Difference Between Territory and Property
Perverseness pt. 2
In the year following my leaving high school, playwright Robert Ardrey topped the best-seller’s chart with The Territorial Imperative. The book became accepted fodder across ideological lines even though it essentially granted more support for those who saw synonymous the idea of territory and property.
To define property (ownership of a territory) as the same as territory (protecting an area necessary for survival) is to conflate extreme difference and destroy what might be to nature’s order. (I leave natural order for others to define, but whatever the perspective of natural order may be it usually entails some type of ‘natural’ superiority and ‘maintenance’ of some type of order.)
Property as such, has little to do with what is necessary for survival. Property redefines existence and subjects that existence (our natural environment) from the necessary territory that any species needs for his existence into whatever limits he is capable of taking from existence to be his. If he can take land, it becomes his, if he can take resources, they are his, if he can take the collective ingenuity that creates the ideas and the tools (today: technology) they are his; and of course this includes taking people to be his. We all seem to agree (mostly all–Bloch, Thiel, who has sort of backed away from claiming he has a right to “own” his labor) that owning people is wrong. So if an employer doesn’t own his workforce, he must work with them. If the workforce supports the boss, they are his, therefore there is no difference to their being enslaved and working to support another as far as I can tell. Just because a laborer is not called a slave does not not make him one.
Territory is simply the mass of land necessary for survival and any species, including man, will attempt to mark the territory he feels he needs to survive. The dispute of encroachments upon the territory, can lead to violent interactions on occasion. This is to defend one’s needs and to enable his survival, whether it be a community of human beings, or a snow leopard, probably the species who needs the greatest amount of territory in order to survive. Humans may “own” greater masses of land, but their survival doesn’t equate with what they might claim is needed. And, once again, the environment in which any group of humans may, live also determines his need for territory to a greater or lesser extent.
Property destroys not just the environment one lives upon, but the environment of human cultural needs and transforms humans into an unnatural (read psychopathic) existence that is a perversion of human cultural evolution. It breaks the natural interrelationship of individual and community; but leaves in place the community and the individual. The bond to the community remains but the individual is powerless to the individuals who own the community. The individuals who own the community have replaced individuals who must cling to their like by abandoning their common community for survival to a common community of likeness that challenges other communities not for physical survival (at least in what are called developed nations) but for psychological territories.
But in this article we are going to dispense with much of the past, that I’ve written about extensively, and focus on what I see is the development of the displacement of people from “cultural races” that identify themselves through common cultural traits of practice into “physical races” defined by some national background, sexual orientation, or most hideous in America, skin colored races not even defined by actual skin color, but by labelly defined skin color, as if a person’s race is an ingredient in a can of soup). The truth is that for a large percentage of so-defined black Americans there is such a degree of intermingled genetics with so-defined euro-Americans that there is very little genetic alleles that could make either definition palatable. Our soup can label, therefore are mislabeled and falsely advertised as being two differing ingredients. Both labels are genetically modified organisms and are not what our brains are being fed as two differing ingredients; but like many a genetically modified food, genetically modified humans are being fooled into believing their remains genetic distinctions.
The key to owning people today is not by labeling them “property” but by falsely labeling them to be “free”. By such a label they are confused into believing freedom is something that is given to them as a property and not genetically inherited as a quality. No one can be given freedom. To “give freedom” is to deny it, because freedom is now defined as to what freedom entails. Black slaves were given freedom in 1863 in states rebelling against the United States, and in all states by the 13th amendment after the war. Fifty years later women were enfranchised to vote. Now that they had that right they were free, so to speak, if freedom entails enfranchisement. For those who had been enslaved, freedom was a stroke of Lincoln’s pen. And we all know this to be true, correct?
No, quit claiming the civil war ended slavery. Slavery is much more insidious that just being told one is free. If the label is false advertising, then it is false because slavery is not about being told one is free, but about being free to participate in determining the needs necessary for the community. Freedom is not just a right to vote—it entails much more. Freedom entails the right to participate in making any decision that effects one. Freedom is not a choice between this or that, it is the right to determine what choices should be and the freedom to accept or reject. Utilitarian government that determines what may be best for the most leaves out what be best for the few.
And so my feeling is we have been “advertised” into a narrower view of freedom than is true. The label is false. Well, for sure I believe voting reform is needed and everyone should be a participant without qualifications or registrations, the reforms needed are those that focus on selection. How can candidates be consensually selected without the false advertising that primaries are somehow are a selection. Who am I selecting? Is he going to further my needs? Is it going to further my neighbor’s needs? But if I have been advertised into not having any comprehension of my vote, then I have not selected the person who will aid me and my neighbor If I have been advertised into believing my neighbor’s needs are not as viable as mine, how am I to select the candidate that will aid us both? If I been advertised into any belief then is belief even possible to comprehension or does it defeat my ability to comprehend?
The problem with the vote for my representative is that I have no vote in determining for whom I should vote. So I turn to my gut disappointments and vote for someone who like me has been chastened into powerlessness. He doesn’t appear powerless, he claims he has lots of money and that he’s successful even though he’s been chastened by the overall culture as a crook. But maybe, my own powerless feelings tell me, he is not a crook, maybe the society is deeply crooked and that’s why I haven’t gotten ahead within it. My choice to follow the crook is made because crooks have displaced me and I am able to identify with the feelings of the designated crook whose very designation of being a crook has been made by a society that is crooked.
I have to buy my house at crooked terms. I have to pay for food offered by crooked markets and not by farmers. There are crooked laws that say I can’t build my own house and help my neighbor build his. I need water to drink but have to rely on the government to supply it, I can’t, with my neighbors find water to fill our need. I have to have a job to support others who employ me, but who don’t support me. So I have no confidence in government. Why should I? The election is obviously stolen because I am dissatisfied with its results.
{I may need food stamps to survive, but the government shouldn’t be supplying my neighbor with food stamps because he doesn't deserve food stamps. (Why not, if you do?) Obviously the government who doesn’t fulfill my needs is not a government that supports me so for what reason should I support the government. I’m as democratic as anyone and my neighbor can do as he wants, but damn, the government is supporting my neighbor to have what he wants.}
This is advertised belief.
So if we don’t want people to follow the crook the government’s responsibility is to prevent crookedness. The crookedness of the system (deep state) that advertises me into believing that my freedom depends on voting for someone who doesn’t fulfill my needs, and I’ve been advertised into believing “all businessmen” are crooks, simultaneously with “all government officials are crooks”, simultaneously with “that’s just the way it is.” That’s the common parlance of the working class belief from his experiences that contradict the promises democracy has made to him of being free. But then there is the other simultaneously advertising of the voices, “It’s only because…fill in the blank…women’s lib, affirmative action, immigrants flooding across the border…”
Racism is a social design to advertise that disadvantages one may feel have a cause and if the cause is removed, my freedom will be achieved. But it is far more than a social design. It is a social construction of property. To have has become more important and those that have are defined by how much they have. It is easily apparent that that measurement standard grants power to those who have the most. {being working class for the majority of my life, I must confess to being prey to being susceptible to the last advertised statement} Again fill in the blank…less money, less education, less intelligence, less of a work ethic.
The advertised structure creates a confusion inside the human mind. Its ability to make decisions based on a practical rationale becomes distorted. Advertising is more than just selling products or selling candidates. We are advertised into believing what contradicts our practicality. It is impractical to drive across the street, We are advertised into believing it is practical. Labeling anything is unnecessarily confusing. Okay, I know what the ingredients in the soup are supposed to be. Fine. But I don’t know what the ingredients really are, do I How do labeling my soup can inform me about the ingredients give me benefit if I don’t know what monosodium glutamate is?
How does it benefit me to know immigrants are crossing our border if I don’t know why they are crossing our border, how they may increase the tax base and perhaps mean I pay less taxes, or how they will really impact my environment and my ability to survive, and exactly who is using the issue of immigration, and what benefit to those doing so bring to them? The practical mind would not put monosodium glutamate into their soup. The practical mind would try to understand if his territory is actually threatened by immigration. The advertised mind has no conception of the reason we even are a species with a brain that enables to jointly solve problems. The advertised mind assumes it has no practical ability other than follow the arguments of the leader(s), none of whom explain any of the practical or impractical benefits of permitting strangers into our territory which is viewed as our property. But worst of all, we are denied our own determinative practical use of our own needs or even to practically comprehend if the immigrant will actually be detrimental to my own needs. Denied personal comprehension, we play simon says and yet have no way to determine who is Simon.
Racism is legally defined practice than cannot be undefined by legally defined freedom if the practical mind is unaware of the concepts of defined freedom and defined slavery are merely advertised constructions. Damn right white people are upset by “rights” given to non-whites when they don't even know who or why races became defined by color or that slavery is only defined as chattelization and only black people were chattelized. Telling “free” people they are not slaves means of course they are by nature unfree. Of course the structure of the label makes the white belief of the black’s innate difference impractical and impossible to find a cooperative solution. And unfortunately this was not solved by the war on poverty, because the belief itself defies freedom and enslaves the believer to the belief.
Freedom cannot exist by advertised beliefs whether they are the advertised beliefs of state, of churches of state, or within a particular state; and particularly it cannot come if we are advertised into believing we have to work to survive when in reality we are working to support others to survive and have more property and our entire existence becomes skewed into a perversion of inimical beliefs. We feel something is wrong, but without the freedom to actively participate in a dialogue to understand why we feel as we feel or to comprehend that the Nakhani on the fringes of existence have coerced their psychopathic personalities into reshaping the needs of the human personality into a perverseness that denies their intelligence its own practical abilities.
To make voting a viable, practical exercise, and not merely a rite performed to maintain an undemocratic (from my perspective) polyarchy, we need to transform voting into a participatory selection process where people can determine whom they want to be their spokesman instead of representatives who decide they should be representatives. Voting reform needs to entail not just ballot access but true reform where caucuses have no predetermined candidate and districts are shaped not by legislatures, but by interest groups. And all political fundraising MUST STOP. A candidate who asks for money is not a candidate I would select were there any others to select from.
But the first step needs to be in letting people determine their own districts by their own interests, and caucuses formulated around creating a district platform and selecting a candidate who is going to support the district’s platform. Representatives would then go into the legislature with a platform designed by the district that he represents.
To return the community to freedom and for democracy to express the territorial needs of the many and release them from the bondage of the psychotic perverseness of being controlled, something like this type of reform should be considered.
“What more of us need to realize is that we live not in a democracy of votes, but a democracy of dollars. The ultimate key to power is found in each man’s wallet and every woman’s purse. By being pragmatic and ruthless with this vote, the people of this country have the the power to change this world more rapidly than they can possibly imagine.” -Mark Hartke
Ken,
I had the feeling reading this that I was not fully penetrating your "model" (I checked for synonyms, an online tool I've got in the habit of using frequently, but I wasn't really satisfied with any of them: "framework" was the only plausible alternative.) Accepting that term, it is certainly an ethical model. Also, a linguistic model: the critique of the word, freedom--its common use, its proper philosophical use, and its deliberately abusive use. (The "Ministry of Truth" in Orwell's 1984 came to mind.)
My context in reading serious discourse such as this is the question: "What is to be done?", which unpacks to 1. "What is the proper goal?" or "What are the proper goals, in order of importance?" and 2. "What are the best means to achieve the goal or goals?"
This paragraph of yours caught my attention: "To make voting a viable, practical exercise, and not merely a rite performed to maintain an undemocratic (from my perspective) polyarchy, we need to transform voting into a participatory selection process where people can determine whom they want to be their spokesman instead of representatives decide they should be representatives. Voting reform needs to entail not just ballot access but true reform where caucuses have no predetermined candidate and districts are shaped not by legislatures, but by interest groups. And all political fundraising MUST STOP. A candidate who asks for money is not a candidate I would select were there any others to select from."
It's occurred to me that analysis of political process can be built around two words: information and money. Information breaks in two parts: information (or disinformation) flowing to the voter, and information flowing from the voters regarding their choices. Money is essential to generate the flow of information to the voters, but also is central to all the corruption of the political system. (In the U.S. the corruption was profoundly set by the Supreme Court’s Abominable Trifecta: Buckley(1976), Belotti(1978) and Citizens United(2010), which wiped out over a century of reform regarding money in American politics, giving us the declarations that corporations have citizen rights, that money is protected political speech, and that, while explicit quid pro quo (stupid bribery) is illegal, implicit quid pro quo (smart bribery) is just fine.
Thom Hartmann in "The Hidden History of American Oligarchy" lists three enabling conditions for establishment of Oligarchy: 1. Corrupt the judicial process. 2. Make bribery legal. and 3. Muzzle journalism. Lewis Powell, a tobacco attorney in 1971, wrote in that year a Confidential Memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce entitled "Attack on Free Enterprise System" outlining a plan to reverse the trend toward democracy in America. In the same year Nixon appointed him to the Supreme Court. He held with the majority votes in both Buckley and Belotti, writing the majority opinion in Buckley. Corruption of the judiciary was a pre-condition for the Abominable Trifecta. The elimination of anti-monopoly legislation and the subsequent concentration of media ownership accomplished the relative muzzling of American journalism. The remaining step from Oligarchy to Tyranny is the control of the Executive branch by the Oligarchy, which may be accomplished in the coming Presidential Election if we can't stop it.
The ”participatory selection process” will require Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), eliminating the voter’s dilemma and the subsequent spoiler effect, and removing the protective shield of the Democratic/Republican Duopoly so that third party members and independent candidates may commonly be elected. The Constitution gives Congress the power to legislate the “Manner” of federal elections within the states, so it could mandate RCV in all future federal elections. This will probably require organized pressure from the American citizenry since the power of incumbency favoring the current member of Congress disappears with RCV. This vote will require statesmanship going against personal interest. In the context of RCV in federal elections, state parties will probably adopt RCV in state primary elections to make independent candidates less likely.
Part 2, Continuing (comment size is limited):
A system of voter determined candidates such as you describe seems to me to require a relaxation of a constant, assumed regarding RCV—the assumption that the voter will only have to choose among a handful of candidates as a matter of practicality. This seems to assume that the voter is voting at a polling place where time in the voting booth is limited, precluding very many candidates to choose from. A national voter registry of voters, enabling a comprehensive vote-by-mail, eliminates the time constraint. Vote-by-mail seems to be a necessary precondition for having very many candidates. (It also happens to DESTROY voter suppression!) Perhaps each candidate could write a paragraph describing his or her positions and include a website for voters seeking more information. Obviously impractical for polling place voting, voting at home could be a leisurely process, perhaps stretching over weeks of deliberation. How many candidates would be practical in this circumstance? More than five or six, but I’m guessing less than a hundred. That number could be tailored by the stringency of the requirement for the candidate to be allowed ballot access: the higher the number of names required for a successful ballot access petition, the lower the number of names on the ballot. If, in retrospect, there were too many for this election, raise the ballot petition minimum number for the next election. Ballots designed for voting at polling places often list candidates in random order to avoid an “alphabetic bias”: a tendency to choose the first. In the leisure of home voting, with many candidates to choose from, random order would be a nuisance and alphabetic order preferred. Raising the number of names allowed on the ballot seems to obviate the need for a separate primary, a great simplification.
“districts are shaped not by legislatures, but by interest groups” brings gerrymandering to mind—districts drawn by partisan legislators to favor one “interest group” over another via “packing” and “cracking”. (“Crack” to spread them into separate districts where they will lose, or if there are too many of them to be denied any representation, “pack” them into one district so they will have only one representative, not two.) Reform makes creation of districts with maximal compaction the standard response, but the distribution of “interest groups” may be such that maximally fair representation would require oddly shaped “anti-gerrymandered” districts—something that will never be done. How can maximally fair representation then be accomplished? Consider multi-winner districts encompassing many of the current smaller districts. These are currently prohibited by Federal law, because with our inadequate one-choice-only plurality voting system multi-winner districts would likely result in the majority swamping all the positions. But that danger is avoided with RCV. With RCV then, the prohibition against multi-winner districts should be removed.
RCV voting in multi-winner districts is the same as in single winner districts, but tallying in the instant runoffs is more complicated, which I will explain. For the single winner district an absolute majority is ½ the votes + 1. For two winners this standard obviously doesn’t work. For two winners the “absolute majority” required of each is 1/3 the votes + 1. (There are not enough remaining votes to produce a third winner.) For three winners, it is ¼ the votes + 1. In general, for n winners, it is 1/(n+1)+1. Another modification in tallying is required. The surpluses held by the first winners over the necessary 1/(n+1)+1 would make it impossible for later winners to attain the necessary 1/(n+1)+1, so the first winners’ surpluses must be reassigned among the remaining candidates based proportionately on the second choices on their ballots. This will allow n winners who have each attained 1/(n+1)+1 votes. For this to work, the sum of all their votes must obviously not be greater than the sum of all the voters. For n = 2, 2*[(1/3+1)] = 2/3+2. For n = 3, 3*[(1/4+1)] = ¾+3. … For n winners, the sum is n/(n+1)+n: by inspection for any n, a fraction less than 1.
The standard description of RCV for multi-winner district has states with many Representatives divided into multiple super-districts rather than one, so the number of winners is never more than five. California currently has 52 Representatives in Congress, so it would have 11 super-districts. But we previously discussed allowing many candidates where the voting was universally done by mail to make it practical. Perhaps 52 winners, as with California, would still be too cumbersome and California would be divided into 2 or 3 super-districts.
Someone has suggested that the over-representation in lowly populated states like Wyoming, in comparison with highly populated states like California is an issue that could be addressed by assigning Representatives who represent more voters multiple votes. Maybe an unworkable idea, but I thought I’d mention it.
“all political fundraising MUST STOP”. This requires an overthrow of what I have called the Abominable Trifecta of Buckley, Belloti, and Citizens United. When a future election makes that possible, I hope to see Congress enact that legislation (and use their authority under Article III of the Constitution to tell the Supreme Court, “Hands off this legislation! Congress declares it out of your jurisdiction.”) While they are at it, judicial reform is needed. Since they are obviously political, eliminate lifetime appointments. Fifteen years seems appropriate to me. And make SCOTUS accountable to an independent Standing Committee. (I learned recently that “Standing” as opposed to “Special” implies a Committee’s time of existence is not limited.)
If even political donations of the size that ordinary people might give is to be eliminated, a mechanism for the costs of campaigning will have to be provided by some government process. Putting a strict limit on the size to some modest total that cumulatively would cover the expenses but not create the possibility of implicit quid pro quos seems more practical to me. And it provides the citizen an opportunity to express himself without being abusive. Perhaps money in modest amounts may be regarded as speech, if modest enough not to be taken as an attempt for special favors.
We need to reverse the benign (actually, NOT benign) neglect of anti-monopoly regulation, particularly regarding media. It will not be possible to suddenly return to the decentralized situation that existed decades ago, but a course needs to be determined to return to something like that, gradually but relentlessly. And the growth of a permanent monied aristocracy must be reversed. Reverse the tax cuts for the super-wealthy made by Reagan, G.W. Bush, and Trump, retaining the sops for ordinary people included to make them politically palatable. Restore weakened provisions regarding estate taxes. Eliminate the zeroing out of capital gains upon death. Make the heirs responsible for those taxes. Make income tax steeply progressive and eliminate all sales taxes which are retrogressive.