In this piece I'd like to respond to Craig Nulan's question regarding Corporate Sovereignty. But I find that in doing so I'm circling around some very important first principles.
..I'm curious to know whether your actual core advocacy is for the rule of law per se, or, for the rule of law as a necessary environmental substrate for corporate sovereignty?
Is your political philosophy rooted in the ideals of corporate sovereignty or individual sovereignty? Which governance model do you consider most conducive to advancing the cause of Black partisanship?
I'm going to take a long time to answer that and go some important places along the way. Please bear with me. But first let me address the reasons I have used the term 'collective' instead of 'corporate', one is to telegraph the answers one should expect of a conservative and the other is that I recognize the aspect of the collaborative in all human social activity is the same.
First directly to the corporation itself. What is a corporation? It is an entity organized for the profit of its shareholders, generally a business with organizing principles that pools the capital resources of a large number of people and groups for the attainment of a set of specific goals. A corporation is very often an abstraction in that regard. Its goals may have nothing to do with the goals of the individuals and groups invested in it, nor is it necessarily under the direct control of its owners. And in that arises the moral dilemma which I believe drives Nulan's question. The corporation is a very powerful organization indeed, and with the willingness of investors to profit at any expense, a successful corporation can accomplish almost anything. Specifically, corporations can be engaged in destructive, immoral enterprises. We'll keep that in mind.
My admiration for Capitalism is twofold. Primarily I am astounded that it channels randomness and allows us to predict the future. I mean this in the very deep way that the mathematics of Black Shoals gives investors ways to manage risk and thus create risky enterprises, and in the deep way that accountancy gives order and completeness to infinite activities. Secondarily that it provides for an extraordinary organizing principle specifically opposed to war. Competition in commerce satiates bloodlust, and the metaphors for war in the business world are apt.
Nevertheless I hedge against Capitalism via Religion. I think we have few pure examples but in general, under Western law, both are expressed fully. More on that later.
I have a longstanding principle in my head which I have held before I converted from Progressivism to Conservatism and it works along the lines of the bigger they are the harder they fall. I call it the social implications of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. Basically because no system of logic can be complete and consistent, nor can any human endeavor. Nevertheless our brains don't hang when we are inconsistent; we percieve things to be consistent. So our systems of governance and everything else have inherent flaws that cause conflict even when we think they are perfect. The more all-encompassing the system, the more people are involved the greater the possible cost to humanity by the inevitable flaws. I have always therefore arranged my life around small perfections, now that I think about it. (This is taking me back to Freshmen and Sophomore years), chief among such small perfections were mathematical and philosophical proofs, software programs and musical compositions.
The individual solution to being a victim of the inevitable conflicts and crashes of all collective endeavors was limited loyalty. If one leads a life of liberty, one became relatively safe. I think this is demonstrably true.Out of ignorance or choice, all of us have limited loyalties to all of the institutions. So I have always believed that individual freedom to adhere to or oppose or ignore any institution or collective endeavor is a fundamental necessity. To deny this choice of the individual is to lock them to the fate of the collective, which will inevitably fail. This is essentially predestination, and we simply can't have that, it's slavery. Even when we don't and can't see how an institution or collective endeavor is distined to conflict or fail, we Americans are fundamentally opposed to permanent associations. Nobody could have predicted how Enron might fail, and though it was a complete catastrophe we wouldn't force those employees all to go down with the Enron ship and be permanently unemployable by any other company. We assume their limited loyalty, we assume their liberty.
And yet I believe that there are limits to whose bounds we are irrevocably wed whether we want to be or not. No human can defy the laws of physics. In fact our very existence depends on them - and yet we live under them ceaselessly. Not only that, but the the laws of physics are never unenforced. Yet because of the way we behave (despite fantastic wishes to travel faster than light or travel through time) we do not feel particularly encumbered by the restraint placed upon us. We are enjoying Liberty (relative freedom) but not absolute freedom. So too the laws of society can be arranged in such a way that we can enjoy liberty without feeling particularly encumbered by the law. The law can accomodate the perception of liberty (remember we are inconsistent but believe we are not) in two ways: limiting scope and limiting enforcement. But the aim of the law is to gain adherence and therefore maximize its aegis. The law must be seductive, it must offer adherents benefits for which they are willing to trade freedom. In America this underlies our social contract.
Before anyone gets jittery about trading freedom to the laws of government, recall that any and all of us do that for the sake of a job. Relatively few of us are propertied to the extent to which we don't have to submit to contracts of employment. We certainly give up a great deal of freedom in order to eat in the belly of this urban beast called the American city. We need a job, a gig, a 9 to 5, and we give up, on average directly 40 and indirectly probably another 28 out of 168 hours of our week to that. That's 40% of our lives, another 30% of our lives we're asleep. This underscores our perception of liberty. I believe Americans know very well of their ability and desire to use the old cliche 'take this job and shove it' in defiance of the costs to their liberty that jobs impose.
At this point I should say that it should be obvious that our contract with obeying the law puts us under less obligation with regard to enforcement than does our contract with employment. However our contract with employment generally has a much narrower scope than our contract under the law. Our boss hovers a lot closer than the cops. Note the irony of the inversion though. In the social context of work, your boss is a lot more likely to influence how you dress, communicate with others, physically locate yourself and spend your time than a cop, but the things that your employer actually requires of you is narrow. Whereas there are host of laws that have to do with the way you raise your children, what your employer can do, how you drive to work, that you pay taxes, how you may recieve health care.. In any case, since all of these are collective endeavors, the law, the business of employment, as an individual your safety depends upon you acting in your own self-interest expressed as limited loyalty.
So we accept permanent limits to individual loyalty as a matter of individual survival. We structure law to be seductive and not oppressive or meddlesome. That's where I am.
Black Partisanship is very much like corporate lobbying. But it assumes racial and therefore permanent fidelity. You will always hear people talking about the 'permanent interests' of African Americans as inviolable axioms of black politics. In fact blackfolks are black when they want to be and so demonstrate their limited loyalty to these black poltics. In otherwords, they refuse to be spoken for and daily prove that black unity operates only in theory.
My political philosophy is rooted in defense of the individual's right to defy any and all institutions. I expect him to enter into social contracts and business contracts and sacrifice freedom in exchange for protections and relative liberty. And I expect the individual to respect those contracts but have the right to arbitrarily terminate them and exercise limited loyalty. I think contracting parties working for collective endeavors need to recognize that their ideas and organizations cannot be both consistent and complete and that the more people they encompass the more dangerous and costly their failures will be. I will say that I believe that nations are as big as this stuff scales, and under certain circumstances, empires. I believe America is too big to be a nation and too libertarian to be a proper empire. I like it this way, though. Geopolitically I am interested in watching the border conditions at which nations fail or are formed. What's in transition now are destabilizing elements of intelligent decentralization due to the advances in information technology like the war between the blogosphere and the mainstream media.
During this time of destabilizing transition between the 20th Century nation-state and globalization, I am increasingly authoritarian, which is to say that aspects of my conservatism are hedges against the dissonance of anarchy. Interestingly, I do so because I firmly believe that somewhere on Maslowe's pyramid is place where the evolved and stable institutions of government and religion and cultural associations with land/turf are strong fallback positions. People who have no opportunity to take advantages in the changes and evolution at the top of society, what us self-actualized individuals are doing with all of our free time and capital, need to be satisfied with their lot in life. It's bad enough that we can have mad scientists underground tinkering with nuclear physics, we can't have everybody experimenting with all the dimensions of life and still have a place to call home.
But I do expect the fruits of experimentation to trickle down in an orderly fashion. It's a great thing that space-age plastics can be used for baby bottles. It's a fabulous thing that hydroelectric power from the Pacific Northwest lights a classroom in South Central LA. So I cannot abide a lower class collevtivism that is oppositional to the infrastructure and institutions that provide these advances. I'd rather see them doing as they do, which is to say buying baby bottles and lightbulbs at Wal-Mart.
Our nation, such as it is somewhere between nation-state and empire, managing the dislocations of the 21C should provide for its citizens a bedrock of laws which handle the social contracts for all of its classes of people. It should be premised on liberty for the individual and yet be supportive of collective endeavors be they non-profit, religious, educational, capitalist corporate, with the right of the individual to challenge any such contract. That's what we have. Open borders and all. I think we all have an obligation to defend such a remarkable system and hold up our end of the bargain of citizenship.
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