Тег: Control

Learned helplessness, the illusion of control, and agorism

Mikhail Pozharsky has released a very good video about the illusion of control. Be sure to watch it in full if you haven’t already, and I, as usual, will provide the key points as I understand them.

  1. The experience of falling into a hopeless situation (one in which the subject’s position does not depend on their efforts) triggers the development of learned helplessness.
  2. Learned helplessness sharply reduces the subject’s competitive potential in situations where their actions actually do make a difference.
  3. An important psychological defense against learned helplessness is the illusion of control. In a hopeless situation, one can believe that something still depends on them, and thus learned helplessness will not arise.
  4. However, the rituals of psychological defense designed to create an illusion of control can themselves worsen the hopeless situation.
  5. Therefore, the skill of reflection is more effective, where the subject analyzes what they can actually control and what they cannot, and does not waste strength on the illusion of control, accepting force majeure as it is.
  6. Such a skill is formed through the experience of independently finding a way out of difficult situations, and in no other way.
  7. Therefore, creating cumbersome centralized structures and shifting the responsibility for everything onto them is an illusion of control, whereas a real fight against difficulties implies a decentralized approach based on personal responsibility. Period.

This is why, having outlined three main paths toward ancap — minarchism, panarchism, and agorism — I pay special attention specifically to agorism.

One can start a political party, like the big shots do, hold rallies, like the big shots do, and believe that through political pressure you are somehow influencing the policies pursued by the authorities — and when asked why life isn’t getting better, answer that the efforts undertaken are insufficient, and not a hundred thousand, but a million people must take to the streets.

One can propose reforms to create functional competing jurisdictions, dream of Facebook citizenship or the Bitnation project, and when asked why none of this is being implemented, answer that everything is heading that way anyway, but it would be good to double the propaganda efforts.

Or one can simply make a deal and not pay a tax. Or bypass an inconvenient ban. Or invent a service that is useful to people but invisible to the state’s servants. This is no longer an illusion of control. This is control itself. Through such things, a person learns to independently find a way out of difficult situations. And if they find themselves in conditions where they cannot control the possibility of getting out of the situation, they will already be resistant to learned helplessness, and will not fall back on rituals for the sake of an illusion of control.

One can remain an atheist in the trenches under fire. While one is shitting their pants and another is praying, the agorist digs the trench deeper.

https://youtu.be/pJuUbGwYH1Q

Hi, I wanted to find out how quality control will work (so as not to eat poisoned food, for example) under ancap?

анонимный вопрос

At the moment, in the field of product quality control, as in everywhere where the state controls something, there is more of a security theater than actual protection. Seeing a certificate from yet another “blah-blah-oversight” body stating that a product has passed inspection, the end consumer never knows: perhaps the product really was thoroughly checked, perhaps it was checked half-heartedly, perhaps the certificate was forged, or perhaps it was bought. The reputation of the certifying body may be as low as possible, but the manufacturer will still be obliged to crawl to them and obtain the paperwork if they operate legally. Thus, compulsory state quality certification always degenerates quite quickly into a fiction, which, however, costs some money, and the consumer will pay that money in full.

In the absence of compulsory quality control, the customer initially has no trust in the product manufacturer. What does this lead to? The most elementary quality check, which instantly arises in any bazaar: the consumer tastes the product before buying. This is a phenomenon of a relatively poor market, where no more expensive methods of control are affordable for either the seller or the buyer.

As prosperity grows and more complex goods appear, demand arises for more sophisticated control, such as chemical analysis and other instrumental research. What does “demand arises” mean? People start wondering to what extent the numbers and words on the packaging correspond to the truth. Next, for example, some video blogger (while this is more often television for now, but we are considering pure, unadulterated ancap) conducts a study and sees an increase in audience from its demonstration. Then a store may refer to this study, stating that their product is perfectly fine. In addition, consumer associations and producer associations may appear (it is also not in their interest for someone to slap “sausage” labels on crap and have people think that any sausage is crap), as well as the insurance companies constantly mentioned by ancap theorists—in short, many people will be willing to earn money by satisfying the market demand for product quality verification.