As I read through the NY Times this Sunday and it’s full of things about identity and democracy: the want for linking state drivers licenses together into some kind of national database; the fiasco that is consumer information and its relationship to identity theft; the rise of popular representative government in the Middle East; the decline of domestic civil liberties; and the lingering sense that America has lost something once admired by de Tocqueville and I’m wondering about the fundamental philosophical mistakes we are making as we incrementally march towards a national ID scheme that will not only assign the mark of the beast to every American, but somehow dissolve the barrier between consumer identity and civil identity without making the distinction between the two as to which is more important.
And which is more important? Well, civil, I think – that is why we have a constitutional restriction on searches by the government. Obviously one could, and I do, argue that the restriction ought to apply universally, but that isn’t what the law says, so right now the more valuable identity is who you are to the government, not who you are to the market because who you are to the government is deemed important enough to be protected by the constitution itself, not just the U. S. Code – it is a right not a privilege. You have no constitutional right to your marketplace identity; it isn’t yours, it belongs to whoever exerts the effort to collect and compile it, which is both messed up and morally wrong, but built on sound axioms and supported by case law and regulation, I suspect.
Making a national id card system will inevitably include breaching that division between who you are to the market and who you are to the government because it will be required to make purchases – specifically airline purchases and possibly purchases of “dangerous or restricted” items, which could include computing and communications equipment, ammunition, explosives, encryption, chemicals, gems, precious metals, bio weapons agents & equipment (like home brewing equipment and yeast) and eventually, any financial transaction with the government, like licenses and permits. This will spill over into private commercial transactions for services being brokered on behalf of the government, health insurance, personal investment accounts (the new social security), home, education and small business loans, prescription drug purchases, the purchase of OTC medicines that have secondary uses (like pseudoephedrine), anything with age restrictions on it, such as alcohol, pornography, movies, video games, or adult venues.
These private commercial transactions (PCT) will all go into private databases, just like they do now, and they will be indexed by your national id number – suddenly there will be a single unique key in every private transaction database in the marketplace – allowing data mining operations within corporations and conglomerates to be done with greater ease, and allowing agents of the government to correlate the commercial identity of a person with the civil identity of a person with just a few lines of SQL. A government that is permitting the transfer of human beings out of the country to foreign prisons that permit torture after they have been apprehended domestically without warrant by covert operatives who do not report their activities to any elected official, isn’t going to worry about asking permission to see the records in question before they help themselves to the intelligence smorgasbord that is PCT data warehousing. Fundamentally it amounts to the commoditization of the American people: the systematic dismantling of the apparatus of civil and economic singular identity in favor of a codification of the individual into merely a “member of the mass” a “member of agency” or a “member of the elite”.
So, how do we get people to care about their civil liberties, and not about being “protected from terror”? You have to have something more terrifying that religious zealots imposing their will upon a people whose lifestyle is offensive to them and whose existence is abhorrent and condemned by God. Unfortunately that statement is true of both al qaeda and the evangelisti. Given the choice between xenophobia and introspection, xenophobia is a good choice: when two equally dangerous foes are facing the American nation, and avoiding the conflict with one is impossible, the American Nation will choose to engage the darker skinned threat. (The converse is also true: given the opportunity to avoid one of two conflicts each with equal moral imperative for action, the American Nation will choose to act on behalf of the lighter skinned victim.)
So, to answer the question, you need something more terrifying than oppressive fascist dictatorship at the hands of domestic, Christian, religious, capitalist zealots to get us to stop looking at the War on Irrational Fear (WoIF) * as something that is so potent that we ought to forsake what’s left of the American Republic so that we don’t have to deal with the consequences of our past actions in the form of car bombs on the 405 and suicide bombers on the A-train.
* (or it could be the War on the Source of Dread (WotSoD) or the War on Consternation (WoC) or the War on Violent Dread (WoVD) but the point is that you can’t have a War on Terror anymore than you can have a War on Laughter or a War on Bliss or a War on Ennui (WoL, WoB, WoE) because warring on a state of feeling is warring against the soul of mankind, the ultimate fallacy of those who know neither poetry or metaphysics.)
There has to be a way to change the rhetoric, but doing it requires something that isn’t there: a personable front man who can be seen as an honest broker. Politics is the ultimate Scarlet Letter, but only someone with a political mind can advance the rhetoric enough to create a real dialog about the issues. You need a madman who will be loved, and there is no way the gatekeepers will let a madman into the arena. Only a true outsider can ignore the rules enough to make anything happen. A lot of people will point to John McCain as ‘that guy’. Honestly, I think McCain is done. He’s been whipped too many times, and he’s going to get to be a Senator for as long as he wants. What we need is the Steve Jobs of politics; the kind of guy who can look as impressive in jeans and a t-shirt with a ball cap as he does in a tailored suit, and who can talk to people at their level – McDonald’s to Wall Street – but still give the straight scoop and not be afraid to say the emperor has no clothes. Politicians just look so phony in their leather bomber jackets and ball caps – they don’t know how to just be themselves… you need someone who isn’t playing a role, and is instead just playing the game…. politicians are like Michael Jordan playing baseball – just wrong; statesmen are like Michael Jordan playing basketball. We need statesmen and we need to take control over the political rhetoric away from the evangelisti and put it back in the hands of the Nation.
Then we need to leave them to their work, and not rake them and their families over the coals in search of something lurid to fill cheap magazines, but that only happens after the tipping point – we haven’t even got to the chasm, much less crossed it. But the mentality of the media, and consequently of the pollsters and the people who accept both without question, is that of middle school boys. No discipline, no sophistication, no need to face a mental challenge, living by their impulses, consuming conspicuously, gratifying instantly, eating unhealthy food, devouring porn and getting their souls whitewashed on Sunday, if they acknowledge their soul at all. Just the kind of people who prefer to get their opinions spoon-fed to them by someone whose motivation is to keep them quiet, docile, and compliant.
What is the problem with democratic republicanism married to market capitalism? People. That is the problem with any society of human beings, you can’t blame any particular belief system on that, it is the belief system because human beings are like that, not the other way around. Human beings are just like that, period. That we have created, through civilization, an environment that doesn’t contain any natural selection to compel us to be less human isn’t the fault of philosophy; philosophy is the fault of human beings outsmarting nature. A society neither exists to elevate its members, nor to allow them to wallow in their basest weaknesses. Society creates consequence. Societies create government to compensate for their shortcomings. Government enforces consequence. All elevates human beings above animals is brain mass and neuron density; given the opportunity and the absence of consequence, human beings are no better than apes, and will act accordingly. When you pander to the basest instincts of humanity, and defend it with the Constitution, it destroys anything a society can do to be consequential.
The problem is that capitalism also enforces consequence, but there isn’t a natural correlation between capitalism and government because they are built on contradictory first principles. Capitalism and government tend to bail out those who ought to be suffering the consequences enforced by the other; it creates a negative feedback loop and, over time, results in no consequences from either system being actualized. Thus, in a nation constructed upon two contradictory systems for enforcing the consequences of weakness and failure that are both functioning perfectly, the emergence of a society that embraces the basest weaknesses of humanity. And, to be fair, there is a third system that also works quite well and contributes to the degenerate moral diaspora of society by establishing the illusion of safety and security for those who believe that they are somehow unaffected by the things of this world; its called religion (and by religion I refer to both the church and the academy).
These three have evolved a sort of symbiosis in the West that requires that none become dominant, and none fail. A government that isn’t afraid of God or of regulating the marketplace will have a society that is compelled to the call of duty and advancing themselves as human beings but they people will lack for hope and the long term prosperity of the nation will suffer. A marketplace that is unregulated will be hyper competitive and the prosperity will come to those who are successful but the fallout of human beings who are unsuccessful will be heavy, and they will be hopeless, and the law will only exist at the behest of those who permit its existence because the government will be too poor to take on the rich. A dominant religion will create a society of lawfulness and ultimate hope but the capital will belong to the god, and the society will be segmented into the wretched and those striving for righteousness; there will be lawfulness, but only as meted out by the religion, and outsiders and non-conformists will be persecuted, leading to the decline of the society over time, or its catastrophic demise when it is unable to rapidly adapt to a new reality.
What you need is an integrated system – one that allows for consequences in all three arenas, but doesn’t allow any one to become too powerful or too weak. We don’t have that in America. Right now, for instance, government is failing miserably: burdened by a massive labor force of unionized bureaucrats; no market accountability; and no respect for the Nation. In effect, the United States believes that the States and the People exist for its sake, not the other way around, and it is acting in accordance to that belief. The market is also failing miserably. It isn’t heeding any of the warnings issued by Marx as it presses forward into globalization; it is mesmerized by the quarterly earnings report; and is buoying the GDP on service industries and consumer debit. And, of course, religion is failing. The church is in ruins, with no core of theology to tie together the messages from the pulpit, and the academy is in denial. The greatest failure is in the absence of Intellectuals and Theologians who speak truth and disprove lies. Instead we are inundated with charlatans and sophists enraptured with the sound of their own voice and enamored with the cult of celebrity.
(So, there isn’t anything we can do. We should all run up our credit cards, sodomize a choirboy, wipe our ass with the Constitution and smoke a joint, because this place is doomed. How is your Chinese?)
Really? Well, practically speaking, I think that if you were to do away with the totality of the tax code, and impose a 17% tax on all corporate profits and dividends and a 15% tax on all personal income; abolish the non-profit status of activist religious groups; constrain campaign contributions to those who can actually cast ballots; and repeal the 17th Amendment, things would sort themselves out in about seven years and we’d be fine, as a Country, for another 200. But, obviously, none of that will happen because there isn’t anyone who can actualize something so radical.
All of those would have to be constitutional amendments, you package them up, bulldog them through the Congress, and maybe toss in one amendment that is a patient’s and consumer’s bill of rights. Then you send them to the states for a vote along with the ERA (which still needs two states to ratify it for some profoundly obscene reason). You pile drive the opposition by calling them the American Freedom Amendments, and basically say that anyone who opposes these amendments opposes freedom for the American people from those who would try to steal our birthright and who desire that ‘government of the people, for the people, and by the people’ shall perish from this earth. Get the ‘got milk?’ and ‘iPod’ media guys to do the spin, run a huge Internet smart-mob campaign, and take a page out of the founding fathers playbook with Tom Paine and Federalist Papers style narrative propaganda. You have to make it ‘us vs. them’, where ‘them’ is the usurpers and robber barons and elites and multinational corporations and anyone who is rich and powerful and wants to make sure YOU never threaten them. You essentially have to put Strauss on trial in the court of public opinion.
You have to say we aren’t the nation of corporations, rich people, special interests, and zealots. We are the Nation of people and the Union of States and we will not have our country stolen from us by interlopers who don’t think people are capable of governing themselves because the mob is a fickle and flighty mistress while the elite is a machine untarried by sentiment or morality. You have to give the United States back to the States, and America back to the Americans.
At this point I have to say a few things about me. I’m not an extremist, which is to say I say I’m not an extremist just like all the extremists. I’m not a zealot for my God, but I do believe I have a personal, un-proxied relationship with the God of Abraham that is none of your business. I’m not a Liberal, but I believe in some things liberals idealize, just like I believe in some things conservatives hold dear. I grew up relatively poor in a public school, but have never experienced ghetto life or abject poverty. I missed getting rich on the dot com frenzy because I was a Marine NCO, but I would have jumped at the chance and I’ve always earned well. I used the GI Bill and a lot of financial aid to pay for some of the most expensive four years of college in the country. This isn’t the rant of some kind of washed out hippy or Marxist or communist or immoral heathen or militia member from the UP. I’m an American who has seen the man behind the curtain and couldn’t help but pay attention.
I trust people to be people, and that at its worst is better than the elites at their best because elites believe they can have the ideal of democracy and the reality of demeaning human beings through deceit, duplicity, and denial. There are those who will argue that the Country is being well served by actions of those who act as though they are better than the People. I say the elites can have the country when they stop hiding in the shadows, declare an oligarchy, and rule as aristocrats, but as long as they hide in the skirts of Liberty they will have my contempt. But if they ever are courageous or foolish enough to leave the safe harbor of deception, they will have my fury.
The greatest threat to the Constitution are those who believe that it doesn’t apply to them and that it serves only to screen their actions from an ignorant mobility that clamors about in the streets seeking guidance and handouts, happily exchanging liberty for bliss and duty for choice while being herded down the gradual, unmarked decent into damnation.
Not all elites are the same, I’m speaking here of the power elite. LaBron James and Alex Rodriguez might be millionaires, but they don’t control anything, they don’t influence anything; they are the show, not the puppeteer. The intelligentsia is the Rasputin of our day; fermenting new wine into old skins while lulling the middle class with lukewarm utterances of inclusion and tolerance, encouraging and licensing the middling mindset that hunkers down and lives a quiet life of isolation and consumption. Duty is anathema to the contemporary intelligentsia, because it is hung up on liberalism for it’s own ends, and it expels or censures anyone who tries to seek a new end. It has become the man who battles to return to his rock and his chains when being lead up from the cave.
The capitalists, in general, are just doing what they are supposed to do. The federalists have failed to constrain them, which is why the 17th has to go, why we have to have only individual contributions to campaigns, and why we need to fix the tax code. Where the capitalists are failing isn’t in their relationship with government, it is in their relationship with people. Every warning that Marx issued in Das Kapital about what will happen if you persist on a path of capitalism that ignores the value of the individual is being ignored. Treating human labor as a capital resource is cutting the consumer marketplace out from under American corporations just when they are becoming goods and services shops and not manufacturing shops. The Indians and the Chinese are about to “get medieval on our ass” when it comes to creating commodity goods and services and they will be hosting their own Nelson at Trafalgar reunion tour when it comes to innovative creativity processes as a capital resource if we don’t stop anesthetizing our people and treating them like sheep. News Corp, AOL/TW, Microsoft, and RJR are sabotaging the National Defense Infrastructure for stopping the next trade war with India and China, which together constitute almost a third of the world. The K-12 teachers unions are destroying our rising university-age minds, and higher education is lowering its standards to meet them. The defense contracting industry is carving the fiscal marrow out of the American Nation, and no one seems to care. 60% of all software projects end in failure, and that number rises almost exponentially when you break it out by total cost of the project. Any Federal software project with a budget over $5 Million is essentially the same as stacking the money up on the National Mall and lighting it on fire. Yet, past performance has nothing to do with the way we award contracts for the defense, intelligence, homeland security, or law-enforcement communities.
We aren’t engaged in a War on Terror against enemies who want to destroy our way of life; we are engaged in a War on America against enemies who want to destroy our Country. They want to take away the opportunity to attend a school that will make you think original thoughts. They want to take away the opportunity to have a job that treats you with respect and dignity and honesty. They’ve already taken away the opportunity to vote in an election that isn’t saturated with professional charlatans, paid political operatives, back room deal makers, and fronted by side show puppets who couldn’t lead a troop of girl scouts through central park, much less lead a nation through the geopolitical, global economic landscape that we find ourselves in today. They’ve taken that away because they don’t think you are capable of making good decisions for yourselves. They’ve taken that away because they don’t respect the American people to be good Americans. The political machine has made the same mistake the capitalists have made – they have lost touch with the value of an individual person. They have fallen in love with the sound of their own voice, with the embrace of their own arms, with the image of their own face. They would rather you not bother them while they go about the “business of government”.