The Serpent's Wisdom

I keep coming back to a definition of freedom offered by Marx and Engels: the ability to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, one is not free if one merely has the ability to choose between life-options offered to her by society - one is free if she can live in the world she conceives and acts to bring about.

The riots in London (and in many other places around the world over the last couple of years) have been on my mind, because I dreamed I was involved in the destruction of a concrete park bench as an act of dissenting vandalism, and found myself in the custody of the Archons, one of whom, in the guise of an authoritative-looking man, held both my hands and interrogated me calmly but firmly. "What do you think it accomplished? What good did it bring about? How is the world a better place as a result?" He wanted clearly for me to feel that my participation had accomplished nothing positive, but also seemed genuinely to want to know my thoughts and feelings.

"People need more outlets," I said. Paraphrasing slightly the rest of my reply: "Okay, destroying the bench accomplished nothing good, but I wanted to express my dissent and that was 'the only train leaving the station.'"

Even my wording though demonstrates the enclosure of the word-fence. People need more than "more outlets" to express frustration. They need to be able to change those parts of the world that frustrate them. I believe that the average person is willing to expend honest effort for honest return. I also believe that most people want to feel as though the effort they expend is leading to something meaningful, some eventual good thing that is brought into the world as a result. How many of us get to feel that our daily work lends to some improvement to the human condition?

I propose, though the matter deserves further investigation, that all of us could select tasks that lend to improvement of the human condition, and live in prosperity. So I might turn the Archon's questions back on his own implicit support for the current financial-industrial order: what good does it bring about? How is the world a better place? We have to be free to ask the next question: can we do better? While humankind has achieved many improvements, it is worth asking whether we are getting less than we might be from our efforts. Why do we have a skewed system with endlessly deep pockets for making weapons, while bridges are collapsing from disrepair and schools are crumbling? Stock market tricks so arcane that even people with a Ph.D. in finance can't understand them reward investors with billions in profits while millions of people have no shelter or food security, and while illness is almost guaranteed to bankrupt a family.

As good as we have made things, we can do better. Silent complicity and empty dissent are not the only trains leaving the station. Every day brings anew the potential to reframe the debate.

The cynic in me is this morning thinking that 22 Democrats voted to confirm John Roberts as Chief Justice, and 4 Democrats (enough to kill Kerry's filibuster) voted to confirm Samuel Alito as Associate Justice, mainly so that they'd be able to argue now, in 2008, that "ZOMG we need to elect a Democrat as President or there will soon be another judge just like these two on the Supreme Court! (And no we totally didn't help them get there.) You know what will happen then - women, kiss your right to choose goodbye!"

I can't help thinking this while wondering how the vote essentially legalizing the President's illegal wiretapping program from 2002-2006 is going in Congress right now, as i type.

Like i said to cowgrrl the other night, history is not going to look kindly on this period of American history. All along there have been people documenting the wrongs - the lies, the maneuvering, the approval of torture, the violation of civil liberties, the secret prisons, the gulag, the media's collusion, the congressional coverups, the profiteering. Unless there are going to be a lot of bookburnings in the near future, historians will have a clear and solid record of just how aware the American people were and are of what was going on. This means it won't just be Bush and his cronies whose legacy will be sullied; it won't just be the Democratic collaborators; it won't just be NewsMax and Fox and Halliburton and KBR; it will be the entire American society.

ETA: HR 6304 to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 passed with more Democrats voting YEA than NAY. You can see the roll call here. If it passes the Senate, it will grant the President the ability to basically write his own rules for wiretapping, and will instruct judges to dismiss any lawsuit brought against any telecommunications company for participating in an illegal wiretap if they can prove the President asked them to do it claiming he was looking for terrorists.

Originally published at Monstrous Regiment. You can comment here or there.

This morning i had a jarring, chilling exposure to what the word “impressionable” really means.

My wife and i had to go to her son’s school this morning to deal with, well, the kinds of things kids do. All we knew was that the principal wanted to talk to her. I went along as moral support. We didn’t know they were going to drag her son into the room with us so that he could sit on one side of the room with four adults looking at him asking him about what happened. We had no idea we were going to be made into de facto accomplices.

And, to be fair, they didn’t grill him like interrogators. No, it was all maddeningly “reasonable.” It’s just that under any sort of scrutiny whatsoever he closes up, so we didn’t hear much at all of his side of what happened.

I’ve never seen anyone squirm so much in my life. And so, with him basically having been found guilty, we coached him through what he would say by way of apology and reassurance to the other aggrieved kids. To some extent that was appropriate, since kids are still learning about what it means to be an ethical person who respects other people’s boundaries.

But my wife and i were profoundly uncomfortable about the whole “words being put in his mouth” thing. And that’s all i saw everywhere i looked in the school. The “pledge of allegiance to the flag,” which was recited while we were there. Everywhere, ‘motivational’ posters with captions like “Curiosity: i choose to learn.”

The underlying message is, this is a place where we put words into your mouth. You know? I don’t think i’ve ever met a kid who had to be told to “choose to learn.”

When you’re a kid, you don’t have the liberty to choose what you want to do or say. You are told what you want to do or say. And it is often presented obliquely as if it is a desire coming from you, the kid. And when it is said this way often enough, and when you parrot it and get the appropriate reward, it sinks in. Really, really deeply.

It doesn’t matter whether or not kids understand what the pledge of allegiance is about. To them, it’s just dumb words that they have to repeat every morning… which they do in a droning, hypnotic, rhythmic monotone. But they do understand, on a basic level, that it is something they do to make the adults around them beam with pride (”What good, obedient, upstanding, patriotic kids we have!”) and to avoid punishment for not complying.

And much of this is about learning how to perform the gender we’ve been assigned.

Being in school helped remind me about how that worked when i was younger. I remember viewing adulthood as this barren wasteland where you wander around as a broken person, your dreams and individuality stunted beyond repair. I suppose that was my expectation because my preparation for adulthood consisted of this constant pressure to be someone-not-me, by way of the silencing of my own galla-voice and the replacement of it with something suitably “masculine.”

I remember, for example, eagerly joining the high school wrestling team after lots of input from my father about how much he had enjoyed it. I had never been a sporty kid, though being on the wrestling team was actually good for me in some ways. I wonder if people today look at my almost-thigh-length hair and somewhat femme presentation (minus, you know, the occasional stompy boots) and have any trouble picturing me grasping someone and pinning him to the mat?

But i would never have “wanted” to do that if it hadn’t been subtly put there, if it hadn’t been rewarded and encouraged once i said i wanted to do it.

On a bigger scale, this is why women’s “consent” to various kinds of things in a patriarchal society can be so sketchy sometimes.

But this leads into troubling territory because i’m wondering how we can distinguish between “educating” a kid (enabling their cognition while also respecting their identity and will) versus putting our thoughts into their heads and our words in their mouths. Kids don’t always know how to make decisions, it’s one of the things they’re still learning, and they sometimes have to be guided to a decision. (Or… light bulb comes on… do they?)

There are many odious things about the new immigration compromise bill between Bush and congressional Democrats. One in particular caught my attention.

In perhaps the most hotly debated change, the proposed plan would shift from an immigration system primarily weighted toward family ties toward one with preferences for people with advanced degrees and sophisticated skills. Republicans have long sought such revisions, which they say are needed to end "chain migration" that harms the economy.

from Deal may legalize millions of immigrants

Okay, this has set off all kinds of little alarms in my brain. The United States is becoming more and more an "employer-ocracy" and it's killing freedom.

Our model of employment is that we are theoretically employed "at-will," meaning that each of us is free to pick up and move on if we don't like our jobs. Show of hands -- how many of you would rather be doing something else? ::counts:: A-yep, thought so.

If so many people are unhappy or underwhelmed or dubious about the ethical ramifications of what they do, why don't we just leave? Well, there's countless variations on this, but what they amount to is, we happen to like those habits of living in comfortable homes and eating. Most of us do not have any way to cover the costs of finding a different employer. There's another factor, which is: many of us don't really know how to do anything else. And: there's probably not going to be much difference where we work, it will more or less be the same. Or maybe: you've punched a timeclock your whole life and don't have the discipline to be a free agent (found this to be true of myself, at least).

Some of us are our own boss, but this is becoming harder and harder to maintain because in one way or another it's being squeezed out. Need to borrow money, find an apartment, buy a home? More and more we've gotta punch a timeclock if we want those things. Our schools are designed to acclimatize us to spending our days on someone else's time.

This limits our freedom considerably. An employer can dictate how you dress, how you color your hair, how you spend your free time, what you put in your body. They can force you to hide things about your life. They demand half or more of the time you are awake. They pay you less than they are making off your labor. And the whole process of being an "employee" detaches you from what it is you spend your time doing, causing a rift Marxists call "alienation." As summarized in that article,

In a nutshell, Marx's Theory of Alienation is the contention that in modern industrial production under capitalist conditions workers will inevitably lose control of their lives by losing control over their work. Workers thus cease to be autonomous beings in any significant sense.

Back to the immigration proposal.

As it stands now, employers already have a tremendous amount of sway over people who come into the United States. Many people enter the US under work visas which require them to stay with their employer. In history class we called that "indentured servitude," only back then, people could stay in America after their contract was up.

Immigrants anywhere are particularly vulnerable, and this is no different in the US. They are far away from their familiar support systems, they may not speak the language well, and their economic resources are limited. Abuse of all kinds -- exploitation, physical abuse, sexual abuse, psychological abuse, you name it -- of immigrants by employers is all too common.

But, even beyond this consideration, i have trouble with the way this new proposal makes the INS a big temp agency, and reduces people to what they can provide not for their communities or their families but for employers.

Think about it this way. Every person in your life -- what are they good for? That's an offensive question, right? You wouldn't care to put a dollar figure on the good things that a friend, acquaintance, or lover brings into your life. A lot of it is intangible and qualitative. They are fellow human beings. We live our lives together. A person brings more than economic value to a community; they bring vitality, presence, creativity. They are the community.

Dammit, what gives the government or the employment cartel the right to step in and say that what a person can do for an employer is more important than that? Is that really what we want to be the foundation of our society? Not companionship, family, togetherness, but what you can do for an employer?

A conservative beat a socialist in the election in France, and many are using this as an opportunity to declare socialism dead in Europe.

The reality is much more complex than that. The last hurrah of state socialism notwithstanding, what is actually happening is a revolution within the revolution, which is precisely as it needs to be.

It's fair to say that a century of experiments have demonstrated that top-down, state-imposed socialism doesn't work. Economies and societies are too complex to be run from the top. Bureaucracies are too slow, too entrenched, to react to changing conditions. And we have seen, to our great disappointment, that there is no edifice we can establish as one generation's solution that cannot be undermined by unscrupulous cronyism and mutate into the next generation's problem.

But, at the heart of the problem is this: it is just not feasible in the long run to achieve the central goal of socialism within the state aparatus. There are some things, like accountability for wrongdoers, which will probably always require government. But the heart of socialism -- unraveling the web of control so we can be free -- is only hindered thereby.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing in the middle and late nineteenth century, envisioned the global scheme of exploitation inevitably hitting a kind of rock bottom, causing ire among the working class to conflate to the point of violent revolution. They could not have foreseen the effects of technology between then and now; the effectiveness of advertising and television in numbing people to the inhumanly cannibalistic nature of the global economy -- nor could they have foreseen the widespread consciousness-raising potential of the internet.

They also imagined that the state could be transformed into an instrument for carrying out the will of the people. They were no doubt influenced by the grandiosity of American and French Revolutionary language -- the proclamation of "we the people" as the granter of governmental authority "by consent of the governed" (implying that consent can be withdrawn) instead of brute force and coersion and fear. That's a wonderful theory but it never seems to work out in reality.

At the other end of it, it is not enough to brew up a new critical rhetoric, bash a wine bottle on the bow and send it off into the world. Time has demonstrated that there is no rhetoric which cannot be misappropriated. Revolutions of this sort really only have to be waited out. A while back i proposed the (admittedly not very catchy) term "hypostatic reverie" to refer to the conceptual apathy by which people, over generational time scales, forget the 'revolutionary' character of new institutions and ideologies, and accept them as part of the landscape. And with this apathy comes the opportunity for misappropriation.

In terms of class struggles, it's been a very educational 140 years. We've learned, foremost, that we can't take the easy way out when unraveling the control paradigm. There is no single route to undoing the ideological and institutional hold of sexism, classism, and racism on society. It can't be imposed from the top; it can't be achieved in an adversarial-style uprising. If it were that easy, it could have been accomplished by now. The control paradigm operates on every level; it is embedded in our brains, implanted during childhood and, figuratively if not literally, beaten into us by parents, peers, and adults in authority.

Views become entrenched, even within the revolution; and "the revolution" has become such a fixture that it now is itself an edifice against which people of conscience must struggle. "The revolution" has been misappropriated so that it now is just another cog in the great machine of violence that chews people up. It is only with hindsight that we can comprehend that the monster often takes the guise of two factions, espousing different ideology, who grind away at each other, with children and women in the crossfire paying the highest price.

The Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle reflects this shift in awareness -- acknowledgment of the need for those with socialist consciousness to greatly re-think the unraveling of control and domination.

The revolution has been changing. It has taken the form of an emphasis on individual efficacy, a fondness for observing with Gandhi that we should "be the change," to recognize one's own place in the pyramid of control and understand that actions carry repercussions.

For example, once you become aware of "fair trade" products, you are directly confronted with the reality of exploitation overseas. You are also confronted with the understanding that if you continue to buy products you can no longer pretend you don't know were made in sweatshops or by slaves, that no matter what political positions you espouse you are a cog in the machine.

It may be, because of limited income or family size, that you have no choice but to continue to buy the cheaper product -- which in itself bears interesting insights about the way the game works, the way we are all swept along with the tide and, scrabbling for our own individual survival, rarely take the time and energy to see the greater pattern.

That fair trade products cost more reflects to a degree the economies of scale, but also the reality that what makes many products affordable is wage exploitation, low labor and safety standards, and even slavery. The difference represents the degree to which it is profitable to have a global empire which does not care about oppression.

But this is the level on which the revolution needs to happen -- not "us versus them" antagonism, but waves of lightbulbs lighting up in individuals on every level of the pyramid. If you're reading this, you're probably pretty close to the top of the pyramid, like me. The closer we are to the top, the more effect our individual choices can have as they propagate down the line. As each of us makes more and more humane choices, this change progresses until it becomes a building wave, a ripple which sweeps across the world.

This weekend i spent a fair amount of time pondering what peace is and how it should be achieved.

Whenever we have a war, there's a bunch of shooting and bombing and fear and rape and famine and torture and maiming, and whole nations are deeply traumatized and face environmental and economic crises for years or decades.  And after the primary spasms of horrific violence end, there are "peace talks."  Or, often the "peace talks" happen when there's been some terrorism and skirmishing and threats.

This whole idea of "peace talks" though enshrines a number of unspoken presumptions and agendas that i want to unravel a bit. 

First, look at who gets to be party to the peace talks: the generals and warlords and state leaders and other people who masterminded the war in the first place.  Does anyone ever speak for, or listen to, the refugees, the broken families, the orphans and widows, the children who were prostituted or drugged and made into soldiers? 

Also absent are the war profiteers.  They would prefer to stay in the shadows, because they benefit most when no one pays any attention to their role in all this and everyone just assumes that they are passive merchants, not power brokers.  They want people to think that it wouldn't matter if they stopped selling arms or hiring out mercenaries because the demand exists independent of their supply, so if they got out of the war business someone else would just offer the same products anyway.

The people who do get to participate in peace talks do so in order to advance their agenda -- and i assert this to be the case for all parties no matter what ideology or doctrine they epouse: they want to duck any kind of accountability they might otherwise face for war crimes, and they want a seat in the cartel that has a monopoly on violence in the region.  Throughout the peace talks, it is in their interest to make it seem that they are willing to return to violence at the drop of a hat -- as if being violent is the easy option, and not being violent is a perpetual struggle.  Running and outfitting an army is not cheap, the resources for training, weapons, and provisions have to come from somewhere, and yet we are to believe that being nonviolent is the harder option?  At peace talks, the biggest asset one has is the appearance of having limitless capacity for violence, and how backward is that?

So the idea of "peace" promoted by the state is the absence of factional organized violence, enforced by a cartel who assert the unique authority to use sanctioned violence in that region.  Anyone else uses violence, they are criminals; the state uses violence, it is just and heroic.  This is "peace:" unrealized potential violence.  The state wants you to believe that peace comes at the point of a gun.

Which is where, like so many of the matters i consider, this comes down to one's view of human nature.  If people are fundamentally unruly animals, for whom it actually is more difficult to be nonviolent than brutal, then pacificism doesn't make sense, and neither does compassion.  Under the pessmistic view of human nature, we should be thankful if we live in an area with a strong state and a healthy culture of fear-respect for God, police and military.

However, i'm not inclined to think that way, for several reasons, not the least of which is that what we are witnessing is not the action of humans in our natural habitat but the action of humans under the severe stresses of crowding and being caged.  If our unruliness is fundamentally the reaction to this stress -- along with stress from various other stressors -- then adding the stress of perpetually-threatened state violence cannot be a lasting solution.  The better solution, it seems to me, is a more direct response to the stresses which cause our unruliness.

Is peace more than the absence of war?  I believe instead that it is the steps we take to foster greater understanding, less prejudice, and reduced stress.  If this is the case, then we all have a stake in promoting and developing peace.  And we, all of us, not just the ones with the guns and bombs, have a voice in saying what it looks like.

Now the government is targeting unmarried adults up to age 29 as part of its abstinence-only programs, which include millions of dollars in federal money that will be available to the states under revised federal grant guidelines for 2007.

The government says the change is a clarification. But critics say it's a clear signal of a more directed policy targeting the sexual behavior of adults.

... Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the Department of Health and Human Services, said the revision is aimed at 19- to 29-year-olds because more unmarried women in that age group are having children.

... The revised guidelines specify that states seeking grants are "to identify groups ... most likely to bear children out-of-wedlock, targeting adolescents and/or adults within the 12- through 29-year-old age range." Previous guidelines didn't mention targeting of an age group.

"We wanted to remind states they could use these funds not only to target adolescents," Horn said. "It's a reminder."

from Abstinence message goes beyond teens

Let that sink in for a moment. The government is paying people to tell adults they shouldn't have sex out of wedlock. Anyone want to guess who is going to be particularly targeted here? Here's a hint: have you ever been to a government assistance office?

The government does not exist to tell you how to live your life. The government exists to facilitate the decisions you, as a free person, make.

The government does not exist to tell you what language you may or may not speak, the government does not exist to tell you what religion you may or may not practice, the government does not exist to tell you what chemicals to put in your body or not put in your body, the government does not exist to tell you to have children or not have children, and the government sure as hell does not exist to tell you who to have sex with or who not to have sex with.

Some of these choices might not be as economically efficient as others, but economic efficiency is not the end-all-be-all of human existence, not even close.

The Echo 9 launching facility for the intercontinental nuclear missile Minuteman III is about 100 miles northwest of Bismarck, North Dakota. Endless fields of sunflowers and mown hay dazzle those who travel there.

... On the morning of June 20, 2006, three people dressed as clowns arrived at Echo 9. The clowns broke the lock off the fence and put up peace banners and posters. One said: “Swords into plowshares - Spears into pruning hooks.” Then they poured some of their own blood and hammered on the nuclear launching facility.

[Fr. Carl Kabat, 72,] is a Catholic priest. [Greg Boertje-Obed, 52,] is an ex-military officer, married and the father of an 11 year old daughter. [Michael Walli, 57,] is a Vietnam vet who has worked with the homeless for decades. Greg and Carl are members of the Loaves and Fishes Community in Duluth. The three are called the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares.

They placed a copy of the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution, international legal condemnations of nuclear weapons, bibles, rosaries, bread, wine, and a picture of Greg's daughter on the top of the missile silo.

Then they waited until the air force security forces came and arrested them.

From Bill Quigley's article CONVICTIONS: The Trial of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares Clowns

The Plowshares Clowns were convicted and each face up to 10 years in prison. What caught my eye in this article was this:

The defense asked for two instructions about justice – one from the preamble to the US Constitution another from Judge Learned Hand – both were denied by the judge. Defendants asked that the jury be read the First Amendment – denied. International law? Denied. Nuremberg Principles? Denied. The US statute defining war crimes? Denied. The US statute defining genocide? Denied.

The judge then went forward and instructed the jury to disregard anything about nuclear weapons, international law, and the good motives of the defendants. The effect of these instructions was to treat the actions of the defendants the same as if they had poured blood and hammered on a Volkswagen – pure property damage.

... One of the jurors told people afterwards that many on the jury learned a lot in the trial and were sympathetic to the defense, but “the judge's instructions left us no option but to find them guilty.”

Of course they had no option but to find them guilty. The whole process had been rigged from the beginning to reduce the various perspectives and nuances of the situation to a single black-and-white renduring of "innocent or guilty." It is not a process by which the truth of the matter is discerned; it is a process by which all of the meaning and significance of life, the big picture, is filtered out as much as possible.

This is what i've referred to in various entries as "the tyranny of the written word." By that i don't mean that written language is somehow evil or tyrannous (although that idea has been explored); i refer to a way of looking at the world which deliberately examines details in a distinctly literal and direct way... pouring over the words of contracts and laws, with the net result that the greater meaning of things -- which many of us might be inclined to think of as the really important part -- is filtered out in favor of a stultifyingly limited cross-section of events.

How else is it conceivable that three people, avowed pacifists, protesting in a less than placid and well-behaved way their lack of voice with regards to the distribution of resources and labor in their society, can be essentially reduced to vandals? The ability of people to speak their wishes aloud, and act in accordance with their words and beliefs -- in short, to act in accordance with their will -- is perhaps the most fundamental right there is. And it is NOT in the best interest of the ruling oligarchy to allow people that right, or to even let them think that right exists.

Hence, we have this "rationalistic" method of smashing reality with a hammer and looking only at the little bits that best suit our goals.

The justice system meets the needs of the state rather than the needs of people. The needs of people would be best served by mapping out a route from here to the maximum empowerment of every person involved. Even though the ideal "government of, by, and for the people" would (according to the US's founding documents) have a similar concern (and would therefore have no interest in restricting people's non-harmful actions or expression), the government we have is not in the least interested in the empowerment of people. It is interested in the self-preservation of ongoing institutional concerns.

The "big picture" is threatening to the state -- not just because, as Stephen Colbert put it, "Reality has a well-known liberal bias" -- but because thoughtful, engaged citizens are not so easily swayed by shepherding tactics. People can only become aware of the inequality and injustice which permeates our society, of the truly small amount of control the state allows them to have in the direction of their lives, if they are able to deeply contemplate the big picture. Being conscious and aware is one of the most radical things you can do.

The idea of "socialist government" is an oxymoron.

Human freedom, as defined by Marx and Engels, is essentially the freedom to "contemplate oneself in a world one has created." In other words, people are free if they have real say in the direction or future of society.

This goes beyond the popular idea of freedom which we have in the United States today. Americans have the freedom to do what they want to do with their time and to pursue what interests they want. But we do not have real freedom to shape the future, to make our voices heard against the ubiquitous ethical bankruptcy of our institutions.

The American ideal, as it exists today (it was not always so) is government of the people, by the people, for the people -- not government that facilitates and provides a veneer of legitimacy or even respectability for the slow-motion cannibalism of the lower classes. The idea of government of, by, and for "the people" points to the "naive need" for society to have just and humane governance, governance which holds perpetrators accountable for injustices at all levels.

Suppose, on a naive level, that people come together to create an institution to facilitate the protection of some degree of fairness. People do so because they recognize that human nature is not at the point where people can be expected to just do the right thing. The problem with this scheme is that the authority of an institutional edifice depends upon its mission being respected by all people. Where the aristocratic class finds a way to undermine the mission of an edifice by appointing cronies as watchdogs -- and we can regard this outcome as inevitable -- suddenly people need to be protected against the edifice itself. It has become a proponent of the injustice which they intended it to prevent.

And so it goes with government of, by, and for the people. Any government established by and for "the people," including one founded on socialist principles, can be expected to be undermined by a cabal of cronies.

We cannot even achieve justice by rebelling against an unjust government, because rebellion is part of the imperialistic scheme. The faces at the top change, the words and ideologies change, but not the methods of imperialism.

The key may be changing human nature, but what do we do until that can be achieved?

The difficulty is in imagining something that will remain "naive" without becoming undermined by cronyism, but which is simultaneously protected against imperialism from outside.

One might contemplate mutual aid organizations that are designed to dissolve every so often, and this would be a decent scheme if it contained the means to protect itself simultaneously (1) against becoming a cronyist edifice, (2) against imperialism from without, and (3) against becoming a tool of injustice against minorities.

One might contemplate a sort of "perpetual radical movement" that replenishes every generation, but such movements have not been able to avoid the fate of being either (1) suppressed and forcibly silenced or (2) misappropriated and misdirected into tacit support for imperialism. (The aristocracy does not have to silence radicals if they can make our own words meaningless by drowning us out with a popularized "safe and sanitized" version of our own terminology.)

To succeed, a radical socialist movement would have to be global in its scope, would have to focus heavily on "values education," would have to minimize power centralization (while simultaneously maintaining a high degree of universal accountability), and would have to perpetually renew to avoid having its language misappropriated and diluted.

The Cato Institute's Doug Bandow suggests that the free market, and not democracy, is the true road to peace.

And if i believed it was possible to actually have a free market, i might agree.

Ivan Eland suggests that the key to peace is not democracy but liberty, which he doesn't define in this essay, but which we can presumably take to mean the absense of authoritarian domination.

Okay, i'll agree with that. A truly libertarian society would be relatively peaceful, because it wouldn't have the means or inclination to build an imperial war machine.

However, a truly libertarian society is not sustainable, for the same reasons that a truly free market is not sustainable -- because it has no defense against the welling-up of oligarchical collectivism. Without anything to stop it from happening, there will inevitably rise up an aristocratic class who work in lock-step to secure their privilege, following the ages-familiar pattern of exploitation.

Freedom, it would seem, requires cooperation so that it can be defended. On many levels, we find that constraints can allow for greater freedom in new degrees than you'd have without the constraint. In political science this observation can be traced back at least to Hobbes.

Hobbes was one of the primary influences on those who founded the American government. Their solution to the problem of aristocratic exploitation was to make protecting the free market and personal liberty a duty of a democratic government. The theory goes, a government whose authority is granted freely by the people (rather than taken by an elite and enforced by a monopoly on violence) and who governs for the benefit of the people, can fairly and justly protect personal and market liberty from the grasp of tyrants.

However, the democratic republic has turned out to have several weaknesses. The success of this system counts on its citizens to be rational and reasonably well-informed. Those who in previous eras formed an aristocratic cabal and took privilege by wealth and force now do so by employing spin doctors to sway public opinion in their favor (even when it is not in the public's best interest), securing jobs for cronies on regulatory boards and courtrooms, and undermining the impartial news media.

A similar problem has befallen attempts at socialism and communism. Centralization of public oversight creates too much temptation and opportunity for those who figure out how to undermine it.

In general, there is a tendency for social institutions created as solutions for one generation to become problems for the next generation. I'm not sure whether it is inevitable, but i lean towards it being a strong likelihood.

In the absense of people taking collective and personal responsibility for civic invovlement, there is no foolproof system. You have to have things like protection of free speech, but even with that protection, there is no safety against tyranny if people are apathetic or are not paying attention. Thomas Jefferson recognized this when he wrote, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be." A capitalist democratic republic or socialist state might work if its citizens remain engaged, informed, open and honest, and compassionate. To ensure freedom, culture that promotes character and involvement is a necessary counterpart along with a fair political system.