In the academic world during the 1990s, there was a parallel preoccupation with the "public, political realm" of discussion and debate (among citizens whose political equality was ultimately contingent on the existence of this realm).
When the World Wide Web was established in 1997, this discourse of openness and democracy became the language of Silicon Valley. When Facebook was founded in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that its primary mission was the promotion of democracy, not profits.
The test case of this was the 2010-2012 uprising known as the Arab Spring. In Silicon Valley, the Arab Spring is often touted as the ultimate triumph and accomplishment of social media. In reality, it was a failure. It turns out that the people did not want democracy, they wanted a different kind of dictatorship.
There seem to be two consequences of the failure of the Arab Spring and disillusionment with the false potential of social media. One was a veering among the technology elite toward straightforward philanthropy. The other was a withdrawal from American life, especially after the election of Donald Trump as president. Silicon Valley is now a scapegoat in the eyes of the disadvantaged, and the response of the tech elite has been to ... buy an estate in New Zealand.
As of 2017, it seems as if Facebook is making the world a much worse place.
All is not lost. China provides an alternative model to all the anarchy and fascism that circulates on social media.
For years, the United States and others saw this sort of heavy-handed censorship as a sign of political vulnerability and a barrier to China’s economic development. But as countries in the West discuss potential internet restrictions and wring their hands over fake news, hacking and foreign meddling, some in China see a powerful affirmation of the country’s vision for the internet.Besides Communist Party loyalists, few would argue that China’s internet control serves as a model for democratic societies. China squelches online dissent and imprisons many of those who practice it. It blocks foreign news and information, including the website of The New York Times, and promotes homegrown technology companies while banning global services like Facebook and Twitter.
At the same time, China anticipated many of the questions now flummoxing governments from the United States to Germany to Indonesia. Where the Russians have turned the internet into a political weapon, China has used it as a shield.
In fact, when it comes to technology, China has prospered. It has a booming technology culture. Its internet companies rival Facebook and Amazon in heft. To other countries, China may offer an enticing top-down model that suggests that technology can thrive even under the government’s thumb.
“There’s a recognition that technology has advanced more quickly than the government’s ability to control it,” Ms. Sacks said. Russia’s interference with Facebook, to cite only one example, was “justification for exactly what they are doing here.”
In the Western media, the current one-party autocratic Chinese model of governance is typically referred to as "Marxist". More specifically, it is based on the Soviet model, which was "Leninism".
Leninism is the political theory for the organisation of a revolutionary vanguard party and the achievement of a dictatorship of the proletariat, as political prelude to the establishment of socialism.[1] Developed by and named for the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Leninism comprises socialist political and economic theories, developed from Marxism, and Lenin's interpretations of Marxist theories, for practical application to the socio-political conditions of the Russian Empire of the early 20th century.In the 1925–29 period, Joseph Stalin established Leninism as the official and only legitimate form of Marxism in Russia, by amalgamating the political philosophies as Marxism–Leninism, which then became the state ideology of the Soviet Union.
In the 21st century, however, at the level of policy, is China best understood as following Singapore as a model?
https://www.huffingtonpost.com
As Mr. Lee — widely known as “Harry Lee,” a moniker he acquired while a law student at the University of Cambridge — often explained, Singapore’s economic success was the consequence of three interrelated factors:-total commitment to free enterprise;-total commitment to a rules-driven society; and-total commitment to a corruption-free system.
This seems to parallel the agenda of the Xi regime in China, which is to downsize state enterprises, impose non-arbitrary order and root out corruption.
China's model of development and governance was never perfectly in line with the Soviet model. For example, the Leninist model was altered by Maoism.
There might be am even deeper ideological legacy as well. As Lee Kwan Yew asserted, the formal structure of governance in China might be based on a Leninist model, and the official ideology might be Marxism modified by Mao, but the mode of thought and the sentiments of the ruling elite ultimately derive from Confucianism. (He added that the Chinese "communist" elite hated it when he said that.)
Moreover, historically, Confucianism was itself merely a thin overlay that informed the ruling institutions (e.g., the exam system). Although the day-to-day life of 99% of Chinese (farmers) might have outwardly conformed to the Confucian model, the ethos resonated more with unofficial, heterodox popular philosophies, like Taoism and Buddhism.
All of this may still hold true, but at the actual level of policy, "communist" China could be following the Singapore model, which might be based on the British colonial model.
Thus, there are at least three levels of models at play in contemporary China.
1. The official communist blend of Marx, Lenin and Mao.
2. The legacy of orthodox Confucianism and heterodox beliefs.
3. At the level of policy, the Singapore (British colonial) model.
(Likewise, in the United States, there are layers of ideology. The formal structures of governance are based on a relatively centralized, elitist republicanism -- indirect, representative democracy. At the popular level, however, the self-image of the society is populistic and democratic -- direct or participatory democracy. But the ethos or attitude of American life is largely anarchistic -- apolitical, chaotic and self-absorbed. At the level of policy, the current "America first" agenda of the Trump administration represent a reversion to 19th-century isolationism. At another level still, the spirit or ethos of Trump's rhetoric and appeal is quasi-fascistic.)
For better or worse, Singapore did (does) not enjoy the kinds of freedom of the press that the United States is committed to.
When pressed, Mr. Lee would acknowledge that a restrained press was an advantage in Singapore’s development velocity.
“I had to do some nasty things, locking fellows up without trial,” Mr. Lee said in an interview with The New York Times published in September 2010. “I’m not saying everything I did was right. But everything I did was for an honorable purpose.”
It may have been honorable, but it also intimidated proponents of democracy. Mr. Lee’s ruling People’s Action Party has been in power for the last 50 years, and it was only in the 2011 “elections” to the 84-member national parliament that an opposition grouping raised its presence to six seats from the previous two seats it’d won in 2006.
Singapore is not a democratic system, and some liberties are curtailed (e.g., freedom of the press). But is it in some respects nonetheless a liberal order, that is, a system of liberty where the rule of law and transparency prevails? This would make it the opposite of an "illiberal democracy" like contemporary Russia, in which democratic institutions exist that express the popular will, but the rule of law and liberty are truncated. (Singapore might best be understood as a "liberal quasi-republic".)
All of this implies the distinction between liberty and democracy.
To make things more complicated, there are also different types of "democracies" (e.g., republics), and there might be different kinds of "liberty".
To illustrate various notions of liberty, a comparison could be made with France and the Netherlands.
The English, French and Dutch were the modern, secular, liberal colonial powers that eclipsed the original colonial powers, traditionalistic and autocratic Catholic Spain and Portugal.
But the liberties valued in France and the Netherlands were not quite identical with the liberties of the English.
For example, in France today, it is unlawful for the press to pry into the private lives of French officials. That is, the freedom and dignity of the individual takes precedence over the freedom of the press in France.
Another example might be the system of group liberties that existed in the Netherlands, based on self-segregating apartheid ("apartness") along the lines of religion and ideology.
The question here is, Is the Singapore model actually a liberal model founded on liberty, despite being non-democratic?
The British, Dutch and French did not bring democracy to the countries that they colonized. Nevertheless, the British did bring the rule of law to their colonies. This later provided a foundation for the later establishment of democracy in countries like India. To some extent, the rule of law involves the protection of rights and liberty. This is the deep, British-colonial background of the Singapore model.
So the basic assertions here are:
-The Chinese model today is secretly the Singapore model, not the ostensible Marxist model.
-The Singapore model is the British colonial model (free markets and the rule of law, albeit without democracy).
-The British colonial model is essentially a liberal if undemocratic model.
-These liberties are not identical with the American conception of liberty.
A couple of questions come to mind:
1. If China is indeed following the Singapore model, Is China now embracing the British-colonial model in order to ... enhance China's security and independence?
China is now officially glorifying its leader Xi ostensibly in order to usher in a new period of history focusing on national security and international stature.
If Singapore is the actual model underlying Xi's agenda, national glory and national defense are not the ultimate motive. The true objective of building up China's military and security forces would be to keep the Chinese population in check. The assumption would be, as it is in Singapore, that any move toward democratization would be a step toward anarchy, civil strife, poverty and vulnerability to outside forces. For example, Singapore has mandatory military service for its young men, but it would seem less a deterrent toward Singapore's neighbors than a way to put young men under surveillance, to keep them occupied (e.g., scraping chewing gum off the roads), to discipline them and to provide them with a sense of national unity and service.BEIJING — China’s Communist Party on Tuesday elevated President Xi Jinping to the same exalted status as the nation’s founding father, Mao Zedong, by writing his name and ideas into the party constitution.Restoring China to greatness is a central message of Mr. Xi’s philosophy. That goal already has guided Mr. Xi’s policies of building up the military, strengthening domestic controls and raising China’s profile in global affairs.
The regime is rewriting modern Chinese history.
The critical phrase is “new era,” which Mr. Xi has used throughout the congress. He has described Chinese historysince 1949 as divided into two eras — the three decades after Mao seized power in a revolution that established a unified People’s Republic and ended nearly a century of civil war and foreign invasions, and the three decades after Deng took power in 1978 and refocused China on developing its economy.
In his report to the congress, Mr. Xi suggested that if Mao made China independent, and Deng made it prosperous, he would make it strong again — propelling the country into its “new era.”
To underline that point, the congress also added a second mention of Mr. Xi’s ideas to the constitution: his call to modernize and strengthen China’s armed forces.
The official story now is that Mao was a freedom fighter, Deng brought prosperity and Xi will bring national honor via national security with a global profile.
That's a stretch. The conventional understanding of Mao and Deng has been that they were both freedom fighters. Mao was a utopian idealist who sought to purge China of foreign (and traditional) influence, while Deng was a pragmatist who sought modernization -- not for wealth in itself in order to improve people's lives (which is an American fixation), but in order to make China less vulnerable to outside forces.
If the current regime is so blatantly misrepresenting Mao and Deng, it just might be misrepresenting its own motives. If China becomes a global player, that would divert its population from its own grievances with the government and Party. Foreign policy would then become a safety valve that would protect elites from domestic discontent.
If the primary purpose of Chinese foreign policy will be to distract its population, what would such a foreign policy look like?
It might look like the behavior of the foreign mercenaries who were hired during the Renaissance to protect Italian city-states that they had no loyalty to.
As a consequence, their battles were often as bloodless as they were theatrical. Splendidly equipped armies were known to fight for hours with hardly the loss of a man (Battle of Zagonara, 1424; Battle of Molinella, 1467).
National defense and foreign policy as professional wrestling.
This might involve a three-part strategy:
1) hyping up a fictitious sense of grievance and resentment against other great powers without ever attacking or provoking them;
2) attacking and bullying smaller, vulnerable countries; and
3) persecuting religious and ethnic minorities at home.
That, in a nutshell, is current Russian foreign and domestic policy. (In fact, historically, that has always been Russia's policy.) It's extraordinarily popular with Russians. It also might be President Trump's instinctual conception of foreign policy.
There is the risk that it might all get out of hand. Big time.
There is also the enormous financial cost of world powers having an arms race (again, not in order to defend their countries from actual threats, but to keep their populations distracted and entertained).
2. Is this Singapore/China model superior to the American model in terms fostering greater liberty when it comes to the Internet?
One can distinguish between two models of freedom: anarchy versus liberty.
This distinction might be embodied in two wikileaks whistleblowers, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.
Edward Snowden seems a throwback to the ancient republican ideals of self-denial, self-sacrifice and integrity that conceptually underpinned the founding of the United States. One might find this archetype embodied in other political activists, like Ralph Nader.
American republicanism was centered on limiting corruption and greed. Virtue was of the utmost importance for citizens and representatives. Revolutionaries took a lesson from ancient Rome, they knew it was necessary to avoid the luxury that had destroyed the Empire. A virtuous citizen was one who ignored monetary compensation and made a commitment to resist and eradicate corruption. The Republic was sacred; therefore, it is necessary to serve the state in a truly representative way, ignoring self-interest and individual will. Republicanism required the service of those who were willing to give up their own interests for a common good. According to Bernard Bailyn "The preservation of liberty rested on the ability of the people to maintain effective checks on wielders of power and hence in the last analysis rested on the vigilance and moral stamina of the people...." Virtuous citizens needed to be strong defenders of liberty and challenge the corruption and greed in government. The duty of the virtuous citizen became a foundation for the American Revolution.
One will note that the rhetoric in the text above refers to "liberty", but never to "democracy". What are liberty and democracy?
Democracy refers to public participation in the formation of pubic policy. Liberty, in contrast, refers to a system of restrains that protects groups and individuals. Democracy expresses the popular will of society, whereas liberty constrains the will of society and its members.
Democracy (Greek: δημοκρατία dēmokratía, literally "rule of the people"), in modern usage, is a system of government in which the citizens exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as aparliament. Democracy is sometimes referred to as "rule of the majority".
A liberal democracy is a representative democracy in which the ability of the elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law, and moderated by a constitution or laws that emphasize the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals, and which places constraints on the leaders and on the extent to which the will of the majority can be exercised against the rights of minorities (see civil liberties).
A definition of liberty reveals several formal variations, but it also distinguishes between liberty and freedom more broadly.
Liberty, in philosophy, involves free will as contrasted with determinism. In politics, liberty consists of the social and political freedoms to which all community members are entitled. In theology, liberty is freedom from the effects of, "sin, spiritual servitude, [or] worldly ties."Generally, liberty is distinctly differentiated from freedom in thatfreedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others.
Ancient Athens was the birthplace of democracy. But it was ancient Persia, the enemy of the Greeks, that epitomized liberty. That is important to remember when discussing modern Russia, which might be democratic but not liberal, or contemporary multiethnic Singapore, which might be liberal but not so democratic.
The populations of the Persian Empire enjoyed some degree of freedom. Citizens of all religions and ethnic groups were given the same rights and had the same freedom of religion, women had the same rights as men, and slavery was abolished (550 BC). All the palaces of the kings of Persia were built by paid workers in an era when slaves typically did such work.
(Most of what I know about it comes from Monty Python's Terry Jones.)
"The Brainy Barbarians"
First broadcast 9 June 2006, it shows how Ancient Greeks and Persians were far from the Romans' view of them as effeminate and addicted to luxury. The Greeks valued science and mathematics, and the Persians had initially allowed multiculturalism among the different ethnic groups of its empire (until years of war with Rome).
Americans vaguely talk about "freedom" whenever they mean to refer specifically to democracy, liberty, equality or national defense -- as if "freedom" were a package deal. (Likewise, Americans speak vaguely about "equality", but they actually mean a very narrow equality of opportunity before the laws, not a "socialistic" equality of material condition.) Perhaps, at a deeper level, the simplified rhetoric hides an ethos or spirit that is actually at odds with the constraints of liberty -- an anarchistic ideal to do as one wills.
American anarchism
This "inner anarchist" is not something that one is as likely to find in a Canadian. Canada is a republic that values democracy, liberty and equality -- as does the American political culture. But to Canadians, Americans seem mysteriously feral; to Americans, Canadians are nice people who just don't get it. The level and type of economic and political development in the two countries is nearly identical, but the spirit of the two countries is different.
Perhaps the case of the labor leader Samuel Gompers is instructive. The goal of his work was to de-politicize the labor movement. Yet a secret anarchist lurked within.
Samuel "Sam" Gompers[1] (January 27, 1850 – December 13, 1924) was an English-born, American labor union leader and a key figure in American labor history. Gompers founded the American Federation of Labor (AFL), and served as the organization's president from 1886 to 1894 and from 1895 until his death in 1924. ... He mostly supported Democrats, but sometimes Republicans. He strongly opposed Socialists. During World War I, Gompers and the AFL openly supported the war effort, attempting to avert strikes and boost morale while raising wage rates and expanding membership.Gompers inspired later generations of labor leaders, such as George Meany, who paid tribute to Gompers as a European immigrant who pioneered a distinctly American brand of unionism.
Gompers instituted a pragmatic agenda in the AFL, and this imbues his image with an aura of moderation. However, I believe that Gompers once described himself as "two-thirds an anarchist". His anarchism was obviously not a typical politicized anarchism that would have utilized the labor movement to transform society. Perhaps Gompers was "privately" an anarchist.
This might be quite common in the United States. First, there is the issue of political orientation. In Europe, radicals tend to be communists and fascists, whereas in the US they tend to be anarchists and libertarians.
Second, there is the issue of privatized beliefs and identities. Alexis de Tocqueville asserted that in the public sphere, Americans are the great conformists who exhibit very little diversity of opinion (e.g., there are only two political parties that maintain the same values, albeit expressed differently), and that Americans tend to express dissent in private. Consequently, in the US, a radical political orientation so often seems to devolve into a mere private identity, or a fancy indulged amongst a like-minded clique. In the US, "radicals" publicly accept the status quo and ascends through its ranks. Thus there is an odd inconsistency in the American sense of being an independent "maverick". In American cinema, the hero in a Western is often a mysterious gunfighter who emerges from the wilderness in order to save the innocent, only to disappear back into the frontier in the end. But the reality of American life is that those who glamorize and identify with the boldly unorthodox, independent-minded individual so often tend to be extremely conformist and obedient (e.g., young white guys in the military and university professors).
Anarchism and fascism: Identical opposites (doppelgangers)?
The Australian Julian Assange is a different creature altogether from the American Snowden. Snowden does not seem to harbor any inner anarchist (almost like a Canadian). Assange, in contrast, broadcasts his anarchism. Intriguingly, Assange's anarchism is alloyed with something even more disturbing than anarchism (that is simultaneously the opposite of anarchism).
It has been noted that there is a duality in hacker culture. On the one hand, there is an anarchistic, romantic ideal of "liberating all information" and challenging the authority of every large institution and entity; on the other hand, there is a kind of boastful, techno-fascistic megalomania involved in breaking into computer networks. ("I own this system. I am a god.") This fusion in hacker culture of anarchistic and fascistic impulses is embodied in Julian Assange, who is at once rebellious and self-righteous, yet manipulative and amoral.
Perhaps one can even find this duality in the staid security apparatus of the US government. Within the NSA, there was an emphasis on breaking in to the computer systems of other countries and creating malware to infect their computers, to the point of neglecting the security of the NSA's own computers. The result is that the NSA was hacked and its malware was stolen by the Shadow Brokers and is now slowly being disseminated on the dark web. Perhaps this dismaying development was symptomatic of the duality of hacker culture that might have flourished within the NSA, with its anarchistic will to subversion married to a techno-fascistic impulse to dominate. That dualistic orientation is distinct from a conservative military mentality characterized by the limited aim of protecting and defending.
The anarchic-fascistic personality type is perfect for the creative artist. The romantic stereotype of the artist is that of a rebel whose tumult is contained and organized by their own tyrannical will-to-power and channeled in a critique of the social order against the prevailing status quo (private DIALECTIC). It does seem that many artists seem to gravitate toward political extremes (e.g., during the Spanish civil war). But this is not an appropriate personality type for the citizen in the public realm, who would more properly be moderate, measured, pragmatic, reasonable, sensible and honest (public DIALECTIC). So Julian Assange might have been better suited for the life of a science fiction writer than a political activist.
Anarchism and fascism might share a deeper identity.
At the sociological level, a surprising number of young white guys who are at the political extremes spent their youth bouncing from one point on the fringe to another. (Of course, this depends on what is considered "extremist" in a particular political context. In Europe, socialism is considered somewhat moderate, and Social Democrats are a major party; the political extremes consist of communists and fascists, and liberals are moderate but rare. In the US, both political parties are "liberals"; the extreme consists primarily of libertarians, whereas socialists, communists and fascists are rare.) For example, the prototypical American extremist was once a socialist, then he became a libertarian, then an anarchist, and now he is a fascist. So when anarchists ambush Trump supporters, it is as if they are attacking themselves.
They are described as "white" guys, but one pattern is that they have no societal reference points. They are not "white ethnics" like Italians or Irish who identify with certain neighborhoods in, say, Boston, and have deep roots and recognizable accents. Instead, they were military brats or otherwise nomadic during their childhood, and/or they come from suburbs or other very generic, sterile environments (Los Angeles). So their "whiteness" does not refer to their race and identity, but their deracination and absence of identity. Sociologically, people who are adrift often swim toward extremes, and the particular belief system seems irrelevant as long as it is extreme. So it seems that it is the same people who are attracted to all these extremist and reductionist ideologies (albeit at different phases of their lives).
Psychologically and philosophically, the close relationship between anarchism and fascism runs deep. There is a cult-like appeal to TOTALISTIC ideologies that seek to reduce the social order to one principle. Today, communism and fascism are seen as totalistic "statist" ideologies that seek to envelop or subsume all human activities and relationships under the domain of the government. Prior to the Cold War (especially during WW2, when the US was allied with the USSR), it would have seemed ridiculous to equate fascism and communism. Indeed, there are crucial differences between communism and fascism in their commitment to the state:
1) Marxist communism imagines that the state is the tool for social justice and radical equality, and that the state will eventually "whither away" when society finally becomes a utopia, whereas
2) fascism worships the state as the embodiment of a primordial national identity.
In terms of its fixation on the state as the end point of human existence, fascism is much more totalistic than communism.
In its complete negation of the state, anarchism could be said to be totalistic. Furthermore, anarchism is totalistic in that it blames all social ills on the government and seeks to dismantle not just the state, but all societal hierarchies. As "identical opposites", anarchism and fascism form a duality, and are two sides of the same coin.
What is the a connection between fascism and libertarianism?
It has been said that libertarianism is anarchism for rich people.
A definition of anarchism.
Anarchism is a political philosophy that advocates self-governed societies based on voluntary institutions. These are often described as stateless societies, although several authors have defined them more specifically as institutions based on non-hierarchical or free associations. Anarchism holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful.
A definition of libertarianism.
Libertarianism (Latin: libertas, "freedom") is a collection of political philosophies and movements that uphold liberty as a core principle.[1] Libertarians seek to maximize political freedom and autonomy, emphasizing freedom of choice, voluntary association, individual judgment and self-ownership.[2][3][4][5][6]
Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power. However, they diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing political and economic systems. Various schools of libertarian thought offer a range of views regarding the legitimate functions of state and private power, often calling for the restriction or dissolution of coercive social institutions.
Libertarians want to maintain a minimalist state in order to enforce the complete rule of liberty in terms of both personal and economic freedom, whereas anarchists would eliminate the state altogether in favor of voluntary, cooperative institutions. Theoretically, libertarians are not as totalistic as anarchists because they seek to preserve minimal government as a tool for ensuring liberty.
That being said, perhaps in the US, libertarianism is more militant and rigid than an Americanized anarchism that has been privatized and domesticated. In that sense, the joke that libertarians are wealthy anarchists does have a certain resonance. In the Europe of the past, anarchists were bomb-throwing fanatics and libertarians were lonely Austrian economists; in the US today, anarchists are hobbyists with composting toilets while libertarians aggressively push their agenda through Congress.
Have libertarians displaced anarchists more generally, and not just in the public realm? Silicon Valley rose up in northern California amidst a unique laid-back hippy culture that imagined computing could be decentralized (e.g., the Whole Earth Catalog). This particular ethos of self-sufficiency has the waft of a utopian anarchism, which seems distinct from the later libertarian/liberal hybrid culture of Silicon Valley.
What differs between the hippy do-it-yourself enthusiast and the libertarian is not just income, but personality type. The the hippy counterculture was (is) marked by an opposition to a centralized, authoritarian, technological rationality.
[The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition is a work of non-fiction by Theodore Roszak originally published in 1969.]When it was published ... this book captured a huge audience of Vietnam War protesters, dropouts, and rebels—and their baffled elders. Theodore Roszak found common ground between 1960s student radicals and hippie dropouts in their mutual rejection of what he calls the technocracy—the regime of corporate and technological expertise that dominates industrial society. He traces the intellectual underpinnings of the two groups in the writings of Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, Allen Ginsberg and Paul Goodman. In a new introduction, Roszak reflects on the evolution of counter culture since he coined the term in the sixties.
Alan Watts wrote of The Making of a Counter Culture in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969, "If you want to know what is happening among your intelligent and mysteriously rebellious children, this is the book. The generation gap, the student uproar, the New Left, the beats and hippies, the psychedelic movement, rock music, the revival of occultism and mysticism, the protest against our involvement in Vietnam, and the seemingly odd reluctance of the young to buy the affluent technological society—all these matters are here discussed, with sympathy and constructive criticism, by a most articulate, wise, and humane historian."
This counterculture was also opposed to Soviet communism and fascism, and advocated instead an internal "consciousness raising" in order to transform society. In some respects, this reflected the historic tendency of many religious Americans who oppose the status quo to withdraw into a subjective world of like-minded peers rather than pursue violent revolution, which itself reflects the religious origins and diversity of the early northern American colonies. But the "consciousness raising" of the counterculture was (is) fundamentally irrational (e.g., drugs), although genuinely spiritual and ethical in purpose; this moral orientation is something that liberals and conservatives also share.
The libertarian personality
Libertarians, in contrast, have a highly rational orientation and a diminished moral concerns.
In a project led by Ravi Iyer, we analyzed data from nearly twelve thousand self-described libertarians, and compared their responses to those of 21,000 conservatives and 97,000 liberals. The paper was just published last week in PLoS ONE. The findings largely confirm what libertarians have long said about themselves, but they also shed light on why some people and not others end up finding libertarian ideas appealing. Here are three of the major findings:
1) On moral values: Libertarians match liberals in placing a relatively low value on the moral foundations of loyalty, authority, and sanctity (e.g., they’re not so concerned about sexual issues and flag burning), but they join conservatives in scoring lower than liberals on the care and fairness foundations (where fairness is mostly equality, not proportionality; e.g., they don’t want a welfare state and heavy handed measures to enforce equality). This is why libertarians can’t be placed on the spectrum from left to right: they have a unique pattern that is in no sense just somewhere in the middle. They really do put liberty above all other values.
"Totalistic thinking" has been characterized by the desire to subsume all human relationships under the institution of the state, and this has been associated with fascism and communism. But perhaps the old-fashioned European anarchist who sought to eradicate the state is likewise totalistic. Libertarians are not totalistic in the minimalist role they would assign the state, but insofar that liberty is their sole value, their thinking is remarkably reductionistic. (Simplicity of design is the highest ideal of the engineer, and it is said that this makes libertarianism appealing to engineers.)
Libertarians value rationality.
2) On reasoning and emotions: Libertarians have the most “masculine” style, liberals the most “feminine.” We used Simon Baron-Cohen’s measures of “empathizing” (on which women tend to score higher) and “systemizing”, which refers to “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” Men tend to score higher on this variable. Libertarians score the lowest of the three groups on empathizing, and highest of the three groups on systemizing. (Note that we did this and all other analyses for males and females separately.) On this and other measures, libertarians consistently come out as the most cerebral, most rational, and least emotional. On a very crude problem solving measure related to IQ, they score the highest. Libertarians, more than liberals or conservatives, have the capacity to reason their way to their ideology.
Libertarians value individualism.
3) On relationships: Libertarians are the most individualistic; they report the weakest ties to other people. They score lowest of the three groups on many traits related to sociability, including extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. They have a morality that matches their sociability – one that emphasizes independence, rather than altruism or patriotism.
To liberals and conservatives, libertarians -- with their emphasis on rationality and individualism, and their deemphasis on morality and empathy -- can seem evil.
To be sure, here is the philosophy of modern Satan worship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The Church of Satan is a religious organization dedicated to Satanism as codified in The Satanic Bible.The church does not believe in the Devil, nor a Christian or Islamic notion of Satan.[3] High priest Peter H. Gilmore describes its members as "skeptical atheists", embracing the Hebrew root of the word "Satan" as "adversary". The church views Satan as a positive archetype who represents pride, individualism, and enlightenment, and as a symbol of defiance against the Abrahamic faiths which LaVey criticized for what he saw as the suppression of humanity's natural instincts.
LaVeyan Satanism is a religion founded in 1966 by the American occultist and author Anton Szandor LaVey. Scholars of religion have classified it as a new religious movement and a form of Western esotericism. It is one of several different movements that describe themselves as forms of Satanism.
LaVey established LaVeyan Satanism in the U.S. state of California through the founding of his Church of Satan on Walpurgisnacht of 1966, which he proclaimed to be "the Year One", Anno Satanas—the first year of the "Age of Satan". His ideas were heavily influenced by the ideas and writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.
The religion is materialist, rejecting the existence of supernatural beings, body-soul dualism, and life after death. Practitioners do not believe that Satan literally exists and do not worship him. Instead, Satan is viewed as a positive archetype representing pride, carnality, and enlightenment. He is also embraced as a symbol of defiance against Abrahamic religions which LaVeyans criticize for suppressing humanity's natural instincts and encouraging irrationality. The religion propagates a naturalistic worldview, seeing mankind as animals existing in an amoral universe. It promotes a philosophy based on individualism and egoism, coupled with Social Darwinism and anti-egalitarianism.
LaVeyan Satanism has been characterised as belonging to the political right rather than to the political left.[54] The historian of Satanism Ruben van Luijk characterised it as a form of "anarchism of the Right".[55] LaVey was anti-egalitarian and elitist, believing in the fundamental inequality of different human beings.[56] His philosophy was Social Darwinist in basis,[57] having been influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand.[58] LaVey stated that his Satanism was "just Ayn Rand's philosophy with ceremony and ritual added".
LaVeyan Satanism places great emphasis on the role of liberty and personal freedom.
The anthropologist Jean La Fontaine highlighted an article that appeared in a LaVeyan magazine, The Black Flame, in which one writer described "a true Satanic society" as one in which the population consists of "free-spirited, well-armed, fully-conscious, self-disciplined individuals, who will neither need nor tolerate any external entity 'protecting' them or telling them what they can and cannot do." This rebellious approach conflicts with LaVey's firm beliefs in observing the rule of law. Although personally neither a fascist nor Neo-Nazi,[80] LaVey was on good terms with various Neo-Nazi and other right-wing groups operating in the United States.
Social Darwinism
In the English-speaking world, social Darwinism implied unrestricted economic competition.
The term Social Darwinism is used to refer to various ways of thinking and theories that emerged in the second half of the 19th century and tried to apply the evolutionary concept of natural selection to human society. The term itself emerged in the 1880s, and it gained widespread currency when used after 1944 by opponents of these ways of thinking.Scholars debate the extent to which the various Social Darwinist ideologies reflect Charles Darwin's own views on human social and economic issues. His writings have passages that can be interpreted as opposing aggressive individualism, while other passages appear to promote it.[2] Some scholars argue that Darwin's view gradually changed and came to incorporate views from other theorists such as Herbert Spencer. Spencer published his Lamarckian evolutionary ideas about society before Darwin first published his theory in 1859, and both Spencer and Darwin promoted their own conceptions of moral values. Spencer supported laissez-faire capitalism on the basis of his Lamarckian belief that struggle for survival spurred self-improvement which could be inherited.
Social Darwinism took on nationalistic and racist connotations in more group-oriented societies like Germany and Japan.
The term was popularized in the United States in 1944 by the American historian Richard Hofstadter who used it in the ideological war effort against fascism to denote a reactionary creed which promoted competitive strife, racism and chauvinism. Hofstadter later also recognized (what he saw as) the influence of Darwinist and other evolutionary ideas upon those with collectivist views, enough to devise a term for the phenomenon, "Darwinist collectivism".[12] Before Hofstadter's work the use of the term "social Darwinism" in English academic journals was quite rare.
So in the US, social Darwinism took on libertarian cast, whereas in Europe it took on a fascistic aspect.
It was Spencer, and not Darwin, who coined the (inaccurate) term "survival of the fittest" to describe how species adapted to competition for scarce resources via random mutation and "natural selection" (the perishing of maladaptive individuals). But "survival of the fittest" as a concept was flexibly adopted by diverse political movements.
Part of the difficulty in establishing sensible and consistent usage is that commitment to the biology of natural selection and to 'survival of the fittest' entailed nothing uniform either for sociological method or for political doctrine. A 'social Darwinist' could just as well be a defender of laissez-faire as a defender of state socialism, just as much an imperialist as a domestic eugenist.While there are historical links between the popularization of Darwin's theory and forms of social Darwinism, social Darwinism is not a necessary consequence of the principles of biological evolution.
However, social Darwinism as it is usually understood -- as ruthless competition -- is not the necessary conclusion of Spencer's theory, which actually has little to do with Darwin's theory.
In The Social Organism (1860), Spencer compares society to a living organism and argues that, just as biological organisms evolve through natural selection, society evolves and increases in complexity through analogous processes.[19]
In many ways, Spencer's theory of cosmic evolution has much more in common with the works of Lamarck and Auguste Comte's positivism than with Darwin's.
Jeff Riggenbach argues that Spencer's view was that culture and education made a sort of Lamarckism possible[14] and notes that Herbert Spencer was a proponent of private charity.
Interestingly, Nietzsche argued against survival of the fittest. He wrote:
"Wherever progress is to ensue, deviating natures are of greatest importance. Every progress of the whole must be preceded by a partial weakening. The strongest natures retain the type, the weaker ones help to advance it. Something similar also happens in the individual. There is rarely a degeneration, a truncation, or even a vice or any physical or moral loss without an advantage somewhere else. In a warlike and restless clan, for example, the sicklier man may have occasion to be alone, and may therefore become quieter and wiser; the one-eyed man will have one eye the stronger; the blind man will see deeper inwardly, and certainly hear better. To this extent, the famous theory of the survival of the fittest does not seem to me to be the only viewpoint from which to explain the progress of strengthening of a man or of a race."
Traces of social Darwinism in American life can be found not only in certain libertarian rhetoric, but in the legacy of resistance against social Darwinism. The most visible sign of this would be the opposition by American evangelical Christians to the teaching of Darwinian evolution in public schools. This is a peculiar development by the standards of Christianity in almost all other countries (e.g., the Catholic church accepts the validity of evolutionary theory). It can be explained in historical terms, in the same way that the prominent "animal rights" movement in Britain (e.g., opposition to fox hunting) can be understood as largely an extension of class conflict by other means. If the animal rights movement continues to flourish in Britain, it is because of the persistence of the caste system in that country; likewise, opposition to evolutionary theory in the US might relate to the continued pervasiveness of social Darwinian sentiment in libertarianism. (What makes this doubly peculiar is that the kind of libertarians who exhibit social Darwinian sentiments are often Republicans politically allied with conservative evangelical Christians.)
There are two elements to the American reception to libertarianism that help to explain its appeal, one relating to the contemporary (mis)understanding of libertarian philosophy, and the other to the historical folkways of colonial America.
Ayn Rand
The first element relates to the novelist Ayn Rand's rhetorical strategy. Her first big novel was "The Fountainhead" from 1943, about an artistically uncompromising architect, Howard Roark, whose two primary enemies are a drab socialist collectivism, on one hand, and creatively sterile, socially aspirational, traditionalistic business elites, on the other hand. This theme of the lonely artist persecuted for his originality seems to come straight out of 19th century Romanticism, and the archetypes go back to Plato's tripartition of society into Rulers, Workers and Philosophers (with the philosopher replaced by the artist).
Her magnum opus was the 1957 science fiction novel "Atlas Shrugged", about business elites going on strike until society collapses. The overt rhetorical maneuver is to frame the ruling class as the real workers whose labor maintains a parasitic society -- an inversion of communist propaganda (Rand was a Russian immigrant). A more implicit reversal, found in the American reception of Rand's work, is that the business elites are not just the true workers, but they are also perceived as the great creative geniuses and founders of new civilizations (e.g., the contemporary veneration of Steve Jobs as the grand maestro of the digital age). Indeed, unlike the aristocratic elites of most countries, the professional and business classes of the United States were never an idle leisure class, and they always embraced rather than resisted innovation. So in their minds it must be a powerfully flattering and seductive idea that it is they, the Rulers, who are not only the true Workers, but the true Artists and Philosophers as well.
The Celts
The second element informing the American reception of libertarianism is the Celtic influence on America's early origins.
Celtic languages are now exiled to the western fringes of Europe, but 2,300 years ago the Celts dominated central and western Europe.
Again, here is Terry Jones explaining the history of the Celts, who the Romans feared and loathed above all others. Celtic culture and society was, in fact, highly advanced, more so than the Romans, but the political system of the Celts (which maintained a notion of human rights, and equal rights for women) was highly decentralized and stood no chance against Rome.
"The Primitive Celts"
First broadcast 26 May 2006, this episode challenges the popular view of Celtic society as a primitive culture that was uncivilised. Compared to Rome, it was actually an advanced society and, in some ways, even more advanced than Rome. For example, many of the roads in Gaul that were assumed to have been built by the Romans were actually built by the Celts themselves. However, Gaul was rich and tempting to Rome. The Roman general, Julius Caesar, set out to conquer Gaul with a professional army. The Celts stood no chance against Caesar and the Romans and so today Rome's version of history is remembered.
Until the Roman conquests 2,000 years ago, the British Isles were inhabited by Celtic peoples -- Gauls, Brythons, Picts and Gaels.
Several centuries later, Britain was invaded by Vikings and conquered by Germanic peoples (Anguls and Saxons). The Germans were tribal people who lived communally in walled villages. (The word "Welsh" is a Germanic word meaning "foreigner" that referred to Celts that the Germans failed to conquer.) Germanic peoples have historically exhibited some measure of "democracy", although it was closer to an open judicial hearing than to full-blown ancient Athenian democracy.
A thing /ˈθɪŋ/ was the governing assembly of a northern Germanic society, made up of the free people of the community presided over by lawspeakers.A famous incident took place when Þorgnýr the Lawspeaker told the Swedish king Olof Skötkonung (c. 980–1022) that the people, not the king, held power in Sweden; the king realized that he was powerless against the thing and gave in.
(A very similar judicial institution existed in medieval eastern Europe among Slavic peoples; in northern Russia, this possibly evolved into a republic. There might have been a Germanic influence, as this region was once a Viking settlement.)
One thousand years ago, England was conquered by the Normans, descendants of Vikings who had settled in western France (Normandy).
The Normans lived in castles isolated from the general population, and imported from France a notion of a centralized, sacred monarchy.
The divine right of kings, divine right, or God's mandate is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm. It implies that only God can judge an unjust king and that any attempt to depose, dethrone or restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act. It is often expressed in the phrase "by the Grace of God", attached to the titles of a reigning monarch.
The royal touch (also known as the king's touch) was a form of laying on of hands, whereby French and English monarchs touched their subjects, regardless of social classes, with the intent to cure them of various diseases and conditions.The claimed power was most notably exercised by monarchs who sought to demonstrate the legitimacy of their reign and of their newly founded dynasties.
For the historian David Starkey, the Normans implanted themselves on a more egalitarian Germanic society, and thus created a new political hybrid: a monarchy with immense power, but which governed by consent. The Norman invasion is so fundamental to English history and character that it was not just an event, but actually comprises who the English are. And just who are the modern English people? They are a people dedicated to rationalizing a kind of wishy-washy pragmatic compromise that promotes eccentric hybrid institutions (e.g., the Anglican religion, which is both Catholic and Protestant).
This hybridity also exists to the American political tradition, with the establishment of a "democratic republic" manifest in a dual federalist system.
Starkey's thesis might miss one crucial element -- the persistence of an anarchistic ethos related to Britain's Celtic heritage. Rather than a hybrid of Germanic egalitarian communality and Norman aristocratic elitism, the political cultures of the English-speaking world might be "tribrid".
Constitutional monarchy is the culmination of England's hybrid political heritage, and it was forged during the English Civil War.
Demographically, the war has long been seen as a conflict between affluent, urban, Protestant "dissenter" parliamentarians and rural, religiously orthodox (Catholic and Anglican) monarchists.The English Civil War (1642–1651) was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians ("Roundheads") and Royalists ("Cavaliers") over, principally, the manner of England's government. The first (1642–1646) and second (1648–1649) wars pitted the supporters of King Charles I against the supporters of the Long Parliament, while the third (1649–1651) saw fighting between supporters of King Charles II and supporters of the Rump Parliament. The war ended with the Parliamentarian victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651.
The two sides had their geographical strongholds, such that minority elements were silenced or fled. The strongholds of the royalty included the countryside, the shires, and the less economically developed areas of northern and western England. On the other hand, all the cathedral cities (except Chester, Worcester and Hereford and the royalist stronghold of Oxford) sided with Parliament. All the industrial centers, the ports, and the economically advanced regions of southern and eastern England typically were parliamentary strongholds. Lacey Baldwin Smith says, "the words populous, rich, and rebellious seemed to go hand in hand".
The "orthodox" elements among the royalists were Catholics and "high church" Anglicans, whereas the Protestant "dissenters" among the parliamentarians were those who had broken with the Church of England.
However, much of the war involved conflicts within the "Celtic fringe".
The term "English Civil War" appears most often in the singular form, although historians often divide the conflict into two or three separate wars. These wars were not restricted to England as Wales was a part of the Kingdom of England and was affected accordingly, and the conflicts also involved wars with, and civil wars within, both Scotland and Ireland. The war in all these countries is known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.
Interestingly, the American descendants of these several major groups who fought the English Civil War -- Dissenters, Royalists and Celts -- are also the primary groups that fought the American Civil War. They also came to comprise the basis of American political culture.
Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America is a 1989 book by David Hackett Fischer that details the folkways of four groups of people who moved from distinct regions of Great Britain (Albion) to the United States. The argument is that the culture of each of the groups persisted, to provide the basis for the modern United States.[1] Fischer explains "the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws and individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture."
The northern United States is of Germanic derivation, while the south is Celtic. The north was dominated by Dissenters such as the Puritans and Quakers, while the south was dominated by the Scots and aristocrats from Celtic areas of England.
The four migrations are discussed in the four main chapters of the book:
- The Exodus of the English Puritans (Pilgrims and Puritans influenced the Northeastern United States' corporate and educational culture)[3]
- The South of England to Virginia
- The Cavaliers and Indentured Servants (Gentry influenced the Southern United States' plantation culture)[4]
- North Midlands to the Delaware Valley
- The Friends' Migration (Quakers influenced the Middle Atlantic and Midwestern United States' industrial culture)[5]
- Borderlands to the Backcountry
- The Flight from North Britain (Scotch-Irish and border English influenced the Western United States' ranch culture and the Southern United States' common agrarian culture)
A summary of the work:
This cultural history explains the European settlement of the United States as voluntary migrations from four English cultural centers. Families of zealous, literate Puritan yeomen and artisans from urbanized East Anglia established a religious community in Massachusetts (1629-40); royalist cavaliers headed by Sir William Berkeley and young, male indentured servants from the south and west of England built a highly stratified agrarian way of life in Virginia (1640-70); egalitarian Quakers of modest social standing from the North Midlands resettled in the Delaware Valley and promoted a social pluralism (1675-1715); and, in by far the largest migration (1717-75), poor borderland families of English, Scots, and Irish fled a violent environment to seek a better life in a similarly uncertain American backcountry. These four cultures, reflected in regional patterns of language, architecture, literacy, dress, sport, social structure, religious beliefs, and familial ways, persisted in the American settlements.
Puritans. The Puritans were the most intellectual and rigorous of the Dissenters, and they have left their mark on the dour, over-educated nature of New England and its great centers of learning. In a sense, New England was an intellectually elitist, modernized version of England implanted in the New World. Ideologically, this corresponds with progressivism, which maintains that government should be a realm of rational management (e.g., city managers rather than mayors). Their approach to socializing the individual involved "breaking the will".
A: The Puritans
Much like Unitarians today, the Puritans were a religious group that drew disproportionately from the most educated and education-obsessed parts of the English populace. Literacy among immigrants to Massachusetts was twice as high as the English average, and in an age when the vast majority of Europeans were farmers most immigrants to Massachusetts were skilled craftsmen or scholars. And the Puritan “homeland” of East Anglia was a an unusually intellectual place, with strong influences from Dutch and Continental trade; historian Havelock Ellis finds that it “accounts for a much larger proportion of literary, scientific, and intellectual achievement than any other part of England.”
Furthermore, only the best Puritans were allowed to go to Massachusetts; Fischer writes that “it may have been the only English colony that required some of its immigrants to submit letters of recommendation” and that “those who did not fit in were banished to other colonies and sent back to England”. Puritan “headhunters” went back to England to recruit “godly men” and “honest men” who “must not be of the poorer sort”.
Royalists. When the royalist aristocracy in England lost its civil war, many of them fled to Virginia, with its promise of re-creating a vast, horrific and oppressive caste system as the foundation of civilized life and freedom (for a few). Socializing the individual involved "bending the will severely against itself".
B: The Cavaliers
The Massachusetts Puritans fled England in the 1620s partly because the king and nobles were oppressing them. In the 1640s, English Puritans under Oliver Cromwell rebelled, took over the government, and killed the king. The nobles not unreasonably started looking to get the heck out.
Virginia had been kind of a wreck ever since most of the original Jamestown settlers had mostly died of disease. Governor William Berkeley, a noble himself, decided the colony could reinvent itself as a destination for refugee nobles, and told them it would do everything possible to help them maintain the position of oppressive supremacy to which they were accustomed. The British nobility was sold. The Cavaliers – the nobles who had fought and lost the English Civil War – fled to Virginia. Historians who cross-checking Virginian immigrant lists against English records find that of Virginians whose opinions on the War were known, 98% were royalists. They were overwhelming Anglican, mostly from agrarian southern England, and all related to each other in the incestuous way of nobility everywhere: “it is difficult to think of any ruling elite that has been more closely interrelated since the Ptolemies”. There were twelve members of Virginia’s royal council; in 1724 “all without exception were related to one another by blood or marriage…as late as 1775, every member of that august body was descended from a councilor who had served in 1660”.
These aristocrats didn’t want to do their own work, so they brought with them tens of thousands of indentured servants; more than 75% of all Virginian immigrants arrived in this position. Some of these people came willingly on a system where their master paid their passage over and they would be free after a certain number of years; others were sent by the courts as punishments; still others were just plain kidnapped. The gender ratio was 4:1 in favor of men, and there were entire English gangs dedicated to kidnapping women and sending them to Virginia, where they fetched a high price. Needless to say, these people came from a very different stratum than their masters or the Puritans.
People who came to Virginia mostly died. They died of malaria, typhoid fever, amoebiasis, and dysentery.
Unlike in New England, where Europeans were better adapted to the cold climate than Africans, in Virginia it was Europeans who had the higher disease-related mortality rate. The whites who survived tended to become “sluggish and indolent”, according to the universal report of travellers and chroniclers, although I might be sluggish and indolent too if I had been kidnapped to go work on some rich person’s farm and sluggishness/indolence was an option.
The Virginians tried their best to oppress white people. Really, they did. The depths to which they sank in trying to oppress white people almost boggle the imagination. There was a rule that if a female indentured servant became pregnant, a few extra years were added on to their indenture, supposedly because they would be working less hard during their pregnancy and child-rearing so it wasn’t fair to the master.
Virginian aristocrats would rape their own female servants, then add a penalty term on to their indenture for becoming pregnant. That is an impressive level of chutzpah. But despite these efforts, eventually all the white people either died, or became too sluggish to be useful, or worst of all just finished up their indentures and became legally free. The aristocrats started importing black slaves as per the model that had sprung up in the Caribbean, and so the stage was set for the antebellum South we read about in history classes.
Quakers. In the aftermath of the English civil war, pacifistic Dissenters like the Quakers fled England and settled in Pennsylvania. Ideologically, they came to espouse a religious tolerance that was extreme and peculiar at the time, but which feels normal to contemporary Americans. The Quakers were the original liberals. The attitude toward socializing the individual was "bracing the will".
C: The Quakers
Fischer warns against the temptation to think of the Quakers as normal modern people, but he has to warn us precisely because it’s so tempting. Where the Puritans seem like a dystopian caricature of virtue and the Cavaliers like a dystopian caricature of vice, the Quakers just seem ordinary. Yes, they’re kind of a religious cult, but they’re the kind of religious cult any of us might found if we were thrown back to the seventeenth century.
Instead they were founded by a weaver’s son named George Fox. He believed people were basically good and had an Inner Light that connected them directly to God without a need for priesthood, ritual, Bible study, or self-denial; mostly people just needed to listen to their consciences and be nice. Since everyone was equal before God, there was no point in holding up distinctions between lords and commoners: Quakers would just address everybody as “Friend”. And since the Quakers were among the most persecuted sects at the time, they developed an insistence on tolerance and freedom of religion which (unlike the Puritans) they stuck to even when shifting fortunes put them on top. They believed in pacificism, equality of the sexes, racial harmony, and a bunch of other things which seem pretty hippy-ish even today let alone in 1650.
England’s top Quaker in the late 1600s was William Penn. Penn is universally known to Americans as “that guy Pennsylvania is named after” but actually was a larger-than-life 17th century superman. Born to the nobility, Penn distinguished himself early on as a military officer; he was known for beating legendary duelists in single combat and then sparing their lives with sermons about how murder was wrong. He gradually started having mystical visions, quit the military, and converted to Quakerism. Like many Quakers he was arrested for blasphemy; unlike many Quakers, they couldn’t make the conviction stick; in his trial he “conducted his defense so brilliantly that the jurors refused to convict him even when threatened with prison themselves, [and] the case became a landmark in the history of trial by jury.” When the state finally found a pretext on which to throw him in prison, he spent his incarceration composing “one of the noblest defenses of religious liberty ever written”, conducting a successful mail-based courtship with England’s most eligible noblewoman, and somehow gaining the personal friendship and admiration of King Charles II. Upon his release the King liked him so much that he gave him a large chunk of the Eastern United States on a flimsy pretext of repaying a family debt. Penn didn’t want to name his new territory Pennsylvania – he recommended just “Sylvania” – but everybody else overruled him and Pennyslvania it was. The grant wasn’t quite the same as the modern state, but a chunk of land around the Delaware River Valley – what today we would call eastern Pennsylvania, northern Delaware, southern New Jersey, and bits of Maryland – centered on the obviously-named-by-Quakers city of Philadelphia.
Penn decided his new territory would be a Quaker refuge – his exact wording was “a colony of Heaven [for] the children of the Light”. He mandated universal religious toleration, a total ban on military activity, and a government based on checks and balances that would “leave myself and successors no power of doing mischief, that the will of one man may not hinder the good of a whole country”.
His recruits – about 20,000 people in total – were Quakers from the north of England, many of them minor merchants and traders. They disproportionately included the Britons of Norse descent common in that region, who formed a separate stratum and had never really gotten along with the rest of the British population. They were joined by several German sects close enough to Quakers that they felt at home there; these became the ancestors of (among other groups) the Pennsylvania Dutch, Amish, and Mennonites.
"Ulster Scots", "Scotch-Irish", "Borderers". In Ireland and Britain, people of Scottish background living in Northern Ireland are known as the "Ulster Scots".
The Ulster Scots (Ulster-Scots: Ulstèr-Scotch), also called Ulster-Scots people (Ulstèr-Scotch fowk[2]) or, outside the British Isles, Scots-Irish (Scotch-Airisch[3]), are an ethnic group[4] in Ireland, found mostly in the Ulster region and to a lesser extent in the rest of Ireland. Their ancestors were mostly Protestant Lowland Scottish migrants,[5] the largest numbers coming from Galloway, Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Ayrshire and the Scottish Borders, with others coming from further north in the Scottish Lowlands and, to a much lesser extent,[citation needed] from the Highlands.
These Scots migrated to Ireland in large numbers both as a result of the government-sanctioned Plantation of Ulster, a planned process of colonisation which took place under the auspices of James VI of Scotland and I of England on land confiscated from members of the Gaelic nobility of Ireland who fled Ulster and as part of a larger migration or unplanned wave of settlement.
Here is a map of Northern Ireland. In the northernmost part of the island, a Germanic dialect of the Scottish lowlands ("Scots") is spoken; in the rest of Northern Ireland, English is spoken (in several dialects). Half of the population of Northern Ireland is Irish Catholic; one-third is (Scottish) Presbyterian; and one-fifth is likewise Protestant.
In the United States, the descendants of the Ulster Scots are known as the Scotch-Irish.
A number of American presidents were of Scotch-Irish background, President Andrew Jackson being the first.
In reality, this group of people is better understood as a collection of border peoples from Ireland, southern Scotland and northern England. Fiercely independent, individualistic and anarchic, their attitude toward socializing the individual was "building the will". They occupied a vast, inhospitable rural area throughout the south, from the Appalachian Mountains through Texas.
If New England was indeed a new, modernized version of England, and the southeastern US represented the aristocratic values of old England, then the Appalachians and Texas can be seen as "New Scotland". Just as every Scottish mother tells her sons that "The Scots bow down to no man", Texans likewise never subordinate themselves. This is the anarchistic ideal of freedom found in rural life, as opposed to the constraining system of liberties found in the city.
An upbeat narrative casts business-friendly Texas in the loner role of swashbuckling cowboy, disdainful of coastal elites. “Don’t California my Texas” has become a rallying cry for Republican state lawmakers and a theme repeated by the governor, Greg Abbott, who has complained about “a patchwork quilt of bans and rules and regulations that is eroding the Texas model.”
He believes cities are the culprit. For years, Texas Republicans promoted local controls to push against federal court orders on issues like desegregation and same-sex marriage. Now state leaders have made a U-turn. Mr. Abbott has complained about “political demagogues using climate change as an excuse to remake the American economy.” At a Republican gathering in June, he talked about the experience of driving out of the state’s capital, Austin.
“It starts smelling different,” he told the audience. “And you know what that fragrance is? Freedom.”
“The whole trans-Mississippi pioneer enterprise was in fact brought to you by the federal government,” says Steven Conn, a historian and author of “Americans Against the City.”
The hypocrisy of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, resisting federal aid to the New York region after Hurricane Sandy but then requesting it for Texas after Harvey, is in fact part of this same history.Houston’s unregulated sprawl, Mr. Conn added, gives physical form to this politics of “decentralization and anti-statism.”
This attitude goes back centuries.
D: The Borderers
The Borderers are usually called “the Scots-Irish”, but Fischer dislikes the term because they are neither Scots (as we usually think of Scots) nor Irish (as we usually think of Irish). Instead, they’re a bunch of people who lived on (both sides of) the Scottish-English border in the late 1600s.
None of this makes sense without realizing that the Scottish-English border was terrible. Every couple of years the King of England would invade Scotland or vice versa; “from the year 1040 to 1745, every English monarch but three suffered a Scottish invasion, or became an invader in his turn”. These “invasions” generally involved burning down all the border towns and killing a bunch of people there. Eventually the two sides started getting pissed with each other and would also torture-murder all of the enemy’s citizens they could get their hands on, ie any who were close enough to the border to reach before the enemy could send in their armies. As if this weren’t bad enough, outlaws quickly learned they could plunder one side of the border, then escape to the other before anyone brought them to justice, so the whole area basically became one giant cesspool of robbery and murder.
In response to these pressures, the border people militarized and stayed feudal long past the point where the rest of the island had started modernizing. Life consisted of farming the lands of whichever brutal warlord had the top hand today, followed by being called to fight for him on short notice, followed by a grisly death. The border people dealt with it as best they could, and developed a culture marked by extreme levels of clannishness, xenophobia, drunkenness, stubbornness, and violence.
By the end of the 1600s, the Scottish and English royal bloodlines had intermingled and the two countries were drifting closer and closer to Union. The English kings finally got some breathing room and noticed – holy frick, everything about the border is terrible. They decided to make the region economically productive, which meant “squeeze every cent out of the poor Borderers, in the hopes of either getting lots of money from them or else forcing them to go elsewhere and become somebody else’s problem”.
Sometimes absentee landlords would just evict everyone who lived in an entire region, en masse, replacing them with people they expected to be easier to control.
Many of the Borderers fled to Ulster in Ireland, which England was working on colonizing as a Protestant bulwark against the Irish Catholics, and where the Crown welcomed violent warlike people as a useful addition to their Irish-Catholic-fighting project. But Ulster had some of the same problems as the Border, and also the Ulsterites started worrying that the Borderer cure was worse than the Irish Catholic disease.
So the Borderers started getting kicked out of Ulster too, one thing led to another, and eventually 250,000 of these people ended up in America.
250,000 people is a lot of Borderers. By contrast, the great Puritan emigration wave was only 20,000 or so people; even the mighty colony of Virginia only had about 50,000 original settlers. So these people showed up on the door of the American colonies, and the American colonies collectively took one look at them and said “nope”.
Except, of course, the Quakers. The Quakers talked among themselves and decided that these people were also Children Of God, and so they should demonstrate Brotherly Love by taking them in. They tried that for a couple of years, and then they questioned their life choices and also said “nope”, and they told the Borderers that Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley were actually kind of full right now but there was lots of unoccupied land in Western Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian Mountains were very pretty at this time of year, so why didn’t they head out that way as fast as it was physically possible to go?
At the time, the Appalachians were kind of the booby prize of American colonization: hard to farm, hard to travel through, and exposed to hostile Indians. The Borderers fell in love with them. They came from a pretty marginal and unproductive territory themselves, and the Appalachians were far away from everybody and full of fun Indians to fight. Soon the Appalachian strategy became the accepted response to Borderer immigration and was taken up from Pennsylvania in the north to the Carolinas in the South (a few New Englanders hit on a similar idea and sent their own Borderers to colonize the mountains of New Hampshire).
So the Borderers all went to Appalachia and established their own little rural clans there and nothing at all went wrong except for the entire rest of American history.
These Border peoples became the great lovers of life in America because of the anarchic freedom that it granted to them, and they lost their ethnic self-identification quite quickly and simply saw themselves as Americans. One can see this in the Appalachian region in a map of American ethnicity.
It is interesting how the "Scotch-Irish" (Ulster Scots) became emblems for the Borderers. This might be reminiscent of how the actor Alec Baldwin is stereotyped as the classic Irish American because of his temperament, his humor, his talents, his politics, his ego and his looks, even though Baldwin is only partially of Irish background. There is an identification of the Celtic with the rebellious and anarchic.
It is also interesting how the values and attitudes identified with these various factions of the English Civil War became detached from these groups and spread throughout the English-speaking world by the time of the American Revolution.
The early stages of the American Revolution consisted of a conservative insistence on asserting the "traditional rights of Englishmen" versus the arbitrary impositions of Parliament. At Valley Forge, General Washington would toast to the "health of the King"; by the time Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" was published, the colonies had shifted their views against monarchy and were for independence. But by the time of the writing of the Constitution, the pendulum had swung back in favor of a strong, centralized government with a powerful executive.
By the time of the American Civil War, the aristocratic South -- whose ancestors fought for a centralized monarchy -- were now for a confederacy, and the descendants of parliamentarian Puritans and Quakers in the North were for a unified federation.
(Interestingly, English-speaking Canadians are very conscious of the influence on their society of Scottish immigrants to Nova Scotia, who are known for being modest and frugal, taciturn and quiet. But the Scottish influence in the US -- for example, Texas -- is just the opposite. Likewise, the Scots pride themselves on their intellectual achievements, producing great poets, philosophers and scientists. The Scottish legacy in the US and Canada is not intellectual.)
In sum, the American openness to libertarianism therefore has three conspicuous sources:
1) social Darwinism,
2) a powerful self-conception by the business classes charmed by the writing of Ayn Rand, and
3) the historical influence of the American frontiersmen who were associated with a Celtic streak of individualism.
The above influences on the American reception of libertarian thought are irrational in origin and finds their origin on the fringes. However, there is one more influence that is the paragon of rationality and is central to the conventional thinking at the practical heart of everyday American life. This would be economic theory.
Economic theory
Standard economic theory largely reflects the basic assumptions of libertarianism.
Rational choice theory, also known as choice theory or rational action theory, is a framework for understanding and often formally modeling social and economic behavior.[1] The basic premise of rational choice theory is that aggregate social behavior results from the behavior of individual actors, each of whom is making their individual decisions. The theory also focuses on the determinants of the individual choices (methodological individualism).
Rationality and individualism are the basic assumptions of economic theory, just as they are the highest ideals of libertarianism.
Economic theory has been identified by the sociologist Max Weber as the most useful tool for understanding society precisely because it is a abstract simplification of reality -- what Weber referred to as an "ideal type".
Ideal type (German: Idealtypus), also known as pure type, is a typological term most closely associated with sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920).[1] For Weber, the conduct of social science depends upon the construction of abstract, hypothetical concepts. The "ideal type" is therefore a subjective element in social theory and research, and one of the subjective elements distinguishing sociology from natural science.
An ideal type is formed from characteristics and elements of the given phenomena, but it is not meant to correspond to all of the characteristics of any one particular case. It is not meant to refer to perfect things, moral ideals nor to statistical averages but rather to stress certain elements common to most cases of the given phenomena. It is also important to pay attention that in using the word "ideal" Max Weber refers to the world of ideas (German: Gedankenbilder, "mental images") and not to perfection; these "ideal types" are idea-constructs that help put the seeming chaos of social reality in order.
For example, the three basic assumptions of rational choice theory are radically simplified. This is what allows the theory to be applied usefully to so many divergent situations.
1. Humans are purely self-interested.
2. Humans are perfectly rational.
3. Humans are totally aware of all the choices that are available.
It is commonly argued that idealization plays a key role in the methodology of other social sciences, especially of economics.[4] For example, homo economicus is the result of a consistent abstraction-idealization process.Homo economicus as presupposed by Neoclassicals is an idealized, abstract creature that can be characterized by an intention to exchange and whose only task is to take economic decisions. For homo economicus, there is no time or social and natural environment, he is ageless, he has no whims, and his decisions are not biased by occasional effects from the (social) environment. So, his behaviour only reflects the objective and consistently prevailing economic laws established by formal rationality. After all, human (and social) sciences, similarly to natural sciences, i.e. abstracting from everything subjective, constrained themselves to phrase only objective truths.
Economics is part of a larger theoretical orientation in the social sciences, methodological individualism.
Methodological individualism is the requirement that causal accounts of social phenomena explain how they result from the motivations and actions of individual agents, at least in principle.
The contrary of this would be methodological holism.
The debate between methodological holists and methodological individualists concerns the proper focus of explanations in the social sciences: to what extent should social scientific explanations revolve around social phenomena and individuals respectively?
There is a general tendency to link rationality to individualism because individuals are conscious and calculating, whereas the social order is not. Conversely, there is a tendency to link certain forms of irrationality -- such as unconsciously or semi-consciously adopted values, social roles, beliefs, ideals, traditions, customs, etc. -- to social cohesiveness and holism.
Of course, irrationality can be linked to individualism. Indeed, the several sources of libertarian thought mentioned above that celebrate individualism and conflict -- social Darwinism, the writings of Ayn Rand, and an anarchism associated with the Celts -- are all examples of irrationality (although, in the first two cases, irrationality masquerades as rationality).
Economics is a rational science that purports to reflect the supposed rationality of the individual. However, the other social sciences are just as rationalistic as economics, but with a holistic perspective that studies a largely irrational social order. In fact, here is one major effort to integrate the social sciences, including economics.
Adaptation, or the capacity of society to interact with the environment. This includes, among other things, gathering resources and producing commodities to social redistribution. Goal Attainment, or the capability to set goals for the future and make decisions accordingly. Political resolutions and societal objectives are part of this necessity. Integration, or the harmonization of the entire society is a demand that the values and norms of society are solid and sufficiently convergent. This requires, for example, the religious system to be fairly consistent, and even in a more basic level, a common language. Latency, or latent pattern maintenance, challenges society to maintain the integrative elements of the integration requirement above. This means institutions like family and school, which mediate belief systems and values between an older generation and its successor.
A: (Economy): Money.G: (Political system): Political power.I: (Societal Community): Influence.L: (Fiduciary system): Value-commitment.
This theory arguably became the backdrop in an effort to specialize the social sciences into a division of labor, which became the model that was adopted at all universities, everywhere.
1) economics as the study of resource acquisition.
2) sociology as the study of social systems.
3) anthropology as the study of cultural systems.
4) psychology as the study of personality systems.
But rationality can be linked to holism insofar as the social system does display a kind of cybernetic rationality. This was the point of the Parsonian integration of the social sciences that was referenced above. (A transformation in one system leads to rational adjustment in the others, e.g., when more women enter the workforce, values and attitudes change, and so do social roles and childrearing and educational practices.)
Moreover, rationality can be linked with holism insofar as the individual is not necessarily self-interested even when they are fully conscious and calculating. The insight that rationality does not necessarily imply individualism is given cinematic expression in the famous death of Spock scene in "The Wrath of Khan". Logic dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few ... or the one.
Again, libertarianism would seem to represent a wholesale repudiation of methodological holism.
This might be symptomatic of a cognitive defect common to libertarians.
Liberals and conservatives might assert that there is a moral defect in the libertarian mind, that libertarians tend to be sociopaths who have little concern for morality. That might be true in some cases (e.g., Satan worshippers). In response, a principled libertarian might assert that ethical concerns are implicit in a rigorous commitment to rationality.
One problem with this defense of libertarian rationalism is that a commitment to detached analysis as an expression of ethical life is symptomatic of autism, which is a perceptual rather than moral defect. People on the autism spectrum find it difficult to read emotion and empathize together with others, even while they are otherwise moral and do have sympathy or concern for others, and are typically very honest and reliable.
The Empathizer-Systemizer scale (adapted from Baron-Cohen [62]) measures the tendency to empathize, defined as “the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion” and to systemize, or “the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system.” In short, empathizing is about understanding the social world whereas systemizing is about understanding the world of inanimate objects and nature.Table 3 shows that libertarians score the lowest of any group on empathizing, and the highest on systemizing (also see Figures 3 and 4). In fact, libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing. Given that these traits are known to differ between men and women, it is important to examine these effects in each sex separately. Table 3 shows that the same effects hold when looking only at men, and when looking only at women.
Research by Baron-Cohen [62] has shown that relatively high systemizing and low empathizing scores are characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism. We might say that liberals have the most “feminine” cognitive style, and libertarians have the most “masculine.” These effects hold even when men and women are examined separately, as can be seen in Table 3. Indeed, the “feminizing” of the Democratic party in the 1970s [63] may help explain why libertarians moved increasingly into the Republican party in the 1980s.
In sum, one major flaw of libertarianism is that it might reflect an ingrained, one-sided, individualistic view of rationality.
But is that also true of fascism in the United States? That is, is there a de-politicized, private, personal fascism that exists in America?
It has been said that "The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
Fascism is a European phenomenon. Why does the US seem immune to fascism while always exhibiting fascistic tendencies? Could it be that, like anarchists, those of fascistic leanings in the US tend to withdraw from the public realm?
In an individualistic society like the United States, genuine fascism is impossible because Americans are too self-absorbed to be hyper-patriotic. Instead, any pretense to extreme nationalism in the US would be merely a pseudo-fascistic ruse by a wealthy demagogue to scam people out of money.
Seventy-three years ago, The New York Times asked the sitting vice president to write an article about whether there are fascists in America, and what they’re up to.
It was an alarming question. And the vice president took it quite seriously. His article, “The Danger of American Fascism,”described a breed of super-nationalist who pursues political power by deceiving Americans and playing to their fears, but is really interested only in protecting his own wealth and privilege.
Again, if the United States is largely immune to fascism because Americans are too wrapped up in narcissism and the pursuit of money, why is it that "The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States"?
First, a definition of fascism is in order. Here are several.
Roger Griffin[F]ascism is best defined as a revolutionary form of nationalism, one that sets out to be a political, social and ethical revolution, welding the ‘people’ into a dynamic national community under new elites infused with heroic values. The core myth that inspires this project is that only a populist, trans-class movement of purifying, cathartic national rebirth (palingenesis) can stem the tide of decadence.
Ernst NolteFascism is anti-Marxism which seeks to destroy the enemy by the evolvement of a radically opposed and yet related ideology and by the use of almost identical and yet typically modified methods, always, however, within the unyielding framework of national self-assertion and autonomy.
Robert PaxtonA form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
John Weiss[Fascism involves] organicist conceptions of community, philosophical idealism, idealization of "manly" (usually peasant or village) virtues, resentment of mass democracy, elitist conceptions of political and social leadership, racism (and usually anti-Semitism), militarism and Imperialism.
George OrwellFascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes... It is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way.
Fascism seems to both borrow from and persecute all other ideological perspectives. It does this for the sake of buttressing and reinvigorating with unrestricted power a nation state that fascism imagines to be in decline and under attack by foreign and domestic enemies. Fascism seeks to establish an absolute border or boundary between the nation and the foreigner, and this outside world is regarded by fascists with hostility and imperialistic aggression. The nation is defined both culturally and biologically in the most primordial terms, and idealized as pure, harmonious and unified.
In a sense, fascism seems to exhibit in exaggerated form the universal wartime mentality that all societies experience when under the stress of potential total destruction. This mentality was evident among all of the combatants of the First World War and the Cold War, not just the Axis powers of WW2. Some of those who experienced this mentality during WW1 actually grew nostalgic for it in the aftermath.
That is, all societies have boundaries and identities that are generally flexible when times are good; however, under extreme stress (e.g., war, industrialization), these boundary practices become paranoid. Some people become addicted to the paranoia.
Similarly, during WW1, it was noticed by the philosopher John Dewey that the same institutions that were designed to promote American democracy -- public education, in particular -- were instead promoting militarism (although Dewey later repressed this insight). Benign, rational, established institutions can have an unexpected dual use during periods of crisis to promote fanaticism (and some people love this).
A parallel duality can be found in Rousseau's concept of the "general will". Every society has social norms expressed in the formal rule of law which applies uniformly and fairly to all. This is the foundation of meritocracy, in which employment and career advancement are based on talent and effort, and not on one's social characteristics.
The law is the expression of the general will. All citizens have the right to contribute personally, or through their representatives, to its formation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, are equally admissible to all public dignities, positions, and employments, according to their capacities, and without any other distinction than that of their virtues and their talents.
Rousseau's idea of the general will was later criticized as being the basis for the excesses of the French Revolution and Napoleon's totalitarianism, as well as being the theoretical inspiration of modern totalitarianism in general.
On the one hand, it seems absurd to suggest that the idea of the general will -- that public opinion forms the basis of the law, which in turn forms the basis for meritocracy -- is the origin of totalitarianism.
On the other hand, one can find the germ of totalitarianism in Rousseau's romantic notion of the primitive origins of the general will. Rousseau argues that the general will (social norms) was originally completely uniform in simple societies (the "will of all"), but that this begins to break down in a complex modern society. For Rousseau, the solution to this loss of uniformity ("mechanical solidarity") is not to reimpose the majority's social norms onto minorities, but to constantly question what the social norms are. While for Rousseau the proper response to diversity and divisiveness is to engage in philosophy and the social sciences, for the totalitarian, the goal is to return to the original harmony by:
1) eliminating ethnic diversity in the name of restoring normality, and
2) forcing class divisions into a frozen harmony (a false "organic solidarity") subordinated to a police state (corporatism).
Under intense psychological strain, social norms go from being the basis of fair competition (meritocracy) to being the inspiration of a romantic desire to "return" to a fictitious harmonious original society by crushing competition, divisiveness, diversity, dissent, creativity, novelty.
Perhaps in an extremely individualistic society, the kind of paranoid boundary practices that characterize fascism would exist instead at the micro-level -- within the mind of the self-obsessed narcissist -- rather than at the macro-level of the nation state.
Hypothetically, the "micro-fascism" of a self-absorbed society might be characterized by an obsession with big guns, big cars and big houses.
This psychology of the encapsulated self would also be marked by a paranoid relationship with food, and a terror of:
- gluten
- GMOs
- cholesterol
- sodium
- MSG
The puritanical diet of the "fascist of the self" might be well-represented in the gustatory habits of Donald Trump, who has never tasted alcohol and who strenuously avoids exposure to caffeine and nicotine. Trump's favorite foods are meatloaf and hamburger, but he insists that they be well-done, with the fluids cooked off.
Many years ago, in an interview on NPR, Ivanka Trump discussed her father in a rather sad, resigned tone of voice. She said, "My father is very strict, and, I think, very American." This strictness is the micro-fascism of the self, and it is one reason why the United States is so "successful" economically.
But the American privatization of fascism is not merely a source of American success, but also a source of security for American democracy. In an interview with the billionaire Ted Turner, he was asked how he as a Southern conservative had come to form a friendship with the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. He said, "Fidel is not a communist. He's a king. Like me." In the United States, citizens are free to live out their megalomaniacal fantasies in the private realm, without having to take over the government. In fact, Americans admire the ostentatious fantasy-land of the self-made eccentric (Elvis's Graceland, Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch, Hugh Hefner's Playboy Mansion, the Hearst Castle), which might be be considered disturbing and vulgar in other countries.
Unlike Canadians, Americans are in touch with their inner fascist and their inner anarchist, and this is what makes America so dynamic and creative. The actor William Shatner once said that there is something special about Canada, where complete strangers will ask you how you are doing and then listen carefully to your response because they do care. But, Shatner said, it would be nice if Canadians could just "kick ass" once in a while. In fact, some Canadians do "kick ass", but they tend to move to the United States because it's better to burn out than to fade away. What is disturbing about the US is when traces of the spirit of fascism and/or anarchism do enter the public realm, which is even less like to happen in Canada (Rob Ford).
Behind the thin veneer of liberalism, one can see this privatized fascism and domesticated anarchism together propelling the tech industry forward in the United States.
Ideologically, Silicon Valley has been described as a liberal-libertarian hybrid. Under a veneer of liberalism, Silicon Valley might be more in line with the anarcho-fascism of Assange -- albeit in a milder, progressive form -- than with the traditional republicanism of Snowden.
The tech founders of Silicon Valley tend to be just as liberal as any Democrat on cultural and economic matters, especially in terms of income redistribution. The one big exception is regulation, where tech founders align more with Republicans and libertarians.
This reflects the self-interest of the technology industry in terms of investing in science and public education, and allowing talented immigrants into the United States, and in staving off restrictions that would limit technological innovation.
But at a deeper level, it might also reflect the dualistic mentality of the tech industry, in which a rebellious, libertarian populism (e.g., the idea of inventing things in one's garage) that disdains regulation is coupled with technocratic confidence and faith that champions the activist state.
This leads to another big area of inquiry: What can and should be regulated?
What is a 'Natural Monopoly'
A natural monopoly is a type of monopoly that exists as a result of the high fixed costs or startup costs of operating a business in a specific industry. Additionally, natural monopolies can arise in industries that require unique raw materials, technology or other similar factors to operate. Since it is economically sensible to have some monopolies like these, governments allow them to exist but provide regulation, ensuring consumers get a fair deal.
A natural monopoly, like the name implies, is a monopoly that does not arise due to collusion, consolidation or hostile takeovers. Instead, natural monopolies occur when a company takes advantage of an industry's high barriers to entry to create a "moat" or protective wall around its operations.
Perhaps in its extreme form, a utility company represents a consensus of what should be tightly regulated (by a Public Utilities Commission).
The utilities industry is a good example of a natural monopoly. The costs of establishing a means to produce power and supply it to each household can be very large. This capital cost is a strong deterrent for possible competitors. Additionally, society can benefit from having a natural monopoly like this because multiple utility companies operating in the same industry overleverage the available resources.
Distributing water and electricity is a natural monopoly because it is virtually impossible for competitors to get into the business by creating their own new infrastructure. Likewise, telephony was (is) a natural monopoly, which led to the rise of the Bell System. This monopoly did not go unchallenged; it was regulated in 1934 and ultimately dismantled in 1984.
In 1913, under AT&T ownership, the Bell System's growing monopoly over the phone system was challenged by the government in an anti-trust suit, leading to the Kingsbury Commitment, under which they escaped being broken up or nationalized in exchange for divesting themselves of Western Union and allowing non-competing independent telephone companies to interconnect with their long-distance network. After 1934, AT&T was regulated by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Proliferation of the telephone allowed the company to become the largest corporation in the world until its dismantling by the United States Department of Justice in 1984, at which time the Bell System ceased to exist.
An equivalent issue today is how much power Internet Service Providers should be allowed to have over the traffic that flows over their infrastructure. This is the issue of "Net Neutrality".
Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments regulating most of the Internet must treat all data on the Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication.[1] For instance, under these principles, internet service providers are unable to intentionally block, slow down or charge money for specific websites and online content.
This would classify ISPs as utilities.
Research suggests that a combination of policy instruments will help realize the range of valued political and economic objectives central to the network neutrality debate.[14] Combined with strong public opinion, this has led some governments to regulate broadband Internet services as a public utility, similar to the way electricity, gas, and the water supply are regulated, along with limiting providers and regulating the options those providers can offer.
What little I remember about this issue is its economic history (which is not included in the Wikipedia article). At one point, the federal government was expected to build America's fiber optic infrastructure. There was a taxpayer revolt against this prospect. The task then fell to cable companies like Comcast and Verizon, who expected to pass on the cost of new infrastructure to heavy users like Netflix and Google. The model was that of private toll roads that collect rent from users. Well, it turns out that not only do Americans not like to pay taxes for things they use, but they don't like to pay rent either. Net neutrality is essentially rent control for cyberspace with the veneer of being a freedom of speech issue (with the same advantages and disadvantages of rent control in real estate).
That being said, the real issue remains, Are ISPs natural monopolies?
That might require a case-by-case local analysis. In a natural monopoly, the cost to a startup competitor is unfeasible. In the case of Hawaii, for the longest time it seemed that Oceanic Cable (Time Warner) was a natural monopoly. Recently, however, Hawaiian Telcom (Cincinnatti Bell, pending) has become a competitor. Such ISPs also compete with the unlimited data plans of wireless providers. It could be that ISPs are no longer natural monopolies. If this is the case, then the arguments for Net Neutrality are largely moot.
This lead to another question, Are the big media companies natural monopolies that should be regulated as utilities?
The big five media companies are Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. There is a debate over whether or not they are monopolies, the question being as to whether there are alternatives to using them. They are definitely conglomerates in that each represents a number of businesses, products and services. Therefore, they are admittedly big and expansive, but they may not fit the strict definition of a natural monopoly.
To some extent, perhaps they have come under suspicion because their rhetoric of "disruption" has become hypocritical.
The worldview of Silicon Valley, rooted in the hippy culture of northern California, maintained that certain technologies could undermine monopoly -- both economic monopolies (e.g., IBM) and political monopolies (e.g.,dictatorships). Moving fast and breaking things meant breaking monopolies (the anarchist impulse).
Back in the 1990s, a startup could bring down a behemoth. Today, however, the big media companies are themselves immune to being brought down by startups because they simply buy or appropriate such startups. However, these same big media firms also foster startups. This does not conform to the classic model of natural monopoly.
The big five are platforms on which a plethora of other things have been built. (The iPhone is really a small iPad in which the phone has been turned into just another app. This is the perfect model of a platform.)
Technically, the big five media companies might not be monopolies, but as platforms within which we live our lives and divulge our personal information, they might be vastly more intrusive than classic monopolies ever were.
In proposals for greater regulation of Facebook, one gets a sense mostly of a desire to turn back the clock to solve a novel dilemma.
1. Abandon emotional signaling (e.g., "like" and "react").
2. Real verification of names.
3. Transparency in terms of explaining Facebook policy and operations.
4. Transparency in terms of openness to outside researchers.
5. The option of going back to the old Facebook menu, prior to feeds and "likes".
6. Chronological news feed option versus an algorithm, and greater human oversight over political ads.
7. Encourage quality of interaction via diversity in management and journalistic principles.
8. Just be honest.
9. Become a public benefit corporation.
One of the most common proposals for regulating social media is that the likes of Google and Facebook should be required to list who purchases space for political advertisements. This is standard operating procedure with radio and television.
Now The Guardian is reporting that politicians are starting to ask if companies like Google and Facebook should have to declare who is paying for political ads running on their platforms, as TV and radio are required to do.
The Guardian said, “[W]hen Facebook or Google sells a political ad, there is no public record of that sale.
That situation is of growing concern to politicians and legislators in Washington as digital advertising becomes an increasingly central part of American political campaigns. During the 2016 election, over $1.4bn was spent in online advertising, which represented a 789 percent increase over the 2012 election.”
Certainly a handful of big tech companies are growing into market-commanding industrial giants that bring to mind early 20th century titans like William Randolph Hearst. In the last quarter Google alone reported $17.7 billion in ad revenue—Google’s quarterly earnings reports have been going up since 2011.
One issue is the feasibility of such regulation.
Facebook and Google now make up roughly 70-75% of political digital advertising sales, but the key question is whether there is any way to effectively implement a method of disclosure that makes transparency a reality. Jason Rosenbaum, the former advertising director for the Clinton campaign, suggested these companies adopt a voluntary system of disclosure. He noted that cable companies, which are not expressly regulated by the FCC had long done this. Rosenbaum noted that legislative and regulatory solutions both face significant political obstacles and that it was hard to envision a technological way to track advertisements.Instead, he thought a voluntary option would not only benefit the public but be good for platforms as it would enable them to sell more advertising which he noted is “what these companies do”. If a campaign knows a rival has bought advertising on an online platform, it is more likely to respond in kind and attempt to match the buy.
A more radical idea is to regulate the big media companies as public utilities.
What they're saying: Commentators on the right, like popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, as well as those on the left, like University of Southern California professor Jonathan Taplin (who authored a recent book about large tech companies), have pushed the idea of regulating platforms, specifically Google, as a utility. Even Michael Bloomberg compared Facebook to telecom companies (which are more heavily regulated) in a conversation with Axios this week.How utilities are regulated: Services like water are treated like utilities because the government believes everyone has a right to access them. Then there are services regulated as "common carriers," which allows the government to appoint a body that keeps a more watchful eye on services that have monopoly-like status, like phone service.Why it's a long shot: Utility-style regulation of online platforms isn't possible without an act of Congress designating the service as a common carrier — and lawmakers don't appear interested in going down that path. Currently no regulatory agency has jurisdiction to fully regulate online platforms the way, for example, the FCC regulates the phone industry.Sound smart: The current net neutrality debate centers around whether to treat broadband providers as "common carriers," just like telecom providers are. That has led people to conflate the utility-style regulation of online platforms like Google with utility-style treatment of broadband providers like AT&T.The other coast: The industry argues that there's adequate competition between big tech companies (and startups), so the very premise that they are monopolistic is wrong.
Conservatives argue that regulation of the media should be done with a "light touch". Ideologies help us to orient our thinking, but they can distract from the real question: Is the business under consideration a natural monopoly for which there is no alternative?
Social media as a public utility is a theory which argues that social networking sites (such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Google Search and Twitter, etc.) are essential public services that should be regulated by the government, in a manner similar to the way electrical and phone utilities are typically government-regulated. Applying utility-status regulation to social media websites has been a debated topic within Internet policy since 1992.Zeynep Tufekci, University of North Caroline Chapel Hill, claims that services on the Internet such as Google, Ebay, Facebook, Amazon.com, are all natural monopolies. She argues that these services "benefit greatly from network externalities[,] which means that the more people on the service, the more useful it is for everyone," and thus makes it hard to replace the market leader.[On the other hand,] Mark Jamison brings up a situation in 2009 which illustrates how consumers can easily find alternatives to social media sites such as Google search. "For about an hour on the morning of January 31, 2009, Google search results contained a noticeable error. During that period of time a large number of customers switched their search activity to Yahoo! and probably to other search engines (Google 2009; Vascellaro 2009)." [14] Such an incident shows that while social media sites are extremely popular, they are "not essential to our social and economic functions in the way that electricity and water are."
That there would arise a call within the US to regulate social media comes as a genuine shock to media companies.
Social-media companies aren’t new to defending themselves in ideological terms — they’re just not used to doing it on their home turf. While to authoritarian regimes, the threat of social media is obvious, in the United States, Facebook, Twitter and Google have for years talked about themselves freely in the language of democracy, participation and connectivity. The emerging tension between internet platforms and democratic governments, however, seems to stem less from their obvious rhetorical differences than from their similarities.
In the case of Mark Zuckerberg in particular, there seems to be an inability to imagine that telecommunications technology could be anything but an unalloyed social good. (The great limitation of technocracy is an ignorance of context, for example, of historical understanding.)
Facebook’s transition from a confident stride to a guarded crouch was conspicuous and sudden, arriving roughly at the same time as President Trump. Shortly after the 2016 election, Zuckerberg dismissed heated claims that misinformation on his platform had gotten Trump elected as a “pretty crazy idea.” In September, he admitted that his comment was dismissive, but did so after months of near-constant scrutiny, including, according to The Washington Post, a postelection lecture from President Obama. In an interview with Bloomberg published in September, he sounded more wistful than irritated: “For most of the existence of the company, this idea of connecting the world has not been a controversial thing,” he said. “Something changed.” It certainly had: Facebook was being implicated as potentially harmful to the systems within which it had thrived, and with which it had sought to identify itself.
It could be that the big five media companies are already too powerful to regulate.
The problem was that Facebook had outgrown every context except its own. Though it neither thinks like nor resembles a government, it has effectively sewn itself into the fabric of users’ public and personal lives. Facebook accounts have now become something like IDs, enabling an ever-growing range of activities: commerce, job-seeking, leisure. Networks stand in for community; encryption, in owned and operated services like WhatsApp, stands in for guarantees of liberty; newsfeeds become sources of diverse information, including ads, yes, but also calls to register to vote — to apply elsewhere what you’ve increasingly experienced online.
Facebook in particular resembles a species of well-intentioned, highly advanced space aliens who have installed themselves everywhere on Earth, and who are totally clueless to the harm they cause. In the face of calls for their regulation, they merely promise to work harder for the public good, admitting neither culpability nor accepting the imposition of restraints.
It’s very likely that any approach to regulating Facebook will look more like diplomacy than anything else — a cautious search for détente with an institution that ultimately gets to set its own laws, whether a government likes it or not. Indeed, the company has been presenting itself as a willing, generous participant in American investigations, but more generally as a supranational, self-regulating force for good, and, boldly, as indispensable for the continuation of democracy around the world. “We will do our part not only to ensure the integrity of free and fair elections around the world,” Zuckerberg said, “but also to give everyone a voice and to be a force for good in democracy everywhere.” For citizen users, it’s a gesture of good faith. To skeptical countries, it’s a gentle declaration of independence, or maybe a dare. For Facebook, it’s something distinct, new and unmistakably statelike: a claim of sovereignty.
Perhaps social media firms may be the cyberspace equivalents of the various East India Companies (Austria, Britain, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Portugal and Sweden). These were essentially multinational corporations that became expansive sovereign imperial powers.
Originally chartered as the "Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies", the company rose to account for half of the world's trade, particularly in basic commodities including cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre, tea, and opium. The company also ruled the beginnings of the British Empire in India.By 1803, at the height of its rule in India, the British East India company had a private army of about 260,000—twice the size of the British Army.[5] The company eventually came to rule large areas of India with its private armies, exercising military power and assuming administrative functions.[6] Company rule in India effectively began in 1757 and lasted until 1858, when, following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Government of India Act 1858 led to the British Crown's assuming direct control of the Indian subcontinent in the form of the new British Raj.
Despite its eventual absorption into the British government, note that at no point did the British East India Company pose a threat to the sovereignty of its home country's political system. The same cannot be said about Facebook.
That being said, even though the big five media companies cannot be stopped, they may not as powerful and large as we imagine. Their deep, interweaving penetration into our daily lives creates an unduly grand impression.
But in other ways, the Five do not cleanly fit traditional notions of what constitutes dangerous corporate power. Only a couple of them enjoy monopolies or duopolies in their markets — Google and Facebook in digital ads, for example.
Apple’s iPhone is the world’s most profitable product, its App Store the most important digital marketplace, and yet two out of three smartphones sold in the United States are not iPhones.Amazon is considered ground zero in the vast transformation of American retail, and is implicated in the unfolding story of how our jobs and our lunches will be gobbled up by machines. But only in the last year did Amazon’s annual revenue surpass that of Costco. It does not yet enjoy a majority share of online commerce in America, has a single-digit share of American retail and is still a minor satellite compared with Walmart’s sun.
In fact, we've been here before with regard to the rise of a revolutionary new form of media. The emergence of radio a century ago inspired the same gamut of emotions, from joyous, utopian hope to hysterical dread. Moreover, the hard core of the two political extremes sought to regulate radio much the way that the likes of Steve Bannon today seek to regulate a liberal Silicon Valley. The media is like the line-item veto -- political parties flipflop in their support or opposition to it depending on whether or not it seems to benefit themselves.
One will note from the text above that the greatest controversy today with the big five media companies is with social media, not with operating systems like Microsoft or home delivery services like Amazon. The controversy lies with Google and Twitter and, above all, Facebook.
Furthermore, while there are calls for making transparent the provenance and origin of political advertising on social media, there is also one other major call for regulation: Verifying the authenticity and authority of the news stories that are circulated on social media.
To clarify these issues, it might help to focus on one narrow topic: How Facebook distributes the news.
The single biggest obstacle in determining how Facebook should be regulated is figuring out what Facebook is. As a platform, Facebook does a lot of everything.
Determining how to regulate Facebook may first require some kind of definition of what it is.Facebook, Read argues, is like “a four-dimensional object” that “we catch slices of” “when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.” It’s really hard to get a handle on it.
Facebook hosts news as a news aggregator, similar to Google News. But Google vets its news somewhat by relying on newspapers as its sources. Facebook does not, and uses a feed to give users the kind of "news" stories that they will agree with.
But Facebook isn’t legally responsible for the fake news that appears on its site. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 contains a section that states, “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This section is a fundamental legal building block of most of the online products that people use. Google cannot be sued for showing false or libelous content to people who search for it. The same goes for what people post and share on Facebook.
This piece of law is also “the existential problem” for large online platforms as it provides too much protection for what gets said on them, according to Jonathan Taplin, a critic of Silicon Valley and author of Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.
Publishers have actual legal responsibility for what they allow onto their sites. The New York Times can be sued based on what it publishes, Taplin noted. Facebook, however, cannot.
“They are given protections that no one can sue them for any reason — that is Google and Facebook — that’s unlike the protection that your publication has or NBC News has or The New York Times has,” Taplin told HuffPost. “They are completely shielded from any responsibility for the content that appears on their service.”
To understand all of this, it is crucial to understand that freedom of speech issues are structured around the public-private dichotomy.
The purely public realm is the government, and the government has no freedom of speech. One example is how the word "oriental" was banned by law in 2016 from all federal communications. Likewise, the official White House twitter account is sharply proscribed in what it can say and who it can restrict from viewing it. In the US, freedom of speech implies carefully limiting the speech of the government.
In sharp contrast, the purely private realm in the US is radically dedicated to free speech. As a "private citizen", anyone (including government workers) can say pretty much anything. Likewise, President Trump can say whatever he wants to on his own private twitter account, and he can banish anyone he wants from subscribing to it. Moreover, Twitter is itself a private entity with its own rules that users must adhere to.
However, there is a "public-private" realm that poses a certain conundrum. For example, if a baker refuses to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple, is it his right to refuse to do so, or is he violating the civil rights of the couple? Social media companies can fall into this gray area.
(This public-private ambiguity also informs the debate on Net Neutrality. Is the fiber-optic infrastructure built by corporations private property like a private toll road, or is it implicitly public property because it is being used a part of the internet? The question is not whether or not it is infrastructure, but whether that infrastructure is public or private.)
All of this plays out in the context of a law that controls digital media—the 1998 Communications Decency Act. It says that online services like Facebook and Twitter aren’t legally responsible for content posted by their users, even if it’s illegal: If a Facebook user posts something defamatory, the injured person can sue the user, but not Facebook.
However, if Facebook is thought of as more of a public entity like the government or like newspapers (which are held responsible for the veracity of their speech), and less as a private, for-profit corporation, then Facebook's freedom of speech rights could be curtailed.
But the same facts lead other scholars to say that social media companies should be held responsible for content posted on their platforms, just as newspapers, broadcast outlets, and other forms of old media are responsible for what they publish or broadcast. They even suggest that it’s time to rewrite the Communications Decency Act—to impose responsibility on social media for the factual accuracy of content they host.The scholars urging a reexamination of this law argue that unless social media platforms are treated as publishers responsible for the content they distribute, enemies of democracy will increasingly use speech on social media as a weapon to attack or suppress truthful speech. The traditional role of the First Amendment is to protect speech about public affairs against coercive control or suppression by the government—to make sure that speech gets heard. But that position isn’t helpful when the culprits are social media outlets owned by private corporations rather than the government.
The courts are beginning to view social media as a purely public forum.
A major premise of these recent proposals to reinterpret the First Amendment is what the Supreme Court said in June: Social media are today’s town halls and public parks, where ideas compete for influence on topics “as diverse as human thought.”
Social media outlets are now the primary news source for most Americans.
For a rapidly growing segment of Americans now use social media as the primary means through which to obtain news. In 2016, the Pew Research Project found that only 20 percent of American adults got their news primarily from newspapers. (And among those 18 to 29, it was only 5 percent.) More people (about half) preferred to watch news than read it. But among the readers, most preferred reading online (59 percent) than reading in print (26 percent). As a result, among all adult Americans, about four out of every 10 got their news online. If you count infrequent as well as frequent users, about six out of every 10 got news from social media. The point is: What happens online is enormously important when it comes to having an informed citizenry.
There is a precedent for altering the status of social media. In 1964, there was a profound change in libel law. Whereas libel was previously defined as the printing of a factual error, it was redefined to mean a deliberate lie written by journalists. This change was made to protect newspapers that were covering the civil rights movement from a barrage of paralyzing lawsuits.
The court’s (and the country’s) conception of the First Amendment fundamentally changed when it realized that America’s most important news outlets—central to “free political discussion,” in the court’s words, “the very foundation of constitutional government”—were in jeopardy of being silenced by libel judgments. By putting the burden on the defendant in a libel lawsuit to prove the truth of a statement said to be defamatory, the law abridged freedom of speech, and of the press in particular, by unduly restricting criticism of conduct by government officials.
The tension between the public realm and private freedoms can be understood in terms of the distinction between democracy and liberty, respectively. The public realm is associated with democracy, the private realm with liberty.
The irony is that Mark Zuckerberg has always asserted that Facebook's ultimate mission is the promotion of democracy -- that is, the public realm. That would mean that Facebook would be a prime target for regulation in the same way public entities like government agencies and newspapers are legally constrained in their speech.
But another issue is that there are different kinds of liberties, and not only in different liberal political cultures (e.g., France, the Netherlands), but even within American political culture. One can distinguish between the liberty of broadcasters and the liberty of listeners.
From 1949 until 1987, the government rule called the fairness doctrine required radio and TV stations to present controversial issues of public importance in a way that was fair—honest, equitable, and balanced. The Supreme Court held that the rule didn’t violate the First Amendment: There was nothing in it that “prevents the Government from requiring a licensee to share his frequency with others.” The Court emphasized, “it is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”
Restricting the liberty of social media corporations like Facebook would not be identical with restricting the liberty of their users.
Another issue is that Facebook literally is a newspaper. The Communications Decency Act exonerates social media companies from their users' commentary and from fabricated news on the premise that social media is itself neutral and open (passive). Yet it turns out that Facebook carefully grooms and procures the news that it distributes. Facebook employees select what is "trending", and do so with a liberal bias.
Facebook’s reputation for neutrality took a major hit. Gizmodo’s Michael Nunez reported that workers tampered with the stories that showed up in its “Trending” module, a list of popularly discussed news events that displays in Facebook’s mobile app and on the top-right corner of its homepage. While the stories in the list often represented legitimately popular topics, the human contractors who controlled it—and who wrote one-sentence summaries of the event in question—sometimes skewed what was actually being said.
According to the report, this manipulation took several forms. First, the curators writing the “trending” headlines might “inject” a topic into the trending list—such as an atrocity in Syria, or a prominent Black Lives Matter protest—even if no one was talking about it, especially if they felt that it better represented the day’s news budget or if outside critics complained it should have been present.
But second, and more seriously, one former worker told Nunez that the workers sometimes missed or ignored popular discussion topics among conservative users because “either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.” He goes on to say that many of the Ivy-educated contractors working for Facebook simply did not recognize the significance of the event in question—or, worse, did recognize a story and hoped to downplay its significance.
Aside from having staff choose what news stories to distribute, there is another, less direct way that Facebook shapes what is distributed -- a way that might at first seem neutral, but which is perhaps especially pernicious.
Facebook is the world's biggest purveyor of news stories. But these stories are largely selected by a computer algorithm that guesses what stories would interest the user.
How News Feed WorksNews Feed is the constantly updating list of stories in the middle of your home page. News Feed includes status updates, photos, videos, links, app activity and likes from people, Pages and groups that you follow on Facebook.The stories that show in your News Feed are influenced by your connections and activity on Facebook. This helps you to see more stories that interest you from friends you interact with the most. The number of comments and likes a post receives and what kind of story it is (ex: photo, video, status update) can also make it more likely to appear in your News Feed.If you feel you're missing stories you'd like to see, or seeing stories in your News Feed that you don't want to see, you can adjust your settings.
Why does Facebook use an algorithm to rank stories in its News Feed?
Entertainment value.
EdgeRank is the Facebook algorithm that decides which stories appear in each user's newsfeed. The algorithm hides boringstories, so if your story doesn't score well, no one will see it. The first thing someone sees when they log into Facebook is the newsfeed.
Facebook is the world's biggest newspaper, but it is run with the ethos of an online casino, the goal of which is to addict as many users as possible.
This was Facebook's goal from its very beginning.
[A]ll the sharing and liking were used like a drug to get people hooked on checking Facebook non-stop. "How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible," said Parker, referring to Facebook's earliest mission.
"God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains," Parker said.
The whole social media experience is designed to deliver pleasure in the form of validation from family, friends and likeminded strangers. Every notification ding, colorful app icon, touchscreen gesture is designed to entice more use.
Parker, speaking at an Axios conference in Philadelphia on Wednesday, talked about how Facebook in particular is engineered for peak compulsivity.
"It's a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology," Parker told Axios.
"The inventors, creators—it's me, it's Mark [Zuckerberg], it's Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it's all of these people--understood this consciously. And we did it anyway," Parker said.
Why would Facebook make itself as addictive as possible? Obviously, to be as successful as possible. It's addictiveness has left Facebook's competitors in the dust.
Interestingly, this highlights how Facebook is primarily a form of entertainment, like gambling, and not essential public infrastructure that should be regulated as a public utility. Conversely, as a form of vice, gambling is more regulated than public utilities, and this might suggest that the more addictive forms social media like Facebook that are aimed at youngsters demand severe regulation.
Why would Facebook want to succeed?
That might seem like a no-brainer for most people, who would assume the goal is profits. But it is really a more complicated question.
It seems that the same liberals who are now obsessed with regulating the social media not so long ago were the ones who were intoxicated with the "liberatory potential" of the internet. The objective of the social media companies (run by liberals) was always advertised as idealistic.
The character of Mark Zuckerberg is crucial to understanding this. Is the problem with Mark Zuckerberg that he is greedy and ruthless, or that he is idealistic and socially clueless? In some respects, Zuckerberg resembles the fictional comedic character Sheldon Cooper, who represents a certain tech-oriented personality type.
-- technically accomplished at the highest possible level.
-- extremely honest and reliable.
-- inability to read basic social cues, which can seem like a lack of empathy.
-- tendency toward literalism, with no sense of irony or sarcasm.
Another distinction that should be made with regard to Zuckerberg and great historical figures in general is the distinction made by the sociologist Max Weber between "material self-interest" versus "ideal self-interest".
Of course, all humans have a need for material goods such as food, water, air, shelter, etc.
But there is also a paradoxical self-interested human need for what might be called "ideal goods". That is, "idealism" is also an expression of self-interest, albeit inner and spiritual.
For example, the statement "I could never live with myself if I put my mother in an old folks' home" can be parsed into two segments with two different values. In an ironic way, the first phrase "I could never live with myself" is the primary concern, and the welfare of the mother is secondary. This is echoed by the old cliche that "love is selfish". The love may be real and powerful, but it is subordinate to an emotional "utilitarian calculus". In terms of ideal self-interest, there is a binding together in the human mind of morality, conscience, self-esteem, ego and pleasure and pain.
Something that we ordinary mortals cannot comprehend is that the great men of history are not primarily concerned with amassing great fortunes (which they plan to give away eventually). They don't primarily want to own things. They want to "own the future".
In the US, idealism has long been associated with liberalism, and realism with conservatism (although not always). One might expect that the liberal titans of Silicon Valley would be more oriented toward an idealistic "ideal self-interest" as compared to, say, the unpretentious, old-fashioned Nebraska investor Warren Buffet (who sees himself as just a regular guy making a living by investing in things like tobacco and coal).
"Monopoly" and liberty as national security
Monopoly can be seen as threatening, but the scale of the threat varies, and the solutions to monopoly likewise vary.
Microsoft was perceived to be a "monopoly" of sorts in the 1990s. Microsoft almost completely dominated the operating system market for personal computers, and so Microsoft became an unofficial gatekeeper for what programs and applications would be bundled with the sale of a computer (e.g., browsers). This was then of concern because it was perceived as the most dynamic segment of the modern economy, but it was a very narrow niche of the economy. Regulation was called for, but to some extent it was the rise of Google, the resurgence of Apple and the emergence of personal technology that rendered Microsoft's "monopoly" irrelevant. Economic growth and diversification and innovation can make a monopoly obsolete.
Standard Oil had much more control over the American economy one century ago than did any of the current Big Five tech companies, and Standard Oil was also much more dishonest. By the time Standard Oil was finally broken up, its market share was already being lost to competition.
By 1890, Standard Oil controlled 88 percent of the refined oil flows in the United States. The state of Ohio successfully sued Standard, compelling the dissolution of the trust in 1892. But Standard simply separated Standard Oil of Ohio and kept control of it. Eventually, the state of New Jersey changed its incorporation laws to allow a company to hold shares in other companies in any state. So, in 1899, the Standard Oil Trust, based at 26 Broadway in New York, was legally reborn as a holding company, the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey (SOCNJ), which held stock in 41 other companies, which controlled other companies, which in turn controlled yet other companies. According to Daniel Yergin in his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1990), this conglomerate was seen by the public as all-pervasive, controlled by a select group of directors, and completely unaccountable.
The government identified four illegal patterns: (1) secret and semi-secret railroad rates; (2) discriminations in the open arrangement of rates; (3) discriminations in classification and rules of shipment; (4) discriminations in the treatment of private tank cars.
Due to competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up and at least 147 refining companies were competing with Standard including Gulf, Texaco, and Shell.On May 15, 1911, the US Supreme Court upheld the lower court judgment and declared the Standard Oil group to be an "unreasonable" monopoly under the Sherman Antitrust Act, Section II. It ordered Standard to break up into 34 independent companies with different boards of directors, the biggest two of the companies were Standard Oil of New Jersey (which became Exxon) and Standard Oil of New York (which became Mobil).Standard's president, John D. Rockefeller, had long since retired from any management role. But, as he owned a quarter of the shares of the resultant companies, and those share values mostly doubled, he emerged from the dissolution as the richest man in the world. The dissolution had actually propelled Rockefeller's personal wealth.
The railroads, when they burgeoned after the Civil War, were far more powerful than the oil industry in its heyday. In remarkably short period of time, not only did they come to dominate the entire American economy, but they controlled the political system as well. Supposedly every member of Congress was on the payroll of the railroads, and the railroads also controlled the Supreme Court; not only did this happen at the federal level, but at the state level, as well.
From an Atlantic Magazine article published in March 1881:
When Commodore Vanderbilt began the world he had nothing, and there were no steamboats or railroads. He was thirty-five years old when the first locomotive was put into use in America. When he died, railroads had become the greatest force in modern industry, and Vanderbilt was the richest man in Europe or America, and the largest owner of railroads in the world. He used the finest business brain of his day and the franchise of the state to build up a kingdom within the republic, and like a king he bequeathed his wealth and power to his eldest son. Bancroft’s History of the United States and our railroad system were begun at the same time.
The railroad tycoons might have become immensely wealthy and powerful, but they were patriots who perceived that their efforts were manifestly for the good of the country.
It's a study in moral ambiguity.
By 1880 the nation had 17,800 freight locomotives carrying 23,600 tons of freight, and 22,200 passenger locomotives. The U.S. railroad industry was the nation's largest employer outside of the agricultural sector. The effects of the American railways on rapid industrial growth were many, including the opening of hundreds of millions of acres of very good farm land ready for mechanization, lower costs for food and all goods, a huge national sales market, the creation of a culture of engineering excellence, and the creation of the modern system of management.New York financier J.P. Morgan played an increasingly dominant role in consolidating the rail system in the late 19th century. He orchestrated reorganizations and consolidations in all parts of the United States. Morgan raised large sums in Europe, but instead of only handling the funds, he helped the railroads reorganize and achieve greater efficiencies. He fought against the speculators interested in speculative profits, and built a vision of an integrated transportation system.Morgan set up conferences in 1889 and 1890 that brought together railroad presidents in order to help the industry follow the new laws and write agreements for the maintenance of "public, reasonable, uniform and stable rates." The conferences were the first of their kind, and by creating a community of interest among competing lines paved the way for the great consolidations of the early 20th century. Congress responded by enacting antitrust legislation to prohibit monopolies of railroads (and other industries), beginning with the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890.
And here we have one form of liberty that is not always mentioned -- national autonomy. The ancient Greeks did not have the concept of liberty for individuals that moderns have, but they did consider their city states to be sacrosanct. For the Greeks, liberty meant freedom from foreign interference.
It could be that countries that have a moderate level of internet restriction are protecting the liberties of the population, as opposed to an unrestricted internet that might be inspired by the spirit of anarchism.
What societies are the most "free" in terms of government censorship of social media?
Freedom House has made a list of countries that are "free", "partly free" and "not free" in 2017.
- The English-speaking world and western Europe and Japan are categorized as free.
- Latin American and south Asian (India) and southeast Asian societies tend to be listed as partly free.
- Societies associated with communism and Islam are described typically as not free.
Southeast Asian societies might prove instructive in this context.
- Only the Philippines is listed as free.
- Malaysia, Indonesia, Cambodia and Singapore are listed as partly free.
- Burma, Thailand and Vietnam are listed as not free.
That's interesting.
In southeast Asia, countries that are developing or fully developed (Singapore) are partly free (with the exception of Cambodia), whereas countries that are poorest tend to be either not free or the most free (the Philippines).
What are Singapore's internet policies?
Singapore has a government agency -- the MDA -- dedicated to censoring the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Singapore
Internet censorship in Singapore is carried out by the Media Development Authority (MDA). Internet services provided by the three major Internet service providers (ISPs) are subject to regulation by the MDA, which requires blocking of a symbolic number of websites containing "mass impact objectionable" material, including Playboy, YouPorn and Ashley Madison.[1] The civil service, tertiary instituitions and Institute of Technical Education has its own jurisdiction to block websites displaying pornography, information about drugs and online piracy.
Singapore is a multi-ethnic society that experience significant civic strife in the aftermath of British decolonization.
Moreover, Singapore is a relatively tiny society sandwiched between two Muslim regional superpowers -- Malaysia and Indonesia. Singapore also has a population that is 75% ethnic Chinese in a region that has long been economically dominated by ethnic Chinese to the great resentment of the ethnic majorities. Singapore's internet censorship policies seem focused on inhibiting racial tensions. But the broad goal of internet censorship in Singapore seems to be to tone down the character of social commentary in order to maintain social harmony, presumably based on the assumption that sharp social criticism would slide down a slippery slope into civil chaos.
Political and racially-sensitive content is frequently censored in Singapore, resulting in a chilling effect on bloggers and academics active on social media.[2][3][4] The early to mid-2000s saw the rising popularity of satire websites such as TalkingCock.com and blogs like YawningBread and mrbrown, which offered alternative perspectives on socio-political issues from government-friendly mainstream media.[5] In July 2006, mrbrown's weekly column in newspaper Today was terminated after he highlighted the immediate price hikes after the 2006 Singapore general elections. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said mrbrown's column had ‘‘hit out wildly at the government and in a very mocking and dismissive sort of tone’’ and Minister for Information, Communication and the Arts sent a letter saying his article could undermine national stability, and that it was "not the role of journalists or newspapers in Singapore to champion issues, or campaign for or against the government".
Singapore's use of its Sedition Act seems to parallel the Dutch conception of liberty as the protection of minority groups.
The Sedition Act inherited from the colonial era is also used to charge internet users deemed to have promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different races or classes of the population of Singapore. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the law was necessary to preserve Singapore's racial and religious harmony as ethnic tensions in South-east Asia may give rise to Islamic terrorism.
Singapore's internet policies have grown even more restrictive since 2014, and from an English-speaking perspective, this is a step away from liberty.
https://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/06/regulating-singapores-internet
The new regulations demand that all websites concerned with the news be licensed, and also that each puts down a “performance-bond” of 50,000 Singapore dollars ($39,550). Any content deemed to be in breach of standards would have to be removed within 24 hours of being notified. This is all in addition to a host of prior regulations, including another licence scheme wherein both internet-service and content providers must follow an official code of practice and meet other conditions.
As draconian as it may be, the overall framework of internet restrictions in Singapore would fit within the model of protecting liberty through social restraints. The divergence from the Anglo-liberal model would be that it is group liberties that are being protected.
This would be distinct from the internet censorship policies of China, which are draconian by contrast, are not intended to protect the liberties of any individual or group, nor serve the purpose of national sovereignty from interference by foreign powers. The goal would seem to be to crush any form of internal dissent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China
Internet censorship in China is extreme due to a wide variety of laws and administrative regulations. More than sixty Internet regulations have been created by the government of China, which have been implemented by provincial branches of state-owned ISPs, companies, and organizations. The apparatus of China's Internet control is considered more extensive and more advanced than in any other country in the world. The governmental authorities not only block website content but also monitor the Internet access of individuals; such measures have attracted the derisive nickname "The Great Firewall of China."
Amnesty International notes that China "has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world" and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders stated in 2010 and 2012 that "China is the world's biggest prison for netizens."
Since May 2015, Chinese Wikipedia has been blocked in China. This was done after Wikipedia started to use HTTPS encryption which made selective censorship impossible or more difficult.
There might be three models of internet policy here:
1) The open internet policies of the English-speaking world, which might be liberal in their legal framework but are animated with an anarchistic spirit that would resist any restrictions.
2) The strict internet regulation of Singapore, which is aimed at protecting the liberties of minority groups.
3) The harsh oppression of China's illiberal internet policies.
Conclusions
The big tech corporations, and social media in particular, are not natural monopolies that should be regulated as a utilities, but Facebook for one needs to be legally reclassified.
- Facebook is essentially a newspaper and should vouch for the news it provides.
-Facebook should be required to divulge the source of political advertisements the way radio does.
-There are issues of addictiveness with Facebook that need to be addressed.
- Singapore's internet policies are strict yet based on liberal principals, which might serve as an alternative for both China's authoritarian policies and the United State's anarcho-fascistic impulses.
