Is there perhaps a benefit for the rich in protecting the poor? And what if there are no rich people somewhere, but only gangs providing “protection” to neighborhoods under threat of violence? Or will such a “ghetto” eventually heal itself over time?
Anonymous question
Today, the weapons market is extremely regulated and largely stigmatized, as a result of which the demand for weapons is predictably lower than it would be in a completely free market. Therefore, there are every reason to believe that due to the expansion of the market under ancap, weapons will be more accessible in terms of both variety and price, not to mention the absence of any arbitrary restrictions. And if even now certain types of self-defense weapons, such as pepper sprays, cost mere pennies and are available even to those with the most modest incomes, then under a free market, things will be quite good in this regard.
What should people do who do not want to pay some security organizations to maintain order in the area where they live? Naturally, do it themselves. After all, we maintain order in the house if we don’t want to pay cleaning services. Similarly, there is no problem in sticking a barrel out the window upon a neighbor’s alarm signal and ensuring that everyone in the line of fire has calmed down and returned to peaceful activities.
In essence, the only thing for which professional help is more likely to be needed under ancap in terms of maintaining order is searching for stolen goods, since theft is a clandestine misappropriation, and a pistol in the pocket does not protect against it by default. Well, here either insurance works, or a simple desire for revenge, corrected by economic expediency. Either way, the victim either searches for the missing item themselves, hires detectives, or the insurance company hires detectives wishing to recoup the cost of paying the insurance premium.
Can gangs that forcibly hold a particular territory under their “protection” exist stably under ancap? Actually, such gangs are called states, and the only thing that keeps them from being destroyed is the consent of those under their protection to put up with such a state of affairs. This will also determine the stability of criminal ghettos under ancap. An additional factor of instability for them is complete freedom of migration. Overly active thugs will simply discover one fine day that everyone has fled their territory. This can be easily observed in criminal enclaves such as certain US cities managed by overzealous Democrats: people simply move away to quieter places. So there are indeed incentives for such ghettos to eventually heal themselves or disappear, and the only thing that can prolong their existence is stupid, irrational submission. It is precisely to eliminate this that ancaps like me conduct their propaganda)))
Now give the purse back to the girl and get the hell out of here!
Libertarian Band has released a video on the ethological approach to defining the concepts of aggression, violence, and self-defense. Ethology, as a science that studies animal behavior and serves as a link between biological and sociological sciences in the study of human behavior, is a fairly precise tool for solving this problem. The ethological approach can provide us with clear answers regarding what should be considered aggression and violence, as well as where the boundaries of self-defense lie.
I recommend everyone watch this video and share it with others, so that there will be less confusion in the future during conversations about aggression, violence, and self-defense.
The idea of universal armament and armed self-defense is often attempted to be portrayed as untenable by resorting to the argument of the attacker’s advantage. After all, what difference does it make whether the victim is armed or not if the attacker is still better prepared for the clash, since he is the one who planned it, while the victim expects nothing. And in general, few attackers will risk encountering a stronger opponent; they will prefer to choose a weak victim and bypass a strong one. The attacker always has the advantage; he is most often stronger, and freedom of armament will only give him more of an advantage since he will be able to arm himself freely.
To begin with, it should be noted that it is precisely the restriction of the freedom to arm oneself that gives the attacker an advantage. The ban only works for law-abiding citizens. If we take statistics from the USA, then 94% of mass shootings occur in gun-free zones, and 80% of armed criminals obtained their weapons illegally, most often on the black market, rather than simply buying them in a regular gun store; furthermore, 57% of criminals fear armed citizens more than they fear the police. All these facts directly indicate that it is precisely the regulation and prohibition of armament that gives the attacker an additional advantage.
And even if, after this, the attacker still retains some advantage over the victim, in general, this still decides nothing. The attacker cannot guarantee success; in the best-case scenario for him, his chance of success is merely higher than that of his victim. However, the risk of his failure in the event that the victim is armed is also high, and he will expose himself to this risk with every attack. Victory in one individual clash will not make him a winner overall; soon he will face a failure that could cost him his own life. And violent criminals make up an overwhelming minority of the population; as analysis of Russian crime shows, in the worst case, we have one violent criminal per year per 695 people (and that is considering not only murders, rapes, and the infliction of serious physical harm, but also, for example, battery). This means that, purely statistically, rapists and violent criminals have no chance of defeating an armed civilian population, or even inflicting any serious harm on society.
An important question is how self-defense fits into the concept of the Lorenz mechanism (LM)/violence inhibition mechanism (VIM). From a rational point of view, restraining violence is a good and useful thing. But would a person with a strong LM/VIM be unable to defend themselves from an immediate threat of violence?
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to find specific studies linking self-defense and the LM/VIM concept. In the future, I will try to study the neurophysiological aspects of self-defense in more detail and combine them with similar aspects of violence inhibition. However, I will now put forward a hypothesis about such a relationship based on the evolutionary aspects of the development of LM/VIM, which can serve as a starting point for further research.
According to Konrad Lorenz’s theory, the inhibitor is most pronounced in species whose representatives possess strong innate weaponry and do not have a statistically significant opportunity to avoid violence by fleeing. These two factors exert evolutionary pressure to strengthen the LM/VIM, as they create a threat to the survival of the species. And how did evolution handle this threat? It is not that complicated. Non-aggressive members of the population encounter intra-species violence only when they are attacked. Aggressive individuals, however, initiate violence themselves. Because of this, they end up in violent clashes much more often, and therefore die more frequently than other individuals, failing to pass their genetic material to the next generation. Thus, violence is weeded out, while the strong version of the violence-inhibiting mechanism is reinforced.
But for non-violence to be reinforced, it is necessary that the victims of violence be able to defend themselves during a direct attack using their weaponry. Otherwise, the aggressor’s life would be under no threat, and it would be the less aggressive individuals who die, leading to the opposite effect, and eventually to the extinction of the species (unless its representatives choose flight as an alternative, as hamsters do, for example, scattering after only a few mutual bites). But since we still observe heavily armed species in nature whose representatives are not prone to fleeing from intra-species aggression, and we also observe a strongly expressed LM/VIM in them, it means that victims of violence can indeed use their weaponry for self-defense against aggressors.
How might this work? An immediate threat of violence leads to a defensive reaction from the victim, which may weaken the operation of the violence inhibitor for a short period of time. As soon as the immediate threat passes, everything returns to normal. At the same time, the possibility of weakening the inhibitor to a state where the affected individual becomes capable of initiating violence themselves is excluded. Otherwise, the threat to the survival of many species would continue to exist, because the number of violent individuals in their populations would not decrease as a result of acts of violence, but might even increase, as victims would become new aggressors.
Self-defense is a permissible and evolutionarily optimal strategy for eradicating violence in a population. And humans are not exempt from this. If everything stated above is correct, then humans should also be capable of self-defense during a direct attack when there is a threat to their life, even if they have a strong version of the LM/VIM inhibitor. At the same time, they would not be capable of initiating violence outside of situations that directly threaten life, as this would relate to other, successfully inhibited types of violent behavior. I will also add that all of this points to the realism of evolutionary strategies for fighting and eradicating violence based on armed self-defense during direct attacks by various types of aggressors.
The idea of universal armament and unlimited self-defense is often criticized from the position that it will lead to an increase in the number of unjustified killings. In this matter, the following formulation is often used: “Do you really advocate for the ability to use a weapon against a person and thereby threaten their priceless life simply because they attacked you with their fists, started approaching with threats, or broke into your home? Most likely, the attacker only wishes to simply hit, beat, or rob you. But injuries can almost always be healed, and material values are not even close to being worth it.” Let us examine this issue in more detail.
People who allow themselves to engage in violent behavior, even if it is not lethal, are still aggressors. Violent tendencies are a part of their personality that they should realize as early as possible and make every effort to overcome. But if a person is satisfied with their violence, if they do not intend to do anything about it and refuse any offers of help, then they represent only a greater threat to other people, introducing multiple negative externalities into their lives.
Some might think that according to my logic, one should specifically seek out all people prone to aggressive violence to take preventive measures. However, this is not the case. It is impossible to know for certain if a person is truly a violent offender until they manifest their violence in practice. But even if a person has committed an act of violence previously but is not manifesting it now, they should not be attacked for any purpose (punishment, extorting compensation, forced coercion into psychotherapy). In the end, by attacking them, we ourselves become aggressors wishing to forcibly subject other people to our orders, which would also introduce negative externalities into our lives and the lives of everyone else.
However, if a person decides to attack you here and now, it is an unconditional fact that they are an aggressor and a violent offender threatening your life and the lives of other people. Furthermore, through their violence, they show that they are not averse to using force to impose their own orders, which is already a very dangerous tendency. To destroy them is to get rid of the threat arising from it. Imagine that through their acts of aggression, they can accumulate a potential for violence. Then they will gain power and turn everyone around them into their own slaves. Can you really consider the life of a person valuable who does not consider life valuable themselves and, at the first opportunity, will organize slavery or even genocide for the people around them?
I personally cannot. Of course, I will not attack such a person myself, because by doing so, I would be no better than they are. But if they attack me, I will rid myself of them, thereby making my life and the lives of other people safer. And if all aggressors are destroyed during their attacks, then non-violence in people will be reinforced purely evolutionarily, since only people who do not manifest or who control aggression will be able to continue their lineage both biologically—since aggressive tendencies can be genetically determined—and in terms of upbringing, as good parents have far greater chances of raising good children than aggressor parents.
Lately in Russia, it has become very simple to understand who possesses political agency. They are the ones the state fights against. If the state is not fighting someone, it means they are either completely under control or staying out of sight: the Russian state seems to have completely forgotten how to tolerate those who conduct noticeable independent activities.
By this criterion, it is difficult to deny political agency to the Russian anarcho-communists of Narodnaya Samoborona: they are actively persecuted, and most of their activities are forced to take place under the mask of anonymity, but if anyone is caught, it is almost always criminal charges, torture, and other trash.
I tried to examine their platform to understand how promising these guys are as allies and how dangerous they are as enemies. On the movement’s website, it is presented as a rather voluminous text. It consists of four parts; I will go through them.
This section describes how ancoms view the modern world order and its main problems. It discusses the division of labor between countries: raw material providers, industrial nations, sources of labor migrants — and the post-industrial peak of the food chain, for which all the above categories of countries toil. It is pointed out that as wealth grows in industrial countries, production must be moved to places where cheap labor still exists. It is also mentioned that the social democracy of first-world countries is a fragile compromise between power and society, maintained only through the exploitation of the rest of the world. Countries that generate problems, according to the author, fight to raise their status within this system, rather than to change the system itself. Finally, it is explained that escaping the system within a single country is impossible, because isolation from the world economy condemns a country to barbarism and poverty.
I will note that the description is generally quite correct, while the analysis is conducted in terms of almost Marxism; and although the growth of welfare in developing countries is noted, the beneficial role of the market is ignored, as is the fact that the described distribution of countries according to their place in the global division of labor correlates best with the level of economic freedom in those countries.
This section provides a historical overview of the emergence of modern types of states, stating that modern states are a product of capitalism. It discusses the growth of inequality and globalization as a logical result of the functioning of capitalism. Examples are used to explain that the state is not required for the self-organization of society, but is needed only to legitimize plunder. It is stated that all forms of state organization fail to fully account for the interests of people, and therefore there is no need to try to improve the state; it must be abolished. It also discusses the dangers of new platform-type businesses, which, in exchange for their services, place a person in a serious state of dependence on them.
I will note that the historical analysis overlooks the fact that capitalism appeared not thanks to, but despite the state: the old aristocracy was quite satisfied with total stability, and only the military efficiency of capitalism forced the state to make concessions and restructure. I also consider it important to mention that the basis of capitalism is not so much wage labor as the possibility of replacing labor with capital — it is this that increases labor productivity and, subsequently, its price.
This section describes a wonderful humanity of the future, representing a federation of direct-democracy poleis — something like the Athenian League from Themistocles to Pericles, but without a hegemon polis, and with robots instead of slaves. Instead of the market, decentralized planning should be the basis of the economy, with the collection of requests from consumers and their aggregation in automated production management systems. The problem of corruption in management and distribution is solved by frequent rotation, full involvement of citizens in the process, and where possible, the replacement of elections for positions with a lottery. To simplify distribution, comprehensive prosumerization is envisioned, where people use 3D printers and similar tools rather than ordering a finished product. Money and private property are abolished.
I will note that the author is clearly more familiar with history than with economic theory, and perhaps his views on planning will change somewhat after becoming acquainted with the impossibility theorem of economic calculation under socialism. Also completely overlooked is the factor of the lack of natural motivation for innovations, and especially for their implementation, within a planned economy. Finally, it would be good to understand to what extent the factor of the tyranny of the majority is overcome in the new society, when direct democracy tramples human freedom, forcing the individual to submit to the collective on issues that do not actually directly concern the collective. These aspects are not analyzed in the text at all.
In the final and most extensive part, the methods for building a new society are discussed. It is stated that one should not search for a permanent revolutionary class; instead, it is more important to find those with whom there is a commonality of interests. The possibility of reforming the system is categorically denied, and the necessity of its collapse is postulated. Direct action is recognized as the best way to accustom people to anarchist doctrine — the transmission of the practice of self-organization to solve various tasks through direct experience and personal example. It is pointed out that although social revolution is the only possible way to transition to a new society, it is fraught with the emergence of a revolutionary dictatorship, through which the state inevitably revives. It is also shown that early ancom societies will be forced during the transition period to operate within the global market economy — which, in turn, can easily turn any cooperative into an ordinary capitalist enterprise; therefore, once started, one must not stop but finish off capitalism worldwide.
The prospects for Russia to become the flagship of the transition to a new society are seen by the author as extremely low, so a long period of underground activity with a gradual growth of the activist network is predicted. It is stated that it is important to create not large leadership structures, but a network of small groups with maximum participant involvement and an emphasis on passing experience from veterans to neophytes. The author suggests approaching violent actions with extreme caution, as they can both inspire supporters and lead to the destruction of cells and even networks due to the reaction of the state security apparatus. Pro-state paramilitaries are indicated as a suitable target for training and demonstrating combat capabilities, as the state will not step in for them. Finally, advice on conspiracy and psychological preparation is given.
The section ends with an ellipsis: the author lists many dangers, points out that none of the previously practiced paths is capable of leading to victory on its own, and that the movement will remain marginal for a long time.
I really liked this chapter, where the author finally moves from the shaky ground of theory to things he clearly understands well and weighs all dangers quite soberly.
Summary
For me, it was important to understand what these ancoms hate more: the state or private property. If it is the former, then we are on the same path for now. If the latter, then it is better to leave them to themselves and not touch them first, while being ready to respond harshly to violence. Fortunately, it seems there is more common sense in them than outdated political-economic ideas, and the obvious bandit that the state is appears to them as a more priority target than well-meaning but mistaken guys like us, the ancaps: they are nonetheless more ready to persuade us than to kill us.
Therefore, I would like to suggest the unknown author of the text discussed above, or any other sufficiently authoritative ancom, to return the favor and analyze the libertarian platform for strengths and weaknesses, inconsistencies, prospects for alliance, and so on. As a basis for analysis, I suggest using the text on libertarianism from the Libertarian Party website — it is detailed enough, yet relatively compact, and has the advantage of being a more or less official document, which my articles, for example, are not.
And after both sides are convinced that there is a minimum understanding between them, it will be possible to consider the possibilities for cooperation.
