Rebellion
No peace talks.
Monday, 2010-05-10 | New Athens, Philosophy, Politics, Zona Roja
| "I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer / The future's uncertain and the end is always near" |
| Jim Morrison |
In The Hacker Crackdown, sci-fi journalist Bruce Sterling's chronicle of "Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier" circa 1993, bruces@well.sf.ca.us notices the following about humans and human communities:
The words "community" and "communication" have the same root. Wherever you put a communications network, you put a community as well. And whenever you take away that network -- confiscate it, outlaw it, crash it, raise its price beyond affordability -- then you hurt that community.No well-known anecdote, popular statistic or celebrated historical account of human communities and the moral imperative felt by individuals to defend their networks exists to counter this point. It's such an obvious and unavoidable idea that to even try to express it in the negative strains the imagination.
Communities will fight to defend themselves. People will fight harder and more bitterly to defend their communities, than they will fight to defend their own individual selves.
Imagine, for instance, if Sterling or I had gone and written something like, "people will fight harder and more bitterly to defend themselves than they will their communities; communities will seldom fight to defend themselves." It is bizarre, stupid and jarringly contrary to experience to try to imagine individuals who would not defend their communities more ferociously than they would defend themselves.
And, since many individuals hold to the Mauler's famous observation that "the best defense is a good offense", a necessary corollary to Sterling's rule of communities must be that a certain percentage of any community's defensive zeal will manifest itself as attacks on external communities that understood by members of the community to constitute a threat.
Which is a large part of the reason that the cliquishness and antagonistic attitudes of communities on the Internet is accepted as a given. We accept this of political parties, social advocacy groups and kindergarteners, and so we are not surprised to find that Digg readers dislike Redditors or that Anonymous meets on the weekends to protest Scientology or that anyone with two eyebrows who can breathe through his nose disdainfully knits the former and looks disapprovingly down the latter when forced to consider the real people out there meeting and mating with the help of Hanidate.
Nor should we be surprised: this cliquishness and network-versus-network antagonism is at least as old as the first organized attempt to scale the walls of Jericho and probably dates all the way back to that golden moment when the Missing Link got the first inkling that he could do more damage with a bleached femur than his own fists and fangs and leapt from the shadow of the Monolith to cudgel his unsuspecting enemies.
So we are primarily social creatures: when we're not busy self-identifying through speech, dress or consumption, we're consciously or unconsciously assessing the identities of others and working to create and uphold relationships based on shared identity and solidarity. But we are also Earth's most prolific homicides as well--this is handily evidenced by the fact that our written history is a chronicle of notable wars, famous murders and significant rapes--and this aspect of our creatureliness takes a very close "second". In other words, the individual need to be a part of a consensus group is modulated by every human's tendency towards aggressively contentious behavior in defense of consensus and that individual's willingness to inflict savage violence upon another individual on the basis of membership in an opposing or infringing consensus group.
And vice versa: the individual capacity for violence is directly related to the pressures that are the natural consequence of attacking one community and defending another.
But even that is not a particularly surprising or unusual thing to assert. The relationship between violence and communities is a very primal and thus drives a great many in popular narratives (think Lone Wolf and Cub, Bambi, The Declaration of Independence or any other document affirming the rights of individuals to defend their various consensus groups by any available means).
Indeed, it is not until we begin to consider individual cognition and the effects of consensus on an individual's thoughts that a genuinely remarkable thesis begins to emerge.
But before we get to that thesis, let us momentarily retreat, as Sterling and Dempsey do, to the realm of the instinctual and the intuitive in order to make one more point about the social homicide. One of the basic principles of the study of human consciousness--one to which the wiki pages on everything from Stockholm Sydrome to The Room, from National Socialism to impressionist painting plainly attest--is that our brains have less in common with coral reefs than they do with hermit crabs: one experientially verifiable fact of the human mind is that if you give it a structure to crawl into and inhabit, and you can bet your bottom dollar that all but the most rigid minds will come, with time, to take the shape of their new home.
Human consciousness is adaptable and impressionable: we know this instinctively because it is verified by every adaptation we have had to make in order to thrive and everything that has impressed itself upon us along the way. So given what we have already agreed about the relationship between consensus groups and violence, is it at all implausible to suggest that the adaptability of the human mind means that membership in consensus groups warps and deforms the imagination?
Of course it is not. Furthermore, when one considers the externally inflicted intellectual deformity that he accepts as "necessary" on a daily basis--at the office, in the ballot booth, on the Internet--it is similarly plausible to allege that a malleable, adaptive and impressionable mind is not only common, but requisite. Desirable, even.
For one literally cannot "fit in" anywhere unless he possesses a certain degree of mental flexibility and thus this sort of flexibility can be understood as a kind of fitness or strength. Loners and outcasts don't last long and don't get much done and so we rightfully call them "weak": people who can leverage the collective ability of many consensus groups and accomplish difficult tasks are rightfully called "strong" and so intellectual flexibility is itself a strength.
But this isn't the end of the story, however, because we cannot forget that the traditional synonyms and metaphors for "strength" are words like "rigidity", "immutability" and "inflexibility". And thus we come to a quandary. And this quandary is a remarkable one, one which is so remarkable, in fact, that I have seen it remarked upon by everyone from Alicia Keys to Immortal Zeus. To wit: if the measure of one's intellectual strength is the measure of his flexibility as well as his rigidity, then discernment and conscience--the faculties that help us discern where to hold fast and where to give ground--are reflected in the the consensus groups to which we belong as well as the ones to which we refuse to belong.
And, most importantly, conscience and discernment are reflected in our apostasy: the consensus groups from which we secede say more about us than the ones to which we belong or the ones we oppose, as the decision to turn one's back and "go it alone" is a reflection of the intellectual flexibility I've been describing as well as the concept of intellectual rigidity that is its opposing virtue.
Basically, if you can uphold a community's values and oppose them at the same time, you score double.
And this brings us unavoidably back to Sterling and Dempsey: once we understand that 1.) individuals will act more aggressively on behalf of the communities to which they belong and 2.) a great many people believe that the best defense is a good offense, it is incumbent upon any man who would keep his conscience fit and in good fighting form to exercise that conscience by occasionally turning on his own ranks and opening fire.
For open rebellion is perfect loyalty. One betrays neither himself or his comrades when he pits the one against the other with the goal of perfecting both.
One must be flexible enough to fit in to his home; one must be rigid enough to maintain its form when he has left the his home behind. Turning away from communities and consensus is the crucible of conscience and summoning one's erstwhile peers to the defense of the consensus to which they adhere is the only way to keep that consensus strong and honest.