Political Theory - Main Concepts

Concepts, characterizations, ethical judgments

1. Individual rights are foundational - the chief one is liberty

2. Individuals create communities of purpose:
- sexual: families - to control procreation and other sexual bonds
- economic: corporations - aim to control material production and consumption
- political: nations - aim to establish the law and its enforcement - the State
- noetic: science, religion, art, media - aim to control systems of knowledge production

3. Communities have rights derived from individual rights - and can come into mutual conflict

3a. The purpose - (τέλος - télos) - of politics is justice and peace

3b. The method - (μέθοδος - méthodos) or (τέχνη - tékhnē) - of politics is to exercise the law and authority

4. The purpose of the law is to arbitrate between the rights of communities and individuals

5. Libertarianism wishes that only individual rights exists

6. Liberalism aims to arbitrate all of the rights at all levels

7. Totalitarianism aims to fuse all communities of purpose into one

8. Authoritarians wish to subjugate the economic, sexual and noetic to the political authority

8a. Socialists wish to subordinate individual rights to the rights of the community

9. Fascism subordinates individual rights to the political authority

10. Wokeness postulates additional rights based on degree of oppression and sets them above individual rights

11. Any political ethics must protect rights at all levels

12. Methods of politics - who gets to exercise power - ie to rule:
- mob rule - leaders of a popular movement
- democracy - officials elected by the people
- aristocracy - the best of character, the nobles - possibly emerging in a public process
- technocracy - scientists, technologists and business people
- oligarchy - the richest
- nomenklatura - officials appointed by officials

13. Forms of government - ie the relationship of the rulers to the governed, status of the rulers
- republic - officials, office holders
- feudal lordship - lords, mafia dons, party bosses
- monarchy - king, the chief protector

Barbies and Kens - a Spoiler

The movie "Barbie" is a disquisition on gender, which is the semantic layer of sexuality, especially, on the mystery of feminine gender.

On the biological level there is the obvious sexual difference in the bodies being variedly adapted to producing and exchanging sperm and egg. There is a biological male and female. However, as beings that have evolved language we produce a difference on the semantic level where we signal our sexuality, by emitting and receiving signifiers, to and from other subjects. That semantic level of sex is called gender.

It appears there could be more variety in gender than in biological sex, constrained to a binary structure by nature. Since the gender signaling is motivated by prospects of sexual success then the structure of gender roughly reproduces the biological binary. Yet gender tends to multiply beyond that because it is the semantic part that we enjoy while sex is a goalpost planted somewhere in reality - beyond the reach of signifiers. Without language we would just produce and act on simple provocations - like animal female in heat calling to all males.

Barbie and her Barbieland presents a version of the world where gender is detached from its sexual moorings and floats freely in the semantic space. So it is gender in its pure state. Ken wants to stay over in Barbie house but is not sure what they would do. Barbie has no vagina and Ken has only an unsightly bulge.

Barbies in Barbieland have unlimited access to power. They can be anything - lawyers, pilots, presidents, construction workers. It is not important how or by whom that power is provided, but it matters that Barbies can easily avail themselves of it. In the center of Barbie life is a home - that specially is in the scope of life of the stereotypical Barbie.

Ken's realm in Barbieland is the beach. Ken and Kens approach the Barbies with admiration and solicitation - trying to get closer to them with vague attempts at intimacy - vague because the sex part has been taken out. Kens are anxious about their purpose in Barbieland.

On a trip to the real world (only so real as a typical city center filled with corporate buildings) Ken and Barbie discover new things. Barbie finds her manufactured gender and Ken - the patriarchy, which he immediately imports into Barbieland. Barbie stays on in the real world a little longer to better inform herself about the mystery of femininity. When she returns to Barbieland she finds it replaced by the patriarchy of "Kendom" where anxious Barbies serve the needs of Kens who have become their pimps.

But Barbie, the stereotypical Barbie traveling the real world, has now found out some new secrets about the patriarchy and its deeper motivations. She will start a revolution to abolish the Kendom with the help of the already institutionalized but sidelined Barbies: the lawyer, president, engineer, etc. Barbies are united in their feminist activism which also aims at getting the Kens to fight among themselves. Peace, and justice presumably, returns to Barbieland and to what relief for the intervening Mattel Board of Directors which is the real world patriarchy! Another intervention comes from the female inventor of Barbie -- an old woman hidden in the bowels of Mattel corporate headquarters. Her insights, shared with the stereotypical Barbie, allow us to hang out the chief question of feminine gender, expressed by the haunting musical theme: "What was I made for?" All the while when Ken has no such question since he is not yet made - he has to make himself.

To Russian Friends

Around 200 years ago, Russia experienced an uprising against despotism. Less an uprising than a gentle protest, a request for the kind of freedoms that Europe has been clamoring for in the aftermath of the Age of Enlightenment. The leaders were harshly punished — some with death, some with humiliating forced labor in remote Siberia. The Decemberist uprising of 1825 was one of the few times when voices were raised in Russia calling for a Russia respectful of human rights and aspirations rather than Russia despotic and brutally crushing any threat to its security. It is the Decemberists who inspired the idea of freedom as a shared pursuit — "For our freedom and yours" — later embraced by the Polish insurrection of November 1830.

 

By Unknown from Poland - Image taken by User:Mathiasrex Maciej Szczepańczyk, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1864374

This moment is one of the few in history that allow us to admire Russian greatness. Russians living with us in the West love to revel in a much broader narrative of Russian greatness, referring to massive outpouring of creativity in the arts, literature and music starting at the beginning of the 1800s. The fact of the Russian creativity is undeniable and remarkable — yet still it occurs against a backdrop of political system of aggressive despotism begun way before Enlightenment and spanning multiple ideologies from the idea of the Tsardom of All Russia, through the Russian Empire morphing into the Soviet Union, to the present Putinist dictatorship. With few exceptional moments in history, Russia has always been a despotic, soul crushing, brutally aggressive, autocracy, since its beginning, as the principality of Muscovy, in the late 1400s.

Those who are of Russia and wish to praise and take pride in its greatness need to stop and consider its despotic and murderous legacy. Why is it that so many Russian greats resident in the country have taken to apologies for despotism while so many prominent emigrés became aloof cosmopolitans? Perhaps because they all think the despotic system is unreformable? Perhaps because they understand that the Russian mentality cannot be shifted away from the habit of bending to despotic authority?
And finally understand that the greatness is likewise a product of the despotic system.

The world stands still in admiration of Russian greatness — and is muted in expressing it. Of course, this is due to the appalling aggression in Ukraine. I am, as many in the West, revolted to hear about Russian greatness — even from well-meaning Russian friends. Russian people, Russian elites, need to re-earn their standing in the world, similarly to Germans after World War II. I urge you to begin — and begin with humility.

I am writing this missive thinking about the poetic address by Mickiewicz in 1832 — "To my Muscovy friends  (Do przyjaciół Moskali)" — mourning his former friends who had taken the side of the Tsarist regime or had been punished by it. Being an emigré Pole, I know that on foreign ground in the US we are friendly and actually like each other as people. We connect by the common experience of the underground culture opposed to Communist oppression, like Vysotsky and Okudzhava. It is a sort of Decemberist connection which aims at shared aspiration to freedom — but abhors Imperial Russia.

 

Libertarianism and its problems

Four years ago I wrote about how to apply the libertarian principles to appeal to both left and right wing ideologies and bring them together in a sort of Americanist centrism.

http://venedi.blogspot.com/2017/08/libertarianism-as-centrist-ideology.html

My view has changed.

The libertarian ideology should be rather seen as what it is: it is a fantasy of a political system based on freely interacting property-owning individuals. It can be contrasted with the other fringe: socialism (or communism) - which is a fantasy of a system where individuals are constrained by communal property and communal goals.

This can be wonderfully shown on a 2x2 diagram where I overlaid some markup on a pertinent internet meme:

This view obviously represents the intersection of two scales - each of them ranging between two extremes. The vertical axis represents the answer to the question "who controls who you are" or "who controls your identity". The answer ranges from top=community to bottom=individual. Community can answer the question of identity in various ways: American, Protestant, atheist, white, Irish, gay. The individual answers this sort of question in a manner related to what they do: businessman, writer, podcaster, - or in a private, subjective and spiritual mode of expression. The horizontal axis is the representation of agency in the real world - it answers "who has the authority to control the material world" and the answer is again ranging from left=community to right=individual. So on the left, community is typically the authority to create and set goals for an enterprise and subordinate the activities and resources of the individuals to those goals. In socialist and fascist state the community tends to a hierarchy and the state becomes the ultimate community.  On the right end of the horizontal axis we have the individual entrepreneur bringing their product to the market as well as setting up enterprises with voluntary participation of others.

Libertarianism, being placed at the extreme of individual determination, looks very much right-wing, however, the real right and left wings of American politics, and politics in other Western liberal countries, are between the left and right liberal who alternately want to assign the control of agency and identity to the community.

The last two years contain the development of the COVID pandemic and the convulsive end of the Trump presidency in the US.

These events took place against the backdrop of an immense growth of authoritarian sentiment among the citizens of the free world. People are begging to be ruled. Begging the governments to curb economic growth to deal with climate change, begging to control people's behavior to deal with the pandemic, begging to censor speech in order to stamp out lies and misinformation in the media, begging to enforce conformity in order to be safe from racism, sexism and other varieties of perceived vice. The list goes on.

Moreover, this is happening the historic peak of unprecedented success of majority of the population of the globe where 80% of people basically live in prosperity as compared to 90% living in poverty 200 years ago. The context of historic success accentuates the enormity of the authoritarian appetite - the desire to be ruled over. This is very disturbing. It appears that about 70-75% of any given population - also of the US population in the "the land of the free and the home of the brave" - is authoritarian. That means they prefer to be ruled in most aspects of their life by a sort of external authority - in most situations, a role readily filled by government.

The pursuit of liberty has a problem in a democracy: the authoritarian majority will not support liberty-minded policies. In this situation the goal of liberty-minded people is not to convert authoritarians into libertarians but to persuade them into supporting liberty-minded policies.

Libertarians should stop painting a picture of a stateless utopia of self-governing individuals, but produce examples and methods where application of libertarian principles leads to just and socially desirable outcomes. They should demonstrate how authority organically arises among individuals.

Another approach is necessary to such "winning hearts and minds" - it is the cultural angle.

Libertarianism needs to make itself attractive, needs to humor, and even trick and seduce authoritarians into supporting liberty-minded solutions not only because they are good and moral - but because they are attractive. For example, the left-liberal single-payer health care system is presented as attractive because you don't have to pay. Libertarianism should present "being able to pay" in a market system as a more attractive goal.

Beyond economics, on the cultural front, libertarianism is hopelessly lost.

The "don't tread on me" slogan promotes - in addition to the laudable principle of individual liberty - an unwillingness to show any sort of face to the fellow human being and just points to the fence designating "my" property - fence instead of face. The property will often harbor a family and an intense intimate life within it - but the libertarian does not make that life present socially in a significant way. Libertarian guards the private from escaping into the social sphere whereas the leftist famously makes the private into political.

Libertarianism must solve its cultural problem.

One way to engage authoritarians is to enter and inhabit what many of them desire - civilization. While liberty gives you the right to bear arms for your own protection, civilization is being safe without bearing arms. Civilization is the foundational safe space. America has a strong impulse for liberty but its civilization is young and rather immature. That is why it appears to so many that the only way to civilization is through a state authority.

Libertarians ought to show publicly and socially how an internally cultivated authority is a civilizing influence.

The internal authority does not have to be a national or religious identity, which comes from external sources, - but an authority of significant personal and subjective experience - revealed in personal relations and works of art.

An important cultural front would be to socialize (but not politicize) the personal. Libertarians should be comfortable to talk openly about their personal lives, which contain many quirks and oddities, and assert the freedom from government intrusion in their lives which might be otherwise laid open. This would include talking about sexual and drug practices - which might be currently illegal or highly socially objectionable. It would lead to a certain reckoning among the libertarians as well as authoritarians who would all be made to look in the mirror.

In principle, the process of socializing the personal is made safe by civilization which allows vulnerable individuals to reveal themselves in public - as is the case with artists and free thinkers. The current punitive influence of "cancel culture" on public life would require heroic courage for such overtures.

I am not optimistic.

Contact improvisation is a consensual space

The space of contact improvisation is intrinsically a space of consent - not unlike any social space that expects certain norms of conduct of its participants.

The participants consent to the conduct and the social space enforces it - typically in a gentle, civilized manner.

In a space like a symphony concert the norm is for the audience to take seats and be quiet when the music begins - and offer applause afterwards.

What is different and unusual of the CI space is what the expected norm is. Here, the norm is the dance of physical contact.

Normalization of physical contact is the main feature of contact improvisation.

When we say that CI normalizes physical contact it means that within CI we can and should determine what normal physical contact is. I propose these answers:

1. Point of contact

Contact anywhere, where the pressure of the body can be felt, - up to the weight due to gravity - is normal. This excludes certain places - such as mouth and eyes - because they lack musculature and cannot take pressure. During contact we avoid genitals and sensitive joints such as ankles. This is based on the principle of ability to take pressure rather than on social norms extraneous to CI. The whole body is basically available.

I am not using the term "touch" as it conveys the idea of variety of sensation to be explored. Of course, sensation due to touch and proximity will occur but CI sees that experience as one of many outcomes of the practice occurring between dancing bodies. Likewise, whether pleasure or pain occurs is left outside the effort of normalization.

2. Non-insistence of contact

Contact is not insistent - it can be stopped or changed at any moment. The dancer-participant can, at any moment, desist from the type of contact, or any activity, happening. The dancer is not trying to achieve a goal. The exception here may occur when engaging in protective activity.

3. Non-inquisitiveness of contact

Contact is not inquisitive, not an examination aimed at knowledge of the other body as an object. Participant is not to engage in the functions of doctor or physical therapist who is finding out about the structure of another's body (or one's own). The body is treated as a body of movement and an integral faculty of physical contact and not as an anatomical or technical puzzle.

4. Protectiveness

Contact is protective - of one's own body and of the body of the other. It is not a fight. Contact dance is about helping and facilitating one's own and the other's movement. As much as we can we protect one another - also, and particularly, against the insistent force of gravity. Protectiveness makes the CI space safe.

Let me point out that contact that is non-inquisitive and non-insistent minimizes or even rules out sexual conduct or erotic interest from being brought into the space of normal CI. This principle also applies to extreme acrobatics. Non-inquisitiveness makes CI genderless.

It is moving outside the norm that requires specific consent negotiation, whereas normal CI practice, within the guidelines above, would enable consent through normalization of physical contact.

What is the goal of the dance of CI? The goal is the revelation of one's body in the presence of another and using the other body - through physical contact, as much as the other body consensually permits, - to facilitate that revelation. The main mental problem of human being is the awareness of not being able to see oneself. This problem is counteracted in the practice of CI which makes it a healing practice.

I am writing this out of concern that the CI movement is trying to go beyond the healing that it is naturally capable of addressing and to burden itself with socio-political issues of social justice. To me, it is beyond the scope of what can be addressed within a practice of dance. If CI tries to go that way it will probably fail and that failure may destroy its future.

Of course, we recognize that individuals join the CI practice while bringing concerns of sociopolitical and personal nature. In my view, they should try not to inject their extraneous concerns into the practice of the dance, but rather benefit from the gift of the practice as a healing gift.

Borat 2 is a vile bad joke

As Borat 1 in 2006 was a "stealthy caricature" of American as an "ethnic specimen" - Borat 2 is focused on the American conservatives. Its political bias is the chief premise of the pseudo-documentary film. Therefore it become a catalog of leftist prejudices about the conservatives. And it manages to add to the prejudice by portraying poor hapless white people from Central Asia and Eastern Europe as the arch-origin of American conservatism with its white supremacist core.
Whereas Borat 1 was a bad joke about Americanism, Borat 2 is a vile joke about American conservatism reflecting leftist prejudice.

Police brutality and popular cruelty

Is the police brutality in the US a result of the racism of many of its members and due to systemic reasons? The question is reopened owing to the riots following a death of a suspect in police custody in Minneapolis last week. For myself I reopen the topic revisiting my notes from January 2015.

I do not think racism is implicated in the killing of innocent, non-violent, frequently unarmed, persons - black or not. The reason is that Americans expect the police to act with intransigent cruelty in carrying out their duties to the letter of the law. The public thanks them for admirably  doing their "difficult" job and deems anybody who makes their job a tad more difficult to be justifiably punished.

Americans are not a kind folk - they are cruel and brutal to the fellow human being. To hide that ugly trait they outsource, so to speak, the cruelty to the agency of the government who carries it out under the mandate of the law. So the cruel human being does not have to punish and discipline his/her fellow human directly - but may smile and wave hello while moving away to facilitate police action.

The law is constructed as a trap that allows a human being to be controlled and punished for any sort of infraction - harmful or not.

• Law functions as a rule. If I drive 59 mph on a road with speed limit of 60 I am fine but when I 61, 65 or 70 a policeman can stop me and subject me to a gauntlet of orders which can show me as a criminal, beaten into submission or dead.
• Law censures citizens for non-violent conduct: such as possession of drugs, firearms or items indicating that a crime may be committed.
• A person violating a law or an order by police suspecting a crime can be punished to any degree of cruelty. This includes jaywalking, shoplifting or illegally crossing the border.

Minneapolis police building on fire - May 2020

Now we are adding to it the outrage culture. This has been developing since 2012 - with impulse to it given by the killing of Trayvon Martin. The elements of outrage started with racism - as the society accused itself of "systemic racism". Racism has been joined by the society self-accusing of sexism - which systematically discriminates against women. While racism and sexism are the pillars of our society being outraged with itself, other and more specific elements of the societal self-hatred have been developing. We are seeing a proliferation of phobias and accusations of phobias being liberally applied to individuals: transphobia, islamophobia, homophobia, etc. Ultimately the accusation of hatred as motivating force in individuals and government is thrown at will.

Outrage culture is society hating itself rather than probing its problems and devising solutions.

The clash against protesters and the law enforcement is very incendiary because it is an unconscious confrontation with the core problems of this society (cruelty) via an emotional (outrage) outburst rather than rational conversation.