A Stoic and Buddhist Critique of Anarcho-Capitalists

If you're a libertarian, first I must congratulate you for escaping from the nonsensical duality of Republicans vs. Democrats, and adopting a more complete mental model. But next I will tell you that your mental model is still incomplete. In fact, no mental model can ever be truly comprehensive.

I've struggled for a few weeks to decide if it's ethical to release this article. Most people will misinterpret this. Unless you are open minded and introspective, I recommend you to NOT read this article. This is your trigger warning. If you experience cognitive dissonance or mental anguish/confusion, you've been warned.

Anarcho-capitalists (ancaps) often pride themselves in thinking that they are the freeist of all thinkers. They are "red pilled". They do not conform to any form of tribalism or ideological mental traps. (I will treat libertarian and ancap as exchangeable terms in this article for simplicity, with ancap simply being a more extreme version.)

Yet libertarians still exhibit tribalist behavior through circlejerking around Rothbard, police bashing, the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP), or throwing Communists off helicopters. They are still in the Matrix. But it's fine, as long as we are on this journey through life, we will all continue to exhibit tribalist behaviors to a degree. The key is to keep conscious awareness to be hypocritical as infrequently as possible. If you self-identify as anarcho-capitalist, but you think that I am making strawmen, then I recommend the following options:

"Anarchist" is bad branding, detach yourself from a branding that causes negative Pre-suasion.
Take Extreme Ownership and lead your fellow ancaps to victory.
Recognize that you are not your thoughts. I am not my thoughts. Let the thoughts pass by without attachment. Identity is form, and form is inpermanent. Your identity is ever-changing and has no need to be tied down to a specific word or associated culture, peer group, or ideology. Silent sitting meditation practices like zazen, shi-ne, or shamatha can help.

I am here to slay the sacred cow of the NAP and dismantle the anarcho-capitalist system, not through basic bitch leftist arguments, but by viewing the dynamics from an expanded domain of consciousness. There is no safe space here. My goal isn't to antagonize anarcho-capitalists as much as for them to realize that there exists even more complete stances. The NAP is a good start, but there's still a danger to fall into fundamentalism.

Nothing is inherently sacred, not even the NAP. The problem with social justice worriers (SJW) and religious fundamentalists is that they are trapped by the "holier than thou" attitude. Zen and Dzogchen claim that nothing is inherently sacred. Through meditation, we can experience vast empty space and overcome the mental obstacle of getting offended. Libertarians conceptually understand the problem, but in reality still often get triggered when you bring up SJWs, Statists, or Communism. Those unnecessary emotional judgments are the basis for dividing the world into pure and impure, sacred and profane. To transcend all mental boundaries, we must overcome this attachment to emotional responses to Statism. This does not mean having no emotions or experiencing no emotions... but to recognize that you have the freedom to not be a slave to your emotions. This subtle distinction is extremely important, easily misinterpreted, and difficult to follow in practice.

Try this: Just sit in silence for 30 minutes and observe your thoughts. Are you not simply attached to the idea of freedom and still controlled by that train of thought?

Life is "suffering", or more precisely dukkha, which means the deep, subtle sense of dissatisfaction that creeps into our lives in a way beyond our control. As much as the ancap maybe claim to love "freedom", his understanding of what is "freedom" is limited, and in preaching libertarian ideas, he is still stuck in samsara (the rat race, the Sisyphean nature of life) and not truly free from dukkha.

The Non-Aggression Principle is an ethical stance which asserts that "aggression" is inherently illegitimate. "Aggression" is defined as the "initiation" of physical force against persons or property, the threat of such, or fraud upon persons or their property.

Libertarians typically claim that the non-aggression principle includes property and freedom of contract as a part of self-ownership. The basis for this extension of self-ownership to one's property is John Locke's argument (also called the homestead principle) that mixing of labor with an unowned resource makes that resource part of one's self. Subsequent exchange of such property (e.g. sale, rental) simply transfers this right. Hence, to aggress against someone's property is to aggress against the individual. As for freedom of contract, the right of self-ownership is held to imply freedom of action in the absence of aggression (e.g. in the absence of false or duress contracts, and the absence of contracts stipulating aggression against third-parties). (https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Principle_of_non-aggression)

There isn't anything inherently wrong with what's stated here, but the problem rises when people take the deontological rule to the extreme and interpret the concept of "ownership" in an oversimplified way. Your typical "pop anarchist" coopts the term "ownership" to neglect personal responsibility. Rather than taking Extreme Ownership, they fall into the mental trap of complaining about the government or "taxation is theft" all day. While the criticisms of taxes and government might be theoretically relevant, the act of complaining the way of living shows someone who has not escaped victim mentality. Steven Pressfield discussed all the "rational" excuses we make for ourselves to escape doing meaningful work and get fooled by RESISTANCE. Complaining about taxes is one such trap of RESISTANCE. We could be producing real value rather than bitching about what others are doing wrong.

I have been guilty of this myself. RESISTANCE kicked my ass and I put off writing this article for a few months. Rather than being productive with writing or coding, I have gotten into pointless Facebook debates that produced zero value or shared liberty memes that aren't even funny. That isn't true freedom. In preaching freedom, I had, in fact, become a hypocritical slave of RESISTANCE in the form of social media. I had no control over my own thoughts. I was not free from reacting to or being affected by other people's negative thought patterns. Through taking Extreme Ownership, I acknowledge that in these moments, I was no better than the Leftists I had been criticizing. I still am no better than the ancaps I am critiquing right now. Since life is samsara, we fall in and out of these bad practices all the time and create suffering for ourselves all the time due to our inability to deal with the complexity of nonduality.

The most dangerous monsters are those who believe they are moral people. Because they believe monstrosity is alien (somewhere else, those bad people), “moral people” are capable of rationalizing horrifying acts of cruelty, which must be OK because “we are not monsters.”

To practice escaping from hypocrisy and fear, we have to recognize that we are all monsters. We can choose to be goody two shoes libertarians and reject that we are monsters, and claim that statists are the true monsters, but that's not a stable stance to hold. It's no different from Leftist normie autistic shrieking "REEEEEEEEE!" We shouldn't go full spirit cooking and adopt the inversion stance either. Rather, I chose to adopt the incorporation stance. I embrace my trolling side while retaining my human nobility. This balance allows me to continue with my Hero's Journey.

"Ownership" isn't just about amassing material goods, it's also about taking responsibility for the consequences of your own actions. You own up to all the good and bad experiences in your life, rather than merely owning objects.

Both Stoicism and Buddhism teaches us that attachment = suffering. The problem is that almost everyone confuse ownership with attachment. When you're attached to objects that you own, you don't really own them, they own you.

"Anything that can be prevented, taken away, coerced is not a person's own - but those things that can't be blocked are their own." - Epictetus, Discourses

The typical anarcho-capitalist belief that humans should own land stems from herder cultures. In Black Rednecks, White Liberals, Sowell discussed how ghetto culture, redneck culture, and Arab culture all stemmed from ancient herder cultures. Herders are very protective of their land, because they don't want other herders' animals to graze on grass for their own flock.

When you say "I own this land", that's your ego telling you that you are more important than you really are. Your existance is impermanent and that land will be around long after you're gone. The land doesn't give a shit about the status of "ownership" that you project onto it. It owns itself and continues to exist long after you die. The Stoics believe that our properties, status, physical health, and relationships aren't really ours, since events outside of our control can take them away without any notice.

Just as Democrats reach terrible conclusions due to a shallow interpretation of their values, the same thing happens to Libertarians. To overcome this problem, it's useful to consider Robert Kegan’s stages of adult development.

Stage	3: Communal	4: Systematic	5: Fluid
Objects	Egocentric Desires	Relationships	Systems
Subjects	Relationships	Systems	Meaning-making
Relationships	Symmetrical, unstructured	Asymmetrical, formal roles	Meta-systematic
Ethics	Compassion, consensus	Procedural justice, responsibility, principles	Nebulous yet patterned; collaborative improvisation
Epistemology	Can put oneself in other’s shoes	Can take perspective of structured social system	Can relate systems to each other

A deontological interpretation of the NAP is stage 4 meaning-making of the world. When it comes to externalities, the most basic NAP interpretation is often insufficient. I propose an tweaked version based in network theory: The further away you are from a node, the less accurate is your perception and the less you should interfere. Reality is nebulous and often require you to step beyond strictly following principles. However, you must first understand the principles and live by them before moving beyond them, or you risk falling back to the stage 2 or stage 3 behaviors of SJWs. Postmodernism and Buddhism both have stage 4+ interpretations, but most people learn about a watered down version before they are ready, so they use false postmodernism and Buddhism to excuse their stage 3 behavior.

To demonstrate what I have been writing in less abstract terms, I will quote my libertarian friend who has the same concerns. His article is excellent and I highly recommend reading it.

Since this has been extremely abstract, let me guide you through a recent example of me dealing with a particular issue of whether to publicly support the i-732 carbon tax on my facebook or not. Brief background: the i-732 is a revenue neutral carbon tax which makes taxes more progressive in Washington state. It has been created by an obviously Kegan 4 person with the strategy of creating a blueprint for taxes that are “adoptable” in every state, including ones which are not very liberal. Thus the “revenue neutral” stipulation which removed the political opposition based on “yet another government increase” from libertarians like me and conservatives around the country. However, it has been opposed by groups on the left for being “revenue neutral” and not considering either the voice or the financial needs of people being affected by climate change. It did not end up passing.

At my stage 4 thought process on this tax, I was overwhelmingly in favor of it. On one hand, it was sideways from my anti-government stance, which made me first feel neutral towards it based on the strongest principles of freedom and self-determination. The secondary principles of fairness and concern for the environment and supporting good strategic thinking in general kicked in favor of it.

But there was also something else. Since I tend to lump myself slightly more with the right, than the left, it was also good as a statement of proof that “the other side” is not taking their own issue seriously enough, thus the communal left’s opposition to it by itself made me like the tax even more.

While on the particular object level, I still view the initiative as correct, I view the second part of the strategy as a somewhat dangerous thought pattern to fall into.
Taking a side too quickly because you view other people as “having” different and opposite systems from you and reversing their stance is a Kegan 4 mistake that mislabels certain situations as a bigger conflict than that which exist in reality.

Buddhism teaches that form is emptiness and emptiness is form, but few actually understand this correctly. Suffering comes from falling into the Four Extremes: eternalism, nihilism, monism, and dualism.

Eternalism says that everything has a definite, true meaning.
Nihilism says that nothing really means anything.
Monism is the stance that All is One. It denies separateness and diversity.
Dualism is the stance that individuals can be unambiguously identified and separated. It fixates on boundaries and denies connections.

While it can be possible to interpret anarcho-capitalism in a nebulous way, the culture tends to devolve into dualist eternalism. Applying the NAP to everything allows people fall into eternalism, and being too anal about property boundaries allows people to fall into dualism. Christian conservatives are also dualist eternalists, so this explains the alliance on the Right. The Leftists tend to be either monist eternalists or dualists nihilists. Monist nihilism is an unstable stance that doesn't really exist.

"Wisdom is tolerance of cognitive dissonance." - Josh Waitzkin, author of The Art of Learning during The Tim Ferris Show

Libertarians often attach meaning to liberty in a way that specifically opposes statism as a way to make meaning of their world. Anarcho-capitalism is a confused stance that is reactionary to statism, it is an example of confused stances coming in pairs. It is possible to detach from both if you can handle nebulosity at Kegan stage 5.

Libertarians pride themselves in being logical, but even logic itself can degenerate into an eternalism. Rationalist eternalism is the confused stance that there is a pattern to everything, that all patterns can be discovered by reasoning, and that they give everything meaning. The universe is reasonable, and so reason can master it. Anarcho-capitalism is often called libertarianism taken to its logical conclusions, but this logic is precisely why it doesn't work on the meta level. If it works, then we world see reality conforming to the NAP. Thus, ancaps experience cognitive dissonance when they question why isn't every intelligent person they know an ancap.

When you understand emptiness through the Four Extremes, you recognize that politics is form and form is impermanent. Therefore, attaching yourself to any stance permanently will lead to suffering through cognitive dissonance. The only way to accurately perceive reality is to constantly adapt to new information. There is no magic sauce solution when it comes to politics, but that doesn't mean that we can't find meaning from our own limited perspective.

I still recommend your typical Democrat or Republican to go in a more libertarian direction, but if you intuitively notice the inconsistencies of libertarian thought, then it can make sense for you to take the next step to escape from the limitations of that mental model.

Take the first step to escape from the matrix of libertarian eternalism: just sit there observing your thoughts without attachment. Free your mind.