Bitarch, Ancap-tyan

In many plays staged in ancient theater, an unusual technique for resolving character conflicts was often used — “Deus ex machina” (“God from the machine”). It consisted of the sudden appearance of a new god-like character on stage at the end of the work, who had not been mentioned previously in the performance and had the ability to quickly resolve the heroes’ problems. Simply put, external forces solved the heroes’ problems without delving into the essence of the conflict. This technique is suitable not only for works of art, but can also be useful for political transformations aimed at the destatization of society.

Let’s look at any libertarian public page on social media, chat, website, stream, podcast, or channel. What will we see? Most likely, an endless discussion of the same topics — how libertarian courts work, who will build roads under ancap, contractual slavery, abortions, the agency of children, nuclear weapons, drugs, the Austrian School of Economics versus Keynesianism and state planning, minarchism versus ancap, ancap versus panarchy, territorial communities versus ECUs. Often, this boils over into an endless holy war, where people spend many days in a row defending their point of view.

But the thing is, if you argue endlessly among yourselves and spend all your resources on it, you won’t achieve much! And is it even necessary? Perhaps there exists a single universal recipe for how to resolve all these problems at once and spend our scarce resources for the benefit of the movement?!

Yes, it exists and is found in the very nature of the state — a stationary bandit can conquer a society only when the balance of violence potential (BVP) is disrupted, while when this balance is maintained, a stateless society exists quite stably, as proven within the methodology of neo-institutionalism. You can hear about this briefly and clearly in the first part of Alexander Auzan’s lecture “Evolution of the Stationary Bandit.” After the formation of centralized coercive structures (the state), movement in the opposite direction toward a decentralized society becomes impossible without applying external effort to the system (this pattern is analogous to the second law of thermodynamics: heat will not spontaneously transfer from a colder body to a warmer one).

If we restore the BVP, the costs of initiating violence become higher than the costs of defense, and the territorial monopoly of the state simply disappears. Beyond that, everything else simply doesn’t matter! Of course, it is better to know the answer in advance as to who will build roads or how to determine the agency of children, but even without that, people will have no choice but to solve this without the state. It simply cannot exist when the BVP is maintained. If you are a programmer or simply know Boolean logic, you understand well: after calculating the value of the first operand in a conjunction (&&), you don’t need to calculate all the other operands if it is FALSE, as the result of the conjunction will be FALSE anyway. Or for a disjunction (||), you can skip calculating the other operands if the first is TRUE, because the result will be TRUE anyway.

It follows that a sufficient condition for the transition to libertarianism is merely bringing the violence potential in society to a more uniform distribution. As you have probably already guessed, this can be achieved by creating and spreading tools for the doctrine of deterrence (DD).

The advantage of this approach is that the development, production, and implementation of DD tools into wide use can be carried out by a much broader circle of people than those currently involved in political campaigning and protest actions. Co-opting techies who can assemble a drone, a blinding laser, or other interesting tools from freely available parts to fight the regime is far more promising in terms of expanding the protest base than limiting recruitment to humanities scholars and economists who are well-versed in the nuances of ideology. Even more useful is the involvement of engineers and managers capable of organizing the mass production of such items, which is also a very numerous category. It should also be noted that semi-cottage production or writing a software product is easily hidden from the state and is therefore safer than attending rallies, which serves as an additional stimulating factor.

When reliable, mass-produced, and inexpensive tools for deterring aggressors are available even to a grandmother, it won’t be long before the “market decides” the fate of the state. After the deus ex machina does its work, all of today’s theoretical disputes about how to organize under ancap will abruptly move into the practical plane. We observed something similar relatively recently, when economists argued about whether it was possible to return to the gold standard in the era of fiat money, and then Satoshi arrived, and now instead of the gold standard we have the bitcoin standard. That’s it, the subject of the dispute has vanished; the agenda is now the widespread practical implementation of private hard money.