Recall that freedom is the fundamental right from which all other rights flow.  For us to be able to claim that any individual is free, they must in fact be able to pursue, with minimal social interference, what they themselves conceives of as what is good, insofar as this does not interfere with others’ ability to do the same.  Furthermore, this right must be real and effective, and not merely formal.  That is to say, an individual should be able to actually pursue their good, not merely in the abstract.  People cannot pursue their conception of the good without having their basic needs – for food, water, shelter, medicine, and social access – met.

People in a free society have duties as a flip side of having rights.  My right to something is defined as your duty to allow me to that thing.  We must keep that in mind when we are told that certain public requirements are a bar to liberty.  While we here at Philosophyhelmet deny the legitimacy of our undemocratic government, in principle a free people will still have duties to one another as citizens.  This includes the duty to provide for one another’s basic needs, so that each citizen may effectively exercise their freedom.

As Trout writes, “In 2004, a total of 1,316 motorcyclists in the United States suffered fatal crashes.  Had all of them worn helmets, 671 of them would have been saved.”  Helmet laws have succeeded in “reducing fatalities by 15 percent in Washington and by 37 percent in California.” (J.D. Trout, The Empathy Gap [New York: Viking] iBooks)  The numbers are indisputable – there is no doubt that helmet laws would save lives.  But, as Trout himself further notes, many dispute the validity of helmet laws on the grounds that they violate human freedom.  Laws exist only to protect our liberty from one another, goes the argument, and the refusal to wear a motorcycle helmet does not injure the liberty of another.  Throughout the work, Trout rejects paternalistic social institutions.  After all, there’s a lot that we really want to do, but fail to do because of our universal cognitive limitations.  Thus, it’s not really paternalism when a social institution is helping us to do what we really want to do, such as saving for retirement.  But he really struggles to justify helmet laws as non-paternalistic.  I think that everyone can understand that not wearing a motorcycle helmet is imprudent.  But helmet laws are not merely helping me make a better decision like some of the other recommendations in the book.  Helmet laws require wearing a helmet, and if you disobey, you are punished.  That’s not helping you make a better decision, that’s making the decision for you.  This is what makes helmet laws paternalistic.  A non-paternalistic helmet law would allow me to have the option of not wearing a helmet but encourage me to attend to the fact that it’s a bad idea.

I am assuming here the justice of the argument against paternalism.  While we surely want to improve the conditions of our society, and work to realize our various values, we do so within the constraints of basic principles of justice.  I view the primary principle of justice to be that each person has a fundamental right to an equal degree of liberty.  Thus (to skip ahead in the argument), the society constrains us only in order that we may each enjoy the greatest possible equal liberty.  It’s a good model of justice that has sustained some branches of political philosophy since the Enlightenment, even if our actual societies fail to make the principle actual.  In any case, we can make laws to improve society within the limits of such a first principle, and paternalistic laws violate that principle.

Trout responds to the paternalism charge that the death of a helmetless motorcycle rider does not only affect the motorcycle rider.  The death of the rider means financial and emotional hardship for family and a burden on medical resources.  While true, this seems to me to be stretching the notion of an “effect” upon others.  It would seem ridiculous to say that other people need to be protected from my riding without a motorcycle helmet (I wouldn’t actually ride a motorcycle).

However!  Society can and does demand that the costs to society that people create by performing certain actions are “internalized”.  In economic parlance, benefits and burdens that are taken on by others are “externalities”.  So, when someone buys a car, the seller gets the money, the buyer gets transportation, but everyone else gets traffic congestion, pollution, and the suburbs, none of which the buyer is paying the rest of us for.  Since these are all costs to society, they are negative externalities.  Likewise, helmetless motorcycle riding is a cost in medical resources to society.  It seems only fair to ask those who create costs to bear them.  Hence, Arthur Pigou, the economist responsible for the concept of externality, recommended a tax structure that “internalize” costs back to the generator of such costs.  Thus, cigarette smokers bear the future costs of caring for their lung cancer when they pay taxes on cigarettes, drinkers pay for the damages of alcohol consumption by paying taxes on alcohol, etc.  Unfortunately, polluters do not yet have to pay for their pollution, nor financiers for the costs of speculation.  So-called “Pigouvian” taxes force the users of socially burdensome goods or services to pay for those burdens to the rest of us.

We can apply the same method to helmetless motorcycle riding.  One might reply that that’s exactly what a helmet law does – the fine imposed internalizes the cost of helmetless riding.  I would recommend a point of payment that does not involve legal punishment.  Instead, motorcyclists who wish to have the option of going without helmets can pay more for the probable burden of doing so when they pay their motorcycle license.  They would be given the statistics on the risks of helmetless motorcycling, written in a manner that makes the information most real to them, and receive a special mark on their license and license plate so that highway patrols know to leave them alone if the motorcyclists decides to go without their helmets.  Everyone else would be subject to the legally required punishment, and informed that they could pay more to not be required to wear their helmet.  Fines for illegal helmetless motorcycling and the fee for licensed helmetless driving would have to be adjusted so that one is not privileged over another.  This would better reflect the aim of decreasing motorcycle fatalities without paternalism.

First, I have been asked “why Wall Street?  They don’t make the rules – why not Washington?” (thanks Mom!).  Well, that’s not actually true.  It would be a mistake to see the State – the institutions of formal law-making and the coercive enforcement of those laws – as the only center of power in a society.  In fact, it is rarely the actual place of power at all, but rather the source of legitimation of power.  To be less abstract, the power of the financial sector has risen to consume any independent political power.  Employees of the big banks rotate in and out of the financial regulatory agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, and now most of the President’s advisors come from Wall Street, particularly Goldman-Sachs.  This is not only true in the United States, but also the European Union, where financiers are being installed by the European Central Bank as the prime ministers of nations like Greece and Italy, all the better to vacuum up the public wealth into private banks.  The State, whether in the United States or in Europe, has become as much an appendage of financial institutions as anything. The fact that trillions can be shoveled into the banks and nothing can be spared for the actual human beings of those societies is only the most dramatic evidence of this fact.  That’s why Wall Street is being occupied.

So why “occupy” then?  Why seize public places, mostly parks, and live there until forced out by pepper spraying thugs?  This is not a new phenomenon, actually.  The ancient Romans offer the first recorded such political activity.  In the class-based republic of Rome, the aristocratic patrician class possessed the balance of power.  When the plebeian class – those artisanal workers and shop-owners who ran the city – could not find justice in the Roman State, they simply walked out of the city and lived in the countryside until the patricians gave in.  This was called secession plebis, or “the secession of the plebeians.”  Labor strikes carry the same reasoning.  The plebeians, the workers, and the “99%” are all the people that actually make society work.  The patricians, managers, and financiers are all parasitic on those lower classes.  When the essential party walks away, the whole motion of society, through the operation of its institutions, will grind to a halt.  That is the purpose of occupying – to disrupt the operation of the institutions until justice is achieved. We make up institutions, after all, by continuing to do what is expected of us.  When enough people decide to stop doing what is expected of them, the institution stops functioning.

But tying up an unjust institution by occupying is great, but what do Occupiers want in place of those unjust institutions?  This was the continuous question of every political pundit who shoved their meaty faces into a television camera: “What do they want?”  As if a collection of strangers would have a ready list of demands for change.  And some did, with Occupy Wall Street releasing a declaration of grievances, and one its groups releasing a proposal to form a National Assembly in July of 2012, while Occupy Washington DC proposed an alternative budget that would reduce the deficit in two years while increasing social spending.

Mostly though, the Occupy movement refused to issue demands.  On the one hand, there was strategy involved, as releasing demands and solutions would allow the movement to be pigeon-holed, mocked, and ignored by an elitist punditry, arrogant politicians, and a lazy press.  On the other hand, many in the movement trumpeted their lack of demands as something to be lauded.  “We are our demands,” they would say.  Well, if that’s the case, I think we can figure out what demands follow from the movement itself.

First, Occupiers want equality.  Mostly, Occupiers have been focused on the inequality of income and wealth.  Since at least the Enlightenment, a rough equality of wealth has been understood as being necessary for a decent society, or a free society, or a democracy.  Political philosophy has had some difficulty in precising what sort of equality we actually understand as valuable, whether it’s an equality of opportunity, or resources, or well-being, or freedom (Andrew Levine has a great discussion here).  However, the results are going to be pretty much the same for the United States today: some redistribution of wealth and income has to occur for American society to continue to function.  The results of a greatly unequal society are bad for everyone.

Second, the first thing that Occupiers do when the take over a public space is to form a General Assembly based on a modified consensus rule of achieving 90% agreement (I’ve expressed my qualified skepticism on this site).  Thus, we could conclude that one thing that the 99% desire is popular democracy, the capacity of the people to make decisions directly for themselves, in any social context they may find themselves in.  Thus, one might hope that, in the coming year, Occupiers spread the Assembly model throughout communities where state and municipal bureaucracies make decisions regardless of what the people want.  Implicit in the self-management of occupied public spaces is a demand for a reconception of the public.  The conflict between the Occupiers and the police is partially about who controls public space, the actual people using the space, such as the Occupiers, or the State, as represented by the police.  Whereas in modern societies, the State claims the right to manage public property, in a popular-democratic society, the users, the consumers, and the producers of the public property ought to manage the space together as an open common property.

Finally, as discussed above, the targeting of Wall Street as the capital of the Occupy movement pretty clearly represents an assault on the power of finance in government. Wall Street is the symbol of an extractive, parasitic force on the real production of wealth in the United States and the world, even though finance has other headquarters (the City of London, for example).  The financial institutions can be understood as being bad from a variety of perspectives.  If you are a supporter of capitalism, then you should be opposed to the financier as a collector of economic rent and not profit.  The capitalist at least puts forward some risk in order to collect profits, but the rentier simply possesses a claim on the wealth of others.  If you are a socialist, then finance capital is the planning agency of the capitalist economy.  If you simply believe in democracy, then such vast accumulations of wealth and power is unconscionable.  For many Americans, however, the enmity towards finance is simply the realization that financial recklessness has destroyed people’s jobs, homes, health, and country, and that Americans are sliding further into both private and public debt to keep the 1% afloat.

What happens next?  The Occupations have been assaulted and many routed by the police in most of the major cities, though the particular Occupations live on as organizations engaging in direct action.  Occupy Wall Street, for example, occupied the foreclosed homes and turned them over to homeless families.  A national Move Your Money day cost the largest banks over four billion in lost consumer deposits.  Discussions in the press about inequality surged – in quantity, if not quality.  The new year will see if the Occupy movement has more to offer, if it will disappear, or if it will transform into something new that can bring democracy to this troubled land.

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is, to quote Rousseau from book I, chapter 6, of the Social Contract: “to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before.” Strangely enough, Rousseau did not consider himself a democrat, but nevertheless he believed that only the assembly of the people could grant legitimacy to the acts of any organ» , whether that organ was a monarchy, or aristocracy, or democracy.  Rousseau advocated an ‘elective’ aristocracy, by the way, thinking that elections would produce a government of the wisest men.  That hypothesis has been defeated, I think.  In any case, what we would call democracy is the solution to the fundamental problem of political philosophy because “obedience to a law which we prescribe to ourselves is liberty” (book I, chapter 8).

From this claim it is reasonable to conclude that one ought not to submit to any law that does not have a unanimous consent.  How then can we live by laws passed by the majority?»   Rousseau’s answer is that the majority is always correct about constitutes the “general will,” which I have discussed before.  The short version is that the majority is always right about the general will of the community is.  I suggested in that linked article that the aim of the general will is the freedom of each of its associates, and thus the decisions of the majority are correct in the sense that the law that had been passed is what the majority of individuals is going to do.

But I have a much less philosophical and more practical answer that I suggested in my previous post on Occupy Richmond.  We must make concessions to the practical considerations of the sort of animal that we are.  Consensus is desirable for the most important decisions, including the determination of procedure and process and other constitutive features of an assembly, as well as any issue that the majority might think requires consensus.  Consensus works well in small groups, and is therefore practically appropriate for committees, councils, and working groups.  But to ask an assembly to make every decision by consensus is going to wear people down.  People are subject to cognitive limitations, like the “decision fatigue” that I mentioned, that make extended deliberations arduous.  The momentum of a revolution is already a fragile thing, and popular energy must be conserved.

It’s the procedures for a clear and precise deliberation that are really important, in which every side of any proposal is articulated.  This is why breaking into small committees is so important.  Deliberation functions as a process of interpersonal transformation, in which a diverse people can come to understand one another through having to actually face someone from a different background.  If the deliberative procedures are strong enough, then the minority in a decision will respect the legitimacy of the majority decision.  I’m speaking empirically (and broadly) here, from the various research in deliberation from people like James Fishkin.

In any case, both consensus and majority decision have a role in collective decision-making.  The more vital and fundamental the decision, or the smaller the group, the closer to consensus we may desire the decision.  But practical considerations, the way that human beings are actually limited, requires that most of the minor decisions that assemblies make ought to be through majority.  Proper procedures for deliberation will ensure that the minority will not be aggrieved.

A scene from Occupy Wall Street (not Richmond)

I had been to the October 6 meeting in Monroe Park of the not-yet-existing Occupy Richmond movement.  Some seventy or so people met and decided to meet back at the park today (October 15) to have a further assembly, and to stand in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.  The assembly went pretty smoothly, at least in my view, though others might disagree.  I know from history that democracy is a messy, tumultuous thing, and can be full of yelling and confusion and bad feelings.  To a society that is accustomed to being calmly but badly managed by smug pricks with bachelor’s degrees, it may seem like a circus where the chimpanzees got loose.  But that’s the price you pay for freedom.

I got to the park early, around quarter of four, so I looked for a snack.  Psychologists at places like Stanford and Princeton have discovered “decision fatigue” – making decisions is hard physiological work, and the body needs fuel to reduce impulsiveness and maintain self-control.  If I was going to be discussing the future of America with a bunch of college students with enough time on their hands to deliberate endlessly, I was going to need something in my stomach.  Unfortunately, I never found anything as I strolled the blocks around Monroe Park.  I could smell frying, but I couldn’t find where he was hiding.

When I got back to the park, people were milling about aimlessly.  Is this an occupation, I wondered?  I genuinely didn’t know at the time what an occupation exactly was.  I leaned against a tree to take in the crowd.  Unfortunately, we conform to the stereotypes.  Dirty and faded t-shirts with political slogans, colored hair, facial piercings, tattoos.  Not that I have a problem with any of that sort of thing, and it can often look great if done right, but we look like the already dubious mainstream expects us to look.  It’s a sad fact of human nature that people just trust people who look like them.  For example, with my collared shirt, pants, and combed hair, these people probably thought I was some damn undercover cop.

At least one person thought I looked nice enough to ask me to help her into the tree I was leaning against.  She was small, so it wasn’t much trouble for to get high up there.  I stretched to hand up her protest sign.  I forget what hers said, but there were a lot of different signs reflecting all the different concerns that people had.  Some group even had a big, attractive “no-nukes” banner that they held between them.  They had to hold it all throughout the assembly.  A middle-aged woman was holding a sign that just said, “I am NOT a hippie.”  I thought she seemed awfully old to worry about what someone was calling her.  The name-calling is going to get much worse if this movement turns into a Movement.  The worst of the signs were the clichés and the slogans – “the revolution will not be televised,” etc.  I’m not asking, like those jackasses on the news, that you fit your whole political argument on a poster, but at least use your own words.

Finally, the assembly began with calls of “mike check.”  This is the “people’s mike”: everybody who can hear the current speaker repeats what the speaker says.  This is in lieu of actual microphones, but I’m not too sure why.  I’ve been studying social and political philosophy since 1997, and I can’t remember anything that would suggest I should be against microphones.  It works remarkably well however.  It results in a strange cadence on the part of the speaker as he or she shouts five words and then waits for the crowd to repeat them.  As the afternoon wears on though and fatigue creeps in, I and many others would forget that we’re supposed to be repeating and not just listening.

The facilitators – really an executive committee or chairpersons – introduced people to the hand signals used by the Occupy movement to silently communicate with the assembly.  I suppose this is to avoid drowning out speakers with applause or other noises of agreement and disagreement.  When I read elsewhere that the Manhattan occupation wiggled their fingers to signal approval I thought for sure that was just a sort of hippie-baiting joke.  When I saw it in action on October 6 in Richmond, I winced.  “Dear Jesus, here we go,” I said.  What the hell though; I teach logic for a living, and the language isn’t half as simple or natural as wiggling your fingers.  You quickly get into it anyway, wiggling “spirit fingers” up for approval, down for disapproval, and straight ahead for undecided.  Then there was the rather appealingly aggressive “crossed fists” for ‘block’, which means that you’ll actually leave the movement if a certain decision goes through.  As you’ll see, this came back to bite us all on the ass.

Things went well for the first hour, with sensible discussion of the benefits and burdens for various locations to ‘occupy’.  At the first meeting, people had asked what an “occupation” means.  The facilitators gave no answer at the time.  That’s probably why it came as a surprise to the assembly that we would be voting which park to spend our nights in for the next week.  I was willing to pretty much go to any park or location, so I didn’t really have a dog in the fight.  Speaking of, there were a lot of dogs there, just a huge number of small dogs.  It’s hard to be revolutionary when you’re carrying around an adorable toy spaniel.

I don’t want to give the impression of not being committed to fundamental change in our social institutions, but I won’t be sleeping overnight in Kanawha Plaza.  That’s a younger person’s game, or maybe for the retired.  The point is, I have to be at work in the mornings and if I smell like Federal Reserve lawn and police pepper spray, I’m done for.  Bless the folks that do occupy though.

Speaking of the authorities, the Richmond mayor’s office has said that Occupy Richmond would not be issuing a permit for the occupation, and that sleeping overnight in parks is not legal anyway, despite Kanawha Plaza being a refuge for the homeless.  To the credit of the Richmond police, its chief had been reported as saying that not permitting the occupation of public spaces would be unconstitutional.  There was actually a lot of concern about getting arrested, and perhaps people who are not like me, a white man with a middle-class bearing if not the actual class position, have to be more concerned about that.  But that’s half the point of massing – the more people who are defying the law, the less likely they are to be arrested.

Things got uglier as the deliberations went on.  The Occupy movement seems committed to their “modified consensus” procedures, where 90% of the 300 people – that’s 270 people – were supposed to agree for the assembly to take action.  And this wasn’t a decision for something vital, but rather which park to meet next in.  I thought the “Sixties” already answered this one for us, where working people were driven away by academic democratic-radicals like me who insisted on consensus for everything with no concessions to practical considerations.  I refer the reader to Mansbridge’s Beyond Adversary Democracy.  Mansbridge describes a collective workplace that struggled with consensus as most of the participants were worn down by the hippie die-hards who were going to argue until the sun went down while the working people wanted to get home to their families or their other obligations.  If the occupation were the only community we lived in, we might take the time to deliberate until 90% of us agreed.  But modern people live in many different communities with many different competing obligations and social roles, and that’s going to be true of any future democratic society in this world.

Modified consensus was where all the trouble came in.  For maybe forty-five minutes the assembly stalled as people waited for the vote for which park to occupy.  This wasn’t the yelling and confusion and bad feelings, but much worse, a paralysis, a computer stuck in a loop.  Everybody’s blood sugar was too low and people couldn’t make themselves understood, and the facilitators were stalling.  Then came the first vote on which park to occupy.  One had a clear majority, but neither was going to get the unattainable 90%.  More dithering – a bad jittery listlessness.  I wandered around the park myself, and checked to make sure my car didn’t have a ticket, as it was past the two-hour mark on two-hour parking.

People were yelling now, “simple majority!” and “majority rules!”  Even people who would lose were anxious for a final vote – people wanted resolution.  A vote on whether to suspend consensus for this vote unsurprisingly passed, but people wanted to push it forward – majority rules for all decisions.  That’s when someone gave us a crossed fist and consensus went to hell.  An attractive woman came to the center of the assembly and said that she would leave the movement if we went full majority rules.  The contradiction of consensus was put on full display – one person was going to prevent the majority from acting as it willed.  I understand the idea behind consensus, I do.  If everyone agrees or close enough, then nobody is doing something that they don’t want to do.  I’m a bit Rousseauean, so I get that.  But Rousseau also counseled us to make our institutions for people as they are, and not as we would like them to be.  In any case, a minority has no right to ultimately thwart the will of the majority – that’s what I’m out here to stand against.

But now the facilitators were the 1%, with the crowd shouting “vote! Vote!” and the facilitators stalling.  I see these facilitators being blind-folded in front of the firing squad of a revolution they helped create.  Some people who want to lead make the mistake of trying to stare down a crowd and that doesn’t go well for anybody.  Bad craziness.  Anyway, everybody seemed satisfied that we would use simple majority for this one vote alone, and it was left at that.

We finally got our vote and the decision was made for Kanawha Plaza.  There was more to cover, but dusk was falling and many people had plainly had enough.  The people who stayed marched all the way to the new location.  I’ll be there tomorrow.  I might have stayed tonight, but I had split my pants when I tried sitting in the grass.  The revolution seems to demand something with a little more give in the crotch.  Make a note: revolution requires sweatpants.

Most Americans do not understand the implications of Obama’s action.  They will just say that they “don’t care about Awlaki’s rights,” just like Osama bin Laden before him.  In fact, when Obama informed an audience with the news, they applauded.  The error here is not just a failure of being a person, though there is that.  The failure is understanding that one’s rights are not something that one possesses for oneself.  Somebody might respond that just because Awlaki’s rights were violated, doesn’t mean that my own rights will be.  This is the lemming-like belief that just because those other lemmings fell off the cliff, doesn’t mean I will – I’m a special lemming.

But our rights are not something enjoyed individually, but socially, because they exist only in the manner that the institutions we share are organized.  We have the right to the freedom of speech only because our society does not prevent individuals from speaking, and those who do prevent free speech are penalized (let’s pretend, anyway).  In this way, Awlaki’s rights are our rights, and if he does not have the right not to be killed by the government for whatever reason that it does not have to prove, then any American is subject to the same extrajudicial execution.

Unfortunately, it’s always the case in these historical transformations that people don’t see, in fact applaud, their journey into authoritarian nightmares.  It’s happened to countless societies, and each failed to learn from history by thinking itself to be specially protected by its own virtues.  Marx said that when history repeats itself, it does so “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” But when it’s your own country, it doesn’t feel very funny.

The response of Bill’s friend to Bill’s tirade was, “you can tell Bill’s a bit of a conservative.”

Is he? I find it hard to believe that such sentiments can come to characterize any genuinely political position. The advocacy of torture should not be considered the policy of some political philosophy – the advocacy of torture is evidence of something gone horribly wrong in a human being’s brain, an explicable but yet unfathomable moral degeneracy approaching psychopathy. Whether or not you think torture is permissible is not a sign of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s a sign of whether or not you are a human being.

At the recent Republican Party presidential candidate debates, the idea that a thirty-year old who “refused” to purchase health insurance should be left to die brought laughter and applause. Again, this is an example of a lack of moral character so complete that one wonders if they are of the same species as homo sapiens. Again, this is not a blogpost about the politics of the Republican Party – hideous politics is a cancer that has metastasized across America’s political landscape. This is not some “liberals versus conservatives” thing.

The whole point is, is that some things just aren’t about politics, but merely about being a person.

Instead, Americans cling to the stories of angels and demons in the White House and Congress who will lead them to the promised land.  The same tendency towards conspiracy leads to the cult of personality that takes over every four years when it comes time to elect the president.  Last time it was Obama, angel to most though demon to some.  And he will probably be turned into some sort of angel-demon for the next election, through the political parties’ media engines of ideology.

This tendency to understand outcomes in terms of human agency seems to be fundamental to the human brain.  But just as nature’s workings are devoid of any intention, so human institutions have their own operations at least partially independent of any person’s will.  Just as we improve our lives through dispensing with the belief that nature has its own will, so we must be jettison the idea that our social problems are the results of sinister men behind the scenes, if we are to solve them.