Hey, I never signed any social contract!

Systems of authority, and the technological order that they serve, impact virtually every domain of our lives.  The anarchist view claims that these systems are not legitimate, and I have yet to come across a compelling argument against the anarchist perspective. 

Cristpin Sartwell has written about how the social contract notions espoused most notably by Hobbes and Rousseau cannot withstand even the most basic logical critique. The idea behind the social contract is that we need a powerful group of people (or person, or some technological arrangement) in order to protect our freedoms and to prevent other people from taking advantage of us as they would surely do if they could get away with it, and that we have therefor agreed (if only tacitly) to acquiesce to the power of these people (or person, or technological arrangement). 

One problem with this is that it smacks against the bald fact that over 99% of the existence of our species has proceeded in the absence of powerful systems of authority. How is it that we were able to survive and flourish as a species for 2 million years without these systems if they are essential for our survival and flourishing? Note that it is very likely the case that these systems are essential in a society that has been structured in ways that support the need for these systems, but that’s a logical merry-go-round that never stops.  

Another problem is that virtually all of the conditions that these systems of authority are supposed to counter, the evil conditions that we need to contract against, exist even in the presence of these systems—and some are clearly a product of the systems themselves. And, of course, social contract theory runs into the two inconvenient facts that no historical society has ever come into existence as a function of explicit contract, and that even if such a contract did serve as justification for authority for the founders of such a mythical society, it would have to be renewed with each new generation.  

I can’t speak for you, by I never agreed to relinquish any part of my autonomy for any of the "protectionist" systems of oppression currently in operation.

Primitivism and personal autonomy

Primitivist writings (my own included) are as likely as any other to fall into the reification trap, the tendency to support a concrete agenda by referencing an abstraction, for example, when arguing for the need to promote the rewilding of "humanity" or the need to save "the human species". Abstractions are a necessary and unavoidable—fundamental—feature of linguistic communication, and there is no way to speak without imposing an artificial symbolic veneer across the fabric of the universe. But we need to be continually alert to the danger of mistaking the map for the territory, or seeing only the forest and not the actual trees.   

There is no humanity, there are only individual persons.   

It seems to me that the primitivist argument holds just as solid when the focus is on the concrete individual as when it is cast over theoretical entities such as "the human species". Admittedly "the individual" is also an abstraction, but there are seven billion (and counting) specific concrete (physical, touchable, lovable, hate-able) referents for the term. 

Consider the impact that rewilding would have on both the degree and prevalence of personal autonomy, or the degree to which individuals would be free from the governing control of other people.

Autonomy has to do with the ability for the individual to pursue goals of his or her own free choosing. This goes beyond the freedom to select from among a limited array of consumer options. It also goes beyond making a forced choice from among a limited set of careers. To have a high degree of autonomy does not necessarily mean to be free from all externally-imposed constraints. It means that the individual is free, moment to moment, and within the contextual limitations operative in each moment, to assemble potential goals, and to pursue purposes of his or her own without any other person or group of people controlling, directing, coercing, or otherwise manipulating the process. 

Civilization’s hierarchical systems of authority reflect social technologies that are designed specifically to constrain autonomy and direct individuals' activity toward goals and purposes that have not been freely chosen—or worse, to convince people that coerced goals are really their own. An extremely high degree of autonomy was a salient part of the life experience of over 99 percent of the individuals who were our ancestors, and in that sense, autonomy, along with the general tendency toward egalitarianism in the social world, can be considered part of each presently existing individual’s authentic human design. And—here’s the endorsement for rewilding—it is, generally speaking (there’s that abstraction again) better for any organism, human or otherwise, to inhabit conditions consistent with evolved expectations.

To summarize:

Civilization exists only by constraining and eliminating (and completely redefining) individual autonomy. Not only is autonomy a supremely desirable value in its own right, but our individual evolutionary histories have predisposed each of us for lives as autonomous agents; as well as being maximally consistent with uncountable other features of our evolved biological, psychological, and social expectations, rewilding reestablishes conditions of maximal individual autonomy.

The state of our police state

We live in a totalitarian police state. We live under the heavily armed and watchful eye of pervasive and invasive systems of control that penetrate all facets of our lives and demand our complete acquiescence. Like prisoners in the exercise yard, our movements are carefully monitored. Like cattle driven to the slaughterhouse, our daily activity is channeled and directed by “authorities” who are sanctioned and equipped to confront any expression of individual autonomy with overwhelming and lethal force.

We live in a totalitarian police state that is becoming global in its scope and universal in its reach. The state’s systems of control do not stop at the walls of our own homes; they sit at our kitchen table, guard our bathroom medicine cabinet, hide in our bedroom closet, breathe at our back during our most intimate moments, and penetrate into our very body, into our bloodstream, into our reproductive organs, into our DNA. The state tells us how we are to live, the people with whom we can associate, the materials that we are to ingest, the words we are allowed to speak, the games we can play, the knowledge we are allowed access to, the ways we can express our sexuality.

We live in a totalitarian police state that is supported by violence leveled against our physical persons.  Violence is the source of the state’s control. Violence and threat and fear and anxiety fuel the machines of power. But the technology of control is becoming increasingly subtle and increasingly directed at our psychology. The whips and maces of our oppressors have become increasingly invisible, increasingly internalized, increasingly of our own construction. We live daily under constant surveillance, our actions subject to continual scrutiny. Even our most private thoughts, should we slip and give them external form, are cached for future reference. “Anything you say can and will be used against you,” but the converse of that is not true: anything you say to the arresting officer in your own defense is hearsay and not admissible as evidence to support your innocence. The power of the state travels in only one direction.    

We live in a totalitarian police state that has stripped us of our autonomy. We are not free to decide for ourselves. We are not free to choose. We are not free to make personal decisions based on conscience.  We are “free” to participate in a limited range of corporate-sponsored activities. We are “free” to select from an ever-expanding array of entertainment options and from an unending parade of consumer products, but even here, beyond trivial options (which flavor, which color, which brand), we simply have no choice. We are worse than slaves—even slaves retain a residual humanity. We are mute mechanical sheep, powerless even to bleat our discontent. 

We live in a totalitarian police state that is gaining power daily. Contrary to the popular myth that the freedoms enjoyed today are far greater than those of past eras with their barbarism, bloody violence, and overt slavery, freedom today is far more circumscribed, and far more rarified than in past times. The technology of control is becoming increasingly sophisticated, increasingly irresistible. The mere thought of resistance is becoming increasingly unthinkable. The bald-faced lie that it is for our own good has been crafted into an unassailable truth through Newspeak reformulations of words like “security” and “safety” and “progress.”  Every program designed to increase security further constrains our freedom, and leaves us less secure. Every policy designed to enhance safety further erodes our autonomy and leaves us less protected.  Every step in the direction of technological progress further distances us from our past humanity and drives us more deeply into the heart of the machine.   

We live in a totalitarian police state. That is not overstatement or hyperbole. That we live in a totalitarian police state is a simple, demonstrable, and transparent fact. We live in a state that exercises its nonnegotiable demand for our total acquiescence through potent and sophisticated technologies of authority and control. What is not so simple and transparent is why most of us appear to be OK with this. Why is it that most of us appear quite willing daily to relinquish our basic human freedom and dignity? This question becomes even more pressing when asked in the following form:

Why is it that we acquiesce to totalitarian systems of authority and control when these systems of authority and control derive all of their power, ultimately, from the bare fact that we continue to acquiesce?   

But there is a second, more important, much more immediate question. This second question sits just below the surface of the question of our continued acquiescence like an ancient and festering wound that will not heal. It is this second question we need to answer if we are to reclaim our humanity. It is this second question we need to answer if our species—perhaps the planet itself—is to have any hope for a future:

“How do we set ourselves free?”

Warfare is a modern invention

Lately I have been running into a lot of incredulity about the idea that Pleistocene hunter-gatherers didn’t engage in warfare. I think part of the problem is that we tend to use the term war in a metaphorical sense to apply to just about any act of aggression. I was reading recently about how even chimpanzees supposedly engage in acts of warfare on neighboring colonies. This is ridiculous on its face. Yeah, the chimps gang up, ambush, and kill other chimps. But to equate what chimps do with human warfare is a bit of a stretch to say the least. Lion prides gang up, ambush, and kill gazelles. So is that war too? And don’t even get me started about what ant colonies do to each other.

Humans are not pacifist by nature. And there were surely situations where conflict over hunting territory—or just plain xenophobia—led to deadly aggression between neighboring bands. But Pleistocene hunter-gatherers lacked two things that prevent me from calling this kind of inter-band conflict war. First, they didn’t have weapons. They had all kinds of potentially deadly tools, spears, knives, poison arrows, etc. But they didn’t have any tools specifically designed for use against other humans. Poison arrows were no doubt used to kill people on occasion (just like screwdrivers and box cutters are today), but they were designed for antelope. It is my understanding that you don’t start to see things like battle axes and maces in the archeological record until you get large-scale domestication.

And second, even more important than the lack of specifically designated weapons, the social structure of hunter-gatherer bands lacks the hierarchical systems of power and authority necessary for assembling and coordinating the deadly labor-power necessary for warfare. The division of labor that occurs with large-scale agricultural projects sets the stage for the hierarchical ordering of power-relations necessary to organize and carryout military operations.

In addition, nomadic and semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers didn’t have any real reasons to kill each other en masse. Sedentary life-ways anchored to specific physical locations for crops and food storage, and the recurrent need to expand into new territory to accommodate exhausted soils and the inevitable increase in population, gives farmers motives to kill each other that foragers don’t have.

Bucket list

Only in a superficial consumer culture like ours does the idea of a bucket list make any sense.  Surely life is more than a series of events or "peak experiences" that can be collected like plastic bowling trophies and ticked off a to-do list.

A brief reflection on the NATO (so-called-)protests in Chicago

What do the phrases physical beating, armed gunman, added bonus, and police brutality all have in common?

Time’s up.

They are all completely redundant.

We live in a totalitarian police state (another redundant phrase!). Our freedom and autonomy are restricted by pervasive and invasive systems of control that penetrate all facets of our lives and demand our complete acquiescence. Our public and private activity is orchestrated and directed by “authorities” with (actual) armies of highly trained thugs who are sanctioned and equipped to use overwhelming force, and who have the power to remove any remaining vestiges of freedom and delusions of autonomy through direct physical means that include beatings, concussion grenades, tear gas, pepper-spray, electrification, and bullets made of rubber. These thugs can also, of course, use bullets made of lead to kill us at any moment and without repercussion if our obeisance is not sufficiently immediate, or if it does not conform to their bosses' ever-changing and arbitrary standards. And, if there is any suspicion that we might be the kind of people who harbor any notions of meaningful resistance (another redundant phrase), and we happen to live in Yemen or Pakistan (or in a year or two from now, South Chicago, East LA, or Cleveland Ohio) there is a good chance that we (and our family members—including our children) will be cleanly evaporated in the middle of the night with the aid of robotic aircraft flown by some obsessively masturbating military dickweed in a trailer in Colorado.

Now for the bonus round: what do the phrases military intelligence, same difference, business ethics, jumbo shrimp, and peaceful protest have in common?

First they came for the anarchists...

 But I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t an anar—hey, not so fast!

Question: What do the five “anarchists” accused of trying to blow up an Ohio bridge and the CIA secret-agent high-tech underwear bomber have in common?

That one’s too easy. They are both, of course, examples of the US government manufacturing “terrorists” so that it can continue to justify the expanding and increasingly invasive presence of the police state. Freedom and liberty simply wouldn't be possible if it were not for the FBI, CIA, DEA—and let's not forget the panty-sniffing TSA—courageously commandeering our freedom and liberty.

Next question: How soon before the first (publically acknowledged) drone strike on a "target" in the US?

War is peace, slavery is freedom, … vivisection is care

I was reading through the materials from a physiological psychology textbook and came across these four bullet points about the ethical treatment of animals by psychological researchers:

•          There is no excuse for mistreating animals in our care.

•          In fact, the vast majority of laboratory animals are treated humanely.

•          Pet ownership causes much more suffering among animals than scientific research does.

•          Fifty times more dogs and cats are killed by humane societies each year because they have been abandoned by former pet owners than are used in scientific research.

Point one:  The use of the word “care” is over-the-top euphemism for “hold captive, starve, torture, drown, maim, drug, poison, and/or slice into histological sections for analysis,” which makes the “mistreating animals in our care” part pure tautology. So the sentence means something like “there is no excuse for what we do.”

And I agree.

Point two: “Treated humanely” can be translated as “the animals haven’t been held captive, starved, tortured, drowned, maimed, drugged, poisoned, and/or sliced into histological sections for analysis unless we thought it necessary to do so.”  Or that’s true for more than 51% of laboratory animals.

Point three: More newborn infants test positive for mercury than test positive for cadmium.  So we really don’t need to worry about a pregnant woman’s exposure to cadmium.

Point four: Almost ten times as many infants test positive for mercury (83.9%) than test positive for cadmium (8.5%).  

Also note in point four that humane societies “kill” and pet owners “abandon” but that scientists (neutrally) “use”.

What's wrong with this picture?

I was listening to a Hal Sparks on a progressive radio station in Chicago a couple days ago. Like all good progressives, Sparks is a delusional civilization apologist who believes that global post-industrial society reflects the material bloom of the creative human spirit—the global machine is our manifest destiny. He is also a flaming technophile, the kind to whom the “fetish” connotation of the term truly applies.

He began his program by singing the praises of twitter. There are those who insist that twitter (electronic social networking in general) is simply a tool for deepening our narcissistic self-absorption, and that the content of a typical tweet lowers the bar for banality. But not Hal. For Sparks, “twitter is about community”. 

Seriously.

We are designed for life in tribal society where we would have regular meaningful interaction with a sizeable number of people, Sparks says. But most of us, as we trudge through the daily grind of work and family, have meaningful interactions with maybe a half dozen or fewer people on a regular basis. Twitter (and facebook and etc., ) allows us to transcend the limitations of physical proximity and establish true community with numerous others.  

Exchanging electronic signals with anonymous strangers is community. 

Fresh water comes from a machine. 

I think I’m beginning to see a pattern here. 

“By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed [and] exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be.”  --George Orwell

More on the domestication bulldozer

Here is a report of a new DNA-based study about the spread of agriculture across Europe 5000 years ago, providing additional evidence that early domestication-technology didn’t transfer across cultures.   Instead, the first agriculturalists in Europe came from elsewhere and displaced (killed) or assimilated (enslaved) local foraging populations:

http://www.nature.com/news/ancient-swedish-farmer-came-from-the-mediterranean-1.10541

A cultural practice that produces exploding populations and exhausted soils can only survive through ever-expanding migration and conquest.