Animal "Uplift"

In an essay entitled Moral Universalism Vs. Relativism transhumanist James Hughes refers to a discussion in which we had both been involved a few years ago:

The transhumanist debate over animal “uplift” -- a term coined and given narrative flesh by new IEET fellow David Brin -- has indirectly addressed this conundrum. (The discussion was carried out for instance on the technoliberation list in 2006.) In Citizen Cyborg, I argued that great apes had cognitive and emotional capacities sufficiently close to human that they should enjoy basic human rights, the position argued by the Great Ape Project. But apes are cognitively and therefore morally like human children in that they cannot meaningfully be asked for or provide consent to decisions that affect them. As with children, I argue, we have an obligation to provide apes the means to reach cognitive maturity, through pharmacological, genetic, and nanotechnological cognitive enhancement, so that they can exercise full self-determination.

In response, critics such as Dale Carrico asserted that the project was a form of eugenics and cultural imperialism, forcing a human model of the Good on other species. Whether humans have a right to insist on universal respect for human rights or not, he claimed moral universalism does not extend across species boundaries. Great apes should not be forced to adopt human cognition. George Dvorsky and I, following Peter Singer, argued that species is morally irrelevant.

Permit me a few quick comments.

One:

I enjoyed David Brin's Uplift novels when I read them, but I think he and we should be very leery of the way his punchy little sf conceit has been taken up by a handful of futurologists here and turned into a "term" around which a "debate" now presumably turns.

Let's be very clear about this. There is no "policy debate" on nonhuman animal "Uplift," and the coinage of a term for such a non-existing procedure prior to its arrival constitutes nothing in the way of nudging the procedure into existence or usefully delineating the terms in which the procedure would no doubt be an occasion for real debate should something like it ever actually arrive on the scene or look the least bit actually likely to do so.

Like comparable futurological "coinages" confused with "accomplishments" -- coinages like "nanotechnology" and "cosmeceuticals," which futurologists seem to treat like rabbit-holes to Wonderland -- one can expect that if the term "uplift" does not die on the vine altogether it will achieve its principal life in an advertising campaign sexing up some candy-colored destined-for-landfill handheld electronic device or describing some non-innovative but nonetheless "revolutionary" property of a polyester blend trouser or dishwashing liquid.

Futurological discourses, as with the oft closely connected pseudo disciplines of hyphenated ethics (neuro-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on), are now and always have been primarily marketing and PR discourses, barking salesmen hyping crap products while fancying themselves philosophers or policy-wonks.

Two:

I would imagine that David Brin is far too knowledgeable about the history of science fiction to labor under the misconception that his are the only or the earliest works in which nonhuman animals are tinkered with so as to converse in a more or less human animal fashion in company with human protagonists in a speculative tale.

It is quite wrong to imply, then, as Hughes seems to me to do, that Brin is the only one who has "given flesh" to this recurring science fictional conceit. And, more to the point, it is really quite flabbergastingly weird, though perfectly typical for futurologists, that the phrase a transhumanist like Hughes would use to make this attribution is "given flesh" in the first place -- inasmuch as nonhuman animal "uplift" has no actually existing fleshly incarnation at all on earth.

As usual, would-be wonder-boy futurologists have lost track of the distinction between science fiction and science, and proceed from this confusion to fancy themselves serious intellectuals in a serious policy-making "think-tank" delineating logical entailments and gaming out various scenarios premised on treatment of the non-real-as-if-it-were-real and as if this pet-nonreality is of urgent moment to our contemplation of the real, in the manner of an hypothesis, a prediction, an allegory, a thought-experiment, or some confused jumble of these.

Such discussions can also take the form of a fanboy-fangrrl circle-jerk, but I didn't include that in the preceding list of confusions simply because I approve of that sort of thing. And, indeed, so long as one doesn't confuse the pleasures of fandom subcultures and sf literary salons with the efforts of critical thought or policy deliberation -- as the Robot Cultists all inevitably and incessantly do -- you can count me among the enthusiasts of such circle jerks, big ol' queergeek that I am. Of course, nobody has to join a Robot Cult or indulge in the fantasy that geekdom is a modality of wonkdom to enjoy the pleasures of sf blueskying of fanwanking.

Three:

Hughes writes that I have "asserted that the project was a form of eugenics and cultural imperialism." The first thing I would want to be very clear about is that there is no such project in existence and so I don't think it IS anything at all, strictly speaking. The only actually-existing Project to which Hughes' essay refers here is The Great Ape Project, and I happen to so approve of the Great Ape Project that readers of Amor Mundi will find a link to it in my blogroll, indeed will find that it is something to which I have drawn the attention of my students in many courses that touch on questions of nonhuman animal rights or environmental justice. That should come as no surprise to anybody who knows that I have been an ethical vegetarian for nearly twenty years, have written and taught extensively on animal rights questions, and so on. I wouldn't want anybody mistakenly to think I disdain the actually-existing and actually-important work of the Great Ape Project as a "form of eugenics and cultural imperialism" just because a confused transhumanist fancies talking about an idea in a science fiction novel somehow constitutes involvement in a "project" of some kind.

Apart from the foregoing, however, I will cheerfully concede that I do indeed assert that were it to become technically feasible to do so -- as, mind you, it is not now, nor even remotely relevantly so to any actually earthly concern whatsoever -- nonetheless "apes should not be forced to adopt human cognition," very much as Hughes reports. Hughes says that I consider this a matter of "forcing a human model of the Good on other species." Since in the very same paragraph Hughes declares "species is morally irrelevant" to the question of "universal respect for… rights… [and] moral universalism" and seems to oppose my assertion that "apes should not be forced to adopt human cognition" (should such a thing be possible, as it palpably is not), well, I really must say that it seems to me that Hughes is pretty much admitting that he does indeed straightforwardly advocate "forcing a human model of the Good on other species." I don't see how this could be a controversial attribution on my part to Hughes, it seems quite literally to be his claim.

Four:

I personally think it is immoral to recognize the suffering of nonhuman animals as suffering that does not matter simply by virtue of making a foundational distinction between human and nonhuman animals. Among the effects of this foundational distinction in my view is that the figure of a being that is apprehended as the being whose suffering is real but whose suffering does not matter subsequently attaches to categories of humans as well via what I describe as "bestializing discourses" in ways that facilitate their mistreatment and exploitation.

But I do think it is quite as wrongheaded to fancy that in eliminating this false foundational distinction between human and nonhuman animals one should therefore treat all the endlessly many differences that make a difference among the varieties of animals, human or nonhuman, fish, fowl, mammal, insect, virus, clam as matters of indifference, morally or otherwise.

My own vegetarianism is ethical, but the moral standing I respect in the cow I would not consume for a questionable "taste" in meat does not confuse me as to the need to extend to that cow a right to the ballot box. I would not eat a horse because I respect it too much, but I hardly would seek to send a mountain lion to trial for murder because she does not share my morals on that question.

I do indeed think that a profoundly and perniciously eugenic outlook drives the curious thought experiments of the transhumanists who would seek to impose anthropocentric cognitive homogeneity on all conscious beings in the name of "universal rights." Quite apart from the foolishness of treating all of these fanciful conceits as matters of urgent policy in the first place, it seems to me quite obscene to assume as a position of ethical concern for nonhuman animals that nonhuman animals in their differences from human ones are inferior, suffering, exploited, unrespectable beings. That is to say, it is precisely in refusing to respect nonhuman animals in their differences that Hughes seems to want to claim his is the higher form of respect for them. And I find such a proposition -- if indeed I am characterizing him aright -- perverse in the extreme.

Hughes would seem to respect difference so much that he thinks almost any difference can and should be crowbarred into conformity with the human optimality he happens to incarnate himself. How very respectful! What a stunning moral vision!

Five:

Notice that in taking up Brin's fictional term "uplift" simply to describe any prosthetic/technical intervention -- however hypothetical or utterly fanciful -- through which a nonhuman mode of cognition might be policed into conformity with a legibly human mode, Hughes and like-minded transhumanists explicitly refuse any of a number of more neutral characterizations of such an imagined change and affirm thereby that any change that is a change in the direction of what they construe as a human norm is a change "upward," a change for the better.

I do not happen myself to assume in advance that any such imaginable change would inevitably be a change for the worst, forcibly imposed, by the way, and so I would not advocate any kind of pre-emptive prohibition of any such interventions should something like them eventually come to be possible, who knows when who knows how who knows what. The devil, as well as the angels, would no doubt be in the details, as is usually the case.

And it is of course all these crucial details -- all the situational costs, risks, benefits, stakeholders, technical specifications -- that are unavailable to us here and now. This is one of the reasons why I believe all such futurological handwaving is almost inevitably perniciously obfuscatory, even when technodevelopmental vicissitudes happen to churn up some gizmo that might seem to have been anticipated in some highly generic way by futurologists. Devices and techniques, when they do appear on the scene, yield their impacts and significances in the actual situations in which they appear. Futurological anticipation merely freights such arrivals with the hyperbolic hopes and fears of an earlier moment long past, deranging sense in the name of foresight and usually in the service of incumbency or, worse, a quick buck.

Six:

But the point I want to emphasize here, by way of conclusion, is that Hughes' "transhumanist" preference for the term "Uplift" to designate what he imagines, and pines for, as an eventual technical imposition of anthro-conformist cognition on the actually-existing cognitive variety of incarnated consciousness among earthly species looks to me to reveal a eugenicist outlook as plain and palpable as one could ask for.

It is interesting to note that Hughes has also expressed (and he is far from alone among transhumanists in so doing) his highly confident assessment that certain neuro-atypical states designated as "autistic" are sub-optimal. He has said that prescribing ritalin to kids amounts to "cognitive enhancement" (in case you are wondering, I agree that some parents are right to want their kids to be prescribed ritalin, but that other parents are just as right to resist such prescriptions even against the strong advice of authorities). He has also said that a non-hearing parent's desire for a non-hearing child amounts to a kind of child abuse. All this strongly suggests to me that it is not just into human conformity but into conformity with an even more crabbed and confined conception of the "properly human" on his own highly parochial terms that Hughes might want to "emancipate" earthly incarnated cognitive diversity from its manifold "sub-optimalities."

This terminological exposure of a eugenicist outlook seems to me only a little more obvious in the term "Uplift" than the same exposure of scarcely stealthed eugenicism connected to the general tendency among far more transhumanist-identified futurologists to use the word "enhancement" to describe any number of genetic, cognitive, and prosthetic interventions they happen to expect eventually to arrive on the scene. Usually, of course, the Robot Cultists hype this eventuality into "soon" to tap into the various Rapture-Ready techno-transcendence narratives on which their membership organizations depend to keep asses in the pews and dollars in the collection plate.

As I have repeatedly argued in the past on this question (for example here and here and, more generally, in many of the pieces anthologized here), an intervention that yields a different morphology or capacitation is always only an "enhancement" in respect to certain specific desires among others on offer, only in respect to certain specific ends among others on offer. Almost inevitably a relative capacitation in respect to certain wants or ends will constitute at one and the same time a relative incapacitation in respect to others.

There are endlessly many ways of being in the world, endlessly many viable, worthy, wanted lifeways and possible incarnations and paths of private perfection available to experience and imagination. To associate a particular constellation of capacities, morphologies, ends, lifeways as optimal ideals or given norms toward the attainment of which any intervention is to be regarded uncritically or neutrally as a generalized "enhancement" is to assign universal values where what is valued or not by whom for what under what circumstances is in fact radically and interminably and properly under contest. This endlessly reiterated disavowal or denigration of morphological and lifeway diversity and contestation among too many transhumanists and technocratic futurologists more generally is also the expression of an essentially eugenic outlook in my view, and should be condemned as such.

Follow the Bouncing Ball

The stealthy techno-immortalists at the Methuselah Foundation (Get it? Methuselah?) are

a non-profit medical charity dedicated to extending healthy human life through proven programs

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over that word "proven" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words!

MLife Sciences makes founding investments in organizations that are making pioneering advances in the twin missions of slowing the aging process as well as rejuvenating the body from the negative effects of aging.

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over those words "pioneering advances" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words!

SENS Foundation is focused on research aimed at the biomedical repair of the damage of biological aging. Using a unique engineering approach, these therapies seek to repair all known forms of aging-related damage in the human body, with the aim of restoring cellular and biomolecular structures to renew their function to youthful health and vitality.

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over those words "unique engineering" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words!

In the case of Methuselah Foundation's fight to end aging and the research that it will take to create the necessary therapies, we focus on funding for the long haul, depending on the commitment of donors such as You. Each donor will be immortalized on a unique marble monument

Bouncing ball likes bouncing right over the word "immortalized" and proceeding to bounce its way toward all sorts of other words, like "marble monument"!

Thank heavens we have techno-immortalists and other superlative futurologists around to re-invent the mausoleum as an immortalization strategy for us.

Bouncing ball bounces its way onward to other indispensable anti-aging tips you just can't get unless you spend time among techno-immortalists, including

taking vitamin D, regular fasting, regular exercise, and popping baby aspirin daily

"We are as gods," as the futurological hucksters say.

Hey, where'd bouncing ball bounce off to?

The Future, I guess.

The Peer

A peer is not an equal -- for there are no equals -- the peer is the one who appears in the public square, and by virtue of the public square, be it the polis of the streets or of the nets, and who appears as one who contributes, contests, collaborates, has a stake in the shared and made world precisely in her difference from others who also appear and associate in company. The ethos of politics, peer-to-peer, which is one and the same as the ethos of democratization, is always the interminable dynamic of equity-in-diversity.

A Trilogy of Futurological Brickbats on the Subject of "Techno-Ethics"

The prefix "bio," when appended to the word "ethics," tends to have the curious effect of draining all the life out of ethics.

The breathlessly ramifying "techno-ethical" disciplines -- bio-ethics, neuro-ethics, net-ethics, nano-ethics, robo-ethics, and so on -- should all be regarded as essentially public relations and marketing subdisciplines, very much in the spirit of the "business ethics" out of which all these latest not-ethics by way of hyphenated-ethics have sprung.

Institutional "ethicians" are not educators so much as they are salesmen. And they should be treated as such: that is to say, with extreme caution.

For more Futurological Brickbats, by all means browse the archive.

Implausible Characters, Vacuous Foundations

In my UC Berkeley course "Altars and Alters to the Market: Polemical Discourse in the Neoliberal/Neoconservative Epoch" we just spent the week talking about Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I thought I might post some of my thoughts here on Amor Mundi as well.

One thing that really perplexes me about the novel that we touched on again and again in class discussion is the radical implausibility of the characters. I focused in class especially on the frankly hilarious implausibility of the protagonists -- pointing out that one can have a romantically heroic protagonist without actually going so far as to make characters literally impossibly brilliant, as Francisco d'Anconia is made to be, literally the instant and effortless winner of everything he tries without fail, re-inventing calculus off the cuff as a child, on top of being fantastically handsome and athletic, and so on and on, or Hank Rearden being not only an incomparable entrepreneur, but also a master prospector for a whole diversity of resources, and also a master metallurgist, and also just happening to be a paradigm-shattering engineer/architect, and so on. It's like the marvelous hyperbolic hilarity of Buckaroo Banzai's plasma physicist slash brain surgeon slash rockstar slash model but treated as deadly earnest plausible character development.

But it also seems to me that the bad guys in the novel are also quite flabbergastingly implausible, invariably exaggeratedly unappealing physically -- "the muscles of his face failed to assume responsibility for taking up a shape" is actually said of someone at one point -- and apt to declarations of the most absurd things imaginable, twisting at their villain mustaches as it were and propounding Dr. Eeeeevil-esque conspiracies organized by their hostility to anything that might be construed as an accomplishment or by their unslakable lust to obliterate anything that might be construed as beautiful, and so on.

Rand takes real pains to insist on the actual factual reality of her heroes:

About the Author: "My personal life" says Ayn Rand, "is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence 'And I mean it.' I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books and it has worked for me, as it has worked for my characters... I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written -- and published -- is my proof that they do."

Needless to say, writing Atlas Shrugged no more proves Ayn Rand the equal of John Galt (or even the equal of, say, Jackie Collins) than the publication of Harry Potter novels (works of fiction in every way -- including philosophically -- better and preferable to Rand's hackneyed hyperbolic bodice-rippers in my humble opinion) makes J.K. Rowling the functional equivalent of Albus Dumbledore.

Setting aside the curious evangelical sales pitch slash motivational speaker flim-flam artistry of Rand's punchy little bit of self-promotion there (change your life! -- it worked for me, it'll work for you! -- just mail in the handy card included in the novel to contact the Ayn Rand Institute and we'll turn your life around!), it seems to me that Rand is insisting on the literal reality of her superlative characters in a way that makes it difficult to treat them merely as "artistic" or "stylistic" conjurations of every person's capacity for greatness or independence or what have you. I mention this in answer to a few who complained about my emphasis on Rand's endless implausibilities and who wanted to rationalize their own identification with the castle she has built in the air here by declaring her choices to be stylistic embellishments for effect (the "effect" in question remaining curiously unelaborated by the proponents of this view).

I also think it is not accidental that conventional Movement Conservative discourse -- arising out of the ferment of works by Mises, Hayek, Hazlett, Rand, Friedman, Heinlein, and others -- many of whom we are reading in this market polemics class, as it happens -- very typically declares humanities departments in universities to be cesspools of relativism, typically dismisses modern art as infantilism, typically declares any concern for the exploited or the vulnerable as expressions of envy, and so on. All of these facile mischaracterizations directly echo the villainous portrayals in Rand's potboilers, treated as literally truthful quite as much as she demands we take her heroes as accurate portrayals of human possibilities (and I might add that there is a cottage industry of lionizing corporate CEO biography/memoir literature that seems to want to declare that the titans of Atlas Shrugged roam the world among us even now -- even if they might strike the everyday observer as rather more flabby sordidly unimaginative crudely opportunistic jackholes than Rand's heady prose would lead one to hope for).

I want to be clear that in saying all this I actually do not mean to deny that there are exceptionally brilliant and creative people in the world -- among them some I happen to reverence myself, as it happens -- nor that there are fairly appallingly idiotic dangerously deceptive people in the world -- among them some I happen abhor for their crimes and their their schemes and their lies (nobody who reads this blog, could doubt that for long). However, I really think both the heroes and the villains in the novel are caricatural in ways that say something important about the way the novel is functioning and what its project amounts to.

I think this reliance on radical hyperbole and caricature treated insistently as literal truth surely connects to the radical under-determination of actually rationally warranted beliefs by the recognition of the vacuity "existence existence" or "A is A" and also the correlated radical under-determination of actually efficacious moral/ethical norms by the recognition that "[i]t is only the concept of 'life' that makes the concept of 'value' possible."

On my page 1018 Rand has Galt declare: "My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists -- and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these."

Needless to say, I think that nothing much proceeds from these vacuities at all, that they are at best foundations in quicksand.

Certainly "existence exists" is a near-vacuity incapable of grounding the host of highly idiosyncratic Randian factual beliefs -- most of which do not square with actual experience of the world, experience of the way technoscience actually functions, industrial and commercial concerns actually function, the way artists and art promotion actually plays out in the world, and so on.

Nor does "the single choice: to live" provide anything like a groundwork for her highly idiosyncratic conception of human "flourishing" -- which, again, does not square in the least with actual human concerns, histories, or hopes as far as I can tell, our awareness, for example, of our reliance on the common heritage of accomplishments and knowledges, our awareness of our interdependence on our peers for our survival and flourishing, our awareness of the ineradicable diversity of stakes, ends, capacities, situations, perspectives that suffuse the plurality of peers with whom we share, contest, and collaborate in the world, our awareness of our precariousness on earth, or vulnerability to humiliation, misunderstanding, our openness to being changed in ways we cannot imagine by the vicissitudes of history, love, conflict, differing perspectives, and so on.

Rand thought of herself as a "philosopher novelist" and of Atlas Shrugged as a philosophical novel. And I think that the false substantiation of Rand's highly idiosyncratic views both of what is and what ought to be through her endlessly reiterated recourse to the nearly vacuous assertions that "existence exists" or "A is A" on the one hand and that we must "choose life" or else "deal in death" on the other hand is a rhetorical gesture of Rand the (abysmally terrible) philosopher that is directly correlated to the rhetorical gesture of Rand the (abysmally terrible) novelist in soliciting our identification and dis-identification with her flabbergastingly ridiculously hyperbolized heroes and villains.


Behind the Music: Atlas Shrugged provides still more Randroid-rage should your tastes go that way...

Dispatches from Libertopia: An Anthology of Wingnut Chestnuts and Democratizing Remedies

I. Wherever government is meant to be of by and for the people, to be anti-government always means to be against the people.

II. Whenever a right wing politician declares all government wasteful, criminal, and corrupt you should pay close attention, because he is announcing his plans.

III. Anti-tax zealots are the ones who think that civilization is the only free lunch.

IV. To declare that money is speech is to ensure that only money talks.

V. To declare that corporations are persons is to ensure that actual persons are serfs.

VI. One will never go far wrong when confronted by a self-described libertarian in America simply to assume that by this term they mean to say they are just another Republican asshole, but one who also wants, sensibly enough, to smoke pot or chew some hooker's foot without fear of arrest.

VII. Gay Republicans are usually white guys who experience "homophobia" primarily as their heartbreaking exclusion from white-racist patriarchal class privileges to which they feel themselves otherwise perfectly entitled.

VIII. "Free Market" ideologues always begin as a criminal conspiracy and always end as a suicide pact.

IX. Any “big-tent” organization big enough to accommodate right-wing ideology will soon be a big tent empty of almost anybody but right-wing zealots.

X. However much they insist on their difference from conventional conservative politicians no American-style market libertarian argument will ever have any life in the actual world except to the extent that it is appropriated by conservatives for conservative ends.

XI. Staunchly "anti-war" market libertarians tend to be sublimely indifferent to the extent to which modern war-making is an essentially entrepreneurial activity.

XII. The only way to end modern wars is to make war-making unprofitable. It would be curious indeed to mistake free marketeers for allies in such a struggle.

XIII. Nobody who believes society to be a competitive war of all against all will ever truly collaborate in the work to end the competition that is war.

XIV. Freedom is not a matter of making a selection from a menu provided by others.

XV. The difference between investment and speculation is the difference between an effort and a scheme.

XVI. Wherever the prose of pricing prevails the poetry of meaning is menaced.

XVII. It is curious the number of Republicans who claim to disdain vast corrupt soulless bureaucracies but who celebrate multinational corporations.

XVIII. The wealthiest one per cent of the world population seem to imagine themselves indispensable. One wishes they would test this article of faith by going away.

XIX. There is no such thing as a natural market.

XX. "Homo Economicus" is a mythical being, and a good thing, too. Just look at the damage done by those entities in reality that come closest to incarnating the fiction of "Homo Economicus" -- that is to say limited-liability corporations -- to see the proof of this.

XXI. Those who begin in a declared belief in "spontaneous order" end in declaring orders they believe should be obeyed spontaneously -- and immediately.

XXII. Those who would dismantle all democratic government and those who would demand good democratic government will point to many of the same instances of government abuse, corruption, malfeasance, and violence in making their separate cases, but it is only a fool who in noticing this would mistake them for allies.

XXIII. We are all beholden to accomplishments and problems we are heir to but unequal to, we are all implicated in the efforts of the diversity of peers with whom we share the world. It is delusive to imagine oneself the singular author of one's fortunes, whether good or ill. And so, only in a world in which the precarious are first insulated from the catastrophic consequences of ill-fortune in which we all play our parts can we celebrate or even tolerate the spectacle in which the successful indulge in the copious consequences of good fortune in which we all, too, have played our parts.

XXIV. It is always magical thinking to declare an outcome need only be profitable for it to be possible.

XXV. Pre-emptive war adventuring is to legitimate defense as hyperbolic financial speculation is to substantial production. It is no accident that pre-emptive war would suffuse public discourse in an epoch of bubble-economics. War hysteria and irrational exuberance are kindred pathologies.

XXVI. Those who declare taxes to be theft either forget or fail to grasp that it is taxes that pay for the maintenance of those institutions on which legitimate claims of ownership or theft depend for their intelligibility and force in the first place.

XXVII. Taxes are not, however annoying they may seem, violations of our freedom so much as indispensable enablers of freedom -- and hence they are a precondition for the constitution of the very experience of the "voluntary" on which notions of the involuntary depend in the first place.

XXVIII. Taxes pay for the administration to basic needs that ensures the scene of consent is non-duressed by deprivation, inequity, or insecurity. Those "libertarians" who declare whatever passes as a market outcome voluntary and nonviolent by definitional fiat -- whatever the conditions of relative deprivation, inequity, insecurity, ignorance, or misinformation that duress its terms in fact -- reveal themselves to be poor champions of an impoverished and profoundly uncivilized notion of "liberty."

XXIX. Ours is a world so sensibly arranged that it is only the ones who could afford to pay for everything who are assured escape from paying for anything.

XXX. The pace at which the tidal forces of supply and demand, or the correction via unprofitability of ignorance and error, or the rationalization via capital flight of panics and bubbles, or comparable market mechanisms manage to compensate for disruptive events, bad information, and irrational conduct is too different from the pace at which metabolism is maintained in human bodies and struggle is enacted in human history for these mechanisms to sustain those lives and that history in a human way, however wholesome they may be in their own inhuman term. This is the long term in which Keynes remarked we are all dead.

XXXI. The point of departure for political economy is the interminable reconciliation of infinite ends in a finite world. The point of departure for market anti-politics is the delusion that an infinite growth satisfies infinite wants, eventually if not actually. The displacement of reconciliation by aspiration in market ideology is satisfied to treat as satisfying even a ubiquitous dissatisfaction so long as it keeps promising imminent satisfaction.

XXXII. What is revolutionary about the market imaginary is its demand that we experience as revolution the interminable deferral of revolution, that we experience as satisfaction the interminable frustration of satisfaction.

XXXIII. Capitalism is everywhere, but it never arrives.

XXXIV. To those who say they would shrink government without end, who say they would deregulate enterprise without end, who say they would cut taxes without end, it must forcefully be said, in the end, that you cannot have a civilization and eat it too.

XXXV. "The free market" does not exist. It has no historical, actual, or even logically-possible reference. Utterances offered up on its behalf have no more substance than utterances on behalf of god. And as with godliness whatever flesh, whatever reality market-fundamentalist assumptions and aspirations assume are carved into the broken bodies and invested in the distressed spirits of the ones made to bear the worldly weight of the lies of the faithful.

XXXVI. So long as Congress is filled with millionaires it will never represent the interests of an America filled with non-millionaires.

XXXVII. It should go without saying that it is perfectly possible to be a member of the Republican Party without being an idiot, a bigot, a hypocrite, and an asshole. But it must also be said that it is unfortunately no longer possible at all to be a member of the Republican Party without being at least one of these and usually more than one.

XXXVIII. Market fundamentalists are pickpockets who like to decry taxes as theft to distract you when their hands are in your pocket.

XXXIX. Randian "Objectivists," "Social Darwinists," and market fundamentalists often fancy themselves supremely materialist rather than the fantasists they palpably are, just as social conservatives and Christian fundamentalists often fancy themselves supremely anti-materialist even as they jockey ferociously for bigger slices of the material pie. These ostensibly opposed factions are, of course, always only engaging in sectarian skirmishes within Movement Conservatism more generally over just which self-appointed priestly elite gets to rule the worldly toypile in the name of just which imaginary deity.

XL. There has never once been an outcome attributed to the Invisible Hand of the Market in which the Heavy Hand of the State did not play an indispensable part, and in which all too many are not sure to discern the Hidden Hand of Conspiracy.

XLI. I am not offended by the faiths of the faithful -- since we should all have the consolation of the poetry which moves us -- but I am profoundly offended by those who would peddle their faiths as evidences and so strive to steal the archive of and hope for a commonplace, commonsense, commoncause, commonwealth from the shared world, peer to peer.

XLII. To be a consumer most of all is to be a criminal first of all.

XLIII Few who have more keep more because they deserve more than most who have less.

XLIV. Anyone, even an admirable or accomplished person, can attract the momentary attention of masses of people, but to be a celebrity for long usually demands one be a profoundly ruthless, relentless, and terribly misguided sort of person, and most likely a straight-up sociopath.

XLV. Every winner is lost.

XLVI. I AM A LOSER AND I VOTE

XLVII. If you want to understand what is going on around you, all you have to do is learn who is making the money, look where the guns are pointed, and listen to the stories the losers have to tell.

XLVIII. The enabling delusion of every historical empire is that it is history's umpire.

XLIX. Nobody truly happy has any inclination while they are happy to tell you how to be happy so stop listening to those who promise you such things. There is no such thing as an earning or an accomplishing or a deserving of happiness in any case, and so it is always better simply to enjoy happiness whenever it briefly appears in life and recall it gratefully whenever it is long gone.

L. To be a civilized person is first of all to say or do what you judge to be righteous or beautiful or true in the world, and to declare things right or beautiful or true for what you take to be good reasons in the hearing of the world, come what may. Civilization is the contest and accumulation of such acts and assertions. Never forget, then, that at the heart of freedom is artistry, and at the heart of judgment is style.

LI. I do not want to smash the state, I want always to democratize it.

LII. Republicans: "Keynes is dead." Keynes: "Your Republic is dead."

LIII. An anarchist's convictions usually have little but their hypocrisy to redeem them.

LIV. Ronald Reagan was an asshole, and it’s high time liberals stopped trying quixotically to score cleverness points by declaring him a better asshole than the assholes the Republicans are now.

LV. At this point, to be a registered Republican is to admit proudly and in public to the kind of sweeping ignorance that should send you back to High School, to the kind of sociopathy, narcissism, and anger management issues that should send you into serious counseling, and to a penchant for fraud, looting, and assault that should send you to trial with a fair prospect of incarceration. Not only can Republicans no longer be trusted to administer the state, one begins to wonder if they should all be wards of the state.

LVI. As a policy matter, austerity measures are nothing but a kind of pseudo-scientific bloodletting, treating as a treatment the weakening of the weakest. As a moral matter, austerity measures are nothing but a kind of brutal bullying, treating as a treat the weakening of the weakest.

LVII. The intolerant always demand tolerance for their intolerance. Bigots always decry as violence and as bigotry the restraint of their bigotry from the worst of its violence. Racists always declare racist the exposure and denunciation of their racism. This is all very clever, if you are very stupid.

LVIII. Mine is an anti-capitalism that will be quite content to build an environmentally sustainable social democracy in which universal healthcare, education, income, expression, recourse to law and franchise is funded by steeply progressive taxes even if everybody decides to call that outcome "capitalism" for whatever reasons perversely appeal to them.

LIX. When everything is a casino everybody loses everything.

LX. If it is usually true that control corrupts, it is absolutely true that only the corruptible covet control.

LXI. That the greedy decry all judgments of their misconduct as expressions of envy is hardly surprising, since in giving in to greed they had first of all to give leave to kindness.

LXII. "Let the Market Decide" Always Means "Let Rich People Decide."

LXIII. Movement Republicanism was born in hostility to governing and dies incapable of governing.

LXIV. Republicans are divided between the rich ones who want to pretend they are giving when they are taking, and the poor ones who want to pretend they will be rich so they are not getting taken.

LXV. When you criticize a successful thief it is not "success" that you are attacking, but thievery.

LXVI. Any institution too big to fail should either be broken into manageable portions that are not, or nationalized so that its successes will be shared as widely as its failures will.

LXVII. Gun-nuttery is the ruggedization of the individualized cyborg-protagonist in Ayn Raelian "free market" nightmare-fantasies.

LXVIII. Anarchy is a perspectival effect -- the rule of elites is always spontaneous or natural and hence no-rule from their vantage.

LXIX. It's stupid to have a big gun because you think that you and your gun can fight the state when you can't, but it's just as stupid to want a big gun when much of what the state is for is to ensure no citizen has any legitimate need of one.

LXX. Defense spending is the disavowed public face of the founding bad faith of Republican Big Government championed as "small government," just as Forced Pregnancy Zealotry is the conspicuous private face of the founding bad faith of Republican Big Government championed as "small government."

LXXI. Of course, what the GOP has always meant by "smaller government" has never been anything other than "less democracy."

LXXII. Funny how often survivalists and people around them don't survive.

LXXIII. Kennedy Rephrased for Greedheads: Brag not what you think you do for this country just by being rich, admit how much you depend on this country for being rich.

LXXIV. "The Market" without "The State" might be a fair, if it is small, or a gang, if it is bigger, and that is all. To say otherwise is not to have an interesting perspective on markets and states, but to reveal you don't know enough about either economics or politics for anybody but a good teacher to pay attention to.

LXXV. The best words to describe your average Ayn Rand fan are "government beneficiary," although occasional splashy success stories among her readership do sometimes also manage to be government employees or government contractors.

LXXVI. Is there any sweeter song in all the world than elites peddling predation and denial as "optimism"?

LXXVII. Scandal is austerity's glamour.

LXXVIII. Just as I have always found it hard to sustain any interest in the interest others have in my queerness, and yet I remain utterly fascinated by the quandaries of the diversity of desire for politics, so too I have always found it hard to sustain any interest in the interest others have in my atheism, and yet I remain utterly fascinated by the quandaries of the diversity of secularity for politics.

LXXIX. If you are an atheist who believes in free markets or who believes evolution applies to history or culture you are not an atheist after all.

LXXX. It isn't an accident that "Un-PC" is the tag always accompanying an ugly lie someone privileged uses to bully someone precarious.

LXXXI. Security without freedom is insecurity.

LXXXII. Democrats are the ones who want to get together through their government to help people, Republicans are the ones who want to get together through their government to harass people.

LXXXIII. Doctrinal "anarchism" seems to exist primarily to provide Republicans with endless rationalizations for irrepressible greed and to provide Democrats with endless rationalizations for irresponsibly not voting in mid-term elections.

LXXXIV. Corporatists are forever confusing profiteerism with patriotism, just as militarists are forever confusing patriotism with prosperity.

LXXXV. Until unemployment no longer holds out the prospect of death or dishonor every employment contract is made under duress.

LXXXVI. Republicans are fighting for elections that are fairer... of skin.

LXXXVII. Getting Republicans to agree on anything is like herding clowns.

LXXXVIII. Libertarianism might have a chance at real world success if only libertarians were fuzzy and cute. As witness the utopia of total greed that is my cat's life.

LXXXIX. For "entitlements" you need look no further than individuals who depend for their wealth on commonwealth but think paying taxes is slavery.

XC. The formalization of an indebtedness of all to some is the forgetfulness of the ineradicable interdependence of all with all.

XCI. A Transparent Society in which indifference and distraction prevail will be opaque, in fact, to all but its elites.

XCII. In the absence of social justice, "Openness" is always emptiness.

XCIII. Every US generational cohort is described as re-discovering libertopian anti-governmentality. That is, after all, the default of insulated ignoramuses.

XCIV. Given that inequity always reveals inefficiencies, it is curious how often efficiency rationalizes inequities.

XCV. Things are so simple in the GOP. Human rights begin at conception. And unless there is a white penis present, they end at birth.

XCVI. A rising stock market is always an unmistakable indicator of economic success… of plutocrats over the vast majority of people who work for a living.

XCVII. Every second Social Security is discussed as a problem to be solved is a second lost to the necessary celebration of Social Security as the ongoing solution to the problem of poverty for our seniors.

XCVIII. Until privacy advocates absolutely refuse the assimilation of privacy politics to privatization politics we will not contribute to freedom.

XCIX. Strange the way people on the right inevitably claim "the left likes mass shootings" whenever we decry the mass shootings they endlessly enable.

C. Republicans talk about Big Government and Small Government to avoid talking about Good Government and Our Government.

CI. Precarization is a terrorism, multinational plutocracy one more terror-network.

CII. Even though more government doesn't always mean more democracy, less government always means less democracy.

CIII. A society is failing when it is only by failing at living gracefully that can one succeed in society.

CIV. You say "feckless," and I say "efficacious," let's call the war thing off.

CV. There is no natural, spontaneous, abiding reality that is either "the internet" or "the market" -- and it is no surprise that arguments presumably defending, saving, promoting "the free internet" are made so often by the same people who make arguments defending, saving, promoting "the free market" and so often in ways that re-enact the false, facile terms defending, saving, promoting "the free market."

CVI. Whenever a white dude pines for a "simpler time" -- and I am including the ones who call themselves anarchists and eco-radicals -- I assume he's got a gun pointed at me.

CVII. When "tax and spend" is reduced to a punchline, it is always plutocrats who have the last laugh.

CVIII. Anarchists on the right want a nation of guns, not laws. Anarchists on the left see a nation of guns, not laws. Both are wrong.

CIX. Open Carry aspires to be the twenty-first century lynch mob of the reactionary right, terrorism in defense of white supremacy and patriarchy.

CX. The invisible hand is the heavy hand.

CXI. Capitalism is always, like, talk to the invisible hand.

CXII. It is hard to think what apart from racism reconciles the wingnut contempt for failed states with their work to make their own state fail.

CXIII. Funny how go getters get got.

CXIV. When money is speech, words are less for making sense than for making bribes.

CXV. Republican antics are about as exciting as watching blood dry.

CXVI. Ever notice how many upward sailing risk takers turn out to be upward failing risk fakers?

CXVII. If liberalism and conservatism are a distinction, neoliberalism and neoconservatism are a loop. There is no neoliberalism without neoconservatism. Every "free" global market is maintained by the threat and reality of global arms and armies.

CXVIII. There is no article of faith more fancifully supernatural than belief in a natural free market.

CXIX. The market has spoken. It hates markets.

CXX. When we say "let the market decide" we are deciding to forget that markets are nothing but our decisions, the better to let others make for us the decisions we should be making for ourselves.

CXXI. The expectation of privacy is not a refusal of scrutiny but a refusal to be reduced to any authority's profile of us. The expectation of publicity is that we are made more capacious in our responsiveness to scrutiny than we can know from our present profile of ourselves.

CXXII. Initial regressive distributions of wealth are no less the product of government intervention than are subsequent progressive redistributions of wealth.

CXXIII. People love calling libertarians "Idea Guys." It pays to remember that every single libertarian "Idea" is an ad campaign to peddle plutocracy to majorities it harms.

CXXIV. The liberty of the libertarian right is an empty deception: its figure is empty space, its impossible project a control to compensate bottomless fear. The freedom of the democratic left is a public work: its figure is assembly, its interminable project enabling equity-in-diversity as an expression of love.

CXXV. Americans can no longer distinguish optimism from advertizing.

CXXVI. The sole purpose of "The Political Compass" is to get you lost enough to espouse right-wing positions without grasping that you are.

CXXVII. That a guaranteed income would end hopeless poverty is a reason to support it, that it would begin endless hopeful enrichments is another.

CXXVIII. "Pro-Life" is the brand name of a death cult. It is foolish to expect truth in advertizing.

CXXIX. Whenever the profits of plutocrats are purchased by the precarity of the people, money is always speech and speech is always moneyed. Securing a basic income guarantee would create conditions under which for the first time it would be possible for money NOT to be speech.

CXXX. The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: "I'm from a corporation and I'm here for profit."

CXXXI. Every time a company advertizes a feature they were forced to provide by government regulations they fought reality withdraws another inch.

CXXXII. DIY is great until it becomes an excuse for Denial of Interdependence Yammering.

CXXXIII. Free marketeers console themselves they may be dogs but at least they're dogs who are eating. When it's dog eats dog, every dog gets eaten.

CXXXIV. Indebtedness, like Original Sin, is a state of abiding existential insecurity enormously useful to the schemes of (market) faithful elites.

CXXXV. Sometimes I think the Right may well bore us to death before they manage to starve us to death.

CXXXVI. Every single person who declares themselves "beyond left and right" is either a secret shill for the right or a perfect dupe for the right.

CXXXVII. It is in our possessiveness that we are dispossessed.

CXXXVIII. An old joke declares that young liberals mature into conservatives, but the true joke is that conservatism is a permanent infantilism.

CXXXIX. The arc of history bends from just us.

CXL. So many manifestos, so few manifestations.

CXLI. Back when I was still dating I used to want to take out a billionaire. Alas, I never got close enough to kill.

CXLII. The rich take everything, but they can't take a joke.

CXLIII. Privatization always kicks you in the privates.

CXLIV. Reactionaries emphasize the potential costs of doing something to solve shared problems in order to distract from ongoing costs of doing nothing to solve shared problems.

CXLV. Take "civil" from "liberties" and what you get is taken.

CXLVI. Republicans never die, they finally manage successfully to secede from the Union.

CXLVII. Republicans campaign in fantasy and govern as foes.

CXLVIII. Conspiracists get right that incumbent elites are capable of anything, but get wrong how incapable incumbent elites are of everything.

CXLIX. The Southern Strategy was a long and murderous road to a short and suicidal destination.

CL. For every market, always a military.

CLI. Protest voting usually reveals incomprehension of both protest and voting.

If you enjoy these bits and pieces of anti-libertopian and hence anti-authoritarian snark, you may also enjoy my Futurological Brickbats anthology, epigrammatically dissecting and deriding corporate-militarist "futurology" and Robot Cultists.