Equality and hierarchies do not mix.

There seems to be a peculiar form of rhetoric, where “equality” is professed but where in practice all sorts of hierarchies are implied. This is the rhetoric of the highfalutin, “noble” sort, making lofty-sounding but not-well-thought-out statements about the inherent dignity of man and so on and so forth. People give a lot of credit to such pronouncements even though they are not worth the paper they are printed on.

It’s still interesting to look at the contradictions inherent to that line of thought. For example, we look at the US Constitution, which starts as the following:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The weird part is that none of these clauses are actually true. The Constitution was not written by “we the people”: it was written by a small group of rich privileged white males who were conscious of the masses’ ability to self-rule and wanted to keep a stranglehold on the territory of which they had led the creation. What’s more, the language of these clauses seems to be grounded in equality (the “common” defense, the “general” welfare, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves- “we the people”, and so on), but the US Constitution establishes a government, a hierarchy of power, with virtually unlimited powers.

Another good example is the U.N. “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (once again, flowery rhetoric: what is “universal” about it?). While its first article states that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and right” and that they should “act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood,” many other articles are a contradiction of this principle.

But then we start getting into judiciary issues:

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals…
Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal…
Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.

But this is a direct contradiction with the first article. A tribunal, by definition, implies that some human beings have more rights than others: the judge, for instance, has the right to direct the course of a trial and make major decisions about it, without any appeal except by his peers; he is, for all intents and purposes, the king of the “court”; an unaccountable power of, basically, life or death, which no other individual has. Not only that, but he is not chosen by any party: he reigns on a purely arbitrary basis. The jury, by comparison, is carefully selected and is completely dependent on the judge’s orders, and can only render a final verdict which is contingent on the admissible evidence as well as the judge’s own interpretation of the law. Juries are, in any case, not universal by any stretch.

It’s also very hard to see the equality and the brotherhood in a system where your guilt or innocence heavily depends on your ability to pay a special group of people who can navigate an extremely complex formalized system, is determined by a corrupt confrontational process, and can lead you to be kidnapped or even killed on the basis of rules no one ever agreed to.

The next problem is that the Declaration makes a lot of references to arbitrariness: it stands against “arbitrary arrest, detention or exile,” “arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence,” and to be “arbitrarily deprived of nationality.” Nowhere in the Declaration, however, is it mentioned how exactly this arbitrariness is decided. Is it decided by some standard? Or by some person, and if so, who?

Since the Declaration is signed by “States” (skipping the ontological nonsense of how an abstraction can approve or sign anything), we are to assume that the States themselves determine what is or is not “arbitrary.” Therefore all these articles mean absolutely nothing. Any State may formalize any given arrest, detention, exile; interference with privacy, family, home or correspondence; or deprivation of nationality as being “non-arbitrary.”

Articles 13, 14 and 15 heavily use the concepts of borders, country and nationality. Yet all these concepts are hierarchical: since the borders are entirely imaginary, arbitrary and unjustifiable, they have to be maintained by force. This use of force necessarily implies wielders of force and victims of force, no matter how many rights are attached. And if the Declaration is correct that “[e]veryone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country,” then what is the justification for a border’s continued existence? This is therefore a contradiction: either the border has some rationale for its existence, or it should not exist at all.

There is also the concept of property (which I’ve already discussed as being the basis of all hierarchies), and many other concepts that make no sense given the premise, but I think you get the idea.

My basic point here is not that this “universal declaration of human rights” doesn’t have good things in it, but rather that there are profound contradictions between a professed desire for equality and a more concrete belief in all sorts of systems where there are necessarily superiors and inferiors, perpetrators and victims, decision-makers and targets of decision-making, orders and obedience. No matter how good-intentioned, their only possible outcome is tyranny on a massive scale.

All constitutions, all the declarations of officialdom, all political speeches, are of this type. What seems to be hard to understand is that the very concept of people being equal precludes such documents. The very concept of people being equal precludes blueprints of rights to be acquired or not acquired, blueprints of institutions to be built or destroyed, blueprints of what is and is not acceptable.

Hostages Say Chiquita Funded Death Squads

I really don’t know what to say except for the title, so… here is the article. Uh, yeah. Hooray for capitalism! Just chalk this one down as another “worst corporation ever” story, along with all the other stories of people being murdered with US corporate moneys…

Former hostages of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) say Chiquita owes them treble damages under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act, because the New Jersey-based company paid FARC up to $200,000 a year for 10 years.

In a March 2007 plea agreement, Chiquita admitted it had paid $25 million and funded the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) – a right-wing, anti-labor death squad – and other terrorist groups, according to the eight plaintiffs’ 82-page complaint.

The FARC and the AUC fought for control of land and lucrative cocaine crops for years, through open war, death squads and terror.
…
By helping FARC wrest control of local labor unions, Chiquita carved out “a competitive advantage over other banana growers facing less accommodating unions,” according to the complaint. Chiquita also allegedly benefited from FARC’s harassment of competitors in the region.

“Defendants knew that FARC engaged in acts of terrorism against U.S. interests in Colombia and knew the danger that providing material support to FARC would pose to the safety of other individuals and entities working within Colombia, but defendant ignored these risks in order to further their own narrow business interests in growing and exporting bananas in Colombia,” according to the complaint.

Here is another recent story of a corporation deliberately killing people, with comments by Kevin Carson.

Massey’s mountaintop removal operation was fined $50 million by West Virginia courts for polluting its neighbors. But hey, if you can afford to spend $3 million replacing an unfriendly justice with your own stooge, running attack ads (he “released sexual deviants”) that would make Lee Atwater or Karl Rove proud, those pesky fines are easy enough to deal with. (Blankenship was spotted in Monte Carlo a few months later partying with yet another buddy on the Supreme Court.) $3 million to buy a Supreme Court justice, to overturn a $50 million fine from a lower court — that’s what I call a pretty good return on your money. It reminds me of all those colorful stories about railroads buying legislators and Congressmen wholesale back in the Gilded Age.

Blankenship also opined, by the way, that it’s perfectly OK for elementary school kids to inhale coal dust from his operations while playing on school grounds. You see, Massey “already pays millions of dollars in taxes each year.” Ever see that episode of The Simpsons where a young Monty Burns ran down workers in the street for the sheer joy of crippling them, and then tossed money out the window?

Blankenship, it seems, is also a major corporate Tea Party sponsor, appearing at last year’s Labor Day Tea Party with the charming duo of Sean Hannity and Ted Nugent.

And to top it all off, here’s a story about how a biotech company almost wiped out the whole world.

How did the leading biotech researchers of the day not realize that they had engineered a bacterium that would kill all plant life it touched? Did they not test it on any, you know, plants?!

Well, for all intents and purposes: No, they didn’t.

Israeli Army makes shirts promoting the killing of Pregnant Palestinian Women in Gaza

Polycentric Order on “anarcho”-capitalism…

Here are two entries from the Polycentric Order blog on “anarcho”-capitalism and its controversies. The first explores the issue of authoritarianism being more than just about aggression, specifically that land property itself is a form of authoritarianism. The second discusses why morally nihilistic Anarchism is not a viable position.

How do I relate all of this to the state? Well, above and beyond it’s aggressive origins and the questionable nature of its aquisition and maintainance of land, the state is problematic because of its exploitative function. It is an authoritarian institution. Aside from the questions of land aquisition, the only thing that meaningfully differentiates it from a land owner that exploits people is a matter of scale. Even if a land owner aquires their power consistently with the anarcho-capitalist norms for property aquisition, there still is the pressing question of their power. If their power, qualatatively speaking, cannot be particularly contrasted with the type of power claimed by a state, then in my eyes the land owner is a state for all intents and purposes. If someone “voluntarily” aquires a chunk of land and goes on to claim “ultimate decision-making power” over anyone that lives or occupies that area, I have trouble seeing how this meaningfully differs from a state.

To be clear, scale is completely irrelevant to my concern here. This is an issue of quality, not quantity. The area of land in question could be as small as an estate or as large as a “nation”, but the principle of the matter would be the same. A neo-lockean land owner that reduces other people to serfs is an archon, even if they do not have control over an area as large as modern nation-states. They don’t even necessarily need to be perpetually initiating aggression on their subjects – modern nation-states don’t even technically do that, they survive on the inertia of power and ideology in addition to aggression. States claim the legitimate power to establish whatever rules they want over everyone that inhabits a particular geographical area. For all intents and purposes, modern states are gigantic land proprietors. If a smaller scale land proprietor claims or excersizes the same or similar powers, it very well be or quickly turn into a state.

“Where did the information come from?”

There seems to be a new sort of Creationist argument, drawing on information theory, which argues that the presence of information in DNA, or the increase of information in DNA, proves that DNA was created by an intelligent designer. Information, they say, can only be the result of intelligent agency, and cannot arise on its own. And without the information contained in DNA, evolution can’t get started.

A good example of this argument is this creationist paper written by Werner Gitt. The paper in question is absolute nonsense, full of misrepresentations, assumptions, and incredible leaps of logic (only the first third of it, which is concerned only with historical discoveries and statistical facts, is accurate). But it is a good example of what we’re dealing with.

The Creationists start at the right place, which is to ask what information is. But they miss the point completely when they start including the concept of code. Take Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, since it’s used by Gitt. He argues that Egyptian hieroglyphs were regarded as information even before we knew how to translate them, because “they obviously did not originate from a random process.” But without the code, how can we posit that? Understanding of the process that led to the creation of symbols can only start from our understanding of the meaning of those symbols, if there is any at all (case in point: how do we know the Voynich manuscript is not random gibberish based off of a natural language? I certainly don’t want it to be, but I don’t discard the possibility).

More importantly, the statement that “not random process=information” is ultimately trivial. The colour of flowers is information about the composition of the soil, our blood content is information about our health, the shape of clouds is information about the weather, and so on. In general we can say: every thing which has a cause conveys information about said cause. But this is a useless principle, since, everything around us having a cause, it tells us absolutely nothing.

And of course, none of these things are designed by a mind or any intelligent designer. They arise naturally, within the framework of cause and effect. The only reason why the Creationists use the word “random” is because they hold to this weird belief that evolution is random. That’s what it’s all about! But the process of evolution is no more random than any other form of cause and effect.

In fact, it’s rather ironic that Gitt himself uses the example of a language to make his point, since words, syllables, rules of grammar, and all other features of languages, evolve much in the same way that DNA does. Sure, language is man-made, but it wasn’t created the way it is now, any more than current-day organisms popped out of nothing. It seems strange to classify one as random and another as non-random.

The main issue is actually much simpler than that. It has to do with differentiating between information and its meaning. When the Creationists say that information cannot be explained, they don’t mean that the color of flowers, the composition of blood, or the shape of clouds cannot be explained. Rather, they are talking about meaning itself. Genes in the DNA strand have a structured and structuring meaning that a cloud doesn’t have. It has its own characters, syntax, and grammar, in short, it is more language-like.

But there’s no reason to consider such a structure special compared to other forms of information. No information has innate meaning. Without the knowledge of human languages, a book is just a bunch of paper pulp with blots of ink on it. In the same way, without knowledge of cell biology, DNA is just a double strand floating somewhere in the cell for no particular reason. The information in DNA is not innately meaningful.

So in a sense, all meaning is “designed,” in the sense that it is created by the individual. But there is no reason to believe that information has to be created. This information argument is therefore no different from any other god of the gaps argument or watchmaker argument. From the materialist perspective, there is no more reason to single out DNA than there is to single out any other part of this universe; if Creationists were really serious about their argument, they should be just as puzzled about cloud types or blood tests, or pretty much anything else in the universe, than they are about DNA, and there would be no reason for them to single out DNA as being especially significant at all.

Sociopathy as the “killer” moral argument.

UPDATE: This entry has been linked to by some bigot who calls me an “abnormal mentality.” All I can say is, don’t encourage the trolls (which is why I will not post a link to his blog).

***

I’ve had some interest in sociopathy, and I decided to read Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, a book from the most established expert in the field, Robert D. Hare. I wasn’t exactly bowled over by the book itself. Many conclusions were unsupported and obviously were only adopted by Hare because they are more conducive to him getting money. There are also some logical gaps. All in all, it’s a spotty piece of writing.

The theory behind it, however, is clear enough. Sociopaths are people who have no conscience, no empathy, and no higher emotions. They see other people as nothing more than means to an end, and have no qualms about lying, hurting and killing others. They feel no guilt about their actions. Despite being only around 2% of the population, they compose a large proportion of criminals, and a majority of the violent criminals. The more successful sociopaths spend their lives exploiting others to get up the corporate or political ladder. Sociopaths are attracted to instant gratification and control over others most of all.

And the problem is not that they don’t understand laws or rules or mores: they do understand them, but they simply don’t have the motivation to follow them. These are individuals whose ethics are very limited, because they lack the internal components that would motivate them to be ethical. They understand that other people suffer, but they don’t have the empathy necessary to relate it to their own experiences. They understand that hurting others is wrong, but they can see no reason not to do so. They understand the consequences of breaking the rules, but long-term consequences simply don’t register.

The first conclusion we can draw from this is that sociopathy proves that morality is innate. If the opposite was true, and that all that sufficed for an individual to be good was for him to be subjected to, and understand, laws, rules and mores (including their consequences), then sociopaths should not be different from the rest of the population in that regard. But they are drastically different. The only possible explanation for this phenomenon is that morality is based on internal mechanisms, and disabling these mechanisms necessarily disables the ability of the individual to distinguish right from wrong, regardless of how much he intellectually understands the difference (forcing a disbelieving blind man to remember by rote that “there is a river to your right” is not the same as actually seeing the river).

This is not really surprising: Kropotkin already proved it a century ago, and scientists keep “discovering” it every year (and somehow they’re always surprised by it, and forget all about it the next year). But this is probably the most elegant proof of them all.

This also leads us to the interesting conclusion that sociopaths are, to a certain extent, innately evil. But that’s what the more principled statists claim all human beings are. They believe that without laws, rules or mores, human beings would be in a constant struggle against each other, because human beings are innately evil and only seek self-gratification at the expense of all other goals. This description actually almost completely fits sociopaths, the only difference being that sociopaths are like this whether laws, rules and mores exist or not.

The other interesting aspect to this is that sociopaths themselves seem to have a very pessimistic view of human nature. They share with statists the belief that man is innately corrupt, that you should harm people before they get a chance to harm you, and they see weaker individuals as being saps, as deserving to be harmed because of their weakness. In a pastiche of leftist views, they see themselves as victims of society, their upbringing, and so on; they cannot accept that they are at fault because they actually do believe that they have done nothing wrong, even if they were mass murderers.

Hare himself draws the exact opposite conclusion: his position is that anarchism, not statism, is more like sociopathy. In fact, I believe he falls into this confusion because he fails to differentiate between internal and external rules. He assumes that because Anarchists refuse to conform to external rules, they display something that is like a lack of conscience.

But that merely means that he has failed to grasp the lesson that morality is innate. As Lysander Spooner has demonstrated, moral laws, which he calls natural law (and which we now know to be an evolutionary adaptation), are universal and accessible by all- which we must now amend to mean, all those who are not hindered in their mental capacities in the way that a sociopath is. We Anarchists have nothing but the greatest respect for these moral laws: in fact, we often oppose hierarchies on the basis that they break these moral laws constantly and with impunity. For example, the excellent documentary The Corporation details how a corporation is like a sociopathic individual (and with the personhood granted to corporations, we can also say “literally”).

We Anarchists do not reject internal rules, rather the contrary. We also do not reject external rules which are legitimately established by the will of the people and implement rational and fair justice. We only reject external rules which are not legitimately established- a prime example of this being the byzantine system of laws and show trials which currently binds us. Suffice it to look at the actions of Anarchists and the actions of the policemen who gas and beat them to see which side is closer to cold wanton violence in the name of self-indulgence.

So once we realize that, we must examine legalism both from the aspect of outer rules and from the aspect of inner rules. The Anarchist rejects only part of the former, but the sociopath rejects both. Seen from that perspective, the sociopath is seen to correspond perfectly to the concept of atomistic individualism: an individual who lives as if he is in a vacuum, making decisions in complete disregard of society or any part of society. So not only is the sociopath a representation of the statist’s straw man, but he is a representation of the collectivist’s straw man as well.

In fact, sociopaths are our enemies, both on the criminal side and on the hierarchical side. Their lack of conscience and empathy makes them expert criminals, and their capacity to exploit others and their lack of remorse makes them good at climbing organizational ladders. And Anarchists should strive to learn more about them, because it is always better to know one’s enemies.