On Complexity - A (non-fictional) Rant
[First published Aug. 13th, 2015 06:14 pm ]
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Had a long talk with Jonathan (*) yesterday while helping a friend getting her stuff moved out of storage. For an actor and would-be gamer who needs to take showers more often, he betrayed an astonishingly good grasp of security issues. Then again, perhaps he was just good at hasty memorization. In any case he was clearly 'on the job.' No idea for who.
It now occurs to me for several reasons that it might be healthy for me to lay on the line, as it were, some core beliefs. Better yet that I do so in a format that does not permit for redaction, shading of the truth, or reasonably honest misunderstanding.
“Politics is war by other means” and vice versa, ad nauseum. I hold degrees in political science and social ecology**; along the way I advanced to candidacy for a doctorate in criminology. So I might have done more than the average share of thinking on these subjects. I am also conversant enough with philosophy, at the annoying layperson level, to keep up with degree seekers in the field. (There is a reason why any Ph.D. is actually a philosophy degree first.)
The nation-state is at its heart somewhere between a public monopoly and a social contract, a “commonwealth” or better yet, “common wealth.” Regardless of the flavor of political system, the nation is a set of agreements. The United States makes it explicit that these agreements are “of the People, for the People and by the People.” The Constitution is therefore a social contract, a deal in which a lot of people gave up pieces of what they wanted in exchange for protections they felt they needed that badly. There is nothing terribly holy about the Constitution – but there is about the human and natural rights which the Constitution imperfectly attempts to protect.
The history of America is a history of changes of government within a loose framework. This broke down totally once – the Civil War – and has been tested any number of times. Whether we have a communist economy (World War II War Production Board), a cult of personality (Kennedy) or any other particular form of government, the system is loose enough that we get to change our minds every four to eight years, without too much fuss and piles of bodies in the streets. At the moment, political power trades hands between the left and right wings of the Republi-Crat (or perhaps Demo-rican) Party, with relatively little change within a narrow range.
In social ecology, I spent a lot of time battering my head against the implications of complex adaptive systems theory (you might call it “chaos theory”); non-linear differential equations and the implications of graphing them in two, three and four dimensions; and practical applications, including the opportunity to interview high ranking political, economic, corporate and social leaders.
I can say this in a sentence, but it may take me several paragraphs to explain. Technological advancement has overrun humanity's capability to manage complexity; however, the rate of change in human complexity continues to increase, posing grave risks of technological and/or social catastrophe.
Certain systems and processes are so complex that the best techniques we have to manage them are not quite good enough. Think of carrier aviation as a great example. The Russians and Chinese have attempted to field carriers. They have not yet been successful and for cultural reasons, it is perhaps possible that ultimately they can't do it – that the qualities needed for successful 'systemology' are beyond the commitments their governments are able to make. Meanwhile, the US Navy is about to make the next great leap in carrier aviation by taking pilots out of the cockpit and having autonomous takeoffs and landings of strike aircraft.
Spaceflight is another such complex process. Nuclear power is another. The modern 21st century hospital is on the verge – especially in trauma medicine and the intensive care unit. Mistakes in these processes kill. Just ask NASA (“Need Another Seven Astronauts”) or Japan's nuclear agency (“Fukushima.”) Medical errors kill more people in the US every year than firearms. The mistakes are largely because human beings, even in large numbers using various tools and methods to error-check each other, make mistakes from time to time and when the technology is sufficiently complex, the results can be and are deadly.
Then again, it was commonly believed that writing a computer operating system and writing an encyclopedia were so complex that it would take a skilled team some years to do so. This is true – yet we have Linux and Wikipedia – very complex human ventures managed by teams of very smart volunteers, using complex systems to manage the contributions of their participants.
With the advent of 3D printers, the last vestiges of Marx can be safely swept away. For $1000 I can go down to Home Depot and buy myself the means of production, thank you very much. I can rent time on much more sophisticated equipment. I have thought about writing a story about a distributed spaceflight program. I think the Mars Society may have beat me to it, just for real.
We have political debates about access to firearms. What will happen when every man is a nuclear power, and every home contains weapons of mass destruction? I've mused about this in the Itty Bitty Bigger Earth fiction (where this rant was posted), and will continue to do so. But the practical implications concern anyone who has thought about it. Never mind Soviet Georgia, what will happen when the state of Georgia gets the Bomb? Or three giggling lunatics with a farm in the boonies?
The tools of memetic and cultural warfare are out of the lab, beyond Madison Avenue, and out in the field. Saul Alinksy has not lived in vain – I would call him a “culture jammer,” someone who breaks the tools and the scenery to get what he wants, and has taught others to do the same. Fox News thrives on this kind of socio-dislocation. So do cheap glossy magazines like “Weekly World News,” except that they follow other people's trends instead of making their own.
Albert Einstein once said (paraphrased) that “Humanity is in crisis because political science is harder than nuclear physics.” He is now more right than ever. There is more and more raw power accessible to humanity (cf Al Gore's presentation, “This was a shovel (picture of shovel) and this is a shovel (picture of tracked steam shovel, taller than a highway bridge).” We are starting to move past the Information Age and into something new. Perhaps the Singularity, perhaps just a man running faster and faster down a steepening slope until his feet lose traction and he face plants. Hopefully not.
When I am asked, with over a decade of private security experience, about the subject of terrorism, I find it hard to give a short answer. I am a trainer with respect to counter terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, emergency response, the surveillance game, B-NICE or WTMD or CBRNE or whatever acronym of the week you prefer, and so on. I could tell you how to build a WMD with a $10 from the shelves of a 7-11 – but I won't.
Terrorism is the use of force by clandestine agents or a subnational group to achieve political change. (Right out of the FBI definition). For a variety of reasons, terrorism is horribly unethical. People who engage in terrorism are not merely criminals – who break the social contract for personal gain – but set themselves up in active opposition to the rest of society. The atrocities a terrorist commits are without any authority – any integrity – or any real justification.
Terrorism is a symptom of serious social problems. Consider a peaceful society in which a crazed man commits an atrocity. The victims are comforted, the madman is made harmless, and life goes on. Justice takes the form of “comforting the afflicted,” understanding that both attackers and victims need help. Consider the opposite extreme – a society in which a significant minority of members praise the attack and the attacker – cheering when they hear of it. Clearly this society has some issues, not least of which is the incipient civil war implied by the presence of large numbers of terrorism supporters.
At present America is somewhere in the middle. We've always had a self-reliant streak, sympathy for the rebel, and a tendency to praise people who take solutions into their own hands. On 11 September, mainstream America figured out that we have global enemies who really would do us a lot of harm, given half a chance. We massively over-reacted, and thereby vastly increased the number, the intensity and the resources of those who would do us harm. (Fortunately, al Queda is too busy hating America and its own xenophobia and racism to realize how much traction it would gain by allying with domestic Black Muslims.)
We recently had a terrorist attack where a single lunatic openly attacked first a recruiting station, then a military base. He was stopped. However, the popular reaction was amazement that soldiers are not permitted arms to defend themselves. The base commander and at least one other, a Marine, were armed – in violation of procedures - and acted to protect their charges.
Another sign that America has a problem is that – spontaneously – Americans decided to take it upon themselves to go to their recruiting stations and protect them, standing outside armed. Some of these folks were veterans – some were not – and they lacked adequate training and in some cases tact – but they were willing to put their lives on the line to protect _their_ soldiers. Note emphasis. The military decided to treat this as suspicious, asked people not to do this, and asked recruiting stations to report this activity as potential terrorist activity.
The Americans who went down to the recruiting stations did so out of distrust – distrust that the Powers That Be would protect their recruiters and other soldiers. The military reaction – confronted with allies of dubious reliability (but far better than that of say, Iraqi translators) – to reject their help and treat them as suspicious, was even more distrustful.
This is a symptom, socially speaking, worse than car bombs. If The People and The Military cannot trust each other – and groups such as the 3%ers are openly recruiting within the latter – we got troubles.
My own reaction to America's relatively new – and a few rebrands like FBI -- state security agencies is somewhere between disgust, disdain and fear. Disgust because I don't think America needs its own KGB (or DHS as the case may be), and it's quite contrary to our traditional freedoms. Disdain because the competence level is so low, and I say this wearing my professional hat. If this is the best the Republic can do to protect itself, I weep for the Republic. Fear because innocence is not always a defense and I don't want to be made an example of. We still have rights, but proving it may someday be expensive.
My reaction to terrorism, however, is rather different. A few times a year, I choose to spend my time at a rather large crowd event, wearing an ugly T-shirt and doing the best I can to help keep people safe – at my own risk and expense. I do so knowing damn well what an attractive target the event is for social terrorism. Maybe I can deter an event by being the scary guy in the ugly T-shirt. Maybe I can make a difference in the right place at the right time. And maybe I might find myself smothering an IED with either the suspect (preferred) or myself, if needed.
For someone who would literally give his life to stop a terrorist, to have an asshat like Jonathan* ask me if John Brown was justified in starting the Civil War is all kinds of disturbing. Clearly Jonathan is not looking for any answer out of intellectual curiosity or a desire to learn. He's an informant or an agent and he's trying (ineffectively) to screen whether I might someday be a terrorist threat. Mr. Brown believed that he was an instrument of God's Wrath (his caps) and acted in the face of a continuing atrocity – slavery - worse than anything in modern society today. I failed to answer Jonathan's question by asking him in turn, “Is it right to ask us to judge our great-grandparents?”
If I had not thought deeply about the appropriate use of force in society, whether by public or by private agents and under what controls, I certainly should not have either of my degrees, nor be a licensed firearms instructor – let alone supervise armed personnel.
I will summarize a potentially far longer conversation by saying this: since the time of English Common Law, the right to use force in self defense has been recognized as a natural human right. It is in the interest of the state to permit private persons to use force to make a lawful arrest. Clearly the police have the right to use force to uphold the law – and in some cases are commanded to do so by that law – and the declaration of martial law brings the final defenders of civilization, the military, but only in extremis and under numerous safeguards.
Offensive force used by private persons in defiance of the law is either criminal or terrorist. Open carry – or the willingness to act in self defense accompanied by ready means – should always be of concern. It may be appropriate or stupid – but even stupidity enjoys Constitutional protections. However, no court or law or man can say to another man (quoting Malcolm Reynolds in Serenity) “So me and mine got to lie down and die so you can live in your perfect world.” The Deacons for Defense and the would-be defenders of military recruiters have a lot in common. Being willing to die to protect others is a very, very different thing from seeking Allah through a detonator.
When John Brown set forth to seize arms from a Federal armory, he crossed a line that he had already crossed several times already … and in so doing, shocked a nation and earned his death by hanging. He could have escaped several times over both during and after the fact, but preferred martyrdom. The idea was ambitious – seize arms, arm slaves, overturn slavery when enough slaves were armed – but the implementation lacked any hope of victory. Ironically, as these events often do, his first victim was a free black who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
My hatred for terrorism is not limited by my moral and ethical views. Even if someone who completely agrees with me on some political point or another – say, the idiot who went into the lobby of the hate group Family Research Council with a gun – commits a criminal or terrorist act, he's none the less a crook or a tango.
As for the Patriot Act and its enormous powers, I think it's reasonable that someone in society be looking out for the lunatics. I'm very comfortable having my E-mail monitored, my Internet activity (Vachss indeed) and phone tapped, so long as the people doing so understand that they are doing so to protect lives. To prevent terrorism, lesser annoyances like crime and tastes in pornography and peccadillos and sins real and venial must be overlooked. Otherwise we have used 1984 as an instruction manual rather than a cautionary parable. We also face grave risks of not catching what we are looking for because we are looking for something else – like the man crying “I swear, they told me it was drugs when I hid it aboard the plane!”
Jonathan asked why I'm a security guard instead of an EMT, or presumably some other emergency service. I admitted that I was a security manager – but it's a fair question. The easy answer is my eyesight, which disqualifies me for many protective services positions – and now my age.
The hard answer is a little more complicated. I think I can make more of a difference doing what I am doing, where I am doing it. But if an asshat like Jonathan has been sent to talk to me, I have clearly failed.
I need to go home and re-think my life.
* Not his real name. If he is paid a commission for his talk with me, I get 10% and told him so. Hopefully he is on salary – but if he is, I weep for the Republic. Again.
** There are few enough programs in social ecology in the United States that it means more or less whatever I want it to mean. The program I took focused on the use of ecological approaches to understand and address social problems. Much as a veteran fraud investigator might say 'follow the money,' a skilled social ecologist does exactly the same, but in an ecosystem of predators and prey.
2019 review. I have reviewed the above content and approved it for republication. May God have mercy on my soul. Today the ATF posted to its FB page a memorial for the four agents killed in the Waco raid. Tone deaf ain't in it, folks. Let's learn from history before we become part of it. Certainly, question authority before it questions you.
