Silber called for a general protest against the state here in America. He asserts that the populace is sufficiently angry, across the political spectrum, to mount such a rebellion which could include massive demonstrations and/or a tax protest of sufficient scale to gum up the works of the state. I’m all in favor of that, although I prefer my own idea of a mass general strike which has the advantage of being perfectly legal in every regard under our current regime. Either way, any mass action by a broad swath of the population would be sufficient to upset the current power structure, and perhaps tip the scales sufficiently to effect immediate, radical change.

Silber is cautiously optimistic about peaceful transitions from whatever you want to call our current version of State:

As conditions continue to worsen for many millions of Americans — and they will, for that is obviously the State’s plan — the pressures on the existing system will grow. In time, they will grow to very dangerous proportions. History, and the logic of the situation, tell us that those pressures will eventually erupt in violence. At a certain point, violence will be inevitable. But we may not be there yet. There may be time for a peaceful revolution.

A lot of people are deeply angry, and torn with anxiety about the future. If those colossal energies are directed toward a specific end, an end which will appeal to millions of Americans, there may still be hope for peaceful change, and even change on an enormous scale.

Don’t say it could never happen. Things that could never happen take place all the time, and sometimes on a monumental scale. What I’m describing — what I hope for — represents a massive, once in a lifetime event. And it all starts with a conversation you have with a good friend. If you have that conversation, millions of others might have it, too. Get a group together to get some ads made. Start planning for demonstrations next spring.

Me, I want my Autonomy Day in 2015 (or sooner, no matter).

But that’s not what this post is about. What occurred to me reading Silber’s post was that philosophical anarchism is a pretty simple negative idea that even a child can understand. All the variations on that theme, as in how in a stateless society we ought to organize ourselves, are not anarchism qua anarchism but rather positive political theories derived from whatever wish fulfilling ideology the individual anarchist is starting from.

If one can resist the temptation to posit an alternative to the current state of affairs, it’s possible to convince people quite readily of the ethical superiority of philosophical anarchism. It just hasn’t occurred to them that human beings can function without a state, when in fact that has been the “natural” state of humanity for the majority of its history. It may be helpful to point this out, but even that isn’t necessary.

Start with coercion. Point out the myriad ways in which the State exercises coercive power. If your subject is a 2nd amendment person, point out that no matter how many guns the government lets you own, State owned weapons will always be bigger and more destructive. Does your subject approve of government surveillance of its own citizens? Does your subject care about his privacy? Is your subject bothered by the weight of taxation? Your subject may try to dodge out of your way by pointing out the superiority of the American political system. Your subject may assert the sacredness of American democracy, and America’s defense of freedom against its enemies around the world. In that case point out that the political system that your subject learned about in grade school has evolved over the past two centuries into a system that touches every aspect of our lives. And that’s just the Feds. Then there are the layers of State government organized at the state, county and municipal levels. Nothing in our lives is untouched by the influence of the State. How is that accomplished: threat of violence.

I’m sure my readers are quite accomplished at this line of argument. For myself, I would rather see more anarchists fall from the tree of so-called Progressivism as our liberal friends become irrevocably disillusioned with their agenda in the age of Obama. But we must happily welcome those from the right who already hate the State (if not their patriotic fantasies about what America represents). The point is to get as many people as possible comfortable with the idea of direct action regardless of affiliation.

Our one and only goal must be peaceful disruption of the status quo sufficient to threaten the established power structure. This must be done with massive numbers of people.

Watch out for the people who demand an answer to the question: “what then?” Representations of the power of the State are made daily in every form. Part of that propaganda is the diminution of the individual. Asserting power through numbers is an end in itself. If you believe that human beings are capable of organizing themselves, then put your belief where your mouth is and have a little faith that that part will work itself out. It’s self-defeating to be advocating a particular version of Post-Capitalist this or that. You or some other person will have those ideas ready at hand when the time comes. Asserting your version of the future is itself coercive and self-defeating. The point is to assert power. Period. The rest will take care of itself (eventually).

BDR noticed over this past weekend that Salon had run a story that echoed something I’d written last month. I have no doubt that it’s a coincidence. After all, the connection between the two topics is obvious, and I’m sure others have made the connection.

Salon makes the following points which I pointed out in my (much briefer) post:

1) Stop & Frisk is a policy that criminalizes a particular cohort of human beings. Here’s Salon’s quote:

Analysis of police data by the NYCLU revealed that 88 percent of the stops did not result in an arrest or summons (and of course an even smaller proportion ever lead to a conviction). This sort of policing doesn’t catch crime suspects, it prefigures (and treats) as criminals young men of color in certain neighborhoods.

2) Preemptive policing is analogous to preemptive assassination as practiced by the Obama administration. Here’s Salon’s quote:

The weak justification given for the regular harassment of young black men in New York is noteworthy. But waiting and watching for “weird behavior”and certain behavioral patterns is not just a flawed NYPD policy — it’s increasingly the sort of preemptive and prefiguring policing that underpins national security policy too, from how the FBI chooses sting targets to the use of drone strikes to target unidentified individuals displaying “signature” behaviors. From police stops in Brooklyn to drone strikes in Pakistan, the “disposition matrix” applies.

What Salon did not do, however, is argue that the outcomes of these activities are both desirable to the parties doing them and expected. 

Stop & Frisk is not a policy that happens in a vacuum. It has to be intentional. And it cannot be the case that the police do not understand what the consequences are. They’re not that stupid. No. This is direct action on the part of the government to criminalize an entire population of human beings. That’s not an unintended consequence, it’s the fucking point.

Same thing with drones. Blowback is why we’re doing it. The alternative is that all these intelligent folks that are running this ship of state really believe that we can win the war on terror. They actually go to sleep at night thinking they’re winning. That we can kill all the terrorists, and by blowing up women and children in Pakistan, we’re going to reduce radicalization of Muslims. Come on! Didn’t these guys go to the best schools! Give them some credit. Rank and file CIA guys might buy that crap, or maybe they just like the job and don’t ask those kinds of questions, but not the leaders of the Free World. It makes no sense.

I don’t think the writer from Salon made that leap. In fact I wonder when I read this kind of stuff what the point of it is? Am I as a reader supposed to just go “Hmmm, very interesting. I wonder why they’re doing that? It seems wrong to me, somehow.” What is the typical reader of Salon supposed to infer from this article? That the cops are racist? That Obama shouldn’t have gotten that Nobel Prize after all? That drone strikes are cheaper than indefinite incarceration in Guantanamo?

The media is full of nothing but bullshit. Have you suffered through a Sunday morning show lately? Vacuous, mendacious sport masquerading as rhetorical illumination. That’s the end of my blog post. See how neatly I wrapped it up?

Is it just me or is the media ignoring the Rios Montt story to an alarming degree?

The conviction of a former dictator in his own country ought to be a major story. I’m honestly perplexed by the silence. Is this  a case where the best defense (of American complicity in genocide) is to count on the general apathy of American consumers journalists?

Slate.com never even posted a story about the verdict or the trial:

Andrew Sullivan has not mentioned it once.

Daily Beast/Newsweek has four stories, one of which provides some analysis:

The New York Times has two stories in the past week. None of the opinion writers have commented.

This is a country in our own hemisphere. It is a country that has a tragic and horrific history of civil war. This is a country that was victimized repeatedly by our own country. What’s going on here?

I’m going to get Graeber’s new book about Occupy as soon as I have a little bit of money. In the meantime, I got the gist of it from that New Yorker piece.

I understand the divisiveness and so on, particularly between liberals and anarchists (we hate each other). The idea of the enemy of my enemy is a nasty little trap. Just because you used to root for the blue team doesn’t mean you owe them anything. In fact, if you’ve outgrown progessivism, which I hope you have, then you may come to loathe it more than the other team. It’s OK. You can hate both teams.

Now, about alliances. When it comes to direct action, should there be a test? Do you need to agree with me to join me on the street? Of course not. What I find interesting about Occupy is that there did seem to be a functional alliance between anarchists and liberals for a time. There may have even been a few anarcho-capitalists in the mix. I don’t know.

But Occupy is seen as a failure by the general public. There is no “Occupy” caucus in Congress. The majority of folks can’t get their mind around something that looks like a futile exercise. They have faith in the constitution, just not the individual actors. They have yet to understand that the system itself is the problem.

My fantasy is a series of General Strikes with no other object than to remind everyone that the greater mass of humanity is voluntarily participating in this system. The best way to prove that is by opting not to participate for a moment: a single day. Let’s call it Autonomy Day! Everyone ought to be able to agree to that. We don’t need the permission of the government to stop working, or buying, or selling or doing much of anything. All state power is power granted voluntarily by each tiny little concession each individual makes. And the most effective way to demonstrate that is by refusing to grant that power, if only for a day.

Let’s set a date. And when the date comes, if there’s no strike, we’ll set another date, and so on and so on. That way I can keep my fantasy alive indefinitely. What date to use? Well, I’ll just pick one: April 13, 2015. Plenty of time to get the word out. See you there!

I was a bit late reading Ron Unz’s Our American Pravda over at TAC, but got to it this morning. Unz’s thesis won’t be shocking or even all that interesting to this backwater of the internet, but I was struck by the comments which seemed to miss his primary point altogether. Here is his concluding paragraph:

Consider the fascinating perspective of the recently deceased Boris Berezovsky, once the most powerful of the Russian oligarchs and the puppet master behind President Boris Yeltsin during the late 1990s. After looting billions in national wealth and elevating Vladimir Putin to the presidency, he overreached himself and eventually went into exile. According to the New York Times, he had planned to transform Russia into a fake two-party state—one social-democratic and one neoconservative—in which heated public battles would be fought on divisive, symbolic issues, while behind the scenes both parties would actually be controlled by the same ruling elites. With the citizenry thus permanently divided and popular dissatisfaction safely channeled into meaningless dead-ends, Russia’s rulers could maintain unlimited wealth and power for themselves, with little threat to their reign. Given America’s history over the last couple of decades, perhaps we can guess where Berezovsky got his idea for such a clever political scheme.

Unz does an excellent job of laying before us an assemblage of worthy and disturbing stories that have not aroused the ire of the American public to the extent they deserve. He indicts the journalistic establishment for not pursuing or investigating these stories sufficiently. It’s not clear that if they did, there would be much interest in them anyway, and he tells us why:

A likely reason for this wall of uninterest on so many important issues is that the disasters involved are often bipartisan in nature, with both Democrats and Republicans being culpable and therefore equally eager to hide their mistakes. Perhaps in the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, they realize that they must all hang together or they will surely all hang separately.

As of this morning, there were 45 comments on the post. Few of them were in response to the actual point of the piece. I’m not sure what to conclude from this. There were a number of conspiracy minded comments. I’m more open to conspiracy theories than I used to be. I was upbraided on Twitter by Ohtarzie a few weeks back for making the point that we don’t need conspiracy theories when so much evil is done in plain sight. But as he rightly pointed out, if anything the fact that immoral behavior is the norm and goes unpunished ought to increase the likelihood of conspiracies. That is, if powerful people do evil things in plain sight, what would they be willing to do to cover up behavior that’s even worse?

I wish something good could come from this type of essay. The internet has opened up access to alternative sources of information for so many, myself included. But consider the difficulty of effecting real change. Of the whole population of the country, only a minority are politically engaged. Of those, the vast majority get their information from outlets “licensed” by one of the partisan factions. The rest are scattered across the landscape and self sort themselves into miniscule ideological camps from far right to far left. This disaffected group is most likely to recognize the fraud of government, but has so little influence that it might as well be invisible. Mass movements like the Tea Party and Occupy [fill in the blank] are quickly exploited and absorbed into the political structure.

If anything good does come from this type of essay, my hope would be that it helps chip away the intellectual barriers to rational honesty. By that I mean the creation of political ideas that stand on their own outside of the historical spectrum. It means that we must reject incrementalism. There is no hope of reform of the system in place today. It will, as it must, completely fall away. Those of us waiting anxiously for that day will still be surprised when it comes. But perhaps not as surprised as everyone else. In meantime, we must do what we can to imagine what a better world might look like. No doubt we will be wrong about most things, and the species will have to figure things out as well as it can. Recognizing that the emperor has no clothes is nothing to brag about. Learning to live without the emperor is vastly more praiseworthy.

So says founding editor, Scott McConnell at The American Conservative regarding the appalling case of the Central Park Five.

I can think of a few morals after watching the film myself.

Moral #1: Fear justifies brutality.

Moral #2: Don’t believe anything a cop says.

Moral #3: Being a prosecutor means never having to say your sorry.

Moral #4: Contradictory false confessions are good enough to get a conviction, and isn’t that the point?

Moral #5: Train the media in the way they should go, and they will not depart from it.

The Federal unemployment rate dipped to 7.5% today due to strong growth in menial, temporary and low paying jobs. Meanwhile, according to the CDC, the suicide rate in 2010 among persons 35-64 years of age jumped by 28.4% compared to rates ten years earlier. The largest increase was in the 55-59 range where rates increased by a whopping 49.1%. The CDC announced that for the first time more Americans die by their own hand than in automobile accidents.

News reports characterized this as an increase among “Baby Boomers” which is a bit misleading since the younger half of the group (35-49) are not baby boomers according to any definition I’m aware of. Presumably, the rate increase is related to the economic disaster that was hitting its peak about during 2010.

The data on suicide by race is interesting. The ethnic group with the lowest rate is Hispanic (3.5 suicides per 100,000 population). Rates among blacks and Asians were also low (5.8 and 10.6 respectively). American Indians had the highest rate at 65.2 while whites had a rate almost 12 times as high as Hispanics at 40.4.

What does a suicide rate say about society as a whole? Each individual death will have been caused by a multitude of factors (not least of which is ready access to an effective method: Firearms for men. Pills for women.) Nevertheless, we ought to be able infer something about the health of a society by this statistic.

If the rate of successful suicides has increased, then it is fair to suppose that there is a corresponding increase in the rate of suicidal despair* as well. Suicidal despair will only rarely result in successful suicide. The pain of this despair is more commonly alleviated by increasing levels of alcoholism and drug abuse. It would be nice to know what that ratio is. I would also like to know how much profit the drug companies have made in the past ten years hawking the latest snake oil version of anti-depressant and anti-psychotics to these millions of people with suicidal despair. Can we not conclude that these charlatans are a total failure based only on this statistic? Shouldn’t the rate of suicide be a pretty fair indicator of the effectiveness of our mental health system? I would guess that the ethnic group that avails itself of mental health and psychiatric services is white people. I would also speculate that Hispanics are probably the least likely ethnic group in this country to use these services. Interesting.

On the positive side, for those who survive their suicidal despair (lost the job, lost the house, lost all their retirement and sense of dignity and self worth as defined by our culture), perhaps learning to find meaning in something other than one’s net worth is the best revenge. Menial, low wage jobs are coming back! And not having health insurance has the additional benefit of discouraging you from seeing a shrink.

*Suicidal despair is not in the DSM.

It’s great that there are so many critics of remote assassinations and racist police tactics. I appreciate that there are civil libertarians out there still to bring this up daily (to no effect, of course) and decry this behavior done on our behalf.

The critics act like the perpetrators of these policies are stupid. They think this is a case of misguided, but well intentioned, policy making.

But what if the outcomes of these policies are producing exactly what the designers want. Drones make more enemies, but cost less American lives (for now). That means we can be reasonably confident that there will be a continuous supply of enemies in the future that we will need to make war on. Pretty straight forward.

Stop & Frisk, as we have seen this week in New York, is a violation of human dignity and if it happened regularly on Wall Street, you can bet there’d be quite an uproar. But since it is practiced almost exclusively on minorities, the liberals get all worked up about it. That’s fine, it’s a horrible practice. But it gives the cops and the legal industrial complex exactly what it wants which is more criminals. The point is to criminalize entire communities, thereby making it inevitable that more criminals will keep the prisons full and the cops busy. Throw in a few terrorists now and then, and voila, you get to be a friggin’ hero and you get new toys.

Bloomberg & Obama. Evil & Eviler.

[Update] The more I think about it, the more Stop & Frisk is analogous to drone strikes. This is preemptive policing, just as drones are preemptive assassinations. Preemptive, but not preventive. In both cases, the punishment is inflicted in the absence of crime to terrorize the intended population. Who benefits? The terrorists (by that I mean the cops and the CIA).

My preoccupation with anxiety and despair is of necessity, not choice. Reading Kierkegaard the other evening, I was inspired. For a moment, I had the sense that I could be “pure in heart” and could have real faith, thereby avoiding despair. But that was just a bit of inspiration. When it comes to it, I am incapable of “willing one thing” and belong in the category of despair.

Lingering on the subject a bit more, I try to distinguish between my sense of dread and anxiety with SK’s conception of despair, which after all one can be completely oblivious to. It occurs to me that the dread and anxiety are not isolated features of my existence. My faith (in SK’s sense) may be lacking, but that doesn’t explain the problem. In fact it’s not clear that SK’s definition of faith would make any difference. It may be that I was created to be in such a state, that that is my natural state, and to resist it is to “kick against the goads.” That is a rather unsatisfying explanation.

What is clear, though, is that my sickness is related fundamentally, and inextricably, to other people. I have no fear of God or his judgment. Nor have I ever had such a fear. All of the fear is related to other human beings. It’s not fear of violence or harm, but a fear of being misunderstood.

Fear of misunderstanding sounds harmless enough. What difference does it make whether someone understands you? But I suspect that there is an existential quality to this fear. It is a fear of being smeared or effaced by the other. Or worse, being vandalized by the other.

The social network Twitter proved this to me. It is impossible for me to be confident that my intent is clear in 140 characters in most cases. I don’t tweet very often, but occasionally will. After I do so, I often experience a significant spike in anxiety once the tweet is sent. This usually is accompanied by the idea that the communication will be misunderstood, and especially will be taken to be hostile, foolish or ignorant. Any of the three responses would be alarming to me. But these are tweets to strangers! Now rationally, I shouldn’t care at all about this, and yet in these instances there is a non-negligible amount of discomfort experienced. More often than not, a tweet is composed and discarded. It is only when my guard is down, that I go ahead and send it. The same phenomenon occurs with comments on the internet.

Here on my own blog I have had restless nights fretting about things I’ve written: to an audience of a couple of dozen people! On a good day!

Now you can dismiss this as mere pathology, which is one way of looking at it. But psychiatry being what it is (quackery!) I am left having to try to understand and cope with it myself.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The existential threat of misunderstanding is not far fetched. We humans are very good at communicating practical information, both verbally and non-verbally, but how well do we communicate our selves? “Solipsism” has lately entered the literary lexicon as a synonym for narcissism. (I guess “narcissism” was becoming passé). That’s a linguistic tragedy, but it points out a confusion about the problem that leads to solipsism. It’s not self-love or self-absorption that would incline one to solipsism, it’s a keen awareness of the immensity of the gulf between oneself and another.

Human interactions are dangerous affairs, particularly during adolescence. Fears are reinforced by rejection, confusion and the humiliation of experimenting with self-expression. For some this fear becomes habituated. An awareness dawns that each expression of self is liable to be misconstrued, distorted or mutilated. Over time the effect is a sense of personal diminution. The outer expression becomes ritualized and contrived in an attempt at control. The self shrinks and withers under the weight of conventionality.

I have a hunch that this disconnect is the cause not the effect of despair. Is it not a basic human desire to be known? Isn’t romantic love the sublime illusion of total absorption with another (and sex its physical manifestation)? Are we not all trying to get stuck back together like the conjoined ancestors of Aristophones’ myth in the Symposium? Separated forever, we’re all dying of broken hearts.

Or maybe it’s just me.

My favorite idea from Nagel’s recent book was his much maligned idea that the universe may be directed by a teleological principle:

“Teleology means that in addition to physical law of the familiar kind, there are other laws of nature that are ‘biased toward the marvelous’”

For this to have any meaning at all, you have to buy into Nagel’s moral realism. After all, what kind of telos could there be if there is nothing good to shoot for? So, having said that, it is worth pondering in what ways human consciousness (which is at present the high point of this presumed telos) is “marvelous.”

Can human consciousness, given the above setup, be considered a worthy “end” in itself, or might it be that we are transitional in some way? And if we are transitional, to what end are we transiting?

I take this to be a practical question. To the extent that we can lament our shortcomings as a species, we ought to be able to identify in what ways we would be better were we different. This is frankly a basic impetus behind all religion as well, so it’s instructive to see where religion has been pointing us for the past five thousand years. Ideologies–religious or not–are predicated on the principle that they have something to offer to humanity that will improve its condition in a general way. Such things are not created in a vacuum.

Nagel believes that the end to which the universe is moving has more or less arrived: human consciousness. The universe has become aware of itself–in human minds. This trope that human consciousness is the universe becoming conscious of itself has been around a long time, and is particularly favored by secular science types. Carl Sagan used this very language when he did Cosmos over thirty years ago. I don’t mean to be churlish, but if consciousness is the telos of the universe, then I have to say the universe is wretched. How many human specimens prefer sleep to work? Simplistically, this is the choice. Revisiting religion, once again, let’s just point out that there are temporal rewards occasionally promised to adherents, but the main reason for religion is the hope of a perfected future. We wouldn’t need religion otherwise, presumably.

Consciousness by itself cannot be a good-in-itself, although it may be a necessary condition for identifying such goods. The point of my digression is to make the case that if there is a teleological principle at work in the universe, then given the state of the human condition, combined with our capacity to imagine it being otherwise, I feel comfortable concluding that we are in a transitional state of some kind.

Now this is not a very novel idea. History is the story of man’s halting progress. The problem is that while we have made dramatic improvements around us, we ourselves haven’t changed very much. We have not educated ourselves into a better species, nor do I think it’s possible to do so. Culturally, we can tamp things down a bit–racism, for example–but take away political correctness for a couple of generations and see if human beings don’t go right back to where they were. We haven’t changed. Culture is not Lamarckian. The species doesn’t change because we change the environment. Culture does not change the genome.

Technological progress has given us longer, easier lives, but it has not changed us. And not all have benefited equally, of course.

But what if the species actually improved? What kind of changes would we want to occur? Does the species need to be more clever? Should it have longer life, or be more attractive? Should it be more adaptive? What are the qualities that we would want a new version of the human species to have that we don’t already have? Would we want a species that was immune to suffering? Perhaps even to death?

While longer life and the diminution of suffering would be obvious choices, beyond that the traits we would most like to see on the list would be ethical. Like Asimov’s robots, we would want the next version of our species to be averse to violence of any kind. That would go a long way toward reducing the grossest forms of human suffering. And provided that this was a basic feature of the species we could feel more or less safe from violence and war. A biological trait that would effect a non-violent version of ourselves might be a greatly enhanced sense of empathy. Hyper-empathy, as a feature of the species, would replace the generally selfish Randian attribute that is characteristic of humans. This kind of empathy would be something on the order of a sixth sense. It would be not unlike the instinctive protective love of a mother to her infant child, but heightened and generalized across the entire species. Empathy like this, which is alien to our species, would form the basis for an entirely different type of social order and culture.

The Christian view, or at least one version of the Christian view, is not far from this idea. The species was created to be in a loving (hyper-empathetic) relation with God, with each other and the rest of creation. Something happened and that awareness was dulled. That moral concern for others above oneself was corrupted by selfishness. God himself becomes human and shows humanity what that kind of relationship is supposed to look like. Christians are called to restore humanity to that condition (this is what the Kingdom of God is). God promises that at some future time, that original state would be restored. In a sense, humanity would become a new species (a new creation), as would the rest of the world.

I’m biased of course, but I have trouble imagining a better version of what we deep down aspire to.