Geography and Perspective

How strange it is, the extent to which one’s thoughts depend on geography and circumstance.

In theory, one could pause and take stock of one’s life anywhere – while sitting in traffic, while waiting in line to buy lunch, while bored at one’s desk in the afternoon.

But it never seems to work out that way. Most of the time, the small obscures the large.

For me, it only happens when I’m on my own, without a phone or internet connection - with the autumn sunshine streaming down, walking in silence through grassy fields and trees with green leaves starting to dapple to yellow and red, somewhere with only my own thoughts for conversation.

Then I think about my life.

No Exit, Part 1: Secession

The two broad political ways that reactionaries talk about changing one's circumstances are voice (influencing the political environment where you are) and exit (leaving for a different political environment).

As far as I can tell, one of the main distinctions between conservatives and reactionaries is that the latter believe that voice is mostly a dead end under current political arrangements. There is little to hope for from the democratic process, except perhaps as a longshot mechanism for abolishing the democratic process itself. As a result, politics quickly becomes uninteresting, except as a sideshow and a freakshow. When one abandons the conceit that one's voice matters, why in the name of all that is holy would you voluntarily watch three hours of Republican candidates' debates? Have you read all the great books already? Is there really nothing else better on Netflix?

Okay, so what of exit?

Well, this can take several forms, none of them particularly likely.

At the mild end is moving to another, more acceptable, state. Though this presupposes you can find one to your taste (maybe Texas) that will stay that way (whoops, cancel Texas - with current immigration patterns, anyone want to wager on it still being a red state in 20 years?). The slightly more interesting version of this is the Free State Project - get enough like-minded people to move to one small state (in this case, New Hampshire) and vote to change it. You're still under the Federal Government, but it's a start.

But what else? Move to a more reactionary-minded country? That seems an even harder mission than moving to a liberty-minded US state. Singapore, perhaps? Maybe. But if there's one thing that the Arab Spring taught us, it's that the State Department takes a very fickle attitude to allies that don't quite toe the liberal democratic line. At the moment, they tolerate Singapore. I would be less confident that this will continue to be the case for the next 50 years.

The more interesting options involve a combination of voice and exit - find some existing piece of land to make into a new country, and run it as you like.

At a first glance, this seems hard, but more promising than the alternatives. There are a range of ways to find a piece of land to govern and turn into a sovereign entity. They vary considerably in practicality. At one end, one can create new land with a bunch of rafts in the middle of the ocean, like the seasteading guys. I think this shows how eager people are to build a new sovereign land - they're willing to fudge the whole 'land' bit to make it happen. The relatively small number of people who choose to live on boats in the ordinary course of events shows you that this ain't exactly plan A, except under very dire circumstances.

More likely you're down to two options. You can take an existing functional part of America and try to secede. Or you could take over an existing crappy country by a coup.

The $64,000 question, of course, is whether Washington would let either of these things happen.

Since both are a long way from happening, it's hard to get a definite answer. You need to dig around to see the reaction to fringe possibilities and try to extrapolate.

One that caught my eye was the following from February this year:

Feds raid Texas secessionist meeting

...Minutes into the meeting a man among the onlookers stood and moved to open the hall door, letting in an armed and armored force of the Bryan Police Department, the Brazos County Sheriff's Office, the Kerr County Sheriff's Office, Agents of the Texas District Attorney, the Texas Rangers and the FBI.

...In the end, at least 20 officers corralled, searched and fingerprinted all 60 meeting attendees, before seizing all cellphones and recording equipment in a Valentine's Day 2015 raid on the Texas separatist group.

...He acknowledged he used a "show of force," grouping officers from city, county state and federal law enforcement to serve a search warrant for suspicions of a misdemeanor crime. He said he had worries that some extremists in the group could become violent, citing a 1997 incident when 300 state troopers surrounded an armed Republic leader for a weeklong standoff.

This is very revealing. There is absolutely no logistical need to involve 5 separate law enforcement agencies to process a non-violent meeting of 60 people on the suspicion that they committed a misdemeanor offense. But they wanted to display the full power of the government, at all levels, to those who were under the impression that Their Voice Matters™ - you will have no support from existing power structures, even in Texas. They absolutely did not want to just send in the FBI to stoke possible paranoia about the Feds.

Of course, the separatists' actions seemed tailor-made to produce exactly this outcome:

The raid was a response to legal summons sent by Republic of Texas members to a Kerr County judge and bank employee, demanding they appear in the Republic's court at the Veterans and Foreign Wars building in Bryan the day the officers stormed in.

Jesus Christ, talk about stupid. With allies like these...

The current secessionist group made themselves obvious targets by threatening government officials. This is a fast way to not only tar yourselves as possibly criminal, but also to eliminate any sympathy among local law enforcement, some of whom might otherwise support the 'Texas Pride' angle of secession. You threaten judges, and don't expect blowback from every single cop in the country?

The motto should be 'we just want a vote on the issue'. That is much harder to argue against.

If Washington has one possible Achilles Heel, it is the following: they are not fully immune from their own propaganda about the nobility of the democratic process. Hence, if you actually get a vote to pass, resisting it becomes considerably harder.

Suppose, in other words, that the separatists actually manage to get Texas to hold a referendum on seceding, and it passes. With what language will Washington condemn the decision? How will they justify their desire to squelch the voice of the people? Do they not believe in Democracy, source of all that is good and right in the world?

The EU, while not strong enough to force countries to stay in against their will, is at least willing to display open contempt for the democratic process. The US, so far, is only willing to do so using the Supreme Court.

In 1860, the answer was straightforward - "F*** you, you don't get to leave".

Do you think they still have the stones to say that, and back it up? I truly don't know.

I think they would worry where the next move in the chess game went - should the State of Texas attempt to engage in forced secession, would the Feds be willing to send in the army to shoot the place up with the TV cameras rolling, firing on US citizens?

For obvious reasons, they prefer to fight this preemptively as a law enforcement action, not as a military action. We're not invading, old chap, just sending in the police to arrest some crazies who broke the law. In 1860, there wasn't an FBI to send in to arrest Jefferson Davis, hence you needed to send in the army.

By contrast, it is much easier today to co-ordinate with the police to squelch secessionist movements early on, but much harder to us the military to stop them once they get going.

When events get to a certain level of seriousness, even the police become very apprehensive about shooting. See: Cliven Bundy




It's not just the US military that is shy about civilian casualties. If you're from the Federal Bureau of Bureaucratic Bureacracy, do you really want to be the guy who gave the order to shoot a man on horseback waving a US flag in front of TV cameras? That absolutely will not end well for your career.

But the Cliven Bundy supporters had one big advantage that a secessionist movement lacks - they only had to defend the status quo. In other words, show up with guns, call the news crew, and dare the Feds to make the first move.

(The other advantage they had is that, extremely mercifully, they had the good sense and collective discipline to not shoot or explicitly threaten any government officials. You'd think this would go without saying, but apparently not. These guys were at least decently media-savvy - the numerous US flags were a very nice touch to make the Feds look like the bad guys).

The secessionist movement, by contrast, has to actually convince people to implement a big change. Hence, anyone opposing a secessionist movement has the easier task of delegitimising the movement before it gets going to just cement the status quo. And the fastest way to do this is to transform it into a question of legality before the vote takes place.

In other words, find some Texas federal judge to declare the purported referendum illegal and unconstitutional before the vote actually happens. This will give any sympathetic law enforcement agencies free reign to arrest those who continue to take steps towards holding the referendum at all. And now, the secessionists, even if armed, have to defend their right to have an illegal vote that the Constitution (peace be upon it, even if it's living) forbids, without even knowing whether they'd win the vote, should it actually occur.

This achieves two things. First, it reduces the number of people still willing to push for (now illegal) secession. And secondly, it gives a strong propaganda angle to convince people who are on the fence about the whole thing - you can bet your bottom dollar that the New York Times would be pulling out all the stops to convince the marginal rube voter that these are just a bunch of crazy armed criminals. Don't you know they're willing to do stuff that's illegal? (Forget that it was the American War of Independence, not the American Court Case of Independence). But convince enough people of their crazy illegal status, and the best case scenario is mass arrests. The worst case scenario is Waco #2 on a much bigger scale if someone pulls the trigger first and events spiral out of control.

If the Achilles heel of Washington is that they struggle to challenge the righteousness of a democratic election, the Achilles heel of secessionists is that they struggle to abandon their allegiance to the Constitution, even just Anthony Kennedy's interpretation thereof.

The problem for secessionists, I fear, is that in any likely secession timeline, the second question will necessarily get resolved before the first one.

The Drain Approaches

So, we're about at the halfway point since I made the following prediction, half in jest, as my version of the Julian Simon bet:

Shorting the rand against a trade-weighted basket of currencies will earn positive abnormal returns over the next ten years.

This was based on nothing more than my hunch that South Africa is a country circling the drain.

How are we doing so far? Well, ignoring the trade-weighted bask bit, here's a partial answer:

The saddest incorrect prediction in geopolitical terms is that it can't possibly get any worse. The Zimbabwe lesson is that it can always, always get worse.

It gives me no pleasure to say that I told you so.

Of the Personal and Statistical

The current Syrian refugee crisis in Europe is a tragedy.

Should that sentence strike regular readers as a little trite, bear with me. I mean it in the classical sense that the Greeks thought of tragedy.

It is calamitous, deplorable, cathartic. It is a sorrowful tale of human misery stemming from root causes of human folly and flaws. It is a tale whose outcome the audience knows in advance, as they have seen the story many times before. It could have been prevented, perhaps, but we all knew it wasn't going to be.

The modern bastardisation of the concept of tragedy is that of a simple morality play, where good and evil are clearly delineated ahead of time. In the Disney-fied version, the upshot of all the sorrow is the lesson that Something Must Be Done.

I feel much has been lost by the Disney-fication of drama. We can no longer see the sadness of tradeoffs, of characters who are simultaneously victims and authors of their own misfortune, of the inevitability of human suffering.

So what, then, is the ultimate tragedy on display in this case?

It is this:

Individually, any one person is the undeserving and unfortunate victim of their broken society.

Collectively, all the people in a society are the reason that the society is broken in the first place.

Now, my instincts regarding public policy lean strongly towards emphasising the general, statistical formulation over the particular, personal formulation. The formulation as written may seem to suggest the primacy of the second statement over the first.

But do not misunderstand me here. It would not be a tragedy if it had such a simple resolution as that. Both parts are true. Try just reversing the order of the two statements to get a different feeling. The most common statement about the general and the specific has a very different connotation about which should be preferred. It is attributed, perhaps apocryphally but understandably, to the great monster - one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

The specific of the Syrian refugee exodus you have almost certainly seen by now. It is heartbreaking, and does not need any particular explanation:



Oof. The sheer sorrow hits you like a punch in the guts.

People's second thoughts after seeing this photo will vary wildly. You may be furious at the policies that let this happen. You may be suspicious of your emotions being manipulated here. You may wonder about what should be done in response. This is the intellectual question - what you make of it all.

But before that, I am almost certain your first thoughts, like mine, were of sadness and despair. Imagine if that were your child.

Humans are endowed with two great traits - empathy and reasoning. Those without empathy are sociopaths and monsters. Those without reasoning are dangerous imbeciles and fools.

Empathy yearns to try to end this senseless suffering by those in the middle of this war by granting them refuge. This is attempting to ward off the Scylla of heartless cynicism, and the gleeful egg-breaking-in-the-pursuit-of-omelettes that characterised the worst tyrants of the 20th century.

But what, then is the Charybdis? What gets ignored if we do not think about the general proposition?

Reasoning wants to know why Syria is the way it is, and what consequences will flow from possible responses to the current war.

What tends to get seldom emphasised in the face of such grief above is the heuristic I always associate with John Derbyshire (though I can't remember exactly where he wrote it) - that the more migrants you bring in from country X, the more your own country will resemble country X.

Several things are notable about this proposition.

One, it is extremely straightforward.

Two, it does not depend on one particular theory of development, and holds for many socially acceptable theories. If you think that poverty is driven by childhood nutrition, the result still holds, as long as the current adults are already impacted by malnutrition from years past. If you think that current ethnic conflict has its roots in colonial history, the result still holds, as long as the hatreds do not disappear upon touching foreign soil. As long as the trait is observable in citizens and fixed in the short term, then the Derbyshire result holds at least in the short term.

Third, it is completely outside the Overton Window of acceptable opinion.

But is it true? You will have to decide that for yourself. The general result is always uncertain and contingent in a way that the emotional result is not. You have to dig a little deeper to find out. Why is Syria the way it is? And how much of that will be replicated if there is extensive Syrian immigration to a western country, such as from a refugee resettlement program? Hard to say, precisely. But here's something to ponder, from Australia in 2012:

A forum discussion on SBS TV's Insight program looking at the uprising in Syria further exposed the divide amongst Syrian Australians over the conflict....

The main sectarian divide in Australia's Syrian community, though, is between the two main Islamic sects, Shi'a and Sunni....

In February, a group of men stormed the Syrian embassy in Canberra, smashing up the ground floor.

Three staff members were there at the time but no one was hurt.

Just days later, there was a shooting in Sydney apparently linked to the Syrian conflict.

The injured man, Ali Ibrahim, was an Alawi, like Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

After expressing pro-Assad views on Facebook, he was shot three times in the legs on the doorstep of his home.

His father, Jamel el-Ali, believed it was a warning from the anti-Assad camp.

It doesn't punch you in the guts in quite the same manner, does it?

But to the thinking person, rather than the feeling person, alarm bells are ringing. Australia did not used to be a country where embassies were stormed and people were shot for expressing political views in public forums. At the moment, this is at a small scale. But how many Syrians can one admit before this is no longer the case? If you bring all of Syria into your country, will you not have simply replicated Syria somewhere else?

This is all well and good, the particularist responds, but how many dead children are you willing to see washed up on a beach in order to forestall this speculative possibility?

It's a good question.

To get a flavor for the generalist argument, it is sometimes necessary to examine it in contexts that do not raise immediate emotional responses. Such as, for instance, the late Roman Empire's decision to allow in hundreds of thousands of Goths. Steve Sailer has a great summary of Edward Gibbon's take on the consequences of that here.

I suspect that the particularist temptation is to wave this away as a largely abstract and irrelevant example. It doesn't resonate emotionally, that's for sure.

But the human catastrophe that resulted from the destruction of the Western Roman Empire was a tragedy that affected Europe for the next thousand years.

If you're waving that away, which one of us is sounding like Stalin now?

The Charybdis, in other words, is that you become so focused on the emotional response to a single death that you forget to think about the long-term consequences of your actions, and end up causing many more deaths.

To my mind, the starting point of the answer, is to shut up and multiply.

This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

Whether a policy makes you feel good is less important than its ultimate consequences. Of course, this then comes back to your view of why the third world is the third world. This is why 'shut up and multiply' is only the start of the answer, not the end of it.

It would be ideal if the policy formulation that saved the most lives in the long run also made you feel emotionally good in the short run.

But what if the two aims are at odds? Are you willing to look clear-eyed on the photos of dead children and still see the lives that you think you're saving by not doing anything? Will you waver? Should you waver?

Uneasy rests the head that wears the crown.