Jessie Tayor (1/2 of Pandagon) writes: Pandagon: Thank You For Coming To Loews, Sit Back And Relax...Destroy The Show!
It's also a bizarre idea of truth that you can arrive at what's true by reading people supposedly equidistant from the political center and somehow triangulating the truth from that, as if it's merely a factual cartogram. It assumes that centrism is the height of accuracy (which feeds into several false narratives in and of itself, more of a "bias" than anything Matthews talks about) and that partisanship necessarily removes one from truth.
It's been a singular pleasure to read Pandagon over the past year or so, to watch their evolution. These guys are in my generation, I feel, but they're still emerging, coming into their own.
Now we see this line of thought developing -- something that's coming across multiple cultural vectors, I might add -- that averaging out partisanship, the whole notion behind "balance," whether attempted in good faith or not, creates a bias in and of itself. This is a revolutionary idea. The realization that the national debate is a false one, that the choices offered (while real) are also quite limited, leads ones thinking down alternate paths in the pursuit of real change. Couple that with the parallel realization that partisanship (or agenda) doesn't equate to innacuracy, and the next logical step is to look around for Reality, decide what to do, and then start mobilizing yourself and anyone you can convince to get it done. That's the revolution, folks.
Let me state up front that I my theory of revolution is social, cultural, political; not militant. Rather than destroy our institutions of power, I think humanity is better served by reforming them to once again reflect first principles. This isn't quite socialism, capitalism, liberalism, communism, or anarchism. I like to think I'm informed to some degree by all these ideas, but I don't have an -ism yet, ok? Anyway, check the rap...
Historically there are always things the political establishment is reluctant to address, stuff that no one wants to talk about changing. Sometimes these are cushy breaks for the powerful. Sometimes these are traditions which it takes great political will to break from. Often these are the interests of the political class (Left and Right) itself -- a case that becomes especially common when the true number of players shrinks to as small a relative size as it's done in the past 40 years.
There are 115 million people out there who vote, but really about %0.01 of them actually run the show (thx to Britt for the graph). That kind of power distribution inexorably produces corruption. It's as close to an axiomatic law as any social science can get: concentration of power increases corruption, which can be evidenced by ignorance and inaction just as it can by outright abuse.
I've been reading The Great Transformation by Karl Polani, and one of the points he makes is that the Industrial Revolution owes more to advances in the social sciences, rather than the natural. It was mostly amateurs, tinkers and artisans who invented the labor-saving machines of the era. Physicists and chemists were peripheral. The critical scientific advancements of the time were in the human sphere: the development of economics, social policy and the destruction of old community orders which were incompatible with self-regulating markets.
I believe we're headed into an information revolution. After a great period of consolidation in the development of Industrial Infrastructure -- a period in which great applications of natural sciences allowed the wholesale re-invention of life on earth to spread worldwide -- we are poised for the next wave. To put it another way: we can't stay where we are. In times past I've imagined a kind of new dark age settling over the globe, a period of relative stasis, life as usual, whatever it may be. But that's clearly untenable. Given our current trajectory in another century there will be wars over water and oil and clean food if nothing else.
So either things change for the better or they change for the worse. I'm hoping for the better, and my hopes are pinned on the notion of an information revolution, which I believe is already underway. I think it will follow the same pattern Polani lays out: a series of social innovations will allow a new way of life to emerge based on a series of essentially technical innovations.
Today our information artisans are called hackers and designers. Rebel engineers and people who cut their teeth writing utopian business plans. The social sphere is going to go through some serious changes. All these efforts are building up to something. It might not be good, could be Orwellian to the extreme. Will the history books record an explosion in Social Entrepreneurialism or the development of Total Information Awareness? Open question.
However, as it stands, going along this line seems to be the only way going forward that doesn't involve Mass Death/Depopulation at some point, so it's the path I choose to follow. Call me a sucker for sci-fi, but I believe in the promise of progress.
Bringing it all back home, a critical component of progress seems historically to be a strong respect for empirical truth, for the reality that binds us together. That's Truth with a capital T, and it exists in the physical and the meta-physical sphere. Cultures which have respected and revered this do well. Those which run afoul inevitably stumble. We seem to be stumbling.
The joke on humanity is that you can't ever know it for sure. Uncertainty is pervasive. You can't fight Heisenberg in the physical sphere, and post-modern consciousness is essentially the extension of the impossibility of truly neutral observation into the social and cultural sphere. Brautigan: you can have security or you can have sanity. Pick one.
On the whole, the reaction over the past 40 years to these revelations has been a gradual decline in the value of Truth on all sides, which is really too bad. We've got to bring it back. An end to bullshit and mind-games, that's the way. We need to stand up for the principles of the enlightenment, for the promise of the Individual and for the virtue of the Public, because the alternative seems to be the continued ascendency of the State as an instrument of the ruling political class.
Make no mistake, there's certain kind of Truth in fascism, in the cynical observations of Menkin, in the mechanics of propaganda. But these truths rest on the centralization of "reality," in the dispossessing of the people of their own ability to observe and choose, to freely participate. There is truth in mental slavery in that it can work, and possibly even accomplish Great Things, but it's a backward idea. It leads back to that ratio of the power elite to the rest of humanity, and that ends in corruption and ruin, things we can ill afford more of these days.
So the challenge is to develop a pervasive global culture that can allow people to unite to their mutual advancement, but which does so by distributing power to them and allowing them to negotiate for themselves what constitutes advancement. That's a big project, and without some ideas for how to get there and where it goes, I don't think it's going to get off the ground. But we've got time. Fill in the blanks.
