Week 4

Democracy requires a nobility class, the only non-Western country who truly managed to work with democracy is India, with strong caste culture.

Partly

.. but not entirely. See Huntington (I am on a neo-con roll these days), The Clash of Civilizations

This European pluralism contrasts sharply with the poverty of civil society, the weakness of the aristocracy, and the strength of the centralized bureaucratic empires which simultaneously existed in Russia, China , the Ottoman lands, and other non-Western societies. Social pluralism early gave rise to estates, parliaments, and other institutions to represent the interests of the aristocracy, clergy, merchants, and other groups. These bodies provided forms of representation which in the course of modernization evolved into the institutions of modern democracy. Fukuyama (from Political Order and Political Decay)

The last of the three sets of institutions to emerge was democratic accountability. The central mechanism of accountability, the parliament, evolved out of the feudal institution of estates, variously known as Cortes, Diet, sovereign court, zemskiy sobor, or, in England, Parliament. These institutions represented the elites in society—the upper nobility, gentry, and in some cases the bourgeoisie in independent cities. Under feudal law, monarchs were required to go to these bodies to raise taxes, since they represented the asset-owning elites in the agrarian societies of the time. So u need nobility, that is, bunch of power centers, mafia / thugs (that’s what they are) who constantly battling amongst eachother (for more goats), and out of this a certain modus-vivendi may come out, they decide to share power somehow. It’d be better if they all wiped themselves out, but hey, you work with what you have. Burgeois is also part of the picture.

However what is known as modern democracy today would never have been possible unless equality is somehow part of the picture, and that only comes from enlightened religion of old, and / or the left during modern times.

Comment

Bourgeois is the only group that is necessary for democracy.

See above.

Gillian Tett, Financial Times

In 1959, a group of anthropologists assembled in an Austrian castle to discuss the nature of cultures around the Mediterranean region. Their brainstorming produced a striking idea: if you want to understand the political dynamic of societies in places ranging from Andalusia to Jordan, you need to look at the concept of “honour and shame”.

The reason? Most northern European cultures tend to assume that societies should be shaped by legal rules, bureaucratic hierarchies and a sense that everybody should be equal in front of the law and state. However, according to Matthew Engelke, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, in many Mediterranean cultures “authority [has traditionally] resided in the family unit”, rather than in the state.

“Displays of power were exercised in and through individuals, even when they related to corporate identities,” he observes in his new book, Think Like an Anthropologist, adding that power and status “were often made in the form of bravado and raw assertions of might”. To put it another way, what creates social glue in the Mediterranean region is not government; instead it is a sense of “honour”, which means defending family and friends at all costs against perceived enemies, never mind the law.

This is a fascinating idea to ponder, particularly if you are sitting on a Mediterranean beach right now. But having watched the extraordinary developments in Donald Trump’s White House in recent weeks, I am starting to think that this honour and shame pattern might be one way to frame the president’s political dynamic too [..]

[H]e places great trust in family ties, insists on high levels of loyalty from subordinates and takes public revenge if this is breached (as James Comey, the former FBI director, knows only too well). He issues orders through personal channels, not bureaucracies. He makes displays of bravado against self-styled enemies, usually via Twitter, and hates being slighted (or “dishonoured”, as an anthropologist might say). Indeed, he tends to view foreign policy through a similar lens: just look at all those tweets complaining that perceived rivals are “laughing at us”.

Then there is his attitude towards the state. As anthropologists such as Julian Pitt-Rivers and John G Peristiany have observed, honour and shame cultures tend to flourish when the state is weak, and are associated with a dismissive attitude towards government structures: although people in a traditional Mediterranean culture may defend their family as a matter of honour, they do not necessarily consider it “shameful” to cheat the state, because government is considered too impersonal to matter. Aristocrats, Pitt-Rivers suggests, have sometimes displayed a similar assumption about being above the law; so too many gangster cultures.

Good Catch

Trump is a man torn - his father apparently was a hard-core Protestan. Good - but he spent too much time in New Jersey, Queens - there are lota f–ing gumba there, he was probably effected by that… he was infected by it. All the glitz, the gold, bling bling, are status symbols, an extension of nobility culture, a descendant of the agrarian era. Sad to see people clinging to forms that are good and gone.

I blame the Republicans for the polarization in US politics, do you?

I blame the Corporate Democrats - because they offer so little alternative by means of policy, they have to create extra friction around hot-button issues, gun legislation, abortion, etc. and that creates its mirror image, its opposite. Republicans are not the instigators, they are merely following suit.

Let’s remember Clinton: after his win 1992 what was his first major crisis? It wasn’t the economy, another country, a war, education, or energy. His first crisis was, wait for it … gays in the military. It all started with Clinton sort of “slipping” during a conversation with reporters, then all hell broke loose and everyone back then thought Clinton was “jumped” by the press, because a story with Clinton and sex was too hard to resist.

That’s not what happened: the problem was (is) Dems have nothing to define themselves with, so you “slip”, and others are wired to “catch” you because they know where the drama is at. Or guns - Clinton regularly shared a story with him coming to punches with an NRA guy. Yeah fine, we want gun control, but beat the shit out of them? No.

Al Gore, after his defeat on 2000, immediately jumps on climate change, books, the movie.. It’s great, it’s a big issue, but you have to see the desperation these people have to define themselves with something, anything that are, sadly, miles away from people’s daily lives. Climate change is of course real, and dangerous - but it is the perfect “behind the scenes” thing that handled exclusively by government. Isn’t those issues what these frakkers are there for? To take the long view so regular people don’t have to?

But no. Because they can’t talk about criminal reform, they have to talk about abortion, gun control, climate, with such disproportionate energy that other side needs to match, so we get useless polarization.

Don’t get me started on Obama and his “they cling to their religion and their guns” thing.

We don’t see Bernie jumping up and down on the “hot button” issues because 1) he doesn’t have to, there is, like, important stuff and 2) electorally it’s actually stupid to bang on that.

That’s not to say that Corporate Democrats can never win elections - they do, sometimes Time for Change dynamics is so strong (the other guy has to go), even a sock puppet will win it. 2008, or even 1992 Dems had a major advantage. But we can see overall the wins are lopsided, out of the last 6 Presidents, 4 were Republicans. Reagan gets his VP in there, but your VP or SecState does not make it.

Question

What are other side effects of lack of substantial policy?

Governance by Cool

That’s where the Holywood selfies, lip-biting, trying to channel Robert Redford (and failing -badly-) comes from.

Reybrouck, Against Elections

The argument for technocracy builds to an important degree on the ‘post-political’ thinking of the 1990s. In that era of the Third Way in politics, of the Neue Mitte and la cohabitation, there was a belief that ideological differences were a thing of the past. After decades of conflict, left and right suddenly walked arm in arm. The solutions were there, people said, they only had to be implemented and it was simply a matter of ‘good governance’. Ideological struggle gave way to the TINA (‘there is no alternative’) principle, and the foundations for a technocratisation of politics had been laid.

The most striking recent examples of such a turn towards technocracy are to be found in countries like Greece and Italy, where in recent years unelected leaders have been allowed to head government teams. Loukas Papadimos was in power from 11 November 2011 to 17 May 2012, Mario Monti from 16 November 2011 to 21 December 2012. Their financial and economic expertise (one as a banker, the other as an economics professor) were seen as trump cards when the crisis was at its worst.

But technocracy comes about in countless other less visible places. In recent years a huge amount of power has moved from national parliaments to transnational institutions such as the European Central Bank, the European Commission, the World Bank and the IMF. Because these are not democratically elected, they represent a far-reaching technocratisation of decision-making: bankers, economists and monetary analysts have got their hands on the levers of power.

This is not just about foreign organisations. Every modern nation state has given itself a technocratic slant by removing competences from the democratic arena and depositing them elsewhere. The power of central banks and constitutional courts, for example, has grown markedly. It seems governments have thought it sensible to take crucial tasks such as monetary supervision and constitutional reform out of the clutches of party politics and the electoral calculus that goes with it.

Is this a bad thing? There is no doubt that a technocratic government can achieve great results, the Chinese economic miracle being the best example, while a leader like Mario Monti was a far better manager of public affairs than Silvio Berlusconi could ever be. But efficiency does not automatically generate legitimacy and faith in the technocrat melts away as soon as spending cuts are implemented. In the presidential elections of February 2013, Monti won only 10% of the vote. China has its own ways of suppressing dissatisfaction with government-by-regents.

Right

TINA is unsustainable. In US it creates false polarization. In Europe it suffocates the left, as it did in Germany. The SPD is slowly being erased from history. —

Question

What are hot topics in Bitcoin world?

The Lightning Network

Good stuff. I was confident performance issues in crypto would be addressed, and they were.

What is known as “left” today is just something to do with French parliament’s seating order [during 18th century, Jacobins sat on the upper left benches]

It’s not just that. It is not simply about blue-collar workers vs. capitalists division either.

I believe the true division between left and right has to do with the division between forager and the farmer. Forager can “go out there” and with some amount of work (spurts of very focused work, not constant toiling) get what he needs. Farmer works on the same land, with boundaries, and he toils away on this land constantly. This is what is known as “hard work”. So forager’s expectation that resources are available (he cannot stash it away), and the farmer’s expectation to protect a clearly delineated land defines the division between right and left. Right’s exclusionary (or overly inclusionary, when they need slave labor) streak has to be related to this. The mobile, adaptable forager would not care. Farmer creates all kinds of structures, social, hierarchical, cultural, and becomes trapped by them. More seeds, more land, bigger families, more seeds. Rinse repeat. Some become big landowners, employers = concept of status is born.

Question

The first beginnings of science took off with the start of agrarian era. Is there a relation?

Yes

The patronage of scientists became possible and you could say this way, some people could focus exclusively on science, so naturally we had more science. The need for it was certainly there, counting, planning, engineering various things and also for war. But naval exploration of the Atlantic, Pacific created that need as well, in even bigger scale, so we had much bigger, better science.

Samuel Huntington

The great political ideologies of the twentieth century include liberalism, socialism, anarchism, corporatism, Marxism, communism, social democracy, conservatism, nationalism, fascism, and Christian democracy. They all share one thing in common: they are products of Western civilization. No other civilization has generated a significant political ideology. The West, however, has never generated a major religion.

True

Good observation… It would seem odd at first but it makes sense once we understand religion is politics of ancient times. Especially all Abrahamic religions are about re-introducing forager / left sensibilities into farmer / right world. Farmers, let’s call them goatfuckers, tried to co-opt these ways, and in Catholic Church’s case they largely succeeded, but now knowledge-age will reshuffle the deck once more. Mobility will win, immobility will lose along with its inane prudes.

Question

Does one always need plants, animals for hunting-gathering?

Fishing will do too

“A seemingly unending resource which you can just go get, and cannot stash”. Fish fits this description, and yes, near the sea in fishing villages people did in fact live in a forager fashion, without resorting to farming. So historically in parts of Greece, Norway, France, people did not have to be goat lovers, they lived normal lives.

Question

How does the description above fit people’s approach to government services?

One example

Healthcare: the left expects it simply “to be there” - u can wait a little of course, or not get all drugs, but within acceptable limits they expect the “availability of these resources”.

Question

Are there traces of this forager / farmer division on movies, TV?

Yes

I was re-watching Lost (I took some potshots at this show for its never-ending plots, but the show is well-made otherwise, and constantly tops popular sci-fi lists), here basically everyone leaves the “modern life” behind, which has a lot of the trappings of an “agrarian village” where made-up make-belief idioacy runs rampant, and they become foragers engaging the real-world, and jumping from one adventure to another. They do not relate to eachother through various statuses, posts, they simply relate to eachother as people.