Equity That Can't Be Rescued

It has been now over six and a half months since the start of Russia's attempted seizure of Ukraine, a seizure which Russian president Vladimir Putin schizophrenically described as "a special military operation to remove Nazis." During these past months it has been Russia which has been revealed to be the fascist thug and it has been Ukraine which has been revealed to be the nation of decency occupying the moral high ground.  It has also been revealed that the "mighty" Russian military can be and is in fact being torn to pieces by its intended victims.

It is now being revealed that the seemingly invincible machinery of political conquest which Putin's Russia has built up over the last two decades is unraveling like a badly knitted sweater attacked by a pack of kittens.  That machinery included the sort of dirty tricks which Russia used in 2016 to install Donald Chump in the White House.  (My, how high you all seemed to be riding back then!)  The machinery also included the use of the Russian military as a tool of terror to frighten nations into the Russian orbit.  The motivation for the building of that machinery was the Russian desire to re-establish Russia as the center of empire, an incarnation of the "Third Rome" which would have narcissistically lorded itself over all the other peoples of earth.  

The Russian empire-building exercise has come off the rails in Ukraine.  News reports over the last week have described how the Russian military has lost thousands of square miles of recently conquered Ukrainian territory, and how the Russian military is close to collapse under the weight of fierce Ukrainian counterattacks.  Yet Putin refuses to surrender to reality.  His experiment in empire-building is now a money pit - like a badly built car or termite-eaten house - yet he refuses to come to the point where he chooses to cut his losses and abandon his "investment".  If Putin persists in his war to the point where all his means of coercive force are destroyed, how will he manage to retain his grip on his own population?

Gantry Collapse

Gantry (noun): "...an overhead bridge-like structure supporting equipment such as a crane, signals, or cameras." - Wikipedia.

Gantry (as in Elmer Gantry): the surname of the protagonist in Elmer Gantry, a satirical novel by Sinclair Lewis concerning a Methodist minister of the American Midwest during the 1920's.

The threat of American white supremacist theocracy was pushed to the forefront of the consciousness of many people after the overturning of Roe V. Wade in June of this year.  But the roots of the threat have existed for a rather long time, as seen in the teachings and activities of Rousas Rushdoony, Abraham Kuyper, Gary North, Pat Robertson, Tim LaHaye, George Grant (one of whose buddies is a certain contemporary religious musician named Michael Card), and others of like character.  When seen from a historical perspective, 2022 is then simply the culmination of a long process.  I find it natural to want to consider, or even to make, predictions regarding its ultimate success or failure.  My personal prediction is that the white evangelical/Protestant supremacist experiment will eventually fail - not only in the United States, but elsewhere, in such places as Brazil under Bolsonaro for instance.  (Here I find myself at odds with the predictions contained in books like The Handmaid's Tale.)  Why do I say this?  Because according to the Good Book, white supremacist theocracy is evil in the sight of God, even the God Whom the white supremacists claim to worship.  Therefore, the outworkings of damnation are already propagating through white evangelical America and through those elements of white evangelicalism that are aligned with the Global Far Right.  The ultimate end state of white supremacist theocracy is therefore failure, regardless of the path taken to that ultimate end state - rather like the result of a line integral taken over a conservative vector field.  But let's see if we can explore and trace some possible paths for this failure, for these outworkings of damnation - not as wanna-be prophets, but as empiricists making educated guesses.  As always, take these guesses with a grain of salt.

First, the theological perspective.  As I have mentioned in previous posts (here, here, and here, for instance), the American Religious Right has declared that the United States is in great need of a spiritual change, and that the proof of this need is America's tolerance of certain sins which the preachers from the Right hold up as being worse than all other sins.  Therefore the American Religious Right has told all the rest of us that in order to save America from moral ruin, we must vote for "godly" politicians who will preserve America as a "Christian" nation by passing and enforcing "Christian" laws.  My previous writings on this subject have stated my belief that the political strategy of the American Religious Right is the wrong approach to trying to create spiritual change in society, and that the New Testament proves this approach to be wrong.  (Read the Epistle to the Galatians, for instance.)  I have also mentioned that spiritual change is not the actual goal of the American Religious Right, but rather, economic, military, and political supremacy for one group of people at the expense of all the other people on earth.  

So then it is natural to ask what actual spiritual change looks like according to the New Testament.  Let's look first at what this change looks like on a personal level, as illustrated in Luke 19:1-10.  This passage concerns Zacchaeus the Jewish tax-collector.  A bit of backstory: by the time of this incident, the nation of Israel had long since been conquered by the Roman Empire.  The custom of the Romans toward the subjects of their conquered territories was to delegate certain functions of the state to private contractors.  Thus the collection of taxes in the Roman provinces was contracted to wealthy private citizens who bid for the right to serve as official tax collectors.  These private individuals frequently cheated the people from whom taxes were collected, and got filthy rich in the process.  Thus when we first encounter Zacchaeus, the Scripture notes that he was rich.  The Scripture also says that he was a sinner.  But by the end of Zacchaeus' encounter with Christ, the Lord said of him, "Today salvation has come to this house, becaus he, too, is a son of Abraham..."  In other words, Zacchaeus had been converted from being a cheat and a rascal.  How do we know that he had truly repented and believed?  Because he gave back all the money he had taken by cheating.  The spiritual change in Zacchaeus was seen in what he did as a result of his encounter with Christ.  Spiritual change brings a change in the things people do and in the things they stop doing.  And this change covers much more than just repenting of sexual sin.  According to the Scriptures, God wants to deliver people from cheating, from greed, and from committing murder as well.  

How then do societies experience this change?  It happens as that change is propagated from one person to another.  It starts with people who have experienced that change as a result of an encounter with Christ, and it is propagated as these people encounter others who can see the incarnation of Christ in the behavior of the people who have experienced spiritual change.  In other words, the change is propagated through believers in Christ - servants of the New Testament - who practice what they preach.  As that change spreads, it changes the society.  But it does so by changing the people of the society.  That spiritual change results in a change in what societies do and what they don't do.  For an example of large groups of people choosing to stop doing things, we can look at Acts 19, where entire communities gave up practicing magic and praying to idols (thus provoking a bit of civil unrest from people who made money from making idol statues!).  But for an example of large groups of people choosing to do things they had never done before, we can look at Acts 2 and Acts 4, in which rich people who became believers in Christ began to sell all their possessions and share them with the poor and with anyone who might have need.  As Acts 4:32-36 says, "And the multitude of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and not one was saying that anything belonging to him was his own; but all things were common property to them...For there was not a needy person among them, for all who were owners of land or houses would sell them and bring the prices of the things being sold and lay them at the apostles' feet; and they would be distributed to each, as any had need."  However, these societal changes are but the result of an inward spiritual change.  The spiritual change must come first.

When we look at the radical nature of this spiritual change, at its radical end point of producing communities of people who truly and practically and radically love their fellow human beings as they love themselves, we can easily see that the American Religious Right (and its evangelical offshoots in places like Brazil) have no interest in this kind of change.  Indeed, if such change were to occur nowadays, the Right would accuse the instigators of such change of being "ssssocialistsssss!" and would bitterly fight against them.  Trying to produce spiritual change by political action and passing laws is completely backward from God's methods.  The white American evangelical/Protestant church should know this, yet they continue to try to seize political power under the pretext of promoting godly laws.  But the evidence of their own moral failure shows that they really don't care about morality or spirituality, but simply seek to use dirty tricks - including corrupting the Word of God - to obtain political, economic, and military supremacy.  Because the real aim and goal of the American Religious Right is to turn religion into a tool of earthly secular empire, the New Testament declares that they are under a curse (Galatians 1:8-9).  They are thus destined to fail.

Why this failure?  Or, to put it another way, what are the ways in which this failure may propagate? To answer that question. let's zoom out from the spiritual to consider historical and literary perspectives.  On its most basic big-picture level (even before we get to theology), those who want to use religion in any way as a tool of earthly empire are trying to get the rest of us to swallow a certain kind of belief.  The tenets of this belief could be described as a "sales value proposition" served up to us by the missionaries of such a religion.  What is the "sales value proposition" which the white church has historically offered to the rest of the world?  It can be summed up as follows:

• That we should believe in a god who has decreed that one group of people should rule and dominate the world, subjugating and/or dispossessing all other nations on earth because the favored nation is supposedly pure while all the rest of us are defective.  
• That we should believe that when this supposedly favored nation proves by its deeds that it is no more righteous, no more pure, no better than any of the rest of us, it should receive all of the forgiving grace of its supposed "jesus" who dispenses that grace in the form of "Mulligans" for bad behavior (see this also) which serve much the same function as the indulgences which the Catholic Church used to dispense to wealthy penitents.  
• That we should believe that the god whom the missionaries of the supposedly favored nation preach has decreed that all the rest of us should be punished forever for our imperfections, whether those perfections are real or only imagined by the members of the favored nation, and that this punishment should consist of enslavement and extermination of us by the members of the favored nation.  No grace, no "mulligans" for us!  Rather, zero-tolerance, three-strikes, let's-build-a-wall, etc.   
• That it is supposedly the "Christian" duty of us who are not of the favored people to submit to such a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose god and his missionaries, and that we should not complain about or attempt to resist our lot in life.  

Given the cultural invasion which we the nonwhite and non-Anglo peoples have experienced, and given the fact that this Kool-Aid was forced down the throats of many of us from childhood, it is understandable that many of us started out believing it.  But now many, many of us are awakening from our enforced intoxication.  How do the missionaries of the supposedly favored people think such a "sales value proposition" is viewed by us in this present day?  You may as well offer to put a full toilet bowl (or chamber pot, for those who want to be more portable and old-fashioned) on each of our doorsteps!  Who in his right mind would accept such a proposition?

In other words, sooner or later, people who have been victimized by religion used as a weapon of subjugation will reject that religion, or at least that presentation of religion.  Consider a purely fictional example of this rejection, as seen in the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov.  In the first book of the series, we see the use of a fictional religion to advance the political power of the Galactic Foundation - and we see how in this story, over a period of a hundred years, religion as a tool of empire ceases to be effective because the intended victims of the empire begin to see how religion is being used in the attempt to politically and economically subjugate them.  This is a purely fictitious example, although Asimov himself admitted that he wrote the Foundation books "with a little bit of cribbin' from the works of Edward Gibbon" who was a historian.  Yet it has been repeatedly played out in real life, as seen in the loss of the political power of the Church during the Renaissance and the Reformation.  

It is also seen in the novel Noli Me Tangere by Jose Rizal.  This novel describes how the Catholic Church in the Philippines began to lose its legitimacy due to its own corruption and oppression of the Philippine populace.  This loss of legitimacy was a key factor in the Philippine war of independence that shattered imperial Spanish control of that country.  Consider also the loss of legitimacy of the Catholic Church in Latin America during the 19th and 20th centuries, as Catholic clerics far too frequently sided with European oppressors against the Latin American poor.  Some of this loss of legitimacy shows up in the writings of Latin American novelists who used the literary device of "magic realism" in order to provide disturbing commentary on the role of the Church in the daily lives of poor people in Central and South America.  Consider lastly the documented experiences of missionaries like Pearl S. Buck, whose exposure to the arrogant nationalism of many white missionaries in early 20th century China turned her off to American evangelicalism and led to her writing essays that were sharply critical of American and European missionary efforts in China.  (As a result, she became so controversial that she earned the distinction of having J. Edgar Hoover's FBI create a file on her!)  

Let's zoom in a little more closely on China and India.  Both nations were subjugated and ruthlessly exploited by Anglo-European power.  Thus a "missionary door" was forcibly kicked open to both nations.  Through that door many white missionaries streamed.  What were their motives?  It is sometimes impossible to say directly, yet there is much evidence that many of these missionaries were moved by a narcissistic desire to establish themselves as mini-popes, big shots over the only people on whom they had any power to force themselves.  Thus they became shovers of things down other peoples' throats.  Consider the example of Mr. Beaver in Have We No Rights? by Mabel Williamson, as well as the literary example of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.  But even more, consider what George Orwell says in The Road to Wigan Pier about the reasons why many poor British young men of the "lower upper class" enlisted in the British Foreign Service in the early 20th century.  I suggest that perhaps some of these reasons carried over to those who volunteered for the mission field in those days.  Given such "ministers of the Gospel", it is no wonder that the struggle for liberation from Anglo-European rule in both China and India was led by men who disavowed Christianity.  It is also no surprise that now, in the 21st century, we see that those white missionary agencies which spent so much in labor and money in the previous centuries to establish missions in these countries have almost nothing to show for it.  For these missionary endeavors were but the expression of the neurosis of the dominators in response to the alarms of their conscience concerning the treatment of the dominated.

China and India are but two examples of the way in which peoples who have been oppressed liberate themselves by building their own internal power - both culturally, educationally, and technologically - as they learn to successfully navigate the world of "peer-polity interaction."  Their example is being imitated by nations, communities, and forward-thinking individuals throughout the African continent and other historically nonwhite locales.  These individuals are in the process of crafting their narrative according to their own calling and not the wishes of their would-be oppressors.  Thus in their examination of the Scriptures, they have accurately seen a call to a theology of liberation.  One consequence of this will be the emergence of a world in which peoples and nations will have to be polite toward each other in order to live decently.  In such a world, those who truly want to advance the Gospel will have to obey the dictum of James 3:13 - "Who among you is wise and understanding?  Let him show by his good behavior his deeds in the gentleness of wisdom."  But those who want to twist the Bible into a political tool of empire will find themselves increasingly thwarted, because the rest of the world will refuse to swallow any of that nonsense.  And those who want to dominate their fellow human beings will find that they can do so only at unbearable cost to themselves.

Scapegoat Sins and Denial

Once again, I have a post in the works, but do not have time to finish it.  So today's post will be short.  This post concerns my observations of the attempts by the American White Right to use religion - specifically Christianity - as a tool of earthly political and economic domination.  As one might guess, I think those attempts will ultimately fail, for they are built on an unsustainable foundation.  The un-Scriptural elements of that foundation have been the following assumptions:

• That God has chosen religious white America from the foundation of the world to be the absolute masters of the world.
• That God has therefore given these holders of white power and white supremacy the right to murder and enslave all the rest of us because supposedly we are morally defective while the white supremacists are supposedly morally superior to all the rest of us.
• That the proof of this moral superiority is that religious white America upholds Biblical morality and has certain intellectual beliefs about Jesus while the rest of us do not.
• That the sole sum and substance of Biblical morality consists of being monogamous and heterosexual, and that God is absolutely not concerned about how white supremacists treat the poor and the nonwhite.

A very quick look at the New Testament disproves this last point completely.  For while it is absolutely true that God hates sexual sin, it is also true that white evangelical America would have been guilty of breaking every commandment of God even without sexual sin, as noted in the part of the epistle of James which says "Now if you do not commit adultery, but you do commit murder, you have become a transgressor of the law."  There is also an added difficulty for white evangelicals these days: namely the abundant evidence that white American evangelicalism is guilty of adultery (and much, much more!), as seen by the legions of white evangelical pastors and Republican politicians who have been caught with their pants down (often with members of the same sex) over the last few decades.  The most recent evangelical fiasco involves the ongoing revelations of the crimes and corruption of the political darling of white evangelicals, namely, former U.S. president Donald John Trump, and the ongoing refusal of white evangelicals to admit that they devoted themselves to supporting the presidency of a complete piece of garbage.

But I am thinking now of how impossible it has been for anyone to get white evangelicals to see and admit the error of their ways.  From climate change denialism to chants of "Blue Lives Matter!" to COVID denialism, white evangelicals continue to remain willfully blind.  And when they continue to say that they have been put here on earth to violently punish the evil of other people, yet they refuse to see and punish the evil in their own ranks (Josh Duggar and Dennis Hastert, for instance), the blindness becomes even more willful.

Thus I find it fitting to share a video with you my readers.  I stumbled on it entirely by accident, as it was recommended to me by someone I know.  I'm sure you will see the parallels.

You Won't Mind Your Own Business, So Why Are You Trying To Mind Mine?

I have a post in the works which will address the attempts by the American Religious Right to establish a white supremacist theocracy in the U.S.  Hint: I have reason to believe that these attempts are about to fail spectacularly.  But I don't have time to write that post just yet.  (Entrepreneurs need to learn sometimes to say no to new work!)  So today's post will not be on that subject.  Today's post will also be short.

I have written in this blog about the ecological devastation being wrought on the Russian landscape under the reign of Vladimir Putin.  Specifically, I have written about the spectacularly widespread Russian wildfires of 2020 and 2021.  It should not be surprising therefore to learn that the Russian wildfire season of 2022 has started off with a bang.  (See this, this, and this for instance.)  According to a Wikipedia article on the subject, 

"The 2022 Siberian wildfires are a series of ongoing wildfires in Siberia, Russia that began in Siberia in early May 2022. Fires are concentrated in the Krasnoyarsk, Altai, Irkutsk, Kemerovo, Omsk, Kurgan regions, Khakassia and Sakha republics. The total area of ​​fires, as of 15 May, is about 20 thousand hectares, and since the beginning of 2022 - more than 100 thousand hectares."

The Wikipedia article also has a map which illustrates how much of the Russian landscape has been plagued by the fires this year.  (Click on this link to see or download the map.)  From this map we can see that nearly a third of the Russian land mass was affected by wildfires as of May.  Russian president Vladimir Putin called for aggressive action to deal with the wildfires, but it should be obvious that his statements are merely a blowing of useless smoke.  For the track record of the Russian government from at least as far back as 2019 shows a singular lack of willingness to effectively deal with the wildfire threat.  And by spending so many Russian resources in trying to take over other people's countries, Putin has left very little to competently manage the affairs of his own country.  Score another point for that thieving little man in his bunker and his piece-of-garbage regime.  This is the man who was worshiped by an idiot named Donald John Trump.

Science Fiction As Cultural Soft Power

Over the last several months, I've been listening to a lot of stories.  I have also listened to the reasons which authors give for wanting to tell a story, for wanting to become skilled at creating and delivering a story.  Why create stories?  I have become interested in the benefits which are experienced by the writers, and to me the most interesting of those benefits are not monetary.  Such benefits include the learning of strategic thinking through storytelling, learning to discover and explore the various possibilities in a possibility space, and learning to foresee the various ways people may react to a set of possibilities, as well as the motives for those reactions.  A writer who applies himself to sharpening his skill also gains the ability to craft his own narrative, thus taking control of his own narrative and preserving himself and his narrative from the voices of others who want to slander the writer and his people through their own narrative.  Learning to craft a good story aids the writer's projection of his own narrative into the world.  By this projection, the author creates a bridge between human beings.  I have come to believe that speculative fiction - particularly, science fiction - has unique advantages as a means of exploring possibilities of situations, and of the possible human reactions (and their motives) to those situational possibilities.  It also has unique advantages as a vehicle for human narratives.

These conclusions of mine have been formed by my introduction over the last year to Chinese science fiction.  That introduction came in a way that would make sense to most of us who have had to live through the last year as citizens of the United States.  It all started with the restrictions on life and movement which reality forced on us through the COVID-19 pandemic.  Being cut off from much in-person contact with others meant that I was to a large degree cut off from cognitive stimulation from other minds.  I engaged in a bit of binge-watching YouTube, but always felt terrible about the amount of time that thus got wasted.  And I'm not a Netflix kind of guy.  But I was open to listening to audiobooks, since I could work out, wash dishes, mow the lawn, etc. while listening.  So I turned to Librivox.  But most of the fiction on Librivox is characterized by the sort of triumphalist point of view common to 19th century authors who came from the "dominant culture", the point of view that people and communities of color find to be intensely annoying because it sings the praises of our oppressors.   I got very quickly tired of trying to listen to that trash.  However, Librivox did not seem to have very many audiobooks whose texts had been written by non-Western, nonwhite authors.  So I began searching for modern stories written by people from non-European cultures.  And I decided to stop being a cheapskate and to become willing to pay to buy recordings of such stories.  Thus I went to an indie audiobook site and discovered Liu Cixin.  I got hooked!    

I discovered that Liu Cixin's works of fiction were part of a massive display of burgeoning Chinese (and Asian) cultural soft power.  Liu is part of what is called a "new wave" of Chinese science fiction.  Other writers in this new wave include Ken Liu, Hao Jingfang, Xia Jia, Chen Qiufan, and Chen Chuncheng, to name a few.  These authors share some key common characteristics: all are quite educated.  All are able to think deeply, to explore deeply a space of possibilities and the possible human reactions to those possibilities.  All are able to write their explorations from a refreshingly non-Western perspective.  All are good, strong, entertaining writers!  Examples which struck me:

• Liu Cixin: The Three-Body trilogy (English title: Remembrance of Earth's Past) is his most famous work.  It was this trilogy that hooked me.  The trilogy concerns the social and technological challenges faced by humanity under the threat of an invasion from alien creatures who are as far advanced above us as a modern First-World nation is above a pack of monkeys.  (Two memorable quotes from the first book: "消灭人类暴政!" "世界属于三体!", and " 不要回答! 不要回答!! 不要回答!!!")  Liu has been compared to Arthur C. Clarke, but in my opinion he is much, much better.  For one thing, his characters are fully fleshed and deeply complex.  For those who have read the books, think of Ye Wenjie, of Luo Ji, of Cheng Xin, of the unforeseen effects of the psychic injury suffered by someone who is deeply violated by the people of her own country.  One other note: It has been reported that Netflix is in the process of screwing up (Oops!  I mean, "creating a movie adaptation of") Three Body, and that their adaptation may be released this year.  I hope that Chinese filmmakers create their own version as well.  Even though I do not speak Chinese, I think I will enjoy the Chinese version much better.

• Hao Jingfang: Ms. Hao is the author of a number of stories.  One of those stories, "Folding Beijing," is a commentary on the effects of inequality and of unequal distribution of privilege in a society.  The other, a novel titled Vagabonds, is a story about a group of kids from Mars who, as a result of a five-year stay on Earth as teenagers, become "Third Culture Kids" who are able to see the flaws in both the hyper-capitalist world of Earth and the stifling central planning of the Martian society.  This leads to conflicts which the kids must navigate.

• Chen Qiufan: Mr. Chen, who goes by the name Stanley Chan when outside China, is the author of Waste Tide, a novel which explores the ways in which even seemingly homogeneous societies create caste systems so that a small number of privileged people can benefit from the dirty work done by those without privilege.  In this case, the dirty work consists of the hand-intensive labor needed to support a low-cost e-waste recycling business and its resulting economy.

• Ken Liu: Mr. Liu is an American citizen of Chinese ancestry.  I got to listen to the audiobook version of his short story collection titled The Paper Menagerie.  Some of the stories that stood out to me concern a social media company that takes over the lives of everyone on earth, a "generation ship" traveling to another star and the heroic choice that saves it, and the consequences to a society that refuses to acknowledge its historical guilt for past injustices.

• Chen Chuncheng: Mr. Chen is the author of a number of short stories.  I read one of these yesterday between cleaning the house and fixing my backyard fence.  The story was titled, "A Cloudcutter's Diary".  I won't tell any more about it except to say that it was a trip!

Let us consider what has been accomplished by these writers and their narratives.  One of their accomplishments has been to refute the white supremacist narrative pushed by Trumpoids such as Fox News that tries to dehumanize the Chinese as monsters and that tries to depict Chinese society as some sort of monolithic monstrosity.  This refutation has been accomplished by telling deeply human stories about complex, deeply human Chinese characters.  (Think again of Ye Wenjie, for instance.)  These authors have presented the Chinese narrative in a compelling manner and from multiple perspectives.  They have also offered trenchant critique of many social and political systems (including their own!)  Their stories have begun to build a bridge between ordinary Westerners and ordinary Chinese people.  They have also provoked their readers into a more rigorous exploration of spaces of possibilities, which is a hallmark of good speculative fiction.  And very importantly, by their own example they have shown other historically marginalized nonwhite populations a path forward to personal and collective liberation by developing technical and scientific expertise in order to create beautifully good work.  Liu Cixin's characters in particular move me to regret every minute of my youth which was wasted in watching cartoons on TV instead of studying technically challenging subjects.  

Chinese SF writers are an example of what Asef Bayat describes as "the art of presence" in Life As Politics: the kind of excellence of work that forces a change in the narrative told against a historically marginalized people by a dominant society.  To quote:

"In this respect, I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in

their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity."

Note that when I read the word "authoritarian" this passage, I am not focusing primarily on the authoritarianism of China's current government under Xi Jinping, although that authoritarianism is something which we should definitely be concerned about.  I am rather focusing on the authoritarianism of the white supremacist Global Far Right which has had, among its ugliest manifestations, the United States under Donald Trump from 2017 to 2020 and Russia under Vladimir Putin. 

A surprising final note: consider the role of religion in the writings of these authors.  Reading them completely refutes the story we in the West have been told that China is rigidly and rigorously atheist, and that the Chinese government forbids any kind of religious expression.  The reality is not nearly as black-and-white.  It should rather be said that many Chinese are becoming open to spiritual explorations.  However, the white evangelical churches of the West should not construe this as "the opening of a missionary door" for the white evangelical message, but should take a good look at themselves to ask why on earth any reasonable person would want to listen to them, or believe in the sort of "jesus" they preach.  More on that in a future post.

The Sacking of The Libraries

Imagine if you will a scene in which a young Southern California boy and his mother are about to enter the Norwalk Library sometime during an evening of a school year shortly before the advent of the Internet.  (Note: I have nothing against the Norwalk Library - it's just that I happen to know where it is because I used to live in So. Cal.)  Let's say that the mom has taken the boy to the library so that he may search for books on treatments for mange in animals such as dogs and cats.  Let's also say that the boy needs this information in order to write a book report (remember those?) for his middle-school biology class.  However, just as the boy and his mom cross the threshold, a mysterious space-time bubble phenomenon transports them to a library built 50 or 60 years into the future.  Imagine that libraries of the future have been shaped by the evolution of commercial culture in ways that could not have been imagined by our hapless boy and mom pair.  

Thus, when the boy and mom go to an information terminal to look for books on veterinary medicine, the first thing they see is not the location of the books they desire, but rather a screenful of paid ads for vets, pet stores, pet treats, pet grooming supplies, cat and dog clothes, etc.  Bemused and befuddled by the screen, the boy and mom start walking around the library in search of a librarian.  Once they find her, they ask where the books on veterinary science are located.  The librarian asks whether they want to buy some dog or cat food while they are at the library, explaining that she gets a commission from every sale she makes.  Oh, and by the way, would they like a recommendation for a vet?  Perhaps some "natural, drug-free remedies"? Or maybe some shampoo?  In a state of both mounting confusion and mounting frustration, the mother of the boy grumbles that she is just looking for books written by veterinary authorities so that her son can write a book report for school.  "Besides," the mom says, "our family doesn't have any pets!"  Grudgingly, the librarian leads the mom and her son to the bookshelves that contain books on veterinary science and diseases in pets.  However, the boy and mom notice that most of these books are actually coupon books advertising veterinary services and pet hospitals in Southern California!  In desperation the boy and mom walk out, wondering what on earth happened to their library.  As they are walking through the parking lot to their car, a man sidles up to them and says, "I noticed that you were looking for information on treating mange.  You must like pets! I have some hamsters in the trunk of my car, and I'm willing to let you have one for a special low price..."

Although this scene may sound far-fetched, I'd like to suggest that this perverse "library of the future" accurately describes the state into which our society has increasingly evolved, and that this is a consequence of the monetization of information exchange.  The prime example of this is the evolution of the internet from its inception until now.  This evolution has been especially rapid and widespread during the last seven or eight years.  Perceptive souls can remember a time in which information that was transmitted electronically was not monetized, and those who provided information via the World Wide Web did so for reasons that had little to do with financial gain.  Indeed, the explosive growth of free exchange of information that occurred during the 1990's was a consequence not only of the growth of the Web, but also of the growth of the availability of technologies that allowed people to bypass traditional gatekeepers in order to publish their own creative content.  A case in point is the miniaturization and lowering of cost of technologies for recording and storage that allowed musicians to mass-produce recordings of their own performances without having to sign on to a record label.  (In fact, I own a few self-published CD's from such "indie" artists.)  Such technologies for self-publishing became known as "democratizing technologies" because they allowed large numbers of ordinary people to publish their creative content without needing access to costly centralized infrastructure.

The internet was originally born out of the need for large governmental agencies and public research institutions to share information easily and cheaply.  Yet the internet swiftly became one of the most powerful democratizing technologies, since it drastically reduced the cost any individual had to pay to reach a large audience quickly.  Moreover, the culture and worldview of the original architects of the internet prioritized its democratizing nature.  To quote from an Atlantic article titled, "The Rotting Internet Is A Collective Hallucination":

"The internet’s distinct architecture arose from a distinct constraint and a distinct

freedom: First, its academically minded designers didn’t have or expect to raise

massive amounts of capital to build the network; and second, they didn’t want or

expect to make money from their invention.  The internet’s framers thus had no money to simply roll out a uniform centralized network ... Instead, they settled on the equivalent

of rules for how to bolt existing networks together.

"Rather than a single centralized network modeled after the legacy telephone system,

operated by a government or a few massive utilities, the internet was designed to allow

any device anywhere to interoperate with any other device, allowing any provider able

to bring whatever networking capacity it had to the growing party. And because the

network’s creators did not mean to monetize, much less monopolize, any of it, the key

was for desirable content to be provided naturally by the network’s users, some of

whom would act as content producers or hosts, setting up watering holes for others to

frequent." (Emphasis added.)

Because access to the original internet was not centrally owned or controlled, the internet became self-curating.  In other words, websites naturally began to be ranked according to how many people found their content to be interesting or useful.  A website thus gathered many hits by being genuinely good.  Thus the early internet became a legitimate source of edification, education, often extremely high-quality information, and exhilaratingly interesting conversation between people who might not otherwise have connected with each other.  

But then certain individuals began to see how they could make money from this sudden outburst of connection and conversation.  The first monetizers were creators of centralized platforms for connecting people to each other.  These creators exploited a weakness of the proto-internet, namely the need for early participants to have somewhat deep knowledge of programming languages and things like Java and HTML.  Since most people did not have this knowledge, they welcomed such platforms as MySpace and Facebook which allowed people to connect with each other electronically without needing deep coding knowledge.  Once most users of the internet were aggregated by the owners of these platforms, it was only natural for corporations and capitalists to seek to monetize these platforms.  At first the monetization was rather clunky and clumsy.  (Remember when big corporations like the Ford Motor Company or Eaton were urging us to "like them on Facebook"?)  But the eventual form taken by platform monetization consisted of pushing advertising (both of the obvious kind and of more subtle, sneaky kinds) on these platforms.

Within the last seven or eight years, this pushing of advertising has conquered its final frontier: the monetization of search engines.  This is certainly true of Google (who are now owned by Alphabet Inc.).  But it is also true of Duck Duck Go, Bing, Brave, Smartpage, Yahoo, and every other advertiser-supported search provider.  Thus when one conducts a Web search using any of these engines, the top results are usually either ads or are webpages that have been monetized by hosting ads on them.  The mission of these advertiser-supported search platforms has thus changed from helping people effectively search for information.  The mission now is to direct people to advertising packaged as clickbait.  I'd like to suggest that this is leading to certain consequences which have possibly not been foreseen by the monetizers.

The first of these consequences is the increase in transaction costs, that is the costs involved in exchanges taking place in a given economy.   To quote from Transaction Costs, Institutions and Economic Performance by Douglass C. North:

"It is the cost of measuring the valuable attributes of the goods and services or the performance of agents in exchange that is the fundamental key to the cost of transacting."

In other words, in making an economic transaction between two parties, each party must spend time and resources to accurately determine what kind of value and how much of this value they are likely to get from the transaction.  When each side has unbiased information from impartial sources, the transaction costs are relatively low.  When the only information that is available comes from paid advertisers, the transaction costs become much higher, because part of the transaction costs consists of spending time trying to figure out how much the information sources are lying.  Case in point: about fifteen or twenty years ago, manufacturers of health supplements began to tout the health benefits of fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS).  Some of the things these manufacturers said began to be of interest to people suffering from intestinal disorders.  However, these sufferers were forced to take what they were hearing with a massive grain of salt, because some of the claims made about FOS were outlandish.  In order to make an informed decision regarding FOS, some of these sufferers turned to the internet, where they encountered a massive amount of unbelievable claims.  These sufferers were stymied until they discovered that FOS is also called inulin (not insulin), and they began to do Web searches with the keyword "inulin."  That was when they found the peer-reviewed papers from research institutions that enabled them to make an informed decision.  (Note: since then, things have undergone a further mutation.  Supplement manufacturers discovered that people were researching inulin and that searches for information on FOS were falling off.  So now these manufacturers have modified their Web advertising to push the fact that their products contain "inulin."  "A rose by any other name...")  From this we see the general principle that when people are faced with decisions regarding transactions that have potentially large consequences (either because of the money that must be spent or the effect of the transaction or both), an increase in transaction costs resulting from a decline in the quality of available information about the transaction leads to a decrease in the number and rate of transactions.  Or to put it simply, if when you walk into a market, you know that all the sellers in the market are lying to you, you tend to not want to spend your money.

The second consequence is a decrease in connected conversations resulting from the restriction of the free flow of free (as in free coffee) information.  Monetization of information flows often means that valuable and useful information is locked behind paywalls guarded by rent-seeking corporations.  This is especially true of the kind of academic knowledge formerly disseminated free of charge by publicly funded research institutions.  The flow of this knowledge is increasingly controlled by gatekeepers such as Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons Inc., the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), and Science Direct.   The combination of monetization of the channels of conversation (through advertising) and monetization of the valuable things that may arise in any potential conversation (through rent-seeking and paywalls) produces a decrease in productive conversation.  This leads to a decrease in innovation within a society.  To see how innovation in the United States and the West has begun to decline, click here and here.  Note especially how at least one of these sources mentions the restriction of the free flow of information.  Also, a fictional case of this decrease can be found in a recent novel called Vagabonds by Hao Jingfang.  (Ms. Hao has a bachelors degree in physics and a doctorate in economics, is a mother of two, a social entrepreneur, a scholar who is part of a think tank in China, and a member of a new wave of Chinese science-fiction writers who have crafted extremely strong, thought-provoking and awesomely good stories.  More on the Chinese sci-fi phenomenon in another post.)  In that novel, set in the 22nd century, Mars has been colonized by humans (sorry, Elon Musk, but Ms. Hao doesn't mention you at all), and has successfully fought a war of independence to break away from the government and economy of Earth.  In her novel, Earth's economy is described as a hyper-monetized "information economy" obsessed with guarding "intellectual property" while the Martians have created a society of free information exchange in which citizens make contributions motivated solely by their desire to create.  As a result, the Martian society becomes more advanced technologically while Earth begins to stagnate.  Although this is a fictional example, I would argue that it reflects what is seen in real life in organizations, institutions, and societies in which the free flow of information is constrained.  Our problem in the West, particularly in the United States, is that we have failed to recognize the constraints which our very own hyper-capitalist system imposes on our own ability to have the sort of cross-disciplinary, spontaneous conversations in which disparate ideas collide to produce innovation.  The internet in its early days began to provide a forum for those sorts of productive conversations, but the monetization of the internet has begun to choke off those conversations.

I predict that this choking off will lead (perhaps has already begun to lead) to a third consequence: an increasing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs, and an increasing push by many people to "get back to the garden"; that is a push by many people to re-create spaces in which neither information nor the channels of conversation are monetized.  I don't believe that I'm the only person who is becoming tired of high transaction costs.  And I don't believe that I'm the only one who is looking for a way to build spaces of connectedness and conversation that are free from the corruption of advertising and rent-seeking.   But those of us who seek to build such spaces must know that we must pay a price in sweat equity (that is, our own hard work) to build such spaces.  They don't come for free.  As the old internet adage goes, "If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product."  Perhaps some will need to work to build spaces in realspace where conversations between diverse partners can arise.  Such spaces will be the strongest form of the revival I am thinking of.  But such spaces may also be virtual.  However, for such virtual spaces to arise, the participants will need to learn to do for themselves many things which they have been taught to take for granted due to the ease of using centralized platforms for connection such as social media.  In the absence of these platforms, people who want to build networks of conversation and information exchange will have to take themselves back to the mindset that built the internet in the first place.  Some of us may have to learn coding (especially HTML); some of us will have to learn how to build our own Web crawlers.  Some of us may have to read books or take courses to learn these things.  Whether in realspace or in cyberspace, it will be interesting to see the ways in which groups of people reclaim spaces for constructive conversation.

Russia Must Not Be Allowed To Win

The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have evolved into a war of attrition.  On the one hand is Putin's Russia, the revanchist monster which has thrown staggering amounts of men and materiel into its attempt to conquer a sovereign and free nation.  Many of these men have been killed and wounded, and much of the materiel has been destroyed.  Yet Russia still has men and materiel to blow on its stupid and evil endeavor.  On the other hand is Ukraine, a small nation which Putin had hoped to make into the first appetizer in his meal of devouring Europe (and after that, the world).  Ukraine has done mighty deeds in resisting the Russian monster, but the people of Ukraine are worn down by weeks of unrestrained war and an onslaught of crimes against humanity which have been perpetrated by Russia.

Russia must be taught that crime does not pay.  Russia must instead pay an unbearable price for its attempt to take over the world.  Therefore, the West must do whatever it takes to ensure that Russia loses completely and decisively in Ukraine.  The West must furthermore destroy Russian power so that Russia never again tries to exalt itself above the rest of the world in order to build a global empire.