anti-authoritarianism #
After all the noise I've been making about Trump, one could reasonably assume I'm a die-hard Democrat.
Those who've known me a bit longer may be surprised, since I have also pulled hard in the past for the Libertarian angle.
Truth be told, the only unifying principle of my political belief is anti-authoritarianism.
I believe that the role of government in a free society should be to free individuals from tyranny, and I am deeply skeptical of power granted to any authority. That power must thus be tightly limited, balanced, checked, and directed by the people for the people. We must only grant power when it is necessary to counter some other form of tyranny.
Make no mistake: ALL power is tyranny, and NONE of us are innocent of wielding it. We have a moral duty to ensure that it is balanced, checked, and restricted.
One of the most deadly forms of power in the world today is American military power. We have the most powerful military in the world, by far, by any reasonable measure. We are over-armed to the point of absurdity.
Killing doesn't always mean bringing death. Tyranny can also be withholding life. Another form of power that can be deadly is the power to restrict and control access to nutrition, water, medical care, shelter, and other resources.
My opposition to tyrannical authority is both moral and pragmatic.
Morally, it offends my emotional sensibility for people to interact as master and slave or as combatants. It doesn't feel good to be operating in a mode of violence, fear, and desperation. At best, it leads to a cycle of adrenaline and cortisol that shuts down the best parts of our brains. At worst, it leads to horrors.
Pragmatically, it is also suboptimal from a systems theory point of view. No matter how well-informed, wise, and benevolent, an authority will almost never have enough insight to make the right decisions. When the boss tells everyone what to do, the company fails. Better to push authority to where the information is, whenever possible.
This idea of pushing authority to the edges, has informed how I've tried to build my company, run open source projects, and design products. It's very challenging, and requires a lot of trust and communication, but people work really well when they have the right balance of alignment, competence, and autonomy. I've tried being in charge all the time. It's exhausting and leads to bad outcomes.
In the American political spectrum, this makes me most closely aligned with Social Democrats and Libertarians, the two groups perhaps most at odds with one another. That's amusing to me.
I have often found other people to be enigmas, but I like studying puzzles, especially the interaction of complex systems. That's why I've loved open source communities and projects so much, and why business and software are also really fun. It's not just debugging the computer, it's debugging the humans. People provide the best puzzles!
I've read a lot of history and philosophy over the years. Never enough to be a real scholar, per se, but some of the best stories are true stories.
The rise of Hitler always fascinated and disturbed me. Of course, everything gets distorted in hindsight. Everyone rushes to say he was monster NOW. But the German people elected him. They voted, and chose him, and supported him. And it's not that he "was a great speaker". Accounts at the time painted him as something of a blustering idiot. He lied constantly, made promises and claims that made no sense, talked about a return to a glorious unified Germanic state that never existed.
It's not as if people at the time didn't call him out on it. They did. Again and again. I once chalked it up to "people were dumb in oldentimes", but the horror of the Third Reich is that they weren't dumb, not really. They were just like us. Less connected, less informed, but not by much. They were smart and dedicated and trying to do what they thought was best.
And then they elected a monster of historic proportions. "The Nazis" are STILL the go-to villain for lazy screenwriters.
So when someone like Trump comes along, and he lies so casually and constantly, it's really unique and fascinating to me, but also very disturbing. No other American politician does that. I mean, yeah, they all LIE, but in a completely different way. Bush and Cheney and the gang lied about the WMDs in Iraq. Bill Clinton lied about getting a blowjob. Every politician has probably lied in countless ways that never come to light.
But that's just it; all those lies are the sort of thing that CAN "come to light". Because in those lies, the person is making up a distinct and consistent factual reality, and trying to convince us all of that reality.
Trump isn't. He's just trying to win. In every social interaction, he's trying to be The Boss. We're over here playing a language game where the truth matters, but Trump isn't playing that game.
Trump's game is to get himself into a position of power in this interaction, and then to use that power to get into a position of more power in the next interaction. That's the point of his game. When he says "I didn't say that", it's only because the other person accused him of something, and he knows that a flat denial is the strongest response. He doesn't care that you have a recording of him saying it. No one can be the boss of recordings, so there's no point interacting with them.
There has likely never been, in the history of American politics, a presidential candidate more directly opposed to everything I believe in. I find myself watching, with abject terror, as we tread dreadfully close to putting someone functionally identical to Hitler in charge of more than half of the modern world's combined military power.
If he's elected, at some point, he's going to say "Bomb the hell outta them!" because that's a badass thing to say in a meeting, and then actual bombs will kill actual people as a result, and there is no way in hell that he'll be measured or restrained in how he does this, because he is never measured or restrained in anything whatsoever.
He's exactly the kind of leader who'd use the FISA Courts to accuse his opponents and protestors of "terrorism", which is exactly the mechanism and function of the Special Courts in 1930s Germany.
He's already suggested "rounding up" muslim-americans.
so what do I believe in? #
I support scaling back the American military complex dramatically. There are no functional checks on this power anymore, and it has become a runaway empire. It is immoral to rule through force without granting political agency to the nations we are dominating.
I support a universal basic income guarantee and universal healthcare and education. People are not free when they live under the constant threat of losing their food, shelter, or health, or when they don't have the mental toolkit to reason about the world around them.
I support Black Lives Matter, same-sex marriage, respect for native peoples' land, equal opportunity housing and employment, and slavery reparations. People are not free when they are second-class citizens. We can't eradicate centuries of racism, sexism, or homophobia in one fell swoop, but we can chip away at it diligently.
I oppose citizenship and immigration control except as necessary for controlling the spread of diseases (including plant- and animal-borne pathogens). The restriction of human movement prevents efficient distribution of labor, reduces overall happiness, and quickly becomes a vector for abuse. Participation within a community should be determined, as it most commonly was throughout history, by residence within that community.
Taxation is a form of tyranny, but it's far less offensive than slow starvation or fast bullets. My heart breaks for the souls we force unnecessarily through hell on earth, and for the future that has lost the art and invention and inspiration that they could have offered.