The Lioness' Den

Things That Don't Exist Because They Have The Wrong Shape.

2010-06-25T00:16:00.000-07:00

Race, as a biological phenomenon, does not exist -- so says standard academic leftist doctrine. In support of this, leftists cite the fact that races & ethnic groups are fuzzy rather than clearly-bounded categories; a single person may possess ancestry of two or more groups, and likewise there are geographical regions whose populations contain racial mixtures or phenotypes intermediate between two adjoining groups. Some genes vary gradually along a geographic vector, known as a "cline". There are a number of genes that all homo sapiens share in common, indeed the great majority; these genes & their corresponding traits are taken as evidence of an essential & universal human nature, and the differences, which reflect adaptations to local environments, are regarded as inconsequential. Race exists at different levels of scale: there are the five major continental races, plus numerous subraces, ethnic groups, & individual tribes. The popular idea of racial identity is also ambiguous..A person's racial ancestry may not be obvious from her or his external appearance, and socially-constructed labels can be based on arbitrary standards which do not accurately reflect DNA evidence. For all these reasons, leftist academicians assert, there is no such thing as race.

However, leftists believe in something else called "culture". Indeed, culture is thought to be a very important, powerful & deterministic influence. Strangely enough, though, culture, as a phenomenon, has many things in common with race. Like races, cultures have no firm or absolute boundaries. A single person can belong to two or more cultural groups at the same time (and can even switch affiliation over the course of a lifetime, which is not possible with genetic race.) Just as genes can be traded between races, so do cultures exchange memes, patterns of learned information such as customs, language & arts. A given cultural practice or artifact can be spread over a wide geographical area and across multiple culture groups. Some anthropologists believe there are cultural universals, such as language, religion & marriage customs, found ubiquitously in all human groups but expressed differently in particular circumstances. Like races, two or more cultures can blend together over time, or one can fragment into many. And, as with races, the vernacular distinctions between cultures are socially constructed & ambiguous. Cultural groups often have arbitrary & superficial standards, such as fashion, for determining who is "in" or "out". Yet, despite all these loose, messy, fuzzy qualities, culture is not only very real, it is held by most leftists (except those who are economic determinists) to be a central force in human life & history.

Another thing which some leftists, particularly those of an extreme collectivist or postmodern bent, assert does not exist is the individual self. We may see human bodies walking around, but even though they appear to move independently, they aren't really individuals. The reasons are as follows: What we call the 'self' is found, on examination, to be composed of a ever-changing stream of subjective contents: states of consciousness, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, & the like. There is no single, unified centre sitting like a rock in the midst of this ocean of flux, no Neoplatonic monad. The mutability of inner consciousness is mirrored by the chaotic, constantly-changing patterns of neuronal activation found in brain scans. The brain, in fact, is a parallel-processing system, in which multiple parts function simultaneously & quasi-independently, & different processes can even contradict each other, as has been found in split-brain research. Moreover, the boundary between self & other, or subject & object, is ambiguous & arbitrary: it can shift with alterations in the state of consciousness, like dreams, meditation or the influence of drugs. There is no discrete, absolute point where "I" end and "not-I" begins; the definition of self, at least on the conscious level, is relative to what is defined as Other.

Therefore, because the self is complex, changeable, nondiscrete & pluralistic, rather than a unitary, immutable lump like the pre-modern-physics model of the atom, it is a mere illusion, with no valid claim to existence or recognition, and can safely be ignored -- in favor of a socialistic concern with the good of Society.

If, however, we turn to look at that same Society, something rather puzzling emerges. For societies are, in many ways, very much like individual selves. Just as a constant stream of contents flows through the individual consciousness, so, on the larger scale, do individual people move through social groups. New members enter a society through birth or immigration, others leave through death or emigration, & there is a complete turnover of populace every generation. Just as an individual retains her subjective sense of identity through changing states & experiences, so does a society retain its form -- though never perfectly -- even while the members that compose it change. Just as an individual self is composed of various parts (subpersonalities, archetypes, aspects, neural modules, etc.), so does a society contain numerous subgroups, subcultures & factions, which often compete amongst themselves for dominance. Just as the boundaries of the self are ambiguous, so are those of the society. Two or more societies can easily overlap with each other; it is not always clear who belongs to what group, and officially-declared boundaries, such as national borders, are often under dispute. Yet, all this change & ambiguity is no threat to the validity of society as a meaningful concept. Indeed, some leftist writers are quick to celebrate the postmodern fluidity of the new social order.

I call this the argument of nonexistence from complexity. This is a rhetorical strategy which implicitly invokes the commonsense notion of an entity as a simple, clear-cut unit, points out how the subject in question diverges from that naive model, and asserts that, because something is not as simple as one might naively think, it therefore does not exist at all. Since most things in the natural & social world are less ideally simple than Platonic solids, this strategy has, potentially, unlimited applications. In actual practice, however, its use in leftist academia is highly selective, politically motivated & disingenuous. Only things which leftists think ought not to exist, like race & individual consciousness, tend to get complexified out of existence.

I have rarely seen this argument applied in the opposite direction by anti-socialists. Perhaps the nearest case would be Max Stirner, who declared that all social, cultural & political institutions are "nothing to me". Yet few even among extreme egoists would deny that social phenomena exist at all.

One phenomenon whose existence no one, not even the most radical leftist, would try to deny is the weather. Anyone who ignores the weather will end up getting wet -- literally. But the weather, judged by academic leftist standards, is very politically incorrect. It is constantly changing, & can never be predicted with complete accuracy. Weather patterns cross geographical & socially-constructed borders with sublime nonchalance. Moreover, weather phenomena are nondiscrete & nonbounded in nature. For instance, take a hurricane (please). There is no specific time or place at which a hurricane can absolutely be said to begin or end; although the Weather Bureau uses arbitrary standards to determine the official extent of a hurricane, it just might as well be said to have begun with the proverbial flap of a butterfly's wing in some distant region. Yet, a hurricane can have quite an impact (no pun intended).

The shapes of all these things can be described in terms like fractals, chaos, fuzzy logic, dynamic systems, networks, etc. All of these are part of the new math & science which emerged toward the end of the last century. Only very recently in history have researchers had the computational power to study such complex structures & processes.The reason that the nonexistence from complexity argument is so persuasive is that this way of thinking is mainly still unfamiliar to us. Simple, discrete forms seem more plausible. Human beings seem to be neurally wired to parse reality into chunky little bits. We tend to think in integers, not because integers are necessarily more real or valid than other expressions of quantity, but, probably, because our early ancestors had to count on their fingers & toes.¹

Around the same time as these new advances in the hard sciences, the literary & cultural movement known as posmodernism began, from its own perspective(s), to explore the kaleidoscopic vistas of a shifting, fluid world. At its worst, postmodern discourse is fuzzy thinking in the illogical rather than logical sense; it becomes an endless series of exercises in complaining about how things are too complicated to say anything substantial about them. At its best, however, it can be a tool for thinking about things that are fractal-like, chaotic, dynamic, sprawling, multiplistic, nondiscrete, fragmentary & liminal; a verbal, conceptual, qualitative tool to complement the quantitative tools of mathematics & science. To fully develop this resource, postmodern theory must first be pried free of the stranglehold of leftist dogma & opened up to a wider range of political views. Next, it must be harmonized with the disciplines of science, mathematics, & statistics, so that the qualitative & quantitative approaches can productively cross-fertilize.

The 21st century requires the ability to think like a fractal. As we learn to put on this odd-shaped new thinking cap, there will be some surprises: we may discover that race is as nondiscretely real as culture & society; that the inner & outer worlds are equally fluid, flexible & frangible; & that the individual self is as intricately chaotic & dynamic as a hurricane.

1. The morpheme "tik", meaning both "finger" & the number "one", is believed by the phylogenetic linguist Joseph H. Greenberg to come from the oldest ancestral human language. Cognates of it can be found all over the world, from the English "digit" to the Eskimo-Aleut Greenlandic "tikiq". (Nicholas Wade, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, pp. 230-2.)

Three Interesting Articles.

2009-11-24T06:02:00.000-08:00

A few good recent articles, courtesy of Rational Review News Digest:

Five cities that will rise in the New Economy:
From Seattle to Huntsville, Ala., five cities are poised to prosper in the New Economy because of exports, innovation, clean technology, and healthcare. .By Ron Scherer November 20, 2009 edition

While President Obama fumbles clumsily with the buttons of macroeconomics, local adaptations to the recession are already occurring. Note, in particular, the following paragraphs, which deal with features I've written about before: specialization, knowledge sharing, and economic integration of a locality to form a unified system of production, like the old factory towns but without a single corporate owner:

In the approaching “creativity economy,” as some are calling it, education will be more vital than ever. This means not just an educated workforce but universities that are interwoven with their communities.

The ivory tower is no longer the model. Now it’s being replaced with universities that turn out corporate spinoffs as well as graduates. Cities such as Huntsville, Ala., – which has a greater concentration of PhDs than it does Baptist churches – are becoming factories for the most important product of tomorrow: ideas.

In other areas, healthcare complexes are evolving into microeconomies in themselves. They attract labs and researchers. Patients fly in from around the world, needing hotel rooms, and laundry and banking services. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center annually pays out $2.7 billion in salaries to its 50,000 employees – the equivalent of the entire Canadian aerospace industry.

While Obama's stimulus packages, healthcare program and bubble loan policy continue to declare the American people too incompetent to help themselves, the people, at the city level, continue to come up with creative solutions to pull progress out of the jaws of failure and keep moving forward. Get Out Of Their Way, Mr. President!

The Paradox of Self-Government. Posted on November 21st, 2009 by Daniel McCarthy

A brief essay on why mass democracy isn't.

Unchaining the Human Heart — A Revolutionary Manifesto. A Book by J. Neil Schulman

The beginning of J. Neil Schulman's new ebook. This is a series definitely worth following.

Some of the things he wrote struck home: for instance, that libertarians tend to be more rational and less emotional than average, and thus that libertarian culture tends to appeal to a limited audience. I've just been reading Simon Baron-Cohen's The Essential Difference, and I am clearly a "high systematizer" rather than a "high empathizer" -- unlike the majority of females, acording to this book's data. These individual differences can explain a lot. For instance, the whole "sensitivity mindset", so dear to cultural leftists, doesn't appeal to me at all. I am not a sensitive person, and I don't appreciate radical-feminist efforts to censor language and media in order to protect women's sweet feminine sensibilities. The current wave of radical feminism, like most of cultural leftism, seems to be based on the preferences of extreme high empathizers -- which is why such beliefs meet natural resistance (pejoratively labeled "backlash" by the leftists) among the majority of the population whose biochemical balance is closer to the middle of the spectrum.

However, it also goes the other way: libertarianism, as it currently is, does seem to appeal mainly to high-systematizer outliers (like me) who actually think economics is sexy. These differences in temperament create divisions which hamper effective communication and learning. Valid leftist arguments can be rejected because they happen to be couched in touchy-feely, bleeding heart rhetoric, just as valid economically-conservative and libertarian arguments can be dismissed because they are too hard and cold and mathy. The need is for people who are able to translate, to cross-correlate different points of view, and to communicate effectively with people who are unlike themselves.

Schulman also writes of the need for passion, and the fact that many of us cold-hearted outliers actually do feel it, but lack the means to express it in ways that will make others listen.

My own thoughts.on that: what is required seems to be a careful balance of genuine, free self-expression and diplomacy, the latter of which requires, yes, empathy. I've never been a whiz on the diplomacy front, but I've gotten somewhat better at it over the years. And there are, undoubtedly, many others better suited to this task than I.

A few pertinent words from Carl Jung: "It is indeed almost impossible for one type to understand the other completely, and a perfect comprehension of another's individualiity is impossible. Due regard for another's individuality is not only advisable but is absolutely essential.... It should not be forgotten that the one type thinks that he is leaving another person free when he grants him freedom of action, and the other type when he grants him freedom of thought."
C. G. Jung, Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, 1922, p. 454.

Decentralism for the Masses: The Big Sort and What It Reveals About Localism andVoluntary Segregation

2009-08-02T21:42:00.000-07:00

Decentralization: How, Why, and What Kind

One of the debates in the libertarian-anarchist community concerns the nature and effects of decentralization. How will people reorganize themselves into smaller social and spatial units, and what will such a milieu be like? Will (or should) people stick together with those similar to themselves, or are there superior benefits in cosmopolitanism and hybridity?

I've seen two major options so far for what a decentralized world might look like. Kevin Carson presents a model of decentralism of driven by necessity through eroding transportation and lack of mobility, characterized by small regional markets, localized production and high levels of economic autarky. By contrast, Keith Preston portrays a model of decentralism by choice along lines of interest and affinity, a panarchy of multiple systems in which social, political and cultural factors are motivating influences, and some degree of segregation and separatism are likely (though not necessarily universal).

Which is more likely to occur -- and which would be more successful? According to Bill Bishop 's The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (2008), an experiment along these lines is already taking place. The United States is becoming progressively more differentiated into smaller units along political, social, economic and geographical lines. What do the data show?

So far, the process fits more into Preston's model of decentralization by choice rather then necessity, enabled by mobility and based on personal preference rather than economic need. Although the two are interconnected, it is primarily sociocultural choice that drives economic reorganization. People are going to places with people they like and jobs they want, rather than adjusting themselves to local necessities.

People can't eat silicon chips, but they can export them and trade them for other goods. When a region specializes in a certain range of goods and services, it can achieve a form of regional economy of scale, equivalent to vertical integration in a business firm, which includes a sociocultural component. Specialized human capital aggregates in the region. People share and trade ideas. The local subculture becomes an integral part of the process of problem-solving and innovation.

This leads to the paradox that decentralization at one level of scale is complementary to relative centralization on another -- sorting into local enclaves of cultural and occupational preference leads to the development of local nodes and centres of specialization.

The Psychology of Tribes and Neo-Tribes: How Free Is Galt's Gulch?

How does the Big Sort affect social attitudes? Another debate in the left-libertarian and anarchist communities focuses on whether pluralist, particularist, or separatist forms of decentralism would lead to the proliferation of repressive, antiquated mores. The actual evidence is ambiguous: differentiated communities tend to become more extreme and polarized over time, through a snowball effect in which a given tendency attracts more of the same. Thus, conservative areas become more conservative, liberal ones more liberal.

The authors regard this shift toward the extrema as essentially a bad thing, but here I disagree. Not all things considered extreme are necessarily undesirable: "For example, the local culture of Portland, Oregon features extreme literacy, a milieu uniquely hospitable to artists, writers and booksellers." (p. 198)

In relation to individualism, sorting-by-community has a paradoxical effect: individuals make the primary choice of which community they want to join, but, once in, the forces of conformity often close in to obscure further choices. In a small, close-knit community, it is easy for members to maintain surveillance of each other's choices and provide criticism and reinforcement, which promotes more conformity than an anonymous, heterogenous setting where no one expects agreement in the first place. Too, when people have found a group with whom they truly feel comfortable, they feel more pressure to be loyal, and fear anything that might jeopardize such closeness. There is a granularity of autonomy, a compromise between freedom on one level of scale and restriction on another.

For those who highly value independent thought and the integrity of the individual mind, this presents a dilemma. The creation of like-minded communities of paleoconservatives, libertarians or even anarchists may, in the long term, foster more like-mindedness than liberty. Maintaining space for genuine cognitive diversity is a challenge that will require new ways of constructing dialogue and social relations. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, even against the very best of neighbors.

Political Subcultures and Partisan Lifestyles

What are the political effects of sorting? The authors focused mainly on divisions along the traditional lines of Republicans and Democrats. The trend toward the extremes applies here: red areas become more red, blue areas become more blue, and there is a ballooning number of landslide counties.

In addition, each political party comes with its own subculture and lifestyle, encompassing religion, family, clothes, food, vehicles, entertainment, etc. One notable aspect is that Republicans tend to be more rural and also more solitary, living in areas of low population density, while Democrats are more urban and gregarious and live in high-density areas. Ironically, Democrats are more likely to be environmentalists while Republicans spend more actual time in nature, hunting, camping and fishing, or working on their farms. It looks like living in a city causes people to develop an idealistic sentiment for the wilderness they encounter so infrequently, while first-hand contact strips them of sentimentality.

Family and childrearing style are important lifesyle factors. The authors quote from in his study which confrirms George Lakoff's classification of the Republican parenting style as "authoritarian father" and the Democratic as "nurturing parent". (Apparently only fathers, not mothers, are typified as "authoritarian", while both can be "nurturing". It makes me wonder about the role that mothers play in conservative families.) Not surprisingly, partisans of both parties perceive government in the parental role, authoritarian and nurturing respectively, which implies that they both perceive themselves, the populace, as children. No members of "third parties" were studied; perhaps one would find more political adulthood in this group.

Interestingly, all the individualist values -- independence, self-reliance, and curiosity -- are on the Democratic side. In terms of childrearing style, at least, Republicans show no interest in individualism at all. Their values are very Old Regime: respect, obedience and good manners. How can this be reconciled with the fact that they call for less government interference (albeit that their own candidates fail woefully to provide it)?

Both political subcultures retain ties to the American dream of individualism, which they interpret in different ways. Conservatives see it in terms of external, physical autonomy. They like to have lots of empty space and open land around them, in which they can engage in the autarkic productive activities of hunting, fishing and farming. Liberals, conversely, think more in terms of inner, personal independence of thought, feeling and belief. But they also strongly tie their personal sense of freedom to being accepted by others: it is not enough to be free to be gay, gays must also have acceptance and inclusion among heterosexuals. Liberals are disinclined to seek freedom in spatial seclusion -- yet, .paradoxically, rural conservaties form closer social networks, more connections to neighbors, church, PTA and clubs, than do the denizens of crowded, anonymous cities. In fact, even suburb and exurb residents are more neighborly than urbanities, which goes to refute the leftist linking of space and individualism with alienated isolation. Individualism, as a social, cultural and geographic phenomenon, is by no means simple, but rather nuanced and complex.

Although regional particularism is a long-standing American tradition, the current configuration of Red and Blue spaces, including their attendant subcultures and lifestyles, is a development that began in the 1970's. Earlier in the 20th century, political affiliation was less tied to other life factors, and locales were more mixed. The formation of party-specific lifeways shows, for good or ill, a totalizing process, a mergence of politics and culture -- a tangible manifestation of the 1970's maxim that "the personal is the political",and the postmodern devolution of politics into every sphere of life.

One positive aspect, from an anarcho-pluralist perspective, is that the localization of political impulses into discrete communities encourages political autonomy and decentralization: "Federal leadership has been replaced by a wild display of federalism, as like-minded communities put their beliefs into law." (p. 222) Another positive aspect (although Bishop does not consider it such) is growing distrust towards government and other large institutions not only in the US but in other advanced, postindustrial countries. This, like sorting, is tied to relative prosperity and the emergence of "postmaterialist" values, the predominance of sociocultural preference above economic concerns.

Genetic Implications

There is evidence that political affiliation has a genetic component along with personality traits such as gregariousness, individualism, altruism, risk-taking and the like.. Moreover, people tend to mate assortatively, choosing partners who are genetically similar to themselves. Assortative mating is generally unconscious and instinctual, since it can involve genetic matching for factors that cannot be consciously perceived, such as blood proteins. Mobility and mass sorting are bringing together people with similar traits and similar genes, who are likely to marry each other and produce families of self-selected stock.

In past centuries, migration typically resulted in mixing and hybridity, as different races, ethnicities, and cultures came together to form new genetic and memetic combinations. Now we are witnessing the opposite pattern: the freedom to move is generating local pockets of homogeneity. What will this pattern entail? Will new genetic combinations emerge with new biological strengths, specialized to compete in the postindustrial world? Or will unconstrained inbreeding result in future generations becoming as hyperspecialied and degenerate as overbred pedigreed dogs?

Advanced knowledge of genetics, such as is now emerging in the Human Genome studies, is becoming crucial to understand such issues and to help prospective parents make wise choices. As a libertarian, I firmly believe that such choices, with their vast and long-term consequences, should remain in the hand of individuals and couples -- not government A biologically-educated populace is needed to make informed and responsible decisions.

Conclusion

So, how good were my predictions? Well, I was right in some ways while my opponents were right in others. Sorting does facilitate personal choice and options, but it also leads to homogeneity and extremes (though not all the same extreme). There is no evidence that sorting is more conducive to conservativism than liberalism; it seems to foster both equally.

The current situation is very limited in that there is polarization toward only two major options (with, quite likely, a smattering of others too small to fit into the authors' data sampling.) This is a product of the nation's two-party system in which dichotomized political groups compete to pull the strings of a single, centralized government. A complete micronational-anarchist system would be quite different, with many more options and a more-market-like structure in which communities would compete for mobile resources like people, trade and investment, rather than centralized political influence. Thus, the Big Sort should be seen as only a very rough intimation of what true panarchy or anarcho-pluralism would be like.

Nonetheless, it is the road down which we are now moving. Whether it continues will depend on political, economic and environmental .factors, including whether energy shortages induce constraints on mobility (as Kevin Carson has argued.) If technology succeeds in keeping up with such changes, and if new political visions of anarchism, secessionism, and microanarchism take hold, the 21st century could witness the transition into a decentralized America.

The consequences of freedom of association need to be understoood as a set of trade-offs: large-scale diversity and local segregation, individual choice and group homogeneity, political autonomy and economic specialization . Unlike collectivist visions of utopia, it offers no guarantees; people sometimes become snared in their own choices. Nevertheless, my own belief is that freedom of association is worth the price, first, because at least the options are there; second, because it provides for a competitive market of lifestyles which, over the long term, fosters memetic evolution and social progress; and third and most important, because it accords with the basic human right of a person's ownership and control of her own labor, actions, participation, and bodily presence.

I highly recommend this book for those who would like to investigate the politics of association with good, solid data.

[A different analysis of The Big Sort and related data can be found in Keith Preston's article, Is Something Really Wrong With Kansas?]

Does Decentralization Lead to Social Regression?

2009-08-01T19:31:00.000-07:00

[I wrote this a while back during the decentralism/anarcho-pluralism debate in the online anarchist and left-libertarian community, but didn't post it back then because, after writing it, nothing in it seemed to me nonobvious enough to require exposition. Since the debate is still continuing, however, I decided to post it, since it clearly lays out what one anarcho-pluralist (at least) thinks such a decentralized milieu would be like. Lately, I've been working on a second article based on what I've since learned from Bill Bishop's The Big Sort, which provides a number of insights about the process and effects of voluntary segregation. I'll post it when I have it written up and HTMLed.]

There's an assumption which seems to be held by both National-Anarchists and anti-National Anarchists alike: that decentralized, organic communities will necessarily be socially conservative, much more so than communities in the same geographical areas under statism, and they will remain so permanently with no incentive to change. I do not see any reason to assume this. The fallacy arises from the fact that the only such small-scale, autonomous societies that we currently know of, with few exceptions, are from earlier stages of history: tribal, ancient and medieval. Therefore these simple societies serve as the image and model in terms of which we imagine decentralism. There is, however, no reason to assume that a shift to political and economic localism will necessarily require a regression toward more restrictive traditional mores, any more than it need require the abandonment of modern science and technology.

Also, the decentralization of cities does not necessarily involve converting them into small villages, or geographically-separated sets of villages. Rather, neighborhoods or sections of the city can become politically autonomous while keeping the physical infrastructure intact. Kropotkin wrote in his Mutual Aid about such independent districts in medieval cities, as well as trade guilds and other organizations which performed some of the functions now attributed to municipal governments. Each city, then, would become a mini-federation.

What, then, would such a decentralized micronationalist confederation, carved from the midst of current American society (for the sake of example) be like? Well, my guess is that the regions that secede, urban and otherwise, will likely retain, at least initially, much the same local cultures they had previously. It is highly unlikely that there will be a mass rush towards Fundamentalist repression, lynching of gays, enforced wearing of the burkha or other unpleasant surprises. Most Americans hold preferences for at least a moderate amount of liberty and tolerance. If a particular autonomous community offers less freedom than the surrounding society, it will find it hard to gain adherents unless it offers some special benefits to compensate.

How would this system develop over time? The main difference between a decentralized world and our current one is that there will be more options, and more opportunities to "vote with your feet" by migration or secession. The result will be some approximation to a free market of sociopolitical systems. And the more closely it approximates to a free market, the more closely it will come to satisfying people's actual preferences. Since people's preferences are different and diverse, there will be a multitude of different niches, which will also be shaped by the requirements of location, demographics, industry and other variables. Preferences, of course, are always changing, along with other factors, so there will be stasis but a dynamically evolving milieu -- a catallaxy.

Instant perfection is by no means guaranteed, but a panarchic-micronalist arrangement would put into play the mechanisms for gradual and cumulative improvement.

If anyone asserts that authoritarianism, small-mindedness and illiberal values would prevail, one must ask, Why would they? What makes such memes so specially attractive that people would choose to "buy" them over their competitors? In most cases, it is the opposite: people stick with repressive customs because they believe they have no other choice.

Since someone mentioned Babylon 5, allow me to propose a new model for decentralism: the space colony. Imagine a society of enlightened, rational and forward-looking people, pioneers in outer space, who build their own habitats, terraform their own land, manufacture their own air, operate a thriving spaceport, and deal with the rest of the universe on their own terms.

If that's a bit too far ahead to envision, these words by Murray Bookchin in Our Synthetic Environment may be closer to home: "'But why should an emphasis on agriculture and urban regionalism be regarded as an attempt to return to the past? Can we not develop our environment more selectively, more subtly, and more rationally tjhan we have thus far, combining the best of the past and present and bringing forth a new synthesis of man and nature, nation and region, town and country?" And, someday, Earth and Space.

Link: 20 Facts.

2009-02-02T23:20:00.000-08:00

What is Obama's stimulus package really paying for?

Brendan Steinhauser, "20 Facts About the Democrats' Trillion-Dollar Spending Plan"

Rebuilding New Orleans: Central Planning vs. DIY

2008-08-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

Link found on the LJ community anarchists:

Three Years After Katrina: While Republicans and Democrats Gather and Celebrate, A City Still Searches for Recovery
By Jordan Flaherty
Published on: August 27, 2008

New Orleaners are not happy with the assistance they've gotten from government -- or with the opening the disaster has provided for central planners to step in and gentrify old neighborhoods, especially traditionally Black ones. Most of all, the people of NOLA are learning that old American lesson, "If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourselves":

It's been community, not foundations or government, that has led this city's recovery at the grassroots. Bayou Road - a street of Black-owned, community-oriented, businesses in New Orleans' seventh ward – has rebuilt post-Katrina to more businesses than they had before the storm. It hasn't been government help that has enabled these businesses to come back, but the effort of community members coming together. It was also local support that brought back the membership of many cultural organizations, like the network of Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, the century-old Black community institutions who organize secondline parades nearly every weekend throughout the year, as well as benefits for causes such as school supplies for students.

Vijay Prashad: Multiculturism vs. Polyculturism.

2008-04-29T18:49:00.000-07:00

An very interesting interview with a writer with a unique perspective:

Interview with Vijay Prashad

A few passages of interest from a Micronational Anarchist point of view:

Seminary Co-op: Does the concept of polyculturalism dilute appeals to "authenticity?" What are some of the dangers for the quest towards culturalauthenticity?

Vijay Prashad: Polyculturalism, taken seriously, obliterates authenticity. The pose of authenticity offers the ruling elites of a "race" to attain demographic power vis-à-vis other "races," to argue that they represent a group of people and because of "race" can speak for them. Authenticity allows race to top all other social fractures, and thereby give entrenched elites of color the power to be representative when all they are is compradors. Fanon's diatribe on the "pitfalls of national consciousness" is an early smash at the idea of authenticity. By the way, the argument about the authentic (whose content is often colonial ethnology) allows white supremacy to adjudge who is a real native, to say that the rebellious Asian, for example, is doing a disservice to Asian culture.

Seminary Co-op: Can polyculturalism resist the seemingly very popular appeals to [state] nationalism?

Vijay Prashad: We'll have to see, won't we? This is one tough fight, but my own sense is that there are too many folk who are fed up with bourgeois nationalism and want to assert a different kind of sovereignty, one that is against the depredations of multinational capitalism but not then tied to national cultural cruelty.

Prashad also talks about popular movements for economic trade and exchange between Africa and Asia which bypass the multinational corporate system-- the basis of a genuine global free market.

Some of the text is tiny, so you may have to use a magnifier utility.

The Democratic Fuhrerprinzip.

2008-04-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

A couple of articles, one by a Democrat and one by a Republican, about Barack Obama's campaign and how Democrats idolize and idealize their leaders more than do Republicans:

Jon Swift, Barack Obama's Achilles' Heel.

J.R. Dunn, Obama as Liberal Messiah.

While I find the charisma disparity between the parties rather interesting, I think, nonetheless, it is more a matter of show and style than actual degree of dictatorial power. After all, it's Republicans like George W. Bush and Arnold Schwarzenegger who admit openly to wanting to be dictators.

J. R. Dunn, therefore, misses the point when zie asserts, "People will invade their neighbors, slaughter minorities, and march themselves right off the historical cliff on behalf of a duce, führer, or caudillo. They generally won't for a chief executive."

Don't look now, Dunn, but they already have.

Returning to the candidate of the hour:

Barack Obama hopes to follow in the shoes of JFK and MLK -- both of whom got shot, which is not such a good sign. If he becomes President, Obama will be torn between the horns of a dilemma, striving desperately to represent both his minority and the nation as a whole. His Black supporters expect him to stand up for their rights and interests, while his White supporters seek, in the words of film critic David Ehrenstein, a "Magic Negro", a gifted Black man who will miraculously resolve race disputes by his mere presence, without threatening White interests (or. for that matter, the power elite's interests.)

In the Fuhrerprinzip, the leader is meant to obey the will of the people, like a sleepwalker or a sockpuppet. But how can a leader do the will of the people when the people have no single will?

War: Not Just for Soldiers Anymore.

2008-02-01T23:58:00.000-08:00

Collateral damage, the number of civilians dying in war, is increasing each time, until [after the Gulf War] 99.15% of the causalities are civilians, not military.

David M. Boje (Peace Aware) Sanctions: U.S. Violations of the Geneva Convention

Quote and link found on Finally, a Feminist 101 Blog.

This article, written by a Vietnam veteran, also includes several charts and graphs showing how civilian casualties were 10.74% in WWI and increased steadily throughout the twentieth century, before reaching the present level of what I can only call criminal absurdity.

One should note, too, that after seven years of American campaigning in Afghanistan and Iraq, Osama bin Laden is still at large -- a real case of blowing up the haystack and missing the needle.

When someone hits the wrong target over 99 times out of 100, one may conclude that their aim isn't very good.

The art of warfare has not progressed during the twentieth or early twenty-first centuries. Despite great material advances in weaponry and technology, war has not become more strategic, effective and efficient, but only more senselessly wasteful. If the goal of the armed forces is to locate and neutralize a military target in the minimum time with minimum losses, then, despite its immense firepower, the US's real military capacity has not increased over the last century. It has deteriorated. This can be seen in the fact that our huge military machine can be easily resisted by smaller, more focused forces, such as Iraqi guerilla fighters.

It is, I think, not coincidental that the burgeoning entropization of warfare has followed pace with the growth of the state. Just as bloated bureaucratic apparatus tends to be inefficient in the economic and social areas, so does it promote military inefficiency. When a government has an unlimited fount of tax dollars to spend, it doesn't care much about wasted bullets -- or wasted human lives.

Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the majority of de facto terrorism -- aggression against civilians -- is performed by states, and the United States government is currently the largest terrorist organization in the world. It's hard to say how much of this state terrorist action is the result of deliberate strategy, and how much sheer sloppiness; how many of the deaths are intentional war crimes, and how many criminal negligence.

Introduction.

2008-01-21T21:46:00.001-08:00

This is my "yang" blog, devoted to commentary on the public world in its social, political and material aspects. (My companion "yin" blog, The Swan's Nest, deals with such topics as aesthetics, metaphysics, and spirituality.)

So, what might you expect to find here?

I wear what may seem a colorful coat of confusing and contradictory labels: Left-libertarian, market anarchist, anarcho-capitalist, anti-corporatist, Agorist, Transhumanist, Extropian, environmentalist, individualist, feminist, anti-racist, racial realist, (micro)nationalist, federalist, etc. I regard all such labels as provisional, relative ways of categorizing which can never capture the whole essence of a line of thought, or a way of life.

My overall approach is an evolutionary one. I view global human society, along with our genome and technome, as evolving towards higher and higher levels of extropy -- integrated complexity, quality and excellence. Therefore, I am a long-term optimist. But optimism for the ultimate future does not mean that one must be blind to the problems of the present. Evolution guarantees nothing except that failure will be punished and success rewarded. Human beings, through their free will, are active participants in this process, and as the 21st century moves along, people will, through the growth of knowledge, technology and communication, be taking a more and more conscious role in shaping their own individual and collective evolvement -- for good or ill.

My thesis is that the 10,000 year-long experiment in increasing social centralization, culminating in the last few hundred years with the rise of the nation-state, is coming to a close. Statism, because it is based on coercion or "power-over", the subjection of one will to another, contains inherent inefficiencies. When the regime of centralization has gone as far as it can, it will collapse under its own cracks, as did the Soviet Union in the 1990's. The current milieu of imperialist globalization under the aegis of state governments and multinational corporations represents this system in its late decadence, a bunch of rotten fruit ready to fall from the tree -- yet bearing the seeds of the new for those willing to pluck them. What the next stage of growth will be depends on what we choose now to plant.

As a left-libertarian, I believe that social issues are important; that, while the abolition of the state will go a long way toward dismantling hierarchies of oppressive power, which are largely held in place by the hidden hand of state coercion, attacking the state head-on is not the sole or sufficient approach, for the state itself is dependent upon such unquestioned social hierarchies. The relationship between the state and other structures of oppression is not that of a pyramid but a network of circular feedback loops: a sort of anti-catallaxy in which dispersed, local effects feed into and enable systems of top-down control. The system must be studied at all levels, and the ultimate level is the individual. Ultimately, the state cannot be abolished until people are free in their own minds.

Thus, I see a continuum between philosophical, psychological, social, cultural, and political issues, and my own specialty is exploring the intersections and interstices between different domains, the synthesis of opposite and multiple viewpoints. This is something I probably could not have learned to do in a university, and, unless I were extraordinarily lucky, could not have gained the opportunity to do professionally in an academic setting. So, perhaps I'm fortunate to be a freelance, freethinking autodidact. That's what the Blogosphere is for, isn't it?