In connection with the recent anniversary of the terrorist attacks committed by Anders Breivik in Norway, I would like to remind you of the importance of fighting violence. Although such a tragic event is not a global catastrophe, it is frightening to imagine what future Breiviks might present to us, especially considering what fruits of scientific and technical progress could end up in their hands. Perhaps it will be another shooting, which is very bad, but it will most likely not affect you personally. Or perhaps such a person will decide to use some high-tech means to cause as much harm to people as possible—for example, by constructing a dirty bomb, releasing a previously unknown strain of a very dangerous and deadly virus (a scenario I described in the material “The Reality of the Viral Threat“), or using some other extremely destructive means unknown to us now.
But the capacity to commit violence is not the norm for a human being. On the contrary, 98% of people experience disgust at least toward brutal violence, and all brutal violence is committed by no more than 2% of people. This is because a natural part of human nature is the violence inhibition mechanism (Lorenz’s mechanism (LM) according to Konrad Lorenz’s theory, or VIM according to James Blair’s model). A person with a strong version of LM/VIM will never be able to commit violence. It is committed only by those who suffer from a pathology of the violence inhibitor. Violence is a pathological state. Therefore, it must be fought in an appropriate manner.
If violent tendencies were noticed to a sufficient extent in childhood—when a person is unlikely to be able to make a decision to intentionally hide them until the time they can organize a terrorist attack—or if mass testing for the congenital variant of LM/VIM were practiced in society, both in childhood and when conducting relationships with people in adult life, and if gene therapy treatment were then applied to those in whom the LM/VIM pathology was discovered, many terrorist attacks, as well as much violence in general, could have been avoided.
Perhaps in the past we did not have a sufficient scientific and technical base for this. But now the time has come; biotechnology and gene therapy are developing at a rapid pace. And now it is not too late to start fighting violence to avoid a catastrophic scenario in the future and finally completely rid human society of pathological violence. Does anyone really want the appearance of a new Breivik, and one who is even more heavily armed?
Long ago, I was commissioned and paid to review three books by the Strugatsky brothers. Roadside Picnic I looked at in April, Snail in May, but I only got around to The City in August. Traditionally, I am not going to recount the plot; you can check the wiki, or better yet, read the book itself.
It is clear that after reading, many want to immediately start figuring out the physics of the strange place described. Here, space is rolled into a tube, there are folds here, some potent grass is packed here, and it’s scorching over there. But if you view the book at such a level, it’s no longer the Strugatskys, but Pelevin.
The book was written for the drawer, so it cannot complain that its content is the product of compromises with Soviet censorship—there was no attempt to publish it as long as censorship existed. Boris Strugatsky asserted that this was their favorite book, and its main character, accordingly, their favorite character. However, for some reason, I am not particularly interested in the characters of the Strugatskys; it is far more intriguing to see what is going on regarding society.
And the society there is quite modern; you wouldn’t say it was described in 1972. Globalism, with a single language and the collision of atomized representatives of various cultures. The triumph of equality and inclusivity (but for all the inclusivity, women in the City, as everywhere with the Strugatskys, are completely flat characters serving a purely decorative purpose—except, perhaps, for the entirely episodic Madame Matilda Gusakova—she is not flat, but also rather decorative). Constant sudden calamities—global warming, the sun switching off, COVID, water turning into bile, BLM, an invasion of baboons. The reaction of the people and the reaction of the authorities to these calamities.
And, you know, for some reason I get the feeling that the Strugatskys are convinced: humanity cannot be handled any other way. It must absolutely be put into a state of artificial stress and deficiency; otherwise, some people turn into Doctors Opirov, and others begin to organize some mysterious “sated riots.” The Strugatskys like to frighten people with sated riots. The idea is that when a person is gastrically satisfied, they aren’t very concerned about further self-development, and they unite with others like them for the sake of self-destruction (Fight Club was probably also inspired by the Strugatskys).
Unlike the Strugatskys, I have been fortunate enough to live in a relatively sated time, and I have seen sated riots in practice, not just in theory. Well-dressed, polite people go out to get hit on the head with batons, and then sigh that it seems they won’t be able to obtain political rights here, and emigrate to peaceful Montenegro, which is practically the model for the city from The Predatory Things of the Century (only this morning returned from a drozhka, that was a strong touch). In short, sated riots are quite inspiring for a very short time, and then, of course, there are abysses of frustration. The Strugatskys clearly imagined something far more disgusting.
It is presumed that through all these endless experiments on humans, some “new man” is being forged, who is the only one capable of building a new world. However, through the example of the novella’s protagonist, we see that the only thing the experiment succeeds in is knocking the ground from under a person’s feet, destroying any ideological supports, and ultimately driving them to suicide, instead of building anything at all. Although, of course, there is hope that after returning to Leningrad in 1951, Voronin will start writing interesting science fiction and become an idol for the entire Soviet intelligentsia.
In your posts, you often state that under ancap, all people (or most of them) will not be prone to violence (and those who are can be “reprogrammed”), which will allow for the construction of a violence-free society. But hold on! With ideal people, one could build an ideal society based on almost any ideology—even communism in its early idealized conceptions. Any modern social structure, however, is built on the fact that people are almost always imperfect—emotional, foolish, aggressive, greedy, cowardly, and so on—and the social order must neutralize human flaws. How can ancap exist in a society of imperfect people, if even now criminals are stupid enough to steal right under cameras, and in the absence of a universally recognized police force, they will become completely brazen, and their capture/shooting by private security companies will become difficult due to the scale of crime and overloaded courts? Will this not lead to a rapid slide of society into a wild state, where even adequate people are forced to be in a permanent state of war against all?
Anonymous question
You are right; many things can be built from ideal people. That is precisely why Bitarch and Voluntarist—the authors of the posts regularly appearing on this channel about building a non-violent society—do not bother with building specifically ancap; for them, the economic model is secondary, and the absence of a central authority is secondary, while the primary value is non-violence, in its narrow sense of the absence of physical coercion.
The doctrine of anarcho-capitalism assumes that the human inclination toward physical coercion will not undergo serious changes. The only thing required for its triumph is the emergence of a critical mass of technologies that make decentralized production and trade more economically viable than centralized ones—this is if we proceed from a materialist position, where being determines consciousness and the base determines the superstructure. If, on the contrary, we assume that consciousness shapes being, then the triumph of ancap requires a critical mass of people for whom libertarian ideas have significant value. To me, it essentially makes no difference which end of the loaf I bite into; it tastes equally good from both ends.
When decentralized technologies dominate everyday life, it means that an uber-police force will arrive faster and provide service more cheaply and with higher quality than a police squad from the Ministry of Internal Affairs; therefore, the Ministry will lose the economic competition for the client and die off. And if people steal right under cameras, decentralized technologies will more likely provide the ability to issue them a fine right under those same cameras. And if they wave at the camera instead and claim that they are, say, renting this car, then instead of a disproportionately large fine, a modest rental fee will be debited from them in favor of the car owner. Or perhaps I am talking nonsense, and the “market” will decide some other way.
When libertarian ideas dominate society, then even under conditions of technologically driven centralization of a large number of industries, people will still value freelancing or freelance-like relationships relatively higher, and the owner of the production facility will have to adapt to this demand if they wish to secure a workforce. People will join the police, but will still view their patrol crew as an autonomous entrepreneurial unit, with its own permanent clients and obligations to them that mean far more than formal subordination within a police department.
The most terrifying thing for libertarianism is an increase in the efficiency of the centralization of violence. In the middle of the 20th century, such efficiency was at its maximum; humanity fought with armies of millions, and there was not the slightest prospect for building a libertarian society. Now, an army of a hundred thousand is considered large, and one hopes that decentralization will continue at an accelerating pace. Cheap and effective decentralized violence, which scales very poorly as the number of involved persons increases or additional capital is invested—this is exactly what is required so that even in the event of armed conflicts, they quickly fade away without further escalation.
As you can see, it is not at all necessary to indulge in empty dreams about how chipping will make everyone “sweethearts and darlings.” Instead, one can indulge in empty dreams about how total armament with handheld weapons—effectively and as painlessly as possible incapacitating a person, but having low lethality—will make everyone “sweethearts and darlings.” As for my time free from empty dreams, I prefer to build a local libertarian community where all necessary skills of interaction between people are acquired through simple habit—and these habits will strongly conflict with the habits of obeying the state or any other centralized force.
I really hope that the conference Constitution of Freedom, announced by the Adam Smith Center for this coming Sunday, will be streamed, so that I can watch and comment in real time. If not, I’ll wait for the recording. In any case, it’s pleasant that the educational part of the libertarian agenda in Russia hasn’t been completely consumed by the political one, although in the future I would like to see similar conferences here in Montenegro, of course)))
Not long ago, I considered the question of morality in the context of the concept of the violence inhibition mechanism (VIM)—a cognitive mechanism that inhibits violent behavior in humans. A healthy person who does not suffer from VIM dysfunction is incapable of committing acts of violence against other people. The manifestation of direct brutal violence is successfully inhibited (restrained) in more than 98% of people. The capacity to commit violence is an aberration and a pathology, not the norm of human nature.
Within this topic, the question of a human’s ability to distinguish between transgressions of a moral and a social (conventional) nature (moral/conventional distinction) is of particular interest. Moral transgressions consist of causing harm to a person, whereas social transgressions consist of violating established norms. A beating, for example, would certainly be a moral transgression, while a student leaving the classroom without the teacher’s permission is merely a transgression of a conventional nature.
When a person encounters experiences that demonstrate moral transgressions, distress signals from their victims, such as a sad facial expression or crying, lead to the activation of the VIM and the emergence of a rejection response. The person develops an association between the moral transgression, the distress signals, and the subsequent rejection; as a result, they become capable of understanding and identifying moral transgressions by analyzing certain actions.
Such an association does not arise in the case of social transgressions, as they do not initially lead to the activation of the VIM in a person. Consequently, people with VIM dysfunction, such as psychopaths, cannot understand the difference between moral and social transgressions, because from a neurophysiological point of view, it truly does not exist for them—they perceive these transgressions identically; more precisely, moral transgressions are perceived by them in the same way as social ones.
The fact that psychopaths and people with violent tendencies are indeed incapable of understanding this distinction is a fact confirmed by a vast amount of evidence and research. Let us also recall the fact that violence is a deviation from the norm of natural human behavior. In fact, the morality of non-aggression is biologically predetermined for humans, which we learned by conducting research into human nature. Thus, this morality can be attributed to moral realism.
But we will not stop there, because it is worth mentioning one more thing—a person with a functioning VIM (which, as previously stated, is the norm of human nature) will become capable of recognizing transgressions of a moral nature, and therefore, a corresponding morality of non-aggression will develop in them absolutely regardless of whether they know anything about their own nature at all. If they are unfamiliar with the concept of the VIM and the notion of a moral transgression, the morality of non-aggression will be perceived by them as something intuitive, self-evident. For the vast majority of people, this intuitive understanding will coincide, and on the issue of violence, they will converge on a single position that committing acts of violence is unacceptable, without conducting any research and without attempting to form any logical conclusions (violent views will originate only from the violent minority). Such a universal intuitive understanding of morality pertains to moral (or ethical) intuitionism.
As we can see, the innate morality of non-aggression is simultaneously an objective fact of human nature, pertaining to moral realism, and an intuitively understood norm, pertaining to ethical intuitionism. Of course, we can see that the latter stems from the former—that is, a person’s intuitive understanding stems from their objective biological nature. Therefore, the innate morality of non-aggression simply unites these approaches to morality, simultaneously corresponding to both of them and deriving one from the other.
I have started on the fourth section of Eric Mackay’s book Libertarianism, dedicated to economic justice and property rights. Like the third, it consists of a short introduction and two chapters showing the views of Nozick and Hayek on the subject—apparently, for Mackay, there are no other libertarians worthy of attention on this issue (though this is likely because Mackay is writing a book on philosophy, not on history, economics, or law, which explains the selection of authors).
The chapter on Nozick examines how he tore into supporters of distributive justice, showing that to achieve some ideal end-state, they would have to launch a mechanism of permanent revolution, and to apply some single distributive model, they would have to reduce everyone to partial slavery. Nozick opposes this redistributive ecstasy with the libertarian approach well known to us, according to which the justice of a particular property right depends on the procedures by which it was acquired, rather than on the size of the property or, for example, the degree of the beneficiary’s loyalty to the party line.
I express my deep gratitude to everyone who sent in donations for the translation of this chapter; now we can start collecting for the next one. And while the money for Mackay (or for Molynneux, you love Molynneux, don’t you?) is being collected, I will return to Friedman; a chapter on the laws of the Chinese Empire awaits us.
About a month has passed since the last news release, so it’s time to briefly share a summary of the progress made.
The fact that we bought a hectare in Montenegro has finally been officially entered into the required registries. To be honest, I didn’t have the brains to personally verify this on the Montenegrin cadastral website; I have to take the word of those who understand its functionality and be content with scans of the documents. As part of the reward for my participation in the project, I reserved the right to buy back two hundred square meters at cost, but for now, anyone wishing to do so can still buy a piece for themselves—the shareholders are already threatening to start selling new land tokens with a markup soon, but they haven’t made a final decision yet.
The development of the land is going briskly in some ways and barely at all in others. The local contractor is taking forever to finish the requested volume of work for the rough laying of the road route. On the other hand, it’s still illegal to build a road until September 15, so it’s hard to make any complaints. However, our landing party is already actively engaged in the complete clearing of the plot from all kinds of unnecessary woody debris and has completed about a quarter of the work. For further road filling and concreting, the installation of electricity and water, digging the sewage system, and actually the construction itself, we have started creating a separate construction company and searching for specialized equipment to purchase, so as not to depend on unreliable local contractors in this regard.
As of today, 11 project participants have relocated to Montenegro. To avoid losing count, a counter was even added at the very bottom of the project’s main website page. We should also start assigning sequential numbers to the settlers, like in the Free State Project, so they can brag. I, for example, would have number 3. So, if someone creates a cool design for a project participant’s booklet (or image), that would be sweet, especially when handing a child a document with number 6.
At one point, we failed to meet with Titus Gebel, the author of the book on charter cities and creator of the foundation promoting them—his “Titus-related” business took him past Montenegro at the time. But now, next week, another interesting meeting is lined up—with Vera Kichanova, a distinguished activist of the Russian libertarian movement, who emigrated long ago and is now, among other things, professionally involved in the topic of charter cities. We hope Britain doesn’t put Montenegro in the red zone at the last moment, the meeting doesn’t fall through, and it proves quite educational for all participants.
One of the serious downsides of Montenegro for freelancers is turning out to be a very unfriendly banking sector. To encounter Montenegrin banks as rarely as possible, we began creating a network of horizontal connections allowing for exchanges like “I need cash euros in Bar, and the counterparty from Budva needs rubles via bank transfer to Sber.” For this, a specialized Telegram chat is mainly used for now; however, our project recently launched a private ad aggregator in the form of a website. I haven’t looked into the functionality in detail yet, but I already see what feature the site is missing: new ads should automatically be broadcast to the chat, because in Telegram a person receives notifications, whereas the website must be monitored manually, which is inconvenient. This is, of course, a makeshift solution for a transition period to build liquidity; it can be disabled later, especially when the need for the chat disappears entirely, except for very complex multi-step transactions.
The Montenegrin hectare, as much as fit in the frame: on the left are untouched thickets, in the center is the cleared area, and in the foreground, the cleared area is cut into firewood and debris.
Based on the concept we are considering regarding the inhibitor of intraspecific violence (the Lorenz mechanism (LM), as we call it in view of the corresponding theory of Konrad Lorenz, as well as the violence inhibition mechanism (VIM) according to James Blair’s model), we find that a human’s ability to commit violence against another human is a deviation consisting of a malfunction of the innate LM/VIM. Thus, violent offenders are people suffering from a genetic and neurophysiological pathology [1]. This concept can be countered by the argument that the level of violence in human society, from the very emergence of humans to the present day, has decreased at rates completely incomparable to the speed at which traits are fixed in a population as a result of natural biological evolution. Additionally, different levels of violence are observed under different social orders. I will not dispute the validity of such assertions; however, by providing two arguments, I will prove that they do not refute the LM/VIM concept.
The first thing to understand is that a person with a weak or dysfunctional version of the LM/VIM does not necessarily have to commit violence. A good upbringing, the absence of circumstances that provoke violence, and the presence of circumstances that deter it, while not eliminating the risk completely, reduce it to a certain extent. Combine this with the fact that violence is committed by a minority of people. Military evidence shows that only up to 2% of people experience no resistance to killing (and war is a highly provoking circumstance for violence). An analysis of crime in the Russian Federation determined that in the worst possible scenario (and in reality, it may be better), on average, only one new violent offender committing a violent crime no less severe than battery is reported per 695 people per year.
If environmental circumstances change such that, for example, instead of one person per 695 people, two people begin to commit violence per year, then the level of violence in society will increase by at least twofold, and most likely much more, since those who have previously committed violence may begin to do so more frequently. The consequences would be significant. However, violence would still originate from an overwhelming minority of people, so observing such changes does not refute the LM/VIM concept.
Let us now turn to the evolutionary argument. Under natural conditions, biological evolution is indeed a very slow process. However, it can be accelerated through artificial selection. Cultural influence can also lead to such selection, as it artificially alters the social and physical environment in which genetic selection occurs. This is called dual inheritance or gene-culture coevolution.
A classic example is the development of lactose tolerance, which resulted from the development of dairy farming that occurred only approximately 5,000 years ago. Another example: between 800 and 1700, the culture of the Ashkenazi Jewish ethnic group practiced limiting employment to professions requiring a high level of intelligence, which created selective pressure in favor of people possessing it. Combined with the genetic isolation of the ethnic group, this presumably led to high IQ scores, as well as a number of hereditary genetic diseases among its representatives. Furthermore, as a result of territorial expansion in the second half of the last millennium, mixed races appeared. And even the consequences of urbanization and industrialization, which began 200-300 years ago, are already leading to measurable genetic changes [2].
Similarly, cultural influence can lead to the strengthening of the LM/VIM. The growing cultural unacceptability of violence creates selective pressure in favor of less violent people, while violent offenders are filtered out more and more. Culture does indeed influence the level of violence in society, but this does not contradict, and may even fit into, the LM/VIM concept.
I watched the conversation between Grigory Bazhenov and representatives of the European University on the topic of inequality.
I didn’t do this immediately after the video was released because the topic seemed boring and leftist to me; it is obvious that if inequality is caused by redistribution through plunder (for example, taxes) and coercion (for example, regulations), then one can oppose the consequence, but it would be more useful to eliminate the causes. And if inequality is caused by the fact that people voluntarily give more money to Alice than to Bob, then one can only be happy for Alice and reflect on whether something can be adopted from her practices so that we can get more too. But then I had a bit of free time, took a look, and didn’t regret it.
The part where it was listed that there is income inequality, wealth inequality, and inequality in the number of limbs was not very interesting. I was struck by one specific strong take that I would like to discuss—regarding inequality caused by the difference in time preference.
Its content is approximately as follows. If one economic agent has a lower time preference, and economic agents can lend to each other at interest, then, all other starting conditions being equal, in the long run, he will plunge all economic agents with a higher time preference into debt bondage, with the further prospect of starving to death. This is, obviously, a mathematical model; however, I immediately recalled historical precedents.
Ancient Athens was formed by a union of Ionian tribes settled in Attica, with an initially fairly high level of equality. Over time, however, the stratification between citizens increased, and some gradually fell into debt bondage to others. This led to civil unrest, and as a result of Solon’s reforms, all old debts were forcibly forgiven, land was redistributed, and debt slavery was prohibited. In other words, the market—due to the difference in time preference—led to extremely unpleasant consequences, which were then corrected by purely etatist methods.
The emancipation of the peasants under Alexander II in the Russian Empire provided roughly equal starting conditions for all members of any given peasant community. However, again, the difference in entrepreneurial abilities and time preference over half a century led to stratification from kulaks to hired laborers, with the latter losing their means of production and often finding themselves in credit bondage. Then there was a civil war, followed by a complete redistribution of property and the writing off of old debts.
The question is: what can free-market anarchism oppose this mechanism with under modern technological conditions? Because if we answer “nothing,” it will mean the unviability of the anarchic model—it will inevitably be replaced by something much more leftist, after which, at minimum, property will be redistributed and debts written off, and at maximum, successful entrepreneurs and their heirs will be hanged from lamp posts.
Let’s look at what mechanisms the free market provided to counteract the mentioned effect in the two previous examples.
Becoming landless, selling one’s household members and oneself into debt slavery was not the only possible development for a landowner with a higher time preference or someone less competitive for some other reason in the ancient polis. Furthermore, as such people accumulated, the polis established colonies. There, land-poor colonists received much larger plots than in their homeland, and with them, a new chance for prosperity. This extensive path to solving the problem of inequality led to the colonization of the entire Mediterranean by the Hellenes. Subsequently, a division of labor arose between the colonies and lively trade began. Now, instead of farming a small patch of land, our Athenian could engage in, for example, molding amphorae or sewing sails—this also gave him a new chance for prosperity.
Similarly, becoming a hired laborer was not the only option for an unlucky peasant in the Russian Empire either. He could become a colonist and move to Siberia, or move to the city and become a worker. Under the conditions of a freer market in the USA, urbanization absorbed a huge number of former farmers without any revolutions, and those who remained began to cultivate much larger areas using much more serious equipment, supplied to them thanks to the much higher-paid labor—compared to that of a hired hand—of their former poor neighbors.
So I believe that an anarchic society under a free market will be able to avoid the scenario embedded in the mathematical model with different time preferences but unchanging market conditions. If the emergence of new markets is not legally restricted, then those with a higher time preference will actually strive to take advantage of new opportunities and obtain windfall profits—while those with a lower preference will stay in a reliable but relatively low-margin business, and everyone will be relatively well off. The second factor weakening intertemporal inequality is personal freedom. You are not a member of a community. You are not the property of the head of the family, who can sell you into slavery to pay off a debt. You are self-owned; you have your own time preference, your own inclinations and talents. You won’t perish. In any case, you are not doomed to perish, and let the scary mathematical model not frighten you.
Violence is a major problem leading to many negative externalities (including catastrophic ones), as well as to the maintenance of a violent hierarchy of dominance in society (which only further exacerbates the externalities of violence). That is why the fight against violence will soon become one of the leading directions in the development of society. And whoever solves the problem of violence will have a chance to significantly elevate the reputation and popularity of their cultural and economic agenda.
There are those who do not consider violence a major problem, and if this violence takes the form of state coercive force or serves the achievement of certain goals in general, then in their opinion, it becomes a beneficial and useful tool. Such a position is typically characteristic of conservatives, although it is not limited to them, and concerns in principle all supporters of violence as a tool for achieving goals, including those who support the existence of a monopolistic state power. Often, even classical liberals and supporters of a free market economy have nothing against the use of force.
But no matter how much they deny the negative aspects of violence, it would be foolish not to understand what would happen if someone else took on the task of eradicating it. Suppose that the supporters of such an idea, instead of cooperating with conservatives or marketeers who see no point in it, go to a hypothetical Bill Gates and manage to convince him they are right. By financing this initiative and ultimately eradicating violence, he would gain giant moral support from society, since for most people, violence is the greatest evil. Being a left-liberal and having acquired enormous authority, it would be enough for him to simply voice his opinion for people to listen. If he says that gay people cannot be refused the right to bake cakes, or that business must be socially responsible and donate a significant part of its income for the benefit of society, then it will happen, because the majority will be ready to follow the direction of such an authority.
Many certainly do not like such a scenario, but it is entirely possible. And if someone does not want this scenario to become a reality, they should support the idea of fighting violence by all possible means. The problem of violence will be solved in any case, either with the help of a hypothetical conservative, or without their participation. But in the second case, their socio-economic agenda will lose a significant part of its support in favor of the views of those who participate in solving the problem of violence. So I advise you to hurry in this matter and start promoting the ideas of non-violence now, regardless of who holds what views.
