Montelibero Project News, Issue 7

In the previous issue, I wrote about the fact that excess forest had been cleared on the plot for our future libertarian village and road construction had begun. As of today, the road to the plot is fully graded, and I can now ride my scooter right under the shade of the native olives.

In the second half of October, I personally took a job working on the road construction and plot clearing, and by yesterday, we already had a full women’s crew working. The work is, of course, not easy, but here in Montenegro, the ladies are quite tough, and one has to keep up. After the first working day, I spent a couple of days recovering, but then I eventually got into the swing of things, and over the past three weeks, I’ve even grown a bit stronger.

The plot has brought in its first small income: several kilograms of olives and some firewood. The highest quality olives were salted, and a tasting is expected in mid-December. The lower quality ones were turned into a liter of oil. I will continue the harvest, but overall the scale will remain modest: without special care, the yield of our olives is small.

As for the firewood, it was sold mainly to neighbors, for self-pickup, and quite cheaply—because long-haul trucks cannot reach the plot, so the logistical costs of hauling the firewood far away would simply eat up all the profit. As of today, 475 euros of this profit has been earned. After this, we will likely stop sales, and the remainder is intended to be kept for the future needs of the village, for which it will be necessary to equip a storage area.

Since the construction of houses will soon begin on the plot, a trailer was delivered there, which is planned to be used as a utility room and a guardhouse. And since the permanent residence of a guard is expected, this will also require the deployment of some minimal domestic infrastructure. The trailer had to be hauled up the hill by a tractor, so we will soon need to concrete the steepest sections of the road; otherwise, it will be difficult to deliver many cargoes. In time, the road will be fully concreted.

Since the construction of houses is about to begin, the issue of privatizing individual plots for building has become urgent. For now, a preliminary plan was drawn up, and mechanisms for mutual agreement on who gets which plot were tested in the chat. For instance, I was chased off a piece of land I liked twice, until I grabbed one for which competition was slightly lower. In addition, a drone was purchased; it is intended to perform aerial photography, tie it to the stakes set in the ground by the surveyor (whose coordinates are precisely known)—and then the preliminary plan can be corrected taking into account the features of the terrain and the remaining trees on the plot. A test flight was conducted yesterday; it didn’t go very well, and it is expected to be repeated soon with slightly corrected parameters. The drone, as is customary in Montelibero, was purchased by a private initiative group through equity participation and using the tokenomics built around the project; its use is regulated by an agreement drawn up between them, and whether they use it for entertainment or monetize it in some way is their business; for me, it is more interesting as a practical solution to various problems related to property rights.

Last week, project volunteers carried out a humanitarian special operation: they rescued one Russian political emigrant from an anarcho-commune at a farmstead near Bijelo Polje. Following her, another communard migrated to us on his own (he is the one we plan to use as a guard living in the trailer). This is how communities work under ancap. Ideologically, they aren’t very close to us yet, but they will do as fellow travelers, and we’ll see from there.

But we are, of course, not so much stealing people from other projects as we are attracting our own settlers. For example, the other day a family of five migrated to Montenegro, which is a record for us so far. Unfortunately, the project website is updated very rarely and sporadically because there is no one to manage it, so the settler counter on it is unlikely to be up to date. As for the freshest information about Montelibero, as before—it’s in the project’s telegram channel.

Finally, I would like to recommend an English-language blog about settling in Montenegro by one of the project participants, which is posted in the English-language Montelibero telegram channel under the hashtag . There are slightly fresher impressions of the country and how local life is organized than what you can find from me.

Stéphane Molinier. Practical Anarchy. Translation of Chapter 8, on collective defense.

Alex Dvoretsky kindly sponsored the translation of another chapter by Eric Mack, but the donation caught me in the process of translating another chapter by Stephan Molinari, which I was crafting according to the dictates of my own soul (and in the hope that donations would follow post factum). So, I finished with Molinari first, and now I will switch to Mack.

In the chapter Collective Defense: An Example of Methodology, Molinari analyzes the third most popular question about ancap, after courts and roads: how ancaps will defend themselves against an attack by an evil neighboring state. The book was written before Putin loudly enough declared his claim to be the world’s number one villain, so Germany is used as the model villain instead of Russia, and the dictator there faces a difficult choice: whether to conquer statist Poland or ancap France. I would say that in his fantasies about how the defense problem is resolved, Molinari appears more overconfident than Friedman, who, at least, considers the problem serious, and even admits that for this specific need he would, grimacing and wincing, agree to feed the state.

Social credit rating and the monopoly on violence

Voluntarist, Bitarch

In today’s information world, the institution of reputation plays an important role. It is already difficult to imagine purchasing an expensive product or seeking a moderately serious service without first checking the provider’s rating. Ratings and reviews have become an essential part of many services. Most likely, over time, reputation tools will be used in all transactions, including direct deals between individuals. This leads us to the emergence of a social rating, in which different people will have different reputations depending on whether they fulfilled their obligations honestly, or whether they deceived others, violated the terms of deals, or even harmed their well-being through robbery or violence.

The institution of reputation and financial instruments, especially ostracism and transaction insurance, are capable of replacing coercive tools as a method of influencing offenders. The need to initiate forceful measures simply disappears, and in cases where the offender themselves has not committed violence, the need for any form of forceful resolution essentially vanishes (in the event of a violent attack, of course, self-defense is unavoidable). This would only contribute to solving the problem of violence and reducing its level in society. But at the same time, in a world of stationary bandits, where states hold a monopoly and the “legal” right to commit violence, reputation institutions and social ratings could well serve a harmful purpose.

It is important to understand that states often monopolize services that are important to society. Previously, they took strict control over roads, the financial system, fire services, medicine, the extraction of many resources, social security, and—most importantly within the framework of our topic—the quality control of services and goods supplied to the market. It is quite reasonable to expect that if, at some point, the vast majority of people begin to rely on the institution of reputation, states will take control over it as well. Officials will claim that private solutions are unreliable and that there is a need to issue strict rules for the operation of reputation services, or even create a single state reputation service for everyone, banning private rating and review systems. In a world where some states decide which charging device standard people should use (referring to European Union states), such a scenario has a high probability of becoming a reality.

Thus, the institution of reputation will not only become bureaucratized and inefficient, it could also become a tool for persecuting and punishing people disliked by the current political power. This is already happening in China—a minus in one’s social rating can be received for friendship with an opposition member or for statements against party policy. By a single order from above, any person can be deprived of access to many state benefits. And never mind these benefits—if the state were not a violent monopoly, alternatives to its benefits would exist. But under states, there are no alternatives, as private activity is heavily controlled or prohibited in the spheres they have monopolized. In the end, instead of being a method to fight violence, robbery, and deception, the institution of reputation becomes a supporting tool for strengthening state power and coercive control.

A simple conclusion can be drawn from all this: the institution of reputation is very useful in ensuring the security of transactions, and it is also important for the transition from coercive methods to non-violent influence as the basis for maintaining public order. But when combined with violence, especially state violence, it loses these positive qualities and begins to work toward the strengthening of state power and coercive control. Therefore, it is very important to fight violence and prevent the institution of reputation from being taken under the control of any coercive agents. After all, we cannot fight violence if the institution of reputation is used only by violators for their own benefit, as is currently happening in China.

Legitimacy. A new video from Libertarian Band

I found the time to watch a fresh video from a team whose activities I continue to follow. I was pleasantly surprised. As is usually the case in their recent videos, it provides a fairly solid analysis of the concept under study—in this case, legitimacy. But besides that, this time it also offers a curious prediction: that the acquisition of legitimacy by various non-state entities (like free cities and other contractual jurisdictions) in the eyes of traditional states will proceed roughly the same way as the legitimacy of the Taliban regime is currently being strengthened.

The Milgram Experiment – is a person truly capable of easily harming another person on command?

Voluntarist, Bitarch

In 1963, psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to conduct a series of experiments to clarify a question: how much suffering are ordinary people willing to inflict on others, completely innocent people, if such infliction of pain is part of their job duties? He wanted to understand how the residents of Germany during the years of Nazism could have participated in the destruction of millions of innocent people in concentration camps.

The essence of Milgram’s experiment is that participants are assigned the role of the teacher (in reality, they think they receive this role by lot, but everything is arranged so that a plant actor always becomes the student). Then the “teacher” goes into another room, sits at a table before a high-voltage device, and reads a list of associative word pairs to the “student,” which the student was supposed to memorize. If the student did not memorize the words and subsequently gave a wrong answer to the teacher’s question, the teacher was to use the device to deliver an electric shock to the student. Starting from 15 volts, with each new error, he was to increase the shock in increments of 15 volts up to a maximum of 450 volts, after which he was to continue using the maximum shock. Of course, the actor playing the student received no shock, but only pretended to receive it and experience pain. In different variations of the experiment, the student and teacher were separated either by a soundproof wall (meaning the teacher could only hear the student knocking on the wall), or by an ordinary wall (meaning he could hear screams, pleas to stop, and complaints about supposed heart problems).

As for the results, for example, one series of trials showed that 26 out of 40 subjects (65%) increased the voltage to 450 volts and did not stop delivering electric shocks until the researcher gave the order to end the experiment. And only 5 subjects (12.5%) stopped at a voltage of 300 volts when the victims showed the first signs of distress. Replications of the experiment under different conditions and with different people showed approximately the same results.

What does this mean—that most people are indeed ready to discard all humanity and inflict pain, or even harm, on other people simply by the order of an authority? If we look at the data from Milgram’s experiment that were not published, it is easy to see that this is not the case at all. By analyzing data from 656 post-experimental questionnaires, researchers found that 56% of participants actually stopped the experiment at one point or another because they believed the person behind the wall was truly experiencing pain. Another study, examining 91 interviews conducted immediately after the experiments, showed that among the 46 participants who continued the experiment after the victim’s distress, 33 participants (72%) did so simply because they did not believe that the victim was actually being caused pain (which was indeed the case—the victim-actors only simulated it).

In total, we find that about 86-88% of Milgram’s experiment participants actually either stopped their participation as soon as it seemed to them that they were truly causing the victim pain, or continued only because they did not believe in the authenticity of the experiment and the victim’s pain. These conclusions, based on unpublished data, do not align with the results that were demonstrated in the original studies and shown to a wide audience. Perhaps the methodology of the experiment itself has nothing to be criticized, but the results were clearly cherry-picked to suit the views of the experimenters. An ordinary person cannot be forced to harm others simply by an order from above. And the multi-million victims of Nazism are the result only of the passive acceptance of the regime by the majority of people, while the acts of violence themselves were committed by a minority of security agents working directly for the Nazi state.

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The second part of the book about ancap has begun, and a title for the book still hasn’t been thought of…

The second part of the book is intended to provide a relatively plausible description of an anarcho-capitalist society. I spent a long time considering where to begin, and I started with a tedious methodological introduction on how such a description can be formed in the first place. There is time to build momentum, so I decided that I could afford not to rush headlong into it. After all, it is important to me not to present some single, alternative-free picture of a beautiful future, but to show the principles of how it is all derived.

The first chapter provides a less trivial approach—by adding capitalism to anarchy. This immediately reeks of alternative history and other joys of that sort. The second chapter takes a more obvious approach, by cutting the state out of an existing capitalist society.

Next, there will likely be a large section with a more detailed analysis of how the main institutions of society work, followed by a necessary section describing the difficulties of ancap.

The mind is kind, but very narrow

I am not very fond of the genre of public spats, but in this case the resulting discussion seemed like a good opportunity to articulate some considerations.

There is a channel called Dobroum, led by the respected Alexander Elesev. It is positioned as philosophical, and a great deal of attention is paid in it to the problem of overcoming adverse childhood experiences.

For a libertarian, everything here is relatively simple. Violence against children is violence against people. No one has the right to initiate violence against people with impunity. From there, one can talk about the specific mechanisms through which violence against one’s own children, not to mention others, becomes a dangerous practice, despite the relative defenselessness of children.

Alexander, however, devotes a lot of attention to demonstrating how adverse childhood experiences negatively affect adult life. I do not know why he chose this particular tactic of dripping into people’s brains, nor am I particularly eager to find out. It does not matter to me whether it is because he lives in a country where therapists are piled on top of therapists, or because he adopted this idea from a book that impressed him, or because something happened in his own childhood that led to this result. I am almost entirely certain that there is no single reason, because life in general is a complex and multifactorial thing where there are no simple cause-and-effect relationships between two isolated events: isolated events are merely conceptual models, whereas life is actually a continuous flow of impressions.

As a result, it turns out that for Alexander, any peculiarities of someone’s behavior begin to signal some childhood traumas. Even an avatar that one of my readers from Bulgaria ordered for me became a reason for him to talk about my childhood experience. I imagine that for a fitness trainer, my condition would be just as ironcladly linked to a training regimen, for a nutritionist to a diet, and for a political scientist to the political regime in the country.

In my book on ancap, I deliberately did not engage in justifying the initial principles upon which all subsequent logic was built. Factually, the principles of libertarianism are such because that is what we want. We like it that way. It seems right to us. Of course, this may correlate with certain facts, certain childhood experiences, books read, a popular streamer heard by chance, and so on.

Yes, narrowly specialized arguments work well on some people, including arguments along the lines of “if a child is beaten in childhood, they will grow up to be a stupid loser.” But that is no reason to obsess and dump these arguments on everyone and everyone, for they will by no means work on everyone.

On my channel, I have my own little “dobroum” named Bitarch, who has also become obsessed with the single theme of the total elimination of violence. Unfortunately, the comments he gathers are more often mocking in nature, and this suggests that his target audience does not overlap much with mine. I seem to be powerless to influence such cases of monomania, and this fills me with sadness.

I hope that if you see signs in my own writing that I have been seized by some single overvalued idea, you will signal this to me.

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In a world of violence, there is nowhere to escape to

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Support for certain social norms through coercive methods provided by states, as well as state violence in general, is often not considered a problem at all, since a person is supposedly absolutely free to move to the territory of another state whose conditions will satisfy them. This possibility is also frequently compared to a voluntary change of service provider, as in a free and competitive market. But this assertion is fundamentally incorrect, as several arguments tell us.

First and foremost, moving between states should not be compared to changing a private service provider or moving within a state due to the colossal difference in accompanying costs. As a rule, this requires significant funds, which is far from always achievable for people in difficult situations or living in poor countries. One should also consider the fundamental change in cultural environment, ways of life, and the need to learn a foreign language. For many people, these costs prove insurmountable; because of them, most people never leave their homeland and resign themselves to violent power in the absence of an opportunity to resist it.

One might say that while all these costs are serious, they do not make escaping violence unrealistic for a specific individual. After all, the minimum action required is simply to move to the territory of another country. But even this is difficult. Consider North Korea, from which it is almost impossible to leave; only a few manage to illegally cross the border, risking their lives. Or even less brutal dictatorships, such as Turkmenistan, which is also very hard to leave. It would be interesting to know how the residents of these countries would respond to the assertion that one can simply get up and leave.

In general, movement between states is possible only through border checkpoints; otherwise, forcible detention awaits you. That is, leaving a state is possible exclusively according to the rules imposed by it through force. And rules can change at any moment, becoming stricter. One does not have to look far for examples — just a month ago, leaving Afghanistan was no more difficult than leaving Russia, and now people are ready to cling to the landing gear of a plane to escape the violence of a new stationary bandit in the form of the Taliban. This also applies to civilized Western countries, where historically strict border controls and passport-visa regimes emerged as a means of tracking the movement of people during world wars but were not eliminated upon their conclusion. Additionally, those who are already being persecuted by the state cannot legally leave its territory.

And finally, living in a world where coercive power is the norm, you are not escaping from violence to non-violence; you are merely escaping from one perpetrator of violence to another. The fact that you crossed the border guarantees nothing. Upon entering the territory of another state, your fate is entirely in the hands of its government. It will set certain conditions, and if you do not meet them, you will be detained and sent back, even if you have already socialized in the new place. For instance, a number of countries return fugitives from North Korea. Not long ago, there was a case where Russia deported a woman to Afghanistan who had fled from the Taliban, who were trying to force her into marriage. And even from Western countries, people have often been deported to whom violent retribution threatened in their homeland, for example, because of their sexual orientation.

After all these arguments, it is hardly possible to speak at all about the idea that one can simply get up and run away from violence, especially state violence. In a world of stationary bandits possessing a coercive monopoly on power, doing this is extremely difficult, and in some cases completely impossible. Even in the most favorable scenario, you have no choice but to live without the threat of coercive power from above. Violence is in the foundation of every current social system, and this is another reason to fight it worldwide and as a phenomenon in general, rather than only its individual forms.

The possibility of transitioning from a failed state to ancap

There is a fragile states index that takes into account many factors, including the state’s provision of public services, the stability of power, and other elements. Is it reasonable to assume that states with a high rating (coincidentally or not, it is easiest in these states to evade taxes, own weapons, and host information without a “censor”) will develop (or degrade) in the foreseeable future into full or nearly full “ancapistans,” after which an era of prosperity will begin?

Katsist

I have already written on a similar topic regarding the possibility of building an ancap state in fourth-world countries. In short: the pros and cons are listed, and some may believe the former outweigh the latter, while others believe the opposite. It is worth trying.

The same applies to forecasts regarding the developmental prospects of one ineffective state or another into an ancapistan. An anarchic regime—that is, the decentralization of law—is established there relatively easily. But it is far more difficult to understand how to preserve or, worse yet, grow capitalism from scratch in an anarchic society that either denies private property (the dream of the an-coms) or is based on clan interests and collective responsibility (the example of Somalia or Libya).

Furthermore, it is not entirely clear how to eliminate the influence factor of surrounding states. These are surprisingly jealous entities that are willing to deal only with other states, demand that their neighbors be as similar to themselves as possible, and if someone dares to start getting by without a state, they inevitably send their peacekeepers. However, the global trend is clearly changing now, and after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it seems that violent attempts to reformat other societies in their own image will gradually go out of fashion.

It seems to me that if we are to talk about the prospects of transitioning to an ancap regime for certain states, the prospects for countries with parliamentary democracies look slightly more realistic—where, for example, a political layout has emerged that precludes the possibility of forming a government coalition, and if one can be assembled, it must be done by yoking together parties of swans, crayfish, and pikes in one wagon, as a result of which their ability for effective lawmaking and even budget adoption becomes blocked.

And so: unable to pay civil servants because the budget has not been passed, the government sends most officials home. People live almost entirely without government services, but they retain civilized traditions of respect for private property and the market; after some time, they begin to spontaneously use market substitutes for former government services, and at some point realize that they actually like it. The idea that we should fundamentally stop trying to choose a single government for everyone and each individual begins to find understanding among the people.

It is from such state incapacity that something might actually grow. To neighbors, it is still the same state, just experiencing a temporary parliamentary crisis, but that’s fine—someday the politicians will agree, and we will continue to settle matters with them. This is what politicians from surrounding countries think, so they don’t force their recipes for state organization on them. How many years it will take for a temporary crisis to finally solidify into a stable status quo—I cannot say.

In short, it seems to me that to build an ancap society, it is far more important to have a mature, rational society rather than a gathering of supporters of simple and effective solutions that are just as bandit-like as those of the state.

Nothing special, pay no attention, just a small crisis, it will definitely pass, like May thunderstorms, so to speak

Market relations and relations with a stationary bandit

Voluntarist, Bitarch

Imagine you have entered into a contract of any kind with someone, whether it’s purchasing a product or employment. But later, the other party to the contract decides to “screw you over.” What are the consequences of such an action? This question can be answered based on who your now former partner actually is. If it was an ordinary person or a company, the worst you will experience is financial loss, and perhaps to some extent moral damage. You will be left without money, your property may be taken through deception, but overall you will still be okay and free. No market entity that does not use violence as a tool in its activities can deprive you of this.

But what happens if some bandit decides to screw you over? And a bandit can do anything, up to a beating resulting in lifelong disability, or even murder. Maintaining relations of any kind with a bandit is always dangerous because there is a significant probability that at a certain point he will decide to get rid of you. The state can also be categorized as bandits, since it is itself a stationary bandit that is not at all averse to committing violence against its citizens if it allows it to achieve certain goals. This means it is dangerous to conduct any kind of business with it, just as with any other bandit. It is enough for you to displease some official once, or even just to be disliked by them, for them to take a serious interest in you and for you to end up either behind bars or in a cemetery.

For example, let’s recall the recent case with Group-IB, a cybersecurity company. Its founder was arrested, and searches were conducted within the company itself. Although it had previously cooperated closely with the FSB, this is certainly not something that can guarantee the absence of violence on its part. From older stories, one can recall the “Seventh Studio” case, when members of a theater troupe that received government subsidies were eventually imprisoned for the alleged misuse of those subsidies. It is dangerous even to engage in work provided by the state or heavily regulated by it. Recently, two honored doctors with heroic pasts were sent to a pretrial detention center for the most ordinary provision of medical care to an elderly patient.

It turns out that it is somewhat risky to hold a government position or even simply cooperate with the state, because in such a case, any mistake or even simple dissatisfaction from the “partner” will cost you not only the loss of funds—you could be left without freedom, or even your own life. Your connections with the state certainly do not guarantee your safety from the state itself.