In this article from The Baffler, anthropologist/author/anarchist David Graeber makes the point that a “successful revolution” has less to do with protestors taking over the government, and more to do with previously fringe/radical ideas becoming common sense, within a short period of time. The article’s powerful closing line:
And the moment any significant number of people simultaneously shake off the shackles that have been placed on that collective imagination, even our most deeply inculcated assumptions about what is and is not politically possible have been known to crumble overnight.
This got me thinking, what was considered fringe thinking ten or twenty years ago, but is currently entering mainstream thought? The following probably seem like common sense/conventional wisdom to a person in their twenties, but anyone holding these ideals in the “greed is good” 80’s was definitely outside of the zeitgeist.
gay people should have equal rights
intelligent animals (dolphins, whales, elephants, apes) should not be used as slaves or slaughtered for body parts/meat
environmental/ecological collapse is possible if our natural environments are treated as economic externalities
the national security apparatus has more to do with control of citizens than it does with the protection of citizens
food, shelter, healthcare, and education should be basic human rights, and not conditional privileges to be granted based on hard work, morality, cleverness, inborn traits like ethnicity, etc.
the value of work should be based on how much it benefits other people and humanity, not on profitability
extreme income inequality erodes social trust and pits the poor against the (shrinking) middle class
mass incarceration creates more criminals and does not increase public safety in the long run
Attitudes vary by country. The U.S. is fairly enlightened when it comes to gay rights, but is behind on healthcare as a basic right (Obamacare is a small step in the right direction, but saddles middle-class families with unaffordable premiums). In terms of mass incarceration the United States is in a league of its own (not in a good way). Japan is behind on cetacean rights; Thailand is behind on elephant right; China is behind on environmental regulation, and so on. But none of the ideas are “fringe” — Americans who visit England and happen to break a leg are pleasantly surprised when they get no bill for services, and wonder “Why not in the U.S.”?
So what ideas are currently fringe/radical, but might enter the mainstream in ten or twenty or one hundred years? I would suggest the following are plausible:
animals with any sort of conscious awareness (insects and some fish probably excepted) should not be used as slaves or slaughtered for body parts/meat
extra-terrestrial communities (moon base, Mars base, orbiting artificial worlds) should be established as quickly as possible to improve humanity’s survival chances
machines that are probably conscious-aware should have legal rights
state benefits should not be means-based, but universal (allowing societies to share wealth without violating Murray’s law)
We can see Steven Pinker’s expanding circle of empathy taking humanity to places that seem strange now, but may make perfect sense later.
Of course, even if the long-term trend is towards more cooperation and compassion, short-term collapse and cultural regression is just as likely. Consider the millions of starvation deaths that resulted from the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the political and economic events (and xenophobic attitudes), that led up to the Holocaust.
Still, there are hopeful ripples in the way human beings are thinking about alternatives to consumer capitalism, which is Graeber’s main topic. Not every detail of the “sharing economy” vision is worked out, but green shoots are visible. Wage slavery and the ruthless exploitation of human labor no longer make sense to most of us. The tide is turning.
What if the state could only use force to prevent bodily harm?
I’ve been following the story of Ross Ulbricht and his fallen Silk Road empire. For those of you who have been living in cave, Ross Ulbricht is the alleged mastermind behind the buy-illegal-drugs-online-and-have-them-shipped-to-your-mailbox-in-plain-brown-envelope website Silk Road. Through the use of Bitcoins (an anonymous digital currency, “digital cash”) and TOR (an anonymous internet), Ulbricht earned some US$80M in sales commissions, enabling dealers and clients to directly connect without the hassle and expense of street-level middlemen. Sound like a familiar business model? Amazon.com has done quite well with the same.
Last week the FBI finally caught up with Ulbricht, and the Silk Road is no more. All the Bitcoins have been “seized,” though it remains to be seen if the FBI can decrypt Ulbricht’s Bitcoin wallet, where most of the money resides. Ulbricht’s capture represents the beginning of law enforcement’s struggle with online sales of illegal drugs, not the end. Dozens of alternatives, including Sheep Marketplace, are already up and running.
What interests me most about this story is Ulbricht’s self-professed libertarian ideals. From his LinkedIn profile, Ulbricht writes:
“I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression [sic] amongst mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort.
The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.”
Somewhere along the way Ulbricht lost track of his non-coercive ideals, and hired a hitman to off his former employee. Still, I’d like to take some time to explore Ulbricht’s vision. It’s easy to write off libertarianism entirely as a kind of sophomoric idealism, but the (libertarian) ideal of Freedom is tagged as “sticky” in the forums of American consciousness, and deserves discussion.
So here’s my thought experiment for the day: What would a less coercive form of government look like? What if police and/or the military could legally use force against a citizen only if that citizen was threatening the life of another citizen? In other words, a police officer could not legally pull a gun (or threaten to pull a gun or use any other form of coercion) on a citizen for any of the following offenses: trespassing, theft, tax evasion, non-payment of rent, using drugs, selling drugs, playing loud music/disturbing the peace, drinking alcohol in a public place, growing psychoactive plants, selling raw milk, etc.
And here’s my teaser: I know a place that already operates according to these rules. I’ll reveal the location at the end of the post.
What Keeps People Behaving Well?
Really it comes down to that question, doesn’t it? If the state can only use force to protect life, what’s going to stop people from going nuts, stealing stuff, vandalizing everything, not paying their taxes, etc.?
Most of the answers are fairly obvious, including:
Conscience: Non-sociopaths have empathy, and will generally treat other people how they like to be treated
Shame: Human beings are quite good at shaming others human beings who don’t follow social convention. Don’t believe me? Go try cutting in line somewhere in the U.S. and see how that works out for you.
Path of least resistance: If rules and laws are reasonable, it’s often easier to just follow them, even if nobody is pointing a gun at your head if you don’t.
Some possibly less obvious factors/trends:
Information transparency: Which would compel you more to pay your taxes, 1) threat of audit and jail, or 2) every single person who looked at you instantly knowing if you were a tax evader? I think for many people, option 2 would be the stronger motivator, even though it doesn’t involve a gun to your head. Google Glass (or the equivalent) and public tax records could make item 2 a reality, no state coercion necessary.
Trust in government: Which would compel you to more to pay your taxes, 1) government spending on citizen spying programs, invading foreign states, and “bailing out” profiteering corporations or 2) healthcare, emergency services, roads, and education for your community? These choices reflect my own personal bias, but my larger point is that government spending that reflects the values of citizens requires less enforcement when it comes to tax collections. Obviously not all citizens have the same values, but in this age of Corporatism, citizen values in general are underrepresented.
Less income inequality: Radical income inequality erodes social trust. In South Africa, homes of the upper class are walled off and barred off. As a contrast, in Denmark, this is how they deal with thieves. Yes, the video is kind of a joke, but the point is that in countries with less extreme states of poverty and wealth, there is a less of a need to enforce property rights with coercive and defensive means.
It’s ironic that a social democracy/welfare state like Denmark can put the libertarian ideal of low coercion into practice. I’m not saying the peaceful wooden pony repo actually demonstrates anything, but Denmark does have a good record of preserving citizen freedoms and protecting human rights. Other European social democracies protect the “freedom to roam“; this would be called trespassing in the United States — behavior a cop could arrest you for (and shoot you if you resisted arrest).
So what would actually change if the threat of force were removed in most cases? This wouldn’t mean that everything illegal would suddenly become legal. But it would mean that a cop couldn’t arrest you and drag you off to jail except in the most extreme cases (such as willfully injuring another person, or threatening to do so). What immediate effects would this have on society?
Government income from taxation would go down, unless governments could persuade citizens that the money wasn’t being wasted/squandered.
With the threat of forced eviction removed, it’s possible that fewer people would be interested in being landlords. With less demand, housing prices might go down.
Fewer silly, pointless laws (few people would obey them and even fewer would care).
More value might be placed on finding ways to persuade citizens to behave well; “social engineering” via education, nutrition, stable family structures, development of empathy through reading and writing, etc. How do you create a good person that generally behaves well?
A Possible Alternative To State-Sanctioned Coercion: The Citizenship Score
Disclaimer: the following idea is in no way libertarian, though it could potentially result in reaching a libertarian ideal (less use of force by the government, including the use of force to make people pay taxes). In fact, this suggestion veers in the opposite direction, towards that of the ultimate libertarian bogeyman, The Nanny State.
Here’s my idea: instead of using force or threatening to use force against citizens who don’t comply with property, substance, and decency laws (like paying your taxes, not stealing things, not drinking in public, not spray-painting your tag on walls and signs, etc.), implement a citizenship score. Your score would go up for regular compliance with laws, and it would down with violations. You could boost your score by performing community service, and other actions that benefited the public good (like inventing something useful and not patenting it, or publishing works under Creative Commons). Your score would be publicly available.
Corporations already have something like this. It’s called a credit score. It rates the only things corporations care about. That is, do you pay your bills on time?
You could argue that a public citizenship score would be a massive violation of privacy. But arrest records are already public. Why shouldn’t being a good citizen be public? And if a citizenship score could replace state-sanctioned violence against citizens, even libertarians might go for it.
Would the threat of a low citizenship score actually dissuade people from breaking the law? I think it would, if they had any interest in getting a job, dating, making new friends, or any other activity that would require impressing people you didn’t already know, and who might check up on you.
Could it be gamed? Of course it could, just like a credit score can be gamed. I can already see the Tim Ferriss blogpost: “How To Massively Boost Your Citizenship Score In Only Four Hours”. Could it be abused? Probably — there would have to be an appeals process; there would be huge legal and technical overhead and expenses involved in implementing such a system and making sure it was more-or-less fair.
But I still like the idea. I especially like the idea of the state persuading citizens to behave well, rather than using the constant threat of violence for citizens who don’t comply with the law. Consider the following scenario: a teenager is spray-painting on a wall; a cop sees them and tells them to freeze; the teenager panics and runs; the cop catches them and threatens them with the use of deadly force if they resist; the teenager resists; the cop (legally) kills the teenager. Punishment for graffiti = death? This kind of shit really happens. It’s just not civilized. I’m suggesting that the hypothetical graffiti artist should receive a demerit on their citizenship score instead. Nanny state? Yes. Death penalty for street art? No.
We’re nearing a society with 0% privacy. Soon, everything we do will be recorded. If you combine 100% surveillance with 100% coercive law enforcement, you get fascism. But if you combine 100% surveillance with 5% coercive law enforcement (reserving state force for protecting people from bodily harm) then you get what? A Libertarian Nanny State? Whatever you want to call it, it’s better than fascism.
A Functioning Near-Anarchic City
The anarchic ideal is not chaos, but rather a smoothly functioning society that operates without a centralized state threatening to use force against its own citizens to keep them in line.
In Oakland, California, the city I call home, we basically have a functioning anarchy (at least in terms of law enforcement). There are so few police per citizen, and the police are so demoralized, that people can basically do what they want without any fear of law enforcement getting involved.
This is not a good thing. We lead the nation in robberies. In some parts of town people dump their trash in the streets and get away it. It’s hard to find a public object without at least one ugly graffiti tag.
What’s remarkable is that things aren’t worse. Most people are good, and will obey reasonable laws because that’s a sensible thing to do. Huge swaths of the city are attractive, clean, well tended, quiet, and relatively safe. Oakland has huge problems, but it’s remarkable how good things are, considering there is almost zero law enforcement in many parts of the city.
Catch-22
Ross Ulbricht fell into the classic criminal Catch-22; when other criminals don’t play fair, you can’t call the police on them. You have to get your own hands dirty. In order to protect his private property, and avoid going to jail, Ulbricht chose to become the enforcer, and his central ideal went out the window.
I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end.
Outsourcing the use of force to the state is one of central pillars of society. We allow the police to enforce laws so we don’t have sit at home all day, holding a rifle and guarding our loot. But how far can we roll back this threat of force? With less income inequality and less scarcity, we might eventually abolish (or at least lessen) the need/desire to steal. And with increased surveillance and less privacy, we might be able to use reputation instead of force to motivate behavior.
You’ve probably already seen the video. If not, it’s worth watching. The main point, that most of us aren’t aware of just how extreme income inequality is in the United States, is an important one.
So why did Steve’s post piss me off? I’ve linked to many of Steve Pavlina’s posts, and I enjoy his writing. He is both practical and spiritual. His writing tends to emphasize changes in attitude and framing; he uses phrases like “aligning yourself with abundance.” Phrases like this make my B.S. meter go off, but I tolerate them from Pavlina because he doesn’t discount the need for action, hard work, and changing habits.
What irritates me about Steve’s post (which includes phrases like “Don’t fuss over what strangers are doing or not doing with their assets.”) is that it ignores the fact that extreme income inequality hurts all of us. We don’t need to be passive and accept income inequality. We can vote for more progressive taxation, and government spending that preserves wealth (a real national health care system, for example, would prevent millions of bankruptcies among middle-class and poor families).
I completely believe in personal responsibility, but I also believe that we should strive for a more equal, more fair, more compassionate society. So many people seem to think that these views are opposed, but they’re not.
To be clear, I’m not swallowing the message of the video whole; there are some inaccuracies worth pointing out:
Perfect wealth equality doesn’t happen under socialism, or communism, or any other system. Wealth equality has never happened in any nation, ever.
The video refers only to wealth distribution and ignores wealth creation. The size of the pie is just as important, or more so. Equal wealth distribution, where everyone is poor, is not a desirable condition.
The video is presented as if by an individual citizen. To my eye, the video looks professionally produced (high-end motion graphics, narration, sound quality, and music), and is posted with a throwaway account on youtube (user “politizane”, with only one video). This post on Mother Jones claims that “politizane” is a freelance filmmaker, proficient in After Effects, staying anonymous in order to “avoid losing clients.” Could be true … but I remain skeptical regarding the source and agenda behind all anonymously posted content.
His outrageous and counter-intuitive proposition that death by violence among human beings has been unevenly but steadily declining throughout history (he provides a great deal of compelling evidence, some of which I discussed in my last post).
His suggestion that intellectuals and academia (especially in the humanities) reconsider their general view that human progress does not exist and is a false ideal.
His point that some of the most horrific genocidal actions in human history have been in pursuit of idealized utopian societies (such as Nazism, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and Stalin’s Communism).
The Messy Utopia
Let’s assume for a minute that the human race avoids destroying itself within the next 100 years. Somehow we’ve made it through global warming, peak oil, massive financial deleveraging, food shortages, our population peaking, droughts and floods, supervolcanoes, weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, corporate malfeasance, extreme concentrations of wealth, ocean acidification and coral reef destruction and the collapse of natural fisheries. Some of these things turned out to be more serious than we thought, some less so, and a whole bunch of other stuff happened that we didn’t even consider or predict at all.
But we’re still here. Maybe 9 billion of us in 2112. Maybe significantly fewer if things have gotten really bad. But still quite a few human beings either way.
So what kind of world do we want to be living in, 100 years from now?
History has shown us pretty clearly that the single-minded relentless pursuit of a “perfect” idealized society is a terrible idea. When the “end” is conceived as infinitely good, that opens up the “means” to be pretty awful (forced relocations, prison camps, and outright genocide, for example).
But that doesn’t mean we have to throw out the idea of progress altogether, or stop trying to envision a better society. Is there room for the pursuit of “messy” utopias?
Here’s how I would contrast a “messy utopia” vs. a “classic utopia”:
Classic Utopia
Messy Utopia
-homogenous population
-diverse population
-rural/pastoral
-capitalizes on efficiencies of cities
-clean slate/new land
-builds/improves on what exists
-one right way
-many good ways
-static/fixed
-constantly evolving
-ignores empirical evidence
-uses empirical evidence
-anti-elite/anti-intellectual
-integrates/uses elites
-disregards less-abled
-accommodates less-abled
-attempts to eliminate problems
-develops systems for coping with problems
-demands moral standards
-encourages moral behavior
-traditional social roles
-wildly divergent social roles
-draconian state power
-judicious use of state power
The “classic utopia” comes in many flavors. Some are secular, others are religious. Some are conservative and some are liberal. All of them are fantastical and not firmly grounded in a realistic view of the world. Here are some examples:
Ayn Rand’s “Galt’s Gulch” from Atlas Shrugged (a secluded enclave protected by energy beams, where residents never borrow things from each other, but instead pay rent for usage)
Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia … a racially segregated secessional nation in which people love arts and crafts, hate TV and professional sports, don’t gossip, smoke a lot of weed, have lots of non-monogamous sex, and plant hidden WMD’s in major non-ecotopian cities as a deterrent to revanchism.
One could go on with visions of libertarian floating city tax havens, anarchist freegan collectives, and so on. These movements, books, and views are not dangerous — what is dangerous is when a powerful insane individual or government tries to implement any kind of utopia with a top-down authoritative approach.
Realism and Optimism Can Co-Exist
I like the idea of envisioning a multitude of messy utopias. Here are my thoughts on rehabilitating the word “progress”:
progress can occur even if human nature doesn’t change
progress isn’t smooth, rather it is interrupted by sharp spikes of regress
not all cultures see progress the same way, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t universal values that most of us embrace
qualities that, when developed in individuals, might lead to progress on a social level might include empathy, reason, connectedness, and purpose
values that many people might agree represent progress on a social level could include more knowledge and understanding (education), less death by violence, public health and safety, more personal freedom, higher social trust, safety nets for families and communities, egalitarianism, rich arts and culture, scientific research and exploration, robust trade, and so forth
Capitalism, as we know it, is reaching the natural end of its global life cycle.
Human beings will retain some of the better aspects of capitalism, including the right to private property, competition in well-regulated markets, robust trade, reasonable compensation for intellectual property, and a modified corporate structure.
The aspects of capitalism that are not long for this world include:
Ayn Rand/Gordon Gecko-style individualism, “greed is good,” disdain for cooperative efforts and collectivist values.
Crass materialism and consumerism as acceptable social norms.
Acceptance of worker exploitation, dehumanizing working conditions, extreme poverty, homelessness, poor nutrition, limited access to healthcare, and substandard education as “necessary costs” in a “free” market economy.
The “predator/sociopathic” corporate charter model, under which corporations are legally obligated to prioritize profit-making over the environment, public health, worker health and safety, research and innovation, public and community wealth, and everything else.
In short, we’re moving towards humane markets (providing for each other) and away from human markets (exploiting each other).
Why is predatory, consumeristic capitalism on its way out? A number of factors are simultaneously converging:
Human population growth is tapering off. Many people alive today will be alive to witness the most significant moment in our collective history — the human population peak. Capitalism is based on perpetual growth, which is not compatible with permanent population decline. Some of the challenges related to population decline will include abandoned cities, rewilding, and permanent economic shrinkage.
We are running into severe environmental limitations. We have triggered the Anthropocene, a geological age characterized by mass extinctions, radical changes in local climates, overall global warming, acidification of oceans from excess CO2 absorption (which will result in almost no fish or coral reefs, but lots of jellyfish and algae), rising sea levels (and massive floods), endless droughts (resulting in the current Dustbowlification of the central US), deforestation, chemical pollution, gargantuan gyres of plastic detritus, and overall ecological shittiness. These problems are a direct result of a devouring capitalist system that sidelines such considerations as “externalities.”
We are in the midst of a radical reorganization of production methods. More and more things are essentially free to produce and distribute, and can be shared/co-created via networks and decentralized production centers (home workshops, personal computers, 3D printers). Open-source production methods, freeware, and peer-to-peer distribution methods directly threaten top-down, strictly controlled capitalistic profit-generation models. Open-source is upending capitalism. Edit – as a commenter on Facebook pointed out, automation (scripting) is doing the same thing for services as peer-to-peer, open source, and 3D printing are doing for products. Humans optional.
Attitudes toward capitalism are changing. The United States, the world’s glowing beacon of capitalistic success, is no longer so shiny. Vast regions of our country display decrepit infrastructure. Cities are going bankrupt. Unemployment is high and underemployment is rampant. Millions go without access to professional healthcare. Our educational system produces only middling results. Wealth inequality is extremely high, and the tax-dodging, politically manipulating plutocrats are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their ill-gotten gains and privileges. Meanwhile, nations that lean more towards social democracy sport better infrastructure, better educated kids, nicer looking cities, cleaner environments, and healthier, happier citizens.
In summary, the 10,000-year pyramid scheme that has been generating wealth at the expense of non-renewable planetary resources has reached its limit. We have exhausted, in order, mega-fauna, pristine virgin forests, fossil fuels, free food from the ocean, fresh water sources, and an atmosphere that regulates temperature, rainfall, and local weather patterns. We have even used up some elements (like helium, which permanently escapes into outer space), and destroyed entire landscapes to extract gold, silver, copper, and rare metals.
The free ride is over, and now we begin a slow, painful deleveraging (both ecological and financial/economic) as we attempt to repair ecological systems and weather our own population peak (in other words, taper off, and not collapse).
So what do we do now? Is all hope lost?
The alternatives to consumeristic predatory capitalism are not mysterious, nebulous, or theoretical. They are already operating and established in many ways, on both large and small scales. Some examples include:
Dozens of countries (including most European countries, but also Canada and Japan) operate more or less as social democracies, and manage to provide healthcare, education, public safety, and other benefits to all of their citizens. Taxes are higher, but income and social inequality are lower. Social trust and happiness tend to be higher in functioning social democracies, which has a lot to do with more income equality.
Large-scale cooperatives such as the Mondragon Corporation provides models for how to simultaneously achieve business excellence and social responsibility.
Open-Source Ecology and their audacious Global Village Construction Set project provide a window into the future of open-source production and distribution methods (beyond information products and into the realm of functioning machines).
Some citizens of the United States are slavishly dedicated to right-wing “winner take all” capitalism, and are outrageously fearful of the lefty pinko “welfare state.” What is really threatening the wealth of our country is not worker benefits, food stamps, public schools, and national healthcare, but rather unfunded long-term invasions of foreign countries, Wall Street bailouts, and ultra-rich tax dodgers.
The Way Forward
Globally, we’ve already explored the consequences of extreme collectivism. We’re not going back. Reasonably regulated free markets are more efficient and generate more wealth than markets that are owned and operated by the state, with no private incentives. I’m not arguing for communism, an end to private ownership, or for “all information to be free” (no intellectual property rights).
What I’m pointing out is that the unstoppable trends of human population peak, the Anthropocene, and open-source production and distribution leave us no choice but to provide for each other during the big deleveraging. Nations that prioritize the health and wealth of citizens over the health and wealth of corporations will fare better during the approaching epoch of restoration, repair, and rewilding.
Is the future of humanity bright? I think it is, especially in terms of scientific and technological progress.
Is consumeristic “winner take all” capitalism the best system for ushering in a bright future for humanity? The Libertarian Space Men think so. I’m placing my bets with the Gaia Collective.
