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Tag: power

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    Representative Democracy: The monarch

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    1–2 minutes

    A second argument against representative democracy is the bureaucratic management that blocks change and disperses accountability. Meanwhile, the benefit of a monarch is that they should care deeply and be attentive lest their head be removed.

    While power can operate behind the monarch, having a singular figurehead allows for a lightning rod and scapegoat; people crave a visible leader and target, not invisible functionaries. However, the risk of notoriety (becoming the figurehead) is rewarded with perceived power converted to real power: the monarch can tyrannically dismiss the puppeteers. This should force a tremulous alliance of mutual use and disdain.

    The positive and negative aspects are long-term stability and a deft reliance on appearances to simulate balance and care, something democracy attempted to circumvent and yet has increasingly embodied.

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    Intellectual Integrity: The outcome is predictable

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    1–2 minutes

    Being educated can lead to illogic because wanting something—such as to be virtuous, moral, and right—allows your education to become a rationalizing faculty. Ideally, academics or scholars would draw from a breadth of resources, allowing knowledge to shape their worldview. As an authority, they would be capable of framing or debating multiple arguments from multiple positions. (authority instead of zealotry)

    However, the counterintuitive dynamic persists where, for the sake of inclusive status, research and authority often mold information to fit personal ideologies. The outcome is predictable before the research begins, resulting in increasingly abstruse and moralistic arguments that fail to create the necessary paradigm shifts.

    In this case, academics are not science, though they wish to hold the authority science once held. Even facts are politically reinterpreted, which begs the question of the possibility of apolitical human discovery as an anomaly, if not an impossibility.

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    Pacifism in Context

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    1–2 minutes

    Pacifism claims a moral high ground, often overlooking the historical complexities of global conflict for idealistic humanism. While noble, this moral stance frequently proves futile, especially in the absence of opposing violent forces.*

    When an adversary is already contending with violence elsewhere, pacifism becomes a strategic position rather than a revolutionary one, allowing for negotiations and compromises with existing state powers that hold coercive authority. Thus, pacifism bows to violent powers to maintain an ethical stance.

    * examples of pacifism prevailing occur when violence on other fronts has decimated or threatened the existing power, meaning pacifism only works when violence is actively applied in some regard.

    from Ward Churchill

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    rebellion as belief

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    1–2 minutes

    A liberal paradox: cherishing rebelliousness signifies a break from tradition, yet ironically cultivates instability through its commitment to disruption.

    Embracing the underdog role (freedom from oppression) is as patriotic as embodying the victorious "winner" role (an American archetype.)

    For us, fighting against the odds transcends typical political affiliations, emphasizing a personal (subjective) quest for success that resonates with national values (transcendent).

    This interplay between destabilization and idealism is a conundrum: embracing persistent turmoil as a form of national idealism (undermining authority as it establishes itself) may be the very trait that sustains America’s humanity despite its perpetual, domineering striving.

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    slippery slope of trust

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    1–2 minutes

    As a society, we handed over more and more authority to science because its agenda was approaching truth in an investigative manner by acknowledging failures and correcting them.
    Over time we placed trust in scientists and doctors, not the discipline, and increasingly handed authority to technocratic expertise: specific knowledge in hard disciplines was earned trust.
    Accordingly, politicians and the state, who seek trust and social persuasion, co-opt technocratic puppets. They utilize credentials to push agendas proven to be blindly harmful.
    The suborning of science’s trust creates a didactic return to the felt experience, the perceptive phenomenal embodied subjective, as more trustworthy, though that too has been proven unreliable.
    Consequently, our state of confusion is valid: we can not trust science, leaders, or ourselves.
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    Overreach backlash: the internal spread of sovereignty

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    1–2 minutes

    The once governed will not be governed anymore: they can now take the authority of the state upon (and into) themselves.

    This is an unintended reversal after state overreach: as grand-scale economic and judicial governance moved into “biopolitics,” the state breached the realm of the subjective individual.

    This prompted a reclamation of personal sovereignty and a citizen’s extension of the new precedent, not authority without but within. We grasped the line of power pushed into us, and before it could retract, we pulled the rest of state authority into us as well: if they can govern our body, we can govern ourselves.

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    Trapped into being hysterical or bureaucratic

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    1–2 minutes

    To stage the need for pathology is to be hysteric.

    The hysteric realizes the necessity for a manic release of the self: an energetic caring arriving as an amped self. This energetic, spastic hyper-concern actively deconstructs the normalized self and traditions, revealing an alternate self and new lines of flight.

    The premise is that spastic hysteria is pathology.

    Yet, the bureaucratic management that surrounds us stages (and maintains) a state of paranoia necessary for control. In this bureaucratic state of paranoic control, forcing normalization, inclrasingly any deviance is labeled pathological.

    Both of these modes extend themselves simultaneously creating a schizophrenic world: the less we can be controlled the more pathological we appear, and yet to be completely controlled is to repress the self unto death.

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    Escaping Bureaucracy via Subversive Excellence

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    1–2 minutes

    Occupations characterized by an intense, almost theatrical level of rigidity—think high-stress chefs, firefighters, specific musicians, trauma nurses, comedians, and daredevil professionals like roughnecks and underwater welders—give rise to a subversive realm that rejects the world of bureaucracy. Within their sphere, they construct an unapologetic hierarchy founded on their unique set of values, deliberately rejecting vacant niceties in favor of excess, darkness, and subversion.

    This subculture they create can be simultaneously harsh and light-hearted, degenerate yet communal. By dynamically responding to the demands of their challenging roles, they manage to elevate themselves beyond bureaucratic tedium and political correctness.

    This dynamic suggests that any occupation that relies on soul-draining bureaucratic oversight to manage its employees, policing emotions and behavior through policy, lacks the kind of passionate dedication and precision that fuels human flourishing.

    Occupations like these, which foster counter-cultural subcultures, cultivate communities bound together, relying on one another while nurturing trust (in an oddly perverse way). In contrast, heavily managed, mediated managerial roles tend to fragment employees, leaving them to bond primarily through shared frustration with the irrationality of upper-level decision-making.

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    shapeshifting beliefs (religion and conspiracy)

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    1–2 minutes

    The early Christians were experts at playing into other groups’ oral traditions and prophecies. They recruited by shapeshifting, assimilating, and aggregating. It’s like grafting new branches onto your tree. The issue is that they had to write in code because the Romans did not want the church to grow too powerful.
    Compared to today, this long conspiracy and aggregation of alternate cur conspiracies, while at the same time hiding from and despising the power of the state, has interesting effects.
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    Early Christians adeptly merged their beliefs with existing oral traditions, recruiting followers through a shapeshifting assimilation. This approach resembled grafting new branches onto an established tree.

    Writing in coded language was crucial as they grew, as overt expansion threatened Roman authority. This blend of espionage, aggregation, and subterfuge under state scrutiny parallels the modern interactions between populist beliefs and established powers.

    From this point of view, it is understandable that a religion distrustful of state authority is primed for conspiracy theories and will morph to adopt survival tactics, even if they are counter to their core tenants.

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    the state as platform

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    1–2 minutes

    Suppose our state is sponsored by capitalism (shaped by it), and corporate platforms have supplanted free-market capitalism (platforms set the market participation terms). In that case, the state has been inverted to be controlled by platforms rather than being the platform from which markets arise.

    The problem is that citizens can be controlled (limited), but pixels are sovereign (not recognizing borders.)

    The inversion (from state to corporate) requires the state to appropriate dominion from corporate platforms to remain relevant: setting the terms of participation.

    from Benjamin Bratton