Obama: “What is my narrative”?

It was a question Obama all but shouted to his aides after getting a whiff of the upcoming disaster of 2010.  As Suskind noted, it was a startling outburst- equivalent to Obama saying he didn’t know who he was.  In Suskind’s 2010 interview  of Obama for his book Confidence Men, the President said his first years taught him he had to do a better job at explaining his policies to the American people.  Not just that- Obama stated that the one thing that a President could do was tell the national story.  Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan attempted some literary prestidigitation in her “Once Upon a Time in America” to suggest that leadership has little to do with the expert craft of storytelling that she,  Tony Dolan and the others of the Reagan speechwriting team excelled at.

I have been highly critical of the inability of pundits to examine the literature of politics at a level any more serious than dismissive comments about messaging, spin and propaganda.  Politics is transformed by a consistently communicated construction of social reality.  Thomas Frank points this out in his book “Pity the Billionaire” (Truthout interview), but the theoretical foundations of the sociology of knowledge may be found in Durkheim’s work on collective representations, and Foucalt’s analysis of language and power.  Is Obama fully engaged at this depth or not?   It is illuminating to consider a concrete comparison between specific events where Reagan succeeded at such transformative construction, and where Obama consistently  fails, declining to place events in the context of a  new narrative arc for the nation.

Obama has stated his goal is to be a transformational president in the way that Reagan was.  America’s citizens understood that Reagan was asking them to join a revolution,  a change in direction.  He consistently constructed a reality with clear stories communicating the libertarian ethos of unleashing (what turned out to be Henry F. Potter) wealth creators by reducing the taxes and regulations they were constrained by.  This formed the structure of the era that the “Reagan revolution” ushered in.  2008 provided ample ammunition to demonstrate the resulting the reality we all live in is a sad failure.  Will there be a transformational end to this era?  What new story will be told?  Will the old story be cast in terms of Pottersville?  Obama has had 4 years to communicate whatever the new narrative arc is, but let’s be honest.  America has no idea what the Obama revolution is, let alone if he intends one.

Let’s me state that again.  Americans- progressives included- simply don’t have any perception that they are participating in anything corresponding to the Reagan revolution, or are even able articulate what the Obama revolution might be.  This is not to say that Obama’s approach to Washington in his first term was not revolutionary, or that revolutionary things did not happen.  So am I splitting hairs?  Why does it matter whether people actually understand whatever the Obama transformation is?  Is it sufficient to enumerate the factual points how  institutions have undertaken incremental reforms?

The fact is that the President has fallen far short of his goal of communicating a national story and he knows it.  Obama has performed a pragmatic assessment and has come to a sober conclusions about these questions.  He has shifted his strategy in response to the impasse with Congress in August 2011 and is willing to cast dramatic contrasts with his opponents.  But he has not yet grasped his failure of narration.   His recess appointments could be presented as  “manning the barricades” of regulatory agencies at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB)   and the  National Labor Relations Board.  They are technocratically sound and politically practical  initiatives in response to a public interest, and that is the extent of the language he uses.  What does America understand about the larger narrative context of these events?  Unlike a Reagan speech, America has no idea.

So let’s consider a specific example:  Obama’s  speech nominating Cordray.  (Transcript and video here)  What is the literary structure?  Is Cordray to man the barricades in some sort of Paris Commune motif, or is America revolting against the thuggery of Wall Street and America’s heroes  like Cordray are the regulatory Cops on the beat?  Did you detect any tropes of some sort of binding national narrative here?

Elizabeth Warren certainly is thinking and communicating  in terms of a larger drama, but you get no whiff of it in Obama’s speeches. You heard plenty of it in Zucotti park, but not coming from the mouth of the President.  The president  tells stories of the isolated biographies of individual suffering and triumph, but they are alienated from any binding national story of change.

The simple fact is that the only faction using the tropes of revolution is the Right. Obama is not calling on people to man the barricades, or any other motif of change. That’s not the narrative at all. In Alinsky fashion, the structure of his speech is that he has identified a self interest and delivered a technocratic policy response to it. There is no communication that this event represents the beachhead of a larger struggle. The public is not aware that they and Cordray are united as part of something much larger than themselves, and how Obama as their leader is moving America to that great goal.  The narrative, if there is one,  is solely one of mechanism- Technocratic elites identify concrete interests and service the public by fixing them.

If the Right has been allowed to maintain a monopoly on the tropes of revolution, what revolution is the Right defending?  It is the one that created this alternate Pottersville reality for America- one where members of unions voted against their interests, where America’s unemployed and poor of Appalachia, Mississippi and Texas consistently vote for people who keep them poor. This was the Reagan revolution.  It is a reality whose advocates recognize that Obama and the Occupy movement represent an existential threat.  They strike out with survivalist fervor, vigorously denying that the meltdown devastated their discursive account of reality.  The Tea Party is not alone among conservative voices that deny everything, claiming that the problem was we didn’t go far enough- that efforts at deregulation and privatization efforts were thwarted.

As a counterpoint to Obama’s speech, consider an economic speech during a difficult economic period in Reagan’s first term (for example, this one). You are introduced to the complete context of an alternative account of reality. This is not about individual stories illustrating self interest as in Obama’s speech, what you have is the big picture.

1. Reagan does not literally express sympathy with the frustration of the “average working stiff”- a phrase Obama uses. He mouths the cynicism about their president their situation.  If the storyteller does not provide a frame for these emotions, these forces will do to Reagan’s administration what happened to Carter.  By channeling the platitude into a familiar and non acidic platitude about the weather the speechwriter provides a safety valve.  Maybe complaining is like expecting the president to do something about natural forces like the weather that adults must simply accept?  This simple platitude is directed at the sense of malaise- that natural forces are causing America to be in decline, a decline that shall cause us all to all be a nation of losers.  It is a storyline that Carter approached literalistically.  Reagan’s speechwriters understand that intended truth telling of that approach tells a falsehood to the heart of the nation.
2. Next, the the platitude that represents the defeatism is swept aside in a casual fashion.  Decisive action is being taken.  The leader is  on the job.
3. More importantly, this is a call to service.  Americans want to do something big, to be part of something big.  The leader is offering America to do something larger than their own private world of problems.  The president is talking to them because they are not unimportant losers.  They can help out.
4. How does he keep the audience awake through a speech on an abstract subject?  Give voice to their emotion about the confusion.  Though he sympathizes that this sounds complicated,  their is a secondary reason for directly engaging the listener with “you can help us do something about it”.  Here is the pedagogical technique of anchoring the abstract in the personal.   The speechwriter has inoculated the President against quickly losing the attention of the audience despite abstract material because the listener is motivated to understand what the President is asking them to do.
5. Next comes introduction of the cast of characters but take note of the compactness of the conversation. Only a few sentences have passed so far and a lot of structure has been constructed.  The writer has so much to say, but great writing observes a strict economy of words.  Besides the cognitive reason for this, there is a practical one.  The listener will give you 30 seconds, so be sure you get the key messages out that either get your foot in the door, or if not provide them something to think more about.  So: to continue with the cast of characters: First the villian(s).  There are mysterious opponents out there that don’t want their names known.  The reason this sounds so complicated is these nefarious forces are telling stories that aren’t so. Actually, the news stories about what Reagan was proposing were literally true, but they weren’t being explained to the people in a way that made sense to them.  That’s what the speech was about.  This story doesn’t mean Reagan intends to lie about it- if you doubt this, skip forward to “swallowing hard”.   Reagan’s budget director Stockman pointed out much later that the 1982 budget they got approved (this speech was part of that effort) raised taxes by 1.2 percent.  To this day, this makes the heads of conservatives explode (Example denial by Cantor).  The reason for this denial is the strength of the construction of the alternate reality Reagan and his speechwriters created.
6. It is mentioned the audience need not be reminded of the President’s name and authority.  Here is the modest but earnest and iron willed Sheriff.  Don’t be confused about such “reports” in the media.  Listen to the voice of authority.  Your President.
7. The audience?  Well of course you know who you are- this is confusing but you townfolk are smart and informed. And you are falling for the lies from the bad guys.
8. Now, the bad guys with selfish “Interests” are resisting our revolution against the status quo.  Unlike you, they think only of themselves.
9. And so on and so forth.  How does this conclude?  How can the American people help?  “You can help again—whether you’re a Republican, a Democrat, or an Independent…Do we tell these Americans to give up hope, that their ship of state lies dead in the water because those entrusted with manning that ship can’t agree on which sail to raise?”  Reagan asks them to pressure their congresspersons to vote for his measure.

I’m not asserting that only B movie scripts work for the American public, or that these specific narremes would work today.  Reagan worked with what he knew.  My view is that Americans are sophisticated consumers of stories and can handle story lines with higher art than this.

If Obama wants people to understand how the CFPB is part of America’s transformation, he is going to have to communicate the narrative. Did his speech in any way communicate that this is a revolution? Did he ask people to help or involve them in any way? Do the people understand the plot structure?  Do they know who they are in this struggle, who the President is, and who the “bad guys” are?

No. Because Obama thinks that telling unambiguous stories is divisive. Wrong wrong wrong. The nation is unified by getting the public to jointly enter the newly constructed reality. One that he needs their help building. The time is right for a paradigm shift.  The story that the right is telling is that the prior conservatives failed because they were held back.  Obama can provide a story line that frames the facts in a much more convincing way: that old (Reagan) deregulated reality was a fantasy. 2008 proved it.

Obama could do something, but up until to now he has continued to refuse to communicate the drama of the new reality, that there is a new era he is ushering in.

Will he continue to be “No Drama” Obama, or will he rise to transform America as only a charismatic president with his intelligence can?  Obama’s Osawatomie speech presented 55 minutes of excellent argument for a binding narrative (Transcript and video here).  The president is well aware of the competition between ideas and the historical dimensions.  To be sure, there is great drama in the pageant of ideas in this speech, but that which makes a devastating argument in political science does not magically create in the minds of the public a transformational narrative arc for the nation.  As Obama observed, “Carter, Clinton and I have sort of the disease of being policy wonks.”*  Right.  Someone sort through this mass of ideas and tell me what the binding narrative is?  We hear a story about Teddy Roosevelt, the generic story of the aspirations for a middle class life, a repetition of the story of the meltdown, the story of workers pressed by outsourcing and automation.  Lots of stories, but please, a national narrative is not an anthology of short stories.  How do these tie together- what is the overall national story, and how do all these subplots fit into it?    There must be a clear and sharp boundary between the reality conjured by Reagan’s narrative for the nation and that being proposed by Obama.  What we have now is a good analytical basis for a story, but no story upon which a new reality may be constructed.  It is what a paper on depression era finance would be to the story of George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

We have casting for the various nemesis’ but who are the protagonists?   Obama knows who we are.  Deep down, he knows who he is.  He has always had the heart for service, as did his mother.  George is not about pursuing his self interest- if that was who he was then he would have left Bedford Falls long ago.  And the people of his home town ultimately were not about self interest either.  Deeply, they want to be part of something much larger than themselves, and they are persuaded to by George to follow that way rather than do what is in their best short term best  interest- sell to Potter.  Philosophically, that is what is wrong about the rugged individualism of the Reagan Revolution and the neoliberal collaborators who have bought into that reality and still buy into it despite the meltdown.  That is what was wrong about the breakdown of the community fabric in Altgelt Gardens where Obama first worked as an organizer.  The reason that churches like Reverend Wrights provided the missing component was that we are about something larger than ourselves.   That is what is missing in Alinksy.   Individually, he tells us we are about self interest, and that is what gets us off our seats.  But where does he habitually go to find a core of supporters?  Places like churches that tell people there is something larger than them that is not simply the collective intersection of their individual sets of selfish desires.  We are a nation of many beliefs, but there is that common notion of pulling together to help others- our heart for service that is at the core of who we are in Obama’s emergent narrative.     Capra made that clear in his story.  Obama so far has not.

If it unfair to accuse the Obama administration of incompetent narration?  If so, try and explain the phrase “Leading from Behind”.  It is a technically accurate phrase from one point of view but the word choice indicates a complete lack of control of language, excluding unintended meanings, the most obvious of which in this particular phrase are self defeating.  These unintended meanings suggest a number of political falsehoods about the narrative arc.    This is the kind of writing ineptness forgivable from internal technocrats, but it is not forgivable from those in the White House whose job is to represent the national narrative- a task that Obama feels is a crucial responsibility of the office of the Presidency.    Those responsible  need to be able to clearly communicate the fidelity of that narrative arc and not unintended meanings.

Will Obama finally build a sufficiently sized and capable  team of speechwriters who understand that a plot is more than set of Alinsky notes anthologizing individual stories?  Obama’s writing style is interesting  but it is about deep exploration of truth within disparate stories not an assertion of a collective story.  The hubris of Obama as a writer is that his exploratory hammer is the best tool for every job.  Writing the national narrative instead requires clear and consistent assertions about the binding collective narrative- the assertion of how we are part of that larger story that he believes only the President can tell.   It is an assertion of an alternate reality of who we are and what endeavor guides the action of the collective story.    So fundamentally, Obama needs more than someone like Lovett to add levity, or ex Kerry writer Favreau who mostly amplifies Obama’s wonkish proclivities.    Obama needs writers who speak to the heart of service that lies at the heart of all Americans.  This is not a decent into the tribalism of a leftist national narrative versus the conservative narrative.  It is a unity narrative, a reality we can all #Occupy- it is at the heart of a Huntsman or a McCain- the heroes on the right and left who put “Country first”- that is-  the good of all first.

Until Obama recognizes this limitation he will be unable to tell the collective story that binds us all together.  And he shall fail to serve the country and transform it out the Pottersville reality we now live in.

Notes:

* Carter /Clinton Wonk disease: (as quoted by Suskind in “Confidence Men”  kindle location 10497)

Swarms don’t use Bullet Points. They Make Waves

Probability density of positions on public issues passing through the Left/ Right category slits

Listening to Nate Silver of Fivethirtyeight talk about probabilities in the GOP poll results reminded me of physicists talking about probability waves. They get so frustrated trying to pin down the location of minute particles like electrons. Sometimes I feel pretty minute, so I can empathize with undecided voters and electrons. The position of these insignificant specks appear maddeningly unpredictable to those trying to measure them, giving the appearance of being in many places, but in no particular place simultaneously. (For a brief review of the physics, take a look at this light hearted youtube.*) If the speck is measured, it appears to be in one certain place, but when the results are plotted, you get a seemingly random cloud of positions, reminiscent of the chaotic graphs indicating the myriad positions conservative voters have taken on GOP candidates in the run up to the 2012 primaries. Maybe the specks are as irrational as many political pundits seem to think  undecided voters are. On the other hand, maybe we specks are exhibiting our multidimensional characteristics. Maybe we are liberal on the X axis of social issues, but conservative on the Y axis of economic policy, and then maybe on the Z axis of victimless “crimes” we are totally libertarian.  Maybe we require as many dimensions as there are issues.  Maybe our “position” is really a multidimensional cloud of points.

I suppose we specks are as messed up as physicists in string theory say reality is- that actually there are a multitude of dimensions beyond three that where we can stake out our positions. They call them degrees of freedom.  I suppose that is not such a bad thing. Freedom has a nice ring to it.

Conservative pundits have been lamenting the fact that right wing thinking has become disaggregated by the internet and social media. That’s a fancy term pundits use when they think we don’t have the knee jerk responses they expect us to have-   that we don’t have whatever reflexive reaction we are supposed to display given whatever conservative or progressive slot we’ve been placed in by central casting.

If a pollster had the several hours required for us to explain, they might understand why any particular one of us specks is vehemently for the death penalty, for legalizing marijuana, for massive defense spending, and for gun control. But we are specks and they really they aren’t interested.  Not that any of those are my positions, or I can relate well to those who do, or that you the reader of this really have the time or energy to understand the nuances of mine.  It’s kind of alienating when you feel like you are misunderstood disengaged speck.  But we have a lot of company with each other, and it turns out, with subatomic particles.  We can feel a great deal of solidarity with them.

If opinions of the electorate were like bullets, then the left/right categories would create predictable results.

A very unruly bunch.  Classical physicists got their minds blown  about specks when they tried what is called the double slit experiment. It’s the same thing that happens when a pollster asks whether you are conservative or liberal. We are supposed to only pass through one  or the other slot even though our positions really are more like a cloud,  some of which go through the red slot and some through the blue. It turns out we break the rules and so do specks. Now, if you shot bullets through one of two slits in a steel plate several yards out, you would see a pattern at your target that would correspond to the two slits. Totally divided. Kind of like Boehner’s House of Representatives. Bullets unlike us specks are respected as significant, probably because they are so mechanically predictable- and can be counted on to do the same numbskull things regardless of the mitigating context or nuances. That’s probably why we use bullets in wars.

Public opinion is more like waves, instead allowing a much wider freedom of results despite the barrier. Moral: don't use bullets. Make waves.

At the minute level of specks with much less significance, actually this is not at all what happens.  When you shoot  electrons through such slits, instead of  a crisp division of left and right on the target, the largest grouping of them land up exactly where the beam would have shot them if the barrier with the two slits weren’t there.  Further, there are not two bands, but a multitude of them. To get this sort of result with bullets, the path would have to be a diagonal to reach the slit, then  after passing through would have to change direction to another diagonal to get back to the center. Very illogical bullets. The reason why this diversity can defeat the categorical barrier is because like subatomic particles we specks are better understood as a fluid collection of positions, not a single identity. When we flow through artificial categories like Conservative or Liberal, our waves penetrate but maintain a great deal of fidelity to the original wave, although the positions are bunched into bands of brightness. It’s the kind of peaks and troughs you see at the edge of the bathtub when you make waves. So we specks are more like waves than bullets. This nature is intuitively appreciated in our language. The opinions of voters are said to be fluid- with a “rising tide” or waves of opinion breaking this way and that on the issues.

Some physicists thought this was a very irrational way of looking at the universe and continued the quest for certainty. They decided to pin the specks down by asking the question- which slot does the electron go through? This is what blew their mind. Because when the measurement is taken, the probability wave collapses. That is, those multiple positions that the electron can be in “decohere” into a single position, and the speck now known certain in identity as one passing through the blue slot or red slot. After this meaurement, thereafter they will behave like bullets in the experiment and create just two bands corresponding to the two slots. This is much like the ideological representation in government we have seen recently. The certainty of the position of the representation is seen to be power- yet ironically this results in a loss of fidelity of the direction of the thought of the voters. The degrees of freedom expressed in the multiplicity of positions the voter takes on different positions has collapsed. That is the numbskull nature of bullets who can be counted on to vote like Tea Party representatives, and never mix in the center precisely because they have been forced to give up their multidimensionality.

Where do the undecided voters actually stand?  The seeming fact that a voter, like electrons could both pass through the conservative and liberal slits creates results that baffle our intuition because of our assumption of linear (bullet like) thinking. In physics, one of the most popularly known of these baffling paradoxes is the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiement. A cat is placed in a box with a Geiger counter and a radiation source. In a given time period, a particle could both be detected at the Geiger counter, or not be detected in equal probability, just as a particle might be detected at one slot or the other if you did that measurement.   The cat experiment adds a cruel detail: if the particle is detected, a poisonous gas is released and the cat is killed. Until the probability wave for the particle has been caused to collapse by an attempted observation, the particle is simultaneously present and not present. Because neither state has occurred until the observation, it is reasoned that the cat will neither be alive nor dead simultaneously until the observation.  So is the cat both dead and not dead until you look in the box?**

A political analog of that situation was the basis of some physics geek humor in my tweet to Christopher Hayes prior to his January 1st 2012 Sunday show “Up!”.

@chrislhayes If Schrödinger’s Tea Party Cat wandered into the Iowa forest, and no one observed it, was it ever in the forest? #uppers

My point was, there is no Tea Party voter passing through a selction barrier if there is no forced detection at a Tea Party slit.  If there is a 3rd slot and a measurement- that is, an interaction in the environment that forces it to drop into a singular position, then the attitudinal elements of that cloud of opinions will not drop out of superposition into a self identified Tea Party voter.

There has been a mercurial and obsessive fascination with identity on the right, and this physics metaphor illustrates the political importance of establishing identity.  This doesn’t mean identity politics in the typical sense of focusing on the character of the leader, but getting the voter to self identify with a particular “movement”.

Alternatives?

For representative process, metaphorically, the intermediate barrier can be thought of as selecting a representative of a particular ideological stripe.

• A) Representatives should be waves, not ideological bullets.  Not all representation is ideological, and instead of selecting a representative with fixed certain positions on all issues, then representatives can be as cloud like as the electorate.  If the nature of these clouds can be described not as fixed ideological laws but as the unwritten spirit of the law, or “logos” of a political point of view, then the voter needs to have the sense that the representative shares the same spirit with them.  This is the transfer point to the focus on the character of the leader, of finding consensus candidates or alternatively inspirational candidates who get the electorate to relax their demands for ideological purity.  The difficulty is that a candidate that mechanically mouths whatever the consensus position appears to be is precisely the Romney problem for the GOP.   The key is whether the candidate represents the spirit rather than the letter of the common ground the electorate feels with them.  This is fundamentally a non rational cloud like connection.
• B) Assure representatives are responsive to the more multidimensional character of the electorate by introducing direct democracy votes on the matters before congress.  This might take the form of representatives who more or less take referenda votes from their constituents on every law being considered.  Some proposals are less simplistic, making the constituent “votes” advisory.  Full discussion of direct democracy representatives is out of the scope of this essay.  The point of the approach is that whether the representative is ideological (as (A) seeks to prevent) or not, the representatives are forced from the uncompromising pattern of two strictly divided groups created with the bullets, and meet in the more representative consensus pattern when wave behavior is allowed.

For activists, the metaphor of the probabilistic cloud describes the activity of the swarm, the murmuration of starlings that dynamically respond to environmental situations, then resume their cloud like nature.  Issue movements self destruct after the demand is answered.  A movement without a specific political agenda may have demands for the individual (such as non violence in the case of the Zucotti swarm).  This was the power of a community logos that organizers like Alinsky habitually found in churches.  It was a wellspring that did not run dry up after the goal is achieved.  This goes to the mystery of how the organizers create successful organizations- some that have a lifespan beyond a few years, with a real community of volunteers that have a deeper committment beyond that of the specific issue; where volunteers don’t inevitably burn out or become alienated from the community.  The model of the movements emanating from churches, as with the abolitionists and the civil rights movements in the US, or the liberation theology of Catholic groups in Latin America needs to find a form more compatible with a society of diverse spiritual beliefs.  Does the occupy movement have any depth or coherence?  How does this become a generational movement, not just a spectacle of optimism like the global student protests of 1968 that fade with time?

Notes:

*Regarding the youtube presentation, the pedagogical purpose of introducing “woo-woo” anthropomorphisms that tend to capture and hold the attention of a broad audience shouldn’t be taken seriously. For example, few if any physicists believe that particles have any sort of consciousness that enables them to “know” they are being watched. Also, many physicsts prefer to describe what is going on with the observation in non human centric ways. That is, it is not the observation but the the interaction with the environment caused by the observation that forces the probability wave (“superposition“) to collapse into the seemingly classical reality that we appear to move within. The concept is known as einselection.

** There are less whimsical, more intuitively acceptable interpretations of the the thought experiment. These may be found deeper into the wikipedia article on the subject.

Dsiclaimer:  I am not a physicist.  My thing is computational linguistics, a field involved with methods  of probablistic analysis of clouds of linguistic units.

The New National Alternative to Self Interest

Economic and political systems pursuing rational self interest can produce irrational results.  The dysfunction of these systems evident since 2008 has established the critical need for establishing an alternative to the ethos of self interest which permeates much of our social, economic and moral theory.  In Osawatomie Kansas in 1910, Teddy Roosevelt proposed a narrative of the common good for the country, calling it the New Nationalism.   In the same city today, President Barack Obama called for the same alternative to the logic of social Darwinism where all citizens are told that pursuing whatever is necessaryto  maximize their self interest will deliver the best results for all society.  As the President stated, the problem with models based on narrow self interest is that they simply do not work.  (full transcript and video of the speech here)

The canonical thought experiment that illustrates the failure of exclusive reliance on self interest is known as the “Prisoner’s dilemma“.   Chris Hayes, moderator of MSNBC’s weekend talk show Up! used the Prisoner’s Dilemma to  introduce a discussion on political dysfunction at the core of the current banking  crisis in the European Union (video).  The dilemma goes like this:

Two men are arrested, but the police do not possess enough information for a conviction. Following the separation of the two men, the police offer both a similar deal- if one testifies against his partner (defects / betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates / assists), the betrayer goes free and the cooperator receives the full one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail for a minor charge. If each ‘rats out’ the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept quiet. What should they do?

In an arms race, it is in each country’s rational self interest to spend more heavily on arms, producing the irrational result of enormous resources wasted on weapons that neither party wants to use- as in the case of the Cold War.  The best strategy in any Prisoner’s Dilemma game is achieved when all players decline to be motivated by narrow self interest.  The relevancy to the EU crisis is that preventing economic collapse  requires unanimous consensus between all players so the maximal result is achieved only if all countries decline to follow the easy course of being motivated by self interest (doing the politically popular action, and getting re-elected).

In the Prisoner’s dilemma,  the game is rigged to persuade individuals to betray hidden information.  There is an opposite game that is rigged so that individuals will strongly resist truth telling.  Whether we call it snitching or betraying information that should be private is dependent on whether we regard the truth telling as morally correct or not.

So what is it that makes the individual prisoners “snitch” and not the persons on the football team/ Catholic church/ foreclosure farm legal firm/ “Margin Call” employee? What encourages snitching in one case but not the other? We understand why the Prisoner’s dilemma works but what goes on with the systemic collusion between large numbers of people in a group to block truth telling about a wide variety of serious misdeeds such as sodomization of boys, selling worthless securities, or fraudulently foreclosing on homes?

The foundation of our economic theory and much moral theory is that what is economically and morally good is that which enhances the individual’s well being.

Whether this principle is true or not, so long as large numbers of people believe it is true, then groups of individuals motivated to achieve particular outcomes will game the public using this handle on their behavior. If plutocratic goals are maximized when individuals are set against each other, then it is best to frame the game as individuals against individuals as in “the prisoner’s dilemma” where self interest encourages them to reveal the truth. If a collusion of silence is desired then the game is framed alternately, so that self interest enforces conformity to the group’s truth.

This is the core of widespread corruption in modern society- the notion that unfettered self-interest will achieve whatever the society as a whole views as good. The popularity of this view is why libertarianism is attractive as a tool of plutocrats. Many entities govern our lives, and plutocrats prefer corporate governance of the affairs of the masses, rather than governance by elected officials who must be lobbied. So the best game strategy from plutocrats like the Kochs is to strongly associate the public’s belief in the philosophy of self interest with libertarian themes, eliciting identification with a group that assaults the role of elected and not corporate governance.

The mystery why some individuals truth tell and other times do not permeates the news. Ginger White comes forward with the truth about Cain not because she felt some greater good that society should know the truth, but because others in her family had leaked the truth to the Press. Minus this impetus, the self interest was to keep her and Cain’s actions secret from public view because the truth would injure her identity: the persona of upstanding moral character she wished to project to others. Truth telling forced her to admit to her children that she had “messed up”.  Similarly, truth telling by members and leadership in certain Catholic churches or at Penn State would injure the bonds of identity that their loyal members have with those strong social groups.  Even admitting the truth to themselves is difficult, and evidence of misdeeds creates can create such intense cognitive dissonance that they seek news sources that will shield them from profoundly disturbing information that is counterfactual to the group logos.  For football players seeing their coach sodomize a young boy, their world would fracture- their “mind would be gone” (source).  Avoiding such pain leads one either to sequester oneself against all news, or to choose a news sources like FOX that make the implied contract with their viewers that they will present only information that reinforces their identity and will not create cognitive dissonance.

Gaming the public’s sense of self interest has been used as a powerful lever of political power, and the fulcrum of the electorate’s sense  of self identity is moved with political messaging in order for the lever to achieve maximal political results.  Having a republican media strategist like Roger Ailes control FOX news presents a 21st century mechanism for dictating what the group logos is.

There is a deeper sense of identity that defeats this cynical leveraging. Who we are- who we really are- is determined by the Ginger White events of our lives.   The veneer of normalcy that people around us assume we conform may or may not have much relationship with who we are behind the social mask, as revealed in the often hidden facts of what we actually do in our lives. Are we a moral person if we simply follow procedure and foreclose on homes that we either know or suspect that we do not have the legal or moral right to foreclose on? Are we moral if we simply follow captain’s orders and are we ok if we do whatever the group think states is correct?  Such self deception relieves us even of guilt pangs as we pepper spray citizen’s peacefully exercising their constitutional rights, and allows plutocrats to corrupt police forces into mercenaries for their interests.

Gaming of individual self interests makes it easy to create conditions so that individuals will behave in ways beneficial to the 1%. It is important to understand cases where this gaming fails and why. The prisoner’s dilemma is no dilemma if the two prisoners identify themselves with the good that the group is united in fighting for. “One fighter may go down, but their brothers will carry on the fight.”  There is a noble identity in “Fighting the good fight” that in tribal terms guarantees on a place at the table in Valhalla. The soldier in the fight must make a move that is not in their rational self interest.  The rational thing is for each individual to feel from the battle.  Luxembourg’s Prime Minister reveal this dilemma is at the heart of the EU banking crisis: ““We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get reelected once we have done it.” (source- Jared Bernstein’s blog) If the EU members behave from an identity tied to the good that the EU represents, the elected officials behave in a manner with the attitude that they may go down, but their brothers will carry on, then there is no dilemma.  Further, if their electorate sees their heroism for the good that the voters also identify with, then the politician will not fall.

The corrupt systems where there is a group conspiracy of silence breaks down if the players bind their identity not to their individual interests but instead define their identity with the good the group represents. Say the two prisoners are captured American soldiers. The two heroically bind themselves to the good their country represents, and appeals to their narrow self interest by their captors fail. Note that “the good that the group represents” can subtly be rephrased in the players’ minds as the “good of the group”.  This form can be gamed because it is simply a variant (group) form of self interest.   Consider the corrupt group collusion case where the member’s identity is tied not to the good the group represents, but to the group’s self interest and the group’s self interest.  Who are you?  Large percentages of individuals will respond with their occupation. In this framing, the soldier comes across evidence that the army deliberately killed innocent civilians. The system based on self interest breaks down when the soldier identifies himself with the good his army is sworn to defend, and not his identity as member of a prestigious group whose interests would be injured if he “snitches”.

How do the football team members/ clergy members/ wall street executives understand their identity? When their identity is tied to the good that the group attempts to faithfully represent, it is much more difficult for plutocrats to game the outcome to their liking.  If you like to avoid the ambiguity with the “good of the group” by referring to the “set of goods that the group represents” as the group’s “logos”. The members of the groups become interested in examining the identity of their officials to see if they are frauds, or genuinely bound to the uniting logos they believe in.

This is not to say that binding self identity with any particular group logos is a panacea for society’s ills. For example, if the group views the good as something akin to the ethos of survival of the fittest predators, then anyone that betrays the tribe by preying on on of its members is unpardonable.  In the republican primary race for the 2012 presidential elections, commentators puzzled why one candidate Herman Cain was brought down by a scandal where he had a 15 year sexual affair, but was seemingly unaffected by charges he sexually harassed other women.  The reason was that the victim was a member of someone he had a bond with (his wife) that he betrayed.  Using the predator narrative, victims outside the tribal group bond are fair gaime, so pursuits of sexual prey (sexual harassment accusations) are unimportant charges, and perhaps even admirable especially if hyper masculinity is part of the group’s logos.

This group logos is more conventionally referred to the kind of “organizational culture” one sees in the shared assumptions, narratives, and group think that Durkheim recognized as a form of  collective consciousness that holds a society of people together. In the Paris commune of 1871, it is what drove individuals on their own initiative to carry our administrative functions of state without central direction.  It can be expressed as a durable corporate culture established by a company’s leader.  Steve Jobs felt this culture was his lasting legacy, not any particular innovation created during his tenure leading Apple corporation.

I used the nonsecular term “logos” as a shorthand to point to an anchoring of identity in a ground of being expressed in literary constructs. I did not intend to imply the requirement of either a nonsecular or secular point of view. This form of identity is what Levy-Bruhl referred to as the Participation Mystique, though in his work he applied it to social behaviors of primitive peoples.  In modern tribalism, it helps us understand the crucial activity of participation with literary constructs.  The constructs differ, but the activity of this participation is cross cultural, transcending the classifications of secular systems versus religious world views.   A modern secular way of describing this is that the individual identity is bound to the Kant’s description of a categorical imperative.  As an individual, you bind yourself to a good, and there is no real philosophical difference between your doing and the essence of your Being. If your process is not living the maxims (logos) you bind yourself to, then at that moment you are a fraud. This means there is no difference between means and ends, that there ought be no difference between what you do unto others and what you would have done unto you.   Although this has a profoundly spiritual sense, it can be utterly secular without any reference to symbols of formal or informal religions.  Speaking in terms meaningful to self identified Christians, analogs of the notion of Logos as described in the Christian 4th Gospel (In the beginning was the λόγος “logos”…) may be found in most religions and does not require further elaboration here except for the comment that the term intends the wider dimensions possible than if I had chosen alternative terms such as “maxim” or group “ethos”.

Asking what the nature of a movement is concerns itself with identification of its logos.  Our ideas of how nature is ordered forms a substrate framework that silent guides the hidden assumptions we make in such analysis.  Our politics are imprisoned in the 18th century enlightenment’s assumptions of what is natural. By the 19th century, social Darwinism had a fully developed metaphor of organisms brutally pursuing self interest, and has dominated our economic, moral and political assumptions of what conforms to norms found in nature. In life sciences, the metaphor is misleading when examining behavior of social organisms, such as the survival value of empathy in animals. For example, as evolutionary biologist Frans de Waal explains in “The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons For a Kinder Society” (Sci-Fri interview), there is high selection pressure placed on females to respond quickly to the needs of her offspring.  If they did not, the offspring would die due to loss of heat, food, or by threat of predators.  Maternal care and other group survival needs fosters strong feelings of empathy and altruism in social groups.   Economic, moral and social libertarians recoil at the “collectivist”  implications of any alternatives to the model of rugged individuals exclusively motivated by self interest.  Historically, the American right has used misogynist phrasings that recognize this gender wisdom, vilifying such group logos as signifying infantile dependence on the “tit of the state”.  De Waal is quick to point out that empathy does not achieve exclusivity in organisms- and that in primates self interest is very much essential to survival.  Nonsecular formulations of the ethical dimensions of this dual nature have a long history of exploration so I refer to them here, but readers ought not feel alienated by them because I do not assert any primacy for these particular constructs. For me the following is a compact way of placing a footnote for a complex subject out of the scope of this discussion, but may quickly provide some of readers an indication of my drift of thought.  My footnote is that in christological terms our nature is duoteletis– that we have two independent wills- one a logos of collective consciousness informing us of the good, the other the will of a concrete human self with our individual responsibilities and constraints.

This much we know from 2008- systems that rely exclusively on self interest cannot be trusted. This is a realization that has dawned even the arch libertarian Alan Greenspan who remarked to a House inquiry “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” He admitted: “… I’ve found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.” (source:NYT)

Regardless whether Greenspan is able to construct an alternative economic model or not, we can recognize the broader failure as we look to the dysfunction in the political, due to analysis expecting the electorate to obey the model of enlightened self interest. When progressives make technocratic mechanisms of achieving electoral victory relying on appeals to self interest and refraining from literary appeals to a collective sense of moral injustice, time and again we fail: 2010, Gore candidacy; Kerry candidacy. Inspiring literature is the heart and soul of the society, not a dishonest decoration pasted on rationalist technocratic policies as a mechanism of propaganda.

The eighteenth century model tells us that appeals that seek to bind the group with narratives and social goods are inherently a-rational because they are unprovable; lacing communication with literary rhetoric that appeals not to reason but non rational empathetic sense of common good. Such emotional appeals are seen to be dishonest manipulations, when rational analysis of self interest is seen to be the clear path to a more orderly rational society. Self interest is held to be universal, and so a health care policy crafted to appeal the the broadest self interests of the largest number of stakeholders technically should have been the best approach. As noted by Jared Bernstein on the Sunday show regarding Health Care, and as noted by Van Jones regarding progressive activists, the White House was resistant to invoking strong literary narratives that explained the presidential policies in terms of an established national logos. Perceiving the failure of technocratic operatives to handle the successor to Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, Obama struggled to resurrect the forces that got him where he was, complaining in Suskind’s book “What is my narrative?” Obama is aware of his oratorical power to convince but seems to believe that convincing people this way is not healthy for the republic. He would prefer that people perform a rational analysis of the commonality between everyone’s self interest, and come to the inevitable compromise that rational enlightened citizens would come to.

If Obama uses the rhetorical skills he demonstrated again today in Osawatomie only for campaign effect and fails to establish in the national consciousness a narrative based on his vision of a New Nationalism group logos, then the great historical curiosity of this presidency will be the irony that a president so well versed in literature was so reluctant to use his literary skills, placing his faith not in the word, but in mechanical analysis of self interest. Obama, with no drama: that approach would be a heroic triumph for the 18th century vision of democracy, but is not only unnatural, but unsuited to battle with the 21st century plutocracy that has thoroughly gamed the ethos of rational self interest.  Perhaps the “Teddy Roosevelt” like themes struck in the President’s Kansas speech is an indication that Barack Obama will vigorously establish this vision of a common logos for the nation.  From my view of his character and what essential service leaders can provide for their society, Obama understands very clearly what he must do.  Yet it is a tremendous challenge for any culture hero no matter how skilled.  The contrast in narratives and the powerful interests arrayed against him are truly of epic proportions.

Shaking the Foundations of Progressive Leaders in Politics and Media

Progressives are innovators.  The commentaries such as those from Chaitt (“When did Liberals become so Unreasonable?”) or Kristoff (“President as Pinata”) demonstrate the same resistance conservatives have to any form of cognitive dissonance about their leaders.  Both grumble about the propensity of progressives to question the authority and wisdom of progressive leadership and their policies.  Chaitt and Kristoff point to patterns and traits that are hardly signs of weakness but of strength, and corroboration for this can be found from managers of innovators.  Having worked in high technology for a few decades managing large numbers of highly innovative and intelligent individuals, the perspective of such commentators is the familiar mark of Cain one would hear from antiquarian managers from companies doomed to failure.  Do such commentators have any idea how many times Bill Gates and Steve Jobs have been told by their employees that they were brain damaged?  Do they understand how many cycles of disillusionment high tech companies normally pass through, and how inevitable such cycles are?  Examine the revolt at Apple during the transition from the Apple ][ to the Macintosh.  It was not pretty, and the “solution” of Apple’s board was to replace Jobs with a conventional manager who nearly killed the company.   It seems to me there is a profound lack of comprehension from progressive leaders both in politics and media about what a productive relationship with the creative forces of their base looks like.

The “business as usual” approach of the conventional social contract between political elites and the people can longer assumed to be valid for true progressive organizations- the swarm will not mass for them.

I can’t say any of the recent commentary about the left’s relationship towards Obama has been insightful.  Consider first the premise of this commentary and ask the inverse.  Why is it that conservatives do not call into question the actions of sitting conservative presidents, and is this a healthy pattern we as progressives wish to emulate?  The conservative’s model of the national family is infantile: After choosing a “Father who knows best”,  all that is required is to display ironclad loyalty and heartfelt perseverance to follow his lead in everything- My President, right or wrong. It  is a simple role to play and the pattern permeates all social units: there is a circling of wagons around any leaders- the coaches, the priests, and the owners of the city businesses- regardless what is alleged is done to innocents in the shower. Aversion to cognitive dissonance about the identity of the leader retards critical thinking. Being critical of the leader is tantamount to insubordination, and any suggestions of disillusionment makes the members feel that their team/tribe/family is losing coherence and viability. Ironically liberals also act out this narrative, associating such criticisms with a disaffected tribe on the road to ruin.

This great leader storyline is a crock.  But the myth of the great leader head of the Hobbesian Leviathan is embedded in everything we were taught about history until Howard Zinn came along and showed that from the microhistory perspective, the pageant of history has always been that of a superorganism, composed of a multitude of small acts of individual initiative

That progressives do not adhere to the “Father knows best” style of relationship with their progressive Presidents is a healthy thing. Now, I cannot say that Progressives have an especially unified model of what a healthy family is like or share a common mode of treating the person heading the national family. But as Germaine Greer stated, the alternative to Patriarchy is not Matriarchy- the alternative is fraternity. That is where we are going with the occupy movement: towards peers collaborating together as brethren.

Kennedy stated that no one should judge a President until they have sat in the President’s chair. I agree that there is a great deal of hubris in judging presidents, but as citizens if we do not do so then we are not citizens of a republic but subjects of a kingdom. We must Be Bold and have little interest in Hero worship or the expectation that someone else in authority is going to solve societies ills. What happens depends on what we- each of us do. Obama is a good public servant and because of what I see in him, I am confident he can do much better.

He is a prudent and practical man, but the times do not call for caution.  We are not looking for a “pretty good” President. Roosevelt was pretty good. Jefferson as a president was “pretty good. Obama’s character is such that he must not rest on his laurels or settle for “pretty good”.

Lincoln was a Great President. Obama could be a Great President.

We are no longer in a Father knows best world of homogeneous families where the Patriarch is looked to for all things. We all serve the family, but the head of the family sets the narrative. The libertarians have their view of a leaderless utopia, but the only replace the governance of elected officials with the governing thuggery of unelected corporations.

The superorganism of mutually nurturing individuals can self govern because it has empathy, not hypermasculine individualism in its heart. This alternative anti-authoritarian model of society is not anarchism nor a dictatorship of the proletariat.  It does not make democratic institutions or voting obsolete.

If the swarm that showed up in 2008 is the same superorganism swarm that is powering the occupy movement, it is fair to ask where they were in 2010.  Ask the occupiers.  Ask if they were in the Organizing for America (Obama’s OFA volunteer organization) in 2008.  Ask them what they think happened to that organization, and you will hear the same story.  It was a massively missed opportunity.  It was allowed  to die.  After the election, progressives were basically told to shut up and sit down. *

So they did.

When conservatives marched in the street in 2010,  progressives were no longer mobilized.  The conservatives were holding angry rallies but progressive activists had basically been seen as a post election irrelevancy to the real affairs of state.  So when 2010 rolls around,  the voter turnout is swelled by an energized conservative base and the progressives don’t show up.  It is the easiest response, and the most cowardly to blame the volunteers for not showing up.   Not only were they were never asked, they were given the distinct impression that they were to go home.  Yet what we hear from the expert political analysts was the reason progressives were alienated was that progressives are infantile: you know,  back biting ingrates incapable of being satisfied with any Democratic President.

It’s a  load of horse manure.

This smug complaint should be seen for what it is.  Although it is true individuals should have had a better appreciation of the danger of the situation in 2010, this was not a failure of the rank and file progressives.  It was a systemic failure of progressive managers to interact with the progressive base in a meaningful way.  The management style of the Democratic party needs to wake up, enter the 21st century and take some pointers from high technology companies.  Progressive leadership must own up to the structural flaw of their organizing, and recognize that their management style requires a fundamentally different approach than that of conservatives.  It must be qualitatively different  because the essence of what it means to be a progressive movement places utterly different organizational demands than what is required for conservative movements.

In industry, organizing for innovation is fundamentally different than managing manufacture of a stable product where the goal is to maintain adherence a system of best practice that are often the expression of decades of investments in refinements.   These two different approaches are well understood in industry- and the only thing bad or good about them is when there is a mismatch between the management style and the organization’s goals.  You don’t manage workers creating new products at Apple in the same manner you manage workers on an assembly line.   At a high tech company, substantial profit results from questioning all prior conceptions in order to create a breakthrough product.  If the company is manufacturing armchairs or bicycles, the product definition is exceptionally stable, and the management’s goal has the entirely different character, with the goal of maintain a steady state of high production with high quality.  While improvements are welcome, methods that risk instability are shunned in favor of incremental improvements to existing best practice.

Let’s be clear:  Of course the barbarians are at the gates.  If Democrats lose the White house and congress, the conservatives will devastate progress made during the last 70 years.  The stakes are high and many say the base is disillusioned but consider this.  The same was true for any previous election where the democrats held the White House. During which of these presidencies were progressives not disillusioned?  For which election were the stakes not high? Johnson- Goldwater? McGovern- Nixon? Reagan- Carter? Gore-Bush?

Chait and Kristoff engage in partriarchy envy and delude themselves that what democrats have to do is become better conformists like the Republicans that fall into lock step behind the great leader. Consider this. Trusting the Democratic leadership, brilliant Democratic Party technocrats allowed the incredibly energized Organizing for America organization to whither on the vine. Political operatives had better things to do and didn’t need the slave labor anymore. Trusting in the Democratic leadership, Martha Coakley was put up for Ted Kennedy’s seat and democratic party elites smugly expected they would have a comfortable win in 2010. Trusting in the Democratic leadership, Democrat patricians in the Senate let stand rules with no constitutional basis that prevented us from achieving Cap and Trade, Single Payer, and numerous appointments such as those of Warren, Goodwin Liu, and Don Berwick. Trusting in the democratic leadership, the debate this summer was focused intently on the republican agenda of austerity measures rather than jobs.

The approach of treating volunteers like star artists rather than drones is hardly idealistic. It is pragmatic. The “street heat” of progressive activists should no longer be regarded with condescension by the Patriarchy of the Democratic party. We should no longer be disbanded or treated like slave labor.

It was not the Democratic leadership that changed the nation’s dialog back to Jobs. It was the Occupy Movement. Yes- when we didn’t leave it to people “Smarter than we are”, the democratic superorganism demonstrated its power.

This is quite baffling to Party elites. It is quite baffling to commentators like Chait and Kristoff. Stuff like this shouldn’t happen according to the patriarchal model of organization. For encyclopedia writers, it was very clear how subject matter elites would carefully craft and assemble the collective wisdom of the culture.

Wikipedia was not supposed to happen. But it did. The breakthrough examples provided by these phenomena presents the profound observation these pundits miss. The big tent of diversity cannot be organized as a Patriarchy with the narrative of unquestioned allegiance to the leader. Unlike followers of the patriarchy, an empire of Fear will not long stand among democrats because progressives do not sustain themselves on the limbic system’s norepenephrine (fear-anxiety) circuits, but on the other limbic system- Dopamine which powers feelings of empathy and joy of service. Chait and Kristoff attempt to terrorize a mass of non conformists into conformity- they think that desperate times require us to tear a page from the republican play book. Well, it is silly because progressives aren’t wired that way.

Chait and Kristoff are both uninsightful and without historic perspective.  It is a strategy that is not just ill informed- if we follow it, we will fail to achieve the congressional wins we need in 2012, and we will fail to retain the presidency in 2016.

If the leadership of the Democratic party wants the respect of progressives, they will have to earn it.  When they do, they will find they will be exceptionally generous with their time and money.  Starting today, they need to jettison the patriarchal and consumerist models of “grassroots organizing”.  Progressives aren’t children, nor are they angry consumers demanding better customer service for governmental products.  Some points:

1. Stop treating volunteers like cattle. Eventually they get the drift that they are regarded as peons.
2. Try stripping 95% of your email of any solicitation for money. The subject matter should about issues, preparation for events, and offers of events and gifts that the rank and file truly value.
3. Stop using the term “grassroots organizing” and start doing it- an organization of individualistic champions achieving recognizable goals and getting some measure of recognition for it,
4. Understand the management style used in high tech, research science and entertainment- where the manager is more of an assistant who helps the workers excel in whatever goals their intuition drives them towards. An organization where the administration is there to help supply the initiatives of the group with resources and tactical advice, not to attempt to treat them as soldiers following the leadership’s marching orders.
5. It is ok and expected that leaders provide the global vision and that leadership will from time to time request participation in comprehensive coordinated activities.

The  historical- philosophical dimension is strongly felt in these times. The antiquation of the dominant Hobbesian notion of the Leviathan must be recognized.  It had its value in its day, positing the great leader model of western societies, as a replacement to the notion of the divine right of Kings that was confronted first academically and finally militarily by Cromwell and his protestants followers who were deeply, theologically released from the old order.  In the wake of that shock, and recoiling from the fear of chaos in the absence of of strong central government, Hobbes proposed  a social contract between the rulers and the ruled which would lend new life to the Patriarchy of ruling elites.  These include the ones whom Senator Bernie Sanders refers to as “royalists” but the principle applies to all political elites of any party or ideology.  With identical timing as the monarchists who expelled the anti-authoritarians of the Paris Commune in 1871, after just two months of occupation, the same forces expelled the Occupy protesters from Zuccotti park, and from the other cities by both liberal and conservative mayors.  Neither the phenomenon nor the customary reaction from authorities was by any means new.  In the wake of the 1871 Commune, Emile Durkeim produced an alternative view to the question of what holds society together.   His analysis laid the foundation for understanding the organically binding influence of the collective consciousness of such such superorganism social movements.  The superorganism is not a beheaded leviathan, necessarily stumbling as Hobbes would have us believe- in the throws of an inevitable death. A more apt image for the superorganism would be not a mechanical body of automatons following the orders of the leader, but an organic brain composed of billions of synaptic individuals, with communication paths between innumerable clusters of working groups.  Solidarity is achieved not through mechanical application of punitive correction, but emerges from the sense of organic strength of interpenetrating cooperative relationships between individuals of diverse interests.

Administrative services have not been made obsolete by the Zucotti/ Indignados re-emergence of the leaderless swarm.  “Keeping the railroads running on time” does not require the heart of an imperious  authoritarian- the functions of individuals who help keep the group coordinated an efficiently achieving whatever goals the superorganism chooses can be born of fraternal desire to serve the brethren, not to patriarchally  decide and demand fealty to policies they judge best for the people.

Notes

*  (“Shut up and Sit Down” failure of democratic leadership was observed by Van Jones and Naomi Klein on “Up with Chris Hayes”- Video here- scan forward to 15:50.  Please excuse lead in commercial.)

Linguistically similar posts:

• Allen Rosenblatt’s “Emergent Governance: Who Needs Bees When the Grassroots Swarm the White House”

Princesses and Zuccotti Fraternité: Threats to the Patriarchs

“I do think that women could make politics irrelevant; by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action the like of which we have never seen; which is so far from people’s ideas of state structure or viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy — when what it really is, is very subtle forms of interrelation that do not follow some heirarchal pattern which is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite to patriarchy is not matriarchy but fraternity, yet I think it’s women who are going to have to break this spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.”- Germaine Greer

In the November 9, 2011 GOP debate in Michigan, Herman Cain touched on yet another area of Conservative denial, referring to former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi as “Princess”.    Conservatives in the audience laughed, but they are in stubborn denial not only about gender and leadership but about the character of their own leaders.  Current polling shows Cain remains is in first place despite two weeks of sex scandal revelations.  The polling reflects the reluctance of conservative voters to confront the cognitive dissonance caused by the accusations that Cain had on multiple occasions sexually harassed if not assaulted women from his workplace.  This state of mind is not confined to a handful of issues.  Since it is shared across a large group of citizens who feel reality consistently fails to fit the frames of conservative orthodoxy,  it is proper to recognize it as cultural dissonance.  The nature of the loss of harmony can be seen in the 2012 Herman Cain candidacy.

Why conservatives find Cain so appealing has to do with his patriarchal confidence- the unflappable certainty he exudes.  The importance of this mystery has little to do with Cain the businessman, who will soon be forgotten by the mass media.  What we need to examine honestly is how it is that Herman Cain, with only a whisp of a campaign staff and such a disastrous handling of  the recent sex scandal  can defy all conventional political wisdom both from the right and left  and still remain the GOP’s favorite candidate.   What is it that Cain embodies for conservatives?   What this is about is the crumbling authority of the patriarchy, and that it is a contagion not just in the GOP but among democrats.  The impregnable bulwark arrayed against advocates of Wall Street reform in the Obama White House- it was personified in the struggle between the imperious Larry Summers versus Christina Romer (Financial Times story).  In the Clinton administration between the triumvirate of Greenspan, Rubin and Summers against Brooksley Born (Frontline:The Warning).  That these conflicts have strong element of gender to them is no coincidence, and it goes back to Greer’s insightful words.

A Zuccotti Swarm of Starlings

A Murmuration of starlings has no need of a patriarchy to instruct it in defending itself against a peregrine falcon.   Similarly, bee superorganisms  do not require central direction in problem solving.  Similar to the Occupy movement, they too reach consensus through voting and achieve decisive group decisions crucial to the survival of the hive without any reliance whatever on structures even vaguely resembling patriarchal authority.  One example of this is how new locations for the hive are decided upon. (Science Friday Story here)

The collaborative alternative that Greer spoke of is not some amorphous wisp of a dream- we now point to a triumph of collaborative leaderless swarming based on consensus anchored decision making.  It’s called Wikipedia.  Nor is it true that this struggle is particularly new, or is the expectation that the Occupy movement will somehow finally put the final stake through the heart of the patriarchal model of society.  We  have been putting stakes into that model for millennia, and the Occupy movement is in important respects new wine in very old bottles.  The early Christian church was filled with revelers released from the strictures of the patriarchal structure of intermediaries and laws.  The result was the  chaos of the Gnostics- a movement that was broader than the Christians who trusted only in the authority of Gnosis- personal, intuitive contact with Truth.  For Christians, it was the binding role of the Holy Spirit.  But the patriarchs quickly restored “order” in the metaphor of the people being the body of Christ, while the head of Christ was represented by the Spiritual/ Secular leader.  In the wake of a cataclysmic political shock in 1871 France, the Paris Commune expressed an unleashing of anti-authoritarian impulses where decentralized neighborhood councils self organized programs for social good.  Within two months, the Royalist army crushed the threat posed by commoners utilizing their own initiative to carry out the tasks of state formerly overseen by the expelled administrative elites.

The head-body model of society has become so accepted as orthodoxy that we have a fundamental problems with even the suggestion we consider the alternate model of society as a swarm.  Very quickly the law and order frames become activated, and the swarm becomes equated with uncontrolled destructive passions of dark unconscious impulses.  Take for example Nathaniel West’s polemic on depression era order in “Day of the Locusts”. (Warning- extreme violence).  Some believe West warned of the danger the power of the mob being harnessed by populist politicians in the mold of Mussolini or Hitler.

The precedent stretches before Cromwell’s swarm, when the theology of the divine right of Kings model was directly confronted.  The fear of anarchy surged, and the English Civil war transformed the religious model of the patriarchy into Hobbes’ equally patristic social model in his book Leviathan.  Prior to the first commonwealth,  the theology of the divinely authorized patriarchy had already lost widespread acceptance.   In Shakespeare’s Henry V, an unruly mob from an island of Scots, Welsh and English tribes are united under a King at Agincourt.  The leader earns legitimacy by embodying their hopes and desires of the people.   Here is the model that permeates the thoughts of progressives as well as moderate democrats.   As Christopher Hayes put it during one of his early theories on the Occupy movement, sometimes the crowd does not know what it wants and it takes a Steve Jobs to show them what that is.  Chris Matthews has the view that what Obama must do is assume the narrative of the heroic leader- the Jack Kennedy/ Henry V who achieves unity through heroic initiative.   That’s the appeal of the order that the Patriarchy brings to the mob.

But maybe we don’t need such genius heroes to do it all for us anymore.  Maybe we 99% can handle this on our own as we did in Wikipedia and in Zuccotti, in Fraternité, Egalité and Liberté.

The Durkheim Swarm in Zuccotti park

‘Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly’ -Thomas Kuhn

The media seems truly baffled by the group of people that forms the “Occupy” movement.   It is an anomaly to conventional investigative journalism whose normal tools cannot be used to fathom a movement without a leader, formal organization, demands, messaging, or spokespeople.  Interacting with Occupy Wall Street is much like interacting with a swarm, and this image provides a key to the mystery.  Movements such as the Indignados, Arab Spring and OccupyWallStreet are perhaps better thought of in terms of what biologists call superorganisms.  In social theory  the notion of a headless Leviathan is both perplexing and terrifying because social order is not supposed to work without an organizing head, and without the organizing principle of rational self interest in the arms and legs of the body politic.    Yet some of the most robust social orders in nature do not employ the hierarchical head-body metaphor.  Example organisms  that pool resources without the governance of a leader to accomplish a goal beyond the capabilities of  individual members include bees, ants, wasps, and termites (National Geographic: Swarm Theory).  In the late 19th century, Émile Durkheim advanced the concept that when human beings organize themselves in this way into a group, this is a collective “social organism”.  Durkeim’s idea was that the culture of such social organisms is a collective consciousness that has used communication to transcend the boundaries of individual minds.  Fast forward to the 21st century when social networks allow faster firing of synapses and message harmonization in the collective mind of the superorganism.  Decision making is the consensus born of the cognitive harmony not just between clusters of synapses in a single mind, but between clusters of individual minds in the collective consciousness of a swarm.

What are the Occupy movement’s goals?  Asking a superorganism what it wants is like asking what an ant colony wants. Of course the first answer is not too illuminating: the colony simply wants to survive and to prosper in a post Hobbesian Common-wealth without menace from other organisms or other threats in the environment.  Journalists can take a cue from biologists who observe the superorganism in specific problem solving contexts to understand the nature of the organism. Say we observe a rain swollen brook blocking the colony from access to a food source.

One narrative of OWS is that it is an expression of frustration.  Using this cognitive frame to understand the agitation of the colony casts it as infantile,  with our corresponding response to be one of empathy.  But empathy from detached observers is not relevant to the colony.   Continuing the narrative of infantilism, we observe the colony is not particularly coherent in its activities with ill stated, “naive” tactics.  The colony “wants” to get a stick to bridge the gap, but the stick is way too small. The colony also “wants” to form a mass raft of ant bodies latched together to bridge the gap- this also may be ill considered. The colony also “wants” to go up and downstream to find a spot where the brook is bridged. It does all of these schemes spontaneously and in a chaotic fashion until one pathway is successful and the colony consolidates its activity on the fruitful pathway.

So why did this superorganism suddenly appear? When does the hive know that it is time for part of it to divide itself from the rest and fly off to create a new hive? Entomologists tell us it happens when the conditions are sufficient- when a tipping point is reached. Maybe the tipping point was the debt crisis- maybe it was the growing threat from groups of  right wing reactionaries gaining formidable strength who threatened to reverse progress in social policies made during the last 70 years. Maybe it was the growing realization that the formidable challenges threatening our society are not being faced. The pathways to the food sources have become constrained and the swarm of ants must find another way.

Why does the human superorganism not normally revert to this instinctive problem solving mode? We normally have more efficient mechanisms employing language, concepts, and social conventions for governing and coordinating our collective activities. The social contract was that if we went to school, worked hard and followed the rules that we would prosper. The 99% have not gotten a share of the growth. The 1% has taken it all. The social contract is that we have differing views so we must compromise or we get nowhere. There is no compromise and we are getting nowhere. The old way of crossing the brook doesn’t work and the superorganism collectively understands this. It will solve the problem, maybe not with the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, maybe not the social action two years from now, or 3 years.

But the 99% will be relentless in its collective desire to achieve the goals of prospering again free from the menace of threats from the world around us.

So in the drum circles down at the demonstrations you might hear suggestions of that wild beat intro of the ancient Song by Blondie: Attack of the Giant Ants (You Tube). This can be a happy joyous endeavor, or not.

Let’s be clear that the human SuperOrganism is not mindless.

• The human superorganism created Wikipedia. That is not the product of a mindless rabble.
• The 1% is not new, nor is refusal to compromise with the Superorganism representing the 99%. FDR called the 1% “economic royalists”, and in 1649, the Superorganism solved the problem by beheading the King.
• In 2008, the Superorganism was energized- blogging and phone banking at Organizing for America, and we got a stick over the river. Van Jones put his finger on it when he said that after the election the DC elites told us “…You need to sit down and shut up and we will deal with this. And I think it turned out that that was wrong”. (video– skip to 15:50).  I am not the only Obama volunteer that was baffled by how this pearl of an organism was abandoned by the democratic political operatives in 2008.
• Four years after the Great Abandonment, the superorganism is skeptical of the tired slogans of “grassroots organisers”, of being spammed with solicitations for our opinion.  Without exception these expressions of interest in our thoughts are accompanied by a none too subtle Donate button with suggested amounts calibrated by computer to whatever our last donation was plus 20%. Political operatives just don’t get it, and whatever downside there may be to strapping the milking machines onto the base, it is not the fundraising operative’s problem. Treating the superorganism in this way has a cost- they poison the well. Commentators then complain how the Superorganism descends into political nihilism, and cynicism about their leadership. (Related post: Shaking the Foundations of Progressive Leaders)
• Can the Superoganism bypasses the political elites with some form of direct democracy? Before getting  too rapturous about how practical this might be with today’s high technology, we ought not overlook the often self contradictory nature of the Superorganism. California has been experimenting with the state initiative form of direct democracy and as Michael Lewis correctly observes in his Vanity Fair article– California is in crisis because its citizens have consistently voted for services and voted against the taxes needed to pay for them
• The human superorganism has robust communication mechanisms. FOX news continues a long pattern stretching back long before the propaganda empire of William Randolf Hearst to the more humble if not less rabid rhetoric of  18^th century pamphleteers seeking to sway the masses with disinformation. In the movie “Network”, a Ratigan like Journalist character parodies the Mass Media’s commercial interest in channeling the SuperOrganism’s frustration into rapt viewership generating enormous ratings in demographic groups that advertisers will pay good money for.
  There are grounds to be optimistic that New Media will change the nature of the one way communication. Paul Krugmann actually responds to those who comment on his New York Times Blog. Some shows solicit Twitter responses, and are deluged with tens of thousands of messages, a few of which are televised. The blogs for the Rachel Maddow Show and Up with Chris Hayes allow for lively extended discussion by the members of the human Superorganism. This takes the vertically directed content of the mass media and uses social media to become horizontal- to assimilate and mutate the collective narratives that excite and animate the neurology of the SuperOrganism. Eventually the narratives translate into action.
• One of the early speakers at OWS was Naomi Klein (Shock Doctrine).  As a guest on Up with Chris Hayes (jump to 5:30), she  highlighting the situation in Argentina in 2002 after an economic meltdown and a succession of autocratic governments had fallen,  and the people felt that the steering wheel out of the hands of the politicians and were deciding what to do with the new found power. Just as in the months following the Arab Spring,  people were out on street corners discussing politics.  In the US, the OWS SuperOrganism is correctly pointing to major structural problems- looking for where the real power is, the effect of Citizen’s United, that maybe it is Wall Street not Washington pulling the strings.   She notes that it is a big mistake to treat the SuperOrganism as simply “the angry arm of the democratic party”.  This is a rejection of politics as usual where the emotions of protests and activist initiatives have been harnessed by political operatives to channel the anger and enthusiasm  into election year goals, free phone banking, and door knocking Get-Out-the -ote foot soldiers.  Independent organizations are asked to submerge their identity as their goals are  subordinated  into the overarching goal of getting the Democrat elected.    After such campaigns, volunteers are told to sit down and shut up while the professionals attend to their demands.    It is a pattern that will not replayed this time.
• 

  Stephen Colbert deep undercover at OWS NYC

  Stephen Colbert parodied how political elites attempt to exploit movements like Occupy Wall Street.  His character is the head of a super pac who is attempting to co-opt OWS by telling them that every cult needs a leader:

  Colbert:  We’re talking about changing the world
  Let’s hit the ground
  Let’s do this thing
  Let’s dance on the edge of a knife.
  Let’s live dangerously
  Let’s get into it
  Let’s Strap on and get on top..
  Top of our game
  Let’s get the message out there
  Let’s be a team
  Let’s be empowerred
  Let’s have our voices heard
  Let’s let the little man roar
  Okay?  And I’m a big man that’s going to help you do that.
  Justin:  We’re not trying to re-create the problems that already exist.  One of the problems is the undue influence of money in politics.
  (source video- 6:09)

• What is different this time?  A movement that does not pander to the egos of the activists, that does not seduce with the illusion of dramatic spectacles- a movement that will not accept a leader or spokespeople .
• Has technology played a role in how the SuperOrganism has become more engaged in a sustained process of what Klein calls “getting at the core problems”?  Perhaps we can repeat the superorganism’s success with Wiki collaboration and apply it to the sphere of politics. Wikipedia is a collaborative triumph, but contributors know that its content has an inherent advantage over that of issue politics.  Unlike political wikis, Wikipedia and other successful fact based wikis can support the content with citations to a large body of common, independently verifiable factual sources. While Wikipedia does have articles on issues, it is not a forum for political activity. I did some experiments with it. To get at concreteness, I tried making policy the spine of the Wiki. Issue articles are pretty much like those on Wikipedia, then those link to particular policy proposals by affinity groups. The policy proposal articles would then link to specific passages in specific proposed legislation explaining how the wording was intended to support the policy.The experiment was Policypedia. I entered a policy resolution I submitted in my state’s Democratic convention and worked on annotating speeches to see how a trail might be traced from political speech to proposed law, to administered program.  The problem I had with Policypedia was that the subject matter becomes wonkish rapidly.  I think the “devil in the details” treatments of practical measures loses people quickly.

  I am not gloomy about the prospects though.  There have been hundreds of other sites that are working on finding a way over this river, and I am confident we will come up with a way just as ant colonies succeed.  There will eventually be a wiki way of sustaining the activities of the SuperOrganism in politics.