Let's Completely Rethink Politics

Let's completely rethink politics. Why not? It's the purview of the most disingenuous and evil in our society, and even apart from all of that, I'm hardly a practical person.

(In fact, I'm somewhat ridiculous. If I ran for office they would dig up so much dirt on me just on how bad I am with writing deadlines that I'd be laughed back to Duluth in a snail's heartbeat, [as the saying goes])

But after reading Jane Mayer's awesome book about the Koch Brothers and their political genius, I'm drawn to the illuminating darkness of the various plutocrats in profile--philosophical mediocrities whose whole lives are one big Davos conference of poisonous sycophants, exotic appetizers downed in a single bite, groups to influence, and thoughtless thought leaders. Everything money can buy--everything except a single person who could testify to the common life of the common person in our era and the single universal truth such a life obtains about the scarcity of anything dependable or sacred. Those are for the people with health care, and personalized education, and opportunities to make more than one particular kind of mark on the world. The rest of us live in continuous view of death, placated only by the sight of things warmer and more interesting than death.

Lest we dwell too far on the Kochs, I nonetheless have this sinking feeling that it might be necessary for me to debase myself and descend into the dark art of politics for a little while. To defeat corruption, I daresay, we must first corrupt ourselves. Corrupt ourselves just well enough to understand and redirect that corruption towards something better, but corrupt ourselves nonetheless.

We must debase ourselves, my reader, even if we say it's all in good fun! And when we're finished with our works, we can promptly go back to inhabiting the pure souls we really are and have really always been, deep down, before we'd made that fateful choice. "It's never too late for anyone," the dying man intones, to no one, even as the obituary writer clacks out the reality of the matter within earshot and then puts it in front of him. Even as he's still cognizant of words, the man smiles and pretends not to see the rest. "He died peacefully, in his sleep" sounds pretty good just then. And as he reads it, he does. We can never taste corruption as might a chef; we must consume all that we prepare.

But we shouldn't fear our inevitable fallen grace which never brings our redemption--after all, is it not far more terrifying to die without ever having fallen? Yes, far more terrifying to die afraid of bruising even a knee. So let us debase ourselves in the spirit of purity, for fear of the awful corruption of debasement's only alternative!

And when I say we must debase ourselves and allow ourselves to think like a propagandist or as a reformer of political ideologies, I don't necessarily mean we must deceive ourselves with some new System of Ideology with its own specially-fitted Party Blinders. Rather, we precisely should not deceive ourselves as such. After all, the road of well-meant self-deception leads precisely to that place where we can no longer tell the difference between our own bullshit and our deep truths--I can't think of a more fitting Hell, made worse by the awful possibility that one might already have arrived at any time in the near or distant past.

So, the necessity of our corruption and debasement admitted, and the necessity of avoiding self-deception posited hopefully, we begin our work.

We of the younger cohorts still believe ourselves to be in possession of our wits. If that's true, then surely we think of a way to practice politics that we wouldn't be ashamed to find ourselves practicing in 50 years. Let's think of a way that we can be political, in a modern context, without being disingenuous. To engage the entanglements of the world at large without becoming too entangled ourselves as we begin a long history of engagements.

Unlike the modern peddlers of lies which we see pervading our institutions, we should gain our strength from the truth, and deception and misinterpretation should become as toxic to our ears as they are so toxic to our political reality. This strength may not be for today or tomorrow, but for the people one hundred years from today. I certainly won't survive that long. None of us reading likely will, barring a tremendous advance in multiple fields of science. If you can envision yourself surviving that long, then push the horizon up to two hundred years. We need to channel our genius and optimism into others and that means precisely to think about politics not from our own position, where we can believe with all our hearts in the virtue and tenacity of our future selves, but from the position of those who come so far after us--those we cannot be nor bear nor touch. Their lives can be made better then, perhaps beginning today. For what I speak of is pragmatism, albeit a pragmatism writ not over an instant but over an eternity, or perhaps just a generation or two.

I call for advance, yes, but not for an advance so radical that it ruptures its connection with us so wholly as to forget about us or our culture's history. Purification is a ridiculous dream meant for those without much imagination for nightmare. Advance cannot be about purifying (another more rhetorical word is "purging") our thoughts, deeds, ideas, or people--history shows that purification can never sustain for mortals, and the pursuit of such self-purification is always as delusional as the corruption it's meant to excise. Even if such a program should succeed, it can last only as long as the thought, the deed, the idea, or the person in question.

No, instead imagine remaking the structure of all our institutions such that--much like today--each fits in its way into all the others, with no institution, idea, deed, or person supreme, where every system gives way to a larger system, which feeds back into the systems of which it's constituted. Picture institutions that will be flawed but whose flaws serve to lend it credibility by affirming a standard.

(For example, suppose a bank lends too much--crisis or even failure of the bank.may ensue for its miscalculation, but in its moment of crisis it speaks to the principle that a bank ought not to lend more than it really can and that a bank is built on the credibility it maintains in fulfilling its function, even if we might not know just why or how that particular miscalculation really took place. A bank's failure is an affirmation of an underlying principle about its purpose.

Let's imagine for a moment building the seeds of a wholly new society within our own that may come to supplant it, just --in their own way-- as the Kochs and their forerunners have done. Let's imagine for a moment that our institutions might have principles that, when fully asserted, might always push those institutions closer over time to the realization of those principles. And let's imagine that we subject those principles themselves to the same scrutiny. Let's imagine that when in a society misfortune afflicts its noblest or its basest citizen, strikes a blow against its richest or its poorest, or otherwise does not live up to our most potently-stated principles--let's imagine that we treat that as a failure of society, full stop, and the structures and principle that society has embodied thus far. And yes, we can make affordances for the occasional failures of individuals that can not be wrangled successfully into the social world--but we ought to make this the explanation of last resort--because you can't build a society which is collective on individual principles or individual ambitions alone. When this basic truth is forgotten, institutions fail, the history on which that truth is based is distorted, and the whole of all our lives is plunged into society-wide delusions.

Imagine a society, then, which works organically towards the absence of oppression not through a perfect platonic structure that can be planned for in the year 2016, but through a succession of human foibles which are somehow captured as information, which fortifies rather than unsettles the foundation of the institution, or moves it closer to the principle, or moves our principles closer to a still-better world. Just as science builds a base of knowledge fortified by the errors of generations, let's have our institutions build a base of power fortified by the madness of tyrants, by the slaver's whip, by the indifference of nobles who do not fear their subjects. Just as manic tech moguls dream of Singularities, let's strive for a Singular Institution in our politics that can itself become the accelerating virus. A dangerous series of ideas, tactics, and malleable frameworks that when applied to conflict would chip away at the base of all oppressors and fortify their oppressed just enough to end the conflict and move them each a notch closer to one another, one day and one moment at a time, the powerful in every relationship of power clinging to that top rung of the ladder with all their might as all society conspires to drag them down gently until they relinquish it and climb down and find to their astonishment not the brutality of their worst extent but the relief of their most fearless days.

Power can never be innocent, so let it commit only the crimes which it can abide. Criminality is an inextricable part of the legal system, with each criminal (including the State itself) constituting a directly-observable case study into the power of the State. Let power in our future society--one part criminal, one part lawful--be structured not so that a rule will never be broken, but so that when a rule is inevitably broken, the breach will serve to reinforce --even improve-- the rule as such. Let precedent be not only a structural constraint but a structural reminder of mistakes.

Let us conspire to structure all our incentives, all our institutions, and the most basic facets of our reality to continually confront us with the truth whensoever we might stray. And let the relation between individual and incentive, between incentive and institution, between institution and principle, between principle and society, and between society and individual be as clear as day even to the stubbornest fool.

As I hope is clear, I can't begin to picture this society because we're speaking of a new series of forms, and some of them may utterly transcend the forms by which I yet understand the world. I can but imagine it. But some measure of essential simplicity seems necessary--not the gray box of modernism but the simple interface of a bazaar or a road sign. What that bazaar may sell, and what that road sign might say--those are not for me to know, and do not tell me what you think they must be, because they must be the institutions that survive a durable assault of an informed citizenry practicing democracy, or whatever the eventual equivalent of this may emerge.

We can't begin to imagine these societies but let's say as a first attempt that for every political form of oppression (or some other egregious-but-perhaps-necessary form) must be paired with an equal and opposite force of anti-oppression which operates quickly enough to provide feedback (or no feedback, or feedback structured differently than we can imagine).

I've mentioned simplicity because I think it's the only way you can reliably organize people and have them remain not merely passive and content but happy and feeling that something is worth defending. From this simplicity, I assert the need for radical, self-reinforcing transparency in all our public power relations, and with every bit of power, I assert the need for radical checks on that power aided powerfully by the transparency. Eventually, those who may surpass us will fall to the temptations of power as they ascend in power--the key is not to pretend this won't happen but to be certain it will happen and build in epistemic, political, and social checks which will attempt to wrest that power away from them the moment they begin to stray from truth, and force them to return to truth in order to hope to regain it, without impairing the ability of a society to respond to its challenges and alter itself as its people understand society more and more. It's not foolproof--it can never be--but this must be the goal of any modern system in the age of Koch. They debase themselves but they do not deceive themselves. They learn, and learn, and learn from their mistakes and the insights of their opponents--and yet, for all their political genius, their mindset was built on corruption to begin with and their political ideals were broken from the outset. Is this not a perfect lesson, if necessarily tragic? Couldn't we reverse-engineer their techniques, mad visions, and institutions to speak instead to the needs and wants of even the poorest as opposed to the whims and self-destructive self-actualization of the feudal capitalist accumulators?

So in other words, we--and the institutions we infiltrate in the course of our political lives--need to become corrupted by non-corruption itself without losing sight of the corruption we intend to replace. As Ellul reminds us, effective propaganda must be rooted in the truth and only then must branch out to dark interpretation. We must branch off from the facts into dark interpretations, as the cynic must, but branch still further to the brighter leaves of optimism, even as we ascend, first in fear, the awful facts of the matter.