Fascinating, illuminating and compelling, as usual.
My thoughts around this, distilled to their most simplistic, are tangential. Having dipped a bit into the field of Complexity study my faith in technocratic expertise has been dented. I can see why making people do or not do things might be desirable (after all, I'm not an emotional conservative or libertarian, despite growing leanings in those ways). Eg I don't mind that the electricity in my home (I live in France) initially tripped off by default when I used several high energy appliances at once. EDF increased my supply, on request, and it made me mindful of the real world consequence of using certain equipment and the often finite resources it consumes.
But the sense I have with the credentialled technocratic blob is that they are often grossly simplistic in their approach. This is nicely explained by people like Nate Hagens (see postcarbon.org) and others in the Complexity field.
It seems to me that we're entering the worst possible version of 'government'. One in which people will feel their freedom increasingly restricted and civil society increasingly 'engineered' by unaccountable people deploying tools that probably don't achieve the desired end result anyway.
Yes, this is how I came to these issues as well actually. Governing complexity is impossible and leads inevitably to bad decisions, simply because consequences cannot be seen in advance. As Jim Manzi once put it, “Omitted variable bias is not a nitpick.” The danger of our current moment is that hubris is leading us to imagine that we can encompass all the variables - or indeed that the omitted ones won’t matter.
This is how we'll come to see many aspects of the pandemic response too, isn't it. Eventually no one will be able to agree where expertise (deep domain area knowledge of very specific fields) can be reasonably applied and how to contain the experts from overreach.
I think eventually expert rule will be so bad and will make everybody so miserable there will be a correction. In this respect I suppose I'm an accelerationist!
The governed population is a mass not simply because it is large, but a mass in the Arendt sense. Previously, classes of people had recognisable interests and characteristics, based on their position in socioeconomic roles, relationships, allegiences, and so on, the weirs and dykes you referred to. A mass population resembles grains of wheat in a silo; no characteristics distinguishing one from another, and no means of resisting the gravitational and mechanical forces applied to it. Modern politics is not merely moving populations, but actively milling away these individual interests; not a class of people, but a mass optimised for profitable storage, distribution, and disposal.
We do have to remember that the State is able to do these things purely because the people allow it. They allow it because they want security, including from the often imaginary threats that the State conjures up.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," - note that use of the word "deserve". It is up to the people (which includes all of us) to DESERVE both liberty and safety. If we choose to replace God with the State to try and obtain illusory safety, we deserve the resulting end of our liberty.
In a nutshell, this is why Christian socialists have missed the point.
Fertility / reproduction are central here too in terms of things that flow. Hence the war on love I keep bringing up. This is once again, a marvellously interesting perspective, David. The suggestion is that it's a basic principle of power and governance, a kind of mindset unfolding in an inevitable manner. I see a connection here with my own notion of a will to incorporation whereby every advance and development is closed off to secure a gain. We see this at the cellular level, as each cell walls itself off; and then again at the level of organs; again at the level of the biological organism, and so on up to the city, state, country, etc. At each level the severity increases vis a vis control of the order beneath. There is always a limit to this severity, however, as the pressure(?) causes the structure to break. As the present cycle goes global, I am concerned (to put it mildly) at how this (in)corporation will fall apart, as it inevitably must.
Fascinating, illuminating and compelling, as usual.
My thoughts around this, distilled to their most simplistic, are tangential. Having dipped a bit into the field of Complexity study my faith in technocratic expertise has been dented. I can see why making people do or not do things might be desirable (after all, I'm not an emotional conservative or libertarian, despite growing leanings in those ways). Eg I don't mind that the electricity in my home (I live in France) initially tripped off by default when I used several high energy appliances at once. EDF increased my supply, on request, and it made me mindful of the real world consequence of using certain equipment and the often finite resources it consumes.
But the sense I have with the credentialled technocratic blob is that they are often grossly simplistic in their approach. This is nicely explained by people like Nate Hagens (see postcarbon.org) and others in the Complexity field.
It seems to me that we're entering the worst possible version of 'government'. One in which people will feel their freedom increasingly restricted and civil society increasingly 'engineered' by unaccountable people deploying tools that probably don't achieve the desired end result anyway.
Yes, this is how I came to these issues as well actually. Governing complexity is impossible and leads inevitably to bad decisions, simply because consequences cannot be seen in advance. As Jim Manzi once put it, “Omitted variable bias is not a nitpick.” The danger of our current moment is that hubris is leading us to imagine that we can encompass all the variables - or indeed that the omitted ones won’t matter.
This is how we'll come to see many aspects of the pandemic response too, isn't it. Eventually no one will be able to agree where expertise (deep domain area knowledge of very specific fields) can be reasonably applied and how to contain the experts from overreach.
I think eventually expert rule will be so bad and will make everybody so miserable there will be a correction. In this respect I suppose I'm an accelerationist!
The State may lead, but we can refuse to follow....
The governed population is a mass not simply because it is large, but a mass in the Arendt sense. Previously, classes of people had recognisable interests and characteristics, based on their position in socioeconomic roles, relationships, allegiences, and so on, the weirs and dykes you referred to. A mass population resembles grains of wheat in a silo; no characteristics distinguishing one from another, and no means of resisting the gravitational and mechanical forces applied to it. Modern politics is not merely moving populations, but actively milling away these individual interests; not a class of people, but a mass optimised for profitable storage, distribution, and disposal.
Nicely put.
Thanks for an illuminating article (again)!
We do have to remember that the State is able to do these things purely because the people allow it. They allow it because they want security, including from the often imaginary threats that the State conjures up.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," - note that use of the word "deserve". It is up to the people (which includes all of us) to DESERVE both liberty and safety. If we choose to replace God with the State to try and obtain illusory safety, we deserve the resulting end of our liberty.
In a nutshell, this is why Christian socialists have missed the point.
...which reminds me of an amazing blog post from way back in 2010...
https://underdogsbiteupwards.blogspot.com/2010/01/fear-witch-for-it-is-you.html
Fertility / reproduction are central here too in terms of things that flow. Hence the war on love I keep bringing up. This is once again, a marvellously interesting perspective, David. The suggestion is that it's a basic principle of power and governance, a kind of mindset unfolding in an inevitable manner. I see a connection here with my own notion of a will to incorporation whereby every advance and development is closed off to secure a gain. We see this at the cellular level, as each cell walls itself off; and then again at the level of organs; again at the level of the biological organism, and so on up to the city, state, country, etc. At each level the severity increases vis a vis control of the order beneath. There is always a limit to this severity, however, as the pressure(?) causes the structure to break. As the present cycle goes global, I am concerned (to put it mildly) at how this (in)corporation will fall apart, as it inevitably must.
Yes, that’s more or less how I see it. Eventually this path that we are on will reach its culmination and there will be a lot of pain when it does.