Fw: 6 Major Media Conspiracies Happening Right in Front of Your Eyes.

[xorcist at sigaint.org]

> In a game there are agreed rules, and participation is voluntary.

Warfare meets this criteria, no? There are rules of war, like the Geneva
convention. Participation is largely voluntary, and even with nations that
have forced conscript armies, one can argue that - for example with
Israel, or Sweden, the citizenry has structured their society so that
everyone must play and its "voluntary" in that way.

If you take the "participation is voluntary" bit absolutely, then no child
is playing a game in gym class, for instance.

I think I understand what you're getting at, and there is something to it,
but I don't think this formulation gets quite at the core of it.


>  In
> an assault, there will be one or more assailants, and one or more
> intended victims who did not agree to participate.  In a game, the
> object is to win.  In a fight, the object is to stop the assault.

Stop the assault = stop the game? Most games end when someone wins.

>
> I prefer terms like "systems dynamics" rather than "games" in this
> context, because the word "games" has way too many loaded connotations.

Yes, I agree that "game" has some unwanted connotations. I am not using
the term to imply a lack of seriousness, or to indicate triviality. Even
with actual games of sport, one may take them quite seriously. Football
hooligans are perhaps the most insane example of this. Some games of sport
involve death, like hunting.

>
>> And in any event, with an attitude like that I certainly wouldn't
>> want to join an 'organization' that you're at the helm of.
>
> In the political organizations I participate in, decisions are made by
> consensus and specific tasks necessary to carry out those decisions
> are delegated to volunteers.  A trusted facilitator has some influence
> but no real power.

That's fine and well. I'm not even commenting here on how decisions are
made, as such, but on the outlook towards competitive "systems dynamics"
wrt "winning" as you stated before. I'd not want to be involved in an
organization that has that view of competitive behavior.

Clearly, coldly, there is something to it. It's obviously a rampant view,
and quite successful. I'd rather fail.

>> How you 'win' is as important as 'what' you win. This is not some
>> namby-pamby point of moralism on my part. It is a matter of
>> strategy for attaining the goal. Because an organization of people
>> that worked, and operated, according to the principles of "winning"
>> that you're espousing -- if successful, would simply become the new
>> gang in town themselves.
>
> If the neighborhood committee should happen to turn predatory, oh
> well, at least the other locals will have a fresh historical example
> of how to deal with the problem.

Yeah. I'm not interested in perpetuating the cycle of abusive history
known as "revolution." I don't care one iota if its "my team" or "their
team" that has power, because I firmly believe that within a few moments,
"my team" will start looking a lot like "their team." Animal Farm, and
all.

That said, I am involved with entirely voluntary groups myself. Your 10/90
rule seems about right.

But nonetheless, I am skeptical of such organizations in principle, if not
in practice at a small scale. At some point, as they grow, voluntary
organizations will get big enough to pay people. That's when shit will
fall apart.

> I can't remember an example of a flash mob that accomplished a
> political political objective.

Depends on what you consider "political" I suppose, but I understand your
point. But that isn't really what I'm getting at. My point was more that
spontaneous organization is possible. How it is leveraged (whether for
art, fun, or something else) is largely not my point.

Most large protests have some form of art / music component. There is an
effort on the part of organizers to make them fun. In the end, that is
what is necessary to actually get people involved.

> An organization is an instance of "organic" cooperation toward shared
> goals, with coordinated division of functions among the participants.
>  The definition as a system where dictates flow from leaders to
> subordinates seems pathological to me.  Homey don't play that.

You must admit that hierarchical organization is the most common
formation, and if I were to put the names of random "organizations" in a
hat and let you pick one out, chances are going to be quite good that it
is run along hierarchical lines.

I don't see it as "pathological" to accept the fact that "firm",
"company", "corporation", "institution" are all synonyms for
"organization" and that one is rather hard pressed to find examples of any
scale that are not hierarchical.

> When an organization's power is established and maintained by mutual
> aid in unified resistance to violence, that organization will be
> inherently resistant to corruption, more so if it proves itself
> competent by acquiring real power by using nonviolent force successfully

I'm not sure I agree with this. Seems to me one can find any number of
corporations which are certainly corrupt which don't use any form of real
violence at all. Google started out in a garage with a couple guys and "do
no evil" as their corporate motto. Charities routinely get corrupted. The
list goes on and on.

What happened?

Money. Influence. Power.

When you're small, you'll have that unified core of "true believers." Then
you get big, and soon the people that are getting involved aren't quite on
the same page. Then you start hiring people to do the work, or you get
well known and the donations are just pouring in and it gets easy to skim
off the top.

And so it goes.

>
> Humans are, collectively, a major pain in the ass.  If you insist that
> any organization with humans in it must be foolproof, you must insist
> that there BE no organizations - as apparently stated above.

Foolproof? No. And again, at small scale, such things can be useful
certainly.

But I am skeptical of the ability to scale such organizations in a way so
that they are capable of ridding us of the threat of government,
corporations, and so on -- without becoming threats themselves.

>
> But no organization means no power.

I suspect we're having a difficulty with terminology here more than
anything else.

If you're talking in terms of truly decentralized organization where the
decision making mechanisms are expressly insulated from the effects of the
cult-of-personality .. I can get behind that, and have.

> No power means no results, and no
> push-back from violent institutions protecting their turf from
> competitors.

I get what you're saying, and to limited degrees, it might be OK - but I
don't see it as scaling.

I mean, Ttis statement right here, can be read as dripping with every bit
as much power-envy as some CEO somewhere:

"No power means no capital, and no means to edge out our competition and
assert market dominance."

The desire for power, no matter how that power is supposedly to be used,
is a problem in itself. Approaching the system this way is like trying to
pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. To paraphrase Einstein, our problems
won't be solved by using the same mindset that created them.

Why must we buy Mayfair and Park Lane to stop playing Monopoly and switch
to a more fun game? Shouldn't it be possible to simply convince the
players to switch to something else?

The difficulty here is profound, I think. Because, in a sense, you are
right. In order to change the status quo, we must develop and create
centralized structures of power to effectively challenge it. But if our
goal is to create a society without such centralized power-structures,
we've already defeated ourselves by becoming the enemy.

How do we bridge this divide? I don't really know, but I suspect it is by
creating very small, very limited organizations in this way. Lots of them.
Tons of them. And we must get used to the idea of dissolving them,
regularly. If none of them get too big, and if we're used to forming an
organized body for a short time and a specific, written-in-stone goal, and
then dissolving it .. then, maybe we'd be in a position to take over the
apparatus of society in a way that spontaneously orders itself without
centralized structures of great power that are doomed to over-reach,
abuse, self-serving ends, and so on.