Predators and Parasites

The thorny question of what to do about difficult people.

Many years ago, some friends and I tried to start an intentional community. It was a very homespun affair. Our food and clothes were largely scavenged. We'd churn butter in mason jars and make gallons of hummus by mashing garbanzo beans with a potato masher. Although we intended to buy land to establish an ecovillage someday, our group wasn't organized or committed enough to ever manage more than renting a house. Part of the reason for this was that we never solved the problem of what to do with the hard cases.

Our fledgling community was partly comprised of people with addiction issues and mental health challenges. We were a magnet for people with no where else to go who wanted to drink their days away in our living room. Several efforts were made to clear the rabble out, but the rabble eventually won. By the time that happened I'd long since moved away.

These days, at the coffee shop where I hang out, I often encounter people dealing with various combinations of addiction and mental illness. Most of them are harmless. Some are annoying. But they're as much a part of the neighborhood as everyone else. I usually get along with them alright. We sit together having coffee and it's fine.

But there are people who sometimes show up at the coffee shop and ruin it for me. Like Scott, who sexually harassed a friend of mine into leaving and never coming back. I've told Scott why I won't be in the same space as him. Yet he still comes around sometimes. And he isn't the only creep that shows up and tries to poison the social ecology with creepiness.

It's easy to remedy a situation like this at a coffee shop by leaving. But fleeing toxicity isn't always an option. Sometimes the world forces us to deal with toxic people. My strategy for these situations is to recall the countless hours I've spent shoveling manure in my life and resign myself to being offended the entire time.

While toxic people can change, they typically do not. And when they do, it can be messy. The lines between support and enabling can become blurred. Progress can be impossible to estimate.

Extreme toxicity is fortunately rare. More common are the people who are simply annoying. The ones who, consciously or otherwise, play stupid social power games. Who monopolize group discussions, interrupting others while visibly failing to listen. Who derail emerging group understanding in favor of thinly-veiled egomania.

I try not to hang out with these people, but they're difficult to avoid. Their behavior is typically considered acceptable. It's also acceptable to push back against their nonsense, which is what I often do, with ambiguous results. Maybe if more people pushed back, there would be less nonsense to deal with.

Our Right to Exist

Thomas Paine published Agrarian Justice in 1795. Many of its ideas have withstood the test of time. Perhaps the most important is its division of property into two types. The first type is the natural world and its bounty, to which we're all entitled an equal share. The second type is the artificial improvement upon this common property to increase its productivity and support denser populations. Paine observed that the second type of property, possessed by relatively few landowners, made it impossible for everybody else to access their fair share of the first type of property. To remedy the inequity, Paine proposed:

To create a National Fund, out of which there shall be paid to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age.

This is the earliest example of a proposed Universal Basic Income that I'm aware of. Paine suggested funding it with property tax, reasoning that property owners were responsible for making natural resources inaccessible to those who didn't own property. Not knowing the economics of the era, I'm not sure how workable this UBI really would've been. But it is telling that it was never adopted.

In my opinion, Paine's rationale for the UBI is of more value than the UBI itself. We all naturally have an equal right to a share of the world's resources, yet the world has been not been divided up that way. Rather, it's been divided up according to a private ownership scheme. No matter what any piece of paper says, the land and water and air belong to all of us by natural right. We may observe the rules of the artificial scheme to maintain civility. Or we may suffer under the tyrannies of those charged with enforcing these rules.

Either way, we accept a reality where our natural rights cannot be asserted. That's not ideal. At this point, I get the impression that many people are genuinely unaware that they even have natural rights. Sadly, many probably don't have rights in practical terms.

This is part of why I write so much about natural freedoms. I used to use the language of sovereignty more but feel like the Sovereign Citizens movement has poisoned this language with their frivolous lawsuits and fake legal proceedings. Now I talk about freedom and the blues think I'm a red.

To my way of thinking, every freedom is tied to obligations. We're free biologically, with the right to use resources and the obligation to protect our ecosystems from harm. Society locks this right in a cage that can only be opened with keys made of money and programs us to forget about this obligation.

What Thomas Paine did in his time was to assert that everyone had the right to exist, with all that entails. We all deserve to exist, and yes, the world does owe us a living. If civilization is getting in the way of that, we'd be wise to remedy the situation amicably. That seems important to recognize in an era increasingly dominated by individualistic voices devoid of social responsibility.

Rigged Popularity Contests

When I was 18, I briefly worked as a canvasser for a PIRG in Seattle. My job was to go door to door in affluent suburbs and ask for money. Most of the funds I raised went into the organization's administrative budget, with the rest going to lobbyists, though tiny portions were theoretically supposed to trickle down into my wages. The psychology of that workplace was toxic in a way that I've seen time and time again in the world of nonprofits and activism.

We were trained to feel good about being overworked and underpaid. The worse we felt, the better we were supposed to feel, because we were making such a big difference in the world. The underlying purpose of our work was to make money for administrators and lobbyists, but no one ever talked about this. Such facts were too material, and the world of progressive politics back then ran entirely on feelings.

This world still runs on feelings, but the feelings it runs on today are darker. Around the time the Clinton campaign conspired with the DNC and mainstream media to prevent Bernie Sanders from securing the Democratic Party nomination in 2016, the remnants of the political left in the US transformed into a pit of vipers. Hopeful optimism gave way to cynical virtue signaling and cancel culture. Fellow Minnesotan Ilhan Omar, the darling of the new left, funneled over $800,000 in campaign dollars into her husband's company, and people still love her. I don't think they love her because she's good. I think they love her because she won.

When Roe v Wade was overturned, the first thing the Democratic Party did was ask everyone for $15. The court decision didn't come out of nowhere. It came from a strategic stacking of the Supreme Court that could have been stopped by sufficiently motivated blues at several points along the way. But the blues aren't sufficiently motivated to solve any real policy problems. Their only motivation seems to be the acquisition of power to better serve their corporate sponsors.

Although I gave up on the left years ago, I've never been tempted to join with this country's political right. I found the Neocon coup of 2000 disturbing, and abhor all of the ways the reds limit freedom in the name of upholding freedom. From my perspective, the reds and the blues aren't on different sides of anything beyond narrowly scripted social issues. Both groups are fueled by hate and use power abuses large and small to articulate their agendas.

On a deeper level, even if our system worked exactly as advertised, it would still involve giving power to the winners of popularity contests. Consider a high school that elects a prom king and queen. Imagine if these elected officials were then put in charge of the high school itself. Obviously, winning the popularity contest wouldn't qualify them to run the school. So the fact that we allow popularity contests to determine who runs the country always struck me as odd.

This system probably won't last forever. And the disastrous public response to the pandemic left many scrambling for alternatives. Here is where I see some hope. It is technically feasible to create alternatives to our broken systems, and now the motivation to actually do this may be building, regardless of party lines. As for what comes next, the big question in my mind is whether or not we can learn to cooperate effectively in the emerging technological environment.

The politics of this new era aren't so different from the politics of the past. Neither has human nature become less ruled by tribalism in recent decades. What has changed is first that we've entered a period of inescapable, overlapping crises, and second that technological advancement is providing us with new tools capable of addressing these crises.

Predators and Parasites

For decades, crime trended downward in the US. According to Bureau of Justice Statistics data reported by Pew Research "the overall violent crime rate fell 74% between 1993 and 2019, while the property crime rate fell 71%." 2020 shifted this trend. Another Pew page informs us that, "The U.S. murder rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020 – the largest single-year increase in more than a century." Squeezed by pandemic policies, more people started killing each other and likely committing other crimes as well. Even so, violent crime is still broadly down from its peak levels 30 years ago.

I don't attribute this positive trend to our criminal justice system. That system is clearly broken. Rather, I think that society has generally become less and less accepting of violence in recent decades. The violence underpinning our way of life has largely been externalized to other countries and violence within our borders has been increasingly confined to marginalized communities that are effectively segregated from more affluent neighborhoods.

In other words, we've been displacing violence instead of addressing its root causes. Poverty. Food deserts. Unfair systems. Barriers to accessing medical care. Until these things are fixed, they'll continue contributing to antisocial behavior. Playing by society's rules makes little sense when society is continually harming you.

Desperate people do desperate things. But even if we transformed our whole system to prevent such desperation from ever materializing, there would still be plenty of people doing wrong by each other. At one extreme there's rampant sexual predation. For reference, about 2 percent of Catholic clergy are pedophiles. More common are people who live by shamelessly taking from others, materially and otherwise.

It's not clear that either group would be deterred if society was made more fair. Although predators and parasites represent just a tiny percentage of our population, their impact would remain significant and negative. Even in a best case scenario, it wouldn't be easy to identify people like this and prevent them from harming others.

Complicating matters is a control regime that's both predatory and parasitic. Some of the regime's crimes are direct and obvious. Others are indirect and deliberately hidden from view. There's no malice in the control regime's misbehavior. There is only impersonal articulation of profitable agendas.

The control regime isn't a person with a personality. It's a segmented, polycentric integrated network. Still, picturing the control regime as a person can be useful in making sense of our situation. I see it as an abusive alcoholic father who is tyrannical at home and barely functional at work. The kind of guy who buys sex with his kid's college money and convinces his neighbors to fight each other.

The metaphor breaks down quickly. A guy like that can change if he wants to. He can start making better choices and find others that support those choices. The control regime, on the other hand, cannot simply change. It's not so much a person as a software running in powerful social networks. Substituting one individual for another does nothing to alter the software. I'm not sure how such software could be altered.

Manufactured Desperation

We all have a right to exist. We're all entitled to life, liberty, and happiness. The predators, parasites, and otherwise difficult people among us have the same rights as anyone. Ideally, society would protect us from them while accommodating everyone. We're quite a ways from this ideal.

The control regime doesn't merely fail to protect us from harmful people, it manufactures the desperation that gives rise to their harmful behavior and sometimes even criminalizes acts of of self defense. This manufactured desperation has produced a vast population of people who are treated like ore that can be mined by exploitative industries and government agencies.

The criminal justice system captures some of these people and literally enslaves them. Even the ones who aren't enslaved are held hostage so the incarceration industry can extract absurd sums of money from their families for basic stuff like phone calls and pads of paper. The total cost to taxpayers is enormous and the victims of crime aren't the ones getting rich off of this scheme.

Government entitlement programs shift public money into private hands, but almost none of this money actually goes to the individuals enrolled in these programs. So-called affordable housing programs subsidize landlords directly. State insurance programs subsidize industrial medicine directly. Food assistance programs are immensely profitable for companies like JP Morgan Chase . Note that this link is a decade old because Google search results appear to have been manipulated to hide the extent to which this bank and other companies are currently profiting from poverty.

The blue solution to these problems is to increase the corporate subsidies. The red solution is to reduce entitlements and enslave more poor people to their favored corporations. Both sides promise to get tough on crime, but what they mean by that is bigger budgets for law enforcement and bigger handouts to select companies. Neither side actually wants to stop crime. They all just want to continue winning their political popularity contests.

The control regime segregates and exploits the lower classes, hiding the inconvenient poor from society at large. In so doing, the regime places large swaths of our population into a perpetual socioeconomic pressure cooker, which screws people up in all sorts of ways. At some point, if we ever hope to free ourselves from this regime, we'll have to come to terms with all of the difficult people created by decades of harmful policies.

There's no easy answer here. Individual and community healing is surely a piece of the puzzle. So is education, whether formal or informal. But we're a long ways from there. We may never get past the problem of how to protect ourselves from both the control regime and its victims.

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