CHAOS POLITICS!

Conspiracy theorists and hack politicos both make the same mistake about politics, a failure to acknowledge and understand it as a product of chaotic forces that are beyond control by individuals, organizations, or institutions. Issues of power are short-lived relative to the long-term political evolution of global society that transcends the geographical and psychic boundaries of nation-states formed essentially to perpetuate arbitrary geopolitical divisions, to hoard resources for some over others. Politics is about hacking the social structure of reality and planting within the collective psyche memes the contents of which are divisive, superficial, illusory...suppositions rather than ideas. I suppose that you and I think alike because we're members of the same club, and we act in concert because "we're in this together" though, in reality, we might worlds apart in our thinking.

Political philosophy is fragmentary, in fact it ignores the whole in favor of the part, and tries like hell to suppress strange attractors. We've evolved far enough along toward a global consciousness, however, to see that chaotic principles that facilitate free development/evolution of life forms and favor extropy over entropy will also interpret oppression as damage and route around it. (This is a paraphrase of John Gilmore's statement about the Internet, which is a chaotic/anarchic system. John sez that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it; I'm taking the same principle from the Internet to Indra's net and applying it there... dig the parallel!)

If you look at it this way, hope makes a bit more sense than despair, though it requires a combination of faith, energy, filtering mechanisms to separate the shit from the bullshit. Those are the very threads I have attempted to weave into all of my projects; though I'm certainly a capitalist and I want to make a buck, if I'm not 'way more than that, I'm not living up to my mission.

As I write this, politics in America has taken what seems to be an ugly turn. Given the "advances" in digital and plastic media, show biz has mitigated the collective unconscious as the source of dreams, and the chaotic attractors at the gestation of show biz projects have some form of spiritual indigestion causing nightmares. Hollywood's been vomiting a steady stream of blood violence, embracing thanatos and suppressing the erotic which is, I suppose, what you'd do in a Death Culture. Alternative cultures are no longer offering alternatives per se; rather, they're dishing up grotesque reflections of the mainstream culture. Communities are fragmenting, stimulants are proliferating, confusion is the rule. And I say there's hope? that we should keep the faith?

You bet. What you're seeing is not just death culture, but the death of a culture that's done its thing. Oppressive measures within "law" and "politics" represent the death throes of the phoenix, and I say ignore it, concentrate on what's rising from the ashes.

It's over a year since the ATF and FBI raided the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and, hopefully inadvertently, burned it to the ground. (The belief's still widespread that David Koresh and followers set those fires, but by the time you read this you'll probably have heard otherwise...I've just read an excerpt from Dick Reavis' work in progress, a comprehensive volume on the Branch Davidian incident, and he presents solid evidence suggesting that the flames resulted from CS teargas ferrets lobbed into the compound.) Reavis explains how the initial botched raid was politically-motivated, and how the ongoing partnership of politics, deceit, and gonzo religion led to the nighmarish death scene at Mt. Carmel.

For many, the credibility of the U.S. government was trashed. A few of these saw, not tragically inept attempts to control the uncontrollable, but a malevolent conspiracy of the U.S. government against its citizens. This is bullshit, of course, and it depends on one of those half-baked memes to which we alluded earlier...the concept of a monolithic government that's together enough to conspire. In fact, what we call "the government" is actually a chaotic system of distributed nodes each of which holds some combination of power and information but none of which is particularly well-integrated with the whole. The bureaucracies that form our administrative government are far more anarchic than they seem, and far less likely to act in concert. When something like the Branch Davidian fiasco occurs, it's usually because one or a few individuals screwed up at their level of responsibility, and when that happens you can hang it on a lack of leadership at some, perhaps the highest, level, but it's important to understand how difficult it is to turn this 18-wheeler on a dime.

With some vague sense of the Federal government as a malevolent entity, a group of militia-trained lamebrains with a pretty good understanding of explosives blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City. Not the first anarchist bombing in this country, but certainly the worst. For the perpetrators, the folks working in that building, even the children in the day care center, represented an evil empire, a threat to individual liberty, a threat to be destroyed. Start with a warning, a huge bomb planted in the heartland, and proceed from there. This is a simplistic, insane response to a very real concern, a feeling that the world and "the government" are out of control, coupled with a conflicting sense that someone somewhere must be in control.

A more complex, intellectualized response to the same sense might be the preachments of Noam Chomsky, who alludes to an institutionalized project to dumb down the general populace through the bogus system of public education, and to manipulate the zombis through mass media. He describes this as though it were conspiracy, not of government, but of corporations, appearing to subscribe to the current phantasy (a la cyberpunks et al) that corporations are new forms of government, that they rule at a higher level than the public political governmental forms. I'd have to agree with Chomsky that institutions have involved the inherent tendencies that he describes, but it's important to separate forces within institutions from any supposition of willful, conscious conspiracy of individuals.

I would have the same problem with any conspiracy theory that I have with the militias' delusions of federal conspiracy: no conspiracy actually exists because the center can't hold. In my world I see that no two people can easily hold a simple marriage together, so why should we imagine that corporations the size of nations can conspire within themselves to hold a conspiracy together? In fact, corporations are, like governments, collections of fairly anarchic nodes that are often in conflict, and each corporation may be in conflict with other corporations, and it's hard to derive empire from all this.

If fact, how many true empires have you seen in the contemporary world? What we historically refer to as empires were tiny compared to our largest cities, and they were held together in the context of several commonalties...geographical, experiential, theological, ontological...which engendered a sense of fundamental unity that's lacking in any postmodern organizations. In fact, the very media that Chomsky critiques as a tool of corporate control of the masses undermines any sense of organization, and the widespread proliferation of media jammers from various subversive subcultures create an underground anarchic intellectual climate that spills memes all over media channels, contributing to an absolute cynicism about manipulative hype. This is hopeful, it promises a disorienting political and cultural fragmentation that'll force us all to concentrate on the real business of living with the humility implicit in an understanding that nobody owns anybody. Even Bill Gates'll have problems in this regard.

To paraphrase hackmeister John Gilmore's statement about the net... the new cynical cultures of diversity will interpret attempts at government or corporate conspiracy as damage and route around 'em. And in that there's real hope for a sane world folding inward from the fringes.

-- jonl July 4, 1995

Buchanan Dam, Texas