Documentary: Engines of Domination

[Miro]

Jeff Berwick has interviewed a man I have never heard about, Mark Corske, in the last Anarchast.

 

The interview was mostly about a book he has written named Engines of Domination. It has also been turned into a documentary available on youtube:

 

 

I have just finished watching and I think it was pretty decent, worth the time. It has a similar approach to analyzing state as Stef's 

True News 13: Statism is Dead but it also comes up with a couple of fresh angles - check it out!

[Ken Cotton]

The conclusion that it goes against human nature to enslave other human beings is completely arbitrary. Human beings are animals, and humans have domesticated all domesticatable animals. There's no reason to think that humans would not domesticate other human beings.

 

The argument cherrypicks the benefits of business competition and the drawbacks of military competition. Introductory portion of the video shows people working together for example, and then the cost of war. It does not show however uncompetitive businesses collapsing, technology replacing jobs, or other negative results. Similarly, it does not show the positive results of war such as increased economic booms, resource acquisition, and other invigorating aspects.

 

Argument suggests that mass war and mass business are the result of a special class of inviduals and not common people. This is nothing short of bigotry, and extends into racism if you choose to believe the subspecies argument for the traditional ruling class. The argument inherently scapegoats all the negative effects of human organization onto a select few. Not only is this intellectually poor and morally reprehensible, it's also extremely patronizing to the common person. It seems as though the core of the argument is that humanity is naturally too stupid to recognize that it is being directed and simultaneously too stupid to direct itself. Negative effects of human existence are placed on "institutions" and "politicians", completely ignoring the fact that tribal hierarchies are inherent to the human condition. Anthropological evidence shows that even the earliest tribes engaged in rudimentary forms of warfare and social arrangement.

 

Furthermore, the argument puts forward the fallacy that animals exist in nature in some kind of preternatural balance. This is a naive view of evolutionary history and not supported by fact. Many creatures have gone extinct well before the industrialization of human beings, from things such as climate change to evolution itself. Creatures with no natural predators can and often do reproduce to the point of destroying their own environment. While the most recent examples of this have been largely caused by human beings, there have traditionally been other causes. Water levels can recede or rise, land masses shift, natural disasters occur, evolution occurs, etc. If you take a virus or some forms of bacteria for example, you can see them display a lethality in humans that ultimately causes their own destruction. Human beings didn't create every single virus that kills them, the same way they haven't created through action or inaction every other animal that destroys its environment or overbreeds/underbreeds itself to extinction. The argument that all of this hinges on human development is completely false.

 

20 minutes onward, the argument misunderstands the basic premise of political power. Politics is at its most basic form relationships. Power is power. Political power is power gained from relationships. Using our tribal example by looking backward in time, we can see the evolution of rudimentary family structures. Inevitably the parents have more power than the children, and it stands to reason that men had more power than women. A single patriarch likely exhibited the most direct power in the tribe, similar to most primate structures we see today. The first form of political power would then be personal relationships with the tribal patriarch such as immediate family. Looking at modern standards there is little reason to conclude that this same mechanism is not at work. Politicians are our modern leaders and have a lot of power, but that power extends to their immediate family as well. There's no logical or political reason for a politician's family to enjoy special considerations or protections, but they do as a perk of political power. This is because the protection and consideration of these people makes the politician happier, and the entire mechanism of political power hinges on relationships - you generally have a good relationship with someone when you make each other happy.

 

24 mins argument completely ignores the fact that the superior capacity to commit violence is a resource. Ignores the fact that money is a resource. Money does not work on people with money, the same way that violence doesn't generally work with an equal capacity for violence. In the example where a dollar is offered to have the cat box cleaned, the author puts forward a positive. Then with the mention of the gun, puts forward a negative. There's no reason this argument can't be inverted. You can threaten to use the dollar in one's posession to big against the person, or offer to use the gun in one's posession to shoot someone that the other person doesn't like. These are all just different resources, just means to the same end of a clean catbox.

 

 

I'll continue the second half in another post.