Science is a Social Activity, Pt. 742

One of the startling things about the modern era is that, by admitting that we don't have a clue about the gods, about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, we have paradoxically learned more about the meaning of life, the universe, and everything than we ever imagined.

OK, so back in the Age of Reason we figured we had it all figured out. I suppose that was what Descartes was all about. But through the British empiricists and skeptics we finally arrive at dear old Kant, who famously declared that we could not know things in themselves, only appearances.

Does that mean that science is impossible? Not at all. It means that science is merely a theory about things in themselves. If the theory is a good fit with the appearances of things, then it is a good theory, and we can go ahead and use the theory to, e.g., make LED lamps based on the assumption that quantum mechanics is true.

But then we have Gödel's incompleteness theorems. The point here is that every theoretical system begins with assumptions. And then there is Tarski's theorem about the undefinability of truth. The short meaning of this is that science will always involve guesses and leaps in the dark, not the careful unraveling of reason and logic.

Or, if you like, Thomas Kuhn's assertion in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science is a social endeavor, where most scientists most of the time act like conformists, staying within the boundaries of accepted doctrine, and only occasionally do total crackpot scientists dare to step outside the consensus to propose a new theory, or paradigm, that brings the consensus science into question.

The dear old Atlantic has a confirmation of Kuhn's notion. It's an article by Bianca Bosker "The Nastiest Feud in Science" about the brouhaha among paleontologists about the great dinosaur extinction -- or Ct-P extinction event to us chaps in the know -- 66 million years ago. Was it an asteroid strike, right here in Yucatan, as physicist Luis Alvarez proposed in 1980? Or was it a 100,000 year outbreak of volcanism, belching volcanos pouring out all manner of eevil pollutants just like in the modern era with our fossil fuel mania, as proposed by rough tough Swiss-born Gerta Keller?

Yes, you knew there had to be a rough tough kick-boxing girl scientist in there somewhere. Otherwise no article in The Atlantic. Because everybody knows that the real scientists were women all along, like Einstein's wife. Remember her?

As you can imagine, where liberal academicians are involved, the whole argument about the Ct-P extinction event has been a 30 year pissing match where partisans have deep-sixed academic articles they didn't like and used their power to retard the careers of rising academics that didn't properly toe the line. In other words, exactly like climate science.

Yeah. Read the whole thing.

All very interesting. Because we humans love to obsess about the End of the World.

But I must say that the takeaway for me was the notion that these scientists sure are having a ball spending money on our dime. Who wouldn't grab at the opportunity to travel all through the Deccan Traps in India, where a lot of the volcanic lava back then seeped out into the innocent environment and where you can get a look at the evidence by finding useful rock outcrops and confusing the natives.

See, I think it is time to do a radical reform of the universities. And my first priority would be to stop government financing of research. Really, research is a rich man's hobby. For chaps like Darwin. Or Einstein in between important bureaucratic deadlines working as a patent-office clerk.

And the study of "toxic masculinity" and the rest of the lefty racist sexist agenda should be for rich girls to play Mean Girls with other Mean Girls. But not with money taxed from deplorables.

All this stuff, from Yale-Harvard graduates getting a lock on Supreme Court seats and NYT house racist slots to the general uselessness of all the people  in the foreign policy/intelligence bureaucracy, is just jobs for the scions of the elite -- the kind of guys satirized by Trollope as Sir Raffle Baffle -- and I don't hold with any of it. It is all bullshit.

Yeah, it would be really cool to know how the various extinctions occurred. Asteroids, Deccan Traps, Aliens. You name it.

But really, people should be paying for the opportunity to do this stuff. It's a game for rich kids, like wineries and the new craze for craft breweries and distilleries. And I'm all in favor of it: science and craft breweries.

I just don't think that anything improves when it is associated with politics. It's the old story. When you mix ice-cream and ordure, the resulting mixture is ordure.

And you can tell what is going down in The Atlantic article about extinction events when it inevitably gets into climate change. Surely, Bianca Bosker, you are better than that.

Like I say, the only warrant for political power is existential peril. If the Persians aren't messing with the Hebrews or the Mongols aren't messing with the Russians or the Nazis aren't messing with Jews, or good faithful progressives, then the only thing to scare the ordure out of people is climate change.

And I don't hold with that.

Yes, But What Message are People Receiving?

You read a lot in political media about "messaging." This has to do with the notions and ideas that you, the political actor, want to implant in the minds of the voters. As I understand, messaging has a lot to do with riling up your supporters and demoralizing your opponent's supporters.

But what message are the voters actually receiving? For instance here is a piece about a poll  of millennial women aged 18-35. A full 54 percent of them did not identify as "feminists:" this in a group of which only 19 percent identified as Republican. What is going on? Well,

Leah, a 22-year old independent, told Edwards, “I feel like the movement has been largely taken over by far-left wing activists that make it nearly impossible for me to identify with.” 

Or this:

A 25-year-old Republican named Stephanie, whom Edwards spoke to, even went so far as to say, “I don't think women in the modern western world are oppressed.” Stephanie continued, “I think modern feminists try to create a boogeyman out of what they call the patriarchy and hunt it down, but it's not necessary.... Men and women have different strengths and weaknesses. Acknowledging that is not sexist.”

In a way, it is shocking that young women can actually believe this, since the whole culture is mobilized to convince them of their victimization. How did they escape the indoctrination? Perhaps it is because the left also operates a counter-narrative of female empowerment. So which is it? Oppression or empowerment? Is a Good Little Girl supposed to feel like a victim or as a powerful free agent?

Perhaps political actors should think more about the message that is inadvertently transmitted by your supporters. In this piece about "Nice Ladies Leaving the Democratic Party" people just don't like the totalitarian mindset of lefties that abuse you as soon as you disagree with them. So, for many women,

The Democratic Party no longer fits their personalities, their values, or their self-image as loving, caring, tolerant human beings. The coup de grace is when they realize they are not free in their liberal social circles to utter one word of doubt or criticism of the party line. If they do, they find themselves attacked and ostracized.

This refers to a significant issue. Politics, civil war by other means, is a male thing. It is an application of what I call the male Culture of Insult. You attack you opponents and punish people for disagreeing. But the female Culture of Complaint does not deal in direct insult, but in indirection, using my classic line "I can't believe she said that." In the Culture of Insult you don't directly attack people that violate the party line. You tell you friend that you can't believe that she said that.

Here's another way that men and women differ. Women expect to be allowed to participate and "share." Period. Men believe that they have to prove themselves before they are taken seriously. When I was on non-profit boards years ago, I would always assume that it would take me a year to be taken seriously and listened to. But I had a female friend that was insulted that she was not listened to the moment she joined a board and wanted to "share."

So I would say that a lot of the day-to-day activism tactics of the left really turns women off. And I would suspect that the bully-boy tactics of the street arm of the Democratic Party, AntiFa, really upsets the average woman. There is nothing that terrifies a woman so much as a gang in the streets. Of course. For woman, going back to hunter-gatherer days, a band of men means trouble.

That's the reason why nobody knows nothing, not in the election of November 8, 2016, not in the election of November 6, 2018. Because nobody really knows the message that the voters are receiving and processing. And that is especially true in an age like ours, where people know that certain opinions are acceptable and other opinions are not to be endured by the ruling class. People are social animals and are acutely aware of what is permitted to deplorables. But they also develop notions of what life would be like in a better world where people like themselves got to say and do what they thought and felt.

And the problem with enforcing correct opinion is that you never know what people really think until they go into the voting booth and pull the lever. That is why, years ago, certain wise men proposed the notion that Congress should write no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. No mention there of impermissible "hate speech."

Rule One for a wise ruling class is that you want to know what the people are thinking and saying, even Alex Jones of InfoWars. Otherwise the day may come when you get blindsided by an assembly of the people petitioning for a redress of grievances that you had forced underground.

And then it may be too late.

No Lefties, Politics is Not the Answer

The lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was not planned. Not legislated. Not even expected. Nobody saw it coming except some Brit in 1685 that took a look at the new manufacturing and wrote that

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

Carew Reynell was the guy's name. Ever heard of him? Didn't think you had. Me neither. In fact Reynell had it wrong. We are 30 times richer than 1800. And not much enrichment happened between 1865 and 1815 because the Brits were busy conducting a Second Hundred Years War against the French.

The point is that the Great Enrichment was a succession of what George Gilder calls Surprises, economic revolutions that nobody saw coming, whether the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the oil revolution, the electricity revolution, etc. Not only that, but the political system usually tried to  stop the revolutions, as it is presently trying to do with Uber and AirBnB. Of course it does. Politics is about power, and the ruling class using the power of government to enrich itself and its supporters. Economic revolutions upset the balance of power and threaten the rule of the ruling class.

You can see why economic revolutions are a Surprise. Take the current possibilities of "blockchain," the technology behind the Bitcoin cybercurrency. You tell me: is this going to change the world, blow current government finance out of the water, or is it a flash in the pan that is being hyped by a bunch of nerdly cyberpunks?

The question is the same as asking about Apple Computer back in 2001. On December 8, 2000 Apple stock closed at $1.08. Today, August 16, 2018, it is trading at $213. So, if I had bought $10,000 of Apple stock for Christmas back in 2000 I would have stock worth about $1,970,000 today. But hey, who was thinking about that back then? Apple hadn't even produced the first iPod yet. And when they did, it was just something that The Kids were interested in.

So, I dare to say, it is not politics that has radically improved peoples' lives over the past 200 years. It is chaps like Steve Jobs, and the nobodies that invented the Spinning Jenny, and that started drilling for oil, and that figured out the relation between electricity and magnetism and then brought electric light and the telephone to every household. And the mechanic Henry Ford that started the process to bring the price of the average personal automobile down to about three to six months of the average worker's wage.

Yet the believers in politics never rest. Here is Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a proposal to put corporations completely under the knout of politicians with her Accountable Capitalism Act. Here are the folks in California trying to gin up state-wide rent control.  And there is this piece by Steve Baldwin about the myriad ways in which President Obama tried to increase Democratic and political control of America.

Actually I understand what is going on. These folks are trying to make the world safe, to nail down their idea of the safe and just society, and defend against disruptive and dangerous irruptions. And what we humans are instinctively programmed to do is defend our "patch of land" from all who would threaten it.

But the world has changed. Now we live in the market economy. Now the threat is that your corporate job will be canceled by the next economic revolution. But that is pretty mild compared with the Mongols sacking your town and killing all the men and enslaving all the women.

People aren't willing to settle for the uncertainty of the market. They want everything nailed down. If they are renters, they don't want to pay more when housing demand goes up. If they are homeowners they don't want their view spoiled by a new housing development. If they are workers they don't take kindly to pay-cuts and layoffs during a recession. And there are always Sen. Warrens and President Obamas to give voice to their rage.

My sister wonders how come the Founding Fathers had a better understanding of human nature than today's experts. How was such a group of intellectual giants possible? I think the answer is that the bourgeois thinkers in the 17th and 18th century were consciously trying to tame the power of kings and aristocrats, so they built a system to limit political power of the Old Regime. But our modern ruling class cannot get its head around the notion about someone else getting power. I mean, darling, imagine some rude, crude monster like Trump getting power. Not going to happen, not on our watch!

Now you would think that the smart guys would say: yeah, our ideas are great, but suppose some yahoo were to become president and use our powers against us?

The fact is that Trump has done exactly that. Obamacare was too complicated to be fully encoded in legislation, so most of it was left for "the Secretary" to enact in regulations. Guess what: Trump has unwound Obamacare with regulations that reverse the regulations of the Obama guys. No fair! Illegal! So write a couple of tame professors in The New York Times. Well, then, you chappies, the Obama boys should have taken their time and written the entirety of Obamacare in the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Actually, it's worse than that. The problem with government programs and big entitlements is that you can't reform them, because the beneficiaries will resist to the knife any attempt to reduce their benefits. You the rulers have to cheat. With Medicare a bunch of "reforms" were passed deep in Obamacare that nobody campaigned on and that amounted to stealth rationing. We are talking about Sarah Palin's "death panels" and the protocols of Medicare Hospice, in which the "system" decides at some point to throw the switch and have you starve to death, courtesy of Medicare, while telling the family comforting words about their "journey."

I'd say that when you pass significant Medicare changes without getting the consent of the governed, or pressure universities to institute special administrative panels to attack "rape culture" on campus without even going through a formal regulatory process, you are committing injustice. But that is the problem with the modern state. It is doing so many things that the bandwidth of the legislature is not broad  enough to legislate it. So it ends up doing stealthy stuff behind the curtain. I call that sort of governance is simple injustice.

But there is none so blind as he that will not see. As progressives flop around from one power grab to another they fail to see the bigger picture. That politics makes most things worse. That the regulatory state serves only the powerful and the well-connected. That the Great Enrichment happened while nobody was looking.

And that the need to defend that "patch of land" to the last man went out with the agricultural age.

The problem is that if our ruling class would ever come to the realization that its use of political power is cruel and unjust it would have to confront another problem: what use is the ruling class, anyway?

But that is the point about ruling classes. After the first generation, the revolutionaries, they are all idiots.

"America Was Never That Great." Oh Really?

So now New York Democrat Andrew Cuomo has come out and said "America was never that great." To groans from the audience. And now he is trying to "'splain" his remarks.

Really, you wonder about guys like that. Because he is playing to Trump's strength.

The point about Trump's "Make America Great Again" is that it speaks to all Americans as Americans. It divides the world into Americans and the Rest.

Remember my maxim: Politics is Division. If you are a politician you want to divide up the electorate  so that you get the majority and the other guy is left with the rest. If you are the president of the nation state of the United States of America that is exactly how you want to divide the world. America vs. the Rest. People that want to make America great again vs. people that say American was never that great. Our optimism vs. their pessimism. Our hope vs. their fear. And so on.

Moreover when the economy is firing on all cylinders and black and Hispanic unemployment rates are at all-time lows, why then the slogan Make America Great Again seems to set exactly the right tone.

I mean. Why would you say America was never that great when the economy is growing at 4 percent and very likely more?

Let's reset back to Obama's Hope and Change.  It was great in 2008 because of the mess of Iraq and the Great Crash. Only thing is that Obama didn't deliver. He didn't revive the economy (because he spent money on keeping teachers in their jobs and he increased regulations rather that shaking out the reins and telling business to go get it); he didn't realize the hopes he ignited in black voters. And his change with Obamacare was an abject failure and a lie.

But in 2008 Hope and Change was a great line and Republicans hated it. Of course they did.

Today in 2018 Make America Great Again is a great line and Democrats hate it. Of course they do.

In my view Make America Great Again has another side. Most Americans are never going to amount to anything. We can aspire to a good job; we can be good fathers and mothers. But we are never going to see their names up in lights. So our chance for immortality (aside from having children and grandchildren) is that America does well, so we can bask in the knowledge that America is the greatest country in the world and the American people are the greatest people in the world.

But if you are a credentialed member of the ruling class, you think differently. For instance, you will very likely spend a part of your life in some gig in a foreign country, as a visiting professor, or working for your employer for a couple of years for a foreign subsidiary. The boundaries of your world are not the shores of the US. You belong anywhere, because you belong to the global elite. Visas and residence permits are not a problem for people like you. So it is not surprising that academics and journalists and writers tend to be globalists.

If you are a member of a minority, still feeling your way from agricultural idiocy to urban competence, then you are probably tribal in your sense of belonging. You are not ready to make your primary identity as American, but identify with your tribal group. Our modern minorities like blacks and Latinos are merely the latest in a long story. When the Irish came to the US they became Democrats because the Americans of British ancestry were usually Republicans. And they became Democrats because it was Republicans that were creating public schools to cure them of their Catholicism. If you read Teddy White and his Making of the President books, you will find long disquisitions on the Irish vote, the Italian vote and the Jewish vote. People carried their Old World loyalties into the New World. Today we don't talk so much about the Irish and Italian vote so much as the deplorable white working-class vote.

So when Trump tweets about record low black and Hispanic unemployment here and again here, what do you think he is doing?  He is trying to get blacks and Hispanics to feel that they are a part of America, participating fully in the economy, and he is tempting them to identify as Americans rather than as blacks and Hispanics. The dirty dog.

Oh, and, of course, the whole Trump thing about illegal immigrants and borders plays to the natural tribal instinct that Our People are OK, but the people beyond the border, not so much.

My point is that all politics is about Us and Them; the only question is who counts as Us, and who counts as Them. The liberal line is that Us includes the enlightened and evolved and the marginalized victims and the Them is the racist sexist homophobes. Trump says that the Us is the ordinary Americans that want to make America great; the Them are the people that say America was never great.

All I say is that one of these slogans is the smart one and the other is the dumb one. Which one do you think?

There is Something in the Air

Something I notice: when I am thinking about my American Thinker piece on Friday or Saturday, I often pick a topic that turns out to be what everyone else is thinking too. Today's piece "Defend Conservatism by Going on the Attack" is an example.

Everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Ed Kilgore is writing the same thing. Rush:

The argument is America sucks versus, no, it doesn’t. 

So it's not an argument about "policy." It's a fight over the meaning of America, and the next time we get to do something about it will be in November.

Really, we shouldn't be surprised that all of us normals are resonating in a collective unconscious. Democratic elections are merely a cunning way of doing civil war in the sham fight of an election "campaign" where the "victor" gets to win political power and the loser says "wait until next time." So it is not surprising that conservatives are feeling that we have "got" to win the midterms in November. It is rather obvious what liberals and Democrats want to do to us if they win.

Really liberals? Is this your mobilization and resistance a good idea? To proudly announce to the world that you will impeach President Trump if you win? To call everyone that disagrees with you a "hater?" To pressure the social media giants to deplatform InfoWars guy Alex Jones? Or even worse to take down a campaign video by a Republican woman running for Congress in California?

I keep coming back to The Sixties. That's the last time that the left got off the leash and filled the streets and told America that it sucked. That was when the media breathlessly reported on the amazing Kool Kidz that were changing the world. That was when ordinary non-political people were told they were bigots, and when they unaccountably rallied to GOP politicians that stood for the "silent majority." That was when the Democrats decided to force a Republican president out of office.

But the point is: how did that turn out, Democrats and lefties? It ended up with Bill Clinton running as a moderate. Nobody here but us moderates. And when he proved himself a leftie, the Democrats lost Congress for the first time in 40 years in the 1994 midterms.

Hey, then Democrats ran a bunch of moderates in the 2006 midterms and won back Congress. And Barack Obama ran as a moderate. But as soon as he showed his true colors in office the voters gave the GOP the House in 2010, and the Senate in 2014. And now we have Trump.

Here's how I understand the situation. The lefties are practicing a secular religion and they are trying  to unify it with the government, using the government to legislate their morality -- only they call it "ethics" and "humanism."

The trouble is that, for people on the receiving end, someone else's religion looks like a reign of terror: conform to our faith or face the consequences. And its governmental edicts look like injustice.

So even though the whole ruling-class apparatus of schools, and culture and education are saying what a wonderful thing the left's program is, the fact remains that many people experience it as an attack on their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.

See, I think that Rule One in politics is: don't get the other guys riled up. Mobilize your own side, but don't mobilize the opposition.

Only trouble is that Big Government automatically mobilizes the opposition. Notice how all my maxims illustrate the problem: Government is Force, so everyone on the receiving end is going to be mad; Politics is Division, so the more politics the more divided and the more people get aroused to action on both sides; System is Domination, so folks on the receiving end of the governmental bureaucratic system are going to experience Injustice.

And finally: There is no such thing as justice, only injustice. I mean a lot with this simple maxim. I mean that almost all legislation is unjust, because it takes tax money and spends it on a powerful client group. And I mean that even with the most popular programs like Social Security and Medicare. Why can't the care of older Americans be done by voluntary savings and the intervention of the odd billionaire to take care of older citizens impoverished by-no-fault-of-their-own?

In fact, if you look at law, "justice" is something the legal system attempts to provide for someone that has experienced harm from someone else. But, of course, the legal system can never really make the victim of harm whole again, in the sense that no wound can really ever heal so that it seems that it never occurred. All the legal system can to is make a statement that a harm or injustice has been done, make some redress, and that society, by the verdict of the trial, acknowledges the harm done.

And this is why I believe that our lefty friends are chasing a chimera. You cannot achieve justice through politics; you only end up compounding past injustice with new injustice.

Well, we shall shortly find out if I am right. If Republicans do better than expected in the November midterms it will mean that the "silent majority" lives: people that just want to be left alone to wive and thrive and survive without the Sturm und Drang of secular lefty religions with its street marches and protests and banners.

How About "Access to Property, Wealth, and Personal Agency?"

The director of a delightful dramatization of Sense and Sensibility at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Hana S. Sharif, understands the Jane Austen novel as women

navigating a world that denied them access to property, wealth, and personal agency.

That got me to thinking.

First of all, contra feminist agitprop, the key to Sense and Sensibility is not the patriarchal hegemony of evil patriarchal patriarchs working out its evil will on helpless innocent young women but that the two men seeking the hands of our young Dashwood daughters, Elinor and Marianne, are denied access to property, wealth, and personal agency by widowed elderly women. No unsuitable marriages for them! 

So the matriarchy did it! The grande dames (or rich old biddies), Mrs Ferrars and Mrs Smith, are determined to disinherit the young men if they marry the propertyless Dashwood sisters. And the powerful older women are careful to make sure that the young men, Ferrars and Willoughby, do not have professions that might give them some independence from their parental moneybags.

A moment's thought tells us that it must be so in an agricultural hierarchy where the social position of an upper-class family depends on its rents from its rich acres. Everything depends on the prudent management of those riches from one generation to the next. And upper-class women were just  as invested in making strategic marriages as the upper-class men. In fact, according to Gergory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, the agricultural society of Britain was a society of downward mobility, in which second sons (and daughters) descended the social hierarchy from upper class to middle class, and kicked the middle class downward into the lower class. You can see that this is a high-stakes world.

Notice too that the feminist narrative about the patriarchy is really only interested in the upper class. What was life like for the middle class of the towns in the agricultural era? Who knows? But we can guess that the further down the social scale you go, the more life becomes a desperate struggle to stay alive at any cost, hierarchy and patriarchy be damned.

Let us think instead about our own age, and the access to property, wealth, and personal agency afforded to young men and young women.

First of all, in our age we infantilize young people by confining them in government schools and government-ruled universities in which they have very little agency, particularly since all educational institutions are now liberal and ne'er is heard a discouraging word against the liberal ruling class. As for property and wealth, the liberal ruling class has instituted a vast program of debt slavery by encouraging young people to get into debt while obtaining higher education; this seriously hampers their ability to acquire property and wealth and exercise personal agency.

Notice that the way that young people are selected for selective colleges is by toadying to the ruling class party line in their college applications. where is the  access to property, wealth, and personal agency in that?

Also, the characteristic job today is a subordinate position in a vast corporate bureaucracy or hierarchy where young people are taught to be obedient and good team players. Where is the personal agency in that?

And this is not just for deplorables and helpless minorities but well-born scions of the ruling class. They must all get with the program or suffer the consequences, just as it was with Edward Ferrars and John Willoughby back in 1811. Then and  now, if the ruling-class scions get with the program then they are rewarded as their parents and their connections shower them with ruling-class benefits. But woe-betide the rebel.

Are there any rebels in the liberal ruling class? Inquiring minds want to know.

The Three Ages of Trust

I just realized that I am going to have to read George Gilder's latest book, Life after Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy.

Why? Because I realized, reading a review of Gilder's book, that blockchain technology radically changes the nature of trust. To see why, let's look at trust through the lens of the three great Ages of Man.

In the hunter-gatherer age, we are talking about a pure face-to-face society. In that culture the dictum of Jürgen Habermas applies. Here is how I describe Habermas in my American Manifesto.

Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action, [is] an attempt to rescue Marxism from the obsolescence of its labor theory of value and the despair of Horkheimer and Adorno. Habermas still carries forward Marx’s two-world system of abstract labor and social labor; only now he finally detaches it from the exploded labor theory of value. Habermas converts the world of abstract labor and social labor into system and lifeworld. System is not just the alienating force of big bad capitalism, but of the terrible twins, rational government and rational business, the system of force and the system of money. Lifeworld is not just social labor producing social value, but, following Husserl and Heidegger, a full face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world, for being is not just consciousness of the ego, but being-there in the world, and being-with the Other.

I would say that the "lifeworld" of Habermas is the face-to-face world of the hunter-gatherer tribe, "a shared culture in which all things and all situations are 'always already' familiar." In this lifeworld trust, the social glue of human social cooperation, is obtained through the unified shared culture in which everyone is down with the always already familiar. To depart from this universal shared culture is to betray the trust that is automatically extended to all the members of the culture because they all know the rules. Such betrayal of trust is unthinkable.

But when communities grow bigger, and the hierarchy of kings and priests develops, then the universal lifeworld no longer applies. That is when written law and legal enforcement begins. It is very hard to betray the trust of the community in the hunter-gatherer tribe, but not so hard in the agricultural hierarchy. In fact it is notorious that underlings almost always steal from their bosses, from servants taking a nip of the master's gin and employees raiding the stationery cabinet at the office to the anonymous young men of the city forming into criminal gangs and confidence tricksters defrauding trusting old women. In other words, once you get out of a simple face-to-face community you have the problem of enforcing trust. And notice also that you see the emergence of a public politics in which the untrustworthiness of the Other is the basis of membership. Politicians make hay out of stirring mistrust in their supporters. In class politics they teach their followers to hate the rich and the businessmen; in race politics they teach them to hate the other races; in gender politics they teach their followers to hate the other gender. Still, people have managed to construct trust networks in the modern age. We see, of course, the growth of markets and brands, which are all about creating trust. And in the internet age we have credit cards, online retail and banking, in which trustable people can travel the globe and be trusted everywhere. Then there are online services like Uber and Ebay which create artificial trust reputations with their star systems.

Enter Blockchain. As I understand it, blockchain technology creates a quantum leap in trust. An example is title insurance. If the history of a piece of real estate is encoded in a blockchain it means that you can trust the history of the property you are buying. In fact, no need for Title Insurance Companies! But this means that we don't need government to enforce trust anymore. Trust is already encoded in the blockchains in which trustworthy people conduct their business. I imagine this also makes it much harder for cheats and frauds to practice their depredations. Thus trustworthy people do not need to pay for a bunch of government heavies to keep the peace and punish the evildoers. The system becomes trust-enforcing.

The most obvious application of blockchain is money, where government has been indispensable in enforcing a network of financial trust and has monstrously betrayed its trust. Imagine a world where the government can no longer cheat and inflate and muck around with the credit system by favoring its supporters.

Of course, it is early days, and nobody really knows what will ensue with the blockchain economy. But we can hope, and what I hope is that the ability of governments and politicians and activists  to sow distrust and loot the wealth creators will be seriously diminished. If that happens then humans may live into a new Golden Age where trust and fair dealing becomes not just the right thing to do but a matter of life and death, where it is no longer the poor that go to the wall, but the untrustworthy.

I have an idea, which I admit is just wishful thinking, that when crooks and frauds find that their cunning tricks no longer pay then they will pretty quickly mend their ways.

And find other ways to misbehave.