Thursday, March 15, 2012
Edge with Max 03.09.12
Friday, March 9, 2012
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Colbert: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Stephen Colbert | Neil deGrasse Tyson | A Discussion about Science, Society, & The Universe | 1.29.10
Saturday, March 3, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Edge: Infinite Stupidity
[MARK PAGEL:] I'm an evolutionary biologist, and my work draws me to the big events that have shaped the history of the world. Some of these we agree upon, and others are right under our noses, and yet we take them for granted and we may not appreciate what a force they've been in our evolution. One of those is the human capacity for culture. It might easily be the most important event in the history of life.
It might be useful, with such a statement like that, to review some of these big events. Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what's fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of our planet, life arose. That life was simple replicators, things that could make copies of themselves. And we think that life was a little bit like the bacteria we see on earth today. It would be the ancestors of the bacteria we see on earth today.
That life ruled the world for 2 billion years, and then about 1.5 billion years ago, a new kind of life emerged. These were the eukaryotic cells. They were a little bit different kind of cell from bacteria. And actually the kind of cells we are made of. And again, these organisms that were eukaryotes were single-celled, so even 1.5 billion years ago, we still just had single-celled organisms on earth. But it was a new kind of life.
It was another 500 million years before we had anything like a multicellular organism, and it was another 500 million years after that before we had anything really very interesting. So, about 500 million years ago, the plants and the animals started to evolve. And I think everybody would agree that this was a major event in the history of the world, because, for the first time, we had complex organisms.
After about 500 million years ago, things like the plants evolved, the fish evolved, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, birds, and eventually mammals. And then it was really just six or seven million years ago, within the mammals, that the lineage that we now call the hominins arose. And they would be direct descendants of us. And then, within that lineage that arose about six or seven million years ago, it was only about 200,000 years ago that humans finally evolved.
And so, this is really just 99.99 percent of the way through the history of this planet, humans finally arose. But in that 0.01 percent of life on earth, we've utterly changed the planet. And the reason is that, with the arrival of humans 200,000 years ago, a new kind of evolution was created. The old genetical evolution that had ruled for 3.8 billion years now had a competitor, and that new kind of evolution was ideas.
It was a true form of evolution, because now ideas could arise, and they could jump from mind to mind, without genes having to change. So, populations of humans could adapt at the level of ideas. Ideas could accumulate. We call this cumulative cultural adaptation. And so, cultural complexity could emerge and arise orders and orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
Now, I think most of us take that utterly for granted, but it has completely rewritten the way life evolves on this planet because, with the arrival of our species, everything changed. Now, a single species, using its idea evolution, that could proceed apace independently of genes, was able to adapt to nearly every environment on earth, and spread around the world where no other species had done that. All other species are limited to places on earth that their genes adapt them to. But we were able to adapt at the level of our cultures to every place on earth.
A lot of that sounds familiar to us. But what's hidden in there is this idea of idea evolution. And if it seems easy to us, it shouldn't, because no other species on earth has been capable of doing it. And I'm including in this our recent ancestors.
If we go back in our lineage 2 million years or so, there was a species known as homo erectus. Homo erectus is an upright ape that lived on the African savannah. It could make tools, but they were very limited tools, and those tools, the archaeological record tells us, didn't change for about 1.5 million years. That is, until about the time they went extinct. That is, they made the same tools over and over and over again, without any real changes to them.
If we move forward in time a little bit, it's not even clear that our very close cousins that we know are related to us 99.5 or 99.6 percent in the sequences of their genes, the Neanderthals, it's not even clear that they had what we call idea evolution. Sure enough, their tools that they made were more complex than our tools. But the 300,000 or so years that they spent in Europe, their toolkit barely changed. So there's very little evolution going on.
So there's something really very special about this new species, humans, that arose and invented this new kind of evolution, based on ideas. And so it's useful for us to ask, what is it about humans that distinguishes them? It must have been a tiny genetic difference between us and the Neanderthals because, as I said, we're so closely related to them genetically, a tiny genetic difference that had a vast cultural potential.
That difference is something that anthropologists and archaeologists call social learning. It's a very difficult concept to define, but when we talk about it, all of us humans know what it means. And it seems to be the case that only humans have the capacity to learn complex new or novel behaviors, simply by watching and imitating others. And there seems to be a second component to it, which is that we seem to be able to get inside the minds of other people who are doing things in front of us, and understand why it is they're doing those things. These two things together, we call social learning.
Many people respond that, oh, of course the other animals can do social learning, because we know that the chimpanzees can imitate each other, and we see all sorts of learning in animals like dolphins and the other monkeys, and so on. But the key point about social learning is that this minor difference between us and the other species forms an unbridgeable gap between us and them. Because, whereas all of the other animals can pick up the odd behavior by having their attention called to something, only humans seem to be able to select, among a range of alternatives, the best one, and then to build on that alternative, and to adapt it, and to improve upon it. And so, our cultures cumulatively adapt, whereas all other animals seem to do the same thing over and over and over again.
Even though other animals can learn, and they can even learn in social situations, only humans seem to be able to put these things together and do real social learning. And that has led to this idea evolution. What's a tiny difference between us genetically has opened up an unbridgeable gap, because only humans have been able to achieve this cumulative cultural adaptation.
One way to put this in perspective is to say that you can bring a chimpanzee home to your house, and you can teach it to wash dishes, but it will just as happily wash a clean dish as a dirty dish, because it's washing dishes to be rewarded with a banana. Whereas, with humans, we understand why we're washing dishes, and we would never wash a clean one. And that seems to be the difference. It unleashes this cumulative cultural adaptation in us.
I'm interested in this because I think this capacity for social learning, which we associate with our intelligence, has actually sculpted us in ways that we would have never anticipated. And I want to talk about two of those ways that I think it has sculpted us. One of the ways has to do with our creativity, and the other has to do with the nature of our intelligence as social animals.
One of the first things to be aware of when talking about social learning is that it plays the same role within our societies, acting on ideas, as natural selection plays within populations of genes. Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas --we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them -- and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations.
I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we'll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.
What do I mean by "sculpted them"? Well, I mean that it's changed the way we are. And here's one reason why. If we think that humans have evolved as social learners, we might be surprised to find out that being social learners has made us less intelligent than we might like to think we are. And here's the reason why.
If I'm living in a population of people, and I can observe those people, and see what they're doing, seeing what innovations they're coming up with, I can choose among the best of those ideas, without having to go through the process of innovation myself. So, for example, if I'm trying to make a better spear, I really have no idea how to make that better spear. But if I notice that somebody else in my society has made a very good spear, I can simply copy him without having to understand why.
What this means is that social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves.
Now, why wouldn't we want to do that? Why wouldn't we want to innovate on our own? Well, innovation is difficult. It takes time. It takes energy. Most of the things we try to do, we get wrong. And so, if we can survey, if we can sift among a range of alternatives of people in our population, and choose the best one that's going at any particular moment, we don't have to pay the costs of innovation, the time and energy ourselves. And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators.
This gives us a whole new slant on what it means to be human, and I think, in many ways, it might fit with some things that we realize are true about ourselves when we really look inside ourselves. We can all think of things that have made a difference in the history of life. The first hand axe, the first spear, the first bow and arrow, and so on. And we can ask ourselves, how many of us have had an idea that would have changed humanity? And I think most of us would say, well, that sets the bar rather high. I haven't had an idea that would change humanity. So let's lower the bar a little bit and say, how many of us have had an idea that maybe just influenced others around us, something that others would want to copy? And I think even then, very few of us can say there have been very many things we've invented that others would want to copy.
This says to us that social evolution may have sculpted us not to be innovators and creators as much as to be copiers, because this extremely efficient process that social learning allows us to do, of sifting among a range of alternatives, means that most of us can get by drawing on the inventions of others.
Now, why do I talk about this? It sounds like it could be a somewhat dry subject, that maybe most of us are copiers or followers rather than innovators. And what we want to do is imagine that our history over the last 200,000 years has been a history of slowly and slowly and slowly living in larger and larger and larger groups.
Early on in our history, it's thought that most of us lived in bands of maybe five to 25 people, and that bands formed bands of bands that we might call tribes. And maybe tribes were 150 people or so on. And then tribes gave way to chiefdoms that might have been thousands of people. And chiefdoms eventually gave way to nation-states that might have been tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people. And so, our evolutionary history has been one of living in larger and larger and larger social groups.
What I want to suggest is that that evolutionary history will have selected for less and less and less innovation in individuals, because a little bit of innovation goes a long way. If we imagine that there's some small probability that someone is a creator or an innovator, and the rest of us are followers, we can see that one or two people in a band is enough for the rest of us to copy, and so we can get on fine. And, because social learning is so efficient and so rapid, we don't need all to be innovators. We can copy the best innovations, and all of us benefit from those.
But now let's move to a slightly larger social group. Do we need more innovators in a larger social group? Well, no. The answer is, we probably don't. We probably don't need as many as we need in a band. Because in a small band, we need a few innovators to get by. We have to have enough new ideas coming along. But in a larger group, a small number of people will do. We don't have to scale it up. We don't have to have 50 innovators where we had five in the band, if we move up to a tribe. We can still get by with those three or four or five innovators, because all of us in that larger social group can take advantage of their innovations.
And here we can see a very prominent role for language. Language is the way we exchange ideas. And our eyes allow us to see innovations and language allows us to exchange ideas. And language can operate in a larger society, just as efficiently as it can operate in a small society. It can jump across that society in an instant.
You can see where I'm going. As our societies get larger and larger, there's no need, in fact, there's even less of a need for any one of us to be an innovator, whereas there is a great advantage for most of us to be copiers, or followers. And so, a real worry is that our capacity for social learning, which is responsible for all of our cumulative cultural adaptation, all of the things we see around us in our everyday lives, has actually promoted a species that isn't so good at innovation. It allows us to reflect on ourselves a little bit and say, maybe we're not as creative and as imaginative and as innovative as we thought we were, but extraordinarily good at copying and following.
If we apply this to our everyday lives and we ask ourselves, do we know the answers to the most important questions in our lives? Should you buy a particular house? What mortgage product should you have? Should you buy a particular car? Who should you marry? What sort of job should you take? What kind of activities should you do? What kind of holidays should you take? We don't know the answers to most of those things. And if we really were the deeply intelligent and imaginative and innovative species that we thought we were, we might know the answers to those things.
And if we ask ourselves how it is we come across the answers, or acquire the answers to many of those questions, most of us realize that we do what everybody else is doing. This herd instinct, I think, might be an extremely fundamental part of our psychology that was perhaps an unexpected and unintended, you might say, byproduct of our capacity for social learning, that we're very, very good at being followers rather than leaders. A small number of leaders or innovators or creative people is enough for our societies to get by.
Now, the reason this might be interesting is that, as the world becomes more and more connected, as the Internet connects us and wires us all up, we can see that the long-term consequences of this is that humanity is moving in a direction where we need fewer and fewer and fewer innovative people, because now an innovation that you have somewhere on one corner of the earth can instantly travel to another corner of the earth, in a way that it would have never been possible to do 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 500 years ago, and so on. And so, we might see that there has been this tendency for our psychology and our humanity to be less and less innovative, at a time when, in fact, we may need to be more and more innovative, if we're going to be able to survive the vast numbers of people on this earth.
That's one consequence of social learning, that it has sculpted us to be very shrewd and intelligent at copying, but perhaps less shrewd at innovation and creativity than we'd like to think. Few of us are as creative as we'd like to think we are. I think that's been one perhaps unexpected consequence of social learning.
Another side of social learning I've been thinking about - it's a bit abstract, but I think it's a fascinating one -goes back again to this analogy between natural selection, acting on genetic variation, and social learning, acting on variation in ideas. And any evolutionary process like that has to have both a sorting mechanism, natural selection, and what you might call a generative mechanism, a mechanism that can create variety.
We all know what that mechanism is in genes. We call it mutation, and we know that from parents to offspring, genes can change, genes can mutate. And that creates the variety that natural selection acts on. And one of the most remarkable stories of nature is that natural selection, acting on this mindlessly-generated genetic variation, is able to find the best solution among many, and successively add those solutions, one on top of the other. And through this extraordinarily simple and mindless process, create things of unimaginable complexity. Things like our cells, eyes and brains and hearts, and livers, and so on. Things of unimaginable complexity, that we don't even understand and none of us could design. But they were designed by natural selection.
Now let's take this analogy of a mindless process and take - there's a parallel between social learning driving evolution at the idea level and natural selection driving evolution at the genetic level - and ask what it means for the generative mechanism in our brains.
Well, where do ideas come from? For social learning to be a sorting process that has varieties to act on, we have to have a variety of ideas. And where do those new ideas come from?
The idea that I've been thinking about, that I think is worth contemplating about our own minds is what is the generative mechanism? If we do have any creativity at all and we are innovative in some ways, what's the nature of that generative mechanism for creating new ideas?
This is a question that's been asked for decades. What is the nature of the creative process? Where do ideas come from? And let's go back to genetic evolution and remember that, there, the generative mechanism is random mutation.
Now, what do we think the generative mechanism is for idea evolution? Do we think it's random mutation of some sort, of ideas? Well, all of us think that it's better than that. All of us think that somehow we can come up with good ideas in our minds. And whereas natural selection has to act on random variation, social learning must be acting on directed variation. We know what direction we're going.
But, we can go back to our earlier discussion of social learning, and ask the question, well, if you were designing a new hand axe, or a new spear, or a new bow and a new arrow, would you really know how to make a spear fly better? Would you really know how to make a bow a better bow? Would you really know how to shape an arrowhead so that it penetrated its prey better? And I think most of us realize that we probably don't know the answers to those questions. And that suggests to us that maybe our own creative process rests on a generative mechanism that isn't very much better than random itself.
And I want to go further, and suggest that our mechanism for generating ideas maybe couldn't even be much better than random itself. And this really gives us a different view of ourselves as intelligent organisms. Rather than thinking that we know the answers to everything, could it be the case that the mechanism that our brain uses for coming up with new ideas is a little bit like the mechanism that our genes use for coming up with new genetic variance, which is to randomly mutate ideas that we have, or to randomly mutate genes that we have.
Now, it sounds incredible. It sounds insane. It sounds mad. Because we think of ourselves as so intelligent. But when we really ask ourselves about the nature of any evolutionary process, we have to ask ourselves whether it could be any better than random, because in fact, random might be the best strategy.
Genes could never possibly know how to mutate themselves, because they could never anticipate the direction the world was going. No gene knows that we're having global warming at the moment. No gene knew 200,000 years ago that humans were going to evolve culture. Well, the best strategy for any exploratory mechanism, when we don't know the nature of the processes we're exploring, is to throw out random attempts at understanding that field or that space we're trying to explore.
And I want to suggest that the creative process inside our brains, which relies on social learning, that creative process itself never could have possibly anticipated where we were going as human beings. It couldn't have anticipated 200,000 years ago that, you know, a mere 200,000 years later, we'd have space shuttles and iPods and microwave ovens.
What I want to suggest is that any process of evolution that relies on exploring an unknown space, such as genes or such as our neurons exploring the unknown space in our brains, and trying to create connections in our brains, and such as our brain's trying to come up with new ideas that explore the space of alternatives that will lead us to what we call creativity in our social world, might be very close to random.
We know they're random in the genetic case. We think they're random in the case of neurons exploring connections in our brain. And I want to suggest that our own creative process might be pretty close to random itself. And that our brains might be whirring around at a subconscious level, creating ideas over and over and over again, and part of our subconscious mind is testing those ideas. And the ones that leak into our consciousness might feel like they're well-formed, but they might have sorted through literally a random array of ideas before they got to our consciousness.
Karl Popper famously said the way we differ from other animals is that our hypotheses die in our stead; rather than going out and actually having to try out things, and maybe dying as a result, we can test out ideas in our minds. But what I want to suggest is that the generative process itself might be pretty close to random.
Putting these two things together has lots of implications for where we're going as societies. As I say, as our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.
The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn't the comment of some reactionary who doesn't like Facebook, but it's rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we're more and more connected to each other, there's more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that's what we do.
And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who's doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that's telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it's playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.
And then, as corporations grow … and we can see corporations as sort of microcosms of societies … as corporations grow and acquire the ability to acquire other corporations, a similar thing is happening, is that, rather than corporations wanting to spend the time and the energy to create new ideas, they want to simply acquire other companies, so that they can have their new ideas. And that just tells us again how precious these ideas are, and the lengths to which people will go to acquire those ideas.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
But, these ideas, I think, are received with incredulity, because humans like to think of themselves as highly shrewd and intelligent and innovative people. But I think what we have to realize is that it's even possible that, as I say, the generative mechanisms we have for coming up with new ideas are no better than random.
And a really fascinating idea itself is to consider that even the great people in history whom we associate with great ideas might be no more than we expect by chance. I'll explain that. Einstein was once asked about his intelligence and he said, "I'm no more intelligent than the next guy. I'm just more curious." Now, we can grant Einstein that little indulgence, because we think he was a pretty clever guy.
But let's take him at his word and say, what does curiosity mean? Well, maybe curiosity means trying out all sorts of ideas in your mind. Maybe curiosity is a passion for trying out ideas. Maybe Einstein's ideas were just as random as everybody else's, but he kept persisting at them.
And if we say that everybody has some tiny probability of being the next Einstein, and we look at a billion people, there will be somebody who just by chance is the next Einstein. And so, we might even wonder if the people in our history and in our lives that we say are the great innovators really are more innovative, or are just lucky.
Now, the evolutionary argument is that our populations have always supported a small number of truly innovative people, and they're somehow different from the rest of us. But it might even be the case that that small number of innovators just got lucky. And this is something that I think very few people will accept. They'll receive it with incredulity. But I like to think of it as what I call social learning and, maybe, the possibility that we are infinitely stupid.
It might be useful, with such a statement like that, to review some of these big events. Obviously one of the big events in our history was the origin of our planet, about 4.5 billion years ago. And what's fascinating is that about 3.8 billion years ago, only about seven or eight hundred million years after the origin of our planet, life arose. That life was simple replicators, things that could make copies of themselves. And we think that life was a little bit like the bacteria we see on earth today. It would be the ancestors of the bacteria we see on earth today.
That life ruled the world for 2 billion years, and then about 1.5 billion years ago, a new kind of life emerged. These were the eukaryotic cells. They were a little bit different kind of cell from bacteria. And actually the kind of cells we are made of. And again, these organisms that were eukaryotes were single-celled, so even 1.5 billion years ago, we still just had single-celled organisms on earth. But it was a new kind of life.
It was another 500 million years before we had anything like a multicellular organism, and it was another 500 million years after that before we had anything really very interesting. So, about 500 million years ago, the plants and the animals started to evolve. And I think everybody would agree that this was a major event in the history of the world, because, for the first time, we had complex organisms.
After about 500 million years ago, things like the plants evolved, the fish evolved, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, birds, and eventually mammals. And then it was really just six or seven million years ago, within the mammals, that the lineage that we now call the hominins arose. And they would be direct descendants of us. And then, within that lineage that arose about six or seven million years ago, it was only about 200,000 years ago that humans finally evolved.
And so, this is really just 99.99 percent of the way through the history of this planet, humans finally arose. But in that 0.01 percent of life on earth, we've utterly changed the planet. And the reason is that, with the arrival of humans 200,000 years ago, a new kind of evolution was created. The old genetical evolution that had ruled for 3.8 billion years now had a competitor, and that new kind of evolution was ideas.
It was a true form of evolution, because now ideas could arise, and they could jump from mind to mind, without genes having to change. So, populations of humans could adapt at the level of ideas. Ideas could accumulate. We call this cumulative cultural adaptation. And so, cultural complexity could emerge and arise orders and orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution.
Now, I think most of us take that utterly for granted, but it has completely rewritten the way life evolves on this planet because, with the arrival of our species, everything changed. Now, a single species, using its idea evolution, that could proceed apace independently of genes, was able to adapt to nearly every environment on earth, and spread around the world where no other species had done that. All other species are limited to places on earth that their genes adapt them to. But we were able to adapt at the level of our cultures to every place on earth.
A lot of that sounds familiar to us. But what's hidden in there is this idea of idea evolution. And if it seems easy to us, it shouldn't, because no other species on earth has been capable of doing it. And I'm including in this our recent ancestors.
If we go back in our lineage 2 million years or so, there was a species known as homo erectus. Homo erectus is an upright ape that lived on the African savannah. It could make tools, but they were very limited tools, and those tools, the archaeological record tells us, didn't change for about 1.5 million years. That is, until about the time they went extinct. That is, they made the same tools over and over and over again, without any real changes to them.
If we move forward in time a little bit, it's not even clear that our very close cousins that we know are related to us 99.5 or 99.6 percent in the sequences of their genes, the Neanderthals, it's not even clear that they had what we call idea evolution. Sure enough, their tools that they made were more complex than our tools. But the 300,000 or so years that they spent in Europe, their toolkit barely changed. So there's very little evolution going on.
So there's something really very special about this new species, humans, that arose and invented this new kind of evolution, based on ideas. And so it's useful for us to ask, what is it about humans that distinguishes them? It must have been a tiny genetic difference between us and the Neanderthals because, as I said, we're so closely related to them genetically, a tiny genetic difference that had a vast cultural potential.
That difference is something that anthropologists and archaeologists call social learning. It's a very difficult concept to define, but when we talk about it, all of us humans know what it means. And it seems to be the case that only humans have the capacity to learn complex new or novel behaviors, simply by watching and imitating others. And there seems to be a second component to it, which is that we seem to be able to get inside the minds of other people who are doing things in front of us, and understand why it is they're doing those things. These two things together, we call social learning.
Many people respond that, oh, of course the other animals can do social learning, because we know that the chimpanzees can imitate each other, and we see all sorts of learning in animals like dolphins and the other monkeys, and so on. But the key point about social learning is that this minor difference between us and the other species forms an unbridgeable gap between us and them. Because, whereas all of the other animals can pick up the odd behavior by having their attention called to something, only humans seem to be able to select, among a range of alternatives, the best one, and then to build on that alternative, and to adapt it, and to improve upon it. And so, our cultures cumulatively adapt, whereas all other animals seem to do the same thing over and over and over again.
Even though other animals can learn, and they can even learn in social situations, only humans seem to be able to put these things together and do real social learning. And that has led to this idea evolution. What's a tiny difference between us genetically has opened up an unbridgeable gap, because only humans have been able to achieve this cumulative cultural adaptation.
One way to put this in perspective is to say that you can bring a chimpanzee home to your house, and you can teach it to wash dishes, but it will just as happily wash a clean dish as a dirty dish, because it's washing dishes to be rewarded with a banana. Whereas, with humans, we understand why we're washing dishes, and we would never wash a clean one. And that seems to be the difference. It unleashes this cumulative cultural adaptation in us.
I'm interested in this because I think this capacity for social learning, which we associate with our intelligence, has actually sculpted us in ways that we would have never anticipated. And I want to talk about two of those ways that I think it has sculpted us. One of the ways has to do with our creativity, and the other has to do with the nature of our intelligence as social animals.
One of the first things to be aware of when talking about social learning is that it plays the same role within our societies, acting on ideas, as natural selection plays within populations of genes. Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas --we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them -- and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations.
I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we'll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.
What do I mean by "sculpted them"? Well, I mean that it's changed the way we are. And here's one reason why. If we think that humans have evolved as social learners, we might be surprised to find out that being social learners has made us less intelligent than we might like to think we are. And here's the reason why.
If I'm living in a population of people, and I can observe those people, and see what they're doing, seeing what innovations they're coming up with, I can choose among the best of those ideas, without having to go through the process of innovation myself. So, for example, if I'm trying to make a better spear, I really have no idea how to make that better spear. But if I notice that somebody else in my society has made a very good spear, I can simply copy him without having to understand why.
What this means is that social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves.
Now, why wouldn't we want to do that? Why wouldn't we want to innovate on our own? Well, innovation is difficult. It takes time. It takes energy. Most of the things we try to do, we get wrong. And so, if we can survey, if we can sift among a range of alternatives of people in our population, and choose the best one that's going at any particular moment, we don't have to pay the costs of innovation, the time and energy ourselves. And so, we may have had strong selection in our past to be followers, to be copiers, rather than innovators.
This gives us a whole new slant on what it means to be human, and I think, in many ways, it might fit with some things that we realize are true about ourselves when we really look inside ourselves. We can all think of things that have made a difference in the history of life. The first hand axe, the first spear, the first bow and arrow, and so on. And we can ask ourselves, how many of us have had an idea that would have changed humanity? And I think most of us would say, well, that sets the bar rather high. I haven't had an idea that would change humanity. So let's lower the bar a little bit and say, how many of us have had an idea that maybe just influenced others around us, something that others would want to copy? And I think even then, very few of us can say there have been very many things we've invented that others would want to copy.
This says to us that social evolution may have sculpted us not to be innovators and creators as much as to be copiers, because this extremely efficient process that social learning allows us to do, of sifting among a range of alternatives, means that most of us can get by drawing on the inventions of others.
Now, why do I talk about this? It sounds like it could be a somewhat dry subject, that maybe most of us are copiers or followers rather than innovators. And what we want to do is imagine that our history over the last 200,000 years has been a history of slowly and slowly and slowly living in larger and larger and larger groups.
Early on in our history, it's thought that most of us lived in bands of maybe five to 25 people, and that bands formed bands of bands that we might call tribes. And maybe tribes were 150 people or so on. And then tribes gave way to chiefdoms that might have been thousands of people. And chiefdoms eventually gave way to nation-states that might have been tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people. And so, our evolutionary history has been one of living in larger and larger and larger social groups.
What I want to suggest is that that evolutionary history will have selected for less and less and less innovation in individuals, because a little bit of innovation goes a long way. If we imagine that there's some small probability that someone is a creator or an innovator, and the rest of us are followers, we can see that one or two people in a band is enough for the rest of us to copy, and so we can get on fine. And, because social learning is so efficient and so rapid, we don't need all to be innovators. We can copy the best innovations, and all of us benefit from those.
But now let's move to a slightly larger social group. Do we need more innovators in a larger social group? Well, no. The answer is, we probably don't. We probably don't need as many as we need in a band. Because in a small band, we need a few innovators to get by. We have to have enough new ideas coming along. But in a larger group, a small number of people will do. We don't have to scale it up. We don't have to have 50 innovators where we had five in the band, if we move up to a tribe. We can still get by with those three or four or five innovators, because all of us in that larger social group can take advantage of their innovations.
And here we can see a very prominent role for language. Language is the way we exchange ideas. And our eyes allow us to see innovations and language allows us to exchange ideas. And language can operate in a larger society, just as efficiently as it can operate in a small society. It can jump across that society in an instant.
You can see where I'm going. As our societies get larger and larger, there's no need, in fact, there's even less of a need for any one of us to be an innovator, whereas there is a great advantage for most of us to be copiers, or followers. And so, a real worry is that our capacity for social learning, which is responsible for all of our cumulative cultural adaptation, all of the things we see around us in our everyday lives, has actually promoted a species that isn't so good at innovation. It allows us to reflect on ourselves a little bit and say, maybe we're not as creative and as imaginative and as innovative as we thought we were, but extraordinarily good at copying and following.
If we apply this to our everyday lives and we ask ourselves, do we know the answers to the most important questions in our lives? Should you buy a particular house? What mortgage product should you have? Should you buy a particular car? Who should you marry? What sort of job should you take? What kind of activities should you do? What kind of holidays should you take? We don't know the answers to most of those things. And if we really were the deeply intelligent and imaginative and innovative species that we thought we were, we might know the answers to those things.
And if we ask ourselves how it is we come across the answers, or acquire the answers to many of those questions, most of us realize that we do what everybody else is doing. This herd instinct, I think, might be an extremely fundamental part of our psychology that was perhaps an unexpected and unintended, you might say, byproduct of our capacity for social learning, that we're very, very good at being followers rather than leaders. A small number of leaders or innovators or creative people is enough for our societies to get by.
Now, the reason this might be interesting is that, as the world becomes more and more connected, as the Internet connects us and wires us all up, we can see that the long-term consequences of this is that humanity is moving in a direction where we need fewer and fewer and fewer innovative people, because now an innovation that you have somewhere on one corner of the earth can instantly travel to another corner of the earth, in a way that it would have never been possible to do 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 500 years ago, and so on. And so, we might see that there has been this tendency for our psychology and our humanity to be less and less innovative, at a time when, in fact, we may need to be more and more innovative, if we're going to be able to survive the vast numbers of people on this earth.
That's one consequence of social learning, that it has sculpted us to be very shrewd and intelligent at copying, but perhaps less shrewd at innovation and creativity than we'd like to think. Few of us are as creative as we'd like to think we are. I think that's been one perhaps unexpected consequence of social learning.
Another side of social learning I've been thinking about - it's a bit abstract, but I think it's a fascinating one -goes back again to this analogy between natural selection, acting on genetic variation, and social learning, acting on variation in ideas. And any evolutionary process like that has to have both a sorting mechanism, natural selection, and what you might call a generative mechanism, a mechanism that can create variety.
We all know what that mechanism is in genes. We call it mutation, and we know that from parents to offspring, genes can change, genes can mutate. And that creates the variety that natural selection acts on. And one of the most remarkable stories of nature is that natural selection, acting on this mindlessly-generated genetic variation, is able to find the best solution among many, and successively add those solutions, one on top of the other. And through this extraordinarily simple and mindless process, create things of unimaginable complexity. Things like our cells, eyes and brains and hearts, and livers, and so on. Things of unimaginable complexity, that we don't even understand and none of us could design. But they were designed by natural selection.
Now let's take this analogy of a mindless process and take - there's a parallel between social learning driving evolution at the idea level and natural selection driving evolution at the genetic level - and ask what it means for the generative mechanism in our brains.
Well, where do ideas come from? For social learning to be a sorting process that has varieties to act on, we have to have a variety of ideas. And where do those new ideas come from?
The idea that I've been thinking about, that I think is worth contemplating about our own minds is what is the generative mechanism? If we do have any creativity at all and we are innovative in some ways, what's the nature of that generative mechanism for creating new ideas?
This is a question that's been asked for decades. What is the nature of the creative process? Where do ideas come from? And let's go back to genetic evolution and remember that, there, the generative mechanism is random mutation.
Now, what do we think the generative mechanism is for idea evolution? Do we think it's random mutation of some sort, of ideas? Well, all of us think that it's better than that. All of us think that somehow we can come up with good ideas in our minds. And whereas natural selection has to act on random variation, social learning must be acting on directed variation. We know what direction we're going.
But, we can go back to our earlier discussion of social learning, and ask the question, well, if you were designing a new hand axe, or a new spear, or a new bow and a new arrow, would you really know how to make a spear fly better? Would you really know how to make a bow a better bow? Would you really know how to shape an arrowhead so that it penetrated its prey better? And I think most of us realize that we probably don't know the answers to those questions. And that suggests to us that maybe our own creative process rests on a generative mechanism that isn't very much better than random itself.
And I want to go further, and suggest that our mechanism for generating ideas maybe couldn't even be much better than random itself. And this really gives us a different view of ourselves as intelligent organisms. Rather than thinking that we know the answers to everything, could it be the case that the mechanism that our brain uses for coming up with new ideas is a little bit like the mechanism that our genes use for coming up with new genetic variance, which is to randomly mutate ideas that we have, or to randomly mutate genes that we have.
Now, it sounds incredible. It sounds insane. It sounds mad. Because we think of ourselves as so intelligent. But when we really ask ourselves about the nature of any evolutionary process, we have to ask ourselves whether it could be any better than random, because in fact, random might be the best strategy.
Genes could never possibly know how to mutate themselves, because they could never anticipate the direction the world was going. No gene knows that we're having global warming at the moment. No gene knew 200,000 years ago that humans were going to evolve culture. Well, the best strategy for any exploratory mechanism, when we don't know the nature of the processes we're exploring, is to throw out random attempts at understanding that field or that space we're trying to explore.
And I want to suggest that the creative process inside our brains, which relies on social learning, that creative process itself never could have possibly anticipated where we were going as human beings. It couldn't have anticipated 200,000 years ago that, you know, a mere 200,000 years later, we'd have space shuttles and iPods and microwave ovens.
What I want to suggest is that any process of evolution that relies on exploring an unknown space, such as genes or such as our neurons exploring the unknown space in our brains, and trying to create connections in our brains, and such as our brain's trying to come up with new ideas that explore the space of alternatives that will lead us to what we call creativity in our social world, might be very close to random.
We know they're random in the genetic case. We think they're random in the case of neurons exploring connections in our brain. And I want to suggest that our own creative process might be pretty close to random itself. And that our brains might be whirring around at a subconscious level, creating ideas over and over and over again, and part of our subconscious mind is testing those ideas. And the ones that leak into our consciousness might feel like they're well-formed, but they might have sorted through literally a random array of ideas before they got to our consciousness.
Karl Popper famously said the way we differ from other animals is that our hypotheses die in our stead; rather than going out and actually having to try out things, and maybe dying as a result, we can test out ideas in our minds. But what I want to suggest is that the generative process itself might be pretty close to random.
Putting these two things together has lots of implications for where we're going as societies. As I say, as our societies get bigger, and rely more and more on the Internet, fewer and fewer of us have to be very good at these creative and imaginative processes. And so, humanity might be moving towards becoming more docile, more oriented towards following, copying others, prone to fads, prone to going down blind alleys, because part of our evolutionary history that we could have never anticipated was leading us towards making use of the small number of other innovations that people come up with, rather than having to produce them ourselves.
The interesting thing with Facebook is that, with 500 to 800 million of us connected around the world, it sort of devalues information and devalues knowledge. And this isn't the comment of some reactionary who doesn't like Facebook, but it's rather the comment of someone who realizes that knowledge and new ideas are extraordinarily hard to come by. And as we're more and more connected to each other, there's more and more to copy. We realize the value in copying, and so that's what we do.
And we seek out that information in cheaper and cheaper ways. We go up on Google, we go up on Facebook, see who's doing what to whom. We go up on Google and find out the answers to things. And what that's telling us is that knowledge and new ideas are cheap. And it's playing into a set of predispositions that we have been selected to have anyway, to be copiers and to be followers. But at no time in history has it been easier to do that than now. And Facebook is encouraging that.
And then, as corporations grow … and we can see corporations as sort of microcosms of societies … as corporations grow and acquire the ability to acquire other corporations, a similar thing is happening, is that, rather than corporations wanting to spend the time and the energy to create new ideas, they want to simply acquire other companies, so that they can have their new ideas. And that just tells us again how precious these ideas are, and the lengths to which people will go to acquire those ideas.
A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.
But, these ideas, I think, are received with incredulity, because humans like to think of themselves as highly shrewd and intelligent and innovative people. But I think what we have to realize is that it's even possible that, as I say, the generative mechanisms we have for coming up with new ideas are no better than random.
And a really fascinating idea itself is to consider that even the great people in history whom we associate with great ideas might be no more than we expect by chance. I'll explain that. Einstein was once asked about his intelligence and he said, "I'm no more intelligent than the next guy. I'm just more curious." Now, we can grant Einstein that little indulgence, because we think he was a pretty clever guy.
But let's take him at his word and say, what does curiosity mean? Well, maybe curiosity means trying out all sorts of ideas in your mind. Maybe curiosity is a passion for trying out ideas. Maybe Einstein's ideas were just as random as everybody else's, but he kept persisting at them.
And if we say that everybody has some tiny probability of being the next Einstein, and we look at a billion people, there will be somebody who just by chance is the next Einstein. And so, we might even wonder if the people in our history and in our lives that we say are the great innovators really are more innovative, or are just lucky.
Now, the evolutionary argument is that our populations have always supported a small number of truly innovative people, and they're somehow different from the rest of us. But it might even be the case that that small number of innovators just got lucky. And this is something that I think very few people will accept. They'll receive it with incredulity. But I like to think of it as what I call social learning and, maybe, the possibility that we are infinitely stupid.
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Pepper: Execution o' MLK
Richard Grossman 10.10.11
CORPORATE CRIME REPORTER: VOLUME 25 NUMBER 40 MONDAY OCTOBER 17, 2011
INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD GROSSMAN, WEST HURLEY, NEW YORK
If the Occupy Wall Street people want to fill in the blanks, they eventually might want to turn to Richard Grossman.
Grossman is best known as the modern father of the movement to challenge the corporate form as a usurpation of people power.
He’s writing a book about reconceptualizing organizing to make people's goals, strategies and tactics commensurate with the constitutional, legal, and structural ursurpations and traditions accumulated since the nation's founding.
And he’s drafted a couple of laws in recent months that the Occupy Wall Street people should take a look at.
One would criminalize fracking.
The other would criminalize chartered, incorporated business entities.
We interviewed Grossman on October 10, 2011.
CCR: You graduated from Columbia University in 1965. What have you been doing since?
GROSSMAN: Right after college, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines for a couple of years.
I worked as an adult education teacher in California, New Jersey and New York City.
In the 1970s, I moved to California and became involved in the first statewide anti-nuclear initiative, which was on the ballot in June 1976.
That took a couple of years.
I then moved to Washington, D.C. for ten years. From 1976 to 1985, I was director of Environmentalists for Full Employment.
At the end of that, I started publishing the Wrenching Debate Gazette.
While publishing the Wrenching Debate Gazette, I was helping to organize peoples’ hearings, particularly in the Southeast and Midwest.
We were combating corporate and governmental toxic chemicals.
I moved to Massachusetts in 1990.
I kept publishing the Wrenching Debate Gazette. But I also began researching the history of corporations, constitutional history and law, past people's struggles.
I co-founded the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (POCLAD) in 1993.
I was with that group until about 2004.
My work over the last twenty years has been to provoke new and different conversation, thought and action among people dissatisfied with what is going on in the USA, among people trying to change the nature of our work – to rethink and reframe problems, our assumptions about this country and our goals, arenas of struggle into which we bring our battles, the language we use, our strategies and tactics.
CCR: Thirty or forty years ago, when you started this work, you were looking at the corporation differently than you are looking at it today.
GROSSMAN: One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.
But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England.
In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don't lay a hand on systemic reality, don't touch the structure of governance and law, don't question the country's great myths.
For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.
CCR: You say you don’t talk about corporations much anymore. But your most recent writing is a draft of a law that would criminalize chartered, incorporated business entities.
GROSSMAN: One governing mechanism of the minority class, of the governing class, is the chartered business corporation, and the two hundred years of constitutional, legal and cultural privilege – of illegitimate governing authority – that legislators and judges have wrapped around corporate directors.
What has been constructed by a few, the many can take down. So as far as I am concerned, this law is for real.
But I wrote this law for educational purposes as well.
With the growing number of demonstrations and occupations going on around the country, I have not heard much analysis, or specific language, about the essence of our problems, or about how we got into such a usurpatory mess, about practical, tangible steps we human earthlings can take to get out from under minority rule so that we can govern ourselves.
I don't hear talk about the tools we have at our disposal, short-term and long-term goals we could seek, strategies and tactics different from past strategies and tactics that have not accomplished what people have sought.
By 1995 or so, I was focusing on usurpation.
The corporate class – driving its values and needs into law and policy – had long been making life and death decisions that defined our communities, defined our nation.
It had long been exercising governing authority. According to lore and myth of the American Revolution and the Constitution, that's usurpation.
Who has been complicit in that usurpation? Our public officials, elected and appointed – legislators, judges, presidents, governors, not to mention legal treatise writers, law professors, historians.
For me, our challenge is teaching ourselves to see beyond each single corporate state invasion and assault and denial to recognize the structures of usurpation that have long been in place – structures of usurpation, of illegitimate governance, that activists with only rare exceptions over the past four-score years have confronted.
The second part of that challenge is this – people who have been taught to mobilize against single corporate state assaults – one at a time and over and over again – start revealing and dismantling those structures, the constitutional and mythological underpinnings of “we the people's” disempowerment.
And begin replacing them with values and governance structures designed to maximize liberty for the earth and biological systems and other species, while engendering healthy humility for the human species.
In terms of Occupy Wall Street, I haven’t been there. I’ve been reading about the occupation. It's very exciting. But one thing that struck me in the first few days were reports saying that the protesters were focusing on corruption and greed.
Well yes, there's no shortage of corruption and greed going all around. But corruption and greed are not the problem. They are diversions.
The essence of the power arrayed against the 99 percent are structures of minority-rule governance deeply rooted, honored and celebrated, even by, I suspect, many of the people who are occupying Wall Street today.
I'm referring to the great myths of this nation's founding and founders, of the U.S. Constitution and constitutional jurisprudence, the nonsense about limited governance, the sanctification of “the rule of law” when lawmaking and interpreting and enforcing have been the special preserve in every generation of a small minority.
I'm talking about the private ordering of economic decisionmaking, the sweeping constitutional privileges wielded by directors of the "creatures of law" we call chartered, incorporated businesses camouflaged as “free enterprise” and “the invisible hand.”
I hope that teach-ins about such realities in Wall Street and Washington and other places are going on. So far, I've not seen evidence.
CCR: You saw the speech on Wall Street by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
He said this: “The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up.”
GROSSMAN: Yes. But he didn’t go on to describe the system. He didn’t talk about the mechanisms of governance, how we got into this mess of government by a few.
I don’t know if he believes that the U.S. Constitution provides people seeking change with appropriate and commensurate remedies.
I see the Constitution as a minority rule document.
At the time the Constitution became the law of the land, the small number of men who did the real governing denied the overwhelming majority of people in the thirteen states standing before the law, the authority to vote, the ability to participate vigorously and equally in the body politic – to drive their values into law and public policy, to write fat legal treatises, to make law from the bench, to accumulate wealth.
The people of my generation – I’m almost 70 – we’ve been struggling against corporate and government assaults one after another, corporate and government wars – one after another, against usurpations galore engineered by corporate directors.
Where can we turn for remedy? What political, constitutional mechanisms can we use to undo accumulated usurpations of the past, to start governing ourselves, our communities, our states, our nation?
For people who see these constant assaults and denials – defined by our corporate, Earth-gobbling culture as “legal” and “necessary” for freedom, jobs and progress – for people agitating to stop these wars, to stop the destruction of our communities and escalating inequalities, to launch sane and just transitions in energy, food – don't we have to reconceptualize our work as humans on this Earth?
One of the tasks for my generation before we leave the scene is to engage younger generations about all this, starting off with this central terrifying point – we've lost.
Fifty years ago, forty years ago, those of us who started off being very active against all kinds of injustices, we had a very different picture of what this country could be like in 2011.
Today, we're not even close.
Not for lack of struggle, persistence, tenacity.
So what happened? What's to be learned from the past half-century of organizing and resistance and electioneering and law-writing?
Here's how I see it. Like activists and radicals of previous generations – we have been crushed. If we admit to this, if we internalize that crushing as reality – I believe people will find this incredibly liberating. That's the case with me.
Because it enables me to abandon gobs of USA mythology, the holiday celebration stuff, the liberal versions of steady progress under a liberty-friendly, governance structure where, it is claimed, here the people rule.
Generations and generations of bloody struggles to end human slavery, to get the vote, to be seen by the law, to be equal before the law, and on and on – are regarded as glorious victories provided by the exceptional liberty-loving American constitution writers and law-makers and law-interpreters and historians.
We were born into a structure that provides no remedy to minority rule. We were lied to in grade school and high school. Our energies and resources and hopes have been channeled into making symptoms of minority rule a little less devastating while leaving every generation's minority rule structures and institutions and accumulations untouched.
Once we grasp that nettle, we then can focus on revealing and changing.
CCR: Not only do we have to admit that we have lost, but we have to admit that we were wrong. Forty years ago, when you were with Environmentalists for Full Employment, you too believed in the power of law, the power of the legal system to control polluting industries. You too were arguing for regulation and law enforcement.
GROSSMAN: Well, initially I never gave much thought to it. When I came to Washington, D.C, I fell into the patterns of the activist movements, of the large, existing organizations. Of the institutions left over from the previous generation's struggles – struggles that had been crushed, institutions that had been neutered. I had no idea about that at the time.
But we – like many others – were able to learn from our experiences. At Environmentalists for Full Employment, as we compiled data to challenge the great “jobs vs. environment” propaganda of those days, as we started looking into the history of regulatory law and agencies, we began to open our eyes.
We had been snookered and deceived and channeled into diversionary efforts. But we started evolving. By the early 1980s, for example, we had pretty much turned our backs on the regulatory system.
In our book Fear at Work, we traced some of the relevant history. We even quoted Attorney General Olney in the late 1880s telling railroad corporation executives not to worry about the Interstate Commerce Commission because it would be a “barrier” between corporations and the people.
But you are quite right, that I was wrong about many things, I was ignorant.
I didn’t know enough about this country's past even to conceptualize commensurate challenges to illegitimate power in the present.
That’s one of the reasons in 1990 or so, I set out to learn what I could about how business corporations became wrapped in the Constitution, how municipal corporations – our towns, villages, cities – were stripped of genuine governing authority, about the way the nation's plan of governance was designed, about legal and constitutional evolutions, about people's constant struggles to set things right.
Imagine – there's a so-called revolution against England, white colonists win, and then the cream of white colonists – slavemasters and men of property – import the English legal system, English jurisprudential theory, English precedent.
They plunk down structures of governance and law crafted by the five percent of English nobility dictating the labors of the many, vacuuming up the Earth from Ireland to India, and ruling over England for 800 years.
What kind of self-governance by the many with liberty and justice for all, with consciousness of Earth systems, with respect for people who work, could emerge from the rigid governing structures this nation's designers put in place?
So, when I say we lost, I'm suggesting also that activists in every generation lost. And that today, we and generations coming up need to explore that reality with dispassion, without getting defensive.
When we were younger, we knew what we knew, we did what we did. It's time to pass on what we've come to understand. Back in 1977 and 1978, I certainly wasn’t able to have the kinds of conversations that I’ve been having – and trying to provoke – over the last fifteen years or twenty years.
CCR: You have drafted legislation that would criminalize the corporate form.
Is it a smoke bomb, or are you serious about this?
GROSSMAN: I’m serious. All existing charters for incorporated business entities would be null and void. Accumulated corporate constitutional privilege – all that illegitimate private governing authority bestowed by legislators and judges –
would be purged.
States and the United States would be prohibited from creating and privileging new business entities.
For starters. And then people would have to get together and figure out what kinds of entities we could design that would not take over like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
CCR: What happens to currently operating businesses?
GROSSMAN: It seems to me that people behind them should be delighted. It would be the essence of the capitalist idea. People who want to go into business, they could go into business. But why should we – the rest of the people – bestow special privileges on them?
CCR: If you believe this, why did you incorporate POCLAD?
GROSSMAN: We didn’t incorporate POCLAD.
CCR: I thought it was a 501c3.
GROSSMAN: Technically, it was part of another non profit corporation.
CCR: But under your proposal, even non profit corporations would be illegal.
GROSSMAN: Right. We went down that path so we could accept tax deductible contributions. We fit right into the pattern. Yes. And we did talk about that frequently as a bit of a straitjacket.
In a broader sense, much of the opposition over the past decades – environmental groups and others – structured themselves in the corporate form, modeled themselves after the dominant oppressive entity of our era.
So, you are quite right to point out the contradiction.
But if people want to do business – isn’t the idea of capitalism that you invest your money and you take your risk?
And the rest of us don’t allow the people running businesses to wrap themselves in special privilege.
We don't allow a private ordering, private governing, where corporate directors' decisions on investment, production, organization of work and technology are beyond the authority of sovereign people.
We don't allow governance and law and elections that enable the most important decisions shaping our communities, dictating people's work, determining society's relationships with the Earth, with other species, deciding life and death, to be beyond the people’s authority.
To get to that point, where we can try to govern ourselves, we have to undo accumulations of governance, accumulations of usurpations, accumulations of illegitimate law and of illegitimate lore and miseducation.
CCR: If we get rid of the corporate form, it will be replaced by another form of business entity that will accumulate wealth. What makes you think it’s the form that makes the difference? What makes you think they won’t be as abusive or equally abusive concentrations of private power?
GROSSMAN: That would be the tendency.
There is no such thing as a silver bullet or a magic fix. This draft law is a step to move to reality. But it is also a step to open up different conversations beyond “greed and corruption.”
To rethink the past, to see beyond symptoms to sources and causes – toward reconceptualizing and rethinking who we are, how we organize, what we do.
Here in New York State, I’ve been involved in anti-fracking struggles.
Folks in Ulster and Green counties started meeting last March as a study group.
We named ourselves Sovereign People Action Network (SPAN).
In early summer, seeing so many anti-fracking people across the state pouring their time, resources and hopes into the State's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), we began drafting a law to rip decision making from this illegitimate agency, and drive it into our state legislature.
Our law criminalizes fracking and fracking-related activities.
Corporate frackers would be Class C felons.
In August, a bunch of anti-frackers from different parts of the state, representing various anti-fracking groups, participated in three sequential workshops I presented on at the New York Green Fest gathering in Western New York.
Some decided to join SPAN on criminalization.
Together we came up with the current draft of the law. We are now creating a new coalition group to concentrate on compelling the legislature to pass our law.
This law is not a magic bullet, of course. We could never pass it unless we build a mass movement in New York.
CCR: Has it been introduced in the New York legislature?
GROSSMAN: No. We met with a state Senator who wanted to learn more about it but he was pretty resistant. That’s okay. This work will take time.
CCR: Do you want to say who that is?
GROSSMAN: Not now. To his credit, he met with us twice. He was patient and courteous, we had some healthy conversations.
We have no illusions about the New York State Legislature. But theoretically at least, that is where laws are made. And that’s where sovereign people go to instruct our representatives.
Our approach to our legislators is: we wrote this law – now you pass it.
But we know we can’t do that until we build a formidable statewide movement that is not only talking about fracking as a destructive technology, but also about illegitimate rule by a very small corporate class.
And the same for the proposed law that would criminalize the corporation.
What does it mean to take on the corporate state? That struggle is not about parts per million of this or that deadly chemical, or how to handle deadly fracking fluid.
It's not about a particular manufacturing process.
It’s not about campaign finance reform and other diversions.
It’s about undoing pillars of the nation's minority-rule structures of governance.
CCR: You are attacking the structure of private business.
GROSSMAN: I'm talking about challenging structures of governance and law which have illegitimately enabled and created a private ordering of this society – increasingly of the whole Earth.
They have denied the many, while empowering private government which Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of all people, labeled fascism.
CCR: But how would capitalism adopt to this law – if it became law? Your proposed law eliminates limited liability for shareholders, it eliminates perpetual life for corporations, it wipes out their Constitutional empowerments.
But what fills the void? Let’s say you run an airline or an electrical utility. They might restructure as insured partnerships?
GROSSMAN: Why should sovereign people aspiring to be self-governing bestow upon mere creations of law eternal existence?
Why give them supreme authority – governing powers – over their creators?
Why subsidize investors with the gift of limited liability and other privileges galore?
If people want limited liability, let them buy insurance.
If people want to manufacture and offer services, and they worry about being sued, let them take extra caution not to cause devastations and denials.
Is it so hard to conceive of businesses as businesses, and not as private dictatorships? Not as deniers of human-ness? Not as pillagers of the Earth?
We can also eliminate the permitting system so that business people wouldn’t get permits legalizing poisons and destructions – which is the purpose of today's regulatory and administrative laws.
We could make sure that businesses could not interfere in elections, lawmaking, debate over values and public policy – in the writing of tax laws and health laws and labor laws and laws conforming our society's existence with fundamental Earth laws.
We could rethink the National Labor Relations Act. That law helps make sure that in corporate workplaces, there is no freedom of speech, no due process of law, no equal protection of the laws, no right to confront one's accuser.
Like all regulatory laws, it assumes the constitutionality – not to mention the wisdom – of corporate directors wielding the law of the land against employees, communities, and the earth.
It legalizes corporations denying workers fundamental standing before the law, denying people their basic humanity, denying autonomy over their hands and brains merely because they are employees.
Why should people aspiring to be self-governing allow our states or the United States to privilege business corporation directors to lord over people who do the nation's work?
CCR: The progression of Grossman’s thinking – from regulate the corporation, to challenge corporate constitutional empowerment, to criminalize the corporate form.
GROSSMAN: And criminalizing public officials who have enabled and abetted usurpation. And then rethinking everything relating to designing institutions to help a sovereign people live in sane and rational ways.
By the way, I take exception to what you wrote last week – I don’t accept paternity for today's corporate personhood fetish.
I never focused on personhood. I helped to explain Supreme Court cases starting with Dartmouth College in 1819 that turned business corporation directors into usurpers.
But I would say from POCLAD's early years in 1994 and 1995, my focus was on the Constitution as a minority-rule plan of governance, and on usurpations galore.
And so this move to amend the Constitution that sprung up after the Citizens United decision – I don’t understand it as strategy, as an educational process, as an organizing process, as a goal.
Why validate the idea that amending the Constitution offers a remedy for two hundred years of minority rule? For today's corporate state? Corporate “speech” is such a minuscule aspect of the nation's private governance and mass denials that have been in place since the nation was founded.
Let's keep in mind that when the Constitution was ratified, all states denied most people standing before the law. They denied most people the authority to vote.
The authors of the US Constitution included no language in that plan of governance requiring the United States to remove all barriers to human liberty – to maximize liberty throughout the land.
They did craft language requiring the United States to remove all barriers to commerce – to maximize production and commerce throughout the land. To impose a national economy on communities throughout the land.
They certainly understood the concept of a strong, centralized federal government swimming in the preemption and prerogative authority of kings.
CCR: You were with POCLAD from –
GROSSMAN: We founded it in 1993. And I left in 2004.
CCR: POCLAD is pushing the move to amend the Constitution.
But they are pushing to amend the Constitution so that all corporate Constitutional rights should be abolished.
GROSSMAN: I wish them well.
CCR: Why did you leave POCLAD?
GROSSMAN: I thought we had accomplished what we could accomplish, given who we were.
Through our writings, our "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Strategy" workshops, we began changing discussion on reframing issues, reconceptualizing goals, strategies and arenas of struggle, changing language.
I felt that 2005 was a good time for us voluntarily to dissolve, to let folks move on in diverse directions.
CCR: But they disagreed. And they have started this move to amend the Constitution.
GROSSMAN: Yes.
CCR: They have gathered over 130,000 signatures.
GROSSMAN: I'm continuing to focus on rethinking, reconceptualizing, activist work – on getting off the defensive, on organizing campaigns against corporate state invasions and denials in ways that challenge its historical, constitutional, legal,
cultural and financial underpinnings – all those pillars of usurpation.
Anyway, it's not the corporation, remember? It's about us, people aspiring to be sovereign and self-governing. What will it take for people to govern ourselves?
CCR: In Upstate New York, where you live, you are faced with the assault of fracking.
Your SPAN group drafted legislation that would criminalize fracking. So, you are back to the state legislature to pass this law.
GROSSMAN: We’re hoping to move the exciting struggle to prevent the fracking of New York State from the dead end, energy sink regulatory realm to the place where sovereign people make law, decide what is anti-social behavior.
We have no illusions about our state legislature. Both houses are tyrannies. Most of the legislators are colonized. We understand that part of our task is to re-make our legislature, and our legislators.
And that to do this, anti-frackers and others confronting diverse assaults of illegitimate private governance must build a powerful state-wide movement.
CCR: You drafted this law in August. What kind of response are you getting from the activists on the ground?
GROSSMAN: Our new state-wide coalition is only now coming together, we haven't begun taking our message across the state. I can say that whenever any of us talks to folks, their response is – of course fracking should be criminalized, should be declared felonious.
CCR: Has anybody written about it yet?
GROSSMAN: I don't think so. We're still under the radar. But I don't think it will take long to emerge. Think back to the evolution of the anti-nuclear movement.
The fracking struggle involves most of the giant corporations of the country, not just business and industrial corporations, but also law corporations and insurance corporations.
The whole corporate class and its vast usurping structures of governance and propaganda are behind fracking. The reasons are clear: the corporate class is committed to endless more. The fuel for endless more is constantly expanding energy.
So people opposing fracking for oil and gas and water are standing up not just to a few giant energy corporations, but to the entire corporate class, and to their vast corporate state, just like the anti-nukers of yore.
In New York, people are already organized in hundreds of groups. We think this legislation will help unify anti-frackers, so that one day in the not too distant, the State of New York will declare fracking, corporate frackers, and fracking-related
activities to be Class C felonies.
CCR: The anti-nuclear movement took a decade. Are you saying that the anti-fracking movement will take less time?
GROSSMAN: For now, New Yorkers are mobilizing to prevent our state from being fracked. Some of us are proposing criminalization. We will be provoking conversation and discussion about the histories and realities of minority rule and usurpation that we've been talking about here.
It's my hope that unlike the anti-nuclear movement – that magnificently stopped the construction of 850 nuclear radiation factories – New Yorkers will criminalize fracking in ways that begin to challenge the corporate state, that set new and liberating conversations in motion, that begin asserting we the people's authority to govern our communities and our State.
CCR: You have a book in the works. What is it about?
GROSSMAN: What we have been talking about. Rethinking history, goals and strategies.
For people who want to reconfigure how this country is run, the question is – how do we change the activist, political work we do?
How do we rethink the language we use, the political arenas we drive our struggles into?
How do we rethink our goals?
How do we move beyond resisting one corporate state assault at a time – over and over and over again, toward undoing accumulations and structures and habits of the past?
What can we learn from valiant and persistent people's struggles for justice, sanity and self-governance waged since in the beginning that have left us and the Earth in the grip of illegitimate private governance gussied up as the cat's pajamas?
How do we talk across generations about emerging younger and older and wiser from the reality of losing? How do we turn ourselves into sane, self-governing people?
INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD GROSSMAN, WEST HURLEY, NEW YORK
If the Occupy Wall Street people want to fill in the blanks, they eventually might want to turn to Richard Grossman.
Grossman is best known as the modern father of the movement to challenge the corporate form as a usurpation of people power.
He’s writing a book about reconceptualizing organizing to make people's goals, strategies and tactics commensurate with the constitutional, legal, and structural ursurpations and traditions accumulated since the nation's founding.
And he’s drafted a couple of laws in recent months that the Occupy Wall Street people should take a look at.
One would criminalize fracking.
The other would criminalize chartered, incorporated business entities.
We interviewed Grossman on October 10, 2011.
CCR: You graduated from Columbia University in 1965. What have you been doing since?
GROSSMAN: Right after college, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines for a couple of years.
I worked as an adult education teacher in California, New Jersey and New York City.
In the 1970s, I moved to California and became involved in the first statewide anti-nuclear initiative, which was on the ballot in June 1976.
That took a couple of years.
I then moved to Washington, D.C. for ten years. From 1976 to 1985, I was director of Environmentalists for Full Employment.
At the end of that, I started publishing the Wrenching Debate Gazette.
While publishing the Wrenching Debate Gazette, I was helping to organize peoples’ hearings, particularly in the Southeast and Midwest.
We were combating corporate and governmental toxic chemicals.
I moved to Massachusetts in 1990.
I kept publishing the Wrenching Debate Gazette. But I also began researching the history of corporations, constitutional history and law, past people's struggles.
I co-founded the Program on Corporations Law and Democracy (POCLAD) in 1993.
I was with that group until about 2004.
My work over the last twenty years has been to provoke new and different conversation, thought and action among people dissatisfied with what is going on in the USA, among people trying to change the nature of our work – to rethink and reframe problems, our assumptions about this country and our goals, arenas of struggle into which we bring our battles, the language we use, our strategies and tactics.
CCR: Thirty or forty years ago, when you started this work, you were looking at the corporation differently than you are looking at it today.
GROSSMAN: One simple way of comparing then and now is that I don’t talk much about corporations anymore. We live under minority rule. And the class of people who do the governing generally could be called a corporate class.
But 180 years ago, they were the slave master class. One hundred years before that they were the propertied nobility in England.
In the USA, a minority designed our structure of governance, has been making the laws, using the power and violence of the nation to deny the many, to accumulate property and wealth, to replicate their designs across generations, to groom leaders of the next generation to continue their supremacy, to create the educational systems, mythologies and celebrations to camouflage and deceive, to channel people who would be activists into realms where even if they stop or slow down a particular corporate state assault, they don't lay a hand on systemic reality, don't touch the structure of governance and law, don't question the country's great myths.
For the past century or so, one such realm has been regulatory and administrative law and agencies, those vast energy sinks and diversions that eat activists for breakfast.
CCR: You say you don’t talk about corporations much anymore. But your most recent writing is a draft of a law that would criminalize chartered, incorporated business entities.
GROSSMAN: One governing mechanism of the minority class, of the governing class, is the chartered business corporation, and the two hundred years of constitutional, legal and cultural privilege – of illegitimate governing authority – that legislators and judges have wrapped around corporate directors.
What has been constructed by a few, the many can take down. So as far as I am concerned, this law is for real.
But I wrote this law for educational purposes as well.
With the growing number of demonstrations and occupations going on around the country, I have not heard much analysis, or specific language, about the essence of our problems, or about how we got into such a usurpatory mess, about practical, tangible steps we human earthlings can take to get out from under minority rule so that we can govern ourselves.
I don't hear talk about the tools we have at our disposal, short-term and long-term goals we could seek, strategies and tactics different from past strategies and tactics that have not accomplished what people have sought.
By 1995 or so, I was focusing on usurpation.
The corporate class – driving its values and needs into law and policy – had long been making life and death decisions that defined our communities, defined our nation.
It had long been exercising governing authority. According to lore and myth of the American Revolution and the Constitution, that's usurpation.
Who has been complicit in that usurpation? Our public officials, elected and appointed – legislators, judges, presidents, governors, not to mention legal treatise writers, law professors, historians.
For me, our challenge is teaching ourselves to see beyond each single corporate state invasion and assault and denial to recognize the structures of usurpation that have long been in place – structures of usurpation, of illegitimate governance, that activists with only rare exceptions over the past four-score years have confronted.
The second part of that challenge is this – people who have been taught to mobilize against single corporate state assaults – one at a time and over and over again – start revealing and dismantling those structures, the constitutional and mythological underpinnings of “we the people's” disempowerment.
And begin replacing them with values and governance structures designed to maximize liberty for the earth and biological systems and other species, while engendering healthy humility for the human species.
In terms of Occupy Wall Street, I haven’t been there. I’ve been reading about the occupation. It's very exciting. But one thing that struck me in the first few days were reports saying that the protesters were focusing on corruption and greed.
Well yes, there's no shortage of corruption and greed going all around. But corruption and greed are not the problem. They are diversions.
The essence of the power arrayed against the 99 percent are structures of minority-rule governance deeply rooted, honored and celebrated, even by, I suspect, many of the people who are occupying Wall Street today.
I'm referring to the great myths of this nation's founding and founders, of the U.S. Constitution and constitutional jurisprudence, the nonsense about limited governance, the sanctification of “the rule of law” when lawmaking and interpreting and enforcing have been the special preserve in every generation of a small minority.
I'm talking about the private ordering of economic decisionmaking, the sweeping constitutional privileges wielded by directors of the "creatures of law" we call chartered, incorporated businesses camouflaged as “free enterprise” and “the invisible hand.”
I hope that teach-ins about such realities in Wall Street and Washington and other places are going on. So far, I've not seen evidence.
CCR: You saw the speech on Wall Street by the philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
He said this: “The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you to give up.”
GROSSMAN: Yes. But he didn’t go on to describe the system. He didn’t talk about the mechanisms of governance, how we got into this mess of government by a few.
I don’t know if he believes that the U.S. Constitution provides people seeking change with appropriate and commensurate remedies.
I see the Constitution as a minority rule document.
At the time the Constitution became the law of the land, the small number of men who did the real governing denied the overwhelming majority of people in the thirteen states standing before the law, the authority to vote, the ability to participate vigorously and equally in the body politic – to drive their values into law and public policy, to write fat legal treatises, to make law from the bench, to accumulate wealth.
The people of my generation – I’m almost 70 – we’ve been struggling against corporate and government assaults one after another, corporate and government wars – one after another, against usurpations galore engineered by corporate directors.
Where can we turn for remedy? What political, constitutional mechanisms can we use to undo accumulated usurpations of the past, to start governing ourselves, our communities, our states, our nation?
For people who see these constant assaults and denials – defined by our corporate, Earth-gobbling culture as “legal” and “necessary” for freedom, jobs and progress – for people agitating to stop these wars, to stop the destruction of our communities and escalating inequalities, to launch sane and just transitions in energy, food – don't we have to reconceptualize our work as humans on this Earth?
One of the tasks for my generation before we leave the scene is to engage younger generations about all this, starting off with this central terrifying point – we've lost.
Fifty years ago, forty years ago, those of us who started off being very active against all kinds of injustices, we had a very different picture of what this country could be like in 2011.
Today, we're not even close.
Not for lack of struggle, persistence, tenacity.
So what happened? What's to be learned from the past half-century of organizing and resistance and electioneering and law-writing?
Here's how I see it. Like activists and radicals of previous generations – we have been crushed. If we admit to this, if we internalize that crushing as reality – I believe people will find this incredibly liberating. That's the case with me.
Because it enables me to abandon gobs of USA mythology, the holiday celebration stuff, the liberal versions of steady progress under a liberty-friendly, governance structure where, it is claimed, here the people rule.
Generations and generations of bloody struggles to end human slavery, to get the vote, to be seen by the law, to be equal before the law, and on and on – are regarded as glorious victories provided by the exceptional liberty-loving American constitution writers and law-makers and law-interpreters and historians.
We were born into a structure that provides no remedy to minority rule. We were lied to in grade school and high school. Our energies and resources and hopes have been channeled into making symptoms of minority rule a little less devastating while leaving every generation's minority rule structures and institutions and accumulations untouched.
Once we grasp that nettle, we then can focus on revealing and changing.
CCR: Not only do we have to admit that we have lost, but we have to admit that we were wrong. Forty years ago, when you were with Environmentalists for Full Employment, you too believed in the power of law, the power of the legal system to control polluting industries. You too were arguing for regulation and law enforcement.
GROSSMAN: Well, initially I never gave much thought to it. When I came to Washington, D.C, I fell into the patterns of the activist movements, of the large, existing organizations. Of the institutions left over from the previous generation's struggles – struggles that had been crushed, institutions that had been neutered. I had no idea about that at the time.
But we – like many others – were able to learn from our experiences. At Environmentalists for Full Employment, as we compiled data to challenge the great “jobs vs. environment” propaganda of those days, as we started looking into the history of regulatory law and agencies, we began to open our eyes.
We had been snookered and deceived and channeled into diversionary efforts. But we started evolving. By the early 1980s, for example, we had pretty much turned our backs on the regulatory system.
In our book Fear at Work, we traced some of the relevant history. We even quoted Attorney General Olney in the late 1880s telling railroad corporation executives not to worry about the Interstate Commerce Commission because it would be a “barrier” between corporations and the people.
But you are quite right, that I was wrong about many things, I was ignorant.
I didn’t know enough about this country's past even to conceptualize commensurate challenges to illegitimate power in the present.
That’s one of the reasons in 1990 or so, I set out to learn what I could about how business corporations became wrapped in the Constitution, how municipal corporations – our towns, villages, cities – were stripped of genuine governing authority, about the way the nation's plan of governance was designed, about legal and constitutional evolutions, about people's constant struggles to set things right.
Imagine – there's a so-called revolution against England, white colonists win, and then the cream of white colonists – slavemasters and men of property – import the English legal system, English jurisprudential theory, English precedent.
They plunk down structures of governance and law crafted by the five percent of English nobility dictating the labors of the many, vacuuming up the Earth from Ireland to India, and ruling over England for 800 years.
What kind of self-governance by the many with liberty and justice for all, with consciousness of Earth systems, with respect for people who work, could emerge from the rigid governing structures this nation's designers put in place?
So, when I say we lost, I'm suggesting also that activists in every generation lost. And that today, we and generations coming up need to explore that reality with dispassion, without getting defensive.
When we were younger, we knew what we knew, we did what we did. It's time to pass on what we've come to understand. Back in 1977 and 1978, I certainly wasn’t able to have the kinds of conversations that I’ve been having – and trying to provoke – over the last fifteen years or twenty years.
CCR: You have drafted legislation that would criminalize the corporate form.
Is it a smoke bomb, or are you serious about this?
GROSSMAN: I’m serious. All existing charters for incorporated business entities would be null and void. Accumulated corporate constitutional privilege – all that illegitimate private governing authority bestowed by legislators and judges –
would be purged.
States and the United States would be prohibited from creating and privileging new business entities.
For starters. And then people would have to get together and figure out what kinds of entities we could design that would not take over like the Sorcerer's Apprentice.
CCR: What happens to currently operating businesses?
GROSSMAN: It seems to me that people behind them should be delighted. It would be the essence of the capitalist idea. People who want to go into business, they could go into business. But why should we – the rest of the people – bestow special privileges on them?
CCR: If you believe this, why did you incorporate POCLAD?
GROSSMAN: We didn’t incorporate POCLAD.
CCR: I thought it was a 501c3.
GROSSMAN: Technically, it was part of another non profit corporation.
CCR: But under your proposal, even non profit corporations would be illegal.
GROSSMAN: Right. We went down that path so we could accept tax deductible contributions. We fit right into the pattern. Yes. And we did talk about that frequently as a bit of a straitjacket.
In a broader sense, much of the opposition over the past decades – environmental groups and others – structured themselves in the corporate form, modeled themselves after the dominant oppressive entity of our era.
So, you are quite right to point out the contradiction.
But if people want to do business – isn’t the idea of capitalism that you invest your money and you take your risk?
And the rest of us don’t allow the people running businesses to wrap themselves in special privilege.
We don't allow a private ordering, private governing, where corporate directors' decisions on investment, production, organization of work and technology are beyond the authority of sovereign people.
We don't allow governance and law and elections that enable the most important decisions shaping our communities, dictating people's work, determining society's relationships with the Earth, with other species, deciding life and death, to be beyond the people’s authority.
To get to that point, where we can try to govern ourselves, we have to undo accumulations of governance, accumulations of usurpations, accumulations of illegitimate law and of illegitimate lore and miseducation.
CCR: If we get rid of the corporate form, it will be replaced by another form of business entity that will accumulate wealth. What makes you think it’s the form that makes the difference? What makes you think they won’t be as abusive or equally abusive concentrations of private power?
GROSSMAN: That would be the tendency.
There is no such thing as a silver bullet or a magic fix. This draft law is a step to move to reality. But it is also a step to open up different conversations beyond “greed and corruption.”
To rethink the past, to see beyond symptoms to sources and causes – toward reconceptualizing and rethinking who we are, how we organize, what we do.
Here in New York State, I’ve been involved in anti-fracking struggles.
Folks in Ulster and Green counties started meeting last March as a study group.
We named ourselves Sovereign People Action Network (SPAN).
In early summer, seeing so many anti-fracking people across the state pouring their time, resources and hopes into the State's Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), we began drafting a law to rip decision making from this illegitimate agency, and drive it into our state legislature.
Our law criminalizes fracking and fracking-related activities.
Corporate frackers would be Class C felons.
In August, a bunch of anti-frackers from different parts of the state, representing various anti-fracking groups, participated in three sequential workshops I presented on at the New York Green Fest gathering in Western New York.
Some decided to join SPAN on criminalization.
Together we came up with the current draft of the law. We are now creating a new coalition group to concentrate on compelling the legislature to pass our law.
This law is not a magic bullet, of course. We could never pass it unless we build a mass movement in New York.
CCR: Has it been introduced in the New York legislature?
GROSSMAN: No. We met with a state Senator who wanted to learn more about it but he was pretty resistant. That’s okay. This work will take time.
CCR: Do you want to say who that is?
GROSSMAN: Not now. To his credit, he met with us twice. He was patient and courteous, we had some healthy conversations.
We have no illusions about the New York State Legislature. But theoretically at least, that is where laws are made. And that’s where sovereign people go to instruct our representatives.
Our approach to our legislators is: we wrote this law – now you pass it.
But we know we can’t do that until we build a formidable statewide movement that is not only talking about fracking as a destructive technology, but also about illegitimate rule by a very small corporate class.
And the same for the proposed law that would criminalize the corporation.
What does it mean to take on the corporate state? That struggle is not about parts per million of this or that deadly chemical, or how to handle deadly fracking fluid.
It's not about a particular manufacturing process.
It’s not about campaign finance reform and other diversions.
It’s about undoing pillars of the nation's minority-rule structures of governance.
CCR: You are attacking the structure of private business.
GROSSMAN: I'm talking about challenging structures of governance and law which have illegitimately enabled and created a private ordering of this society – increasingly of the whole Earth.
They have denied the many, while empowering private government which Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of all people, labeled fascism.
CCR: But how would capitalism adopt to this law – if it became law? Your proposed law eliminates limited liability for shareholders, it eliminates perpetual life for corporations, it wipes out their Constitutional empowerments.
But what fills the void? Let’s say you run an airline or an electrical utility. They might restructure as insured partnerships?
GROSSMAN: Why should sovereign people aspiring to be self-governing bestow upon mere creations of law eternal existence?
Why give them supreme authority – governing powers – over their creators?
Why subsidize investors with the gift of limited liability and other privileges galore?
If people want limited liability, let them buy insurance.
If people want to manufacture and offer services, and they worry about being sued, let them take extra caution not to cause devastations and denials.
Is it so hard to conceive of businesses as businesses, and not as private dictatorships? Not as deniers of human-ness? Not as pillagers of the Earth?
We can also eliminate the permitting system so that business people wouldn’t get permits legalizing poisons and destructions – which is the purpose of today's regulatory and administrative laws.
We could make sure that businesses could not interfere in elections, lawmaking, debate over values and public policy – in the writing of tax laws and health laws and labor laws and laws conforming our society's existence with fundamental Earth laws.
We could rethink the National Labor Relations Act. That law helps make sure that in corporate workplaces, there is no freedom of speech, no due process of law, no equal protection of the laws, no right to confront one's accuser.
Like all regulatory laws, it assumes the constitutionality – not to mention the wisdom – of corporate directors wielding the law of the land against employees, communities, and the earth.
It legalizes corporations denying workers fundamental standing before the law, denying people their basic humanity, denying autonomy over their hands and brains merely because they are employees.
Why should people aspiring to be self-governing allow our states or the United States to privilege business corporation directors to lord over people who do the nation's work?
CCR: The progression of Grossman’s thinking – from regulate the corporation, to challenge corporate constitutional empowerment, to criminalize the corporate form.
GROSSMAN: And criminalizing public officials who have enabled and abetted usurpation. And then rethinking everything relating to designing institutions to help a sovereign people live in sane and rational ways.
By the way, I take exception to what you wrote last week – I don’t accept paternity for today's corporate personhood fetish.
I never focused on personhood. I helped to explain Supreme Court cases starting with Dartmouth College in 1819 that turned business corporation directors into usurpers.
But I would say from POCLAD's early years in 1994 and 1995, my focus was on the Constitution as a minority-rule plan of governance, and on usurpations galore.
And so this move to amend the Constitution that sprung up after the Citizens United decision – I don’t understand it as strategy, as an educational process, as an organizing process, as a goal.
Why validate the idea that amending the Constitution offers a remedy for two hundred years of minority rule? For today's corporate state? Corporate “speech” is such a minuscule aspect of the nation's private governance and mass denials that have been in place since the nation was founded.
Let's keep in mind that when the Constitution was ratified, all states denied most people standing before the law. They denied most people the authority to vote.
The authors of the US Constitution included no language in that plan of governance requiring the United States to remove all barriers to human liberty – to maximize liberty throughout the land.
They did craft language requiring the United States to remove all barriers to commerce – to maximize production and commerce throughout the land. To impose a national economy on communities throughout the land.
They certainly understood the concept of a strong, centralized federal government swimming in the preemption and prerogative authority of kings.
CCR: You were with POCLAD from –
GROSSMAN: We founded it in 1993. And I left in 2004.
CCR: POCLAD is pushing the move to amend the Constitution.
But they are pushing to amend the Constitution so that all corporate Constitutional rights should be abolished.
GROSSMAN: I wish them well.
CCR: Why did you leave POCLAD?
GROSSMAN: I thought we had accomplished what we could accomplish, given who we were.
Through our writings, our "Rethinking the Corporation, Rethinking Strategy" workshops, we began changing discussion on reframing issues, reconceptualizing goals, strategies and arenas of struggle, changing language.
I felt that 2005 was a good time for us voluntarily to dissolve, to let folks move on in diverse directions.
CCR: But they disagreed. And they have started this move to amend the Constitution.
GROSSMAN: Yes.
CCR: They have gathered over 130,000 signatures.
GROSSMAN: I'm continuing to focus on rethinking, reconceptualizing, activist work – on getting off the defensive, on organizing campaigns against corporate state invasions and denials in ways that challenge its historical, constitutional, legal,
cultural and financial underpinnings – all those pillars of usurpation.
Anyway, it's not the corporation, remember? It's about us, people aspiring to be sovereign and self-governing. What will it take for people to govern ourselves?
CCR: In Upstate New York, where you live, you are faced with the assault of fracking.
Your SPAN group drafted legislation that would criminalize fracking. So, you are back to the state legislature to pass this law.
GROSSMAN: We’re hoping to move the exciting struggle to prevent the fracking of New York State from the dead end, energy sink regulatory realm to the place where sovereign people make law, decide what is anti-social behavior.
We have no illusions about our state legislature. Both houses are tyrannies. Most of the legislators are colonized. We understand that part of our task is to re-make our legislature, and our legislators.
And that to do this, anti-frackers and others confronting diverse assaults of illegitimate private governance must build a powerful state-wide movement.
CCR: You drafted this law in August. What kind of response are you getting from the activists on the ground?
GROSSMAN: Our new state-wide coalition is only now coming together, we haven't begun taking our message across the state. I can say that whenever any of us talks to folks, their response is – of course fracking should be criminalized, should be declared felonious.
CCR: Has anybody written about it yet?
GROSSMAN: I don't think so. We're still under the radar. But I don't think it will take long to emerge. Think back to the evolution of the anti-nuclear movement.
The fracking struggle involves most of the giant corporations of the country, not just business and industrial corporations, but also law corporations and insurance corporations.
The whole corporate class and its vast usurping structures of governance and propaganda are behind fracking. The reasons are clear: the corporate class is committed to endless more. The fuel for endless more is constantly expanding energy.
So people opposing fracking for oil and gas and water are standing up not just to a few giant energy corporations, but to the entire corporate class, and to their vast corporate state, just like the anti-nukers of yore.
In New York, people are already organized in hundreds of groups. We think this legislation will help unify anti-frackers, so that one day in the not too distant, the State of New York will declare fracking, corporate frackers, and fracking-related
activities to be Class C felonies.
CCR: The anti-nuclear movement took a decade. Are you saying that the anti-fracking movement will take less time?
GROSSMAN: For now, New Yorkers are mobilizing to prevent our state from being fracked. Some of us are proposing criminalization. We will be provoking conversation and discussion about the histories and realities of minority rule and usurpation that we've been talking about here.
It's my hope that unlike the anti-nuclear movement – that magnificently stopped the construction of 850 nuclear radiation factories – New Yorkers will criminalize fracking in ways that begin to challenge the corporate state, that set new and liberating conversations in motion, that begin asserting we the people's authority to govern our communities and our State.
CCR: You have a book in the works. What is it about?
GROSSMAN: What we have been talking about. Rethinking history, goals and strategies.
For people who want to reconfigure how this country is run, the question is – how do we change the activist, political work we do?
How do we rethink the language we use, the political arenas we drive our struggles into?
How do we rethink our goals?
How do we move beyond resisting one corporate state assault at a time – over and over and over again, toward undoing accumulations and structures and habits of the past?
What can we learn from valiant and persistent people's struggles for justice, sanity and self-governance waged since in the beginning that have left us and the Earth in the grip of illegitimate private governance gussied up as the cat's pajamas?
How do we talk across generations about emerging younger and older and wiser from the reality of losing? How do we turn ourselves into sane, self-governing people?
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