Goldwater went on to lose to the sitting president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, in a landslide defeat (Johnson won 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52). After the election Hess broke away from mainstream conservatism, eventually embracing radical libertarian and anarchist politics that stressed decentralization and local self-governance.

He became involved with both Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), reflecting his attempt to find common cause between the Old Right and the New Left. The SDS was an organization of student activists in the United States who rejected the notion of permanent leaders, hierarchical relationships, and parliamentary procedure. Rather, the organization was based on the idea of broad governance through “participatory democracy.”

The IWW, also known as the Wobblies, was an international organization of labor unionists who understood economic struggle as a transnational conflict between capital and labor rather than as conflict confined to workers within a given country. For example, industrial workers in the United States had more in common with workers in Canada, England, or Germany than they did with upper-class capitalists in America.

Hess’s shift toward left-leaning politics was driven in part by his opposition to the Vietnam War, as well as by his belief that the conservative movement had become aligned with corporate hierarchies and an increasingly anti-democratic national security state. His preference for decision-making at the smallest possible scale was akin in spirit to the writer and cultural observer Tom Wolfe’s assertion that a neighborhood or block association is the quintessential democratic institution. A fierce opponent of the concentration of wealth, Hess has been called “the ideological grandfather of the anti-1% movement”.

Karl Hess’s political evolution contributed to his decision to become a federal tax resister. In 1969, he stopped paying his Federal income tax. Hess’s position was that he could not in good conscience support a government whose spending on war, welfare, and centralized power he opposed. After he notified the IRS of his refusal, the agency pursued his identifiable assets and income; Hess later wrote that it had imposed a “100 percent lien” on everything it could reach, including bank accounts and a salary from the Institute for Policy Studies.

Unable to retain ordinary wage income or maintain a bank account, he worked as a commercial welder, and often bartered his labor directly for food and other necessities. This did not make him wholly independent of money or government power. Still, it was a deliberate effort to rely more on skills, direct exchange, and local self-sufficiency than on the conventional cash economy.

Rather than trying to survive by figuring out how to make the rules of the game work in his favor—in this case, earning money to buy the necessities of life—Hess chose a different approach, one that reduced his need to make money to survive. He made it so that money—and the government’s power to control it—were irrelevant to the way he lived. He survived by other means.

Which brings us today.

We live in dark times. Authoritarian rule grows stronger and is becoming more overt. Wanton consumerism among all strata of society drives an increasingly complex economy. It seems as if the pursuit of money rules the day at a grander, more destructive scale than ever before.

There have been darker times in the past, when pestilence, war, famine, and death—the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—cast a longer shadow of misery over humanity. Today, by many measures, these threats are less severe. When the Black Death swept through Europe, it killed roughly one-third of the population over several years; life expectancy dropped from the then-typical 30–35 to as little as 20–30 in hard-hit urban areas, with infant mortality rates of 30% to 50%.. By contrast, in developed nations today, most people live into their seventies, and most children survive into adulthood. The human condition has improved.

And yet it seems as if we have taken a step backward.

Competition and corruption trump cooperation and fair play as the modus operandi of modern life. Human dignity is not an aspired-to universal value but a quality subject to the demands of the marketplace, and right now, demand seems pretty low.

So, what’s to be done?

This is where the politics of irrelevancy comes into play. Few of us have the means and courage to do what Karl Hess did: eliminate the power of money over a substantial portion of our lives. As mentioned above, we live in a complex economy in which money-mediated transactions structure much of our work, housing, food, health care, transportation, and political life. Bartering, while possible at a very small scale, is not a realistic way to render those things we abhor irrelevant. There’s just too much money doing too many things for too many people. Clearly, we need to find another way.

For me, the road to irrelevance as a political action is to make the information streams that are intended to engage, anger, intrigue, and incite me inconsequential to my life. In short, turn off the “news”.

Some information has a useful, direct impact on one’s life and how one lives; for example, the daily weather report, the traffic report, and flight notifications. Cold-weather reports can change how you dress that day. A warning of a traffic delay can make you change the route to your destination. A delayed flight means you can take more time to get to the airport. On the other hand, I have learned that most of the information available via mass media, while intriguing and entertaining, has little impact on my life beyond affecting my emotional state. When the good guys win, I feel happy. When the bad guys win, I get scared and then angry. The depth of the details reported may vary, but the essential outcome is the same: the evocation of an emotional response, not a thoughtful one.

To my thinking, few of us have the power to alter the course of events on a grand scale. Being “up on the news” does not translate into having influence over the people, places and things reported in the news.

Collectively we might have some impact during special moments in time, but for the most part, most of us are at the mercy of forces far more powerful than we will ever be. I have come to accept this. For me to think otherwise is to be part of a folly that distracts me from taking a very close look at the reality before me as it unfolds.

This does not mean I will shroud myself in ignorance. I still read books and articles from reputable sources on a variety of subjects. My desire is to keep educating myself, not to cast myself into the throes of reactionary anger and outrage.

While I cannot control events that happen outside my being, I can control myself, my thinking, and my behavior from within. And, I can try to make those things that hinder my well-being irrelevant to my life. The work is to learn how.

I suspect that Karl Hess followed a similar path, at least I hope he did. In any case, I admire his evolution. I am grateful that he taught me the power of making those things that oppose me irrelevant. I hope that his soul, in whatever form it took and takes now, rests in peace.

Share

Allow me to elaborate.

A future with AI hits home

Recently I created a complex day-trading application. (You can find the code and documentation here.) AI did all the programming and testing, writing over 21,000 lines of code. Also, AI wrote all the documentation necessary, under my direction, to describe the system’s architecture, logic, and behavior on an ongoing basis. My role was that of a product manager and Q/A engineer, making sure that the product AI created was the one that I specified.

By my estimate, the work that AI did on my trading program in a few weeks of collaboration would have taken two to three developers two to three months to implement. No company in its right mind would ignore such an increase in productivity. Why should a company hire a cohort of entry-level developers when it can just buy some tokens from a service provider on an as-needed basis and let AI do the grunt programming work? Businesses won’t. Entry- to mid-level developers still on the payroll will be let go; new ones won’t be hired.

This trend is already taking place, as described in the article “Canaries in the Coal Mine?“ by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen at Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab. They found relative employment declines of around 16% among 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed occupations, from October to November 2025. As AI matures, I speculate that the trend will accelerate, affecting workers beyond those who use computers as their primary tool.

The future of software programming by humans

In the not-too-distant future, programmers won’t be working on applications as we presently know them. Rather, they’ll be operating on artificial intelligence as a surgeon does on humans. It’s AI that will be slinging the code. Highly educated programmers will become the people who keep AI healthy. This next generation of programmers will need to follow a career path similar to a physician’s: lots of formal education followed by years of general and specialty internships under the tutelage of highly experienced experts.

So, let me pose a question: what do I hope will happen to all the entry- and mid-level programmers who will be displaced by AI and don’t have the time or money to pursue the excruciating career path necessary to become a viable programmer in this new environment?

The fast answer is that I hope the powers that be will understand that significant displacement is at hand and that there will be limited opportunities to move onto the next step in employment, if indeed there is a next step.

The shrinking labor frontier

The dictum that technology creates new jobs for those who are displaced is questionable. In his essay “Post-AGI AI Won’t Replace the Jobs It Takes” author Carlo Iacono uses the term labor frontier to describe the new types of wage-earning work that get created in the wake of technology-produced displacement. For example, as more powerful farming equipment came on the scene, displaced farmers over time went on to work in factories, offices, and skilled trades. These occupations were the labor frontier, the place where technology wasn’t yet mature enough to do the new work that the economy needed. However, Iacono points out that technology, particularly AI technology, is maturing in new ways. AI and AI-powered robots with fine motor skills are becoming more capable of doing more types of work, even knowledge work. Hence, the labor frontier is shrinking.

In other words, it’s quite possible that within 30 years there will be no next job to go on to, for the workers displaced by AI.

A big problem needs big solutions

Should this become the case, my hope is that the powers that be will subsidize displaced workers, while also helping them find meaning and purpose in life as their occupation once did. This is not a simple solution. It will require enormous efforts outside the capabilities of business, because most businesses are concerned with only one thing: making money. The travails of the displaced worker are a secondary consideration, if any consideration is given at all.

Such initiatives will need to be a social transformation powered by governments in cooperation with charities, religious groups, non-profit organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGO). Describing the actual mechanics of these initiatives is beyond the scope of a thousand-word essay. But I hope that the transformation happens because the alternative is a bleak future for those of us who have to work for a living.

As the ability to earn money through our physical and cognitive labor diminishes, so too will our standard of living, particularly for those starting out in the workforce. Unless you are independently wealthy or are in the good graces of someone who is, living in a tent on the side of the road is a real possibility for any wage-earner when the paychecks stop coming in and the money finally runs out.

My hope is for the better outcome.

Author’s Note: This piece has been edited by artificial intelligence and human editors for accuracy, clarity, and grammar. Every effort has been made to ensure that the work is original and creative.

Share

Subscribe now

On the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, torpedo bombers, level bombers, dive bombers, and fighters launched from six aircraft carriers of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the military installation at Pearl Harbor, on what was then the U.S. territorial island of Oahu. The attack sank or damaged all eight U.S. battleships in the harbor, along with multiple other vessels anchored in the port. 2,403 Americans were killed, and 1,178 were wounded. It was the first time since the War of 1812 that a foreign navy carried out a major assault on a U.S. military installation in or near U.S. territory.

America declares war, for real

The next day, December 8, 1941, the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressed a joint session of Congress, requesting a declaration of war from both the Senate and the House of Representatives. As Roosevelt stated, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The Senate responded by passing the declaration of war on Japan by a vote of 82 in favor and 0 against. The House had one dissenting vote, with a tally of 388-1.

Four days later, on the morning of December 11, 1941, in Berlin, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop informed the American chargé d’affaires at the U.S. embassy that Germany considered itself at war with the United States, and Adolf Hitler announced the declaration in a speech to the Reichstag at the Kroll Opera House. Later that same day, the U.S. Congress in Washington, D.C., approved a resolution by unanimous votes in both the Senate and the House, declaring war on Germany. Roosevelt’s signing of the declaration formally brought the United States into the European war.

By the end of 1942, the United States was engaged in a worldwide conflict across multiple theaters of war, including the European and Mediterranean theaters in Europe and North Africa, the Pacific Ocean Areas and the South West Pacific Area in the Pacific, the China–Burma–India Theater in Asia, and the American Theater, which covered the defense of the continental United States and surrounding waters.

The effect of the declaration went far beyond military action. It affected every aspect of civilian life in the United States, economically, culturally, and politically.

Four days after Pearl Harbor, the first wave of rationing began in the United States when tires were officially taken off the open market. A short time later, food rationing included sugar, coffee, meat, fats and oils (butter, lard, shortening, margarine), cheese, canned milk, and a broad category of processed/canned foods. In addition to tires, rationed non‑food items included gasoline, fuel oil and kerosene, coal and other solid fuels, and new automobiles and bicycles, all of which were tightly controlled due to rubber and fuel shortages. Footwear (especially leather and rubber shoes and boots) was rationed; styles, colors, and non‑essential trimmings were also restricted to conserve leather and rubber.

The Ford Motor Company and General Motors halted regular civilian automobile production early in 1942 and spent the rest of World War II producing almost exclusively military vehicles, aircraft, and other equipment under government direction. Moviemaking production continued, but many scripts were shaped to support the war effort and foster patriotic sentiment at home, often in consultation with the Office of War Information. Movie stars of the time, such as James Stewart, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda, Robert Taylor, and Lee Marvin, enlisted in the armed forces, while future star Paul Newman served as a young sailor in the U.S. Navy. Leslie Howard, who played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, and Carole Lombard, wife of Clark Gable, died in war‑related incidents. Major League Baseball continued, but in a diminished state because many of the star players, such as Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, and Hank Greenberg, were also serving in the armed forces.

More than 16 million Americans served in the military, while millions more worked in war industries, civil defense, rationing boards, Red Cross, USO, and other volunteer roles. For many Americans, casualties and deaths were not an abstraction: it was commonplace to know families whose sons were serving, and all too often, some of those sons had been killed or badly wounded.

America was going all in on the war, but there were dark sides, too. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942—a little over two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor—that authorized the internment of Japanese-Americans into isolated detention centers. Eventually, about 120,000 people of Japanese descent were removed and incarcerated, and roughly two-thirds of them were U.S. citizens. German and Italian nationals (and a smaller number of German- and Italian-Americans) were also subject to arrest, internment, or movement restrictions under “enemy alien” policies.

Yet for the most part, despite the detentions in the name of national security, when it came to waging war during WW II, America and Americans were overwhelmingly committed to the war effort, in spirit, in action, and, most importantly, in objective. That objective was the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan, in which the terms of surrender required formal acceptance of complete military defeat and submission of their armed forces—and effectively the state itself—to Allied control on terms set by the Allies, not negotiated as equals.

Enemies surrender, for real

Just as the war began with formal declarations, it ended with formal surrenders—legally binding instruments that clearly acknowledged military defeat and transferred authority to the victors.

Italy had formally surrendered to Allied forces midway through the war, first by signing the Armistice of Cassibile on September 3, 1943, which ended hostilities, and later by signing a formal Instrument of Surrender on September 29, 1943, acknowledging Italy’s defeat and specifying its unconditional surrender to the Allies.

Germany signed two formal surrenders. The first was on May 7, 1945, when Germany signed an unconditional surrender at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) in Reims, France. The second, at the Soviet Union’s insistence, in Berlin on May 8, 1945.

Japan formally signed a surrender document five months later on September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

Undeclared war in the 20th Century

World War II was the last major war in which Congress formally declared war, and the United States compelled an enemy state to sign an instrument of unconditional surrender, thereby acknowledging total military defeat.

In fact, since the country’s inception in 1776, the United States military has been involved in approximately 200 conflicts, yet has formally declared war only 11 times across 5 wars: the War of 1812, Mexican-American War (1846), the Spanish-American War (1898), World War I (1917), and World War II (1941). (As strange as it might seem to declare 11 wars over 5 years, the reasoning is that a single war often requires multiple declarations because the U.S. must declare war against each specific enemy nation individually, not just the conflict as a whole. Hence, 11 declarations of war by the United States over 5 years.)

In recent times, the Korean War was termed a police action by the United Nations, and the cessation of hostilities was formalized in the Korean Armistice Agreement of July 27, 1953, signed by the U.S.-led UN Command, North Korea, and China.

In the case of the Vietnam War, the U.S. had withdrawn forces in 1973 as agreed upon in the Paris Peace Accords, signed by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong’s Provisional Revolutionary Government. Still, the formal surrender that ended the overall conflict on Vietnamese soil took place two years later, on April 30, 1975, when the President of South Vietnam, Dương Văn Minh, admitted defeat during a radio broadcast on Saigon Radio. His broadcast announced an unconditional surrender and ordered the Army of the Republic of Vietnam to lay down arms. North Vietnamese/PRG officers publicly declared they accepted this surrender, marking the end of the war and commencing the occupation of South Vietnam by opposing forces. North and South Vietnam were formally united over a year later, on July 2, 1976, when the new state of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was officially proclaimed.

The congressionally authorized but not formally declared First Gulf War between U.S.-led coalition forces and Iraq came to an end when the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 687, adopted April 3, 1991, set out the formal cease‑fire conditions, including Iraqi disarmament obligations. While Iraq was not invaded by coalition forces, the country did accept the terms that created the legal framework for ending active hostilities.

The Second Gulf War (2003 to 2011) had no formal declaration of war, unlike the one Congress issued to start World War II. However, Congress did authorize the use of military force under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002. The conflict did not end in a single, formal national surrender or classic bilateral cease‑fire treaty. The invasion of Iraq caused the state to collapse. As a result, there was no continuing Iraqi regime capable of signing a national instrument of surrender. Instead, hostilities continued after the fall of the government, evolving into a prolonged insurgency and internal conflict in which various factions, successive Iraqi governments, and foreign forces fought, struck local deals, and sometimes agreed to cease‑fires, without ever producing a single, definitive surrender document that ended the war.

Which brings us to today.

When war becomes informal

There is a joke from the ‘60s that goes like this: President Johnson declared a War on Poverty, so I went out and killed a beggar. Despite its morbid humor, the joke reveals how “war” has become a digestible catchphrase far removed from the true horrors of armed conflict. What we now call war exists in three separate realms: the actual violence and destruction experienced by those in the midst of the fighting and dying; the entertainingly sanitized media presentation that shapes public perception back home; and the political calculations of executives who deploy military force as an instrument of policy, often driven more by domestic political needs and strategic posturing than by existential threats to national survival.

As the formality of war wanes, the violence and destruction incurred become a matter of executive fiat rather than a consensual expression of national will.

In over half a century, America has not fought a war that combined a formal declaration of war with an unconditional surrender and a definitive peace settlement. Rather, today’s military actions that are called “war” are something different. There’s practically no sacrifice among the citizenry other than higher prices for commodities and the loss of wealth on paper due to an inflationary economy.

The difference between WW II and the wars since is more than temporal—it’s constitutional, moral, and existential. When FDR stood before Congress requesting a declaration of war, he was asking the American people, through formal ceremony to commit the nation to total war with all its attendant sacrifices and horrors. The response from Congress and the nation was nearly unanimous because the question was serious and the stakes were clear: the United States’ continued existence was at obvious risk.

Today, military action requires no such reckoning. Wars begin with media manipulation, executive orders, and authorization resolutions—not declarations. The “wars” do not end with surrender documents signed on battleship decks, but with muted, sometimes controversial withdrawals and political spin. The machinery of war has been separated from the machinery of democratic consent, and in that separation, we have lost something essential: the weight of consequence, the shared burden of decision, and the clarity of purpose that comes only when a nation—not just its executive—chooses to go to war. What remains is not war as our forebearers knew it, but a simulation of war more akin to a video game than an all-out national effort. Today’s conflicts ask nothing exceptional from most of us, only our acceptance and inattention to the death and destruction that are endemic to any large scale military action.

Today, in America, war is easy to digest. In the past, it was a harder pill to swallow. While the implications of this transformation may seem banal on the surface, they are devastating to those of us who want the United States to evolve into a more civilized nation—one in which the weapons of war are forged into the tools of a defensible peace, and where we finally learn to live together in harmony with goodwill toward all, foreign and domestic.

Author’s Note: This piece has been edited by artificial intelligence and human editors for accuracy, clarity, and grammar. Every effort has been made to ensure that the work is original and creative.

Subscribe now

Share

The rise of Mohammad Mosaddegh as Prime Minister of Iran, along with the 1951 Oil Nationalization Law, were democratic attempts to assert Iran’s economic sovereignty. Fueled, in part, by the Cold War’s climate of fear and containment, the U.S. CIA and U.K. MI6 helped topple Mosaddegh in a 1953 coup that restored the Shah as an autocratic ruler and fostered SAVAK’s brutal surveillance state, which radicalized opposition across classes. Those dynamics fed directly into the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the establishment of Iran’s theocratic state—something that the covert forces did not anticipate back in 1953. The current US/Israeli military action may produce a similar type of unintended consequence, one that fortifies rather than topples the current regime in Iran.

As of this writing, the armed forces of the United States of America, in collaboration with the armed forces of the State of Israel, are conducting ongoing air and missile operations against targets in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran has responded with missile and drone attacks on Israel and on United States military facilities and allied states in the surrounding region. Hostilities began on February 28, 2026, when U.S. and Israeli forces launched coordinated strikes on Iranian territory.

Observers of the situation have inferred that one of the underlying objectives of the United States military operation—an operation undertaken without a new, specific authorization from Congress for the use of military force—is to create conditions in which the population of Iran might rise up against, and potentially overthrow, the country’s theocratic government, an inference based on the administration’s repeated appeals to the “freedom” of the Iranian people and its public encouragement of domestic opposition.

The events of February 28, 2026, are not the first time that the United States of America has engaged in the overthrow of the government of Iran. In fact, the US government’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was an instrumental actor in orchestrating the 1953 coup d’etat that ousted Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Prime Minister backed by a democratically elected parliament of Iran, replacing him with an army officer, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as Prime Minister. A byproduct of the coup was that it helped embolden the country’s Shah to evolve Iran into an authoritarian police state, contributing to the conditions that culminated in the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the Iranian theocracy.

Theocracy in Iran did not appear suddenly as if by magic. It occurred due to a convergence of economic, social, and nationalist forces that had been building since the beginning of the 20th century. It’s a story worth telling, even at a cursory level, given the death and destruction taking place in Iran today.

So, I will.

Iran, oil, and nationalism

It’s essential to understand at the outset that, while most countries in the Middle East were governed by the Ottoman Empire until after World War I, Iran has been an independent, sovereign state ruled by its own monarch, the Shah, since 1501. Through several millennia, until 1935, the country now known as Iran was generally known in the West as “Persia,” even though its inhabitants had long called it “Iran” or related names. The national language is Farsi, not Arabic.

The country is not a collection of tribes organized into sovereign states according to arbitrary political boundaries drawn from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, as in the Sykes–Picot Agreement after World War I. (The Sykes-Picot Agreement created the countries Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Transjordan after World War I.) Rather, Iran has long been an independent country ruled by a monarch. Because of its long history as a sovereign state, its inhabitants have a distinct national identity.

The Shah had near absolute political power in Iran until the beginning of the 20th Century. That changed with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911, when a parliament was created and a constitutional monarchy established. Still, government intrigue was commonplace in the forms of bribery, patronage, and sometimes violent political upheaval. (It’s interesting to note that 1905 was also the year in which the Duma, the legislative assembly of the government, was created in Tsarist Russia, in an attempt to loosen the absolute power of the monarch.)

Despite the discovery of the first oil field in the Middle East in 1908 by the British firm, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which became today’s energy company BP, Iran remained a poor, rural country. The subsequent wealth generated by the oil discovery benefited the lower classes only marginally. Rather, the bulk of oil profits was shared among foreign oil companies, with a far smaller share going to the Shah and a narrow elite. During the 1930s, when the oil industry was producing enormous, reliable profits, most of the population still lived in near poverty.

Things changed in 1951 when the Majlis, the Iranian parliament, became more assertive and passed the Oil Nationalization Law, which realized many aspects of the nationalist sentiment in Iran that had been growing since the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911. Also in that year, the Majlis further expressed the country’s growing nationalism by electing the committed nationalist Mohammad Mosaddegh as Prime Minister by a significant majority. The tenor of the times could be summed up in Mosaddegh’s simple slogan, “Iranian oil for Iranians.”

Which brings us to 1953.

Containment and the coup

1953 was an eventful year in geopolitics. Dwight Eisenhower, former Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, had begun his term as President of the United States in January of that year. Joseph McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, started the Army Signal Corps Hearings in February to begin his attempt to expose communist infiltration of the US government.

Joseph Stalin, the decades-long and notoriously brutal dictator who held the Soviet Union in an iron grip, died the following month, in March of that year. Hostilities in the Korean War, sometimes described by U.S. officials as a “police action,” came to an end with the armistice of July 27, 1953. In August of 1953, the Soviet Union detonated its first thermonuclear bomb, above-ground at the Semipalatinsk test site in modern-day Kazakhstan. That Soviet device had a yield of roughly 20–30 times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped by the Americans eight years earlier on Hiroshima.

Using nuclear weapons had precedent, provided by the United States. Thus, the fear of nuclear annihilation by the Soviets, along with the anxiety among those in power in the United States government for having “lost China to the communists” in the 1948 Communist Revolution, added justification for any and all action on the part of the US to battle the Soviet threat.

Part of that threat was perceived to be in Iran with the election of Mosaddegh and the nationalization of Iran’s oil industry. In the thinking of American policymakers, nationalization equaled socialism, and socialism equaled communism. Adding fuel to the fire of Anglo-American concern, the streets of Tehran were filled with ongoing demonstrations, organized in part by the Marxist-inspired and pro-Soviet Tudeh Party.

From the viewpoint of the Americans and their British allies, Mosaddegh had to go, and eventually he did. The only problem was that in their haste to remove him, the American and British intelligence agencies had misjudged an important fact that would come back to haunt them decades later. In addition to secular nationalists and leftists both inside and outside the government, Mosaddegh had Islamic clerics as supporters, too.

The clerics wanted foreign influence out of Iran for reasons of their own. Their support of Mosaddegh was a strategic alliance of convenience fostered by the dynamics of parliamentary politics—after all, as the saying goes, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

One of the influential clerics who supported Mosaddegh was the religious leader Ayatollah Abol‑Qasem (Abolghasem) Kashani. Kashani’s activist, anti‑imperialist politics helped shape a younger generation of clerics, including Ruhollah Mostafavi Musavi Khomeini. Khomeini would return decades later as both the symbol and the leader in exile of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. It was Ayatollah Khomeini who would lead the new Iranian state into a theocracy.

The end result was, as mentioned previously, that in August of 1953, Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was overthrown in a coup organized by the U.S. CIA and U.K. MI6 intelligence agencies, with the cooperation of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Majlis was weakened, and the Shah became autocratic.

The Shah’s despotic tendencies were tolerated because oil contracts with the foreign oil companies, now freed from the specter of Iranian nationalism, were rewritten to give the Iranian state about half of the oil profits. The Shah and his minions grew richer, but money also reached the upper and middle classes. Iran modernized. However, the rural population remained poor and began migrating to the cities in search of work they needed to survive.

A discontented urban underclass living under precarious conditions on the urban outskirts emerged, beside an increasingly affluent middle class. Many of the poor maintained strong ties to traditional Islamic religious networks even as parts of the educated middle class became more secular. The growing wealth inequality, combined with a poorly educated, poorly served, impoverished lower class with strong ties to conservative religious organizations, contributed to the tensions that eventually fed into the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But it wasn’t wealth inequality and social issues alone that sparked the population’s outrage toward revolution in Iran. There was also the problem of SAVAK.

SAVAK, the Shah, the Ayatollah, and the Revolution

In the annals of geopolitics in Iran, getting power and then keeping it has been dangerous work filled with sometimes deadly intrigues. Mohammad Reza Shah’s father, Reza Shah, the first shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, came to power in a 1921 coup that ultimately ended the previous Qajar dynasty. Subsequently, Reza Shah’s son came to power when the Anglo‑Soviet forces occupying Iran during World War II forced the elder Shah to abdicate the throne. Iran saw more violent political upheaval when Haj Ali Razmara, the Prime Minister who preceded Mosaddegh, was assassinated in 1951 by Khalil Tahmasebi, a member of the fundamentalist Fada’iyan‑e Islam.

Thus, given the very real probability of being overthrown and even killed at any time, it’s reasonable to think that the then-current Shah would do whatever was necessary to avoid the fate of others who failed to stay in power.

And he did. One of the things he did, with the help of the American CIA, was to create SAVAK. (It’s interesting to note that the American CIA operative who helped train the Iranian forces that would eventually become the core of SAVAK after the 1953 coup was Major General Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Sr.. His son, the American General, H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., became the head of coalition military forces opposing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.)

SAVAK, formally known as the State Intelligence and Security Organization, was a secret Iranian intelligence and security organization established in 1957 to directly serve the Pahlavi shah. SAVAK was operational until it was disbanded in the wake of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The purpose of SAVAK was to keep the Shah in power by stamping out opposition at home and abroad. The organization did this by spying on, detaining, and torturing suspected dissidents, foreign and domestic. In some cases, opponents were killed.

By 1960 and into the 1970s, the fear of SAVAK permeated Iranian society. The subjects of SAVAK’s terror were not confined to political leftists; they also included students, clerics, artists, and intellectuals. Iranians suspected of opposing the regime by thought or action could be taken away. As a result, a good portion of Iranian society began to unite in an unintended way, not out of an ideal of a democratic Iran with rights and benefits for all, but rather out of disdain for the Shah, his government, and SAVAK.

Eventually, the anger of repression overtook the fear of punishment. In 1979, the dam holding back the population’s discontent burst, spreading revolt into the streets of Tehran. The Shah was deposed by forces under the influence of the nationalistic, fundamentalist, Shi’a Islamic cleric Ayatollah Khomeini. The Shah fled the country, as did a significant number of Iran’s upper and middle class, who could escape to Europe and North America.

Khomeini returned to Iran from exile in France in 1979 to a hero’s welcome. During the uprising, the Iranian revolutionaries stormed the United States embassy in Tehran, taking 66 Americans hostage. The hostage-taking situation gave rise to the TV news show Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel. Americans were subjected to nightly broadcasts throughout the 444 days that the Americans were held in captivity. Each episode was given a title according to the day that the hostages remained captive, according to the format: The Iran Crisis—America Held Hostage: Day [X]. The crisis had turned into a television event.

52 of the hostages were released on January 20, 1981, the day that Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President of the United States. Reagan’s Vice President was George H. W. Bush, the former head of the CIA under the previous president, Gerald Ford. The taking of hostages by the Iranians created an animosity toward Iran by both politicians and average Americans that would continue for decades, long after the hostage situation left the daily headlines in the newspapers.

As mentioned previously, Khomeini had significant support from multiple social groups in Iran when he assumed power in 1979. Many, if not most, of the Iranians who remained in the country rallied behind Khomeini as an alternative to the Shah. Some supported the Ayatollah’s vision of clerical rule; many were ambivalent or simply ignorant about the reality of living in the theocracy that Khomeini was to establish. Within a year, Khomeini and his allies created an Islamic Republic under a new Constitution that made Islamic law the foundation of future legislation, while some of the pre-existing civil codes of the prior regime were retained.

In addition, Khomeini’s government built a dense network of Revolutionary Courts and revolutionary committees, along with a cadre of Islamic security forces such as the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which carried out widespread arrests, torture, and executions. The result was a culture of political repression at least comparable to, and in many accounts more pervasive than, the Shah’s SAVAK.

However, despite the despotic and fundamentalist Islamic currents that followed in the wake of the 1979 Revolution, life outside of politics did improve for most after the Shah’s overthrow and Khomeini’s return. According to the website Statista, in the 40 years after the Revolution, Iran’s GDP increased from $80.6 bln USD to $454 bln USD. Adult literacy went from 36.5% to 84.7%. Infant mortality dropped from 93.3 deaths per 1000 to 12.8. The share of the population living in poverty dropped from 46% to 10.5%, and life expectancy increased from 55.8 years to 76 years.

Clearly, progress was made over the decades. However, today, gender segregation is still the norm in Iran’s primary and secondary schools. Political activity and speech are tightly regulated, and posts, blogs, or even private messages that challenge state policies or religious norms can lead to arrest and prosecution. Public demonstrations must receive state authorization, and close surveillance of labor unions and political organizations persists. “Moral” behavior—particularly women’s dress—is subject to scrutiny and prosecution by law enforcement and morality‑policing entities. Consensual same-sex sexual activity is a criminal offense and punishable by death in certain circumstances.

Today, Iran is an autocratic, tightly controlled theocratic state, largely bereft of meaningful democratic competition and political freedom, but which has nonetheless expanded basic health and education services and improved basic living standards for many Iranians, even as broad‑based economic security and opportunity have eroded under foreign sanctions and domestic mismanagement in recent years.

In addition, the country has a sizable military that is disciplined and well-organized. Also, it has an educated professional class of doctors, lawyers, scientists, academics, and financiers. Its diplomats know how to engage in modern geopolitical diplomacy on the world stage and, if need be, conduct both covert and overt military action.

Iran is not a nation that descended from illiterate nomads who came into fast money because of the random good fortune of having a lot of oil available for others to extract. Rather, Iran is a mature state, albeit an authoritarian, theocratic state, that has evolved over a century to be and remain independent and sovereign.

The effect of unintended consequences

So, what’s my point?

My point is this: just as the CIA/MI6-backed Iranian coup in 1953 was akin to dropping a pebble in the pond of Middle East geopolitics that rippled and then cascaded into a series of unintended, consequences detrimental to the aims of the external aggressors, so too, today, there is a real risk that current US military action in Iran could yield similar unintended results.

Iran was not the only country in the world to nationalize key industries in the late 1940s and 1950s. The United Kingdom created a national health service in 1948 and brought its iron and steel industry into public ownership in 1951. France nationalized major banking and credit institutions in 1945, large insurance companies in 1946, and key telecom and aeronautics enterprises a few years later. Sweden followed suit by bringing the LKAB mining company under tighter state control in 1957.

There are two reasons that stand out as to why Iran’s nationalization drive was distinctive. The first is the unusually tight integration of the Anglo‑Iranian Oil Company—renamed from the Anglo-Persian Oil Company—into both the Iranian economy and the British state. The company was Britain’s largest overseas investment and a mainstay of the global oil industry. The second is that Iran became a key Cold War battleground where British and American intelligence services sought to defend Western control over oil while battling the specter of Soviet‑backed communism. Mosaddegh's nationalization efforts were an attempt to end foreign orchestration in Iran’s domestic affairs, both economic and political.

Mosaddegh was by no means an angel. During his tenure, he pushed to dissolve parliament through a highly controversial referendum and sought to reduce the Shah’s political role to that of a largely ceremonial head of state. For many Iranians, whose political expectations had been shaped by centuries of monarchic rule, sharply curtailing the Shah’s visible role as an active monarch was deeply unsettling, even within a constitutional framework.

Had covert American and British forces left Iran alone and allowed the nationalization efforts to run their course, one plausible outcome might have been that, under sustained pressure, the nationalized industries would eventually have come up wanting and their control might have passed back to private companies, as in fact it did under the 1954 consortium agreement. Furthermore, given the historic role of the Shah in Iranian society and the executive powers vested in the throne by the 1906 Constitution, it is also conceivable that parliamentary failure would have been followed by a renewed concentration of real executive authority in the Shah’s hands.

But the clandestine interests didn’t leave things alone.

Instead, U.S. and British covert forces intervened to help to entrench the Shah’s rule, giving him the backing that made his monarchy appear unassailable, for a time anyway. U.S and British actions set the stage for the harsh repression and misrule that fueled the 1979 revolution. In that sense, Western support for an increasingly unpopular monarch contributed to the conditions under which a clerical leadership was able to seize power twenty‑six years later, even if that outcome was never the interveners’ intention. The theocratic state that emerged in 1979 has now survived for nearly five decades, and it is unlikely to be overthrown quickly by air strikes alone, whatever timelines the current U.S. administration invokes in press conferences.

But bomb away our government does, creating conditions that could plausibly work in favor of the Iranian government if enough people respond to foreign attacks by rallying around the regime out of a sense of national resilience, a trait that has historic precedence.

At least the covert agencies of times past tried to perpetrate their missions out of public view. Today, the government wages military action overtly for the world to see, justifying it with shifting and unconvincingly stated objectives, while the current president of the United States packages each strike as something to brag about to a commercial, for‑profit press corps all too eager to consume whatever sound bites and video images emerge, provided they make for good TV.

Most probably, the violence will continue. Sadly, most of those who will bear the brunt of the destruction being inflicted upon them want nothing more out of life than a safe place to live, enough food to eat, a decent education, adequate health care, and a future that will be better for their children than it was for them. These are not things that can be bombed into being. As recent elective wars—in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond—have shown, military actions launched by choice have a poor record of delivering real, long‑term benefits to the civilians under fire. At best, every bomb dropped and every missile fired is but a pebble that ripples through a fragile geopolitical pond, setting off chains of events that are unintended and sometimes in conflict with the original aims.

Share

Author’s Note: This piece has been edited by artificial intelligence and human editors for accuracy, clarity, and grammar. Every effort has been made to ensure that the work is original and creative.

The cannon had a firing range of about 6 miles. A high-explosive shell fired from Big Bertha could create a hole 6 meters deep and 9 meters wide at its target. That area of destruction is equivalent to a hole about 6 parking spaces wide and 2 sub-basements deep in the car lot at your local Best Buy. Or, to put it another way, if, back in 1913, the gun had been placed in Weehawken, New Jersey, it could easily have destroyed the Woolworth Building skyscraper in lower Manhattan with a single shell.

Big Bertha was not intended to directly shell an urban area during World War I. Its primary use was to destroy fortress systems near urban areas such as those found in Antwerp, Belgium, and Maubeuge, France. But cities were not to be spared. Another gun was used to fire upon Paris. That gun was the Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz, nicknamed the Paris Gun. The Paris Gun was also manufactured by Krupp.

The Krupp company, formally known as Friedrich Krupp AG, began in 1811 as a cast-steel manufacturer, producing, among other things, spoons. By the early 20th Century it was selling or licensing armaments to over fifty countries, including Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Great Britain. Krupp had royalty and patent agreements with the British armaments firm Vickers, which meant that, although Krupp was not selling its manufactured weapons directly to all the belligerents during World War I, its designs were used for weapons on both sides, as nations pounded the battlefields and cities of Europe into oblivion.

During World War I, nine to eleven million soldiers died from combat, wounds, or disease, as did six to thirteen million civilians who were also subjected to disease and famine. Europe lost 10-15% of its male population of prime military age. During the war, birth rates in Europe dropped by about 50%. In many Western European countries, stable, high fertility rates comparable to that of the pre‑1914 European population did not return until the baby‑boom era.

Today, Krupp, the manufacturer of Big Bertha and the Paris Gun, still exists as part of the conglomerate Thyssenkrupp AG. The company makes, among other things, household stair lift chairs.

In the book, The Arms of Krupp, author William Manchester describes Krupp’s sales technique as one of continuously innovating its weapons systems to have its customers “leapfrog” one another in acquiring the company’s latest and greatest weapon, in order to obtain military superiority. Krupp would make a weapon — for example, the 30.5 cm schwere Küstenmörser L/8 / Beta‑Gerät, manufactured in 1890 — and sell it to Russia. Later, it would make another weapon superior to the predecessor and sell it to an opposing country, marketing it as a countermeasure to the older legacy model. Thus, the company ensured continuous sales by creating a dynamic of countervailing obsolescence. In short, the company perpetuated an arms race to its own benefit.

Which brings us to today.

Krupp, the weapons manufacturer, is gone, but other armament companies have taken its place.

For example, some of the aircraft used in the current military action in Iran are manufactured by Northrop Grumman Corporation. The company also sells F‑5 Tiger jets to Saudi Arabia, F‑16 Block 60 to the United Arab Emirates, and is a contributing contractor for the Fixed Site–Low, Slow, Small Unmanned Aircraft System Integrated Defeat System (FS‑LIDS), which is sold to Qatar. The UK Ministry of Defence, the Australian Defence Force, and Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense also buy weapons from Northrop Grumman Corporation. In addition, Iran’s Air Force has Northrop Grumman (née Northrop) aircraft too, in the form of an aging fleet of F‑5A/B and F‑5E/F jet fighters.

While Northrop Grumman is subject to constraints on which countries it can sell to — for example, limits defined by the Arms Export Control Act — those countries need not be pro-democracy. The United Kingdom and Australia are parliamentary democracies. Taiwan is a semi‑presidential democracy. However, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE are monarchies in which the population has no meaningful national‑level democratic rights and at most very limited, tightly controlled opportunities for electoral participation.

Nonetheless, there is one common factor among all six countries discussed, democracies and monarchies alike: they all purchase weapons systems from Northrop Grumman in US Dollars. Thus, there is a reasonable argument to be made that military action in Iran is not completely about national safety or spreading democracy and civic freedom among the population, as the current executive branch of the government maintains; there’s also the benefit of private commercial profit and maintaining the dominance of the US Dollar as the global currency of choice.

So what’s the point?

Just as Krupp directly and indirectly provided the hardware to all sides of the conflict that made the death and destruction of World War I possible, so too does a surprising array of modern-day high-market-cap corporations supply the weapons used in the current military action in Iran. No matter the geopolitical outcome, these companies will make money as others suffer.

There’s been some change. Today’s armaments game has new players, and the world economic order is different from that during World War I. The US Dollar has been and remains the world’s reserve currency; Israel has emerged as a quasi-independent military force supplied by an armament industry that’s a combination of private Israeli defense contractors and state-owned firms not completely dependent on support and direction from the US. But details aside, in the Big Picture of modern industrial history, there’s not much new here in the armaments game. It has been this way since before the time Krupp rolled out Big Bertha. The players are still a relatively small group of what used to be predominantly men, but which now has a growing number of women, whose purpose is to make and sell weapons that make war possible. And those at the top make a lot of money. For example, Kathy J. Warden, the current CEO, Chairperson, and President of Northrop Grumman, has a compensation package valued at $24-$25 million, of which the total cash compensation is $6.9 million. The rest is awarded in stock.

On the other side of the transaction is yet another group, mostly made up of men with still a growing number of women, jockeying the halls of governmental power, who want to buy those weapons in order to forcefully achieve some sort of geopolitical dominance for their state or themselves, or to deter other states and non-state actors from encroaching on their spheres of interest.

When nations load up on weapons, history has demonstrated that, at some point, there’s a good chance that those weapons will be used. And then, many times, the reasoning that started the destruction gets lost in the bloodlust and “patriotic” newscasts that ensue. All that’s left is a pile of rubble, famine, disease, too many graves, and a declining birthrate.

Strange to say, but in the wake of such devastation, there are corporate profits to be made rebuilding from the rubble and feeding those who are starving. Also, there’s a good chance that resentment and hate will become a foundational feature of the population that’s left behind and emerges from that destruction as the birthrate recovers. Such is the profit and loss statement of war.

The saddest part is that, given all we know and all we’ve experienced, you’d think we’d have figured out a better way of conducting world affairs, superior to spending vast amounts of the world’s wealth blowing each other to smithereens. But, as history has shown, when it comes to choosing between investing in the tools of war or the tools of peace, as destructive and devastating as it is, war wins out just about every time. The profit margins are just too good to ignore.

Share

Author’s Note: This piece has been edited by artificial intelligence and human editors for accuracy, clarity, and grammar. Every effort has been made to ensure that the work is original and creative.

Enslaved people endured punishment that was even more extreme. Under state slave codes, slaveholders enjoyed nearly complete control over those they held in bondage and could whip, brand, or maim them with little realistic fear of legal consequences. Some statutes limited “cruel treatment” or killing, but prosecutions were rare, and the law largely treated enslaved people as property without rights or legal recourse.

Over time, statutes and constitutional amendments pushed formal law in a more humane direction. Congress abolished flogging in the Navy with the Naval Appropriation Act of September 28, 1850, due in part to the revelations reported by the author, Herman Melville, in his book, White Jacket. The Army followed suit later on under the Act of August 5, 1861; the Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 ended slavery and promised citizenship and civil rights to people born in the United States, though Native Americans were notably excluded. In the twentieth century, the Supreme Court began to describe the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment in terms of “evolving standards of decency,” emphasizing that what counts as cruel depends on the moral progress of a “maturing society.”

The United States now condemns torture, mutilation, and other wanton abuses of suspected offenders and prisoners as unconstitutional. Yet practice has not always matched the ideal: beating and fire hosing demonstrators during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, excessive brutal force administered by officers against Black communities in Los Angeles under Police Chief Darryl Gates during the 90s, abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, and episodes in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents used lethal and arguably excessive force against U.S. citizens, such as Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and Marimar Martinez — these examples illustrate how quickly public institutions and government agencies can revert to cruelty under the cover of security or enforcement.

There has never been a timeless, shared standard for what counts as cruel punishment; instead, the line shifts over time. Today’s cruelty is often yesterday’s acceptable practice. The question, then, is not whether human beings are capable of cruelty—we apparently are—but whether we can build systems that make cruel behavior in law enforcement rarer, riskier, and less acceptable.

The answer is, we can.

Allow me to elaborate.

Cruelty vs reasonable force

Cruelty in law enforcement is not just any use of force, nor even every instance of excessive force. Rather, it’s deliberately inflicting serious physical or psychological pain on a person in the state’s custody or control, with the intent to humiliate, brutalize, or torture the suspected offender.

This definition matters because, for better or worse, policing requires the use of force. Officers must occasionally tackle a fleeing suspect, restrain a combative person, or display weapons to protect others in life and death situations. Policing is dangerous work that can justify the use of force in certain situations. But there’s a difference between justifiable force and cruelty. Cruelty begins when force is used to punish rather than prevent, to humiliate rather than secure compliance, or to vent frustration rather than protect the public.

In theory, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and its interpreting case law impose exactly this limit by allowing only “objectively reasonable” force in light of the circumstances. In practice, however, the boundary between reasonable force and gratuitous violence can be thin, especially when officers operate under stress, in environments that foster aggression, or within a culture that implicitly celebrates rough treatment.

When cruelty becomes habit

Cruelty in law enforcement is as often the result of cultural habits and norms as it is about statutory failures. Most people can recall small acts of everyday cruelty—shoving past someone in a crowd, cutting off another driver in anger, or firing off a spiteful, vindictive email instead of having a difficult conversation. Each act, taken alone, may be trivial, but over time, they can harden into patterns that feel automatic and unremarkable.

Law enforcement is especially vulnerable to such habitual patterns. Officers are human; they absorb cues from academy training, peers, supervisors, and the broader society. If the informal culture of a department or agency values toughness, frames suspects as less than fully human, or treats procedural rules as obstacles rather than safeguards, then cruelty can become a default response in tense encounters—even if current policies forbid it.

Popular culture also shapes expectations. Films and television shows often present retributive violence as cathartic and heroic; iconic revenge movies such as Taken or Death Wish glorify the lone avenger who inflicts pain on “bad guys” with little regard for legality or proportional response. These films do not automatically cause cruelty, but they help create an emotional landscape in which extremely violent retaliation feels satisfying, even admirable. Popular violent video games require players to kill many people in order to progress, and award more points for committing more violent executions. Culture, in this sense, is like a stew: as more ingredients that celebrate dominance and humiliation are added, the more that flavor spreads through the whole.

Legislation alone will not solve the problem when cruelty in policing is partly a matter of habit and culture. Laws can prohibit certain acts and punish violations, but they cannot solely reshape the instincts that guide split‑second decisions. The challenge is to change both the rules and the habits that govern how law enforcement operates. It’s a difficult undertaking. Fortunately, there is historical precedent: the campaign to reduce cigarette smoking in the United States. It offers a useful, if imperfect, analogy.

A model for change

In 1965, about 52% of adult men and 34% of adult women smoked; by 2023, those figures had fallen to roughly 12.8% for men and 9.3% for women, with overall adult smoking at about 11%. This dramatic decline did not happen quickly, and it did not rely on criminalizing smokers.

Instead, a wide array of actors—federal agencies, state and local governments, medical organizations, and advocacy groups—pursued a coordinated, multi‑decade strategy. The Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking and Health, published in 1964, educated the public about the link between smoking and disease; Congress required warning labels on cigarette packages and later banned cigarette advertising on television and radio; regulators classified secondhand smoke as a known human carcinogen; states raised cigarette taxes and restricted smoking in workplaces and public spaces; airlines eliminated in‑flight smoking. Smoking gradually became more expensive, less convenient, and less socially acceptable.

Crucially, the goal was reduction, not eradication. Policymakers recognized that many people would continue to smoke and that an outright ban was politically and practically unrealistic. By focusing on long‑term, measurable reductions and by aligning legal rules, economic incentives, and cultural messaging, they changed behavior across a generation.

Cruelty in law enforcement is not identical to cigarette use: one is interpersonal and institutional, the other, smoking, is a largely self‑regarding health behavior. Still, the anti‑smoking campaign illustrates how sustained, multi‑layered efforts can shift entrenched practices without expecting an overnight moral transformation.

Taking concrete action

If we treat cruelty in law enforcement as a public safety and public health problem, rather than solely as an unfortunate side-effect of flawed behavior by a minority of “bad cops”, we can imagine long‑term strategies, similar to the successful smoking reduction campaigns of times past.

First, leaders in government, law enforcement, business, and civil society must acknowledge that gratuitous cruelty by law enforcement harms individuals, corrodes trust, and imposes social and economic costs. Public declarations are not enough, but they matter: they signal that reducing cruelty is a shared priority, not a fringe concern.

Second, institutions should adopt visible commitments to non‑cruel policing. One symbolic step might be for departments to require officers to display badges or uniform labels indicating that they are trained and have pledged to avoid unnecessary harm, analogous to how “smoke‑free” signs communicate expectations in public spaces—for example, a large patch with the text Reasonable Force Certified sewn onto the front of a law enforcement officer’s uniform.

However, caution is needed. Such a label would be hollow unless the patch represented real certification training and actual accountability. Nonetheless, there is a positive impact on both officers and civilians when officers clearly advertise, via the patch, that they use only reasonable force. After all, there is validity to the adage: Say the words often enough, and the behavior will follow.

Third, policy should make cruel behavior harder to commit and harder to conceal. Mandatory body cameras, clear rules limiting the use of masks or face coverings in routine operations, and strict consequences for disabling or tampering with recording equipment, all increase the likelihood that excessive or degrading treatment will be documented and punished. These measures resemble smoking restrictions, not in criminalizing the underlying act, but in raising its practical and reputational costs.

Fourth, departments can rethink how they organize the use of force. Some countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Iceland, and New Zealand, separate officers who are trained and authorized to use firearms from those who are not, deploying armed units only in situations where lethal force may genuinely be needed. A similar division could reduce the routine presence of lethal weapons in low‑risk encounters, narrowing the opportunities for escalations that cross the line into cruelty.

Fifth, recruitment, training, and promotion must reward restraint as much as assertiveness. Screening processes should identify candidates with strong emotional regulation and a low tolerance for unnecessary suffering; training should emphasize de‑escalation, dignity, and the psychological impact of humiliation; evaluations and promotions should reflect not just arrests or “toughness,” but also adherence to non‑cruel practices.

Cruelty and the cultural landscape

As alluded to above, many aspects of law enforcement officers’ behavior reflect the society in which they operate. Just changing the rules and attitudes of an officer’s engagement with civilian populations will falter if the broader culture continues to glamorize cruelty.

Portrayals of cruelty and extreme violence are endemic in American culture today. In many forms of commercial entertainment, scenes of humiliation and suffering draw attention and profit, encouraging producers to push boundaries. Viewers who repeatedly see cruelty rewarded or unpunished may become more desensitized to the suffering and harsh treatment of others. Some will mimic what they see on screen in pursuit of self-gratification.

One way to address this problem is to require films and television programs that feature overt cruelty to display prominent warnings, similar in visibility to the health warnings on cigarette packages. Such notices could alert viewers that the content depicts dehumanizing treatment, invite reflection on its effects, and help parents guide children’s exposure.

Whether this would measurably reduce cruelty in the long term is uncertain, but the anti‑smoking experience suggests that consistent, clear warnings can contribute to shifting attitudes.

Any attempt to regulate media in this way would face serious objections about free expression, artistic integrity, and governmental overreach. Businesses would need to place greater weight on public safety than on short‑term profits, and legislators would have to resist pressure from well‑organized industry groups. None of this would be easy, but past public health campaigns show that economic power is not always decisive when the political will for reform is strong.

All good things take time

Tobacco companies had enormous influence in Congress and state legislatures in the 1960s, yet the policies they sponsored eventually gave way to warning labels, advertising bans, and higher taxes, as public understanding of smoking’s harms deepened. A similar shift could occur in law enforcement’s use of force if a substantial number of officials at the local, state, and federal levels—and the public they serve—treat the issue as a long-term priority that will take decades rather than years to bear fruit.

Meaningful change will take time. In order to reduce cruelty in policing, policymakers and communities must set clear, measurable goals, develop detailed multi-year plans, and then apply consistent pressure to implement and refine those plans over time. The work is incremental and could be discouraging in the short term, but given that the alternative is to accept cruelty in law enforcement as the acceptable price of order, it’s work well worth doing despite its challenges.

Reducing cruelty in law enforcement will not eliminate our capacity for cruelty, but it can make a civil society more civil. Taking action is the least we can do in memory of those who have suffered, unjustly and without cause. We’ll all be the better for it, civilians and law enforcement officials alike.

Share

Author’s Note: This piece has been edited by artificial intelligence and human editors for accuracy, clarity, and grammar. Every effort has been made to ensure that the work is original and creative.

Fortunately, a few weeks ago, when I was in the throes of anger and despair, a friend of mine shared a way to ease my distress. She sent me a link to the Southern California Vipassana Center website. This link was the start of a transformative experience that is changing my life.

The purpose of this post is to share some details of that experience. I’ll begin by describing the background of the person who brought the Vipassana meditation technique to the United States. Then I’ll share some aspects of my introduction to the technique. Finally, I’ll report the impact that the experience has had on my attitude and behavior moving forward.

Let’s start with S. N. Goenka.

Part 1: The background

In 1955, S. N. Goenka, a successful Burma-based Indian industrialist and businessman, had a history of experiencing severe, debilitating migraines that did not respond to medical treatment. Unable to find relief, he turned to Sayagyi U Ba Khin, a lay meditation master and senior government official, from whom he learned the technique of Vipassana meditation. Goenka’s introduction to the technique came through a ten-day intensive course. Over time, through sustained practice, Goenka’s migraines subsided, and he continued to study and practice under U Ba Khin’s guidance for fourteen years.

In 1969, after this period of deep, detailed training, U Ba Khin formally authorized Goenka to teach Vipassana and to carry the technique to India. From there, the teaching gradually spread around the world, reaching the United States in 1982 with the opening of a Vipassana Meditation Center in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts.

Part 2: The experience

As I mentioned at the start of this article, 2025 was a very difficult year for me. The political climate was overwhelming. I was filled with fear, rage, and an ongoing sense of powerlessness. I knew I had to make a change in order to keep my sanity, to survive, to be socially and politically effective.

I came to understand that the only reliable change I could make immediately was within myself. So, I took the 10-day meditation course offered by the Southern California Vipassana Center. There were ~90 students in the course, of whom I was one.

The Center is located in 29 Palms, California, in the high desert near Joshua Tree National Park.

Upon arrival, I registered in the facility’s dining hall and was assigned a private room. My room had a bed with a mattress and a pillow. The room’s bathroom had a toilet, sink and a shower. There was a small nightstand with a digital clock and a lamp. In addition, there was a small chest of drawers with two drawers to store my clothing. The condition of the room was pristine.

I brought my own bottom sheet and pillowcase, along with a blanket and a crocheted throw. I also brought a toothbrush, floss, shampoo, soap, razor, and some shaving gel. I discovered, as time passed, that the blankets I’d brought weren’t enough to keep me warm at night. Fortunately, the Center provided me with an additional blanket, and, having forgotten to bring toothpaste, the Center also provided a travel-size tube.

At the start, I had to turn in my cell phone, so I did. Outside reading material was prohibited.

Then, for 9 days, I followed Noble Silence: No talking to other students, no eye contact, no gestures acknowledging others. I could talk to only two people: the teacher, and the facility’s manager. Conversations with the teacher were one-on-one and conducted only at appointed times. For most of my time there, it was just me and my mind, a mind that was sadly tied up in too many knots.

My day began at 4 AM, and I spent the next hours learning and practicing the Vipassana meditation technique. There were two types of meditation: group sessions in the common meditation hall, and private sessions in the hall or in the quiet of my own room.I also had time to rest and take walks along a predefined path on the Center’s grounds in California’s high desert.

There was a ~90-minute discourse each evening, during which a video of a lecture given by Goenka was screened. Goenka died in 2013, so the videos are his legacy of teaching.

I went to bed at 9 PM.

There were two vegetarian meals a day, one at 6:30 AM and the other at 11 AM. I ate the meals in silence, seated at an assigned spot in the common men’s dining hall. (Men and women were physically isolated from one another in the dining hall. They were also separated in the meditation hall, men seated on the left side of the hall, women on the right; all attendees were visible to one another, but the lighting was dim.)

On the 10th day, talking resumed, and the meditation schedule continued. There was a one-hour meditation on the 11th day, with the rest of the morning devoted to cleaning my room and volunteering to help clean the facility in preparation for the attendees of the next upcoming course.

I returned to Los Angeles on Sunday, January 25, 2026.

There is more to tell about my experience and transformation over each of the ten days, and I’ll happily do so in other posts, but for now, I’ll leave it at this.

Part 3: The benefit

The experience was rigorous and transformative. It was results-oriented. I got what I wanted: moments of peace within, and a perspective on how to move forward in the trying times before us. It’s all about understanding my miseries, the miseries of others and having compassion for all, myself included.

A basic principle in Vipassana is that our lives are pervaded by various forms of suffering and dissatisfaction, which arise from mental reactions to events, real and imagined. These reactions manifest as anger, despair, discouragement, and harmful behavior. The practice aims to observe reality as it is and dissolve the roots of reactions in the mind.

One important thing I learned is that the 10-day course isn’t a one-off. The takeaway suggestion is that in order to continue reaping benefits, one will do well to meditate for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. The practice also recommends attending a weekly group meditation if one is available in your area, or joining a session online.

So far, I have been meditating as recommended in the morning and evening. As Goenka said in the video shown on the first night, I am still in Vipassana Kindergarten, so I have no current ambition other than to get better at the practice according to the instructions provided.

At this point, I need to mention something about myself. I am suspicious of those who seem charismatic. Also, I am an atheist. The notion of a distinct, anthropomorphic deity makes no sense to me and hasn’t for a while. I am sharing this because, when it comes to the Vispassana technique, my religious affiliations or rejections do not matter. Neither does the person of S. N. Goenka. He is a source of learning, not of veneration. What matters is my desire to see reality for what it is, not what I want it to be, and to gain the peace and effectiveness in my life that follow from that clarity.

Postscript: Dāna

Dāna is a principle of Vipassana practice — the principle of generosity and giving freely without expecting anything in return. For this reason, the Center does not charge any fee for students to attend; instead, donations are accepted only after a student has completed the course. Students may also offer their service to help run courses and centers, a form of generosity that is held in very high esteem.

In my case, I have and do plan to contribute money every month so the next person can attend. And, in terms of my immediate contribution after the course was over, I volunteered to clean the industrial-strength Blodgett ovens in the communal kitchen. The experience was both rewarding and meaningful.

Of all the lessons I learned in the 10 days, one of the most meaningful was revealed by the phrase Bhavatu sabba maṅgalaṃ, loosely translated from Pali as “may all beings be happy.”

If I can stop spreading misery, become more compassionate, improve my political effectiveness, and garner a modicum of happiness, those 10 days spent in the high desert of California will have been time well spent. My hope is to stay true to the practice moving forward and to do no harm.

Share

Please subscribe. It’s free, as in something that is given freely expecting nothing in return.

In the allegory, prisoners are chained in an underground cave, so that they can face only one wall. Behind them, higher up and farther back in the cave, burns a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners runs a raised path with a low wall, like a puppeteer’s screen. Along this path, people pass, carrying various objects and images that rise above the wall. The prisoners see only the shadows of these things cast on the cave wall before them, never the people or objects themselves. From these shadows alone, the prisoners form their beliefs about what is real and about how those things move.

But then the story twists. One prisoner escapes his chains and goes behind the wall, up into the sunlight, to see things as they are. It’s like seeing that a shadow that appears as a rabbit is actually a pair of human hands mimicking the animal’s form. At first, the prisoner is confused by this new reality and tries to reject it, but eventually, as he becomes accustomed to the sunlight, he accepts what he sees as real. Furthermore, he does not simply bask in the light; he bears a burden to return, to face hostility and disbelief, and to help others leave the shadows behind.

The shadows in the cave allegory raises essential epistemological questions: how do we know what we know, how do we move from opinion to knowledge, and when—if ever—do we actually make that move and encourage others to do so, too?

For the most part, viewing the world as shadows in Plato’s cave is a benign way to go through life. Answering epistemological questions about the nature of knowledge is probably best left to philosophers, who are educated to handle the task. Most of us can get by on our opinions and the opinions of others, until reality rears its head and demands our attention — as the events in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 7, 2026, have done.

Allow me to elaborate.

Streaming from reality

I watch a lot of streamed content on my very big TV set. It’s the centerpiece of my private home theater, a theater that 50 years ago would have been found only in the homes of the rich. Today, nearly everyone has one. Ours is a world in which there is more content, on bigger, cheaper screens, with more eyeballs glued to them than ever.

These days, I’ve been binge-watching all 7 seasons of the political drama, The West Wing. There are about 140 42-minute episodes in the series. That’s a lot of TV.

I know the show is a fantasy. The show’s President of the United States is a skilled politician who is intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, and flawed. I like the show because it portrays politics and a political regime that could plausibly exist, confronting the rough-and-tumble, life-and-death challenges faced by governments in the modern world. The characters in The West Wing are men and women who want to do the good, right thing despite their limitations—limitations inherent in most human beings.

I prefer to watch the show rather than view the latest news broadcasts, because the news scares me. It’s as if the militaristic, good-guys/bad-guys world I read about in history books is unfolding before my very eyes. On the other hand, episodes of The West Wing comfort me. The show soothes my fears and anxieties about our modern, might-makes-right world.

In a way, I am like Plato’s prisoner in a cave. Only, in my case, the confinement is self-imposed. I am choosing to chain myself to the comfort of my electric recliner in my home theater and lie back while images of an imagined reality dance about before me on my TV set.

For a few hours a day, I live in a political world that suits me, albeit one based on a contorted version of reality. But now things have changed, and my world of illusion has given way to the reality of the events that transpired on a cold winter street in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The risk of retreating from a revolting reality

These days, there are a lot of stories being told, in more ways, in more places. As AI technology evolves, it’s becoming harder to distinguish in those stories what is real from what is not. After all, if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, and if it sounds like a duck, … well, you get the message. The problem isn’t so much that it’s getting harder to distinguish reality from images of reality; it’s that those images might be preferable to the reality they displace.

On January 7, 2026, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 37-year-old woman was shot three times by an agent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The woman was seated in the driver’s side front seat of a moving vehicle. Some stories say the agent fired in self‑defense to avoid being run over by her vehicle. Other stories say she was trying to move her vehicle away as instructed and was shot without reason.

These versions are but the shadows cast by mass media upon the wall of a cultural cave in which we are chained. However, when we take the chains off and move into the sunlight, to view the many nearly identical videos of the event, we see a law enforcement agent firing 3 shots into the front driver’s side window of a slowly moving vehicle. The visual evidence makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that the driver was the target of those shots.

My reaction to the video is one of horror. In fact, the horror is so intense that a very large part of me feels that if this is what reality is about, I want no part of it. I’d rather chain myself back into my electric recliner and watch episodes of The West Wing.

And therein lies the danger.

Today, we live in a world of infinite content and ubiquitous artificial intelligence technology that can contort reality into images that entertain us endlessly. These images have the potential to become more appealing than reality itself. The danger is that should reality become unbearable beyond the pale, we’ll revert to living in our chosen world of stories and shadowlike images, a place where everything is to our liking. It’s like a heroin addict who kicks the habit but, having to cope with the world as it really is, decides to go back to shooting up because life without drugs is more painful than life with them.

Fortunately, for as much as I want to retreat, I won’t get back to the recliner. I owe it to those I care about to live outside the cave, to live in the sunlight of reality, as painful as it might be.

We are past hyperbole. As events in Minneapolis reveal, the situation has become deadly. The imperative for me moving forward is to be keenly aware of those things and events that are real, and those that are merely shadows cast by profit-seeking media businesses, intent more on garnering viewer attention than on reporting the verifiable facts on which knowledge and, subsequently, effective political action can be based. Just as importantly, I need to not retreat into an all-too-easily accessible fantasy world but instead to stay in reality and take action.

This starts by publicly saying that while giving government agents a license to kill might be an acceptable entertainment in the fantasy of a James Bond movie, when it comes to living in the real world, government agents killing the governed just because they can is not OK. The rule of law counts in a civilized society, and accountable law enforcement matters for everyone, without exception, particularly when the use of deadly force is involved.

Given the life and death circumstances surrounding the events unfolding in Minneapolis, staying silent won’t work. Believing that these events are isolated incidents of political drama and that things will improve on their own is a comforting wish. Reality reveals otherwise. Now is the time to voice opposition and act accordingly in a non-violent manner, while such liberties are still possible. This is what I plan to do until the situation in the United States changes for the better. I hope that others do as well. Living in a world of comforting delusions, mistaking shadows cast on the cave’s wall for today’s reality will only lead to further tragedy.

Share

Subscribe now

Subsection § 76q defines the memorial status but does not grant any person the direct authority to alter that status or the Center’s name; there is no renaming power embedded in § 76q itself. Any change to the official statutory name or memorial designation would have to come from a new act of Congress amending Title 20. The same goes for places such as the Lincoln Memorial and Jefferson Memorial. Although a separate set of laws governs the naming of those various monuments, a name change still requires an act of Congress.

While an act of Congress is required to formally change a monument’s official name, informal unofficial names are often used to refer to it, even by the monument’s custodial agency. For example, it is permissible for the National Park Service to lawfully use “Pearl Harbor Memorial” or “Pearl Harbor National Memorial” in brochures and other interpretive materials, even though one of the constituent structures’ statutory name is the narrower and more unwieldy “United States Ship Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor.”

Still, opinions differ regarding the limits of informality. Can renaming the signage on a building or monument even be considered an informal gesture, like conferring a nickname? And then, can it be done directly without a Congressional vote? Maybe. Has it been done? Yes, as is the case with the current President of the United States adding an informal name to the signage on the building housing The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. This act, along with others such as revising the signage on the United States Institute of Peace to bear his name, is the first time a sitting President of the United States has applied his brand name to public buildings subject to statutory naming.

To his supporters, the move is probably A-OK. To his detractors, the act feels like extralegal vandalism. I fall into the latter group. For me, changing a public building’s signage to support a living President, particularly this President, is akin to the graffiti tagging that gang members do with a can of spray paint to mark their territory. It’s more than advertising. It’s a declaration of ownership analogous to the way ranchers brand their cattle. It’s also about authority and control.

The President as an authority figure

Many, if not most, people obey the law less out of fear of punishment than out of a sense of duty to rules they have internalized throughout their lives — social and legal conventions taught by such authority figures as mom, dad, grandparents, teachers, clergy, etc. With the proliferation of mass media, people in the public eye have also become authority figures as well as cultural role models. As their behavior changes, so does ours.

When I was a child, I was occasionally punished for using profanity in front of my parents. My usual defense was, “But they said it on TV.” Sometimes it worked. Even my parents, back then, showed a certain deference to the language used on television. Today, when it comes to profanity, the sky’s the limit. As public discourse has grown more profanity-laden, so too has everyday speech, because these are our authority figures now. As they do, so do we, the viewing audience.

If Dad can do it, so can I.

This notion of public authority figures setting a standard for what is permissible and what is not, brings us to the behavior of the President of the United States, who is and has been probably one of the most influential authority figures in mass media, whose reach extends well beyond that of today’s YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok influencers. For many, he is our Cultural Dad.

FDR and Eisenhower were Cultural Dads of the Greatest Generation, as Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan were for the Baby Boomers. (Carter could have been, but some of the failures of his tenure pushed him into the recesses of authority figures until his post-presidential years. Nixon was Dad for a while, until his antics during Watergate put him in the category of Fallen Dad, the guy down the street — a community banker, for example, who turned out to be an embezzler, whose family had to move out of town to avoid the consequences of his everlasting shame.)

For those that come after the Baby Boomers, it’s the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama. For the most part, Presidents of the past are Dad personalities who could have come right out of Central Casting, although Clinton’s version of Dad would have been more like the father of shifty Eddie Haskell than the sage-like Ward Cleaver, as seen on the TV show Leave It to Beaver. Were I to have uttered a profanity in front of my parents, the defense that “the President said it” would not have prevented my mouth from getting washed out with soap, because there would be few instances, if any, when the public heard (or even learned of) the President using profanity. But now, any kid can proffer not only “but the President said it” but also “the President did it” as a viable defense.

In short, we live in a time when one of the media’s predominant authority figures, the President of the United States, is emblematic of the notion that norms and democratic law don’t matter. All that matters is what you can get away with. So, if these things that used to be foundational to the Presidency don’t matter, what does?

The answer is: might.

When might makes right

A society living cooperatively under the conventions defined by impersonal legal statutes is a relatively recent behavior in human history. For the most part, unless there was a strong sense of social cohesion, people obeyed the law when it could be enforced, but could and did pursue their own will when unconstrained. Other than in places where government agents were nearby, making law enforcement possible, survival depended on one’s ability to be as mighty, or belong to a group as mighty, as those intent on threatening one’s survival. It wasn’t so much a dog-eat-dog world as it was “I’m gonna do what I want. Try to stop me.”

That was then; now, we’ve ceded law enforcement to the government, and given the government a monopoly on using violence in such enforcement when necessary. When it comes to “try to stop me,” we rely upon the government to do just that, which is all well and good until it doesn’t do that at all, thus abrogating its responsibilities and violating the social contract.

While the current President did not violate the letter of the law regarding the naming of federal buildings, national memorials, and monuments, he ignored the spirit of the law, and he got away with it because, to date, the mechanisms of government have not tried to stop him. The ramifications are significant. It’s as if we have a Cultural Dad who can do whatever he wants—beat and berate the kids, sell their baseball card collection for his personal gain, grope their boyfriends and girlfriends—it doesn’t matter. For the current President, the operational guidelines are, “I’m Dad, and I can do whatever I want. Try and stop me.”

At a personal level, with regard to The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, it feels as if a gang member tagged the walls of our local public library to declare, “This is no longer yours. It’s mine.” Until someone, a person, group, or organization scrubs away that graffiti—legally, institutionally, and culturally—they are right. The message is not subtle: if the President of the United States can treat a national memorial created by Congress as his personal branding opportunity and nobody stops him, why can’t anyone with enough power treat any shared institution the same way? Should this be the case, it doesn’t bode well, because when the law proves powerless, all that’s left is might.

And, as history demonstrates, when might is all that matters, right becomes irrelevant.

Share

Subscribe now

An education at CUNY was among the highest in higher education. It produced 14 Nobel Prize winners, as well as the likes of General Colin Powell, former Secretary of State, mayors Abraham D. Beame and Edward I. Koch, and authors Upton Sinclair and Mario Puzo, among others. Anybody, from anywhere in New York City, could get a quality college education for the cost of books, school supplies, and a subway ride.

Then, in 1976, it all changed due to the New York City financial crisis. Yearly tuition went from $0 to $925. This was at a time when the minimum wage in NYC was $2.30 an hour, the cost of a subway ride was 50¢, and a pack of Camel cigarettes was 35¢. The increase had an impact, but with the help of financial aid programs, such as the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP), children of cab drivers, hotel maids, and short-order cooks who earned near-minimum-wage income could still attend a CUNY college full-time. Nonetheless, after charging tuition, enrollment declined, particularly among Black and Latino freshmen.

Today, the tuition and fees for NYC residents to attend CUNY are ~$7500. But that’s not all that’s changed. Gone are the days of Open Admissions for those attending senior colleges in the system, such as Hunter, Queens, and Brooklyn colleges. Admission is now based on an applicant’s high school GPA and the courses taken. The current acceptance rate to CUNY senior colleges is 58%. Fortunately, Open Admissions is still in force at the community college level.

For those concerned with post-secondary educational policy, this tale is an interesting piece of collegiate history, but the general public might ask, How does any of this matter in the scheme of things?

I was going to connect the dots by writing that CUNY’s free tuition and Open Admission policies were emblematic of the transformative experience that, as Ruby Payne writes about in her book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, enables teenagers and young adults from poor families to gain the intellectual wherewithal and social capital needed to transcend poverty and move into the middle class. Then I was going to note that doing away with these policies makes it a whole lot harder for those from lesser backgrounds to move up in the world. Also, I was going to pepper the writing with personal anecdotes about the critical role my college education played in enabling the social mobility I enjoyed from the lower to the middle class, and that, without a college education, I would have been another kid on the street trying to figure out a way to make a buck and survive.

The long and the short of it is that a university system accessible to all, like CUNY, allows those coming from a meager background, such as Colin Powell and former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns, to thrive and we’re all the better for it.

That was the intention. But then I received an article in my inbox from Rachel Bitecofer titled “The Whole World is Getting Dumber.” You can read it here. The piece threw a wrench into the works because the college experience I imagined is not the way it is. I imagined college to be intellectually challenging as well as socially and economically transformative, particularly for those coming from a lower-class background. Bitecofer’s view is different. Her take is that attending college doesn't make students smarter, wiser, or richer; rather, they’re becoming dumber, not only in the United States but everywhere — not because colleges are teaching less well, but because students are ill-equipped to meet the rigors of academic pursuit.

To quote Bitecofer:

“Everyone is slipping.

And the timing lines up perfectly with the most consequential technological shift of our lifetime:

the smartphone + social media + high-speed mobile internet.

That’s the trilogy that broke attention spans, rewired cognition, and kneecapped learning.”

She should know. She has held teaching positions at several colleges. She even provides a graph from a report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

For all the good intentions and thought I had planned for this article, I made a critical mistake. I assumed that my college experience then was not that different from a student’s college experience now. I was dead wrong. It’s like nothing I could have imagined.

A friend, a tenured college professor, reports to me that in his experience, these days, students don’t talk to each other before his classes start. Rather, they gaze into their cell phones, and when class starts, they’ll continue to give their phones as much, if not more, attention than the classroom activities. They’re wired in, Matrix-style.

This zombie-like symbiosis is a strange, dystopian, and frightening circumstance that makes one wonder if there really is any value now in going to college at all, even for a working-poor student trying to make it into the middle class. If the intellectual banter and personal interactions between students from different walks of life that used to be part of the post-secondary educational experience are gone, and all that’s left is going through the motions of attending class while ChatGPT writes your papers, where are the poor to garner any cognitive development and aspirational social capital?

Maybe nowhere. Maybe we’re going back to the rigid class system of 19th-century Britain, in which the inbred nepo babies of intergenerational wealth do just fine, no matter their capabilities (or lack thereof), simply because they’re rich, while those in the lower classes never transcend the social status of their birth because there are no opportunities to do so. If you were born into a family of factory workers or coal miners, you, too, became a factory worker or a coal miner. Only, this time around, you might be born into a family of Uber drivers, with your only option in life being to become an Uber driver too — at least, until self-driving cars take over completely.

One of the great promises in the legend of the American experience was that anybody, from anywhere, could go as far as their abilities and efforts could take them. The image of the self-made man — or, in modern terms, the self-realized person — looms large on the historical landscape. America is supposed to be the place where you can get ahead. And for the longest time, society did what it could to support this idea, leading progressive governments to implement tuition-free colleges with open enrollment.

But that was then, and this is now.

Something strange has taken place in the developed world, in general, and in America in particular. It seems we no longer aspire to get smarter and be better. Of course, there will always be a very small number who transcend their condition, no matter what. For example, Abraham Lincoln literally made his way out of abject poverty, at times living alone with his younger sister in the danger-filled wilderness of Kentucky, to become President of the United States. But he and his kind are rarities. For the most part, it has always taken a lot of support for the average person of limited means to get ahead. But when the mechanisms of opportunity are replaced by a ubiquitous, pocket-sized device that captures one’s mind in a mesmerized thrall of infinite content 24/7, what does the future look like?

The answer is scary.

I don’t see how a democracy powered by a well-informed, educated citizenry is possible, least of all when most citizens are ill-informed and poorly educated. Perhaps a workable society doesn’t have to be a democracy. Perhaps elite dictatorships akin to Plato’s philosopher kings actually do work best when everyone else is dumb, except for one disturbing fact: aspiring modern-day autocrats are just as wired into their cell phones as everybody else. So then, who or what will really run things?

I could say the agents in control will be the AI that’s left over in the wake of human achievement, but that might be a bridge too far. Or maybe I’ve hit the nail right on the head, and the future is a dark vortex filled with mindless scrolling, emojis, and podcasts, one that’s too forbidding to fathom.

Might happen, might not, but it’s something to think about the next time you hit the Like button.

Subscribe now

Share

There’s a lot of hubbub among those in the media and politics about socialist this and socialist that. The recent election of Zohran Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist” as mayor of New York City, has raised the specter of a socialist government being implemented in the Big Apple. And by the same token, for the last twenty years, the mention of Bernie Sanders, Senator from Vermont, another self-proclaimed democratic socialist, also fuels the fear in some that if elected to office of President of the United States of America, he too would turn the country into a socialist political state that would rival that of the Soviet Union of days past: food lines everywhere, cheap eyeglasses and ugly cars for the lucky few that could afford them.

But it’s a myth.

Just because some call themselves democratic socialists does not mean that they want to implement a socialist state. The suggestion that they do is a scare tactic popular among those on the right side of the political spectrum. In a truly socialist country, which democratic socialists don’t seek to establish, the state owns all the means of production and services. There is no private enterprise. The state makes the trains, planes, automobiles, nuclear reactors, cell phones, and bicycles. Food is not produced by the likes of corporate giants such as Archer-Daniels-Midland (ADM), Tyson Foods, and Land O’Lakes. It’s produced by Uncle Sam. When your cell phone service sucks, you don’t call T-Mobile, Verizon, or AT&T to complain. You call the department in the government that runs communication services.

In short, when it comes to large-scale manufacturing and services under socialism, the state owns and runs everything. Again, there is no private enterprise. And guess what? Because there is no private enterprise, there are no stock exchanges. There’s no market for buying and selling stock because there are no private companies issuing stock to be bought and sold.

Thus, when it comes to figuring out if a country is socialist or not, I ask one question: “Does it have a stock exchange?”

If the answer is yes, it ain’t socialist.

There were no stock exchanges in the old Soviet Union or in its satellite states. East Germany did not have a stock exchange. Neither did Poland, Hungary, nor Czechoslovakia, for that matter. They were all textbook socialist states.

Then, around 1990, the Soviet Union and the Soviet-centric state-socialist bloc collapsed. Germany united and the satellite states went their own way. Things changed. Investment banks, financial markets, and stock exchanges popped up all over the place to support the equities issued by the newly formed private companies.

Socialism went away and was replaced by capitalist, market-driven economies that provided a wider variety of TVs, personal computers, cell phones, cars, blue jeans, running shoes, fast food franchises, and convenience stores.

Today, there are still some countries that do not have stock exchanges, for example, Cuba, North Korea, Somalia, and Afghanistan, to name some of a very small few. But the big players in the big leagues of geopolitics all have stock exchanges. China has three major exchanges: the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, and the Beijing Stock Exchange. Russia has the Moscow Exchange (MOEX). Even Hungary and Vietnam have exchanges — the Budapest Stock Exchange (BSE) and the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange (HOSE), respectively.

So, it seems that in the scheme of things, capitalism — and its arousingly attractive cousin state capitalism — is on the rise. In the rough and tumble world of zero-sum equities trading, more private companies are issuing more securities that get bought and sold publicly in stock exchanges that are open to anybody with the capital to play.

It seems to be working, at least as measured by economic growth. Since 1990, China, Russia, Vietnam, Hungary, and Poland have experienced consistent growth in their GDP under economies that are best characterized as state capitalism. Along with it, the standard of living for the average person in those countries has improved correspondingly — sadly, accompanied by a noticeable growth of obesity in their populations. It goes with the territory. In addition to Apple Inc. selling a lot of iPhones in China and Vietnam, Kellogg’s sells a lot of Fruit Loops and Pop-Tarts, too. That’s how it goes in a market-driven economy. People want what they want, and if they have enough money, they’ll buy it.

But that’s not all. For many, if not most, Americans, they also want affordable health care, adequate education, and a place to live. This is where the social-democrat stuff comes into play.

To my understanding, Zohran, Bernie, and AOC do not want a socialist state. They don’t want to shut down the stock markets and have Uncle Sam own and run big-ticket manufacturing and services. In fact, Bernie indirectly owns stock as shares in Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs) such as the VALIC Socially Responsible Fund and CREF Growth Account, a mutual fund which, surprisingly, holds shares of Elon Musk’s Tesla — not a person or company in Sanders’ good graces. These elected officials are not socialists. Rather, they want social democracy, a political framework that aims to promote social justice and economic equality within the framework of a capitalist economy. The democratic socialists in the vein of Zohran, Bernie, and AOC are not out to destroy what works for most people. They just want to change the stuff that’s not working.

The takeaway?

Yeah, the term ‘democratic socialist‘ has an inherent branding problem. For Americans who have been absorbing a century’s worth of propaganda driven by powerful capitalists that claims that social democracy leads inevitably to “communism,” it brings up for the average American consumer the specter of a commodity-starved citizenry, trodden under the boots of a legion of anonymous apparatchiks hidden deep in the halls of the Kremlin, wielding the hammer and sickle of the old Soviet Union while a chorus singing the The Internationale anthem plays in the background. It’s a frightening image that’s been effective in its intent to scare the bejesus out of the average Joe or Josephine. So, obviously, something has to change.

Maybe democratic socialists should use a term such as ‘equity democrat‘ to describe themselves. Or maybe they should just send the problem off to a brand-identity consultant to solve. In any case, the next time you hear someone accuse a self-described democratic socialist of being a socialist, don’t buy it because, as we’ve learned on the terrain, if a country has a stock market, socialist it ain’t.

Share

Subscribe now

In terms of worth, it's not that talk is cheap; it's that talk needs to have millions of ears on the receiving end to be valuable. Once a person has an audience of millions, any blabber from that person's mouth or keyboard becomes valuable. When all that matters is quantity, blabbing about the betting spread on the next Red Sox game is as valuable as blabbing about the transgressions of ICE on the streets of LA. In fact, there is a good argument to be made that blabbing about the betting spread on the Red Sox game has more utilitarian value to the listener than reporting on ICE shenanigans, unless, of course, the receiver happens to fit ICE’s target profile. The only people who make money on ICE are the private detention centers, and they don't really care what's being said on Facebook. Yet, there are significant profits to be made by people from any walk of life wagering for or against the Sox. But, I digress.

At one time, complex discourse had value. To be considered thought-provoking was a compliment. These days, in the mainstream of social media, most discourse does not provoke thought because the quality of thinking informing the discourse just isn't that good. Thought-provoking discourse tends to be complex. If something is hard to understand, in the world of social media, it’s often ignored. Enraging a user is easy. Twiddling with a user’s emotions is the low-hanging fruit of public speech. Twiddling with a user’s thinking is hard work for both the sender and the receiver.

Social media, those websites, and applications that were sold as a way to foster more and better connections between the people on the planet, has become, for the most part, the present-day Colosseum. They’re essentially pornographic in the sense that the content arouses the user; it goes to the id of a human’s personality. There’s little reasoned debate, just discourse that never gets beyond the level of a “less-filling/tastes-great” beer commercial argument.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the platforms were benign, but they're not. They are powerful, ever-present, and controlled by very rich individuals who understand the power of money and the consequences of not having enough of it. Preserving wealth becomes paramount.

So, I will be moving away from mainstream social media, even in terms of my consumption.

It’s not that I am giving up. Quite the opposite. We are in dire times. The leaders of the MAG7, the people who control the operational foundation of all the social media platforms, have shown their true colors. Now it's all about Plan B.

I will be hard at work keeping food in the refrigerator. I need to survive to be effective. I will also be working on my Plan B for when the whole show goes south once AI-driven robotics really kicks in and the size of the unemployed population becomes unsustainable under the current system.

Additionally, I am acutely aware that the planet is continuing to heat up, and catastrophic weather events are becoming more frequent. Solving the problem requires hard thinking. But, sadly, those who can actually do something about it don't. It's too hard; instead, they talk about the Epstein Files. (What an arousing thought. I wonder if there are any Playboy centerfolds of naked women in them.)

However, this does not mean that I am putting my head in the sand and hoping that it all goes away by itself. It won’t. I will continue to read verifiable news sources and listen to thoughtful opinions from all perspectives. I will continue to write and publish on this site. Effective action still counts.

Being effective outside of social media is possible. The late David Graeber's thinking about effective action for resistance is to make the opposition irrelevant. Journalist I. F. Stone was blacklisted from the mainstream press corps in the 50's, yet he persisted. I find both to be powerful examples of how to be effective during these horrendously difficult times.

We’re in for a bumpy road ahead. Taking action matters. One step I've taken is donating money to the ACLU, and I encourage others to consider doing the same. Unlike political donations—which can seem as if one is buying the right to have a say in their government, a notion that is completely antithetical to the ideal of a true democracy—supporting the ACLU actually strengthens democratic principles by funding an organization that protects constitutional rights for everyone. You’re not buying your civil rights. You are paying an organization to protect them, which, in a way, is not that different from your local fire department. So, give now. Don’t wait.

In terms of social media, I’ll still be wishing people happy birthday and acknowledging their art and achievements. I will also be posting videos and photos of my trusty pet dog, Willie. But, as far as feeding the beast that social media has become, those days are over.

Subscribe now

Share

I don't know the actual reason behind the cancellation. It's all a bit murky. But what I do know is that Stephen Colbert’s salary at The Late Show is around $15 million a year, and despite the attention I’ve given him, not once did he call me up and offer to take me out to dinner. With a paycheck of over $288,000 a week, it would be no sweat off his back to treat me to a nice iced tray of a half dozen oysters at Balthazar. But, sadly, no dice.

Why? Because he has no idea who I am. On the other hand, I, along with millions of others, have some idea who he is; at least we’d recognize him and might greet him by name should he pass by on a New York City street. He might return the greeting. He might not. It's a one-way interaction that's not worthy of a dinner invitation. Such is the nature of a parasocial relationship.

The rise of fandom

A parasocial relationship is one in which a person has a deep awareness of and an ongoing affinity with another person, such that the target of that awareness is completely unaware of the person giving the attention. World history abounds with examples of parasocial relationships. They are nothing new.

Parasocial relationships emerged as soon as a few performers and leaders could capture the attention of many in recurring, large-scale mass gatherings, thereby becoming famous in the process. In classical Greece, accomplished actors enjoyed fame and prestige; we even know some of their names. In 19th-century Europe, composer and pianist Franz Liszt was wildly famous, playing concerts to packed audiences. His adoration was widespread to the point of fanaticism. Women in the audience, unknown to him, threw their underwear at him as he played. He was a superstar. And yet, he knew few of his followers.

Parasocial relationships became even more widespread with the rise of mass media, advertising, and publicity driven by professional public relations firms. They exploded in the mid-twentieth century as mass media took hold. Figures such as Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Clark Gable, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, and Humphrey Bogart became celebrities in the modern sense: people celebrated for their accomplishments, certainly, but each with a unique image, their brand, which publicists and reporters kept in the public eye. Their mass-produced, autographed photos hung on the bedroom walls of ordinary people hoping one day to meet them, or to gain some of their qualities by osmosis. The public knew their every move, their ups, and their downs. The marriage of baseball player Joe DiMaggio to Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe in January of 1954 made it to the front page of the New York Times. The paper reported their divorce 10 months later. It was all newsworthy and attention-getting. Each morsel of their private lives became fodder for public consumption. The daily “news” about their activities created millions of one-way, parasocial relationships.

Fan clubs, formal organizations devoted to following the life and work of a celebrity, became commonplace. In fact, a sign of status for a fan club was to have the celebrity to whom the club was devoted actually attend a meeting with his or her fans. Whether or not a relationship with the celebrity ever actually continued beyond the meet and greet is a matter for research. Still, in most situations, the fan is an abstraction unknown to the celebrity. And yet, in that abstraction is some sort of affinity. How often have we heard a celebrity say, “I owe it to my fans,” or in more modern terms, “I owe it to my followers”? But that affinity, from celebrity to fan, is limited to momentary episodes of awareness, if any. In the scheme of things, it’s the fan, follower, or sycophant who bears the labor of giving attention. All the celebrity needs to do is perform in some attention-getting manner.

But, back to Stephen Colbert.

A meager cause célèbre

Colbert’s cancellation is a cause célèbre. A cause célèbre is a famous or well-known issue, event, or legal case that attracts widespread public attention and controversy. It often involves sensational, unusual, or highly debated claims of injustice that spark intense public interest and debate. History is filled with causes célèbres, but the phrase entered English as the name of the phenomenon when the Dreyfus Affair in France captured international attention at the end of the nineteenth century. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French army officer, was accused and convicted of passing military secrets to the Germans. The veracity of the accusation was doubtful and attributed by many to feelings of anti-Semitism among the French officer corps. The affair became a cause célèbre reported continuously in newspapers around the world. It became a topic of hot conversation among French society. Eventually, Dreyfus was exonerated, despite having spent four and a half years in the savage jungles of Devil’s Island, the penal colony off the coast of French Guiana in South America.

Then there was the case of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Julius Rosenberg was a civilian electrical engineer for the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Ethel Rosenberg, his wife, was a homemaker turned union activist. They were convicted of selling secrets to the Soviet Union. They were executed by electric chair in 1953. There was a good deal of controversy about their activities and their subsequent execution. Key to the nature of their cause célèbre was that the Rosenbergs would be the only civilians to date to be executed by the United States for espionage. The trial and conviction were a source of national debate throughout the early 1950s.

Finally, one of the most prominent causes célèbres of the twentieth century was the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. Nelson Mandela, leader of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, was arrested in 1962 primarily for two specific actions: organizing an illegal strike and leaving South Africa without valid travel documents. He spent 27 years in prison before being released in 1990. He went on to become President of South Africa in 1994 after apartheid ended.

The long and the short of it is that history is filled with causes célèbres. And for the most part, they were parasocial relationships. The person at the center of the controversy knew few of those interested in their plight. Occasionally, a prominent figure might step forward, as did the writer Émile Zola during the Dreyfus affair, and as modern-day actors Robert De Niro and Eddie Murphy protested Mandela’s imprisonment. Yet, overall, the relationship was one-way. Anonymous support is not a bad thing in the case of Dreyfus, the Rosenbergs, or Mandela. Those causes célèbres fostered significant change in the way the world works.

The victims at the centers of these causes célèbres suffered to bring about those changes. For eighteen years, Mandela pounded rocks in a limestone quarry on Robbins Island. The Rosenbergs were sent to the Great Beyond. By comparison, Colbert’s suffering is meager. He loses his spot on late-night TV, and for that, he gets to leave CBS with a net worth of $75-$76 million.

Colbert’s jokes on late-night TV didn’t free a nation from the shackles of apartheid or the injustice of anti-semitism. His contribution? A few minutes of political humor delivered nightly, the result of which is one more episode of a media celebrity whose preaching to the choir has little or no impact on the voting behavior of the nation. When you compare Colbert’s current problems to those controversies in the past, to riff on Humphrey Bogart’s line in the movie Casablanca, “It doesn't take much to see that the problems of some late-night media celebrity don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."

Who’s gonna take me to the airport?

So, what’s my point? It’s this: It seems that we are spending more and more time giving attention to media figures who have no idea who we are at a personal level, and we get little concrete value in return. They get more from us than we get from them. We’re just viewers, fans, followers. We might exist in their world as an email address, a link to a Facebook page, or at the least, a photo in some sort of follower-management software. That’s about as good as it gets. We’re just one of millions. We’re an audience to a Grand Amusement that’s creating a growing number of all too dysfunctional parasocial relationships. Our politics has become cult-like, driven by parasocial relationships on steroids. We adore public figures who know us not.

Now, don’t get me wrong – fans, fandom, and fan adoration have been around for a long, long time, as have the parasocial nature of those relationships. Joe DiMaggio had no idea who was sitting in the last row of the bleachers, cheering him on at Yankee Stadium. To Jerry Garcia, his audience were Deadheads, with just a few of whom he might have had a two-way relationship. The rest were just faces in the crowd.

Celebrities play to the crowd, garnering their attention and, in turn, make millions, whether on purpose or by accident. That’s just the way it is. But to think they are just like you and me, that they’re the type of people we could have a beer with, is delusional. They're not. Take a look at the list below of TV personalities and their yearly salaries.

• Stephen Colbert: $15 million

• Jimmy Kimmel $: 15 million

• Seth Meyers: $5 million

• Jimmy Fallon: $16 million

• Tucker Carlson: Between $12–$45 million

• Bill O'Reilly: $25 million (Fox peak)

• Megyn Kelly: $15–$20 million

• Lawrence O'Donnell: $4–$7 million (recent range)

• Rachel Maddow: $25 million

• Anderson Cooper: $20 million

• Sean Hannity: $25 million (Fox)

• Jesse Watters: $5 million

They are not average Americans. They don’t have to worry about paying for the expenses of everyday life, everything from health insurance, getting the kids braces, to making the monthly mortgage payment. They live in big houses, possibly many big houses. They drive expensive cars. Their refrigerators are always full. Some, such as Sean Hannity, own a private jet. They might have been working class at some point earlier in life, but today they live the lives of the rich and famous. God bless them for their ambition, labor, and good fortune. I begrudge them none of it.

But I am under no illusion that they are just like me. While they might care about me in the abstract, were I to need even the most trivial help, such as a ride to the airport or someone to take care of the dog for a weekend, these TV commentators aren’t people I could contact, let alone rely upon. In fact, I wonder what I could rely upon them for, other than being on time for a regularly scheduled broadcast.

And yet, we give these media celebrities oodles of attention, which they convert into millions of dollars for their employers and themselves. So, whether Stephen Colbert continues on with his antics or gets removed from the media landscape under the taint of political censorship, it matters not to me. All he ever added to my life was some humorous outrage during the two or three times I’ve tuned in.

When it comes to getting help with things that really matter in my life, that help has come from my friends and family, as well as the local police, firefighters, and other public employees and business people in my neighborhood. The clerk at the DMV office, half a mile away, has done more to help me keep my car on the road than Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) ever has.

As for the likes of Maddow, Colbert, Kimmel, and Tucker Carlson, they’re just images on a screen trying to harvest my attention. I care for them no more than they care for me, unless, of course, one of them invites me out to a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant. Then, at least, we’ll both become something more than abstract parties in a parasocial relationship. Who knows? We might even get to know each other well enough to fight over paying the check.

In his book, Discipline and Punish, the philosopher Michel Foucault describes the 1757 execution of Robert-François Damiens for the stabbing and attempted assassination of King Louis XV of France:

On the scaffold, his flesh was torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and legs with red-hot pincers. The hand with which he had held the knife during the assassination attempt was burned with sulphur. The wounds were then doused with molten lead, boiling oil, burning pitch, melted wax, and sulfur. Finally, Damiens was drawn and quartered by horses—a process that proved so difficult that executioners had to cut his tendons to complete the dismemberment.

Such was the administration of justice back then—only, “back then” wasn’t that long ago. Damien’s execution wasn’t some form of barbaric medieval justice. In the scheme of things, it was a fairly recent practice. Keep in mind that in 1757, the sextant, the device that transformed the reliability of oceanic travel, had just been invented, and nineteen years later, the Declaration of Independence would be signed. It wasn’t modern times, but it wasn’t ancient times, either.

So, what gives? Why was such barbarity embraced in what we have come to think of as the Age of Enlightenment?

The answer, I think, has to do with the notion of the relationship of the person to the state. In a monarchical, class-structured society, some people are part of the state, and most people aren’t. Nobles, high-ranking clergy, and very rich merchants and tradesmen are in the state. The rest are subjects. They have no say in matters. They have no rights. They are just bodies that need to be controlled. They need to be subjugated.

Thus, when a subject offends the state, punishment must be exacted against the body of the offender. The body committed the crime; it’s the body that must be punished. Punishment by confinement in a prison is too abstract, too removed. Punishment had to be painful, public, and spectacularly inflicted upon the body of the criminal. There was no intention to rehabilitate or reincorporate the offender back into civil society. The intention was to publicly inflict cruelty as a deterrent against future transgressions against the state.

The idea that a human might have privileges, let alone rights, governing the relationship between the state and the individual and the state’s treatment of the individual, was a concept that had yet to be formulated. It took a few revolutions to make real the notion that a human being could have rights that were inalienable—inalienable not because of the state, but despite it.

Rights and rehabilitation

The notion of inalienable rights—rights that cannot be surrendered, sold, transferred, or taken away under any circumstances—gained widespread political prominence during a relatively recent period in human history: the Enlightenment era. While earlier traditions, including Stoic philosophy and documents such as the Magna Carta, hinted at individual liberties, it was Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke who formally articulated the theory of natural rights. These ideas laid the intellectual foundation for the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), where Thomas Jefferson famously wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,…”

This represented a dramatic shift in the relationship between the individual and the state. The governed do not exist for the state; rather, the state exists for the governed: its central purpose is to guarantee their rights.

Of course, from the very beginning, there has been much controversy about whose rights were actually being protected, especially given the existence of slavery and the exclusion of large segments of the population from protection. Nevertheless, the Declaration established a powerful underlying principle: people are not subjects to be controlled by the state; instead, the people form the state itself.

The US Constitution, adopted in 1789, takes the notion of rights a step further by formally declaring the limits of punishment in the Eighth Amendment of the Bill of Rights:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

In other words, the governed have a right not to be tortured.

Thus, executions with the type of mutilations and torture performed on Robert-François Damiens were eliminated from the list of permissible criminal punishments. But, along with humane punishment came another feature in the evolution of criminal justice: the notion of rehabilitation.

Returning a criminal offender to civil society was not a priority when most people were excluded from membership in the state. They were just bodies for labor. Punishment for a crime meant inflicting pain and suffering on that body.

However, as Enlightenment thinking gained influence, a new philosophy emerged—one that emphasized the potential to reform offenders and reintegrate them as productive members of society, thereby reestablishing their membership within the state. As such, a prison sentence began to represent more than mere confinement, retribution, and forced labor. It also became a period for reflection, moral instruction, and rehabilitation, providing the offender with an opportunity to recognize their wrongdoing and change their behavior for the better, ready to re-enter the workforce as a productive member of society.

This evolving approach was rooted in a broader political philosophy: if the state is composed of its people, and the purpose of the state is to protect the rights of the people, then having more law-abiding, productive citizens would ultimately strengthen the state itself. The result was the introduction of forward-thinking penal codes and practices in 19th-century America. For example, New York implemented the Auburn System in 1817, and the Pennsylvania System followed in 1829.

Under the Pennsylvania system, prisoners were kept in solitary confinement at night in complete isolation from the general population, thereby avoiding the risk of negative influences. The Auburn System also employed nighttime solitary confinement in addition to work and trade programs that were instituted alongside silent communal labor, emulating factory work. The work activities provided the skills, experience, and changed attitude necessary for the criminal to leave prison prepared to become a law-abiding person.

Somewhere along the line, to the good fortune of convicted criminals, someone figured out that a penal system in which cruel punishment and torture are the norm did not make society safer. It just hardened criminals and put them back on the street. Rehabilitation is beneficial for both the individual and the state. However, it’s an entirely different matter when a prisoner is not expected to re-enter society.

The return of cruelty by the state

Back when most people were subjects of the state and not citizens with inherent rights, cruel and unusual punishment had a grim logic. If you want to stop someone from stealing, just cut off their hands. That the offender would become useless for honest work was immaterial because making a person useful through rehabilitation was not a goal. They were just bodies to be disciplined. The goals were to neutralize the criminal and to set a spectacular deterrent example for others. If a blasphemer had his tongue cut out, no more could he blaspheme.

But that was then, and this is now.

In recent times, we have at least had the pretense of humanity in the criminal justice system. We just don’t lock them up and throw away the key. A prison sentence is intended to be both a form of punishment and an opportunity for rehabilitation.

Sadly, things are changing and not for the better.

Today in America, under the current government, it is possible for a person to be abducted off the street by masked agents of the law who bear no identification, and then be whisked away to be incarcerated in a facility that may or may not be in the United States. The in-country facility most likely does not have a torture room, but reports indicate that these detention centers are overcrowded and that many detainees, aka prisoners, live in cages and are inadequately fed.

Those detainees who have been relocated to facilities outside of the United States are not protected by the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment because the rules and restraints guaranteed by the Constitution apply only within America’s borders. Thus, if a detainee ends up in a facility in El Salvador, for example, cruelty and torture may very well be on the table because, according to the World Organisation Against Torture (OCMT), the use of torture is widespread in that country.

In short, cruel and unusual punishment is now part of the administration of justice by the United States Government, particularly when it comes to the behavior of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Why? My theory is that humane incarceration, free of cruel and unusual punishment, is useful in a penal system when the government intends to rehabilitate prisoners for a return to society. In such cases, there is a prospect of release from detention, and a reformed offender is safer to have back on the streets than one who remains committed to their criminal ways. But, what if the government never intends to release those who are incarcerated? What if ICE detains people under the justification that being an illegal immigrant is, by definition, to be a criminal who is best removed from the country permanently, whether to their country of origin or to a detention facility elsewhere? It matters not a whit where they are, as long as they are not in the country. And if it turns out the illegal immigrants end up in a detention center in which torture is commonplace, so what?

Remember, back in 1757, as Robert-François Damiens was being tortured to death, the purpose of punishment was twofold: inflict pain on the body of the offender, and do so in a spectacular manner so as to deter others from committing crimes against the state. Rehabilitation was not a factor because there was no intention of reintegrating the person—nor, in particular, the person’s body—back into the state. As I've said previously, punishment was intended to serve as a gruesome deterrent to others and a spectacular example of the state's power.

So, today, as more people, illegal immigrants and US citizens alike, are being rounded up by masked agents and taken to detention centers located who knows where and subject to conditions unknown, the overwhelming power of the state is apparent and something to be feared.

I guess the word has gotten out. The punishment for crossing the border illegally or overstaying a visa is not yet to be drawn and quartered, but ending up in a detention center in Southeast Africa is not exactly a walk in the park either.

Today in the United States, our government brags about its cruelty. We are no longer a country with a government that forgives our trespassers and tells them to trespass no more. Rather, our government has decided that spectacular cruelty is just A-OK. The result is that for foreigners, coming to the United States is a trip they take at their own peril.

It’s sad, no doubt. But what's even sadder is that the cruelty works. One cannot help but notice that illegal border crossings into the United States have been reduced to the lowest level in decades.

So, for those of us who hold out hope for what former president George H. W. Bush called “a kinder, gentler America”, the question becomes: at what point do we, the governed, say, “enough is enough” and take effective, non-violent action to end the cruelty?

Or, do we just throw in the towel and endure the day when torture and executions once again become a public spectacle and cruelty is an all too common technique used by the government to control the governed?

Given the choice, I’ll go with a kinder, gentler America, every time.

UPDATE: This cartoon has moved its new location on Substack:

The World in Which We Live

The 3 Ps

After taking a year off from my cartooning, I am back at it again, for as long as I can…

Read more

a year ago · The World in Which We Live

Sound improbable? Allow me to elaborate.

Then they came for the doctors

The DaVinci Machine is a surgical device that enables surgeons to operate on patients using a number of sterile robotic arms controlled from a separate user console. The surgeon sits at the console and controls the robotic arms with a high degree of precision. The surgeon does not touch the patient. The device does.

The DaVinci machine is not well-suited for complex, multifaceted, or rare surgeries. Rather, the device is better suited for surgeries that have been performed thousands of times before, such as appendectomies.

Hundreds of thousands of appendectomies are performed in the United States each year, and millions are done worldwide. Given that appendectomies have become so common, it’s no surprise that robot-assisted surgery using a DaVinci Machine has become an accepted way to perform the operation.

At present, the DaVinci Machine, aka the DaVinci Surgical System, is not AI-enabled. However, this was also true of the automobile twenty years ago. As history can attest, it’s only a matter of time before the machine is emitting information that can be absorbed by AI. Once AI can “train” on the data from millions of appendectomies performed each year worldwide, it’s only a matter of a little more time before the machine can automatically do the work presently done by a human surgeon. For those who think this is an impossibility, keep in mind that at one time, many thought autonomous automobiles were nothing more than a conceptual novelty. Then, in 2018, Waymo’s self-driving taxis appeared on the streets. Today, the company has over 1500 autonomous vehicles driving the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin, handling over 250,000 trips a week. For what it’s worth, there is a good argument to be made that the work it takes for a DaVinci Machine to do an appendectomy autonomously is not much more difficult than the work required to get an autonomous motor vehicle to drive the busy streets and highways of LA successfully. And, when you think about it, the danger posed by one autonomous vehicle going berserk on a crowded city street is greater than that of an autonomous DaVinci Machine making a mistake during a surgical procedure. A single DaVinci Machine can only kill one person before its plug is pulled. A driverless car can kill dozens.

AI-enhanced robots could replace not only surgeons, but also radiologists. There are millions of digital X-rays out there for AI to be trained on. Once an AI model for radiology is well-developed, it will be able to make diagnoses that were previously part of a radiologist's work. Dentistry is also low-hanging fruit for AI-enhanced, robotic-assisted procedures. One can imagine a robotic apparatus that could remove cavities and do simple fillings. Or even fit a patient for orthodontic braces, or do dental implants. Already there are machines that create the crowns used in dental restoration.

For those who think that AI-powered devices could never perform such tasks, remember that twenty years ago, most call centers were staffed by humans. Today, call centers powered by automated voice response and chatbot technology have become the norm rather than the exception in the customer service industry. As a result, many human service agents and tech support personnel have been put out of work.

Not all human beings have been replaced by AI, but many have, and more are being replaced every day. As AI gets smarter and its integration with robotics improves, the rate at which humans get displaced by automation will increase dramatically. AI will do to the general workforce what the steam shovel did to ditch diggers. Making a living by slinging a shovel ten hours a day is no longer a viable way to earn a wage.

Eventually, most human labor, except for tasks that require extraordinary intelligence and creativity or are intended to garner attention (think influencers), will be replaced by automation. Why? Two reasons. First, if it's work that’s been done a thousand times before by a significant portion of the observable population, the plethora of data generated about that work makes it ripe for training AI models that integrate with ever-advancing robotic technology. Second, businesses are always on the lookout for ways to reduce costs and increase productivity. It's intrinsic to how they operate.

Capital’s need for labor

According to Marxist theory, constant capital needs labor to realize value. Constant capital is machinery, tools, raw materials, and other means of production that are used to create goods and services. A hammer without a human wielding it is useless, as is a truck without a driver or a stove without a cook.

Factories need workers to produce goods, and businesses such as banks need employees to produce services. This is why businesses hire: to secure labor to operate the various forms of constant capital they own. Businesses spend money on constant capital to extract as much value from the labor of a worker as possible, hence the logic of buying a steam shovel that requires the labor of one worker to operate rather than a hundred ditch diggers with shovels. Machines increase cost efficiency and productivity.

For most profit-seeking businesses, the goal is not to employ people; it's to make money. The key to making money is mechanization and automation. A company is always on the lookout for technology that lowers costs by reducing, if not eliminating, human labor. Machines don’t tire over time; they make no demands beyond reasonable repair and maintenance. Also, they are easy to command. All that's required is to read the user’s manual. Whenever a machine can do the work at least as well as a human, if not better and faster, automation will be a company’s preferred choice. In fact, there's a good argument to be made that the perfect business should have no employees, only automation technology. The only expense is acquisition and maintenance, or, as is becoming more commonplace in many businesses, the cost of leasing the machine.

Think this is a fantasy? Dark factories, factories that don't need lighting because they are run using machines and robots operating in the dark, are sprouting up in Asia and may, one day, come to a town near you.

One of the primary goals of a profit-seeking business is to minimize its headcount. This applies just as much to businesses valued in the billions of dollars as it does to a small law firm that utilizes AI to compose and analyze contracts. Why incur the overhead of hiring secretaries and associates when you can pay a fraction of their cost for an AI to consume a prompt describing a legal matter and generate a draft contract for an expert partner to review and edit? Then, when the typing-challenged partner makes mistakes, the AI does another pass to correct spelling and grammar. Not only will the AI correct errors, it will also complete the task faster than a human can. The choice is almost a no-brainer: spend a lot of money on human labor, or some money on AI labor? The choice is obvious if you're intent on making a profit.

What it boils down to is this: the question isn’t whether AI and autonomous machines will replace most human labor; the question is when, and then, what will humans do when work disappears because intelligent automation has taken over?

When work goes away

Humans are not born with a sense of time. That sense itself takes time to develop. Unless an adult intervenes, a two-year-old will get up in the morning and carry on until they drop. It’s up to parents to provide their children with structure. Hence, they build rituals around the activities of everyday living, such as getting dressed in the morning, having meals throughout the day, being put down for a nap, and listening to stories and songs that go with bedtime. The rituals provide the cues that enable the child to develop a sense of time and the ability to transition between events. These external cues continue as the child enters elementary school, and the day is divided into lessons, such as math, reading, language skills, and arts and crafts, with the teacher guiding the transition between events. The child develops a stronger sense of time and transition in middle and high school when they can move between classrooms for specific subjects. As a person grows into adulthood, their ability to organize themselves matures to the point where they can independently accommodate cues and manage their time accordingly, enabling them to attend college classes in various locations or be gainfully employed in the workforce.

The important thing to understand about all this is that external cues provide a sense of temporal structure in a human. Those cues range from simple ones like telling the time by reading a clock face, to more complex ones like responding to the demands of one’s job. It’s these predictable cues that bring structure to a person’s life.

Knowing what’s coming and being ready to meet the demands of that moment provides a sense of safety and purpose. For many, a job, being gainfully employed, is the environment that provides the predictable and reliable events by which a human can structure their life. A job gives one’s life structure and, for many, a sense of purpose. A job provides not only the money a person needs to survive but also the structure they need to navigate life.

Those accustomed to having a job can become unmoored when their job goes away. A study conducted in Spain in 2020 reports that an estimated 28% of the population entering retirement developed signs of depression. A 2012 report from the Suicide Prevention Center reports that an unemployed person in Frankfurt, Germany, was 16 times more likely to die by suicide than those with jobs.

Losing a job is a significant event that can be a devastating experience for some. Still, most people will get through the experience and find other work when the unemployment rate is low. However, it’s another matter when there are no more jobs to be had because AI-enabled software systems and autonomous robots with highly refined motor capabilities have replaced most, if not all, human labor. What happens then? This is a question that few in positions of power are asking. Rather than taking the time to think the issue through and formulate rational approaches to the looming problem, the conventional wisdom seems to be to assert that “there will always be jobs” — as Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Google lay off more engineers every year. Politicians might believe there will always be jobs. Those in industry who actually hire workers are thinking differently.

Keep in mind that in the 1890s, there were about 150,000 horses in New York City. Today, there are fewer than 300. They were replaced by motor vehicles. The horses that remain on the other side of their automated obsolescence are used mainly for entertainment, such as horse races and pulling carriages filled with tourists through Central Park. Perhaps this is what happens to humans when their labor is no longer needed for productive work. They become performers whose sole value is derived from their ability to entertain.

Recently, the President of the United States announced his intention to host Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fights on the grounds of the White House. The event will consist of contests between two human beings confined in a cage, fighting each other with their hands, arms, legs, and feet.

Maybe this is the future for humans when work goes away — to beat each other to a pulp for the viewing pleasure of powerful and ordinary audiences alike, on-premises and remotely. As for the rest, AI and the robots will have it covered.

Unelected governors appointed by the President and then Congress established new state governments that took over the day-to-day running of those governments. They also supervised voter registration as well as the reentry of the belligerent Confederate states into the Union.

Former Confederate politicians were not immediately allowed to serve in Congress after the Civil War; their participation was contingent upon meeting federal requirements for readmission to the Union and demonstrating loyalty to the United States. However, by 1877, many politicians of the former Confederate States did return to Congress, most notably Alexander H. Stephens, who had been Vice President of the Confederacy but was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia in 1873. He served until 1882. Stephens accepted the legal reality of the abolition of slavery but never changed his view about white supremacy and the subjugation of Black Americans.

The day-to-day activities of Union soldiers in the Southern States were mostly confined to peacekeeping activities, for example, patrolling the streets, breaking up fights, arresting criminals, and protecting Federal postal workers as they processed and delivered mail in the occupied states. Nonetheless, Union soldiers had an apparent and significant presence on the civil landscape of the Southern states.

But that was then, and this is now. Today, Reconstruction has been reversed. Today, it’s no longer about the Federal government occupying Confederate states. It’s about Red states occupying Blue states.

The politicians running the US Government are in the Republican majority in Congress in tandem with an elected Republican President. Recently, that President sent National Guard and US Marine personnel into the City of Los Angeles to subdue residents protesting the collection and detention of illegal immigrants. Neither the Democratic Governor of the state nor the Democratic Mayor of the city asked for their assistance. The legality of the presidential deployment is questionable.

A few days into the deployment, the Secretary of Homeland Security gave a press conference during which she said the following:

"We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialist and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into this city."

So there you have it. A high-ranking member of the Federal government asserted that the National Guard and US Marines will stay in Los Angeles to take over power from an elected Governor and Mayor in the state of California. It’s a strange event, but not one without historical precedent. The only difference is that in the past, it took a full-scale war for the Federal military to occupy the Southern states. Now, all it took was some manufactured propaganda and a made-for-TV department head to call in the troops.

A certain part of the population, some of those in the states of the former Confederacy, is getting great satisfaction from the occupation of Los Angeles. For those in the city, not so much. For me, the whole situation is scaring me to death. But, as they say on the terrain, payback is a bitch.

Yesterday, as I was returning from lunch with a friend, walking down a street around the block from my building, I spied a large recyclables garbage truck parked on the side of the road. I walked over to the truck as the driver was also approaching the vehicle. I greeted her and asked for a moment of her time. “Of course,” she said.

I then shared my tale of woe about the uncollected recyclables at my building. She asked for my address, which I gave her.

At this point, she did something amazing. She said she would immediately drive the truck around the block and pick up the recyclables. She asked that I meet her at my building to open the gate into the parking area where the bins were located.

So, I did

I walked around the corner to my building, and five minutes later, the recyclables truck appeared with Myra, the driver, at the wheel. She double-parked the very big truck at the gate at the front of my building. I opened the gate. Myra got out of the truck, entered the driveway, and hauled the bins to the rear of the truck. Then she dumped the bins’ contents into the hopper at the truck’s rear.

I helped Myra return the bins to their original place at the end of the parking area. Myra was about to leave when I asked her to wait a minute while I fetched two five-dollar bills from my wallet. I offered them to Myra as a token of appreciation for her extra effort. She refused the money, saying, “I’m just doing my job.“

I asked her to accept at least one of the five-dollar bills to make me feel better. She accepted the bill. As she was leaving, Myra informed me that the regular driver was out, but she was sure he’d be back next week and that the recycling collection would be back to normal.

The experience made my day.

Myra’s display of caring and kindness was a refreshing break from the “me first” attitude I experience when driving the streets of L.A. and the selfishness of people at the gym who monopolize time on the weight-training machines only to gawk at their cell phones rather than exercise. Throw in the unbridled political and commercial corruption reported every day by the news in its many formats, and you can understand why my expectations about the human condition are pretty low these days. Fortunately, people like Myra, the recyclables truck driver, and Santos, the manager of the taco joint down the street, who greets me with a smile every time I’ve come in over the years, give me hope that there are more nice people in the world than I imagine.

Myra could have just as easily told me, “It’s not my route. Call LADWP,” and driven off. But she didn’t. Instead, she helped me out. Whether it was “her job” or not, Myra did a good deed and we’re the better for it. For a tiny moment in time, she made my world a nicer place in which to live.

If I were to generalize from my recent experience, it seems that everyday people-the working stiffs, the people who do the ordinary jobs in life to earn a living—are closer to the ideal of a benevolent, cooperative society than those in the throes of acquisitive self-interest and corporate ambition.

But maybe my assessment is more of a hopeful dream than a data-driven reality. In any event, here are two hard facts you can take to the bank. First, my generalization and $1.75 will get you a bus ride down Venice Blvd. to the beach. And second, as we’ve learned on the terrain, opinions are like noses; just about everybody has one.

Nonetheless, Myra, the recyclables truck driver, made my day, and I am genuinely grateful to her for what she did.

The audio is narrated using my voice clone, generated using AI.