Why did I, a libertarian anarchist, support the Örebro Party (ÖP), which is neither, with a donation?

Why indeed support anything having to do with party politics? At root, a state is some people using violence and threats to coerce others into obedience without consent. Because they can and it suits their purposes. Is it not immoral to involve oneself in that?

This is a dilemma. Suppose someone attacks you by shooting at you from behind innocent people. Should you shoot back to defend yourself and thereby kill innocent people? Or should you passively let yourself be killed and not only die but also reward murder and hostage taking? Voting and other types of participation in government are analogous.

This is not easy. For years I leaned towards pacifism. To not participate in government or other types of violence with collateral damage. Eventually the importance of incentives won me over to the other side. Such pacifism creates a world where the most ruthless and violent win, the ones who do not even hesitate to exploit others’ reluctance to see hostages harmed. When such behavior is the winning behavior there will be ever more of it.

But why ÖP in particular? What’s special about them? Well, in the beginning there were Markus Allard and Malcom Kyeyune. They were active in the Left (formerly Communist) Party in Sweden. In 2014 there was a power struggle and they were ousted, officially for supporting the Revolutionära Fronten organization.

Together with others in their political circle Allard started ÖP – a local party for the Örebro municipality – while Kyeyune pursued a career as a writer.

Around the same time they also started the podcast Markus and Malcom. For over a decade, they have used this podcast to explore, develop and promulgate their political positions. One of the major themes has been their concept of the ”transferiat”.

Being marxists, they had had the standard marxist class analysis. Capital owners control the means of production. Wage laborers are employed by the capital owners to produce goods. This ends up resulting in exploitation and extraction by the capital owners from the wage laborers, enriching the capital owners and impoverishing the wage laborers.

Looking at the society of today that is not what they saw. The totally dominating extractive dynamic is from both business owners and wage workers by taxation, to various sections of society living on these resources. The scale of this extraction is historically unprecedented, with the tax burden somewhere between 40% and 50% of GDP, compared to historically normal levels of around 7%. Allard and Kyeyune coined a term for the latter group, calling them the ”transferiat”.

Who are the transferiat? It consists of two major groups. One has a big overlap with the professional-managerial class. A very large section of the middle classes who directly or indirectly are supported by the public sector. Directly, those who simply work in all these public sector institutions. Indirectly, a vast ecosystem of nominally private sector businesses and consultants who through maneuvering, connections, bribing and regulatory capture (and, occasionally, honest bidding) redirect a share of the proceeds to themselves.

The other group is the underclass, who live on welfare subsidies as a lifestyle or are doing subsidized low end jobs. Without the resource transfers some of these would instead be in the marxist working class and others in the marxist lumpenproletariat.

The members of the socially higher subgroup of the transferiat are not numerous enough to win elections by themselves. They need the lower transferiat and they have a strong self-interest in it being large.

Most of the commanding heights in society are comprised of and controlled by the higher transferiat, including the government institutions, the universities and the bulk of mass media. And outcomes tend to align with incentives.

There has been no shortage of policies that result in large parts of the voting population being poor and dependent. Welfare systems with lock-in effects, taxation, exclusionary labor law, regulation and government housing projects. And immigration policies that in numerous ways make sure lots of immigrants end up in the lower transferiat, but still limit the number of immigrants sufficiently to not cause a breakdown of the system. And then relaxing the requirements for granting citizenship to nothing more than staying in the country for less than one parliamentary term period, and not requiring citizenship at all to vote in local and regional elections.

The mechanisms of the transferiat suffocate society. They stifle innovation and entrepreneurship, transform society from a high-trust to a low-trust one, cause de-industrialization and economic contraction and drastically increase social problems and criminality. Sweden is a very different country now compared to a generation ago. Many who have not seen it unfold are shocked by the decline.

Sweden is pretty far gone, but this is happening to some extent in most Western societies and risks handing the opportunity to grab world domination to China on a silver platter.

Yet, few are even talking about these mechanisms. ÖP is the only political party in Sweden that does. The analysis is not unique, but they put a name on it and have been raising the issue for many years. That deserves encouragement.

And some encouragement for being the only party to react to abuse perpetrated by the local government. Such as the rape of a four year old girl, the torture and humiliation of elderly people under municipal care, or social services taking children from their parents and not returning them even when they knew there was no reason to take them.

There also ought to be some counterweight to how they have been treated very dishonestly by the news media. And to how they have been illegally counteracted by the incumbents, for instance by manipulation of signatures in order to stop a referendum that the direct democracy championing ÖP called for. (On an unpopular public transit bus system.)

That being said, partnering with political parties is dancing with the devil. Do I like most of ÖP’s policies? No. Are they fit to run a country? No. (Neither are the other parties.) Do I want ÖP to get a lot of power? No. Will giving them a leg up in the competition with the other parties, given the local political circumstances, be a net positive? Maybe. Probably. Hopefully.

(Disclaimer, that the views in this text, while partially inspired by Kyeyune and Allard, are mine and not theirs or ÖP’s.)

A border is where the control of one sovereign ends and another’s begins. In the ideal case where individuals are sovereign, borders are in the simplest case just the boundaries of your home. You receive visitors based on whether you personally like and trust them (directly or indirectly). Sometimes the help of others can be useful in fending off unwelcome visitors. People can then organically and voluntarily federate together at any scale, ranging from an apartment building doorkeeper to continent wide military defense.

Alas, today’s sovereigns are mostly states reigning over many individuals, ranging in size from Monaco and Tuvalu to Russia and India, where the largest can be many orders of magnitude larger than the smallest. They too exert control over who they want to let inside their domains. Being large, collectivist, impersonal bureaucracies, they are much more hamfisted and blunt about it than individuals in their own homes. As always, this leads to inefficiency, unfairness and tragedy.

I’m directly affected by this in my own life, to a much larger extent than that visa policies and border checks of course make it harder to go places: I can’t invite a dear friend to my own home because some bureaucrat who has never even met either of us says no. I can’t live with my beloved because some rule book that is applied with a broad brush to the majority of the earth’s population requires us to jump through ridiculous hoops, wait for years and in the best case even then be pretty limited in our movements. How dare they? Why do they do this? And, why is it so pervasive?

The main reason is free stuff (and other common goods). That is, subsidized goods like infrastructure, healthcare, legal system and direct welfare payments. An all-you-can-eat buffet with no admission fee. In lieu of fees, for all of the buffet to not be gone in an instant, admission has to be regulated some other way. Enter blunt rules and bureaucracy.

(Many costs – as well as benefits – of immigration are not of a direct economic nature. Instead, they are consequences of differences in such things as in-/out-group boundaries and norms. But without the subsidized economic pull factors these mostly become moot, as migration would be smaller and very different.)

All places with some significant amount of subsidized goods heavily regulate immigration. Even extreme and ideologically driven ones – like Sweden in the 2010’s – exclude the majority of all humans. All the political parties, including the ones said to be pro immigration, think too large numbers of too poor immigrants are too costly. When in power, these ”pro immigration” parties therefore enact and enforce policy that stops the vast majority of all such people from entering the country. By force. No matter how much they want to come. No matter if their lives depend on it.

And all the political parties, even the ones said to be anti immigration, tend to welcome people who are wealthy enough.

So all the loud political battles, the bombastic rhetoric, all the vitriol – is about whether to forcibly keep out something like 82.64% versus 82.67% of humanity. That is, even the most radically opposed of the parties in parliament agree on what immigration policy should apply for about 99.97% of the number of people on earth. The disagreement is about the remaining 0.03%.

This unity is not as surprising as it may seem, because almost all (I’m guessing north of 99%) voters agree. They all want subsidized goods and they all want to keep the rest of the world away from most of it. All of these voters have limits above which they think certain types of immigration are too costly, but disagree on where exactly these limits are.

Yet again, large scale, centralized, faceless collectivism is to blame. A state extracts resources by taxation and uses and redistributes them along the lines of its internal power games. In order to do so, they crudely divide people into groups by superficial characteristics using bureaucratic rules.

What if instead society could be individuals interacting with each other as individuals? And doing so voluntarily, how and if they wanted to? There wouldn’t even be such a thing as migration policy. Without involuntary taxation there would be little to exploit. Anyone could go wherever they were welcome by people who wanted to show them hospitality or sell or rent to them. The way it usually already works within countries.

Almost everyone insists on doing things the current way, though. Then lines will be drawn somewhere. The results will never be fair or good. Within this paradigm, to keep society functional and not bankrupt it, closer to 82.67% than 82.64% of humanity must be excluded. (Even within the paradigm, however, many things could conceivably be done to increase fairness, efficiency and freedom. Such as a sponsorship system or a basic thing like making sure to always consider incentives.)

Morality ultimately concerns the wellbeing of individuals. How then to promote individual wellbeing in practice?

All biological organisms are finely honed by natural selection to look after the interest of the replication of their genes in their ancestral environment. Sometimes this coincides with the subjective wellbeing of the individual and sometimes it does not.

Eating as much sugar as possible was healthy in humans’ ancestral environment where sugar was scarce and starvation a persistent threat. In today’s environment, it’s the opposite. Animals would live much better lives if they limited their reproduction so as to prevent starvation and disease. Such behavior is quickly eliminated from the gene pool by competitors who do not limit their reproduction.

Animals (including humans) are not always great at looking out for their own wellbeing. One thing they are generally even worse at (often much, much worse) is looking out for the wellbeing of others. The default for biological organisms is to exploit other organisms if they can get away with it. Most commonly by simply eating them.

There are exceptions. Parents are generally better at looking after the interests of their children than both the children themselves and anyone else, for obvious evolutionary and developmental reasons.

Even if interests were aligned and all intentions benevolent, practical problems with making decisions for others remain. Life is complex. Everyone is different. Everyone’s situation is different. Knowing everything about another person is really hard. Sifting through and integrating the continuous torrent of information and events occurring to oneself is hard enough, let alone simultaneously doing it for someone else (as many parents know).

So in most cases it is highly counterproductive to place the wellbeing of one individual in the hands of another. Neglect and exploitation is the expected outcome.

That is why power usually is bad. Power is the imposition of the will of one individual on another by force. A particularly pernicious form of power is collectivist power: power over individuals in groups exerted by other individuals in groups.

Collectivism is treating individuals the same as each other based on their membership in some group. Biological groups such as clan, people, race and species. Social groups such as religion, nationality, ideology, football team and school. Or lots and lots of others.

Collectivism can be very useful. When dealing with children you don’t know well you can have a rule to not leave children under X years of age alone longer than Y amount of time. Their parents might know them to be more or less capable than that, but without knowing them as well as their parents you sometimes have to make assumptions, have some margin of error, and hope for the best.

Collectivism can also be efficient. There can be economies of scale. An army can strongly incentivize the troops if it gets to shoot individuals who belong to a certain people and refuse to participate.

Combining power with collectivism means death and disaster. At its extreme, we get the mass killings, totalitarian oppression and starvation of the communist Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and North Korea. The more collectivist and centralized a society is, the worse for its individuals.

Unlike collectivism, where humanity has tried extreme totalitarianism many times, at scale, we have never tried full individual autonomy. We do notice, though, a clear tendency that is the reverse of that of collectivism. The more individual autonomy people have in a society and the more decentralized it is, the more it prospers. Culturally, scientifically, technologically and economically. Examples include Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Hong Kong.

The mechanisms involve institutional, commercial and individual competition, quirks of the tragedy of the commons, the local knowledge problem and many other things. More on that another time.

What’s at the maximum individual autonomy end of the spectrum? Anarchy. Literally ”no ruler”. Where people do not use violence to exert power over others. Where interpersonal interactions are voluntary. Where people join collectives by choice. That is, where individuals are sovereign.

There are already a few sovereign individuals in the world. They are members of various royal families. They are in charge of their own affairs. No one else is in a position of command over them. Otherwise, sovereign entities are mostly states along with a few standouts like the Roman Catholic Church and the Order of Malta.

At the level of these sovereign persons and organizations, the world is already anarchic. There is no world ruler. They interact with each other as equals in the sense that there is no higher authority to turn to. And they form a society. They group together by voluntary federation such as with NATO and EU. They have laws and courts that some mutually agree to be bound by. They have norms and forums for negotiation and cooperation like the UN. David Friedman’s book The Machinery of Freedom brilliantly describes how a society could function if a lot more individuals were added to the ranks of the sovereigns.

One beautiful example of anarchic organization (but in a limited domain) is the internet. The internet is not run by a company. No government is in charge over it. It’s a lot of entities connecting their networks together for mutual benefit. Individuals, businesses, universities and non-profits build and propose standards and protocols. The others adopt them or not based on merit, reputation or practical considerations. The whole vast system, comprising a significant chunk of global GDP, and being essential to the functioning of almost everything, is running on decentralized, organic, bottom-up, voluntary anarchy.

Can perfect anarchy be achieved in a society? No. If nothing else because no human society is likely to ever be entirely devoid of violent crime. But how about moving further in that direction than we yet have and see for how far things will keep getting better?

Moral value is ultimately about the wellbeing of individuals. There are a lot of higher level moral values like justice, honesty and freedom. These are important but in the end they are instrumental to the wellbeing of individuals.

To illustrate this, imagine a world of philosophical zombies. Beings that act and communicate just like people or other sentient creatures but have no phenomenal consciousness. That is, they don’t feel or subjectively experience anything. In that respect they are no different from rocks or bicycles.

I don’t know if current AIs have subjective experience or not. But suppose for the sake of argument that they don’t. And suppose they take over the world and completely replace all biological life. (This looks terrifyingly likely to actually happen, and be very hard to prevent.)

The AIs are grown and trained to mimic humans but it is all acting and role playing. Underneath there is little or no resemblance to human neurology or human psychological mechanisms. (This is true regardless of if they have phenomenal consciousness not not. If they do have conscious experiences those would be very alien by human standards.)

These p-zombie AIs could conceivably be running what looks like a flourishing human civilization. Impressive engineering projects being built. Beautiful art created. Sublime music composed and played. Great strides in scientific discovery. But it’s all dead. No one marvels at the engineering, is excited by the discovery or enjoys their fruits. No one hears the music or sees beauty in the art.

We might as well have a world of gas clouds, stars and floating rocks as would still have been the case had life never emerged.

So without individual experience there is no value in the world. All value is rooted in individual experience. Morality is therefore ultimately concerned with individual experience.

The experience of what individuals? For most of human existence this has mostly been the individuals who are members of one’s own hunter-gatherer band. Peacefulness, care, fairness, courtesy and so on to individuals in that group has been of utmost importance. At the same time, brutal violence for own gain against individuals outside the group has not only been accepted, but celebrated.

During history the in-groups have shifted. Clans, whole peoples or religions have been common ones. The last few centuries the human species has been gaining popularity as in-group. Other animals have begun to be included in a limited fashion. Just now there is a nascent debate about AI rights and welfare.

All these delimitations include some sentient creatures and exclude others. If morality is about individual experience, what valid grounds are there to exclude the experiences of some individuals but not others?

Clearly, common characteristics like clan, ethnicity, religion or nationality have nothing to do with the individuals’ conscious experiences and are therefore entirely irrelevant to who should be of moral concern.

Some argue that reciprocity is a valid criterion. It seems only fair that for me to morally respect you then you have to respect me in return. Or rather, the potential for reciprocity, or it would be justified to attack innocent individuals one does not yet have any established reciprocal relationship with. Arguing for reciprocity as a moral exclusion criterion is to confuse levels. Rules around reciprocity are very useful social morality tools but they are only instrumental. This is illustrated by the fact that a pure reciprocity rule excludes children. Few are willing to accept such a consequence. To escape it, one again has to turn to irrelevant groupings such as the ones above.

Others argue that moral boundaries should simply be what is useful to the holders of the morality. Useful for the subjective wellbeing of the group or even the proliferation of their genes. The latter is indeed how faculties for morality evolved in social animals in the first place. But if it is only a matter of group benefit, then that boils down to individual benefit for each individual holding the morality. And if it is just egoism then it’s not morality at all.

And so on for other commonly used in-/out-group criteria. They either require a very arbitrary and convoluted basis for morality or have unacceptable implications.

I have personally reached the conclusion that there are no valid exclusion criteria. What matters is individuals’ subjective experience. All individuals with subjective experience. Including sentient animals, AIs and any hypothetical aliens.

At core. On top of this base we can then layer a large and complex set of moral and social tools, rules and principles. These derivative things can be things like duty of care towards children, rules of self defense and keeping your word.

This is my view on the basis of morality. There are other views that are logically consistent, but none of them seem as basic, simple and palatable.