How To Become A Dictator

Opening Pitch: A Curveball, Low and Outside
If you look at a map of Africa, and gaze down its West Coast, 20 miles off the coast of Cameroon, in the Gulf of Guinea, you'll see a little island named Bioco. For nearly 500 years it was called Fernando Po, after its discoverer.

In the early 1970s Captain Ernesto Tequila y Mota read and re-read from Edward Luttwak's book Coup d' Etat: A Practical Handbook. Reading from yet another book that addresses Mota's coup: "He set up a timetable, made his first converts among other officers, formed a clique, and began the slow process of arranging things so that officers likely to be loyal to Equatorial Guinea would be on assignment at least 48 hours away from the capital city when the coup occurred. He drafted the first proclamation to be issued by his new government; it took the best slogans of the most powerful left-wing and right-wing groups on the island and embedded them firmly in a tapiocalike complex of bland liberal-conservatism. It fit Luttwak's prescription excellently, giving everybody on the island some small hope that his own interests and beliefs would be advanced by the new regime. And, after three years of planning, he struck: the key officials of the old regime were quickly, bloodlessly, placed under house arrest; troops under command of officers in the cabal occupied the power stations and newspaper offices; the inoffensively fascist-conservative-liberal-communist proclamation of the new People's Republic of Fernando Poo (sic) went forth to the world over the radio station in Santa Isobel. Ernesto Tequila y Mota had achieved his ambition - promotion from captain to generalissimo in one step. Now, at last, he began wondering about how one went about governing a country. He would probably have to read a new book, and he hoped that there was one as good as Luttwak's treatise on seizing a country."

I'm having you on, of course: that long passage I quoted was from the rollicking, psychedelic book of conspiracy theories, the eldritch and menacing underground fiction book, The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. (pp.18-19)

OG Loves His Crazy Books
Except...the Luttwak book is a real book. I own it. It's one of my favorite "Walter Mitty" books: I have a large collection of outrageous literature: Hitler's autobiography, The Turner Diaries, John Birch Society classics, books on how to get revenge on your enemies, Lyndon Larouche tracts, books explaining how advanced aliens have been herding humans like sheep since Day One, Report From Iron Mountain, a book called How To Start Your Own Country, on and on. There's a frisson I cop from owning these books; the reason I call them "Walter Mitty" books is because they have solely to do with some sort of ironic fantasy life: it's not that I would ever adhere to the ideologies in those books, much less take the same actions. The ideas are almost 100% abhorrent to me, but maybe they make for fascinating sociology? A large chunk of my epistemology is influenced by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's phenomenological sociology: knowledge must be anything that is taken as "real" by anyone. For my literary mind, these tomes represent possible habitable worlds. Possibly: worlds that some of my fellow Citizens take seriously as "real." (So...:"oppositional research"?)

These sorts of outrageous books also fuel the anthropological imagination. I like to imagine I could or would, but know I couldn't or wouldn't (I really want us to be nicer to each other: what a friggin' dreamer!) be in some racist, nazi terror group, for some inexplicable reasons not entirely clear to me. When friends see my couple shelves of Weirdo Lit, the easiest - and indeed very true - explanation is: I'm a hardcore 1st Amendment person, especially when it comes to books. But then there's my digression...

                                    Edward Luttwak, prodigious amoral scholar of power,
                                      born 1942.

Edward Luttwak
My, but Luttwak is a learned person, if an amoral one. I've seen him interviewed a few times and he's guileless. And smart. The amoral intellectuals scare the crap out of me, but fascinate me in roughly the same way that Mad Scientists do. I don't consider myself a Moralist, but when I'm confronted by the mind of a Luttwak, or Kissinger, or Herman Kahn, who experimented with LSD and found it a delightful enhancement to his schemes for winning a nuclear war, or...the King of the NeoCons, Leo Strauss...it makes me think.

Let me quote from Luttwak's Coup d'Etat:
(He's discussing France's ineffectual 4th Republic [1946-59]): "The France of 1958 had become politically inert and therefore ripe for a coup. The political structures of most developed countries, however, are too resilient to make them suitable targets, unless certain 'temporary' factors weaken the system and obscure its basic soundness. Of those temporary factors the most common are:
(a) severe and prolonged economic crisis, with large-scale unemployment or runaway inflation;
(b) a long and unsuccessful war or a major defeat, military or diplomatic;
(c) chronic instability under a multi-party system." (p.31)

Near the end of the book, in Appendix A, "The Economics of Repression," we read:
"Once we have carried out our coup and established control over the bureaucracy and the armed forces,  our long-term political survival will largely depend on our management of the problem of economic development. Economic development is generally regarded as a 'good thing' and almost everybody wants more of it, but for us - the newly-established government of X-Land - the pursuit of economic development will be undesirable, since it militates against our main goal: political stability." (p.175)

In 1999 Luttwak published an article in one of the foreign policy journals called "Give War A Chance." Some more idealistic scholars attempt to take him to task HERE.

                                        Out of the mouths of morons...

These Books Have Been Around For Yonks!
From Sun-Tzu's Art of War to (my personal fave) Machiavelli's The Prince, to Clausewitz on to today, polymathic scholars of realpolitick  have written books like Luttwak's. And what always strikes me when I read them: how refreshingly empirical and rational they are! I know that may sound horrible, but hear me out: given the 24/7/365 of corporate propaganda and punditocratic mush we're all subject to, I feel a sense of no-bullshit relief when reading the scholars of realpolitick. I'm not saying I agree with them - I cop to a certain idealism - but at least they are saying the stuff that you're not supposed to say. And if they have wit, all the better.

Back to my Walter Mitty frisson-dealio: I distinctly remember working in a posh old public library in a very rich and conservative area of Los Angeles, and I happened upon a field manual for how to conduct guerrilla war, by Che Guevara. Of course I checked it out and read it cover to cover. How it managed to stay on the shelves of that library (I doubt anyone had read it in at least 15 years), I don't know. That's one big reason I love physical books in physical libraries: the shock and joy of finding something that you didn't even know existed!

                                This is probably pretty close to what Machiavelli looked like

The Latest In This Hallowed Tradition: The Dictator's Handbook
Appearing in 2011 and subtitled, "How Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics," from NYU political scientists Alastair Smith and the very Robert Anton Wilson-y and Robert Shea-ishly-named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (I actually thought that was Alastair Smith's nonexistent writing partner, a nom de plume of sorts), but Mesquita (not to be confused with the fictional character Ernesto Tequila y Mota) is not only real but he's a big deal. Apparently he has a odd track record of making predictions that come true, which, if you've been reading me for long, know is quite rare. HERE is a five minute piece on "the new Nostradamus" (as Mesquita's been called) on NPR, from November 2009.

Aye: "Using the logic of brazen self-interest" pretty much sums up Smith and Mesquita's approach to political power, whether it's Obama or some dictator in a war-torn little African country. The only difference, our NYU profs think, between democracy and dictatorship, is that the guy operating in the democracy has to deal with more constraints. For any leader, the goal is simple: to get power, keep it, and control the money as much as you can. Perusing The Dictator's Handbook reminded me of reading Luttwak, but it was more breezy, and had a Freakonomics-like vibe.

If "using the logic of brazen self-interest" makes you think immediately of Game Theory, then you're one of those I wanna party with. 'Cuz you're smart, not due to any adherence to a singular "logic of self-interest." Yes: Smith and Mesquita use game theory as both a method and as a motor of considerable rhetorical effectiveness. It's as if their deftness about embedding their ideas in the theory of games makes the book not only compelling due to argument, but thrilling due to mood. And why would I, a non-Gamer, who's never played Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft, find something thrilling in a popular-poli-sci book that seems to be imbued with a chunk of that same zeitgeist? I don't know, but it's not because I feel emotionally removed due to feeling like a disembodied player for hours-on-end of intense and involving video games. I think it's more that I'd rather my body not be as much affected by what I now - pessimistically? - call realpolitick. Fascistic, money-driven politics of the spectacle tend toward depressed moods. Therefore, I'll cultivate an...ironic mood?...towards... "reality"?

Let me think this through a bit more over the next week or so. And back to Mesquita and Smith.

Forget about the complex logistics and strengths and weaknesses of states, what "they" want, the grand strategies and even national interest and good and right and wrong and justice: you need supporters to keep you in power, and you need to draw from as large a pool of supporters as possible (which our profs call "the selectorate"). Who will keep you there? Billionaires and fanatical leaders of coalitions, which explains why a democratically elected leader will champion spending programs that a large chunk of the population don't really want.

There's soooo much bullshit in political reality - especially as we're ramping up for another Prez Election in Unistat - that reading a book like this might feel to you like going through the looking glass. One of our new Machiavellis, Alastair Smith, says, "It's virtually impossible to find any example where leaders are not acting in their own interest."

Another one: "If you're working for the common good you didn't come to power in the first place. If you're not willing to cheat, steal, murder and bribe then you don't come to power."

And every man's vote counts, right? Well...I have talked to a whole lot of very brilliant, well-read young people at Occupy rallies. They have read everything and they're articulate and passionate and they can't get a job to pay off their student loans. And they know why.

But when they vote, who reading me here believes their vote goes as far as a billionaire's or the leader of some fanatical coalition that will rally voters to the polls?

Furthermore: the leader must not terrorize his supporters or take money out of their pockets to make other people's lives better - says Smith and Mesquita - but it's okay for Occupy folk to feel terrorized; it's always better to tax the crap out of people and make them fear for their next meal; it is bad to let them grow their own food. So: Occupy kids: no change, plenty to fear, almost zilch for power. The CEOs on Wall Street?: they're part of the leaders' supporters, they take care of the members of the board and big investors and senior management people. No terror there. And for their "work" they receive mega-outrageously large bonuses.

When we were in grade school, the answer to the riddle, "What do you get when you cross a penis with a potato?" had a funny answer. Now? Maybe "funny" in another, darker way. And I'm reminded of Gore Vidal, who died last week. I paraphrase, but he often said that the American public were so gullible that they harbored the perennial belief that if we just elected a "good, nice man" as Prez, we'd be fine.

for extra credit:
How Will the 99% Deal with the Psychopaths in the 1%?
10 Mad Dictators From the 20th and 21st Century
Dictators and Fascists and their musical tastes: Kim Jong Il loved Eric Clapton?
Osama bin Laden smoked pot and watched "The Wonder Years" and was crazy about Whitney Houston?
George W. Bush 43: "Eight years was awesome and I was famous and I was powerful."
Got a budding scholar of dictatorships? Read 'em all!

Night of the Living Chomsky Problem

In our previous adventures, the Overweening Generalist and his crew (he has no crew) have marshaled what meager intellectual reserves they had, and set out on the open road (a small room filled with books, mostly) to seek out the answer to a question posed in the NY Times Book Review section in 1979 by Paul Robinson: how do Chomsky's linguistics intersect with his politics? Robinson thought Chomsky was arguably the most important intellectual alive, and his achievement in linguistics was monumental (or something like that), while his political books seemed maddeningly simple-minded. I'm about a 180 from Professor Robinson, but the Big Q remains: how do the politics and linguistic works intersect? Lots of people have asked Chomsky that over the years, and he's given enough variation of answers that it's an intriguing puzzle to dyed-in-the-wool-weirdos like myself. I'm hacking away, folks. But it's fun. On with the show...
----------------------------------------------

I should get this out of the way: there is a linguist who's made a career out of hating Chomsky named Geoffrey Sampson. I actually own one of his books, Schools of Linguistics. He seems to deliberately misunderstand Chomsky, but maybe he just really doesn't get him. Or maybe he despises Chomsky for Noam's criticisms of Israel. Anyway, he has tackled the Chomsky Problem too, rather lamely, especially in his book Liberty and Language. Sampson wants to warn us all about Chomsky in this book, especially Chomsky's supposed "scientism," and here's a slice of Sampson's non-lapidary prose with regard to this issue:


"[Scientism is] the prejudice which holds that the scientific method applies to all possible subjects of human thought, or (what amounts to the same in practice) that matters which cannot be treated by the method of science are somehow unreal or unimportant." - p.1

Well, in an earlier post about Chomsky I quoted him saying that we may learn more about the human condition by reading novels. He has made similar statements many times. What's even more embarrassing about Sampson's status as a teacher of young people, is how far he gets the "scientism" thing wrong. Chomsky has written scads and scads of stuff on the limits of science; one of the things that strikes me most about his thought are his ideas about "limitology": for some reason our nervous systems were able to tease out the quantum theory, but we really don't know much about the social worlds, in scientific terms. In an interview with Wiktor Osiatinsky in 1983 Chomsky says, "There are huge areas where the human mind is apparently incapable of forming sciences or at least has not done so. There are other areas, so far in fact one area only, in which we have demonstrated the capacity for true scientific progress."

Osiatinsky: Physics?

Chomsky: Physics and those parts of other fields that grow out of physics: chemistry, the structure of the big molecules - in those domains there is a lot of progress. In many other domains there is very little progress in developing real scientific understanding.

But if one reads Chomsky, he admits the foundations for his vision of a libertarian socialist society are not solid; however, he likes to talk about this other possible society.

I guess Chomsky wasn't impressed by the moves Wilhelm Dilthey and his colleagues made in the late 19th century/early 20th: an understanding that social sciences (geisteswissenschaften) were indeed different than the physical sciences (naturwissenschaften), and that they deserved different hermeneutics. The natural sciences (what Chomsky seems to think are the only true, successful "science"), which worked wonderfully via nomothetic or law-like descriptions (F=Ma); while the social sciences, because of their inherent difficulty due to the involvement of complex human Being, should be described in ideographic or picture-like language. Lakoff would call this metaphor...

I was being coy: of COURSE Chomsky rejected Dilthey and co: they stressed the presence of a living, breathing interpreter of the world - they were Romantics! - while Chomsky seems to always have the ideal Cartesian as the model for making sense of the world. (Please see neuroscientist Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error.)

Here's Sampson again, regarding his version of the Chomsky Problem. Sampson is going to inform us "with the ideas of man who represents this scientistic pseudo-opposition to scientism more forcefully and influentially than anyone else in the contemporary world, and who bids fair to corner the forces opposed to scientism so completely as to render any genuine fight against scientism impossible of success."-p.3 of Liberty and Language. You can't make this shit up, folks! Sampson is David, you see. Chomsky is Goliath. Goliath is awesome! But David will carry the day. Sampson has a PhD, folks. And what an incredible edifice of a straw man Sampson has concocted! Goliath will burn!


Embarrassing.


Back to my Chomsky Problem:

In a May, 1968 interview originally done for The Listener (London), Chomsky gets this question:

Q: Do you think that when one thinks of these principles of order and transformation and preferred structures in language as restrictions, they set a restriction on scientific thought?

Chomsky: I suspect that the properties of the language faculty are probably closely associated to the faculties that lead us to what we call common sense - our common-sense knowledge of the world, that is.

[He then elaborates about maturity and language competence and a the vast knowledge of the physical world: it's intricate, complex, highly organized, and mysterious.]

Then:

Chomsky: This whole mass of knowledge falls into what we roughly call common sense and we know from the history of science that common sense knowledge has had its limitations, that it's necessary to try to make this incredibly difficult leap beyond common sense to some sort of abstract picture of the nature of experience, of the nature of the physical world. Making this leap is a uniquely human ability, and it involves properties of the mind that we do not yet even begin to understand. I would suppose that there are restrictions on these further faculties. And a very fascinating question would be to try to think of a way of discovering these restrictions. If we could discover some of them, we could begin to say something about the possible bounds of human knowledge.
-----------------------------------------
How does this play in my Chomsky Problem? I think that it's wonderfully illustrative and pithy regarding his epistemological stance, to this day, 42 years later. It's a marvelous idea to think about. How far can we go before we look into the abyss, where possible knowledge ends and beyond there's nothing but hopeless darkness? I don't particularly subscribe to it, simply because neuroscience is relatively new. Chomsky, in all my readings of him, seems only trivially interested in axon potentials, neurochemistry and neuroanatomy, and anything limbic seems terra incognita to him. He has marveled at Hubel and Wiesel's work with vision (to me: one of the most stupendously great works in all the sciences), and he's mentioned Gestalists and their findings in perception, but found them too "peripheral." He's mentioned Karl Lashley and Yosef Grodzinsky, but he's never really been interested in going, as Jerome Feldman's book title has it, From Molecule To Metaphor, subtitled "A Neural Theory of Language." Feldman's approach just makes sense to me; it can account for why people fall for "The Death Tax," or "Collateral Damage" or "heartland values" or "American is the greatest country that God has ever seen fit to create in the history of the world," a version of something heard on right-wing TV and radio in Unistat every day.


I don't worry that much about the limits of knowledge. It's an interesting question to ponder though. In the social sciences, I think ideographic approaches are more appropriate, but there are some statistical methodologies that are being combined with descriptive language and yielding some mindblowing results in, say, economics. See the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, for example!
------------------------------------------
"Intellectual passions are more bewitching than love affairs, which is why they last longer. A man can adore a woman until she changes or grows surly, but he can be madly infatuated with a Theory all his life." - from Robert Anton Wilsons' novel Nature's God.
------------------------------------------
Okay, I'm not sure I've sufficiently begun to nail down a concise answer to my own puzzle of a Chomsky Problem. I'll keep working on it. Any poking or prodding or provoking from The Reader might help.