Category: Power Page 2 of 13

On January 9, 2023

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Watching “left wing” reactions to the Speaker’s election in the US House was instructive. Too many people were appalled when I pointed out that the left, the “Squad” specifically, could have done the same thing to get concessions in 2024.

If you were appalled at the idea then you are not a member of the left in any useful way.

(That statement and this post will occasion another torrent of abuse in the comments for me to throw into spam, and laugh about. If you think that after 30 years online, most of it moderating comments, you can insult me in a way I haven’t heard before, you are a fool as well as a piece of human garbage.)

You have power in electoral politics when you can deliver or deny votes and money and get people elected or un-elected. That’s the bottom line.

Usually when a House member tries to vote in a way that the party leadership doesn’t like, they are threatened with the cut off of money or votes.

Right wing Republicans have power because they can deliver votes and money. Right wing Republicans who chose to get concessions in exchange for the votes in the House Speaker election (which is an entirely democratic thing to do an in line with what the founders intended) have their own, largely small money, donor networks. They don’t need the Republican money machine. Furthermore their voters expect them to act on their stated beliefs.

The difference with the Squad is instructive. They claim to have left wing beliefs, but won’t vote them when it matter. Either they are scared of the threats made by leadership, or they don’t really believe their beliefs, or they know their supporters don’t really believe and won’t hold them to account. If you won’t do something when you have the power to do it, you don’t really believe in it.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write next year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

This, by the way, is why the Netroots movement failed. For a while we had influence and were a rising power in the Democratic power.

Why? Because we could raise money from sources Democrats couldn’t; we could deliver votes and we threatened incumbents with primaries.

The Netroots lost because Obama figured out how to bypass us to get the money and votes without us and our primary threat proved weak.

The radical right has succeeded to a large extent because the institutional Republican party has not been able to bypass them and their primary threat is real. They stand a good chance of winning many primary challenges and they will make an incumbent’s life miserable if crossed.

The voters are loyal to their beliefs and, while not perfect, do have an expectation that their representatives will represent those beliefs. You may laugh at them for supporting even Trump, say, but if so you’ve missed the point: Trump gave them what they wanted most, control of the Supreme Court and an end to Roe vs. Wade. Those of you old enough will remember when Bush Jr. was forced to back down on his preferred Supreme Court nominee because she was too moderate and nominate someone acceptable to the pro-life movement.

No political movement has power if its “supporters”” do not actually vote their beliefs; donate based on their beliefs; volunteer based on their beliefs and hold their elected and un-elected representatives responsible when they violate those beliefs. (This doesn’t mean you expect reps to be perfect, but on whatever matters most — say abortion for right wingers — you hold them accountable.)

If you can be peeled off because of appeals to lesser evildom or some-such, you make your movement weak and your beliefs are worthless. Without solidarity and accountability there can be no movement which matters.

I don’t agree with radical Republicans about almost anything (except that the world and America would better off if the US interfered a lot less in other counties business). They are, essentially, my ideological enemies, though so are mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

But they have power because they have solidarity and they expect and get results from their representatives. The American left refuses to use power when it has it, and its members just want performative leftism from the likes of AOC. They don’t want or expect results and they display little solidarity, and that why for over 50 years the left in the US (and the UK) has staggered from defeat to defeat.

(There’s some conflation in this article between Republican groups, that’s unavoidable. But basically the bleeding edge, wherever it is, has been winning internal Republican party battles for about 50 years. The left edge has been losing those battles and that’s why America has become an authoritarian dumpster fire with soaring inequality which is in possible terminal collapse.)

We’ll talk a little more about real belief and the use of power soon.

Life In The Absence of Coercion

On December 19, 2022

On Friday I wrote an article which asked two questions: one about what you’d do if you couldn’t be easily coerced with violence:

Imagine that if you chose no physical object could affect you. Bullets don’t work, fists don’t work, no one can grab you or put you in handcuffs, and that’s true of everyone.

The second was:

What if you didn’t need to eat or drink and you cold and heat didn’t bother you or harm you and you didn’t get sick? You might still want shelter or a home or objects like books or computers, and objects like cosmetics would exist, but not medicine. But you would need nothing.

I didn’t write very much about these because I wanted people to think it thru on their own first. If you haven’t done so, please spend some time thinking about it now before you proceed.

I’ll suggest that applying it to yourself first is a good idea before you move on to society. Absent the possibility of violence against you and with your basic needs met would you still work at the job you’re doing now? Would you pay your taxes? Would you live where you are? Would you have kept going to school?

What would you do, or have done instead?

The point here is how much of what we do is because of fear or need, with fear of not having one’s needs met being what need is really about. Marx called this “the whip of hunger”, pointing out that people had to take terrible jobs because the option of not doing so was starving to death. You didn’t need physical whips and chains, you just needed to ensure that people couldn’t meet their needs without doing what those with power wanted.

This is what the closure of the commons, among other things, was about: removing people’s ability to support themselves. Closure of the commons was done legally, but backed by force.

I will gently suggest that most people wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing if they weren’t scared of the consequences of not doing it and that they would do very different things if fear of privation and violence were taken out of the equation.

This is important personally because it speaks to something close to who you really are or would be, and lets you know what you’re doing out of fear.

It’s not the same thing as being really rich, because money is the ability to command other people’s labor and the results of their labor. If I buy a tomato at the supermarket, a lot of labor went into growing that and getting it to the supermarket.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating. Alas, I’m neither God nor Beast.)

What it does tell you is who you would be without fear.

At the social level it asks the question of what a society would look like where social ties were fundamentally voluntary. Where you were a minor God and could live without society?

Obviously you still wouldn’t live as well without society: no internet, no supermarkets, no books, no whatever. But you could do it.

This isn’t about finding holes in the specific questions: it’s not about whether you could find a way to hurt someone without touching them or what do about some jerk following you around and screaming and you can’t use violence to shut him up, though those are worthwhile questions too, because they lead to the question “is some ability to coerce good? Under what circumstances?”

Imagine having a fire department, say. If some people didn’t want to contribute, you couldn’t make them, but a fire in their house can still spread to yours. Garbage would still need to be picked up and pollution dealt with and so on.

But if someone didn’t want to do something, there would be no way of making them.

So society would have to work without coercion.

Is that even imaginable? What would it look like? What things we do today just wouldn’t happen, or exist? A government run by people who couldn’t coerce anyone would look very, very different from what we have today or almost anything we’ve ever had.

Now this goes a bit further, in that you don’t even need to eat so there’s no “if you don’t work, you don’t eat”, but we can imagine an abundance society where there is such surplus that we have more than we need even without these hypotheticals. In a sense we almost had it: for most of the last 80 years there’s been far more food produced than is needed, and yet people still went hungry and there were famines.

But the fundamental point of these questions is simply to point out what you do because of fear of violence; fear of lack, or both.

Then, should anything which exists only because of coercion exist? Is coercion a good thing in small does even if it’s not required to protect people from the violence of other people or to distribute basic necessities?

I’m pretty sure there’d still be society, for what that’s worth: people would still need to cooperate to create certain things they want. But what would society be like if people would only cooperate to get what they wanted, in the absence of fear or violence, starvation or homelessness?

This is a genuinely hard question to think about. We’ve never existed in such a society, and no such society has ever existed. As long as we’re human, it won’t exist, though some transhumanist futures might create something close to such a world.

We think about such possibilities to show ourselves the extreme, and then consider if we should work to get closer to it, even if we can’t reach the end-state.

There are other hypotheticals, perhaps better. For example, what if association was always voluntary: you can’t even hear or see or touch someone without their consent?

Think thru these questions and you’ll see both where the constraints of being humans form you, and where they form society.

Imagine A World Where Violence Or Need Are Impossible

On December 16, 2022

There are two main types of coercion in the world.

The first is violence. If you don’t do what someone else wants, they will do something physical to you.

So, imagine if that was impossible. Imagine that if you chose no physical object could affect you. Bullets don’t work, fists don’t work, no one can grab you or put you in handcuffs, and that’s true of everyone.

What would change about society if this were true? What would change about how individuals act?

The second is need. What if you didn’t need to eat or drink and you cold and heat didn’t bother you or harm you and you didn’t get sick? You might still want shelter or a home or objects like books or computers, and objects like cosmetics would exist, but not medicine. But you would need nothing.

(This is half the conception of a pagan God: they can be harmed, even killed, but they don’t need anything. Except they can also, usually, create what they need without other Gods or people.)

Banquet of the Gods by Jacques de Gheyn II

What would you be like, and what would the world be like if you; if people, didn’t need anything?

These are serious questions. Think about them.

Now, question 3 is what if both of these things were true?

These questions matter because they tell you what you put up with because of need and fear. They tell you what other people; what society does that it couldn’t do if people weren’t, in effect, vulnerable.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating. Alas, I’m neither God nor Beast.)

It’s also important to do them separately. The first is about violence, in effect, and that’s not the same as the human need for cooperation, which is much (but not all) of what the second question is about.

This is what what Donne was getting at with “no man is an island.” It is also what is related to Aristotle’s observation “But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god…”

There are things I want to say about these questions, but I’m not going to do so in this article. Instead I want you to think about them. Think about them in general and in particular: think about what you would and wouldn’t do in these three cases.

What Is Right for Those You Love Is Right for All

On August 5, 2022

Trial of Titus Manlius’s Son

The Roman Consul Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus was at war with the Latins. He instructed that anyone who disobeyed orders would be executed. His own son, and some companions left their sentry posts to skirmish with some enemies, defeated them, and returned to his father with the spoils. Seeing that his son had left his post (leaving a sentry post is particularly bad), he had him executed for disobeying orders.

Now, if you think Manlius did the wrong thing, we disagree.

“If you would do it to your son, daughter, spouse, or parent, you should do it to anyone.”

This is a fundamental rule. If someone random does something, and you would punish or reward them, then if you don’t act the same to those you care about, you are unsuited to have any authority, private or public.

Everyone has a father and mother. If you’d kill someone else’s child, or imprison them, or otherwise hurt them, then you must do the same to your child in identical circumstances. The same is true of reward: If you’d reward your child, and someone else is under your authority, they must be rewarded the same.

This is true beyond immediate authority, though: If you believe that people should be killed if they murder, you must support that for those you care about. If three crimes, no matter how petty, means 20 years in prison, then if someone you care about commits three crimes, they, too, must serve those 20 years.

Anything you would not do to someone you love in terms of punishment or reward, you cannot do or support doing to anyone else. If Manlius would have executed anyone else for disobeying orders, he had to execute his son.

The application of this to larger issues, like those who vote for war not sending their children, and those who will never be affected by a law voting for it are left, for the moment, to readers to work through.

Books and TV and Movies Are Mind Control

On June 27, 2022

I read a lot. I’ve read many thousands of books.

Books are mind control, quite literally.

The words in a book are mean to make you experience certain emotions, imagine scenes, and understand certain themes, including moral and ethical ones. A book is a small world with rules, and if you read enough books with the same rules, you learn the rules.

All of this is also true of audio and audiovisual media; they are intended to make you think certain thoughts and feel certain emotions. They, especially audiovisual media like TV, leave less room for visualization and the use of your own imagination (and are both more and less powerful because of it, doing the work invests you more, but fine control is lost).

Every time you read something (including this essay) you’re putting your mind; your consciousness, under the control of someone else.

They may have your best interests at heart (does Fox, MSNBC, Disney, or Ayn Rand?) and they may not, and even if they mean the best, well, what they think is best may not be, or may not, be for you.

This isn’t exactly a revelation. We know advertising works, we know propaganda works, we know media changes how people think of and view the world, and how they feel about it.

But I’ll suggest (trying to change your view) that you see it as mind control. It’s not necessarily bad, and in most cases you’re consenting to it, but you are letting someone else control your mind.

If you’re consuming media, including mine, and it’s making you into a person you don’t want to be, then the best thing to do is stop consuming that source of media, and in general, you should consider very carefully who you let control your mind.

Consider why they are doing so. Don’t assume it doesn’t matter — and for God’s sake, don’t think you’re immune, because you aren’t.

Media is mind control. It’s conditioning, and you need to know who’s controlling your mind, and who’s making you into what, and why, and who that benefits.

Does it benefit you?

Failures of Democracy & the Original Intellectual Fascist

On June 23, 2022

Bertrand Russel once called Plato the original intellectual fascist (in “A History of Western Philosophy,” which is well worth reading.)

In The Republic, Plato tries to come up with the ideal form of government and decides on a caste system, where children are educated, and then, based on their character and aptitude are divided into workers, enforcers, and rulers. The rulers are to be those who are philosophers by nature and training — those who love wisdom and are uninterested in wealth.

It’s easy to sneer at Plato, but there’s a reason why Whitehead’s line that “All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato” has a lot of truth to it.

And one has to remember the context: Athenian democracy, the most famous in the Grecian world (and the most famous in Western history) had failed and been defeated by Sparta, after a reign of abuses which turned its allies against it. Entire cities were destroyed, with men killed and women and children sold into slavery. The most glorious city in their world, conquered and occupied.

Plato was never a democrat, and he hated Athenian democracy for killing his teacher Socrates, but he was looking at a real problem: those who became leaders in democracy were very often unsuited to rule. Pericles was great, aye, but he led Athens into a war it lost.

There are really two problems: the selection of leaders, and how they are treated. Lord Acton said that “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Tends is important; it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to most. When you’re powerful, you don’t have to care about other people without power, and over time, most people tend not to.

Further, powerful people spend time with other powerful people as equals or near equals and, in time, they become their own faction, and look after their own interests and not those of people without power.

The story of “crusading politician goes to the capital and gets corrupted” is ancient. A cliche. It’s a cliche because it happens most of the time; there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

So, for any and all societies, the question is: How should we select leaders?

As I’ve said before, there can be no question that all societies on Earth have failed the leadership selection test (with the possible honorable exception of tiny, powerless Bhutan). We have failed because we knew of climate change and ecological collapse and we did nothing; indeed, we put our collective foot, hard, on the accelerator.

There’s an argument that this is just how humans are. There have been multiple collapses in history, including ecological, and we never seem to do anything to stop them.

But there’s another argument that we can find a better way.

Leadership and followership are related. I had this first brought home to me when I was in elementary school. From the third grade to halfway through sixth grade, I was in a class where the boys had two leaders. They were best friends, and they were friendly, inclusive of everyone, and tolerated no bullying. It wasn’t that they stopped it, though on a couple occasions did I see them step in, it was that their example was so much the opposite that it just didn’t happen.

Then, halfway through sixth grade, I went to another school and the leader of the boys was himself a bully, and bullying was rife.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen how groups and organizations become like the people who run them. Leadership is incredibly powerful, just by example, even before any “power” is used.

So the most important question in improving human society and groups is improving how we select and treat leaders, and by this measure, representative democracy has rather obviously failed.

This is noted often by conservative neo-reactionaries, but such folks are misguided at best. The eras of nobles or aristocrats (two different things), or of kings, were not better — they were often awful. The rise of agricultural kingships lead to cruelty of a type and scale hard for us now to imagine, and that continued throughout their history. One common punishment in Tudor England was opening someone’s stomach, pulling out their intestines and burning them while the person was alive; crowds would gather, treat this as entertainment and have a party while it was going on.

The answer to democracy’s failures isn’t some foolish nostalgia for a time which was worse; we need to find something genuinely new, or we will keep stumbling from catastrophe to catastrophe, and at some point said catastrophe will wipe us out.

So I suggest to readers to consider the question, which Plato tried to answer, of how to select, train, and treat rulers — and I would add that they should act in the best interests of all, especially including those they don’t know, both who are alive at the same time the leaders are, and those who will be alive after they are dead.

This is the human problem. If we can’t solve it, we can’t have good societies — save by chance and for brief periods.

The Bottom Line On Ukraine As An Example Of Decision Analysis

On April 26, 2022

I could write a lot of words on this, but let’s keep it simple.

First: Russia keeps taking land.

Second: Putin has far more reserves he can commit than Ukraine does.

Third: this means that the decision about whether to win or lose is Putin’s.

Which do you think he’ll choose.

Oh, there’s considerations around acceptable costs and a possible guerilla war later, but this it the essence of the invasion.

This is a fairly basic but important style of analysis. Ask yourself:

1) Who makes the decision?

2) Do they have sufficient resources and power to enforce their decision?

3) What do they think the right thing to do is? (This isn’t always about self interest, though it often is.)

4) What decision are they likely to make?

You can add bits to this, like “does anyone have a veto?” but this is the essence of it.

This is why I have said for years that nothing would be done about climate change till too late, because the people who have the power to make the decision don’t think it affects them, and do think that the status quo is good for them, so they aren’t going to do anything.

Most reasonably reliable analysis comes down to simple heuristics like this one. Complicated heuristics for social decision making rarely work.