Тег: War

Libertarian Theory of War, a review

@SperryUNIVAC

Writing reviews of friends’ books has always been difficult for me, because on one hand there is the demand for objectivity, and on the other—sympathy for the person, which clouds the critic’s vision. Therefore, I usually avoid such a conflict of internal interests, but in this case, I decided to take it on (especially since the theme of war is generally close to me). I decided to do it, but for a long time, I struggled to find the right angle, for although the book is small, it took me quite a while to understand what it is actually about. During the reading process, I periodically felt outraged, then touched, then outraged again, and so on in a circle; things only started to make sense when I finally realized what it reminded me of. That is what I will talk about first.

Once, I read a book of similar size and also self-published called Warlordism 101, dedicated to an instrumental analysis of the warlord concept with various historical examples, from successful ones (Álvaro Obregón, Li Mi) to failures (Baron Ungern, Charles Taylor, Chen Jiongming, and others). One of the goals of its writing was to create a Reader that the Author would be afraid to meet (in his own words)—simply put, it is a small pocket guide on how to become a successful warlord based on historical examples. I haven’t become a warlord yet, but the book, it seems to me, turned out to be quite practical and useful.

The Libertarian Theory of War, however, stunned me upon first reading precisely with its relative uselessness, especially in those sections where the war itself is described. The author’s recommendations take up literally a couple of paragraphs and are formulated in the spirit of “do good, don’t do bad”—meaning, before an attack, one should conduct reconnaissance (specific recommendations on how, with what, etc., are unfortunately not provided); if you go to war, stock up on resources (an important but trivial thought), and so on. In short, from the perspective of the art of war, Sun Tzu is more useful, not to mention Clausewitz.

Mahan, Duhe, Ludendorff, Liddell Hart, Guderian, von Seeckt, Svechin, Mao Zedong, Boyd, Lind, and Warden: for those wishing to partake in the military wisdom of the 20th century (the 21st is still being processed), there is no shortage of non-fiction. Frankly speaking, it would be difficult to expect a modest volume to crack themes comparable to general staff textbooks, but nevertheless, I am used to understanding a book on the theory of war as something slightly different, and therefore I initially treated what was written with great skepticism.

So what, then, are we being offered, if not an exhaustive work on operational art, strategy, and other useful things? While thinking about this (and almost letting the review slide into a typical paragraph-by-paragraph dispute), I had an epiphany. The book, in general, is not about the art of war at all; that is presented in such modest strokes just so that it is there in principle. The author is far more interested in something else: the correlation of wars with libertarian philosophy—that is, reflecting on what goes on (and should go on) in the head of a libertarian who goes to war. Of course, libertarianism as such is not very compatible with classical warfare, where millions march under state flags, but the author immediately makes a pivot and declares war as any confrontation in which one side desperately wants to physically kill the other—permanently, so they don’t get back up. Thus, war immediately moves into the cozy plane of small scales and frantic individualism. One immediately envisions a kind of Wild West, where a farmer with a Winchester shoots back from the attic at a neighbor who decided that the farmer stole his cow. And it is clear that descriptions of what is happening in the heads of both actors in this fun are precisely what interest the author most. He wants to study how deadly conflicts will ignite, proceed, and end in a society of such atomic super-individualist rationalists, sitting on their farms with rifles and killdozers—that is, libertarians.

And here I almost started a paragraph-by-paragraph dispute in the spirit of “that’s not how people’s heads work!!”, but I stopped again because I was finally enlightened. Lem once had a series of sci-fi stories presented as reviews of non-existent books. On one hand, they were so tasty that it was terribly frustrating that the book itself couldn’t be read, but on the other—Lem masterfully opened and closed the topic, describing the plot twists and characters in such a way that there was hardly any need to read the fictional book itself. There is also a genre of in-world books found in various novels or even RPGs, which seriously expound concepts that are terribly important to the inhabitants of that world, but, of course, do not relate to the real world. They are usually composed to make the player’s or reader’s immersion deeper, so they can peek through such a window into the mechanics of relationships and philosophies of the depicted world.

The Libertarian Theory of War reminded me of exactly such a publication: a book arrived from some parallel reality that has no touch with ours, a world of those very farmers with rifles on their own land and without governments (not even large corporations), who need a moral (first and foremost!) guide to action: how to act in accordance with one’s faith if a neighbor stole a sheep, and a private court, misled, for some reason decided that the sheep is his. This is a serious question in a world of atomic rational super-individualists with rifles sitting on their farms: do I have the moral right to go to my neighbor and smash his house, threatening him with a weapon? and what will my neighbors say? and what if he gathers neighbors, lies to them about the sheep, and before I arrive, comes to shake my house? Of course, for us, these things are of about as much practical interest as listing the Sixteen Permitted Heresies, referring to the Daedric Princes in Oblivion, but for the inhabitants of such a hypothetical Libertarian Wild West, all these questions are extremely important.

And here the author can no longer be blamed for stupidity or lack of logic: in his head, as with any good writer, there is a high-quality and internally consistent picture of such a wonderful place, and for its inhabitants, he provides answers to all the above questions. When and how it is permissible for a libertarian to enter a war, why, how to end it, what to do if one has to fight non-libertarians (suddenly a state appears on the horizon, Achtung!) and so on and so forth. Of course, everything is laid out quite concisely, but in an elegant style, and almost all conceivable questions are touched upon briefly (i.e., within a couple of paragraphs), up to potential PTSD and the realization that war changes people. Generally speaking, all thinking people of East Slavic origin have been affected, one way or another, by the sudden war in Ukraine, which, to be honest, has been going on for far too long. And everyone has somehow reflected on their attitude not only toward it, but toward wars in general, even if they hadn’t thought about war before. This book represents an interesting philosophical experience of libertarian reflection on hypothetical wars of libertarians—here, again, the author speaks about what is closer to him and what he feels more deeply.

Who will find this useful? Well, definitely not hard-core materialists who do not believe in a libertarian paradise, nor those looking for specific recommendations like “storming a forest belt under conditions of enemy drone countermeasures” or “features of the strategy of highly decentralized armies.” Escapists will definitely like the author’s world, that’s a fact, and we will all derive practical benefit from this work when the specified world arrives. And the last part of the book will definitely prove useful, where a quite realistic case is considered: states have started to fight (or a war has started inside a state)—what would be ethically justified to do to preserve both one’s libertarian faith and one’s skin in such a situation, is it permissible to side with someone, and if so, to what extent, how, and why, or is it ethically justified to simply get away from this mess as far as possible? In principle, considering that, as already mentioned, the war has affected quite a lot of people, among whom was clearly the target audience of the book, discussing the ethical issues of a libertarian’s behavior in a war between states is clearly not useless. Let us note that at the beginning, the author makes references to his first work—an introduction to libertarianism—and clearly indicates the target audience of the book (essentially, it is a second volume continuing the theme), so from this point of view, everything is correct. If you are not in that audience, there is no point in complaining about the text.

Ah, and in conclusion, one cannot fail to mention the author’s most original feature. Emotions, which people are guided by (and which are by definition irrational), he considers as imaginary entities, so-called spirits, by which people can be possessed, and which are quite real from the point of view of physical influence on the world and peculiar desires. That is, one can say that a person killed someone out of hatred and revenge for the sad fate of a sheep stolen from him, or one can say that he did it because he was possessed by the spirit of the sheep craving vengeance, and this spirit will not rest until the offender’s blood is spilled. All this is laid out, again, elegantly and poetically; the question arises—how justified is it to introduce extra entities? On one hand, it seems we haven’t said anything new; on the other—the irrationality of human behavior, which leads to quite material consequences, is emphasized, and a uniform view of the entire spectrum of such behavior is provided. So, I hope the metaphor takes root; it is quite unconventional.

How Psychology Predicts Support for the War

Debates about war often revolve around questions of morality, law, or geopolitics. However, modern psychological research reveals a very interesting point: a person’s attitude toward war is largely determined not by arguments, but by their personality traits. For instance, a recent study in Britain showed that support for war is closely linked to certain stable psychological characteristics, rather than just a rational assessment of the situation.

First of all, it should be noted that so-called social dominance orientation (SDO)—the tendency to believe that society should be hierarchical and that some groups of people deserve to have power over others—plays an important role. As it turns out, people with high SDO scores are more likely to support military actions because they perceive the world merely as an arena of competition and a struggle for power. Conversely, people with low SDO scores tend toward more egalitarian views: they are more likely to consider all people equal and are therefore less inclined to justify violence as a tool of policy.

Another point worth noting is childhood abuse. As is well known, there is a connection between childhood experiences and attitudes toward violence in adulthood. Accordingly, it was found that people who were subjected to both emotional and physical abuse by family members in childhood are far more likely to come out in support of war.

We should also consider the willingness to obey authority. People with an extremely submissive personality type tend to align themselves with the aggressive policies of the state, including the waging of wars. In their understanding, one must not speak out against authority or sow useless doubts in people’s minds. On the contrary, people with low scores in obedience to authority who support the freedom to oppose it are not inclined to speak in favor of war.

Finally, let us not forget the dark personality traits. As it turns out, sadism is very strongly linked to support for war. People with this trait derive pleasure from cruelty and causing harm to others, and are therefore highly inclined to advocate for violence as a method of conflict resolution. Support for war is also characteristic of personalities with psychopathy, as they are emotionally detached from other people and feel no aversion to committing violence.

All this shows that the choice “for” or “against” war cannot be explained by a person’s rational assessment of the situation alone. In practice, the opposite often happens: first, a person has a certain psychological predisposition, and only then are arguments selected that fit well into it. Certain personality traits lead a person to rationalize military aggression, exaggerating convenient arguments and ignoring everything else.

From a libertarian perspective, this is especially important, because if support for war is linked to personality traits such as a drive for dominance or psychopathy, it calls into question the very idea of granting a “monopoly on violence” to a stationary bandit. In such a case, decisions about war would reflect not objective necessity, but the psychological distortions of those given the power to make them.

It is also interesting that such attitudes are closely linked to views on freedom and control in general. People who accept violent hierarchy as the norm are more likely to justify not only external aggression but also internal restrictions—from the strengthening of security forces to the suppression of civil rights. The presence of such people in society is very beneficial to the state, as it allows it to introduce authoritarian orders without hindrance.

Therefore, any debate about war is not just a clash of arguments, but a clash of psychological types. This means that to achieve peace and freedom, it is not enough to simply “convince.” It is necessary to understand which psychological predispositions make people inclined to justify violence, and to work specifically with them. For as long as there are enough people in society who are psychologically ready to accept war, a reason to start one will always be found.

Voluntarist, Bitarch

I finished her off!

That’s it, Libertarian Theory of War is finished and even immediately formatted into epub – download it as a single file and read in comfort.

I still have some grievances regarding the cover: Rothbard’s portrait resemblance to his spirit in the image leaves much to be desired, and the neural network stubbornly insisted on depicting me in exactly that image, despite the reference I provided. Nevertheless, I generally like the result, so I’ll leave it as is. But if anyone decides to try and improve it, I’m all for it; post your versions in the comments.

I also believe that finishing the book is a good occasion to remind readers of the link for donations to the author: https://ancapchan.info/donate/

Libertarian Theory of War, section 3.3.4 on war between states has been completed

So, the book on libertarian theory of war has finally touched upon war itself just before the finale. A couple of paradoxical conclusions and several banal ones have been made, and recommendations have been formulated on what libertarians should do in all this mess—in short, I am rather satisfied with the new section.

Now all that’s left is to smoothly summarize the entire text, and then the book can be assembled into a single epub, illustrated, and presented to the general public in some way.

And just as the finish line is very close, one misplaced question has started to irritate me. Actually, I love juicy and atmospheric details in books. But I made both of mine—on ancap and on the theory of war—as dry and concise as possible. Compressing ideas into a minimal volume was sometimes damn difficult, and now I wonder: was it even necessary to bother with that? Perhaps it would have made sense to generously pour out a stream of consciousness, adding various historical anecdotes and lyrical digressions? Maybe that would have been swallowed much more easily?

What is Wrong With the War, Part 2

Now I will add my own thoughts on the two designated topics: the degeneration of strategy and the disappearance of the willingness to make sacrifices.

What historically constitutes a successful offensive strategy? A sudden start to the war, rapid achievement of predetermined goals, and the political consolidation of success. The greatest strategist of all time and nations is Genghis Khan. A successful defensive strategy: disrupting the attacker’s plans, dealing a convincing defeat, inciting the attacker’s other neighbors against their defenseless rear, and, again, politically consolidating the success.

A failed offensive strategy is either a crushing defeat at the operational level or, having exhausted the potential of surprise, becoming embroiled in a war of attrition. A failed defensive strategy is allowing the enemy to decapitate one’s centralized management structure or failing to avoid the demoralization of the defense forces.

When a clear division emerged in the world between the club of great powers and all other countries, it quickly became apparent that offensive strategies among great powers toward one another had ceased to work: even a clearly defeated party was unwilling to accept defeat, and other great powers were even less willing to accept the defeat of a great power. As a result, for a long time, this manifested as purely colonial wars, where European offensive strategies generally worked perfectly.

But after the Second World War, a general democratization of world politics began. Countries gained formal equality, a dogma on the inviolability of borders was adopted at the interstate level, and new large interstate alliances were formed—and as a result, the era of territorial conquests, and with it the era of corresponding strategies, ended. Now, as a surrogate for conquest strategy, the strategy of supporting political instability in the target country and bringing to power a group that would subsequently declare its country an ally of the supporting state prevailed. Aggressive war became a task for special forces, and a successful army became de facto a conglomerate of tools for various special operations. The only exception remained Israel, which emerged after the Second World War through war with all its neighbors and has continued to successfully expand its territory at their expense for decades—until it receives diplomatic recognition from a particular neighbor, which allows it to fix a piece of the border.

Thus, the only successful strategy for territorial seizure became the long-term nibbling of a neighbor’s land—provided that it is possible to ignore the pressure of the global community to return to the pre-war status quo until such a return becomes unthinkable. In principle, this is exactly the strategy that Putin is currently implementing.

As for defensive strategies, they developed largely in mirror image to offensive ones. Will the enemy destabilize your political regime? A successful defensive strategy consists of completely purging the domestic political field of any seeds of opposition. Will the enemy ignore the global community? Then the global community must scream in your favor so loudly that it cannot be ignored, and primarily, the opposition in the aggressor country and its key allies should handle this. Does the enemy lean toward special operations and is not ready for a war of attrition? Then one must develop immunity to decapitation strikes and prepare to engage in partisan warfare.

It should be added that all these strategies leave no room for benefit for the people of the country whose government implements either an offensive or defensive strategy. For people who do not derive direct benefit from political maneuvering, any war is inherently loss-making. Therefore, it does not matter much whether it is a hipster accustomed to high earnings and a wide variety of smoothies, or some tire repairman accustomed to moderate earnings and a wide variety of beer—they will not become the political support for any pro-war clique. Hence the tendency of aggressive governments toward the lumpenization of their subjects, in order to strip them of sybaritic habits and make the state their only hope for survival.

Summary: both Sonya and Sperry, while generally correctly identifying the trends, exaggerate them somewhat. Strategies have not completely degenerated, although they have changed significantly following the change in the nature of wars—and it is generally possible to compel people to go to war in the interests of the government, but the entire political regime must work meticulously toward this. From this comes my main conclusion: states have not yet exhausted themselves as a systemic factor of external aggression, but they can achieve this only at the cost of a sharp increase in internal aggression, which is incompatible with long-term economic growth. Those forces within states that are interested in economic growth will restrain pro-war sentiments in governments.

What is wrong with the war?

In the Stalag Null channel, Sonya Shirogorova, first apologizing for moving from the eternal to the immediate, states that since roughly the time of the First World War, the strategic component of warfare has degraded terribly—that is, the art of employing the armed forces and other national resources to achieve military victory. Many countries have top-tier tactics, and operational art has also actively developed, but strategy is frankly sagging. Sperry UNIVAC is reflecting on a similar topic, and I will first give him the floor:

The ongoing clown show of what is currently called war compels me to comment on this marasmus. It is clear even to a blind person that military art has degraded completely and finally: weaponry is becoming smarter and exponentially more expensive, Skynet-style hunter-killers are practically flying over us, an F-35 wing has its own internet with 4K real-time video support, Musk is providing network coverage for the entire planet, the invisible B-2 drops a MOAB on the adversary, yet the utility of all this is many times less than that of a grandfather with a Mosin-Nagant in a quilted jacket in 1943. The most important thing is—no one understands what the hell is happening? Why have people, possessing far more effective means of killing than our ancestors, begun to be so desperately obtuse? Why have their balls fallen off, and why haven’t the likes of Kyiv or Tehran yet turned into Dresden or Hiroshima?

It is not at all about some terrible military technologies, like FPV; after all, the legendary butchers Cadorna, Joffre, Nivelle, Haig, and von Falkenhayn sent 200-300 thousand men into machine guns per wave, repeating this 10-20 times in a row, and people went quite briskly for years. Nor is it about the absence of certain technologies; “Bomb them all” LeMay and Bomber Harris together turned about 100 cities to dust, killing millions with airplanes that were not far removed from the Wright brothers’, which significantly accelerated the end of WWII. Now, in theory, we have everything to wage war on a completely apocalyptic scale of destruction, which is exactly what should have made wars fast (and incredibly bloody, even without the use of non-conventional weapons). The desire to wage war hasn’t evaporated either; people still passionately want to engage in it, it’s just that they do it so absolutely clumsily and stupidly.

Where does such a bias in people’s consciousness come from? Why, at the peak of Modernity, were people ready to suffer and die on scales unimaginable today, whereas now the Yanks were forced to fight so delicately in Afghanistan (and because of this, with such monstrous overhead costs that they dragged the matter out for 10 years) that they lost only 2.4 thousand—less than one person per day (from a wild, monstrous mobilization reserve of 120 million!), and this was enough to make them throw up their hands and leave ignominiously. The gold standard of meaningless slaughter in the 21st century is the war in Ukraine, where the maximum estimate of lethal losses over 4+ years is around half a million people. It is often compared to WWI, but let me tell you—Haig killed that many in a month in one operation for 10-15 km of land. At Verdun, as many fell in less than a year (and half a million were left disabled) with zero result (only 2 forts out of 28 were taken, Voumont and Douaumont, both were retaken, they didn’t even reach Souville), after which both the Germans and the French fiercely continued. Essentially, we see the same picture in Iran, just on maximum settings—only a few dozen Americans have died so far, but the people are already wailing and groaning that everything should be wound up because it’s somehow too costly.

What do we see now? Do people want war? Yes. Can they win it? With certain caveats—quite. The gist of the caveats is that in practically every country, the great military industry of the Cold War was dismantled almost to zero over the next thirty years. For example, in the USA, only one plant remains that produces RDX, and 90% of the armada of 700 B-52s were decommissioned and dismantled, so first, all of this needs to be restored. We won’t even mention the state of the RF Armed Forces. Have the methods of achieving victory changed? Not really—in the case of Iran, not only the missiles, but the population would run out faster than the bombs of the Yanks from the golden era of the Cold War (Japan showed that it is quite difficult to fight on “banzai” alone without cities, ports, roads, bridges, factories, and generally when a country is turned into a burnt-out wasteland). Do people want to pay a fair price in their own suffering for such a victory? Not at all; they don’t want to pay at all.

As a result, every modern war degenerates into a farce: spitting and loud wailing by politicians, banging a slipper on the podium, vows to crush another axis of evil (regardless of whose—Western or Eastern), the main thing is not to forget to season it with promises that everything will end by Christmas. At the beginning of WWI, they thought so too, but when it didn’t end—they tightened their belts, cursed everything in existence, and set to work for several more years. Now, in response to the desperate attempts of the EU to whip up the people for a war with Russia, Zoomer Germans claim that Putin is better than war, and NATO allies tell Trump to get lost when he hints that it wouldn’t be a bad idea for them to also join the mess in Iran. Only Russia and Israel have managed to somehow mobilize relative masses for a long and very bloody confrontation, but even their scales are incomparable to how people fought previously.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a fairly large shift in collective thinking, deforming many concepts familiar to our grandfathers much more strongly than the period from 1945 to 1990. How does the situation at the beginning of the 20th century differ from the beginning of the 21st? Why did the transition to Modernity quickly slide into a monstrous global slaughter that cumulatively destroyed hundreds of millions, while the transition to Postmodernity slid into a state where a government, theoretically capable of putting thirty million soldiers under arms, is unable to even conduct a ground operation on a scale that would cause Homeric laughter in Ludendorff?

Questions of this kind, generally speaking, should be answered not by military science, but by economics, because its primary profile is the study of human motivation. (Note from Ancap-chan: I would rather speak of praxeology, but that is an extension of the concept of economics, so overall everything is correct) People are complex things, managed by a dozen instincts upon which the eternal white noise of consciousness is layered; however, what remains constant is that any action a person undertakes is in accordance with what they perceive (regardless of how rationally) as their greatest benefit at the current moment (which is what allows the behavior to be categorized as a subject of economics). Thus, everyone always does exactly what they truly want in the moment; the only difference is the duration of the calculated forecast (those very instrumental and terminal values) and the extent to which a person realizes how they are thinking. The same is true for human societies, because they consist of people and generally move toward where people believe (regardless of how justified) moving to be best for themselves.

The modern person is pulled in one direction by an inextinguishable desire to gain power through war (which is indeed eternal and unchanging), and this desire is bolstered by the existence of increasingly powerful tools of war. But in the other direction, the Postmodern person (unlike their colleague from Modernity) is pulled no less strongly by a completely different desire—more accurately, a complete absence of desire to suffer and bear all the cumulative costs of war in all forms. Where ancestors were ready to rot in trenches for years and work three shifts, pouring TNT into bombs for a bowl of plastic porridge, the modern person falls into hysteria because gasoline might increase by a couple of bucks a gallon, and driving a Dodge Ram to the McDonald’s on the corner will become costly.

That is exactly why selling a war becomes almost impossible. As is known, even Trump started a Special Military Operation against Iran, copying the homework of Uncle Pu. By design, both Kyiv and Tehran must definitely fall in three days; there is no other way. The only thing Trump proved smarter in is that once a week he declares that his SMO is completely won, and the fact that the ayatollahs aren’t letting tankers through the strait is not his problem and generally they are meanies, while the Yanks have already won.

The next reasonable question is—why has motivation changed so strongly? It is difficult to answer briefly, but we will try to outline the main line. Firstly, the nightmare peak of Modernity played its part—both world wars. Whatever you say, they were an apocalypse that remained imprinted in memory for generations and prevented the world from sliding into a similarly destructive Third World War (despite the fact that there were fanatics on both sides who wanted it—every time, attempts toward it were effectively halted). The horror of the word “war” itself was so imprinted on people’s consciousness that it became deeply obscene, and openly admitting that we are waging war became something completely unacceptable, like admitting to coprophilia or incest. The words “Nazis” and “fascists” have long since ceased to be politically significant terms and have become simply dirty swear words.

Secondly, after WWII, the world changed radically and completely. All the things that Modernity glorified—the state, the nation, faith, the Führer—became very, very suspicious to all postwar generations (which ultimately resulted in the great rebellion of the sixties and the birth of postmodernism). The result of this was that two great blocks waged leisurely proxy wars for 45 years. The fever of the holy crusade against communism/capitalism of the 1950s burned out in literally 10 years. People grew tired of living in a besieged fortress and preferred sex, drugs, and rock and roll (in the USSR, the process dragged on somewhat until its very collapse). Due to the local wars of the 1970s, the Great Western economic rise was briefly replaced by a crisis, and people truly became afraid of the destruction of that beautiful way of life to which they had become accustomed. When the Union fell in 1990, there was incredible rejoicing among the masses on both sides (of course, marred by the wild nineties in Russia, but the spiritual lift at the very beginning was still great).

People were so glad of the end of the Cold War that they didn’t even bother to clean up all the loose ends left over from it, or somehow sort out the mess—whether in the Middle East or in the territories of the post-USSR—and this is haunting us to this day. Overlaid on this was the second demographic transition already in full swing in the West: the fewer children born, the more sacred the life of each of them becomes, and the more hyper-protection those who are born receive (which gave birth to the phenomenon of life-unadapted Zoomers, falling into hysteria over a wrong pronoun in a chat). Factually, only the dinosaurs continued to perceive war as a normal means of resolving conflicts: look at the old marasmatics at the helm of the USA, Israel, and Russia. Netanyahu was born in 1949 and grew up during continuous war; Putin was born in 1952 and grew up in devastated postwar Leningrad; the record-breaker Trump was born in 1946, and his entire youth coincided with the hysteria of McCarthyism, Korea, and the war against the red threat. It is not surprising that in all these countries, the main percentage of the population approving of their führers currently is aged 50 and older.

And so we come to the logical finale. Zoomers prefer to have a choice of 20 smoothies and to fight only on imageboards, which is why selling a classic war to the majority of voters is quite problematic. The problem can be dealt with in different ways: in Russia, it is solved by the fact that a clique of old madmen is in power, relying on powerful grassroots ressentiment from the nineties on the part of those over 50; in Israel and Iran—a crowd of religious fanatics (from similarly half-mad old men), relying on the status of a besieged fortress and a holy war for survival; in the USA, a similar gerontocracy of old sick bastards is in power (the average age of a senator is 67, a congressman 60), but there the desire to fight is somewhat restrained by numerous counterweights established by the founders, which prevent the country from becoming fully totalitarian for long. Will the world change when Trump, Putin, and other grandfathers finally die? The problem is that a new generation will grow up, which has already grown up amidst their wars. The only thing that is slightly comforting is—as we said—the scale of current wars is much more toy-like, so perhaps the politicians of future times will be slightly softer.

Why human rights papers aren’t working anymore and how to make them respected again

Recently, Maxim Kats released a video about Davos and the sunset of the “long world.” And you know, there he voiced a thought that makes any normal person (and especially a libertarian) start to feel their hair stand on end. Of course, Maxim isn’t our ally by virtue of his political views, but he still knows how to effectively dissect current problems, so we’ll be considering his reasoning nonetheless. Because he rightly observes: what we call “human rights” – it’s essentially a system error, an anomaly.

His video begins with pointing out that war has long since ceased being just a slaughter between soldiers—scientific and technological progress has reached the point where it’s possible to erase entire cities from the face of the Earth. The idea that humanity could simply self-destruct as a result of another war has stopped being fantastic and has taken on the form of a real risk. Political elites who had experienced World War II realized: we won’t drag out another round. The response was the creation of so-called “international law” and the concept of “human rights,” simply to avoid dying. It was, essentially, a global non-aggression pact signed with a trembling hand at one’s temple.

Of course, international law is largely just a “fiction,” but to some extent states are still willing to play by the established rules and observe restrictions, so this fiction is quite useful. Politicians, naturally, don’t care about the lives of ordinary people and humanitarian ideals, but they are afraid for their own skins anyway, so they won’t go completely overboard. At least that’s how it worked until recently…

But what changed? To power came a generation of politicians who hadn’t personally witnessed disasters or felt the threat of war themselves. They no longer fear mutual guaranteed destruction (MAD) and other scenarios of “deterrence doctrine” so much. For them, all this is just an abstraction from historical textbooks. And therefore, their motivation to observe the “fiction” agreed upon by previous generations of politicians has decreased significantly. As a result, the world once again faces a state of war between everyone and everyone.

Однако несмотря на эти рассуждения, всё же может оставаться вопрос того, насколько реальной является угроза самоуничтожения человечества с технической точки зрения. Кто-то сразу подумает о ядерных боеголовках, но их не так уж много и находятся они в руках очень ограниченного числа лиц (хотя и они могут отбросить человечество на многие десятилетия назад). Впрочем, сейчас технологии зашли ещё дальше. Например, в ближайшем десятилетии мы вполне можем ожидать появление массовых, простых и очень дешёвых в производстве боевых дронов, которые будут иметь автономное управление на основе ИИ и смогут поражать любых «неугодных» людей, включая политиков, используя распознавание лиц, а глушение сигнала окажется неэффективным из-за отсутствия канала связи с оператором. Ещё одна угроза – создание смертоносных и очень заразных искусственных патогенов с целью применения в качестве биологического оружия массового поражения. Биотехнологии уже сейчас довольно продвинуты и дешёвы, чтобы такое было достижимым даже для небольших групп людей, преследующих насильственные политические цели.

В таких условиях в мейнстримовую повестку не просто вернётся значимость универсальных прав человека, гуманизма и идей о недопустимости насилия, а перестанут быть маргинальными и более радикальные способы предотвращения глобальной катастрофы. Идеи наподобие усиления механизма ингибирования насилия и даже морального улучшения людей с помощью биомедицинских технологий (биоусиление морали) уже не будут восприниматься как что-то невозможное или нежелательное для реальной жизни. Развитие этого направления становится необходимостью для долгосрочного искоренения насильственных угроз как в личной, так и общественной жизни. Иначе, как отмечают исследователи, нас ждёт либо глобальный тоталитаризм с круглосуточной слежкой за каждым, либо вовсе уничтожение цивилизации и даже всего человечества.


Не ИИ – пост написан людьми!

Libertarian theory of war, section 3.3.2 completed

An important section has been completed, analyzing when the state attacks a group. Instead of the traditional internal classification of cases based on the answer to the question “is it attacking your group?”, here the priority had to be given to the answer to another question: “did the group identify itself as such?”

It also became clear that the next section will not be the final one regarding state-on-state attacks, but another intermediate one — about civil war.

Minnesota and the Libertarian Theory of War

For a long time, I struggled to find the right tone for the final chapter of the book on libertarian theory of war, where a libertarian analysis and recommendations for wars initiated by the state should be provided. However, then a road incident occurred in the US state of Minnesota, which was accompanied by heated discussions online—and things finally started moving. So, I express my gratitude to all security services, civil activists, and lovers of online flame wars for their valuable contribution to science.

So far, only section 3.3.1, in which the state attacks the individual, is ready, but things should move faster from here.

Oh, and a small warning has been added at the very beginning of the third part of the book, regarding the fact that war with the state can be understood in different ways; in this book, we are interested in war in its more brutal sense, as it is precisely this form that has so far lacked libertarian theoretical reflection.

On Futurism of War: Discussion

Atomic Cherry uploaded a four-part article cycle for his paid subscribers titled “On the Futurology of War”, and he sent me the drafts in Word. There was a brief discussion afterwards, but I’ll have to prepare a short overview of the cycle, where I partially restate the author’s opinion and partially supplement it.

The cycle briefly describes how a professional army, with the invention of nationalism in the 19th century, mutated into mass conscripted armies, and during the Cold War, due to the second demographic shift, there was a renewed trend towards professionalization. It also describes changes in military doctrines, from competition about who can outmaneuver the other, to the idea of a general battle, and then to total war, from which offshoots of information, hybrid wars, etc., later detached themselves.

The key contradiction that led to the crisis of modern wars, the author sees in this dilemma. On one hand, nationalism is still quite strong, and it intensifies even more when an invasion takes place, so it’s relatively easy to mobilize a large, motivated contingent for defense. On the other hand, most countries have already undergone the second demographic shift, have negative demographics, and gathering a motivated army of aggression is difficult. Thus, nationalism inevitably dictates that the aggressor follow the doctrine of total war, but demographics don’t allow them to draw an endless supply of human resources. Moreover, international humanitarian rhetoric forces them to be shy about blatant genocide, if, of course, the war is on the front pages of international media.

In light of this dilemma, the author describes several scenarios.

  • In countries where the second demographic transition has not yet occurred and a lack of industrial power prevents conducting a total war in the manner of the World Wars, low-tech genocide is taking place. Examples are primarily focused on Africa.
  • If the aggressor has overwhelming technological superiority, we have a war in which it destroys the enemy’s military and civilian infrastructure remotely, and the phase of ground operations either follows after complete suppression of resistance or does not occur at all. The most successful example of such a war is the bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict, when bombings alone were enough to bring the enemy out of the war and convince it to change its political regime.
  • The aggressor may also solve the problem of a lack of motivated living force by outsourcing military tasks to private companies. This has been actively used in the Middle East and continues to be applied in Africa. However, the loyalty of mercenaries is tied to the economy, and the feasibility of their use is largely determined by the economic tasks they solve, so it often comes down to nothing more than power control over objects generating income.
  • Finally, in a situation where opponents are comparable in strength but cannot ensure a full-scale total war of the scale of Korea, positional confrontation occurs, examples of which are the Iran-Iraq and Ukrainian wars. The latter is particularly interesting because it is a war of states that have already undergone the second demographic transition.

Discussing the articles, I noted that they somehow focus on the fact that total war remains the only way to resolve interethnic conflicts by force, while there is also another way – eliminating the ruling elite of the enemy. To this the author replied that Hamas’s leadership had already been destroyed several times and it didn’t help. It seemed to me, however, that for countries with a negative demographic, such a method should still be relevant. Understandably, he was referring to removing Putin: the regime is quite personalized, the population is sufficiently apathetic, therefore eliminating the first face should, in my opinion, make the regime much more willing to negotiate. Atomic Cherry argued that the Russian regime is not so personalized, and that a no less frozen character will come to Putin’s place, who will continue the same policy, and in the worst case there would be many such frozen characters, they would arrange a full-scale civil war, and then it would be like with the Soviet Union, which calmed down after the citizen and went to seize the world.

Well, of course, then the Maduro takeover happened, a regime that wasn’t particularly personalized – and the country is obviously experiencing depopulation. So we’re both thrilled to observe this natural experiment: will this methodology work or won’t it? Will old-fashioned nationalism prevail, or postmodernism? If the latter, then a total war looks like a viable alternative, and that’s definitely a plus. And the next important precedent in the history of wars will be the forceful elimination of a nuclear dictator. I, of course, am betting that this won’t lead to a nuclear war, and that the world is almost ripe for this revelation.