“Scientific societies are as yet in their infancy. . . . It is to be expected that advances in physiology and psychology will give governments much more control over individual mentality than they now have even in totalitarian countries. Fitche laid it down that education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. . . . Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. . . .”
― Bertrand Russell,1953
In The Scientific Outlook [PDF]Russell does us a great service decoding the complex and varied DNA of genetically modified fascism (as opposed to Rousseau’s state of nature giving rise to the organic social contract). Two things really jump out at me, and both give me hope and inspiration. Relatedly, I’m a huge fan of Ralph Nader’s vote with your dollars mantra, which I ironically heard defended yesterday on NPR by an American Enterprise Institute brain-truster.
The first springs from my trust in the DeTocqueville version of American Exceptionalism, as opposed to the omnipotent Wilsonian version. While it’s true that the great vampire squid is ever seeking to suck capital and livelihood from our people while aggregating power in service of authoritarian control, the American ideal, the dream, or what-have-you, is sitting fat on the other side of the scale. By this I mean the people fighting in the new frontiers, constantly opening new gateways for the flow of information. The American dream, as I see it, exists because of the recalcitrant nature of American’s founding ― people refuse to be restrained in thought or commerce. While the political maelstrom portrayed in the mainstream media resembles Marx’s grand play, there’s plenty of folks on the left and right silently fighting to defend the autonomy of their communities. Places like New York City, western Massachusetts, and even Wyoming (as I recently learned) are constantly disaffected by the grand play, and while the fascist state fortifies in Washington, the people are hoarding the means of production to fight another day. This gives me great hope.
The Germans can sit on their new financial throne in Europe, enforcing austerity upon the Spaniards and Greeks, but they won’t win the long run by punishing their allies, regardless of the natural justice of the credit-debtor relationship. Further, the centralization of financial power does nothing to improve productivity; it merely extends the credit lines of power, which one day will come due. To clarify my point, it’s a house of cards. While the Batan death march of globalization sends decrepit pigs in concentrated animal feeding operations from Iowa to China in the name of efficiency, the Chinese are merely a few years behind us in realizing their folly. My hope springs from the belief that the timeframe it takes for the developing world to wake up to the long-term damage of rapid commercial expansion is shrinking. Information flows faster than ever before, and it is the intrepid Americans, as the Pony Express, that accelerate its movement.
This is all to say that Nader is correct: the best weapon in our democracy is the dollar. I’d be curious to know whether he agrees with my next thought, which inverts the dollar democracy concept and flies in the face of my own conscience. The Supreme Court upheld the Citizens United case as a First Amendment issue. That is to say, the spending of money for speech is codified in our Bill of Rights. Is it possible that this decision is actually in service of our cause? Is it not our obligation to protect the ability for anyone or anything to “vote with their dollar” in our democracy? If we take it away in this case, is it not likely to be taken away elsewhere? While it’s unfortunate that corporations are people, too, fundamentally it is just another layer of the great cake of people. In America we are free to organize by any number of institutional means ― churches, municipalities, political parties, limited liability partnerships, and yes, corporations. It is by that freedom that we also combat evil, combat those same corporations. The corporation itself is not constituted as evil, though the people who run it and the interests of the boards which govern it may be the devil himself.
The varied constitutions of fascism, like the various layers of institutions represent just a cross-section of possible genealogical outcomes. Just like religions, I see biogenic evolution at work. I would also argue that there is human-induced genetic modification present in these mutated forms of faith and government. Fundamentally, the eugenics freaks of right-wing Norway and the New World Order fly under the same banner. They are temporal organizations of thought and power which can be disassembled rapidly and often collapse naturally, generationally, through the evolutionary force which compels survival of the fittest. Bad ideas lose, and the old order is supplanted by the new, healthier order, and the great enabler of this process is information and possibly the human version of the “weak” force ― human nature’s predilection toward the good.
Anyhow, as principled left-libertarians, it is our duty to defend and proliferate the good, while also supporting the legal framework and freedom of speech mechanics which make our nation powerful in the first place. As W.E.B. DuBois reminds us, there is a duality in our nature. While on the one hand we hate the evil which persecutes and oppresses us, we also possess the same weapons within, and so we must be responsible to ourselves and to the good. And so it goes, our eternal struggle.
