A Brief Introduction to the Archotropism Framework (Part Two): The First Law of Archotropism

 

Picking up from where we left off. The problems of Archotropism begin where its value does. As we established in part one, the act of aggression—of coercing another person to do one’s bidding—can have value to good and bad people alike. Humans throughout time, culture, and creed usually always view benevolent aggression as justified. Couple this with the fact that they usually define “good aggression” as “When I’m the one doing it” and “evil aggression” as “when someone else does it to me” and you have a real problem because no one is the villain in their own story. This is why the great 20th-century Christian thinker CS Lewis wrote,

Not to get all religious on you guys, but that is Evil’s dirty little secret: Evil thinks it’s the good guy too. Once more from CS Lewis, “A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.” So what does this mean? Well, it means that, from this, you can assume that nearly all humans on the bell curve in between good and evil will value aggression to one degree or another and nearly all of them will see it as "good" aggression. Evil people will certainly value it far more, on average, than good people. Humans in the middle of the bell curve will obviously place a moderate value for it. That all adds up. There are seven billion of us and all of that low, medium, and high demand for aggression aggregates.

That is where the state enters the picture. Just as any act that has value is worth doing to the degree where that act is MOST valuable, the same is true of aggression. As we discussed earlier, hierarchy is an efficiency mechanism that naturally arises from human nature in order to make valuable processes more efficient, and therefore, more valuable. The state, therefore, is the result of this same efficiency mechanism, naturally arising of omnipresent human incentives to maximize the value of aggression, much to the dismay of free marketeers, who wish it to be otherwise. Moreover, we can say with praxeological certainty that since the state exists to the extent that the act of aggression is maximally valuable, that the size and scope of the state are therefore tethered to that value! What this means in practical terms is that merely making a law prohibiting aggression will not suffice in altering the value of aggression any more than making a law prohibiting alcohol, prostitution, drugs, etc…, altered the value of those acts of producing those goods and services. All such a legal injunction on aggression (let’s call it a “Non-Aggression Principle”) would do is create a black market of suppliers for the service of aggression, which would behave like the current crop of black markets and consolidate itself into cartels of violent criminal suppliers of aggression and… Oh. That’s what we have right now. Praxeological descriptions of anarchy invariably turn out to be descriptions of the status quo.

This underscores the axiomatic truth of the statement that only power can control power. Law and principles are not required to create a free society. All that is required is for enough power to be in the hands of people on the far end of the moral bell curve. We can prove this by seeing it as a cost to the remainder of the power that is in the hands of evil people. For, if the evil people seek to use their lesser power of aggression against the more powerful moral minority and their protectorate, then they will incur a punishment that makes the value of the act in terms of risk turn negative. Thus, in order to reduce the size and scope of the state, it is not simply a matter of repealing laws, but of making the state’s acts of aggression less and less marginally valuable. That is much easier said than done…

That’s the main crux of the problem. How does one make aggression valueless for all potential aggressors? Well to answer that question, we must ask another question about the nature of aggression’s value. How is the value of an act of aggression measured? As noted earlier, aggression carries a dual-incentives with it: the first is the one-sided value of the coercion itself, which incentivizes the aggressor to aggress. The second is the disincentive for the victim to be aggressed against (to guard oneself against such acts) by the aggressor. Thus, we can clearly see that the value of any particular act of aggression is relative. Specifically, the value of an act of aggression by an aggressor is relative to the difference in power between the aggressor and the victim. Logically, this makes sense as we see that it is always the strong that prey upon the weak and never the other way around.

The greater the difference in the relative power levels between the predator and his prey, the less risky the chances of the predator suffering critical injuries when the prey tries to defend itself. A lion is at very minimal risk predating on a gazelle because gazelles can’t fight back. A lion is at substantially higher risk of predating upon a human because humans have family members that can avenge the human prey’s death, not to mention high-tech weapons that can be used to turn the lion into prey from a distance. A criminal on the street might fair well against an old grandma, snatching her purse and making a run for it. The same criminal would be a fool to try to snatch a wallet from the average cop. The grandma is probably unarmed, can’t hold onto her purse very easily, and can’t give chase. The cop, on the other hand, is well-armed, is trained to fight, and has legal immunity to brutalize any criminal for basically any reason. A tin-pot dictator feels pretty comfortable telling his soldiers to open fire on some unarmed villages in the middle of nowhere. The same dictator wouldn’t dare shoot at the US Military, who would likely respond by drone bombing his palaces (and mistresses) for fun.

Now, enters the First Law of Archotropism, and the discussion of our main topic can begin. The First Law of Archotropism states, “The value of power is relative, not absolute. Therefore, the value of power can neither be created nor destroyed. It may only be transferred from one wielder to another or transformed from one form into another. The sum total value of power is always conserved.”

From this thought process, we can draw our newest a priori law of praxeology: “The Law of Pseudo Demand”, which forms the economic basis for all acts of aggression. The Law of Pseudo Demand states, “An aggressor will prioritize the more valuable acts of aggression over less valuable acts of aggression, the value of which, is equal to the marginal utility an aggressor stands to gain from the act, multiplied by his chance of success, minus the marginal utility he stands to lose should he fail, multiplied by his chances of failure.” To be clear, in this definition, value, marginal utility, and both sets of chances are all subjective. Applying the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility to the examples I gave earlier, it is self-evident that a predator will prioritize acts of aggression with greater value over acts of aggression with lesser value. A lion will value predating upon a gazelle more than a human. A criminal will find more value in mugging a little old lady rather than mugging a cop. Welcome to Austrian Economics (Sociopath Edition)! The more powerful you are, the more you’re able to aggress without fearing repercussions and the less everyone else who is weaker than you is able to aggress against you.

Now, let us return to the crux of the problem we spoke about earlier. How does one make aggression valueless for all potential aggressors? Let’s frame this question in terms of the Law of Pseudo Demand and the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility. How do we make all acts of aggression have zero or negative value, ensuring that they won’t be valuable enough to be acted out? To do so would mean, firstly, that one would have to find a way to make every potential victim equal in power to (zero value) or more powerful than (negative) every other potential aggressor. Secondly, one would also have to deal with the marginal utility part of the equation as well, making every aggressor stand to lose exactly as much as he would stand to gain or stand to lose even more than he stands to gain. Essentially, you have to make every person as powerful as the state and we all have to be equally wealthy. Sorry (not sorry), Lefties, but equality is impossible.

My condolences to libertarians as well. This basically puts the nail in the coffin of any nation without aggression as it guarantees that any and all acts of aggression will always have value. We can’t hope for equality, nor can we hope for a world where every common man has a Mark of Cain guaranteeing the Almighty God’s seven-fold vengeance upon their aggressors. Unfortunately for the libertarians, the problem of aggression’s relativity of value is actually even worse than that. In another seemingly paradoxical way, given that it is a risk vs reward prospect, and acts of aggression can have asymmetrically bad consequences if risks aren’t mitigated properly, it actually incentivizes predators to work together against prey rather than compete with each other for a kill. Think about it logically. You’re the big tough guy on the block and a petty thief, who lives in a place with plenty of powerless potential marks and little in the way of security. There’s only one of you, which doesn’t exactly scale very well, but it still puts food on the table, drugs in your veins, and hookers in your bed. One day, another half dozen thieves individually (not as a group) move into your neighborhood. Do you fight them all individually for control of your turf? Actually, no. That’s risky, they’re tough, and there’s only one of you and plenty of marks to go around anyway, so it doesn’t suit your interests to fight them for control of your turf. What does make sense, on the other hand, is joining forces with them and combining your predatory talents to make your sociopathic enterprise scale upwards better. Perhaps y’all could afford some accountants to keep track of who has paid their protection money and who hasn’t for you because numbers aren’t any of your strong suits. Perhaps your new gang could jointly hire a journalist or a pedophile economist or two to write articles for you about how you’re helping raise aggregate demand which helps the economy, so your sociopathy isn’t so bad after all. You can specialize in doing what you do best, working together with your new crew, and hire employees who specialize in other professions to help you make your profession more efficient. However, the single most important implication of this incentive for aggressors to work together instead of work against each other is that Ayn Rand was wrong about competing police forces in an anarchy necessarily wanting to kill each other for territory. That's not their incentive.

This can also be proved to oneself simply seeing the Law of PseudoDemand as aggressors on one side (the positive side to which value is transferred) and victims on the other side (the negative side from which value is transferred). If the predators are fighting with each other over who gets to predate on the victims, then that substantially raises their costs of risk because one of them certainly won't make it and neither probably wants to find out who it will be. One of them will be on the victim side of the equation and that’s a very unenticing (and unprofitable) prospect. Thus, they're naturally disincentivized to conflict, albeit not perfectly so. However, if they join forces, then not only is their cost of risk reduced, but their chances of success against their victims increase too. Thus, we’ve all heard the saying that "power naturally prefers to coexist with power", rather than to compete. Power naturally forms itself into monopoly due to its relative value structure, unlike the rest of the market which has a positive-sum value structure and, therefore, spreads itself out.

To Be Continued…