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 goal of meta-neo-inquiry is to answer, as well as possible, the question: "What is going on here, and what is the most just way to respond?"

Response is an indispensable element because meta-neo- ethics demands more emphasis on right action than on right words or right belief. It's not what you say or feel, it's what you do that matters. I can forgive errant words if your actions put you on the side of conscience.

A lot of the time the answer is pretty straightforward. Someone is beating up someone else; the most just way to respond is to stop the fight and find out why it started. Someone stole someone else's car; the most just way to respond is to recover the car and return it to its owner.

Sometimes though the answer is not straightforward at all, often because the truth has been occluded.

Discourse tends to be dominated by those in power; and so where conscience leads us into opposition with the power paradigm (on those fronts where the people in power are committing injustices and warping the cultural discourse to legitimize or cover it up), discourse itself becomes territory to be fought over.

Dissidents are kept off-balance by having even their very language pulled out from under them like a rug. One generation of dissidents comes up with a way to vocalize what is happening to them and what is wrong with their condition; it's an organic process which starts with art and fashion, or other kinds of consciousness raising. Political changes are demanded, and a few concessions are made. But by the time the next generation comes along, when it comes time to pass on this knowledge, all of the groovy terms and images they came up with to communicate their dissent have been misappropriated and commodified by the power paradigm. They've been rendered useless; their meaning has decayed.

It is fair to ask, of every text you encounter, what is the author's agenda? As time passes it becomes harder and harder to answer this question, because one's agenda in writing a text is a response to the culture to which she belongs. Cultures change but texts tend not to. So any text older than, say, 40 or 50 years, can easily be subverted by the power paradigm and people can be educated to read it a certain way; afterwards, one requires a specialized awareness of historical context to have any hope of recreating the original agenda of any text, especially if the text had any degree of subversiveness to it.

My contention is that this line of inquiry will demonstrate that many spontaneous movements over the centuries -- whether political, religious, philosophical, or artistic -- can be demonstrated to have their origin in subversion against the injustice of the power paradigm. The products of a "culture industry" established by the power paradigm itself tend not to endure because they carry remarkably little meaning to begin with, and most of us carry an innate recognition of that even if our consciousness has not been raised.

Boston's Big Dig. The NYC steam pipes. And now a freaking highway bridge in Minneapolis.

Forget terrorists. I'm afraid of our crumbling infrastructure. Each of us is far more likely to be killed by collapsing bridges, falling ceiling panels, or exploding steam pipes than any terrorist.

Let's go further back and include the Katrina response in this, because it, too, reflects a similar lack of focus.

And, let's expand outwards and include ethylene glycol in toothpaste and melamine in pet food. Because all of these things are connected by a central theme... which is, ironically, the lack of anything resembling a common focus or vision.

We don't have any kind of meaningful common focus in our decision-making as a society. So many of the quandaries we're in -- from global warming to the oceans dying to resource depletion -- happen because millions of developers, politicians, investors, and laborers are each doing our own thing, with little or no regard to anything resembling a big picture.

We're winging it, and we can't do that anymore. Luck runs out.

Part of this problem has been described in economic discourse as the Tragedy of the Commons. But beyond the obvious difficulties of overuse and depletion, these problems are a tangible result of the dearth of meaningful discourse regarding economic problems and solutions.

Politics has become an advertising-driven enterprise. Campaign consultants talk about their candidate's image as a "branding" concern, and they judge the success of their efforts by what kind of emotions people have when they think of their client. They focus-group test sound-bites and slogans and key phrases which are designed to worm their way into your brain and install an emotional pushbutton so you respond the proper way when they press it. Meaning is driven from the process because meaning is unpredictable. If any candidate comes along who says something really meaningful, it could throw the whole scheme off, and everyone's jobs in the campaign-industrial complex would be threatened. The consultants, whose job it is to win elections, not solve society's problems, distrust meaning. And the media, of course, plays right along, encouraging this trend and helpfully marginalizing any candidate who threatens to bring in too much meaningful discussion. Because for them, too, meaning is dangerous.

This sounds like an abstract problem, but it isn't because people are dying as a result of this, and those of us who haven't been killed by it are seeing our quality of life be affected.

"Boring" things like routine maintenance and food inspections and disaster preparation -- you know, the stuff that should be a no-brainer -- gets de-funded and de-prioritized because it's easier to get a photo op standing in front of something new, bigger, shinier. The result is mile after mile after mile of empty shopping centers, brownfields, urban blight, crappy schools, decaying neighborhoods.

This isn't a call for a political solution, BTW. This problem can develop in a Communist nation (cf. Chernobyl) just as easily as it can happen in a capitalist nation. The real issue is lack of involvement. Lack of discourse. Lack of contemplation and consideration.

The Epoch Times is a newspaper which was founded primarily to report on human rights abuses in China. I have on my desk here at work a copy of a similar paper which was handed to me a few months ago in Harvard Square, carrying a story about the Chinese government basically farming dissidents for their organs -- rounding them up, carving them up while they are still alive, and putting their organs on the transplant market.

Excuse me, i don't mean to speak out of line, but didn't we, as a species, decide that we wouldn't tolerate this kind of thing the last time a government rounded people up and farm-cannibalized them? Every now and then some government or other will make a statement about this, but so far not a damn thing has been done about it.

And i don't know what to say to the people who stand on the street trying to hand these newspapers out to people who, for the most part, don't want to be confronted with it. It's truly chilling to know that you can stand on a streetcorner all day and talk openly about terrifying crimes going on against thousands of people right now, here's the evidence, and few will even care to listen, and fewer still will do anything about it.

Elsewhere in the world, millions of girls have had their developing breasts ironed by their parents to keep them from growing. This is ostensibly to protect them. The city of Bangalore in India is considering a law that would forbid many employers from scheduling women to work at night. This is ostensibly to protect them.

Elsewhere in the world, the Virginia Citizens Defense League organized a gun giveaway to pointedly spit in the eye of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, who complains that people are buying guns in Virginia, where laws are lax and enforcement of them even laxer, in order to commit crimes in New York City. Gun control may or may not be the answer, but the message is clear: for trying to stem violence at the source, you get ridiculed.

At the source -- that is the key to what i am getting at with all of these things, the thread that connects them all. No one ever wants to talk about what is wrong with bullies and abusers; instead the attention goes on the victims, the survivors, or the potential victims. For example, the most popular answer to widespread gun violence in the US is to propose that more people get guns, so they can have standoffs with would-be gun criminals. Perhaps that may even work.

But what troubles me about this approach is that it leaves completely unquestioned the observation that people buy weapons and commit crimes with them. Try to address the problem from that angle, and people get furious. Why is the most popular solution to take thuggery for granted and meet thugs at their level, rather than try to change them?

Many cities in the US have a shelter system for battered women. These operate on shoestring budgets because abuse survivors are not a social priority. But this system is frustrating and disheartening because everything falls on the survivor. The abuser almost always gets off scot-free. The survivor often loses everything, including whatever social standing they had. After seeing this happen to one survivor after another, after seeing one abuser after another getting away with it and facing no consequences whatsoever, it becomes really disheartening. Is this truly a world where someone can beat a person they claim to love and no one will do a goddamned thing about it?

"But, Sabrina, the prisons are overflowing. We do hold thugs accountable." Yes, prisons are overflowing, but to what extent does this actually address or fix the problem? This subject demands its own series of journal entries actually, particularly the extent to which the prison system is itself a form of institutional bullying, and the extent to which crime survivors feel bullied by the justice system. Suffice it to say for this entry that the justice system and the prison-industrial complex takes for granted the existence of thugs and bullies.

Our justice system examines individual events as if they occur in a vacuum, excluding social and economic factors from consideration as much as possible. The goal of the court proceeding is to establish guilt or innocence with regards to single isolated incidents, with everything else being deemed irrelevant. The bigger questions of social environment are thus kept out, are never scrutinized; a verdict is reached, someone is imprisoned or goes free, and justice is said to be served. Court proceedings are part of the enforcement of laws which have been crafted to call attention to some forms of bullying while legitimizing other forms or creating loopholes for abusers.

And this criticism is not meant to say that we shouldn't examine individual events and seek accountability in such cases, but to say that this is not all there is to justice. We are leaving out the biggest part. Instead of addressing the systemic problems in society that cause and perpetuate abuse, our edifices of justice play whack-a-mole and, as often as not, whack survivors instead of perps. It is a reaction, not a response.

Not only are we accustomed to treating thugs as "inhuman others," we are unaccustomed to thinking of injustice as something that permeates a society. Catch the bad guy and you're done, right?

Lasting justice will require sustained focus and interest on thugs themselves, why they do what they do, and how they play on our fears in order to avoid scrutiny and accountability. It will require every single person to look inside themselves and face what they do not want to face -- the piece of them that sympathizes with bullies and sees their point of view as normal or even normative. It will require sustained scrutiny of our institutions for encroachment by abusers and their sympathizers. It will require facing head-on the culture of fear that keeps each one of us scrambling for our own survival instead of seeing the interconnected threads of injustice. It will require keeping some of the focus on the big picture, to recognize when our pursuit of injustice on the small scale has made it possible for some to get away with injustices on a bigger scale because no one was looking.

But most of all, we have to start expecting better from thugs and bullies. If we resign ourselves to the "fact" that there will always be bullies, we enable them.

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.

As a sort of counterpoint to my last post, about how the government does not exist to tell us how to run our lives, i think it is worthwhile to comment also on personal responsibility to the public good.

My thoughts on this come down to what i've written before about the ethics of taking. Ethically, we each have a responsibility to other people, to society, and to the ecology. "How we live our lives" must be tempered by an ethical awareness.

Our answer, to date, is to push this off onto the state. The state becomes the regulator of business, the protector of the environment, the keeper of the peace, the caretaker of the elderly and disabled. Then we act as though anything we do without the state's intervention must be ethically okay. Money and laws and property deeds free us of the burden of pondering the ethical rightness of poverty, wage serfdom, and perpetual debt.

The state does not share our interests or reflect our needs, so ultimately we cannot go on letting the state pretend to be our conscience. The best answer is for each of us, individually and collectively via mutual aid socities, to regulate our own business, protect our own environment, keep our own peace, take care of the elderly and disabled. Each of us plays a role in that and we must ethically own that.

This is nothing other than what just about every religion has ever taught... so this is nothing new. What keeps it from happening?

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.

Yesterday, the Mexican Federal Electoral Tribunal certified conservative candidate Felipe Calderon the winner of a close and hotly contested presidential election (spurring a serious case of deja vu for any Americans who might be paying attention). The leftist candidate, Lopez Obrador, has refused to accept the tribunal's decision and is now vowing to create a government of his own.

In Britain, the Labor government is in tatters. We saw a string of sleaze scandals earlier this year, and now members of Prime Minister Tony Blair's own party have utterly lost confidence in him, openly criticizing and even insulting him (and his ally George Bush), and now resigning in droves.

This scene could be played out soon in Israel, too, as faltering confidence in Ehud Olmert might couple with a brewing cronyism scandal to topple the ruling coalition there.

It could be that we are just seeing coincidental simultaneous instability... or, it could be that people in democratic nations are starting to become aware of the ways in which their leaders have been betraying them. Am i paranoid to think that the radical distrust of government which seems commonplace today is qualitatively different from the cynical resignation of ten years ago? What i mean by that is, i don't think that people are simply more cynical than they used to be. There is now an active distrust which may start to look like revolutionary fervor before too long.

A kleptocracy, established by aristocrats who band together for mutual gain, can remain in power for a while through fear and the veneer of legitimacy we're collectively willing to grant the institutions of government. But when the aristocratic self-interest leads members of a government to turn on one another and start openly sparring, it can only mean that the inevitable has happened.

What we've seen in recent decades is a worldwide attempt to disguise imperalism and cronyism as "freedom" and "democracy." While in Newspeak freedom is slavery, and the "leaders of the free world" have done their best to misappropriate the word "freedom" so that it is a mere emotional catchphrase (the so-called "Islamo-fascists" are said to "hate freedom," to which Osama Bin Laden replied that Americans should ponder why al Qaida hasn't attacked Sweden), i do not think they will be ultimately successful. That is, i'm optimistic that, in the long run, authoritarians cannot micromanage our lives and exploit us while giving lip service to freedom.

A Stanford University computer science professor has come up with an idea to circumvent the more than 200-year-old Electoral College system and institute a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States.

The proposal by John Koza, who also invented the scratch-off lottery ticket, is receiving serious consideration by lawmakers in several states. Legislators in California, New York, Colorado, Illinois and Missouri have sponsored bills to enact such a plan.

Koza's scheme calls for an interstate compact that would require states to throw all of their electoral votes behind the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of which candidate wins in each state. The plan doesn't require all 50 states to join, but a combination of states that represent a majority (at least 270) of the electoral votes. If the largest states join in the agreement, only 11 would be needed.

... Assemblyman Mike Villines, R-Clovis (Fresno County), however, argues that a national popular vote is a bad idea that would force presidential campaigns to focus only on large urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York and Miami.

... Koza, a registered Democrat who served as an elector in 1992 and 2000, claims the current system also has resulted in presidential campaigns largely ignoring states that heavily favor a particular party or candidate. California, which has strongly supported Democratic candidates in recent presidential elections, has become a state that candidates only visit to conduct fundraisers, he said.

"The main thing wrong with the current system is that two-thirds of the states are left out from the whole system ... because a (presidential) candidate has no reason to campaign in those states where they are way ahead or way behind," said Koza, 63, who lives in Los Altos Hills. "It's not just whose baby gets kissed in which campaign, it means that, for example, California issues such as Pacific Rim issues, high tech, California's agriculture don't get addressed."

... "In terms of the likelihood of this actually happening, I think it's pretty slim, considering many of the states have vastly different political leanings," said Nancy Martorano, an assistant political science professor at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "I just don't think states like Texas and California will ever enter into any sort of interstate compact."

Perhaps an easier fix would be to change the states' winner-take-all system to awarding electoral votes in proportion to the popular vote, Martorano said.

from Stanford professor stumps for electoral alternative (thanks to metaphorge for the link)

The Electoral College has already in my lifetime made the United States an international embarassment. It makes the job of selling representative democracy around the world more difficult when the main exporter and proponent of this system uses an antiquated electoral system which can sometimes give the election to the candidate who lost the popular vote.

The Electoral College is based on the idea that the masses are too dumb, uneducated, and gullible to trust with the solemn duty of selecting a President. Therefore every four years the states were to select a group of its elite elder statesmen, scholars, and captains of industry to make the choice for us. These were to be people free of "any sinister bias," but given that the agenda of the aristocracy has always "gone without saying," anyone who has examined the way cronyism works can see that the elites wanted to lock in the central executive power of our government for themselves. The President was to be the advocate of the aristocracy's agenda in the federal government.

And we cannot rid ourselves of this system, despite dozens of attempts over the last 200 years to do so. Perhaps the above proposal, while not exactly ideal, will accustom Americans to selection of the President by popular vote. If this movement succeeds, after a couple of generations perhaps it will be much easier to shed this antiquated, elitist relic from our system of government.