Today, I will be going through the laws of archotropism, as created by Andrew from Popular Liberty, and laying out which I think are correct and which go entirely off the rails. Just for fun, I will also be addressing some “extra laws”, things that Andrew often asserts as facts, that are related, and/or tied into the framework.
Andrew has repeatedly asked for responses to his laws, and expressed surprise that there has not been more pushback. Consider me happy to deliver said pushback.
First, a disclaimer: Andrew has not actually written these down anywhere that I can find. They may be behind a paywall on his subscribe star, but if it is, that is useless to me. If I try to refute that, I will be either publicly sharing content from behind his paywall to give you context so the argument makes sense, or I will be giving an argument with no context. Also, I am not sure that it does exist behind the paywall and would rather not spend the money on a hunch.
Why does this matter? Stream of consciousness conversations are often unclear; when you have to write things down that structure can add clarity. People also often misspeak and don’t catch themselves, so I may misrepresent an idea if he misspoke. Beyond that, the idea being difficult to understand, and thus respond to, is the most common criticism I have heard of both archotroism and the AntiTax.
Is writing harder and takes more time than recording a video? Yes. But if you are trying to spread a complex idea, I think it is on the person trying to spread the idea to make it clear.
With all that said, I will be mostly referencing this video from Andrew breaking down the laws, and this written piece from blackbird podcast elaborating on them, and adding the 6th, most recent law.
As a final point before diving in, I have no problem with trying to understand how governments come about, which is what archotropism is, in theory. I think that understanding is valuable, I just don’t think that the 6 laws that Andrew has written are accurate. The fun thing about laws that are claimed to be absolute is if there is a single counter example, the law is disproved, and I will provide plenty. If you are operating with a misunderstanding of reality, you will mess up and waste valuable time, energy, and capital.
I believe that Andrew and I both have similar goals on increasing human liberty, which is why I find it valuable to point out if someone is going in the wrong direction. And as always, if I am wrong, please let me know, and I will be happy to admit it if I was mistaken. I firmly believe that making and admitting mistakes is a virtue and not something to be embarrassed over, because that is how improvement happens.
What are the 6 laws of Arcotropism?
The value of power is relative, not absolute. Therefore, the value of power can neither be created nor destroyed. It may only be transferred from one wielder to another, or transformed from one form into another. The sum total value of power is always conserved.
Power seeks consolidation from lower concentration to higher concentration. “Predation” (for our usage) is defined as the act of consolidating power.
The economic value of power is subjective.
P = F/D (Power equals force divided by distance.)
In a closed system, all power is subject to entropy (chaos) and tends toward decay.
Overreach from one “side” demands overreach from the other “side”.
And the extra 2 laws, that Andrew has not stated as explicitly part of archotropism, but keeps coming up and seem to be pretty tightly linked to archotropism:
Time preference for power is what determines political affiliation.
Societies only turn towards statism/you need to be right wing first and then to liberty.
Now, let's get into it!
The value of power is relative, not absolute. Therefore, the value of power can neither be created nor destroyed. It may only be transferred from one wielder to another or transformed from one form into another. The sum total value of power is always conserved.
This is probably the hardest law to unpack, partially since the terms are not well defined. Especially the word “power”. He defines potential power as wealth, knowledge and influence, and then kinetic power as political power.
I believe that by political power, Andrew means the ability to control people or property. To force someone to do what you want, or to force property to be assigned to a use as you see fit. It is worth noting that he then proceeds to mostly ignore potential power from here on out.
He is also fairly unclear on the value of power. In this context, “value of power” means how much people and stuff you have control over using said power. Later, it is how much individuals subjectively value the “value of power”. Confusing? Yes.
Where does this go wrong? That “therefore”. Something being relative does not mean that it cannot be created or destroyed. For example, if you are on an island with 5 people, and you are in charge with a gun, the value of your power is control over 5 people (including yourself). If a new person is born, you have power over a 6th person. Boom, the value of your power has gone up. New value has been created.
The same logic applies if someone dies, power is destroyed. If power gives you control over property, creating or destroying property will create and destroy the value of power. If you had power over a large city with a million people and a volcano erupts, killing and destroying everyone but you, your power loses a significant amount of value. Value has been lost without being transferred.
Is this changed when we add in the subjectivity? No. Subjective value is created and destroyed all of the time. Investing a way to process gas increased the subjective value of oil in the minds of speculators, and showing cigarettes causes cancer decreased their subjective value it the eyes of many. Saying value is subjective does not mean it cannot be created or destroyed, and even if that was the case, the therefore would still be incorrect.
Power seeks consolidation from lower concentration to higher concentration. “Predation” (for our usage) is defined as the act of consolidating power.
Here is where you run into issues with the definitions of power. Is this only “kinetic” political power? Because companies in a free market don’t tend to be monopolies, and experts with extensive knowledge in one area often get complacent in other areas. This doesn’t seem to be true for “potential” power.
Even for “kinetic” power, I am not sure if this is the case. Remember, every form of government is really an oligarchy, and kings often end up delegating away more and more control. The story of the deep state and bureaucratic control of power in the US is not an uncommon one in history, and results in power moving away from an individual or group. This happens simply because one person can only process so much information and make so many decisions in a day. If you are looking at governments rather than individuals this may be the case (though since secession and governments breaking apart is common in history I wouldn’t call this an absolute rule), but especially if you are looking at individuals, I think that this law completely breaks down.
The economic value of power is subjective.
This is true, since all value is subjective. However, many of the conclusions Andrew draws are not from the text of this law, but from the implied law #7, time preference of power determines political affiliation, which I will cover in that section.
P = F/D (Power equals force divided by distance.)
This is the law that I find the most obviously flawed. Overall, one of my critiques of these laws as a set is that they are a form of scientism. Believing that physics and the hard sciences are so great and absolute that economics and philosophy should mimic them.
However, if we are going to relate this system to physics, what are your units here? If I have a gun, being 20 miles away from me radically reduces my power over you. If I have a fighter jet, that distance has essentially no reduction in the power I have over you. In fact, if I have a nuke, I don’t have power over you unless you are far enough away that I won’t be caught in the blast. If I have a piece of ransomware, distance doesn’t matter at all. I could see this being a bit of a general rule, albeit a confused and vague one, but it completely falls apart as an absolute law.
In a closed system, all power is subject to entropy (chaos) and tends toward decay.
Honestly, I don’t entirely understand this law. One part of it seems to be in contradiction with the 2nd law, though it does make sense to have two laws in conflict so you can bounce back and forth between them. Either way, you can say that your laws are always correct.
He is essentially saying that when you have a government, it slowly accumulates “chaos” until it falls apart. But the term chaos isn’t really defined. What does it mean here? I am not really sure. Degeneracy? Low time preference? Prey behavior? Another buzzword? Not really sure.
I could very easily see an argument that the issue of decay is more stagnant order (like too much red tape) which makes things collapse rather than chaos. But, as stated previously, this is the law which makes the least sense to me.
Overreach from one “side” demands overreach from the other “side”.
This law is just vague. What do you mean by “demands”? What do you mean by overreach? I can think of many extreme actions without overreach in response, especially in America’s history of the progressives reaching for more, and the conservatives compromising. Overall, this law is so vague that I don’t know if it applies. It is just a Rorschach test where you see what you want to see.
On to the extra laws:
Time preference for power is what determines political affiliation.
This is how Andrew defines left, right, and libertarianism. In his words, the left has a high time preference for power, the right has a low one, and libertarians have near zero time preference for power. To be frank, I disagree with every part of this and don’t think that he is even clear in what he is saying.
Here is one fun example of how confused the definition is. Quoting from a interview with Ace Anarchist and Andrew:
Ace: “How do you define left wing? Is it more of a prescriptive definition in the sense . . . ?”
Andrew: “Top 50% of people with a time preference for power.”
Why is this confused? Because after Andrew calls the left the top 50% and the right the bottom 50% in terms of time preference to power, he goes on to say the left vastly outnumbers the right. In other interviews he has said that we used to all be left and that the right is a relatively new concept created through enculturation.
To be fair, lots of contradictions are normal when speaking off the cuff, but this is why it’s annoying to try to pin down what he means when he won’t write things down.
Why do I disagree with this framework overall? First, I need to lay out three terms:
Time preference: How much are you willing to delay gratification for future benefit. How many future dollars are worth one dollar to you today?
Subjective value: How much is something worth to you.
Understanding of cause and effect: How well do you understand the effects of your actions.
Why do these matter? Because Andrew seems to be mixing them all up for time preference. To give an example of this, let’s say I give you a nice bottle of bourbon that will taste better as it ages. If you drink it now, you have high time preference, and you value drinking the bourbon. If you don’t drink it, you could either have low time preference and want to save it for later or you could not really value drinking boroun. Your time preference, and how much you value something are separate.
To take another example, you could have a really low time preference, and save and invest all of your money, but put it into a pyramid scheme. Or put it into some sketchy condos that you think will make you a big return in 20 years, but go bankrupt in 2. Even if you have low time preference, you can have a poor understanding of cause and effect.
Why does this matter? Because once you take that into account, I don’t think that his time preference of power theory makes sense. I am not against taxation now, or locking people in jail now, so that I can get more taxes or lock up more people later. I am against them, full stop. As a libertarian, I don’t value these actions. It is not that I want to delay my gratification of them to get more in the future, I don’t want them at all. Taxation is theft. It is not that libertarians have a low time preference for power, it is that they don’t value those specific applications of power, or they consider that form of power negative. Time preference is besides the point.
This also comes back around to the left. If someone on the left doesn’t understand economics and legitimately thinks that making college free and increasing the minimum wage has good short and long term effects for society, it’s not time preference that is making them favor those policies. It is their misunderstanding of cause and effect.
Finally, there are many examples of the left having a very lower time preference for power, as defined by Andrew. Thaddeuss Russell’s parents were some of the many socialists who were college educated but gave up their cushy college jobs (aka giving up short term power) to work in factories and live among the working class to organize for political change (aka investing in future power). Another example is the long march through the institutions and the Fabian society. Many leftists and socialists became professors, newscasters, and the like. Not because that would give them power in the short term, but because it would give them power in the long term, decades down the road.
The final example I will give is global warming. While there are corporate interests that are just in it for the money, many leftists are true believers, and are in favor of sacrificing in the present to have a better world in 80 years.
The right wing also has many examples of violating your binary and opposing policies that are “high time preference” (opposing free speech, supporting government spying, the war on drugs, etc.). However, when this is brought up, you generally have either said they were lied into it, or that that was not the true right wing Scotsman. So, I am going to mostly ignore that side of it.
I would even say that when conservatives talk about cutting taxes to boost future tax growth (the main example I have heard Andrew make on the issue to show low time preference of right wingers), it is establishment RINOs appealing to the left when the right wing base doesn’t value the government eventually taking more in taxes.
What does this all mean? Unless multiple major groups of socialists are all right wing infiltrators, this is a flawed definition of right and left. Additionally, I think it’s a completely inaccurate portrayal of the average libertarian. It seems like a sloppy way to define right as good and left as bad.
Societies only turn towards statism/you need to move right wing first and then to liberty.
This is another point often made by Andrew. He will claim that you have to go right wing before you can head towards liberty. Or he claims that governments only grow more tyrannical. Or that in order to get your freedoms back you have to negotiate and give the government something of equal or greater value (with his main example being the taxation of legalized weed). As you can probably guess, I disagree.
There are many examples of governments just moving towards liberty just for the sake of liberty. Not as many as I would like, but still more than enough to refute some absolute rule saying that it’s impossible. My favorite one is probably the 1980s economic reforms of New Zealand when the country accidentally ended up with a hardline capitalist in charge of both of their major political parties at the same time (here is a good book on it: https://www.amazon.com/New-Zealands-Far-Reaching-Reforms-Democracy-ebook/dp/B011WEJDL4 ).
Some other examples include: the re-legalization of alcohol in the US, the legalization of homeschool in the US in the 80s and 90s, the current move to constitutional carry in the US, Scandinavian countries cutting their welfare states and allowing for a private medical insurance option, the 1978 airline deregulation act, to name a few. These were not for the economic benefit of the powerful, but because people demanded it.
This is not to say that getting back your freedoms is easy, but rather that it is possible if you don’t give up. If there is an option to buy my freedom, I will take it, but while it doesn’t exist, I will fight for freedom without strings attached. Compromise positions like these belong at the Cato institute, and should be abandoned as a primary goal along with all of the other plans to make government “bads” more efficient (like tax withholding and the UBI). It is important to keep real freedom as the target.
In conclusion, I think that the archotropism framework, and the definitions that Andrew uses, are extremely flawed. Obviously, this would also reflect on the conclusions that he draws from the framework, and the vague meta framework he has around the 6 laws. I hope that he takes the time to respond, or at least write down his ideas and give clear definitions so readers can make up their own mind and we don’t talk past each other.