In the battle for Kobane on the Syrian border everyone talks about the enemy - IS - and the frightening ideas that drive them. No-one talks about the Kurdish defenders and what inspires them.
But the moment you look into what the Kurds are fighting for - what you discover is absolutely fascinating. They have a vision of creating a completely new kind of society that is based on the ideas of a forgotten American revolutionary thinker.
He wanted to create a future world in which there would be no hierarchies, no systems that exercise power and control individuals. And the Kurds in Kobane are trying to build a model of that world.
It means that the battle we are watching night after night is not just between good and evil. It is also a struggle of an optimistic vision of the future against a dark conservative idea drawn from the past.
It is a struggle that may also have great relevance to us in the west. Because the revolutionary ideas that have inspired the Kurds also shine a powerful light on the system of power in Britain today. They argue that we in the west are controlled by a new kind of hierarchical power that we don’t fully see or understand.
There are two men at the heart of this story.…BBC
HAPPIDROME - Part One
Adam Curtis
h/t Andy Blatchford
h/t Andy Blatchford
29 comments:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/HAPPIDROME-Part-One
No link?
Oops. Fixed.
Thanks.
"They argue that we in the west are controlled by a new kind of hierarchical power that we don’t fully see or understand. "
then how the do you know it exists in the first place?
Textbook cognitive bias:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_bias
"Individuals create their own “subjective social reality” from their perception of the input.[2] An individual’s construction of social reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behaviour in the social world.[3] Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, or what is broadly called irrationality"
That's what rigorous analysis is supposed to do.
How do we know that the money multiplier has the causality reversed when most economics and many bankers think that it's the multiplier that governs lending wrt loanable funds.
Pity both these guys didn't just take a simple biology class.
In a culture as well as in a physiology, there will always be hierarchies of specialization.
The ONLY thing that really matters, in the end, is loyalty to aggregate, and trust.
It's amazing how much policy is promulgated from starting completely Out-of-Paradigm hallucinations. These guys are hopelessly anthropomorphic.
If they were capable of a bit more dialectic, they'd see the options any & all cultures are STILL waiting to explore.
Not saying that our NeoCons & Neo-Liberals are any less ignorant! Just saying that these guys offer no better alternative.
Hierarchical class/power structure has generally meant parasitism historically.
Hierarchical organization has shown itself to be very powerful militarily, which is a reason that hierarchical organization predominates. But hierarchical organization lends itself to capture by parasites who run the system chiefly for their own benefit, e.g., by extracting rents, and more than occasionally have destroyed the host system through their misallocation of system resources to themselves.
The question is how to make hierarchical social system resistant to parasitic capture, or how to design an alternative system that is. For example, political scientist Sheldon Woldin calls democracy "episodic" because it is vulnerable to capture.
Oops. Should be Wolin. Sorry, Professor.
There's always semantics.
You can define "hierarchy" to reflect some narrow meaning, like leverage or inter-personal power.
Yet all "systems" display many hierarchies simultaneously, all interleaved, through what we call degeneracy.
Even the most "powerful" person defers to their spouse every evening, or to a daughter/son, or parent, etc, etc.
Not to mention waiters, bartenders, plumbers, car mechanics, & on and on.
There are endless "processes" in interleaved play, and we all act out different hierarchical positions in alternate processes, in alternate moments.
That's the definition of a system.
"The hiearchy is dead. Long live the hierarchy!"
"Hierarchical class/power structure has generally meant parasitism "
Correlation is not causation...
"He wanted to create a future world in which there would be no hierarchies, no systems that exercise power and control individuals."
ok, 'speed limit 55 mph'... YOU ARE TRYING TO CONTROL ME!!!!!! 'cannabis illegal'... DONT TRY TO CONTROL ME!!!!!
Govt=control for these people... textbook libertarianism 101
I found the Murray Bookchin video interesting.
So, Bookchin was a union organizer, but workers would not join the unions (I've been there, and done that, btw).
The problem, Bookchin says, is that workers are either unwilling or incapable of understanding their best interests. There is a whole lot of things (gender, race domination, hierarchies) that conditions workers and making understanding difficult or impossible.
Note that Bookchin never claimed that the Marxist economic exploitation was not a problem (he was, after all, a union organizer); he claimed that it wasn't the only problem or maybe even the main problem. Fair enough.
Then, Matt Franko asked a very good question: "then how do you know it [i.e. the "hierarchical power" thing] exists in the first place?"
Tom Hickey tried to answer (in my opinion, without much success): "That's what rigorous analysis is supposed to do."
But, for the sake of the argument, let's accept Tom's answer. Remarkable individuals, like Bookchin, after rigorous analysis, can discover all these deeper things that condition workers.
The problem is how will Bookchin convince workers (or anyone else, for that matter) about these much deeper problems, if he was unable to convince workers about the much simpler economic exploitation problem?
Other than some handwaving about anarchism and this or that, he didn't explain.
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For what it is worth, I tend to be wary of silver-bullets, universal cures for all sorts of problems, seen and unseen.
I would be happy if at least we could fix the much simpler problem of Marxist economic exploitation.
Per se, that would not make us prettier, wiser, holier; it would not fix tooth-aches, hair loss, or weather change. But something is something: better than nothing.
"Hierarchical class/power structure has generally meant parasitism "
Correlation is not causation...
That true. However, concentrated power is much more amenable to capture than distributed power, so concentration is a factor. Historically, concentrated power has been captured by a ruling elite that has used that power for its own benefit and often to the detriment of the social system as a whole due to exploitation of resources.
Then, Matt Franko asked a very good question: "then how do you know it [i.e. the "hierarchical power" thing] exists in the first place?"
Tom Hickey tried to answer (in my opinion, without much success): "That's what rigorous analysis is supposed to do."
I think that this argument should be obvious to those attempting to promote MMT, when even very smart people can't seem to see the obvious, even when their math can be shown not to add up. If economists can't get MMT, how are working stiffs going to get political nuance?
This blind-sidedness is simple to explain in terms of psych, soc, anthropology and poli sci. People see the world through the lens of their world view and if the lens is distorted by bias, incorrect assumptions, selection of norms and criteria, etc, then not only won't they see the obvious, but also they won't be able to see it when pointed out to them unless they remove the lens that is distorting perception.
How is it possible to discover which lens is the correct one and of the right power wrt to the subject matter? That's what rigorous analysis and science are about as methods of gaining true knowledge in contrast to opinion and belief.
This is also basic to Marxism. A revolutionary vanguard is necessary because ordinarily workers cannot see that they are exploited, let alone how they are exploited, and it has to be pointed out to them convincingly enough to motivate them to take action that is designed to upset the apple cart.
What Bookchin was saying is that he was not able to do this successfully as a union organizer and came to wonder why not. His analysis led him to the conclusion that like fish in water, workers could not see the medium in which they were immersed because the cultural entrainment was so powerful and pervasive.
I realized this early the countercultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, and while I kept a hand in activism, I recognized that freedom lay in the direction of adopting alternatives with others committed to living free and willing to cooperate voluntarily with others in pooling resources for mutual benefit.
A good number of young people are coming to the same conclusion today. It's not just that the ruling elite is so power but also the people they are controlling for their own purposes aren't able to see this deeply enough to do anything intelligent to effect change. So they either wander in circles or fire off shots into the dark, maybe even hitting each other.
On the other hand, the Kurds did not have this luxury that we did then and do now, living in a relatively free, safe, and prosperous country, and they still don't. So they have had to develop methods and approachs suitable for them. For better or worse, they hit upon Bookchin. We'll have to see how their strategy works out against powerful enemies on all sides.
Interestingly, while not specifically related to Bookchin, this is the way that many alternative groups developed, that is, on the basis of cooperatives, adopting hierarchical organization suitable to various tasks, with no permanent hierarchy in control and decision-making by consensus. With the right people it work. Who are the right people? Those who trust each other and also trust the process, and are willing to work together at making it work.
"Who are the right people? Those who trust each other and also trust the process, and are willing to work together at making it work."
I think this is where our modern (5000 years old) civilizations fail to address organizational (and hierarchical) problems, and all the trouble that comes from that.
We fail to put the proper people at proper positions because we are unable to, in an ocean of information overload, recognize and monitor the relevant data to the problem. Modern capitalism in theory works around this problem through imitation of evolution as it creates an ecosystem of competition for scarce resources (all summarized in the end to prices and financial capital) and throughout infinite iterations.
But this solution comes with it's own share of problems, and because it's a meta-solution sometimes it will build huge imbalances. This also happens in nature btw, the problem is in nature it usually ends up with a complete rebalance of populations (up to extinction of whole species sometimes) and we obviously want to avoid that solution altogether.
"The Marxist theory said that once working men and women came together in factories the scales would fall from their eyes - and they would see clearly how they were being oppressed. "
And it didnt happen... those that would have believed such a thing had a cognitive bias...
this is like the other day, libertarian Ann Coulter was blaming the govt for what was going on with solar flaring... so Coulters cognitive bias is "govt bad" or however the deranged libertarian mind is biased and this leaves her unable to discern truth which could easily be explained via empiricism by measuring solar ejections and then reviewing the EM V/m saturation point for the satellite receivers, etc...
The Marxist cognitive bias is "people dont want to work for wages" so they will always be surprised when the "wages and debt" people show up for work....
So the Marxists are probably "slaves" and their norm is "working for rations" rather than "working for wages".... they are biased towards the side of the 'slaves'...
the Marxists (to me) (and not saying "they are wrong!"... trying to be objective here..) the Marxists dont want to be seen as 'working for wages'
they will work, and even work hard, but not because they are getting paid... of course like any of us they need provision to live so they need to be provided means of subsistence.... call it 'rations' then instead of 'wages'....
then when you take these people and FORCE or coerce them into a 'working for wages' job they just go off the rails... they are not 'wired' for 'wages'... it may actually be a more 'moral'? (having a hard time describing it....) way of life than 'working for wages'...
And they go off the rails when, if they can get themselves into a 'slaving' job, the 'rations' provided are an insufficient means of subsistence and do not result in a robust/fair quality of life (as compared to other 'slave' jobs or 'wages' jobs)...
You know what is annoying, as we sit around blogging, we enter digits to "prove that we aren't robots" and we help google maps to improve their address detection algorithm. In and of itself, I don't mind being a monkey that gets rewarded with better google maps and address detection by posting on blogspot, but I'm not sure that helping the PTB to read blurry text from great distances is a helpful technology for those of us who value our freedom, this one in particular has broad law enforcement, military and intelligence applications. Orwell's thought police never imagined the possibilities.
It seems like technology has brought us to the point where formerly pie-in-the-sky ideas about governance could be a reality. There is no reason we couldn't have a more direct democracy. Representatives are no longer necessary as education has improved to where most people are well educated on important issues and have collectively deeper knowledge and perspective on issues than the people who get elected to represent us. The public schools have created curriculum and teaching styles to reduce diversity of thought and radicalism to manageable levels.
People voluntarily come together to discuss topics and come up with decent solutions and ideas to problems in all parts of society. It could be extended to solving governance problems in a direct democracy. If there is no way to avoid corruption in a capitalist representative democracy, maybe we need something closer to the near anarchy of direct democracy and better libertarian protections for the individual from government and the businesses that run it.
Avoiding self appointed experts that seek to influence debate in any system will always be a problem even in a direct democracy.
In any case, more limitations on government might be in order since government is prone to act against the will of the people, to act in a hysterical manner to persecute those who oppose governance, and is largely unable to articulate policy or strategies that result in prosperity or welfare for most people. We need something better than what Exists in Washington, Ottawa or Brussels. When we tell the government we want more freedom and protections they mock those calls. When the government needs to act, as in economics or fiscal policy, or even military strategy, the government is clearly confused and unable to act to promote the interests of the nation because of political parties and ideological worries about voters and periodic elections over practical problem solving.
Domestically, I think the pragmatism and incoherent, non-ideological policy of a direct democracy would be helpful.
In the foreign sphere, The Chinese government shows loyalty to no one and has no allies. They single mindedly promote Chinese interests in foreign policy. They will create "friendships" or fleeting alliances so long as those promote China. The US maintains alliances and becomes a monkey for despotic regimes like the EU, Saudi Arabia and Israel that started out with noble causes but became problems themselves. I think a direct democracy would solve many of these problems and result in a similar foreign policy closer to that of China. Or could be the opposite. I don't know how it would work in foreign policy.
The problem we learned in business is that group-think, team culture and endless meetings don't work. Often the least popular ideas are the correct ones.
Marxism views wages as exploitative, to be abolished in favor of democratically decided profit sharing. In order to do this, workers have to become their own employers.
Wage contracts exist because workers do not have legal ownership rights. The terms of exchange are entirely at the discretion of the employer.
When workers are the owners, the concept of 'wages' becomes nonsensical.
"group-think, team culture and endless meetings" ONLY work, if the embodied analysis is yoked to observed Outcomes
Aggregated Outcomes always wins in the end, via a more resilient & adaptive aggregates;
Any compromise on Desired Outcomes only leads to less than optimal resiliency & lagging adaptive rates.
Ignacio: "nature .. usually ends up with a complete rebalance of populations (up to extinction of whole species sometimes) and we obviously want to avoid that solution altogether."
Do we? There's no evidence saying that we want to avoid that 100% of the time. Social species generally outdo comparable a-social species based on their superior ability to scavenge and reuse a higher proportion of their members once systemic change is needed.
The MOST_SOCIAL species, however, can also turn on a dime, when required to. That means being able to shed significant membership ... but ONLY when absolutely required.
What social species excel at is aggregate agility, in whatever form it takes to survive given contexts and given challenges.
Well, we do want to avoid that on a civilization scale I mean. Nevertheless, it wouldn't be the first time for humans anyway.
But if it's a product of social choice (rather than natural pressures, but who knows maybe some virus like Ebola may make the decision for us in the future), who gets to do 'God's work'? We have already 'experimented' with that 'solution' resulting in stuff like several sort of autocratic regimes and ideologies, resulting conflicts, ethnic cleansing, and now a new iteration of religion crusades. Does not seem to produce better outcomes so far but maybe we didn't have enough of it. We haven't tried to eliminate "problematic individuals" like psychopaths systematically, but maybe that's because we don't have proper methods to identify them in the first place or because dominant social rules.
Coming back to the OP, been spending part of the evening watching videos and reading about the whole thing, inspired by the original piece (always find Curtis pieces intellectually engaging and making me want to explore new stuff). As usually, it all ended being rather depressive:
a) Bookchin in the end was defeated and exhausted after a life of radicalism, by it's own radical movement, as he came to realization that the whole thing had been 'co-opted' by the dynamics of the current system: anarchism turned inside, away from it's original socialist roots (or the federalists "communalists" model he professed, which btw may have a lot of striking similarities by the government system professed by some founding fathers of the USA like Jefferson), towards radical individualism and 'spiritualism' after being politically defeated by the dominant capitalist system, as a mental scape from the reality of the day-by-day (abandonment of meaningful political action).
b) Reading about the Kurdish and in the end about the current conflicts in Syria, I came to realization that Syria (where some of the communalists experiments are taking place in the autonomous kurdish region) may very well be an image in the present of how the future will look like in a big part of the globe (maybe even in some now apparently healthy developing strong nations, like China), civilization collapse in slow motion -Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria as the model of entire regions-. Whole regions on the globe are going to be destabilized by resource (the whole thing exploded when the country transitioned from a net oil exporter to an importer/consumer and a hike in prices triggered by high oil prices, pretty much the same happened in Egypt in the 'Arab Spring') AND financial constraints (product of falling exports and necessary imports) and economic shocks. We seem to be heading towards a period of eternal war and increasing chaos.
For me, the most encouraging bit of the whole story is that a guy like Ocalan, in a prison in a place like Turkey, could still have access to a book by someone like Bookchin ... and that a remote electorate like the Kurds could actually be so audacious to champion something so random.
Ya gotta give humans credit. We continue to surprise ourselves.
Actually, ya gotta love humans.
They're all we got.
So, let's see if I understood:
"This blind-sidedness is simple to explain in terms of psych, soc, anthropology and poli sci. People see the world through the lens of their world view and if the lens is distorted by BIAS, incorrect assumptions, selection of norms and criteria, etc, then not only won't they see the obvious, but also they won't be able to see it when pointed out to them unless they remove the lens that is distorting perception.
"How is it possible to discover which lens is the correct one and of the right power wrt to the subject matter? That's what rigorous analysis and science are about as methods of gaining true knowledge in contrast to opinion and belief."
So, the problem is one of cognitive bias (which is something that affects THEM, not YOU guys), which YOU solve through rigorous analysis, just like Bookchin did (although Matt Franko thinks he also manifested textbook cognitive bias). And you guys know you are not affected by cognitive bias because... [fill the blanks]. And you know your analysis is rigorous because... [fill the blanks].
But, fair enough, let's grant you guys suffer no cognitive bias and your analysis is rigorous. You still need to answer: how do you persuade 7 billion people that they are cognitively biased, that you are not, and that they should embrace your rigorous analysis?
Bookchin (cognitively biased or not) did not persuade the workers.
"So, the problem is one of cognitive bias (which is something that affects THEM, not YOU guys), which YOU solve through rigorous analysis…"
Having a worldview can be viewed as a type of cognitive bias but a worldview is constructed from different cognitive biases and there's a load of them. Rigorous methodology has been developed to discover them and reduce them, but it is simply not possible to arrive at a world view that can be shown to have eliminated all cognitive bias existing as hidden assumptions.
The arguments, then, are generally over methodology and its application. For example, this is the basis of the orthodox/heterodox divide in economics.
Unreasonable people argue that their approach is the only correct one. Reasonable people argue that different approaches need to be used and their methods and results debated in every discipline and all areas of knowledge.
No one has the ocean in their bucket.
The only people that may have a reasonable claim to absolute knowledge are sages, based on access to more expanded levels of cognition. But those are claims that are difficult to prove intellectually using any rigorous method that is widely recognized. At any rate, those claims are matters of belief for any not privy to a level of cognition that sages claim. However, the historical fact is that sages have convinced a lot of people to believe that their claims are supernatural, and that has shaped history and continues to shape.
There are also the "giants on whose shoulders we stand," who are accorded intellectual or moral authority. They, too, shape history.
There are also ideas of others who may not be giants but collectively contribute to the context of the time ("spirit of the age"). These include social and political leaders, scientists, and so forth, some of whom are cultural icons but many toilers behind the scenes. Then there are those that shape the institutional arrangements that affect behavior widely. These include not only leaders but also lawyers, lobbyists, etc.
Sorting out context is a next to possible task. Historians, philosophers of history, sociologists, and anthropologists occupy themselves wit this task. The results are diverse and controversial.
One of the mysteries of life shown by history is that some personalities and ideas resonate at a particular time, giving rise to the thrust of the context in which the times unfold. In our time, we are the products of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom through Thatcher and Reagan, for example, which was a reaction to the influence of Marx on Lenin and Mao. Etc.
continued
continuation
Hegel sets forth an interesting dialectical approach to history as a series of moments that are reactions to previous moments, and he tries to induce some pattern from it. Hegel concludes that history is the march of freedom, for example. Conversely, traditional Eastern views based on the teaching of sages views history as cyclical rather than linear, as the West generally does.
Then there are the different cultural worldviews that are now closely interacting owing to globalization. Some of these worldviews clash as much as mesh. Even in a single society or group there can be clashing and meshing due to different ways of configuring the same data. To the degree there is meshing, agreement is possible, but where there is clashing based on different norms, agreement may be out of reach without compromising principle.
This is the dilemma of constructing a liberal group or society and holding it together. The attempt to do this on a national level is extremely difficult and we are seeing how much more difficult it is on a global level, where tribal and cultural worldviews may be quite different and opposed.
Tolerance requires recognizing that everyone (at least everyone that is not a sage if sages exist) is operating under cognitive-volitional-affective biases that affect intellectual assumptions, preferences, and emotions. Fundamentalisms and orthodoxies may tolerance difficult for those who adhere to them owing to the emphasis on purity and loyalty.
No one has the ocean in their bucket.
The only people that may have a reasonable claim to absolute knowledge are sages ... [TomH]
"There is a drop in the ocean ... everybody knows that".
"But that there is an ocean in each drop; not everybody knows" [Kabir]
Just wanted to point out that the 'sages' claimed knowledge of the Absolute - not knowledge of how to fly the A380 airbus. :-)
For me it is actually quite obvious: a duck with one leg tucked up into his undercarriage is always going to paddle in circles. There is an inside knowledge and an outside knowledge - we need both. It makes a human, human .... nothing religious, nothing spiritual - just knowledge, knowing!
I was just qualifying my statement that no one has the ocean in their bucket to mean those in gross consciousness whose knowledge is limited to the gross world. But now that jr barch as brought it up I will qualify it further.
Perennial wisdom delineates many states and stage of knowledge based on experience (Russell's "direct acquaintance") wrt to subtle consciousness of the subtle word and its aspects, mental consciousness of the causal world and its aspects, and realization of the Absolute and its aspects. There are many levels set forth in the literature.
Wrt to gross consciousness knowledge by direct acquaintance is limited to knowledge of the gross, which is "horizontal." Those in gross consciousness are unable to know the entirety of the gross owing to the limitations on this mode of knowing. Those in gross consciousness are also unable to know by direct acquaintance vertical levels that lie beyond the limitations of this mode of knowing.
Knowledge of what those in gross consciousness cannot experience can only become a matter of belief or disbelief wrt the testimony of those reporting "vertical" experience. This is the basis of religions and wisdom traditions, the teaching of which gets distorted when interpreted from the limitations of gross consciousness, since those in gross consciousness are only able to imagine what is being reported but cannot actually experience it other than vicariously. As a result much of the literature that is based on putative testimony of sages is either poorly understood or badly misunderstood. Here "sage" means one in a position to gain wisdom that transcends the gross.
The study of this is comparative spirituality and philosophy of spirituality, which I've specialized in. These are different from comparative religion and philosophy of religion, which are chiefly concerned with gross phenomena such as doctrine and belief, ritual and rubric, and precept, injunction and observance, whereas spirituality is concerned with direct acquaintance, reports thereof, and teaching about how to acquire it. While this is an ancient extending into the mists of prehistory, it is also cutting edge at present, considered by some to be the next frontier along with space exploration. In contrast to exploration of outer space, this is exploration of inner space.
Understood Tom!
For me it is interesting in that in some of the wisdom religions, 'sages' looking up (inside) at the stars in our solar system saw only Being: i.e. in the same way that a human 'being' occupies a persona (mental, emotional and physcial body) so too Venus or the Sun were the physical manifestations of Beings far more evolved in the universe. Astrology was the human science of recognition of the effect of energies emanating from these celestials; reflected in our history and personas, and as far down as physical Nature as the waxing and waning and interaction of these cyclic energies. These celestials predated the current universe - in the end a manifestation of the ONE absolute principle. The whole makes just a good a hypothesis as to the origins of the universe as the western science one in my estimation; and are not mutually exclusive - fashionable as it is to be a devotee of modernity and the strictly human version of reality. I have no idea why people are so enamoured of atoms and molecules, and want to collect them or rule them; or each other. For all our self-importance and fascination with human events, we are less than the microscopic life found in a drop of the primaeval swamp water - move the earth a few increments closer to the Sun and we are just toast; the rest of the universe would go on unperturbed. Maybe it is our unevolved response to the cyclic energies of the stars????
Humility says I should say: 'I do not know'.
I do know, as do many many people on this planet, that there is an 'ocean in the drop' [Kabir's version]. That there is an inside and an outside to every human being (the door is the heart). And one-legged ducks swim in circles! That at least is fundamental .... the only frontier in my estimate! Outer space is just more atoms and molecules - why collect rocks or look for life elsewhere when there are perfectly good rocks here; and an abundance of incredible Life! When all of the atoms and molecules will one day be swept away, and the universe will 'sleep' again. Why do we insist on this ridiculous play. Life is a journey that is homeward bound.
Knowledge to me is like learning how to ride a bike. We need to know. And stop falling off!
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