TEN CANNOTS
Reverend William John Henry Boetcker (1873-1962)
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label society. Show all posts
Friday, November 7, 2008
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 21, 2008
Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure by Daniel Quinn - Excerpts
Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure. Daniel Quinn. 1999. ISBN 0-609-60490-2.
EXCERPTS
Programs never stop the things they’re launched to stop. No program has ever stopped poverty, drug abuse, or crime, and no program ever will stop them.
Old minds think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?
New minds think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?
Old minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do MORE of it this year.
New minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do something ELSE this year.
One can imagine how desperately the pontiffs, potentates, dynasts, princes, pendragons, princelings, rajahs, hierophants, priests, priestesses, and palace guards of all these tottering civilizations must have desired to implant in the minds of their vacillating subjects this very simple concept: Civilization must continue at ANY cost and must not be abandoned under ANY circumstance.
Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.
Our cultural vision was shaped by people who were perfectly satisfied with the notion that the universe they saw was in its final form, and had come into being in that form – in a single stroke, so to speak. The Genesis tale of creation didn’t originate this notion; it merely affirmed it: God did his work, saw it was in no need of improvement, and that was that.
Natural selection is a process that separates the workable from the unworkable, not the perfect from the imperfect.
… there’s a difference between painting in order to make money and making money in order to paint.
The way rulers benefit from the success of the society is vastly different from the way the masses benefit, and the pyramids and the temples testify to the importance of the rulers, not to the masses who build them.
Kids of all ages run off to join the circus. No one runs off to join Disney World.
As everyone knows (especially revolutionaries), hierarchy maintains formidable defenses against attack from the lower orders. It has none, however, against abandonment. This is in part because it can imagine revolution, but it can’t imagine abandonment. But even if it could imagine abandonment, it couldn’t defend against it, because abandonment isn’t an attack, it’s just a discontinuance of support.
We deeply believe in taking a military approach to problems. We proclaim a “war” on poverty. When that fails, we proclaim a “war” on drugs. We “fight” crime. We “combat” homelessness. We “battle” hunger. We vow to “defeat” AIDS.
One element of acceding to homelessness is accepting the fact that the poor will consistently choose the least worst alternative available to them. If you find them living under a bridge instead of in a nice, clean municipal shelter just a block away, you can be absolutely sure they haven’t made a mistake – from their point of view. The shelter’s admittance procedures may be intolerably invasive, arbitrary, or humiliating, or its rules may be Draconian. Whatever, the discomforts of sheltering under the bridge are more endurable.
Acceding to homelessness would look like helping the homeless succeed WHILE being homeless. What an idea! I can almost hear the howls of outrage from both liberals and conservatives that must greet such a concept. Help people succeed at being homeless? We want them to fail at being homeless! (So they’ll return to the mainstream.)
Don’t try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.
Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be – nothing more and nothing less.
The tribe, in fact, is just a wonderfully efficient social organization that renders making a living easy for all – unlike civilization, which renders it easy for a privileged few and hard for the rest.
Communes never begin in this haphazard way. They’re “intentional” communities, originating among people who want to live together in pursuit of common ideals, usually in relative isolation. Communes are about living together and may or may not involve working together. Tribes (and I speak here of “new” tribes, of course) originate among people who want to pool their energies and skills to make a living together. Tribes are about working together and may or may not involve living together.
It’s a fundamental tenet of our cultural mythology that the only thing wrong with us is that humans are not made well enough. We need to be made of finer materials, to some set of better specifications (provided, perhaps, by greened-up versions of our traditional religions). We just need to be made kinder, gentler, sweeter, more loving, less selfish, more far-sighted, and so on, then everything will be fine. Of course, no one succeeded in making us better last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that – but maybe this year we’ll get lucky … or next year or the year after that.
QUOTATIONS
Jacques Attali
Machines are the new proletariat. The working class is being given its walking papers.
Marshall Sahlins
The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.
EXCERPTS
Programs never stop the things they’re launched to stop. No program has ever stopped poverty, drug abuse, or crime, and no program ever will stop them.
Old minds think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?
New minds think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?
Old minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do MORE of it this year.
New minds think: If it didn’t work last year, let’s do something ELSE this year.
One can imagine how desperately the pontiffs, potentates, dynasts, princes, pendragons, princelings, rajahs, hierophants, priests, priestesses, and palace guards of all these tottering civilizations must have desired to implant in the minds of their vacillating subjects this very simple concept: Civilization must continue at ANY cost and must not be abandoned under ANY circumstance.
Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.
Our cultural vision was shaped by people who were perfectly satisfied with the notion that the universe they saw was in its final form, and had come into being in that form – in a single stroke, so to speak. The Genesis tale of creation didn’t originate this notion; it merely affirmed it: God did his work, saw it was in no need of improvement, and that was that.
Natural selection is a process that separates the workable from the unworkable, not the perfect from the imperfect.
… there’s a difference between painting in order to make money and making money in order to paint.
The way rulers benefit from the success of the society is vastly different from the way the masses benefit, and the pyramids and the temples testify to the importance of the rulers, not to the masses who build them.
Kids of all ages run off to join the circus. No one runs off to join Disney World.
As everyone knows (especially revolutionaries), hierarchy maintains formidable defenses against attack from the lower orders. It has none, however, against abandonment. This is in part because it can imagine revolution, but it can’t imagine abandonment. But even if it could imagine abandonment, it couldn’t defend against it, because abandonment isn’t an attack, it’s just a discontinuance of support.
We deeply believe in taking a military approach to problems. We proclaim a “war” on poverty. When that fails, we proclaim a “war” on drugs. We “fight” crime. We “combat” homelessness. We “battle” hunger. We vow to “defeat” AIDS.
One element of acceding to homelessness is accepting the fact that the poor will consistently choose the least worst alternative available to them. If you find them living under a bridge instead of in a nice, clean municipal shelter just a block away, you can be absolutely sure they haven’t made a mistake – from their point of view. The shelter’s admittance procedures may be intolerably invasive, arbitrary, or humiliating, or its rules may be Draconian. Whatever, the discomforts of sheltering under the bridge are more endurable.
Acceding to homelessness would look like helping the homeless succeed WHILE being homeless. What an idea! I can almost hear the howls of outrage from both liberals and conservatives that must greet such a concept. Help people succeed at being homeless? We want them to fail at being homeless! (So they’ll return to the mainstream.)
Don’t try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.
Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be – nothing more and nothing less.
The tribe, in fact, is just a wonderfully efficient social organization that renders making a living easy for all – unlike civilization, which renders it easy for a privileged few and hard for the rest.
Communes never begin in this haphazard way. They’re “intentional” communities, originating among people who want to live together in pursuit of common ideals, usually in relative isolation. Communes are about living together and may or may not involve working together. Tribes (and I speak here of “new” tribes, of course) originate among people who want to pool their energies and skills to make a living together. Tribes are about working together and may or may not involve living together.
It’s a fundamental tenet of our cultural mythology that the only thing wrong with us is that humans are not made well enough. We need to be made of finer materials, to some set of better specifications (provided, perhaps, by greened-up versions of our traditional religions). We just need to be made kinder, gentler, sweeter, more loving, less selfish, more far-sighted, and so on, then everything will be fine. Of course, no one succeeded in making us better last year or the year before that or the year before that or the year before that – but maybe this year we’ll get lucky … or next year or the year after that.
QUOTATIONS
Jacques Attali
Machines are the new proletariat. The working class is being given its walking papers.
Marshall Sahlins
The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The 500-Year Delta by Jim Taylor, Watts Wacker, and Howard Means.
The 500-Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next. Jim Taylor, Watts Wacker, and Howard Means. 1998. ISBN-13: 978-0887309113
Excerpts
“freedom to know” – a world in which for the first time in human history caste or schooling or economic circumstance no longer limits access to knowledge, a world in which knowledge itself is less important than the skill to access it.
“freedom to go” – a world in which for the first time true global citizens will have true global mobility.
“freedom to do” in accord not with professional processes or bureaucratic structures but with one’s own intuition and entrepreneurial zeal.
“freedom to be” whatever one wants to be and the obligation to exercise that freedom.
If you are going to succeed in chaos, you must connect with chaos. You must act in concert with chaos. What does that mean? It means that you must trust in intuition, trust in self.
The media today is not only the message – it is the message discriminator. And increasingly it is around those finely discriminated messages that we organize our social lives.
Jacque’s theory … what really mattered in any organization was not how many people you managed, not how much money you had under your control, but how binding your decision was on the life span of the organization.
Rainmakers – individuals who simply by virtue of their existence, their contacts, and their reputations could cause large pieces of business to move with them.
The island-hopping executive. The professional who is most willing to make life changes not in pursuit of the group mission but in pursuit of his or her own ambition. The employee who recognizes that power in a chaos organization migrates to the greatest variable, that the new success paradigm frees the individual.
Because access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete. As borders disappear, the concept of taxation, which supports governments, becomes increasingly fragile.
Because leverage in a chaos world goes to the critical variables, the person able to cut the best deal in a corporation today is not the most loyal one, but the one willing to leave himself or herself the most outs.
… there is no surer way to lose customers – and lose them for good – than to sell them stone and flint when you are just about to introduce safety matches into the marketplace. That is another corollary of the acceleration of technological change. Quality may still be job one, but mediating a consumer’s risk of feeling like a fool is at least job two.
First, as new products arrive on the marketplace with ever greater rapidity, the products themselves lose value and the ideas that drive them gain value. Second, as consumers increasingly drive the economic relationships of the marketplace, the need to massively accumulate data on individual consumers increases proportionally.
Generation X has powerful subsidiary values. Its very uncertainty about its economic future is helping to turn the fear of downward mobility into the virtue of downward nobility, and the rise of downward nobility – the desire not for many things but a few good things – will drive consumerism in the years immediately ahead.
Flight impulse is building to critical mass. Undermined by the death of loyalty or liberated by the new freedoms to know, to go, to do, to be – it is all a matter of interpretation – forty-five to fifty-year-olds soon will be seeking en masse completely different lifestyles and actively plotting their flights.
As the marketplace drives toward a supersaturation of products, scarcity disappears, and with it status orientation. As mass culture breaks up into, in effect, hundreds of millions of individual realities, there can be no shared assumptions of what is enviable to own.
For most people in most industrialized nations, governments now exist as a mechanism for the transfer of payments and almost nothing more – save for their sheer entertainment value. For a radical theory, that one, in fact, is about as plain as the nose on your face. Why has the Washington intellerati failed to grasp it? Because the centrality of the political process is intimately tied to the intellerati’s own centrality – if government doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Like other communes, the political commune talks mainly to itself, and thus has its worldview both set and confirmed within the confines of its commune.
In the drive toward sameness, cultural discriminators are disappearing. It is in the interest of politicians to foster the impression of international business conflict, because conflict is drama, and politicians get to star in the playlets that ensue.
If nationalism no longer has meaning, if corporate identity can float away in an instant, if you are no longer identified by your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, by where you went to college or what clubs you belong to, you can choose to reinvent your life every single day.
One of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, the explosion in information has bred such widespread discontent is that too much information is chasing too few decision – and too little interest.
Every human life becomes, in effect, a data bank. And as that happens, everything about you – your habits, your preferences, your buying whims, your opinions – assumes a transaction worth. They become more than the sum total of your wants and needs; they become your intellectual property, to be valuated and protected as strongly as any other property you possess.
As privacy becomes rarer and rarer, it will assume greater and greater worth, and privacy management will become one of the great growth industries of the twenty-first century.
… as people become more and more aware of the economic worth of their own privately held information, they will come more and more to realize what a fortune about themselves they have absolutely pissed away. Therein lies the beginning of anger. And revenge.
Time really is money; so is attention.
For better or worse, study after study has shown that working women still can be broken into two groups: those who think that what they do is a career and those who think it is a job. Otherwise, the lives of women who work outside the house for money are virtually indistinguishable one from the other.
Like the lives they reflect, the new lifestyle discriminators are situational, deal-based. None of them relies on loyalty, because the future itself isn’t about loyalty – it’s about contracts.
“filocity” – the ability to adapt instantaneously to multiple relationships and move easily among multiple cultures.
Mass religion, we contend, is as doomed as mass culture, not because people will believe less, but because group reality is becoming particularlized and because loyalty to a single overriding interpretation of the divine is as dated as loyalty to family or to a corporation.
By definition, freedoms free, but they also sweep away excuses.
To be free to know whatever it is you need to know to pursue your destiny means that there will be little sympathy for those who fail to arm themselves with the essential knowledge to succeed. To be free to go wherever it is you need to do to pursue your destiny means that there will be little sympathy if you elect to go nowhere and suffer as a result. To be free to do whatever it is within you intellectual and physical capacity to do means that if you fail to make an attempt to do it and suffer as a result, there will be little sympathy. To be free to be whatever it is within your intellectual and physical capacity to be means that if you don’t pursue possibility and suffer as a result, there will be little sympathy.
True freedom … entails true responsibility. It is impossible to have one without the other, impossible to demand true individual rights on the one hand and claim group victimization or demand group redress on the other.
Like success, failure is a solo act; individuals alone are responsible for both.
… the only thing you can count on in your personal or professional life is that people and organizations will act irrationally.
The reality is that “families” are largely a status symbol today, a luxury for those who can afford to keep them intact.
The reality in a chaos world is that the greatest power belongs to the person who controls the most unstable variable.
The reality is that there are only two kinds of workers in any business organization: owners and employees. And the further reality is that there are only two kinds of employees: the 5 percent who would stay where they are if they were offered twice their salary to leave and the 95 percent who would be gone in a flash.
The myth of governments. the myth is that they matter. The reality is that they matter mostly to those who have an economic stake in their day-to-day operation – that is, to government employees and those who receive federal transfer payments.
The myth of action. The myth, made famous by the Nike sports-wear slogan, is just do it. The reality is that in a chaos world, you cannot “do” your way to anything. You can achieve an end only by focusing on outcome and letting each individual decision be dictated by your final goal. Don’t do it. Be it.
… the myth that reality is real. The reality is that each individual edits reality for himself. The reality is that the combinations and permutations of media choices allow each person to have an entirely idiosyncratic view of reality. The reality is that today reality is constructed.
In a chaos world … the only way to manage a life is from the edge, and the only thing you can depend on is you.
… when you can’t depend on institutions as you have known them, when you can’t depend on relationships, when converging rivers of change are rushing forward into a new world, and when uneasiness, chaos, and disharmonious conjunctions have become the organizing principles driving those rivers of change, anxiety is simply unavoidable. And we further argue that the largest part of our cultural schizophrenia – of this disconnection between attitudes and behaviors – comes not from the onrush of change, but from the fact that we are being programmed to avoid anxiety as the same time we are coming to intuitively understand that we must embrace anxiety to survive.
What do you find when you embrace anxiety? That it turns to enlightenment.
Enlightened anxiety doesn’t mean that you ignore problems or that you worry over them at random. It means that you allow problems to take their course and do the best that you can within them. It means that you recognize that there are enormous numbers of things in your personal and professional life over which you have not control, no ability to effect an outcome, and that you recognize further that there is great liberation in having no control over them. It means that you stay permanently flexible, because it is only by being so that you can achieve synchronicity with a world that has itself entered into a state of permanent flexibility, a world that is being subtly and meaningfully altered every day. Here’s the real secret of successful people and businesses: They are different every day of their existence.
Fusion creates energy. Energy feeds values. Energy plus values creates wealth.
Corporations frustrate the four freedoms by their very nature. No matter how deftly they are handled, they limit the right to know, to go, to do, and to be.
It is only by giving loyalty to your customers that you can get loyalty back in return, and it is only by recognizing that customers are under no obligation to give their loyalty that you can hold on to it day by day.
How do you prove your loyalty to customers? Not by pursuing customer loyalty, but by being loyal to your customers. In a customer-loyal world, your first concern is someone who purchased your product, not someone who might do so, because that customer with the product is now your best and cheapest billboard. In a customer-loyal world, you thank your customers, not in expectation of what they might do in the future, but for what they have done in the past. And in a customer-loyal world, you make your own value structure isomorphic with the value structure of your customer base.
To structure a business so that it meets its customers’ real lives, make the ownership of a customer relationship a fundamental part of the creation of the business itself.
Best of all, maybe, you build scarcity into products by individualizing them for the individual realities that collectively compose today’s marketplace. By becoming, in effect, a component editor for your customers, you allow them to create their own individual realities instead of imposing a collective reality on them. Nothing, finally, could be more scarce than that.
Instead of the old rules of social behavior that required us to build relationships based on a reciprocal self-disclosure of information, we build them instead on a systematic sharing of information in the service of the deal at hand. And when the deal is done, we all walk away.
… pseudo-intellectuals actively pursue an entry in Who’s Who, while real intellectuals flee from such exposure. Why? Because it is in the culture of the tribe of pseudo-intellectuals to want recognition – recognition is the validation of their pursuit – while it is in the tribal culture of real intellectuals to be eternal outsiders.
The rules of such exceptional intelligence are very simple for children: Never acknowledge it, not even to yourself, and never flaunt it in from of others. Yet very smart children almost inevitably know they are very smart, and from an early age. They understand things before other children even begin to grasp the question, and they are too smart to miss that fact. Other children see it too, and being to organize their own tribes in defense against such intelligence.
Thus is born what is known as the “dilemma of the genuinely talented individual”. And thus, too, arises the fundamental ethic of the tribe of true intellectuals: never pursue celebrity and never care what others think about you.
… “privilege” implies conspicuous consumption when it is inconspicuous consumption, stealth wealth, and downward nobility that are helping to drive the dynamic of the marketplace today.
Avoid the activity trap. Manage choices out of your life, not into it. In the storm of information washing over you, realize that only a tiny fraction of it is germane to your own goals and that it is that tiny fraction on which you absolutely have to concentrate. Take a nap, catch an afternoon matinee. Conserve energy and you’ll have more of it for the things that really matter. You’re the boss; you’ll make sure you get the job done on time. That’s freedom, too.
… the ones most likely to have achieved satisfaction – the ones most likely to have internalized that they don’t have to overspend their capability in order to achieve very high levels of social and self-esteem – are people who are living ordinary lives extraordinarily.
Stop thinking of your customers as a mass market and start thinking of them as a mass of individual collectors.
In an age in which raw intelligence is the most prized commodity, being thought stupid is the greatest fear. Making customers feel stupid is the worst sin a business can commit.
What does risk management mean at a personal level? That the only way to manage risk is to embrace it. That the only way to cope with risk is to swim in it, dance with it, let it happen. A victim says that the world is at fault for exposing me to this risk. A thrivalist – a person who not just survives but thrives – says that every risk is an opportunity.
… even if you are not robbed or shot or bombed or vandalized during your adult life, even if you somehow escape the mortal lock, the only way to survive in a chaos-based world is to be 100 percent prepared for all those things to happen. Ducking for cover and planning for disaster aren’t just exercises for the nuclear generation. Today they are exercises for sustained reality – and for corporations more so than any other single entity.
Take out a sheet of paper. Write down the ten worst things that could happen to your business in the next five hundred days, the next five hundred weeks, and then start acting as if they will happen, because in a chaos world they or something very similar will.
Write down where your own business’s moats are, where and how fortified your castle walls are, where the intellectual property of your company – its secrets, its private systems – is stored, who has the key, and how many keys there are.
The best thing to do when you are lost is wait to be found.
Our advice: Find your own sacred site, not ours, a place where you can sit on the edge and look back to the center. There is no greater clarity to be found anywhere.
Listen, escape your own white noise, and you’ll be astounded by what you will hear.
It is only by concentrating on the inevitability of disaster that you can free yourself to pursue the fruits of possibility.
The critical issue in planning today is not how to get there. The critical issue is where you want to be.
It is not products per se that consumers want. Products are everywhere, generally at deep discounts. In a world starved for scarcity, uniqueness gains value. And it is only by focusing on points of distinction that you can produce uniqueness within your category.
Nothing holds you back but the reluctance to exercise your own Freedom to do, and beyond that, there can be no asking for more.
Excerpts
“freedom to know” – a world in which for the first time in human history caste or schooling or economic circumstance no longer limits access to knowledge, a world in which knowledge itself is less important than the skill to access it.
“freedom to go” – a world in which for the first time true global citizens will have true global mobility.
“freedom to do” in accord not with professional processes or bureaucratic structures but with one’s own intuition and entrepreneurial zeal.
“freedom to be” whatever one wants to be and the obligation to exercise that freedom.
If you are going to succeed in chaos, you must connect with chaos. You must act in concert with chaos. What does that mean? It means that you must trust in intuition, trust in self.
The media today is not only the message – it is the message discriminator. And increasingly it is around those finely discriminated messages that we organize our social lives.
Jacque’s theory … what really mattered in any organization was not how many people you managed, not how much money you had under your control, but how binding your decision was on the life span of the organization.
Rainmakers – individuals who simply by virtue of their existence, their contacts, and their reputations could cause large pieces of business to move with them.
The island-hopping executive. The professional who is most willing to make life changes not in pursuit of the group mission but in pursuit of his or her own ambition. The employee who recognizes that power in a chaos organization migrates to the greatest variable, that the new success paradigm frees the individual.
Because access creates globalism, and globalism disrupts political systems by making the concept of borders obsolete. As borders disappear, the concept of taxation, which supports governments, becomes increasingly fragile.
Because leverage in a chaos world goes to the critical variables, the person able to cut the best deal in a corporation today is not the most loyal one, but the one willing to leave himself or herself the most outs.
… there is no surer way to lose customers – and lose them for good – than to sell them stone and flint when you are just about to introduce safety matches into the marketplace. That is another corollary of the acceleration of technological change. Quality may still be job one, but mediating a consumer’s risk of feeling like a fool is at least job two.
First, as new products arrive on the marketplace with ever greater rapidity, the products themselves lose value and the ideas that drive them gain value. Second, as consumers increasingly drive the economic relationships of the marketplace, the need to massively accumulate data on individual consumers increases proportionally.
Generation X has powerful subsidiary values. Its very uncertainty about its economic future is helping to turn the fear of downward mobility into the virtue of downward nobility, and the rise of downward nobility – the desire not for many things but a few good things – will drive consumerism in the years immediately ahead.
Flight impulse is building to critical mass. Undermined by the death of loyalty or liberated by the new freedoms to know, to go, to do, to be – it is all a matter of interpretation – forty-five to fifty-year-olds soon will be seeking en masse completely different lifestyles and actively plotting their flights.
As the marketplace drives toward a supersaturation of products, scarcity disappears, and with it status orientation. As mass culture breaks up into, in effect, hundreds of millions of individual realities, there can be no shared assumptions of what is enviable to own.
For most people in most industrialized nations, governments now exist as a mechanism for the transfer of payments and almost nothing more – save for their sheer entertainment value. For a radical theory, that one, in fact, is about as plain as the nose on your face. Why has the Washington intellerati failed to grasp it? Because the centrality of the political process is intimately tied to the intellerati’s own centrality – if government doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Like other communes, the political commune talks mainly to itself, and thus has its worldview both set and confirmed within the confines of its commune.
In the drive toward sameness, cultural discriminators are disappearing. It is in the interest of politicians to foster the impression of international business conflict, because conflict is drama, and politicians get to star in the playlets that ensue.
If nationalism no longer has meaning, if corporate identity can float away in an instant, if you are no longer identified by your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, by where you went to college or what clubs you belong to, you can choose to reinvent your life every single day.
One of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, the explosion in information has bred such widespread discontent is that too much information is chasing too few decision – and too little interest.
Every human life becomes, in effect, a data bank. And as that happens, everything about you – your habits, your preferences, your buying whims, your opinions – assumes a transaction worth. They become more than the sum total of your wants and needs; they become your intellectual property, to be valuated and protected as strongly as any other property you possess.
As privacy becomes rarer and rarer, it will assume greater and greater worth, and privacy management will become one of the great growth industries of the twenty-first century.
… as people become more and more aware of the economic worth of their own privately held information, they will come more and more to realize what a fortune about themselves they have absolutely pissed away. Therein lies the beginning of anger. And revenge.
Time really is money; so is attention.
For better or worse, study after study has shown that working women still can be broken into two groups: those who think that what they do is a career and those who think it is a job. Otherwise, the lives of women who work outside the house for money are virtually indistinguishable one from the other.
Like the lives they reflect, the new lifestyle discriminators are situational, deal-based. None of them relies on loyalty, because the future itself isn’t about loyalty – it’s about contracts.
“filocity” – the ability to adapt instantaneously to multiple relationships and move easily among multiple cultures.
Mass religion, we contend, is as doomed as mass culture, not because people will believe less, but because group reality is becoming particularlized and because loyalty to a single overriding interpretation of the divine is as dated as loyalty to family or to a corporation.
By definition, freedoms free, but they also sweep away excuses.
To be free to know whatever it is you need to know to pursue your destiny means that there will be little sympathy for those who fail to arm themselves with the essential knowledge to succeed. To be free to go wherever it is you need to do to pursue your destiny means that there will be little sympathy if you elect to go nowhere and suffer as a result. To be free to do whatever it is within you intellectual and physical capacity to do means that if you fail to make an attempt to do it and suffer as a result, there will be little sympathy. To be free to be whatever it is within your intellectual and physical capacity to be means that if you don’t pursue possibility and suffer as a result, there will be little sympathy.
True freedom … entails true responsibility. It is impossible to have one without the other, impossible to demand true individual rights on the one hand and claim group victimization or demand group redress on the other.
Like success, failure is a solo act; individuals alone are responsible for both.
… the only thing you can count on in your personal or professional life is that people and organizations will act irrationally.
The reality is that “families” are largely a status symbol today, a luxury for those who can afford to keep them intact.
The reality in a chaos world is that the greatest power belongs to the person who controls the most unstable variable.
The reality is that there are only two kinds of workers in any business organization: owners and employees. And the further reality is that there are only two kinds of employees: the 5 percent who would stay where they are if they were offered twice their salary to leave and the 95 percent who would be gone in a flash.
The myth of governments. the myth is that they matter. The reality is that they matter mostly to those who have an economic stake in their day-to-day operation – that is, to government employees and those who receive federal transfer payments.
The myth of action. The myth, made famous by the Nike sports-wear slogan, is just do it. The reality is that in a chaos world, you cannot “do” your way to anything. You can achieve an end only by focusing on outcome and letting each individual decision be dictated by your final goal. Don’t do it. Be it.
… the myth that reality is real. The reality is that each individual edits reality for himself. The reality is that the combinations and permutations of media choices allow each person to have an entirely idiosyncratic view of reality. The reality is that today reality is constructed.
In a chaos world … the only way to manage a life is from the edge, and the only thing you can depend on is you.
… when you can’t depend on institutions as you have known them, when you can’t depend on relationships, when converging rivers of change are rushing forward into a new world, and when uneasiness, chaos, and disharmonious conjunctions have become the organizing principles driving those rivers of change, anxiety is simply unavoidable. And we further argue that the largest part of our cultural schizophrenia – of this disconnection between attitudes and behaviors – comes not from the onrush of change, but from the fact that we are being programmed to avoid anxiety as the same time we are coming to intuitively understand that we must embrace anxiety to survive.
What do you find when you embrace anxiety? That it turns to enlightenment.
Enlightened anxiety doesn’t mean that you ignore problems or that you worry over them at random. It means that you allow problems to take their course and do the best that you can within them. It means that you recognize that there are enormous numbers of things in your personal and professional life over which you have not control, no ability to effect an outcome, and that you recognize further that there is great liberation in having no control over them. It means that you stay permanently flexible, because it is only by being so that you can achieve synchronicity with a world that has itself entered into a state of permanent flexibility, a world that is being subtly and meaningfully altered every day. Here’s the real secret of successful people and businesses: They are different every day of their existence.
Fusion creates energy. Energy feeds values. Energy plus values creates wealth.
Corporations frustrate the four freedoms by their very nature. No matter how deftly they are handled, they limit the right to know, to go, to do, and to be.
It is only by giving loyalty to your customers that you can get loyalty back in return, and it is only by recognizing that customers are under no obligation to give their loyalty that you can hold on to it day by day.
How do you prove your loyalty to customers? Not by pursuing customer loyalty, but by being loyal to your customers. In a customer-loyal world, your first concern is someone who purchased your product, not someone who might do so, because that customer with the product is now your best and cheapest billboard. In a customer-loyal world, you thank your customers, not in expectation of what they might do in the future, but for what they have done in the past. And in a customer-loyal world, you make your own value structure isomorphic with the value structure of your customer base.
To structure a business so that it meets its customers’ real lives, make the ownership of a customer relationship a fundamental part of the creation of the business itself.
Best of all, maybe, you build scarcity into products by individualizing them for the individual realities that collectively compose today’s marketplace. By becoming, in effect, a component editor for your customers, you allow them to create their own individual realities instead of imposing a collective reality on them. Nothing, finally, could be more scarce than that.
Instead of the old rules of social behavior that required us to build relationships based on a reciprocal self-disclosure of information, we build them instead on a systematic sharing of information in the service of the deal at hand. And when the deal is done, we all walk away.
… pseudo-intellectuals actively pursue an entry in Who’s Who, while real intellectuals flee from such exposure. Why? Because it is in the culture of the tribe of pseudo-intellectuals to want recognition – recognition is the validation of their pursuit – while it is in the tribal culture of real intellectuals to be eternal outsiders.
The rules of such exceptional intelligence are very simple for children: Never acknowledge it, not even to yourself, and never flaunt it in from of others. Yet very smart children almost inevitably know they are very smart, and from an early age. They understand things before other children even begin to grasp the question, and they are too smart to miss that fact. Other children see it too, and being to organize their own tribes in defense against such intelligence.
Thus is born what is known as the “dilemma of the genuinely talented individual”. And thus, too, arises the fundamental ethic of the tribe of true intellectuals: never pursue celebrity and never care what others think about you.
… “privilege” implies conspicuous consumption when it is inconspicuous consumption, stealth wealth, and downward nobility that are helping to drive the dynamic of the marketplace today.
Avoid the activity trap. Manage choices out of your life, not into it. In the storm of information washing over you, realize that only a tiny fraction of it is germane to your own goals and that it is that tiny fraction on which you absolutely have to concentrate. Take a nap, catch an afternoon matinee. Conserve energy and you’ll have more of it for the things that really matter. You’re the boss; you’ll make sure you get the job done on time. That’s freedom, too.
… the ones most likely to have achieved satisfaction – the ones most likely to have internalized that they don’t have to overspend their capability in order to achieve very high levels of social and self-esteem – are people who are living ordinary lives extraordinarily.
Stop thinking of your customers as a mass market and start thinking of them as a mass of individual collectors.
In an age in which raw intelligence is the most prized commodity, being thought stupid is the greatest fear. Making customers feel stupid is the worst sin a business can commit.
What does risk management mean at a personal level? That the only way to manage risk is to embrace it. That the only way to cope with risk is to swim in it, dance with it, let it happen. A victim says that the world is at fault for exposing me to this risk. A thrivalist – a person who not just survives but thrives – says that every risk is an opportunity.
… even if you are not robbed or shot or bombed or vandalized during your adult life, even if you somehow escape the mortal lock, the only way to survive in a chaos-based world is to be 100 percent prepared for all those things to happen. Ducking for cover and planning for disaster aren’t just exercises for the nuclear generation. Today they are exercises for sustained reality – and for corporations more so than any other single entity.
Take out a sheet of paper. Write down the ten worst things that could happen to your business in the next five hundred days, the next five hundred weeks, and then start acting as if they will happen, because in a chaos world they or something very similar will.
Write down where your own business’s moats are, where and how fortified your castle walls are, where the intellectual property of your company – its secrets, its private systems – is stored, who has the key, and how many keys there are.
The best thing to do when you are lost is wait to be found.
Our advice: Find your own sacred site, not ours, a place where you can sit on the edge and look back to the center. There is no greater clarity to be found anywhere.
Listen, escape your own white noise, and you’ll be astounded by what you will hear.
It is only by concentrating on the inevitability of disaster that you can free yourself to pursue the fruits of possibility.
The critical issue in planning today is not how to get there. The critical issue is where you want to be.
It is not products per se that consumers want. Products are everywhere, generally at deep discounts. In a world starved for scarcity, uniqueness gains value. And it is only by focusing on points of distinction that you can produce uniqueness within your category.
Nothing holds you back but the reluctance to exercise your own Freedom to do, and beyond that, there can be no asking for more.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Democracy: The God that Failed, by Hans-Hermann Hoppe - Excerpts
[Democracy: The God that Failed – The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order. Hans-Hermann Hoppe. 2001. ISBN 0-7658-0868-4]
EXCERPTS
The world-historic transformation from the ancient regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way.
In the U.S., less than a century of full-blown democracy has resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and crime. As a result of an ever-expanding list of nondiscrimination – “affirmative action” – laws and nondiscriminatory, multicultural, egalitarian immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by government management and forced integration; accordingly, social strife and racial, ethnic, and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically.
No form of taxation can be uniform (equal), but every taxation involves the creation of two distinct and unequal classes of taxpayers versus taxreceiver-consumers.
In short, monarchical government is reconstructed theoretically as privately-owned government, which in turn is explained as promoting future-orientedness and a concern for capital values and economic calculation by the government ruler … Democratic government is reconstructed as publicly-owned government, which is explained as leading to present-orientedness and a disregard or neglect of capital values in government rulers, and the transition from monarchy to democracy is interpreted accordingly as civilizational decline.
If one must have a state, defined as an agency that exercises a compulsory territorial monopoly of ultimate decisionmaking (jurisdiction) and of taxation, then it is economically and ethically advantageous to choose monarchy over democracy. But this leaves the question open whether or not a stat is necessary, i.e., if there exists an alternative to both, monarchy and democracy.
The term adopted here for a social system free of monopoly and taxation is “natural order”. Other names used elsewhere or by others to refer to the same thing include “ordered anarchy”, “private property anarchy”, “anarcho-capitalism”, “autogovernment”, “private law society”, and “pure capitalism”.
I will explain the rapid growth of state power in the course of the twentieth century lamented by Mises and Rothbard as the systematic outcome of democracy and the democratic mindset, i.e., the (erroneous) belief in the efficiency and/or justice of public property and popular (majority) rule.
The imposition of a government tax on property or income violates a property or income producer’s rights as much as does theft does. In both cases the appropriator-producer’s supply of goods is diminished against his will and without his consent. Government money or “liquidity” creation involves no less a fraudulent expropriation of private-property owners than the operations of a criminal counterfeiter gang.
Every government, and that means every agency that engages in continual, institutionalized property-rights violations (expropriations), is by its very nature a territorial monopolist.
Having to begin small, the original form of government is typically that of personal rule: of private ownership of the governmental apparatus of compulsion (monarchy).
But as the government’s private owner, it is in his interest to draw – parasitically – on a growing, increasingly productive and prosperous nongovernment economy, as this would – always and without any effort on his part – also increase his own wealth and prosperity. Tax rates would thus tend to be low.
Owing to its exclusive character and the correspondingly developed class consciousness of the ruled, government attempts at territorial expansion tend to be viewed by the public as the ruler’s private business, to be financed and carrier out with his own personal funds. The added territory is the king’s, and so he, not the public, should pay for it.
A democratic ruler can use the government apparatus to his personal advantage, but he does not own it … He owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value … Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a king would do, a president (the government’s temporary caretaker or trustee), will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume.
… with a “publicly” owned and administered government a new type of “law” emerges: “public” law, which exempts government agents from personal liability and withholds “publicly owned” resources from economic management.
… the mere act of legislating – of democratic lawmaking – increases the degree of uncertainty. Rather than being immutable and hence predictable, law becomes increasingly flexible and unpredictable. What is right and wrong today may not be so tomorrow.
If a democratic ruler and a democratically elected ruling elite want to expand their territory and hence their tax base, then only a military option of conquest and domination is open to them. Hence, the likelihood of war will be significantly increased.
… just as monarchy was once accepted as legitimate but is today considered to be an unthinkable solution to the current social crisis, it is not inconceivable that the idea of democratic rule might someday be regarded as morally illegitimate and politically unthinkable.
It is not government (monarchical or democratic) that is the source of human civilization and social peace but private property, and the recognition and defense of private property rights, contractualism, and individual responsibility.
In contrast to the right of self-defense in the event of a criminal attack, the victim of government violations of private property rights may not legitimately defend himself against such violations.
As hard as they tried, monarchical rulers did not succeed in establishing monopolies of pure fiat currencies, i.e., of irredeemable government paper monies, which can be created virtually out of thin air, an practically no cost. No particular individual, not even a king, could be trusted with an extraordinary monopoly such as this. It was only under conditions of democratic republicanism – of anonymous and impersonal rule – that this feat was accomplished.
In addition to increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among the most murderous periods in all of history.
… after the crushing defeat and devastation of the secessionist Confederacy by Lincoln and the Union, it was clear that the right to secede no longer existed and that democracy meant absolute and unlimited majority rule.
Motivated (as everyone is) by self-interest and the disutility of labor but with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s response will invariable be the same: To maximize expenditures on protection, and conceivably almost all of a nation’s wealth can be consumed by the cost of protection, and at the same time to minimize the actual production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.
Under democracy, everyone is equal insofar as entry into government is open to all on the same terms. In a democracy no personal privileges or privileged persons exist. However, functional privileges and privileged functions exist. As long as they act in an official capacity, democratic government agents are governed and protected by public law and thereby occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of private law (most fundamentally in being permitted to support their own activities by taxes imposed on private law subjects).
Given the rules of democratic government – of one-man-one-vote and majority rule – a caretaker, whether to secure his present position or advance to another, must award or promise to award privileges to groups rather than particular individuals, and given that there always exist more have-nots than haves of everything worth having, his redistribution will be egalitarian rather than elitist.
The decision to secede involves that one regard the central government as illegitimate, and that one accordingly treat it and its agents as an outlaw agency and “foreign” occupying forces. That is, if compelled by them, one complies, out of prudence and for no other reason than self-preservation, but one does nothing to support or facilitate their operations. One tries to keep as much of one’s property and surrender as little tax money as possible. One considers all federal law, legislation and regulation as null and void and ignores it whenever possible. One does not work or volunteer for the central government, whether its executive, legislative, or judicial branch, and one does not associate with anyone who does (and in particular not with those high up in the hierarchy of caretakers).
… the decision by members of the elite to secede from and not cooperate with government must always include the resolve of engaging in, or contributing to, a continuous ideological struggle, for if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.
Political integration (centralization) and economic (market) integration are two completely different phenomena. Political integration involves the territorial expansion of a state’s power of taxation and property regulation (expropriation). Economic integration is the extension of the interpersonal and interregional division of labor and market participation.
As one approaches the limits of a One World state, all possibilities of voting with one’s feet against a government disappear. Wherever one goes, the same tax and regulation structure applies. Thus relieved of the problem of emigration, a fundamental rein on the expansion of governmental power is gone.
… under socialism, ownership of productive assets is assigned to a collective of individuals regardless of each member’s prior action or inaction relative to the owned assets. In effect, socialist ownership favors the nonhomesteader, the nonproducer, and the noncontractor and disadvantages homesteaders, producers, and contractors … since means of production cannot be sold under socialism, no market prices for factors of production exist. Without such prices, cost-accounting is impossible.
From the fact that one does not want to associate with or live in the neighborhood of Blacks, Turks, Catholics, or Hindus, etc., it does not follow that one does not want to trade with them from a distance. To the contrary, it is precisely the absolute voluntariness of human association and separation – the absence of any form of forced integration – that makes peaceful relationships – free trade – between culturally, racially, ethnically, or religiously distinct people possible.
Other things being equal, businesses move to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus effecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital.
While the judicial monopoly of governments extends nowadays typically far beyond a single city and in some cases over almost an entire continent, the consequences for the relations between the races and sexes and spatial approximation and segregation of government (monopoly) can still be best observed in the great cities and their decline from centers of civilization to centers of degeneration and decay.
As a result of this overproportional growth of low and even underclass people and an increasing number of ethnically, tribally, racially mixed offspring especially in the lower and lowest social strata, the character of democratic (popular) government will gradually change as well. Rather than the “race card” being essentially the only instrument of politics, politics becomes increasingly “class politics”. The government rulers can and will no longer rely exclusively on their ethnic, tribal, or racial appeal and support, but increasingly they must try to find support across tribal or racial lines by appealing to the universal (not tribe or race specific) feeling of envy and egalitarianism, i.e., to social class ( the untouchables or the slaves versus the masters, the workers versus the capitalists, the poor versus the rich, etc.).
Whether intended or not, the welfare state promotes the proliferation of intellectually and morally inferior people and the results would be even worse were it not for the fact that crime rates are particularly high among these people, and that they tend to eliminate each other more frequently.
Welfare must be recognized as a matter exclusively of families and voluntary charity, and state welfare as nothing but the subsidization of irresponsibility.
To be a conservative means nothing specific at all except to like the existing order, whatever that may be.
Social education and social security provide an opening for the rebellious youth to escape parental authority (to get away with continuous misbehavior). Old conservatives knew that these policies would emancipate the individual from the discipline imposed by family and community life only to subject it instead to the direct and immediate control of the state. Furthermore, they knew, or at least had a hunch, that this would lead to a systematic infantilization of society – a regression, emotionally and mentally, from adulthood to adolescence or childhood.
A return to normalcy requires no less than the complete elimination of the present social security system: of unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, etc. – and thus the near complete dissolution and deconstruction of the current state apparatus and government power.
What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multi-cultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.
The modern welfare state has largely stripped private property owners of the right to exclusion implied in the concept of private property. Discrimination is outlawed. Employers cannot hire whom they want. Landlords cannot rent to whom they want. Sellers cannot sell to whomever they wish; buyers cannot buy from whomever they wish to buy. And groups of private property owners are not permitted to enter in whatever restrictive covenant they believe to be mutually beneficial.
In civilized society, the ultimate price for ill behavior is expulsion, and all-around ill-behaved or rotten characters (even if they commit no criminal offense) will find themselves quickly expelled from everywhere and by everyone and become outcasts, physically removed from civilization.
Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental – indeed foundational – fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations. Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism.
Once the principle of government – judicial monopoly and the power to tax – in incorrectly accepted as just, any notion of restraining government power and safeguarding individual liberty and property is illusory.
Among the most popular and consequential beliefs of our age is the belief in collective security. Nothing less significant than the legitimacy of the modern state rests on this belief.
… statists from Thomas Hobbes to James Buchanan have argued that a protective state would come about as the result of some sort of “constitutional” contract. Yet who in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed one’s protector to determine unilaterally – and irrevocably – the sum that the protected must pay for his protection? The fact is no one ever has!
In short, the more the state has increased its expenditures on “social” security and “public” safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.
In short, while we have become more helpless, impoverished, threatened and insecure, the U.S. government has become ever more brazen and aggressive. In the name of “national” security, it “defends” us, equipped with enormous stockpiles of weapons of aggression and mass destruction, by bullying ever new “Hitlers”, big or small, and all suspected Hitlerite sympathizers anywhere and everywhere outside of the territory of the U.S.
The empirical evidence thus seems clear. The belief in a protective state appears to be a patent error, and the American experiment in protective statism a complete failure. The U.S. government does not protect us. To the contrary, there exists no greater danger to our life, property, and prosperity than the U.S. government, and the U.S. president in particular is the world’s single most threatening and armed danger, capable of ruining everyone who opposes him and destroying the entire globe.
Every American supposedly pays taxes to the U.S. government and is thus de facto, whether he wishes to be or not, implicated in every government aggression.
As taxpayer or draftee, every Iraqi is implicated in his government’s defense just as every American is drawn into the U.S. government’s attack. Thus, the war becomes a war of all Americans against all Iraqis, i.e., total war.
No clear distinction between combatants and noncombatants exists. Everyone is an enemy, and all property provides support for the attacked government. Hence, everyone and everything becomes fair game.
How in the world can anyone expect that a majority of an increasingly degenerate people accustomed to the “right” to vote should ever voluntarily renounce the opportunity of looting other people’s property? Put this way, one must admit that the prospect of a social revolution must indeed be regarded as virtually nil.
EXCERPTS
The world-historic transformation from the ancient regime of royal or princely rulers to the new democratic-republican age of popularly elected or chosen rulers may be also characterized as that from Austria and the Austrian way to that of America and the American way.
In the U.S., less than a century of full-blown democracy has resulted in steadily increasing moral degeneration, family and social disintegration, and cultural decay in the form of continually rising rates of divorce, illegitimacy, abortion, and crime. As a result of an ever-expanding list of nondiscrimination – “affirmative action” – laws and nondiscriminatory, multicultural, egalitarian immigration policies, every nook and cranny of American society is affected by government management and forced integration; accordingly, social strife and racial, ethnic, and moral-cultural tension and hostility have increased dramatically.
No form of taxation can be uniform (equal), but every taxation involves the creation of two distinct and unequal classes of taxpayers versus taxreceiver-consumers.
In short, monarchical government is reconstructed theoretically as privately-owned government, which in turn is explained as promoting future-orientedness and a concern for capital values and economic calculation by the government ruler … Democratic government is reconstructed as publicly-owned government, which is explained as leading to present-orientedness and a disregard or neglect of capital values in government rulers, and the transition from monarchy to democracy is interpreted accordingly as civilizational decline.
If one must have a state, defined as an agency that exercises a compulsory territorial monopoly of ultimate decisionmaking (jurisdiction) and of taxation, then it is economically and ethically advantageous to choose monarchy over democracy. But this leaves the question open whether or not a stat is necessary, i.e., if there exists an alternative to both, monarchy and democracy.
The term adopted here for a social system free of monopoly and taxation is “natural order”. Other names used elsewhere or by others to refer to the same thing include “ordered anarchy”, “private property anarchy”, “anarcho-capitalism”, “autogovernment”, “private law society”, and “pure capitalism”.
I will explain the rapid growth of state power in the course of the twentieth century lamented by Mises and Rothbard as the systematic outcome of democracy and the democratic mindset, i.e., the (erroneous) belief in the efficiency and/or justice of public property and popular (majority) rule.
The imposition of a government tax on property or income violates a property or income producer’s rights as much as does theft does. In both cases the appropriator-producer’s supply of goods is diminished against his will and without his consent. Government money or “liquidity” creation involves no less a fraudulent expropriation of private-property owners than the operations of a criminal counterfeiter gang.
Every government, and that means every agency that engages in continual, institutionalized property-rights violations (expropriations), is by its very nature a territorial monopolist.
Having to begin small, the original form of government is typically that of personal rule: of private ownership of the governmental apparatus of compulsion (monarchy).
But as the government’s private owner, it is in his interest to draw – parasitically – on a growing, increasingly productive and prosperous nongovernment economy, as this would – always and without any effort on his part – also increase his own wealth and prosperity. Tax rates would thus tend to be low.
Owing to its exclusive character and the correspondingly developed class consciousness of the ruled, government attempts at territorial expansion tend to be viewed by the public as the ruler’s private business, to be financed and carrier out with his own personal funds. The added territory is the king’s, and so he, not the public, should pay for it.
A democratic ruler can use the government apparatus to his personal advantage, but he does not own it … He owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value … Instead of maintaining or even enhancing the value of the government estate, as a king would do, a president (the government’s temporary caretaker or trustee), will use up as much of the government resources as quickly as possible, for what he does not consume now, he may never be able to consume.
… with a “publicly” owned and administered government a new type of “law” emerges: “public” law, which exempts government agents from personal liability and withholds “publicly owned” resources from economic management.
… the mere act of legislating – of democratic lawmaking – increases the degree of uncertainty. Rather than being immutable and hence predictable, law becomes increasingly flexible and unpredictable. What is right and wrong today may not be so tomorrow.
If a democratic ruler and a democratically elected ruling elite want to expand their territory and hence their tax base, then only a military option of conquest and domination is open to them. Hence, the likelihood of war will be significantly increased.
… just as monarchy was once accepted as legitimate but is today considered to be an unthinkable solution to the current social crisis, it is not inconceivable that the idea of democratic rule might someday be regarded as morally illegitimate and politically unthinkable.
It is not government (monarchical or democratic) that is the source of human civilization and social peace but private property, and the recognition and defense of private property rights, contractualism, and individual responsibility.
In contrast to the right of self-defense in the event of a criminal attack, the victim of government violations of private property rights may not legitimately defend himself against such violations.
As hard as they tried, monarchical rulers did not succeed in establishing monopolies of pure fiat currencies, i.e., of irredeemable government paper monies, which can be created virtually out of thin air, an practically no cost. No particular individual, not even a king, could be trusted with an extraordinary monopoly such as this. It was only under conditions of democratic republicanism – of anonymous and impersonal rule – that this feat was accomplished.
In addition to increased exploitation and social decay, the transition from monarchy to democracy has brought a change from limited warfare to total war, and the twentieth century, the age of democracy, must be ranked also among the most murderous periods in all of history.
… after the crushing defeat and devastation of the secessionist Confederacy by Lincoln and the Union, it was clear that the right to secede no longer existed and that democracy meant absolute and unlimited majority rule.
Motivated (as everyone is) by self-interest and the disutility of labor but with the unique power to tax, a government agent’s response will invariable be the same: To maximize expenditures on protection, and conceivably almost all of a nation’s wealth can be consumed by the cost of protection, and at the same time to minimize the actual production of protection. The more money one can spend and the less one must work to produce, the better off one will be.
Under democracy, everyone is equal insofar as entry into government is open to all on the same terms. In a democracy no personal privileges or privileged persons exist. However, functional privileges and privileged functions exist. As long as they act in an official capacity, democratic government agents are governed and protected by public law and thereby occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of private law (most fundamentally in being permitted to support their own activities by taxes imposed on private law subjects).
Given the rules of democratic government – of one-man-one-vote and majority rule – a caretaker, whether to secure his present position or advance to another, must award or promise to award privileges to groups rather than particular individuals, and given that there always exist more have-nots than haves of everything worth having, his redistribution will be egalitarian rather than elitist.
The decision to secede involves that one regard the central government as illegitimate, and that one accordingly treat it and its agents as an outlaw agency and “foreign” occupying forces. That is, if compelled by them, one complies, out of prudence and for no other reason than self-preservation, but one does nothing to support or facilitate their operations. One tries to keep as much of one’s property and surrender as little tax money as possible. One considers all federal law, legislation and regulation as null and void and ignores it whenever possible. One does not work or volunteer for the central government, whether its executive, legislative, or judicial branch, and one does not associate with anyone who does (and in particular not with those high up in the hierarchy of caretakers).
… the decision by members of the elite to secede from and not cooperate with government must always include the resolve of engaging in, or contributing to, a continuous ideological struggle, for if the power of government rests on the widespread acceptance of false indeed absurd and foolish ideas, then the only genuine protection is the systematic attack of these ideas and the propagation and proliferation of true ones.
Political integration (centralization) and economic (market) integration are two completely different phenomena. Political integration involves the territorial expansion of a state’s power of taxation and property regulation (expropriation). Economic integration is the extension of the interpersonal and interregional division of labor and market participation.
As one approaches the limits of a One World state, all possibilities of voting with one’s feet against a government disappear. Wherever one goes, the same tax and regulation structure applies. Thus relieved of the problem of emigration, a fundamental rein on the expansion of governmental power is gone.
… under socialism, ownership of productive assets is assigned to a collective of individuals regardless of each member’s prior action or inaction relative to the owned assets. In effect, socialist ownership favors the nonhomesteader, the nonproducer, and the noncontractor and disadvantages homesteaders, producers, and contractors … since means of production cannot be sold under socialism, no market prices for factors of production exist. Without such prices, cost-accounting is impossible.
From the fact that one does not want to associate with or live in the neighborhood of Blacks, Turks, Catholics, or Hindus, etc., it does not follow that one does not want to trade with them from a distance. To the contrary, it is precisely the absolute voluntariness of human association and separation – the absence of any form of forced integration – that makes peaceful relationships – free trade – between culturally, racially, ethnically, or religiously distinct people possible.
Other things being equal, businesses move to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus effecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital.
While the judicial monopoly of governments extends nowadays typically far beyond a single city and in some cases over almost an entire continent, the consequences for the relations between the races and sexes and spatial approximation and segregation of government (monopoly) can still be best observed in the great cities and their decline from centers of civilization to centers of degeneration and decay.
As a result of this overproportional growth of low and even underclass people and an increasing number of ethnically, tribally, racially mixed offspring especially in the lower and lowest social strata, the character of democratic (popular) government will gradually change as well. Rather than the “race card” being essentially the only instrument of politics, politics becomes increasingly “class politics”. The government rulers can and will no longer rely exclusively on their ethnic, tribal, or racial appeal and support, but increasingly they must try to find support across tribal or racial lines by appealing to the universal (not tribe or race specific) feeling of envy and egalitarianism, i.e., to social class ( the untouchables or the slaves versus the masters, the workers versus the capitalists, the poor versus the rich, etc.).
Whether intended or not, the welfare state promotes the proliferation of intellectually and morally inferior people and the results would be even worse were it not for the fact that crime rates are particularly high among these people, and that they tend to eliminate each other more frequently.
Welfare must be recognized as a matter exclusively of families and voluntary charity, and state welfare as nothing but the subsidization of irresponsibility.
To be a conservative means nothing specific at all except to like the existing order, whatever that may be.
Social education and social security provide an opening for the rebellious youth to escape parental authority (to get away with continuous misbehavior). Old conservatives knew that these policies would emancipate the individual from the discipline imposed by family and community life only to subject it instead to the direct and immediate control of the state. Furthermore, they knew, or at least had a hunch, that this would lead to a systematic infantilization of society – a regression, emotionally and mentally, from adulthood to adolescence or childhood.
A return to normalcy requires no less than the complete elimination of the present social security system: of unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, public education, etc. – and thus the near complete dissolution and deconstruction of the current state apparatus and government power.
What the countercultural libertarians failed to recognize, and what true libertarians cannot emphasize enough, is that the restoration of private property rights and laissez-faire economics implies a sharp and drastic increase in social “discrimination” and will swiftly eliminate most if not all of the multi-cultural-egalitarian life style experiments so close to the heart of left libertarians. In other words, libertarians must be radical and uncompromising conservatives.
The modern welfare state has largely stripped private property owners of the right to exclusion implied in the concept of private property. Discrimination is outlawed. Employers cannot hire whom they want. Landlords cannot rent to whom they want. Sellers cannot sell to whomever they wish; buyers cannot buy from whomever they wish to buy. And groups of private property owners are not permitted to enter in whatever restrictive covenant they believe to be mutually beneficial.
In civilized society, the ultimate price for ill behavior is expulsion, and all-around ill-behaved or rotten characters (even if they commit no criminal offense) will find themselves quickly expelled from everywhere and by everyone and become outcasts, physically removed from civilization.
Egalitarianism, in every form and shape, is incompatible with the idea of private property. Private property implies exclusivity, inequality, and difference. And cultural relativism is incompatible with the fundamental – indeed foundational – fact of families and intergenerational kinship relations. Families and kinship relations imply cultural absolutism.
Once the principle of government – judicial monopoly and the power to tax – in incorrectly accepted as just, any notion of restraining government power and safeguarding individual liberty and property is illusory.
Among the most popular and consequential beliefs of our age is the belief in collective security. Nothing less significant than the legitimacy of the modern state rests on this belief.
… statists from Thomas Hobbes to James Buchanan have argued that a protective state would come about as the result of some sort of “constitutional” contract. Yet who in his right mind would agree to a contract that allowed one’s protector to determine unilaterally – and irrevocably – the sum that the protected must pay for his protection? The fact is no one ever has!
In short, the more the state has increased its expenditures on “social” security and “public” safety, the more our private property rights have been eroded, the more our property has been expropriated, confiscated, destroyed, or depreciated, and the more we have been deprived of the very foundation of all protection: economic independence, financial strength, and personal wealth.
In short, while we have become more helpless, impoverished, threatened and insecure, the U.S. government has become ever more brazen and aggressive. In the name of “national” security, it “defends” us, equipped with enormous stockpiles of weapons of aggression and mass destruction, by bullying ever new “Hitlers”, big or small, and all suspected Hitlerite sympathizers anywhere and everywhere outside of the territory of the U.S.
The empirical evidence thus seems clear. The belief in a protective state appears to be a patent error, and the American experiment in protective statism a complete failure. The U.S. government does not protect us. To the contrary, there exists no greater danger to our life, property, and prosperity than the U.S. government, and the U.S. president in particular is the world’s single most threatening and armed danger, capable of ruining everyone who opposes him and destroying the entire globe.
Every American supposedly pays taxes to the U.S. government and is thus de facto, whether he wishes to be or not, implicated in every government aggression.
As taxpayer or draftee, every Iraqi is implicated in his government’s defense just as every American is drawn into the U.S. government’s attack. Thus, the war becomes a war of all Americans against all Iraqis, i.e., total war.
No clear distinction between combatants and noncombatants exists. Everyone is an enemy, and all property provides support for the attacked government. Hence, everyone and everything becomes fair game.
How in the world can anyone expect that a majority of an increasingly degenerate people accustomed to the “right” to vote should ever voluntarily renounce the opportunity of looting other people’s property? Put this way, one must admit that the prospect of a social revolution must indeed be regarded as virtually nil.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Voltaire's Bastards by John Ralston Saul - Excerpts
[Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West. John Ralston Saul.
1992. Vintage, New York. ISBN 0-679-74819-9]
EXCERPTS
Reason is a narrow system swollen into an ideology. With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry. Like most religions, reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.
Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated. The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme – the theme song of their expertise. However, their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use. Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized belief. The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. The illusion is that we have created the most sophisticated society in the history of man. The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.
The essence of rational leadership is control justified by expertise.
Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk.
… reason is not more than structure. And structure is most easily controlled by those who feel themselves to be free of the cumbersome weight represented by common sense and humanism.
Solutions are the cheapest commodity of our day. They are the medicine-show tonic of the rational elites.
Neither Capitalism nor Socialism can pretend to be an ideology. They are merely methods for dividing ownership and income.
This absence of intellectual mechanisms for questioning our own actions becomes clear when the expression of any unstructured doubt – for example, over the export of arms to potential enemies or the loss of shareholder power to managers of the loss of parliamentary power to the executive – is automatically categorized as naïve or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs.
Efficient decision making is, after all, a characteristic proper to authoritarian governments. Napoleon was efficient. Hitler was efficient. Efficient democracy can only mean democracy castrated.
All in all the building of weapons has become the most important source of make-work projects in the late twentieth century. Neoconservatives may condemn Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA projects, but at least they kept the countryside clean and were reasonably cheap.
… there has been a gradual undermining of the idea of a general social consensus. All of this has been fueled by a slavish devotion to the rational certitude that there are absolute answers to all questions and problems.
More often than not, the problems of a state relate to the refusal of local elites to do their job – that is, to provide competent leadership and to protect the interests of the population as a whole. This includes improperly managing resources, failing to adjust to changes in technology or simply losing interest in leadership and management. Exploiting the pleasures of power without assuming the accompanying responsibilities is the most common means by which established elites inadvertently destroy their own nations.
Governments and large corporations always have more material than their critics. That is one of the privileges of power. They also have access to captive research institutes and bevies of "independent" professors, who are kept on contract to provide supportive studies and statements. How is the citizen to choose among so many "true" statements? The factual snow job is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century.
When faced by questioning from non-experts, the scientist invariably retreats behind veils of complication and specialization. Of course it is complicated. But there is no other profession in which the sense of obligation to convert the inner dialect into the language of man is so absolutely absent. Through this form of secrecy the scientist makes it impossible for the citizen to know and to understand and therefore to act, except in ignorance.
Whatever the constitutions of the nations may say, the reality today is that judges and courts are more important legislators than the elected representatives. This is the third element in the decline of the elected assemblies. Just as parts of the representative's power have gone to the executive and to the administration, so another part has gone to those who argue and apply the law. As the lawmakers have declined, the law itself has grown into a seamless structure. Like administration, it has become both a substitute for policy and a body behind whose back policy can be made.
The fixation of most eighteenth-century thinkers on inviolable legal codes was produced by two factors: their desire to end the intolerable rule of arbitrary, absolute authority and their belief in some sort of social contract. Their assumption was that this contract would automatically encapsulate and defend acceptable social standards.
… at the heart of justice must be the citizens' belief in the laws they obey and their collaboration with the authorities. The actual statutes do not exist because everyone would act in a criminal manner without them. They are there to lay out general social standards and, above all, to deal with a small minority who have always rejected responsible behavior. There is an assumption in any social contract that the constituted elites are protectors – for better or worse – of that social agreement. The idea that a civilization could function with its elites as the principal abusers of the contract is impossible. And yet that is precisely what we have.
A real belief feels to the believer to be a natural state and does not respond to questioning. That is one of the reasons we have so much difficulty dealing with the Islamic world. They don't want to discuss fundamentals. They are not interested in a rational analysis. They believe the way we once believed. Not only do we find this incomprehensible and frustrating, we also find it troubling, because their certainty is a reflection of our own past.
… the free market may be a good, bad, or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion.
Heroic leaders always encourage the people to dream, as if the capacity to dream were a positive political attribute. In truth, it has more to do with unleashing our fears, which then swell into the limitless realms of fantasy.
The Westerner's inability to mind his own business shows a lack of civilization. Among his most unacceptable characteristics is a determination to reveal what he thinks of as himself – his marriages, divorces and children; his feelings and loves. The European likes to think of that as an American characteristic, but the difference between the continents is merely one of degrees. Any man or woman produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition is dying to confess – unasked, if necessary. What the Buddhist seeks in the individual is, first, that he understands he is part of a whole and therefore of limited interest as a part and, second, to the extent that he tries to deal with the problem of his personal existence, he does so in a private manner. The individual who appears to sail upon calm waters is a man of quality. Any storms he battles within are his own business.
In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren't even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed by competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition.
1992. Vintage, New York. ISBN 0-679-74819-9]
EXCERPTS
Reason is a narrow system swollen into an ideology. With time and power it has become a dogma, devoid of direction and disguised as disinterested inquiry. Like most religions, reason presents itself as the solution to the problems it has created.
Elites quite naturally define as the most important and admired qualities for a citizen those on which they themselves have concentrated. The possession, use and control of knowledge have become their central theme – the theme song of their expertise. However, their power depends not on the effect with which they use that knowledge but on the effectiveness with which they control its use. Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized belief. The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. The illusion is that we have created the most sophisticated society in the history of man. The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and coordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.
The essence of rational leadership is control justified by expertise.
Our business leaders hector us in the name of capitalism, when most of them are no more than corporate employees, isolated from personal risk.
… reason is not more than structure. And structure is most easily controlled by those who feel themselves to be free of the cumbersome weight represented by common sense and humanism.
Solutions are the cheapest commodity of our day. They are the medicine-show tonic of the rational elites.
Neither Capitalism nor Socialism can pretend to be an ideology. They are merely methods for dividing ownership and income.
This absence of intellectual mechanisms for questioning our own actions becomes clear when the expression of any unstructured doubt – for example, over the export of arms to potential enemies or the loss of shareholder power to managers of the loss of parliamentary power to the executive – is automatically categorized as naïve or idealistic or bad for the economy or simply bad for jobs.
Efficient decision making is, after all, a characteristic proper to authoritarian governments. Napoleon was efficient. Hitler was efficient. Efficient democracy can only mean democracy castrated.
All in all the building of weapons has become the most important source of make-work projects in the late twentieth century. Neoconservatives may condemn Franklin D. Roosevelt's WPA projects, but at least they kept the countryside clean and were reasonably cheap.
… there has been a gradual undermining of the idea of a general social consensus. All of this has been fueled by a slavish devotion to the rational certitude that there are absolute answers to all questions and problems.
More often than not, the problems of a state relate to the refusal of local elites to do their job – that is, to provide competent leadership and to protect the interests of the population as a whole. This includes improperly managing resources, failing to adjust to changes in technology or simply losing interest in leadership and management. Exploiting the pleasures of power without assuming the accompanying responsibilities is the most common means by which established elites inadvertently destroy their own nations.
Governments and large corporations always have more material than their critics. That is one of the privileges of power. They also have access to captive research institutes and bevies of "independent" professors, who are kept on contract to provide supportive studies and statements. How is the citizen to choose among so many "true" statements? The factual snow job is one of the great inventions of the twentieth century.
When faced by questioning from non-experts, the scientist invariably retreats behind veils of complication and specialization. Of course it is complicated. But there is no other profession in which the sense of obligation to convert the inner dialect into the language of man is so absolutely absent. Through this form of secrecy the scientist makes it impossible for the citizen to know and to understand and therefore to act, except in ignorance.
Whatever the constitutions of the nations may say, the reality today is that judges and courts are more important legislators than the elected representatives. This is the third element in the decline of the elected assemblies. Just as parts of the representative's power have gone to the executive and to the administration, so another part has gone to those who argue and apply the law. As the lawmakers have declined, the law itself has grown into a seamless structure. Like administration, it has become both a substitute for policy and a body behind whose back policy can be made.
The fixation of most eighteenth-century thinkers on inviolable legal codes was produced by two factors: their desire to end the intolerable rule of arbitrary, absolute authority and their belief in some sort of social contract. Their assumption was that this contract would automatically encapsulate and defend acceptable social standards.
… at the heart of justice must be the citizens' belief in the laws they obey and their collaboration with the authorities. The actual statutes do not exist because everyone would act in a criminal manner without them. They are there to lay out general social standards and, above all, to deal with a small minority who have always rejected responsible behavior. There is an assumption in any social contract that the constituted elites are protectors – for better or worse – of that social agreement. The idea that a civilization could function with its elites as the principal abusers of the contract is impossible. And yet that is precisely what we have.
A real belief feels to the believer to be a natural state and does not respond to questioning. That is one of the reasons we have so much difficulty dealing with the Islamic world. They don't want to discuss fundamentals. They are not interested in a rational analysis. They believe the way we once believed. Not only do we find this incomprehensible and frustrating, we also find it troubling, because their certainty is a reflection of our own past.
… the free market may be a good, bad, or insufficient idea, but, in any case, it is just a crude commercial code. Now it is regularly equated with or given credit for or even precedence over the freedom of man. But the freedom of man is a moral statement on the human condition, both in the practical and in the humanist sense. To equate it with a school of business is to betray a certain confusion.
Heroic leaders always encourage the people to dream, as if the capacity to dream were a positive political attribute. In truth, it has more to do with unleashing our fears, which then swell into the limitless realms of fantasy.
The Westerner's inability to mind his own business shows a lack of civilization. Among his most unacceptable characteristics is a determination to reveal what he thinks of as himself – his marriages, divorces and children; his feelings and loves. The European likes to think of that as an American characteristic, but the difference between the continents is merely one of degrees. Any man or woman produced by the Judeo-Christian tradition is dying to confess – unasked, if necessary. What the Buddhist seeks in the individual is, first, that he understands he is part of a whole and therefore of limited interest as a part and, second, to the extent that he tries to deal with the problem of his personal existence, he does so in a private manner. The individual who appears to sail upon calm waters is a man of quality. Any storms he battles within are his own business.
In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren't even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed by competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition.
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