Тег: Culture

Dignity for the herd, honor for personalities

Bitarch and the Voluntarist claim that of the two cultural models of behavior—honor and dignity—the second is more attractive to libertarians, as the first is collectivist and the second is individualistic.

Let us use the same definitions. In a culture of honor, a person’s standing is determined by how much their behavior conforms to certain high standards. In a culture of dignity, a person is valuable by the mere fact of belonging to humanity.

From this, it is easy to draw both the conclusions of the article and the exact opposite: honor is about individualism, since a person defends their own honor or chooses dishonor; dignity, however, is a collectivist thing, since only collective trends will determine what offends human dignity and what does not. Other people within a “culture of dignity” may turn out to be so valuable that any sidelong glance would humiliate their dignity, and the law would punish this, for example, with imprisonment for “inciting hatred.”

If today a person chooses to rely on the protection of an impersonal law instead of individual action, then tomorrow that same law will strip them of their dignity, and the person will have already lost the capacity for individual action in the previous step.

What is the culture of honor based on? On the fact that a person is always ready to demonstrate their willingness to defend themselves against the encroachments of others, and thereby avoids the need to repeat this again and again. Others see the readiness to repel and are wary of infringing upon another’s honor. Of course, the concept of honor is broader than the readiness for violence, but in the article under discussion, it is reduced only to this, so we will not expand the topic unnecessarily.

And what is a culture of dignity, if described in the language of a culture of honor? It is the presumption that everyone can defend their honor. I do not know if every person I meet is truly a person of honor. But I will assume this and base my behavior on it. Therefore, I will not encroach upon what is dear to them, knowing that their honor commands them to defend it. They are worthy of this. In other words, dignity grows out of honor. It limits honor, but does not deny it.

Bitarch and the Voluntarist propose to cast aside honor in favor of dignity. They want to deprive a person of the right to forcefully defend what is dear to them, while hoping that the law will be observed in a culture of dignity. But they forget to remind us that the law can become anything. A society with dignified laws (referring not to written norms, but to the actual practice of their application) will preserve a culture of dignity. A society with undignified laws will lose it. But what will compel people to fight for dignified laws and against undignified ones? Honor, of course!

To summarize. In reality, we are talking about the same thing. Respect for the values of the individual is important for building a prosperous society. But we do not agree on the means. If the NAP is reduced only to the refusal to initiate direct violence, then an encroachment on another’s freedom can bypass the NAP through indirect methods. This is exactly why the capacity for proactive violence cannot be taken away from a person. Without this capacity, a person will be unable to resist their own enslavement. Bitarch and the Voluntarist are developing mechanisms to strengthen the inhibitor of violence. If their means worked, it would make me their enemy. Fortunately, they work only on paper.

Honor is for the herd, dignity is for individuals.

Many people like movies about cool guys who “take charge,” protect family honor, and stage impressive duels at dawn. But let’s sort things out: real life isn’t a Clint Eastwood movie. And “the culture of honor,” which seems romantic at first glance, is actually not a cool tradition, but an ancient relic that still messes with our lives.

You might ask: what are we even talking about? Let’s consider two cultural models of behavior that shape society. The culture of honor – this is when your reputation in the eyes of others is the most important thing. Someone insults you? You must immediately “respond,” otherwise you’ll lose respect. Your honor is the honor of your family, clan, nation. If you don’t defend it—you are a coward. In turn, the culture of dignity is a completely different story. Here, your dignity is internal and doesn’t depend on what others think. If someone tries to insult you, you don’t rush into a brawl, but either calmly ignore the provocateur or handle the situation civilly through the courts.

Basically, the culture of honor is an ancient thing. Remember Homer and his epic “Iliad.” Those guys fought for honor like crazy. Then there were knightly duels in the Middle Ages, Italian vendettas, blood feuds on the Caucasus. And it seems like this is already in the past. But no! Even now, the state actively plays on the concepts of “honor” and “national dignity” to silence anyone who dares criticize management. What’s that if not medieval logic? And in private life, we’ve probably all heard phrases like “Do you respect me?” from various types of thugs.

What’s wrong with the culture of honor? Well, everything is wrong! It’s based on the fact that your value is determined by someone else, not by yourself. You as a person don’t matter; what matters is your “reputation.” You have to constantly prove your right to respect because someone suddenly decided to offend you. This is a culture in which the individual is always subordinate to the group. “Are you against our clan? Then you are an enemy.” People can be manipulated into fighting each other by saying that their honor has been “offended.” The authorities use this perfectly. Besides, it’s one of the factors stimulating violence.

The alternative is the culture of dignity. This is when society recognizes that every person is valuable in themselves simply because they are a human being. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from – your rights are protected by law, not a fist. You don’t have to beat up the first person who offends you to prove that you are worth something. In a society of dignity, reputation is trust earned through deeds, not fear of revenge.

Why do we so dislike “honor”? Because libertarianism is about personal freedom and respect for individual rights. And the culture of honor is about anything but this. Honor is always about the collective. You have to obey the interests of the family, nation, leader – that is, other people. Your personal freedom doesn’t matter if it’s at stake for a certain “correctness” and “reputation.” And we as libertarians say: no, that won’t do, because you can’t break a person just for their compliance with these “honor” and “reputation.”

By the way, an interesting fact: many developed and successful countries (such as Scandinavia, Canada, developed American states like California and New York) have long been living according to a culture of dignity. But countries stuck in a culture of honor (Russia and other Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries) are somehow constantly suffering from authoritarianism and corruption. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

And is it possible to get rid of a culture of honor? Of course, it’s possible. Besides the traditional approach in the form of changing the prevailing mentality in society, broad therapeutic practice will give a big immediate effect – strengthening the mechanism of inhibiting violence in individuals with its deficit. After all, only mentally ill psychopaths can support all this toxic culture in reality, while most normal people with a strong inhibitor will not even want to “defend their honor” using violence!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

If buying is not owning, then copying is not stealing

When someone talks about piracy, images from pirate movies usually spring to mind—a wooden leg, a bottle of rum, and a parrot. But in the digital world, things are a bit different. There, a pirate isn’t some guy stealing “riches” from poor authors. It’s more like a guy or a girl who keeps the doors of a massive digital library open for everyone.

Imagine Nintendo. The legendary company has released over 1,500 games over the last 40 years. Many of them are now lying in dusty boxes in attics or have long since rotted in landfills because it’s not profitable for the corporation to maintain old content. But who saved these games for history? Exactly, those same “pirates.” In the digital age, they are a kind of volunteer guarding cultural heritage. Piracy today is a guarantee that we won’t lose priceless culture tomorrow.

But isn’t this theft? This is where it gets interesting. Theft is when you take something from someone, and that person no longer has it. By downloading a movie, a song, or a book, you aren’t taking it away from the author. The file remains exactly where it was, in its original form. No real loss—except, perhaps, the copyright holder’s illusions about their hypothetical income.

Fine, but shouldn’t authors be paid for their work? Of course they should. But for the first copy of the product that buyers voluntarily purchased, the money was indeed paid. Everything else is an artificial monopoly imposed by the state (i.e., a privilege from a stationary bandit, which is what patents were openly called in the past).

It’s also important to understand that the modern copyright system (let’s call it “copyrism” for convenience) doesn’t allow us to fully own even the things we’ve already paid for. You bought a game? Great, but it’s tied to a dozen DRM protections that vet you like a border guard at an airport. Bought a Netflix subscription? You aren’t the owner of the movies, just a temporary tenant. Subscription ends—goodbye, favorite series. Copyrism is a cult of control where the user is always under suspicion. We have become tenants rather than owners of our own culture. Admit it, that’s not very market-like at all.

Lost sales are a myth. Companies love to calculate virtual losses: claiming that since you downloaded 10,000 copies of our album, we lost 10,000 sales! No, folks, you lost at most the chance to sell it to a few dozen people. The other 9,950 would most likely never have bought your product if they couldn’t download it for free. And you know what’s funny? The most active pirates spend more on music and movies than the average consumer! Because piracy is more like a sampler than a robbery.

Piracy also helps in cases where the copyright holder doesn’t want to or cannot help. Remember how HBO ruthlessly deleted favorite series from its servers when closing HBO Max? They were saved specifically by pirates. When a book is banned by censorship, the only hope of reading it is again through pirate sites. They literally support the freedom of information.

Free does not equal immoral! Libertarian ethics are simple: violence is bad. And when you make a copy of a digital file, you aren’t taking anything from anyone. But government raids on servers, million-dollar fines for students, and criminal cases against “pirates”—that is real violence. If an author is talented, grateful listeners, readers, and viewers will support them voluntarily. This is fair and free, and most importantly—non-violent.

What can we do? Advocate for the abolition of copyrism. Don’t be afraid to say out loud: copying is cooperation and the dissemination of knowledge, not theft. We are not obliged to feel guilty for simply wanting to freely manage our files and the culture that has long since become part of a common heritage. And one last thing: keep your torrent client handy. Because while corporations are playing Monopoly, pirates are the only ones truly ensuring the preservation of culture!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

How is the culture of libertarian political thinking structured?

Rinat Enikeev

Politics is how collective actions are customarily carried out in a given community. Political thinking is a complex of ideas and evaluations concerning politics. Libertarian political thinking is political thinking determined by libertarian principles. The culture of libertarian political thinking is how it is reproduced and promoted.

Now the full definition: the culture of libertarian political thinking is how the complex of ideas and evaluations regarding how collective actions are customarily carried out in society, determined by libertarian principles, is reproduced and promoted. How is this culture structured?

In modern society, politics very rarely corresponds to libertarian principles, so a libertarian usually involuntarily shuns politics. In what cases will they not shun it?

First, the collective action must be voluntary for its participants. Rallies by quota, mandatory elections, and the like will be sabotaged by a libertarian whenever possible.

Second, the collective action must pursue an obvious benefit for its participants. A libertarian is unlikely to be inclined to pull chestnuts out of the fire for others.

Third, collective action may involve causing harm only if it is intended to restore justice. Lynching or street clashes with police committing illegal acts may well fit into libertarian political thinking. Pogroms—unlikely.

How are all these values reproduced and promoted? Like many other cultural ideas: through personal example, references to successful political actions, and campaigning.

Violence and Cultural Influence

Voluntarist, Bitarch

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.

Sources:

  1. https://panarchy.ru/2021/07/12/анализ-внутривидового-насилия-как-яв/;
  2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK210012/.