I want to write more of a philosophical, maybe spiritual and psychological essay tonight. I write this in a form of exploration and play, not authoritatively. Through the process, I have discovered some questions, a hook or two, and yet another direction to do some research for my projects. It's endless, I tell you. But I invite you to come along on this journey with me, and to contribute if you have anything to add.
A typical question I ask myself on a regular basis: Why do people come together to form societies and cultures? What keeps them together?
For my bachelors project, I've given myself a high bar to evaluate an all encompassing universal hypothesis to tack on it: Would this theory for good behavior convince a Hitler, a Stalin, or any other horrible dictator to act better (even a [45], who sometimes feels like a wannabe dictator)? I don't justify what they've done, but the the end of their reign, any chance of a good reputation, or their ideas not spreading mostly occurred because of circumstance.
I'll admit, I'm not too familiar with Stalin, and his oppressive tactics continue to be used by dictators. Nonetheless, there are enough people on "both sides" that his legacy has become a norm, and even ostensibly has become accepted as a horrible reputation among many, to be avoided at all costs.
Many would argue that Hitler's downfall came about because Nazi Germany turned on Stalin's Soviet Union. Germany basically turned World War II to war on one front to a war on two fronts.
But then add the United States entering the war, with a fresh army compared to the armies of other countries that had been beat down by Germany and Italy. Without this combination of events, Fascism likely had a good chance of taking over Europe, Asia, and possibly, in a little more time, America.
And frankly, with the anti-semitism in the whole world at the time, the biggest outlying characteristic of Germany and Nazism versus the rest of the privileged populations of the world at that time was more about their organization and success at war for a time. The rest of the world seemed to have more a problem with Nazi Germany having success at winning the fight for their bigotted interest than with Germany being bigoted in the first place. Some may argue that the reaction to Nazi Germany's success created a turning point in at least liberal demoracies, creating a momentum of norms against anti-semitism. Philip K Dick may not have had to use too much original imagination when he wrote Man in the High Castle.
Another crazy circumsantial turn of events and norms: the turn against chattel slavery in the United States. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to trace the growth of people feeling that chattel slavery is unjust in the United States and how it brought the country to the Civil War. I still haven't had the luck or research skill to find how this momentum of history grew and came to fruition.
At least a minority of white colonists or even just inidividual outliers existed that spouted against slavery or tried convincing people that it's an evil practice, but no one took them too serious until a few years or decades before the Revolutionary War. Then up in New England, at least, some of the Founding Fathers before the country's founding wrote against slavery and sometimes took legal and rhetorical action against it.
As tensions grew against the British, New Englanders felt that Parliament levied too many taxes on them, everyday townspeople wrote town-wide Declarations of Independence arguing that they felt England was treating them as slaves, and they wouldn't take such indignities. The momentum to outlaw chattel slavery became adopted by "regular" white people through a rhetorical flourish that justified fomenting revolution, which then entered the nation's zeitgeist. I still haven't isolated where all that came from, though I have the feeling that it came from the rising tensions of Absolute Dictatorships in Europe disrespecting national/ethnic cultures, instead trying to build strong states without nation.
No matter the occasion, though, I feel like only historical circumstance has prevented authoritarianism from spreading all around the world. It reminds me of the trope of a child thinking "As long as I don't get caught, I can get away with it." Do dictators just not totally succeed and create an everlasting legacy because of their personalities, because they can't trust anyone else enough to hand off their nation that can possibly become an everlasting monument to their family or something like that?
In some way, North Korea feels like a success when it comes to dictatorship and leaving a legacy of an authoritarian system in place. We're in the third generation of the Kim's since World War II. Many in the world might think the Kim family has a strain of crazy megalomania, and that country might grow more and more isolated in world that simultaneously grows larger and smaller at the same time.
Seventy years after installation, though, North Korea remains with the same authoritarian structure. I'm not very familar with the history of North Korea, but it could very well have gotten stronger if China and the Soviet Union/Russia had given it even more support than they had throughout the years or if China and Russia hadn't spread themselves thin during the Cold War. At the same time, would those larger, stronger country really wanted to have dealt with the Kim family?
With the inreased reent development of nuclear weapons in North Korea, though, the country could grow and sustain the Kim family structure of authoritarian government, possibly the longest authoritarian and maligned country in at least the United States consciousness. Will they "get away with it" if they become a nuclear power and other nations fear them? Even now, if they could release utter destruction on the Korean peninsula with conventional weapons, would they be "getting away with it"? Has the Kim family bucked the trend of circumstance of history that seems to turn against authoritarianism (even China, which has successfully kept something of a stable, steady regime through the decades has been making "compromises" to grow and fluorish, at least economically).
[At this point in an edit run through, I tried finding some analagous phenomena regarding novelty and evolution for the sudden appearance of novelty when too much order occurs. I got that idea from a magazine article I read something like 15 years ago. Couldn't find anything useful, but I found some interesting research hooks that are pointing me toward minority influence, Serge Moscovici, cryptomnesia, and other threads looking at norms changing via phenomena similar to how I'm describing in this essay. For now, I'm just going to have to accept randomness occurs through novel circumstances. . .and plan to fill the conceptual space missing to me at a later date.]
I don't have the knowledge and expertise to get into all the details and come up with historical or even psychological arguments for all these situations. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of minds very different than mine that disgust me, but based on historical, philosophical, psyhological, and other trends I can't identify, being an authoritarian jerk with a plan to create a legacy of a nation state that can continue a legacy of acting badly, violently, horribly, domineering, and so forth seems like a rational direction to go if someone can get away with it.
Just because it hasn't succeeded before doesn't mean that the person deciding to do it can't get it done. The people before just weren't smart enough, they didn't think of all the contingencies, they didn't plan well enough, they weren't charismatic enough. People full of pride, narcissists, can make plenty of arguments for why they're so special that they'll succeed where so many others have failed before. Note that this paragraph is me putting myself in someone else's shoes.
After all, the route of sharing, working with other people, democracy, republics, etc. etc., these are systems and practices in which you need to work with others, people need to depend on each other. They need to trust each other. That requires people to let their guards down and make themselves vulnerable. Even for people who believe in democracy and rule of the people, doing such things has its difficulties. Not just because people might turn on you, but because other people might make mistakes or not have the capability to complete what they're supposed to do.
Successful authoritarianism just requires being the first one to get IT right and be able to handle all the contingencies. Plenty of people have enough of pride to think that they're the chosen one to make it happen, and they can also get a base to support them. [45] got into office after all. Then throw on top of that uncontrolled emotions, the ease of manipulating the emotions of crowds, etc. etc. As much as I would hate to see sustainable authoritarianism happen, a sustainable democratic utopia of happiness would probably be harder and slower to make, though more rewarding.
The latest Doctor Who Christmas Special, "Twice Upon a Time", has a great line that I think summarizes my feelings about all the above. I have complicated feelings about Steven Moffatt's writing on Doctor Who, but I had the feels when I heard this long line because it felt like it described me:
DOCTOR 1: There is good and there is evil. I left Gallifrey to answer a question of my own. By any analysis, evil should always win. Good is not a practical survival strategy. It requires loyalty, self-sacrifice and er, love. So, why does good prevail? What keeps the balance between good and evil in this appalling universe? Is there some kind of logic? Some mysterious force?
-Copied and pasted from transcript of the episode found at http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/36-13.html
I don't have answers to that big question. Maybe I will some day, more likely that I won't. Lately, though, I've run into some thoughts and theories that provides some insight into societies, democracy, civic republicanism, and "rational" arguments for people coming together. I don't know how original any of the following is, but I feel the need to put some random thoughts out there, play with them, and possibly get some insight from my audience.
Last night, I listened to Episode 49 of APM's podcast, Make Me Smart with Kai and Molly, titled "Gerrymandering, hard-wired brains and the baby under the desk". Kai and Molly revisited episode "12: This is your brain on Trump" where they had on George Lakoff, professor emeritus of cognitive science and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Lakoff discussed our instinctual brains, [45]'s sophisticated use of rhetoric and Twitter to manipulate the minds of his base by appealing to their need for a "strict father". Lakoff mentioned three other strains of appeal that connect with the instinctual mind, I believe. One of those three stuck out as the opposite of strict: the language of the nurturer. The following quote from Lakoff's essay, "Why Trump", I think gets to the brass tacks about the strict father:
[. . .] The basic idea is that authority is justified by morality (the strict father version), and that, in a well-ordered world, there should be (and traditionally has been) a moral hierarchy in which those who have traditionally dominated should dominate.
[. . .]
Family-based moral worldviews run deep. Since people want to see themselves as doing right not wrong, moral worldviews tend to be part of self-definition — who you most deeply are. And thus your moral worldview defines for you what the world should be like. When it isn’t that way, one can become frustrated and angry. [. . .]
Read the rest of the essay, Professor Lakoff has some good insights into the minds of traditional conservatives. I hate how much truth this reflects and want to fight the mentality that many traditional conservatives and reactionaries embody. On Make Me Smarter, Lakoff discusses the difficulty of changing the minds of people who take this kind of mindset, and even people who take the nurturing mindset won't have their minds changed if they're approached in a way that goes against their way of framing the world.
As someone trying to get as close as I can to writing a novel or some piece that might convince even a Hitler or a Stalin that they're framing things wrong, I guess I need to understand this type of thinking more. Seeing that I might have to take such an approach brings me to the end of my next random thoughts that I've mulled over the last couple days, but we'll need to start at the beginning.
Back in the spring of 1998, I wrote a set of two college papers during my sophmore year that compared and contrasted Jesus of Nazareth's Kingdom of Heaven and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, a social contract theory of giving up natural liberties to a monarch for security in society (because fully free people in nature would be in constant war with each).
I finished the book Citizenship & Community: Civic Republicanism & The Modern World by Adrian Oldfield a couple weeks ago (don't worry when you see the price on Amazon, I borrowed it from the library). It defined civic republicanism, did a quick survey of some "classic" thinkers on the topic, then made some final conclusions about requirements to make it work. The book has some useful information and a bit of useful insight, but I don't accept it hook, line, and sinker.
Oldfield's discussion about Alexis de Touqueville's view of republicanism and praising of early 19th-century United States brings up social contract theory, but discusses it in a novel way to me. Instead of talking about Social Contract theory as GIVING UP liberties, Oldfield talks about joining together with other people in a community, society, nation, etc. as a way to FREE ourselves from the dangers and destruction of the natural world. The peace and collaboration of civilization allows us the ability to do so much more than we could in a State of Nature where we have ultimate freedom. In civilization, we're not totally obsessed with survival and putting all our energies into surviving (I'm not saying that our nations and states are civilized enough to help us reach this freedom).
The sacredness that Christians put into Jesus of Nazareth sacrificing himself on the cross always confuses me. It still does. Please bear with me because this will relate to social contract theory.
On a secular level, Jesus of Nazareth provides an interesting allegory. Jesus of Nazareth sacrifices himself on the cross to provide us the potential to gain freedom from Original Sin. In a way, through this sacrifice, Jesus provides an example that by giving of ourselves to the rest of us, we can find freedom from the suffering of nature. Jesus was selfless on the cross for us, we can be selfless in civilization for each other.
Another Jesus of Nazareth story always fascinates me: Pilate asks the crowd whether they want to free Barabbas, the violent political revolutionary, or Jesus, the peaceful revolutionary of the mind and soul, and they choose to free Barabbas. The Bibles of today hide the fact about Barabbas being a political revolutionary, pretty much just saying that he's a violent murderer.
When the part about him being political revolutionary gets brought up, the power of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure and the desires and consciousness of the masses becomes more poignant: Jesus brought true but long and difficult change to the people so they might possibly establish a long lasting peace because they have peace and collaboration in their hearts. Barabbas offered change, too, but just a surface change, a change in the position of a group of people in a society, something that they might accomplish faster but also more likely to lose.
As I addressed in the first few paragraphs of this essay, Barabbas offered a change of circumstance while Jesus offered the chance for more lasting, sustainable change, though a harder change that requires more effort because it required changing your identity and soul. The crowd chose to free Barabbas. Barabbas allowed themselves to stay the same for the possibility of changing outside circumstances. Jesus, however, requires the crowd to lose themselves to establish themselves, to establish a Kingdom of God.
Adrian Oldfield and many civic republicans talk a lot about the importance people's obligations and duties to society, in opposition to liberals arguing for rights and liberties of individuals, especially to grab hold of the rights of the oppressed and marginalized. Until I took a more serious look into civic republicanism that argued against liberalism, I didn't see these two positions as opposite sides to a dichotomy.
Reading academic, nonpartisan essays about political philosophy, I had understood rights as "fundamental to civilization". After all, the first sentence of the United States Declaration of Independence says:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Rights, as academic political philosphers understand them, require the obligation or duty of other people to respect them. I can't agree with rights being self-evident or unalienable, since if other people exert enough force, physical or social, on someone, they can take those rights away. We see it happen it authoritarian countries. It happened in the United States with chattel slavery after the Declaration of Independence that argues for these unalienable rights.
I advocate a lot for equal rights and liberties that civilization can provide to all humans, but for them to exist, the other people in communities, societies, nations, states, and civilization have to accept the obligations and duties required to grant those equal rights and liberties, rather than seeing society as fighting for the interests of your self and your chosen and unchosen groups. This type of situation can break out into a State of Nature at any time and causes a ton of stress, which defeats the purpose of coming together into a civilization.
At the same time, however, Christianity and other social arrangements have a history of one internal group or person sacrificing or giving up their rights, just engaging in obligations and duties to support the rights of others who have a higher social status. At the same time, that dominating other gets to exercise all the rights they want without feeling any obligation or duty toward the people sacrificing their rights.
That's pretty much what authoritarian leaders like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Hussein, and plenty of aggressive and/or privileged interest groups do out there: take, take, take all the rights and benefits that they can while the other side sacrifices, sacrifices, sacrifices to meet obligations and duties to the other person, party, or group interest that lords over them.
We have norms that justify enabling domestic violence to create this social arrangement. Privileged people in our societies believe norms that create this kind of social structure. When interests are equal enough that one side can't win but they can't see eye to eye, they fight to become the dominator, to get all the rights while the other side has all the obligations and duties, and they have ideologies and norms that tell them that this OK, people tell themselves that it's normal and good to create these tensions, so they can try to be on top, so they can create the circumstance where they come out on top and "get away with it".
To the depths of my soul, I can't accept this. I can't believe any side can have true happiness or contentment where there is all this tension and vying for power and property, even though the fighting and take can get exhilirating, filling people with adrenaline. But we have studies and anecdotes that show that praying for peace creates contentment in us, meditating on compassion for the world brings monks contentment, making connections with other people gives us rushes and exhiliration, and doing good acts for others can provide us euphorias and highs that can rival psychoactive drugs for intensity, length, and even for our inability to build resistance against the joy of giving selflessly. Humans were made for emotional attunement and protecting that attunement from loss.
And yet we can also debase our integrity by giving too much and other people taking, taking, taking, feeding their neverending desire for more and more illusionary connection, debasing themselves of having actual emotional attunement. I understand that we can't just focus on duties and obligations because in giving too much, we start losing; but at the same time, if we focus too much on rights and liberties, when we take too much, we become overfilled with stuff, losing the ability to sense happiness and contentment, but thinking if we just get more and more, we'll eventually get our fill, except we won't. It's like in a society of affluence: eating too much junk food is ingesting fake, artificial sentiment and connection that our souls don't know how to get any nutrition from it, so it just keeps taking, taking, taking in empty emotional energy, but it keeps getting starved of nutritious emotional energy.
The other day, imagining a world where everyone focused so much on giving to each other that it became effortless and the rights and liberties came out of nowhere, I had that feeling of world-embracing love. I also had some righteous anger at [45], his base, and others who focus so much more on all the taking and not seeing how they're hurting others with all their taking. . .an anger that wanted to figure out how to get them out of power, so we can go on learning how to teach giving and getting to real emotional attunement.
Other than polticking here in the United States, connecting to people, learning, and sharing with people, I don't have any good answers. I want to keep going, though, and hopefully I'll find a way to contribute to other peoples' consciousness and also to civilization so future generations can do a better job than what we're doing, if we don't destroy ourselves in the process.
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