Proposed Address, Statehouse Vigil for the Homeless, 2020, Draft 3.2

To the assembled, thank you for standing with the community of those we call homeless. Especially, I want to thank those of you here who are without permanent, stable housing, for coming today. You made a special effort to get here. This vigil is for you, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. 
We are here today to think about, feel about, and remember, the Vermonters who in their daily lives have to ask “How will I stay safe?”
“Where will I sleep tonight?” 
“How will I keep my possessions safe?” 
“How will I eat today?”,
“Can I get my children to school?” 
“Where can I park my car so it won’t get towed away?”,
“How can I get my car out of impoundment?”.

Homelessness is a condition of desperation. People who pay into the engine of profit – those who rent and those who pay mortgages – are given permission to claim a space as their own. 
People who can't work and can't pay, 
people who refuse to work two jobs just to give all their money to a landlord or a bank, 
people who can't manage their lives,  wracked by trauma,
or living in the misery of mental illness, 
people who are broken and have no resources, 
people driven  from their homes by domestic violence,
can't get that permission. 
So they sleep in places that aren't their own. They sleep in public, in a car where they worry about being rousted from the depths of sleep, 
They sleep on a sidewalk,  where someone who is cruel can kick them or worse, 
where someone also desperate can steal their few possessions, 
where someone too privileged to see themselves in that huddle of blankets might complain to the police, 
They sleep in a dumpster that is warm, yet deadly, 
They sleep scrambling from couch to floor from friend to friend. 
The question "Where can I sleep, that is safe?” hangs like a cloud over the entire day, because there is no place to rest, that is their own.

But how is this worse than being evicted, with no place to move to?
How is this worse than having a job you can’t get to because the car is broken down?
How is this worse than going without insulin because it’s too expensive?
How is this worse than losing a spouse, getting sick, being foreclosed, and finding no help to stay in your home?
How is this worse than enduring the blows of a violent partner, because that place is the one place you know to stay warm?
those without housing usually had housing, and those with housing are often in fear of losing their housing,  so where is the boundary between the housed and the unhoused?
Indeed, we see the unhoused and the housed on the street, as one, and call them all “homeless”,
But we don’t see the many who are sleeping in an unheated shed, 
in a wrecked camper, 
on the couch of a friend, 
in a tent in a hidden patch of woods;
we don’t see the many elders and working people who struggle to pay their rents, and face evictions, 
we don’t see those who work 100 hours a week and spend all of their money on a motel room,  
We don't see the that person who could work and wants to, but cannot for lack of an ID,
we don’t see those who live in a cold damp moldy basement, 
we don’t see those who pay their rents to a landlord who won’t repair the leak in the roof, 
remove the moldy sheetrock, 
abate the lead paint, 
repair the plumbing, 
or respect privacy. 
we do not see the young mother or father trying to care for their children and struggling to keep them while the department of children and families wonders whether they can.
We don’t see the 31% of single mothers living in poverty. 
We don’t see the families and retired desperate for fuel to heat their homes. 
When we see the homeless on the street, we see only a few of the one half percent of Vermonters who are unhoused, out of more than 10% of Vermonters who earn less than $15,000 per year,
we see only a few of those whose lives are tossed about on the stormy seas of bad luck,
poor education,
poor health,
poor choices,
unhealthy families or families who abandoned them,
whose lives took that bad turn and landed them on the street.

We hope that getting the unhoused housed is sufficient to correct their deficits.
But it is not, because the help is often not quite enough,
Because you don’t qualify for help
Because your id was stolen, you can’t take the job you were offered,
Because you can’t afford child care,
Because the owner of the apartment you rent won’t repair the plumbing or remove the moldy sheetrock, or fix the drafts in the door,
Because throughout your life you have tried to be self-sufficient, and yet you couldn’t earn enough to pay your bills, keep the electric turned on, keep the car in repair, repair your teeth, or stay safe.
Because the message you got was “You don’t matter”.
Poverty is structural, and homelessness is structural.

They are products of laws and policies that assume that every individual person has the health, the education, the serenity, and the opportunity, to sustain life and health and pursue ambitions,
They are products of custom that assumes we do not need community support to flourish.
They are products of culture that does not care about people without power or money.
Poverty and homelessness are forms of Economic Injustice.

Let us remember that communities create wealth, through investment in education, roads, health care, and the social fabric that supports meaningful human lives.
and that when a few get rich, they are harvesting the value created by communities, by the collective effort of many people.
and even as those communities grow poor, it is not the fault of those who live there, it is the fault of the law that does not capture that wealth for public goods.

Thus, It is the engine of profit that captures this wealth,
it is that levy on the meager earnings of the common waged worker, which is demanded by every for-profit landlord and bank,
it is our reliance on property and housing as a source of wealth,
that drives the cost of housing ever higher, ever more beyond the means of those who sell their labor,
and it is this engine of profit that must be turned toward the dignity, safety and development of the entire community, through selective taxation of the bads and spending on goods.
We cannot allow our private drive for wealth to oppose our shared well being, lives, and our communities.
We must strive to preserve and strengthen our democracy.

So let us change the rules of participation in our society,
Let us provide a living minimum wage. 
Let us provide universal, single payer health care, 
Let us require parental leave rights,
Let us provide affordable quality childcare. 
let us give the youth who loses her mother to jail a second chance to arrive to adulthood with safety and dignity,
Let us license landlords and make their right to operate conditional upon their properties passing health and safety inspections, and let us fund those inspections.
Let us tax high-end mortgages and rents, to pay for the infrastructure to build affordable housing and rentals. 
Let us make foreclosure painful for the banks, 
Let us create enough housing to make it a buyer’s market.
Let us pass a homeless bill of rights, 
Let us put a cap on impoundment fees,
Let us fund free public transit for those eligible for SNAP,
Let us provide DMV identification to anyone who can’t afford the fees.
Let us create enough shelter so no one ever needs to fall asleep in a doorway!
Let us provide enough shelter so that no one fleeing domestic violence is forced onto the street.
Let us recognize a right to a safe place to park, 
to pitch a tent,
or to throw down a blanket,
let us install sleeping pods
in every town in Vermont!
Let housing NOT be a commodity, from which to extract profits and to increase private wealth, 
Let housing exist to house people and build communities. 
let housing be a social utility, socially regulated, a source of personal security and stability, elemental to community and meaningful lives.
Let us reduce the cost of housing by reducing our dependence on property as a source of wealth
Let us create a quality of life floor below which no one needs to go.
Let us build a strong safety net for all Vermonters, rich and poor alike,
so that being rich isn’t required for a safe and dignified life.
Let our public policy drive everyone toward the middle class,
Where everyone can have a meaningful life.
Let us build a just economy. For the sake of us all.

Tiny House Fest Link Compendium.

Stephen Marshall: Centrality of Community

https://dispolemic.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-tiny-house-movement-wedging-open.html

SHELTERFORCE: Seattle opens and plans multiple tiny house villages. Low Income Housing Institute manages 2200 beds.

https://shelterforce.org/2019/

YouTube: LIHI's Sharon Lee explains their project

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

City of Seattle: Civic details and news on permitted villages

http://www.seattle.gov/

Unauthorized camps

http://www.seattle.gov/

GOVERNING: Seattle Tiny House Village Closed, Others remain open

https://www.governing.com/

CURBED: 10 Tiny House Villages

https://www.curbed.com/maps/

Washington Post: Six Examples of Tiny House Projects

https://www.washingtonpost.

DesMoines Register: Where to put Tiny Houses?

https://www.desmoinesregister.

CBS Denver: Tiny Houses Lovett community must move. $900 per month rent

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Opportunity Village, Eugene Oregon, self governing, Great images, discussion, 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

DATELINE: LA activist builds tiny houses but city won't allow them to be sited.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?

DesMoines Register: Text only, Joppa Village

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1lIO8RB_5utsMT8fC_T2lyvhX5T4nhLYh

Nashville

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xkPwAMIARyqdt174ZJRfrA5I4IsY6HMR

Seattle Lake Union

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rdGqD3hxQIcqQxEBLfuSgKjIakK5GExQ

Seattle True Hope Village

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1cQL6wfxOIwgt2PtUpWYdxEA0OFh7s86t

morality as an adaptive strategy to correct undesirable behavior

The theory being actively debated is whether morality is a system designed to promote cooperation. Recent work on the disgust reaction and how it activates moral thinking challenges this model. A more generalized model explains how both models agree.

To say that morality is a factor in decision making isn't precise enough. We need to identify the somatic-cognitive experience that is moral thinking, and place it in a behavioral framework. When we say that something is immoral, the mind-body is reacting to it negatively, communicating that the behavior or condition is unacceptable, deserves social opprobrium, should be punished, banished or destroyed. When we say that something is moral, we are applauding it and encouraging its spread. Some of these responses are internally directed, toward choices the active agent might make, and some of them are directed at the behaviors of others: morality can be used to promote behaviors, or even control the behaviors of others.

But in principle, what could be called the moral response is an adaptive, instinctive, response to a situation which demands an automatic, unreflective, unequivocal judgement or behavior. The disgust response fits easily into this pattern. But how does cooperation fit?

Cooperation is itself a survival strategy, and where disgust helps the active agent avoid harmful pathogens, Cooperation helps the active agent produce helpful behaviors. Because cooperation is so adaptive, a somatic-cognitive response that produces cooperation would also be adaptive. Sometimes cooperation produces joy. Sometimes we cooperate because it is just the right thing to do, in the absence of a somatic reward. Cooperation may be easy to produce, under some circumstances, but isn't always easy, and may need some help from emotions, training, and-or morality.

So what is the difference between joyful cooperation and moral cooperation? In the former, the payoff is immediate: the result is that both or all participants are better off as a result of cooperation. In the latter case, the payoff is not immediate, and may go to someone else in the community. "Moral" cooperation improves the community or other individuals, while the active agent pays the cost in health or energetic expenditure. But if there is a short term cost to the agent, there is a long term benefit of maintaining cooperative behavior as a norm of the community. Because of the danger to the active agent, in health and energy, more may be required to motivate the agent, and this is the somatic-cognitive force of a moral precept, whether learned or instinctive.

So the moral somatic-cognitive experience is one which produces, in the agent, acts which are contrary to the "rational" choice (that one which would conserve health or enhance private material gain), in service to the greater good. It is an adaptive, instinctive, response to a situation which demands an automatic, unreflective, unequivocal judgement or behavior, which the agent is frequently unable to explain, except by saying "it was the right thing to do".

Thus responses to a wide range of conditions, including pathogenic disgust, Haidt's "purity", and the imperative to cooperate, are all supported by invocations of "morality". In this case, we might sense that "morality" is just a catch-all category of responses whose ultimate causes are not given to us. They are adaptive and we just have them.

The Tiny House Movement: Wedging open the Conversation about Housing and Community

The tiny house movement surges on the wave of increasing inequality, as we seek ways to maintain stability and dignity. It is a laudable and profound assertion of modesty in the face of a consumerist society which tells us to build bigger, eat more, own more. But as we build smaller to maintain our personal dignity and autonomy, and to join with like-minded fellows to reduce our individual impacts on the planet, let us not forget the inequality to which this modesty responds. Suppose we were to somehow re-balance the distribution of wealth. Would we prefer to reclaim it for personal enrichment, or designate it to solve problems?

Lest we forget, huge fractions of the American populace are laced with disappointment because the engine of wealth has left them and their communities behind, and believing that more money equals more security, for them the answer is: I want it in my bank account. (Neo-liberal economists enable this response: instead of correcting the flaws in the economy and devising schemes to distribute wealth, they insist that growth will provide the wealth and everyone will get a share. Since we are given no choices, we depend on the truthfulness of this claim. And it is a lie.) But as participants in the tiny house movement, as participants in the economy, we can designate our surpluses to solve problems.

Here, I think, is where we need to remember that material wealth is not the definition of happiness or well-being. Humanity evolved as peoples with little to no clothing, and a few tools to build minimal shelter and to hunt and gather food, using cooperation as its principle strategy, and these societies, anthropologists tell us, were in no sense miserable. "Poor" societies the world over today provide security and happiness to their members, because the horizon of self-interest includes an entire community.

These communities persist until colonialism, war, and the Neo-liberal world order, destabilize them and the local ecology of sustenance, forcing people to turn to more narrowly self-seeking behavior.

As Americans, more even than Europeans, our ecologies of sustenance are so unstable and siloed that our horizons barely escape the outer walls of our dwellings. Do we know our neighbors? Do we rely on them to maintain a share of labor needed to keep the community safe and fed? Do we assist each other with childcare? Do we teach our children to love the place in which they live, to build relationships and build their community, or do we teach them to follow a dream and start a life far away? Do we teach them about responsibility to the greater good, and about community service? Do we teach them it's okay to let someone else win? Do we teach our children to take care of each other, humanity and the planet?

As human beings, we are creatures in search of reciprocity, where we find safety and prosperity. And reciprocity requires long term relationships, economic stability, housing stability, provision of education and health-care services, and systems to assure safety. These are the services naturally provided by community. Provide equal access to these facets of community, and you have the beginnings of meaningful, and sustainable, lives. To provide those services, the wealth, the energy, the material and spiritual products, of that community, must be captured and directed at those services.

But let us also remember this: Wealth is not produced by individuals alone. Wealth (the sum value of products that support life) is produced by individuals working in and supported by communities. Communities, therefore, are entitled to a portion of that wealth sufficient to build infrastructure, provide services, and maintain the integrity of the social fabric.

The profound misunderstanding of the modern world is that stuff matters, that technology matters, that innovation matters, that economic growth and money in the bank are sufficient in the search for well-being. They do not, they are not. Deeper thinkers than myself have noted how much of material consumption, substance abuse, and mental illness, is driven by the loneliness and emptiness we feel, from the absence of a greater good, of reciprocity, friendship and community. What matters is the fabric of relationships we have, the quality of that fabric, and the balance of responsibility and freedom provided by that fabric, and whether by participating in it we can privately experience our unity with it. Innovation and new institutions will be necessary to create this world, but innovation, wealth, and stuff, by themselves, are not sufficient to provide human well-being. It must be directed at doing the work of healing and sustaining the people, the families, the communities, and the planet. This is the opportunity that the Tiny House movement creates.

Our Continuum of Housing

Homelessness is a condition of desperation. People who pay into the engine of profit (renters and mortgage holders) are given permission to claim a space as their own. People who can't work and can't pay, people who refuse to work two jobs just to pay, people who can't manage their lives, people who are broken and have no resources, can't get that permission. They sleep in places that aren't their own. They sleep in public, in a car where they worry about being rousted in the depths of sleep, or on a sidewalk, where someone who is cruel can kick them or worse, where someone also desperate can steal their few possessions, where someone too privileged to see themselves in that huddle of blankets might complain to the police. The question "Where can I sleep, that is safe?" hangs like a cloud over the entire day, because there is no place to rest, that is their own. 

Some who are homeless are luckier than others. They find a place to camp. A well hidden camp increases safety, but can still be discovered, possessions can still be stolen, the tent can still be destroyed, and the person is still not there by permission. But it is better than sleeping in an ATM booth. 

So, have you watched as locations used by homeless campers have been cleared, razed or developed? Just here in Burlington, the waterfront, the clover leaf, Pine Street. Or just declared off-limits, like 311 North Ave. The camp site is progressively harder to find.  

The Champlain Parkway project will displace numerous homeless campers. As such, the good of the community might be greater if the parkway is built, even after the bad of uprooting homeless camps is subtracted, but where will those campers go? How will the City compensate for the bad of evicting settled, quiet, unobtrusive, campers, people who are hiding to escape notice? Has the City designated locations, where campers can set up tents and expect the protections of police patrols? 

As the City pursues its development projects, it forces homeless folks more and more onto the street, into doorways, into church yards. For the first time in Burlington Vermont, tents have cropped up on church properties and bundles of blankets taken residence on church lawns. The time has come for the City to develop plan to help the homeless find homes, places to camp with permission, with police protections, with services, like trash pickup. The homeless are not such because they live outdoors, they are such because they don't have permission to call a place "home", a place they can claim a right to live in. The City can correct this flaw in our thinking by providing safe places to camp. 

The aspiration to house everyone in hard-wall housing is laudable. If we had the will, a sufficient will to build that housing, a sufficient will to make that housing affordable to people living on Social Security or a minimum wage job, then we could put everyone in standard hardwall housing, and we could impart to everyone the dignity and safety of their own locked door. 

But we don't have that will. Even as we in the Chittenden County Homeless Alliance build up our coordination, new housing comes on line, and some of our long time homeless get housing, more folks turn up as homeless, more folks are recruited into homelessness. Do we see a national plan to build millions of units of housing, as we did after WWII? Do we see HUD pumping millions of dollars into Vermont to subsidize infrastructure and new housing? Until these things happen, we need to recognize softwall housing as a part of our housing continuum, as part of the solution to homelessness, and something we need to plan for. Camps and shelters are solutions we resort to because we don't have the affordable housing that would make them unnecessary. We could do the homeless the dignity of recognizing these solutions as part of our plan for housing. 

Growth not the key to prosperity

Miro, tough audience last night. I never thought you were yelling, I heard passion, but some people thought you were "falling apart". Hmm. I never got it that the discourse had broken down. Maybe you felt you needed to defend your position. I think you could have done a better job listening, but we were all on the same subject. Good for you for facing this tough audience, and standing up for what you believe. 

Rent control is not a solution but you need to hear the desperation and the anger people feel that housing costs too much, and slum lords get rich while not being held accountable. 

It is interesting to me that where there are jobs, the cost of housing is too high, where the housing is affordable, the jobs are scarce. It demonstrates that "growth", or at least a "robust" economy, are not the keys to prosperity that neo-liberals (Greenspan acolytes) make it out to be. To achieve both quality of life and affordability, a community must be willing to seek that balance which optimizes profit seeking against affordability. This is a question of what pain we can tolerate and how it is distributed. 

We are facing a classic conundrum of ecology and economy. These forces are tidal and we are just one of the pools on the edge of the ocean. State law sets boundaries on what you can do. But the simple explanation is this: Carrying Capacity predicts that you must choose your pain. With a city bursting at the seams, constraints must cause pain (Malthus reviewed this problem). There are two questions: Can the pressure be reduced? and Who will experience what pain? If we seek the optimum balance of prosperity and affordability (reducing the pressure) we can then look at the political problem of distributing the pain fairly. 

The the unfettered market leads to increasing concentration of wealth, among a few, while the many suffer. The question is, how will you capture the wealth that the economy produces so that it is more fairly distributed, and applied to meet the needs of the many? Increasing the revenue for the Housing Trust Fund is an example, but modest beyond impact. 

Many boats are already swamped and a rising tide simply drowns the occupant. Prosperity through growth, at its extreme, unmitigated by distribution strategies, is a failed strategy. We have growth but not affordability. What next? What will you do differently? 

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Stephen.Alrich.Marshall@gmail.com

Dispolemic.Blogspot.com

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The Loophole of Surplus value

There is a loop-hole in neo-liberal economics which, if used, reduces inequality (increases the distribution of the wealth generated by economic activity), and undermines corporate power.

This economic theory distinguishes between pure monopoly and pure competition, with a gradation between. "Firms" are described as being "price takers" or "price makers". As a market is controlled by fewer firms - as it moves toward monopoly - those firms acquire "market power", which allows them to gain control over prices. This power is the goal of every business. More than anything they want to control their prices, and set them high.

I can't give you an entire economics class, but here is an important concept: Surplus value is the difference between what a customer will pay and what a business will sell for. In a monopoly market, the surplus value is sucked up by the business operator (cash is paid to the monopolist for the product). In a competitive market, surplus value remains in the community (cash is retained by the buyer). Another important distinction: accounting profits assure that the business is operating in the black, and economic profits assure that the investor has maximized return on investment.

The business environment where surplus value remains in the community is a tough one, but if it isn't churning too much (weather or riots destroying property) it doesn't suppress business activity. Businesses (firms) have motivation to operate down to the point where economic profits go below zero. Down to zero, they are still meeting payroll, paying taxes, and sending the owner home with a modest income. The difference is that their Price Curve is inelastic - they are price takers.

But the surplus value is still produced, it just isn't funneled into the hands of the owner. This is the loop-hole. Just by dividing the market into sufficiently many businesses (imposing pure competition on them) we can cause the distribution of the surplus value of business activity into the communities in which they operate.

While I agree that many economic activities are too important to be left in the private marketplace (health care, where it is also cost-ineffective), there are numerous economic activities that we might want to socialize which, if operated in a competitive market, would not do the damage they are doing. Every firm must know it is a pure competitor. For example, housing. Large holders of property must find their costs increasing as they own more property, giving them incentive to divest.

This means dividing every firm into its logical units of production. Let there be firms that design cars. Let there be firms that buy designs and build cars. Let there be firms that distribute cars, and let there be firms that repair cars. Make them all compete. Do not allow owners to buy multiple units of production- investors are allowed multiple investments in unrelated fields, only.

As bad as control of a given market is - a horizontal monopoly - is control of a given production chain- a vertical monopoly. Apple, for example is a vertical monopoly for its products, since it controls the entire supply chain, buyers are trapped in its particular "ecosystem". Fortunately there are other manufacturers of computers and smartphones, but these others experience much more competition, because it is a more fractured ecosystem of products. It is easier for a new company to get into the market.

This is a model for breaking up the mega corps whose impacts on the world are so questionable. You don't have to force people to use other search engines than Google, if you break the corporation into so many separate businesses. The subunits - let them operate self driving cars as a separate business- can do business with businesses other than the mother business.

This tool has not been explored. Many people want to jump directly to socialism, because they hate the control corporations have over people's lives, and they hate the poor quality of services that result. I agree. But let's try this too: just impose the capitalist ethos on the capitalists: make them compete.

The First Social Contract

"States" were constructed, evolved, from social and economic relations over time, iteratively (see James C. Scott, Against the Grain). Being resisted by the populations they sought to manage, they are coerced into existence by the holders of power, and use coercion to perpetuate themselves, including coercion of the people who constitute their populations. Ironically for the coercive state, the populations they encourage possess an innate power of numbers which can impose on states limits, limits identified as "democracy", "rule of law", and "justice". The populations which have grown up in these states have come to expect services from the state, in trade for their compliance and support of the goals of the state, including freedom from danger, coercion and violence. Thus the state exercises a monopoly on the use of force, which is both a protection to the population and a threat, depending upon how it is used.

Implicitly, in the contract with the populations they have created from the original hunter-gatherer peoples from which states coersively built their populations, states are justified insofar as they allocate resources fairly, without bias for prior wealth, in that way which maximizes the freedom of its members to pursue well-being, social relations, education and personal and community development, without harming the ability of others to do the same. Since freedom is so easily used to bring harm to others, this freedom is in truth a limited freedom. And states are justified if they can persuade their populations that it is worthwhile to accept those limits.

Without the fair, equitable distribution of the resources and opportunities, without protection from harm, and without the freedom to create meaning (culture, family, community), states have no value and their members have cause to rise against them. In the absence of a clear ideology of fairness and equity, such rebellion is likely to merely destroy the society that so rebels. The only path to a future in which the state and large populations, can exist in peace, is the path on which the state endeavors to bring services of care and safety to its populations, requiring that its own purpose is to protect the ability of its members to pursue meaningful activity. 

Finding my humanity

The story I tell is that my life turned a corner when I began to listen to and for feelings, to pay attention to the interior worlds of the people I interact with, when I began to value relationships. The corner I have turned is from idealism to realism.

I thought I understood right and wrong. I thought I could coach us back from cruelty,  genocide and ecocide, to a stable, sustainable way of being together on this planet. But my vision is just my vision, and at that, only a vision for humanity.

In my teenage years I was approached, as nearly everyone is, by those who keep faith with a God and wish for a heaven on Earth. I would say to them "Your wish for a perfect world cannot happen because you will never convince everyone of your plan.". I was thinking of myself – I knew they would and could never convince me. "If you want a better world, your plan must accommodate many different world views." That was my aspiration – a plan that would accommodate every different point of view.

So the question on which I meditated was, "on what can we all agree?". 

The framing of course controlled the answer. I was seeking a vision for how to live peacefully and sustainably in the world. The very least that is necessary for peace is that we respect each other's bodies, autonomy, safety. I saw that for me to be safe, I had to promise to everyone else that they would also be safe from me. I would hurt no one. For this premise to hold did not require everyone to join, but the degree of not joining would be the degree of unsafety.

The world we live in teaches me that there are many, perhaps half of humanity, unwilling to accept this premise. "Your gain is my loss, and I will hurt you to get what I need."

So I despair of enlisting a groundswell of humanity in the belief that we must keep each other safe. I despair of enlisting humanity in the ideal that we must take care of each other, that only by sharing, across group boundaries, ideologies, national boundaries, do we minimize misery and maximize the quality of life, that the resources of our abundant planet can support all of life, if we are willing to share.

But we must be willing to take the least we need, and not take the maximum we can get. Our lives must be about living, and sharing, and ensuring that others have what they need, not about getting and hoarding. And yet, Me-ism is what we are taught in economics and in culture, and I do not know how to appeal to the great mass of humanity that accepts this vision for living. And thus we careen toward Gaia-cide. 

There is a deeper problem. Who am I to tell anyone else how to live in the world? Each other person who is trying to survive will make choices to suit them, and who am I to challenge their logic? Would that not be the harm I am counseling against? That any person ought to resist the leading of their inner guidance?

So if there is a principle, the principle of the zero sum, to which we all forced to turn, it is not a principle with which we all agree. Me-ism is the great default strategy, to which we are all forced to turn because everyone else is using it, while sharing is a fragile ethos, easily  damaged by defectors to me-ism. 

I remember, of course, that I am humanity. That every feeling I have felt has been felt by another human being. That every feeling that has been felt by another human being I can also feel. I also engage in me-ism, because at the margin, I need to succeed and survive. I embrace all that is human, even its mean, repugnant, hateful parts. I understand these choices that other people make. And I despair in them. 

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Stephen.Alrich.Marshall@gmail.com

802-922-1446

Dispolemic.Blogspot.com

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Violence and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Reports were heard that Peru had closed its borders to Venezuelans, in light of increasing crime  rates. As images of chaos in Venezuela spilling over into Peru filled my mind, I saw decisions in the margin, "what do I have to do to survive?", spreading like a plague across a landscape of intact communities, inflicting violence on their systems of sustenance. The communities that had generously received the Venezuelans received all of them, all of them desperate, some of them willing to steal or cheat to meet their needs, and some of them already criminals in the country they came from, and the Peruvians experiencing this disruption in their communities must be asking, "Why would we endure the loss of our own security and sustenance to benefit people who do not respect our way of life?". Of course, the Venezuelans probably emerged from such communities as well, but intact communities can absorb only so much disruption before they begin to break down. As the communities are flooded with people struggling to survive, burdening the capacity of individuals to respond with compassion, the cooperation and sharing that is intrinsic to community life is unrewarded, and the choices in the margin – "Today, will I cooperate and assist my neighbor, or will I protect myself and ignore my neighbor?" – lean toward self-protection, and away from generosity. 

The Prisoner's dilemma suggests that in many instances cooperation will yield the greatest rewards for the community, but not the actors in the scenario, and if the actors do not trust each other, their choices will be guided by the edict, "Make the choice that benefits me, no matter what the other person does." In the prisoner's dilemma, that is the low value choice to not cooperate.

Our dilemma, as researchers, as activists, and as people who see life in peril, is that we need everyone to choose the  common good over the private good. We need them to choose cooperation in scenarios that scale from not using plastic bags to joining together in a strategy to reverse Global Warming.  But when faced in the margin by hunger, violence from gangs or governments, loss of family, what is the incentive to "cooperate"?

At the level of hunger and safety, the most elemental form of cooperation is whether to use violence, whether to steal, whether to  attack another person or their property,  or not. Those communities in which people feel safe are communities in which people follow a simple principle: I shall respect you and your property, in my confidence that you will respect me and mine. They are also communities in which people are able to find means to meet their needs without hurting other people. They have jobs, homes, food, family, and friends.

Violations of this principle always hurt, and many laws are written to prohibit and sanction these violations. Unfortunately, the laws are often written to protect the "safe" community from the unsafe community, the community of property from the community of poverty, the community in which the principle of "me first" results in great wealth, from the communities in which there isn't enough food, enough housing, enough health care, enough jobs, enough education, in which the violence is structural, in which cooperation is itself submission to violence, in which great disinvestment produces that violence which teaches "me first". At a larger scale, in which we include the impoverished and the wealthy, "me first" is the defining ethic, because at this scale, wealth can be accumulated only by interposing forms of violence such as fences, laws, and police, between those who have and those who do not. Arching over the "safe" wealthy community is the principle of "me first": that the communities of the rich might seem safe is a product of exported violence. 

As a form of the prisoner's dilemma, inter-communal cooperation is thus much more complicated than the simple example of individuals considering what to do. Perhaps in this matrix, the wealthy actor continues to accumulate wealth when not cooperating, and must pay in more when cooperating, while neither "me-first" nor cooperation improves well being of the poor actor. Not only are individuals asked to cooperate with other individuals for the greater good, but they are asked to cooperate in an effort of their group to cooperate with other groups for a gain that is shared among many groups, at a loss to itself, while it is still possible for individuals and the group to gain more from making the "me-first" choice. Nor is the actor given any reason to trust that the other groups will reciprocate. So what is the reason to cooperate? Most people understand the rules and necessity of cooperation and sharing without being instructed - it is instinctual. And when presented with low cost opportunities, they will cooperate. So how do we induce cooperation between people?

By reducing the causes of violence – you ensure that people have reliable means of self-support, you build economies in which people can rely on their jobs, their homes, the food supply, the water supply. You must enforce the distribution of wealth to those who do the work, and to those who cannot work, you provide that least which is sufficient to create stability, security and health.   In short, by cooperating for the good of all. 

"Free Will" distracts once again.

The debate over free will is encumbered by the old ideas that surround it. Determinism of the Newtonian sort (the billiard ball theory) stands on the obsolete notion that if it were possible to measure the velocity and direction of all particles, an observer could predict the outcomes of all future interactions, and predict all future events. Chaos theory shows that these measurements quickly seek out infinite degrees of precision, and therefore are, even theoretically, impossible to make, making prediction also impossible. Accordingly, the future is not determined by the present. Randomness emerges across time, even though immediate events are determined through causality. 

The mistake that Einstein made was the mistake that the quantum theorists were making: to think that the behavior of quantum particles, which were being described as random, would in fact be random. Einstein could not believe that anything could happen without causality, while the Boor and others asserted the opposite. But why should we not postulate that at the infinitesimal scale of strings, quarks, etc., that causality still operates, but simply beyond our ability to measure? The fact that we can only measure probabilistic behaviors, and not the behavior of particles, is not a comment on nature, it is a comment on our relationship to it. We just don't have the tools to read causality at that scale. Perhaps, as in the Newtonian model, randomness occurs as an emergent property of a deterministic system. But in quantum physics the time scales are so small that there is no meaning to the word "causality". 

Let us also remember that no one has postulated a true causal linkage between the uncertainty of quantum mechanics and the manner in which "free will" is produced. "Free will" is a psychological condition, and what is the relationship of this to subatomic particles? Without this link, quantum mechanics is merely a metaphor, or at best proof that determinism isn't necessary. 

Thus "free will" lives in the margin of uncertainty between randomness and determinism. When we use these dichotomies, we defeat our efforts to understand. Determinism, causality, and free will, are invented categories which give us a game-board on which to play, but do not actually give us new power to live in accord with what we are and do what we want to do. 

For me the greatest challenge in the "free will" debate is the paradox involved. If you are a student of evolution and the life sciences, you might find plenty of cause to believe we do not have free will. We are determined by our biology. But we need to overcome the connotation of "determined" in this case. Our precise thoughts and choices are not predictable, but our tendencies (like the mass properties atoms and quarks) are. Take enough humans together, and we can be expected to eat, poop, seek out sex, give care, talk, scheme, plan, act. We are intrinsically biological, and each of us takes a form predicted by the billions of years that life has flourished on this planet. But that biology gives us a sense of self, and relationships with other selves. In fact, the "self" we possess is a direct product of our relationships — another way that determinism is woven into who and what we are — and yet at that scale, on the scale of relationships, we insist on freedom of action and self determination. 

It is foolish to deny our biology, and yet the freedom we covet is real, in the realm in which it operates. The problem is that we treat "free will" as a thing to be owned or not. But let's perform one or two thought experiments. Do you have free will to choose to be another person? Could you choose the body of a mouse, or a tree, or choose to operate as a physical law of the universe? The fact that there is only one body in which you exist, and can exist, and that you will cease to exist when that body dies, determines important properties of your existence. You are a property of the physical universe. That does not mean you are not free within your realm of consciousness. It's a paradox. Pay attention, get accustomed. Breath it. 

The distinction between "being" and "doing" is likewise a distraction. While to say "I am gay" or "I am a poor writer" is a box to die in, "being" need not be a static state. From moment to moment I am changing what I am, depending upon the energy I have and the interactions I am engaged in. But being true to myself has always been important to me. I am not trying to be a particular thing, I am trying to be honest and without disguise — I am myself to the extent I am not coerced to express that I am something else (which is the root question of "free will"). "Being" is not adhering to a definition, it is standing in coherence with the internal processes of the body and mind.

Thus "doing" emerges from "being", not as a contradiction, but as a natural property. I feel and live in the internal experience of my body, but everyone else, and everything else, experiences me as what I do, so if I am watching and listening to the effects I have on the people and the world around me, I am learning whether what I am, whether what I value, is expressed in what I do, whether the dynamic, learning, growing, changing self that I am has the impact in the world that I would like it to have, through what I do. 

Like the concept of "consciousness", "free will" is a problem of its own making. Without the framing, without the definitions, the problem would not incarnate. They are philosophical problems derived from circular definitions which collapse when we understand them as expressions of a philosophical tradition. They are interesting questions, but I prefer the functionality of paradox over the illusion of certainty. 

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Stephen.Alrich.Marshall@gmail.com

802-922-1446

Dispolemic.Blogspot.com

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On Being an Alumnus of Storm King School

Hello Lynn, 

I received your note and the magazines, and thank you for reaching out. I enjoyed talking with you, which reminded me that one of my secret aspirations was to teach, if not at Storm King then perhaps another private school. 

Just behind our conversation about visiting was the memory of an actual visit I made to campus, within the last year, on a day the campus seemed to be empty. I did not want to make any demands on who ever might be there, as I have no right to expect hospitality if I show up unannounced, so I left without any human contact. This is why I said I would write to you if I planned to be in the area again, so there could be an announced visit. I am not now planning that visit, but I wanted to reciprocate your reaching out to me, and thank you again. 

I realize that the cultivation of relationships with alumni is an important part of what every school must do. Unlike hospitals, whose alum are likely to revisit many times, before they actually expire, or the military, which must actually provide health care to its retired soldiers, schools have a time-limited occupancy with a distinct beginning and end. The only relationship is "You were once part of this community". But that relationship is meaningful to the student as much for the period of life it overlapped, as for the people and lessons that were learned. Any experience at that time of life will be meaningful. But for the school, this tautology is irrelevant. That relationship is a source of continuing benefit to the school, and perhaps also of accountability to its mission, so there may be something reciprocal and conservative about the relationship, although ultimately transactional. 

I have positive memories of my time at Storm King, but in other ways my two years there were merely a hiatus from my emotional development, which resumed when I returned to my neighborhood school. Important growth in my brain, my cognitive powers, insights in the nature of human life and my life, were denominated by isolation, meanness and entitled arrogance, and I have no way to account for the loss implied. In the vast range of ways to be in the cosmos, I do not blame Storm King for not being what I needed it to be, but neither do I feel indebted. It gives me cause to wonder what being an Alumni of any school really means. Like my meditations about religion, if they all claim to be correct, then which one deserves my loyalty? If I find reason to believe in family, community, and principles of the social contract, Storm King was a model of both what to do and what not to do. 

I like the circle of community still embodied by the campus. I liked the individuals who were thoughtful and kind. I enjoy now the sense of communality of dormitories, a central dining hall, an infirmary, and a small account at the school store for postage and supplies. I also got a personal and visceral exposure to privilege and entitlement whose "positive" is that I know what form I do not want my community to take. The other boys I remember were full of themselves and their ambitions made them obnoxious. There is not a single one of them I remember fondly or that I wish to catch up with. My failing in emotional development was that I did not know how to protect myself from unkindness, and one boy made my life so miserable that I hit him. My roommate for one year was also very cruel to me, and I didn't know I could ask  to be given a different roommate. My roommate for the other year was a baseball fanatic, which had no meaning to me. When my father asked me if I wanted to go to Storm King, I only asked "Can I do woodworking?". I was told that I could, but when I got there, I  was told that only maintenance people could use the wood shop. So I have a lot of pain connected with my years at Storm King. 

There is no lesson I wish to impart. I am indulging this moment to express feelings long held, to reflect on the meaning and purpose of an Alumnus relationship. I have always wanted a family where I could be safe (which I approach in my maturity), and Storm King was another of those places that didn't offer that to me. So I am and remain ambivalent about my connection to Storm King. 

As 1/7,700,000,000 th of humanity, My family feels too big with too divergent interests for me to feel safe. Embedded in a time of rapid growth of technology and decline of the biosphere, I feel danger growing around me exponentially. The United States is led by a madman who wants to plunge the world into war, and the model of military hegemony by which the  United States has protected (and sacrificed) its white citizens for a century is now being turned against it by a country with all of the technology and energy that we have, and a massive population with which to execute that model. The best way to survive in the world is to make friends, and work together to make the  world a better place. Yet what is the central premise of our foreign (and domestic) policy? It is the way of the bully. To win or lose. Likely, against that bully, to lose. 

I have friends with whom and relationships in which I feel safe, and yet I find very little else to be loyal to. I have been a defender of the underdog for my entire life. I have espoused cooperation and sharing as sustainable social models which could help assure the survival of humanity and life, and I have watched their opposites increase in control of our country - selfish me-ism, security through wealth hoarding, neglect of the social fabric and avowed elitism, racism, sexism and phobias of various sorts, and status seeking through consumption of stuff. It is very short term thinking which advocates me-first-ism. Imagine believing the world will continue as it is and that wealth could possibly protect a person from the inevitable degradation of the environment? There is so much work not being done. Is Storm King preparing young people for this world? 

Stephen Marshall.  

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Stephen.Alrich.Marshall@gmail.com

802-922-1446

Dispolemic.Blogspot.com

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The Next Phase Shift

An Important Argument hasn’t been made.

Hunter-gatherer groups are fiercely egalitarian. Egalitarianism insists on distribution of resources, cooperation within groups, perfect personal freedom, strict accountability for anti-social behavior, and is highly sustainable. It is by insisting on sharing and reciprocity that egalitarianism promotes the well-being of all members of the group, regardless of the role that each member fulfills, and thus promotes social stability, and ultimately sustainability. Egalitarianism isn’t just a strategy in a set of sustainable practices. Egalitarianism is the necessary attitude for sustainability.

Tragically for the fate of life on Earth, and humanity (sixth great extinction, global warming), the super abundance of natural resources suitable to the uses of human ingenuity has supported economic systems which encourage inter-group conflict, and hyper-inequality in their distribution. This is the academic way to say that humanity has stolen, betrayed and warred on itself most extensively and tragically since ingenuity produced surpluses and the greed of some found these surpluses could be used to control other people. Simply, egalitarianism is sustainable so long as cheating can be punished, but is “unfit” in competitions with hierarchically organized groups, when resources are surfeit (horses, clubs, swords, guns, grain) and can be mustered against small, stable, homeostatically regulated groups. Scott (Against the Grain, 2017) argues that the emergence of the coercive state was resisted by hunter-gatherer groups, as long as they had access to food and resources. However, as population densities rose and the vagaries of weather forced some people into dependence on those others who controlled the grain supply,  nascent coercive states – utilizing hierarchy – were able to focus more energy and more lethal technology against surviving hunter-gatherer groups, in addition to the subservient of their own societies.

The transition from egalitarian hunter-gatherer modalities to hierarchical modalities could be described as a phase shift from a super stable, low impact, survival modality (egalitarianism) to an unstable, high impact modality (hierarchy and privilegism) which in its nature drives culture toward short-term gain at the expense of long-term sustainability. At that point at which habitat suited to hunting and gathering diminishes to negligible, hierarchical societies has won in nature’s game of natural selection. The course of history is set.

The problem at hand for us is either how to transform, or with what to replace, hierarchical organization, such that we can maintain modern levels of science, education, health care and nutrition, while deprecating modern levels of poverty, habitat destruction and pollution, mental illness, war, and genocide. Egalitarianism is perhaps not the goal, but a principle strategy. Success in such a project would be the next great phase shift for humanity: considering the impact of hierarchy on human history, what would post-hierarchy look like?

Traditional economists emphasize innovation and growth as key strategies toward meeting human need. These strategies are consonant with the hierarchical model, but provide no means of accountability for being unsustainable. Practice of the traditional, Neo-liberal economic model speeds us toward the brink of Gaia-cide. We do not play “chicken” in this race. We aim to stop the race. The key research question is “How do we make hierarchy unprofitable? How do we make sharing seem necessary and inevitable?”.

The hunter-gatherer model of economic activity sustained itself in the abundance of nature until food supplies began to expand with farming and pastoralism, while diminishing for hunter-gatherers. The surpluses of the agrarian economies (grain, cattle, military supplies) energized hierarchy, larger populations, and dominance over subsistence groups. Without those surpluses, hierarchy could not have prevailed over egalitarianism, and surpluses, or at least value available to be skimmed from the producers of value, continue to drive hierarchical wealth accumulation. The argument here made is that the thing we fear – Gaia-cide, the loss of our life on Earth as we know it, the loss of the resources we need to live – may be the loss that finally forces humanity to enter this next phase shift. Easily might populations of Homo sapiens collapse, in which case populations would be so dispersed that hunting and gathering might be feasible again, except we have lost the knowledge of how to do it.  But we value our own lives and the opportunities of the modern world, and we don’t want to go over that cliff. So what changes permit us to begin the phase shift?

What would a cooperative, egalitarian world culture look like? What does the next phase in human history look like? Are we trying to imagine a compromise between hierarchy, property and control, and equality, sharing and mutual respect? Does the natural fitness of hierarchical systems, where resources are available to energize those systems, make the totalitarian social control exhibited by the Chinese state a necessary future for humanity? Or will the instinctive drive of Homo-sapiens toward “fairness”, freedom and accountability effectively undermine the fitness of the totalitarian state? What innovations are needed to build self-correcting sustainable systems that can prevail over the natural short-term advantages of the hierarchical organization?

The one thing that I prize that only the modern world can provide is information: science, stories of other people in other places, visions of the past and the future, deep knowledge of how the universe works, and fiction. I want only enough energy available to me so that I can, one, enjoy these flights of imagination that make my intellectual and emotional growth possible, and two, so that I can engage with other people in creating the world that we want. I do not want to be above or below anyone, I don’t want to be the decider. I want my voice to be among the voices that decide. I want my share of voice, where everyone gets a fair share – and not more.

Hunter-gatherer societies were highly sustainable and required very little work from their members. Effectively, nature did the work, of growing plant foods and hunted foods, and the hunter-gatherer only needed to go harvest them. At some point, as explained by Scott (2017), humanity had to work harder to get enough food. We have been working harder and harder ever since. Up to the dawn of the age of fossil fuels, energy was supplied mainly by human labor and animal labor, with some wind and water energy, and people typically worked all day, frequently under dire cruelty. With the advent of fossil fuels, slavery was eventually outlawed, though not eliminated, but we continued to work hard. Instead of using all of that energy to reduce our workload, it was used to increase material wealth, some even for those at the bottom of the hierarchies, and to sustain ever more people. The burdens on other life forms, eco-system services, and the planet, multiply exponentially.

The use of power to coerce behavior is only possible where there is power. What if social organization – with prolific use of altruistic punishment – were to deprive those centers of privilege and authority of that power, when it is shown to be abusive? What if we appealed to the instinctive egalitarianism of human beings? What if we systematically retrained resources to be distributed as they are created? What if we designed our systems for finding leaders so that the modest, reasonable and compassionate were as likely to be chosen as anyone else? What if everyone in the world were trained in how to resist coercion, and to recognize manipulation? What if we designed new systems of accountability for leadership which is over-ambitious? What if community members were taught to make appropriate use of power, by other members of the community, the measure of status? What if everyone was trained to seek the distribution of wealth, instead of allowing the concentration of wealth? Axelrod (Evolution of Cooperation) predicts the long-term inevitability of cooperation. But for a global civilization, how long do we have to wait? What efforts, what transformations, are necessary to achieve that cooperation? Can we enter the transformation soon enough? We are asking these questions.

I think we can safely predict that the vast majority of social revolutions are driven by the egalitarian principle “I want a life worth living.”. IOW, egalitarianism is alive and well in the human psyche. Our question is “How do we tap this instinct to create the world where everyone, including every other form of life, has a life worth living?”.