The fifth column on the US left

The "Don't Vote Democrat" club appears to be made of two groups of people. The first, larger group consists of clueless dupes who delude themselves with the idea that some "third" party responding to the will of "da people" is a real possibility. It is not and never has been - third parties of any kind failed to attract popular support beyond single digit numbers, but this does not stop these folks from fantasizing about it. It is, in my view, an outgrowth of American-brand religiosity that borders on magic - if you pray hard enough it will happen.

The second, smaller group consists of the fifth column players whose role is to sabotage Democrat voting deep behind the front lines. To understand the role of this fifth column, it useful to consider a model of the bi-partisan system in the US stipulated by the Hoteling's law.  In short, this law says that in competitive duopolies, the center of gravity for both sides will fall close to the center of gravity of the whole system. That is to say, positions of both sides will be closer to each other than to positions of fringe supporters on each side.

This model implies a two fold electoral strategy. One is frontal assault to control the center, the other one is the "fifth column" to sabotage the territory deeply behind the front lines where main electoral battles are fought. The frontal assault is intended to sway the "median voter" to vote for party A rather than party B, and consists mainly by portraying the position of each side as being closer that that occupied by the "median voter." This is poli-sci 101 and should not be a surprise to anyone with a brain.

However, the frontal tactic to control the center has little effect on guys deep behind the front lines - both the "core" supporters and fringe radical even further removed from the center. It is clear that these guys have no other place to go and no tactical maneuvering to control the center will sway them to vote for the other side. This is where the fifth column strategy comes into play. It purpose is to sabotage voting deep behind the enemy lines among the core and radical supporters who are already far away from the gravity center from voting, a phenomenon known as "splitting the vote."

The fifth column strategy typically operates on the principle of increasing transaction cost of voting. Voting is a low transaction cost - low benefit activity for individuals. I will not benefit if I vote or lose much if I don't, but it does not cost me much to go to a polling station and cast the ballot. Since my transaction cost is low, I may be inclined to vote for emotional reasons even though I know that I will not benefit from voting in any meaningful way. However, if my transaction cost goes up, I may decide not to vote for "my" side of bipartisan divide or not to vote at all.

To accomplish its goal, the fifth column of the "Do not vote Democrat" club creates a subterfuge to increase the real or perceived cost of voting Democrat among its core or far-left supporters. A common tactic, often used by the Republican storm troopers, is increasing the transaction cost of voting, e.g. by requiring proof of registration, ID, or by limiting physical access to polling stations. This tactic can be used by those whose affiliation with the Republican party is no secret to anyone. A second tactic is more subtle, however. It aims to convince potential Democrat voters that voting Democrat has some hidden cost, for example that Democrats are "sell-outs" "turn-coats" or "traitors" so voting for them will make things worse. To be effective, this tactic requires that the identity of the messenger is fake or at least concealed. This advice must come from someone who appears to be on "our" side to be taken seriously. Nobody would believe it if it came from a known Republican hack.

So here comes the fifth column of the "Do not vote Democrat" club on the left. Some of them may be false flag operators, republican functionaries posing as radical lefties. But most of them are probably not - more likely they are useful idiots who willy-nilly play into the hands of the Republicans. They may be genuinely disgusted with the politics of compromise, lack of proper zeal among Democrat politicians, or just the general way things are going. They may be swayed by the idealism of the first group in the club who believer that this country is a populist democracy and casting votes is all that it takes to change the deeply ingrained institutional structures. Or they may be waiting for a savior and when someone who looks like one appears, they may put all their hopes in him, and if those hopes fail to materialize, they become disillusioned and bitter and demand a crucifixion of the "fake savior."

Whatever their motivation, their passion and their convictions are genuine and that is what makes them perfect fifth columnists. Nobody will suspect them of being a false flag operation for the enemy. They are genuine radicals sincerely fighting for the cause. The fact that their efforts help the enemy does not typically enter their consciousness where ideological purity and moral convictions reign supreme and reason has  been relegated to the periphery where it is only a tiny bit away from treason. 

On Clueless Rationalism

I resent the ubiquity of throwing invective - "stupid", "libtard" "bigot" "racist" "fascist" etc. - on other people on the internet. It is a sure sign of intellectual laziness that has become a norm of the discourse these days, not just on the internet but in general. More specifically, it is an act of avoiding the difficult task of trying to understand motivation behind other people's thoughts or behavior in favor of simplistic demonization of them. Someone says or does something we dislike - we judge him a bad person because it is much easier than making an effort to understand the reason behind this behavior.

Take for example, the Left's favorite blood sport of posting quotes by conservative politicians and media personalities and treating them as evidence of ignorance, stupidity, racism, bigotry etc. There is double irony here. First, this practice of publicly deriding "stupid" or "bigoted" figures enormously boosts their public outreach beyond their original audience. That reason alone is sufficient to explain why these politicians and media personality say such things. Any rational person in the business in which his/her success critically depends on his/her popularity would use attention grabbers to expand that popularity. And what is a better attention grabber than saying or doing things that you know will outrage people your perceive as your enemies?

But the second layer of irony lies much deeper than attention grabbing gimmicks. A lot of what people say or do does not have only a utilitarian function - communicate an idea or obtain some utility - but a ritualistic-expressive function as well. This means that people often say or do things to express who they are where they stand in society. In such situations, their choice of words or acts is governed by this ritualistic-expressive function rather than the truth function of what they say or the utilitarian function of what they do. What they say may be patently false and what they do may serve no utilitarian function whatsoever, but they say or do it anyway because it serves the ritualistic-expressive function.  An obvious example is people saying things that may stretch the. truth or be even patently false to bond with their spouses, children or friends.  A kid flunks school because he is lazy, skips classes, and gets zero parental support.  All his family and friends know that darn well, but will tell the kid that it was bad teachers, bad schools and "racist" society that failed to provide him with proper education.   This is not a statement of fact, but a statement of social solidarity.

This is what the rat-choice folk, which includes most of the Left, fail to understand. They hear something they find not only patently false i.e. irrational but also objectionable, but in their reaction to it they focus only on the rational aspect of it (truth function) while totally ignoring the emotive aspect (ritualistic-expressive function). And since the irrationality of what they hear is obvious on its face, they easiest explanation these rat-choice folk can find is that the person saying it is ill-informed or, using the vernacular, "stupid" "bigoted" "racist" and so on.

But this is also a wrong explanation, because the chances are that things in question were said not to communicate the logical truth function, i.e for rational reasons, but to express the social identity position of the speaker- i.e. for ritualistic emotive reasons. If I see myself as a folksy homeboy in the "heart of America," this defines not only who I am and who are my peers are (i.e. my "ingroup") but also who I am not and who are not my peers (i.e. my "outgroup"). Consequently, a lot of what I say or do will serve ritualistic-expressive function to mark who I am and who I am not. Wearing a plaid shirt, driving a pickup truck, avidly watching NASCAR races, carrying a gun, and believing certain common-sense platitudes serves that ritualistic-expressive function because it effectively distinguishes the "in-group" of "homeboys" from the "out-group" of "city dwellers" or "liberal elites."

What is more, this ritualistic-expressive function is likely to be evoked more often when the identity of the "in-group" is being threatened. In such situations, speakers often resort to hyperbole as a more forceful way of marking their social identity and status. If the "homoeboy" identity is threatened by economic and cultural changes, people espousing this identity will likely use exaggeration to mark that identity. This entail conspicuous displays of identity symbols, like pickup trucks, guns, etc, as well as conspicuous displays of markers that differentiate them from out-groups, such as saying or doing things that out-groups consider outrageous, e,g, disparaging comments about minorities and women, disdain for the environment, or various expressions of anti-intellectualism.

This explains the nonsense that politicians and media personalities say - it is designed to mark their in-group affiliation to gain popularity among their target audiences. In the same vein, "converting" to radical Islam, Judaism, Hinduism etc. is a social identity and status marker to differentiate the respective in-groups from out-groups, such as Western liberals, secularists, etc. The extremism of these beliefs is proportional to the sense of threat the believers feel from the out-groups. The greater the threat the more the belief or action would differ from those accepted by out-groups. If the outgroup professes modernity, the ingroup would espouse going back to medieval times. If the outgroup professes equality, the ingroup would espouse extreme inequality. If the outgroup espouses rationality and science, the ingroup espouses extreme-anti-intellectualism. If the outrgoup rejects physical violence, the ingroup would engage in extreme acts of such violence complete with public executions and beheading.

The greatest irony in it is that the folks who engage in these seemingly irrational and barbaric forms of speech and behavior show a greater understanding of their enemies than the rat-choice folk who find their behavior and ideas repulsive. The former understand what motivates their enemies, what makes them like or dislike things, what makes them toe the line, and what makes them cringe, and guide their speech and actions accordingly. The latter, otoh, fail in this difficult intellectual task of understanding their enemies, and cover up their ignorance, or perhaps intellectual laziness, with simplistic demonization.

HL Mencken "Bayard vs. Lionheart"

http://amomai.blogspot.com/2008/10/hl-mencken-bayard-vs-lionheart.html

“It is not often, in these later days of the democratic enlightenment, that positive merit lands a man in elective office in the United States; much more often it is a negative merit that gets him there. That negative merit is simply disvulnerability. Of the two candidates, that one wins who least arouses the suspicions and distrusts of the great masses of simple men. Well, what are more likely to arouse those suspicions and distrusts than ideas, convictions, principles? The plain people are not hostile to shysterism, save it be gross and unsuccessful. They admire a Roosevelt for his bold stratagems and duplicities, his sacrifice of faith and principle to the main chance, his magnificent disdain of fairness and honor. But they shy instantly and inevitably from the man who comes before them with notions that they cannot immediately translate into terms of their everyday delusions; they fear the novel idea, and particularly the revolutionary idea, as they fear the devil. When Roosevelt, losing hold upon his cunning at last, embraced the vast hodgepodge of innovations, some idiotic but some sound enough, that went by the name of Progressivism, they jumped from under him in trembling, and he came down with a thump that left him on his back until death delivered him from all hope and caring.

It seems to me that this fear of ideas is a peculiarly democratic phenomenon, and that it is nowhere so horribly apparent as in the United States, perhaps the nearest approach to an actual democracy yet seen in the world. It was Americans who invented the curious doctrine that there is a body of doctrine in every department of thought that every good citizen is in duty bound to accept and cherish; it was Americans who invented the right-thinker. The fundamental concept, of course, was not original. The theologians embraced it centuries ago, and continue to embrace it to this day. It appeared on the political side in the Middle Ages, and survived in Russia into our time. But it is only in the United States that it has been extended to all departments of thought. It is only here that any novel idea, in any field of human relations, carries with it a burden of obnoxiousness, and is instantly challenged as mysteriously immoral by the great masses of right-thinking men. It is only here, so far as I have been able to make out, that there is a right way and a wrong way to think about the beverages one drinks with one's meals, and the way children ought to be taught in the schools, and the manner in which foreign alliances should be negotiated, and what ought to be done about the Bolsheviki.

In the face of this singular passion for conformity, this dread of novelty and originality, it is obvious that the man of vigorous mind and stout convictions is gradually shouldered out of public life. He may slide into office once or twice, but soon or late he is bound to be held up, examined and incontinently kicked out. This leaves the field to the intellectual jelly-fish and inner tubes. There is room for two sorts of them—first, the blank cartridge who has no convictions at all and is willing to accept anything to make votes, and, secondly, the mountebank who is willing to conceal and disguise what he actually believes, according as the wind blows hot or cold. Of the first sort, Harding is an excellent specimen; of the second sort, Cox.

Such tests arise inevitably out of democracy—the domination of unreflective and timorous men, moved in vast herds by mob emotions. In private life no man of sense would think of applying them. We do not estimate the integrity and ability of an acquaintance by his flabby willingness to accept our ideas; we estimate him by the honesty and effectiveness with which he maintains his own. All of us, if we are of reflective habit, like and admire men whose fundamental beliefs differ radically from our own. But when a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, of self-respect, it is cruelly hard. But if he is, like Harding, a numskull like the idiots he faces, or, like Cox, a pliant intellectual Jenkins, it is easy.

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.”

Guns, guts and god from a sociological perspective

I have traveled in some 40 or so countries around the world and a number of the US states. I also lived in major US metropolitan areas - New York, Baltimore, Washington DC. In all those places I have never experienced a situation in which I wished I had a gun or for that matter any other weapon to get out of a threatening situation. This means there was not a situation in my life in which using deadly force or even violence would do anything useful. Not a single one. 

My personal experience is not unique and is, in fact, quite common as evidenced  by empirical data.  According to the National Crime Victimization Survey - the most comprehensive data source on crime in the US conducted by the Department of Justice, less than 2 percent of crime victims used guns, or for that matter any weapon, to defend themselves from attackers.  This may seem strange when you consider the prevalence of guns in the US - about 1 gun for every adult, the highest in the world, but it  makes sense if you consider the demographics of crime.  Most victimizations occur among people who know each other, family members, friends, neighbors and the like.  Violent crimes against strangers are relatively rare, even if they get most media attention.  Most people do not bring weapons to interactions with family members and friends.

So why is that a good share of the US population, many of whom have not left their home state in their lifetime, feel that they need to have a gun to 'protect themselves' against strangers and become aggressive if anyone questions it? What is the reason behind such attitudes? 

A popular view, especially among liberals, is that such attitudes are a byproduct of racism.  White people, the argument goes, are afraid of Black people and buy guns to 'protect' themselves, rationalizing it as anti-crime measures.  The obvious problem with this 'explanation' is that gun ownership and gun violence are more prevalent in Black communities than in White communities.  Conservatives would label it  'reverse racism' but this is the same bunch of nonsense as the original argument.

My hypothesis rests on two concepts championed by the French sociologists Emile Durkheim to explain different suicide rates in different countries: social alienation and social integration.  Alienation basically means weak social bonds among isolated individuals whereas integration means the opposite - very strong social bonds. Durkheim's theory was that too much of either increases suicide rates but for different reasons - despair in alienation and guilt over failure to meet obligations in integration. The implication of it was that you need a balanced society with not too much alienation and not too much integration.

My theory is that the concept of balance is fundamentally alien to the American culture - where extremes coexist side by side. Extreme wealth and extreme poverty is what comes to mind. However, a less obvious is coexistence of extreme alienation with extreme integration. 

On the one hand, the US society is extremely individualistic with weak social bonds, as evidenced for example by geographic mobility patterns. People tend to move on a drop of a hat, often over long distances - to get a better job, to buy a bigger house or whatever other individualistic reasons. This is very different from Europe where people tend to stay in the same location. As they say, In Europe 100 miles is far far away, in America 100 years is long long time ago. 

On the other hand, however, the American society consists of social enclaves with high level of integration. Most suburban communities belong to this mold. When you live there, you have to conform to certain norms - have a house of a certain type, mow your lawn every week, display an American flag, be of a certain ethnicity and so on. 

 Another example is religious community which, unlike in Europe, tends to congregate people who are alike. In Europe, churches tend to be gathering places of people from different walks of life, but in the US every group tends to form their own church. 

 As a result, many if not most people experience both - too much alienation and too much integration - at the same time. They are tightly integrated to their local groups where they experience pressure to conform to group norms, but at the same time they are alienated from other groups. In a way, this is a form of modern tribalism, like in Africa or Afghanistan, where different clans (pun intended) exercise social control over their own members but are at almost constant war with other clans. The US may put a veneer of modernity over it - modern houses, modern cars, modern jobs, modern life styles - but the social structure is pretty much the same. 

So the social effect of this crazy coexistence of extreme alienation and extreme integration is a combination of nihilism and xenophobia that on the surface resembles liberalism and bigotry at the same time. On the one hand, people do not give a flying fuck about other social groups - they care more about stray cats or dogs than people living a couple blocks down the street. All the care about is themselves. That may create an image of liberal attitudes of "live and let live." 

 But that image is deceptive, because the same people may feel extremely threatened when the folks from a different walk of life "invade" their little social enclave. "Invade" simply means "come to contact" which is tantamount to contamination, akin to flying a foreign flag in an all-American community or rooting for the other football team instead your "own." While such acts have no material effect on people around, they disrupt the sense of "coziness" and bring the alienation right into the middle of integrated community which violates its norms to conform.

This "invasion" of alienation into integrated groups of sameness creates a constant sense of threat and danger, putting people on the defensive. Hence the urge to acquire 'defensive' measures - such as guns or security systems. The liberals mistakenly label it 'racism' - but I do not think it is racism in a conventional sense of the word i.e. belief in supremacy of one 'race' over another. This is evidenced by the fact that non-white communities operate in pretty much the same way - extremely strong pressure to conform (e.g. the rigid dress code of Blacks, for example) combined with extreme mistrust of other groups.

America can be described as a social experiment that failed. Instead of the lofty goal of creating an integrated and balanced society it created a modern version of clanish, tribal-like structures that combines extreme conformity with extreme alienation. An analogy is the place with a nice moderate climate, say the Mediterranean, contrasted with a place with extreme desert conditions - very hot in the day, very cold at night. Both may have the same average temperatures, but the second one is a far less pleasant place to live. This is not unique to America, but it evolved on a much larger scale here, thanks for the most part to commercialization of life that promoted it.

Bankruptcy of liberal democracy

American liberalism is a bunch of crock. It is based on a false premise that most people can run public affairs by making rational informed decisions. They cannot. They cannot even run their own private lives in a rational way, let alone manage affairs that affect many. 

They cannot act rationally most of the time because 1. they are usually swayed by appearances that more often than not are false and thus need careful rational critique, however 2. people are too lazy to perform such careful rational critique most of the time. Both traits likely had evolutionary advantages. If you live in a jungle, as the humankind did for most of its time on this planet, quickly reacting to appearances offers a much better chance of survival than delaying reaction until a critical examination of appearances is performed. And laziness conserves energy, which again increases a chance of survival under condition of scarcity.

While these traits might have offered a better chance of survival in the wild, they proved disastrous in civilization, because they made people vulnerable to manipulation by their fellow humans. Humans quite early discovered that they can make their fellow humans do virtually anything if they appeal to human laziness and susceptibility to deception and offer them something for little or no effort. It almost never fails. It is the mother of all scams, business, religion, and politics.

The risk of manipulation has always been there, of course, but increased exponentially as the size of human societies grew. This, in turn, created fertile ground for the growth of the shyster class - professional manipulators exploiting humans as resources to their own advantages. The professional shyster class invariably includes priests and religious figures more generally, political leaders, entrepreneurs of various kinds, and story tellers. This does not mean that ordinary humans did not try to manipulate their fellow humans, but that the shyster professionals do it on a much larger and systematic scale that employed art and science.

Consequently, any political or social organization that purports to appeal to rational choice of informed citizenry has as much credibility as an offer of a multi-million dollar transfer from a Nigerian bank received by email. Both are the same type of exploit of the fundamental vulnerability in the human operating system - offering something of value for little or no effort. The only difference is how well the code of that exploit is written, which explains why most but hopelessly naive people distrust Nigerian bank offers but swallow raw bullshit spoon-fed to them in civic lessons is again - deceiving appearances. Nigerian bank offers are laconic notes written in poor English and skimpy on vivid details. Civic lessons, otoh, are dressed in impeccable prose and illustrated with numerous uplifting and heat-warming details. That is, pretty much, the main difference.

It follows that American style democracy, as explained in civic lessons, is a lie, a bunch of crock designed to deceive people. The lie of religion is to convince people that the most threatening thing to their well being is not their fellow human in the shyster class, but some abstract entity called "demon" or "satan," from which the shyster class is supposed to "save" them. American democracy uses pretty much the same lie but substitutes "demon" with "government." But both are pretty much the same protection racket in which a professional shyster - a priest, a businessman, or a politician - is offering "protection" from a peril that he invented.

It further follows that the most effective form of social organization is not one that offers "choice" - which almost invariably is a racket invented by some entrepreneurial character - but one that offers real protection from manipulation by entrepreneurial characters. Such form of social organization was described by Hobbes as Leviathan - a supreme authority that suppresses human freedom to harm fellow humans. Of course, this also creates the danger of manipulation by the Leviathan himself, but that danger is far less damaging to the humankind than unrestricted freedom to deceive and manipulate others.

The USSR is a case in point. There was a deception and manipulation by the Leviathan in the form of the Communist Part apparatchiks, but the society as a whole was remarkably free of entrepreneurial shysters, and those few that existed were typically punished. As a result, the life was good for most people - basic life necessities were provided, people did not have to worry about uncertainty of their material existence, the temptation of fetishes offered by entrepreneurial shysters to cure imaginary ills or to offer imaginary happiness low. An most people learned how not to be fooled by Leviathan's deceptions, which was like a known pothole in a road. Everyone knew where it was and how to avoid it to use the road effectively. OTOH, the American-style democracy is a road where potholes appear daily in most unexpected places without warning, and often swallow the road itself - making it virtually impossible to move effectively.

Although the USSR ultimately failed under the relentless attacks by the global shyster class, the goal it tried to achieve was ultimately good and worth further pursuits. If "good society" is going to be implemented on this planet one day, it will take the form of Communist Leviathan paved over the treacherous potholes of the American style "democracy."

Winter solstice wishes

The winter solstice is near and it is the time of making wishes. As an unrepentant atheist, I send people generic "happy holidays" wishes, but as any generic or abstract phrase - it is pretty meaningless. What does "happy holidays" really entail? What exactly would need to happen during the holiday/winter solstice time to make a person happy? What is it that would make a person like me happy during a holiday season in a similar way that finding a new fantastic toy under the dying, electrocuted x-mas tree makes a 10 year old child happy ? 

Bringing a 10-year old into the picture is a useful mental exercise not only because it conveys spontaneous, unadulterated, and unqualified joy, but also focuses the mind on tangible objects. A 10-year old will not be satisfied with vague abstractions, he or she is hoping for tangible objects that can be touched and manipulated. An abstract promise of "peace love and happiness on earth" simply will not do. It may entail something specific to an adult, like cessation of bombing people back to the stone age in the name of democracy, sexual gratification, or winning state lottery, but they are pretty meaningless to a 10-year old. Worse yet, they look like a cheap way of weaseling out of giving a good old tangible present: a model train, a doll, a bicycle or a pair of skates. . 

So suppose that a forest fairy who is in the business of fulfilling people's wishes appears before you and says "Make your winter solstice wish, and it will be fulfilled." Most people's homes are full of gadgets: i-pads, i-podS, i-phones, big screen tee-vees, big ass lawnmowers, vehicles of all sizes and shapes, garments, fancy-schmancy kitchen appliances - in a word, anything but shit and a haystack - so I do not think another gadget will do. Getting together with friends and celebrating goes in the right direction, but we do not need holidays or forest fairies to do this. In fact, many people practice this on a regular basis all year round. 

So after pondering it for a while I thought "how about socialism?" People like me consider socialism to be a good thing - so wishing socialism during holidays seems natural. Alas, there is only one problem - socialism sounds like one of those dreary abstract ideas that cheap adults use as a way out of buying a good old fashioned tangible present.

However, socialism does not have to be an abstraction - it has been turned into one by people who like abstractions: academics, lit-critters, the commentariat, and assorted peddlers of intellectual commodities. Socialism also means living a good life in a good environment, which means good old tangible things like, say, a good job, a nice place to live, accessible health care, decent education, efficient means of transportation, opportunities to spend your time with your family and friends, pursuing activities you enjoy, like fishing in the morning and writing poetry in the evening, or if you don't like fishing and are not poetically inclined, tending your garden or building a model railroad in the morning and playing Scrabble or doing crosswords in the evening. In a word, things that you can see, touch and manipulate in a way a 10-year old can see, touch and manipulate his or her x-mas present. 

So what kind of socialism do you wish as your winter solstice present? Be specific - avoid abstractions and sweeping generalizations of the smash-the-state-abolish-the-wage-system variety. Focus on your social proximity, the place where you live and work. What specific, tangible things you would like to see happen in your social proximity, if you were to enjoy or winter solstice gift of socialism in the same way as a 10-year old enjoys his or her good old fashioned tangible x-mas present. 

In a word - think of socialism in your social proximity, not socialism in books or far away places. And think of specific, tangible and positive things, like a health clinic, school, or public transportation system rather than the absence of this or that. And please share your wish list with others. I am really curious how people visualize socialism.

A Short Soliloquy on Freedom and Fishing

When I was a student, deep down behind the Iron Curtain, an event took place that shaped my thinking about freedom for the years to come.  I was invited to a boozing party organized by the local university students.  The times were the 1970s and it was chic to be a political dissident, so the conversation centered on kvetching about “the system.”  Alas, there was a fellow there, a student at the local Higher School of Agriculture we were told, who remained silent. 

For those unfamiliar with the Eastern European scene, a word of explanation is in order.  There was a steep social stratification between the cities and the countryside.  The cities were urbane and high culture, the countryside was parvenu.  By extension, higher education institutions training for urban professions were high class, while those training for rural pursuits, such as agriculture, were déclassé.  There was even a derogatory term for the latter derived from the acronym for “Higher School of Agriculture” which, when pronounced in a certain way, connoted defecation.  To translate the situation into the American scene, it was like a duck showing up at a cock fight. 

As the empty bottles piled up, the ag school guy finally broke his silence and asked “Why do you guys hate our country so much?”  Onerous silence followed.  It was taken for granted in the Eastern European intelligentsia circles that “the system” sucked.  No further proofs or explanations were needed or expected.  Asking the “why” question was, in fact, a form of the breaching experiment pioneered by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, a violation of an unspoken social norm that leaves everyone perplexed and bewildered.  People looked at each other, not sure what to say, but the challenge needed to be countered.  A bunch of philosophy students not being able to answer a simple question posed by a peasant meant defeat and humiliation.  So shaking my grey cells from the alcohol induced stupor I spurted “There is no freedom here.”  The ag school guy was quick to reply.  “What do you mean there is no freedom?  You can do what you want.  You can meet who you want, you can travel places, you can go fishing ….”  The “fishing” – undoubtedly high on the agricultural agenda - was nonetheless one word too many. The poor peasant should have finished with travel.  The crowd burst with uncontrollable laughter “Ha, ha, ha you can go fishing and you are free, ha, ha, ha”. 

The challenge was deflected but I knew that “we,” the urbane philosophy students at an elite liberal arts school, had lost to a lowly peasant from the Higher School of Agriculture.  Unable to answer his simple question, we simply laughed the guy out of the stage.  That is what country bumpkins do when challenged with philosophical questions.

Freedom is like god, a word that people like throwing around on every occasion, but nobody really knows exactly what it means. Or rather it means whatever one wants it to mean, that is, nothing in particular.  They are like Rorschach blots onto which people project their thoughts.  Their appeal lies not in what they denote, but what they connote, or to be more precise, in the feelings they evoke in the audience.  Such words are the building blocks of what the philosopher Harry Frankfurter calls “bullshit.”

To be sure, much ink has been spilled on the subject of freedom.  Academic distinctions and careers have been produced, lofty speeches delivered, crowds enthused, fortunes made, people swindled, sent to prison or shot, places ransacked, wars fought, empires created – all that in the name of freedom.  Yet, as the philosopher Edmund Burke aptly observed, freedom is as common as air or water – everyone has it save those few who are locked up and chained.  All people have air, water and freedom regardless of their wealth, residence, social standing, religious beliefs, political convictions etc.  What varies is the price they have to pay to use them.  If a dictator proclaims that people have to pay for the water they drink or be whipped and jailed for crossing a line in the sand or saying things offensive to the dictator – the people did not lose their water or freedom.  They still can drink and do or say what they want – all they have to do is to pay a higher price for their choices.  If they find the prices imposed by the dictator too high, they can move to another land which itself entail a cost, so the decision they face is the choice between the price they pay to the dictator, the price they pay for moving to another land, or refraining from actions that they deem outside their price range. 

What distinguishes freedom from air, water and similar nearly inalienable things is the connotations that the former evokes but the latter do not.  Uttering the word “freedom” creates warm glow, the feeling of something good and desirable which, it is often hoped, will be extended from the utterance itself to the person uttering it.  When I say “freedom” I in fact say “trust me, I am a good guy, I like good things in life.”  It was this connotation that prompted me to counter the peasant’s challenge with uttering the word “freedom.”  “Us” are the good guys because we like freedom, but “them” the functionaries and the apparatchiks are the bad guys because they do not.  That also explains why most demagogues liberally dispense the word “freedom” at the sight of a slightest challenge.

What it does not explain, however, is what happened next in my story – the uncontrollable laughter caused by uttering the word “fishing” after the word “freedom.”  The easy answer to this puzzle is that the laughter was provoked by the juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane – a common literary device used to produce comedic effects.  But that merely begs another question, why one ordinary activity (fishing) is construed as a profanity in the context of sacred freedom, but another ordinary activity (taking a train or a bus) is not.  In fact, Karl Marx mentioned fishing as one expression of individual freedom in the communist utopia, juxtaposing it with writing poetry at some later time of the day, so there is clearly something about freedom and fishing that appeals to human imagination. 

One answer to this puzzle lies in the idea of the sociologist Emile Durkheim.  Durkheim was grappled by a problem originated by the philosopher Immanuel Kant answering the ages old question whether human knowledge is subjective or objective.  His answer was “both.”  There are subjective and objective elements in human knowledge, and indeed all human perceptions of reality.  What we feel and sense is objective, that is, reflections of what is “out there” rather than figments of our imagination as idealist philosophers maintained.  However, how all our perceptions and indeed all our thoughts are organized into coherent wholes is subjective, that is, controlled by apriori forms of perception and reasoning residing in human mind rather than “out there” in reality, contrary to what realist philosophers maintained.  Kant’s solution, while ingenious, nonetheless posed a pernicious question about the origins of those apriori forms themselves.  Since different people use different apriori forms to organize their perceptions and thought process, asking about the origins of these forms is a legitimate philosophical pursuit.

Durkheim’s answer to this question was probably one of the most fruitful inventions in social science.  Apriori forms are ingrained in human mind by society in which individuals live, by ritualized forms of social behavior, such as religion or ceremonies, which in turn, reflect the idealized form of social organization, that is, how different roles, functions, statuses, rewards, etc. are distributed among members of that society.  If a biological analogy can be used here, apriori forms of cognition are imprinted in human brain, just as behavioral patterns are imprinted in the brains of young animals by following their parents or their flocks.  A duckling will treat any large bird it sees around after it hatches as its “mother”, and there are indeed reported cases of ducklings following hens or even humans if the mother ducks were absent.  Of course, human brain is far more complex and flexible than that of animals, so it is capable of acquiring and holding many imprinted forms during its life time.  However, once “imprinted,” the apriori forms organize human thinking and perceptions in a manner that can be compared to photographic lenses – they alter the image we see by focusing on certain elements of the image, and blurring or filtering out other elements, but they are neither a part of that image nor visible in it.  This invention led to the emergence of modern cognitive science as well as theories of organizational behavior.  The famous “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” postulating the influence of language on variations in human perceptions of the world is another example of this idea.  The speakers of a language that lacks the concept of snow are very bad at perceiving variations of snow when they encounter it.  It is not that they cannot see differences in, say, snow consistency but rather they do not know whether these differences are relevant. 

But what does that have to do with freedom or, for that matter, fishing?  Freedom, like god, belong to the category of nondescript feelings and conceptions grounded in general human experience. When we are born, we are totally dependent on our parents for survival, food, protection, etc. which imprints in us the idea of an omnipotent human-like being that watches after us, aka “god.”  This is a generalized nondescript feeling that gets specific and manifest shapes from the cultural environment in which we grow up.  If we happen to live in, say, India our conceptions of god take the form of dancing men and women, or monkey-like figures, if we happen to live in a Catholic country, then our conceptions of god take the form of an old bearded man on a throne or a youngish guy nailed to a cross, and so on.  What matters here is that our generalized experience of god – which originates in general human condition of growing up – is shaped by our cultural experience that presents some empirical forms as legitimate manifestations of god while other as illegitimate.  Portraying god as a monkey is perfectly legitimate in India, but it is a sacrilege in Catholic countries. 

Ditto for freedom.  We get our generalized experience of freedom from our childhood, as absence of parental supervision and control.  We feel the thrill of doing new and exciting things when parents are not watching and this gives us the positive vibes associated with freedom.  This generalized positive feeling is again shaped by the social environment in which we grow up.  If we are born to a family of serfs or slaves, then the ability to change place of residence or hunt and fish on the lord’s land is indeed a legitimate expression of freedom.  If we are born to bourgeois family, however, fishing is parvenu pursuit of house servants and of little concern to us.  On the other hand, the ability to travel or grub money without hindrance from governmental authorities is of significant concern, and freedom takes the form of the unhindered ability to engage in these pursuits.  This explains why peasants see freedom as the ability to fish while the bourgeoisie see it as freedom from government regulations.  It also explains why the latter see the juxtaposition of freedom and fishing as comic, if not sacrilegious.  Fishing is one of many mundane pursuits that bourgeoisie can pursue for pleasure, and as such lacking any significance.  Using it as an example of the sacred freedom to grub money is like using the image of a monkey to express the idea of deity.  Only primitive parvenus can do it in good faith, otherwise it is a joke of the “holy shit” or “fart in an opera house” variety juxtaposing the sacred and the profane.

Americans are enamored with the notion of freedom to the point of calling their piece of real estate “the land of the free.”  I can see the historical roots of this infatuation – the indentured servants shipped off to the colonies, the slaves captured in Africa and sold like cattle to American plantation owners, the refugees escaping imprisonment by dictators or invading armies – they all dreamed of freedom understood as the ability to hunt, fish, marry and raise children without fear of someone else hindering that ability.  It was a simple, and in a way, a noble human dream to live a normal life.  But some way down the road that dream was captured, colonized, and subverted by conniving entrepreneurs, businessmen, shysters, gangsters, and sociopaths who sought a different kind of freedom – that from government oversight and social control hindering their criminal or money grubbing activity.  At that juncture, the freedom has been defined as “liberty” or lack of government oversight and social control of any kind, the ability to get what I want and to kill anyone who stands in the way.  And, strangest of all, the peasant who used to dream of the freedom of fishing to feed his family went along with this subversion.

This is another puzzle that begs an explanation.  Why do people adopt ideas and viewpoints that are irrelevant or even contradictory to their own interests?  Many answers have been given to this question, but I would like to hint one suggested by my story of the freedom of fishing – because guys like me, the aspiring intellectuals, laughed the guys who wanted the freedom to fish out of the stage.  In other words, because intellectuals stopped identifying themselves with people who work for a living, and instead became lackeys of the money grubbing entrepreneurial class, begging for scraps from their tables and aping their manners and their speech. 

I personally managed to get over the anti-statist bent and shed the libertarian/anarchist conception of freedom, not an easy feat for an Eastern European intellectual who grew up behind the iron curtain.  The drivel of the imbecilic American political discourse liberally dispensing the words liberty and freedom was a helpful push factor.  Studying sociology rather than economics or business management was a strong pull factor.  But many of my friends and acquaintances still profess this notion of freedom colonized by businessmen, gangsters, and sociopaths.  Maybe they too see the light some day.

A sociologist whose name escapes me at the moment once observed that intellectuals a peculiar socio-economic class – they have more power than they think but not as much as they think they should have.  This builds on the idea of “organic intellectuals” proposed by Antonio Gramsci.  Organic intellectuals are producers of ideas that have close affinity to particular socio-economic classes, the working class, the professionals, the bourgeoisie, and so on.  As such, they are able to draw power form the class interests they represent, and articulate and amplify those interests.  Gramsci hoped that the development of the organic intellectuals of the working class is the key to transforming a bourgeois society into a socialist one.  If there is such a thing as organic intellectuals of the working class in the US, EU or elsewhere they indeed face an uphill battle, as neoliberalism has thoroughly colonized the public discourse.  A good way to start is to take back the stolen concept of freedom that is the pivot of the neoliberal ideology.  Freedom resonates with universal human experience and liberating it from the clutches of neoliberalism will travel a long way in liberating the entire public discourse from this scourge.  We should be able to say that all we need is freedom to fish and feed our families without fearing of being laughed out of the stage by neoliberal hacks.