One of TR's best observations is that every reforming movement has a lunatic fringe, in our own time the end of the Nixonian state and the disconnect of public will from the results of elections are two essential targets of reform. However, both have created lunatic fringes. One believes that 911 was planned by Bush, and seeks to prove that the World Trade Center had to be brought down by explosives. The other believes that the election system is rigged and in the hands of evil forces.
These are only small steps from the reality: namely that the Bush Executive was criminally neglegent in warnings about 9/11, and the other that the election system no longer reflects the reality of our own lives. They "lunatic fringe" versions are not supported by the facts as we have them, but the are theories which have a great deal of cachet because they clearly place the blame on "them". What is more frightening is that the lunatic fringe theories of the right, of a perpetual war against evil terrorists who are all in league with each other, and of a left wing conspiracy to have politically correct gay black stormtroopers impose an Orwellian social order, are the operative theories of our current government. That is, if you think Bush planned 911 is crazy, realize that we went to war on the operative theory that Saddam planned 911, which is even more crazy, because at least Bush had something to gain from 911's occurance.
But looking leftward for a moment - the insanity of the right being a continual topic from my keyboard - why is it that "election reform" has made so little traction, when the insanities of the right wing have netted trillions - with a trill - of dollars for their purveyors?
The problem is not in the lunatic fringe, but in the core of the reforming movement itself. In order to defeat an established order one has to have a theory of what is wrong, a narrative to explain why it came to be, and a forward narrative - an eschatology - of how to create a better world. Leaving aside the narratives of the fringe - what are the narratives of the left that answer the two problems of a world which is increasingly unstable and unwilling to remain unequally able to access the wealth of the west, and what is the narrative that explains why the election system does not produce results which reflect the popular will?
The only common one is warmed over Marxism. That narrative states first that evil corporations plan all to keep everyone else in slavery, and they buy elections. However, I will state unequivocally that this narrative does not pass inspection. While corporate profits have been fattened by the last few years, they are no where close to keeping pace with what occured under Clinton. And more over, many corporations, even large ones, are not doing all that well. The stock market has not recovered from the crash of 2000-2002, and even the Dow, closest to recovery, has not touched its 1999 peak, though it is likely to do so within the next 12 months. If there is an evil coporatocratic conspiracy, it is not doing very well at its stated goals of enriching its members.
The other part of this narrative involves that time honoured dodge, "false consciousness", namely that the stream of "opiate of the masses" entertainment is poisoning people to their realities, and creating a false allegiance to their exploiters. But this too does not correspond to reality - the popularity of both the current government, and the current governmental order has fallen precipitously, even though the stream has not altered very much in the last 12 months. If the theory of false consciousness were correct, it should be child's play to have maintained it in the face of rising GDP, rising property values for the land owning class, steady employment and easy credit.
In short the basic neo- or perhaps degenerated, marxist narrative does not explain why the broad corporate class has not prospered as much as it did under the old regime, nor does it explain the crumbling of faith under what is not very much pressure. There have been larger sustained falls in real wages, far more destructive and expensive wars, and far worse economic tensions than exist at present.
The reality is that the problem is not in the general system of production, which is, in fact, behaving as one would expect it to, it is in our method of distributing the profits of extraction, and in our means of creating a public will based on our method of distribution. It is not that there is an cogniscant evil conspiracy, it is that we, ourselves, willfully avoid facing the realities of our own situation.
That is, we are living in the past.
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Post-structuralism and post-modernism hang heavy over our thought, they are the description of the previous age, and they are relatively successful in describing life and being in that age. The writers, often French Academics, had a particular axe to grind, but let us strip aside their personal goals and complaints, and offer a unified field theory of the pop era, which goes far beyond post-structuralism and encompasses the entire intellectual era.
The Principles of the Pop Era:
1. The Principle of Ubiquity
Data and information are omni-present, and extremely cheap to move.
2. The Principle of Relativity
That the movement of information and data, and the processing of it, is capable of ordering the whole of society. That is, there is no absolute framework of knowledge necessary, but, instead, the pragmatic observation of whether the communications system is flowing is enough. Lest I be accused of nihilism, this is also the principle of Friedman's monetarism: no need for a gold standard or a plan from government, watch the money supply. And money is (1), ubiquitous data.
3. The Principle of Identity
Individuals exist in the stream of data that (1) presumes, and are aware only of (2). They are "scroungers" in the data and production stream and create identity by assembling parts which they can not modify intrinsicly, but must glue together. Everyone is an ecleticist who creates a self out of collage.
From these it is argues that he who controls the ability to flood (1) can control (2), and therefore set the limits on (3). Or what one might call the Huxley-Orwell theory of society - since these two authors ennunciated this structure long before post-structuralism. Societies are thus a struggle over the power of (1) and (2), which creates (3). But, since that struggle is within the context of the flow of data - the river of images and media - and is conducted by use of images and media, no one can escape the basic power struggle itself. There, you've just read Foucault, Lacan and Derrida.
There are two directions this, one is an explosive look at how this plays out. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Marshall MacLuhan's work on media are such explosive views: how this plays out. Modern conservative economics is basically a search for how to get a gold standard economy in a world of "fiat money" - how this works another day.
The other direction is implosive - how this creates the kind of people that we are. The basic division is into the way of being of producers - and those that control the production stream - versus consumers, those that are alienated or disenfranchised from it. There are, basically, two world which, while co-dependent on each other, do not have the same morality or world view. Philosophers like DeLeuze and Jameson argue that the producer mentality is retrograde, and that one day we will all be scroungers and consumers.
The post-modern world then divides into "top down" moralities and theories and "bottom up" moralities and theories. Those who seek to change the structure of the present ally themselves with "bottom up" even when this is patently absurd. The bottom isn't cogniscant of these things.
The alienation of top-producers from bottom-consumers (sexual pun intended) leads to the perverse and bewildering array of insanities described above.
Producer insanity is constantly paranoid that the consumer herds which they hunt will get smart, organize and overthrow them. They see terrrosim and file sharing as equal threats, since they provide a way for the vastly more numerous consumers to leverage capital against the producers. Terrorism is matched with "piracy". As if a 16 year old pulling down a copy of a song is slitting people's throats. Producer insanity is far more dangerous, because it has real power attached to it. The US believes the number 2 terrorist threat after al-qaeda is, people who blow up SUVs and logging camps with no one in them.
The Consumer insanity is the converse. They see their own disorganization as a moral imperative, since organized groups within the consumer body can tilt the results of ordinary life and are, ipso facto, evil - and therefore they assume that if something happens, it must be the linear result of intent. There is such a high barrier to being effective, that effectiveness is presumed to be the result of design. This, in fact, is the argument of the Ignorant Denial people applied to biology - if it is too organized, it must have been intentional.
The scribbling classes are therefore presented with two sets of neurosis to catter to - tell the producers that there is a conspiracy of consumers, tell consumers there is a conspiracy of producers - or conversely, deride the other sides memes by point out that there is, in fact, no way for such a conspiracy to operate, even when it in fact exists. Producers know how hard it is to get agreement on anything, and the idea of a top down structure, absent direct control of money, among them is absurd.
Which is why where such conspiracies do exist and are functioning, people have a hard time believing them. The current American Republican Party is, in fact, a conspiracy of the top, and it has populated the US political scene with clones of itself by controlling access to the money needed to run and win elections. It then leverages this money to get power, leverages the power to extract bribes and kickbacks - called campaign contributions and favorable coverage - from those seeking access to power.
But the very results of this deny both the lunatic fringe theories, and the realtively acceptable marxian paradigm. First things first, if Bush planned 911, dealing with Katrina was child's play. Bush couldn't even deal with Joe Wilson, let alone deal with the complex burying of evidence needed for 911.
The neo-maxian framework is refuted by the experience of Iraq, ironically by the success of the creation of a temporary wave of hysteria. What happened to get the US to Iraq is what the neo-marxian theory says happens all the time. But Iraq has already fallen apart, and it was a disaster. If the world ran this way all the time, we would already being seeing catastrophic breakdowns of economy and society.
So what is a better counter theory?
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The principles of a counter theory are:
1. Equilibrium
Under normal circumstances, the competing efforts to control or benefit from the information stream cancel out. Instead, all profit and progress comes from either arbitrage - being able to out wait others - or organization of previously disorganized behavior.
2. Emergence
Organization is emergent, that is, behavior is organized by organizing one unit so that it both produces some progress - but as importantly organizes at least one other unit.
3. Discontinuity
There are, within the texture of equilibrium and emergence disequilibria, moments where previous behavior has been disorganized, it is at these moments or under these conditions that there is an opportunity for radical reorganization, and consequently, for small organized cores to have disproportionate effects, since the barriers created by counter-action have, for a moment, been suspended.
In this view 9/11 represents disorganization of previous behavior, this disorganization was filled with a concerted campaign. Not to create "false consciousness" but what might be called "predictive consciousness", that is Bush and his circle presented what seemed to be a consciousness which could function in the new environment, and predicted, and continue to predict, an emergent order based on them.
The failure of this proposed or predictive consciousness is in its success.
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What do I mean by this?
In the post-modern framework, the only way to judge success is whether it produces an order which functions. Derrida's "the game itself". This is taken to be an enternal principle, that is "The Wisdom of Crowds" and the belief that markets always come to the right decisions.
However, the converse is true: it is not that equilibrium implies correct decisions, it is that equilibrium is the goal to which people strive, because it is in equilibrium that they are protected from disruption, and can use the heuristic of crowds. The heuristic of crowds is "you are always safe doing what everyone else around you is doing". This is protected, not by any intrinsic force that moves a society back to equilibrium - there is no Say's Law of Information - but instead by selection. Societies that cannot reach equilibrium do not work.
Let me take a simple example. Imagine you are crossing a street. Since your time is valuable to you, you want to cross as soon as possible. One way is to follow the lights. But even better is to move with the crowd. It is the earliest safe time to do so. It also creates a curve of risk - those who are more willing to take risks cross as soon as they see the crowd about to cross, and thus gain a fraction of time. Those that do not yet want to cross wait, but don't cross if, when they are ready, the crowd seems to move on. As long as the crowd is risk free - that is people don't plow into crowds - the curve of risk is established, not by calculation, or by reading the minds of drivers, both hard to do - but by simple observation of the crowd.
Without this heuristic - or in societies where following the crowd is too much a game of negative expectations, people cannot function. It is not that crowds are smart, it is that society can't be any smarter than its crowds are, and if they are really dumn crowds, then it will be a society composed of statistics.
It was this that, in the end, destroys totalitarian states. Totalitarian societies are afraid of any emergent order they do not control, so they obliterate it. People no longer feel safe to do anything, so they do as little as possible, and the society becomes inflexible.
This counter theory turns the entire Huxley-Orwell framework on its head for other reasons as well. The producers are not "in control" of the consumers as they are in Brave New World, but, instead, are constantly watching the crowd for heuristics of when a crowd is ready to walk, and being there a bit before, or by charging for signals that will make the crowd risk free safe.
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Why do I propose this? For the simple reason that the post-modern framework is disconnected from the realities of its existence. If Egypt was the gift of the Nile, then the pop era was the gift of a river of petroleum. A river that is now running dry, and, as importantly, has more and more people that want to feed at its banks.
In this framework the reason that the political machinery is no longer producing results which work is that the old machinery was about creating a "precrowd" and getting others to follow. It was about leveraging Postmodern (1) to create (2) and therefore persuade people to adopt it as part of their identity. The reactionary wing was very successful at this, but it produces people who cannot maintain their own standard of living.
Elections don't work because the entire mechanism of crowd creation, first, is subject to equilibrium - it cancels itself out. Second it is counter-emergent, it does not come from the results of self-organization. Third it must therefore rely on, and worship, discontinuities - gaffes, events, public moments of outrage. It lives in a world of "good weeks" and "bad weeks", and the fear that a "bad week" will puncture the balloon. One cannot make progress this way.
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The counter view then is that the media stream does not create us, but, instead, that is is a constant reflection of what we would like to be like, which twists and turns as people find out they can or can't live in the images that they have adopted. It is possible to manipulate the present, but only to the extent that equilibrium is re-established.
The present circumstance is pumping money from large numbers of people - particularly in the developed world and the future - and piling it up in the present holders of rent. This is unsustainble, because those who are disequilibriumed, that is, who can't stop it - are going to grow increasingly upset. This means that every day it is creating a counter-organization.
Let me explain a bit, the people who are being robbed are not organizing because of bin Laden, or anyone else, but simply because they must respond to being robbed. As each response on the tree fails, they move to the next one.
In the US the first theory was that we had to act with unity. That theory is dead in the public mind. The next theory is the "waste and fraud" theory - that everything is fine except for the fact there are people who are stealing from the system. This theory will be the operative theory of the next election.
However, the reality is that while there is massive theft and corruption, the real hole in the bottom of the economy is that it is counter-emergent. People are not buying houses that will have long term value, that others can pay for now, but the belief they can force others to pay much more later. They are betting that they can force others into an emergent order. This is unsustainable, because the energy to pay the high prices is also energy to decide the prices are too high.
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Summary:
The post-modern era positted a world where the exchange of messages and data organized society, and that people were products of this exchange. Society was then, a struggle over the control of the data flow.
The post-modern era had two theories of social organization - producer consciousness driven, that is society should reflect the producers desired organization, and consumer consciousness driven. That is "top down" versus "bottom up". Neither model works, because both models presume counter factuals about the other, and generate an increasing paranoia about the motives of the other co-dependent group.
A counter model is one which rests on the necessity of maintaining equilibrium, not on its axiomic existence, and the nature of emergent order and discontinuities. This model avoids both the problems of pervasive paranoia, and the problems of disconnection of the information system from its reality. That is, it recognizes that modern society is not "about" messages, but "about" the surplus of extraction and the conflict over it.
This model shows how for short periods of time, or in particular circumstances, when equilibrium breaks down, the belief in conspiracies and disinformation being effective is real. That is, there times when a small group with rapid control over its parts can gain disproportionate power. But it also shows why such moments break down, because to maintain them requires a persistent violation of emergence and equilibrium. This violation inevitable breaks down.