The inherent illegitimacy of social power

Every now and again I get to feeling like some things are really obvious, but no one else seems to get them.  Or maybe they're too polite to talk about them.  And then sometimes I get writing fiction and bits of reality insist on intruding, or maybe vice-versa, and I get an explanation of why I cannot stand to read a lot of otherwise excellent writing.  And then I wonder if I ought to post this at all.

But, anyway; if we talk about "power" in a human social context, power is the ability to have other people not fight back when you harm them.

(If you're doing a really good job exercising power, they'll come up with reasons why they deserve to be hurt.  A mediocre job will have them come up with reasons why they cannot hope to retaliate effectively.)

Any power structure has to do two things; it has to make it unambiguous who is allowed to hurt whom[1], and it has to get itself copied into the future.

Attaching the exercise of power to individuals isn't the only way or the best way to organize society, but it's extremely persistent.

It's extremely persistent because it's simple—better usually means more complicated means more maintenance and more trouble with system exploits by defection—and because it provides a powerful motivation; no one wants to be powerless because being powerless means you get abused.

There's a big set of social and economic changes going on where the (obviously) economically superior form of organization says "let's not structure society around who gets hurt" and there's enormous pushback from the people who have power and want to keep it.

(This is why it's useless to talk about "privilege"; privilege is in the passive voice, and you don't get from impersonal historical forces to a recognition that those who now have power ought not to because there is no legitimate exercise of social power vesting in individuals.)

So one response to the helpless—refugees, the poor, anybody lacking the social connections to have a good-enough lawyer—is to hurt them.  This has (from inside that social structure) the positive feature of reinforcing the social order.

So when people get up and make calls for refusing any and all Syrian refugees, the harm to the refugees isn't a lamentable side effect of due public caution; it's the point.  It establishes who legitimately exercises power.

When people engage with art by adding layers of story, there's a ubiquitous tendency to make violence and cruelty not that character's fault because that's the character they like. This is arguably what art is for.  This context of art makes looking at the legitimacy of social power vested in individuals difficult.  (There isn't any, unless you agree that you should be hurt for the convenience or pleasure of others.  It's…awkward, to have to start over.)

This presents the really difficult question of "what else should we do?"

Social power structures depend on getting copied into the future.  Imagining an entire future is too difficult; no one can, or can expect, to be able to do that.

Fortunately, an entire future is not necessary.  Delegitimizing social power vested in individuals -- agreeing that nobody gets to hurt others because they want to (or claim they need to, or have a belief system which asserts the positive good of coercion…) -- is enough.  The result isn't predictable in detail, but is predictably better in result.

It's enough to get something better; that's success.  Control, specific foreknowledge of just what better thing can be had, isn't available and (fortunately) is not required.


[1] this is why "gender neutral" children's clothing looks like boy's clothes.  In a patriarchial culture, girl's clothes label you as someone anyone male can hurt.  Very nearly someone who anyone male should hurt.

Commonweal #4 current status 2015-11-22

Word count screenshot for 2015-11-22

A bit over 8,000 words.  So I made my thousand a day.  (Not much more than the thousand a day, so it feels kind of an average week, but a good average.)  The plotty bits appear to be headed somewhere, and the protagonist hasn't gone on strike for a better writer, so it'll do.

Commonweal #4, current status 2015-11-16

word count screenshot for 2015-11-16

Started getting some momentum at long last.  (You can't see directories argh and argh2 here.  Voice, why must it torment us so.)  So that doesn't really count as "from the start of November".  But I'm happy, because Safely You Deliver had an average rate around 25 kwords/month once it woke up and went live in my head.  So this feels like it might be progress.

Not so bad for a phone camera

Juvenile merlin in the Hawk Hill oak in High Park

Admittedly a phone camera with some help from a spotting scope.   This was the only raptor seen at today's hawk watch; the weather being entirely gorgeous means the migrants don't hit the lake or proceed along the shoreline.  (It would be interesting to see what a hawk watch along the shore of Lake Huron would be seeing this year.  Everything still seems to be funnelling over the Detroit River.)

October did actually happen.  I got to the Ixiasoft DITA CMS conference in Montreal; it was excellent.  It's cheering to see something I was involved in the beginnings of doing so well.  There was a federal election that avoided disaster.  (It might have been a good thing; ask me this time next year, after we know what happens to C-51 and a bunch of other issues where Liberal policy is at best dubious.)  I got a bit of cycling in.  Commonweal #3, tentatively Safely You Deliver, is off to copy-edit after acquiring more unicorn viewpoint.  (I may have acquired a bit of extra gibbering.)

I have at long last managed to pull apart the various narrative threats, err, threads, which are (I think) going to turn into Commonweal #4, #5, and #6.  There's a pile of notes, chunks of actual narrative of uncertain utility, the beginnings of a formal timeline, and somewhere past 10,000 words on #4 for the... fourth? I think fourth... time.  But it has a nice simple plot now, rather than trying to get everything into the one book.