| > disobedience of the illegitimate laws it supposedly creates This is the key problem. Lawrence Lessig has been making a good case recently that the root problem is institutional corruption, but I think that was the problem we had in the past. The time to address corruption was several decades ago. Unfortunately, most people we either scared by the changes that technology was bringing to society or blinded by greed and shared hallucinations about prosperity. Unfortunately, most people were happy to assist this corruption through indifference. Lt. Gen. David Morrison described this problem very succinctly in his calls[1] for people to report harassment whenever they see it: The standard you walk past,
is the standard you accept.
So now, after decades of walking past corruption I believe we're past the problem of corruption. We now live with politicians are actively trying to undermine the legitimate operation of government. We now live with the expectation of revolving door corruption. Wort of all, we now live with the results of putting politicians in a Skinner Box that conditions them to believe they are above the law. Operant conditioning works, and now we are seeing the results walking past decades of problems.What we're seeing with the TPP (and may other situations in modern society) is the breakdown of the Rule Of Law. Why the hell should anybody else respect the law, when it clearly doesn't apply to entire classes of criminals? Why should we care about laws that are clearly designed to make these problems even worse for the benefit of the few? Well, most people eventually realize they are being taken advantage of (even f it takes a few decades), and we've already had a few previews of what happens when people no longer respect the law in places like Baltimore and Ferguson. It's small praise, but I suspect that even a small portion of the worrying aspects of the TPP end up happening, it will actually impact a lot of people who are already living on the edge. Rebellion happens when people start to go hungry. We could walk back from this line, but that would require too many people to admit to their own. Why would the? We've been conditioning them to believe the are untouchable and right. The best description I've ever seen of this mindset is this interview[2] with a "senior adviser to Bush": The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community,"
which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious
study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment
principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works
anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll
act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how
things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left
to just study what we do."
Does this sound like someone who will walk back from their mistakes for the greater good? No, that's the voice of a fanatic who knows he can never be wrong.As Lawence Wilkerson - former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell - said about our current situation in his recent lecture[3] on the fall of the American Empire: This is what empires do. This is what they do...
particularly when they are getting ready to *collapse*.
Meanwhile, as these problems get worse and worse, there is a growing risk of someone deciding the Guillotine is a cheaper and easier solution.[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaqpoeVgr8U [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-a... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckjY-FW7-dc |