During the big government shutdowns in the Clinton Administration, I remember thinking, “what a great way to get rid of government. Just stop paying for the useless !*!&#!!”
While I will say that Donald Trump is doing his level best to make “no government at all” look better than his rule administration, he’s also providing a cautionary tale that illustrates how “no government at all” collapses into autocracy. In spite of Trump’s best (by which I mean, he plays a lot of golf while Rome burns) efforts to destroy everything he touches, there are still pieces of government that are mostly trying to keep the system afloat in spite of him. Literally, in some cases, from spite. But I’ll take what I can get.
We’ve all been used to smooth operators like Barack Obama and, uh… Well, we’ve all been used to Barack Obama, who made the trains run on time and the bombs fall on the correct people. But Trump is something else: he shows us that a well-intentioned system constructed to serve the people is going to get gamed all to hell by the sociopathic political class. Where we’d see a government, for the people, by the people – they’d see a government for the taking. Anarchism does not address these sharks in bespoke suits, because it is impossible for a well-intentioned system to embrace and manage people who are fundamentally opposed to even their own self-interest. It’s tempting to call them “nihilists” but I don’t think they’re as thoughtful as nihilism requires one to be. I used the similie “sharks” because they haven’t got much of a strategy beyond “get in my mouf.” It’s a strategy that is remarkably short-term but it has worked for sharks for millions of years.
It has worked for sharks, because sharks don’t have nuclear weapons, and sharks don’t have the ability to open new parts of the planet for oil extraction, when the byproducts of oil extraction are killing all the sharks. They’re just sharks, they can only bite what is in front of them, one thing at a time; the damage they can do is limited by their nature.
Not so, our political sociopaths. By aggregating the reins of power so that they can be handed from one set of little hands to another, we have centralized a power structure that anarchism cannot address. First off, it will kill us all if we try to displace it or dismantle it. Secondly, it will replace itself with something just as bad if not worse. There have been a lot of creatures that have occupied the same niche as sharks but the sharks have out-sharked them for a long time. Perhaps the oil-burning humans will be the thing that finally brings the long line of successful sharking to its conclusion. It’ll be a pointless and pyrrhic victory; that’s redundant I suppose.
We anarchists need government because well-intentioned systems simply cannot summon the political will and structure necessary to deal with people like the Republican Party – a party so corrupt and of such ill will that it’s trolling the entire planet by pushing the financial interests of oil monopolies ahead of even the sharks’ interests.
I’ve been noodling over this, and I feel like my mind is swirling around like water down a toilet: I want to use the word “nihilism” to describe Trump’s politics, but Trump has managed to create a system that is worse than nothingness. Remember: a nihilist is a radical skeptic; a person who doubts and does not accept beliefs – especially not political or moral ideologies. A nihilist would not [*] hold beliefs so strongly; they’re more like the peaceful anarchists who believe they don’t have to have a government because they don’t want to be bothered to form one.
There must be a term for this unbelief that is not nihilism; this belief that anything of value must be trolled to death. Everything that is beautiful (or that was accomplished by Barack Obama) must be used to wipe the asshole that is Trump. It is “un-belief” – a reflexive meanness that expresses itself in pointless destruction. As I write this, Trump is gloating over how he’d happily shut down the government if he doesn’t get his vanity-wall, and Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer – more sociopaths – haven’t got the courage to tell him “if you shut down the government, who the fuck do you think is going to build a wall, then?”
Of course, the shut down is a lie. ICE won’t get shut down. The DoD won’t get shut down. The F-35 program won’t get shut down.
That tells me anarchism is a lie, too: we can’t shut the government down, unless we have a government to shut it down with, and that would be Hobbes’ Leviathan.
We are stuck with these people, forever, until they kill us all.
Checkmate.
[*] Bakunin helped establish the mis-characterization of a “nihilist” as someone who wants to destroy everything. As a skeptic, I see “I want to destroy everything” as a dogmatic view (in the pyrhhonian sense) – it is taking up a position. More to the point, it’s making a moral assertion, namely “things are worth destroying.” Embedded within Bakunin’s quip (he wasn’t really saying that, seriously, as a political option) is the idea that not only do things not matter, they un-matter.
I get what you mean and why you are using this simile, but you are being unfair towards sharks. They are beautiful animals who simply occupy a necessary ecologic niche. Moreover, sharks themselves are endangered and likely to die out in the near future.
By the way, have you read If Sharks were Men by Bertold Brecht? http://www.pamolson.org/ArtSharksMen.htm I might have mentioned this one already somewhere, because I sort of like how it’s written. And this one actually shows how sharks are better than people.
We anarchists need government because well-intentioned systems simply cannot summon the political will and structure necessary to deal with people like the Republican Party …
To which I can only imagine the anarchists I have known responding with some variant of “Whaddya mean we…” folowed by clouds of ideological rhetoric. (Apparently none of them read this blog, or do so under a firm vow of lurkitude.)
I doubt the games theorists have developed any cheat-proof systems, unless perhaps you posit a designer behind the laws of thermodynamics or suchlike. The old “who guards the guardians?” paradox still reigns as the Supreme Conundrum.
In some ways, the US Constitution remains the best attempt at resolving that problem, despite its contradictions in aiming to secure liberties for a class dependent on exploiting other classes below it. It succeeded, so far as it did, thanks more to geographical isolation, a relatively short burden-of-history, and a unique abundance of material resources easily (if bloodily) obtained – and the depletion of those advantages may have more to do with its evident failures now than any coterie of corruption.
Erich Fromm in “The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness” used the term “necrophilia” to describe the drive to destroy everything in service to some belief, ideal, or material object. The belief itself isn’t important – what is important is that the necrophiliac willfully destroys everything they can. In other words, you could say that they actively love death.
As an example he (writing as a witness to Nazi Germany) describes Hitler as willingly destroying the German people – in the service of the idea of the German people as the master race. If the German people couldn’t meet his standards they deserved to die.
So the Republican party is a Necrophiliac machine – not only with those objectives but actively turning out people who share them.
Of course, the word itself has other, unpleasant connotations. But hey, I can live with that term sticking to anyone who is exterminating life on this planet in service of ticking up numbers on a balance sheet .
Republican Party – a party so corrupt and of such ill will that it’s trolling the entire planet by pushing the financial interests of oil monopolies ahead of even the sharks’ interests.
Knee-jerk jerks
Pierce R. Butler@#2:
“Who controls the uncontrollable?”
We need to face up to the fact that it’s impossible to negotiate with nihilists; they will do anything, say anything, and if the arrangement is not working in their favor, or if it’s monday, they’ll go back on it with no hesitation. Any attempt to negotiate is just “if I win, I win. If I lose, I’ll ignore the terms.”
You can’t share a democracy with people like that, either.
One thing that perpetually amazes me is their short-term thinking — whether in economic terms, buying a cushy economy for a little while now because when the time comes to pay for it, they won’t be around — or the obvious problem of global warming — or else in political terms, smashing all political norms now with gerrymandering and what’s going on in Wisconsin and North Carolina, AS IF it couldn’t ever be used against them in the future. If they get the reckoning they’re asking for, I don’t see how their party can even survive.
My understanding of anarchism as a philosophical position is that it is not so much a hostility to all forms of hierarchy, dominion and power, but a constant presumption that their legitimacy is not self-evident and must be demonstrated. The anarchist is perfectly consistent in supporting some kind of power structure, when that power structure performs a legitimate and necessary function. We must keep asking the question “why does this have to be here?”, not as a rhetorical flourish where we always expect the answer “it doesn’t”, but genuinely and with the possibility that a good reason can be found. We might justify, for instance, parental authority over small children, because said children have not the capacity to look out for their own best interests yet. Or we might say that government is necessary because it acts as a bulwark against other institutions of power, like corporations or private armies.
How then to label these amoral, slash-and-burn exploiters of the human weal for their own enrichment? I agree, it’s not really nihilism in the original Nietzchean sense which, like anarchism, is more a constant bearing in mind that inherited values are not self-justifying, and invites the formulation of new values to replace them rather than just the abandonment of everything for the sake of it. It seems to me that we search too hard for a term of art, when what they really are is robbers pure and simple. Petty thieves and bandits, with no thought for anything but what they can grab, but magnified a thousandfold to the point where they can make a pass at grabbing everything.
They’re not even on the level of organised criminals, because organised crime takes care to husband its victims as a renewable resource – you don’t extort more than your marks can afford, because otherwise the take soon dries up. It’s the mindset of people used to little crimes, theft of an order that the mass of society can easily absorb and write off, but applied on a scale where that is no longer true. If they do have the wit to realise what the consequences will be, they haven’t the moral maturity to act on it.
If I had to sum up the guiding princple in one word, that word would be Rapacity. The Latin root of the word – rapax – (pl. rapaces) suits these people well – it’s all about the taking, no more.
The Founding Fathers set out to create a New Rome, and they were remarkably successful in doing that.The similarities between the late Roman Empire and USA 2018 are striking.
polishsalami@#7:
The Founding Fathers set out to create a New Rome, and they were remarkably successful in doing that.The similarities between the late Roman Empire and USA 2018 are striking.
Yes, but the US has it easier since it’s a continental land-mass that it could fill and dominate politically (pace the Canadians)
The US and Rome bring the inevitable question “how can any political system survive in contact with Rome?”
cartomancer@#7:
My understanding of anarchism as a philosophical position is that it is not so much a hostility to all forms of hierarchy, dominion and power, but a constant presumption that their legitimacy is not self-evident and must be demonstrated. The anarchist is perfectly consistent in supporting some kind of power structure, when that power structure performs a legitimate and necessary function. We must keep asking the question “why does this have to be here?”, not as a rhetorical flourish where we always expect the answer “it doesn’t”, but genuinely and with the possibility that a good reason can be found.
That matches my understanding. I’ve considered myself an anarchist of some sort or other – but I’ve never addressed the problem of what if the hierarchy we are trying to live with is simply deaf to our challenge of its legitimacy? We are off the page of talking about “legitimate government” right now – the Republicans are doing the sort of things associated with a tin pot dictatorship, and show no signs at all of being inhibited from going farther if it’s politically expedient. So if we think we are negotiating with someone, or we are challenging their legitimacy, and we discover that they don’t care at all – that’s all just noise to them – then what?
We have to ask “why does this have to be here” but it doesn’t mean anything if the answers we get back are glib nonsense that was never intended to actually answer anything. In fact, we can ask for answers forever, and all we’ll get is glib nonsense.
For example, I see that Republicans’ reaction to getting caught trying to make Obamacare unconstitutional was “we are going to fix it and make it better!” Does anyone but a simpleton believe that? Yet, that’s all we’ve got to go on. There’s no dialogue to have.
It seems to me that we search too hard for a term of art, when what they really are is robbers pure and simple.
These guys are something else, I think. A robber, you can understand their greed. (Like a shark) They make sense. If they make sense, you can negotiate with them, or understand them in terms of whatever their agenda is. The Republicans don’t seem to even make sense if you just assume they’re power-mad authoritarians: authoritarianism has an agenda, even if it’s O’Brien’s out of 1984. “The object of power is power.”
Robbers are honest. These guys are robbing from themselves, lying to us about it, lying to themselves about it, and none of what they say matters.
It’s starting to feel like a joke – especially watching Rudi Giuliani – “what do you get when you cross a nihilist with a surrealist?”
“Nothing funny.”
In the odd absence of an existing term for this, I propose “misotrophy”, meaning ‘to eat/live on hate’.
abbeycadabra@11:
I like that.
annihilationism? locustry? hard vore? (link is nsfw text and mind-melting)
Quorum-sensing bacteria eating their way across the petri dish full of agar-agar. They can tell the end of the deliciousness is coming soon, spew out a different set of autoinducers designed to confuzalate any immune system around, and change their behavior to something else more vicious.
@ Marcus
The F-35 program won’t get shut down.
There will be great rejoicing in Beijing and Moscow.
We like to believe that we live in free-market capitalist economic system but the core of free-market capitalism is competition, maintenance of a relatively level playing field and protection of the consumer. On the other hand, business, all business, is simply about gaining, maintaining and increasing profits. It is government, and only government, that has any chance of getting business to play by the rules that harness the motivation of greed and force it to serve the interest of society.
It is the difference between a horse trampling the fence line and eating your corn and the same horse pulling a wagon for a time and them begin fed a serving of corn. It is only through the regulations of laws enforced that demand competition and delivery of value to consumer and the wider society in return for pay that the raw spirit of greed is made useful. It is also the government that establishes the reputation for fair return that differentiates the honorable businessman from the dishonorable highwayman.
This point flies in the face of the false assertion by free-market advocates, and many Libertarians, that free markets are self-regulating. The fact is, and the historic record shows, that left to their own devices, unregulated and stripped of any need to maintain reputation by the size of the market and opportunity to rebrand and hide their identity business will resort to theft, fraud and misrepresentation to gain profits simply because it is both easier and more lucrative than honesty and competition. Markets do not self-clean and bad actors are not penalized or removed. In actual fact the presence of bad actors tends to force other businessmen to become bad actors to keep up. The only counter-force that has ever been shown to work is regulation by government.
Which is why business wants to discredit all government does and and keep it as small and as weak as possible.
I’m not sure where you got this, lorn, but I don’t see any evidence that this is what any of the “free market” promotors believe. Markets are clearly rule-based social constructs, and “free” is generally just the excuse winners use for “I deserve what I was lucky enough to get or be given.” All markets have a design towards an aim, whether explicit or implicit, and like hammers and other tools they can be used not only to build houses but to bash other people’s heads in with pretty reasonable effectiveness.
For what it’s worth, I tend toward anarcho-communism myself (hat tip to cartomancer re “anarchy” in #7 above) and while I’m all in favour of markets as an excellent tool when designed to enourage what I consider moral aims, most “free market” folks would be horrified by my beliefs. (Most horrifying to them would probably be that I’m starting to have grave doubts about the idea of “private property,” as separate from “personal property,” because I don’t see why any particular people have any right to natural resources just because they’re there.)
For some nice depressing reading, check out Gibney’s A Generation of Sociopaths. It may go too far, but it’s an argument that definitely needs to be made and considered.
“but the core of free-market capitalism is competition, maintenance of a relatively level playing field and protection of the consumer.”
I should have specified: free-market capitalism that functions long term, works within the context of a functional society, and does not foster violent revolution. It needn’t be perfect in any of these specifications but it has to, at the very least, limit the frequency of the most egregious offenses and generally establishes nominally effective legal or social penalties for violations.
As it is now the regulators, assuming the laws they are expected to enforce have not fully embraced corruption, are disinclined to see any but the offenses held high and illuminated by outside interests and the penalties are so infrequent and manageable that they are simply considered the ‘price of doing business’.
To Marcus
I still have hope that we can design systems that partially muzzle the sharks. I know as well as you that it’s impossible to get rid of the sharks entirely, but surely there are government structures in the world that are better than American’s government.
…
The US Constitution was hot shit 200 years ago. However, today, it’s just shit. Like, bad. Really bad. It is trivial for any of us to make substantial improvements to it, like guaranteeing that every person’s vote had equal weight instead of the per-State representation in the US senate.
The US constitution was the first real attempt at proper democratic governing of a large modern country. It worked out decently well too, compared to the nothing of other democratic governments that it could be compared to at the time. However, today, the US constitution is pretty shitty. “Biggest plurality wins” election system is utter garbage, and I’m convinced that it’s a big part of why America is so fucked compared to much of Europe. It doesn’t even have rules to stop gerrymandering. Like, almost anything is better. Shortest-splitline districting. Ranked-preference instant-runoff elections. Better still, party-list voting. Get rid of the presidential veto while we’re at it.
There are also plenty of vitally important civil liberties should have been written down, but the founders thought “there’s no way that they’re foolish and servile enough to let that happen”, but look at where we are today. I can name a few dozen amendments that should be passed. See here for a partial listing of some of my ideas (some are in a very rough state – forgive me Marcus for the technology section – I should just edit that out until I get I can phrase it more clearly and succinctly).
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EJRrzrZAuWv2tU4wz6GZLATBphmx72D__kV-5rdS2Ro/edit