GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Anna Wierzbicka sees her discovery of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage containing all the words found in all languages to be a continuation of Gottfried Leibnez’s project to develop an alphabet of human thought, a universal system of symbols. I’d like to suggest a way of approaching this project, processing it, of course, through Eric Gans’s originary hypothesis and the originary grammar I have derived from it. I’m going to begin by reviewing and following up on some work I’ve done in recent posts on the verbs in the NSM. What originary grammar does to help us articulate rather than simply list the verbs in the metalanguage is ground verbs in the imperative world. Verbs have their origin in what we could call the “evasive object,” the object (or act) the demand or command for which is rejected in the proto-declarative sentence combining the “operator of negation” and the “negative ostensive,” with the demand rejected (and we could even say proscribed) on grounds of the object’s unavailability. Indicating that unavailability is the first, or proto-predicate. Now, an object can be unavailable because of some quality or condition of the object (e.g., the person whose presence is demanded can’t come because he is dead, the tool is broken, the stone is heavy), or because the object is engaged in some other activity. To be engaged in another activity is to be doing something which might be done pursuant to an imperative (ultimately, even conditions and qualities can be viewed as determined by imperatives). I should mention the pertinent philosophical point here: all the questions of “will” and “free will” generated by the alignment of a verb with a subject (he ran, she threw the ball, they danced, we refused to participate, etc.) can be approached in a completely different way by simply positing an imperative initiating these actions. Instead of struggling to figure out what comes between the “he” and the “running” (his will to run!) we can just say he was ordered to run. By whom? Well, that depends—maybe by his coach, but maybe by the institutional order (it was a competitive race), maybe by an oath he took months ago to run every day, maybe by his deceased father who wanted him to fulfill his own ambition of becoming a champion, maybe by his own observation that someone is chasing him. This provides us with an avenue of inquiry far preferable to trying to discover and define the attribute that enabled the choice to run, to throw, to dance, etc. Taking that latter route, one day we’ll end up back with Descartes’s pineal gland.

Here are the verbs among the semantic primes, according to the categories Wierzbicka has grouped them in:

Mental/Experiential Predicates: think, know, want, feel, see, hear

Speech: say

Actions and Events: do, move, happen

Existence and Possession: exist, have

Life and Death: live, die

The best way to organize what is so far just a list is to note the obvious relations between them (of course, there are lots of non-obvious ones as well that will be the subject of further inquiries): we think and know things in order to say them, we say things in order to do them, we think about what we have said and done, etc. My approach is to analyze these words in terms of their possible uses as imperatives, and in that way develop a vocabulary for discussing the relation between imperative and declarative orders. So, “think” works perfectly well as an imperative—you can tell someone to think in perfectly natural speech situations (think about something, think something through, think before you act…). “Know” is a bit trickier: it’s hard to imagine natural situations in which you would order someone to “know” something. We have the idiom, in contemporary English, “know this,” but what usually follows is some kind of oath or promise. “Knowing” doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing, unlike, say, “learning,” that can be commanded. Knowing exists only in the declarative order, then, and it is assumed that one has thought, heard or seen in order to know—so, knowing is the result of faithfully obeying those other imperatives. It also follows that a challenge to someone’s claim to know would take the form of a demand that he think, hear, feel or see. “Know” belongs more in questions and answers: questions, in our grammatical schema, are modified imperatives, imperatives of the form “tell me…,” requests for information rather than commands to act. Asking whether the other knows, then, is a prelude to demanding that one do or move. Knowing is declarative, and takes us from mental imperatives to practical ones.

“Want” is also very difficult to think of in terms of imperatives: how could you order someone to want something? Wanting seems even asocial, prehuman—after all, animals want things too. But we can situate wanting in a couple of ways here: first, as marking resistance to some imperative (I don’t want to; instead, I want…), as a declaration that one is following another imperative; second, and closely related, in an interrogative negotiation over fulfilling the imperative (well, then, what do you want?). This latter use would include situations where items are being distributed (which do you want? How many do you want? I want that one). The implication here is that the “will” is less a “faculty” than a kind of friction point between imperatives. Meanwhile, one can certainly be ordered to “feel,” either something in particular or a particular way—bad or good, for starters (be happy! The Bible has no problem commanding us to love God and our neighbor). “See” and “hear,” meanwhile, go perfectly well with imperatives. As for “say,” one can readily be commanded to say something that has already been said (e.g., a messenger or orator), but more primarily what one thinks, what one has seen or heard, what one feels, but most of all, or as the purpose of all that, what one knows.

So, in an interesting confirmation of Aristotle, “know” seems to be the apex mental verb: seeing, hearing and feeling are transformed by thinking into knowing, while saying serves the purpose of turning what one knows into grounds for doing. We can now move on to action. Here, we have previously noted a continuum from “do” to “move” to “happen”: “do” is as imperative friendly as possible, as being told to “do it” assumes one is in a highly imperative situation in which you already know what needs to be done; meanwhile, it’s almost impossible to imagine commanding someone or something to “happen.” “Happen” seems to refer to the outermost edges of the imperative world—it refers to the results of imperatives so distant or obscured that we can’t perceive them. “Move” is an act that can easily be commanded, and is therefore close to “do”; but “moving” is in the middle of some process, and is therefore encompassed by doing (you move something to get something done)—while also sliding toward the “happen” side of the scale, the more the moving gets detached from the doing (if you push a rock down a hill, by the time it reaches the bottom, it is something that happens). I have suggested that knowing could be said to involve seeing the doing behind the happening, and the happening behind the doing: someone or some power or force is ultimately doing the things that merely appear to happen, while even the closest adherence to the imperative we have been given sets us adrift amongst counter and intersecting imperatives that may deflect us—to that extent, what we do also happens. That continuum do-move-happen, then, is what we do most of our thinking about, and therefore what we discipline ourselves to feel, see and hear signs of.

The existence/possession and life/death verbs, meanwhile, are subject to higher imperatives: only a god can order someone to exist, to live or to die (your enemy can order you to die, at least in a James Bond or superhero movie, but that’s just a hammy way of telling you he’s going to kill you). Ordering someone to “have” something, meanwhile, can be an ordinary part of a gift exchange, but “have” is also central to all kinds of cooperative activities in which one would ask another whether he “has” something needed. These verbs, these higher imperatives (to order someone to accept a gift is in a sense “higher,” insofar as you refrain from supervising their use) might very well provide the frame within which all the doing and knowing are set. Are we fulfilling the other imperatives in such a way as to fulfill the imperatives to live, to exist, to have (accept, possess) and, perhaps, to die well?

Once we have this model of the relations between the “primal” verbs, we can use it to analyze all the other, more complex verbs: where are “play” and “work,” for example, on the do-move-happen continuum; how do they channel the processing of seeing, hearing and feeling through thinking to knowing; how is wanting provoked and integrated, and what do these activities have us say? What about “remember”? I would say that this kind of thinking, knowing and saying would transcend traditional philosophy and replace it with an originary thinking interested in revealing the center. Wierzbicka’s books are filled with analyses that provide us with a great deal of material. Such an inquiry would simultaneously be a historical and political one. David Olson, in his study of the effects of literacy on cognition, The Mind on Paper, provides a list of Old English mental and speech act verbs (which is to say, for the most part prior to the introduction of literacy) and Latinate words (following that introduction). The pre-literate verbs line up fairly well with Wierzbicka’s primes:  believe, know, mean, say, tell, think (“understand” comes in with Middle English)—Wierzbicka doesn’t tell us which are to be found in, say, 95% of languages, but I would think that “believe,” “mean” and “tell” come pretty close. Meanwhile, what characterizes the post-literate verbs (assert, assume, claim, concede, contradict, declare, doubt, explain, infer, predict, suggest, etc.) involve telling us something about the situation, goals, credibility, perspective, and so on of the thinker or speaker—that is, they are inquiries into the speech situation because writing has to find ways to supplement everything that is lost in the speech situation when discourse is transferred to paper (tone of voice, posture, the relation between interlocutors, a particular setting and context, the social relation between interlocutors, etc.). So, saying “he contended” rather than “he said” tells us that the saying was part of an argument, and other did or might contend otherwise—all things you would know if you were witness to an actual discussion or if the person orally reporting the discussion acted out the dialogue he reported (repeated in an angry voice something originally said in an angry voice, etc.). With verbs representing a speaker within a situation, the imperatives derive from a space of writing, which is also to say a disciplinary space, one in which not only what is said, thought or known is at issue but the status, within that space, of what has been said, thought or known. It’s a difference between ensuring (demanding) that everyone is paying attention to the same thing, on the one hand, and enabling (demanding) everyone to have their attention oscillate back and forth between what we are paying attention to and the means by which we direct that attention.

Olson broadens the inquiry (especially in his recent The Mind on Paper) by defining writing itself as an inquiry into language: all the features of language we are aware of, and that become the topics of linguistics, are results of the need to figure out how to use marks on paper to represent speech. In the process such phenomena as “syllables,” “phonemes,” “sentences” (along with all the attendant grammatical categories) and even “words” were discovered. (Here, I’ll note a disagreement between the two formidable scholars I am working with here: Wierzbicka claims “word” among the primes, while Olson contends it is a post-literate word/concept.) Having what neither Olson nor Wierzbicka does, an originary hypothesis regarding the origin (and subsequent evolution) of language, I can take Olson’s insight further: the declarative sentence is an inquiry into imperative and the ostensive, the imperative is an inquiry into the ostensive, and the ostensive is an inquiry into the center. An inquiry into the center, moreover, is also an inquiry into the relations between all who are constituted by that center and the center itself. Language is inquiry all the way down, and, as I have argued previously, verbs chart the movements, real and metaphorical, of human (and other) “satellites” around the sacred and various attentional centers. And we conduct such inquiries in the presence of such a center, a linguistic presence that represents a real present (that may, of course, have been present 100,000 years ago while being made present to those of us on the scene of inquiry now): a real present stripped and framed according to the question posed on the scene of inquiry.

There is, then a telos to human activity and human life: inquiry into the center. This inquiry into the center situates us within some tradition, that ultimately continues from the origin and preserves and extends the means and modes of inquiry created until now. There is a dialectic to human history: we repeat existing forms, sometimes mistakenly or inappropriately, and those anomalous uses are themselves repeated and become new forms when they provide a way of deferring some novel threat of violence. The new forms prompt further inquiries into the center, and the social order comes to be split between those extracting fresh forms of ancient imperatives and those distracting from such inquiries (“sinners,” who want to weaken some command coming from the center so that more peripheral commands can be obyed). The outcome is unknown, but it will always be possible to retrieve the memory of the originary center and create centers devoted to renewing the inquiry initiated there. And all this can now be done by inquiry through language and inquiry into language. You could always start with the latest thing you heard someone say.

Here’s why I talk so much, and so abstractly, about language: my goal is to develop a way of thinking that would really be a way of speaking and writing that would dismantle and reassemble the utterances in which it participates and would do so in the process of participating; while at the same time just talking. This implies the possibility of people who would want to train themselves and each other in this manner of discourse. Why? Because it would make it possible to apply more focused and concentrated force upon all the weak points of the reigning ontology and construct a solid one out of its ruins. Central to this project is an account of technology, and ultimately contemporary technology, in terms of originary grammar. I touched a bit on this in a recent post (Technology and Magic, Doings and Happenings), but that is still preliminary. Ultimately, we need a way of creating an absolutist ontology out of the ways people already speak about communications and information technology. I’ll take another run at it here.

I must first review the concept of “imperative exchange,” which I have made much use of and still see much promise in. I should emphasize that this is not a concept of Gans’s, but one I have developed through a reading of some of the early chapters of Gans’s The End of Culture. An ostensive culture is one that takes for granted the presence of the object, so only gestures are necessary—the most basic elements of ostensive culture are warnings which can be assumed to be immediately intelligible, like “look out!” These kinds of utterances can sound a lot like imperatives, and can even be imperatives, grammatically speaking, but if I tell you to “look out!” because there’s a bee flying around your ahead I’m not telling you what to do; it may not even clear what you should do, other than be aware. Human culture was originally ostensive, but it’s clear that it still contains a thick ostensive layer, and always must—the fact that we still have names testifies to that.

The imperative emerges (is discovered/invented) when the ostensive fails, or is issued “inappropriately.” One person names or refers to an object assumed to be present—the situation here must be less immediately urgent than “look out!,” perhaps involving some kind of cooperation—when the object is in fact absent, leading the other person, who wants to maintain linguistic presence, to retrieve it. Now we have an imperative. There is a lot involved here—to see how much procure the forthcoming re-issue, in streamlined form, of Gans’s seminal The Origin of Language—the beginnings of social hierarchy, but also a kind of intellectual hierarchy insofar as the person receiving the order understands the desire of the other better than the one giving orders does; we also have the beginning of a specifically human temporality, because, unlike the immediacy of the ostensive, here there is at least some lapse between the sign and its “completion.”

On the originary scene the center doesn’t “speak,” but for the members of the group the center is repelling their desire—that is, a kind of intentionality is attributed to the center, and registered in the sign, but this intentionality cannot be given “voice.” This becomes possible with the imperative. It becomes possible to make requests of the center, and to construct commands coming from the center. It’s impossible to imagine the members of the group making requests without framing that request in terms of their response to a command, since doing so would be tantamount to placing themselves outside of the sign and community. By the same token, compliance with any command from the center must be considered as looking toward an ultimate reward—first, it was the consumption of the central object itself, but as new imperatives are developed, the rewards to be expected from obedience will become more varied. Hence my claim that all interactions with the center take the form of an imperative exchange.

The next step is to posit that imperative exchange constitutes all of our relations with objects. If I work with a hammer, I am commanding the hammer to drive in the nail, while the hammer is constructed in such a way as to command me to hold it and swing it in just such a way. We see this most clearly when we make a mistake, or misuse a tool, and are forced (commanded) to ask, in essence, what does this thing want me to do with it? If we fix, refine, or improve our things, we are stepping back and giving them second order imperatives: we are telling them to work a certain way so as to tell us to work a certain way. With the development of technology, “we” (this “we” becomes increasingly problematic) create an imperative order, in which we command things to command other things to command yet other things… until, finally, the command makes its way to the end users. The end users then engage in imperative exchange with the technological object as it presents itself to them, which of course occludes the entire technological or imperative order that brought it to them. Facebook or Twitter users could, of course, propose changing some elements of the social media they use, but only a very few could ever do so with the entire medium, and all the decisions made along the way, present in their thinking—and even if they are aware of it, there’s nothing they can do regarding the longer decision chain, and will ultimately end up busying themselves with the available options.

Along the way, of course, the development of the declarative proceeds parallel to imperative culture. To recapitulate briefly several earlier discussions, the declarative identifies something that prevents the completion of the imperative exchange. The earliest discourse was myth, which involved narratives of the central figure—usually some animal. The animal-ancestor created the group, supplies the group with its necessities, punishes the group, fights against the groups enemies, offers words of wisdom, etc. If the people were saved, it was because they needed saving, and if they needed saving it was because they failed to uphold their end of an imperative exchange, or perhaps the central figure didn’t hold up its end (it must have its reasons), and the narrative comes along to demonstrate what needs to be done to bring the system of exchange back into accord. It eventually becomes possible to tell stories of members on the group, modeled on the stories of the central figure—what I have been calling “anthropomorphization.” Within the mythical and magical system, the distance between creators and end users remains very small—one could say it hardly exists at all. When we are nostalgic for “unalienated” conditions, in which all members of the community were in sync with each other and therefore with themselves, that is what we are yearning for.

And it is, of course, what we can’t have. “Alienation” begins with the usurpation of the center by a member of the group, the Big Man. All imperative exchanges henceforth go through the Big Man. The Big Man himself emerges out of the process of imperative exchange: in the gift competition, whereby various tribal chiefs try to best each other in showing their ability to provide for the community, the Big Man is the one who so out-gifts the others that the competition is rendered moot. The Big Man is first of all the center of distribution: gifts come to him and he recycles them back out to the community. This in itself won’t change the system of production, but once the Big Man must mobilize the community in battle against other communities, led by other Big Men, and once the victorious Big Man dislocates the “subjects” of his enemies and must find some use for them himself, new modes of production are initiated, first of all based on slavery and war. The new modes of production require at least some degree of abstraction, as the sovereign now acts directly upon subjects outside of their established social settings and traditional modes of life.

The imperative, as I suggested above, contains a double asymmetry: on one side, it is a command, in which one person obeys another; on the other side, what is for the imperator or commander already done (the imperative for the one issuing it is really just a time-delayed ostensive) is for the recipient of the imperative a mere possibility. The one who will compose a declarative exploring the conditions of fulfilling the imperative will be he who has to carry it out. This is essentially the relation between the king and the priests: the priests need to construct a reality that enables the king’s command. This was the function of astrology, the foremost “science,” physical and political, in the ancient kingdoms. The heavens represented a hierarchical, orderly world, just like the one on earth, and the high degree of predictability studies of the movements of the stars provided implied that such control was also possible on earth. The technological accomplishments of antiquity, their imperative order of things, comprised mostly extending the power and celebrating the glory of the God Emperor.

The axial acquisitions involved making the originary scene, rather than duplications of the worldly hierarchy, the model for both “priests” and “merchants.” The ruler must do justice and must give back to his people. The imperative order of things is gradually extended from massive hydraulic projects and war to industry. The model stays the same: the new proletariat is driven off their ancestral lands and atomized in cities, just like the slave hordes were once ripped from their now-destroyed communities. The industrialists are essentially generals. The command chain, leading from those who initiate the imperative order of things, and going through all those who extend the chain and standardize the “links,” until the end users, keeps getting longer. The end users are now located somewhere in the production chain as well, but the most constrained end users are also those most distant from the origins of the production chain. The chain becomes more communicative, as innovations at one end transform the possibilities for those at the other end more rapidly. A technological system, like a discipline, is self-referential: everything signifies insofar as it directs us from one element of the system to another. Unlike the discipline, which the absolute imperative retrieved in the axial age commands us to form, the origin of the technological system is obscured by the system itself.

This really is the fundamental problem of modernity, the one chewed over endlessly by Marxists and traditionalists alike: how to address the incommensurability between the constantly transformed and extended imperative order of things and those who occupy only one link on the chain? This really means everyone, even if the alienation is most evident with those who overwhelming receive, and rarely issue, commands. But one more thing: the development of post-axial imperative orders of things coincided with the post-axial deconstruction of the imperative order of people—industrial and post-industrial armies and reserve armies have also been pawns and proxies in the power struggles of the elites; and, just as important, the imperative order of things has never been made to conform to the imperative order of people. The state, in its process of centralization (creating an iron chain of command that somehow keeps producing broken links) has made itself a vehicle of masters of the imperative orders of things who want political order to be modeled on their own self-representation to the end users. The end users are locked into the liberal ratchet while the imperative order of things verticalizes and the imperative order of sovereignty sprawls (which sprawling in turn provides the model for orders to the end users). “Alienation” doesn’t quite cover it.

The path to order is to seek out a straight line of imperatives, as far back as you can go, and start obeying them. Let your declaratives expose the reciprocity that line of imperatives demands of you, and point out where those imperative exchanges have failed. At least some of those failed imperative exchanges can be reconstructed, and you can treat some power center as if it is more explicit about its place in the imperative order than it appears to be. That makes you a producer in the sovereign order, with some relation, however distant, to a possible end user. Producers attract other producers. Most of us will remain end users in the imperative order of things. Still, anyone can get to work on exposing the imperatives bearing down on the end user. Perhaps the most prominent one right now is to present yourself as data to be looted. But what could be more social than the data that regularly peels off of us? Our resistance to our conversion into data might simply the humiliation of having our final liberal illusions shredded. Data is itself converted back into the command to adhere to the norm, to contribute to the averaging out. Each such command can be placed on the boundary between absolutist and liberal ontologies: “they” want your data to sell you things, to sell you yourself as someone who transcends the data; but data unrolls difference after difference that the liberal order wants veiled but which can be so easily exposed with just a little nudge, a marginal inappropriateness in your obedience to some command. The averaging out has more than a hint of mob rule, in which the imperative follows directly upon the ostensive; that’s a time to hearken back to an imperative that has been raised above the ostensive and provides a little model of secure rule: a model, a norm, rather than an average.

How to replace a liberal democratic regime with an absolutist one? We’re clearly not thinking in terms of a revolution, which would replace the liberal democratic regime with an even more radically democratic one. There might be elements of regime change similar to military coups, but military regimes don’t really change anything—they’re just placeholders until the powerful and propertied can get their act together and re-establish some mixed authoritarian/liberal regime. Some portion of the “high” (the corporate elite, the top military brass, perhaps presidents of universities and heads of other institutions) would have to break from the high-low vs. the middle action and work on preserving the middle against the high-low coalition. Today’s populism, which is primarily interested in order, stability and normalcy, and directs its resentments towards those who undermine all three, is a kind of faint image of what that might look like. Presumably, we have to imagine some deep crisis, with liberalism confronting problems it has no solution to and, perhaps, rivals it can no longer contend with—“we” are then prepared to be prepared to be the ones with solutions, the ones who can contend. A lot of people, at different levels of the social order, would have to have their minds very clear. And that’s really all we can do now—keep clarifying out minds.

In my previous post I argued that the marginal security force is a kind of fulcrum and measuring rod upon which to focus energies: when the security forces start obeying the people they would have been arresting a short time ago, things have demonstrably changed. I’ll suggest another, more political, focus, here. Consider the question, why anyone is obliged to pay attention to the ravings of Black Lives Matter, Pussyhat feminists, LGBT, antifa, immigration activists, and all the rest. Reactionary Future made a very good point a while back (it certainly wasn’t the first time he said something along these lines), asking, why pay attention to what these lunatics say, when we can just go right to the top and see who supports, funds and promotes them? The only reason to worry about being called a racist is because you can lose your job, get kicked off social media, be targeted by on and off-line mobs, and be permanently ostracized. And obviously the BLM people themselves have no means to do all that; the Left as a whole has not the means to do all that. Only corporations, foundations and other institutions (universities, media companies) have the power. So, the real question is, why does a corporation like Kellogg’s fund an organization like Black Lives Matter? And the answer is simple: anti-discrimination law.

I’ve pointed out before that words like “sexism,” “racism” and “homophobia” don’t really mean anything—no one could give you a clear definition of any of them; indeed, they’re not meant to be defined, they are “always already” weaponized. The meaning of “racism” is that you use the term to identify “racists.” But this is because “racism” is the ideological expression of anti-discrimination law. Once you have laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of race, you need a concept like “racism” so that you know who to punish for breaking the law. Paradoxes abound here. Once “discrimination” is against the law, no one will ever admit they are discriminating—so, if we have some employer who doesn’t want to hire blacks, he’ll just tell prospective black employees that they’re not qualified enough, or they don’t fit into the company’s culture; or he’ll fire them quickly for being lazy or insubordinate. But, of course, that means that all those criteria—qualifications, competence, industriousness, loyalty, obedience, etc., all become proxies for “racism,” and will eventually be seen to be coded “white.” Also, while anti-discrimination laws are originally formulated in impeccable liberal, individualist terms, forbidding discrimination against whites as well as black, it’s perfectly obvious that no one would ever consider such laws if racial discrimination was seen a randomly distributed occurrence, with blacks discriminating against Mexicans here, Jews discriminating against Chinese there, blacks discriminating against Pacific Islanders somewhere else, etc. No, the laws are implicitly (at least) collectivist and reparationist from the start, impugning the majority as “discriminators,” making them inherently suspect. The notion that America is a racist or “white supremacist” culture is simply a necessary ideological “superstructure” upon the anti-discrimination “base.” There’s no other way to use these laws other than to make such assumptions. Ironically, it is here that “profiling” is actually built into the enforcement of the law.

Now, it is because of anti-discrimination laws that Kellogg’s funds BLM. Corporations can be sued for discrimination, and the lawsuits can be very damaging in monetary terms and also in terms of reputation. There is no real defense against them, and the inevitable extension of anti-discrimination laws to cover women, gays, etc. renders institutions even more defenseless. How do you prove you haven’t created a “hostile workplace”? Well, the courts will tell you what to do, which means the attorneys for the “victims” will tell you, and what they will tell is, first of all, give us and the institutions sponsoring us lots of money. But they will also tell you to restructure your internal corporate relations in such a way as to provide yourself with a prophylaxis against further lawsuits: quotas, beefed-up human relations, diversity officers, employee workshops, community outreach, the works. In short, the entire victimary movement comes down to the government as a shakedown racket. (The Obama Administration cut out some middle men and perfected it as an art form, but there’s really no other way anti-discrimination law can work.) In the end, the people who really believe in this stuff and will implement it enthusiastically take over the positions of power—after all, they’ll be better at it than anyone else. Meanwhile, the institutions that replenish the ranks of the elites and essentials make sure to train people so as to take up those positions. I apologize for taking so much time to state the obvious—we all know this, right? I have to state a little more of the obvious: the reason for anti-discrimination law is because such law is pretty much the Platonic form of the high-low vs. the middle strategy used by Power, in this case the State, to centralize power. “Discrimination” is precisely what makes the “middle” the middle: standards, gradations, deferences, differential loyalties, etc. Attacking discrimination in the broadest sense is the most effective means imaginable of demolishing all social constructs that can’t be reduced to the relation between the individual and the state. The very commandeering of the word “discrimination” for the purpose has proved prophetic, as it has become sometimes illegal, but always immoral, to discriminate in favor of intelligence against stupidity, good against bad, beautiful against ugly, competent against incompetent, and so on.

So, anti-discrimination law delenda est. Nothing much new there, and if anyone who wanted to had the power to do something about it, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. The only thing to do is to “become worthy,” and the way to do that is by scouring our minds clean of any remaining anti-discrimination debris and learning how to be unresponsive in the right ways when others wish to echolocate in their social environment by pinging their virtue squeaks off of us. It makes a difference, how much it’s impossible to tell, to have individuals in institutions who are recognizably human in all ways to the SJWs but refuse to provide even the slightest indication of being on board. No “sure I believe in civil rights but sometimes it seems things have gone too far…”; no “whatever happened to Dr. King’s dream that we would be judged by the content of our character…”; no “of course we need strong sexual harassment laws to provide a safe work environment for women but there must be safeguards for the accused…”; etc. Maybe there’s nothing new here either—we have to be completely uncucked, which has been obvious for a while. The racket has been rigged from the start—no nostalgia.

You want to be the one they want to get, but can’t. They can tell there’s something not right about you—you’re silent when you’re supposed to contribute the obligatory cliché, you seem amused rather than appalled in hearing about the latest Trumpocity, you redirect virtue-signaling sessions back to overlooked points of fact and law, you bring conversations about fairness and equity back to the primary function of the institution, you come across as a little bit more naïve than possible when asking them what, exactly, is wrong with making some forbidden statement (why is that racist?). But they can’t quite pin anything on you. You even seem like a kind of nice guy, and maybe good at your job, and it doesn’t compute. Those who want to know will see that you’re a discriminating man, though, and they will sense, tentatively, at first, that they can talk with you. As more companies and institutions go crazy, like Google, and become subject to anti-anti-discrimination lawsuits or just mere scandal, and the release of documents and testimony from the inside becomes more common and feared, everyone will wonder whether you just might be the guy to do something like that. All conversations, work-related and otherwise, in your presence will come to have a certain “pre-leaked” character to it. You represent the possibility of a kind of counter-surveillance and exposure, which they will model in their imagination precisely on what they would like to do to you. And how many of you are there? They’ve noticed you (and even there they’re not quite sure) but who haven’t they noticed?

I contend that this is a kind of power. Just as no regime can do without competent, loyal security forces who will nevertheless not allow themselves to be wantonly attacked even by friends of the regime, no institution can completely do without those who fit the profile of the discriminating guy. Some people have to be doing real work, and many others have to at least gesture toward it. The elites who realize that things have gone too far and are in a position to do something about it will be aware of the discriminating guy—they will be heartened by his presence and know how to use him. (And he will know how to be used.) The discriminating guys will have acquired intimate knowledge of the enemy, and will be relieved to be able to deal with them ruthlessly. Entering the new regime, ensuring its transplantation with minimal disruption and immediately evident positive effects, will just be a continuation of what all these guys have been doing all along. They will be at the point where not only does talk of “non-discrimination” fill them with disgust, but where the stupidity of mass culture, mass propaganda, electoral politics, and elections themselves are becoming pretty clear. (The greatest service the left is providing us now—it’s really beyond estimation—is a demystification of liberal freedoms—speech, assembly, vote—far more powerful than anything we could have disseminated. No one could say, “but here at least you’re free to say what you like” in any Western country with a straight face anymore.) Just like I just want to get my job done here, it will be easy to understand how the new national leadership just wants to get its job done as well—endless “debate” catering to the lowest common denominator, majority rule, a scandal-mongering media wouldn’t help me become a better engineer, doctor, teacher, manager, business owner, so why should it help him be a better sovereign? The only question I have is, how many discriminating guys and marginal security forces need to read analyses like this in order to be prepared to do what they must?

The fulcrum of any regime is the security force that maintains public order. The sign of regime change is that the security force is replaced or, far more common, stops obeying one master and starts obeying another. The purpose of public protest is to test the security forces, which must repress, contain or protect the protesters—or some combination of all three. The point might be to demonstrate that the security forces will protect you against enemies (counter-protesters), confirming that you are an integral part of the regime. Or, it might be to test the security force’s loyalty to the regime—if you provide the security forces grounds for arresting or physically attacking you (by attacking them, or violating the rules they establish for you), or if you know that the regime is hostile to your protests and has or may have ordered the security forces to suppress them, then you confront those forces with a choice: either attack the protesters in the name of the regime or signal disaffection with your superiors by refraining. If your aim is to change the regime, then your entire analysis and strategy can be reduced to this fulcrum: what could you do that would increase the chance of security force defection? We could refine the question further: what could you do to increase the chance that a sample of the security forces will defect, and to in turn confront their own brethren with the choice of loyalty or defection. And not just any sample, but a sample that might serve as a “tipping point.”

It’s easy to minimize the role of such mass protests in revolutionary change and to point to the “real” shift in power going on behind the scenes. And, no doubt, powers antagonistic to the sovereign, indigenous and/or foreign, must be supporting the protesters for them to have gotten to this point. But those antagonistic forces are no more in complete control of the outcome than the sovereign—they lay their bets, put their fingers on the scale and see what happens. And what happens does depend on that confrontation on the front lines. The proxies do have to fight it out. So, if your politics are focused on regime change, you want to be able to game out the possibilities of such confrontations. And all serious politics regards regime change, either advancing it or preventing it—if you’re the sovereign, you want to ensure that the security forces make the right choice in that encounter. So, we can reduce all the things we talk about in politics, all the policy issues, all the outrages, all the big ideas, to that single question of the marginal security force: what will tilt the balance one way or the other when the regime hangs in the balance. The competent sovereign who wants to ensure that things never get anywhere near that point nevertheless will do so by reasoning backward from that point, and taking measures to ensure that each rogue move by some power center that might push us slightly closer to crisis is never taken. At the same time, keeping that fulcrum in mind helps us understand the forces of disorder better: with greater or lesser awareness, all the efforts of the left are aimed maximizing the likelihood that when push comes to shove, the security forces will take orders from them, or those favorable to them. Even the formation of paramilitary extra-governmental forces aims at the existing security forces—no one could ever expect to come anywhere completely replacing the existing forces with one’s own.

So, in a roundabout way, even discussions about, say, tax policy, are ultimately aimed the marginal security force. That marginal security force is more likely to obey the guy you like because the security force considers, however distantly, that change in taxes to make the system as a whole more worth defending; or, perhaps, it will make the guys on your side richer, and the security force will consider it a better bet to obey the wealthier side. Needless to say, the other side tries to give your policy proposal a completely different implication, trying to convince the marginal security force that it would make the order embodied by your side less worth defending. And that’s really what it comes down to: what’s worth defending, with the gun in your hand right now, in solidarity with your comrades, rather than more abstract considerations of “legitimacy.” This seems to me a very good way to focus our attention on political issues: we have in our mind whom, what type of figure, we’d like the marginal security force to obey in a crunch, and whatever we support or oppose should be with an eye toward making that force likelier to do so. You could say that it’s very hard to predict what the marginal security force might find worth defending some balmy May day in 2028, but that just means we should always be singling out what is most worth defending here and now, and then tomorrow, and next year, because this doesn’t change radically continuously, and it will change less the more it is emphasized and inculcated.

One very good consequence of this approach is that it is a way of constantly baiting the left to support exactly those things that are least likely to lead the security forces to support them. What the marginal security force must find worthiest to defend are competent hierarchies, professionalism, loyalty, and courage. These are precisely the institutional structures and virtues the left has the greatest contempt for, because all of them presuppose a social and moral core that sets the tone for the rest of the social order. To put it in today’s parlance, all these forms are “white.” The left cannot attack them as such, but since rigorous adherence to them will inevitably “privilege” the majority and best prepared culture, the left will have to attack them as exclusionary. The precise formulations will change, but we can say, for now, that our goal should be for the marginal security force to not care when he is told his competent, loyalty and courage implicate him in white supremacy and patriarchy. He should be prepared to immediately identify these charges as indicating low status and uncontained resentment on the part of those making them—the charges themselves should lead to the conclusion that we are dealing with people to whom no mercy can be shown. Bringing up “whiteness” in any discussion must be made to seem the most incendiary thing there is, veritable fighting words.

I’m suggesting that the high-low vs. the middle scenarios available to the elites now have their limits. Let’s say that the major corporations and foundations keep funneling money into BLM, Antifa, various pussyhat movements, the next iteration of Occupy Wall Street, violent environmentalists, etc. They have to do this because simply giving money to media outlets and politicians to try and get people to vote for more power for the left is insufficient—if it’s just a question of getting the middle to passively support the low with its votes, why should they bother, regardless of how much you harangue them? You need an army, however rag-tag, to engage in actual confrontations that will extract concessions—i.e., you need blackmail leverage. So, these groups must enter into continual confrontation with security forces, local, state and national. We already have sense of all the different ways this can go. The local politicians can tell the police to stand down and allow the leftist rioters to wreak havoc. For that matter, politicians can, as they are now doing in Europe, have the police ignore rape and spend their time arresting people who post Islamophobically on Facebook. I wonder whether this is sustainable, though. If leftist progromists know that the police will stand down, it can’t be long before they start attacking the police—passive, neutered security forces that nevertheless provide a fat target for attacking “fascism,” or ‘white supremacy,” will be too tempting to ignore. Can the security forces be ordered to allow themselves to be injured and killed? It seems to me at a certain point they will start to choose other careers, and you will have greatly weakened and ineffective security forces. But the state needs security forces, and to keep them they will have to let them do their job at least to some extent. And if they let them do their job to some extent, we are back where we started, with the security forces pondering whether it would be better for them to obey this or another source of power.

I now want to suggest that the question of the marginal security force converges with what can seem like the opposite end of the social spectrum: education. We can see education most simply as the recruitment and replenishing of what Imperial Energy calls “elites” and “essentials”—those who actually participate in rule, and those who provide the forms of knowledge and management the rulers require. (The “expendables” are also educated, but that would happen as a result of the aforementioned recruitment, simply because in order to continue replenishing the elites and essentials you’d need to cast a wide net, providing access to knowledge and skills for many who will never use them past a certain point.) The focus on the marginal security force provides us with a way of organizing education as well. A good education system will ensure that joining the security force is seen as “essential,” which is to say honored, and its code will be prioritized within the social order. Every educated individual is to be made to see himself, if not as that potential marginal security force, then as one whose own work contributes to the clarity of the chain of command within which the marginal security force is located. The hypothetical dilemmas that would form the substance of moral and ethical education would focus on obeying commands and responding to the point at which obedience must give way to judgment. You are given a general order to “suppress” a riot, but the means you would ordinarily use to do so might inflame the rioters, perhaps because the guy next to you is the marginal security force at that moment. As a sociologist your main interest might be the dispersion of mobs into small groups that make this dilemma less likely to occur, or easier to resolve if it does. As an architect you think in terms of designs that would mitigate or eliminate such situations; as a doctor or medical researcher you want any confrontations to be less deadly; as a psychologist, you develop scripts for the security forces to rehearse.

A side effect of seeing education explicitly as the process of recruitment to the elites and essentials is making “protest” unthinkable. Protest really serves no purpose other than to draw “your” elites into battle with “their” elites, by forcing them to bid for control or influence over the security forces. The more the marginal security force is made the center of political reasoning, the less sense it would make to enter into confrontation with them. In a well governed order there would be no protest. Still, such a possibility would always be considered as a frame for considering any changes in the form of the rule: would a particular change eventually, indirectly, activate the marginal security force? And by the same token we can see why in a poorly governed, democratic order, protests must be a regular occurrence—it’s the way the “reserve armies” of the various elites keep track of their standing—how expendable are they in relation to other expendables? And it’s also the way the elites keep their networks of power active. By focusing on the marginal security force, we direct our attention right to the middle of the middle, the thing all power forces must ultimately reckon with. The expected effect of any idea, action or policy on the marginal security force can give us a precise measure of its value.