Today’s column, oddly enough, was inspired by a quote from Konrad Lorenz used as an epigraph for Stephen King’s novel Cell: “Humans have not evolved any ritualized aggression-inhibiting mechanisms to ensure the survival of the species.”
In fact, this is not true. Aggression-inhibiting mechanisms are quite prevalent among hunter-gather societies like those in the Amazon, and simple fishing and farming societies like the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Almost all such societies have had ritualized forms of warfare, relying on such practices as coup-counting to minimize the damage from conflict between villages or tribes. The peasant village communes predominant from the agricultural revolution to the emergence of the first states were mostly peaceful and cooperative. Even among highly organized and aggressive non-state societies, like the tribal confederations of nomadic Indians on the Great Plains, where genuine warfare took place it was still highly ritualized by all sorts of customary taboos that limited the damage done.
Relations between individuals and small groups tend to stabilize themselves on the sort of peaceful pattern game theory would predict, when they have ongoing, rather than one-off dealings, with one another and expect that “what goes around will come around.”
All this happens because human beings are rational utility-maximizers. But these damage-limiting mechanisms disappear in total war between states because states are functionally insane.
Institutions governed by authority relations behave in a manner analogous to that of a human being whose perception of the world is distorted by some cognitive dysfunction, and cannot logically evaluate the consequences of her behavior. This is because authority relations pervert and distort the institutional mechanisms analogous to an individual’s perceptions and evaluations of the world around her.
As Robert Anton Wilson pointed out, dealing with reality in a sane manner requires accurate environmental feedback about the consequences of one’s actions, which in turn requires two-way communications between equals. This is impossible under authority relations, because authority results in one-way lines of communication.
Those in authority give orders without accurate feedback on the results of those orders, because the upward flow of communication is distorted by power. Information is filtered by power relations as people tell those in authority what they want to hear. No one tells the real, unfiltered truth to someone with a gun, or even to someone with the power to fire her. When the genius MBAs in the C-suite decide to lay off half the production workforce in order to goose their own stock options, there’s not much danger of a factory manager, or even the head of a production division, saying “you know, that’s a really stupid idea.”
Those in authority are also insulated from the real consequences of their actions, because power is a machine for appropriating the positive externalities of others’ actions and imposing the negative externalities of one’s own behavior on those with less power. The net consequences of a decision for everyone in the organization may be negative, but what counts is that they’re a positive for the leadership. “It’s good to be king.”
The state is the ultimate in power relations. Its leaders are functionally insane; their own power distorts their perception of reality and the consequences of their actions. Total war, in which a major portion of a country’s population and wealth is sacrificed for the leadership’s purposes, seems worthwhile because they’re not the ones whose their families are slaughtered, homes bombed and crops burned. A state leader will send an army to devastate Georgia or to firebomb Dresden because he knows any retaliatory consequences will fall on other other heads. “Let’s you and him fight.”
There’s been no strategic nuclear war since 1945 because the leadership of the nuclear powers had enough residual perception of reality to understand that — for the first time in history — a nuke could be dropped at will right on the Kremlin or the White House, with virtual certainty of death for themselves. The bomb for the first time raised the possibility that, if war went total, the king would be the equal of his subjects before the Grim Reaper. That’s why, despite all the cries of alarm about “foreign threats” in the buildups to war, the U.S. government since WWII has only attacked those it thought couldn’t fight back.
Rational behavior is possible only when people voluntarily associate with one another, communicate as equals, and experience the full consequences of their own actions.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, The State is Insane, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation, 06/25/11
That is incorrect, because it is only true that authority tends to result in one-way lines of communication. From time to time, there have been very able rulers who realised that and bypassed it by sending out personal representatives drawn from a small group directly responsible to them, to inspect and/or put things into effect (or even went out in disguise among the people to do that themselves, as in some of the stories of the early Caliph Haroun Al Raschid). I believe the early Ming emperors did this, and also some of the Ottomans, and Cardinal Richelieu when he laid the groundwork for the French “intendant” system that was ably continued and extended under Louis XIV. But after Louis XIV came Louis XV and Louis XVI…
If you measure the behavior of corporations according to an individual human yard stick, then they are quite psychotic.
States more so. Something about large organizations encourages it's members to make vile, insane decisions and then act to protect their fellows when these insane and evil decisions are found out.
This group loyalty thing is broken.
I suspect it's designed to protect tribal unity in the face of competition and aggression from another tribe, but even then, it's broken. It allows members of one tribe to unsee their own faults and misdeeds, while being horrible to outsiders.
I hope we can educate and encourage each other out of this mind set.
Good post overall, but I don’t see the point in using anarchist newspeak to make the state sound like a market firm or why there’s any connection there (which seems to be the recurring theme on this site) other than the uncontroversial-among-all-libertarians point against outright state subsides and protectionism ie. crony capitalism. The likes of Stossel and Cato have been making that point for decades.
Why does “accurate feedback about the consequences of one’s actions” require communication between “equals” …?
It’s easy to see why the state, in particular, inhibits accurate feedback: the state is made economically possible through mass ideological legitimation of the top down law-making and mass coercion by a centralized subgroup operating over a static territory. People don’t support all the actions of their nation-state, and very likely wouldn’t be willing to personally pay for most of them, but they support the legitimacy of the monopoly institution itself through time.
The state as an institution is a positive feedback loop of mass ideological legitimation and mass coercion. And it does both of those things extremely efficiently.
Democratic states these days are supposed to be collective action institutions via the mechanism of individuals voting according to their preferences. But preferences are largely incommensurable and incommunicable (before they are revealed by individual interaction based on mutual benefit to self-perceived interests). There is no measurement of the intensity of preferences or cost-accounting of state actions via majoritarian voting. People are not incentivized to be informed or rational when voting. People signal personal identity and group loyalty through votes and political activity without ever being really aware of the costs they personally pay for what the state does. Politicians and any others who at any given time control the centralized subgroup institution of the state are not incentivized (and furthermore do not have the information acquisition capacity) to “do what’s best for society.” etc.
Clearly, the state as an institution in particular is a rather inefficient feedback mechanism for socially beneficial collective action… due to the (unique) empirical nature of the state as a creature of mass ideological projection and, in democratic states, due to the crippling inefficiency of democracy for collective action.
However it does not at all follow that the same is true for “authority” as such or “power relations” as such or “inequality” as such or “hierarchy” or “capitalism” or any other obscurantist anarchist buzzword. The state is not uniquely defined by it being a “power relation” or “authority” or “inequality” or “hierarchy” or “leadership” or “private property.” It has a specific empirical definition that does not apply to families or football teams or firms on a market, large or small, hierarchical or horizontal or whatever.
Theory of the firm explains why, on a market, some firms will have vertical management and hierarchy – and why the managers of those firms will not and do not want be surrounded by slavish yes-men. Common sense and psychology explain why some institutions in civil society (like football teams, firms, families) will have power relations and authority. Economics and biology explain why there will be inequality of wealth and influence always among humans. Using such amorphous terms to define the state and its faults is counterproductive to a clear, intelligent, intellectually honest anti-statism.
There was no State level politics until there was City. "Civitas" means "City-State" or Civilization.
Use the word "Civilization" in stead of "State," and your article is much more accurate from an archeological, historical, psychological, and anthropological perspective.
Libertarian economics are always trying to divorce the City from the State, but it has never been done. I predict it never will be done. There are many reasons why. One reason is game theory – the prisoner's dilemma.
"The Prisoner’s Dilemna provides the logical foundation of why civilization must always continue to grow. Each society faces a choice: do we continue to intensify production, adopt greater complexity, and increase the size or scale of our society, or do we happily accept the level we’re already at? If you choose not to intensify, you will be out-competed by those who do–and your lower level of intensity and complexity will become a resource they can absorb to fuel their further acceleration, whether by outright conquest or more subtle forms of economic or cultural exploitation."
Thesis #12: Civilization must always grow.
by Jason Godesky | 23 October 2005 http://rewild.info/anthropik/thirty/