October 28, 2004
October 24, 2004
October 22, 2004
What is Hyperstition?
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Ron Suskind’s essay, ‘Without a Doubt’, can be read in its entirety here.
October 17, 2004
Intelligent and clean
Poor, happy and independent! – these things can go together; poor, happy and a slave! These things can also go together – and I can think of no better news I could give to our factory slaves: provided, that is, they do not feel it to be in general a disgrace to be thus used, and used up, as a part of a machine and as it were a stopgap to fill a hole in human inventiveness! To the devil with the belief that higher payment could lift from them the essence of their miserable condition – I mean their impersonal enslavement! To the devil with the idea of being persuaded that an enhancement of this impersonality within the mechanical operation of a new society could transform the disgrace of slavery into a virtue! To the devil with setting a price on oneself in exchange for which one ceases to be a person and becomes a part of a machine! Are you accomplices in the current folly of the nations – the folly of wanting above all to produce as much as possible and to become as rich as possible? What you ought to do, rather, is to hold up to them the counter-reckoning: how great a sum of inner value is thrown away in pursuit of this external goal! But where is your inner value if you no longer know what it is to breathe freely? if you no longer possess the slightest power over yourselves? if you all too often grow weary of yourselves like a drink that has been left too long standing? if you pay heed to the newspapers and look askance at your wealthy neighbour, made covetous by the rapid rise and fall of power, money and opinions? if you no longer believe in philosophy that wears rags, in the free-heartedness of him without needs? if voluntary poverty and freedom from profession and marriage, such as would very well suit the more spiritual among you, have become to you things to laugh at? If, on the other hand, you have always in your ears the flutings of the Socialist pied-pipers whose design is to enflame you with wild hopes? which bid you to be prepared and nothing further, prepared day upon day, so that you wait and wait for something to happen from outside and in all other respects go on living as you have always lived – until this waiting turns to hunger and thirst and fever and madness, and at last the day of the bestia triumphans dawns in all its glory? – In contrast to all this, everyone ought to say to himself: ‘better to go abroad, to seek to become master in new and savage regions of the world and above all master over myself; to keep moving from place to place for just as long as any sign of slavery seems to threaten me; to shun neither adventure nor war and, if the worst should come to the worst, to be prepared for death: all this rather than further to endure this indecent servitude, rather than to go on becoming soured and malicious and conspiratorial!’ This would be the right attitude of mind: the workers of Europe ought henceforth to declare themselves as a class a human impossibility and not, as usually happens, only a somewhat harsh and inappropriate social arrangement; they ought to inaugurate within the European beehive an age of a great swarming-out such as has never been seen before, and through this act of free emigration in the grand manner to protest against the machine, against capital, and against the choice now threatening them of being compelled to become either the slave of the state or the slave of a party of disruption. Let Europe be relieved of a fourth part of its inhabitants! They and it will be all the better for it! Only in distant lands and in the undertakings of swarming trains of colonists will it really become clear how much reason and fairness, how much healthy mistrust, mother Europe has embodied in her sons – sons who could no longer endure it with the dull old woman and were in danger of becoming as querulous, irritable and pleasure-seeking as she herself was. Outside of Europe the virtues of Europe will go on their wanderings with these workers; and that which was at home beginning to degenerate into dangerous ill-humour and inclination for crime will, once abroad, acquire a wild beautiful naturalness and be called heroism. – Thus a cleaner air would at last waft over old, over-populated and self-absorbed Europe! No matter if its ‘workforce’ should be a little depleted! Perhaps it may then be recalled that we grew accustomed to needing many things only when these needs became so easy to satisfy – we shall again relinquish some of them! Perhaps we shall also bring in numerous Chinese: and they will bring with them the modes of life and thought suitable to industrious ants. Indeed, they might as a whole contribute to the blood of restless and fretful Europe something of Asiatic calm and contemplativeness and – what is probably needed most – Asiatic perseverance.
— ‘The impossible class’, Daybreak, pp. 125-127.
Many commentators on contemporary China, even - or perhaps especially - locals, tend to regard the country's farmers as a problem. The relative poverty and sheer immensity of the Chinese peasant population is considered to be a serious matter for concern. Furthermore, when rural people flood into the cities as "migrant workers" they are often the objects of suspicion or even contempt by established urbanites.
History provides little support from such prejudices. On the contrary, from the Britain of the industrial revolution to the dynamic East Asian societies of today, the first generation influx of rural migrants into burgeoning cities corresponds to something like a "golden age" of economic development, the vibrant stage of raw urbanization.
It is no coincidence that such periods are often marked by a flourishing of market-oriented thinking. Unlike urbanites, whose sole experience of markets tends to be shopping and occasional job-hunting, peasant farmers have always provided the world's primary reservoir of market activity. And unlike the often highly-regulated or monopolistically-warped markets for advanced industrial products, peasant markets are remarkable for their efficiency, spontaneity and freedom.
Governments or large corporations may be able to fix prices for certain manufactured commodities, but no one running a fruit and vegetable stall in a peasant market is able to rig their prices. Instead they learn from the market what their produce is worth and then use this information to adjust their production - the way markets are supposed to work.
The peasantry was originally conceived by urban Marxist intellectuals as an untrustworthy "petit bourgeoisie", but the virtues of rural people eventually contributed the bulk of the "Chinese characteristics" which set East Asian Marxism on a new and productive path. Their spirit of independence, enterprise, resilience and family loyalty proved stronger than the disdain of those who considered only urban proletarians to be "true workers".
The peasant roots of the Chinese Communist Party largely explain why its ideological evolution has so radically and positively diverged from that of its ill-fated European and Russian counterparts.
The characteristics of endurance and initiative which have made peasant guerrilla armies the world's most formidable revolutionary forces have been accompanied by practical and realistic attitudes, making the ensuing regimes far more willing to learn from their mistakes, to adapt and move forward, than their urban-socialist alternatives (who have always tended to disastrous utopianism and intellectual rigidity).
Far from "migrant workers" from the countryside constituting a problem for cities, the matter could be usefully reversed. Rather than dwelling on the "farmers issue" it would be better to ask: How can urbanites retain more of the peasant features that underly social dynamism and ongoing economic revolution? How can they avoid the pampered dependency which has turned so many developed world denizens into robotic paper-pushers or pitiful welfare addicts, perpetuating instead the grit and entrepreneurialism which new rural migrants bring to life in the city?
China's vast peasant hinterland is an extraordinary social resource. The most poignant question is whether it is a renewable one.
— ‘Peasant productivity’, Shanghai Star, 2003-09-11.