This essay first appeared in Cliterati on February 2nd; I have modified it slightly to fit the format of this blog.
I find it fascinating (albeit in a sad and terrifying sort of way) to see how oblivious modern Westerners are to the fact that our “leaders” are nothing but tribal chieftains who hide their naked barbarism behind fine talk, fancy titles, ersatz philosophy and elaborate rituals. The “rule of law” is absolutely meaningless when society supports a parasitic class whose only function is to make more laws, to interpret them in such a way as to inexorably increase their own power, and to hire thugs in order to inflict violence upon those whom they can (credibly or otherwise) accuse of having violated any of the tens of thousands of arcane, abstruse, vague, overbroad and complex laws to which they add new (and invariably worse) specimens every week. And despite their modern “scientific” or “democratic” veneer, the vast bulk of those laws are based in superstitious concepts which any primitive would recognize:
…that plant matter or technological devices can be intrinsically evil; that certain words or images can be literally harmful to children or even to grown men and women; that the mere action of taking a photograph of a naked person (or in some cases, even a clothed child) is intrinsically inimical; that certain forms of human interaction can mystically harm the participants even if they freely choose to engage in the activity and suffer no physical damage; that magical vestments or talismans can grant power over other people or absolve the wearer of moral culpability for his actions; that official pronouncements from anointed leaders can make things vanish; and even that being given a spell-scroll of one variety can make a “dangerous” action into a beneficial one, while being given a different kind of rune-inscribed parchment can make an innocuous action evil…
The most astonishing part of all this is that Westerners can often recognize these principles for what they are when they are displayed by the “leaders” of a non-Western culture, while remaining willfully blind to the exact same behavior in our own. Take, for example, this recent news item: “A 20-year-old woman has been raped in public by as many as 12 men on the orders of tribal elders in a village in eastern India…as a punishment for an ‘unauthorised’ relationship with a man from another village…” The rest of the article tries to fit this in with other gang rapes in recent years, but that’s nonsense; the latter are the actions of criminals, while this was the action of a group deputized by officially-recognized leaders. The only reason the rapists and the officials were arrested is that a higher level of government disagreed with their actions. But while comfortable middle-class Guardian readers tut-tut about how awful “those people” are, people in the UK, Europe and the US are harassed and punished by our own “village elders” for “unauthorized” relationships all the time. Sex workers and our clients are humiliated in public, confined, assessed fines that are nothing but legalized robbery, and even punished by rape:
A new Justice Department study shows that allegations of sex abuse in [American] prisons and jails are increasing — with correctional officers responsible for half of it — but prosecution is still extremely rare…a growing proportion of the allegations have been dismissed by prison officials as “unfounded” or “unsubstantiated”…even in the rare cases where…[officials admit] sexual abuse occurred…fewer than half were referred for prosecution, and only 1 percent ultimately got convicted…
And as in India, the only time these officially-sanctioned rapists get in trouble is when a higher level of government decides (for whatever reason) to do something about it:
A Justice Department investigation accuses Alabama officials of…fostering an environment of rampant sexual abuse at the state’s Tutwiler Prison, where inmates “universally fear for their safety” and officers allegedly forced women to engage in sex acts just to obtain basic sanitary supplies…male officers openly watched women shower or use the toilet, staff helped organize a “strip show,” prisoners received a constant barrage of sexually offensive language, and prisoners who reported improper conduct were punished…“Officials have been on notice for over eighteen years of the risks to women prisoners and, for over eighteen years, have chosen to ignore them”…
We are all, every last one of us, intellectually indistinguishable from our ancestors who migrated to the far corners of the world over the past 30,000 years; the only thing which makes us different is the body of wisdom and learning we have accumulated over that time. Basically, we don’t act like savages because we are taught from an early age not to. But when society gives certain individuals – our “leaders” – explicit or implicit permission to ignore the constraints it places upon everyone else, we should not be terribly surprised when they take advantage of the offer.
In the 1993 then NSW Minister for Corrective Services, Michael Yabsley, was asked by a journalist what he intended to do about the steep rise in reported prison rapes.
His reply:
“Nothing. Rape in prison is inevitable and provides a useful deterrent factor to those thinking of offending.”
He should have been forced to step down immediately. It is a gross violation of human rights for a judicial system to sentence people to being raped.
There were plenty of calls for his dismissal, believe me, but the Greiner government just toughed it out, with the full support of shock jocks and the Murdoch press, until the hoo-ha died down.
There’s always more votes in demonising and abusing prisoners than in treating them like human beings. Just ask Joe Arpaio.
‘Fascinating’ is a fascinating word. I thought for a time that it derived from fasces, the bundle of sticks or twigs carried by a Roman magistrate as a symbol of office and authority. The symbol is still in use, if you can believe Wikipedia, in various US bodies and authorities such as the White House etc. Fasces is also, unsurprisingly, the origin of fascist.
But no; ‘fascinating’ apparently derives from fascinum, described as a (divine) phallus-shaped amulet worn around the neck of the Romans, with a by-line for witchcraft, or protection there-from. Next time you’re at the races or a posh wedding, look at the girls and their fascinators and try not to snigger.
I used to work in the White House and sometime even gave tours. The “fasces” is definitely in the Oval Office. It is engraved into the wood over every window and door in the Oval Office. I have never looked up the origin of the symbol but a Secret Service friend of mine told me it was symbol of “strong government” – and that’s what I told people when I occasionally took them in there.
By the way the Oval Office is more ceremonial than functional – the Emperor has another office on the 2nd floor residence that he normally uses.
Fasces were the bundle of rods that the red togaed lictors carried with them when they preceded (and theoretically protected) the magistrates of the Roman Republic. Aediles had 2 or 3 lictors, praetors had 6, consuls had 12 (as did the “master of the horse” when a dictator was appointed), and the dictator 24. These bundled rods indicated the right of these officers, within the scope of their duties, to mete out punishment against Roman citizens.
Dictators, and consuls in times of war, had their fasces bundled around an axe, to show that they had the power of life and death over Romans (in the case of consuls it was only Roman soldiers). I do not remember if “masters of the horse” had axes inside their bundles of fasces or not.
I wouldn’t “read” too much into the presence of “fasces” in the White House. There were probably 13 rods in each fasces symbolizing the 13 original colonies and the “bound rods” give shape to “unity” and the strength of the colonies united.
This is probably what the founders were shooting for when they designed the oval office – rather than trying to encode some secret “masonic” message. Wherever possible in the oval office, the number 13 is applied. For instance – in the Oval Office rug, and every President approves a new design of it – the rug has 13 colors.
I wouldn’t either Krulac. I was only giving historical context to the question of the origination of the idea and term.
We agree on the disease, but not the cure,I suspect.
Anytime a small group of people are given extraordinary power er the rest of s, the result is never good for the people being ruled.It doesn’t matter f you call the rulers kings, generals, priests, commissars or CEO’s or bosses. The result is the same.
Only when people rule themselves, based on agreed upon .principles, is the outcome good. I don;t see abandoning government as a good thing. I think the peopl must become the government, but we are a long way from that.
No, I do basically agree with that, unless by “people” you mean majority (mob) rule, because that’s even worse than a dictatorship. A very small government of very constrained powers, with no individual having much power individually, and removed the instant he does anything wrong, is the only way to minimize the innate harm caused by allowing any entity a monopoly or near-monopoly on coercion.
That’s my view too.
Nahh.
We all know what even the smallest government does. Grows. And grows greedy. Mostly for power. Give them even a scrap more than the general population and they’ll leverage it into totalitarianism. That includes economic power and that’s where US libertarians come completely unstuck. You can’t have a stable system where some people are allowed to accumulate disproportionate wealth. Even meritocracies inevitably become plutocracies.
The only way to keep power in check is to keep it as decentralised as possible. Lots of small nodes with as much power devolved downwards as is feasible. The basic node shouldn’t be any bigger than a village, medium sized workplace etc and decision-making should be democratically distributed among it’s members. The nodes will overlap in many areas with most people participating in several of them. For stuff that can’t be resolved at that level – big infrastructure projects or public works, defence against centralised authorities, public health or environmental emergencies, etc you need representative democracy that is completely responsible to the lower level node, scaling upwards according to the principles of syndicalism.
They made it work in Spain in the 1930s. Or at least they would have if both the fascists and their Marxists ‘allies’ hadn’t ganged up on them.
You can’t abolish power or even minimalise it. You have to balance it. The best way to do that is to keep it flat and broad. Yeah, there’s lots of administrative overhead, but it’s still pretty small beer compared to the bureaucratic overhead all centralised power structures accumulate.
“The only way to keep power in check is to keep it as decentralised as possible. Lots of small nodes with as much power devolved downwards as is feasible.”
In EU speak, this is called subsidiarity. And it’s exactly how things work in Switzerland
Indeed.
There are many aspects of the Swiss cantonment system that have informed anarchist theorist and visa versa.
Not sure about that. The koch brothers aren’t in check. And I don’t see how decentralization would effect them in anyway.
I was talking about how to set up a functioning system. I didn’t say I had a clue how to get there from here.
But my best hope relies on the fact that all systems must die and for systems as unstable as our own that will be sooner rather than later. Hopefully it will not die in a way that will completely erase all that goes before it and by setting up devolved power nodes – as my colleagues and I once attempted to do with locally based alternatives to the criminal justice system – we can sow the seeds for a better system to grow in the ashes of the old one.
The power of the Koch brothers stems from the most undemocratic and authoritarian feature of our society – the incorporated company. Needless to say, these things are incorporated, given a legal fiction of personhood, by the state.
All of Swift’s warnings about the struldbrugs apply to these artificial monsters.
We are in perfect accord.
But as many of those corporations are now so much more powerful than the state it has no choice but to bend to their demands it’s really a moot point.
And that power is not guns and bombers. It’s money.
The tribe – hunter/gathers – is the smallest social unit that has been successful for the longest – usually it is governed by one person.
You are correct that it was successful for the longest. Approximately ten times longer than all other method of social organisation known to man put together. Unfortunately, given current population density, it is no longer viable in most places but it is still the model we must look towards for building a viable replacement.
You are only correct about it being governed by one person in the broadest and most transient sense of the word ‘governed’ though. Native Americans – as with Australian Aborigines – had different leaders for different functions. War, hunting, gathering, childbirth, ceremonial/religious, etc, etc. This was possible because everyone in the tribe (or confederation of tribes) knew enough about everyone else to develop broad agreement as to who should lead any particular endeavour.
Pemulwuy and Crazy Horse did not lead resistance movements by virtue of being the biggest thug on the block or the best funded PR campaign. They did so because everyone agreed they were most suited to the job.
Westminster style three legged power structures (independent executive, legislature and judiciary) work to balance power between elite groups. Too bad about the rest of us but at least they stop any one group from becoming totalitarian. But they made a fatal mistake. Corporations. They allowed a plutocratic power base to develop that eventually gained the capacity to buy all three legs up and consolidate their power within itself.
You can’t have functioning democracies and permanent corporations. It might work if they’re kept to a limited charter as they were originally designed, but it’s got to be very strictly limited or they’ll just buy out the limitations and take over. Government is a problem. A big one. But corporations are a bigger one.
The problem with corporations is that they’re given power to inflict violence by A) buying politicians, and B) using civil lawsuits. Remove the first and limit the second by redesigning the legal system, and corporations wouldn’t be nearly the problem they’ve become. Fascism is probably the worst of all possible governmental forms because it enhances the natural tyranny inherent in both political and economic power, then marries them to military & paramilitary (police) violence. So if the government (by which I mean the whole complex) can’t destroy a person in one of the three ways (politically, economically or physically), it still has two others to fall back on. And nobody, but nobody, can withstand that kind of arsenal.
There’s a few problems with that proposal Maggie.
Firstly corporations don’t need to buy politicians directly. I’ve worked closely with the Australian Greens (I’d never vote for them) and know that most wouldn’t dream of accepting money from a big corporation either by party donation or under the table. But media corporations can and do manipulate them simply by controlling their coverage and thereby their vote base.
But the big question of course is “How are you supposed to ‘prevent’ corporations from buying politicians if they are allowed to accumulate enough money to corrupt any conceivable regulation system?”. Whatever method you use it would have to be such a major power base in and of itself it would become the foundation of the new despotism.
IMHO fascism is simply the natural end point (almost) of any system that allows centralised power. You couldn’t find two manifestos much more different than Das Kapital and Mein Kampf but in the end they produced pretty much the same thing. Magna Carta and the US constitution would seem to be the same.
Remember, I don’t believe in centralized power, either. My point is that power needs to be limited at ALL levels, not just in the central government. If nobody has the power to violate individuals’ rights except under clear, strict, rare criteria, it won’t much matter how much money somebody manages to accumulate. And if you allow the precedent that somebody can rob somebody else because he has “too much”, you start the cycle of tyranny all over again.
Control the ability to inflict violence, and corruption matters a whole lot less than it does now.
But money is power.
How on earth are you supposed to prevent it from being leveraged into political power unless you have other political power structures that are at least as powerful as the wealthy?
Governments are able to gain disproportionate monopolies of violence precisely because it is the only way to keep the capacity of other hypertrophied power nodes – including economic ones – from monopolising violence themselves.
People will always inflict violence on each other even though most claim to abhor it. What you need to do is ensure that the capacity of the majority to retaliate is never overwhelmed by the capacity of the minority to violently suppress them. Ultimately that will always be the case anyway. Plutocracies will inevitably accumulate so much wealth and power to themselves that the mob will rise up and take it all back by force simply in order to survive. Gated communities will burn. But unless the mob then sets up a system that prevents new plutocracies from forming the cycle will just repeat.
I don’t believe in power monopolies. Every individual should be armed and prepared to defend himself against the powerful. Economic power won’t be able to overbalance political & physical power if those reside mostly in individuals. And if plutocracies are stupid enough to grasp that much to themselves that they provoke revolution, I say let them burn.
With due respect Maggie, that is an adolescent fantasy propagated by Hollywood and the NRA. I am dumbfounded that so many otherwise intelligent Americans buy into it.
There is no way you will ever be able to accumulate enough weaponry to defend yourself even against the Koch brothers, much less the BATF, FBI or Pentagon. If you did, you would become the despot we would all have to arm up against.
Power corrupts you know.
Tell that to the Afghans, the Iraqis, the Vietnamese…no individual can hope to prevail, no. But no government can prevail if the entire citizenry is against it. The problem is that people love material existence more than they love freedom, so we get what you see around you. And there’s another advantage of having weapons and being unafraid to use them: unless I’m taken totally by surprise, they won’t be able to humiliate me with “perp walks” and show trials followed by a slow wasting death in a cage.
I agree with everything in your last comment but you’ve left out the ingredient that enables the sort of consensus to enable broad enough coalitions to form to resist centralised power.
All the participants must be able to feel they have a stake in whatever will exist after the threat has been defeated (usually they are fooled of course). Homeless Harry will never feel enough identification with Mansion Maggie to fight alongside her no matter how nasty FBI Fred is to both of them. If he does momentarily reach that conclusion it would be pretty simple for FBI Fred and his mates to wedge them – perhaps by offering Maggie’s mansion to Harry once Maggie has been shot.
I wish my mansion were actually habitable, like with doors and internal walls and plumbing and electricity and such. Ah, well, we can’t have everything. 🙁
Maybe you need to return to your family’s religion.
They say “The Lord’s Mansion has many rooms”.
The plumbing still smells pretty medieval though.
And it’s not a matter of ‘stupidity’ that causes plutocracies to become unsustainably top heavy. It’s the nature of the system.
If one plutocrat isn’t ‘stupid’ enough to accumulate ridiculous amounts of power, others will and take his away from him.
Ideas are power, money just happens to be one of the ideas.
Absolutely true. Money only has the power we think it has or choose to give it. Ditto even for more substantial wealth stores such as gold. However there are some forms of wealth – e.g. land – that confer power to those who control them no matter what ideas we may have about them.
But under current circumstances those with money have power even if they have no ideas. And they can use that power to suppress any ideas they don’t like.
#cabrogirl–but all power is phantasm, it exists because we believe it exists (although the manifestation of that power might be quite real, because there are people who believe that power exists and supports it). this was why Gandhi was correct when he reminded the Raj that 100,000 English could not rule 400 million Indians without their consent. If tomorrow, everyone in the United States woke up, believing i was king, I would be King, the rest would be paperwork, including my abdication.
The American people–and much of the world have been convinced of the power of the almighty dollar, backed by the barrel of a gun. But the power of those objects exists only because we–and a lot of other people–believe that they do. Take away that belief, and “poof!” the power is gone.
Jeez. And I thought I was fond of abstraction.
Yep, all power is phantasm. If we are indifferent to being tortured, killed, losing our health and possessions, having our family wiped out, etc, etc, then no-one has any power over us. But there’s not too many Jobs about.
There are people in this country who can send uniformed thugs around to bash me, have me thrown into a cell, have me hung while I’m in there, ensure the coroner rules it as suicide then get the media to run a campaign asserting I was such a monster I deserved everything I got and more. I would go to considerable lengths to try to stop that from happening, including doing things I would very much prefer not to do. Those people therefore have power over me.
Dear, I am not saying we should ignore the very real manifestations of power. That would be STUPID. We should however take advantage of the fact that power is Phantasm, that it is based solely on belief,and make people believe in something different than what they currently believe. It is what Gandhi and King did, and in the process, freed millions of their preconceptions and their hate.
I love life, so I do not look forward to either pain or death, but I realize that they are a part of the panorama of our existence. The very best I can hope for is to love and show compassion to my fellow human beings, enjoy their triumphs with them, console them in their hours of difficulty, and hope and pray that I make a small difference in just a few lives.
PS–I have been accused of being a mystic (by author Steven Barnes, no less), which is very true. But I am continually reminded of Richard Bach’s admonition in his book “Illusions,” when quoting the “Messiah’s Handbook,” (in paraphrase) “Smile and laugh on the way to your execution. It will give hope to your friends, and scare the hell out of everyone else.”
Lots of love and affection, and to quote Saint Walker in the Green Lantern comics, “All Will Be Well!”
Err, you do know that some people get quite offended when complete strangers call them “Dear”? Fortunately I am not one such person. As a 52 year old heterosexual guy, when a strange man starts calling me “Dear” I just assume I’m in the wrong sort of pub.
I’m gonna assume you’re being wittily ironic rather than obliviously oxymoronic here. It reminds me of the David Bowie song Cygnet Committee:
Funny. I don’t see many Indians or African Americans who are free of preconceptions, hate or the power of others. What I see is one lot of preconceptions, hate and power being replaced by another lot. That’s why you need to design systems that realistically incorporate these things instead of imagining you can wave a magic wand and make them disappear.
Accusations of mysticism by others are completely empty, the mystical experience being so subjective and all. If you have mystical experiences you are a mystic, but you’re the only one who will ever know for sure.
Where mystics so often get completely messed up is in thinking their experiences can somehow inform the lives of others. That’s when they become gurus and almost invariably lose whatever the experience may have potentially offered them. Mind you, there can be compensations. Multi-car garages full of luxury cars, book endorsements by Oprah Winfrey, lots of things to feed the ego that your experience showed you was nothing but a conceited delusion …
To quote the great sage Russell Morris:
My apologies, I had not checked your profile, and from your writing, pseudonym, etc., had assumed you mid-30’s female. My mistake.
As to my belief on the power of mass belief, I’ll let Thomas Jefferson speak for me:
“Opinion is power.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1816. ME 14:39
“The good opinion of mankind, like the lever of Archimedes, with the given fulcrum, moves the world.” –Thomas Jefferson to M. Correa de Serra, 1814. ME 14:222
As to the following two paragraphs you wrote:
“Accusations of mysticism by others are completely empty, the mystical experience being so subjective and all. If you have mystical experiences you are a mystic, but you’re the only one who will ever know for sure.
Where mystics so often get completely messed up is in thinking their experiences can somehow inform the lives of others. That’s when they become gurus and almost invariably lose whatever the experience may have potentially offered them. Mind you, there can be compensations. Multi-car garages full of luxury cars, book endorsements by Oprah Winfrey, lots of things to feed the ego that your experience showed you was nothing but a conceited delusion…”
As an agnostic, you are unable to judge “mystic experiences,” in an informed manner, because you believe that all of them are, in your mind, untrue delusions.
But as I explain to my friends who are agnostics and atheists, I am quite aware that I cannot offer objective, empirical evidence of my experience. It is entirely subjective. That does not mean that it is not true. You must consider the possibility that the human mind is capable of experiencing phenomena that humanity’s finest detection and measuring devices are unable to detect or measure. 300 years ago if you had postulated subatomic particles such as neutrinos, muons, baryons, leptons, “dark matter,” etc., they would have locked you in the madhouse, or burned you at the stake. Inability to detect or measure something can mean it does not mean it doesn’t exist, only that your equipment may be too insensitive to do so.
If I was a thirty something woman I would probably be more offended by being called ‘dear’ by strange men. If I was an attractive one I would probably be completely jack of it.
Which is precisely why it is oxymoronic to imagine you can free people from power by exerting power over their opinions. As David Bowie so concisely put it.
You couldn’t have possibly made a more incorrect statement.
What I know about mystical experiences is that they are neither rational nor communicable. If anything I am inclined to believe mystical experiences are real and consensual ‘reality’ delusional rather than visa versa.
As an agnostic I am open-minded about their meaning but am very disinclined to impose a religious belief system upon them, which I believe is a post hoc add on done for many rational reasons but which I think almost certainly loses their essence. My own mystical experiences are almost invariably non-dual and to even twist them to comply with thought or language – which are inherently dualist, even via negativa – much less examine them through the lens of an a priori belief system is to turn them to lies and ashes.
It seems to me the Catholic church has a rather unfortunate history with both its treatment of many of its mystics and the theological framework it insists on imposing upon their interpretations. That’s probably why Thomas Merton so often reached for Buddhist frameworks and metaphors when trying to discuss the insights he had gained from his. It’s also probably part of the reason much of de Chardin’s work remains under monitum. Ratzinger of course did his best to completely desanguinate de Chardin’s work. At least by de Chardin’s time it was no longer fashionable to torture people like him into recantation.
That said, I am struck by how uncanny the number of similar ‘notes’ seem to be struck by writers in the tradition of Buddhism, Advaitism and Kashmiri Shaivism and my own unfortunate but probably inevitable attempts to conceptually grasp my own mystical experiences. I am inclined to attribute that to the fact that those belief systems have sramana at their very foundation rather than as some kind of Gothic, jerry rigged add on. (I’m open to the theory that Jesus was essentially an Essene and therefore primarily sramanic, but St Paul put paid to any hope of that becoming a permanent feature of the Christian tradition).
No one is able to judge them. Not even their own much less those of others.
“He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.” –Thomas Jefferson
An open mind and an empty mind are not the same thing.–Me, Although I think Alan Watts may have made a similar comment.
Considering Watts’ regard for Zen one wonders which one he preferred.
“An agnostic is someone who doesn’t pretend he knows what’s going on in the universe” – me.
Oh, and regarding your suggestion that agnostics know less about religion than the faithful, perhaps you’d like to check out what the Pew Forum found when they looked into the question.
Not the faithful, the student.
I’ve seen the Pew study, which demonstrates the ignorance of the average believer.
Apartheid didn’t end in South Africa because Mandela was a saint. It did so because De Clerk was a realist. He knew it would end one way or another and he didn’t want to see it end in flames. Mandela’s role was to allow the whites to surrender much of their power without setting off the sort of retaliation for past crimes that everyone had been expecting for so long.
I see no such leadership in the US (though I didn’t really see it coming in SA or the USSR either) and suspect that the ‘one percent’ in your country will not go out with a whimper but in a conflagration. I only hope those with their fingers hovering over The Button don’t pull out the Samson Option and ensure all of us go out with a bang.
Fill the seats of justice
With good men, not so absolute in goodness
As to forget what human frailty is.
—Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd
As quoted, rather surprisingly, in Edward Steichen’s ‘The Family of Man’.
I reckon that sentiment is one of the biggest impediments to producing a working system of any sort – from the Supreme Court down to the committee that heads your local sports club.
Systems take on a life of their own. Ultimately they no more respond to the motives of their constituent members than you respond to the motives of your skin cells (or neurons, drachefly). If the ‘leadership’ doesn’t do what the environment created for the system demands they will be marginalised or replaced by the system itself, whether they are ‘good’ men or utterly ruthless and corrupt ones. It’s always survival of the fittest and if the ecological niche requires criminality that’s what it will produce.
The three legs of government were working more or less to balance elite interests and the 99% until 1913. The Apportionment Act of 1911, also known as Public Law 62-5, was passed by the United States Congress on August 8, 1911. The law set the number of members of the United States House of Representatives at 435, effective with the 63rd Congress on March 3, 1913. Today the 99% should have 10,000 representatives in the house.
Actually, it was one rep for every 200,000 Americans. so we should have 1550 members of the House. I also think that when we stopped appointment of Senators by State Legislatures (a good thing), we should have increased the number of senafors per state to 6, elected to 6 year terms, 2 every general election–I.e. same year Reps elected.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_States_Constitution The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; a
On Mar 12, 2014, at 4:52 PM, The Honest Courtesan wrote:
“Shall not exceed.” We had 65 Representatives in 1789, with a population of a little over 3 million, or roughly 50,000 people–without doing all the weird math for figuring a slave as 3/5ths of a person–per representative.
1550 would be a three-and-a-half-fold increase, while increasing the number of Senators to six would be only a three-fold increase. However, either would-IMHO–lead to a more responsive Senate and House to the needs of the people, especially if we put in proportional representation in some form.
We do not need 10,300 Representatives, that would make it too cumbersome to get anything done.
10,300 was too cumbersome during the 1900’s which was the argument used to pass the law. In the information age online meeting of 10,000 to 100,000 people occur frequently. At Stanford there was an online class of 50,000. In the information age the reality is that these additional representatives could be based in their home districts. Having many more representatives, who are based in their home districts, would be a lot more responsive to constituents and harder/expensive to influence by special interests.
The main challenges of repealing that 1911 law is politicians and special interests don’t want to give up their powers. Representatives today have greater influence than the senators of previous generations. Special interests don’t want to have to send lobbyist all around the country. My estimate is it would cost from 25 – 50 times as much to maintain their influence at present day levels. On the other hand regular people will be able to actually interact with the representatives.
Let us try 1550 first. (Or 1035 which is a number I’ve suggested elsewhere. If it works (together with the six senators per state), then we can expand it further. My idea is to cut down the number of committees each member serves on to one, so he can concentrate on that one committee. PS–We have to get rid of the Electoral College first, before we expand either house.
Oh yes there are many permutations that could be tried, some undoubtably would be more effective than 10K new representatives. But I wanted something that is technologically and legally doable. Something that could be implemented under our current constitution.
All I really want is the representation due to all Americans that is specified by the founding fathers. Like how patriotic is that ?
Repealing an old law is likely a lot easier than holding a constitutional convention. The only Constitutional Convention in US history was called in 1787.
And one can never guarantee the outcome of a new Constitutional Convention; just ask the Anti-Federalists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_One_of_the_United_States_ConstitutionThe number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; a
Just wanted to compliment you on the picture of the late Phil Hartman as Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. You can find those old SNL skits on YouTube—they’re still pretty funny.
P.S. As wikipedia explains, the “point” of the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer was a parody of the Andy Griffith series Matlock. Griffith’s character, although he was a highly paid criminal lawyer usually professed to the jury that he was just a simple “country boy.” Hartman’s caveman is doing the same schtick although as a lawyer is more obviously selfish and power-hungry.
Fascinating, Maggie. In fact, it probably demonstrates the reason for religious extremism and the violence that goes hand in hand with it.
MHO is that the concentration of power in the upper classes has happened with all civilizations. This symptom of a social species leads to corruption and the bad decisions that precipitate the fall of our civilizations. The old 91% tax rate for the rich which existed between 1952-64 inadvertently kept a led on this corruption. Today, corporations and the rich twist the government to their benefit while the situation of the 99% continuously deteriorates.
My reaction to the article is ARRGGHH!!!
And I agree with comixchik–and Thomas Jefferson– about government. The reason that we are in this current mess is that we permitted ourselves to get lazy and not ride herd on the government–and the various people and organizations trying to control its functions–like we are supposed to. Martha Stout, in her book The Sociopath Next Door, states that 1 in 25 of us are sociopaths, with no moral compass, and no limits except the ones imposed by society. The past 30-40 years has seen the sociopaths take charge in this country, and ignoring them isn’t going to fix the problem.
The Book of Samuel tells the story of how before their was a king in Israel “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” But the people were afraid of the Philistines and, in spite of being warned of the many abuses that are inevitably committed by kings, they insisted on having one.
Three thousand years later, we still sell our freedom for the illusion of security. We haven’t advanced a bit.
there was a king