A Brief Introduction to the Archotropism Framework (Part One)


Why does the state exist in the first place? Why do the masses so fervently demand its existence? Is it really just because they’re propagandized and lied to? Or, is there some fundamental incentive of human nature that the masses are responding to, the value of which, the state is attempting to supply to them? Why have states been the default for most of human history? In the Archotropism Framework, I seek to answer these questions, which I feel have been neglected in Libertarian and Free Market Economics discourses for decades. I’m not seeking to justify the state’s existence or its perverse practices. Rather, armed with a grounding in Austrian economics, I seek to understand the enemy, and the spirit that animates it. I seek to understand its incentives as it sees and understands them, perhaps even better. Perhaps, in understanding why society always seems to turn towards rulers (aka “Archotropism”) and why it turns towards a state-derived aggressive order, we can find a solution to it and generate, for ourselves, an incentives-based strategy that will enable future generations to live free.

“Humans act using means over a period of time to achieve ends.” It’s such a simple statement, and yet, it encapsulates all of economics in one statement. It follows logically then that humans will prioritize the pursuit of their ends based on the ends’ order of importance—a hierarchy of values as Jordan Peterson would call it. In psychology, this is called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. As this writing is not about free-market interactions, but of the compulsory class of interactions (aka “aggression” which the state holds a monopoly on) I will not delve too deeply into that part. Production arises as the result of voluntary transactions where each party values the goods or services of the other more than their own goods or services and decides to trade with the other. Aggression arises, however, because the act itself has value (obviously only to the aggressor). To the aggressed against, the act has a negative value. This act can be basic predation or criminality, but it can also be benevolent. An aggression could be both a criminal forcibly extracting money from a victim or it could be a father trying to enforce sobriety on an addicted member of his family. Obviously, in both cases, the person being aggressed against does not want the interaction and has their freedom to choose overridden by the aggressor. However, for the aggressors, society may oppose the first and be sympathetic to the second. Regardless, the incentive for each is the same: each sees value in the act, and therefore, does the act.

What is critical to avoid in this discussion is confusing ideology with incentives. While society may ethically oppose the first and condone the second, the fact that each incentive still exists regardless of what society thinks of it is why the actions of aggression get performed. People can believe that taking money from their neighbors is morally wrong, but that belief doesn’t at all stop them from voting for it to be done by their state on their behalf. For humans, if the incentive is there, then the action will get done. As humans with needs that demand to be met, this behavior is actually very rational, even if the decision is not reasoned to, or even a fully conscious decision. If the action has moral opposition, then it is only a matter of humans rationalizing the action. People behave their incentives, not their ideas. They behave the incentives that they observe and then post-hoc rationalize them if need be. Again, we prioritize acting out our incentives based on our perceived subjective values. When it comes to human aggression, it is only a matter of what order that subjective marginal value of aggression falls in on one’s hierarchy of values at any given time.

This creates a seemingly contradictory situation in life, where nearly all civilized people agree that aggression by others against themselves is “wrong” because it has a negative value to them. However, they also agree that aggression is acceptable when they’re doing it because they have come up with XYZ reasons why it is acceptable that make sufficient sense to them in achieving their values. While some might call this behavior hypocritical, as I have explained, it is not. On the contrary, it is actually being quite consistent with one’s values—his incentive-driven values, not his ideological values. Therefore, simply trying to educate people morally/ethically against such actions is not likely to succeed in diminishing the frequency of their occurrences because moral education does not change the value of the incentive of the action, which is always situational and subjective. This seemingly paradoxical incentive-driven behavior is mirrored in the state, where voters simultaneously want to exert control and taxation over others while also seeking to minimize and evade such taxes and controls upon themselves.

Now, we can answer the question of why the state exists in the first place. Recall from earlier that humans use means over a period of time to achieve ends, of which, one end is always power because power has value. Now factor in that humans are economizers who seek to achieve the most ends using the least amount of means and over the least amount of time. From this, we can conclude that any action that has value is worth doing to the extent that it is most profitable, and no more and no less. Thus, in order to maximize the value of actions, humans engage in activities such as collectivization, division of labor, and specialization, which lower the costs of means and time in achieving desired ends. In one word, they create "hierarchies". Hierarchies enable humans to maximize value by ceding decision-making power to competent leaders to organize collective use of the means of production to more efficiently achieve ends. As such, all hierarchy is an inevitable human behavior as it is an economizing behavior that makes the most efficient use of means in terms of achieving ends. The same is true of the means of predation and aggression. The state is the hierarchy that naturally forms to economize and maximize the value of predation over a given territory. As acts of aggression will always have value and the acts of hierarchy will always have value, putting them together, we yield that the existence of hierarchies for aggression (i.e, “states”) are inevitable.

The state exists to supply its citizens with the value of aggression against other people and to lower the costs incurred from that aggression in terms of time and means, using economizing behaviors such as collectivization, specialization (primarily for aggression), division of labor, and applicable economies of scale. It provides them with the perceived value of aggression against their countrymen: control over their behaviors and (sometimes) direct predation of private property in terms of wealth redistribution. Put simply, the state’s main service is to provide orderly aggression (sometimes called an “aggressive order”) as a service to its citizens to supply their demand for its value. Unfortunately, that’s where the value ends and the problems of Archotropism (defined below) begin. To be continued in part two…