True Refuge wrote:Recently I emailed a libertarian article/columnist, Michael S. Rozeff, who wrote an article entitled "Essentials of Panarchy" back in 2009, asking some questions about panarchism and wider libertarian concerns such as the NAP and freedom-intolerant ideologies. I got a much quicker response than I anticipated, and got some insightful commentary out of it. I've copied the text of the email and Rozeff's response for anyone who'd like to see it below. Rozeff's replies are in brackets throughout.Dear ------,
Thank you for your inquiry. I make some comments in braces below.
From: -----
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2020 3:29 AM
To: Rozeff, Michael
Subject: Questions From An Aspiring Panarchist
Dear Michael
Greetings, I’m --------------------------------------. In the last two weeks I’ve undergone a protracted period of inward reflection regarding my moral beliefs and political discussion with fascists, anarcho-capitalists, anarcho-communists, centrists, and more, and I have found myself believing in panarchism with the confidence that I finally know what my inner moral axioms are and that I have an ideology that matches them.
Your 2009 LewRockwell.com article “Essentials of Panarchism” drew my interest soon after I had discovered the term “panarchy” and had gone looking for relevant political theory (that is sadly somewhat scarce relative to other ideologies, as many thinkers seem to deal with panarchism and hypotheticals of panarchist society only indirectly). I was very glad to find that there was more writings on the subject than just Paul-Emile de Puydt’s article “Panarchy”.
Naturally of course I don’t agree with everything you’ve written, just as you would disagree with many of my positions, but I earnestly agree with you on the core maxims of panarchist belief, and since it’s the most important issue of all I’m emailing to share some of my thoughts on panarchist concepts in the hope that your response and clarifications might help me clarify my own beliefs, and if you disagree, that I can use the challenges to the ideas within to craft a more consistent belief in panarchism. [My thoughts of then are limited by unsolved problems and challenges, so I may not agree either with those ideas of mine at that time.]
I found the quote from your article below quite poetic in how well and concisely it summarised the panarchist mindset for me when I was looking for definitions and descriptions:
Panarchists do not attempt to smash the governments others want. They deny no one the freedom to be unfree. However, they deny others (and their States and governments) the freedom to make them unfree.
I find this type of freedom to be of the utmost importance, especially in regard to nation-states and governments as you mention. However, a critical question that I’ve found myself raising in regard to panarchism is the problem of ideologies and belief systems that are inherently opposed to the freedom to choose one’s laws and way of life. The chief examples of these, although extreme, are human extinctionism and religious sects within which militant proselytism is seen as an essential form of worship (many of which have evolved out of major world religions over the last two millennia, even out of Buddhism). The common characteristic of such ideas could be their “ideological imperialism”, where the ideology or belief system cannot properly in an exist in a form where the mindset is “I should do this” rather than “everyone must do this”. [True, there are many people who refuse to live and let live, or who have other ideas such that they would deny you your freedom. Consequently, must the rest of us all the time be defending against them? It looks like "yes", we'd have to. Nothing guarantees our winning, and they may build up a powerful state by making it militaristic. What then? We may be impelled to coalesce into a state ourselves. As long as such ideas and tendencies exist, the panarchy has no stable solution. Nozick may be right. ]
This question manifested for me when I read Dr Ada Palmer’s novel series Terra Ignota, which depicts a vision of a deterritorialised society of non-geographic voluntary governance that embraces panarchist principles but also deals very specifically with the question of freedom-exclusionary beliefs. The books delve into analyses of many kinds of philosophy, morality, and governance systems through the lens of political fiction, but this particular point seems most relevant to panarchism.
From my perspective, which is likely fallible as I just a person aspiring to hold an internally consistent but also implementable ideology, I worry that “pure” panarchism, where total freedom is allotted for choice of law and government and belief and so on, might be inherently unstable due to its vagueness regarding such. This might be described as an application of Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance to panarchist governance, although it seems that a panarchist society and it’s morally foundational standoff with freedom-intolerant ideologies seems to be far more intense than the simple freedom of speech issues that the paradox is often mentioned in reference to.
[Yes, it may be unstable. States arise for inherent reasons, and one of them is to produce a stable enough situation of survival of a people in a given territory. The result is the world situation we observe today. We do not require everyone to do and think the same about many things , and they have freedom in those realms within their states. But states do impose a single set of laws, a sovereign and conformity to the body politic. SO we have a mixed system. It's semi-stable, but subject to imbalances of power that sometimes erupt in extremely bad wars. There has been found no solution to this problem among the states. There's a prickly international order, always ready to crumble or fall into war..]
It seems that a panarchist society needs means to defend itself from ideas that seek to destroy the individual’s freedom to choose, either by depriving them of that freedom, killing them, or making the Earth so uninhabitable that a free society is not possible. From my discussions with adherents of voluntarism and anarcho-capitalism, the lesser relatives of panarchism, it seems that the most common response to this is the Non-Aggression Principle. There are several problems I see with this:
1. Ideologically imperialist all-or-nothing ideologies and religious belief systems.
[You are correct. This problem exists. The NAP is idealistic. The only way to assure a degree of freedom at this time is by combining forces and living with a sovereign who focuses our resources on war materials. Peace and freedom (in part) through having a state and strong self-defense. The NAP is toothless and so is the idea of panarchy in the face of this reality and others like it. If the fighting among states gets bad enough, as in WW 2 and WW1, the sovereigns try something like a UN. This creates one world state, and it threatens to be even a worse totalitarian solution, even though currently a weak thing. Individual countries still are seeking world hegemony, the top 2 being the U.S. and China. Also, as you note, certain religious or ideological sects are also seeking world hegemony. Human nature is simply not tuned into live and let live. Panarchy and the NAP moderate behavior up to a point, and so do some good moral teachings and so does self-interest, but only up to a point. The world is a mixture of freedom and unfreedom.]
In my humble opinion, I find the NAP is insufficient to protect the system from those that would undermine it, because it has no special quality or definition to it that will protect the system from those that believe violence and unilateral ideological imperialism to further their cause is justified. The NAP is simply a factor in economic decision-making for them, and at some point they will grow large enough that they can violate the NAP and either get away with it or, if they end up failing, at the very least start a war with catastrophic collateral damage to people, property, infrastructure, the panarchist system, and so on.
[You are right. I agree with this conclusion. I have not expressed all my later views in print, but sometimes in offhand remarks and analyses they come out.]
2. Beings without the capacity to choose their laws with full understanding of the implications of those laws (children, AIs with the intelligence of children, and non-sentient beings)
A gap that I haven’t seen filled is what means does the NAP protect beings that lack the capacity to consent to authority from those who say their beliefs allow them to inflict torturous and unnecessary suffering, and, in the case of children and child-equivalent sentient AI (when it is eventually developed), manipulate said beings into consenting or appearing to consent? If a person said paedophilia and bestiality were, under their personal moral code, permissible, can they aggress on and manipulate on beings that do not have the capacity to give informed consent to submit themselves to an authority that leaves them with no protections? I ask this from the perspective of stripping away any personal moral opinions on the subject, as to do so would be contrary to the principles of panarchism. The question is whether the NAP is capable of protecting those who cannot submit themselves to an authority with full understanding of all the authority’s powers, and even if it is how does society handle definitions of incapacity when there is no body to standardize the answer to what is also a very difficult scientific and philosophical question.
[Panarchy has the same gaps as ancap. There is no moral theory there or not enough of a moral-social theory. The treatment of children and the weak remains a serious challenge to these political ideas. For the same kinds of reasons and conditions such that states arise, we humans also create or find our way toward workable moral structures that serve our survival and interests. We find our Gods too in this endeavor. There is no getting away from this. Politics doesn't do this, it only translates the moral to the legal, and then only partly because it allows some freedom in one's moral philosophy, that too apparently being closer to optimal than trying to enforce a single moral code for every person in a body politic. We live with mixed systems. It's the best we've come up with so far.]
3. The seemingly extreme importance of deterritorialisation and technology in sustaining a panarchist society, and their need to be protected from those who would tear the whole system down for either ideological reasons or for the hell of it.
Since panarchism sees the detachment of authority from geography to be of utmost importance, it seems to follow that transport system(s) that make intercontinental travel a trivial occurrence are of utmost importance in keeping authority non-contiguous and human culture accepting of this detachment. Should there be some kind of protection of the products of civilisation that are required for a panarchist society to be both possible and theoretically stable?
[There are reasons why territory and sovereign authority are connected. The panarchy theory does not address this. I have few thoughts on this aspect. The world solution is territorial states. Within each, we have a lot of freedom of movement. Again, we get a mixed set of systems.]
4. Varying moralities and conceptions of the NAP.
[It's a problem. All I can say is that being -- years old, you havea fuller sense of the issues than I had when I was 70, and I'm 79 now. My education in all of this (religion, morality, politics, systems, etc.) was very limited. I'd always been a math type and regarded these realms of thought as to soft to provide answers. Even today as much as I read, I come back to that view. There are no rigorous answers to any of these questions of human social and political relations. That's simply the way things are. Your questions reflect these quandaries. You will not find your God in any philosopher or great thinker. You may or may not find it in any conventional religion. But I say that you will need a religion if you attempt to achieve the goal you set out to find, a consistent system. You may have to invent your own religion or philosophy. That's how we're built, as individuals, and that is why at the very same time panarchy seems right, and yet we do not get panarchy because inside us we want to impose our "gods" or philosophies on everyone else.]
This is the least developed of my concerns as I thought of it only very recently, but it seems that in a world that embraces subjective morality as panarchism does the scope of the NAP varies wildly. A person with very high conceptions of property rights and the right not to be harmed might see trespassing as a violation of the NAP that deserves retaliation from all who hold similar views, but an anarcho-egoist or Stirnerist might say that is only up to the person or people directly harmed to retaliate for actions that do not have wider ramifications for the community, and even then they would say the NAP is simply a reminder of emotionless rational self-interest and the inevitable consequences of committing harm, not an actual societal rule.
[All too true. Congratulations on seeing these challenges to the NAP at such a young age.]
Overall, this quote from The Will to Battle, one of Dr Palmer’s works, encapsulates my concerns with a system reliant wholly on the NAP:
And yet, because it lies within the power of a human being to inflict such damage upon the human race as to compromise its future, and to inflict such damage upon Nature as to endanger all present and future life and to inflict such damage upon the Produce of Civilization as to undo the life’s labors of past and present generations, and to commit intolerable crimes which so outrage the common conscience of humankind that they cannot be suffered, it is therefore necessary that certain universal Laws bind all human beings to that necessary minimum of restrictions upon their general license without which civilization and the species itself cannot endure. These Universal Laws being necessary, it is also necessary that there exist an Authority capable of expressing and enforcing them.
[I provided my conclusions above prior to coming to this quote. Clearly, Palmer and I agree. Lately I read a great deal of Hobbes and cite his work on occasion. Palmer just expressed what Hobbes said. It's not a new theory, but it's a very powerful theory. I currently accept states as necessary outcomes of what he says and what Hobbes said. But I retain moral and pragmatic ideas that promote LIMITATIONS of this sovereign. That's the battleground of ideas here. CAN A STATE BE LIMITED? Is that a stable solution. Can there be more than one sovereign? Can there be deivided authority? Can we divide up activities and lives such that we divide control and authority? Or will this ultimately fail? There are very real political science issues here, and I urge you to locate the literature. I've only got as far as Hobbes, so far. There must be much more on the logic and viability of mixed authority solutions. It seems to me that our tendency in the weatern countries has been toward centralization of control over more and more of our lives. This has natural barriers, but not without internal strife.]
And thus to me it seems that the outcome of pure panarchism and voluntarism has a very real potential to end up worse than the status quo, and so does less to further panarchism moral axioms' goals then it does to set back long-term freedom. I understand fully that any form of “universal” restriction that is not truly 100% universal and objective goes against panarchist principles, but when it seems that pure panarchism cannot prevent grave injustices against those without the capacity to choose nor its own downfall at the hands of ideological imperialism, this question has left me heavily conflicted. I have received criticism from voluntarists and anarcho-capitalists on this point, and I admit that a “practical” or “pragmatic” or minarchist panarchism does not stand up to stringent purity tests, but considering that pure panarchism is (in my opinion) not stable and has significant risks of returning back to the status quo or worse, the criticism doesn’t hold much weight in my eyes.
[Stick to your guns. I agree with you on all counts. I do not know what sort of outcomes we might get in theory or whether it's be worse or better, etc. I only feel strongly that centralizing authority in too many spheres of human life is a dysfunctional course to take. We are doing this against our own best interests, in my view. The state does many stupid things. Can't we even stop some of that? Our victories in limiting government are almost non-existent. I also do not know which of the challenges are the most serious to the ideas of voluntaryism or panarchism. Children's protection? Ideological imperialism? Suppression by central governments? Etc. I only know that there are a lot of unsolved problems here.]
Of course, there are many problems with defining what such “Universal Law” would be, and the risks involved of delegating their enforcement to an overarching organisation even if all the voluntarily-formed governmental entities are represented in that organisation. It would be easy to say something is an intolerable crime in one or two sentences, but the amount of documentation required to limit enforcement of the corresponding law to the absolute bare minimum required to protect a panarchist system would be extensive.
[I think mankind has found elements of universal morality, enforcement being through a variety of different legal systems and states. However, these systems tend to expand and try to dominate rival systems that differ in various ways. Law varies, and it should. We just have to keep struggling to deal with "good" and "evil". That's what the Garden myth teaches. Once we became like God or tried to, we became bedevilled with the knowledge of good and evil. We knew the categories but not what's in them or how to deal with them. We knew too much and too little, a paradox. We cannot delegate enforcement of any universal law; and we can't come up with such a law, and we probably' should not try to do so, and we surely shouldn't seek one sovereign worldwide. That will never work out for the good. ]
There are other practical problems I see popping up in a pure panarchist society, namely the tracking of everyone’s choice of government without an independent organisation and dispute resolution between governmental entities, but as they are less fundamental I’ll save them for the future after this core question has been solved.
Since you’ve been writing about panarchism and related concepts for quite a few years, do you have any insights as to the operation of panarchist society that would indicate that a pure panarchist society would be able to deal with them?
[My insight is that it does not work. Does it offer direction for us, however? I think we have mixed systems and we have to evaluate the good and bad aspects of authorities and limited governments continually. Social choice is a big problem. Our governments do not work in our interests without a whole lot more of our systems working a whole lot better. We know the big laws against murder, rape, theft, child abuse, adultery, etc are right laws. Everyday behavior is more or less adequate. Sometimes it threatens to deteriorate. I feel the media are letting us down, and a good many professionals are letting us down. I feel we need more truth-telling, transparency, courage, truth-seeking, maturity, and a few other virtues. We need more character and backbone. We need to focus more on virtues that help us all. It's not clear that panarchy or the NAP, political theories, have much to do with these ethical matters. As I look over my writings, it seems my main concern is actually ethical behavior, not really politics. It's the lack of ethical outcomes within political matters that bother me, and the lack of ethics in jorurnalism, for example.]
I can’t say enough how much thanks I have if you read this all the way to the end. I understand that I probably don’t have the most clear, and I try my hardest to spell out my ideas thoroughly, but I don’t always succeed. If there are any problems with my expression or queries due to poor explanation on my part, please let me know.
Kindest regards,
--------
Thanks for your inquiry. Keep at it. I myself am working through Hobbes, a truly great thinker.
Best regards,
Michael
Oh wonderful, another useless political ideology that only a niche will follow.
