Politics

I'm reading "The Reactionary Mind", by Corey Robin. My mind keeps returning to Buckminster Fuller's absent big pirates in "Operator's Manual". I cannot help but imagine that MAGA conservatives are rooting for non-existent masters. And that the real masters that resist democracy are systems, such as corporations and governments. Even Trump is just a servant of the bankers, networks, and echo chambers in his life. Milo would be no one without the leaderless website that controls him. Koch has no more control of his enterprise than journalists do.

Just as straight rows of treeless rockless monoculture make it easier to keep hungry people away, straight rows in factories help keep innovation away, and uniform testing keeps away stray thoughts. But it is volunteer harvesters, interruptions of production, and imagination that have the least entropy. Disorder is the friend of creativity; order is the foundation of chaos. Sometimes chaos is necessary, as to provide sustainable replacements for exploitative technologies. Putting up a windmill is merely preparation for the destruction of the fossil fuel vicious cycle. Presumably, our entertainments will progress to the point that even windmills are unnecessary.

As I understand the definition of conservative, I'm reminded of Octavia Butler's admonition against combining intelligence and hierarchy. If in fact conservativism is love of hierarchy, then liberalism must be intelligence. This would explain why it is so frustrating to argue with conservatives. They create illusions of intelligence by paroting human mediums between themselves and their absent masters. Call it discipline, but it is a severely un-Socratic discipline. Press a conservative beyond buzwords, invective, or academic civility, and they get defensive, which is their way of compromising. In contrast, intelligent people can't get enough of being corrected. The so called loss of spirituality is just too many conservatives making intelligent conversation difficult.

The existence of conservatives demands periodic destruction of hierarchies to prevent stagnation and decay. Conservatives use the complexity of issues they do not care about as shields to hide their true purpose. In their finest moments, conservatives are inspired to invoke democracy as an argument in favor of hierarchy. Opposition to affirmative action and regulation, personhood for fertilized eggs and corporations, wars in Viet Nam and Iraq are rationalized as democratic. Invariably, conservatives are excessively insistent abount their own intelligence. They measure intelligence by how many conservative followers, and non-conservative detractors, they have.

The resolution to the present crisis is resisted as usual by conservatives. However, the present crisis may live up to the hype this time. Climate change is worse than anything before, and though it is manmade, it has inhuman agency. The cause of climate change is different from the causes of previous crises. Corporations are outside of government. Previous crises were caused from within government. To grow as they must, corporations must grow into government by electing representatives. Now that every representative in government represents big oil, we finaly recognize the threat from a new direction. The sons of the founding mothers did not anticipate the corporate threat, and neither did we until now.

A genetic basis for conservatism is mostly wrong. My father had to admonish me to not be conservative, and only now do I realize the meaning of his observation that "is" differs from "aught". On the other hand, my brother did not live with our father. My brother's politics were formed by the representatives of venture capital corporations, so he does not listen to opinion. Similarly, Trump and Koch learned politics from tender fathers that were the representatives of corporations. MAGA conservatives will be as easily swayed by fear of corporations, as they were by the irresponsibility of their ancestors.

I wish I knew what loss my brother feels victim of, but it is difficult to communicate with someone that does not listen. I can speculate that he is bumping up against a glass ceiling that Stanford University did not prepare him for. The nature of software limits the amount it can be scaled up. In contrast, oil wells can be replicated. Software cannot get more complex than entry level programmers can understand. The originators of the software may well be able to push its complexity further than readers of the software, but the originators are necessarily few.