JOURNAL: New article on "Containing Chaos" at the WPR

I have a new article at the World Politics Review entitled "Containing Chaos."  It's about systemic threats and the systemic solutions needed to solve them (although I don't touch on environmental threats, the threat profiles/solutions are similar).  There's a free trial subscription if you want to read it.  Here's the intro:

In 1946, George Kennan keyed the famous "Long Telegram," which identified the Soviet Union as an enemy of the United States. In 1947, the original telegram was reworked and published in Foreign Policy magazine as "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Together, these documents formed the codex for the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment, and thereby the basis of the eventual U.S. victory in that conflict. Here's what a "Kennan" might have written for the 21st century....

Comments

[Alpwalker]

Excellent, well thought through article. Unstated by assumed is that government policy, especially the federal, has brought us to this point of extreme societal fragility. Which means we have to address (remove or circumvent) policy obstacles to resilience before we can have truly resilient communities. Here's what I see:

-A tax code that caters to special interests, seeks to maximize revenue by minimizing privacy, is all but opaque to the average tax payer, penalizes or makes more expensive entrepreneurial income, and has a seemingly haphazard and highly punitive enforcement system.

-The failed wars on poverty and drugs that have destroyed what little community existed in urban areas and are having a similar impact in rural communities.

-What appears to be an increasingly militarized domestic (both federal and federal wannabes on the local level) police force where everyone is a potential enemy/threat requiring overwhelming pre-emptive by the book response with little or no accountability for mistakes/criminality.

-Food policies that reward and subsidize highly centralized, unsustainable, unhealthy, extremely fragile industrialized food system while threatening to regulate small scale sustainable agriculture out of existence in pursuit of “food safety”. Watch the new movie Food, Inc.

These and similar trends are destroying existing and preventing or at best slowing establishment of new resilient communities while at the same time destroying the legitimacy and effectiveness of the overly centralized, too big to fail government.

I hate to be a pessimist but it seems we have the worst of both worlds.

[Anonymous Author]

Fantastic article, applying those concepts to America it seems pretty clear that California is a likely candidate for systems disruption:

http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/06/overtaken-by-events.html

...as that'll be the easier place to create accidental guerrillas:

http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/07/forging-terror-and-accidental-guerrillas.html

[jsquared]

You provided an extremely insightful and innovative view of the ills of globalism. While our framework remains stuck in the left-right dialectic and the competition between nation-states, the global financial parasites rule. They have silently siphoned the remaining blood from the dying corpse of the US and the vast majority of the populace don't even have a clue. I am taking hope; however, in the recent work of Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone and the blog Zero Hedge in opening the veil on Goldman Sachs and in gaining public attention. I believe that the obscene profiteering will be revealed at the same time as immense suffering arrives in the US and that this will finally drive harsh judgement and punishment for the parasites.

[dagezhu]

The essay is good, but the host website is fragile and unusable.

"De-escalation makes it possible to co-opt predatory groups and entice them to fight among themselves -- by turning them into allies of convenience. For example, the use of "loyalist" militias against gangs in the slums of Sao Paulo or the Anbar "Awakening" effort in Iraq are examples of this approach. "

This reminds me of Curtis Sliwa and the Guardian Angels.

[ryan king]

brilliant article. climate change refugee migrations and environmental systems collapse will add another level of chaos to the "zero-sum game" within the next decades. we were way off on calculating the speed of climate change... dang mass psychological reticence to admit the apocalypse.

one of the best places to catch up on the climate situation is www.climatecodered.net.
my favorite is the permafrost methane apocalypse stuff. billions of years of evolution and a process of change becomes aware of itself just in time to die of a massive, planetary fart. awesome fate. but perhaps avoidable...

human conscious evolution was previously driven under similar circumstances of social and environmental upheaval - the second millenium BC saw violent conflicts, migrations and mass catastrophes which dissolved hierarchies and led to the evolution of conscious adaptations (subjective awareness). once again, we are forced to create novel representations of the self, authority and our place in the world. i think these will be the foundations of RCs and rhizome, just as the hierarchies were founded on "I" and led by "god(s)." Jeff Vail's "A Theory of Power" expresses more clearly the link between emerging enlightenment beyond the ego and rhizome...

"The speed of the supernetwork puts nation-states into hyper-competition, since it can create change at a rate that looks and feels very much like a zero-sum game."

a zero-sum endgame.

kinda like that one song
zero sum
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WEVbKpjPnA&feature=related

keep up the great writing
-ryan
http://news.mongabay.com/2008/1113-ryan_king.html

[Duncan Kinder]

According to a United Nations report released yesterday, in addition to oil bunkering, other illicit commerce is undermining West Africa.

http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/d86db66e

According to the press release:

"Trafficking in persons, drugs, oil, cigarettes, counterfeit medicines, toxic waste and electronic waste ("e-waste") is posing a serious threat to security and development in West Africa.

A UNODC report issued today in New York shows that in the past few years, West Africa has become a hub not only for cocaine trafficking from Latin America to Europe but also for other trafficking flows. West Africa suffers from a combination of factors that make it vulnerable to organized crime, such as weak governance, and criminals are exploiting those conditions to traffic products through the region.
....
Its key findings include the following:

* Cocaine trafficking through the region is decreasing, although flows of 20 tons (valued at $1 billion at destination) still have a destabilizing impact on regional security;
* In Nigeria, 55 million barrels of oil a year (a tenth of production) are lost through theft and smuggling ("bunkering"). Illegal oil bunkering, particularly in the Niger Delta, is a source of pollution, corruption and revenue for insurgents and criminal groups;
* As much as 80 per cent of the cigarette market in some West and North African countries is illicit, meaning that cigarette sales in those countries chiefly profit criminals;
* 50-60 per cent of all medications used in West Africa may be substandard or counterfeit. This increases health risks in a region where there is high demand for anti-infective and antimalarial drugs, and promotes the development of drug-resistant strains which are a hazard to the entire world;
* West Africa is a major destination for electronic waste (including old computers and mobile phones), also known as "e-waste", which contains heavy metals and other toxins. The European Union alone produces 8.7 million tons of e-waste each year."

[Duncan Kinder]

Robert Reich: says that the old ways are behind us forever:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/robert_reich/2009/07/when-will-the-recovery-begin-n.php?ref=fpblg

Reich's article reminds me of the scene in the movie, Twister, in which people are speculating over when a predicted tornado may strike and the guy looks out across a dark field and says "It's already here!".

When Will The Recovery Begin? Never.
July 9, 2009, 5:02PM

The so-called "green shoots" of recovery are turning brown in the scorching summer sun. In fact, the whole debate about when and how a recovery will begin is wrongly framed.

....

Eventually consumers will replace cars and appliances and other stuff that wears out, but a recovery can't be built on replacements. Don't expect businesses to invest much more without lots of consumers hankering after lots of new stuff. And don't rely on exports. The global economy is contracting.

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.

[Duncan Kinder]

Translating this into Chinese Confucian terms, it means that the "Mandate of Heaven" is being revoked.

See, eg:
http://nichirenscoffeehouse.net/Ryuei/RAR22.html

"Tung Chung-shu (179-104 B.C.), the greatest Confucian scholar of the age, expressed the central idea best when he wrote that the action of man flows into the universal course of heaven and earth and causes reciprocal reverberations in their manifestations. Since there was this close relationship between heaven and man, the Han Confucianists believed that abnormal events in the human world caused heaven to manifest abnormal phenomena in the natural world. These abnormal phenomena were known as catastrophes and anomalies. Catastrophes represented the warnings of heaven to errant man. Such warnings might be in the form of floods, famines, landslides, or earthquakes. If man persisted in his evil ways despite these warnings, then heaven caused strange anomalies to arise in the form of eclipses of the sun or moon, unusual movements of the stars, growths of beards on women, or birth of babies with two heads. If man still persisted in evil, unmindful of these signs from heaven, then he was doomed to ruin. On the other hand, if man acted correctly, then the world system would be harmonious and well governed. (Buddhism in China, pp. 22-23)"

[Seerov]

"One method of achieving this, already mentioned above, is to remove barriers to community resilience." (John Robb from WPR article)

This is the bottom line the way I see it. Is it in the system's interests to remove these barriers? At some point, they might not have any choice? The simple stuff will be changes in community regulations that allow for medium sized windmills in suburban areas, or changes in zoning to allow for communities to manufacture goods in former residential areas.

Where it gets complicated is when you start thinking about WHO people will want to build their RC's with? If some small town/neighborhood/area wants to add resiliency to their community, they might not look too kindly upon people who may deny them their right to a nativity scene, rainbow flag, or decision to name a school after Malcolm X. People will not invest resources into communities that don't feel like "communities."

People need to understand that this transformation to the RC model is world changing. This is more than just throwing up a few solar panels. This is a huge shift in the eco-political spatial order.

If things move this way we will see huge battles in the legal system over private property and freedom of assication. At the same time, as national governments become more and more unable to provide for their residents, they may be happy to see residents taking survival in their own hands? This will allow for the government to concentrate on helping those least capable of building resilience (see: Hurricane Katrina).

The federal government might have to accept freedom of assication for its residents if it wishes to remain legitimate? The future role of the federal government might be limited to foreign policy (notice I didn't say homeland security, as this role will be taken on by local communities) and some sort of minimal welfare system that can provide for the "least resilient" among us. Local communities will take up the slack left by the Fed becuase people will actually care about "one of their own." Besides food, shelter, energy, and security, RCs will provide health-care, education, and other social issues.

So it appears America has a choice? It can become more tyrannical and oppressive as globalization intensifies, or it can give it's people the freedom to innovate and live as they wish? I predict that it will attempt the former through a strategy of anti-free speech laws, higher taxes, forced diversity, Internet censorship, and intense propaganda and socialization in the media and schools. After time, this strategy will fail and people will move to the RC model anyway.