Asymptotic Anarchism for Anti-Authoritarians

Let's use the famous "Framework for Utopia" as a North Star but replace Nozick's theoretical minarchism with the pragmatism of subversive innovation.

John Shaider

The fundamental problem with both anarchism and minarchism is that both are constructs. Maintaining some Hayekian humility is important because we really can't know what the "ideal" might be, as society will unfold in unpredictable ways.
—Robert Capozzi, Facebook comment

In our actual world, what corresponds to the model of possible worlds is a wide and diverse range of communities that people can enter if they are admitted, leave if they wish to, shape according to their wishes; a society in which utopian experimentation can be tried, different styles of life can be lived, and alternative visions of the good can be individually or jointly pursued.
–Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia

Yesterday’s article was designed to whet your appetite:

Asymptotic Anarchism

Today’s article goes deeper.

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Most students of political philosophy have had some contact with Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia (ASU)—specifically Part II. And for good reasons. Part II is essential because it sets out devastating critiques of competing moral-political doctrines and awakens our deepest intuitions about the coercion required to make those doctrines a reality.

Nevertheless, Part III: A Framework for Utopia (henceforth Framework), I believe, is Nozick’s most important contribution. The Framework is under-appreciated compared to familiar thought experiments about people giving up money to watch Wilt Chamberlain play basketball. However, my objective in persuading readers of Part III’s importance is not to rearrange the philosophical canon for students. Instead, my goal is strategic. Nozick’s Framework recommends a mindset that can inspire more subversive innovators.

If you’re not familiar with Nozick’s work, don’t worry. I will summarize some key points. We can situate Nozick’s ideas squarely within the Jeffersonian tradition that animates this work. 

Nozick’s Framework, properly applied, offers those who share his ideological priors a sketch of how to liberate more people from power and poverty. Such a project is more valuable than arguing endlessly about ideal justice, as to realize ideal justice is practically impossible.

Debates about minarchism or anarchism can distract us from more salient questions about how we create more markets in governance despite the imposed Westphalian order. I suggest we reshuffle Nozick’s thesis to transform his theoretical framework into a practical mindset. Finally, we can use the Framework as a strategic lens for spawning subversive innovations that promise each of us a society that comes closest to our ideals.

Minarchy vs. Anarchy: The Debate is Largely a Distraction

Before getting into a theoretical inquiry about minarchism or anarchism, permit me to offer a brief overview of Nozick’s rationale in Part III. It goes something like this: To the extent that there is a justifiable state monopoly on violence (Nozick’s minarchist version), the Framework’s job is to facilitate the free formation of new communities, which we’ll follow Nozick in calling Utopias. Finding (or founding) a Utopia is a discovery process. So the Framework’s function is more or less to protect the rights of individuals exiting and entering new Utopias. Competition for members among Utopias accelerates the discovery process and means that the Utopias must serve their members sustainably to survive.

We can get lost in a series of questions about such a Framework’s details, including whether or to what extent the Framework needs to be a monopoly, a coalition, or a confederation, or whether it could run on a set of governance protocols that we might consider anarchist by degree. Such arguments, I contend—like the wider debate between minarchists and anarchists—are highly speculative and largely a distraction.

Nozick built almost the entirety of ASU on post hoc rationalization of the following statement: “Individuals have rights, and there are things no person or group may do to them (without violating their rights).” We can interpret this statement as aspirational and normative without detouring into metaethics debates. Beyond moral suasion, I doubt Nozick thinks of rights as somehow inhering in people like a protective forcefield. Certainly, he would acknowledge that—whether or not rights exist objectively—powerful people will continue to act in ways that bring offense to less powerful people, despite moral suasion. They do, and they will.

My argument here is not designed to settle debates among academics in Abstractionland, much less to go toe-to-toe with someone as formidable as Nozick on matters of moral theory. Instead, I assume that Nozick and I share similar values, whatever their metaphysical status. Indeed, as he opens ASU, Nozick starts with the Kantian presumption about rights, which we can safely interpret as something like the ‘sacredness of persons.’ I share this value. I hope you do, too. But Nozick doesn’t try to justify that presumption in ASU and uses Part II instead to prime readers’ intuition pumps about situations in which other theorists throw rights out the window. I will do something similar but perhaps more attenuated: Seek solidarity with others who share Nozick’s values. In other words, if you don’t value human freedom or don’t think of individuals as sacred, this article might not interest you.

Nozick constructs ASU in a manner that he believes will limn an ideal institutional substrate to protect sacred persons. I am doing the same, only acknowledging more explicitly that we (those of us who practice a sacred-persons doctrine) are operating in a world filled with those hostile to our values, including the values of autonomy, property rights, and—indeed—the liberal sacredness of persons.

So, as perhaps Nozick was, we are not attempting to persuade those who are hostile to our values to consider a different political philosophy, even a pluralistic one like that in ASU. Instead, we are presuming the value of human freedom and the sacredness of persons. We seek to instantiate those values in a hostile world by offering people choices. And we employ practical means–especially entrepreneurial means. Some of those means will involve traditional arguments about ideal justice, but also better marketing—or what economic historian Deirdre McCloskey calls “sweet talk.”

Still, we know that most of these arguments smash into the sturdy barricades that protect political authorities and their supplicants.

Indeed, the main problem with academic arguments about minimal states or anarchies tend to operate as if completely abstracted away from a world filled with politicians, corporate cronies, cultural baggage, and traditions extending backward in time. Theorists think and write as if it were feasible to get everyone, everywhere, to sit down and read their three-part essays, then be transported to some magical realm where societies can be spawned on a vast, empty green.

Alas, the world is a patchwork of predators and powers with claims on nearly every patch of soil. 

I hope you can see why debates about minarchism and anarchism are mostly a distraction—unless, that is, one’s strategic focus employs means that are ostensibly minarchist or anarchist. Governance institutions, including any given person’s Utopia, exist in a world of Hobbesian states full of rabid supporters with authoritarian bees in their bonnets.

Arguments such as those between Yaron Brook and Bryan Caplan about ideal justice resemble those debates about how many angels can fit on the head of the proverbial pin. Our ideals are our North Star but may never be our destination. In that sense, we must sit more squarely in the reality that arguments about ideal justice do little to create Utopias, much less a Framework for Utopia. Instead, we must turn to strategic means to move toward our ideals, which are niches or zones—systems—for sacred persons that must be created in a hostile fitness landscape crawling with predators and parasites.

A Framework for Utopia-Building: Reshuffling Part III’s Thesis

The basic idea of Robert Nozick’s Framework is that some people have utopian aspirations, but they have inadequate knowledge to realize their idea of Utopia in a complex world. The only way to discover any given Utopia is for people to try fashioning it and inviting others to join. According to Nozick, accomplishing this requires some general set of procedures—institutions—that make governance pluralism possible at all. To reiterate, it looks like this:

• Some people want to live in their idea of Utopia, even though those self-same people have inadequate knowledge to realize that Utopia.

• People should be permitted to attempt to build their best approximation of Utopia so long as such attempts do not injure others in their parallel (peaceful) attempts.

• The Framework for Utopia is a theoretical construct that can and should be turned into a set of political institutions with pluralistic Utopia-building as its mission.

From this, one might imagine institutional or constitutional designers busily setting out to instantiate the Framework in a body of law.

At this point, Nozick must surely be aware of the problem we suggested above, namely that there are authoritarians among us. They eat at the same restaurants. They vote. And they hold forth on social media every day. Nozick calls them “imperialistic utopians” who seek “the forcing of everyone into one pattern of community.” These utopians have no time for pluralism.

Apart from a small minority who might read this, I’d speculate that once you factor out the politically apathetic or “conformists,” most people can be called “imperialistic utopians,” even in the United States, which the Founders built on the ideas of freedom and pluralism. The media landscape provides ample evidence, however anecdotal, for such speculations. At the very least, we know that powerful authorities are likely to attack any Framework such as the one Nozick imagines. In the United States, the 9th and 10th Amendments are our closest purported legal means of guaranteeing some measure of pluralism. But political operatives and lawyers with notions about a “living constitution” rendered these Amendments inert long ago.

So what is to be done? 

That’s not a terribly philosophical question. Indeed, it’s just the sort of questions philosophers routinely avoid. Nevertheless, I have asked it and will try to answer it. I will appeal to Nozick’s genius while reorienting it to strategic ends.

• Nozick wants people to pursue building their idea of Utopia through a scaffolding hospitable to pluralism, even though most people hold views that militate against the Framework for Utopia.

• Instead, the Framework for Utopia can serve as a strategic construct—niche carving—through which dissidents can pursue various Utopia-building projects, despite obstacles.

• People who share our values should vigorously pursue the construction of their best approximation of Utopia, so long as such attempts do not injure others in their parallel (peaceful) attempts and they are aware of the risks that authoritarian powers present.

No doubt Nozick was doing his job by offering a philosophical case—not just about the facts of pluralism but also about the need for a pluralism-enabling framework.

In reordering Nozick’s premises into a strategic Framework of niche creation I call subversive innovation, I look around at the authoritarian powers in our midst. Then, I seek out weak joints or legal gray areas to exploit, in which one might apply a liberatory strategy or recruit new constituencies through entrepreneurial means. Carving niches means experimenting with new governance systems, however modest, hoping that these systems prevail in competition. Such is the delicate dance of dissidence.

Asymptotic Anarchy: Innovation and Entrepreneurship are Subversive Acts

Asymptotic anarchy is a process that, through innovation and experimentation, might move us closer to an ideal, even if we never fully realize it. In mathematics, an asymptote is a line that a curve approaches as it heads toward infinity. We might call that curve “degrees of frictionless freedom.” Metaphorically, we can represent the movement toward anarchy as a similar function toward an ideal state: We might move ever ‘closer’ but never get there. The ideal state would be one in which humanity has more or less eliminated the initiation of violence by one person against another and reduced the costs—to near zero—for any given person to exit a governance system that isn’t serving her. We refer to this ideal state as “anarchy” because it means no rulers. In this condition, one can join any existing community or association. In short, all governance under anarchy is rooted in “the consent of the governed.” Of course, one might consent to another’s rule in such a condition, but the consent provision and a right of exit are basic to our ideal.

Now let’s turn to the idea of transaction costs. The main issue with Nozick’s theoretical Framework is that it doesn’t offer a full accounting of such costs, which, to be fair, is probably not really philosophy’s job. So it’s up to us to figure out how to apply a revised Framework in our current circumstances. For example, the dominance hierarchies that reign today, even in our vaunted democratic republics, not only come with incentives for self-preservation and expansion, they almost always come with legions of supplicants who depend on their influence or largesse. Public choice theorists explore the dynamics of political authority's interactions with special interests. Of all the sub-disciplines of political science, Public Choice is perhaps the most realistic, as it assumes that even political leaders are motivated by incentives, just like anyone else. So whenever we are considering any political event, we can always expect such incentives to be in play, lingering in the background.

In light of these real-world dynamics, if we move towards some ideal, we won’t do so simply by imagining the Framework as the ideal, although that can be helpful in knowing our why. We must also apply the reshuffled Framework as a strategic focus on a continuous process of asymptotic anarchy carried out by dissident innovators and entrepreneurs with diverse conceptions of the good. In these different conceptions lie customer value propositions associated with an alternative system the entrepreneur proposes.

Notice the term customer. Despite connotations of bourgeois materialism, I submit that the Framework-as-Strategy mindset prompts subversive innovators to think of people as customers rather than citizens. Why? A citizen operates in the magisterium of must (politics) rather than the magisterium of ought, which includes both morality and markets. So, you ought to do x because x is the right thing is a moral claim, or you ought to try product y is a marketing claim. Both appeal to one’s ability to choose. In the magisterium of must, that is, you must pay for z or else, authorities simply compel you. Thus, the transition from a citizen-centric mindset to a customer-centric mindset lies first in your willingness to remain in the domain of ought and then serve people better by offering them something better through marketing.

According to management consultant Matt Gilliland,

• “​​When the perceived (risk/time-discounted) benefits of switching to an alternative (system) exceed the perceived benefits of the status quo (system)—factoring in the perceived switching costs—people will switch to the alternative.”

We can translate this heuristic into a series of steps:

1. Create overwhelming value in an alternative system.

2. Expose the diminishing benefits of the status-quo system.

3. Reduce switching costs.

4. Change people’s perceptions of the alternative relative to the status quo.

5. Serve customers well and continuously improve.

Now, consider a few examples of the above, which can serve as object lessons:

• Uber persuades billions to use their platforms instead of the taxi cartel.

• Poor performance and bad policies send parents to myriad educational alternatives.

• Satoshi Nakamoto offers the bitcoin network as an alternative to the fiat monetary system.

• Legal innovators set up a special economic zone in Honduras (Prospera), which has some of the least restrictive institutions on earth.

This handful of examples demonstrates subversive innovation. Notice in each example that there is some elbow room in what constitutes a ‘system.’ While none is perfect, each system iterates in its efforts to practice steps 1-5 in terms of customer focus. Each effort carves out a niche that offers one the option to exit a legacy system (a la Albert Hirschman) and enter an alternative system. In today’s hostile environment, it might be quite difficult to do wholesale institution building from scratch. There will be no constitutional moment. Instead, each effort might be narrower but slice into some aspect of a more comprehensive status-quo institution.

But note that system-switching from the magisterium of must (politically-contrived system) to that of ought (market-derived system) is different from going from one market-derived system to another, such as, when abandoning MySpace for Facebook, or Google for Presearch. In such cases, ceteris paribus, the more desirable system wins out as the absence of new customers destroys the less-valued system. By contrast, politically-contrived tax and transfer systems have a competitive advantage in that they can use compulsion to trundle along, despite mass defections and relatively poor performance. And those dependent on the status quo will go to great lengths to protect their systems and to sow seeds of doubt about nascent competitors.

That is why subversive innovators must be prepared for counter-strategy by vested interests with seemingly endless resources.

Specifically, the vested interests will:

1. Find ways to bolster and defend the entrenched system.

2. Sow uncertainty and doubt about your alternative system.

3. Attempt to raise your switching costs through political favor-seeking.

4. Change people’s perceptions of the alternative relative to the status quo.

5. Maintain perceptions instead of making system improvements.

In response to such counter strategies, subversive innovators won’t be able to rely on the coercive apparatus of the tax and transfer state. But they can rely on a commitment to telling the truth. So, suppose the subversive innovator finds herself in narrative warfare with her enemies. In that case, the value she creates for customers is a truth that will be difficult (though not impossible) to overcome. The subversive innovator must create more value, and customers can shout it from the rooftops.

Uber and Bitcoin entered the market without asking for permission. Because they did, consumers got a taste of their services before establishment cronies could pay lawmakers or agitate for regulators to shut them down. Indeed, because customers could get a taste of the value before anti-competitive efforts were fully underway, those customers became a forceful constituency for protecting the newcomers’ venture. 

Now the question becomes: Can new legal systems gain new customers before predatory authorities frustrate their plans?

A version of this article first appeared at Econlib.