Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Solution to Kleptocracy

What a Sane People Would Do About Kleptocracy
at Knatz.com 2000 12 02
This module makes an important point: way down below, buried in important, but less important narrative: so I repeat it up top:

All people, all peoples, should recognize that no polity is legitimate. Our species has a "right" to exist, but excess populations have no right to perpetuate themselves through kleptocracy. All deeds, all charters, all treaties should be burned. We should agree that no one owns the world. Yet we have a right to occupy it, to function in it. Militaries and police should receive amnesty provided that they sin no more. There should be no new police to enforce this: we should put coercion behind us. If we can't do this voluntarily, through our own "enlightened self-interest," then the hell with us ...

Read on.


The people we call the "Ancient Greeks" were "Indo-Europeans" who swept out of Asia and displaced whichever peoples had occupied the Peloponnesis. The peoples we (now) call "Native Americans" (after having called them "Indians") settled the Americas within a thousand years of walking across the once dry Bering Straight. (Other prehistoric peoples may well have sailed all over the coasts of the Americas, but if indeed there were such peoples, they don't seem to have settled: but rather sailed on and on.)

pk is three-quarters "German" and one-quarter "British": part English, part Scot. The Scots were pushed out of "England" by peoples more numerous, better weaponed, less scrupled ... "Germans" don't come from "Germany"; the English don't come from England. The Australian aborigines sailed to Australia some forty or so thousand years ago. That's a long time by our standards. But still: do they really "belong" there? Should "Australia" really "belong" to them? Should it belong to the "English" who killed them in such numbers?

I don't recall asking to be born. I know of no records of any creatures ever requesting such a thing. I am sure I didn't ask to be born in Brooklyn Hospital to a red-headed mother and a lawyer father. But I was. I have enough imagination to believe that had I been born a Jew in the time of David I too would have hated the Philistines, wanted them dead, believed that God loved us Jews and hated the Philistines, gloried when David killed Philistines and took their foreskins as trophies. There are a couple of tribes in Africa whose men carry specialized castration knives: they earn no prestige unless they wear the severed balls of some poor bastard they waylaid from the other tribe. Do those tribes have a "right" to be what they are? (I for one am not going anywhere near them to discuss it with them.) If you or I were born among them, I believe we should believe that we'd be carrying such knives ourselves. (And I'll speculate on one thing about their "rights": I'd don't believe either of those tribes are overpopulated: yet they endure.) Who's to criticize?

Well I criticize. I criticize a great deal. My training is in criticism. I was taught it. Critics from Jesus to Dr. Johnson to Henry David Thoreau were held up to me as models. I attended a liberal arts college. Liberal Arts there were presented as a "free" discussion of what would constitute "the good life." (Not that the college necessarily practiced what it preached: criticize Columbia (as I have) and see what it gets you (as it got me).)

Having been born at Brooklyn Hospital, I was born into the kleptocracy that calls itself the United States. "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in my life time. The law required me to sit through more than a dozen years of talk about law, about rights, about legitimacy. My parents pressured me to elect even more of such sitting. One day they tell us about law; another day they admit that we kept slaves, practiced constant guerrilla war with the natives, designed one-sided treaties: You have to keep it; we can break it whenever we want.

I attended a church that taught that the world was "made" by an entity called "God," that God somehow owned us; but was also our Father. God manifested himself as a mortal. The king of God's own people and the priests of God's own Temple didn't recognize their God in mortal form, sandbagged him, broke their own laws and suborned the Roman force occupying Palestine to break their own laws and falsely condemn, torture, and execute God. God did this because he loves us and wants to forgive us. My church taught that the Church that claimed to be the new church, to have things right for a change, was in fact another false church, that they too reigned by terror, practiced false magic, repressed reasoned inquiry. Problem is: I don't see my own church to be one whit different in any respect. OK, there is one respect: they don't torture reasoned inquirers; they just don't hear them, don't acknowledge them. Still, the Catholics faulting the Jews and the Protestants faulting the Catholics are all black pots calling black kettles black.

What the hell. You and I didn't invent it. Enjoy life. Try to cut the other guy's balls off without him cutting off yours. Ah, but I do enjoy life. I love life immensely. I love to criticize. I love to offer sensible solutions. The solution I offer today follows logically from a suggestion by R. Buckminster Fuller already reported here (link below). Fuller made a speech in India in which he congratulated the peoples of the sub-continent on being the first people to emerge from the receding tide of imperialism. He suggested that all people who loved freedom and hated imperialism should apply for citizenship of India, form one united post-imperialist world.

India has had its own wars, and aggressions, and repressions since then, but rhetorically at least, the suggestion is a great one. I modify it however.All people, all peoples, should recognize that no polity is legitimate. Our species has a "right" to exist, but excess populations have no right to perpetuate themselves through kleptocracy. All deeds, all charters, all treaties should be burned. We should agree that no one owns the world. Yet we have a right to occupy it, to function in it. Militaries and police should receive amnesty provided that they sin no more. There should be no new police to enforce this: we should put coercion behind us. If we can't do this voluntarily, through our own "enlightened self-interest," then the hell with us: we may as well grab what we can: lie, cheat, steal, dominate our spouses, our children: cut the other guys balls off and wear them with honor.

Our chief hope lies in finding ways of permanently tying self-interest to the common good.
Brin, Glory Season




Fuller's Suggestion

2005 12 21
First we lived, then we raided, then we coordinated our raids into kleptocracies, some temporarily "winning," most losing. Now our predations threaten to trigger quantumly more synergistic collapses. As extinction is on a different logical level from a bunch of individual deaths, so are any of a number of previously unguessable ecological potentials. If we kill the forests and the plankton far enough, the whole earth may cease to breathe. Then it won't matter who holds the marbles. I don't say that Life will end; only that part of it that we care about: starring US.

I'm just enjoying Dan Simmons' LoveDeath. There his Sleeping with Teeth Women visits the Lakota people on the eve of their engulfment by the Wasi'Chu. In that context the narrator acknowledges his own Lakota's depredations against other tribes in their own Westward expansion (Never forget: West symbolizes death: that's were the sun sets (no matter where on earth you are: the earth's spin has been constantly one way).

I particularly love the narrator's aside at that point, warning a specific listener that he cannot image how alive the "empty" plains had been: not just with bison, and other tribes, but with spirits, with gods.

Previous estimates had North America's population at about one million humans in 1492. More archeological finds reassess that figure to ten million! However, shortly after 1492, the population did fall to around one million.

If the Europeans had deliberately killed not one single Indian (whether or not the Indians killed one or many Europeans), nine million natives rapidly succumbed to the Europeans' imported diseases. The men themselves stole westward into the continent only very slowly, but the diseases raced. The bulk of the population lived in the Mississippi valley. Nine million dead before the Colonists had penetrated fifty miles into the forest way east along the Atlantic coast!

And if Simmons is right, and it sure is a nice metaphor, then the EurAsian God with his kleptocratic monotheism, killed off the native gods nearly as swiftly, surely as stealthily, as the germs killed off the people.

Typhoid Mary hadn't a clue who she was killing, or even that she was killing. Did God?

Simmons' medicine man has it that even the rocks had been alive. Once the spirit of the Lord passed over them, not only were they dead, they were so dead you'd swear that they could never have lived.


Notes


Humans in the Americas
Did Humans Colonize the World by Boat?

Research suggests our ancestors traveled the oceans 70,000 years ago.

See Discover Magazine's report of 2008 05 20

Torture Reasoned Inquirers

I can't have meant that quite literally when I wrote it in 2000 December. Already I'd been made a pariah, illegally fired, not hired, had my son kidnapped while the law approved ... been assaulted while the law nodded ... Now that I've also been arrested, jailed, railroaded, watched the court and its prosecution lie like a rug and then censor my web sites! I have to take it back.

2008 05 27 Note

I replace a note here reporting an out of date shuffling of files and folders at
Knatz.com. Deschooling files and "solutions" files have moved and moved some more. The problem has deep meaning, it's not just a question of which drawer the socks are in: no one's business but the wearer of the socks (and perhaps his wife, family, maid ...) Deschooling modules were in a FLEX folder which went into a Social Solutions folder. Eventually they expanded to their own domain: InfoAll.org, since knocked off line by my arrest as a "federal felon." (The magicians who control our illusions lie with every move they make.) Now I rebuild Knatz.com, and take the occasion to make a point structurally I'd previously made only in words, too few words: deschooling was born as a subset of Ivan Illich's deconstruction of institutions in which he pointed out how dehumanizing the proliferation of professions was. To have separated doctors and lawyers from the population was bad enough. For teachers, and firemen ... to follow, to have "professional" salesmen ... (some oxymorons are too much!) ... yech, we deserve whatever happens to us. Anyway, all deschooling materials at Knatz.com are now in a DePro(fessionalize) section of my Teaching area. The Social Solutions area remains stunted, but not empty. It's now stuck in the NoHier(archy) section, formerly Society / Order.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Run to Ruin

How did it come to be in a supposed democracy that the fed, the "state," runs everything?

The Spanish Civil War is conventionally seen as a square off between democracy, fascism, and communism: a dress rehearsal for WW II. Fascism won the preliminary; democracy was supposed to have won the big one. But as an anarchist I can't tell the difference between democracy, fascism and communism, not in the actual world of experience. In democracy the people are supposed to decide important issues. (Of course this is done only by the people voting for other people, who are then supposed to know what their voters wanted, and act accordingly.) In fascism the state decides who gets the important contracts. Communism is supposed to lead to anarchism, a stateless society: but only after a communist state runs everything. Democracies, after WW II, the US, for example, staged elections but somehow got the representatives to all out-fascism fascism and to extend its interference into all areas: just like communism!

(I gave myself great pleasure this week by revisiting the movie Belle Epoque: a "beautiful time" before the Spanish Civil War: which was of course followed by Franco, fascism, WW II ... and the sad history we all inherit (which I don't believe the human species will survive). The characters in the movie are torn between their old habit of the Church and their new hope for a republic.)

Whoops, I see I need to revise my title: The State Runs Everything.
I see that what I wrote will make the best sense if I add a letter. Gee, the same letter that stands for me: I!

The State RuIns Everything!



My son responds:This explanation isn't directly applicable to US democracy, but in all the "former" fascist countries, the CIA actively influenced all the elections, promoting the most hard-line anticommunist candidates, who happened to be supposedly reformed fascists. In Japan and Italy, especially, the fact that the CIA was running the government was something of an open secret. You might enjoy some of the details as told in Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

(I grew up with an awareness of the CIA's attempts, mostly failed, to control Latin American governments. I had no idea how much more successful they were with Europe and Japan — or of how many Western journalists, scholars, publications, and think tanks they sponsored through unmonitored funds.)

On the other hand, the most fascist government the United States has had was the one that decided to join WWII, so we can't blame the war for American fascism. Instead, we might have to blame American fascism for the length and depth of the war.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Juvenile Authority

For some time I'd been meaning to add comments to Knatz.com about the juvenile nature displayed by authority in its common attention-getting tools: sirens, for example. I first started to write infantile, but that's not right; no, juvenile. Infants demand attention when they're hungry, when they're uncomfortable. Parents interpret the baby's crying or screaming to mean, "I'm hungry, feed me" or "I'm stinking, I'm wet: change me." Governments too make noises when they're hungry, when they're wet, when they're stinking; but the kind of attention-demand I'm thinking of is common to humans around the age of puberty. It says, and means, "Pay attention to Me, Me, Me!!!"

The cop's siren, the siren of the ambulance ... They all proclaim, "I am more important than you are." "What I'm doing has the right of way over anything you might be doing."

Nowhere in the courts are there hearings for an Einstein suing the ambulance for breaking his concentration when he was about to solve the biggest knot in the problem of unification theory. Jesus won't get to sue Caesar Augustus till after Judgment: by which point, Jesus won't need to sue Caesar Augustus.

Knatz.com got expunged; I'll put it here. Now,Pay attention to Me, Me, Me!!!But there's a difference: my caterwauling may seem to focus on "me"; but I have the double-purpose of trying to save you!
That you make sure I fail is not my fault: or even my business.

Cop Stories (moved)

I'm moving all pk domains materials to the PKnatz blog where I can control "page" menus, and sort by category! Post by post this blog is getting replaced, improved.