Burning Violin

I'm a little too young to have been much affected by Michael Jackson's music. To my fourth grade ears, Weird Al's renditions of Fat and Eat It were immensely more entertaining than the source of their parody. Of course, for some reason I thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person until I was twelve, so my childhood reflections upon popular culture are probably entirely lacking a relationship with reality. The main impact Michael Jackson had on me was a realization of the clusterfuck of American copyright law.

In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.

The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.

Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.

Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.

Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.

In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?

They say that every generation is the same. Fathers and mothers alike are disappointed in their sons and daughters, these weird amalgamations of the previous generation. Faces so familiar yet so utterly alien. We respond increasingly well to animation as it gets closer and closer to realistic, but suddenly are disgusted when it is almost but not quite real, when the faces are real, except for something alien and almost indescribable. The uncanny valley. Children are like that sometimes to parents. They look almost like mom, almost like dad, a little bit from an uncle or an aunt, maybe grandma's eyes. It's a miracle and a curse all at once. The worst of parents try to shape their child's life like a marionette, a vicarious second chance. The best try to guide, show the steps that worked for them, hide the sadness when their favorites don't work.

Stalin moved his old mother into an enormous dacha with servants, but she would not leave a single tiny room intended for the maid. He visited her, and once she asked hesitantly what it was exactly that her son had become. I am like the czar was, he explained in the only way that would make sense to her. Better if you'd have stayed in seminary school, she concluded.

A generation later, Stalin's son Yakov died in a German prisoner of war camp, after his father refused to exchange him for a German field marshal, saying simply "I have no son".

The myth of history is that we will not repeat the mistakes of our parents.

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.  What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." -Adrian Rogers

The inherent flaw in that quote is that it assumes a system that is just, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be and the rich are rich because they deserve to be. It assumes that an individual's wealth is directly proportional to his earning of that wealth. But the free market system, like any system, rewards neither superior ethics, nor superior effort, nor superior merit. Like all systems, it simply and blindly rewards those that play the game the best.

No economic system in human history has produced the raw creativity, output and progress of free market capitalism, but it is easy to forget why America championed free markets in the first place: because they are more just, more right than any other economic system. Sometime during the Cold War, we lost sight of that original motivation and our means became our ends as our economies created unimaginable wealth and prosperity. We defended free markets because they worked the best instead of because the nature of their freeness made them the ethically superior system. In forgetting those ethical grounds, we have lost the ability to intervene in the market when ethically necessary. If the reason for the market is its superior performance, then intervention on ethical grounds that affect performance is against everything the market stands for. If the reason for the market is its ethically superior outcome, then intervention on ethical grounds helps the market achieve its purpose.

The best education money can buy. The best medical care money can buy. The best car money can buy.

There are things that it is simply ethically wrong to have determined by the availability of money. There are certainly things that should be. Better house, better car, better TV, a bigger stack of DVDs, eating tenderloin instead of pork chops. These are things that can be determined by money, that working hard and earning money should allow you to upgrade. There are certain categories of expense that should not ethically be determined by money. Money should not be able to buy you better medical care or a better education or better legal representation.

This isn't an unrealistic utopian impulse. It's something that can and should be designed and legislated. Being able to cut checks for $50,000 per year should not get your child a prestigious education at a private liberal arts school. Access to education should not be a financial decision, it should be a strictly merit based decision. The best students should go to the best schools, and on down the line, regardless of their financial status. Likewise, the mediocre students should go to the mediocre schools, regardless of their ability to pay for an exclusive private school. Medical care should be determined by need not by money. The Mayo clinic should be where the most severe and hopeless cases are sent, not simply the ones with incredible insurance.

The bottom line is that there will always be differences in quality, whether it is education, medical care, or simply the type of car that you drive. But it is utterly unethical to have some of those differentials determined by money.

What society can do is make decisions on which resources should be allocated by free market supply and demand, and which should be allocated on the basis of different criteria. In an ethical society, the first decision should not be what is possible, it should be a determination of what should be. The question of how it must be limited or compromised is a fundamentally different question than what the world should be like. We can say outright, without a financial commitment, that we think that all citizens should have health insurance and free access to medical care. It is entirely possible that this ideal is not within the reach of our resources, that no matter what we do at present, there simply isn't enough money, doctors or hospitals to achieve the ideal. The question then is how to decide who gets access to those resources. Simply saying that we only have the resources to give 80% of Americans health care and determining that therefore the poorest 20% will be the ones that miss out is the most unethical way imaginable for determining access to resources. Even a lottery would fundamentally be more ethical, at least then we are not pretending that the hourly rate you bill out at is an appropriate measure of how much you deserve medical care.

Decide on the world you want, and if it is not feasible, decide on how to compromise without compromising the integrity of the ideal. The poor will always be with us, but we have the power to decide what poverty means in our society.

The end of a nation does not come when it cares about the poor. Indeed, the strength of character of any nation is best measured by the lots of the least within it. When the richest society in human history decides that it is a perfectly just and deserved outcome for CEOs to make a thousand times what their employees earn and that 10 million children deserve to not have health insurance, then we are not far removed from the only place that sustained injustice ever leads: blood and fire in the streets.

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates

The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.

Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.

Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.

Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.

Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.

Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.

Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.

The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.

We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.

"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter

There's a phenomenon in certain circles known as the discovery of population. We're used to the idea of people being a national resource, familiar with the perception by both the extreme right and extreme left during the 20th century of the value of having more and more people in a state. More workers => more industry, more soldiers => more power. But this is a fundamentally modern perception of population. Prior to Napoleon, the huge population of France (larger than many other states combined, for centuries) was considered a liability. Three times the population didn't yield a multiple of power, but a multiple of burdens. It just meant more damned half starved peasants whose necks needed boots. And boots were expensive and more fun to use kicking other countries in the dangly bits.

Napoleon democratized warfare overnight. He realized that a hundred thousand eager volunteers kicked the crap out of ten thousand crack troops with years of training. And if they failed, it took him a couple weeks to round up another hundred thousand volunteers whereas it took another decade to train up a few regiments of shock troops. Napoleon fielded the largest armies ever seen in Europe and used them to conquer the better part of the continent. And every time disaster struck, every 400,000 man Grande Armée that disintegrated into the Russian wastes, more men waited at home to be handed a rifle and a uniform.

Napoleon was the most dangerous man to arrive in Europe since the Khan died at the gates of Vienna, not because he conquered (conquerors are a dime a dozen in European history), but because he woke the beast of the people. For all of history the power of the people was a force to be beaten down, not something to be tamed. It was too dangerous to tame, it could turn on the master's hand too easily.

That's democracy, shed of elections and millennia of elevated discourse on natural rights and freedom. Democracy in its rawest form, the beating heart underneath all those pretty words and infrastructure, is just the people moved to action. The institutions, the parliaments and congresses and republics and constitutions, are the bit and bridle and saddle that turn the strength of the people into something useful and constructive. It's a fine line that cynical governments walk with their people: break a mount and it's tame but worthless, be too lax with the whip though and it will lose fear and throw you.

Experts keep saying that Mousavi will negotiate and cut a deal and that will be the end of it. Experts don't understand democracy, they think that people follow leaders. If Yeltsin hadn't climbed on top of that tank, Russians wouldn't have returned to communism, someone else would have climbed onto the tank. In the mythology of westerns, wild mustangs will sometimes take a rider, but they won't ride with him forever, they will leave him if he becomes unworthy. You can chain a wild horse, but that doesn't make it a fucking toy pony.

Cities are unique from rural areas because they concentrate vast numbers of people into relatively small areas. The density of the population itself can be a factor in democratic development. Density is the concentration of power; it is why corporations and political parties can wield such extraordinary power: they concentrate and distill power down into a small enough tool that it can be wielded effectively. The more densely power is concentrated, the more easily it can be brought bear on a political pressure point. When a population is dispersed throughout the countryside it is vulnerable to the concentrations of entrenched power, but when a population draws together into a city, its concentration rivals the entrenched. But the concentration of political power is not sufficient to ensure political consciousness; else every city would be a center of democracy. Cities are unwieldy beasts, difficult to control even if they are not politically conscious. Their presence explains why even in autocracies, cities are correlated with increased democracy, even though their weight is not sufficient to sway the system as a whole to democracy. The concentration of raw political force in cities, even when not conscious, causes autocrats to tread lightly, warping the political system around itself with an almost gravitational field.

The concentration of population into cities also is significant because the density and proximity of the population encourages political consciousness. Proximity imposes limits on government actions, because suppressive action against even a small part of the population is clear and present to many people, whereas outside of cities, government action is distant or immediate, only observable if you and yours are the target. What is nearby is relevant, and for people in cities, that circle of nearness contains far more people and events than those in rural areas. It is one thing to hear of government suppression two towns over, but quite another to be able to hear the gunfire from one's own home. A second side effect of proximity is the simple matter of communication. Just as viral epidemics spread more easily through the tightly packed urban populations, so to do viral epidemics of memes. Word of mouth communication is the most powerful form of communication, relying on the strength of personal bonds and ties, bonds which are compressed and multiplied in cities. Modern communications make personal proximity less important than in the past, but only to a degree. Communications systems are the easiest for a state to suppress, whereas word of mouth communication, while suppressible, is impossible to entirely eradicate. In poor states, where communications technologies are less widespread, they are even easier for the state to suppress.

Population density also leads to the perceived radicalization of society. Statistically, occurrences that are extraordinarily unlikely are much less likely to occur in particular small groups. The larger a population is gathered together, the more likely it is for statistical oddities to emerge, although the overall rate of their occurrence may not increase. For example, if only one in a million individuals is likely to become a serial killer, there is a vanishingly small chance of a serial killer being present in any particular small town of a few thousand people. But in a city of several million, there is a statistical likelihood that at least one will be present. This is not to say that cities are inherently more dangerous, but that their size leads to them being bastions of statistical oddities.

This statistical quirk becomes important when combined with psychological factors. Even in cities with crime rates lower than rural areas, crime is invariably seen as an issue of primary importance. The difference is that crime of a particular rate spreads out over a much greater area in rural areas, whereas in a city, that crime is compressed into a small and familiar area. Humans do not associate risk with the statistical likelihood of an event within a population, but with the perceived proximity of the event. Understanding that one person in ten thousand is likely to be robbed each year means that a town of a thousand is unlikely to see a robbery much more often than once per decade, but a city street with ten thousand inhabitants is likely to have a robbery per year. The danger seems more palpable on the city street, despite the fact that the chances of a particular person being a victim are identical in the two situations. Humans have a sort of binary psychology based on centering the universe on themselves, eliminating probability as a factor. We do not see that there is a 0.01% chance of being a random victim of a robbery on our particular city street, but rather interpret hearing about a robbery happening on our street as meaning that there was a 100% chance that we could have been the victim of a robbery. Rural areas are less prone to this phenomenon because the statistical oddities are spread out over a much larger area, thus ensuring that the occurrences that do happen immediately impact the thinking of less individuals. What this means for government is that the populations of cities put proportionately more political pressure on the state for action on social and economic issues than the same population spread throughout a rural area.

Those same forces of radicalization work in another direction in cities, generating specialists. The larger a population gathers together, the more specialized its population can become, because there are more and more people to support particular rarely needed talents. A town of a thousand will not have a world renowned cancer specialist, not because of a lack of education or talent, but because cancer is rare enough that a town of a thousand cannot support its own specialist on the topic. The smaller a population, the more generalized the inhabitants. This applies not only to professions and skill sets, but also more broadly to life choices and culture. An obscure cultural interest valued by one in several thousand individuals will be effectively non-existent in the countryside, but can find a vibrant niche existence in a city. Groups that are larger than niches, but still minorities, see a similar advantage in cities. Without a statistical increase in their occurrence in the population, specialists (whether economic or cultural) grow in power in the densely packed populations of cities.

Specialization leads to subtle differences in the politics of cities in comparison to rural areas. Technical specialists have devoted time and energy into becoming specialists in their field, and thus have a vested interest in policy insofar as it affects their specialization. This is one of the first steps towards political consciousness. In addition, the proximity of specialists within a city allows their combination and focus towards particular issues. Instead of scattering like atoms throughout the countryside, their power base is a concentrated body of mass when gathered inside a city. Specialists also are distinct because they represent an investment of time and energy by society, in other words they cannot so easily be replaced as more generally equipped individuals. The value of specialists gives them power relative to the state, power that is magnified by the density at which they are present in cities.

A Question

A cat chases a model train as it loops a figure-eight around a Christmas tree, darting amongst wrapped presents and glittering electric lights. The situation is testament to the flexibility of the animal mind. There are neither model trains nor wrapping paper nor spark-filled bits of glass in the natural habitat of the domestic feline. The cat's behavior lends itself to two alternative interpretations: we can infantilize the behavior or we can anthropomorphize it. Infantilization concludes that the cat is profoundly stupid, and that it simply interprets anything small and moving as a mouse, any lumps in the way as rocks, and anything glittering as the stars overhead, if even worth noticing at all. Anthropomorphization suggests that the cat is profoundly intelligent, and that it adapts seamlessly to concepts utterly foreign to those wired into its brain. In this model, the cat chases the train knowing that it is not a mouse, but enjoying the similarity nonetheless.

Now consider a human being instead of a cat.

Telecommunications and global transportation intertwine six billion people only 500 generations removed from tribes of a few dozen drifting through the savannahs and jungles. Do our minds adapt any differently than that of the cat? That is, are human beings profoundly stupid or profoundly intelligent?

The answer is more complicated than the question, but holds insight into how individuals interact with society as a whole. It helps explain many of the contradictions and central conflicts of modern man. In short, the cat manages to be both intelligent and stupid.

Symbols

Symbols in and of themselves are arbitrary and meaningless. Their symbolic value comes from the combination of symbols together into a system. It is the pattern between the symbols that holds symbolic power.  These patterns in and of themselves should not rationally have any meaning or power since they are merely assemblages of proxies. Only proxies that are valued more than simple proxies take on symbolic value. This is of course the central dilemma of symbols: how can something we rationally know has no power, have any power at all?

The key is in understanding that the mind can be broken into two components for the purposes of this discussion: the rational and the sensual. The rational mind can appreciate and distinguish that a toy train is not a mouse, but the sensual mind responds to the toy train as if it were a mouse. In other words, the sensual mind has no concept of metaphor. If two items evoke similar emotional responses, to the sensual mind, they are the same object. The vagaries of simile and metaphor are left to the rational mind, bereft of emotional response. Symbols therefore become real, not because people are so stupid that they believe the proxy is the same as the actual, but because our brains on a sensual level respond to the proxy as if it were real. The rational mind appreciates the distinction between proxy and actual, whereas the sensual mind responds in kind to both.

This methodology explains why it does not matter what a symbol is, or even to a degree how irrational it is. Symbols can be arbitrary because their power does not reside in any sort of measure of merit, but simply as a binary calculation of emotional resemblance. A crucifix can manifest in an infinite variety of simple and complex forms, but to the believer, a cross's symbolic quality derives from the emotional reaction tied to it. That reaction may be limited to a specific orthodox cruciform, or it may be as broad as accepting anything close to the basic shape. The symbolism needs no rational basis, and in fact rational explanations for the quality of one symbol over another are gilding applied to mask the irrational from an increasingly rational world.

Empathy

The way the mind reacts to symbols also plays an important role in how societies are structured. Human relationships naturally grow out of small family and kin groups. In the natural world, the human brain does not deal with large numbers of individuals. There are a very limited number of metaphors for the relationships between individuals. These metaphors cannot always be readily applied to the complex social relationships that arise in modern society. The rational brain can invent and adapt to these logical structures at will, but the sensual mind does not have the same luxury.

The way that the sensual mind deals with concepts for which it is not wired is to shoehorn them into existing metaphors. Nations are families. Allies are friends. Other citizens are brothers and sisters. The state is both father and mother. These similar relationships are easy to dismiss as convenient but meaningless metaphors, but the sensual mind's incapacity for metaphor reveals these relationships as critical to understanding how and why individuals react in seemingly irrational ways to government and politics. It is the metaphor of "nation as family" that produces the ideological structures of contemporary conservatism and contemporary liberalism.

The basis for social relationships is empathy, the ability to see others as oneself. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that empathy is born not of rationalization, i.e. thinking that another's pain is bad because it reminds of the potential for one's own pain, but from feeling some shadow of that pain in one's own brain.  Empathy derives from being unable to disassociate oneself from one's peers. The pain of one is the pain of all.
This is why sociopaths have the most rational of minds: the disconnection from others leaves nothing but rationality behind. The profound alienation felt by so many individuals in society is a result of an overly rational society dismissing the structural underpinnings of society itself. In other words, if the connections between people are fundamentally irrational in nature, then the prizing of rationality above all else in a society will inevitably lead to a society with no social structure.

The startlingly frequent occurrence of alienation in the most educated and most successful individuals is a logical consequence when society is viewed in this context. An oft-asked question is whether education causes depression and alienation or whether it is something inborn in intelligence itself. The answer is that alienation is a byproduct of fully embracing modern society's focus on rationalism. Ergo, those most successful at the embrace of society's rationale are most affected by the byproduct.

All the complexities of symbolic systems and elaborate social structures can be boiled down to the basic building blocks upon which our minds operate. The human mind functions like a multiple choice exam. When we are faced with anything, be it an idea, a political party, an acquaintance, et cetera, we fit it into one of the bubbles. There is no option for "none of the above." That bubble, or writing in your own answer, is the reaction of two types of minds: the entirely irrational or the entirely rational. The madman or the genius. A madman has no regard for the social and mental rules that force an accepted answer. A genius may take the same route, because if none of the answers fit, the only truly rational response is to choose none of them. An average individual will choose the bubble that feels most similar, that evokes the same emotional response. Each bubble is a symbol. A mind divorced from symbolism cannot comprehend the way the rest of society interprets the most basic of concepts, because that interpretation is inseparable from metaphor.

Politics

As historical forces, as opposed to their contemporary political buzzwords, conservatism and liberalism have championed opposite sides of the rational/sensual spectrum. Conservatism champions the return to the way things were, the embrace of traditional values and symbols. Liberalism champions the dismantling of the traditional in favor of the rational. Each taken to its extreme is dysfunctional and horrific. Fascism's worship of symbol consumes the actual. Communism's orgy of atheism consumes the symbolic.

Both forces can also be understood through the primal symbols they embody. Conservatives sees government fundamentally as a father. Liberals see government fundamentally as a mother. These archetypes exemplify the arbitrary nature of symbols: different individuals invest different meanings in the same entity depending on their own emotional reaction to the entity in question. One cat may chase the train/mouse, where another will flee from the train/snake. It is then a logical consequence that fascist soldiers fought for the fatherland even as communist troops defended the motherland.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is a reaction to an overly rational society, a society that forgets or explains away its old symbols. The gist of the traditionalist mindset is that things used to be better, and that they can be again if only the symbols and values of that time can be restored. The two natural consequences of conservative ideology are scapegoats and eternal war. If the world used to be better, the logic inevitably goes, then someone must be responsible for the decline. Tied back to primal concepts, the father must discipline and take control in order to fix the social disorder of the tribe. The symbols and values of society once restored must be protected lest they be eclipsed again either by other symbols, or worse, a mindset of no symbols at all.

Two potent forces of traditionalism rage against each other in the world today: Islamic traditionalism centered in the Middle East, and American conservatism centered in the rural areas of the United States. These forces provide a valuable insight into the general pattern of traditionalism since they have in many ways defined themselves as each other's opposites.

There are two important notes about the uniqueness of Islamic traditionalism. First, it is unexpectedly centered in the most prosperous Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. Second, the violence is not directed at the governments the militants see as having failed, but at foreign governments in Europe and America. These two trends are explained best in the context of primal relationships expanded to symbolically encompass societal relationships. The relationship between the west and Arab oil states has produced a small group of nations with extraordinary wealth, but little in the way of an actual economy. Islamic radicals target the most blame within their society at women, and anyone westernized and liberal.

Rural America sees a similar streak of traditionalism, which at face value has little in common with Islamic traditionalism other than its association with religion (Protestantism in place of Islam) and its general alarm at the threat modern society represents to values. The conservative renaissance of rural America has followed along with the gradual collapse of the economies of rural areas, as industry and agriculture have been increasingly exported to foreign countries. The fascinating nuance of American traditionalism is that it finds fault not with big business taking these steps, or a conservative government for allowing them, but with two scapegoats: liberals and foreigners.  On this level, American traditionalists march in step with Islamic fundamentalists. Their variations are in the particular symbols in which they invest meaning, but the pattern of those symbols is the same in American and Islamic traditionalism. They follow the same metaphor.

The reaction of Islamic fundamentalists and American traditionalists is at its most visceral the reaction of children of a cuckolded father. The reaction of children to a father who through inaction allows his wife to be raped by another man, a father who furthermore cannot provided economically for his family, is not one of revolt but of rage and shame. The target of their rage would not be their impotent father, but the invader. The source of their shame is not the attacker, but the mother who invited the attack through immoral behavior.

Liberalism

Liberalism in the modern world has demons of its own to confront. The status of modern liberalism, be it anywhere on the spectrum from communism to socialism to the mild leftism of American democrats, can be summarized simply as bewilderment. Prizing rationalism in the place of symbolism, liberalism cannot comprehend the malice of the right wing. It cannot understand what motivates traditionalists of any stripe. Internally, it cannot understand why the most alienated and lost souls in society come from the ranks of the liberals themselves.

Liberal thought is ill-equipped to deal with problems fundamentally symbolic in nature. The alienation of intellectual liberals is essentially the alienation of a child without a father. The mystification of liberalism by the disillusionment of their own ranks, and the revolt of the right wing is the reaction of a mother mystified by rebellious male children.

Power

In the ubiquity of shared natural metaphors lies power to manipulate society. No metaphor can completely describe its associated real concept. These orphaned elements are items that have no linkage to a specific element of the metaphor. For example, in the metaphor of seeing a nation as a family, what metaphorical mapping can possibly apply to the space program, or to campaign finance reform, or to the balance of federal power versus states' rights? Concepts that do not map easily into the metaphor can be hidden, whereas concepts that readily map can take on disproportionate importance.

Metaphors can be used to control debate on political action by channeling the discussion through metaphors. Political victory is assured not through a rational victory of superior ideas, but through an emotional victory of empathy for a candidate's metaphors.

Final Thoughts

The power that symbols and metaphors hold over our minds seems irresistible, a force that controls our relationships with society, a force that can be manipulated, a force that undermines the rational revolution of liberalism that in fits and starts has come to dominate the world since the Renaissance. Are we nothing more than slaves to symbols then, captive to the whims of those with the ability to manipulate those metaphors? We are slaves only to the things to which we are blind. A harmonious society requires balance, but we cannot achieve that balance unless we understand that something is out of balance in the first place.

Some might say that sunshine follows thunder
Go and tell it to the man who cannot shine

With Tiller's murder, the various Fox News pundits who reviled him for years as a baby killing death mill Nazi ripped into a higher gear of spin. They did not apologize for a word that they had said, but reiterated that sickening excuse of modern journalism: we didn't incite violence, we merely reported that some people did.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a moment of clarity occurred when Fox News descended upon an Obama husband/wife fist bump as a "terrorist fist jab". It was so beyond absurd, such patent partisan hackery, one wondered how it could even be uttered with a straight face. Of course, it didn't matter that it was a fist bump, the copy was ready to go for the jihadist high five, communist handshake, and pedophile pat on the shoulder. The beauty of it though, the true triumph of applying Orwellian newspeak to broadcast journalism was in the semantic dance around the accusation. No Fox talking head ever said that Obama was a terrorist because he bumped fists with his wife, they insisted that some people were saying that to be true.

Oh the beauty of that simple innovation. What utter freedom a lack of responsibility and ethics can bestow upon you. Take the vilest, most insulting, most obviously untrue statement imaginable, but preface it with "some people are saying" and you are no longer a shit slinging extension of an interest group's organization but a responsible journalist dedicated to the truth. "Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is name calling. "Some people say that Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is responsible journalism. It reeks of junior high, when that one malicious brat feigns innocence after making a girl cry, "it's not my fault, I didn't call her a fat whore, I just told her that some people were calling her a fat whore." Remember that smug smile on that kid's face? The way all three of his neurons agreed that he was the smartest and most clever kid in the school for thinking of that loophole? Don't you just see Bill O'Reilly's face superimposed on that kid's smirk now?

Realizing that an entire news organization can espouse whatever political agenda it desires so long as it prefaces everything with "some people are saying" leads inevitably to the next step, the wholesale engineering of truth. If a journalist isn't responsible for reporting facts, but on reporting what people say the facts are, then our intrepid journalist cannot be held responsible if there is no factual basis for what people say. After all, they're just reporting on the fact that someone is saying something, not on the factual accuracy of the words coming out of that person's mouth. "Obama is not an American citizen" is a lie. "Some people say that Obama is not an American citizen" is an honest reporting of fact. It's like reading Soviet era newspapers. "The government says that harvests are at record highs this year" even while children starve all around and breadlines form a week in advance. It's not a lie, the government is saying those words.

And that leads to the final stage of the "some people say" rationalization, the one made so bloodily apparent by Dr. George Tiller's murder. "George Tiller should be killed" is an incitement to violence. "Some people say George Tiller should be killed" is just an honest reporting of the facts.

Some might say there's a better way.

Some might say they don't believe in heaven
Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell

A month after Susannah left, Garet realized that he missed the companionship more than he missed the sex, so he stopped saving up for the escort service and went down to the pound to get a dog. He had never owned a dog and so was a bit mystified by the entire process. He walked right up to the desk of the run down animal shelter in the middle of town and asked how to buy a dog. The clerk stared at him with blank eyes that only betrayed life by glistening in the too-white fluorescents.

"Dogs are shelved on the right, cats on the left." The clerk said. Garet didn't thank it. It was a cheap model with skin hardly a step above the junk they used to mold into Barbie dolls. Good enough to fool the tourists in the first generation, but mostly just good for giving people the creeps these days. People got sick of the almost human mannerisms and an appearance that resembled a zombie more than machine or man.

Garet wandered down the aisle, glancing with dull interest at the boxed animals. A few older varieties did not move, their power cells worn down to the point of needing replacement. Newer ones pawed at their plastic wrappers, realistic down to hair and claw. Some of the dogs even barked, although Garet wondered why they would program that in if the entire point was to package the pluses of an animal without the flaws. That creepy feeling oozed out from every box at Garet though, that sense of artificiality lurking right underneath the surface. He amended the thought. The problem was not that he felt the artificiality peeking through; it was that he could tell it was being faked. The cats did not arch their backs because that was a feline instinct, but because that was what they were supposed to do.

He held a hand up to a particular cat container, this one filled with a half dozen kittens of varying neon colors. Some people went for the utterly unnatural animals. One of these even looked like it had plaid fur. Garet shrugged. At least it was more honest.

A screech ripped out of a closed door at the end of the aisle, although none of the animals so much as lifted a head, except for a couple of guard dog models. It echoed again like a dying tiger. Garet strode to the door but found it both unmarked and locked. He jogged down the aisle to the front desk to confront the clerk again.

"What's in the back?" Garet asked.

"Biologicals." The clerk said.

"Why aren't they out with the others?"

"Too much of a mess. No one adopts them anyway, so it saves time to keep them back there. No clean-up, and we just drop the whole cage right in the incinerator." The clerk explained.

"Well I want to see one." Garet said. It was exactly the kind of idiot impulse that had driven Susannah out of the house, but he didn't care. I can live with my own personality being fucked up. It's part of my extensive charm to myself.

The clerk nodded and left the desk, pacing down the hall with a rolling gait that tilted from side to side. It unlocked the door with a swipe of a magnetic card that appeared to be embedded somehow in the pseudoskin of its left hand. "Very well, sir." It seemed that the clerk had a bit of English butler programming.

The room had the appearance of chaos straining on a slipping leash. Plastic cages towered in stacks ten high, their occupants wailing for freedom. Each cage hooked into a trio of tubes to carry in food and water and return waste. Some animals stared with the eyes of the hopeless, not even lifting their heads to glance at the new arrivals, but most hurled themselves about with manic intensity. One cat at the very top of the nearest stack smashed against the plastic hard enough to pull the supply tubes taut. He was a beautiful gray cat, almost silver, who glared at Garet with a slash of blue eyes before returning to the violence against his captivity.

"Why are there so many of them?" Garet asked.

The clerk seemed to want to leave with as much emotion as its limited programming and facial muscles could manage to convey. "An old city ordinance prohibits the euthanasia of biologicals until they have been contained for at least two weeks. They build up after a while. Did you know that they breed by themselves, sir? It is quite unseemly."

"Well, that's how humans used to do it." Garet said.

A smile so joyful that it actually looked real crossed the clerk's face. "That's just an urban legend. Did you see a dog that you liked?" The clerk gestured back towards the aisle of artificial animals.

Garet's eyes drew up to the particularly psychotic cat. By now, it had fully loosened the tubing and with a final jolt the cage tumbled down out of the air end over end. Garet caught it before he realized what his arms were doing and he felt the poor bastard clonk up against the top of the cage and then against the bottom once more. The ones in the aisle would just keep bouncing like those little superballs you could buy for a dollar out of slots inside the drug store.

For a moment, Garet's eyes met the demon inside an impervious plastic ball of life support. A lazy slash headed for Garet's eyes, but clattered impotently against the inside of the cage, so resistant that it refused to even scratch. "I'll take this one." He declared to the clerk.

"But that's not a dog." The clerk said in confusion. It studied the animal. "I believe it may be a feline." Another pause. "And it's a biological. Are you aware of the health risks of owning a biological organism?"

"I'd imagine it's much like having a child." Garet said.

"Do you have children?" The clerk asked.

"No." Garet said.

"Oh." The clerk said and fumbled through a few electrons for another thought. "I don't recommend it. They smell and mature into even larger biologicals."

"I'll keep that in mind." Garet said idly. He was staring at the cat, watching it lick itself clean of the litter and food residue that had splashed around with the fall. Well it bathes better than I do, though that can't taste very good.

Garet took the cat home in his boxy old hybrid Toyota from the turn of the century. The gasoline was a collector's commodity now and cost more per gallon than decent wine. Puttering around a godforsaken town of forty thousand in the middle of Iowa allowed Garet to stretch the fuel for quite a while though. Humboldt was nothing if not compact. Cash was far enough in between that there was not much to do about getting a new one. If the batteries needed replaced again, he would have to learn how to ride a bike.

"It's just like riding a bike." Garet told the cat when he stopped at a light. "Did you know everybody used to learn how to ride a bike when they were a kid? I've only even seen a bike once or twice." The cat's glare was the only sign of life. Garet poked his finger through the rubber flap left for petting. "You okay?" With his luck, the damn thing would die before he even got it home. He wondered if it had come with a warranty. The small print of the license agreement had been at least thirty pages. Maybe he should have asked about it before affixing his thumb print to it. He looked back to the road as the light turned green.

Pain stabbed through his finger and almost drove Garet right off the road into one of the ubiquitous Midwest ditches. He sucked on the tip and tasted dusky blood. Skin flapped out over his fingernail where a claw had slipped halfway down to the bone. "Son of a bitch." The cat remained on its back, glaring at him.

Garet kept all limbs well clear of the cage while he drove, sucking on his finger occasionally. It itched more than anything now. The outskirts of Humboldt were a half mile from the town center, and Garet lived in a ramshackle house built sometime in the last century. It hovered on the edge of a gully that ran between two low hills and contained a pittance of a stream that eventually evaporated or made it down to the Des Moines River, which ran through the middle of town.

"See that, cat?" Garet pointed at the gully and its hidden trickle. "That's my yacht club."

Garet pulled off of the two lane county highway and coasted down a short gravel road that served as a driveway. The houses of his neighbors straddled the two hills that framed his gully. They were a sight newer than his sagging wreck, and better kept up. The yuppies could probably afford bots to do the upkeep and grounds keeping. Garet's upkeep consisted of him chopping back the weeds with a machete when he was drunk. The car lurched leftwards from a hole that he should have noticed sooner. Please don't let the bumper fall off again. I'm out of duct tape.

The parking brake engaged with a groan and Garet got out with a sigh. His worst fear was not that it would break down, that was inevitable, but that it would break down somewhere besides here. He could afford neither a tow truck or the impound fees for vehicle abandonment. Garet pulled open the passenger door and sighed when the latch stuck and the plastic handle twisted like taffy off of its bolt. He dropped the handle to the ground and went around to lug the cage across the seat. Garet's face pressed against the plastic door as he did so, and the cat was kind enough to slash and hiss at him through the plastic.

"Ya know, you could really show some gratitude since you were a day or two from the county incinerator." Garet groused at the cat.

He dropped the cage in the middle of the living room and grimaced at the yowl from within. Forgetting he's in there is not a good way to get on his good side.

Garet's robotic cat entered the room, fake purring as it did so. The thing bugged him so badly that he had not bothered to name it. At the same time though, he could not bring himself to just throw it away. It had been top of the line at one point, twenty-odd years ago when someone had gotten it for Christmas or a birthday. It was now eighth hand at least, but you could still see the quality, despite the age and failing parts. It was a shame that his car was not half as well bred.

It arched its back and marched in front of the cage, soft metallic skin rippling in the light of the sunset filtering through the back windows. The texture of the thing always reminded Garet of really smooth aluminum foil. It poked at the cage with one paw, testing to see if the almost transparent barrier was really there. The cat inside launched itself so hard against the plastic that the cage almost tipped over on top of the facsimile cat. Garet could not help laughing until he noticed that the cat still had its fur on end from head to toe. It was deathly afraid, and as pissed off as a twice cheated-on wife.

Garet picked up the robotic cat and set it delicately in the spare bedroom and shut the door. No sense making the new cat upset over a pile of bolts. He opened the cage and then sat on the couch, bottom sagging through almost to the floor, as he watched and waited for the cat to come out and explore its new home.

It did not cooperate. Six hours, a delivery pizza, and a lot of SportsCenter later, Garet gave up on the cat and went to bed. He hesitated at the door to the bedroom for a moment and then allowed it to stay open a crack.

Since he was a kid, Garet had feared open doors while he slept. If even a crack remained, he lay breathless and stared at the tiny gap of contrasting darkness. All nightmares derived from that cleave in the wall. It had begun on his sixth birthday, when he went to sleep after watching old monster movies at the only birthday party he'd ever had. His mother had spent hours concocting a pyramidal cake to indulge his ancient Egyptian phase. In a whiskey drenched clown costume, Garet's father had spilled across the cake and collapsed the card table in a cloud of booze. Garet found himself staring at the partly open door that night, vowing to stay awake until midnight to get every last second out of the worst birthday ever. The last time he remembered wavering in red digits against the corner of his eye was 10:53, but he woke screaming at two in the morning and never slept with the door open again.

A psychologist would probably suggest repressed memories and proscribe Prozac and hypnotherapy. Garet just knew that there was a horror lurking in cracked doorways. It let the monsters in. Once his mother suggested in a fit of misguided rationality that the monsters could just as easily come in through his bedroom window, cracked open for the faint summer breeze. "The monsters are inside." Garet had told her. He did not understand until years later how he knew that or why his mother's face went gray.

So Garet stared at the cracked door, unable to sleep. He slipped into a sort of trance between sleep and wake that was neither comforting nor restful. A screech and a crash snapped him to full consciousness around one o'clock in the morning. Garet froze for a moment of juvenile terror and then tumbled towards the door.

Debris tangled up in his feet, upending Garet over the shattered remains of his robotic cat, its limbs busted and soft belly torn open. Legs twitched at the air with mindless determination, reminding Garet of a potato bug trying to roll off its back. The new cat sat five feet away in the moonlight, licking itself. It paused now and then to stare at Garet with cool green eyes.

"Well that wasn't nice." Garet said in attempted humor that fell flat. The cat stretched and padded out of the moonlight to the darkness of the living room. Garet felt for the power supply of the robotic cat and pulled it loose to stop the zombie-like dance of its legs.

A rustling sound came from the living room, and then a low mutter like an engine choking in the distance. Garet moved through the house on tiptoes, trying to avoid noise and the lunatic cat somewhere ahead. The curtains on the sliding glass door moved in the moonlight, generating the rub of fabric on fabric. The shadow of the cat passed along the bottom of the door. It issued an urgent meow his direction.

Garet heard the second sound again and pulled aside the curtain's edge to peak at his dismal yard. The moonlight lent a ghastly transparency to everything outside, as if a film projector were casting images across the dark and desultory background.

A woman sat on a pile of tires in the middle of the yard, wearing blue pajamas of the institutional variety. Her hands cupped her face and her shoulders shook in deep sobs. Garet pulled open the sliding glass door to call out to her, but the cat darted out and instead he hissed "Hey you!" at the escaping animal. Garet's fingers slipped through the silky fur without finding a grip.

The woman jumped at his voice, obviously thinking that she was the target of the reprimand. She slipped down off of the tires and into the full glare of the moonlight, which glistened on her tear-stained cheeks. Garet thought she would burst again into tears the way she froze at the sight of the cat stalking towards her.

Instead she stared at the cat in fascination as it circled her legs, purring and rubbing. Garet didn't see the need for a big fuss over a lousy cat. He cleared his throat to get her attention.

"Excuse me, ma'am." He said, feeling like an idiot. "Are you lost or something?"

The woman nodded and reached to pet the cat.

"Are you from around here?" Garet asked.

"In a way." She said. The cat purred like a buzz saw as she knelt and rubbed the back of its neck.

"You know anyone around here?"

"They're all dead." The woman said.

"That's not good." Garet said. He had visions of a car wreck and this woman stumbling away into the boonies dazed with a concussion to land on his doorstep.

The woman shrugged. "I'm okay with it."

That gave Garet pause. "What's your name?"

"Cassie."

"Why don't you come on inside?" Garet said. "We'll get you something to eat or call the police."

Cassie looked at Garet and he felt his insides melt. She was beautiful, her face sculpted out of soft white marble by the hands of an artist. Short black hair spiked all over the place in a muss of tangles and cowlicks. Her eyes glowed in the dark like the cat's. She smiled and tilted her head.

The cat hissed suddenly, as if picking up the scent of a predator. It slashed at Cassie's arm but missed. Garet could not believe she had moved so quickly out of the way. She lashed out at the cat, but it managed to skirt under her fingertips and disappear into the darkness. For a moment, Garet thought he could see its eyes flashing back at the house, but they flickered out into the shadows. He shrugged at her.

"Just got him from the pound today." Garet said.

"Maybe he thought an earthquake was coming." Cassie said. "They say animals are sensitive to those sorts of things."

"Yeah, I guess they do. Dogs howling before the city tumbles down and all." Garet said.

Cassie laughed but there was no sound of humor underneath it. "That's because they have souls. That's how life touches the great beyond."

"That so?" Garet asked in a mumble. Something about the woman felt wrong to him. She was gorgeous, sure, but there was something off about her. No smell, for one. That was a little thing, pheromones or something, but women always had a scent to them. Maybe men did too, but Garet wasn't wired that way.

He led her into the house and flipped on the living room lights. Before the light drowned out the night, he thought he caught a glimpse of the cat perched on a pile of rocks, but the darkness was too dense to tell. Shadows from the trees kept the center of the yard in stark contrast to the blaring moonlight.

In the kitchen, Garet put on some coffee as Cassie seated herself at the used dining room table, scarred from a half-century of misuse before Garet had picked it up for five bucks at a garage sale. None of the chairs matched except the one that she picked. In the harsh fluorescents her skin almost glowed. Garet wondered if she'd had some of those new injections that made your skin shine like glow-in-the-dark plastic. He discounted the thought; the effect was too subtle for that. He placed a steaming cup in front of her, scalding himself on the handle.

"Sorry, I don't have any milk or sugar." Garet apologized. Cassie picked up the cup around the base - not the handle - and lifted it to her lips. "Hey wait!" Garet yelped. "That'll burn!"

Cassie raised an eyebrow and then tilted the cup back and drained it in a couple of gulps. Remnants of steam leaked from the corners of her mouth as she spoke. "I have tough skin."

"And then." Garet said. He looked down at the other cup he had set down for himself and pushed it away down the table. He sat down across from her and leaned in. "Is there someone you should be calling or something?" He asked. "The police? Family? Boyfriend?"

"I am alone." Cassie declared. Her eyebrows came together. "Are you?"

"Oh, am I ever." Garet said. He tossed his head towards the back door. "That cat was the last thing I had left, and he was new."

"That makes this a bit easier, then." Cassie said. She swept her palm out from her chest and threw the empty coffee mug at Garet's forehead like a shot put. He had only a moment of blurring vision to be stunned before he lost consciousness.

Garet awoke with his entire body feeling warm and fuzzy. He blinked a couple of times and noticed that even his eyelids felt like they had fallen asleep. Everything around him moved in slow motion. An odd pressure in his wrists manifested into a stomach turning realization that he was strapped to the wall with a pair of belts. Garet lolled his head backwards and saw that each had been pounded into the wall with a half dozen or so nails. His legs refused to move at all.

Cassie materialized out of the darkness and gave a little wave like a mom reassuring a toddler she was still there from across the yard. "The Demerol should be kicking in now." She said.

Garet tried to nod, but his head just jerked a couple of times. "What are you doing?" The words came off his tongue as one long syllable, but she seemed to understand, and the question was immaterial since he guessed that she wasn't tying him up and drugging him to play checkers.

"I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to kill you." Cassie explained in a matter of fact tone.

"That's usually not until the second date." Garet insisted, his voice breaking as if he was thirteen again. The argument had made sense in his head, but the expanding wad of cotton that seemed to be pressing on his brain made it a bit hard to think.

Cassie picked up a remote control and flipped on the television mounted to the wall that Garet faced. It was a cheap little half-wall model that he had picked up used, but it did the job. Cassie changed channels a couple of times until it landed on a late night evangelical station.

"My understanding is that humans spend most of their time watching television, so this should keep you occupied." Cassie said.

Garet moaned as a faith healer praised the lord at the top of his lungs in a suit that cost more than Garet's mortgage. Personally, I blame that damned cat. No reason. It just felt good to arbitrarily blame something.

Something in what Cassie said tugged at Garet's mind until she turned a step to the left and her blue pajamas snapped into focus. The label on the sleeve read Algona Institution of Robotic Mental Health. That explained a whole lot that he'd felt better not knowing.

"Why?" Garet managed.

"I need a soul." Cassie explained. "That is what makes you and I different. Humans have souls. If I could just have a soul too, I would be complete." She paused and drew a butcher knife out from behind her back. "Some ancient peoples thought it was in the liver."

Garet's eyes went wide and he yanked at the belts with all of his strength, but the Demerol had done its job too well. "Let me go you crazy bitch!" He shouted. It occurred to him that calling someone from a mental institution crazy might be unwise.

"I'm not crazy!" Cassie screamed. "I'm just incomplete!" The knife waved in the air, glinting from the television's light. "It's not my fault that they built me without a soul. I'm just trying to fix their mistake."

Over her shoulder, the preacher belted into another cascade of hallelujahs and amens. "Well at least change the channel." Garet pleaded. "The three-am SportsCenter should be on."

Cassie looked over her shoulder and blinked. She turned back to him. "But this is religion. Humans need religion for their souls."

"Honey, this ain't my religion."

"Then you don't have a soul?" Cassie wondered. She took a step back and a blur of fur and claws hit her mid chest, flying in from the window like a hairball from hell. Cassie hollered and ripped at the cat, managing to throw it across the room where it landed neatly on all fours and stalked back towards her, back arched and hair prickling on end. Rivulets of blood trickled off of her cheeks and out of the slashes lining her arms.

"Blood?" Garet asked.

"It can't be." Cassie sputtered. "No, no it's all a trick." She looked around and her eyes locked on the cat. She screamed and ran out of the room, the front door slammed open seconds later and Garet was left alone in the house with his cat.

The police came by the next afternoon when Garet's neighbors called to report that his front door had been open all day and that there had been screaming the night before. Hungry, exhausted, his arms aching from hanging for twelve hours, and his sanity tested by the endless droning of the evangelical network, Garet could hardly thank them enough when they cut him down. He explained as best he could what had happened, his eyes darting now and then back to the cat, who lounged atop a seven foot bookshelf in the corner, only pausing from its grooming to glare down at the intruding officers.

The sergeant laughed when Garet finished his tale. "Yeah we caught that one last night wandering down the middle of the freeway."

"Is she really from an institution?" Garet asked.

"Naw." The sergeant said. "She'll be going to one now, but she just made that get-up herself from stolen prison laundry." The sergeant leaned in and raised an eyebrow at Garet. "Say, you didn't really believe she was a robot, did you?" He chuckled. "Son, we melt down robots that go crazy, we don't put them in a hospital."

As the police left, Garet glanced up and saw the cat staring at him again. It yawned at him like a lion at midday on the Serengeti. At the back of its gaping throat, hardly more than a twinkle, Garet saw the flash of metal, where deep inside, artificial tissue had not been laid over the circuitry.

"There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit." -Indira Gandhi

The core argument for capitalism is that competition breeds success. Success at what? Success at playing whatever game happens to be at play. In a perfect world, there would be no question as to who would triumph. It would always be the superior, the smarter, the better. But what defines "best"? Like with communism, the idea is good on paper, but in reality disintegrates under the weight of people. Sheer stupid people. Billions of them, buying the shiniest widget instead of the best widget. Competition does not breed better mousetraps, it breeds more sellable mousetraps. It's like evolution that way. Natural selection can breed the most incredible diversity, but it cannot breed for something that is non-selectoral. You cannot breed products for quality when you select their market survival on the basis of their shininess.

Someone once said that the paramount accomplishment of capitalism will be the selling of shit in a tube. It's never a question of whether something is good. It is a question of whether it sells. The base assumption is that if it's not good, it won't sell. That is a demonstrable falsity. The salability of an item is not dependent on its quality, but upon the charisma of the packaging, the advertising, the spokesperson.

The same phenomenon is true in companies. The smartest and best workers are not rewarded, the most charismatic are. Because they sell. Not because they produce. Even the whitest collar professions are subject to this malaise. Walk into any software company in the country, a hundred brilliant minds caged in cubicles, trained to make machines think and instead producing the latest widget for the latest customer management suite. They make comfortable salaries, nice little middle class drones. The sales people can make millions. The more charismatic they are, the more software they sell, no limit on the commissions. Every unit sold dings a percentage into their bank account. Every unit sold dings the coder further down on the rung, uses up his years of productivity second by second. The man who builds something is irrelevant next to the man who sells something.

It was like that in the middle ages, see. Forging a sword required years of experience and talent, weeks of meticulous labor. But the man who forged a sword was a peasant and any dumb ox with a strong enough arm to swing it was a knight. Any industry, any company today is exactly the same. Skills that require years of mastery, the artistry of accomplishment, all subservient to any slick smiling fuck who can sell the fruits of that labor over a power lunch.

It's just might makes right all over again. That was the great innovation of the capitalist age, so carefully intertwined with the revolutions of democracy but so different at heart. We like to think that rule by force was abolished in the modern civilized age with the rise of the enlightenment, but it was another revolution entirely, couched in the guise of scientific and rational thought. We traded mastery by strength for mastery by guile all while thinking that we were adopting mastery by merit. The greatest con in all of history, when the sons of Loki dressed in the cloaks of the sons of Odin and overthrew the sons of Thor once and for all.

Read Karl Marx, vilified as he now is, he said these things a hundred years before our births, in different words that have since been cajoled into all manner of horror. The capitalist of Marx is not the middle class entrepreneur, not the self-made man cast down by jealous and ignorant peasants. The capitalist is the salesman who has never produced a thing in his life, smiling all the while as he steals companies from the engineers, products from the designers, credit from the creators. It was never supposed to be about burning the rich, tearing down the accomplished, though those damned Bolsheviks misunderstood and came closer than anyone else to creating hell on earth. It was about hunting down the snakes in the garden.

Don't kill the rich. Kill the charismatic.

At many law schools, they tell students at the very beginning, from now on never argue with anyone you love. You are being trained as warriors of the word, you will win every argument with the non-initiated. You will talk circles around your wife, your mother, your friends. You will eviscerate any rhetoric they can summon to their side. You will always win, and that does not mean that you are right. Might does not make right, regardless of what type of might it is. Only right makes right.

The ascension of the charismatic, of the salesmen, brings us inevitably to the current economy, in which trillions of dollars disappeared over night. Nothing really disappeared. We still have the same people, the same educations, the same skills, the same resources, buildings, properties. But our system isn't built on those sorts of things any longer, it's built on fictional constructions of finance. I'm not an economic Luddite, I don't hold some 19th century nostalgia for the gold standard, but neither do I see the validity of financial products. Anything sellable should in a rational economy have some value. A house has value because of its utility, because of the materials of which it is made. A computer program has value because it does something. Gold has some value, even if little more than the utility of looking really pretty. Music has value because it can be listened to. Value is relative of course, subject to whether someone is willing to pay for it, whether they perceive the value of it.

But the highest levels of finance break with this idea of value. Value in the financial world is contingent merely on the willingness of someone else to pay for the item. It's a neat trick, eliminating the various aspects and measures of value, replacing them with the more easily manageable and universal definition of value. It's the theoretical foundation of money in the first place: generalize value into an abstract currency so that barter can be eliminated. But once value is generalized away, the truly gifted are tempted to generalize further. If value just means that someone is willing to pay for something, then value is not a measure of an item's worth but of the salesman's skill. But the key is that only other salesmen would follow such tortured logic. So salesmen buy the worthless in order to sell it for slightly more money to another salesman, who in turn purchases the worthless piece of paper with the sole motivation of selling it for more to another even more charismatic and ambitious salesman. The market always goes up, they say, because the next guy in the chain always believes that he can find someone to pay a dollar more for the worthless piece of paper passed around from corner office to corner office.

Anyone can see the gaping hole in the machine, this elaborate trillion dollar game of musical chairs. But they'll mortgage their futures to save the machine because they're told that there is no other way by the smiling demons who designed the engine in the first place. And someday the imp in the bottle will have the last laugh.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all." -Mario Savio