Originally published September 27, 2020 on Medium

The Era of Democracy Has Closed.

Democracy is the luxury of elites who have plenty to share between them, who feel they are safe to share their power. Then, who is “elite” in this “democracy” can be defined (grudgingly) to include non-property owners, non-men, non-whites, non-cis-gender, the non-wealthy, even non-nationals! Who is elite, and for whom democracy operates, can be defined to be an entire nation, as long as the actual elites feel ok with sharing. But then when sharing seems to interfere with holding onto power, so also do the customs and expectations of “democracy” seem unnecessary. All they need is a little army to scare the bejeesus out of the rest of us.

Some folks helping to clean up a homeless camp. copyright Stephen Marshall.

Fortunately for the elites (a selection of those with power, money, and lacking humanity), as the Non-s proliferate and demand shares of the fruits of a democratic society, some regular folks freak out. As they see their vaunted freedoms, their nest-eggs, and their privilege, having been premised on the captivity and social slavery of some of these Non-s, drains away from their own debt slavery and low wages, they get less willing to share. They see all these OTHERS, all these Non-s, gathering around, and they see Non-s not accepting their captivity under the knee of the police, they see the water rising around them, in many cases very literally, while their bosses and their role models escape in their yachts, sometimes literally, and they see the value of their wages going down, and their health care getting too expensive to use, they see their homes going on sale, and they feel ground down by the need to keep multiple jobs to pay their bills, and they’re not better off than their parents, and they’re feeling super-stressed, and when they don’t understand why they are feeling all these things, when they look for a reason for this stress, the words of a demagogue are soothing.

Don’t practice humility, don’t be vulnerable, don’t ready yourself to take responsibility for the crimes of your kith and kin, don’t ask “What can I do better?” Blame everyone else. Blame the OTHER. Blame the Non-s. Blame for your embedded guilt for the acts of genocide and slavery of your ancestors, blame for your embedded guilt for having what you need, everyone else. But don’t blame the elites. Don’t blame them with the bullhorn. Don’t blame them with the checkbooks. Don’t blame them who can do something about it. They have what you want. And why would that include democracy for everyone else?

And while some people freak out because the Non-s are coming for their share, the Non-s might have some pent up rage, and hate at them who hold them away from full humanity, freedom and access to the privileges of America’s promise. So there might be some tension in the air. And danger of riots.

And if we get Donald Trump for another term, it may be a very long term, it may be the terminal term, not just because he has so cleverly crafted his rhetoric and used his powers of manipulation, but because his actual constituents, his favorite people, tell him, “Naw, we don’t really want to share anymore. We’re done with this farce.”

I think they think they won the argument. How is it that “democratically” controlled town boards cannot set building standards for the residents of their towns, so that when fires rip through, those houses will not be destroyed? I think that they’re happy with a democracy that will kill itself on the altar of personal freedom and prefer to die in an inferno. If a scientific fact cannot be accepted by the democratically elected Congress, and that Congress cannot write legislation to fight global warming, and the government can’t govern and can’t promote the domestic tranquility, and allows the government to rule without regard for the Constitution, by Jesus, the job of democracy has been done!

Because who needs democracy, when you’re only ever asking “Where’s mine?”. All you really need is to be in the army of the elite. Now how do we get rid of these pesky “democratic” customs?

So Americans have fought for the rights of democracy, they have grown to think that democracy is a real thing, an American custom, something indelible, something indestructible. But as more folks reach for it, it becomes more and more of a nuisance for the oligarchs. They like their privilege and the idea of privilege doesn’t sound bad to them, and they know that the real effect of the machinery of democracy is to limit privilege (democracy is contrary to the rights of property, because the electorate can vote them away, says the Cato institute, so we’re better off without it), so the time has come to demolish democracy. They’re tired of sharing power with Non-s and even their army, and they’ve convinced their army of disillusioned its only because of the Non-s that their lives are at risk. Never mind the Oligarchs have been systematically squeezing the workers since the founding of the republic. Never mind the real progress for the American worker and the American middle class was made by unions at the expense of the oligarchs. The Oligarchs know they have won the war of rhetoric. Now all that remains is to disassemble the machinery of democracy.

How do we preserve the remnants of Constitutional democracy we have? how do we claim the democracy we want? We don’t do the things we have always done. We don’t just go the voting booth and vote for the lesser of two evils. (We must do that first). We must redefine what democracy means. We must do things the Oligarchs won’t like, won’t allow, and will use their power of the bullhorn to drown out.

We must march and strike, occupy the streets, and shut down the economy. We must end the monopoly of the media held by rich elites who use it to appeal to our brothers and sisters in the heartland, who use it to denounce our hopes for justice and a truer democracy, who use it to appeal to fear, and divide us. We must march and strike for solidarity of the people against the Oligarchs.

We must make sharing an explicit requirement of OUR democracy. We must write into law policies that damages extreme wealth, that eliminates poverty, that push everyone, each and every Oligarch and every bit of white trash and every lost soul and every Non toward the center of the American wealth spectrum. We must guarantee that every person can find a way to get what they need, and never be in fear of want. We must decide that hoarding political power, wealth, food, opportunity, and ecological services, is no longer morally acceptable. We must reinvest in the communities of the oppressed, so they can raise themselves up. We must guarantee radical equality.

For one of the first steps in this march toward the New Democracy, the rich can give their money to brain trusts for the New Democracy, can spend all of their money building new housing, new schools, and Green Economy infrastructure. The rich can use their privileges to demand that the privileges rigged into the system, be disassembled, so that everyone can be paid for the work they do what they earn when they do it. The rich can demand that their taxes be raised until their money dwindles to the wealth of a middle class family, so that middle income people feel their burdens are shared by those with much more. So we can all have health care, all can have affordable housing, all parents can have the child care and education for their children that a only a well paid professional class of caregivers can produce.

We must in fact begin to rebuild the role of America and the World, and declare that thenceforth, the wealth of America is the wealth of the world, and that democracy is the promise of humanity and of life on Earth, not just of America. We must declare that in the democratic world order, the creatures matter, and the protection of habitat is the justice that extends to even the voiceless.

We can begin this march by committing ourselves to the maxim “I can only be safe myself if I am safe for you.” And then to march the slogan, we must stop hating on each other. This lesson from the prophet Jesus redounds brilliantly to this moment. We must listen to those who oppose us, we must listen to those who have served the Oligarchs, and we must embrace them as members of the clan of common prosperity and common sacrifice. We must respect the rights of everyone to disagree, and if someone still hates, we may simply put boundaries around the hurt they can do. We must remember we are all capable of fascism, and to keep the brilliant eye of compassion awake.

We must give up on our own personal importance. We must re-imagine our own personal value as the value we derive from the happiness and survival of everyone we know — including those we hated on. Please stop hating. Time is running out. When you are staring into your own death, do not your priorities get reset? When you are staring into the death of your planet and all that you love, could it be time to reset how we, as humans, do things?

In fact, every other path leads to global flood and global inferno, leads to the planet purging us, and all of life as we know it, in a great raging fever. Maybe now is the time to try something new. Maybe the era of democracy has closed. Maybe the era of the New Democracy has opened.

It’s merely up to us.

Hardin’s Tragedy

Originally published on Medium on October 23, 2020

Recently I read an article by Matto Mildenberger, writing in Scientific American, about Tragedy of the Commons. Inspired, I read Hardin’s commentary for myself.

Garrett Hardin in his commentary The Tragedy of the Commons, (1968), argues that because selfish rational actors will by default damage interests that are shared in common spaces and resources — the commons — civil society enacts regulations to restrain or control their use. He extends this argument to populations — saying that Earth, a finite space, is a commons, which Darwinian and genetic logic tell us will be filled by those with the least concern for sharing that commons, and that therefore governments are justified to control populations. (China’s one child policy emerged around 1980; Wikipedia).

In some ways Tragedy of the Commons is a snap shot of modern political thought, a freeze frame of the philosophical logic of its time. Having grown up in the 1960s, I recognize much of its thought, having been assaulted with it and suffered the accusation of being selfish. That logic assumes the validity of the rational actor model of human beings, and with the rational actor in mind, projects the consequences for humanity, life and Earth, which are dire, if population levels are not controlled. The irony of his analysis is that he would be correct, if the rational actor were a correct model of human nature. But he is wrong about the rational actor as a necessary standard of human behavior, and wrong about the need for governments to set limits on populations.

Tragedy of the Commons is a strange mix, to me in our times, of progressive thinking, neo-liberal thinking, fascist thinking and communitarian thinking. He worries about environmental pollution and the infringement of private noise on public spaces, hence communitarian. He uses that logic to defend population control, hence fascism. He defends regulation for the common good, hence progressive. Since his premise is and remains, throughout his logic, the rational actor, we hear a neo-liberal. But because of the cross-category thinking, the logic of this piece can’t be placed in a box that we would recognize today. Garrett Hardin himself is accused of being a fascist, eugenicist, and Islamaphobe, and I won’t defend him. But we do hear him arguing for preserving the health of the environment and the right of governments to regulate the market place. He also does not defend the right of individuals to do whatever they want to — he just expects them to. Maybe he believes that is right. Significantly, he wants to protect the commons.

But the flaw in his logic leads to a flawed conclusion. People do not act and think in the manner of the rational actor, unless they are trained to, as in American economics education classes, and on the battlefield of American capitalism. And government programs that seek to directly reduce population, in a tragedy of the commons mind set, are not necessary. The Earth is finite, and as the number of humans increases, conditions for us collectively grow worse. But population isn’t the only cause or the only problem that needs to be addressed. The mal-distribution of wealth and global warming are also existential issues for humanity, and hunger, poverty, wild habitat loss, and disease are compelling needs for us to address. The best solution for all of these problems is education, access to resources, and the freedom to demand change from national and international leaders.

But the progressive logic of how to live together fails if we slip back into the rational-actor mode of thinking. The rational actor does not care about the impacts of their own behavior on others, and if we cannot count on people to care about each other, all bets are off. Our communities and our lives only succeed if it is an embedded assumption that we are all members of communities, where we all matter, where we will all get our needs met, where we must protect others to protect ourselves, and when we share, we do not lose.

This logic is as inevitable to me as Hardin’s logic was to him. By removing the premise of the rational-actor we are able to deploy the community-human model, and if we do this, we might be able to build a world in which human freedom is properly balanced with conscience and the health of the commons. Those who deride this model are those who learned their lessons in economics classes, learned the lessons of survival in the hyper-competitive American capitalist state, and stand to gain in their short term thinking. There is nothing we can do to change them, but we have an essential fact on our side: the rational actor model is a fabrication, but the community-human model is real and the subject of sociological study. People around the globe are conscious, care about each other, and when they are presented with a need, will help each other. Communities which assume this construct can succeed anywhere. Be careful not to put a label on it, many who call themselves conservative are community minded too.

Sharing equals security

date of original publication April 6, 2017. Posted to Vermont Digger. 

The Trump era is not of Trump's making. The financial stress, promised to us as conservatives, finally in charge of the purse strings after fighting the New Deal for 80 years, rewrite the social policy priorities of our country, will destroy many of the gains against poverty we have made, and leave millions of Americans and 100,000 Vermonters in a Social-Darwinist gutter. I can't bring myself to imagine the picture that results.

Of course we enter what is for us a new world. Where we are no longer Post New Deal. We are now Old Deal. That very old deal. Where privilege begets privilege and all of the gains, which have been made to bring people out of poverty and improve the health of every person, are under threat. Where democracy, which made the elites subject to law and the will of the people, of central concern to those who wield power, is at risk. And because climate change can reset the entire course of life on Earth, and what we choose will determine how that unfolds, the future of humanity and life is in play, and this is a civilizational moment. Do not take this choice lightly.

As we face the impacts of the “conservative” vision in our individual spheres of interest, I hope that everyone will speak loudly and as one voice, that the problem is not that there isn't enough money, that the problem is not that our group deserves money and the other group does not, but that the problem is that those of privilege, those who are in control of the wealth, are unwilling to share it. There is plenty of wealth to do what we need to, but the people who control the wealth also control the people who write the laws and govern the people. We must set them straight. They are not entitled to hoard the wealth that the community produces.

The idea that wealth is created through investment is not wrong. But the work is not done by the investor. The entire community, working as an enterprise, including the law, the labor, the natural legacy of the community, and the social fabric, is needed, and that the law is written so that the investors reap the rewards and are able to accumulate that wealth for personal hoards, while others live with too little to meet their needs, is a mistake in the structure of the economy. Such a harvest of the wealth by the wealthy undermines the vigor of that economic engine, and damages the lives that are its purpose. Wealth must be circulated, and the needs of the people met, or the society will fall ill, decay, and destroy itself. We are witness to this process now.

Americans seem to regard the acquisition of wealth as the best way to create personal security, and the right to get wealthy as an intrinsic right of self-care. It is the core of the American Dream, and there are so many flaws in this logic

1) Wealth in a silo is inherently insecure. Every person, no matter how wealthy, depends on the health and well-being of everyone else and the community to be safe and comfortable. If you do not share, you are a target. You resort to guns, increase oppression, become callous to the loss of life, witness the destruction of our planet and discover the meaninglessness of your own life.

2) Wealth in a silo ignores the eternal human strategy of sharing to ensure community well-being. People instinctively reject selfishness on the part of others. If you have nuts, meat, land or money, you are expected to share. Sharing creates long-term stability and security for everyone, and hoarding (including wealth) is damaging to the community. Imagine I have caught game and I hoard it. Before I can eat it, it rots. Others have not enjoyed the benefit of my catch, nor have I.

3) The most secure and stable societies, in which everyone gets their needs met, value sharing. Wealth is not required to have a rich and meaningful life when the entire community is healthy. When the social fabric is healthy, there is no poverty no matter how little wealth there is.

4) Wealth disparity in itself is a signal of decay. (See "The Spirit Level" by Wilkinson and Picket.) Social, political and economic sustainability is reduced by increasing wealth disparity. We can improve our chances of social and cultural longevity and sustainability by creating institutions which enforce the circulation of wealth from the wealthy back to the poor and marginal.

Since the normal functioning of the economy transfers wealth from the poor and marginal to the wealthy, measures that transfer the wealth back to the underprivileged merely balances the system. The question we are compelled to ask is whether we will allow those who are privileged and control the wealth to continue to increase their wealth forever, leaving the rest of us to become poorer and poorer, more and more desperate, and the society ever more divided and combustible, or we will decide that the well-being of the community and its members is important, that living in one community in which everyone is valued is important, and find ways to capture the wealth of the society to correct its ills.

The change we must make in our thinking is from "wealth=security" to "sharing=security." When we achieve illusory security through wealth, we divide our fates from the fates of our fellows, and make the world less stable. When we decide that the entire society must be secure and healthy to promote personal security and wellness, then sharing is the logical course of action. We must all be asking, “How can we make the community and its members healthier and more secure?” And be prepared to support those strategies with the wealth of our communities.

A silent thought

May 3, 2022

I have neglected my blog because life whirls around me and my efforts fly centrifugally away. I write and my words are lodged in a notebook, a letter, a journal, any where but without a thought of this repository. 

Perhaps I will change this. Perhaps I will fly another year before I land on this page again. Perhaps I will devote my time to a website or academic papers. But Dispolemic is the home of my writing. Perhaps I will try to bring unkeyed writing to the electronic page. 

I am going to take a chance and deposit a coin of my time from five years ago. Let's see if the silent audience even notices.