Killing Children

The following excerpt from an account of the reality of warfare in Iraq has stuck with me since I read it. I felt I had to put it here in case you think that the oil is worth it. Call me what you like but I believe that when a child is killed in war then that war has gone too far; if it can’t be prosecuted without killing civilians then it should never have been started. From Zach Scott-Singley’s blog (March 2005): http://www.misoldierthoughts.blogspot.com/

I ran up and overheard the captain asking what had happened and why this soldier had opened fire. The soldier answered that he had seen a man holding an AK-47 in the back of the black truck. I was among the four, including the soldier who had fired, selected to go check on that truck. We were out of breath when we got to the gun-truck nearest to the black civilian truck. There were four Iraqis walking towards us from the black truck. They were carrying a body, a small boy no more than 3 years old. His head was cocked at the wrong angle and there was blood. So much blood. The Iraqi men were crying and asking me WHY?

Someone behind me started screaming for a medic. It was the young soldier who had fired. He screamed for a medic until he was hoarse. A medic came just to tell us what we already knew: The boy was dead.I stood there looking at that little child, someone’s child just like mine, and seeing how red the clean white shirt of the man holding the boy was turning. Then I realized I was speaking to them, speaking in a voice that sounded so very far away. I heard my voice telling them how sorry we were. My mouth was saying this but all my mind could focus on was the hole in the child’s head. The white shirt covered in bright red blood. I couldn’t stop looking even as I kept telling them how sorry we were.I can still see it all to this day. There were no weapons found and we accomplished nothing besides killing a child. I stayed as long as I could, talking to the man holding the child. I couldn’t leave because I needed to know who they were. I wanted to remember. The man was the child’s uncle, minding him for his father who had gone to the market. They were carpenters and what the soldier who had fired on the truck had seen was one of the Iraqi men standing in the truck bed, holding a piece of wood.

Before I left I saw the young soldier who had killed the boy. His eyes were unfocused and he was just standing there, staring off into the distance. My hand went to my canteen and I took a drink of water. That soldier looked so lost, so I offered him a drink. In a hoarse voice he quietly thanked me. Later that day we were filling out reports about what we had witnessed. The captain who had led the raid was angry: ‘Well, this is just great! Now we have to go give that family bags of money to shut them up … ‘ A family had just lost their beautiful baby boy, and this man is worried about having to pay for a family’s grief and sorrow. To this day I still think about that raid, that family, that boy. I wonder if they are attacking us now. I would be. If someone took the life of my son or my daughter nothing other than my own death would stop me from killing them.

Distributed Power

The Roman Empire overstretched itself. It had no real culture of its own, tending to borrow from other cultures. To the extent that the Romans had a culture it was characterised by warfare, violence, slavery, and empire building. The widely distributed nations that the Romans assimilated then turned on Rome, and despite the Romans’ great power the empire collapsed due its own lack of resilience. This process took hundreds of years. Today the process can happen so much quicker due to faster communications; the internet and transportation being two examples.

Empires are highly fragile because they are rigid hierarchies controlled from the centre. Centralism aggregates power. It is a dangerous process of putting all your eggs in one basket which is destined to failure one way or another. It emerged with the birth of agriculture and capitalism some 10 millennia ago. This is how empires work, but it is also their fatal flaw in that they cannot adapt and they burn out under their own rigidity; resilience, strength, and robustness as rigidity is a particularly Western classical fallacy. We have learned nothing from the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, from Eastern philosophies, or from nature. Rome’s adversaries were distributed groups, each struggling against Rome in its own way based on its own strengths, and that is how nature works. The same is true of all biological systems, and whether we like it or not we are part of those systems. In a survival of the fittest scenario, ultimately natural ‘winners’ (who are always destined eventually to lose again anyhow) always emerge from the milieu, from the bottom upwards. Winners have never been constructed by man, and probably never will be. We are subject to the laws of nature, evolutionary processes, not our own anthropocentric ideas. Evolution will win out eventually, and the more we try to hold it off as nations in warfare, or in laboratories, the stronger will be its eventual response.

The US would be wise to heed lessons from history and from nature, and take on board the proven superiority of distributed autonomous agents. Autonomous agents can be groups but internally they are highly integrated. Autonomous agents may appear to be aligned with each other but they act individually. When they are challenged by another entity they may respond alone but they do share a common purpose: to compete with or cooperate (3) with the other entity. It may initially appear that centralised might is stronger than an unorganised ‘rabble’, but when that rabble have common aims they are far stronger and more resilient against the power of a single centralised system to act adaptively against them. The idea of autonomous agents is emerging now in the business world as a viable way to be more adapted in an uncertain world, and a reasonable prediction is that politics will also have to adapt to the realities as individuals continue to arm themselves with the power of communication. Despite the apparent tendency for politicians to be concerned only with amassing power they are also intelligent beings who have survival instincts too. Along with modern communication abilities the natural principles of self-organisation mean that the more enemies the US makes around the world the more likely those adversaries will emerge and adapt to exploit its weaknesses. Each adversary will struggle for its own reasons in its own ways. Those adversaries need have nothing in common except the ability to adapt to their own particular context; using their localised strengths against the US’s localised weaknesses. If politicians are smart enough they will adapt their systems to create a more distributed state which will be more resilient overall.

Centralised power is not a very intelligent approach in the 21st century, given the way individuals now have such strong communication power. The situation in Iraq for example, where the US is aiming to ‘destroy’ its broadly defined ‘terrorist enemy’, is likely to lead to even more recruits rallying to the cry of ‘death to America’. Every family who loses a loved one, whether just or unjust, is likely to hold a grudge for at least a generation. So in effect the US is empowering its self-defined enemy. The politicians and generals seem to have learned nothing from Lao Tzu’s Art of War: One must cooperate at the same time as competing; war is a synergic interaction in which there is no winner or loser. If a power thinks they have won a war then they have lost it.

The US seems unaware that its linear attitude of destroying the enemy to become the winner is a purely Western fantasy. It may believe that it holds the best hand, but its nuclear arsenal and mutually assured destruction (MAD) is no deterrent against a distributed threat; in their adversaries’ distributed mind each as an individual has a better chance of surviving a global nuclear Armageddon than the does the US empire. Their enemy thinks in a natural way based on the lowest common denominator: ultimate survival at the lowest hierarchical level. The US cannot think in that way and its hand will be forced if challenged to MAD.

The same arguments apply to Western world’s, and increasingly the developing world’s, attitudes to the ecology of which we are all a part. There is a Western myth, based on linear logic, that we can plunder natural resources and interfere with ecosystems using intensive agriculture and genetic modifications, interfere with natural biological processes like disease using Western medicine, and eat ‘foods’ which have been processed and adulterated beyond our bodies’ ability to properly recognise them as food. This is all part of the same delusion that we have power over nature, but we do not have such power. We are part of the ecosystem, and by killing it we are killing ourselves. We are also part of humanity, and by killing another person we are also killing ourselves (John Donne; a Western philosopher). We are all interdependent, all species, and all people. Sooner or later the rest of nature will bite back, whether it be via people or rainforests or climate.

The lesson is a simple one. Fail to heed the principles of nature and you will be eliminated you from the ‘gene pool’. Unless the US accepts that distributed power is far superior to centralised power then they are doomed to fail at whatever they are trying to achieve. By asserting itself around the world the US is making the same mistake that Rome did. In today’s world changes occur much faster than they did 2000 years ago. This increases the fragility of a centralised control system and reduces uncertainty for a distributed system. The more the US fights the more its distributed enemies will resist, for a multitude of reasons and with a multitude of unpredictable tactics, as did the resistance to Rome.

The US is following a path that the rest of us should avoid. It is highly vulnerable to the overall emergent property of its ‘enemy’ which is more adaptive and more suited to the distributed environment than is the US with its centralised control. The EU and other regions would be wise to learn the lessons of Rome and of nature and distribute their power hierarchically downwards among nations, regions, and give autonomy to local communities in order to remain resilient in a rapidly changing world. They should remove as many controls as possible in order to allow strengths to emerge from the ‘bottom upwards’. This runs counter to classical thought and even challenges the idea of the nation state, and it is radical to that extent (1). Self-organisation is a radical idea for the Western mind but this does not affect its validity. The time has come to take on board this entirely natural concept and embrace its superior anarchistic (2) forms of self-governance, and hence bring about a true democracy and greater global stability where power is shared between all. The ideas I have expressed here are not new. They have been handed down for thousands of years, and they exist in many books and increasingly are expressed in columns like this one across the internet. See Jeff Vail’s book A Theory of Power http://www.jeffvail.net/index.html

Autonomy and anarchy (2) are ideas promoted by sixties radicals and embraced by terrorists ever since. Autonomous teams are already being used in the business world, and one can only hope the politicians will take on board some of these ideas before the human race consumes the ecosystem and itself through centralised power. Small tightly integrated communities (networked into a wider global distributed system) in which individuals feel the immediate effects of their actions, but with the benefits of knowledge through communication with the rest of the human race, are a solution. If the individuals within those communities harm each other or the environment the feedback is immediate and they learn to act sustainably. If a community harms another community, or the environment, or gets out of line in some way that threatens others then the networked communities around it will take action to rebalance the disease. The power of distributed systems is natural and sustainable. Healthy distributed human systems, human societies, tend to be characterised by an organic bottom-up culture, in contrast to Western society’s current romance with capitalism, consumption and self-gratification which further feeds the destructive cycle. Centralised power is a flawed Western concept which is nearing the end of its life, one way or the other.

To take these ideas further, as an example have a look at Derrick Jensen’s website http://www.derrickjensen.org/

1. The term ‘radical’ is used here in a neutral sense. To be radical is neither a positive nor negative value in itself, unless of course one views conformity as a positive value.
2. Anarchy is used here in its true sense, meaning the absence of centralised control.
3. Competition and cooperation are Western concepts which tend to be over abstracted and used inappropriately. Others do not necessarily see them as distinct processes; interdependence or synergy are better terms
   

The writer provides the above as opinion, and takes no side in the ‘War on Terror’. Nothing in this commentary is intended as support for terrorism or violence, nor is it against the American people. It is an argument against the deluded Western mind. The comment is made with concern for global peace, sustainable economics and society, true democracy, and ultimately for human survival - including the American people.

Prohibition is the Problem

So cannabis is to remain a ‘Class C’ drug under the Misuse of Drugs act 1971. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs produced a report, based on ‘new evidence’, which told us nothing new. There was something new in it though. The report was presented by the government, or rather its conclusion was presented by the government, in support of the claim that cannabis use is ‘dangerous’. This bears little resemblance to the body of the report which rehashes the often repeated association (1) between cannabis and schizotypal mental states. The following statement pays lip-service to the lack of a causal association:

Because schizophrenia is comparatively uncommon, most of the studies on the effects of cannabis on mental health have used the presence of psychotic symptoms to study the effects of the drug. It is important to note that the conditions described in the literature as schizophreniform psychoses and psychotic symptoms do not necessarily lead to the longterm disability that is so common with schizophrenia.

What I find even more disturbing about the report is that it does not address the possible benefits that can be obtained from cannabis in comparison to any harm it might do. It is an essential part of the research if we are to be properly informed, but the government seems to lack the will to do thorough research and instead produces a one-sided view of the world. For instance, if more people used cannabis (using safer methods such as hookah or in food) instead of alcohol then what effects would there be. A tentative hypothesis could be that there would be less alcoholism, less liver and brain damage, and less violence on our streets. Whatever the outcome it is a very important part of the assessment, one which has never been performed. It seems irresponsible for those in government in 1971 to have decided that prohibition is the answer without exploring the alternatives - despite the negative effects that alcohol prohibition caused in the 20th century. Unless the ACMD look at the whole picture how can they say that cannabis is, overall, dangerous?

One of the respondents in Jon Snow’s programme touches on this but no one else seems to think it is important. Nor does the ACMD report address whether prohibition is the best way to prevent harm. Harm to young people is the most widely cited reason for doing something about drugs. Is the best way to make it illegal and for young people to have to buy it from suppliers who are more interested in promoting harder drugs? Is it better to have a situation where young people are not mixing with, and being influenced by, responsible adults while using cannabis? The best model for harm prevention is cultural controls so that young people grow up learning habits in relation to drugs which help to protect them from harm. We accept that this is a good model for alcohol, so let’s investigate its utility with other drugs too. But of course that is not considered possible because some well-meaning but incompetent officials managed to completely desocialise drugs during the 20th century, to the extent that the public only sees the false dichotomy of legal equals good and illegal equals bad. We have to have a smart discussion instead of putting dumb constructs into simple boxes.

So to come back to the mental health and schizophrenia issue. There is as yet still no evidence of whether cannabis causes clinical disorders such as schizophrenia, despite the misleading ACMD report conclusion and the media distortion. It was also asserted that cannabis causes depression. However, both the mental states seem correct to any cannabis user; cannabis causes non-logical thinking patterns (or in medical terms an increase in schizotypal state which we all have in varying degrees) and the day after using cannabis one experiences a period of depression. These changes are not out of the ordinary in most users and the depression is accepted as the price one pays for the welcome high. Cannabis users also learn something about themselves by going through this process and for some it is a part of their spirituality. The logical leap from accepting that there are mental changes associated with cannabis to assuming that cannabis causes negative effects and clinical disorders requires evidence otherwise it is merely conjecture. Given that no one has so far produced evidence to show that reported cases of schizophrenia or depression have increased along with the increased use of cannabis over the years, one has to ask why there is this lack of association. There also appears to be an implicit assumption that psychosis is an inherently negative phenomenon. The fact is that psychosis is a very broad spectrum of effects that are negative for some and positive for others. To use a simplistic generalisation: for artists it can have positive effects on their work and for people doing clerical work it can lead to all kinds of slips and misatkes.

Both my friend and I would use a different term for psychosis: The term psychosis can be turned on its head to create the concept of eupsych. Eupsych is a way of saying that our experience of the same effects is of positive value. Many tokers will attest that their personal growth has benefited immensely from cannabis (But I doubt if the ACMD will ever consider such benefits). The Dagga cult is also an example of how the apparently negative effects of psychosis can provide positive transformational benefits. I predict that in the distant future we will come to realise the miracle of cannabis (and LSD) in psychotherapy.

It seems to me that the problem our society has with ‘psychosis’ is that it is a phenomena which doesn’t sit well with Western culture and the social norms we have. This is to argue that maybe it is our society that is at fault as much as the effects of cannabis; the two are incompatible. If this is what the government and media are getting at then they should come out and say so. However, instead of arrogantly assuming that the way our society works is a given and that the effects of cannabis are inherently negative for that society it has to be acknowledged that we are a free society. If it is a legal part of our way of life to engage in socially destructive activities like drinking, gambling, pornography, eating adulterated and unnatural ‘food’, being misled and indoctrinated by media and advertising dishonesty, and wholesale submission to the gods of consumerism, then it also has to be acceptable to smoke a joint and change your view of life and dissent against these ‘norms’. Whether you believe cannabis causes psychosis or eupsych depends on your cultural point of view, but there is nothing written in US and EU constitutions which requires individuals to sign up to a particular lifestyle other than to obey the law. Making cannabis illegal may have seemed like an easy fix but too many people see it for what it is: a political, economic, and cultural social control measure dressed up (very thinly) as a health measure. And as a health measure it fails by putting users in direct contact with pushers (of all kinds of substances), prohibition puts users out of contact with the medical profession. Could there be a worse way to deal with a health issue?

Many of the practical problems that people in the West have through cannabis induced ‘psychosis’ are described as difficulty at work, school, university, etc, as well as the individual mental problems (2). The evidence that shows cannabis to be associated with a decrease in learning and performance is flawed because it starts with the cultural bias which assumes we all want to learn logical-sequential knowledge and do technical work. This bias fed into the research into cannabis and learning, which only investigated classroom learning. Classroom lecture type learning is only one way that a person learns. If studies had covered intuitive learning or ‘learning by doing’ or learning by playing some very different effects may have been found. Anecdotally, jugglers, musicians, and others who learn by performing tend to find that they ‘get it right’ when using cannabis. There is also clear evidence showing that cannabis can have positive effects on intuitive performance: high divers perform better under the influence of cannabis. If cannabis is shown to affect learning ability and performance then different kinds of learning ability must be investigated, not just those which make people good wage slaves.

Whether the effects of cannabis are positive or negative is a question that is embedded in our culture; they are a product of that culture as much as they are a product of cannabis use. A few years back there was a TV documentary about a young man going through ’schizophrenia’, from which the informed viewer could see both sides of the argument about psychosis. We could see that his behaviour was in itself not a problem, he was an intelligent, witty, and creative thinking young man, but when he came to interact with his family (who were rigid and controlling) his ’symptoms’ then became problematic and increased in severity. We could see that it was the interaction that caused schizophrenia, something that strongly echoes R.D. Laing’s theories. The social hypothesis does seem to have some truth, that a person who is susceptible to schizophrenia can be led into that way of thinking by others. This social effect may explain the contact high that is often reported by someone interacting with another person who is using cannabis. The cannabis user’s thinking appears to infect the other person, hence the ‘contact’ high. What this goes to show is that a person’s state of mind is easily influenced by context.

This is the crux of the arguments about schizophrenia which often are often confused with psychosis. The clinical definition of schizophrenia covers a host of symptoms which may or may not include psychosis. The definition of psychosis is much more problematic. On a pure reading of the DSM criteria one could diagnose a religious person as psychotic simply because they base their worldview on an unsubstantiated belief. Because this belief is held by many people society does not label the religious person as ill. The confusion over what constitutes psychosis is therefore wrapped up in social effects, and the way in which we decide whether someone is ‘diseased’. Nor is evidence of psychosis an indicator of a propensity to become ill, because of moderating social, cultural, and biological variables (in myriad forms). To take this one step further. How do we know that someone who has a psychotic episode isn’t experiencing true reality and that everyone else is deluded? R.D. Laing is a good read on this; also David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous pulls apart the constructs that pre-determine the Western mind. Many people have argued this philosophical point and the only conclusion is that it depends on context. Society says that psychosis causes delusion. Many tokers (and LSD users) might disagree, saying that when high they see a clearer reality and that it is everyone else who is deluded by social conformity, their social context. This is the problem with psychosis: it’s what society wants it to be. To base so much research on this house of cards is unwise, and yet few people are challenging it.

It is difficult to see, from the body of the ACMD report and not its conclusion, how the government conclude that cannabis should be a class C substance, or that it should be illegal at all. If they were to have substituted caffeine or nicotine for cannabis in the report we would see similar findings, because there are similar kinds of effects from caffeine and nicotine (not to mention alcohol) on people who are disposed to or have mental health problems. Would they have made such a strong conclusion and classified caffeine as C? Of course not, we would have seen calls for public education and higher taxes on these substances to fund the health service. Prohibition is not just a blunt instrument, it is the wrong instrument. We need a culture of real social and familial control around drugs rather than creating a black market in which criminals profit and where there is no protection for young people.

1. Let’s be clear about what association and causal association mean. Association can be due to a common causal factor. Young men are more likely to die in car accidents, they also drive fast. They may also be shown to own fast cars. Can we say that fast car ownership is associated with a higher risk of dying in a crash? Perhaps, but that does not imply a causal relationship. Teasing out the underlying causal association is very difficult to achieve. See http://www.mth.kcl.ac.uk/~streater/cannabis.html
2. I agree that psychosis can be hellish for some, and that for a few cannabis induced psychosis may well exacerbate or cause full-blown schizophrenia. However, the solution has to be education and support so that those people learn to avoid cannabis (some use it because the cannabidiol combats some of the side effects of their medication) in the same way that diabetics avoid alcohol. Prohibition provides no protection and actually increases harm to young people.

Western Fragility

Just in time production is an excellent idea. Don’t store resources, produce them and get them to the user immediately. In principle this is efficient but when you look closer at the broader economic and social aspects it is a house of cards. A similar situation exists in relation to many of our social structures. Our society is becoming increasingly fragile due to hierarchical centralisation of processes, whether they are social or economic. The West has developed structures that are highly dependent on energy, on centralised control, and blinkered thinking. The potential for energy shortages to cause a system failure is only one of the threats the West faces. Disease, terrorism, and climate effects all pose a significant threat of social and economic collapse and these factors are all on the increase.

Where do you get your food and other vital supplies from? Most of us obtain our food through the supermarket supply chain. They obtain the produce from a myriad of sources in your country and from around the world. This is a process which is highly dependent on energy and communication systems. If those systems break down (even if only for a few weeks) where will you get your food and medicines? Our ancestors had their sources of food and medicine all around them. Even in living memory people had the means to grow sufficient food locally and kept a stock for lean times. If there are lean times now where will you get your food? You might grow it, or you might live in an area where farms grow food and would sell it to you directly. But where would you or the farmer get their seeds? The way we organise production is highly fragile. The solution is to decentralise production, reduce the reliance on complex communication networks and transportation.

Technology should be offering solutions that help to decentralise our production systems and yet it seems that every technological innovation is applied in ways that increase centralised control. This is in order to maximise profits and shift high quantities of product to the consumer. This depends on highly complex technology which itself depends on a network of production, communications systems, and a trained and available workforce. However, all of this is predicated on a cheap and flexible energy source. If that energy source is disrupted there will be far less of everything to go around, if at all. The complex web of resources that are brought to bear on production may simply collapse. A major epidemic, or a concerted terrorist campaign could have similar effects, although for the time being having oil makes our systems reasonably resistant. But consider what would happen to the US and EU if avian influenza took hold? Who would want to risk catching it by going to work? With a low labour turnout a complex network of production may fail simply because of its complexity.

I have not touched upon our social life which is also highly centralised, relying on communication systems in order to push information hierarchically downwards. Our culture used to emanate from the bottom upwards, it used to come from us, but now it comes predominantly from the top down. If we are to maintain a rich culture and the economics which are interdependent with it then we need to distribute its control. The internet helps this but increasingly corporations are finding ways to control the internet and it means that our culture is also becoming fragile.The answer is distributed control systems and local production of all essential resources, and a move towards less reliance on energy and just in time processes. This all points to the need for a revolution in the way the West organises itself economically and socially in order for us to replace fragility with robustness in the face of emerging threat such as and end to cheap energy, terrorism, disease, and climate change.

Think About It

In The Independent (20/01/06) the energy expert Jeremy Leggett provides a convincing and well supported argument that the World is facing an energy crisis on an unprecedented scale. The Western way of life as characterised by the US and Europe, which it seems everyone else wants a piece of, is so dependent on fossil fuels that a significant (or in my opinion a major) part of economic functioning is destined to collapse.

Leggett titles his piece What they don’t want you to know about the coming oil crisis but whether ‘they’ want us to know or not it is going to happen and we all need to be prepared. Changing our lifestyles now, if we all did so, may help to conserve resources for vital services and it would also help to stem the amount of carbon going into the atmosphere and reduce the strain on Gaia. The solution is a simple one: stop using energy. However, in practical terms this means a complete revolution in the way we live. If we don’t do so and our children suffer and die then it will be entirely our fault. Think about it.