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Exercised power usually opposes a description of itself. Even in the exceptional cases where it does not, such as during the reigns of Frederick the Great and his successors and of other despots who have sponsored the philosophy of power relations, the pictures presented to different social classes have differed greatly, and only the exceptionally independent-minded among the ‘men of letters’ have been able to escape from their ‘self-incurred tutelage’ to the degree necessary to understand the descriptions.

Even where power does not explicitly silence, it can still do so implicitly. It is prone to do so simply according to the default behaviors of the ruling classes expansively defined. Government bureaucrats count, for instance, as part of the ruling class by the most expansive meaning of the term. The Blue wall of silence counts. So do many aspects of the mental health establishment and arguably even the concept of mental health in anything like the sense in which most people believe in it today; every class or interest group: teachers, judges, securities regulators, and more. Among all of those who sense their efforts validated when the GDP of one of a few other official statistics goes up, among essentially any bureau or guild, there is very little chance that a predatory behavioral pattern within the group having been normalized will lead to that group being unseated and replaced by a new bureau or guild aimed at the same function.

In many parts of the world, most of us assume, by and large, that we are safe from violence. That doesn’t change the fact that all power has its roots in the threat or implicit threat of violence. Usually, violence is aimed at all who do not conform, always, at the very least, aimed at those who oppose power and at those mobilized by competition over the artificially constrained and inadequate supply of some vital good such as a drug, a home, or the willingness of a court to engage with one’s arguments.

Stonewalling is a generalized tool for lowering productivity. In the general case, protecting monopoly profits calls for avoiding productivity increases and establishing an industry culture of inept communication, utilization, and verification of text but highly subtle use of subtext.

Power is the ability to silence. Status often does this. Status isn’t power without the ability to back the silencing with force. All power has its roots in the threat of violence.

People refusing to see this mostly do not see it because modern cities and living allow for a privileged sense of progress where one’s safety is assumed. That is the problem of losing the map and territory for some more incredible illusion that we prefer to be true. We forget our hard-won roots against the threat of violence, and we don’t realize the danger that comes from the threat of violence capable of emerging from the pursuit of abstractions that don’t possess any intrinsic value. With this, we end up taking things like social and physical security for granted, and in doing so, we put ourselves in society at significant risk.

Evidence of effective power comes from the ability to silence others. Here, I want to encourage the recognition and adoption of a new term for a broader category of anti-humanity, one that the concept of anti-semitism, for instance, is subsumed in. I see a kind of generalized anti-semitism in the social dynamics of high-growth businesses today. This pathology is no longer strictly about Semites.

A-priori to silencing is implicit physical violence. All silencing has its foundation in physical violence. All preference falsification is due to silencing. All cultural changes are either between a preference falsification regime and a non-preference falsification regime, the inverse, or are transitions between preference falsification regimes. All contain aspects of a professional face (I will describe this in later posts.) that the individual holder of a perspective must hide.

April 13, 2023 by Michele Reilly

Military Strategy, Epistemology & Information Theory

After Claude Shannon, a “Cybernetic War” on Information was Predictable

Contrary to Stephen Pinker’s primary thesis that rational decision making is getting increasingly better, I think one needs to first make a distinction between decision-making as a ‘subject’ a personal subjective self, versus as an ‘object’ so to speak, i.e. your country.

While the Enlightenment is presumed to have given us core concepts regarding, agency, and the values of the mind, with the aim of understanding of the world, ourselves, and ourselves in the world. Most of society has forgotten the part about self-inquiry. For the time being, I will leave the latter for another writer. Here, I will also leave out my critique of the foundational thought of so-called Enlightenment thinkers; who, in order to have gotten the macroeconomic models right, even proximately, they would have had to acknowledge women as the foundation of Capital, much more starkly than they did. Probably in ways that would make everyone slightly uncomfortable, but are strictly necessary to real models of so-called economic progress!

Rationality was a basic tenet of the intellectually validated aspect of the New Deal, one running alongside Keynesian pressures. Rationality is an attribute of decision-making under conditions of certainty. Decision making under conditions of uncertainty requires behaving consistently with your preferences. I make a distinction between this, that is, discovering your norm, and that of appealing to a-priori axioms, ones not specified by you, but said to be rational by the establishment cognoscenti: A la, the Savage axioms, coming from the 1950s.

The assumptions of so called rational utility theory based on the 1950s Savage’s axioms are that:

– Agents must make bets over every choice presented to them.

– One -sided bets, i.e. you do not have to pay if you’re wrong.

Better models would include payment for both sides of a bet.

In other words, what things can be said to be a “norm” for you, appealing to your past behavior, and therefore implicitly betting norms, a la your past record. Furthermore, when presented with evidence that you are behaving irrationally, compared with your preferences, to be a norm for you, you then are willing adjust your bets to update in accordance with your forgotten preferences. In other words, it’s not irrational to make mistakes, only to not change your behavior in light of information, and someone reminding you of your existing preferences.

As an individual, only when you have access to this kind of “self-ledger”, can you attain models of others, which keep you oriented to them in ways which make it possible for you to make valid predictions in line with reality, and to be modeled. Particularly to be well-modeled by other agents who are willing to cooperate. Whether I am an agent with the same norm, a different one, or not an agent at all is an altogether different matter. I would advocate a different decision criteria over each of the three categories, each of which can reasonably be discovered by you, upon reflection, however long and difficult.

[Despite Pinker not doing so] making decisions from the perspective of a person, versus as a nation, must mean very different things. The reader of Pinker’s books will be confused when thinking through Putin’s Mad Man world, and Pinker’s claim that rationality generally has increased or currently prevails. Distinctions should be made.

We went from a world of what I call ‘modernist warfare’ for under a single century, as evidenced in how we used-to [1919-Nixon] make collective decisions. This seems different from today, but mostly has gone thus far unexamined.

During the Great Wars, modernist warfare can be considered by way of an example. For instance, the strategic repurposing of a dead soldier by the British, one holding fake war plans, made to wash up onto the shores of Germany—such a soldier who possessed military plans which the Axis Powers shared “Common Universal Priors” over, with the Allies; i.e. concrete and explicit shared facts about how large land masses are used or blocked.

When you can model situational dynamics in principle, shared models have the attribute of giving an intrinsic probability of information for next steps in a game involving strategy. In principle, concrete aspects of shared realities help to be able to predict events like the Normandy invasion in the first place. Today, my claim is that there is a new kind of economics, and therefore, a new kind of military, one of ‘Post-post-modernity’ but we need a better name. [Post Modernity I will not define and there is a plethora of literature already on the subject].

In fact this ‘Post-post-modernity’ is showing up in how we do war. This new kind of politics shows up for instance in global patterns, but also local ones. On a global scale, e.g. Vladimir Putin denudes-in-the-north of Ukraine, as a response to Ukraine’s leadership, decrying that they are going to attack in the south. Is it appropriate for military strategy to be literal and reactive in response to the exact claims of the underdog?

My claim is that Putin’s seemingly non-strategic behavior shows up locally too, so to speak, over persons today, as well as non-equilibrium defection scenarios, both in business deals and personal interactions: The global Weltschmerz is local.

Have we lost the art of war?

It is as though the public broadcasting of one’s intentions is all one ought to reflexively account for. Perhaps this is all or part of a definition that might be formulated as the way to lose a war, and Russians are poor at war strategy today. I claim that the Rationality Utility Axioms of Savage are an artifact of the Modernists, the architects of modernity after the Second World War, and the New Deal macroeconomics which won the market dominant narrative.

Furthermore, Silicon Valley and social media as primary news sources changed what rationality meant for the public preferring to as the economists told us we do “maximize utility of money”. That thesis failed. The supposed tenet that we all maximize our preference for money was invalidated with the St. Petersburg paradox. Whenever one or more model assumptions are wrong, you will get paradoxes.

Modern Keyesianism; promised work for everyone, and growth for all time, conjoined with the myth of rationality. Furthermore such a myth was already, at the time, invalidated with empirical evidence in the 1950s, via the empirical studies which showed the possibility of preferences for “ambiguity seeking” behavior. That is referred to in Daniel Ellsberg’s PhD thesis, giving people a choice of two urns with the same payoffs, where one of the urns has an ill-specified probability distribution.

Rational utility does not capture any nation’s latest policy on national defense; and Keynesian economics only worked for the boomers. You cannot group the decision making apparatus of nations, with that of persons. Even if you separate the two, as truly different magisteria, models of decision making by persons can indeed–as the failure of Savage’s axioms by Ellsburg and St. Petersburg showed us–be improved upon. Today nation states officially seem to be using an entirely new norm. A new military strategy, post ‘ODDA loops‘ is ripe for description.

January 5, 2023 by Michele Reilly

Motherhood is a Grift

Here I make a distinction between two real categories (morality, ethics) that are solutions to different problems, and in future writing will attempt to discuss how political processes conflate and distort these labels.

Intuitively, morality strikes me as (almost by definition) always and everywhere an economic proposition. Morality is ‘always and everywhere’ a way for institutions to scale their memetic presence onto human minds. Whenever someone asserts a moral frame: something is ‘making bank’, look for it. Morality is often confused with ethics; and ethics, with morality. I suspect it is worth decoupling the two.

Ethics is distinct from morality in the sense that it asserts that the individual should come into the foreground with a decision theory over any given crossroads in his/her values, using his/her own conscience. Ethics has always been a threat to the existing order, as it is impossible to scale, nor can you make universal rules around ones own conscience.

If morality is an unreflective set of constraints and demands over large groups of people, ethics is a reflective one. Individual ethics, done with a sound mind, is the way to understand oneself and conscience.

Morality begins with a favored mimetic, and is then spread by an interest group, which needs the stability of the particular moral in order to maintain its position. Priests are related to ethical decision makers, but, in practice this is not based on high-quality ethical thought, more accurately a morality: necessarily entailing the family unit, combined with ‘original sin’, where they cast the shadow of their moral valence at full mast. As a simple example, monogamy and marriage creates a stable middle-class. Probably nothing wrong with it, if it works well for you. Opinions vary. This moral norm is also indeed easier for government sovereigns to count household output, predict annual income and productivity metrics, and to take census of households for various forms of financial control.

One could argue, that the only legitimate example of applied morality are the practiced norms during times of global stress, to prevent human extinction and mass suffering, such as during a pandemic. For instance, I am perfectly happy not fighting for my ‘right’ to avoid masking at the peak of such a crisis. This is a real moral restraint, because it actually effects the lives of others, such that applying pretty much universal behavioral norms help everyone.

What’s the problem with ethics? It isn’t with ethics per-say, rather with its undeveloped interpretations. For example, in 1924 in the criminal case of Leopold and Loeb, two male children, particularly the older lad of the young friend duo, argued within their ethical orientation, whose interiority might only be gleaned by them, to take the life of another boy their age. This is an example of an unsound/undeveloped mind using ethics incorrectly and one that power anticipates. A sound ethics would never entail egregious harms to others, because a decision to take a life, would leave out many things, ones relationship to others, the existing order, and subsequent consequences. The case of Gavrilo Princip is also relevant.

By now you may have heard of the concept of a “tradwife“. It is an opportunistic position where a woman who is adjacent to the ‘aristocracy’ (the new monied class) in America, gets to invoke an old morality of marriage in order to be cared for by one well-off partner. While this is a fine sexual strategy, and frankly, surely even admirable to want to caretake ones own growing tribe, the newly termed notion doesn’t address the real question of what women might really want and need. In other words, true revealed preferences, in the absence of society’s manufactured artificial scarcity. The scarcity mindset in women, one that marriage casts over women in the first place. Its claims are to find someone to tether your assets to, and thereby to be “secure”.

Getting a career might not be the answer either for most women, to be sure. The point is women do need to have access to socio-economic capacity, but that can never come from a single partner alone. This requires a culture that provides a kind of universal basic income to not have to rely on one person in the first place, but not from directly the government i.e. one that cannot be easily ‘”rent seeked” away with the market fixing higher prices targeted to them, due to such inheritance of capital.

Women need various positive inputs to production, and also it’s possible to interfere with their access to physical resources or help in various ways, and patriarchal societies are structured to attack anyone who’s not in some kind of formal enclosure. But the territorial claim “women need security” itself is not really part of the means of production here, it’s just a defense against specific kinds of interference, which we might defend against, evade, or attack in other ways.

For the average or below average man, marriage levels the playing field, by making this reflexive moral norm a scarcity issue to women. Ensuring that women continue to offer their productive livelihood to someone who is just good enough, without reflecting sensibly on the abundance of her own diversification and comparative advantages: reinforced within networks of trust and communities, which are perfectly able to provide financial and emotional support for oneself and ones children, alongside the support of ones mate (or mates) of choice. This should be better incentivized (or indeed, incentivized at all) by the state. Of course every now and then slaves (“the domesticated”) convince masters (“the domesticating”) to join in their norms and the masters themselves get confused. In a mixed culture, there’s a spectrum of people living together, from the more domestic to the more feral. The feral get confused when things aren’t quite as satisfactory as advertised.

I would be appropriate to admit a social need for increasingly more conscientious ethical reflection, with respect to how to mitigate shame from female sexual strategies that differ from the nuclear family, including but not limited to legal and tax recognition for diversified mate choice. Women are ready for new tax legislation aimed at alternative agreements on family support, ones that represent material diversification and arrangements between multiple people, romantically involved or not, who raise the children. After all, it takes a village.

Such a social reckoning would entail a focus on taking steps against the cultural shaming of women, particularly by women themselves, who are in a variety of life situations. It is a spectrum. Women with higher time preference for money, for instance prostitutes over a single day, and those women with a lower time preference: one-off mate selection, i.e. the marriage contract, which points at least on paper to a lasting arrangement for decades, is currently the only arrangement that is incentivized by the state.

November 13, 2022 by Michele Reilly

Politics & Critical Theory

Language, Ideology, Barbarism and Conditioning: HOW DID WE GET HERE?

Written: Jan 13th 2022

Back in Plato’s day, there was only one wise guy wise to the fact that he could get away with a lot if he claimed to know nothing. By the time I was a kid in Coney Island, the news had trickled down, through books like Illuminattus, published in the same year as the second presidential debate, between Johnson and Ford and not that different from debates between Obama and Romney. But back in the day of the first presidential debate, between Kennedy and Nixon, the American public got to see what it was like for two people to think they did know something, understood more or less how their institutions worked, and had a plan for the country. Not long after that Kennedy at least received a rude awakening, when he learned that even as the President he couldn’t see the US Nuclear War Plan.

Daniel Ellsberg remedied that, sharing the real Nuclear War Plan with Kennedy, who had eventually been given a fake one. He could do that because he had written the real one. Many years later he shared other information with people who he really believed were entitled to know it. This almost got him killed but played a key part in bringing down Nixon, another guy who thought he knew something.

He had some more important secrets to share, but he couldn’t hold on to them while he was running from the government, and somewhere along the way the general public ended up believing that they knew nothing, and could no nothing, so by the time he was able to reveal them anyway, in the Doomsday Machine, and by the time Assange and Snowden tried to invoke his precedent, tried to tell the public and the courts about crimes that were being committed against them, there was no-one left to think that now they know.

Militaries internally employ a great deal of technical jargon such as ‘orientation’ and ‘situational awareness’ derived from the more cybernetics influenced side of Postmodern thinking. They also make use of modern thinking such as game theory, which requires agents representing the world and making decisions within it. Military language presumes a metaphor of chaotic collective exploration and motion, within which we presume the impossibility of clarifying the situation adequately to make use of a courtroom process. What would ‘‘reasonable doubt’ mean from someone who hadn’t established that they know which way they’re going? The military mindset centers on stimulus and response, action and speech-action. When we bring its radical skepticism into our public affairs, we don’t presume that we could credibly carry out a free and fair election. Military language embeds the ideological assertion that man does not survive by thinking. When we bring it into our military contracting process, it cements a commitment against thought, a commitment to look at what thought calls for and get it backwards.

Military jargon sees the world as a system of control systems with certain human capacities such as situational awareness granted as applying to elect troops as additions to its major working metaphor of springs. For compatibility with the military, the MBA curriculum and other jargon of the professional/managerial class implicitly makes analogous assumptions, for instance by treating markets as consisting of alpha and beta with the latter determined in terms of an assumed correlation between the prices of assets and a ‘market’ which they deviate from as if on springs. This is a different system of metaphor from that which would have been used by more traditional investors, who would have thought in terms of concrete questions about what might go wrong in their proposed plans and how much they would be likely to bring in if their plans came to fruition. The latter is a natural fit for the language of commercial accounting and civil law, but not to that of military jargon, which would regard a court as having too slow an OODA loop to provide credible civic defense.

OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It’s a bit of Air Force jargon developed by John Boyd. It doesn’t leave room, within it’s jargon, for courts adjudicating ownership of assets via contract disputes. It imagines that delay tactics will make disruption of the context of the decision inevitable, rather than the dispute resolving. The Professional Managerial Class, inheriting such assumptions, runs Boeing under the assumption that credit flowing to it from the federal government and if need be the federal reserve need not be in any sort of correspondence to expected ability to repay. The common sense of the ideology is that it would have to be rolled over.

Doing business with the military is conditional on using its language, which assumes a world where people are trying to be used instead of trying to make decisions, and who think it’s wise to maintain that they know nothing but are only following orders. The function of bureaucracies locks in uniform truth standards among its participants, leading to the propagation out from the military ethos which precluded making one’s own decisions and being intentionally accountable for their outcomes. Instead, not sticking out is the norm to be approached.

The managerial class is the extension of the professional norms of the military industrial complex throughout the top ranks of the sectors of the economy deemed militarily important during the Cold War. Being crypto-military, explicitly claims, through its jargon, that the way to receive value is by applying force, a-la cybernetics. This paradigm contrasts strongly with the jargon of the bourgeois, who talk in terms of ownership and profit, a-la Classical Economics and Commercial Law.

February 8, 2022 by Michele Reilly