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.
Yesterday morning I was happily drinking coffee and reading the New York Times, when I came across this disturbing article by conservative think tanker Arthur Brooks.
The piece starts off as a bland rehash of “the latest” happiness research (trotting out studies from the seventies). Nothing new, but nothing offensive either. Towards the end, the piece takes a sharp right turn as Brooks champions free enterprise as the solution to both personal happiness and global poverty. The bogeymen of socialism and collectivism are trotted out as the usual enemies. Perhaps as an apologetic concession to liberal NYT readers, Brooks does acknowledge that social mobility and economic opportunity are on the decline in the United States (at least as compared to Canada and the Scandinavian countries — ironically all collectivist social democracies). The whole piece is a confused mess.
Personal Development Hijacked by Corporate Ideology
So why am I writing about it?
This blog is subtitled “Systems for Living Well.” I agree with many of Arthur Brooks’ conclusions about personal happiness (a spiritual life, strong relationships, meaningful work, and connection to community are all important). But I want to distance myself from Brooks (as well as bloggers like Steve Pavlina, Gretchen Rubin, Tony Robbins, and Tim Ferriss) who approach personal happiness and life satisfaction in a “bubble” context, ignoring social and political issues as if they didn’t exist.
Too often, self-help philosophies function as a justification for right-wing ideology. Ignore the bad cards life has dealt you, and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps! Pursue your passion and beat the economic odds! Be a winner not a loser! A credo of personal accountability ties in neatly to ideals of free enterprise and anti-welfare sentiments.
In a similar vein, advocating gratitude and forgiveness as spiritual practices is usually good advice (in terms of emotional health and personal empowerment). But the same philosophy can be twisted to imply that workers should be happy with (and feel grateful for) whatever is doled out by their employers, instead of negotiating for better wages, benefits, and working conditions, or fighting against corporate crime and corruption. It’s one thing to forgive the CEO of a Wall Street company that swindled tax-payers, so you don’t have to live with hate in your heart. But it’s another thing to lie down and let them do it again.
I believe in personal accountability, the value of hard work, establishing effective habits, practicing gratitude — all the same things that the Pavlina/Rubin/Robbins/Ferriss types are pushing. But I also believe that if we truly want to live well, we should fight against the injustices that prevent others from living well.
So what are the injustices we should be fighting against? Well, for starters:
Maybe, if I’m not happy, it’s because my conscience isn’t clear. Maybe I’m not working hard enough for the right for others to get a fair shot at the pursuit of happiness. Yes, we’re all responsible for our own happiness and sense of meaning in life. But if we ignore injustice, others may not even get the chance to pursue happiness.
Call To Action
To writers, bloggers, economists, psychologists, and social scientists who are exploring the topic of happiness, here’s what I’m suggesting:
Don’t be a tool for corporate ideology. In the discussion of personal happiness and life meaning, don’t ignore oppression and injustice, wherever you see it.
Allow for the possibility that the concepts of personal accountability and social inequity/injustice can co-exist.
Don’t only look at happiness and life satisfaction on a personal level, but consider social and economic factors that affect us collectively, and call people to action to fight against injustice, greed, corruption, oppression, and other realities that hurt all of us.
I do understand why self-help writers want to steer clear of these topics. If you write about political issues, you potentially lose half your audience (or more). And I want to give credit to Ferriss and Robbins especially for raising money for schools, fighting poverty, etc.
But it’s delusional to think that we can *all* pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and visualize (or optimize) our way to an ideal life, when income inequality is so high, and social mobility so low, and we live in an age of rampant unchecked corporate irresponsibility.
It’s cold outside. Crisp. You snow-state people might laugh, but temperatures in the thirties are unusual for the Bay Area (especially the East Bay). But what I was thinking of, when I dropped my daughter off for school this morning, was how thankful I felt for *clear* skies. If you’ve been following the news in China you know what I’m talking about. Air pollution is so bad that visibility is as low as 5 meters in some cities.
I remember similar stories about Los Angeles in the early 70’s (though I don’t think it ever got as bad as mainland China). Things got better after strong amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1970 and 1977.
Environmental compliance can be an expensive chore for businesses (I’ve helped a few on the reporting side of things). But once the changes to operations and systems are made, they’re done, and the result is a cleaner environment.
The alternative is the pollution dystopia the Chinese have created in their balls-out push for global economic domination. The good news is that the problem is fixable. The solution is not to wait for a windy day (the current Chinese strategy), but national legislation with high air quality standards and strong enforcement.
I would love to visit China someday. But not just yet.
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.
Software coders use the phrase “technical debt” to refer to aspects of an application that are poorly designed and might cause trouble down the road. Hard-coded references, non-normalized data-structures, and opaque functions that do too many things all contribute to a project’s technical debt.
It’s a helpful concept, and one that makes me consider kinds of debt beyond fiscal/financial.
The national debt consists of public debt (money the U.S. government owes its citizens, corporations, and foreign governments) and debt held by governmental accounts, including the Social Security Trust fund. Here’s a simple breakdown of U.S. Federal Debt compiled by Steve Conover of The Skeptical Optimist, taken from this article:
Who do we owe?
The current U.S. debt is about the same as our annual GDP. This worries some people. I don’t know enough about economics to know if I should worry about this statistic or not. Economists who seem credible to me seem to lean towards reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio by encouraging economic growth. Gold-bugs like Ron Paul and the bears over at zerohedge.com are totally freaking out about the size of the national debt and are hoarding gold coins, canned food, and bullets. They insist we’re “past the point of no return” in terms of a bloated out-of-control fiat currency and that Nigerian-style hyperinflation and social collapse are right around the corner.
Who to believe?
While I will admit to a small hoard of canned food and gold coins, it’s not the fiscal debt that worries me most. There are other kinds of national debt that reduce a nation’s productivity and can even edge it towards collapse.
Like what?
The U.S. carries a large infrastructure debt, with an aging, inefficient power grid, laughably slow internet, and old-ass railways and airports. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave U.S. infrastructure a “D” grade back in 2009 (the next infrastructure report will be released March 19th). I think Obama missed a huge opportunity by not pushing for more and bigger public works programs after the 2008 economic crisis (which would have also boosted employment).
As a nation we carry several kinds of social debt too. Racial debt, for being a country that has had legal slavery for 38% of its short history. Another is income inequality, which breeds resentment and dissatisfaction among neighbors and neighboring communities.
We carry a health debt; more and more we are a nation of obese people with respiratory, cardiovascular, and blood-sugar control problems.
Other countries carry far more debt than we do in certain areas. India carries a huge debt in terms of women’s rights and safety. China carries huge debts in terms of pollution, government corruption, and income inequality. Japan has a serious demographic debt (too many old people and not enough young people).
Environmentally we’re doing much better than China, but there are signs of serious regress with our new love of fracking, and the transfer of public lands to private interests.
What about moral debt? For decades, after World War 2, the United States held the world’s moral high ground. More recently, adventurism in the Middle East, our freedom-eroding “end justifies the means” war against terrorism, and remote control drone strikes that murder civilians have all eroded our pride. So has our mediocre treatment of the innocent poor (children) within our own borders.
How do we pay our debts? It’s a lot of work, but not complicated. We rein in the most severe of our budget excesses (foreign invasions), and launch massive (but relatively cheap) preventative health campaigns to reduce long-term medical costs. We invest in infrastructure, education, and scientific research, which all pay huge dividends a few decades down the road. We make our tax system more progressive to curb income inequality.
How do we repay our moral/ethical debts, and regain the moral high ground in our own eyes and the eyes of the world?
We should fund, build, and discover things that contribute to the welfare of all humankind. An effective asteroid tracking program. A space elevator, so we don’t have a waste a buttload of rocket fuel every time we want to get up out of our gravity armchair. Publicly-funded scientific research that goes into the global public domain. A mission to Tau Ceti.
Big, expensive projects? Definitely — but all excellent investments in our economy and national spirit.
If we don’t pay our debts and come up with a new sense of national purpose, inertia will lead us to more divisiveness, mediocrity, isolationism, cultural Balkanization, dirty energy, bankruptcy (of every kind), and boring, purposeless lives. If not outright collapse, then gradual, depressing decline.
So let’s get our shit together, unite, and get some cool stuff done.
