contact individual members of that group, applying the fourth rule.
One could continue to fantasize, but five rules are already a lot, see the third rule. Therefore, I will limit myself to what has been stated, and in conclusion, I will briefly summarize all three parts of the text.
- Trust is what libertarians unite for in communities. Trust must not be destroyed, otherwise the community loses its meaning.
- Organization is what without which a community will not move toward a goal. But organization devours trust, and thus destroys the community.
- A balance between trust and efficiency is possible, but it is not achieved automatically. One can formulate several rules, the observance of which will help maintain the balance.
Do not be your own enemies; we already have enough enemies from the outside.
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