(English version)
quoting
naddr1qv…r73fA Manifesto for Liberty, Community, and Association
The great poet Vinicius de Moraes once wrote:
“Um libertas quae sera tamen (A certain libertas quae sera tamen)
Que um dia traduzi num exame escrito: (Which I once translated in a written exam:)
‘Liberta que serás também’” (‘Set free, and you too shall be free.’)
But the translation I like best came almost half a century later, when Beto Silva offered an even more carioca version:
“Liberdade, ainda que à tardinha.” (“Liberty, even if only by late afternoon.”)
Liberty has never emerged ready-made, perfectly defined, and correctly translated.
Every age inherited institutions, customs, knowledge, and technologies that made some freedoms possible and others difficult even to imagine. Political progress does not consist in discovering, once and for all, the perfect society, but in continually expanding the space in which coercion can be replaced by choice, monopoly by competition, command by cooperation, and sovereignty by association.
We do not propose a final society.
We propose principles by which different societies may discover their own paths.
I. The individual is sovereign over what is properly his or her own
“I alone am morally responsible.”\ — Robert A. Heinlein, 1966, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
There is a domain in which decision belongs primarily to the individual: conscience, ideas, home and private property, voluntary relationships, communication, and personal choices that do not impose significant harm on others.
Disapproval is not harm.
Offense is not violence.
Disagreement does not, by itself, create a legitimate power to coerce.
The fact that a majority desires a certain form of conduct does not automatically grant it jurisdiction over the life of those who disagree.
Henry David Thoreau took this principle particularly far when he imagined a state that would recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which the state’s own authority ultimately derives.
We do not claim that individuals live in isolation. We claim only that the community does not morally precede the person in every matter.
Principle: what concerns only the individual belongs to the individual.
II. Where common consequences arise, a legitimate community arises
“Private where private belongs.”\ — Robert A. Heinlein, 1966, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Individual autonomy does not eliminate commons, externalities, or shared interests.
A street, a river, a condominium, a company, a network, a market, or any shared resource may require common rules.
The legitimacy of collective decision-making grows in proportion to the extent to which individual action produces relevant effects on others.
This also means that collective authority must be proportionate to the problem.
A community does not acquire universal competence merely because it possesses legitimate competence over one particular matter.
Elinor Ostrom showed empirically that the governance of commons need not be reduced to a choice between individual private property and centralized state command. People can create their own institutions, often overlapping and operating at different scales, to govern what they share.
Principle: authority follows externality; competence follows function.
III. Community is a relationship, not necessarily a territory
“A culture is—a group of people…”\ — Neal Stephenson, 1995, The Diamond Age
A community may be geographical:
a village, a neighborhood, a city.
It may also be associative:
a church, a company, a cooperative, a profession, a virtual community, a cultural association, or any group organized around a shared purpose.
The same person belongs to many communities at once.
They may overlap without forming a single pyramid.
The proper community to decide a given question is the one related to that question, not necessarily the one occupying the largest territory.
We therefore reject the automatic identification of society with the territorial state.
The Spanish federal constitutional project of 1873 expressed a remarkably similar idea when it declared:
“Todo lo individual es de la pura competencia del individuo.”
It then assigned the municipal, regional, and national spheres to their respective levels.
We extend that logic beyond geography.
Principle: the relevant community is defined by the relevant relationship.
IV. Power should rise, not descend
“from the bottom up”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed
Smaller communities do not receive their autonomy as a gracious concession from larger authorities.
It is the higher authority that must justify the competence delegated to it.
When several communities face a problem that none can solve alone, they may create common institutions for that specific purpose.
The existence of such an institution does not automatically grant it competence over other matters.
Proudhon understood that a federation would cease to be truly federal if the center gradually absorbed the powers of its constituent communities.
A road may justify one consortium.
A watershed, another.
Defense against a threat, another.
None of these needs proves that there must exist a permanent institution with general sovereignty over all participating communities.
Principle: delegated competence does not create sovereignty.
V. Free communities may be profoundly different
“Some cultures are prosperous; some are not.”\ — Neal Stephenson, 1995, The Diamond Age
Pluralism does not mean the absence of values.
Communities may possess traditions, moral norms, recognized authorities, and strong expectations of their members.
A religious community need not become secular in order to be free.
A traditional community need not abandon its traditions.
An experimental community need not adopt the customs of its neighbors.
Jonathan Haidt uses the expression moral capital to describe values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, and institutions that help a community restrain opportunism and sustain cooperation.
Moral capital is necessary for cohesion.
That does not mean all moral capital is necessarily good.
A community may possess enormous cohesion around bad values.
We therefore regard social cohesion as important, but not sacred.
Moral capital allows a community to endure.
It does not grant that community unlimited rights over its members.
Principle: freedom of association includes the freedom to form morally dense communities.
VI. Rational criticism marks the limit of community autonomy
“You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them.”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed
We do not wish to replace one universal culture imposed by the state with thousands of small local tyrannies.
A community may defend its customs through argument, example, persuasion, tradition, and moral authority.
It may decide who represents it.
It may exclude from a particular role those who reject the conditions inherent to that role.
But its legitimacy begins to erode when it must coercively prevent its members from questioning, refusing, or leaving its authority.
Here we adopt and extend an important intuition from Karl Popper.
In the paradox of tolerance, Popper did not simply propose banning intolerant ideas. As long as they could be confronted through rational argument and public opinion, suppression was unjustified. The rupture comes when argument is abandoned in favor of violence or the threat of violence.
We apply the same principle to community self-government.
A community may say:
“We believe you are wrong.”
It may say:
“This conduct violates our norms.”
It may say:
“You cannot represent our association if you reject what it stands for.”
It may not conclude:
“You are forbidden to question what we believe.”
Disagreement is not coercion.
Social criticism is not coercion.
Ostracism is not necessarily coercion.
Losing a role within a voluntary association is not necessarily coercion.
If every social consequence were called violence, no community could possess norms and no moral capital could exist.
The limit lies in violence, threat, confinement, prevention of exit, or the use of coercive power to make a doctrine immune to criticism.
Principle: no community has the right to make its ideas infallible by force.
VII. Conscience cannot be delegated
“When law and duty are one…”\ — Frank Herbert, 1965, Dune
Belonging to a community does not transfer the conscience of its members to that community.
Law, custom, tradition, vote, or superior order do not erase the individual’s moral responsibility for his or her own actions.
Thoreau rejected the idea that the mere existence of a law is sufficient to transform obedience into moral duty.
This is particularly important in a society of autonomous communities.
Self-government does not mean:
the community decided, therefore it is right.
It means only that the community possesses legitimacy to govern what genuinely belongs to its domain.
The individual remains free to disagree.
To argue.
To refuse personal participation.
And, where possible, to leave.
A free society must be able to live with those who say no.
Principle: political authority does not replace individual conscience.
VIII. We are fallibilists
“I learn slowly.”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed
No individual knows everything.
No community knows everything.
No government knows everything.
No model knows everything.
It is precisely because we err that we need the freedom to experiment, criticize, and abandon institutions that do not work.
Hannah Arendt placed plurality among the fundamental conditions of politics: different people see the world from different perspectives and must act together without ceasing to be distinct.
Popper adds an epistemological consequence: an open institution must allow errors to be discovered instead of shielding them from criticism.
Hayek demonstrates a similar problem in economics: relevant knowledge is dispersed and cannot be fully gathered by a single authority.
Thoreau adds the moral dimension: even when everyone else agrees, the individual’s conscience remains his or her own.
We therefore prefer systems in which it is possible to:
contest, experiment, compare, leave, and correct.
We do not merely want good rulers.
We want institutions capable of surviving bad rulers, bad ideas, and our own mistaken certainties.
Principle: institutions should be built on the assumption that their leaders, members, and founders may be wrong.
IX. Liberty is a historical direction
“Do not let the past be a straitjacket!”\ — Robert A. Heinlein, 1966, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Liberty is not a binary condition.
Societies do not suddenly move from “unfree” to “free.”
Technology, productivity, knowledge, customs, and legal forms alter what can be organized without coercion.
Every generation inherits institutions built under limitations that earlier generations could not overcome.
That does not make every historical institution just.
Nor does it require us to judge people of the past as if they automatically possessed our institutions, knowledge, or material possibilities.
We must distinguish:
the moral principle
from
the historical capacity to realize it.
New productive technologies may render old forms of coerced labor unnecessary.
New legal institutions may make possible relationships that were previously difficult to organize.
New communication technologies may make it possible to coordinate communities spread across the planet.
New monetary forms may make viable what once necessarily depended on intermediaries.
And new political experiments may demonstrate that powers once thought inseparable can, in fact, be divided.
Fallibilism prevents us from demanding instantaneous perfection.
But it also prevents us from turning historical imperfections into eternal excuses.
When we discover a less coercive way to achieve a given purpose, the old coercion must justify itself anew.
Principle: the progress of liberty consists in continually expanding the space of possible choice.
X. Markets are mechanisms of discovery
“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”\ — Isaac Asimov, 1951, Foundation
We defend markets not because individuals are infallible.
We defend them precisely because they are not.
Economic knowledge is distributed among millions of people.
Prices, profits, losses, and competition allow local information to influence decisions without first having to be assembled within a central authority.
This is one of Friedrich Hayek’s fundamental contributions.
The problem with planning is not merely that planners may be ill-intentioned.
It is that they cannot possess all the information they seek to use.
Mathematics, econometrics, and modeling are not enemies of this view.
Models help us understand relationships.
The error begins when we confuse the model with the reality it abstracts.
Microeconomics provides the mechanisms from which aggregate phenomena emerge.
Macroeconomics should not treat those aggregates as though they existed independently of the people, incentives, prices, and institutions that produce them.
Principle: markets do not eliminate error; they distribute discovery and correction.
XI. Market is not privilege
“where people can come without crawling to Potter.”\ — Frank Capra, 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life — film
Defending markets does not mean defending every existing company.
Selective subsidies, protected monopolies, artificial barriers to entry, and regulatory capture replace competition with privilege.
Companies are legitimate forms of association.
Their owners possess broad authority over the resources they own and over the direction of the organization.
But property does not turn other people into property.
Employees, consumers, and third parties retain their own domains and legitimate interests.
A company exists within a network of relationships.
When its actions produce significant externalities upon others, those affected acquire a legitimate interest in determining the limits of those actions.
Principle: property creates authority over resources; not sovereignty over people.
XII. Technology can expand the territory of liberty
“Information technology has freed cultures…”\ — Neal Stephenson, 1995, The Diamond Age
Legal rights matter.
But technology can alter what must be requested from an authority in the first place.
The cypherpunks understood this clearly.
Eric Hughes summarized one of their fundamental premises:
“Privacy is necessary for an open society.”
Privacy should not depend solely on a legal promise.
It can be reinforced by cryptography.
Communication can be protected by protocols.
Reputation can exist without mandatory civil identity.
Money can circulate without necessarily requiring trust in a single intermediary.
Communities can exist independently of territorial borders.
Tim May recognized early that cryptography and digital networks would enable forms of human association that territorial states would struggle to fit into traditional categories.
The experience of the cypherpunks themselves demonstrated something else:
a voluntary, decentralized, strongly individualistic community can still possess culture, informal authority, reputation, and moral capital.
Liberty does not imply the absence of community.
It implies that community need not mean central command.
Principle: when technology allows compulsory dependence to be replaced by choice, it expands the possible territory of liberty.
XIII. Money can also be a choice
“Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest.”\ — Frank Herbert, 1965, Dune
Money is simultaneously technology, institution, and information.
There is no reason to presume that only one form of money may be legitimate.
Public, private, community, or digital currencies may coexist and compete.
Hayek explicitly explored the possibility of competition among currency issuers.
Later technologies vastly expanded the range of what can be attempted.
Bitcoin demonstrated that even monetary scarcity and transaction settlement can be organized through a network without a central issuer.
We need not presume that the currently dominant monetary form will be the final one.
Principle: what people voluntarily accept as money does not require sovereign origin in order to acquire legitimacy.
XIV. Liberty requires the possibility of exit
“Those who build walls…”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed
A voluntary community remains voluntary only if the possibility of leaving it is real.
Not every exit is easy.
Family, identity, religion, language, property, reputation, and personal relationships create costs that may be unavoidable.
We do not confuse every cost with coercion.
But a community should not deliberately turn bonds into a prison.
The possibility of exit also disciplines institutions.
Communities compete to retain their members.
Companies compete for workers and consumers.
Currencies compete for trust.
Services compete for users.
Where there is no possibility of exit, that discipline disappears.
But exit does not replace voice.
A member of a community should not have to choose between submission and departure in every disagreement.
He or she should be able to argue.
To criticize.
To persuade.
Only when coexistence becomes impossible does exit become the final mechanism for protecting liberty.
Principle: voice and exit are complementary mechanisms of liberty.
XV. The form of government also belongs to the community
“The machinery of government is always subordinate…”\ — Frank Herbert, 1976, Children of Dune
Liberty is not synonymous with universal suffrage over every decision.
One community may organize itself through direct voting.
Another through representation.
Another through councils.
Another through traditional authorities.
An association may choose its leaders through election, sortition, seniority, merit, or any other mechanism recognized by its members.
An indirect, elitist, or hierarchical political structure is not necessarily incompatible with liberty.
The decisive question is different:
what is the domain of that authority, and how far may it coerce?
A church does not need to elect its priests by universal suffrage.
A company does not need to submit every decision to its customers.
A traditional community may entrust certain decisions to elders.
Institutional pluralism means recognizing that different communities may discover different forms of representation and decision-making.
The limit remains the same:
no form of government turns its rulers into owners of the people they govern.
Principle: democracy is one possible technology of governance; liberty is the boundary within which any technology of governance must operate.
XVI. A free population retains the means of defense
“No conscript armies.”\ — Robert A. Heinlein, 1966, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
The absolute concentration of force in a single institution creates a dangerous asymmetry between those who govern and those who are governed.
Peaceful citizens should be able to retain effective means of defense.
This does not mean that violence is desirable.
It means that the capacity for defense need not be monopolized by a central authority.
Various historical movements that distrusted standing armies preferred some form of armed citizenry or local militia.
A free society seeks to reduce the need for force.
It need not, in order to do so, make its citizens incapable of exercising force in defense of themselves or their communities.
Principle: the capacity for defense should remain as distributed as reasonably possible.
XVII. Justice should remain understandable and close
“mutual aid between individuals”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed
Law exists for people.
It should not become a priestly language accessible only to a specialized class.
Experts are necessary.
But specialization should not produce sovereignty.
Juries and other forms of direct participation preserve a connection between justice and community.
Police power should exist to the extent necessary to respond to citizens and prevent violence and fraud.
It should not become an autonomous power that treats the population as an object of administration.
The greater the coercive power, the greater its accountability should be to those over whom it is exercised.
Principle: force and justice should remain subordinate to society, not the reverse.
XVIII. Cooperation among communities does not require a common sovereign
“functions through coordination, not by rule.”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness
The same principle applies internationally.
Different political communities may trade, cooperate, arbitrate disputes, and create common institutions without necessarily surrendering general sovereignty to those institutions.
The tradition of democratic peace, associated in modern scholarship with Michael Doyle, draws attention to the historically distinctive relationship among liberal representative regimes.
The literature on commercial or capitalist peace adds another mechanism: economically interdependent societies have more to lose when they replace cooperation with conflict.
These hypotheses remain subject to empirical debate.
The political principle we draw from them is more modest:
voluntary relationships create costs for violence and benefits for cooperation.
We prefer trade to conquest.
Voluntary interdependence to empire.
Functional federation to absorption.
Principle: durable peace should arise, as far as possible, from the advantages of cooperation, not merely from fear of a superior power.
XIX. There is no universal policy for every problem
“Circumstances alter cases.”\ — Robert A. Heinlein, 1966, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
An immigration policy suitable for one city may be unsuitable for another.
An environmental rule necessary for one watershed may make no sense in another region.
An urban policy for a metropolis need not be imposed upon a village.
The correct answer often depends on information that exists only near the problem.
The first question therefore should not always be:
“what is the correct policy?”
Before it comes another:
“which community is relevant to deciding this question?”
In some cases it will be the individual.
In others, the condominium.
In others, a city.
In others, an association spanning several territories.
In others, several communities will need to cooperate.
There is no politically sacred scale.
Principle: governance should seek the smallest scale capable of addressing the problem adequately.
XX. We do not want a better center
“Change is freedom.”\ — Ursula K. Le Guin, 1974, The Dispossessed
Between the isolated individual and the sovereign state lies almost all of society.
Families.
Companies.
Churches.
Municipalities.
Associations.
Clubs.
Cooperatives.
Markets.
Networks.
Digital communities.
Temporary federations.
Institutions we have not yet invented.
We do not wish to replace them with a single authority supposedly capable of representing them all.
Nor do we wish to abolish collective action.
We want to multiply the places in which it can occur.
Ostrom showed that real human systems often escape the simple dichotomy between market and state.
Arendt showed the importance of plurality and collective action.
Thoreau affirmed the moral independence of the individual before authority.
Hayek showed the limits of centralized knowledge.
Popper explained why institutions must remain open to criticism.
Haidt drew attention to the moral conditions that make social cohesion possible.
Proudhon and radical federalists imagined political structures built from the bottom up.
Hughes, May, and the cypherpunks demonstrated that new technologies can enable forms of liberty and association that earlier territorial institutions could not provide.
None of them wrote this manifesto.
None of them need agree with all of its conclusions.
We are not looking for political scripture.
We are looking for a tradition of problems, experiments, and ideas from which we can learn.
And we must remain prepared to discover that we, too, are wrong.
Synthesis
We are liberals because we presume liberty before coercion.
We are polycentric because we recognize multiple communities and multiple legitimate centers of decision.
We are pluralists because we do not wish to impose a single conception of the good life.
We are associationists because we know that liberty does not mean solitude, and that communities need sufficient trust to exist.
We are fallibilists because no individual, community, or institution is immune to error.
We defend markets because knowledge is dispersed.
We defend communities because human cooperation requires more than contracts.
We defend criticism because no tradition is infallible.
We defend open technology because new tools can expand the domain of choice.
We defend exit because association without the possibility of exit can become subjection.
We defend cooperation because decentralization does not mean isolation.
We do not desire a society without institutions.
We desire institutions that know the limits of their competence.
We do not desire a society without authority.
We desire authority without presumed sovereignty.
We do not desire a society without tradition.
We desire traditions capable of surviving criticism without having to silence it.
We do not desire a perfect society.
A society that considers itself perfect has already begun to lose the capacity to correct its errors.
Liberty is not a finished project.
We do not know which technologies, institutions, and forms of community will allow future generations to be freer than we are.
Our task is merely not to close that path.
And whenever it becomes possible to exchange coercion for choice, privilege for competition, silence for criticism, and subjection for association, we should do so.
Perhaps immediately.
Perhaps after learning how.
Perhaps, as a Brazilian humorist once put it, only by late afternoon.
But always in the same direction:
Libertas quae sera tamen.