Scary Monsters and Crazy, Dangerous Worlds

It's been a vacation time for me lately. Part of that has been some total sloth binge-watching Netflix. In particular, I've been immersing myself in "Marvel's Agents of Shield". For those of you who don't follow such stuff, "SHIELD" is an enormous, incredibly well-funded, secret police agency who's task is to protect the entire world's population from the dangerous "super people" who keep popping up in the alternative "Marvel universe".

Watching episode 7 of the 3rd season of the series I heard a little speech by Rosalind Price---a US intelligence leader---talking about how scary it is to live in a world with "super people".




This is a really interesting conversation because Rosalind pretty much embodies the naive fear that people routinely express about any number of issues our society has trouble dealing with. I say "naive" because she is completely oblivious to the danger that she represents to the rest of the world. She suggests that Daisy (the younger woman---who has a super power) can "bring down the plane" and "kill Rosalind", without contemplating the fact that Rosalind can kill Daisy and bring down the plane too. After all, she is a trained killer who carries a gun. Moreover, she ignores the fact that she is the head of a secret police agency that routinely kicks in people's doors, drags them out at gun point, puts them into a coma and warehouses them indefinitely, and, has no compunction at all about shooting people who refuse to comply with their orders. (Heck, that dear plane that they are flying in can also shoot rockets and drop bombs, if you really want to get into it.)

As if it isn't loony enough that it appears that something like 20% of the world's Gross Domestic Product in the Marvel universe seems to be devoted to funding secret police agencies, there is plenty of evidence that plain old, garden-variety human nastiness is still around. The big enemy of SHIELD is a group of neo-NAZIs called "Hydra" (it has the cool slogan "cut off one head and another will grow to replace it"), led by some very nasty villains who were obviously based on folks like Josef Mengele. They like to dirty their hands in stuff like recruiting and brainwashing super-villains, but the concept works even without all this "alternative universe" stuff. It's obvious that there's no sense having to invent a new, hypothetical way of being evil when you can draw on the Niagara Falls of horror known as the Holocaust.

For heaven's sake, the world doesn't need "super heroes" and "super villains" to be an insanely dangerous place, science plus politics is more than enough to come up with nuclear war, genocide, climate change, etc. Can Marvel comics come up with a scenario as nightmare-inducing as Donald Trump in control of the nuclear football? I don't think that the writers of this tv show really have thought through how insanely vicious things like hydrogen bombs and nerve gas really are, or else they'd feel a little sheepish about the "devilish devices" dreamed up by the guys at Hydra. A disk that you throw that can turn you into rock? That's really nothing compared to nerve gas---a single drop of which on the skin is deadly.

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The point I'm trying to work towards is that the world is an insanely dangerous place. It always has been. It has always been the case that politics can go bad very fast. The Mongols or Vikings or British Empire can show up, and you end up dead or a slave, and, your entire society being plucked and devoured like the Christmas turkey. You don't even need outsiders. Some bad political events can happen and you end up with a long-term catastrophe like the Wars of the Roses (the real-life inspiration for the Game of Thrones series.)

Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens
(1908) by Henry Arthur Payne
Yup, a bunch of toffs pick flowers and hordes of peasants die
Public Domain Image c/o Wiki-Commons

Do I really need to mention religion? If you don't know why I would say that, do some reading on the "Thirty Years War". It killed off half the population of the German nation. It also inspired some very interesting art.

The Hanging by Jacques Callot
More public domain goodness from the Wiki Commons

If you want to talk about crazy behaviour inspired by fear of "the other", nothing really compares to terror of heretics by fundamentalists. (Something to think about in our current political climate.)

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This blog post isn't meant to an attack on "Agents of Shield". I actually really enjoy the show. But the role that Marvel plays in our society is that it allows people to work through the "big issues" that face us as human beings. It is the equivalent of the myths and legends that people used to tell around the hearth when it was too dark to work. As such, it creates a common language and more emotionally neutral way of discussing issues that are terribly important to all of us---but often so fundamentally terrible that people have a hard time talking about them.

And yeah, the basic fragility of life and human society is one of those things that people fool themselves into ignoring because they find the idea too scary to contemplate. We are all somewhat like Rosalind Price---up to our eyeballs in a vicious, dangerous, nasty world yet somehow deluded into thinking that in some way it is safe and stable. It is one of those key, important truths of Daoism that this is just a fantasy. The only thing that is constant is change. The Dao is totally indifferent to the suffering of humans, it treats us like "straw dogs".

This isn't to say that we need to become indifferent to suffering, just that any kindness or compassion that exists comes about because we choose to show it to others---not because it is intrinsic to the way things are. It also should teach us that we need to savour every moment (ie: hold onto the One), because it really may be our last chance to do so.

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Yeah. More blue type. Just remember that "creatives" need to eat too. We're happy to share with folks that can't afford to toss something in the tip jar. But if you can, think about doing so. If not for this blog, maybe someone else's. If you think that you gained some insight or even wisdom from my words, how about tossing me a buck? 

Daoism and the Dominant Paradigm

At work the other day I was asked to cover up some furniture with so that when some contractors came in to do some construction work they would be protected with dust. It wasn't a terribly difficult job, but it put me in a totally foul mood. This carried on with me for the rest of the shift, over the night, and on into breakfast the next morning.

I mentioned my emotions to my partner, Misha, and we talked about them over bacon and eggs. We came to the conclusion that the reason why I was so annoyed was because I had been asked to do a half-assed job that served almost no useful purpose, and, which resulted in totally unnecessary waste to the planet---and there was effectively nothing at all I could do about it.

The thing is that I was asked to use plastic film to cover up the stuff. And plastic film is useless at this job---even though most people use it. It doesn't drape properly, it is repelled by static electricity, and, it is so light that it gets moved even by the slightest air current. You can't tie it up with string, it is slippery so it slides off items easily, masking tape doesn't stick well to it, and, it actually attracts dust which doesn't stick to it (that's a neat trick)---which means that when you take it off a piece of furniture the dust will slide off it onto what you are trying to protect. For these reasons, I never ever use it for this purpose at home. Instead, I have a heavy-canvas drop cloth that I've used for years. It has none of the problems I've mentioned above, and on hot sunny days I can clean it off with soap, a deck brush, and, a garden hose.

So part of my funk was just about the half-assed, ridiculous job I had been asked to do.

Another part of this exercise in futility was the fact that once the work was done the plastic film would be removed and tossed into the garbage, and from there into a landfill. I'm a bit of an expert on our local municipal government as well as a manual labour drone, so I know about how much time, money, and, political anguish goes into solid waste issues in my town. So the idea that we would create another bit of stupid garbage in order to just go through the motions of protecting some not-terribly valuable (and easily cleaned) furniture just seemed irritating as Hell. 

My partner Misha took this annoyance and ramped it up a notch by pointing out that there is no sense at all blaming any of the people involved in this process. Each one of them exists in a system of thought and organization that creates a logical justification for the decision to do something inherently wasteful with only marginal utility. That is, the idea that the cost of disposal and the impact on the environment are rarely part of the design criteria of any decision. And, that in many cases it is more important to be seen to care about an issue than it is to actually accomplish anything. Until society decides to put an actual cost on environmental destruction, it is called an "externality" and ignored. And, in order to ensure the smooth functioning of a large, horizontally-organized institution, it is very important to let each individual know that their concerns are being considered by management. This means that people are rarely told "No, that's a dumb idea" and instead are told "OK, I'll get someone to do that right away."

The really annoying thing about all of this is the fact that as a species we are skating very close to the edge of an existential environmental disaster. I personally believe that we have already overshot the carrying capacity of the earth  and we are causing a lot of very expensive and deadly extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change. And yet, none of this seems to filter down to the level of ordinary human behaviour around things like construction. There is nothing at all like a consensus around having to get "all hands on deck" to save humanity, instead it's just "the same old, same old." Until the government makes a collective decision to take climate change seriously and mobilize society to the same extent it did to fight World War Two, it is ridiculous to expect most ordinary people to just spontaneously "get with the program"---because there really isn't any "program".

We can mobilize the public to fight a war,
why can't we mobilize them to save our civilization?

When I'm able to get my rational mind to keep my emotions under control, I realize that as Daoists my lovely Misha and I have isolated ourselves from the rest of the human population. We see things so differently from people who "buy into" the "Dominant Paradigm" (DP) that sometimes we must seem like Martians to ordinary folks. And it goes the other way too. I often find it hard to understand how these people think. Mostly, however, I find it profoundly frustrating to be around what I call "DP'rs". I know that they cannot do any better, so there is no sense blaming them for their individual choices. But that doesn't mean that I am not annoyed with the casual and unconsciously brutal way they affect the natural world and future generations. To a large extent that's why I have spent most of my work life trying to avoid being around them. But sometimes I cannot avoid interacting with DP'rs, and this generates negative emotions.

I suspect that this has always been the way with Daoists. It's true that global environmental destruction is not something that loomed large in ancient China, but there was always the casual brutality of the ruling class towards the peasants (that's why Daoists were involved in the Yellow Turban Rebellion), or, the tendency of military leaders to smash and destroy anything or anyone in their way (that's why Changchunzi met with Genghis Khan to try and soften his aggression towards the Chinese people.) When you make the effort to "embrace the void", "hold onto the One", and, "follow the watercourse Way", you find yourself more and more estranged from DP'rs.

Confucius and the John Birch Society: Rectification of Names and Modern America

Recently I did an experiment where I used two social media sites---FaceBook and Quora---to ask why so many Americans say that they don't live in a "democracy", but instead a "republic". That is to say, why do many Americans believe that there is a contradiction between the two words---that a country can be a "democracy" or a "republic"---but not both at the same time. 

I ask this because if you look up the Google definition of both terms, you will find the following:

de·moc·ra·cy
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives
re·pub·lic
a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch

If anyone knows much about systems of government, it is obvious that these two terms are orthogonal. That is to say, they refer to fundamentally different issues---which means that they aren't the sort of concepts that can contradict each other. An example of two orthogonal concepts are the class of an vehicle and the company that made it. So two classes of vehicles are "car" and "pickup truck", and, two companies that make them can be "Datsun" or "Ford". That is, a car can be either a Datsun or a Ford, and, either one of these companies can produce both cars and pickups. It simply isn't a case of "either it is a Datsun or it is a pickup", or "either it is a Ford or it is a car". So, China is a republic, but not a democracy. Canada is a democracy, but it is not a republic. And, the USA is both a democracy and a republic.

If you try to explain this in an American context, you get a bunch of responses. One of the more common ones is to suggest that the only real meaning of "democracy" is "a government without any form of elected representation". That is the word "democracy" for them means "a system where every single issue is decided directly through popular referendums". Another popular statement that they make is that in a "republic" there are constitutional laws that protect the rights of individuals against the capricious will of the majority.

When I try to work through the implications of these idiosyncratic definitions of both terms, I find that there are lots of strange results. For example, what is a "representative democracy" if you simply define "democracy" as only being exercised through referendum? Does that mean that all the nations of the world that have elected representatives aren't really "democracies"? Wouldn't arguing this case be committing tremendous violence to the common understanding of the concept?

In addition, the idea that only a "republic" has legal protections for minorities against the fickle decisions of the majority is also a bizarre reading of the term. Nations that specifically say that they are not republics---such as Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, etc---do have things like constitutions, Supreme Courts and so on that protect individuals from bad legislation.  In contrast both the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China---both of which call themselves republics and fit the dictionary definition---have terrible reputations when it comes to protecting the rights of individuals when they annoy the powerful. Moreover, what exactly is it about the difference between popular referendums and elected legislators (if we accept that this is the distinction between a republic and a democracy) that ensures protection of minorities? Surely it is just as possible for elected legislators to deny individual rights as the general public in a referendum? The Jim Crow laws in the Southern US that kept blacks under the thumb of the white majority were not passed by popular referendum, but rather by elected representatives in a state legislature governed by a constitution based on recognized law.

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Most of the responses I got from my question were of the sort mentioned above. I found this interesting, but the real issue I was trying to deal with was "why do so many Americans believe this?", not "how do they justify this way of thinking?". As far as I know, no one outside of the US uses the words "democracy" and "republic" in these ways. They use the standard dictionary definitions that I gave in the beginning of this essay.

When I asked one person why his definition was so different from a standard dictionary one, he replied that the new dictionaries are wrong, and it is necessary to check older ones. When I went on to ask him where specifically he got this idea from, he said that he got the info directly from the "Founding Fathers", although he didn't suggest a specific document. Another woman simply said that America has a different "culture" than other nations, and she likes it that way---. Several others just agreed that it is an idiosyncratic definition, but it helped people understand the limitations of extreme democracy, so it is a good way of understanding the terms.

One person who understood what I was trying to learn from the question said that these odd definitions come from the Republican party because it wants to justify ignoring the opinions of the majority of voters. Another said that this is a distinction dreamed up to encourage people to think the names of the two major parties represent really different ideas about how the country should be run: Republicans support the rule of law, and, Democrats support mob rule.

Finally one fellow suggested that "point zero" for all of this can be traced to a video tape put out by the John Birch society. He provided me with a link that ended in a pay wall, but a little more effort and I found this which seems to get to the heart of the issue. (I'm going to be discussing a lot of what goes on in this video, so take a good look at it. What follows isn't going to make much sense without having seen it.)

Let me start by stating that the above is a piece of very effective propaganda. And like all very good propaganda, it doesn't work by telling the viewer absolute falsehoods, instead, what it does is manipulate the way people think about issues by leaving out crucial issues while at the same time suggesting that they have completely explained the state of affairs.  Propaganda is often most effective by what it doesn't say, instead of what it does. To understand this point, consider one of the first ideas introduced in the video.

At about the 0:45 point, the narrator discusses what people routinely call "the political spectrum"---communism on the left, fascism on the right---and suggests that it is all wrong. He suggests at about 1:15 that people who call NAZIS and fascists right wing "never define their terms", and instead argues that the key issue in left versus right is the amount of power that a government has over an individual.

The video is correct to a limited extent. It is true that some people often throw around the words "left", "right", and, "fascist" without really clearly defining what they are talking about. But the John Birch solution is no answer either. The idea of "left" versus "right" comes from a specific moment in the French revolution where the representatives of various political factions were seated either to the left or right of the President of the Assembly. As such, it has continued as a very rough way of articulating where a specific individual or party sits in relation to others. The problem that arises, of course, is that politics is so complicated that it is impossible to accurately map any particular political system on one single axis. Indeed, I'd suggest that it is probably impossible to accurately map all human political tendencies in any specific sort of two-dimensional map.

The left/right spectrum that is introduced in the video suggests that communism should be on the left and fascism on the right. But it is important to understand that this only deals with one or two variables: nationalism and corporate ownership. The major Axis powers of WW2 gave great power to the major corporations in their countries:  for example, Krupp, Fiat, and, Mitsubishi. In addition, all three were tremendously involved in an extreme nationalist agenda: Lebensraum for the Germans, recreating the Roman Empire for the Italians, and, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere for the Japanese. In contrast, communism believes in state ownership of the means of production, which means elimination of all privately-own corporations. It is also internationalist in orientation, which means that it doesn't support the creation of empires specifically for the benefit of one particular nationality.

The spectrum that video introduces is based on a totally different set of criteria: relative power of the state versus the individual. This is a perfectly legitimate move---but only if you understand that you are switching what is being measured. What makes this video propaganda is the subtle move to suggest that the first spectrum is wrong and the second one right, instead of saying that they each measure something totally different. Political scientists are quite aware of the problems of the left/right way of measuring different tendencies, which is why they have attempted to come up with various other ways of encapsulating differences in easily understood graphics.

Another way of mapping political tendencies
Image by Liftarn, c/o Wiki Commons

This map separates out the role of ownership in differentiating Marxism from Fascism on one axis, but on another one it brings them together on how each deals with personal freedom. Please note, that this particular graphic doesn't deal with the relative role that nationalism plays in various political tendencies. That's the problem with these sorts of things---no matter how hard someone tries, they end up leaving something really important out. The problem with the video's depiction of this spectrum isn't that it says anything particularly wrong, it just leaves out an enormous amount of complexity and implies that what has been said pretty much exhausts the issue.

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The video goes on to make an argument in favour of the radical split between democracy and republicanism that brings in several similarly wildly over-simplified descriptions of reality. But I hope that I've already shown how the John Birch society is manipulating the naive into believing something false in order to promote their agenda.

I've put forward this modern example to illustrate a point from Confucius' Analects that has direct bearing on modern society. In Chapter XIII, part three, of David Hinton's translation we read:

Adept Lu said: "If the Lord of Wei wanted you to govern his country, what would you put first in importance?"

"The rectification of names," replied the Master. "Without a doubt."

"That's crazy!" countered Lu. "What does rectification have to do with anything?"

"You're such an uncivil slob," said the Master. "When the noble-minded can't understand something, they remain silent.

"Listen. If names aren't rectified, speech doesn't follow from reality. If speech doesn't follow from reality, endeavors never come to fruition. If endeavors never come to fruition, then Ritual and music cannot flourish. If Ritual and music cannot flourish, punishments don't fit the crime. If punishments don't fit the crime, people can't put their hands and feet anywhere without fear of losing them.

"Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act. Therefore, the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech."

Chapter XIII, part three, Analects, David Hinton trans.

To a certain extent, I've tried to do a little "rectification of names" on this post with regard to the terms "democracy" and "republic". I'm concerned about the confusion that surrounds these words, because how ordinary people understand these two concepts has tremendous impact on what they expect from their society. If people associate "democracy" with mob rule, they are not going to be as upset if the influence of ordinary people declines in society. And if they believe that the existing legal structure trumps the aspirations and needs of common folk, they will be easier to convince that they shouldn't expect help from society-at-large for their problems. The John Birch Society definitions ultimately support an elitist vision of society where the legal right of the wealthy to own property effectively trumps every other value that people support. If they can control the definition of words that people use to understand politics, they will have already won half the battle to convert the USA into a Plutocracy.

Confucius wouldn't be a fan of the John Birch Society!
Engraving c/o Wiki Commons