Rational War in the Post-strongman Era
Preventing activation of the “Big Zipper”
With Miroslaw Manicki
There will come a time when the idea of a strongman is passé, even for people who have flirted with strongman politics in one form or another. When that time comes, those people will have choices to make as to the management of their affairs, as do the people of all states. This is particularly true in our fraught era, as the style and behavior of would-be strongmen levy such a high price on the world.
We provide guidance here as to what can be done, not to gain power, but to use it. We are collectively witnessing a collapse into a ‘black hole’ of authoritative prerogative, the horrific result of savage, unchecked power. This is a regional situation and hopefully it will not spread. There are global impacts, to be sure. The violence is not only unfair, it is unwise — counter to the knowledge and wisdom resident throughout the world. While we have seen similar developments in degrees, we are witnessing an extreme example that screams foul from the news wires and the television screens.
How can we be assured that this Pandora’s box of terror and death and destruction can be put back in its place?
Revitalization is the key. This is to say, revitalization of the old ways, the tested means by which civilization was built in the first places. Civilization-building is a very old phenomenon.
Revitalization of past success is the best bet as to improved social and economic conditions. This was demonstrated by Chalmers Johnson in his evaluation of modern-day China and Anthony F. C. Wallace, who had earlier reported similar findings, principally from his studies of native North American indigenous cultures. This included the Delaware, the Iroquois, and the Tuscarora.
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As to China, success came from reassertion of what was termed “the organic law of China”, which amounted to organized, institutionalized support of diverse decision processes by the communities and societies in question. This continues to be supported by means of the Chinese Peoples’ Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). It is useful for non-specialists in Chinese governance to learn of this and for Chinese authorities to be reminded of it.
Peace, to be enjoyed, comes from bringing something from the past that has worked, within the culture in question or in another that can be studied, understood, and applied. This is how irrational and unworkable utopias can be avoided. As can be seen, one person’s utopia can easily amount to a world of terror and pain for many others, an intolerable condition.
We must continue to fight wars, but of a different kind. We need to fight for process over prerogative, of rationality and order over chaos and destruction. This involves both our interactions with nature and commitments and enterprises among the people. As an example of what we mean, we published a book in 2015 on the subject — Rational War, as can be seen below.
The point of the book is that to do away with one kind of war, we need to replace it with another. This isn’t to say that we need new wars based on violence and armaments, but that we need to engage in a persistent fight for process over prerogative. Constant struggle and awareness in communication and public discourse are needed. It is not a matter of “sticks and stones,” but it is a matter of trees, which is to say, commitment to logical processes with regard to both nature and society. We offer up the following representation of what we need to work to achieve — rational combination of knowledge and authority.
This model generates pervasive overtones that extend to essentially all fields of endeavor, including governance of the whole. Flux is persistent in our world and in the universe. We need to be vigilant in recognizing and navigating through the issues and commitments needed to steer toward a desirable course. Here is the nature of the message, as outlined in the Rational War book:
In the age of the network, geopolitics still matters. Geographic dispersion isn’t all it used to be, however. The compression of time and the instantaneous nature of information flows from the ever-present network result in a shifting of the balance in our day toward the Internet and its enticements. Cloaked in both geopolitical and technological frames of reference, however, is an embedded hostility toward process, particularly knowledge-driven process orientations controlled by experts and the personal preferences of individuals and societal institutions. Rational efforts in support of underlying processes, resulting in dual control and order, will not only forestall open hostility and chaos, they can permanently strengthen the fabric of society.
There is more to the matter than a metaphor about fabric itself. Societal commitments indeed demonstrate structure and form. It is in understanding and supporting and documenting and carrying out such things that we gain the prize as to how to live together. Strong, structured fabric provides a useful example of how such forms of living can be achieved, and how they can be extended over time.
As we have discussed earlier, the space between Russia and Ukraine north of Kiev, the Pripet marshes, was the backdrop for many years for the kind of cooperation and activity that formed the societies and communities that support, inform, and protect. That spot is where the early Slavs congregated and lived, in large part to obscure their farms and gardens from invaders.
As we have pointed out, the traditional means of engaging in democratic governance, the Greek way, begins with a fight over the control of land. Once such control is achieved, there is an election of leadership to whom you give prerogative to act in your behalf, in your name. In the Greek case, this was typically someone distinguished in the battle itself. In some sense, such an election amounts to a blank check as to the behavior of such leaders during a defined period. Elections by the people, with related deadlines or other stopgaps, are intended to regulate and minimize effects of such a grant of power, to limit the powers of the people in question. Experience has shown that many, once in power, will typically try to find ways to extend their mandate, broadening and deepening their personal power in the process. Constitutions also refine and limit powers, but these support authoritative acts better than knowledge-driven ones.
This is not to say that traditional political and governing models are not good. They are. Their political underpinnings simply matter too much. Granting prerogative carte blanche to anyone is a bad idea that does not age well. This is what motivated the Greeks in coming up with their system — they did not want to grant power in perpetuity to anyone. They indicated that they wanted to make their laws, decided in advance among themselves, their king, not any one person. There term for this was Basileus.
This was the Greek idea of democracy. It is not that the form was carried out exactly the same in every case. There have been and continue to be many monarchies that support democratic or democratic-like forms of organization that do not exhibit a collapsing of power onto itself such as we describe. Under some circumstances, enlightenment by monarchs has shown to be the very development that brings knowledge and power together in useful ways.
The answer in any case is in waking up and activating communities and societies of all kinds to act and to be supportive of what they know to be right and proper. Experts do not so much need to be listened to, they need to be empowered in the context of their own peer arrangements and in the course of their work. It is to understand that our societies and cultures frame behavior and support relationships in ways that achieve desirable outcomes for the people.
There must be a reliable “dance pattern” between authorities as they are selected — often elected by the whole — and other commitments made by each and all of the people. Individuals and their commitments speak for themselves. As to organizations and collections of people, there are two kinds, the social ones, or communities (Gemeinschaft) and the purposive ones with special interests (Gesellschaft). These may involve something that you like or don’t like or something you are committed to know about or experience. These are typically called social networks.
Both are important. Communities help us to know how to act — some of them even enforce this in some way as a part of membership; the other groups are good at coming up with facts. Along with skills, interests, and possibly enjoyments, arriving at facts may well be the very purpose for the association. If there is a political aspect to the program, it involves the question of how best to arrive at governance based on the best of the two worlds — facts from knowledge networks and acts from communities.
It is easier to be a member of more than one social network than it is to participate in more than one community. A community has much to do with how you live, with lifetime and lifestyle commitments that may involve fixed or predictable behavior patterns, that involve belonging and mutually-exclusive decisions. These may also include deeply-felt beliefs and means of self-identity. As to social networks, they may involve professional or leisure considerations or activities that don’t have anything to do with anything else.
This comes down to the fabric of society, how it can be understood and maintained. An example of this can be seen below.
There is structure to this in all woven fabrics. Directional strands give the fabric style, shape, and strength via warp strands up and down and weft strands side-to-side. These are an intrinsic nature of the looms and other equipment used to create the fabric. The intertwining of these and the different forces at play based on their structure and position bring strength and resilience to the whole. The nature of warp and weft can be seen below:
A civil civilization can make use of this concept to bring authority and knowledge together, to assure a balance between the two. The same principles are at play as exist with cloth. Differences and distinct positioning bring reliable results and invest stability into the whole. Such comparisons of warp and weft with authoritative and knowledge-based phenomena within society are seen below:
Maintaining these is a never-ending challenge. People in positions of power can tend to manipulate the system, to both ‘kick at their traces’ to expand their power and to play with election or selection processes to lengthen their tenure. This where elements of a “Big Zipper” begin to enter in. Various checks and balances are included in political and governance systems to keep authority from overwhelming knowledge and social responsibility. Nonetheless, vigilance must be in order to minimize the impact of such efforts.
This move to make use of a ‘zipper’ to rend strands within the fabric of society could be called rending the veil. This is a concept with torrid implications — very Biblical. It should be considered in such a light, as it is a most uncivilized and inhumane act. As below, we can see such an action in the extreme. As we described earlier, this connotes a ‘black hole’ of authoritative prerogative. How is society to recover from the full weight of this? Under such conditions, the well-being of the people is at risk from both natural and social causes. Natural relationships among parties and effects, the warp and the weft collapse, with negative consequences.
Understanding such factors can seem simpler than it is. There are many signs of such a breakdown and many implications. Below we can see a word cloud from the book outlining many of these conditions. These are the kinds of conditions that people would want, representing sanity and well-being and prosperity.
Following are the kinds of conditions that typically can be found where authority overshadows all else. These are typically less desirable to people as a whole. Their existence may connote that a ‘zipper’ is in the works. Heaven forbid that such a project should take hold to the extent that it can be used.
Once again, the point to be made here isn’t about the structure of power, nor is it about how power is gained. This is about the use of power. Of course, if power is gained by means of untoward and cruel violence, it may be difficult to achieve the kind of multipolar world needed to balance knowledge of nature and society, and authority.