The Compulsive Explainer

People can be downright evil—and enjoy it immensely. They can enjoy being abusive or being abused. Their primary interest seems to be in exercising power, in whatever form they can find it—or invent it.

Power can also be benevolent, and often is. But in practice it often lends itself to evil designs.

I am not saying anything new here, no knowledge is more ancient. But Americans, with their mandatory optimism, are prone to overlook this—and get some unpleasant surprises as a result.

Their primary mantra is “Everything is all right!” Which can be replaced instantly with its opposite: “The forces of evil are destroying the world!” Either one is acceptable.

The derivation from Christian theology is obvious: the eternal struggle between God and the Devil, one perfectly good and one perfectly evil. Or the Freudian struggle between the conscious and unconscious—with the unconscious usually winning. Or in the case of my family-of-origin: the struggle between godliness and worldliness. Or the Pauline struggle between the spirit and the flesh. There is always a power struggle going on somewhere. And the outcome is always in doubt.

Entire cultures can self-destruct—or self-construct. Empires rise and fall—the basic activity ever since civilization was invented. It behooves each one of us to observe which condition he is in.

My experience in Silicon Valley, for example, was that I was in a scene of intense destruction. Companies came and went like flies. But no one noticed this, they just changed jobs more often and soldiered on, leaving the dead bodies behind them.

A wise person would have noticed something awesome and important was going on: he was witnessing the destruction of a culture. But he would have needed not only wisdom but a thick skin to protect him from the slings and arrows his fellow workers would have hurled at him. This was the one thing no one was supposed to notice.

Slashdot, which I read regularly, pointed me to an article by Bruce F. Webster, entitled Anatomy of a runaway IT Project. What he says here makes any comments of mine seem puny—but he, as a software authority, can get away with it. Will this light shining on the darkness make any difference? No, corporate craziness is too well entrenched.

It has taken me six years, living in isolation in Latin America, for me to get the courage to raise my feeble voice. I am glad I have finally found my voice, but certain that no one cares. I cast my bread upon the waters, where the little fishes will gobble it up.

From Truthout

Last week, I testified before the Texas House Committee on Elections (you can read my testimony). I’ve done this many times before, but I figured this time would be different. This time, I was armed with the research from the California “Top to Bottom” reports and the Ohio EVEREST reports. I was part of the Hart InterCivic source code team for California’s analysis. I knew the problems. I was prepared to discuss them at length.

Wow, was I disappointed.
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Until then, the bottom line is that many jurisdictions in Texas and elsewhere in the country will be using e-voting equipment this November with known security vulnerabilities, and the procedures and controls they are using will not be sufficient to either prevent or detect sophisticated attacks on their e-voting equipment. While there are procedures with the capability to detect many of these attacks (e.g., post-election auditing of voter-verified paper records), Texas has not certified such equipment for use in the state. Texas’s DREs are simply vulnerable to and undefended against attacks.

This is now the strongest force in the world and American is holding a losing hand in this game—at least on the global scale. When dealing with Latin America, however, it takes maximum advantage of its relative power to get what it wants: riches for its corporations. I has always done so, ever since the Monroe Doctrine was enunciated. But its instrument of choice until recently has been the Marines: brute force.

The Marines have invaded Nicaragua six times and US organized a Contra force back in the Eighties to overthrow the Sandinistas. This was partly for ideological reasons, to defeat the march of communism—but looking at it another way, it was to advance the march of Capitalism.

Recently, it has concentrated a more efficient tool: “free trade” negotiations. These are never for free trade, they are to negotiate between the American power structure and the local power structure. They let the local power structure operate its economy (to its advantage, of course) while most of the profits end up on the American side. Not a gun has to be fired. All American has to do is share some of the greed with the local dictators, who will keep their country under control.

America has been able to do this because, from long exposure, it has learned how Latin America works. At first it just went in with the Marines, then it found corruption was not only necessary but cheaper—and could do the job completely, without anyone being aware of it.

Its experience in the Middle East, however has been negligible. So it has followed the example of its protoge Israel and opted for a military solution—which was not very smart. China, meanwhile, has moved in quietly to latch onto one of Iraq’s new oil fields, see my posting China to develop Iraqi oil field following assurances of security. This clever deal was managed right under the noses of the Americans, with no cost at all to China—because the Chinese have the economic muscle, and the savvy, to do it. And this continues; I checked with Azzaman in English today and saw another article: Chinese firm explores for oil in Kurdish plateau.

I should spend more time on this site. The view you get from here is far different from what you get from the American media. For example, check this posting: U.S. troops bomb hospital and refuse to pay for damages.

But the most important use of economic coercion is inside the US, where it is all-powerful. This works at all levels: against the population who need jobs, and will do anything to get them, and against the government, which is financed with corporate money. And of course the Pentagon, the Media and the educational establishment, which it controls also. All this is economic coercion.

From the NY Times, where Timothy Egan puts it eloquently.

Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry, perhaps the bloodiest week yet of a year where many papers are fighting for their lives. You read about the great names — the Baltimore Sun, the Boston Globe, the San Jose Mercury News — as if reading the obituary page. Rich cities like San Francisco can no longer support a profitable daily paper.

Columnists, reporters, editors, cartoonists and photographers — including some colleagues here at The Times — who brought to life the daily narrative of a city or region have been swept aside. What started as layoffs and buyouts is edging toward closures and bankruptcies.

I said the same thing myself

Media on the Internet is in a crisis. People are used to advertising-financed media and they will not accept anything else. This is fine with Google, who is making a fortune selling advertising on their excellent search site. But the newspapers are doomed. People will not pay for subscription-based services on the Net. They will still pay to see a movie, and pay well. And they will happily take anything they can get for free from the Net. But reasonable payments for services infuriates them. Why this is, nobody knows, but it is a serious problem.

Of all the societies that were cruel to their children, the Victorians must have been some of the worst—and some of the best at documenting this cruelty.

I am now listening to Nicholas Nickleby—and once again I am impressed by Charles Dicken’s genius. The Victorians were also reformers, and he was one of them. England abolished slavery, for example, before America did—and without a war. American had one of the bloodiest civil wars in history, which only resulted in another form of slavery in the South.

From New Scientist

It’s not just the world’s platinum that is being used up at an alarming rate. The same goes for many other rare metals such as indium, which is being consumed in unprecedented quantities for making LCDs for flat-screen TVs, and the tantalum needed to make compact electronic devices like cellphones. How long will global reserves of uranium last in a new nuclear age? Even reserves of such commonplace elements as zinc, copper, nickel and the phosphorus used in fertiliser will run out in the not-too-distant future. So just what proportion of these materials have we used up so far, and how much is there left to go round?

Armin Reller, a materials chemist at the University of Augsburg in Germany, and his colleagues are among the few groups who have been investigating the problem. He estimates that we have, at best, 10 years before we run out of indium. Its impending scarcity could already be reflected in its price: in January 2003 the metal sold for around $60 per kilogram; by August 2006 the price had shot up to over $1000 per kilogram.

The calculations are crude - they don’t take into account any increase in demand due to new technologies, and also assume that current production equals consumption. Yet even based on these assumptions, they point to some alarming conclusions. Without more recycling, antimony, which is used to make flame retardant materials, will run out in 15 years, silver in 10 and indium in under five. In a more sophisticated analysis, Reller has included the effects of new technologies, and projects how many years we have left for some key metals. He estimates that zinc could be used up by 2037, both indium and hafnium - which is increasingly important in computer chips - could be gone by 2017, and terbium - used to make the green phosphors in fluorescent light bulbs - could run out before 2012.

The discovery of objective reality was the discovery that created the modern world. Previous to this mankind had lived in its own reality, like any other animal. This is obvious anyone who has lived around another species for awhile.

For example, once when I was hanging out my wash behind my house in Costa Rica I looked down and saw I was surrounded by tiny chicks who seemed to believe I was some kind of large mother chicken, a reasonable assumption, I suppose for a baby chick. Mother chicken gave a loud cluck “Come here, you dummies, that is not a mama chicken, I am your mama chicken—get that straight!” They immediately obeyed; now that she mentioned it I did look rather strange—for a chicken.

But still, in the back of their little chicken minds they still hoped I would be the big chicken they dreamed of, and would feed them generously. And in the back of my little human mind I could not resist going to the store and buying them some chicken food. They loved it and I thought they loved me too. We had a brief love affair—until they grew up and no longer needed a big mother chicken to feed them. They went to live in their world as adult chickens and left me to live in mine.

In the same way humans conceived of supernatural beings, beings who controlled the world around them. Everything had a spirit, and that spirit and our ancestors could communicate readily. The ancient Hebrews, for example worshiped volcanoes. I still sometimes consider some rocks to be living beings, especially large rocks out in the desert. And I can understand what people mean when they have experienced the desert as a living being. There are definite benefits from being religious. But let me go back ten thousand years.

In those days we lived as small groups, living off the land. A life that could hardly be bettered. Then we became civilized, which resulted in two things: the spirits became gods and our simple social structures became very complicated. Power and Authority were born, and they have not left us. Our authorities ran the world just as our spirits had before—and this included religious authorities. It didn’t take us too long to get used to this, and then it seemed natural. This lasted for many empires and thousands of years—culminating in the West with the Middle Ages. People lived in a human world, a subjective reality, where their main interest was not the natural world, but getting to heaven after they died.

Then something amazing happened, a whole complex of changes in some parts of Europe. The key technology was the printing press, and it led directly to the Reformation. One of the first things printed was the Bible, and it blew people’s minds. They didn’t need religious authorities anymore, they could read God’s word for themselves! The next step was just a little step, but it changed the world: people became less interested in authority and started to explore the world for themselves. This was called Natural Philosophy, but later became known as science.

What they discovered was Objective Reality. A world that was ruled by mathematical laws operating in a space and time that was independent of people. A world where the earth and the other planets revolved around the sun—and where the attraction between them was proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them—a mathematical law. The church fought this with every means at its disposal, but failed. In Germany, England, and Switzerland the ruling classes simply created their own Christian churches—and everyone could see that God did not destroy them.

At a more abstract level, these cultures discovered the natural world was logical and orderly. And they could coordinate with this harmony and benefit from it. This was originally seem as a new way to appreciate God as he really was: through his laws operating in the natural world.

Then something unexpected happened: the countries that believed in this new reality became rich and powerful! This was by no means an easy process, it involved centuries of bloody warfare. This occupied the 16th though the 19th Centuries. A process Southern Europe avoided; there they had the Inquisition instead of the Reformation.

Early in the 20th Century, a German sociologist, Max Weber, took a survey of the Western countries, and noticed there were two kinds: rich and poor. What’s more, the rich were Protestant and the poor were Catholic! Being a scientist, he came up with a theory for this, but not being a historian he overlooked the fact that this was a historical development, a cultural development. The Reformation was just the first of many revolutions, culminating in the Industrial Revolution.

These revolutions, this development, didn’t happen everywhere. There were developed countries and undeveloped countries. Some countries had changed and some hadn’t. The later remained traditional and authoritarian and poor.

The rich people were not better than the poor people, although they liked to think that, they had simply accepted Objective Reality—which the poor cultures rejected. As someone living in one of these cultures (Costa Rica) I see this all the time. And I have to keep reminding myself not to expect them to be logical or organized—or even honest.

One result of this great change was absolute honesty. You had to be honest about your approach to this reality, dishonesty would meant you were not really paying attention. The scientific process has to be honest, and it has built-in checks to make sure this happens. This is radically different from the concept of honesty in traditional cultures, where, like everything else, honesty is relative, and depends on the situation. A subjective reality.

This is one of the reasons the developed countries became rich. Honesty is good for business. You can’t have a market without it. And the more honest people, such as the Quakers, became rich, because people knew they could depend on them. If they promised to deliver something, they delivered. In Latino countries, by contrast, cheating is endemic.

I wish I could tell you that the advanced countries continued to advance, but in some countries, such as the United States, just the opposite happened: they turned against science and ignored the facts (objective reality). They rejected evolution, even though it is a scientific fact. It is also a fact that women sometimes get pregnant but don’t want to have a child just then. They deny them an abortion. It is a fact that some people are homosexual, but they deny this also. And the list goes on and on.

The overall result? American is becoming a poor, authoritarian country.

I enjoy listening to recorded books, the only person I know who really does. I have even given some of my friends recorded books on my old MP3 player so they could enjoy them too, but they didn’t like them that much. They even preferred cassettes, because they could understand them, but the downloadable MP3 technology seemed so strange; they were not comfortable with getting so much information out of the the cloud (the Internet) loaded into such a little piece of plastic. It was just too strange.

Media on the Internet is in a crisis. People are used to advertising-financed media and they will not accept anything else. This is fine with Google, who is making a fortune selling advertising on their excellent search site. But the newspapers are doomed. People will not pay for subscription-based services on the Net. They will still pay to see a movie, and pay well. And they will happily take anything they can get for free from the Net. But reasonable payments for services infuriates them. Why this is nobody knows, but it is a serious problem.

I just listened to A Tale of Two Cities, a classic novel by Charles Dickens. The narrator, Richard Pasco, does a great job. I find listening to a performance more enjoyable than reading, even though I have been a bookworm forever. This is not true of every production, however. I bought Madam Bovary down here, started to read it, then changed my mind and sampled several recordings on Audible.com. None of them were as good as my reading experience.

I seem to be able to concentrate on my eyes or my ears, perhaps this is because of many years of listening to classical music.

America is terrified of terrorists. It believes these evil beings are going to kill all their children in all their cribs—or perhaps other acts equally terrible, but unspecified. And it believes they have the cunning, motivation and ability to do so. For this reason, strong measures against American citizens (for example spying on everyone) must be used to root out the terrorists—wherever they are.

So far, this kind of action has only been taken against “enemy combatants”, often persons with little connection to terrorist groups of any kind, picked up at random on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Americans watched with little interest as these guys, drugged into immobility, their faces covered with masks and goggles were trundled into Guantanamo—for extended stays, where all kinds of torture would be used on them. This didn’t bother them in the least, after all terrorists deserve rough treatment—whether they were terrorists or not. They were foreigners, that was obvious from their dark skin and beards, so they deserved little sympathy. Americans supported their government completely.

In all fairness, it should be admitted that many Americans were horrified, and acted vigorously to stop this inhuman treatment. But they have had little success. In American, the majority rules—another concession to power.

And America’s adaptation to power is what makes it so susceptible to its abuses. This is clearly seen in its dominant social institution: the corporation, which is nothing but a power structure aimed at getting more power. Everyone works for one of these—or a similar power structure. They hold the power of life and death—employment or unemployment. Naturally people react appropriately to such a threat: they conform. If the big boss says “Shit!” they say “What color sir?”

I exaggerate, of course, but you get the general picture: a climate of fear—largely unconscious fear—a dangerous motivator, because the driving force is not known to the conscious mind. But given the appropriate circumstances, being confronted with “enemy combatants”, for example, severe punishment can be condoned and even enjoyed.

It is worthwhile noting that American has the highest percentage of its population incarcerated in the world. Americans like punishment, and its troops know it. Given the slightest provocation, they will lay waste to entire countries (such as Iraq). And the people will “support their troops,” who are trained killers.

For more information on this subject see my posting Terrorism against Infrastructure.

Any affluent country has invested heavily in its physical infrastructure: electrical distribution networks, pipelines, water systems, airways, highways, bridges, tunnels, and ports. This is what makes it an affluent country. But every one of these can be easily sabotaged.

Let me emphasize that: EASILY SABOTAGED. Any organization with any organization at all, and any funding at all, that wanted to destroy the infrastructure of a well-developed country could do so easily. I am tempted to give some examples, but I would probably be convicted as a terrorist if I did. But you can easily think of examples. Just think of the damage a semi-trailer loaded with explosives, at the right spot, could do.

If the terrorists who had operated the 9/11 plot had flown an airliner into a nuclear power plant near New York City, the results would have been much more devastating. But they didn’t; they were not interested in destroying New York City; they wanted to scare Americans—and they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. America went into mass convulsions.

And the American military used scrap iron from the Trade Center ruins to build another warship: the USS New York (LPD 21) . You might be interested in the Wikipedia entry, they are a new class of ship being used by many countries (even Indonesia!). But I digress.

My main point is that real-life terrorist organizations are not interested in this kind of sabotage—which would destroy their enemies. Why? Because they need these enemies; without them they could not exist. And it is equally true that America needs them too—and will go to great lengths to encourage their existence—and exaggerate their existence if they are not powerful enough.

But the terrorist countries (who are small and poor) have a big advantage: they haven’t much in the way of physical infrastructure—only people willing to die for their cause. They cannot be eliminated.

From Wired

Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter–such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.

The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.

Here is the Wikipedia link for FISA:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978 is a U.S. federal law prescribing procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers” (which may include American citizens and permanent residents engaged in espionage and violating U.S. law: §1801(b)(2)(B)) on territory under United States control.

Here is something different, really quite amazing: six grand pianos playing short excerpts from classical favorites. Sign up for a trial subscription and put on your headphones, they want to get you addicted.

A friend recommended an article in Harvard Magazine, Unequal America. I can’t recommend it, it’s just too long. But it does make some excellent points:

Tax policies and employer-pay practices affect income distribution directly. But what governs these pay practices, and why have American voters and politicians chosen the tax policies they have? One answer lies in Americans’ unique attitudes toward inequality. Asked by the International Social Survey Programme whether they agreed or disagreed with the statement that income differences in their home country are “too large,” 62 percent of Americans agreed; the median response for all 43 countries surveyed—some with a much lower degree of inequality—was 85 percent.

Americans and Europeans also tend to disagree about the causes of poverty. In a different survey—the World Values Survey, including 40 countries—American respondents were much more likely than European respondents (71 percent versus 40 percent) to agree with the statement that the poor could escape poverty if they worked hard enough. Conversely, 54 percent of European respondents, but only 30 percent of American respondents, agreed with the statement that luck determines income.

This matches my experience: many rich Americans think the poor should have worked harder—even though their own wealth was mostly a matter of luck and circumstance.

If any of you have been traveling by air this book should interest you. The mess in the air, and in the air terminals, has reached disaster proportions.

I used to work for the Federal Aviation Agency, back in the Sixties. Back then, things were still in good shape, although we were laying the seeds for today’s disaster. Then total disaster struck with deregulation and neoliberalism.

The article in Slashdot

From Progressive Democrats of America

You have asked the question “Are Institutional Investors contributing to food and energy price inflation?” And my unequivocal answer is “YES.” In this testimony I will explain that Institutional Investors are one of, if not the primary, factors affecting commodities prices today. Clearly, there are many factors that contribute to price determination in the commodities markets; I am here to expose a fast-growing yet virtually unnoticed factor, and one that presents a problem that can be expediently corrected through legislative policy action.

What we are experiencing is a demand shock coming from a new category of participant in the commodities futures markets: Institutional Investors. Specifically, these are Corporate and Government Pension Funds, Sovereign Wealth Funds, University Endowments and other Institutional Investors. Collectively, these investors now account on average for a larger share of outstanding commodities futures contracts than any other market participant.

Today, Index Speculators are pouring billions of dollars into the commodities futures markets, speculating that commodity prices will increase. Assets allocated to commodity index trading strategies have risen from $13 billion at the end of 2003 to $260 billion as of March 2008, and the prices of the 25 commodities that compose these indices have risen by an average of 183% in those five years!

As money pours into the markets, two things happen concurrently: the markets expand and prices rise. One particularly troubling aspect of Index Speculator demand is that it actually increases the more prices increase. This explains the accelerating rate at which commodity futures prices (and actual commodity prices) are increasing. Rising prices attract more Index Speculators, whose tendency is to increase their allocation as prices rise. So their profit-motivated demand for futures is the inverse of what you would expect from price-sensitive consumer behavior.

There is a crucial distinction between Traditional Speculators and Index Speculators: Traditional Speculators provide liquidity by both buying and selling futures. Index Speculators buy futures and then roll their positions by buying calendar spreads. They never sell. Therefore, they consume liquidity and provide zero benefit to the futures markets.
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As he says, Congress could easily rectify this situation. That’s the good news. The bad news you know already: these speculators have Congress in their pocket.

My father was born in 1908, and joined the Marine Corp at the beginning of the Depression, about 1930. He served four years, then came back home to Ft. Madison, Iowa. At that time Ft. Madison was something of a sin city, the home to a number of bordellos, operated by a well-known madam, one of the prominent citizens of the town.

I remember my father following a story in the Evening Democrat, the local newspaper. A policeman had been discovered in one of these houses of ill repute, during duty hours. He was fired, but he told the paper if he was not rehired promptly, he would “Tell all,” and “He had plenty to tell”. The next paper reported he had been rehired, to the intense amusement of my father.

Municipal corruption in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century was organized and thorough. The Daly machine controlled Chicago, for example, and the Pendergast machine controlled Kansas City. Ft. Madison was halfway between them, and it had a lot of hard-drinking men working for the Santa Fe railroad. The amount of drinking that went on back then was unbelievable, as it had been for centuries. But that is a story all by itself. I started to write about prostitution, the amount of which was unbelievable also—by today’s standards. In any public area they were obvious, because they were “painted women” openly advertising themselves.

There were also other “public women”, such as actresses and singers, who operated in the twilight zone of respectability. “Respectability” was extremely important—and extremely hypocritical, since many important men also had shady lives on the side—as they do now, for that matter. Respectability for women women was simple: they simply had to be completely uninterested in sex—which made for considerable hypocrisy also.

America was a class-conscious society back then, to a degree unimaginable today. If a girl was born “on the wrong side of the tracks” she had a hard future ahead of her—unless she opted for a shortcut. My parents were of the “upwardly mobile” generation: determined to get ahead. They immediately moved away from the working-class neighborhood my father was raised in, to a new neighborhood that had brick-paved streets. (In my youth Santa Fe town still had mud streets with deep ruts). This “new” neighborhood is now mostly abandoned, its occupants having “moved on” to newer suburbs, with even better streets and bigger garages.

Now I can finally tell the story I sat down to write—now that have described its setting. My father told me this story, so I am sure it is true.

When he was in the Corp, he was in a Marine band, one of many Marine Corp bands. Back then, any military organization had its band; there were even military bands for the Nazi death camps, for example. My father remained a bandsman all of his life, playing for concerts in city parks. But I digress. The story I started to tell was this.

Back in the Marines, back in the early Thirties, every payday his Marine Corp buddies would buy a large quantity of beer, and pack it in a large tub full of ice in the parlor of a whorehouse, sit around playing their band instruments, interspersed with visits to “the girls”—until they ran out of money.

The madam of the house had a daughter, and her worse fear was that her daughter would become a prostitute. So Dad would take the daughter to the movies while his buddies entertained themselves differently.

This happened when Dad was still in the States, in Alabama I believe, later he was sent to Haiti, where he had a black girlfriend, much to the horror of his family—but that is another story.

I have never understood why the French people (the poor French people, that is) were so prone to violent mob action. My middle-class, Midwest education was very deficient in this—and in recognizing the suffering of the poor anywhere or anytime.

For example, my family (like most Americans) is not aware of the American-sponsored terrorism in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. This story is now a documentary The War on Democracy, which does a good job of portraying the horror of those wars. It’s not for the squeamish. When I traveled in those areas I was amazed to see they liked America and Americans. They have forgiven us (because they need those American jobs over the border to support their starving families) but we have forgotten them—and build fences to keep them out.

I am listening to A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, which is brilliant. We are prone to believe we are better than people used to be, but in the area of literature at least, this is not so. The ancients were every bit as smart as we are.

The chapter about the abuses of the aristocracy is as skillful in its characterizations as anything I have read. Now I know why the revolution happened.

Recently, I wrote American Rules the World, about America’s meglomania. Today I found a Pentagon document entitled Joint Vision 2020. A key concept in this document, which is online in glorious PDF color, is Full Spectrum Dominance. A more grandiose term I cannot imagine.

Perhaps you thought I was getting a little crazy. A short perusal of this document should convince you of the insanity of our military and the government that encourages this.

The end of worship amongst men, is power

Thomas Hobbes

The following is taken from Democracy Inc; Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalarianism. by Sheldon S Wolin
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Hobbes asks us to imagine what life would be like in the absence of a strong authority armed with the power to enforce law, administer justice, and keep the peace. He likened that condition to a “state of nature” in which human beings lived in constant fear of violent death, and unending war of each against all. Hobbs solution to the problem of fear and terror required individuals to agree to establish, and then obey unconditionally, an absolute power. He named that state “Leviathan” to emphasize that the price of peace was the investiture of a power freed from the restraints of other institutions such as courts or parliaments. “There is nothing on earth.” Hobbes wrote, “to compare with him.”

Leviathan was the first image of superpower, and the first intimation of the kind of privatized citizen congenial with its requirements, the citizen who finds politics a distraction to be avoided, who if denied “hand in public consciousness,” remains convinced that taking an active part means to “to hate and be hated,” “without any benefit,” and “to neglect the affairs of of his own family.”

Hobbes had not only seen the power possibilities in the oxymoron of the private citizen, but exploited them to prevent power from being shared among its subjects. Hobbes reasoned that if individuals were protected in their interests and positively encouraged by the state to pursue them wholeheartedly, subject only to laws designed to safeguard them from unlawful acts of others, then they would soon recognize that political participation was superfluous, expendable, not a rational choice.

Hobbes crucial assumption was that absolute power depended not just on fear, but on passivity. Civic indifference was thus elevated to a form of rational virtue, the sovereign have established and maintained the conditions of peace that enable individuals to pursue their own interests in the sure knowledge the law of the sovereign would protect, even encourage them. Virtually unlimited power, on one hand, and, on the other, an apolitical citizenry now assured of its own security so that it can single-mindedly pursue private concerns: a perfect complementarity between apolitical absolutism and economic self-interest.
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The most striking aspect of Hobbes’ argument was the increased potential of “fear” and “terror” for justifying unlimited power and authority. The “fear” and “terror” of external enemies did double duty, as it were. Not only did they serve to justify giving the sovereign all the power necessary to combat threats from abroad, but fear and terror could be made reflexive. Instead of being fearful only of foreign enemies, the citizenry, having observed the effects of extraordinary power used against foreigners, would become conditioned to fear its own sovereign, to hesitate before voicing criticism.

Today I listed to an lecture about Voltaire and his Philosophical Letters written from England in 1743. In this book, Voltaire compared France to England, and made his fellow-countrymen aware of the overall superiority of the English, with their many religions and their active commerce. At the time France was about evenly divided between the Catholics and Protestants (the Huguenots), but the Huguenots were severely prosecuted. There was no commerce to speak of.

He had been imprisoned in the Bastille for insulting a nobleman, but was released on the condition he left the country. This gave him a chance to make the French nobility and the Church officials look truly ridiculous in front of the whole world.

His book was burned by the French government; and Voltaire remarked typically that “France had advanced because now she only burned books, whereas previously she burned the authors.”

The part that interested me was about inoculation, which was accepted in England (as in America) as a sensible precaution against smallpox. In Catholic France it was banned for the next 40 years (until the French Revolution), opposed by the Church as thwarting God’s will, and by the faculty of medicine because it violated the traditions of medicine to give a disease.