For the time being, I don’t have enough confidence in my grasp of the problem to suggest anything more than its global outline – which however necessarily contains some attempt at answering it.

[click to enlarge]

The essential problem of freedom-based politics is indeed consent, and the only (perpetually incomplete by definition) answer I’ve found until now of is to work towards consensus politics, as only them can respect both relative inertia and radical change.

A constitution only has true moral precedence over people’s better judgment in very religious countries such as the US. Only through resorting to transcendent authority can some writings (or any kind of traditional symbols) be given such power. Indeed, the very notion of a “constitution” relies on the authority of tradition to trump people’s autonomy.

An apparent counter-argument might be that “even” consensus can lead 99.99% of the people to legitimate pointless coercion. A closer analysis makes it obvious that any constitution is subject to a criticism of the same nature. All sacred principles enshrined in constitutions or whatever sacred scriptures can ever reflect nothing but what a given community of politicians (usually people with authority) agreed on (in other words, consented to) at a given time. And as history shows, in politics, all great fundamentals have been questioned – and improvement often required radical change.

Yes, consensus politics aren’t perfect, and can’t completely prevent coercion of the minority due to the ignorance of the masses. And that is irrelevant. The point of consensus politics is to recognize that ignorance is an inherent part of the human condition, and that learning – that is, change – is the only possible solution. Constitutional politics, on the other hand, rely on traditional authority of historical lawmakers to enforce rules upon people.

It is unwise to pretend to know scriptural truth and use these claims to coerce others. Politics are no exception, and the dialectic of openness and closeness is as essential on a social plane than an individual plane. You might think that your system would imply the least coercive (or otherwise “best”) system, but those claims are never anything but the reflect of the state your own consent.

Nothing but consent should be given sacred status. That is the essential definition of freedom-based politics.

Circumcision has been performed on children, male and female, in many cultures throughout history. The elementary aspects of circumcision are most often that of an initiative ritual where one gender, or both, is/are “purified” through the removal of what is perceived as remnants of the other gender’s reproductive organs. This initiation also served the purpose of reinforcing social links within a tribe and identifying other members of the group.

The Western world has more frequently circumcised boys, while many other cultures have more frequently performed circumcision on girls. Ironically enough, Westerners that circumcise little boys will often call the practice of circumcising little girls, even in its milder forms that exclude clitoridectomy, “genital mutilation”. I see little reason not to use the same expression to describe circumcision of boys.

From an ethical standpoint, it is imperative to take into account the inability of children to give consent. If respect of freedom requires one to accept the right of adults to mutilate themselves, claiming that parents should have the “freedom” to mutilate their children is nonsense. That said, not all surgery is to be seen as “mutilation”.

Two aspects are therefore to be taken into account to determine the morality of a surgical procedure performed on a child: “necessity” and “harm”. Weighing those factors against each other is the key to determining the morality (and potential legality) of surgical procedures on children.

“Necessity” refers, quite obviously, to the fact that surgery is to be considered justified if the life or health of a child is seriously endangered. Although Western science justified male circumcision for a while, modern science has demonstrated that proper hygiene makes circumcision utterly pointless in all non-pathological cases.

“Harm”, on the other hand, refers to the probable physical and psychological wound that the procedure implies – the smaller this wound, the more trivial the required “necessity”. For example, piercing the earlobes of a child leaves only a negligible wound – both physical and psychological – and thus the procedure would be only trivially immoral, assuming no necessity whatsoever.

On the other hand, there is evidence, scientific and anecdotal alike, suggesting that circumcision is likely to be sexually crippling. It indeed strikes many (including myself) as obvious that one that has a significant and highly sensitive part of one’s genitals removed is bound to never experience the sexual experience to its full potential. Furthermore, such surgery is a traumatic experience; the depth of the potential trauma is outlined by, among other things, the special meaning of reproductive organs in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Needlessly inflicting physical and psychological trauma upon children is immoral, and should not be allowed if it is likely to cripple them for life. Only a highly problematic conception of sexuality can lead one to believe that routinely cutting little children’s reproductive organs is a healthy procedure.

On the other hand, the quest for objective coherence remains necessary for any political system to exist, and the only known way to reliably assess theoretical coherence is its inter-subjective acceptance. Two broad attitudes are possible when faced with this dilemma of ideological coherence:

1. Recognizing irrationality: fundamental normative beliefs are too often anchored in the subjective aspects of one’s own reality to serve as Law enforced on everyone.
2. Denying irrationality: claims of knowledge of pure objective rationality legitimize authoritarian legislation.

Now, claiming that pure rationality is impossible in political discourse doesn’t mean that we should give up altogether on rational politics, nor that we should move away from the axioms of democracy. If anything, it means that we should move closer to the underlying principles of democracy. Empowering the People, which I believe to be a commendable ideal, shouldn’t be about empowering 50%+1 of it while the remaining minority obeys to whatever irrational demands the majority – or powerful minority – has.

As theoretical grounds for a “new rationality”, I would echo various libertarian and anarchist thinkers in suggesting that as politics are to be assumed as fundamentally irrational, the only fundamental basis for political “rationality” we have, beyond consensus acceptance, is the maximal possible respect of the individual free will of all. Without this one ethical rule, consensus is worthless. That one ethical guideline is thus a synonym of political rationality if we recognize the fundamental presence of irrational beliefs in political thought. It logically leads to libertarian ideals.

So, if politics are irrational, what did I learn about myself and the Universe during those past 3-4 years of meditations on the topic? Mainly that there are several conflicting paradigms that all make some sense to me for different reasons. My personal aesthetic ideal would be anarcho-communism. My “rational”, ethical ideal would be panarchism, seen as the ultimate libertarian system. The practical means I suggest to get there is an economically centrist but socially radical form of libertarian socialism.

Economic structures throughout history have first and foremost served the purpose of reinforcing existing power structures. But unlike Marxists, I don’t (more precisely, no longer) believe that changing the economic system will magically change the authority structure of society, which until now has simply spontaneously re-instituted itself under different forms. Socialism and eventually communism will emerge from a strongly libertarian society, not the opposite.

I would hypothesize that intuitive knowledge of this is one reason capitalists are overwhelmingly authoritarian. So-called “libertarian” Market fundamentalists are probably deluding themselves when they think their system will ever be anything more than a fringe movement and a literary phenomena. If they care about freedom in large liberal democracies, they should accept compromise on economic issues and join hands with economically centrist and left-wing libertarians. Only then might we be able to counter the authoritarian capitalists – authoritarian socialism mostly died with the USSR – that is so powerful only due to the fragmentation of the libertarians.

This was my last post on the topic of political philosophy (and politics in general) for a while.

I find it a fertile idea to assume that schooling exists to transmit to youths a body of knowledge that cannot be transmitted by the parents, for two reasons:

1. The knowledge that must be passed on to the new generation can no longer be contained within a handful of individuals, let alone the parents.
2. Parents, in an increasingly individualistic world, choose to work full-time rather than raise their children, earlier.

These social conditions lead to the knowledge transmitted to youths being generally both more general (it is relevant to large numbers of people, if not ideally to everyone) and more impersonal (it is less and less tailored to specific individuals). Increasingly impersonal education, in turn, appears to lead to an introspective void, as children are no longer told as clearly who they are by their parents and tutors. Thus, as a greater existential void implies more diverse ways of filling it, the increasing impersonality of education appears to be an essential cause of individuation.

On the other hand, the universality of the knowledge passed on to children implies that it often disregards the child as a unique being and force-feeds him predigested information that generally quickly turns out useless in individual day-to-day life. The average proportion of one’s life dedicated to education is also growing: the knowledge necessary to be socially non-marginal is greater than ever, even though much/most of it will never be of any use outside of exams. This results in individuation exacerbating many of the problems it would be thought to solve: children, more than ever in many regards, seem unmotivated, alienated and hateful.

As I assume that individuation does not inherently unmotivate and alienate children, and can in fact do quite the opposite, I would suggest that the near-identical content taught to all students until they reach their mid-teens is to blame for a great part of the problems faced by contemporary students – and by extension society as a whole. The easiest way out, I believe, would be to apply a modular system similar to that of modern universities closer to all levels of education save possibly for kindergarten. Students should be given maximal control over what they learn as soon as possible, while being as free as possible in the process.

A frequent criticism of this approach is that children would tend to choose the laziest option rather than that most useful to their future or to society. I answer that this mindset is the result of current education paradigms, which miserably fail to instill in children the love of learning, that can otherwise be fostered by a strong sense of identity, and incidentally by some individuation.

Here, I find it important two distinguish between two fundamental “types” of individuation, which I will call negative individuation and positive individuation. The former is the reactionary kind chain-produced by e.g. mainstream education, while the latter is the visionary kind created by e.g. good parenting and the brighter creative side of the Web. Only the latter kind can be a strong vector of both social and individual cognitive freedoms.

To facilitate positive individuation, education should be both impersonal and specific, as opposed to current education that is impersonal and general. The impersonality of education allows for a more individually defined purpose, but only if children actively seek such a purpose. The generality of education as we know it today teaches children that learning has little meaning. Its main goal should be to do precisely the opposite, and transmitting “general information” to the child’s “psychological hard drive” should come only second, after the basics have been mastered. I will come back to the nature of those basics later.

Meta-knowledge has become at least as important as knowledge itself; critical thinking matters more than thought alone as it allows one to sift through the informational chaos that surrounds us. How we educate the adults of tomorrow should attempt to reflect, at least, the world of today and not that of yesterday. This points to what I believe to be the most promising educational tool of this era: the Web (which doesn’t substitute for good parenting, but complements it).

In the Middle Ages, the diversity of information was low as knowledge was still local, and the hegemony of religion was strong. Externalized information in the written form available at the time could be contained within a single or at most a few libraries. It is in such a context that universities were created. With the slow diversification of data available, more universities were created and greater communication between them was made easier. Centuries later, various new types of recording formats as well as a greater creative output (due in part to a larger world population) diversified archives, but only barely and slowly democratized access to it.

Today, smartphones allow us to access, through a device no bigger than our hand, incommensurately more information that ever was contained in any physical library. Material available for free online can be as good as most teachers, provided that the student is given the proper tools to exploit the practically bottomless pool of information that is the Web.

Contemporary education’s purpose should be first and foremost to teach children to learn by themselves, that is, teaching them both the capability and the desire to do so – in a manner creative and unique to themselves. In this line of thought, reducing the amount of time spent passively listening to a teacher should leave place to more creativity and existential satisfaction in students. The role of the teacher, in this new paradigm, would be to guide the children’s individual learning processes and to overlook the exams necessary to provide standardized certification of competence. As much as practically possible, those exams would occur whenever each child feels ready.

Finally, as to the mandatory “basic topics” to be taken by all students, they should remain conceptually close to the four fundamental fields outlined in a previous post: communicational thought, logical thought, social thought and rational thought. The only of the those core fields that is done more or less right in the current system is communicational thought or language in the broad sense. Mandatory logical thought courses would focus more on practical reasoning and much less on abstract mathematics. Social thought (including ethics) and rational thought (including epistemology) are nearly ignored by the current system, while I believe them to be critical aspects of a good early education.

In retrospect, I would therefore suggest implementing four interrelated major changes to today’s education system:

- a modular paradigm similar to that used in modern universities, at all levels, which would consequently be merged into a single non-linear education process (with the possible exception of kindergarten);
- a focus on critical thinking, especially applied to the newest technologies in knowledge management and information in general;
- less time spent listening to teachers in the classroom, more individual, active, purposeful learning, complemented by mentoring-like teaching and exams as individually chosen trials;
- four fundamental fields of knowledge as only mandatory topics to be studied by everyone.

The main purpose of those changes is to provide students with maximal existential satisfaction in school and later in life, in contrast to several reforms suggested nowadays that are intended solely to artificially increase the number of graduates on paper or to produce “tomorrow’s efficient workforce” – two approaches that avoid confronting (and even more certainly, solving) the main issues of today’s education system.

“This is only his box. The sheep you asked for is inside.”
I was very surprised to see a light break over the face of my young judge:
“That is exactly the way I wanted it! [...]”

~The Little Prince, Chapter 2

Beyond this core, political thought can be seen as a system composed of two poles in what can be hypothesized to be a dialectical interaction: descriptive/interpretive “reality” and prescriptive ideals. The roots of this dichotomy can be traced back at least to Platonic idealism, although it should be emphasized that as far as this analysis is concerned – unlike what is claimed by Plato and religion, among others – ideals have, a priori, no existence outside of people’s minds.

First, “reality” refers to the world as it is perceived and interpreted by a given individual or group. This is roughly equivalent to what we could call the context, understood as the sum of “objective” constraints stemming from the natural and social environment. It is however critical to note that these constraints become “contextual” only when we focus on a small part of the global reality and interpret the whole through the nature of that part. By definition, the focus of politics is humans, in all their subjective, irrational glory.

Second, “ideals” refer to how the world should be, according to a given individual or group. Ideals are always different from “reality”, if to varying degrees. Everyone might not wish to change the world radically, but it seems safe to assume that everyone would change at least something – everyone that engages in political thought, that is. These changes are envisioned according to subjective ethics, which led me many times to define the main subject-matter of politics as something like “community ethics”.

We can thus notice that political thought is doubly relative: both context and ideals are subjectively defined, consciously and unconsciously. This is where [] comes into play: one’s perspective is wholly dependent on one’s core self. One’s [] will reflect his satisfaction with the current political system, his natural tendency to empathize with – or to hate, for that matter – other people, his desire to avoid cognitive dissonance… and a myriad of other aspects that make someone a unique being.

But politics aren’t simply the dialectics of reality and ideals, as these dialectics also accurately describe the global mechanics of individual hopes and fears. That isn’t to say that one’s hopes and fears are unrelated to political thought (they certainly are closely related), but rather that politics can’t be reduced to those hopes and fears we have for ourselves. Politics are social, not individual; that is, political ideals are defined as to affect many people by default.

With all the above in mind, we can define politics more precisely as the multidimensional dialectical process of, on one hand, individual reality and ideals, and on the other, collective reality and ideals.

In short, politics are a huge mess of contradictions and uncertainty. That’s also what makes them fascinating.

[image source]

Several implications of this visualisation of political opinions are novel to my thought:

- The examples of utopias on the sides of the outer square correspond roughly to the examples given by Mannheim in Idéologie et utopie. He also added fascism, which appeared at first glance to fit somewhere between the authoritarian left and right. However, it is quite obvious that fascism is globally more authoritarian than either socialism-communism or historical and bureaucratic conservatisms. This led me to the conclusion that the extremes of either axis require to compromise between the extremes of the other axis. The choice of panarchism as the penultimate libertarian system is, of course, biased: the “ultimate” systems included in the corners of the square (and therefore at the tips of each axis) should be treated as mere examples and not absolute answers. There is no such thing as an absolute answer.

- The diagonal arrows refer to the level of congruency of the utopia with the current socio-historical context. These examples are meant to represent the current world and will most certainly become irrelevant in the future, just as they are mostly irrelevant to describe most of the past. It is however likely that the structure of change has remained, and will remain, similar throughout eras, assuming that social change is indeed driven by “utopian thought” (cf. Mannheim).

- Many people who claim to be “free-market capitalists” are in fact closer to the bourgeoise liberal or historical conservative utopias as described by Mannheim. Similarly, many “left communists”, are closer to radical anarchism (e.g. myself) or socialism-communism. The fact that Reikoku is quite close to believing in the bourgeoise liberal utopia while I am close to radical anarchist utopian thought is most likely why we agreed on panarchism.

- A society can’t be half communist. Or half panarchist. It either is or isn’t. And if a society is not communist – which means the absence of private property – it is necessarily capitalist; if a society is not anarchist it is necessarily authoritarian to a degree. On the other hand, there is no limit to how “capitalist” a society can be. People could come to “own” the air people are breathing. People could even “own” the stars in the sky (cf. The Little Prince). Hey, we can “own” ideas, so why not? The same can be said about authoritarianism : Big Brother anyone? In summary, utopias are mostly a fixed set of ideals, while the “established order” is constantly changing.

- In light of the above: in any political orientation test, determining just how much one is in favour of the current established order (principles, beliefs, etc.) relies exclusively on historical precedent. The “established order” is always threatened by utopian thought such as, in the current era, those embodied by left communism, radical anarchism, panarchism, and to a lesser degree socialism-communism or bourgeoise liberalism. On the contrary, the conservative “utopia” is paradoxically extreme stability – the negation of utopian thought. In current times, “fascism”, “historical and bureaucratic conservatisms” and “free-market capitalism” all embrace the established order of competition and consumption, albeit in quite different ways.

- In conclusion, the outer limits of the diagram are highly vague, to the point where it is difficult to properly assess the validity of the above claims. I would suggest that they be used as general orientations for further research/theorising.

Sources:

ADORNO, Theodor W. et al., The Authoritarian Personality, Harper & Brothers, 1950; via ANESI, Chuck, The F Scale : Final Form [http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm]
MANNHEIM, Karl, Idéologie et utopie, 1956 (1929), [http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1522/cla.mak.ide1 ]
PACE NEWS, The Political Compass [http://politicalcompass.org/]
Azarius and Friends’ Political Orientation Test 3.0 [http://test.cogitatus.info/] (which I host…)

Given this initial similarity, the great problem of freedom, namely that of its necessary limits, was to be the essence of our debates. As a starting point, we used as working definition of freedom the idea that one’s freedoms should end where another’s begin. Furthermore, freedom was to take precedence over security due to the fundamentally authoritarian nature of the latter: protecting one’s security through social means necessarily curtails the freedom of many.

Our stance is a socially individualistic one: the main goal of society should be to provide individuals with the greatest possible autonomy. This is also where our approaches diverge. Azarius, as an adherent to far-left positions, namely anarchist communism, sees property laws as a curtailment to people’s freedoms. Reikoku, as an adherent to far-right positions, namely laissez-faire capitalism, sees property laws as a necessary component of freedom. Finding through dialogue a workable compromise between such diametrically opposite economic positions, to our knowledge, has never been attempted before.

We have not only attempted such a feat, but we believe to have succeeded. On the plane of ethics, our approach is centered on the values of tolerance, peace and transparency. We would unashamedly say that we have probably found the libertarian system which would satisfy the greatest number of people. This system, or rather its ideal archetype, is panarchism.

On a practical level, panarchism can be conceived as a rough translation of the “network society” into the world of nations and government; it is indeed made possible through modern technology and knowledge. In this aspect, the main feature that distinguishes it from other theoretical political structures is that it dissociates government from geography whenever possible, therefore allowing true cohabitation of many ideologies within a single territory. In this regard, it is a political meta-structure rather than structure. It is arguably a form of anarchism, as it allows any “responsible adult” to opt-out of external governance in the statist sense at any time.

Laws, in such a system, would be divided in two:

- “Universal” laws, common to all systems and people, and ideally to all humanity. These should be defined through consensus, and be kept to a bare minimum: they would penalize non-consensual aggression such as murder and rape. They will be the specific object of a later post.

- “Specific” laws would be defined by the constitution of any given system, and people would be able to view these constitutions before joining any system. These laws would not be able to remove the universal code, only to add to it. They might include, but are by no means limited to: privacy or property laws, explanations of what a person could take – physically or symbolically – when leaving the system, an age of majority for the system, or a provision for contractual law.

Both standards would be enforced by each system independently as long as both the plaintiff and the defendant are part of the same system. Crimes between different systems, defined a priori by the legal system of the plaintiff, would be dealt with by a jury composed of an equal number of people from the plaintiff’s and the defendant’s systems, plus an additional, lower number of people from other systems – that both sides would have agreed on. Therefore, at least 3 different systems would have to be involved. This would, we believe, simplify the original solution of panarchism to this issue, which is to treat crimes between systems roughly the same as the current world applies international law.

[Next post: Transition and Progress -->]

As were temporarily shattered memories and feelings long deemed useless, there resulted a distinctive euphoria, a state of consciousness immersed in the Now. I remembered vaguely the after-taste of the herb, still present in my mouth.

Time as humans had so thoroughly defined it lost its meaning; meaning itself was tainted of thought patterns unlike what was available to the sober mind. What did meaning mean, again? Nothing but associations of subjective mental constructs, themselves fostered by experience, filtered through cognitions built upon purportedly innate features of personality? The answer was ready-made, bearing little practical implications.

At a much more fundamental level, consciousness is an ephemeral feature of the minuscule beings that we humans are, and yet it is too vast for us to ever truly know anything about it. Each time we believe to know, we end up realising that we know nothing about knowing. Interpretations, perspectives, emotions are, practically, infinite. The psychedelic experience, from the mellow fumes of cannabis to the intense intellectual rushes of LSD, is a stunning demonstration of this multidimensionality of the mind.

My thoughts raced ahead, I slowly lost track of myself through their meanders. I caught a glimpse of a subjective reality built anew through the lenses of mind-altering chemicals. Pleasant feelings, unusual thoughts; consciousness amplified and distorted. And nothing more than my own brain and an insignificant little herb.

How can this soft inner peace be so widely frowned upon, I wondered. Ignorance and fear of the unknown were obvious candidates. And the obvious reply was that humans should accept that they will never know everything, if nothing at all. And they should concentrate on learning about themselves – opening their minds to both themselves and the world, as nobody is ever alone.

“There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” ~Aldous Huxley

Given that the amount of information that can be processed and stored by the human brain is finite, I suggest that “understanding” is nothing but a change of perspective, or interpretation (cf. Nietzsche), often for practical reasons, but possibly for emotional reasons, environmental reasons, or any reason imaginable as we subjectively perceive it. In a context where the global population becomes constantly greater, saying that the “total knowledge” becomes greater would be fallacious, as we have no reliable way to assess the size of knowledge.

Knowledge is not a finite, objective concept. At most, we can hypothesize that information available is becoming slowly more diverse. I believe that it is essential for the purpose of this theory to distinguish information from knowledge: information is whatever is available to our senses, whilst knowledge could be tentatively defined as the processed form of information as it is organised and stored in the human brain. Paradoxically, knowledge therefore has meaning only through knowledge.

But how was/is meaning originally created? What about love, happiness, or existence itself: these are hardly constructs available in ambient information. However, I would argue that such essential concepts cannot be understood – they can only be subjectively experienced. Fearful of what it doesn’t understand, the modern human too often disregards subjectivity and focuses on rules and roles – so-called “objective” laws that purportedly make the world tick like a huge clock. Love is no clockwork still.

However, the diversification of information that I claim is happening – through several successive revolutions in the ways humans communicate, the most recent being the Internet (cf. Lévy) – has the direct result of allowing greater freedom of thought, and incidentally of behaviour. That is, more diverse information available implies more freedom in constructing one’s personal reality.

Can the way humans see knowledge and information change? And most importantly, should it change? Would people actually gain from greater cognitive freedom? I would be inclined to say that they would, but that is irremediably biased by my consistently labyrinthine mind and my views of happiness, peace, love and everything else…