Social Contract

Abstract

Civilization as a process over time that people subjected themselves to. The process of extinction of the hunter-gatherer way of life has examples in written history. Advantages used by settled groups such as superior numbers of those in cities against those of hunter-gatherers led to their conquest. The rise of the state: irrigation for crops likely the cause of the rise of government. In the economic arena, there was the rise of crafts
There was a corresponding change in religion from Shamans to priests and the end of equality and the rise of class. The beginnings of war came thereafter.
The other end of civilization: Collapse and rebuilding, invasions by non-settled peoples. Civilization collapses and settled people are invariably conquered by non-settled people.
Is there a Social contract? Was the social contract ever presented? Is it a valid contract between equal parties?
The basis of every society is the Social Contract, which is entirely fictional and no more real than Rawl's Veil of Ignorance.

    The Social Contract is a concept used in political philosophy whereby a contract  binds together the ruled and rulers. It usually states that humanity subjects itself into society via willful choice. Abuses will bring punishment, and that law will rule over all and there will be some common good. There are two proponents of this: Rousseau and Hobbes. But has this ever been an event or is it only a concept used by philosophers to justify the existence of the state superstructure overlaying the modern social body? When one  views the history of the transition form the 'natural state' into settled people, there occurs something different from any compact between the governors and the governed. The change happened slowly, in a gradualistic process more akin to geologic time than anything we associate with history. The small roving bands became chiefdoms, and these chiefdoms morphed into monarchies as the transition from horticulture to intensive agriculture took place. The process was a total transformation of what it meant to be human. By the time society came into being in cities, there was nothing like a party to a compact, but merely a subjected populace and the rulers these de facto slaves supported.
    Thus, one of the obvious problems of the social contract is the idea of when it began. An additional one where different individuals with different social standing came to cut a deal to divide their rights and whether anything like this ever occurred. The formation and dissolution of society are so historically common that to pick any of the occasions of this would necessitate a book. Instead, if one is to be honest, one  must go back to the original transition between the 'natural man' as a hunter-gather to Homo Civilis, the being that today inhabits the earth. .
    Hobbes: 'The equality of ability arises from the equality of hope. Therefore if any two people desire the same thing which they cannot have they become enemies and try to destroy each other. Hence it is manifest that during which time men live without common power ….life is nasty, brutish and short.'’
    Rousseau: 'Although in this state he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his soul so uplifted, that, had not the abuses of his new condition often downgrade him below that which he left.....'
    On the one hand, Hobbes claims the state of nature to be entirely undesirable. On the other Rousseau thinks that it has advantages but that so does the state of nature. The first idea of the social contract theory is that there exists man, 'in a state of nature'. What does this mean really? This state usually goes undefined. Beyond philosophers, what can one  find out about the state of nature? Aristotle says that man is a 'social animal'. But there are other social animals, so an examination of them will help. We clearly cannot compare ourselves to insects, despite our current numbers we are still mammals. To take an obvious example, Wolves also have a social structure. Lone wolves are wolves who live outside this social structure. Chimpanzee society resembles human society the closest: chimps have complex dominance structures and engage in conflict. So humanity, in its basic hunter-gatherer structure resembles a combination of a wolf-pack and a chimpanzee troupe. So this is the 'natural man' that the philosophers speak about without proper definition. His/her state of nature is an egalitarian extended family moving about surviving by hunting and gathering naturally occurring plants-the transition to society came later, and took many generations.
    The rise of the state is not something that can be easily tied down in a matter of fact. The rise of agriculture after many generations of horticulture and modifications of crops into  a form of wheat that could be cultivated en masse required an irrigation system which itself required administrators to oversee it. The hunter-gatherers thus would be slowly absorbed and driven off the richest land, and into the hinterlands. The rise of the Scythians in Asia would be an example and all of the nomadic groups that followed them. In the historical record, there have been many instances of non-settled people converting their way of life under a monarchy or another imposition. Norse Pagans would be an example. On another extreme are the extermination of Siberian peoples by Russian Cossacks and the settlement of North America to the detriment of its native peoples, that is, the act of genocide by settled peoples against non-settled ones.
The process of civilization was as follows: Acculturation of the values of the settled community. In the adaptation to the environment that they created, so was ascribed status, that is, a noble class which fed off of the work of others. At some point between the transitions from chiefdom to full monarchy, hereditary nobility took charge; social stratification then took hold, and deculturation of the skills and norms of the hunter-gatherers followed. They lost the ability to hunt and find food on their own, and became tied to the land even in times of drought and starvation. The birth of peasantry was the final result from the process; that is a group of people who were one harvest from starvation. Therefore, by the time the society rose, there was nothing like equal parties present to a contract. Instead, there was a king ruling over craftsman and then peasants with the point of the sword. Health and sanitation were horrible in ancient cities. Though it is not universally so, we know that the Indus Valley Civilization had clear streets and public bath facilities as well as indoor plumbing. Clearly infectious diseases followed these cramped conditions with otherwise would not have been in play. So the move to cities led to a loss of quality of diet. It is also a fact that most causes of infant mortality are diseases that found their breeding ground in ancient cities. So it is clear that the first mass of people to become dwellers did not benefit from it. It may have taken some time for them to lose the skills that allowed them to live on the land. Or it may not have taken much time at all: Families that supported themselves in the Great Depression via gardens and hunting have lost those skills only a few generations later.
    The spiritual values changed with the physical. The change in religion was one where the language of ritual and spiritual hierarchy took the place of Shamanic practices. People enjoyed ritual drugs, an example of which would be Soma in the Rig Veda. In contrast to a society which consumed beer in large quantities and whose priests held a monopoly on contact with the spiritual. The rise of the state meant the rise of crafts and with a division of labor came a class system, and these artificers had the task of making weapons for the army of the god-king. The monopoly on violence and the army itself gave them and edge in warfare. The difference in combat would have been of numbers and severity. War would have been just as brutal as hunter-gatherers, but now it was possible to raise thousands in an army where hundreds would have been the upper-limit in a tribal setting. The evidence of animism is everywhere in cave art. The transition to theism clearly came with settlement. The idea of a powerful deity, usually a paramount solar one as the king of the gods meant that the celestial/astral realms followed their earthly counterparts. The social order was divine. Thus, the change in economics meant a change in spiritual values. Language requires an explanation for dominance. Therefore, most ancient cultures merely said that the gods had written the social order in the sky.  The Bible acknowledges that writing was so powerful that literacy never spread outside of a scribe class. Therefore, the audience for the written tale would be small, though no doubt priests would pass it verbally to the common citizens. The idea that the social order was divine was, therefore, also a justification for the 'master-class' in treating its social inferiors as lower beings. Writing overtook verbal storytelling as a transmitter of culture for the elite. The people who were not literate did not have this. Literacy is one clear demarcation between humanity and its closest cousins and made the sort of varied multi-generational societies which have popped up all over the world as possible. It became possible to leave a legacy other than the biological. The written word enhanced the capacity for cultural evolution. Deification of the sun followed the transition to intensive agriculture. Celestial objects had always been venerated by now with the shift from a nomadic society to a settled one; the power of the sun to bring crops was seen as paramount. Time was always something humans had been aware. Winter would surely bring a shifting of the migratory patterns and types of game, but now knowing the very time of year in which one resided gained much importance. The very concept of a year would come from this. The proliferation of mega-scale architecture using stone monoliths as giant calendars came in this period.
    The repeated collapse of complex societies and their constant wars with nomadic tribes suggest that it is not a simple interaction. Thus, the social contract appears to have never been torn up, because with each collapse there is a rebuilding of the same type of society. Modern societies in the West are either democratic-leaning or republics. Both of these societies pay lip service to the concept of a social contract. What significance does the social contract have if it is nothing but a foundation myth for the modern west? If everyone born today was never presented with the contract, and their ancestors never were, then how would one register the displeasure towards the system? There are two schools of thought on this: to engage in political participation or to revolt.
    Democratic societies are in reality variations of representative republics, with only the Swiss Cantons practicing a true democracy. The myths of the state even extend into the realm of national founders. The national myth is a uniquely American behavior in today's world, in fact, the mythic nature of the explanation of national origins goes back to the stories of Solon and Lycurgus. They were both semi-mythical figures who founded two city-states that would bequeath the world a democratic/republican tradition which has planted itself in New Delhi, Tokyo, Seoul, Moscow, and Pretoria. Globalism has a political edge. Revolution seems to be an event where people clearly repudiate the social contract by overthrowing the political system. Revolutions are clearly a redefining of the social contract. But in reality many revolutions fall short, but why? Why did the Communist revolution in Russia, run by syndicalist 'soviets', lead to a totalitarian state? Why did the American Revolution lead to a country that was the last to ban slavery and whose presidents have power that King George could not dream about? Because shedding blood is the language of violent repression in the state and once formed, the state will only replicate itself. By accepting this language and its blood-sacrifice lexicon, you are inevitably leading to the very institution that a revolutionary society  worked to overthrow. Simply put the state was established by violence, and anyone seeking to overthrow it with the same will only perpetuate the same pattern.
    So if these 'wages of civilization' are so negative then what type of changes need to come about to address this? Firstly, a return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not desirable or practicable.  Ancestors made the choice to settle in cities and had a reason for doing so. Barring a near-extinction of the human race the global population would not be capable of surviving and the damage to most of the biosphere has been severe and would not make for ideal living conditions.
    You must question all the idea that is as absurd as the proposition of 'original sin' would be to an atheist. The myth of the social contract is positive in that it at least suggests that society have a consensual basis. The same idea is dangerous in that it misconstrues legitimacy of authority as based on some social contract which happened in the past, and binds future generations to it. The common alternatives are a 'love it or leave it' approach. If one does not accept the existence of the state one should just 'move to Somalia' or some other randomly chosen undeveloped nation. This is problematic in that it suggests that the globalized world has political diversification that it does not. It also binds each generation to the mythic events of the past.
    The social contract was an 'event' that never occurred. It is a concept used for political legitimacy. The actual process of transitioning from a 'state of nature' into civilized life involved slow and painful change over time. The change encompassed spirituality, technology, daily habits, and even the very perception of time itself. It culminated in a dominance hierarchy which was self-perpetuating and whose main method of keeping control was force. In the age of globalization the system of representative democracy has become common, as well as its foundational cornerstone the social contract.

The Indirect Approach to American Foreign Policy

The Indirect Approach to American Foreign Policy

American foreign policy has been dominated by the question of preventing attacks on the Continental United States such as those that occurred on 9-11. I would have to argue that on balance the terrorist acts do not justify the response which has devastated two countries and has no end in sight, despite two declared ends to the Second Iraq War and an occupation of Afghanistan that has gone on longer than the Soviet intervention in the same country. The resolution to the current international tensions present in the world is that the United States should stop supporting covert operations in which the right hand of the federal government does not know what the left hand is doing, and stay out of regions in which is has no actual national interest like the Ukraine. Leaving aside the aforementioned crisis in Ukraine and the sequel to the Cold War which the human race can only hope will get stuck in development hell, the primary conflict the United States is engaged in is called the War on Terrorism. Terrorism, legally speaking is only the threat of violence to accomplish objectives, and there exist criminal statues for dealing with the act, statutes which have been applied to countless everyday people in situations ranging from altercations to domestic disturbances. So the idea is so vast as to include ordinary people decidedly not Islamic, let alone foreign.

Then there is the question of method: BH Liddel Hart, a noted strategist, favors an indirect approach to warfare, and it stands in direct opposition to the hyper-power approach followed by the American government post September 11th. Often cited as the 'good war' by vast swathes of the political spectrum, World War 2 was far less interventionist than any war since. Indeed, during the lead up to the war, Americans did not assist Spain during the Spanish Civil War and American companies helped arm and fuel Franco through various mechanisms. That is, the United States did not intervene in Europe in some attempt to prevent the rise of Fascism like it did post Great War to attempt to strangle Bolshevism in its cradle.

The American response to the destruction of three buildings in the World Trade center complex can best be analogized with an example using hypothetical real people. Suppose a kid, who could be rightly called a punk, puts a brick through a man's window, who could be named 'Sam'. This punk causes some damage harms or kills members of Sam's family and runs. Sam is angry and finds where the punk is staying, and in this case, he is a guest in someone else's home. Sam goes, kills members of the family he is staying with, and lays claim to the damaged home. But the punk escapes. Rather than track him down, Sam attacks a neighboring home because they shared similar interests with the Punk, claiming that he never liked the shady nature of the residents in the second household anyway. This is what America did in launching two invasions, killing hundreds of thousands and rendering millions homeless in a hopeless act of retributive justice which has left the U.S. looking like a unipolar rogue state. The recent contradictions relating to Syria are grand. America armed Syrian rebels to destroy the sole remaining secular Arab regime that had cooperated with it against Sunni terrorists in the past, and now claims a faction of the people it armed are so great a threat that it will again re-enter Iraq and attack targets in Syria after the American population clearly rejected direct intervention against the Damascus government.

The opposition to the idea of not intervening abroad is sure to include the moralistic component that underlies American politics. Americans are as outraged at a beheading as Romans were at the accounts of the Wicker Man ceremony. There is the constant glorification of military service in popular culture, which is a far cry from what most military personnel experience when they learn to 'hurry up and wait'. Self sacrificial ideas are at the heart of Western Culture, which draws its obvious inspiration from Christianity. Terrorism is an asymmetrical response to the American 'hyperpower'. There is a fear of this force, which managed to hijack planes, get past NORAD and accomplish what the major empires in the 20^th Century never could: a strike on the American homeland. It was a strike against the financial and government centers. The fear of this, and desire to change the Middle East through military action is understandable. Why not maintain such a military presence as we do when there are such wide-ranging threats? The post World War 2 Red Army was scary, and the existence of the military industrial complex grew out of a desire to dominate the Soviets and prevent a Red Pearl Harbor. There is a certain wisdom in being afraid of people who hold the Salafist interpretation of Islam and who have no obvious fear of death despite obvious American superiority on all levels. Islam is not a simple weak faith. There is a history of conflict between Islam and every other religion it encounters, and a theocratic impulse towards establishing religion. The American Republic even fought wars early on against Barbary pirates.

Fear of Islam in general ignores the disparate interpretations of Islam. It also ignores the modern roots of the Salafist organizations which has root in the very interventionist approach that is supposed to solve it. Fighting this global movement with military force merely leads to the replacement of the destroyed terrorist network with that of another, ad infinitum. 9/11 would have been best prevented by following existing protocol, or perhaps not fermenting religious extremism in Afghanistan, nor of setting up the apparatus for a modern Jihadist movement to kick the Russians out of this country. Surprise attacks are not going to occur as a result of state actors, and if it remains the role of the U.S. Military to combat other nations, and not small non-state groups, it should not be forward deployed in the current manner.

What would a voluntary withdrawal from the world stage look like and how could it be accomplished? Bases in Europe are antiquated. NATO should have been dismantled post Cold War, its expansion is absurd. A treaty with Russia, of whatever form, is the best way to redress any grievances. Putin is not Stalin. Massive commitments in the middle east have destroyed two countries and dismantled one terrorist network, merely to see another rise on its ashes out of American desire to overthrow Bashar Al Asaad. These conflicts are not something America should be involved in. American commitment to Israel began in 1973, so the fact that this relationship is regarded as sacrosanct is odd. Syria and Iran are nations with whom we need to be negotiating. Our commitments in the pacific are likewise nonsensical. North Korea is so starved and poor that if it ever crossed the DMZ its soldiers would spend more time eating than fighting. South Korea is perfectly capable without the American presence of arming and defending itself. China is not some Maoist backwater, but now the second largest economy on earth. Japan was long ago capable of building a navy and air force to defend itself and the idea of such a country being under our 'defense umbrella' is insane. Afghanistan is a choice of occupying a country until the end of time in order to force its various groups to continue pretending to be a nation or to bring the troops home and let that country sort itself out.

Humans are capable of great iniquity to one another in the name of conflicting metaphysical values, and the world can be a scary place, especially when viewed through a media filter that is owned, operated, and held in place by a handful of companies. Sensationalist internet reports, cable news of whatever bent broken by commercials to convince you that you are undersexed, unhealthy, or otherwise flawed certainly causes the person watching such programming to become more insecure about themselves and the environment. But this ignores cold hard actuarial fact that Americans are far more likely to be killed by a black uniformed police officer than a terrorist. It ignores the fact that this exact kind of paranoia led to the world wide atrocity called the Cold War and the subsequent war against the Third World that has never stopped. It ignores the fact that if you act as an empire you will be subject to the deprivations of liberty inherent in imperial action. It ignores the destruction of rights, whether they be natural or simply invented that should form the rational basis for society. It ignores the militarization of the police which has recently led to near revolt in Missouri. It ignores the fact that men who hold ideas can be killed, but the ideas themselves do not die. 'No man, no problem' doesn't kill the meme of the person that you killed. There is no way to democratize the middle east, or the police borders drawn up in centuries long struggles that predated the United States. We cannot kill our way to world peace, nor is this the sole national responsibility of the paramount world power.

Our Choices in the Election

What is the Cheddar at the End of the Rat Race?

'The use of money does not disestablish the normal process of creating credit. Money, it is true, is always being paid into the banks by the retailers and others who receive it in the course of business, and they of course receive bank credits in return for the money thus deposited. But for the manufacturers and others who have to pay money out, credits are still created by the exchange of obligations, the banker's immediate obligation being given to his customer in exchange for the customer's obligation to repay at a future date. We shall still describe this dual operation as the creation of credit. By its means the banker creates the means of payment out of nothing, whereas when he receives a bag of money from his customer, one means of payment, a bank credit, is merely substituted for another, an equal amount of cash.'

 Economist Ralph George Hawtrey, Currency and Credit (1919)

Christmas

Whenever you talk about putting the Christ back in Christmas, I can't help but think I would rather put Saturn back in Saturnalia.

What would Machiavelli Do?

The first order of business is some sort of treaty with Russia. That within itself is a deeper issue than can be discussed here. The Ukrainians need to be abandoned in favor of allies who did not support Hitler during WW2. The military balance with Russia has inverted from the Cold War days, and their conventional capability is not strong but their nuclear one is. American nuclear development was initially a response to Russian conventional superiority, now Russia lacks this and retains nuclear weapons as a trump card against the U.S. But we would have to settle accounts. Of all the things we learned post-Cold War with the opening of the archives, this much is clear- there never was a missile gap or a serious threat of the Iron Curtain extending westward. But McCarthy may have been correct in many of assertions regarding communist influence but then its a question of how much respect one pays to freedom of speech.

On the 'Yellow Peril' Version 2: The Chinese do not have a navy to match ours. It appears they are trying to build one, yet America required a half-century cold war of military spending to build its forces. China will not catch up for a long time. It’s a major head-start. In any armed conflict, China lacks a nuclear force of any size to threaten the U.S., and the PLAN/PLA Air Force would not doubt be destroyed without offering much resistance.

All major nations: Europe, Israel, India, Russia are under threat from terrorism so cooperation between them all would go a long way. You fight terrorism effectively in the international arena and with small precise forces.

The United States would then pursue a peaceful settlement of the Syrian Civil War, with Bashar signing away his alliances with Iran and Hizbullah in exchange for the U.S. To cease supporting the anti-government forces in his country and the carrot to offer him would be intelligence cooperation on cutting the jihadists out of his country. US forces could operate in a limited fashion in North Iraq with an eye to keep the Kurds safe while diminishing ISIS.

Ever wondered why Middle East or Afghanistan has exceptionally retarded borders? The Sykes-Picot Agreement. America is attempting to enforce borders drawn by the same red-coated idiots our forefathers fought a long and bloody war to over-throw. History is ironic in the extreme. People arguing for the partition of Iraq seem to think that the current constitution ignored regional autonomy or that a division would magically end the existing tensions. Neither is the case, and either way you slice the pie, you will end up with a very messy desert to the Second Iraq Conflict. Keep this in mind: the Sunnis and Shias are killing each other over a disagreement about who should be Caliph. The Caliph ceased to exist during the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. The ultimate question dividing Sunni/Shia has existed since the 7^th Century. The Ethnic divisions in Iraq date to Ottoman-Safavid Wars.

Iran has had much time to prepare for war with the U.S and any military confrontation with them has to have this in mind. Operations from northern Iraq could threaten Tehran. Mutual defense agreements with bordering states are a plus. The Iranian military could easily fall back its own hinterland, but any attempt to cut the straits of Hormuz would require large numbers of men and expose them south of the Zagros Range. Destroying these forces in a potential war would be necessary. The Iranian response would mean terrorism across the region. But with ISIS pushing to Baghdad the Shiites there will be distracted. Kurdistan should be supported, even at the cost of Turkey. Kuzestan is ripe with Sunni tension and there has to be a better use for some of the Gitmo inmates somewhere. Israel could be told to deal with Hezbullah, which it could do, thus rending the Iranian response useless. Iranian terrorism is not a threat and neither are nukes. The biggest worry in regards to Iran developing such weapons would be a nuclear arms race in the region with Saudi Arabia developing nuclear weapons to combat the Iranians, and what you then have is the most religiously extreme Salafist supporting state in the area with nuclear weapons and only a slight grip on power to prevent these weapons from going to the same people that carried out 9/11 itself.

Of course, Machiavelli would probably be confused as to why a country that was recently discovered across the Atlantic was in the middle of Mesopotamia.

Of course, Machiavelli would probably be confused as to why a country that was recently discovered across the Atlantic was in the middle of Mesopotamia.

With leadership like William 'I sure Ain't Jefferson' Clinton, Vice Commander in Chief George 'Constitution Burning Bush' and Dick Cheney, we are sure to bungle every conflict. With people like these running the show, such wars are inevitable, and the blow-back from each of these administrations would be enough to challenge any president, let alone the national joke currently in office.