In Defense of ChicaneryJuly 10, 2011The US today is undergoing a severe downturn in its economy. Many reasons are hypothesized to explain why, ranging from demographic (the baby boom generation is retiring) to resources (peak oil) to criminality (bank executives lobbying politicians to undermine sane rules). But one reason seems to be missing from the discussion - the erosion of desire from the people who produce wealth. A classic evil vs good argument posits that evil cannot exist without good people - because it needs them to generate the power to accomplish things. Nothing in this world comes for free, evil has to steal from the people who work and create things. Also, it has to be tolerated by the good. On the flip side, good cannot thrive without some chicanery. Conservative (=good?) people often cannot accomplish significant things, because they are too unwilling to take a risk; one sometimes needs an accomplished fraud to get people to believe that something can be done or a principle has been met when it has not, and so do the things that make good things happen. In many places we allow or ignore fraud; traders sell things they dont have (called 'selling short'), and buy even though they dont have the cash to buy (called 'buying on margin'); banks are allowed to lend money they dont have (called 'fractional reserve banking'). In daily life lying is often necessary; an unemployed person will not be able to get a place to stay (even if they have the money to pay the rent) because many landlords want 'evidence of employment' before they will take the risk of renting to a person they may have to evict shortly. Where our ever increasingly computerized and public society with credit bureaus and background checks makes it impossible to lie, we encounter some major injustices towards a minority of the people. Freshly released prisoners, especially those on probation, find it hard to get employment anywhere due to now ubiquitous background checks, and so are often forced back into the prisons or into truly criminal enterprise. Far before modern technology, the need for chicanery has been recognized; in the human mating dance a woman will often 'test' a man to see if he is willing to break some rules to make interesting things happen. Of course, he should also not be stupid enough to allow serious consequences, and every woman draws the lines differently. Humans have such a wide range of individual behaviours that applying stereotypes to an individual is likely to do some individuals a major injustice. But on average, a woman has to carry babies, feed them, and bring them up, while men tend to be assigned the role of creating and defending a safe space, and to acquire the necessary resources. Thus women in general have conservative tendencies, while men in general will take more risks. Given that, every corporate regulatory agency should really be headed by a woman. Women will also gravitate towards and support the most powerful or popular in society in return for their protection. In todays society, faceless government is the most powerful component of society and so women tend to support government, and in return government tends to support women. Men generally support individual rights, and only acquiesce in the face of overwhelming power. Men also tend to challenge power in the hands of others. As the female to male ratio increases, a democratic government will surely tend to criminalize men and masculine behaviour, but this will also be true of most late stage governments. In this way, we can equate the aversion to risk, centralization of power, and the increasing power of the majority to the feminization of society. Women pushed into work, increased lawlessness, and descent into small fiefdoms would correspond to the extreme masculinization of society. Lets take DSK. I'm pretty sure his wife does not particularly care about him philandering, but simply does not believe he stepped over the line to commit rape, and so continues to support him. That's what I believe is her line (and for French society in general) between acceptable chicanery and unacceptable crime. It is also the law in the US. But for many in the US, the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour lies somewhere beyond that, and it is hard for a person widely known as a philanderer to be a successful politician. Pretty soon, it will be criminal to be a philanderer and a male. The more insiduous part of the criminalization of chicanery is the effect on the risk-taking and wealth producing components of our society. Lets use the male female power balance again as an example. Instead of relying on the husband, women come to rely on government to provide resources. Instead of providing men with access to their children to inculcate male values, men are kicked out of homes and children (even boys) are brought up with female values. Since men are still the primary wealth generators of our modern society, government forcibly takes from men the resources necessary for the upbringing of the children and maintenance of the government. Indeed, since some men will try even under such circumstances to be with and influence their children, with the possibility of the government and other hangers-on being eliminated, the alienation of children from the fathers in such situations is often quietly acquiesced to. Without the emotional rewards of bringing up their own children or the male values inculcated by having a man in the house, men and boys lose the drive to produce real things, and boys lose the drive to be independent. Political correctness prevails over sanity. One may try to argue that men are not the wealth generators of society, especially by pointing at some hunter gatherer societies where the women provide more total calories of the diet by agriculture than men do by killed game. Ours is not such a society, although it could well be forced to become one if the current processes persist. One only needs to see the correlation between male dominance signs such as the prevalence of short skirts and pants on women and economic uptrends to see the correlation between male drive and freedom and economic well being in our society. One may also point to the fact that the leaders of our society are typically not women, but men. But the argument is not about who leads or whether they are men or women - because leaders are few and it really does not matter whether they are men or women or something else. It is about the many people at the bottom and how they are treated. The argument is that society naturally tends to evolve to marginalize small risk-takers and extort and enslave small wealth producers, when it really should be encouraging small risk-takers and rewarding and freeing small wealth producers. In the current recession, while the US focussed on big banks and big business and big labor, Germany spent a lot of time worrying about the 'Mittlestand' and how things and proposed laws affected them - and came out a whole lot better as a result. Going back to the "good cannot thrive without some chicanery" argument, one of the clearest indicators of an unjust and oppressive society is the definition of smaller and smaller acts of chicanery as crime, and resources available to prevent them through sheer force. Mob rule and extreme punishments are not a good sign - one of the most powerful (and attractive)leitmotifs of early American civilization was the federal judge who fought lynch mobs to preserve the rights (and life) of suspects. Chicanery levels out disparities within society, and it would be advisable to restrict the ability of any society to define more and more acts as crime and to severely restrict the resources to successfully prevent them. Criminals, especially the non-violent kind, are typically the risk-takers of society who deliberately or mistakenly over-stepped the lines drawn by society, and should be considered a resource that needs to be reintegrated with society. Zero-tolerance systems and 'throw away the key' attitudes are incredibly detrimental to justice - and to economic well being. While being lucky to have information technology blossom during his time, Clinton succeeded also because he did not take a zero tolerance attitude, unlike Bush senior or junior. Our Constitution actually does a remarkably good job of defining such restrictions on government, but over time has been watered down by erroneous interpretations that granted the federal government more and more power, until we have a state today where it is essentially unlimited. The cycle of civilization being what it is, I think we in the US are condemned to a period of further decline, followed by a period of chaos where government cannot be looked upon as a provider, followed by ascent. The leader we chose is instructive here - Obama came from a broken family with a mother and grandmother supported by the government being the prime care providers - compare that with Merkel who came from the chaos of a dissolving East Germany. Our Constitution even provides for consideration of the beneficial aspects of chicanery, by providing for the right to a jury and the possibility of jury nullification. Currently we make every effort to block this - maybe we should instead require courts to provide instruction to juries about their right to ignore the law and acquit when it would be just and right to do so? If a law is regularly flouted or nullified should it not automatically be abolished?
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