Policing the State-We-Are-In

The Free Range Activism Website have analysed the way political activism is being policed and controlled by a state that is becoming ever more resistant to dissent and civil disobedience. I would add that The State (most Western states) appear to have developed the consensus that in the likely tough years ahead it will be necessary to control the populace and constrain the rise of citizen democracy:

What’s the relationship between the recent ‘authoritarian’ crack-down on “protesters” in Britain, the current economic crisis, the debate on growth, the economy, climate change and resource depletion? Perhaps not that obvious?… A new report from the Free Range Network ties these issues together to try and find a deeper motivation behind the recent authoritarian shift against protest and dissent in Britain — yes, the threads are there if you look for them!

What is The Fear

The following is a contribution to the website www.whatisthefear.com

The Fear is a label given to the state of anxiety driven by human consciousness of individuality, social division, and mortality. Civilisation is mediated by fear as the most basic social control mechanism of the State, and this fear feeds through into most social processes as a perpetual state of anxiety.

Where there is a strong and extended hierarchy dividing people then anxiety and The Fear increase. The website www.anxietyculture.com takes a light hearted look at some of the symptoms of the fear in contemporary culture.

The book by prof Bob Altemeyer The Authoritarians describes the authoritarian personality and its two sub-groups – the followers [brown shirts] and leaders [hitlers]. The Authoritarians relates to The Fear because the conservative mindset driving authoritarianism seems to be caused by anxiety and fear – authoritarianism and conservatism are ways of controlling the fear of uncertainty in a fractured (less collectivist) social world and seem to be caused by ‘tough-minded’ childrearing and other trauma during childhood. Psychopathy is a related trait.

The Fear then, is what happens when there is social division and competitiveness between people. It relates to the Masculine Principle of competition and conflict – and The Self. It is antipathetic to the Feminine Principle of connection, cooperation, collectivism and the general inter-relatedness of wholism.

The hierarchy of civilisation ultimately causes The Fear due to the dependency of those higher in its ranks on those ‘lower down’, and the consequent need to divide and control those whom you are dependent upon using implicit violence and occasional reminders using explicit violence (Derrick Jensen, Endgame: The Problem of Civilization)

The anxiety of civilisation is empirically valid, but the anxiety theory (cf. Hobbes) that argues that non-civilised peoples also live/lived in a state of anxiety and fear is unproven. So long as those societies are strongly collectivist then there appears to be no evidence of people living ’solitary, nasty poor brutish and short’ lives. It is social division (predominant within civilisation) that seems to invoke The Fear.

Fear Factor

On 14th April 2009 a report emerged saying that Britain is becoming a more fearful place. On the same day we see reports that police are now starting to make mass arrests in order to stifle political protest.

The authors of the fearful Britain research offer some superficial explanations for The Fear, ignoring the widening gap between rich and poor, dependency on consumerism, dependency through socio-economic hierarchy, and the overall culture of control and implicit violence that pervades our superficially free society. When people loose connection with each other (through economic divisions) their confidence drops and anxiety and depression rise.

The former Thai Prime Minister made it crystal clear on Monday when he said ‘when there is inequality in a society violence will increase’. It is our socio-economic and political structure that is to blame and those whose charge that is need to accept this fact and take responsibility.

In contrast with the newspapers analysis of The Fear which centred around CCTV, crime, media language, and terrorism, bloggers quickly came into the discussion with more cutting arguments about the culture of control that Britain seems increasingly set on building around itself. Responses to the question ‘do you identify with [the fear research]‘ resulted in the following list on the BBC Have Your Say webpage (highest peer rated first). This is what the people say:

This report must make HM Government very happy indeed. For years it’s been trying to frighten it’s citizen’s so it can push forward with things like ID cards, DNA database of every person and more and more CCTV ( all these things are for our good of course ). So it’s looks like it’s well on the way to increasing fear, and with fear comes control.

Recommended by 259 people

Interesting what they said about politicians and the media ‘fuelling a sense of unease’ – fear has long been a tool of social control.

A population that is afraid will more readily give up it’s civil liberties, freedoms and privacy in order to feel ’safe’. Fear makes it OK to demand more draconian punishments for offences, spy on one’s neighbours for the authorities and so forth.

They may even go so far as to support illegal wars.

I made a decision a long time ago not to give in to fear.

Recommended by 219 people

I am no more afraid of crime than I was thirty years ago.

But now that a council official can give me a criminal record for putting a piece of paper in the wrong bin – yes, I am afraid. Very afraid.

Recommended by 212 people

I’m fearful…. i’m afraid my country is changing, and my rights are being eroded… and i have a say in neither.

Recommended by 207 people

My only fear is a government that treats “1984″ as an instruction manual rather than a warning.

Recommended by 169 people

It’s a lot easier to control a scared society than a happy one, ever seen 1984?

Recommended by 169 people

Our biggest fear, in my humble opinion, is that our inept and corrupt political and economic systems have sacrificed the happiness and stability of future generations to satisfy the insatiable greed of the elite few in the present.

Recommended by 150 people

My biggest fear is the state and the powers they are giving themselves over overblown invented threats.

Recommended by 140 people

With the largest database state in the world now operating in this country we should be scared. With constant surveillence using CCTV and ANPR cameras, the introduction of ID cards, snooping on telephone calls, web browsing and emails, constant interference on what we do and where we go, we are losing our privacy to the state.
This is happening due to the government telling us how dangerous the country is and these measures are required to keep us safe, even if it means our loss of freedom.

Recommended by 135 people

I am fearful of the way the country is degenerating into a cultral free for all.

The British values are relegated to the bottom of the heap in a left wing push to see who they can promote against the wishes of the people.

I fear that the forces set up to protect the law abiding have been hijacked by those who seek to protect the wrong doers ,deviants and fanatics.

Recommended by 119 people

It is Nu labour’s policy to make us more fearful, because fear increases control. What scares me is a quotation made by Gordon Brown “I did maths for a year at university. I don’t think I was very good at it” and yet this man is going to lead us into a new financial era.

Recommended by 95 people

Is hardly surprising we are all feeling anxious.We have rising unemployment,rising bills,home repossessions,less money for food and a stupid,incompetent cynical government who live in cloud cuckoo land believing we can all get through this crisis if we “calmly carry on”whilst they continue to wallow in our taxes.I wonder if any of them have tried to survive on £60 a week?Its 1979 all over again.

Recommended by 87 people

There are many reasons for this, the least not being my huge annoyance at the benefits system that Gordon has put in place.
I find this exceptionally frustrating.
Handouts for all, and for those of us that have worked constantly that really grinds.

Many many reasons I feel anxious about this country now, Labour being one of them and considering I was a hardened Labour supporter, thats not a good sign is it Gordon. have gone to the BNP after 20 years of voting Labour.

Recommended by 83 people

People grow increasingly fearful for one prime reason, the victims of crime are fotgotten and not protected whilst the ciminals know there is little or no punishment because they are greatly protected by the politically correct brigade, do gooders and a gutless government that will not reintroduce punishment that will bring confidence back onto the street.

Recommended by 77 people

Not really any more fearful than 30 years ago. I think this “fear” is mainly caused by the media winding people up by publishing articles such as this one. The very old adage “sensationlism sells” is still as true as ever!

Recommended by 75 people

Authoritarianism – Culture and Mind

The cultural phenomenon of authoritarianism has been on the decline for decades, this is an empirical fact. But the psychological personality drive to authoritarianism still exists in all of us to greater and lesser extent.

What is going to happen when those with stronger authoritarian drives (perhaps the majority by many accounts) are threatened by the decline of authoritarian culture (or ‘old fashioned attitudes’) and the growing power of progressive liberal culture?

In my view authoritarian culture is on the decline because those who have always existed without need for it (those with low authoritarian personality traits, deep self-confidence, no need for father figure or gods) have been able to communicate outside the hierarchical-broadcast control framework of authoritarian communication processes. In the 1960’s there was a flourishing of this progressive reconnection, and now open-source and peer-to-peer communication via the web (net 2.0) is taken it its power to a qualitatively different level.

I have also formed the opinion that progressive liberal culture is adaptive, creative, innovative, and uncontainable. It is a force which could very well lead to people with non-authoritarian personalities subjugating those with authoritarian personalities. Not necessarily wilfully but through cultural dominance, economically and socially – net 2.0 is the structure in which this could happen, appears already to be happening. The first will be last and the last will be first.

Generally speaking the non-authoritarians with considerable latent power that could unleash itself via net 2.0 tend to be educated and intellectual – creative and adaptable. They do not need rules or fixed thinking patterns, they think for themselves ecologically not classically, and need no gods or dads to dictate life for them. They are people who were likely brought up outside a culture of fear and control that appears to be the genesis of the authoritarian personality trait. They are smart and ready to wage war against authoritarianism, from the need for God to the need for Kings and other strong masters. Being brought up free and self-confident they are creative and resilient. They have no Achilles heel (father figures) through whom they can be unsettled. But authoritarians (one example is the Christian Right) on the other hand tend to have lower self-confidence, less ability to adapt and think for themselves, less ability to deal with a complex world – seeing things in black and white and getting anxious and angry when clear distinctions or their gods’ existence are challenged.

So, to net 2.0 culture. What is going to happen when a majority that believes it still has power meets a minority that gradually is revealed to be usurping that power through powerful alternative networking and creative socio-economic processes (see this for an explanation of the field of battle).

I predict that we will have a situation of a kind not unlike civil war as authoritarians lash out against aspects of a new and more complex social-economic world that they are unequipped to deal with psychologically (e.g. fundamentalist Christian and Muslim authoritarian followers). Authoritarians need a simple order that they can understand. Their spirits will be crushed and they will attack all and every in their random attempts to recreate the simple order that they crave.

Those who are not authoritarian will have to find a way to help authoritarians heal the deep scars that got them there in the first place – to help them grow beyond simple childhood attitudes, and to understand the meaning of ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited on the sons’, and to understand the true meaning of Love. In contrast with Richard Dawkins I believe that we should not be talking of waging a war against those who crave authoritarian leadership but of making peace and Love with them.

The Emperor is a Naked Ass

Since the 60’s and 70’s we have been saying this: civilisation is going into its endgame.

In fact there were some (e.g. Sayyid Qutb) who were arguing this earlier in the twentieth century during modernist discourses over the image of man and civilisation. Qutb by the way, is a name related to the Sufi saints – and the Sufis themselves have been saying something similar about civilisation for the best part of a millennium.

We are now very clearly in the endgame, the endtimes, and everyone is now saying it, everyone except for those we have chosen to take control of the situation! Their crass political drivel sounds as though they are broadcasting at us from a different planet.

It’s about time we sack the lot of them and get on with solving the problem ourselves. Stop listening to the political white noise and make your own decisions, rebuild your own community, get the F out of other peoples communities and the land that supports them. Stop the fighting and start the cooperating. The Open Source is open for you, contribute and rebuild human and Gaian community, rediscover your humanity before its too late.

No you don’t need to get on the streets to make this revolution happen – this revolution is not being televised – you just have to hook up with people and build solidarity against the culture of civ and all its institutions of centralised power. Simply disconnect from them and connect with the free-range open-source movement.

Assumptions: Test Them or Ignore at Your Peril

I believe we are failing to address some fundamental assumptions about the situation that this planet faces. It is a responsibility of all who are attempting to change the world to address every assumption and to refuse to build a new world on assumptions that have not been followed through to their conclusions.

I am currently a student on an MA course in Sustainable Development Advocacy. During the initial month of the course I repeatedly raised what appear to be to be two major unchallenged assumptions about forms and scales of human organisation, human ecology, and their relationship with sustainability. This was in the context of a range of dependent but easier questions. And of course you guessed it, the assumptions were generally stepped over in pursuit of the easier questions: let’s build our new house without any foundations for now since they are the hard part – we’ll somehow find a way to squeeze them in later!

So let me try to get these assumptions out:

Civilisation is good – the Ascent of Man. Err, I don’t agree. It could be good or bad depending on what is to be achieved with it. Let’s talk further before reaching conclusions.

Human organisation in terms of civilisation’s strongly hierarchical socio-economic structure is inviolable. Err, no. such hierarchies must continue to grow or they will naturally collapse (Jeff Vail – Hierarchy Must Grow and is Unsustainable). This is not only true of capitalism which is also strongly hierarchical (economists understand that infinite economic growth is essential to capitalism) but the whole of our socio-economic organisation. In fact it is intractably a partner of the population problem so lets give it the same prominence and discuss it as such!

Agrarian life is a ‘hair shirt’. Not today it ain’t. With or without books and internet human society has enough knowledge now that we could live comfortably in a permacultural existence if – no group is permitted to source staple resources outside of its bioregion and if – non-hierarchical principles of organisation are applied (e.g. locally legitimate authority and distributed democratic processes such as anarcho-syndicalism). Why are we accepting the ‘hair shirt’ assertion so very easily?

An urban, techologically based way of life is what we desire and its absence – a non-civilised life – is a “war of all against all” and thus “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Well, civilisation achieves these descriptors with its ever increasing dependency, through war driven by those at the top of the hierarchy and hence most dependent, on imported resources from other peoples’ communities. And those who live outside civilisation, peoples who never experienced The Fall, those in no need of salvation, would not understand what Hobbes was saying. Hobbes point of view came from within the culture of civilisation (which IMHO due to the lack of natural population control is the cause of bellum omnium contra omnes!). Such classical perspectives on nature and man were built on civilised culture making assumptions and misinterpreting Judeo-Christian history of the birth of civilisation and Eden: a misconception of Genesis in the bible itself – See Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. Those premises have clouded our view of what civilisation is for millennia. Hobbes, a product of classical culture, would not understand the perspective of a pastoral or hunter-gatherer culture. Let’s continue to discuss!

Unless we challenge such fundamental assumptions, in particular assumptions about what civilisation is and what it does, assumptions that seem to many people to be set in stone, then we are not going to solve the sustainability problem but will simply whitewash over the core problem so that future generations, and Gaia, have to deal with them. We must take responsibility for the hard questions, today.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita: Three predictions on the future of Iran, and the math to back it up

Bueno de Mesquita shows the upside of mathematical modelling of social processes. He forgets that social network analysis overlaid on our communications data offers the same technique to the state but not to the people

State-wide database systems currently mooted as an antidote to terrorism will permit a lot to be known about how we are likely to behave. This use of mathematics for predicting outcomes will increase the power of the state to a level not seen since feudal times.

However, as a self-fulfilling prophecy it will enable to state to clamp down on terrorism and thus have the effect of fuelling terrorism through an over-controlled society and repression surrounding the terrorists’ communities.

G20 Protests – Marred by Thuggish Minority

A man dies after being assaulted by Police at the G20 protests in London. Deaths at the hands of the Police are uncommon, however the events leading up to this man’s death are all too common. There appears to be a significant minority of police officers who see protests as cover to let loose some pretty brazen violence.

The BBC footage from the G20 protests shows quite clearly what commonly happens hundreds of times at protests – police acting like thugs. And the most astounding thing is that despite the full public view so few of these officers seem to be prosecuted as the criminals that they are or at the very least stripped of their career.

It seems that a small number of police are little more than criminals hiding behind a uniform that you pay for: Their job is supposed to be upholding the law, and not to bring their profession to the state of disgrace that it resembles after almost every public protest.

Worse, it is probably the aggressive nature of some police officers that actually provokes public order situations at demonstrations – the police need to look very carefully at how unmasked aggression from some of their number is likely to cause the kind of situations they are trying to prevent.

The ban on photographing police officers is very badly thought out since these bad apples are now going to get away with impunity.

The senior officers must know who the thugs are. Those senior officers have a responsibility to keep violent police away from the public. The whole police force could and should purge these ‘pigs’  from its ranks and in so doing it would regain a lot of public confidence, and more calmness at demonstrations.

If the police respond by claiming that they were under attack it simply show that they are protecting the thugs and will do nothing for public confidence in them. Wearing a uniform is responsibility not a Brown Shirts charter.

Change is in the Long Tail: Change is Now

I believe that the days of centralised power are numbered, and that a re-tribalisation of society is an inevitable, if sometimes painful, process. The applied theories of politics, economics and industry have made a sick society; it is time for new approaches. We live in the post-industrial world, and have an immense amount of sophisticated information and technology which enables us to exchange information while living in a village situation. -Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture (1991)

If you look around right now you may get the impression that the time for change is imminent, that converging factors of climate change, financial instability, social instability, war, peak oil, and zeitgeist are begging for real change to begin and that world leaders are stepping up to the challenge.

An alternative view is that change already started, decades ago or more, and that current turmoils are bound up in that change. The global restructuring looks like its just getting under way but only from the standpoint of institutions and centralised organisation – the real change has been happening since the early days of the information age.

When we look at the human organised world we tend to see it the way it is presented through the lense of our culture: Most human societies are presented as being organised in centralised ways around institutions and group norms, in terms of objective (abstracted) standards, in pursuit of quality and speed of decision-making, in the belief that some are better at governing us, some are better at teaching us, that some are better at this or that aspect of keeping our world turning – standards are good. Through this culture, our governance and our habits are constrained, certainly in terms of the way the mass of society converges around common principles. But this constraint is as much in our minds as it is a reality – the world continues to turn regardless. Liberal culture began to disturb the foundations of the monoculture significantly during the twentieth century.

Liberal culture may have been one factor in social change but another critical factor was mass communication. Alexander Graham Bell started it and the World Wide Web lead a quantum leap in the way we telecommunicate. The ongoing reorganisation of society which has been accelerated by the web, the fragmentation of (rigid and limiting) institutions and centralised norms of behaviour as its core, is seen by some as yet another crisis on the horizon. But to others this is a new age of creative possibility. The norms and averages, the classes and trends, standards and winners, of an institutionalised society are giving way to a diverse culture created from the bottom up. It is communication technology that is weaving its way around the foundations of a top-down centralised society and beginning to strangle the constant increase in power that a sustained hierarchy must feed on. And there is no way back other than through repression, and thankfully we left that behind a long time ago.

Self-organising communities, distributed communities of people and their minds, in nature’s own image – Capra’s Web of Life, the real forces of cultural change, do not operate as classically formed institutions. Self-organising communities, communities of rich ecology, reflect life in its uncertainty – there are no rules or norms but the fundamental need for equilibrium and permanence of culture. Conversely, the classical culture of institutions is based on the idea of norms and acceptance of Kantian ideas about ‘natural class’, an abstraction and poor representation of equilibrium, often anything but equium or librium. In our social and family lives we have always practised the self-organising, informal way of finding equilibrium. Now it is the turn of public life to submit to the flat structures demanded by peer-to-peer communications, to build a rich human ecology unconstrained by concepts of norms and standards and power hierarchies, no limits to creativity and difference, no limits to the potential for change and hence the strength of human ecology.

The short and homogenous tail of the Greek’s, Kant’s and Gauss’s ideas about the way the world works is giving way to an ecological way of thinking (see Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, and Makridakis et al Dance with Chance). Self-organising networks and communities of people are nurturing human culture back to its potential of rich diversity and creativity in balance with the earth’s life processes. The ecological and creative thinkers, the non-normalists, the unclassifiable, have been excluded from the filters of our narrowly homogenous institutions and the power structures which perpetuate them but the new framework of the internet is now allowing their creative solutions to flourish beyond the control of centralised concepts of authority and standards. Creative minds hook-up and instantly they have the competitive edge over-and-under fixed institutions – self-organising communities spell the end of centralised hierarchical thinking.

Clay Shirky argues that current economic trends are partly related to this ongoing shift as the information age truly takes over from the industrial age (mass centralised organisations of production). The information age, in terms of peer-to-peer organising possibilities (e.g. social networking, collaborative tools, open source problem solving) is subverting existing social power structures and forcing them to contract. This happens whenever a form of industrial organisation is replaced with a new method.

When the motor car and oil-based production were in the ascendant the old social structures were forced to restructure and this caused economic turmoil. We are now in a similar situation as information and communication technology is beginning to support new ways of non-industrial economic organisation – the power of the individual is starting to overgrow institutional rigidity and causing them to contract. The grass-roots rhizome promised by ideas of democracy is now empowered by communication technology, it is spreading scale-free, it is putting pressure on representative forms of democracy to perform better at their representation, and is bleeding over into our economic world in ways that were never intended. It is a brave new world of opportunity for the creative thinkers of the long tail and an unsettling future for those who based their world on social norms and standards promoted by institutional hierarchy and classical thinking.

In terms of the Bill Mollison quote above there is everything to be sanguine about in these changes – the potential for a relocalised world in the context of peer-to-peer global communication means that power will continue to trickle from centralised and globalised processes back to the minds, places and activities that are best fitted for their environments. We are in the heart of an ongoing revolution of human reorganisation that institutions will inevitably try to keep up with as they go through their ‘global restructuring’ – but they will be the last to realise the facts of life long after the power of self-organisation has reasserted itself on human society.