Questions:
- How can you stop people doing evil or stupid things, and have freedom at the same time?
- If you have rules, then you need a hierarchy of power to enforce them, and if you have a hierarchy of power, then you don’t have freedom … right?
Such has been the dilemma of anarchy, labelled as chaos by propaganda … but anarchy does not mean chaos, it means no rulers, not necessarily no rules, which brings us back to our dilemma.
The problem here is actually that a whole bunch of people decided that if they couldn’t figure it out, then the answer did not exist.
Nothing could be further from the truth … and here it is:
The Answer:
To have rules but no rulers, to have rules but also freedom …
- Firstly one must accept that these rules do not govern people but principles, and the principles must be perspective agnostic (ie – not tied to an ideology, but tied to logic, maths, science and other facts).
- Secondly one must be able to motivate people to be guided by these principles, without any kind of hierarchy to force them … which is achieved through non-property/trade/currency-based economics.
In life, people are motivated by pleasure and pain … and they need to access resources in order to access opportunities to attain pleasure and avoid pain.
So if you grow some food, and you have more than you need, you can take it to a market and provide it to someone else who needs it … and if food is easy to produce, there’s an abundance, so people can have what they need without question. The only thing they need to do is acknowledge you as the benefactor who provided their food, and in that acknowledgement we can have a system to record the thermodynamically calculated input to their life … and thus you’re now partially responsible for the nutritional value of that food to their wellbeing, and which in turn powers their activities.
Statistically speaking, you have now provided more benefit than someone who produced nothing & helped no one … so while food may be abundant, other resources are scarce, and if competing for access to scarce resources provided by someone else, you’re more likely to gain access than the person who contributed nothing.
But, is there an authority or rules forcing a provider of scarce resources to provide them to you rather than the guy who did nothing? No. But he’s nonetheless motivated to do so, because his resource is scarce, and thus has a greater impact than an abundant one, and his own competition for scarce resources provided by someone else is best helped by providing it to the person who contributes, because it influences their capacity & motivation to do so.
However, he’s free to go against the advisory and provide it to the guy who does nothing, it’s just less probable that he will do so … unless that guy is a friend, relative, or someone else he’s willing to make that statistic sacrifice for; or where that guy perhaps has a proposed usage for that scarce resource which may have a greater positive impact than yours.
Thus freedom and anarchy without disorder.
A more serious example: murder.
So what about stopping people from serious crimes, like murder … how is this achieved without hierarchical authority? Easy … the exact same way.
Committing an unjustified or unprovoked murder (as one example), means you’re causing a thermodynamically quantifiable consequence in loss of life, plus stress and suffering for family and friends of the victim, and the loss of the victim’s productive activity, and further disruption to productive activity of all others affected … and that’s a pretty big cost, so there’s very little motivation to do it, especially when there’s no significant resource advantage you couldn’t have gained more easily another way in such an economic paradigm, not to mention without the risk.
Psychopaths?
Ok, for arguments sake we get a homicidal maniac on the loose … well, this is no different to the status quo, it already happens in the world we live in … but what to do about it in a world without hierarchical power?
Well, such a person being the cause of an immense amount of damage, is therefore a very valuable thing to stop, so people may choose to specialise in hunting them down, working alone or in teams, and either incarcerating or disabling them one way or another.
Since such a person’s productive output is negative, killing them may be pragmatic … but it’s not about judgement or punishment or vengeance, it’s simply about preventing harm. So an Open Empire Bounty Hunter (so to speak), is looking for the maximum possible reward (acknowledgement) for minimising the harm done by such people … and to maximise the value of that, they work with as many specialists as they can, from psychologists to jailers and so on, to determine which course of action most reduces the harm (and risk of further harm) done by this person, without causing additional negative consequences in the process.
Again, no rulers, no hierarchy required, and nor was it against any “law” to kill anyone … it was merely the principle of the system, that you bear responsibility for your actions, and by becoming a homicidal maniac, your career path created value in either incarcerating or killing you, in order to prevent the damage you’ve done killing others.
Conclusion:
You’re free to do what you want, but so is everyone else … and rather than being motivated by maximum exploitation without responsibility for consequences, now you (and everyone else) are motivated by minimising harm & maximising benefits in ecological & social terms.
So do what you want, but understand that the most productive and ambitious people are likely the producers of the rarer (scarcer) resources … and if you want to be a priority recipient of such resources, you’re in competition with others whom are also motivated by the same system … so you’re only doing yourself a disservice if you desperately want access to such scarce resources, but your hobby is arson, murder or animal abuse.
You get the idea?