Автор: Анкап-тян

Learned helplessness, the illusion of control, and agorism

Mikhail Pozharsky has released a very good video about the illusion of control. Be sure to watch it in full if you haven’t already, and I, as usual, will provide the key points as I understand them.

  1. The experience of falling into a hopeless situation (one in which the subject’s position does not depend on their efforts) triggers the development of learned helplessness.
  2. Learned helplessness sharply reduces the subject’s competitive potential in situations where their actions actually do make a difference.
  3. An important psychological defense against learned helplessness is the illusion of control. In a hopeless situation, one can believe that something still depends on them, and thus learned helplessness will not arise.
  4. However, the rituals of psychological defense designed to create an illusion of control can themselves worsen the hopeless situation.
  5. Therefore, the skill of reflection is more effective, where the subject analyzes what they can actually control and what they cannot, and does not waste strength on the illusion of control, accepting force majeure as it is.
  6. Such a skill is formed through the experience of independently finding a way out of difficult situations, and in no other way.
  7. Therefore, creating cumbersome centralized structures and shifting the responsibility for everything onto them is an illusion of control, whereas a real fight against difficulties implies a decentralized approach based on personal responsibility. Period.

This is why, having outlined three main paths toward ancap — minarchism, panarchism, and agorism — I pay special attention specifically to agorism.

One can start a political party, like the big shots do, hold rallies, like the big shots do, and believe that through political pressure you are somehow influencing the policies pursued by the authorities — and when asked why life isn’t getting better, answer that the efforts undertaken are insufficient, and not a hundred thousand, but a million people must take to the streets.

One can propose reforms to create functional competing jurisdictions, dream of Facebook citizenship or the Bitnation project, and when asked why none of this is being implemented, answer that everything is heading that way anyway, but it would be good to double the propaganda efforts.

Or one can simply make a deal and not pay a tax. Or bypass an inconvenient ban. Or invent a service that is useful to people but invisible to the state’s servants. This is no longer an illusion of control. This is control itself. Through such things, a person learns to independently find a way out of difficult situations. And if they find themselves in conditions where they cannot control the possibility of getting out of the situation, they will already be resistant to learned helplessness, and will not fall back on rituals for the sake of an illusion of control.

One can remain an atheist in the trenches under fire. While one is shitting their pants and another is praying, the agorist digs the trench deeper.

https://youtu.be/pJuUbGwYH1Q

How to be an agorist and engage in ordinary business with the minimum possible payment of taxes?

For example, I want to open a cafe. Opening a cafe in the city center, I run a high risk of losing money to the state. How can I avoid this, and is it even worth risking opening an illegal business in modern Russia with a physical space and people inside? It feels like agorism right now is only about selling substances, but I don’t want to sell substances on Tor; I want to run, for example, a cafe, and there is absolutely not that kind of anonymity—you need people to know about it, and it needs to be out in the open. That is completely different from the substances market, for instance, where you can do business via Tor. Furthermore, if some problems with the authorities arise, the courts and law enforcement are monopolized, and no one will protect me from the arbitrary actions of tax officials. What should I do? Wait until avoiding taxes becomes the norm? Grease palms with bribes? Then the money will go to government officials and increase their interest in creating problems (so there would be more bribes). It’s some kind of vicious circle.

The question is accompanied by a donation in the amount of 0.0001985 btc

Agorist practices always imply a certain solidarity between counterparties against the state; this is what you should focus on when figuring out how to build your shadow business. For instance, if you set up a tax-free establishment in an open square in the city center, you have only one chance to avoid repressive pressure from the state: if, in response to such attempts, your customers immediately shoot the state representatives to hell, and the state knows this in advance. Outside the Chechen Republic, you cannot count on this, so let’s move on.

Since we are talking about the catering sector, I would suggest a different business model. Find a business center that isn’t too posh, with a lax access regime, visit every office, and present your simple commercial proposal—that every working day during the lunch break, you are ready to deliver a hot set meal at a fixed low price, with payment in cash. Here is a link to a Telegram bot; every morning until 11:00, an order can be placed by choosing one of three set meals, and from 13:45 to 14:15, the order will be delivered to the office. That, essentially, is the whole model. You will need to rent a kitchen space as a private individual, hire staff under the table—and get to work. You don’t even have to introduce yourself by any name; your name is the Telegram bot. Oh, and you’ll also need to spend some money on writing the bot. Alternatively, the bot can be replaced by a website, but that depends only on how widespread Telegram is in your city.

By the way, to avoid walking around with your advertisements in vain, when you promote your hot lunch service, bring some tasty pastries with you; they’ll go down great in offices whether it’s closer to lunch or closer to five o’clock. Then you won’t just be “some guy who came by with brochures,” but “those people with the buns who can also bring hot lunches.”

Of course, this model works better when there is some life in the offices, so the period of total self-isolation is not the best time to start such a business. On the other hand, right now you can organize free meals for doctors in hospitals, funded by donations. Some NGOs are already doing this; nothing stops you from starting to hone your organizational skills right now. Any charitable organization spends part of the collected funds on its own needs, so, as long as you aren’t greedy, you will at least be able to provide a minimal income for yourself and your employees, plus earn a reputation and visibility, and the object of charity will be grateful to you and, if necessary, will provide a ventilator out of turn.

Of course, this idea is not new, but there will be space for agorism in this sphere for a long time, especially outside the capitals

Strategies in a crisis

Vladimir Milov has started a “on quarantine” section in his video blog and has released two videos in it so far. In the first, he gives a rough outline for employees, and in the second, he offers some tips for small businesses. It is better, of course, to watch them in full, but I will point out the moments that I consider important.

  1. This is for the long haul. If you are already suffering losses right now, you should not expect to simply wait out the absolute clusterfuck; you need to work on reducing them immediately.
  2. The state will not help. You should demand as much as possible from it and as loudly as possible, but you should not seriously base your plans on state support.
  3. Being assholes is unprofitable. The state has not declared force majeure, it does not compensate for losses, and it does not curb its appetites. If we start eating each other now, it is a path to nowhere. It is important to reach amicable agreements among yourselves, since this has hit everyone. As for the assholes, they can be shown the full power of the institution of reputation.

I will stop separately at the third point. Milov advises adjusting your consumption model so as to buy only from those who meet ethical criteria: feeding doctors free lunches, caring for animals, paying employees’ salaries instead of sending them on unpaid leave – and so on.

Indeed, the role of every consumer has significantly increased now, and it largely depends on them which business survives and which does not. But I would recommend adding one more, and very important, selection criterion to all the others: how much this business kicks back to the state. Feeding the state with one’s taxes has always been a burdensome moral compromise, but now it is becoming almost a crime. Previously, one could work under the table and be indifferent to the fact that the state takes VAT from your purchases. Now it is important. In conditions of people’s impoverishment, the growing tax collections of the Russian government are a demonstration of sheer madness on the part of the citizens.

Therefore, when choosing whom to buy, say, food from, orient yourself primarily on this. Pickles or potatoes at the bazaar are an excellent placement of money. Buying from a farm kiosk is great, but it’s even better if it’s from a car and without a cash register. Buying at a local store – only if it is not a chain and is on a simplified tax system (the absence of VAT can be seen on the receipt).

The best moral choice for any small business today is to go underground. Closing officially and continuing to serve clients by personal agreement is a measure that will allow not only to plug the hole through which your money leaks to the state, but also to accelerate the development of horizontal ties. It is time to expand contact lists, acquire personal plumbers, hairdressers, doctors – and clients, of course.

In order to refuse service to the security forces, the atmosphere in society has not yet heated up enough, but it already makes sense to have soul-saving conversations with them. Like, you are state employees, you’ll survive on your salary, it’s harder for the private sector. So don’t get in the way, don’t interfere with work – don’t tempt fate.

The next stage of rejecting the regime after going underground is usually sabotage, diversion, and guerrilla warfare: destroying surveillance cameras, smashing FNS offices, setting fire to police cars and other cute trifles, but one should not bother with nonsense. If it is possible to achieve total non-compliance with state orders without violent excesses – then all the better for all of us.

And when Putin leaves, and some Navalny takes his place, then it is important to immediately put him before the fact: things will not be as they were. An efficient state is a cheap state. The cheaper it is for the citizens, the more grounds it has to expect that its polite requests will be fulfilled. As for any demands from the state in the beautiful Russia of the future, citizens should have a simple and quick answer: fuck off – that way. And point in the direction where today’s dictator was sent.

Speculation during an emergency

A few days ago, the New York police arrested Baruch Feldheim, who had pre-emptively bought up 192,000 masks and 600,000 gloves (and many other goodies) to later sell them to medical professionals and ordinary citizens with a massive markup (around 700%).
How would anarcho-capitalism deal with such speculation during emergencies?
On one hand, he acted exclusively through market methods and sought to maximize profit; on the other, his actions could very well have cost someone their life.

Slava Mahorkin

So, imagine it is the era of ancap; everything is calm in New York, while there is some local epidemic in China. No one cares about it, no one is panic-buying masks and gloves, no one is closing borders, and at the hour destined by fate, the epidemic breaks out in New York. Suddenly, everyone rushes for PPE, instantly clearing out the small warehouse stocks, and collapse ensues. Later, of course, everything will resolve itself—supplies will be brought in from where there is no epidemic, production will be expanded, and so on. But at first, there will be chaos.

Now let’s consider another scenario. There is some local epidemic in China, no one cares about it, but the vigilant Baruch Feldheim is already buying up masks and gloves. Pharmacies face increased demand, order more, and just in case, raise prices by about ten percent. Blogs write about the price hikes, linking them to the distant Chinese epidemic, and now other anxious people start flocking to pharmacies, just in case. As a result of the increased demand, PPE production begins to increase long before the epidemic reaches the USA. Consequently, when it does happen, it is met fully prepared: output has increased, warehouses are full, and everyone who wanted to protect themselves can do so. Riding the wave of hype even before the arrival of the epidemic, Baruch Feldheim sells most of his stocks at double the price, making a good profit, and keeps the rest for personal use or to sell even higher if the occasion arises.

And finally, let’s consider a third scenario. There is some local epidemic in China, no one cares about it, but the vigilant Baruch Feldheim is already buying up masks and gloves. Pharmacies face increased demand, order more, and just in case, raise prices by about ten percent. Blogs write about the price hikes, linking them to the distant Chinese epidemic, and now other anxious people start flocking to pharmacies, just in case. Meanwhile, the epidemic in China is localized and fizzles out. The vigilant citizens find themselves sitting on a pile of junk, pharmacies are overstocked, PPE prices drop, and gradually the unlucky entrepreneurs sell off their illiquid remains, recording small losses or even breaking even if they manage to maneuver skillfully.

Speculation is an attempt to earn money by predicting the future. If the speculation succeeds, the future turns out better for both the speculator and those who bought from him. If it fails, it is the speculator’s problem. But if a society develops a habit of punishing the speculator for his success, then the second and third scenarios described above will be closed off to him. No one looks to the future; everyone looks warily at their neighbors, fearing they might provoke envy and get punched in the face.

Yesterday I wrote about Somalia and mentioned a lecture by Vladimir Zolotorev, where he talks about Somali law. Capitalism did not happen there precisely because any personal success is considered accidental luck, and its fruits must be shared with the clan. The same nonsense reigned in Melanesia and among North American Indians with their potlatch culture; the same thing happens in today’s USA, although, it would seem, Indians have long since stopped living on Manhattan.

Raider carrying away the loot

Fall of the Black Hawk

Yesterday, after I finished editing the article on the inefficiency of violence, I sat down to watch the movie “Black Hawk Down,” which I came across while following links related to the article. The film focuses on the episode mentioned in the article: how the US was forced to leave Somalia after the failure of what they considered a peacekeeping operation—losing nearly two dozen special forces operators in a single day and killing around a thousand locals in a dense urban environment, without much regard for who was a combatant and who was not.

In 2001, when Black Hawk Down was released, I was more interested in things like The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, which came out around the same time, but I’m glad I finally got to it; the movie is excellent. However, I want to talk not about the plot in general or the visual quality, but about literally two moments that were key for me personally, and to which all other narrative serves, in my view, merely as illustration.

The first moment is around the eighteenth minute. The Rangers are discussing a fact from a thin brochure they were given titled “All About Somalia”: if one local kills another, his clan must pay the clan of the deceased a hundred camels. To this, one of the soldiers notes that he couldn’t even afford one camel, and the locals must all be in debt now. And now, let’s listen to a lecture by Vladimir Zolotorev:

I am providing a link exactly to the moment where he explains how the civil war in Somalia was effectively stopped by a court decision: the combatants were quieted by their own clans because the relatives of the killers were tired of paying giant sums for other people’s debts.

Thus, the film brilliantly shows how expensive and pointlessly cruel the UN intervention was, and how little importance the self-proclaimed peacekeepers attached to the mechanism that actually stopped the war.

The second important moment is closer to the end of the movie, around 1:45. A Somali man is talking to a captured American pilot and explains: you took our hostages, we took you. The pilot replies: my government will not negotiate. OK, the Somali replies, then let’s negotiate between you and me, soldier to soldier. To this, the American replies that he has no decision-making power. The Somali huffs in response: you, apparently, are granted the right to kill, but not to negotiate, while for us, war is just another form of negotiation. Therefore, you have nothing to gain here.

Many thanks to Ridley Scott, who didn’t film a propaganda piece, but truly managed to show the difference between a dull and meaningless state military machine and an anarchic society. I especially recommend the film to those who repeatedly ask the same questions about how “Ancapistan” would defend itself from a state invasion.

Of course, Somalia is not Ancapistan—things are doing well with anarchy there, but significantly worse with capitalism, especially at the time shown in the movie. Nevertheless, even a pre-capitalist stateless society managed to teach a good lesson to the strongest superpower on the planet. States risk a lot when they try to impose their rules on anarchic orders, and if these orders are backed by a truly strong economy, then the outcome of a direct military confrontation between a state and Ancapistan can be considered predetermined.

The best scene in the movie

They didn’t ask for some promo for nothing

I finished listening to Yuneman’s stream, which was announced recently. Impressions of the speakers:

  • Vatoadmin. The most energetic of the four; as a humanities person, his stories are, of course, closer and more understandable to me. He believes the world will emerge from the crisis renewed, having discarded some of today’s inefficient practices.
  • Bazhenov. The most high-brow economist among the four interlocutors, and is perceived as a bit of a snob because of it. He believes that nothing will change much; we will recover and carry on as before.
  • Zubov. Had the most terrible connection, due to which I couldn’t make out everything he was saying. Being more of a financier than an economist, he is skeptical about the post-crisis future, because massive government interventions will, naturally, significantly worsen the structure of the global economy.
  • Yuneman. The least of an economist among those gathered, but he conducted the conversation quite sensibly and structurally. He believes that the pandemic should have a long-term impact on our social practices, and this will likely be its main consequence.

A considerable and least interesting part of the discussion was devoted to the analysis of current support measures for citizens being implemented in various countries. It was full of banalites already worn out a thousand times elsewhere. Well, except that they didn’t stoop to reciting the plight of the Pechenegs.

To hell with the Pechenegs, but the word “bitcoin” was also not mentioned once, which, in my view, indicates too narrow a perspective on the situation. Bitcoin emerged as a reaction to the pumping of the economy with fiat in 2008, and in the years since, it has developed and strengthened significantly. Now, that pumping looks like playing in a sandbox, and I would be truly interested to hear an economic analysis of how the coexistence of a printing press going “brrrr” and ready-to-use deflationary money will affect the global economy. If economists believe that this influence will be negligible, again, I would like to understand why.

The prospects of some regimes simply not surviving the crisis were mentioned at the very end and only briefly, but they can be understood here: let political scientists discuss such topics.

I don’t watch streams very often, but I don’t feel that this specific one was a waste of time; the material was dense and the delivery was of decent quality.

The (In)effectiveness of Violence

Bitarch’s Column
(with editorial edits by Ancap-chan)

When you want to achieve a certain goal, you choose one of many available tools. Suppose a hostel has opened in your house, which constantly creates noise and a criminogenic environment near your home. What can you do? The simplest option at first glance is to force the owner to close their business by using physical violence.

But what if they have at least a pepper spray? Now, in the event of your attack, your potential costs have increased. Violence as a tool no longer looks as profitable as it seemed initially. So, willy-nilly, you have to look for other ways to influence them—persuading, explaining the situation to the property owner so they terminate the lease, giving the hostel a one-star review on online resources, and calling on other residents of the building to do the same. In short, you have a incentive to act civilly.

Initially, the simplest tool of coercion, physical violence, quickly loses its effectiveness when the potential victim is capable of applying counter-violence, even in the smallest amount. The former Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, once praised violence as a tool of extremely high efficiency. But for this to be the case, he had to introduce some of the strictest rules for purchasing and owning weapons in Singapore, even for self-defense—because even a slight leveling of the balance of violence potential in society leads to a sharp decrease in the effectiveness of violence as a tool of coercion.

I can propose a hypothesis well-supported by facts: the costs of aggressive violence increase exponentially as the possibilities for counter-violence by the victim increase.

Suppose a stationary bandit (the state) wants to use violence to force someone to comply with its demands. If the victim of state aggression has no lethal weapon, a small operational group is sufficient for the arrest. But what if the victim has a pistol? Police special forces must be sent. For a minor reason, such as unpaid fines or the retail sale of psychoactive substances, no one will send special forces. In Alexander Rozov’s blog, there is a post with confirmation of this fact using the example of Sweden.

Suppose the potential victim of state aggression is not some tax delinquent, but a more significant target—for example, a clan leader in Somalia. He doesn’t just have a pistol, but a thousand fighters with Kalashnikov rifles, albeit poorly trained. As history has shown, the damage even from such “bandits” proved unacceptable for the US government.

Imagine that the followers of the Branch Davidians sect, who took refuge at the Waco ranch in 1993, had anti-tank grenade launchers in addition to shotguns and rifles. As we know, the FBI decided to use tanks at the time to ram the walls and release tear gas. If the defenders had anti-tank weapons, such an option would have had to be rejected as excessively risky.

In such a situation, the state could either turn the assault on the ranch from a police operation into an army operation, using mortars or other lethal indiscriminate weapons, or starve the ranch out, with the prospect that these fanatics would indeed all die of hunger. Both options in a democratic state are fraught with significant political damage, which for politicians is even more important than economic damage to the state. For more details on such factors, I recommend reading Martin van Creveld’s book The Rise and Decline of the State.

Finally, we have already analyzed a potential situation where a potential victim of state violence threatens the use of weapons of mass destruction. Currently, this is perceived as something extremely unlikely—not because the state effectively prevents the creation of WMDs by private individuals, but because people who have enough skills to create WMDs also have strong internal moral convictions that preclude the use of indiscriminate mass violence, including against innocent people. If a democratic state sets an example by being the first to use WMDs against its own citizens, this moral prohibition will be weakened, and over time will disappear altogether. No official in a relatively civilized state is ready to allow such consequences.

Conclusions can be drawn:

1) The costs of coercion by the state or any other aggressor increase exponentially as the means of counter-violence by the victim are strengthened. Minimal self-defense weapons, therefore, sharply raise the price of an attack, and against a cheap dirty bomb made from nuclear waste, even the nuclear arsenal of a superpower will be ineffective.

2) In order for a free society (a territorial or extraterritorial contractual jurisdiction) to protect itself from conquest by the state, it is more profitable for it not to invest in a single “wonder weapon,” but to provide incentives for clients to acquire personal weapons, skills for their use, and the readiness to use them for defense. This will also help society protect itself from its own coordinating bodies, should they decide to become a state, since it will ensure an even distribution of the potential for violence. This is discussed, in particular, in the previously translated work by Jack Hirshleifer, Anarchy and Its Dissolution.

Finally, I will provide a good quote from the book The Liberal Archipelago by Chandran Kukathas.

Take gamblers and casino owners. Their activities may be alien or even repulsive to us. However, would the fact that gambling takes place in another country be sufficient grounds for invading it?

Take “monopolists.” They may set prices for their products that we consider unfair. However, would we consider the fact that a country supplies its goods too expensively a sufficient ground for declaring war on that country?

But why are we ready in similar cases to send armed men (police) to our fellow citizens, take them captive (prison), and take tribute from them (fine)? Probably because, unlike a neighboring state, they cannot defend themselves.

Asked to promote it

Sorry for posting other people’s announcements two days in a row, but people in self-isolation have clearly livened up and started broadcasting their ideas into the network with redoubled force. I will try not to fall behind myself, although in my life, with this whole pandemic, almost nothing has changed at all.

Roman Yuneman is known as the only independent politician in the country who managed to defeat Navalny’s smart voting in the elections. And he would be a poor politician if, after that, he didn’t set about developing his success. Yuneman created the Society.Future community, within which he engaged in various expert studies: first, studying the intricacies and pitfalls of the electronic voting that ruined him, and then, after Putin’s January address, he took on work for a new constitution, since the current regime intends to completely spoil the old one.

On April 8, he is organizing a stream on his YouTube channel with a fairly representative team:

  • Vatoadmin, who taught us all to cross ourselves at the word “AES” and to apologize for any reason
  • Grigory Bazhenov, who knows how to scream very loudly at the sight of fuel price tags
  • Dmitry Zubov, whom I know from the Telegram channel Right Economics, but I haven’t encountered him on YouTube, so no stories come to mind about him.

The plan is to discuss pressing issues: how deep today’s crisis is, how long it will last, and what to do about it all. I will be glad to hear the opinions of smart people, many of whom I disagree with (for example, I find Yuneman’s idea of introducing a curfew harmful), but it would be foolish to deny their competence. I hope that some practical steps will also be announced by the participants of the conversation.

So, April 8, 20:00 Moscow time, on Roman Yuneman’s channel.

Three short announcements

I recently published a selection of interesting quasi-libertarian channels, and among them was Artyom Seversky’s channel Life with Others. I specifically recommended checking out the series of posts on monetary policy, but digging through a Telegram channel’s history can be inconvenient. Fortunately, the author was kind enough to compile these posts into a single article and post it on the website. At the same time, you can browse the site; there are some interesting things there as well, for example, an article on classical liberalism and libertarianism by the same Eric Mack, whose book we are currently translating.

The Libertarian Band channel, where I write scripts for a series of educational videos, has started its own separate news section and today released a pilot episode with a new charismatic host. Please take a moment to leave a comment about what you think of the presentation to help improve it.

I have also posted the translation drafts of five new chapters of Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molneux. With this, my budget for incentivizing volunteers has completely run out, so I think the flow of drafts will now stall, and I can calmly focus on editing what has already been sent. However, you can contribute more money, and the volunteers will perk up. As a reminder, here is the wallet for financing the translation project: 1AFkD2bazCs5YZBBrSD7HsRMWLmRbg6QBo

Conspiracy Theory and Praxeology

Conspiracy theory is an explanation of facts of observed reality by the hidden, purposeful activity of certain subjects or organizations. It is common to ridicule it, especially if a particular conspiracy theory provides truly absurd explanations.

Praxeology asserts that acting subjects can only be individuals, and if so, it can be assumed that any social phenomena must be caused by either overt or covert purposeful activity of specific people. However, this assertion is supplemented by the claim of the existence of spontaneous orders, which are the unintended consequences of the activities of an indefinite number of persons. Therefore, not wishing to delve too deeply into the subtleties of the theory, we state that social phenomena can be based on both the unintended consequences of the actions of a wide circle of actors and the intended consequences of the actions of a narrow circle. Moreover, in the latter case, these actions and their goals may be consciously hidden from the general public. In other words, conspiracy explanations can be truthful.

In my observation, older people are more prone to conspiracy explanations. I can assume that this is an interpretation of their life experience, since in their years they usually manage to participate in many successful and unsuccessful conspiracies themselves, and to observe the uncovered conspiracies of others. And in general, it is difficult to deny the very existence of constantly conceived and implemented conspiracies, since every government budget has a secret part, and every self-respecting enterprise has a slush fund, as its management is in a conspiracy against the government to reduce taxes or bypass regulations.

In order to avoid constantly shrugging and stating that everything is possible and we will never be told the truth, I would like to have a criterion that, when applied, would allow one to decide for oneself in which case a conspiracy explanation is quite probable and in which it is improbable. To formulate such a criterion, I will use the praxeological concept of the planning horizon (or timepreference, that is, the inverse of the planning horizon, but it is not as convenient for me to use and sounds clunky in Russian).

To evaluate a conspiratorial design, simply estimate what planning horizon is required for its implementation. Then compare it with the planning horizon usually demonstrated by the presumed actors in the conspiracy hypothesis under consideration. If the required horizon is much longer than the one usually demonstrated, this is a strong argument for considering the conspiracy hypothesis untenable.

One more clarification is needed here. If the presumed actor, guided by their short-term goals, unintentionally supports what appears from the outside to be a single long-term design, then the conspiracy hypothesis, while actually incorrect, proves to be effective—the actor was guessed correctly, the direction of activity was guessed correctly, and the fact that not the entire design was planned in advance—who cares, the main thing is in whose interests everything is being done. Here, for additional verification, I can recommend checking whether there were numerous cases where the actor’s actions contradicted the goal assumed by the conspiracy hypothesis. If this is observed, we are most likely dealing with a tactician, and there is no need to invent a strategic design that they are supposedly following.

At this point Scheherazade ceases her permitted speech, as further information does not correspond to your security clearance.