The Emperor Drives an AT-AT

Next year is an election cycle in the United States, and the airwaves will be filled with congressmen and other officials demonizing their rivals and hurling invective, promising change or restoration, before sweeping into office to do what their predecessors have done for dozens of years previously: very little of worth. A few years ago I wrote that the American political system had been ruined by finance-driven election campaigns. I still believe this, but in recent years I've begun to see it spoiled in another fashion. When considering how vast the government has grown in attempting to tackle complex problems, I suspect it has gotten too big to be effective. I consider it a truth that the greater the complexity in a system, the greater its fragility.

In 2008, I was  joyful that Barack Obama had been elected president. Not that I voted for him; that was out from the moment I learned he had supported the PATRIOT Act.  But -- in addition to dreading Palin and the bellicose McCain -- I had become fascinated with popular political movements, direct action,  direct democracy -- the politics of people congregating in mobs and forcing the government to respond to them, as with the Civil Rights movement.  Obama's language indicated that he believed in that, too; his best political speech to date was one given after he was beaten by Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary; he told a story of America that featured ordinary citizens as the agents of change, the central actors in the drama:

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes, we can.
It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights: Yes, we can.
It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness: Yes, we can.
It was the call of workers who organized, women who reached for the ballot, a president who chose the moon as our new frontier, and a king who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the promised land: Yes, we can, to justice and equality.

Save for the mention of JFK's enterprising vision, , the people in this story were not civic leaders, and certainly not politicians; they were ordinary people effecting changes themselves. Maybe he had voted for the PATRIOT act so he wouldn't be criticized as soft on terrorism, I thought. In view of his emphasis on grassroots campaign financing, I dreamed: maybe the man and the vision were one, maybe he was a leader who wanted to empower people to help themselves. The president of the last six years hasn't been that man, however; he has instead been like the last man to sit in the big seat:  frightfully comfortable with its power. The chair in the oval office is one that molds the occupant to its contours, rather than being molded by theirs. I do not believe Obama is malevolent;  I believe the NSA scandals and the like simply bear witness to the fact that power is corrosive. People weren't meant to wield the power a president has;  there's a reason lawmaking was supposed to be the province of a Congress that would spend its time arguing instead of doing things, because our brains can't handle the rush.  Although I am woefully disappointed in the dream, the failing is in the system and not the man. Simply put, I do not believe Obama, Bush, or any congressman is actually in charge.  The systems controlling American politics -- banking, economics, etc. - aren't under the control of any one man.  Perhaps these systems aren't even under the control of a group of men, perhaps they're plowing along under their own inertia.

We look to the President or to the Prime Minister to do stuff because at heart we are chimpanzees whose idea of a leader is an alpha who can take direct, immediate, precise action. He can say "move", and the troop moves; "attack", and the troop attacks.  Modern political leaders aren't in that position. Even if they sit in the big seat and amass power, , they can't do it because the things they're trying to do are too vast.  A president can't dictate food prices, or alter the atmosphere. They can try -- they can pour enormous subsidies into agriculture, for instance -- but they won't necessarily get what they want. At that level, they're using so much power they can't predict what will happen. Nixon wasn't trying to create a nation where obesity and diabetes were more common than health, or where the life of rural and small-town American had been destroyed by agribusiness, but that's what he did.   The politics of the modern state put a leader in a position of having to exercise enormous power that he can't really control;  he is made captain of a runaway locomotive. The tracks dictate his course;  he can blow all the whistles he likes, but the machine is moving on its own inertia.  This brings to my mind -- my SF-addled mind -- the image of someone trying to drive an AT-AT.

The AT-AT, introduced in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back,  is the largest, most stupidly-contrived war machine one might imagine.  They are enormous and under the direction of men sitting in their heads, who are somehow expected to move four clanking legs and direct fire from the head while being unaware of anything happening behind them. In the movie, the machines are not destroyed by weapons, but by their own clumsiness: the rebels trip the legs and the great terrible machine falls down.  Imagine how destructive these machines would be in action, even without their guns;  the clumsy 'feet' would constantly smash things on the ground even if the drivers weren't aiming to.  AT-ATs are too big, too removed from the action, too sluggish to respond -- they are doomed by their own size, either to blundering or to eventual destruction.

For this reason I have lost interest in national politics, because it doesn't matter who is captaining the AT-AT: it's going to ignore important matters,   crush life underfoot, and stumble ever-forward intending destruction.  The state, I think, is a machine that answers to no one's direction, and takes would-be commanders of it along for a ride. National politics, because it seems to be an exercise is spending money, and arguing, neither of which fascinates me. What I am interested in, what I think we need all over the world, are healthier places and more fulfilled people. My politics are local, limited to my home, my neighborhood, my city. Beyond that governance is too abstract to bother with.  I don't know how this emphasis will be expressed in my life; presently I am researching local, sustainable agriculture. There is a great deal of interest in that in this area, for we are an agricultural region and still peopled by those distrustful of those in power, from corporations to the state.  Whatever the expression, I believe localism is going to be at the heart of my thinking, and both the end and the means have to be local.  Living in a town with the painful history and lingering problems, I know we have to effect its healing on our own. Industrial agriculture can't restore topsoil and heal the land;  that takes the careful husbandry of a few people on the ground, people with a stake in restoring it. The same is true of other political problems; we have to build on personal, civic responsibility. I am no longer interested in people forcing the government to respond to them; people ought to effect the changes themselves and let the AT-AT stumble about as it will.  We have to create our own pockets of civic health everywhere.

Accidentally Evil: Considering Libertarianism

For years my operative definition of 'libertarian' was 'someone with all of the vices of a Republican, and none of the virtues'.  That is, I regarded them as people who not only wanted to let the beast of the free market run riot over people and the environment, but who at the same time denied the wisdom of government maintaining systems too important to turn on profit - like education and healthcare. The appeal of libertarianism, I thought, must be limited to big business and psychopaths.

I eventually learned the difference between libertarianism, which had 'good' (read 'left') roots, but had been hijacked by the right, and Objectivism, which was what I took the former to mean. For most of my life, I regarded socialism and communism as functions of a coercive, oppressive State:  those words were synonymous to me with Stalin and Mao. Thus, while the idea of equality and such was very nice, it wasn't workable because that kind of power cannot be trusted to human hands. If growing up under an authoritarian god and religion, and later revolting from it, had instilled in me anything, it was a contempt for force and coercion. Emile Carles' A Life of Her Own introduced me to leftists who believed in peaceful, democratic communism -- a government in which the ideals of communists were realized through democratic, not autocratic, means. They saw communism not as an ideal that had to be enforced from the top down, but which was a perfectly logical application and extension of democracy: self-rule. How could any one be at liberty when they did not have economic self-command?

This, for me, was the most valuable idea in Marxist thought. The labor theory of value was fine, the historical dialectic made sense enough, and class struggle was simply the human way of the Darwinian struggle for existence. But economic independence? It was an idea that took on momentous importance. At this time same, I was studying the life of Gandhi, whose commitment to nonviolence was seductive -- but his thinking was not limited to that. He stressed the importance of economic self-reliance for India and for Indians in general: they should not be swallowed up by the state economy or the world economy, but function as as people living in thousands of largely self-sufficient communities. For him, this was of spiritual importance -- and for me, a new student of Stoicism who now put great stock in self-command and independence, it was part of the allure. The essential reason for economic self-reliance, however,  was practical:  if you can fend for yourself, you won't depend on the Leader, or his Army, or the government. This I thought key to keeping endeavors at equality from being the victims of power. Keep the power distributed among the people, and you can have your revolution without simply replacing one tyrant with another.

All of these ideas -- Marxism, Stoicism, Gandhigiri -- mixed together in my mind, and I emerged from my university studies someone who thought of himself as a left-libertarian. I made no association with the so-called libertarians of the right, the Americans who were simply dressing up free market profiteering with the principle of liberty,  but I shared with them a sharp disdain for authority and force. This was where the libertarian label came from in the first place: I didn't think I or anyone else had the right to order anyone about. Although I shared the ideals of communism in part, in truth my ideal community was a bit more old-fashioned. While thousands of communes in a world republic was fine, I'd be happy if the people in a given town owned the businesses in that town, and they bought their food from people who grew it just outside of town, and the people growing that food likewise lived just outside of town. The idea, for me, was that each community was independent and nominally self-sufficient. Though connected to a world economy that it purchased goods from, it was largely self-contained: people who know one another and be responsible on that basis.  This is an old-fashioned notion, of course, but it was mine and it remains mine.

 I've been mourning the loss of small-town communities, the kind described above,  virtually all of my thinking life without knowing it.  Early on I developed an obsession with cities of the early 20th century. At first I thought this owed to my wanting to live in a big city, but eventually I realized it was because I saw in these cities of the past a shadow of what I wanted in the present: to live in a town of healthy buildings filled with people whose lives connected to one in a myriad of ways every day. I realized this after I moved to my university town of Montevallo, whose setting evoked that feeling quite strongly.  But before I realized that, I was obsessed with cities in general, and this has lead to odd interests in the details of transportation, energy, planning, infrastructure, and the various systems and technologies and practices that keep cities alive.  Since graduating from the university, I've been engaged in private study of the holy trinity of urban civilization: food, energy, and infrastructure, which includes transportation.  This is how I became slightly evil.

Without realizing it, studying the history of these subjects lured me into the dark side: the Other Libertarianism. The American libertarianism. The market-obsessed libertarianism.  When I studied urban planning, I came to realize how the government promotes city-destroying urban sprawl through zoning codes and highway and housing subsidies. When studying food, I grew disgruntled after realizing how successful regulations and subsidies are to letting corporate giants monopolize farming and make it an industrial enterprise, reliant on disaster-inviting monocultures and cheap oil that destroys the land.  Every field I studied attentively,  I found regulation in the way. I was a big fan of regulation: I viewed big business with fear and wanted a government that would keep a pistol pointed in its face all the time. I wanted the lion of the market to be chained and caged. But now I was seeing instances of it hurting people -- and not just getting in the way of productive endeavors, but promoting power accretion. At first, I merely winced -- oh, here's bad regulation, we should remove it and make new regulation, regulation that will be good -- but as I continue to run into those bits of bad regulation, I realized they were popping up with unfortunate regularity. They weren't exceptions to the rule; they were the rule, an example of what happens when we ignore the limits of our knowledge and assume we can make things so by legislative fiat. I believe these community-destroying forces of sprawl and big business would hoist themselves on their own petards were they not on the life-support of public funding.

Though I've begun to appreciate the market as a means of sorting things out, I'm only slightly evil.  I do not believe the chief end of man is self-satisfaction, or that money is the measure of  a good life. My roots remain in simple living and the  cultivation in myself the best fruits of the human condition.  However much I might admire Emma Goldman's individualist stance, I don't know if it is one I share, for we cannot escape our biological status as social creatures, and more importantly as mortal creatures -- creatures for whom a connection to the group, to a community, to a folk of our own is our  hope of living beyond the grave. If we live, it is because we are remembered. The philosophical mind may know there is no sting in death, but the animal flees from it as the instincts of million years triumphant urge it to. Not for me is the atomization of humanity into billions of self-absorbed creatures,  who sit in a puddle of time and space and think themselves masters of the cosmic ocean. The older I get the more I recognize the importance of our connections to one another, connections perhaps more important than an idealized notion of liberty.

au Natural

Both the Stoics and the Epicureans advocated living according to nature, though each sought inspiration with different eyes. The Stoics believed in a universe bound up by a divine plan, and that a life of virtue meant living according to that plan, accepting what happened as the will of God -- or cosmic fate.  Deities and their wills were more immaterial to the Epicureans, however, who saw more chaos than order in the cosmos and believed virtue lay in making the best of what we were given, of enjoying life while it lasted. There is wisdom in learning to adapt to whatever life throws at you, just as there is wisdom in enjoying it fully and not getting too distracted by mental chatter -- but there is more to living naturally than either.

What does it mean to live naturally? Outside of culture, beliefs, and ideology, human beings are fundamentally members of the animal kingdom in full standing. We use ideas to put distance between ourselves and that kingdom, but we are its subjects at every moment of the day whether we think we are or not. We are motivated by the same needs and instincts as every other animal on the planet, even if we dress those instincts up as feelings.  Our instincts and needs are the products, not of perfect creation, but of imperfect evolution, of millions of years of trial, error, fix-it-on-the-fly biological compromise.  To live naturally, first, is to respect that fact.

Before going forward, however, there is the matter of the naturalistic fallacy to address. Just because something is Natural does not mean  it is good, or to be desired.  Wariness and hostility toward strangers might be a natural instinct, but in modern times, chances are that the sudden arrival of group of strangers will not be a raiding party intent on killing your young,  eating your fruit, and kidnapping your sisters -- a scenario our genes may be expecting when they produce anxiety in us at the appearance of an unknown person.  Here is the wisdom of philosophy, in teaching us to overcome instincts that work to our detriment.  However, we will presumably function best in the environment in which we evolved. That environment is not limited to the physical climate, but includes the kind of behaviors we're allowed to enact, the relations we engage in. Thus, humans are happier with one another than alone; we are happier sheltered from inclement weather than exposed to it; we are happier eating fresh food than rotting.

We must be conscious of our status as natural creatures, because instincts will manifest themselves with or without our permission.  Hierarchies are ubiquitous among social animals, for instance, and in mammals there is often an alpha individual who rises to the top through strength, cunning, or in the case of certain primate species, cunning. Why then are we so surprised at the regularity with which political systems produce strongmen, and our easiness in accepting them?  That monarchies persisted for so long, and that democracies become oppressive, is less a condemnation of political organization and more a mark against the systems which allow our natural weakness to lead to unnatural brutality. If Hitler had been the alpha male of a group of hunter-gatherers,  the same strengths which brought him to power might have let him lead the tribe against threats -- and if they did not, or if those strengths failed him, he could have been displaced with ease.  Civilization, however, has given alphas armies to expand their own power beyond natural limits, and given them means (like tradition or media outlets)  to control by influence what they cannot touch by brute force.

We cannot turn back the clock and become hunter-gatherers. We must learn to work within the limits of our biology. In the realm of politics,   the most rational response to our hierarchical weakness is to decentralize power as much as possible. Charismatic, strong, and cunning individuals will rise in every population and hold influence over people, but there is no reason their power must metastasize and become cancerous, dementing and corrupting them while abusing the public. Despite the lessons of the 20th century, political power, especially in the United States, is tending to become even more centralized, a trend that needs desperately to be reversed. Equally problematic is the power amassing in corporate entities, who are just as liable to tyranny as politicians, but who are even more wily, turning the very chains of regulation that we try to bind them by into weapons to whip their rivals and opponents with.

There is more to 'natural living' than politics, however. Evolution is starting to guide medicine more than in years past: we are now realizing that dropping anti-biotic bombs into our guts isn't the wisest course of action  given our dependence on some bacterial species for basic processes like digestion. Some researchers suggest that our bodies need 'hostile' bacteria in them just to give our immune system something to do: otherwise, it attacks its own body.  Or take matters of diet:  just as a cat would not fare well on salad, or a dog on plankton,  or a koala on anything other than eucalyptus leaves, so do we not fare well on  many of the modern 'foodstuffs' filling the grocery store.  In recent  years a 'paleo' diet movement has arisen, maintaining that people should eat what we evolved to eat: meat, fruit, nuts, and some vegetables, leaving behind artificial food products like snack cakes, rolls, margarine, and imitation crab meat. 

Many of the problems we face are caused by our attempting to live as something we are not, as creatures in a world of our choosing. We cannot drastically change our circumstances of living and expect the consequences to be marginal.  We create an environment filled with fake food and no opportunities for the physical exertion our bodies were designed for, then wonder why obesity and diabetes have soared. We allow children to keep themselves overly stimulated with games on their tablets, or force them to sit in a box for seven hours a day quietly listening, and then label mark them as having attention deficit disorder.  Perhaps it is our way of living, not ourselves, that are disordered. Maybe if children were taught the way they were evolved to be taught -- in the field, through the experience -- and played as they evolved to play,  skin on skin with physical playmates --  they would not be bundles of neuroses. Perhaps if adults spent more time with one another and their families, and less time slaving at jobs producing profits for other persons, or stuck in traffic, they would not be as easy marks for depression and energetic religions.

Truth be told, I don't know what it means, entirely, to live naturally. I have some ideas, which is why I eat real food,  voted libertarian in the last election, and practice simple living.  In abstract, I can only say: to live naturally is to embrace our humanity -- to guard against our weaknesses while revelling in the experience of being human.

Despair, Ye Mighty

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818. "Ozymandias".)

Humanism and Politics

I'm often tempted to describe my political views as humanist. This is because for me humanism is all-encompassing. I don't restrict myself to the modern definition, which tends to be defined by what it isn't, but rather embrace the whole of humanity's spirit: literature, politics, philosophy, and everything else in the library. Although there are humanist parties in place (associated with the "Humanist International"), I don't know too much about them and according to Wikipedia -- whose veracity is unquestionable, you know -- other humanist groups view them with a great deal of suspicion. This is not a matter I have looked into for myself because it is a moot subject: there is no Humanist Party in the United States that I know of. If there was, though, what would be be constituted of?

I sometimes identify my politics with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to make it clear I am human-rights centered. I am a humanist: my concerns start with humanity first, not in endorsing political ideologies. It seems to me that many political groups care only for abstracts -- The Nation, for instance, or The Economy. These things only matter to the point that they help us. I care little for free markets or planned economies by themselves: I want to know what state people can be their best in. I have a few opinions on that subject, but I don't know if this is the place for them. I think human rights is a good starting point for political humanism. I think human rights must be universal, with no distinctions made to seperate those who do not share political viewpoints. To deny human rights to prisoners, even terrorists, is to deny our own humanity. I don't think we can keep someone's face in the dirt without getting down there themselves, in other words. We can't call ourselves humanists and forgoe human rights.

Branching off from a commitment to human rights is the necessity for democracy: among the rights we cherish is the right of every person to think, believe, and act for himself -- to be in control of his or her own destiny. 

Although human rights is a starting point, crucial to modern humanism is the spirit of rationality. Reason must inform our politics -- not vain trust in ideology. It is one thing to explore the consequences of free-market options versus planned options, for instance: it is another to believe that The Free Market is god and that only in it can people be happy. The same goes for planned economies: although they sound splendid on paper, societies are difficult things to plan. I mention these not because of the current political debate, but because this is something I think about a lot: I have a zealous distrust of corporate power and a healthy respect for the corrupting influence that power has on the people who think they hold it, but I also can't underestimate the tendecy for bureacracies to get bogged down or for the system to simply not work because we will never have access to all the information that we need to plan things properly.

I don't need to praise Reason to humanists, but I so very rarely hear it praised in political matters. Instead, we hear a lot about belief and values. I don't condemn these things, but we must temper them with reason. We cannot blindly trust in something because it makes us feel good, or because if everyone trusted in it everyone would be happy. Unthinking praise for beliefs and values is the road to nationalism, for beliefs and values are always personal. Reason is impersonal: we humans may think differently about many things, but we know something is reasonable when we hear it. Our brains understand the language of logic, even if they make mistakes in the translation. Reason cannot be a passive thing: we must interrogate ideas, make them prove their worth. 

You might wonder why I have not yet mentioned church-state seperation, as it seems to be the easiest thing for humanists to rally around. I think this misses the point: we plant the flag and bare our teeth when a religious group attempts to enforce its own values on the rest of us, but try to do the same about corporations influecing the government through campaign contributions and you'll be called a socialist. There is no difference between an oil company and a religious "company" influencing politics or culture: a minority is attempting to rule the majority, or more plainly one group is attempting to dominate or unduly influence another.

Although these are a couple of starting points, there's much room for individual interpretations. Because of my commitment to human rights, for instance, I am a firm believer in universal healthcare. For me, healthcare is too important to not be available to all who need it: it is a moral imperative. I do not want it to be subject to the whims of profit and greed: the starting point for planning the policy must be to meet needs, not to generate profit. Democracy is also not a simple issue: while some believe in representation, others value more direct forms of democracy.

What are your thoughts on how humanism can be expressed politically? 

Anarchism and Humanism

Ever since reading an Emma Goldman reader (Red Emma Speaks), I've been thinking about humanism and anarchism. Anarchism was never an idea that crossed my mind before: to the extent that I thought of it, I regarded anarchism as the province of odd ducks -- people who wanted to reject everything in society, who cared only for themselves and what they wanted to do. The biography of Emile Carles, a fantastically interesting woman who became a freethinking humanist despite her background as a peasant girl in late 19th century France, first exposed me to the thoughts of self-identifying anarchists.  Carles seems to be as passionate a humanist as I, but she saw government as the enemy of her values -- as a tool of the few in power. I was hard-pressed to disagree given her account. Modern nation-states have a frightful amount of power over people, and they are quick to abuse it.  My own feelings of patriotism were already changing during this period: I increasingly distanced myself from politics while yearning for something on a smaller scale --a "human-sized" community where juggernauts were absent. Thanks in part to Stoicism, my moral code became sterner -- more demanding of me to live truly, to seperate myself from culture and live according to rational and human principles.  Laws, tradition, and culture do not matter: only goodness, only justice, only truth.

No gods and no masters for me, then. All the little roads in my life seemed to lead to anarchism: both humanism and Stoicism, for instance,  encourage people to free themselves from slavery -- from the will of outside forces, whatever form they take. Both cultures and dictators can be tyrants: I must stand against both.  When I read Red Emma Speaks, I found much of interest. She, too, stood for humanity: she opposed governments that use people unjustly, of religion that cripples us, of cultural norms.  She was a rabid individualist who derided the great mass of humanity who behave unthinkingly, following whichever flag their priests and politicans offer.  This is hard for a humanist to hear: we wish to believe the best of people. Losing heart in ourselves means conceding defeat to our weaknesses, not gloriously triumphing in spite of them.

I became and matured as a freethinker in 2006, and ever since then I have maintained a no-nonsense state of mind. When I hear an explaination or a model of something -- Marxism and Stoicism are my own personal examples -- I will admit that they sound valid, but I will not admit them into my mind before they show some rational identification of some kind. Whatever the model, if I am to believe it I want to understand it. Believing things without this inquiry is the path to self-deception. I suppose it's linked to naturalism: I call it my "show me the bones" mentality. I want to see what makes the model tick. When the subject is humanity, for instance, my "show me the bones" policy means the idea must rest on our biological heritage. We human beings are natural creatures, who are as inseperaable from Earth's history as elephants, pine trees, and the Indian Ocean.  I think it most likely that our ancestors, prior to settling permanently, acted like modern primates: we lived in family groups.  We are social animals, born into and living in groups. If we try to live by ourselves, utterly alone, I think it probable that we will be miserable.

Our intelligence grants us admittance to another world, the world of culture and beliefs. We live in this one, too. We live in this cultural-social world as assuredly as we live in the western or eastern hemispheres: we breathe ideas as we breathe oxygen.  To what extent can we seperate ourselves from that culture, from society, and be happy?  What balance between staying true to our highest ideals and compromising so to live comfortably within our society is the best for human flourishing? These are questions I am still grappling with, questions I doubt I will have answers for anytime soon.

For me, humanism and anarchism walk the same road for a great distance. They both stand for humanity, rejecting outside influences. Humanism tends to focus its wrath on religion, anarchism on government.  If Emma Goldman and Emile Carles are examples, both believe in the potential of humanity, and that this potential must be freed if it is to be realized in full.  I think, though, there is a point at which the paths diverge: humanism is more community-based, using politics to move society forward in ideals. Anarchism is fixated on the individual, the anarchist's role to be an island in a sea of culture. As much as I sympathize with the anarchist spirit, my heart is and ever shall be a Humanist one.

The Fate of Democracy in the US II: A Solution?

In my last article I identified what I think are two problems with the American political system:

1. Political power, ideally in the hands of the voting public, is not and cannot be realized by that public because of a lack of actual information. Actual power is instead in the hands of those who control the information the public receives through advertisements and special-interest pamphlets.
2. Actual power in the hands of the politicians is not often used for the common good. Politicians are beholden to campaign contributors and to the whims of the voting public -- uninformed, fickle, and often irrational. They cannot promote unpopular legislation for fear of losing their jobs, and they often make bad decisions purely to maintain their office.
   

I believe money is the root of the problem -- and so my solution is to remove it from the political equation as much as possible. End campaigning -- period. Advertising has no place in politics. There should be no television ads, no radio spots, no promotional political material from any special interest group, no pulpit commentary -- nothing. If money can influence a medium, the medium is unsuitable for the democratic process. In one fell swoop, we remove the main cause of political corruption: money. People can no longer be motivated by attack ads: their fears cannot be preyed upon. The politicians and interest groups will have no medium through which to lie. Because they no longer have to spend so much time cajoling the public, they can do their jobs. Because they no longer have to compromise their integrity to raise money, they can do their jobs more effectively. Democracy can become a public affair -- not a privatized, money-driven affair.

How are voters to make informed decisions in this new system? I propose a new way to manage and distribute information -- a rationalization of the democratic process. People who want to run for any given office must submit an election dossier -- a summary of their relevant qualifications, their stances on the issues, an explanation of why they think a given issue is important, and so on -- to a new "Voter Information Office". This office, before which all are equal, adds a summary of that person's voting record (if they have held office before) to the dossier, and all dossiers are made available online a year before the election. In this way, politicians stand on their own records and their own opinions -- not compromised by or to party interests, money, or lies. The dossiers can also be augmented by information from independent fact-checking institutions. A year should allow plenty of time for the voters to access and analyze all relevant information to make their decision. If necessary, we can have a two-day holiday season before the election day for voters to make last-minute decisions.

We can supplement this with televised town-hall meetings, although this could be ungainly if there are a large number of people running for the same office. Small local elections like mayor, city council member, and school board member can have actual town-hall meetings taking place in auditoriums and so forth. Positions for larger cities, state offices, and national offices would have to have televised forums in which the candidates debate. This would be very ungainly and hard to work out, not to mention the risk of giving charismatic people an upper hand. This is not a necessary part of my proposal, nor is it even a part I particularly like: it's a supplement, and that's all. It would only give the people an idea of who they were voting for, as well as given the candidates an opportunity to explain their stances more.

What about referendums? That is where televised forums become a necessity, I think. Whoever proposes a referendum can use the opportunity to explain why s/he believes the voters should vote "Yes" on it, and an opposition speaker will explain why the voters should vote "No". They can debate, then -- these two people or teams of people. These forums would be promoted, then televised or aired on radio stations. Television and radio stations could be compensated for the airtime or simply be made to do it as civic duty. I think the smaller, more financially unstable stations could be compensated, while the larger ones can just be told to do it or face losing their license.

The above is my major idea, but I do have three lesser ones. The first is to rationalize the election process by thinning out unnecessary elections. Do we really need to elect coroners and county sheriffs? Shouldn't those be experience-based, appointed positions? There are far too many positions to vote for, in my opinion. We should allow the voters to focus on the important ones -- city, state, and national positions -- not petty stuff like county coroner.

The second is to create better voters. Suffrage should not be universally granted: it should be earned. We do not allow people to drive unless they've proven they are familiar with the laws that apply to them on the road and have proven that they are familiar with the handling of a vehicle via a road test. The same should be true of voters. Beginning at age sixteen, anyone can qualify to become a voter providing they pass a series of tests on their national and state constitutions. "Current Events" classes should be added to our curriculum. People should know the law of the land. I live in a state with a spectacularly dismal constitution, and believe that if more people were familiar with it, we would be able to gain widespread support to reform it.

The third is to create better politicians by emphasizing education and public administration. I believe presidents should be well-informed of matters of history, science, economics, sociology, and geography -- for starters. Governors should know about science, economics, and geography. Mayors should know about economics, urban geography, and the importance of urban planning. School board presidents should be familiar with the importance of the scientific method, the importance of history, and the importance of education in general. I read recently that there is a university project just beginning: its intention is to be a university focused on education relating to public administrators. This pleased me because it's an idea I've held for quite some time now.

There is another idea, not my own, that says people should be able to propose legislation directly. This is called the National Initiative for Democracy, and it is something I am looking into.

That concludes my thoughts on how to make democracy better in this country*. I think reforming the process is a must: we live in a very different country from the one our forefathers conceived, and we need a system that takes the effect of money-culture and the mass media into effect. While the rationalization of democracy that I propose above will not be perfect, I believe it's a big step in the right direction.


* Of course, if we taught our children to be rational, we wouldn't need all of this -- but then where would businesses, corrupt religious figures (like Jimmy Swaggart) and so forth be? Life just wouldn't be fun without ghost stories, Santa Clause, horoscopes, and dare I say organized religions.
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These two essays have been my attempt to articulate the problems of the current US political system and what I think we can do to change it. Neither my analysis of the problem nor my solution to it are necessarily perfect -- perfection is impossible. I think my analysis is fairly spot-on, but I'm not so sure about my major idea, that of removing money from the political equation and replacing it with a rational information management system.

The Fate of Democracy in the US I: The Problem

I have grown increasingly concerned about the status of 'democracy' in the United States. There are two major problems that I can see:

(1) Political power, ideally in the hands of the voting public, is not realized owing to insufficient access to information. The majority of the voting public consists of fully-employed adults who spend forty to sixty hours a week working and commuting. In addition, they must tend to family affairs -- bill-paying, school functions, house maintenance, automobile maintenance, time with children, shopping for groceries, etc. -- and to their own personal needs for rest and relaxation. This leaves them with precious little time with which to access and analyze information. Voters are expected to vote for presidents, vice presidents, senators, representatives, judges, tax commissioners, school board members, clerks, coroners -- the list goes on. They are also expected to vote on a long list of referendums, most of which they've never heard of until the ballot is in their hands. Because they have no time, they are forced to depend on other sources to retrieve and analyze information for them -- namely, television advertisements and "information" distributed by special interests groups like PETA and "traditional values" lobbyists.

Television advertisements are a poor way indeed to distribute information. Our society's problems are complicated. They demand and deserve thoughtful analysis and commentary. Voting records serve more consideration than "Representative Schmuck: Conservative, Christian Values" Or "Representative Joe Schmuck: are his LIBERAL values yours?" Television advertisements are short and sensation -- and yet even if people don't believe them, they are still influenced by them. People readily believe what they want to hear, and there's a killing to be made by capitalizing on that. I find it obscene that the voting public is informed by television -- a medium completely dominated by money, where "truth" is just a facade with no substance. Political advertising, like all advertising, is organized lying. The exceptions prove the rule. Special interest pamphlets and mailings are also very problematic. Because special interests typically focus only one or two key issues, they must harp on it to mobilize their voting base. They do this by ignoring other and often more important issues. The role played by special interest groups make it possible to succeed in electing one-trick ponies -- candidates who work for them on that issue, but are incompetent otherwise. Advertising sabotages the ideal that people vote in their best interests by presenting them with limited, biased, or false information. They are manipulated into voting for the ADVERTISERS' best interest, for the lobbyists' special interests -- not for their own.

We find ourselves in a situation where the voters have no power because they cannot make informed decisions for themselves: they are dependent on information fed to them by advertisements and special interest promotional material.

2. Actual political power, as held by politicians, is often misused or not used by the politicians in the interests of the common good, and this is so because of the system that we use. Representative democracy, capitalism, and the influence of the media have resulted in a combination that is not beneficial t to the common good. By themselves, democracy and capitalism are not bad ideas: together, though, and coupled with the power of the mass media, they make it possible for the peoples' interest to be completely ignored.

The United States is not an actual democracy: it is a representative democracy, where the voters send in proxies to do the voting for them. Ideally, this would work: the politicians are supposed to be professional civic administrators who decide what is best and do it. Voters can't even handle elections every two years -- let alone making decisions every day. We create the jobs of senator and representative so that there will be people whose only responsibility is to collect information on a situation, analyze the consequences of it, and act in a way that is conducive to the "promotion of the general welfare". If they do not do this well, ideally, they are removed from office and replaced by someone who the electors think is more competent.

This is not the case. The founding fathers never envisioned universal suffrage and the mass media. To borrow from Neil Postman, they created a constitution that envisioned a relatively small number of men making rational choices to serve their best interests -- not millions of people voting based on emotional appeals and out-and-out lying that constitute television ads and special-interest circulars. The result is the enslavement of democracy by money. I'll explain what I mean by that.

While democracy has always been a servant of money, so much money is now available that democracy has become an actual slave. The majority of campaign contributions to go advertisement -- organized lying. Each politician must counter the slander produced by the other side and produce slander of his or her own. Advertising costs money -- and money comes from business interests and special interest groups. Promises are made to them. Who wins? Whoever lies the best and whoever produces these advertisements. Who loses? The American people, whose interests have been subverted in favor of lobbyists and selfish businesspeople.

While democracy has always been the servant of monied interests -- witness the American and French revolutions -- so much capital is now available that democracy has become a complete slave. The majority of campaign contributions to advertising, which is just organized lying. Even if the advertisers don't intend to lie, the medium of television limits them to soundbytes. Polticians have to counter the lies the other side tells about them with their own lies. It takes a lot of money to advertise on television, especially during primetime or peak hours. Lobbyists and political action committees provide an easy source of revenue -- obtainable for promises of favorable legislation. Politicans whore their office and responsibility out to whoever can provide the money, just so that they can keep their offices. Who wins? Whoever lies the best, and whatever lobbyist supports the best liar. Who loses? The American people.

Not only has democracy become a slave to money, but it has become a slave to the whims of the public. To be frank, people do not always not what is best. We would like to think that we do, and we take umbrage when some 'elitist' implies that we aren't -- but consider! Consider that if people make judgments based on limited, poor, false, or biased information, they are tremendously liable to make bad decisions. Considering the mediums through which they typically get their information, why are we surprised to find ourselves in trouble?

Elections have become sheep-calling contests, with the contending politicians and their supporters yelling out buzzwords. The buzzwords change rapidly. I remember watching the political conventions, where one of the main issues was immigration. It dominated one particular Republican debate -- and yet now, we hear nothing about it, and we heard nothing about it before the economic crisis. We hear nothing of Iraq -- but people are still dying. The government there is still unstable. Why do we not hear of these issues?

I believe it is because of this problem that the citizenry are motivated chiefly by emotionalism and whims. Politicians who are running for election cease to do their jobs -- they are too busy campaigning, too busy making speeches and cajoling the populace. Their problem is that the populace gets tired of hearing the same words over and over again, so they have to move on to new ones. Politicians, in order to maintain their positions, must constantly cajole. They must constantly compromise the purpose of their office to obtain funds so they can do this -- and so concerned are they about losing their posts that they fear making unpopular choices that will evict them from office. Bear in mind that unpopular decisions are not necessarily bad, nor are popular decisions necessarily good.

The result of these two factors -- an uninformed voting public and the constantly compromised nature of political offices -- is a broken system. When James Madison and others wrote the Constitution, they could have never imagined the industrial revolution and the generation of more capital that has ever been witnessed in the history of humankind. They could have never imagined cheap newspapers, radios or television -- they never imagined a system where business interests could simply buy political advertising, lie to the voters, and protect their enormous profits. Had our Constitution been written in 1976, I believe it would have been quite a bit different.

How do we mend this system? How do we set it right? Is there a essential crack that we can fill with mortar and restore stability? I think there is -- and I believe the flaw is money. Remember how much voters rely on advertising, which is paid for by monied interests. Remember that advertising consumes the lion's share of campaign contributions. The money required -- $3 billion in the presidential election alone -- comes at the price of making promises: not promises to the voters with their divided interests, but promises to the people who have the money and only the interest of maximizing their own profit. We thus have both ill-informed voters and compromised politicians being unable to fulfill their potential. They are hindered by the inordinate role of money in our political system.

My solution is to remove money from that system as much as possible -- and I write on that here.

McCain, Palin, Opportunism, and Democracy

Until recently, I wasn't paying much attention to the upcoming presidential election. I've become increasingly more cynical about the state of democracy and liberty in the United States, and remain unconvinced that either candidate can or will turn things around. I wasn't even sure who I was going to vote for, since until recently I couldn't honestly support one candidate over the other. I was thinking of writing in Mike Gravel, myself, or Marcus Aurelius. But recent events have compelled me to make a decision, and I'll probably be enabling the two-party system again this November.

Until recently, I was pretty much OK with John McCain. He was far from ideal, but considering what the Republican party gives us to work with, he looked like a bastion of integrity, civility, and reasonableness by comparison. I wouldn't mind if he lost to Obama, but my world wouldn't fall apart if he became the president. It's not as if I'm entirely comfortable with the idea of Obama being president, either. As said, until recently I was pretty much "eh" on the election. When it came to my decision of whether I should vote my conscious (Marcus Aurelius) or vote for Obama came down to one question: how far will McCain go to appease the religious right -- the supporters of Pat Robertson, the happily late Jerry Falwell, and the rest of that gang who decry every scientific advance since Galileo as "Satanic" and who think homosexuals are demon-possessed?

In recent decades, this group has become a political force to be reckoned with. As a result of decades of pandering to this group of uninformed peasants, it is now impossible to be elected without payng lip-service to the state god. This situation is a violation of Article VI of the Constitution, but who cares about that quaint little document? I realized that if McCain wanted to be elected, he had to pander to this group. I know that referring to these people as uninformed peasants sounds snobbish and elitist, and it is -- and with good reason. I want my broken bones set by doctors who know what they're doing; I want criminals pursued by police officers who know what they're doing; and I want my laws passed by people who know what they're doing -- and I do not think for one moment that people who think the Earth is six thousand years old can be trusted to choose the people who will deliberate on education standards. These people believe sickness and homosexuality are the result of demonic forces and they want to elect people who are in charge of health and medicine? Call me elitist if you will, but I do not want my politicians elected by people whose political opinions are solely informed by commercial television. Yet I see no solution to this problem, which is the reason I've become so cynical about the future of liberty and democracy: its fate is to be decided by mass hysteria.

You can see now why I was apathetic when it came to the election and why my only concern was with John McCain's relationship to the religious right, these lovable peasants whose fathers stopped the Freedom Riders and set their buses on fire and who think that the hypothetical Creator of the universe, with its billions of stars and solar systems, cares about the welfare of a political abstraction on one small continent of one small planet in a backwater galaxy -- and cares about it because It wants worship. Not only are these people wrong, they're insufferably arrogant. To think that Deity would care about the worship of primates!

So a week or so ago, John McCain answered my question and in so doing made an enemy out of me. I don't like being McCain's enemy, but I have no choice. He chose Sarah Palin to be his running mate, and in so doing told me how far he'll go: he will happily bend over and take it in the bum from Ted Haggard. That's how far he'll go. Sarah Palin is inexperienced, and is sure to alienate half the nation and all of the world -- but McCain wants to ensure his victory, so he'll risk her becoming President to get himself elected. It doesn't bother me that he's being a cynical opportunist -- that's American "democracy". Reagan made his bones by being a witch-hunter, after all. What bothers me is that he's so brazen about it. Other cynical politicians at least try to HIDE their opportunism. This guy is brazen about it. His contempt for the American people and reality is impressively massive. What is he going to next? Start flinging Mexican immigrants into "internment camps" to await deportation? What will McCain do to stay in power? I don't want to learn the answer. If he wins, I do not see good things in store for the future of human rights, informed democracy, and liberty -- those liberal values his party despises so much.

Fire Aim Ready

Earlier in the week, I received a video entitled "Creation, the Universe, & the Evolution to a funky beat". The song is "Be Mine", and is by "Fire Aim Ready". The song describes the beginning of the universe (as far as we know it) and the evolution of life leading up to us. Strangely enough, this is a love song.



First verse:

14 billion years ago, time and space were born;
filled with homogeneous, nearly uniform
quark and lepton plasma that led to you and me
through the interplay of chance and necessity.
The plasma later cooled to make mostly hydrogen fueling fusion in the stars' generation one .

I looked the band up on MySpace and found a number of other songs, although sadly the rest are not songs about science. Another song, entitled "The Decline and Fall", offers political commentary about the United States through comparison to Rome.

"The Decline and Fall", last three verses:


All Iraq’s divided into three parts
Even Kurds are getting in our way
Barbarians are blowing up the legions
Seems that they’d prefer us not to stay
It’s carved there in plain Latin, the inscription on the wall:

“Welcome one and all to the decline and fall.”

Hadrian builds his fence along the border
While he fills the Army with the Picts;
It’s hard to tell Centurions from Vandals
The fall of Rome is not hard to predict
It’s carved there in plain Latin, the inscription on the wall:

“Welcome one and all to the decline and fall.”

Lead poisons our wine and makes us stupid
Gladiators keep us entertained
More votes cast for idols than for Caesar
The end of empire’s easily explained.
It’s carved there in plain Latin, the inscription on the wall:

“Welcome one and all to the decline and fall.”

And if your Latin's rusty, here's the writing on the wall:

“Welcome one and all to the decline and fall.”


If you would rather listen to songs about science and that sort, Prometheus Music produces music focusing on "the history and future of space exploration". Five songs are available for free on the website: I recommend "Suprise!", "Fire in the Sky", and "Others Standing By". "Fire in the Sky" is easily my favorite, and I suspect that I've shared it in the past here. If I have not, I'll remedy that now.