Building a Just World, Part 7

The Common Respect Protocol (Draft 1)

In parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, we blazed the trail toward a Common Respect Protocol (CRP)—a voluntary agreement intended to keep the peace and maintain a polycentric jurisdictional ecosystem based on consent and human respect. Now it’s time—finally!—to see where that trail leads.

A brief review

So what do we know?

We know that the valid consent of the individual is the only rightful foundation for any exchange, agreement, authority, or encroachment upon the person, property, or liberty of another.

Thus, a just world must respect individual consent.

We know that force is justified only in response to actual violations (trespasses against person, property, or liberty).

Thus, in a just world, we would not use force to impose a system of governance or force others to live a certain way—not even democratically.

We know it is a fallacy to presume that the only way humans can possibly get along is if we are forced to live under a single system. We figured it out with churches, and we can figure it out with governance solutions, too. Cramming everyone into a single ‘solution’ is unnecessary and a source of permanent strife.

Thus, in a just world, people would be free to ESTABLISH their own polities and experiment with different ways of life; AFFILIATE with the experiments of others on mutually agreeable terms; EXIT from such polities or SECEDE from involuntary governance; or REMAIN ungoverned and hold their property separate from any jurisdiction.

Controversial though such notions may sound, this is where the logic takes us. A truly just world would see the rise of a polycentric jurisdictional ecosystem that includes many different types of free polities (territorial, distributed, virtual) and free regions in which people can stay right where they are and choose from among competing systems of governance or market agencies that provide governance-type services.

But this logic also leads us straight to a dilemma.

Resolving the tension

Respecting consent means allowing people to form and join polities whose internal policies may not fully respect consent. Preventing such polities from forming, or meddling in their affairs, would itself violate the very principle we seek to uphold. How do we navigate this Scylla and Charybdis?

Ultimately, we know that there are no perfect solutions in this world—only tradeoffs. And the main tradeoff we will have to accept is that people must be free to choose systems we might not like, so long as their initial participation is voluntary. We can rightly expect that no one will be forced to live in any particular system, but we cannot go too much further than that. If the CRP reads like it is trying to smuggle in a world government, no one is going to sign on.

The CRP, in other words, cannot attempt to do too much. The goal is to create the conditions in which consent is respected at the boundaries, not to govern anyone’s internal affairs. We must find a balance that allows everyone to coexist.

As such, the CRP must also be a voluntary agreement. It should be something that people, polities, and agencies want to agree to, not something they are forced to agree to. It should help to cultivate a climate of peace. It must enshrine certain essentials—respect for property and free travel, the impermissibility of initiating violence, and the need for peaceful dispute resolution—but it must also tread lightly.

We can reasonably ask signatories not to hold anyone captive. We can insist that they not make indiscriminate war upon their neighbors. We can ask them to live and let live, and promise the same in return.

So let us now make our first attempt at such a document. We can add, subtract, and adjust as needed, but it’s time to get something real on paper. To wit,

The Common Respect Protocol (draft 1)

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In order to

Secure the self-determination of persons and polities,

Facilitate peaceful coexistence,

Encourage prosperity,

Safeguard the consent of the individual, and

Enshrine a spirit of respect in human relations,

We, on behalf of ourselves or as recognized representatives of our respective polities or agencies, do hereby agree that

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I. Non-Aggression

We shall not initiate force against individuals, groups, polities, or agencies.

II. Defensive Response

We may deploy protective force in response to the initiation of force.

III. Respect for Personhood

We shall respect the bodily autonomy and voluntary consent of all individuals.

IV. Respect for Property

We shall not encroach upon, seize, damage, or obstruct the use of the property of others without consent.

V. Freedom of Exit

Individuals shall be free to discontinue association with, and depart from the physical and legal jurisdiction of, any polity or agency, unilaterally and without detention, coercion, obstruction, or any conditions on exit. Contractual obligations may persist, but shall not be used to prevent or delay exit.

VI. Freedom of Transit

We shall not obstruct the peaceful movement of persons, goods, or data along routes designated for common or inter-polity transit, and shall respect the neutrality of such routes.

VII. Arbitration

Disputes among polities, agencies, and individuals shall be resolved through arbitration mechanisms prearranged by agreement or otherwise mutually recognized by the parties.

VIII. No Collective Punishment

Enforcement actions shall be directed only at specifically identified responsible actors and shall not target uninvolved individuals or any persons by association.

IX. Non-Interference

We shall not intervene in the internal governance or operations of any polity or agency.

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In voluntary agreement and a spirit of cooperation, for mutual prosperity and peace, we commit to these principles and protocols and commend them to the world.

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Informal exegesis

We can (and should) write a formal concordance down the road. For now, let’s settle for a more informal exploration.

I.
We begin by grounding the CRP in non-violence. This is, and must be, foundational.

II.
We follow up by acknowledging the necessary corollary: that protective force is justified in response to violence.

Note the simplicity of the language. Yes, we could start adding in qualifiers such as proportional protective force, but this becomes a slippery slope. This is neither a legal document nor a philosophical one: It is a set of protocols. Thus, the language needs to be simple, principled, and universal. Details can be spelled out in an official concordance, and there will no doubt be further clarifying agreements once it is applied in the real world.

III.
Our statement on the respect of personhood follows the same approach. Obviously, there is much more we could say about the nature of the individual and the respect that nature entails. But we are going for a grounded, operational simplicity, not a complete philosophical treatise.

IV.
“Obstruct the use of” helps to expand the scope to include acts such as blocking a road or harbor, or locking someone out of their own building. Yet here too, the top-layer protocol must balance the need for simplicity with the desire to be comprehensive. Further specificity—on matters such as digital property, pollution, radio frequencies, and the like—will have to be handled separately.

V.
Real freedom of EXIT is a necessary condition of consent. Without it, polities become no different from the involuntary governments of today: demanding loyalty, permitting some amount of voice, but never allowing a viable exit option (except to some other involuntary system).

At first blush, it seems that a proper condition of consensual order would also require formal statements of respect for the other jurisdictional rights: to ESTABLISH, AFFILIATE, SECEDE, and REMAIN. However, for reasons previously specified, this complicates matters. The best compromise is to insist on respect for EXIT. That is our primary kill-switch against tyranny.

Note that we carefully crafted this section to close loopholes: exit taxes and fees, detention and delays, and other ways that a polity might allow exit in theory, but not in practice. These must be discouraged. Exit is understood in the CRP to be unilateral and unconditional: it does not require permission.

At the same time, we ensure that while no one may rightly be held hostage, contractual obligations, debts, and responsibilities are not erased by exit.

As always, the devil is in the details: How, for example, will contractual obligations be satisfied after exit? This and much more will need to be resolved as part of the arbitration processes to be established pursuant to Section VII.

Note also the inclusion of legal jurisdiction. This helps avoid any claim along the lines of Yes, you’re no longer physically here, but you still belong to us. Applying these concepts to agencies as well as polities adds a further bulwark.

VI.
As discussed at some length, a polycentric jurisdictional ecosystem cannot survive without a robust respect for transit.

Humans need to move. Humans also need property, and it is not conducive to the use of property to have people traipsing across it day and night. The establishment of recognized common thoroughfares is the primary way in which these two basic human needs are harmonized.

This is important in any circumstance, but it becomes more complicated in a polycentric ecosystem with more polities and private jurisdictions within a given region. By using the phrase “routes designated for common or inter-polity transit,” we acknowledge that private entities will have jurisdiction over their own internal thoroughfares. We are simply requesting respect for routes designated for travel between polities, in unaffiliated regions, and across large landmasses.

This ecosystem will also greatly benefit from a general acknowledgment of such thoroughfares as neutral ground. Whether these are owned by private corporations, a consortium of interests, or the last vestiges of an involuntary government, neutrality is essential for free movement and trade, and to avoid weaponizing access to travel as a tool of conflict. Neutrality also ensures that genuine EXIT is possible.

By expanding beyond the movement of people to include goods and data, we make an important statement: that blockades, trade strangulation, and information warfare are no more conducive to common respect than any other interference with peaceful travel.

VII.
Any talk of this decentralized world of the future inevitably elicits a boilerplate objection: Without government, warlords will take over.

The history of the twentieth century alone ought to be enough to demonstrate the flaw in this argument. In less than 100 years, governments murdered approximately 400 million people in a combination of world-scale wars and population-scale democides. The ”warlords” that defenders of the involuntary state so often warn us about could never achieve even a tiny fraction of that carnage.

As Hugo Grotius explained early in the seventeenth century, governments are in a “state of nature” relative to each other. They have no superior authority to which to appeal or from which to take orders.

Entities like the United Nations do not solve that problem.

The UN’s member states are just that: nation-states, whose authority is based entirely on force (and upon their captive peoples’ willingness to acquiesce thereto). A fair number of these states are quasi-despotic in nature, but even if they were not, the United Nations is still a chorus of players who maintain their authority through violence. Such an entity will never be able to keep the peace because its members are not peaceful.

The polycentric ecosystem we are describing will not be perfect. It won’t eliminate violence or reform human nature. But it does begin with an advantage: a growing recognition of the fundamental necessity of consent. Instead of authority being imposed, an increasing amount of authority will be based on agreement.

This shift in ethos lights a pathway toward resolving disputes by means other than war. By arranging for arbitration procedures in advance, signatories solve Grotius’ “state of nature” problem: they agree to a neutral third party to act as a “common superior.” Unlike current circumstances, however, this arrangement is temporary and purpose-driven, and the common superior is not an overlord but a chosen expert with a good reputation for fairness and probity. Moreover, this expert must perform in a competitive market, rather than simply imposing the because-we-said-so authority that every government does today. (We will discuss more precisely how this will work in future installments.)

Note that our wording “prearranged by agreement or otherwise mutually recognized” allows for prior contractual arrangements, but it also stipulates the possibility of choosing a mutually acceptable arbitrator ad hoc, if no such prior arrangement had yet been made. This also guards against attempts to impose a judgment from a unilateral tribunal.

The CRP is a set of top-level protocols, not a complete legal document. There are, of course, ways that bad actors can attempt to game any system, and these will have to be addressed in future agreements. Overall, however, replacing government courts with a private-law arbitration system solves a number of problems. And it is exactly the sort of solution we would expect to find in a just world.

VIII.
The lex talionis (“An eye for an eye”) was intended to be a civilizational upgrade—an attempt to encourage proportional punishment of responsible parties, rather than your whole damn clan for an eye. But the truth is, the modern nation-state has taken us in the wrong direction in many ways.

Yes, local justice has gotten somewhat more proportional, but collective punishment is still very much a feature of state warfare. Civilians are intentionally targeted or considered ”collateral damage.” Entire cohorts are considered guilty by association. Collective punishment is a moral minefield, and yet it has largely become a normalized part of governance across the modern world.

A civilizationally advanced approach begins with a recognition that this must change.

IX.
The purpose of the CRP is to offer a framework for peaceful coexistence: the smallest set of shared protocols that allow different systems to coexist and interact without conflict. Section IX sends a vital message:

We don’t need to agree on how we govern ourselves internally—only on how we treat each other at the boundaries.

A quintessential example is a collection of Amish farms. They might agree to a set of protocols designed to harmonize relations with their “English” neighbors. But they’re certainly not going to let anyone govern their internal affairs. And neither would anyone else.

That’s the whole point. Individuals, alone or acting in concert, ought to enjoy complete self-determination. All we can reasonably require is the same respect in return. The CRP’s goal is to help make that happen.

A Just World

Problem

Throughout history, the lives of individuals have been playthings in the hands of others.

Under hereditary rule, much of your fate was in the hands of monarchs and nobles. For shorthand, let’s call that HumanGovernance 1.0. Over a period of about 300 years, we moved on to 2.0—replacing most of the world’s monarchies with democracies and republics.

Yet the same core problem remained. We substituted majorities for monarchs and administrators for aristocrats, but at the end of the day, the fate of the individual still rests in the hands of others.

Victorious conquerors. Venal kings. Vicious communists. Voting majorities. The type and degree of severity changes, but the fundamental problem remains: Someone else’s will overrides your own, and decisions are made for you to which you never consented.

Worse still, monarchy, communism, democracy, and all the rest are inevitably controlled by a small number of concentrated interests. Thus, they all ultimately resolve to oligarchy. Wherever there is inescapable, involuntary authority, there will be abuse, tyranny, or worse.

Solution

In order for there to be true justice in this world, we must evolve to a condition—call it 3.0—in which peaceful people can make decisions about their own lives, free from any forcible impositions whatsoever. People must be free to choose how they are governed.

We have envisioned what such a world might look like.

There have been partial and imperfect hints of it in the past—Brehon Ireland, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hanseatic League, Cospaia, and others. These lasted far longer than the many conventional nation-states that have come and gone. And many smart writers have done significant work in explaining how a modern free market in security and justice can not only produce order, but do so more efficiently, at lower cost, and without the inescapable coercion of the state.

Such a world is decentralized and polycentric. Such a world, as we have discussed, will have its own tensions. But such a world is definitely possible.

So, does the CRP help stabilize such a world? Does it offer a common ground upon which many or most will want to stand? Does it successfully split the difference—establishing the necessary respect for human consent while avoiding meddling in everyone’s business?

That’s not a rhetorical question. You are a part of this. Please feel free to offer your thoughts and suggestions.

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Cover page | Preface | Introduction 1 | Introduction 2 | Introduction 3 |

(Part I) Why: 1.0 | 1.1 | 1.2 | 1.3 | 1.4 | 1.5 | 1.6 | 1.7 | 1.8 | 1.9 | 1.10 | 1.11 | 1.12 | 1.13 | 1.14 | 1.15 | 1.16 | 1.17 | 1.18 | 1.19 | 1.20 | 1.21 |1.22

(Part II) What: 2.0 | 2.1 | 2.2 | 2.3 | 2.4 | 2.5 | 2.6 | 2.7 | 2.8 | 2.9 | 2.10 I 2.11 | 2.12 | 2.13 | 2.14 | 2.15 | 2.16 | 2.17 | 2.XX | 2.18 | 2.19 | 2.20 | 2.21 | | Where: 3.0 | 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5 | 3.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 3.9 | 3.10 | 3.11 | 3.12 | 3.13 || Who: 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.2 | 4.3 | 4.4 | 4.5 | 4.XX | 4.XY | 4.6 | 4.7 | 4.8 | 4.9 | 4.10 | 4.11 | 4.12 | 4.XZ | 4.13 | 4.YX | 4.14 | 4.15 | 4.16 | 4.17 | 4.18 | 4.19 | 4.YY | 4.YZ | 4.ZX | 4.20 | 4.21 | 4.22 || How: 5.0 | 5.1 | 5.2 | 5.3 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 5.6 | 5.X.1 | 5.7 I 5.X.2 | 5.8 | 5.X.3 | 5.9 | 5.10 I 5.X.4 | 5.X.5 | 5.11 | 5.12 | 5.13 | 5.14 | 5.15 | 5.16 | 5.X.5 | 5.X.6 | 5.17 | 5.18 | 5.19 | 5.X.7 | 5.20