Month: August 2018 Page 1 of 2

THIS POST IS BY MANDOS, NOT IAN

The fundamental unit of representative democracy in the vertically-stacked, hierarchical systems of governance of most modern states that claim to be democratic is the political career of the individual representative, not, as it might seem on the surface to some, the vote. This is necessarily the case, because during the term of representation, the representative is only bound at best indirectly to the will of the voters, and in formal terms, principally through the risk of being rewarded or punished at the next election through the ballot box. The reward of cushy post-office positions and honours, effectively post hoc bribery, is not “formally” a part of the system in the way that losing office definitely is.

The representative is therefore an independent agent, subject to incentives and disincentives, even under the condition of the best intentions and personal incorruptibility. The purest-intentioned elected representative must thus weigh the good that can be done now in terms of their official powers against the risk of losing office — thereby losing the ability to do future good at a critical juncture, and worse, potentially losing the position to someone who will use the power to actively do evil/harm, from the perspective of the current representative or candidate. This means that this hypothetical “best-intentioned representative” is constantly faced with the possibility that foregoing good or accepting an evil may extend their term of office to do greater good and that doing good or rejecting evil may end their term of office and usher in a greater evil.

In our large-population, modern states with elaborate political hierarchies (municipal, county, state/provincial, national/federal, with multiple branches, etc.), it takes considerable resources to operate a candidacy, because one is usually competing against other candidates for the attention of a large number of voters. Such systems vary across countries, but this fact is the same in all cases under conditions of formal electoral freedom. Even under ideal conditions of equitable campaign financing and media access, election campaigns will still differ in resources relative to the effectiveness of their message and numerous, difficult-to-control conditions relating to the number of activists and volunteers that can be mustered to raise awareness, bring voters to the polls, and so on. Furthermore, because the system is hierarchical, again, with other conditions being hypothetically equal, very few (personally ideal) candidates can be successful trying to start at the “top” of the system (e.g., president, prime minister), but instead must fight the electoral battle upstream, if they have the ambition of doing good at a larger scale.

All of this necessarily becomes part of the incentive calculation for our hypothetically best-intentioned candidate.  Simply put, such a candidate must factor in the ability to maintain a stable support base to pursue a political career not only to implement one good policy or piece of legislation, but over time, and upwards in the hierarchy.  (Indeed, not at least appearing to strive for status-improvement in the hierarchy in the future may weaken a representative’s ability to enact policy in the present, by causing their colleagues to filter out their future influence on said colleagues’ own political careers.)

What does this mean for the role of ideology and material benefit in the political system? Quite simply, both are effectively marginal/tangential to the system as a whole. The main currency of representative democracy is politics itself, whereby good or at least ideologically-consistent policy is a by-product created by interactions among representatives who must necessarily balance all decisions against the benefit of continuing their political careers. This, I must emphasize once again, is under the hypothetical conditions of maximum honesty and good intentions among such representatives, conditions that of course we do not obtain in the real world.

Anyone, inside or outside the formal houses of representative democracy, who is principally interested in an ideological or material aim that they believe must be achieved through legislature or state orders, is therefore also constrained to consider the incentive structure of representative democracy in terms of the political career of the representatives.  This means, even given ideal circumstances of personal probity and ideological alignment which do not hold in the real world, that they must provide a stable basis upon which a significant number of representatives can resolve the choice between doing good now and doing good later at the minimal total “goodness cost” overall. Ideological movements that are not able to supply an close-to-optimal resolution between these choices will, one way or another, not be able to obtain the cooperation of sufficient representatives as to implement policy.

Then, factor in the reality that we do not live in an ideal world of equal financial resources, media time, personal probity, ideological commitment, and so on…

Let us speak today of how a new world is created. Let us do so by examining a creation myth: the Norse one.  Here it is, in part.

Odin, Vili, and Vé killed the giant Ymir.

When Ymir fell, there issued from his wounds such a flood of blood, that all the frost ogres were drowned, except for the giant Bergelmir who escaped with his wife by climbing onto a lur [a hollowed-out tree trunk that could serve either as a boat or a coffin]. From them spring the families of frost ogres.

Earth, trees, and mountains

The sons of Bor then carried Ymir to the middle of Ginnungagap and made the world from him. From his blood they made the sea and the lakes; from his flesh the earth; from his hair the trees; and from his bones the mountains. They made rocks and pebbles from his teeth and jaws and those bones that were broken.

Dwarfs

Maggots appeared in Ymir’s flesh and came to life. By the decree of the gods they acquired human understanding and the appearance of men, although they lived in the earth and in rocks.

Sky, clouds, and stars

From Ymir’s skull the sons of Bor made the sky and set it over the earth with its four sides. Under each corner they put a dwarf, whose names are East, West, North, and South.

The sons of Bor flung Ymir’s brains into the air, and they became the clouds.

Then they took the sparks and burning embers that were flying about after they had been blown out of Muspell, and placed them in the midst of Ginnungagap to give light to heaven above and earth beneath. To the stars, they gave appointed places and paths.

The earth was surrounded by a deep sea. The sons of Bor gave lands near the sea to the families of giants for their settlements.

(This continues on, if you wish to read the rest, and what came before, follow the link.)

The important part here is that to create the new world, the sons of Bor destroyed the old one; they destroyed the most important form of life in the old one, their ancestor, the giant Ymir. In destroying it, they committed a genocide against the dominant form of life in the world, the giants.

Not all creation kills so many, but all creation is destructive. For the new to be created, the old must die, and the new is created out of the corpse of the old.

Democracy is born when the nobility lose their power. The industrial world is born when peasants are forced to leave the land (violently, usually) to go to cities to work in factories. This process is always one that makes them unhappy, even when it is mostly voluntary. You can see it in the Chinese happiness statistics: Chinese who left their villages for the cities are less happy than those who stayed in the villages.

And while some villages survive, they are not what they were. Many do not survive, they no longer exist. Often, they are paved over or turned into industrial agricultural land.

The vast sweep of industrialization destroyed many cultures, they were lost. It destroyed many peoples, they died or were so assimilated that they no longer exist. Hundreds of languages were lost, we no longer know how they were spoken. Species went extinct, and that process continues, many more will go extinct.

A new world was created. Many celebrate it. There is an entire genre of writing which says, “This is the best it’s ever been and it’s just getting better” (because idiots think trend lines don’t reverse), but even if you think that’s true (and there’s a lot to it, though less than its exponents think), it was born in blood and the extinction of previous realities.

The New China was created from the Old China, and according to many in China, there is a pervasive sense of loss among the Chinese, a knowledge that most of the old culture was lost, and something important was lost with it. Most indigenous American cultures were wiped out, those that remain were badly injured and much was lost. Even in Europe, vast amounts of culture and language were lost. What we call, say, French, is the old Parisien French dialect, and pretending it is more than a dialect is close to a lie–much of what was spoken elsewhere in France was not understandable to a Parisien. The same is true of every major European language; a particular language, perhaps a dialect, was elevated by government action (forceful, often violent action) to the status of “the language.”

This is true with respect to Mandarin in China, which has wiped out or reduced multiple other languages. There is currently an effort to do this with respect to Hindi in India, and the effort is abetted by government action, often enough violent.

New realities are born not just in blood, but in death.

Consider the myth of Zeus.

The first thing that Zeus does is kill his father. His father had been eating all his children.

This is what hegemonic realities, hegemonic systems, do. They kill other possibilities. Many people have tried to create alternatives to capitalism, they have all failed. They have been eaten. The most recent left-wing large attempt in the Western world was the Hippies. They failed.

Basically, the Hippies either succeeded at capitalism, and by doing so became capitalists, or they refused to play the capitalist game and were forced out. The hippie homeland was California, but they don’t live there any more. The remnants fled to Vermont and Santa Fe and some other cheap areas because they couldn’t afford to live in California any more.

Those who could afford to, who kept up with the Jones’, or who became rich, stopped actually being Hippies. They became Yuppies or multi-millionaires. They became capitalists. The Ur-rule of capitalism is to make money. If you decide what to do based on how much money it makes, you start being a member of the capitalist reality (whether or not you wind up “owning capital”), and you stop being a member of an alternate reality which challenges capitalism.

Capitalism: The father of the Hippies, ate the Hippies. If you become successful using capitalist rules you can’t defeat capitalism, you become part of that system.

So, when you want to create a new reality, a new system, you often have the kill the old one, as in the Zeus myth. It is the old system which gave birth to you, and you kill it. Feudalism was killed by people born of feudalism. Capitalism will be killed by people born of capitalism. The only other way it can work is that outsiders conquer a society, but even that is often deceptive: Rome fell to the barbarians only after Rome had completely rotted from within. Augustus would not have recognized late Romans as much resembling those he ruled.

New worlds, new realities, can only be born in the destruction of the old world.

Because that destruction often entails much suffering and death, we often put off the creation of the new until the old is completely untenable. But by doing so, we usually make the transition much worse than it would have been otherwise.

Capitalism needs to end. It needs to end because it has failed the climate change problem: It didn’t deal with a problem so catastrophic it will forseeably kill a billion or more people and which might end in human extinction. Capitalism knew this was likely to happen, capitalism didn’t just not deal with it, capitalist institutions fought (and are still fighting) to conceal that it will happen and against doing anything about it.

So capitalism needs to die or be heavily modified. It was clear by the 90s that this was so, and we did nothing.

This won’t stop it from dying.

It will, however, make its death throes and what comes immediately afterwards much worse.

As with the giants, when Odin killed the giant Ymir, we will die in a flood of blood when capitalism dies.

But that is a choice we have made.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.