Political systems, II.

Jiwei Ci in his book Moral China in the Age of Reform talks about two different strategies followed by human beings to acquire agency: agency-through-identification and agency-through-freedom. The latter is the method of choice in modern (liberal) democracies, while the former is found in traditional Eastern societies such as China and India as well as in Maoist China. To understand a people and their politics, and, more, the differences between the East and the West, I believe that understanding well these two concepts is important, hence this post about these two strategies.

The strategy of agency-through-identification is about identifying yourself with someone (else): this belief gives you the feeling of a free agent and the power to do things what you would interpret as in accordance with whom or what you believe in. The constraint is a prerequisite of belief; thereafter, the interpretation may be left to you, making you feel an agent, controlling your own subjectivity, thus giving you a sense of power, a freedom. This freedom may be illusory or manipulated, but you may never realise it as long as you are a believer. The range of actions for a believer are manifold: he or she may interpret it even to kill others or to do other things which otherwise would be socially sanctioned; as long as you identify with the someone else, you have a wide range of actions available. (You would normally be conditioned to not think of this constraint at all; identifying with that someone else would never come into question.) Traditional India with its caste system (especially when fluid) is one such example of this system: once you believe in the fate, you do not question your assigned status and role, and having accepted that, you could reinterpret your role as much as you would like, even crossing to other statuses, all within the belief system. It is like coming to a game of cards on a table: you may believe yourself and others to be the cardmakers as well as cardplayers, and you wouldn't be surprised to see a fifth ace of the same colour, since the cardmaker could of course make new cards on the fly as long as he or she does not question others' cards and cardmakings. The freedom seems unlimited once you have believed in a role, identified with being a cardmaker or a cardplayer. The creative drama at play even stimulates you to conceive of and add new suits on the fly.

The strategy of agency-through-freedom is about the freedom to choose from a given set of possibilities identified as legal for you by the society: this gives you the illusion that you have the freedom to do what you wish, even though it would only be from a socially sanctioned set. You can mix and match the sanctioned possibilities, thus playing with identifications to a certain extent, but can never go out of them. The constraint thus is the lack of creativity: they set the dance moves allowed, though their sequence you are free to readjust. (You would normally be conditioned to not think of this constraint at all: that any other dance move is possible would never come to your mind.) Modern (liberal) democracies are one such example of the system, and this traces its origins to the importance of a contract in Western societies (for the Word has held immense importance in Biblical societies). (The Western societies of old have already been evolving to this point for many centuries, especially since the rise of Protestantism.) It is like coming to a game of cards on a table: there is only a fixed number and variety of cards, and you can only play with those cards, though of course you could make any move with those cards. You are only a cardplayer, not a cardmaker. The freedom seems unlimited once you are happy with those cards and like the order of it all. It even stimulates you for greater cunning to either circumvent the rules or best your opponent's way of thinking.

Imagine now the collision that must have happened when the West met the East: whether in India, China or Japan. The Indians were adding aces and even suits on the fly; the Westerners were aghast, finding it cheating or even, worse, savagery, finding the East as uncivilised; they wanted the contracts of cards, suits, rounds, everything fixed. They wanted to "reform" the Easterners. Some of the Easterners did get educated or were educated ("enlightened" or "reformed") in the Western ways, and then, naturally, a confusion arose in Eastern societies, notably in India, colonised by the British and taught many British ways. The presence or absence of contract was seen and felt by some: it was cheating for some, it was creativeness for others. A modern democracy (with two marketplaces of intellectual and ideological being open) was chosen as the way to go by India, thus a contract-respecting society, and in 1990 the liberalisation was complete with the opening up of the economic marketplace as well: however, it is not that India's nature itself of being a creative society changed with this political structural change. Hence, a new set of knaves, India's present-day political leaders, arose from this pell-mell: they saw a golden chance of appropriating power through exploiting this confusion. They could make cards on the fly using the first method and playing the cardmaker, and then say these are the only cards to play and new ones are not permitted, using the second method: in this way, you surreptitiously use the social acceptance (in an Eastern society) of the first method (agency-as-identification), and then exclude all other cards, all creativity in favour of only your cards using the second method (agency-as-freedom) using the tools of a society in Westernization: in this way, you hijack the agency of those others who until now were also cardmakers. (As a more specific instance, you pretend to be dharmic or national, for remember that identification is the form of agency as society's nature has not changed, then introduce your cards in the play as now a valid cardmaker, now start claiming that there could only be fixed cards and that anyone introducing their cards is against dharma or nation, which argument seems very plausible, even cogent, as after all the norms of the state are now of having a particular set and playing by that, and then you start excluding the possibility of introducing other cards by others; and this process could keep going on, thus a single player designing the set in their way completely, not letting others having their cards in the game. This disgruntles both those who expect contracts to be the be-all as the opportunist is continuously changing cards by reinforcing identification as strategy, and those who adhere to the identity but because their cards are at the mercy of the opportunist, are unable to play any longer. Eventually, the tension can only build up, and inevitably it results in a shattering of the tension through violent means.) You have now an added advantage against those whose agency you are hijacking: some of them still playing the old game, they are trying to act as cardmakers and not questioning your cardmakings, without realising that you are on the side playing a parallel process of discarding some cards (their cards) for ever from the game. By the late time they realise it, your cards are dominant in the game, for remember that in any game a card carries a certain different value than others. (In any society, some things are valued and some are not: those things may well be different in different societies, but a value attribution is inevitably there in any human society, plus an absence of attribution itself for whatever is not on a society's horizon.)

I will continue.

Political systems, I.

With the rise of technologies, the model of representative democracies is getting broken and exposed, and it is no wonder that knaves, whose knavery democracies are designed to protect from, are finding enough loopholes to overrun them. It is hence that I open a series of posts intended to look at the systems themselves, in order to understand them well, before we can think of something new. My focus eventually will be primarily on India, which is going through a crisis of governance, a crisis that is rooted in what I see as an incompatible system with its traditional ethos and now being milked by the thugs that know how to take advantage of it. I will also focus, secondarily, on China, which I estimate is slowly reaching a critical turning point (which may yet take a decade or more to materialise).

Let's talk about democracy per se. The original democracies of Greece were a completely different proposition than today's representative democracies. The most important distinction is that in a direct democracy such as Greece, everyone had a skin in the game: so you do not want war sitting from your drawing rooms just like that, for it is you or your son who would be out on the battlefield. Today, in countries such as Switzerland, there are referendums on big and small topics, so there is some element of directness, but there is still no skin in the game: people may vote for something even though they do not suffer necessarily the consequences of it (or so they think). Direct democracies have the obvious fault that they are unwieldy to manage. With today's technology, that shouldn't be a problem, but how to ensure that everyone has a skin in the game? It might be possible in some creative ways if a place were to have more or less equal access to resources (education, health, security, infrastructure), but in most countries of the world, there is too much of an inequality in access to resources.

Let's talk about the modern type of democracy: representative democracy. Here, a person is supposed to represent the wills of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. In a way, the small currencies, the individual wills, are "demonetised" (taking the expression from a 2016 Indian disaster): it's the big note, the representative, that counts and has a disproportional power. Now to cut down the powers to some proportionality, a variety of checks and balances are introduced. These checks and balances, crucial in any democracy, whether direct or representative, but even more so in a representative democracy on account of a de facto voicelessness of the small currencies, basically come from the very Christian, pessimistic view of human nature: the original sin. Since all human beings are considered in Christianity as inherently fallible and sinful, it is important to keep a check on them: thus a system of governance has to attempt to not to give too much power to anyone, and hence an elaborate system of checks and balances, especially more so when a representative system actually does give more power to certain individuals. (Of course, Greece was pre-Christian, but having your own skin in the game was in itself a strong check and balance. The Greek city-states were more, politically speaking, a kind of "tribe", which obviously has all its privileged members sharing all the smooth and the rough, but with the sophistication of a state.) The Christian-inspired model assumes that it is knaves, fools, the greedy, the imperfect who will be governing a country along with some better informed, who may also fall to greed or foolishness any time: a democracy assumes in advance man's readiness to make a contract with the Devil, operates from a complete lack of trust and hence introduces elaborate checks to thwart the contract's implementation. This model worked tolerably well until information technology exploded: the checks and stalemates are too rusted to work against today's technology, which keeps on advancing day by day. (Just imagine when deepfakes become commonplace! We will need to change the term to "disinformation technology.") In first-past-the-post electoral democracies, the problem was always bad: a person chosen by 25 people out of 100 might still be considered to be representing 100, thus not only making 75 voiceless but even maimed. (That calls for another thinking about electoral systems of such countries: should the win in an election be based on first-past-the-post overall as well as at least 50% votes of each significant minority; or should it be a proportional system as in Scandinavia; and so on, but that merits a volume of discussion on its own backed by several statistical inputs.)

An autocracy of course works in a very different way, whether it be the enlightened king, a set of technocrats or an all-knowing party assumed to be wise (like the CCP in China). Eastern societies such as China and India have had the dominant thought of "good" (li or dharm) as being the most important yardstick and maintaining of which is the most important goal. Human beings are not considered fallible but rather considered to have the potential to reach the dao or brahm, the Ultimate Reality: it is not considered impossible to attain harmony in human societies; Ram rajya is not just a myth, but a striving, a goal. China has thus not adopted a system designed for knaves (democracy), but rather a system designed for a set of wise leaders and gurus guiding the country to the goal of a harmonious, stable and prosperous society. Of course, in doing so, through this optimism, the power placed in the hands of its leaders is near absolute, which is very much prone to misuse: for it is one thing to hope that power is being placed in the hands of the wise, but another thing to find that it is knaves who now possess an inordinate power. A preventative could have been a very strong, healthy, debating democracy among the learned, the guiding class (the CCP in the case of China), but the circumstances of modern China's birth and Mao's ruthless consolidation of power after that put paid to that. In ancient India, the learned (the Brahmins) could have taken the power in their hands rather than left it to the kings and created such a society, but that didn't happen for whatever reason, and we were left with the Brahmins rather trying to consolidate their power relative to other segments of Indian population (e.g., via casteism). Modern India is not even in alignment with its traditional thought: it has adopted the Christian fallibility-inspired representative democracy as its political system, and yet living by and large with the Eastern optimistic ethos of aiming for the Ultimate. Thus, India currently lives permanently in a state of schizophrenia, and new tools of information technology are only bringing out the disease so far hidden out of sight. For China, instead of the schizophrenia, it is an alienation that is getting ever more stronger. The sight of the "good", of the dao is now lost with the CCP leaders only interested in a power grab, and thus the CCP exists now merely to ensure the opium of money and a hedonistic lifestyle, which means that many people have started to live in a moral vacuum, not knowing how to find meaning in their lives, not knowing how to express themselves. Meaning-making is essential for a human being to live, for without it we would be merely sated beasts: in schizophrenia, the condition which India finds itself in, you are taught to interpret something in some other way than what you internally experience it, and hence you realise the meaninglessness of the meaningfulness of meanings, and thus a horror is born within the soul; in alienation, the condition which China finds itself in, you learn the meaninglessness of meanings, and thus an intense desolation is born within the soul.

I will continue in future posts.