Contracts

I had a debate yesterday. My opponent was pushing popular takes about how the state is no different from those contract jurisdictions of yours, and that obtaining a passport is like signing a contract. Where is the text of the contract? Right here, the body of laws. Much arguing followed, during which I formulated for myself why contracts are needed and how to view them.

A contract is merely a mutual promise. Promises are made, revised, disavowed, and broken; their violation may have certain consequences. The vast majority of contracts are not smart contracts. They cannot execute themselves; they must be executed by people. My interlocutor asks: if you ancaps reserve the right to break any contract in advance, and even explicitly state that you reserve the right to try to avoid harmful consequences of its breach—then why are contracts needed at all? How does a world with contracts differ from the state of nature, where nobody owes anyone anything?

Contracts are needed to make the world simpler, more predictable, and more understandable, providing the ability to make longer-term plans by relying on other people. But if a contract does not execute itself, then simply relying by default on the fact that it will be executed by other people is fraught with erroneous planning. And here there are two paths, both valid and not contradictory. One can invest in contract enforcement mechanisms. Or one can try to enter into contracts that the counterparty will want to fulfill.

For example, the traffic rule “in this area, it is customary to keep to the right side of the road” is a good rule. It is far better than its absence because it increases the predictability of traffic. It is cheap to follow, because what difference does it make which side you drive on; you can drive on the right. And it is expensive to ignore. There is no need to specifically enforce this rule; it is enough that everyone knows about it, and if they happen not to know, they quickly find out by observing the flow of traffic. And since those who love to stretch the truth tend to call the relationship between a citizen and the state a contract—implicitly concluded on the principle of a public offer—then this traffic rule is a good example of a healthy person’s social contract.

Now let’s imagine a situation. A person enters a certain territory. At the checkpoint, they are offered twelve volumes of rules of conduct on this territory—and a place to sign this contract, which will give them the right of entry. Since the person will not read these volumes, the procedure for them boils down to the following: you ask for a signature to let me in. Here is the signature, let me in. The contract on my part is fulfilled. And any further appeal to the contents of the sixth volume of the tomes gathering dust at the checkpoint will be perceived by them as lawlessness, and pointing out that you signed the contract will be perceived as mockery. Such contracts do not make the world simpler or more predictable. They are needed by self-proclaimed enforcers to have a reason to nitpick a violation, while the party who signed them for the right of entry will constantly violate them without any ulterior motive; therefore, one cannot rely on the existence of such-and-such a contract and people’s adherence to it in their planning. This means that under ancap, the natural emergence of a practice to accompany stay on a territory by imposing a voluminous code of rules is unlikely to take hold. More precisely, the maximum volume of rules acting on a territory will be proportional to the exclusivity of access to it and the ease of enforcement. An expensive, elite, closed club can afford complex norms of behavior. A public park cannot.

Of course, there are contracts where complexity is due to the complexity of the subject of the deal. For example, the merger of large joint-stock companies. But there, the contract is prepared by professionals from both sides, not provided by one party in a ready-made form without the right to make edits. So the complexity will be voluntary. And it is precisely this that will ensure the desire to fulfill everything exactly as written.

And finally, there are contracts where the subject of the deal is complex, but the text is standard. For example, a bank loan agreement. But for the bank’s client, this text essentially boils down to a short explication: you give me this much now, I give you this much monthly for this many years. As for what exactly should be done if something goes wrong—here, the presumption of the bank’s good faith applies. The client believes that the bank provides fair procedures for such scenarios and is not against following them specifically, because he did not think them through himself. But when it comes down to it, his opinion may change sharply. This is where the bank discovers that all these procedures, from the client’s point of view, are not sacred tablets. It is not a contract at all. These are the bank’s wish-lists. And the client has their own. And the more the bank insists on the observance of its wish-lists, the more dissatisfied the client will be, and the more costs he will try to create for the bank. Therefore, the more highly competitive the loan market will be under conditions of decentralized law, the more customer-oriented the contracts there will be.

The same applies to our ordinary life—most of the rules that others insist on observing are not contracts, but wish-lists. Some we respect, some we don’t, we resolve our conflicts ourselves—and it’s fine, we live. Quite peacefully and happily.

A wise guy who knows which wish-lists are worth voicing and which are not

How cooperation between members of different groups arises

Voluntarist, Bitarch

It is generally believed that purely human phenomena, such as culture, traditions, and social norms, are necessary to make cooperation between different societies possible. At the same time, animals that lack such phenomena are typically considered social only in relation to their own group and hostile toward members of other groups. Of course, the importance of these phenomena should not be underestimated, but they may well be unnecessary for the emergence of cooperation between groups.

As demonstrated by research on pygmy chimpanzees, or bonobos—humans’ closest genetic relatives—they exhibit high levels of tolerance between members of different groups. They can travel, rest, and feed together. Resource exchange between groups is not uncommon among bonobos. Moreover, it has been noted that individuals who exhibited more pro-social behavior within their own group were also more pro-social toward members of other groups. At the same time, such cooperation does not arise under the influence of any culture or social norms. One could say that this is simply a natural state for bonobos.

It is also worth comparing bonobos with common chimpanzees. The latter are quite hostile to strangers; in their case, intergroup clashes can even end in lethal violence. Why does such a difference arise? If one compares the neurophysiology of common and pygmy chimpanzees, the latter are found to have twice the density of serotonergic neurons in the amygdala of the brain. Additionally, it is worth noting the relationship regarding aggression between serotonin, oxytocin (a hormone that promotes only intra-group pro-sociality, or so-called parochial altruism), and testosterone (a sex hormone). Common chimpanzees exhibit high testosterone reactivity, which reduces their tolerance and provokes a drive to fight for higher status. And as is known from studies, the function of the serotonergic system (which is more pronounced in bonobos) includes inhibiting the pro-aggressive influence of testosterone. Pro-sociality is also stimulated by oxytocin, and it should be noted that the serotonergic system can exert an influence on its release.

It should also not be forgotten that cooperative-communicative skills, which emerged in the early stages of human evolution, were key to the emergence of various forms of human cultural cognition, including language. Therefore, it is entirely possible to assume that pro-sociality and cooperation arise not simply because of culture. Rather, all these phenomena have common evolutionary roots. The basis for their emergence may well be the development of a violence inhibition mechanism and the strengthening of serotonergic function during evolution. Such adaptation is necessary for peaceful coexistence and the prevention of lethal violence, which in many circumstances is extremely detrimental to the entire population. Furthermore, the observation of such adaptation in an extremely strong form in bonobos indicates that “constant wars between neighboring groups are not necessarily a legacy of humanity and do not seem evolutionarily inevitable.”

It is often possible to hear from various leftists that the AES does not rely on empiricism, and accordingly, it is generally unclear how praxeology, for example, will work. Could you clarify these points?

Lazzy

Praxeology is indeed simply a set of deductive inferences from the axiom of action: “humans set goals and choose means to achieve them.” To the extent that real people satisfy this axiom, praxeology works for them. Similarly, for example, Euclidean geometry is a set of deductive inferences from five axioms, and to the extent that real physical space and the objects within it correspond to these ideal geometric shapes, this geometry will work for them. Replace the axioms—and you get, for example, Riemannian geometry, which will differ from Euclidean geometry and be better suited for describing real objects in a space with different properties.

Similarly, if we replace the axiom of action, for example, with “man is an instrument for the realization of divine will,” then we would have to derive a different praxeology for it, and to the extent that real people satisfy this new axiom, the praxeology we derived will work for them. Although, of course, given such starting data, a researcher would find it far more interesting to study theology rather than praxeology.

We can conventionally say that the leftists (more precisely, proponents of social engineering) build their praxeology on something like “human action is a phenomenon of the influence of the forces of the material world upon them, obeying the objective laws of physics and biology.” Deductive inferences from this axiom form the set of approaches that the left apply to people. And this also works in some way.

Thus, praxeology indeed does not rely on empiricism. It is verified by empiricism. I hope this clarified things.

Leftist praxeology

Libertarian Theory of War, starting to write a book

I think it’s enough throwing unstructured notes at you; it’s time to get started on the book itself.

The current version of the book will be available on my website at a fixed location at https://ancapchan.info/war/. Currently, there is a rough table of contents available there, which gives an idea of how I envision the structure of the future text. And to get things started, I am immediately posting a short preface.

The scale of the task scares me a little. Moreover, I don’t want to drag out the writing process for over a year, as happened with the basic book on ancap, but rather manage it a bit faster. Wish me luck, cheer me up with donations, criticize the text as it appears — let’s together expand the horizon of human conceptions of the world a little (well, okay, in our case, not so much about the world as about war).

The Typical Politician is a Psychopath

Voluntarist, Bitarch

It is known that more than half of people will not score higher than 2 out of 24 on Robert Hare’s PCL:SV test. And only 1–2% of individuals will score 13 or higher, indicating a high level of psychopathy. But it is interesting to wonder how a “typical” politician would fare on this test? Based on the article “On Politics and Psychopathy,” let us conduct a thought experiment and assign a score from 0 to 2 points for each trait of psychopathy to his personality.

Let’s start with the first factor of psychopathy, which assesses an individual’s selfishness, callousness, and ruthlessness.
– Does a typical politician possess superficial charm? Of course, it is very important for him to present himself well in public. It should also be noted that he tends to pretend to be someone he is not and simulate emotions. On this point, he can certainly be given 1 point, and possibly 2 points.
– Does he consider himself better than everyone else, i.e., someone worthy of ruling others? He wants power, so he certainly gets 1 point, and possibly 2 points.
– Is he deceitful, insincere, manipulative, unscrupulous, and dishonest? Needless to say, 2 points.
– Does he lack empathy, sensitivity, and respect for other people? And we are speaking specifically about people as individual persons; we are not interested in his feelings toward a certain nation or political course, since empathy can only be felt toward individuals. Of course, he actually doesn’t care about individual people, except perhaps his friends and family members, so we confidently give 2 points.
– Does the politician evade responsibility for his actions? Naturally, he will cover up his wrongdoings and will only take responsibility if it brings him even more power, wealth, or fame, so we can confidently give 1 point, or even 2 points.
– Does the politician lack guilt and remorse, and is he cold toward others? Is he completely indifferent to the pain and suffering of the victims of his actions? Yes, he passes laws that cause people inconvenience, make them poorer, or violate their rights, so we confidently give 2 points.

Now let’s move to the second factor of psychopathy, which assesses how antisocial an individual’s lifestyle is.
– Is the politician impulsive, reckless, rash, and unpredictable? Not always, however, from time to time he may support extremely risky decisions, so we give 1 point.
– Is he impatient, unrestrained, and irritable? Also not always, but politicians often allow themselves sharp, “alarmist” appeals, so we also give 1 point.
– Is his lifestyle parasitic, does he have no long-term goals for the future? Of course he has goals, but these goals consist of achieving power, wealth, and popularity by worsening the situation of others. Also, a politician lives on taxes forcibly collected from people, so he is a parasite who receives 1 point.
– Is he irresponsible, unreliable, and fails to meet his obligations? A confident 2 points.
However, as for antisocial behavior in adolescence and adulthood, this is not typical for a politician, and if he did behave this way at some point, it would be hidden from the public, so a confident score cannot be given here.

In the end, a typical politician receives 9 to 12 points for Factor 1 (which is the maximum result) and 5 points for Factor 2. His total score is 14 to 17 points. It turns out that he confidently falls into the worst 1–2% of the population. He is not someone we would want to associate ourselves with, let alone vote for. And in a properly organized human society, he would simply be exiled; he would not receive the slightest share of power.

I would also like to add a comparison of a typical politician with war criminals. As research demonstrates, ordinary violent criminals have high total scores, but fairly balanced scores across the two factors of psychopathy, whereas war criminals, while having similar total scores, have higher scores on Factor 1 and lower scores on Factor 2. They are not overly antisocial personalities. At the same time, they are excessively cruel and callous, just like a typical politician.

Network State, Chapter 2.7. Fragmentation. Frontier. The Fourth Turn. The future is our past.

The translation of another chapter of Balaji Srinivasan’s book The Network State is ready. While the previous chapter seemed overly long to me, oversaturated with facts and undersaturated with ideas, here the balance has more or less leveled out.

The author points out that since the world will soon stop revolving around the USA, it makes sense to prepare for this in advance, starting with the dissemination of new narratives and concepts that explain the state of affairs. After which he rolls out as many as four—here they are, from left to right, in the header.

Some of them, such as the frontier thesis, were more or less familiar to me; some considerations turned out to be quite new despite their simplicity—for example, the thesis that the future, in terms of the general level of centralization, will mirror the past in the coming years.

I simply cannot find the time to translate another chapter of Eric Mack’s book, and I really should, because a small donation came in for its translation. But The Network State is an urgent order, and I’m already struggling to maintain the agreed pace. So I feel slight pangs of guilt, but I’ll have to endure them for a while longer.

Libertarian Band, a video about FSP

The Libertarian Band team, with whom I collaborated a long time ago on creating videos with an introduction to libertarianism (this experience later proved useful to me when writing the book), has after a long break produced an excellent video about the Free State Project.

This is their second video dedicated to libertarian communities (the first, released at the end of 2021, was about Monte libero.

The screenwriter who replaced me works in a completely different style: where I preferred my own, as original as possible, reflections, his focus is on much richer factual detail. In my opinion, it turned out quite entertaining; it’s great that the guys are still active and continue to deliver the basics.

Now, of course, a video about Liberland is overdue; I hope it won’t be more than a year before they enrich their playlist with a corresponding episode.

Sketches on Libertarian War Theory. Part 2, on why the NAP is a poor criterion.

When I was writing the book on ancap, you could observe the results of the creative search process in real-time. After publication, the material was restructured; as a result of discussions in the comments, personal communication, and simply rereading the text, serious revisions to the wording were introduced, and a couple of chapters were discarded entirely, after which the second part of the book started over in a different vein. And this was while I was navigating relatively familiar territory: libertarian doctrine has long been and repeatedly laid out, and all that was required of me was its reimagining and a brief retelling.

As for the libertarian theory of war, this is uncharted territory, so I am not attempting to write a book right away, but am simply recording separate considerations for now. The only support I currently have are the questions laid out in the first part of the sketches that a libertarian theory of war should answer. These are the points I will go through.

How to determine when it is worth starting a war?

As a reminder, I define war as a class of conflicts in which, for at least one side, the survival of the opponent is not a deterrent factor. That is, to be strictly precise, the party to a conflict that is prepared to kill is waging war, while the party to a conflict that is not prepared to kill is not waging war, even if they are currently being attempted to be killed. Thus, even if someone is attacked with the intent to kill, they do not automatically find themselves in a state of war, but are free to choose for themselves whether to wage war or to evade it in some way.

Evasion can be direct: using passive defense, fleeing, hiding—something along those lines. Or it can be indirect: resorting to someone else’s protection. This immediately raises the problem of fuzzy boundaries. On one hand, even if a subject feeds and equips their protector, as well as pays them a salary and promises to recognize their ownership of captured trophies, they themselves are still not directly fighting. On the other hand, take a drone operator: they might be sitting a thousand kilometers from the target, sipping coffee and having nothing against the target of liquidation in general: should this operator be considered the one waging war—or their client, who feels enough antipathy toward the target of liquidation to shell out for the hire of an operator? How, fundamentally, does a drone operator differ from the drone itself? By the fact that they make the decision to kill? And what if the drone is controlled by AI and makes that decision itself?

In short, in conditions where there is a deep division of labor everywhere, finding someone who wages war completely independently is as easy as finding someone who lives entirely on subsistence farming.

By the way, this circumstance also complicates the precise determination of who started the war and, consequently, who the aggressor—that is, the initiator of violence—is. Parties can spend a long time inventively doing nasty things to each other, primarily through other people’s hands, and then some particular nasty act, for some reason, begins to be interpreted by observers as the start of a war and a legitimate reason to respond to aggression with all their military power.

What is my point in all this? That in the libertarian theory of war, it is not enough to simply say “NAP.” This is an abstract principle that can be applied to any interpersonal interaction to decide: in this specific elementary action, Vasya is the aggressor and Petya is the victim of aggression. And before that was an action in which Petya was the aggressor and Vasya the victim. And even earlier… and so on, until one grows tired. The aggressive IDF bombs Hamas. Well, yes, it bombs. If we take October 8, 2023, as the starting point, then the IDF is the aggressor. If October 7, 2023, then Hamas is the aggressor. Let’s wind further back into the past—and we slide into questions about land property rights, the content of sacred texts, and so on. In other words, the NAP as a criterion for when to start a war is inapplicable, at least in its pure form. At least when it comes to collective conflicts, rather than elementary situations like “you are just walking, someone lunges at you with a knife, and how to determine at what moment to shoot the attacker.”

With that, I conclude the second part of the notes; I didn’t even manage to fully analyze the first question, but it is better for me to post small notes more often, as the overall speed of work will be higher. In addition to sequential numbering and links to previous pieces of text, I will also use the tag LTV (libertarian theory of war) for these notes.

Milei

My Monday began with the news of Javier Milei’s victory in the presidential elections in Argentina. There happened to be a little prosecco left in the bottle on the table, enough for a symbolic toast to commemorate a bright future. And that is why I want to say a few words about the future.

Some look at Milei with hope: they say that Argentina is about to dismantle a significant part of the state, Argentines will start living like human beings, and then, perhaps, others will want the same, and maybe we will get something too.

Others look at him with suspicion: they say that a populist has finally grabbed power; Zelensky also called himself a libertarian, and now he is preparing to become a military dictator, so this one won’t do anything meaningful in the economy, will only ban abortions, and will discredit our beloved libertarianism before the broad masses of the people.

Both points of view focus excessively on Argentina itself. Meanwhile, for most of us, Argentina is a distant fairytale land in another hemisphere, and the libertarians there will either succeed or screw up on their own, without our participation. We, at least those who intend to maintain their own agency, must not only follow the news from across the ocean as if it were a sports match, but also analyze it, draw lessons for ourselves, and popularize the experience being developed by the Argentines—in short, we need to take full advantage of such a gift of fate as the appearance of libertarianism, in its most radical anarcho-capitalist form, on the big political stage.

Of course, it is clear that libertarian reforms are only taken up as a banner by the majority when the state has managed to fail completely, and the utter hopelessness of further attempts to rigidly steer society is resolutely visible to everyone. Therefore, even in the most favorable scenario, Argentines will in the near future only be crawling out of the poverty and chaos into which the previous regime drove them. When society becomes more prosperous, ideas of active redistribution of wealth as a vital state function will emerge from the shadows again. Therefore, it is very important that many other peoples manage to catch the Argentine spirit and embrace the ideas of reducing the state. And for this, we will have to work quite hard.

Treating the Incurable: A Single Case of a Psychopathic Patient Undergoing Therapy

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Since the first conceptualization of psychopathy in modern psychiatry, this condition has been considered practically incurable. However, there is an experimental approach that may refute such a view. Schema therapy is a psychotherapy for the treatment of personality disorders that has performed well in the therapy of borderline personality disorder, but has also been adapted for patients with other problems, including those with high levels of psychopathy.

There is a case study of schema therapy for psychopathy in a 25-year-old rapist. His father was a cruel man who subjected him to beatings and authoritarian upbringing. From the age of 8, the patient exhibited serious behavioral problems; at 17, he was first convicted of assault causing grievous bodily harm, and at 19, together with an accomplice, he committed rape, after which he tried to shift all the blame onto the victim (calling her a prostitute and claiming she had consented) and the accomplice (saying that he had forced him into it).

First, the patient took the PCL-R test. He scored 4 out of 8 on the interpersonal component (dishonesty, manipulativeness, etc.), 7 out of 8 on the affective component (lack of empathy, guilt, other emotions, and failure to take responsibility for his actions), 6 out of 10 on impulsivity, and 8 out of 10 on antisociality (history of behavioral problems and criminality). Considering additional traits outside the components (sexual promiscuity and a tendency toward multiple short-term relationships), he scored 28 out of 40—a high level of psychopathy.

The therapy lasted 4 years. In the first year, the therapist earned the patient’s trust and worked on his control over impulsive aggression. He also discussed his early behavioral problems and encouraged him to evaluate his emotions. Initially, the patient had difficulty with this and did not want to admit guilt for his actions. However, later, a sense of guilt was successfully evoked in him. He burst into tears, admitted responsibility, regretted that he could not restrain himself, and said that he deserved to pay for this act for the rest of his life. After a year, the therapist managed to establish a close emotional bond with the patient by employing empathic confrontation (convincing the patient of the sincerity of his intentions).

In the second year, the patient decided to make peace with his past. Additionally, he entered a relationship with a girl (who often accompanied his mother when visiting the clinic), after which he began to have conversations with the therapist about friendship and love. Although the relationship was later broken off due to the girl’s infidelity, he still wanted to build a healthy relationship.

In the last two years, the patient underwent imagery exercises in which he imagined, described, and worked through memories of his father’s cruel acts. After this, he was allowed to leave the clinic, he started a new relationship, and underwent resocialization. At the end of the 4 years of therapy, he was released, found a job, had a child, and no longer participated in criminal activities.

For another 3 years, he was monitored by the therapist and took the PCL-R test again. Now he scored only 1 out of 8 on the interpersonal component, 1 out of 8 on the affective component, and 3 out of 10 on impulsivity. Of course, the antisocial component remained unchanged, but this was primarily due to its historical nature. In total, he scored 14 out of 40, which is no longer a high indicator of psychopathy.

Of course, such an approach is very long. The creation and application of pharmacological agents to correct the dysfunction of the violence inhibition mechanism—due to which the interpersonal and affective components of psychopathy and the lack of certain emotions in a person manifest—could potentially yield a faster and more reliable result. But at the very least, it shatters the myth of the incurability of psychopathy and violent behavior, which gives us huge prospects in eradicating the problem of violence in human society. It should also be noted that congenital predispositions to weak violence inhibition tend to manifest in practice due to the negative influence of the environment, which is why proper psychological work with children is very important.