the oligarchy will not give up its power
Some time ago a narrative about this election was born. i honestly do not know where it came from but it seems to have caught on. It suggests that all Bernie needs to do to make a successful revolution is to win the nomination.
To give credit to those who don’t support his bid I have to acknowledge one of their most potent criticisms, namely that that idea is nonsense. Fortunately it is not an idea Bernie has ever entertained.
The tone of the election as I view it here and on Facebook is changing. One repeated theme is that the elections are “rigged” and that all sorts of fraud and other dirty deeds are happening with great frequency. Registrations seem to be being changed on a significant scale.
When systems fail to meet our expectations we look for someone to blame. Conspiracies arise when systems analysis is lacking. Human institutions are always part of larger systems. Complex self organizing systems seem like magic to those whose only means of analysis is direct cause and effect models. Such models are useless when causality is complex and involves closed loops and branching pathways.
Quite some time ago we discovered that non-linear dynamic systems exhibited chaotic behavior and that in such systems direct cause reasoning fails completely. With their failure falls any hope of a conspiracy theory ever being successful. Conspiracy theories have a number of obvious flaws, the reliance on direct cause being but one.
It is amusing to me that so many progressives are willing to accept complex systems analysis when they listen to climate scientists about global warming and its consequences. It would be silly to point to individual human agents and see them as direct causal reasons for the effects of a complex system of economics, transportation, agriculture, and many other subsystems all interacting in myriad ways.
When it comes to climate change resulting from global warming the human element is not nearly as prominent in the way the global patterns change and interact.
Human systems that involve politics, economics, technology, education, communication, etc. are far more complex than anything we encounter in he physical world of climate yet we pretend we can understand them completely. If this were not universally true there would be almost no diaries on this site.
Individual human agents are assigned powers that, if looked at objectively, are incredible. Heads of state leaders of movements, office holders, etc. are all given credit for direct causal actions that result in our situations. Yet they come and go, live and die, and the system they were supposedly controlling goes on its merry way.
I have maintained from the start of Bernie’s campaign that he is not the cause he is an effect of very complex things we really do not understand completely. Yes, I know, that does not help you if you are believer in elections and what they contribute to the larger complex system in which they occur. People are beginning to understand, most for the first time, what our system is like and all too many do not like what they see.
Others still have no clue and are annoyed by the way this stuff gets in the way of their doing politics as usual. As each day wears on the failure of the two world views to allow anything like communication becomes more pronounced. It would be amusing if so much were not at stake.
Meanwhile, some of us have a revolution to tend to and we can’t wait for the election to pass, however it comes out because then maybe more people will be able to open their eyes and ears to what the system is doing to all of us. Power like that behind this country’s ability to wage war and to dominate so very many people can never be explained in terms of individual human gents.
Look at the election from this perspective. How can anyone seriously entertain the myth that all Bernie has to do is win the nomination and we will have had a revolution? How can anyone entertain the myth that agents working against Bernie are able to stop a revolution in the making?
Such naivety is really not worth having arguments about. It is part of how our human minds are incorporated into ongoing myths that serve the system’s stability. They happen because one component of the system is human action resulting from worldviews held by humans collectively.
Why is religion so powerful? Because it gives answers to unanswerable questions and gives people reasons to behave as they do. Other ideologies serve a similar purpose. These are powerful motivators for human behavior because humans need explanations that can not be provided by anyone.
If you look closely, cognitive dissonance is a large factor in all of this. Our compartmentalized beliefs based on compartmentalized models inevitably lead to conflicts and even if we try to behave “rationally” we can not without admitting that we really don’t understand as much as we thought we did.
This can be liberating and a source of growth or it can cause a more rigid stance to thecause of the conflict in our psyche.
The premise stated in the title “The oligarchy will not give up its power” is deliberately misleading since it is framed in the mindset that would accept that such a thing as “the oligarchy” has will and could give up its power. If you have read this far you know that this is a silly notion. There is an oligarchical system that derives its power from myriad factors in our socioeconomic system. It came about by a more sophisticated kind of evolution than biological evolution but has at least equal validity as a way of understanding its being. It uses human agents and also creates roles for human agents who wish to curtail its power and change it.
It will survive in one form or another depending on how forces that threaten it manifest themselves. It will incorporate those forces as new aspects of the system thereby removing any threat they may have posed or, more simply, it will destroy them. In my lifetime I have seen many such threats destroyed and others absorbed.
I leave you with what has been called an old Chinese curse:
May you live in interesting times
