Colorado Confluence

As some of you may have noticed, I went on one of my informal (self-)promotional campaigns recently on Facebook, posting links to my Colorado Confluence Facebook page on a variety of group sites (and some friends’ pages) that seemed like well-chosen places to do a little advertising. On one FB page I chose, “You know you’re a political staffer when…,” I was received with the reflexive vitriol that seems to have become an integral part of what passes for political discourse these days. Apparently, the sole purpose of the page was to complete the title phrase (though I saw plenty of posts that did not serve that purpose, without complaint), and my post was an act of “hijacking the thread” (the whole page being conceived of as a single thread).

One poster there complained that I should be dismissed for writing “impractical abstract bullshit” rather than manning the phones in order to move the political needle a little. That got me thinking (and pontificating): What is the relative value of my “impractical abstract bullshit,” and what is the relative value of manning the phones to move the polical needle a little (in competition, of course, with those of the opposite ideology, doing the same in the opposite direction). (I also threw in a long list of the other things I’ve been doing to affect the world positively, that might compare favorably to manning the phones….)

So, here are some of the things that economically, sociologically, and legally informed “impractical abstract bullshit” helps with, if you are involved in “politics” (which used to –and still should– mean the art of devising and implementing “policies”):

1) A popular mental health “consumer movement” idea called “money follows the individual” is burdened with the same flaw that the popular “school voucher” idea bears: It allocates money equally to individuals, thus leaving those with the greatest needs in a ghetto of underfunded and underserved extreme problems. (See School Vouchers, Pros & Cons)

2) School reform requires the opposite of current popular incarnations of it, with more attention to community involvement, more attention to holistic and integrated child development, and more attention to creating a culture of positive reinforcement through, for instance, designing school programs and policies which give students a stake in one another’s success. (See Real Education Reform and Mistaken Locus of Education Reform)

3) While we do have to create a trajectory in which our national debt is stabilized as a proportion of GDP, it is not the urgent problem that some pretend it is. In fact, new debt is being financed at a rate about equal to the rate of inflation, meaning that in real terms it is costless to finance. And our current entire national debt is equal to about one year’s GDP, which compares very favorably to the average homeowner, whose household debt in the early years of home ownership is equal to several years’ income. Also, the private sector, to which many conservatives bow as the model to which the public sector should aspire, relies on credit as the life-blood of its operations. (See The Economic Debate We’re Not Having , The Real Deficit , The Restructuring of the American and Global Economy , The More Subtle & Salient Economic Danger We Currently Face, and Why Extreme Income and Wealth Inequality Matters)

4) Popular attitudes toward “illegal immigration” in the United States sometimes parallels deeply discredited historical chapters of identifying reviled “foreigners” living within a nation, and seeking to remove them. While there are important differences between our current political situation vis-a-vis our undocumented residents, and the most infamous of historical chapters of mass xenophobic scapegoating (e.g., our directly targeted foreign population does not include descendents of immigrants, but only those who actually crossed the border after their own birth; and our treatment is not yet at “concentration camp” levels, let alone approaching genocide, though detailed knowledge reduces this gap to an extent that would surprise many, including a family detention center that made small children stand at attention for hours and urinate in their pants). (See A comprehensive overview of the immigration issue, Godwin’s Law Notwithstanding, and Basal Ganglia v. Cerebral Cortex, Basal Ganglia Keeping Score)

The list, of course, goes on (and on, and on, and on…; see Catalogue of Selected Posts), but the point here is that it pays to think about the world we live in; and think about the exact nature of the policies we are currently pursuing or advocating, versus the exact nature of the policies that a better informed and more reflective stance might support instead.

Apropos this discussion, I responded to Ed Quillen’s column in today’s Denver post (The Hazards of Nitpicking: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_19360471?source=bb) with a discussion of the importance of getting the facts and analysis right, rather than merely engaging in the blind partisan warfare and ritualism that the critical poster on that FB page was so committed to. My DP comment (which for some reason does not seem to appear after the column on the DP website) is reproduced below:

Excellent point, Ed!

As a Progressive Blogger (at http://coloradoconfluence.com/) and person engaged, in many different ways, in our shared human enterprise, the only ideology I want to see anyone embrace is the one that acknowledges the limitations of our knowledge and understanding, and commits us to strive to be reasonable people of goodwill working together to confront the challenges of a complex and subtle world.

I cringe just as much when I see a Progressive leap to some insufficiently supported conclusion, or cling to some insufficiently justified assumption, as when I see a conservative do it, because it is just as counterproductive to our collective welfare (more so, in some ways, since it squanders the opportunity to define ourselves as something other than blind ideologues opposing other blind ideologues).

The real political divide isn’t between the Right and the Left (or Libertarians and “Statists,” or whatever substantive dichotomy you might want to define yourself by), but rather between those who, on the one hand, are committed to applying reason to reliable evidence in service to human welfare, all things considered, and those who, on the other, want to engage in blind ideological warfare, relying on cheap and irrelevant shots, shoddy or false information, poorly reasoned arguments, and cynical and base methodologies of all sorts, ranging from mindless marketing of candidates and policies to disingenuous smear campaigns to simply inventing facts to suit one’s ideological convenience, in service to the displaced goals of advancing an insufficiently examined ideology rather than advancing the interests of humanity.

Ed, there is no message that needs to be repeated as frequently and as forcefully as the one you’ve reiterated in this column. Thanks!

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In the Perspective section of last Sunday’s Denver Post, Ray Mark Rinaldi wrote an excellent piece exploring the two competing development visions for Denver’s Union Station (Who’s on the right track with Union Station plans? http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_19312116). What I like about this article isn’t just the informative discussion of a single issue of current significance, but rather how it focuses on one instance of a more general challenge we face: Public Entrepreneurialism.

In all of the ideological noise, the competition of those who consider government the enemy and those who consider corporations the enemy, we don’t discuss enough the shared enterprise we are in, in which both government and corporations are problematic but indispensable players. Treating the public sphere as a popular entrepreneurial challenge, with one of the issues being how best to articulate that public entrepreneurship with the private sector to maximize our welfare through the most robust and efficacious utilizations of both, is exactly what we need more of. This is a wonderful discussion of that oft-forgotten but critically essential aspect of public participation and discourse: How we can act together in productive ways to improve our social institutional landscape. Let’s hope that is the kind of conversation we have more of in the future, displacing the one we already have far too much of.

Public entrepreneurialism is a concept that can join the pantheon of entrepreneurialisms, along with commercial, political, and social entrepreneurialism. Commercial entrepreneurialism requires no elaboration: It is what is normally referred to by the term. The development and implementation of a commercial idea in pursuit of private profit is commercial entrepreneurialism, and it plays a vital role in the ongoing evolution of our social institutional landscape.

Political entrepreneurialism involves political leadership outside of the established and official political landscape, in service to fomenting fundamental political change rather than preserving or operating through the status quo. Gandhi, King, revolutionary leaders and leaders of radical political movements, are examples of political entrepreneurs. They might leverage assets, mobilize resources, and divert profits of other enterprises toward the political goal. Clearly, commercial entrepreneurialism can be a strategic component of political entrepreneurialism.

And, similarly, political entrepreneurialism can be a strategic component of social entrepreneurialism. Social entrepreneurialism isn’t about changing regimes or merely expanding the franchize; it is about altering the culture. Changing the political landscape may be a means to that end, but, for social entrepreneurs, it is not an end in itself. Political entrepreneurs are often also, to varying degrees, social entrepreneurs: Certainly, King was a social entrepreneur to a very large extent, and Gandhi to a lesser extent. (Gandhi’s goal was primarily political: Indian independence. King’s was primarily social: The end of racism.)

But political entrepreneurs do not need to be social entrepreneurs: Many revolutionary leaders are simply trying to topple the current political power structure and replace it with what they believe to be a preferable one, because they believe the preferable one better serves either the public interest or their own interest, or the interests of those close to them, or some distribution among these, depending on the degree to which they are acting idealistically or cynically, and selfishly or altruistically.

All three of these forms of entrepreneurialism, on average, involve a higher proportion of charismatic authority than other forms of leadership (see What is Leadership?), though rational and traditional authority may well be invoked as well.  Social and political entrepreneurship probably rely more than commercial entrepreneurship on charismatic authority (though commercial entrepreneurs are often charismatic; think Steve Jobs), if only because the rewards of the former two are less immediate and less fungible: Those who follow, or work for, a commercial entrepreneur can do so for the promise of income without being otherwise persuaded, while those who follow political and social entrepreneurs generally have to be convinced of the ideals for which they are working.

Public entrepreneurialism is something different from all of these, articulating them into a single enterprise, and doing so from or through the established power structure rather than in opposition to it. It involves the mayor who has a vision for his or her city, the governor who is focused more on long-term development than short-term indicators, the president who has a vision for the country that guides his or her policies as much as or more than the ephemeral tides of political exigency.

It also involves those who try to influence them, not to change the nature of the game, but to play the game that exists more beneficially. Commercial entrepreneurs exist on a continuum ranging from the purely profit-motivated to the socially idealistic and visionary, and political and social entrepreneurs exist on continua ranging from extreme radicalism to subtle tweaking of existing institutions. Those who occupy the ranges closer to the latter poles become more involved in public entrepreneurialism, in partnership with others who occupy the more visionary range of elected and appointed office and bureaucratic careers.

Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, was less radical, less rejecting of the status quo, than Malcolm X; the American Revolutionaries less revolutionary than their French counterparts. The former were more willing to retain much and make changes mostly on the margins, moving the sophisticated package of human history along a slightly diverted trajectory rather than trying to destroy what was and replace it en masse with what they believed should be.

Public entrepreneurialism is characterized, for instance, by the vision touted by recent Denver mayoral candidate James Mejia, involving developing the river front in much the same way that San Antonia did in the latter’s creation of its famous River Walk; and by the vision espoused by now Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper during his campaign, in which he discussed a vision for Colorado that revolved around articulated roles for political, social, and commercial entrepreneurs (see A Positive Vision For Colorado).

Public entrepreneurialism can emphasize different aspects of our social institutional landscape: The economic, the cultural, the aesthetic, the charitable. It can focus on improvements in education, or in the delivery of social services, or in the production of wealth, or in the promotion of fairness and justice and human decency; but, at its best, it involves at least a little of all of these, emphasizing one more than others in each project, but pursuing projects which, taken together, emphasize all of these values.

We are indeed in a shared enterprise, one which we can participate in by “railing against the machine,” or one which we can participate in by “rallying agents of the organism.” The former is often more emotionally gratifying, assuming the role of someone external and superior to that which is. The latter is more productive and realistic, recognizing that we are indeed a part of something larger than ourselves, something that has a history and a value worth preserving and developing. Public entrepreneurialism can be bold, idealistic, even radical at times. But it is the kind of change realized through the realization that no viable change occurs that does not leverage what is to create what can be.

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Grasshopper, when you can snatch the set-up to the logic game from my hand, it is time for you to matriculate….

In a rare moment of mercantile marketing, I am posting to inform my friends, followers, and faithful readers, as well as folks who stumbled onto this page due to clever search-engine maximization protocols, about my availability to assist you in going to the law school of your dreams, on a full merit scholarship, and possibly with a live-in masseuse or masseur (that’s how important a good LSAT score is!).

One of my current gigs, and something I intend to do forever (since it is a part-time job that is easily scheduled around other things), is LSAT tutoring for GetPrepped, a lower priced but higher quality LSAT prep company. First, let me tell you, I love the LSAT. I really do. I took it almost five years ago, scored in the 98 percentile, and, strange as it may sound, did so because I enjoyed the intellectual challenge it presented. The logic games are some of the world’s best intellectual puzzles. All of it involves systematic thinking and reasoning. It is a dream come true for over-educated intellectuals woefully ill-equipped for surviving in anything other than a world designed by and for over-educated intellectuals (or, as we like to call ourselves, “lawyers”).

So, if you are thinking of going to law school, then you have to first take the LSAT. And if you are planning on taking the LSAT, then you have to first prepare for it. And if you are going to prepare for the LSAT, then I am certainly a good person to help you to do so. And, if not me, then one of the other fine tutors and teachers at GetPrepped is ready to guide you through the zen-like journey of discovery that gives you access to “The Zone” –not just any zone, but the one in which questions that begin with phrases like “On Tuesday, an accountant has exactly seven bills to pay by Thursday of the same week, according to the following rules…” cause you to vibrate at the resonant frequency of legal reasoning.

If you go to the getprepped website at http://www.getprepped.com/net/, sign up for a class or 15 hours of tutoring, and tell them that I sent you, you will get $50 off the regular price. If you live in the Denver area, you can also request me as your tutor (you can request me as your tutor wherever you live, but you’ll have to commute to the Denver area for the sessions).

(Please circulate this to anyone you know who is considering, may be considering, or might some day consider applying to law schools; or who may know anyone who knows anyone who knows anyone who fits that description….)

Having recently received a poignant lesson in what effective leadership isn’t, I decided to explore the question of what it is, by considering how individual efforts articulate with what I will call “the social field” (and have previously called “the social institutional and technological landscape”). I will discuss two kinds of leadership: Authoritative Leadership (broken down into Traditional, Rational, and Charismatic), and Surreptitious Leadership (a particular segment of the broader category of “surreptitious power”), as well as how leadership articulates with the innovation and diffusion of ideas. Then I will consider all of this in the context of my overarching social systemic paradigm (see Adaptation & Social Systemic Fluidity, The Evolutionary Ecology of Social Institutions, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology, The Fractal Geometry of Law (and Government), Emotional Contagion, Bellerophon’s Ascent: The Mutating Memes (and “Emes”) of Human History, The Politics of Consciousness , Information and Energy: Past, Present, and Future, The Evolutionary Ecology of Audio-Visual Entertainment (& the nested & overlapping subsystems of Gaia), The Nature-Mind-Machine Matrix).

Social change occurs primarily through three types of interacting mechanisms: Innovation (see, e.g., The Evolutionary Ecology of Human Technology); social evolutionary drift (see e.g., the first six paragraphs of The Fractal Geometry of Social Change); and social organization in service to cooperative ends, frequently in conflict or competition with other organized efforts to accomplish what are presumed to be incompatible ends (this includes intentional social movements, such as, e.g., Transcendental Politics). Generally, these three mechanisms organically articulate to generate the ongoing dynamic of human history. While any enterprise is a portal through which our wills can, with varying degrees of consciousness, interface with this dynamic of change, there are certain institutional processes and roles through which human beings attempt to harness and channel the integrated processes of human history. These are found in the realms of politics, economics, culture, and religion.

Innovation and leadership are the two intentional mechanisms of social change. They can coexist -a leader can innovate, and an innovator can lead- or either can exist on its own -a leader can rely on established techniques, and an innovator can innovate without making any attempt to influence other human beings. Certainly, they are more robust together: Innovative leaders tend to capture our imaginations more, and thus be more charismatic and compelling, while entrepreneurial innovators, especially in the modern era of highly complex technologies, generally need to rally others to their enterprise in order to successfully innovate.

But, regardless of the degree to which they are braided currents in the stream of history, they can be considered separately in order to understand each and both better. I’ve given more attention to innovation than to leadership on this blog; hopefully, this essay will help establish a more optimal balance.

Leadership does not have to be dedicated to social change. A leader can try to preserve a desired status quo, or to resurrect an admired past condition. But, since the world never stands still, leadership affects the dynamic of change over time, even if it does so by seeking to regress or stagnant.

Leaders can occupy established positions as well as create new ones. But, intentionally or not, by becoming focal points around which others rally (or around which other’s actions swirl), they are conduits for the creation and spread of both their own preferred memes, and catalysts for the counterreactions of those who prefer other memes in their stead. As such, even the most conservative or reactionary of leaders, or the most humble and unassuming, are vehicles of social change: Change is the one constant, and leadership is one vehicle by which it occurs.

In most conceptualizations, effective leadership requires that the person in whom it is embodied is perceived by others to possess some kind of “authority.” The early 20th century German sociologist Max Weber identified three kinds of authority: Rational, traditional, and charismatic. Charismatic authority is that aspect of authority that is vested in the personal qualities of the leader. Examples of leaders who have successfully relied primarily on charismatic authority are those renowned civil rights leaders (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.), rebel and revolutionary leaders (e.g. Gandhi), and, in some cases, tyrants who have wrested power from existing governments. But such leaders also exist in more humble movements, in classrooms and community organizations, in nonprofits and government agencies. Charismatic authority is generally a vital ingredient in any effective social movement, on any level.

Traditional authority is that authority that vests due to the ancient (often, though not always, archaic) traditions of a given society. The authority of parents, elders, tribal chieftains, and clergy are examples of traditional authority. This can be considered authority derived from cultural habit, from some deeply embedded and not generally re-examined informal hierarchical structure that simply endures across the ages.

Rational authority is that authority that vests by conscious design, a function of modernity rather than antiquity. Occupation of formal, modern governmental and bureaucratic offices are the quintessential examples of rational authority, from the President of the United States to the clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

These three forms of authority can coexist and interact. Charismatic authority is often a vehicle to being assigned rational authority (e.g., a charismatic candidate is elected to office), and rational authority is often a codification of some pre-existing traditional authority (e.g., the organizational structure of a modern religious institution derived from the ancient traditional authority vested in religious leaders). Religious leaders exercising charismatic authority is a common occurrence (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.; Ayatollah Khomeini).

What we conventionally think of as “leadership” is well mapped-out by these three variants of authority. But that conventional conceptualization only identifies one general form of leadership, what I am calling “Authoritative Leadership.” I believe that there is another kind of leadership as well, one which, again, can coexist and interact with Authoritative Leadership in various ways. I call this other form of leadership “Surreptitious Leadership.”

Surreptitious leadership can take the form of being “a king maker,” making behind-the-scenes arrangements which help imbue others with authoritative leadership. Sometimes, this involves some elements of localized authoritative leadership mobilized in service to cultivating broader authoritative leadership in others (i.e., those close to the surreptitious leader perceive in him or her local authoritative leadership, which is then exercised in service to broader surreptitious leadership). Often, these people are not really “surreptitious,” but rather are perceived as the real power behind the person nominally given the position of authoritative leadership through which the surreptitious leader is operating. For example, Karl Rove, the conservative political strategist who orchestrated the election victory of George W. Bush, was a not-so-surreptitious surreptitious leader (and perhaps Dick Cheney, thought by many to be the real power in the Bush administration, as well).

But there are other forms of surreptitious leadership as well. Perhaps the quintessential example of surreptitious leadership is the “Chinese Servant” archetype employed by John Steinbeck in East of Eden. Lee, the Chinese servant in the household, who pretended to speak only broken English, was really a highly educated and extremely wise individual, who confided in another character that he liked being a servant because it enabled him to control his master. In other words, he played on stereotypes to make himself invisible and non-threatening, but to position himself to whisper in his master’s ear in ways which guided his master’s decisions, who in turn affected others.

This pure form of surreptitious leadership is quiet, humble, and unassuming. It seeks neither credit nor glory, but rather allows others to receive them in order to remain most effective.

There is a subtle distinction between surreptitious leadership and surreptitious power. Though the former generally requires he exercise of some form of the latter, the latter can exist independently of the former. So, for instance, J. Edgar Hoover was famous for his surreptitious power, his ability to blackmail prominent office-holders (including the President of the United States) with information that he had illicitly procured through misuse of his Federal Bureau of Investigation.

This is a case of information being used to control those ostensibly with more institutional power, but not necessarily an exercise of surreptitious leadership. If, for instance, it were utilized only to procure wealth and luxury for the person employing it, it would be surreptitious power but not surreptitious leadership. The more it is used to affect public policy formation, and to channel the actions of multitudes of others down desired paths, the more it becomes an example of surreptitious leadership.

As in the earlier examples of surreptitious leadership, it often involves localized authoritative leadership exercised in service to broader-based surreptitious leadership. So, just as Karl Rove authoritatively led his staff and followers in order to surreptitiously lead the nation, so too did J. Edgar Hoover authoritatively lead the FBI in order to exercise surreptitious power over individuals holding the highest offices of the land.

A broader hybrid of authoritative and surreptitious leadership involves authoritative sources or counselors that surreptitiously lead. The archetypes for this are: 1) the viziers or ministers who counsel, and are the real power behind, sultans and kings; and 2) the philosophers whose ideas are employed by authoritative leaders. Examples of the latter (sometimes called “opinion leaders”) are the 17th and 18th century Enlightenment philosophes whose ideas informed both the “Enlightened Monarchs” and the revolutionary leaders of the late 18th century, and the 19th century American transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau, whose ideas informed both Gandhi and King.

The best leaders combine elements of all forms of leadership -mobilized in service to the innovation, selection, diffusion, and implementation of ideas- not necessarily by occupying every role, but by recognizing and mobilizing every role, channeling their forces and orchestrating rippling transformations which serve the purpose to which their leadership is dedicated.

And so leaders of all kinds -the three varieties of authoritative leaders, and the various forms of surreptitious leaders- are nodes in our dynamical social networks through which memes are collected, synthesized, refined, disseminated, and employed. In The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, they are intensifiers, nodes at which the described dynamic is invogorated according to the wills of those occupying those nodes. Their leadership can be more local or more global, broader or narrower (i.e., affecting broader or narrower ranges of “colors” in The Fractal Geometry of Social Change), more or less salient (i.e., establishing lasting and significant change, or created mere momentary ripples).

Whether authoritative or surreptitious, or some hybrid of the two; whether innovative or derivative; whether more global or more local; whether broader or narrower; leadership is about facilitating change. It is less about the person who occupies the role than how they affect the patterns into which they have effectively tapped (though, of course, the person who effectively taps into those patterns is honored and admired, or reviled, depending on for what purpose and to what effect). The best leaders are focused not on themselves, on their own desires or beliefs or self-glorification, but rather on the world around them, the people they are tryng to influence, the ideas with which they are working, the currents of history they are attempting to navigate. Leadership is more about conducting than commanding, inspiring than imposing. It is not, as we often think, the placing of oneself above others, but rather the immersion of oneself into the system composed of others, in order to affect that system most profoundly.

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(The following is a slightly extended version of my response to an op-ed by Vince Carroll,  Putting Fat Cats In Their Place, in today’s (10/30/11) Denver Post: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_19211159?source=bb.)

Vince Carroll is absolutely correct that we must consider not only the distribution of wealth, but also the absolute growth of wealth, when discussing issues of our economic well-being as a nation and a people. Certainly, if everyone is getting wealthier, then why should we worry if that is accomplished by means of a system in which the wealthiest get astronomically wealthier while the further down you go along the spectrum of income and wealth, the less robust the growth of wealth becomes (less robust even as a proportion of existing income and wealth, meaning a lower percentage of a lower base number)?

There are several reasons why:

1) The growth in household incomes that Carroll cites is due to an increase in two-worker families, and a decrease in stay-at-home moms. In reality, there has been a decrease in real individual average income in that same time period, an anomaly in the modern era of ever-expanding wealth which corresponds precisely with the rise of income-concentrating deregulation.

2) We have an economic system demonstrably less efficient than some others in existence (e.g., Germany, the Netherlands, etc.) at striking an optimal balance between absolute growth and distribution of the fruits of that growth, resulting in far greater levels of impoverishment, infant mortality, homelessness, violent crime, incarceration, mental health problems, and numerous related problems, than have been achieved by other nations that have struck a more sensible balance.

3) Extreme income inequality reduces economic vitality by constricting the breadth and depth of economic activity. The more concentrated wealth is, the less disposable income, in the hands of fewer people, is available to contribute to the consumer engine of our economic vitality.

4) Carroll disregards the role of deregulation (from the 1980s onward) in generating this economically debilitating concentration of wealth, how that deregulation has been implicated in every major economic crisis since its inception, how it has now undermined the consumer engine of our economy in dramatic and enduring ways, and how, as a result, our economy is in a period of stagnation following contraction, with a no-longer-growing pie still obscenely concentrated in far too few hands.

5) Carroll disregards the various costs not measured by traditional economic indicators, referred to in the economic literature as “externalities” (those costs and benefits of economic transactions that affect those who were not parties to the transaction, in either positive or negative ways), which, while helping to author the huge concentration of wealth in America over the past 30 years, also have helped to do so on the back of the population at large by reducing public health, safety, and welfare, and placing increasing burdens of accumulating and devastating negative externalities on future generations across the globe.

6) Extreme income inequality has many other socially destructive consequences, even aside from the ones listed above. It undermines national solidarity and cultivates inter-class resentments, creates subjective feelings of relative poverty, and undermines democracy by concentrating both the means of affecting public opinion (and thus determining the outcomes of elections) and the power to determine the economic well-being of the vast majority of the people of the nation into the hands of a small, corporation-beholden-and-embedded economic elite.

One must look not only at this “snapshot of reality,” but also at the trends revealed over time, and the consequences of such trends. Even if all of the present reasons for considering how equitably distributed wealth is did not exist, a trajectory of accelerating concentration of wealth is clearly untenable in the long run.

Today, 1% of the nation’s wealthiest command 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 80% command less than 15% of the nation’s wealth. In 2007 (see http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html for an overview of 2007 income distribution figures), the top 1% commanded slightly less than 35% of the nation’s wealth (already considered an indicator of astronomical inequity). The current growth trend in capital concentration has been underway since 1980, coinciding precisely with the Reagan-coined “government is the enemy” paradigm of the right; in 1979, the top 1% commanded just over 20% of the nation’s wealth, having fluctuated since WWII between 20% and, in a rare outlier in 1965, 34%.

The last time the concentration in wealth in the hands of the wealthiest 1% of the population exceeded 40% was in 1929, on the eve of The Great Depression, when policies similar to those advocated by the Libertarian Right today had been successfully championed under the Hoover Administration.

If the challenge is to “get it right,” all things considered, then our grotesque and accelerating concentration of wealth in America, accompanied by the highest-among-developed-nations rates of poverty, hunger, homelessness, violence, incarceration, and other social ills, is indeed an indicator of having failed to do so.

Yes, we do not want to seek “equality” in a vacuum, engaging in the folly of imposing an equality of impoverishment. But we as a nation are not teetering on the edge of that particular folly; rather, we are over the edge of the opposite folly, which we insanely avoid addressing by pretending that it doesn’t exist.

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 (This essay was a final exam paper for a Legislative Practice class with Prof. Paul Campos – “the philosopher” referred to in the essay- at the University of Colorado Law School, written in December, 2008)

“The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful.”

-Edward Gibbon, “Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire”

One need not be a solipsist to recognize that he cannot refute the unreality of a law by kicking either it, or its unambiguous and definitive meaning, but neither need one be a Bishop Berkeley to recognize that the reality of law is precisely the fact that we imagine it to have one. We have focused this semester on the elusiveness of the meaning of any given law, and on the various fictions employed to disguise that elusiveness. This, of course, is not a phenomenon particular to law, but rather a basic linguistic (and epistemological) fact: The ambiguity of language (and, more generally, the individuality of perception and cognition) produces a multiplicity of possible interpretations. Any text (or communicative act), especially one that is authored by multiple people through some collective process (such as illustrated by the convoluted politics by which the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed), has no single intent or original meaning, nor does it remain tethered to the context of that process when later readers (or audiences) implement it. Even the meaning of a single text by a single individual is not a fixed entity: Is it what the author intended, or what each interpreter understood? Should it be interpreted literally when experience and context suggest that the purpose of the text is better served by filling in the blanks and adapting it to changes in circumstances?

Given the fact that the interpreted law is a chameleon molded by the various attributes of various minds employing various techniques serving various biases and predispositions, it is, arguably, merely a sham, an “opiate of the masses,” which the magistrate finds useful because it legitimates his power and enables him to better herd the beguiled sheep. To serve this function, the people must be duped by the sham, must accept the law –arrived at by all the various modes of legal interpretation employed by its practitioners (“the various modes of worship”)– as an objective reality, so that they will submit to its authority. And the philosopher deconstructs this system of fictions upon fictions, vacillating between an existential crisis and a concern that he may be abrogating his responsibility by destroying the illusion he is paid to maintain and to train others to maintain.

My thesis is that the philosopher need suffer neither affliction. The comedian George Carlin, somewhat paralleling the Gibbon quote above, said, “Some people see a glass that’s half empty, others see a glass that’s half full, but I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” In other words, it is what it is. We can measure our social institutional framework, knowing that it is all smoke-and-mirrors, against some unattainable ideal of the just and transparent society, and despair that it has fallen so short (the utopian approach). Or we can measure it against it’s absence, and rejoice that we are, to some limited extent, spared the “short, nasty, and brutish lives” of all other creatures (the Hobbesian approach). Or we can, like the philosopher, strive to understand precisely what it is, to reveal the little man behind the curtain, to peel the onion away and find insight in the void thus revealed, but, while doing so, avoid the philosopher’s crisis by mitigating our angst with a combination of pragmatic utilitarianism and benevolent egalitarianism.

The Great and Powerful Oz, Toto, and the Little Man Behind the Curtain

Our legal system is a dialectic of mythos and logos, a functioning mythology operating according to its own internal logic, but also implicitly challenged by the logic of critical analysis. The mythos is employed to legitimate power, and in doing so, to co-opt logos, to convert (using Max Weber’s terms) “traditional authority” into “rational authority,” and to claim that “charismatic authority” (personal authority subject to personal caprice) has been vanquished from the realm of law. To articulate the Gibbon quote, the Wizard of Oz metaphor, and the dialectic of mythos and logos: The people are awed by the mythos (“The Great and Powerful Oz”), while the philosopher (Toto) tugs at the curtain hiding the magistrate employing his machinations (the little man pulling the levers). The magistrate, wittingly or unwittingly, uses mythos (the mechanisms of which are hidden behind a curtain of logos) to beguile the people, while the philosopher uses logos to pull at that curtain and reveal what’s behind it, creating a dialectic between critical examination and uncritical legitimation.

The mythos is that we are “ruled by laws rather than by men.” The curtain of logos that hides the magistrate’s subjectivity is comprised of various theories and techniques of legal interpretation (briefly summarized below). The people uncritically accept these theories and techniques as true and legitimate, the esoteric tools of legal wizardry. The philosopher rejects them all as the sophistry of actors who either accept the play they are in as reality, or pretend that they do. And the magistrate is untroubled by the question as long as order is maintained, and the status quo unthreatened.

The Dead Hand of the Past, the Capricious Hand of the Present, or the Mindless Alternative?

The pleats of the curtain of co-opted logos hiding the little man and his levers are intricate indeed, involving choices along the two primary dimensions of past (when legislated) to present (when interpreted), and narrow (literal) to broad (interpolative). The large folds are defined by three theoretical approaches: 1) intentionalism, which purports to discern and apply the original intent of a statute’s authors; 2) purposivism, which purports to discern and apply the statute’s purpose; and 3) textualism, which purports to discern and apply the statute’s “plain meaning.” Lodged within and draped across these broad theoretical approaches are both specific applications, such as legal process theory and cost-benefit calculations, and the canons of statutory interpretation, falling into three categories: 1) textual canons, 2) substantive canons, and 3) reference canons. There are folds within these folds, of course, linguistic rules, guidelines as to which statutes to interpret how broadly or narrowly, when and how to go beyond the text to “discover” its meaning. But the essence of the matter is that laws are, by the nature of texts rather than by choice, intersubjectively produced, that the interpretive techniques which contribute to their production do not discover something objectively in existence, but rather mold it through the act of delivery, each midwife attempting to finalize the product, but its finalization, to the extent that such exists, being achieved by the subjectivity of an institutionally powerful individual channeled through the artifice of these interpretive techniques.

The inevitability of interpretation is illustrated by Rex v. Liggets-Findley Drug Stores, Ltd., (1919), in which a municipal ordinance required that drug stores “be closed…at 10 p.m.” every day. A narrow literal reading of the ordinance would imply that the drug stores could close from 10:00 p.m to 10:01 p.m., and then reopen without violating the ordinance. The Canadian judge who wrote the decision held that “we should take the words to mean what they would quite clearly mean to the ordinary person,” that the stores should remain closed for the rest of the day (but could they then reopen at midnight?).

In Rector, Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892), Justice Brewer employs a “funnel of abstractions” to argue that an “accurate” interpretation of a protectionist statute barring employers from paying for the passage of imported employees should not be read to bar the church from paying for the passage of an English minister: From the least abstract (the “common meaning” of the word “toiler”), up through the specific intent of the statute as applied to this case, through the general purpose of the statute, through the social policy it serves, and, at the highest level of abstraction, to the greater social good intended. Even had the argument been strained at some or most of these levels, the others could have been used to come to any preferred conclusion.

Steven Smith, in “Law Without Mind” (88 Mich. L. Rev. 1989), frames the conundrum this way: According to current legal theory, we have essentially three choices: 1) “originalism,” whose primary defect (setting aside the epistemological problems of determining original meaning) is to bind us to “the dead hand of the past,” thus limiting our ability to inform our implementation of the law with the values and challenges of the present; 2) “pragmatism,” whose primary defect is the replacement of “the rule of law” with the caprice of judges; and 3) “present-oriented interpretation,” which “seeks to appropriate the virtues of each,” but, by freeing itself both from “the dead hand of the past” and the living caprice of the present, relegates itself to the realm of the arbitrary. The defect of the present-oriented interpretation, according to Smith, is that it neither binds judges by the political will of the legislators who enacted the statute, nor empowers judges to pragmatically “promote present values and objectives.” Rather, it surrenders human rationality to an inanimate text detached from its authors but binding on its interpreters.

Zen and the Art of Legislative Interpretation

The theories and canons summarized above purport to address the fundamental ontological and epistemological questions of legal interpretation: 1) what is the law? and 2) how do we know what the law is? The normative as well as descriptive versions of these questions are implicit within them: 1) what should the law be? and 2) how best should we determine what the law is? As disciples of the philosopher, we know that it is ultimately impossible to determine what the law “is,” that it does not have a fixed objective reality independent of our act of interpretation. What it is is inherently elusive; what it should be is a debate framed by various fictions. How, then, should we conceptualize the enterprise?

“What is law?” and “What is the best way to determine what law is?” are both similar to the question Robert Pirsig asked in his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “What is quality?” Is “quality” (in reference, say, to art or music) what a few self-anointed experts say it is, or what is most popular? Neither solution seems quite satisfactory: The consensus of experts (embracing, for instance, dots on blank canvases and atonal compositions) often appears more pretentious than insightful, but popular preferences (for, say, paintings of Elvis on velvet or songs by Brittany Spears) often appear more anesthetizing than aesthetically redeeming. Similarly, in academe, post-modernists and positivists ridicule one another for being either oblivious to reality or oblivious to the lack thereof, and no authority stands over these feuding camps to declare which paradigm is of higher “quality.”

But this elusiveness does not mean that “quality” does not exist. We know it does, can come to general agreement on some isolated examples (such as that a requiem by Mozart is of “higher quality” than the latest pop hit), and can wink among ourselves at some more contested examples (such as whether Sarah Palin or Joe Biden was a “higher quality” candidate for Vice President).

“What is the law?” and “what is the best way to determine what the law is?” are similarly elusive questions, similarly contested by the highest authorities, but referring to something as real, and a process as inevitable, as the recognition that “quality” exists. To arrive at the best (i.e., most functional and most fair) answers we need to embrace this reality rather than rage against it. The fundamental “defects” in legal interpretation we’ve discussed this semester are inherent ontological and epistemological limitations; they cannot be remedied, and therefore should not be cause for despair. They are parameters rather than variables, givens within which we operate rather than malleable factors upon which we can work our will. The self-help organization “Alcoholics Annonymous” has enshrined the appropriate attitude to take toward such parameters in The Serenity Prayer (“Give me the strength to change what I can change, the patience to accept what I cannot, and the wisdom to know the difference”). As obnoxious as it may be, it is none the less a pearl of wisdom: What sane alternative is there to this sage advice?

Therefore, the facts of diffuse authorship, unrecoverable original intent, and the inevitable injection of the interpreter’s subjectivity in the act of interpretation are not, per se, legitimate causes of concern, because they themselves (as opposed to how they inform strategies in response to them) are fixed constellations that can neither be wished nor legislated away. It is reasonable and useful to recognize and be informed by these facts, but not to lament them. To what extent these parameters should be openly acknowledged, and to what extent they should be discretely downplayed, is a question inevitably addressed by the process discussed in the next section.

The Political Epidemiology of Reifications (and other memes)

Within the parameters we are obliged to accept, we are confronted with sets of interrelated choices: To what extent should we prefer the “dead hand of the past” to the caprice of the present, and to what extent should we bind judges by increasingly elaborate algorithms of interpretation, perhaps, at the extreme, programmed to evolve by meta-algorithms as they encounter unforeseen circumstances, rather than delegating discretion to judges, incurring both the benefit of the latter’s more supple minds and the detriment of their prejudices and predispositions? How much caprice can be permitted without undermining legitimacy, and how much rigidity can be imposed without undermining substantive reason and justice? Steven Smith presents us with three alternatives, each of which reifies something clearly dysfunctional: either the increasingly anachronistic supposed intentions of the legislators who enacted the laws, or the prejudices and predispositions of judges largely untethered from those texts, or the decontextualized constraints that bear a disconcerting resemblance to medieval trials by ordeal. But to proffer no acceptable alternative is to beg the question: In this imperfect world, what is the best we can do?

In a sense, we are doing it right now. The people, the philosopher, and the magistrate are all just muddling along, individually and collectively pursuing desired goals, and, through some combination of trial-and-error and proactive innovation, carve our social institutions in the lathe of time and numbers. “Memes,” like genes, are packets of information that reproduce (are communicated), mutate (are altered through interpretation and innovation), compete for reproductive success (e.g., guns or spears? pantheons or Yahweh? socialism or capitalism?), and thus evolve (Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 1976). The myth of “the rule of law” is a somewhat successful meme, and in many ways beneficial to our collective existence: The magistrate is not wrong that the techniques by which it is maintained are all equally useful. But neither is the philosopher wrong to question the validity of those techniques, to analyze them, and to seek to refine them. Order without justice is oppressive; justice without order cannot exist. The reification of “the rule of law” provides more order than justice, but its absence provides neither. The challenge, then, is to accept its reification, and to maximize the justice produced by refining the particular form of that reification.

This is not a benign process, nor one actually pursued as a global collective enterprise. My use of the first person plural (“we”) has been a simplification that must now be unpackaged: The selection of genes according to their relative reproductive success produces organisms that are carved by the requirements of such success. This biological algorithm produces complex arrangements of both cooperation and competition, and a variety of strategies. Humans embody what may well be the epitome of the flexible strategy, one which in fact produces an echo of the evolutionary process in the form described above. We can conceptualize and communicate in order each to pursue his or her own fundamentally selfish agenda, which generates ever more sophisticated forms of cooperation along the way (just as biological evolution does, in the formation of ecosystems). Cooperation is so advantageous to those who can overcome the obstacles to it that our social institutions -our hierarchies, our markets, our norms, and our ideologies- are laden with mechanisms to align our individual and collective interests, through structures of legitimate authority, means of exchange, informal social approval and disapproval, and values and beliefs which create cognitive dissonance when we fail to police ourselves.

But the politics of the processes which produce these arrangements is an ever-present element. Cooperation is a means to compete more effectively: People, historically, band together to gain advantage over others. Human history is, in a sense, the story of conquerors and the conquered. Conquerors become rulers and nobles; the conquered become peasants and laborers. The competition between conquerors and their respective states, however, forces refinements to more effectively raise and finance armies, which forces some decentralization of power in order to better exploit the state’s human and natural resources in service to this competition. The decentralization of power fosters and facilitates resistance to power, while concessions by the powerful become increasingly expedient. By these and other mechanisms, the modern world saw the rise of “liberal” societies, and the ideologies that accompany them. But our social institutions still bear the imprint of violent power struggles which produced somewhat hereditary winners and losers, and our social institutions are still the arena within which such power struggles continue to ensue.

So, while order is useful, complacency about the existing order is always unjust. The reification of “the rule of law” facilitates our aggregate prosperity, but it disproportionately benefits the rich and powerful, because the rich and powerful were (and are) its authors. Justice requires resistance and criticism; justice requires Toto tugging at the curtain. It is a happy coincidence that evolutionarily successful memes have facilitated processes of decentralization of power and diffusion of wealth, and probably will continue to do so, gradually infecting even those societies less blessed by egalitarian social institutions. The egalitarian values that have gradually and incompletely matured in conjunction with this decentralization of power and diffusion of wealth reinforce the process, and motivate actions in service to it. But the underlying dynamic by which all this has happened, and will continue to happen, is essentially political, involving strategic behaviors in pursuit of personal and local advantage.

 By sublimating primal conflict and channeling it through peaceful social institutions, humans prosper. Belief in “the rule of law” has proven to be a powerful meme contributing to the effective sublimation of that primal conflict. But the struggle for an increasingly just society that can and should take place within that social institutional context necessitates vigilant attention to the reality behind the myth, to the political exercise of power inevitably embedded in the depersonalized reification. There is an inherent tension that cannot be escaped: The sublimation and pacification of human conflicts and passions accomplished by the reification of “the rule of law” is simultaneously oppressive and liberating. It liberates us from the “war of all against all,” but it institutionalizes the brutality of huge disparities of wealth and power. And as such it challenges us to strike the delicate balance between maintaining the myth and resisting its ossification.

In light of this analysis, the goal of legal interpretation, then, is not to be true to the political will of those who enacted the statutes, nor to avoid the “mindlessness” of “present-oriented interpretation,” nor to eliminate the caprice of judicial pragmatism; it is, simply, to maximize the justness of the imposition of authority on those who have been pacified by that authority. Clearly, the respective defects of these three modes of legal interpretation each reduces, in one way or another, the justness of the authority thus imposed. But just as “the perfect should not be the enemy of the good,” neither should it be the enemy of the merely possible. Identifying the most just, or perhaps the least unjust, option among all known alternatives (while simultaneously attempting to contemplate alternatives not yet known), and engaging in the political struggle to implement it, or to implement a compromise that approaches it, is the best we can do.

The fact that these competing flawed paradigms are discussed and debated, each having its own authoritative supporters and detractors, with the ever-present possibility of new additions entering the fray, is precisely the robust competition of memes required to prevent the ossification of a suboptimal status quo. Nor is it merely an ivory tower academic exercise: Judges themselves, by the choices they make, subject these paradigms to the crucible of human experience. It is a messy and often unjust process, but, at present, I can think of no way to improve upon it, and if and when I do, I will merely be participating in it. As John Maynard Keynes subtly put it (before Winston Churchill appropriated the quote in particular reference to Americans), “Men (sic) will do the rational thing, but only after exploring all other alternatives.”

The Emperor’s New Clothes

The law, like all social fictions, is a naked emperor whose clothes we are taught to admire. Law school is the in-depth analysis of the fine raiments the naked emperor wears. To the curmudgeonly philosopher who feels obliged to point out that the whole process is the reification of an unreality, that the real fates of real human beings are decided by a confused little man behind a curtain, that the Great and Powerful Oz is all smoke and mirrors, this vast fiction is malignant rather than benign, half empty rather than half full. But it is neither particularly malignant nor particularly benign; it is what it is.

Not all social fictions, not all social institutional contexts, are equal; not all are of equal “quality.” A quick survey of systems of justice and checks on power that the world has yet produced suggests that the myth of “the rule of law” is worth retaining for the time being.

That the fiction evolves, driven by some combination of psychological needs and material desires, through political struggles large and small, is, at the very least, one of nature’s fascinating wonders. Rather than apes foraging in the African savanna, naked and vulnerable to all of nature’s limitless injustices and indignities, humans now live clothed in the products of the mind, which inflict limitless injustices and indignities of their own. And yet, these fictions, these products of the mind, these technologies and social institutions, afford me the luxury of contemplating them, while sitting in this comfortable chair, sipping my favorite beverage. Through such contemplations, and a prospective career dedicated to helping sew and select the naked emperor’s imaginary wardrobe, I hope to marginally influence the evolution of legal memes in such a way as to ever-so-slightly increase human welfare. The American judicial system is still laden with injustices and indignities, with intolerable frustrations and galling deficiencies. There is no cause for complacency. But this horribly imperfect system fares well in comparison to known alternatives. And it certainly beats running from lions on the African savanna.

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As I’ve frequently written, the fundamental ideological dichotomy in American politics today is not the right/left dichotomy (or “statist”/libertarian, or pro-corporate/anti-corporate), but rather the rational-people-of-goodwill/irrational-people-of-ill-will dichotomy. Perhaps that latter dichotomy is always the real dichotomy in politics, in all times and places; or, if not the real dichotomy, then at least the real poles of perpendicular axes, with various specific ideological orientations falling within the space thus defined. How reasonable are the various positions being advanced? How much in service to humanity?

As is usually the case, people at opposite ideological extremes are oddly similar, obsessed with oversimplistic panaceas in a complex world, angry that others fail to recognize the one absolute truth of which they are so prematurely and impenetrably certain. Just as fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims share a tendency toward theocratic moral tyranny, the extreme right and extreme left of political ideology share a failure to recognize that we are embedded in a complex dynamical social system, that the reality with which we are coping and the ways to do so effectively are organic rather than mechanical in nature, and that dogmatic assertions about what single change or doctrine need be advanced, without adequate consideration of that complex organic whole, are counterproductive.

What we need instead of these sweeping reductionist ideologies is a commitment to systemic understanding and systemic action. Not surprisingly, extreme ideologies tend to be anti-intellectual, either explicitly refuting the value of applying our minds to the challenges we face as a people (as is frequently evident among some factions on the far right today), or implicitly eschewing the value of skepticism and scientific methodology as applied to social and political issues by clinging to blind ideological certainties instead (as is too often evident on the far left as well as the far right).

We see this commitment to systemic understanding and action emerging from time to time in what to many are counter-intuitive positions being advocated by responsible representatives of otherwise highly opposed ideological orientations. I recall, for instance, the ubiquitous public relations push of a couple of decades ago for continued investment in space technology, putting various pairs of ideological opposites on screen together lauding the benefits of doing so. For many, the notion that we should invest significant amounts of our limited resources in aerospace research struck many as counter-intuitive: We have so many problems to address here on Earth, why should we be squandering precious resources on something so frivolous as the development of exotic technologies for use beyond the Earth’s atmosphere?

Of course, the case for investing in such technologies is that, by doing so, we create a constant flow of valuable off-shoots with very significant applications here on Earth. Simply by trying to understand and work with some highly complex aspect of our surrounding reality we benefit ourselves, even if the focal aspect of our surrounding reality seems remote or irrelevant.

A similar, also to some counterintuitive, example of a policy position that all reasonable people support is the need for Americans to invest in our infrastructure. There are those, lost in the error of linear thinking in a non-linear world, who insist that we cannot invest in infrastructure because we have a huge and growing national debt, and that therefore no investment is justifiable. This is simply an economically illiterate position, not understanding how economic growth occurs, both as a historical fact and as a basic systemic reality (see, e.g., Real Fiscal Conservativism, The Economic Debate We’re Not Having and The Real Deficit).

To underscore the degree to which investing in infrastructure is a no-brainer, the presidents of both the U.S. Chamber of Commerce AND the AFL-CIO have teamed up to encourage Congress to pass the president’s call for investment in infrastructure (http://www.uschamber.com/press/releases/2011/march/us-chamber-afl-cio-urge-infrastructure-bank, http://blog.aflcio.org/2011/01/26/union-movement-business-back-obamas-call-for-infrastructure-rebuild-and-other-sotu-reactions/).

The right has long claimed that government is inefficient because it doesn’t create wealth, and doesn’t act in ways similar to how private enterprise, the engine of wealth production, acts. The first point is a red herring, because the only sector of our economy that “produces wealth” directly is labor; all other sectors perform auxiliary functions (e.g., management, capital investment, etc.). Government, in a modern capitalist economy, imperfectly performs vital functions for the production of wealth, including reducing transaction costs and internalizing externalities (see, e.g., Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems and Small Government Idolatry).

The second point, that government doesn’t act like private enterprise and so fails to perform as well, has some validity in some contexts, but is mere misdirection when, at those  times when government is indeed employing sound economic principles in ways very similar to private enterprise, the same critics obstruct rather than applaud such efforts. Investing in infrastructure, and even doing so through deficit spending, has long been a hallmark of successful private enterprise in a modern capitalist economy. Businesses large and small depend on credit as the lubricant of economic growth, and it makes perfect sense for governments to do the same.

Just to put our debt into perspective: We currently owe an amount equal to our annual GDP, and are paying interest on new debt that is about equal to the rate of inflation (that is, when adjusted for inflation, we’re paying zero percent interest on new debt). An average homeowner, conversely, borrows about four times their annual income in order to purchase their home, and pays a far higher interest rate on that debt. Without this form of credit commonly in use, very few people would be able to afford to purchase their own homes. Credit, even proportionately far larger than our national debt, and at a far higher interest rate, is clearly not by definition a bad thing.

The problem is not our current debt, or even any immediate additional debt we undertake, but rather our ability to make economically sound policy decisions as a nation, including implementing a plan to control the long-term rise in debt (without which our national debt will eventually become the problem that some, erroneously, consider it now to be). One aspect of such economically sound policy making is the ability to use deficit spending to grow the economy in order to produce both greater individual prosperity and greater future public revenues in order to reduce our national debt and increase our national prosperity in the long run.

It’s time to leave the blind ideological noise on the margins of our public discourse, where it belongs, and bring well-informed analyses in service to human well-being front and center. When the leaders of organized labor and big business are both advocating the same policy, and when that policy has been proven by both world history and private enterprise to be a sound one, all reasonable people should have the good sense to rally around it.

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Mi película favorita en mi niñez era Espartaco, con Kirk Douglas. Cuando el ejército de esclavos estaba conquistado y en cadenas, el general Romano dijo, “Denme a Espartaco, y esclavos eran, y esclavos serán. Si no, todos ustedes van a morirse en la cruz.” Espartaco no podía dejar eso pasar,  y estaba al punto de anunciarse, cuando su mejor amigo se paró mas rápido y gritó, “¡Yo soy Espartaco!” Entonces otro, y otro mas, y todos empezaron a gritar, “¡Yo soy Espartaco!”

Cado uno que tiene valor, que tiene alma, que tiene un fuego en su corazón, aun si un esclavo en cadenas, es noble, tiene dignidad y esperanza. Es un esclavo hecho héroe, un carpintero hecho dios. Y cada uno que se fija en el sufrimiento del mas oprimido, y se siente un poco de lo que ese humano siente, cada uno que toma responsibilidad por el trato ajeno, comparte el corazón de humanidad.

Yo no voy a pretender que soy hispano. Soy judío con antepasados del noreste de Europa, como Kirk Douglas (que no era esclavo y no se murió en la cruz). Pero somos un pueblo, una raza, gente unida por la mente, el corazón y la historia mundial que compartimos. El destino ajeno es el destino propio. Su destino es el mío. Sus esperanzas son mis esperanzas. Su lucha es mi lucha. Porque  justicia no existe si no existe para todos. Es un desafío compartido.

Tampoco debemos creer que la lucha por justicia para los hispanos es algo que existe aparte de la lucha por justicia para todos los demas. Somos un pueblo, con una lucha, con una meta: Que la humanidad se haga mas consciente, que toda la gente de buena voluntad se junta en contra de injusticia y en servicio de la razón y humanidad. Así somos un pueblo. Así somos invencibles.

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I believe in the human endeavor. I believe in our ability to become ever wiser and more compassionate as a society. I believe that the technological and social institutional innovations we’ve come to take for granted, many of which were unimaginable just a few short generations ago, are ripples on the surface of an unfathomable sea of possibilities, and that what we accomplish in generations to come, like what has come before, will appear in retrospect not just to be more of the same, but rather profoundly revolutionary and transformative, and acceleratingly so.

But there is nothing automatic about the direction this punctuated evolution takes, and no guarantee that it will be benign rather than malignant. In what ways and to what extent, in service to which emotions and inclinations always vying for dominance within and without, we free the genius of the many, this captive giant fuming within her prison of oppression and repression, of intolerance and intransigence, will determine what wonders and what horrors we unleash.

Will we find new, more sterile and yet more virulent ways to enslave minds and souls, to shackle the human spirit by overlords of fear and bigotry, using our genius against itself in acts of brilliant inhumanity? Or will we harmonize more deeply and fully, through soaring but disciplined imaginations, with the malleable but coherent dream of which we are but a part?

Our minds form an ecology of their own, with flora and fauna of our fancy reproducing, evolving, giving way to new forms. We thrive best when we harvest most of that cognitive diversity, articulating the novel into the complex, sublime whole, accommodating more, suppressing less. So it’s no surprise that a sociologist such as myself, who perceives us less as a collection of individuals and more as slightly individuated moments of a shared consciousness, would become an advocate for mental diversity and mental freedom, for that mind we share does not best thrive by imposing as much conformity as fear and convenience counsel, but rather by tolerating as much non-conformity as wisdom and compassion allow.

If this movement, and this organization, were just about helping those in mental or emotional distress to find greater harmony within and avoid the ravages of a brutally destructive psychopharmacological paradigm imposed from without, that would be more than enough to inspire me to join in the effort. But it’s also about all of us together finding a richer and subtler harmony among ourselves and beyond ourselves, about that mind we share spiralling toward enlightenment, and about the increased wealth of joy and wellness we can produce together, from which we all can draw.

It’s to that latter ideal that all of us who believe in the human endeavor ultimately aspire.

(For essays and vignettes related to this one in various ways, see, e.g., Kick-Starting A ClearMind, Symptoms v. Root Causes, An Eddy In The Stream, The Politics of Consciousness, The Fractal Geometry of Social Change, The Hollow Mountain, and A Proposal: The Politics of Reason and Goodwill.)

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(The following fictional vignette explores some aspects of “mental diversity,” a term I coined while helping a friend start up a non-profit dedicated to a more holistic approach to mental illness. For some expository discussion related to it, see, e.g., Individual & Society: Conformity v. Accommodation, The Variable Malleability of Reality and The Fractal Geometry of Social Change. For related fictional narratives, see The Wizards’ Eye and “Flesh Around A Whim”.)

My parents began to worry when I first started speaking. Initially, everyone thought it was cute, the way I spoke only in verbs and adjectives and adverbs and prepositions and conjunctions. But when I turned three and still hadn’t uttered a noun, the visits to doctors began, specialists of all kinds poring over me to find and fix whatever was broken.

I didn’t perceive them as others do, of course. I didn’t perceive them as distinct things, but rather as swirls in the stream, thoughts and beliefs and routines and even the physical stuff through which they flowed itself flowing, coming into this eddy or that and out again to enter another. I couldn’t express all of this, of course, at least not in words. I could only see it and feel it and know that it not only was real but was more real than what others perceived. And that’s why they were so intent on curing me!

Many of the experts I was sent to at first believed that I was suffering from developmental retardation, because I had not developed any sense of “self” and “other,” or any ability to identify discrete objects or people around me. All I saw were colored streams and rivulets flowing in unbelievably complex patterns and sub-patterns, similar yet different, across endless scales and creating endless ephemeral forms.

I sensed that these patterns could be tweaked and altered by acts of will, by undulating frequencies of vibrations launched into them, by complex sequences of movements in response to combinations of localized and dispersed messages flickering across chains of internal and external pathways, the whole reconfiguring around every new variation injected into it, and every new variation emanating from the coherence of the whole. I wanted to reach out and pluck the polychromatic threads dancing around me, but to do so required my will in interaction with the will of others and the will of nature itself; I could not do it alone.

But I could see that a single will, channeled through the right vibrations and mobilized by the right cascades of signals within and without, could affect other wills, could mobilize them in desired ways, or cause unintended and undesired reactions; and that, by doing so, this moving tapestry surrounding and permeating me could be altered in varying ways and to varying degrees, requiring varying amounts and kinds of force, using varying types of tools (themselves the product of previous pluckings of these threads); changing the trajectories of these interwoven threads and the patterns they formed, altering history on scales large and small, sometimes rippling outward in cascades of accelerating change, sometimes petering out as a small detour into oblivion.

I learned to write but initially used little punctuation, and when I did only commas, semi-colons and question marks. Obviously, since then, I’ve learned to conform to accepted modalities, using nouns in both speech and writing, using periods and exclamation points. I even have come to appreciate their convenience, enabling me to say little inadequately in abbreviated and easily digested form, rather than anything truly meaningful which requires at least a lifetime to utter.

For instance, it’s so much easier to say “people,” one word for all occasions, than “interconnected by talking and writing and mimicking and imagining,” or “passionately striving, exploiting, and manipulating” or “fearful and hopeful and feeling and yearning,” along with all of the other various ways to express that moment of energy, that swathe of the cosmic dance as it manifests in various contexts and circumstances.

I’ve always understood why people become angry with me when I try to speak their language (they just are uncomfortable and walk a wide arc around me when I speak my own): I offend them by saying something rather than nothing, opening the mind to the torrent of reality rather than helping to stack the verbal sandbags against it. I’ve always understood but lamented it, because that torrent liberates rather than harms. Fortifying against it is the construction of one’s own prison from within, and yet that is exactly what we generally use our words to do.

Though the world and I danced in ways that sustained me on multiple dimensions, that fed my physical and spiritual whirlpools, I could not tweak the fabric of reality alone, at least not as substantially, and certainly not enough to truly thrive. Very few can; none, if by “alone” we mean not just without human cooperation, but also without nature’s cooperation. And I could not control the torrents of human emotions and their physical expressions that swirled around me in response to my strangeness, that swept me up and whisked me away. So, without others accepting what I had to offer, and offering what they had in return, my insights meant nothing, and my survival was always tenuous.

My teachers, for instance, were beside themselves (or, as I saw it, made more turbulent by my presence). I was quickly diagnosed as ADHD, psychotic, and just plain nuts, put on an “individualized education plan,” and assigned a special education teacher who slowed things down so I could keep up. Unfortunately, that just made it even harder for them to keep up with me.

Soon, certain kinds of swirls (tight, contained, buffered) were causing things to be introduced into the swirls that comprised me, things that were supposed to make me vibrate and flow in more manageable ways, to help me “focus” and then sleep, to “stabilize my mood,” and, I suspect, to just make me as much like everyone else as possible. In our society, people preach tolerance for others of different ancestry, religion, color of skin, and sexual orientation…, just as long as they, as individuals, don’t dare actually be different in any less superficial way.

What we as a society don’t tolerate, are unwilling to tolerate, is any actual variation of perception and understanding. That is a threat that must be squashed.

Now, I’ve been cured. I see the world as others do, speak and write as others do, am dulled and reduced even more than others are. The pills I must take keep me up at night, cause me all sorts of physical problems, have made it hard for me to think and function at all, though to the extent that I do, I do as others expect me to. Yes, now I’m cured….

I was an eddy in the stream, unique and beautiful, interesting and integral, but they’ve removed everything that distinguished me from the undifferentiated flow, everything that made me who and what I am. Now, I use nouns and periods, and say little in inoffensive ways. Now, I have been reduced to the blandness that others demand, in service to their convenience or their fears, and that impoverishes us all. That is the triumph of civilization, conquering me rather than flowing around and through me as I am, as I was, preserving the treasure of my individuality and, by doing so, enriching the mind and soul that we share.

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