Some clever subcontractor for Charter Communications decided, yesterday, that I needed a 14 to 18 hour vacation from having any television or Internet access in order to get some reading done. Well, no. What actually happened is that some dimwit, sent out to disconnect the cable service to the empty apartment below me (so the next tenant doesn't get free cable) misread the order and disconnected apartment 6 instead of apartment 7, and then apparently turned his pager off as he drove away so he didn't get Charter's text message to go back and fix his problem, leaving Charter unable to restore my service until the next day. But it did have the "desired" effect of getting me to finish a book I've been reading at mealtimes for (admittedly) too long now: Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006).

I wonder how much it would cost, and how we could raise the money, to get a copy of this into the hands of every manager and every politician in America? Hey, here's a suggestion for starters. The book costs about $30. Divide that by the number of people in your department, take up a collection, and buy your direct supervisor a copy for Christmas. Best thing you could possibly do, for yourself, for him, and for the company. And maybe even for the country.

See, here's the deal. Think about how decisions get made, especially in management. The manager needs to make a decision. So he or she makes some assumptions or guesses about how the world works, or applies whatever ideology or beliefs he has about how the world works. He or she then reasons (more or less correctly) from these untested beliefs to the "obviously" correct conclusion, and issues the order that it be implemented. Anybody who questions this decision is punished for stupidity and arrogance. If the manager weren't perceived to be better able to reason from the "facts" then they wouldn't have been put in a position of authority, so if a subordinate is questioning their reasoning, either that subordinate is too stupid to reason correctly from the "facts" the manager "knows," too stupid or too arrogant to recognize the manager's superior reasoning skills and superior knowledge, or (at best, from the manager's point of view) too ignorant of the "facts" from which the manager reasoned. Having convinced himself or herself that his or her decision was brilliant, the manager then invests a great deal of confidence in it; if it turns out badly, the manager will either not notice, or will look for some external factor outside of his or her control to blame, because since the decision was reasoned (theoretically) correctly from (theoretically) known facts, the decision itself can't be at fault.

Pfeffer and Sutton have written a book documenting the results of literally hundreds of studies of both successful and unsuccessful management decisions, in order to hammer home the pitfalls of that style of decision-making and that style of implementation. Let's start from the beginning. Did the manager, in the example above, test any of his or her opinions about how the world works against external reality? Or are they prejudices, ideologies, half-baked guesses? Before reasoning forward from the "facts," this book keeps showing you the benefits of asking yourself how sure you are of these so-called facts.

For example, "everybody knows" that incentive-based pay systems make people more productive; it "has to" be true because "everybody knows" that the only reason that people come to work every day is to get paid, and "everybody knows" that the only thing that could motivate them to work harder is the offer of more money if they do. Really? Ask yourself, they tell the manager, is that actually true of you? Is that actually true of anybody you know well?

Well, no. On the contrary, they cite a ton of evidence, based on actual studies of actual employees, that employees are motivated by money, yes, but also motivated by a lot of other things, including a desire to please others and a desire to feel good about the work that they're doing. So, okay, now that we've acknowledged that there might be other ways to motivate people to work harder or smarter, have we tested the theory that the best way to motivate them, the most cost effective and/or efficient way, is via strong cash incentives? At most companies, the answer is no, they haven't tested their theory about how to incent employees, at all. In fact, they could only find large company that did run controlled experiments, using a variety of pay systems and management systems, to see which ones actually produced the most productivity improvements. When they looked at their own experimental results after a year, they concluded that in their company, at least, there were gains, but they were offset by serious negative consequences, such as impaired teamwork and more infighting, so they discontinued it. Which, sadly, only lasted until the next senior management change, because the company in question was HP. Not very long thereafter, then-new CEO (and now, perhaps not coincidentally, McCain economic adviser) Carly Fiorina came in with a firm ideology that strongly incentive-based pay systems "just obviously" work better than more egalitarian ones, a belief she held so strongly and that she was so sure of that she was flatly unwilling to look at any evidence to the contrary, even from within her own company. You will notice that she was a disastrously awful CEO; several times in this book she is cited as a bad example, as someone who never thought to ask if her ideas were right, to ask if anybody had any evidence to back up their suggestions, if anybody had checked if other companies had tried some idea and what percentage of them had failed, if any of the orders she'd given were actually producing good results or not once they were tried, someone who was adamantly unwilling to admit mistakes even when the evidence was overwhelming for fear of undermining her own authority.

Where do these incorrectly assumed so-called "facts" come from? Some of them just plain come from ideology, from religious or political or cultural assumptions about what people are like and about how the world works. But the most pernicious ones are often the ones where managers can cite something they mistakenly think is evidence to back up some theory, because they don't understand the rules of scientific evidence. Never mind the incentive-pay example above, think of any idea a manager has ever had, of every idea any manager has ever had. Odds are, they got it by looking at successful departments or successful companies and asking themselves, "what did they do that made them successful?" Which sounds like a smart question, but it's not. The successful managers did more than one thing. Some of those things were probably smart, some of them were probably dumb. How do you decide which ones were the ones that actually contributed to their success? If you don't understand the rules of evidence-based science, medicine, or management, you do so by latching onto the one that "obviously" mattered. What makes it obvious? That it agrees with something you already believed in, or that you'd already made up your mind you wanted to do. The way that actual science cures this bias is to look at not only successful examples, but also unsuccessful ones. Suppose I tell you that 75% of the successful companies did x. Sounds good, right? Will you think to ask what percentage of the unsuccessful companies did x too? If it's 0%, or 5%, or 25%, that might tell you you were right. If it were 75%, or worse, 99%? That would tell someone who knew how to make decisions based on evidence, not assumptions or guesses, to look for another factor to explain their success.

Based on that kind of thinking and on the results of hundreds of scientific studies, Pfeffer and Sutton do have some very specific half-truths and total nonsense to attack throughout this book. They especially emphasize the half-truths over the total nonsense, because they're harder to deal with. If you can show a manager that one of his favorite assumptions is total nonsense, even he might agree with you, but if he can show you some circumstance under which his favorite assumption is true, he probably won't be at all interested in listening to your examples of times when it's not -- that is to say, unless he's become devoted to actually thinking, unless he's learned to value all of the evidence. Anyway, here are their big examples:

"Work is fundamentally different from life, or should be?" Well, yes, in a few ways, but that doesn't change the fact that in deep and equally fundamental ways, it isn't: being a jerk is still being a jerk and leads to bad outcomes, people are not entirely mercenary and greed-driven, and if it's morally wrong outside of work, it's still morally wrong at work, just to name a few.

"The best organizations are the ones that only hire, retain, and pay the best people?" Uh, no. The best organizations, in example after example and study after study, are the ones that make the best use of the people they have, who are the best at taking ordinary or even poor performers and making top performers out of them. In fact, the ugliest side effect of this belief is that so many companies have concluded that "obviously" even the best team has a certain percentage of "under-performers" in it, so every team must fire or demote (or at least withhold incentives from) that percentage of its people. Really? Actual evidence shows that some teams are already made up of top performers, that applying that dangerous half-truth to such a team only wrecks the team, that it actually lowers performance. Not to mention the fact that pitting employees against each other for the best rewards, while it does do a little to incentivize the top performers, absolutely guarantees that nobody will even try to improve the performance of their worst-performing team members. I mean really, seriously, think about it: when you learn a way to be more productive, do you rush out to tell your competitors in other companies how to do it, too? No, of course not. So what makes you think that your people will share their productivity "secrets" with their internal competitors? Or even with you, if they think you might give away their advantage to someone else who'd use it to compete with them?

"The best way to get people to do what you need them to do is to pay extra for it?" Uh, no, not most of the time. Actual comparisons of which companies did well with what companies did poorly show that many of the best companies offered minor financial rewards to top performers, and the rest none at all; the others, through sheer self-selection bias, attracted only the most greedy, dishonest, and mercenary employees who set out to do, not what is right for the company or the team, but what brought them the most money personally. In study after study, the strongest, harshest, most unequal incentive systems were statistically associated with the most corrupt, dishonest, and destructive behavior.

"Strategy is destiny, it's better to do the right thing poorly than the wrong thing well?" Uh, not so much. Sure, doing the wrong thing is bad, but it's not nearly so hard to tell what the wrong thing to be doing is as is made out; actual strategy for a company or a department can probably be decided in one meeting of a couple of hours' length every year or two. No, actual evidence shows that the best companies are the ones that only change strategy when there is clear and unambiguous evidence that the only strategy isn't working, and who dedicate their actual attention the rest of the time to better and better implementation.

"Change or die?" Depends: is it really that dire? And is there actual evidence that the change is doable, the need is real, that we're going to make the right change as opposed to some random change, and that things really will be better after the change? And will the economic gains from the change outweigh the costs of the change? If not, then no; if not, you're better off with "get better at what you're doing, or die."

"Great leaders are in total control of their companies?" Uh, no; nobody ever is in complete control of their companies. No, from dozens of examples, both statistical of companies in the wild and in laboratory studies of leadership in teams, they show that good leaders are the ones who project confidence, yes (or else they don't get to stay in charge), but who also know that it's more important for them to design company systems, to learn and to teach, and to say the things that set the culture and tone of the organization than it is for them to micro-manage, that it's better leadership (not in theory, but in demonstrated fact) to concentrate on only doing those things and to otherwise get the heck out of peoples' way and let them do their jobs. And no, what the best leaders have in common is not how much control they exercise over the people under them, but how much effort they put into maintaining their own private humility, their own willingness to continue to privately question their own decisions and to keep looking for evidence that they might be wrong and might need to change their minds.

But the actual examples of bad ideas themselves, in chapters 3 through 8, are meant to be merely examples. Oh, sure, for a lot of managers who read this book and who lack the grounding, education, and inclination to actually think, those couple of dozen demonstrably half-true popular myths or demonstrably dangerously wrong classic blunders will be all they take out of it. Probably the most you could hope for, if your boss read this book, is that Pfeffer and Sutton might actually grudgingly persuade them out of continuing with some truly awful management fad or pervasive cultural bias that's wrecking your life. But some percentage of the managers who read this will, one can reasonably hope, have a moment of satori and set out to develop the habit of asking the kinds of questions that result in actual evidence and actually meaningful reasoning. Are my assumptions true, or false? Has anybody actually tried this, and of everybody who tried this (not just the winners, but the losers as well) what were their results? If nobody has tried this, how (and when) will I know if I was wrong, so I can change course? How (and when) will I know that I'm right, so I can share this with other people in the company and everybody can benefit from it? That would be actual thinking. It's hard. It's not obvious. It's unusual. But the companies (and countries) that do it best will be the ones that succeed.

So maybe what you should really hope is that your boss will read it, and he and the other managers at his or her level will take up a collection among themselves to buy their boss a copy, too?

I was expecting a firestorm over Sunday morning's piece. I was a little bit proud of it even before Patrick Nielsen-Hayden and Arthur Hlavety promoted it and David Brin (!!!) showed up to praise it; I put a little bit of work into this one. And I knew that there is no more reliable path to Internet notoriety than mocking the libertarians, who are famously thin-skinned; libertarianism is legendarily one of those "third rail" topics on the Internet, the ultimate sacred cow. If you don't take criticism (and hate screeds) gracefully, mock the libertarians (and especially the "Objectivists") at your peril. (Non-LiveJournal.com readers: I apologize for the occasional lengthy delays unscreening comments; I will say, in my defense, that it was a holiday weekend and I was busy much of that time.)

But the piece really only started as two independent bits of mental fanfic. Yes, fanfic. Sure, I despise Ayn Rand's philosophy. But I'm not a whole lot crazier about Ernest Callenbach's, and I love Ecotopia. I'm generally a fan of political SF that puts some thought into alternate ways the world might be arranged, whether dystopian or utopian. I think Anthem may actually be the best dystopian novel ever written. And even Atlas Shrugged, for all its didacticism, flawed political theory, and utter failure to predict the present, I find better than John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which even shares Rand's horrific recommendation for saving the world: mass die-off. And Zanzibar won the Hugo, for crying out loud. Similarly, Anthem makes most of the same points that Orwell made in 1984. But it makes them in a more plausible way, in a more chilling way, with more compelling language, and in a substantially more concise way.

And, well, when I read almost any novel I like, the book goes on in my head beyond what the author wrote. I think about what I would have done differently than the main characters. I think about what comes afterwards for the characters and their world. If the novel doesn't explicitly say how the world it's set in came about, I think about that, too. It was largely by coincidence that I noticed that the real likely outcome of Atlas Shrugged lined up astonishingly closely with the facts as stated in Anthem. Yes, I know that Anthem was written first. Yes, I know that Ayn Rand's personal vision of how the world of Anthem would come to be would be by steady expansion of communism, liberalism, environmentalism, and political correctness, not as a reaction against techno-libertarian utopians. But by the time I was reading Ayn Rand, anybody with eyes in his head could see that actual communism was in full-fledged retreat everywhere in the world, including in the so-called Communist bloc countries themselves. Heinlein's 1950 prophesy that by the year 2000, the the Soviet Union would be capitalist and democratic, but that they'd still be calling themselves communist, turned out to be more nearly true than Rand's irrational fear that communism would conquer the world. No, by the 1980s, right-wing pseudo-libertarian corporate fascism, sold under the bogus rubric of "the free market" (which is anything but) and "deregulation" (which turned out to be a code word for "legislation by corporations only") was doing an amazing job of discrediting the very idea of free market entrepreneurial capitalism all over the world; by the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000, or if not then, then certainly when the US did to Iraq what Germany did to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the name of "freedom," the idea that the world might sweep in some kind of pious moralistic and anti-capitalist dictatorship in reaction to libertarian rhetoric, that idea was uncomfortably feasible. Hence: "Shrug Harder."

But even while I was thinking about this, other events conspired to cause me to rethink a literally sacred cliché in American politics: "All government is by the consent of the governed." It's an oversimplification of John Locke's hugely influential 1689 2nd Treatise on Government, and where the traditional American interpretation goes far beyond what Locke was saying is this: Locke was arguing that in an ideal society, governmental legitimacy would depend upon the mechanisms of democratic consent, rather than monarchical fiat or other imposition of force. But American thinkers and teachers are more likely to argue it not as a utopian ideal but as a law of nature: not that all government ought to be by the consent of the governed, but that it is always within the power of the governed to withdraw their consent, overthrow a government they no longer consent to, and (in Jefferson's famous words, from the American Declaration of Independence) "to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." And, indeed, examples abound, both good and bad, from the French Revolution to both Russian Revolutions to the Iranian Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Polish Solidarity uprising to the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, all of them incidents when the people withdrew their consent and government fell, for better or for worse.

So be it. But the thought's been growing on me, for a while now, that not everybody's consent is weighted evenly, nor can it be. There will always be people whose consent to be governed is more important than yours or mine, because they have a lot more power to withdraw their consent than you or I ever will. Coups d'etat are, after all, still the most common method by which governmental executives change around the world; anybody who commands an army's loyalty has the power to withdraw the army's consent to be governed by the current government. The Kamalist Democracy model pioneered by Mustafa Kamal Ataturk even institutionalizes this, as the people of Turkey have come to rely upon as a protection against religious sectarianism and the people of Pakistan and Egypt have come to regret. In the US, we institutionalized a long list of measures to prevent this, from the explicit depolitization of the military officer class to intense indoctrination of all American citizens to resist military coup to the intentional cultivation of inter-service rivalries. But even here in the US, there's another group that's even more able than the army to withdraw their consent and bring down the state, or more or less so. And they're the very ones that the first democracy, Athens under the constitution of the divinely-inspired Solon, went to so much trouble to disarm: the wealthy. If nothing else, the very first democracy had to explicitly recognize that as long as wealthy individuals can hire their own mercenary armies, then if those mercenary armies ever become bigger or more dangerous than the people's own army, then the consent of the people or of the people's elected government or the people's army becomes irrelevant. And this did in fact turn out to be no small part of how democracy died in Athens.

It's never come to that in America, although we've had one rather famous brush with it, when wealthy financiers tried to finance their own coup d'etat against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the infamous Business Plot. America's institutional safeguards, and the Commander General of the Marine Corps' personal integrity, kept it from going that far. Nonetheless, by no later than the early 1980s, what wealthy financiers and corporate CEOs did to America, and what they've continued doing since then regardless of which party has ruled the White House or Congress, despite pleas to their conscience and extensive taxpayer-funded bribes to change their minds, can only be reasonably described as virtually all of the owners of American industrial capital withdrawing their consent to be governed by the United States federal government. Overthrowing that government having turned out to be impractical, even after a multi-decade propaganda campaign, they have done what the John Galts of the world can not be stopped from doing: they looted the country of every capital asset that wasn't nailed down and shipped it overseas, preferring to have their actual business operations "governed" in third-world hellholes from Mexico to Thailand where the laws were more to their liking.

I find it absolutely worth reminding my fellow liberal progressives that unless you can, like the divinely-inspired Solon, persuade the wealthy to consent to your laws, it doesn't do you any good to write them. It is entirely within their power to withdraw their consent to be governed, to liquidate every asset they own in this country (roughly 90% of it, I remind you) and send it overseas. That failure to continue to persuade the wealthy that the taxes they were paying and the regulations they were enduring were what protected their profit margins from unprofitable races to the bottom, to persuade them that campaign finance reform and other anti-corruption methods were what protected their own businesses and their own fortunes from the depredations of their fellow rich, that failure deserves to be writ large as the great failure of the Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations, and of the Democratic political thinkers of the 1970s.

I don't know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn't explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It's probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between "All You Zombies" and "If This Goes On."

Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a "free energy" machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth's own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company's management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn't get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

And that's where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I'm whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity's saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt's manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that's not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We're looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor's village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers' twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

Because she died without telling anyone, it's not entirely clear how Shrug Harder would have ended. We know that at some point, at least one of the Strikers does leave Galt Valley. He built a high-tech home, stuffed it with a library and all the wonders of the Strikers' science, and then (apparently) set out to make contact with the nearest survivors' village, assuming that they'd worship him as a god for his technological superiority, assuming they'd cheerfully feed him and provide him with anything he wanted for the products of his labor. And, rather obviously, they did what anybody would do: they executed him for crimes against humanity. His technological redoubt was never found. Did other Strikers meet the same fate, or are they all holed up in Galt Valley still? We'll never know. But that brings us to the book that would clearly have been relabeled once the trilogy was complete ... Atlas Shrugged 3: Anthem.

Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it's a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers' personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt's Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. The massive die-off from John Galt's strike has resulted in the rise of the most vicious and backwards and cruelly unfair totalitarian regime in human history. And our nameless hero slowly has it dawn on him that the ruling council is so afraid of selfishness that they're retarding any attempt to restore human technological civilization, no matter how miserable and stunted low-tech life is, until they figure out some way to integrate technological progress into their civilization without anybody being able to claim credit for it. Which cannot possibly work.

Our nameless hero, having found working light bulbs and a working electrical system in the ruins of the city his farming town is built over, even offers to forgo personal credit for the discovery, offers to accept no credit for it at all. But their paranoia and terror that he's a prospective future Striker pushes them to hound him to the point where in desperation he and his girlfriend flee the city into the uninhabited wasteland ... where they find the technological trove, and the library, left behind by the unnamed Striker at the end of Shrug Harder. He and his now wife settle down to raise children, to use the subsistence farming skills they learned from their own civilization to sustain them, to gather any other stragglers who escape the cities, and to stay out of sight until they find a way to overthrow the horribly dictatorial Councils that rule the world and lead it to a saner middle ground, one that (presumably) knows to watch out for civilization-wreckers like John Galt but that also knows that giving personal credit is a prerequisite for technological advance. It is, if not an entirely happy ending, a hopeful one.

---

Oh, except for one thing. I made up the whole bit about the second book. I don't think Ayn Rand was aware enough of the limitations of her philosophy for her to realize that the communo-primitivist dictatorship of Anthem, not a techno-libertarian utopia, would be the inevitable outcome of a genocide of almost the entire human race by techno-libertarians. Oops. Never mind, then. Sorry!

True story.

I'm not really close to any of my family, but I hear of one of them rather more often than the others. About once every three or four years, he makes the news locally, in some minor way, and I recognize his name: he's in law enforcement, and he's the officer quoted in some news story about that often. And I notice something every time, without exception. But first, some preface.

I've scarcely seen him at all since a family holiday event a smidgen over 25 years ago. I was back from college, he was a recent college graduate working for the county police department. And it came up in conversation that he'd been recently assigned to the vice and narcotics squad, working undercover. Knowing what I knew about vice and narcotics work in general, and about the then truly awful reputation of the county's vice and narcotics squad, I expressed my sympathy, and assured him that most officers find it pretty easy to rotate out within at most a year or two. He demured, and stated right out loud that he'd asked for the transfer to narcotics and vice, and intended to make a career out of it. I couldn't square that with his life-long reputation as the straightest of straight arrows in the family, as someone with zero taste for any kind of moral or ethical compromise, couldn't see how he could do work that compromises you ethically and morally even in the cleanest of departments, which the county vice and narcotics squad absolutely wasn't at the time. He couldn't understand what part of it was confusing me. So after talking past each other for a while, I brought up all the scandals I'd seen in the past year's worth of newspapers, asked how a guy who felt the way he did could make the ethical and moral compromises necessary to do undercover work at all, let alone participate in cover-ups of criminal activity by fellow officers and superior officers, and not want to escape it as fast as possible?

I think I was expecting some kind of nuanced answer. I did not get one, nor was I braced at all for what I got: an explosion. Incoherent, angry raving and screaming. To which, being no more mature than any other 20-something, I responded by trying to yell over him to try to ask him what he was yelling about, which, of course, only made things worse. The family began to steadily gather around us from other rooms, to see what the yelling was about, just in time for he and I to figure out exactly what the point of conflict was between us:

My relative is firmly of the opinion that it is flatly never acceptable to place your own moral judgment above that of anybody in authority over you. Ever. Not only is it never acceptable, it's never moral. Not only is it never moral, it is never even legal, he insisted. Not only is it illegal, but it's a sign of a sick mind; only the most twisted and psychopathic and immoral of perverted reprobates says that their moral judgment is more reliable and more trustworthy than that of any authority figure over them. If someone in authority over you tells you that something is moral, then either that settles it, or you're the kind of criminal monster sicko that guys like my relative have sworn to protect society against. And when he got that across to me, I lost my temper even bigger than he had. I reminded him of the Fourth Nuremberg Principle, as I'd been taught it all the way back in first grade: "I was only following orders" is not a defense, it's an indictment. I reminded him that we had sent Nazi and Japanese war criminals to long prison sentences for not exercising independent moral judgment when given immoral orders by their superiors. Within seconds, we were both screaming apoplectics, and that's when the whole family stepped in to separate us. Both his mother and my father said the same thing: "There is no way for you two to ever talk to each other ever again, if that's how you both feel." And we've both stuck to it, even at my parents' funerals; he stays over there, I stay over here. Even though he's almost one of the only living relatives I have in the local area, we never, ever interact, and it suits us both just fine.

And the thing is, in the immediate aftermath of that screaming match, my parents said something to me that took me decades to even grudgingly accept the possibility of: they told me that both he and I are completely insane on this subject. Someone who can never accept another person's moral authority when that person is in authority is just as crazy as someone who can never question it, they told me; the sane course is to know when the other person's moral authority is more trustworthy than your own, and to know when to question it. Some days, I can even intellectually accept that. But I cannot make myself actually believe it. I can be persuaded, when no moral issue is at stake, to follow orders I disagree with, because I accept that sometimes it's just not up to me. When moral issues are at stake but those in authority decree that there is to be no punishment for the path that's abhorrent to me, I can usually pretty effortlessly persuade myself to suspend judgment on others, usually even mind my own business, especially in cases where the people who're accepting the moral mis-steps are themselves the only ones being ripped off or hurt. But I can never, ever, ever judge right and wrong, especially as it applies to my own actions, by any standard other than my own moral compass.

Chalk it up as more evidence that I'm crazy, I know. But here's the thing I notice, every time he's in the news: he's gotten another promotion. Every couple of years, he moves up in rank, moves to a more prestigious department, or both. My particular insanity on this subject has rendered me unemployable, made enough actual and potential employers and co-workers uncomfortable as to have explicitly cost me three jobs, for not being unethical enough. Even when I was willing to go along to get along, people felt judged. His insanity, on the other hand, has been steadily lucrative for him, a lifetime source of satisfaction and prestige. And that makes me uncomfortable in ways I can't even begin to express, not all of which I even understand myself.

I have no doubt that when you were a kid, at least once in your life you went to your parents and asked for permission to do something that "everybody else" was doing. And I predict with utter confidence, because it's probably something that all parents say, that your parents asked you, "if everybody else jumped off of a cliff, would you?" If you have kids of your own now, you've probably even said it to them. But you know, a funny thing happens when you ask a question like that to a kid whose brain expects symbolic language to be interpreted literally. I know that I asked, "Well, why did they all jump off of the cliff?" Because, after all, I couldn't possibly predict what I'd do in a situation like that without knowing more of the facts, right? I haven't thought about it a whole lot over the intervening years. But after the dot-com bubble and the sub-prime mortage lending melt-down, I've had occasion to think about it as a metaphor for an entire class of problems in politics and economics. So let's take this metaphor, shall we, and stretch it beyond all rational comprehension:

Let us posit that you are up on an actual cliff with a statistically significant number of strangers, none of whom's word or judgment (or interest in protecting your interests) you may assume that you trust, let's say a thousand or more. You happen to be standing near the edge of the cliff. You look down, and it is 100% clear to you that if anybody jumps off of that cliff, well, some of them might survive, even a few survive unhurt, but that's not the most likely outcome for any one of them. If you jump off of that cliff, the odds are very, very high that you will at least break an arm or a leg, and uncomfortably high that you'll die. So, having investigated the situation based on the facts, you will quite smugly conclude that only idiots jump off of that cliff. And you will therefore smugly conclude, when you see someone jump off of that cliff, that that person was an idiot, that they probably didn't look. Will you still be just as smug when, over the course of some span of time, several more do? Of course you will. The facts are still on your side. How about when the number of people who've jumped off of that cliff passes twenty or so? Now peer pressure is starting to kick in. But if you're the kind of person who reads this blog, the odds are you'll stick to your guns and tell all of your friends not to jump off of that cliff.

But at some point, if the steady stream of people jumping off of that cliff keeps going by you, you are actually insane if you don't at least ask, "what do they know that I don't?" Or at least, "What do they think that they know that I don't?" I mean, if nothing else, you're going to keep feeling awfully smug, standing up on top of that cliff, as the last person jumps off, feeling really superior for being the only guy smart enough not to jump off of that cliff. Will you still feel smug as you're getting eaten by the bear everybody else was running from, that you didn't see because you were busy feeling smug?

So okay, that's probably not what's going on. Humans are lemmings. (Yes, I know, lemmings aren't really "lemmings," it's a horrible hoax perpetrated on us by Disney. Google it, if you don't know what I mean.) Once herd behavior sets in, most of the people who are jumping off of that cliff couldn't even tell you why they're doing it. But that doesn't mean that there's no reason. Let's talk about the likely reason. Let's assume that what the first guy to jump off the cliff noticed was that there's something really nice down there. He did the math, decided to over-value the reward and under-value the risk, and jumped. Maybe he died. Probably he died; the first guy to do something risky, the first person with a new idea, the first company to enter any given market, almost always does. Even if he didn't die, he probably didn't do well enough to enjoy the benefits of whatever was down there that he jumped for. If nothing else, he's got a broken arm or something, but all the doctors and so forth are up on top of the cliff, with you, because that's where everybody is.

But at some point, just by sheer odds, somebody who jumps off of that cliff actually manages a safe landing, and now he's got the monopoly on the nice thing. That's when envy kicks in. Even beyond envy, though, something even bigger kicks in: somebody else has shown that jumping off of the cliff to get the good thing is actually possible. Now people want to try even more. If nothing else, they're going to over-estimate their personal chances of making it because of one particular bit of math that humans really suck at, the same bit of math that (according to a AAA survey I saw years ago) causes 85% of all drivers to consider themselves above average. So now more and more people are jumping off of the cliff. Nobody's looking at the people who didn't make it, because they assume that they won't be one of those people, that they're better than that. If they do look at the people who didn't make it, what they're doing is landing on those people to cushion their fall, because let's face it, the first wave of people to jump off of any particular cliff are like that.

But you're probably not like that. You're not interested in jumping off of a cliff, piling more injury on top of the injured people you land on, for a chance at some dubious benefit, when you're perfectly fine up on top of the cliff. So now, in addition to feeling smug about having been smart enough not to jump off of the cliff, you're feeling morally superior, too. Will you continue feeling super smart and morally superior when you have a heart attack, or your appendix bursts, and you look around and find out that all of the medical personnel are down at the bottom of the cliff, dealing with broken legs and broken ribs and cracked skulls? Too bad for you, but society will always focus its problem-solving efforts on where the most common problems are, not on the ones that only a few people have. Least of all, the ones that only people who are famously smug and self-righteous have, hmm?

Under no circumstance do you want to be one of the first people to jump off of the cliff. The odds are poor. The support resources haven't been deployed. The strategies for surviving the jump are poorly documented. The competition for the nice thing is at its fiercest. And if you do get hurt, you'll get no, and I mean no, sympathy. Nor, under almost any circumstances, do you want to be the guy who refuses to jump no matter what the facts are, because even if you're not wrong, you'll get no benefit out of being right. And in general, you don't even want to risk being one of the last people to jump, because whatever resources are down there to help the people who got hurt from jumping are likely to have run out, and whatever the good thing was is likely to have been used up, so the risk/reward ratio gets skewed the wrong way all over again.

So, having thought about what I just wrote, when everybody else, and I mean everybody else, starts one by one jumping off of the cliff, are you sure you'd never jump? No? If sooner or later you would jump, when would you? Are you one of the people who risks being one of the first to jump, in hopes of securing that mythical "first mover advantage?" Are you somebody who waits until enough people have failed, until you've carefully calculated that there are people to land on? Are you somebody who waits until half of the people up on top of the cliff with you have jumped, figuring that even if you don't know why they're jumping, over half the people can't be wrong? Are you somebody who waits until nearly everybody has jumped, who jumps only because the last of the resources you depend upon are going to help the people who jumped? Or are you one of those smug people who's so certain, once you've made up your mind that jumping doesn't make sense, that you never change your mind and never jump, betting you won't need any help up there by yourself?

Anarchy is, briefly, the absence of government, the absence of hierarchy. But as soon as inevitable randomness and uneven distribution of skill introduces even relative wealth into anarchy, it spirals inevitably into tribal warlordism. That's not speculation. That's historical fact. Anarchy isn't the path to human freedom, it's the path to the worst form of government known to all of history, one that guarantees that everybody, even the warlords themselves, dies young and lives crushingly awful lives. The closest things to historical counter-examples that you can point to are all in deserts so barren that nobody ever gets wealthy enough to hire their neighbors to protect their stuff; do you really want to live like that? And if so, what are you doing living indoors and typing on the Internet?

That anarchy cannot possibly work does not condemn us to an eternity under some hereditary hierarchy's boot. That's a false dichotomy. Contrary to what Mr. O'Brien predicted to Winston Smith in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, history has not marched in irreversible lock-step towards "a boot stamping on a human face - forever." On the contrary; virtually everywhere outside of the former Spanish colonies, no brutal dictatorship has lasted long enough that anybody born under one who lived a normal length life died under it. Even the among the medieval and Renaissance European monarchies, few of which were as brutal or dictatorial as American propaganda would tell you, none of them lasted more than a couple of hundred years, and were seldom brutal for longer than a couple of years at a time. No, a brutal hierarchy starving its own people falls within at most one lifetime, if for no other reason than this: its neighbors' citizens make their whole society more wealthy, funding an even better army for the less brutal adjacent government, and fight harder for it.

Remember this, as I pointed out yesterday: there is no reliable way to force wealthy people to give up their wealth. At best, you end up overthrowing them with even more brutal dictatorships that are just as hierarchical, like the Bolsheviks in 1917 or the Terror in France in 1793, or in mass starvation leading to a third to two thirds of the population dying over the course of a decade or so, as happened all over the Mediterranean circa 1200 BCE. Under circumstances of any less brutal slaughter than that, it will always come down to this: however much force or law or religion or custom you can muster to take the wealthy people's wealth, power, and force away from them, they can muster more to keep it. If nothing else, it is always in their power to starve enough of the rest of the population into a willingness to fight for their oppressors, if that's the only means available to feed their own kids. Doubt it? Go back and look at the history of the mining strikes in the US in the early 20th century. No, then, now, and forever throughout human history, there has ever been a way to have a middle class, a way for the poor to live anything but the most dirt-eating miserable lives, because the wealthy people gave in and let them.

And the only reason they have ever done so was because they were persuaded that it was the only way for them to get ahead. You know that lie that the modern philosophers sold us back in the 1970s and 1980s, "a rising tide lifts all boats" the slogan went, that making the wealthy people wealthier would benefit us all? Lie. The current President's father was telling only the truth when he called it "voodoo economics." A rising tide does, in fact, lift all boats, but giving more and more wealth to the wealthy doesn't raise the tide. What raises the tide is raising everybody up, starting with the poorest of the poor; that's what lifts all incomes in society, including the wealthy's. Again, you want an example? I was living in a city during the dot-com bubble that went into "negative unemployment," where companies were bidding against each other in raises to compete for the only "suitable" workers, and desperately hauling in the "unsuitable" and finding ways to make them minimally suitable. The modern philosophers, sold on the lie of trickle-down economics, cried "doom!" Instead, the companies that were temporarily forced to raise wages found out that their sales went up faster than their wages; their own employees and other people's could suddenly afford to buy the products the wealthy had piling up in warehouses before. When the dot-com bubble burst, unemployment went up, and wages in that city stopped rising, fell relative to inflation same as the rest of us. And suddenly those same companies, owned by the wealthy, are reporting sharply lower sales and falling profits. Funny how that works. Eventually they'll figure it out.

The wealthy never give up their money voluntarily? How much do you know about the Ivy League university system in America?

Social class serves as a floor under the individual, as disaster-proofing against the inevitable time in your life when something goes wrong. Other members of your social class and above aren't afraid that if they give you the money and other help you need when things go wrong they'll be throwing money down a rathole, throwing good money after bad, because you display the class signifiers that persuade them that if you are kept at your current social class level, you'll be able to continue on your own without further help once the current crisis is dealt with. That's why upper-class etiquette manuals have been best-sellers for the middle class ever since 1528. And in America, one of the fundamental pillars of upper class society, the place where even the children of the upper class have to go if they want to learn the last bits of the language of the upper class, and make the upper class contacts outside of their home town and family they'll need some day, and acquire the credentials needed to convince other upper class people that they're not worthless layabout bums, is the Ivy League university. Now, remember what I said about how you can never create a system where the wealthy give up everything? Unsurprisingly, the wealthy people who voluntarily fund the heck out of the Ivy League schools insist that roughly half of all admissions are reserved for wealthy kids. But only about half.

The other half are awarded on merit, with a special effort made to look for merit among the working class and the middle class. That's how the dirt poor son of a single mother in a trailer park in one of the most god-awful poor places in America enters the upper class. Would we be a lot better off if, like China under the Confucians, all of those upper class educational positions were awarded strictly on merit? Of course. But how are you ever going to persuade the wealthy people who fund those schools, and who have control over enough of the economy to starve off any attempt to overthrow them, to give up all of those seats? No, they didn't have to give up any of them. But not only can said single mother's son from a trailer park go to an Ivy League school, rich people pay for most of his tuition and costs if he does. Voluntarily. Why? Because they learned in America, as they're learning all around the world, what a great idea that is. It increases the flow of good ideas that originate outside the upper class up to where the upper class will hear them. It co-opts the people most likely to be able to organize trouble for the upper class and gives them an incentive to protect it. It gives everybody outside the upper class reason to hope that the system will reward their hard work if they work hard, by making a place at the top for their own kids.

Even at today's gutted top tax rates, the wealthiest quarter or so of the population pay for half of what gets done in this country. And as they've spent the last 25 or 30 years reminding us, they don't have to. If they get it into their heads that the money they give up is being poured down ratholes, that good money is being thrown after bad, they have it in their power to hire think tanks to persuade the voting public to defend the wealthy's wealth instead of taxing it. For a while, anyway. But it won't last; eventually, the wealthy people will need more people to sell things to, will need the remaining workers to work harder than downtrodden slaves ever do. The reason to have hope in politics even in a world where hierarchy and unequal distribution of wealth are inevitable is that beyond a certain point, both because they get tired of having to spend all their time and money lawyering up and hiring lobbyists to defend themselves from each other and because they need the rest of us to work hard and be able to afford to buy the stuff they have to sell, the wealthy smarten up just like the rest of us do.

Persuading them, and persuading all of the rest of the voting public, that the wealthy are better off with capped access to wealth and power and that everybody, including the wealthy, are better off with a comparatively egalitarian distribution of wealth, is not only easier than overthrowing the system, it's safer. As a once-wise man once said to me, the problem with violent revolution is that people with guns and uniforms become inordinately influential, and the garbage doesn't get picked up on time.

How did I forget that anarchism is one of the ur-topics of the Internet? There are ur-topics, you know: subjects that all Internet conversation eventually devolves to. Libertarianism. Abortion. Gun control. The Christian Bible. Regulation of the Internet. A few others. And yeah, anarchism. And there I went and touched the third rail. Well, okay, in for a penny, in for a pound. If I'm going to get wet, I'm going to get good and soaking wet. Here is what strikes me as so repeatedly proven and so demonstrably true that, after about age 25 or so, if you continue to believe to the contrary it lowers my opinion of your intellect: anarchism is to political philosophy what Flat Earth is to geography, what young-Earth creationism is to biology, what communism is to economics. It's something that sounds very tempting when you're young, frustrated, and as ignorant as a cow. I forget who it was who said that anybody who's never had the urge to run out the guns and hoist the black flag has no soul, but that part is true. But let's dispose of the idea that it would actually work, shall we? Trivially easily.

If you were to somehow accumulate all of the wealth in the world and divide it evenly among everybody in the human race ... well, for one thing, most of us would starve, because the act of dividing up that wealth would almost certainly wreck an awful lot of our productive capacity. But even if you found some way to avoid that pitfall, let's face it: by the end of the first week, it would be distributed unevenly, if for no other reason than no cure has ever been found for the urge to gamble. Even if you managed to stifle short-term gambling and managed to educate people completely out of short-term stupidism first, by the end of the first year the amount of wealth people had would vary widely. Two farmers on side-by-side fields planting the same crops with the same equipment in roughly the same soil; one of them's going to have more luck than the other, with rainfall or pests or whatever, and he's going to harvest more crops. That's just as true in every other line of work. Attribute it to luck, attribute it to spirits, attribute it to God or the gods, but not everybody who does the same thing ends up with the same outcome.

So if you want egalitarianism, somebody's going to have to go around and tally up everything that everybody has every year (at least), divide by the number of people, and take away everything above that from the people who have it and give it to the people who have less than that. Now frankly, this is already the point in the conversation at which we've demonstrated that anarchism is deranged: once you have the mandatory power to compel taxation, it's a government, no matter what you call it. But there have always been a handful of anarchists who've insisted that if people weren't somehow traumatized by living under government or taught bad habits by a government, they'd never think to object to giving away all of their excess wealth. This has been tried. Over and over and over again. The net result is that everybody starves. Every time. You can not "educate" a human being to recognize an identical need in his neighbor as just as pressing a need as the same need when he feels it himself. You can not "educate" a human being to recognize that if he and his neighbor are working equally hard, he isn't working harder than that lazy bum over there. You don't have to be on the autism spectrum to fail to recognize other people's identical pain as being as intense as your own; on the contrary, it may actually be easier to teach this to those of us on the autism spectrum, because we rely on harder to spoof cues, like actual facts rather than emotional expressions. Every time "from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs" has been tried, the result has without exception been that people over-state their needs and under-estimate their own abilities, under-estimate everybody else's needs and over-state everybody else's abilities. No exception has ever been recorded, no matter what education (spiritual or practical) went into the population, however carefully selected, before the experiment has been begun.

But okay, let's assume that you have found some hitherto unknown way to do just that, to make everybody agree on what sharing fairly looks like. We are already deep into false-to-fact counterfactual territory here, but to humor the anarchists, let's keep going. After all, the experiment they want us all to undertake has been tried many times, some times have gotten farther than others. What happens next? Without exception in all of recorded history, someone concludes that if people would stop taking away his stuff every year, he could make even more stuff, and next year there'd be a lot more to share. He might even be right, up to a certain point. Or he could be kidding himself, which is going to be true more often. Either way, after a few years of resenting watching his stuff get carted away by the redistributors, it is as sure as the sun coming up in the morning going to occur to him that for less than what was taken from him, he could hire his own armed guards to turn back the redistributors. And now he's a warlord.

But the real problem doesn't even get started until two people think of this. Because maybe he really was right; maybe he could produce a lot more, and he and his warriors live well, and maybe he even stays educated like the anarchists assure us he would and wants to share the same amount with the greater community that the redistributors were taking away from him before. It could happen. I know it could happen; it has happened before. What happens, though, the first time somebody else raises their own private army to guard their stuff? One of the two of them looks over at the other one's private army and goes, "oh, crap, if he wanted to, he could send them over to take away my stuff." So now he has to have a bigger army. Maybe he gets more productive. Probably he does. But the same logic that applied to the two farmers with side-by-side fields applies here: even if he and the other nearby warlord start with equal resources and equal skill, by sheer luck one of them is going to end up richer than the other one. Which means that he can afford the bigger army. So now what does the unlucky warlord do? Now it's a matter of life and death; screw egalitarianism, I've got to get a bigger army. So now by simple logic he has no choice but to go on a war of conquest against any non-warlords he can conquer, and redistribution now goes the other way now: from the poor to the rich, to fund an arms race. History does not yet record a single instance of this experiment being tried where, if it even made it this far, that isn't what happened.

And if we stopped there, the people with Social Dominance Orientation would be right. But they're not. Observe.

During the dark age that followed the crisis of 1200 BCE, modern-day Greece was settled by two different tribes, both of them people who'd deliberately left civilization with an intent to never be ruled again. Within a couple of generations, though, they were already up to their necks in tribal warlords, and most of the population was starving to fund armies to defend the rival warlords from each other. After one particularly ugly spasm of inter-tribal warfare, all of the tribal warlords in the area around Athens agreed to a negotiated settlement. They picked one guy with a reputation for being fair, and swore their most sacred oaths to obey whatever peace treaty he wrote. The man's name was Solon, and he went far, far beyond his mandate, deciding instead to solve the original problem of warlordism. He abused their oaths to make them agree to one more round of really aggressive confiscation and redistribution, in this case of the farmland, along with a total wiping clean of all recorded debt. He then set up several limits by which anybody who got anywhere near amassing enough wealth to be able to afford an army would have it taken away from him before it got that far; he could have more wealth than anybody less hard working and less lucky, right up to that point, but no farther. And he incorporated a set of political and religious monitoring and auditing systems whereby if anybody did try to keep enough wealth to be able to raise an army of his own, everybody else would know it ... and know to descend on him en masse and stop him.

Solon was not given a mandate to redistribute land and wealth as radically as he did. They were bound by their oaths to obey, but they weren't bound by oath not to punish him. Every single wealthy warlord spent money they were about to lose anyway, before the redistributors got there, to hire the best hired killers in the region to track down Solon and kill him. He barely escaped with his life, and fled into exile under an assumed name. But here's the funny thing: seven years later, those same rich people sent out embassies to the whole known world, begging for Solon to come home, because having seen how it worked out, they had to admit that he had been right. Divinely inspired Solon, they called him thereafter, for the next several hundred years. And divinely inspired he may well have been; he was displaying the clear mark of inspiration, someone operating far beyond their own known capabilities. But seven years into this system, the rich people of Athens realized that they had never been as afraid of their own poor people as they were of their fellow wealthy people; that they had squandered so much money on defending themselves from hypothetical or actual threats from their fellow wealthy people that they were living better, more comfortably without the money than they had been when they had it.

Look, one great constant throughout all of history is that rich people arise through inescapable laws of nature. And once they do, there is no way to make them share any of that with us. You will never come up with a system where the people who have more can't find some way to hire guards, bribe judges and priests, impress the public with their short-term generosity, and hire writers and poets and philosophers to convince everybody else that they the rich people are right to insist on keeping all of their stuff. If Plato and Socrates were alive today, they'd be working at the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, doing their flat level best for the same kinds of wealthy people who funded all of the philosophers except Diogenes the Cynic back in the day. (This of course makes Aristophanes the Michael Moore of ancient Athens. Don't think so? Read Clouds, a play that doesn't get staged nearly often enough if you ask me. The famous and hysterically funny debate between Good Logic and Bad Logic lacks only Powerpoint slides of being right out of Roger and Me.) But history has shown, and not just in ancient Athens, that if you persuade the rich that they are better off giving up an awful lot of the stuff they earn or make, as long as all of their fellow rich people have to do so too, then they're all better off, even if all you can appeal to is the logic of negotiated mutual arms reduction.

Think it wouldn't happen here? It has. And does so again every generation. I've already run too long, though. I have a specific example in mind; I'll give it to you tomorrow.

I've been thinking off and on for days about Ted Rall's latest cartoon, the one I linked to yesterday: "How We Got Here." It presents a hypothetical: what if George Bush, at a press conference, had instead of blaming Saddam Hussein claimed that the Democrats had been behind 9/11, proposed that the War on Terror include sending all known and suspected Democrats to prison camps to be interrogated to find out what they know about planned terror attacks? Rall points out that because of the importance of the President of the US, there's no way journalists could refuse to report what he'd said. Assuming he'd never said anything like it before, no journalist would have experts' names and phone numbers ready on file to call for a contrary report. So standard journalistic practice would be to report the President's accusation, properly sourced. Days later, presumably, they would print follow-up articles in which experts on terrorism would counter-claim that the Democrats weren't behind 9/11. But because of journalistic standards, those articles would necessarily also include fresh statements from people who did insist that the Democrats were behind 9/11. If the newspaper were to take sides in the debate, it would do so only in the Opinions and Editorials section, and not even on page 1 of that. It would appear somewhere above the fold (presumably) on page B2 or D2. And even it would acknowledge, as a matter of course, that there are those who disagree with the newspaper and believe that the President is telling the truth, and probably include an admission that "we cannot know what classified sources have told the President about Democratic Party involvement in the 9/11 attacks" even if they then went on to disbelieve him.

The net effect would be to present this claim as two competing statements of equal value, where the readers are left to themselves to decide which side's opinion to believe. But oddly enough, this standard of reporting doesn't apply to every story in the news. Many of them, yes. But not all. Imagine, if you will, the following hypothetical exchange between a Minneapolis area newspaper reporter and his editor on the night of August 1st, 2007:

Editor: I can't use your story about the I-35W bridge collapse. It's full of unsourced statements. The whole first paragraph is unsourced.

Reporter: Beg pardon? "At 6:05 pm, during rush hour traffic, the I-35W bridge across the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis collapsed."

Editor: Who says it collapsed?

Reporter: Everybody!

Editor: You didn't cite anybody.

Reporter: I was there! I saw it with my own eyes!

Editor: You're the source? I can't use this whole article, now. I need a front page article; this is an editorial. Go write me a news article. If you're flatly determined to give your own opinion about what happened, submit this to the Editorial Board, maybe they'll run it in a couple of days. The newspaper can't take a stand on this until tensions have died down some and we've had time to analyze expert opinions. We don't want people thinking that the newspaper jumped to conclusions based on one reporter's personal opinions.

Reporter: It's not a matter of opinion! The bridge is actually lying in the river in pieces!

Editor: So now you're an expert on bridges? The newspaper is supposed to cite you as someone who, based on your own expert opinion, believes that the bridge has collapsed into the river?

Reporter: What if I said I was enough of an expert on bridges to tell a collapsed bridge from an intact one? What would that change?

Editor: I'd say that we still can't use your piece. Because running that opinion as your professional opinion while you work for me would put the newspaper in the position of taking sides on whether or not the bridge has collapsed.

Reporter: But you can see the bridge has collapsed for yourself? Haven't you turned on a TV set all night?

Editor: So that's what your opening paragraph was really supposed to say? "According to unnamed witnesses cited by WCCO-TV, the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River at 6:05 pm"? You think I'm going to put a news story on the front page that cites a TV show, when the accusation is this serious? I need a better source than this. Call the Minnesota Department of Transportation, get somebody there on the record as saying that the bridge has collapsed, and what time. Rewrite the article and resubmit it. No, wait, before you do that ...

Reporter: Now what?

Editor: Also find out of the director of transportation is a Democrat or a Republican.

Reporter: What? Why?

Editor: Make sure you call someone from the other party before you write your story, see if they're disputing whether or not the bridge has collapsed.

Reporter: What's to dispute?!?!? The bridge fell down.

Editor: You'll never make it in journalism. That kind of attitude might fly over at City Pages, but it's got no place in my newsroom. We don't do advocacy journalism, we just report the news and let the readers decide.

I assume that nothing like this ever happened. Whether or not the bridge actually fell down is so obvious and easily demonstrably true that a statement to that effect doesn't have to be sourced. So when Alberto Gonzalez lies to Congress, such as during the scandal over the politicization of the US Attorneys, why doesn't the lead paragraph of the story say, "US Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez lied under oath to Congress today when he said ..." some easily checked demonstrable falsehood? When Dick Cheney continues to lie, for example on Meet the Press about Saddam's having ordered the 9/11 attacks, why isn't the opening sentence of the news story about this, "Vice President Dick Cheney lied on television today, falsely claiming that Saddam Hussein ordered the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the US"? When the President lies for the umpteenth time and says that the United States has never tortured anybody, why don't the reporters who've seen with their own eyes the victims of CIA torture and the victims of Abu Grahib say outright, "Today President George Bush again repeated the lie that the United States doesn't use torture"? When a lie is just as easily demonstrable a fact as whether or not a bridge has collapsed why does the statement calling that lie what it is have to be sourced, and why does it have to be balanced by another liar backing up the lie?

I know that there are at least some professional journalists who read this blog. I'm dying to hear what they say.

I was going to post my Archon/NASFiC review, but I got distracted and spent the same time writing a lengthy answer to a question somebody asked on the City of Heroes official discussion forum web page. So to kill two birds with one stone, I'll repost it here. EternalWho started a discussion with the subject, "Your kids watching you play, would you let them?" To sum it up for those of you who don't want to read the whole thing, even though City of Heroes is rated "Teen," he lets his 5 year old daughter play (an ice blast/ice manipulation blaster). He was perfectly comfortable with that, because the 5 year old understands that she's not killing people, just making them so cold that they can't fight back and sending them to jail, and understands (on some level) that she's only doing this to bad people who are hurting people. But then the 5 year old asked to play a sword-using supervillain, because she thought that would be fun. And in the middle of the tutorial, halfway through watching his little girl play a ninja blade assassin fighting her little way out of a prison riot over the bodies of the cops and prison guards who'd already been killed by the time she got out of her cell, he freaked out and took the game away from her. There were too many things going on there that he didn't want to explain, didn't want her thinking about.

It also brought up questions he'd previously been hand-waving related to "what am I teaching my kids?", like why it's okay to use super-powers to kill super-criminals, and how lame he's beginning to think his excuse was, and even bigger than that, why high level heroes in the game (like him) are willing to run or fly right past low-level crimes in progress on their way to a crime that's closer to their level. Several other parents chimed in, discussing their feelings about letting kids as young as 3 and as old as 10 play; age six was a common number for where even the most tolerant parents were unsure their kids should be playing this game. So, here's what I wrote:

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They really need to make it clearer in-game what they've explained in the out-of-game materials, that all registered heroes carry around a pocket full of "arrest teleporters." They're tiny beacons that key into the emergency medical teleporter system, only instead of teleporting the person wearing it to the nearest hospital, the people wearing arrest teleporters get teleported to the medical wing of Ziggursky Penitentiary, where superhero doctors patch them back up to stand trial. This isn't even vaguely obvious, though, because not only is it not mentioned much in game, they skipped the animation where you stick the arrest teleporter onto someone and push the button, but the reason you need to kill someone or at least beat them into a coma is that if they can struggle at all, they can knock the beacon off of themselves. You don't have to invoke "invisible police;" just tell them that when the body disappears, that's them being teleported to the jail hospital, just like daddy gets teleported to the hero hospital when he falls down too hard.

As for the rest of the original poster's questions, I better explain my own skew perspective on this. My father had his own bone to pick with the world: he thought this whole "stages of mental development" thing was a crock. He believed that children were just human beings with lower vocabularies and less experience, and that's how he raised me. If I could demonstrate safety skills with something, I was allowed to use it or play with it. If I knew to ask for a book or a record or anything, I was allowed to read it or listen to it. (It must be mentioned here that computer gaming didn't come up, considering that the childhood in question was in the 1960s, but I'm 100% certain the same principle would have applied.) And most importantly to this discussion, it was a 100% flat rule in our household that unless there was an emergency in progress and seconds counted, we children were entitled to a straight answer to any question. ANY question. And frankly, I approve of the results of this policy, and wish more parents would follow it.

So if I had been the one whose 6 year old daughter wanted to know why people are villains in the real world, or why anybody would want to play a villain, I'd call that a fair question. If you don't have it thought out yourself, "I don't know. I'll think about it, ask some people some questions, and get back to you," is a fair answer, one I heard often growing up. (By about age 10, half the time I was getting instead, "Why don't you look it up yourself, the next time you're at the library?" "Why don't you type the question into Google?" would be an interesting way to answer, too, now.)

Having thought about it myself, not least of which because I do mostly play villains, here's what I would have told her if she'd asked me. I would have told her, "In real life, some people don't have a whole lot of choice, and get stuck being villains, either because they got stuck in a situation where there weren't any legal ways out or because they got mistaken for a villain and now everybody treats them like a villain. Some people become villains on purpose because they think that the heroes are even bigger villains, and they think that the bad things they do are the only choice they have if they're going to fight back against the bad so-called 'heroes' who are hurting people. In some kinds of fights, both sides think that they're the hero and the other people are the villains.

"So some people play villains because they don't like what the people who are called heroes are doing and wish they could fight back in real life; pretending to fight back in here lets them pretend to do so, get it out of their system where they won't get in trouble. Some people play villains because it's easier for them to imagine themselves as someone who got mistaken for a villain than to imagine themselves as someone everybody thinks is a hero. And don't forget, it's a game. If heroes are going to have real player characters to arrest, somebody needs to play the bad guys, just like teams in sports."

As for the question of why would you run past a bunch of Skulls who are vandalizing somebody's car, remember that in game terms, "cons gray" is short-hand for, "is less dangerous to the city than the villains who don't con gray." When you were a beginner superhero and the only good you could do was fighting Hellions and Skulls, that was important for you to do. But the city also needs people to fight the Banished Pantheon, who are going to do a lot more than set a few cars on fire if somebody doesn't stop them. Hopefully somebody else will save that lady from a purse-snatching or keep that person's car from blowing up. But if they don't, well, saving her purse wasn't going to do her a lot of good if you don't get to Talos Island and stop the Banished Pantheon from killing us all, her included.

I know a lot of parents who don't want to have discussions with their kids when they're little about whether or not the bad guys think that they're the good guys, and even more so don't want to have discussions with them about whether or not it's possible to get mistaken for a villain, and they really don't want to have to explain the concept of "triage" to a 6 year old. Except ... well, except that kids aren't stupid, (*expletive deleted*). By age 6, kids know from playing with other kids that the bad kids think that they're the good kids, that who's a good kid and a bad kid is something kids disagree about. By age 6, every kid has been mistaken for the kid who did something bad when they were actually innocent at least once. And I don't think that age 6 is too early for kids to understand the idea that sometimes even when everybody tries their best, it's not enough to keep bad things from happening, so it's important to concentrate on doing the important stuff first.

You don't want your daughter to lose sleep, and I understand that. You know what the next question would be: "Will I ever get mistaken for a bad guy and locked up, daddy? Will I ever need to be rescued and die because the good guys were too busy to get to me?" There is an answer for that. Well, there are two. The traditional answer to questions like that is to lie, "No, honey, that will never happen to you." Which is BS. The better answer is, "Honey, I will do everything up to and including laying down my own life if that's what it takes to keep those things from happening to you. So far, I've been able to keep them from happening to you, and I haven't let you down yet."

This might be a good time for you to go back and re-read, oh, for example, Andrew Lang's translations of the classic fairy tales, or a good translation of the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale collection. Parents used to all know that kids figure at least some of this out on their own by the time they're 6, that they're interested in these questions by then and want to see it dealt with in the stories they hear. And have no doubt at all about the fact that superheroes versus supervillains is the fairy tale literature of our age.

Yesterday I mentioned the story of Johnny Dahlquist, the character in Robert Heinlein's 1948 short story "The Long Watch" who, when given the order to prepare for nuclear war, decided instead to use his technical skills to disable the nukes that his superior officers were (it turned out) planning on using for a global coup d'etat. I gave it as an example of something I like to see in my fiction, namely hope, specifically the hope that any ordinary person in the right place at the right time can reasonably hope to do the right thing when it really matters. Maybe you think that's unrealistic of me, but I think that's backwards. I can't stand the fiction of despair because, frankly, that's not how the world really works.

Hope is not irrational. For example, the reason that you and I are having this conversation is that there really were, not in fiction but in reality, more than three Johnny Dahlquists. We did not survive the Cold War without a global nuclear exchange by accident or by luck or by clever strategy. We survived the Cold War because every time nuclear war was about to start, one or more of the people, not necessarily at the top of the military command chain but sometimes even at the bottom said, "No."

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, there came a point at which a panicky President Kennedy decided (not unreasonably) that he needed an update on the launch readiness of the Russian missiles in Cuba, and needed it faster than a U2 spy plane could bring it back. So a flight of US fighter jets was dispatched to quickly overfly the missile sites and report back. What he didn't know at the time, what nobody knew, was that the Russian officers on site were told that there was one and only one circumstance where they were authorized to launch on their own, rather than waiting for orders from Moscow. Their standing orders anticipated that the only circumstance under which the US would actually attack a Russian missile site would be if World War III had already begun; if they saw American fighter planes approaching their position, they were under orders to launch at once rather than risk having their retaliatory strike capability bombed away from them. The Russian officer on site saw the American fighters approaching and began the launch sequence. His Cuban Army liaison shot him to death rather than let him start WW III.

Some years after that, the senior missile control officer for the whole Soviet Union was on duty late one night when the whole Russian early-warning radar system lit up with tracks that could not possibly be anything other than an entire swarm of US nuclear bombers crossing into Russia, heading towards every radar position. Standing orders said that if multiple radars agreed, and he could not prove that they were in error through visual confirmation in less time than it would take the bombers to wipe out his radar stations, he was to initiate a total nation-wide launch of every missile aimed at the US and Europe. It being the middle of the night, he knew there was no way to get visual verification. So instead, he checked the newspapers, concluded on his own authority that this was an unlikely day for the Americans to attack because tensions were fairly low, and decided to risk not giving the launch order. When his KGB political officer attempted to countermand that order, he ordered his troops to hold the KGB officer at gunpoint and shoot him if he approached the command console. That he turned out to be right that it was a software glitch didn't save his career, he was still demoted for pulling a gun on a political officer and retired to relative obscurity many years later.

Some years after that, before the US was officially in the Vietnam War, US pilots were sent along with American bomber aircraft that we gave the South Vietnamese. Our pilots were supposed to train the Vietnamese to run bombing missions against North Vietnam. The North Vietnamese had been given Russian fighter jets and trained to intercept and shoot down those bombers. But both sides' trainers ran into so many problems training their Vietnamese clients that they gave up and quietly flew the missions themselves. The pilots for both sides caught each other at this, almost immediately. Both sides' pilots had long before been given standing orders: if in any combat zone they came under fire from the other side's aircraft, they were to report that immediately to their superiors, as it may have been the beginning of World War III. What we found out, when the pilots for both sides admitted this to reporters only a few years back, was that both sides' pilots discussed this among themselves, and independently of each other both sides concluded that they were all going to disobey that order, for fear that someone above them in the chain of command would give the launch orders for a nuclear war.

In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of Heinlein's characters made the point that Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea would later make in Illuminatus, and that is that ultimately, all chains of command are illusions. Every order that is given ends up in the hands of a self-aware moral individual with his or her own responsibility to decide whether or not that order is the right thing to do. Yes, some people abdicate their moral responsibilities and do what they're told, sometimes even whole armies of them. If such things never happened, then Hitler's army wouldn't have obeyed the order to march in to Czechoslovakia and Bush's army would never have obeyed the order to march into Iraq. Nevertheless, our history and our economy and everything about our lives would be much, much worse than it is if the world and its history were not literally full of people who decide every day, no matter what they were told or what the people around them are doing, to do the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do.

And any auther whose fiction does not reflect this fundamental reality misunderstands the human race so severely that I find it flatly unreadable. Any book whose characters are all greedy selfish monsters or morally bankrupt obedient automatons is simply too unrealistic to hold my attention.

This evening was another reminder that there is an entirely 100% reliable asshole detector for massively multiplayer online roleplaying games.

Here's my most recent version, in the front, on your right, with the purple hair. Her supervillain combat name is Misery Chick, and she's the (self-proclaimed) student body president of Aeon University. (You may, for these purposes, ignore her necromantic army, waiting in the lobby of an "abandoned" warehouse in the Black Mariah neighborhood of St. Martial island, where they're waiting for her to give the orders to slaughter an obnoxious gang of cyberpunk tech thieves because they stand between her and an Associated Press reporter who printed Misery Chick's premature death notice.)

What makes her, like a lot of my characters in various MMOs over the years, an entirely reliable asshole detector is that she is costumed as a believable female character. In this case I was going for something of an exaggerated goth-punk college student look: faded black jeans, black Doc Martens, black biker jacket, Cthulhu t-shirt, a big butch-looking black leather belt, elbow-length white gloves, purple stringy hair with black roots still showing, way too much black eye makeup, and a faintly sour facial expression. What makes a character even this obviously a role-playing character, even this obviously exaggerated, an asshole detector is that your average player can see that she's costumed as neithe