Any form of abuse in a relationship deserves condemnation for many reasons and should not be tolerated. However, particular attention should be paid to the consequences of relationships with degenerates who possess a weak violence inhibitor and exhibit psychopathic traits. As shown in one current Canadian study of victims of abuse in heterosexual relationships (93% of whom were women), up to 30% of “abusers” meet the criteria for psychopathy, and such individuals are the strongest predictor of long-term violence in relationships. Additionally, due to a dysfunctional violence inhibitor, they easily ignore distress signals (expressions of sadness and fear) from their partners, except in cases where they can use this for their own manipulative purposes. For example, by manipulating fear, they may intimidate their partner, coerce them into sexual contact, or force the use of substances. And the main conclusion of the study is that psychopathic abusers have the worst impact on the mental health of their partners, leaving them with post-traumatic stress disorder.
Obviously, degenerates with a weak violence inhibitor should not be allowed into relationships, at least until they agree to therapy for their disorder. First and foremost, every normal individual should think about their own safety and mental health, as relationships with such psychopathic abusers can only cause harm. Furthermore, if you know that a certain person is capable of easily committing violence without experiencing any resistance, it would be a good idea to warn everyone in your circle about this and the potential consequences of a relationship with them. Finally, the predisposition to a weak violence inhibitor simply should not be reinforced in the human gene pool. A good example is provided by a close relative of humans—the pygmy chimpanzee (bonobo), which has an extremely non-violent society and does not kill its own kind. According to some researchers, female bonobos simply refuse to breed with aggressive males. By acting in the same way, humans could significantly reduce the prevalence of a weak violence inhibitor in the very next generation.
The final chapter, summarizing the third part of the book, is finished. Now, everyone who dislikes ongoing works can finally download the book in its entirety and devour it in one evening. Those who postponed their donation until the completion of the work, not wanting to spend money on something that might not be finished, can also relax and open their wallets. By starting to write a book and continuing to do so, you eventually finish it. By starting to achieve ancap and moving in the right direction, you eventually achieve it. That is the way things work.
Next, the book will undergo editing (please send in your valuable comments), and after that, I will handle its distribution, and I, of course, urge you to do the same. Prepare your publishing capacities for the distribution of hard copies, consider which resources to spread links to the text on, write reviews—everything helps.
It was a great pleasure working on this project. I believe it allowed me to seriously systematize my own views. I hope it allows you to do the same.
There is a claim that modern living conditions negatively affect the human psyche, as a very high level of stress, the prevalence of psychological problems, and even suicides can be observed in society today. At the same time, more primitive, conservative, and often even authoritarian societies of the past are cited as examples of the opposite, in which supposedly no psychological problems were observed. Sometimes such claims go as far as suggesting that people who slogged away around the clock simply to ensure basic survival and submitted to authoritarian-conservative orders—with attributes such as a lack of women’s rights, cruel upbringing of children, and submission to authority—were mentally healthier than the average resident of a modern city, who has far fewer difficulties and far more freedoms in life.
In one Indian article about mental health problems in conservative societies, there is a good paragraph that describes the entire situation: “Due to erroneous conservative views on mental health, society characterizes patients [suffering from such problems] as crazy or weak people. People with such conservative beliefs generally remain in ignorance and suffer in silence, hiding their pain or suppressing the pain of their loved ones, who may also be suffering. As a result, such an undesirable conservative ego prevents people or their family members not only from accepting their pain—that is, opening up about their struggle—but also from seeking professional help.”
People with authoritarian-conservative views have no evidence that people in stricter and more authoritarian societies possess better mental health. On the contrary, it would be logical to expect that phenomena such as poverty, violent coercion and abuse, and a lack of rights and freedoms should seriously traumatize people. But in societies characterized by such attributes, it is not customary to even raise the issue of psychological problems, because no one would simply understand the suffering person; they would quite likely be ridiculed, called a weakling, or even punished for such a revelation. Therefore, such problems will not be observed in them.
In modern society, things are different, as over time, sharing one’s problems has become a normal practice that does not face misunderstanding and condemnation. Now we can observe so many psychological problems because people take the opportunity to tell everyone about them. If in the past a person hid their suffering, and suicide was an absolutely unexpected act for those around them, now few people would hide, and a potential suicide would complain about their state to those around them many times, or at least hint at it in some way, before attempting to cause themselves real harm. This is precisely the difference between authoritarian-conservative and more liberal and free societies—the latter only have more visible psychological problems because they are hidden less. However, a greater number of real psychological problems can be expected specifically from stricter and more authoritarian societies.
Finished polishing the subject. In the course of the narrative, I often had to bite my tongue, because there was much that could be told about how we practice agorism in our Montellibero, but I promised to make the book as concise as possible, which means there is no room for lyrical digressions.
Each chapter about one approach or another to building ancap ended with a list of that approach’s shortcomings and a pointer to the fact that it is unable to lead to ancap. Now all that’s left for me is to summarize everything written, and after that, I can move on to editing while the trail is still hot.
In 2011, US Air Force psychologists conducted a mental health screening of 600 combat drone operators. As it turned out, 42% of UAV operators reported moderate or severe stress, and 20% reported emotional exhaustion or burnout. A later study showed that drone operators suffered from the same levels of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, alcohol abuse, and suicidal ideation as conventional combat crews. Many will immediately ask—why is this happening?
As far back as the 20th century, many military experts concluded that 98% of people experience strong internal resistance to committing murder, and only up to 2% of individuals with psychopathic predispositions do not. In analyzing the issue of modern warfare involving combat drones, it is important for us to pay attention to what these experts said about the factors influencing the ability to kill and the factors leading to psychological trauma on the battlefield. The conclusions drawn and listed in the works of Dave Grossman will be especially helpful to us in this regard.
Firstly, this example with combat drone operators confirms the conclusion that killing is the most traumatic experience for a human being. As Grossman writes, the contradiction between the necessity to kill and the inability to do so due to internal resistance traumatizes a soldier’s psyche more than any other difficulties of combat operations. And those soldiers who were still able to kill most often suffer for the rest of their lives after the war because of what they committed.
A drone operator does not experience cold, hunger, lack of sleep, physical injuries, the loss of comrades, the risk of dying at any moment, and many other things that an ordinary soldier faces in battle. The only thing that unites them is the necessity to kill. This, therefore, only proves the long-established conclusion that killing is absolutely unnatural for humans and is the most traumatic experience of all possible ones.
Secondly, although military experts of the past concluded that distancing allows one to bypass the resistance to killing, they apparently underestimated how strongly it is expressed in humans. Even for a UAV operator, who may be located on the other side of the planet from the combat operations, this resistance does not completely disappear. The mere awareness of committing a murder is enough to cause psychological trauma.
An analogy can be drawn with the trench warfare of the First World War, in which hand grenades proved to be psychologically effective weapons. A soldier simply threw a grenade toward the enemy trenches, and it was not necessary for him to directly observe the enemy for this or what his actions led to. However, if he did see the result of his actions, or even just heard it, for example in the form of the screams of enemy soldiers, it could already traumatize his psyche.
All of this shows us that as long as a human is fundamentally capable of realizing the fact of committing a murder, no means will make it an easy act for them. By the way, this also aligns with the assumption of the Violence Inhibition Mechanism (VIM) model. Although this mechanism is directly activated only when a person can observe the suffering of their victim, due to the process of conditioning (the formation of conditioned reflex reactions), its functioning from childhood develops the ability to experience a rejection reaction even at the mere thought of committing violence.
As we can see, one cannot underestimate how unnatural the act of killing is for a human being. Every mentally healthy individual possesses a violence inhibitor, the function of which cannot simply be bypassed or suppressed. Even if certain means and methods enable some people to commit murder, it still does not end well for them. Only a tiny percentage of psychopathic personalities are truly capable of easily committing murder.
It’s been a while since I worked on the translation of Molynieux’s “Practical Anarchy,” but from time to time, even those texts that don’t receive donations need to be posted, otherwise the public forgets they exist.
In chapter 17, The Stateless Society: An Exploration of Alternatives, the author examines several groups of typical arguments put forward by supporters of the state in defense of the state’s right to exist, and for each group provides a brief justification of their invalidity. As usual, he maintains a brisk polemical style, but, of course, the orientation of the arguments toward a Western reader is evident.
As a reminder, I am continuing the projects to translate several books into Russian:
Libertarianism by Eric Mack – 20 out of 23 chapters translated
Practical Anarchy by Stephan Molynieux – 18 out of 29 chapters translated
There is a myth that more cruel and aggressive people should be more successful in reproduction, as this is an advantageous behavioral strategy. An example can be drawn from the research of anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, according to which greater reproductive success compared to tribesmen of their own age is found among those men of the Yanomami indigenous people living in Brazil and Venezuela who commit murders. It is claimed that they have 2.5 times more wives and 3 times more children.
As Chagnon and some other researchers believe, the success of aggressive men in reproduction is the rule for primitive societies. According to their evolutionary logic, killers push their neighbors out of reproduction and have more offspring, meaning murder becomes a hereditary trait. Therefore, humans became born killers in the course of evolution. But if this conclusion is examined in more detail, it turns out that 6 arguments can be put forward against it:
Computer simulations of evolutionary processes have shown that neither a warlike strategy (hawk), consisting of carrying out attacks, nor a timid strategy (dove), consisting of retreating during attacks, are as evolutionarily stable strategies as the “retaliator strategy,” where individuals behave non-aggressively but will still fight back in the event of an attack. Timid individuals cannot compete with aggressive individuals, but at the same time, aggressive individuals risk sustaining injuries in battles. Therefore, the mixed retaliator strategy is the most optimal.
Data from animal behavior research shows that most intra-species aggression is non-lethal. Of course, in some situations, killing conspecifics can be beneficial, but in most cases, this is not the case. Accordingly, in the course of biological evolution, inhibitors of intra-species aggression are developed, preventing harm in battles.
Military research has shown that the average healthy individual has strong internal resistance to committing murder. Only 1-2% of soldiers with sociopathic tendencies do not experience this in battle. There are also a number of evolutionary factors as to why such resistance is inherent in humans. As with animals, killing conspecifics is rarely a strategy encouraged by natural selection for humans.
Humans possess the potential for competition, aggression, and even committing murder, and wars occur in many societies. However, examples of absolutely non-violent societies, such as the Semai and Paliyar peoples, show that humans are capable of living peacefully. This raises questions regarding the claim that murder is a natural trait of humans.
Research on the Yanomami people has methodological problems. Firstly, anthropologist Brian Ferguson questioned the claim that killers and non-killers were of comparable age. Accordingly, the difference in the number of children may be explained by the difference in age of the studied individuals. Chagnon ignored this criticism. Secondly, examining Chagnon’s data, Ferguson concluded that even if killers had a reproductive advantage, it was nowhere near as large as 3 times. The criticism of Chagnon’s research does not end there; there are many other reasons why they may be methodologically unsound.
Other studies demonstrate opposite results. For instance, a study of the Waorani people of Ecuador showed that zealous warriors who carry out raids on fellow tribesmen have lower reproductive success. They did not have more wives or children; moreover, their children were less likely to survive to reproductive age. As a result, warlike men proved to be not as individually fit as less aggressive men.
As we can see, a large amount of theoretical and empirical data shows that in various social circumstances, killers should have fewer children than non-killers. And the idea of murder as an evolutionarily advantageous strategy for humans faces many obstacles.
Minarchism is an extremely unstable state, where the cancerous tumor called the state has just been pushed into maximum remission by stripping it of as many functions and resources for their execution as possible, leaving only what simply cannot be taken away—either because officials resisted strongly, the people cannot understand how to manage without it, or something else.
Therefore, I understand the question roughly as follows: under which form of government will a minarchist state expand its powers most slowly? My answer: shareholder democracy. Historically, trading republics, such as Venice, were quite close to this method of management.
The point of this form of government is that the right to vote in the administration of the republic belongs to those who contribute to its functioning, and exactly to the extent to which they contribute. Modern technologies fully allow for quite complex voting with share packages, including options for delegating votes and revoking that delegation.
When people allocate their own money, they tend to maximize savings and are least inclined to give anyone the right to forcibly seize citizens’ money. This is precisely what makes them vigilantly monitor any potential abuses by authorized officials, which works more reliably than a simply formally drawn scheme of checks and balances.
One might wonder, how is this worse than a scheme with a benevolent dictator who unilaterally pays for all state functions out of their own pocket, providing state services to others? The problem is that everyone else must be guided by his sole conception of the common good, which can change unpredictably and rapidly. Simply compare the pace and amplitude of changes in the structures of Bitcoin and Ethereum.
At Montelibero, we are implementing exactly this form of government: both in the eponymous fund and in the land cooperative building the village. (These are two different entities with slightly different vote-counting mechanisms: in the village, we simply vote by square meters, and in the fund, a logarithmic formula for calculating vote weight currently applies so that no one can obtain a controlling interest.) So, I am not only reasoning theoretically about the best form of government, but I am also participating in the field testing of the one I consider to be the best.
Enrico Dandolo, Chairman of the Board of the Most Serene Republic of Venice
It is a well-known fact that the hormone oxytocin plays an important role in pro-social behavior. It promotes the formation of attachment between mother and child, pair bonding, disposes a person to trust and benevolence toward those they consider “their own,” helps establish relationships between people, and so on. The hormone vasopressin also plays an important role in pro-social behavior, including the formation of paternal love for children.
These hormones are often called regulators of aggression. It is believed that in intra-group relations, oxytocin promotes the establishment of altruism and non-violence, which unite and coordinate the actions of individual group members. Conversely, in the case of inter-group relations, this only increases aggressiveness, as a cohesive group is ready to fight more fiercely against other “alien” groups, toward whose members oxytocin does not dispose one to trust. This is often used to explain the occurrence of wars between different groups of people [1].
At the same time, based on the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism, in species where it is strongly expressed, including humans, the restraint of aggression extends to all intra-species relations. Nevertheless, the violence that does occur is explained by the presence of a small number of individuals in whom this mechanism is impaired. This conclusion is supported by many studies, including military ones. They show that most people experience strong resistance to harming others and committing murder. Even on the battlefield, this applies to the majority of soldiers, and only a minority of them constitute the driving force of war [2].
Having two such explanations for the nature of social and aggressive behavior, the question arises as to which one is correct, or if both are correct, how they relate to one another. Answering such a question is not so difficult if one looks at how the corresponding neurophysiological systems work and interact with each other.
Recall that the use of certain agonists of serotonin 1A and 1B receptors (drugs that activate them) led to the suppression of attacking aggression in animals, while not affecting defensive aggression or other forms of behavior and social communication. This result is completely consistent with the expected result of the work of a violence inhibitor, which speaks to its function as part of the serotonergic (5-HT) system.
It is interesting that the 5-HT system, including 1A and 1B receptors, is involved in the regulation of oxytocin and vasopressin secretion [3]. In one experiment, the use of a 1A receptor agonist in mice promoted not only the suppression of attacking aggression but also the emergence of pro-social behavior (close contact and grooming of a conspecific) due to oxytocin secretion. At the same time, the simultaneous administration of an oxytocin receptor antagonist (a drug that blocks it) did not reduce the anti-aggressive effect at all, but only suppressed the pro-social behavior. And administration together with a vasopressin receptor antagonist changed nothing at all [4].
It can be concluded that the regulation of aggression and the stimulation of pro-social behavior are functions performed by different neurophysiological systems. Moreover, the 5-HT system, responsible for the former, is capable of influencing the operation of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, responsible for the latter, but not vice versa. This means that it is precisely the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism that explains the nature of aggression regulation, while oxytocin relates only to pro-social behavior. And the absence of such behavior in an individual—for example, when encountering a “stranger” (but a representative of their own species) or simply due to the impairment of the oxytocin receptor, while the violence inhibitor is still functioning—absolutely does not mean that they will be predisposed to a violent attack.
1. De Dreu C. K. W. et al. (2010). The Neuropeptide Oxytocin Regulates Parochial Altruism in Intergroup Conflict Among Humans; 2. Theory of Violence: https://antiviolence.io/ru; 3. Jørgensen, H., Riis, M., Knigge, U., Kjaer, A., & Warberg, J. (2003). Serotonin Receptors Involved in Vasopressin and Oxytocin Secretion; 4. Tan, O., Martin, L. J., & Bowen, M. T. (2020). Divergent pathways mediate 5-HT1A receptor agonist effects on close social interaction, grooming and aggressive behaviour in mice: Exploring the involvement of the oxytocin and vasopressin systems.
The matter is gradually nearing completion. The book is almost ready in rough draft; later, I will polish it, adapting the text so that even a non-professional narrator can read it aloud without getting tripped up by tongue-twisting phrasing (I want to make an audiobook). For now, I present to you a freshly written chapter on the instrumental approach to building ancap. There are no historical studies on cypherpunks and such—just a very brief overview of why all this is needed, how it works, and why it doesn’t work very well.
