Part I: What’s Wrong With the World
I’m gonna save the world—who’s with me? How do we do this? Answer: technology, but not just the sort of technology you’re thinking of. Technology, though often enabled by scientific knowledge (this is the sort of technology we usually think of when we speak of “tech,” or as the British say, “kit”), is actually a manifestation of culture; it is something we do, and not just something we know. Failure to observe this distinction has resulted in the common idolatry of technology, where the mere fact that we can do something is assumed to mean that we must do it—or at least, that we should. Money—not just coinage or paper money, but the very idea of money, debt, credit, etc.—is arguably one of mankind’s greatest technological inventions; but even the best of inventions needs to be reexamined from time to time.[1] Perhaps if the ancient Greeks had been willing to question the social technology we call slavery, they might have seen the possible applications of Hero of Alexandria’s work with steam, and an industrial civilization would have arisen on Earth centuries before it actually did.
So, yes, our technology can help us save the world. But it’s not just new machines we need, but new ideas of social organization. I have been reading for years on this question, the question of how we can improve our world, not just through new gadgets, but through new ways of relating to each other, and to the world we find ourselves in. The purpose of this essay is to attempt at lest a preliminary and partial synthesis of numerous ideas found in the writings of a number of different people. These are not my ideas (mostly), and I will seek to direct my readers to those books where they can read about these ideas from those who had them first, and who deal with them in much greater length and depth.
Allow me to begin with a simple observation: one of the best thing about a rich man is that he dies. Throughout history, wealth and power have tended to go together, and those who possessed the power of wealth and the wealth of power have so often used them selfishly, to oppress and exploit their fellow man. It is often only through death—the gift of Ilúvatar to men, as Tolkien has it[2]—that the career of such oppression is cut short. Yet, our systems of law do what they can to help the oppression to continue. Despite inheritance taxes, a rich man who dies can pass most of his wealth—and so, his power—along to his children unimpaired. Our unacknowledged caste system allows those children of the rich—though they be fools—access to wealth, power, and the means thereto which is often denied even the most gifted children of the poor.[3] Increasingly, upward mobility is no longer a part of the American experience. Wealth seems, of late (and wherefore we know) to be flowing increasingly upward, so that, even during the post-2008 financial crisis, the richest 1% actually grew their wealth significantly, while the rest of us suffered.[4] As if that weren’t enough, much of the wealth in the world is now owned by corporations, legal constructs which, through a legal fiction, are considered to have the status of legal persons. The problem is, these legal persons are immortal. They are non-corporeal, and so neither age nor sicken, and can be neither wounded nor slain. They accumulate wealth and keep it, and if they choose to use that wealth to terrorize those subject to its power, those subjects cannot comfort themselves that “this too, shall pass.” Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Herod; they all died, and their oppressions were ended—but what if the next villain of history is not a corporeal man, but a corporation, which, like the worm of Hell, dieth not?
Worse yet, the very nature of the modern corporation is such as to drive its behavior towards the sociopathic. The modern corporation is owned by a plurality of shareholders, while its actions are decided by a group of managers. Today, the only purpose recognized for a corporation is to create profit for its shareholders,[5] rather than any benefit to stakeholders, such as employees, customers, or the local environment and community. Since the managers manage the corporation, but do not own it, they are expected—indeed, pressured—to submit to the demands and expectations of those who do have ownership, the shareholders. And since the shareholders are only owners and nothing more, they have no reason to desire anything other than a maximization of return on their investment (ROI) in the form of maximum profits. Thus, the corporation is schizophrenic, with each half of its splintered mind possessing plausible deniability for what it does: the managers who manage the corporation’s acts solely for the profit of the shareholders say, “What do you want us to do? It’s not our company, or our money—we just work here.” Meanwhile, the owners are mere investors, and say, “We invested in this company to make profit. Whatever must be done to achieve that is what we want. It’s not personal; it’s just business.”
And so, the modern corporation is an enormously rich, enormously powerful, immortal, unkillable, legal person whose very structure tends to make its behavior selfish to the point of being outright sociopathic.[6] What should we do? The logical thing, of course, is to at least consider changing the rules, which are, after all, only matters of positive law, and can be changed—indeed, should be changed, especially when they conflict with higher laws of morality and right. Perhaps we should start by honestly applying anti-trust laws in order to break some of these corporations into organizations of more reasonable size.[7] Even more radical, but still, perhaps, right, might be elimination of the fiction of the corporate legal person. Giving legal personhood to deathless conceptual abstractions seems like a recipe for tyranny to me. How about you?
Even then, there is still the problem of the corporate structure and personality. As Joel Bakan points out in Corporation, the danger of the joint-stock company, with its separation of ownership from management, was foreseen as early as 1776 by none other than Adam Smith himself in The Wealth of Nations. A similar thing happens when the government first gives money to some group or other (such as a federal grant to private schools, or to a state government), and then starts demanding certain things about how that money be spent and how the school or state should operate because—and this was the succinct and insightful, not to mention honest, response of then-president Bill Clinton when asked about it—“It’s not their money.”
One thing is for sure: we must not simply roll along, singing the praises of “progress,” especially of a scientific sort. Anyone who tries, as I try, to keep abreast of the course of scientific and technological developments, can see that there are two possibilities on the horizon that could wind up fulfilling the prophecy, “Gaze fondly upon today, for tomorrow is bound to suck worse.”[8] One of these is the quest to find a way to extend the human lifespan—especially the length of one’s productive years—using advanced medicine. One need only look at someone like Tom Cruise—now in his sixties, yet still playing the action hero—to see that, at least for the sufficiently wealthy, aging is not what it used to be. And while some are trying to keep their wealthy clients alive through advanced medicine, others are trying to develop ways to cheat death altogether by uploading a person’s mind to some sort of neural-network artificial brain that, by replicating a person’s “connectome” (like your genome, but the sum total of your neural connections, rather than your genes) would—hypothetically, for all this is all still very speculative—constitute a transformation of that person into a potentially immortal machine. Thankfully, despite much hype to the contrary, we seem to be a long way from any sort of true mind upload, and many there are who still call it impossible.[9] Yet, I can see a certain nightmare scenario happening where a company has used a person’s digital footprint and a lot of computing power—possibly one of the quantum computers featured in Michio Kaku’s latest book, Quantum Supremacy—to create something which claims to be, say, the uploaded mind of Jeff Bezos, or some other rich person. And if the law should be fool enough to recognize such a thing as, if not the actual uploaded person, then at least a legal person, and his rightful heir? Can you imagine a simulated person—perhaps with Max Headroom-level brain damage—being in control of billions of dollars?
The ultimate end of all this, of course, has already been envisioned by our friendly neighborhood science fiction writer, specifically in the film In Time. In that film, we see a dystopian future where advanced science has found a cure for ageing and disease, so that no one gets sick or ages past the physical age of 25 years. Yet, time has now become the currency. The wealthy are not only powerful, but literally immortal. Meanwhile, when the glowing tattoo clock on your arm runs out, and you go broke—when the clock stops, so does your heart (a phenomenon well exploited by the film’s plot). And so, we find in this world that there are still rich and poor, and while the poor neither get sick, nor age, going flat broke constitutes a sentence of “sudden, instant, and even immediate death.”[10]
My point is that, without certain changes in our social organization, this is precisely the sort of thing the discovery of immortality would lead to. William Gibson has been credited with the remark that “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” What that means, essentially, is that the rich receive all the benefits of progress first—if they ever come to the rest of us at all. Indeed, today, if you are rich enough, you can play action hero in your 60s (Tom Cruise) or fly into space in your 90s (William Shatner), but if you are not rich, you likely can’t even afford to prevent cavities by going for regular dental check-ups (because insurance often won’t cover it and—in the United States, at least—a lot of us still can’t afford to get health insurance anyway). The development of a way to slow ageing or upload a mind to a machine, if it were to happen tomorrow, would not improve the lot of most of us—it would just help our oppressors to outlive us, the oppressed.
While I am on the topic of technology merely enabling the oppression, I should mention another example. As I was reading Michio Kaku’s latest starry-eye paean to progress, the aforementioned Quantum Supremacy, about the prospect of an imminent, shall we say, quantum leap forward in computing power (one company he cites suggests that its new quantum computer is a trillion times as fast as a normal supercomputer), I noticed that among the things he thought quantum computers could help with was optimization, helping companies to operate more efficiently. As I read this, I thought: great, technology to help them lay-off and disemploy even more of us, or at least to squeeze us just a little bit harder.
Part II: Possible Paths to Help Tomorrow Not Suck Worse
“Religious authority has often, doubtless, been oppressive or unreasonable; just as every legal system (and especially our present one) has been callous and full of a cruel apathy. It is rational to attack the police; nay, it is glorious.”—G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), ch. 3, “The Suicide of Thought” (p. 30).
“Prisons are for holding men for trial, not for punishing them.”—Justinian’s Digest of Roman Law (AD 529).
So what is the answer? Not more use of technology to further enable and accelerate the status quo, but some altogether different ways of doing things. Combating monopolies, monopsonies, corporate sociopathy, and massive wealth accumulation is just the beginning.[11] Beyond that is our deeply flawed legal system, and the very question of money itself.
What’s wrong with the legal system, you ask? Nothing, so long as you are rich enough to manipulate it. For the rest, it can hold multiple terrors, especially if you are poor, black, female, or some combination of those. The solution, so say some, is in one word with a powerful history: Abolition.
From what I can see from my own reading, there are at least four different, but not necessarily independent, abolition movements abroad. The first is the movement to end our current system of incarceration for any and all offenses, the so-called prison industrial complex—for the details of which, one might start with Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book The New Jim Crow. So closely related to this that it is not really a separate movement is the movement to change our law-enforcement system into something quite different. Sometimes called “defund the police,” it is really something more like “Let there be No More Police!” In fact, those last three words are the title of the new book on the subject by Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie. I must confess that I have not finished reading that book—but only because I found so many powerful statements in the introduction that I got bogged down recording them for this essay. And I had gotten the book from the local library, so I shall have to buy my own copy if I wish to start annotating it. But here are a few of those statements from the introduction, just to give us all a taste of their vision of a better future:
“ [H]istory, experience, and research all point to the reality that policing is not [as some claim,] ‘broken,’ it is operating exactly as it was intended: dealing out daily violence to contain, control, and criminalize” (p. 9).
“In fact, what they [our critics] actually oppose is the demand’s central premise: divesting from policing and investing in nonpolice approaches to safety…the notion [in short, is that] of defunding, and ultimately abolishing the police” (10).
“[Defund is] a manifestation of Black feminist politics focused on ending all forms of violence experienced by Black women—and all other people—living [in]…interlocking systems of oppression that increase vulnerability to violence, deprivation, and criminalization” (11).
“Given the role of the U.S. military as global police, defund demands are deeply connected to global struggles against settler colonialism, militarism, and imperialism, and for migrant justice” (11).
This, as opposed to “the more than $100 Billion [!] the U.S. spends annually on policing…[money better spent on] nonpolice, community-based safety strategies, such as mental health crisis response; long-term, safe, quality, accessible, and affordable housing; guaranteed income programs; violence interruption and youth programs” (12).
“Of course, the demand to defund police is not just about cuts to police budgets. It is also about limiting police contact, functions, weapons, legitimacy, and power—and uprooting surveillance, policing, punishment, and criminalization from every aspect of our lives. As abolitionist scholars Dan Berger and David Stein put it, ‘The call to defund is best understood as an effort to revoke the political and economic power of the police—and of the larger criminal legal system it upholds’” (13; emphasis added).
“Defunding police means investing the billions currently poured into policing and the prison industrial complex into community-based safety strategies: meeting basic needs that include housing, health care, access to care for disabled people, child care, elder care, a basic guaranteed income, and accessible, sustainable living-wage jobs that enable [people] to prevent, escape, intervene in, and transform the conditions that make violence possible” (14).
“Defunding police is neither the beginning nor the end of the story. It is simply a step toward a longer-term abolitionist horizon of dismantling police departments and abolishing policing, the prison industrial complex (PIC) that requires it, the economic system that produced it, and the social order it fabricates, while rebuilding a society organized around meeting our individual and collective needs, as well as the needs of the planet. The demand to defund is just the basement floor, abolition is the sky we are reaching for” (14).
“Simply put, PIC abolitionists want to end the whole system of mutually reinforcing relationships between surveillance, policing, the courts, and imprisonment that fuel, maintain, and expand social and economic oppression, structural racism, patriarchy, ableism, and imperialism. It’s not just about prisons or even police, but the entire world they reflect and produce…a system of racial capitalism” (14-15).
“[T]he reality [is] that the role of police is not to create safety, but to establish and maintain a violent social order rooted in…patriarchy, wealth accumulation, and the protection of private property over public good” (17).
Finally, their three-part argument is simple: 1. “Cops Don’t Stop Violence” (the title of their first chapter) 2. “[T]he violence of policing cannot be reformed—because violence is inherent to the institution itself” (18) 3. There are better ways (17-18).
You get the point. There is much good in this book, and no doubt also in another book on my to-read list: An Abolitionist’s Handbook: 12 Steps to Changing Yourself and the World, by Patrisse Cullors. Until I found No More Police, I was completely unaware of the real meaning behind the slogan “defund the police.” Now, I can see this idea as eminently logical. I was already on the bandwagon for ending the carceral state, inspired by the wisdom of the ancient Byzantine state, which already understood that using imprisonment as a mode of punishment was a bad idea (an example of the principle that different eras make different mistakes and have different insights, and one reason to study the past is to see where we might, right now, be going wrong—see the work of C.S. Lewis for more on this topic).
But the movements to abolish policing and mass incarceration are not the only abolition movements. There is also the movement to abolish poverty. In this case, I recommend the excellent book Poverty, By America (2023), written by Matthew Desmond. This book is an excellent read alongside the previously mentioned books, since it clearly demonstrates how our system—and not just the carceral aspects of it—is designed to enrich the already wealthy and bracket out the poor. From the perpetual screwing-over of workers, to the use of tax breaks and government funds to enrich the wealthiest among us rather than alleviate poverty, it is all brilliantly documented in Desmond’s book. His three-pronged strategy to abolish poverty? Simple: 1. (Actually) invest in ending poverty (it really would not cost that much, if the rich paid all the taxes they owed—less than 1% of annual GDP, actually). 2. Empower the poor through things like adequate housing and greater bargaining power with employers (give them shelter, and the power to get the respect they deserve). 3. Tear down the walls literally separating the rich and the poor. Forcing the poor together into practical ghettoes deprives them of the means to improve. The key to ending poverty is much like the key to fighting racism: integration.
And since Desmond, like Kaba & Ritchie, has written a book full of brilliant epigrammatic observations, I simply must include a few of them here before I leave this topic. If these lines intrigue you, do read his book:
“Other countries, like Germany, permit their incarcerated citizens to visit family members outside detention centers, but the American prison system seems designed to break up all sorts of relationships. By one estimate, the number of marriages in the United States would increase by as much as 30 percent if we didn’t imprison a single person” (38).
“[T]he taproot…[is] the simple truth that poverty is an injury, a taking. Tens of millions of Americans do not end up poor by a mistake of history or personal conduct. Poverty persists because some wish and will it to” (40).
“As the sociologist Gerald Davis has put it: our grandparents had careers. Our parents had jobs. We complete tasks” (53).
“[T]rapping the poor in a cycle of debt…might be the oldest form of exploitation after slavery” (71).
“An irony of capitalism is that work, which early Americans rejected as a barrier to independence—‘wage slavery,’ they called it—is now seen as our only means of acquiring it” (84).
“We spend over twice as much on [tax breaks for the rich] as on the military and national defense” (93).
“The American government gives the most help to those who need it least. This is the true nature of our welfare state, and it has far-reaching implications” (95).
“A trend towards private opulence and public squalor has come to define…[our] whole nation” (107).
“If this is our design, our social contract, then we should at least own up to it…what we cannot do is look the American poor in the face and say, we’d love to help you, but we just can’t afford to, because that is a lie” (102).
“Poverty abolition is a personal and political project…[but] Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so. And today, such a movement stirs” (183-84).
“The United States could effectively end poverty in America tomorrow without increasing the deficit if it cracked down on corporations and families who cheat on their taxes, reallocating the newfound revenue to those most in need of it” (121).
“How can we afford it? What a sinful question. What a selfish, dishonest question…We could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes” (121).
“It makes you wonder: Is all the rhetoric around political polarization just another kind of scarcity diversion, just another way to narrow our vision so that an emancipated future remains outside our field of view?” (188).
“Manufactured scarcity empowers and justifies racism, so much so that the historical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox once speculated that without capitalism ‘the world might never have experienced race prejudice’” (174).
The fourth abolition movement I wish to mention is even more radical than these, but first I should note an idea very much related to these first three: abolishing the death penalty. This matter means much to me, if for no other reason than that I come from a background where the people worship a man wrongly executed as a criminal (Jesus of Nazareth), yet seem to take it for granted that the right-wing position on everything is always right: more cops; an enormous military that gets antsy when it has no war to fight; the death penalty; and capitalism (always capitalism—lots of capitalism!). This, I do not get. Jesus lived under Roman imperial rule, with soldiers always ready to force you to carry their gear for that first mile (the second mile he encouraged his hearers to go was illegal, and would get the soldier in trouble with the law); he and his followers taught that few things endangered one’s soul more than riches; and he himself—and a lot of his followers, too—was executed by the Roman state. None of this seems consistent with the flag-waving, chest-thumping, war-mongering capitalism that so many of my childhood co-religionists saw as their Christian right and duty. And so, for those out there who still think the death penalty is good and Biblical (because nearly every American who is pro-death penalty seems to use the Bible to justify it), I recommend The Biblical Truth About America’s Death Penalty, by Dale S. Recinella. Anyone who reads this book and still thinks that being in favor of the death penalty is the obvious Biblical and Christian position—well, they’re just not paying attention. I can only say that, before I read this book, I did not have any particular objection to the death penalty; after reading it, I feel that no follower of the God of Israel can truly support the death penalty as it exists in the U.S. today. If you really want to know for yourself how the death penalty fits—or doesn’t fit—with Biblical ethics, or if you know someone who thinks the answer is obvious, this is the go-to book on the subject.
I wanted to cover some more ideas, but this should do for now. The rest shall have to come later. Still, let me end with—as Lt. Columbo used to say—“Just one more thing, sir.” Here is a short list of some of the books I have looked at recently on to topic of American violence—no doubt one of our greatest social problems—and especially our fascination with (as two different Keanu Reeves characters said) “Guns. Lots of guns.”
Books on America & Guns
Bellesiles, Michael A. Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Says America had few guns until the gunmakers started pushing their product.
Cramer, Clayton E. Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as
American as Apple Pie. Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006.
Responds to Bellesiles by objecting that guns were—ubiquitous?
Haag, Pamela. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture.
New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Guns as byproduct of capitalistic greed.
Halbrook, Stephen. The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms.
[Oakland, CA: the Independent Institute] Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2008.
Good for going back to the source.
Murphy, Chris. The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy.
New York: Random House, 2020.
The title says it all.
[1] “Kenny: wings on the sides of planes—why? Write it down. Write it all down.”—Brian Hackett, pilot, to his assistant Kenny, from an episode of Wings.
[2] Cf. the last page of the opening chapter of The Silmarillion, “Of the Beginning of Days” (p. 42).
[3] Don’t believe that America has a caste system? Check out the book Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. Better yet, just ask yourself this question: how else did George W. Bush, a man who admitted to never once having read any book all the way through to the end, get into Yale, graduate, then go on to become President?
[4] The journalism of Matt Taibbi is generally a great source for pursuing these ideas, especially his book The Divide. Consider also the various books of Michael Lewis, such as Boomerang and The Big Short.
[5] The Grand Nagus would be proud.
[6] Much more could be said about the sociopathic personality of the modern corporation—and has been said, quite well, by Joel Bakan in his book Corporation, from which much of this is taken. I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the problematic nature of corporations.
[7] Anti-trust laws are meant to avoid monopolies, where a certain seller becomes, as it were, “the only game in town,” and so, free from genuine competition, can control the game. When a buyer achieves the same situation, it is called a “monopsony.” For a great look at one of the biggest monopsonies at work today, read The Wal-Mart Effect, by Charles Fishman.
[8] Again, from an episode of Wings, Antonio Scarpacci quoting his grandfather’s life motto.
[9] E.g. David Bentley Hart’s marvelous book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, especially the section on “Consciousness.” Also, there are at least two books on the subject by Roger Penrose: Shadows of the Mind & The Emperor’s New Mind.
[10] The words of Poor Prince John, from Disney’s animated Robin Hood.
[11] For a look at just how crazy the super-rich have become, read Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, about how a group of them, convinced that their own actions were driving us toward immanent global apocalypse, tried to recruit the author to help them plan to escape it, possibly by leaving Earth itself—and the rest of us—behind.
