Civil War Escalation: Looking at Systems Moves from the Outside Shows How Crazy Things Are

I've decided to permanently leave twitter. I just can't morally justify things which are obviously energizing the very likely US civil war which is almost certain to come in a couple of election cycles.

The dynamics of how the woke left has evolved and how they and the reactionary right interact now seem pretty well known. I'm not getting anything new from twitter on these fronts. Right now I'm starting to look in more detail how the reactionary right is evolving to counter the existential threat they feel they are facing of overt censorship, deplatforming, racist job firings, mobbing (physical, online, and workplace) and institutional lock out. Gab is a cesspit that I just can't jump into.  Locals and Thinkspot are too paywalled. So, I'm looking at Parler as a potential alternative. While I doubt it will get the liberal voices needed to make a viable community, it may offer some insights into how the reactionary right is going to handle the next phase of civil war escalation.

ESCALATION

The latest round of escalation doesn't involve the obvious online de-platforming escalations and fake news spins. This escalation builds on the removal of physical space. A few years ago I had highlighted (on twitter I think) how the Proud Boys- Antifa conflict was a pissing contest to see whether one's identity could be a cause to void access to communal space. It was one gang signalling that certain people weren't welcome in their territory. The counter protests were largely about trying to keep public space open. Although there was certainly a decent proportion of people looking to rumble. But it was, I think, best viewed as a space battle.

I also said this was a key dynamic to watch. Tommy Robinson and the criminalization of identity in the UK was another key thing I suggested people watch. Could someone's identity curtail what physical spaces they were functionally allowed to attend? The answer was a resounding yes. Just ask Andy Ngo.

The latest escalation on this front is the attempt to prevent Trump rallies/protests from reaching critical mass. Alexandria Ocassio Cortez celebrates a scary escalation here. There was a fairly organized initiative to use up tickets to prevent Trump supporters from achieving a frenzied mob mass.

This is a VERY GOOD strategy. 

Unfortunately it has HUGE social capital costs. The escalation value for Civil War is very large. When large groups of people are unable to even congregate, they loose the last avenue they have for expression. This is a fairly essential aspect of democratic society. Just imagine if no BLM protests, during the day when things were largely peaceful, were functionally allowed.  

Now "burning" a bunch of rally seats isn't the same thing. But, what you have is a move into the same space. Certain identities aren't allowed to congregate. This is what the ante-bellum and Jim Crow south did against blacks. It was very strategic then. It is equally strategic today. It is equally as bad then and now. It's just that now, people see it as supporting a "correct moral". That's of course how segregationists also saw things.  That's a bad sign.

I'll be writing more on the civil war aspect of things over the next few months. Right now I'm writing up some posts on the increasingly obvious moral-religious aspects of the mob movements. To say they fit sectarian religious dynamics is an understatement.

And, I think I'll end up lambasting strident atheists who un-ironically have fallen into the mob mentality of current hysterias.  If they had had the tools to understand metaphorical truth, they probably wouldn't have fallen prey to a new religious movement... But, they gave that up for the sake of factual purity, and now the roosters have come home to roost.

Signs You've Got a Cult

Cults tend to have problems separating out things that don't matter but which make great demarkers of social difference from things that do matter but don't demark well.

For instance, a cult might come to believe knowing the one true name of god is so important they'll do almost anything to get you to say or confess it. There's good adaptive reasoning for this. Quasi-factual beliefs like these aren't meant to convey an actual sense of the world, they're meant to make it really obvious who's on the in and who's on the out.

Google, you're a cult

Right Sizing Police Work or Giving Police Power to #AmericanTaliban

I really dislike the Right's current hyperbole around the reduction in policing power. It seems clear there are a few issues.

BURROUGH LAW

Some communities (or at least many members in them) want a different rule of law from what they now have. This mirrors how old city charters used to go. It also mirrors states rights vs. federalism. Can different burroughs in City have different laws? Probably. But not as regulations now stand. But the theory is sound. 

There are pro's and con's and a lot of very likely "unintended" consequences. (Just think of how fun it could be being the wrong race in an untethered racially agitated para-military militia burrough / county. It's what rule of law tried to solve in the racist Jim Crow era south.)

RECONCILLIATION & RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Limiting the use of armed police for civil disturbances is not the end of the world. Religious leaders, community leaders, and extended family used to do just this. Reducing police job complexity by removing their presence from many domestic and civil disputes is not necessarily a bad thing. For one, it may lead to more reconciliation and fewer tangential or escalatory arrests. Police may try to encourage informal compromises, but unless you live in a judge Dredd world, they are not a judiciary. Most compromises are suited for the civil not criminal world. Professional counsellors / social workers may be more capable at handling the demands of many domestic type issues than are police officers. The most appropriate interaction may involve social services not criminal services.

The big worry on this front comes from a number of simultaneous landscape changes:

1. quasi-criminalization of hate speech and modern diversity sins
2. the domination of social service sectors by a single political ideology
3. the cult like nature of diversity zealots
4. hyper racialization (including very overt and publicly sanction racism (usually anti-white, anti-semitic, and often anti-asian)) 

Thus moving social workers into more of a law enforcement role is potentially very scary. The norms for equality, justice and fairness just aren't there. Unless of course you take the position that old wrongs need to be redressed by oppressing old oppressors and freeing old victims. This is the structural racism approach. Racism is fine, as long as it works in favour of those with unequal outcomes (or those designated at "chosen" people).

QUALIFIED IMMUNITY

The issue of qualified immunity seems like a sacred cow. I would not like to be a police officer. Risking your neck to catch criminals and then risking your neck in terms of the legalities of the catch is not something I would like to be stuck between.

Nonetheless, it's exceptionally clear there are some bad apples in the police bucket. The system, like the education system, does an insufficient job of weeding them out.  Things are certainly getting better. Silly things like 1st amendment audits have moved the needle. Cell phone video has slammed the accelerator. There is little doubt about where things are headed for bad officers.

It is not unreasonable to think that if a police officer is doing something clearly illegal, you should be able to call the police on them. If an officer punches you for not answering quick enough, they should have the police sucked on them. The easiest way to do this is the felony murder norm. If you are engaged with someone who commits a crime you get a portion of that charge onto you as an accomplice.

This is a big burden to place on police. Especially new officers who may feel pressure to confront more experienced officers on matters in which the new officer is wrong. But it certainly would do wonders to stop police abuse. You just have to make the threshold of crime appropriate. Say, anything violent? Any evidence fabrication?

CONCLUSION

There is a lot that can be done for police reform. Some of it makes sense (qualified immunity replaced by accomplice crimes). Some of it doesn't make sense (burrough law). And some of it sounds good, but is really scary as mob mentalities become the norm (social work police).  I just wish there could be a rational discussion on things. Instead, both sides have sacralized the issue. 

Ying vs Yang: Takes two to tango

The outward vs inward comments on the riot are staggeringly different.

The outside view is that of unbroachable allegiance to an ideological cause. There is no sense of concern for consequence and balance. It seems all about pushing a narrative which will then re-jigger the system toward a desired balance. Rhetoric is all about overcoming a system so that a better balance is obtained. It's the classic logic of 90's era G-7 protestors: "it's not that anarchy is the solution, but it's the voice that needs to be heard right now to counter-balance entrenched power".

Indeed, soft Critical Theory is based exactly on this. You don't push an objectively reasonable solution, you push as hard as you need for things to settle down to where you originally wanted them. It's no surprise Trumpism does exactly this. Such transformational logic fosters extremism. Adversarial systems, like Western legal systems are based on some deep seated social contracts. When these fail....

The inward face of the riots is very different. As this articles shows, there is a lot of concern about the practicalities of unleashed and unchecked anger. How are people going to get food when the stores are all burnt and won't re-open?

Here is a look inside Chicago. It is VERY different from the PR crap you hear on the news. If you want to understand the systems dynamics at play, you really have to read it in full.

On one hand you have to feel incredibly sorry for people. On the other hand, you have to think, what did you think would happen? Why were you railing against the only tool our systems had to respond to this? The sad point is that the complaints are largely about those very same system problems.

The frustrating part was such railings against the system usually work to establish a decent-enough correction. The problem is that phase changes happen quickly. Without a ying-yang balance, one player can ditch things and then you're screwed. In this case, the police didn't ditch, they just got swamped by a riotous phase change.

This leaves people light Mayor Lightfoot debasing the very same people she is crying to for help. Liberals and conservatives need each other. But at some point, one party is just going to say "screw it". Compromise and toleration no longer make sense. People try to ensure the other party feels the full consequences of their actions. And, if that means you get hurt in the process, oh well. Negative Sum thinking.

What's Good for the Goose is...

As I mentioned last post, it seems the American, (and to some extent the general Western) ideal of equality under the law is reforming, or at least under pressure to reform.

MULTI-LEVEL FRAMING

Equality under the law and as a social contract can, from a multi-level selection lens, both be seen as a necessary condition for inter-dependency / coordination / conflict minimization and as a limiter for each of those. These conditions are of course the main factors required to stabilize selection at a higher level. Equality basically ensures there is no gamesmanship. Everyone, in theory, gets treated equal.

Yet, you wouldn't think your brain needs the same amount of energy as your skin? Both are organs, but some organs are more equal than others. Thus, at some point selection at higher levels requires specialization. That's one way of viewing todays lukewarm civil war. The American social contract no longer works. Specialization is required to prevent structural issues from solidifying different classes of life.

But, ironically, this position seems to occur by solidifying Orwell's famous quip "all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others". System rules against the solidification of caste are being asked to be broken by solidifying a new type of intersectionalized caste.

The rub seems to be the grift that occurs in elite allies and elite allied leaders. This comedy bit highlights this issue - are protests for Black Lives Matter and against the President alright in a Covid world? If so, what about protest for All Lives Matter and for the President / against a politically-moralized priest caste?

Tim Pool takes a long time to get at these same ideas. He is very concerned about the implications of two-sided standards where the government clearly provides immunity for one politicized side.

It seems inevitable that if society can't solve issues of protracted disparities in outcomes, either operation at this level of selection must stop, or the system itself will stumble into untested experimental remedies. The probability of stumbling into something sustainable is very low. The probability of breaking into smaller more cohesive units is very strong, especially in a world with few major existential threats that require operation at a higher level to survive.

Climate change and open borders can be seen as one attempt of the system to frame things for selection at a higher level. But, despite the new priest class' exhortations that the world will end, the threats are just not credible at an "organize or die" level of immediacy.

IMPLICATIONS

It was always certain that excusing rioters from Covid critiques was going to end lockdowns one way or another. People are now free to ignore what they don't like. That leaves local governance in an awkward position about enforcement. Will they go down the one-sided enforcement trap? Probably. But a demoralized police system may have little energy to attack their historic supporters (like churches, Trumpers, and small business owners).

This energized system makes a whole bunch of trigger points possible. For instance, imagine Trump decides to hold some rallies in key states where the governor or mayor has TDS. Let's imagine Governor Whitmer in Michigan gets mad about a Trump rally. She works with her ally mayor in Detroit to prevent Trump from selling a "Trump is for black business" line and they decide to ticket everyone in line.

There will be some angry people, but that is fine. I don't imagine many people will give their name, so the police will be forced to decide if they arrest some as a show of force. I imagine they will have to... "for law and order".

Now the Trump supporters see themselves as singled out in their protest movement. Who will protect them from incarceration next time? Well, violence worked for the rioters, so maybe instead of physical violence, you get a number of militia folk, putting up a similar wall of pressure, albeit with a quiet 2A show of force. Militia folk, especially people of colour, now guard the perimeter. What will the police do?

Now things are at such powder keg levels. There is near certainty that the protest dynamic of a Trump rally energizes this demographic in the same way BLM protests energize other demographics. The application of governmental force to shut them down (or fine them) is equivalent to the police shutting down BLM protests. The lack of violence at the Trump rallies will accentuate feelings of oppression. So while you can say Trump ralliers aren't oppressed like minorities, it will not feel that way to them.

Will Trump no call in a national guard to protect his ralliers from a politically controlled police? Under Whitmer, no. But under a Republican governor who is going to get voted out due to a Democratic Mayor's? Probably. What about Trump using a federal force to protect his rallies and ensure peace? That sounds a lot like what happened down in the south during the civil right's era. I would weigh that possibility as very likely. It is the natural landscape trap for this space.

Both sides will feel incredibly aggrieved, and both sides will be highly energized. Polarization is certain.

The End Game is Scary - Equality's Foundational Social Contract has Broken

It's looking like peaceful protests continue, with no lowering of the bar for what constitutes a sacrilegious offense...

I get the sense there's a huge holding pattern of energy developing within the US' other tribal faction. That's scary.

One interesting thing to come out of the Covid energized explosion is a better sense on what grounds the political tribes are now separating. The left - right divide has obviously foundered. The horseshoe theory of politics has proven itself true. The positions of the far right (KKK type) and far left (radical intersectionalists) are now pretty much indistinguishable except for which groups each consider righteous.

Steve Bannon's citizen nationalism (Trump) and economic nationalism (Sanders) was, for a long time, the most apt characterization of the new divide. But it always felt wanting.

I think the new divide is best characterized as equal righters vs intersectionalists. One side says every rule must function the same for everyone. They want special interest and loopholes out of government. But the Republican establishment will certainly never go along with that. Whether Trumpers have enough cache and integrity to do that is very questionable. Some progress may be made, but in the end, the House always wins.

The intersectionalists seem to want to revolutionize America's founding social contract that all people are created equal. The aim seems to be replacing it with equal outcomes. Albeit equal outcomes that make up for past oppressions. How could that not work well? </irony>

The rift is HUGE. It is all about an extremely fundamental social contract that makes American unique. I don't see that moral foundation going down without a fight. And, for better or worse, that sentiment is very easy to now frame as equivalent to 1860's slave rhetoric. 

I find it infinitely fascinating (in a 1984 double speak sense of things) that equality of law could suddenly get popularly interpreted as the most insidiously racist thing possible. Human culture is logic is, from a dispassioned view, unbelievably fascinating. Hyper-rationalists, like Sam Harris, who argue that pure logic can govern social systems, have never before seemed so naive.

Struggle Sessions & Maoist Purges are Real, Albeit Much Less Violent Than They Used to Be

This and the professors removal from duty as a result of mob action can either be interpreted as an overly cautious response by admin to an unnecessarily honest and unbending response from a professor to a student, or as an example of the dynamics of Maoist purges and struggle sessions (as well as most other major modern marxist based revolutions).

The two radically different interpretations of the same event are not a good sign for social coherence. I suspect an increasingly large number of wrong-thinking academics, especially those with a disdain for authoritarianism will flock to Chicago styled universities with objectivist based teleogogies and the social norms that normally go with them.

I suspect that's a good thing. Let people separate and then do their thing. Religious folk should be able to be fully religious. Secular folk should be able to be fully secular. Customers shouldn't be surprised. Open and honest norms are essential. Unfortunately, I'm not sure society can tolerate difference...

Civil War & Systems Views

Systems View of Civil War

The basic idea behind systems thinking, popularized by Peter Senge’s 90’s era book, is that a view at any level hides other views, at higher or lower levels, each of which paints a slightly different picture of things. This happens because of

-different levels have different factors which dominate (or recede)

-yet each level is connected, often by numerous factors, many of which produce novel insights when mapped through.

Senge operationalized this with his 5 level of why questions. Whenever you think you have an answer, ask yourself what is going on behind that answer. In practice this means any problem can be viewed from multiple levels of granularity. Finer views are better for some questions, but worse for others.  Complexity means that emergence always happens and no single view is able to capture every (eventually) significant thing. The nice thing about systems thinking is how it lets you hold onto the threads from one level to the next.

The US’ current cold, but gradually warming, civil war is at a stage where a systems view is probably needed.  There are multiple views of causation, each one being right is its own way, and each highlights different aspects and causes of the current turmoil, which is bound to get worse after the Nov elections.

National Level

At a high level, current civil strife is well characterized by Peter Turchin’s secular cycles frame. Current civil strife is caused by elite over production. Real wages of producers continues to shrink. The gradient between elite and non-elite status becomes starker. Governance systems become increasingly strained to employ a civil servant class who comes to expect more and more. Governance and monetary reward / power become increasingly intermixed. The only way to keep your head above water is to abuse the producer / lower classes (either directly through commerce and low real wages, or indirectly through governmental grift)

This is good view for the current US unrest. Wage disparities have energized a system. Authoritarianism and loss of trust in the rule of law are the weights that topple the cart. Intra-elite competition between moralized media and various political cabals are, at this view, the root causes of strife.

Supra-National Level

One level above Turchin’s view is a multi-level selection frame based on polity sizes. From this frame, the current civil strife is a consequence of the tensions between operation at a pan-national level of selection and a national level of selection. Steve Bannon has the best framing here. It conceives of current tension as tensions between nationalism and globalism. It explains the right side of Trumpism as a form of sort-of-ethnic nationalism and the left side of Bernie Sanders as a from of economic nationalism. This is the horseshoe theory of politics. Eventually the far right and far left become functionally indistinguishable by policy, albeit not be social demarkers.

In the 20th century, nationalism gradually stabilized. Fits and starts of it occurred during the treaty of Westphalia. It continued to settle down as the French revolution ushered in a new type of ideological unity as a national unifying force. While in the 1910’s you could still conceive of a war for land between developed nations, WW2 was the last real kick of the land grab can. Various cold war encounters sealed this deal. Nation state lines are now largely inviolable. Of course proxy possessions still occur, but they have to be framed very different than they once would have had to have been.

From the multi-level national-vs-pan-national perspective, US’ current civil strife is a result of an inevitable backlash against the requirements that occur with a country’s move to pan-national focus. The gene-cultural traits (conflict minimization, inter-dependence, coordination) required to stabilize things at a higher level of selection just aren’t ingrained or common enough to enable stabilization. The national level focusses on things like the need for borders, tighter labour markets to drive up real wages, etc. The pan-national level focusses on things like accepting open borders and  such Movement to a higher level of selection, such as pan-nationalism, is almost certainly never going to stabilize on the first few go rounds. Expect a good thousand years or so for stabilization, at least if history is any guide.

The ultimate causes here are genetic. It is simple selection between the adaptive value of larger groups vs the adaptive value of more tightly coverable smaller groups.

Stability Through Tribal Based Dynamic Tension

If you haven’t watched any of the new genre of ex-felon prison vlogs, you probably should. They’re equally informative for current social tensions as the various 1st amendment and police over-reaction vlogs that have been popular for a number of years.

From a multi-level selection frame, you can interpret current de-fund and disband the police rhetoric as both an appeal for community based policing by local militias and a desire for more localized rule of law which are not arbitrary but are sensitive to local contexts. The US constitution seemed quite keen on these ideas. Federalism sort of quashed this. Remember the uniqueness of each cities’ charters back in the early 1800’s?

That’s all well and good. But from a multi-level selection lens, what you seem to have is an exploration of dynamic tensions. To go back to the prison example, federal higher level prison have very clear race based dynamics. I doubt that such people aren’t any more or any less racist than anywhere else. What seems to happen is clear boundaries between arbitrary groups produce a stability that exceeds what could happen when migration between groups is free and you can never be certain who is on who’s side or who is subverting whom.

The result is some scary group based thinking. Things such as “I don’t care who gets punished, but your group owes us a head” tend to occur. You had similar type thinking among many native american groups, especially amongst plains indian groups.

Tension between competing groups with similar polity sizes produces an environment that doesn’t tolerate much gamesmanship. Obviously operation at a higher level of selection minimizes overall violence levels (see Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature on the history of violence decline as polity size increases), but this is only true is the conditions necessary for operation at a higher level of selection are stabilized in a population.

As the riots, and inner city violence, and police double standards show, this isn’t the case in many environs.

Socio-Cultural Level

This is a view that dominated up until a few years ago. We’re in the last stages of a cultural war. The winners of the cultural war went for total domination and now having backed its foes into a corner, have elevated things into a full existential war.

This is really a group social psychology frame.  It’s one group against another for cultural domination. I doubt much more needs to be said here. If you thought the culture wars were coming to an end as woke-ism died out these last few months, you were probably as wrong as I was. 

Governmental Level

The simplest systems frame is that of competing governing factions. Blue vs red state thinking. To my way of thinking this is overly simplistic. But, it does work, especially if one starts to look for negative sum thinking (if it hurts my enemy more than me, its good)

*Notes

Civil War 1.0 was the war of independence. It was a combination of a socio-political purge with a foreign power rebellion.

Civil War 2.0 was ‘the civil war”. I interpret it as a weak empire conflict. I believe empires that weaken (or are stretched too thin for federalist demands) tend to bifurcate into two or so strong mid-sized states. In the lead up to this war, northern and southern states solidified. But, in a very unique solution, moderately strong federalism won out. Nonetheless northern and southern differences remain very start up to this day, despite fairly large levels of migration between the two.

Civil War 2.nothing was the social conflict that almost blew up in the late 1890’s and into the early 1900’s. It was avoided, largely due to strong memories of the Civil War, and elite inter-pressure for philanthropy. The New Deal 

Civil War 2.nothing2 was the social upheaval of the 60’s with its fairly large levels of left-wing violence.  Death rates per annum amounted to 

Civil War 3.0 (usually called 2.0) is where we are now. As I’ve said before things will get bad in 2020, but really bad in 2024 or 2028.