AIM Framework glossary
Self-Defence Orthogonality Principle
Canonical definition
The Self-Defence Orthogonality Principle is the result that, in aggression or violence between parties at any scale, from a fight between two Individuals to a war between states, the Belief that a party acts in self-defence is held by every party whatever the facts, and each party's Belief names the other party as the aggressor with the same force. The Beliefs therefore cancel, as two signals of equal strength and opposite phase cancel, and leave no Evidence about which party is the aggressor: the likelihood ratio each Belief supplies is one. Where the conduct of the parties is also symmetrical, a judgment that prefers one party can rest only on a preference the judge supplies, which is neither a principled nor a reliable basis for the judgment. The claim of self-defence is therefore orthogonal to the response to aggression or violence: no response is selected by the claim, and every response is selected by conduct (which party is using violence, which party is supplying the means of it, which party continues after another has stopped) and need (which Individuals are below their floors). The Principle follows from Phenomenological Collapse and Dual-Role Confabulation, which produce the self-defence Belief in every party at once; from the Grievance Belief, whose type is fixed by structure rather than by accuracy, so that a defender's Grievance Belief and an attacker's are of one type; from the scale invariance of the mechanism that produces violence, which runs identically from the interpersonal to the organised scale; and from the Belief Multipolarity Principle, under which an intervention in the Subcriticality Maintenance set is specifiable on a rate, a threshold or a structural property of the arrangement and never on the content of a Belief. The Principle asks no Belief to change and no Individual under attack to stop defending themselves, and it leaves the question of which party started the violence to a procedure after the violence, whose answer decides repair rather than which party may use force.
Explanation
Anyone who uses violence, in a fist fight, a feud between neighbours or a war between nations, almost always believes they are defending themselves, and the other side believes exactly the same thing about them. The two beliefs are equal and opposite, so they cancel each other out, the way noise-cancelling headphones play a sound wave equal and opposite to the noise so that the two add up to silence. What is left when the beliefs cancel is what the parties are actually doing. If both sides are doing the same thing, nothing in the situation tells an outsider which side to favour, and any choice of side comes from the outsider's own leanings rather than from the facts. So the response to violence cannot be decided by who claims to be defending themselves. It has to be decided by what people are doing, who is using violence, who is supplying the means, who keeps going after the other side stops, and by what people need. The question of who started it is still answered, but afterwards, and the answer decides what has to be repaired, not who is allowed to use force.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Principle. Derived in Chapter 17 (Violence as Architectural Output) §17.20.1, which states the Principle for aggression or violence at every scale and applies it to war.