An "offensive" editorial

[I received the following email from Sunsara Taylor's assistant and tour coordinator, Joan Hirsch]

Here's the OpEd piece that Washington Square News editor called "offensive" and wouldn't publish. Spread it everywhere:

Anti-Abortion Ad has No Place in College Sports or National Television

This weekend, CBS will air an anti-abortion ad from Focus on the Family featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam Tebow, during the Superbowl.

This is in spite of CBS's long-standing policy to reject “advocacy.” Last year they rejected an ad welcoming gays and lesbians into the United Church of Christ.

Tim and Pam Tebow's story is that during her pregnancy with him, her doctor suggested she consider abortion due to possible health risks. Her claim to fame is that she refused to even consider abortion and ended up with a healthy baby who grew up to be a huge college football star.

But, as Joy Behar pointed out on The View, Tim Tebow could just as easily could have grown up to be a rapist pedophile.

On a deeper level, there's no inherent value in risking one's life for a pregnancy. Fetuses are not people. They have the potential to become people, but until they are born, they are a subordinate part of a woman's body. If she decides to terminate that pregnancy, for whatever reason, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If a woman does have a child and it grows up to do great things, that doesn't validate her any more than if it does terrible things that means she has failed.

The only framework in which it makes sense to celebrate a woman for risking her life to have a child is if you are stuck in the Dark Ages. You know, back in the day when a woman's worth was reducible to the “quality” of children she bore to her husband and master.

Not surprisingly, that is exactly the framework that Tim and Pam Tebow and Focus on the Family are in. They are Biblical literalists. That means they believe it is a woman's job to make babies and obey men. If you don't believe us, read it in the Bible. In 1 Timothy 2:13-16 that “god” explains the curse put on women for “deceiving” Adam in the “Garden of Eden” and how we can only be saved if we bear children.

This is why Focus on the Family is not only against abortion, they are against birth control! Further, they think being gay is an abomination and they believe the earth is only 6000 years old.

The problem is not just that CBS decided to take this ad and are denying other ads, although that is hypocritical. The problem is that this particular view of women has no place in any decent society. It doesn't belong in college football, it doesn't belong on the SuperBowl, it doesn't belong in politics, it doesn't belong in this millennium.

Women are not breeders. We are not lesser beings. We are not objects created for the sexual pleasure of men. We are human beings, capable of participating fully and equally in every realm of human endeavor. It is time that we be portrayed as such.

Janai Garfinkel
NYU Graduate 2000

Sunsara Taylor will be speaking about the liberation of women at NYU Cantor Film Center on February 23rd.

Don't miss the Sunsara Taylor YouTube video exposing the Christian fascist lunacy behind Tim Tebow and Focus on the Family.

A Declaration: For Women's Liberation and the Emancipation of All Humanity

Sociological and political truth

In sociology, politics, economics and other related areas, there are three kinds of truths.

Scientific truths are "objectively" true, i.e. true regardless of our preferences and the specific ideas that happen to be in our individual minds. We can further subdivide (or place on a continuum) scientific into general or universal truths, more or less "deep" principles that govern all or most social phenomena, and accidental or historical truths, all the millions of accidents of history that have become embedded in our social and political constructions. This subdivision closely corresponds to what we know about biological evolution: there are deep truths that govern all of biological evolution, and there are accidental truths about what variations did or did not arise, and which of those variations did or did not happen to survive selection pressures.

Preferential truths are precisely those preferences that do in fact exist in our individual minds. It appears to be a scientific truth that human beings primarily have preferences and act as best we can to fulfill those preferences. The specific preferences we actually have are themselves the result of scientific truths, general and accidental. (Strictly speaking, preferential truths are scientific truths: facts about the physical world with a causal history composed of general, universal and accidental truths. I single them out because they are especially important truths to human beings.)

While preferences and their distribution are facts, they are time-dependent facts: they change over time in the same sense that physical reality changes over time. It's a fact that my "bad kitty" coffee cup (right now) is empty and in the kitchen cabinet; it may be a fact (tomorrow) that it's full of coffee and on the desk in my office. Likewise preferences and their distribution can change over time: all the preferences that we have today almost certainly will not be all the preferences we have tomorrow.

Normative truths are truths about what preferences and social organizations we should have. As it turns out, there are no normative truths substantively distinct from either scientific truths or preferential truths.

For example: in a sense we "shouldn't" have the widespread desire to commit suicide before reproducing. But it's a scientific truth that such a desire (or the biological infrastructure that enables or promotes such a desire) cannot become prevalent: nature will inevitably select against this sort of desire. To the extent that we want to talk about normative truths as being substantively distinct from scientific truths, we could not call this truth specifically normative.*

*Of course, one might want to just call "normative" a synonym for "scientific". There's a valid (albeit silly) argument about the nature of God which says that God has actually actualized His own normative beliefs as the physical laws of the universe. If an extant omnipotent being really did have preferences, it would seem reasonable to conclude those preferences would be universal and immutable and our compliance ineluctable, precisely the character we observe of fundamental physical law. The idea that a God would have an actual preference and create a world where that preference could be frustrated or unfulfilled is arrant nonsense: a preference that one does not fulfill when it is possible to do so is no preference at all, and an omnipotent being cannot by definition actually have a preference it is logically impossible to fulfill.

If normative truths really were substantively distinct from scientific truths, we could not know any normative truth. We obviously cannot use the scientific method: scientific truths are precisely all and only those truths known by the scientific method; any normative truth we could know about the scientific method would be ipso facto not substantively distinct from a scientific truth. Furthermore, a scientific theory is known to be true only because observation never contradicts the the theory. Normative statements, however, are comparative: they compare what we do actually observe (or theories that scientifically proven true by observation) between "better" and "worse".

But "better" and "worse" are preferences. To be distinct from preferential truths (i.e. truths about the preferences we actually have) a normative truth must be true even if our preferences were globally contrary (i.e. every human being who has or will ever actually existed). Otherwise, it's a preferential truth or a scientific truth about the distribution of preferences.

Human beings are nothing but bundles of preferences (which are brute facts) and scientific beliefs, i.e. beliefs about the objective physical world (including self-referential scientific beliefs about our own and other people's preferences, their distribution and causal history) we use to fulfill those preferences.

I have come to the conclusion that almost all philosophy is bullshit because it appears that the overriding "mission" of philosophy is to establish normative truths as substantively distinct from scientific or preferential truths. As such it is doomed to creating nothing but ever more elaborate delusion, because there is no such thing as a normative truth. I say almost all because every now and then a philosopher comes along who learns how to think more effectively and efficiently; to do so they must first abandon the philosophical mission of establishing normative truths.

Almost all political philosophy, therefore, is bullshit. Anarchism, communism, socialism, capitalism, Libertarianism: all bullshit. These political philosophies all are about the preferences and social organizations we "should" have. Almost all philosophy (including and especially political philosophy) is the attempt to justify the philosopher's individual preferences as general or universal scientific truths. But there are only specific brute facts about what we presently want, the knowledge of reality about how world works, and the actions we take to change the physical world to get what we want. There are only the preferences we do actually have, and how we can cooperate or work independently to best fulfill those preferences.

What almost all philosophers do (especially political philosophers) is an inversion: Thus-and-such is what I prefer, scientific theories about the world that would make what I prefer predominant are therefore true. Most political philosophers justifying the existing social order (such as Aristotle) conclude that because their preferences are indeed predominant that the scientific theories about the world that would make those preferences always predominate must therefore be true. Most political philosophers criticizing the social order still believe the scientific theories are true that would make their preferences predominate; the reason that those preferences don't predominate is that most people are deeply deluded about the scientific truth and are acting irrationally.

(Of course, most people are indeed deeply deluded about scientific truth and do act irrationally, which tends to help the prima facie plausibility of every critical political philosophy. And of course no philosopher of any stripe would make his fallacy so transparent: skill in philosophy typically consists of obfuscating and concealing one's fallacious reasoning.)

Tom Tomorrow explains it all

Deep Undercover
The Plot Thickens!

The concentration and distribution of capital

One disadvantage of being an autodidact is that I tend to assume or take for granted ideas that other people don't, or I take things for granted in different ways than others. It's undeniable that formal education provides a much more uniform set of assumptions, which, even if one is questioning those assumptions, makes communication much easier. At this point in my life, however, autodidacticism is not a choice, and formal education is not at all practically feasible.

One element where I seem to have idiosyncratic assumptions that seem to be confusing my readers is my statement that capital must be concentrated to be efficient. I'm grateful to db0 for pointing me to Kevin A. Carson's Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective. I've just started the book (it looks like an almost 700-page slog; Carson is a wordy bastard who takes forever to get to the point), but just reading the first chapter has clarified my thinking and revealed some of my own unspoken, idiosyncratic assumptions.

It appears that it's an actual position on both the "left" and "right" that the maximal concentration of capital is good in and of itself, or is by itself a reliable indicator of the efficient use of capital. (Presumably there's a similar actual position regarding the maximal distribution of capital.) More concentration is in general always better than less concentration, and the only thing keeping us from One Big Corporation or One Big Government Bureaucracy, the most theoretically efficient use of capital, is our temporary and correctable administrative incompetence. This isn't my position, and my native cynicism should (but didn't) render me unsurprised that any rational person in the 21st century would hold such a moronic position.

It's completely my fault for not recognizing this trope in political economics, and completely my fault for not explaining my position in more detail. I'm pretty Zen and guilt-free about my faults, though, especially faults unavoidable as an autodidact; I do my best correct them as I find them, and move on.

When I say "capital must be concentrated", I do not mean that capital must or should be maximally concentrated, or concentrated as much as possible given other constraints, such as administrative competence. I mean, rather, that maximal distribution* is in all cases sub-optimal, and that some degree of concentration will always be better than no concentration at all. It seems, however, that even given perfect administrative competence, maximal concentration is also obviously sub-optimal.

*Where each individual literally owns and controls 1/6,000,000,000th of the world's physical and/or financial capital.

Furthermore, I definitely think it's a good idea on general principles, when and if it's physically possible, to distribute capital widely and concentrate it voluntarily. I would rather we go to the moon because a bunch of people want to, and they voluntarily pool their own capital to build a rocket, than because John F. Kennedy got into a pissing match with Nikita Khrushchev and appropriated the capital involuntarily through taxation in a capitalist state. On the other hand, I'm pleased we did in fact go to the moon, regardless of how we got there.

The present capitalist system, because it does indeed concentrate capital for its own sake (since an individual's personal ownership of finance capital is his relative standing in the capitalist class), cannot bring us to the point where capital can be distributed widely and concentrated voluntarily. All it can do is continue to involuntarily concentrate capital, until over-concentration finally brings down the United States, Western civilization, or all life on Earth.

My position as a communist is that we are not yet at the point where it's physically possible to perfectly distribute capital. We must presently concentrate capital to some degree to survive, and this concentration ipso facto cannot be voluntary; our only choice presently is how to involuntarily concentrate our capital.

As bad as capitalism is therefore, we cannot honestly say it is bad just because it concentrates capital; we cannot honestly say the remedy is to just distribute capital willy-nilly. We are forced today, rather, if all six billion people on the Earth are to survive and prosper, to find a different way to involuntarily concentrate our capital more efficiently, for our mutual benefit, and in such a way that we can move towards a wider distribution and ownership of capital.

The critique of anarchism

I'm not particularly interested in a specifically political critique of anarchism. I'm not trying to criticize the programme and Line of the Anarchist Central Committee*. I'm not interested in saying, "Don't follow db0! He's leading you to disaster!" I'm undertaking rather a philosophical critique of anarchism. I want to answer the philosophical question: why do we need any particular privileged social constructions at all? Why do we have to have a communist society? Why can't we just have a society of free individuals? Why can't we just let people do what they want, and trust the wisdom of the masses to do the right thing?

*A joke. The first rule of the Anarchist Central Committee is that you don't talk about the Anarchist Central Committee.**
**Another joke: this is not the Anarchist Central Committee you're looking for.

The answer is definitely not that the masses are stupid and must submit their will to the intelligence, character or wisdom of some self-described elite. The answer is not even that some people were born to submit, and some people were born to lead, and the leaders — who presently prove their value by accumulating capital — "naturally" emerge at the top. Unfortunately, both of these principles are deeply ingrained into our social consciousness, so deeply that anyone who talks about particular, specific social constructions — at least the "wrong" sort of social constructions — is seen immediately by many on the as precisely the sort of dictatorial elitist that has actually been exploiting people for millennia.

But the real answer is more subtle. First of all, our modern global society already is the result of people doing what they want. The Psychlos have not landed in their spaceships and taken over, there is no God to ordain the character of our society, and I don't think that cows and crickets are yet sufficiently well-organized to intentionally affect our politics and social organization for their own benefit. The social and political world we have today is the result of the actions of human beings, no one and nothing else. For better or for worse, this is our world. And no human beings have special magical powers; every ruling class is composed of people fundamentally just like those in the ruled class.

In a deeper sense, it appears at least scientifically plausible that human beings are nothing but sets of privileged social constructions. Asking why we need privileged social constructions is like asking why a species needs a gene pool made of DNA. Why can't organisms just grow as they please? Why should they be constrained by their genes?

It appears that we are not fundamentally "rational" beings in the sense that we know what we want, we know how the physical world works, and we "think through" the consequences of all the plausible choices and actually perform the choice that will have the most desired outcome. We are, rather, principle management and use beings: we have a set of interacting principles*, "When you see A, B, and C, do X" and meta-principles, "When principles X, Y and Z are activated, do A". Our perceptions get thrown into into the "pinball machine" of interacting principles and some preferred action emerges.

*The actual principles operative in the human mind would of course have to be considerably more complicated.

There's both a causal explanation and a good pseudo-teleological reason for having brains that work this way. Organisms and societies can build up principle management brains and specific principles by biological and social evolution, i.e. heritable variation and natural selection. Building a world-understanding and alternative-comparison machine from scratch does not appear to be evolutionarily plausible. It appears too that operating even in the very restricted "reality" of chess, whatever it is that our brains do, we do it seven or eight orders of magnitude more efficiently than a brute force search through the space of alternative possibilities. Indeed it appears that we actually perform "rational", computational thought by iteratively using a specific and relatively small set of principles that model the deep structure of reality.

Our brains seem fairly complicated, and probably encompass an enormous number of principles (millions? billions? may trillions?), built up through 500,000,000 years of biological evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of social evolution. But principles are probably combinations of elements; an individual is a combination of principles, and a society is a combination of individuals. And when we're talking about combinatorial maths, even merely astronomical* numbers are almost vanishingly small**.

*There are, for example, ~10⁸⁰ subatomic particles in the observable universe.
**There are, for example, 52! ways to order just a single standard deck of cards; 52! ~= 10⁶⁷, roughly comparable to the number of hydrogen atoms in a typical galaxy.

Therefore, the combinatorial space of possible human beings is enormously larger — larger than can be expressed using puny exponential notation — than the space of all human beings that could plausibly exist for the entire lifetime of the universe. Therefore, it is physically impossible for human beings to be whatever they want to be. We must, instead, just be who we are, who we happen to be by virtue of accidents of variation and natural and artificial selection. We can, to some extent change who we are, but we can't "hoist" ourselves from the physical necessity of being particular individuals with particular sets of principles.

Our choice, therefore, is not whether to individually and socially privilege some specific, finite set of principles, but rather which set of principles to privilege. Worse yet, there's no way of algorithmically or computationally determining which set of principles we "should" privilege; we can never even in theory know what is "best". And even worse, we can evaluate "better" and "worse" only according to the principles we happen to already have at any given time: Marx is more deeply correct than he supposed that what is to come is dependent on what has come before.

db0 and the hair across his ass

db0 seems to have new formula: take whatever I say, interpret it in the most uncharitable way possible, even to the extent of lying and taking quotations out of context, and argue absurdly that I'm some sort of totalitarian dictator in the making.

He even argues that George Orwell is an an advocate of dictatorship, possibly one of the stupidest positions I've ever heard a human being take since I stopped debating cretinists.

Fundamentally, db0 is peeved that I failed to suck his dick with sufficient vigor after he persuaded me to self-host my blog, a move that I did not find to my liking despite his heroic efforts to make the transition. He also copped an attitude in comments; since I've returned, I've decided that I have zero patience with other people's attitudes. He's apparently taken my exhortation that "if you're going to call me a fucktard, do it on your own blog" to heart, perhaps to excess.

Judging from the comments (I don't collect any hit statistics) he's sending interesting people to my blog, so I suppose I should be grateful.

Update: I'm thinking of perhaps responding to some of his "criticisms" of my work, but his reasoning is incredibly sloppy and tendentious, he seems to lack even basic intellectual integrity, and his personal animosity is obvious; I suspect that a direct response would be no more productive than a direct response to Republicans, Randians or Christians. Anarchism — at least db0's version of it — is just incoherent sputtering bullshit, without even a valid critique of capitalism, much less any kind of realistic vision for a better society.

Anarchism and voluntary cooperation

An important element of anarchism is voluntary cooperation. As with "authority", I think it's useful to examine precisely what we mean or could rationally mean by this term.

It seems clear that under modern economic circumstances, there's a substantial material benefit to cooperation. No individual can create all the material stuff she needs to live a "good life". Other people made the house I live in; other people grow the food I eat, other people built the electric generators and other people operate them to provide the electricity I use, etc. Furthermore, regardless of the infrastructure, very few of the material things we can create today can be created by just one person working alone. We have created a world full of "irreducible" complexity (which we know can evolve through the use of scaffolding).

This is, of course, an observation about present day economic realities. There's nothing in the "deep structure" of reality that logically or ineluctably requires cooperation. It seems entirely plausible that we could develop the technological and social infrastructure that would make individuals truly self-sufficient, without requiring self-sufficient individuals to live in material poverty. We do not, however, have that level of technology today.

One of the biggest ideological differences between left-wing anarchists (libertarian socialists) and right-wing "anarchists" (Randians, anarcho-capitalists, big-ell Libertarians) is how they view economic or physical necessity. Right-wing anarchists see economic necessity as being inherently non-coercive; and if someone through some circumstances can leverage or employ economic necessity to interfere with the will of another individual, they are still not "coercing" that individual. Left-wing anarchists see economic necessity as genuinely coercive, at least in some sense.

I agree with the left-wing anarchists: economic necessity is coercive, and someone who leverages economic necessity is himself coercing others. "Work for me or starve" is just as coercive as, "Work for me or I'll kill you." I disagree with left-wing anarchists, though, in that I see economic coercion as being a part of present-day physical reality; economic coercion is not a purely social construction. Our social constructions do not establish but rather manage and distribute (or concentrate) coercion by economic necessity.

Just as we don't have true freedom of religion unless we have the freedom to adhere to no religion at all, we don't have voluntary cooperation unless we have the freedom to not cooperate at all. And we must have the freedom not just to survive, but to live a "good" life without any social cooperation at all. But noncooperation is simply not physically possible today, and without the physical possibility of noncooperation, we cannot have voluntary cooperation. We're just arguing over what kind of involuntary cooperation we want.

As I see it, the social constructions around economic necessity differentiate anarchists, "socialists" and communists. Anarchists seem to more-or-less want to wish away or socially-construct away economic necessity. You cannot, however, wish away reality; you have to work to change it. Socialists want to equitably distribute economic necessity (or, rather, equitably distribute capital, the means to respond to it). But capital, under today's circumstances, must be concentrated to be effective. Since workers must cooperate to concentrate capital, noncooperation is untenable, and we do not have voluntary cooperation.

The communist solution is to socialize the concentration of capital, in much the same sense that we socialize the concentration of directly coercive power in the hands of a more-or-less (and presently less rather than more) democratically elected government.

Must as I completely agree with anarchists that society of autonomous individuals more-or-less immune to organized coercion is desirable, we can't just declare an autonomous society. We must instead create a bridge to such a society. The specific set of social constructions we call "capitalism" cannot form such a bridge, not because it concentrates capital, but because it concentrates capital in the hands of private individuals, and almost forces those individuals to use that capital for their own individual benefit, without regard to mutual benefit.

Communism means, and has meant since Marx, to do the best we can with what we have today to build such a bridge: a bridge from a society dominated by economic and physical necessity to one dominated by each individual's self-actualization. To the extent that historical communist governments did not build such a bridge, they failed at the task I would have set for them, and at the task that Marx set for them. We can talk all we want about why they failed (did they jump or were they pushed?) but lack of success for any reason is failure.

But failure is not necessarily thorough discredit. The accomplishments of historical communist governments are notable and dramatic, and we can plausibly attribute their failures to circumstances external or accidental. The nascent Soviet Union first faced a bitter "civil" war openly backed and supported by the West, followed by the explicitly genocidal Nazi regime, followed by the implacable hostility of a nuclear-armed United States. And neither Russia nor China suffered through the century of armed conflict that established what few "Enlightenment" values that became part of the West's common social construction (and the West seemed willing and easily able to abandon those values in their relation to their colonies, leading to excesses as gross as the Belgian Free State, or the less malevolent but still socially distorting colonization of India).

It's not by any means a perfect or optimal solution, but communism still seems to be the best we can do presently to build an economic and social system that will indeed lead to the development of an autonomous society.

Jobs!

Remember that Hitler's rise to power was supported in no small part by his promise — which he kept — to put the German people back to work.

If the right-wing and Republican party can successfully merge the eliminationist narrative of purity — we must purge the corruption of liberalism and socialism and restore our pure American values — with the story that the Republicans can succeed in putting America back to work where the Democrats have failed, they will win handily in 2010 and 2012. The Republicans await only the emergence of a leader as disciplined, focused, and most importantly pitiless as Hitler. They lack only the will, not the opportunity.

Remember too that Hitler did not have a majority of popular support, but his minority was, like him, disciplined, focused and ready to do what was necessary. The Christian fascists are just as disciplined, just as focused, and just as ready to do the job, however dirty. They lack only leadership.

Anarchism and authority

It seems clear that anarchism at least entails opposition to "hierarchies" and authority and promotion of voluntary cooperation. The problem is, I can't figure out precisely what they mean by these terms. Worse yet, a philosophical investigation doesn't reveal any sense of these terms that makes rational sense as the organization principles of a working society of actual human beings on the planet.

Anarchists complain that I don't understand anarchism. They're probably right. But whose fault is that? I've never heard a convincing description of anarchism that didn't employ vague generalities. When I try to drill down to the specifics, I face increasing hostility and contempt, and I'm dismissed as not having the spirit of the Lord not "getting it"*, that I should read The Bible the Anarchist FAQ, and that I'm just a heretic Maoist tyrant (or have unspecified "Maoist tendencies"**, whatever that means).

*Scare quotes
**Actual quotation

(Communism is, in contrast, relatively simple to describe: The "government" "owns" the capital; the people own the government. The devil is, of course, in the details, but communism is fundamentally predicated on the idea that concentrated capital is under present-day material circumstances orders of magnitude more effective than distributed capital, and there are mutually beneficial uses of capital that are not in any individual's or "freely associating" group's interest. Communism is not intended to be perfect or optimal, merely substantively less sub-optimal than modern capitalism.)

What precisely do anarchists mean by "authority" and "voluntary cooperation"? It's obviously not the case that anarchists are opposed to "authority" in the sense of expertise; it seems ridiculous to suppose that anarchists would consider it objectionable to label Bjarne Stroustrup as an authority on C++. Nor is it reasonable to suppose that anarchists oppose "definitional" authority: I can't see any sensible opposition to the idea that the distance traveled by light in free space in 1⁄299,792,458 of a second is the authoritative definition of the meter. It also doesn't seem sensible (to the extent that the Catholic church is to some extent a "voluntary association") to oppose the Pope's authority to define Catholic doctrine.

It seems logical at first glance to interpret the kind of authority that anarchists oppose as having something to do with coercion, the ability to force people to do things. Of course, coercion is (in an abstract sense) an ineluctable property of the physical universe; it would be ludicrous to be opposed to physics and entirely uncharitable to attribute that opposition to anarchists.

One might see anarchism as opposition to the "imposition" of coercive authority. This view, however, seems contradicted by the fact that there's no place to impose coercive authority from. All structures in human society — authoritarian or otherwise — are self-organized; they come from "within" the society.

(The anarchist opposition to "hierarchy" does seems really nonsensical; a small group that exercised coercive power should be objectionable even if it were organized other than hierarchically. For example, the capitalist ruling class employs hierarchical structures, but is not itself organized hierarchically. Similarly the self-organization of natural (non-human) ecosystems shows degrees of hierarchical organization, such as the "food chain" — strictly speaking a food web, but we can identify more-or-less hierarchical levels.)

Just by excluding plausible alternatives, we're almost forced to see anarchism as opposed in principle to any concentration of coercive power. (It must be "in principle" and "any"; were it otherwise, it would be something-archism, not nothing-archism.)

For coercion to not be concentrated, it must therefore be nearly perfectly distributed (any substantial deviation from perfect distribution is by definition concentration). But if coercion is perfectly distributed, then a majority of people can therefore arbitrarily* exercise coercive force on a minority. This "distribution" leads to Orwell's observation that,

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behavior is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by 'thou shalt not', the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by 'love' or 'reason', he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

It is simple observation that the rights and freedoms of minorities, including the individual as a minority of one, can be guarded only by a minority.

*Technically a redundancy; coercive force is necessarily exercised arbitrarily.

The only alternatives to unchecked democracy would be if it an individual or group was not able to coerce any individual, or if people were so constituted that they categorically did not want to coerce others. The former seems physically (and perhaps logically) impossible; the latter definitely not presently the case.

Another important consideration is that there are intrinsic variations in individuals and in the organization of more-or-less "voluntary" associations. These variations can combine naturally to afford some groups more power to effect their desires than other groups. And, of course, one natural desire is for more power. Not only does power naturally concentrate, but the concentration of power forms a positive feedback loop. In order to keep power distributed, some group would have to have the authority — the coercive power — to block or reverse natural concentrations of power. Concentration of power is necessary to stop concentration of power, a nifty paradox.

We have a similar situation regarding people's desires and will. It sure would be nice if people didn't want to coerce others, but people's desires tend to vary randomly. In order to have a population without some set of desires, someone has to actually select against those desires, i.e. to exercise coercive force. We don't actually solve the problem by operating on desires instead of actions, we just move the problem of "authority" to who gets to perform the selection of desires.

I think anarchism is not a coherent or realistic political philosophy, but I'm not at all against anarchism and anarchists. I think it's a Good Thing to have a group of people in the world implacably opposed to any concentration of coercive force. While it seems physically necessary under present-day and foreseeable circumstances to have some concentration of coercive force, i.e. some kind of authority, no authority should ever sleep easy, and anarchists are necessary to disturb their sleep.

Self-organization and democracy

All human societies are self-organizing. How could they be otherwise? Who is organizing a society other than the people in it? God? Hardly. Even colonialism and imperialism are self-organizing: once the people in one country, culture or society start interacting with people of another, they create a new society composed of both the original societies; the organization is coming from within that larger society.

All human societies are "democratic" in a sense: the self-organization comes from the interaction between all the people. Even the most brutal, tyrannical slave society is the result of the interaction of all the people in that society, including the slaves. If all things considered the slaves preferred rebellion to slavery, they would rebel; that they do not shows that all things considered they prefer slavery. And even in a the purest direct democracy, there will be great differences between the power of individuals to affect the course of society. There are individual differences in intelligence, discipline, focus and will, and there will be organizations or ad hoc collections of people that differ in the overall focus and unity.

I'm not trying to justify slavery or any other objectionable political or economic system. I'm saying only that a "meta-analysis" of how a society is organized is not a useful way of distinguishing between societies. You can't abstract away the details; you have to look at the specifics of how a particular society has organized itself to make any kind of judgment about that society. It's absurd to say that thus-and-such society is bad because its social organization was "imposed from without"; there is no "without" from which to impose a social organization.

It often appears that some social organization is imposed from within by a minority. The United States Constitution and much of its legal and political doctrine was created not just by the capitalists, but by an elite within that class. (And there was immediately a factional struggle within the capitalist ruling class between the federalists and the anti-federalists.) But it's important to understand that the capitalist class was able to shape society precisely because the combination of individual and aggregate qualities of the capitalists combined to give them power disproportionate to their raw numbers. Furthermore, their individual and aggregate qualities, as well as the power of the group, were all shaped by global properties, by their interaction with everyone.

This principle can be succinctly summarized as, "The people know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard."

All societies conform themselves to their present-day economic necessities. Economic necessity exerts as profound a selection pressure on social evolution as it does on biological evolution. Elements of social organization that lead to sufficiently poor economic performance get selected against; what remains in a society is sufficiently well-suited to economic necessity to not be selected against. But, just as in biological selection, economic necessity does not entail or force an optimal system or any specific social system; it merely eliminates certain kinds of egregious sub-optimality.

A lot of social selection happens inside our heads, which means that social evolution can occur much faster than biological evolution. We can consider social elements abstractly in our thoughts, and eliminate elements we consider sub-optimal or otherwise objectionable, without actually trying them in physical reality and letting them succeed or fail. We can also transmit ("inherit") and consider social elements (ideas) individually, which means we can try many more different combinations of elements than we can in biological evolution, where an organism is stuck with a random collection of heritable elements from its parents, and all biological selection can operate on is the organism as a whole*. (To a certain extent, there are biochemical selection pressures that operate directly on the heritability of individual genes, but phenotypical selection can operate only on the organism as a whole.)

There's an interesting theoretical consequence of the above view. There will always be variation within the ideas of a population. Since human beings are genetically homogeneous and more or less socially homogeneous, people will sort themselves out into groups. The interactions of all the variations mean that the members of some groups, by virtue of their individual characteristics and the aggregate characteristics of the group, will have more power proportionate to their numbers to fulfill their immediate desires. Other groups, for the same reason, will have less power.

This is a scientific truth. This truth, however, leads to the naturalistic fallacy: Because some group actually has power, it therefore objectively "deserves" power. It is therefore "wrong" for another group to take power from the first, regardless of the changing mix of individual and aggregate characteristics and the conformance of that mix to changing material economic reality.

It is not the case that communists are (or should be) against capitalism because the capitalist class does not "deserve" power. (The construction "does not deserve" is ambiguous: it can mean there is such a thing as objectively deserving, and capitalists lack that property; it can also mean that there is no such thing as objectively deserving, and it is a category error to speak of this property as if it did exist.)

It's rather that communists are (or should be) against capitalism because they observe the disconnection and contradiction between modern economic reality and the traits and characteristics of the capitalist ruling class. By introducing new traits and characteristics into the population, and by creating their own group with its own individual, aggregate and global characteristics, we can introduce a new set of social constructions to the evolutionary mix, social constructions that better meet more needs, economic, political, social and psychological, of many more people.