In the following text, I assume that everyone has already seen the movie and formed their own opinion, and if not, it doesn’t matter much whether you watch it before or after reading this text.
Reviews often call the film a piece of propaganda, a pamphlet, or a political manifesto. That is not the case. What we have here is an instructional film. It does not criticize the current state of affairs. It provides instructions on how to act and what is needed for that. Here are the narratives that need to be transmitted: if you are a vigilante; if you saw a news story about a vigilante; if you are a TV presenter talking about a vigilante; if you are a witness being questioned by the police about a vigilante. No wide field of opinions is given — only clear, correct answers; the viewer must not be confused, they need clear instructions. The key message is: look, I’m showing you how it’s done. Later, you will do it yourself. This is the only take that is repeated several times in the film, including right at the curtain call.
A successful vigilante needs: to have combat skills, a stable source of income, the ability to articulate their position, neatness and attention to detail, to demonstrate professional integrity, and not to leave the regime with hostages in the form of family members, sticking to superficial connections; always offer simple executors on the opponent’s side to retreat, and shoot only in case of refusal. Outsiders need: to express a clear public demand, saying, “it’s cool that there are such people, we need them very much in such-and-such a country.” Journalists need: to hammer the public and the establishment with the question, “should our system protect victims of violence or criminals? And if it handles criminals poorly, then why hinder those who handle them better? Or are you in favor of more crime?” Witnesses need: while demonstrating a willingness to cooperate, to sabotage police actions to capture the vigilante.
A separate important feedback mechanism is shown, which is necessary for the vigilante to remain within the framework of the public demand, without replacing it with personal notions of morality. The main character always asks the victim if they are satisfied with the procedures of restoring justice already carried out. And only when the victim states that they are not satisfied do they give the vigilante sanction to act. However, a vigilante can, of course, search for injustice directly perceived through the senses in order to correct it immediately. To do this, he simply needs not to move around the city in a Batmobile, but to occasionally use public transport, walk, drop by bars, and so on. In short, not to be detached from life.
With that, I will end the general conclusions and move on to various sweet details.
The film takes place in a kind of averaged Europe, but from the visuals, it is obvious that it is Croatia. It is clear why. First, Croatia is almost devoid of the shortcomings that the main character fights against: it is an almost mono-ethnic and quite racist society, without a painful law-abidance drilled into its citizens. In short, Uwe Boll is using the sacred right of a Soviet citizen to shout on Red Square that Reagan is an idiot. Second, the target audience of the film is not Americans at all, and for them, all European countries look more or less the same. Third, those who are slightly familiar with regional specifics can get an extra laugh out of this.
For example, it is precisely in light of Croatian specifics that the episode in the brothel acquires additional meaning. The girl is unaware of why mold is appearing on the walls, which means that this is her first winter on the Adriatic. Obviously, in her native Ukraine, this problem does not exist. And for us, this is a clear signal: the author shows that not all migrants are equally harmful; there are useful, hardworking ones, ready to perceive local cultural values, and they need the local specifics to be explained delicately and to be paid honestly for honest work.
There are probably other cool moments, but I will leave you to discover them on your own. The main thing I wanted to say was said at the very beginning. Before you is an instruction. Take note and apply it creatively.
Every time you start a conversation with someone about a voluntary society, you inevitably encounter the trump card of any statist: “But what about the free-rider problem? If people aren’t forced to pay under threat of a club or prison, everyone will just enjoy the benefits, and no one will chip in! Everyone will want to be a free-loader, and society will collapse!” It sounds logical. Yet, an interesting thing happens: in nature, the free-ride problem was solved millions of years ago, and completely voluntarily, without a single tax inspector or ministry of coercion.
Let’s look at an unexpected example—vampire bats. Life for these creatures is certainly not a walk in the park. They feed exclusively on blood, and night hunting for large animals is a highly unpredictable business. About a third of the colony returns home empty-handed every night. This is where the harsh mathematics of survival comes into play: if a bat does not eat for three consecutive nights, it dies of hunger. Individually, this species would simply have been wiped off the face of the earth. This means they needed an insurance system. And they created one.
When a lucky, well-fed bat returns to the cave, it regurgitates part of the obtained blood to feed a hungry neighbor. From the outside, this might look like a socialist’s dream—from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. But there is no need to rush to rejoice for the leftists, because we are talking not about a common pot, but about a system of decentralized mutual aid built on reputation.
And here we return to the argument of the fans of the “strong hand.” What stops some cunning bat from simply sitting in the cave, squeaking pitifully, collecting tribute from neighbors, but never sharing its own prey? How will that end for it?
Bats are far from stupid. They have a disproportionately large neocortex, an excellent memory, and they recognize each other without fail by voice. They practice strictly targeted cooperation. Bats do not dump resources into an abstract fund; they invest in specific social ties. They remember who shared with them and who withheld their prey.
If a bat only takes but does not give, its social rating drops to zero. Neighbors simply stop feeling sympathy toward it. The next night when it is unsuccessful and begs for food, its yesterday’s “friends” will simply turn their backs to the wall. Through its dishonest behavior, this bat will kick the bucket without any coercion, bat courts, or prisons!
Now for the most interesting part. How does this mechanism work at the level of neurobiology? Evolutionary selection was not tasked with inventing this form of cooperation from scratch. There was already a powerful, perfectly tuned chemical circuit—maternal bonding (the mother’s attachment to the child), which forces an adult individual to spend colossal resources on a helpless offspring and derive pleasure from it. Selection simply took and extended this mechanism to non-related individuals.
When a bat shares blood with a neighbor or grooms its fur, its brain is flooded with the same cocktail of oxytocin and dopamine as a mother’s during contact with a child. Oxytocin forms deep attachment and trust, and dopamine reinforces this feeling with powerful pleasure from the very fact of mutual aid.
This is why bats, like you and me, help each other not out of cold calculation, but on emotions, which also serve as a biological detector of cheating. If a partner plays a one-way game, oxytocin simply stops being produced in your brain in their presence. The attachment breaks, and you no longer want to help them.
Of course, you might say now: “But we aren’t bats; we have millions of people in our society!” And you would be absolutely right, because our brain has a biological limit on the number of social ties it can maintain. However, today we have the tools (institutions and technologies) to scale this natural mechanism to all of humanity. Though, that is a completely different story, which we can discuss in future publications.
Just as I started to be glad that I can now post long-form content directly into Telegram, Sperry released a mega-long post that definitely won’t fit anywhere. I even initially thought about posting it on my own website in chapters rather than on a single page, but in the end, I decided not to overcomplicate things.
The scariest part is that he isn’t joking when he calls this a short essay; I also had the chance to hear several historical anecdotes that didn’t make it into the text, and if he wanted to, it could have been significantly longer. I can’t do that!
So: Prediction Markets. A brief essay on libertarianism, rationalism, ludomania, and mathematics. It turned out to be a very interesting mix. For me personally, the essay is useful primarily because it allows me to distinguish more confidently between the spheres of the predictable—and therefore the plannable—and the unpredictable, i.e., that to which one should merely adapt.
What if the concept of the free market, spontaneous order, and the minimal state wasn’t devised by Mises, Hayek, or Rothbard, but by guys in robes sipping tea in the mountains of China 2,500 years ago? Does such a claim surprise you? Then today we will talk about Wu Wei—the ancient philosophy of “non-action,” which, of course, does not mean lying on the couch with a beer, but refers to how the Universe (and the economy) works.
What is Wu Wei and what does it have to do with the free market? “Wu Wei” literally translates as “non-action,” but this is a terrible translation that makes Daoists look like slackers. It would be much more accurate to translate it as “action without violence” or “non-interference.” Imagine a surfer. He doesn’t try to beat the ocean with his fists to force the wave to go where he wants (which is how any government behaves). The surfer catches the wave and uses its natural power. He acts, but does not contradict the nature of things. In libertarianism, we call this “spontaneous order.” People, interacting voluntarily, create highly complex systems themselves: languages, money, markets. And a bureaucrat’s attempt to step in with his wrench and standards only breaks the mechanism. The Daoists understood this even before paper was invented.
Let’s transport ourselves to Ancient China (the Warring States period). Complete chaos, kings slaughtering each other over territories. Against this backdrop, the Confucians appear—ancient etatists of a sort. They walk around with tablets saying: “We need more laws! More officials! More subordination and taxes!”. And then Lao Tzu comes along and drops the “base,” which exactly mirrors modern libertarians: “The more prohibitions and restrictions there are in the world, the poorer the people become. The more laws and decrees are issued, the more thieves and robbers appear.”
Lao Tzu argued that the best ruler is one who rules so unobtrusively that the people forget he even exists. The ideal policy according to Wu Wei is to lower taxes, remove prohibitions, and leave people alone. Let them plant rice, trade, and make agreements on their own.
Some might say: “Sounds great in theory, but did it work in practice?” It worked, and brilliantly! Let’s recall recent history: Mao Zedong, wanting to take everything under his control, ordered the destruction of sparrows. A typical example of anti-Wu Wei (“I am smarter than a complex system”). The result: locusts devoured the harvest, and tens of millions of people died of hunger.
Now let’s rewind 2,000 years. The Han Empire (2nd century BC). After the brutal tyranny of the previous Qin dynasty (which tried to control every sneeze and predictably collapsed), Emperors Wen and Jing came to power. They were convinced fans of Daoism. And what did they do?
– Reduced agricultural taxes first to 3%, and then abolished them entirely for 12 years! – Deregulated the economy, allowing peasants to freely mint coins, extract salt, and smelt iron. – Abolished repressions for criticizing the authorities and abolished corporal punishment. – Stopped waging senseless wars and reached agreements with neighbors.
The state simply stepped aside. What did this lead to? The economy exploded with growth. The standard of living soared, granaries were overflowing with grain, and the population grew rapidly wealthy. This period is still considered the Golden Age of China. No state plans—just give people freedom, and they will build everything themselves.
By relying on Wu Wei, we can learn two things:
1) Macro-level: Do not believe in saviors. Any political program that promises to “make everything good for everyone” through new prohibitions and regulations is doomed to fail. The system is too complex. The market will always find a way, just as water finds a crack in the asphalt.
2) Micro-level: Agorism and the black market. Do not waste energy on head-on collisions with the leviathan. Water does not fight the stone; it flows around it. Use crypto. Build parallel institutions. Find loopholes. Mind your own business without attracting the attention of the “sovereign’s eye.” Be like water.
The state is heavy, rigid, and fragile. While freedom is fluid, flexible, and unstoppable. And in the long run, water always wears away the stone!
Have you heard this before? If you have ever moved to another country and had the misfortune of criticizing the local taxes, bureaucracy, or healthcare out loud, you have likely faced a similar storm of indignation in response. Moreover, this is said by local “patriots” and even other immigrants, who apparently suffer from a severe form of Stockholm syndrome.
For some reason, in the minds of authoritarian etatists, the state is a kind of sacred deity. A strict but fair father who, out of great mercy, “took in” the poor orphan immigrant. Consequently, the orphan must fall prostrate, kiss the ground, and keep quiet. Only we understand that this is all nonsense that does not fit into common sense.
Imagine that you checked into an expensive hotel. You paid for the room a month in advance and left a deposit. You enter, and the faucet is leaking, the Wi-Fi only works on the balcony, and cockroaches are running down the hallway. You go down to the reception to express your dissatisfaction. And suddenly some guy in the lobby screams at you: “How dare you complain?! If you don’t like the hotel, go sleep on a heating pipe! Be grateful that you were even given keys!” Sounds like the rambling of a madman? But it is exactly the same as the phrase “if you don’t like it, leave.”
It is also necessary to understand that immigration is by no means “charity.” Modern legal immigration is a harsh, pragmatic, and very expensive procedure. The state is effectively selling you access to “its” infrastructure. And it certainly does not lose a single cent in the process.
You pay for this access long before your foot touches the new land. You pay visa fees, document translations, agent services, language tests, and medical examinations. You go through a rigorous administrative filter that checks your health, education, lack of criminal records, and ability to bring in money. The state power of the country lets you in not because it is kind. It is simply because you are a ready-made, trained taxpayer at someone else’s expense with minimal risks for the system.
Does this end upon arrival? Not at all. At that moment, an invisible counter starts. Your life in the new country has a specific price—the cost of one hour of life. Calculate your rent, utilities, insurance, groceries, gasoline, taxes, and divide by 30 days, then by 24 hours. You will get the amount you owe this system simply for the right to breathe its air. Even when you sleep or are sick, your counter ticks. You continuously pour money into the local economy as a customer of banks, supermarkets, insurance companies, and landlords, who, by the way, pay exorbitant taxes. Even if you personally do not work “on the books,” these taxes are already included in the price of goods and services.
So why on earth should a client, who regularly pays the “subscription fee” (in the form of huge taxes and the cost of living), not have the right to say that the service is, to put it mildly, mediocre? State lovers adore the proverb “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Only the horse was never a gift; it was bought at a double rate. And we have every right to be outraged if the horse is defective.
Citizenship, by the way, also changes nothing fundamentally. A passport is not the end of the game or an indulgence from levies, but simply “premium access” within the framework of the same contract. Once the counter is started, no one will ever turn it off.
Therefore, to the words of a defender of the stationary bandit saying “pack your bags,” you can boldly ask—are you saying this to the investors who invested their capital, their brains, and their time in this country? People have every right to demand quality service, be outraged by high taxes, and criticize unfair laws. In any language and in any part of the globe, regardless of their origin and the color of their passport!
@SperryUNIVAC, whom I infinitely respect for his frantic work ethic and very broad range of interests, besides various commissioned books and military-technical analysis, also runs a small channel (slightly larger than mine) purely for the soul — about coins. I don’t understand much and am not particularly interested in how many ounces of silver were in which thaler, but when he posted a powerful cycle of texts called “What is Money,” I could not help but give it my close attention.
Mainly, the text is a retelling of Graeber’s book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” but in some places, the accents are set differently.
Part 1 — in which the author immediately describes the economy as a zero-sum game, but at least acknowledges that not everyone adheres to this ancient belief. Also, the concept of debt appears on the scene as a moral obligation, which is the basis of all economic magic.
Part 2 — in which it is pointed out that the strong can easily impose debt conditions on the weak that have nothing to do with justice. In general, the idea of debt is based on violence. If there is no possibility to forcibly reclaim what was lent, there is no institution of loans. But if this violence is abused, the moral obligation to pay debts weakens.
Part 3 — here the author continues to retell how wretched these debts of yours are, but for the first time disagrees with Graeber and refuses to unequivocally condemn the concept of debt-money itself. He suggests that since the concept of debt led to the emergence of the state, it must have brought some benefit to human communities under its yoke, regardless of how individual people suffered from it.
Part 4 — here the author, following Graeber, mocks Adam Smith and explains that money did not emerge from direct barter, but first took the form of debt receipts for homogeneous goods convenient for storage, such as grain or livestock, while coins made of precious metals appeared much later and were state-issued.
Part 5 — it describes three types of economic relations according to Graeber: communism (within small groups), exchange (for one-off transactions with strangers), and hierarchy (where debt cannot be repaid, leading to dependency). Communists try to prevent hierarchy, but once they increase in number, the transition is almost inevitable. Markets, meanwhile, are created by states so that people sell their goods for a pittance for the sake of paying taxes (this thesis is designed to cause “butthurt” for all supporters of the strict opposition between state and market).
Part 6 — here the author describes how, besides credit-commodity money, symbolic money has also been in circulation since antiquity, used to assess damage to property, life, and honor; the clash of these monetary systems led to the symbolic money system losing. Roughly speaking, life and honor became commodities. The author also persistently calls Irish bards “skalds,” but those are trifles.
Part 7 — describes how the appearance of iron democratized war, mass violence destroyed systems of credit trade, which led to the invention of coins; it is convenient to pay mercenaries with coins, and so that they could spend them, empires required taxes to be paid in coins. The result was the launch of the main engine of all ancient empires: army–slaves–coins. These changes led to revolutions in consciousness, which is why antiquity is now known to us as the time of the birth of almost all great doctrines.
Epilogue — the pace accelerates sharply, and in one post, it covers the entire history from the end of antiquity to the end of cash. Until the next leap in military technology, which led to gunpowder empires, Europe relied again on commodity-credit money, then regained a taste for coins, but soon smoothly transitioned back to credit receipts—first for precious metals, and then to pure fiat, which subsequently rapidly transitioned into cashless form so that the money circulation could, first, keep up with the pace of monetary operations, and second, with the ambitions of states to control the economy. The word “blockchain” was mentioned, but the word “bitcoin” was not, because it does not fit into Graeber’s concepts.
It is foolish to dispute the anthropological material on which Graeber bases his monetary theory. Therefore, it would be far more logical for supporters of the Austrian School of Economics to agree with the erroneousness of Mises’s regression theorem (that today’s demand for money is derived from yesterday’s, and so on back to a commodity with consumer value, which became the first money), especially since the foundation of economic theory does not crumble from this admission. Money has various functions — unit of account, store of value, means of transfer of value, and so on. There is nothing surprising in the fact that at different times, different peoples practiced different ways of implementing these functions. Later, in the course of history, convergence occurred, and now we call various implementations of these functions “money” under one umbrella.
The regression theorem was needed as a justification that the state is unable to create purchasing power for money. Well, let’s discard this doubtful take: it is capable, and very much so. Take a group of ten people, give an eleventh person nine tokens and suggest they distribute them among this ten as they please, while warning them that in a month, whoever among the ten cannot produce a token will be killed. The tokens will have astonishing purchasing power. The distributor of the tokens will receive a huge amount of benefits. And in a month, they will present you with ten tokens, at least one of which will be counterfeit, because people want to live.
It is not so important who created the first money and when. It is not so important who and by what means attempts to endow current money with purchasing power. For a libertarian, the only thing that matters is exactly how people will organize their interaction in the absence of coercion. If they want, they will provide services to each other without a strict fixation of debt. If they want, they will use commodity receipts or tokens backed by a basket of goods. If they want, they will turn to items made of rare materials or to digital rare assets, such as bitcoin. Or they will use different methods for different situations and different counterparties, as has been the case in history.
In conclusion, I will touch upon an important assertion by Sperry that, from the perspective of survival and prosperity of large human associations, the emergence of the state and the improvement of means of state control over the activities of subjects turned out to be very useful. This conviction has a right to exist, however, there are a couple of remarks.
Firstly, after the appearance of Dawkins’ works, the subject of biological evolution is not the species, the population, or the individual — but the gene. Similarly, the subject of cultural evolution is not humanity, not the community, and not the human — but the meme. The fact that memes about the moral obligation to repay debts and the necessity of hierarchies are successfully passed from generation to generation does not necessarily condition the prosperity of human communities in which these memes are widespread.
Secondly, even if we assume that evolution primarily ensures an increase in the adaptability of a population to current conditions, this in no way guarantees that a useful trait that once appeared through evolution will retain its utility in new conditions. Since the appearance of the first states, the conditions of human interaction have changed significantly, and today the existence of a state that controls the daily lives of people and preaches some debt of every subject to it no longer looks so unconditionally useful for the community. With equal success, it can be viewed as a kind of atavism destined to be displaced by other forms of human organization.
Questions like these are increasingly coming from our subscribers. It sounds as if terminators are already marching outside the window, and Skynet is about to cut off our hot water for non-payment. Many seriously fear that neural networks and robots will leave us without work and means of subsistence, and if the market is allowed to remain free, then evil corporations will throw us out into the cold. But there is no need to worry so much—this threat is greatly exaggerated. And the fear of “technological unemployment” is perhaps the most persistent myth in human history.
Do you know that mean joke? “We thought that in the future, robots would carry heavy loads and mop floors, and people would paint pictures and compose music. In the end, AI draws and writes poetry, and we continue to mop floors.” This is the essence of the so-called Moravec’s paradox. What seems complex to us (higher mathematics, playing chess, writing code) is a piece of cake for a computer. But what is elementary for us (walking through a room cluttered with junk without tripping) is an impossible task for AI.
Any physical work requiring fine motor skills and the ability to act in the chaos of a non-standard environment will be automated last. Electricians, plumbers, auto mechanics, builders, painters, roofers, welders—they can all sleep perfectly soundly! No robot, not even the most advanced one from Boston Dynamics, will be able to climb under the hood of your old car, feel for the right bolt, and understand why it’s “making a strange knocking sound on turns” in the coming decades. Replacing a plumber in a Khrushchev-era apartment with its unique, historically formed pipe geometry is a task for super-civilizations, not for ChatGPT.
“But surely someone will be replaced!” you might say. Of course. But let’s look at a history textbook. In the 19th century, English weavers (Luddites) smashed steam looms in a panic. They were convinced that machines would deprive them of their bread. What actually happened? Fabric became many times cheaper. People were able to buy an entire wardrobe instead of one shirt every five years. Demand skyrocketed, and the industry required far more laborers: tailors, logistics specialists, salespeople, and mechanics to maintain those very looms appeared.
Or remember the beginning of the 20th century. About 80-90% of the population toiled in the fields. Then came the tractor. It seemed like a catastrophe! Millions of peasants would be left without work! But no, they went to build factories, produce cars, and open restaurants and barbershops.
And remember the panic of the 1970s when the first ATMs appeared? Bank tellers thought it was their funeral. But ATMs made opening new branches so much cheaper that banks began to grow like mushrooms after rain. In the end, the demand for bank employees only grew—from simple “bill dispensers,” they turned into consultants and managers.
We often fear what we cannot imagine. Try explaining to an 18th-century peasant who a “targetologist,” “SMM manager,” “cyber-athlete,” or “prompt engineer” is. He would simply tap his temple with his finger. In the same way, we currently cannot even imagine the professions that will appear in 10-15 years.
People think: “If the state doesn’t protect my rights and regulate AI, I’m doomed.” In reality, it’s exactly the opposite. When technology closes a door in one place, enterprising people immediately cut ten new windows. If officials start introducing quotas, bans on the use of AI, or robot taxes, they will simply freeze the economy. Enterprises will become uncompetitive, goods will become expensive, and you and I will become poor.
A deregulated market allows capital and resources to flow instantly into new, as yet undiscovered niches. Will AI take over the routine? Great! This means that the production of goods and services will become incredibly cheap and your real income will grow. We will work fewer hours but live in greater abundance, spending time on creativity, service, interpersonal communication, and those very new professions that will be born out of entrepreneurial freedom.
Let’s be honest: we all love movies where a lone hero goes up against an entire army of bad guys with a single pistol and wins thanks to incredible marksmanship and plot armor. It looks cool over popcorn. But in real life, especially in political struggle, it doesn’t work that way. In reality, the winner isn’t the one with the bigger gun. The winner is the one playing hide-and-seek, knowing in advance where the opponent is hiding. In the digital age, our primary weapon against a stationary thug is the asymmetry of anonymity.
Imagine a situation. You know absolutely everything about your opponent. You know their real name, where they live, and what time they pick up their kids from school. You know the make and plate number of their car; you’ve seen their drunken photos from a corporate party ten years ago; you know where they work, who they’ve crossed, and what scares them to the point of chills down their spine. And what do they know about you? Only your Telegram nickname. Some hypothetical LibertyNinja99 with a capybara avatar, and that’s it. One of the subscribers recently voiced a damn bold but absolutely brilliant thought:
“If I have full personal data, addresses, life history, and an understanding of my enemy’s weaknesses, while the enemy has even a nuclear bomb but doesn’t even know my name—I have a much better chance of destroying them than they do of destroying me.”
And you know what? That is the pure, crystal truth. Power, even the size of a nuclear bomb or the entire repressive apparatus of the state, is simply raw energy. And any energy must have a vector, a point of application. What use is a nuclear button or an OMON division if you don’t know where to strike? In such a situation, the authoritarian machine turns into a blinded Cyclops, frantically swinging a huge club, smashing its own caves while the cunning Odysseus stands quietly to the side. You, on the other hand, hold a scalpel. You don’t need an atomic bomb to destroy the life or career of a corrupt official or a brutal security officer. One flash drive is enough. One letter to his wife. One leaked document about offshore accounts. One report to the security service of his own boss. You strike precisely, at the most vulnerable spots, because you see everything, and he sees nothing.
This asymmetry is critically important everywhere:
In political struggle: etatists, conservatives, and bureaucrats love the spotlight when they are at the podium, but they are terrified of the light of a flashlight pointed at their dark dealings. When a nomenklatura official realizes that ghosts they can neither imprison nor buy are watching them, paranoia sets in. And paranoia causes mistakes.
At protests and during revolutions: remember why the punishers so desperately hide their faces under balaclavas and rip off their badges? Because they understand that as soon as they are deanonymized, they cease to be an “immune cog in the system.” They become Vasya from the third entrance, whose tires might be slashed tomorrow or who might be refused bread at the local store. Deanon turns a faceless machine of terror into a bunch of frightened people fearing retribution.
Authoritarian regimes are built on the illusion of omnipotence and total control. They want you in their databases, they want your biometrics, they want your passport linked to social networks. They want to see right through you. Because as soon as you become anonymous, their monopoly on violence collapses. The state can imprison a person of flesh and blood, but it cannot handcuff a cryptographic key or VPN traffic.
What conclusion can be drawn? Maintaining this very asymmetry is not just geek paranoia, but basic hygiene and a vital method of struggle for any libertarian and free-thinking person. Hide yourself. Use pseudonyms, encryption, crypto, proxies. Do not feed the Leviathan with your personal data. Be an impenetrable black square to them. And at the same time—tear the masks off them. Study OSINT tools. Dig through registries, find their villas, mistresses, secret accounts, and corrupt connections. Make their lives absolutely transparent.
Writing reviews of friends’ books has always been difficult for me, because on one hand there is the demand for objectivity, and on the other—sympathy for the person, which clouds the critic’s vision. Therefore, I usually avoid such a conflict of internal interests, but in this case, I decided to take it on (especially since the theme of war is generally close to me). I decided to do it, but for a long time, I struggled to find the right angle, for although the book is small, it took me quite a while to understand what it is actually about. During the reading process, I periodically felt outraged, then touched, then outraged again, and so on in a circle; things only started to make sense when I finally realized what it reminded me of. That is what I will talk about first.
Once, I read a book of similar size and also self-published called Warlordism 101, dedicated to an instrumental analysis of the warlord concept with various historical examples, from successful ones (Álvaro Obregón, Li Mi) to failures (Baron Ungern, Charles Taylor, Chen Jiongming, and others). One of the goals of its writing was to create a Reader that the Author would be afraid to meet (in his own words)—simply put, it is a small pocket guide on how to become a successful warlord based on historical examples. I haven’t become a warlord yet, but the book, it seems to me, turned out to be quite practical and useful.
The Libertarian Theory of War, however, stunned me upon first reading precisely with its relative uselessness, especially in those sections where the war itself is described. The author’s recommendations take up literally a couple of paragraphs and are formulated in the spirit of “do good, don’t do bad”—meaning, before an attack, one should conduct reconnaissance (specific recommendations on how, with what, etc., are unfortunately not provided); if you go to war, stock up on resources (an important but trivial thought), and so on. In short, from the perspective of the art of war, Sun Tzu is more useful, not to mention Clausewitz.
Mahan, Duhe, Ludendorff, Liddell Hart, Guderian, von Seeckt, Svechin, Mao Zedong, Boyd, Lind, and Warden: for those wishing to partake in the military wisdom of the 20th century (the 21st is still being processed), there is no shortage of non-fiction. Frankly speaking, it would be difficult to expect a modest volume to crack themes comparable to general staff textbooks, but nevertheless, I am used to understanding a book on the theory of war as something slightly different, and therefore I initially treated what was written with great skepticism.
So what, then, are we being offered, if not an exhaustive work on operational art, strategy, and other useful things? While thinking about this (and almost letting the review slide into a typical paragraph-by-paragraph dispute), I had an epiphany. The book, in general, is not about the art of war at all; that is presented in such modest strokes just so that it is there in principle. The author is far more interested in something else: the correlation of wars with libertarian philosophy—that is, reflecting on what goes on (and should go on) in the head of a libertarian who goes to war. Of course, libertarianism as such is not very compatible with classical warfare, where millions march under state flags, but the author immediately makes a pivot and declares war as any confrontation in which one side desperately wants to physically kill the other—permanently, so they don’t get back up. Thus, war immediately moves into the cozy plane of small scales and frantic individualism. One immediately envisions a kind of Wild West, where a farmer with a Winchester shoots back from the attic at a neighbor who decided that the farmer stole his cow. And it is clear that descriptions of what is happening in the heads of both actors in this fun are precisely what interest the author most. He wants to study how deadly conflicts will ignite, proceed, and end in a society of such atomic super-individualist rationalists, sitting on their farms with rifles and killdozers—that is, libertarians.
And here I almost started a paragraph-by-paragraph dispute in the spirit of “that’s not how people’s heads work!!”, but I stopped again because I was finally enlightened. Lem once had a series of sci-fi stories presented as reviews of non-existent books. On one hand, they were so tasty that it was terribly frustrating that the book itself couldn’t be read, but on the other—Lem masterfully opened and closed the topic, describing the plot twists and characters in such a way that there was hardly any need to read the fictional book itself. There is also a genre of in-world books found in various novels or even RPGs, which seriously expound concepts that are terribly important to the inhabitants of that world, but, of course, do not relate to the real world. They are usually composed to make the player’s or reader’s immersion deeper, so they can peek through such a window into the mechanics of relationships and philosophies of the depicted world.
The Libertarian Theory of War reminded me of exactly such a publication: a book arrived from some parallel reality that has no touch with ours, a world of those very farmers with rifles on their own land and without governments (not even large corporations), who need a moral (first and foremost!) guide to action: how to act in accordance with one’s faith if a neighbor stole a sheep, and a private court, misled, for some reason decided that the sheep is his. This is a serious question in a world of atomic rational super-individualists with rifles sitting on their farms: do I have the moral right to go to my neighbor and smash his house, threatening him with a weapon? and what will my neighbors say? and what if he gathers neighbors, lies to them about the sheep, and before I arrive, comes to shake my house? Of course, for us, these things are of about as much practical interest as listing the Sixteen Permitted Heresies, referring to the Daedric Princes in Oblivion, but for the inhabitants of such a hypothetical Libertarian Wild West, all these questions are extremely important.
And here the author can no longer be blamed for stupidity or lack of logic: in his head, as with any good writer, there is a high-quality and internally consistent picture of such a wonderful place, and for its inhabitants, he provides answers to all the above questions. When and how it is permissible for a libertarian to enter a war, why, how to end it, what to do if one has to fight non-libertarians (suddenly a state appears on the horizon, Achtung!) and so on and so forth. Of course, everything is laid out quite concisely, but in an elegant style, and almost all conceivable questions are touched upon briefly (i.e., within a couple of paragraphs), up to potential PTSD and the realization that war changes people. Generally speaking, all thinking people of East Slavic origin have been affected, one way or another, by the sudden war in Ukraine, which, to be honest, has been going on for far too long. And everyone has somehow reflected on their attitude not only toward it, but toward wars in general, even if they hadn’t thought about war before. This book represents an interesting philosophical experience of libertarian reflection on hypothetical wars of libertarians—here, again, the author speaks about what is closer to him and what he feels more deeply.
Who will find this useful? Well, definitely not hard-core materialists who do not believe in a libertarian paradise, nor those looking for specific recommendations like “storming a forest belt under conditions of enemy drone countermeasures” or “features of the strategy of highly decentralized armies.” Escapists will definitely like the author’s world, that’s a fact, and we will all derive practical benefit from this work when the specified world arrives. And the last part of the book will definitely prove useful, where a quite realistic case is considered: states have started to fight (or a war has started inside a state)—what would be ethically justified to do to preserve both one’s libertarian faith and one’s skin in such a situation, is it permissible to side with someone, and if so, to what extent, how, and why, or is it ethically justified to simply get away from this mess as far as possible? In principle, considering that, as already mentioned, the war has affected quite a lot of people, among whom was clearly the target audience of the book, discussing the ethical issues of a libertarian’s behavior in a war between states is clearly not useless. Let us note that at the beginning, the author makes references to his first work—an introduction to libertarianism—and clearly indicates the target audience of the book (essentially, it is a second volume continuing the theme), so from this point of view, everything is correct. If you are not in that audience, there is no point in complaining about the text.
Ah, and in conclusion, one cannot fail to mention the author’s most original feature. Emotions, which people are guided by (and which are by definition irrational), he considers as imaginary entities, so-called spirits, by which people can be possessed, and which are quite real from the point of view of physical influence on the world and peculiar desires. That is, one can say that a person killed someone out of hatred and revenge for the sad fate of a sheep stolen from him, or one can say that he did it because he was possessed by the spirit of the sheep craving vengeance, and this spirit will not rest until the offender’s blood is spilled. All this is laid out, again, elegantly and poetically; the question arises—how justified is it to introduce extra entities? On one hand, it seems we haven’t said anything new; on the other—the irrationality of human behavior, which leads to quite material consequences, is emphasized, and a uniform view of the entire spectrum of such behavior is provided. So, I hope the metaphor takes root; it is quite unconventional.
It is amazing how laypeople sometimes imagine the “black market” or the darknet. Thanks to Netflix, crime reports, and government scare stories, most people picture something out of “Mad Max.” Constant chaos: brutal cartels, automatic weapon shootouts over distribution points, gloomy sociopathic hackers trading uranium and contract killings, and absolute brutality.
But let’s come down to earth and see how it looks in reality. Imagine a typical transaction on the “terrible and horrible” black market: – Psst, man, did you bring the goods? – Yes, here. Here is some farm cheese made from unpasteurized milk, freelance design without paying an exorbitant tax, crypto bought without KYC humiliations, and medication from abroad that our Ministry of Health decided to ban for some reason.
Sounds less bloodthirsty already, right? Because 99% of the so-called “black” market is an absolutely peaceful, voluntary exchange between people who simply want to live their lives. It is the reaction of a healthy organism to the suffocating grip of a stationary bandit. Therefore, it is worth understanding where the shadow economy comes from in the first place and why it has nothing to do with violence:
First, it is protection against financial striptease (AML/KYC). Today, to transfer your own honestly earned money, you have to turn yourself inside out. “Anti-money laundering” procedures have turned banks into branches of intelligence services. “Where did these 500 dollars come from? Prove it! Bring a certificate! We will freeze your account pending investigation!”. People move to crypto and the darknet not because they are laundering millions of dollars from cartels. They do it because they want to reclaim the basic right to financial privacy.
Second, it is an escape from the over-regulation of every single breath. The state loves to create monopolies and feed bureaucrats. Want to start a business? Get 150 permits, pass the fire inspection (which requires a bribe), buy a license. For many small entrepreneurs, this is simply unaffordable. The shadow sector consists of garage masters, tutors, home bakers, and IT freelancers who simply say: “Leave us alone, we want to work, not feed an army of inspectors.”
Third, these are goods banned by the whim of the Leviathan. The state constantly decides what we can read, watch, eat, and how we should treat ourselves. Banned the import of decent antidepressants? They will appear on the gray market. Blocked convenient subscription services? People will appear to help bypass this. Banned vapes or certain types of plants? Welcome to the darknet. Demand does not disappear just because a man in a suit banged a wooden gavel on a table.
But what about violence? What about the mafia? Now, this is the most interesting part. Violence on the black market is a direct consequence of state intervention, not a property of the free market. Remember Prohibition in the USA. Before the alcohol ban, brewers fought in courts or competed on price. As soon as alcohol was banned, Al Capone, shootouts, and Tommy guns appeared. Why? Because legal dispute resolution mechanisms vanished, and risks skyrocketed. The state itself creates crime by pushing entire industries outside the legal framework.
By the way, the darknet itself is a brilliant example of how the free market solves the problem of trust without any state. There is no police there and you cannot sue. But there is a system of reputation, reviews, and escrow accounts (where money is frozen by a guarantor until the goods are received). Sellers on darknet marketplaces tremble for their rating more than a legal restaurant does for Michelin stars. If a shop cheats a customer or sells low-quality goods, it will simply be destroyed by reviews and lose its business. Pure reputation economics and agorism in action.
So next time someone tells you horror stories about “illegal” markets, remember: the largest and most dangerous gang, which regularly employs violence and takes money from people, is not in the darknet, but collects taxes.
