Deterritorializing Authority

I think it's crucial to understand the role of habit in upholding social systems.  Yes, it is true that the state's authority is ultimately backed by violence, but most people don't encounter this violence, and don't even give it a second thought.  They're simply used to always doing things a certain way.  David Graeber, in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, suggests that hierarchy develops out of habit.  If someone acts like royalty, people will begin treating them like royalty.  In what sociologists refer to as the Matthew effect, there is a common social tendency to give more to those who already have more.  More prestigious scientists are likely to be given more credit for a discovery than lesser-known scientists who did more significant work that preempted theirs.  If you do a favor for someone, you are more likely to do favors for them in the future.  If someone does a favor for you, they are more likely to do favors for you in the future.  In order to avoid the emergence of such hierarchy, rules about reciprocity need to be established and made habitual.

We also see the notorious effects of habit in all systems of privilege.  White privilege exists because white people are used to being treated a certain way and people of color are used to being treated another way.  White people are oblivious to their privilege because for them, things have always been a certain way, and it's working great for them, so they don't understand why everyone's complaining about it.  They don't see what it's like for people of color when interviewing for a job, applying for a loan, trying to move into a neighborhood, or getting pulled over by the police.  And if they did see it, they might not recognize what's going on, because they don't see the influence of habit in these situations.  The person interviewing a person of color for a job probably isn't consciously looking to disqualify them based on their race, but they might think they look "unprofessional." The police officer might pull over a black person not because they're consciously looking to persecute black people, but rather because they look "suspicious."

Habit creates systems of privilege through normativity.  It determines the norms that people follow without questioning them.  This is not to demonize habit.  Habit is neutral.  The issue is what kind of habits we have, and how to shift toward healthier habits.  This is no easy task.  If morphic resonance means anything, it is that each repetition of a habit makes it more solidified and deeply entrenched.  Counteracting these habits involves the construction of new habits.

Why I became an Anarchist

Those of you who read my old blog are probably aware that I was Georgist for many years.  I now identify as an anarchist.  I'm sure some of you out there might be confused about this, so allow me to explain how I got here.

In a sense, it wasn't as big a transformation as it might have seemed.  I remember about eight years ago, when I was going through a right-libertarian phase, I nonetheless said that I was an anarchist at heart.  I just didn't have the practical or theoretical knowledge to understand how anarchy might work.  I always had anti-authoritarian instincts, but it took me a long time to rid myself of the notion that there needs to be hierarchy in order for any kind of organization to take place.  I also had also always had a sense of compassion and even duty to those less fortunate than myself, and the conflict between this and my anti-authoritarianism made both liberalism and right-libertarianism uncomfortable fits.  I became a right-libertarian out of shame.  In order to justify the welfare programs I was defending, I had to justify the state's power to coerce individuals into giving up money that they earned(or so I thought -- I did not yet understand the concept of rent and interest).

When I discovered the work of Henry George, it was a breath of fresh air for me.  The state taking money that people had earned from their own labor was theft, but taking unearned income in the form of land rents and rendering them to the commons seemed more than fair.  The fact that doing so would not only fund government, but also reduce the need for government by reducing inequality and thereby eliminating the need for a welfare system appealed to my anti-authoritarian side.  Georgism helped teach me about the difference between charity and justice.  It also compelled me to learn about economics.  While I never pursued a degree in the subject(I was never much of a math person anyway), I read vociferously about economics, particularly heterodox economics, as I had become sickeningly disillusioned by the neoclassical synthesis.  As I read about things like Modern Monetary Theory, Silvio Gesell's theory of interest, John Maynard Keynes' prediction of the "euthanasia of the rentier," and so much more, I developed my understanding of Georgism to a level where I found very few Georgists had anything to teach me.  I was taking it into new territory.  I worked out how land value taxation would not only take the "free lunch" of rent out of the hands of speculators, but would also eliminate artificial scarcities of capital and thereby cause interest to fall to zero as well(I didn't realize it yet, but I had inadvertently stumbled upon Marx's theory of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall).  This would mean the end of wage labor, and a new economy based on worker ownership. Suddenly, I found myself in a quasi-socialist position.