The CTA Problem

Is activism the best we can do?

I don’t know if James Fallows is a good journalist or exactly what he is other than famous and smart. I suppose his details should matter, but the fact is that I don’t know the man and because somebody died and somebody else said ‘good’, he has issued a Call To Action.

But what can anyone do?

—One week from today, the next “No Kings” mass protest will occur. The preceding one, last October, was the biggest one-day demonstration in the nation’s history. And that was before the ICE murders in Minnesota, the war-on-a-whim in Iran, the surge in gas prices, the “glad he’s dead” post.
Next Saturday’s should be bigger. Find out more about it here.

—Call and write the White House and leave messages of outrage about this vile expression from a serving president. The address as always is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC 20500. The main phone number is the same one I remember: 202-456-1414. They now have a comment line, 202-456-1111. Flood them with outrage.

—Call and write your Senators and Representative, especially if they are Republican. You can look them up on their websites. But the main Capitol switchboard number, as always, is 202-224-3121. They notice when people call and write.

Go outside and do some democracy!

How does any of this help me? Seriously.

I am not a sucker for this kind of stuff. When I want to be outraged or emotionally engaged, I have a large screen TV with 300 watts of subwoofer and high quality gin. I’m not turning the channel to activist journalism. I’m watching Lewis Hamilton podium in a Ferrari. Yay!

No. I’m not your demographic James, and I’m a little bit upset that the Substack Algorithm is unable to disambiguate me from the people who need to feel righteous every four years in casting their secret ballots. Or every year when some Hollywood face repeats the political slogan of the year at the Oscars. Not my monkey. Not my circus.

You would think, and goddammit I used to think, that we had a cadre of folks we could rely upon to handle geopolitical reality and not lose their minds. Maybe that was the century of Rudyard Kipling that produced those who could walk with kings nor lose the common touch. Naw. They’re just journalists. So it comes with no irony whatsoever that when you read their complaints, purportedly in the spirit of democracy, it turns out that you have to be a paid subscriber to comment. Hell, I can do that, and I’m the guy who needs the money.

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Don’t Just Stand There
I’m not mad at James Fallows. I’m not missing Robert Mueller. I’m not afraid of Donald Trump. I understand that they are predictable adversaries, just as I described in my post on mimetic desire. These people simply are not a part of my everyday life, nor is what they symbolize. I’m not out there to be whipped into submission or extolled to heroism, and surely not the hell to take to the god forsaken streets to make noise and influence microphones (and helicopters).

Is this the kind of loop we are supposed to engage? Is this the hamster wheel of representative government? No, I don’t think so. I think the business of government is found in the exercise of state power to attend to the material concerns of the people, not their spiritual and emotional concerns. All these exhortations are ridiculous. We the people are supposed to feed ourselves. Our government is supposed to protect us from people who would steal our food. But I’m being reductive.

What I really think our government should do lies somewhere in the realm of the combined and deconflicted injunctions of John Locke, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper and Leo Strauss. Somewhere in there is Niccolo Machiavelli but probably not in the way you think. Aside from the probability of Locke, none of those thinkers are wishful. They are completely rational about the percentages of us who are willful numbskulls, villains and sluggards. That’s what we have to deal with, the willful. Those who do. Not those who inspire, cajole, seduce, exhort, blame, whine, scream, protest, pray, dream, plead, and wheedle.

The problem is that we peasants wait to be called into action, as if we don’t know what’s good for us. Well maybe most of us don’t, so we sit on our tuffets until some spider frightens us away. Are we not men? Are we just waiting on Big Mama to pat us on the head and give us a hug?

I’m not wasting my time on the currencies of indulgences and comforts. I can’t be bothered. Maybe that’s the true Stoic’s slogan. I can’t be bothered. Or to put it into a contemporarily edgy standup’s coda. I can’t be bothered with all this boooollshit. Sounds grumpy, but it makes you laugh in synchrony.

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Separation of Peasant & State
I’m genuinely starting to wonder if we are losing our autonomy out here in the peasant class. I’m fairly certain it has to do with the extent to which we are actually seduced by representative democracy yet reliant on our neo-feudalisms.

The origin of my Peasant Theory came out of a skeptical take on the actual meritocratic capacities of our institutions and the extent to which our broad middle class was integrated with actual merit. That required a certain amount of faith in the unity of moral merit and competency merit. Now I see they diverge and as I say, we sustain a lot of amoral economies. We monetize everything and anything. I think the extent to which universities have been compromised in the Humanities and NGOs and charities have served the interests of politically minded oligarchical social engineering have surprised me.

There’s a lot of thinking I’m not going to entertain right now in revising the Peasant Theory, but I think the furthest downside I can envision is that the sloth of the elites trickles down. IE we would all accept burning through inheritances by cannonizing the our post-mortem heroes agains those that do. (as Fallows does) More specifically, we the people might accept that we are Basic, and therefore should accept universal basic income. This is actually little more than extending neo-liberalism to an extreme. A Tuffet for Everyone!

Unfortunately our ability to monetize everything undermines, in light of scarcity, our ability to monetize the right thing, particularly industries enabling self-sufficiency for the masses. We have outsourced our brains to TSMC or so it would seem, and that’s just the least of it. [Insert supply chain research here]. Notice how Bernie Sanders is half right when he wheedles. First that Amazon warehouse jobs are dehumanizing, next that Amazon warehouse jobs are going to robots. If Sanders had half a brain, he’d understand the extent to which the luxury of having personal shoppers for the masses of Americans was ultimately a bad idea in the first place. We need meaningful work, not just the stuff that rich folks have. So the other side of that downside is that people might accept that we are Basic Soldiers and therefore accept universal draft. We’ll certainly be taken care of. You can feed an army on $20 per day per soldier. That’s a fact.

So if we’re going to be a broad consumer economy, we have to think a bit more about which politics and which megaphones we enable. Activism is a problem.