I
have read that the Chinese government keeps it secret exactly how the
social score is calculated. But I have also heard a rumor that it has
five levels (from Alex Jones, I believe). I would expect that it
would be much more complicated than that. In fact, it has recently
come out that Chinese citizens start-out with 1,000 “points”, and
then have points added or deducted, to reflect good and bad deeds
they've been seen doing.
Whether
or not there's any truth to the idea that the Chinese social credit
system is a five-tiered system in some respect –
for example, perhaps there are five ranges of numbers, and
1,000 is in the middle range –
it reminds me of the Hindu caste system, which has four levels and a
fifth underclass.
It
seems bizarre to me that such systems are practiced as openly as they
are. Most brazenly, China currently dispatches agents to collect
information about good and bad deeds about several thousand people in
a given neighborhood, and there is no attempt to keep this practice
secret whatsoever. I would not be surprised if it turned out that
many Chinese citizens thought it was a good idea.
Below
appear some images explaining caste systems throughout history. Some
are socialist propaganda posters which criticize hierarchy and
domination of workers, while others are images inspired by
libertarian philosophy (including an illustration of mine, featuring
two pyramids, from my 2012 article “Two Competing Class Theories”),
which criticize hierarchy in their own unique way.
[All above images borrowed from other sites without permission.
Copywrong, all rights reversed :)
I claim creative commons and fair use of all images
not bearing authorship accreditation within the image itself.]
My own image, published in 2014
Above
appears an image of the U.S. Homeland Security system, which has five
levels, like the Hindu caste system. Some people have noted how the
terror threat level was changed by the government, numerous times,
following incidents wherein negative news came out about the Bush
administration, and have accused the administration of using the
terror alert system to distract people from Bush's crimes.
The terror alert levels system is not directly relevant to the social credit system, but I mention it
because it is a propaganda tool used by the government to terrorize
the populace. This is to say that it is an image which overtly and obviously displays a
hierarchical symbol (depicting a hierarchy of risk levels), while it
is covertly being used to further the aims of the people at the top
of the political power structure (to keep people in fear). Additionally, it is worth mentioning that introducing a five-tiered system to the public, concerning any subject matter, could potentially result in a more widespread acceptance of numbering systems applied to any and all types of human activities, whether economic or security-related in nature or not.
I
think it's important to notice hierarchies, whether they are hidden
or out in the open. In "conspiracy theorist" circles,
there's something called "the open conspiracy": a
conspiracy so obvious and “un-hidden” that it's impossible to
deny. Maybe it's also seen as an everyday activity, or as a tolerable
“necessary evil”. I would say, and many would agree, that
belonging to a cult based on exalting and excusing personal greed, is
one of such everyday activities. People are allowed to defraud others
in the name of feeding their families, doing their job, and obeying
the law, and that lowest common denominator becomes the new standard
of moral leadership. That's how countries lose their moral authority,
embracing the idea that morality is determined by legality. This
everyday evil is what philosopher Hannah Arendt referred to as “the
banality of evil”.
Another
open conspiracy is the idea that collaboration – and even collusion – is fine, as long as it's done openly. Many believe that conspiracy
theorists are crazy, and that conspiracies don't happen (despite the
facts that conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes happen all
the time, and that police investigators get “conspiracy theories”
all the time). Since many people who have no problem with open
collusion, seem to also doubt conspiracy theories, they may have a
sense of cognitive dissonance, until they resolve this conflict by
pretending that collaboration and conspiracy are any different from
one another.
One
thing I criticize Americans for is that they reject the idea that
there's anything we ought to be able to do (even use our own
property, or rather what we think is our own property) without
paying and begging the government, and/or a private owner, in order
to do so. And with that, too, comes filling out forms, working to
earn government-printed money to pay fees to process the forms,
paying taxes, following regulations, and participating in several
government programs.
All
this bureaucratic nonsense is what is required nowadays to work,
marry, hunt, defend oneself with a firearm, vote, drive, get a
library card, and extend any tiny degree of real ownership over
anything we think
we
own. Few Americans can identify these freedoms as something that the
Ninth Amendment to the Constitution was supposed to uphold, and that
is because we are never taught about that amendment. The average
American student would be lucky to have recited it a single time,
much less discussed its meaning in class.
Our
4th Amendment right to be secure in our persons, papers, homes, etc.,
is somewhat taught about, but most people assume that if you need an
I.D. in order to drive, and vote, then you need it for everything
else. They never stop to ask why, or whether, we "need I.D."
in order to drive and vote in the first place. Aside from needing to
breathe, eat, drink, eliminate, sleep, and a few other things –
what nature
requires
of us – governmentally-imposed “needs” can only take
freedoms away
from us. Aside from the necessities of life, we
only “need” what we
require the law
to order
us to “need”. (That is, only if we
are really in control of what laws get implemented).
The
American and Chinese systems seem obsessed with establishing
databases of people's identity, complete with biometric information
about them (height, weight, eye and hair color, birth date, etc.).
I believe that this is, plainly, a violation of our liberties. Only
people who have committed crimes against people and justly acquired
property, deserve to be tagged, tracked, and forced to identify
themselves. The only people who should be arrested are those who are
properly presented with real evidence they've committed a crime, and
a claim from a real person of interest who can claim victimhood, and
presented with a warrant from a judge specifically describing what is
to be searched and for what type(s) of evidence they are searching.
In
my opinion, the very idea that a baby
ought to be fingerprinted and footprinted, and given a number at
birth,
ought to frighten
any rational person who is concerned about their family's safety. It
ought to insult
anyone who has just carefully chosen a child's name instead of a
number. It ought to shock anyone who believes that a person should
not be held to answer, nor have his right to security in his person
or property violated, until after
he's been convicted of committing a crime (or else it's proven that
he must be detained because he's a clear and present danger to people
around him). Show me a baby whom has committed murder, and I'll show
you the only baby who deserves to be forcibly I.D.'d and
fingerprinted on his way out of his mother's womb. How ridiculous!
Unfortunately,
since 9/11, and the Patriot Act, due process norms like those I
mentioned, have been routinely
violated.
And, at that, more and more each year, with courts agreeing to
destroy barriers which previously kept police out of our homes for
various reasons. On and on it goes. Not to mention the cameras
everywhere in the U.S., Western Europe, and China; cameras on
government buildings, police vehicle cameras, red-light cameras at
intersections, the phenomenon of people
“consenting” to be spied on by privately owned cameras, and so
on.
America
used to value privacy, and yet Americans are still obsessed with
private property. That's why it's ironic and perplexing that many
Americans believe that nobody has, or should have, an expectation of
privacy. Even in “our own homes”, most of which, it turns out,
are owned by landlords, homeowner's associations, banks, and
government (which shows it's the true owner when it levies property
taxes and requires us to register our land claims).
Nor
are we free to exert any degree of privacy in public. Some say Muslim
women shouldn't be free to wear headscarves. Well, nuns wear frocks,
so what are you going to do, take nuns' clothes off in the streets
like an 18th century French revolutionary? Is an Islamic woman who is
encouraged to wear a veil - as a compliment to her good looks, and in
the interest of promoting her safety from men - necessarily more
oppressed than a woman in a Western country whom is expected, or
required as part of her job, to dress in a revealing fashion?
You
might say, “Taking a photo of someone who's wearing a head
covering, defeats the purpose of photo identification.” But to
that, I say “Taking a person's head covering off for a photo I.D.
defeats the purpose of a head covering; to show what they usually
look like.” To take a picture of someone's face when they don't
consent to it, is to defeat the purpose of a human
being:
to live in dignity.
On
the topic of Islam, it pains me to hear stories about Uyghur Muslims
in Xinjiang (in the West of China) being arrested en masse, and possibly put
into concentration camps, having their graves dug up to make room for
government projects, Uyghur women forced to marry Han Chinese men,
etc.. I'm not sure how many of these stories are true, but
even if just a few of them are, the situation in Xinjiang is
disturbing, and looks like a humanitarian catastrophe, whether in the
making or already occurring.
I
recently discovered that what preceded World War II and the Holocaust
– and, effectively, what was used to justify those horrific
events – was a large refugee / migration crisis. Essentially, many
nations decided to try to fix their economies by expelling foreigners
in droves, and few countries would accept them. [Note: To better
understand what the world's views on refugees and immigrants were at
the time, you can read about the Evian Conference, the S.S. St.
Louis, F.D.R.'s late "I hate war" speeches, and U.S. trade
with the Nazis (including Prescott Bush's management of Nazi
financier Fritz Thyssen's American accounts) until late in the war.]
The
situation with the Uyghurs, and the looming international refugee
crisis, are why it worries me that continuing to pass-off
responsibility to take-in refugees to other countries, and assuming
other countries will take them in, will lead to the same situation
that led to World War II. All the signals are here: a widespread and
still growing embrace of ultra-nationalism; and adoption of a wartime
economic system that favored high degrees of government intrusion in,
and direction of, the economy.
And
all of this – just like WWII after the Great Depression – was
preceded by overproduction of automobiles, and too high a degree of
faith in America's government and its banking institutions (which
effectively own the government). I believe that soon, America's
reason for expelling foreigners - “we can't afford them anymore”
- will change to “we don't need them anymore”. And that is what
people said about the Jews before the Nazis began to destroy them.
As an aside: Incidentally,
the B.D.S. (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement must never
grow into a boycott of all Jewish shops; the outcome would be a
second Krystallnacht (I see this danger as yet another reason
for B.D.S. to focus its boycott efforts solely upon firms located in
occupied territories the Holy Land).
I
think about some of the stories I've heard coming out of China, like
about organ trafficking, and children in classrooms hooked up to
saline drips in order to be able to study for long periods of time.
After studying ethnic cleansing, and the attempted "extermination"
of Jews, knowing about black Americans being sprayed with hoses,
knowing that both German Jews and Mexican immigrants to America were
exposed to Zyklon-B in the 1930s, and more... It
has become clear to me, from all this, that government promises of
free health care, are part of a white racist scheme to push the
ideology of racial purification through the need to purify our bodies
with medicine.
I think that the internationally accepted definition
of ethnic cleansing needs to be expanded and changed in order to
fully explain the ideology of people who use "beast",
"virus", "parasite", "pig", and other
words - and assume immigrants are diseased, and compare religions to
diseases - in order to dehumanize individuals. Because once you can
dehumanize someone, you can justify treating them as badly as you
want, because in many people's eyes, they're no less than animals.
I'd
be interested in knowing whether anyone in China has heard others compare Muslims or law-breakers to animals, worms, dogs, pigs,
parasites, or viruses, etc.. It is certainly becoming more popular
and acceptable to talk that way about other human beings here in
America.
On
the topic of the intersection of hierarchy with China's economy,
above I have included a diagram I published in a post from 2014
(under the title “Privatization and Industrial Combinations”),
concerning many different ways to structure firms. Certain types of
businesses have bosses and hierarchy and high stratification, while
others don't. I think that having more workers on the boards of
companies, implementing Employee Stock Ownership Plans, and giving
workers a realistic chance to buy enough of the company to create a
new franchise and establish a new company built on a cooperative
basis.
I,
of course, want to make it perfectly clear that I am, in no way,
praising the Tiananmen Square Massacre, but Deng Xiaopeng's economic
ideas did help China. I believe that the intentions of his
economic program, which began in the late 1970s, would have worked,
if the regime had actually achieved it, and (obviously) if they had
not been so adverse to oppressing their people whom were pleased at
the influx of Western culture that followed China's opening to trade
in the early to mid- 1970s.
I
think that what Deng's system did right, or at least intended
to
do right, was have the state stop owning so many resources, and start
transitioning into a situation in which ownership and control of
resources and distribution are balanced;
between the
state, the communities, private businesses and corporations, and
small family-owned shops. Deng's plan, in my opinion, showed an
attempt to create an economic policy that's in the exact political
and economic center.
If
you study the economic theory of Mutualism, or research various
economic systems which have been termed “market socialism”,
you'll discover that market systems can exist alongside
socialism, and that they're not mutually exclusive. Market socialism
is a scenario in which most distribution is done through markets (as
opposed to economic planning and democratic decision-making), while
most of the goods being bought, sold, and owned, are traded and owned
by socialized actors; workers' cooperatives, community boards,
councils, federations thereof, etc.
If
the United States' economy were to retain markets, while increasing
the degree of social and worker ownership, it would lead to the same
result, as if China were to open its markets back up, and open itself
up to foreign investors, but also ensure that a high degree of social
and worker control will continue. But the Chinese government would
also have to diminish state influence and control, which it, by no
means, seems prepared to do. Additionally, the Chinese government
would have to constrain the influence of any wealthy businesses which
it may aid and subsidize (which, if you think about it, is all the
businesses). But that would defeat the purpose of aid and
subsidy, so the more rational and likely solution would be to simply
end the aid in the first place.
But
how can the government end aid to businesses, without neglecting the
need to ensure a high degree of social and worker control and
management? That might require deferring responsibilities to not
labor bureaucracies, not unions, but the cooperatives themselves.
If not that, then by outsourcing the responsibility to ensure
adequate safety and health and compensation, to some non-governmental
international organization that sets and adopts standards that are
voluntarily obeyed (for which, hopefully, there would be some sort of
enforcement mechanism to which everyone would agree).
Going
back to the topic of the social score: It disturbs me that, aside
from all the information they're collecting about our physical
bodies, we are being numbered. In the United States, the Social
Security Act gives each of us a nine-digit number. Although we are
not required to carry our Social Security card or our state-issued
identification on us at all times, we are more or less expected to
have our I.D. near us at all times, and we are expected to memorize
our Social Security number.
A
brief aside on Social Security and illegal immigration: Undocumented
immigrants to America sometimes obtain fraudulent Social Security
numbers in order to work. So not even immigrants can work in
America without using a form of identification; doesn't even matter
if they're using the wrong identification, as long as they're
working and paying into the system, the more money for Americans. Not
that all undocumented immigrants deserve to be busted; the point is,
why would the government do such a thing, even if it wanted to? It
would mean less money in the S.S. system, and less irate citizens
being able to accurately claim that illegal immigrants are stealing
their money through the tax code.
But
back to the Social Security system itself. All citizens are required
to participate, even though the government tells us that it's
optional. They tell us that it's optional because they want us to ask
them to explain, whereupon they can tell us the following sick joke:
“It's optional because you always have the alternative of going to
jail if you don't like it. You can stop participating, you'll just go
to jail.” They say the same about taxes. Even some “taxation is
theft” Libertarians are now enthusiastically supporting sales taxes
(especially when nonsensically excused as part of a larger plan to
transition state revenue sourcing to all fee-for-service and user-fee
-based models).
In
my opinion, the idea that we have to be assigned a number, in order
to work and participate in society, should disturb not only lovers of
human liberty, but also those who find any grain of truth in the
Christian religion.
In
the last book of the New Testament - the Book of Revelation, Chapter
13 - it is foretold that in the time of the Apocalypse, people would
be marked on their forehead or their hand, and not allowed to
purchase anything without showing that mark:
“And
he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond,
to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And
that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark, or the name
of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that
hath, understanding, count the number of the beast: for it is the
number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six”
[666].
-
Revelation 13:16-18
The
phrase “or the name of the beast, or the number of his name”
might imply that a number standing for a person's name, or the
name of the beast, can be substituted for the mark on a person's hand
or forehead. But it could also mean that these three things
are one and the same; which would imply that the beast is a
man, and a man whose “number” is equal to 666.
It
is certainly interesting to note that the German currency during the
Nazi regime was the Deutsche Mark, and also that Jewish prisoners in
Nazi death camps had six-digit numbers tattooed onto them (I say this
not to question the validity of the claim that a seven-digit figure
of Jewish people died at the hands of the Nazis, but to point out the
coincidence of the number six; I know 666 and 6 aren't the same
numbers, but 666 is 6 repeating). Additionally, it is disturbing to note that Sir Francis Galton, who coined the term eugenics, proposed a system of "marks" to denote the desirability of particular families.
It's
also interesting to note that currently, in Venezuela, you can't buy
food without a United Socialist Workers' Party identification card.
This fact should ring alarm bells to lovers of freedom, Christian or
not. So should the widespread use of U.P.C. codes (Uniform Purchasing
Codes), which have all but completely replaced price negotiation and
haggling, once viewed as an indispensable characteristic of a system
of voluntary exchange.
I
know someone who once tried to pay for a bag of Cheetos at a Wal-Mart
in Florida with a credit card, and for some odd reason, they were
expected to present their fingerprint for scanning in order to
complete the transaction with sufficient identification. I went into
a major bank in Portland, Oregon, to cash a check, and one of the
bank's employees eagerly walked over to me with a fingerprinting pad,
and presented it at chest level. All I wanted to do was cash a simple
check, and I felt like I was being fingerprinted at a police station;
I felt like I was being processed after being arrested.
When
I moved to Waukegan, Illinois, I
had to give my fingerprint in order to get a library card.
Most Americans simply do
not care about
these “ordinary, every-day” usurpations
of
human liberty (as Madison would say)!
It
goes on! Several years ago, a group of children at a Florida
elementary school, in preparation for going on a field trip, had
their retinas scanned in order to identify them, without
their parents having been notified or asked permission. Some
Native American and Aboriginal tribes believe that photographs steal
your soul (even if taken with the subject's consent). What are we
teaching our children if strangers can take pictures of them without
even notifying their parents?
I
am now having second thoughts about providing my second-grade teacher
with the “heritage” information for which she asked: information
about my and my parents' eye colors, nose shapes, hairlines, and
more. Knowing the people who taught at my school, I shudder to
think of whose hands that information could have ended-up in. Knowing
how lengthy and deceptive those consent forms can be, it is beyond
me, how people can willingly surrender parts of their own bodies, and
all the genetic information along with it.
Perhaps
most disturbingly of all, workplaces in Wisconsin and Sweden have
implemented microchip
inserts under the human skin,
which allow
employees access to their buildings. The employers and managers say
it's not
for tracking employees. Maybe it's not! They also say it's voluntary.
Maybe it is! But as with the example of the photograph possibly
stealing our soul, and subverting our human need of privacy,
something can be demoralizing
without
necessarily being oppressive, restrictive, nor directly harmful.
Think
about the potential slippery-slope effect. How
long will it be before employees use these microchips to buy
things, like
it predicts in the end-of-times book of the Bible? Many will likely
say it makes things more “convenient”,
and claim they are glad to volunteer because of that. But how long
will it be until all
employees
at those companies are required
to have them implanted? How long until all
workers in Wisconsin, or Sweden, come to be expected to submit to the
same types of systems? Undoubtedly, the vague differences between
them will be expounded at length, until they finally admit that,
“Yes, this is for tracking you, we are looking to make it
mandatory, and you will not be able to work or
buy
anything without it.”
It
sounds inconceivable, but is that really different from the way
things are now? Every major piece of property we own – our land,
our homes, our car – we're expected to register those things to the
government, which gives government authority to take them away from
us if we don't use them the way they like. The mere existence of a
website like WheresGeorge.Com
confirms that many of the dollar bills we spend are being tracked
after we spend them (after we get them from the bank tellers, who run
them through a digital counting machine, God only knows why).
I
hate to sound like King
of the Hill's
Dale Gribble character, complaining about “The Beast” (a
hypothetical system of interconnected computers and devices,
monitored by the government in order to collect as much information
as possible), but can't most of my suspicions be confirmed by the
average article about “e-meters” and “the internet of things”?
Look them up some time.
I'm
not saying that China is the beast of Revelation, nor am I saying
that communism and socialism are. I'm also
not saying that they aren't.
What I'm saying is that many regimes, of whatever economic
persuasion, find it in the interest of furthering their power, to
collect as much information as possible on their people, and that
collecting this information requires computers if efficiency is to be
expected. Whether a country chooses to use that information to kill
people – and in the name of whatever economic, political, or
religious ideology – is purely on them.
I'm
also not saying that God or the Devil has to be real in order for our
governments to be spying on us, and planning to take our stuff or
maybe even kill us. Governments do that all the time, whether in the
name of God, the Devil, the King, the People, or whatever else.
Put
it this way: Even if the Bible isn't
true –
and there's no God, and no Devil –
that is no guarantee that there's nobody out there who might want
to
sacrifice us to (what he thinks
is)
the Devil. Even if all religions are made up, and so is the Book of
Revelation, that doesn't mean there aren't people out there who are
trying to make that prophecy come true. And, why not?: “Just
because you're paranoid, doesn't mean there's nobody out to get you.”
Not
only is China undertaking an effort to put its more than a billion
people into a biometric identification system; India began to do so
years ago. It has come out, in the last several years, that millions
of cameras, all around China, are attempting to track people's every
move as best as possible, through the use of facial recognition
software.
I
believe that technology, information technology, and computers have
done a lot of good things to improve people's lives and make them
easier. But I also know that the American computing company I.B.M.
manufactured computers that were used by the Nazis in order to
efficiently catalog information they had collected about all the Jews
and “undesirables” in Europe that they were thinking about
murdering. Without I.B.M.'s assistance, it's possible that the
Holocaust might have claimed many fewer lives.
Knowing
what I know now about the Nazis – that the Nazis persecuted the
mentally ill, and that Jews and Judaism were treated like diseases,
viruses, and infestations – it disturbs me to read that Chinese
authorities are throwing around terms that, in English, translate to
“ideological illness” and “ideologically diseased” to
describe Uyghur Muslims in West China.
The
use of the word “ill” suggests that they are attempting to cast
the religious spirituality of Islam as if it were a physical,
material illness that can and should be treated. Not with medicine,
of course, but if it's a physical ailment, then it requires a
physical solution.
And that's where government force comes in; the government ideology
is to “cure” and replace the former ideology. It is to be viewed
as a sort of “baptism by fire”, a purification through death.
Human
beings are not animals, nor insects, nor diseases, nor numbers. We
are souls inhabiting bodies, and we deserve to be free unless and
until we harm someone. We should not have to identify ourselves, and
show some number every time we want to walk five feet, or use our own
property, or vote, or do anything else that carries low risk of
danger. I hate to add “especially not in the country of our own
birth”, because I regard national borders as mostly meaningless,
but my point is that a non-violent citizen in good standing does not
need to be treated like they are trying to smuggle a bomb into every
airplane flight, football game, and movie theater they enter.
In
Ayn Rand's book Anthem,
all people are assigned numbers as part of their names. Given the
popularity of dominionism, and the dominance of what Nietzsche called
the “slave morality” of Christianity, it is a miracle
that
there are any
Christians
out there who reject this intrusion upon human freedom. Numbering a
human being – whether it is part of his legal name or not – is an
insult to his parents who named him (sometimes even named us after
Biblical characters, and with priests and God as witnesses, the name
recorded in the family Bible). Numbering a human being is also an
insult to our ability to determine our own identity and our own
destiny.
If
the state's spying on us, numbering us, and all of this, is any
indication as to its intentions, then the state seems to exist solely
in order to deprive us of the illusion that we might be able to
defend ourselves, and provide for ourselves and our families without
its help and its careful supervision. Strict though it may be (the
state claims), it's tough love, and the punishment is for your own
good. The state takes away our means to provide for ourselves, and
rent those means out to us at exorbitant prices (in a currency that
it created and regulates) solely in order to humiliate us, and
to make us think that we would be helpless without it. The opposite
is true; we are helpless in its presence, and independent without it.
A reading of the Tao te Ching will show that Chinese scholars
have understood this for millennia.
Above
is an image about culture, which I previously published in 2014 in my
blog post “Citizenship and Culture Pournelle Chart”. I think
that, in countries like America (with its white, Christian majority)
and China (with its Han majority), full multiculturalism can be
difficult. Considering the situation in Xinjiang, it might be
too late to do something about it. But if there's still time, an idea
called civic pluralism could help China. Civic pluralism allows
minorities to retain their cultural traditions and uniqueness,
without being subsumed under the dominant culture (neither in the
name of assimilation, nor multiculturalism).
I
feel that too many Americans cling to assimilationism. Whites do it
to justify their exclusion of new immigrants, on the grounds that
"they're not assimilating”. Even legal immigrants do
it, on the grounds that "I came here legally, I obey the law, I
assimilated, they won't, they broke the law, I was here first").
Many Democrats and liberals, too, have come to pay lip service to
assimilationism, seemingly because they know it will help ingratiate
themselves to their Republican masters (many of whom seem to want
foreigners to check their language, their flag, and their culture at
the door the moment they arrive here).
I
think that promoting civic pluralism –
instead of forced multiculturalism, and assimilationism, and cultural
monism, and forcing very different cultures together into the same
neighborhood or the same voter pool –
could make people more accepting of different people's cultures, and
more accepting of their right to keep to themselves (should they
choose to exercise it) when they come to a new country.
Forcing-together disparate groups and cultures often forces
conflicts, and I believe that such conflicts could be delayed or even
avoided entirely, if people ceased viewing voluntary separation as if
it were the same thing as forced segregation.
Lastly, I
would like to dispel the notion that all of China's problems, or the
government's treatment of Uyghurs, are attributable to socialism.
To
me, and to those who accept the common definition of socialism, the
word means worker control, or social or societal ownership, of the
means of production. More worker control does not always, and does
not necessarily, require large government, the growth of government,
or the centralization of resources and/or decision-making power. In
fact, libertarian
socialists believe that Marx's call (in The
Communist Manifesto)
to centralize the means of production was antithetical
to the goal of socialism; that being, to distribute the productive
means into as many hands as possible.
The
idea that worker
management
or social
ownership
is the cause of China's problems seems silly to me, because those
terms are what I think of when I hear the word “socialism”. Maybe
it's my fault for not believing enough propaganda from the C.I.A.,
and from the American public school system (which would have you
believe that America won World War II all by itself), but I believe
that a country that still has billionaires, stock exchanges, and
private property, is not fully socialist.
Some
might argue that there is
no private property because it's all registered to the state, and
that there is
no free exchange in China because it's all regulated. But the fact
that the state regulates and registers all the property, should not
be taken as evidence of socialism (that is, social ownership, or
worker management). Leaders who expropriated properties and resources
in the name
of
the people, or in the name
of
the workers, are often only doing it for the sake of furthering the
interests of the ruling party. What China does is no more than
nationalism – nationalization
of resources –
with the appearance that such efforts are being undertaken for the
benefit of the people (populism) or for the workers (socialism).
I
don't want to sound like a brainwashed apologist for socialism, who
can only repeat “That wasn't real socialism”, but China is
neither fully socialist nor fully capitalist. Dirigism, fascism, and
command-and-control economics (which, for all intents and purposes,
are roughly the same thing) are an economic system unto
themselves,
distinct from both socialism and capitalism. Now, socialist and
capitalist regimes may emulate
dirigist policies – that is, economic policies that invite the
government to direct where resources go, and direct people's
transactions and economic activities – but no regime which emulates
them too much, can stay truly socialist or entrepreneurialist for
long.
Additionally,
the key reasons for turning to these policies, usually involve some
sort of economic crisis, or population crisis, energy or food crisis,
etc..
Not that I'm excusing
drastic measures like concentrating or relocating large numbers of
people; in fact, I admit that these crises are sometimes manufactured
when
not enough people volunteer to make excuses for their government
destroying their fellow citizens' lives. The Chinese do not have to
build on top of Uyghur graves; the purpose of this is to humiliate
Muslims (as China has one of the largest territories on the planet,
and could build anywhere).
China's
treatment of Uyghurs is not due to its (supposed) embrace of
socialism. The fact that Uyghurs are being forced to eat pork and
drink alcohol in Chinese concentration camps (in violation of their
religious ethics) ought to suggest the exact opposite; that China is
trying to rid itself of foreign cultural influence. That, to me,
suggests ultra-nationalism. And combined with China's ambitions
concerning trade, it's possible that those ultra-nationalist
sentiments could grow into a desire to conquer the world in the name
of China.
If
conquest of the world by China is inevitable, then I certainly hope
that China embraces socialism more than nationalism at that time. If
it does, then that just might be one of the few scenarios in which
subjugation to the Chinese government's will would be tolerable (at
least, for anyone besides the best-connected, and highest-scoring,
Chinese citizens).
I
hope that Chinese citizens see the state's call for a return to
communism, for what I believe it is: a move to clamp-down on power,
and grow the state, and secure the Xi regime's single-party rule,
instead of empowering workers to exert control over the workplaces in
which they spend more than half of their waking lives.
Post-Script
I would like to add that I do not agree with the notion that the credit rating system in America is better, nor less authoritarian or invasive of our privacy, than the social credit rating system in place in China.
In September 2017, it was reported that the personal information of 143 million Americans was breached, accessed by hackers who hacked into the computers of the consumer credit reporting agency EquiFax.
Despite the fact that the credit system in America is in place "voluntarily" (that is, on the part of people who check their credit rating), Americans with any desire to make use of their credit score are, in effect, pressured into choosing from among one of the government-licensed, government-approved, overregulated, overtaxed agencies that are allowed to do so. And what a coincidence, they all require us to surrender a lot of personal information.
Where can I go to check my credit score, or take out a loan, without revealing my legal name and my government-issued number that allows me to work? What if I don't even agree that the government's conception of the construction of my own name is misguided and presumptuous in the first place? If I can't trust the government to understand that families give names to people, not governments, then how can I trust the government to decide which agencies are allowed to gather the personal information of hundreds of millions of people (be it EquiFax, the offices of the Social Security system, the Secretary of States' offices, etc.).
I do not believe that any mass storage of personal information is safe, either from hackers, or from legalized government invasion. I hope that what I have explained above, concerning I.B.M.'s collaboration with the Nazis, explains my suspicions. Additionally, I find it ridiculous that personal information - much of which anybody could easily find out about us - is used to protect our privacy, and serve as a voucher of our identity.
Our identity is within us. It does not display itself to the outside world; at least, not in the same way that advocates of biometric systems assume it does.
Originally
Written on December 13th,
14th,
and 16th,
2018
Expanded
on December 18th,
2018
Edited on December 20th, 2018
Post-Script Added between December 24nd and 26, 2018
Originally
Published on December 18th,
2018
(with
the exception of several images;
original
images published in 2012, 2013, and 2014)
