A curious phenomenon of US elections is the idea that citizens of other countries, though unable to govern themselves sensibly, should have influence in US elections. They argue that since the US affects them that they should have a voice. Should the US then have a reciprocal voice in their affairs? They don't speak of that directly but of course this is their true agenda, the majoritarian nightmare discussed in the earlier post Extremists. They wish to have a single world government.

The fact remains that this election will have a material impact on the rest of the world, especially people living overseas. We do feel the brunt of these foreign policies in direct and indirect ways. I can no longer travel as care-free and safely to the places I once could just five years ago. The degrees of freedom in terms of my personal business have narrowed considerably. And this lack of say, this powerlessness to exercise my right to make certain decision-makers accountable, really pisses me and many, many, many people off. Over the long term, this democratic deficit is clearly unsustainable. The bottom-up dynamic will break the political dam.

Taken from a long view, this is really not a Republican versus Democrat thing. Even large multinationals are feeling the negative consequences of the last four years, either through boycotts of American brands or through the bottom line. Quite simply, economic growth and markets favours stability and certainty. So you can make an argument (which I heard at Davos last year) that this administration is single-handedly unravelling 50 years of US multilateral leadership in building a global legal and economic order which multinationals need to conduct business around the world. Of course, this can be seen as a good or bad thing, depending on your view. Anti-globalization activists may cheer hurrah, while neoliberals would not. I personally think the neoliberal view is not sustainable nor reflective of how the world (or economics for that matter) really works. Thus my biggest concern is that we don't have a back-up plan for when and if the current system of wealth creation starts to hiccup and unravel. But that's another story.

How soon we forget. That 50 years of the old world order hardly included "the world" in that supposedly stable system which was in truth neither stable nor sustainable. Well over half of the world was excluded from that supposed economic stability as well as being armed to the teeth, with nukes pointed in several directions, and engaged in continuous war at the fringes of power centers on a far larger and more deadly scale than current wars. War is nothing new for Afghanistan, Iraq or Iran. The middle east has been embroiled in continuous war for the whole period. Parts of Asia, Africa and south America were nearly continuously at war during that period as well. It was a continuation of the European insanity that ravaged the whole 20th century, embroiling the world in their childish tantrums and fever dreams. It's remarkable to hear anyone pining for that past era.

The first half of the century was dominated by open warfare in Europe. The US was dragged into that mess twice by alliances. The last half of the century was dominated by cold war and the threat of total annihilation in which large portions of Europe rooted for the other side, a preview of their behavior today as they root for Islamo-fascism.

The provincialism and historical forgetfulness of those most culpable for the insanity of the last century is a continuation of the intellectual poverty that caused those barbarities. They take no responsibility for their destructive behavior and learn no lessons. They live in an echo chamber that admits no outside voices and so maintains the illusion that what they say is what all people say, and so whip themselves into destructive frenzies.

...part of the problem in living in such a large country like the United States, so isolated physically and psychologically from much of the world, is a lack of feedback loops across space and time. (This is a species-wide problem to some degree.) Put another way, it's hard for the average American to feel, up close and personal, the consequences of its leader's actions, and more generally the implications of what's happening beyond its boarders. While this has always been thus, as I was reminded recently sitting on the beaches of Normandy recalling how long it took the US to join both World War I and II...

It isn't clear how US disinterest in cleaning up European messes can be spun as a problem of physical isolation. It was clear then as it is clear now that Europeans have no interest in sensible self rule, peace and prosperity. The hobgoblins in their minds keep them on the brink of mayhem even when not actively engaged in pogroms or hot wars. Terrorism is a fixture of European life.

... September 11th may have changed this dynamic; for this was one gigantic feedback loop, the logical consequence of policies dating back to the American-lead coup in Iran in 1953, the first and best definition of blowback. But even with 9/11, the difference between how the East Coast and West Coast have internalized this event is quite large. People in Manhattan were emotionally shaken to the core, while for residents of San Diego or Portland what transpired was inherently more intellectualized and abstract. Distance from the event does matter. Today, with body bags mounting, the war in Iraq might be a feedback loop of sorts. Or not: because a1000 dead is not the same as 50,000 dead, the death toll in Vietnam. The shock signal has to be louder, an amplification which Michael Moore's film tried to achieve.

How convenient to stop the wayback machine in 1953. It avoids all those European armies that had ravaged the area for the preceding centuries, continuing right up to 1953, and omits Pearl Harbor, a far more destructive event. But what can we expect from someone who thinks of a film by a 3rd rate hack as a politically important act?

We need better scholarship and more intellectual maturity to make good choices in the present. Useful views are hard for Europeans and europhiles to formulate as Europe continues to implode, shrinking back from its puffed up colonial period when it dominated the world to assume its proper relationship to large and powerful regions of the planet such as India, China and the US. Eurocentric thinking, not the least of the reasons why Europe had such a bad 20th century, dims their eyes and clouds their minds.

One indication of the isolation and provincialism of Europeans is their failure to grasp the concepts of subsidarity. They may have an abstract understanding but are too lazy, and a bit squicked out, to understand the implications. Confusion about films is one part, and even greater confusion about centralized broadcast media is another.

One could argue, then, that the pervasive and instantaneous global media means that Americans are no longer isolated. That they don't need to travel outside their boarders to know what's going on in the world. If only that were true. More information does not bring better understanding. Actually, it might be quite the opposite. As Brian Eno recently said at a talk he gave for ArtAngel at the Royal Institution in London a few weeks week, the UK and the US have a dangerously mediated environment. If you don't believe this, just for fun, start reading four different newspapers from four difference cultures -- pick Singapore, Brazil, India, and hey even Canada -- and you'll see what I mean. You'll read things you'd never hear in the US media, especially news items that should be there. As Russians would say, the biggest difference between the US and the former Soviet Union is that at least they knew that it was propaganda. Even well educated Americans and British are only dimly aware of just how much of the political agenda and discourse is being driven by a narrow set of informational and political parameters. For instance, immigration has been pounded upon relentlessly in British media, but for most people in the UK it's really not an issue, or at least not in the way that it's being framed. The same could be said for countless situations in recent media history, the poster child being the Monica Lewinsky scandal, which was a politically driven cause by a Washington elite that was entertaining to the average American but ultimately not a big, morally-threatening deal. One bumper sticker put it in perspective: "at least when Bill lied nobody died."

All broadcast media everywhere is propaganda and entertainment. It always has been and always will be. This isn't curable. Information from a large area cannot be aggregated, analyzed, digested, summarized and simplified without becoming cartoonish and false in every measurable way, not least in selection and framing. This is why command and control systems can't work, why global government is a silly idea, and why cybernetic thinking is delusional. Though regional broadcast media such as newspapers vary from one another, seeming to describe different worlds, they are still insufficiently particular or timely to be useful for anything but propaganda and entertainment. They are displaced and untimely, fictional in every sense though like all fiction based on historical or even eternal verities. The idea of information flowing to an aggregation point from various directions and then being redirected back out is simply unworkable. So much is lost, and so much is added, that broadcasts are fiction. They are nothing but propaganda and entertainment and people know this. They may wink at it, willingly suspend disbelief as they do when they enter a theater, but this doesn't mean that they think that the propaganda is true. It's just social behavior, like following current fashion and wearing whatever outlandish garments are currently the style in order to socialize with neighbors.

Children and mental incompetents sometimes have trouble with fiction. The make-believe worlds of the media can dominate their consciousness when they have too little stimulus in the real world to draw them out of themselves to interact with family and friends.

So despite my disenfranchisement and frustration (which we try to compensate for by getting otherwise apathetic Americans to vote, if not for themselves, as proxies for us), I feel that overall this kind of democratic verve from the City of Light is indeed enlightening, and perhaps a glimmer of hope for what's ahead.

The "City of Light" has never grasped the idea of democracy. They botched the evolution from monarchy to democracy, bouncing from one extreme to another and making a mess in the process. Their current authoritarian system of centralized control by a hereditary elite is little different from the era of the Sun King. There is still no self rule, just an isolated and provincial elite with great power blundering about until mobs revolt and dump manure in the streets. The mobs don't rule themselves, don't take responsibility for governance and do the hard work of sensible management, and periodically government collapses completely. After a period of barbarity another government is formed to limp along for a few more decades if it is lucky. This bi-polar approach to social management, alternating periods of maniacal obsessive-compulsive order with utter chaos, is not useful to others. If democracy ever comes to the "City of Light", if they ever adopt self-rule, the world will heave a sigh of relief. It would be as if a troublesome neighbor had been given new medications which allowed them to control their mood swings and destructive behaviors, and so become a good neighbor and good citizen for the first time in their life.

America is different. It is mostly in the coastal fever swamps that people become disconnected from reality and inhabit the fictional worlds of media to a significant degree. Most of the country is still real. They rule themselves and wish others would do so as well. They wish the troubled children elsewhere would grow up and learn to wipe their own butts instead of expecting Americans to do it for them when they have "an accident".

There is hope. Broadcast media is losing some of its grip on the fevered minds of the world due to developments in ICT. For the first time the world is able to observe Americans ruling themselves and begin to grasp what democracy and self-rule mean. The ancient elites are livid and fearful since it is apparent that they will lose control of their kingdoms when their oppressed populations begin to rule themselves. They have mounted a rear guard action, through broadcast media, to whip up a frenzy of fear and hatred against Americans, to inoculate them against the mind virus of liberty and self-rule. This won't work unless they also censor the new ICT networks.

As broadcast media is replaced by networked communication, as push is replaced by pull and limited choice is replaced by richness of choice, the old elites will lose their ability to dominate populations through information control. There will still be superstars that attract huge attention and have great influence, power laws and all that jazz, but they won't endure and won't have captive audiences. The heart of darkness in the "City of Light" will never be enlightened, there are no final solutions, but it can be repelled and prevented from gaining greater strength.

Though it will take a long time, maybe centuries, liberty and self rule seem inevitable as larger and larger numbers of humans climb the technology ladder and become competent in a technological world. The evolved nature of humans makes them most comfortable, happy and productive in a state of liberty. The dark ages that began when humans traded their liberty for agricultural civilization, a blip in the history of the species, is coming to an end. There may be new, local dark ages when humans huddle together in regimented sub-societies - perhaps to migrate to other worlds for example, it's a technique that has uses - but the idea that all human societies will become monotonically more integrated and regimented until there is a single society is empty. It doesn't work. It's neither desirable nor possible.

See All The Way for a related discussion.