The Adlerian Organizer

In recent days, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been sounding a needed alarm about the state of democracy in the United States at present, as well as the continuing efforts by the Republican Party to destroy American democracy by restricting the right to vote in various states.  Therefore I want to return once again to one of the closing themes of my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  This is the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

In a previous post I said that building an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed" starts when the oppressed start organizing themselves into local, small groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  As they grow, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

I also mentioned that this kind of organizing was key to many of the successful liberation struggles of the past.  Yet we see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  It is good to ask why this is so.  As I mentioned in the post I have cited, a partial answer can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, specifically in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that book, Freire posits that the oppressed are conditioned by their environment and by the education imposed on them by the oppressor.  This education (which takes place in all areas of society and not just the classroom) teaches the oppressed that they are merely passive victims of a fate that is imposed on them and which they must merely accept.  On the other hand, the pedagogy which leads to liberation opens the minds of the oppressed to see their situation as a problem which can be critically examined.  Critical examination of this problem leads to the realization that the problem can be challenged, changed and overcome.  Seeing the problem as something that can be changed leads to the realization that the oppressed have the power to make that change.  The outcome of this realization is that the oppressed begin to live in freedom - that is, they begin to make the changes which they see as necessary to change their situation.

In other words, Freire treats the problem of oppression in a certain sense as a problem of cognition, a problem whose solution starts with the oppressed becoming first free in their minds.  And yet freedom can be somewhat frightening, even though it begins only in the mind first.  For a free mind begins to lead to free actions.  And those who choose to begin to live in freedom will almost always begin to bear the costs of their choice, for their oppressors will begin to make the choice of freedom costly.  Those who are frightened by the cost of freedom will often therefore reject the dawning awareness that freedom is possible in order to continue their submerged existence as oppressed people without being bothered by their consciences.  So we have two kinds of oppressed people: those who are not free because they don't realize that freedom is possible, and those who are not free because they are unwilling to pay the cost of becoming free.  What is to be done for this second group of oppressed people?

I believe I have stumbled on what is at least a partial answer.  It is found in some of the writings and teachings of a European psychiatrist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Dr. Alfred Adler.  

Adler was an interesting character, who made much metaphorical hay from the simple realization that people always have reasons for the things they do - even when the things being done are dysfunctional or cause self-harm.  The experience of being oppressed tends to lead to dysfunctional behavior by the oppressed.  But this dysfunctional behavior has a goal, namely, to compensate psychologically for the damage done by the oppressive situation.  I suggest that this dysfunctional behavior often consists of what looks like passivity, fatalism, and apathy, and that it is an expression of "exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence."  According to the Adler Graduate School, the objective of Adlerian therapy is "to replace exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution."  What the organizer is trying to bring about is the "courageous social contribution" of oppressed people coming together into groups to achieve their common liberation.

Thus one part of an organizer's work is to help his or her people begin to see their own motives and the role of these motives in their continued enslavement or oppression.  For it is these motives which motivate the continued passivity of the oppressed and their continued refusal to live in freedom.  Adler used a graphic word picture to describe the process of getting patients to see both the dysfunction and the consequences of certain motives, namely the idea of "spitting in the patient's soup" in order to make the dysfunctional behaviors less palatable.  This notion of spitting into someone else's soup conjures images of organizers going to their people and telling those people what is wrong with their ongoing passivity.  However, the best and most skillful Adlerians get the patient to spit into his or her own soup - that is, they use respectful Socratic dialogue to get their people to admit to themselves out loud what are the motives, goals and consequences of their choices.  From that admission can spring the discussion of better ways to meet the goals of their people.

So it is that Adlerian dialogue can be seen as a component of Freirian problem-posing education of the sort that turns passive, fatalistic, atomized members of the oppressed into purposeful, united, interdependent people laboring together for their common liberation.  There is more that can be said about this, but I need to do some further reading both of Freire and of Adler!  Stay tuned...

Strategic NVR In Action: The Colorado Trucker Boycott

As I mentioned in my last post, my blogging schedule for the next few months will usually be bi-weekly, so that every two weeks a post will be published.  The posts will usually be on Sundays.  However, should there be an event which merits commentary, I may write a short post in between the major biweekly posts.  Today's post is one of those short posts.

I want to call attention to the case of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a Cuban immigrant to the United States.  Mr. Aguilera-Mederos was employed as a semi truck driver (for those who use British English, "semi truck" means "lorry"), and was recently sentenced to a 110-year prison term for the deaths of four people in an accident in Colorado in which the brakes on the truck driven by Aguilera-Mederos failed, preventing him from safely stopping.  The sentencing was determined in large part by the prosecutor in his trial, a Ms. Kayla Wildeman, who "celebrated the harsh verdict" according to one source.  This same Ms. Wildeman reports to a chief deputy district attorney named Trevor Moritzky.  Moritzky gave Wildeman a trophy for the harsh sentence handed down, yet Moritzky managed to obtain only a misdemeanor conviction for a Colorado police officer who raped a woman in the back seat of his police car.  According to another source, Aguilera-Mederos' case also differs from that of a white motorist in Texas named Ethan Couch, who received only ten years probation at his initial sentencing after he killed four people while speeding and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.  His parents were wealthy.  (See this also.)

I must say now that while many posts on my blog have condemned white supremacy, I do not believe that all white Americans are evil.  There are examples of good men and women who do not believe that they and they alone should rule the earth and that they have the right to treat the rest of us as their slaves or punching bags.  However, the prosecution of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos is yet another example of how much of the American "justice" system is corrupted by right-wing white supremacists who seek to use the power of the state to vent their unresolved rage.  Not only do these supremacists want to dump that rage on people of color, but they even rage against those of their own people who do not share their monstrous sense of entitlement and their malignant narcissism, as is seen by the murder of two white people and the wounding of a third by Kyle Rittenhouse.  It seems that Mr. Rittenhouse took exception to the fact that his victims were standing in solidarity with people of color.  Mr. Rittenhouse is, in my book, a pile of human garbage, as is the jury which miscarried justice by acquitting him of murder. 

To repeat, the "justice" system in the United States at present is merely the tool of those who are rich and white and who wish to dominate.  Therefore, many of the verdicts rendered by that system are actually a miscarriage of justice.  Among the victims of that miscarriage of justice, the standard response to that miscarriage over the last several years has consisted of things like mass protests, listening sessions, bumper stickers proclaiming that our lives matter, petitions, and attempts to have conversations about "race".  In other words, our strategy has looked much like trying to convert our oppressors by trying to have conversations with them.  

But the case of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos has begun to show something different.  Aguilera-Mederos was not drunk or intoxicated, and did not willfully and deliberately kill people, but was involved in an accident.  (Note to Kayla Wildeman and Trevor Moritzky: go find a dictionary and look up the word "accident."  The job of a prosecutor is no place for doofuses.)  His sentencing was harsh and unfair.  And while there have been protests in response, there has also been something else - something with teeth that can bite.  Truckers have begun to boycott Colorado.  This boycott has begun to produce results FAST.  When you can't get things in a certain state because truckers refuse to make deliveries to your state, you tend to sit up and take notice.

And this is the power of strategic nonviolent resistance when it's done strategically.  Effective resistance is NOT protest (at least, not solely or even mainly protest), because protests by themselves do NOT impose coercive costs on an oppressor.  Effective resistance is the coordinated, unified withdrawal of economic and political support from an oppressive system.  If that withdrawal is done according to a wise strategy, the oppressed can cripple the system which is oppressing them.  For effective resistance to have long-term staying power, communities of the oppressed need to build their own self-sufficiency by means of what one writer calls "self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement."  This is how one can engage in long-term strikes and boycotts which inflict pain and which strike fear into the heart of anyone who wishes to be an oppressor!  For those of us in communities of color, it is this kind of power which we need to build.  

Let's see how Mr. Aguilera-Mederos' case goes.  If Colorado does not commute his sentence (and fast!), I may post a list of companies which are headquartered in Colorado, so that boycotts can be organized against them.

The Urgent Need for Conscientização

[Note: For much of the last two years, I have been posting to this blog on a once-per-week basis.  Lately that has changed to posting once every two weeks.  For the next several months, I will remain on my current blogging schedule as much as possible, so I will continue to post once every two weeks.]

The end of a year is often a time in which people project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto the future.  Those who have become accustomed to easy, privileged lives tend to be on the hopeful side of the forward-lookers; those who have had experience of hard times tend to look forward more soberly.  Certainly the last few years have given the world an abundance of reasons to approach the future soberly and cautiously - even in the privileged nations of the Global North.  In the United States, for instance, we have seen the erosion of civility and safety for many groups of people.  We have also experienced widespread environmental catastrophes such as the wildfires of 2020, and the explosive growth of tent cities comprised of the recently disenfranchised.  We have seen the beginning of the breakdown of those supply chains which nourished the consumerism of the nations of the Global North.  We have witnessed the hyper-concentration of the world's wealth into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of so-called "owners".  We have witnessed the emergence of a pandemic whose consequences will be with us for decades into the future.  We have witnessed the undeniable  accelerating consequences of the destruction of the earth's environment, the increasing loss of safe and healthy habitats for the world's biosphere.

And we have witnessed another loss, namely the global loss of safe spaces for democracy.  Consider the following reports:

• "Freedom In The World 2021: Democracy Under Siege", Freedom House
• "'An Urgent Matter': Biden Warns Democracy Is Under Threat At Summit", The Guardian
• "Democracy Slipping Away At Record Rate, Intergovernmental Body Warns", Reuters

The series of posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance and on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy have been my response to this loss of safe spaces for democracy, and especially the damage done to American democracy during the regime of Donald Trump.  Among the themes discussed in those posts, the last theme discussed was the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

What does it look like to build an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed"?  It starts when local, small groups of the oppressed organize themselves into groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  Moreover, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

History is full of examples of this process in action, from the "constructive program" of Indian self-reliance organized by Gandhi against the British empire to the preparations for strikes and boycotts by the Black majority of South Africa which helped to end the apartheid regime in that country to the parallel institutions organized by the Polish against conquerors and oppressors in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Indeed, I might suggest that one sign that oppressed people have become liberated in their minds is that they begin to organize ways of taking care of themselves without relying on their oppressors, in order that they might then withdraw their labor from the continued support of the oppressor in order to break the oppressor.

We see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  (It would be good to ask why.  More on that later.  Let's just say that this kind of organizing is the hardest kind there is at present.)  What we see instead among the oppressed are either masses of people who are apathetic and fatalistic in the face of their suffering, or we see people who put their hopes entirely in elections, even though they now live in countries in which the electoral process is breaking or has been broken.  Among those who trust in elections, there are "organizers" who seek to stand for the oppressed or for the environment or for something better than unrestrained predatory capitalism.  Their ethics are indeed worthy of praise.  But their strategy and tactics revolve around trying to organize political campaigns to get the right sort of people elected.  And their story of self/story of us/story of now dialogue with the people they try to recruit focuses on the short-term transactional goal of merely getting people to vote a certain way.  Their "dialogue" thus degenerates into a manipulative, slogan-laden monologue.  So the "collective action" of the people is reduced to merely casting a ballot once every few years, and once the ballot is cast, the "collective action" goes away - and has to be rebuilt almost from scratch during the next election cycle.  And the battle between the oppressors and those who seek change by means of political action becomes merely a battle between dueling emotive slogans.

Now I do believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to participate in the electoral process.  It is partly because of decent people who did not vote in 2016 that we had to suffer four years of Trump.  But voting is not the only characteristic of good citizenship.  And to rely on voting alone as a means of positive change is a grave mistake.  In democracies whose democratic processes are being sabotaged or have become broken, election seasons have become downright nasty.  (To me as a citizen of the United States, the last several election cycles have not been a time of hope or of joy but rather like a paroxysm of coughing during a long bout with pertussis or like one of the paroxysms of fever and chills which characterize a long bout of malaria!  Except that in this case, it's the Global Far Right that is the infectious agent.  And next year, here we go again...)

The kind of organizing which liberates the oppressed in their minds so that they begin to collectively take charge of their own destiny - this is the kind of organizing which truly transforms.  To quote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the true organizer must labor with the oppressed to forge a pedagogy of liberation - "a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.  This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48).  In other words, the organizer engages with the people he or she is trying to organize, in order to collectively create a "story of us" and a "story of now" by which the people thus organized begin to change their world.  

The organizer's task is to engage his or her people in an act of what Freire calls "problem-posing education", where "...people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.  Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world.  Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 83)  To break this down into simpler pieces, the education of the oppressed should do the following:

• It should show the oppressed that the world is not just some static thing over which they have no control and to which they have no choice but to submit.
• It should enable the oppressed to see themselves and their relation to the world more accurately - not as mere objects acted upon by forces over which they have no control, but as people who have the power to act to change their reality.
• It should move the oppressed to begin acting on their reality, both as individuals and collectively, as a logical consequence of beginning to see themselves in the world more accurately.
• As part of this movement toward activity, it should lead the oppressed to more clearly see the present intolerable reality of their oppression.  To quote Freire (who quotes Marx), "Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella loa conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla."  ("It is necessary to make real oppression even more oppressive by adding to it the awareness of the oppression...")

And this change in consciousness is not something which the organizer shoves ready-made down the throats of his or her people, but something that arises as a result of dialogue as organizer and people engage in common reflection upon the world.

It is this patient work of consciousness-raising which is lacking from the work of many organizers who seek to reverse the rise of oppressive autocracy in the world today.  And while I have enjoyed my contact with the Leading Change Network over the last year or so, it seems to me that the members and teachers in this network have a surprisingly weak knowledge of this kind of organizing.  (For that matter, so do I.  But I do want to get stronger!)  This weakness of knowledge has led the LCN increasingly to organizational efforts which focus solely on electoral politics and whose tactics seem at times to be shifting away from bona fide organizing to mere mobilizing. 

It is because I want to strengthen my ability to do this consciousness-raising work that I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts exploring Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This may be my next series.  Those who want to read along with me will, I am sure, be able to find online versions of the book if they want.  Otherwise, the book itself is not that expensive.  The aim of my exploration of this book will be to answer the question of how to lead oppressed people from passivity to the kind of activized consciousness that causes the oppressed to collectively take charge of their own destiny.  This movement is the beginning of any true liberation struggle.

Research Week - Late November 2021

In my most recent post, I mentioned that I am in the process of drafting a critique of Erica Chenoweth's latest book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know.  I also admitted that I have dragged my feet in getting through her book due to the fact that, while much of her book contains valuable insights, there are yet significant portions which present morally questionable advice for those who need to engage in strategic nonviolent resistance.  Writing a worthy critique therefore promises to involve a significant amount of research, a more than fair amount of blood, sweat and tears in writing an accurate rebuttal to some of her statements, and a few dozen hours of my time.  Which is why this past week I again procrastinated.  I'm almost halfway through the book.  (Some day, I'm going to have to finish eating that frog.  Maybe if I tell myself that frog meat tastes like chicken...)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking on and off again about Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and his educational philosophy, as his philosophy has a direct bearing on the question of how to recruit and organize oppressed people into a liberation struggle.  The biggest hurdle an organizer or would-be organizer faces is how to begin to activize people who have been submerged all their lives in oppression.  Freire developed a method of what he called "critical education" or "problem-posing education" in which each participant could function at times as both student and teacher.  The focus of his education effort was adult literacy among poor Brazilian peasants.  But for Freire, the development of literacy always had an end goal that was larger than merely learning to read, namely, to move the peasants to begin to see their situation of oppression not as a fixed element of their fate, but as a problem to be examined and acted upon by the peasants themselves.  His educational methods and strategy were so successful that the CIA-backed Brazilian government "honored" him in 1964 by arresting and imprisoning him for "preaching communism".  The government also "honored" his teaching methods by banning them.

Freire wrote a book titled Pedagogia do Oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), a book that first caught my attention as a result of an interview of Dr. Soong-Chan Rah which I recorded for The Well Run Dry back in 2017.  After hearing about Freire's book, I decided to get a copy and read it.  Freire's book is short - only 140 pages, not counting the preface - yet it is densely packed with statements that require deep thought.  I read it while commuting to and from work on the light rail train, and my attention was frequently divided between the book, watching to make sure that my bike didn't get jacked, and watching to make sure that I didn't miss my stop.  Therefore I did not retain very much of what I read.  But the concept of conscientizacao (loosely equivalent to consciousness-raising or "critical consciousness") by means of problem-posing education stuck with me, and intrigued me over the past few weeks to such an extent that I bought an audiobook copy of Pedagogy of the Oppressed to supplement my print copy.  (Audiobooks are good companions when uprooting blackberries, pruning trees, cleaning the yard, etc.  Just one word of warning: DO NOT buy audiobooks from Audible or Amazon!  They will sell you an audio file that is in a proprietary format and force you to download a proprietary app to listen to it!)

Chapter 3 of the book has always been hard for me to grasp.  In this chapter, Freire describes how to set up what he calls "culture circles" in which participants can collectively examine the "generative themes" which frame the perceptions which oppressed people have of their oppressive situations.  It would have been nice (although practically impossible at the time Freire wrote his book) for readers to have a set of videos showing these culture circles in action.  If a picture had been worth a thousand words, a short video would have been worth much, much more!  As a result of my renewed interest in the book, this weekend I scrounged YouTube to see if I could find any videos which showed such culture circles in action.

I did not quite find what I was looking for.  However, I did find a couple of videos that either came close or were intriguing for reasons of their own.  The video below illustrates the contrast between what Freire calls the "banking concept of education" versus the "problem-posing education"which Freire advocates.  (Although the video seeks to make a serious point, it has a certain goofy humor...)

I think the second video was included in the YouTube search results only because it had "Paulo Freire" in the title.  The video is not a picture of a Freireian culture circle, but of something that seems rather similar, and it takes place at a Brazilian school named after Freire.  (It seems that since Freire's death, the Brazilian government has decided to confer on him the status and recognition that are more appropriate to honor - although Brazilian society remains under the control of oppressors.) 

Although this video does not illustrate a Freireian culture circle, I was intrigued for a few reasons.  First, it is a good present-day example of real, in-the-flesh, boots-on-the-ground community organizing in the age of COVID.  Note that almost everyone in the video is wearing a mask, and the one woman who is not masked is there to serve as a visual prop to illustrate what the presenters are talking about.  This indicates an implicit (and perhaps unspoken) covenant between the participants to respect this public space by acting for the common good.  There are no selfish, reactionary anti-maskers or anti-vaxxers here!  Second, note that the circle is intimate - that is, the total number of participants is manageable enough for people to ask questions and to begin to form relationships with each other if they so choose.  Third, note that a wide range of ages is represented in this group.  Last, note that although the group is not collectively exploring a problem of their lived situation (instead, a few presenters do most of the talking), the group is still confronting a societal problem that needs to be addressed.

I am still searching for visual examples of Freireian culture circles in action.  What I want is examples of oppressed people and their self-chosen leaders engaging in these circles.  What I am not interested in is circles formed and organized for the "disadvantaged" by so-called "saviors" who are not from among the oppressed.  Nor am I interested merely in the use of Freireian methods or culture circles to help to shore up the rotting structures of American primary education.  Rather, I am interested in the use of problem-posing education as a means of activizing people, as a means of fostering nonviolent revolution.  Maybe I'll have to make my own video.  That should be quite a project...

The Ride Of The Gray Cowboys

At the beginning of this year, as part of the work that pays bills, I found myself checking out a book on digital logic design.  The book was intriguing because it made use of a piece of open-source digital circuit simulation software.  (I always like reading about how to use free tools!)  As I read the preface, I ran across a paragraph titled, "How to Acquire Intuition?"  The paragraph explained why instilling mathematical rigor through proofs is a key part of instilling the mathematical intuition needed to understand digital logic circuits.  As a criticism of the modern way in which many technical subjects are taught, the authors wrote the following sentence: 

All we can say is that this strategy [that is, the non-proof strategy] is in complete disregard of the statement: "When you have to shoot, shoot.  Don't talk"  [Tuco in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly].

Let me assure you that today's post is not about digital circuits!  But I have to admit that the quote intrigued me for reasons that are completely non-technical.  You see, I have never watched The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly - although I have known that this movie and other movies like it helped launch the big-name careers of some hitherto obscure actors, including Clint Eastwood.  So I checked out a few YouTube clips from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and I pondered the career of Mr. Eastwood.

I have seen only a couple of Clint Eastwood movies in my entire life, but I know that he made a big name for himself as an actor by specializing in the portrayal of morally ambiguous leading characters, characters for whom one might root if one was still a kid, but whom one's parents might not allow around their children.  A case in point is his Dirty Harry character - a cop who doesn't quite play by the rules, a cop who makes us wonder whether or not he'll really do the right thing in the end, a cop whose message seems in part to be that the end justifies the means.  Eastwood's "spaghetti Western" roles were similarly morally gray characters, a somewhat jarring contrast to the image of the American cowboy which had been built up in American culture until that time - the absolutely pure and wholesome blond-white-and blue adult male "Boy Scout" in white hat, set in opposition to the utterly evil, black-hatted villain in the western movies and pulp novels of the early to mid-20th century.

Eastwood's characters largely get away with their moral ambiguity in his movies, as things usually seem to work out in their favor by the time of the closing credits.  In other words, the consequences of moral ambiguity are portrayed as positive for the ambiguous character who has the right skills.  Yet there are other storytellers who provide a glimpse into the costs and side effects of such ambiguity.  One such storyteller was the late John le Carre, whose subject matter was the spy as an agent of government and empire.  Like Eastwood's characters, le Carre's characters were intended to poke holes in a romanticized depiction of a certain type of hero - namely, the sort of uber-cool, gadget-laden, macho adventurer-spy typified by James Bond.  Like Eastwood's characters, Bond is morally ambiguous in his means, but in the movies, it's always okay because we are told that the ultimate end is ultimately good.  In le Carre's work, by contrast, the spy is seen as a morally ambiguous agent of a morally questionable empire, and the things which the empire demands of the spy in the course of his job frequently end up destroying his soul.  

Thoughts of le Carre (whose audiobooks I have recently been enjoying) bring me to a central question of tonight's post, namely, what sort of society we create for ourselves when we choose to live by the dictum, "Do not be excessively righteous, and do not be overly wise.  Why should you ruin yourself?  Do not be excessively wicked, and do not be a fool.  Why should you die before your time?" (Ecclesiastes 7:16-17)  In such a society, we may start out with a righteous end, yet find that in our misguided zeal we choose means that are completely incompatible with the end we profess.  Or - and this seems far more likely nowadays - we may find ourselves searching for ends and means which maximize our own personal advantages regardless of the ultimate righteousness of those ends, even though we say otherwise.  This leads to such things as the ambiguity and the sometimes immense suffering that comprises the legacy of Mao Zedong.  Or the fiendish Machiavellian legacy of V.I. Lenin and the horrors which the Bolsheviks unleashed on Russia and Eastern Europe.  Or the regime of the recently ousted former President Trump (although he seems to have heeded the part of Ecclesiastes which said not to be too good and to have disregarded the part that said not to be too evil!).  Or the legacy and ongoing "witness" of the white American Evangelical/Protestant church, which has by now conclusively proven that it has nothing to do with the Lord Jesus Christ because it has no intention of ever doing what He commanded - especially in the Sermon on the Mount.  Rather, this church has shown that it is the spread-legged whore and serving wench of secular earthly economic and political power, a mere means to a materialist end consisting of earthly domination for a certain select group of people.  When we consider American evangelicalism, we see that one consequence of the toleration of moral ambiguity is a society in which people say things merely to try to achieve certain effects in their hearers, rather than saying things in order to communicate truth.  Hence, for instance, the Right's defense of Trump even in the face of Trump's own moral contradictions.

In short, if Clint Eastwood's characters are the sort of people whom good parents don't let near their children, then morally ambiguous societies are the sorts of places in which good parents don't let their children play - because someone is bound to get hurt in such places.  When such societies do arise (for "it is inevitable that stumbling blocks come"), then it becomes necessary for decent people to resist such societies and the masters who run them.  This has been the motivation for the series of posts I have written on strategic nonviolent resistance during the Trump presidency, and especially during the last eighteen months.  And if one goes through some of the literature on strategic nonviolent resistance that was written and published before the middle of the last decade, one sees that a righteous cause is a necessary ingredient of successful resistance.  It is not by itself a sufficient ingredient - for a righteous cause still needs good strategy - but without a righteous cause, what reason do people have to join a struggle?  Especially when joining a particular struggle may result in the loss of life, liberty and property?

Consider some of the things Gene Sharp said in his book How Nonviolent Struggle Works: 

• Cowardice and nonviolent struggle do not mix
• Cowards seek to avoid the conflict and flee from danger, while the nonviolent resister faces the conflict and risks the dangers involved
• Bravery in this technique of struggle is not only moral valor but a practical requirement
• Civil resisters ought to have confidence in the justice and force of their cause, principles, and means of action (Emphasis added)

Note that last point.  In other words, righteous ends must use righteous means.  Another writer, Jack DuVall, made the same point in a series of paragraphs titled, "Power from Ends" contained in an essay titled, "Civil Resistance And The Language of Power."  To quote DuVall, "For civil resistance to work, it has to shred the legitimacy of power-holders to whom it is opposed and model a higher legitimacy based on representing the real aspirations of the people.  But the fastest way to forsake that advantage is to resort to means that are not seen as legitimate."  (Emphasis added.)  This, for instance, is why Gene Sharp in his writings rejected both violence, sabotage, and the destruction of the opponent's property as appropriate means of struggle.

Contrast such moral clarity with more recent attempts during the last five or six years by so-called "civil resistance scholars" to "gray-wash" the theory and practice of strategic nonviolent resistance.  I am thinking particularly of a book I bought within the last few months titled, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs To Know by Erica Chenoweth.  (I told you all in an earlier post that I was reading a book for which I might write a critique soon.  A delay of two months isn't exactly "soon," but I've been dragging my feet somewhat - partly because I've been busy, and partly because some parts of Chenoweth's new book make me choke.  More on that in another post.)  I had guardedly high hopes for the book when I first heard about it, but I had already begun to prepare myself for the possibility that Chenoweth might have become among the morally compromised "scholars" who now seem to inhabit the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict.  It's a good thing I did prepare myself.  For on page 57 of her book, she seeks to legitimize those who want to include property destruction in the arsenal of what she calls "civil resistance", saying, "When it is disciplined and discriminating, and sends a clear message, property destruction can be considered a nonviolent method of sabotage..."  And she goes on to cite the Boston Tea Party as an example of the wise use of sabotage in a nonviolent struggle.  However, I'd like to suggest that perhaps the backfire among loyalists which resulted from this act has been overlooked.  And on page 79, she suggests that sometimes a movement can achieve strength only by partnering with allies who may not be willing to remain nonviolent, saying that "...questions of justice and political effectiveness are often in tension.  Most scholars of civil resistance stay agnostic on this question by leaving aside moral questions altogether and focusing on strategy, not morality..."  Similarly, chapter 3 of her book appears at first reading to be a moral minefield for a reader such as myself, as she paints those voices who advocate for allowing limited movement violence as people who are engaged in an honest debate over the effectiveness of tactics.

But it seems to me that the evaluation of civil resistance tactics and strategy solely on the basis of their supposed "effectiveness" can lead to a trap if we ignore the righteousness or unrighteousness of the strategy and tactics in question.  (It can also lead resisters to adopt means, methods, and ends that are both immoral and violent.)  For by ignoring questions of morality or righteousness, we ultimately ignore the Scriptural maxim that "...whatever a man sows, this he will also reap."  Such a maxim is easy to forget precisely because we humans tend to look at trends from time scales that are too short.  By way of analogy, for those who are handy with math, consider a parabolic function whose vertex is positive and nonzero, yet whose vertex is a maximum and not a minimum.  Over a short enough interval of the independent variable, the function looks like it will rise forever.  But over a long enough interval, we see that the function value eventually crashes back to zero before becoming forever negative.  Such are the ultimate results of moral graywashing - sooner or later, you lose.

Nimrod's High School Yearbook

 

Tower of Babel, Mathys Schoevaerdts, created

between 1682 and 1702, public domain

On the 13th of this month, a ninety-year-old, formerly somewhat well-known Canadian actor took a ride in a rocket manufactured and owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner and former CEO of the vast Amazon.com empire.  The name of the actor who took the ride is, of course, William Shatner, who was the main star in an American sci-fi TV series that first aired well over fifty years ago.  The name of that series was Star Trek.  And Star Trek, which initially struggled to find acceptance with the executives of the network on which it aired, has become enough of a cash cow that over the years it has spawned several big-screen movies and a number of spin-off TV series.  (Some might say that Star Trek has by now become in the American consciousness like a piece of chewing gum that has been left in a person's mouth for 55 years...)

Some interesting things about Shatner's Star Trek character, Captain Kirk: he was supposed to be a youthful super-achiever whose drive and determination had helped him to become the youngest captain in Starfleet.  He was also modeled very much after the type of Germanic war-hero typified in ancient Anglo-Saxon fables such as Beowulf - that is, he was always the first member of his crew to confront any mortal danger, the bravest and most physically capable (with the possible exception of his first officer, Mr. Spock), the point man leading the charge as his ship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, boldly went where no man had gone before.  (He was also a champion womanizer.  Lucky for him that there were plenty of compatible alien women on those planets where no man had gone before!)  According to several sources, Shatner struggled at times with his association with Captain Kirk during the first years after the original Star Trek series was canceled by its host TV network - perhaps being fearful of typecasting.  But those struggles soon died away and Shatner began to consciously associate his own personality with the larger-than-life character of Captain Kirk.  And as Kirk had commanded the lion's share of attention in both the original series and the movies that resulted from it, Shatner sought to command all available attention for himself in any social setting in which he found himself.  I speculate therefore that the chance to ride in Jeff Bezos' rocket must have seemed the chance of a lifetime for him to recapture some of the lost glory of his youth.

Some interesting things about Shatner's rocket ride: most media outlets wrote that Shatner became "the oldest living human being to go into space."  But that begs a question: where and what, exactly, is "space"?  For if one digs beneath the surface (and if one is sufficiently geeky to do so), one learns a few things.  So watch yourselves, because I'm going to geek out for a few paragraphs.  First off, let's look at the launch vehicle that Shatner and his fellow passengers rode.  It is named the New Shepard 4, and its typical flight profile is thus: it launches vertically, then ascends under power for 140 seconds, reaching a maximum velocity of 3,615 km/h (2,247 mph).  Once the powered phase of the flight ends, the crew capsule coasts upward to an altitude of 66.1 miles above the ground, which is just above the von Karman line.  The von Karman line is a widely accepted definition of the boundary of space.  Given the fact that other definitions used by some of the armed forces of the world's most advanced nations are a bit more lenient (allowing for definitions of a boundary of space below 60 miles), we must hand it to Mr. Shatner.  He really did go into space after all.  But could he have stayed there for any appreciable time?  The answer is no.  The velocity of his capsule at its maximum altitude was far below the velocity required to achieve orbit.  And even if his capsule had achieved orbital velocity at its maximum altitude of 66.1 miles, atmospheric drag would have degraded its orbit very quickly so that in much less than a 24-hour day, he would have fallen back to earth again.  Such facts cut Shatner's trip a bit down to size.

And maybe the boasts of the people who put him into space ought to be cut down to size a bit as well, as well as the boasts of their competitors.  The two most dominant figures in the privately funded race to space are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.  They are now locked in a lawsuit over space, by the way.  (See this also.)  And both have made a number of rather outlandish claims about what they are going to do to get humans back into space again in a big way.  Bezos seems to me to have painted himself as the visionary humanitarian whose interest in space travel springs from his desire to make a better future for humanity.  Musk, on the other hand, seems to me to have painted himself as the uber-smart inventor whose genius has imbued him with the power to work magic.  Bezos boasts that his company is intending to build a space station as a place for researchers and industrialists to get some out-of-this-world work done.  Musk, on the other hand, has promised to colonize Mars.  (See this also.)  But geeks like me must ask, How?  Who's going to pay for it all?

For the undeniable fact is that space travel - the way it is done at present - is expensive.  The unavoidable element of expense consists of providing the kinetic energy required to accelerate a load to orbital velocity.  And it gets even more expensive if you're trying to accelerate that load to a speed that will enable it to escape the gravitational pull of Earth.  That required amount of energy is captured in the following formula:

where k.e. stands for "kinetic energy", m stands for mass, and v stands for velocity.  If you're handy with math, you can therefore calculate the amount of energy possessed by an object with a certain mass when it is traveling at a certain velocity.  That's how much energy must be supplied by the fuel which any rocket uses to accelerate a mass to orbital velocity or to escape velocity.  And when you calculate how much chemical energy is contained in any given amount of the fuels now used in rockets, you see that it takes a lot of fuel to put a given mass into space.  Moreover, there's a hard upper limit on the amount of energy you can extract from fuels that are burned in chemical reactions.  Making large amounts of these fuels costs some serious folding money.  That's why Bezos, Branson, Musk, and others will find that they will fail in the same places in which the governments who initially pioneered space flight have failed.  No one will be able to pay for their dreams.

But some might protest, saying, "We can always use nuclear fission rockets!  They have much higher potential energy densities than chemically fueled rockets!  And one day we'll have fusion rockets, which have even higher energy densities!"  However, the promise of cheap space travel via nuclear fission rockets depends on the possibility of an abundant supply of plutonium fuel, and an abundant supply of plutonium fuel depends on the ability to construct breeder reactors that are both safe and commercially viable.  At present, breeder reactors are neither safe nor commercially viable.  One problem which breeders have is that operation of the reactors destroys the materials the reactor is made of, by processes such as neutron embrittlement.  The same process threatens to make nuclear fusion commercially non-viable for the foreseeable future.  And this of course does not take into account the problems with proliferation of weapons-grade nuclear material and large amounts of radioactive waste, as well as environmental degradation.

So now, let's drop the geek persona for a bit and ask some philosophical questions.  Could it be that the space boasts of Branson, Bezos and Musk are part of a larger cultural trend?  Could it be that fantasies of space conquest are a sort of psychic defense mechanism for the most high-flying members of the Global North as the Global North is increasingly forced to confront the signs of its own mortality, its own loss of dominance, its own passing?  Could dreams and boasts of space conquest serve the same function as the magazines I see from time to time in the checkout line at Winco when I shop for groceries - magazines commemorating the life of John Wayne or of America's best rock bands or the British royal family or the Apollo lunar landings or World War 2 or the Beach Boys?  Could it be that the flight of William Shatner was, in the grand scheme of things, really nothing more than a very expensive moment of nostalgia?  Perhaps what's needed now is not a cultural escape into fantasies of unlimited success, brilliance, beauty, power and love, but a realistic letting go of lost glories and a realistic embrace of a future that is actually coming.

Why There's Not Enough For (Some of) You

It is no secret that the last decade saw a concerted effort by the Global Far Right and its Russian ringleaders to reverse the economic gains of communities of color and nations that are not part of the Global North.  This was the motivation for the ethno-nationalism fostered in many parts of Europe by far-Right politicians, as well as the motivation behind Russian attempts to pressure the European Union into restricting immigration into EU countries by barring nonwhite people.  If you want proof of this pressure, please read "The Writing Is On The Wall For The European Union" from the blog titled "Vineyard of the Saker."  The pretentious doofus who calls himself the "Saker" is a pro-Putin Russian transplant who lives in Florida, and it was this piece of his (and the picture which accompanies it) which in 2016 finally convinced me that the Russian government is run by some truly disordered people.

Two asides here.  First, since the Saker himself is an immigrant to the U.S., shouldn't we now treat him the same way he was wanting the U.S. to treat immigrants from certain select countries during the Presidency of Mr. Let's-Build-A-Wall?  Second, note that the "Vineyard of the Saker" is by no means the only pro-Putin sewage pipe dumping itself into the Internet.  There is also the "Unz Review" as well as many others.

Funny, the connection between the Russian government and white supremacy, isn't it?  And funny is the need which far-right groups and their leaders have to create both an in-group and an out-group - the creation of which is so typical of personality-disordered people.  A world in which people look different and have differing skin color/hair color/eye color/language of origin/place of birth provides an easy means to make this differentiation.  But I was thinking this past week of what life must be like in those places where, either through historical accident or design, everybody looks the same - especially those places where everyone is white.  How do the clique-creators behave in such settings?  The answer is bound up in the phrase, "the narcissism of small differences," and in the concept from calculus of the limit of the value of a function as the difference between the function's independent variable and a certain set value of that variable approaches zero.

The concept of race as applied to humans who look different from each other has been abundantly proven false, so hating people based on race is an example of a narcissism of a small difference.  But when everyone looks more or less the same, a personality-disordered person must look for even smaller differences on which to construct his in-group and his out-groups.  There have been a number of examples of this narcissism of smaller differences over the years, from the office cliques and cubicle politics that make so many workplaces hellish to the grander European narcissism of small differences that triggered World Wars 1 and 2.

And there is a much more significant example.  I am thinking just now of those European or Eastern European nations which have leaders who have been installed or helped to power by the government of Vladimir Putin.  A measure of the division within these societies is the level of wealth inequality within these societies.  This has been documented in the 2021 Global Wealth Report published by the Credit Suisse Research Institute.   On page 24 of that report we discover that the economic top 1 percent of the Russian population have owned around 60 percent of the total wealth of Russia over the last decade, and that Russia has a Gini coefficient of 87.8 percent at present.  Now a high Gini coefficient is like a high golf score - a sign that you're playing the game badly, especially if you're the leader of a country and the object of the game is to provide a healthy outcome for all your citizens.  

Looking at another Credit Suisse document, the Global Wealth Databook, provides another picture of the evolution of wealth inequality in European and Eastern European countries over the last ten years.  On page 115 of the Databook, we see the Gini index for the following countries in 2020:

• Armenia - 73.0
• Belarus - 66.7
• Bulgaria - 70.1
• Georgia - 81.3
• Hungary - 66.5
• Italy - 66.5
• Moldova - 69.4
• Poland - 70.7

I have listed these countries because of the association of their leaders with the Global Far Right and/or their association with Russia.  Note that although Poland is not ostensibly associated with Russia, the Polish government can be said to be aligned with the Global Far Right, according to some measures.  Concerning Italy, please also see "Inequalities in Italy" by the Inequalities Forum.  Note also that Italy has been turning increasingly fascist over the last five years.  (See also, "The Growing Concentration of Wealth In Italy: Evidence from A New Source of Data".)  A similar story can be told for Hungary, which means that Viktor Orban has not exactly turned that place into Paradise.  Similar stories can be told regarding the rest of the countries I have listed, but I'm running out of time tonight.  Concerning Orban again, note that high levels of inequality in a nation are almost always tied to corruption practiced by the ruling elites, as was pointed out in a lecture delivered by Margaret Heffernan to a class at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore.  We had our own case of this with Donald John Trump.  Note also that like Trump, Orban has tried to dodge the issue of inequality in Hungary by scapegoating the few nonwhite people he can actually get his hands on, who in this case are the Roma (Gypsies) who live in Hungary.  One last note about the countries listed in the table above: their Gini indices are calculated based on the best available data.  But not all of these countries are open, honest, and transparent in the publishing of their economic data, as documented in the Inequality Transparency Index of the World Inequality Database.  So actual inequality may be worse than noted.

Britain, of course, is a long-standing historical example of the narcissism of ever-smaller differences, whose second-class citizens have at times included the Irish, the Welsh, the Scottish, the peoples of the de-industrialized North Britain, the Cockneys, the Scousers, etc, etc.  And note - these people all look like each other and like the royal "Cool Kids"!  Note also that many of the people who were meant to be excluded from Britain by the Brexit look almost identical to the native Britons.  Note lastly that the Brexit has led to massive shortages in Britain - just in time for the Christmas shopping season.  The joining of Britain to the orbit of the Global Far Right has been a natural fit.  And the Gini index of Britain has been climbing upward over the last decade.  Boris Johnson has not helped.

How are many members of the dominant cultures of the world responding to the sudden appearance of their own disenfranchisement?  How are they responding to the surprise announcement that, " Sure, everyone whom we feel to be deserving got some, but, er, well, there's not enough for you"?  I don't know how the answer to this looks in other countries, but during the Trump years I used to drive by a homeless encampment which had a little American flag flying over one of the tents.  What badge did the dwellers in that tent wear that got them excluded from the big party?

P.S. To learn more about the spread of inequality through Russian society in 2020 and 2021, check out "The Middle Class Went Into Self-Destruct Mode" ("Средний класс вошел в режим самоуничтожения") from the Ведомости website.  Oh, the horror of losing one's middle place in an unsympathetic pecking order...!