Cascades of Failure

The malaise in the air is not merely constrained to one side of the Atlantic. Writer Charles Stross has similar feelings in the UK. While the conspiracy sites and cranks have been at it for decades, they do inadvertently provide a venue for certain types of news before the mainstream media diverts them to the masses. Things like the NDAA, LIBOR scandal, surveillance, and other stories all filtered through the alternative media before the mainstream one picked it up.

Imagine the headlines if it did: Centuries of legal tradition abolished! Democracy in death throes! Republics turning into hollow counterparts of themselves. (And so on.) Even if they did, however, there is a fundamental thing that many of the conspiracy sites miss (such as the unwittingly hilarious Alex Jones show): this is a systemic decline. The various scandals are just the symptoms of a larger issue, systemic decline and cascading failure. Attempts to fix the system from within often amount to putting a bandage on a terminal cancer patient. 

Resource depletion, escapism in all its forms (such as utopian wishing and dystopian nihilism), wars, unrest, and the like are stirring this up. There is no single mastermind behind it. There are a small clade of professional parasites that benefit from the ride down (police state shills, plutocrats, neocons, investment bankers, lawyers, lobbyists), but locking them up would be largely symbolic. A better approach could be to invest in what comes next: relocalized production of food, energy, and manufacture. Networked communities largely leaving each other on their own (but still assisting each other), rather than nation-states (although smaller nations, city-states, and microstates make economic/political sense).

It is not the end of the world, despite what the dying Boomers think. As the world economy flies off the rails, the answer is not to double down on failed policies. It is to step back, and focus on what truly matters: home, friends, and building a place welcoming to both. It is not the Apocalypse, but Ragnarok. A new world awaits on the other side.

The Process of Perversion

Continuing with last week's theme of regulatory capture, I mused on the process itself. A robust institution may maintain several failsafes in case of abuse. In a free society, this often comes in the form of transparency from the public and press. The judicial and legal branches (in theory) act as ways to ensure the social contract. Security forces exist to enforce the laws of the land and protect citizens. These institutions essentially go mad, as catabolism wracks the system. We live in such a time where most of these had failed. The security system has become an end, rather than a means of defense. In an age of enforced frailty, the best defense is resilience, and opting out whenever one can. 

Regulatory Capture and Assassin's Creed

While another whistleblower story dominates the online and mainstream media spheres, I would like to focus on a larger issue at hand: regulatory capture. Regulatory capture occurs when individuals with clear conflicts of interest are appointed to positions where the role of the position can easily be abused for private gain at the expense of the general public. Now, certain positions' own requirements can often make them innately prone to such capture, such as financial regulation done by former investment bankers.

A certain videogame franchise, Assassin's Creed, focuses on a war between two secret societies, the Assassins and Templars. The Templars attempt to centralize power, and the Assassins try to keep societies open and free. While they have similar methods, such as subversion and (of course) assassination, both factions generally stick to the shadows. Generally, the Templars tend to be prone to abusing their positions, despite lofty rhetoric about bringing peace. When something outside of their control arises (such as a new political entity, economic system, subversive technology, or scientific discovery), the Templars instinctively try to repress it, or failing that, co-opt or hijack it. Thus, the Templars are able to directly use societies' most powerful institutions (governments, corporations, etc.) as their weapons of choice, while the Assassins are limited to the fringes of civilization (although they try to 'make friends' within the status quo when possible). Thus, the Assassins constantly seek out new ideas and tools to break down or subvert the status quo while the Templars try to reinforce it.

There is a neurological and psychological basis for this eternal clash of order and chaos. Some personality types may be authoritarian, and most people subconsciously prefer even a false sense of comfort or reassurance to change (even if the change would be better). Human beings are social animals, and our sense of "us" and "them" shapes our senses of moral and immoral, as well as social and antisocial behavior. By contrast, some intelligent and creative people are not as burdened by the mores they were taught, and are more open to experimentation. (This is one reason that artists and intellectuals tend to be the first to vanish during political purges.)

Likewise, as institutions fail, power becomes increasingly centralized in a few institutions. Those few functional institutions left can easily host opportunistic parasites as regulatory agencies fail. Unlike Assassin's Creed, however, real life does not require an organized conspiracy to conquer the world, but only the continued unraveling of the rule of law. The worst sorts of people rise to the top, like the biggest pieces of stool floating to the top of a clogged toilet. The end result is a positive feedback loop leading to increasing instability. The only feedback to this is criticism and openness, which is anathema to kleptocracies, It will be interesting to see how the show goes. The covert war of real human history has always been a set of elites against historical forces. We shall see how this one plays out.

Lessons in Supervillainy: Attorney General Eric Holder

Today's lecture will put an example of practical supervillainy into focus. A supervillain, by definition, uses their rank, connections, and abilities to commit massive crime, prevent the administration of justice, or preferably administer injustice. Now, in the United States, there is a Department of Justice, the group in charge of law enforcement administration at a Federal level. The Attorney General in charge of the DoJ is a Presidential Cabinet member and a powerful figure in the interpretation and enforcement of the laws of the land. 

As such, assignment of the position to a corrupt and/or criminally incompetent person would seriously compromise any attempts to retain the rule of law across the USA. As of this writing, the current holder of that position has done his best to turn the DoJ into the Department of Injustice. Appointing a corrupt public official to a position involving legal matters is the very incarnation of regulatory capture.

The list is certainly something worthy of a Bond villain more than an equitable arbiter. Some noteworthy events:

-Mexican drug cartels were armed by US law enforcement.

-Spying was performed upon all manner of political groups.

-There is a failure to prosecute the admission of nearly a trillion dollars with of money laundering for criminal and terrorist groups by mega-bank HSBC.

-The latest scandal, surveillance on even mainstream media reporters, is merely the icing on the cake.

 This is no isolated case, either. Neocon remnants of the Bush years linger on like a bad hangover. Interventions (overt and covert) continue. With due process free drone assassinations, indefinite detection on no evidence, blanket legal immunities for political and corporate leaders, and a growing gap between the rich and poor, what could possibly go wrong?