Breaking Westphalia

Continuing the theme of pathological abstraction.

Northern rebellion and Southern secession, written in 1904 by Ewing, answers and verifies several of my long-running questions.

Ewing covers the Kansas terrorists in fine detail, verifying my historical and personal conclusions.

Ewing also looks closely at the process of federation in 1776. He finds that the 13 colonies declared INDIVIDUAL independence from British control, after loosely working together to defeat England. The separate sovereignty continued in the Articles, which formed a league, not a nation.

The 1787 constitution was a secession from the articles by the Northern colonies. The North pulled a bait-n-switch to gain approval by Dixie.

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It was believed and intended by all the contracting parties that these amendments most certainly preserved to each State, the very backbone of State sovereignty — the right to take whatever and all steps the protection and preservation of its peace and happiness demanded. Nowhere did any State name sovereignty as one of the granted or surrendered powers; and likewise several other powers and rights had not been named as granted, and so all thought that the language of the Ninth Amendment preserved to each State all that it had demanded when that amendment declared, “The powers not delegated” are “reserved to the States, or the people” [of the respective States].

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New thought:

We’re accustomed to viewing organisms through the same modern Westphalian lens. There have always been a few tolerated exceptions like jellyfish and pyrosomes, but we assumed that more complex organisms were nation-states, not leagues. This new look at the octopus starts to break away from Westphalia.

From the micro end, new research on the independent brainpower in each neuron is breaking up the supposed top-down unity of the nervous system.

Networks like the fungal wires that connect a forest, or the communication among bacteria in a biofilm, blur the distinction even more.

The internet is the ultimate Westphalia, connecting the whole world in a fixed hardwired SINGLE NATION. Most attempts to secede are either fake or stupid. Any secession that runs ON the web is doomed. Bitcoin runs ON the web, so it can’t be decentralized no matter how many layers of algorithm you add. NSA can always see what you’re doing.

Biofilm offers a better metaphor, and the money version is already present and functional. Hawala or scrip is the biofilm of money.

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How do you cure economic abstraction? I was making the point that MMT/UBI claims to cure abstraction by even worse abstraction, like curing crack addiction with flakka. Bitcoin is another reverse “cure”, pulling economics even farther into the world of pure software. You need to cure abstraction by REDUCING abstraction, but you don’t have to go all the way back to gold.

You just need to keep the abstraction MINIMAL and LOCAL.

America discovered the cure ALL BY ITSELF, without government help, in 1933 when FDR closed the banks. As I’ve noted before, a system of SCRIP self-organized almost instantly. It wasn’t entirely new; similar systems were invented after the Panic of 1907.

Scrip was not exactly currency; it was more like pre-printed and pre-denominated checks. It was issued by city governments or major businesses or the Chamber of Commerce. All local businesses agreed to use it for paying workers and selling things. And it worked.

Populists missed the chance to grab onto Scrip and maintain it. They were still trapped in the pluponent idiocy of bimetallism.

Another decentralizer was Mutual Benefit Societies, universally active from 1870 to 1920 and still existing marginally. (See Christian Medishare.) These were nonprofit businesses that handled all insurance services from medical to property to burial, and often specialized in care for the elderly.

Fordist corporations were another decentralizer. When you worked for NCR or Ford or Conoco, you had the same all-around service as an MBS. Populists did help to create and spread MBS, and Fordism was the last big push of Populism.

Both of these trends were displaced and scattered by the financialist boom of the 20s. When the boom crashed, some Fordism remained but the MBS were gone. The government picked up the elderly side with SS, then the profit-making insurers picked up the medical side after WW2.

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Hawala or scrip is the economic implementation of a principle that’s painfully familiar and even trivial in other areas.

Decentralizing works ONLY when the modules or units share a common ground.

A trust network (like MBS) holds up ONLY when the units are built with a shared purpose. Ideally each unit should be physically incapable of harming the network.

When you can count on the units to follow the same rule in the same situation, you don’t need a heavy controller sending commands to the units, and you don’t need a lot of communication between the units.

When the modules have different grounds or different limits or different operating systems, you need a strong central controller, and even then the overall system will be inefficient. Most energy will be chewed up in the contradictory and redundant operations of the bureaucratic control system.

In electronics the common ground is literal, and the modules may also need to agree on limits of output voltage and input impedance, or may need to be sync’d to a common phase. It’s easy to design modules that are physically incapable of violating the limits.

In law and morality, the common ground is a shared immersion in the same system of commandments and taboos. Natural Law works best because Natural Law was scientifically settled by 50k years of experimentation. Other systems and charters and constitutions are generally designed to violate Natural Law, so they don’t hold up. (Our insane constitution held up for only 16 years, 1787 to 1803.)

The Chaotizers of Deepstate understand this principle better than anyone. After you eliminate the common operating system, the common understanding of reality, the units will DEMAND a strong controller.

With hawala or scrip, the independent bankers share a common PURPOSE of helping the ethnic group or township. A banker isn’t quite physically incapable of breaking trust, but he knows that the group or township will physically break his legs if he goes wrong, so he remains trustworthy.

Hawala has both sticks and carrots. The banker earns a small fee on each transaction. The American scrip system, though short-lived, sometimes included a fee system to reimburse the providers and printers.

Paper checks were the Patient Things that saved us when the banks dissolved. Paper is OUTSIDE THE CONTROL OF NSA. That’s exactly why Deepstate hates it and tries to make total control COOL with the Agents Provocateurs of Bitcoin and MMT/UBI.

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Overall point: Unified top-down nation states are unnatural and unsustainable. We’re starting to recognize that Nature doesn’t do top-down. Nature ALWAYS builds loose modular federations at every scale. Human empires built as federations can last a long time. The old Roman empire was loose, allowing each colony to maintain its own culture and governing system as long as it paid taxes and sent products to Rome. The new Chinese empire follows the same principle. The new American empire, like the post-1860 American nation, is rigidly hard-wired for total cultural unity. Every mind must move in perfect unison. America doesn’t care about taxes or products. Pure abstraction makes products and profits and thoughts and peasants unnecessary.