There really is no Theory of Everything in the social sciences
1. The illusion
A few days ago, one of my libertarian friends shared this X post (in French) on a common Signal group. Here is an automatic translation into English of some parts of it:
“The whole thing comes down to 5 axioms. Humanity has been hoodwinked by making itself seem complicated. The social sciences, economics, political philosophy. Thousands of pages, dissertations, schools of thought, movements, counter-movements. To what end? A muddled mess in which nobody knows what is true any more. When in fact the whole thing comes down to 5 axioms.”
And then:
“Axiom 1 — You own yourself. Your body, your time, your mind, your labour. Nobody else does. Anything that contradicts this is a form of slavery.
Axiom 2 — What you produce belongs to you. If you own yourself, you own what comes from you. Your labour, your ideas, your accumulated capital.
Axiom 3 — You have no right to initiate violence. Neither physical violence, nor violence by proxy through the State. You may defend yourself. You may not aggress.
Axiom 4 — Free exchange is positive by definition. If A and B exchange voluntarily, it is because each values what they receive more than what they give. Otherwise they would not do it.
Axiom 5 — The rule of law exists to protect 1, 2, 3, and 4. Not to violate them. The legitimate role of the law: to enforce contracts, punish aggression, protect property. Full stop. Everything beyond that remit is a deviation.
That is all.”
And when this guy says “that is all”, he really means it:
“No need for 800 pages of Piketty. No need for a sociology professor. No need for Bourdieu, Habermas, or Stiglitz. These 5 axioms are sufficient to analyse any economic, political, or social discourse (sic).”
Five axioms is all we need. How?
“The test is simple: when someone talks about economics or politics, check whether their reasoning respects these 5 premises. If they say ‘we must redistribute’ → they are violating Axiom 2. If they say ‘we must regulate this market’ → they are violating Axiom 4. If they say ‘the State must decide on your behalf, for your own good’ → they are violating Axiom 1. If they say ‘property is theft’ → they are undermining the entire foundation. If they contradict these axioms, they are urinating in your brain.”
Because, to reiterate:
“Humanity is simple. It is the intellectual parasites who have an interest in making you believe it is complicated.”
There you have it. How come nobody had thought of that before?
2. Falsifying the illusion
I wrote very recently about the temptation to reduce all of human complexity to a single theory that could explain everything. Libertarianism is certainly liable to this, but in general any political ‐ism has a strong tendency to fall into this trap, because whatever comes before “ism” is by definition given disproportioned relevance and is therefore a strong candidate to be considered the fundamental force or the guiding principle above everything else.
Libertarians (I mean anarcho-capitalists here) put their Non-Aggression Principle (NAP) on a pedestal (axiom 3 above). And by all means, that is a sensible heuristic to navigate life. But even the most innocent-looking and benign of “axioms” fall short or have to be modulated or contradicted, sometimes.
For instance, issuing credible threats of violence against specific targets is a punishable offence in most developed countries, and for good reasons. If someone is sufficiently likely to imminently attack someone else, the right thing to do may be to take their resources or weapons from them (against Axiom 2) or to detain them (against Axiom 1). “Initiating violence” (or expropriating private goods) may be the moral response to mere acts of speech, under some conditions.
Also, sometimes violence has to be initiated against someone who is not being violent against ourselves: if someone is attacking (or threatening to attack) someone else, sometimes the right thing to do is to intervene to (physically) prevent the aggressor from causing (more) harm, even if we were not threatened or damaged ourselves. That intervention may include restraining their freedom (against Axiom 1) or being violent towards them (against Axiom 3).
To this, the clever libertarian would respond:
“Ah! Of course we must help those who are being abused. But what would happen in such scenario is that the actual or potential victim would ask me to help them, that call for help would be our implicit free ‘contract’, and therefore by attacking the attacker I'm merely fulfilling my contract with the victim and technically not initiating violence myself, but defending the victim by proxy. No contradicting any of the axioms here.”
To which I would reply:
First of all, notice that, according to you, “violence by proxy through the State” being bad is a corollary of Axiom 3 and no justification for it is given, but violence by proxy through something-other-than-a-State being bad is not. Why? What if that something-other-than-a-State is a group of individuals, all agreeing freely to collectively defend a potential victim through violence? What if it's a corporation? What if it's all the inhabitants of some territory? What if just 57% of those inhabitants want to use violence to defend that victim in some other territory, but at the same time all inhabitants of the land have an ongoing compact by which they pool together some resources long-term (call that a “military”), decide to use those resources collectively, and agree to delegate some decision-making to a temporary body of institutions or special individuals (call that a “democracy”)? Perhaps Axiom 3 isn't sufficient, and we need a clear way to distinguish the evil State from other forms of collective action that look very similar to it?
But most importantly — and even if we granted the distinction between being violent as a State (forbidden) and being violent as a free collective of individuals to defend a victim (good) — the “free contract” and the “victim defending themselves by proxy” provisions do not hold, either.
A victim may lack the knowledge, the resources, or the capacity to formally ask for help. By the victim's own worldview or framework, they may not even know that they are being subject to violence, or being kept down by an implicit threat of violence. The victim may not know what is theirs to keep in the first place, or that a different state of affairs is possible (think colonialism, extractive institutions, illiteracy, status quo bias). The victim may not know that we exist, what resources we have, or that we would be willing to help them. So waiting for the victim, or potential victim, to send us that e-mail with their plea for help and the attached term sheet before we lift a finger to defend them may be unrealistic and immoral.
The victim, as a group of individuals (call that a “country”), may be so damaged by the aggressor already that they lack the coordination resources (institutions, infrastructure) to discuss their situation, delegate to special individuals, broadcast a call for help, and negotiate the terms of that “contract for help” with another country. That country may be in such a dire situation that surviving another day always take precedence over deploying the resources needed to hold a referendum to elect the Axiom 3 National Comittee and then summon it to discuss whether and how to ask other countries for help.
But this “framework” can't contain all of (good) economics, either. “We must regulate this market” is sometimes a legit proposition, even if it “violates Axiom 4”. Air would be polluted and fisheries would be depleted in libertarian utopia, too. Externalities need regulation.
Abusive monopolies need forces external to the market to be prevented, too. Even under perfect competition and perfect symmetry of information (and those conditions are rarely, if ever, met), monopolies can arise as a consequence of chance, first-mover advantage, network effects, or coordination problems. Bad monopolies have to be broken. Not even Peter Thiel (perhaps the most staunch defender of monopolies) is in favour of all monopolies (“if you told me there was a monopoly that was going to stop all innovation and squash everybody for the next 100 years, that's probably a pretty unhealthy dynamic. […] I would be disturbed if you had a permanent monopoly”).
Let's see other ways this particular “framework” is very far from being “sufficient to analyse any economic, political, or social discourse”. Think of the following scenarios.
According to the framework, self-defence is permitted, private property is sacred, assets such as land and weapons can be traded freely. From this follows that I can store a knife, or a collection of rifles, in my house. What if I'm worth in the vicinity of a trillion monetary units, acquire archipelagos across the planet, and decide to manufacture or store a nuclear arsenal and the most potent biological weapons in those islands? Which of the axioms prevents someone from doing that? (If your answer is: “none of them, and that is fine”, then this is where I leave the debate. I have used this “nukes in the shed” thought experiment in the past to evaluate objectivists and anarchists I met, and it proved very efficient in telling serious thinkers and dogmatists apart.)
What if another restless billionaire (or a few million rich people pooling their resources together) decide to buy the most cherished cultural artefacts in the world and use them to fuel a bonfire, for fun? After all, Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Leicester, many paintings by Rembrandt, the rights to all the songs by The Beatles or to One Hundred Years of Solitude — those are all private property, right? No problem vaporising every trace of The Lord of the Rings and all associated cultural products from the surface of the Earth. This comprehensive framework would sanction our naughty billionaire's pet project. And since I dare to object, I must be “urinating in your brain”.
How does the libertarian pentalogue help us adjudicate fair historical reparations for people spread across disputed lands for generations? How does it illuminate the tensions between the autonomy and the property of infants versus their tutors'? How exactly does it solve the trolley problem, unambiguously, in all its variants? How does it settle, once and for all, capital punishment, the ticking-bomb scenario, abortion, Omelas?
3. Consent and the social contract
At this point, the clever libertarian may point out that even if some of the above interventions and exceptions to the axioms may yield benefits to society, and even if he may agree that they are the ethical thing to do, they are vitiated as long as they are imposed on people without their explicit consent. States are imposed on us, citizens don't consent to them, and the social contract is a fraud.
That clever libertarian is not wrong. As libertarian-adjacent myself, I am sympathetic to those arguments. And yet.
The vast majority of us, disgruntled with “the system” as we are, nevertheless opt to live within it. It's true that we do not choose to be born into a specific jurisdiction, but it's also true that most people don't move to a different one. Why? The majority of people don't become hermits or rebels: instead, they own cars, pursue degrees, sign mortgages, use passports, are tied to phone numbers, request public subsidies, drink water from the tap, and call emergency services when they are needed. Ugly as it sounds, as long as we participate in and gain something from society, we owe society something, implicitly.
Even if you think you owe only your parents, they in turn benefitted from so many others (your parents were no hermits, either). Besides, nobody's a true hermit. Even if you retired to a mountaintop, you'd travel there by paths and roads opened by many others, and ultimately rely on resistant crops, useful animal breeds, batteries, water purification, antibiotics and so many other things discovered or invented generations before your time. At some level, it's wrong to think that one doesn't owe anything to the human species as a whole simply because one already pays for all the goods and services they consume.
If nothing else, you benefit from accumulated culture and language.
Yes, in theory you could change the social contract. But in theory you could also change English to replace the word “partisanship” with “xuf”, which is shorter and therefore easier to type, and would thus benefit everyone. Or you could have everyone switch at once to using Finnish (which is one of the most information-dense and least ambiguous natural languages) to be more efficient in our communication. Yet you're stuck with “partisanship” (and probably with English too) because: tradition, individual tastes, coordination problems.
We all owe something to society, if only because there are matches to make fire, because there's the Pantheon, and because there are thousands of libraries, each preserving thousands of useful ideas from the past, all at our disposal.
Dogmatic libertarians ignore that there are implicit contracts, across time and across space. Contracts that we don't sign (that we couldn't sign), but have to be honoured nevertheless. Across space, for instance, because a victim may live on the other side of the planet, ignore that we exist and that we can help, and never communicate with us. Across time, because people who are long dead decided to donate to us Indo-European languages, the Encyclopedia, markets, institutions, a forest, the town square, the metric system, musical notation… so much that we benefit from.
What's our end of the bargain in those contracts that we did not sign? Respect that inheritance, pass it along to future generations, and help those in need. In more specific terms, it may be: help maintain that forest, produce more music to contribute to the commons, take care of others, preserve the past, advance scientific discoveries for the common good (either directly or by funding scientific institutions), or give away a chunk of our wealth to keep the compact alive. That's what all those other signatories of the “contract” from centuries ago would have asked from us in return, had we had the opportunity to actually negotiate with them.
If you object to this framing, and regard implicit contracts as vacuous nonsense to defend statism, consider this other thought experiment.
You are hiking alone, high up in the snowy mountains, when a storm breaks. You spend hours battling the icy weather, completely lost in the blizzard, and after a day or two you are exhausted and about to collapse and die. Suddenly, you see a refuge in the rock. Being such a good libertarian, the first thing you do is try to recall if you own a cabin in the mountain, notice that you do not, and from that infer that this cabin is someone else's sacrosanct private property. You wouldn't dare forcing the door to the cabin, but you peer at the window and can see through the misty glass a medical kit, blankets, fuel, matches, canned food, batteries, a radio, an SOS flare… in sum, everything that would save your life. This is clearly an emergency shelter that someone built and equipped for themselves or for others.
A dogmatist we-signed-no-contract-here libertarian would have to curl at the door of the cabin and resign to die, unable to accept neither obligations nor privileges towards someone else's property — no matter how dire the situation. Someone who believed in implicit contracts, on the other hand, would recognise the shelter as an implicit agreement, and agree to the reasonable terms of the deal.
The deal, in this case, could take different forms. Perhaps the refuge was truly intended for its owner only, the door locked, and the hiker forced to break in to save his life. Perhaps the door was unlocked and the hiker found a note on the table welcoming him to enter and to make use of everything, for free. Or perhaps the builder of the shelter asks on his note for something in return. Like, pay him some sum for the service when the hiker is back to safety. Or, return in the future to restock the shelter and leave it ready for the next mountaineer in distress. Or, sacrifice your eldest and devote the rest of your life to worshipping Loki. Whatever the particulars, the right thing to do in this situation is to recognise the implicit contract in front of your eyes, and agree to it, in full or in part.
What is a State, if not an implicit contract across time and space?
Remember how I said that our ancestors passed along to us libraries, inventions, institutions and ideas, all useful things at our disposal for free? Well, it's bigger than that: our ancestors decided to leave us an entire planet full of stuff, when they were not obligated to leave behind anything at all.
Think about it. If you so believe in private property, you have to admit that twenty or thirty generations ago, the entire world belonged to a few million human beings. After all, there was no-one else around, so whose else would it be? Opting to leave behind some of that (let alone most of that) for distant descendants that they would never meet, or even for the descendants of others — instead of hunting, eating, burning, defacing, burying, blowing it all up — is the ultimate implicit contract with the future. You can call that contract “humanity”, “civilisation”, “culture”, “nation”, “State”… it does not change the fact that owe at least some loyalty to it.
Note that this reasoning does not defend that all implicit contracts are fair (or that all States are always justified in their actions). If the State imposes abusive laws, or burdens that are too onerous, of course the right options (after having fought to change that via the State's own mechanisms) are black markets, civil disobedience, boycott, and ultimately revolution.
When the owner of the refuge demanded that you kill your first-born and waste the rest of your life in exchange, you were justified in agreeing to an amended version of his original contract. If you trespassed to save your life and there was no welcome note on the table, you are bound by an implicit contract to sufficiently compensate the owner for the troubles you caused him (and the owner is bound by that contract to be satisfied with that). The ancestors of your nation condemned all albinos, or all women, or all Christians, to a life of misery? Of course that implicit contract is null and void.
(If you are now wondering what is The One Missing Axiom to adjudicate whether an implicit contract is fair or not, the next section is for you.)
4. It's complicated
Perhaps the author's reaction to all this is to say:
“Well, of course. For the sake of brevity, I left out the provision that using violence to defend a third party is also acceptable. And I concede that I forgot this or that edge case. We can amend that to avoid ambiguity. But the five Axioms work, in essence.”
Our answer should be: no, but that proves that the whole project is misguided in the first place. You don't get it. It's not one or two special cases. It's not about polishing the five Axioms, or realising that a sixth one is needed. It's that humanity is all edge cases and ambiguity, from end to end, all day long. That's why totalising efforts like this one are doomed to fail, every time.
Every attempt to reduce any of the social sciences to a simple set of principles is doomed to fail. In moral philosophy, in political philosophy, in economics, in sociology.
Here's a good heuristic that support discarding by default any Theory of Everything: there are many books. Like, many, many books (“thousands of pages, dissertations, schools of thought, movements, counter-movements”). The best minds over millennia poured themselves into those thorny questions. Is all that “a muddled mess in which nobody knows what is true any more”? Not quite. Most of those thinkers were truly onto something, and we have built collectivelly on top of their insights. And yet random freshmen with a penchant for Ayn Rand think they have solved it all.
Apart from that, that post included many other red flags: “the whole thing comes down to…”, “the test is simple”, “that is all”, “no need for [insert influential books, thinkers or disciplines]”. And, worst of all: “humanity is simple”. That last sentence alone should invalidate any discourse.
This is not meant to be a critique of libertarianism per se. Others have written that post much better than I could dream. And besides, like I said, I generally like the libertarian impulse (at least in prosperous welfare societies, the fight for smaller States, more individual autonomy and privacy, and lower taxes is directionally correct).
If I have a conclusion, it's that all of us naturally rebel against the messiness of human nature, and of the universe at large. That includes the best minds of the last three thousand years. It's statistically unlikely that we are better than them.
AI tools were used only for research and for syntax checking.
Yarn ball: Wikimedia (Creative Commons)
Cabin in the snow: Wikimedia (public domain)