Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Power Page 9 of 14

The Duty and Responsibility of Left-wing Leaders

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On April 14, 2020

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Let us say that you are leading a movement which, if it wins, will save hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths, and will take millions of out of poverty.

The corollary to this is that if you fail, if you lose, those people will die or be stuck in poverty, and generally that many others will fall into poverty.

Your loss, then, occasions a great deal of suffering.

It is often hard to know what to do to win, and there are red lines. Unless a situation has descended to civil war, or you intend civil war, like America’s founding fathers or slavery abolitionist John Brown, you shouldn’t murder, and obviously rape and torture are off the board no matter what.

But because the stakes are so high, you do have a responsibility to play your hand seriously. It isn’t actually a game.

In modern democracies, the most important thing is to control parties. Margaret Thatcher said that her victory was only complete when Labour accepted her ideology. If they hadn’t, when they got into power, they would have just un-done everything she did. John Major, the Tory PM wasn’t her true successor–Tony Blair was.

When Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour party he took over a neoliberal Blairite party. Most of the MPs had voted for most of the worst Tory policies, or abstained from the key votes. They were complicit in a great deal of the evils of austerity.

They were implacable enemies of Corbyn, as were the party bureaucrats. Indeed, a story came out with emails proving that these bureaucrats worked against Corbyn in the 2017 election. Given just how close that election was, they probably cost Corbyn the victory.

Had Corbyn won, he would have refunded the NHS. If it was a majority victory, he’d still be Prime Minister and he wouldn’t have bungled the Coronavirus response like Johnson, a bungling which appears to have about doubled the death rate next to comparable European countries.

Those bureaucrats, then, are responsible for the deaths caused by Johnson being PM. If you don’t understand this, you need to learn how, because this sort of thing is the key driver of why our societies are so bad: The forseeable consequences of evil actions are treated as if they are incidental. Having incompetent ideologues in charge of government who believe that “society doesn’t exist,” and that government isn’t responsible for people’s welfare has consequences.

Corbyn also failed in another important way: He never kicked out MPs who were traitorously constantly attacking him, nor did he support the mandatory re-selction of MPs, a process by which the Labour membership gets to vote for their nominee.

Doing both of these things would have transformed Labour back into a proper left-wing party, and given Corbyn a much greater chance at victory. Even if he lost both elections, his successor would be left-wing and properly supported by the party, and in first past the post democracy, the second party will eventually wind up in power.

Nothing is more important than ideological control of a party.

Now, the thing here is that neither of these strategies required Corbyn to go against his beliefs: Corbyn always said he believed the party should be run by the membership. Re-selections, indeed re-selection every election, is exactly and completely in accord with that.

Corbyn is a truly good man, but like a lot of people of his generation, he has an addiction to being nice, confusing it with being good.

Being nice to bad actors, to MPs who support cutting the NHS and social welfare and bailing out bankers, isn’t good, it’s evil. They need to be removed from power. This isn’t terrible for them, no centrist MP is likely to wind up on the bread lines if they aren’t an MP (which is part of why they were willing to be evil).

Then we have Sanders. Sanders was never as good a man in political terms as Corbyn, his politics are nowhere near as good. Still, he was a good man in American terms.

Sanders is also addicted to niceness. He refused to attack Biden on Biden’s terrible record, a record which is at odds with everything that Sanders claims to believe in, supposedly because Biden was his good friend.

This is dereliction of duty. If he had done it because he believed it was the best strategy, fine. It might or might not be. But to put his friendship with Biden against the welfare and even the lives of millions of Americans is a sickening betrayal of principle and of his followers.

Power has responsibility. Those who work to save millions of lives and make sure millions more are not in poverty, have a responsibility to their mission, and that responsibility does not allow one to put one’s personal desire to be “nice” ahead of the mission.

Good and nice are not the same thing. Niceness is, well, nice, but people who are willing to impoverish and kill millions are evil people and they need to lose their power. The actions taken to remove their power may not be “nice,” but they are good.

I admire Corbyn more than any other British politician of the past 40 years. But he failed in part because he wasn’t willing to be even moderately ruthless against people who were, well, doing a lot of evil. Traitors, in fact.

As for Sanders, well, it appears the same is true. He asked his followers to fight for someone they didn’t know, but he wasn’t willing to fight someone he did know.

A hypocrite, in effect.

Sanders’ and Corbyn’s times are done. They were the best of the Boomers, the last major politicians who hadn’t sold out or sold their soul. Their failures are not theirs alone. Brits and American Democrats genuinely prefer to let people die and live in poverty than vote for a moderate left-winger. That it is older Brits who voted against Corbyn whom Johnson’s policies are killing is ironic.

New politicians will now rise. Hopefully those on the left are people who understand that if one is the champion of the people, one has responsibilities which go beyond being nice to those doing evil. That, in fact, their responsibility is to remove all power from those who use that power from evil.

Doing so won’t be nice to the people who lose their power. It will be “nice” and good to those who are lifted out of poverty or who don’t die due to evil austerity policies, corruption, and incompetence.

Gotta decide what’s more important. Being nice to bad people, or doing good.

And you have to be willing to actually use power when you have it. The right certainly is. The left needs to be.

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.

 

Our Leaders Kill for Their Own Benefit

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On August 20, 2019

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Big Brother Award

Most people are terribly confused when it comes to understanding our leaders, whether corporate or political.

They think that the sort of ethical or moral constraints which hold them back, hold back leaders.

But being a leader in our society is about “extracting value” from ordinary people.

Raising the price of insulin to $300, for example. Or launching a war against a country which is no threat to you. Or throwing people in jail for 20 years for minor drug offenses.

Our leaders don’t think the same way we do. Their function isn’t to make our lives better, their function is to make their lives better–along with the lives of those people who can help them or the few people they care about. Biden, for example, goes on and on about how much he loves his family. Boo hoo. Then he supports policies like the bankruptcy bill or three strikes laws which destroy other families.

Obama and Geithner quite deliberately created a relief program for homeowners which relieved almost no one and instead made sure that they went bankrupt, so the banks would get their homes. The policy was intended, and this has been admitted, to help the banks, not ordinary people. (See David Dayen’s Chain of Title if you need the tedious proof.)

To elites, we are tools at best, useless eaters at worse. They are trained to look at us and figure out how much value they can extract: as consumers, workers, voters, and soldiers.

Then they extract the value, and if some of us wind up dead, homeless, sick, or crippled, well, they don’t lose one second of sleep over it.

Because to them, we aren’t people.

The great problem of being a member of an elite is keeping the Praetorian guard happy; this doesn’t just mean the core soldiers and cops, but the key retainers who execute policy at the highest level.

The next great problem is the mob: The tools and useless eaters sometimes get uppity, and revolt and you need to be sure you can put them down–hence the Praetorian guard.

But they’re working on this problem. Modern surveillance makes it so much easier to keep us down. Modern education trains us to be obedient (if you don’t think that’s what school, which is “Sit down, shut up, speak only when spoken to, and give me the answer I want, the way I want it,” does, you are either stupid or haven’t thought about it. Or it’s really, really worked on you.)

Meanwhile, we’re not so far out from the military bots. Get bots that can make bots and they won’t need us.

And that’s good, for them, because, man, having so many of us around is causing them huge problems. Once they don’t need us any more, once they have bots who will do what they want, don’t talk back, and don’t mind being scrapped or mistreated, well, the easiest way to deal with climate change is to get rid of six billion people or so, isn’t it?

I mean, they won’t need us. We’ll be a problem. They’ll have a solution: Climate change will kill some, the bots will deal with the rest, and they have the perfect servant class.

Dystopian fiction? Lunacy?

Well, maybe. But tell me, given that they are accelerating climate change, even though they’ve known about it since the 70s (we have the papers, we know they knew), and given their proven willingness to do anything nasty to us they want if they think it’s in their interest and they can get away with it, what would they be doing differently if this wasn’t true?

More reasonably, of course, some of them are planning this and the rest are just willing to go along when push comes to shove.

Remember, $300 insulin. You do that, you know people will die. You’re OK with it.

And your fellow elites haven’t stopped you. (And yes, yes, they could.)

Killing us for money or other benefits is one of the things our leaders do.

And that isn’t going to change until they’re more scared of us than we are of them.

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.

Why and When Good Wins

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On August 12, 2019

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We live in a degraded Age. This isn’t to pretend that what came before was good in all ways, but all too often we deny the power of good. We think evil is smart, so good loses. Or we deny that good and evil even exist, claiming they are spiritual or metaphysical constructs with no impact in the world.

Raping someone is evil. It is always evil.

Torture is evil. It is always evil.

Feeding a hungry person is good.

Protecting the weak is good.

Healing the sick is good.

Kindness is good, and cruelty is evil.

This is not to say violence is never justified, or even killing.

Good must fight evil.

Those who refused to fight in World War I were right. Those who refused to fight the Nazis were wrong.

But here’s the important part: Good is Powerful.

When you refuse to do certain things like rape and torture, people want to be part of your group.

When you are known to be kind and take care of others, people want to be part of your group.

“Rational” evil people, who will rape or torture sometimes, and who will only help another person if it’s in their self-interest, are not trustworthy. When you need them–actually need them–they will not be there for you, AND if it’s in their interest to do terrible things to you, they will.

Good people, actual good people (and not those who pretend), can be trusted.

Anyone truly rational would rather be with good people.

But goodness can’t be based just on rationality. Rational people sell out. Rational people don’t help when they think helping isn’t in their interest. Rational people will be cruel to get what they want if they think they can get away with it.

Good, like any virtue worth having, must be something people do even when it is not in their self interest.

This is why people think good is stupid. Individuals are better off “free riding”; being evil and getting good people to help them. Groups, however, including the individuals in them, are better off if the group and the people are good.

Which is why good people have to also have an irrational hatred of evil. A complete intolerance for it. A “you get one chance and if you don’t reform you’re out” policy. (And out means either ostracism or death.)

Because rational people have to know that if they aren’t good, irrational people will fuck them up.

It is when good people refuse to enforce the norms of goodness, when they let people like those who run most of our societies today free-ride on the basic goodness and peacefulness of other people, that societies and groups turn terrible.

Good wins, but only if good believes in and enforces itself.

Evil, faced with actual good, tends to lose, because the good group is better to be a part of.

There are, of course, caveats and edge cases and “in group vs. out group,” but this is fundamentally true, and why, as long as they actually believed in their own ideology, hegemonic philosophies like Democracy and Human Rights and in older days Confucianism (despite its flaws) and even Christianity (before it became a state religion and turned evil) tended to win.

Evil has advantages, no question. But so does good, and when properly implemented, good’s advantages are greater.

Good loses when people want other people to be good so that they can be evil.

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.

Jeffrey Epstein Commits Suicide

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On August 10, 2019

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Or should I say “suicide?”

Or perhaps he really did it and was encouraged.

I mean, I don’t know. But I do know that Epstein was, essentially, pimping teenaged girls to rich and powerful people, which is why he got away with it for so long, and why the first time they went after him, he got only a slap on the wrist.

Lots of important people are breathing easier today.

Feel free to use as as open thread as well.

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.

Inequality Is Unnatural

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On July 19, 2019

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I’ve been reading UltraSociety, by Peter Turchin. Turchin’s a biologist who turned to mathematical models of human society, and he’s done interesting work, not all of which I agree with (or agree is quite as radical as he claims).

But one of the points he makes in UltraSociety, a point which has also been made by many archeologists and anthropologists, is that for most human existence we were radically egalitarian.

One of the great curses on understanding ourselves has been a tendency to compare ourselves to other primates, in particular chimpanzees, with whom we share most of our DNA.

But we aren’t chimps, and we don’t act like them. Chimps have terrible, terrible lives, ruled by fear, in despotic dominance hierarchies.

For most of our existence, we simply did not. One anthropologist, whose name I forget, once wrote that if aliens had observed humans 10,000 years ago, they would have assumed we were hopelessly egalitarian and wouldn’t be able to form a hierarchy even if we wanted to.

In normal human society (a.k.a., not what we have now, what we had during most of our existence), if someone started to put themselves above others they were first mocked, then ostracized and if that didn’t work, they were killed.

Being stronger didn’t matter, because as Turchin and others have pointed out, what makes humanity unique as a hunter and killer is the use of thrown and missile weapons. Even thrown rocks are deadly. Sharp, thrown objects like spears and javelins are deadlier; bows deadlier still.

Get out of place, don’t accept social correction, get dead.

It was that simple, and that’s how we lived for most of our existence.

So what’s going on now is unusual, and it takes a great deal of coercion to have it happen.

The fundamentals are only two: First, you must have an ideology which legitimates radical inequality (CEOs earning 1,000 times what normal people earn; politicians who send people to war and don’t go themsleves); second, you must have violence specialists who are better at violence than random people who get tired of being unequal.

This is also why periods with good weapons of assassination tend to be more equal (the pistol or even the concealed dagger). It is why Nixon, who ruled in a period of relative equality, went to visit protesters with only one aide, while modern Presidents live in fortresses and federal buildings are armored up. As a young man, I remember being able to walk through the first floor of the Department of Defense in Ottawa. You can’t do that any more. You can’t do it in most buildings. In the 80s, you could.

So, as inequality increases, so too must defenses against violence. This is true for domestic inequality and it is true for international inequality, now that it is possible for those who feel aggrieved thousands of miles from our countries can see that our country is responsible, travel to it, and inflict harm.

Turchin makes another important point, which cuts against Pinker’s “violence just keeps decreasing.”

Violence actually appears to have the form of an A. Before agriculture it was relatively low, after agriculture it increased until peaking around the time of the Axial sages, whose teachings tried to reduce it, and when those teachings were applied by various rulers, did. Thus, a long decline in the odds of dying by violence. (This claim comes with sharp local exceptions in time and place–exceptions which may prove, in the end, larger than the generalized decline. The story isn’t over yet.)

In the meantime, inequality isn’t natural to humans. It’s bad for us in every way possible (it shows up on every metric from health, to happiness, to stress, to how long we live), including to those at the top.

And maintaining it requires an ideology which pretends it is justified, and a cadre of violent men (and a very few women) who keep those who insist on being unequal from the normal, human, consequences of their actions.

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.

Why the Economy Is Bad for Most People and How to Make It Better

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On June 10, 2019

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This is the second collation of articles on why our world is what it is, and how we can change it. Some of these articles are old, as I don’t write as much as I used to about economics, mostly because the decision points for avoiding a completely lousy economy are now in the past. The last decision points were passed by when Barack Obama announced his economics team and refused to try and get rid of, or bypass, Bernanke to enforce decent policy on the Federal Reserve.

However, this economy was decades in the making, and if we do not understand how it happened we will only wind up in a good economy through accident, and, having obtained a good economy, will not be able to keep it. These articles aren’t exhaustive; a better list would include almost five centuries of economic history, at least in summary, and certainly deal with the 19th century and early 20th centuries.

I was heartened that hundreds of people read the articles linked in my compendium on ideology and character so I dare hope that you will, again, read these pieces. If you do, you will walk away vastly better informed than almost anyone you know, including most formal economists, about why the economy is as it is.

The Decline and Fall of Post-war Liberalism

Pundits today natter on and on about income inequality, but the fundamental cause of income inequality is almost always determined by how society distributes power. As power goes, so goes income–and wealth. The last period of broad-based equality was the “Liberal Period,” which started with the Great Depression. You can locate the end of that era at various points from 1968 to 1980, but 1980 was the point at which turning back became vastly difficult. This was the moment when a new political order was born; an order conceived to crush those who were willing and able to fight effectively for their share of income and money.

(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.)

Why Elites Have Pushed “Free Trade”

Those who are middle-aged or beyond remember the relentless march of free trade agreements, the creation of the WTO, and the endless drumbeat of propaganda about how FREE trade was wonderful, inevitable, and going to make us all rich. It didn’t, and it was never intended to. Fully understanding why “free trade” has only enriched a few requires understanding the circumstances required for free trade to work, the incentives for free trade, and the power dynamics which make free trade perfect for elites who want to become rich (often by destroying the prosperity of their own countries). Free trade is about power, and power is about who gets how much.

The Isolation of Elites and the Madness of the Crowd

All societies change and face new challenges. What matters is how they deal with new circumstances. The US, in specific, and most of the developed world, in general, is in decline because of simple broken feedback loops. Put simply, ordinary people live in a world of propaganda and lies, while the rich and the powerful live in a bubble, isolated from the consequences their decisions have on the majority of the population, or on the future.

The Bailouts Caused the Lousy “Recovery”

This may be the hardest thing to explain to anyone with a connection to power or money: The bailouts are WHY the world has a lousy economy, not why it isn’t even worse. If people cannot understand why this is so, if they cannot understand that other options were, and are, available, other than making the people who destroyed the world economy even richer and more powerful, we will never see a good economy, ever again.

(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.)

The Rapid Destruction of Countries

You may have noticed, you probably have noticed, that most countries are becoming basketcases faster and faster. Some are destroyed by war and revolution, others by forced austerity. However it happens, the end of anything resembling a good economy through austerity in places like Greece, the Ukraine, Italy, or Ireland, or through war, in places like Lybia and Syria, is sure. Understand this: What is done to those countries, is being done to yours if you live in the developed world, just at a slower pace–and one day, you, too, will be more valuable dead than alive.

Why Countries Can’t Resist Austerity

Many of you will realize that much of the answer to this is related to the article on free trade. Weakness, national weakness, is built into the world economic system, and done so deliberately. The austerity of the past six years is simply the deliberate impoverishment of ordinary people, for the profit of elites, on steroids. But it is worth examining, in detail, why countries can’t or won’t stop it, and what is required for a country to be able to do so.

Why Public Opinion Doesn’t Matter

We live in the remnants of a mass society, but we aren’t in one any more (though we think we are). In a mass-mobilization society with relatively evenly distributed wealth and income, and something approaching competitive markets, public opinion mattered. If it was not a King, well, it was at least a Duke. Today it matters only at the margins, on decisions where the elites do not have consensus. Understand this, and understand why, or all your efforts to resist will be for nothing.

The Golden Rule

Money, my friends, is Permission, as Stirling Newberry once explained to me. It is how we determine who gets to do what. He who can create money, rules. This is more subtle than it seems, so read and weep.

It’s Not How Much Money, It’s Who We Give It to and Why

We have almost no significant problems in the world today which we could either not have fixed had we acted soon enough, or that we could not fix or mitigate today, were we to act. We don’t act because we misallocate, on a scale which would put Pyramid-building Pharoahs to shame, our social efforts.

Higher Profits Produce a Worse Society

No one ever told you that, I’m sure. Read and learn.

The Fall of the USSR

The USSR fell in large part because of constant and radical misallocation of resources. This misallocation occurred because those running the economy did not receive accurate feedback. Despite the triumphal cries of the West and the managerial class who pretend to be capitalists, a version of this exact problem is at the root of our current decline, and it would serve us well to understand how and why the USSR fell.

What Privatization Does

Of all the ideological bugaboos of our current age, one of the strongest is the idea that private enterprise is always more efficient and better. It’s not, but that belief is a very profitable to our elites, and understanding how the engine of privatization works is essential to understanding both our current economic collapse and how the fakely-bright economies of the neoliberal era–especially the early neoliberal period of Thatcher and Reagan–were generated.

What Prosperity Is and Isn’t

It is, perhaps, odd to put this article so far down the list, but it’s wonky and important and not very dramatic. Simply enough, what we define as prosperity is not prosperity, which is why we are sick, fat, and unhappy with rates of depression and mental illness and chronic disease which dwarf those of our forbears despite having so much more stuff. Fix everything else, but if we insist on continuing to produce that which makes us sick and unhappy, what we have will not be what we need or want, nor will it be, truly, prosperity worth having.

The Four Principles of Prosperity

Prosperity, at its heart, is an ethical phenomenon, as much as it is anything else. Without the right ethics, the right spirit, it will not last, nor be widespread. If we want a lasting prosperity, which is actually good for us, we will start by reforming our public ethics.

How to Create a Good Internet Economy

The internet is wonderful, but despite all the cries of “Progress, progress!” it has mostly made a few people rich, created a prosperous class of software engineers who often lose their jobs in their 50s, and has simultaneously overseen the decline of the prosperity for most people in the developed world. It has not produced the prosperity we hoped it would. Here’s why and how to fix it.

Concluding Remarks

The above is so far from comprehensive as to make me cry, but it’s a start. I do hope that you will read it and come away with a far better idea of why the economy sucks for most people, and a clearer understanding of the fact that it is intended to suck, why it is intended to suck, and how the old, better economy was lost.

(Author’s Note: This was originally published October 6, 2014. I’m putting it back up top, as I have gained many new readers since then.)

Why Elites Are Creating Surveillance States

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On June 3, 2019

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It’s commonplace now to note that China is a surveillance state.

But most other countries–including the UK and the US–are on their way. Cameras proliferate everywhere, virtually everyone carries a phone which is tracked constantly (and 5G networks will be so precise they can tell which room of a building you are in), and audio surveillance is increasingly being added. (That much of this surveillance is private, rather than government, changes little.)

AI + various recognition algos (face, gait, etc…) and cheap long term storage means that, increasingly, it is possible to know where people were, when, and store that information for years. Cameras and phones and other devices which listen in, plus access to all chat, phone, email, and other messaging means we know what they were doing and saying.

1984 was nothing on this. Big Brother couldn’t store information (no video tape even) and someone had to actually be watching the camera and listening in when you did something The Powers That Be didn’t like. If no one was watching, you got away with it.

The endgame, as I’ve been pointing out for years, is a society in which where you are and what you’re doing, and have done is, always known, or at least knowable. And that information is known forever, so the moment someone with power wants to take you out, they can go back through your life in minute detail. If laws or norms change so that what was okay ten or 30 years ago isn’t okay now, well, they can get you on that.

Surveillance societies are sterile societies. Everyone does what they’re supposed to do all the time, and because we become what we do, it affects our personalities. It particularly affects our creativity, and is a large part of why Communist surveillance societies were less creative than the West, particularly as their police states ramped up.

Surveillance societies also just suck to live in: paranoia, fear, little freedom.

So why create them? I mean in one sense the answer is obvious: Surveillance is control, and powerful people always want small people under their thumb, and small people can be sold on arguments like, “This stops crime!” and “Oh, think of the children!”

(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.)

But there are three specific reasons for this upsurge in the surveillance state beyond, “We can, so why not?”

The first is that elites have become very aware that modern military technology is mostly not in their favour. Iraqis fought the US to a standstill. The US military had to pay militias to let it leave. You don’t do that if you won. The Taliban is straight up winning in Afghanistan. The biggest and arguably the most expensive military in the world has lost to opponents who don’t have one percent of its budget. Israel lost to Hezbollah the last time it invaded Lebanon, and even lost the e-lint war.

The issue is that a big military like America’s can’t be defeated on the battlefield by rabble, but technologies of area denial (most notably IEDs) mean that large parts of any sizeable country can be made into no go zones. The state can’t rule them and neither can the militias really (because air power can be used to devastate them).

Meanwhile technologies like drones, and, I suspect, in the longer run, weaponized robots, are actually technologies that will be more useful to the weak than the strong. Bombers that cost a billion bucks and can only be made by huge firms or government organizations, and then require teams of specialists to run and maintain? Those are weapons of the strong.

But drones and weaponized robots and IEDs are or will be technologies that any competent mechanic/engineer will be able to make.

What is even scarier is that, as Bush and Obama made clear, drones are weapons of assassination. Like daggers and pistols in earlier eras, they make it possible to kill important people and are really hard to stop.

That will remain true as they disperse out to non-state actors, which is already happening.

They are also excellent weapons of sabotage. A few drones shut down Heathrow Airport, Britain’s most important airport, for days, without having to do anything beyond buzz about.

So, the technological soup to which we are coming makes assassination, sabotage, and area denial easy (as does cyber warfare). A single ransomware attack can shut down an entire bureaucracy, private or public.

The only way our elites can see to stop this is to know what everyone is doing all the time. Oh, there is one other way, but they are ideologically opposed to it.

The Rise of Inequality

The other way to stop people from sabotage, assassination, and insurgency is to make life good. People who are happy, expect the future to be better than the past, and have great social ties (love/friendship) don’t commit violence except when it is socially acceptable violence.

But this requires actually letting ordinary people have stuff: money and good futures. It means not treating them badly at work. It means sharing power (because there is no shared wealth without shared power over time). It also means, in an increasingly small world, actually giving developing country inhabitants decent lives–equality within and between societies.

If you are the richest rich in the history of the world, you sure don’t want to do that. Moreover, you are aware that you have so much, and that other people want it, and you are scared. Especially because you know serious disruptions to the social order will occur as climate change and ecological collapse worsen.

So, to keep your position, and save your lives when things go bad, you need a surveillance state. People have good reason to hate you, the smarter among you realize that, and know that only real, credible fear will stop them.

Remember, the surveillance state, combined with the technologies we’ve discussed, already means the state can easily kill and capture you. If they know where you are, who all your friends are, and everything you’ve done or do, it’s just a matter of visiting some violence on you, and they have plenty of violent capability. Finding you is the important part. The rest is easy.

A Grand Experiment in Cost

Traditional surveillance societies were expensive. The East German Stasi reputedly had one-third of its population spying on the other two-thirds. That’s ludicrous. It guts productivity, making the state poor. Combined with the creativity effects of surveillance societies, you will eventually lose to healthy, non-surveillance societies.

But what if you only had to pay a few percentage points of people to spy on the others, and, if necessary, kill or capture, the rest of the population. What if most of the work was done by AI, algos, and robots? Even better, this gets rid of the need to keep a large number of internal police and spies loyal, so you need a much smaller class of people to keep your surveillance state running.

But wait! It gets better! (Worse.) What if these new technologies mean that you don’t actually need peons? What if you can do the manufacturing, delivery, and service jobs all with combinations of AI and robots. Who needs workers? Just give the peons a guaranteed annual income large enough for them to buy your shitty goods and services, stick them in sub-par housing, and run the society mostly without them!

Oh sure, the same technology could be used to create a utopia (luxury-automated communism) but why do that? That would mean you wouldn’t be the richest, most powerful elite the world has ever known.

As members of the powerful elite, the problem of peons and minions revolting has always been the thorn in your bowl of cherries.

Finally, finally, technology offers a solution. A possibility of a permanent state where you never can, or will, lose your power.

Give it a little longer and make sure that you get access to the new gene-editing technologies (and the peons don’t), and you can even give yourself another permanent advantage by making yourself and your children actually, biologically superior to the hoi polloi.

The possibilities! The possibilities! If you can just hang on and get all of this into place, this could be the greatest age of aristocracy and autocracy the world has ever seen, and one that has no reason to ever end.

Ahhhhh.

It’s always good to be rich and powerful, but potentially this is the best era ever to be rich and powerful, with the best yet to come!

The Rise of the Strongman

By

On February 7, 2019

Comments

Who does this describe?

…authoritarian leaders around the world have refined a playbook for acquiring and consolidating power. The strategy goes something like this: appeal to nationalism, stoke fear and divide people into an “us” and a “them,” use that polarization to win an election (even if it’s just an internal party vote, as in China), and systematically undermine democratic rules and other procedural safeguards.

According to Foreign Policy’s “Top 100  Global Thinkers” piece, it describes the strongman — its most influential thinker.

FP lists:

Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines, Xi Jinping’s China, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and even Donald Trump’s America”…

And that’s fine as far as it goes.

But who is dividing America, say, into “us and them?”

Is it just Trump. Or is it a Democratic leader calling a huge chunk of the population “the deplorables?” Whether you agreed or disagreed with Clinton, is this not an internal enemy?

What about the Democratic and “Resistance” strategy of demonizing Russia and Putin? Is this different in kind from China demonizing Japan and the West? (Perhaps it is, in that those countries really did despoil China, while Russia has never despoiled America.)

Is it so different from what is happening in Britain, with Brexit, or in much of Europe, especially Eastern Europe with regard to refugees?

I think Foreign Policy magazine is correct, understand. I just think that being members of America’s elite, they have trouble seeing and naming this tendency when it is being done by leaders or movements they identify with. Trump is outside the foreign policy establishment (he actually talks about withdrawing troops from Syria and Afghanistan!) He is easy to criticize. But Trump has not been tangoing in the US alone and US politicians have a long history of using internal and external enemies, just like strongmen, to win internal elections.

Likewise, that US democratic elections have been systematically undermined (thru gerrymandering, voter suppression and vast lakes of money) is undeniable, as is the fact that the rule of law means little in the United States after Obama’s Department of Justice immunized virtually every senior financial executive in the country.

There is a general global trend to authoritarianism. In the US it did not start with Trump, and it is already in the acute stage. It entered the acute stage not in 2016, but on September 14th 2001, with the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), when the US Senate decided to give away its war-making authority to the Presidency. (And with the Patriot Act, when the US decided to formally become a soft police state.)

It is seen in austerity, where government functions have been systematically weakened so that tax cuts and privatization can be given to the rich.

It is abetted by the destruction and hobbling of the media. It is true that Turkey’s Erdogan is terrible when it comes to jailing the media; that China’s media is censored, and so on.

But the US media is being eviscerated by market forces. Journalists are laid off in waves. What oversight they offered (generally pitiful, as the run up to the Iraq war showed, with virtually all media onside and critics deliberately silenced, fired and demoted) is withering on the vine.

The trend away from meaningful democracy, whatever forms are maintained, is not limited to a few bad apples and one rogue President, Trump. It is, instead, something with deep roots in the hegemonic power of the age, America.

It will continue so long as the general population are considered sheep. As long as the needs of the many are subordinate to the needs of the few, and as long as large groups of the many are impoverished, they will remain demagogue bait and willing to support authoritarians.

Fear, as FDR understood, is at the heart of all authoritarianism.

People are scared. They have good reason to be scared, because their leaders despise them and want to hurt them. And whenever they find someone they think is strong and on their side, they will flock to that person. They will usually be wrong to do so, but abused people usually make bad decisions.

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