Introduction/Disclaimer
This is a hastily written draft, meant as a vehicle for me to get some thoughts down and out in public so I can receive comments. This will be more object level than my usual remarks, both because I want to be able to use contemporary examples in context, and because I’m feeling a little perverse.
As a preliminary statement though, I want to share the perspective that I’m coming from. Hopefully this will help to avoid misunderstandings. I come from a very political family with a history of activism in both partisan as well as grassroots politics. My great uncle Jim was a labor organizer (as well as a lineman for the telephone company). My uncle Paul was very active in the counter-culture political movement in the late 1960s. He had the pleasure of having his apartment tossed (on spurious allegations) by the FBI not once, but twice. I have an aunt who’s a county level organizer for the Democratic party. In my generation of, I have two cousins who are currently or formerly professionally engaged with campaign organizing and web services for the Democratic party. I say this all so you can get the idea that I was raised in pink diapers by a family who really really likes to talk about politics. They’re all left-of-center, ranging from mainstream liberals to left wing socialists. None of them is very online or captured by an extremist ideology. They’re moderate (in temperament, if not politics) and reasonable people. Middle class, but from working class roots. Well educated and smart. Compassionate and well-intentioned. I also think they’re wasting their time and subject to errors of perception that consistently leaves them aghast at the happenings in the political world.
As for myself, I’m at the uncomfortable intersection of Libertarianism and Democratic Socialism. I’ve sometimes labeled myself as “left-libertarian” which is a useful conjunction if you’ve seen the 2 dimensional political axis with Left/Right on the x-axis and Authoritarian/Libertarian on the y-axis. If you ask me for my personal political role models I’ll probably start with Ursula LeGuin and proceed to Ivan Illich and Noam Chomsky and Aldous Huxley. This graphic might help clarify.
Liberty
I’m a New Yorker through and through (though I’m living in Colorado right now). There’s a lady in the harbor overlooking the port-of-entry where my Ashkenazi ancestors arrived after crossing the Atlantic in the early decades of the 20th century. They fled the pogroms of the old world, really right down to the wire, just a few years away from the door closing on them forever when the Third Reich blitzed Europe. Not everyone made it out. I carry this ancestral memory with me and consider it to be my sacred duty as their surviving descendant to understand what it means.
Liberty is the social good that underlies all other social goods. On a fundamental level it is necessary (but not sufficient) for your very survival. If you’re hungry, you must be free to work for your meal, or free to own land to grow your crops on. If you’re unsheltered, you must be free to rent or buy housing suitable for you and your family. If you’re sick, you must be free to seek medical treatment for your ills. All of these necessary conditions for survival can and have been restricted and curtailed in both historical and contemporary societies. Subjugated people survive only at the mercy of their subjugators. They often don’t survive at all.
In the United States of America, this is much more taken for granted in 2021 than I would have expected from a country filled with people who are descendants of subjugated peoples. My family’s story is not a rare one, unfortunately. Waves upon waves of people immigrated to America because the only remaining freedom they had was the freedom to leave. A lot of Americans are the descendants of people who never even had that choice. Their ancestors were simply taken, against their will. Traded as livestock.
We sometimes imagine that liberty is a default condition. A null hypothesis of the condition of humanity, absent the influence of subjugation. I don’t believe this is true at all. People aren’t born free. They are born into societies that immediately constrain their thoughts and actions. Freedom is something you work for. Freedom is something you do, not something you have.
What kind of doing? It’s a non-doing. 為無為 (wei wu wei) is the sequence of traditional Chinese characters that summarizes a central principle in The Way. The first character 為 means “acting” or “doing”. The second character 無 means “void” or “emptiness” (but is sometimes translated as simple negation). 為 is repeated as the third character in the phrase. It means “do non-doing”. A bit abstruse maybe, and what does this have to do with politics?
Non-doing is not passiveness or inaction. It’s skillful absence of action. It’s discretion and the good sense to leave well enough alone. It’s removing obstacles. It has the quality of accomplishment through effortlessness. If one determines, through skillful discernment, that the best course of action is no action, then everything has been done already.
Freedom is this kind of non-doing. Many things arise in the world that those with power will be tempted to control. The word government means “control system” (analogy to a ship’s rudder) after all.
In the United States of America in 2021 we have forgotten this ancient wisdom. The politics of our era are all about exercising power by seizing political control of the government and wielding that power in an uncompromising (or obstructionist, if you’re in the minority) way to accomplish whatever you think you’re supposed to do. Non-doing is not part of the conversation. We’re currently watching congress attempt to pass a bill to spend as much money as they possibly can to try and DO SOMETHING about every conceivable social ill.
I have no comment about the contents of the bill itself. My comment is on the frenzied nature of the state of mind that produces a strategy for government that would even look like this. Control. It’s a desire to control everything. I believe that this obsession with control is a form of derangement that arises from the misconception that things even can be controlled to this degree, and that given that they can that they should and that WE are the right people to be in control. Consequently, this belief brings with the natural complementary belief that THEY are the wrong people to be in control. They mustn’t be permitted to be in control! They’ll undo all our work! They’ll block our agenda! WE MUST BE IN CONTROL THEY CANNOT BE IN CONTROL!!!!
In my circles, this is called “having no chill”. It’s incredibly neurotic. It’s also an ouroboros. There is no escaping the hell realm this way of thinking opens a portal into so long as one persists in this way of thinking. Only further frantic polarization and obsessive partisanship can possibly result from it. We are here right now. The way out requires a relinquishment of this desire for control. Do non-doing.
Trust
The zeitgeist has indigestion and we are subject to the various expulsions of it’s agita on a continuous basis, the sulfurous belches of this beast being transmitted over broadcast media to the entire world 24/7. I have never lived through a period of my life (37 years) where distrust was as high in America as it is right now. I just want to start by acknowledging that the ambience of this entire era is very very unsettled.
I want to talk about trust between institutions and the individuals that interact with those institutions. Of particular interest to me are the following institutions: the U.S. based media, the U.S. based academy, and the Federal Government of the United States.
Trust is hard earned and easily lost. Institutions lose trust when they fail to perform in their role and break the social contract. An untrusted institution is fundamentally illegitimate. It cannot perform it’s role without legitimacy, which requires trust. Illegitimate institutions pursue ulterior agendas than the ones they were entrusted with.
The media is entrusted to inform and entertain us. They break this trust by misinforming us with lies, propaganda, and psychological manipulation. The academy is entrusted to educate us and train us in useful habits of thought, and pursue knowledge on the frontier of understanding. They break this trust by creating an environment that trains people in dysfunctional habits of thought and by indoctrinating us with ideologies. The Federal Government of the United States is entrusted with representing the will of the people. They break this trust by misrepresenting the will of the people.
All three of these institutions have chronically abused this trust for years now, and show no sign of relenting. They haven’t managed to convince everyone that they’re still legitimate. Their illegitimacy is widely perceived amongst the populous but not universally agreed upon. In fact, the perception of trust in these institutions displays the same polarization I commented on earlier. People tend to cluster into camps where they will trust-by-association one set of institutions and distrust-by-association the opposite polarized set of institutions.
Example: “Red” polarized person is likely to trust the Republican party, Fox News, and their Church. “Blue” polarized person is likely to distrust all of these things. instead, they might trust the Democratic party, The New York Times, and “Science”.
This is not to make a false equivalency by way of lazy symmetry. The Red cluster and the Blue cluster are not mirror images of each other and are differently untrustworthy on different topics.
This state of partial and partisan aligned distrust is of course deeply discordant and non-sensical. It arises from the delusion that “if my side was in control everything would be ok”. The same delusion that produces the obsessive frenzy to be in control. If you really thought that way of course it would be an urgent moral imperative to seize control! The problem here is the blindness that being stuck in the polarity causes. It must be comforting to bask in certitude. To know that you’re on the right side. It’s more uncomfortable to consider that maybe there is no right side. Maybe you’re being lied to and manipulated by the institutions you thought you could trust AND SO IS THE OTHER TEAM. It’s not “my side tells me the truth your side tells me lies” it’s actually everyone is lying to you. They’re lying to you in order to make you vulnerable to subjugation.
Outside of polarized belief clusters is a wilderness where you don’t know if you’re right and you don’t know if anyone else is right. You have to practice discernment in a rigorous way to form beliefs about anything. You can’t rely on social proof. It’s exhausting. No wonder people cluster up.
The consequences of the polarized form of institutional distrust is a society divided against itself with half of the population very very likely to get something badly wrong purely on the basis of the polarity of their institutional trust. This has consequences.