Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire. Morris Berman. 2006. ISBN 0-393-05866-2
EXCERPTS
In his famous essay of 1784, “What is Enlightenment?”, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote, “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” which he defined as his “inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another.” Sapere aude!, cried Kant; “have the courage to use your own reason! – that is the motto of enlightenment.”
Quite honestly, we may be only one more terrorist attack away from a police state.
Despite the unifying patriotic rhetoric that permeates the United States, on some level Americans are not really fooled; at bottom, each person knows he or she must continually “reinvent themselves,” which is to say, go it alone. America is the ultimate anti-community.
American citizens cannot choose not to participate in the utterly fluid, high-pressure society that the United States has become. Liquid modernity is, in short, quite rigid: a world of compulsive self-determination.
On the grassroots level of people’s working lives, this merger of our identities with the economy is surely one of the most destructive aspects of the new globalized world order.
The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci pointed out long ago that if you capture people’s minds, their hands will follow. He called this “hegemony”, the symbolic level of the dominant culture that convinces people – the evidence of their lives notwithstanding – that this is the best of all possible worlds.
… “one dollar, one vote”, which is actually the description of a plutocracy.
Globalization is our destiny; it is, in effect, the final phase of capitalism. We did not evolve to this place by accident, and short of massive civilizational breakdown, there seems to be now way to alter this trajectory – not even slightly.
In the absence of broad structural awareness, alternatives to a world characterized by liquid modernity don’t have much of a chance. It is also the case that the absence of such alternatives is our consciousness is an inherent feature of this world. In such a context, anything truly different, and certainly anything truly creative, has to swim against an enormous tide of commercial garbage.
The fact is that liquid modernity has a strongly addictive quality to it: its participants are often convinced that death is actually life. In “The Numbing of the American Mind,” Thomas de Zengotita points out that it constitutes “a vast goo of meaningless stimulation.”
… the more money moves to the center of our lives, the more cynical we become about higher values. This … generates a culture of sensation, a longing for speed and excitement, because natural excitement is increasingly absent.
Modern American childhood … is for the most part an education in shopping.
The upshot of all of this is that school is turned into a venue for corporate and consumerist indoctrination – with the blessing of many schools and probably most of society.
The reason shows such as Seinfeld or Friends were so popular is that they depicted community situations – i.e., ones in which people hang out together on a daily basis and have a shared history. The irony of millions of isolated Americans sitting home alone and vicariously participating in a group experience that they themselves will never have, because they will never have it, hardly needs comment …
In what other context would we expect to find “reality” shows on TV, such as Survivor, in which screwing the other person is the name of the game, and which millions find vastly entertaining.
… “social capital”, the connections among individuals that are based on reciprocity and trust.
Shopping malls are now America’s most distinctive public space, and mall culture is about being in the presence of others, but not in their company.
… it is precisely in the declining phase of a civilization that it beats the drum of self-congratulation most fiercely.
Negative freedom … is essentially the freedom to be left alone. Societies without this type of freedom tend to be tribal (or organic) in nature, heavily dominated by custom and tradition. In those cultures, the separation of church and state – a mainstay of secular democracy – is usually absent.
As a California migrant worker once remarked to his family, on a return visit south of the border over the Christmas holiday, “The gringos don’t like to be reminded that they are corpses.”
… Osama’s laundry list of grievances … in particular the fact that the United States has inherited the mantle and pattern of nineteenth-century European imperialism: military garrisons, economic control, support for brutal leaders, exploitation of natural resources.
Beginning with the Wilson administration, taxes collected for individuals were used to provide corporations with loans and subsidies for overseas expansion.
Michael Hunt defines ideology as a structure of meaning that is part of the culture – so much a part, in our own case, that we take it for granted, are not really aware of it, and regard other ideologies as aberrant.
Americans still live in a world in which Anglos are on top, Europeans follow, and the Third (read: nonwhite) World sits at the bottom … Plainly put, Americans don’t respect cultural patterns different from their own, and this has facilitated an imperial foreign policy.
The American Dream involves something more comprehensive than just making money … it includes Americans’ vision of themselves as bringing freedom and the American way of life to the world, being atop a racial hierarchy (although this is no longer expressed overtly), and keeping political revolution at bay.
Across much of Asia and Latin America, our allies cared nothing for democracy; their allegiance was to our dollars, not to our values. Nor did we care, so long as they let us install military bases and said the “right” things.
Recall what [George] Kennan wrote: that the USSR viewed the outside world as hostile, was persuaded of its own doctrinaire rightness, insisted on the elimination of all competing powers and ideologies, believed that no opposition to them could possibly have any merit, and saw their regime as the only true one “in a dark and misguided world.” Let’s not kid ourselves: it would be hard to find a better description of American postwar foreign policy, right down to today.
It is this, to my mind, that makes [Carter] so unusual; it sets him off from presidents such as Reagan or Bush Jr. – men who were (are) very doctrinaire and who confuse(d) strength with rigidity (the American public does as well). Carter accepted compromises and contradictions when necessary, and saw the foreign policy arena as one necessarily fraught with conflict and inconsistency. Allied with this, he did not think in oppositional terms, and since that is all the media and public seem to be able to do, his message got lost.
It is no accident that [Carter] was defeated by an actor, a not terribly astute, sloganeering individual with an opposite modus operandi. Popularity with the media was at the top of Reagan’s list. He was not interested in the substantive details of foreign policy; he probably couldn’t even understand them. What interested the fortieth president was rhetoric, public appearances, and ceremonial duties. He had no intellectual curiosity whatsoever; his political philosophy amounted to little more than “us good, them bad”, and that was basically what most of the American people wanted to hear.
We love our large, energy-inefficient vehicles, and don’t seem to be too preoccupied with the fact that other peoples of the world have to die in large numbers so that we can live an extravagant and wasteful lifestyle.
Americans as a people don’t really like to look inward. Our feelings on the subject are much closer to, say, Bush Sr. than to Jimmy Carter. Whenever the elder Bush was asked probing questions, his immediate response was “Don’t stretch me out on the couch.”
[Andrew] Bacevich claims that [America] had a “globalization” strategy in the 1890s and that it was still operative one hundred years later. Then as now, the goal was to create an integrated international order that offered no barriers to the flow of goods, capital, and ideas, and that is administered by the United States.
The German philosopher Hegel referred to this as “negative identity,” the process of creating an identity for yourself by defining yourself against something. Ultimately, he said, it never works, for to say “I am not that” is at root empty; it doesn’t tell you who you actually are, and in essence enables you to hide from that question.
When you get down to it, globalization, besides being an updated euphemism for imperialism, is not much more than the elite version of shopping.
That September [2002], the White House released the “National Security Strategy” (NSS) … We shall “rid the world of evil”, it fatuously declares; we shall act preemptively; we shall act alone if necessary; and w shall decide who is or is not an enemy, and deserving of “regime change”. In a word, we are going to militarily rearrange the world to suit ourselves. The war on Iraq began almost exactly six months later.
Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker argues that the NSS was a “vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination.” The document, he claimed was a prescription for a benevolent American dictatorship, as well as for perpetual war. A regime in which the cops have to answer only to themselves, he pointed out, had a name: police state.
In the case of the Bush Doctrine, coupled with the Bush administration’s assault on civil liberties, I think it can be argued that we have been in the midst of a slow-motion coup d’êtat, one that has, in fact, been building since the late seventies, and that can now, in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, finalize its program for a one-party system and a theocratic plutocracy.
To realize their dream of a pax Americana, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al. relied in the 1990s on a number of think tanks and front groups that have interlocking directorates and shared origins in those earlier organizations: the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, among others. They provided the Bush Jr. administration with policy advice and personnel. They also relied on right-wing media empires to blanket the public space with their message, in much the same way – if more powerfully – that the yellow press of Hearst and Pulitzer did during the Spanish-American War. Thus Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda via Fox News, and the Weekly Standard is a mouthpiece for defense establishment intellectuals (for instance, Richard Perle, who is also a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute). There is also the National Interest and the Washington Times (the latter owned by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon), which also owns the UPI newswire. The result is a “seamless propaganda machine” that has effectively destroyed public discourse in the United States, to the point that we now dwell in a kind of right-wing propagandistic fog.
When individuals “get religion” – and there is really no other name for the Manichaean anticommunism that gripped America during the Cold War – reason and even common decency typically fly out the window, and the results are frequently horrific.
Our basic Middle Eastern policy is by now fully transparent to the Islamic world: the United States supports whoever serves and extends its power, and that can change at a moment’s notice.
On 1 November 1983 Secretary of State George Shultz received intelligence reports showing that Iraq was using chemical weapons almost daily. The following February, Iraq used large amounts of mustard gas and also the lethal never agent tabun (this was later documented by the United Nations); Reagan responded (in November) by restoring diplomatic relations with Iraq. He and Bush Sr. also authorized the sale of poisonous chemicals, anthrax, and bubonic plague.
An intellectual lightweight who didn’t really know what he was doing, Bush Sr. was quickly pushed aside by history after he had fulfilled his role as a catalyst for certain events. By the time his son came to power, the new world order – that is, global American hegemony and the final phase of empire – was pretty much in place. Being a lightweight – or a vacuous marionette, in George Jr.’s case – was not a liability but actually an asset; that Bush Jr. was (is) a hollow mouthpiece for a self-destructive imperial project is an arrangement that makes the project all that much easier to fulfill. That “he’s a real nowhere man” is not an obstacle for a nation sliding into chaos while it is trying to convince itself that it is in charge of the world. Indeed, it’s a perfect fit.
The “coalition” bombardment of Iraq began on 17 January 1991 (Baghdad time) and went on for forty-three days … As many as 200,000 people died. Targets chosen included water and sewage treatment plants, electrical generating plants, oil refineries, transportation networks, factories, bridges, roads, and irrigation systems, much of which bombing constituted violations of international law … There was also a kind of demonic violence exercised against retreating Iraqi forces, who were massacred in flight on February 26-27, after a cease-fire was already in place (also a war crime, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention).
… as philosopher Douglas Kellner points out, there was really no single reason that the United States went to war; rather, it was “overdetermined”, a confluence of political, economic, and military considerations all coming together. Yet the most suspicious aspect of the whole affair, according to foreign policy expert Christopher Layne, was the Bush administration’s inability to articulate a coherent rationale for it, which suggests that the core reason lay in the values and premises of the foreign policy elite – principles that they themselves couldn’t clearly articulate – regarding the concept of a new world order.
But whatever the U.S. policy has been on the [West Bank] settlement question, the one thing the United States has decidedly not done is force the issue by threatening to pull the plug on the huge amount of foreign aid it gives Israel each year. The reason for this lies in the latter’s role as our proxy in the Middle East.
The Nixon Doctrine – that certain countries in key regions of the world would play the role of “local police” under the direction of the U.S. ….
And because Israel serves as America’s proxy, supposedly protecting U.S. economic and strategic interests; because Muslims the world over know about the $3 billion subsidy and where Israeli weaponry comes from; because they see the United States consistently voting against the Palestinians, and for the Israelis, in the United Nations, even on human rights issues – for all these reasons, they despise the United States, and cite the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the key sticking point in their relations with the West.
The enemy – “evil” – can never be defeated by definition; there are no possible criteria for what a victory would consist of.
As the British journalist George Monbiot predicted even before the “National Security Strategy” was issued by the White House in September 2002, “If the U.S. were not preparing to attach Iraq, it would be preparing to attack another nation. The U.S. will go to war because it needs a country with which to go to war.”
… when a powerful nation can pick fights only with the small and the weak, it is because appearances to the contrary, it is weak itself.
… on 19 July 2004 Newsweek broke the story that the White House and the Justice Department had, for several months, been discussing the possibility of postponing the November 2 presidential elections, which would have been a first in American history, if it had come to pass. If power at all costs is the game, then democratic elections, protection against torture, civil liberties – all of the things we used to take for granted – become expendable, and practically overnight. As America morphed from a republic into an empire, these sorts of changes began to occur quite naturally, the unthinkable became perfectly thinkable, after all. Nor have most Americans, it must be said, been overly concerned about this new direction in which we are moving. Indeed, a large percentage of them are probably not even aware of it.
Two days after 9/11, Chalmers Johnson remarked in an interview, “I know it sounds cruel to say, but the people of New York were collateral damage of American foreign policy.”
In very rough terms, the central drama of American history is that of an expanding capitalist economy that gained momentum, moving faster and faster, feeding greedily on technological innovation (especially after World War II), eventually steamrolling all other values except those of a market economy, and heavily influencing U.S. foreign policy in its wake.
Our typical idea of the perfect vacation is to go somewhere that has escaped the ravages of “progress”, or that can create the illusion of having done so, because we are disgusted by urban decay and suburban sprawl and meaningless jobs to which we commute an hour or more every day.
“It has been our fate as a nation,” wrote Richard Hofstadter, “not to have ideologies, but to be one.” Americanism, in short: that is our religion.
As Clay McShane points out in Down the Asphalt Path, trolleys contradicted basic American values. They were dirty and overcrowded and made it impossible for the middle class to isolate itself from the lower classes – blacks and immigrants in particular. Meanwhile, by 1932 General Motors formed a consortium of tire, oil, and highway companies to buy and then shut down streetcar systems, bribing local officials when necessary. In the next quarter century, as 1974 Senate antitrust hearings revealed, GM, by means of monopolies and interlocking directorates, killed off more than a hundred electric surface rail systems in forty-five states.
From a European point of view, says sociologist Ray Oldenburg, American suburbs are like prisons. There is no contact between households, and one rarely knows one’s neighbors. There are no places to walk or cafes to sit where people drop in and socialize or read the newspaper.
Portland politics does not revolve around race because the place is one of the whitest cities around, and Oregon one of the whitest states. Given the absence of the “white flight” factor endemic to much of the United States, there hasn’t been that great a motivation for suburban housing in the greater Portland area.
The truth is that cities and civilization are nearly synonymous, and if the former die out, so do the latter. Nor does renaming a phenomenon change it. Techno-oriented or not, the new suburbs continue the trend of racial and class segregation; have not become independent economic entities; are destructive of the environment; epitomize the culture of consumption; and lack the diversity, cosmopolitanism, political culture, and public life that real cities have. The ethos of the technocity remains what the suburban ethos has always been: resistance to heterogeneity, and the desire to live apart.
.. the sad fact is that daily American life contains a great amount of violence and ignorance and is pervaded by a lot of (repressed) alienation and spiritual emptiness.
As Fareed Zakaria notes, the sacred cow in the United States is the American people, to which politicians have to pay ritual homage if they value their careers. No matter how manifestly stupid the people’s behavior is, American politician praise their sagacity. Uttering the phrase, “the American people”, says Zakaria, is tantamount to announcing a divine visitation; anything has the force of biblical revelation if it is ascribed to this mystical, all-knowing entity.
It seems to me that the people do get the government they deserve, and even beyond that, the government who they are, so to speak.
Shopping, of course, is a pretty pathetic religion, but if “God” can be said to be where someone puts most of their attention, then the data are in. Americans spend far more time in shopping malls that in church, for example, and by 1987 the country had more malls than high schools.
The basic perception of Americans from the outside is that we are children, adolescents at best, and Bush is just such a person.
Those of us who now have different values from the country may have to look elsewhere for hope, quality, humanism, and – possibly – freedom, which is not exactly what we had in mind when we were growing up.
Note that since World War II, we have avoided taking on an equal power. Our engagement with the Soviet Union itself was a balancing act involving the (often judicious) use of diplomacy. When we actually attacked, it was at the periphery: Korea (a stalemate); Vietnam (a defeat). Otherwise, the engagement consisted of covert operations against virtually defenseless nations or massive attacks on puny countries or tinpot dictators (Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and so on).
Leaving its abysmal record on human rights aside, China is beginning to resemble the United States in Mandarin. It seems to have no larger vision, and there is absolutely no indications that its emergence as a superpower will herald a better world.
So many Americans posses what might be called a kind of “life stupidity”: they haven’t a clue as to what the good life really is. Like Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, they think it amounts to a single word: more.
… former Wall Street Journal reported Michael Ybarra, in Washington Gone Crazy, demonstrates quite clearly that the anti-Communist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s was not really a response to espionage or an external threat, but more fundamentally “a conservative reaction to the New Deal,” a long-standing series of resentments that included “rural rancor toward urban cities, nativist dread of encroaching minorities, fundamentalist anxieties over the spread of secular values,” and the like. When you add to these the contemporary hatred of knowledge and Enlightenment thinking, and the subliminal awareness that we have become unmoored and are basically failing as a nation, you have a rather potent brew on your hands.
QUOTATIONS
Robert Bellah
Our material success is our punishment, in terms of what that success has done to the natural environment, our social fabric, and our personal lives.
Cicero
Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child.
Samuel Huntington
The West won the world not by its superiority in its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
H.L. Mencken
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more clearly, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
Emmanuel Todd
Theatrical military activism against inconsequential rogue states … is a sign of weakness, not of strength … This is classic for a crumbling system … The final glory is militarism.
Polly Toynbee
God’s chosen people, uniquely blessed, nurture a self-image almost as deranged in its profound self-delusion as the old Soviet Union. The most advanced … nation on earth knows nothing of itself, irony-free and blind to the world around it.
Sharon Zukin
The seduction of shopping is not about buying goods. It’s about dreaming of a perfect society and a perfect self.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
What's Going on with A.I.G. Bailout?
There has been a considerable uproar over the Federal Reserve Banks $85 billion load to A.I.G., in return for a 79.9% equity stake. Some commentators have complained that the Fed had no government authority to conduct this transaction – that Congress or the Treasury or some regulators should have given approval. This simply demonstrates the ignorance of both the American public and the media. The Federal Reserve Bank is NOT a government agency in any form, but instead is a privately-owned consortium of twelve regional banks, each of which is in turned owned by a number of private domestic and foreign banks. No approval is therefore needed.
As for the implications and ramifications of this and other recent Fed activities, please consider the following informative commentaries:
Christopher Laird
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/laird/2008/0917.html
Darryl Schoon
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schoon/2008/0917.html
Keep your eyes and mind open.
Michael Childress
As for the implications and ramifications of this and other recent Fed activities, please consider the following informative commentaries:
Christopher Laird
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/laird/2008/0917.html
Darryl Schoon
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/schoon/2008/0917.html
Keep your eyes and mind open.
Michael Childress
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Creating a New Civilization by Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler - Excerpts
Creating a New Civilization: The Politics of the Third Wave. Alvin Toffler and Heidi Toffler. 1995. ISBN 1-57036-223-8
EXCERPTS
Even more jarring and significant, however, is the growing transfer of political power away from our formal political structures – the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties – to electronically-linked grassroots groups and to the media.
What is needed, we believe, is a clear distinction between rear-guard politicians who wish to preserve or restore an unworkable past, and those who are ready to make the transition to what we call a “Third Wave” information-age society.
The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money, and power.
Today all high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second.
The Second Wave created mass societies that reflected and required mass production. In Third Wave, brain-based economies, mass production (which could almost be considered the defining mark of industrial society) is already an outmoded form. De-massified production – short runs of highly customized products – is the new cutting edge of manufacture. Mass marketing gives way to market segmentation and “particle marketing”, paralleling the change in production.
Anyone reading this page has an amazing skill called literacy. It comes as a shock sometimes to remember that all of us had ancestors who were illiterate. Not stupid or ignorant, but invincibly illiterate. Not only illiterate, they were also “innumerate,” meaning they couldn’t do the simplest arithmetic. Those few who could were deemed downright dangerous. A marvelous warning attributed to Augustine holds that Christians should stay away from people who could add or subtract. It was obvious they had “made a covenant with the Devil.”
The only reason we ship huge amounts of raw materials like bauxite or nickel or copper across the planet is that we lack the knowledge to convert local materials into usable substitutes.
While land, labor, raw materials and capital were the main factors of production in the Second Wave economy of the past, knowledge – broadly defined here to include data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is now the central resource of the Third Wave economy.
Work itself is transformed. Low-skilled, essentially interchangeable muscle work drove the Second Wave. Mass factory-style education prepared workers for routine, repetitive labor. By contrast, the Third Wave is accompanied by a growing non-interchangeability of labor as skill requirements skyrocket. Muscle power is essentially fungible. Thus a low-skilled worker who quits or is fired can be replaced quickly and with little cost. By contrast, the rising levels of specialized skills required in the Third Wave economy make finding the right person with the right skills harder and more costly.
Economies of speed replace economies of scale. Competition is so intense and the speeds required so high that the old “time is money” rule is increasingly updated to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.”
In Second Wave or smokestack societies an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and generate jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. Since the jobs were either interchangeable or required so little skill that they could be learned in less than an hour, virtually any unemployed worker could fill almost any job. In today’s super-symbolic economy this is less true – which is why a lot of unemployment seems intractable, and neither the traditional Keynesian nor monetarist remedies work well.
In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or compact disc player merely sends dollars to Japan, Korea, Malaysia or elsewhere. The purchase doesn’t add jobs at home.
The jobless desperately need money if they and their families are to survive, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. But any effective strategy for reducing joblessness is a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge.
We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect previously reserved for manufacture rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector as “hamburger flipping.” McDonald’s cannot stand as the sole symbol for a range of activities that includes everything from teaching to working at a dating service or in a hospital radiology center. What’s more, if, as is often charged, wages are low in the service sector, then the solution is to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions, primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing, need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to support rather than resist such things as work-at-home programs, flextime and job-sharing.
In lowbrow industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. The manufacture of goods – autos, radios, tractors, TV sets – was seen as “male” or macho and words like practical, realistic or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing.”
Marxist economists, if any thing, have had a harder time trying to integrate high brow work into their schema, and “socialist realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, their Schwarzenegger-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks and steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principles of a lowbrow economy.
In brief, production is reconceptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologists of lowbrow economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not cheap labor, and symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of the sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashes the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and the material-ismo that gave rise to both. Thus, the ideas that value is sweated from the back of the worker alone and that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-ismo, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically.
A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel and commands flowing downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, after all, about knowledge.
A Third Wave economic policy should not pick winners and losers, but it should clear away the obstacles to professionalization and development of the services needed to make life in America less stressed-out, less frustrating and impersonal. Yet no political party as yet has even begun to think this way.
America’s schools, for example, still operate like factories. They subject the raw material (children) to standardized instruction and routine inspection. An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualized, customized education. A similar question could be asked of health legislation, welfare legislation and of every proposal to reorganize the federal bureaucracy. America needs new institutions built on post-bureaucratic, post-factory models.
EXCERPTS
Even more jarring and significant, however, is the growing transfer of political power away from our formal political structures – the Congress, the White House, the government agencies and political parties – to electronically-linked grassroots groups and to the media.
What is needed, we believe, is a clear distinction between rear-guard politicians who wish to preserve or restore an unworkable past, and those who are ready to make the transition to what we call a “Third Wave” information-age society.
The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money, and power.
Today all high-technology nations are reeling from the collision between the Third Wave and the obsolete, encrusted economies and institutions of the Second.
The Second Wave created mass societies that reflected and required mass production. In Third Wave, brain-based economies, mass production (which could almost be considered the defining mark of industrial society) is already an outmoded form. De-massified production – short runs of highly customized products – is the new cutting edge of manufacture. Mass marketing gives way to market segmentation and “particle marketing”, paralleling the change in production.
Anyone reading this page has an amazing skill called literacy. It comes as a shock sometimes to remember that all of us had ancestors who were illiterate. Not stupid or ignorant, but invincibly illiterate. Not only illiterate, they were also “innumerate,” meaning they couldn’t do the simplest arithmetic. Those few who could were deemed downright dangerous. A marvelous warning attributed to Augustine holds that Christians should stay away from people who could add or subtract. It was obvious they had “made a covenant with the Devil.”
The only reason we ship huge amounts of raw materials like bauxite or nickel or copper across the planet is that we lack the knowledge to convert local materials into usable substitutes.
While land, labor, raw materials and capital were the main factors of production in the Second Wave economy of the past, knowledge – broadly defined here to include data, information, images, symbols, culture, ideology, and values – is now the central resource of the Third Wave economy.
Work itself is transformed. Low-skilled, essentially interchangeable muscle work drove the Second Wave. Mass factory-style education prepared workers for routine, repetitive labor. By contrast, the Third Wave is accompanied by a growing non-interchangeability of labor as skill requirements skyrocket. Muscle power is essentially fungible. Thus a low-skilled worker who quits or is fired can be replaced quickly and with little cost. By contrast, the rising levels of specialized skills required in the Third Wave economy make finding the right person with the right skills harder and more costly.
Economies of speed replace economies of scale. Competition is so intense and the speeds required so high that the old “time is money” rule is increasingly updated to “every interval of time is worth more than the one before it.”
In Second Wave or smokestack societies an injection of capital spending or consumer purchasing power could stimulate the economy and generate jobs. Given one million jobless, one could, in principle, prime the economy and create one million jobs. Since the jobs were either interchangeable or required so little skill that they could be learned in less than an hour, virtually any unemployed worker could fill almost any job. In today’s super-symbolic economy this is less true – which is why a lot of unemployment seems intractable, and neither the traditional Keynesian nor monetarist remedies work well.
In today’s global economy, pumping money into the consumer’s pocket may simply send it flowing overseas without doing anything to help the domestic economy. An American buying a new TV set or compact disc player merely sends dollars to Japan, Korea, Malaysia or elsewhere. The purchase doesn’t add jobs at home.
The jobless desperately need money if they and their families are to survive, and it is both necessary and morally right to provide them with decent levels of public assistance. But any effective strategy for reducing joblessness is a super-symbolic economy must depend less on the allocation of wealth and more on the allocation of knowledge.
We will also have to begin according human-service jobs the same respect previously reserved for manufacture rather than snidely denigrating the entire service sector as “hamburger flipping.” McDonald’s cannot stand as the sole symbol for a range of activities that includes everything from teaching to working at a dating service or in a hospital radiology center. What’s more, if, as is often charged, wages are low in the service sector, then the solution is to increase service productivity and to invent new forms of work-force organization and collective bargaining. Unions, primarily designed for the crafts or for mass manufacturing, need to be totally transformed or else replaced by new-style organizations more appropriate to the super-symbolic economy. To survive they will have to support rather than resist such things as work-at-home programs, flextime and job-sharing.
In lowbrow industrial economies, wealth was typically measured by the possession of goods. The production of goods was regarded as central to the economy. Conversely, symbolic and service activities, while unavoidable, were stigmatized as nonproductive. The manufacture of goods – autos, radios, tractors, TV sets – was seen as “male” or macho and words like practical, realistic or hardheaded were associated with it. By contrast, the production of knowledge or the exchange of information was typically disparaged as mere “paper pushing.”
Marxist economists, if any thing, have had a harder time trying to integrate high brow work into their schema, and “socialist realism” in the arts produced thousands of portrayals of happy workers, their Schwarzenegger-like muscles straining against a background of cogwheels, smokestacks and steam locomotives. The glorification of the proletariat and the theory that it was the vanguard of change, reflected the principles of a lowbrow economy.
In brief, production is reconceptualized as a far more encompassing process than the economists and ideologists of lowbrow economics imagined. And at every step from today on, it is knowledge, not cheap labor, and symbols, not raw materials, that embody and add value. This deep reconceptualization of the sources of added value is fraught with consequence. It smashes the assumptions of both free-marketism and Marxism alike, and the material-ismo that gave rise to both. Thus, the ideas that value is sweated from the back of the worker alone and that value is produced by the glorious capitalist entrepreneur, both implied in material-ismo, are revealed to be false and misleading politically as well as economically.
A one-party political system is designed to control political communication. Since no other party exists, it restricts the diversity of political information flowing through the society, blocking feedback and thus blinding those in power to the full complexity of their problems. With very narrowly defined information flowing upward through the approved channel and commands flowing downward, it becomes very difficult for the system to detect errors and correct them. In fact, top-down control in the socialist countries was based increasingly on lies and misinformation since reporting bad news up the line was often risky. The decision to run a one-party system is a decision, after all, about knowledge.
A Third Wave economic policy should not pick winners and losers, but it should clear away the obstacles to professionalization and development of the services needed to make life in America less stressed-out, less frustrating and impersonal. Yet no political party as yet has even begun to think this way.
America’s schools, for example, still operate like factories. They subject the raw material (children) to standardized instruction and routine inspection. An important question to ask of any proposed educational innovation is simply this: is it intended to make the factory run more efficiently, or is it designed, as it should be, to get rid of the factory model altogether and replace it with individualized, customized education. A similar question could be asked of health legislation, welfare legislation and of every proposal to reorganize the federal bureaucracy. America needs new institutions built on post-bureaucratic, post-factory models.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Financial Markets Believe McCain Will Win in '08
Good analysis of why financial markets believe Senator McCain will win in '08:
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/danielcode/2008/0828.html
Just before the '06 elections, mostly for Representatives, Goldman-Sachs manipulated the unleaded gasoline futures markets so that gasoline prices dropped sharply, but temporarily. This effectively removed the economy as an issue in that election period, leaving the "Wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan as the main issues. This time around, it looks as though the Powers That Be are again manipulating the markets to keep the economy out of the picture - oil and gas are cheaper, the dollar is stronger, gold and silver and other commodities are lower, and the media "talking heads" are chanting in unison that the economy, exports, and GDP are doing much better. Mr. Needham in the above commentary suggests that this is temporary again.
Keep your eyes and mind open.
Mike Childress
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/danielcode/2008/0828.html
Just before the '06 elections, mostly for Representatives, Goldman-Sachs manipulated the unleaded gasoline futures markets so that gasoline prices dropped sharply, but temporarily. This effectively removed the economy as an issue in that election period, leaving the "Wars" in Iraq and Afghanistan as the main issues. This time around, it looks as though the Powers That Be are again manipulating the markets to keep the economy out of the picture - oil and gas are cheaper, the dollar is stronger, gold and silver and other commodities are lower, and the media "talking heads" are chanting in unison that the economy, exports, and GDP are doing much better. Mr. Needham in the above commentary suggests that this is temporary again.
Keep your eyes and mind open.
Mike Childress
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Alternative News Columnists - Links
Two good sources of alternative socio-politico-econo-information:
Jim Willie
http://www.goldenjackass.com/main5.html
F. William Engdahl
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/main.html
You might want to bookmark these two sites to check their latest postings.
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
Jim Willie
http://www.goldenjackass.com/main5.html
F. William Engdahl
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/main.html
You might want to bookmark these two sites to check their latest postings.
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg
The third and last book by investment advisors Davidson and Rees-Mogg. I sure wish they could write another circa 2008. This volume talks in detail about how things had progressed through 1997, pretty much on track from their projections in 1987. The struggle continues between large and small scale forces of violence, wealth, and government – but the mega states appear to be gradually losing. Davidson and Rees-Mogg have numerous suggestions about how the affluent can avoid the carnage. For the rest of us, their megapolitical insights indicate what to watch out for, and when to run for the hills as best we can. Be forewarned.
Excerpts
We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today.
The changes implied by the Information Revolution will not only create a fiscal crisis for governments, they will tend to disintegrate all large structures. Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the nation-state itself.
As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.
In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish.
The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.
Western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means.
There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. Encounters with these new “Luddites” will make the transition to radical new forms of social organization at least a measure of bad news for everyone. Get ready to duck.
… information technology will destroy the capacity of the state to charge more for its services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.
Instead of relating to a powerful state as citizens to be taxed, the Sovereign Individuals of the twenty-first century will be customers of governments.
The civic myths reflect not only a mindset that sees society’s problems as susceptible to engineering solutions; they also reflect a false confidence that resources and individuals will remain as vulnerable to political compulsion in the future as they have been in the twentieth century.
In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence.
We put violence at the center of our theory of megapolitics for good reason. The control violence is the most important dilemma every society faces.
It is precisely the fact that violence does pay that makes it hard to control.
Conventional thinkers of all shapes and sizes observe one of the pretenses of the nation-state – that the views people hold determine the way the world changes.
… formulations of economic justice in the modern context presuppose that society is dominated by an instrument of compulsion so powerful that it can take away and redistribute life’s good things. Such power has existed for only a few generations of the modern period. Now it is fading away.
We expect that representative democracy as it is now known will fade away, to be replaced by the new democracy of choice in the cybermarketplace.
The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, social security, income tax, deodorant, and the toaster oven is dying. Deodorant and the toaster oven may survive. The others won’t.
Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think of how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new system that takes its place.
Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained.
The most profound causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control. They are the factors that alter the conditions under which violence pays.
Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.
… politics in the modern sense, as the preoccupation with controlling and rationalizing the power of the state, is mostly a modern invention.
As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible. What we have in the final years of the twentieth century is inarticulate disdain.
This is worth remembering as you plan ahead. The twilight of state systems in the past has seldom been an polite, orderly process.
As the millennium approaches, the new megapolitical conditions of the Information Age will make it increasingly obvious that the nation-state inherited from the industrial era is a predatory institution.
Another revealing hint that mass democracy is not controlled by its customers is the fact that contemporary political culture, inherited from the Industrial Age, would consider it outrageous if policies on crucial issues were actually informed by the interests of the people who pay the bills.
During the Industrial Age prior to 1989, democracy emerged as the most militarily effective form of government precisely because democracy made it difficult or impossible to impose effective limits on the commandeering of resources by the state.
… we expect nationalism to be a major rallying theme of persons with low skills nostalgic for compulsion as the welfare state collapses in the Western democracies.
A delicate etiquette shrouded straightforward analysis of labor relations during the industrial period. One of its pretenses was the idea that factory jobs, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century, were skilled work. This was untrue. Most factory jobs could have been performed by almost anyone capable of showing up on time. They required little or no training, not even the ability to read or write. As recently as the 1980s, large fractions of the General Motors workforce were either illiterate, innumerate, or both. Until the 1990s, the typical assembly line worker at GM received only one day of orientation before taking his place on the assembly line. A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.
The ability of workers to coerce their employers into paying above-market wages depended on the same megapolitical conditions that allowed governments to extract 40 percent or more of the economy’s output in taxes.
Information technology is making it plain that the problem faced by persons of low skill is not that their productive capacities are being unfairly taken advantage of, but rather the fear that they may lack the ability to make a real economic contribution.
For the first time in history, information technology allows for the creation and protection of assets that lie entirely outside the realm of any individual government’s territorial monopoly on violence.
One bizarre genius, working with digital servants, could theoretically achieve the same impact in a cyberwar as a nation-state. Bill Gates certainly could.
Private financial institutions and central banks will adopt unbreakable encryption algorithms when they realize that the U.S. government – and it may not be alone – has the capacity to penetrate current bank software and computer systems to literally bankrupt a country or sweep the bank account of anyone living almost anywhere.
The fact that the fading industrial era’s first stab at conceiving the information economy is to think of it in terms of a gigantic public works project tells you how grounded our thinking is in the paradigms of the past.
Soon after the turn of the millennium, anyone who pays income taxes at rates currently imposed will be doing so out of choice.
In the 1980s, it was illegal in the United States to send a fax message. The U.S. Post Office considered faxes to be first-class mail, over which the U.S. Post Office claimed an ancient monopoly. An edict to that effect was issued reiterating the requirement that all fax transmissions be routed to the nearest post office for delivery with regular mail.
… the view that the state improves the functioning of the economy by massive reallocation of resources is an anachronism, an article of faith roughly equivalent to the widespread superstitions at the close of the Middle Ages that fasting and flagellation were beneficial for a community.
… we believe that foreign aid and international development programs have had the perverse effect of lowering the real incomes of poor people in poor countries by subsidizing incompetent governments.
The ideology of the nation-state was that life can and should be regulated in a positive way by subsidizing undesirable outcomes and penalizing desirable ones. To be poor is undesirable; therefore, the poor were subsidized. To become rich is desirable; therefore, punitive taxes were laid on the rich to make life more “fair”.
As new, more market-driven forms of protection become available, it will become increasingly evident to the large numbers of able persons that most of the supposed benefits of nationality are imaginary.
Sovereign Individuals will also have to cope with the corrosive consequences of envy – a difficulty that sometimes detains monarchs, but which will be more intensely felt by persons who are not traditionally venerated but invent their own sovereignity.
The “losers and left-behinds” in the Information Society will surely envy and resent the success of winners, especially as the deepening of markets implies that this will be increasingly a “winners take all” world.
While the leading states will no doubt attempt to enforce a cartel to preserve high taxes and fiat money by cooperating to limit encryption and prevent citizens from escaping their domains, the states will ultimately fail. The most productive people on the planet will find their way to economic freedom.
Governments in the industrial era priced their services on the basis of the success of the taxpayer, rather than in relation to the costs or value of any services provided.
… it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration.
The United States is one of just three jurisdictions on the planet that impose taxes based on nationality rather than residence.
The United States has the globe’s most predatory, soak-the-rich tax system. Americans living in the United States or abroad are treated more like assets and less like customers than citizens of any other country.
As the larger, more inclusive national grouping begins to break down, with the more mobile “information elite” globalizing their affairs, the “losers and left-behinds” fall back upon membership in an ethnic subgroup, a tribe, a gang, a religious or linguistic minority. Partly, this is a practical and pragmatic reaction to the collapse of services, including law and order, formerly provided by the state. For persons with few marketable resources, it often proves difficult to purchase access to market alternatives to failed public services.
By eliminating the beneficial impact of competition in challenging underachievers to conform to productive norms, the welfare state has helped to create legions of dysfunctional, paranoid, and poorly acculturated people, the social equivalent of a powder keg. The death of the nation-state and the disappearance of income redistribution on a large scale will no doubt lead some among the more psychopathic of these unhappy souls to strike out against anyone who appears more prosperous than they. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that social peace will be in jeopardy as the Information Age unfolds, especially in North America and in multiethnic enclaves in Western Europe.
If the past is a guide, the most violent of the terrorists of the early decades of the new millennium will not be homeless paupers but displaced workers who formerly enjoyed middle-class incomes and status.
… the most predictable and vulnerable assets of the rich in the coming Information Age may be their physical persons – in other words, their lives. Which is why we fear Luddite-style terrorism in the coming decades, some of it perhaps covertly encouraged by agents provocateurs in the employ of nation-states.
When state and local taxes are considered as well, democratic government at all levels confiscates the lion’s share of each dollar earned in the United States. Predatory tax rates made the democratic state a de facto partner with a three-quarters to nine-tenths share in all earnings. This was not the same thing as state socialism, to be sure. But it was a close relation.
Hong Kong, of course, is not a democracy. Indeed, it is a mental model of the kind of jurisdiction that we expect to see flourish in the Information Age. In the Industrial Age, Hong Kong had no need to be a democracy, as it was spared the unpleasant necessity of gathering resources to support a formidable military establishment.
Now that information technology is displacing mass production, it is logical to expect the twilight of mass democracy.
A system that routinely submits control over the largest, most deadly enterprises on earth to the winner of popularity contests between charismatic demagogues is bound to suffer for it in the long run.
… our expectation is not that politics will be reformed or improved, but that it will be antiquated and, in most respects, abandoned. By this we do not mean to say that we expect to see dictatorship, but rather entrepreneurial government – the commercialization of sovereignty.
It will be perfectly reasonable for you and significant numbers of other future Sovereign Individuals to “vote with your feet” in opting out of leading nation-states to contract for personal protection with an outlying nation-state or a new minisovereignty that will only charge a commercially tolerable amount, rather than the greater part of your net worth. In short, you would probably accept $50 million to move to Bermuda.
… it is doubtful that firms will be able to survive the increasing penetration of market forces into what have heretofore been “intrafirm relationships”. As a result, firms will tend to dissolve as information technology makes it more rewarding to rely upon the price mechanism and the auction market to undertake tasks that need doing rather than having them internalized within a formal organization. As information technology increasingly automates the production process, it will take away part of the raison d’etre of the firm, the need to employ and motivate managers to monitor individual workers.
We believe that as the modern nation-state decomposes, latter-day barbarians will increasingly come to exercise real power behind the scenes. Groups like the Russian mafiyas that pick the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas, drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will increasingly be laws unto themselves. They already are.
The end of an era is usually a period of intense corruption.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to depend upon normal information channels to give an accurate and timely understanding of the decay of the nation-state.
The deeper and richer textures of history are precisely the parts that tend to be edited out in the twenty-five-second sound-bites and misconstrued on CNN. It is much easier to convey a message that is a variation on an already understood theme than it is to explore a new paradigm of understanding.
As we move toward the next century, a high proportion of people in the growing cognitive elite have been given little religious or moral education in the family. The commonest religion of the elite is an agnostic humanism … A godless, rootless, and rich elite is unlikely to be happy, or to be loved. This inadequacy of the initial moral education of what will be the dominant economic group of the next century is likely to be reinforced by their life experience.
In every field it has been the radical who has won, and the conventional thinker who has fallen behind, who has literally fallen out of the race. Our politics may be led by conventional thinkers – Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, John Major – but our most successful businesses are led by radicals with a keen understanding of the new technological world; the archetype is Bill Gates. Conventional thinking has been discredited by its inability to deal with the rapidity and the sheer force of change.
Of all the nationalities on the globe, U.S. citizenship conveys the greatest liabilities and places the most hindrances in the way of becoming a Sovereign Individual. The American seeking financial independence will therefore obtain other passports as a necessary step toward privatizing or denationalizing himself. If you are not an American, it is economically irrational to become a resident of the United States and thus expose yourself to predatory U.S. taxes, including exit taxes.
The fastest-growing and most important new economy of the next century will not be China but the cybereconomy. To take full advantage of it, you will need to place your business or profession on the World Wide Web.
Thinking about the end of the current system is taboo. To understand the great transformation in the Information Age, you must transcend conventional thinking and conventional information sources.
Quotations
Frederick C. Lane
… one of the most distinctive characteristics of governments is their attempt to create law and order by using force themselves and by controlling through various means the use of force by others.
Chinese Proverb
Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is – leave.
Alan Greenspan
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
Christopher Lasch
Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.
Excerpts
We believe that much can be learned by analogy between the situation at the end of the fifteenth century, when life had become thoroughly saturated by organized religion, and the situation today, when the world has become saturated with politics. The costs of supporting institutionalized religion at the end of the fifteenth century had reached a historic extreme, much as the costs of supporting government have reached a senile extreme today.
The changes implied by the Information Revolution will not only create a fiscal crisis for governments, they will tend to disintegrate all large structures. Fourteen empires have disappeared already in the twentieth century. The breakdown of empires is part of a process that will dissolve the nation-state itself.
As technology revolutionizes the tools we use, it also antiquates our laws, reshapes our morals, and alters our perceptions.
In cyberspace, the threats of physical violence that have been the alpha and omega of politics since time immemorial will vanish.
The state has grown used to treating its taxpayers as a farmer treats his cows, keeping them in a field to be milked. Soon, the cows will have wings.
Western governments will seek to suppress the cybereconomy by totalitarian means.
There is a high probability that some who are offended by the new ways, as well as many who are disadvantaged by them, will react unpleasantly. Their nostalgia for compulsion will probably turn violent. Encounters with these new “Luddites” will make the transition to radical new forms of social organization at least a measure of bad news for everyone. Get ready to duck.
… information technology will destroy the capacity of the state to charge more for its services than they are worth to the people who pay for them.
Instead of relating to a powerful state as citizens to be taxed, the Sovereign Individuals of the twenty-first century will be customers of governments.
The civic myths reflect not only a mindset that sees society’s problems as susceptible to engineering solutions; they also reflect a false confidence that resources and individuals will remain as vulnerable to political compulsion in the future as they have been in the twentieth century.
In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence.
We put violence at the center of our theory of megapolitics for good reason. The control violence is the most important dilemma every society faces.
It is precisely the fact that violence does pay that makes it hard to control.
Conventional thinkers of all shapes and sizes observe one of the pretenses of the nation-state – that the views people hold determine the way the world changes.
… formulations of economic justice in the modern context presuppose that society is dominated by an instrument of compulsion so powerful that it can take away and redistribute life’s good things. Such power has existed for only a few generations of the modern period. Now it is fading away.
We expect that representative democracy as it is now known will fade away, to be replaced by the new democracy of choice in the cybermarketplace.
The civilization that brought you world war, the assembly line, social security, income tax, deodorant, and the toaster oven is dying. Deodorant and the toaster oven may survive. The others won’t.
Every social order incorporates among its key taboos the notion that people living in it should not think of how it will end and what rules may prevail in the new system that takes its place.
Part of the reason that Rome fell is simply that it had expanded beyond the scale at which the economies of violence could be maintained.
The most profound causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control. They are the factors that alter the conditions under which violence pays.
Other things being equal, the more widely dispersed key technologies are, the more widely dispersed power will tend to be, and the smaller the optimum scale of government.
… politics in the modern sense, as the preoccupation with controlling and rationalizing the power of the state, is mostly a modern invention.
As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible. What we have in the final years of the twentieth century is inarticulate disdain.
This is worth remembering as you plan ahead. The twilight of state systems in the past has seldom been an polite, orderly process.
As the millennium approaches, the new megapolitical conditions of the Information Age will make it increasingly obvious that the nation-state inherited from the industrial era is a predatory institution.
Another revealing hint that mass democracy is not controlled by its customers is the fact that contemporary political culture, inherited from the Industrial Age, would consider it outrageous if policies on crucial issues were actually informed by the interests of the people who pay the bills.
During the Industrial Age prior to 1989, democracy emerged as the most militarily effective form of government precisely because democracy made it difficult or impossible to impose effective limits on the commandeering of resources by the state.
… we expect nationalism to be a major rallying theme of persons with low skills nostalgic for compulsion as the welfare state collapses in the Western democracies.
A delicate etiquette shrouded straightforward analysis of labor relations during the industrial period. One of its pretenses was the idea that factory jobs, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century, were skilled work. This was untrue. Most factory jobs could have been performed by almost anyone capable of showing up on time. They required little or no training, not even the ability to read or write. As recently as the 1980s, large fractions of the General Motors workforce were either illiterate, innumerate, or both. Until the 1990s, the typical assembly line worker at GM received only one day of orientation before taking his place on the assembly line. A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.
The ability of workers to coerce their employers into paying above-market wages depended on the same megapolitical conditions that allowed governments to extract 40 percent or more of the economy’s output in taxes.
Information technology is making it plain that the problem faced by persons of low skill is not that their productive capacities are being unfairly taken advantage of, but rather the fear that they may lack the ability to make a real economic contribution.
For the first time in history, information technology allows for the creation and protection of assets that lie entirely outside the realm of any individual government’s territorial monopoly on violence.
One bizarre genius, working with digital servants, could theoretically achieve the same impact in a cyberwar as a nation-state. Bill Gates certainly could.
Private financial institutions and central banks will adopt unbreakable encryption algorithms when they realize that the U.S. government – and it may not be alone – has the capacity to penetrate current bank software and computer systems to literally bankrupt a country or sweep the bank account of anyone living almost anywhere.
The fact that the fading industrial era’s first stab at conceiving the information economy is to think of it in terms of a gigantic public works project tells you how grounded our thinking is in the paradigms of the past.
Soon after the turn of the millennium, anyone who pays income taxes at rates currently imposed will be doing so out of choice.
In the 1980s, it was illegal in the United States to send a fax message. The U.S. Post Office considered faxes to be first-class mail, over which the U.S. Post Office claimed an ancient monopoly. An edict to that effect was issued reiterating the requirement that all fax transmissions be routed to the nearest post office for delivery with regular mail.
… the view that the state improves the functioning of the economy by massive reallocation of resources is an anachronism, an article of faith roughly equivalent to the widespread superstitions at the close of the Middle Ages that fasting and flagellation were beneficial for a community.
… we believe that foreign aid and international development programs have had the perverse effect of lowering the real incomes of poor people in poor countries by subsidizing incompetent governments.
The ideology of the nation-state was that life can and should be regulated in a positive way by subsidizing undesirable outcomes and penalizing desirable ones. To be poor is undesirable; therefore, the poor were subsidized. To become rich is desirable; therefore, punitive taxes were laid on the rich to make life more “fair”.
As new, more market-driven forms of protection become available, it will become increasingly evident to the large numbers of able persons that most of the supposed benefits of nationality are imaginary.
Sovereign Individuals will also have to cope with the corrosive consequences of envy – a difficulty that sometimes detains monarchs, but which will be more intensely felt by persons who are not traditionally venerated but invent their own sovereignity.
The “losers and left-behinds” in the Information Society will surely envy and resent the success of winners, especially as the deepening of markets implies that this will be increasingly a “winners take all” world.
While the leading states will no doubt attempt to enforce a cartel to preserve high taxes and fiat money by cooperating to limit encryption and prevent citizens from escaping their domains, the states will ultimately fail. The most productive people on the planet will find their way to economic freedom.
Governments in the industrial era priced their services on the basis of the success of the taxpayer, rather than in relation to the costs or value of any services provided.
… it is to be expected that one or more nation-states will undertake covert action to subvert the appeal of transience. Travel could be effectively discouraged by biological warfare, such as the outbreak of a deadly epidemic. This could not only discourage the desire to travel, it could also give jurisdictions throughout the globe an excuse to seal their borders and limit immigration.
The United States is one of just three jurisdictions on the planet that impose taxes based on nationality rather than residence.
The United States has the globe’s most predatory, soak-the-rich tax system. Americans living in the United States or abroad are treated more like assets and less like customers than citizens of any other country.
As the larger, more inclusive national grouping begins to break down, with the more mobile “information elite” globalizing their affairs, the “losers and left-behinds” fall back upon membership in an ethnic subgroup, a tribe, a gang, a religious or linguistic minority. Partly, this is a practical and pragmatic reaction to the collapse of services, including law and order, formerly provided by the state. For persons with few marketable resources, it often proves difficult to purchase access to market alternatives to failed public services.
By eliminating the beneficial impact of competition in challenging underachievers to conform to productive norms, the welfare state has helped to create legions of dysfunctional, paranoid, and poorly acculturated people, the social equivalent of a powder keg. The death of the nation-state and the disappearance of income redistribution on a large scale will no doubt lead some among the more psychopathic of these unhappy souls to strike out against anyone who appears more prosperous than they. Therefore, it is reasonable to suppose that social peace will be in jeopardy as the Information Age unfolds, especially in North America and in multiethnic enclaves in Western Europe.
If the past is a guide, the most violent of the terrorists of the early decades of the new millennium will not be homeless paupers but displaced workers who formerly enjoyed middle-class incomes and status.
… the most predictable and vulnerable assets of the rich in the coming Information Age may be their physical persons – in other words, their lives. Which is why we fear Luddite-style terrorism in the coming decades, some of it perhaps covertly encouraged by agents provocateurs in the employ of nation-states.
When state and local taxes are considered as well, democratic government at all levels confiscates the lion’s share of each dollar earned in the United States. Predatory tax rates made the democratic state a de facto partner with a three-quarters to nine-tenths share in all earnings. This was not the same thing as state socialism, to be sure. But it was a close relation.
Hong Kong, of course, is not a democracy. Indeed, it is a mental model of the kind of jurisdiction that we expect to see flourish in the Information Age. In the Industrial Age, Hong Kong had no need to be a democracy, as it was spared the unpleasant necessity of gathering resources to support a formidable military establishment.
Now that information technology is displacing mass production, it is logical to expect the twilight of mass democracy.
A system that routinely submits control over the largest, most deadly enterprises on earth to the winner of popularity contests between charismatic demagogues is bound to suffer for it in the long run.
… our expectation is not that politics will be reformed or improved, but that it will be antiquated and, in most respects, abandoned. By this we do not mean to say that we expect to see dictatorship, but rather entrepreneurial government – the commercialization of sovereignty.
It will be perfectly reasonable for you and significant numbers of other future Sovereign Individuals to “vote with your feet” in opting out of leading nation-states to contract for personal protection with an outlying nation-state or a new minisovereignty that will only charge a commercially tolerable amount, rather than the greater part of your net worth. In short, you would probably accept $50 million to move to Bermuda.
… it is doubtful that firms will be able to survive the increasing penetration of market forces into what have heretofore been “intrafirm relationships”. As a result, firms will tend to dissolve as information technology makes it more rewarding to rely upon the price mechanism and the auction market to undertake tasks that need doing rather than having them internalized within a formal organization. As information technology increasingly automates the production process, it will take away part of the raison d’etre of the firm, the need to employ and motivate managers to monitor individual workers.
We believe that as the modern nation-state decomposes, latter-day barbarians will increasingly come to exercise real power behind the scenes. Groups like the Russian mafiyas that pick the bones of the former Soviet Union, other ethnic criminal gangs, nomenklaturas, drug lords, and renegade covert agencies will increasingly be laws unto themselves. They already are.
The end of an era is usually a period of intense corruption.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to depend upon normal information channels to give an accurate and timely understanding of the decay of the nation-state.
The deeper and richer textures of history are precisely the parts that tend to be edited out in the twenty-five-second sound-bites and misconstrued on CNN. It is much easier to convey a message that is a variation on an already understood theme than it is to explore a new paradigm of understanding.
As we move toward the next century, a high proportion of people in the growing cognitive elite have been given little religious or moral education in the family. The commonest religion of the elite is an agnostic humanism … A godless, rootless, and rich elite is unlikely to be happy, or to be loved. This inadequacy of the initial moral education of what will be the dominant economic group of the next century is likely to be reinforced by their life experience.
In every field it has been the radical who has won, and the conventional thinker who has fallen behind, who has literally fallen out of the race. Our politics may be led by conventional thinkers – Bill Clinton, Helmut Kohl, John Major – but our most successful businesses are led by radicals with a keen understanding of the new technological world; the archetype is Bill Gates. Conventional thinking has been discredited by its inability to deal with the rapidity and the sheer force of change.
Of all the nationalities on the globe, U.S. citizenship conveys the greatest liabilities and places the most hindrances in the way of becoming a Sovereign Individual. The American seeking financial independence will therefore obtain other passports as a necessary step toward privatizing or denationalizing himself. If you are not an American, it is economically irrational to become a resident of the United States and thus expose yourself to predatory U.S. taxes, including exit taxes.
The fastest-growing and most important new economy of the next century will not be China but the cybereconomy. To take full advantage of it, you will need to place your business or profession on the World Wide Web.
Thinking about the end of the current system is taboo. To understand the great transformation in the Information Age, you must transcend conventional thinking and conventional information sources.
Quotations
Frederick C. Lane
… one of the most distinctive characteristics of governments is their attempt to create law and order by using force themselves and by controlling through various means the use of force by others.
Chinese Proverb
Of all the thirty-six ways to get out of trouble, the best way is – leave.
Alan Greenspan
The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves.
Christopher Lasch
Ambitious people understand, then, that a migratory way of life is the price of getting ahead.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
