Category Archives: Sociology

Embedded beings: how we blended our minds with our devices

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By Saskia K Nagel  & Peter B Reiner

(aeon)

Like life itself, technologies evolve. So it is that the telephone became the smartphone, that near-at-hand portal to the information superhighway. We have held these powerful devices in the palms of our hands for the better part of a decade now, but there is a palpable sense that in recent years something has shifted, that our relationship with technology is becoming more intimate. Some people worry that one day soon we might physically attach computer chips to our minds, but we don’t actually need to plug ourselves in: proximity is a red herring. The real issue is the seamless way in which we are already hybridising our cognitive space with our devices. In ways both quotidian and profound, they are becoming extensions of our minds.

To get a sense of this, imagine being out with a group of friends when the subject of a movie comes up. One person wonders aloud who the director was. Unless everyone is a movie buff, guesses ensue. In no time at all, someone responds with: ‘I’ll just Google that.’ What is remarkable about this chain of events is just how unremarkable it has become. Our devices are so deeply enmeshed in our lives that we anticipate them being there at all times with access to the full range of the internet’s offerings.

This process of blending our minds with our devices has forced us to take stock of who we are and who we want to be. Consider the issue of autonomy, perhaps the most cherished of the rights we have inherited from the Enlightenment. The word means self-rule, and refers to our ability to make decisions for ourselves, by ourselves. It is a hard-earned form of personal freedom and, at least in Western societies over the past 300 years, the overall trajectory has been towards more power to the individual and less to institutions.

The first inkling that modern technology might threaten autonomy came in 1957 when an American marketing executive called James Vicary claimed to have increased sales of food and drinks at a movie theatre by flashing the subliminal messages ‘Drink Coca-Cola’ and ‘Hungry? Eat Popcorn’. The story turned out to be a hoax, but after attending a demonstration of sorts, The New Yorker reported that minds had been ‘softly broken and entered’. These days, we regularly hear news stories about neuromarketing, an insidious strategy by which marketers tap findings in neuropsychology to read our thoughts as they search for the ‘buy button’ in our brains. To date, none of these plots to manipulate us have been successful.

But the threat to autonomy remains. Persuasive technologies, designed to change people’s attitudes and behaviours, are being deployed in every corner of society. Their practitioners are not so much software engineers as they are social engineers. The most benign of these ‘nudge’ us in an attempt to improve decisions about health, wealth and wellbeing. In the world of online commerce, they strive to capture our attention, perhaps doing nothing more nefarious than getting us to linger on a webpage for a few extra moments in the hope that we might buy something. But it is hard not to be cynical when Facebook carries out an experiment on more than 680,000 of its loyal users in which it covertly manipulates their emotions. Or when the choices of undecided voters can be shifted by as much as 20 per cent just by altering the rankings of Google searches. There is, of course, nothing new about persuasion. But the ability to do so in covert fashion exists for one simple reason: we have handed the social engineers access to our minds.

Which leads us to the threat to privacy of thought. Together with his Boston law partner Samuel Warren, the future US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis published the essay ‘The Right to Privacy’ (1890). They suggested that when law was still being developed as codified agreements among early societies, redress was given only for physical interference with life and property. Over time, society came to recognise the value of the inner life of individuals, and protection of physical property expanded to include the products of the mind – trademarks and copyright, for example. But the intrusive technology of the day – apparently, the first paparazzi had appeared on the scene, and there was widespread worry about photographs appearing in newspapers – raised new concerns.

Today’s worries are very similar, except that the photos might be snatched from the privacy of any one of your interconnected devices. Indeed, having institutions gain access to the information on our devices, whether flagrantly or surreptitiously, worries people: 93 per cent of adults say that being in control of who can get information about them is important. But in the post-Snowden era, discussions of privacy in the context of technology might be encompassing too broad a palette of potential violations – what we need is a more pointed conversation that distinguishes between everyday privacy and privacy of thought.

These issues matter, and not just because they represent ethical quandaries. Rather, they highlight the profound implications that conceiving of our minds as an amalgam between brain and device have for our image of ourselves as humans. Andy Clark, the philosopher who more than anyone has advanced the concept of the extended mind, argues that humans are natural-born cyborgs. If that is the case, if we commonly incorporate external tools into our daily routines of thinking and being, then we might have overemphasised the exceptionalism of the human brain for the concept of mind. Perhaps the new, technologically extended mind is not so much something to fear as something to notice.

The fruits of the Enlightenment allowed us to consider ourselves as rugged individuals, navigating the world by our wits alone. This persistent cultural meme has weakened, particularly over the past decade as research in social neuroscience has emphasised our essentially social selves. Our relationship to our devices provides a new wrinkle: we have entered what the US engineer and inventor Danny Hillis has termed ‘the Age of Entanglement’. We are now technologically embedded beings, surrounded and influenced by the tools of modernity, seemingly without pause.

In 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone with the catchphrase ‘this changes everything’. What we didn’t know was that the everything was us.

Propaganda Techniques of Empire

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By James Petras

Source: Axis of Logic

Introduction
Washington’s quest for perpetual world power is underwritten by systematic and perpetual propaganda wars. Every major and minor war has been preceded, accompanied and followed by unremitting government propaganda designed to secure public approval, exploit victims, slander critics, dehumanize targeted adversaries and justify its allies’ collaboration.

In this paper we will discuss the most common recent techniques used to support ongoing imperial wars.

Propaganda Techniques of Empire

Role Reversal
A common technique, practiced by the imperial publicists, is to accuse the victims of the same crimes, which had been committed against them.  The well documented, deliberate and sustained US-EU aerial bombardment of Syrian government soldiers, engaged in operations against ISIS-terrorist, resulted in the deaths and maiming of almost 200 Syrian troops and allowed ISIS-mercenaries to overrun their camp.   In an attempt to deflect the Pentagon’s role in providing air cover for the very terrorists it claims to oppose, the propaganda organs cranked out lurid, but unsubstantiated, stories of an aerial attack on a UN humanitarian aid convoy, first blamed on the Syrian government and then on the Russians.  The evidence that the attack was most likely a ground-based rocket attack by ISIS terrorists did not deter the propaganda mills.  This technique would turn US and European attention away from the documented criminal attack by the imperial bombers and present the victimized Syrian troops and pilots as international human rights criminals.

Hysterical Rants
Faced with world opprobrium for its wanton violation of an international ceasefire agreement in Syria, the imperial public spokespeople frequently resort to irrational outbursts at international meetings in order to intimidate wavering allies into silence and shut down any chance for reasonable debate resolving concrete issues among adversaries.

The current ‘US Ranter-in-Chief’ in the United Nations, is Ambassador Samantha Power, who launched a vitriolic diatribe against the Russians in order to sabotage a proposed General Assembly debate on the US deliberate violation (its criminal attack on Syrian troops) of the recent Syrian ceasefire.  Instead of a reasonable debate among serious diplomats, the rant served to derail the proceedings.

Identity Politics to Neutralize Anti-Imperialist Movements
Empire is commonly identified with the race, gender, religion and ethnicity of its practioners.  Imperial propagandists have frequently resorted to disarming and weakening anti-imperialist movements by co-opting and corrupting black, ethnic minority and women leaders and spokespeople.  The use of such ‘symbolic’ tokens is based on the assumption that these are ‘representatives’ reflecting the true interests of so-called ‘marginalized minorities’ and can therefore presume to ‘speak for  the oppressed peoples of the world’.  The promotion of such compliant and respectable ‘minority members’ to the elite is then propagandized as a ‘revolutionary’, world liberating historical event – witness the ‘election’ of US President Barack Obama.

The rise of Obama to the presidency in 2008 illustrates how the imperial propagandists have used identity politics to undermine class and anti-imperialist struggles.

Under Obama’s historical black presidency, the US pursued seven wars against ‘people of color’ in South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.  Over a million men and women of sub-Saharan black origin, whether Libyan citizens or contract workers for neighboring countries, were killed, dispossessed and driven into exile by US allies after the US-EU destroyed the Libyan state – in the name of humanitarian intervention.  Hundreds of thousands of Arabs have been bombed in Yemen, Syria and Iraq under President Obama, the so-called ‘historic black’ president.  Obama’s ‘predator drones’ have killed hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani villagers.  Such is the power of ‘identity politics’ that ignominious Obama was awarded the ‘Nobel Peace Prize’.

Meanwhile, in the United States under Obama, racial inequalities between black and white workers (wages, unemployment, access to housing, health and educational services) have widened.  Police violence against blacks intensified with total impunity for ‘killer cops’.  Over two million immigrant Latino workers have been expelled – breaking up hundreds of thousands of families– and accompanied by a marked increase of repression compared to earlier administrations.  Millions of black and white workers’ home mortgages were foreclosed while all of the corrupt banks were bailed out – at a greater rate than had occurred under white presidents.

This blatant, cynical manipulation of identity politics facilitated the continuation and deepening of imperial wars, class exploitation and racial exclusion.  Symbolic representation undermined class struggles for genuine changes.

Past Suffering to Justify Contemporary Exploitation
Imperial propagandists repeatedly evoke the victims and abuses of the past in order to justify their own aggressive imperial interventions and support for the ‘land grabs’ and ethnic cleansing committed by their colonial allies – like Israel, among others. The victims and crimes of the past are presented as a perpetual presence to justify ongoing brutalities against contemporary subject people.

The case of US-Israeli colonization of Palestine clearly illustrates how rabid criminality, pillage, ethnic cleansing and self-enrichment can be justified and glorified through the language of past victimization.  Propagandists in the US and Israel have created ‘the cult of the Holocaust’, worshiping a near century-old Nazi crime against Jews (as well as captive Slavs, Gypsies and other minorities) in Europe, to justify the bloody conquest and theft of Arab lands and sovereignty and engage in systematic military assaults against Lebanon and Syria.  Millions of Muslim and Christian Palestinians have been driven into perpetual exile.  Elite, wealthy, well-organized and influential zionist Jews, with primary fealty to Israel, have successfully sabotaged every contemporary struggle for peace in the Middle East and have created real barriers for social democracy in the US through their promotion of militarism and empire building.  Those claiming to represent victims of the past have become among the most oppressive of contemporary elites.  Using the language of ‘defense’, they promote aggressive forms of expansion and pillage.  They claim their monopoly on historic ‘suffering’ has given them a ‘special dispensation’ from the rules of civilized conduct:  their cult of the Holocaust allows them to inflict immense pain on others while silencing any criticism with the accusation of ‘anti-Semitism’ and relentlessly punishing critics.  Their key role in imperial propaganda warfare is based on their claims of an exclusive franchise on suffering and immunity from the norms of justice.

Entertainment Spectacles on Military Platforms
Entertainment spectacles glorify militarism.  Imperial propagandists link the public to unpopular wars promoted by otherwise discredited leaders.  Sports events present soldiers dressed up as war heroes with deafening, emotional displays of ‘flag worship’ to celebrate the ongoing overseas wars of aggression.  These mind-numbing extravaganzas with crude elements of religiosity demand choreographed expressions of national allegiance from the spectators as a cover for continued war crimes abroad and the destruction of citizens’ economic rights at home.

Much admired, multi-millionaire musicians and entertainers of all races and orientations, present war to the masses with a humanitarian facade. The entertainers smiling faces serve genocide just as powerfully as the President’s benign and friendly  face accompanies his embrace of militarism.  The propagandist message for the spectator is that ‘your favorite team or singer is there just for you… because our noble wars and valiant warriors have made you free and now they want you to be entertained.’

The old style of blatant bellicose appeals to the public is obsolete:  the new propaganda conflates entertainment with militarism, allowing the ruling elite to secure tacit support for its wars without disturbing the spectators’ experience.

Conclusion
Do the Imperial Techniques of Propaganda Work?

How effective are the modern imperial propaganda techniques?  The results seem to be mixed.  In recent months, elite black athletes have begun protesting white racism by challenging the requirement for choreographed displays of flag worship. . . opening public controversy into the larger issues of police brutality and sustained marginalization.  Identity politics, which led to the election of Obama, may be giving way to issues of class struggle, racial justice, anti-militarism and the impact of continued imperial wars.  Hysterical rants may still secure international attention, but repeated performances begin to lose their impact and subject the ‘ranter’ to ridicule.

The cult of victimology has become less a rationale for the multi-billion dollar US-tribute to Israel, than the overwhelming political and economic influence and thuggery of billionaire Zionist fundraisers who demand US politicians’ support for the state of Israel.

Brandishing identify politics may have worked the first few times, but inevitably black, Latino, immigrant and all exploited workers, all underpaid and overworked women and mothers reject the empty symbolic gestures and demand substantive socio-economic changes – and here they find common links with the majority of exploited white workers.

In other words, the existing propaganda techniques are losing their edge – the corporate media news is seen as a sham.  Who follows the actor-soldiers and flag-worshipers once the game has begun?

The propagandists of empire are desperate for a new line to grab public attention and obedience.   Could the recent domestic terror bombings in New York and New Jersey provoke mass hysteria and more militarization? Could they serve as cover for more wars abroad . . .?

A recent survey, published in Military Times, reported that the vast majority of active US soldiers oppose more imperial wars. They are calling for defense at home and social justice.  Soldiers and veterans have even formed groups to support the protesting black athletes who have refused to participate in flag worship while unarmed black men are being killed by police in the streets.   Despite the multi-billion dollar electoral propaganda, over sixty percent of the electorate reject both major party candidates.  The reality principle has finally started to undermine State propaganda!

 

Nationalist Propaganda has Many Progressives Demonizing ‘The Russians’

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By Robert Barsocchini

Source: Washington’s Blog

Neocon and neoliberal war propaganda, as exhibited in the Washington Post, New York Times, etc., “has turned much of the liberal/progressive community” in the US “into a pro-New Cold War constituency willing to engage in a new breed of McCarthyism”, Robert Parry notes today.  (This author has personally witnessed similar displays.)

Leading Russia expert Stephen Cohen, a professor at Princeton, observes there has been a possibly ‘unprecedented’ ‘propaganda’ ‘tsunami’ occurring in the US targeting Russia and Putin and increasing the already high risk of nuclear war. (The Nation)  This predates the election and the “unproven allegations that Putin had intervened … to put Trump in the White House”, and largely stems from Russia’s intervention at the behest of the Syrian government to prevent the Western-sponsored overthrow of the Syrian state by what US officials privately say is an insurgency dominated by Islamic terrorists being funded by US-backed Saudi dictator Salman bin Abdulaziz’s cadre and similar parties.

Jeff McMahan, a philosopher at Rutgers, notes of the kind of propaganda observed by Cohen that “the powerful sense of collective identity within a nation is often achieved by contrasting an idealized conception of the national character with caricatures of other nations, whose members are regarded as less important or worthy or, in many cases, are dehumanized and despised as inferior or even odious.”  As Parry noted last week, another example of this is the Washington establishment doctrine, partially a holdover from eugenics scholarship and largely a PR tactic serving overtly stated goals of hegemonic expansion, that Russia as a nation is so inferior that any “equivalence” between it and the US is impossible.

However, the world outside the US doctrinal system sees the matter somewhat differently.  In a Western-run global poll taken during the height of the ongoing Ukraine crisis, the international community considered both Russia and the US, along with other countries, for the title of “greatest threat to world peace”.  The US was voted greatest threat by far, receiving twelve times more votes than Russia and three times more votes than the runner-up, Pakistan.

As author David Swanson recently noted in Foreign Policy Journal, in the 95% of the world that is not the US, it is scarcely a secret “that the United States is (as that Putin stooge Martin Luther King Jr. put it) the greatest purveyor of violence on earth. The United States is the top weapons dealer, the top weapons buyer, the biggest military spender, the most widespread imperial presence, the most frequent war maker, the most prolific overthrower of governments, and from 1945 to 2017 the killer of the most people through war.”

McMahan continues: “When nationalist solidarity is maintained” through the type of nationalism described above (which includes keeping much of what Swanson describes secret from or distorting it for the domestic population) “the result is often brutality and atrocity on an enormous scale.”  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which includes respected thinkers and sponsors such as Stephen Hawking, notes the world is at an extremely dangerous moment in terms of the potential for nuclear war, and has set its “doomsday clock” to three minutes to midnight.

Somewhat similar to gang membership, nationalism, McMahan concludes, provides people with “a sense of security and belonging and, by merging their individual identities into the larger national identity, enables them to expand the boundaries of the self, thereby enhancing their self-esteem.

“[W]hile nationalist sentiment may have beneficial effects within the nation, these are greatly outweighed from an impartial point of view by the dreadful effects that it has on relations between nations.”*

 

Robert J. Barsocchini is an independent researcher and reporter whose interest in propaganda and global force dynamics arose from working as a cross-cultural intermediary for large corporations in the film and Television industry. His work has been cited, published, or followed by numerous professors, economists, lawyers, military and intelligence veterans, and journalists. Updates on Twitter.

*McMahan, Jeff. The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. 6th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp 221. Print.

Courage and Free Speech

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Throughout human history there have been individuals who have been ready to risk everything for their beliefs

By Timothy Garton Ash

Source: aeon

‘Nothing is more difficult,’ wrote the German political essayist Kurt Tucholsky in 1921, ‘and nothing requires more character, than to find yourself in open contradiction to your time and loudly to say: No.’ First of all, it is intellectually and psychologically difficult to step outside the received wisdom of your time and place. What has been called ‘the normative power of the given’ persuades us that what we see all around us, what everyone else seems to regard as normal, is in some sense also an ethical norm.

Numerous studies in behavioural psychology show how our individual conviction of what is true or right quails before the massed pressure of our peers. We are, as Mark Twain observed, ‘discreet sheep’. This is what John Stuart Mill picked up when he wrote in On Liberty (1859); that the same causes that make someone a churchman in London would have made him a Buddhist or a Confucian in Beijing. The same truth is gloriously captured in the humorous song ‘The Reluctant Cannibal’ (1960) by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, in which a young cannibal revolts against the settled wisdom of his elders and declares that ‘eating people is wrong’. At the end of the song, one of the elders exclaims, to huge belly laughs all round: ‘Why, you might just as well go around saying: “Don’t fight people!”’ Then he and his colleagues cry in unison: ‘Ridiculous!’

Yet norms change even within a single lifetime, especially as we live longer. So as elderly disc jockeys are arrested for sexual harassment or abuse back in the 1960s, we should be uncomfortably aware that some other activity that people regard as fairly normal now might be viewed as aberrant and abhorrent 50 years hence.

To step outside the established wisdom of your time and place is difficult enough; openly to stand against it is more demanding still. In Freedom for the Thought that We Hate (2007), his fine book on the First Amendment tradition in the United States, Anthony Lewis quotes a 1927 opinion by the Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, which Lewis says ‘many regard as the greatest judicial statement of the case for freedom of speech’.

The passage Lewis quotes begins: ‘Those who won our independence… believed liberty to be the secret of happiness and courage to be the secret of liberty.’ This is magnificent, although it also illustrates the somewhat self-referential, even self-reverential, character of the modern First Amendment tradition.

Lewis cites Brandeis, who credits this thought to the 18th-century founders of the US. But those founders would have been well aware that they got it straight from Pericles’ funeral oration during the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century BCE, as reported – if not invented, or at least much improved upon – by Thucydides. ‘For you now,’ Thucydides’ Pericles admonishes his ancient Athenian audience, after praising the heroic dead, ‘it remains to rival what they have done and, knowing the secret of happiness to be freedom and the secret of freedom a brave heart, not idly to stand aside from the enemy’s onset.’

More directly, the US tradition of courage in the defence of free speech draws on the heritage of the 17th-century English. People such as John Lilburne, for example. In 1638, while still in his early 20s, Lilburne was found guilty by the Star Chamber court of helping to smuggle into England a tract against bishops that had been printed in the Low Countries. He was tied to the back of a cart on a hot summer’s day and unremittingly whipped as he walked with a bare back all the way from the eastern end of Fleet Street to Westminster Palace Yard. One bystander reckoned that he received some 500 blows that, since the executioner wielded a three-thronged whip, made 1,500 stripes.

Lilburne’s untreated shoulders ‘swelled almost as big as a penny loafe with the bruses of the knotted Cords’, and he was then made to stand for two hours in the pillory in Palace Yard. Here, in spite of his wounds and the burning sunshine, he began loudly to tell his story and to rail against bishops. The crowd was reportedly delighted. After half an hour, there came ‘a fat lawyer’ – ah, plus ça change – who bid him stop. The man whom the people of London had already dubbed ‘Free-Born John’ refused to shut up. He was then gagged so roughly that blood spurted from his mouth. Undeterred, he thrust his hands into his pockets and scattered dissident pamphlets to the crowd. No other means of expression being left to him, Free-Born John then stamped his feet until the two hours were up.

As an Englishman, I find particular inspiration in the example of Free-Born John, and those of all our other free-born Johns: John Milton, John Wilkes, John Stuart Mill (and George Orwell, a free-born John in all but name). More broadly, there is no reason to understate, let alone to deny, a specifically Western tradition of courage in the advancement of free speech, one that can be traced from ancient Athens, through England, France and a host of other European countries, to the US, Canada and all the liberal democracies of today’s wider West. But it would be quite wrong to suggest that this habit of the heart is confined to the West. In fact, there have been rather few examples of such sturdy defiance in England in recent times, while we find them in other countries and cultures.

Consider, for instance, the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Liu was sentenced to 11 years’ imprisonment in 2009 for ‘subverting state power’. Both his written response to the charges against him and his final speech in court are, like many of his earlier writings, lucid and courageous affirmations of the central importance of free speech. He definitely does not draw only on Western traditions. For example, in his book No Enemies, No Hatred (2012), he quotes a traditional Chinese 24-character injunction: ‘Say all you know, in every detail; a speaker is blameless, because listeners can think; if the words are true, make your corrections; if they are not, just take note.’

After paying a moving tribute to his wife (‘Armed with your love, dear one, I can face the sentence that I’m about to receive with peace in my heart’), Liu looks forward to the day ‘when our country will be a land of free expression: a country where the words of each citizen will get equal respect, a country where different values, ideas, beliefs and political views can compete with one another even as they peacefully coexist’. The judge cut him short in court before he had finished speaking, but free-born Xiaobo, like free-born John, still got his message out. In his planned peroration, Liu wrote: ‘I hope that I will be the last victim in China’s long record of treating words as crimes. Free expression is the base of human rights, the root of human nature and the mother of truth. To kill free speech is to insult human rights, to stifle human nature and to suppress truth.’

Liu was by this time famous, and that great speech made him more so. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. But perhaps the most inspiring examples of all come from people who are not famous at all: so-called ordinary people doing extraordinary things. People such as the Hamburg shipyard worker who, at the launch of a naval training vessel in 1936, refused to join all those around him in making the Hitler salute. The photograph only achieved wide circulation on the internet more than 60 years later. There he stands amid a forest of outstretched arms, with both his own firmly folded across his chest, a portrait of stubborn worker’s pride. His name was August Landmesser. He had been a Nazi party member but was later expelled from the party for marrying a Jewish woman, and then imprisoned for ‘dishonouring the race’. After his release, he was drafted to fight in the Second World War and never returned.

Again, such moments are emphatically not confined to the West. During the Arab Spring of 2011, a ‘day of rage’ was proclaimed by dissidents in Saudi Arabia. Faced with a massive police presence at the appointed location in the country’s capital Riyadh, almost nobody showed up. But one man, a strongly built, black-haired teacher called Khaled al-Johani, suddenly approached a group of foreign reporters. ‘We need to speak freely,’ he cried, with an explosion of pent-up passion. ‘No one must curb our freedom of expression.’ A BBC Arabic service film clip, which you can watch on YouTube, shows a tall secret policeman, in white robes, headdress and dark glasses, looming in the background as he snoops on al-Johani’s speech. A little further away, armed police mutter into their walkie-talkies. ‘What will happen to you now?’ asks one of the reporters, as they escort the teacher back to his car. ‘They will send me to prison,’ al-Johani says, adding ironically: ‘and I will be happy.’ He was subsequently condemned to 18 months’ imprisonment.

In many places, we can find monuments to the Unknown Soldier, but we should also erect them to the Unknown Speaker.

Fuck Work

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Economists believe in full employment. Americans think that work builds character. But what if jobs aren’t working anymore?

By James Livingston

Source: aeon

Work means everything to us Americans. For centuries – since, say, 1650 – we’ve believed that it builds character (punctuality, initiative, honesty, self-discipline, and so forth). We’ve also believed that the market in labour, where we go to find work, has been relatively efficient in allocating opportunities and incomes. And we’ve believed that, even if it sucks, a job gives meaning, purpose and structure to our everyday lives – at any rate, we’re pretty sure that it gets us out of bed, pays the bills, makes us feel responsible, and keeps us away from daytime TV.

These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills – unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way.

These days, everybody from Left to Right – from the economist Dean Baker to the social scientist Arthur C Brooks, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump – addresses this breakdown of the labour market by advocating ‘full employment’, as if having a job is self-evidently a good thing, no matter how dangerous, demanding or demeaning it is. But ‘full employment’ is not the way to restore our faith in hard work, or in playing by the rules, or in whatever else sounds good. The official unemployment rate in the United States is already below 6 per cent, which is pretty close to what economists used to call ‘full employment’, but income inequality hasn’t changed a bit. Shitty jobs for everyone won’t solve any social problems we now face.

Don’t take my word for it, look at the numbers. Already a fourth of the adults actually employed in the US are paid wages lower than would lift them above the official poverty line – and so a fifth of American children live in poverty. Almost half of employed adults in this country are eligible for food stamps (most of those who are eligible don’t apply). The market in labour has broken down, along with most others.

Those jobs that disappeared in the Great Recession just aren’t coming back, regardless of what the unemployment rate tells you – the net gain in jobs since 2000 still stands at zero – and if they do return from the dead, they’ll be zombies, those contingent, part-time or minimum-wage jobs where the bosses shuffle your shift from week to week: welcome to Wal-Mart, where food stamps are a benefit.

And don’t tell me that raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour solves the problem. No one can doubt the moral significance of the movement. But at this rate of pay, you pass the official poverty line only after working 29 hours a week. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. Working a 40-hour week, you would have to make $10 an hour to reach the official poverty line. What, exactly, is the point of earning a paycheck that isn’t a living wage, except to prove that you have a work ethic?

But, wait, isn’t our present dilemma just a passing phase of the business cycle? What about the job market of the future? Haven’t the doomsayers, those damn Malthusians, always been proved wrong by rising productivity, new fields of enterprise, new economic opportunities? Well, yeah – until now, these times. The measurable trends of the past half-century, and the plausible projections for the next half-century, are just too empirically grounded to dismiss as dismal science or ideological hokum. They look like the data on climate change – you can deny them if you like, but you’ll sound like a moron when you do.

For example, the Oxford economists who study employment trends tell us that almost half of existing jobs, including those involving ‘non-routine cognitive tasks’ – you know, like thinking – are at risk of death by computerisation within 20 years. They’re elaborating on conclusions reached by two MIT economists in the book Race Against the Machine (2011). Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley types who give TED talks have started speaking of ‘surplus humans’ as a result of the same process – cybernated production. Rise of the Robots, a new book that cites these very sources, is social science, not science fiction.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.

In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

Certainly this crisis makes us ask: what comes after work? What would you do without your job as the external discipline that organises your waking life – as the social imperative that gets you up and on your way to the factory, the office, the store, the warehouse, the restaurant, wherever you work and, no matter how much you hate it, keeps you coming back? What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?

And what would society and civilisation be like if we didn’t have to ‘earn’ a living – if leisure was not our choice but our lot? Would we hang out at the local Starbucks, laptops open? Or volunteer to teach children in less-developed places, such as Mississippi? Or smoke weed and watch reality TV all day?

I’m not proposing a fancy thought experiment here. By now these are practical questions because there aren’t enough jobs. So it’s time we asked even more practical questions. How do you make a living without a job – can you receive income without working for it? Is it possible, to begin with and then, the hard part, is it ethical? If you were raised to believe that work is the index of your value to society – as most of us were – would it feel like cheating to get something for nothing?

We already have some provisional answers because we’re all on the dole, more or less. The fastest growing component of household income since 1959 has been ‘transfer payments’ from government. By the turn of the 21st century, 20 per cent of all household income came from this source – from what is otherwise known as welfare or ‘entitlements’. Without this income supplement, half of the adults with full-time jobs would live below the poverty line, and most working Americans would be eligible for food stamps.

But are these transfer payments and ‘entitlements’ affordable, in either economic or moral terms? By continuing and enlarging them, do we subsidise sloth, or do we enrich a debate on the rudiments of the good life?

Transfer payments or ‘entitlements’, not to mention Wall Street bonuses (talk about getting something for nothing) have taught us how to detach the receipt of income from the production of goods, but now, in plain view of the end of work, the lesson needs rethinking. No matter how you calculate the federal budget, we can afford to be our brother’s keeper. The real question is not whether but how we choose to be.

I know what you’re thinking – we can’t afford this! But yeah, we can, very easily. We raise the arbitrary lid on the Social Security contribution, which now stands at $127,200, and we raise taxes on corporate income, reversing the Reagan Revolution. These two steps solve a fake fiscal problem and create an economic surplus where we now can measure a moral deficit.

Of course, you will say – along with every economist from Dean Baker to Greg Mankiw, Left to Right – that raising taxes on corporate income is a disincentive to investment and thus job creation. Or that it will drive corporations overseas, where taxes are lower.

But in fact raising taxes on corporate income can’t have these effects.

Let’s work backward. Corporations have been ‘multinational’ for quite some time. In the 1970s and ’80s, before Ronald Reagan’s signature tax cuts took effect, approximately 60 per cent of manufactured imported goods were produced offshore, overseas, by US companies. That percentage has risen since then, but not by much.

Chinese workers aren’t the problem – the homeless, aimless idiocy of corporate accounting is. That is why the Citizens United decision of 2010 applying freedom of speech regulations to campaign spending is hilarious. Money isn’t speech, any more than noise is. The Supreme Court has conjured a living being, a new person, from the remains of the common law, creating a real world more frightening than its cinematic equivalent: say, Frankenstein, Blade Runner or, more recently, Transformers.

But the bottom line is this. Most jobs aren’t created by private, corporate investment, so raising taxes on corporate income won’t affect employment. You heard me right. Since the 1920s, economic growth has happened even though net private investment has atrophied. What does that mean? It means that profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated.

So investment decisions by CEOs have only a marginal effect on employment. Taxing the profits of corporations to finance a welfare state that permits us to love our neighbours and to be our brothers’ keeper is not an economic problem. It’s something else – it’s an intellectual issue, a moral conundrum.

When we place our faith in hard work, we’re wishing for the creation of character; but we’re also hoping, or expecting, that the labour market will allocate incomes fairly and rationally. And there’s the rub, they do go together. Character can be created on the job only when we can see that there’s an intelligible, justifiable relation between past effort, learned skills and present reward. When I see that your income is completely out of proportion to your production of real value, of durable goods the rest of us can use and appreciate (and by ‘durable’ I don’t mean just material things), I begin to doubt that character is a consequence of hard work.

When I see, for example, that you’re making millions by laundering drug-cartel money (HSBC), or pushing bad paper on mutual fund managers (AIG, Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Citibank), or preying on low-income borrowers (Bank of America), or buying votes in Congress (all of the above) – just business as usual on Wall Street – while I’m barely making ends meet from the earnings of my full-time job, I realise that my participation in the labour market is irrational. I know that building my character through work is stupid because crime pays. I might as well become a gangster like you.

That’s why an economic crisis such as the Great Recession is also a moral problem, a spiritual impasse – and an intellectual opportunity. We’ve placed so many bets on the social, cultural and ethical import of work that when the labour market fails, as it so spectacularly has, we’re at a loss to explain what happened, or to orient ourselves to a different set of meanings for work and for markets.

And by ‘we’ I mean pretty much all of us, Left to Right, because everybody wants to put Americans back to work, one way or another – ‘full employment’ is the goal of Right-wing politicians no less than Left-wing economists. The differences between them are over means, not ends, and those ends include intangibles such as the acquisition of character.

Which is to say that everybody has doubled down on the benefits of work just as it reaches a vanishing point. Securing ‘full employment’ has become a bipartisan goal at the very moment it has become both impossible and unnecessary. Sort of like securing slavery in the 1850s or segregation in the 1950s.

Why?

Because work means everything to us inhabitants of modern market societies – regardless of whether it still produces solid character and allocates incomes rationally, and quite apart from the need to make a living. It’s been the medium of most of our thinking about the good life since Plato correlated craftsmanship and the possibility of ideas as such. It’s been our way of defying death, by making and repairing the durable things, the significant things we know will last beyond our allotted time on earth because they teach us, as we make or repair them, that the world beyond us – the world before and after us – has its own reality principles.

Think about the scope of this idea. Work has been a way of demonstrating differences between males and females, for example by merging the meanings of fatherhood and ‘breadwinner’, and then, more recently, prying them apart. Since the 17th century, masculinity and femininity have been defined – not necessarily achieved – by their places in a moral economy, as working men who got paid wages for their production of value on the job, or as working women who got paid nothing for their production and maintenance of families. Of course, these definitions are now changing, as the meaning of ‘family’ changes, along with profound and parallel changes in the labour market – the entry of women is just one of those – and in attitudes toward sexuality.

When work disappears, the genders produced by the labour market are blurred. When socially necessary labour declines, what we once called women’s work – education, healthcare, service – becomes our basic industry, not a ‘tertiary’ dimension of the measurable economy. The labour of love, caring for one another and learning how to be our brother’s keeper – socially beneficial labour – becomes not merely possible but eminently necessary, and not just within families, where affection is routinely available. No, I mean out there, in the wide, wide world.

Work has also been the American way of producing ‘racial capitalism’, as the historians now call it, by means of slave labour, convict labour, sharecropping, then segregated labour markets – in other words, a ‘free enterprise system’ built on the ruins of black bodies, an economic edifice animated, saturated and determined by racism. There never was a free market in labour in these united states. Like every other market, it was always hedged by lawful, systematic discrimination against black folk. You might even say that this hedged market produced the still-deployed stereotypes of African-American laziness, by excluding black workers from remunerative employment, confining them to the ghettos of the eight-hour day.

And yet, and yet. Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience and hierarchy (see above), it’s also where many of us, probably most of us, have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient. We have defined ourselves for centuries by what we do, by what we produce.

But by now we must know that this definition of ourselves entails the principle of productivity – from each according to his abilities, to each according to his creation of real value through work – and commits us to the inane idea that we’re worth only as much as the labour market can register, as a price. By now we must also know that this principle plots a certain course to endless growth and its faithful attendant, environmental degradation.

Until now, the principle of productivity has functioned as the reality principle that made the American Dream seem plausible. ‘Work hard, play by the rules, get ahead’, or, ‘You get what you pay for, you make your own way, you rightly receive what you’ve honestly earned’ – such homilies and exhortations used to make sense of the world. At any rate they didn’t sound delusional. By now they do.

Adherence to the principle of productivity therefore threatens public health as well as the planet (actually, these are the same thing). By committing us to what is impossible, it makes for madness. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton said something like this when he explained anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’ – by suggesting that they’ve lost faith in the American Dream. For them, the work ethic is a death sentence because they can’t live by it.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?

Sigmund Freud insisted that love and work were the essential ingredients of healthy human being. Of course he was right. But can love survive the end of work as the willing partner of the good life? Can we let people get something for nothing and still treat them as our brothers and sisters – as members of a beloved community? Can you imagine the moment when you’ve just met an attractive stranger at a party, or you’re online looking for someone, anyone, but you don’t ask: ‘So, what do you do?’

We won’t have any answers until we acknowledge that work now means everything to us – and that hereafter it can’t.

How the Super-Rich Will Destroy Themselves

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By Paul Buchheit

Source: Nation of Change

Perhaps they believe that their underground survival bunkers with bullet-resistant doors and geothermal power and anti-chemical air filters and infrared surveillance devices and pepper spray detonators will sustain them for two or three generations.

Perhaps they feel immune from the killings in the streets, for they rarely venture into the streets anymore. They don’t care about the great masses of ordinary people, nor do they think they need us.

Or do they? There are a number of ways that the super-rich, because of their greed and lack of empathy for others, may be hastening their own demise, while taking the rest of us with them.

1. Pandemic (Because of Their Disdain for Global Health)

“A year ago the world was in a panic over Ebola. Now it’s Zika at the gate. When will it end?” –Public health expert Dr. Ali Khan.

It could end with a global pandemic that spreads with the speed of the 1918 Spanish Flu, but with a virulence that kills over half of us, rich and poor alike. Vanderbilt University’s Dr. William Schaffner warned us a decade ago, “You’ve got to really invest vast resources right now to protect us from a pandemic.” Added infectious disease specialist Dr. Stephen Baum, “There’s nobody making vaccines anymore because the profitability is low and the liability is high.”

The flu is just one of our worries. It has been estimated that less than 10 percent of the budget for health research is spent on diseases that cause 90 percent of the world’s illnesses. According to a study in The Lancet, of the 336 new drugs developed in the first decade of this century, only four of them were for diseases impacting third-world peoples. World Health Organization director Margaret Chan lamented the long decades of disregard for the African-centered effects of the Ebola virus: “Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations. The R&D incentive is virtually non-existent. A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay.”

The super-rich had better make sure their anti-chemical air filters are also anti-viral.

2. Terrorism (Because of Global Inequality)

In The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett document some of the most frightening effects of inequality: higher levels of crime and violence, impacting all classes of people.

Inequality is worst at the global level, and the victims of global greed are getting more violent. The World Protests report concluded that the most recent decade represents one of the most agitated periods in modern history — comparable to pre-Civil-War days, World War 1, and the Civil Rights era. According to expert Scott Atran, terrorism primarily appeals to young men who are bored and underemployed; for them, “jihad is an egalitarian, equal-opportunity employer.”

The terrorism of the future could easily take the form of the viral killers mentioned above. As Dr. Khan notes, “A deadly microbe like smallpox — to which we no longer have immunity — can be easily recreated in a rogue laboratory.”

3. Drought (Because of Their Denial of Environmental Destruction)

National Geographic’s 2012 Greendex Survey reveals a remarkable human response to environmental damage: “[Those] demonstrating the least sustainable behavior as consumers, are least likely to feel guilty about the implications of their choices for the environment.” Citizens of Mexico, Brazil, China, and India tend to be most concerned about climate change, pollution, and species loss, while American, French, and British consumers are more concerned about the state of the economy and the cost of energy and fuel.

Even worse than denial is the outright suppression of climate-saving technologies, as, for example, by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which wants to charge the “freeriders” who install solar panels on their roofs.

The result of this environmental contempt, according to a Columbia University study, is the prospect of “drought beyond the sub-tropics and into the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes, regions of globally important agricultural production.”

The super-rich can while away the hours in their underground bunkers watching videos of the good old days when the earth was cool.

4. Atrophy (Because of the Debt-Induced Collapse of Innovation)

A Small Business Administration study found that only 2% of the Millennial Generation are entrepreneurs (self-employed or business owners), compared to 6.7% of Baby Boomers and 5.4% in Generation X. According to the Kauffman Foundation, 20- to 34-year-olds made up over a third of all new business startups in 1997, but less than a quarter of them today. The super-rich have manipulated the financial system to the point that would-be entrepreneurs, many of them young and deeply in debt, are unable or unwilling to take chances on new startups.

Yet on a global scale youth entrepreneurship is on the rise. America is exceptional in its entrepreneurial decline.

5. Decay (Because of Their Disregard for Our Crumbling Infrastructure)

The corporate elite may face further business collapse if they continue to ignore the breakdown in our nation’s infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that every American household is losing $3,400 per year in disposable income due to infrastructure deficiencies.

The tens of billions of dollars already being paid for additional transportation and storage costs may not kill the capitalists, but the losses to China and other fast-developing nations will surely deflate their stock prices and their egos.

How the Super-Rich Could Help Themselves

Amidst all the talk of unity and prayer and peace, a solution exists: job opportunities and affordable housing. The super-rich could prolong life for all of us, including themselves, if they recognized the need to support a strong society. If not, they’ll be ensconced in their bunkers with their children at their sides, with nowhere to go and nothing to do.

On the Process of Awakening

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

We cannot help but feel a hunger for authenticity, honesty, spiritual solace and human connection, but these are precisely what is scarce in our social and economic structure.

There is a tremendous amount of pain in our society. There are many sources of this pain: the emotional desertification of dysfunctional families, the knowledge that we don’t fit in and never will, a widening disconnect between the narratives we’re told are true and our experience, and a social and economic structure that tosses many of us on the trash heap.

The lifestyle we’re told we need to be happy is unattainable to many, and disconcertingly unsatisfactory to the top 10% who reach it.

We cannot help but feel a hunger for authenticity, honesty, spiritual solace and human connection, but these are precisely what is scarce in our social and economic structure.

The process of awakening has many paths. For some, the path starts with the incoherence of official explanations and narratives. For others, it’s the inner search for truth via psychotherapy or spiritual practice.

For some, it’s an investigation into the way our economic and political hierarchy function. For others, art is the starting point: a film, a novel, a comic, a song.

For many of us, it begins with this simple but devastating realization: I don’t fit in. I don’t fit in, have never fit in and never will fit in. I play along because it’s easier on me and everyone I interact with to do so, and I value my independence which means I have to find a way to support myself. That is difficult, as what I like to do has little to no value in our economy.

What interests me is how the epidemic of pain and alienation that characterizes our society is the direct result of how our economy and social order is structured. Incoherence, self-destruction, pain and alienation are the only possible outputs of the system we inhabit.

I have explored this dynamic in my books, starting with Survival+ in 2009 and working forward to my latest book, Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform. (My other books are: A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All; Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy; The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education; Resistance, Revolution, Liberation: A Model for Positive Change; Why Things Are Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It and An Unconventional Guide to Investing in Troubled Times.)

I recently had an amazing free-form 1:50 hour conversation on these topics with New Zealand talk-show host Vinny Eastwood. Any conversation that stretches from the erosion of community to loneliness to Daniel Ellsberg to Marx to Taoism to alienation to Michelangelo Antonioni and on to the process of awakening is amazing in my view.

Here’s Vinny’s page with listening/viewing/downloading options, and the program on Youtube (please ignore my goofy expressions): The magic of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies (1:49:54)

My conclusion may strike many as radical, but to me it is self-evident: the primary source of the rot, insecurity, inequality and alienation of our society is the way we create and distribute money, which is the conduit for creating and distributing political power.

I explain why this is so in my books A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All and Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform.

If we don’t change the way money is created and distributed, we change nothing. Money = power. If we don’t devise a form of money that is beyond the reach of central banks and states, all “reform” is just window-dressing, simulacra of “change” that simply solidifies the system’s bogus claim of being reformable.

Cryptocurrencies are in their infancy. There will be many more iterations of Cryptocurrencies beyond bitcoin and Ethereum; recall that bitcoin went public in 2009.

There are security challenges with cryptocurrencies, and the potential for central-state meddling via backdoors in computer operating systems. But once we understand that community and the potential for a less toxic society and economy are crippled by the centralized structure of the state and its money, then there is no way forward but to develop structures of money, work, community, purpose and meaning that are outside the direct control of the state and central bank.

This sort of “crazy talk” is unwelcome. As I noted earlier this week on my chart of the Ministry of Propaganda, in the status quo, skepticism is always a conspiracy or a hoax.

So instead we consider an exploding opiate epidemic, an epidemic of obesity and metabolic illnesses, a discourse of inchoate rage and a Grand Canyon-sized gap between what we’re told is true and what we experience as true “normal.” These things are not normal; they are manifestations of a system that can only generate one output: self-destruction.

Anarchy vs. Statism: Uncontrolled Order Over Controlled Chaos

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By Gary ‘Z’ McGee

Source: Waking Times

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” ~Frederick Douglas

Caught up, as we are, in the politics of statism, it is often extremely difficult to see the forest for the trees. We’re often so busy pretending to think outside the box that we lose track of what’s “the box” and what’s not. We’re so inured by this system of exploitation that it’s often too easy to kiss each other with lies rather than smack each other with the truth.

Meanwhile, complacency sets in and inertia takes hold. Apathy takes root and ignorance becomes “bliss.” Our lives go on and we placate each other with such cowardly platitudes as, “It’s just the way things are,” or “Why fight it? There’s nothing we can do.” Bullshit!

This is not the way things are. This unhealthy system (statism) has separated you from the way things are (natural anarchy). Why fight? Derrick Jensen said it best, “We are the governors as well as the governed. This means that all of us who care about life need to force accountability onto those who do not.” You think there’s nothing you can do about it? Well, you could begin by educating yourself on what the difference between statism and anarchy really is.

Statism is controlled chaos under the illusion of order. Anarchy is uncontrolled chaos under the delusion of chaos. That’s the difference in a nutshell. But if the nutshell doesn’t suffice, please read on.

Controlled Chaos Under the Illusion of Order (Statism)

“Chaos is what we’ve lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.” ~Terence McKenna

Statism is bureaucratic order. When order becomes bureaucratic it becomes an abstraction of an abstraction. It loses the essence of real order because it is in the throes of an “order” pigeonholed by fallible men claiming to hold infallible truths that become ill-conceived laws that generally don’t coincide with cosmic laws. Deception becomes rampant in such an illusory state. And the innocent people who are conditioned, brainwashed, and propagandized to no-end by such an illusory bamboozlement become easily manipulated into believing that man-made laws must be followed. Sometimes even at the expense of cosmic laws that should not be avoided.

Statism is the result of an obsolete idea (that has somehow (stupidly) withstood the test of time) held by a group with outdated notions of power lording such power over an ignorant majority. The small group of individuals harboring outdated notions of power want to remain in power –no matter how misguided, immoral, or downright stupid their notion of power is. And so they manipulate the hierarchical nature of statist dogma to keep themselves entrenched in their parochial seats of power, usually at great expense (exploitation, structural violence, violent expropriation, debt slavery, andenvironmental rape) to others.

Under their deceptive controlled chaos and unhealthy illusion of order, all healthy order falls in polluted disarray. Unnecessary poverty is rampant. Avoidable wars are waged. Needless divisive racism and xenophobic jingoism is rife. Preventable pollutants destroy the land, poison the air, and toxify the oceans. All because of the idiotic statist notion of order, which is nothing more than controlled chaos, which is nothing more than an unhealthy hierarchy high on its own ignorant understanding of power, which leaves the world bleeding and dying at its feet.

It matters not the state; any state pushing its statist dogma onto otherwise free human beings is fundamentally unhealthy and is the opposite of liberty. In fact, it is disguised tyranny. Which is ten-times worse than naked tyranny, because naked tyranny is easily thwarted and thus easily denied by the majority. But the disguised tyranny of the state is not so easily thwarted, for it becomes diabolically entrenched in the mind of the majority of conditioned men, deceiving them into believing the Great Lie, as Nietzsche wisely put it, “State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” Indeed. Such a lie is not easily untold. Much cognitive dissonance must be navigated in order to dissolve it. Cognitive dissonance can cripple even the most intelligent and most open-minded of men.

If the State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters, then Anarchy is the name of the freest of all free liberators. Anarchy slays the beast that is the state by “being so absolutely free that its very existence is an act of rebellion (Albert Camus).” Anarchy is the only way to deal with the “unfree world” erected by the disguised tyranny of the state.

Uncontrolled Order Under the Illusion of Chaos (Anarchy)

“The multitudes have a tendency to accept whoever is master. Their very mass weighs them down with apathy. A mob easily adds up to obedience. You have to stir them up, push them, treat the men rough using the very advantage of their deliverance, hurt their eyes with the truth, throw light at them in terrible handfuls.” ~Victor Hugo

Anarchy is cosmic order. When order is uncontrolled and allowed to flow, then a healthy equilibrium becomes manifests. It only seems chaotic because the majority of us have been conditioned by statism to think that a world without man-made laws is a world in chaos. Nothing could be further from the truth. On a long enough timeline most man-made laws become irrelevant. Unless they coincide with cosmic laws. As James Russell Lowell surmised, “Time makes ancient good uncouth.” This means that what once seemed right and just and lawful eventually goes out of date, and if we cannot let go of it, if we cannot update our outdated values, we become uncouth, immoral, or even downright stupid for withholding them.

Such is our plight against the heavy shadow of the state. The state is without a doubt an “ancient good” deemed uncouth by the passage of time. And it is on us as rational, healthy, and free human beings, who are attempting to progressively evolve on an ever-changing planet, to discard such parochial values. Indeed, as Eliezer Yudkowsky proclaimed, “You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.”

As it stands, becoming more ethical than the society we grew up in means shedding the too-heavy, overreaching, unhealthy, unsustainable armor of the state and donning the anarchist cape of vulnerable courage. It means adapting to, and overcoming, a world that must continue to change in order to remain healthy. It means embracing the flexible courage of anarchy in the face of the inflexible cowardice of the state. In short, it means becoming healthier than the society we grew up in. Which is easy, really. Because the society we grew up in is fundamentally unhealthy. It means being proactive about finding a cure for the sickness within society. The sickness is statism. The cure is anarchy. It means undeceiving ourselves. It means holding those accountable who deceive, and who are still deceived. It means getting power over power by using our updated understanding of prestigious power to trump their outdated understanding of violent and exploitative power.

There is a way to have our progressive evolution and our freedom as well. It’s not a “you can’t have your cake and eat it too” situation. It’s a freedom begets freedom situation. It’s a situation of ‘I want to be free so that I have a better chance of helping others be free.’ Because with enough people free, who also honor the freedom of others, the less likely the chances are that tyranny and slavery become a problem. Alas, as Voltaire quipped, “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

But the problem is the way power is perceived. Statism has conditioned us to think that power means having money, stockpiling possessions and gaining wealth through the violent exploitation of others in a vicious cycle of one-upmanship. Statism preaches the use of exploitative and violent power as its unhealthy dogma. Anarchy advocates the use of cooperative nonviolent power through reciprocity. Because power can be healthy. Power balanced with humility and humor is healthy. Healthy power is moral. Healthy power is prestigious. It is nonviolent. It balances itself out in healthy accord with the natural order of things. It is harmonious with Cosmic Law, The Golden Rule, The Golden Mean, The Golden Ratio, The Nonaggression Principle, and Ubuntu. Indeed. Healthy power is naturally anarchic and egalitarian.

The conclusion? The uncontrolled order of anarchy is healthier than the controlled chaos of statism. It’s healthier not only because its eco-centric freedom trumps the statist’s egocentric tyranny, but also because it frees the independent individual into a deeper freedom, into realizing his/her own interdependent nature, despite a codependent state. Interdependence is what we’ve lost touch with. Anarchy is given a bad name because of this, because interdependence is antithetical (even deemed chaotic) to the codependency of the state (which is nothing more than controlled chaos). But anarchy bridges the gap between nature and the human soul, and thus connects thesis to antithesis, which then becomes the synthesis of interdependence.

In the end, the uncontrolled order (cosmic law) will win out, whether or not our species is still around to experience it. However, if we continue to kowtow to the controlled chaos of unhealthy states, then we will not survive. But if we can learn to embrace anarchy, we will give both ourselves, and the environment that sustain us, a fighting chance at survival. Just remember, as Marcus Aurelius said, “The best revenge is not to be like your enemy.” Have no illusions. The enemy is the state.