Conceiving Prosperity Again, Composing, 23/07/2018

If all goes well, this is going to be a very different kind of website in a few months. It’s why I might not post here as frequently as I have before. It will be the first good reason behind any sustained pauses in blog updates I’ve had in nearly a year.

So I came home from the gf’s place Sunday afternoon and after I unwound, I started work on my review of Raphael Sassower’s book, The Quest for Prosperity. It’s not quite finished yet, though I wanted to get it done by now. But I don’t have much longer, and it should still go live by Thursday at SERRC.

A key idea I’m writing about in that review is the notion that civic institutions aren’t sufficient to prevent the rapacious activities of oligarchs. I think our current political moment seems to be demonstrating that. What American Trumpism shows is that institutions – despite all the structural precautions that may exist – can always be corrupted somehow.

Shepard Fairey drew this image of Ronald
Reagan on a wall in the Little Tokyo
neighbourhood of Los Angeles in 2011, as
part of a public art initiative called the
Freewalls Project. He had the support of
the city's Museum of Contemporary Art.
Image by Wally Gobetz via Flickr /
Creative Commons

I think it’s a bit of shortcoming in Sassower’s analysis. But only in the sense that landing a crew on Luna is a shortcoming in that we eventually need to get to Mars.

Sassower, in the latter chapters of his book, asks what kinds of civic institutions can best guide people to socialize each other into communitarian moralities, where oligarchical personal greed is less likely to develop. He identifies several key ethical principles, and a few very intriguing examples among existing institutions and organizations.

I can probably add to his list of example institutions, given what I’ve been reading lately as well. I’m thinking of how Leanne Betasamosake Simpson describes the ethics and socialization paths of Ontario’s Indigenous societies.

It’s a life that’s called Nishnaabewin, and I’m going to talk about my own engagements with these ideas, including how I want to use them in my own work, later on. As you can imagine, it’s probably going to get awkward.

So we have our guidelines and we have our models. But those guidelines and models aren’t enough because institutions alone can’t do anything when power imbalances grow.

Here’s an example to illustrate what I’m trying to say. Because I’m at the point in the review where this is what I’m trying to say, and I’m having a tough time articulating it.

Let’s say you’re a claimant in a civil case. Doesn’t matter if you’re technically in the plaintiff’s or defendant’s chair. All that matters is that you’re making a claim with the help of your legal defence, and the other side is making their claim too.

In terms of your civil rights, you’re both equal. That’s what equality before the law means – the institutions regard you as equal claimants whose dispute will be settled according to reason. But in terms of your material resources, you aren’t equal.

You can tell how unequal you are when you see your opponent walk in with Alan Dershowitz as his counsel, and you’re sitting next to a snot-nosed, freshly graduated, already-drunk part-timer.

Material power dynamics overcome nominal equality in the context of civic institutions. This fact is a powerful reason why it’s so difficult to overcome greed – no matter the law, money is always power. Now what do you do about that?

Despotism as Over-Writing and Overriding Thought, Jamming, 31/03/2018

A couple of days ago, I finished a white paper for a Toronto-based think tank / consulting firm on democratic governance. I’m not going to get into the details of it right now, because it’s pretty dense.

Happily, the firm’s research supervisor enjoyed what I wrote and had some great recommendations for the second draft. A lot of his suggestions had to do with signposting – letting a reader know explicitly why you’re making a particular inference or reference.

If we understand the world according to only a single set of ideas,
we'll do serious injustice to people who think differently, and
impoverish our thinking and our civilization. Spirits must become
more than ideas and practices.

I always need an editor’s hand with signposting in a lot of my non-fiction work. I immerse myself so deeply in the research material and the concepts that what appears clear to me needs to be made more explicit. The connection is there – I just sometimes have to be reminded to say it blatantly. I can be too subtle for my own good when I write.

The paper explores the chaotic and dangerous nature of online social media platforms. They can encourage democratic movements – the Arab Spring, Idle No More, Stoneman Douglas – or revanchist, reactionary movements among all ideologies – the alt-Right, left-wing Putin boosting.

One of the best comments I got from my editor was that I should add, in the final section of recommendations, a brief response on whether these platforms should be nationalized to control them in the public interest.

I think this would be disastrous. Because while the rapid chaos of barely restrained social media can encourage dangerous extremism, nationalization would put media that can also encourage democratic revolution in the authoritative hands of the state.

In most of our political conversations today, talk about the danger of state authority is a libertarian idea. I take a different tack, following the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari – along with the philosophical current in which they were major players. Their conception of the state’s dangers is rooted in their concept of despotism.

As much as we fear Trumpism – and there's plenty to fear in his regime
of egotism, corruption, and validation of racism – his politics merely
makes explicit the inherent oppressive danger of state institutions.

We associate despotism typically with despots – dictators or authoritarian rulers whose power falls short of the Führer ideal, while still moving along that trajectory. But Deleuze and Guattari talk about the despotic machine – this is the state itself.

When the material power of a state institution is barely or not at all restrained, it overcodes everything in the territory it’s responsible for. What do I mean by overcoding? It’s a technical term, referring to institutions that orient more and more (and eventually all) of people’s activity to the state.

In a despotic machine, if you want to do anything in your life, you have to run that activity through some kind of state machinery. State institutions, regulations, and rules determine every aspect of life. Not simply in terms of conditions – like laws, safety or environmental rules.

I mean state institutions and machinery determine and actively shape cultural and social development. Diversity and indigeneity are wiped away by state mandates for uniformity.

Here’s a simple example. It comes from touchstones in Deleuze and Guattari’s own work. Franz Kafka was a Czech Jew living for most of his life in the Austro-Hungarian empire, whose thinking and work was informed by his sardonic attitude toward the bureaucratic drudgery of his day job, as well as his personal engagement with Jewish mysticism.

As useful as state institutions can be for supplying common goods to
huge populations, the institutions are very dangerous. They can all
too easily be used to oppress people, and force the many ways of
living across a population into a single, uniform character. That's the
power that Deleuze and Guattari called overcoding.

Kafka had a complex identity and set of ideas, whose linguistic influence was Czech, Hebrew, and Yiddish. But the language of his fiction writing and daily business life was German. This was a state imposition on his identity, which was more complex than the monarchist political morality and subtle German supremacism that the Austrian state imposed on all its citizens. It didn’t matter whether you were in Vienna, Prague, Ljubljana, or Timisoara.

Here’s a more complex example. Last year, there was a very strange court decision in British Columbia. The Ktunaxa people sued the provincial government to stop the development of a huge ski resort on their sacred mountain in the Jumbo Valley, where their religion holds that a grizzly bear spirit lives.

The court mandated that an area of the mountain be set aside from development for Ktunaxa worship. According to the laws of the state of Canada, freedom of religion requires that the Ktunaxa have a place set aside on the mountain to practice their faith.

But the Ktunaxa’s ontology of the divine has nothing to do with having a place on the mountain to worship. The mountain itself is the material manifestation of the bear spirit. So any resort development would be an act of violence against their divinity. Full stop.

Ktunaxa thinking sees the mountain as the manifestation of divinity. Canadian law sees the mountain as a place where the Ktunaxa need some accommodation to practice their religious beliefs. What is a matter of existence for the Ktunaxa is a matter of cultural practice for the Canadian state.

The court judgment couldn’t even comprehend Ktunaxa ontology, let alone acknowledge it as valid. Their entire way of existence was invalidated, overcoded by the state’s systems of meaning. That’s the despotic character of even the most democratic states.

We Prohibited It Because It’s Illegal!, Research Time, 23/03/2018

I haven’t been in the best headspace this week. All I’ve managed to do is get myself together enough to work on my paying gig at the moment, that think tank paper. Even the last few blog entries were exercises in getting through a conceptual block in the paper’s main argument.

It’s been difficult for me to summon energy beyond that, which has caused me to fall behind on some other commitments. And I’m sorry – but depression can be a pain in the ass. A pain in everything else too, which is why they call it depression.

This weekend will be catchup weekend, I’m just going to get tonight’s post finished – actually a short one this time – get a solid night’s sleep, and get back on track.

A long and unnerving shadow.
Art by Marcelo Neira

My thoughts about the nature of law are kind of funny and sometimes too simple. I knew a lot of legal theorists at McMaster, but I shared very different premises about the nature of law than a lot of that research community.

I don’t see law as something you have a moral obligation to obey. I think the law done right encourages ethical activity, encourages people to treat each other with kindness as individuals and with justice through institutions.

Now, that hardly ever happens in real life, so I actually don’t think we have much obligation beyond fear of punishment to follow the law – insofar as it’s the law. If the law happens to coincide with what’s ethically right, we’re obligated morally to follow it – not because it’s the law, but because the law actually encourages justice.

Examples of laws that encourage justice – laws against theft, assault, killing, fraud; regulating acceptable practices for health care, education delivery, utilities provision, record-keeping, ecological protection.

Still rolling through some of my notes on Ian Buchanan’s book about Anti-Œdipus. Bringing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concepts into my projects that involve politics, law, and the institutions of the state means understanding the conceptions of law that they reacted against in their own theoretical development.

What were the concepts that cast the longest shadow?

The Freudian and Lacanian models that dominated French psychiatry around the time of the Paris Uprising was probably the biggest single shadow. Except probably for Marx. That way of thinking had a disturbing concept of law.

Law, on this model, is prohibition. Law exists as one side of a yin-yang complex with desire – each can’t exist without the other. The manifestation of desire simultaneously manifests the law prohibiting it.

Desire can only develop through being continually stamped down.
What kind of political and social philosophy can come from a
premise like this?
Art by Ashley Montague

That law could be institutional if you live in a bureaucratic state, or cultural if you live in what Lacan and the mainstream Parisian intellectual community called a primitive society. But the law is the prohibition of desire which develops along with and in dialectic with that desire.

Deleuze and Guattari’s solution to this was surprisingly practical. You can’t argue against the concept on its own terms, because the concept rests at the premise of the whole discourse. You can’t talk a Freudian out of Freudian thinking by arguing entirely on Freudian terms.

So you stake out an entirely different way of thinking, and show how well those concepts deal with real-life problems the mainstream can’t handle. Psychiatrically, Freudian rationality can’t deal with schizophrenics.

In the legal-institutional context, Freudian rationality understands desire as something that needs its own prohibition to develop at all. It legitimates law as a necessary repression. Law is legitimate because it represses. Politics that considers repression necessary is fascism.*

* Thinking back to Snyder’s essay again. He also lists Freud as a major influence on Ivan Ilyin, the Russian fascist. Ilyin's conclusion that a civilization develops through the collective suppression of our drives as individuals. He seems to be a profound thinker against democracy. Terrifying.

You Come to Swell the Numbers, Advocate, 26/02/2018

I’m not going to write about philosophy today. One is that most of the philosophy I read this weekend was for a book review I have to write, so I’m not going to throw it out on the blog.

I started work on a new novel manuscript this weekend too, but I only just finished the prologue. On to page three! Yeah, not much to say here.

But I’m coming to protest on Saturday. It’ll be a good protest, a damn fun protest, a beautiful protest, and a necessary protest. The rage will be necessary, and channelled through the power of a group.

So this Saturday, there’ll be a Justice for Tina Fontaine protest, and yeah of course I’m fucking going.

There are two arguments that I can imagine getting trotted out about this. One is the legalist’s, the other is the quietist’s.

To Mr Legalist

The lawyer’s argument is the most insulting to me, because it’s so reductive. These are the people who say that Jian Ghomeshi deserves his job and office back at CBC because the criminal trial found him not-guilty. Who reduce all truth to the verdict of a jury.

Rather, they expand what was designed to be a narrow, difficult standard of proof to stand for the entire truth of the matter. Yes, a jury decided that Ray Cormier’s drunken ramblings weren’t sufficient grounds for criminal conviction. Would “Justice for Tina Fontaine” really be complete if this one evil jackass went to prison for 25 years?

I don’t even believe in the sufficiency of retributive justice as an individual, and I came to that decision as a Westerner. Indigenous Canadian cultures lived under justice institutions – the customs and methods of redressing crimes – whose grounding principles were restorative, communitarian values. Centuries of cultural continuity.

Do you seriously think Indigenous Canadians would have only the punishment of a perpetrator in mind when they chant “Justice for Tina Fontaine”?

To Ms Quietist

I understand the centrepiece of this argument, I truly do. But you can’t just say that this is only for Indigenous people and cluck sadly as white extremist opposition goes unchallenged.

Remember what I said about the communitarian values at the centre of justice questions larger in scope than “Who did it?”

Tina Fontaine – and everyone else who’s met an untimely death after a life of neglect, suffering, and marginalization – doesn’t achieve justice when a jail cell closes. Because people still live as neglected as Tina Fontaine was.

Many of the causes and conditions of that neglect are the structure and operation of Canada’s government institutions. It may not be the residential schools anymore, but the child welfare agencies in some regions are very effective with the spin they’ve put on the basic process.

As a person who lives in Canada, I’m enmeshed in the same institutions, the same cultural currents as everyone else in this country. If our institutions and cultural beliefs, common sense, and habits are set up in such a way that many people needlessly suffer neglect and indignity, we all have to work together to change them.

When you’re suffering, you need to know that you have friends. That minimal level of friendship – respect and solidarity – is the relationship that constitutes community.

I’m not going to be some presumptuous ass trying to speak for Indigenous people. I haven’t gone through any experience like they have. But if anyone needs to know that they have friends, at least I’ll be there.

Swell the numbers until everyone joins.

Creative Energy IV: Becoming Thought or Thinking, Research Time, 11/12/2017

I've talked about what it means for a philosopher to become an adjective or a noun. That’s a matter of social reception – how is your work received by those who study and continue your tradition.

That’s one aspect of what Gilles Deleuze calls the conceptual persona – what a thinker becomes in the tradition through his influence. It’s sometimes hard to get past this, because the whole field of influence includes how we’re taught about a thinker.

How they’re presented in class – Analytic or Continental? Rationalist or Empiricist? Liberal or Communitarian? – is part of that influence. But that influence also happens outside universities, through the general influence their ideas have had on everyday discourse.

To be most human, we have to be the most rational. Another twist on the
old definition from Aristotle, the rational animal? Ten Thousand Doctoral
Theses have been written on the subject. Do we need to prove it? Or
simply note the similarity of the ideas, and move on to more
important things.
Image by Renee Bolinger

One of the major ideas in contemporary extreme nationalism, especially its libertarian streak, is cultural marxism. This is their label for the common features of all progressive ideologies. It’s based on Andrew Breitbart having a very strange reading of Theodor Adorno.

That’s how we’re taught. If I want to dig into the heart of Deleuze’s idea – the conceptual persona – here’s a question I should ask. Having figured out their own core concepts, how did a great thinker use them?

Example. When did Kant become a Kantian? When he wrote The Metaphysics of Morals. That’s clear enough to me. The process goes like this.

In 1785, he publishes The Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals. It lays out in really simple language* the basic guiding principles he’ll use to build a comprehensive set of moral laws for his society. The moral imperatives of reason, which we have a duty to follow wherever they lead us in life – because reason is the highest human power.

* Compared to the Critique of Pure Reason anyway.

Three years later, he drops the Critique of Practical Reason, in 1788. It’s the shortest of all the Critiques, but incredibly dense. The entire book is, as far as this example is concerned, a single argument that the basic laws of human reason, expressed in the most abstract moral context,** describes a universal moral imperative.

** Or maybe call it a plane?

What did I just say? The argument is that we know there’s a moral law, and reason is how we deduce it. Reason, like Kant said in 1781’s Critique of Pure Reason, can’t apply to understanding how the world works because the physical world doesn’t run according to laws of logical deduction.***

I don't know how much I'll include of
these examples in the Utopias text. Kant,
for all the solemnity of his style, gets so
many academicians riled up when you talk
about him. It's like the community of
academics can't deal with people
speaking off the cuff about the ideas
you've spent your careers studying.
Now that I put it that way, I think I
finally see where they're coming
from.

*** The most TL;DR sentence I think I’ve ever written.

But morality works according to laws, Kant says. Let’s build a concept of moral law where the logical operations of reason show what actions you should do – show you your duty.

The Metaphysics of Morals is Kant, at extreme length, applying the duty of reason every moral law he could identify – from murder and lying through marriage and masturbation. It takes him nearly a decade to pound this one out.

So the project’s introduction is in 1785, he lays out the key principles in 1788, then spends – on and off – until 1797 on a massive application of those principles.

In 1785, the Groundwork was released to help create a few Kantians in the world. In 1788, Kant releases a work of profound and complex philosophy – Kant the person becoming Kant the philosopher. Then in 1797, Kant becomes a Kantian.

As a Kantian, Kant knew his own concepts better than anyone, so could apply them most faithfully and rigorously. In that, he was speaking through his conceptual persona – he was at the smallest possible remove from Kant as conceptual persona.

Most Kantians – all the ones who weren’t Kant – could be as rigorous as they wanted, but they’d inevitably put their own spin on becoming a Kantian. To be a Kantian is to think with the conceptual persona Kant created.

Hans is becoming a Kantian philosopher. Apply the machinery of Kant’s concepts to your own thinking and investigations – let the concepts he established become the framework of your thought. That’s what it is to adopt a conceptual persona.

How is a conceptual persona created in the first place? My next example will be about what Kant was doing in 1788.

Where We Can Stare the Madness in the Face, Jamming, 17/11/2017

So the horror film project is coming together way faster than I thought. The Ghost actually wants to get this all done before the end of the year. He’d shot about half the footage already, but I’m now part of the project writing the scenes that deliver the context.

It’s a five minutes into the future scenario, but I still think of its themes primarily as a horror film. As I assemble the ideas, I’m thinking philosophically too. Not in a pretentious way – just about the broad themes that are holding the piece together.

Orson Welles directs Anthony Perkins in his adaptation of The Trial.
In the philosophical discussions I've had about absurdity, few ever
touch on how useful absurdity is to depict truth in societies where
no one is allowed to speak.

I was talking about existentialism the other day. That’s definitely a big part of my ideas here. But I always found one important limitation in the traditional existentialist writing. The best ones are deep, satirical attacks on the real danger of a hostile world and hostile institutions.

Ever since I first came across the storyline and read it, I found it clear that a book like Kafka’s The Trial is a depiction of how ridiculous the law, police, and justice institutions truly are – the arbitrariness of the application of the law, and of the law itself. This was all clear to me as soon as I read it.

But I’ve long been a bit of an anarchist at heart. So the idea that the law’s content is pretty damn arbitrary and the police have a horrifying tendency to let the power go to their heads, growing abusive and corrupt?

I've known this to some degree since I first watched Serpico as a kid. So Kafka’s point was clear to me from the start.

But the popular reception of Kafka’s stories is that they’re pure absurdities. Their depiction of our world is so strange that we disconnect them from reality. The Trial’s K goes through an obviously absurd justice system. Yet it was just an intensified, comically cartoonish version of real institutions.

At the end of the day, K’s story is of a man who’s arbitrarily detained on charges whose content he never knows, his arguments to defend himself are utterly disregarded on the flimsiest of contexts, authorities order him around arbitrarily. Then he’s just taken out to an alley and summarily shot.

Who stole the soul from black folk?
Same man that stole the land from Chief Black Smoke
And made the whip crackle on our back slow
And made us go through the back door
And raffle black bodies on the slave blocks
The new plantation, mass incarceration

It unfolds like a cartoon, but that’s daily life for anyone who grew up under the authoritarian states of Europe – like Kafka’s Austria, or Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Assad’s Syria. But in those countries themselves, you couldn’t say so directly.

That’s why Kafka’s books were received so weirdly in the West – with our democratic institutions, we didn’t know to recognize the reality they depicted. Westerners saw the cartoons only as absurdities. Not the absurdity as the only way to depict the truth.

We’re in the middle of something very different now. You can make a pretty strong case – and many do – that the police, military, and justice systems of the United States and many other democratic countries are not focussed on true justice.

Mass incarceration is the absurd system of modern criminal justice in the democratic West. The United States is at the leading edge of developing this system, and it’s most intense there, but most Western democracies have developed terrible incarceration rates, and even more terrible racial disparities in prison populations.

My country Canada has a mass incarceration problem of its own, mostly focussed on Indigenous people. It’s the latest phase of the Indigenous genocide that the Canadian state was designed to facilitate and complete.

Here’s the difference between what we can say and what Kafka – or whatever Kafka will emerge from the haunted dust of Syria’s revolution – could say. We can call it what it is.

Democratic states of the West currently live out a terrible conflict of conscience – we have free speech and free press rights and laws built into our constitutions. It’s immensely difficult to prevent a journalistic outlet or a social media forum from talking about whatever embarrassing fact of state violence they want to discuss.

More than that, we all generally stand by their right to talk about it. A 1910s Czech living under Austrian dictatorship or a 2010s Syrian living under Assad’s dictatorship could never say in public the horrible things their government did. Everyone knew, but no one could say so where they could be heard – the public square was happy, patriotic, living as if nothing at all was wrong.

We can still defend our rights to call a genocide a genocide, and accuse the icons of our nation of mass murder. No one comes to arrest us for it.

In a way, it’s even more absurd. We can keep calling attention to it, and show how ridiculous the defenders of genocide are whenever they speak. We can mock them in public. Yet the genocides and enslavement continue. It’s like they aren’t afraid of us.

In Syria, at least the government was scared enough of people who spoke the truth to put them in prison. Here, they just laugh at the SJW libtard.

Law Is Too Powerful to Follow the Truth, Advocate, 25/10/2017

At this moment, at least, powerful conceptual and emotional spasms are pounding through our society. The long-awaited acknowledgement that Harvey Weinstein was a serial sexual predator throughout his entire career as a Hollywood mogul has caused a media exorcism of horror and shame.

Yet everyone knew about it. There were rumours swirling about Weinstein for decades. Actresses at every level of power and fame would whisper to each other, warning each other to be careful around him. Everyone knew.

It was just one feature of a climate of abuse throughout the entertainment industry. Allegations continue to confirm what everyone already knew about performers, photographers, directors.

Here's one profoundly depressing – I think because it feels so
inevitable – of Harvey Weinstein's explosion. He doesn't think he did
anything wrong, and that it was all consensual. I think he actually
believes that all the horrible, icky things we read in the accounts of
so many women are ordinary, legitimate ways to obtain consent.

In some of the long, exploding mess of discussion in the media and among more ordinary folks on the internet, a friend of mine got into a huge amount of trouble. Most of the rage directed at him was the result of his natural sarcasm being not quite appropriate for the context at the time.

But aside from putting his foot in his mouth (allowing so much of Twitter to bash it in deeper), my friend made an intriguing point. I still think he was wrong about it, but he was wrong in a way that helped me clarify some ideas about how we rely on the law.

Particularly the wrong ways we rely on the law. Legal theorist friends – shoot me some feedback if you see this.

My friend’s idea was that if Harvey Weinstein was brought to trial, we’d be able to figure out the truth. Now, I think that’s incredibly wrong-headed and ridiculous. And I’m going to tell you why.

But I’m going to say why without any more reference to patriarchal social structures, or any other concepts about systemic inequality or discrimination. Because I want to write something that will be believed by people who already don’t believe in all that.

It has to do with different standards of truth for different purposes. See, I’ve already seen this dynamic play out in Canada, and it went very badly. That was Jian Ghomeshi’s trial for sexual assault.

The film producer and his second wife, Georgina Chapman, in 2011.

Harvey Weinstein made himself out to be different from the predatory
Hollywood moguls of the past because the Weinstein Company was
cool in a way those stuffy hokey old-fashioned images could never
manage. But he showed every sign of being just another one of
those old men who used money and power to control much
younger, vulnerable women. If it looks, walks, and quacks like
a duck . . . Do I need to finish that?

Ghomeshi was found not guilty. One reason was because his defence lawyer was very good at discrediting the witnesses. Another reason was because the crown prosecutors built their case around incidents that happened about a decade before the trial, and human memory can’t remember events from so long ago with consistency, accuracy, and detail.

But his not-guilty verdict was taken, by some folks who yelled at me on Twitter about it, as proof that he was actually totally innocent of everything. There’s a popular perception that a criminal trial unveils the truth. Well, it doesn’t quite do that.

Criminal trials do not have the goal of uncovering the truth. The goal of a criminal trial is sending someone to prison . A prison sentence is the end, and the criminal trial is – in a democratic state’s legal system – the only possible means. Truth is related to this process, but only instrumentally.

Instrumentally to two degrees of abstraction. One – the trial is an instrument to inflict a prison sentence. Two – establishing the truth to a particular standard of certainty is an instrument to a successful criminal trial.

Now, sending someone to prison is a pretty serious thing. Prisons are not nice places, and they probably never will be, no matter how dedicated to restorative justice a society becomes. Prison is the most terrible place a democratic society can send someone without the death penalty.*

When OJ Simpson went to prison for robbery in 2008, I don't think
anyone commented on the irony that after being falsely brought to
trial for murder, he went to prison for this. No, we all know OJ
killed his ex-wife and her boyfriend, and we saw him beat the rap.
Yet MRA types today will never accept that Ghomeshi actually
sexually assaulted and harassed a bunch of women, because being
found not-guilty proved his total innocence.

* Itself kind of a debatable question.

So if you want to take prison as seriously as you say you do, as a democratic society, you’ll make the standard of proof to send someone there enormously high. I’m not just talking about the reasonable doubt standard, though that’s one very high standard.

In the Western legal system, we define our crimes according to specific acts carried out at specific times. You apply your standard of reasonable doubt to whether the prosecution can prove whether a particular event unfolded exactly as their account said it was.

A prosecutor has to describe and prove true a narrative of that event so detailed that very, very few humans’ memories can provide it. No one remembers the exact time and precise order of events of everything that happens in our lives.

An assault victim must consider every detail of the assault – “You’re certain that it was his right hand coming for your jaw? Your jaw first?” – as it happens, timing it at least to the minute. Human memory can’t function that way in the adrenaline of facing aggressive physical assault.

To avoid inflicting prison on those who don’t deserve it, the standard of evidence to convict someone for a sentence is monstrously high. But a not-guilty verdict only means that no one could meet quite that standard of evidence.

It’s perfectly consistent to know that someone did it – for everybody to know they did it – and for him to get a not-guilty verdict. The phrase is, “That asshole got off.” Remember?

Slowing History Down, Research Time, 12/10/2017

Here I am continuing the short but dense post I wrote yesterday. The real unfolding of history – the complex web of interconnecting events and processes – is too chaotic for us to understand it as a whole.

Our histories simplify the world. Look at how we discuss history over centuries at a time. We focus on a few great leaders, the activities of governments, business leaders, and massive economic interests. Zoom in or zoom out from the village to the globe, and it's the same structure to the story of the place.

Human spaces are carved into simple patterns and clear paths. All
other creatures are driven from the space. Co-existence – even
though ecological co-existence is always kind of dangerous and
rarely peaceful – becomes impossible, or at least rare.

We can contain much of the immense detail of history, but only if we either stick to a single phenomenon, or a very short period of time.

I once knew a professor of history who concentrated almost all the research articles of his multi-decade career on a few key decades of industrial development in early 19th century Montreal.

It’s immensely impressive, but I’m reminded of an image I came across once. You can achieve incredible things in a narrow specialization, but ultimately you have to put it to use. But now you have to wonder if you need more than narrow or broad knowledge to act best.

If you do need that level of knowledge, you’re screwed because that knowledge is practically impossible at the speed of human life. We can build datasets that big, but comprehensively understanding that dataset takes way longer than any time we’d have to act on what it can tell us.

Here’s a place where Hannah Arendt’s discussions of Greek culture turn out to be pretty enlightening for folks living in the nuclear age. You can – with reasonable accuracy for such a big, complicated, chaotic assemblage – describe modern civilization as an attempt to grasp hold of the world by paring it down to the human story.

Raccoons are called human-adapted species because they've done so
well adjusting to life in human urban spaces. They're one of very few
success stories in humanity's industrial age.

Human geography is simple – like a European park, we shape our world into simple structures. Boxes with clear boundaries. Specific lanes segregated for different kinds of vehicles and directions of traffic. We build our cities in grids and circular patterns – simple shapes.

We bulldoze the complex patterns of multifaceted ecologies. To see the chaotic mess of wilderness disgusts many of us – unsanctioned plants are weeds. So we reduce the world to human structures – cities, highways, farms, parks – to simplify this complexity.

Then we’ll at least have a better chance of grasping hold of the world. It won’t be so chaotic, and it will have a pattern of entirely human design. The world won’t change so fast because there won’t be so many ways for it to change. In paving the world, we’ll slow it down enough to grasp it in our knowledge.

When we shape our society to make it last forever, we finally have a world that we can understand. It won’t escape from us.

Arendt finds this idea in the political thinking of Plato and Aristotle. They saw the greatness of humanity in building a world that lasted – a permanent world. It would be a world built by craftsmen, designers. That’s the image of the legislator, the mythical founder-leader who builds a city and a society just as an architect and team of masons builds a temple.

Laws and institutions exist to constrain human behaviour and
channel it in directions where it can be understood. If you
understand it, then you know how to control it without the
chafing violence of constraint.
Can we even achieve that level of constraint in human societies?
Why on Earth would we want to?

The designed order of institutions and laws would make the desperation of human action unnecessary. We wouldn’t need to fight with chaos to catch up with reality itself as it steamrolls us. Durable institutions are reliable, and human institutions are comprehensible.

We associate Plato and Aristotle with how the Greeks thought. They’re often the only Greek thinkers popular culture pays attention to. But they were rebels in their society – while they created concepts at the heart of our culture, they had little direct influence on their own for a long time after their own lives.

Most Greeks were creatures of the polis – the one durable institution in Greek society, built to hold the hurricane force of contingent, improvised action. These were the debates and duels of Greek politics.

The culture as a whole most valued fleeting glory than vain dreams of permanence. Instead of grasping for comprehensive knowledge, they were content to become the brightest light in the chaos for a moment.

Who do you think was most wise?

The Power(less), Research Time, 01/06/2017

Yesterday, I wrote about how the larger work of forging a unified American identity across all 13 states was a key purpose of the country’s federalist project, the United States’ second constitution.* But Alexander Hamilton had both lofty and brutally pragmatic reasons for wanting American federalism to succeed.

* Another reason why I find modern originalist jurists’ slavish devotion to a virtually Salafist originalism of the 1789 American constitution. That constitution was itself the second go-around of the American government’s structure. The Founding Fathers wrote it with the knowledge that they were fallible.

Grover Norquist is a well-spoken man who I respect as the most honest
and straightforward of the contemporary right wing. I mean, I reject
and am appalled by almost everything he stands for. But he doesn't
pussyfoot around the bush, and I respect that. It's a breath of fresh air.
It's the air of an ambition to build a one-party state. Still counts.

Actually, let’s compare and contrast some contemporary Americans with the originals. One of the biggest arguments to justify a lot of the Republican Party’s reactionary program has been “state’s rights.”

Giving more power to the states, and away from the federal government, is a major goal of the modern American right. They understand the presence of the federal government in local affairs as a massive intrusion on your life.

Now, it’s not as though a lot of people aren’t under threat by the federal government of the United States. I’d say we’re a generation particularly suited to understanding, in systematic and fairly rigorous terms, all those hideous powers of the government.

That’s what the mass incarceration system does – millions of people imprisoned for years on laughably minor marijuana offences, their careers after release ruined by laws and popular fears of hiring convicts. The growth of the private prison sector is just one dangerous (and sometimes confusing) addition to this long-festering social cancer.

The surveillance state does it too. This is more indirect, because its presence in people’s everyday lives is more of a hovering aura than the direct violence of gunshots and prison walls.

But the Republican right wing rarely focusses on this. Having to pay taxes, I think. Environmental protection laws. Workplace safety laws.

Yet what does the hippest Founding Father write? He says that an expanded federal government that can act on many local levels is a massive decentralization of power. It seems totally counter to the problems of today.

Now look at his examples of serious problems facing the country in 1789. It all comes down to a very Machiavellian answer – corruption.

Alexander Hamilton may finally have lost.

Hamilton describes local mega-rich (for the time) industry leaders. Plantation owners and factory chiefs. Men who, practically speaking, own their entire towns – or else, they hold everyone in their grasp through wealth and influence.

That's one original danger to American democracy – local oligarchs. A strong federal government would counter-balance their power.

The other danger Hamilton discusses are local state officials – mayors, appointees, legislators, and governors – who use their positions to exploit their people. Maybe they’re kleptocrats, for sale to the highest-bidding local businessman. Maybe they’re tinpot autocrats building a personal fiefdom for their ego.

These are groups who corrupt the practices of government and business for selfish reasons. People who’ve lost their sight of the public good, or who never cared for it in the first place.

The greatest danger America faced in 1789 – when the gun barrels of the War of Independence had barely cooled – was corrupt powerful people who’d abuse their power and public trust for their own gain.

So you'd need a powerful federal government to overcome the local schemes of on-the-ground businessmen and corrupt local officials.

Hamilton’s words are insightful and powerful. Maybe there was something to originalist legal theory after all. But I’m left with a question.

What happens when the corrupt men take over all the levels of government?

Come Together III: In Perfect Harmony, Research Time, 17/03/2017

Continued from last post . . . An impossibility is an inspiration. It is Eden. Heaven on Earth. Rather, it’s Earth becoming Heaven.

That’s the movement Rousseau makes from the reality of humanity to its perfection. In real life, we’re a bunch of incurably corrupt, inescapably ignorant bastards. But in our perfected state, we damn near perfectly understand the common interest of our whole community, and are kind enough always to act on it.

Submitting completely to an authority that speaks with the voice of God
has never been a request that turns out well for anyone of whom it's
asked. Usually, it's a submission to slavery, as when Indigenous
Canadian children literally had Christianity beaten into them.

This is the mind-set of the individual when the will of a community is expressed as the general will. The harmony of thought across the whole society isn’t somehow imposed from above.* It’s a perfectly harmonized expression of every individual spontaneously.

* I haven’t read nearly enough Rousseau scholarship to say authoritatively whether my hypothesis is generally on target. Nor would I really want to, even if I had time. It’s not like I would have had time as a professor either – I’d have had budget meetings to attend with the associate vice-deans.

When he says that “Gods would be needed to give men laws,” he isn’t talking about God as a person standing over obedient humans. This isn’t any divine absolute despot, giving orders to which you submit.

If that were the kind of god that was on order, then Rousseau is quite the totalitarian. That’s what it means to submit all of human existence to the orders of an authority. But I’m taking Rousseau as a thinker of radical freedom, and it’s easy to do so if you just think of God in that line differently.

Remember that he’s said that the only true laws that a legislature could write were rules and institutions written as the expression of the general will. Only when the entire community (politicians and bureaucrats included) act in perfect harmony and love spontaneously is any legislation a truly legitimate law.

In any case less perfect than that, the laws are just rules backed up by threats of punishment (like jail time) or rewards (like tax credits). The law has only moral significance.

No ethical significance. The general will is the immanent expression of a community itself. Now you see it.** I’m using Rousseau in Utopias as part of a tradition of political materialism, whose fulcrum is Spinoza.

Well, hello there, good sir.

** And so do I.

I have one question for any of my scholar friends who might come across this. I may actually just write a former professor of mine who I remember has published academic articles on Rousseau. I’m not sure how believable this reading is. Maybe I should call it an appropriation. I feel like that’s a more accurate term for what I’m doing with the historical research for this book.

One of the problems with Rousseau is that he knew his audience too well. This is what makes it difficult – as a scholar or just an attentive reader – to be sure he’s really thinking what you think you read in his writing.

So when he uses terms like “the sovereign” or tosses off flourishes like that line above about gods, he sounds like he’s referring to monarchs and God the Father. Because that’s what his audience of reasonably intellectual literate people in 1760s Europe thought of when they heard those terms.

It’s how Rousseau’s own audience thought of power, authority, kingship, and the divine. This conception of divinity as a perfect material expression would have gotten someone strung up for some hardcore heresy.

Geneva was a Calvinist country at the time, and that is not a religious authority known to tolerate leniency. At the time, “Spinozist” was an insult you hurled at someone when you wanted to destroy their reputation. Materialism of Spinoza’s expressive, free kind was considered just as corrosive as atheism.

So how plausible would it be for me historically to make Rousseau a chain link in a semi-underground Spinozist tradition? Should I even care about plausibility to the scholarly community when I don’t even plan on making Utopias a scholarly book? . . . To be continued

Original Equality VI: Dying Like Qaddafi in a Sewer Pipe, Research Time, 14/03/2017

Read my whole series of posts about ideas in Rousseau's On the Origin of Inequality starting here.
• • •
Continued from previous . . . So you have a problem. Law does function as a chain. Rousseau is a flamboyantly over-the-top writer, so he describes it as a retreat into slavery. That’s the heart of his most charismatic line, that man is born free but lives everywhere in chains.

But it's been a busy weekend, so here’s the question I left with last time I was talking about political equality.

“We’ll always need the law. And the law will always require some element of coercion. And Rousseau writes with a mix of trolling, theatricality, and ironic honesty when he says that the law amounts to slavery. So is there a way out of this?”

Not as such, no. At least not in The Origin of Inequality itself. The rest of this week will be follow-ups of reading The Social Contract, so I’ll continue the idea there. Because The Origin of Inequality ends on an impasse.

If human nature inevitably corrupts our institutions until they crush us
like the most brutal dictators, then are we stuck with always having to
explode in violence for even the most unlikely shot at rebuilding
a fair society?

It’s an impasse that’s meant to challenge you, leave you thinking. An ambiguous ending where there seems to be no escape from either growing slavery or chaos. It ends with such a note of pessimism, but it strangely fits with the image of humanity as inherently peaceful and loving.

Human nature is to embrace peace, but the complexity and stress of large-scale social life in a world of scarce resources brings humanity to embrace conflict and mutual irritation instead. The conflicts of daily life corrupt our inner virtue.

So we turn to laws and institutions to relegate our complexity with moral dogma and police. Yet this traps human society in a trap. State institutions can’t regulate human life to the nanometric degree necessary to remove all human corruption and dickishness.

Slicing our dickishness out of humanity would be just as destructive as slicing our virtue away. Our grimier qualities are an integral part of expressing our virtues anyway. Purely virtuous behaviour, goes Rousseau’s analysis, can’t even really happen beyond small groups. At most, the size of a large family.

Then you're left with a society that will always wear away at the edges. People will always be corrupt to some degree. There will be just as much, if not much more virtuous, kind behaviour in society. But erosion is inevitable.

Human nature is always going to be just as mean, egotistical, and
even cruel as it is kind, sympathetic, and generous. Human dignity is
our unity of all these chaotic traits in a single soul.

A threshold is crossed somehow. Maybe some disaster happens like a huge crop failure, pollution event, or military invasion. Maybe rage, corruption, and resentment become an overwhelming part of daily life. So there’s a clampdown of more laws and more ruthless enforcement to restore order.

But our desires chafe against these tougher rules. Our desire to be free, as well as our desire to be a cheating jerk. Those virtues and vices destabilize even this tougher social order until the only institutions that can contain them is despotism, dictatorship, tyranny.

And even the iron fist of the most brutal tyranny is susceptible to the same slow erosion of the law under that natural human chaos of social and personal complexity. That’s the greatest vision of hope Rousseau has left for the future of any real government.

When the oppression has become unbearable, humanity can always drag our dictators out of the sewer pipes where they fled to hide from the masses, beat and shoot them dead in a dirt road. Then we can start again.
• • •
A tidy narrative. Comprehensive? Absolutely not. Rousseau’s narrative of inequality is exquisitely simple.

Given the current situation of global politics, I very much hope
violence is not the only way to scale down from authoritarian
behaviour in democracy. Because it's already getting pretty bad.

Most obviously, it never accounts for the other most important vectors of human society. Yes, there’s virtue, but there’s also economy and ecology.

Economy: The consumption and production processes by which, at the minimum, people eat and maintain their lives. Ecology: The environmental conditions which have so many complex effects on all aspects of human health individually and socially.

But given the purpose of the book, I don’t blame him. Rousseau isn’t building a comprehensive guide to the means by which real states and governments collapse. He’s presenting an aspect of human nature that inevitably corrupts and erodes our goal of building a peaceful society of equals.

He imagines the kind of society in which humanity would be happy, but shows how that happiness is incompatible with any possible circumstance of real people. He shows us the power of our impossible aspiration, yet lets it remain inspiring despite its impossibility.

Original Inequality V: Laying Down the Law, Research Time, 09/03/2017

Continued from previous . . . So why do we need the law if we’re naturally good to each other? When you read Rousseau, he lays out a vision of human nature where we’re fundamentally good to each other.

Our instincts toward each other are naturally for sympathy and pity. When we see someone in pain, even a face expressing sadness or stress, we have an almost autonomic instinct to help them somehow. If only to ask if there’s a way we can help.

Most of you may not experience that kind of universal kindness every day. Most of the time, we probably walk around in a constant hum of mutual irritation. When I’ve worked in customer service jobs at different points of my life, I’d meet people who seemed constantly on the verge of exploding with rage just from interacting with strangers all day long.

Judge Dredd is the most intense, clear, and hilarious demonstration of
the terrifying violence in the idea that there's a moral obligation to
obey the law, or of the violence underlying any regime of laws at all.
I sometimes want to hang out with my friends from McMaster legal
theory again, but we live such different lives. I always found it
really rewarding conversation to throw an outsider's radical ideas
at them, because I'd learn so much and inspire creativity all around.

This, goes the stereotypical argument, is why we live in nations of laws. Because we’re really just constantly annoyed with each other all the time. When you learn the history of Western political philosophy, you inevitably cover Thomas Hobbes’ much worse thesis – that we’re naturally at constant war with each other, always paranoid, deranged with fear that we could be attacked and killed at any moment.

Society, says Hobbes, requires the strong hand of a police power who must never be questioned. The sovereign is the force that keeps us in line. Fear is the goal of the law.

Yet our natural state is more along the lines of that annoyance. We can still live together without having to suppress the urge for violence. But we do get pretty irritated with each other.

And that vision of a complicated society of mutual irritation is much more like Rousseau’s conception of how humanity lives together. It fits with his vision of a fundamentally kind humanity because of the context of where and how human kindness emerges.

It’s in the face-to-face interaction of people. And the better we know someone, the closer they are to us in our daily lives, the more powerful that face is in evoking our sympathy and love.

The problem is that when larger numbers of people live together, society gets complicated. We find ourselves reliant on many strangers for a lot of our needs – our food, shelter, education, entertainment, general well-being. And our networks of mutual need become so big and complicated that it stresses us to maintain them.

We experience stress, irritation, and pain that separates us from each other. We need to accumulate far beyond our personal needs when our society depends on each of us supplying the needs of others. The need to accumulate all-too-easily tips over into greed, which is at the root of so many destructive human behaviours.

Yet sometimes, we learn to rely too much on others to look after our
neighbours who are in great material need. That's the lesson I take from
the modern parable of the homeless pastor. When you expect an institution
– whether the church, a charity, or a government welfare program – to
care for the poor, you can erase your pangs of guilt when you look in
the face of people who ask you for help but still look through them.

So we turn to the law to regulate the complexity of agricultural and industrial human society. When humanity becomes the holocene, and not just the scattered interactions of wandering bands of humans, we need institutions to shape our societies through laws and regulations. Otherwise, greed and mutual piracy really will overtake us.

But civil laws don’t restore the original equality all people shared in simpler social structures, when each of us could provide for our own needs with our own efforts. Far from it.

Laws lock in some specific regime of inequality. Maybe it would be the state of political and social affairs at the time of an institution’s birth. Maybe a community would refine their legal institutions and regulations over time to become more equal, more fair. To redress past wrongs and build a better future for everybody.

Of course, political pressures of all kinds could push changes in those laws to fuel inequality, stall social mobility, lock in systematic inequities, discriminations, and humiliations. It feels like that’s the trend of the last few decades.

But that law is still the law. It can never restore the genuine equality of a totally self-sufficient population because it can never simplify society to flatten away all those differences and new needs that arise from the complexity of just a few hundred humans living together.

We’ll always need the law. And the law will always require some element of coercion. And Rousseau writes with a mix of trolling, theatricality, and ironic honesty when he says that the law amounts to slavery. So is there a way out of this? . . . . To be continued

When the Imaginary Is Real, Composing, 18/01/2017

Social contract stuff again today. Because the whole concept of the social contract has been at the centre of Western political theory for literally hundreds of years. As a popular idea, it informs the very act of writing states’ constitutions.

As annoying and constraining the concept can be, it’s not going away, and anyone who wants to write foundational political theory has to grapple with it.

Here’s a common stereotypical way* to describe a social contract: as a thought experiment. “We all know that such a moment could never have existed. But if all the members of a society could have gathered to decide among themselves how they’d live, they would decide that . . .”

* You know where you can find the best examples of sadly common lazy stereotypes about how to describe philosophy? Look up a kind-of-shit Introduction to Philosophy textbook.

But here’s a problem with that image of the social contract concept as a thought experiment. It doesn’t really make clear why we would make the experiment in the first place.

Social contract thought experiments are ostensibly about discovering the fundamental relationships and concerns of society. Depending on the emphasis, it tends either to security (so you lean Hobbes) or productivity in community (so you lean Rousseau).

Yet it rarely works as a means to discover a real essence of politics. It’s an argumentative demonstration, but as an argument, it’s strictly rhetoric. If you’re interested in building a vision of society as fundamentally about mutual security, you’ll work through a social contract experiment that makes it so. Same goes for whatever set of values you want to argue is paramount in society.

That's not to say that social contract thought experiments are useless or poor philosophy. They’re actually great philosophy, but not because they reveal some real essence of society. It’s because thinking through them is an engine of concepts and ideas about fundamental issues of social life and human nature.

You don’t want to get to a right answer that’s so clearly correct that it shuts everyone up and they just memorize it as the perfect answer to the question. You want the best way to encourage thinking.

Now here’s how Immanuel Kant lays it out. He turns it into an example of a technical term in his complex, carefully designed ontology of the human subject – an ideal of pure reason.

How an “ideal of pure reason” works – it’s a framework principle of thought itself. Literally a regulation for our minds. So while it's an imaginary scenario, it's a real part of the human mind and subject.

So what kind of thought does thinking through a social contract argument facilitate? For Kant, it’s the thought of governors themselves – heads of state, politicians, functionaries, legislators, parliamentarians.

By focussing their minds on the fundamental questions of what brings people together in a society, leaders will create laws, regulations, and institutions for their own societies that align with the values and best interests of their own people.

As Kant puts it, they’ll write laws to which every citizen would consent if given the opportunity – just like in the image of writing the social contract in the first place.

There are some limitations to this. But I’ll get into those tomorrow.

You Want the Lot Fees Suck Them Out of the Tip of My Cock: Money Worries, Sunnyvale, 16/04/2016

Sunnyvale is in danger again. If it wasn’t, then we wouldn’t be making a series. Maybe that’s why Ricky gets so upset with the camera crews whenever they come back to the trailer park. Because whenever they’re around, things get upended again.

But it’s not Jim who’s causing trouble. Jim is out. Jim’s gone. Jim’s done with Sunnyvale for good. He’s figured out exactly how to live a balanced lifestyle – a breathalyzer to optimize his liquor levels, a comfy little trailer just for him, and a campsite where he can live in a sedate, trouble-free environment.

This is why Sunnyvale could become the happy place that it was at the start of this season. Jim Lahey was gone. Not only was he gone, but he didn’t want to come back. Lahey has always been the source of law in Sunnyvale. He disrupts it, fucks everything up for everybody with his interference and his resentfulness of free, joyful people like Ricky, Julian, Bubbles, and all the rest of the gang.

And Lahey leaving Sunnyvale wasn’t just good for Sunnyvale. It was good for Jim! He’s happy at last. Content with himself. His own struggles are finally over. When he thinks of Sunnyvale and Julian, you can see the anger still seething. But he can still walk away from it. Jim may not have moved on from Sunnyvale completely, but he’s moving on. You see him come out of this little camper van surrounded by liquor bottles smiling and more relaxed than you remember him all series long, and you love him. He’s literally an overgrown kid with a paper route. He’s lovable now. He’s left the real world behind.

But there’s a new Lahey in town. Barb appears with her goons Donna and Candy to bully Jim into joining her scheme to retake Sunnyvale. Watching this sorry scene on Jim’s paper route unfold, it’s like some horrible succession ceremony. You’re watching Barb inherit the mantle of Lahey. She’s become the villain of Sunnyvale, the one whose very nature drives her to destroy the community’s joy and harmony. 

She’s the new villain of Sunnyvale now, just like Jim was for nine seasons and 15 years. But she’s not the law, definitely not. She’s not there to bring anyone into line or make them conform to some bland existence. Barb Lahey is no authority. But she is an authority in another way – the bully, the aggressor, the tyrant. She intimidates and scares, threatens and destroys.

Look what she does to Jim. Interrupts him on his paper route, speaks condescendingly to him – her words flowing out of her in a flirtatious tone, but only because they’re insults and threats. She’s chilling in her effectiveness – which is a fancy way of saying that she clearly has him by the balls. Candy is nothing but a goon pushing Jim around, and Donna’s been reduced from what she was to nothing more than a goon. Jim can get in a brief sneer early in the conversation, but he’s quickly overpowered.

This used to be Jim Lahey, the scourge of everything fun in Sunnyvale Trailer Park. Now he’s just a sad old man named Jim, and Barb Lahey is out to destroy all that goodness in the world.

Even when she’s off screen, Barb Lahey’s presence is on the screen. Ricky and Julian are panicked and scrambling just as much as Jim is, desperately trying to scrounge up the money to fend off her lawsuit as it bears down on them like a speeding truck. They’re thrown back into the world of money, debt, and capital again from the paradise they had in Sunnyvale.

Now, that's a weird thing to say, isn't it? Isn't Julian a businessman running his country bar? Doesn’t it make him a bunch of money? That’s certainly what his blonde girlfriends seem to think. And doesn’t Ricky love running his Drugs Store? It’s the centrepiece of his family business – he even has his little grandson packing joints for him with those perfect fingers. Bubbles plays in the bar and plies away at his cart business.

But look what happens when Julian and Ricky have to start raising actual money to pay their lawyer. Julian announces that he has to ask people to pay actual money for drinks instead of getting everyone to pay on credit. They walk out in disgust. Or else openly mock and insult him. So Julian has to send his flunkies after him – Cory and Jacob, then Randy.

Yes, it’s true. Randy has become Julian’s idiot flunky, just like Cory and Jacob. But Randy knows better – he remembers being the instrument of the law, the right hand of the force that would normalize Sunnyvale and bring it to order. Now he chafes at being an instrument of Sunnyvale’s new order. Or rather, it’s the true order of Sunnyvale finally having won. Against what he’s fought to achieve for more than a decade, the natural anarchy of joy and community have established themselves as the dominant order of Sunnyvale.

But the need for money has ruined that joy. People have to pay for their drinks. Worse, they have to pay for their trailers’ lot fees. The need for money has forced Julian and Ricky to become the law. 

Well, Julian anyway. Even though Ricky is part of the plan to raise money to fight Barb Lahey by collecting lot fees, he still refuses to hand over the lot fees he owes. He and Randy end up fighting like a pair of idiot schoolboys. Ricky refuses to give in to the law when its agent – Randy – comes to enforce it.

But Randy is working for Julian, and Julian needs to collect the lot fees to defend Sunnyvale. This is the vicious paradox that’s wrapped Julian this season. And it reveals a lot about the fundamental nature of Sunnyvale and Sunnyvale’s freedom, if you want to look. The paradox works like this.

Julian thrives when no one is paying any money for what he provides. No one pays lot fees. No one pays for their liquor. Everyone is drinking and partying and having a wonderful time. The whole system breaks down in rage and resentment as soon as anyone has to pay any money for what they need – as soon as anyone has to pay to party or pay to live in Sunnyvale. In Sunnyvale’s purest state, all its people don’t need to do anything except party, relax, and express themselves. Sunnyvale is a playground, a paradise of pure joy. I could call it the Land of Do-As-You-Please.

But then Barb Lahey exploded back into Sunnyvale. She isn’t the law, though. She’s a blatant, violent, raging threat. She's a pure force of destruction who controls through intimidation. She’s a shit tornado. 

She forced Julian to run his life with actual money – a real cash payment so his lawyer would be able to defend Sunnyvale against her assault. And in order to collect all that money, Julian had to become everything that’s against his own nature and against the nature of Sunnyvale itself. 

Julian became the law.

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