Bidness & Gubmints

“The new free spirits must overcome the fear of technology in the hands of government and recognize it for what it is: government in the hands of technology.” - Ramsey Dukes, 1979

Government, like commerce, is a necessary evil. Though lately both have seemed more evil than necessary. Commerce used to be trade. One item exchanged for another item of equal value. As technologies lumbered along into the Iron and Bronze ages, metals became available and accorded high value. These metal bits were traded and standardized into coin setting value to the weight of a specific material. Soon you could trade seven silver sheckles for 2 pigs. But the pig owner wasn’t a metal worker so he traded his newfound sheckles for feed. Before long you have a currency that you can carry in your pockets.

Government probably has it’s origin in simple organizational structures designed to coordinate early hominids. Pair that with an alpha male evolutionary strategy and you have a control hierarchy. From leading the hunt to leading the tribe, then leading a business interest or a political faction, the alpha male expanded his dominion over greater and greater swathes of people and resources. Of course, the power base is constantly being assailed and challenged by competitors. Thus the city-state is guided by fear first and foremost. For rival apes, rival tribes, rival armies or corporations , conflict is ever-present, even in times of peace.

With the economisation of value abstracted into currency, rulers gained power by wealth and affluence, governing the exchange of value within the tribe and siphoning off a nice tithing for the crown (public works, you know). Taxation funds greater armies to defend against the rival tribes always eyeing covetously your precious resources. The line between businessman, soldier, and governor continues to blur. The real leader is expected to be all, sustaining the weight of the domestic city-state while constantly defending against threats, real or imagined. Surely all such leadership must spiral around great heights and depths of megalomania and paranoia.

Government exists only by conflict. If there were no conflict, why would you need government? People must be regulated or they might walk out on their jobs and start looting department stores and murdering children. The state always assumes the worst about humanity. And it probably should, for now. Although we think we’re so special and evolved and “Chosen", the truth is that we’re barely out of the cradle, still baring our teeth and tucking our tails. A simple survey of the global sociopolitical zeitgeist reveals a species driven in large part by ape politics. Resource hoarding, tribal warfare, fear of the Other, sexual and physical dominance and submission, and an overall lack of self awareness - all these characterize modern human existence. Some tribal cultures have managed to find an equilibrium of harmony and sustainability, simple and peaceful. Others whirl out of control driven mad by imposed scarcity and repressive socialization or marched into oblivion by fearful men of god. The ongoing expansion of commerce ensures that the simple cultures will be duly “civilized” and taught how to make Nikes and buy cigarettes. Every ape is a potential contributor to capitalism.

In the modern world abstractions of commerce are the foundation of power. You cannot become powerful without acquiring wealth, for wealth buys allies and servants, tools and weapons. Money must constantly flow into seats of power to sustain their consumption of resources and constant warfare against the competition. The business must continue to grow or someone else might take your marketshare. The government must continue to develop it’s scientific abilities in order to create better weapons than the Russians or the Saudi’s or the terrorists or the drug lords. Peace is constantly at war. Business must go on and fear is really big business. Consider the arms industry or the prison industry or the security industry. Do you think they want a peaceful world?

How to control large numbers of apes:
1) Keep resources scarce. Apes must be in a constant state of competition and servitude in order to survive. Only the strongest will climb their way up and by the time they’re near the top they’ll either be ready to serve with the power elite or lulled into complacency by the narcotic of luxury.
2) Cultivate fear and discourage education. Apes must be willing to make sacrifices in order to stay safe, and they must be suspicious of others. Intelligence tends to make apes question incompetence, law, and bureaucracy.
3) Keep the apes restrained by a narrow moral code and an invisible, all powerful parental deity ready and willing to dole out eternal suffering. Fear laws. Fear foreigners. Fear terror. Fear god. Fear each-other. If you’re good enough, you might be rewarded with a pillowy afterlife in the clouds.

The system perpetuates these elements whether it tries to or not. Ape biosurvival is predicated on obtaining resources and defending against competition. Somewhere along the way you mate and produce viable offspring. Commerce has removed value from product and replaced it with labor. We work for our sheckles so we can buy the pig that has been locked behind corporate doors. In the process we’ve lost the ability to effectively be the apes we still are. If it all shut down tomorrow, would you be able to survive on your own, grow your own food, fight off the unwashed hordes? Our adaptability as animals has been traded for a relatively stable sense of security, as long as we keep working for The Man. It’s not so much a conspiracy as an outdated program of civilization.

So what do we do? Well, make sure government stays addicted to technology. Technology provides most of the value within commerce so anything that satisfies a market demand will come to reality. Nanotech fabrication of material substrates? High efficiency solar conversion? Advanced communication technologies? Global information repositories? If there’s a profit, business will find a way to make it, even if it means side-stepping government. Indeed, business has almost completely replaced government. But they’ll always take the quick gain, oblivious to the long-term consequences. Sell them the internet! Sell them nanotech! Sell them video cameras and computers! Sell them the very tools that will be the ultimate undoing of business and government. Rupert Murdoch votes Republican because they protect his profits. But he still runs progressive shows like The Simpsons, or radically conspiratorial shows like X-Files, because they ARE his profits. Power-hungry apes will always sell out the future to their own greed. Even their own future.

And do whatever you can to assist religion - and all fanaticism - in continuing to lose hold on the civilized mind. There are plenty of good Christians and Muslims out there, but the majority are caged by fear and dogma, forcing their ideologies on the world, condemning anyone who follows another path. Religion holds great power and continuously meddles in business, technology, and government, inflicting it’s apocalyptic denial of flesh on the simple apes still nostalgic for the Savannah plain. Nanotech is an affront to god. Stem cell research is evil. Your body is governed by Our Lord, not you. Give us enough tithings and we’ll put in a good word for you to the Big Guy. And if you want our votes next term, Mr. President, you’d better well make sure that our will is made law. We can always tell our pastors to drop your name in their sermons. Are you on the side of The Lord, Mr. President?

Communicate and build communities. Play a role in local politics (probably the only politics that really matter anymore). Give any money or support you can to foundations that enable humanistic technologies. Defend schools against religious parents and institutions and budget-hungry legislators. Talk about the future dream as if it’s real and right around the corner. Today’s science fiction is tomorrow’s technology. Get enough people believing in it, seduce them with your narrative of our future, and they’ll demand that it be delivered. Witness cyberspace. You know someone’s going to create the ultimate human interface for the VR-enhanced version of EverQuest. Then we’ll all be living in William Gibson’s mind.

Technology is ours. It flows from the human mind, accreting around thoughts and giving them life and persistence and shared utility. It’s our greatest evolutionary adaption and continues to be driven by the need to gain control over our world and free us from those ancient instincts of biosurvival that make us so fragile and needy. Until the phantom pains of our vestigial tails are finally gone, apes will gain power and attempt to divert the flow of technology to serve their will alone. No tool has remained in the hands of a single individual.

Classical evolution may focus on the fitness of the individual, but it’s really the species that’s being perpetuated or snuffed. Technology is in service of the human species, not George Bush or Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates. The adaptive utility of government and commerce and religion is highly suspect as of late. It might not be long before someone comes along and invalidates them all with an entirely new set of technologies far more appropriate for our current trajectory along the arc of evolution.

Now let’s close with one more quote from Ramsey Dukes, just for the sake of symmetry: “It is not people that rule us, but fashions, beliefs, demons and gods.”

Posted by LVX23 at August 8, 2005 09:29 PM