Mystery of the Mundane

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Tue, 21 May 2013 19:57:08 -0400

Bitcoin’s Untapped Possibilities

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:39:53 -0400

Our favorite little cryptocurrency that could continues to overcome pitfalls and exceed the expectations of even the most starry-eyed of its early adopters. Since its inception a mere four years ago, Bitcoin has weathered at least five significant price drops and one major protocol exploitation. The Schadenfreude enjoyed by some of Bitcoin’s noisier detractors was short-lived.

Rather than foretelling the certain demise of this quirky digital currency, these trials tested and strengthened the network’s resilience. Bitcoin prices quickly re-equilibrated following each crash. The protocol exploitation became a case study in how quickly the Bitcoin community is able to spot and respond to coding problems: After a problem with the update in March was spotted on a Bitcoin forum, all of the major exchanges voluntarily suspended payments while the problem was patched. What could have been a death knell for this fledgling network was quietly handled before most traders even noticed. After withstanding considerable uncertainty and stress-testing, it appears that the Bitcoin model is here to stay.

While the viability of Bitcoin as a decentralized peer-to-peer payment system is becoming less of a question, the regulatory future of the cryptocurrency is still murky. An early red flag shot up with the reveal of FinCEN’s guidance on Bitcoin users and exchanges this March. The guidance appears to have been applied for the first time last week when the Department of Homeland Security suspended operations and seized the assets of Mt. Gox’s mobile payments account serviced by Dwolla.

Despite the troubling uncertainty that this new regulatory environment injects into the Bitcoin platform, Bitcoin prices have remained steady since the unprecedented expropriation. Still, public regulatory wishes from other powerful agency heads should give us cause for concern about the government’s capacity to stifle the full potential of this still-nascent technology.

Many people, if they have heard of Bitcoin at all, associate it with libertarian pipe dreams of overturning the dollar and that rascally Federal Reserve. I can’t blame anyone for holding this impression; after all, the average Bitcoin user is an atheist libertarian male in his early 30′s. However, to primarily view Bitcoin as, for better or worse, a libertarian dream currency is to overlook the wonder of its potential as a platform for financial innovation. The problem that Bitcoin’s mysterious creator, Satoshi Nakamoto (he will never be found), outlined in his original white paper is how to replace relatively-costly third party trust-based transfers with a system based on relatively-inexpensive cryptographic proof. I think that people of all political persuasions can find something to like about Bitcoin’s properties as a decentralized digital payment system.

First, Bitcoin holds enormous potential to help lift the world’s destitute out of abject poverty. Insufficient access to basic financial services is one of the biggest problems facing the poor in developing countries today. Jeff Fong observes that mobile payment services, like M-Pesa, are already wildly popular in countries like Kenya, Tanzania, and Afghanistan. An open, global system like Bitcoin will be a natural financial fit for the fiduciary needs of the world’s poor–and with the benefits of no middleman and more discretion. Additionally, Bitcoin’s capacity to cheaply transfer funds will save new immigrants the 20% fee that they currently pay to send remittances back to capital-starved relatives in their home countries.

Bitcoin’s assurance of privacy will also improve the lives of those in oppressive situations who need to make confidential transactions. Both women who need to gather their children and discreetly flee from a domineering husband and exploited citizens of oppressive regimes need some way to transfer funds away from the prying eyes of their particular tyrant. Already, citizens in Argentina are turning to Bitcoin as a way to escape the devastation of the 25% Argentine inflation rate. On the other side of the transaction, Bitcoin’s pseudonymity ensures that persecuted groups will not be blocked access to capital because of their ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, or disability.

Conservatives will find much to like about Bitcoin’s potential to help lift developing countries out of poverty through market means and export the Western values of industriousness and self-sufficiency. Progressives will be excited to learn of Bitcoin’s ability to help subvert to despotic regimes and obviate the potential for race-based and gender-based discrimination in transactions. Both groups will likely appreciate the privacy that Bitcoin can restore to our over-tracked and over-marketed digital lives. And of course, libertarians like myself will continue to enjoy sticking it to the central banks. But in terms of Bitcoin’s capabilities, these ideas still only scratch the surface of what is possible.

Many functions built into the Bitcoin protocol have yet to be harnessed. During the Bitcoin 2012 convention last year, Mike Hearn, one of the original developers of the Bitcoin protocol,unveiled a few of Bitcoin’s dormant features that programmers can harness. In true Satoshi style, the mastermind only provided a few comments on these in-built features, called “contracts,” before digitally vanishing. Hearn took to the task of discovering these capabilities himself; the possibilities are promising. The Bitcoin protocol contains the ability for seamless micropayments, dispute mediations, assurance contracts, and smart property, among other features that can be developed independently. This allows for the easy development of cheap internet translation services, Kickstarter-like services, and peer-to-peer stock and bond markets. If you’re excited about Bitcoin now, trust me: You ain’t seen nothing yet.

As I write now, scores of Bitcoin developers, investors, journalists, plain old enthusiasts, and one lucky Ümlaut editor are gathered in San Jose for the Bitcoin 2013 convention, discussing plans and possibilities for Bitcoin’s future. Amid high profile calls for protected areas of open experimentation and floating rumors of a new autonomous region that will officially recognize cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin community is standing at a precipice. Either we can convince government regulators of Bitcoin’s promise as a financial innovation and procure a pledge for open experimentation, or we can risk losing the core capabilities of this cryptocurrency to the confused dictates of the state. It is time for the Bitcoin community to educate policymakers and the public of the vast untapped possibilities that this cryptocurrency can create, lest government regulators be allowed to unknowingly extinguish the potential of this force for good.

Audio

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:12:01 -0400

I have a date with Wild Nothing, Bitcoin, and Rolf Dobelli this...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:11:00 -0400

I have a date with Wild Nothing, Bitcoin, and Rolf Dobelli this week. I got 99 problems, but (bad music|monetary mischief|cognitive biases) ain’t one.

Groovy times.

She’s richer than Croesus, she’s tougher than...

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:40:19 -0400

She’s richer than Croesus, she’s tougher than leather

Clans, States, and Individual Liberty

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:59:00 -0400

Imagine a society without a centralized system of law. In this world, people form social groups associated by kinship, marriage, and religious affinity. Through repeated interactions and shared experiences, they gradually develop unique cultures and norms of behavior that do a pretty good job of keeping the peace within the group. Territory among the different social groups is known and generally respected. In the unusual event of an inter-group dispute, both parties designate a mutually-trusted third party arbitrator to peacefully broker the disagreement before tensions escalate. In the absence of a beefed-up executive branch to throw its monopoly of violence around and enforce imposed law, this society still manages to promote harmony and order through an emergent, decentralized process.

At first glance, this kind of social arrangement looks like it could have been copied and pasted from the imaginative pages of For a New Liberty or The Machinery of Freedom. Indeed, liberals (classical, mind you) of all stripes embrace the decentralization of power as a go-to remedy in our toolbox to beat back the prying tentacles of the state and reestablish the primacy of the individual within society.

Any liberal enthusiasm for the society described above would quickly evaporate upon hearing the important details left out of the original description. For one, participation in these social groups is not euvoluntary at best and directly coercive, particularly towards women, at worst. In fact, the very idea of the “individual,” let alone any recognition that individual humans have dignity and rights that should be respected, is foreign to this society. People in this society are recognized and valued in proportion to the power of their social group and their position within it.

The norms of behavior that developed, while useful to maintain order, significantly infringe on an individual’s unique identity and claims. In this society, not only are you only your brother’s (legal) keeper, you are also your aunt’s, your nephew’s, your sister-in-law’s, and your second cousin’s (twice removed)…and they are all yours. This complex and contextual system of influence, history and nuance is not easily navigable by outside parties willing to trade and therefore not exactly conducive to a developed system of exchange. The collective emotions of honor and shame, rather than individual feelings of self-interest and guilt, primarily motivate action in this world. Even the seemingly amicable inter-group arbitration system is backed by the imminent threat of ceaseless blood feud, which has destroyed both clan-based societies and the dreams of star-crossed lovers on more than one occasion.

The world described is the social system of clannism, a form of governance that has marked the histories of most modern nations and still exists in much of the world that the U.S. military attempts to erect states upon today. This system is explored in great detail in Mark Weiner’s new book, The Rule of the Clan. Building upon Henry Maine’s dichotomy between Societies of Status (clans) and Societies of Contract (modern states), Weiner paints lush pictures of clan-based systems in history and today. Whisking us through vivid impressions of life with the Nuer of Southern Sudan, medieval Icelanders, and the Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan, among others, Weiner illustrates the logic of clannism in societies that completely lack states, have ineffective states, or exhibit some attributes of both.

The book is interesting enough as a series of anthropological vignettes and colorful collection of the world’s more dramatic creation and history myths (“if you liked A Song of Ice and Fire, then you’ll LOVE the Brennu-Njáls saga!”), but it also raises questions for those interested in stateless governance. In one of this month’s featured articles at the Library of Economics and Liberty, Arnold Kling reviews The Rule of the Clan and summarizes the relevant arguments:

1. A decentralized order is possible. Indeed, it is natural for human societies to achieve such an order, rather than degenerate into the Hobbesian war of all against all.

2. The natural decentralized order is, however, highly illiberal. It requires a set of social norms that bind the individual to the clan. Under the rule of the clan, peace is broken by feuds, commerce is crippled by the inability to put trade with strangers on a contractual basis, and individual autonomy is sacrificed for group solidarity.

3. In the absence of a strong central state, the rule of the clan is the inevitable result. In order to graduate from the society of Status to the society of Contract, you must have a strong central state.

Kling concludes that point 2 was most aptly demonstrated by the author and that point 3, while plausible, needs more evidence to be convincing. Weiner closes his book by warning against taking the state’s capacity for protecting a liberal social order for granted and regressing into the stifling and volatile collectivism of clannism. He raises an interesting question: We know that clan-based societies grow more liberal and less violent after they develop states, but would state-based societies grow less liberal if a decentralized order was to emerge and replace the state?

One point that Weiner did not explore in depth was the development of liberal morality that accompanied the rise of the state. Like Henry Maine, who was driven to write about the then-unappreciated distinctions between Societies of Status and Societies of Contract while immersed in the enchanting exotica of 19th century India, psychologist Jonathan Haidt first came to appreciate the deep differences between WEIRD and non-WEIRD moral systems while living among and learning from the Indian families that hosted him. There appears to be a strong association between the development of liberal states and the rise of WEIRD morality. This morality might be enough to save a modern post-state society from the illiberal byproducts of a decentralized order.

As John Hasnas has noted, we already live a large part of our lives in a decentralized order. Much of the order that we enjoy in our lives is not the direct result of government provision, but rather the product of tradition and experimentation among civic organizations and social groups. Where our ancestors’ clan identities used to broil over into honor brawls of all against all, we now channel these tensions into friendly sports rivalries, sorority philanthropic dance marathons, and company chili cook-offs. The state was probably instrumental in promoting the relative peace that allowed for the development of this new face of benign clannism, but this doesn’t mean that it hasn’t outlived its usefulness.

"… irrational passion for umlauts may have been his undoing"

Tue, 14 May 2013 08:39:20 -0400

“… irrational passion for umlauts may have been his undoing”

- Arika Okrent on Johann Schleyer (from “Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük.” The Public Domain Review, 17 October 2012)

surrealism: Happy Birthday, Salvador Dalí! Illustration from...

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:52:34 -0400

surrealism:

Happy Birthday, Salvador Dalí! Illustration from Alice in Wonderland, 1969. Watercolor on paper.

Audio

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:04:08 -0400

How Commerce Expands Culture

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:38:53 -0400

The view that we exist in a cultural wasteland is both popular and mistaken. Contemporary humans have unparalleled access to the greatest amounts and qualities of expressive media created in any point in our history. The fruits of the division of labor and specialization have grown so bountiful that we can eat our fill of the raw necessities of life while having enough left over to savor the nuances of delicate artisanal wines. The rise of capitalism has driven down the costs of producing and enjoying creative works; the supply and diversity of products has expanded accordingly. Still, the tempting allures of cultural pessimism stubbornly persist.

In this month’s edition of The Freeman, one member of the creative class airs his grievances towards his comrades’ penchants for rabidly gobbling subsidies to the arts stolen from the meager pockets of the army of baristas-slash-whatevers likewise struggling to make a splash in the art world. Comedian and writer Andrew Heaton decries the regressive injustice of extracting involuntary endowments for the arts from working class people to buttress the coffers of exquisite high society taste.

Heaton is right that people are made worse off when their hard-earned money is siphoned from the monster truck rallies and Croods that they would otherwise enjoy and diverted towards a $75,000 NEA grant to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra Hall so that Motown’s élite can enjoy a complete cycle of Beethoven’s works on the cheap. This criticism, however, falls on hollow nouveau aristocratic ears: they don’t care that fewer people can watch the Croods if it means that Beethoven will live on. Defenders of public arts funding argue that undirected market activity produces too many low-brow Psys and not enough high-brow Beethovens; they forget that Beethoven himself was a glorious agent of commerce and trade (and an old school pop artist, to boot).

Tyler Cowen extols the largely unappreciated virtues of capitalism as the driving force behind artistic development and dissemination in his book, In Praise of Commercial Culture. Plucking and presenting the most popular theories that drive cultural pessimism—among them conservative worries of degeneracy and decadence, gripes of capitalism’s corrupting mediocrity from the Frankfurt crowd, and multiculturalist concerns of global cultural whitewashing—Cowen demonstrates that each of them fail to recognize how commercial development assuages their artistic anxieties and expands high, low, and minority culture.

Take our friend Beethoven. His stellar musical rise was fueled by the productive powers of capitalism. The commercialization of the printing press allowed the Maestro to sell sheet music directly to middle class families and make a cozy artistic freelance living. Businessmen eager to peddle instruments to a growing middle class improved production and lowered the costs of owning a family piano, which drove demand for the sheet music that allowed classical composers to live free from the bondage of patronage. The rise of a wealthy merchant class allowed composers to work for private grants and performances, freed from the strictures of stuffy state and religious taste. Classical composers’ growing roles as businessmen in the developing music market allowed them unprecedented degrees of artistic freedom.

Classical music flourished in the fertile commercial culture of 19th century Germany and Austria without the meddling of the National Endowment for the Arts. Today, technological developments and growing wealth makes the case for government-subsidized culture all the more scant.

Not only is the market better for creative culture than most people realize, the state can be downright toxic to creative expression and cultural development. Elsewhere in the fresh pages of The Freeman, Mike Reid warns of the perils entrusting social culture to the brute purveyance of the state. The state exerts its tyranny on social culture through paternalism and imperialism. In the case of the Jarawa “primitives” of the Andaman Islands, their government’s desire to preserve their “pristine” culture resulted in laws that forcibly prevented these people from culturally assimilating. Elsewhere and more commonly, governments have enacted harebrained “culturalization” schemes to smother the traditions of indigenous people.

In the same way, when placed in a position to judge and cultivate artistic culture, the state oscillates between propping up stale established forms and attacking the avant-garde. Upon appointment as head of the state-controlled French musical Academy, composer Jean-Baptiste Lully refused to subsidize works that did not meet his particular taste; many years passed where his production was the only one bankrolled in the entire country. On the other side of the spectrum, the cool angles and industrial philosophy of Walter Gropius’s Staatliches Bauhaus was stifled by state cultural authorities in Nazi Germany. More recently, state funding for the arts has backed questionable works of middling quality for pure shock value (Piss Christ: never forget).

The areas in which the modern arts have most flourished are those that are the most commercial and free from the clumsy taste of the state. In her book The Substance of Style, Virginia Postrel chronicles the explosion of aesthetic options wrought by our growing global marketplace. Today, consumers survey seas of products that deliver solid functions and the perfect forms to suit more individualized tastes—all for a fraction of ugly earlier models’ costs. Echoing these observations, social critic Camille Paglia suggests that the relative stagnation in the visual arts is a result of modern artists’ disconnectedness and disdain for commercial culture. Industrial designers are driving renaissance of style and function because they are still tapped in to the creative forces of market activity.

There is no reason to believe that the state will be a responsible steward of our culture. Our cultural history gives us every reason to believe that capitalism will continue to provide the diversity and quality of forms that we have come to take for granted. The rich should shell out to pay for their own whimsies; the art world will thrive with or without this stolen “generosity.”

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Sat, 04 May 2013 17:37:27 -0400

angelou/basquiat

Fri, 03 May 2013 14:16:09 -0400

angelou/basquiat

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Wed, 01 May 2013 00:07:26 -0400

Government: Once Necessary, but Not Inevitable

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 21:20:00 -0400

Most people accept the desirability and necessity of a centralized state to maintain order and provide a basic standard of living for its wards. Like the old David Foster Wallace riff about the fish who don’t know that they’re living in water, it is very difficult for us to shake off the comforts of our daily routines and turn a dispassionate eye toward examining the mundane mysteries that undergird our social reality. For this reason, the claim that the state is actually undesirable and unnecessary strikes many as patently absurd.

The folks that are able to get past their initial shock at the suggestion of statelessness are in for a real intellectual treat: the body of anarcho-capitalist scholarship breathes new life into the hoary field of political philosophy with its critical analyses of deeply-held assumptions about society and governance. Even if you end up concluding that you disagree with the arguments put forth, you will likely find that you at least enjoyed mentally wrestling with the novelty of this theoretical ride.

The two pioneers that journeyed deepest into this avant-garde analysis of anarchism are Murray Rothbard and David Friedman. Rothbard epitomizes the view that the state is undesirable. He fashioned a deontological argument for a stateless society from the radicalized bones of Locke’s treatment of self-ownership and natural rights. Rothbard parted with the Lockean conception of the social contract and maintained that any violation of property rights–by an individual, group, or state–for any reason is immoral. In Rothbard’s view, the state is not only bad at doing things–its very existence is based on theft and extortion.

Friedman, on the other hand, maintains that the state is unnecessary. He made the case for statelessness on consequential grounds: in his view, anything the government can do, the private sector can do better. Friedman greets skeptics of the view that the private sector can better provide the core functions of government–like law, protection, and social insurance–with historical accounts of societies that did just this in addition to theoretical conjectures for how this system might function in the modern age.

Both Friedman’s and Rothbard’s contributions have been wildly influential within the community of state skeptics, but they have not gone without criticism. One critique was offered by Randall Holcombe in his essay, “Government: Unnecessary but Inevitable.” He argues that the efficiency and morality arguments for statelessness are moot because states are created for the benefit of those running them. They extract resources from their subjects under the guise of providing for the “public good.” The concept of statelessness is therefore inherently unstable: Salivating mafiosos will always lurk in the wings of any would-be prosperous society, ready to confiscate the fruits of their weaker subjects’ labors. Constitutionally constraining our existing states as placeholders to thwart potentially-worse politicos is therefore the most prudent course of action.

Our unfortunate historical record of statelessness seems to support Holcombe’s view. Stateless societies tend to be some combination of bellicose, short-lived, or unprosperous. The Yanomamö people of the Amazon jungle, for instance, are a modern stateless society that lives under constant threat of intertribal war fueled by honor and the lust for women and power. Another stateless society, the people of the unorganized territory of Zomia, was famously documented by James C. Scott in his anthropological study, The Art of Not Being Governed. Although these people were able to resist state control and achieve a level of relative peace, the costs of this lifestyle–including nonliteracy, living in inhospitable terrains, and maintaining limited contact with the outside world–are a high price to pay for statelessness. The examples of statelessness that David Friedman provides as proofs-of-concept for decentralized law and protection, like medieval Iceland, while interesting and relevant, might be the exception rather than the norm.

In his analysis of the historical decline of global violence, evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker found that stateless societies have suffered from rates of violence unseen in societies that developed states. He notes that there are exceptions and recognizes that states are ultimately predicated upon the threat of violence and tacit extortion, but the association between societies with states and lower levels of violence is undeniable. This decrease in violence would then have created the conditions necessary to develop a system of private property and exchange. Since the state is simply an institutionalized threat of violence, how could it be associated with a decline in violence?

Traditional political philosophy focuses on the state’s capacity as a lawmaker and keeper of order to explain the relative peace that results. This is no doubt part of the story, but it overlooks the critical role that morality and culture play in civilizing man. In fact, Pinker ultimately credits our expansion of cultural values, and not solely the state, as the force that extinguishes rates of violence. To understand what role the state played in propelling this phenomenon, we need to understand the moral realities of pre-state societies and how cultural morality develops.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt discusses the differences between moral systems in developed countries and developing countries in his book The Righteous Mind. There are large differences between the moral systems found in societies he dubs “WEIRD” (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and developed) and those in non-WEIRD (read: developing) countries. People living in non-WEIRD countries view themselves and others less as individuals and more as members of a group. They more strictly adhere to all six moral foundations than people living in WEIRD countries do, possibly to their detriment. Three of the foundations, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation, are socially illiberal and constraining. These attributes are not the most ideal for participation in a global system of trade predicated upon individual property rights and freedom of association.

We can observe that the dominant moral matrices of modern developing states are less-than-perfectly-compatible with participation in a liberal system based on the primacy of the individual. Imagine, then, how difficult it would have been for a newly-minted agricultural revolutionary to develop enough trust among his neighbors to decentrally develop the institutions that are necessary to promote property rights, rule of law, and prosperity. Might the state have been a cultural spandrel that allowed for the rapid development of morality and culture for heterogeneous, open societies? Even if a state was originally created for the benefit of a stationary bandit, the fortuitous reduction in violence that resulted might have been what created the conditions necessary for many societies to develop the prosperity and morality needed to eventually subvert its grabbing hand.

Whether arising from the direct reduction of violence through the state’s capacity as the keeper of order, or as an accidental adaptation built on a tendency for the strong to exploit the weak, the rise of the state is associated a reduction in violence and increase in conditions that are favorable for trade and growth. At a time when the milk of human morality was only reserved for one’s closest kin, the reduction in violence brought on by the brute force of the state allowed for the development of commerce and culture that has since made the state unnecessary. Our modern development of WEIRD morality suggests that the state is not inevitable. Anarcho-capitalism can one day exist, but it will not be evenly distributed.

Audio

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 14:35:54 -0400

wild nothing - a dancing shell

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:18:26 -0400

wild nothing - a dancing shell

Don’t [Fuel a Moral] Panic!

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:20:33 -0400

In the aftermath of the horrific bombing of the Boston Marathon, Americans immediately looked for an explanation of what led to this senseless loss of life. Before the streets of Boston were even cleaned (and subsequently pressed under martial law), commentators looked for answers in the few digital droppings and breathless testimonials from the reeling friends that brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev left behind. Theories about their motives still abound, but some early crowd favorites were that the brothers were bullied or socially excluded, sociopaths, or militant radical Islamists. Of course, all three of those things could conceivably be true, but ex-post rationalizations havelimited explanatory power. We may never have a full understanding of why certain people choose to do evil.

This, of course, does not stop us from trying. Far before public acts of violence became the new normal, our first reactions to a man-made disaster were to diagnose the assailant and build systems of prevention for the antisocial characteristics that we identified. More often than not, these solutions proved to do more harm than good.

The fallout from Columbine is a good example. The student-led attacks on Columbine high school shocked America awake from the global, halcyon dream world of the Pax Clintonia. Commentators quickly condemned the bully culture that permeated American schools as the straw that the broke these troubled boys’ backs.

Facing the dire consequences of potential mass student terrorism, America was instantly gripped by a moral hysteria against the bullying plague. Hoping to prevent another Columbine, parents, activists, politicians, and media personalities lobbied for increased funding for anti-bullying programs and Zero Tolerance Policies that stiffly upped punishments for “bullies.” Schools created a large administrative apparatus to categorize and identify instances of bullying and dole out punishments deemed appropriate for the severity of the crime. Educators started closely monitoring and intervening in the previously free world of student interactions. No cost appeared too high to save The Children™ from themselves.

There was one big problem: Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t actually bullied.

Although the narrative that fueled America’s War on Children Bullies was the stuff of imagination, the residual administrative-bully-complex that resulted is still very real. It is also counterproductive, argues educator Susan Eva Porter in her new book on the subject.

Porter’s arguments are many and detailed, but they boil down to the observation that state-set standards for permissible private behaviors lack nuance, introduce conflict, and simultaneously exaggerate and amplify the problem it tries to solve. Rather than tasking educators to merely mediate bad behaviors that come and go throughout childhood, we now issue them label guns to christen young children with static roles—bully, victim, bystander, ally—that are integrated into their still-budding identities.

Children accused of bullying do not get the help that they desperately need and view themselves as hopeless aggressors. Children labeled as victims find it harder to psychologically heal and develop less resilient psyches. Our anxieties that our children may be bullied cause us to see bullying everywhere; the definition of what constitutes “bullying” has progressively expanded in tandem with the alarming statistics that cause more alarm and more counterproductive measures. Our false diagnosis of a problem produced a solution that made the problem worse.

These observations echo many made half a century ago by a psychiatrist monitoring the state of his profession. Thomas Szasz was concerned about psychiatry’s growing role as the final arbiter of human conduct and permissible activities. Behaviors that doctors considered to be socially undesirable were explained away and dealt with by slapping the label of mental illness on collections of traits. The poor souls that bear these bundles are institutionalized and their cognitive cases are closed: each new development in that person’s life will be analyzed through the lens of the label that was given to them.

Mental illness is routinely offered as an alternative explanation for random acts of public violence like the recent shootings in Newton and Aurora, which would make the need to control mental illness (read: people) all the more imperative. Each new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders expands the criteria for mental illness while discarding now-acceptable behaviors, like homosexuality, and adding behaviors that have since fallen into disfavor. If there is a crisis of mental illness, it is at least partially because we have created it.

Like children who are labeled as victims, people who bear the stigma of mental illness face an extra psychological hurdle in pursuing a recovery that may never come. Like whistle-happy school administrators who zealously target formerly-innocuous student transgressions to avoid the burden of liability, earnest psychiatrists are quick to see the inflating patterns for which they are looking and diagnose accordingly. A tangled web results: of state desires for social control, medical professionals itching for subjects, pharmaceutical corporations all too eager to sell salvation, and a very confused patient who just wants to feel better but is told that he can’t on his own because of neurological forces beyond his control.

Despite the varied forms that moral panics can take, they share several common features. Each involves a highly emotional, usually violent, subject matter which is crystallized in the public imagination by a dramatic national event. In our efforts to prevent these horrors from ever happening again, we turn to state-sanctioned standards of behavior to help us categorize and identify potential threats to public safety. This approach creates a new form of social control guided by fear. Not only do these methods come at a huge loss to our civil liberties and freedoms of association, they are usually ineffective and harm the groups that most need help.

The social fallout from the attack in Boston is still being revealed, but it has the makings of a destructive moral hysteria. Be wary, but please don’t panic.

an upside-down world

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:30:00 -0400

how should you tell the world that you wrote a book?

Audio

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 18:46:04 -0400

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Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:27:26 -0400