- DEMOS: LAOCRACY OR PATHOCRACY 3 -

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Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:09 Laocracy’s worst adversary is a seamless news apparatus devoted to weapons elites
• 3:09 There is no Left in America
• 4:12 A Learner news agency
• 6:16 future political parties

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

 
- DEMOCRACY: LAOCRACY OR  PATHOCRACY 3 -

Laocracy’s worst adversary is a seamless news apparatus devoted to weapons elites. 

Something important was discovered when Poland underwent its worst political repression just prior to the collapse of its Communist government. Its Central Propaganda Bureau could not maintain a watertight seal between the truth and its disinformation substitute. It discovered that its propaganda arm worked better when like-minded weapon mentors, handpicked for political orthodoxy, remained in charge of disinformation on a decentralized basis.

Currently, the same collegium of like-minded weapon mentors ‒ effectively decentralized but collectively motivated ‒ controls most major news outlet — American misinformation monopolies foremost. Corporations and Chambers of Commerce serve weapon mentality best by steering the media’s attention away from important matters and toward trivial ones. This tendency will be reversed. Many independent news agencies will defy the handful of authorities responsible for the current focus of corporate news (or lack of such). Facing honest competition for a change, orthodox media will have to represent a broad spectrum of public opinion and call for progressive reforms to earn their clients’ loyalty. 

But let’s discuss the vaunted objectivity of the Press. 

Take me, for example, and my writings. I’m frankly biased, categorically so against Repugnants of every political stripe, who ignore their limitations and thus organize the next mega-disaster. Anyone who reads Learner can recognize its bias and react to it in any way they choose. I don’t have much to hide. I am openly biased against people who insist that they have no bias because they overlook their own, whether through opportunism or delusion.

You cannot consider yourself impartial if you hate every point of view except your own; just as a state religion couldn’t call itself tolerant while its proxy government suppresses every other faith. That form of impartiality is known as the Inquisition or its fundamentalist equivalent elsewhere (Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, all those run by psychopaths these days) that suppresses every other creed impartially.

This is what Western journalism does well. It suppresses every point of view not its own and calls that tactic unbiased. Every new point of view it suppresses, regardless of its political source (whether from the Left or the Right) seems to confirm its lack of bias. In other words, the more oppressive it becomes, the more stories it passes over or distorts through editorial selectivity, and the more important those ignored stories are to one side or the other, the more impartial and objective it can call itself. How very convenient. 

I call this the “Tito” or “Saddam Hussein” strategy. Punish everyone on both sides of every dispute and call yourself unbiased.

This type of Press and its info elite can adopt their favorite policies opportunistically and yet consider themselves unbiased. They can accept any fascistic abuse they find useful in the short-term (as have several Presidential administrations), and still call themselves “moderate and objective.” They could adopt progressive policies just as easily, but they won’t because they have sterilized Left Wing politics of United States in the name of “moderation.” 

In America, they call you a “looney Leftist” if you seek to preserve constitutional protections legislated a hundred or more years ago. Conservative centrists get branded raving Leftists. 

There is no Left in America, as it would be recognized in Europe and elsewhere. Rightists are free to distort and ignore the Constitution to promote their advantage. Every few electoral cycles, they ratchet the Nation a couple steps rightwards for every one their opposition takes back toward the Center evermore distant and lapsed, now branded “Far Left.” As for centrists during their momentary custody of power, they are pushed a little further to the Right (just a bit more slowly).  

The abuses of the Radical Right are more to the taste of the ruling elite, just as they were in Nazi Germany, because they are more open to monopolistic greed, its inevitable brutality and suppression of political dialogue. The sad outcome, barring massive transformation, is the same. Only the Party name changes, from National Socialist to National Capitalist, to better express the weapon corporatism in a nation-state setting that winds up ruling in any case.

 A Learner news agency would accept any point of view to confirm its objectivity. It would organize bicameral newsrooms, one side enthusiastically progressive and the other just as grimly reactionary. Both lobes of this bicameral mind would have to operate on the same budget and recruit the best talent that would confirm its bias. Both would issue one or more editions of its paper or broadcast (each edition more extreme to conform to its chosen audience). Both will cover its slice of the political pie and accept any outside point of view that strengthens it. As long as every point of view, no matter how extreme, finds a forum, the news system can honestly call itself balanced and objective. 

This bicameral newsroom could perhaps run a halfway-edition in which one side drafted the story and the other would edit, fact-check, and print or broadcast it. Then they would change places, the way two children could share a piece of cake fairly: one cutting it and the other choosing his piece. They could compete to establish which side generated the most objective, well-balanced reporting. That might work.

Otherwise, we wind up with a very subtle propaganda agency enslaved to special interests, indifferent to bias or lack of such, as long as those special interests achieve their goals. As the ultimate evolution of weapon journalism, this subtle form of bias may be the most pernicious one.

In Mein Kampf, Vol. I, Chap. 10, Adolph Hitler sorted readers of the Press into three categories:

1.     those who believe everything they read; 

2.     those who distrust and no longer believe anything they read; and

3.     those who critically examine what they read, and form their judgments accordingly.

He dismisses the first group as the largest but least intelligent, and the second as useless. He concludes that the third group of critical thinkers is too small to influence events, whereas the first group, that of credulous simpletons, is the most influential and easily swayed.

If the Virtual Agora took place, both lies and the truth would gain equal access: his third group would become an incontestable majority. All this would no longer pose a problem for anyone except Hitler and his kind who would find the going much tougher. 

Future political parties will crystallize around geographic, economic, cultural and religious hubs. Other clubs and special interest groups will provide valid political nuclei if they merit the time, study and votes of their devotees. Already, some South American adults attend communidades de base (basic communities) where they study the Bible, promote their education and discuss possible courses of action in light of their faith. It’s too bad they can’t choose to be progressive Learners (who have not yet organized in Brazil or elsewhere) rather than the militaristic fascists they favor instead. Such Learner communities will become commonplace.

 Learners will feel enormous tenderness towards neighbors near and far, once they feel free to express their deepest convictions in public. The this warm front of mutual affection will delight us as will its good deeds. 

“People today seem unable to understand love as a political concept, but a concept of love is just what we need to grasp the constituent power of the multitude. The modern concept of love is almost exclusively limited to the bourgeois couple and the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family. Love has become a strictly private affair. We need a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love. We need to recuperate the public and political conception of love common in premodern traditions. Christianity and Judaism, for example, both conceive love as a political act that constructs the multitude. Love means precisely that our expansive encounters and continuous collaborations bring us joy. There is really nothing necessarily metaphysical about the Christian and Judaic [and Islamic, etc.] love of God; both God’s love of humanity and humanity’s love of God are expressed and incarnated in the common material political project of the multitude. We need to recover today this material and political sense of love, a love as strong as death. This does not mean you cannot love your spouse, your mother, and your child. It only means that your love does not end there, that love serves as the basis for our political projects in common and the construction of a new society. Without this love, we are nothing.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, The Penguin Press, New York, 2004, pp. 351-352. 

We will soon cast off our willful lack of empathy and fellowship, the way a disabled person would cast off awkward crutches upon miraculous cure. Learners will encourage all kinds of gemeinschaften: communities of affection, to supplant gesellschaften: those based on weapon duties and labor. 

Let me repeat this idea. This warm front of sympathy will be global, its inclusiveness all-embracing, so much better for us it will go beyond imagining. 

I am grateful to the late Randy Revell and his Context, Inc., social/commercial gatherings during which staff and volunteers routinely liberated the spontaneous mass affection of the audience and harnessed their creative energy to future projects, as if they were showing off a magic trick that anyone could duplicate.

New political parties will encourage electronic communications and voluntary political rallies. The combined laity of Learners will leverage the politics of information and no longer leave those things up to official nominees, committee chairs, media magnates and Party bosses intent on suppressing it. Once we pop this fantasy balloon, the inefficiencies of those politics will stun us. To explain it, Learner historians will have to recall the allegory of a starving elephant steered by a cockroach’s brain, that can’t feed itself in a farmer’s market. 

This inverse-scale efficiency is inherently risky, however. It is easiest, for example, to connive at overt racism while running a small village. It is less so from a county seat or a public school district. It is still harder from the power base of a major metropolitan electorate. It would be even more difficult from a continent-spanning government. Bigots and psychopaths may seize temporary control of a certain level or place of governance, but the conscience-driven will rally adjacently to drive them out spontaneously. At each higher level of governance, resistance against this type of bigotry seems to increase. Thus, grand-mother politics will play an over-watch role, making sure that universal human rights override local prejudices in all but the most trivial circumstances. 

Fustel de Coulanges, in The Ancient City, New York, Doubleday, n.d., p. 334, described the enormous amount of time and attention demanded of a Greek citizen to fulfill his democratic obligations. About once a week, he had to listen to countless speeches to determine matters of war and peace, of life and death for himself and his family. If he did not attend all day long, he was not allowed to vote.

Murray Bookchin states, in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, Black Rose Books, Montreal, 1991, reprinted 1995, page 263, that he does not expect “modern” citizens to bear this burden of freedom at the expense of free time, entertainment, busyness and leisure — the institutionalized waste of time those words imply. Learners will expect many impassioned people to take up that burden in the World Agora.

It might be advisable to give each person 50,000 computerized votes a day. 

I might cast 1,000 votes toward my favorite mayoral candidate, 5,000 votes for a certain Congressperson, 6,000 votes against two unsavory candidates for State Governor, 20,000 votes to support a Community College Levy, one or two dozen votes to fix a pothole in my neighborhood, 5,000 votes to recommend peace in some war-torn corner of the globe, another 5,000 to free political prisoners in some far-off land. I could use my last 7,988 votes to petition the World Court to rule whether or not to intervene there, etc. 

The next day, I might change my mind. Some grievous offense might make me devote all my votes to get my Police Commissioner replaced. 

I might choose to draft a legislative bill. I’d research it with other interested Learners on the Network, and we’d allocate our votes to disseminate it and get it ratified. 

Computers could track of vote. Laocracy would tabulate these decisions without hidden manipulation or bureaucratic drag.

“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections. To break off that point is to avert the danger. The common system of representation perpetuates the danger. Unequal electorates afford no security to majorities. Equal electorates give none to minorities. Thirty-five years ago it was pointed out that the remedy is proportional representation. It is profoundly democratic, for it increases the influence of thousands who would otherwise have no voice in the government; and it brings men more near equality by so contriving that no vote shall be wasted, and that every voter shall contribute to bring into Parliament a member of his own opinions.” Acton, Lord John Emerich Edward Dalberg, The History of Freedom, McMillan and Company, Ltd, London, First Edition 1907, pp. 97-98.

It is obvious that computers are vulnerable to political manipulation and electoral fraud. We’ve found this to be the case with automated election tampering. Instances of crucial vote fraud come to mind from the Presidential elections in 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio — at odds with exit polls, with no valid audit trail and under no-one’s control except for partisan political contributors: both the businessmen tasked with distributing voting machines and officials supposed to supervise them; with no redress, no penalty, no administrative or legislative makeover and no formal interdiction of future recurrence.

Nowadays “the Russians” must be guilty of turning ALL the key, swing, purple districts of key, swing, purple states, in favor of Trump by razor-thin margins. He needed every swing district to carry those States and take their electoral votes; no lesser tally would work for him. Think about that: both candidates should have carried more or less half of the swing voters and states, but Trump won them all. Voting fraud, that the Republicans accuse their opponents of without proof from then on. And the Democrats, never. What an unbelievable coincidence!

According to those truly guilty: “The unpopularity of our political goals has made victory impossible the next few decades of elections and getting away with the cheating it would require. So be it. Let’s refine our electoral frauds until they are foolproof, minimize our defeats during each electoral cycle and guaranty victory at some future date (Trump). After all, no-one honest is stopping us; not even the Constitution.” 

Hitler would have been proud. As for me, this political deceit makes my mouth water, as prior to throwing up. I must remind myself we make these hick errors today to do better tomorrow, once our parochial politics become global and honestly cosmopolitan.

We might expect to find similar mass fraud in commercial information systems: in the stock market and its computerized transactions, for example. That is not the case, barring the rare exception, because well-paid experts make it their business to guarantee the integrity of commercial information systems.

That will be the case in spades for Learner votes. Many bright Learners will stake their expertise, passion and honor on the integrity of electoral information systems. Potential cheats will be watched very carefully. They will lose access to the system once their sinister plots are exposed. In addition, political tabulations will grow so numerous and redundant yet intertwined and mutually validating that no one could seize credible control of them simultaneously. It will become much more difficult to distort vote counts in a consistent but untraceable way. 

Any system struck by corruption – or merely suspect of it – will be replaced by multiple systems of greater reliability. Every contact (no matter how innocent) between politicians and the managers of such voting systems will be examined without mercy. Such encounters will hurt the reputation of both parties, to such an extent that everyone involved will eventually consider them taboo, the same way honest lawyers treat jury members out of court.

Otherwise, we will go back to paper ballots easier to crosscheck in realtime and audit afterwards, even though they may be slower and more laborious to tally. Maximum reporting speed at the risk of serious cheating: that would only appeal to ravenous news agencies with deceitful special interests to cover up and nothing much more to report.

Those political parties and corporations that remain could collect their members’ votes and allocate them en bloc, in accordance with a pre-advertised political platform. They will offer decision-tree menus, in-depth analyses of complex issues and pre-digested “voting packages” Learners may endorse. 

As long as all of us receive an equal number of votes, a renewed spirit of "one person, one vote" will replace the deflated electoral turnouts caused by the abuses of disinfo politics: "one million dollars equal one vote; one voter equals nothing."

It goes without saying, the Electoral College and all its machinery of political dominance by unnamed special interests at third remove will be thrown out.

A majority of abstentions cast for-the-record will force another election ‒ the principal candidates forbidden to run anew ‒ for as many times as necessary until an acceptable candidate is found.

In addition, this system will permit ill-treated minorities to advance their sharply focused cause by outbidding the scattered priorities of majorities. It will allow those fascinated by a certain topic a greater say in its management, regardless of their financial involvement: the essence of small-scale democracy writ large. 

This text advocates a world-spanning, multi-variant political party whose members will support peace mentality and relegate weapon mentality to vestigial status. It recommends some Laocratic principles, but no detailed model of future Administrative bodies. These should evolve organically according to popular consensus and local peace custom. Each culture retains a model of Golden Age wisdom and justice in the collective superconscience. Learners should nurture all of them, each in its own setting. 

“But the general objectives of every good institution should be modified in each country according to relations that arise, as much in terms of local circumstance as by the temperament  of inhabitants; and it is with respect to these relations that each people should be assigned a specific system, not necessarily the best in itself, but for the State to which it is destined.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, (The Social Contract), Bordas, Paris, Bruxelles, Montréal, 1972. Book II, Chapter 11. 

“It is impossible to anticipate, from this vantage point in time, the details of institutional structure that would be settled once the requisite political consciousness emerges that would engender a revolution in world order. Despite a measure of interplay, the mechanics of administrative management are an outgrowth of political consciousness rather than its source. … 

“… What is needed is a new political energy, on the one hand animated by planetary goals and a coherent vision, and on the other propelled to action by self-interest and a sense of urgency.” Richard A. Falk, A Study of Future Worlds, Free Press, New York, 1975, p 154. 

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net