Anarchism is a Loser's Game

The following is a reply to a member of an anarcho-capitalist group. The response is "in-line" and the portions of the reply which are quoted from the AnCap are presented in italics as well as being enclosed in quotation marks. The illustrations and links are added for color and interest.

---

"Consider for a moment that the history of government is, what, 10,000 years? How much time does a species need to "fine tune" a class system (that, as a rule, allows some in that species to use violence to enforce their will over others, either through popularity contests or some other means that legitimizes the ruler(s)) so that it works without leading to total collapse?"

I would contend that the complexity of the problem is second only to, if not on par with, the grand question of science. What I mean is that the number of factors which exist to be manipulated and understood, and the measurement of second- and third-order effects from manipulation of the factors, and the fact that oftentimes the manipulation of factors reveals information hitherto not even conceived, is similar to the way that the scientific method tends to raise more questions than it answers. The complexity of the problem is augmented by the fact that the parameters of the experiment are constantly shifting - the human condition is markedly different from what it was even at the beginning of recorded history. Additionally, like science, the systematic analysis of the efficacy of the experiment is a novel development and, like science, the practice and interpretation of the method is subject to significant emotionalism from society.

For a short answer to "How much time?" I offer these two rhetoricals: How much time does a species need to fine tune its understanding of the universe? Would the abandonment of the rigidity of the scientific system be justified due to its failure to thus far produce complete understanding?

"Remember, you're arguing that some people *must* possess the "legal authority" to force their will on others with threats or actual use of violence in order to meet some utilitarian end."

As I've argued elsewhere in these threads, elimination of a legal governing apparatus does not necessarily reduce coercion; nor does it eliminate a class system. Realistically, it only reduces coercion de jure and replaces it with coercion de facto: the claim that a man is free to leave his job, and is therefore not "coerced" or "enslaved" is naive. No economy can be comprised entirely of successful venture capitalists, all economies require the skills of laborers and as such any economy outside of the strictest Planned Economy will have stratification.

The expense of vital services comprises a greater portion of the income of the poor. In an anarcho-capitalist society, where all services are rendered by private (and ostensibly, for-profit) businesses, this means that the poor must either prioritize which services they will pay for - to include vital services - or they must collectivize in order to bargain for them, a practice which has been sneered upon by your associates in other portions of this thread.

Why the freedom to freely associate and form supportive organizations which create bargaining parity is somehow immoral is beyond me. I do not understand why it is necessary for the business owner to hold all the cards if the only requirements for the AnCap model are the right to freely contract as sovereign entities; but it seems that to some, the right of the business owner to dictate wages is more important than the right of the worker to freely form a coalition in order to negotiate.

Returning to the point of the expense of vital service, I would like to comment on the market implications of a game theory model; the first-order effects of which you can yourself observe any time you see, say, two coffee shops on the same block:

Consider a beach of length X. On this beach are two ice cream vendors, selling an identical product at an identical price. The beach is populated evenly along its length by bathers who, realizing that the product is identical, will minimize the effort/time cost of obtaining ice cream by patronizing the nearest vendor. Where do the vendors establish their stands?

The optimal solution is that one vendor (Vendor A) establishes his stand at 1/4x, and the other (Vendor B) at 3/4x. In this arrangement, each vendor has half the beach as clients and client cost is minimized, with no client having to travel more than a quarter of the beach's length to obtain ice cream.

However, once the vendors are imbued with a profit motive, the optimal solution fails: Vendor A realizes that by moving his stand immediately next to Vendor B, he will control three quarters of the beach, even though only one third of his customers enjoy the convenience of having a vendor only .25x away, and some must travel as far as .75x for ice cream. Vendor B then moves his stand to the other side of Vendor A, effectively reversing their positions. This dance continues until a Nash equilibrium is reached with both vendors as close to .5x as possible. Each vendor now serves exactly as many clients, and generates the same revenue, as in the socially optimal solution. However, half the beach is now experiencing an exaggerated cost in obtaining ice cream.

When it's just ice cream on the beach, it's hard to care. When it comes to vital infrastructure, however, the difficulties of this arrangement become clear. Our mixed economy already places a premium on proximity to services such as fire and police departments, hospitals, schools, and commercial districts. The wealthy - who could afford the extra cost in transportation to these areas - instead pay a higher initial cost to station themselves near to them. The poor, who already have difficulty obtaining the services in the first place, now have an additional cost attached to even reaching the services, which exacerbates the stratification of the society.

The ability of the poor to deal with monetary inconvenience - ill health, temporary unemployment, vehicle breakdown, etc - is greatly reduced. These issues make it such that social mobility is exchanged for economic survival. The poor cannot afford to buy healthy food or buy supplies in bulk, so they purchase cheaper items which provide poorer sustenance or which have lower durability; the net result of which is that the cost of the same necessities which the wealthy buy not only claim a higher percentage of the poor's income, but that they are forced to spend money more often. The percentage of their cost of living isn't simply higher, it is disproportionately so.

The Anarcho Capitalist model of private toll roads, private security, private healthcare, etc. creates additional burdens on the poor. When you say:

"That is, the people who are on the receiving end of those threats or actual violence are, by all accounts, nothing more than drones meant to carry out the will of the rulers."

I see presented as an alternative a method whereby the poor are made drones, kept poor so that they can continue to buy services and cheap products to bolster the accounts of the entrepreneurial class.

Which leads us to the question of violence.

Most anarchist traditions rely on the voluntary participation of people in the social structure. The right-wing variations of them typically hold that private enterprise will provide goods and services through payment and contracts.

The question becomes: in what manner are these transactions and contracts enforced?

It is tempting to model these societies on the assumption of "enlightened self-interest," where the reputation of a company is what keeps it honest, and that companies will cooperate to provide socially optimal solutions. Those who propose this theory posit that the incentive towards profit maximization and rational actors on all sides of the arrangement will ensure the fair, impartial, and optimal distribution of goods and services - to each according to their ability, and assuming that ability is sufficient to match need. As with the ice cream vendor experiment above, the veracity of which can be determined in nearly any shopping center, this is not how human beings operate. And even in cases of game theory where the "winning" move - that is, the one which results in the maximization of profit to the player - assume rational actors on all sides, in many games the winning move is the one which disregards social cooperation.

Take, for instance, the "Centipede Game." As I've rambled on quite a bit already, I will leave it to you to familiarize yourself with the setup in the interest of brevity. There is an article on Wikipedia which does a fine job of discussing moves, payouts, and the empirical data of how people actually play.

In such a game played entirely by rational actors, the Nash equilibrium is reached on the first move, which ensures that the first player wins, though it means a much lower payout than the potential maximum. It is noted "Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2009) find that expert chess players play differently from college students. With a rising Elo, the probability of continuing the game declines; all Grandmasters in the experiment stopped at their first chance." This means that there is real experimental evidence that rational play does not result in the maximum payout. As anarcho-capitalists rely on the assumption of all parties to the social structure to be "rational," it will follow that such elimination of incentive - or requirement - to cooperate is inefficient. However, given the variation of rationality in the human race, various levels of apparent cooperation can be expected, with the various "players" cashing out based on two variables - 1) their individual threshold for a desirable payout, and 2) their assessment of the trustworthiness of the other players. In all cases, "defection" is inevitable as all players seek to maximize their profit and will do so the instant they assess the game is reaching imminence.

When applied to the supply of goods and services, highly rational actors can maximize profits by "playing rationally," that is, by screwing over the other guy as quickly and as often as possible. This does not bode well for the development of trust necessary for "enlightened self-interest" and all that is necessary for "enlightened self-interest" to fail as a social model is that barest bit of self-interest which causes people to "defect"

What this means is that, in the absence of methods which enforce cooperation, theft, fraud, and extortion become widespread. This can be witnessed in Bitcoin markets, where people regularly pay for goods or services which are undelivered. Without any means of enforcement on the trade, there is no recourse. Essentially, the "threat of violence," as AnCaps and libertarians so often put it, is necessary to ensure cooperation.

To tie it all together, let's consider the following scenario, based on the quote "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins"

I am happily swinging my fist about when it connects with your nose. Whether this meeting was intentional or not is immaterial: You rightly demand an apology, and because in this scenario I am the sort of asshole who will do what he can get away with, I refuse. Not only that, I continue to swing my fist about, with no regard for your nose. You attempt to take responsibility for the well-being of noses everywhere, and attempt to exercise your right to self defense by attacking me. However, it seems I am an experienced fist swinger, and you are beaten. You appeal to your friends for support to deal with the fist swinging threat. As a person of limited means, you are able only to gather a few friends, but because this is a free market society violence is also a commodity for sale, and you pool some funds to retain a small posse in order to come and deal with me. When next you find me, however, you discover that I have not only a physical, but also an economic advantage: I am able to retain in my service a squad of the finest, most aggressive, and best equipped bodyguards.

You are clearly wronged, but due to the total privatization of all commodities, and the inherent stratification of wealth, you have no recourse in this scenario. The only possible way to deal with me would be to entreat an equally advantaged person to spend their wealth in support of your cause. Because of the security forces each party is able to hire, this results in some small-scale warfare which does not necessarily result in a just outcome, and which causes danger to innocent bystanders.

Government is an administrative apparatus, which exists primarily to deal with the affairs of those it governs in a way which minimizes expressed violence through the threat of violence. It is capable of enforcing contracts and ensuring the equitable distribution of goods and services by pooling resources and making them commonly available. One of these resources is justice.

You said:
"I think you're conflating what you have with why you have it. Those things exist and increased once people became freer."

Those things I mentioned which exist certainly have an aspect of freedom to their proliferation, but they have far more an aspect of planning to them. The light-socialism of Scandinavia is empirically responsible for the ascendancy of the people therein - by many metrics, they are among the happiest, most equitable, best educated, most mobile, and least stratified people on the planet. If their wealthy suffer for their tax rates, it is incomparable to the suffering of the poor who live paycheck to paycheck, living in constant dread of the next calamity.

Someone else in these threads stated something to the effect that the sole commandment of the human condition is "to survive". I call bullshit. Beasts just survive. We have reached our place on this planet through two things: social cooperation, from the human hunter-gatherer herds to the modern corporations or Scandinavian light-socialist governments; and the ability to modify our surroundings.

Any method which reduces the human condition to "survival" is a backwards step, sociologically, morally, and evolutionarily.

The Shrine of an Idiot God

While I am sympathetic for many reasons, I am increasingly of the opinion that one of the greatest recommendations of the monarchic system is that it has as an effect the disenfranchisement of essentially the entirety of a societies many, many idiots.

This has no bearing on the actual quantity of idiots present, or their vociferousness, but so long as the particular idiot that you hear is not the monarch, you can take comfort in the absolute knowledge that this idiot is not, and never will be, dictating policy. In this day and age I think nobody can deny the appeal of that sort of assured impotence in ones ideological opposition.

Imagine what changes there would be in our approach to discourse, which in the internet age is more prolific than ever, if it were known by both parties that their discussions are nothing but the exploration of hypotheticals? Without the illusion that anything said by any pundit has the slightest influence on policy, what good could getting worked up possibly do? From whence would come vitriol? Perhaps it is out of the habit of a lifetimes under a crown that gave our forefathers their seemingly effortless ability to discuss passionately matters of state, then just as quickly turn from them to more mundane subjects: a deeply ingrained belief that nothing they wrote actually had import or impact.

So what if the monarch is not brilliant, a master statesman? So what if now and again the monarch is one of the idiots? That is actually another upside which is critical to the contentment of the populace: Someone concrete to blame.


The monarch, as the State incarnate, literally is responsible personally for the well-being or otherwise of their subjects. If there is one thing that can be proven by the rantings of the people - of their blame casting and religious fervor and conspiracy theorizing and appeals to the state to intervene somehow - it is that the people above all want to know that someone is ultimately in charge. Not some amorphous, intangible Congress or Parliament. One solitary individual. Human nature all but demands a king.

And why not? Better to have one person in charge than this Byzantine mess of shifting allegiances and untraceable accountabilities. One person under whom we all thrive together or not; one person who is trained in the art of statecraft and who may even excel in it, potentially to bring us to new heights.

Let's not forget that the vast majority of governments have been some form of autocracy. The bulk of human achievement - art, technology, civics, literature, philosophy - has been accomplished under these conditions. The greatest and widest and longest lived empires the world has seen were united under a crown. Let's stop pretending that this is an accident.

Let's stop pretending that populist doublethink has truly improved upon tried and true methods. Let's abandon the idea that democracy and republicanism are new developments and logical progressions of autocratic government, when in fact these institutions date back to the ancient world. Let's stop pretending that by forcing politicians to pander to the populace for votes that we have attained greater transparency or accountability in our government; or that the plebians are even entitled to a hand at statecraft. Let's abandon that notion that says that all of us are better than some of us. Let's stop pretending that it isn't stupid to believe that democracy isn't mediocrity enshrined: that the law of averages somehow works in our favor in the long run.

Let's give monarchy another go of it.

My Final Correspondence with the Libertarian Party

Dear "Chair"

I will not be renewing my membership at any level of the Libertarian Party. Frankly, I'm a little embarrassed that my membership took so long to lapse.

There are a variety of reasons for this.

First and foremost, as you may or may not be aware, the LPC is incapable of culling felons from its membership. Any political organization such as yours, which intends to break into the "two-party" paradigm, must be able to present a spotless face. That incidents such as those surrounding Matthew Barnes, a convicted child molester, should even be an issue within the organization is unacceptable. Violent crime is unacceptable to libertarians. Felons are unacceptable to voters. That the issue of such persons being members of the Party was even a debated subject is deplorable and comments rather strongly against the intention of the LPC to conduct itself with principle and with an intent to succeed. My dollars are better spent elsewhere and my integrity demands I associate myself with better people than the LPC sees fit to include.

Second, the LP as a whole seems to suffer from an exclusionary, extremist, fundamentalist mentality that may not be representative of the Party but is its most vocal component. The conspiracy theorists, the anarchists, the potheads and the racists have only grown more vocal and more powerful within the party since the death of founder, guide, and voice of reason, David Nolan. To be associated with the likes of Starchild at the state level and Jim Davidson at the national level is an embarrassment and a risk to me professionally.

I do not require a reply to this. There is nothing that can be said or done to regain my membership. It is due to the several years spent attempting to improve the Party that I have even dignified your letter from "Chair" with a response. Please remove me from your lists and do not contact me further.

Regretfully,

[TheMadJack]

The Mad Jack Takes On Michael Shanklin

Collected from elsewhere on the internet, these were my comments to Mr. Shanklin regarding his naïve anarchistic beliefs. All anarchism is unrealistic, but his ideas regarding every person being subject to no law other than that which they choose for themselves was especially appalling in its sheer, blind idiocy.

---

"So what you are saying is that you are someone who would gladly force your will on others, murder for profit, and ensure that NO ONE is free just as long as you are getting something in return?" etc, etc, ad nauseam ...
I love how good you anarchists are at making stuff up. It must be wonderful to have such active imaginations and such a detailed fantasy world to live in.
In fact, I believe quite the opposite. Which is why I am no anarchist and I do not support a stateless society. Anarchy and Statelessness are only possible in a world filled with a type of person that is actually so rare in reality that it is almost fair to say that the advocates of such "systems" are experiencing an almost total disconnect from reality. The truly amusing thing is that for everyone to be "free" absent a state, all ambition, striving and competition will have to be somehow culled from the race: in reality, an anarchist or stateless society would collapse as soon as the first punch is thrown.
That is, anarchy is more dependent on "sheeple" for "success" (for what success is there to be had without striving and ambition?) than any other government concept in the history of man.
Until sociopathy is cured, until there are no jerks left in the world, until a way of imbuing each generation with a total and homogenous sense of morality is accomplished, anarchy and/or statelessness is impossible. And as the proud and rather arrogant owner of certain qualities, such as ambition and a general disregard for useless people; it makes me happy to say that there will be no anarchy or statelessness within my lifetime.
"Once people take the time to research dispute resolution organizations and competing law, they will realize how it is the future ..."
A person who attends Berkeley is more likely to have liberal ideas, a person who attends Georgetown more likely to have conservative ideas. I suppose if you spend all your time reading fantasies, you're more likely to be an anarchist.
Your arguments aren't arguments at all, Shanklin. Simply declarations. "It will NOT be as you say! It will be GLORIOUS!" and waiting for your choir to shout "Amen! Preach it Brother!" behind you. Which I suppose might be construed as an argument to popularity, but I'll grant the benefit of the doubt and not invent things whole cloth the way your friends, such as Mr. Mathewson, have been doing.
You say we need education? Educate us. But I don't believe your system has what it takes to suffer dissent and come out ahead. It takes a society full of anarchists to make an anarchist society, and that sounds like the very antithesis of freedom of thought to me.
Especially given what I've seen of anarchists and their intolerance and hysterical decrial of anything that's NOT anarchy ...since I support some form of a state, I must constitute a threat to your freedom, no? Does that or does that not make me a target for any "freedom fighter" out there who wishes to silence my voice? If it does not, what law will avenge me when cooler heads do not prevail?
If I and people like me are allowed to live, your statelessness will collapse. If we are murdered for the sake of your precious homogeny of thought, then statelessness never was.

---

The following was my next post in the discussion.

---

"Murderers would be sought much harder in a free society"
By what law or right? You simply declare it to be so when in fact you have no support for your declaration. They may be pursued harder, but will they be pursued fairly? Who is to guarantee that the right person is pursued? Who is to prevent the phrase "Dead or Alive" (or simply "Dead") from preventing a person seeing trial?
What happens when Posse X, hired by Grieving Widow A, encounters Posse Y, hired to protect Suspect B? With no law, there is nothing illegal about it. It might be immoral, but that hasn't stopped anyone's dollars from buying force, violence, and coercion, which will be valuable and highly sought commodities on an open market. What happens when Posse X is a group of folks who hunt as their day job and take bounties for the general welfare; but Posse Y is a company by the name of Blackwater? After the shootout, has justice been served?
By what law or right does the killing finally stop?
I'm a fan of Westerns, too, but I understand why the people of Texas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Utah, etc, were glad to have real law come about at the turn of the century.
"Government is coercion, and unneeded."
More declarations. I've got one of my own:
Any reasonable study of human history and nature will reveal that total freedom and lawlessness are unsupportable systems. What then arises is the pragmatic issue of What and How Much freedom it is necessary to sacrifice in order for everyone to maximize the amount enjoyed by the largest number of people.

Against Compulsory Federal Service

The following was originally posted as a reply to a friend of mine who had just heard of Rep. Charles Rangel's (asshole) bill, H.R. 5741, which would create compulsory Federal service for everyone.

This is the same Rep. Charles Rangel who was recently arrested for "ethics violations". You know it's bad when Congress has a problem with your ethics.

But on with the show.

---

While I am a fan of the concept of service as a requirement for suffrage (a la Heinlein's Starship Troopers, and for many of the same reasons) such service would be meaningless if it were not voluntary (a point which I believe Heinlein also addresses in that novel). Such is a different conversation.

In a more immediate sense, compulsory service is a really bad idea, especially when it becomes understood that the traditional name for such service is a Draft. I have seen the bill, and it is definitely military in focus, the service in "homeland security" being a catch-all for those who are inadmissible for military service.

Why? Take it from a pragmatic standpoint. Today's military is an advanced professional military that uses some rather complicated equipment and tactics and therefore needs people who are capable of using them and motivated to do so. The military needs to be able to refuse people who are not only physically incapable of the demands that would be placed upon them, but also to refuse the mentally and psychologically incapable.

There has also been a cultural shift in our military over the last 20 years to change the image of the military from a bunch of rednecks, dropouts and delinquents to an organization of professionals worthy of respect. Not too long ago, young criminals were often given military service in lieu of jail time. During this same period, the public image of the military was of a group of thugs, a place for people who couldn't get their shit together any other way and who only needed to be smart enough to follow orders and shoot a gun. This is no longer the case.

Military service is now career focused. The vast majority of MOS' are support roles that simultaneously give a soldier real-world skills; and even the lowliest infantry have access to a rather generous college program. On one side of things, more and more soldiers are required to learn various computer and telecommunications-based skills, while on the other squad-based tactics have taught leadership skills to everyone. Unlike 20 years ago, a soldier leaving todays military is a respected member of society. People don't look at their resume and wonder what they did that made them need to join up. In many fields, military training is an advantage and a boon and many employers actively seek out veterans.

By making service mandatory - even if not ALL government service is military, just some of it! - the military loses all these gainss it has worked very hard to achieve over the last two decades. It becomes just another branch of the public school system.

My final point that relates strictly to the military (I will address government service in a broader sense shortly. Whether you take that as a promise or a threat is up to you) is that no soldier in a volunteer army wants a draftee watching his back. Today's military enjoys an unheard of esprit de corps. Unit cohesion is keeping combat casualties at an all time low in general and friendly fire is practically unheard of. Every person in combat today is there because they volunteered for military service AND they took a combat MOS. If you start throwing draftees into the mix, morale goes down, discipline problems rise, desertion becomes a major issue, and friendly fire casualties stop being accidents. I have a lot of friends in the military (including a Captain in the Army) and every single one of them speaks with horror and disdain at the prospect of fighting alongside a draftee. I, for one, will not dishonor our troops by inflicting such horror upon them.

They have enough to deal with.

As for government service being compulsory in general, well, it remains a bad idea. First up are the economics of the idea: Somebody has to pay these people. Now in the rest of the market, a business provides a service or product, people spend money on that product, the business makes more, etc. In this system, things are being produced, wealth is being generated. If enough people want to spend money on a product, the business can pay people to help it create and sell the product. If it hires too many, it can't afford to pay them, and has to fire some. The number of employees a business can have is contingent on the value of the service or products it generates. That value is determined by how much people are willing to spend on it.

Government work, on the other hand, is make-work. The vast majority of government employees are engaged in paperwork and redundant functions. They produce no product or service. If we pour more people into this already bloated system, we alleviate nothing. We would have to pay them, but with what? We can either cut a government program to "free up" funds, which would accomplish nothing because those funds are simply being shifted to another government program. (As Robert Anton Wilson once noted, "Bureaucracies never die, they just change names) The other option is to print more money, but since money is a representation of value, and no additional value is being produced, this simply inflates an already excessively inflated economy. The end result, economically, is either 1990's Russia or 1920's Germany.

Second is the idea of entitlement. We already have enough of a problem with it in this country, and handing people a job doesn't make it any better. A person is generally granted a job based on their own merits. Usually, this job is given to them over several other applicants. Nobody was entitled to a job, they had to work to get it and they have to work to keep it. Being a high school student might qualify someone to work at McDonald's, but telling the manager that they have to hire you is a sure way to remain jobless. The most important thing for people, especially young people, to learn - what working in a place like the grocery store or a burger joing is supposed to teach a person - is a work ethic. The understanding that work sucks, but you still have to do a good job; that at the end of the week your paycheck MEANS something, that you EARNED it, is of paramount importance.

This is not accomplished by handing out do-nothing government work to any schmuck who happens to be over 18 in America. In this compulsory service system, a person IS entitled to a job. Not only can they get the work through no virtue of their own, but they can do a piss-poor job and the government has to keep them. Two years later, these people go to get their first real job, having been "prepared", and find that this "experience" doesn't make it any easier for them to find work. Why? Because EVERYONE ELSE has the exact same experience. Which means that the professional jobs which these people are suppsed to be qualified for (having been working in an office environment for two years) aren't available. They now have to go get that same post-high-school burger flipping job. That same job that barely pays minimum wage, doesn't have a union, and enjoys such high turnover that they can - and will - gladly fire any slacker they catch taking an unauthorized smoke break. Employers, on the other hand, undoubtedly start to notice that a lot of these so-called "experienced" employees don't actually know how to work. They want vacation benefits right away. They call in sick all the damn time. They complain about working overtime. All because they never actually had to work to work before. Sure, some people will excel, get promotions, move on to better jobs, but these are the SAME people who would have done that anyway, the people who know what a work ethic is, and all that has happened in their cases is they wasted two years of their lives in government service rather than getting started on their careers.

The argument that this would create a paradigm of civic duty is also bunk. There is a large amount of evidence that the exact opposite effect would actually be created. Of note is a famous study of day care centers by two economists in the 1990's. The day care centers had a policy that the children had to be picked up by a certain time. As can be expected, some parents would usually be late each day. In a controlled experiment, some of the centers imposed a fine for parents who arrived over 10 minutes late. The result was that late pickups at the centers with the fine SKYROCKETED. The reason for this result is that before the fine, the parents were bound by a sense of duty and respect to the teachers. Those who were late were only a little late. What the fine did was allow the parents to buy off their duty. For a small fee each day, they could no longer feel guilty about being late, because they had already compensated the teachers for that inconvenience. The situation in mandating service cheapens the sense of civic duty in the same way. By making it mandatory for people to serve, we actually DECREASE the likelihood of future public service because, in the minds of these people being enlisted, they have already done their time or met their quota. What is interesting about the study is that it took place in Israel, a country that already has a service requirement. If such mandatory service did indeed create the effect of amplifying a person's sense of civic duty, we would very likely have seen completely different results.

Finally, service is meaningless if it's not voluntary. You cannot imbue someone with a sense of civic duty by forcing them into it. All that creates is resentment. Besides we already have a word for mandatory or involuntary service. That word is slavery, which was, by the way, made illegal and unConstitutional in the United States by the 13th Amendment.

"Setsuninto - Katsujinken" by Ellis Amdur

" ...He deserves death!

"Deserves it! I dare say he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all the ends...."

--J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring


"Every minute my joy increased... because I found myself in an extraordinary state of the most complete invulnerability, such as I had never before experienced. Nothing at all could confuse me, annoy me or tire me. Whatever was being thought of by those men, conversing animatedly in another corner of the room, I would regard them calmly, from a distance they could not cross."

--Vera Zasulick, after her assassination of General Trepov, governor of St. Petersburg

The Sword That Takes Life, The Sword That Gives Life

The Japanese sword was never a mere ribbon of polished and sharpened steel. In the juxtaposition of blade and scabbard, there exists an emblem of the dynamic interplay of male and female, penetration and containment, power dependent as much upon its reserve as its expression. The sword itself was the embodiment of the principle of law founded upon hierarchy, the ruling warriors' power rooted in their submission to a web of obligations and loyalties to superiors, their weapons instruments of service rather than of freedom. In religious iconography, the Taoist sword cuts through undifferentiated chaos, introducing delineation into the universe, creating darkness and light, yin and yang, positive and negative and from this duality, the birth of the myriad forms of the universe. The Buddhist sword is the sword that cuts through illusion, the bright cold edge of mindful consciousness which requires one to face reality with open eyes and courageous heart.

Setsuninto (the sword that takes life) and katsujinken (the sword that gives life) are concepts which attempt to differentiate between the use of the sword for murderous ends as opposed to its use to protect people or to preserve the order of society.

These two phrases give rise to a variety of interpretations. At its most naive is the idea that, having power, one can choose to use it either to hurt others or lead them from evil paths. This is sometimes a fantasy of aikido devotees: that when attacked, the skillful practitioner, who could easily annihilate his or her attacker, moves in such a way that not only is the attack neutralized, but the attacker realizes the error of his ways and turns from violence. I call this naive because, even though it is sometimes possible, it presupposes that one's attacker will always be far inferior in skill, and even more unlikely, that being humbled and even shamed by one far superior, an attacker is likely to undergo a profound change of personality.

A second concept is that of surgical violence, one particularly common among the Japanese right wing,whose ideology, in many ways, is closest to those of the warrior class in pre-modern Japan. This is best shown in the phrase, "One life to save a thousand," which is used to explain various political assassinations. In this concept, not only murder, but also inaction which allows war or other disaster to develop, would be setsuninto. Katsujinken would be to "cut the head off the snake" so the war could not start.

Some pseudo-Buddhist scholars of the sword imagine that there is a state of fluid perfection, called "enlightenment," in which one can act at each and every moment without reflection or doubt, the spontaneous act being the only one suitable to that particular moment. The enlightened one, then, could cut down an individual without murderous intention, in their intuitive all-encompassing understanding that the interpenetrating web of universe is best served that this individual die. The slaughtered one's life is culminated and, in fact, "demands" death at this moment to be properly fulfilled.

Whose life is preserved in katusjinken? One's own? The enemy's? Bystanders'? Whose life is taken in setsuninto? Is this a problem only of the moment, of the two individuals in conflict, or does it encompass all whose lives are touched by violence, by apparent evil? Is this a problem only of the present, or does it extend into the past and future? Are the reasons an enemy resorts to violence relevant to how you will resolve it? Are the potential results of alternative ways of resolving violence relevant to considerations of how one must act?

Sometimes I think I know the answers to these questions. At other times, I know that I have no idea.

---

There are houses, in the state of Washington, called Crisis Respite Centers. They are staffed by paraprofessionals skilled in dealing with troubled and aggressive youth. Children, usually teenagers, who are wards of the state and unplaceable in a foster home, are placed in these houses. The Crisis Respite Centers have a no-turn-down policy.

They also have unlocked doors. The six beds might be filled with three violent 16-year-old gang-involved youths from rival "sets," along with a "sexually reactive" developmentally-delayed girl, a chronic runaway 13-year-old, and an enormously irritating chubby 12-year-old boy who taunts the gangbangers and then runs to hide behind a staff member when one of them chases after him to squash him like a mosquito. The demands upon the staff, who have to ensure everyone's safety, are enormous.

I received a phone call early one morning from the director of a Crisis Respite Center. "Ellis, we have this kid here and we don't know what to do with him. He is threatening to staff and has a violent temper. He spent several years in Allister House (a facility for mentally disturbed kids), and it came out that he had been systematically raping the younger children, terrifying them so badly that it is sure that many have never told. He's in the foster-care system. He can't return home to his family, that's impossible; he was horribly abused there when he was young. We're concerned about him being here, and also, what kind of treatment he needs. He is a pretty scary kid, and it's hard to figure out what is intimidation and what is really dangerous. Would you come out and assess him?"

Much has been written over the millennia about the nature of evil. When does a man or woman step over a line, if such a line exists, where we are justified in no longer merely condemning their acts, but the person as well? When, if ever, is an evil act the manifestation of a corrupt soul, a voluntary embrace with evil?

I have met many violent young men and women over the years. They are often lazy. One boy said to me: "Crime is the easiest job there is." They often crave pack acceptance so much that whatever their friends are doing, they will also do, despite misgivings. They often have impaired judgment. They use drugs or alcohol, and their emotions are fueled, then, as much by chemicals as by anything innate to them. They often are people with a low tolerance for any sort of frustration. There is seemingly no space between desire and the act. There is a sense of entitlement: if I want it, then I deserve it. All of these traits, however, are merely an accentuation of one or another of the more venal characteristics of all humanity. Such a person is not someone to trust, or even to like, but they are not incomprehensible. They are of the same breed as we are.

There are some, however, who seem to have set as their life task to extinguish the painful demands of conscience. At the same time, some of these people take sadistic delight in the pain of others. There is some research that suggests a capacity to distance oneself from the trauma of violence, particularly the trauma incurred when inflicting violence, is, in part, hard-wired genetics. There are people born to be comfortable with violence.

There is also research that indicates that severe trauma, particularly early in childhood, leads to unpredictable neurological changes--some children develop into timid and fearful adults, others are resilient and compassionate. Yet others are exploitative, manipulative or even further--feral conscienceless beings who have seemingly disappeared from the community of men and women. For them, other people are objects of use that move in and out of their field of perception. Their capacity to form attachments to others is minimal or even absent. When contact with another human being engenders a feeling of sensitivity or vulnerability, their reaction is often a deep and profound pain, the pain felt by the exile upon tasting the scent of home on the wind, a pain so deep that they may respond by trying to extinguish that which causes the feeling, which is usually the capacity for sensitivity, or even, in the most extreme cases, the human being who evokes the response.

No one really knows how or why some people migrate to that dark star, leaving the world of love and conscience behind. Most criminals have a capacity, to some degree, to turn compassion and empathy on and off. Others can feel it to a limited degree, but only for people within their circle. In the course of a wide-ranging conversation, I once told a young man in jail about the sense of violation I felt in having my house robbed. His brow wrinkled in sympathy, and he said, spontaneously, "Yeah, it's like someone rapes you or something." He was, as best as I could tell, outraged for me--and he was a burglar!

There are, then, a few people, who have schooled themselves to have no openings, no vulnerabilities whatsoever, to respond with detachment to what they feel they have to do or want to do. If that sounds dangerously close to the image we have of the warrior, good! It's food for thought isn't it?

---

I was already sitting in the room, waiting for him when he came in. He was a boy of wire and bone, narrow features with startlingly full, sensual lips and dirty-blonde hair. The moment he saw me, he started whirling and kicking in self-made karate, kicks of surprising precision lashing out towards me. I don't know if this was merely an attempt to show that he was tough and I'd better keep my distance, or if, in the incredible intuition of the feral and predatory, he somehow "knew" that I was trained in martial arts. Predators often have intimate access to their fear as well as their rage and perhaps, in this manner, he intended to frighten me in return, thereby letting us start on "equal" terms.

I didn't move from my chair as his feet cut the air--he was careful not to kick too close. After a minute or two, I gestured towards a sofa, saying, "Why don't you sit down, Jared?"

He threw himself in a chair, slumped down, and said, "I've been training karate for seven years! One of these days, I'm going to tear someone up. Maybe one of these staff bitches," and as if jerked by an electric prod, leapt back to his feet, and shadow-boxed and kicked in the center of the room again. He looked at me with a kind of wired glee, prancing like an imp in the coals of a fire. At my request, he sat down again and slumped, torpid as a lizard on a rock. It was as if his immobility was as much an act of will as his movement--he never could be said to be relaxed.

We talked about the place he was staying, which he did not like, and his family, whom he idealized, despite their abuse and abandonment of him. He told me how tough he was, and how, despite our difference in size, how he was sure he could take me if he wanted to. He was like quicksilver--he never responded to my questions directly, skittering off in one tangent or another, attempting to keep me off balance with threats, complaints and silliness. He didn't care if I liked him or hated him or even if I remained alive for one more minute. I was just this "thing" he had to talk to.

I asked him about the well-substantiated reports of his rapes, and he smirked, and said, "Yeah, I did do that. But I'd never do it again."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because it's wrong," he said, making not even the slightest effort to place a tone of sincerity in his voice.

"I feel sorry for you, then," I said. This evoked a reaction--a flare of emotion emerging from behind the flat screen of his eyes; a fire banked.

"Why's that?" he asked.

I then said something that is not necessarily true, because sexual deviancy is far more complex, but I wished to find out who he was and hopefully, to evoke some truth from him. "Well, everybody knows that guys who like sex with little children can't have sex with people their own age. They just can't do it. So, if you aren't going to rape kids anymore, I guess you won't ever have sex with anyone your whole life. I feel sorry for you." At the last, my voice softened with compassion, which was real; despite my hatred of what he had done, he was still little more than a child, and I could feel sorry for him the same way I could for a brutalized pit bull, frightening and dangerous though it may be.

He rounded on me, angry. "I can too have sex with people my own age!" He said a few more sentences to "substantiate" this, but as he was talking, he picked up a teddy bear that was lying on the couch of the room, and unconsciously, with almost no visible effort, ripped its arms off. He noticed my eyes drop to his hands, and he looked down and saw what he had done.

He smiled at me, and his voice a lilting tone, said, "Aw, it's broke now." Then, placing the arms back to the body, "All fixed now!" Pulling them away, "Broke again." Back together. "Fixed again. Broke again. Fixed again. Brokeagainfixedagainbrokeagain. . . ." He stopped, and continued to smile as he unconcernedly cast the doll, arms and all, away from him onto the floor.

Our interview concluded soon afterwards. I had touched the core of pain from which he was trying so hard to distance himself. The result. Rage. I was sure that if he could have done so, he would have dismembered me just like the doll.

My recommendation was that he needed to start over somehow--to learn from the beginning how to act as a human being, to be placed in a dependent situation so that he would have to bond to caregivers like a small child. He would have to somehow be placed in a restricted 24-hour setting which would, at least, teach him that his own best interests lay in "acting" like other people. A few such programs exist, and based on this recommendation, he was placed in one.

He lasted six months. As intensive a procedure as it sounds, the person has to have a fundamental desire to return to humanity, in the same way that an addict must have a bone-aching desire to stop using drugs if treatment is to have any effect. "Returning" means to experience all the pain that one shut down in becoming a conscienceless being. Jared did not have the courage for this anymore. He had already embraced the cold reptilian safety of solitary hatred and pure self-interest. He physically assaulted staff and other youth, and was expelled. His parting words were, "I was born to rape, and there's nothing anyone can do about it."

Because of the way the laws are written, by destroying his placement in this secure facility, he was returned to the care of the foster-care system--his "parents," who were not mandated to lock him up. Once again, he went back to the same Crisis Respite Center.

He was there only a week or so when he exploded with rage towards the staff at being required to pick up some clothes. He kicked a hole in the wall, and trashed the furniture. As they called the police, Jared ran out the door with two women staff in hot pursuit. Young and lithe, he left them behind, and entered a school ground, coming upon two young 12-year-old girls. He dove upon one of them, and in broad daylight, in the middle of a sidewalk, began to rape her. Only a few moments later, the staff found him and managed to pull him off.

Aged 16, he was tried as an adult, and will be doing, I believe, 15 years in prison.

Several months later, before his sentencing, I saw him in detention from a distance. Although in the open recreation hall, he was isolated from the other boys, not because of his crime, but due to his demeanor, coiled within himself in bands of hatred. After years in the gladiator schools of our modern penal system, God help us all when he gets out.

The philosopher Derrida refers to the "community of the question." All of us who live in the martial world, either through our profession or through our avocation in combative arts, face similar questions when it comes to the responsibility we incur through our acquisition of power. So I ask the following question, not to get any answers from you, but perhaps to evoke the question within you:

Am I a moral failure in that I did not kill him?

When I interviewed that boy, I knew what he was capable of doing. I had no expectation that treatment would help him, but that was the best suggestion I could come up with. I knew he would, sooner or later, do something horrible to some poor child.

Is it my responsibility merely to offer therapy to those I can, teach as many people as I can how to protect themselves from violence, saving myself to raise my sons, saving myself, therefore, from the consequences of what I knew was going to happen?

I could have saved the child he raped an unimaginable world of pain, and probably other children, too, when he finally gets out of prison. Were you to hear that I had killed him, solely based on my intuition and assessment, what would be your reaction?

My own answer to this question is the choice I made, but I will be haunted until my death at the thought of that child, her flesh ground into a sidewalk, the sun beating down upon her pain, indifferent as the flat, shark eyes of her rapist.

What, then, is the sword that gives life?

---

Copyright ©2000 Ellis Amdur. All rights reserved.

Whatsoever a Man Soweth, That Shall He Also Reap

Evil is easy.

It is easier to steal than to earn, to force than to convince, to rape than to seduce. It is easier to look the other way when you see these things happening. It is hard to stay honest, truthful, and moral. It is hard to have empathy for strangers, a sense of duty to self and society, and integrity in the face of temptation. It is hard to turn and face evil and stop it.

Evil is the path of least resistance, the low road, a gently downward sloping path. Evil does not need proponents, advocates, supporters or proselytizers to thrive. All evil needs is for people to do nothing. Do nothing, and a serial killer can terrorize a neighborhood until he dies of old age. Do nothing, and gangs control whole cities. Do nothing, and corruption consumes the police. Do nothing, and we have Ayatollahs, Pinochets, Pol Pots, Kim Il Sungs, Idi Amins, and Hitlers taking power.

Good requires active dedication. Every day, good is presented challenges and temptations. To be good demands that we choose, consciously, every minute and every second, to do the right thing. It is more than choosing not to do the wrong thing. The right choice is often difficult, unpleasant, and unpopular.

And so, there will always be evil in this world.

Always.

It is necessary, then, to be prepared to deal with evil. A good person will not initiate force against people, but that means nothing to an evil person. It is said that "War is the result of failed diplomacy," and the axiom scales to a personal level, too. What can peaceful measures accomplish when peace is the last thing in your opponents mind? When evil people attempt to threaten us with force to their whims, the only appropriate response is the threat of force. When force is applied, the only appropriate responce is force. When that force is violence, the only appropriate response is violence. When that force is deadly, the only appropriate response is death.

It is necessary, then, to be prepared for violence. A good person will not initiate force against people, but it is a duty of all people to stop force and avoid escalation Violence must be employed to stop violence until the desire to act evilly and violently has been destroyed and not one iota longer. We meet force with force so long as the will to fight exists in our enemies. In this way, evil acts are met immediately with retribution. In this way does evil beget its own punishment.

This is no mean excercise, no abstract experiment. If you are approached by a mugger, surrendering your wallet is only certain of encouraging the activity further. That mugger will rob again. Surrendering your wallet does not even guarantee your safety. This is how inaction permits evil to thrive.

Rather, suppose you met the threat with appropriate force. At the production of whatever weapon accompanies his demand for your wallet, you instead reach for a pistol*. If the mugger's hands go up, call the police. No further violence is needed. If not, the mugger's life is forfeit. The right thing to do is to continue shooting until the mugger no longer has the will or ability to fight - whichever comes first**. It is paramount that you stop shooting once the threat is neutralized: to kill a wounded person in the heat of passion is no more excusable than to steal at gunpoint. On the other hand, at no point should you take dangerous cautions to preserve that criminal's life. If the situation appears at any point that, of the two of you, one will likely die, it is imperative that every effort be made that it is not your life given up.

And what of stumbling across the commission of a crime? We exist in a society, nothing happens in a vacuum. Evil anywhere is a threat everywhere, and it is therefore our duty to address and meet the evil of others, whether by police or vigilante action, where ever it is encountered. Some months ago I wrote of a series of violent episodes wherein I proponed the idea that we must all take a stand to improve the society in which we live. The same is true of evil and violence as it is of ill mannered people: their behavior is only rewarding if it is permitted, and it is permitted so long as nothing is done to stop it. We have a duty to confront evil. The morality of the victim is irrelevant: the commission of violence must be met with instant retribution whenever possible.

Further, there are instances, as I've also said before, of people who are irrevocably evil. Such people constitute a constant and looming threat, even when they are not actively engaged in their predations. Serial killers and rapists, child molesters and pedophiles - who, oddly enough, seem to have considerable overlap within their fields - constitute individuals who can be said to always be a danger. These individuals have no claim to the rights of life, liberty, or happiness: Their actions are a threat, their lives are forfeit. Their presence in society is a bane, they deserve no libety. Their proclivities are anathema to all that is good - their happiness is misery, violence and death. Should they be caught in the commission of one of their acts, summary death is appropriate. Should they be proved guilty of these acts, life imprisonment is the only mercy they should be granted.

Evil and violence will always be a part of the world. It is a foolhardy and dangerous naivete that informs pacifistic approaches to these problems. It is essential that good people are prepared, not only to deal with the personal consequences of their chosen life, but to deal with the darkness to which they have become opposed.

---

*While we are talking in hypotheticals, I feel it is necessary to express that life and death situations should be left to as little chance as possible. Therefore, I provide some small tactical advice, firstly: A pistol should be kept concealed in a location easily mistaken with a place you might keep a wallet whenever possible. To this end, Seecamp provides some excellent concealed carry options.

**It should go without saying that, in the event your opponent is also using a firearm, offering an opportunity to surrender is a foolhardy move almost certain to result in your own injury or death. Shoot first and shoot often.

שלום דרך עוצמת אש טובה ביותר

It has been in the news a fair bit lately, people protesting Israel, people saying that neither the US nor anyone else should be backing Israel, that maybe we should be backing Palestine instead. Or, perhaps, we should back neither. We should go in and "enforce peace" or let Israel and Palestine and Jordan and Syria and Egypt duke it out and then we talk to the winner.

These people suck. I do not get a lot of modern entertainment these days. I do not watch TV, I do not go to the theatre, and I do not listen to the radio. What I do is I watch Israel. Israel rocks. Forget for a moment whether or not Israel SHOULD exist. That is ancient history, it does not matter any more. The fact is, these people are here now. And they have every right to live there now. They were born there. They have families there. They might just grow old and die there. That is what makes them our protagonists.



Our protagonists are surrounded on all sides by evil neighbors. Malicious, theocratic, self-entitled, whining Muslim nations who are so pissed over losing 8,000 square miles and one holy city that they have sworn their treasuries, their policies, and the welfare and lives of their citizens to getting it back or destroying it in the process.



But Israel is not our ordinary peace-loving nation. The Israeli people understand that they are in a fight for their lives and they will NOT be robbed of them. They do not fight weak wars. They do not occupy and set up provisional governments. They do not do the Cold War Berlin thing. They kick ass in ways so painful that their neighbors will not even look at them cross-eyed. Oh, sure, they talk the bad shit to eachother or to the rest of the world, but soon as Israel walks into the room they sit up a little straighter and start saying "Sir". Why?



Israel is a nation composed ENTIRELY of badass. Israel is a country whose military's mission statement, as it's first item, says "Israel cannot afford to lose a single war".

In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq decided they were going to have a little gang-bang. Israel got wind of this, and literally DESTROYED the main opposing air force in the early hours of the morning. By the end of the first day, they had TOTAL air superiority. 5 days later, they controlled the ENTIRE Sinai peninsula and were well on the path to Cairo before everyone said "Uncle". They call this the Six Day War.



6 years later, almost the same group of belligerents (whose name for the "6 Day War" is "The Setback", just to give an idea of their learning curve) decided to make a sneak attack on one of Judaism's holiest days, Yom Kippur. Things went well, at first. Then the Israeli Defense Forces finished lacing up their ass-kickin' boots and made for a total reversal. They regained all of the territory that had been invaded and even EXTENDED it by the time the war ended.



This is a government that is so dead-set on peace with their neighbors that in spite of controlling Jerusalem, one of the holiest, most ancient cities on the planet, and controlling the site of some of the holiest ground in THREE religions, the Temple Mount, that they have turned over administration of the Temple Mount to a group so intolerant of other beliefs that nobody not of this belief is permitted to worship there. Muslims ONLY, and everyone else, in their minds, should be grateful to be granted visitation. The good graces of the Israeli people made a gift of this holy place, and they are trying to hurt not just the Israelis, but EVERYONE with that gift. The goodwill of teh Israeli government even helps to enforce this petty ban. It is not even the holiest site in Islam, like it is for the Jews and Christians. That honor is reserved for Mecca, a city that forbids entry to non-Muslims. Are we sensing a pattern here? Israel is right to fear for its safety. Israel has shown remarkable maturity and restraint in its diplomacy. And as far as I am concerned, Israel is right to strike at their foes, preemptively or no, and I will side with them by default.



This is a country composed of people who can work a 9-5, Monday through Friday workweek, punch out Friday night, go to a party, get drunk, and decide to invade Palestine over the weekend. So they do. They march over the countryside, do some off-roading with their tanks, and are back in time to shower and be back in the office Monday. And I LOVE to watch them do it. It gives me a warm fuzzy. It is my favorite thing in the news, on television, or to hear on the radio.

And these people want to cancel my favorite show.

Now do not get me wrong. I would never reduce the valiant struggle of the Israeli people to little more than a TV show. What I find, however, is that I get as excited about the news of Israel kicking ass as some people get about their football team winning the Superbowl - when the IDF lays the smackdown on Palestine, gives Iran the finger, laughs at Syria's pathetic chest thumping, or when they effortlessly defuse another attempt by Muslim fanatics to start a war over the Temple Mount, part of my rejoices like a stadium full of Argentinians whose team just won the World Cup. Because what we get with Israel is a fight that matters, a fight for the right to live and exist, a fight against some of the most pervasive religious intolerance in the world, a fight against some of the most belligerent, violent, stubborn governments on the planet. Were I Jewish, I would join that fight without a second thought. Outside of that, I have little choice but to cheer these people who understand, above all else, that if you want peace you must prepare for war.

A people who truly understand that Peace is won through Superior Firepower.