Context Basics

Freedom, the control regime, and the power of stories.

There are many subjects I'd like to cover with this newsletter. But before I get to those, there's some background information to share. Here you'll find my views on foolish assumptions, the purpose of freedom, the control regime, and the power of stories. These things underpin our social order and structure our subjective realities in important ways. Yet their importance is too often lost in the noise surrounding the events of the day. So I invite you to take a step back with me and consider these basics.

Foolish Assumptions

When I was growing up, the large stone heads on Easter Island were considered a great mystery. More recently, it was discovered that these giant heads sat atop giant stone bodies, which had been buried. This discovery was big news. It upended society's assumption that the heads were disembodied. In hindsight, this assumption seems baseless. Foolish, even. And yet, the assumption was widespread in the recent past.

Protests against the Iraq war in 2003 were unprecedented in human history. Up to 14 million people in sixty countries participated in these protests. Did they make a difference? They did not. There was an invasion, an occupation, and a legacy of death, all for no good reason.

Civil rights demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 were on another level. Up to 26 million people in hundreds of US cities participated in those demonstrations. In my hometown of Minneapolis, where they started, those demonstrations didn't result in a dismantling of systemic racism. They resulted in a crime wave and a divided populace.

Both of these unprecedented demonstrations were products of galvanizing events. A war started under false pretenses. The callous murder of a man by police caught on camera. Both situations proved that society isn't a person you can talk to with a protest. Instead, it's the machinery buried under the talking heads.

This machinery is inaccessible by design. How we vote is irrelevant to its operations, yet we're told that voting is the only way we can change things. So we vote for the big stone heads. And we ignore the machinery supporting the big stone heads, hidden from view.

Political protest and the act of voting are useful only in a symbolic sense. And media portrayals of current issues are designed to keep the conversation centered on symbolic actions like voting and protest. Society's myriad problems consequently remain unaddressed until they reach the level of crises. These crises then become new galvanizing events used by the machinery to advance an agenda of further power consolidation.

Society is currently poised at the intersection of several such crises. The machinery's agenda of power consolidation is evident everywhere. The government keeps awarding itself new powers. The corporate world has begun exercising more and more control over our lives. Meaningful dissent has all but disappeared.

I don't believe the problems we face can be solved by adhering to the status quo. Neither are solutions likely to be found in opposing the status quo by traditional means. Both paths are variations of the same path. A path that has already led us into a mess of wicked problems.

Freedom with Purpose

Responding to our circumstances requires freedom. Freedom is our natural state and society impinges upon this natural state in far too many ways. But freedom on its own is abstract and meaningless. For it to mean something, it must have purpose.

From my perspective, the purpose of freedom is that it allows us to meet our obligations. Every one of us exists within a vast web of obligations that can only be effectively navigated when we're free to make choices about how we use our energy. These obligations are personal, familial, social, professional, civic, environmental, and for some religious. The total network of these obligations is the glue that holds society together.

Not everyone can meet their obligations on all of these different levels all of the time. Sometimes the reason for the failure is out of a person's hands, like illness. Other times, the reason for the failure is more of a choice, like a bad attitude. There are even those who view freedom itself as freedom from obligations. These people make everything worse and are rarely held accountable for their actions.

Our control regime has arranged our legal and economic systems in such a way as to shield powerful bad actors from accountability. And most of our informal accountability structures have disappeared as society has become more diverse and we've become more atomized. Many sense that the absence of these structures is problematic. I suspect that this sense motivates cancel culture, which attempts to reintroduce personal accountability into society in a variety of misguided and harmful ways.

Imagine a society where everyone was both perfectly free and entirely accountable. That's where I start when I try to picture a better future. The great challenge of this, of course, is that large swaths of our population barely understand their obligations to themselves, and can't even conceive of the other areas where they're obliged to behave in a responsible way.

Society's main strategy for dealing with these people has been to impose increasingly authoritarian controls on all of us. Living under these authoritarian controls has programmed most people to lose their innate sense of freedom and to consider their obligations burdensome, if they consider them at all.

The Control Regime

The total global control regime is built like a social movement. It's a segmented polycentric integrated network, or SPIN. On paper, it can be seen in the intermarriages of powerful families, interlocking corporate board directorships, and the revolving door between government and industry. This regime can't be influenced by average people, nor can its power be challenged. It has no central point of failure.

In this Big SPIN, participants share assumptions and values with each other. Because of this, their actions may appear to be centrally coordinated, though they tend not to be except in moments of crisis. The international wave of lockdowns when covid started definitely appeared to be centrally coordinated, though behind the scenes, it probably looked more chaotic. Outside relatively narrow parameters, most people don't really seem to know what they're doing. This goes doubly true for the people in power.

In a sense, society is a rudderless ship bumping into rocky terrain while all of the sailors play games with each other instead of charting a better course. But society is also an endless nest of interdependent systems. The Big SPIN controls these systems. This doesn't mean that it controls society.

Factions within the Big SPIN do exercise immense influence over events and the public narratives crafted to explain these events. The relationships of these factions with each other range from cooperative to adversarial. On matters of power and freedom, all of the factions typically behave as a single class. This class, whether termed the managerial class or the power elite, always seeks to expand its own power at the expense of others. That is the entire purpose of this class.

Sometimes, one of the Big SPIN's factions exposes itself to public scrutiny by flagrantly violating mores or law or decency. Even then, it can take years for a faction's transgressions to come fully to light, if they ever do. Jeffrey Epstein was caught procuring disadvantaged girls for sex and received a suspiciously lenient plea deal in 2008. By the time Epstein was charged in New York a decade later, it was clear that he had friends in the highest of places. People like Alan Dershowitz, Alex Acosta, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Prince Andrew surrounded Epstein, while an unknown number of unnamed accomplices escaped public notice. Some have suggested that the sex trafficking of children was part of a larger blackmail ring used by Epstein to control other powerful people. That would be totally in line with how the elite seem to operate.

Not every celebrity belongs to one of these factions. And some billionaires appear to be factions unto themselves. Bill Gates has bought up a quarter of a million acres of US farmland in recent years. His purchases are part of a larger trend of institutional investments in agricultural land and residential property. To me, the Gates faction looks like it's part of a coordinated campaign to make property harder for people to own by buying everything up and raising prices. But to Gates or other investors, the underlying motive behind these purchases is likely simple profit. Reducing the average person's purchasing power in real estate markets is just a side effect of their relentless profit-seeking.

A great many actions undertaken by the Big SPIN or its factions have side effects like this. Altogether, in aggregate, these side effects systematically reduce the power of individuals. This reduction of individuals' power is always visited upon the lower classes, though it's rarely evenly distributed. The uneven distribution of the negative impacts of these side effects is presented to popular culture as contested territory. Members of the lower classes are encouraged to fight with each other over this territory.

It would be very surprising to me if the Big SPIN had a Big Plan. But it does have clear motivations, and these sum to a desire for more power. Governments and companies articulate this desire at every turn. Fortunately, their reach is not absolute.

The Power of Stories

In society right now, we don't so much have universal shared stories. We have a heterogeneous panorama of perspectives, varying in popularity, competing for our attention. Many of these perspectives were manufactured for us by our rulers. They know the power of stories.

I recently ran across an article titled 'We are fictional characters of our own creation.' The piece argues, fairly convincingly, that our realities are essentially fictionalized by our minds. Here's a quote:

The stories we tell ourselves about our motives, beliefs, and values are not merely unreliable in their specifics but are fictitious through and through. They are improvisations, created in retrospect by the astonishing story-spinner that is the human mind. ... The very same story-spinning machinery our brains use to create explanations for the actions of fictional characters are used when we interpret the actions of people around us, and indeed, ourselves. We are, in a very real sense, fictional characters of our own creation.

So our brains tell us stories about ourselves and the world around us and not all of these stories are factual. Our autobiographies are mythologies. Our stories about one another are similarly constructed. This perspective may sound threatening. It undermines the whole idea of objectivity. But I don't see it as threatening. I see it as empowering.

In a sense, it means that the world is literally made of stories. Stories that are the creative products of our own minds. While the production of these stories is mostly automated, I feel like we have a measure of influence over the process. This seems true both of our individual stories and of the stories we share.

Sure, the world is made of physical material as well as stories, but I can't make sense of any of that except through stories. In practical terms, shared stories are the basis for all of society. They coordinate activities and establish the reality of things that would otherwise be mere fantasies, like the powers of laws and contracts.

This is part of why I like working in news media. It gives me a look behind the curtain into how realities are manufactured. And make no mistake, our realities are manufactured. The big question, in my mind, is how to manufacture better realities. If step one was the internet, what is step two?

I think step two begins with learning to harness the potential of networks. Web 2.0 is dominated by corporate powers forcing individuals into online niches to maximize revenue from ads and data sales. The emergence of Web 3.0 promises something better. Public blockchains. Individual control over individual accounts. Censorship resistance. These things aren't trivial. They're stepping stones to better systems.

Connecting the Dots

Here I've introduced my perspective on foolish assumptions, the purpose of freedom, the control regime, and the power of stories. I feel like these things are necessary background for considering societal problems and what to do about them. It would be great if we could all just check our assumptions, reclaim our freedom as individuals, displace the power of the control regime by adopting alternatives to its sick systems, and participate in the development of better shared stories. But I feel like we still have a ways to go before all of that will be possible.

In the mean time, my intention is to focus largely on the stories being told to us by the powers that be. I don't often feel like I live in the same world these stories describe, and I'm convinced that there are plenty of others out there who harbor similar sentiments. By contributing my opinions to our public discourse regarding important events or cultural circumstances, I hope to get people thinking along new lines. Constructive new lines, ideally.

For more of my writing, check out my scifi novels and my Hive blog.