June 21, 2010 at 12:55 P.M. One letter was removed from this essay and from "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script." I have corrected both inserted "errors."
April 21, 2010 at 11:04 A.M. This essay was, once more, disfigured. I have made the necessary corrections. I expect that these tactics will continue to be used as part of induced frustration efforts meant to discourage all writing by me. Censorship, suppressions of speech, denials of publication efforts or access to images will be routine in my writing life. All efforts to obtain the truth from New Jersey continue to be greeted with silence. ("Is Senator Bob 'For' Human Rights?" and "Senator Bob Struggles to Find His Conscience.")
February 28, 2010 at 1:40 P.M. An attempt to access "White Collar" on Free Prime Time a little while ago was blocked by a notice labelled "Error 101." I am sure that this is only a coincidence and entirely due to "Time/Warner" graphics. Is this a referrence to Room 101 in Orwell's 1984?
January 5, 2010 at 3:46 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in essays and corrected, as usual. Nothing changes. Same old, same old.
December 8, 2009 at 8:48 A.M. I encountered obstacles in reaching this site this morning. I am running a full scan of my computer as I type these words.
December 2, 2009 at 9:19 A.M. A letter was deleted from a word since my previous review and spacing was affected in "The Heidegger Controversy." I have made the necessary corrections. For the rationale and goals of this harassment effort and the source of the protocol, see "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory." The objective is to maximize nerve damage and long-term psychological harm to a designated victim through induced frustrations, anxieties, financial pressures, together with disconfirmations and denials of identity as well as undermining self-esteem. The goal is for the victim to accept a status as a sub-human worthy of exploitation and enslavement. This "acceptance" should never be given. (See the C.I.A.'s so-called, "Bluebird Manual." Many of these tactics have been "tested" on African-American revolutionaries.)
November 26, 2009 at 9:25 A.M. "Error" inserted overnight. I have now corrected that "error." The goal is to destroy a mind and intelligence that is feared. Why? ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.") 1988-today. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
November 24, 2009 at 6:13 P.M. More "errors" were inserted in this essay since my review a few hours ago. I will make the necessary corrections. (Again: "Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
November 24, 2009 at 1:46 P.M. "Error" inserted and corrected since this morning. I cannot say how many other essays have been vandalized.
November 24, 2009 at 9:38 A.M. An advertisement was imposed on this site against my will: "Small Business Network, Connect with small business for ideas, jobs & employees! Free. http://www.PartnerUp.com/ " Allegedly, this advertisement emanates from: "Ads by Google." ("What is it like to be tortured?")
November 24, 2009 at 8:58 A.M. Spacing was affected in this essay hours after I posted it last night. Overnight a single word was deleted from the text. I have now restored that word to the essay. For an example of the harassment process to which my writings are subjected, see "The Heidegger Controversy." ("Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'")
Perhaps with the departure of Mr. Codey and Speaker Roberts, minimal decency will return to (or arrive at) Trenton and, at least, a pretense will be made at compliance with the Constitution of the United States of America. This is a slim hope, but it is all we have. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
November 23, 2009 at 1:04 P.M. Attacks on this essay must be expected over the next few days. I will make corrections as quickly as possible. ("Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "Is American Legal Ethics a Lie?")
"The Prisoner," Sunday, November 15, 2009 at 8:00 P.M. through Tuesday, November 17, 2009 at 8:00 P.M. AMC, Granada ("Brideshead Revisited") and ITV ("Lost in Jane Austen") Productions. Director: Nick Hurran; Written by Bill Gallagher (bravos!); Starring: Ian McKellen (Two); Jim Caviezel (Six); Hayley Atwell (4-15); Ruth Wilson (313); Lennie James (147); Rachael Blake (M2); and Jamie Campbell Bower (11-12).
Alessandra Stanley, "Rethinking of a Number Between 1 and 10," in The New York Times, November 13, 2009, at p. C1. (The Times reviewer did not get this series.)
Benedict Carey, "Surgery for Mental Ills Offers Hope and Risk," in The New York Times, November 27, 2009, at p. A1. (The return of lobotomy as an instrument of normalization. When applied involuntarily and secretly, as it would be in New Jersey, this "weapon" against "abnormals" threatens all of us. I am sure that, if the technique were available in the late eighties, I would have been subjected, involuntarily, to such brain surgery.)
Herman Hesse, Magister Ludi: The Glass Bead Game (New York: Henry Holt, 1963). (A parable similar to "The Prisoner" written by the German Nobel prize winner shortly after the Holocaust.)
Introduction: "Richard Nixon in Hell."
This comment on "The Prisoner" by Alessandra Stanley is a sad indication of the state of "reviewing" in today's journalism. None of the people evaluating movies and t.v. shows for America's premier newspaper these days deserves to be called a "critic" -- with the possible exception of Janet Maslin. The reader of these articles is treated to daily displays of the current prejudices and fashions among Upper West Side hipsters, of a certain age, typically enjoying the correct ethnicity and gender as well as sexual-orientations. No, this does not describe me.
The one thing that may not be said about this television series is that it suffers from a "postmodern fatigue with ideology and big thoughts." Ms. Stanley goes on to observe: "It's still a British production" -- alluding to the sixties' original series that inspired this remake -- "but now the hero is an American from New York City, a sign that when it comes to far-reaching conspiracies, the sun has set on the British empire."
Aside from resorting to such an original phrase, the problem here is that the reviewer does not realize that this story is a political allegory, among other things. "The Prisoner" is all about ideology. The show is a detailed critique of ideological rationalizations of evil. The reason that Number 6 is a New Yorker has to do with the judgments made in this work concerning post-9/11 America. The presence of the Twin Towers, as a symbol, should make this obvious. (World Trade Center, pre-catastrophe.)
The spellbound t.v. viewers undistracted even by the possible death of a member of their family from their idiotic t.v. fare may be a comment on the viewers of this very show. We are the morons sitting before our t.v. sets passively accepting a view of the world from the likes of Number 2. Tragically, this is probably an accurate description of Ms. Stanley. Ms. Stanley's comments concerning Melanie Griffith, as I recall, in "Viva Laughlin" were unfortunate and inappropriate. Michael Sandel, "Herbert Marcuse's America," in The Company of Critics (New York: Basic Books, 2002), pp. 178-184.
" ... Marcuse writes with bland assurance, [of] 'moronization.' It isn't easy to accept his parallel assurance that the culture of consumption is far better than what came before we were morons!). Marcuse asks us to believe in the existence of people instantly and totally responsive to modern commercial advertising, instantly and totally content [like the residents of the "Village"?] once they have purchased the advertised goods and services. [Antonio cologne.] But I don't know many people like that."
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 184-199 and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), pp. 129-238.
Freud's picture is displayed prominently in "The Prisoner" which clues us in to the engagement with a postmodernist-Marxist reading of Civilization and Its Discontents. This film is a radical political reworking of the original series because it is a vicious attack on America's current role in the world. It is also a mythological exploration of issues of freedom, power, justice and identity. The work explores philosophical-logical puzzles in the context of various familiar thought-experiments in philosophy. The Oxford created "Prisoner's Dilemma" gets a Parisian make-over. Mythologically, the obvious sources for the writer are John Milton's masterpiece, "Paradise Lost" and Shakespeare's poetry. There are also echoes of Kafka and Borges, Alex Garland and Michael Moorcock. Mr. Moorcock's classic Behold the Man (New York: Avon, 1968) and Mr. Garland's The Beach (London & New York: Penguin, 1997) must be sources for the scriptwriter.
Buddha's struggles against Mara -- the trickster-god and deceiver -- parallel the "prisoner's" adventures. Ironically, Number 2 is a trickster-god with all the charm of Shakespeare's Prospero mixed with Falstaff and Iago. Number 2 becomes the analogue of George W. Bush or Dick Cheney. Milton's Lucifer is transformed into a Republican politician. This is Richard Nixon in hell. The residents of the Village are Nixon's "silent majority," coopted by Reagan and both Bushes into doing their bit for America by "adjusting" to being deprived of their freedoms. Gore Vidal's An Evening With Richard Nixon should be read after seeing this series. Among the predecessors of this work are "The Truman Show" and "Mumford." Stephen Bachelor, Living With the Devil: A Meditation on Good and Evil (New York: Riverhead, 2004), pp. 17-29. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script" and "The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
Psychologically, the dystopias of Huxley and Orwell -- in particular, Huxley's fears concerning the complicity of psychology and bio-chemistry in the process of enslaving populations -- are invoked under the shadow of an Abu Ghraib-like facility for "re-training" Villagers failing to "adjust." The works of Michel Foucault anticipate many of the issues dramatized here: the way power insinuates itself into the tissues of its victims -- which is all of us to some extent -- shaping the subjectivities of those who surrender their humanity as well as those who resist enslavement. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1979), pp. 135-170 ("Docile Bodies"). Please compare Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Anchor, 1971), pp. 73-123 ("Marx's Early Writings").
Resistance is always called for among us "dreamers" -- that is, artists, intellectuals, revolutionaries, philosophers, all of the "really weird" people in society:
"For at least three decades now, behavior specialists in particular, and consultative experts on life's problems and conduct in general, have constituted themselves the chief outriders of the false and dangerous concept of adjustment. More cogently, in countless cases, by therapeutic and educational devices and practices arising from a preoccupation with adjustment, by the weight of their authority, prestige and influence, they have literally forced people into the mold and co-operated in the establishment of a quietus on protest. ... They operate chiefly by the process of weaning a sufferer from the form of protest which expressed his woe [Number 2's "wife"?] and they broadly ignore the woe itself. ..." (emphasis added)
Robert Lidner, The Revolutionist's Handbook (New York: Grove-Zebra, 1971), pp. 15-17, then Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage, 1974), pp. 87-97 ("Bread and Freedom" and "Letter to a German Friend").
John Milton's protest is echoed at several points in this "film-narrative" which poses a hermeneutic challenge: "Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties." A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644), then Fidel Castro, "Che Guevara," in Revolution: Faces of Change (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000), p. 2. ("For the man who fell, as a mortal man, as a man who faced bullets time and again, as a soldier, as a leader, was a thousand times more able than those who killed him by a stroke of luck.")
Perhaps they killed Che while his back was turned to his murderers. This is a method still used to destroy persons that is very popular in New Jersey and among Right-wingers. Right, Senator Bob? ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")
Friedrich Nietzsche's theory concerning fragmentation of the psyche through power-relations into "multiplicities" is another obvious reference. Leslie Paul Thiele, "The Politics of the Soul: The Soul as a Plurality" and "The Well-Ordered Soul," in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study in Heroic Individualism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 51-99 and Mark Warren, Nietzsche and Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 227-237 ("Nietzsche's Political Elaborations of the Will to Power"), then David Ingram, "Foucault and Habermas on the Subject of Reason," in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Michel Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 215-261 and Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 44-60 and G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, On the Line (New York & Paris: Semiotexte, 1983), pp. 84-113. (See the mirror scene in "Inception.")
The organic theory of the state is adumbrated in the model of the psyche, as "disturbed," only to the extent that it retains freedom and personality from the collectivity. The Village is a psychic territory and also a social experiment. We are told that we must "assimilate or die." Freud meets Plato, then they go out to dinner with Hegel and Marx. The effects of trauma and shock on a mind are abstracted to the level of collective mind or social theory. Just as persons may be driven to violence through psychological stress and manipulations leading to terminal shock, so entire cultures may go mad and abandon their values in crazy efforts to "domesticate" and control defenseless populations, including children and old people, after tragedies like 9/11. All of us must resist the concerted and well-planned efforts to transform us into "gladiators" for the powerful. Perhaps robot bombs will be fired into enclaves of political radicals on the Berkeley campus. John Le Carre, "The United States Has Gone Mad," in Not One More Death (New York & London: Verso, 2006), p. 11. ("America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember[.]")
I will focus on the concept of evil as "political-therapy" aimed at subjectivation; I will then turn to the concepts of love examined in this series. "The Prisoner" expresses doubts concerning the capacity of postmodern beings to feel genuine love under conditions of alienation, fragmentation, and mutual suspicion; finally, I turn to "quantum metaphysics." Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality (New York: Anchor, 1985) and Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Plume, 2001).
Parallel universes are to be expected not only as a product of quantum physics, but also socially -- for fragmented and compartmentalized selves interacting with other "pieces" of human beings recovering from mass-manufactured death as spectacle and entertainment. Days after 9/11, American insurance companies were offering "death planning kits." ("It's never too early or late to prepare!")
"This notion of psychological defense is of major importance. The whole of psychoanalysis has centered around it. An investigation of the unconscious, a search for infantile traumas, the freeing of a libido that supposedly existed behind all the phenomena of the affective life, an uncovering of such mythical impulses as the death instinct -- psychoanalysis has long been just this; but it is tending more and more to turn its attention to the defense mechanisms and finally to admit that the subject reproduces his history only because he responds to a PRESENT situation." (Foucault commenting on Bingswanger, p. xiv.) Please compare Willem Van Reijen, "The Enlightenment Devours its Children," in Adorno: An Introduction (Philadelphia: Pennbridge Books, 1992), pp. 33-43.
Number 6 is a resident of both a bleak mental Village and a post-apocalyptic New York, filled with people who can only connect "for a little while," without real communication or self-giving, dominated by dark corporations and mysterious powers of surveillance, security, and control. The show begins to feel like a documentary. Part of what is suggested in this narrative is that persons dwelling in such shattered territories -- whether psychological or political -- are in danger of being forced to "adjust" to a passive, almost dead condition. We are in danger of dying, inadvertedly, without allowing our demise to disturb our busy schedules or tax planning.
Death is indeed a lingering off-stage presence -- holes that appear in the Village and that seem to lead nowhere symbolize the death that awaits all of us -- even as schizoid division is a constant danger in the individual's journey towards integration. The resolution of this drama has to do with the possibility of self-sacrifice, fulfilling the Christian allegory in a manner that would make Milton proud. Loving others is "Paradise Regained." ("Out of the Past.")
What is analogized to the afterlife is not the semi-life of the Villagers who are distracted by entertainment or medicated into oblivion. The underworld or landscape of death is the so-called "real world" of New York after the impossible has become possible. We are the undead. We are the dreamers. We are all victims of broken minds. We are potential terrorists subject to control and surveillance in the totalitarian society that America is slowly becoming. Observe your neighbors. Inform on mom and dad. Is your child a terrorist? Are you potentially dangerous? If not, why not? In the aftermath of trauma, persons and nations become paranoid. Defensive. Mr. Cheney would remind us that even paranoid persons and nations have real enemies. ("Morality Tale.")
"It is never too early or late to prepare!"
I. "Assimilate or Die!": Thoughts on the Problem of Evil in the Age of Therapy.
Ian McKellen deserves an Emmy for this performance. Mr. McKellen understands the demonic brio of this character -- Number 2. The great British actor's performance is enriched by knowing allusions to Milton and Dante. Mr. McKellen, clearly, is a very well-read man. Byron's "Don Juan" -- who is torn between lovers -- hovers in the mind, as Mr. Caviezel suggests this figure, but we see, also, the more puzzling archetype of Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell." Sartre's "No Exit" is a way of dramatizing this "prisoner's dilemma." I wonder whether Mr. McKellen has "played" Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus"? As in Sartre's great essay "Anti-Semite and Jew," Number 2 and "The Prisoner" are involved in an intricate dance or dialectic of freedom against necessity. Freedom wins. I hope. ("Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
Both women in this series are hauntingly beautiful and beguiling -- especially Ms. Atwell --seducing audience members into sharing Number 6's dilemma. Ms. Atwell's flawless New York accent is a miracle of British thespians' concern with technique and preparation. Ms. Atwell's character is "blind" in the Village -- like Milton, Borges, and so many blind "visionaries." James Joyce? Is this the blindness of love? Or is this blindness a way of seeing more truly from the heart? ("'Brideshead Revisited': A Movie Review" and "'The Matrix': A Movie Review.")
Alessandro Ferrara has devoted considerable philosophical attention to the phenomenon of evil in postmodernist cultural spaces within the blasted psyches produced by cultural-overload or -shock. Professor Ferrara's work develops in relation to the monuments examining absolute evil after the Holocaust. We see the essential importance of those Twin Towers. For me, 9/11-like horror has been a twenty-one year (and counting) experience:
"I will start from the assumption that radical evil -- provisionally defined as that which is repugnant to our conscience to bring into any kind of relation to the good, even into opposition to the good -- is never pursued directly by human beings. As Plato reminds us in 'Protagoras,' no one commits evil actions while thinking that they are evil. ["This is for your own good."] People commit evil actions while carried away by their misconceived views of the good. ["The Patriot Act."] A similar point is made by Kant. In the section called 'Man is Evil by Nature' of book 1 of Religion Within the Province of Reason Alone, Kant points out that 'man (even the most wicked one) does not, under any maxim whatsoever, repudiate the moral law in the manner of a rebel (renouncing obedience to it). [That's Milton's "Lucifer."] In fact, a 'reason exempt from the moral law' or a 'malignant reason' or a 'thoroughly evil will' cannot, according to Kant, be a human form of reason. [Such a totally evil person abdicates his or her humanity.] It can only be a form of reason of a devilish being. [Inhuman.] The evil person, instead, is distinct from the morally good one neither by the absence of the moral law in her heart (for Kant the moral law is innate to our inner constitution qua moral subjects) nor simply by her receptiveness to incentives of a sensuous nature (for also that receptiveness is equally part of every human subject), but rather is set apart from the good person on the basis of the priority she accords to sensuous incentives, over the moral law, in shaping the maxims of her conduct."
Alessandro Ferrara, "The Evil That Men Do: A Meditation on Radical Evil From a Postmetaphysical Point of View," in Maria Pia Lara, ed., Rethinking Evil (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), pp. 173-188. ("An Open Letter to My Torturers in New Jersey, Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli.")
By this understanding, the evil person is afflicted with a pathological GREED for sensation or possessions, control or domination of others, combined with satisfaction of selfish pleasures regardless of the suffering caused to others. Ginarte? Garcia? Notice that Number 2 is not alone:
"Hitler and the other Nazi leaders presented themselves not simply as military leaders, but also as 'collective physicians' who would take the adequate measures for eradicating what they had discovered -- namely, the ominous consequences of a racial virus called 'international judentum,' [Patricia Cohen?] which had begun to spread its effects everywhere [Al Qaeda?] but with particular virulence in Germany. World history was recast as a biological lab -- where Rassenhygiene, racial hygiene, became the main imperative." (Ferrara, p. 176.) ("The Heidegger Controversy.")
Adjustment. The goal was to produce a Village of healthy and beautiful "Aryan" children and adults. A Pax Americana. No homosexuals. No Communists and socialists. No annoying intellectuals to question everything. No little brown people adhering to strange religions. Everyone would be practical and law-abiding: "Family is very important to the healthy community." (Joseph Goebbels) No "reinventing" the family. No insistence on the right of persons to love others freely and non-exclusively. ("Is there a gay marriage right?") The autonomy of conscience must be forbidden. Everything is subject to invasion by the state, through hypnosis and interrogation, perhaps, a state that acts secretly on the lives of its victims. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?" soon "What is it like to be raped?")
Not surprisingly, the bioevolutionary project that the Nazis introduced and which fascinated Foucault in his late work ("biotechnology" and "bioethics") features a concern with "masculine courage" and "feminine demureness" or chastity. This is our old enemy, racism. Fascism. Family values? Christopher R. Browning, "Ordinary Men," in Donald L. Niewyk, ed., The Holocaust (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2003), pp. 76-91. ("How does a Jew become Mengele?")
Now let us turn to America's embrace of evil: Christopher Kutz, "The Lawyers Know Sin: Complicity in Torture," in Karen J. Greenberg, ed., The Torture Debate in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 241-247 and Mark Danner, "The Depositions: The Prisoners Speak," in Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: NYRB, 2004), pp. 225-249. (The way to oppose terror is through terror and torture.) Please compare "America's Unethical Medical Torturers" with "Is America's Legal Ethics a Lie?"
Sometimes you have to destroy a village in order to save a village. Perhaps this logic has caused our leaders to protect our Constitutional freedoms and rights by violating them. Unfortunately, my writings are suppressed, vandalized, plagiarized, and censored in America. ("How Censorship Works in America" and "Censorship and Cruelty in New Jersey.")
These thoughts may find their way to readers in the world who will be able to articulate similar concerns, making use of popular culture and works of art -- like "The Prisoner" -- to explore these issues which should be discussed today in America and the world. Someday, it may be possible for these essays to be published outside of America. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?")
The obvious turn to Hannah Arendt's philosophical corpus is unavoidable. Not so much Eichman in Jerusalem, but Professor Arendt's later weary and sad meditations on the systematic nature of evil in our times. We moderns are the only humans to have created "factories" of torture and death. We have chosen in America, in the words of Mr. Cheney, to "go to the dark side." I do not believe that history will judge this Bush/Cheney decision in favor of torture to have been successful or wise. Torture has guaranteed us generations of enemies in the world. Our prison policies have guaranteed us generations of criminals in America. ("Psychological Torture in the American Legal System.")
"It was the totalitarian attempt to make human beings ... superflous by transforming them into something other than (and less than) human, that led her to the themes and questions that are so prominent in The Human Condition. I fully agree with Margaret Canovan, one of the few interpreters of Arendt who traces in detail the trains of thought that led from The Origins of Totalitarianism to The Human Condition, when she writes: 'Not only is The Human Condition itself much more closely related to The Origins of Totalitarianism than it appears to be, but virtually the entire agenda of Arendt's political thought was set by her reflections on the mid-century. ... "
Richard Bernstein, "Arendt: Radical Evil and the Banality of Evil," in Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (New York & London: Polity, 2002), pp. 212-213.
" ... What is it about superflousness [being an "object,"] that makes this evil so distinctive and so radical? [Is it like being Ralph Ellison's "invisible man"?] It is not exclusively the humiliation, torture, and systematic murder of millions (Jews and non-Jews). It is also the hubris of those totalitarian leaders who think they are omnipotent, that they can rival a God who created a plurality of human beings." (Ibid.) ("David Remnick" or "Daniel Mendelsohn"? "What is it like to be plagiarized?")
Torturers say: "We are the gods." These Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torturers are our self-professed "superiors." The Villagers are slaves. Are you a slave? Please compare Richard Bernstein, "Evil and the Corruption of Religion," in The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion Since 9/11 (New York & London: Polity, 2005), pp. 96-97. ("The widespread use of torture and deliberate humiliation [by Americans] not only at Abu Ghraib, but throughout Iraq.")
This is the hell depicted in "The Prisoner": America as a bizarre and twisted version of Dick Cheney's "wet dream" of power. This is the America that is seen by the world at this moment in our history. A Disneyworld fantasy of normality and order, self-righteous, prescriptive, greedy, intolerant of dissent or contradiction which is also amazingly beautiful and hopeful as well as morally concerned, unable to come to terms with its so-called "dark side," still judgmental of others on the planet. America is schizoid, like Number 6. If you have not done so, please see "Something Wild." ("The Art of Melanie Griffith.")
The paradox in which we live called "America" is also a contradiction that many of us embody as individuals -- the same nation firing drone weapons into villages killing 48 persons to "get" a single alleged terrorist and torturing "detainees" in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo is rescuing people in Haiti, feeding and clothing victims as well as providing medical assistance. The world sees this contradiction that we are that is best captured in the antinomies of our legal system. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
I am afraid that saying these things will guarantee another wave of cybercrime directed at these writings from New Jersey's government, despite the provisions of the Constitution of the United States of America. If I had a dog, they'd kick my dog. As President Bill Clinton said during his first presidential campaign: "Now, they're picking on my mamma!"
Is a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of a secretly selected victim in which lawyers participate not a breach of legal ethics, Mr. Rabner? Is such a conspiracy criminal and legally unethical? I think so. Before turning to the possible solution to America's "prisoner's dilemma" -- through my discussion of love and quantum metaphysics -- I will return to Herbert Marcuse's influential "Essay on Liberation":
" ... 'Law and Order': these words have always had an ominous sound; the entire necessity and the entire horror of legitimate force are condensed, and sanctioned, in this phrase. There can be no human association without law and order, enforceable law and order, but there are degrees of good and evil in human associations -- measured in terms of the legitimate, organized violence required to protect the established society against the poor, the oppressed, the insane: the victims of its well-being. Over and above their legitimacy in constitutional terms, the extent to which established law and order can legitimately demand (and command) obedience and compliance largely depends (or ought to depend) on the extent to which this law and this order obey and comply with their own standards and values. These may first be ideological (like the ideas of liberty, equality, fraternity advanced by the revolutionary bourgesoise), but the ideology can become a material political force in the armor of the opposition as these values are betrayed, compromised, denied in the social reality. Then the betrayed promises are, as it were, 'taken over' by the opposition, and with them the claim for legitimacy. In this situation, law and order become something to be established as against the established law and order: the existing society has become illegitimate, unlawful: [New Jersey-like in its corruption,] it has invalidated its own law. Such has been the dynamic of historical revolutions; it is hard to see how it can be arrested indefinitely." ("Quills.")
Herbert Marcuse, "Subverting Forces --in Transition," in An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 77-78. ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
Perhaps the solution has always been staring us in the face. Compare Herbert Marcuse, "Sartre, Historical Materialism and Philosophy," in George Novack, ed., Existentialism Versus Marxism (New York: Dell, 1966), pp. 165-172 with Colin McGinn, "The Evil Character," in Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 61-92.
II. Love and Soul: Does "The Prisoner" become an African-American Revolutionary?
Among the disturbing features of this series are depictions of a terrible loss of affect from romantic relationships. Ms. Atwell's character encounters the New York version of Number 6. The man and woman -- both become "generic" -- return to the man's apartment. They consider having sex. Their discussion is intense, but weirdly impersonal. They are without genuine self-revelation or burning passion as distinct from desire for each other, or for much of anything. The surreal version of the relationship in the Village includes a symbolic blindness, as I have indicated, on the part of 4-15 (Ms. Atwell), together with jealousy for a rival, 313 (Ruth Wilson).
All of this interaction is deliberately cartoon-like, suggesting the characters' inability to love intensely. This is a condition which seems to have become generalized throughout American culture. ("Martha Nussbaum on the Vindication of Love.") Let us contrast Kenneth J. Gergen's descriptions of the Romantic subject with the postmodern self:
" ... much of the contemporary vocabulary of the person, along with associated ways of life, finds its origins in the romantic period. It is a vocabulary of passion, purpose, depth, and personal significance: a vocabulary that generates heroes, of genius, and of inspired work. It places love in the forefront of human endeavors, praising those who abandon the 'useful' and the 'functional' for the sake of others. It fosters a belief in deep dynamics of personality -- marriage as a 'communion of souls,' family as bonded in love, and friendship as a lifetime commitment. [Furthermore, these relationships are "defined by the heart."] Because of romanticism we can trust in moral values and an ultimate significance to the human venture. For many the loss of such a vocabulary would essentially be the collapse of anything meaningful in life. [Notice that retaining what is good in this system of values does not prevent us from reinventing their implications all the time.] If love as intimate communion, intrinsic worth, creative inspiration, moral values, and passionate expression were all scratched from our vocabularies, life for many would be a pallid affair indeed. Yet, as we shall see, it is just this vocabulary that is threatened by the modernist" -- and postmodernist -- "views that follow."
The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 27.
Then,
"With the technology of social saturation, two of the major factors traditionally impeding relationships -- namely time and space -- are both removed. The past can be continuously renewed -- via voice, video, and visit, for example -- and distance poses no substantial barriers to ongoing interchange. Yet this same freedom ironically leads to a form of enslavement. For each person, passion, or potential incorporated into oneself exacts a penalty -- a penalty both of being and being with. ... as others are incoporated into the self, and their desires become one's own, there is an expansion of goals -- of 'musts,' wants, and needs. Attention is necessitated, effort is exerted, frustrations are encountered. Each new desire places its demands and reduces one's liberties." (pp. 74-75.)
Men speak of "having to go to a 'chic flic.'" Women complain about sports events. In a culture where the consumer model provides the only example of interaction, the subject is constantly forced to determine whether this "other" person, a lover -- like this appliance -- satisfies "my" needs and demands, or should be replaced. Your true spouse may be your t.v. set. ("A Doll's Aria.")
Notice that this draining of emotion from "relationships" relies on an assumption that selves are separate choosing entities with "needs" that are akin to commercial concerns. This reduces the other to a satisfier of needs who is distinguishable from ourselves. Relationships become a form of prostitution. This is to create one's own "prisoner's dilemma." See Marshall Berman's discussion "Of Marx's Capital," in Adventures in Marxism (New York & London: Verso, 2002), pp. 19-37.
With the obscene multiplication of entertainment and consumer options, opportunities become infinite and demands paralyzing. People wonder about what am I "getting" out of this relationship and whether "the gains outweigh the losses"? Such an attitude to passionate affairs would have seemed insane to nineteenth century figures or romantic persons at any time:
" ... Liberation becomes a swirling vertigo of demands. ... Daily life has become a sea of drowning demands, and there is no shore in sight." (Gergen, p. 75.)
This postmodernist "inner-emptiness" is also a product of psychological disintegration in the aftermath of great shock (or shocks), like 9/11 for America. Subjectivity is projected on to the contents of shop windows and entertainment products -- i.e., movies and t.v. shows, like "The Prisoner" -- these items are often related. People in Manhattan still seem to wander around in a daze, mentally-obliterated, baffled. They are not given the tools with which to understand the geo-political realities that explain events like what took place on 9/11 -- unless they spend hours every day reading elite intellectual works by commentators like Chomsky and newspapers in several languages -- since they are invaded every second of their waking lives by nonsensical slogans and advertising jingles as well as manipulated by power.
How does one come to terms with the disappearance of a person you saw at breakfast one day and never again thereafter? There is no meaning, no reason, no understanding of such malice and evil that can diminish the hatred and disgust that one feels for persons responsible for such human suffering, often out of insane ideological commitments dramatized in gestures or experiments based on those ideologies or religions, fundamentalisms of various kinds.
The banality and ignorance routinely found among American lawyers (who should have some semblance of an education) is shocking to persons from other countries. I am thinking of persons like Sybil R. Moses or Stuart Rabner -- individuals who give "mediocrity" a bad reputation. Below their level are semi-illiterates in New Jersey's legal profession happily wondering "Who had the stop sign?" Therapists may be worse. To have such persons address or seek to resolve cultural-political dilemmas of this magnitude is absurd. Yet it is such judges and officials who classify persons (like me) as "retarded" and "sub-human." ("Why Philosophy is for Everybody.")
The goal of this system is to transform New Yorkers and all Americans into beings like the residents of the Village in "The Prisoner." A revolutionary act in America in 2009-2010 is to turn off your t.v. set and refuse to purchase any consumer item for 24 hours. Most people are no longer capable of these seemingly simple acts and would regard the suggestion to do such things as bizarre to the point of being insane. The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Paris & New York: Semiotexte, 2009), pp. 31-35 and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York & London: Verso, 2004), pp. 128-153, then Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990), pp. 128-129. Finally, Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," NLR 146 (1984). ("Not One More Victim.")
The Village is akin to a shopping mall (Xanadu?), where persons are guided to walk in some directions that are intended to maximize their consumption of food and goods through the strategic placement of items in displays appealing to synthetically-generated appetites. This is even more true during that special time of the year when we worship Santa and "Frosty the Snowman." It is painful, if increasingly routine, to witness the manipulations of family members transformed into characters in a drama of commercial or other exploitation. Stupidity and ignorance are convenient for controllers, but they are increasingly damaging to America's competitiveness in the world economy. Japanese companies require persons with Masters' degrees in America to do what high school graduates accomplish in Japan. In New Jersey, they will need employees with Ph.D.'s to fill out basic forms.
Sex is only another such commercial appetite. Sex is a commodity, another consumer item, as are the persons transformed into sparkling sexual "items" in shop windows -- like Ms. Atwell, perhaps -- intended to satisfy those yearnings in virtual terms, just as a burger at McDonald's "cures" hunger while providing zero nutrition and, maybe, contributing to killing you at the same time. How about a "happy meal"? See what I mean about "moronization"? Morons are usually blissfully "happy," as in the U.S. Senate. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?") See the final section of my essay, "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem." Like Number 6, the protagonist of Yevgeny Zamyatin's classic anti-Communist dystopia, We (New York: Avon, 1972), pp. vi-vii, is seduced into ...
" ... violent and irrational passion" -- as an attempt to feel alive in a death-like society, "violence is therapy" -- "he makes a shocking discovery of a long-suspected, long-suppressed realm [...] the realm within, of individual identity, of self. 'Who am I? What am I like?' he cries despairingly. In a supremely comic scene, he visits a doctor, seeking help against this terrifying malady. The doctor gravely tells him [that] he is seriously ill -- he has developed a soul. 'Is it dangerous?' he asks. 'Incurable,' the doctor replies. But alas, it turns out to be curable in the end. The Benefactor's [Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Cheney] men have found a remedy for individuality, for rebellion, for humanity: a simple operation to excise the seat of all infection -- imagination -- and reduce all citizens of the one state to grinning semi-morons." ("'The Island': A Movie Review.")
How about surprising the family with a lobotomy! In these evil social spaces -- regardless of political affiliation -- all of us must be transformed into brain-dead residents of New Jersey. Of course, "brain dead residents of New Jersey" may be a redundancy, especially in Ridgewood. The goal for state controllers is for victims to accept that "violence is therapy." For this reason urban males are made violent. "Dreamers" must be cured of their failure to adjust. This originally Communist solution has been "improved" upon by postmodernist culture in the megasocieties of the First World, especially in America. Distraction (also, biochemistry) and confusion generated by so-called "entertainment" and the cartoon-version of the world on television is made available just for you. "They are evil. We are good. You are with us or against us." "You give us three minutes and we bring you the world." ("A Review of the Television Series 'Alice.'")
Life in various amusement parks -- each leading into the others, like a labyrinth -- makes it unlikely that contemporary Americans will ever experience the so-called "real world," not the one on MTV, except for the 49 million of us who are hungry on a regular basis, of course, and destitute or homeless persons, illiterates (like Manohla Dargis and/or Ginger Thompson and/or Claudia Dreifus/Patricia Cohen of the Times), and other unfortunate individuals whom we are encouraged to ignore and despise. This may be a good time for New Jersey to insert another "error" in this essay. Is the goal of frustration tactics to make me violent? ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
The assault on the psyche makes it perfectly understandable that genuine love and romantic passion between man and woman lasting for decades is absurd in the judgment of a Dr. Phil-like dominant ethos. Big Brother in Orwell's vision has been replaced by Oprah Winfrey as well as the women on ABC's "The View." (Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton seem to offer opposing views of family?) Love that results in excruciating agony from unwanted separation or loss of an adored presence in one's life becomes rare, or even impossible, for the semi-humans living in this Wasteland of despair and nihilism. Whatever. This sort of suffering -- or any deep emotion -- is literally incomprehensible for the autistic zombies that emerge in postmodernist cultural spaces, like the Village, which is exactly the goal of Number 2. It is very convenient for powerful forces in American society that the population be made both ignorant and apathetic. ("New Jersey is the Home of the Living Dead" and "Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics.")
During the Reagan "go-go" eighties, the slogan was "Greed is Good!" Today, the idea of "Goodness" has been replaced by "Niceness." It does not matter what kind of person you really are, but whether you appear "nice" and "down-to-earth" as opposed to "stuck-up." Dick Cheney or Jeffrey Dhamer may be "nice," in this understanding, even if they have done terrible things. Whereas, someone like Pablo Picasso or Norman Mailer may offend against political correctness in the process of making art, so as to be less "nice." ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?")
African-American culture has largely developed in opposition to conditions of dehumanization and resistance against oppression. African-American culture is in eternal protest against official and unofficial forms of enslavement. If there are people in this world who are experts on resisting subtle forms of oppression and coopting, then it must be African-Americans. James Baldwin, at the level of literary genius, and philosophical thinkers like Angela Davis and Cornel West have produced a body of intellectual work that is about RESISTING injustice and promoting psychological-philosophical INTEGRATION. ("America's Holocaust" and "Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey.")
Soul, passion, solidarity and hope are weapons of liberation developed by African-American culture that are expressed in artistic works of genius made available to all who remain human and capable of appreciating such works. If you do not "get" Billy Holiday, then you have probably died but have failed to notice the fact of your demise. ("America's Holocaust" and "What a man's gotta do.") Al Baker, "'Hot Potato' With a Gun, and a Bullet Takes a Toll in the Bronx," in The New York Times, November 19, 2009, at p. A1. (Carvett Gentles, 16, accused of shooting Veda Vasquez, 15.)
Judith Butler and many others have found themselves forced to think and act against oppression. Ernesto "Che" Guevara expressed one solution in a conversation with Jean Paul Sartre, allegedly, "commitment to struggle, endless struggle, against social injustice." Casualties of the psychological warfare aimed at the African-American community, poor people, and women are visible in America's streets, every day. This will not change with the election of President Obama nor with the arrival of any Chief Executive. (Again: "Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey" and "How to Execute the Innocent in New Jersey," then "What is it like to be tortured?")
Number 6's journey toward integration and overcoming of his violent impulses and anti-social inclinations, the defeat of any tendency toward evil in himself (which is the real defeat of Number 2), is made possible only by his love for two women -- women embodying the dual aspects of independent passionate women in these postmodernist cultures -- and the suggested final act of kenosis or self-giving is the ambiguous resolution of this nightmare, where realities are always in question and evil is omnipresent. Welcome to Manhattan in the twenty-first century.
Why ambiguous? Well, this work is uncertain even about the possibility of resistance, much less of successful revolution against postmodernist society's omnipresent and totalizing power to define reality by creating the psychological equivalent of Auschwitz as Disneyworld:
"Foucault's irony works by portraying the very practices of humane penal reform and sexual liberation as instead further enmeshing us in a 'carceral society' and an enforced regimen of truth. ["Political Correctness."] Yet for many readers his irony is troubling. The tone of Foucault's portrayal suggests that these new forms of power/knowledge ought to be resisted. [For some of us, even in a doomed effort, resistance will always be offered.] Yet he resolutely rejects the idea that there is any ground or standpoint from which such a call to resistance could be legitimated. The connection he proposes between power and knowledge is not just a particular institutional use of knowledge as a means to domination. Foucault objects to the very idea of a knowledge or a truth outside of networks of power relations. The scope of his objection thus also encompasses the possibility of a critical knowledge that would speak the truth to power, exposing domination for what it is, and thereby enabling or encouraging effective resistance to it. [We see the influence of Malcolm X, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, and many anonymous African-American heros of resistance.]"
Joseph Rouse, "Power/Knowledge," in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Michel Foucault, at p. 99 (emphasis added).
This task of resisting oppression against overwhelming and inescapable power-relations is Number 6's true dilemma. Billions of persons can identify with this dilemma. Tragically, this is a dilemma associated with the U.S. for many persons in the world. (Take another look at the efforts to suppress and destroy this essay because it is better than what appeared in the Times.) Does Mathew Alper know "Benedict Carey"? I wonder whether Mr. Alper has visited my sites? "Again and again" powerful dissenting and protesting speakers will be destroyed through criminal efforts at silencing and suppressing speech or the torture of family members in the interests of preserving an illusory consensus and myth of normality. We will inflict violence and rapes on people in order to generate violence and rapes for which victims may be punished by the legal system. ("Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.")
Conclusion: Resolving the Quantum Mystery of the "Prisoner's Dilemma."
Robert Nozick explains the so-called "prisoner's dilemma" (contemporary America) which has been widely discussed in terms of this t.v. series:
"Another candidate for a fundamental principle of morality concerns cooperative action in prisoner's dilemma situations, so-called after the example used by A.W. Tucker in first delineating them. ..."
Nozick provides an illustration:
"An action that leaves someone better off or as well off, for each action another person might do, as any other action available to him is termed by game theorists a (weakly) dominant action; while an action over which another act is dominant is termed dominated. It appears that when a dominant action is available in an impersonal situation a rational person should perform it. Yet the prisoners' dilemma situations are so structured that both are worse off performing their dominant action than if both had performed their dominated one."
Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 542 (emphasis added). For a cinematic depiction of the classic "prisoner's dilemma" scenario, see Clive Owen's Guggenheim scene in "The International."
American criticisms of other societies -- like Cuba, for example -- as "unfree," are rejected by persons all over the world who are aware of America's public promise of freeedom, even as they see the reality of censorship and oppression, as in this blog, for example. Good luck with the grand juries, Albio Sires and "El Bobo" Menendez. ("The Embargo Against Cuba is Rejected by the World.")
Are any of the "journalists" profiled in these essays acting on behalf of political or legal figures in New Jersey? A little "payola" and you can insert your views in the Times? Are cybercriminals "hired" by American politicians to disrupt the web sites of political dissidents? Senator Bob, can you shed any light on these mysteries? Mr. Openheimer? (Again: "Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Political Murder in New Jersey?")
Much American foreign policy and social scientific "engineering" is based on this type of madness. The very notion that a dominated action is for the "choosing agent's own good" depends upon cultural assumptions concerning agency and human dignity that are not widely shared in the world. You getting this, Terry Tuchin? These are American cultural assumptions that are INSULTING and denigrating of others, especially of persons in the Islamic world. How does it feel for New Jersey's powerful bosses to receive such treatment from one of their victims? Once more: How does a Jew become Mengele, Terry? Why do you assume that you are authorized to decide how others should live or what they should feel? ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
This attitude towards others as worthy of "domination" or enslavement is insulting because it denies the independent wills of other persons, often reflecting a hideous will to power and sexual delight in cruelty on the part of powerful politicians or so-called "therapists." This means you, Terry Tuchin. (Number 2.) Senator Bob? ("Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics.")
For many cultures -- and for an entire central tradition in Western thought -- an action produced by domination (or dominated action) is always the WORST possible action for a person to perform. This is true regardless of material "self-interest." Such an action is a "lose-lose" action. Death is preferable to domination or enslavement. ("Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility" and "Behaviorism is Evil.")
To act under conditions of domination is to be a slave. The actions of a slave are always an abdication of humanity. Number 6 must resist the will of Number 2, just as he must breathe in order to remain human. ("Give me liberty or give me death.") This is what much of the world wishes to say to America. We must decide our own fates. The prisoner is willing to abdicate his own will only when it may serve the interest of another whose welfare concerns him even at the expense of his materially understood "rational self-interest." Compare Jean Paul Sartre, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr (New York: Mentor, 1964), pp. 71-275 ("I decided to be what crime made of me ...") with Walter Dean Myers, Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (New York: Scholastic, 1965), pp. 63-96, p. 37 ("A lawyer -- that's not a realistic goal for a n_____.")
To the extent that you remain silent and passive in response to the tortures that you are witnessing at these blogs, these tortures become your actions. These are the crimes for which you share in responsibility. The same may be said for the events at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Furthermore, the denial of one person's inviolable Constitutional rights is the potential violation of every other person's fundamental rights in America. New Jersey has long ago surrendered the capacity or right to pronounce a judgment on my "ethics." You will not stop me from reading or writing. ("Who is responsible for the cover-up in New Jersey?")
A criminal, whore, or n____ is something that you must choose to become or a status that you must accept. As long as you reject the label placed on you, you remain free. "A person can be destroyed, but not defeated." (Ernest Hemingway and "Bernard Williams and Identity.") Who is "unethical"? Me or you? Who is a whore in New Jersey? ("Corrupt Law Firms, Senator Bob, and New Jersey Ethics" and "The Long Goodbye.") You decide. ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" and "Cement is Gold in New Jersey!" then "Senator Bob Loves Xanadu!")
One letter was deleted from the foregoing statement in parentheses. To define such a highly sensible and widely-shared attitude of hostility towards all forms of domination among billions of persons in the world as a kind of "material rational self-interest" is absurd. This is to make the very concept of "rational self-interest" meaningless. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory" and "Richard A. Posner on Voluntary Actions and Criminal Responsibility.")
For many of us, DEATH will always be preferable to such a condition of domination in life. Attempts to induce psychosis or suicide through frustrations (or embargos) will not succeed. Such attempts will merely confirm many of the criticisms of power and fascism found in these essays. The decision by another person concerning what is "for my own good" in terms of my values is always the wrong decision for me. There are contexts -- an example is the welfare of a child -- where the goal of one's actions is not "maximizing self-interest" -- but the welfare of another person, even at the cost of my own welfare, or life. The very notion of a "self" that is distinct from those I love and their interests is ridiculous for many philosophers, for example, Hegel and Marx are strong communitarians. G.A. Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Oxford & Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). ("The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
A revolutionary is always fighting for the future. Such a fight for the future is a kind of love. How that struggle for the future is understood may differ among persons, but the individual's motivation does not change. Number 6 comes to resolve his dilemma only when he struggles for the future. (Mumia Abu-Jamal, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Dr. King, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Mary Wollstonecraft -- select your hero.)
Please compare Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Marx & Engels: A Biographical Introduction (New York: Ocean Press, 2008), pp. 30-64 with Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844, published in 1932), then Edward W. Said, "Speaking Truth to Power," in Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Random House, Inc. 1994), pp. 85-103. (The Palestinian struggle is most effective as a moral mission to achieve sovereignty and self-determination.) Finally, Walter Dean Myers, Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (New York: Scholastic, 1995), pp. 144-166. ("Malcolm's Haj.")
Within the context of the contemporary American philosophical conversation, the implications of this "prisoner's dilemma" and the values-assumptions underlying the doctrine are rejected by Kantians, like Nozick, whose next section in this very work is entitled "Kantian Structuring":
"There could not be a universe in which it was alright" -- regardless of "self-interest" -- "to murder or torture people with no overriding reason. [9/11-like atrocities are always evil.] Moral truths do not just happen to hold in our universe. They hold in any universe -- anyone containing value-seeking I's. Therefore, they are more like NECESSARY TRUTHS than like contingent ones. [This is true regardless of the dynamics of a situation.]" (Nozick, p. 545.) ("Why I am not an ethical relativist" and "John Finnis and Ethical Cognitivism.")
Among those necessary truths that feature in all rational moral agency is the human capacity for "other-regarding" loves and the actions required by such loves. The Kantian implications undermining the assumptions of the "prisoner's dilemma" are explored by Nozick:
"To ground ethics sufficiently, the structuring that brings ethics in its wake must be inescapable, and also something we would not choose to escape, even if we could. One thing we would not wish to escape is being an I. [Persons must be capable of love.] If the process of structuring ourselves as I's brought ethics along, then ethics would be deeply grounded [in our very humanity.] (One attempt to work out such a theory is Fitche's in his System of Ethics.) [I urge a return to Schelling for Continental thinkers.] Ethical truths, then, would be avoidable only at the cost of no longer being a self; the egoist [Rand] would be able to avoid ethical truths only by giving up the very thing whose interests he [or she] wants to place paramount, the self. (Note that this is a point about the existence of truths, not about motivation.)" (Nozick, p. 547.)
From necessity (ethics) to love (other-regarding action). Nozick fails to realize that the mere existence of a truth provides a motivation to action. However, Thomas Nagel did achieve that realization as he developed this famous response to the "prisoner's dilemma" at Oxford University in 1960, then developed the thesis further as a doctorate at Harvard University, a realization shared by Roger Scruton today. First, Thomas Nagel explains:
"Just as there are rational requirements on thought, there are rational requirements on action, and altruism is one of them. This book defends a conception of ethics, and a related conception of human nature, according to which certain important moral principles state rational conditions on desire and action which derive from a basic requirement of altruism. [Socialism.] Altruism itself depends on a recognition of the reality of other persons, and on the equivalent capacity to regard oneself as merely one individual among many. ..." ("Is there a gay marriage right?")
Therefore,
" ... The view presented here is opposed not only to ethical relativism but to any demand that the claims of ethics appeal to our interests: either self-interest or the interest we may happen to take in other things and other persons. The altruism which in my view underlies ethics is not to be confused with generalized affection for the human race. It is not a feeling."
Thomas Nagel, The Possibility of Altruism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 3.
A steady hammering noise fills the room in which I write. How curious? "Errors" have been inserted several times today in this essay alone. I wonder why? There is the reality of human nature that "explains" human agency before justifying human conduct. Then there is the essentially human "motivation" of love or concern for the other. There is a political dimension to this discussion, see again: "Fidel Castro's 'History Will Absolve Me.'"
November 23, 2009 at 6:45 P.M. Spacing was affected in this essay posted hours ago, probably by someone who does not like my reference to Fidel Castro. I will make it a point to refer to more of Mr. Castro's writings. ("Havana Nights and CIA Tapes.")
November 24, 2009 at 9:14 A.M. A word and letter were removed from this text overnight. I have now restored that letter and word. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba" and "Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Unconstitutionality of the Death Penalty.")
For those interested in the implications of this discussion in legal theory and decision theories in morality, economics, metaphysics and epistemology, see Robert Nozick, "Newcomb's Problem and Two Principles of Choice," in N. Rescher, et al., eds., Essays in Honor of C.G. Hempel (Reidel: Dodrecht, 1969), pp. 114-146. On the prisoner's dilemma, see R.D. Luce, Howard Raiffa, Games and Decisions (New York: Wiley, 1957), pp. 94-102. Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey (New York & London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 413-414, pp. 576-577.
From an aesthetic direction and religious thinking, "escapes" from the prisoner's dilemma are also easy enough. This scholarship is particularly important for those seeking to reinvent postmodernism in theology by rescuing key aspects of Romanticism as reinterpreted to fit our contemporary culture, see Paul Ricouer's Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology (New York & London: Contuum, 2004), pp. 53-54 (discussing Hegel's dialectic leading to hermeneutics) and the productive dialogue between Jacques Derrida and Hans Georg Gadamer concerning the "fusion of horizons." Fred R. Dallmayr, "Hermeneutics and Deconstruction: Gadamer and Derrida in Dialogue," in Critical Encounters: Between Philosophy and Politics (Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1987), pp. 130-158.
Continental thinkers -- like Ricoeur, Derrida, and Gadamer -- mark out the territory where I do my thinking, which is heavily indebted to these much greater philosophers. The idea of a dialectic and "entanglement" provides an "exit" for all of us in a universe of multiplicities inhabited by everyone who feels like a "prisoner" searching for an escape from an unlivable and now obviously evil situation of self-enclosure towards community through revolutionary struggle. ("Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal" and "'Che': A Movie Review.")
Time for another inserted "error"? Will New Jersey's legal eagles "instruct" me on these matters? Who was behind the destruction of the "Philosophy Cafe" at MSN groups? Lulu? Publish America? Senator Bob, can you provide any information concerning this criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights through torture and censorship? Will torturers bring freedom to Cuba? ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?")
The escape into freedom that must be available in every possible universe (for me) is a Kantian-Jeffersonian recognition of fundamental human dignity and rights for every person -- like the right to freedom of expression. Ethical recognition is a matter of our universal human necessity. This is as American as you can get. Philosophers to read in order to deepen your appreciation of these issues include Cornel West, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Fried. You will see my essays discussing their works and the writings of legal thinkers, like Lawrence Tribe and Alan Dershowitz, Roberto Unger, Mary Joe Frug, Robin West, Judith Butler as well as many others, especially Drucilla Cornell. ("What is it like to be plagiarized?" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")
Nick Herbert's discussion of the "Interconnectedness Theorem" in quantum mechanics suggests that linkages between entities (New York and the Village) requires that an action upon a smaller unit must affect the larger unit or totality. Politically, this means that the sanctioned violation of one person's rights to freedom of speech or privacy, physical safety, or deprivation of property (Republicans like the last of these rights!) -- like stealing a person's watch, for example -- will affect the rights of all members of a community. "Bell's Interconnectedness Theorem," in Quantum Reality, pp. 211-231, then Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement, pp. 137-148. (How's life treating you, Alex Booth?)
"The Prisoner" is about the insight that we are all trapped in alternate realities and struggling for freedom, both against external forces seeking to control us through ever more subtle methods of manipulation (hypnosis, drugging, tortures, censorship, silencing, rapes, assaults, suppressions of creative work through distractions of various kinds, including forced impoverishment) and within our fragmented and multiple selves drifting in a sea of media images and political slogans intended to stupify and bewilder us. The answer is love. The goal is to translate this love into a politically viable theory and action. ("Roberto Unger's Revolutionary Legal Theory.")
Love for another person can never lead us wrong. This is because, properly, love is always an other-regarding emotion taking us beyond morality into what religions have called, "God." By loving "for" the other, we regain paradise wherever we are, including prisons, defeating those evil Republicans or the villains of your choice, by -- perhaps, painfully -- achieving ourselves even as we give ourselves away. Love (in any form) is not a Communist plot nor a terrorist scheme to destroy your life in the pleasant suburbs of America. ("Is there a gay marriage right?" and "Would Jesus be a Christian?")
"As an outlook on life [Kant's philosophy] is the formal definition of a sane, balanced and critical liberalism. [Democratic Socialism?] Seen in retrospect it is a prophetic warning of the peril to freedom which lurks in the romantic outlook" -- and even more in the total abandonment of that outlook! -- "the danger that the form of the organic will be used to plan and construct the good society on earth. For Kant himself his philosophy is a critical acceptance of Rousseau and the French [and American Revolutions.] For us it is the prophetic analysis and condemnation of totalitarianism. We are aware today of the totalitarian implications of Rousseau's social theory, particularly in its mature development in Hegel. Totalitarianism is the result of determining the good as an object in a spatio-temporal world, and planning its achievement by the use of scientific techniques within a heuristic framework of organic concepts. ["This is for your own good."] Kant's condemnation of the attempt is this, that though it intends a free and self-determining society, it must necessarily result in destroying freedom, and with freedom morality and religion, so bringing human personality under the bondage of a total determination."
This is where we should join our brothers and sisters -- in Cuba and everywhere in the world -- in opposing such a loss of freedom and equality for any one of us in any (or all) of our societies. A word was deleted from the foregoing sentence overnight. Much of what I am saying and everything argued by the Cuban Revolutionary government is established by its enemies in Miami as well as New Jersey and their increasingly pointless totalitarian tactics against me. This censorship is hurting you, and your so-called "cause," far more than it hurts me. You are witnessing the process by which a Jew (Patricia Cohen?) becomes Mengele.
Why are Cuban-Americans called "the Jews of the Carribean"? Has the quest for "freedom" among Cuban-Americans caused us, Cuban-Americans, to deny freedom to others in our country and also in the world? ("The Heidegger Controversy.") I will not be intimidated from expressing my opinions and protests. I will not become your laboratory animal.
Why did Cuban-Americans come to the U.S. if not to enjoy freedom of expression and recognize the same freedom as the RIGHT of other persons? Do you wish to threaten or censor me, again, chico? Mr. Diaz-Balart, censorship is not the answer to your dilemma. Mr. Rubio, come out of the closet and be whatever you are. ("American Hypocrisy and Luis Posada Carriles" and "Miami's Cubanoids Protest AGAINST Peace!" then "Miami's Cubanazos Pose a Threat to National Security!")
"Kant could be content to limit knowledge and leave the beyond to faith and hope. For his time a dualism of theory and practice was possible, and indeed was the path of wisdom. For us it is impossible. We are committed to planning, whether we will or not, and planning is the unity of theory and practice under the primacy of the practical. So long as our most adequate concept is the organic concept, our social planning can only issue in a totalitarian society. [B.F. Skinner's behaviorist paradise.] This is the reason why the emergent problem of contemporary philosophy is the form of the PERSONAL."
John MacMurray, The Self as Agent (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 83 (emphasis added). Good luck with the "ethics matters," Jose Ginarte. How's it going, Gil? (Again: "Is Senator Menendez a Suspect in Mafia-Policial Murder in New Jersey?" and "Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?" then "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")
Did you say something about "ethics"?
