Big Piranha Brothers, Inc.

"Oh yes Kipling Road was a typical East End Street, people were in and out of each other's houses with each other's property all day. They were a cheery lot."

Billmon:

If someone would just translate The Leviathan into modern colloquial English – or even better, turn it into a comic book – I think Shrub might discover a new favorite philosopher...

The ultimate enemy, in the Hobbesian universe, is anarchy – the dreaded war of the all against the all – in which human life is rapidly reduced to its natural state: “solitary, poor nasty, brutish and short.” Even the most ruthless repression is preferable to that horror...

...riots and sectarian hatred were as common in the slums of London and Paris as they are today in the streets of Baghdad, although without the heavy explosives. Hobbes’s Leviathan – for all his attempts to build up its confidence – was really just the largest piranha, swimming in a pool filled with piranhas.

Two world wars, a dozen genocides and innumerable police states later, the piranha truly has grown into a whale: an armor-plated, nuclear-armed, supercomputing whale with a bad case of paranoia. An tyrannical state may still be preferable to sheer anarchy – as the citizens of Baghdad learn nightly – but it’s a closer contest than it was in 1651.

One reason for that shift in the balance of dread is the rise of a new form of state organization – the bureaucracy, which exists partially inside and partially outside of Hobbes’s three categories of government, borrowed from Aristotle, and their modern equivalents: monarchy (or dictatorship), aristocracy (or oligarchy) and democracy (or the representative republic.)...

It’s essentially mindless, driven by a set of basic imperatives, of which the most relentless is the urge to grow, to expand both in size and power. To paraphrase Edward Abbey: It has the ideology of a cancer cell.

This is particularly true when the officials at the top of the heap – who are theoretically in the driver’s seat – are either incompetent, corrupt (and thus not inclined to challenge the status quo) or driven by their own personal imperatives, such as obsessive fear of external or internal enemies...

But what makes the program so scary, at least to me, isn’t the possibility that it was built to serve some sinister purpose, like subverting what’s left of American democracy (which is scary enough) but rather that it may be the end product of a national security bureaucracy running completely out of control -- even more so now than during the worst years of the Cold War. Rogue actors can still be voted out of office, even impeached. But a rogue Leviathan is another story.

I’m certainly no technical expert, but I find it really hard to believe that collecting such a staggering horde – 2 trillion call records since 2001 – will yield useful intelligence about a relatively small and increasingly amorphous network of clandestine operatives who by now have almost certainly learned not to use the phones...

But phone records, of course, are just the electronic frosting on Big Brother’s birthday cake...

William Arkin has posted a list on his Washingtonpost.com blog of some 500 different DoD data mining packages, which appear to cover everything -- financial records, medical records, e-mail headers, fingerprints, insurance investigation files, news reports, and God knows what else...

... it reflects some powerful, built-in trends that are driving the national security Leviathan in that very direction. These include, roughly in ascending order of importance:

* The U.S. intelligence community’s traditional faith in technology as the all-purpose solution to its obvious deficiencies in human intelligence gathering.

* The even more long-standing tradition – at work since the first Europeans arrived on the continent – of substituting cheap capital (processor chips) for expensive labor (spooks.)

* The economic need to stuff the giant, gaping maw of the defense industry with IT contracts, and the willingness of guys like Brent Wilkes to hand out poker chips and pussy in order to obtain same.

* The complete lack of any countervailing force in American politics, to the point where it is no longer possible to imagine any president – much less a retired general – standing up to warn his fellow citizens about the growing power of the military-industrial complex.

* The replication of the behavior and values of that same complex throughout corporate America and in American society as a whole.

...The millions of Americans, like yours truly, who work in the corporate or public sector white collar world have already grown accustomed to a loss of personal privacy and a degree of social control that make Pentagon data mining look like an ACLU fundraising dinner.

We know our phone calls and emails may be and often are monitored, that company net nannies will stop us from visiting certain web sites (and not just porn pages: I’ve been blocked out of labor union sites, progressive political sites – even that notorious left-wing web magazine, Slate.) We know that if we say the wrong thing to a company snitch it could be reported to our supervisors, that those reports could end up in our personnel files, and that really serious thought crimes could cost us our jobs. We know the security cameras may record when we walk in the door and when we leave. We know we can’t make certain jokes or raise certain topics because they might be construed as sexual harassment. We know how to smile and feign enthusiasm when the pointy-haired boss has a really dumb idea. We know what a cult of personality looks like, because it looks like our CEO...

it is a training ground of sorts, a place where habits of thought and social roles are acquired and reinforced – patterns that are then reflected in the popular culture. The lesson learned is submission to authority, or at least the passive acceptance of hierarchical relationships. It teaches people to be good bureaucrats, and good bureaucrats understand that if the organization is tapping phones – or infecting test subjects with syphilis or dumping toxic waste in rivers or shipping undesirable people off to concentration camps – it must have a good reason.

The result is a social contract that owes a lot to Thomas Hobbes. In exchange for the economic security that corporations provide – a degree of shelter from an anarchic global market – we willingly, if grudgingly (at least in my case) give up a hefty share of our freedom and an even bigger chunk of our privacy.

..an awfully large number of our fellow citizens have already decided, or have been conditioned to believe, that it’s better to be subjects and let others make the hard decisions for them.

...Leviathan, in other words, is almost free of any restraint, save the arbitrary limits – such as they may be – set by the Cheney administration or, perhaps more importantly, by custom and habit. The creature doesn’t know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn’t tried to do them yet. But it’s starting to figure this out, and it’s going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down...

Learn to love the Leviathan. You're going to live with the Beast if you live here:

Vince: "Well one day I was at home threatening the kids when I looks out through the hole in the wall and sees this tank pull up and out gets one of Dinsdale's boys, so he comes in nice and friendly and says Dinsdale wants to have a word with me, so he chains me to the back of the tank and takes me for a scrape round to Dinsdale's place and Dinsdale's there in the conversation pit with Doug and Charles Paisley, the baby crusher, and two film producers and a man they called 'Kierkegaard', who just sat there biting the heads of whippets and Dinsdale says 'I hear you've been a naughty boy Clement' and he splits me nostrils open and saws me leg off and pulls me liver out and I tell him my name's not Clement and then... he loses his temper and nails me head to the floor."

Interviewer: He nailed your head to the floor?

Vince: At first yeah

Presenter: Another man who had his head nailed to the floor was Stig O' Tracy.

Interviewer: I've been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.

Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me..."

All it takes is a little attitude adjustment, and the Kool-Aid goes down fine.