Only a Game

Café Américain: Information Is Not Truth

I'm back in Café Américain this week with an essay entitled "Information Is Not Truth". Here’s an extract:

If we reduce “truth” to mere factual statements, we eliminate not only any hope of touching upon the profound truths that lie at the heart of arts and philosophies, but also the sense of truth that each of us can express through our discourse. That we must try to discover the worthwhile truths was once the central tenet of the sciences, and perhaps the very reason that religion came to be viewed as their opponent, since truth within Christian traditions was supposedly 'revealed'. Truth is not information in any substantial sense, for while informational statements may be factually true, and may provide evidence for or against some truth, information itself is merely data until it is transformed by human practice into reality. 

You can read the whole thing over at Café Américain.

Manifesto for Eternal Commons

The public domain, that collection of books and other media for which no claim of intellectual property is being asserted, might represent an early example of an Eternal Commons. We might add to this that wonderfully successful experiment known as open source software, and its fellow travellers with the apt epithet of 'creative commons'. However, a mythic image like 'Eternal Commons' evokes a project beyond being free to share, one that aims to secure as permanent everything within these intellectual commons and also to expand our thinking about what might become (or return) to being a commons.

Exploring this topic requires what Mary Midgley liked to call pulling up the conceptual floorboards to discover where that wretched stench is coming from. One such concerning whiff emanates from 'private' versus 'public'. Consider that 'private' describes my ownership of a teaspoon I inherited from my late father with which I proudly maintain the British tradition of brewing tea and also the holdings of land barons who claim ownership over vast tracts of our planet. Likewise, 'public' denotes those aforementioned intellectual commons and also state-ownership of everything from schools, to armies, to regulators-slash-enablers. Likewise, how does this public-private distinction apply to chatter on social media platforms owned by giant corporations and censored by supra-national entities like the European Union...? The public-private distinction is beyond strained at this point, it is inadequate.

Yet so much of our political discourse is caught up in this public-private mythos. In the United States, for instance, where I currently live, the blue team waves the 'public' flag while taking much of its funding from corporations. This camp tries to convince voters that an enlarged state will benefit everyone, and not just the shareholders for those companies investing in blue team politicians. Meanwhile, the equally corporate-funded red team waves the 'private' flag and is absolutely convinced of the hopelessness of relying upon governments to solve problems. While I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea of a smaller state bureaucracy, nobody seems to have an answer to my question about what can place limits on commercial power if it is not the state...

As the renegade Catholic priest Ivan Illich understood all too clearly, part of our problem is that these carefully curated political divisions merely offer different flavours of economics. In my modest career as an author I've been repeatedly struck by the ways the Marxists I've worked with mirror the capitalists they purportedly oppose. Witness the strange case of John Hunt Publishing: wealthy Marxists bought out a publisher they previously worked for, then ejected the also-Marxist editors who had been working in good faith on the brands this publisher established. Everything about this takeover scenario is indistinguishable from capitalism - and with good reason, because communism and capitalism are merely different forms of economics, with both embedding the same core assumptions. Marx's great achievement was bringing capitalism into clear focus so that economists could pick which kind of giant economic entity gets to gobble up everything of value - the corporations or the nation states.

Against this, one of our few lines of defence is maintaining commons. The term comes to us through English history, but I will refrain from a digression on this theme since I think it quite likely that anyone who has made it halfway through this essay has a fair idea what the commons were, and how wealthy landowners were able to destroy them through 'enclosure', which is a charming euphemism for 'theft'. Sadly, the tremendous merit of our shared spaces was rather obscured by Garrett Hardin's infamous essay "The Tragedy of the Commons", published in the journal Science in 1968, despite a notable lack of anything scientific within its rhetoric. Hardin's claim that the commons were doomed to mismanagement was mistaken, as he was eventually forced to concede, since historically most common lands were well-managed. But his mistake was one which everyone makes: interpreting everything within the rigid assumptions of economics. Once you've made this commitment, it scarcely matters which flavour of economics you prefer.

Eternal Commons could be texts, images, music, sculpture, video, games, shared land, nature reserves, funds of money, technological processes, or anything else beside. They consist of the two elements their name implies: a commons, being something that nobody owns but that everyone might benefit from, and a state of being eternal, such that their exclusion from owned property cannot be terminated. If the public domain currently seems to be an Eternal Commons, I would caution that the growing lust for censorship must eventually threaten even this. The necessity of defending against that flexible bugbear 'misinformation' may yet require cordoning off sections from this library of the past 'for our own protection'...

It is the librarian and not the economist whose practices carry with them the hope for a future worth imagining. The public domain, open source software, and the creative commons already provide us with Eternal Commons to defend, and from this bastion of intellectual thought and digital pragmatism we might sally forth and ponder what else might be transformed into an Eternal Commons, what other kinds of collective agreements we might forge in this image.

It is noteworthy that in 1620, when Sir Francis Bacon set out his battle plan for the future of the sciences, he was convinced that inventions necessarily benefit all mankind, and not just some privileged subset thereof. In retrospect, it seems clear this was a manifesto less for scientific practice than for technological research - the bastard child of economics and the sciences. From our vantage point it should be becoming abundantly clear that, in the context of pharmaceuticals at the very least, patent law does not so much encourage innovation as invite fraud and bankroll corruption. A great deal of harm could be prevented by placing all methods of pharmaceutical manufacture into an Eternal Commons, from which it will become far, far easier to establish what is an effective medicine and what is toxic snake oil dressed up in scientistic branding.

The practically minded will no doubt at this point be bursting with objections, including the pragmatic concern that such a wistful ideal as Eternal Commons is inconceivable given the ambitions of the disproportionately influential. But here the economists might have a helpful lesson for us! For did not the more scurrilous lovers of money realise that smaller nations, lacking the resources to sell out to the plutocrats, were in a wonderful position to invent laws making them home to 'offshore banks' that could ride roughshod over attempts by the larger nations to derive taxation from the wealthiest individuals...? Likewise, those countries outside the reach of economic empire might well be places where the seeds of new Eternal Commons might be grown.

In this regard, Bruce Sterling's 1988 novel Islands in the Net - whose narrative commences last year in 2023 - is prescient in imagining 'data havens' in Singapore, Luxembourg, and Grenada that refuse to comply with global attempts at online censorship. Might the illegal filesharing network I call the 'black library' (since it is certainly not a black market) have potential to become a worthwhile Eternal Commons...? Perhaps. For now, however, I'll restrict my remarks on online piracy to the more modest idea that the outrageous punishments corporate intellectual property owners inflict for violations of copyright are entirely unreasonable consequences for the crime of operating an unlicensed library.

In time, we might even find ways to put land ownership within reach of an Eternal Commons... This is absurdly ambitious, and far beyond the scope of what we can hope to achieve now. Yet we are already appreciating the dangers entailed in the ludicrous concentration of wealth that gave us 'effective altruism', which might be better called 'imperial philanthropy'. This dreadful project of the ultrarich to remake the planet in their own delusional image comes from a hopeless vision of charity that obscures the profiteering entailed in the majority of 'humanitarian' projects. Perhaps the only legitimate ideal for high-society charity we ought to endorse is the transfer of wealth into the Eternal Commons - any kind of commons would suffice. If we can ever achieve the normative conditions for this, we really would be getting somewhere!

It is not enough to oppose the New Normal, we must have ideals that can circumvent it. This cannot come from fully-fledged utopian templates, which fortunately we seem to have lost faith in. What we require are flexible templates that are resistant to economics, and the only concept I've encountered with anything like the necessary collective power is that of the commons. Nobody owns the commons, and everybody must co-operate in maintaining these libraries and shared spaces. In an age of censorship and fragmentation, it feels inconceivable that a manifesto such as this could take root and from it flourish a forest of Eternal Commons. Yet when thought itself is threatened, perhaps it is only the unthinkable that can rescue humanity from itself.

The opening image is Eternity by Michael Lang, which I found here. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Termites vs Meerkats in the Knowledge Wars

12 minute read

Among the more surprising things I've been told by an intellectual acquaintance this year is that there was no point debating the evidence on a certain contentious issue because we could each cite our own supporting research. Yet this amounts to saying we've given up on empirical science - and honestly I rather fear this might be the case. But if this were so, how can it then be insisted by those who purport to possess authority that we must 'follow the science'...? There are questions here that matter and that can hardly be ignored without undermining any plausible concept of democracy.

When we encounter strangeness, the easiest psychological defences will always tend towards either denial or demonisation - hell, the whole of the political landscape in almost every democratic nation is almost entirely explicable through cognitive dissonance. The path less taken (especially by contemporary philosophers) is thinking. To borrow my mentor Mary Midgley's metaphor of philosophy as conceptual plumbing, this means tearing up the floorboards underneath our house of concepts in order to discover where the nasty smells are coming from.

In this instance, and indeed many like it, the problem originates in the loss of something we didn't even know we had: our shared framework of collective knowledge, that is, an epistemic commons. 'Epistemic' is the adjective for knowledge, and a 'commons' is something everyone makes free use of, while communally agreeing on the practices relating to it (for instance, a field that anyone can bring their sheep to for grazing, and the community itself decides how to organise this). A civic society requires an epistemic commons, not least of all to ensure we are talking about the same things. That major political arguments can now occur over such traditionally uncontroversial concepts as 'woman', 'man', 'climate' and 'weather' - not to mention 'safety' and 'efficacy' - are clear warning signs that something has gone horribly wrong with our epistemic commons.

This problem is rooted in radical and unprecedented changes to our academic circumstances. Up until the twentieth century, it could be claimed that the primary civic role of universities was to cultivate a community of virtuous scholarship that maintained the epistemic commons. Since then, alas, research investment has usurped and supplanted this purpose and arguably led to the end the university as such (see After Universities). The impression that this is 'how it is supposed to be' is merely back projection to justify the enslavement of scholarship to technology (that is, 'science plus money'). We have forgotten what a university was and now resolutely believe this to denote a research institution, a concept that arrives only after 90% of the history of universities to date has passed.

We cannot afford to leave this matter unattended, much less permit the cognitive dissonance it engenders to heighten our denial or our demonisation. Without either a newly negotiated epistemic commons (see No Reality without Representation) or an entirely unconceived alternative, we are slouching towards civil war on a global scale, the outcome of which could be far more catastrophic for human life than current anxieties about our every-growing environment impact. This question is thus a most urgent locus for thinking, perhaps the most urgent our species has yet faced, and it is no solution whatsoever to refuse to talk about it.

In order to trace possible solutions, I want to present two different metaphorical images for epistemic commons, one that I believe lies behind my academic acquaintance's ongoing allegiance to the ruling power structures, and another that I suspect underpins my own rejection of this new whirled order. Neither is 'right', both have strengths, weaknesses, and risks - both could be corrupted... indeed, my sense of the crisis we have sleepwalked into (see Awakening the Sleepwalkers) is precisely that both have been corrupted in radically different ways.

Termite Knowledge Networks

Of all the incredible aspects of the natural history of Africa I witnessed during my brief time in what is now Burkina Faso, little was more impressive than termite mounds. Towering above the ground - often at twice my height - these insect-built skyscrapers are constructed above underground nests that are home to thousands of termites, each specialised to different roles within the colony. Workers, soldiers, reproductives... specialisation is key to the extraordinary achievements of these relatives of the earliest winged insects, who in parts of Africa have transformed the entire local ecology in ways that have benefitted all the local wildlife.

The names of 'queen' and 'king' termites are misleading - they do not rule as such, but merely provide the eggs for the huge number of nymphs that then differentiate into specialist roles. Rather, each termite colony is a collective (a so-called 'superorganism'), where the contributions of each insect is vital to the prospering of all. This kind of eusocial arrangement has developed among many other largely unrelated insect species such as ants and bees, and the key in every case is specialisation and not - as the regal euphemisms imply - hierarchy. This is not hierarchical monarchic rule but a network of mutually defined purposes.

By analogy, then, we can speak of a termite knowledge network, where specialisation of roles is the underlying principle. Indeed, intuitively this what we imagine underpins our industrial knowledge economy. Specialist researchers and non-researcher experts (whom today we often forget exist) maintain knowledge in compartmentalised domains. Journalists with their own specialisations (sometimes asininely conceived, as with the absurdly broad term 'science reporter') then propagate changes with respect to this knowledge as 'news', while book publishers try to capture lightning in reference books.

I feel confident that faith in the efficacy and reliability of these networks are the reason so many, including my aforementioned academic acquaintance, place their trust in government and industry sponsored narratives, despite a lack of trust in both government officials and corporate CEOs. Indeed, this is the only way to explain the widespread acceptance of such diverse and otherwise arcane popular beliefs such as 'climate change is so vital we must not research it', 'vaccine candidates without pharmacovigilance are safer than with rigorous oversight', or 'pornography in school libraries saves lives'. Yet the strangeness of these claims is not prima facie evidence that our termite knowledge network has been corrupted. Remember the oddness uncovered in quantum mechanics, after all...

However, the termite knowledge network absolutely requires that those who have been specialised to a role are able to fulfil it. The sign of the corruption of our knowledge network - and the consequent collapse of the epistemic commons - is that those who are best positioned to advise are prevented from doing so if they do not align with pre-prescribed positions. The strongest evidence of this can be found in the lawsuit Missouri vs Biden administration (now, Murthy vs Missouri), legal discovery for which showed how epidemiologists and health economists were censored on social media at the command of the US government (shredding the First Amendment), solely because they brought attention to the lack of reliable knowledge behind what were very odd courses of action to undertake. Likewise, despite their evident qualification to speak on the topic, detransitioners are routinely excluded from the conversation about how to approach the fraught political quagmire that is gender metaphysics (see Were You Born This Way?).

As always, denial and demonisation remain the most common result of confronting any aspect of this corruption of our termite knowledge network. Ever wondered how a diverse range of people are suddenly 'far right' - even committed lefties like Russell Brand! - and thus necessarily deplorable...? The tremendous desire to believe that there's no reason to be concerned and that the problem is entirely up to those terrible Others is in itself a sign of the problem. But to truly get to grips with the situation requires us to wrestle with the other go-to cognitive dissonance avoidance phrase: conspiracy theory. And this brings us to the meerkats.

Meerkat Knowledge Communities

Unusually for social mammals, meerkats do not have a strict hierarchy. It is not that no meerkat is dominant - there is always a pair 'in charge' - but unlike wolves (or indeed chickens) there isn't a strict 'pecking order'. Up to thirty meerkat cooperate in each mob, pursuing a variety of communal activities including keeping watch for predators. There are even birds, drongo, that will stand guard in return for some of the food the meerkats gather - a situation that sometimes becomes a real life Prisoner's Dilemma when the bird proves less than trustworthy.

Again, by analogy we can speak of a meerkat knowledge community, where trust and cooperative practice underpins the activities, the groupings are smaller, and roles are mutable and overlapping. Historically speaking, many academic fields went through a stage like this: when Isaac Newton wrote about the mathematics of planetary motion, the number of 'natural philosophers' with skin in the game was few enough that everyone had read everyone else with anything to say on the matter. Anyone with an interest in Newton's physics simply read Newton's own book. (Of course, a printer also produced the book itself - but they changed nothing in what Newton wrote, which is never true of publishers today.)

The impression that this form of knowledge curation is no longer around is caused by our false association between knowledge and research. But maintaining knowledge is a much older and indeed far more crucial practice than research, which has only risen in importance owing to the commercialisation of the sciences through technology. We can find meerkat knowledge communities at every church, temple, mosque, and synagogue; in every scout and guide troop; at every gun range and bowling alley - even pubs and bars can be meerkat knowledge communities. Wherever knowledge is conserved and propagated, there will be a knowledge community... and the communities entailed are typically small and localised.

An authentic meerkat knowledge community maintains the practices of a form of knowledge, and these are legion. Such communities can also adapt to almost any change in the circumstances surrounding their practices - consider the enormous transformations entailed by raised row gardening as a brilliant example of how even successful knowledge practices can undergo radical and unexpected transformations, even within comparatively short intervals.

Furthermore, because such communities are usually comparatively small (many have no more than a hundred or so people) they can also maintain practices which may or may not constitute knowledge as such. Some may be metaphysical, such as theology or faith in the sciences; some may be speculative in other ways - and this is where we find conspiracy theories being shared. Despite the archetype of the lone kook, communities of one kind or another connect almost all conspiracy theorists (by which I mean people speculating about actual conspiracies, not people being censored for holding inconvenient views).

Now it is an interesting feature of our times that 'conspiracy theory' has been massaged into the implication of being false. Because this could only be a plausible assumption if nobody was ever involved in conspiring - which would be a ludicrous assumption. Indeed, the people who benefit from a blanket dismissal of conspiratorial thinking are precisely those most likely to conspire. Still, most conspiracy theories are not knowledge as such but rather speculative scenarios that seek to provide explanations of events in terms of the causal actions of people who would plausibly deny wrongdoing (i.e. everyone). Authentic conspiracy theories inevitable lack decisive evidence (although evidently some of the reports that are now dismissed under this term are well-evidenced e.g. that the Biden administration has censored inconvenient discourse, which disclosure in Missouri versus Biden confirmed as factual).

The meerkat knowledge communities of conspiracy theories are thus engaged in discussing speculative models of events that run ahead of the evidence to some degree. As such, they perhaps ought to be called speculative hypotheses, and we might therefore talk of meerkat speculation communities as a specialist kind of knowledge network. It is my conclusion after observing the discussions of this kind of community online that they occur in a pattern of layers, from the surface layer of a meerkat knowledge community that constrains its speculations to the available evidence, to the most fanciful deep layers that explain half a century or more of events as the result of interlocking conspiracies. I cannot prove these hypotheses false, and if they become extremely fanciful in the depths they are not more fanciful than the hypothesis that everything done by government politicians and corporate executives is strictly for the good of humanity.

Thus much as strange conclusions from our termite knowledge networks are not evidence of their corruption, neither are conspiracy theories evidence of the corruption of meerkat knowledge communities: nobody is in a position to discredit or debunk speculation that further evidence might yet reveal to be true, and by definition conspiracies are underdetermined until such time as substantial evidence is unearthed (especially but not exclusively through legal disclosure). It is worth remembering, after all, how preposterous heliocentric cosmology, continental drift, and even hand washing to prevent infection were in their times. It is certain that some subset of conspiracy theories will be validated - and nobody can reliably predict which will come to be accepted. (Look at the utter reversal of beliefs about Emily Dickenson, for instance).

Rather, the corruption of meerkat knowledge communities is evidenced by the collapse of the community itself. The minimum knowledge any community possesses is an understanding of how to remain a community - a far more significant achievement these days than we give credit! No matter the weird and wacky beliefs of any group that associates, the fact of their continued association is a kind of knowledge (often of a habitual rather than a propositional kind), and it is the corruption of this knowledge that will destroy the association.

This provides a clue as to the other reason why the epistemic commons has collapsed. In addition to the corruption of our termite knowledge network through censorship, we have also thinned down our knowledge of how to maintain meerkat knowledge communities by supplanting them with an automated alternative: social media. Yet the knowledge entailed in participation with these digital tools is not knowledge of how to associate, but merely interface competence. Worse, the associations we make in such spaces (follows) and their opposite (blocks) serve not to foster community but rather to purify ideology - they group people into an illusion of community without providing any knowledge of how to associate. Indeed, the habit inculcated through participation in these non-communities is how to push a button in order to self-alienate from anyone remotely different from us - it is a sick joke to then make claims that our motivations are 'diversity and inclusion'!

We have thus corrupted both aspects of the epistemic commons, and the illusion that our collective knowledge is still functioning normally is scaffolded by the manipulation of the very tools that facilitated this wretched calamity. I am largely agnostic to the question of whether this dreadful state of affairs was intentionally manipulated or the consequence of a cascade of incompetence, although it is my default policy - we might call it hokum's razor - to avoid invoking conspiracy where ineptitude suffices as an explanation. Frankly, how this happened is far less important than what we do about it... and in this regard, it matters greatly that an enormous number of otherwise sapient people, like the associate I mentioned at the beginning, continue to have faith that our epistemological situation remains fundamentally trustworthy.

Conclusion

It will come as little surprise if I say that I place greater trust in meerkat knowledge communities than I currently can in our termite knowledge network. Yet I would be the first to admit that we do not currently have a means of maintaining a global epistemic commons without the help of the termites. It is a luxury I possess as a voracious reader that I am willing to negotiate the conflicted accounts of the meerkats with some confidence, sorting wild speculation from grounded interpretation with the care that flows from perpetual agnosticism. It is evident that this is not a general solution to the problem, but rather a situation evoking endless ambiguity, and whatever my competence I am limited by all the weaknesses inherent to any lone investigator.

Of course when the termites are causing more harm than good they become a pest - I find it easy to abandon premature certainty under such wretched circumstances, yet acknowledge the psychological costs involved will not appeal to most academics, who derive a great deal of their self-worth from the legitimacy claims of the network they participate in. This is also true of those downstream of academics, most obviously science reporters, who are apparently woefully incapable of the thinking required to operate without termites, or else perhaps have 'purified' their associations of anyone who might be so endowed with prudence.

The crisis here is exacerbated by the fact that all the oddest positions taken up by the termites are politically aligned with the blue team in the United States - this, indeed, is the most plausible explanation for why the termites have fallen into corruption: politicisation. This is why this nightmare could result in civil war if it is not resolved, since a nation of gun owners founded upon 'the shot heard around the world' requires an epistemic commons to bolster any stable national identity. Furthermore, the collapse of the US would trigger a global destabilisation (if indeed one is not already underway). The epistemic commons has been helping to stabilise international relations far longer than banking and commerce, which have failed to achieve the international peace Kant and others hoped for (see The Great Graveyard of Humanity).

If we want to escape the worst consequences of this ever-growing catastrophe, we must begin by admitting we have a problem. Termites see the problem in those who don't acknowledge their network's authority, but a great many meerkats don't seriously recognise any authority but their own liberty. Small wonder this dispute frequently manifests polemically as authoritarians versus libertarians. Yet we agree on one thing: we have a problem with our knowledge, and anyone who thinks the solution is going to come from a policy of 'shut up and accept what we say' is more naïve than the most credulous of conspiratorial speculators.

The only viable solutions begin by admitting failure and renegotiating the terms of our collective knowledge. There is more than enough political, historical, scientific, religious, and ethical knowledge held in our extraordinarily diverse meerkat knowledge communities to rebuild a termite knowledge network capable of acting as a viable epistemic commons. But to get there, we first have to recognise that a metaphorical wasteland we cannot bear to acknowledge has been encroaching upon our termite mound for decades. Now and forever, we need the wisdom of Socrates who warned "all I know is that I know nothing".

Comments always welcome, although my replies here may not appear swiftly.

How The Left Stopped Thinking

In the 1950s, movie audiences were wowed by monsters bursting out of the silver screens. All they had to do was put on a pair of paper glasses with a red gel over one eye and a blue gel over the other. Each eye then saw a different part of the image on screen, and the small differences between them created the 3D effect through an illusion of stereoscopic vision. Today, however, people put on a pair of glasses with the same colour gel over both eyes, and consequently see only one half of the image on screen. It is small wonder that when people exit the cinema, it turns out they've been watching an entirely different movie!

There is a long-standing joke about US politics: the Democrats are the Evil Party, the Republicans are the Stupid Party, and every now and then they get together and do something that is both stupid and evil, and that is called 'bipartisanship'. Of course, those on the blue team are convinced its the red team that's evil, and those on the red team think the blue team is stupid (or, more commonly, crazy). The truth, as ever, is not so simple. The electorate in the United States is neither evil nor stupid, but it is spectacularly distracted, in the sense traced by French philosopher Jacques Rancière. We don't so much stop using our intelligence as deploy it almost exclusively to uncover the horror caused by those wearing the other colour gels over their eyes.

I am ambivalent as to whether this perpetual distraction is the result of an intentional collaboration to keep the populace fractious, or whether it emerges blindly from the commercial properties of news media. For instance, consider why George Floyd's murder was singled out for media attention in 2020 and not, say, Donnie Saunders who was killed by the police two months earlier. (There are many more depressing examples I could choose even in that one year.) The Floyd murder was 24 hour news catnip. Those wearing blue gels would respond to either of these dreadful incidents the same way, but those wearing red gels over their eyes would see Floyd as a criminal who had been arrested nine times for drug and theft charges... Whenever you really want to turbo-charge your news cycle, you need a story that sets the red and blue team against each other, ramping up the outrage and cognitive dissonance. I can't rule out that this entails some attempt at supra-political control of the populace (how could you...?), but we don't need to resort to conspiracy to explain how this happens.

However, by the time of the Black Lives Matters protests and riots, the legacy media was already shooting fish in a barrel in terms of stirring up the political left in the United States. For it is my accusation that long before 2020 the left stopped thinking, primarily because they were distracted in Rancière's sense. The evidence of this distraction was felt most astutely in that very year, because nearly everyone on the political left jumped upon a hastily constructed media bandwagon the moment the panic word 'pandemic' had been spoken. In the wake of this, the zeal with which denouncements of 'misinformation' and 'disinformation' leapt above the necessarily-prior task of establishing the facts was staggering.

Although I am saying the left has stopped thinking, I ought to make it clear that this is not the same as the loss of their intelligence. It is simply that those wearing the blue gels have been so distracted by the fault lines being farmed by the legacy media that they apply their intelligence almost exclusively to justifying their hatred for the other team. Yet whichever gels you wear, it's a certainty that you've witnessed the other team engaged in this grubby process of informed hate - it's impossible to miss once you take off the gels of either colour. This is where our capacity for thinking is expended, safely exploded where it can do absolutely no harm to the guilds and houses of the contemporary technocratic empire.

Yet thinking can also means something more than the application of our intelligence. The German existentialist Martin Heidegger asked what it is that calls for us to think. Whenever we are genuinely engaged in thinking, we are not simply pursuing partisan reasoning. He suggests: "Thinking is thinking solely when it pursues whatever speaks for a matter." What calls for us to think is never as readily visible as the moral flaws of our political opponents. That which calls for thinking withdraws from us, remaining hidden and beyond experience. This withdrawal is something more than a blind spot - our own moral flaws, which our political opponents see all too clearly, are unseen to our own mind's eye, but they are not withdrawn from us in Heidegger's sense.

That which calls for thinking is always beyond our intelligence until we learn how to think about it, and that withdrawal creates a kind of draft, the pull of which can be felt even though what is calling for thinking is not there. Like birds pulled along by the wind, we find ourselves thinking only when we take a leap from the ground and let this draft carry us onwards. This is akin to Alain Badiou's idea (inspired by Plato) where truth is something that punctures the order of everyday existence, an event that upends what we previously believed. Thinking is what happens when we let ourselves be caught up in such an event, just as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière were in May 1968.

This traces an answer to the question 'how the left stopped thinking'. If thinking is our capacity to encounter that which goes beyond the dogmas and lazy intellectual accountancy of everyday life, if thinking always speaks for a matter, and never against, then the left stopped thinking the moment it became the left. For the origin of the left-right distinction is the French revolution, and the seating arrangements within the National Assembly. Those who sought to uphold aspects of the traditional structures prior to the revolution sat on the right of the hall, and those who sought greater change sat on the left. But at this very moment the left came into being, the left stopped thinking - because those belonging to the left were immediately and permanently committed to opposing tradition, to political partisanship against the right. And this remains the case, more than two centuries later.

The surest sign of the failure of the contemporary left to engage in thinking is its hatred for the right, and its refusal to recognise the legitimate and even at times admirable ways the political right deploys its intelligence. I read a lot of what is said by those on either side of United States political partisanship (not the politicians, of course, the clever people). At this time, I find the intellectual right using their intelligence far more creatively. They have come to recognise what fools they were for instituting the Department of Homeland security. They have maintained their suspicion of collaboration between corporations and the government. They are applying their intelligence to the question of how to dismantle the corrupt and disastrous federal agencies. In the Bizarro World that is the United States today, the right is closer to the naïve politics that the left explored in the 1960s, while the left is closer to the ghastly politics the right inflicted in the 1950s. What obscures this amazing circumstance is hatred of the other - which is to say, the left's hatred of the right and the right's disgust at the left. This more than anything else keeps us away from any hope of thinking.

If we wish to attempt the infinite challenge of thinking, if we wish to discover all that has withdrawn from us, to find ways to let the truth puncture through the familiar prejudices of our everyday lives, we may need to abandon this split into left and right. Yet we cannot do this, can we...? We must keep the coloured gels over our eyes or else disaster will surely follow soon after we remove them because 'the other side must be stopped'. Horror at the thought of a second term by whichever terrible president it is that you happen to despise compels you to squander your intelligence in partisan in-fighting, and never once to stop and attempt to learn how to think, to seek that which calls for us to think.

Perhaps it is time to abandon our allegiance to right and left, and to give thinking a chance. A future worth sharing lies in rallying those who might attempt to think together, and there is an ancient name for these people: citizens. The left-right divide does nothing now except prevent any hope of thinking, and the partisans of the left and the right need to be contrasted against the citizens of the future. Decide for yourself who you will be: the partisans whose intelligence is squandered upon demonising their political opponents, or the citizens of a future world that is open to thinking. It is calling to us, inviting us to learn how to think together. All you have to do is take off your coloured gels, blink, and look for the first time at worlds that were always far stranger, far more wonderful, than any 3D movie ever imagined.

A journey away from partisans and towards citizens takes two steps forward every Tuesday at Stranger Worlds and How to Live in Them. If you're interested in the challenges of thinking, please join me there.

The Last Citizens

The Last Citizens may already have been born. The ideals that made it possible to be democratic citizens of a nation protected by international human rights have become so corrupted, and indeed purposefully distorted, that it is far from clear that anyone is still a citizen in the sense that came to exist immediately after World War II. But the Last Citizens are still citizens in at least one sense: they remember what it means to be part of a democracy of rights... and even the capacity to remember what this means provides some glimmer of hope for the future.

Despite its influences in the ancient world, citizenship in the sense of belonging to a democracy of rights is a comparatively contemporary idea. Unrest in the imperial nations brought an end to the old faith in the divine right of kings that had sustained monarchy as the sole legitimate mechanism of rule. The English Civil Wars ended in 1649 with the execution of Charles I - a situation previously unthinkable. Yes, one monarch had executed another, and wars of succession had a long history, but this was something different. The king was found guilty of asserting "unlimited and tyrannical power to rule according to his will, and to overthrow the rights and liberties of the people". The world's first Bill of Rights arrived forty years later. But we were not yet citizens.

There is a certain irony to the way that the American Revolution was also a revolt against the British crown, that is, against the monarchy formed through a merger between the Scottish and English crowns. The throne had been restored after the English experiment in republicanism ended in failure after just eleven years, but it now faced in 'the colonies' what it had previously faced at home: revolution. Yet the Declaration of Independence in 1776 still did not create citizens, and even the constitution of 1789 did not allow for this understanding until the addition of the Fourteenth Amendment, in 1868. Conversely, the French Revolution that followed soon after proudly announced in 1789 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

As Benedict Anderson remarks of these events, the combination of a revolution followed by a declaration of rights and citizenship created a model for a nation that could be creatively 'pirated', and citizenship spread around South America and the former imperial colonies bordering upon the Pacific with a certain inevitability. Anderson's claim, oft repeated but seldom fully appreciated, was that the arrival of widespread printing created novels and newspapers that allowed people to imagine themselves as part of the same community. These imagined communities were the origin of the nation in a sense that was radically different from that of monarchy. No longer subjects, we were now citizens.

The usual interest in Anderson's arguments is rather shallow, since it is taken as a diagnosis of nationalism, taken in the negative. But Anderson's interest was broader and more intriguing - he expressly denies we should think of 'nationalism' as an ideology, like liberalism or fascism. Rather, he sees 'nationalism' as akin to 'kinship' or 'religion' - as different ways of imagining human relationships. Indeed, a large part of his book is taken with showing how the imagined communities of religion served a role similar to that of the nation in the half millennia beforehand: people imagined themselves as members of a religion that united them with vast numbers of strangers long before they imagined themselves as members of a nation.

To be a citizen of a nation, however, is to recognise one's membership in that nation, just as to be a Hindu, a Christian, a Buddhist, a Muslim, or a Jew is to recognise one's membership in that religion. In both cases, what matters is not merely recognising membership of a set, but a metaphorical brotherhood and sisterhood with others who also belong to that set. Those who leap from Anderson's book to nationalism-as-ideology misunderstand his purposes. Racism, he argues, justifies repression and domination within the nation; nationalism leads to wars with others in order to protect 'our' land. Whoever loves their nation is willing to die for what it represents, just as one who loves God is willing to die for that faith represents - and contrary to how this is usually taken, this need not mean being willing to kill.

The lazy assumption that these imagined nations are a pathology betrays us. We are lured into thinking that those people who believe in nations are terrible and need to be excluded and repressed. In other words, demonising the love of a nation is itself a path to the bigotry being reviled - a pattern we have seen so many times, with each and every belief system whether religious, national, or secular. In this regard, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, whatever its flaws, attempted to transcend nationalist bigotry by declaring not only rights for everyone, but a right to citizenship itself (a right to belong to a nation). It was a spirited attempt to make good on everything that had gone wrong when the old conception of 'Natural Rights' that had fuelled the Revolutions had been discredited by the two World Wars.

No, nationalism as such is not necessarily our problem. Indeed, it was love of the United States that led people to protest against the Vietnam war in the 1960s, as Anderson himself later made explicit. The citizen of a nation is capable of feeling ashamed of crimes their country has committed, for which the concept of 'not in my name' carries some weight. While we are still citizens, we must have this connection to a nation, because it is only in the context of a democratic nation that we can be citizens, and we can be so solely if we belong to that nation. It is the erosion of this sense of imagined community which is precisely why citizenship has begun to unravel.

The problem, as Chantal Mouffe brilliantly explored in the early twenty first century, is that the 'left' and the 'right' ceased to be mutually engaged in citizenship any more. The entire point of this original division, which commenced in the French Revolution with the first seating of the National Assembly, was to distinguish two different perspectives within one common nation. But as Mouffe traces, the 'left' gradually lost this commitment, and this in two ways: through adopting extreme forms of individualism, that elevated the individual and denigrated the nation, and also through an obsession with a zealous rationality that is often named 'Science' but has nothing whatsoever to do with scientific practice.

Thus for those caught up in the imagined tides of the 'left', identarian politics invited people to join different imagined communities - as LGB or one of its later permutations, as neuro-diverse, as queer, as black, as trans, and ultimately, when all the seats outside of white and male had been taken, as these final accursed categories, which became the reviled and excluded remnants of the identarian parade. These alternative identities pulled people away from imagining themselves as part of a democratic community united as nations. Nowhere was this clearer than in the nonsense of the last few years, when the mistaken belief that experts could establish, at the drop of a hat, scientific and therefore medical truth, led people to abandon citizenship for a brutal and ignorant technocracy. Nations were suddenly irrelevant: what mattered was your chosen identity and your loyalty to a specific political surrogate for scientific truth.

Between these two forces, the imagined ideal of the citizen in a democracy of rights was entirely torn apart. Rather than the 'left' and 'right' having different imaginings about the same nation, the 'right' continued to imagine the nation, while the left began to imagine internationally, which is to say (like the subjects of the English and French crowns before them), they began to imagine an empire. As I wrote in The Third Accord, our image of citizenship has thus been torn into two fragments. The 'right' clings to the image of membership in a nation that belongs to them, while the 'left' has carried the freedom to dissent to an absurd extreme that now denies any disagreement. For this 'new left', any attempt to imagine belonging to a nation has become secondary to the coalition of imagined identarian communities united in commitment to an empire of magical science.

Nowhere is this collapse of the ideals of citizenship clearer than in the cries of 'Not My President' and the deranged denouncement of political opponents as inhuman, evil, and beneath contempt, such that any thought of compromise or debate with them is unthinkable. The absolutism of monarchy has returned in the divine right of idiots to believe in their own stupidity so completely as to become incapable of listening to any other perspective at all. On this path, even censoring free speech and tampering with elections becomes morally justified because 'they' cannot be allowed to 'win'. The United States has all but lost any notion of citizenship because it has abandoned its commitment to debating disagreements and working collectively to forge a common image of what the nation could or should become. And the other nations are never far behind the mistakes that the United States leads the world in making.

Yet all is not lost. The Last Citizens may indeed have already been born, but these are still the people among us willing to listen and compromise. These brave souls - or those that follow them - might be able to forge the third accord, to reunite the many different worlds of our one, shared planet into a common political ideal. Those that were seduced away from freedom by the deceptions of a false necessity have at least this one redeeming quality: they still believe in ideals... it is just that our collective imaginings have been so corrupted they can now cause only harm. We must rebuild either the notion of citizens within democracies of rights, or an ideal that can replace it. And the only way this can come about is if we discover how to pursue this momentous undertaking together.

The opening image is a detail from Citizens by Chris Arlidge. No copyright infringement is intended and I'll take the image down if asked.

Open Data

Open source began a cultural movement back towards the commons that for the first time established a form of solidarity within technology. At its heart, the open source movement argues that the computer code behind software ought to be publicly available, for both ethical and pragmatic reasons. But open source isn't enough. What we may need to complete this transition is open data.

The recent news that Elon Musk's bid to takeover Twitter is back on the table has created the usual stir. The new left, committed to a censorship it deems entirely necessary, is up in arms about how this will allow the right back onto Twitter, which is apparently a disastrous proposition. But the suggestion that censorship is 'necessary for democracy' is laughable if all this means is "I don't want to have to listen to what my political opponents have to say". Democracy requires the free exchange of ideas, and the moment one faction is given the power to decide what speech is or isn't permitted, we are deep into the territory that Orwell's 1984 warned about.

This sudden zealotry for censorship has collapsed scientific discourse in the last two years, not because research has ceased to function, but because dissemination has faltered. It has been surreal to find open scientific discourse driven underground where, oddly, it thrives, although while it is trapped there practitioners have to interact with folks holding fringe beliefs who I imagine have been excluded from polite society for quite some time. Meanwhile, it seems far too many people (including and especially doctors) trust the media to accurately inform them, which reporters have shamefully ceased to do, preferring one-sided phantasmal narratives over authentic investigation. Alas, if the behaviour of the Vatican in the Middle Ages didn't sufficiently warn of the dangers of allowing institutions to control thought, then the surreality of these past two years will presumably also fail to teach us the lesson we neglected to learn from history. The substitution of enforced consensus for scientific discourse is not a path to truth, it is the utter denial of it.

When Musk declared that Twitter was the "de facto public square", I believe he was absolutely right. Don't let the smaller number of users deceive you - Facebook has many more people sharing cat photos, but the political snowball effect that led to censorship and thus enormous global harm originated on Twitter, where a grim consensus formed over speculative health care interventions that was pure fabulism, having no basis in the existing scientific data or practices. Our first step to restoring democracy must be the restoration of civic discourse. Thus when Musk revealed his intentions for Twitter, I could not help but feel a glimmer of hope that a 'third accord' to replace the fallen Old Republic of human rights (and the Rights of Man that preceded it) might yet be achievable. This third accord may not even need the actions of the nation states to bring it about.

It is fascinating to dig through the private messages that Musk disclosed for the lawsuit between him and Twitter. Two exchanges leap out at me in particular. Firstly, one with former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who suggested on 26th March 2022:

I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn't own the protocol, only advanced it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can't have an advertising model. Otherwise you have surface area that governments and advertisers will try to influence and control. If it has a centralized entity behind it, it will be attacked. This isn't complicated work, it just has to be done right so it's resilient to what has happened to twitter.

And secondly, on 9th April 2022, an exchange with Musk's brother, Kimball:

I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like twitter. You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on the chain, which will cut out the vast majority of spam and bots. There is no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed.

This is not just open source we are talking about here, it is open data. Right now, social media messages belong to the company that provides the tools - who are then both tempted and empowered to censor, as both Facebook and Twitter did to reckless degrees in recent years. This alternate path would see these messages shared as part of a public protocol. You could choose who you want to curate messages for you, because anyone could mount a tool on top of the protocol. Musk also appears to be considering a "marketplace of algorithms" (suggested to him by Matthias Dopfner in an exchange on 6th April 2022), such that those who require personalised censorship for the benefit of their delicate sensibilities might indulge in it without cutting of public conversation at its roots.

It is well worth pondering the case of Alex Berenson, a former journalist for the New York Times who was banned from Twitter in August 2021 for posting alleged 'misinformation'. In fact, Berenson had not posted anything that was not factual, and it was apparent to anyone who had kept their ear to the research literature that Berenson was both in the know and in the right. So convinced was Berenson of the justice of his cause that he took Twitter to court - and won. On 6th July 2022, Twitter was forced to reinstate him. (Although they banned him again on the 8th October 2022...) However, Twitter clearly knew they had no legitimate basis to ban him, as this internal discussion inside Twitter shows:

As Berenson makes clear, this legal ruling against Twitter was technical and concerned violation of terms of service (the court did not, as far as I can tell, explore any of the  specifics of the claims Berenson was making). What's especially interesting about the Berenson case, however, is what the legal disclosure revealed. The Biden administration leaned on Twitter to silence Berenson, because he was challenging (with legitimate cause) the behaviour of the CDC and the FDA, and by extension undermining the authority of the White House. In this regard, Twitter was behaving as a 'state actor', and therefore violated the First Amendment. This is yet another huge and explosive story that is not permitted to be told, but in my view this approaches the Watergate scandal in its despicable audacity.

Those that are committed to supporting Biden because they have been polarised into one of the two major kinds of useful idiot will struggle to accept the evident wrong-doing entailed in this debacle. For such people I am delighted to report that what President Biden allowed to happen on his watch through apparent senility is matched in shamefulness by what President Trump permitted to happen on his watch through incompetence. Apparently distracted by someone in the audience metaphorically jangling some keys, Mr Trump allowed a positively jubilant Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci to throw away the right to free association that by legal precedent is also ascribed to the First Amendment. You are free to support whichever useful idiot you like, but please don't try to convince me that either of these Presidents has in any sense of the word been 'good'.

Open data would have prevented the White House from pressuring Twitter to silence Berenson, because his messages would have been irrevocably available for everyone to see - as they always should have been. The integrity of the public square matters greatly if we truly believe in free expression, in democracy, in free speech, or for that matter in the value of the sciences, which always rests upon the freedom to discuss all the possible interpretations of the evidence. Trust in 'The Science' is blind faith in magical science, and this is nothing but idolatry, a corruption of everything scientific investigation stands for. This graven image is one that far too many people have been fooled into worshipping by the New Empire, whose primary tool has become the silencing of those who break with doctrine. A shiny new oligarchical cyber-Vatican for the 21st century!

Nor should we think about open data as applying solely to our social media messages. An intriguing suggestion has been made repeatedly by 'El Gato Malo', a retired pharmaceuticals executive and well-known figure in the scientific underground. He was also banned from Twitter, in his case simply because President Trump shared one of his tweets (strange but apparently true!). I am far from convinced by everything the 'Bad Cat' says, and he is clearly politically to the right of anywhere I might choose to sit down. However, I am in complete agreement with him when he suggests that "public health must be made public", and proposes using open data to share anonymized health records publicly. Such an approach would remove, to name just one benefit, Pfizer's ability to hide their trial data and prevent third parties from adequately investigating its veracity, as British Medical Journal editor Peter Doshi has repeatedly called for as necessary. Open data would ensure adequate scrutiny on all public health claims, rather than permitting the tyranny of unelected agencies we have endured for the past two years. It would represent a radical step toward finally decolonising public health.

As I wrote in The Paradox of Conviction, we would rather be certain than know the truth, and this is the underlying psychology that drives sci-dolatry, self-righteous calls for censorship of contrary opinions, and a great many of our contemporary 'culture war' ills besides. If we want to recover the will to discover what might be true, we must be prepared to endure the collision of disagreements. Censorship, 'fact checkers', disinformation committees - these are not means to protect the truth, they are methods of preventing its discovery. Lies require such authoritarian mechanisms to sustain themselves, because they cannot withstand open discourse. The truth never requires us to silence those who have made mistakes, for the truth itself is strong enough to withstand whatever we might say about it.

It is this sensitivity to the dangers of allowing the institutions with power to control public discourse that Musk, and other like him, appear to share. If Musk is an unlikely ally against the New Empire, we can at least be grateful that anyone is still willing to take a principled stand in these dark and wretched times. When I argued at the beginning of the year against the colonial philanthropy of someone such as Bill Gates, whose institute has been a major player in exacerbating the disaster that was the last two years, I proposed that the only legitimate philanthropy was that which restores or expands the commons. Musk's takeover of Twitter certainly entails enormous commercial benefits for him, but then, Gates too has made extraordinary sums of money from his colonial philanthropy. Elites, it seems, do nothing for free. Yet in so much as Musk's motivation in this affair might also include principled goals, it leans towards a philanthropy of the only kind we should be willing to accept from wealthy power elites: that which restores the commons.

The public square is indeed a commons, one that forms the hub of political, cultural, and scientific discourse. The closing of this space through censorship lies at the heart of everything that has gone wrong in the past few years. We will struggle to get beyond the impasse, however, if we do not take the opportunity to reveal and confess all the myriad mistakes that contributed to the global catastrophe that was our response to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. If the Republicans gain the advantage in the coming US midterm elections, we will likely get little more than recriminatory witch-hunts that will intensify the fractures. What we may need to restore both public and scientific discourse is something more like truth and reconciliation, and if I rather doubt we will get it, I remain hopeful there is still a path forward provided at least some of us remain committed to the inevitable ambiguity of truth.

Truth may be elusive, but it is not fragile: it survives the battle of disagreements that it attracts. Truths are like dark matter, exerting an inexorable gravitational pull that we can witness, even though the truth itself remains forever hidden. If we wish to recover our openness to unveiling these intangible truths, all we need is our willingness to talk to one another, to disagree, to debate. That alone has the power to restore scientific discourse, and perhaps to get us beyond this horrific disaster we have recklessly enacted together in a deadly convergence of cultivated fear and misguided ignorance. This restoration of the global public square requires open data, and with it the power to place all discourse beyond the reach of any individual, any corporation, or any government to silence.

The opening image is The Eclipse by Alma Thomas, which I found at the website for the Smithsonian, here. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Power and Scale

Since World War II, the cultural battle of ideologies has been pivoting around 'capitalism' as one of its axis. Even when Islamism is used as a foil (instead of the usual villain, communism), the ideals that square up against it are aligned with the concept of 'capitalism' as a kind of liberty rooted in the freedom of the marketplace. But even if we value the notion of uninhibited commerce, we can no longer pretend that capitalism, communism, or anything else of this kind is the shape of an ethic we can legitimately align with liberty. Those of us who still care about human freedom must think anew about what it is that we could reasonably hold as a shared ideal.

To understand how the situation has swung out of control, we first have to appreciate the remarkable achievements of the New Empire that has risen up to replace the Old Republic of human rights. But to bring this into focus, we need to think around the problem, to see what is hidden by the immense shadow that it casts upon our thought. A comparison with the historical 'dark ages' is not too great a stretch. These were not, as first thought, a period where there was no cultural development or exchange, but they were certainly a period during which maintenance of doctrines in a top-down fashion placed a limit upon thought and knowledge. It was not by accident that the 'dark ages' were followed by 'the Enlightenment'. Now that the light from this era dims, we face, as Alastair MacIntyre already warned us back in 1984, a "new dark ages" where the barbarians "have already been governing us for quite some time."

Since the nonsense descended upon us, I have spent more time than usual exchanging missives with US libertarians, which is to say, people who believe in personal liberty and also have great faith in the free market. There is a package of beliefs here, a non-religion that is not my own but which I respect. The assumption, not without justification, is that when we are permitted to trade our goods and services freely, the psychology of value works to bring about efficiencies in certain aspects of human life. To put this another way, those companies that deliver goods and services effectively triumph in the marketplace precisely because they act efficiently. Libertarians of such ilk are generally against the intervention of the government in matters of this kind for the logical reason that such meddling disrupts the order of the marketplace, which they contend works to bring about efficient delivery of goods and services. I actually do not disagree with them on this point, but I am perhaps too acutely aware that it is merely an ideal.

We need ideals, we need ethics, because without them we fall swiftly into evil, which is to say, causing harm and excusing ourselves of doing so (or causing harm and refusing to acknowledge that we have done so). But every ideal we adopt, every package of beliefs we take on, always also deceives us, because it comes with a blind spot that the very framework of our chosen ideal makes harder to see. For the libertarians, one way of seeing this blind spot is in the way that they conceive 'communism' (and by extension 'socialism'). To a US libertarian, socialism/communism refers to the administering of any service via the State rather than via the free market. By and large, this is not quite what these terms mean to Europeans.

Certainly, there are many on the old political left that this faith in State-services would fit, and this is especially so in the US. Completely missed here, however, is the solidarity of the workers that used to be the key ideal in British left politics before the Labour party betrayed its roots and swore allegiance to the New Empire. That there is a distortion of perception wrapped up in this understanding can be seen in the way that the US libertarians like to say that Italian fascism was a left-wing political movement. It wasn't. But neither was it a right-wing movement. It was a movement against Communism that acquired support from both the left and the right. Indeed, left-leaning radicals in Europe often supported Italian fascism if they were not convinced by Communism. This doesn't alter the nationalistic thrust of fascism, which the left simply cannot associate with itself, since it clings to an understanding of the universal genderless human that once underpinned our commitments to human rights but that has now been severed from them.

So this libertarian ideal sees the intervention of the government as harmful and the action of the free market as good. But this framework misses the enormous problem with the ideal of unencumbered trade - one which is well-known and not in question: those that successfully build enough resources through trade will form monopolies, and these inevitably disrupt the free market by virtue of the power they have thus acquired. I still do not quite understand what the libertarian's retort is in respect of monopolies, because surely you cannot complain about government intervention in the market yet turn to the government to break up monopolies!

It seems unavoidable that the only power structure with the influence to break up monopolies is the State, but the libertarian does not want the State to possess any power over the market. Do such libertarians believe that, in the imaginary ideal of free trade, people would bring down monopolies of their own accord because they would clearly see the problems they cause...? The trouble with this understanding is that nothing of the kind has ever happened. Monopolies enjoy such advantages of efficiency that the end users frequently are delighted by it - just ask those who without qualms or scruples use the services provided by Google, Meta, or Amazon, or for that matter Disney, not to mention Pfizer. Such people are delighted with what these monopolies, near-monopolies, or (in the case of pharmaceuticals) cartels deliver them. Why would they object...?

When we look at the incredible power that these transnational corporations possess, we can also see the enormous difficulty that any State has in applying power against them. The power the megacorporations possess exceeds that of most nations, not only because of the scale of the money that flows through them, but also because the sheer size of their network allows them to wield enormous influence upon the State itself. The US has tax revenues of $3.8 trillion, which is more than Amazon, Google, Meta, Pfizer, and Disney put together (about $1.04 trillion collectively). But those corporate billions not only make for enormous tax revenue the State is strongly motivated to defend, the transnationals can also buy substantial influence in Washington through political donations. In the case of the United States, where all of these companies are registered, this ultimately means the State is more interested in serving these organisations than anything else, especially while the citizens are satisfied with the services these near-monopolies and trade cartels are delivering. This is especially problematic when this allows the harms caused by these organisations to be quietly concealed.

Support for 'capitalism' means too many different things to really describe anything worth defending or opposing any more, it is an artefact of a time that has passed. To the US libertarians, 'capitalism' means supporting a free market that has not existed for quite some time now. To supporters of US corporations, 'capitalism' means something very different indeed. And either way, putting up 'communism' or 'socialism' as an opposite pole conceals the authentic political and social risks that are being faced by accepting this new power bloc. The Old Republic of human rights was not brought down by a sudden re-emergence of communism as a major international force any more than the delivery of so-called 'socialised medicine' in the Scandinavian nations excluded them from falling in line with the pharmaceutical cartels up until the Summer of this year.

For what remains of the radicals and activists, all this talk of the power of the corporations (capitalism) or the power of the state (socialism) is a distraction from what has truly destroyed the old world order and taken charge of a new one, essentially unnoticed. For it is the power that comes with scale that has triumphed, and upon which the New Empire rests. Yes, the United States operates on a global scale, and yes so does China and, to a lesser extent, the European Union, and even Russia, who everyone has their knickers in a twist over right now. But Amazon, Google, Meta, Pfizer, and Disney (in that order) equally operate on a global scale, and with greater power and influence, and each has billions of users in their networks. Even China only has a population of one and a half billion.

In The Virtuous Cyborg, I drew attention to the blurring of the lines between nations and corporations because the sheer scale of the circumstances relating to the transnationals was now coming to dwarf that of nations. It is not hard to appreciate that this increase in scale has come with a commensurate increase in power, but what it has not come with is an increase in understanding. Indeed, in The Virtuous Cyborg I suggested that "nothing is in control, least of all humanity..." precisely because power now outstrips understanding by orders of magnitude. It is far easier to build power than knowledge, since while the sciences and other methods of knowledge-production can benefit from the network effects of scale, this is only true when free debate operates within them. The moment discourse is prevented, there are no sciences as such, only power and control over research agendas. If the power grows first, the knowledge is all too easily brought under distortive control.

Whether our ideals revolve around the free market or something else entirely, we may finally have reached a point where we have to ask whether continuing to permit these transnational organisations to operate on the vast scales they have attained isn't an invitation to cause inevitable and tremendous harm. It is all but impossible to possess the power that comes with this degree of scale without falling prey to evil (causing harm) because power grows with scale but understanding need not, and certainly will not when those with power interrupt the discourse required to carefully construct understanding. Indeed, this is a possible diagnosis of the global tragedy that we just lived through.

Yet even if we reached this conclusion, what could we then do about it...? If these transnational corporations already have the greatest degree of influence over the largest of the nation states, who or what could possibly bring them to account now? The only possible answer is to forge new ideals that act against the power of scale, for without an ethic of this kind, no counterweight is possible, and the New Empire's reign will inexorably become absolute. This is one of the greatest challenges that faces those of us who are already aware that a new dark ages might already be upon us.

The opening image is Daydream Nightmares, which has been attributed to Martin Cervantez, but does not appear at his artist website for some reason. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Meritocracy vs Equitocracy

Democracy is something more than one person, one vote. It is perfectly possible to reign tyrannically and still grant a vote to individuals, as many a dictatorship has shown. Democracy used to mean that we all shared equal rights, but the Old Republic has fallen, and we cannot get back to it from where we are. Still, we ought to strive to understand why it failed. One key reason the era of human rights ended was the emergence of a new political tactic for claiming 'emergency powers' as a means of usurping democratic rule. This boondoggle can make any nation into an overnight tyranny, simply by claiming that experts are certain that extreme measures must be deployed. Thus expert power is antithetical to democracy, when it is understood as the equality of citizens. Yet expert advice is vital to democratic life. How do we resolve this contradiction...?

Experts are a form of elite, those that are appointed their status through academic achievement rather than by birth. It may be worth noting that when these intellectual elites first appeared, in the preceding centuries, every one of them was born into elite status. Nowadays, it is no longer permitted that we think like the Victorians did about the superiority of the 'gentleman' - a theme that Charles Dickens revolted against again and again in his novels. We are supposed to know today that noble birth doesn't automatically make us into better people. Yet this same mythology lives on, it has just been recast as meritocracy. Today, those born into money and status routinely ignore the tremendous luck involved in their circumstances in just the same way that the Victorian gentlemen salved their consciences and stoked their egos with their own arrogance. Believing in meritocracy means that power, status, and wealth necessarily flow to the worthy. Therefore the fact that I have power, status, and wealth becomes the evidence of my worthiness.

Against this facile implementation of the ideal of meritocracy, the left-leaning academic community have quietly revolted in disgust. The ivory tower crowd have managed to come up with a supposedly brilliant new alternative: equity. Correctly recognising that meritocracy ignores the tremendous disparity in starting circumstances, this new ideal of equity sets about to attain equality of outcomes. No longer will people be judged on their merits, now it is just a matter of determining who is disadvantaged and giving them more advantages, a kind of sports day handicapping system based upon... well, our whimsical perceptions of disadvantage as far as I can tell. This new equitocracy is directly opposed to meritocracy although, ironically, both are supported by elites, albeit of different political flavours. Pragmatically, equitocratic rule does not undermine the power already possessed by elites, it merely chooses an arbitrary subset of the non-elites in the echelons below to bestow advantages .

Yet regardless of which form of appointment we prefer (merit or equity), we still leave open the path to expert power. It seems we would much rather accede to our own stupidity than work together to overcome it. This brings us back to the themes of last week's discussion of equal stupidity. We are all, I claim, equally stupid, because while we each will (which is to say, commit) to learning various different skills, every individual has numerous blind spots that are best defended against by pooling our intelligence. What's more, our desires distract us... even where we are skilled, the things that we want can disturb our good judgement. All the more important, therefore, that we do not rely on individual experts to make important decisions but have mechanisms for pooling our intelligence, such as open scientific discourse.

Neither appointing expert power on the basis of merit or appointing it on the basis of equity is anywhere near enough to defend against our equal stupidity. For all that equitocracy is opposed to meritocracy, it is far from obvious that it is an improvement upon it - and this will either sound obvious or blasphemous, depending upon where your political desires have been drawn. Diversity hires may seem like a way of 'helping' minorities, but if everyone knows that experts are appointed for the identity boxes they check rather than their expertise, it undermines trust in those experts and exacerbates existing prejudices ("they were only hired because they ticked such-and-such a box"). What a ludicrous mistake to make!

Unavoidably, both meritocracy and equitocracy are equally stupid, and for the same reason: people have stacked their own stupid on top of people with the same stupid, instead of being open to criticism from those with a different stupid to contribute. Somewhere between the elite tautology of meritocracy and the reshuffled Marxism of equitocracy lies a way of living together that everybody might plausibly will. But instead of working out what it is, we have decided we would rather just let our political desires draw us into the lazy pathways of oh-so-many painfully stupid political conflicts. Again.

This tyranny of experts that has reigned since the Enlightenment is certainly empowered by meritocracy but it is also inevitably implied by equitocracy too. After all, how can equitocracy function if not by having experts determine the disadvantages in order to distribute the advantages...? Yet expertise is a funny thing. Success in the meritocracy, as equitocrats know all too well, is not wholly dependent upon skill, and is often far more influenced by social position ("it's not what you know, it's who you know"). Conversely, success in the equitocracy, as meritocrats know all too well, is also not wholly dependent upon skill, and is often far more dependent upon being something other than white, male, or straight ("it's not what you know, it's the identity boxes you tick"). So we have no good reason at all to trust that any experts are adequate to the tasks assigned to them these days - and every reason to expect that their equal stupidity will manifest, since there is nothing set up as an adequate counterweight to expert power.

The inevitable, the unavoidable truth that this leads to is that censorship is incitement to stupidity. For whenever we appoint experts to adjudicate and do not allow for the debate to determine the wisdom and intelligence of what is proposed, we are aligning our equal stupidity to create dangerous blind spots. Political factionalism is the engine of staggering ignorance that has led us to this bizarre future world where our technology is unthinkably advanced and our problem-solving is asinine. Or, as Einstein put it: "Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem to characterize our age." The strongest defence against our equal stupidity would be to pool our equality of intelligence together. Why don't we want that...?

I know the objections this will rear up. "But such-and-such a person believes such-and-such!" Yes, but so what...? Open debate is the greatest crucible for distinguishing desire from will, for overcoming equal stupidity, and for benefiting from the equality of our intelligence. Do you really think open debate will lead to public health policy being dictated by those who believe viruses don't exist, or maps being drafted by flat earthers, or history being written by Young Earth Creationists...? Or is it more likely that being able to freely hold such debates might in fact allow us to pool our equality of intelligence to overcome those ways in which we are all equally stupid.

The truth that has remained hidden from us for so long is that reasonable objections take many forms, and it does not require an expert to raise them. If a particular course of action bankrupts a great many small businesses and transfers money to large corporations, is it not wise that a democratic society should listen to the objections of those running those small business...? And this is especially so if those who have been granted expert power are in fact swayed in their desires by the incitements of wealth that inevitably accumulates around the large corporations. This seems to me to be one of two ways of explaining the abject failure of the CDC and FDA in the last two years, the other being that its experts were distracted from open scientific discourse by their mere political desires. Most likely, it was both.

If there is a way to combine meritocracy and equitocracy, it must begin by tempering the excesses of expert power with the open debate that is the lifeblood of authentic democracy. Social media might provide an ideal forum for doing so, if only we could just stop letting 'experts' determine what is or isn't permitted to be spoken. The law already gives us the boundary condition we need - incitement to violence. Everything else is intellectual gerrymandering, a grotesque opportunity for those who happen to express their equal stupidity identically to destroy our collective intelligence, both scientific and otherwise. The moment we grant anyone the covert expert power to adjudicate what must not be said, we abandon democratic ideals. Censorship cannot empower expert knowledge, it merely inflates the risks inherent in our all-too-human stupidity.

We ought to take from meritocracy the idea of expert advisors requiring suitable expertise rather than meeting arbitrary identity checkboxes. But we ought to take from equitocracy the vital necessity of keeping the pathways to success open to everyone, regardless of their circumstances. Hiring the same kind of people increases the risk of stacking up the same kinds of stupid, while authentic diversity enhances our collective intelligence. Besides, changing how experts are appointed merely shifts whose power matters, it does not solve any significant problem we are facing. What is required instead is an equality of objection, the freedom to speak out against whatever form of stupidity is being allowed to manifest. It is time that we demand again our once-sacred right of free speech from each and every space of discourse, for only free and open debate can truly defend against the manifest dangers of our equal stupidity.

The opening image Cell No.7 by Angela Canada-Hopkins, which I found here. As ever, no copyright infringement is intended and I will take the image down if asked.

Improperganda

High risk of cognitive dissonance.

If I were to allege that a particular article of news was propaganda, it would not cause even the faintest stir. For it has come to be accepted by everyone that the nature of all reporting is to advance a political agenda in one way or another - for instance, to produce sympathy for refugees by telling a story from their own wretched perspective, or to encourage antipathy for 'migrants' by detailing their attempts to enter a nation illegally. But if I was to allege that a news article in support of vaccines was propaganda, it would be treated as a scandal about me that I would say such a thing. Why should this be...?

There is perhaps no-one left who believes that the news media is in the business of establishing the truth. It is therefore no surprise that we choose a source of news that conforms to our political commitments - only when we are looking at the news for those others that are not like us does the news becomes filthy propaganda. Our own news is appropriate and proportionate, it is, shall we say, properganda.

What, then, is the point in complaining about the behaviour of reporters if all we are doing is assessing whether the stories align with our prior beliefs...? Intuitively, we should like there to be some criticism we can bring to bear against those writing the news that cuts deeper than the merely trivial assessment of whether they are in line with (or opposed to) our politics. Clearly, these kinds of judgements are external to the art of reporting, such as it is. In other words, we feel that there must be some way that something can be judged as improperganda.

However, in order for this accusation to bear fruit, it cannot simply be that the opposing political positions produce improperganda and our political allies write properganda. This would be a vacuous way of making an assessment, since it would merely be reiterating our political judgements. It follows, therefore, that if there is such a thing as improperganda, it must be something that our own journalists can be found guilty of. Thus our very desire to impugn the media of the opposing camps must be set aside if we are to establish any viable criteria by which the delivery of news can be judged proper or improper.

What constitutes improperganda, then, must be either internal to the logic of the story told, or entail a comparison between the story and the available facts that exceeds anything that can be made to fit by creative interpretation. Improperganda must mark a flaw in the story that breaks its purpose - for if the tale being told was fit for its intended purpose, it would then be suitable to be called properganda. We can say that what constitutes improperganda is akin to a flaw in a gem. However we cut or polish it, that imperfection cannot be removed or hidden. Only if the uncut gem was without flaw can we finish up with a perfect jewel. Likewise, to end up with properganda, we must have raw material without a flaw, to which no imperfections are added by the writing.

Now we are getting somewhere! And it leads also to a distinction that might be made between a journalist, who exercises an art and a craft through their writing, and a mere reporter, who reiterates claims they have heard, and is largely just a paid gossip. The journalist writes about people, while the reporter presumes to be merely writing facts - which means that the journalist, in shaping the story, can produce properganda by finding how their political commitments are reflected in the events being conveyed, or improperganda when they misrepresent the events beyond plausibility.

The reporter on the other hand produces properganda solely if they somehow manage to get all the facts correct. This is rather beyond their control on most topics, since the reporter has little knowledge of their own on which to judge what they are repeating. Thus a great deal of reporting is likely to end up as improperganda. There is also the 'fact checker', which is a kind of reporter who exploits the widespread decline of trust in the news in order to masquerade as an authoritative expert. Specialising in counter-propaganda, 'fact checkers' redirect both proper and improperganda according to the political dictates of their paymasters. This is a whole new low for the news media - their very name is improperganda, for it implies an impartiality that is the exact opposite of their true motivation.

Whenever news providers make political commitments on matters of fact (whether as reporters or as 'fact checkers'), it leads to trouble. It is particularly troubling when such pledges are made behind closed doors, but even when they are made in public they can be extremely dangerous. Thus when Google, the BBC, Reuters, the Associated Press and so forth formed the Trusted News Initiative and vowed to prevent 'misinformation' about vaccination circulating, how could they possibly hope that they could then remain factual in covering this topic...? In choosing to take solely one possible line of interpretation in advance ('every negative thing spoken about vaccines is necessarily misinformation'), this reckless censorship alliance could only grossly increase their risk of circulating vaccine improperganda.

Of course, there's plenty of improperganda to go around when it comes to vaccination! For instance, you will find people pathologically committed to conspiratorial tales about how the World Economic Forum contrived to purposefully unleash a killer drug in order to intentionally depopulate the world. As much as it amuses me to think of the one-percenter club as the villains in a second-rate Bond movie, such tales strain credulity. But then, the deployment of dubious computer models in a widely parroted Bill Gates-funded paper that claims that millions of lives have been saved by COVID-19 vaccinations is an equally preposterous example of improperganda. It might be decades before any plausible scientific conclusion can be reached about how many lives were saved by these medical treatments - and at this point, we still cannot rule out the possibility that this was not at all what actually happened...

The entire situation is as embarrassing as it is tragic, and even without the full facts at our disposal the news media's behaviour with regard to the COVID-19 debacle has been unforgivably reckless. It could never have been sensible to assume an equivalence between those twentieth century vaccines that underwent ten years of rigorous testing before being widely deployed, and these newer treatments that were enthusiastically forced onto everyone despite zero years of data and no long-term control group. It was equally foolhardy to cheerlead national lockdowns on the basis of little more than the blind hope they would help rather than causing even greater harms, as many people tried to warn us at the time.

What slips between the cracks of the media's willingness to report seems to become more and more alarming with every passing day. There is no doubt that Pfizer conducted fraud in its vaccine trials, for instance - not only did the British Medical Journal break this story in November 2021, but Pfizer bizarrely admitted to fraud in an attempt to get an embarrassing whistleblower case thrown out of court! Not entirely surprising given that this is the company that was forced to pay out the largest ever fine for fraudulent behaviour ($2.3 billion)... But it's not just the pharmaceutical companies who are riding roughshod over adequate safety procedures - as Vinay Prasad accuses, the fact that the FDA and CDC "have to rely on a Thailand preprint for the first prospective study of cardiac biomarkers is mind-boggling negligence." According to independent media reports, the FDA and the CDC are now in disarray. One senior FDA official was quoted as saying: "It's like a horror movie I'm being forced to watch and I can't close my eyes... people are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything." Likewise, a CDC scientist was quoted as saying "I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I'm embarrassed." Yet still, the mainstream reporters say nothing.

The most generous interpretation of the news media's behaviour in this regard is that they believe they are acting in everyone's best interests. Perhaps they opted not to report upon the ever-growing evidence of problems with both the safety and the efficacy of Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA-based treatments for fear of reducing people's trust in traditional vaccines or (equivalently) out of a dogged refusal to lend support to those demoniacal 'anti-vaxxer' scapegoats. It is a bit late for that, though, since the lockdowns these reporters previously championed have already significantly undermined childhood vaccinations - a colossal blunder for which our governments and media are both unapologetic and unrepentant. We seem to have a choice between understanding this refusal to report on these topics either as a bizarre form of principled censorship, or else as an improperganda of silence... and neither option is particularly encouraging. 

This disaster has made billions of dollars for Pfizer, aided and abetted by the CDC, the FDA, and an increasingly compromised WHO. And still, the majority of news media remain staunchly unwilling to undermine their messianic vaccine improperganda by calling anyone to account for everything that has gone so disastrously wrong. It now seems unavoidable that whether by reckless lockdown or fraudulently-justified injections, a disturbing number of people tragically damaged their own health after being promised with unwarranted certainty that they were helping to save lives. Until journalists are able to tell these forbidden stories and uncover the truth of what has happened, the news media are complicit in something far, far worse than mere improperganda.

An Abundance of Useful Idiots

May contain traces of snark.

The accusation that someone is a 'useful idiot' is one we deploy against our political opponents. As a result, we miss all the ways that we ourselves are the most useful of idiots - because in seeing stupidity always in others and never in ourselves, we are easily manipulated for agendas we simply refuse to recognise.

Pick a political topic, find a useful idiot on both sides. Immigration? Support open borders to provide cheap labour for industrialists, or tighten border controls to provide lucrative business for organised crime and security contractors. Taxation? Support high taxes to give more money for government to squander on crony-staffed NGOs, or support low taxes to help millionaires avoid paying their share of infrastructure overheads. Abortion? Provide an effortless power base to red-team politicians who can do what they like because your support is baked-in, or do the same for the blue team on the other side - either way, once you are polarised on this topic, you are politically neutered because this issue on its own ensures your vote.

It is always those terrible others who are the useful idiots. We are incapable of seeing ourselves this way, for we are oh-so-good and oh-so-smart. We know climate change is the big environmental issue, so we make the awesome sacrifice of paying extra for an electric car that will somehow reduce carbon dioxide emissions even though the electricity that it runs on comes primarily from power plants that emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Best not to look into the environmental impact of lithium mining for the batteries used either, nor at the road safety implications of vehicles that offer far swifter acceleration, but are largely invisible to blind people.

And don't get me started on the useful idiots on either side of vaccination... Are you one of those extremely useful idiots who have helped pharmaceutical companies cut safety testing down from ten years of openly available data to 'we promise it works'...? Or one of the even more useful idiots who prevent medical professionals raising the alarm by insisting upon grand conspiracies about depopulation and mind control because you just couldn't resist grandiose mediocrity...? A more perfect example of bilateral idiocy serving the needs of the rich and powerful there may never have been. If it was revealed tomorrow that Pfizer had invented the term 'anti-vaxxer' as a marketing ploy I would scarcely raise an eyebrow.

The nature of political partisanship is that some proportion of the wealthy and powerful stand to benefit from any issue in the form you are likely to encounter it. This subtle qualification is critical, as there are indeed issues that are not a source of bilateral idiocy. Proposals for paying owners of forest lands fees for environmental services, as happens in Puerto Rico, is unlikely to appear in the mainstream media. Neither will coverage of road accidents, despite these killing 1.3 million people globally every year, many of them children. No matter what the benefits in terms of saving lives or reducing environmental impact, stories that hurt large financial interests (e.g. that make the automotive industry look bad) will simply not get covered. Because the news media know which side their bread is buttered, and its not you providing their bread or their butter.

Unless you support politically marginal topics or belong to an inconsequential faction like the remaining Marxists, its a virtual certainty that you are a useful idiot. Your strongly held political convictions have been fed to you by media lackeys who like you are in mindless thrall to the big commercial powers - whether business, government, or (as is increasingly the case) both together. And the beauty, the horror, of this scheme is that once you are successfully triggered by any one of these fault lines, you are effectively neutralised as a participant in any genuine kind of democracy or politics, because your vote has been captured.

Authentic political existence is a difficult conversation about how we shall live together. The moment you accept instead the temptation to channel your hate and outrage as one of these pre-packaged useful idiocies, you are merely propping up the powers that be. Tragically, it is solely those who can afford the immense cost of sponsoring the news who determine the allowable kinds of idiots. All we get to do is decide which kind of stupid we want to become.