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Title: The Leaderless Revolution
Author: Carne Ross
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: leaders, leadership, popular power, 21st century, revolution, anti-authoritarianism
Source: Retrieved on 19th December 2020 from http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=8877897B2AE16D60BD39F2FEE512DDBB

Carne Ross

The Leaderless Revolution

Preface: Guide to the Leaderless Revolution

Things do not seem to be going as planned. The system is broken. Meant

to bring order, it foments instead disorder. We need something new.

The end of the Cold War was supposed to presage the triumph of democracy

and with it, stability. Globalization was supposed to launch everyone

upon an eternally rising wave of prosperity. Some called it “the end of

history.” But history has instead opened another, unpredicted, chapter.

While the opening of markets in India and China has released hundreds of

millions from poverty, globalization has also triggered violent and

uncontrolled economic volatility. Trillions of dollars shift from asset

to asset (or from debt to debt), sometimes faster than a human can press

a computer key—for it is an algorithm that controls the trade. Banks and

whole countries crash, almost without warning. Meanwhile, the gap

between a tiny number of the very rich and everyone else has accelerated

rapidly, in every region and in every country.

The profits of this modern economy flow to a minuscule minority that

holds the wealth closely. Everyone else—the middle class and the

poor—have seen their incomes stagnate over the last decade or so. And

stagnation in reality means decline, as food and energy prices, driven

by rising shortage, have risen faster and faster. And for those in the

bottom 10 percent, incomes have declined in absolute, as well as

relative, terms. Though they live cheek by jowl with the rich and share

the same cities, the poor are getting poorer. In New York City, one in

five children is dependent on food stamps for survival.

In every profession and trade, global competition means that jobs and

careers once thought of as safe are no longer. Industries that have

stood for generations can collapse in a few years. Only two classes can

now look forward to a secure retirement: the rich and those working for

government.

The promise of capitalism seems more and more hollow. As its benefits

are ever more unevenly shared, it has created a culture that cherishes

much that is worst in human nature. Too much modern work is demeaning or

humiliating, or simply boring. Little offers meaning.

In the exhausting yet often banal race to get ahead or at least to make

ends meet, there is little time for others, for the community that seems

ever more fractured, or for an ever more poisoned planet. Nature is no

more, there is only what we have made of it. As The Economist recently

put it, we live in the Anthropocene era: an Earth primarily formed by

man.

Despite the dismal familiarity of these problems, credible solutions are

hard to come by. Celebrities launch simplistic “single issue” campaigns,

absurdly claiming that an e-mail to a representative will solve the

problem. Each new cohort of politicians offers to fix this malaise, but

they are less and less believed including, one suspects, by themselves

(for they too can sense the mounting unease). Indeed, the political

class now appears more part of the problem than the solution. Even

politicians now complain about “politicians.”

In Britain, politicians and media crow over the humbling of press baron

Rupert Murdoch, but barely admit that both estates were grossly

corrupted by him, and for decades. In Washington, needless political

bickering has managed to worsen America’s debt problem—and increase the

cost paid, eventually, by all Americans. “Washington” has become

synonymous with ugly partisan argument and deadlock.

In democratic systems, it has become evident what is more obvious in

autocracies—power is monopolized by the powerful. In the U.S., corporate

lobbyists far outnumber legislators (there are now lobbyists for the

lobbying industry). Legislation is sometimes created simply for

political parties to extract rents from corporate interests. Big

business donates to all parties, careful to ensure that their interests

are protected whichever prevails. For it is still money that wins

elections, and it is still large corporations that contribute the most.

In the 2008 “credit crunch,” irresponsible and untransparent lending by

banks and inadequate legislation (loosened by well-funded lobbying of

both U.S. parties) combined to wreak massive and lasting damage on the

world economy, affecting the poorest most of all. But despite this

disaster, there is little sign of effective rules, national as well as

global, judged by impartial experts as effective.

Banks lobby country by country to water down regulation, arguing that

national competitiveness will be undermined—even though all the biggest

banks operate in many markets at once. And at the international level,

as so often is the case, governments are unable to agree on anything but

the lowest common denominator, and even then often fail to implement

it—as is clear with the so-called Basel III rules, which are claimed to

bring banks back under control. In another equally important forum,

after years of elaborate multitracked negotiations involving thousands

of delegates in hundreds of meetings, there remains little prospect of

international agreement on the necessary measures to limit carbon

emissions.

And of the mounting evidence of this fundamental ineffectiveness and

indeed corruption, the most striking piece of all is that the wealthy

pay less tax, proportionately, than the poor. Returns on investment,

such as hedge funds, are taxed at a far lower rate than the income tax

levied on ordinary wage earners. Striking too is that complaints about

this gross inequity are almost never to be heard in our supposedly

representative parliaments.

So what is to be done? Voting for someone different at the next election

seems a pathetically inadequate response—and it is. In Manhattan’s

Zuccotti Park where the Occupy Wall Street protests are centered, few

are demanding different politicians or new laws. Instead, the protesters

are showing, by the nature of their movement, a new way: debates and

decisions that include everyone, a culture of collaboration and sharing,

and a belief that there are many, not one, changes necessary to make a

better world. No one claims the right to lead this movement: There are

many voices that want to be heard. But although Occupy Wall Street is a

sharp cry of anger echoed by many across the U.S., and indeed more

widely around the world, the protest alone will not be enough.

What is needed is a much more fundamental, wholly new method of doing

things. No longer should we look for change to emerge from untrusted

politicians, arguing in distant chambers. As turkeys will not vote for

Thanksgiving or Christmas, these institutions will not reform

themselves. We have to accept the painful reality that we can no longer

rely on government policy to solve our most deep-seated and intractable

problems, from climate change to social alienation. Instead, we need to

look to ourselves for the necessary action.

There are four simple ideas at the heart of The Leaderless Revolution.

Together, they suggest a radically different approach to conducting our

affairs.

The first is that in an increasingly interconnected system, such as the

world emerging in the twenty-first century, the action of one individual

or a small group can affect the whole system very rapidly. Imagine the

world as a sports stadium, where a “wave” can be started by just one

person, but quickly involves the whole crowd. Those most powerful are

right beside us; and we—in turn—are best placed to influence them. A

suicide bomber acts, assaults his enemy and recruits others all in one

horrible action: a technique with such effect that it has spread from

Sri Lanka to Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, Bali, London and New York

within a few short years. But the same lesson is taught, with greater

force, by peaceful acts, a truth shown by Mahatma Gandhi as well as the

heroic young women, some still unknown, who refused to move to the back

of the bus in the 1950s and 1960s American South. Modern network theory

shows how one action can rapidly trigger change throughout the whole

system. One person becomes a group, then becomes a movement; one act

believed in and repeated by others becomes material, dramatic change.

The second key idea is that it is action that convinces, not words. New

research is now demonstrating what good theater directors have always

known: Show, don’t tell. The actions of those people closest to us—and

not government policy or even expert opinion—are the most influential.

This means that Internet petitions are not likely to bring about

fundamental change, although they might make the signatory feel better

(which may indeed be the purpose). Likewise, social media may help

organize and inform larger groups in ways that have never been available

before, but unless this organization is used for a purpose—to do

something—it is worthless.

In contrast to asking for or voting for someone else to do it, action

can address the problem directly. There is an education intrinsic to

action—you have to learn about the problem to solve it, for most

problems are complex. This education reverses the infantilization and

ignorance that authority encourages: You need not worry about the

details, because we will take care of it. Equally, it demolishes the

common notion that ordinary people are somehow incapable of making

intelligent decisions about their own circumstances. Again, evidence

shows this to be an arrogant fallacy—people know their own circumstances

best of all.

The third key idea is about engagement and discussion. Again it is a

simple idea: Decision making is better when it includes the people most

affected. In the current Western model of representative democracy, we

have become accustomed to the idea that politicians, elected by us,

should negotiate among competing interests and make the necessary

compromises to produce consensus and policy. In Washington today, it is

painfully clear that this is the opposite of what is actually happening,

while in Europe political consensus around the social democratic model

is breaking down. The far right is emerging once more as a significant

political force, in reaction to the largely unpredicted and sometimes

violent changes that the world is now experiencing. In times of

uncertainty, the false appeal of those who loudly proclaim certainty

gains luster.

In Brazil, Britain and New Orleans, a better way of deciding our affairs

together is emerging (and it is not the Internet, or on the Internet).

It resembles democracy in its earliest and purest days—people gathering

together, not in chat rooms, to make real decisions for themselves, not

voting for others to decide on their behalf, or merely ventilate their

frustrated opinions in town hall meetings or on the World Wide Web. When

lobbyists fill what used to be called the people’s parliaments and

congresses, this alternative “participatory” democracy offers something

unfamiliar yet extraordinary.

When large numbers of people make decisions for themselves, the results

are remarkable: Everyone’s views are heard, policies take all interests

into account (as all lasting policy must), and are thus fairer. Facts

and science are respected over opinion. Decision making becomes

transparent (and thus less corrupt), respectful and less partisan—people

who participate in decisions tend to stick to them. More responsibility

and trust in society can only come about by giving real decision-making

responsibility to people. If you do not give people responsibility, they

tend to behave irresponsibly, and sometimes violently. Happily, the

converse is also true—give people power and responsibility, and they

tend to use it more wisely—and peacefully.

This hints at the fourth idea that suffuses the argument throughout The

Leaderless Revolution: agency—the power to decide matters for ourselves.

We have lost agency. We need to take it back. We have become too

detached from the decisions most important to us; we are disconnected,

alienated, including from each other. This has contributed to a deeper

ennui about modern life: What is it all for? Where is the meaning? What

is the point? And in the solution to this crisis, which is both personal

and political, something profound may be available.

If we take back agency, and bring ourselves closer to managing our

affairs for ourselves, then something else may also come about: We may

find a fulfillment and satisfaction, and perhaps even a meaning, which

so often seems elusive in the contemporary circumstance.

These four ideas form the core of the philosophy of The Leaderless

Revolution. Adopt these ideas, above all act upon them, and things will

change. The book is intended as a guide and not a prescription. It sets

out a method of doing things and taking action, and not what the outcome

of this method should be. That is for everyone—acting together—to

determine, and no single individual can pretend to know it, let alone a

writer tapping away on a laptop. No one can claim to know what others

truly want. These needs and concerns—and dreams—can only be expressed

through action, shared decision-making and discussion with those most

affected, including those who might disagree. But this method is the

essence of a new form of politics, indeed a new way of living together

on our crowded planet.

How might these ideas play out in practice? While the aspirations of

this philosophy are grand, the steps needed to embody it are simple:

small steps, things that everyone can do, every day.

It is no small struggle merely to live out the ideals that you aspire

to. The first step, and perhaps the most important, is to work out what

your ideals are. The slogan “Be the change you wish to see” is often

associated with the environmental movement, but it applies more

universally. At the simplest level, you cannot expect a political goal

of “equality” if you treat people unequally or tolerate that treatment

for others. People are not mere factors of production (or

“utility-maximizing consumers”), as economists would depict them. By

altering our conduct and thus impact, we may incite change in others far

away, with surprising force and speed.

One essential of any method of change is this: Consult those most

affected. Those suffering from the problem (which may include you) will

know far more about its dimensions and likely solutions. People will

reject strident argument; they rarely reject informed interest. When I

served as a diplomat, I was subjected to both. The reader will already

know which had the more effect.

And it’s important, in all this, to reject the easy sanctimony of the

so-called Golden Rule: It exhibits a profound solipsism if not

arrogance—that we can know the requirements of others. Instead, the

maxim should be to ask others what they want, and not assume. They

always know, and now, thanks to the Internet, we can hear their voices,

all over the world, with more clarity and vigor than ever before. If in

any doubt, addressing those in most suffering is a good place to start,

as Karl Popper once suggested, for unlike “happiness,” suffering is all

too easy to recognize and measure.

So much for the personal; now, how to change the workplace?

Here, the dominant model is the private company whose primary and

overriding purpose is to maximize profit. The volatile flow of “hot

money” from poor to well-performing stocks in the stock market, usually

based on very short-term actual or predicted returns, reinforces this

tendency. Meanwhile, a culture has arisen where bosses pay themselves

hundreds of times more than their average employees, sometimes

regardless of performance. And government ownership has been proven a

disastrously inefficient alternative. But there is another way to run a

business, less often mentioned.

Consider cooperative companies, like Britain’s retail chain John Lewis,

that share ownership, as well as agency, in the company. All partners

(not “employees”) share in the profits and, notably, in decisions about

the company’s future. Differences in pay between the bosses and the

others are far lower. Yet this company has been an enduring success,

profiting and growing year after year in the most ferocious of markets.

It has lasted nearly a hundred years.

Such enterprises are not created by government legislation, or by the

inevitable machinations of the market. They are established by the free

choice of their owners and founders—people who choose to follow and

propagate a different way of doing things, without abandoning the

entrepreneurship that drives innovation and growth. And by their very

nature, and embodiment of values other than mere profit seeking, these

companies produce benefits that are today rarely associated with the

modern company: equality, solidarity and a satisfaction of real

involvement—as well as sustained economic stability. Contrast this with

the feelings most wage slaves associate with their employers. Typically,

one New York store owner told me that his biggest management problem was

to create a sense of “ownership” in his business. But it is absurd to

hope for “ownership” among employees who do not own any part of the

business.

Then there are the banks. The current system drives banks to lend

recklessly in boom times as they are forced to compete for profit and

share price, or else face buy-out. A more robust system might consist of

depositor-owned banks offering mutualized loans, where risk is spread

transparently[1] There is no intrinsic reason why such a bank should not

be set up—indeed there are already such—but it takes a decision by a

brave group to take the first step, and decisions by depositors to

reward institutions driven by values other than pure profit. This is a

politics of personal action: at home, with each other, and in the

workplace, incorporating the political goals we desire into everything

we do.

In turn, consumers can reward these companies with their dollars. There

are websites that offer competitive alternatives to the products of

companies that exploit their workers or the environment. At the most

extreme, customers can organize a boycott of the most egregious

offenders, as depositors at one European bank did to protest the bonuses

paid to executives after a huge government bailout (the bonuses were

withdrawn and the government outlawed them for all bailed-out banks).

When you’re buying, you’re voting. Every act becomes political. Indeed,

it always was.

This simple method of action applies at the global level too. The

Internet is now witnessing the genesis of online movements, where people

sharing a common concern unite across borders to address it, not through

campaigns but through action. We all know intuitively it simply isn’t

enough to fight genocide in Darfur or sex trafficking by clicking a

button.

In the 1930s, forty thousand foreign volunteers traveled to Spain to

fight fascism. Ten thousand never returned. These were extreme

circumstances but illustrate the debilitating late-twentieth-century

decline from acting to campaigning, a shift that has entirely suited the

powerful. It is now abundantly clear, as it ever was, that it is action

that makes a difference. If concerned about refugees from a distant war,

give refuge. Boycott the aggressor’s corporate partners. Build systems

of cooperation and action, so it is no longer necessary to rely on the

cumbersome reaction of our governments which, as I have seen as a

diplomat, too often act upon an artificial calculus of “national

interests” that relegate human needs beneath those of the state or

commerce.

No one pretends that it is easy to set up these alternative systems, but

neither is it impossible. Like a modern day version of Voltaire’s

Pangloss, who endlessly repeated that “all is for the best in the best

of all possible worlds,” it is tediously restated that the current

status quo is immutable and, certainly, incapable of improvement. We are

encouraged to believe that no one has the power to change it. Thus

paralyzed, we are frozen into inaction. This paralysis of thought is the

greatest obstacle to overcome. Defeat it, and everything becomes

possible.

The Leaderless Revolution is not demanding the violent overthrow of

government, or anything else. Everything worth changing can be changed

without resorting to violence; this should be a gentle revolution, using

force more lasting and convincing than any violence—our own actions and

convictions. The most extreme cases of savage repression or attack may

justify violence, and then only rarely, and only after all nonlethal

alternatives including isolation, boycott and sabotage have been

exhausted.

The Leaderless Revolution instead advocates the construction of an

alternative and better system, step by small step.

Power must be taken back to where it rightfully belongs—to those who

have, until now, let it be given away. No government will decree this.

No politician will declare their own irrelevance. But we do not need

orders from authority to take control. It can succeed at the simplest

level, as well as on a broader canvas.

Self-organization need not and should not be an antagonistic process.

Simply start talking to your neighbors. Identify shared concerns, and

take action. Establish forums to discuss common issues, moderate these

respectfully and inclusively, invite all those concerned to attend—and

to speak.

In this way, these new forms of organization will gain legitimacy, a

legitimacy of real popular consent, delivered through participation.

Soon politicians will start to refer to these new forums, then bow to

them, and one day perhaps, give way to them. An alternative system is

created.

At work, the same thing is possible. Unions once performed this

organizing purpose, and still can, if they are truly inclusive and

democratic—and not outlawed. But it can happen informally too. It can

start with a few people meeting weekly over coffee, but as it builds and

others join, those in charge will have to take notice. True power comes

not from the assertion of rules and threats, but from the aggregation of

honest and sincere voices, and their concerted heartfelt action. When

sustained, uncorrupted and driven by real concerns, such power is

ultimately irresistible. Thus is power taken back.

The Leaderless Revolution challenges the stale choice between free

markets or government control. There is a better way that celebrates and

releases the power of individual passion and enterprise, yet also

expresses that equally deep-seated but less-celebrated human trait:

concern for others, responsibility for the common good and a belief that

the most important things in life—community, love, purpose, each

other—cannot be bought, but have to be enacted, striven for, lived.

But before any of this, the fear that must be overcome—fear of each

other, fear of ridicule or failure and, perhaps most inadmissible of

all, fear of our own considerable power, as yet unleashed. It is this

fear that authority plays upon, indeed relies upon: Only we can protect

you. But that claim is ever less plausible in the face of global forces

which are, increasingly, out of control, whether terrorism, climate

change or economic volatility. Indeed, governments’ attempts to impose

order, through force or legislation, not only seem ineffective but may

exacerbate the problems they are claimed to solve. Worse, they have

convinced us, who have in fact the greater power, that we are powerless.

We have been silenced by the pervasive belief that there is no better

system than the current one of profit-driven capitalism and

representative democracy, when in fact our democracy has been hijacked

by those with the largest profits. We have been intimidated by the

bullying repetition that the status quo represents the summit of human

progress to date, when in its inequality, its carelessness for our

planet and its inhumanity to our fellow humans, in many ways it

represents the worst. Our silence permits this outrage to continue, and

profound injustice to be perpetuated. And it is this silence that must

now be broken, through a thousand acts of construction to build a better

world, a thousand acts that declare that there is a much, much better

way of organizing and deciding our lives together. Though peaceful,

these are revolutionary acts.

And with those acts, a new vista may open up, a possibility for the

human endeavor far more exciting and inspiring than that offered by the

current way of thought. Economic progress is not the measure of who we

are, just as bickering politicians should not define our ability for

cooperation. We are far more than merely this. And this possibility

cannot be defined; it can only be enacted. This revolution can only

succeed, indeed can only begin, without leaders: led by us—in control,

at last.

Carne Ross

New York City

October 2011

INTRODUCTION: THE SHEER CLIFF FACE

Some stories from the young twenty-first century:

When the H1N1 “swine flu” virus struck Mexico in early 2009, it took

only hours and days to spread to every continent in the world except

unpopulated Antarctica. Authorities struggled to contain the spread of

the disease. Desperate to prevent the import of infection, some

governments resorted to aiming remote thermometers at arriving air

passengers to measure their body temperature. The World Health

Organization, responsible for global coordination of the fight against

disease, admitted some months after the first outbreak that it had been

unable to keep up with the vast flow of data from national health

bodies. The virus, it later appeared, was spreading out of control.

One Sunday that same year, a preacher from a Sikh sect was attacked

during a service in Vienna, Austria. Sant Rama Nand was set upon by six

men armed with knives and a pistol and died early the next day. Within a

few hours, widespread riots had broken out across the Punjab, where the

preacher’s sect was based. By nightfall—some six hours after Sant Rama

Nand had died—several people had been killed in turmoil that had

convulsed Punjabi towns and cities. Thousands of Sikhs took to the

streets, clashing with police and setting fire to buildings and

vehicles. Major highways were blocked by bonfires of tires and sticks.

Trains were attacked in several places. The authorities had little or no

warning of the outbreak.

One afternoon in 2010, it took less than thirty minutes for the Dow

Jones Industrial Average to fall nearly a thousand points—the biggest

one-day points decline in the Dow’s history. It took five months for

regulators to explain what happened. According to the Securities and

Exchange Commission report, the rapid plunge was triggered by a poorly

executed sale by one mutual fund company. The firm started to sell $4.1

billion of futures contracts through an algorithmic trade, mistakenly

taking account only of volume, not time or price. Buyers, including

“high-frequency” traders who make rapid high-volume purchases and sales

to exploit tiny price margins in a dynamic market, purchased the

contracts. As sales of the contracts accelerated, the seller’s algorithm

responded to the increase in volume by unloading the contracts faster,

pushing prices down further. The liquidity crunch then spread to the

equity market. Many traders withdrew from the market. Some reverted to

manual systems but could not keep up with the spike in volume. As the

market dived, shares in some household name companies were sold for as

little as a cent. The SEC’s report was widely criticized for offering no

effective prescription on how to prevent such disruption in future.[2]

In the summer of 2008, food prices increased dramatically across the

globe thanks, it seems, to a sudden surge in oil prices, although the

causes of the spike are not fully understood. One factor may have been

the introduction of subsidies for ethanol production in the U.S.

Congress. Another possibility, speculation. The rocketing prices caused

riots and political tension in Cairo and Indonesia and many other

countries and reinforced an already emerging trend that some have called

a “food crunch” of static global supply and rising demand.[3] The prices

of commodities such as rice and wheat jumped to record highs, triggering

food riots from Haiti to Egypt to Bangladesh and Cameroon and prompting

UN appeals for food aid for more than thirty countries in sub-Saharan

Africa.

In response to this phenomenon, companies and in some cases governments

in money-rich but “food-poor” countries, like South Korea and Saudi

Arabia, began to buy up land and agricultural rights in money-poor but

land-rich countries. The Saudi Star company plans to spend up to $2

billion in the next few years acquiring and developing 500,000 hectares

of land in Ethiopia, one of the poorest—and hungriest—in the world.[4]

Up to fifty million hectares of land—an area more than double the size

of Britain—has been bought in the last few years or is under negotiation

by governments and wealthy investors, often enjoying state subsidies.

The South Korean company Daewoo bought the rights to as much as half of

Madagascar’s available agricultural land. This deal in turn helped

trigger a coup against the Malagasy government that signed the deal.

This coup produced political instability in Madagascar that continues to

the time of this writing.

Earlier in the century, an Egyptian architecture student living in

Hamburg was horrified by reports of Russia’s brutal campaign against

separatists, mostly Muslim, in Chechnya in the Southern Caucasus, a war

whose atrocities were scarcely reported in the information-overloaded

citadels of the West. The Chechnya war confirmed his view of the global

oppression of Muslims. Mohamed Atta joined a local mosque where, it was

later learned, he was introduced to the concept of jihad, a personal

struggle for liberation.

Atta made his way to Pakistan, to join a terrorist network called “The

Base,” or Al Qaeda, which had been founded—and funded—by a middle-aged

man who himself had been radicalized by the Soviet Union’s occupation of

Muslim Afghanistan—as well as America’s military domination of his home

country, Saudi Arabia. In the Afghan mujahideen victory over the Soviet

occupation forces, Osama bin Laden found his inspiration to seek a

global jihad. Mohamed Atta was to become the pilot of the American

Airlines Boeing 767 which cannoned into the north tower of New York’s

World Trade Center. Walking to work that dread morning, I heard his

aircraft fly overhead.

The singular act of the 9/11 attacks helped trigger the allied invasions

of two countries, and further massive, complex and unforeseeable change.

The attacks were brilliantly anatomized in the U.S. Congress 9/11

Commission Report, which took over eight hundred pages to describe the

antecedents and chronology of this one single, if remarkable, event—and

that was concise.

More recently, the defaults of a few subprime mortgage holders

concentrated in just three American states triggered in a very short

space of time a global economic meltdown that—among many, many other

things—brought down several long-established banks in the United States

and necessitated a $700 billion bailout of other banks. When confidence

in the ability of U.S. banks to meet their obligations collapsed, rapid

contraction of credit was contagious across the globe, destroying in

quick time both overleveraged banks, and the deposits of their

customers. Banks in Iceland fell overnight, eliminating at a stroke the

savings of depositors in the UK. The ramifications of that event

continue to delay Iceland’s entry into the European Union, while in

Britain the credit crunch, among other factors, has contributed to the

most severe austerity measures and government spending cuts in many

decades, including a 70 percent cut to higher education budgets. In Hong

Kong, thousands of small investors and pensioners suddenly lost their

Lehman “mini-bonds,” worth billions of dollars, when Lehman Brothers,

founded in 1850, fell in the U.S.[5]

The origins of the “credit crunch” were manifold and are debated still.

Greedy lending by banks, unwise borrowing by homebuyers, loosening

legislation from government, enacted with the worthy intention of

enabling broader home ownership: perhaps all of them played a part. But

some have suggested a more deep-seated cause—the growing inequality in

America between the rich and everyone else, which drove the

income-stagnant middle classes to borrow ever more to maintain their

living standards amid rising costs.

Another intriguing factor has been barely noted. The statistical models

used by the banks to assess the risks of bundled mortgages were out of

date: Not only did they underestimate the volume and riskiness of the

increasingly popular subprime mortgages, the banks’ models also

underestimated interconnectedness within the housing and mortgage

markets, regionally and nationally. The preponderance of the “no money

down” high debt-to-deposit subprime mortgages meant that only a small

dip in the economy made huge numbers of mortgages suddenly unaffordable,

and the buyers defaulted. The banks had underestimated the degree to

which one thing would lead quickly to many others. They underestimated

complexity.

Whatever the cause, no government was ready for the crash, which came

almost without warning. Then President George W. Bush said later that he

had been “blindsided” by the crisis, stating that he “assumed any major

credit troubles would have been flagged by the regulators or credit

agencies.”[6] The cascading and multiple effects of the “credit crunch,”

many of which have yet to be felt, included the loss of tens of millions

of jobs across the globe, and an immeasurable but nonetheless notable

shift of power from West to East, as the U.S. relied ever more heavily

upon China to buy up almost a trillion dollars’ worth of American

government debt to finance the government bailout.

The tortured, twisting paths of cause to effect in these stories of the

twenty-first century are discernible only in retrospect by separating

out these threads from the confusing rat’s nest of simultaneous

events—itself a somewhat artificial and falsifying exercise. But these

stories are not extraordinary. They are typical of a vastly

interconnected age, where billions and billions of people are

interacting constantly, a wholly unprecedented phenomenon which we are

only beginning to understand. These events were not predictable by most

conventional theories of politics or economics.

Some may see chaos in these events, or purely random cause and effect.

These events do not suggest the structured order of past experience—of

units, be they states or individuals, behaving according to established

theories of international relations or neoclassical economics,

predictable for the most part, and comprehensible within our existing

models. But neither are they chaos, a random, meaningless mess. They are

something else. This is a new dispensation—complexity—requiring new

tools: the science of complex systems. Pioneers in many fields are using

techniques like agent-based modeling and network analysis to begin to

offer powerful new insights into this multiplying complexity.

But this new world requires something else beyond new tools of

interpretation. This world is defying the ability of existing structures

and institutions to understand and arbitrate events effectively. Even

senior government officials confess the decline of state power:” We are

in a world where governments, as a whole, have less power than they once

did,” a senior U.S. State Department official recently said, sensibly

concluding, “Let’s take the world as we now see it.”[7] Confidential

briefing papers prepared for the UN Secretary-General noted the

declining importance not only of the UN itself, but also of governments

in managing the world’s most pressing political, economic and

environmental problems, observing cheerily that “Our planet’s ability to

sustain life, as we know it, is under enormous strain.” [8] As Parag

Khanna has commented:

Globalization is… diffusing power away from the west in particular, but

also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups,

humanitarian nongovernmental organizations and super-empowered

individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists. This force of entropy

will not be reversed for decades—if not for centuries.[9]

Timothy Garton Ash has called this world “not a new world order but a

new world disorder. An unstable kaleidoscope world—fractured,

overheated, germinating future conflicts.”[10] Governments failed to

predict the credit crunch, as they did 9/11. Their blunt methods to

manage both economic volatility and terrorism—as well as other global

problems—are insufficient, and sometimes counterproductive.

Politicians argue that only if they are in power will decisions be the

right ones, and thus we must suffer tedious rounds of facile political

argument over enduring and deep-seated problems, when closer analysis of

these problems leads to the more disturbing conclusion that no

politician and no government, however wise, however right, is able to

solve them. Somehow we know this. Frustration with conventional politics

is rising everywhere, depressing voter turnout and fueling popular

anger. Politicians too can sense the mood, but are unable to offer any

prescription except more of the same politics, perhaps spiced with a

dangerous and hollow populism.

This new world requires something else beyond more promises, something

beyond new theories of interpretation, something that might, just might,

make us at last feel that the tools might fit the job. This new world

requires a new politics.

Climate change, terrorism, ceaseless wars in places that defy

understanding or resolution and where victory or defeat both seem far

away, a perpetual economic volatility.[11] These are now already

familiar problems of this young and turbulent century. They are easy

problems to define: borderless, a product of the new “globalized” world.

But at the same time they seem intractable: There seems very little that

any individual can do about them.

Taking their allotted role, instead governments, and associations of

governments—the UN, the EU, international conferences in Copenhagen or

Doha—claim that they have these problems in hand. Every day witnesses a

summit, a statement or a resolution claiming to address these worrying

ills. It is a never-ending video-feed of activity, tedious to watch in

detail, but nonetheless reassuring in its unceasing activity and torrent

of verbiage—at least, that is the intention.

“Trust us,” the statements say, “we have these problems under control.”

But the evidence suggests otherwise, more and more insistently. Measure

the outputs, not the promises made. Take two familiar problems.

At the 2009 Copenhagen climate change summit, an intensive two-year

international negotiation involving hundreds of delegates from almost

every country, and thousands of pressure groups and lobbyists, produced

at its end a short two-page document which, in hastily drafted and

ungrammatical prose, offers only the most general statements of concern

about the problem of climate change and no binding commitments to limit

carbon emissions or to compensate those most affected by its manifold

impacts.

Despite the global membership of the negotiation, encompassing every

country in the world, the statement was hashed out in the last few hours

of the conference in a closed room session involving China, Brazil, the

U.S. and India. The needs of those most affected by climate change, like

low-lying island states or Bangladesh which are already losing land to

rising seas, were ignored.

The Copenhagen process had been formidably complicated, involving

multiple “tracks” of negotiation in an attempt to address the many

different aspects of the problem of climate change, including forests,

technology transfer and protection of oceans as well as the “big

picture” questions of carbon emissions and how to finance the costs of

adapting to the effects of rising temperatures. Despite the thousands of

hours spent negotiating these subsidiary issues over the previous two

years, none of them was addressed in the final text.

In Cancún, a year later, delegates successfully agreed that their states

wanted to limit global warming to 2°C—the “danger” level, beyond which,

a recent paper in the scientific journal Nature warned, warming may

increase beyond any control. The conference was widely touted as a

“success,” as the Mexican hosts managed to secure agreement on key

issues, including financing for climate adaptation in poorer countries.

But there was no agreement on how climate change might be

prevented—concrete agreement on the carbon emissions targets that

scientists concur as necessary. As The Economist reported, Cancún was

successful in rescuing the UN climate negotiations “process”; its value

in rescuing the climate was less clear.[12]

Recently, the UN Environment Program reported that even if states

fulfilled all of their commitments to reduce carbon emissions, including

those made at Copenhagen, the world’s temperature would still most

likely exceed the 2°C “danger” level. Outside of predictions and

commitments, and in the real world of the Earth’s atmosphere, where

success or failure is truly measured, the concentration of carbon in the

atmosphere has continued to rise unabated. In 1992, at the time of the

first international gathering of governments to address climate

change,[13] the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere was 354 parts

per million by volume. By 2010, it was nearly 10 percent higher, an

unprecedentedly rapid increase.

Meanwhile, in the global economy, the years that immediately followed

the 2008–2009 credit crunch witnessed innumerable G8, G20, UN and Basel

Committee discussions attempting to agree on new standards and rules to

prevent a recurrence of the devastating crash. But within the confusing

barrage of statements and commitments on new task forces, committees and

“watchdogs,” nowhere to be found was the one simple

measure—substantially higher capital/debt requirements for banks—that

almost all disinterested analysts believe would actually prevent a crash

happening again. And there was a reason for this absence.

While globalization intensifies apace, its rigors and stresses ever more

evident, its rewards seem to accrue mostly to a minority: the top 1

percent of the population in the U.S. took home nearly 25 percent of all

income, the highest percentage since 1928.[14] Middle-class incomes are

declining, but living expenses are not. Meanwhile, for many of the

poorest, life has actually gotten worse.

Across the globe, more than one billion still live on less than one

dollar per day; two billion live on a pathetic two dollars per day. And

while it is easy to ignore the miseries of life in Somalia and

Bangladesh, it is more astonishing that in New York City one in five

children is dependent on food stamps for survival, while Goldman Sachs

bankers enjoy bonuses of some $700,000 each and hedge fund traders throw

parties costing hundreds of thousands. In 2011, as leading bankers

declared that the “years of apology” should be over,[15] one study

showed that seven million of the poorest Britons had seen their living

standards decline by a massive 10 percent over the previous decade.[16]

In 2009, one in seven Americans was living in poverty, the highest

proportion of the population for fifty years. In some parts of America,

life expectancy is actually declining thanks to poverty, though health

care spending per capita—averaged across the population—is higher here

than anywhere on earth.

As the whole world, except North Korea, adopts the capitalist model,

such inequality is rising everywhere, both between and within countries.

In China, the introduction of free market economics has freed hundreds

of millions from poverty. But at the same time it has created the worst

inequality in Asia, apart from Nepal, until very recently an autocratic

monarchy: Official estimates suggest 1 percent of Chinese households

enjoy 40 to 60 percent of total household wealth.[17] In India,

politicians obsess about headline GDP growth rates, and the richest

build billion-dollar skyscraper houses, but hundreds of millions remain

in abject poverty and malnourishment—the calorie intake of the poorest

has remained stagnant for over a decade, and more than half of India’s

children under five suffer stunting and poor brain development.[18] Even

in the supposedly egalitarian Nordic countries, the gap between rich and

poor is growing fast. Worldwide, a new trend has emerged, barely

noticed: Beyond a certain level of development, those at the top benefit

enormously, those at the bottom often actually do worse, while the

income of the bulk of the population stays more or less stagnant.

It is little wonder, then, that this model is so confidently extolled as

ideal by those who benefit from it. So often are the virtues of this

system avowed that it has taken on the characteristics of a moral

system, where anything done in the name of that system, however gross,

is morally justified as part of the necessary mechanics of the market.

The future offers an unsettling vision of ever greater competition for

markets and scarce resources. The ferocious contest of the global

marketplace is like being chained to an accelerating treadmill, under

constant pressure to cut costs and invent new products, trapped by a

ceaseless desperation to attract customers who themselves are ever less

satisfied, hopping from product to product (as surveys reveal) craving a

satiation—a fulfillment—they can never find. As billions join the global

labor force, no job is secure, no industry is stable, no profession may

not one day face obsolescence.

While economic insecurity is on the rise, so too is a more insidious and

equally permanent anxiety—political insecurity and violence. As U.S.

officials with great candor admitted after 9/11, we are in a “Long War”

with global terrorists, and it seems to be getting longer. The war with

Al Qaeda is spreading across the world’s geography, as its affiliates

metastasize. The invasion of Afghanistan whose rationale I delivered to

the UN one winter morning,[19] wholly justified to remove the government

brazenly hosting our attackers, has succeeded not only in perpetuating

civil war in Afghanistan but has also triggered the spread of

instability and extreme violence to the border areas and across

Pakistan, where now every major city has seen repeated suicide attacks

of horrific violence.

In the “homeland,” violent jihadists may be found not only among

immigrants and visitors, but from the ranks of our own population:

“Jihad Jane,” who was radicalized in her Philadelphia suburb; the U.S.

Army doctor who killed thirteen and wounded thirty at Fort Hood. A third

of all charged U.S. terror suspects are American citizens.[20] Contrary

to the received wisdom that economic underdevelopment is the fount of

terrorism, former CIA case officer Marc Sageman found in a study of 172

Al Qaeda terrorists that the majority were middle to upper class, well

educated, married with children, and occupied professional or

semi-professional positions, often as engineers, architects, scientists

and doctors. In Britain, suicide attackers who killed fifty-six and

injured several hundred on the London Underground and buses on July 7,

2005, came not from Saudi Arabia but from Dewsbury and Leeds. The

would-be murderers who tried to detonate a nail bomb in a London

nightclub in 2007 included a highly trained and British-born National

Health Service doctor.

Thanks to the spread of technology—which can be as simple as cell phones

and fertilizer—and information on the Internet, it is now

straightforward for small groups of extremists to kill large numbers. In

Japan, police discovered that the Aum Shinrikyo sect had the capability

to produce the deadly nerve gas sarin in aerosol form. Had they chosen

to use this method, the fanatical group could have killed many hundreds.

Instead, they chose to deploy the less toxic liquid form of the agent,

but still killed scores and horribly injured many more.

In Oklahoma, Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh killed five hundred and

injured thousands with a truck bomb assembled at a cost of less than

$5,000. After mounting attempted attacks in 2010 to detonate package

bombs on several airliners, the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda (AQAP)

announced that “Operation Hemorrhage” was part of a new approach

eschewing major attacks, and instead setting out to cause “death by a

thousand cuts,” stating that “To bring down America we do not need to

strike big,” and adding that the total bill for the parcel bomb

operation was a mere $4,200, but that it “will without a doubt cost

America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security

measures. This is what we call leverage.”[21]

Some 700,000 to 800,000 light weapons are produced every year, adding to

the vast stock of weapons already in circulation, as many weapons remain

in use decades after their manufacture—Taliban fighters carry AK-47s

produced in the 1960s or earlier.[22] Countries like Austria, Canada,

the UK and U.S. join North Korea, China and Russia as the largest

producers of these weapons, the primary means of conflict worldwide. The

annual authorized trade in such weapons exceeds $6 billion a year.[23]

The Small Arms Survey now reckons that globally there are nearly 900

million light weapons, some of ever greater sophistication: sniper

rifles deadly at two miles’ range; man-portable missiles that can down

airliners; mines that can sink cruise liners. In Mexico, drugs

traffickers have used submarines and antitank missiles in their wars

with each other and the authorities.

But it is not only the growing ubiquity of weapons and terrorism—what’s

in the backpack of that man down the railroad car?—that threaten our

sense of safety and well-being. In Britain, the millions of CCTV cameras

broadcast their own message of our lack of trust in one another. Some

cameras now bear loudspeakers to broadcast their correctional message to

the “antisocial.” In some city centers, authorities deploy noise-making

devices whose deterrent screech can be heard only by the young, like

dogs or rats already designated as “troublemakers.” Police are beginning

to deploy unmanned drones with high-resolution cameras to monitor car

traffic and the population, as defense companies push for military

technology to be adopted in policing. Some of the drones carry

loudspeakers with which to relay instructions to the civilian

populace.[24] It is reported that the London 2012 Olympics will be

monitored by Royal Air Force “Reaper” unmanned combat air vehicles

(UCAVs), hitherto deployed in Afghanistan to attack insurgents.

Meanwhile, in the United States, nearly four thousand federal, state and

local counterterrorism agencies monitor the population, while thirty

thousand officials are employed solely to monitor telephone and other

communications, creating, in the words of The Washington Post, “a new

level of government scrutiny” of its citizens. Thousands of Americans

are included in a vast database, including many who have never been

accused of any wrongdoing.[25]

But the intrusiveness of such measures does little to lessen the evident

tension in public spaces, nor deter random, almost casual violence. In

2008, Kevin Tripp had an argument with a stranger in a supermarket

check-out queue in South London. The argument escalated. Tripp was

punched to the ground, suffering serious head injuries. He died later in

the hospital. In Baltimore in 2010, one man killed another with a chunk

of concrete during an argument over a parking space.

Research data show that community life in Britain, and America, is

deteriorating. Measuring the number of people in an area who are single,

those who live alone, the numbers in private rented accommodation and

those resident for less than a year, researchers found that all

communities in Britain were “less rooted” than they were thirty years

earlier.[26] Comparing data from a census taken in 1971, researchers at

the University of Sheffield found substantially higher levels of

“rootlessness” and “anomie” in contemporary communities. Commenting on

this data, the research leader, Professor Daniel Dorling, said, “Even

the weakest communities in 1971 were stronger than any community now.”

Ninety-seven percent of communities studied had become more fragmented

over the last three decades. “These trends may be linked to higher

likelihoods of fearfulness because we are less likely to see and

therefore understand each others’ lives.”

In the U.S., over a similar period, the rate at which Americans invite

people to their homes has declined by 45 percent. In his classic study

Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reported indices of discohesion and social

fragmentation rising across the board. For instance, membership of

chapter-based organizations, where members attend regular meetings and

participate in social activities like the Rotary Club, the Masons, the

NAACP, Boy and Girl Scouts, etc., halved in the last fifty years. Others

report that Americans are also—unsurprisingly—lonelier. Between 1985 and

2004, the number of Americans who said they had no close confidants

tripled. Single-parent households are on the rise, and the U.S. Census

estimates that 30 percent more Americans will live alone in 2010 than

did so in 1980.[27]

As if these data were not dismal enough, it seems too that the very

ground on which we stand is less firm than before. Mankind foolishly

believed that nature, once conquered, would remain quiescent in our

plans. Rising sea levels have already required the evacuation—forever—of

several low-lying islands. In Australia, forest fires rage with a new

and terrifying ferocity, consuming whole towns. Even the skeptical

notice greater volatility in the weather—everything’s hotter and colder,

and wetter and windier—than it used to be. This too is consistent with

science’s predictions. This volatility feeds a deeper disconnection

between man and his environment. For the first time ever, more people

now dwell in cities than the countryside. The urban majority now barely

encounter what their forebears took for granted: trees, fresh air,

birdsong, silence. Lives are lived out in a frantic, noisy hecticness;

fulfillment is distant, with peace and escape dreamed of, sometimes

purchased, but all too rarely experienced.

This list is so depressing that together these problems offer a sheer

and intimidating cliff face, upon which there appears no handhold, no

purchase at all. The temptation is simply to switch off, tune out,

escape.

And indeed advertising offers us a tantalizing vision of that escape, a

ceaseless promise to leave the burdensome everyday and wander into

sunlit uplands: “Go forth!” says one advert for jeans, with an evocative

image of a young man shirtless in a field of waving grass. These

messages claim not only to sell us jeans but to solve our all too

obvious, if never to be admitted, existential crisis: That all this—the

modern condition of prosperity, a sort of peace, a sort of freedom—is

simply not enough. The yearning for more, for distraction, never quite

goes away however much is purchased, however many holidays are taken.

This hunger is all but explicit in the advertising (Go forth! Find

yourself! Choose freedom!), but can never be confessed in a culture

where our arguments—capitalism, democracy—are supposed to have won, and

provide a convincing, empirically justified answer to all objections,

except the one we cannot admit to.

But in this existential crisis, the first fragile handhold upon the

cliff face of intractable problems is revealed. The answer to both

crises is, in fact, the same. And it is simple. It is embodied in one

word: agency. Agency over events—the feeling of control—is a gross

absence in the contemporary condition. Recapturing it is available

through one simple mechanism: action. Action to reassert control over

events in our lives. And this in a nutshell is the simple essence of the

philosophy to be offered here. We lack control; we need to take it back.

The incredible and seismic changes of the late twentieth and early

twenty-first century have forced dramatic and sometimes revolutionary

changes in almost every realm of human activity—finance, technology,

culture—save one, politics. In this most crucial forum, the institutions

and habits acquired in different times have endured, even when their

effectiveness is less and less evident. On the contrary, the evidence is

accumulating that these inherited bodies and rules are less and less

able to comprehend and arbitrate the forces now swirling around us.

Something else is desperately needed. That necessity has been

articulated by many but none has offered a solution except more of the

same, politics as usual: pathetic calls for more “political will” to

address this or that problem; celebrity-endorsed “single issue”

campaigns for the public to pressure their representatives to address

one particular crisis over others; superficial online campaigns to

address some deep and poisonous malaise, like starvation or child

slavery. Some believe that technology alone will deliver the necessary

revolution, but here too it is clear that technology’s effects are often

as malign as benign, serving the dictatorial as much as the democratic.

A more fundamental shift is needed.

One telltale sign is the increasing number of politicians who now

promise to “change politics” itself. In 2008, it was Barack Obama; in

Britain, it was the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition of 2010

which promised to change the very nature of the system. In America, the

change-the-system sentiment is now expressed by the Tea Party movement,

with its demand to “take back our government.” And just as surely, the

Labour Party in Britain, now in opposition after thirteen years in

government, will develop a new claim, that it too will “change the

system” if only voters give them a chance. The pattern is a clear one.

Politicians can smell the frustration, and must respond to it, but are

surely doomed. With each electoral cycle, the disillusionment appears

greater, data show that voters chop and change parties with greater

frequency, while turnout falls steadily in all democracies, with only

the occasional upward “blip,” like the sputtering of a dying fire.

This revolution is as profound as it is simple. Evidence and research

are now suggesting that the most important agent of change is ourselves.

At a stroke, the prevailing notion that the individual is impotent in

the face of the world’s complex and manifold problems is turned on its

head. Instead, the individual is revealed as a powerful motor of change,

offering the prospect of immense consequences for politics and the

world, and, no less, for themselves.

I once believed in the capability and rightness of enlightened

government so fervently that I went to work for it. I was a British

diplomat, in an institution and a system which was founded on a deep

belief that state officials like me could understand and arbitrate the

world effectively, for the benefit of the less informed masses. I no

longer believe this. This disillusionment came not from ideological

conversion, but experience.

In my work on many of the world’s most worrying problems, including

climate change, terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (I was

responsible for both issues for the UK at the United Nations), it became

slowly clear to me that government was unable, by its very nature, to

comprehend and manage these forces effectively. Why will become clear,

but in short I realized, dimly and slowly, a profound and intrinsic

deficit of governments: that they are required to take what is

complex—reality—and turn it into simplistic pronouncements and policy,

the better to convince the population that government has matters in

hand. People in government are not bad or stupid, on the contrary; but

the contract between people and government forces them to claim

something which no sensible person should claim, that

government—anyone!—can understand and predict the massive complexity of

the contemporary world, and manage it on our behalf. Every politician

must claim to the voters that they can interpret the world, and produce

certain effects, just as the officials working for them must pretend

that they can too. I know this because I did it.

I saw how in looking at places like the Middle East, and by extension

the whole world, governments were forced to reduce hugely complicated

and dynamic situations into simplistic models, us and them, security

versus threat, just as they were required to project the manifold needs

of their own diverse peoples into simple and artificially invented sets

of “interests.” Such a process is inherently false, requiring

governments—and officials like me—to create stories and policies that

offer clear, straightforward and therefore often very simplistic

solutions. Then, to justify these stories, their officials must seek out

the facts to suit the policy, the very opposite of a more valid

empirical method—where we observe the world, then respond accordingly.

Governments have it the wrong way around.

I gladly took part in such processes, writing speeches and talking

points, and arguing in vicious negotiation to claim that Saddam’s Iraq

was a threat, that his regime’s overthrow would deliver stability and

spread democracy across the Middle East. On Afghanistan, I wrote embassy

telegrams from a Kabul freshly liberated from the Taliban, explaining

how democracy “Afghan style” would bring peace and prosperity to the

Afghan people, conveniently overlooking the reality that much of

Afghanistan remained unliberated from the Taliban’s grip and that the

democratic government we proclaimed was in fact largely our own

creation, our own fantasy of what democracy should look like, rather

than necessarily what the local people really wanted. After fifteen

years as a diplomat, I was highly skilled in writing cables and reports

and policy submissions that endlessly reaffirmed our version of events,

often without the benefit of any knowledge from the ground at all. In

five years working on Iraq, not once had I set foot in the country, yet

at the UN. I was called Britain’s Iraq “expert.” I was not alone in such

ignorance, nor in the arrogance that, despite it, government could

declare with confidence what was happening or what might happen in such

places. Only after much subsequent slow and sometimes painful reflection

did I come to these broader conclusions about the intrinsic amorality,

but also incapability, of government.

I watched dramatic forces at play in the world, and felt rising

frustration at the seeming inability of government, or indeed anyone, to

offer meaningful and plausible solutions. As political violence spread,

and the credit crunch exploded, I watched desperate politicians, some of

them friends, as they argued to pretend that they might understand,

might control these forces—terrorism, the stresses of globalization, the

deteriorating natural environment. I watched the growing angry chorus in

public gatherings and on the Internet, demanding action, change,

something, with ever more belligerent rhetoric, but never themselves

offering solutions beyond a rejection of the current cohort of lousy

politicians.

And I pondered change itself, how to react to this vastly complex world

in a way that might work, that might provide the satisfaction of finding

real traction upon the ghastly sheer cliff face of problems. And I

realized that perhaps the worst deficit of government itself was this:

In claiming to arbitrate the world’s problems, unintentionally it

encourages our own inaction and detachment. And in that detachment, rage

and frustration has fermented dangerously. In the disembodied anonymity

of the Internet, or the vapid chatter of commentators and newsreaders,

and in the ceaseless demand for government and politicians to act—do

something!—I saw how our opinions have become yet more polarized, an

alienation from each other exacerbated by the mobility and rootlessness

of modern economies. The problem is always someone else’s, never ours,

to solve.

And yet it is action—and only action—that changes things. Whether in the

history of the battle for civil rights in America’s South or the

Franco-Russian wars, or in the contemporary research of social

scientists and network theorists, the same and ancient truth is

repeated: It is the action of individuals which has the most effect on

those around them, on their circumstances, and thus the whole world.

Whether in Gandhi’s salt march to free India from colonial rule, or a

group of men trying to stop muggings in their neighborhood in New York

City, it is the expression of conviction through action that has the

most powerful impact upon each other, our surroundings, and indeed our

own well-being. The scale of the world’s difficulties—the sheer cliff

face—and the magnitude of globalization produce a paralyzing sense of

impotence and frustration. But in fact, a world that is more

interconnected than ever before, where each person is only a few links

away from anyone else, means that actions in our own microcosmos can

have global consequences.

These stories and ideas will be explored in this book: facts, research

and stories that together suggest a radical philosophy of how to create

a better world, one that more closely reflects the current reality than

the easy but dangerous assumption that we can leave it all to government

to fix. This philosophy could fit under the broad school of thought

known as “anarchism,” a term commonly associated with violence and

nihilism—more what it is against, than what it is for. And mere

opposition to government, authority and hierarchy is clearly

insufficient as a solution. This book has a more positive vision,

presented in detailed principles to guide action. It is not proposing a

violent overthrow of government, but a much gentler revolution—in the

way we think about the world, and how we—ourselves—might therefore

respond to it. Changing our own approach is critical: embodying our

political beliefs in every action. Changing the self may change the

world. In all the haze and chatter, rediscover what you truly believe

in, then act. And following that transformation, another necessary

shift—negotiating directly with one another, rather than leaving it to

distant institutions. In contrast to the paralysis of modern

legislatures, too often dominated by the interests of the powerful

rather than the mass, collective decision making, whether in New Orleans

or Brazil, has emphatically shown the benefits of shared debate and

responsibility: respect for one another, for facts, but above all

agreement upon better, fairer and more enduring solutions.

In a world where government influence is in inexorable decline, and

other transnational forces assert themselves, some beneficent but some

malign, there is little choice but to take on the burden of action

ourselves. If we do not, others surely will, whether criminal mafias

with worldwide reach, global terrorist movements or multinational

companies and banks with no concern but their own profit. This book

offers some simple pointers to what that action might

comprise—conviction, action, consultation—with some inspiring stories of

how these principles have worked before. But this is no historical

survey; it is an attempt to look at the world as it actually is, not as

we or governments might wish it to be, and design a plan of action to

respond. It is above all a manifesto about how to act—method—not a

prescription of what end-state or utopian system to seek. No book can

offer solutions to every problem, though there are several suggestions

here. But that how is the key, for, as we shall see, the method is the

point—the means are the ends. For in that method, there are

extraordinary prizes to be won—not only the accomplishment of the

desired goal, but a greater sense of cooperation, respect and community

with our fellow human beings, and a deeper sense of our own satisfaction

and purpose, needs that are all but ignored in the current obsession

with material well-being, status and celebrity. It is a humble and very

practical manifesto, though its ideals are transcendent.

In the current crisis there are small but glimmering signals that point

the way forward. These signals are but rarely noticed by those who

defend the current order, but the lessons of this new philosophy are all

around us, if we care to look. You won’t find this teaching in the

academy, or in economists’ predictions or politicians’ speeches.

1. The Wave and the Suicide Bomber

When American troops entered Iraq in 2003, they were briefed to expect a

conventional army consisting, as such armies do, of tanks, artillery and

infantry. Saddam Hussein’s army had once contained more Main Battle

Tanks, a primary unit of the conventional army, than all the armies of

Western Europe put together.[28]

The lead elements of the American and British armies, then, were

surprised to find that most of the opposition they faced comprised not

tanks and howitzers, but men in pickup trucks, bearing rocket-propelled

grenades (RPGs) and machine guns. These bands would attempt to ambush

the advancing allied columns, launch the RPGs, then flee. They were not

often successful. Indeed, so desperate and dangerous to their

participants were these attacks that they resembled nothing so much as

the Japanese kamikaze suicide attacks familiar from the Pacific theater

of the Second World War. These fedayeen fighters, as they came to be

known, did not appear to belong to particular Iraqi army units, or if

they did, their members had abandoned their uniforms and badges that

denoted their unit allegiance.

The allied invasion proceeded with remarkably little substantial

opposition. The American tanks at the head of the advance reached

Baghdad almost as fast as they could drive. The capital quickly fell,

the statues of the hated dictator were toppled and the allies assumed

control of the country, taking possession of the main government

buildings abandoned by Saddam’s cohorts and thus, they believed,

control.

It was only in the days that followed that the real military opposition

to the invasion began to assert itself. The first suicide attack had

taken place during the march on Baghdad. The attacker—an Iraqi army

officer dressed in civilian clothes—drove a taxi to a checkpoint near

the central city of Najaf and, as American soldiers approached,

detonated the vehicle. Four soldiers were killed.[29] Iraq’s then vice

president, Taha Ramadan, warned that there would be many more such

“martyrdom missions”: He was right, though the attacks that followed

were not under government orders; his government would soon disappear. A

few days later, two women suicide bombers killed three coalition

soldiers north of Baghdad.

Over the days and months that followed, the number of suicide bombings

rose dramatically. In one month in 2004, there were several attacks

every day. As Dexter Filkins reported in The New York Times, “in the

first five years, more than nine hundred people detonated themselves in

Iraq, sometimes several in a single day. That was before you counted the

car bombs when the driver got out before it exploded. There were

thousands of those.”[30]

Suicide bombers used cars, trucks and motorbikes; often they came on

foot, sometimes on bicycles. During the “surge” of American troops in

2008, attackers launched fusillades of massive “lob

bombs”—explosive-filled gas cylinders propelled by crude rocket

engines—from flatbed trucks parked alongside U.S. bases. The operators,

their intent clearly suicidal, were inevitably annihilated, but only

after unleashing hours of bombardment. Such were the ferocity and

effectiveness of the attacks, and the allies’ inability effectively to

stop them, that they began to undermine the will of the U.S. to remain.

Even before Barack Obama’s election as president in 2008 when during the

campaign he had promised to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq, the

administration of George W. Bush had declared a date when the soldiers

would leave.

In Afghanistan, allied war planners preparing the 2002 invasion had

expected a more irregular resistance. The Taliban who ran the country

were more militia than a conventionally organized army, more AK-47 than

Main Battle Tank (though they did have a few tanks, at least before the

allied airstrikes began). Their tactics had been honed in decades of

fighting against other Afghan militias and conventional military forces

during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

Adept at ambush and hit-and-run attacks, the Taliban fighters were

extremely hardy and able to endure long periods without logistical

support. After trekking over Afghanistan’s harsh terrain, they would

launch an attack with RPGs and machine guns, and occasionally a heavier

weapon like a mortar or small artillery piece, then melt away into the

unforgiving countryside. The Taliban were not known, however, to use

suicide attacks. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, there were

no known instances of such tactics, except very occasionally by foreign

mujahideen fighters, some of whom later became infamous as Al Qaeda.

When I was posted to Afghanistan as a diplomat shortly after the allied

invasion, the defenses of our embassy reflected this assessment of the

Taliban’s military capabilities. The embassy was located in a compound

surrounded by high, thick walls. Atop the walls was another high fence

of sturdy netting, designed to prevent the flight of RPGs into the

compound.

In the early days, during and after the allied invasion, this military

assessment proved correct. But after a while, as in Iraq, things began

to change. The harbinger had taken place on September 9, 2001, an event

overshadowed by the attacks shortly afterward in Washington and New

York. Suicide bombers posing as a television film crew assassinated the

anti-Taliban mujahideen leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud. Setting up the

camera to film him, the “cameraman” blew himself up, and fatally wounded

Massoud, who died a few hours later. Indicative of the changing and

multinational nature of that conflict, the bombers were Tunisian; the

camera had been stolen in Grenoble, France.

There were other antecedents. The Tamil Tigers used suicide attacks

extensively against the Sri Lankan army (and, sometimes, civilians) in

their fight for a separate Tamil homeland in northern Sri Lanka.

Hezbollah cadres used bomb-laden cars and explosive-bearing individuals

to attack Israeli army patrols and convoys during Israel’s occupation of

southern Lebanon. To those watching elsewhere, the technique appeared

crucial in dislodging an enemy which otherwise enjoyed a massive

military advantage: Israel’s conventional strength in tanks and aircraft

was far superior to Hezbollah’s. Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000,

demoralized by the suicide attacks it could not effectively prevent.

But it was the suicide attacks in Iraq that seemed to have the most

influence. As such attacks mounted in Iraq and increased the discomfort

of the allies, suicide attacks became more frequent in Afghanistan,

where before they had barely featured. Allied troops, and even trucks

carrying humanitarian supplies, were forced to form convoys, protected

by tanks and armored vehicles. Not a single major road was safe to

travel.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the use of suicide bombings produced its

own consequences. American and allied forces were forced to adopt

aggressive defensive tactics to prevent attacks, including challenging,

shooting and destroying people or vehicles that approached allied

patrols too closely and ignored (or failed to hear or understand) the

warnings given them.

The consequences of these tactics can be imagined and were realized in

civilian deaths and growing antipathy to “the occupiers.” Eleven members

of the same Iraqi family were shot dead in their car approaching

coalition troops, just days after the first suicide attack in March

2003.[31] The effects on the troops obliged to adopt these tactics can

also be imagined. As in Iraq, debates grew about the wisdom of a

long-term allied military presence in Afghanistan. One reason for the

spread of the technique of suicide attacks was all too clear: It worked.

This was a new phenomenon. Normally, the deployment of particular

military techniques—aerial bombing, mass armored assault—was a function

of hardware: the availability of tanks or aircraft, and carefully

constructed strategy. These factors themselves are functions of others:

economic development and the degree of organization within both the

military and society as a whole. The spread of suicide bombings was

different. They were spreading like a virus. If their appearance was

correlated with anything, it was not the degree of economic development

or military organization, but their opposites.

Some analysts suggest that common to suicide attackers is their

strategic objective to remove occupiers from desired territory;[32] some

that religious ideology, and in particular Salafi jihadism, is the

driving force.[33] Whatever the debate about motives, there is agreement

that the incidence of suicide attacks has dramatically increased

everywhere over the last two decades, and particularly the last few

years. Suicide attacks were not confined to religiously motivated

terrorist groups like Hezbollah, the Taliban or Al Qaeda; in Turkey’s

Kurdish regions and Sri Lanka, the technique was used by groups driven

primarily by secular, and indeed nationalist, ideology.[34] Whatever the

motivation, the empirical results—of casualties caused, and political

effects in consequence—were demonstrable.

This recent trend had earlier precedents. Japan employed kamikaze

attacks only during the last stages of the Pacific war, when all chance

of strategic victory had evaporated. The Japanese leadership did,

however, encourage the attacks, after initial experiment, for the very

same reason: They worked. During battles such as that in Leyte Gulf, the

U.S. Navy lost scores of vessels to kamikaze attacks. A later survey

showed that kamikaze missions were four to five times more likely than

conventional missions to damage or sink their targets.[35]

Just as today’s suicide attackers are often characterized as fanatical

and therefore irrational, the kamikazes have been similarly dismissed as

the product of death-loving samurai cultlike thinking that gripped the

Japanese military elites. But for them, too, there was a logic: The

higher the price exacted upon U.S. forces approaching the Japanese

homeland, the more, they hoped, America would hesitate to attack the

home islands, and would instead sue for a peace more favorable to Japan.

Just as in Iraq, Lebanon and now Afghanistan, suicide attacks were

permitted by a culture that celebrated death in combat, but also, and

above all, because they had a palpable and successful political effect.

By 2005, the use of suicide bombings had spread to Bali and Britain,

which suffered major suicide attacks on the London Underground and buses

that year. The U.S. of course had already seen such attacks on September

11, 2001. In Mumbai in 2009, suicide attackers killed nearly two hundred

people and wounded more than three hundred in a three-day rampage of

shooting and murder. Suicide attacks are now commonplace across North

Africa and the Middle East, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa, and have

spread elsewhere, including sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, the Caucasus,

Indonesia and the Indian subcontinent and even Iran, where in 2010,

suicide bombers killed thirty-nine.

Despicable as some may find it, suicide bombing has been perhaps the

most influential political-military technique of the late twentieth and

early twenty-first centuries: In conflicts that are about different

ideologies, territories and religions, fighters have adopted the

technique without prejudice. In its horror, suicide bombing offers up an

insight into something important, something about how change happens,

and how we as people work, and thus how things might be changed for the

better—but without killing people. Curiously, that lesson is apparent

too in sports stadiums.

At many a baseball game, it takes only one, or a small group, to stand,

raise their arms in an attempt to start a wave (they may whoop or cheer

at that point). Sometimes the attempt is ignored, but at other times it

might initiate a coordinated yet spontaneous motion of tens of thousands

of people around the stadium. It’s frivolous, fun, but also oddly

moving: “We’re in this together.”

In his book Herd, marketing guru Mark Earls explains why people buy what

they do, or rather how they are influenced by the person sitting—or

whooping—next to them. Earls cites the sales phenomenon of the Apple

iPod. He describes how the color of the headphone cable was a crucial

factor in the device’s dramatic sales success. The unusual white color

of the cords attracted people’s attention—and enabled them for once to

see the brand choices of their peers even though the product itself

remained hidden: The cables made the otherwise private choice visible.

The innovative features of the product were of course a vital factor in

the ultimate decision to buy the iPod, but it was the white cords that

triggered the chain of events that led to the purchase.

Earls suggests that most of our lives are “quotations from the lives of

others,” as Oscar Wilde put it, a phenomenon evident in the spread of

agricultural mechanization across America’s Midwest in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century, when farmers bought tractors

when they saw their neighbors had them; or the names we give our

children and the music we listen to. All of these trends, Earls asserts,

are shaped by social influence first and foremost, and not by our own

independent decisions or the inherent appeal of the thing being chosen.

Hitherto, economic theory has suggested that rational choice—a weighing

up of the costs and benefits—is the primary basis for decision making,

and particularly purchase decisions. But it turns out that nothing more

complicated than mimicry may be a better explanation of why people buy

what they do. As one correspondent to the New Scientist put it, man

should not be named Homo sapiens, “wise man,” but Homo mimicus, “copying

man.”

Conventional economic theory claims that humans calculate by numbers,

assessing rationally the profit and loss of any transaction. But it

appears that even in deciding our finances, like taking on or abandoning

a mortgage, the behavior of others is influential. The herdlike

popularity of subprime mortgages is already well documented. More

recently, the practice of abandoning properties whose mortgages cost

more than the value of the house has spread “like a contagion,”

according to a recent study, as both its economic rationale but also,

crucially, its social acceptability have grown: “It’s okay to walk

away.”[36] Researchers found that borrowers were 23 percent more likely

to default on their mortgage once their neighbors had done the same.

This mechanism is evident elsewhere. The British government commissioned

research to find out how to persuade people to adopt more

pro-environment behavior, for example to limit their carbon emissions.

The research found that government was itself an ineffective device to

encourage behavioral change: People did not trust government and

believed it was using climate arguments as an excuse simply to raise

taxes.[37] (Indeed, this distrust is one reason why government may be

ineffective in promoting the change necessary to protect the

environment.) Instead, the research found, the government would need to

recruit more influential agents to persuade people to act. These were

not scientists, officials or experts, all of whom were nevertheless more

trusted than government. Those with the most potential to influence

others’ behavior were, the researchers concluded, our next-door

neighbors. Indeed, it appears from another study that people take more

notice of each other’s actions than they do of formal rules.

Researchers at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands tried to

see whether the well-known “brokenwindows theory” of policing actually

worked: the concept that if police aggressively target minor crime, such

as littering and vandalism, they will reduce overall lawlessness,

including major crime, like assault and mugging.[38] The researchers ran

various experiments to find out how context—the environment people

encounter—affects behavior, including law-breaking. The researchers were

trying to understand how disorderly behavior spreads.

In one experiment, they tested whether people took more notice of a

clear legal prohibition—a police sign telling people not to lock their

bicycles at a particular spot—or of whether other people were violating

the rule by locking their own bicycles there. To test this, they ran

scenarios with and without the sign, and the presence or absence of

other rule-violators: people illegally locking their bikes.

The study’s results were clear. People were more inclined to violate the

rule and lock their bicycles illegally if they saw others doing the same

thing, regardless of what the police sign said. The study’s authors

suggest that their evidence therefore confirms the brokenwindows theory.

As such, the study could be taken as affirmation of an assertive

policing model where police act quickly and robustly to deal with minor

violations, and thus deter more serious crime. But the study also

implies a more subversive message. The Groningen experiments show that

norms are more important than rules: It is the actions of other people

that have the most influence on what we do.

Earls offers the wave as a metaphor for this model of change—it is also

in its way an example. It takes no instruction or authority to initiate

the rolling wave of spectators standing up and lifting their arms at a

sports stadium. One or two people might try to start a wave. If others

around them follow, the wave can quickly ripple around the stadium,

involving tens of thousands of people in an utterly spontaneous yet

coordinated act. The point is a clear one: The person most important in

influencing change may be the person standing right next to you.

Suicide bombing and the wave thus offer strikingly similar lessons in

how to affect others. Intriguingly, both suggest that it is action in

the microcosmos, our own little universe, that matters most: what we do.

This is not the only parallel.

First, neither suicide bomber nor waver looks to anyone else, let alone

their government, to produce the desired effect. Simply, if you want to

start a wave, you do not wait for someone else to stand up. More

starkly, the suicide bomber is prepared to sacrifice their own body and

existence to attack their enemy. Horrible though it may be, it is truly

a politics of personal and direct action.

Second, the action is directly linked to the desired effect—in fact, the

action is that effect. Standing up in your stadium seat, though a small

action in a crowd of thousands, constitutes the start of a wave. In

contrast, voting for a wave to be started most emphatically does not

constitute the start of a wave. Detonating a bomb that kills your

attackers, as well as yourself as the necessary adjunct, may be viewed

by many of us as unconscionable but it does constitute resistance in a

very material and—often—effective manner. Action and consequence are

connected without intermediation.

Third, both suicide bombing and waves can plausibly be replicated by

others, indeed in the case of the wave, that is the very point. One

reason why suicide bombing has proven so effective is that it requires

very little training to undertake and is relatively cheap compared to

other military tactics: Others can easily imitate the tactic. An

uneducated peasant can suicide-bomb as effectively as an experienced

infantryman. Indeed, it would be a waste of a trained soldier to expend

him so.

Fourth, the action offers the possibility of real and immediate change.

The wave, if initiated at all, is initiated immediately. This must be

very satisfying to the person who stands up to start it (I have never

done this). The suicide bomber, if successful, will destroy the enemy

vehicle or the people he or she is targeting. Though they will die in

the process, the effect they seek is as immediately forthcoming as their

own death.

And in one crucial respect, of course, suicide bombers and wavers are

very different. Unless coerced, which they sometimes are, suicide

bombers are motivated by a belief (some would call it fanaticism) so

great that they are willing to sacrifice their lives. This too helps

explain the uniquely persuasive power of suicide bombing. Along with the

bomb belts portending the deaths of themselves and their victims,

suicide bombers carry something else, undeniably: conviction.

And here is where we must abandon the example of the wave as too

superficial, for however fun, few would be much impressed by the

conviction of those participating in a wave. And it is conviction that

convinces.

Suicide bombers illustrate this truth with horrific violence, but

others—Gandhi, American civil rights protesters—have shown the uniquely

persuasive force of nonviolence. In either case, it was conviction that

propelled the action; it was the action that recruited others to the

cause. Thus, an essential first step to produce any lasting influence

and change is the discovery of conviction.

This discovery is sometimes a personal realization; sometimes it is

conducted with others. For Gandhi, it began in South Africa when as a

“colored” he was thrown off a whites-only train. In Alabama in 1955,

fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin was riding the bus home from school

when the driver demanded that she give up her seat for a middle-aged

white woman, even though three other seats in the row were empty.

Claudette Colvin refused to budge. As she put it, “If she sat down in

the same row as me, it meant I was as good as her.”[39]

Colvin was arrested. Two police officers, one of them kicking her,

dragged her off the bus and handcuffed her. On the way to the police

station, they took turns trying to guess her bra size. Colvin’s action

took place six months before the same was done by Rosa Parks, whose

refusal and arrest are the more celebrated, but together their actions

triggered a bus boycott. The court case occasioned by the boycott, at

which Claudette Colvin testified, effectively ended bus segregation. As

David Garrow, a biographer of Martin Luther King, Jr., commented, “It’s

an important reminder that crucial change is often ignited by very

plain, unremarkable people who then disappear.”[40]

Interestingly, network researchers have found similar effects. Contrary

to some recent popular books, such as The Tipping Point, it is not

necessarily a few key influencers who create viral trends; it can be

anyone.[41] In fact, Duncan Watts has found that predicting who is

influential in starting or shaping any particular trend is more or less

impossible. This may be bad news for advertisers trying to save money by

targeting their campaigns to a few key influencers, but in terms of

political change, it is very exciting. Anyone can initiate a profound

social change.

Whatever the insights of network theory or marketing gurus, political

change is rather different from buying iPods or downloading the latest

Lady Gaga single. Our beliefs about right and wrong are powerfully held;

to shift the convictions of others requires profound experience or equal

if not more powerful conviction, something rather more substantial than

clicking “like” on a Facebook page. In a word, action.

These forces are rather harder to measure, though somehow we can tell

when such experience strikes or when we are moved by the actions of

others: You know it when you see it. Conviction can be found in myriad

different ways, but it can rarely be told: As in all good theater, it is

better shown.

To find true political conviction, beliefs that move us and others must

be tested, lived, embodied, just as suicide bombers, horribly, embodies

theirs. And for this to happen, it’s necessary first to confront a

painful reality.

It is comforting to believe that governments can provide for us, and

protect us. Governments want us to believe it, and we want to believe

them. Unfortunately, it is ever more evident that this comfortable pact

between us rests upon weak foundations indeed.

2. The Pact

When a child is born in Britain, as in most other developed countries,

its parents must register his or her birth. It is not made clear why

this is necessary, but it is legally obligatory. At the local council

website, it is politely explained that a new parent is required to

register a birth; it is not stated—anywhere—why. You are, however, told

that you will receive—free of charge!—a short birth certificate. Failure

to register a birth is a criminal offense, and can incur a hefty

penalty.

It is an ornate and archaic ritual. The harried parent must put aside

diapers and bottles in order to attend the local register office, which

can be many miles distant. When the appointment takes place, the

registrar will enter parents’ and child’s details into a thick ledger, a

heavy book weighty with portentousness. In my case, the registrar had a

bulbous fountain pen with which to inscribe the birth date, location and

other minutiae. She took an evident pleasure in wielding this

instrument, carefully unscrewing the cap and lovingly poising the pen

above the thick vellum page for a second, the better for her, and me, to

contemplate the gravity of the registration moment.

In Britain, government first instructed its subject populace to register

births, deaths and marriages in 1538. The purpose then, of course, was

to monitor the population in order to maximize the collection of tax.

Today, if it is stated at all, the implied rationale for such

registration is the protection of the citizen.

The presence of government at these cardinal moments of life—its

beginning, its end, the entwining of one’s life with another in

marriage—is rarely questioned, but assumed. In this way, government

inserts itself into the very foundation and fabric of our lives. With

self-assessed taxes, the individual is required to declare to government

almost every significant event of their lives.

Reading the registration form for my children (they are twins), I

noticed an odd question: Was the child, at birth, alive or dead? I

questioned the registrar. She confirmed that, indeed, parents of

still-born children are required to register their births. The

deadline—six weeks—is the same as for the births of living children. If

the parents of a dead child do not meet that deadline, they too must pay

a fine.

“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” was a compelling slogan from

the presidential election campaign of Barack Obama. It captured

something about his promise of change, but also, more subtly, spoke to

our deeper anxieties about the troubled state of democracy today. It

yoked these two ideas together to evoke, in eight words, the suggestion

that collective mass action by us could alter things at last. The

problem, however, is that the slogan contains a profound but unaddressed

contradiction: Even led by a man as enlightened and sophisticated as

Barack Obama, government is not about mass collective action; only

getting someone elected is.

During the campaign, Barack Obama gave a speech in a sports stadium in

Denver. Invesco Field, named after its corporate sponsor, had been

chosen over other smaller venues in anticipation of the enormous demand

to hear him. Only John F. Kennedy had managed to fill a stadium at such

a moment. This time, over eighty thousand people filled Invesco Field,

while thousands of others watched on huge video screens outside the

stadium and millions watched the event on television around the world.

The New York Times published an extraordinary panoramic picture of the

stadium crowd, composed of several shots taken over a short period.[42]

The picture deserves iconic status: It has an almost religious quality,

like a fresco on a cathedral ceiling. The photograph shows a vast and

diverse crowd, young and old, black and white: an astonishingly vivid

snapshot of Americans animated as never before in this generation by the

election of one man, the first African-American with a chance at the

presidency, the first Democrat after eight years of George Bush’s

Republicanism. The picture is moving and awe-inspiring, a visual

testament to the political energy and enthusiasm Obama’s candidacy

unleashed.

During Obama’s campaign, reportedly over a million people volunteered to

work for his election. This was a larger number than recorded for any

previous campaign. Obama raised $650 million for his campaign, the

largest amount ever raised; and also, significantly, from the greatest

number of donors. However, only a small proportion of Obama’s funding

came from small individual donors. The vast bulk of the largest

donations, as usual with contemporary politics, came from the rich and

corporate donors, including banks and corporations like Goldman Sachs,

Microsoft, Citigroup and Google.[43] After his election, the Obama

administration, following traditional Washington form, appointed over

two dozen of the largest donors to the Democratic presidential campaign

to choice overseas ambassadorships.

The Denver crowd and the extraordinary mass effort mobilized by Obama’s

campaign spoke of a hunger for change and a willingness to contribute to

it without precedent. The enthusiasm did not end with his election: An

astonishing ninety thousand people applied for the three thousand or so

political appointments in his administration.

Epitomized in the slogan “Yes, we can,” Obama’s campaign played upon

people’s desire for change as well as, crucially, for involvement in

politics. Both during the campaign and since, Obama urged people to

become involved in their communities, to volunteer and themselves help

fulfill the political promise of his election. But in this message there

was unadmitted contradiction. For what Obama was asking for, first and

foremost, was not for volunteers to improve their communities, but for

volunteers to campaign for his election. As if to highlight this awkward

fusion of objectives, one group—Obama Works—was set up for people to

volunteer for local activities in the name of Obama’s campaign. Obama’s

campaign call to local action was a secondary if necessary moral

buttress to his primary appeal for voters’ support. The political end of

his campaign was not change itself, but for him to be elected to deliver

change; a subtle but crucial distinction, and the disjunction at the

heart of representative democracy.

The night of Obama’s election, a great roar could be heard across Lower

Manhattan when his victory became apparent. But the party atmosphere

soon dissipated. After Obama’s election and the excitement of his

inauguration, you could almost sense the air going out of the balloon.

With the government’s encouragement, volunteering fairs were held across

the country. And while attendance was high, it was noted that this

enthusiasm was less a function of a new surge of political activism, but

more one of the rampant unemployment of the post-election months. In

Brooklyn, a few hundred turned up to a volunteering fair, where

thousands had been hoped for—in a borough numbering millions. Tellingly,

the fair was described as seeking to exploit energy “left over” from the

campaign.[44] Obama Works went into “hibernation.” Since then, there has

been no revolution in volunteering and community organizing. The

conventional model of politics has remained largely unchanged. As usual,

attention focuses on the intentions and utterances of a very small group

of people in the White House and a slightly larger group in Congress,

where the betrayals, ethos and peccadilloes of a small number of

representatives and senators determine the nature of legislation imposed

on a country of three hundred million people. Everyone else is left to

rant about their doings on websites or, more commonly, simply get on

with their lives with a shrug of the shoulders. It seems like the ones

we’ve been waiting for wasn’t us after all.

Some attribute this passivity to the inherently idle and feckless nature

of ordinary people: Some politicians I know are inclined to this

supposition. But in truth, the reason is that conventional

representative democracy, where the many elect the few, rests on a pact

between voters and government: We vote, they act; we get on with our

lives, they protect. This is the pact in which the parent must enroll

their baby after birth. It endures until death. This pact is rarely

examined nor is it anywhere clearly or fully stated; it is rarely

admitted to, though its effects are profound.

The pact has several layers. At the most fundamental, the pact implies

that government will protect its citizens; it will provide for their

security and safety. In return, citizens agree to limit some of their

freedom: They accept the rule of law, and with it, various restrictions

on their behavior. To government is reserved certain extreme powers and

rights, which are denied the rest of us. These include the power to deny

freedom to others, to imprison and to punish. In some countries, like

the U.S., this includes the power to kill in the name of justice. All

192 member states of the United Nations have agreed to a code to govern

this right to wage war, the UN Charter. But the charter is a voluntary

document and infringing it does not invoke automatic punishment,

especially if the infringer is a powerful state.

Domestically, the government’s commitment to provide security means that

government takes responsibility to preserve peace, prevent crime and

disorder, and to save the populace in times of grave peril, say, after

military attack or natural disaster. So far, the pact is familiar, and

echoes the theories of political philosophers down the ages, from Locke

and Hobbes, and earlier still, Plato.

Less familiar is the second layer of the pact, one that is less often

mentioned than the first, but one with more insidious effect. In

addition to protecting the population, government makes a further

commitment—to take care of society’s problems, including education, in

some states health care services, care for the elderly and disabled,

protection of the natural environment, including now the globe’s

atmosphere, and above all, providing for growth and employment—to take

care of the economy. This commitment—and its consequence—are almost

never explicitly stated: Government will take care of these problems, so

we don’t have to.

Instead of admitting this pact, politicians instead declare policies and

promises to manage these problems, much as Barack Obama did at Invesco

Field. But by declaring government’s intention to address such problems,

a politician is sending a powerful if concealed message: If government

is willing and able to sort out these problems, we the populace do not

need to worry. In Barack Obama’s case, the message was carried a step

further: I the politician need your active involvement—to campaign,

raise money, etc.—in order to get elected, then I will be able to

address these problems.

Indeed, Obama raised the stakes a notch further: The mass involvement he

was able to activate through his candidacy exploited the massive

political energy and frustration of the progressive electorate: the

millions who volunteered for his campaign. His implicit message was

“Mobilize to elect me and I will deliver.”

But the effects of the pact can be witnessed in what followed the

election. The mass of volunteers who mobilized to campaign for Obama by

and large threw away their badges and stayed at home, their job done.

There was no dramatic upswing in volunteering for social causes. Even in

electoral politics, hard-core party activists found that the “Obama

effect” had little long-term benefit in recruiting volunteers to fight

elections at the more local level. The long-run trend in volunteering

for social causes remains, as Robert Putnam and others have attested,

resolutely downward.[45] In general, we are doing less and less. And

here is one message that issued unintended but with subtle and powerful

force from the millions watching that one charismatic man at Invesco

Field. That vast crowd is watching, not acting. For most of us, politics

is a spectator sport—we observe, they do.

The trouble with the pact is that it is breaking down. National

governments are less and less able to tackle the transnational and

global causes of the various problems that confront us. At the most

basic level of the pact, government is unable to guarantee protection

against terrorist attack; it is unable to provide an effective response

to prevent climate change; it is unable to manage the global causes—and

effects—of economic volatility. In society, government is unable to slow

the seemingly inexorable rise in “antisocial” behavior, a trend

evidenced, for example, in mounting attacks on bus drivers, but apparent

in other innumerable ways including the subtle yet palpable tension in

our public spaces. CCTV cameras on every corner do little to curb this

discomforting trend, though they provide ample proof of our absence of

trust in one another.

As a result, trust in politicians, never high, is declining. In Britain,

a well-known television presenter called the prime minister “a cunt” in

front of a studio audience. Such disrespect is now commonplace in many

established democracies. In America and virtually every democratic

country, there is widespread disillusionment if not disgust with the

political classes, and with politics itself. In Germany, polling before

recent Bundestag (parliament) elections indicated that 18 percent of

voters would vote not for regular politicians but for a comedian playing

a politician.[46] The election campaign was dominated not by discussion

of education or economic policy, but by a scandal over a politician who

had used her government car to be driven on holiday to Spain. Commenting

on elections widely seen as “boring,” one voter said, “There’s just no

belief that anything is going to change.”[47] In Iceland, widespread

disillusionment after the catastrophic impact of the financial crisis

saw a professional comic elected mayor of Reykjavík. In the U.S.,

antipathy toward politicians manifests itself mostly, as in most issues

in America, in partisan terms: The other side’s politicians are venal,

corrupt and self-serving; the manifest failings of ours are overlooked.

The disintegration of the pact is exacerbated by a further damaging

phenomenon: the deepening chasm between voters and their

representatives. The evolution of democracy has been, in general, one

from direct democracy to representative democracy; from people

collectively deciding their affairs, to electing others to do so on

their behalf. But as representative democracy has evolved, so too has

the distance grown between voters and the decisions that affect them.

In every national democratic system, individual participation has been

reduced to mere occasional voting to choose legislators or the executive

(in the British system, these are one and the same election; in the U.S.

and other systems, they are separated). Today, the executive, in cahoots

with the legislature, manages society and the economy and the country’s

international affairs. These highly complex decisions are taken not by

the population collectively, but by a small executive often comprising

only a few hundred people. This pyramidal, top-down structure produces

several inherent and thus inescapable features.

The competition to become one of the elite is intense and antagonistic,

and sometimes violent. It costs an estimated $1.5 million to win a seat

in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the Senate, $9 million.[48]

Once in power, legislators join lobbyists in ferocious competition to

gain the executive’s attention and influence their decisions. The

evidence for this is clear in the growing professionalization of this

process, both of politicians and the industry established to influence

them. In Britain, many politicians have spent their whole professional

lives practicing nothing but politics, starting as researchers to

Members of Parliament, then graduating as MPs and sometimes government

ministers. David Cameron, elected Britain’s prime minister in 2010, has

never had any job outside of politics, unless one counts a brief stint

working in public relations. The leader of the opposition, Ed Miliband,

likewise. In Washington, every politician claims to be an “outsider” as

they try to ride the antipolitics wave, but in reality very few are.

The contest to secure political influence has become increasingly

professionalized and has assumed the characteristics of an industry,

with professional associations and its own group interests: There are

now lobbyists representing the interests of lobbyists. In Washington,

the number of registered lobbyists has more than doubled since 2000, to

nearly thirty-five thousand in 2005.[49] While the recession may have

thinned their ranks, the ratio of lobbyists to legislators remains,

incredibly, hundreds of lobbyists to every member of Congress.

At the European Union in Brussels, an increasingly dominant source of

legislation affecting economic interests worldwide, no one seems able to

give precise numbers of professional lobbyists; most estimates, though,

place the number at about fifteen thousand. A former commissioner for

the EU’s most expensive and wasteful policy, agriculture, described

Brussels as a “paradise” for lobbyists.

One reason for the proliferation of business lobbyists is all too clear:

It pays to invest in influence. BP helped Liberal Democrat European

Parliament member Chris Davies draft climate change legislation that

secured a €9 billion subsidy from European taxpayers, covering the

entire cost of new technology to convert from “dirty” coal-fired power

stations, saving energy firms from having to pay for it themselves. The

industry later gave Davies an award. Davies was at least open about the

process he conducted to prepare the new European laws, justifying his

actions by using a famous quotation often misattributed to Otto von

Bismarck: “The public should never be allowed to see two things: how

sausages are made and how laws are made.”[50]

If this is the reality of the supposedly democratic legislative process,

it is unsurprising that popular enthusiasm for conventional politics is

waning. Membership of political parties, one measure of popular

participation in conventional politics, is in steep decline in all major

Western societies.[51] Global surveys confirm that while people in

general prefer democracy, they are less and less happy with the practice

of democratic government.[52] Voter turnout has been in long-term

decline in almost all democratic systems. In the last parliamentary

elections in France, for instance, turnout was the lowest ever recorded.

The European Parliament elections of 2009 suffered the same ignominious

outcome—fewer voters turned out for them than in any election since the

parliament’s inception. In the United States, 25 percent fewer people

vote in elections than they did in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was

elected

Despite the promises of politicians to limit the lobbying industry and

its influence, it has continued to grow. Its pernicious power—an

inherent function of the reductive pyramid from voters to deciders—seems

greater than them. One of President Obama’s first acts in government was

to appoint as deputy defense secretary a longtime lobbyist for Raytheon,

a top weapons contractor, despite Obama’s campaign commitment to

prohibit any such appointments. In New York State, the successful

Democratic candidate for governor in 2010 proclaimed his forthright

opposition to special interests and lobbyists throughout his campaign,

yet the bulk of his campaign funding came from organized labor, real

estate firms and related industries like construction, the health care

sector and lobbying firms.[53]

In 2010, the Supreme Court, in its misleadingly named “Citizens United”

ruling, decided to allow commercial companies to pay directly for

political advertising, absurdly defining companies as having the same

rights as individuals, and overruling the existing feeble limits to curb

their influence. The ruling permitted corporations and other types of

organizations to raise large amounts and run political campaign ads

without revealing the source of funding. Sure enough, the 2010

congressional elections saw large influxes of money from these

unaccountable bodies, tilting the races for many seats. Professor

Lawrence Lessig has argued that the mutual dependency of lobbyists and

legislators is now so profound, and corrupt, that legislation is enacted

with the sole purpose of extracting rents from corporate interests.

Former senators have admitted the same thing: that all legislation is

made on “K Street,” the infamous Washington street where lobbyists have

their offices.[54] One observer estimates that the lobbying industry

spent $3.3 billion in just one year (2008).[55] Private companies that

run prisons now employ lobbyists to press for legislation requiring

judges to impose longer sentences.[56]

In Britain, the corrosive influence of lobbyists is better concealed and

less acknowledged. In a system where vast power is concentrated in the

prime minister’s office, many of Tony Blair’s advisers left office for

highly paid executive positions in companies that had substantial

political interests in their earlier incarnation. One senior adviser

joined Morgan Stanley’s investment banking division as a full-time

senior managing director. Another left her job in Blair’s inner team to

work for the oil giant BP.

Several of Blair’s press advisers formed a PR group on Blair’s departure

from office that now enjoys lucrative contracts with businesses, many of

which had clear interests in legislation delivered by the Blair

administration. After leaving office, Blair himself was awarded a

position as “senior adviser” to investment bank JPMorgan for a salary of

half a million pounds a year, a role to which he gave rather less

publicity than to his position as a peace envoy in the Middle East for

the so-called Quartet group of countries.[57]

Within the political class in Britain, there appears to be a tacit

understanding not to criticize such obvious conflicts of interest,

perhaps because other members of that class wish to leave themselves

that opportunity in future. The self-serving excuse, which can often be

heard sotto voce in Westminster, is that such rewards are a just payoff

for the supposedly poor pay and hard labor of a career in politics.

A similar unspoken understanding is clearly at work in Washington too,

where politicians “retire” from their legislative duties as elected

officials to sell their contacts and networking expertise as lobbyists.

When former Democratic majority leader Senator Tom Daschle was

scrutinized by Congress to lead President Obama’s health care effort, it

was revealed that he had earned over $5 million as a lobbying adviser to

various industries. Notably, it was not this blatant influence-peddling

that provoked the criticism that met his nomination, and ultimately

forced him to withdraw, but his failure accurately to declare for taxes

the gratis use of a limousine—one client’s form of payment for his

services.

Meanwhile, former American ambassadors, after their years of public

service, sometimes return to Washington to act as paid lobbyists for the

very countries to which they used to represent U.S. interests, a naked

breach of ethics, not to speak of the risk to national security.[58] Two

senior officials from the Clinton administration, including the former

president’s legal counsel, later ended up as paid lobbyists for Laurent

Gbagbo, the former president of Côte d’Ivoire, whose refusal to

relinquish power after losing elections in 2011 led to widespread

violence costing hundreds of lives. These well-connected American

officials lobbied the State Department and White House on behalf of the

worst of tinpot dictators.[59]

Given the pernicious forces at work in the current political system, it

is unsurprising that the decisions produced are often grossly divorced

from the needs of electors, or even of the state itself. In the United

States, where the lobbying industry is most developed and where

politicians are highly dependent on campaign contributions, these

effects are most noticeable. For instance, members of Congress in 2009

demanded that the government purchase seven extra F-22 fighter aircraft,

at nearly a quarter of a billion dollars each, which the Department of

Defense itself had not requested. At this point, the U.S. was at war in

two countries—Iraq and Afghanistan. Although by that time already in

USAF service, the F-22 had not been used in either conflict. In the UK,

the government has been convinced by the defense industry to purchase

two enormous aircraft carriers to “maintain Britain’s ability to project

force,” even though the carriers offer a far greater capability than

Britain has enjoyed for many decades, if not ever.

Trade sanctions are commonly instituted by the U.S. to pressure

countries that have committed some grievous breach of international

peace and security, or stand accused of “state sponsorship” of

terrorism, like Iraq, Libya or Iran. Some American companies, however,

have managed to win exemptions to rules preventing trade with these

countries. Unsurprisingly, most are large companies with a commensurate

lobbying presence in Washington. Kraft Foods, Pepsi and some of the

nation’s largest banks have secured thousands of exemptions for their

products to be sold to countries like Iran, allowing them to do billions

of dollars of business despite tough measures to prevent commerce with

states that sponsor terrorism. Wrigley’s chewing gum was classed as

“humanitarian aid” and thus exempted from sanctions, permitting millions

of dollars of sales to Iran and other sanctioned countries. One official

later admitted that while the government debated whether chewing gum

counted as food, and thus would be exempt, lobbyists too had played

their part: “We were probably rolled on that issue by outside

forces.”[60]

On another patch of the carpet, the oil giant BP revealed that it had

“expressed concern” to the British government about slow progress in

diplomatic negotiations between Libya and Britain on the transfer of

prisoners, on the grounds that it might negatively affect BP’s oil

exploration contracts with the Libyan government. These contracts were

worth $900 million. The company claimed that such an expression, and

indeed its concern, had nothing to do with the incarceration of the

Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, whom Libya was campaigning to

have transferred to Libya from his Scottish prison, where he had been

sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which

killed two hundred seventy people.

BP admitted its intervention on the prisoner exchange issue only after

al-Megrahi’s transfer to Libya and following a public outcry. The delay

in the negotiation had been caused by the British government’s

insistence that the Lockerbie bomber be excluded from the prisoner

transfer agreement. It backed down, and no exclusion to the agreement

was specified. Al-Megrahi was transferred, much to the outrage of many

of the families of those killed.

Thanks to pressure from lobbyists and agricultural special interests,

the U.S. Department of Agriculture has spent millions of dollars, under

both Republican and Democratic administrations, encouraging the

consumption of cheese, including the promotion of extra-cheese Domino’s

pizzas which contain 40 percent more cheese than “regular” pizzas.

Pressing this foodstuff upon consumers is directly contrary to the

interests of citizens themselves, whose consumption of cheese, and with

it saturated fat, has tripled over the last thirty years. Other parts of

the government, including the Agriculture Department’s own nutrition

committee, meanwhile, are busy telling Americans to reduce their

consumption of highly saturated fats.[61] Perversely, the government’s

promotion of cheese is a direct consequence of consumers’ growing

preference for low-fat and nonfat milk and dairy products. This has

created vast surpluses of whole milk and milk fat, which the dairy

industry turned to the government to help offload—as high fat cheese.

Thus, even as consumers exercise their own choice to eat less fat, the

government, pressured by cheese lobbyists (hilarious but true), exploits

the consequence—unused high-fat milk and cheese—to persuade the consumer

to eat more of it.

In a similar case in Britain, the government in 2011 published a list of

healthy eating guidelines, including the advice that consumers should

eat no more than 2.5 ounces of red and processed meat per day. The

Department of Health produced a list helpfully indicating several meaty

items alongside their respective weights. Alongside a cooked breakfast

and the Sunday roast and other common meals, only two branded products

were mentioned by name: Big Mac and Peperami. It just so happened that

both items came in under the limit. The previous November the government

had set up five “responsibility deal” networks with the food business to

come up with health policies. At the time, this was criticized as being

akin to letting Big Tobacco draft smoking policy. Two of the companies

were McDonald’s and Unilever, who happen to be the manufacturers of the

Big Mac and Peperami, respectively.[62]

The political space is more and more occupied not by citizens, but by

big business and the wealthy. Not content with the purchase of lobbying

power in our nations’ capitals, oil companies are using the political

techniques of environmental activists to promote their own interests, in

this case to prevent curbs on carbon emissions. In a memo leaked in

2009, the American Petroleum Institute, which represents the U.S. oil

industry, wrote to its member companies asking them to “move

aggressively” to stage up to twenty-two “Energy Citizen” gatherings,

mostly located, it turned out, in districts of representatives with slim

majorities. Without irony, the memo declared that the objective of the

demonstrations, which would be organized and funded by API, would be to

“put a human face” on the impacts of “unsound” energy policy, i.e.,

efforts to limit climate change.

Elsewhere, wealthy philanthropists use their foundations, and financial

pull, to promote their political preferences. The foundation of Wall

Street billionaire and Nixon administration Commerce Secretary Peter G.

Peterson, for instance, is seeking to address the issue of taxes,

deficits and fiscal responsibility, using advertising and public

appearances by foundation experts to educate the public and increase

engagement on the issue of the fiscal deficit. The foundation’s website

offers sample op-ed articles and letters to public officials and

editors, some of which have appeared in newspapers. All members of

Congress received a copy of a report by the foundation.[63] This is an

interesting twist on the traditional understanding of philanthropy; some

foundations now act—with tax-free benefits—as a kind of “force

multiplier” for the political preferences of the “philanthropist.” These

activities may be beneficent, such as Bill Gates’s efforts to improve

school curriculums, or malignant, but either form of influence shares

one common characteristic—it is accountable to no one.

It is not only big business that engages in the lobbying business. To

compete in the overcrowded and cacophonous halls of modern “democratic”

legislatures, anyone with an axe to grind has to follow the same

tactics. At international conferences, invariably there are now “NGO

forums” to accommodate the scores and sometimes hundreds—as at the

Copenhagen climate conference—of organizations with views to present.

There is no assessment of the democratic legitimacy of these groups:

Some represent many millions of members; others are tiny, and represent

nobody apart from themselves. The more skillful use direct tactics to

get their message across to legislators: The National Rifle Association,

one of the most accomplished at this practice, maintains an online

roster of the voting patterns of members of Congress, “scoring” them

according to their support of—or hostility to—pro-gun positions. Such

tactics are now becoming commonplace across the political spectrum.

The number of nonprofits in the U.S. has increased by over 30 percent

between 1996 and 2008, to well over 1.5 million.[64] Such organizations

are today more likely to be located in Washington and have a subscriber

base of members who pay dues but do not attend or participate in local

meetings. There have been similar trends in Britain. Such organizations

are in effect turning political activity into a business, what some have

called a “business of protest.” The organizational model for many

contemporary political nonprofit organizations now resembles that of a

commercial business, which defines its target audience, purchases

relevant mailing lists and advertising to reach that audience, and asks

minimal participation (usually just membership fees) from them to

achieve their lobbying goals.[65] Whereas active participation in

community organizations correlates with political participation, there

are no such “positive externalities” of paying membership dues to a

nonprofit. In essence, we are contracting out politics to be done by

others.

Common to these interest groups is that they are in general focused on

single, narrow issues: gun rights, fuel taxes, environmental protection,

abortion rights. Their aggressive tactics and sheer numbers fill the

domestic political space and have created a new culture of politics,

where legislators are confronted with a panoply of groups and lobbyists,

erecting a kind of wall between them and individual voters.

Such groups also contribute to a growing and unpleasant extremism in

political debate. Adept at one-sided presentation of the evidence, these

groups advocate black-and-white positions with aggressive vigor and

armfuls of one-sided research—often representing those who oppose them

as foolish and sometimes evil. The compromises inherently necessary in

political decision making thus become harder; deadlock becomes likelier.

Facts and reasoned analysis are invariably the victims.

One effect of these trends is the polarizing rise of partisanship. Many

have commented on the growing ugliness and vituperation of public

debate. For the first time in living memory, a lawmaker shouted, “You

lie!” at the U.S. president when he spoke to both houses of Congress. It

is a long way from the method of the Indian “talking stick,” introduced

by the Iroquois to Ben Franklin, and reportedly used by America’s

Founding Fathers, which requires participants to be able to articulate

one another’s position before having a chance to speak.

At the conservative National Review, which had prided itself on its

high-minded and thoughtful debate, the columnist Kathleen Parker

received eleven thousand e-mail messages when she argued in an article

during the 2008 presidential campaign that Governor Sarah Palin was

unfit to be vice president. One message lamented that her mother did not

abort her.[66] On the Internet, which some extol for its invigorating

heterogeneity and debate, it is clear that the opposite is also true:

Online, people tend to choose views that confirm their own.[67] There

are even dating sites to accommodate lonely hearts distinguished by

their political views.

In Britain, recent elections saw the first ever accession to a

parliamentary seat—in the European Parliament—of a far-right party with

the victory of the British National Party. In the U.S., Republicans and

Democrats are increasingly choosing to live apart from one another, and

locate themselves with others of similar political views.[68] Red and

blue are now more starkly drawn than ever.[69]

The polarization of political views, the intercession of business,

lobbyists and interest groups between voters and their representatives,

the growing number and power of political actors who are neither

politicians nor conventional political parties, nor accountable to

anyone but themselves yet nonetheless wield considerable

influence—together, these factors suggest a deepening divide between the

public and their nominal representatives. They suggest nothing less than

a crisis in democracy.

The pact between citizen and government is never explicit. You can spend

an entire life paying taxes, obeying laws, without once being asked

whether you wish to contract into or out of it. Government insists upon

your registration at birth, and to be notified upon your death. At no

point does it seek your consent. You never get the chance to contract

into the pact: Your parents are legally obliged to do so on your behalf

whether they like it or not. And there is only one way to contract out.

The pact rests on one central pillar (and, oddly, it is the same whether

a country is democratic or not)—that government more or less represents

the collective interests of the populace. The democratic process

provides—in theory at least—for continual feedback, as Karl Popper once

theorized, from governed to governors, the only way, Popper believed, to

optimize policy so that it reflects the needs and preferences of the

people. But if that feedback is interrupted, government policy, at best

approximate to the collective wishes of the people, starts to diverge.

People and government become estranged. When this happens, the pact

breaks down. The evidence is accumulating in the twenty-first century

that this is indeed happening.

If government cannot provide for the stability, safety and just

arbitration of our common affairs, who can? The answer is both radical

and discomforting. For there is only one alternative if government

cannot successfully provide: We must do so ourselves. Self-organized

government is one term; another, rather more loaded term, is anarchism.

But this is not the anarchism of early twentieth-century bomb-wielding

Russians, or nihilists charging police lines at G8 summits. It is a

different vision, of individuals and groups peacefully organizing their

affairs, arbitrating necessary business directly with one another,

guided by their conviction and direct experience—not by party political

dogma. It is more evolution than revolution, for it is dawning on people

across the world that in order to fix our problems, there is no one to

look to but ourselves. The minimalist act of voting is looking less and

less adequate as a solution.

This vision may animate people, but it does not prescribe. Instead, this

new way of doing things is just that—a way of doing things, a method,

and emphatically not an end in itself, nor a design to be imposed upon

others. Only a fool would wish the abrupt or violent overthrow of the

current system, for the certain result would be violent chaos—anarchy of

the worst kind.

But if it’s true that government is less and less able to manage our

collective affairs, it seems we have little choice but to take that

burden upon our own shoulders. We must learn anew to look to ourselves

to produce the effects we desire, to take responsibility for ourselves

and for others, and to cooperate and negotiate with each other, instead

of leaving that arbitration to an evidently imperfect mechanism. As

these habits spread, a new and more durable order may emerge, not—as

now—legislated from above but built from the ground up, by people acting

upon their beliefs and engaging with each other.

For curiously, it is perpetuation of the existing way of doing things,

not anarchism, that may pose the greater risk to our peace and security.

It is the alienation of government from people, and us from each other,

that more endangers our fragile stability. It is no coincidence that

this is the commonest criticism of anarchism, that it engenders

disorder, that Anarchy = Chaos. Let us examine this, most serious,

objection to this different way of doing things.

3. Anarchy = Chaos

When the trouble first ignited in March 2004, I was in Geneva, at a

conference designed—ironically, it turned out—to promote reconciliation

between Kosovo’s Albanians and Serbs. An adviser to Kosovo’s prime

minister, a friend, drew me aside: “Three Albanian children have been

killed,” she whispered conspiratorially, “by a Serb.” With deliberate

portent, she added, “There will be trouble.” Curiously, she seemed

excited by the news. It was as if she was relieved that, at last,

something was happening.

Next day, back in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital where I then lived, it was

clear that her premonition was correct.[70] Tension was palpable in that

city’s polluted air, straining people’s faces. The rumors were

widespread, amplified by irresponsible journalists: A Serb had driven

three children to their deaths, the reporters claimed, by drowning.[71]

Not only that, but they had died that horrible death in the Ibar, the

very river dividing Serb and Albanian halves of Mitrovica, Kosovo’s most

divided city.

That afternoon, at UN headquarters where I worked, we received reports

of crowds gathering in towns and villages across the province. Suddenly,

the security guards announced over the office loudspeakers that a large

group of young men was approaching the headquarters. Soon, their

chanting “U-Ç-K! U-Ç-K! U-Ç-K!”—roughly, Ooh-Chay-Kah—reverberated

around the building, loud and aggressive. “UÇK” is the abbreviation for

the Kosovo Liberation Army, the Kosovo-Albanian guerrillas who resisted

Slobodan Miloševi’s repression, including during the 1999 war that led

to the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces.

Without warning, the loudspeakers announced that the building was

immediately to be evacuated. But there was no information on how the

evacuation should proceed or where the UN staff would go. There was a

sudden and anxious sense of panic. People began to run up and down

corridors. Mobile phones stopped working—it was later discovered that

the riots had overloaded the networks, partly because some had used

their phones to organize the riots. For some reason, the elevators

stopped functioning too. Some began to weep, perhaps with fear.

I was with my wife, who had come to my office for its greater security.

My Albanian assistant, Besnik, took charge and ushered us down the fire

escape and into a car. We drove out of the compound and back to our

house. On the streets, groups of young people were gathering. Many were

children. They looked excited and agitated. That night, the groups

merged into mobs.

I had agreed that evening to take part in a television discussion with

political leaders at the main television station in Pristina. As we set

out driving to the studio, near our house a large mass of people blocked

the streets. It was dark and I could not tell their number. The mass

swelled and shifted; it had a shape and intent beyond its individual

components. There was shouting and the bangs of what I thought at the

time were firecrackers. I later realized it was gunfire. There were no

police in sight.

The television debate was ugly. Along with an American diplomat, I

argued that the riots must stop immediately. Parents should tell their

children to go home. But the political leaders from Kosovo’s Albanian

majority did not agree. According to them, the trouble was the UN’s

fault. In their version, the riots had been triggered by the UN’s

decision to allow Serb protesters from a village nearby Pristina to

block one of the main roads to the south.

The Kosovo-Albanian leaders argued that the anger on the streets was

legitimate protest at the many injustices Kosovars had suffered, past

and present. From the tenor and aggression of the debate, it was clear

that some of the leaders sensed a revolutionary moment where the UN, the

de facto power in Kosovo, might be overthrown. They grasped the tail of

the tiger. By the end of the program, my back was in painful spasm from

the tension gripping me. I returned home through a city smoldering with

violence.

Back at home with some Albanian friends, we sat listening to the gunfire

and occasional explosions. A red glow appeared at our window. We looked

out to see sparks and flames spurting into the air nearby. We realized

it was the Serbian church at the top of our street, aflame. There was an

awful sound: a bell ringing incessantly.

After a while, when things seemed calmer, my friend Ardi suggested we go

out to see what was going on. We walked up our street to the church. It

was ablaze like a summer bonfire, its steeple a column of fire. On top,

the church bell rang with a desperate rhythm. The heat was somehow

making it ring. Fortunately, there was no one still inside the blazing

building. At last the bell stopped. Scores of young men surrounded the

church. Their work done, many were sitting, gazing at the fire, smoking

and chatting. Someone was selling cigarettes.

We walked away. Ardi, a Kosovo-Albanian, would not look at me. He was

beside himself with anger and shame. Spent cases of plastic bullets and

rifle cartridges crunched under our feet. The UN riot police had

confronted the mob here. But they had been overwhelmed and retreated,

leaving the church to its fate. All across Kosovo, the forces of law and

order—the UN and local police and NATO peacekeepers—had lost control. In

one town, a contingent of German soldiers had remained in barracks while

a mob of thousands roamed the town for hours, moving from district to

district, picking out Serb churches, houses and UN offices, ransacking

buildings and putting them to the torch. When we later visited the town,

we saw at its center a blackened hillside, studded with the shells of

burnt-out houses, as if a forest fire had swept through it.

The next day, the violence continued. There were reports of buses

transporting rioters around the province to attack different Serb

enclaves. In southern Kosovo, a large mob was prevented from besieging a

Serb Orthodox monastery by the intervention of a local Albanian former

KLA guerrilla leader (he was later to become Kosovo’s prime minister).

In the divided town of Mitrovica, where the Albanian children had

drowned, NATO troops shot and killed several Albanians trying to cross

the river to attack Serbs in the northern part of the city. Riots went

on around the country into the night. Every UN office in the territory

was attacked, more than a hundred fifty UN vehicles were destroyed. At

least 550 homes and twenty-seven Orthodox churches and monasteries were

burned, and more than four thousand people—mostly Serbs, but also Roma

and other minority groups—were driven from their homes.[72]

Eventually, the violence died down. Local political leaders claimed that

their calls to end the turmoil had worked, rarely confessing that these

entreaties had been made under pressure from international officials.

But in truth it appeared more that the chaos and violence had simply

petered out. On the streets, the rhythm and the momentum of the violence

pulsed through the city. Before the violence erupted, you could feel it

build up as an urge needing expression. As the violence played out, that

dark energy was ventilated. As it ended, somehow you could tell that the

force that had driven the chaos and rage had at last been exhausted.

It is commonly held that society requires authority in order to enjoy

peace and stability. Without such institutions—law, the police, the

army—society will collapse into anarchy and disorder; the many will fall

victim to the criminal few. In case we need reminding of what this might

be like, movies abound with depictions of anarchy, even if often

perpetuated by zombie hordes (28 Days Later, I Am Legend) or provoked by

alien invasion (War of the Worlds). Either way, the anarchy shown is

entertainingly terrifying. It seems there is only a fragile veil

dividing us from the jungle. Television offers ceaseless titillating

depiction—both real and falsified—of the criminals who lurk to destroy

us, but for the thin blue line of law and order to hold them back.

But in these illustrations lies a clue. There is scant entertainment

involved in the real and actual horrors of humanity—the Holocaust, the

Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero” or the butchery of Charles Manson. If anarchy

were so close, and so awful, we wouldn’t find its Hollywood depiction

entertaining; instead, we would find it horribly frightening,

unwatchable.

One criticism of anarchism as a political strategy is so ubiquitous that

it merely requires a reshaping of the word: anarchism = anarchy. Without

a superstructure of institutions to maintain order, it is claimed,

disorder and chaos will surely result—Hobbes’s “war of all against all.”

This is indeed a frightening prospect that few dare contemplate. When

disaster strikes, like an earthquake in Haiti or a hurricane in New

Orleans, it is never long before commentators, safe in their television

studios, issue dire warning of social disorder and breakdown, as if this

is more frightening than the original natural disaster. In post-Katrina

New Orleans, reports of carjackings, rapes and murders flooded the news.

Thousands of law enforcement agents were deployed from other states as

Louisiana’s governor warned, “They have M16s and are locked and loaded.

These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will.” Police

in one suburb neighboring the flooded city were so alarmed at the

prospect of looters and other malcontents that they blocked the bridge

from the city, preventing the hungry and desperate from getting help.

Others cold-bloodedly shot fleeing refugees.

As the essayist Fareed Zakaria has noted, the federal government’s

fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the

creation of a Kafkaesque, Guantánamo-like prison facility in which

twelve hundred American citizens were summarily detained and denied any

of their constitutional rights for months.[73] Later accounts, such as

Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, told stories ignored at the time, like that of

Abdulrahman Zeitoun, who after the hurricane paddled around the flooded

city in a canoe offering help, ferrying neighbors to higher ground and

caring for abandoned pets, only to be arrested by National Guardsmen and

held incommunicado for several weeks without charge and without medical

attention along with other Arab-American companions.

But as Rebecca Solnit has written, disasters in fact often produce the

opposite of disorder in human society: instead of violence and anarchy,

community and solidarity.[74]

A recent letter to the Financial Times makes a common claim: that

civilization is fundamentally fragile and requires government to protect

it. The correspondent cites the example of the arrival of the mutineers

from the Bounty on the isolated Pacific island of Pitcairn:

When the nine Bounty mutineers and 17 Tahitian men and women arrived

there in 1789 it was as close to the Garden of Eden as anywhere in the

real world: generously endowed with water, sunshine and fertile soils,

and uninhabited by anyone else. The perfect test of Hobbes versus

Rousseau. In the event, Hobbes won. The British sailors fought among

themselves and tried to subjugate the Tahitians. The Tahitians resisted

and fought among themselves.

By 1800, 11 years later, only one of the mutineers, nine Tahitian women,

and many children were left, most of the others having died unnatural

deaths. The surviving mutineer created political order by establishing

not just an autocracy but a theocracy, with himself as the link between

God and man.”[75]

The writer concludes—quite reasonably, given the episode he offers as an

example—by emphasizing “the importance of continued efforts to sustain

governance organizations that bring together the specific interests that

count most in the definition of a common (national, regional, global)

interest, in order that, through repeated interaction, convergent

interests will prevail over divergent ones.”

The writer’s conclusion is entirely correct. Unfortunately, however, it

is not clear that contemporary political institutions, whether national

or international, do in fact successfully give sufficient attention to

the common interests of humanity. Instead, it’s increasingly evident

that these institutions instead elevate the interests of the most

powerful interest groups over collective interests, and neglect

long-term primary needs, including the environment.

One can also argue that the worst outrages in human history occurred not

in the absence of authority and government, but were instead perpetrated

by governments claiming to act in the common interest: Nazi Germany,

Stalinist Soviet Union, Khmer Rouge Cambodia—the list is a very long

one. The criminal acts undertaken by these governments were permitted

and in fact ordered in the name of the collective interest; the

individual perpetrators were thus rendered immune. Democratic

governments are also fully capable of terrible crimes, legitimized by

government’s ultimate moral immunity of droit d’état, or “state

interest” (on this, more later). But in any case, the correspondent’s

argument is widely shared: Institutions protect us against ourselves,

above all against what would otherwise prevail—chaos and disorder.

It’s worth examining this specific proposition in more detail by taking

the opposite case: a thought experiment—imagine a world without

institutions. And let us take a difficult context: the sometimes venal

and secretive world of financial investment.

The gigantic Ponzi scheme orchestrated by the financier Bernard Madoff

was the world’s largest fraud ever perpetrated by one man. It ruined

thousands of investors and symbolized the most grotesque excesses of

Wall Street. Despite the abject failure to catch Madoff by the

government body established to police and regulate the investment

industry, it was almost universally agreed that the best way to prevent

such crimes in future was tighter regulation and scrutiny of the

investment industry. The overwhelming reaction was that the government

should have protected the innocent investors: Something must be done!

But there may be an alternative approach that overturns every assumption

we have about how to deter, prevent and punish such crimes in future. It

may be that the very rules and institutions established to protect us in

fact do the opposite.

Madoff’s fraud was simple. He encouraged investors to deposit money with

his firm, paying them returns that were consistently higher than the

going rate. With the appeal of above-market and above all steady

returns, Madoff had little difficulty in attracting new investors. Their

fresh deposits would be used to fund returns to the earlier investors.

All the scheme required was a never-ending flow of new investors, with

deposits sufficient to fund the above-market returns to the earlier

investors, and to pay off the occasional depositor who wished to

withdraw their whole investment—and for obvious reasons, those wishing

to withdraw from this cash cow of easy money were few.

Madoff and his co-conspirators manufactured a huge volume of falsified

reports and data to pretend that their fraudulent scheme was in fact a

legitimate and highly successful investment business. Madoff’s cover was

effective. On three occasions in the 1990s, he was elected chairman of

the NASDAQ. By his own admission, he perpetrated this massive fraud for

nearly two decades, and was uncovered only when the precipitous market

collapses at the end of 2008 prevented him from raising the funds to pay

off those wishing to withdraw their money. In the end, it was estimated,

Madoff’s fraud cost his investors perhaps $20 billion.

Less simple is why a scheme of such magnitude and pervasive dishonesty

succeeded for so long. Madoff lied systematically both to his investors

and to the supervising federal authorities. In this criminal endeavor,

he was apparently assisted by colleagues, some of whom have been

prosecuted or face further investigation. But the scale of profits from

his fund should have provoked more intrusive suspicion; few others

within the industry tried to work out how his company could consistently

make such high profits, against market trends, outperforming all

competitors year after year.

The institutions designed to prevent such crime completely failed. The

Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal body established

in the 1930s to supervise the investment industry, conducted several

investigations. Madoff himself has later said that he had “hundreds” of

contacts with SEC staff.[76] Prompted by tip-offs from others in the

industry who questioned Madoff’s fantastic profits, the SEC failed,

however, to uncover the crime.

A later report on how the SEC missed Madoff found many failings: Staff

were overspecialized, devoted to particular subsets of fraud and

rewarded for pursuing that particular kind of crime.[77] Different parts

of the SEC investigating Madoff were unaware of each other. Each

individual part cleared Madoff of other allegations against him.

Together, they managed to miss the big picture.

Elsewhere, the report revealed not only that SEC staff were often

incompetent in understanding Ponzi schemes, but that Madoff intimidated

SEC investigators because of his stature on Wall Street. The

investigation at one point describes investigators as “enthralled” by

Madoff: Some of them asked Madoff’s staff if they could work for

him.[78]

This failure appears part of a disquieting pattern. It was only after

the BP Gulf oil spill of 2010 that the many failings of the body

assigned to monitor and regulate the oil industry surfaced. In the

aftermath of the disaster, it emerged that the Minerals Management

Service (MMS) had allowed BP to skip environmental assessments ahead of

drilling the well that spewed millions of barrels of oil into the Gulf.

MMS inspectors had also permitted oil company employees to fill out

inspection forms in pencil, which they would then ink in. Others had

accepted illegal gifts, consumed drugs and literally gone to bed with

officials from the companies they were supposed to regulate.[79] One

inspector had negotiated a job with an oil company while at the same

time inspecting the company’s operations.

With Madoff, the financial industry’s own self-regulatory bodies did

nothing to investigate or stop his suspiciously profitable activities.

This was unsurprising given that Madoff was a prominent member of many

of them. Madoff was at various times chairman or board member of the

National Association of Securities Dealers, a self-regulatory securities

industry organization. The Madoff family had longstanding, high-level

ties to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the

primary securities industry organization. Madoff’s brother Peter served

two terms as a member of this organization’s board of directors.

Madoff was regarded as a dominant figure in the investment industry, one

of the largest “market makers” at the NASDAQ. He and his company were

major political donors: Notably, he gave nearly a quarter of a million

dollars to both Democrats and Republicans, indicative not of any

political preference, but more a naked purchase of influence. Some have

suggested that his political connections, and links to the SEC, helped

deter a more thorough investigation of his activities.

The testimony of financial analyst and would-be Madoff whistleblower

Harry Markopolos to Congress, after the fraud was uncovered, was

revealing. Giving evidence to the House of Representatives capital

markets subcommittee, Markopolos said that he had investigated Madoff on

behalf of a group of private investors.[80] After only a short

examination of the numbers, he came to the conclusion that Madoff’s

spectacular returns could be explained only by one investment technique:

fraud. Markopolos testified that for nine years he had repeatedly tried

to get the SEC to investigate and shut down the Madoff Ponzi scheme. The

SEC had not only ignored these warnings, according to Markopolos, but

was fundamentally incapable of understanding the complex financial

instruments being traded in the twenty-first century. And here lies one

clue to what might be done to prevent such crime in future.

Another lies in an uncompromising look at the investors themselves. Many

suffered terribly from Madoff’s fraud, losing life savings, being forced

to sell homes or return from a well-earned retirement to work

indefinitely, their nest egg stolen. In many cases, their lives were

utterly ruined. But why did these investors give their money to Madoff

without the most cursory scrutiny of his company? Madoff’s returns were

so implausible that any sensible investor should have held back, but

many committed their entire life savings. Harry Markopolos told Congress

that investing in Madoff was a “no-brainer” in that “you had to have no

brains whatsoever to invest into such an unbelievable performance record

that bears no resemblance to any other investment manager’s track record

throughout recorded human history.”

Some commentators have suggested that one of Madoff’s techniques was to

hint at a vague air of wrongdoing to help justify his otherwise

inexplicable returns. The right to invest in his company was by

invitation only, creating an air of desirable—and perhaps

disreputable—exclusivity, that something special was going on, maybe

something if not illegal then a little bit questionable: insider-trading

perhaps, of some kind. For several years, potential investors who

approached Madoff were told that the fund was “closed.” Such false

allure is the classic sign of a Ponzi scheme.

In The New York Times, business commentator Joe Nocera has argued that

for these investors to blame the government for their decision to give

every last penny to Bernie Madoff “is like a child blaming his mother

for letting him start a fight while she wasn’t looking.”[81] But here

lies one explanation of why people may have invested in Madoff. The mere

existence of the SEC, with its claim to supervise, scrutinize and

protect, must inevitably lower people’s own sensitivity to risk. If the

teacher is present, what is going on in the playground must be, in some

way, acceptable.

Research suggests that when measures are in place to protect people from

risk, they tend to indulge in more risky behavior. In his 2006 book

Government Failure Versus Market Failure, Clifford Winston, an economist

at the Brookings Institution, cites considerable and diverse research

which shows, for instance, that people drive faster in vehicles that

feel safer, cycle more dangerously when they wear helmets and take less

care bathing infants when using child seats designed to reduce the risk

of drowning.

This research makes sense. We tend to lower our guard when told that the

coast is clear. Indeed, so evident is this fundamental human tendency

that one can make a further, and perhaps provocative, presumption: that

criminal frauds like Madoff are actually made more feasible by the

presence of institutional authorities designed to prevent them. The

evidence for this seemingly outrageous claim is in front of our noses:

The fraud happened, right under the SEC’s nose.

Moreover, as the Madoff example has clearly shown, it is naive to expect

any single authority to keep up with the massive complexity and dynamic

changes of an industry like securities investment. There is a

fundamental and insoluble imbalance in such supervision. Government

bodies suffer the constant depredations of budget cycles, cuts and the

intrinsic disadvantages of employers who can offer salaries equivalent

to only a tiny proportion of those available in the industry they

supervise. Given this fundamental and persistent power imbalance, it is

surprising not that institutions like the SEC fail, as they regularly

do, but that investors expect such institutions to keep up with the

free-wheeling, greed-tainted and secretive world of securities

investment.

On the broader scale, it is often claimed that the recent global credit

crisis was caused by the absence—or more precisely, the withdrawal—of

the correct controls on the financial industry. It is persuasively

argued that it was the proliferation of certain financial instruments,

collectively known as derivatives, and specifically “credit default

swaps” (or CDSs), which helped spread the poison of the subprime

mortgage crisis across the world. CDSs are essentially legalized

gambling: They are bets on whether certain financial indices, like

mortgage repayments or stock prices, will rise or fall; a financial

instrument that Warren Buffett has called “financial Weapons of Mass

Destruction.” Some have called them the twenty-first-century version of

the “bucket shops” of the 1920s where people could bet on whether stocks

could rise or fall without actually owning those stocks. The bucket

shops were blamed for the wild speculation that helped fuel the Wall

Street Crash of 1929. They were subsequently outlawed. In 2000, Congress

passed a little known law that essentially permitted such betting again.

As for the industry’s own alleged safeguards, banks paid the ratings

agencies to rate and thus endorse the mortgage-based investment

instruments that “sliced and diced” and concealed and spread the

dangerous risk of subprime lending.

Many commentators have therefore reasonably concluded that the obvious

answer is further regulation, to ban CDSs and rely on legislation to

tame the industry. The problem with this analysis, however, so tempting

in these turbid days, is that it rests on an assumption about the

legislative process that is perilous indeed: that legislators act upon

the interests of voters, and no one else. The law in question, the

Commodity Futures Modernization Act, was passed in 2000 by a Democratic

administration; it was proposed by the Clinton administration and passed

quickly through both Houses. Not one member of Congress raised

objections to this particular provision, which was secreted away in a

bill of many hundreds of pages. Needless to say, that year the financial

services industry, which strongly supported the bill, contributed large

amounts to both Democrats and Republicans.

After the crash, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic roared their

populist anger against the banks and mortgage companies that helped

precipitate the crisis, then demanded massive government bailouts for

their companies, while continuing to pay their executives grotesque

bonuses. In all countries, political leaders queued up to decry the

greed and swear their commitment to legislation that would “never again”

allow such abuse to recur. But out of this bellowing public rage, the

legislation actually delivered resembled more a mouse’s squeak.

The legislation is complex. In the U.S., the bill finally passed in July

2010, allegedly to “reform Wall Street,” is a document of thousands of

pages.[82] Many of its provisions are highly technical in nature,

allowing politicians to claim to an ill-informed public that the new law

amounts to more than it in reality is. The press, in its complacency as

the “fourth estate” in the body politic, did little to inquire into and

explain the complexities. For instance, much was made of the

prohibitions against “proprietary trading”; most people would have no

clue what this actually is.

In fact, this prohibition, in any case very limited, will do almost

nothing to prevent the kind of collapse that the global economy

experienced in 2008 and 2009. Within months of the “reform Wall Street”

legislation, banks were finding ways to circumvent this “Volcker rule”

to limit trading—perhaps better known as betting—on their own accounts:

precisely the activity that helped bring down Lehman Brothers in

2007.[83]

Most financial commentators agreed that there was one simple and easily

explicable measure that would surely have limited the ability of banks

to create the chaos that they did: limits on capital-to-loan ratios,

i.e., require banks to hold more capital relative to their lending. In

the confusion and obscurity of new measures, such rules were largely

absent or, if present, in watered-down form. Instead, in a telltale

signal that the necessary tough decisions had been dodged, Congress set

up new bodies, and new mechanisms, to deal with these problems in the

future. Likewise, amendments designed to address the problem of banks

“too big to fail,” by limiting their capital and thus the risk they pose

to the whole economy, were rejected. Instead of passing the necessary

measures in the immediate aftermath of the crash, when they might have

been politically possible, the congressional legislation empowers a new

regulatory body to pass them in future, when without doubt still less

political support will be available. In a sure sign that the legislation

was indeed to the benefit, not detriment, of the banks, shares in all

financial service companies significantly rose immediately after the

Senate vote.

Meanwhile, at the global level, neither the G20 nor the global banking

regulatory mechanism, the Basel Committee, have managed to agree on

measures to ensure that banks hold sufficient deposits against lending.

The “Basel III” proposals in 2010, celebrated by the banking industry as

a major step forward, were judged by a more independent and

disinterested group of distinguished academic finance experts as “far

from sufficient to protect the system from recurring crises.”[84] Clive

Crook in the Financial Times commented that the new Basel rules were an

improvement on the preceding arrangements, but “not by much.”[85]

The reason for this failure is not hard to find. As soon as anyone

suggested more effective measures, like higher capital-to-lending

ratios, legions of banking industry spokesmen would rise as one to

complain that such requirements would render U.S. financial companies

“uncompetitive” in the global market place. The CEO of JPMorgan Chase,

for instance, wailed that new financial regulation including stricter

capital controls would be the “nail in the coffin” of big American

banks, adding for good measure that this would “greatly diminish

growth.”[86] This was a powerful argument in a country deeply mired in

recession. But the argument rarely needed to be publicly advocated:

There was precious little public debate on the bill, since politicians,

both Democrats and Republicans, conspired to pretend that the bill had

sharp teeth when in fact it was but a set of crummy plastic dentures.

This too was unsurprising, since the financial industry had taken care

to donate generously to both sides. In advance of the congressional

bill, financial institutions spent $1.4 million a day on lobbying; they

had hired seventy former Congress members to their payroll, and 940

former federal employees. Senator Scott Brown, a Republican from

Massachusetts, raked in “off-the-charts” donations from the financial

industry while working to water down the financial bill.[87] On the

Democrats’ side, President Obama’s then budget director, Peter Orzsag,

left the White House and waited a seemly four months before joining

Citibank, which of course was busy marketing new credit cards to

indebted Americans.

The congressional debate was in fact not a substantive discussion of

what was really required to prevent another financial meltdown in the

future. It was instead a kind of theatrical performance presented for

the public’s benefit to reassure them that “something was being done.”

The Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee,

Spencer Bachus, soon afterward remarked with refreshing candor that “my

view is that Washington… [is] there to serve the banks.”

The answer then may be to do the one thing that no one seems prepared to

contemplate: Take away the teacher in the playground. Let anarchy reign.

It’s interesting to contemplate what might follow. Some pointers are

already available: in the behaviors and systems that have grown up on

the World Wide Web.

On eBay and other online marketplaces, there are few certain methods to

prevent fraud. It’s easy for a seller to take payment online for

imperfect or nonexistent products then disappear into the anonymous

jungle of the Internet. When eBay began, the anonymity of the Web did

little to produce trust. On the contrary, buyers and sellers were quick

to complain about each other—often directly to Pierre Omidyar, the

founder of eBay, who in the early days would answer customer service

complaints himself. He was soon overwhelmed with the volume of

complaints.

Omidyar decided to introduce a system under which eBay participants

could rate each other online—not just to say when they were

dissatisfied, but when they were happy, too. This feedback system is one

of eBay’s most well-known features: Sellers advertise their positive

ratings as a selling point. Sellers without positive ratings struggle to

find buyers. Thus, there is a huge incentive for sellers and buyers to

treat each other well, if they are to do any repeat business. And

interestingly, like the accumulation of friends on Facebook, which takes

months and years to build up, the accumulation of trust indicators

within this system is also a huge barrier to entry for prospective

competitors to eBay.

The idea—and effect—was to incentivize sellers to behave well: to

deliver what they sold promptly and in good order. The system seemed to

work. Introduction of the ratings system helped drive a massive increase

in transactions on eBay and a reduction in the number of fraud charges

arising from eBay purchases.

In China, things have worked slightly differently, but prove the same

point. Here, eBay lost market share to a competitor that understood

better how customers wanted to build trust with one another. On its

Chinese site, eBay did not offer ways for buyers and sellers to chat

online, fearing they would close their transactions off the site to

avoid paying fees. By contrast, eBay’s rival service, Taobao.com,

understood that live conversations were necessary for Chinese consumers

to cultivate trust, and offered an instant-message service to allow them

to haggle over deals. eBay forfeited the Chinese online market to Taobao

partly as a result.

The online classifieds site Craigslist did something similar to eBay,

following the philosophy of its founder, Craig Newmark, that “people are

good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through

the day.”[88] All you have to do is build a minimal infrastructure and

let them work things out for themselves. The primary mechanism of the

site is the red flag: If other users flag an unacceptable advertisement

enough times, it will disappear. The mission of Craigslist is simple: to

enable local, face-to-face transactions. This formula clearly works

despite the many aesthetic flaws and frustrations of Craigslist. It is

by far the most popular community site in the U.S., and is reportedly

viewed by forty-seven million unique users each month.

The very openness of the Web, however, has brought to the surface some

of mankind’s worst aspects. But with the transparency, others are

learning to combat the most undesirable and sometimes criminal

activities.

For instance, in 2010, campaigners demanded that Craigslist remove its

“Adult services” section because it was being used by sex traffickers to

pimp underage girls. Craigslist at first refused, citing its commitment

to freedom of speech, but eventually succumbed to the pressure and

removed the offending section. Likewise, Amazon removed a self-published

book on pedophilia after mass Twitter and e-mail protests. In both

cases, the action to address the offense took place with no government

intervention.

Small businesses everywhere must rapidly adapt to a world where their

services and products are discussed openly and critically on the Web by

customers. Discomforting for some, the enforced visibility and criticism

on the Web is proving for others a liberation, and a sales advantage.

The evidence is mounting that of two otherwise identical businesses, the

one that responds quickly and positively, and above all transparently,

to customer complaints online, will rapidly gain the better online

ratings, with positive consequences for their likely sales.

A new phenomenon is emerging on the Internet, which one commentator has

called the “Panopticon.”[89] The original Panopticon was an imaginary

prison, designed by Jeremy Bentham, where all parts of the prison were

visible from one central point, without the prisoners knowing that they

were under observation at any particular moment. But the Panopticon of

the Internet is not for the observation by one of many, but more of “all

watching all.” As our lives are lived increasingly online, so are our

traces apparent. More and more it is possible to locate, identify and

examine people from their online presence.

There are obvious privacy concerns here, which we have yet properly to

contend with. It is a new and disquieting world when a trainee teacher

can be denied a college degree because she has posted a photo of

herself, drunk, on MySpace.[90] But at the same time there is also the

potential for a new form of collective security. Already, it is possible

easily to access the human rights and environmental records of major

companies;[91] one website allows you to research all the components,

and the labor history embodied in them, of even complex products like

computers or TVs.[92] It is easy to see how this scrutiny will spread

more widely. Already, employers Google prospective employees to

scrutinize their online history. Prospective lovers do the same. The

Panopticon is already reality.

While online transparency and criticism may help improve the services

offered by competing local plumbers, it’s harder to see how it may work

for the securities industry, a world that is not only secretive but also

so complex that many of its most sophisticated denizens (George Soros,

for instance) freely admit that they do not fully understand the

financial instruments now available. Here, we return to Harry

Markopolos.

After conducting his own investigation of Madoff, and concluding that

something very fishy was going on, Markopolos sought to inform the SEC

which, as we now know, failed to follow up on his suspicions. This he

was permitted to do by law. Markopolos was not, however, permitted to

publicize his concerns, for to do so would have immediately made him

vulnerable to punitive lawsuits by Madoff. Indeed, Markopolos testified

that the failure of the SEC to investigate his complaints made him fear

for his safety. The net effect, therefore, of the laws existing at the

time of the Madoff fraud was not to inform and protect investors, but to

protect Madoff.

Perhaps it is naive to expect ordinary investors to enjoy the expertise

to scrutinize investment funds like Madoff’s, even if one might expect

them to exercise more diligence than that demonstrated by Madoff’s

unwise and unfortunate investors. It is not unrealistic, however, to

envisage a system whereby disinterested experts might offer advice on

the wisdom of investing in certain funds. Looking at the way e-commerce

is developing on the Web, this might consist of several connected

elements: a ratings system for buyers anonymously to rate their

investment “experience,” independent sites which offer disinterested

advice on various investment alternatives and, finally, investors might

form groups—like cooperatives—such as that which hired Harry Markopolos

to conduct research on their behalf.

Above all, the Web shows that it is transparency that wins customers.

Ergo, those that eschew it—or actively reject it, as Madoff did—should

pay the penalty in lost business. Madoff himself has argued that his

claimed “black box” investment strategy—the series of computerized

algorithms to decide equity trades—was unintelligible to most of Wall

Street, let alone ordinary investors, claiming that many other hedge

funds are similarly opaque to outside scrutiny: “Does anyone know how,

say, Renaissance really makes its returns?” Madoff asked in an interview

with the Financial Times, referring to the wildly successful hedge

fund.[93]

Perhaps he is right. However, what is beyond dispute is that from 1992

onward Madoff, by his own admission, conducted no trades at all and

faked the documents, pretending that they had taken place. This fraud

should have been easy to detect with only the most cursory scrutiny, if

the market were more transparent: It should be straightforward to

corroborate the trades with the counterparties, those who supposedly

bought and sold Madoff’s equity holdings. In other words, transparency

does not need to reveal the secret investment strategies of successful

funds, but it can—and simply—reveal other telltale signs of fraud like

Madoff’s. Unlike his faked investment strategy, Madoff’s fraud was

devastatingly simple.

There is perhaps a final and subtle lesson to be learned from this

miserable episode. It is clear both from victims and Madoff himself that

the wealth and power of big Wall Street players was a deterrent against

scrutiny and investigation, intimidating those who sought to question,

including the SEC. From many accounts of the Madoff scam, Wall Street

appears as a layered hierarchy governed not by the SEC but by an

exclusive club of powerful financiers, whom Madoff sought to join and

succeeded in so doing. This club was bound by a wary but mutual trust

and tacit agreement among members to forbear from questioning one

another’s affairs too closely. Madoff claims that many major Wall Street

figures and banks, including JPMorgan, knew what was going on. Once

Madoff joined the club, and hobnobbed with its members, he was all but

untouchable.

We have been culturally conditioned to accept that the prosecution of

the occasional Madoff somehow proves the power of law and intrinsic

justice in the system. In fact, the story unearthed by his case proves

the opposite: The system is revealed as fundamentally iniquitous and

persistently vulnerable to crime and violent instability. The gross

inequality of contemporary society permits a culture of unaccountability

and, sometimes, criminality among the richest and most powerful. The

most extreme results of this imbalance are scandals like Madoff but

also, with the credit crunch, economic volatility that destroys millions

of jobs and endangers the entire global economy.

Methods to address this inequality will be discussed later. Money and

power are of course hard to assail as sources of influence and secrecy.

But what can be changed is the attitude of those outside the private

circle. We should no longer be intimidated. One clear lesson of the

Madoff scandal is the requirement for individual investors themselves to

use greater care and scrutiny: to exercise, in short, their own agency

rather than submitting their choices to the care of others. Everyone has

the right to question. This is a right that cannot be taken for granted

but must be continually asserted, by one and by all. The more that each

of us demands it, the easier it will be for all of us.

The exercise of collective and individual scrutiny, disinterested

analysis shared publicly, insistent questioning: None of these elements

alone would necessarily suffice to deter or prevent future Madoffs. But

together they would create a lattice of checks and balances whose

collective effect would be to force greater transparency within, and

scrutiny of, a notoriously closed, clubby and corrupt industry: a result

that decades of government supervision and legislation have signally

failed to achieve.

That lattice would not have a fixed structure, and it would likely

change over time in response to changes in the industry it was

monitoring. It would not have the reassuring bricks-and-mortar

institutional presence, and claim to expertise and authority, of a body

like the Securities and Exchange Commission—itself a comforting name, at

least prior to Madoff. The lattice may not be imposed by legislation,

and its origin may be in a state of affairs some might call anarchy—the

absence of rules—but its result would be not the disorder usually

associated with that word, but its opposite.

For two days in 2004, there was anarchy in Kosovo. The “authorities”—in

this case the local police, UN and NATO peacekeepers—lost control. This

was never publicly admitted. The candid admissions of failure in reports

by UN officials in Kosovo itself were altered at UN headquarters in New

York before they were reported to the UN Security Council, the ultimate

authority which supervised the de facto government of Kosovo. It wasn’t

the UN’s fault, the Security Council was told. The violence was

deliberately instigated by extremist Kosovar leaders, an allegation for

which there was little hard evidence.

The journalists who arrived in Kosovo after the violence chose their own

convenient narratives: This was a typical, if depressing, cycle of the

familiar ethnic violence that had plagued Kosovo, like the Balkans, for

generations. Only a few chose to report the more complicated truth,

including the fact that the violence had been in part a kind of

rebellion against the ruling authorities in Kosovo—the UN. Only one NGO,

a specialist in conflict whose two staff were deeply embedded in

Kosovo’s complicated stories, managed to capture the many strands of

what had happened there.[94]

In truth, each chosen narrative carried some weight. The story of

generational ethnic hatred was, in a sense, a true one. Serbs were

attacked by Kosovo-Albanian mobs across the territory; many Serbian

houses were burned; some Serbs were physically assaulted; eight were

killed (the remainder killed in the violence were Kosovo-Albanians shot

by NATO and UN forces).[95]

A second narrative was better concealed than the first, conventional

account. This was that the anger was directed as much against the UN

rulers of Kosovo as it was against the Serbs. Despite having their own

democratically elected government, the people of Kosovo were excluded

from the crucial decisions about their own future. I saw the evidence

with my own eyes. The UN was attacked in all its manifestations—offices,

cars, staff. Other international organizations, such as the EU, were not

attacked.

There was a deeper flux at work too. The boys and young men in the

rioting crowds were not sophisticated political critics. If you had

asked them why they were rioting, they would not have said it was

because Kosovo’s people were excluded from political decision making

about their future. They might have said, “We hate the Serbs.” But what

one most frequently heard was this: “It is because we are angry.” Angry

at the potholes and the lack of jobs; angry at the endless power cuts;

angry because the girls and the luxury we see on MTV are unavailable to

us.

So far, so political. But it was clear, because you could feel it, that

there was a collective emotion at work. An emotion that was evident in

individuals, but took greater force, and found expression, only when the

crowd formed. The violence felt, in some terrible inadmissible way, like

a release.

After the violence subsided, I returned to my work at the UN. My job had

been to guide the local elected Kosovo government to adopt so-called

standards of democracy: the rule of law, minority rights and other

measures of a state’s worthiness to exist and be accepted in the

community of nations. The “international community” in this case was

embodied in a small and secretive group of six countries known as the

“Contact Group” which ran international policy on Kosovo. This group had

insisted that such standards be established, and in some way fulfilled,

before Kosovo could be considered for “final status”—whether it could

become a state, as the large majority of its people desperately wanted.

Politically, the imposition of these standards was one reason why the

violence had erupted. Because Russia, the U.S. and others disagreed in

principle on whether Kosovo should become a state, no one in the

“international community” was prepared to say what precisely Kosovo had

to do to become independent. Kosovo was caught in a state of perpetual

limbo, like being ordered every day to take an exam but never told if

you’d passed or failed, or indeed what a pass or fail required.

The two-day orgy of violence, therefore, represented a total failure for

my work. I sat at my desk, facing Besnik, my loyal assistant, and stared

at the stacks of papers elaborating the democratic, rule-abiding

“standards” that Kosovo was required to meet. We discussed whether to

take the papers to the street outside the UN building, make a little

pile and set fire to them. In the end we decided it would be a

ridiculous and futile gesture: The rioters had already done it for us.

One incident, seemingly unremarkable, stuck in my memory. On the morning

of the second day of the trouble, the head of the UN mission, a former

president of Finland, had summoned Kosovo’s political leaders to his

office. He demanded to know what they were doing to stem the violence.

Reading from a note prepared by his staffers, he looked over his

spectacles at the leaders across the conference table, peering at them

like a remonstrative school teacher at his unruly pupils.

And the leaders were silent. They sat glumly, looking a little shifty,

like naughty schoolboys who had been caught smoking cigarettes behind

the gym. A few muttered excuses, but those uttering them seemed as

unconvinced as we were. There was a general air of embarrassment.

I pondered this incident. Why had the leaders not spoken up for their

political demands? Why had they not blamed the UN and the international

community for stoking the frustrated anger of the Kosovo-Albanian

majority? Why had they resembled nothing so much as a bunch of

adolescents being punished after school?

Slowly, it dawned on me. No one was prepared to take responsibility for

the violence, because no one felt responsible for it. The behavior of

Kosovo’s leaders was immature and childish, because that was what was

expected of them. The international community had refused to give these

political leaders the real responsibility to run the country, telling

them instead that they and their country were not yet ready for the

burdens of statehood. My work in elaborating and implementing the

“standards” sent, and made concrete, this very message.

Kosovo was permitted to have elections, an elected government and a

parliament, but the real power resided in an unelected official—the UN

Special Representative, the Finn, appointed by the UN

Secretary-General—who could veto any decision made by the local elected

government.

The dramatic events in one small Balkan province (now a state) were

unique, but there are nevertheless lessons of broader significance.[96]

Western democracies are not on the cusp of violent disorder (although it

cannot be ruled out if the current system is not improved). The violence

and unrest on the streets of Kosovo, but above all the feckless behavior

of Kosovo’s elected but powerless politicians, carried one crucial

lesson: If people do not have responsibility, do not expect them to

behave responsibly.

This episode suggests a broader lesson about democracy, stability and

anarchy. Defenders of the current order argue that to abandon the system

of representative democracy is to invite anarchy, a war of all against

all. But the 2004 disorder in Kosovo suggests a more subtle and

unexpected lesson. It is this: The less people have agency—control—over

their own affairs, and the less command they feel over their futures and

their circumstances, the more inclined they are to take to the streets.

The best way, indeed, to invite violent anarchy is to reduce the agency

and sense of control that people need to feel over their lives.

The disconnection between voters and their government, along with

government’s declining ability to deal with problems of global origin,

are combining in the current dispensation to produce this very effect.

The frustration, disillusionment and growing extremism all too evident

in today’s democracies are symptoms of this phenomenon: loss of agency.

Kosovo may represent an extreme case, but for it not to become a

harbinger, action must be taken. Our way of doing politics, indeed our

way of thinking about politics, needs to change, from passivity to

action: reclaiming agency.

And in that reclamation, we must find better ways of doing business with

one another. If too distant and corruptible institutions are proving

inadequate, what might work? Some believe that technology alone, and the

Internet in particular, can deliver the necessary revolution. Some even

believe that the Internet is the necessary revolution, and that its

inherently heterogeneous and transparent nature amounts, in itself, to

political change. Closer analysis reveals, however, a more complicated

and ambiguous reality.

Something else is needed. And that something else, it turns out, doesn’t

require fancy technology, Web-based platforms and Twitter feeds (though

they may help). That something else turns out to be simple indeed.

4. The Importance of Meeting People

During the Spanish Civil War, more than thirty thousand people from over

fifty nations volunteered to fight the Nationalist armies of General

Franco. Many gave up jobs and left families in order to fight the

emerging global threat of fascism, and to defend a nascent socialist,

even anarchist republic.

They joined Republican forces that were in many cases undertrained and

equipped with antique and inadequate weapons. In Homage to Catalonia,

George Orwell vividly describes the miserable conditions of the

front-line troops, dug into feces-strewn trenches with neither the

clothing nor arms properly to fight the Franco’s armies, which by

contrast received substantial international support from Italy and Nazi

Germany.[97] Yet Orwell compellingly evokes the comradeship among the

Republican troops, the abolition of traditional hierarchies and the

appealing idealism of both the Spanish and international volunteers. He

recounts too that anarchist principles were no obstacle to effective

military organization: Although there was debate within army units—and a

welcome absence of the cringing deference of many military

organizations—there was also discipline, not least thanks to the unity

of purpose among the troops.

Much history since has given the impression that the international

volunteers were mainly middle-class intellectuals. But in fact they came

from all walks of life.[98] The “International Brigade” of foreign

volunteers fought in several key battles of the civil war, including a

notable role in the ferocious Battle of Madrid, where Republican forces

successfully beat back a Nationalist assault in the autumn of 1936. The

fighting was intense and bloody: Infantry fought at close quarters, room

by room, with bayonets and grenades.

Of the thirty thousand or so foreign volunteers who went to fight for

their beliefs, nearly ten thousand were killed in action and another

eight thousand or so wounded. Of those who survived, many returned to a

less than welcoming reception in their home countries. Some were

imprisoned, others were denied citizenship, while some, such as the

three thousand or so antifascist Germans, were unable to return home at

all.

The war in the Darfur region of Sudan has been raging since 2003.

Civilian casualties are enormous, with some estimating that several

hundred thousand people have been killed, and perhaps three million

refugees displaced. The killing has been sustained and deliberate,

leading many to depict the conflict as a planned genocide of the

indigenous inhabitants of Darfur, engineered and led by the Sudanese

government in Khartoum and executed by militias under its control,

including the notorious Janjaweed. In 2008, the president of Sudan, Omar

Hassan al-Bashir, was indicted for war crimes by the International

Criminal Court in The Hague. At the time of this writing, however,

Bashir has not been handed over to the court for trial;[99] all the

signs indicate that the “international community,” including the U.S.,

is prepared to allow the indictments to be quietly forgotten.

But nongovernmental reaction to the killings in Darfur has been

vociferous. Across the world, hundreds of protest groups have demanded

action to stop the killing, calling for the intervention of foreign

troops either under United Nations or African Union auspices. Some

protest groups, such as Not on Our Watch, were set up by famous film

stars, including George Clooney and Brad Pitt.[100] Students from

Swarthmore College set up a telephone hotline that immediately connects

the caller to the office of their representative in Congress, whom they

can demand take action about Darfur. There have been a large number of

Internet petitions about Darfur, some attracting many millions of

signatories.

But this vast expenditure of campaigning energy has resulted in scant

additional protection for Darfuri civilians. As the war raged, the

“international community’s” response amounted to a small and

underequipped African Union force which, several years after the

conflict began, comprised only a few thousand lightly armed troops to

provide security in an area approximately the size of Spain. Even the

force’s defenders make no claim that the AU force is in any way adequate

to deter or prevent attacks against civilians. And indeed the killing

has continued up to the time of this writing.

Some commentators have suggested that the rhetorical heat generated by

Western pressure groups, and in particular their use of the word

“genocide,” may have made the chances of finding a peaceful outcome

locally more difficult.[101] Just as distant governments must simplify

the complex realities of foreign conflicts in order to pronounce policy

about them, so too did the simplifying lens of distance enable

campaigners to turn a complicated and fluid situation into a compelling

black-and-white narrative of good and evil, leading some to argue that

the simplifications of celebrity campaigning have actually helped

prolong the conflict.[102] No foreign citizen has taken up arms

themselves to defend the Darfuris.

The advent of the Internet has released a wave of enthusiasts who

believe that democracy can be improved—saved, perhaps—by technology

alone. There are now innumerable websites where online petitions can be

created and propagated on any topic, from freeing imprisoned Burmese

democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to liberating socialite Paris Hilton

from her brief incarceration for drunk driving. Politicians have been

quick to glom on to the petition trend. The website of the British prime

minister, like that of the White House, encourages their submission

though there is little mention of what becomes of any petition thus

delivered. The woefully undemocratic British House of Lords, where every

member is either appointed or inherits their seat, recently established

an equally pitiful blog site to encourage “dialogue” between their

Lordships and the grateful public.[103] Even the British sovereign, to

whom all Britons are subject, now has a Facebook page where the Queen’s

subjects can ventilate their feelings.

Not one to miss out on a trend, China’s Communist Party, a body not best

known for accountability and transparency, has launched its own

discussion forum, “Direct line to Zhongnanhai.” Zhonghnanhai is the huge

and secretive compound in the heart of Beijing where China’s leaders

live and work. As one commentator aptly put it, “The site appears to be

an effort to persuade people that the leadership is listening to their

very personal concerns…. It is clearly designed to demonstrate that the

leadership is attentive and sensitive.”[104] But as the Financial Times

reported, although the new message board is trying to demonstrate

responsiveness, it does not actually provide responses from the leaders

addressed. A further problem with “Internet democracy” was revealed when

such an attempt was mounted during the transition period after the U.S.

presidential election of 2008. When the new administration of

President-elect Barack Obama created an online “Citizen’s Briefing Book”

for people to submit ideas “virtually” to the president, they received

over forty thousand proposals and nearly a million and a half people

voted on their preferences among those proposals. The most popular idea

was to legalize marijuana. Legalizing online poker topped the

contributions in the technology category. Revoking the Church of

Scientology’s tax-exempt status garnered three times more votes than

raising funds for childhood cancer. The New York Times’ conclusion from

this episode was that advocates of the Internet as the incarnation of

real-time participatory democracy—“Athens on the Net”—still had some

arguments to answer.[105]

There are now websites that invite views on proposed legislation,

scrutiny of campaign finances and details of your representatives’

voting patterns. “See, click, fix” allows citizens to identify local

problems online for government action.[106] But all these supposedly new

forms of political action rely on a very traditional mechanism of

political change—up/down: pressuring, scrutinizing, demanding that

representatives and government take action. There has been no change to

the fundamental model of politics.

It is correspondingly easy for government and other embodiments of the

status quo to adopt these new technological tools, and thus neutralize

any benefit. Governments are now replete with their own tech fetishists,

wittering on (or twittering on) about “Government 2.0” and organizing

podcasts, tweets and blogs saying more or less the same things that

politicians have always said, albeit through a different medium.

Despite the repeated claim from government that the flow of information

is from people to government, the evidence suggests that the true

direction is the opposite. There is scant evidence to suggest that any

significant government policy has been informed or altered by tweeting

or the fancy online tools set up, for instance, by the U.S. State

Department to encourage a “global conversation.” The basic power

structure is unchanged—up/down—the only difference is the form of

communication. Revealingly, the most palpable results of this “new” Web

activism are to be found in the most traditional manifestations of “old”

politics: organizing get-out-the-vote volunteers and, inevitably,

raising money.

Celebrants of the new technological democracy often cite examples from

“abroad” where technology has brought about political change, like the

“color” revolutions in Ukraine or Georgia, or the “Twitter” protests

against the government in Iran in 2009, and most recently the

revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in the “Arab spring” of 2011, where

indeed it is clear that social media played an important role.

They rarely mention that there are equally many examples where

technology has had a more malign effect. In Nigeria, deadly riots in the

city of Jos were fueled, according to one authority, by text messages

sent between rampaging mobs;[107] the same thing happened in the

violence that gripped Kosovo in 2004 (described in the previous

chapter). In London, the killing of a fifteen-year-old boy was

coordinated by his attackers on Facebook.[108] The “Twitter” protests in

Iran did not lead, yet, to the overthrow of government; many protesters

ended up in the same prison very traditionally used by different regimes

to house political prisoners—Tehran’s notorious Evin jail. These

prisoners now include Iran’s best-known blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, who

in 2010 was sentenced to nineteen years in jail for alleged

collaboration with foreign governments, spreading “propaganda” against

the Islamic regime and setting up “obscene” websites.

In early 2011, the dictatorial regime in Sudan learned quickly from the

Mubarak regime’s mistakes in managing Internet-based protest in Egypt.

Khartoum turned the Internet against the protesters, setting up fake

pro-democracy pages on Facebook and arresting all those who showed up

for the demonstrations advertised on the site. Eventually, activists

avoided using Internet-based tools at all, returning to more traditional

and covert forms of organization.[109] The lesson is stark: Power adapts

to new technology, and swiftly.

After an initial spasm of excitement at the liberating possibilities of

the World Wide Web, it is now emerging that China’s adoption of the

Internet does not necessarily herald a new dawn of transparency and

incipient democracy. Every major Internet company in China employs

scores and sometimes hundreds of Internet “administrators” to search for

subversive content. The city of Beijing recently advertised for ten

thousand volunteers to act as monitors.[110] Twitter, Facebook and

YouTube remain blocked. China is adapting search technology similar to

Google’s to hunt and prosecute dissent. The search company that

pioneered the antidissident algorithms is now a successful commercial

company, listed on the Chinese stock exchange—a neat rebuttal of the

naive equation that free markets ipso facto produce freedom of speech.

In general, the protection of basic freedoms on the Web relies on the

goodwill and good intentions of the very small number of people who

control its most powerful institutions: the very opposite of the ideal

condition required for the maintenance of freedom and democracy. Large

companies—Yahoo, AOL, Google—dominate decisions about what content may

appear on the Web; one can only hope they are beneficent. Google alone

controls 63 percent of Internet searches. In deciding what can or cannot

be published on the Web and listed in its searches, and whether to

comply with censoring governments, Google is taking decisions of immense

consequence for freedom of speech. Its decision to confront censorship

in China in early 2010 was a decision of great political, and not merely

commercial, consequence.

As Google stood up to China, Microsoft without apology continued to

offer a censored search service. Yahoo! and Microsoft have been accused

by Amnesty International of abetting censorship and repression in China

by supplying equipment and adapting their search engines to block

certain sites and, in Yahoo!’s case, assisting the Chinese authorities

in identifying online antigovernment critics. In response, they have

argued that no company alone can change Chinese law, by which they must

abide.

Eli Pariser of MoveOn has warned of a more subtle danger: that Google

and Facebook’s filtering mechanisms are creating a “filter bubble”

around us; the algorithms applied by these sites to “personalize” our

Web experience are effectively rendering much of the Web invisible.[111]

We think we are browsing the entire World Wide Web, but in fact we are

only seeing the sites Google and Facebook’s filters deem appropriate to

our interests. The Web surfer in China experiences the same phenomenon.

There is no outward sign that the sites they are visiting have been

vetted—or filtered—for their consumption by the sophisticated filtering

technology used by the Chinese government. Unwitting, they think that

they are surfing the whole Web. In this regard, they are just like Web

users in the West.

As Stanford University’s Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued, it is

hard always to square the interests of a commercial company seeking to

expand market share with the protection of freedom of speech: “[Google

has] enormous control over a platform of all the world’s data, and

everything they do is designed to improve their control of the

underlying data. If your whole game is to increase market share, it’s

hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don’t raise privacy

concerns or that might help repressive governments to block

controversial content.”[112]

At least the Internet, it is argued, will encourage debate and

interaction, albeit virtually rather than in person. But here, it

appears that instead of encouraging debate among those of differing

views and thus convergence, the opposite may be happening. The Web

offers multiple locations to find those one agrees with, and to avoid

those one doesn’t. As columnist Nicholas Kristof has commented, we

select the kind of news and opinions that reflect our own prejudices

back to us, an emerging news product Nicholas Negroponte of MIT has

called “The Daily Me.”[113]

One result is that any clash of opinions, especially in the

anything-goes anonymity of the Web, is increasingly violent, hostile and

insulting. Name-calling is frequent; reasoned debate rare. Particularly

when opinions differ from the party line—whether of left or

right—criticism tends to escalate, and coarsen. It’s not only domestic

debates that witness such growing vituperation. In China, when a Chinese

fighter plane crashed, killing its pilot, after colliding with a U.S.

reconnaissance aircraft over the South China Sea, the Chinese

blogosphere erupted with violently anti-American and nationalist

sentiment: views that the Chinese government was happy, at least at

first, to allow, perhaps as a means to ventilate more general political

frustrations. Demonstrations followed, and the American embassy in

Beijing was attacked by stone-throwing hordes. Some demanded that China

declare war on the U.S. The traditional state-controlled press, while

critical of the U.S., had taken a more measured tone. The Chinese

authorities struggled to contain the situation and began to downplay the

issue in public. Some of the more rabid blogs were closed down.

Eventually, the riots stopped. Back in the U.S., the government’s

director of National Intelligence has observed that the Internet is a

fertile breeding ground for terrorism, warning that, “When it comes to

susceptibility to radicalization, virtual communities have become as

important as physical communities.”[114]

The antagonism and hostility of political debate on the Internet reveals

an essential truth of the modern condition, which is in fact a perpetual

condition of humanity, but one which modernity places in starker relief:

The more detached people are from one another, the more they can cloak

themselves in anonymity and be shielded from the consequences of their

views, the more violent, hostile and irresponsible they are likely to

be. It is a peculiar but retrograde feature of modernity that its

facets—the nature of modern work, communications, political interaction

and the modern state itself—have heightened that detachment.

There is a form of politics which produces more consensus, a better

understanding and respect for alternative points of view and a deeper

acknowledgment of facts over opinion. It does not require an expensive

computer or any technical equipment at all, for the Internet often

excludes the poor and otherwise marginalized.[115] It is as

old-fashioned as the earliest parliaments, where people gathered on a

hillside to arbitrate their common business. The academic who has

pioneered the technique calls it “deliberative democracy,” but really it

can be called something simpler: meeting people.

After Hurricane Katrina, much of the infrastructure of New Orleans was

devastated: More than 70 percent of housing was damaged and entire

neighborhoods were almost completely destroyed; schools, hospitals and

police stations were shut down. Nearly a hundred thousand jobs were

lost, and eighteen months after the hurricane, more than half of the

city’s population had not returned.

In the aftermath, plans to rebuild New Orleans confronted a ravaged

infrastructure, enormous financial losses, a local government in

disarray and a citizenry whose trust in government had been sorely

undermined. The early planning efforts by city officials were met with

anger and protest as the community struggled with the challenges of

distributing resources and reviving an entire city.

Faced with this crisis of confidence, city officials decided to involve

the citizens in a full discussion, in depth and face-to-face, on the

priorities for the city. Most of the city’s inhabitants were still

spread across the U.S., not yet able to return. Four thousand New

Orleanians met in “Community Congresses” staged across the country to

discuss recovery priorities for their city. As decision makers listened,

citizens discussed how to ensure safety from future flooding, empower

residents to rebuild safe and stable neighborhoods, provide incentives

and housing so people could return, and establish sustainable and

equitable public services.[116]

At the end of the deliberations, fully 92 percent of participants agreed

on the “Unified Plan” for the city. Critically, this approval rating

represented the collective view of the citizenry: Participants reflected

pre-Katrina New Orleans—in proportion to both race and income. At

earlier similar events, black and poor citizens were often severely

underrepresented. This time, citizens had participated not only at home

but in cities across the country where hurricane refugees were then

living. Thus, the city’s new plan was discussed and endorsed not only by

its officials, but also by its citizens, who overwhelmingly committed to

support the plan.

There has been a more sustained experiment in such “participative” or

“deliberative” democracy in Porto Alegre, one of Brazil’s largest

cities. “The Porto Alegre Experiment” again shows that better outcomes

result when citizens are directly involved in decisions over their own

lives. In 1989, when the experiment began, the city suffered some of the

worst inequality in the continent. The poor—one-third of the city’s

population—lived in slums around the periphery; the rich controlled the

city’s government and budget. Over the last ten years, the city has

gradually developed a multilayered approach to participatory budgeting.

Starting at the most local level, citizens are encouraged to participate

in debates about local spending priorities—water, schools, hospitals,

housing, roads. Of the city’s 1.5 million inhabitants, every citizen is

informed about the budget process and around fifty thousand now take

part.

According to a World Bank study, the participatory process has fostered

direct improvements in facilities in Porto Alegre. For example, sewer

and water connections increased from 75 percent of households in 1988 to

98 percent in 1997. The number of schools has increased fourfold since

1986. The city is at the cutting edge in developing progressive

recycling and renewable energy projects. The participatory process is

overwhelmingly supported by the city’s population. It has also,

reportedly, encouraged a change in the tenor of local politics. Less and

less a partisan contest, the common enemy is the occasional crisis.

Everything is transparent, from decision making to the awarding of

contracts.

These new deliberative processes are locally driven and designed for

local circumstances; there is no “one size fits all.” The general

benefits—of greater citizen empowerment, of greater consensus over local

spending—are clear: They flow directly and crucially from the agency of

those involved. People participate not to be consulted by government and

service-providers but to make real decisions themselves about their

circumstances. And when people are trusted and informed to make

decisions, they tend to make good ones. Such deliberative processes,

with real decisions as their result, are not to be confused with

America’s overheated “town hall” meetings of recent memory, or the

vulgar arguments on Internet “forums.” While politicians claim that they

are intended as a place to hear the views of the public, the town hall

meetings are not places where decisions are made. Typically, the local

angry brigades line up to denounce elected officials and their plans,

providing an unpleasant experience for everyone except those who enjoy

public confrontation. Rational discussion and respect for the facts are,

unsurprisingly, rarely the result.

In a recent book, legal scholar Cass Sunstein has noted that very often

when groups of people are placed together to debate an issue, they often

end up more polarized than at the beginning.[117] But Sunstein’s work

also suggests how to create greater unity. The more detached groups are

from society, the more extreme their decisions are likely to become. The

less that a decision debated within a group actually matters, the

greater the likelihood of dispute and conflict. A lesson becomes clear:

When nothing is at stake, and when no one has agency, it is predictable

that heated disagreement will be the outcome.

It is not only hurricane-struck New Orleans that suffers a crisis in

democracy. With turnouts falling and disaffection with “politics”

growing in all democratic countries, its model, like that of Porto

Alegre, offers lessons applicable beyond the occasional management of

disasters.

One particular example of that crisis is found at the European

Parliament. Originally conceived and empowered to give European peoples

a voice in EU decisions largely dominated by governments, its problems

highlight weaknesses increasingly apparent in other democratic

legislatures.

At the most recent elections to the parliament, extremist parties jumped

at the opportunity offered by the dismal turnout of Europe’s voters—the

lowest in the parliament’s history. Realizing that many mainstream

voters would stay away, extreme and far-right parties made special

efforts to mobilize their supporters. The result was that such parties

were represented in greater number here than in their own national

parliaments. The right-wing British National Party joined Italian and

Lithuanian proto-fascists, Dutch anti-immigrant parties and other

assorted representatives of the fringe in the home of European

“democracy.”

Neither phenomenon—low turnout, extreme political parties—bodes well for

the legitimacy, popularity or effectiveness of the decisions arising

from the parliament. Both phenomena, however, point to a future of

democratic politics, of both disenchantment and extremism, that may

become more and more evident, in more established parliaments and

congresses too. What is to be done?

The Financial Times recently reported an exercise which sought to

address this problem, asking the question: How much longer can the EU

continue as a project controlled by elites and disregarded by the

masses?[118] What is the solution to this “democratic deficit”?

One answer was attempted by Professor James Fishkin, a social scientist

at Stanford University. He conducted an experiment in which a balanced

sample of 348 Europeans from the EU’s twenty-seven countries were

brought to Brussels for a three-day dialogue on the elections and the

policy issues surrounding them. This is a procedure known as

“deliberative polling,” a concept Professor Fishkin introduced in 1988.

One outcome of the exercise was that many participants changed their

voting intentions as a result of the dialogue. Beforehand, 40 percent

said they would vote for mainstream center-right parties, 22 percent for

socialists, 9 percent for centrist liberals and 8 percent for Greens.

After the exercise, support for the center-right dropped to 30 percent,

the socialists and liberals were almost unchanged at 21 percent and 8

percent respectively, and the Greens shot up to 18 percent. The rise in

support for the Greens came about as a result of detailed discussions

among the participants on climate change. Participants were asked to

choose between the view that “we should do everything possible to combat

climate change even if that hurts the economy” and the alternative view

that “we should do everything possible to maximize economic growth, even

if that hurts efforts to combat climate change.” Before the discussions,

49 percent wanted to emphasize the fight against climate change.

Afterward, this figure rose to 61 percent.

Exercises like that performed by Professor Fishkin, and the New Orleans

reconstruction plan too, have shown repeatedly that when a group of

people gathers together to consider their affairs and collective

response to them—and, crucially, make decisions—a number of valuable

benefits follow:

• Participants pay greater heed to each other’s positions and are more

likely to acknowledge the concerns that underlie other people’s

political views.

• There is a deeper consideration of facts—including scientific

data—than normal political debate, composed largely of opinions, allows.

• Partly as result of numbers 1 and 2, such exercises usually produce a

greater degree of consensus within the group.

• The group feels a much greater commitment to decisions reached

collectively in this manner than to decisions imposed by any other

authority.

Fishkin calls this “deliberative democracy.” It is a process of a

different order from the current system, prevalent in all democratic

states, of representative democracy, whereby citizens elect

representatives to make decisions on their behalf. Indeed, deliberative

democracy in its fullest form, where people make genuine decisions of

consequence as a group, or a grassroots, community-based democracy, is

in fact ultimately incompatible with representative democracy. If two

mechanisms make decisions, what if their choices are contradictory? One

must be supreme.

Professor Fishkin attempts to bridge this problem, and render

deliberative techniques compatible, by proposing that deliberative

polling, of the kind described above, should help inform the regular

structures of representative democracy—the legislators and members of

the executive who make up the decision makers. But despite his efforts

to construct such groups as representative of the general populace—by

selecting their members in proportion to the political support for

different parties in the broader population—such “deliberative polling”

groups fail in one fundamental regard: They lack legitimacy. They are

not elected, so why should their voice, however proportionately it might

represent the rest, be heard above others?

Polling—like frequent referendums—fails in another regard too. While

polls may provide an indication of what people think on a particular

question at a particular moment, they leave out one crucial component of

Fishkin’s experiments—the deliberation: the talking, the to-and-fro, the

listening, the compromise. Any citizen of California, where referendums

are frequent, will recognize that they have done little to contribute to

responsible and effective government of the state—rather the opposite.

This is also why Internet surveys of opinion, or petitions, tend to the

extreme, and are so pathetically inadequate as a new form of democracy.

In his essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” Isaiah Berlin concludes that in

deciding what to do, the only option, in private life as in public

policy, is to engage in trade-offs—rules, values, principles must yield

to each other in varying degrees in specific situations, adding that “a

certain humility in these matters is very necessary” since we have no

guarantee that any particular course we choose will be right. This is

the essence of democracy: discussion of differing views and options on

how we together must live, with a view—ultimately—to collective

decision. The mere ventilation of opinions, whether in person or online,

does not qualify.

In microcosm, it is self-evident that encounters and negotiation offer a

greater possibility for respect and agreement than either the virtual

chat room or a distant authority. Difficult discussions with friends or

family can quickly degenerate online as misunderstandings; willful

misinterpretations multiply. No one pretends that meetings in person are

necessarily easier, or less painful, but somehow we are able to see and

feel more and thus achieve a greater comprehension. Perhaps, above all,

we simply spend more time.

Professor Fishkin’s excellent books are filled with examples of

deliberative democracy, and his comprehensive analysis of why and how it

works and the impressive results it clearly delivers. But by and large,

deliberative democracy has remained a matter for academic discussion,

and occasional illustrative, yet tantalizing, exercises of the kind that

took place in New Orleans or Porto Alegre, or the experiments practiced

by Professor Fishkin.

The trouble with deliberative democracy is, of course, that it poses a

direct challenge to the existing constitutional order of representative

democracy, where the few are elected to arbitrate the affairs of the

many. Deliberative polling, while imaginative and revealing in its

insights, fails to bridge the gap. For in the existing system, it is not

tolerable to the existing authority for citizens to gather to sort out

their affairs and make decisions with real effects: that is what

governments are for!

For deliberative decision making to function properly, and for citizens

to enjoy its full and evident benefits, a condition must apply which,

oddly, even the most ardent academic proponents of deliberative

techniques seem loath to confess: There must be no other authority, at

all.

Though it is rarely mentioned, even in the histories of that period, the

Spanish civil war saw a moment, tragically brief, of real existing

anarchism. In the area of Spain under Republican control, anarchists for

a short while held sway, as far as that term means anything when no one

was completely in charge. This was not anarchy, an absence of order, it

was a society that for a period decided to govern itself not by

centralized authority, but by the wishes of local communities, workers,

men and women, led by values of equality and mutual respect.

This happened between 1936 and 1938, and was confined mostly to parts of

Catalonia in northern Spain, including Catalonia’s capital, Barcelona.

It was estimated that perhaps ten million people participated in this

“Spanish Revolution” where farms and factories, and even shops and

barbers, were collectivized and run along communal lines—neither owned

by the state nor private capital, but run by the peasants and workers

themselves. Decisions were made on libertarian principles—by those

affected, without bureaucracy. In many areas, agricultural production

significantly increased.

By 1938, it was over. The Communist Party in Moscow decided that Spain

was not ready for proletarian revolution—at least not this kind—and

ordered its cohorts in Spain, the local Communists, to suppress the

anarchists. There were mass arrests, street fighting and executions.

Anarchist leaders and parties were denounced. This repression was one of

the reasons for the ultimate defeat of the Republicans, and the ensuing

four decades of fascist dictatorship under Franco.

George Orwell’s memoir of his experience in Catalonia contains vivid

depictions of what anarchism, in practice, was really like. When

published, Homage to Catalonia was attacked in Britain and elsewhere,

above all by Communists and the left in general, who rejected its

account of Communist suppression of the anarchists, preferring Moscow’s

propaganda that the anarchists were somehow in Franco’s pay or otherwise

to blame for the in-fighting in the antifascist ranks.

Homage sold very few copies on initial publication. Even now, the book

is rarely seen for what it truly is, and is instead interpreted as a

tragic and picturesque account of failed resistance against

fascism.[119] Orwell had joined a small Marxist-oriented party,

POUM,[120] in order to fight fascism, but later in the book confesses

that if he had the choice again, he would have been an anarchist. He

describes life in Barcelona during anarchism:

Many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness,

money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.—had simply ceased to exist. The

ordinary class division of society had disappeared to an extent that is

almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one

there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as

his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was

simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being

played out over the whole surface of the Earth. But it lasted long

enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much

one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in

contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community

where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word

“comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for

humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.[121]

This description tantalizes with its suggestion of what might be

possible if self-organized government were to become reality. Homage to

Catalonia also tells a vivid story about how one generation chose very

directly to tackle the problems of the world, in this case fascism. And

it is to this global stage that we must now turn. For here particularly,

perhaps even more than in the domestic realm, governments and their

organizations claim to have matters in hand. And in general, it seems,

we are happy to believe them. On the world stage, in general, the

management of “international affairs” is left to practitioners like

statesmen and diplomats, which I once was.

It seems at first sight a reasonable bargain. The world is complicated;

it requires professionals to sort it out. But as we shall see in later

chapters, the bargain, like the pact between government and voter at

home, seems to be breaking down. Established systems of interstate

cooperation do not seem to be producing the solutions the world needs.

But there is a worse and more pernicious effect too.

Somewhere along the way, it has become accepted that in representing a

state, normal moral rules are suspended. Under the catch-all moral

permission of droit d’état, officials acting in the name of the state,

even law-abiding democracies like Britain or the U.S. are entitled to

forsake normal moral inhibitions, like those against killing or causing

harm to others. If such actions are justified by the needs of the state,

they are not only excused, they are explicitly available. Indeed, the

good diplomat is told to reject the soft-headed morality of ordinary

people if he is to practice his trade as it must be

practiced—realpolitik. If death and the suffering of others are the

result, this is a necessary price of protecting our own.

I have not come by this criticism by way of academic study or historical

research. I know this, because once I did it. I helped do harm to

innocent others, with the explicit moral cover of the state, safe in the

knowledge that I would never be held to account. With the comfort of

impunity, I once committed violence in the name of the state.

5. The Man in the White Coat

The experiments conducted in the early 1960s by the Yale psychologist

Stanley Milgram are a well-known demonstration of how authority can

incite people to undertake heinous acts. Conducted soon after the 1961

trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, Milgram’s experiment showed how

otherwise normal individuals could be instructed to commit horrific acts

including torture and murder, if commanded to do so by a person of

sufficient, even if feigned, authority.

But the experiment also illustrates a problem that pervades the current

international system and the current practice of diplomacy. That problem

has a name—amorality: the profoundly negative moral consequences of

officials, in this case diplomats, of not taking responsibility for what

they do. And as we shall see, it is not only a problem of diplomacy, it

is a problem of any system that suppresses people’s sense of agency.

Milgram arranged a fake experiment whereby volunteers were instructed to

give ever greater electric shocks to another participant in the

experiment, unknown to the volunteer, an actor. As the subject failed to

give correct answers to the instructor’s questions, the volunteer was

told to give higher and higher electric shocks. As the shocks increased,

the actor pretending to be the subject would bang on the wall in feigned

agony, complain about his heart condition and, eventually, as the shocks

increased to the normally fatal level of 450 volts, fall silent. If the

volunteer hesitated in administering the electric shocks, a white-coated

“instructor” (in reality, another actor) told the volunteer that they

must continue. If at any time the unwitting volunteer asked to halt the

experiment, he was told, successively, by the “instructor”:

• Please continue.

• The experiment requires that you continue.

• It is absolutely essential that you continue.

• You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the volunteer still wished to stop after all four successive verbal

injunctions, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after

the volunteer had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in

succession. Of Milgram’s subjects, 65 percent (twenty-six out of forty)

administered the experiment’s final—and theoretically fatal—450-volt

shock. Only one participant refused to administer shocks before the

300-volt level. Notably, all were told during the experiment that they

would not be held responsible for what happened.

Traditionally, and by Milgram himself, this experiment has been cited to

demonstrate the pernicious effects of authority upon moral conduct. If

people are told to do something awful by someone who is clearly in

authority—in this case, a professorial type in a white coat—all too

often they do it. But another lesson is also evident in the fact that

the volunteers who administered the electric shocks, crucially, were

told that they had no responsibility for the results.

The nasty human truth of Milgram’s experiment has been demonstrated many

times in recent history. Mass warfare offers many examples. During World

War II, German reservists were called up by the government to join

regular military units but also police units, like Reserve Police

Battalion 101. The members of this unit were “ordinary” men: teachers,

bankers and plumbers drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds, from

across Germany. As is the way with groups put into difficult

circumstances together, the battalion quickly bonded into a close-knit

team. The battalion was deployed to the Eastern Front, where it followed

closely behind the Wehrmacht advance across Eastern Europe and into the

Soviet Union.

The battalion was not recruited on any particular ideological basis,

though some were also members of the Nazi party (a good percentage of

Germans were at the time). But these were not Waffen-SS ideologues; they

were largely middle-aged men with wives and families, gardens and pet

dogs.

The battalion, in other words, was unexceptional, banal (as Hannah

Arendt might have put it).[122] In a little over a year, this battalion

of approximately five hundred “ordinary men” killed thirty-eight

thousand Jews and dispatched approximately forty-five thousand more to

extermination camps.[123] The battalion did most of its killing by

shooting civilians at close range after rounding them up from villages

and towns overrun by German forces. In the course of this murderous

spree, not one member of the battalion questioned their orders or sought

to leave the unit. When given the option by commanders to opt out of

specific opportunities for mass murder, fewer than fifteen men of five

hundred did so.

The Milgram experiments were recently repeated, to test how people today

might submit to authority when ordered to inflict pain upon innocent

others.[124] As reported in the journal American Psychologist, Professor

Jerry Burger replicated part of the Milgram studies—but stopping at 150

volts, the moment at which the subject cries out to stop—to see whether

people today would still obey.[125] There were some changes to account

for modern ethical rules and social sensibilities. University ethics

committees barred researchers from pushing the unwitting subjects

through to an imaginary and “lethal” 450 volts, as Milgram did.

But despite these restrictions, the results were very much the same. As

in the 1960s, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the

experiment past the 150-volt mark. Burger interviewed the participants

afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves

to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to

hold the experimenter accountable. This reveals a crucial distinction:

It was the participants’ assumption for relinquishing of agency that

determined their actions.

Milgram’s experiment is today so well known that it has entered the

collective consciousness—but for the wrong reason. Although the

experiment is generally viewed as demonstrating the pernicious effects

of authority, in fact it reveals a more important truth: that when

people feel no agency and no responsibility for their actions, they can

commit horrific crimes. The Milgram experiment nevertheless seems remote

from our normal lives. One problem with such an experiment is that it is

hard to imagine ourselves in a situation where we would have to give

electric shocks to an innocent person. But the uncomfortable truth is

that such situations do not come announced; the chance to perform

cruelty upon others comes disguised. I know this now because I was once

in a position of one of Milgram’s test subjects, asked to inflict

suffering upon others. Except in my case, unlike his experiment, the

suffering was real.

For almost as long as I remember, I have wanted to be a diplomat. As a

schoolboy, I read The Times (of London) every day, pretty much all the

way through, gripped by its accounts of détente, the proxy wars between

East and West and the terrifying, yet intriguing, calculus of nuclear

war: first strikes, the “missile gap” and the strange but compelling

logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Thanks to inherited

color-blindness, I couldn’t fulfill my original ambition to become a

fighter pilot. The next best thing would be to become a diplomat and

enter this weighty but arcane and closed world, to learn its

terminologies and codes.

I was, moreover, fired by emotional urges. My family exuded a certain

awe of “the Foreign Office” where British diplomats worked: Several

relations had tried and failed to enter the elite ranks of the

diplomatic corps. One childhood memory stands out. At perhaps age

twelve, I announced to my family that I wanted to become a diplomat. My

father, who later denied having said this, turned to me and said, “You

have to be very clever to become a diplomat.” Thus was my ambition

sealed.

University came and went. Eventually, I managed to enter the fast stream

of the Foreign Office, a tiny group: some twenty-odd of the many

thousands who applied. We were a chosen elite, given to expect that in

due course we would become ambassadors and undersecretaries, the most

senior exponents of our country’s wishes. I was elated to join this

exclusive club and happy to undergo the many compromises membership in

this group entailed.

Among them was the process that all new entrants must undertake in order

to join the foreign service, and therein become party to the state’s

secrets. “Positive vetting” is a deeply intrusive examination of

friendships, family relations, habits and personal history designed to

discover whether the proposed new diplomat poses any kind of security

risk.

To check its prospective sharers of secrets, the Security Department of

the Foreign Office assigned an investigator to examine my personal

background, quiz acquaintances and friends, in order to find out whether

my behavior, past or present, might render me vulnerable to approaches

from foreign intelligence services. Without this clearance, the would-be

diplomat cannot begin work since a great deal of work in the “office,”

as it soon became known to me, involves access to Top Secret material,

the compromise of which, in theory at least, poses a grave risk to the

security of the state.

Others who had gone before told me that the process was straightforward

“as long as you don’t tell them anything.” Unfortunately for me, my

personal referees had already told my investigator various things,

including the fact that I occasionally drank too much at university,

played poker and that I was sharing a flat with a gay man. I took the

naive view that since I had nothing in my life to be ashamed of, I would

tell them the truth. This approach proved to be a serious mistake.

My vetting took place almost exactly as the Cold War was ending, in

1989. But the Foreign Office still feared the corrupting attentions of

the KGB and others, and it was felt that being homosexual, which I am

not, risked exposing the officer to blackmail. It did not seem to have

occurred to the mandarins in charge of Security Department that a

blanket prohibition on homosexuality was more likely to force serving or

potential foreign service officers to lie about their true sexual

natures and thus increase their vulnerability to blackmail. So my

vetting officer subjected me to a long series of absurd and insulting

questions about my sexuality, culminating in the conclusive, “So you’ve

never been tempted off the straight and narrow, then?”

Meanwhile, my investigator had found out from application forms that my

grandmother was Polish. Poland was at that time undergoing its

transformation to democracy. But Security Department suspected,

following policy, that the mere fact that I had Polish relations posed a

security risk, since the KGB might “get at” them and use them to “get

at” me (it had happened in the past when Poland was a vassal of the

Soviet Union). My family was thus forced to dig up long-buried records

and tell the awful investigator exactly when, where and how all my

Polish ancestors had died, in order that the KGB couldn’t discover their

names and impersonate them to “get at” me. This led to the upsetting

discovery that some of my Polish forebears, captured as members of the

Polish resistance, had died in Auschwitz.

I was obliged to attend several interviews with the investigator in a

sparse office in an anonymous building near Parliament Square, furnished

with sinister-looking steel filing cabinets. His desk, like that of an

interrogator, was bare but for one government-issue swivel lamp, the

only light in the otherwise gloomy room. Sometimes the interviews would

last for hours. My family and friends, who were subjected to separate

questionings, were at first amused by his questions, but soon became

irritated and in some cases upset.

The planned start date of my work at the Foreign Office came and went

and I had not passed my “PV,” as positive vetting is known. The

personnel officer assigned to my case took some pleasure in telling me

that it was extremely unlikely that I would eventually be allowed in. I

considered withdrawing from the process and abandoning my application to

join, but I decided instead to swallow these humiliations. Too badly I

wanted to become that rarefied species, a diplomat.

In retrospect, this process was akin to a kind of “hazing” ritual, of

the kind practiced in certain American colleges, the military or similar

institutions. It was a form of ritual humiliation, where my sexual

habits, personal finances and most intimate relations were probed and

exposed. Once complete, not only was I permitted to join the elite club

of those permitted to see state secrets; I felt that I had shared with

them—through my investigator—something of me, something private and

personal. This was more, much more than a regular induction into a job.

The inculcation went further when the new entrant to the diplomatic

service entered training. Immediately, we were encouraged to undergo a

subtle but crucial transformation: the “I” became “we.” In describing to

us the arcane and fetishized practices of the foreign service (the use,

for instance, of special paper for ministers and senior officials:

green-colored paper called, perversely, “blue”), our instructors did not

talk of how they saw things with the personal and individual “I.”

Instead, they talked about how “we” saw the world. Telegrams, then the

principal form of communication between the Foreign Office and British

embassies worldwide (there are now “e-grams”), were written in the first

person plural. The author did not describe his or her own view of

politics in Iran; instead they described how “we” saw the prospects for

engagement with the Islamic regime.

A young diplomat from the British High Commission[126] in Pretoria

lectured the new entrants about how “we” thought sanctions on apartheid

South Africa were a bad idea (these were the days of Margaret Thatcher’s

policy of “constructive engagement” with the white minority regime). A

diplomatic dispatch was presented to us as an example of how to write

such pieces. In it, the ambassador wrote about how “we” had got Iran

“wrong” and “we” needed a new approach. In a number of different ways,

the new recruits were taught how “we” saw the world. What we were never

taught, however, was why it was that “we” saw the world that way. This

method was assumed, implied, never confessed but nonetheless supreme.

One training exercise involved a game revolving around a crisis in a

fictional country, Boremeya, and what “we,” meaning Britain, should do

about it. It was a good game, and fun. It lasted about a day and

consisted of crisis meetings, submissions to ministers (“Make sure to

use ‘blue’ paper!”) and difficult encounters with the Boremeyan foreign

minister, played by one of our instructors. Throughout the game, the new

entrants were told to consider what “we” wanted or needed in the

situation. Within such exercises, and infused in all our training, was a

clear, if only rarely explicit, assumption. As diplomats, “we” were the

embodiment of the state, Britain. What we thought was right was thus

implicitly right for Britain.

It is obvious to the reader that such a transformation from the

individual to the group must imply a loss both of individual agency and

of moral autonomy. Processes such as that I underwent to join the

Foreign Office have parallels in military induction, including in more

striking form, Reserve Police Battalion 101. But it was not obvious to

me at the time. I still felt the same person. I still believed that I

was autonomous and free to make my own choices, within certain limits

that I freely accepted. I convinced myself that if faced with a morally

unacceptable instruction, such as murdering Jews, I would have the

courage to refuse. Little did I know that today’s moral choices rarely

come so clearly signaled.

I had been in the foreign service some nine years by the time I was

posted to the British mission to the United Nations in New York. By then

I was deeply steeped in the culture and mind-habits of my institution.

Many of my friends were in the Foreign Office. The “office,” as we

called it, was a kind of brother-and-sisterhood: All over the world

there were co-members with whom I shared a common language and

experience. I had experienced with them excitement and boredom, from the

corridors of the United Nations to the mountains of the Hindu Kush. I

was with them as they wept at the frustrations of negotiations, and as

gunfire crackled on the streets of Pristina. They have been at my side

in Hebron and Dresden, Oslo and Islamabad. With them, I watched wars

begin and end, wrote and argued international law, and shared the many

joys and miseries of a life lived in the glamour of overseas embassies,

of high-level meetings and the dinginess of Whitehall offices. It was

not an ordinary job.

And my job in New York was not ordinary either. I was to be the head of

the Middle East section at the British Mission to the UN. It was an

exciting and challenging task. My responsibilities covered the

Arab–Israel dispute, the 1988 Lockerbie bombing by Libyan agents, and

the long-standing and unresolved injustice of Morocco’s occupation of

the Western Sahara. But my primary responsibility was Iraq—ensuring its

disarmament and containment after the 1990 war, and the sanctions agreed

at the UN Security Council to effect these goals. For Britain at the UN

in those days, there was no more important task, and it was my

responsibility. In the early days of my posting, I was so excited by the

prospect of my work that I would whoop with joy as water poured over me

in my morning shower.

One central part of my job was to maintain the UN Security Council’s

support of restrictive economic sanctions against Iraq. When first told

of this task, I relished it. I had no question that the sanctions were

justified. Their purpose was, after all, to punish and contain that most

evil and lawless of dictators, Saddam Hussein. When briefed in London

before my posting, however, the first doubts began to assert themselves.

Sanctions on Iraq had been imposed, I naively thought, because Iraq had

not disarmed itself of its infamous “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD),

in this case defined as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, and

ballistic missiles with a range of over 150 kilometers. This failure

presented a clear case for the maintenance of sanctions. However, when I

asked one of my briefing officers in London whether the UK believed Iraq

maintained significant stocks of WMD, he looked a little sheepish. “Not

really,” he replied. How, then, do we justify sanctions, I asked, trying

to contain my astonishment. He replied, on the basis that Iraq had

failed to answer multiple questions about the destruction of its earlier

stocks. In summary, sanctions were in place because Iraq had not

correctly answered questions.

By the end of 1997, when I joined the mission, British and American

policy at the UN Security Council was under severe pressure. Iraq’s

allies on the council, particularly France and Russia, were arguing for

an easing of sanctions on the grounds that Iraq had complied fully with

its obligations, following the Gulf War cease-fire, to disarm completely

of its nuclear program, chemical and biological weapons and long-range

missiles. The UN weapons inspectors were, however, clearly saying that

this was not the case, and that there remained many unresolved issues

about Iraq’s WMD. We, the U.S. and the UK, deployed these unresolved

issues to argue support for sanctions—what had happened to all the

missiles Iraq had imported? Why the discrepancy between chemical bombs

produced and those verifiably destroyed? Et cetera, et cetera.

Sanctions, we argued with great vigor, were necessary to force Iraq to

disarm, fully and verifiably, as it had demonstrably not yet done. It

was a tough diplomatic fight, not helped by the absence of hard

evidence.

Though opponents of sanctions argued that they were unjustified and

caused immense human suffering in Iraq, our counterarguments were

plausible: Iraq had failed on many occasions to cooperate fully with the

weapons inspectors, leaving important questions unanswered; Saddam

Hussein obstructed the operation of the UN’s oil-for-food program, which

was designed to lessen the humanitarian suffering.

It was my job to cull and collate the innumerable statistics, reports

and testimonies in support of this latter version of the story and to

deploy them in speeches and debates in the Security Council. On the

other side of the table, the diplomats opposing sanctions—led by Russia

and France—could cite myriad reports detailing the suffering under the

sanctions regime and the inequities of the oil-for-food program.

It was, of course, a complex story that we managed to divide into two

distinct and opposing narratives. The atmosphere between the delegations

on the Security Council was aggressive and adversarial, as it remained

until—and after—the 2003 invasion. Political divisions were allowed to

degenerate into personal animosities. The council, its chambers and

corridors became a diplomatic battle zone where the more we fought, the

more we entrenched our positions into competing blacks and whites. Thus

were we able to obscure the deeper truth.

Governments and their officials can compose convincing versions of the

truth, filled with more or less verifiable facts, and yet be entirely

wrong. I did not make up lies about Hussein’s smuggling or obstruction

of the UN’s humanitarian program. The speeches I drafted for my

ambassador to deliver to the Security Council and my telegrams back to

London were composed of facts filtered from the stacks of reports and

intelligence that daily hit my desk. As I read these reports, facts and

judgments that contradicted “our” version of events would fade into

nothingness. Facts that reinforced our narrative would stand out to me

as if highlighted, to be later deployed by me, my ambassador and my

ministers, like hand grenades in the diplomatic trench warfare. Details

in otherwise complicated reports would be extracted to be telegraphed

back to London, where they would be inserted into ministerial briefings

or press articles. A complicated picture was reduced to a selection of

facts that became factoids, such as the suggestion that Saddam Hussein

imported huge quantities of whiskey or built a dozen palaces, validated

by constant repetition: true, but not the whole truth.

In the end, it became clear even to us that comprehensive sanctions were

counterproductive. They targeted the wrong group of people, and their

effects undermined the necessary international support for the

containment of the Saddam regime. This reality slowly percolated into

our small policy-making group, and eventually led to a change in policy.

As the century turned, the U.S. and initiated a shift in Security

Council policy toward what became known as “smart sanctions”—whereby

Iraq could import all civilian goods except those with potential

military application: so-called dual-use goods. But by then, the damage

had been done.

That damage has been more fully revealed since the 2003 U.S.-led

invasion of Iraq. One assumption of those planning that war was that

Iraq’s middle class would quickly recover from Saddam’s removal, and

Iraq’s economy would rapidly thrive. That assumption quickly met the

brute force of the reality that there was no longer an Iraqi middle

class and no economy to speak of. Iraq’s non-oil economy had been more

or less completely destroyed by the dozen years of sanctions that I, and

others, had helped enforce. Anyone with the chance—mostly the educated

and professional classes—had left. Within a year of the imposition of

sanctions, Iraq’s GDP had dropped by about three-quarters of its 1990

value to approximately that of the 1940s. By 1996, one million children

under five were malnourished. In a country that had been cholera free,

by 1994 there were 1,344 cases per 100,000 people. Even after the

oil-for-food program came into operation, water treatment plants lacked

the proper spare parts and maintenance; there were extended power cuts.

The population had no choice but to obtain water directly from

contaminated rivers, resulting in turn in massive increases in

water-borne diseases such as typhoid and cholera. Though the statistics

are debated still, and data from Iraq during this period are unreliable,

a recent and thorough academic history of the sanctions era concludes

from a review of epidemiological studies that for the period from 1990

to 2003, there was an “excess mortality rate” of more than 500,000 for

children under five. In other words, half a million children died.[127]

Though Saddam Hussein doubtless had a hand too, I cannot avoid my own

responsibility. This was my work; this is what I did.

I have no way to assuage the shame I feel when I contemplate this

episode. I was aware of the reports of humanitarian suffering, but I did

little about them. In discussion within my ministry, I may have

occasionally argued for easing the effects of comprehensive sanctions.

But if I did, I suspect that I argued the political grounds for such a

shift—the loss of support for our policies—rather than the urgent moral

and humanitarian arguments. In our ministry’s culture, it was often

deemed “emotional” or “immature” to burden arguments with moral

sentiment. Real diplomats were cold-eyed and hard-headed, immune to the

arguments of liberal protesters, journalists and other softheads who did

not understand how the “real world” worked.

For years afterward, I wondered how this might have happened. Why did we

permit this? Or, rather, the actual, direct but more uncomfortable

question: Why did I do this? My colleagues and I were decent people, or

so I preferred to think. Likewise, my ministers and officials who

endorsed the policy and defended it in Parliament and before an

increasingly critical press. It was this very decency that helped still

my doubts, that persuaded me that we could not have been doing wrong.

Later, in recounting this story, my former colleagues or friends would

say, “You were doing what you were told,” implying thereby that I bore

no guilt and, needless to say, that they bore none either.

And as in all institutions unscrutinized from outside, the hold of

“groupthink” was a firm one upon our little group of policy makers—no

more than half a dozen or so people in the British government, a few

more in the U.S. We reassured one another that we were doing the right

thing. Our arguments sounded all the better the more we rehearsed them

to one another.

The comfortable succor of my institution, in this case the British

Foreign Office, allowed me to ignore the dictates of my own conscience.

My bosses and colleagues were to me as the white-coated instructor in

the Milgram experiment. The man who knew better. The man who held

authority. Paid and committed to my profession and its enveloping

persona, I was more than happy to press the button.

But here the parallel with Milgram ends. Milgram was an experiment. No

one was hurt. Nothing really happened except a point was proven.

Sanctions on Iraq were, unfortunately, no experiment. Though the

arguments we played out in stuffy rooms in the UN in New York often

seemed abstract, the effects of sanctions on ordinary men, women and

children were to them all too painful. In the end, the difference

between what I did and the Milgram experiment was this: In Milgram, the

victim being electrocuted was an actor. In my case, the screams of pain

and anguish coming from the other side of the wall were real.

The “man in the white coat” problem, as the insight from Milgram’s

experiment might be called, is not just a problem of diplomacy. It takes

little imagination to see how, to varying degrees, it is a problem

intrinsic to any system where people feel dissociated from the

consequences of their actions—where they feel that someone else, not

them, is really in control. Thus, the ultimate paradox of government,

however well-meaning in intent, is revealed. The more government seeks

to act to tackle particular problems, the less individuals are likely to

feel responsible for them. Whatever is legal is thus rendered morally

permissible. Evidence for this is all around us in the decaying

standards of public behavior in many realms, from the shameless greed of

Wall Street bankers, to the brutality and exploitation perpetuated in

the anonymity of the World Wide Web, to the thuggish antics to be

witnessed on public transportation.

The answer is obvious. Confront individuals with the consequences of

their actions. Restore the moral understanding that each of us is

responsible for the world as it is, and for each other. Take away the

man in the white coat.

6. Why Chess Is an Inappropriate Metaphor for International

Relations, Why Jackson Pollock Paintings Are a Better but Still

Inadequate Metaphor, and Why This Has Profound Political Consequences

The chess game is a frequent metaphor for the business of international

relations. Artfully shot photographs of kings and knights adorn many a

book or scholarly article (particularly those about the theory of “IR”).

The chess game appeals as analogy because it is complicated, it involves

two clearly defined opponents and, above all, because although a very

difficult game, it is ultimately comprehensible: There may be a very

large number of permutations (according to Garry Kasparov, there are

10¹²⁰ possible games), but there are a limited number of outcomes.

Computers can be programed to play chess, as well as if not better than

the best human players.

Such metaphors, therefore, have a reassuring quality: If the game is

played well by a state, a government, they will win, or at least prevent

a loss—as long as our players, or computers and software, are good

enough. The shape and possibilities of the pieces and board are known

and finite. It’s comforting to think that foreign policy is a bit like

pulling a lever, and after some whirring and clicking, a result pops out

at the other end. Historians and commentators reinforce this suggestion.

Their articles and books abound with the linear narrative: Decision A

leads to policy B leads to outcome C; if only Washington adopts policy

x, result y will surely follow.

Maps and atlases evoke a similar effect. None of them portrays a world

as it is: No globe is big enough. Jorge Luis Borges suggested such a map

in his wonderful story Of Exactitude in Science: a map to the scale of

the Earth, with every manhole cover, every goat path depicted as it

actually is. Such a map would be perfectly accurate but of course wholly

useless. All depictions must therefore reduce and thereby distort. All

maps are nonetheless imbued with a certain implied confidence that their

delineations are meaningful and significant. The neatly drawn lines,

dots and shadings convey a message that the world is ultimately known

and demarcated, complicated but clearly defined.

There are several problems with the chess metaphor, and indeed with the

conventional way of thinking about international relations. In the

discomforting reality of the world today, the number of relevant actors

who may affect the outcome is invariably far greater than two, the

potential moves of these multiple players is unlimited, and therefore

the number of possible interactions in a globalized world is certainly

greater than 10¹²⁰, even though this is already an unimaginably big

number.

Multiply the billions of connected humans in today’s world by the

actions available to them, then throw in the reactions and

counterreactions to these initial actions, run the calculation for even

a short while, and you will end up with an impossibly large number of

possible outcomes. That number is massive and possibly infinite; there

are probably insufficient atoms in the universe to equal it. Given this

reality, the hope of a foreign policy of deliberate action to produce

predictable results looks increasingly vain. Instead of pulling a lever

on a machine to produce a predictable result, making foreign policy

starts to look more like a roll of the dice—or more accurately,

selecting a number between one and infinity.

Few dare acknowledge what increasingly appears to be the truth—that the

world has no defined shape, aside from its continents, rivers and

oceans, and even these shift form and location, now at an alarming

speed. That instead of a chessboard or a web, it is in fact a swirling

miasma of billions upon billions of interactions, not on a fixed

pattern, or a net, but an ever-changing mesh of connections, some

significant but temporary, some long-lasting but inconsequential, a

reality more evocative of the swirls and spatters of a Jackson Pollock

painting than a chessboard.

When we look at some illustrations drawn from this maelstrom, you’ll see

the dilemma….

In 2009, a spate of high-profile kidnappings in Phoenix left Arizona the

kidnapping capital of the United States. That same year, eighteen people

were killed in Mexico City after a gang of hooded gunmen attacked a

local drug treatment facility, apparently a refuge for rival gang

members. The connection between these two phenomena was a seemingly

harmless U.S. policy aimed at improving border enforcement with Mexico.

The policy was designed in part to placate a domestic constituency

alarmed at high rates of illegal immigration. But it had the adverse and

unexpected consequence of aggravating a series of drug wars in Mexico.

By slowing migration from Mexico, so too it slowed the transfer of drugs

to the north. But as drug supply in the U.S. fell, supplies increased

dramatically in Mexico, lowering domestic prices and fueling a spike in

local drug consumption. Over the next months, gang-related violence and

kidnappings surged as new and old gangs alike sought to mark out their

turf in the newly developing marketplace. With thousands dead and the

violence spreading back to American territory, U.S. policy makers are

now forced to contend with the unintended consequences of actions once

thought to bring greater stability to America’s southern border.

It is now well known that Osama bin Laden’s involvement in the battle of

the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet army served as the springboard

for Al Qaeda’s campaign of global jihad. The defeat of that army’s

occupation of Afghanistan, among other factors, helped contribute to the

fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire. Though

bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were wholly unconnected, the 9/11 attacks

created the political momentum for the invasion of Iraq.[128] That

invasion indirectly led to the de facto separation of Iraq’s Kurdish

north, the rise of Iran as the dominant regional power and, likely and

tragically, the demise of the Christian community in Iraq, driven out by

sectarian violence. None of these outcomes was predicted, even by the

invasion’s most imaginative planners.

The weapons and influence of Al Qaeda were a function of bin Laden’s

personal wealth, which was itself a consequence of his father’s large

fortune, made from building for the royal family and others well

connected in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, his home country, a long-standing

U.S. ally. The “original” Al Qaeda, as some analysts now call it, has

meanwhile spawned several deadly affiliates or “franchises,” a name

reminiscent of the spread of McDonald’s burger restaurants—Al Qaeda in

the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), AQ

in Somalia, AQ in Afghanistan, the “Nigerian Taliban” Boko Haram, and

terrorist groups without names in London and Miami—and has helped

inspire murderous attacks from Fort Hood, Texas, to Bali and Mumbai. One

of the planners of the Mumbai rampage, which cost nearly two hundred

lives, was an American who also, it turns out, was for a while an agent

for America’s Drug Enforcement Agency, which wanted his help in locating

heroin suppliers in Pakistan. The DEA, it appears, failed to inform

other parts of the massive U.S. intelligence machinery.

Elsewhere, Al Qaeda is also loosely associated with, and serves as

inspiration for, the Al Shabaab Islamist militia, which currently

controls much of southern and central Somalia.

Here, the insatiable global appetite for fish has driven international

fishing fleets—from Japan, Russia and Europe—to plunder Somalia’s

unprotected waters, denying a livelihood to Somalia’s many coastal

fishermen. Partly as a result (there are other reasons too), some have

turned to piracy, hijacking vessels in a lucrative trade, which a

substantial flotilla of heavily armed ultramodern warships deployed in

the area has failed so far to prevent. This naval fleet, sometimes

numbering as many as twenty or more vessels, embodies unprecedented

international cooperation, including warships from former antagonists

like Russia, NATO, India and China. “Combined Task Force 150” also

includes the European Union’s first ever joint naval deployment. But so

far, this unique and expensive military collaboration has failed to stop

or deter the pirates. More people were taken hostage at sea in 2010 than

in any previous year on record.[129]

Some of the proceeds of that piracy, where ship owners often pay several

million dollars to liberate their captured vessels and crews, have found

their way to Al Shabaab, which has used the money to purchase weapons

with which to fight its insurgency against the internationally backed

Somali Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu. Young men are now

travelling from the U.S., Britain and elsewhere to train with Al Shabaab

and their piracy-funded weapons. National security agencies—MI5, the

FBI—have warned of the danger that these radicalized young men pose on

their return to their “home” countries, trained and ready to commit

further acts of violence. In late 2010, a young Somali-American sought

to detonate a bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland,

Oregon.

Such effects are inherently unpredictable and can appear random, even

though some causes and some effects are, at least in retrospect,

discernible. They do not follow the neat patterns of a flow chart or a

mathematical equation. Though multiple and complex, the model of a chess

game is no more appropriate, either. What we witness in the world is not

ordered, at least in a sequential, logical fashion, but neither is it

chaos. It is entirely wrong to say that the pattern of cause and effect

in the world today is chaotic or anarchic, even if sometimes it seems

that way. It may resemble chaos, but in fact it is a hugely complex and

dynamic mesh of multiple cause and effect and back again (even Jackson

Pollock paintings comprise an underlying order). Given this reality, any

model or any metaphor may oversimplify and thus distort this nature—an

artificial simplicity imposed upon complexity.

Only later will historians, masters of the reductive art of the

narrative, be able to put shape to what seems today formless, and even

then they will be capturing but a tiny part of what comprises existence

now. For now, a better depiction suggests itself, a fantastic mélange

with ends and connections that shift, merge and disappear. To shape this

mesh, to put form to it, to give it names, is to change it, to reduce it

and ultimately to fail to understand it completely. Unfortunately, this

is precisely what governments are required to do.

It is conventional wisdom that with myriad international problems that

cross frontiers, the world needs ever more international diplomacy and

engagement. But it may be, in fact, that we need less, at least of the

kind that currently predominates—the lattice of state-to-state relations

and multilateral institutions.

There are now a great many international negotiation processes

addressing a bewildering array of problems, from the familiar—climate

change, nuclear proliferation—to the obscure—postal standards and the

standardization of measurements. But on the most acute and urgent

problems, the evidence is mounting that these processes are not

delivering the necessary results—effective solutions to the world’s

international problems. The measure of the effectiveness of this form of

politics must be as for any form of politics: What are the outputs? What

are the real effects on real problems and people?

The climate change “process,” with its summits at Copenhagen (2009) and

Cancún (2010), has comprised hundreds of meetings involving thousands of

delegates and, on more than one occasion, “world leaders.” But the

process has yet to produce any substantive agreement, let alone concrete

and plausibly effective measures, to reduce atmospheric carbon, despite

the vast expenditure of negotiating energy and voluminous reams of

treaty text and media commentary. Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon

in the atmosphere continues to rise.

The G8 Gleneagles summit in 2005 was notable for the extraordinary

length and height of the fences erected, and the ten thousand police

required, to keep protesters away from the tiny group of decision makers

meeting in the remote Scottish location. The summiteers themselves

sought to make history by their commitment to $50 billion in new aid

money. This announcement was claimed to “make poverty history,” echoing

the rhetoric of the huge “Make Poverty History” campaign, which

culminated in several massive “Live8” concerts that summer, where those

enjoying the music in person or on television were encouraged to lobby

their leaders by sending them text messages asking them to relieve Third

World debt. At the UN World Summit later that year, all member states of

the UN recommitted themselves to the goal of reducing absolute poverty

by half by 2015—the headline target of the so-called Millennium

Development Goals. (MDG).

It is depressing to relate the utter failure of those making these

commitments to keep to them.[130] Of those making the Gleneagles

declaration, all serious countries and seven of them more or less

democracies, not one fulfilled the promise they had made. Five years

after Gleneagles, it was estimated that G8 pledges would fall short by

$20 billion.[131] The U.S. and European Union had done virtually nothing

to remove the import barriers and agricultural subsidies that do much to

stymie economic growth in developing countries. By 2010, the G8 itself,

perhaps out of embarrassment, had ceased mentioning its aid goals in its

communiqués. It did, however, make play of yet another new “initiative,”

this time to target maternal health. The most recent assessment of the

MDG is that they will certainly not be attained, an unsurprising

assessment given the paltry efforts made by the signatories of the UN

declaration to substantiate their rhetoric. Of one thing, however, we

can be sure: There will be more such declarations, freshened up with new

slogans and impassioned speeches or tweets, or Facebook pages, or

whatever, in future.

The recent financial crisis has occasioned massed bouts of international

hand-wringing over global regulation of banking and investment. The G20

countries has emerged as the leading forum to discuss such measures,

clearly necessary to manage the out-of-control flows of unintelligible

financial instruments, like the infamous “collateralized debt

obligations” (CDOs) that spread risk with no oversight. But despite

repeated meetings, communiqués and speeches, here too no effective

policy response has emerged. It has instead become clear that the

financial industry’s lobbyists in each country have conspired to ensure

that every government is unwilling to trade their supposed competitive

advantage for collective measures, like globally agreed and sufficient

capital requirements for lenders. To satiate public concern, instead

these meetings offer “commitments” to effective controls, and

“processes” to discuss them—no doubt without cease until the next crisis

erupts. Thus, the impression of activity is created, the absence of

concrete action obscured.

Given the gravity of the problems that these international processes are

supposed to address, and yet their feeble outputs, it’s urgent to

consider what’s going on. The cynical might argue that these processes

are simply rackets run by the powerful, who have no intrinsic interest

in success. In its own way, this is a comforting and self-serving excuse

that requires little response save cynicism on our part. But my own

experience of diplomacy and international negotiation suggests something

more subtle is the problem.

Invariably, when these negotiations and conferences fail, commentators

are quick to point fingers at one participant or other for derailing the

process: the Chinese for eviscerating the Copenhagen climate change

talks, France for blocking Security Council authority for the invasion

of Iraq in 2003. But these accusations may be missing the point: The

problem of international diplomacy is not the actors within it, though

their actions may hint at the more submerged problem. The real problem

may be concealed within the very system itself. Indeed, the problem may

be the system.

Diplomacy is a system. Any system—like a club—requires certain

characteristics in order to participate. And it reinforces these

characteristics merely by existing and by requiring its members to

exhibit these characteristics. The current international system

comprises the conventional institutions of diplomacy. From these

institutions, we can see clearly what characteristics are required to

participate.

Diplomacy and international relations are, by their nature, about nation

states. The United Nations, the European Union, ASEAN, the World Trade

Organization, the G20 are all associations of states. This may seem a

very obvious and trite point to emphasize, but it is essential. For my

experience suggests that states, and their exponents, do not accurately

reflect what humans are about, nor what they want. Thus, it is naive to

expect that their machinations, in the form of interstate diplomacy,

will produce results consistent with humanity’s needs in general.

This problem takes several different forms, and the evidence for it, if

you choose to look, is manifold. The first is that the connection

between what states do and say in international negotiations and what

their populations think is now extremely tenuous, to say the least. In

democracies, the international representative of the state is

accountable to their home ministry, which is led by a politician who is

accountable to the legislature, which is ultimately accountable to the

population which elects its members. This is already a very long chain

of explanation and accountability.

A good example of an acutely important but complicated issue is Iraq

policy. My experience dealing with Iraq policy was that only the very

small group at the coalface of the policy had any hope of a

comprehensive grasp of the many and diverse issues at stake: WMD,

sanctions, international law, the dynamics of the UN Security Council,

to mention just a few, all of which themselves were extraordinarily

complicated. My ministers, whose job it was to explain and “sell” the

policy in public and to Parliament, usually had only a very general and

hazy grasp of the subject. In Parliament, there were no MPs who could

equal the officials’ knowledge and expertise, and thus properly hold

them to account. In any case, during the four and a half years that I

worked on Iraq policy inside the British government, I was never

questioned by any MP directly about my work, nor did any journalist ever

closely question me with any serious expertise. The picture in the U.S.

is similar.

One consequence of this extraordinarily dissociated chain between

diplomat and citizen is that the diplomat can have no accurate idea of

what the citizen wants. Hence, this requires diplomats to assume, or

rather invent what they think the citizen—his nation—wants. I know this

because I did this myself many times. It is a function of the

inculcation process diplomats must go through to join and then embody

their profession—the assumption that “we” know best. Diplomats, by the

nature of their job, are encouraged to believe that they can determine

what is in their nation’s interests, without consulting those in whose

name they claim to be operating.

This process of assuming or inventing the desires and requirements of a

state, often called “interests,” is usually conducted in secret by

exchange of telegrams or classified e-mails, or in policy submissions to

senior officials and political masters. I have participated many times

in such exercises. With exquisite concision, the official will describe

the issue at hand, then he or she will articulate what is at stake for

“us”—our “interests,” in short. In recent years, it has become

fashionable for the exponents of foreign policy to talk about “values”

as important in diplomacy—things like democracy and human rights. But in

truth, the underlying calculus remains little changed, as does the

diplomatic mindset, and this is no surprise, for it is only natural for

the exponent of the state to think in terms of what his state needs and

wants; it is to the diplomat as to a cow eating grass or mooing; it is

what they do.

It would be absurd for a diplomat to adopt a different set of criteria

to guide their work and policies, and would certainly guarantee a short

career. Such interests typically, and by inherited tradition, take the

form of a hierarchy of priorities where security—the requirement to

secure the state and its population—ranks at the top, followed by

economic interests. There is little rigor in these delineations and

orderings, and indeed only rarely do officials distinguish between types

of interest, instead talking in more general terms about what “we” may

want in any given situation. The identification between diplomat and

state cannot be overemphasized. While both security and economic

interests would fit onto most people’s lists of what is important, only

a very few people would, I suspect, declare them as paramount in all

situations or as their sole requirements in any situation.

The premise of the international system, and the state exponents who

populate it, is a fundamentally incredible one—that the needs and wants

of the Earth’s billions of people can be boiled down into separate and

discrete subsets of interests which can then be meaningfully arbitrated.

This is difficult to grasp because we have become so acclimatized to the

state-based system: the international diplomatic forums with their

neatly lettered name cards adorning serried rows at the UN General

Assembly or European Council. But reflect for a moment and the absurdity

becomes clear: How is it a tiny group of people can possibly know what

is best for their country of millions? By extension, it is equally

implausible to expect that a collection of such tiny groups, meeting at,

say, the UN or G20, can produce meaningful and effective agreements for

the whole globe? The disconnection is simply too great. They are

required to assume, to guess. They know it, as I knew it. But it is the

rest who believe it.

The problem is more insidious and damaging in its effects than merely

this. The requirement of the system is that the needs and wants of the

world’s peoples are reduced into such subsets—a reductive requirement.

That need to reduce the complexity of reality into simplicity imposes

upon the diplomats and other denizens of the system an unnatural and

distorting burden—to turn their understanding of the world, and our

needs upon it, into something else: the calculus of states. Most of the

time this process is invisible, assumed and unremarked upon. Only

occasionally are its aberrations so gross that they break the surface of

our indifference—for me, it was the experience of Iraq sanctions where I

realized, and only in retrospect, the gross divide between my own

beliefs and understanding of what was right, and the way I was required

to think—and do—at the time.

There is an additional negative consequence of this state-dominated mode

of thinking. The chess game requires two sides to be played: white and

black. The process of simplifying and overstating our own needs, known

as calculating our interests, requires a reciprocal technique. If there

is to be an “Us,” there must also be a “Them.”

This happened on the Iraq sanctions issue at the UN Security Council,

where the diplomats gaily perpetuated the national divisions between

opposing delegations, even when there were no facts to disagree over. I

was a willing participant in this farce: the UK/U.S. would veto

proposals made by the “other” side, in this case France and Russia, even

if we ourselves had made the very same proposal a few weeks earlier and

they had blocked them. The effect of such essentializing—the segregation

of ourselves into two competing sides—was not to reduce conflict, but to

perpetuate it.

It is not coincidence that it is governments that perform this

essentializing. They must. It is necessary for government, and the

diplomats who represent it, and the politicians who lead it, to claim

that only they can speak for the whole country. Equally, therefore, they

must affirm the nature of the international system by accepting that

other governments speak for their whole countries. A modern diplomat

would deny that they are so crass as to generalize about other cultures

and countries in the way that I have described. Of course, they aver,

when they talk about Iran’s policy, they mean the policy of the Iranian

government, and indeed that is often how they will describe it.

But despite this designative care, the habit of referring to whole

countries in the singular and referring to their government as the

embodiment of that state is one as deep-rooted as the state-based

international system itself. To change the naming of the actors, to

remove the assumption that governments represent the whole of their

countries, would be to change the nature of the international system,

from one based around states as the primary unit of agency, to one based

on some other unit. But as long as governments wish to hold sway in

international policy and decision making, they must continually reaffirm

not only their own but each other’s legitimacy to speak for their

countries, even when the government is as grotesquely undemocratic as,

say, the Syrian or North Korean regimes.

One of the seminal texts that helped define the nature of diplomacy is

by François de Callières in Paris, published in 1716.[132] De Callières

saw the principal function of diplomacy as moderating and managing the

clash of conflicting interests as efficiently as possible. The diplomat

was required to assess how the interests of his state, and the other

state, could be met in terms acceptable to both.

One can see how remarkably similar this conception of diplomacy is to

the way it is usually conceived today. Yet the world is remarkably

different. The postwar establishment of new multilateral diplomatic

machineries—the United Nations, NATO and the European Union—while

creating new forums for state-to-state interactions, has not altered the

fundamental idea that diplomacy is about states identifying their

interests and arbitrating them with one another: that these interests

and identities are susceptible to calculation. Indeed, these

institutions are premised on the very notion that states can meet there

and decide upon their common problems. It is therefore no surprise that

diplomats tend to render the world and its myriad problems into these

shapes. That this process is becoming more and more artificial, and

disconnected from the reality of the forces at work in the world, is

only now becoming evident enough to compel change.

The negative consequences of this kind of thinking can be clearly seen

in negotiations over issues of common global concern, like climate

change. Here, where a shared solution is clearly necessary and urgent,

the habit of state-led thinking still dominates. While “world leaders”

and UN officials pontificated about the lofty goals of the process, the

negotiators in national delegations in the trenches of the conference

resorted to type. Zero-sum bargaining over concessions and commitments

dominated the discussions, with the usual rancor and finger-pointing

when a deal—predictably—proved impossible to find. Some delegates

suggested that the Earth’s atmosphere was divisible and that the

industrialized nations had already taken their “share,” as if the

atmosphere were a cake to be sliced up.

As the head of Greenpeace dejectedly stated at the dismal end of the

Copenhagen summit: “It seems there are too few politicians in this world

capable of looking beyond the horizon of their own narrow self-interest,

let alone caring much for the millions of people who are facing down the

threat of climate change,” he said. “It is now evident that beating

global warming will require a radically different model of politics than

the one on display here in Copenhagen.” He didn’t say what that model

was, however.

Some would argue that the solution to this problem is to increase the

number of supranational institutions like the European Union or the

United Nations, where unelected officials chosen by the member states

can somehow transcend the differences that bedevil nation states.

However, here too the outputs are disappointing. Again, we are

confronted with a vast, confusing and obscure tableau of processes and

groups and subgroups that pretend to solve common problems, from

terrorist financing to avian flu and the Middle East peace process. It

is clear that the existence of such processes can have in itself a

debilitative effect: The mere existence of a “process” creates the

erroneous impression that something is being done, when it is not.

The dysfunctional Copenhagen climate process is one example. Another,

lesser known, is the “peace process” to resolve the illegal occupation

of the Western Sahara. This “process” has lasted since the cease-fire in

1990 between the occupiers, Morocco, and the representatives of the

indigenous people, the Sahrawis—twenty years and counting—when Morocco

agreed to a referendum for the territory’s people to decide their

status, an agreement and legal requirement endorsed many times by the

“international community” at the UN. Every country in the world pretends

to support this process, run by the UN, but none does anything in

reality to advance it. The referendum has never taken place. In fact,

the “process” is a way of shelving the issue indefinitely, to permit the

existing status quo—of occupation. The process is thus a sham, the

opposite of what it pretends to be.

Both the United Nations and the European Union have contributed

enormously to limiting the twentieth-century scourge of international

conflict. The EU has bound European countries together so tightly that

war, once habitual, has now become unthinkable. The UN’s sixty-year

existence has witnessed a steep decline in the interstate conflict

prohibited by its charter. But in these successes, new weaknesses have

emerged, not least in dealing with the more fluid and boundary-less

problems of the twenty-first century. The UN Security Council was

established to prevent wars between states. Today, not less than 80

percent of its agenda concerns issues involving nonstate actors, and

conflicts both within and sometimes transcending states, like

terrorism.[133]

Fatally, all such multilateral or supranational institutions suffer an

irredeemable deficit of democratic legitimacy. The greater the distance

between representative and elector, the less legitimate that

representative. The UN Secretary-General is, at least in theory,

supposed to represent us, but no one except the public is expected to

believe that he does. The UN Secretary-General is well aware that it is

the realpolitikers of the five permanent members of the Security Council

who mail his paycheck every month, and he behaves accordingly, just as

the president of the EU takes care to keep in close step with the major

powers of the EU: France, the UK and Germany. I have often attended

meetings between my ambassador at the UN and the Secretary-General where

he would be told in unmistakable terms what party line he and his staff

were required to toe. It didn’t have to be spelled out in threats,

merely implied and hinted at. He invariably got the message.

For the ordinary citizen, institutions like the UN and the EU are even

more impenetrable and opaque than their already distant national

governments. I run a nonprofit diplomatic consultancy. Its staff works

full-time to understand the world’s diplomatic and multinational

institutions, and we find it difficult to work out who does what, and

where real decisions are made. Pity the ordinary citizen seeking a

hearing in the shiny but dismal corridors of the EU’s institutions in

Brussels. Even for the acute, it is all but impossible to find out who

is truly responsible for anything. It is reminiscent of nothing so much

as the pathetic queues of provincial Chinese who make desperate but

hopeless pilgrimage to Beijing to seek settlement of grievances against

corrupt or incompetent Communist Party officials.

Moreover, but more subtly, the officials themselves are dangerously

detached from the problem—and the people—they are seeking to arbitrate.

I saw this in the UN Security Council—it was a curiously dry and boring

place to work despite its dramatic agenda of genocide and civil war. The

blood and emotion of these conflicts was absent in its discussions, and

it was not a good absence: It was not conducive to better negotiation,

but to worse. For one thing, the parties to the disputes on the

council’s agenda were almost invariably absent from these

deliberations—it is hardly a recipe for good decision making to ignore

the views of those most concerned. Moreover, the emotional and moral

content of events, so crucial to the motivation to solve such problems,

was missing. Between the reality of the problems and our deliberations

was a huge and unbridgeable divide, not only of actual distance—for we

were usually many thousands of miles from the disputes we discussed—but

of import.

These deficits are intrinsic to supranational institutions, just as the

limits of nation-state thinking are inherent to the nation-state system,

a system that has, since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, dominated

world affairs. Given these deficits, the answer to our global problems

may not in fact be more diplomacy and international negotiation, at

least not of the current kind. Thus conventional wisdom is turned on its

head: We do not need more state-to-state diplomacy to solve these

problems; we may, in fact, need less. And instead of relying on

state-to-state diplomacy to manage the world, we must do so ourselves.

As writer Parag Khanna has commented, “As was the case a millennium ago,

diplomacy now takes place among anyone who is someone; its prerequisite

is not sovereignty but authority.”

The deficits of the state-based system are commonly known, yet these

systems endure, even when the operators of the system—my many and

cynical diplomatic colleagues—have themselves ceased to believe in them.

As they take the stand at public inquiries, or address the press, they

can hardly believe that anyone still believes them. It is a hollow,

hollow feeling and I know it. These systems will continue to endure

until those in whose name they claim to function withdraw their consent.

The pact is broken; it doesn’t work. To name a problem as

“international” is to absolve oneself of responsibility and to place a

solution in the hands of those proven manifestly incapable. The

international is not international any more; it is simply us.

And here is the most insidious and yet hidden effect of the

international system—of interstate diplomacy—as it currently exists. It

is not that this system may exacerbate differences, force its players to

define themselves more starkly than they otherwise might, nor that its

exponents must naturally reflect a calculus not of the messy and diverse

human family but of these strange and artificial units, states, or that

these exponents are, as I once was, wholly separated from their sense of

moral responsibility for their actions. These deficits are not the worst

aspect of this system. (The “Live8” text messages to the G8 Summit

provide a clue.)

The most dangerous effect of the system is not that it doesn’t work; it

is that we, in whose name it is supposed to function, condone it,

pretend to believe it contrary to all evidence and permit it to

continue.[134]

It is one thing to accept this critique, but it is another to embody

this philosophical shift. In a world of global terrorism, a rising India

and China, and intense national competition for scarce resources, what

meaningful action is available to the individual? How can the world be

made to reflect its human reality rather than its inherited and

inappropriate delineations of segregated states and peoples?

One obvious answer is for individuals to organize across nations and

states around common causes. This is already beginning to happen:

witness the global movements around climate change or the protection of

human rights. (Ideas to guide such action will be more fully elaborated

later.) Less encouragingly, such borderless cooperation is also visible

in the transnational organization of drug trafficking or jihadist

terrorism, where extremists of many different nationalities have

gathered around the flag of the new Umma.

It is too easy to succumb to defeatism in regarding the world today—its

weapons, its states, its self-serving and bumptious leaders. How on

earth are we supposed to deal with that? It might be revealing to look

at an issue that inspires the most pessimism and also the most horror.

Nuclear weapons embody in their very existence the possibility of

appalling destruction and indeed the annihilation of humanity as a

species. In some ways, they manifest the gross inhumanity of the state

system—that in order to defend the state, governments are prepared to

use weapons that threaten the destruction not only of their own

population, but the entire world’s.

The conventional answer to this problem has been to look to governments

to get rid of nuclear weapons. Even the demonstrators massing on the

streets waving banners ultimately urge their governments to respond. Is

this a realistic ambition?

The 2010 review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the

cornerstone of the world’s efforts to reduce nuclear weapons, lasted a

month and involved highly skilled delegations from someone hundred

ninety countries. The agreement they reached was lauded as a success,

primarily because, unlike previous review conferences for the last

decade, this gathering had actually achieved agreement. But the content

of the agreement—the output—was feeble, despite the international

atmosphere being its most propitious for decades.

As usual, the “outcome document” was long—twenty-eight jargon-laden and

barely comprehensible pages—with a misleading sixty-four “action

points,” most of which amount to no substantive action whatsoever. The

vast majority are declarative: “reaffirming,” “welcoming” or “noting.”

The press, focusing on one small part of the forest, made great play of

the agreement to hold a conference—in the future—on a nuclear-free

Middle East, but even that agreement left out the only country in the

Middle East currently possessing nuclear weapons, Israel. Otherwise, the

conference agreed merely to encourage the nuclear weapons states to make

more concrete progress toward nuclear disarmament and reduce the use of

nuclear weapons in their military doctrines; but attempts to make such

disarmament concrete and obligatory through a nuclear weapons convention

were fiercely resisted by the nuclear weapons states. As even the most

favorable commentators put it, all that was agreed was a further

process, not an output.[135]

In its closing statement, Cuba noted pointedly what the review

conference had not agreed: no timetable on nuclear disarmament; no

commitment to begin negotiations on a nuclear weapons convention; no

clear commitment to stop the development of nuclear weapons; no call for

withdrawal of nuclear weapons to home territories (i.e., out of Europe);

and no legally binding negative security assurances—we shall come to

these strange creatures later.

President Obama has declared his intention of ultimately ridding the

world of nuclear weapons. The Global Zero campaign, supported by many

prominent former statesmen and women and highlighted in a popular

documentary film, Countdown to Zero, is advocating the same. But it is a

fair bet that in the current state-based dispensation, these noble

efforts will fail. For it is implausible to expect that China, or

Russia, or even France or Britain, let alone Israel or Pakistan, will

give up this ultimate guarantor of their security, even if some

reductions may nevertheless be possible. As total arsenals go down,

louder and louder will become the argument that nuclear weapons have

successfully prevented mass conventional war between their possessors.

It’s a plausible argument, as long as the proxy conventional wars that

these powers fought on the territories of others are ignored. But

nonetheless, the argument has force. Total disarmament relies on

something that evidently does not exist—complete confidence and trust in

the commitments of others that they too have disarmed irreversibly, and

that they will not launch conventional attack.

The NPT’s answer to this problem is fundamentally ridiculous. To the

non-nuclear states who demand assurance that they will not be the victim

of nuclear attack, the nuclear weapons states (NWS) have offered

“reverse security guarantees”—promises that they will not use nuclear

weapons against non-nuclear states in certain circumstances. The

“progress” of the 2010 review conference was that the conference agreed

to consider making these “guarantees” legally binding. In other words,

if a nuclear weapons state dropped the bomb or bombs on a non-nuclear

state, the victim state would be able to seek redress in an

international court, presuming that there would remain—post-apocalypse—a

government, lawyers or courts with which to press such a claim. And such

legal obligations would arise only if the nuclear weapons states agree

to them, which they have yet to do: At the review conference, they

agreed only to “consider” them. Such reverse guarantees, even if legally

enforceable, are unlikely to provide much reassurance if, for instance,

Ukraine finds itself dealing with a fascist-led nuclear-armed Russia,

which unfortunately is a more plausible prospect than the legally

binding reverse security assurances.

Under the NPT, the UK, like all other declared nuclear-armed states, is

in theory committed to disarm itself of all of its nuclear weapons. The

NPT was founded on a conceptual bargain—that the rest of the world would

not develop their own nuclear weapons capability, as long as the nuclear

weapons states agreed to get rid of theirs, eventually. One indicator of

the “progress” made at the 2010 conference was that the UK for the first

time declared the full number of its nuclear weapons. No other declared

NWS has done so. Revealingly but perhaps also most honestly, France

insisted that the goal of the NPT “process” not be stated as a “world

free of nuclear weapons,” but the creation of “conditions which will

lead to a world free of nuclear weapons.”

Earlier that year, the U.S. and Russia agreed under the Strategic Arms

Reduction Treaty, or START, to a reduction in their arsenals of nuclear

weapons. Heralded as offering substantial new reductions, some analysts

judge that in reality the agreement barely affects the number of actual

deployed weapons, and involves no reduction in the number of Russian

launch vehicles.[136] Both powers continue to maintain hundreds of

nuclear delivery systems at Cold War levels of alert: ready to be

launched within a few minutes. One respected think tank noted that

“while the operational readiness of some weapon systems has been

reduced, there has been no major change in the readiness levels of most

of the nuclear weapon systems in the post–Cold War era.”[137]

Instead, it is more plausible to refer to, reinforce and promote a

reality that the diplomats, politicians and analysts refuse to

contemplate. The calculus of nuclear weapons depends upon the existence

of the chess board—a “Them” and an “Us.” If you attack me, I will attack

you: black and white pieces, segregated and discrete. If those

distinctions no longer exist, the game cannot be played. If instead of

two distinct sets of pawns and pieces, clearly separated across the

board, all pieces are but varying shades of gray, intermingled and

spread all over the board. This depiction is much closer to the

contemporary reality, and the more time passes, the more accurate it

will become. A Pakistani attack on New Delhi would kill hundreds of

thousands of Muslims. An attack on Israel would kill thousands of Arabs.

Any use of nuclear weapons, more or less anywhere, would have

devastating effects on a highly interlinked global economy. Destroying

New York would kill people from every country on earth: people of more

than ninety different nationalities were killed in the destruction of

the twin towers; one borough of the city contains 174 different

nationalities. Killing Them would mean killing Us.

Nuclear weapons make this doubly true as even a limited strike on one

country would, according to recent research, imply appalling

consequences for the whole planet. Studies have shown that even a

“small-scale” nuclear exchange, say, India and Pakistan launching fifty

weapons each against each other, would have devastating consequences not

only for the countries directly targeted but for the global environment

and potentially for the survival of mankind.[138] Thus, nuclear weapons

are revealed in their true nature: not as weapons of deterrence or

plausible utility, but as mankind’s suicide pill.

This truth is already slowly spreading among some enlightened members of

the military, who are realizing that the use of nuclear weapons by

states is basically implausible—and self-destructive—in almost any

circumstance. The most likely people to use nuclear weapons are not

states but suicidal millenarian terrorists. Osama bin Laden’s deputy

Ayman al-Zawahiri has already written a book dismissing moral objections

to the use of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear

weapons.[139] Our possession of nuclear weapons is no deterrent to such

threats, but the very existence of nuclear weapons provides a possible

method for these extremists. Thus, the best thing would be to do away

with them altogether.

Establish this as a cultural truth, and eventually that understanding

will filter through. Wherever possible, travel, interact, make love,

argue, live with people elsewhere. Engage; co-mingle. Resist the efforts

of governments and others to paint the Other in stark colors, whether

black or white. Throw away the chessboard; cut the ground from under

those who would pretend humanity is but chessmen. Cease using the

outdated nomenclature of a world that is already receding into history;

stop naming; stop dividing.

One surprising conclusion from this analysis might come as a shock to

the antiglobalization protesters storming the next G8 Summit: What might

be the most effective tactic ultimately to get rid of nuclear weapons is

not less globalization, but more. The deeper the intermingling, the more

dense the mesh connecting humanity, the less the chessboard may be

clearly defined, the more absurd becomes the calculus of nuclear

weapons, and indeed of states as discrete entities, themselves.

Interestingly, this reasoning also applies to other harmful, if less

apocalyptic, forms of warfare. Many have expressed concern that China or

Russia are able to launch devastating “cyber attacks” against Western

institutions, and economic and financial infrastructure. But one Chinese

official has reportedly dismissed this option, primarily on the grounds

of China’s dependence on U.S. financial stability—China owns nearly a

trillion dollars’ worth of securitized American government debt—a cyber

attack on Wall Street would harm China as much as it harmed the

U.S.[140]

These examples suggest that the antiglobalizers storming the

G8-protecting riot police are precisely wrong.

Instead of conventional theories of government and international

relations, we need a new set of tools—and perhaps a dose of humility

too, for a complex world may defy all but a general understanding of its

inherent and pervasive unpredictability and contingency. In fact, we

need the tools that interpret complex systems.

Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the concept of the “tipping point,” the

idea from complexity theory that even small events may trigger complex

systems to “tip” over from one condition into another. Historian Niall

Ferguson and others have begun to suggest that empires, such as the

American “empire,” are complex systems and thus may be highly vulnerable

to outside events, perhaps seemingly minor, over which they have little

or no control, causing their downfall.[141] In finance, Nassim Nicholas

Taleb has suggested that highly aberrational “black swan” events,

hitherto regarded as extremely rare, are in reality much more frequent

than predicted, and moreover have vastly more dramatic consequences. The

May 2010 “flash crash” on the Dow Jones seemed to prove his point.

There is, then, a growing realization that human affairs make up in

their totality a complex system. Complex systems share characteristics

which have important but barely noted consequences for politics.

Complex systems are not chaotic. They are not simple and ordered, but

neither are they an uncontrolled mess. Complex systems are instead

something “in between,” as Professor Scott Page, an expert on

complexity, has observed.[142]

Another characteristic is perhaps the most telling, and recollects the

stadium wave or the suicide bomber. The actions of one individual may

redound in very powerful and consequential ways. This insight is a

conclusion completely at odds with contemporary notions of the ranking

and power of government, state and individual. The individual is not

powerless, not subordinate; in fact individuals are a potent agent of

lasting change in the whole system.

If individuals begin to behave in the way suggested in this book—to act

themselves to produce desired political results, cooperating and

negotiating directly with others affected—then a new dispensation will

emerge, something that we may not yet be able to describe. This is the

phenomenon of “emergence,” a key characteristic of complexity: that from

the combined actions of many agents, acting according to their own

microcosmic preferences and values, a new condition may emerge from the

bottom up, almost unconsciously, and certainly without imposition by

government, god or anyone else.

Intellectually, we understand that turning a vast heterogeneous mesh

into a chessboard of discrete players is to do something inherently

reductive, oversimplifying and thus, in its way, deceptive if not

downright dishonest. It is simply not possible credibly to claim that

any authority, like any historian, can understand this huge pattern of

interaction and connection. They cannot know, yet they must claim to.

Yet there is something still more insidious going on. In claiming

authority to organize our affairs, to order the Pollock-like mélange

into something that it isn’t, governments take away something more

crucial from us—our own agency. Or rather, they take away our own sense

of agency, for in truth our control over events never left us, only our

belief in its existence.

Contrary to common assumptions, individuals acting collectively have a

far greater power to control their circumstances, and indeed those of

the whole world, than governments pretend. The immediate overthrow of

governments now would bring only chaos. But as individuals and groups

begin to assert their own agency over decisions and events within their

own reach, there will eventually emerge a much wider and more

fundamental effect, one that would ultimately amount to a revolution in

how we organize our affairs.

How this might look is inherently unpredictable. No one can know how the

sum of such deliberate actions might appear. This is, above all, a

cultural change not an architectural redesign of political structures.

Gustav Landauer, a nineteenth-century theorist, once wrote:

The state is not something which can be destroyed by a revolution, but

is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of

human behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by

behaving differently.

It will start with individuals acting upon their convictions. It will

continue and gather force as they join together—perhaps in person,

perhaps on the Web—to organize, not to campaign, but to act and embody

the changes they seek. These networks of cooperation may be temporary;

they may be long-lasting. They may encompass a street, or the

inhabitants of a building, cooperating to manage their affairs. They may

span the globe as millions act together to address a shared concern. The

embryonic forms of such cooperation are already evident: There are

consumers cooperatives that bargain for lower prices; “common security

clubs” where unemployed people share job-seeking skills, barter services

and organize shared childcare;[143] local groups where unemployed

handymen and babysitters offer their services to the community;[144] and

Internet campaigns that enroll millions across the globe.

As the realization of governments’ dwindling power spreads, this new

form of politics will become less about protest or petition and more

about action. The sum of these collectives will not have a fixed

structure; they will ebb and flow, responsive to the changing needs and

passions of the population. They may be local, but they will also

transcend borders, inevitably weakening the mental hold of boundaries

and inherited national identities upon peoples with common interests.

One day, so strong may be this new culture of collective collaboration,

and this mesh of different networks of cooperation, that our existing

institutions, based on the singularizing, centralizing unit of national

government, and indeed the notion of the nation state, may wither away,

unneeded, outdated, irrelevant.

This mesh of networks, of collaborating groups both local and

transnational, represents in its indefinite shapes its dynamic changing

nature and its responsiveness to the needs of its participants—us,

ordinary people—a form much closer to the actual nature of the world

today, its diverse and massive flows, the multiplying and shifting

identities of its peoples, and above all its manifold challenges. And in

its consonance with the nature of the world, that mesh, that

shape—indeterminate, unstructured, changing though it may be—offers

paradoxically much greater stability and coherence than the fixed and

hierarchical forms of organization we have inherited from the past. The

world should be ordered according to our needs, not the projections and

requirements of static institutions.

The future nature of this world cannot be foreseen; it will emerge. But

one thing is sure. No longer would we be fooled into seeing the world as

a chessboard, demarcated, separated, neat, but instead it would seem to

us as it really is.

7. The Means Are the Ends

In colonial India, the British forbade Indians from making their own

salt, and charged steeply for it as a form of indirect taxation on the

subject people, a tax that hit the poorest especially hard. In 1930,

Mahatma Gandhi decided to attack this injustice directly, and organized

a march to India’s coast, where salt could be made from seawater—for

free—directly challenging the British monopoly of salt production.

Gandhi’s “salt march” or “Salt Satyagraha” is rightly renowned as one of

the most important acts of political protest in recent history.

Gandhi chose to attack the salt tax, against the advice of some of his

political colleagues, because it was both a tool and a symbol of

Britain’s oppression. Thus, the action to undermine the tax assumed both

a practical and symbolic value. Gandhi carefully planned the march,

choosing only his most disciplined cohorts from his own ashram, and

sending scouts to reconnoiter villages ahead. He built up public

expectations and attention with press conferences before and during the

march. The salt march above all manifested a core principle of Gandhi’s

political philosophy—that of satyagraha—a synthesis of the Sanskrit

words satya (truth) and agraha (holding firmly to). In the common

shorthand of today’s times, Gandhi’s philosophy is often summarized as

“nonviolence” or “passive resistance,” and indeed it encompasses these

elements. But for Gandhi, satyagraha had a deeper and more positive

significance, not merely an absence of violence but more a strength. In

his words:

Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and

therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian

movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth

and Love or nonviolence, and gave up the use of the phrase “passive

resistance,” in connection with it, so much so that even in English

writing we often avoided it and used instead the word “satyagraha.”[145]

Above all, Gandhi believed that means were intimately connected with

ends. Indeed, they were to him the same thing, as connected as a tree to

its seed. If you used violence, you could expect nothing but further

violence in return. Satyagraha by contrast engaged a force—love—to which

there was no resistance. The salt march demonstrated clearly how these

concepts, combined with an acute political intelligence, played out in

practice.

The British, at first dismissive, were confused as to how to respond to

the march, which gained huge publicity in India and worldwide. It was

reported that sixty thousand Indians came to hear Gandhi speak on the

eve of the march. Not one to eschew melodrama, Gandhi warned that his

speech might comprise the last words of his life; he invoked a

compelling spirit of self-sacrifice: “My task shall be done if I perish

and so do my comrades.” As the march progressed, crowds of tens and

sometimes hundreds of thousands gathered along the way. Gandhi’s

marchers slept in the open in the villages they passed through, asking

only food and water, the better, Gandhi judged, to recruit India’s poor

whose support would be vital to imperialism’s defeat.

After a march lasting nearly three weeks and nearly two hundred fifty

miles, building up expectations and political tension all the way,

Gandhi arrived at the coastal village of Dandi in Gujarat, where raising

a handful of mud which he then boiled to make salt, Gandhi declared,

“With this, I am shaking the foundations of the British Empire.” Gandhi

implored his followers and all Indians to follow his example and make

illegal salt, breaking the British monopoly and depriving the empire of

an important source of revenue. In the weeks that followed, sixty

thousand people were arrested for making salt. At Peshawar, British

troops killed over two hundred peaceful demonstrators. Gandhi was

arrested while planning his next satyagraha at the Dharasana salt works.

The march went ahead, eventually under the leadership of Sarojini Naidu,

a female poet and freedom fighter. She warned her fellow Satyagrahis to

expect to be beaten, but that “you must not even raise a hand to fend

off blows.” Sure enough, soldiers beat the marchers with steel-tipped

clubs. As United Press reported:

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They

went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks

of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers

groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with

fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground

was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white

clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly

marched on until struck down.[146]

Despite its receiving worldwide attention, this sacrifice failed to win

any immediate concessions from the British, and it would be another

seventeen years before India would at last be independent. Though

India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, acknowledged the

enormous importance of the salt march in mobilizing India’s masses

around the goal of independence, his Congress Party, to which Gandhi

then belonged, eventually abandoned satyagraha as a political technique.

Historians today tend to view the Second World War as the more

significant factor in ending imperial rule in India.[147] But the Salt

Satyagraha is remembered still for its signal achievement in one crucial

aspect. As one British colonial administrator noted at the time,

“England can hold India only by consent; we can’t rule it by the sword.”

And thanks to the salt march, they had lost that consent.

Though technically the more powerful of the two antagonists—with the

power of the state, of arrest and ultimately of force—Britain lost the

contest against Gandhi’s force of will, satyagraha. Those who were

clubbed to the ground ended up victorious, for by their reaction to the

march, the British lost the consent of the Indian population, upon which

they relied to maintain their colonial rule. The Salt Satyagraha thus

qualifies as one of the most effective political actions of recent

times. It is worth summarizing why:

• It confronted its political target—Britain’s colonial rule—directly:

The goal of the salt march was to make salt, directly confronting the

British salt tax and denying the colonialists revenue, thus the action

itself contributed to the political result intended.

• It confounded and confused the British by using nonviolent methods;

one British administrator later confessed in an internal memo that they

would have preferred violence.

• By combining means and ends nonviolently, the march attracted and

created enormous moral force, which not only helped recruit followers

but was also crucial in garnering massive international attention and

sympathy.

In an age of terrorism and violent counterreaction, such examples can

seem quaint and irrelevant, but surveys suggest that even in the Muslim

world, Al Qaeda’s use of violence, and in particular its targeting of

civilians, alienates more followers than it attracts. The persuasive

power of self-sacrifice and nonviolence remains undiminished, even if

violence seems once again the more fashionable.

In his short manual Guerrilla Warfare, Che Guevara dismisses terrorist

violence as ineffective:

We sincerely believe that terrorism is of negative value, that it by no

means produces the desired effects, that it can turn a people against a

revolutionary movement, and that it can bring a loss of lives to its

agents out of proportion to what it produces.[148]

Guevara preferred direct military confrontation with the repressive

forces of Batista, Cuba’s then dictator. In modern Mexico, recognizing

that conditions, though unjust, were less repressive than in

prerevolutionary Cuba, the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico’s

Chiapas region, Subcomandante Marcos, prefers irony and nonviolence to

bring home the Zapatistas’ message of the exploitation of Mexico’s

indigenous peoples. As Marcos put it:

We don’t want to impose our solutions by force, we want to create a

democratic space. We don’t see armed struggle in the classic sense of

previous guerrilla wars, that is as the only way and the only

all-powerful truth around which everything is organized. In a war, the

decisive thing is not the military confrontation but the politics at

stake in the confrontation. We didn’t go to war to kill or be killed. We

went to war in order to be heard.[149]

Gandhi himself sometimes despaired of the Indian people’s propensity for

violence. Exploiting his immense public standing and moral authority, on

several occasions he used hunger strikes as a tool of political

persuasion, including to seek an end to fighting between Muslims and

Hindus.

This technique too has modern relevance. The hunger strikes by

Republican inmates in the Maze prison in Northern Ireland in 1981

resulted in the deaths of several strikers, most famously Bobby Sands,

who was elected as a member of the British Parliament during his hunger

strike. After ten inmates died, the British government offered some

concessions. The most lasting impact, however, was, like the Salt

Satyagraha, deeper in its effects on that intangible: will. By 1985, the

British government, had negotiated the Anglo-Irish agreement that gave

the Irish Republic for the first time a consultative role in the

government of Northern Ireland, and heralded the peace process that

resulted in the Good Friday agreement of 1998, which largely brought an

end, though sadly not yet final, to the violence and sectarian strife

that had benighted the province for over thirty years.

In 2009, a forty-two-year-old woman named Aminatou Haidar used the

hunger strike for similar effect. A native of the Western Sahara, which

has been occupied by Morocco since 1975, Haidar has ceaselessly

campaigned for the right of her people, the Sahrawi, to

self-determination.[150] For these efforts, she has been repeatedly

imprisoned and abused. Returning from the United States, where she had

been awarded various human rights prizes, Haidar was prevented by

Morocco from reentering the territory where she and her children live.

The Moroccans seized her passport and demanded she sign an oath of

allegiance to Morocco’s king in order to get it back. Haidar refused and

went on a hunger strike to demand its return. As Haidar approached

death, international efforts on her behalf stepped up and even Morocco’s

allies, France and the United States, were forced to intervene. After

thirty-two days without food, Haidar was taken to the hospital, her

respiration and blood pressure dangerously low. She remained, however,

committed to the end, determined, she said, to return unimpeded and

without conditions or to die in dignity. Morocco at last capitulated and

permitted her return, a public humiliation for a monarchy that had sworn

it would not back down. Thanks to her willingness to starve herself to

the end, Haidar not only secured her own return to her homeland, she

also succeeded in attracting unprecedented international attention to

Morocco’s occupation of Africa’s “last colony.”

Sometimes protest can take the simplest form. In East Timor, then

occupied by Indonesia, the indigenous East Timorese would approach every

Indonesian soldier or settler they came across and ask, “When are you

leaving my country?”[151] The most basic declaration of discontent,

repeated, sends a signal that the status quo cannot endure.

In the summer of 1964, about a thousand American students mainly from

northern colleges—most of them white—traveled to Mississippi as part of

a campaign by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to

fight against racial segregation in the southern states. The students

lived in communes—“Freedom Houses”—or with local black families. They

registered voters and taught in Freedom Schools. In one of the most

notorious crimes of the civil rights era, three recently arrived

students were beaten to death by segregationists assisted by the local

police, killings made famous in the movie Mississippi Burning. The

murders shocked the world. As with Claudette Colvin, who refused to

change seats on her bus, the students’ actions directly contributed to

the repeal of the notorious racist Jim Crow laws and the end of

legalized segregation in the South, a reminder that laws follow action,

not vice versa.

These dramatic actions were often taken to address grave injustices,

like occupation and systematic repression. The hunger strike is an

extreme action taken in response to extreme circumstances. Moreover, as

Gandhi and Haidar both illustrate, it helps that the striker already

enjoys some standing in public, and ideally, as in both cases, moral

authority.

Political actions which produce, even in small part, the political end

they seek carry a persuasive force far greater than any mere campaign,

both for their demonstrative and symbolic force, and for the simple

reason that such actions, even if only on small scale, contribute to the

desired solution.

For example, in New York City’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, after a spate of

robberies, a group of local men decided to escort pedestrians home from

the subway. One of the founders of “We Make Us Better” said, “I decided

we can’t have these people terrorizing our young women and children, and

we’re not speaking up and making our presence felt.” The members of the

group don’t regard themselves as political or activist; they are just

trying to make their community better by their example.[152] They plan

soon to set up a mentoring program.

This illustrates an important message—that it is changing attitudes and

demonstrating new forms of behavior, as much as laws, that matters. This

lesson is also evident in Naples, the heartland of the Camorra organized

crime ring. Here, local people have taken the initiative to resist

extortion and corruption, some pasting “anti-pizzo” stickers on their

shops to indicate that they do not pay “protection” money, and as a

signal of solidarity with those who do the same. Others are establishing

cooperatives to run the farms and businesses seized by prosecutors from

the mafia.

In a country where several legislators and the prime minister are

accused of links to the mob, a judge made the same point, “The battle is

not just won by force and sequestrations, but by a social struggle. It

is a cultural battle.”[153]

In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has made great play of a

concept he calls “The Big Society,” offering a rather sketchy blend of a

vague localism with more familiar Conservative moral philosophy about

individual responsibility. At the same time that the government has made

severe cuts in public spending, Cameron has argued that people should

play a greater role in local activities, hitherto the preserve of

government, including schools, parks and other public services. The

conjunction of cuts with the moral sermonizing is not the only aspect of

the Big Society that jars. This book argues that people will benefit by

taking charge of their shared affairs locally, but crucially this means

that they must also have agency over these decisions: control. The

benefits outlined here—of better and more equitable outcomes, and social

consensus—from local and participatory decision making are not available

in the Big Society because in Cameron’s vision, central government

retains overall control. If taxes and revenues are collected and

distributed centrally, it is impossible for people at the local level to

have real control over budgets and thus policy.

The Porto Alegre experiment described earlier is an example of what real

local agency looks like, and its benefits are clear—above all in the

more equitable distribution of government services, but also in greater

social consensus underpinning policy choices. The Big Society, by

contrast, has yet to amount to real autonomy at the local level. Local

people may provide, but not decide. It is this contradiction that

perhaps explains Cameron’s inability to explain his concept with any

clarity, and suggests that it will amount to little more than

encouraging volunteers at the local library. For this half-baked

philosophy entirely misses the point of real devolution of power.

Indeed, it represents no such devolution in substantive terms at all.

All that it offers is responsibility without power.

In 1980, CEOs of the largest American companies earned an average of

forty-two times as much as the average worker; in 2001, they earned 531

times as much. It is hard to imagine that these bosses have in twenty

years increased their contribution to company performance by such a

remarkable degree. Instead, there appears to be an emerging culture

among the top executives that, because they can pay themselves so much,

they should. This self-interested belief piggybacks upon and exploits a

vague cultural notion that competitive economies somehow require

exceptional rewards for the successful. Thus capitalism takes on the

qualities not only of an economic system, but also a moral code.

There is nothing inevitable about such excesses, or inequality. Such

irresponsible greed is not necessary for a competitive company, nor

intrinsic to an efficient economy. Indeed, the opposite seems to be the

case. Some economists, including a former IMF chief economist, now

believe that America’s gross wealth inequality lay at the root of the

financial meltdown: Middle-class families, whose incomes have been

stagnant for a decade, were forced to borrow more and more to buy houses

and maintain acceptable living standards.[154] Meanwhile, the rich, who

enjoyed a far greater share of the rewards of America’s economic growth

over the last decade, spend far less as a proportion of their overall

income, depressing the consumption necessary to fuel sustained

growth.[155]

But what might be done?

John Lewis set up his first draper’s shop in 1864. His son Spedan joined

the business toward the end of the century. While convalescing from a

riding accident, he realized that his father, his brother and he

together earned more than all the hundreds of other employees in the

family’s two stores put together. Spedan Lewis instigated new systems

and practices as soon as he returned to work: He offered shortened

working days, set up a staff committee, and a third week’s paid holiday,

an innovation for retail trade at the time. He founded a house magazine,

The Gazette, which is still published today.

In 1920, Spedan introduced a profit-sharing scheme. Twenty years later,

it was expanded into a partnership: In effect, Lewis handed over the

business to its workers. Today, nearly seventy thousand partner

employees own the scores of major stores and supermarkets operated by

John Lewis across Britain. Every branch holds forums to discuss local

issues. These aggregate to form divisional councils; partners elect the

large majority of members of the Partnership Council. The councils have

the power to discuss “any issue whatsoever”; the partnership puts “the

happiness of Partners at the centre of everything it does.”

The partnership’s constitution sets out to be both commercial and

democratic. The annual bonus for partners in 2008 was equivalent to ten

weeks’ wages. The partners own two country estates, sailing clubs, golf

courses, hotels and other extensive recreational and social facilities.

Pension schemes are generous; after twenty-five years’ service partners

are rewarded with six months’ paid leave. With its well-known slogan of

“Never knowingly undersold” and a guarantee that it will repay customers

the difference if they can find a lower price elsewhere (though not

online), John Lewis has been consistently profitable, despite the

cutthroat competition of the retail sector. Its revenues in 2008 were

nearly £7 billion.

Speaking in 1963, shortly before he died, Spedan Lewis explained why he

set up the partnership and handed over what had been the family business

to its employees.[156]

It was soon clear to me that my father’s success had been due to his

trying constantly to give very good value to people who wished to

exchange their money for his merchandise but it also became clear to me

that the business would have grown further and that my father’s life

would have been much happier if he had done the same for those who

wished to exchange their work for his money.

The profit… was equal to the whole of the pay of the staff, of whom

there were about three hundred. To his two children my father seemed to

have all that anyone could want. Yet for years he had been spending no

more than a small fraction of his income.

On the other hand, for very nearly all of his staff any saving worth

mentioning was impossible. They were getting hardly more than a bare

living. The pay-sheet was small even for those days.

Note that Lewis suggests that his father would have been happier himself

if he had paid his workers more fairly, an observation borne out in the

2009 book The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett

(Penguin), which found that everyone in society is better off—in terms

of mental health, crime and other indicators—in economies with greater

wealth equality. Spedan Lewis continued that the state of affairs in the

country was a “perversion of capitalism”:

It is all wrong to have millionaires before you have ceased to have

slums. Capitalism has done enormous good and suits human nature far too

well to be given up as long as human nature remains the same. But the

perversion has given us too unstable a society. Differences of reward

must be large enough to induce people to do their best but the present

differences are far too great. If we do not find some way of correcting

that perversion of capitalism, our society will break down. We shall

find ourselves back in some form of government without the consent of

the governed, some form of police state.

Cooperative businesses, such as John Lewis and Spain’s Mondragon, which

pays its executives no more than eight times its lowest paid employees,

have shown that businesses owned by their employees can be as successful

as the most hierarchical, profit-driven enterprise. At such companies,

wage differentials are lower, benefits are more widely shared and, above

all, employees who are also owners feel not only more agency over the

future of their business, and thus their own, but also more

satisfaction. These companies are not compelled to a more egalitarian

approach by legislation; they were set up that way by the free choice of

their founders.

Founded in 1884 by Karl Eisener, who wanted to provide long-term jobs to

discourage the Swiss from emigrating because of poor economic

conditions, the knife company Victorinox is going strong, with a

respected global brand nearly a hundred twenty years later.[157] Still,

it suffered a severe crisis when penknives were banned from airports,

hitherto important sales channels, under post-9/11 airport security

measures. The company responded by referring to its values of

inclusiveness and loyalty to its workers. Despite a steep decline in

sales, no one was laid off. The company instead stopped hiring,

encouraged workers to take early vacations and reduced shifts, while

expanding its product ranges, particularly in watches. The company had

suffered similar crises before, such as a sharp decrease in orders from

the Swiss army after the First World War.

Victorinox, in contrast to the prevailing hire-and-fire model, treats

its workers the same, in good times as well as bad. It acts according to

its pronounced values (means and ends again) by establishing

employee-oriented management schemes and an integration policy that

better incorporates younger and older workers, immigrants and people

with disabilities. It pays the highest paid workers no more than five

times the wages of the average.

In the financial sector, mutual banks and insurance companies endured

the depredations of the financial crisis much better than publicly owned

banks and companies. Mutuals, by their very nature, discourage excessive

risk-taking and indeed excessive pay. They return banks to the

old-fashioned notion that lending should not grossly outpace deposits.

The trouble is that stock-market listing encourages the emphasis on

short-term profits—and thus risk-taking—that contributed to such

problems in the credit crunch. The ensuing government bailout of the

banks reaffirmed the implicit guarantee that no major bank would be

allowed to fail and risk wider economic meltdown. Thus, the current

system, even after the much-heralded “bill to control Wall Street” in

2009, and thanks to government action, rewards the most destructive Wall

Street behavior.

Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff has proposed that all

financial products be mutualized as “limited purpose banking” (LPB) with

benefits in reduced risk, greater transparency and less excessive

executive compensation. Under LPB, mortgage lending, for example, would

take place through “mortgage mutual funds” whose managers would pick

loans to invest in. Mortgage applicants would provide the information

they do today, and different funds could bid for their custom. The

lenders would be investors owning shares in the mutual funds. At no

point would any bank actually hold the mortgage on its books. Indeed,

banks would not hold anything on their books at all except the modest

assets needed to manage a fund—computers and offices—and the matching

equity. They would neither borrow nor trade with borrowed funds.

Kotlikoff extends this principle to all of finance, including insurance

and derivatives. His proposed system, crucially, would mean that all

contingent liabilities would be fully backed by capital.[158]

In defending the inequities and excesses of the current system, the

beneficiaries of these injustices tout half-baked economic arguments

remarkably often—such as the economic necessity of enormous executive

“compensation.” In public debate, the merits of private enterprise are

invariably presented as superior to government provision. These

arguments come to a head over “public goods” such as the nation’s health

or the world’s oceans, where the choice is usually presented as between

private ownership or public provision and regulation: market versus the

state. Evident in these debates is an assumption that there are only two

options—public or private—to resolve the “tragedy of the commons,”

whereby common resources such as water, land or oceans will be abused by

some, and neglected by all, without some form of order.

In fact, pioneering economists have shown that other spontaneous forms

of voluntary management and sharing of such resources have sprung up and

are, if anything, more successful at husbanding these common goods than

either of the two conventional models. One such economist was awarded

the Nobel Prize for economics in 2009. Professor Elinor Ostrom’s work

has shown that societies and groups regularly devise rules and

enforcement mechanisms that stop the degradation of nature. The

traditional theory holds that pollution and depletion of resources would

occur because individuals fail to recognize—or do not care about—their

effect on others. However, her research has shown that people can manage

resources tolerably well without rules imposed by the authorities if

rules evolved over time, entitlements were clear, conflict resolution

measures were available and an individual’s duty to maintain the common

resource was in proportion to the benefits from exploiting it. Notably,

she found that the most important criterion for the success of such

schemes was this: active participation in setting and enforcing the

collective rules to manage the common good.[159]

The tortured debate over health care illustrates this problem. In the

U.S., a system dominated by massive private insurance companies has

created enormous and escalating costs for American business and many

other distortions and inequities, particularly for the poor, who have

been excluded from private insurance provision. Vast sums may be spent

to prolong the lives of the well-insured for merely a few days, while

many millions of the poor endure chronic or even fatal illness without

treatment. Ideologues from the right, but also the heavily lobbied

representatives of both Democrats and Republicans, successfully

destroyed the “public option”—that government should provide

insurance—in the 2009 health care bill. Needless to say, the enormous

health insurance industry spent over $600 million on lobbying in the two

years before the bill.

Meanwhile, in the UK, where public provision—and universal coverage—of

health care is entrenched in the form of the National Health Service,

there is very appropriate concern, among both doctors and patients, at

the overweening and barely accountable bureaucracy seemingly necessary

to run the system, and the sometimes arbitrary choices it must make, for

instance, that certain drugs be denied to the sick because they are too

expensive.

In both countries, the fundamental truth of any health care system,

whether public or private, is barely acknowledged—that there must be

some system of rationing care. Otherwise, demand for health care is

insatiable; its costs would eventually consume the entire economy, as

the costs of America’s insurance-based system indeed threaten to do if

unchecked.

Arrangements to include both doctors and patients equally in the

provision of health care have worked in the past, and work today. In

earlier eras, cooperative or “friendly” societies pooled the

contributions of working families to provide care when illness or death

struck. Today, health care cooperatives are able successfully to manage

and deploy their available resources according to what their members

(i.e., patients)—and not the insurance companies or bureaucrats—regard

as important. This possibility is barely mentioned in the U.S. debate,

presumably because cooperatives have no lobbyists. If it does arise, the

idea of cooperatives is often hysterically attacked by both the

insurance industry, which claims cooperatives are public provision in

disguise, or by advocates for the “public option,” who argue that

nonprofits cannot possibly compete with the massive cartels of the

insurance giants. Neither argument stands up to scrutiny, for

cooperatives would operate without taxpayer support, and by their

nonprofit nature would be less expensive than profit-maximizing private

insurance companies: The CEO of one of the largest U.S. health care

companies earns over $33 million.[160]

The company, the primary unit of economic activity, is not a fixed

entity; it can be, and is being, transformed. The distinction between

for-profit companies and not-for-profit charities is blurring as

companies incorporate social and environmental responsibilities into

their business model, not as addons but as intrinsic to the way that

they work. Chris Meyer of the Harvard Business Review has called this

“internalizing the externalities” of the traditional economic model of

the firm. While it is easy to be cynical about this development, and it

is right to criticize the “greenwashing” of otherwise unchanged

corporate practice, there is also here unarguably an opportunity.

Encouraged by an NGO, scores of companies are choosing to eschew high

carbon fuel sources, like oil sands.[161]

In another initiative, thousands of the world’s largest companies are

voluntarily publishing data on their electricity consumption and carbon

emissions in a collective effort to reduce emissions, organized by

another small NGO, the Carbon Disclosure Project.[162] Utilizing the

power of peer and investor pressure rather than government regulation,

the project organizes letters to companies representing investors

holding $55 trillion, pressing them to participate and thus be

scrutinized on their environmental records. Other banks are ceasing to

lend to the mining companies that blast the tops off Appalachian

mountains in Virginia, not because this activity is illegal—it is

not—but because of the growing damage to their reputations.[163]

Consumers through their own choices can reinforce these trends: “When

you’re buying, you’re voting,” as the founder of Stonyfield Farms, the

organic dairy producer, once exhorted. Every choice carries economic,

political and environmental effects. It will soon be easy to monitor the

labor and environmental records of manufacturers on the Web, and perhaps

at the point of purchase. At projectlabel.org and other sites, the

embryonic form of such indices is already visible.[164] The space is

available to rethink what companies do, to realize at last that their

impacts are inherently political, but also to embrace and exploit that

reality. Whether this transformation is positive or negative will be

determined by simple, small everyday choices: the actions of those who

compose these new commercial, social and in fact highly political

entities.

A French philosopher was once asked about the significance of May 1968,

the demonstrations and eruption of spontaneous public anger in France

and elsewhere.[165] He replied that the importance of May ’68 was that

it was the opposite of what the Communists had said was the correct

manner of the revolution. The Communists had said that the revolution

should be:

Not here but somewhere else, like Cuba, Vietnam or elsewhere.

Not now but tomorrow, in the future.

And not you but the Communists instead, the appointed cadres.

Rejecting this injunction, the May ’68ers had declared instead, “Here,

Now, Us!”

The next chapter suggests some core principles that might guide an

individual or group wanting to take up the flag on any issue. This is a

politics that offers the possibility of yet-unimagined outcomes, not

those defined by our current structures and ways of doing business.

This manifesto is rather short and simple. It does not proclaim a

particular end-state or utopia, but instead a series of methods for how

the individual might engage upon the issues that most concern them. The

methods themselves are the message: a way of doing things that promises

greater mutual concern, meaning and community of purpose.

The ends are indeed the means.

8. Kill the King! Nine Principles for Action

So much for all the theory, stories and ideas… what is to be done? Here

is a short list of principles that may guide action, along with a few

practical examples. The principles are by no means exclusive or

comprehensive: mere pointers, not instructions.

1. Locate your convictions.

This is perhaps the hardest step, and I have the least useful to say

about it (apart from Gandhi’s and Claudette Colvin’s examples, cited

earlier). This must be an individual discovery of what you care most

about. And this is the most fundamental point: Do not let others tell

you what to care about. This can only be a leaderless revolution, if it

is to succeed. Make up your own mind. Examine your own reactions. This

is difficult in the banality yet ubiquity of contemporary culture, with

its cacophony of voices and opinion. Space for contemplation is all too

rare. But here’s one suggestion which is doubtless revealing of my own

dyspeptic disposition: What makes you angry? What never fails to

irritate you for its stupidity and injustice? That may be thing you

should take up arms against. It was for me, and anger puts fuel in the

tank.

2. Who’s got the money, who’s got the gun?

Before taking action, assess the landscape. This simple axiom will point

to the main sources of influence, and obstacles. Thanks to the Internet,

it is now possible to discover pretty rapidly who has a stake in any

given situation, and thus who might alter it. When revolt against the

dictatorial rule of Colonel Muammar Gadhafi broke out in Libya in

February 2011, information on which companies were doing business with

his regime was available in detail, triggering immediate pressure for

these companies and individuals to disengage. The same week that the

revolt broke out, several major oil companies announced their refusal to

do business with the regime, under pressure from their own investors

organized by a campaign group, the Genocide Intervention Network. The

Sunlight Foundation published a chart of the lobbyists, including former

congressmen, who were paid by Gadhafi to promote his interests. The

director of the London School of Economics was forced to resign just

days after the revolt began when it was revealed that his university had

received substantial funds from the regime to train its elites. One

welcome consequence of the vast mesh of connections that the globalized

world now comprises is that even distant situations may be affected by

actors close to home, who may be susceptible to pressure. Find them, use

it.

3. Act as if the means are the end.

In the summer of 1968, Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia, crushing the

“Prague spring” of growing political freedom. Massively outgunned by the

Soviet tank columns, the Czechoslovak army gave way. Demonstrators

attacked the tanks in city squares with stones and petrol bombs. The

Soviet troops responded with machine-gun fire. One protesting student

set himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square. Thousands were

arrested, many to be imprisoned for long sentences. The leader who had

encouraged the liberalization, Alexander Dubek, was forced to

capitulate, under duress signing an agreement with Moscow to reverse the

reforms. Czechoslovakia endured more than another twenty years of

Communism before democracy at last dawned.

That summer of ’68, thousands of Czechoslovak students had traveled

abroad to work. The invasion left them stranded. Among them was P., who

spent the summer picking fruit in Kent. The Soviet invasion gave him a

terrible choice: Should he stay in Britain, or return to Communist

dictatorship? Compounding his dilemma, he had nowhere to stay. A story

in The Times reported on the predicament of the stranded students: An

organization was quickly set up to find them shelter.

My parents read the story and decided to offer refuge to the

Czechoslovak student, P., who arrived shortly afterward. Though my

parents that summer were caring for three children under four (my

brother and I are twins, my sister only twenty-three months older), and

had more than enough on their plate, they gave P. a bed. He stayed for

several weeks while considering what to do. After much agonizing, he

eventually decided to stay in England. By chance, he had hitched a lift

from a professor at Warwick University. That professor liked P. and

offered him a place on his course. P.’s studies were duly arranged and

he completed his degree, frequently spending his holidays at our house

in South London. He went on to become an expert in fish storage. The

father of two children, he now lives in Scotland.

Thirty years later my parents gave refuge once more, this time to a

Zimbabwean escaping the repressive rule of Robert Mugabe. Now they were

living in a smaller flat, their children long having flown the nest. My

father recalled that it wasn’t as simple as giving P. a room back in

1968. Asylum laws in Britain are now strictly enforced. My father was

required regularly to report to the local police station that Ngoni was

indeed staying with them and had not absconded. Finding study

opportunities and work was also harder, though not impossible.

(Universities and other such educational institutions are today

themselves required to check the legal status of their foreign students,

and report any noncompliance, thus, in effect, making them arms of the

state.)

I asked my parents why they had taken P. in. Neither could really

remember, answering my question with vague responses like “We could” or

“It felt like a good thing to do.” Now with my own small children, and

exhausted by the tasks of their care, I marvel at my parents’

hospitality.

Life is about means, not ends. There is no utopia to be gained, there is

no end-state that is static and eternal, once accomplished. This was one

of the great lies of Communism. Likewise, capitalism offers the great

deception that thanks to its machinations everyone will be richer in the

future, thus justifying gross inequality and humiliation today.

Instead it’s all here, and it’s all now. Nirvana tomorrow does not

justify avoidable suffering now. We and our world are in constant

motion, responding to each other without cease. This is one reason why

Francis Fukuyama was wrong to declare “The End of History” with the

triumph of liberal democracies after the collapse of communism. No fixed

state of affairs lasts forever.

4. Refer to the Cosmopolitan Criterion.

This is a pretentious way of saying give consideration to the needs of

others, but based upon what they say are their needs, not what we think

their needs are. The so-called Golden Rule states that you should do to

others as you would be done to. This rule is often lazily touted as a

universal rule applicable in all circumstances. This rule is in fact

dramatically wrong, for it assumes that we know what they want or need.

This logic, taken to its extreme, leads to the arrogant violence of the

neoconservatives, who believe that they have the right to use force in

the interests of those they are attacking, to kill people for their own

good. The invasion of Iraq was clearly motivated by this logic: that the

Iraqi people needed democracy, even at the cost of their own lives (we

know of course that the reason was not to combat an imminent

threat).[166] A hundred thousand people and perhaps more died as a

result. Instability was triggered that endures, with accompanying

violence, to this day. Needless to say, those advocating the war never

consulted those who would do the dying for their lofty goals, whether

allied soldiers or Iraq’s civilians.

There is instead a much simpler way to decide what to do and how to

calibrate your own action. Ask people what they want. They are usually

more than willing to tell you.

With the Internet, ubiquitous mobile phones and Facebook, it is no

longer credible to claim that we cannot find out what people “over

there” are thinking. During the Arab revolutions of early 2011,

pro-democracy protesters broadcast their tweets direct from Cairo’s

Tahrir Square, their compelling 140-character messages shattering

generations-old Western stereotypes of the Middle East and the “Arab

street.” Websites like Global Voices now aggregate citizen reports from

all over the world, but from close to the ground. And those voices are

clear and fresh and urgent.

5. Address those suffering the most.

A few years ago, my wife and I traveled to northern Mali, to the

southern reaches of the Sahara desert north of Timbuktu. We were on our

honeymoon. We decided to take a camel tour with some Tuareg tribesmen;

the trip appealed to our sense of adventure. The camels carried us far

from Timbuktu into a romantic landscape of trackless desert wastes.

As night fell, we were brought to a Tuareg encampment. It turned out to

be the tented home of our guide, a young Tuareg man who wore loose robes

and a turban of deep blue cotton, wound around his head and neck to

protect him from the blasting rays of the sun. We slept under a vast and

magnificent canopy of stars, our baggage stacked around us as a

barricade against the camels, who had been known to tread upon sleeping

humans.

We awoke to a clear and silent dawn, and wandered to the tents to join

our guide and his family for breakfast. And here the romance began to

shatter. The guide’s young wife sat with her baby under a rough screen.

The previous evening, in the dark, their shelter had appeared as a

robust canvas tent. But it turned out to be a patchwork of plastic and

burlap sacks. The young woman and her baby were besieged incessantly by

large swarms of flies, which would land in waves upon her and her

sleeping baby’s face. The woman, clearly exhausted, perhaps by hunger or

illness we could not tell, listlessly swatted the flies away, but they

would settle nonetheless on the baby’s eyes and lips, in swarms so thick

they appeared as a blanket on the poor child’s face.

Shocked, my wife and I drank our tea and ate our bread in silence. The

guide’s father joined us. Talking to his son, he would with horrible

frequency emit an awful hacking cough. As he coughed, he doubled over in

pain, his throat broadcasting the most disgusting sounds of collecting

phlegm and blood, which he would periodically spit onto the sand by the

fire. He clearly had tuberculosis or some other serious respiratory

disease. He was desperately thin, and appeared enfeebled to the point of

death.

Conversing in broken French with the guide, we asked what was wrong. The

young man answered that he didn’t know. The old man had never seen a

doctor. But, the guide said, he had some drugs. He spoke to the old man

who pulled out a half-used packet of paracetamol, its use-by date long

past. Perhaps, ventured the young man, we could give any drugs we might

have. Of course we obliged and ended up handing over perhaps a couple of

hundred dollars to the guide, in excessive payment for the trip. The old

man had noticed my spectacles and exclaimed in delight when I handed

them to him to try. I gave him these too (I had a spare pair).

We were appalled and upset by this encounter with desperate poverty. We

were glad to return from the camel trip. After leaving Mali (to be

honest, with some relief), however, we have not had any further contact

with the guide or his family. We give some money to charity on a regular

basis, but it is not in truth very much, and certainly not enough to

occasion us any significant limits on our own consumption.

How should one respond to suffering? Consider two contrasting answers to

this question. In a recent book, the philosopher Peter Singer uses an

example to illustrate our obligation to others, including those far away

who may be unknown to us.[167] A small girl is drowning in a lake in

front of you and you are the only person who can rescue the child. You

are, however, wearing $400 shoes which will be ruined if you dive in to

rescue the girl. Singer believes, of course, that the answer to such a

dilemma is clear and accepted by almost everyone: You must dive in to

save the child, but ruin the shoes.

Singer argues that in reality the crisis of the drowning child is

presented to us constantly. Every minute, eighteen children die of

hunger and preventable disease: twenty-seven thousand every day. It

costs, moreover, far less than $400 to save them. Just as if the child

were drowning directly in front of us, the moral imperative is clear and

precise: We must act, even if there is a cost to ourselves, albeit a

small one. Using calculations by economist Jeffrey Sachs and others,

Singer suggests that if everyone in the rich world gave a mere 1 percent

of their income, poverty and preventable disease in the world could be

effectively eradicated. Singer has set up a website where individuals

can make such pledges.[168] Singer reportedly donates 25 percent of his

own income to charity.

At the other end of the moral spectrum, nineteenth-century German

über-anarchist Max Stirner believed that the idea of morality is

basically absurd and manufactured by those who cloak their selfish

purposes in pseudo-universal principles which have no other origin.

There is no such thing as society (as Margaret Thatcher too once

famously observed). It is instead the individual and their own desires

which matter. Thus, the individual is required to do nothing but follow

their own wishes to the fullest, wherever this may lead. To do anything

else is to act falsely and to invite falseness from others in response,

thus risking an order—or rather disorder—based on dishonest and

manufactured ideas.

Stirner’s ideas imply that we have no obligation to dive in to save the

child in Singer’s thought experiment. Almost everyone would find this

appalling. Yet, as Singer has observed, this is what we consistently do.

Very few individuals give even 1 percent of their income to those worse

off than they. Several thousand people have made such pledges at

Singer’s website, but of course this is but a tiny drop in the bucket.

Most rich governments have failed to fulfill their own oft-repeated

pledges to commit 0.7 percent of their GDP to development aid. The funds

required to meet the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, established in

2000 as achievable targets to reduce poverty and disease, have not been

provided, including by the G8, G20 and UN General Assembly, which have

on repeated occasions, promised all efforts to do so.

So what’s the flaw with Singer’s reasoning? Why are we unconvinced to

help the distant poor? Are we inherently selfish, more Max Stirner than

Peter Singer? It is easy for a moralist to say that the needs of a

Somali woman dying in childbirth should be as compelling to us as if she

were our sister. But, as Singer has disappointingly discovered, such

reasoning has little lasting impact.

If a child drowns before us, how tiny would be the minority who refused

to act because they didn’t want to get their expensive shoes wet, and

what would the majority do to that person once they found out? Somehow

we need to find a way to stimulate the emotional connection that evokes

compassion, an emotion that, unlike moral rules, seems shared among

humanity (with some sociopathic exceptions). How is compassion between

people generated? One clear and straightforward answer presents itself:

the encounter.

Missing in the reasoning of Singer is any sense of what Stirner, by

contrast, believed necessary, intrinsic and inevitable—engagement.

Stirner firmly rejected any a priori assumption of what such engagement

might produce, least of all that it should result in an obligation to

render help to others. But it makes sense that engagement produces a

different kind of reaction, and a different conversation, than mere

knowledge. It is clearly not enough to know that people “out there” are

suffering. But locate oneself next to that suffering, as my wife and I

found in the Malian desert, and the reaction becomes entirely different,

even though the facts and our knowledge of them remain exactly the same.

Thus nineteenth-century Stirner may paradoxically provide a truer guide

to action in the connected twenty-first century than contemporary

philosophers who, with great humanity, urge that we accept the

obligation to rescue the drowning child. For it is engagement—or rather

its absence—that may precisely explain why the Singers, and the

proponents of the UN Millennium Development Goals, or the 0.7 percent

goal, or the Bonos or Angelinas have failed to convince those who have

so much to hand over even a little bit, and make a huge life-saving

difference, to the billions who have so desperately little.

And from this, one conclusion stands out: States, borders and indeed

institutions in general must by their very nature limit our engagement

with one another; they channel, frame, render detached and sometimes

obstruct the vast mêlée of human interaction. And by limiting that

engagement, somewhere along the way our compassion is eviscerated. The

requirement for engagement, as demanded too by the cosmopolitan

criterion (above), is reinforced.

The twenty-first century offers engagement at levels unprecedented in

human history. As Kwame Anthony Appiah observes in his elegant study

Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, a stroller along New

York’s Fifth Avenue will pass more nationalities in half an hour than an

ancient Roman would have met in a lifetime. The multihued society of

America, Britain, Europe and more or less everywhere, increasingly,

offers commensurately varied chances for encounters with the hitherto

distant Other, be they Somali, Kyrgyz, Malay or Tongan. “Abroad” is more

and more located right here. At least four hundred million people now

live in countries not of their birth. And these are just the first

generation immigrants; add a second and third generation, and the

proportion grows much higher. Over two million of London’s seven and a

half million inhabitants were born overseas. Heterogeneity will become

routine. Whether we like it or not, we will have to engage.

The sharp and unprecedented increases in immigration in almost all

developed countries, driving commensurate increases in ethnic diversity,

have triggered anguished debates in Europe and the U.S. In Switzerland,

a popular referendum affirmed a ban on mosque construction, though there

are very few mosques already. In the Netherlands, the 2010 general

election saw a significant swing to the far right anti-immigration party

of Gert Wilders. In the U.S., Arizona enacted a law allowing police to

stop anyone merely on suspicion of being an illegal immigrant.

And at first sight, it appears that fears of the effect of an influx of

outsiders on established stable societies are well placed. Harvard

sociologist Robert Putnam has found that the more mixed a society, the

lower its indices of “social capital”—trust, altruism, associations,

active cooperation—and the higher its indices of social

fragmentation—crime, for instance.[169] But crucially, he found that

these reductions in social solidarity and “social capital” were

short-term effects. At first, it appears, local societies “hunker down”;

trust declines, even within members of the same race or ethnic group.

People retreat into privacy.

In the longer run, however, the outcomes are more positive. New forms of

association and social solidarity emerge. In more hybrid societies,

there is more creativity—as measured, for instance, by the number of

Nobel Prizes. Immigration is associated with more rapid economic growth,

although short-term effects should not be overlooked, particularly on

the lowest paid who tend to feel first the effects of more intensified

competition for jobs from immigrants.

The evidence suggests that immigration from the global south to the

global north greatly enhances development in the south, partly because

of the flow of remittances from new immigrants to their families “back

home,” but also because of the transfer of technology and new ideas

through immigrant networks. This effect is reportedly so powerful that

it may offset the “brain drain” costs to the southern countries sending

the migrants. Putnam cites evidence of yet greater positive effect,

including a World Bank study that estimates that increasing annual

northward immigration by only 3 percentage points might produce net

benefits greater than meeting all national (U.S.) targets for

development assistance plus canceling all Third World debt plus

abolishing all barriers to Third World trade.

A further reason to address those suffering the most is simply this:

Here, you can make the most difference.

6. Consult and negotiate.

When I was responsible for sanctions policy on Iraq at the UK Mission to

the United Nations, we were often approached by campaigning NGOs who

wanted us to alter our policies, and lift or amend sanctions in order to

end the humanitarian suffering in Iraq. They were right, of course, but

that didn’t mean that they were effective.

In general, I avoided meeting these campaigners, well aware that I would

be subjected to a rhetorical finger-wagging session. It was difficult

for campaigners to find out who was dealing with Iraq in our mission,

and we didn’t make it easy for them (it’s still very difficult, even

though now the mission has the inevitable official website, as opaque as

the smoked glass at the mission’s entrance). Only rarely did the

campaigners manage to identify me, and persuade me to meet them.

Such meetings were tedious and predictable. Invariably, the campaigners

would march into my office, then lecture me about the immorality of what

my government was doing, demanding change—but rarely specifying in any

detail what that change should be: just change! Discussion would be

tense and confrontational; the meetings would end with much relief, for

me at least. I sensed too that the objective for the campaigners was

often the fact of the meeting, which they could now parade as effective

action on their part, the meeting alone amounting to a victory. Of

course, it was not.

No doubt such lobbying made them feel better. But the effect on me was

to make me more determined to avoid such future encounters. Thanks to

the superficiality of the campaigners’ arguments, I was able easily to

dismiss them. They forgot that I worked on Iraq full-time every day, and

was steeped in the arguments and data to justify and defend our

policies.

Two academics from Notre Dame University in Indiana used a different

approach. They approached the individual officials involved in the

British and U.S. governments, asking to collect information about our

policies. They were polite and patient. They came to meet me several

times. After several meetings, they offered a detailed set of proposals

to change our policy, ideas that addressed our concerns to limit Iraq’s

potential to rearm while minimizing the potential negative humanitarian

effects of sanctions. The U.S. State Department held a discussion

meeting with many officials concerned to meet the academics and hear

their proposals. Eventually, their ideas were adopted as

British–American policy and led to a major amendment of sanctions

policy, which was put into place in 2002.[170]

It was too late, and such a policy should have been enacted from the

beginning of comprehensive sanctions on Iraq in 1990. But the point is

clear.

Negotiation should ideally be direct, not through intermediaries. When

my wife and I bought our apartment in New York City, we were represented

in the negotiations by our real estate agent and eventually by a lawyer.

The negotiations quickly deteriorated. Every move by the seller was

scrutinized for deviousness, every motive and communication was

immediately placed under suspicion. When the seller sought to delay the

sale after we had agreed a price, this was seized upon as a sign of “bad

faith.” Lawyers reported antagonistic exchanges. As stalemate beckoned,

we proposed a meeting with the sellers. Tense and anticipating a

conflict, we arrived at the apartment, to find—needless to say—a

perfectly affable couple who merely wanted to stay in the apartment for

a few weeks before their new home was ready. For them the alternative

was taking their small children to live in a hotel.

7. “Big picture, small deeds.”

The innovation company ?What If! offers this maxim as a way to overcome

the inertia that too often stymies change. ?What If! trains employees in

how to be innovative but found that sometimes, though inspired by their

training away-day, their trainees would still fail to implement the

techniques they had learned. It was simply too overwhelming to change

the prevailing culture of their everyday workplace. To counter this

problem, ?What If! proposed a simple philosophy: Keep in mind the

overall change you wish to achieve, but act a little every day to make

it reality.

Though transposed to the corporate world, this technique echoes the

“small steps” proposed by Mahatma Gandhi to achieve profound and

enduring change. There is an ancient Chinese proverb to the same effect

(the Internet tells me): “It is better to take many small steps in the

right direction than a great leap forward then stumble backward,” sage

advice that Mao Zedong clearly ignored in forcing China’s Great Leap

Forward in the 1960s that forced peasants from their land and led to the

starvation and death of perhaps more than thirty million. Perhaps

recognizing this catastrophe, Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping proposed a

more pragmatic method of change: “crossing the river by feeling the

stones.”

This metaphor is both more compelling and offers a more pragmatic

approach: Stones are palpable, material, solid. The steps of any

strategy should be concrete; not rhetorical but practical. Internet

campaigns clearly fail this criterion; volunteering at a local school

does not. Mahatma Gandhi distilled the epic struggle against British

colonial rule into a simple but practical act that anyone could

undertake: making salt.

And the goal must be epic. The spirit soars at the momentous challenge,

not the banal. Break that challenge down into small, practical, daily

tasks, and get to work. Though the steps toward it may be humble, find a

goal that is great: End poverty, prevent war, save the planet. Locate

your objective, grasp your flag, then march deliberately toward the

enemy. If you do so with courage and conviction, others will surely

follow.

8. Use nonviolence.

Alexander Berkman was an anarchist who passionately detested the

widespread exploitation and abuse of workers in industrial America of

the late nineteenth century. An immigrant from Russia, he was influenced

by anarchist thinkers and groups in New York City, where he became a

close friend of the famous anarchist Emma Goldman. As told by Goldman in

her autobiography, My Life, and Berkman in his Prison Memoirs of an

Anarchist, both were deeply affected by the Haymarket affair—or

massacre, as it is sometimes known: the name of the event an indicator,

as it often is, of the prejudices of the namer.

On May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago, at a rally in support of

striking workers, an unknown person threw a bomb at police as they

dispersed the gathering. The bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in

the deaths of eight police officers and an unknown number of civilians.

In the trial that followed, eight anarchists were tried for murder

despite paltry evidence against them. Four were put to death, and one

committed suicide in prison. The judge declared, “Not because you have

caused the Haymarket bomb, but because you are Anarchists, you are on

trial.” To this day, debate continues about the true identity of the

bomber.

It is clear from both Goldman’s and Berkman’s memoirs that they were

radicalized by what they saw as a profound injustice. Both came to

believe that only dramatic, and if necessary violent, acts—the

attentat—would galvanize the working population to rise up against a

deeply unjust system. The opportunity for such an act was soon to

present itself.

In June 1892, workers at a steel plant in Homestead, Pennsylvania, were

locked out after pay negotiations failed between the Carnegie Steel

Company and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers. The

result was one of the first organized strikes in American labor history.

Andrew Carnegie had placed his factories, and indeed later his

industrial empire, under the control of Henry Clay Frick. Carnegie

publicly supported the rights of workers to join unions and employ

collective bargaining. Privately, however, he encouraged Frick to break

the strike, and with it, the union.

Frick locked the union workers out and placed barbed-wire fences,

searchlights and watchtowers around the factory. He hired nonunion

workers to take the strikers’ jobs and get the factory going again, but

they were unable to break through the union’s picket lines. So Frick

hired three hundred armed guards from the Pinkerton Detective Agency to

break the picket lines. When the Pinkerton guards arrived at the factory

on the morning of July 6, a gunfight broke out. Nine union workers and

seven guards were killed during the fight, which lasted twelve hours.

There was widespread outrage at Frick’s actions and the violent attack

of the “Pinkertons.” Berkman and Goldman decided to assassinate Frick.

This was the opportunity for the violent attentat to rouse the working

class to revolt. There was no viler capitalist than Frick: For a while,

he was known as “America’s most hated man.” In his memoir, Berkman

recounts his romantic fascination with the extreme act:

Could anything be nobler than to die for a grand, a sublime Cause? Why,

the very life of a true revolutionist has no other purpose, no

significance whatever, save to sacrifice it on the altar of the beloved

People.

Berkman’s execution of the plan, however, was amateurish. His plan was

to assassinate Frick and commit suicide afterward; Goldman’s role was to

explain Berkman’s motives after his death. First, Berkman tried to make

a bomb, but he failed. Berkman and Goldman then pooled their meager

savings to buy a handgun and a suit for Berkman to wear for the

assassination attempt.

On July 23, 1892, Berkman entered Frick’s office armed with a gun and a

sharpened steel file. Frick dived under a chair and began to yell.

Berkman shot Frick three times, then grappled with him and stabbed him

in the leg. Others in the office came to Frick’s rescue and beat Berkman

unconscious. He was convicted of attempted murder and given a

twenty-two-year prison sentence. Frick survived the attack.

As he later related in his memoir, Berkman encountered a Homestead

striker soon after his imprisonment. Berkman immediately romanticizes

the man as the embodiment of the workers’ struggle. He is enthralled to

meet an actual striker, a true-blooded member of the working classes.

Here at last Berkman would find his vindication. But the meeting

produces nothing but bitter disappointment. The striker decries

Berkman’s assassination attempt. “We are law-abiding people,” he says,

adding that the workers don’t want anything to do with the “anachrists,”

as he misnames them.

Other workers on whose behalf Berkman made the attentat were not

impressed either. There was no worker uprising as a result of Berkman’s

effort; his attack was widely condemned, including by unions, workers

and even other anarchists. Negative publicity from the attempted

assassination resulted in the collapse of the Homestead strike.

Twenty-five hundred men lost their jobs, and most of the workers who

stayed had their wages halved.

If not violence, then what? All too often, the debate is framed as

violence or nothing; pacifism as mere inactivity. As the world

contemplated how to respond to Colonel Gadhafi’s brutal repression of

unrest in Libya, media commentators dwelt on the debate over the

imposition of no-fly zones or other forms of military intervention,

ignoring the many various nonmilitary but nonetheless coercive measures

available: These were complicated, and thus ill-suited to the Punch and

Judy requirements of sound-bite debate.[171] The whole framing of such

debates suggests that violence is strong, the absence of violence weak.

Pacifism is invariably portrayed as a kind of “do nothing” philosophy.

Nonviolence resolves this problem. Nonviolent methods are not doing

nothing. Instead, they are forceful methods that can be highly effective

but avoid injury and bloodshed, while gaining moral authority from the

rejection of violence.

To get down to specifics, nonviolent action can take many different

forms. In his essential and concise essay “From Dictatorship to

Democracy,” Gene Sharp lists no fewer than 198 different nonviolent

methods, but here are three:[172]

Boycott—The word “boycott” entered the English language thanks to

Captain Charles Boycott, the land agent of an absentee landlord in

Ireland. In 1880, harvests had been poor, so the landlord offered his

tenants a 10 percent reduction in their rents. The tenants demanded a 25

percent reduction, but were refused. Boycott then attempted to evict

eleven tenants from the land. The Irish nationalist Charles Stewart

Parnell proposed that ostracism was more powerful than violence: Greedy

landlords and land agents like Boycott should be made pariahs. Despite

the short-term economic hardship they incurred, Boycott’s workers

stopped work in the fields and stables, as well as in his house. Local

businessmen stopped trading with him, and the local postman refused to

deliver mail. Boycott soon found himself isolated and unable to hire

anyone to harvest the crops. Eventually, fifty outsiders volunteered to

do the work, but they had to be escorted by a thousand policemen and

soldiers, despite the fact that local leaders had said that there would

be no violence, and none in fact materialized. This protection ended up

costing far more than the harvest was worth. After the harvest, the

“boycott” was successfully continued.

Gandhi organized a boycott of British goods. In Montgomery, Alabama,

African-Americans boycotted segregated buses. The National Negro

Convention boycotted slave-produced goods in 1830. Today boycotts are

even easier to organize, thanks to the Internet. The Dutch bank ING was

forced to cancel bonuses for its senior staff after thousands of its

customers threatened to withdraw their deposits, and thus risk a run on

the bank. A Facebook and Twitter boycott campaign erupted after news

emerged that the chief executive was to be awarded a £1 million bonus

despite the bank having received €10 billion in state aid to keep

afloat, had frozen pensions and given staff only a 1 percent pay rise.

Dutch politicians later voted for a 100 percent retrospective tax on all

bonuses paid to executives at institutions that had received state aid

as a result of the financial crisis.[173]

Isolate—The withdrawal of social approval for individuals is distressing

to those subjected to it. Public shaming is an underutilized tool. To

politicians and public figures who bask in public attention, its denial

can be painful indeed.

In New York City, a group of women were fed up with the harassment they

routinely faced on public subways or the street, ranging from unwelcome

sexual comments to groping and stalking. Frustrated with cultural

attitudes that suggested such abuse was an inevitable price of being a

woman, they founded a group to fight back, called “I holla back”

(www.ihollaback.org). Emily May founded Hollaback with friends five

years ago. Today it has chapters in six American cities, along with

others in Britain, Canada and Australia. The group has recently

developed an iPhone application to allow women immediately to log and

report such incidents, and, if possible, photograph the perpetrators.

The aim is to produce a comprehensive picture—and identify “hotspots”—of

such harassment, citywide and even nationwide. Reports will be forwarded

to police for action, including particular zones of repeated activity.

But there are obvious obstacles for the police to press convictions—they

cannot solve the problem alone. By identifying and exhibiting the

photographs of perpetrators, the group also hopes to shame the men who

carry out the abuse, and create new cultural attitudes to replace the

old: to render harassment socially unacceptable.[174]

In a more international context, a white farmer in newly independent

Zimbabwe once told me that the economic and political isolation of white

minority-dominated Rhodesia may not have undermined the economy

sufficiently to force the Rhodesian government to give up its apartheid

practices. We could survive economically, she told me, but once we were

under international sanctions, she said, we knew one thing with

certainty—that white minority rule could not last forever.

Sabotage—This method is to be used only in the most extreme

circumstances of gross injustice and repression, when other nonviolent

methods have failed. A recent illustration of the inherent risks and

ambiguous consequences of sabotage, even of the nonviolent kind, is the

story of the Stuxnet computer worm, which appears to have been

deliberately designed to interfere with Iran’s nuclear program. The worm

was highly sophisticated, suggesting that states (perhaps the United

States) were behind its creation. Concealing itself in the operating

system of computers that control industrial mechanisms, Stuxnet

reportedly works by speeding up the gas centrifuges used to enrich

uranium so that the centrifuges are damaged or destroyed. All the while,

the control systems continue to indicate that everything is normal. The

effects of Stuxnet are not clear, and Iran has admitted to only limited

damage from the virus. Illustrating the dangers of using such

techniques, however, there is now debate that the way has been cleared

for others to use similar devices—which are effectively sabotage, albeit

by the most modern methods. In effect, a new front has been opened in

conflict, with few rules to govern it. As one journalist put it: “We

have crossed a threshold and there is no turning back.”[175] There are

now belated calls for new international agreements to prohibit such

cyberwarfare, while others comment that enforcement of such rules would

in any case be all but impossible, given the intrinsic anonymity and

complexity of the Web. If you are going to use these tools, it would be

wise to be sure that they cannot then be turned against you. Hence the

requirement to use nonviolent sabotage only in extremis.

But for all the drawbacks of sabotage, it has one signal and perhaps

overriding virtue: It doesn’t kill people.

In Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire, an old man is in a library

contemplating wartime photographs of dead children. He is very elderly

and perhaps dying. He thinks to himself, “My heroes are no longer

warriors and kings, but the things of peace…. But so far no one has

succeeded in singing an epic of peace. What is it about peace that its

inspiration is not enduring? Why is its story so hard to tell?”

9. Kill the King!

Chess may be useless as a metaphor for international relations but it

carries one very important lesson. The only point of the game is to take

the opponent’s king. All other moves, and elegant plays with bishop or

pawns, are but preliminary to this object. Do not be satisfied with

process, but only with results. A campaign to end genocide, richly

adorned with expensive video and glamorous celebrities, is worth nothing

if it doesn’t save a single life. Don’t campaign for others to perform

the action required to achieve change: Do it yourself. Sending a text

message or signing an Internet petition is likely to achieve nothing,

given that so little went into it.

The measure of any political action is not how many hits you get on the

campaign website, how many followers you may have on Twitter, or

supporters on your Facebook page. The measure is effects in the real

world on the thing you are trying to change: Are there fewer nuclear

weapons, has the dictator been overthrown, is one child saved from

starvation?

Alexander the Great always aimed his forces at his enemy’s strongest

point. When that fell, the enemy collapsed. Kill the King!

Individually, these principles are unexceptionable. Who can object to

nonviolent, step-by-step action, negotiated with those affected, and

designed to address those most suffering? But taken together, these

principles in fact amount to a radically different form of political

action from the contemporary cultural model, which seems by contrast to

amount to very little: Vote for the government, maybe campaign a little

to ask others to do things you want, and, if you’re directly concerned,

perhaps lobby government. The principles suggested above offer a rather

more vigorous, directed but above all effective, even transformative,

course of action. This is perhaps why there is such establishment

hostility to these methods, and indeed to the word “anarchism,”

including the very peaceful and collaborative form proposed here: The

employment of these methods will actually change things, including by

changing the way that things change. Those who benefit from the current

status quo don’t want you to know that.

One person following these principles will not cause a global

revolution, though it may revolutionize their own lives. But the action

of one may stimulate others. And if many adopt these principles, a

revolution, a leaderless revolution, will eventually become manifest.

9. Conclusion: A Vision of the Human

In Tolstoy’s War and Peace, some of the greatest scenes are those

depicting the battles of the Franco-Russian wars. Cannonballs from

Napoleon’s artillery whizz overhead, cavalry horses rear and flare at

fusillades of musket fire, men quiver with fear and red flows their

blood.

In one scene during the Battle of Austerlitz, the Russian troops are

taken by surprise by advancing French columns that suddenly emerge from

the engulfing fog. As the French fire scatters them, the Russian front

collapses and men flee in disarray. Weeping with anger and shame as he

contemplates imminent defeat, Prince Andrew picks up a standard that a

retreating officer has let fall. Heedless of the danger and the bullets

cracking all around him, he gives a cry “piercing as a child’s” and runs

forward.[176]

His singular action is enough to rally the disordered infantrymen around

him. Suddenly, one soldier moves, and then another, and soon the whole

battalion runs forward shouting “Hurrah!” and overtakes him. Surrounded

by charging troops, Prince Andrew runs forward, now just twenty paces

from the French guns, so close that he sees the fear and anger on the

gunners’ faces. Prince Andrew is struck down; others seize the flag to

maintain the advance.

The battle is, however, lost. Later, Prince Andrew, now captured, lies

gravely wounded in a French dressing station. Napoleon visits the

injured Russians. Close to death, Prince Andrew is unmoved by the sight

of his erstwhile hero. Looking into Napoleon’s eyes, “Prince Andrew

thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life

which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of

death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.”

Tolstoy’s battle scenes are of the microcosmic actions upon which pivots

victory or defeat. These actions are not the function of the decisions

of generals or emperors; they are the contingent decisions of individual

officers and soldiers, like the courageous if ultimately futile charge

of Prince Andrew. In an earlier chapter, the Battle of Schöngrabern is

turned by the decision of one man, Timókhin, to charge the French lines,

armed only with a sword. Such actions, almost random in appearance, are

for Tolstoy what matters, not grand strategy or great men.

In his seminal essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin analyzed

Tolstoy’s view of history. War and Peace, according to Berlin,

illustrates Tolstoy’s skepticism of an account that suggested that

events were under the control of leaders, states or governments. Such

history, Tolstoy believed, accounted for not more than 0.001 percent of

human affairs; it was, moreover, basically false. At Austerlitz, the

Russian czar and his generals are described standing on a hilltop

observing their troops descend into the thick fog enveloping the valley

beneath them. It is a figurative illustration of their true knowledge,

Tolstoy suggests. The chief Russian general, Kutúzov, enjoys heroic

stature in Russian history, but Tolstoy portrays him groaning helplessly

as his troops are attacked by surprise. Only Prince Andrew is decisive

in response to the emerging catastrophe, and his response is not to

issue orders but to seize the fallen flag and advance.

In Tolstoy’s descriptions, real life was far too complex and contingent

to be controlled by those at the summit of the pyramid. In fact, they

could not be expected to understand it at all, because they were not

part of it or close enough to witness it. Those who claimed such

understanding were either naive or were claiming knowledge for some

other purpose—to wield power, for instance. In fact, as War and Peace

shows, it is those at the base of the pyramid who make history, even if

they do not know it.

This chimes with our own intuition. Battles are as life: the strange and

inconstant mix of circumstance, random events and our own volition. Each

is crucial; none is separable. The abstraction from this mix into a

linear, polished narrative is inherently false. Equally false is any

claim that human action is driven by a singular motive, such as the

requirement to “maximize utility,” as some economists would claim. Under

scrutiny, any event, however great or small, is revealed as a fantastic

and hugely complex mix of influence and causation, some inconsequential,

some crucial. There is no base, no bottom to these causes and effects,

all are contingent upon others.

Tolstoy’s hostility was directed against those who pretended that

history was of great men and their decisions, a depiction he believed

fundamentally inaccurate and dishonest. But it is not only historians

who must reduce. Governments too are required to aggregate the world’s

incredible complexity into simple truths, to take the billions of

actions and wishes of their populations and claim that they can be

aggregated. This adduces no malign purpose to governments; they have no

alternative but to reduce in this way. They are required to do so in

order to claim that they understand, in order that they can produce

policies and decisions that offer to arbitrate the complexity.

“The Hedgehog and the Fox” is celebrated as a superb analysis of

Tolstoy’s writing and historical views. Oddly, however, Berlin does not

explore how Tolstoy’s writing, and the view of history intrinsic in it,

informed the writer’s politics, instead concentrating on the more

mystical aspects of Tolstoy’s thought. For Tolstoy believed that all

authority impeded the power of independent action by individuals—and

that only the individual had any authentic understanding of their

circumstance and how to change it. Tolstoy was an anarchist.

Tolstoy believed that it was those at the base of the pyramid—the foot

soldiers on the battlefields of Borodino or Austerlitz—who in fact made

history. The “great men” and generals who claimed to understand it had

not a clue. For Tolstoy, it was ironic that historians looked to the

generals and leaders for the decisions that determined history, rather

than the infantry. More ironic still was that the infantrymen did so

too.

The dominating thought-systems of the twentieth century hold only

fragmentary clues to the necessary remedies today. Communism offered a

spurious equality at the sacrifice of individual liberty. Capitalism

offers liberty at the expense of social justice, harmony and that

essential sense of individual or shared meaning.

But both left and right do, however, offer hints of a new and stronger

philosophy. The greatest strength of the right has been its appeal to

individual enterprise and self-expression, freed of the deadening burden

of government. That of the left is its recognition that we are not

separated from one another, that community embraces and succors all,

opposing injustice, inequality and a merely selfish and ultimately

divisive individualism. We are all better off together.

But both the economic theory underlying capitalism and communist

orthodoxy offer a very limited and ultimately negative view of the

human. In neoclassical economic theory, it is claimed without evidence

that people are basically self-seeking, that they want above all the

satisfaction of their material desires. The ultimate objective of

mankind is economic growth, and that is maximized only through raw, and

lightly regulated, competition. If the rewards of this system are spread

unevenly, that is a necessary price. Others on the planet are to be

regarded as either customers, competitors or factors of production.

Effects upon the planet itself are mere “externalities” to the model,

with no reckoning of the cost—at least for now. Nowhere in this analysis

appear factors such as human cooperation, love, trust, compassion or

hatred, curiosity or beauty. Nowhere appears the concept of meaning.

What cannot be measured is ignored. But the trouble is that once our

basic needs for shelter and food have been met, such factors may be the

most important of all.

In Marxist theory, the proletariat should eventually be freed of all

burdens, including of government. But in practice, all communist systems

rapidly established and maintained huge bureaucracies, with their

privileged elites, to instruct the people on their best interests. Never

were they to be asked what these might be. Those who offered a

dissenting voice were repressed, often with great cruelty. In

suppressing the anarchists of the Spanish republic, or the Bolsheviks of

the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921, the Communists showed their true

colors. Communism could never mean freedom from authority. That

revolution would never be permitted. The people were not to be trusted.

The methods discussed here instead imply a different view of mankind.

That people can be trusted successfully to manage their own affairs, to

negotiate with one another, to regulate their own societies from the

bottom up—by moral rules, rather than coercion and punishment. That

there is more available than the ugliness, conflict and emptiness of

contemporary society. Cynics will argue that such trust is misplaced,

and that conflict is inevitable. But the evidence from the few occasions

when people have been given true agency over their affairs suggests

rather the opposite: respect, consensus, or at worst an acceptance of

difference. If all authority disappeared today, our current condition of

mistrust and fear would guarantee the “war of all against all.” But the

practices offered here would, with time, build trust anew. It even may

be built into something never experienced before, something

extraordinary and beautiful—a new society, governed by itself.

The preparation of this book has concluded just as something

extraordinary has begun. In the Middle East, mass protests have driven

dictators from power in Tunisia and Egypt. In Libya, an uprising, with

outside military support, has deposed the repressive Gadhafi regime. And

in America and Europe, mass popular protest has broken out against the

injustice of the current political and economic system. The Occupy Wall

Street movement may currently comprise only a few thousand people, but

it seems to represent a much wider disillusionment and anger with the

status quo. As I write these words, the protests have spread across the

United States and Western Europe.

There is a whiff of revolution in the air—and not only in the Middle

East. We have perhaps arrived at one of those moments of history where

fundamental change becomes possible, as people awaken to the profound

injustices, but also incapability, of the current dispensation. In an

echo of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts in scientific belief,

the old paradigm of politics and economics is appearing more and more

inadequate. A new paradigm cries out to emerge.

As this book has argued, protest alone is unlikely to be sufficient when

the political system, although ostensibly democratic, has been co-opted

by the rich and the powerful. It is implausible to expect such a system

to deliver, for instance, necessary banking reform, when banking CEOs

enjoy far greater access to the political system than ordinary voters.

Just read the newspapers.

Instead, a new system needs to be created. What that system should

consist of has been laid out in this book. At Zuccotti Park in downtown

Manhattan, where the Occupy Wall Street protests are centered, some of

the attributes of a new system are already evident.

Instead of a hierarchy, decisions among the protesters are made by

consensus. Everyone who wants to gets a chance to speak. Each night, a

“general assembly” of the protesters is convened. There are no leaders,

but it is organized. And, amazingly, everyone respects the common rules.

When one speaks, nobody interrupts. Though the police have banned

bullhorns and microphones, across the square other people echo the words

of the speaker so that everyone of the hundreds present can listen.

Paradoxically, this has had the effect of binding the group more closely

together. Even the act of one person speaking is now, thanks to the

“human mike” more involving. Astonishingly, it feels like an intimate

conversation, but among hundreds of people.

But the drawbacks of this form of protest are also evident. There is no

list of demands. No one claims to speak for all the protesters, so there

is no single common message save, perhaps, “Enough!” This has confounded

many commentators and journalists, accustomed perhaps to more directed

and traditional forms of protest. What do you want? they ask. But if one

would-be leader were to stand up with a manifesto, others would surely

protest that no one has the right to sum up their demands. As I heard

one man exclaim, with some passion, “I don’t want anyone to speak for

me!”

A more succinct plea for direct involvement in politics and our future

could hardly be spoken.

But for such protests to amount to anything, change must be inspired

that can be transmitted across the system, and not confined to a few

thousand idealists on the streets. It must be change that anyone, with a

will, can undertake.

What might this consist of?

The economy can be changed from the inside out by altering the basic

model of the company, from privately owned profit-seeking, to

cooperative benefit. Cooperative companies, owned by their employees

(or, rather, partners) can be both competitive but also fair, and more

fulfilling for all involved. They can hardwire justice as part of their

construction—for instance, by declaring a commitment that the highest

paid employee is paid no more than, say, five times the lowest. By

making every worker a partner, they can create an entirely different

culture of the workplace, where everyone has a voice—and a stake—in

success, in contrast to the latent antagonism between highly paid bosses

and minimally paid employees.

Then the choice is for all of us to encourage such companies with our

patronage. Thus, this culture, this new way of doing things, can spread,

an organic change to the nature of the economy. As cooperative companies

multiply, they can form collaborative networks, where

business-to-business transactions reinforce the trend, which one day may

then become the norm. The genesis of such networks is already visible,

in efforts like solidarityNYC.org, a website that lists the many

businesses that promote values—sustainability, economic justice—other

than mere profit. Already, the site covers a vast range of goods and

services, from food basics to financial services. It can be done, but it

involves a choice.

Other changes are possible too, though none will come about by the

natural forces of the market—or by government legislation.

How might we replace the currently iniquitous and risky financial

sector, where risk taking has been insured by the taxpayer but the

profits go only to the bankers, a system that is not only grossly

unfair, but also has put the entire global economy in jeopardy? In

Canada, the third largest national bank is a credit union. Illustrating

the stranglehold of the profit-seeking banks on Washington, such a

national bank is all but impossible in the U.S., such are the obstacles

in federal legislation, the result of intensive and wholly

self-interested lobbying by the commercial banks.

But it is not implausible to imagine a cooperatively owned bank that is

not only national, but international, and able to reap the economies of

scale currently enjoyed only by the big private banks. Cynics will

snigger at the idealism of such a venture, but the cynic, as Oscar Wilde

once observed, knows only the price of everything, not its value. No one

pretends that the challenge is easy, but to imagine it is a start.

It is the same story with politics or, to put it more accurately, the

method of deciding our future. It is hard to find anyone in America who

still believes in the current political system. Indeed, even politicians

must attack “politics as usual” in order to stand a chance of being

elected. Yet here too, there is widespread cynicism that any improvement

is possible. The problem seems just too big. We shrug and sigh with

deepening despair, but nothing is done to change it.

Taking control of our affairs must start with doing just that. The

necessary change will not come from above, however much we wish for it.

The habit of taking a full part in decisions about the things that

matter to us must start small, like the participatory decision-making at

Zuccotti Park. At the schools our children attend, parents and teachers

can form collective groups to debate the school’s business. Whatever the

rules of the school, those that run it, including the local authorities,

must pay heed

The same can be done at other local institutions, including hospitals or

parks. Participation—and government of our own affairs—starts to become

habitual and the norm. Local residents can come together to debate local

concerns, from muggings to tree-planting. This is how self-government

can begin.

And this is key. At no point does this book propose violent revolution,

or the overthrow of the existing system, or indeed anything illegal

except perhaps in resisting the most vicious repression. This is a

revolution that can, and perhaps should, come about gradually, changing

minds and customs day by day. It is a revolution that will come about

through small actions, starting with a few, but then spreading to the

many, a revolution that will come about through demonstrating the value

of this new way of doing things—show, don’t tell—and neither forcing

others nor lecturing them, and least of all ramming change down

unyielding throats.

Gradually then, and by force of example, self-government of the many by

the many can become the norm. Networks of cooperation will emerge,

reinforcing positive change elsewhere. Borders need not be an obstacle.

In a highly connected world, they are arguably less and less relevant.

The most effective international networks of the twenty-first century

have been terrorists and criminal syndicates. They have already

recognized and exploited the true nature of the world today. We must

replace them with better and more powerful bonds of mutual cooperation,

untrammeled by archaic boundaries.

Ultimately, such bonds offer a greater stability than the fragile if

logical-seeming architecture of state-based interaction, which is in

fact secured upon very uncertain foundations: the false calculus of a

state’s “interests.” Instead, these would be deeper and broader flows of

collaboration, comprising the real and enacted interests and ideals of

peoples cooperating, en masse. Indeed, the failure of the state-based

system in managing our most worrying problems—economic volatility,

climate change—indicates that the system itself may now be the problem,

for it is more perpetuating this instability than solving it.

Again, this is not to propose the abolition of the international

diplomatic system, or the demolition of the United Nations. Instead, it

is about a more fundamental shift in our models—and practice—of human

cooperation. But it is a shift comprising the doing of a new way, slowly

replacing the old, simply by being better and rendering the earlier

obsolete.

After working within government, I stopped believing that protest or

campaigning can deliver real justice and enduring change, even if such

methods can call attention to urgent need. The current system is far too

deeply entrenched. Small but important battles for justice may be

won—for instance, to legalize gay marriage, but overall the war is still

being won by those who put profit before people, exploitation over the

environment, and who claim states matter more than the peoples who make

them. Sorry to say, but those who believe that others should be led,

told or coerced, not inspired, are winning. These cynics are far fewer

in number than those who want a better way. But they have the better

weapons—political access and the abiding power of money over numbers.

And their most powerful weapon is secret—it is our own acquiescence and

belief in the immutability of the system.

In her brilliant analysis of the recent financial collapse, and how the

irresponsible actions of a tiny number of bankers ruined the livelihoods

of millions, the Financial Times journalist Gillian Tett offers a

compelling hypothesis of how the disaster came about: “In most

societies, elites try to maintain their power not simply by garnering

wealth, but also by dominating the mainstream ideologies, in terms of

both what is said and what is not discussed. Social ‘silences’ serve to

maintain power structures, in ways that participants often barely

understand themselves let alone plan.”[177]

Somehow, the neat logic of neoclassical economics and representative

democracy has created a mental cage for our minds, and ambitions. In

theory, such systems are ideal; but in practice, their imperfections are

ever more evident. And yet the theoretical logic is so often repeated,

it is as if an insurmountable wall surrounds our imagination: We can see

nothing beyond, and dare not even conceive it. We have been numbed into

inaction.

In the current way of things, the blatant selfishness, neglect and

cruelty of the few is almost easier to stomach than the feeble apathy of

those who claim that nothing better is possible, and that this is just

the way things are, ordained by unarguable theory if not by some supreme

power. This is exactly how the silence is perpetuated; this is exactly

how the status quo is maintained.

Such numbed passivity is a denial of our very humanity—and moreover

leaves the field empty for the foe. It is inhuman to tolerate the rank

and visible suffering of others. To believe the patent falsehood that

the few who rule know better than the many is as demeaning to the rulers

as to the ruled. It is pathetic to witness the injustice of the status

quo and yet do nothing, however slight, to amend it. Above all, this

inaction in the face of inequity and looming crisis is to render

ourselves less than we are.

There is thrill in the fight, even if there must also be fear. As

Spartacus gloriously put it in the eponymous movie, “I’d rather be here,

a free man among brothers, facing a long march and a hard fight, than to

be the richest citizen in Rome, fat with food he didn’t work for, and

surrounded by slaves.”

But this adventure will not happen of its own accord.

This book is not proposing a revolution against government, but one in

our own attitudes. The individual is the most effective agent in

altering their immediate circumstances. Thus, they are the most

effective agent, when acting collectively, in effecting global change—in

anything. Moreover, action opens a possibility that is strange and

unfamiliar, a world without limits: to realize at last fully what one

is, what we are as humans. This is not an immutable or logical force

that we can simply observe and idly comment upon. It requires summoning

up our own dark forces, our fear, our hunger, our ideals: It requires

action.

The alternatives are grim to contemplate. The slow but inevitable

decline in state power can be arrested, but only by governments

acquiring more power, thereby constraining our own freedom and

exacerbating many of the pernicious trends already here identified. The

growing sense of disorder will attract those who offer to calm the

stormy waters, proclaiming order and certainty in place of chaos.

Twenty-first-century fascism probably won’t look much like

twentieth-century fascism. We are too inoculated—one hopes—against the

crude semiotics of the swastika and black shirts and the devastating

violence of the Holocaust. It will come in a different form, cleverly

argued and convincingly presented. Instead of Nazis gathering in Munich

beer halls, it may start on a website, for technology is indifferent to

democrats or fascists. Indeed, jihadist terrorists share with

twentieth-century European fascists their absolutism and willingness to

sacrifice innocent life in the construction of a greater society—and

they are not alone in this inhuman calculus. Meanwhile, a new breed

emerges of European anti-immigration politicians and their American

analogues, with smart suits and whitened teeth. As the disorder grows,

so too, with inevitability, will emerge those who promise to tame it

with authoritarianism and, inevitable but admitted only sotto voce,

coercive force.

The choice will become clearer: to cede our voice to those louder, to

watch while governments, corporations and criminal networks joust for

control, or to join battle for agency over affairs that are rightfully

our own.

There is no easy answer to the problems that confront humanity in the

twenty-first century; it would be foolish to place our faith in one form

of management—government—to solve them. Whether environmental

degradation, incipient political violence, economic volatility or a host

of other dangers, the evidence is stark of government’s waning powers.

If others are not to exploit this instability, there is but one

alternative: to step in ourselves.

The goal cannot be defined neatly, as a concrete system or a state of

affairs. It is instead a method, a process, a means—which is itself an

end. And by its nature, no one can define where that process may lead.

Critics can paint that blank canvas with nightmares; I can suggest

instead a future of cooperation, justice, mutual understanding and a

deeper sense of purpose upon this crowded planet. If this path is taken,

a vista of possibility may open up, beyond the dull limits of the ideas

that today dominate our conception of society and ourselves. The limits

are of conventional thought; the possibility is of us, ourselves: the

human.

Somewhere along the way, anaesthetized by vacuous but incessant

politics, ubiquitous advertising and the flickering screen, we have

forgotten that we are at our best in adventure, compassion for others

and the aspiration for something greater. When confronted by danger and

unfathomable challenge, as we surely are, only then are we truly alive.

Words like “meaning,” “purpose” and “solidarity” capture a small sense

of this richness, but in fact it comprises much, much more. It is

nothing less than the human project, lived to the fullest. No longer a

life of mere silent acceptance, but instead the imagining and

construction of a true and direct democracy of the people, a vibrant but

just economy and, with these prizes, a better world.

Even failure is better than acquiescence.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

More than a dozen people helped with the research for this book over the

five years I spent preparing it. I would like particularly to thank Tait

Foster, who gave me a great deal of excellent, prompt and accurate

research help.

There were many others who read the book, listened to its ideas and

provided suggestions and helpful criticism. Many people, therefore,

should share the credit for the book, and I thank them sincerely, while

all errors of course remain my own. They include:

Rob Akam, Ardian Arifaj, Stephanie Blair, Lyle Berman, Lili Birnbaum,

John Brademas, Jake Camara, Royston Coppenger, David Cornwell, Neill

Denny, Joy de Menil, Anna Dupont, Mark Earls, Susanna Emmet, Nick

Fraser, Karl French, Sasha Frère-Jones, Katie Genereux, Ed Harriman,

Arya Iranpour, Ian Irvine, Mladen Joksic, Tina Kraja, Jordan Kyle,

Alnoor Ladha, Horatia Lawson, Ann Lee, Neil Levine, Andrew Lewis,

Professor Catherine Lu, Joshua Marston, Catherine Martin, Charlotte

Meyer, Professor Laila Parsons, Vincent Pouliot, Catherine Ross,

Clementine Ross, Ivo Ross, Karmen Ross, Oliver Ross, Paddy (Alan) Ross,

Victoria (Tori) Rowan, Jeffrey Rubin, Iain Scollay, Imran Shafi,

Angharad Thain, Inigo Thomas, Professor Rob Wisnovsky and Melissa

Withers.

I want to thank my colleagues at, and the board members of, Independent

Diplomat, and Whitney Ellsworth in particular, who have been very

patient in tolerating the preparation of this book, and the voluble

expression of its ideas, sometimes in very primitive form. I am

profoundly grateful to my wife, Karmen, who has accompanied me in the

long journey of this book, and remains, as ever, my chief inspiration

and most acute critic. More than anyone, she has helped me cut through

the wooliness and hypocrisies of political convention, including most

particularly my own, to the necessary truths of injustice.

I am especially grateful to David Rosenthal at Blue Rider Press for

supporting this book, and for his acute advice and criticism, and to

Aileen Boyle and other colleagues at Blue Rider, and to Dorian Hastings,

for their rapid and sensitive encouragement and support. And I thank my

editor at Simon & Schuster (UK), Mike Jones, who shepherded the book

when it must have seemed a doomed venture. I’m deeply indebted to my

agents in the UK and U.S., respectively Jonny Geller at Curtis Brown and

George Lucas at Inkwell Management. Without their help and

encouragement, at times in dark days, this book would not have come into

being.

[1] A crucial factor behind the crisis wrought by the selling of “credit

default options (or swaps)” in the 2008 financial crisis was that these

products, initially designed to spread risk, in actual practice obscured

it, because purchasers of the CDOs did not properly understand the risk

they comprised.

[2] “The Flash Crash: Autopsy,” Economist, Oct. 7, 2010.

[3] Alex Evans of Chatham House originated this term.

[4] “Food and Water Driving 21^(st)-Century African Land Grab,”

Observer, Mar. 7, 2010.

[5] “Immeasurable loss,” Economist, Nov. 12, 2008.

[6] As reported in Financial Times, Nov. 9, 2010.

[7] State Department Assistant Secretary for Human Rights Mike Posner,

reported in “Clinton Defends Human Rights Approach,” New York Times,

Dec. 14, 2009.

[8] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Takes Stock of Its Diminished Influence,” Sept.

13, 2010,

turtlebay.foreignpolicy.com

.

[9] Parag Khanna, “Future Shock: Welcome to the New Middle Ages,”

Financial Times, Dec. 29, 2010.

[10] Timothy Garton Ash, “Timothy Garton Ash in Davos: Illiberal

Capitalism and New World Disorder,” posted to his listserve, Jan. 28,

2011.

[11] The head of the British armed services, Sir David Richards, told

the BBC in November 2010 that Al Qaeda could only be “contained” not

defeated, saying that you cannot defeat “an idea.” BBC website, “West

Cannot Defeat Al Qaeda, Says U.K. Forces Chief,” Nov. 14, 2010.

[12] “Climate Change Diplomacy: Back from the Brink,” Economist, Dec.

16, 2010.

[13] The so-called Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

[14] “As Jobs Fade Away,” Economist, May 6, 2010.

[15] Bob Diamond, the chief executive of Barclays Bank, said, “There was

a period of remorse and apology; that period needs to be over.” His

expected bonus that year was over £3 million.

[16] Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

[17] “China to Alter Taxes in Attempt to Cut Wealth Gap,” Financial

Times, Apr. 20, 2011.

[18] “India’s Boom Fails to Feed the Hungry,” Financial Times, Dec. 23,

2010.

[19] The letter set out the legal justification—self-defense—under

Article 51 of the UN Charter for the United Kingdom’s participation in

the allied invasion.

[20] Economist, May 6, 2010.

[21] AFP, “Al-Qaeda Vows to Continue Parcel Bomb Attacks,” Nov. 20,

2010.

[22]

C. J. Chivers, The Gun (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

[23] Small Arms Survey (Geneva: Graduate Institute of International and

Development Studies, 2009).

[24] Steve Graham, “From Helmand to Merseyside: Unmanned Drones and the

Militarization of UK Policing,” Open Democracy, Sept. 27, 2010;

www.opendemocracy.net

.

[25] Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “Monitoring America” and “Top

Secret America,” Washington Post, Dec. 20, 2010;

projects.washingtonpost.com

.

[26] Mark Easton, “Life in UK ‘Has Become Lonelier,’” BBC website,

news.bbc.co.uk

; see Mark Easton’s blog.

[27] John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature and

the Need for Social Connection (New York: Norton, 2008).

[28] As an official working during the first Gulf War with Iraq in 1991,

I had as one of my duties to count Saddam’s tanks and soldiers in such a

way as to affirm the claim, not strictly true but made by a politician

and therefore requiring some kind of validation, that Iraq had “the

third largest army in the world.” This claim could only be “proven” if

all of the reserve forces of the Iraqi army were included in the count,

but were ignored in counting the armies of other competitors for the

third place slot (India, the United States, Russia).

[29] “Iraq Warns of More Suicide Missions,” BBC website, Mar. 29, 2003.

[30] Dexter Filkins, The Forever War (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).

[31] BBC website, Apr. 5, 2003;

news.bbc.co.uk

.

[32] See, for example, Robert Pape, “Suicide Terrorism and Democracy,”

Cato Institute, Policy Analysis No. 582, Nov. 1, 2006, and other such

arguments by Pape.

[33] See, for instance, Assaf Moghadam, “Motives for Martyrdom: Al

Qaida, Salafi Jihad, and the Spread of Suicide Attacks,” International

Security 33:3, 2009.

[34] The PKK in Turkey fights for a Kurdish homeland.

[35] Max Hastings, Retribution: The Battle for Japan 1944–45 (New York:

Vintage, 2009).

[36] See “Setback for U.S. Mortgage Sector,” Financial Times, April 30,

2010, quoting a study of the same date by the Kellogg School of

Management at Northwestern University.

[37] “A Framework for Pro-environmental Behaviors,” Department for

Environment, Food and Rural Affairs DEFRA), 2008;

www.defra.gov.uk

.

[38] Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg and Linda Steg, “The Spreading of

Disorder,” Science Express, Nov. 20, 2008.

[39] Brooks Barnes, “Claudette Colvin: From Footnote to Fame in Civil

Rights History,” New York Times, Nov. 26, 2009.

[40] David J. Garrow, quoted in Barnes, “Claudette Colvin: From Footnote

to Fame in Civil Rights History.”

[41] In this book, itself influential, Malcolm Gladwell suggests that a

few highly connected people influence the choices of everyone else, what

he calls the “Law of the Few.” Another book—The Influentials—similarly

claims that “one American in 10 tells the other 9 how to vote, where to

eat, and what to buy.”

[42] The picture can be found online at

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/28/us/politics/20080828_OBAMA_PANO.html?scp=2&sq=obama%20denver%20speech&st=cse.

[43] OpenSecrets.org.

[44] Morning Edition, NPR, Feb. 9, 2009.

[45] Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American

Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001).

[46] Horst Schlämmer, a mock politician played by a well-known German

comedian.

[47] “Before Election, Not a Voter Was Stirring,” New York Times, Aug.

20, 2009.

[48] OpenSecrets.org.

[49] “The Road to Riches Is Called K Street,” Washington Post, June 22,

2005.

[50] “How BP Drafted Brussels’ Climate Legislation,” www.Spinwatch.org,

Dec. 15, 2010.

[51] This trend is well documented in many democratic systems. See, for

instance, Peter Mair and Ingried van Biezen, “Party Membership in Twenty

European Democracies: 1980–2000,” Party Politics, Jan. 2001; Robert

Putnam, Democracies in Flux: The Evolution of Social Capital in

Contemporary Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); and most

recently, Paul Whiteley, “Is the Party Over? The Decline of Party

Activism and Membership across the Democratic World,” paper presented at

University of Manchester conference, April 2009.

[52] The source is worldpublicopinion.org, whose survey “World Public

Opinion on Democracy,” a twenty-country global public opinion poll on

democracy and governance, found that in every nation polled, publics

support the principles of democracy. At the same time, in nearly every

nation, majorities are dissatisfied with how responsive their government

is to the will of the people. For a more detailed analysis, see:

www.worldpublicopinion.org

=

[53] “Cuomo Accepts Millions from the Interests He Assails,” New York

Times, June 23, 2010.

[54] Senator Fritz Hollings, interviewed on PBS NewsHour. [NEED DATE;

NOT FOUND (about K Street/lobbyists]

[55] Center for Responsive Politics.

[56] See Nina Bernstein, “City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells with Its

Own,” New York Times, Dec. 27, 2008.

[57] BBC News. [NEED DATE?]

[58] One of the clients of The Gabriel Company, headed by Edward

Gabriel, former U.S. Ambassador to Morocco is, of course, Morocco (U.S.

Department of Justice, Foreign Agents Registration Act [FARA] listings).

[59] “American Lobbyists Work for Ivorian Leader,” New York Times, Dec.

23, 2010.

[60] “U.S. Approved Trade with Blacklisted Nations,” New York Times,

Dec. 23, 2010.

[61] “While Warning about Fat, U.S. Pushes Cheese Sales,” New York

Times, Nov. 6, 2010.

[62] Private Eye, Mar. 18, 2011.

[63] “Some Philanthropists Are No Longer Content to Work Quietly,” New

York Times, Nov. 7, 2008.

[64] Urban Institute, National Center for Charitable Statistics.

[65] Grant Jordan and William Maloney, “The Rise of Protest Business in

Britain,” in J. W. van Deth, ed., Private Groups and Public Life (New

York: Routledge, 1997).

[66] “At National Review, a Threat to Its Reputation for Erudition,” New

York Times, Nov. 17, 2008.

[67] “The Daily Me,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 2009.

[68] “The Big Sort,” Economist, June 19, 2008 .

[69] Though there is not the space here to explore this phenomenon

fully, this sorting—or to put it more bluntly, segregation—by political

views, which also occurs according to income, religion and race, is a

characteristic of complex systems. Economist Thomas Schelling won the

Nobel prize in economics for explaining how the choice made by a few,

say, Democrats, to live in a particular location can, over time,

transform or “tip” a hitherto mixed neighborhood into one that is

uniformly of one political persuasion. Even if individuals are tolerant

at the micro level, over time a neighborhood will become segregated, a

phenomenon called “micro level tolerance; macro level segregation.”

[70] I was the strategy coordinator at the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK)

from 2003 to 2004.

[71] The deaths were later found to have been accidental.

[72] Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org.

[73] Fareed Zakaria, “What America Has Lost: It’s Clear We Overreacted

to 9/11,” Newsweek, Sept. 4, 2010.

[74] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary

Communities That Arise in Disasster (New York,: Viking, 2009).

[75] Letter from Professor Robert H. Wade Financial Times, Jan. 4, 2010.

[76] “From Behind Bars, Madoff Spins His Story,” Financial Times, Apr.

8, 2011.

[77] SEC, Office of Inspector-General Report, case number OIG-509;

www.sec.gov

.

[78] See, for instance, “Report Details How Madoff’s Web Ensnared

S.E.C.,” New York Times, Sept. 3, 2009.

[79] “Chief Regulator Resigns after Strong Criticism,” Financial Times,

May 28, 2010.

[80] online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/MarkopolosTestimony20090203.pdf.

[81] Joe Nocera, “Madoff Had Accomplices: His Victims,” New York Times,

Mar. 13, 2009.

[82] The full name of the bill is the “Wall Street Reform and Consumer

Protection Act of 2009.”

[83] “Wall Street to Sidestep Volcker Rule,” Financial Times, Nov. 10,

2010.

[84] Letter from Professor Anat Admati of Stanford University and

nineteen others, “Healthy Banking System Is the Goal, Not Profitable

Banks,” Financial Times, Nov. 9, 2010.

[85] Clive Crook, “We Have Failed to Muffle the Banks,” Financial Times,

Sept. 12, 2010.

[86] “Dimon Warns of Bank ‘Nail in Coffin,’” Financial Times, March 30,

2011.

[87] “The Bipartisanship Racket,” New York Times, Dec. 19, 2010.

[88] See Gary Wolf, “Why Craig’s List Is Such a Mess,” Wired, Aug. 24,

2009.

[89] Mark Pesce at the Personal Democracy Forum, New York City, 2008.

[90] The New York Times reported that “Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old

teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa.,

posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a

pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption ‘Drunken

Pirate.’ After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school

told her the photo was ‘unprofessional,’ and the dean of Millersville

University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was

promoting drinking in virtual view of her underage students. As a

result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied

her a teaching degree.” Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of

Forgetting,” New York Times, July 19, 2010.

[91] The Business and Human Rights Council is one example.

[92] www.sourcemap.org.

[93] “From Behind Bars, Madoff Spins His Story,” Financial Times, Apr.

8, 2011.

[94] That NGO is International Crisis Group, whose local researcher,

Ardian Arifaj, contributed to the preparation of this section; see the

full Crisis Group report on the 2004 violence at their website,

www.crisisgroup.org.

[95] Eight Serbs and eleven Albanians were killed in the violence;

International Crisis Group.

[96] Kosovo became a state on Feb. 17, 2008. Independent Diplomat has

advised various of Kosovo’s governments and the multiparty negotiating

team in this process.

[97] An international embargo was in theory supposed to stop arms

supplies to both sides, but its enthusiastic enforcement by Britain,

France and others had the principal effect of denying arms to the

Republicans. Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, meanwhile, breached the

embargo to support the Francoists with impunity. A similar situation

arose during the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s when a UN arms

embargo, proposed and enforced by the UK, U.S. and others, failed to

diminish the military effectiveness of the genocidal armies of the

Bosnian Serbs (mainly because they already enjoyed the considerable

military resources of the former Yugoslav army). The UN embargo,

however, considerably hindered the defenses of their victims, the

Bosnian Muslims and Croats. The effect of that embargo therefore, as

with Spain in the 1930s, was to deliver a military advantage to the

fascist aggressor. In the 1930s, this was indeed the intent.

[98] Anthony Beevor, The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War

1936–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).

[99] In its first ten years of operation, the court has failed to secure

any convictions.

[100] www.notonourwatchproject.org.

[101] Edmund Sanders, “Is the Darfur Bloodshed Genocide? Opinions

Differ,” Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2009.

[102] Rob Crilly has made this accusation in his book Saving Darfur,

Everyone’s Favourite African War (London: Reportage Press, 2010); see

also:

news.bbc.co.uk

.

[103] The laughably named lordsoftheblog.net.

[104] “Chinese Communist Party Opens Online Forum,” Financial Times,

Sept. 14, 2010, including quotation from Russell Leigh Moses, a

Beijing-based political analyst.

[105] “Athens on the Net,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 2009.

[106] www.seeclickfix.com.

[107] BBC News website. [ provide URL, date?]

[108] In American prisons, the proliferation of smart phones has allowed

criminals to continue to organize drug trafficking and gang activity

outside even while incarcerated; Facebook, Twitter and e-mail

listservees were used to coordinate recent protests across several

prisons (New York Times, “Outlawed, Cellphones Are Thriving in Prisons,”

Jan. 2, 2011).

[109] Alan Boswell, “Sudan’s Government Crushed Protests by Embracing

Internet,” McClatchy Newspapers, Apr. 7, 2011.

[110] “China’s Censors Tackle and Trip over the Internet,” New York

Times, Apr. 7, 2010.

[111] At the Personal Democracy Forum, New York City, June 2010.

[112] Jeffrey Rosen, “Google’s Gatekeepers,” New York Times, Nov. 30,

2008.

[113] “The Daily Me,” New York Times, Mar. 19, 2009.

[114] “U.S. Warns of Terror Groups’ Western Recruits,” Financial Times,

Oct. 6, 2010.

[115] The so-called digital divide.

[116] See www.americaspeaks.org: “Unified New Orleans Plan”; this site

also has many other examples of deliberative democracy in action.

[117] Cass Sunstein, Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sunstein is now an adviser to

the Obama White House.

[118] “How to Get a Better Informed European Public,” Financial Times,

June 3, 2009.

[119] A senior Labour government minister, Peter Hain, for instance,

chose Homage as “the book that changed my life” in the New Statesman.

[120] Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or Workers’ Party of

Marxist Unification.

[121] George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Harcourt, 2010), p. 104.

[122] Arendt coined the term, in describing Nazi Adolf Eichmann during

his trial: “the banality of evil.”

[123] Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101

and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).

[124] Benedict Carey, “Decades Later, Still Asking: Would I Pull That

Switch,” New York Times, July 1, 2008.

[125] Dr. Jerry M. Burger, “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey

Today?” American Psychologist, Jan. 2009.

[126] In former colonies that are now members of the British

Commonwealth, British representations are not known as embassies but as

High Commissions.

[127] Professor Joy Gordon, Invisible War: The United States and the

Iraq Sanctions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

[128] As the UK’s Middle East and Iraq “expert” at the UN from 1998 to

2002, I was required to read a thick folder of intelligence every day on

Iraq, its WMD and efforts to rearm. There was not a single report

suggesting a connection between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda, nor

would such a connection be plausible given the radically different

natures of these entities—one secular and Ba’athist, the other

fundamentalist and Islamist. The head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence

Service (often known as MI6) also confirmed the absence of connection.

[129] International Maritime Bureau.

[130] See, for instance, Alan Beattie, “Wealthy Countries Fail to Hit

Aid Target,” Financial Times, Feb., 16, 2010.

[131] “Millennium Goals” (editorial), Financial Times, Sept. 21, 2010.

[132] Full title De la manière de négocier avec les souverains, de

l’utilité des negotiations, du choix des ambassadeurs et des envoyez, et

des qualitez necessaries pour réussir dans ces employs.

[133] Unpublished research by Independent Diplomat.

[134] These arguments are more fully discussed in my earlier book

Independent Diplomat: Dispatches from an Unaccountable Elite.

[135] By contrast, an excellent account of the review conference is

online: Rebecca Johnson, “NPT: Challenging the Nuclear Powers’ Fiefdom,”

June 15, 2010;

www.opendemocracy.net

.

[136] See Alexander Golts, “An Illusory New START,” Moscow Times, Mar.

30, 2010.

[137] EastWest Institute, “Re-framing Nuclear De-Alert: Decreasing the

Operational Readiness of U.S. and Russian Arsenals,” 2009;

iis-db.stanford.edu

.

[138] Reported in ScienceDaily, Dec. 11, 2006, from the annual meeting

of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, where twin papers on

this topic by scientists from Rutgers University, the University of

Colorado at Boulder, and the University of California at Los Angeles

were announced.

[139] Ayman al-Zawahiri, The Exoneration: A Treatise Exonerating of the

Nation of the Pen and the Sword of the Denigrating Charge of Being

Irresolute and Weak (2008), referred to in Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, “Al

Qaeda’s Nuclear Ambitions,” Foreign Policy Nov. 16, 2010.

[140] See Seymour Hersh, “The Online Threat: Should We Be Worried About

Cyber War?” New Yorker, Nov. 1, 2010.

[141] See Niall Ferguson, “Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge

of Chaos,” Foreign Affairs, Mar./Apr. 2010.

[142] Professor Page teaches complexity theory at the University of

Michigan and presents the invaluable primer on complexity theory,

“Understanding Complexity” a DVD-based course from The Teaching Company.

[143] See www.commonsecurityclub.org.

[144] We’ve got time to help:

wevegottimetohelp.blogspot.com

/.

[145]

en.wikipedia.org

, citing M. K. Gandhi, Satyagraha in South Africa (Ahmedabad: Navajivan,

1928), pp. 109–10

[146]

en.wikipedia.org

, citing journalist Webb Miller.

[147] Judith Brown, the eminent historian of Gandhi, reaches a more

nuanced view of the Salt Satyagraha, and indeed Gandhi’s movement of

civil resistance, in her excellent essay “Gandhi and Civil Resistance in

India, 1917–47,” in Adam Roberts and Timothy Garton Ash, eds., Civil

Resistance and Power Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

The essay is well worth reading for those interested in judgments of the

effectiveness of Gandhi’s methods.

[148] Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare (New York: Penguin Books,

1961).

[149]

en.wikipedia.org

, citing Alain Gresh, “The Dream of Better World Is Back,” Le monde

diplomatique, May 8, 2009.

[150] The POLISARIO Front, the political representatives of the Sahrawi

people, is a client of Independent Diplomat.

[151] Nelson Santos, East Timor’s permanent representative to the United

Nations, in conversation with the author.

[152] “Group of Bed-Stuy Men, We Make Us Better, Escorts Pedestrians in

Wake of Robberies,” New York Daily News, Nov. 30, 2010.

[153] Guy Dinmore, “Naples Fights to Reclaim the Mafia Badlands,”

Financial Times, Sept. 27, 2010.

[154] Raghuram G. Rajan, Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still

Threaten the World Economy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,

2010).

[155] According to economist Raghuram Rajan’s calculations, for every

dollar of growth in income between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the

top 1 percent of households. The other 99 percent of American families

had to scrap over the 42 cents of loose change. The result was a country

as unequal as it had been just before the Wall Street crash of 1929—and

with much the same results. The Guardian, “What the £35,000 Cocktail

Taught Us,” August 3, 2010.

[156] Transcript and recording available at

www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk.

[157] “Case Study: How to Cope with a Slump in Demand,” Financial Times,

Dec. 23, 2010.

[158] See the review of Kotlikoff’s book: Martin Sandbu, “A Less

Wonderful Life for Bankers” Financial Times, Mar. 22, 2010.

[159] See Elinor Ostrom’s excellent “meta-research” article “A

Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action:

Presidential Address, American Political Science Association, 1997,”

American Political Science Review 92(1): 1–22.

[160] The Heritage Foundation published an interesting but not

comprehensive analysis of principles to observe in health care

cooperatives: Edmund Haislmaier , Dennis Smith and Nina Owcharenko,

“Healthcare Cooperatives, Doing It the Right Way” June 18, 2009,

available at

www.heritage.org

.

[161] ForestEthics.org.

[162] www.cdproject.net.

[163] “Banks Grow Wary of Environmental Risks,” New York Times, Aug. 30,

2010.

[164] See, for instance, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre

at www.business-humanrights.org, or www.climatecounts.org.

[165] This is a paraphrasing of what Bernard-Henri Lévy said during a

discussion at the New York Public Library on Sept. 16, 2008. It’s

possible that I recorded this statement incorrectly, in which case my

apologies to the reader and “BHL.”

[166] If in doubt about this question, please consult my testimony to

the Butler inquiry in 2004, and to the Chilcot inquiry in 2010, both

available at relevant websites, or upon request.

[167] Peter Singer, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World

Poverty (New York: Random House, 2009).

[168] www.thelifeyoucansave.com.

[169] Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the

21^(st) Century,” 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture, in Scandinavian

Political Studies 30:2, 2007.

[170] The new sanctions policy altered controls on exports to Iraq so

that everything was permitted except goods that appeared on a “control

list” of items that might be used for weapons manufacture. Previously,

nothing could be exported except goods which were expressly permitted,

case-by-case, by the UN sanctions committee (with some exceptions).

[171] You will find further discussion of these options on my personal

website, www.carneross.com, and in my opinion article “Let’s Boycott,

Isolate and Sabotage Gaddafi,” Financial Times, Mar. 10, 2011.

[172] I also recommend Mark Kurlansky’s Nonviolence: The History of a

Dangerous Idea (New York: Modern Library, 2009).

[173] See “Dutch Bankers’ Bonuses Axed by People Power,” Observer, Mar.

27, 2011.

[174] See “Helping Women Fight Back Against Street Harassment, Seconds

After It Occurs,” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2010.

[175] See this invaluable article on Stuxnet: Michael Joseph Gross, “A

Declaration of Cyber-War,” Vanity Fair, Apr. 2011.

[176] Quotations from Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, are from the Louise

and Aylmer Maude translation (New York: Macmillan, 1943).

[177] Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J. P. Morgan and

How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial

Catastrophe (New York: Free Press, 2009).