The Helicopter Government
We are gripped too tightly.
You know what a helicopter parent is. I have just listened to the podcast with Walter Isaacson and Andrew Sullivan and they scraped some fairly deep barrels of succinct observations. I’m going to attempt to summarize what they left unsaid.
Too Much Meritocracy
Passive-Aggressive Legislation
Entrenched Diversity
Perfect is the Enemy of Good
If there is anything to learn about the massive hype and uptake of Artificial Intelligence, it is the assertion that you are not intelligent enough and you need more. So we have a parade of geniuses and billionaires creating a new industry for us to chase after and perform some merry wish fulfillment. What if you had a super intelligent genie who responded at length to every command you typed into an app? Are you really not smart, or have the geniuses convinced you to spend more money and give more permission for their silicon agents to capture your hopes, dreams and wishes into their massive data centers?
Those of us who have spent any time thinking outside of the box know that the death of freedom is inside the box. So we watch carefully when our free thinking, our free speaking, our free physical movement are given labels we didn’t invent. When did I become ‘islamophobic’? When did I become ‘fascist’? When did I become ‘racist’? When did I ‘culturally appropriate’? When some genius decided to put me in that box and cancel me.
This kind of Orwellian shite doesn’t just spontaneously happen. America is too large and complex for simple-minded crap to become funded and weaponized. You have to have access to national networks of crafty people. You have to be persistent and you need to be able to speak out in plain sight and remain credible. One doesn’t simply walk into the NYT, CNN or NPR. These institutions produce gated industrial-strength narratives with very specific pedigrees. I have called the people behind this ‘The Ivy Cabal’ only to make a point that they are part of meritocratic networks married to resourceful patrons. The exact shape of that beast is mythological and hard for me to pin down, but I know its hot stanky breath when I smell it.
What is significant about this loose confederation is that they pretend to be inclusive but are exclusive by omerta. They develop a spycraft that ingratiates themselves into any corridor of power. This essay cemented the concept in my mind last year. Dig this:
The goal is the fluid movement within hierarchies, and the recognition that hierarchies, properly perceived, “are not barriers that limit but ladders that allow for advancement. Learning to climb requires interacting with those above (and below) you in a very particular way: by creating intimacy without acting like you are an equal. This is a tricky interactive skill, pretending the hierarchy isn’t there but all the while respecting it.”
St. Paul’s, from this perspective, is a thickly organized hierarchical culture committed to, and justifying itself according to, a meritocratic egalitarian ideology. Nearly every minute of every day—in the dorms, in the classroom, at formal and informal meals, on the athletic fields, at dances, at office hours, etc.—students are forced to navigate as best they can a variety of shifting interactional and hierarchical domains. The more skilled they become in negotiating the various situations, the greater their social success and increase in status.
Who better to represent just such genius capacity than the Upper West Side’s own Zohran Mamdani? By this sort of ‘inclusive’ meritocracy, a socialist can be the mayor over Wall Street. It’s a meritocracy of manipulative social climbing in hierarchies of power having nothing to do with principle or intellectual integrity. Very smart people are doing it, and it works.
The context of why Americans are fearful of tyrannical and arbitrary power is central to the conversation with Isaacson, as he is writing a book about Ben Franklin and his pseudonymous work as Silence Dogood. The reason why we have arbitrary power in this republic is because those people who are adept at climbing arbitrary hierarchies of power can easily claim to be for the people in a populist society. Harris, Trump and Mamdani are stars of such climbing.
A Law for Every Motion
A story I tell about my time with the FBI Citizens Academy goes to the core of something we in the software industry call cruft. Cruft is the bloat of software code in market leading products that go from being uniquely elegant, purposeful and swift, to being the equivalent of shit eating pigs. The same applies to the law.
What makes this happen is the desire for products, or oligarchical industries, be all things for all people — Godlike in inescapability. As it was once possible to have a decent word processing program that worked in under one megabyte of memory, now we have web browsers that can show movies, play music, and now run entire programs in the emerging standard called WASM. This very single tab in which I compose this essay is one of eleven, each using an average of 200 megabytes of memory.
At the Academy I learned that the original charter of the FBI was something on the order of 600 pages. This is what the Congress said the FBI was supposed to do. Then time passed and people in Congress were upset at what they perceived as the haphazard application of the Bureau’s force. Thus came 10 volumes of new regulatory law which described the ways in which the Bureau was to operate legally. Now the Congress had a full shelf of law. This wasn’t enough, so over time a set of committees and protocols were established that dictated how oversight provisions were to be staffed and handled as well as all of the recourse for checks and balances and how inter-agency matters were policed. Now America has an FBI with six levels of approval for every federal administrative warrant.
Once upon a time, Sir Isaac Newton taught us that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. We now have it such that for every federal criminal action there is a law library’s worth of cruft straddling the arm of justice. So much so that the FBI, when I was attending their classes in 2015, was still talking about Whitey Bulger, a criminal it took them 16 years to apprehend after an FBI employee tipped him off that he was to be arrested.
My point is not to badmouth the FBI but to demonstrate large, overly complex code slows down every process and costs more besides. Complexity makes oversight burdensome and gives the operation a larger attack surface. Inevitably such rule spaghetti leads to cross-purposes, like FBI officers leaking inside information to wanted criminals, like Microsoft Word’s inability to open its own 15 year old files.
The US Congress has laws on immigration that citizens cannot understand. The Executive has agencies that cannot enforce. The news reports what it feels like reporting and simple things like a fence between nations becomes a practical impossibility. The excuse for every failure and every ridiculous expenditure becomes simple “It’s complicated.” So citizens are left to ponder the motives and capacities of our deliberative bodies and government executives. We end up with governors who defy federal law over immigration and drugs. We end up with Presidents who defy Posse Comitatus over civil rights and immigration.
Do citizens have any expectation of the effective and rapid defense of their rights when everything becomes so complicated? How can democracy work when we’re all ‘not intelligent enough’ to get straight answers? How is this self-government? Sounds more like government for the special interests, of the overcomplicated bureaucracies, by the hierarchs of merit. Speaking of special interests, I could go on 2000 more words talking about the complexity and endless revision of the federal tax code. But let us talk about the madness we the people have brought upon ourselves.
The Unbearable Chaos of Diversity
Where is the unity in this flag?
There is only the unity of rebellion, the unstoppable intolerance of a rotation of grievances that try to capture and lift ev’ry broken heart and sing death to America. It works when rational Americans who love this country disagree. In that way, its penchant for dispute becomes permanent. Our own pervasive clique of American heretics, is now part and parcel of our calculations of shrink. Unfortunately, whereas retail shrink hovers under 2%, one could hardly hope these folks are only 2% of Americans. Their aims are as varied as their identities, but their methods are evolving to find every chink in the armor of an open and free society. None desirous of public safety in a free and open society would dare remove police from the commons, but they rally to abolish police. None convinced of the rationality of stare decisis would seek revolution, but they seek to rewrite the very history and meaning of our republic’s law. Progressives want progress, always and everywhere the status quo is suspect, and this continuing process of grievance against America itself delivers alienation between generations and sows distrust of the successful.
A Deadly Coincidence?
Here then are three foolish errands which in combination reinforce their own idiocy and thus define something much closer to enemy action than a series of unfortunate events. If we are convinced by the purveyors of the latest fashion of convenient automation, which by the way may obviate human serendipity, in the name of perfect intelligence, then we are fools. One may as well outlaw adolescence. But considering how rapidly Americans consume political rhetoric promising impenetrably dense legislation as ‘big and beautiful’, we come even closer to the desire to automate our representatives out of the picture. What’s worse is that most people in GenX understand how much more fiercely children are policed and saved from suffering consequences, or legally seduced into adult behavior. This serves the motley crews of perpetual grievance who aim to pick our stores of reason clean on their terrible path to the deconstruction of every American tradition. This is vicious.
What indeed are the vices which stand against the virtues of humility and discovery? They are the two faces of vainglorious complacency, and of dogmatic entitlement. The first face is that of the Ivy Cabal and of the Healthcare Industrial Complex, the second that of the Woke and of the Alphabet People. Perhaps somehow you knew this conclusion was coming. Perhaps I did as well, when I first started writing here years ago. We hopefully use our occasional bursts of creative reason to make sense of our gut sensitivities that something is out of order. Hold fast to virtue and the crimes against it will become self-evident.
The question about what to do with our government on the eve of its 250th year of independence lies in a deeper understanding of that which frames what works and has been replicated not only here but in Constitutional republics around the world in history. Deeper still is a clear-eyed investigation of those principles of liberty that instigated the courageous departure from arbitrary power. Most of all, says me, is our dedication to removing the obstacles to sustained liberty in our mutual paths, the defects in our wheels, the mud on our windshields, and the weakness in our engines. Slowly. Surely, with purpose.
We are a free people. We cannot let this trio of overproductions swamp our government. We cannot allow it to be automated away from us, no matter how expert these systems appear to be. This is technically possible, it’s called sandwiching. Scalable oversight is possible. Perfect is still the enemy of good. We must work to make the legislative process more discrete and properly effective. Unfortunately I have no idea about how to accomplish that. Thank God you subscribe elsewhere. How indeed can we simplify the law without undermining it? We cannot be anarchists but we fortunately have both Canon law and Secular law to allow each to be minimal and not yoke us too tightly. We must work to disqualify false and transient identities ossifying into permanent castes. Without that freedom we defy ourselves any chance to enjoy or preserve the Commons or even see transcendent value in the lives of others.
We are monitoring ourselves too closely and with jaundiced eyes. Back off. Slow down. Relax and release. Let it be.