Kleptocracy can work best for Homo sapiens [making some of us rich before all of us die (and a good part of the bulk of the biosphere as well)] only if we're not too sapient.
Our institutions will serve kleptocracy best if its functionaries are none too self-aware. That's why kleptocracy (aka: civilization) will always jail, torture, murder its Socrates, its Jesus, its Galileo — if not in the name of the church then in the name of the state.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Appraisals and Inherent Value
Only kleptocrats are literate, only kleptocrats maintain schools and universities, only kleptocrats have governments in which leaders tell citizens the value, the validity ... of this, that, and the other thing. If you're reading this, you're almost certainly a kleptocrat, trained from birth in the values of this or that kleptocracy. You probably know that in 1492 Columbus got some backing from the queen of Spain and parlayed it into a "discovery" of "America." You may also realize that Christian cultures typically assumed that Christian values trumped all over values: thus the values of things in America were zero until some Christian put a value on them.
Of course after the Protestant Reformation, to Protestants, things Catholic no longer counted: old things, Catholic things had no value until revalued by some Protestant. Thus it didn't matter what value the emperor of the Aztecs put on his palance, or his kingship, or his people, the Conquistadors and the priests could declare it null and void and place a new value on it: this beautiful maiden in the gold necklace has no value, but I'll sell her to my friend for a Spanish coin: so, her correct value is one Spanish coin. Similarly the Lutheran could desecrate the popish altar and then sell it to his fellow Lutherans for so many German pfennigs.
It may happen that in 1920 that some Irishman arrives at Ellis Island, ferries to Manhattan, beholds the Brooklyn Bridge, and is swiftly offered the purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge by some Five Corners street tough. The salesman even offers the Mick a receipt. In this case the Mick has no money whatsoever and is thereby saved from buying property not owned by the seller.
OK: that's enough background for starters: now I ask this: did the Aztec maiden have any intrinsic value? Should Montezuma's value of her count? Is there in Heaven an Accounts of all things in the Cosmos, all appraisals logged?
In other words: is God's appraisal any better than the Spaniard's? or the Lutheran's? Or the Street Tough's?
Can use value ever be translated into market value? Might God's heavenly accounting make such a distinction? What if God's heavenly accounting makes distinctions that I haven't made or even hinted at here? (Gee: how could that be? I'm trying to hint at everything!) What if the atheists are right and there is no god: do my questions therefore become meaningless?
For now I'd be happy could I only know that somebody read this and reviewed their own assumptions about value! and god! and market! and intrinsic! and kleptocracy!!
Of course after the Protestant Reformation, to Protestants, things Catholic no longer counted: old things, Catholic things had no value until revalued by some Protestant. Thus it didn't matter what value the emperor of the Aztecs put on his palance, or his kingship, or his people, the Conquistadors and the priests could declare it null and void and place a new value on it: this beautiful maiden in the gold necklace has no value, but I'll sell her to my friend for a Spanish coin: so, her correct value is one Spanish coin. Similarly the Lutheran could desecrate the popish altar and then sell it to his fellow Lutherans for so many German pfennigs.
It may happen that in 1920 that some Irishman arrives at Ellis Island, ferries to Manhattan, beholds the Brooklyn Bridge, and is swiftly offered the purchase of the Brooklyn Bridge by some Five Corners street tough. The salesman even offers the Mick a receipt. In this case the Mick has no money whatsoever and is thereby saved from buying property not owned by the seller.
OK: that's enough background for starters: now I ask this: did the Aztec maiden have any intrinsic value? Should Montezuma's value of her count? Is there in Heaven an Accounts of all things in the Cosmos, all appraisals logged?
In other words: is God's appraisal any better than the Spaniard's? or the Lutheran's? Or the Street Tough's?
Can use value ever be translated into market value? Might God's heavenly accounting make such a distinction? What if God's heavenly accounting makes distinctions that I haven't made or even hinted at here? (Gee: how could that be? I'm trying to hint at everything!) What if the atheists are right and there is no god: do my questions therefore become meaningless?
For now I'd be happy could I only know that somebody read this and reviewed their own assumptions about value! and god! and market! and intrinsic! and kleptocracy!!
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Solution to Kleptocracy
What a Sane People Would Do About Kleptocracy
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.
Fuller's Suggestion
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.
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.
Our chief hope lies in finding ways of permanently tying self-interest to the common good.
Brin, Glory Season
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.
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!
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.
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:
(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.
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,
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.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Jared Diamond's Kleptocracy
1999
"How come Britain is so powerful?" That's what Col. Harry Brighton is asking in the Lawrence of Arabia version of Prince Feisal's tent.
"Guns," says Prince Feisal. "Discipline!" says the frustrated Col. Brighton.
Guns agrees T. E. Lawrence.
Guns, Germs, & Steel, Jared Diamond agrees, elaborating in what he calls, correctly, the first scientific "history."
The situation was WWI. The movie was 1962. Diamond's book is 1998. (This module is 1999, and I'm revising it this 2004 11 29 (and reposting it to a blog, after federal censorship, this 2009 02 26!)
God bless Jared Diamond. For years, decades, I've been unhappily using the word civilization to mean the juggernaut of environmental degradation, theft of the commons, and factitious hierarchical force for the sake of surplus food and damaging population levels. I've had to salt notes here and there to emphasize that by civilization I do not mean music, art, literature, manners ... Those latter are tens of thousands of years old at the least. Citifying the biosphere is only six thousand years old at the most. For tens of millennia modern man had had culture organized in bands, occasionally in tribes. Agriculture was discovered around ten and a half thousand years ago. By six thousand years ago, the farmers had monopolized and degraded enough land for it to be becoming a problem. Chiefdoms formed and finally states. (See my Tower of Babel [once I can repost it].)
So how do you tell a kleptocrat from an ordinary scoundrel?
How shall I your true love know
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon
From another one?
By his cockle hat and staff
And his sandal shoon
By their exemption from ordinary standards of accountability. The government, any government, makes a treaty. The government breaks the treaty. Does everyone pronounce the government a liar, a breaker of trust? No. Or it doesn't matter if they do. The next day, month, year, decade, the government is making new treaties. Day after day after day of Watergate the Nixon White House was caught telling the public more lies. Did the press, the public re-gather at the White House to remove and punish the frauds? No, they reassembled, hats in hand, to hear the next day's lies.
All governments are kleptocracies, but by the standards offered here many other institutions are also kleptocracies. The Church claims that God created the universe, that he owns it, that everything is his property, that he can give it, take it away, and re-give it at his pleasure. The Church further claims that it, the church, represents this God. No evidence. At least no evidence that wouldn't be laughed out of any rational assembly. OK, let's hypothetically accept the Church's statements: there is just the one God, or at least he's the boss god, he owns everything, and he told the story in a book, the Bible, there's only one Bible and the Church has it. They understand it and can explain it to you. But then, with Greek being relearned, the possibility of reading the Septuagint, of criticizing the Vulgate emerged. What did the Church do? They tried to repress the knowledge. They made it a capital offense to learn Greek. And they, kleptocrats true, went on making claims that, if those claims hadn't been deliberate lies before the discovery, they were certainly deliberate lies afterwards.
And it's not just the Church. Doctors are the second leading cause of death, but are they accountable? No. If fact their kleptocrat allies do everything in their considerable power to force you to endanger yourself at their expensive hands. Your law suit goes kablouie if, having been injured by one doctor, you don't endanger yourself further by going to another, and another ... until you find one who'll testify against the first. (Good luck.) The evidence of your injury isn't evidence until it's been blessed by another killer. (And meantime, you're now also in the hands of the lawyers!)
Time and again school teachers are caught teaching falsehoods. Time and again evidence surfaces that the best teachers are fired while the worse get tenure.
The Church had said that God made the universe so that everything revolved around the central earth. The Bible didn't say so: the Church just granted itself the privilege of making up God's mind for him. Galileo built a telescope and first thing found satellites revolving around Jupiter. Ergo, at least one thing that the Church said was false. Ah, but they were kleptocrats! Kleptocrats are not accountable to the evidence of experience. The truth is whatever they say it is. Thus Galileo's evidence was overruled by the authority of myth. (Where the banner didn't read "The Bible" then it read "Aristotle": that is, the managed Aristotle: a dead man's written word, with the dead man not available to correct his "experts.")
All right. The hell with history. The hell with the Caesars and the Church and with Stalin. The hell with Hitler and Nixon. Just think: what lies have you been told since Watergate? Even if you don't go as far as I do and see for example American democracy, free trade, freedom of speech, assembly, etc. as just another set of myths, utterly unsupported by rationally reviewed evidence, and perpetrated on you by the current crop of kleptocrats so that they can have their hands in your pockets, their hands in your marriage, on your life, on your children (in fact, how can you say they're your children when the Church takes them x number of hours and the school y number of hours, and the court, the cop, the social worker can walk in and take them from you on any pretext) ... still consider what lies and interferences you do see.
What do you do? Vote for one who promises more goodies and less interference? Did you happen to notice how many government palaces Ronald Reagan built for himself once you'd elected him on the basis on his rhetorical anarchism? I'd like to see a study of the following: chart candidates who promise more of something, monitor their term. How many actually gave more of the whatever; how many less? Do the same for those who promise less. People voted for Nixon to kill the commies. What did he do? He made treaties, nice treaties, with China. Where was the hook?
If there ever really were a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, what people would be so stupid as not to install a recall system? There was recent news of a politician who ran for election on a platform of mandatory retirement under some condition: age, number of terms ... Elected, he reached that position and announced that he'd changed his mind: he'd stay in office. If his office really were our office which we appointed him to occupy, why didn't we change the locks on the door, bar him from the hall, clean out his locker and put the stuff on the street? Why didn't we sue him to pay for a new election?
(Of course there is a recall system, a mythic one. The kleptocrats are supposed to police themselves. And even the extent to which it is real and has even actually surfaced on some occasions, is still mythic so long as the media, like the lawyers, the doctors, the churches ... are fellow kleptocrats in league with the political kleptocrats.)
Kleptocracy is an Abbott and Costello routine. The kleptocrat is Abbott and we're Costello: screwed, swindled daily. And he still says he's our best friend. (And we say so too: if Costello didn't have Abbott to swindle him, what would he have? He'd be, heaven forefend, alone.)
To close this insert, I'll say one last thing: Jesus talked about the truth. Pontius Pilate talked about the truth. The Church talks about the truth. Governments talk about the people. Revolutionaries talk about the people. Sociopaths talk about the people. In one "Introduction" at Macroinformation I argue that the truth is another Christian universal that doesn't exist. This statement may correspond to experience and that statement not, but there is no Platonic Form: The Truth. Similarly, here I say that there is not and never has been such a thing as The People. There's you and me and him and her ... I never signed any social contract. Did you? Isn't it the case instead that a bunch of lawyers got together and palmed another illusion onto us? When I have suggested ways that we could form a union, a real one, honest ... nothing happened. The kleptocrats had us too busy with their illusions. There is no people; just upwards of five billion dupes of kleptocracy.
Diamond calls the latter two types of organization kleptocracy and henceforth I shall too. The points I've been making for decades Diamond seems to take for granted. I emphasize them not because I believe kleptocratic citizens will recognize themselves in the mirror and reform, but because I want it to be clear ... once the animals are gone, all is domesticated and all domesticates require hospitalization, once the remaining oil is unreachable, the waters all poisoned ... while only the richest kleptocrats can afford gas masks to breathe the air ... when all of the soldiers and police turn on all of the tax payers ... when the taxpayers lay in wait for the police and each other, baseball bat or golf club in hand (no right-caliber bullets to be had), for—finally—a little fresh meat ... as clear as it can be to crazed cannibals, that it was unnecessary, that we (necessarily many fewer of us) could have chosen sanity, restraint, nature ... and lived much better, much longer.
Our long slide turning to a short slide will have been unnecessary: provided that is that sentience is potentially anything but a genetic defect.
Meantime, I continue my characterization of, bless you Diamond, kleptocracy.
Mankind has long been specialized. We certainly didn't invent specialization. It's the females who produce the eggs, the males the sperm; it's the males who have upper body mass and leverage, the females who are lower to the ground, have better balance ... All humans beings defend their territory, but the males define territory in acres, the females in cubic yards ... (Once behind the wheel, we must all become females.) Culture emphasizes these specialties, sometimes factitiously: the females gather food encumbered by baby or gather close to where the baby is cached; the male searches further afield ... Experience is honored in either gender. The organization of the group is casual. Puberty is a hallmark, but children are still people, not chattel as states' laws have it.
Things change qualitatively as well as quantitatively once the numbers of humans exceed a few hundred. Organization becomes hierarchical. Now the adult is not "more experienced" than the child but "better" than the child (until it backfires and the child becomes "innocent"). The male is better than the female (until that backfires and the female is sanctified). The chief is better than the ordinary male. ...
The hunter pretends to be a duck or a moose or a bush. The bush which is one hunter doesn't want to be shot by the bush which is another hunter, so communications develop in which identification is almost as important as misidentification. Hamlet opens with the line "Who's there?" What's the probability that the answer will be a lie? Well, in your own castle, the probability for the truth is very high: friend (Francisco and Bernardo are changing the guard.) But if Bernardo is actually a Nazi trying out his Brooklyn accent, your cave, home, castle, corporation may soon belong to his Nazis. (If your home is a castle or corporation, then you too are a kleptocrat. (Hamlet certainly was.) You probably have a deed saying that the castle is yours. The deed may be signed by the king who's supposed to have a deed signed by God. Don't worry: Francisco's Nazis will soon have their own deed signed by their king. You won't get to see where God signed their king's deed either, but you can bet they'll claim that the divine signature they don't have is more authentic than any that you don't have ever was.
Kleptocracy functions hierarchically. Kleptocracy creates its cosmology in its own image. There's a boss, an owner, a law giver. These laws are not confirmable in nature, mind you. You can't verify them in experience outside the group believing in or pretending to believe in the laws. Thou shalt not kill. ?!? How are you going to confirm that one? Come to think of it, you can't confirm its "truth" even within the group that declares it sacred. don't eat pork. Eat with your right hand, hold your dick with your left hand. In fact, the more laws a kleptocracy has, the less can they be confirmed even within the group with the laws. 55 mph speed limit? The President shall uphold the Constitution?
OK. Most of these points have already long been here in one place or another, one form or another. There's something else already strongly (at the least) implicit at this Knatz.com that I want side by side with the above recapitulation: if you want an accurate map of a kleptocratic territory, don't just swallow the kleptocrat's map; reverse engineer the kleptocratic map against the territory itself. Apply evolutionary theory. Apply the tools of reason. I don't mean the reason spoken of by Pope, Paine, Jefferson ... I mean the reason theorized by Karl Popper and tested by Peter C. Wason.
I dislike the word engineering the way I was dissatisfied with my knowing no word but "civilization," and I've been likewise dissatisfied with my attempts at a new coinage. But I have to say engineering twice. If you want to know how to fix what's wrong, quality engineer it.
Reverse-engineering tries to figure out what something's actual, not advertised, use is. Quality engineering bypasses the kleptocratic hierarchy. In quality engineering the consumer's opinion counts as much as the CEO's, the lineworker's as much as the foreman's.
Friend or Foe
I am indebted to Gore Vidal for the following bit of kleptocratic disability. Vidal was talking to a young Egyptian man who with his friends numbered among Egypt's military reserve. The friends were assigned to what should have been a cushy weekend guarding some nothing out in the desert. Halfway there, one of them confesses to having forgotten the beer and sandwiches, the falafel and yogurt, the whatever ... He'll go back and join them later. They're relaxing against their sandbags when they hear him arrive.
What's the password?
Um, er ... I forgot it. Gimme a hint.
After a bout of O'Brien's torture, George Orwell's Winston Smith no longer knows how many fingers O'Brien is holding up. That's just the way Big Brother wants it.
When 1984 was being popularly read in the 1950's, I suppose the book sellers expected us to see Stalin. I did. Now I see just any kleptocrat: American, Egyptian ...
(By the way, when I taught 1984 in a course I'd developed at the request of The New School for Social Research (1972), I thought I should have gotten a better laugh when I announced it to be the only "dated" book we'd read that semester.)
I am developing a reading of Hamlet's opening lines at Macroinformation.
2004 08 28 I've just been poking around in some memorabilia from my father's estate. Lo and behold I find that he saved the flier for that course!
I'll decipher the central message here:
Paul Knatz taught English, including Poetry of the Later Renaissance, at Colby College. Founder and Coordinator of the Free Learning Exchange, a not-for-profit educational service for NYC. Engaged in writing a book, Paradox as Structure and Meaning in Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
