Lachlan Brown on Wed, 16 Jan 2002 17:48:01 +0100 (CET) |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: Don't Fuck With Democracy. |
Thank you MCKenzie, Kermit, and Mikael for pointing out the source for ‘the tragedy of the commons’. "The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin, Science, 162(1968):1243-1248. Hmmm… One might have expected Malthusian biology combined with in the equation of Mass Destruction Game Theory and validated by a retrenching scholarship compromised by the military industrial complexes reaction to counter-cultural social innovation would crop up somewhere around the question of ‘the commons’. I see Hardin, citing J.B. Wiesner and H.F. York ‘the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security’, is not writing about 'the commons' at all, but about Nuclear Arsenals in 1968 during an intensely insecure cultural period in which scholarship became deeply compromised by the institutionalization of education as a mere element and resource in a new social contract and a new form of government, that of The National Security State. He was writing not about ‘the commons’ at all but about ‘Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed Upon’ the necessary basis for suspension of the social contract and democratic rights and an apology for a ‘new social contract’ in which the balance between estates of The State, The Market and Ethics mediated by the Public was to be suspended for the sake of Cold War emergency contingency. Was he one wonders writing to posterity an apology for his time from the fall-out shelter to which What relevance does ‘R-Complex thinking’ of the National Security State have for the rich, complex, diverse, contradictory nature of our common wealth, our culture(s), how is it to anticipate and assure the longevity of our culture(s) and why do we continue to accept this imbalance to the social contract? Scientific Rationality among herdsmen is an unlikely scenario. Some of us have higher brain functions than those governed from the brain stem, and any argument based upon assumed behaviour with no empirical basis may make interesting economic theory, and might make what appears to be a fairly interesting game simulation but... ‘The Commons’, our democracy, is not a given, an ideascape to be colonized, it is an outcome of democratic thinking. Behaviour in a 'commons' is comparative and cultural, governed by best use of land and resources for a 'community', ‘how do we make best use of what we’ve got” governed by ‘tradition’ or what has worked well in the past and carried a community across unremembered unrecorded events -- long term cycles of climate change, pestilence, war, --“kinship” trust in unpredictable as well as predictable behaviour among co-‘herdsmen’’/wimmin, as well as well as openness to the memes of other cultures, in a forum where all matters affecting the commons, and the common wealth, our culture(s), may be raised, discussed, and commonly understood. .This is democratic thinking. Historically, managing ‘the Commons’ or communal land of the community was how we got democracy. Alexander Wilson’s The Culture of Nature is helpful toward an understanding of a 'new social contract', and of course Serres had something to say about 'the Natural Contract'. About my subject line, I apologise but Hardin provides validation for it: 'Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now, [1968] but it need not forever be so. As with the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be cleansed away by exposure to the light, by saying it over and over without apology or embarrassment. ' Hardin. I repeat, don't fuck with democracy. “The only way we can preserve and nurture other and more precious freedoms is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, and that very soon. "Freedom is the recognition of necessity" -- and it is the role of education to reveal to all the necessity of abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, can we put an end to this aspect of the tragedy of the commons.” Hardin 68 Nazi. Make love not war. Lachlan Brown Thirdnet Cultural Studies Goldsmiths College -- _______________________________________________ Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup 1 cent a minute calls anywhere in the U.S.! http://www.getpennytalk.com/cgi-bin/adforward.cgi?p_key=RG9853KJ&url=http://www.getpennytalk.com _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold