The Protocols of Natural Law
Rules to live by. (DN 2.13)
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
Chapter 2.13
Principles and Protocols, 3
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
—R. Buckminster Fuller
Introduction
When lovers of freedom praise the U.S. Constitution, they are frequently thinking of its Bill of Rights. Though the final state of the Bill of Rights was a watered down version of what the states and the Antifederalists wanted (and though its protections have been further degraded since), it has nonetheless served as an important bulwark for individual freedom.
It seems clear, for example, that without the First Amendment, speech rights in the United States would be in the same sorry condition they are in the countries of our Anglophone cousins. The same can be said for the Second Amendment and our right to own the tools required for the adequate defense of life, property, and liberty.
The benefit of the Bill of Rights is in the bright lines it attempts to draw: These things, the government may not do. Governments will always try to surmount these obstacles, and given enough time, they always do. But the obstacles make it harder.
Setting aside the issues with any particular existing constitution, there is value in the concept. A set of written rules can be very helpful in restraining a government.
But as voluntaryists and anarchists—and anyone else who is just sick of being tyrannized—we are faced with a curious task. We must find a way to restrain government and restrain ourselves.
The calculus is fairly simple. People want order and peace. Government monetizes that desire by promising to provide order and peace…for a price. Those of us who recognize that their price is too high (and will always grow higher until it eventually becomes intolerable) must thus find a way to demonstrate that peace and order are possible without the government’s protection racket.1
As economist Lawrence W. Reed put it, “If you don’t govern yourself, you will be governed.”2 Or we could look to the religious variant, commonly attributed to William Penn: “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” In the religious understanding, of course, God is the source of natural law.3
Simply put, we must behave ourselves, or someone else will make us behave.
In order to do this, we do not need a ton of rules. We do not need a massive (and ever-growing) accretion of manmade laws. We do not need overlords.
But we do need something.
The principles of natural law are intuitively clear, but they can be hard to put into words, and even harder to formulate into rules. But we must do our best.
Fortunately, natural law is clean and simple, and the rules emanating from it are too.
First, natural law tells us that we are pretty darned free:
There are a zillion things you are perfectly free to do.
It gives us some guidance on good behavior:
There are a lot of things that you SHOULD do.
But the most important contribution of natural law is to create a non-negotiable foundation:
Here is the short list of things you MUST NOT do.
Here is the one thing you MUST do.
The big-brain revelation—which increasing numbers of people across the globe are now having—is that this foundation applies equally to people calling themselves a ‘government.’ People are figuring out that governments everywhere are violating the foundational rules of natural law—every minute of every day, with everything they do.
The purpose of putting this foundation into words, then, is not simply to express the natural-law guardrails by which we ought to govern our own behavior. It is also to put up a massive stop sign to governments everywhere: These rules apply to you too.
Drawing from our discussion thus far, from our understanding of natural law, and from the many giants on whose shoulders we now sit, we have much grist to work with. So let us make a start of it. We can refine and improve our work down the road.
Choosing a name
As an aside, we also have the question of what to call these. “Guidelines” is too weak. “Laws” or “codes” carries the baggage of millennia of involuntary governance and manmade law.
I find myself inclined towards “protocols,” from the Greek prōto- (“first”) and kolla (“glue”). We can think of protocols as a set of rules that bind us together by restraining the things that tear us apart. And we can think of them as the “first glue” that binds a distributed nation of free people.
But here too, we can revisit the question of what to call them down the road. For now, let us just get something on paper.
The First Protocol: Consent
Our first task, then, is to inquire as to whether there is a single rule, a single protocol, that serves as a linchpin for the rest. In our discussion of first principles, we sought to derive such a rule:
No person may be subjected to any imposition of authority, initiation of force, or violation of property or personal agency to which (s)he does provide voluntary, informed, explicit, transparent, and revocable consent.
In standard libertarian thought, the nonaggression principle is generally considered to be that linchpin, and it does serve that role admirably. However, as we will see as we explore the MUST NOTS below, there are certain activities that natural law tells us are forbidden, but that are hard to describe as an initiation of force per se. (There are ways to deem all such actions as force, but it requires a bit of philosophical work.)
Yet as we have determined, all such actions are impermissible when they violate consent. We may thus be able to say that consent is actually the paramount value.
After all, some people like to spar in a karate dojo. They are consenting to the initiation of force, even knowing the risks. Some people like to get slapped around for sexual pleasure. They are consenting to an act of force that would be entirely impermissible otherwise.
Self-ownership is central to the concept of rights. Your self-ownership is the reason why things may not be done to you without your permission: initiations of force; transactions to which you did not agree; impositions of involuntary authority; and other interference with your ability to make your own choices. Respecting self-ownership first and foremost requires respect of consent. As such, it seems we should prefer our first protocol as the single-most important instruction of natural law—even above the nonaggression principle.
And now, without further preamble, let us proceed with the rest of those instructions, and the protocols that emanate therefrom.
The Protocols
MUST-NOTS (crimes)
(In the absence of consent that is voluntary, informed, explicit, transparent, and revokable),
It is impermissible for any person (or order of persons)
Violence
To use force
To attack, injure, or kill the body of any person.
Subjugation
To use force or the credible threat of force
To subject any person to any form of authority, control, dominion, or tyranny;
To extract from any person any resources, property, money, tax, or any other thing;
To compel the allegiance, adherence, obedience, vassalage, compliance, service, labor, bodily agency, or any other form of subservience of any person.
To subject the property of any person to any form of overlordship, taxation, control, use, or seizure;
Theft
To use force, the credible threat of force, or a violation of consent
To deprive any person of the possession, use, control, occupation, enjoyment, or ownership of any property, personal possession, land, asset, money, product of labor, private information, or any other alienable thing.
Trespass
To use force, the credible threat of force, or a violation of consent
To encroach upon, invade, use, or occupy the property of any person;
To cause measurable, substantive, and direct damage to the property of any person.
Fraud
To use deception
To deprive any person of the possession, use, control, occupation, enjoyment, or ownership of any property, personal possession, land, asset, money, product of labor, private information, or any other alienable thing.
Breach of Responsibility
(In any circumstance in which a specific intentional, reckless, or negligent act has produced a positive obligation of responsibility to a rightful claimant),
To fail, through neglect or choice
To satisfy the terms of a voluntary contract to which one has duly agreed;
To provide restitution and compensation to the victims of a crime one has committed;
To provide restitution and compensation to the victims of a reckless or negligent act one has committed or caused;
To provide for the care and raising of any children one has created.
Grievous coercion
To use brainwashing or extreme manipulation techniques
To deprive any person of agency or control of mental faculties;
To cause any person to commit or undergo any act of violence, subjugation, theft, trespass, fraud, or breach of responsibility;
To subject any person to any Hobson’s choice or no-win scenario.
MUSTS (positive obligations)
(In the absence of a voluntary release of responsibility by a rightful claimant),
One who has, through any specific intentional, reckless, or negligent act, acquired a positive obligation of responsibility is required
Fulfillment of Responsibility
To satisfy the terms of a voluntary contract to which one has duly agreed;
To provide restitution and compensation to the victims of a crime one has committed;
To provide restitution and compensation to the victims of a reckless or negligent act one has committed or caused;
To provide for the care and raising of any children one has created.
MAYS (freedoms)
It is permissible for any person
Self-defense
To deploy (alone, or in concert with others) proportional protective force in response to or to defend against the initiation of coercive force;
To seek remedy for any act of violence, subjection, theft, trespass, fraud, breach of responsibility, or grievous coercion.
Enjoyment of Rights
To engage in any action, choice, thought, experience, or other phenomenon of living that does not impose any act of violence, subjection, theft, trespass, fraud, breach of responsibility, or grievous coercion upon any other.
Notes
Well, now I’ve done it.
Usually, references to natural law remain in comfortably vague territory—as principles we understand intuitively, but do not need to put into words. Yet here, I have had the nerve to do exactly that. Even more dangerous—I have sought to divine, from the instructions of natural law, a set of actual rules.
It had to be done. Yes, we all have a wordless, ineffable understanding of natural law, but that is not enough. We have to get specific.
We do not need a massive political system.
We do not need a central authority.
We do not need a dung-heap of manmade legislation, churned out by people who have come to believe that they are the law.
All we need are the fundamental rules that emanate from natural law, and a common-law process to adjudicate disputes. And a few market agencies to help with all of this.
But that means that we have to do the hard work—and take the risky step—of making an explicit statement.
Hard, because once we have something down on paper, we see how devilish the details really can be. Risky, because once we have something down on paper, we also have something to criticize.
But that’s okay. In fact, it’s good. This is just a preliminary version; I will be continuing to work on it in the weeks ahead. And your constructive input is needed to help in that process. What is missing? Is anything superfluous? What can be improved?
Simplicity vs. Complexity
I have sought to split the difference between simplicity and complexity.
Simplicity is clearly desirable, but wording that is excessively open-ended can produce two undesirable outcomes: accidental misinterpretation by friends and intentional distortion by enemies.
Complexity leaves less to interpretation, but it is harder to wrap one’s mind around. Also, at some level of complexity, these would cease being protocols and would become a body of code law. We do not want that.
Concordance
At some point down the road, we can add a concordance to solve the simplicity vs. complexity problem. Any confusion about terminology or intent can easily be solved by a simple concordance.
Indeed, think how much better the situation would be in the United States if the Constitution had come with a concordance…
No, the Second Amendment is not just referring to the National Guard.
No, the General Welfare clause does not refer to taking money from some people and giving it to others.
No, the Necessary and Proper clause does not grant the government plenary power to do whatever it wants (in spite of what that jerk Hamilton might say).
Yes, when we chose to enumerate powers in Article 1, Section 8, we really did mean those and those ALONE…
The situation is not exactly analogous, since the distributed nation is not creating a central authority. But you get the idea. Clarification can help.
SHOULDS
We still have not addressed any ‘rules’ about what one should do: be nice to others, leave things better than you found them, etc. The problem there is that these cannot be made into rules. Degree of niceness, how much you should give to charity, and the like are not enforceable. The fact that you must not steal, rape, or kill IS enforceable. So we will have to address the SHOULDS in some other way.
Be brave. Be BOLD.
Let us borrow from General George Patton:
A good plan executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
Time is short, and the need is great. The distributed nation isn’t going to build itself.
The above is not perfect, but we must not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good.
So there it is. We can fix it on the fly.
(3/12/25: Post edited to improve clarity.)
Note, of course, that governments are nearly the sole cause of war, and they are the only entity with the power to print money and conscript soldiers, and thus with the ability to wage war on a global scale. Governments may produce a kind of order, but they do not produce peace at all. Just ask the 400 million people they slaughtered in the 20th century alone. If only we could ask them…or the children they would have had.
Reed is also president emeritus of one of my favorite think tanks: The Foundation for Economic Education.
As an aside, this is a place where libertarians ought to look kindly upon the values of their conservative brethren. Without a touch of the personal restraint and social mechanisms lionized by traditional conservatives, anarcho-libertarian communities will likely fail. If we cannot govern ourselves from within, we truly will be governed from without.
Phenomenal post!
I always ask people who think anarchy leads to a dystopian hellscape where cannibalism suddenly emerges and people find themselves in bondage (i.e. what Hollywood has conditioned them to think) the same question:
“There are ~ 8B people on earth. How many do you believe are naturally inclined toward senseless violence, murder, rape, etc. and would act on those impulses absent a government?”
They say whatever foolish thing they’re gonna say next. I’ve heard it all. I’ve heard 80%. My next question is this:
“Can you and I jump on a conference call with your ten closest friends and family members so I can break the unfortunate news to eight of them about how you perceive them to be?”
Next, they get all agitated and start telling me all about how their circle is different than the population-at-large. The simple truth is this. Most people are generally good, even more still just want to coexist, and those that are neither good nor interested in coexisting could be dealt with by the majority in a government-less reality. Try taking forced scarcity out of the equation and see how many of the crimes of desperation disappear.
It’s 2024. Either we can govern ourselves or we don’t deserve to exist.
IMO, you don't need to address the "shoulds". These represent conscience and are entirely the remit of the individual.