Some observers have noted a
potential problem with the society I intend to propose as model (and thus
devote my efforts to materialize) which I think raises a very valid point, so I
am going to devote this post (a kind of interlude in the development of the
Manifesto, if you wish) to try to clear it up. What my critics have noticed is
that the whole schema of leaving behind the current dominant reason and its
three noxious rules rests on the following premises:
·
Close-knit
groups that can police themselves with a minimal institutional apparatus (4-10
leaders and a handful of guardians, plus occasional arbitrators with no
specialist training), which can only be achieved if they consistently maintain
a shared, coherent set of alternative values (the “traditionalist” part).
Alternative, that is, to the current “respect people only insofar as they own
lots of money (and the more money, the more respect should be bestowed on them)”
·
To
avoid those groups impinging too much on the autonomy and liberty of its
members (the “anarchist” part) we are trusting in an almost unlimited mobility,
so people can leave with minimal impact those groups perceived as too stifling,
or demanding too much from them. That would in practice put a limit on how
authoritarian (or how constraining of their members’ freedoms) groups can
become, under the threat of loosing too many of them and stop being
economically (or socially) viable
The problem comes from the fact that
both premises may be conflicting, or even downright incompatible. For the “freedom
to leave” to be meaningful and to work as intended (as a brake in every human group’s
innate tendency to encroach on its members lives beyond what their individual
interests would grant) people doesn’t only require a lack of impediments in the
group from which they depart, but a moderate amount of goodwill from the group
that receives them, without which they would find it very difficult to successfully
settle and prosper. And, depending of the kind of values that the receiving
group espouses, that goodwill may not be forthcoming at all.
To better explain the kind of
problem the AT society we propose may pose, let’s imagine a couple of friends
living in phratry A, and surrounded by three other phratria: B, C and D.
Phratry A has fallen under wretched times, as the leaders that have come to
power are reckless and authoritarian, have appointed their cronies to all the
positions of power, are wasting the common resources in their own exclusive
benefits and extracting ever increasing percentages of the rest of the populace’s
earnings, and have so curtailed the election process (may be eliminating it
altogether) that there is no reasonable expectation of ever dislodging them. So
our friends decide to vote with their feet and look for greener pastures in the
surrounding polities. They first arrive at Phratry A, and soon decide that it
is not of their liking because it is entirely made of mormons, and they enforce
a strict prohibition of alcohol, coffee, tobacco (or any other recreational
drug) and homosexual activity and, guess what, our two friends are gay… No
biggie, they think, they will try their fortune at the next phratry, phratry C,
where they have heard they have no problem with alcohol, coffee and tobacco
(and even marijuana) and, as far as they know, have no prejudices against gay
couples. Problem is, it is a phratry with a policy of blatant racial
discrimination, as it is peopled exclusively by white nationalists. They teach
their children that there is nothing wrong with being black, and are civil and
polite when dealing with black people outside their territory, but they are
virulently opposed with them settling in there or mixing with them. Needless to
say, our two friends happen to be black… Sometimes life is a bitch, so somewhat
dejected they turn their weary steps towards phratry D, where they have heard
they have nothing against blacks. Indeed, there is a vibrant black community
there, the falashas, as it is a
predominantly (exclusively, indeed) jewish community. Reformed jews, so they
are accepting of alcohol, coffee, tobacco, gays and blacks. But somehow our
friends Rashid and Mohammed think it is not such a perfect fit for them… What I
wanted to highlight in this somewhat contrived example is that maximum mobility
(to keep communities in check internally and prevent them from becoming too
overbearing) and maximum freedom to establish homogeneous, tradition based
communities (so they require a minimum “government” to coordinate the
individual wills and function harmoniously) are going to be difficult to
reconcile. And of course, there may be people whose sense of belonging is so
distributed (or distributed between combinations of groups so bizarre) that they
can never legitimately aspire to ever find enough like minded people to form a
community of their own, and so will necessarily have to compromise some aspect
of their being, some expression of their truest self, to be able to live with
their fellow humans.
Of course, that is a problem that
liberal, multicultural societies have faced since the advent of modernity and
the weakening of the traditional narratives that bounded people together (a
common faith, a common language and race, a common understanding of their own
history). The formulation of the Universal Rights of Men we incorporated in our
AT Manifesto can be construed as an attempt to ensure that people with
different origins and different preferences could coexist peacefully in a
functioning group, sharing a minimal purpose which the liberal world defined as
the “pursuit of happiness”, but was truly the unlimited pursuit of material goods
accumulation, while being able to express different religions, aesthetic taste
and sexual preference. The problem, of course, is that when the group only
shares that minimal purpose we end up under the iron rule of the three laws of
our current dominant reason, with anomic individuals who tend to think they are
giving more than what they receive, so they require a vast state apparatus to
coordinate and constrict their drives and impulses so they end up producing into
socially acceptable behavior, and to punish them when such constrictions fail…
This being such a tough nut to
crack, I see I’ll need to come back to it in a later post
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