Three such private actors come to mind: Vigilantes, bounty-hunters, and sleuths.

For centuries, members of these three groups have patrolled the darker paths that remain largely invisible to the ordinary, law abiding citizen. From Jack the Ripper to the Boston Bomber, private citizens have sought to assist in uncovering the killer. Traditionally, in the old analogue world, the private actors put time on the street, using up shoe leather talking to people in neighbor haunts, taking in oral information, following up until they had enough information to establish a probable location where the offender could be found. While their working methods were roughly similar, their motives differed. And revealing a person’s motives is usually a good way to tell a story that people can understand and relate to.

Vigilantes are motivated by personal or ideological reasons to bring a criminal to justice. A vigilante is emotionally driven. He or she is more likely to go along with street justice and dispense with due process.

A bounty-hunter, in contrast, has a more straightforward reason—his or her motive is money. They deliver a criminal to law enforcement officers in return for receiving a cash reward and what the authorities do with the criminal is up to them as the bounty-hunter walks away counting his cash.

Professional or licensed private investigators or sleuths undertake cases on behalf of clients who might wish a wayward bank teller is caught with their hand in the till. They aren’t motivated to go after a wrong-doer in their capacity as sleuth. It involves work, it can involve danger, and most people seek to minimize the risk of harm unless they can see the cash up front.

Amateur digital sleuths who work online to solve crimes that law enforcement officials have let fall between the cracks. This is a new category, and appears to fall somewhere between gaming and support groups. It is hard to peg all of the sleuths in this category as it is still evolving and taking in members from the traditional brigade of privateers who work the edges of the criminal justice system.

Vigilantes, for the most part, tend to be amateurs fired up by anger and hated. That fuels the emotional rocket for awhile. Though true-believers can burn up a lot of nuclear fuel before exploding into a white dwarf. Bounty-hunters and sleuths have the appeal of being cool, rationale, Sherlock Holmes cerebral types who through deliberative, clever, deductive reasoning solve the mystery that leads to the wrong doer. From online feuds and flame wars, the amateur digital sleuths have their irrational, emotional side, as well as their Dr. Spock, never-understood-emotional-response types. A CBC News report titled Madeleine McCann to Jeffery Boucher: Web sleuths quest for the missing

Private citizens spend untold hours online trying to solve crimes — does it help police? about online sleuthing, mentions that empathy for the families of the victim is another motivator.

Laura Miller, who writes for Salon,  reviewed Deborah Halber’s The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths are Solving America’s Coldest Cases. The book comes out 1st July 2014. The Skeleton Crew goes into the online sleuthing community to report on how the digital

Miller writes about The Skeleton Crew and the personal drama that arises from online sleuthing. There is, in Miller’s words,  “a methodological schism over how to interact with law enforcement and the families of the lost. Halber divides the two groups into the ‘mavericks,’ who prefer to proceed swiftly and as they deem fit, and the ‘trust builders,’ who insist on deliberating as a group before approaching officials or the bereaved.”

This is an interesting premise but I am not certain The Skeleton Crew is for me. The book is a series of anecdotes that illustrate the lives, ordeals, successes and drama of online investigators. In other words, as told from the lives of actual investigation as opposed to analysis of big data to see what patterns emerge from the activities of this community. Anecdotes, no matter how entertaining, revealing, and persuasive are not evidence. They are a story about a story. The end.

Miller’s review got me started thinking about the implications of three traditional categories being ultimately disrupted by a digital community that wouldn’t have existed 10 years ago. Halber’s book is coming at a very good time. Others are discussing the growth, meaning and use of the online sleuthing community. If Wikipedia can bring in hundreds of experts to work for free to patrol the factual accuracy of information, there must be thousands of people who a lifetime of movies, TV, and novels behind them to give them a sense that: a) they can have fun; b) they can meet other people who share their interests; c) they can benefit the public; d) they can obtain status in the eyes of others by solving cases that have stumped the police.

A cup of coffee in hand, and a burning to desire to find a murderer or kidnapper without leaving the comfort of one’s home was sufficient to attract the attention of the BBC. If you want to become a digital sleuth, where should you start? At the start, you are likely going to be looking to solve a ‘cold’ case. That’s an old, unsolved case that just won’t go away and the police, at least from the public’s perception, have put it in the unsolved file.

There are a number of sleuthing websites like Websleuths.com DoeNetwork Reddit’s Bureau of Investigations, NamUs.gov and Unsolved Mysteries. Inside of these websites, you’ll discover digital communities of people who devote time and effort, sharing information to solve kidnappings and murders. The BBC also know the danger of vigilante justice, and sites the Boston Bomber case, where the wrong person was accused of involvement.

What do the professionals say about this development?

Professor David Wall of Durham University, is quoted as saying that he “believes online communities can be hugely beneficial in some cases, but the temptation to get involved in more serious crimes is a recipe for disaster.” Joe Giacalone, a NYPD retired Detective Sergeant, with many years of experience, worried about the public getting involved in old, unsolved cases. “‘As an investigator, where you’re dealing with evidentiary issues and things, you don’t want to have people poking into the case,’” he says, adding, ‘You gotta remember, you have anonymous people sitting behind keyboards, you don’t know exactly – you could have somebody with an axe to grind.’” He’d never seen a case solved by someone working through one of the online sleuthing communities.

Professor Wall is joined by Nic Groombridge, a senior sociology lecturer at St. Mary’s University in London, England, who told CBC News,  “During the Jack the Ripper case, one of the problems the police had wasn’t a lack of leads — it was too many leads.”

The British, through their Association of Chief Police Officers take a slightly different view from Giacalone, saying, “” [Wrong quote repeated from above, you should have the Brit one handy.]  There are a fair number of lawyer’s demarcations as to the boundaries that private sleuths must recognize. It is a rather nice touch to use property law concepts to define the police as the owners of a criminal case. As former property law professor, the police are alerting outsiders that trespass is something to avoid. The case belongs to them. Be careful or you might be in trouble with the police and saying you were only trying to help won’t likely be a defense.

Where there is a niches that appear to welcome these outside communities it is with medical examiners who have skeletal remains and no clue as to the identity of the person. There have been some breakthroughs in identifying skeletal remains. There are a couple of larger questions looming in the near future—is online sleuthing a passing fashion at this stage of development? Big Data is developing at a speed that is difficult to assess (without metadata to help assess big data—you start to see a pattern not unlike one Escher’s recursive birds or frogs). My best guess is solving crimes turns on the amount, quality, provenance of data, and it is only a matter of time before the amateurs will be way outside the information silos where it is stored and analyzed.

Will the idea of police ownership of criminal cases gain more support as police forces hire experts and development specialized algorithms to search through vast amounts of data looking for clues? The probable answer is the police monopoly over cases will increase over time. And a monopoly is a property owners best friend.

Meanwhile, there are online scheduled meet ups and book clubs for online amateur sleuths. You’ll need to do a bit of sleuthing to find a meet up near where you live.

The New York Times  correspondent Sandra Blakeslee reminded us that in 1765, John Ward was hanged for stealing a watch and a hat.

The historical cases reveal a very different world of criminals and law enforcement officials. The authorities have been reactive. They’ve had to wait until a crime has been reported before springing into action. Catching someone who violated the law meant rounding up witnesses and gathering evidence that implicated a wrongdoer.

The old policing model has very little to say about the future. It functioned on what was known in the present. A victim lodged a report. It also rested on the hunch or intuition of the police. Experienced police had knowledge about neighborhoods. Though that information, in the large scheme of things, was bound to be incomplete and tainted by bias. Until recently, the literature of crime followed the Sherlock Holmes model of a logical, clever and objective detective who outsmarted the villain.

We inhabit a very different world now. Not only do most countries no longer hang watch and hat stealers, they are using Big Data to predict geographical areas where crime may, on probability, be more likely to occur and with that information police can step up patrols. We have entered the machine age of law enforcement. The old model is in the process of a radical change as Big Data arms the police with predictive models and that takes policing into the future where crime hasn’t yet been committed. Such a change allows for development of policies of crime suppression for crimes that might be committed.

Los Angeles police have managed to reduce burglaries (33%), violent crimes (21%) and property crimes (12%) by adapting software developed to predict earthquakes and aftershocks.  Eighty years of crime that included 13 million criminal acts were fed into the mathematical model that used the data to predict the areas where crime was most likely to occur. It seems the model yielded good results. New crimes are constantly added to the database, and the LAPD officers who were at first resistant to taking orders from a mathematical model have become true believers.

Chicago police have gone beyond hot spots to using Big Data to target people most likely to commit a crime in the future. There is mapping of crime hot spot areas of the city and the mapping of social networks is the logical extension. “Commander Steven Caluris, who also works on the CPD’s predictive policing program, put it a different way. ‘If you end up on that list, there’s a reason you’re there.’” In the future, the map of your social network may be used by the law enforcement agencies to assign you a probability statistic as your future criminal activity. Like a travel ban list for air travel, you may never know what is behind the inclusion of your name on a hot list. Florida is going down the same road.

Professors at Rutgers’ School of Criminal Justice have received grants to develop software called Risk Terrain Modeling Diagnostics Utility.  Here’s a glimpse of the future of Big Data in policing:

“The National Institute of Justice recently awarded two grants, totaling nearly $1 million, to conduct RTM research in seven U.S. cities: Newark; New York City; Chicago; Arlington, Texas; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Glendale, Ariz.; and Kansas City, Mo. Researchers from Rutgers’ School of Criminal Justice and John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York are conducting the studies using the RTMDx Utility. The Rutgers software is currently being used in the top four U.S. markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami. It is being adopted by industry and law enforcement offices in many countries, such as Australia and Canada, and major foreign cities such as Paris and Milan.”

The Australian Crime Commission has also funded a big data project. The goals is to use to “data mining to trawl through data sets looking for patterns and potentially predicting emerging crime issues and trends across the country.”

The promise is that patterns emerging from the big data will allow the police to identify areas where resources are needed. This has the advantage of consolidating resources in the areas where crime is most likely. It is being sold on the basis of efficiency. Like Wall Street brokers, the police have entered the world of big data with the goal of assessing risks. For a broker, it is getting in and out of a stock so as to make a profit. For the police they have structured data that predicts what types of crimes are on the increase or decrease for a given geographical area. The police study the big data looking for trends. And like a broker, the police having identified a trend, can allocate necessary resources to deal with the kinds of crime that are predicted from the data.

The BBC reported on Big Data in crime prevention, noting the need to accumulate masses of data about an area in order to predict crime trends. Making connections between crime and connections, and those that happen across international boundaries leads to unraveling complex networks of individuals. The BBC report shows how far we’ve come since the hanging of John Ward in 1765. Big Data allows a corporation to detect who on the inside is communicating with whom on the outside and to look for patterns that suggests an employee may be leaking information. It also allows the military tactical advantage in the field as Big Data is constantly fed into analytical models updating positions, movements, and communications on the ground.

Philip K. Dick predicted in The Minority Report that the State will evolve a system to predict crimes before they are carried out. The Big Data is used to define ‘hot spots’ where crime is most likely to occur. In the future, before you buy that house or condo, you might want to ask the real estate agent about whether the property is within a crime hot spot!

One should bear in mind that we are very early days into collecting and mining Big Data. The dynamics of technological change make predictions in the medium and far future nearly impossible. The reality is that we are headed down a road for future decision-making about the mechanism of the criminal justice system and we don’t know where it will lead us. We only have best guesses and cognitive biases such as best-case scenario.  We run the real risk of an information infrastructure that will build a criminal justice system that surrenders our notions of free will and liberty.

In the future, John Ward may be hanged before he steals the watch and hat, doomed by Big Data, which assigns a 98% probability of future criminal conduct. Or if he had a 98% probability of being a serial killer, would you agree that he should be arrested and sent to prison? On the Big Data road map, this might be a destination. We have set out on a long journey and along the way we lose much of what we value as individuals for a class of elites who have most to gain in a new culture based on total security.

This causes anxiety like watching a PGA golf tournament and the professional who is on the green but 20 feet from the 7^th hole sends the ball on its way. We hold our breath. Is the putt too soft or too hard? You simply wait and watch with everyone else.

In politics, those with the putter claim the ball will drop. Even when it misses the hole, they claim the ball dropped. Ambiguity trails us like a shadow. There is rarely an objective moment, unlike golf, where you don’t need to rely on anything other than your own eyes to know whether the shot succeeded.

Our political life isn’t a game of golf. We can never escape the velocity of doubt whether the politicians are using the right club, lining up correctly over the ball, or accurately reporting the trajectory of their shot in relationship to the hole.

We live in a world where a large number of people exchange their doubt and anxiety for a promise to deliver a more certain, stable, ordered and predictable world than the actual one they live in. That is costly, as politicians must rely on various illusory devices and tricks to conjure up this illusion with enough credibility that they substitute reality for a replacement story that creates an alternative reality.

We are willing to pay relatively high price in the reality stakes for answers that allow us individually and collectively to believe what we are told is true. The illusion of Understanding (see my essay on the Illusion of Understanding.) is easier to maintain and the tacit conspiracy to pretend the illusion is real allows us to move on from an issue and spend our cognitive resources elsewhere.

There is a constant tension over the official story between the individual and her group, and between her group and other groups. The group may be a circle of friends, relatives, colleagues, sports team or a religious, secular, or political party. We draw much comfort in shared, collective beliefs and we draw our identity from our group association.  Mostly we place group solitary and individual identity as a higher priority than understanding the complexity where the truth is difficult to detect with certainty. Our group, returning to the golf metaphor, always makes a hole in one, while those in rival groups are lost in the tall grass, looking for their ball as the night closes in.

How do we resolve this dilemma that arises as we move between the goals of group grooming and truth-finding?

We have two basic models to work with: Insubordination and Challenge. Each of them offers a separate vision on how best to work through the messy, hard problems that confront us. Sometimes these two very different systems work in harmony, side-by-side, with each delegated a role; sometimes, one model is ascendant and marginalizes the other.

The Spotlight Culture

The first model that controls how we perceive reality rests on a system of subordination. Officials inside an institution such as an orchestra or movie set work along a chain of command. Orders are passed down the chain of command. The orders are to be obeyed and not to be challenged by subordinates. The film director (he has a producer breathing down his neck) or conductor (has a wealthy patron breathing down his neck) is in charge. Despite certain limitations, his word is the law of what the performance will be.

The job of film director or orchestra conduct is to avoid chaos. So long as everyone he leads follows his direction, he can deliver a certain quality of performance. The price of a subordination system is the agreement for all involved to accept submission to a disciplined hierarchy where each person’s role is defined and the person giving the orders possesses the position and rank to justify his subordinate to act without questioning the order.

Officers in the military expect their subordinates to follow orders, and they expect to follow the orders of those officers who rank above them in the chain of command. This is fundamental to the culture of the military. Subordination systems share values in common such as authority, loyalty, honor, respect and continuity. Whether it is the military, the police, a court system, a sports team, a factory assembly line, a film set, or an orchestra, there are subordination values used to co-ordinate the work among a group of people.

An orchestra where the first violinist stops the performance and challenges the conductor’s interpretation of a movement would change our experience of music. Whatever the private feelings of the first violinist or the cello player, these are not expressed and the conductor’s authority is unchallenged as the orchestra performs.

In other words, criticism, dissent, difference of opinion give way to the rules of subordination otherwise the performance by the orchestra collapses, a lower court overrules an appellant court, the quarterback’s call is reversed by the right tackle, and a sergeant decides against his officer’s command to advance on an enemy position. All of these reversals happen now and again and the person who makes such a challenge is guilty of insubordination. Treason, betrayal, faithlessness and disloyalty are express the stigma attached to such insubordination.

If the conductor had absolute power, he might seek to expand his authority to include what is appropriate for poetry, ballet, literature, drama, TV, computer games and film and impose an artistic vision for all of the arts. That is unlikely to happen. There are too many different visions, tastes, traditions, and messiness for any one person to control. Any attempt at such a command and control system would drive artists underground. In the arts, like in science, we assume that experimenting and testing is a good thing to be encouraged. Note that some of it will be a dead end and without value to the artist or society, but that is only discovered by allowing the space to fail.

The spotlight culture is a place where truth is manufactured and distributed to the consumer. The finished product is complete, reliable, and ready for immediate consumption. There are no alternatives to challenge the truth in the spotlight culture.

Flashlight Culture

The flashlight model (this is idealized) is based on the individual’s right to criticize, challenge or question authority, policy, motives, efficiency, or outcomes by those in power. Journalists, scholars, academics, NG0s, whistleblowers, and outside experts are obvious players in the flashlight culture. The flashlight has also become a symbol in protest and demonstrations as the picture below from the Ukraine illustrates. People have a huge desire to see the hidden and buried story. Those who seek information of activity occurring behind the scenes of power rely on the flashlight. These lights are pointed at the dark areas well outside the spotlight and act to keep government officials honest and transparent.  In the case of someone like Edward Snowden the flashlight is on the magnitude of a supernova. Socrates urged people to ask questions as a way of shining a light into darkness and to ignore the facile answers found in the spotlight.

A flashlight culture assumes we share similar flawed knowledge and the same cognitive biases that distort reality unless corrected. Western parliamentary styled political systems rest on the opposite, an opposition challenging the government of the day to explain and justify their decisions. The individual challenges the group leader because he or she is one of us and knows no more than anyone else about the complex network of information.

Unlike an orchestra, the prime minister, unlike a conductor, answers his or her critics with explanations rather than with threats or suppression. The role of the opposition is to make the conductor account for his choices. The purpose of shining a light on evidence that is contrary to the government’s narrative is to expose weakness of policy or execution of policy. The motives of flashlight holders may not be pure. They may be exposing facts for political gain at the expense of the government but such exposure works to the favor of the general population which benefits from  a correction in policy or a change in personnel to carry out the policy.

The encouragement of challenging authority is what has given us a robust scientific method. The most junior member of a research team is not disqualified from overturning the theory of the most respected member of the scientific community. The theory, in other words, is separate from the personality supporting it. But we have difficulty distinguishing attacks on theory as attacks on the person who supports the theory. The question in science isn’t, what does this critic have against the person who supports the String Theory, but what evidence does he or she have to refute the theory. In non-scientific areas such as politics, we are still a long way from isolating policy for critical analysis from the personality, background and reputation of the person who has proposed the policy.

We can also accept that the challenge-the-authority paradigm isn’t always appropriate in all circumstances. An orchestra, military, police, or football team, to name a few examples, depends on subordination to work effectively as a cohesive unit. The question is how and who decides what is the right place for one system to operate and claim legitimacy over and above the other?

The flashlight culture exposes flaws and defects in the spotlight cultural truth products. The flashlight illumination exposes dangers, risks, omissions, and distortions. Truth becomes stripped of illusions in the process.

Fitting Spotlights and Flashlights into a Unified Lightning System

Every culture has a different interpretation on how to fit these pieces together, and who gets the job, and how those with power are selected, controlled and discharged.  How best to light the political stage is a question every country answers in its own way. The reality is we need to find the right combination of subordination and challenge. Last week, I examined the BBC 2012 top-ten list of the largest employers in the world. (Crunching Big Number, Understanding Short Lists.) From the American Defense Department to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the ability to scale huge operations relies on implementing an effective subordination system.  A ‘soft’ subordination system explains the presence of Wal-Mart and McDonalds on the same list. Co-ordination on a large scale is impossible without an order and command structure, where insubordination is punished.

The question is whether the Spotlight or subordination system, an absolute one, where flashlights are confiscated and flashlight people’s action are criminalized, can operate effectively at the political and government level. Can a government be run along the lines of an orchestra with a conductor choosing the music, time, length, place of performance and exclude any other orchestra from performing and jail music critics who claim the cello player made several mistakes and the piano needed tuning?

Looking around the world from Thailand, Egypt, Syria, and the Ukraine, the old consensus on the right mix of spotlight and flashlight culture has broken down. The attempt to contain instability, the messiness of life, leads to fear, and to banish fear is to embrace subordination. There is a belief that salvation rests in choosing the right conductor and letting him run the whole performance. Challengers to the vision are seen as enhancing fear and instability. They are the first violinist who rises and objects to the choice of music. The pendulum swings to subordination. But the nature of pendulum is to swing back, too. In time, the flirtation with expanding the subordination model into the political realm will reinforce a historical lesson about the nature of governing.

As the flashlight culture has gone online, the means of shutting it down are difficult. The digital flashlight exposes hypocrisy, deception, half-truths, cover-ups in a very public way. This is inconvenient and embarrassing for those who banish flashlights and wish to return people’s attention back to the spotlight.

Throwing your opposition in jail or send them fleeing into the mountains and jungle or exile, may work in the short-term, and you can control the performance. But in the long term, people who want classical music will understand they need to accommodate a space for those who love jazz, hip-hop, pop, Hollywood show tunes, and even for those repulsive noise traps called rap, country and Korean boy bands. Politics is a noisy place. When one director plays only one tune you can be sure people will sooner or later find a way to switch the channel. To return to our lighting metaphor, the amount of repression required to neutralize and co-op its flashlight holders would turn the world against those in standing in the spotlight.

Most of the time we unearth information from personal experience and observation. Other times we stumble over information sent by others that stimulates our imagination.

A friend* sent me a link to a top ten list of the world’s largest employers. I immediately saw a story. One told in numbers. As the impact of Big Data filters into our daily lives, you can expect more storytellers to mine these huge information warehouses to cull stories.

Let me explain the kind of story to expect in the future.

Mathematics conceals all kinds of interesting stories about how societies, economies, and governments are entangled. The language of numbers opens information doors to understanding the complexity of these relations. When we examine the numbers, we can draw conclusions about the dynamic relationship of private and public sectors within cultures and across cultural boundaries.

This is an essay about economic and political structures, allocation of power, concentration of resources, and how power is projected inside a political system. It is also an essay about how top ten lists influence our view of reality.

I’ve become suspicious of all the lists: top ten, top 50, or top 500. One reason is all of these lists share in common an implicit promise of completeness. The purpose of a list is to close off ignorance, which is ringed by information presented. It is as if a list has a roundness of knowledge that deflects our lack of understanding, knowledge or awareness. Lists create an illusion of knowledge at best and at their worst promote a lie or deception that doubt has been addressed and answered. The main danger of lists is they seduce us not only by the false promise of completeness by also by the allure of simplicity. A list masks the higher level of complexity it closes off.

When you examine any list you might think of playing chess in a dark room where you can’t clearly see the board or pieces. You know there are 32 pieces and 64 squares as part of the game. The average top ten list you read is addictive because you are playing in the dark like the rest of us and want the edge of knowing that you’ve discovered that what amounts to 10 moves will show you how the game is won. In the final part of the essay, I have a look at how difficult it is to play chess in the dark with lists with your cheat sheet to victory.

A list: The Top 10 Largest Employers in the World

Work is an essential component of any economy, whether based on capitalism, socialism or any other ideology designed to govern the business of extracting resources and energy, and distributing and allocating products and services. An employee’s ‘work’ is carried out under the authority and supervision of an employer. The employer may be the government; or it may be a private company. One way to understand any national system is to ask who are its largest employers. Identifying the major employers and the enterprises it controls tells a great deal about a country’s values, politics, beliefs, and policies.

If you were to draw a list of the world’s largest employers, including public and private, what would you expect to find on that list?

In 2012 the BBC produced a top ten list of the largest employers.

(Source: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_employers )

In 2012, 30% of the world’s largest employers came from the ‘private enterprise’ sector. 70% were ‘state enterprises’ or government workers (though we don’t often think of soldiers as government workers that is indeed what they are). Leaving aside what the figures suggest about India where the Indian state railway has more employees than the Indian army, my attention is on the ‘big’ employers in the US and China. These two countries, with three employers each in the top-ten list, comprise 60% of the big employer list for 2012.

Military Employees

Take the US Department of Defense. There are “2.13 million active duty soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and civilian workers, and over 1.1 million National Guardsmen and members of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Reserves. The grand total is just over 3.2 million servicemen, servicewomen, and civilians.” (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Department_of_Defense ) Private contractors are no longer a niche but viewed as part of the total military force. (Source:  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R43074.pdf ) It is difficult to source the role of private contractors in the PLA. It is enough to note that the two top positions are military organizations organized, equipped, maintained and deployed by the government, with, at least on American data, a healthy percentage of private contractors part of the enterprise and who are supplied by private companies.

The US population in 2012 was 312.8 million (Source:  for China it was 1.26 billion people.) That results in  1.023% of the total population were employed by the US military.

In contrast, the military footprint in China works out to 0.1825% of its population. Thus in roughly population terms there was a huge disparity in the size of the military in comparison to the size of the relative populations. America’s military employees are 5.6 times greater than China in terms of total population. Based on the BBC statistics, in terms of military to military comparison of numbers, in 2012 the US military was about 39% larger than the Chinese.

Roughly 143 millions were employed in the US in 2012. (Source: http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/visual-history-us-workforce-1970-2012 ), which works out to 2.2377% of the total work force being US Department of Defense employees. In 2012, China’s workforce reached 764.2 million and its military personnel was 0.30096% of this workforce. (Source: http://www.statista.com/topics/1317/employment-in-china/ ) In terms of comparing overall employment numbers between the two countries, the disparity between those employed by the military indicates that the US military as a percentage of the total work force is 7.44 times larger than the Chinese work force.

The statistics reveal something about the presence of the military employment footprint in the population and the workforce of the country. Size matters for a lot of reasons including politics and economics, not to mention the social component from having a large number of people in uniform. The military has a particular ‘culture’ based on rank, duty, discipline, honour and authority. Profitability doesn’t appear as part of this culture. Its primary duty (some may disagree) is to project power in order to instill fear, which will cause adversaries to bend to the will of political establishment in charge of the military.

What may come as a surprise is that Wal-Mart, owned by one family, employs almost as many employees as China’s People’s Liberation Army. And if Wal-Mart and MacDonald’s were to form an alliance, their combined employees would outnumber the entire American military with a significant number of employees left to take over part of the Chinese military as well.

In other words, the world’s two largest private sector employers have under their umbrella more employees than the world’s largest military. When you start to register the power employers have to influence the attitudes and values of their employees (not only the military runs boot camp for new recruits), the political influence of such employers’ wealth would attract the attention of politicians and their campaign staff. Beyond this obvious risk of system policy being wealth driven, there are other, deeper implications to consider.

Private Enterprise Employers

Wal-Mart and McDonald’s share, in a manner of speaking, certain similarities with military culture: there are no unions, recruits are assigned largely routine, frontline jobs that take stamina and discipline, they have uniforms, codes and little prospect of mobility up the chain of command. They are canon fodder for the elite. They are also paid less than soldiers.

Wal-Mart is a dystopia vision of what a peacetime military might look like if it had different uniforms and grunts were assigned to patrol aisles of merchandise with the mission of maintaining order and security. McDonald’s, like the US military, has bases established all over the world, siphoning money to shareholders in return for distributing dubious foodstuff with a dodgy health record and a tendency to make regular diners obese.

The average Wal-Mart grunt earns $15,576 per year or 13% less paid to a military private.

These two huge US employment giants weren’t created by an act of God or evolved from nature. Their corporate growth and success was largely luck, which in retrospect, we explain in stories about brilliant leadership. Myths are created to support the conclusion that their rise was inevitable. American exceptionalism has its privatized counterpart of this myth. Wal-Mart and McDonald’s were never destined to become the 3^rd and 4^th largest employer in the world by 2012. In fact, each company emerged in the domestic US market as a result of an ecological system comprised of culture, history, values, and laws, and like that if you changed the variables everything might have turned out quite differently. And their corporate success can be attributed, in part, to the protective umbrella of the US military which was funded by all taxpayers (including Wal-Mart and McDonald’s employees).

Another thought is, this private army of soldiers serving the domestic consumer appetites for food, gadgets, and aisles stocked fire-ladder high with consumer goods, is itself protected against intruders from abroad and can enforce its presence in the intruders backyard by using the military. Guns protect existing markets and they open new markets. That’s why the military is so important for a country on an economic march, whether grabbing resources, or opening new consumer markets.

Compensation Disparity

The top ten list of the largest employers presents an opportunity to compare compensation paid to for those at the top of management with their counterparts in other sectors and the disparity between the top manager with the medium pay of a worker employed by that employer. If you want to know why Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21^st Century with evidence of huge income and wealth disparity has struck a chord, a good place to start is an examination of the US military and Wal-Mart pay.

Income

The salary of the Chairman of the Joint Chief Staff is $20,263.50 a month, and that of a private in the army is $1,467.00 per month. The Chairman of Joint Chief of Staff makes roughly fourteen times as much as a private in the army.  That’s right. 14 times is what separates the top solider from the one pulling the trigger on the frontline. The army pay range from top to bottom is closer to a Denmark or Norway than to the big employers inside the world of private enterprise in the US.

Not only is the Wal-Mart grunt paid 13% than a private in the army, the CEO of Wal-Mart is paid 1,034 times the median salary of a Wal-Mart worker. (Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/29/walmart-ceo-pay_n_2978180.html)The CEO of McDonald’s is paid 434 times the median salary of a MacDonald’s worker. In the rankings from the highest disparity between CEO and medium pay for a worker in the company, Wal-Mart is number 1 but MacDonald’s falls to number 5. Three companies pay their CEO at the following multiples of one medium worker: Target #2 at 597:1, Disney #3 at 557:1, Honeywell #4 at 439:1.

If you applied the Wal-Mart ratio of 1034:1, using the bottom pay (note this is likely lower than the medium pay of all soldiers) which is that of a private, the Chairman of the Joint Chief Staff would be paid $21 million a month, or $8.8 million a month if applying the McDonald’s 434:1 ratio. One person is in charge of the defense of an entire country; the other is in charge of selling consumer goods and services inside the same country.

It seems in the scheme of things someone is vastly under paid or overpaid in the military if the private enterprise system values apply to the military. The system that generates muscles has a wholly different compensation system than the underlying system it is designed to protect which is based on maximizing profit. One way to accomplish that goal is to underpay the hugely numerous military personnel, especially those at the higher leadership ranks.

Capital

The generals in the US military don’t own the tanks, forts, jet fighters, submarines, aircraft carriers, canons, rifles, and flame throwers. More importantly, the sons and daughters of the generals don’t inherit their father’s rank and step into his shoes on death as owners. While the generals stand in as leaders of the enterprise, they don’t own it.

The top Wal-Mart leadership is under the control of the Walton’s family. There are no congressional hearings, no public vetting, and no presidential appointment.  When a family member of the Wal-Mart dynasty dies, his or her share is inherited most likely by another member of the family. Any family that has 2.1 million people working in it is business is, in effect, a kind of aristocracy. While the original meaning of aristocracy was ‘rule by the best’, it has come to mean control over the most. In our time of democracy, aristocracy and oligarchy have risen to new positions of power and influence that would have been the envy of dukes and earls of the past.

The Wal-Mart family given the size of its private workforce and the profits generated are a potent economic and political force. The influence of the Wal-Mart family, as its wealth accumulates, has a strong possibility of being expanded over multiple generations. And the accumulation of greater wealth, power and workers inside one family will likely persist as military generals come and go like store managers.

Complexity and story telling in the reign of Big Data

The number of employees isn’t necessarily the best way to ask who is in control of the world’s wealth. You can’t really understand the true lay of the pieces on the chessboard by limiting your study to the Top 10 List of the World’s largest Employers. The relationship of employee numbers to control of wealth is, for example, misleading when the real question is: who is in control?

The “The Network of Global Corporate Control” examines a data base that includes 37 million companies and finds that 147 companies in the world control 40% of the world’s global wealth. The Walton family, the one that owns Wal-Mart comes in as Number 15 on the list of the top 147.

While Thomas Piketty has used big data to break the code of silence and ideology around the issue of the wealth owned by the 1%, but there is another shoe to drop. Having shown the history of wealth concentration is useful. But it doesn’t necessary tell us how wealth translates into control. It is the nature of control that flows from wealth that allows us to move a step closer to understanding how economic and political power is financed and allocated and functions. The old adage of ‘follow the money’ needs to be refined to read: follow how the money is leveraged.

The 2011 study on global corporate control shows that: “Network control is much more unequally distributed than wealth. In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.”

The underlying grid of connections emerges from Big Data. As our information accumulates, the emergent patterns will likely show correlations that are predicted by dogma and lists, or from our usual inventory of cognitive biases. In the future, others will look back at our ‘list mania’ as another example of how we played chess in a dark room and without a true understanding of how the game worked, and we compensated by simplifying it, dumbing it down to a game of checkers or draughts.

Final thoughts

This essay has been a brief glimpse at the top ten largest employers of the world in order to make sense of how we are governed, compensated, and protect and exploit resources and markets. It is an essay about the perils of lists in a sea of complexity. Knowing who are the largest employers on the planet reveals an aspect of existing economic and political systems and the public institutions that carry out government pro-business and growth policies.

I suspect the BBC list is based on less than big data. It is crude and limited data. The time will arrive when we will have a better idea from much more complete data sets and links between data sets. It is what we have now. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem suggests that no data system will ever be complete; that contradictions will emerge. This sentence is false. A sentence we can never shake off, answer or ignore. It follows us like a black dog on a moonless night.

Meanwhile, storytellers can practice their skills by examining the numbers. They will be important in the future; when confronted with big data we will want plausible explanations of meaning. Also, storytellers will highlight what is missing from the existing numbers.

For example, it would be interesting to know in a Thomas Piketty statistical way whether the ratio of employees working for public and private companies in the top ten positions has been constant over time, whether the ratio is connected with concentrations of wealth and income, and the consequences of major economic events like recessions on downsizing, wage capping, and success of rival economic powers and systems in taking market share.

More data will provide answers as to whether the world’s largest private employers are best explained by the use of Western styled democratic systems, or whether they might have evolved in modified form from a Chinese styled system. Wal-Mart and McDonald’s might not have emerged from the chaotic American democracy without the presence of American coercive power at its back. The culture of the military, with its authoritarian command structure and democratic compensation system, may have played an essential role.

Other powerful US companies with fewer employees such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple, Hollywood filmmakers, and war equipment manufacturers have added members to the new emerging American aristocracy. Defense contractors, might reasonably be added to the employees of the Defense Department as the separation between public and private and between civilian and military is often artificial and maintained for political purposes. Thus allowing retired generals a second chance and career to cash in on the profitable side of violence.

I leave you to consider this data: Wal-Mart is committed to hiring 100,000 ex-military personnel by 2018. (Source: http://walmartcareerswithamission.com ) But they should keep in mind that grunts at Wal-Mart start at less pay than a private. This is a story that between now and 2018 will likely be told by some writer, somewhere, wondering about the complexity of our future life, which is unfolding. Now.
________________

*Thank you, John Murphy.

One approach to comprehending the forces that have caused this intellectual dead end to control public debate is to ask a few basic questions:

(1) What do we really understand about an issue or policy?

(2) What knowledge do we have and where did we turn to find that knowledge?

(3) How complete and updated is our information? and

(4) What are the limits to our understanding of the underlying complexities of the system from which the issue emerged or the policy must be implemented?

Researchers have suggested that one problem is that we suffer from the illusion of understanding about how something works, say, a flush toilet or air-conditioning unit. They are familiar objects in our daily life. Because they are familiar we believe we understand how they work. That is an illusion unless you are a plumber or air-conditioning engineer. The illusion of understanding also applies in the political realm to policies on immigration, transportation infrastructure, health care, energy policy, climate change and so on. Given where I live and write, I am interested in the politics of change.

We read the headlines (though 66% of people don’t read newspapers). Most of our opinions on policy issues have a headline depth—a mile wide and inch deep. We believe though we know all there is to know about a preference or position from an 800-word story. We would begrudgingly admit there are a few minor details we might look up if need be, but we are pretty confident that our knowledge is solid and relevant. Our 800-word world of knowledge has prepared us for a policy debate, and we enter the battle over right and wrong with a brittle, dull blade and no shield. But we are confident that our weapons of knowledge will allow us to prevail and we emerge in victory, showing that we are right, and they—fools and charlatans, their reasons turned to ashes have been defeated.

That’s pretty much our world of political debate. We dive head first into a pool that is an inch deep and if possible close down the counter arguments made by people who are basically ignorant, know-nothing troublemakers. We need to convert them to the right side.

In utopia people come to their senses and realize that they lack an in depth understanding of a policy position. In the real world, we are ‘cognitive misers’ says BBC’s Tom Stafford.

Our cognitive vulnerability flows from two sources: first, we are lazy thinkers and would rather know just enough to lay down an emotional platform of support that plugs us into our community of like-minded believers.

Second, our headline knowledge gives us a feeling of familiarity about policy issue debate: it might be gun law restrictions, sending special forces to find school girls kidnapped in Nigeria, or the wisdom of a coup in Thailand. An audience of true believers will emerge with similar talking points. Slogans and talking points create a sense of real knowledge and of the familiarity.

An extremist position for or against a policy is almost always drawn from a slogan, talking point, headline grab that passes as reason or justification for why a position is right. This leads to conflict between people on the opposite side of an issue. They hurl reasons at one another. The other side sneers at the reasons from their opponents. Deadlock ensues, positions hardened, and violence begins to rear its ugly head.

Third, our mental processing of patterns, knowledge, and values is filtered through cultural filters. These biases can’t ever be overcome; they are our setting, channels, frequencies over which information is sent and received.

Danger and red flashing lights should be turned on once it is realized that our problem is our tendency to unquestioningly accept that our understanding is sufficient, good enough, to support high confidence in our position. That’s why it’s an illusion. It is also why it’s a contradiction. We deceive ourselves in believing our simple understanding is an accurate summary of how a complex system functions when we don’t understand the complexity.

Researchers have shown that politically polarizing positions rests on superficial understanding of the complexity of how policies work. When pressed we can’t explain how the policy functions in such complexity. We don’t have the information or breadth of knowledge needed to connect policy, policy outcomes, and the system in which policy sinks or swims. The problem with requiring someone with a polarized position to give such an explanation is that it threatens the black and white thinking. The hallmark of an extremist is one who refuses to undertake such an inquiry.

We need diverse information about systems, and that comes from people who see and experience the system in diverse ways. But diversity of explanations can be viewed as challenges or criticism. If you had true power, you’d close down those explanations that didn’t support your policy or actions. Here’s an example from my week.

I received an email from the FCCT (Foreign Correspondents Club Thailand) this week about an event:

With absolute power, you can shutdown all public voices that probe for a deeper knowledge, and a broader explanation of the mechanism working inside the system. Asking a question can be viewed as an act of aggression. While a coup is unusual in most countries, the impulse to control policy making by keeping away from the deep waters of knowledge that may cause ‘confusion’ or ‘undermine authority’ is nearly universal.

In a research article titled “Political Extremism is Supported by an Illusion of Understanding” the authors started with the hypothesis “that extreme policy preferences often rely on people’s overestimation of their mechanistic understanding of complex systems those policies are intended to influence.”

Our understanding of policies remains stuck at the abstract, superficial headline level of reality. That understanding is disconnected to an inquiry as to how policies function inside the day-to-day system. The takeaway from The Political Extremism research is the conclusion that when people discover their illusion of explanatory depth, they moderated their opinions. They become less confident in supporting an extreme position.

How do we discover the illusion of explanatory depth has deceived us over whether a policy is good or bad? When asking someone about a policy, the trick is to refrain from asking them to give a list of their reasons to support their preference or position. But why not listen to their reasons? Because the probability is their reasons are degraded products built from inferior materials e.g., vaguely understood values, third-hand reports, talking points by leaders, opinion-makers, celebrities, and pundits they trust or admire, or form from the star dust of generalities that don’t require a great deal of knowledge.

The policies of airport/passenger security are a good example of polarized positions. The government claims its security/inspection policies are essential tools to fight terrorism. This is their reason for what we go through at airports when we travel, young, old, it doesn’t matter. The possibility of a terrorist boarding a plane with potential weapon is the headline reason that in a given year a billion airline passengers must remove their shoes, belts, watches, keys, coins, declare their iPads, laptops, Kindles, and leave behind any liquid more than 50ML.

Remember while you’re putting your shoes back on, and gathering up all the bits and pieces from the plastic tray, that in many countries, officials don’t check boarding passengers’ passport against a database of stolen passports. In a story about stolen and false passports in Thailand, The Guardian noted:

“Interpol’s database of Lost and Stolen Travel Documents (LSTD). Created after the September 11, 2001 terror attack on New York and Washington, the LSTD database now has some 40m entries. The inter-governmental police cooperation organisation says this weekend it is searched more than 800m times a year, mainly by the US, which accessed it 250m times, the UK (120m) and the UAE (50m).”

Two passengers on the ill-fated MH370 flight that vanished without a trace (remember that?) boarded with dodgy passports.

Instead of confronting authorities who support the current airport inspection regime not to give their reasons for supporting failed security, we might ask them for a mechanistic explanation of the effects of its procedures, how those procedures were designed, how they have been subject to quality control, how system operators have been trained, how their skills are updated, what disruptions occur inside airport processing systems and how does the policy account for those disruptions. These aren’t questions of preference; it is an explanatory discussion of how inspection works, who works in that system, who supervises and updates, manages and is accountable in the system, the cost of the system (direct and indirect), and what outcomes the policy has produced.

Certain problems can only be resolved by a military solution. That is the use of force to remove an obstacle to the state’s interest and neutralize the threat of the obstacle being reinstalled. Most problems are political in nature and a military solution is ill-suited to serve as a substitute for a political process which is inherently civilian, with the military is only a component in the overall grand plans for governing.

Taking off your shoes at an airport and executing a military coup to overthrow a government are both justified on the basis of providing public security.  Can one discover a rational link between these two very different situations in which security is invoked? We seek explanations as to why and to whom policies apply, how the policy targets were designed, detected, and detered, the process of implementation to assess security measures. All policies, including ones connected with security, ultimately must pass through the test of whether the operational filters reduce security threats. Are we, in other words, detaining the people who threaten security or people who ask questions about power arrangements?

People can argue all day and never persuade the other to change his view on the use of a military solution to resolve a certain conflict. Pro-intervention supporters would reason that the military as the last resort could be trusted where politicians are characterized as evil, corrupt and bad people. Anti-intervention supporters would reason that a democratic system can’t by its very nature emerge from a military dictatorship. And the two parties would go round and round in a debate, each feeling more confident the other person was insane and they’d been right all along.

Might there be another more promising approach, which might diffuse each opposing party’s fixed position based on the illusion of understanding?

There is. And it works like this. You ask the other person not for his reasons to support his position on a matter of government, resource allocation, energy or environmental programs, climate change, but you ask him to explain, step-by-step how the position he supports would define its policy and the goal or outcome it seeks to achieve. The Cognitive Miser Theory kicks in at this point. It exposes that the fixed knowledge of how something works, what it takes to make it work, how it breaks down or other limitations, is very shallow.

Finding a middle ground means that people learn to change their use of hearsay, values, and headline knowledge. The breakthrough comes with the realization that these elements promise the illusion of an ocean of truth but deliver a tiny, muddy pond. Rather than attack their policy (that won’t be productive), ask them to explain how the policy they support will bring about the outcome they claim will happen. Give us the specifics of how the policy is connected to and integrated with the larger system, and how that system will be modified, altered, updated and how someone can measure whether it achieved the intended outcome.

Remember that this approach to diffuse political extremism is a two-way street. No one thinks they hold extreme views; this is a label that we stigmatize others with. If you ask another person to take you along an explanatory tour of how the policy he or she supports integrates with the larger system and produces the outcome claimed, he or she may well ask you to do the same. Your explanation may also stall or fail, and you also realize the illusion of understanding doesn’t only rear its head from your opponent’s nest; it lives inside of you, too. That’s when both sides of a policy debate realize they both need to revise their understanding about the meaning, design and purpose of a policy; that it wasn’t as absolute and perfect as they thought and a compromise becomes possible.

Debating the illusion of understanding is an interesting idea. Unfortunately it can’t be raised until the possibility of an illusion is acknowledged. That acknowledgment is difficult to come by and that is core of the problem. Many people are frustrated because their minds are tuned (perhaps imprisoned is a better metaphor) to the easy ride they are accustomed to along the lazy mental landscape of illusions. Suggesting this is an illusion is to touch a nerve and the patient jumps a mile high out of his armchair. Anger and hate are the preferred anesthetic in dealing with the cognitive dissonance.

The discussion between those holding conflicting policy views and what steps are needed before we can go on that explanatory journey has been put on ice. But I write from the tropics where the ice, sooner or later, melts under the noonday sun.

There are two silences that concern me and should concern you.

“You have a right to remain silent.”

What usually follows is: “Whatever you say may be used against you in a court of law.”

This right to be silent is enshrined in the 5th Amendment of US constitution. Like many constitutional rights the right to remain silent has been chipped away, sculptured into an object that continues to have similar traits but is a different species. In principle, the right to stand your ground against the vast power of an oppressive state is a symbol against tyranny.

The right to remain silent when questioned by the State is a radical right. The right is your shield against forced incrimination. It is why torture and beating are so repulsive and threatening. In the face of overwhelming power, all citizens, even those we despise and hate, need protection against authority. One man can stop a column of tanks through sheer defiance. But how long can he stand before being run over? It’s for our own sake that we protect our right to silence. To exempt one is to exempt everyone. The onus is on the authorities to make a case of wrong doing without torturing the suspect into a confession.

But confessions are popular in many places. Confessions have an enormous advantage—they shortcut the tedium of dead end investigations, paperwork, false leads and trails, and looking for incriminating evidence and witnesses.

The second category of silence is connected to the truth. Freedom of expression is the truth telling process. Of all the amendments to the American constitution, this is the number one right of a citizen. As George Orwell wrote, “In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” He also wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Silence is not just a right. It is a condition that can be imposed. Silence can be commanded on political grounds. In this case, not remaining silent becomes a crime. It can be seen as a provocation to those in authority. Speaking and non-speaking in tyranny must pass the test of loyalty. There is no other feature in such a system by which silence can be judged.

Silence is one purpose of repression as it mutes critics, those with the awkward questions, those who wish someone to explain a contradiction, a paradox for which there is no good answer. Silence never embarrasses authority; it comforts them.

How to illustrate or describe silence in words is difficult. The act of writing breaks the silence. This state of being quiet is both an internal mental process we aren’t privileged to witness in others, and an external signal of the silent process. When I am silent, you may guess that something is going on inside my mind, but it remains a guess until I reveal my thoughts.

I can illustrate silence by describing an exterior event. An empty dinning room table with a woman reading. A bedroom with an elderly man staring at the ceiling as death approaches. A crime scene with yellow tape draped across a doorway, with a woman with blood on her blouse, staring into space. Silence envelopes each, expressing a different range of possibilities as to why words are absent.

There is another kind of silence that writers throughout the ages have faced. Not a tyrant seeking to incriminate the writer for a crime he didn’t commit, but the tyrant who uses power to stop a writer from voicing criticism, challenging dogma, pointing out errors, mistakes, flaws and deceit. Silence in this case is the tyrant’s friend and ally. The weight of occupation is the enforced silence the occupiers impose. Like torture or beatings, the command to shut up and obey causes suffering.

Silence in the interrogation room is prohibited. But silence inside the marketplace of ideas may be required. Power has this contradictory relationship with silence. You have to say the State’s position on silence depends on the context.

Writers such as George Orwell have been curious about the meaning of silence. Most people are not by nature silent. In a silent room, look for the censor. Ask him the score. He won’t be able to tell you more than I’ve told you: either remain silent or join in praise of the leader. “You see,” he says, “we give the same choice to all people. The good people and the bad people are known by their choice.”

We have a natural impulse to explain, to discuss, to debate, to test, challenge and contest theories, beliefs and principles. But in a time of repression, the spontaneous discussions grind to a dead halt. It is a time for thinking, in silence.

You have a choice. You can be defined by the censor’s choice or you step forward in front of a tank. Until this week, I never emotionally felt how brave that man was. How he gives me hope in a world where words bend to the iron will and tanks of rulers. That is our history. What our ancestors experienced. They understood the lesson repeated generation after generation, that to break the official silence is a crime. The truth card won’t get you out of jail, and it may well be your one-way ticket to a prison cell.

Here are some thoughts from writers about the nature of silence, truth and censorship.

“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
―George Orwell, 1984

“When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.”
―Yevgeny Yevtushenko

“I said nothing for a time, just ran my fingertips along the edge of the human-shaped emptiness that had been left inside me.”
―Haruki Murakami, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
―George Orwell

“Silence is the ultimate weapon of power.”
―Charles de Gaulle

“Orthodoxy means not thinking–not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
―George Orwell, 1984

You might think of these biases like the searchlights used in London during the Blitz in World War II to spot and shoot down enemy intruders. We are bombarded daily with ideas, thoughts, facts, opinions, evidence and our biases distort, deflect, and filter the information as we process it. These are our prison walls. No one can scale them and be free.

Billions of people live inside such socially constructed structures erected from ancient holy books, customs, beliefs, and rituals. When a tsunami of facts washes over these ancient structures, showing they are false, unsafe, and unreliable, what do people do who live in these buildings? They hunker down and claim their traditional structure of reality is stronger than ever. And the heretics with their ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ are condemned and vilified. Ever since the science revolution in the 17^th Century, the battle over what material is appropriate material for social constructs of reality has been waged.

An article in Macleans titled America Dumbs Down observed, “A national poll, conducted in March for the Associated Press, found that 42 per cent of Americans are “not too” or “not at all” confident that all life on Earth is the product of evolution. Similarly, 51 per cent of people expressed skepticism that the universe started with a “big bang” 13.8 billion years ago, and 36 per cent doubted the Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years.”

The first obligation of the average best selling writer is to pander to people’s biases, confirming their vision of reality. Not all best sellers are cynical attempts to make money. Accidental best sellers like Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21^st Century is a good example of a book that undermines conventional economic wisdom, exposing the bias and fraud of many contemporary economists.

To make people think for themselves critically in an age where independent thinking is uncomfortable, out of fashion, and suspected to be a covert tool of the elites to undermine faith and religion. An example of the trend in the Macleans article: “Last month, the school board in Meridian, Idaho voted to remove The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie from its Grade 10 supplemental reading list following parental complaints about its uncouth language and depictions of sex and drug use. When 17-year-old student Brady Kissel teamed up with staff from a local store to give away copies at a park as a protest, a concerned citizen called police. It was the evening of April 23, which was also World Book Night, an event dedicated to “spreading the love of reading.”

The crucial question is what do we use language for? Every culture and time throughout history has addressed this question. In our culture and time, the debate continues. By examining the controversies about literature and the world of ideas found inside books, we can take a snapshot of how we address this question. Without language and books we can’t communicate about the past and the make predictions about the future. This makes language potentially dangerous. This explains why the past in every culture is a manufactured product. The reality of the past when challenged leads to conflict, assassination, exile and stigma.   Students are not so much taught as indoctrinated. And the task of envisioning the future, which draws lessons from the past, becomes riddled with the serialization of errors, lies, and illusions continued from the past.

Language in print establishes our sense of reality so completely that we become accustomed to perceiving the world visually. Our other senses: hearing, touch, smell, and taste atrophy as we explore the world through analogue and digital print worlds, and the visual worlds of YouTube, TV, and movies. By controlling what people see, they can be easily programmed to share a homogenous reality—social or political. The financial control by the elites over the medium of print and images is a guarantee of their power and influence can be extended and remain largely unchallenged. One of the first tasks of coup makers is to take control of the media. And they seize TV, radio station and threaten others in social media for good reasons.

We design the space we call the ‘present’ by reference to this unreliable account of the past. When students enter that design space in school and university they can come in for a shock. We can’t tell them they’ve been lied to and deceived most of their life, instead we warn them to brace against a ‘disturbing’ scene in a play or book as it might unsettle, confuse or disconcert them.

The number of books being read per person is in decline. Ignorance and anti-intellectual attitudes are in vogue. The New York Times reports a trend in American colleges that seems to be a parody, something Jon Stewart would run on the Daily Show.

“Colleges across the country this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as “trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder [as] in victims of rape or in war veterans.”

That’s not a mistake. This isn’t an article about 10 year olds in a South Carolina redneck country school; it is about colleges throughout the United States. Though, I am skeptical of the NYT’s author’s claim. The author offers the usual anecdotal evidence without supporting data to support the claim of a mass movement in this direction. Let’s assume, for purposes of argument, that the big data supports this claim of a countrywide trend in American colleges in support of trigger warnings to be issued by professors assigning plays, poems or books with disturbing themes, characters or events.

Isn’t one of the purposes of a college education the goal of exposing students to a wide range of ideas, cultures, histories, and theories as an introduction to the reality of the world? Yes, Johnny and Mary, the world is often in conflict over ideas, events, personalities, and history. If you read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, who found himself at ground level during the fire bombing by the allies of Dresden, you will discover one way of processing such a traumatic event. Every great book ever written triggers an emotion, upsets values, threats the orthodox views, and, yes, makes you appreciate we have always lived in an uncertain, contentious, messy, dangerous world, where people are injured, disappeared, killed, tortured and abused. Shouldn’t college students have an deeper, more diverse, complex understanding of ways that reality are fashioned in our world?

Apparently that view is a minority in the American trend for bringing in a system of ‘trigger warnings’ as the last step toward creating a state of near total control. If I were one of the oligarchs, I’d very much support and fund such a trend. The reality is anything that might threaten the oligarch’s social construct of reality is deemed a threat to all. The trigger warning is itself a warning about who has their finger on the trigger and where the barrel of that gun is pointed at writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf.

The New York Times article gives a couple of examples, “Among the suggestions for books that would benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” (contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses suicide).”

The new purpose of university education has narrowed considerably as it has gone into the mass education business. Trigger warnings become a strut in the new infrastructure of reality to reinforce the prevailing view that college is a place to learn job skills. Our biases ensure that we are hardwired to believe things that are not true.

Recent studies have shown that most people live in a ‘fact free zone’ and debunking lies and deceptions brings in Backfire Effect like ack-ack guns firing at the incoming facts until the barrels melt. These people, it appears, need protection from the blitz of images, facts, opinions that challenge their personal operating system of reality. Having internalized the message, the herd becomes self-censoring. The Elites react negatively and intervene when an individual or group attempts to divert the masses from their auto-pilot setting. For example, someone may ask a dangerous question: Is wealth equitably distributed by unregulated capitalism?

America is, in other words, trending toward the Chinese model of higher education. Intellectual and emotional controls are a step away from eliminating the awkward that may get in the way of learning how to build a bridge or computer program. If a professor must live under the shadow of a trigger warning, the temptation will be to avoid any literature that might have such a trigger for fear that his warning was too little, too late, and he is open to a law suit for failure to make a full and informed disclosure in a complete warning. Every professor would need to retain a lawyer with expertise in what is an appropriate trigger and how to give effective warnings. Does society want to go down that path? It seems there are many in America who wish for this path.

Students are cocooned in a manufactured reality where disturbing, disruptive or destabilizing images, scenes, characters might upset the reality that has been pre-ordered and assigned to them. The Oberlin College guideline is specific: “Be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.”

Unfiltered, ugly, twisted, confusing and threatening reality is an enemy to those in power. Most people are willing to hand over their liberty and privacy to escape that reality. Oligarchs know this about the human condition and they exploit this design defect to their and their heirs enduring long-term advantage.

The techniques of control are outright repression as in Orwell’s 1984 or soma in Huxley’s Brave New World. We are learning this is a false choice. In many countries the oligarchs use a combination of both techniques to quell rebellion and to dampen fears of the disturbing, inconvenient truths of most people’s lives. Issues of ‘privilege and oppression’ are triggering events. We must warn students that an assigned book might create an uncomfortable sense of cognitive dissonance.

Not all messages are allowed equal passage along the pipeline of information. The medium has more than one way to deliver a message and more than one message: the most powerful symbol of blocking the herd from seeing what the caretakers wish them not to know about their plans, policies, and self-dealing is ██████████. When a non-authorized person wishes to send a public message over the heads of the caretakers which alerts the herd of a danger, a misdeed, or abuse the message is blocked are behind a wall: ██████████. Analogue or digital, the traffic of ideas, information, and theories is under constant surveillance, censors patrolling space, searching for the words and images that challenge authority’s version of reality. We can follow their trail. Our overlords leave behind their historical signature of disapproval ██████████ erected like a tombstone over the grave of a murdered thought.

Trigger warnings are a sign of attempts to restrict and ultimately to abolish cognitive dissonance. No one should be surprised by this desire. Thais often say that thinking too much gives them a headache. That view, as it turns out, may now represent a larger, universal attitude in many other places.

Deliberate calculation, skepticism, doubt, and calls for falsifiable theories are time-consuming, slow thinking in a world where change accelerates and people are afraid of being left behind. The sheep keep dogs as house pets not quite seeing the terrible irony of that relationship, without seeing what has happened to the wolf over evolutionary time has happened to them.

Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, more than fifty years ago saw then what we are experiencing now: “Homogenization of men and materials will become the great program of the Gutenberg era, the source of wealth and power unknown to any other time or technology.”

Trigger warnings are another example of the Hyperreality that maintains an environment for the herd. In dense concentrations in modern cities, the members of this herd, individually and collectively, remain calm, content, and undisturbed as they study, work, eat, love, pray and shop. The gates leading from one to the next enclosure should give the appearance of freedom. People need to believe they glide along one seamless path where they are warned in advance against any thoughts or images that might disturb them. Guidelines are issued to carefully monitor and control ideas, reports of psychological states, degrading and horrible experiences, injustice and arbitrary action as if they are about to be injected with a dangerous drug. The best of literature is dangerous as it shows the manufactured reality is a drug of the worst kind of oppression.

The future is a fight against a model of reality that is a monopoly, controlled and protected and defended against dissent. We are already far down the road where our reality is one manufactured under close supervision, blending entertainment, status, prestige and pride. Non-corporate media has noticed how big corporate media has been relatively quiet in reporting about a Princeton Study that showed the considerable power to influence government policy held by the economic elite.  Information has been sufficiently filtered by big corporate media and the question is how long before non-corporate online players make the old filters irrelevant?  The information dam will bust. People will know who has what and where they’ve stashed it. It seems the chase has started.

I try to imagine how this will work out. The economic elites still operate the main feed line of what you experience everyday. Every object around you throughout the day connects you to a product that comes off the feed line. Personal emotional attachment and engagement becomes detached from day-to-day reality. We are attached to what isn’t real, and reality, which we no longer engage with, seems less and less real.  Disneyland is the prevailing metaphor, the 3D cartoon world. The artificial environment becomes the new real. The Eiffel Tower displayed Disney World in Orlando becomes as ‘real’ to the visitor as the one in Paris. People no longer can distinguish one from the other. A copy becomes as valid an experience as the original. It is inside this blended reality that students are shielded against an earlier world of experience and reality where bad things happened to good people.

The best writing will continue to explore the sharp edges of reality, the hypocrisy of power, the abuses of authority, the inequity and injustice of those behind the veil. It is a rearguard action as those who have used truth to challenge power, only to discover that those in power deflect truth under the guise of protecting youth from the harmful consequence of truth. We have advanced technologically beyond what our ancestors could imagine while emotionally running on the same treadmill that Socrates pointed at in the public square. And that cup of hemlock takes a new form as we escape deeper into the world of sheep forgetting the history of dogs.

Marshall McLuhan wrote in Gutenberg Galaxy: “We now live in the early part of an age for which the meaning of print culture is becoming as alien as the meaning of manuscript culture was to the eighteenth century. ‘We are the primitives of a new culture.’” We enter this new culture will our bias guns fully loaded and blazing away.

Characters, even the most memorable ones, are creatures of their place and time. Time is an inescapable aspect of character, giving it weight, dimension, and volume like a physical property. As people are born, live their lives and die, so is the fate of fictional characters. While the expiry date condemns most fictional characters to the literary graveyard, a few manage to achieve a kind of immortality. This literary elite roll call of characters is handed onto future generations. But as this is such a rare event, we should be asking how and why that happens at all. As Lewis Carroll implies in the opening quote, people, like novels are period pieces, who understand themselves in a way that has little relevance to the contemporary world shaped by new and different forces.

As the cartoon suggests, an essential quality defining a character in a novel (or life) is the way they are products of the technology of their time. Their technology has shaped their view of the world and how they see themselves and others.

In crime fiction, the office of a private eye might contain a Remington typewriter, a hat and umbrella tree, a Bakelite rotary phone and a couple of metal file cabinets with neat rows of paper folders. The private eye’s Secretary takes short hand or transcribes her boss’s dictation.

Investigations are centered in the analogue world where people are followed, watched, and there are face-to-face meetings, confrontations, discussions and arguments. We can read the classic fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammet with pleasure by the simple act of accepting that we enter a world of very different artifacts, objects, and technology. This conceit works because inside that world everyone is working, living, stealing, killing, lying, and running on the same technical infrastructure. None of them have a significant technological advantage over the other. It is then a war of wits, shoe leather, discipline, and one or two lucky breaks that makes the difference in a private eye’s fate.

I have described a world that pre-dates the age of big data, computers, GPS systems, Google, Facebook, Twitter, tracking programs recording computer keystrokes and website searches, CCTV cameras, and computer forensic experts. This technology provides the context in which we live, move and die; it is how we perceive what is meaningful in the age we live in.

Let’s take the example of a murder. If the police or private eye discover a murder victim who had no email, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Skype accounts, and who had no text-messages, no smart phone, and whose sole possession was a black and white TV, radio and cassette player, they might wonder if this person was a time traveler from the past. Certainly it would seem odd; a character who chose in 2014 to divorce himself from the digital world would be a fish out of water. His murder would appear more freakish to the new generation because he chose find happiness in a life totally removed the digital world. That seems incomprehensible to many young people (a hypothesis that needs testing).

It is easy for the older generation to devalue communication channels such as texting and tweeting. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and author of many books including “How the Mind Works” and “The Better Angels of Our Nature” http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2014/05/what-could-be-more-interesting-than-how-the-mind-works/ has a good response to this tendency to criticize the new channels:

“So I am wary of the “young people suck” school of social criticism. I have no patience for the idea that because texting and tweeting force one to be brief, we’re going to lose the ability to express ourselves in full sentences and paragraphs. This simply misunderstands the way that human language works. All of us command a variety of registers and speech styles, which we narrowcast to different forums. We speak differently to our loved ones than we do when we are lecturing, and still differently when we are approaching a stranger. And so, too, we have a style that is appropriate for texting and instant messaging that does not necessarily infect the way we communicate in other forums.”

A non-connected character stands a chance to gain a reader’s interest if she is a technology lover, who wonders how such a character can exist outside her digital zone and call themselves content and happy; and satisfies the Luddite, who sees her own possibilities in following a life (minus the unhappy ending) like such a character, drawing inspiration and courage from the example.  It would be a character both sides of the digital divide would enjoy but for different reasons. That’s what makes for a good character—he or she plays across the narrower bands of class, education, and status lines.

Unfriending or blocking someone online and offline are two different social spaces, protocols, repercussions, and reactions.

As readers we follow the lives of characters moving about inside fictional worlds that are significantly different from our own life. The strength of the characters and their story can (and do) allow the reader to enjoy the human aspect of the experience that transcends primitive information retrieval and storage systems, and rudimentary communication systems which makes their culture very different from our own.

Readers now expect their characters to be influenced, affected by, and in reaction to the things that happen in the digital world.

The technological distance between 2014 and 1974 is only forty years. In many ways the forces that shape lives have changed considerably over this brief period. Part of the fallout is that more people have vastly more information about each other. Meet someone new and want to find out who they are? In the analogue world it might take a long time to find out information about someone. Today, we Google them and in a few minutes have a profile.

All of us have become private investigators with access to far more information than any governments had at their disposal 50 years ago. The lives, possessions and luxury life style of the .1% are no longer secret. Inequality and the gap between those who own the system and those who work for the system has created digital interest, with the online communities channeling statistics, reviewing books, discussing causes, priorities, policies and propaganda. A worldwide audience has a conversation that goes on twenty-four hours a day and leaves that conversation online for others to read and participate in.

Our ideas about secrecy and privacy come to have very different meaning and importance depending on the technology environment.

Are the old classics relevant to the new generation and those who will have more advanced technology in the next 50 years? Will they enjoy Richard Stark’s Parker novels like The Score, or James Crumely’s The Long Good Kiss or James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice.

Cain’s title begs for a cartoon with the ten year old asking: Was his email account down? The issue isn’t limited to crime fiction. The classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry of Values by Robert M. Pirsig written in the early 1970s assumes a technological platform that has long since vanished. A son and father on a road trip, discussing the meaning of life; they lacked a digital connection. In the novel, there were just the two of them on the road and the stars above their heads at night. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?

We are at a crossroad (some would argue we are always at a crossroad). There are those who read these novels, learn from them, share them with others, and increase their understanding of others (call this the empathy bonus). But there is no doubt that the characters in such books experience life in a quite different fashion from contemporary people.

We shop online. We socialize with one another over large distances, fall in love, out of love, feud, form alliances, vent anger and hate—all online, from the safety of their home, office, car, Starbucks or Siam-Paragon shopping mall. Most young people spend as much time (if not substantially more) online as they do in their offline world. People hang out online the way in once did at the local pub. A character’s personality, desires, motives and goals are as much defined by his or her relationship with others online as in the old analogue world. We think we know others in the digital world and they know us? But what do we really know about each other from our computer screen, iPad, or iPhone? Pinker might argue there are different styles of knowing. To some extend that is true. We all know some people much better than others even in the analogue world.

But the medium of the messages, its style, is also a clue to its limitations. The digital world is a substitute for face-to-face conversations. Your choice of medium will be a trade off in the quality of collecting and analyzing information.  In the analogue world, you can see a person’s facial expressions, their hands making a gesture, their posture as they sit, talk, stand, walk across a room, or observe their eyes during a moment of silence when all kinds of information about mood, attention, veracity, and openness/resistance is revealed outside of formal language. Emotional icons are a poor substitute. The judgments we make in the analogue world are both restrictive—what you see is all that you get—and expansive—they include smells, sounds, touch and taste.

Many readers hunger for a reading experience that not only explores the technological impact on the lives of fictional characters. A novel recreates the risks, dangers, and opportunities such innovations bring, ones that disrupt like a knife blade cutting through skin and soft tissue and ones that change the ways we think about ourselves and each other.

News feeds produce a huge volume of information about the global migration of people across geographical boundaries. The Rohingya fleeing Burma on old unseaworthy boats to escape persecution and murder under the eye of local authorities. Africans escaping again by boat to Europe. Hispanic people cross into America for a better life. Cambodians and Burmese cross the border into Thailand for a new, better life. We don’t get a true sense of the proportion of such people and their problems in our cozy digital social networks. The one justification for writing a novel is to make such people ‘real’ and ‘tangible’ and ‘individual’. How do such people fit into our hybrid analogue-digitally divided lives? That’s the question you should be asking a novelist?

The physical world continues to draw our attention and when we read these stories we rarely ask how much longer until the digital world distracts us from the analogue migration patterns of our species. As the locus of the real action moves into ‘hyperreality’, blurring what is ‘real’ along with what we are paying attention to, we may be losing our ability to distinguish digital migrations from physical ones.

We can easily make a list of our favorite analogue world authors, where the technological perspective is pre-1982 (IBM PC goes to mass market). Writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Simenon, James Crumley, Richard Stark, and many others who are widely read, discussed and admired fall into that category.

The Bakelite phone generation, as a result of the scope and nature of their technology, have (to our modern eyes) severe limits on how they can find out things about other people, how they go about looking, where they search, and what they do when they find what they are looking for. We see them as handicapped in a way that we are not.

The people in the pre-1982 novels had no devices others than telephones to communicate with each other. Most of the inter reaction is face to face. How primitive the new generation might be tempted to conclude.

We expect a character from a contemporary author to mirror the reality of the modern world and that means an accounting of his or her connections to the digital world. Readers expect to find hybrid characters with a foot in both worlds. These connections are essential to understanding a person’s identity. The separation of what they believe, know, or understand from the two worlds is blended in a way that it can’t be untangled. Person and device blurred into one. The device augments, enhances the character, makes him feel smarter, more knowledgeable, capable and in control. Like drugs or alcohol, in the digital world the information flow becomes an addictive river where people wish to bathe for hours. Such people start their morning and finish their day checking their timelines, email accounts, and browsing for the latest breaking news.

People who have crawled into the digital world are readers looking for stories about how others have used this crawl space, their problems, ups and downs, and the way they handle relationships in the online and offline worlds.

The final chapter about character remains as open ended as technology. But there seems no going back to the time of the classics, not in crime or literary fiction. As future readers, if an author is to purchase a piece of their fragmented attention, he will need a story that transcends time and technology. That’s a tall order and no one can say what will survive.  Readers in different times have wanted the same experience: a literary mirror, a compass, a shield and a sword to go forth and wage the battles in their daily life. And to understand the meaning of those battles, the victories and the defeats.

Characters in books will need to adjust what they pay attention to and who pays attention to them. Authors who ignore the evolution of human relationships and identity building will be writing about a lost past. There will always be a market for nostalgia and idealized fictional characters. As there will be those suffer from the delusion that such characters whose lives never touched the digital world are meaningful to the new generation of readers. Those of us who reached adulthood long before our world was rewired for broadband width communication remember that earlier off the grid analogue world we grew up in. We also know that this world is behind us. And the new generation of readers will expect, what we expected, characters we could identify with; not characters that would judge us or look down on us, our way of life and values.

What will this new generation of readers expect from fiction authors? In my view, we will enter fictional worlds where characters’ emotional reactions, intentions, preoccupation shift between the analogue and digital experience. Young readers will have many more people they call ‘friends’ than prior generations. Most of these friends, they will have never met outside a computer screen but that won’t lessen their feeling of connectedness and intimacy. Friendships in the analogue world will have a different time scale and priority. Books will chart the connection between characters inside the two worlds. Technology disrupts not only jobs and industries; it disrupts the nature of our identity. Authors, in the future, will discover ways to tell the stories about people whose identities are the product of information and communication linking two different worlds of thought, experience, ideas, values and relationships.

Not us smart, non-complacent ones we assume, but the others: we see their bodies and we see the tears in the eyes of their families and friends. Sometimes all the vigilance in the world won’t be enough. Things happen to people and to the planners who have gone through the checklist twice before taking off. Call it bad luck, or karma, or the randomness of the universe, mysteries which mock our planning.

We are nearing the end of an age when crime fiction was an epic battle of law enforcement authorities matching wits with criminals at the domestic and international level. From the Parker novels to the Wolf of Wall Street, there is a parade of crime in the back alleys of Main Street and Wall Street.

Leonardo Di Caprio, Wolf of Wall Street

The state authorities have been making gains employing the latest advanced technology such as surveillance cameras, Internet tracking, GPS systems, and recording of our online search histories, credit card purchases, telephone calls, and emails. There are many more ways to discover what others are planning, and to catch criminals after they commit a crime. There are fewer dark corners for criminals to hide and they continue to diminish.

Technology is dynamic. The devices appear to be egalitarian, and seem through the promise of connection to expand our sense of kinship, and that lulls us into feeling empowered.

The reality is the data collected about you and me and everyone is being concentrated. It is the new Capital, the new wealth from which income is being generated. Not US Treasury Bonds or dividends paid to shareholders. We are starting imagine where all of this is leading us.

As most people are caught up in the daily struggles it’s no surprise that the larger forces remain invisible even as they gather significance. One of the best examples is the potential for existential shifts caused by AI or Artificial Intelligence. This essay is about what the possibilities of AI may have waiting for us in the near to medium future. Let’s take a walk down that alley.

Johnny Depp, Transcendence

Often the first hints about the nature of abrupt change are found in literature and film. Two recent films: Hers and Transcendence ask questions about the intelligence combined with technology that dwarfs human intelligence.

Joaquin Phoenix, Her

We begin to notice small stories buried in the back pages about how the military is funding the development of autonomous-weapon systems. The technological entity launches itself, select the target and destroys and we sit back with a bowl of popcorn and watch the video replay.

We start to see articles about how people around us have withdrawn from the world and their lives, even as they are in public, are lived in a digital link through their iPhone or tablet. There are articles pleading for people to look away from their iPhone and engage the world around them.

The next canary to ring the warning bell is found among scientists, the rationalists, those who aren’t in the business of channeling our fears but understanding and explaining the nature of the world and updating the context of our reality. These aren’t doomsday people or someone trying to make a market, a buck, a name. They are shouting. They are asking people to pay attention.

Stephen Hawking in a recent piece for the Independent wrote:

“One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.”

As Hawking notes, few resources are being marshaled to monitor AI development, but there are “non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute.”

AI depends on not just who controls it but on the more basic question—at what point does AI slip the collar and no longer can be controlled by human intelligence? And slips that collar around our necks.

What is the timeline for an event when AI exceeds human intelligence? Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky have debated issues, including the speed of AI development and the debate has been archived. Judging the possible rate of AI acceleration is hotly debated. AI might go through many steps allowing for all kinds of plans, policies and consensus to develop before the next step; or it might happen suddenly without advance warning. No one can give a reasonable probability of which position is more likely. As a result, scientists like Stephen Hawking have argued (this is the existential concern) that government should take precautions on AI going FOOM.

The rate of change factor is a major difference that distinguishes the impact of AI, its disruption of the concentration of wealth accumulated over many generations, which is Piketty’s domain. It is, for example, highly improbable that all wealth in the world would be owned by a single human being, acting on his or her own intelligence, in the space of 5 hours; but there is an argument that this probability is significant enough with AI that we should pay attention and plan for that probability.

Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century is generating a lot of attention, controversy, and heated exchanges. Perhaps it is time to take Piketty’s argument about capital and put it in a different context to see if the feelings it evokes shift. I’ve written a short think piece on how Piketty’s argument would look inside the field of AI.

Artificial Intelligence and the Piketty Argument

Piketty’s research showing the exponential threat of unregulated capitalism hitting a wall, one built during the Cold War as a response to communism. The time between the fall of the Berlin Wall and Capital in the 21st Century is too short for the old ideological beliefs and faith in capitalism to not influence some contrary reaction.

Wasn’t capitalism what the Cold War was fought preserve against a collectivist nightmare? How can a French academic appear out of ‘nowhere’ and challenge the banner under which that Cold War was fought and won?

Piketty has said in an interview:

“’One of the conclusions that I take from my own work is that we don’t need 19th century economic inequality to grow. One lesson of the 20th Century is that the kind of extreme concentration of wealth that we had in the 19th Century was not useful, and probably even harmed growth, because it reduced mobility and access of new groups of the population into entrepreneurship and power. It led to the capture of our political institutions prior to World War I. We don’t want to return to this.’

We are headed down that road and we should take note and prepare ourselves. How we prepare for it and what tools we can reasonably use are another questions that require political solutions.

In a review of Piketty’s book, Branko Milanovic summarized the main thesis:

“Piketty’s key message is both simple and, once understood, almost self-evident. Under capitalism, if the rate of return on private wealth (defined to include physical and financial capital, land, and housing) exceeds the rate of growth of the economy, the share of capital income in the net product will increase. If most of that increase in capital income is reinvested, the capital-to-income ratio will rise. This will further increase the share of capital income in the net output. The percentage of people who do not need to work in order to earn their living (the rentiers) will go up. The distribution of personal income will become even more unequal.”

One way of understanding Piketty’s arguments based on research is to remove it from an economic platform associated with having avoided the prospect of subjection to communism. That is, let’s leave capitalism aside for a moment. And instead, we will focus on the basic idea Piketty’s research has revealed in another domain, Artificial Intelligence.

Now consider a revision of Branko Milanovic’s summary as follows:

We have a world of intelligence divided between human and machine intelligence. We live in a world where human intelligence is a domain. But as we continue to develop artificial intelligence, if the rate of increase of intelligence by AI (defined to include general and specialized intelligence and the ability to update itself) exceeds the rate of growth of human intelligence, the share of artificial intelligence will increase at a rate faster than human intelligence. If most of that increase in AI intelligence is reinvested by AI to make even smarter AI intelligence, the machine to human ratio the will rise.

At some point AI intelligence exponentially explodes to a level vastly beyond human intelligence (the ‘singularity’). Along this path, we can expect that the ratio between machine and human intelligence will result in a further increase the share of AI intelligence in the net output until human intelligence is no longer a significant or relevant factor.

The end game of AI arrives once human intelligence is no longer a relevant factor in technology, government, resource allocation, investment, etc., so that thinking, information, solving problems, analyzing data for patterns is no longer primarily carried out by human beings.

After the singularity, human beings might occupy a world where human intelligence no longer shapes or defines their world. Their lives and choices are in the memory and sub-directories of machines. After all human beings are a collection of particles and an advance AI might rationally believe those particles are put to better use by using them to make paper clips or fiber cables or memory boards.

Given this potential, does it make sense to invest resources to regulate the development of AI? Are the arguments that apply to the capital/income ratio applicable to the machine/human intelligence ratio? Should work be done to calculate this ratio, to monitor it, and to guard against a tipping point beyond which human intelligence is reduced to close to zero?

We have spent most of our time worrying about divisions within the society of human beings as if that society can never have a substantial challenger. Such species exceptionalism is an example of the hubris that history teaches is the ultimate undoing of all great leaders and empires. We try to think of a situation where the difference between members of the species is not the primary concern but the survival of the species is. It seems too far away for most. Remote like climate change or science fiction, we smile and move on.

We hear the canary in the mineshaft but we don’t believe he’s calling our name. Stephen Hawking understands the risk. He’s raised the alarm. The biggest crime story of all times is to ignore that warning and continue on with the day-to-day politics, crimes, injustices and unfairness putting off the day when we all get mugged and turned into paper clips.

William Shakespeare observed what it takes for kinship to take hold: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”  Earthquakes shake the ground under our feet. They spare no one. The same result may be the fate for our children and grandchildren once AI goes FOOM. And there lies the irony, we are fated to experience kinship when it is too late to celebrate and enjoy the recognition of our common bond.

I believe every writer develops their own secret formula to describe the writing process that works for them. Mine is not that original or profound but I set out some of the guideposts that have served me well along the journey to writing a book.

I am also asked ‘How do you go about writing a book?’  Another question I am asked is closely related—‘What book would you recommend that I read?’

We genuinely seek satisfactory answers to these questions, we need to address how a writer thinks about books and the writing process.  Not have the usual discussion about when you write, how many words in a day, where your inspiration comes from, what does your office look like, what time of day do you write and so forth. These are the questions we are curious about and wish to ask an author.

I will start instead with a question that I believe a writer should put to himself or herself: What kind of book should I write?

For me, I start answering this question by glancing up at two boxes on my Borges’ library shelf. Each box contains an infinite number of pieces to an infinite puzzle.  My first decision is which of the two boxes to take from the mental shelf and start to work.

The Fiction Box

The first box the puzzle pieces require the author to assemble a number of complex relationships, that grow, fall apart, set up in conflict, ignite emotional reaction, detail involvements, track maturity and damage of characters who face conflict, hard decisions, and life-changing choice.

This is what I look for when I open the Fiction Box.

When I write a novel this is the box I choose to take off the shelf and start taking out the pieces and figuring out how the pattern connects. Yes, there are novels of ideas where the characters’ emotions are far in the background. This proves the Fiction box has a range of possibility. Because an intellectual novel can succeed doesn’t undermine the basic premise that most novels succeed on an emotional plane, explaining the source of our feelings, the depths of our fears and anxiety, and the tensions arising from relationships, family, schools, political systems, and religion. The author goes inside people’s lives to examine the personality, attitude, and character, their limitations and failures as well as their successes.

The Non-Fiction Box

The second box is also filled with infinite pieces of infinite puzzles.

This is the Non-fiction Box. It is the box I open to write essays for this blog.

When I open the Non-fiction Box, my approach is to build logical arguments based on evidence, facts, statistics that support the arguments. The idea is to persuade the reader that your interpretation of the evidence supports your argument, solution, or policy proposal. In this box there are few if any pieces that represent a character whose emotional reaction is central to the book. Yes, there are highly polemical books charged with emotional calls urging others: join a cult, a political party, or a life-style.

These are confirmation bias-based books that promise to confirm what you already believe to be ‘factually’ true or consistent with your ‘faith’, or the stories manufactured about history, culture and language. The best of non-fiction challenges your preconception by assembly of facts and evidence and argues for a change of your views. The non-fiction book is deliberate, rational and analytical and emotions are seen, like a cognitive bias, as weakening a clear assessment of the evidence.

The Beagle Expedition

Charles Darwin

My personal role model, whether I choose The Fiction Box or The Non-Fiction Box may come as a surprise. It is Charles Darwin. His Origin of the Species published on 24^th November 1859 changed not only science, but also his book immediately raised a serious debate about religion and the existing social order. Darwin’s creative process is instructive for any writer.

The Origin of Species

Darwin’s journey resulted in a book that, over time, changed the way we perceive our world. A significant minority remains to this date unconvinced by the evidence to support the theory of natural selection. Darwin in the 1830s signed on to an expedition of discovery. The Beagle, the name of the ship, which allowed him to explore was also his lab.  Darwin went into the field. He observed first hand the evidence of the diversity of life. His theory of natural selection arose from the evidence that he gathered.

Every time I start a new book, I tell myself I am signing on as a crew member to a new launching of the Beagle. And my job while on the expedition is to observe, note, research beyond the shoreline, go deep into the interior, look under rocks, down valleys, up the side of mountains and look for patterns.

Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21^st Century is another of those Beagle explorations. This time computers and historical records combined to yield patterns of wealth and income that create a picture of the real world.

The Entanglements

What a writer is doing, whether conscious of the process or not, is finding patterns in objects, things, ideas, people, animals, language, history, and culture that are knotted up, entangled in seemingly random, chaotic ways. A writer’s goal is to find patterns, correlations, and causation that gives a sense of order to the mess of what is life.

Quantum physics is a good place for a writer to explore the hidden reality of entanglements.

A writer needs to sign on to his own private Beagle and set sail.

A writer needs to take time to observe, record, and search for connections.

A writer needs passion. A book is a long voyage. Without a burning passion fired by curiosity, a sense of wonder, a withholding of judgment, a love of research, the journey can become intolerable. You really must be honest how passionate you are to reveal in the entanglements a plausible story.

Ultimately what readers look for in a book is a voice that they can trust that can untangle the complications, incoherence and randomness of life. A charlatan earns trust through empty promises and sleight of hand; they never take a personal journey on the Beagle, though they may try to convince you that they have.

Readers hunger for meaning and purpose, and a writer’s task is to fulfill that desire.

Buddhist’s Lessons for Writers

Buddhism offers several lessons that help me as a writer, and they may help you once you’ve decided to write a book. I am grateful to Professor John Paulos for drawing my attention to an interview with Jay Garfield who discusses the key premises of Buddhism. All three lessons are stories about fear and how we deal with fear.

Non-attachment

A central theme of Buddhism is non-attachment. Whether that attachment is to a theme, facts, emotions, a character, a plot point, a sentence, or at every writer’s personal base camp: the self. Many people become frustrated and angry at a dialogue tag, a setting or scene, or a phrase, and they can’t move on until they have resolved their internal conflict.  My advice when you hit that impasse? Let it go. Don’t become attached to your idea that this passage, sentence or word must be perfect before you give yourself the green light to move through the intersection and continue your journey. The desire for perfection is a destroyer of creativity. When you are trying to be perfect as you write, ask yourself whom you are trying to please?

You think that it is you. But it is most likely you’ve learned the perfection habit from someone in your past. Your mother, the person who had her share of disappointment and frustrations (as many mothers have) and she wants  you to be perfect and have a perfect life like the one she idealized that she could have had? Or it might have been your demanding father, an uncle, a teacher, a neighbor who passed along the idea, the one you’ve never allowed yourself to seriously challenge, that you must be careful, organized, perfect in every detail before you are allowed to take the next step.

When you write you sometimes reach a dead end.  Don’t panic. Find a new trail around the avalanche that has blocked the path ahead. Don’t stop, in other words. Creativity is finding another path when the one you’re on is closed. Fear is the roadblock that keeps you clutching onto something you can let fall away. Non-attachment is a way to defeat fear of disappointment, regret, failure or being less than perfect.

Unpredictability

Another important tenet of Buddhism is that reality is unpredictable and chaotic. We spend our entire lives trying to make sense of a reality that science increasingly shows makes no intrinsic sense.  Most people hate and fear uncertainty and doubt and will seek refuge in illusions of certainty. We find our way by making correlations knowing that the patterns we create aren’t fixed or permanent; they are that temporary pontoon bridge that allows us to get from one side of a river to the next.

If your characters are too predictable you will likely bore your readers. If they are too chaotic, readers will also abandon your book. The challenge is to build characters and stories that have real life unpredictability and your story navigates a passage, a bridge, a boat, and a life raft that gives confidence to a reader that he or she is in good hands.

Specifically this means you don’t need to have a full solution to every problem, not everything turns out the way you thought, and the things that turned out right didn’t last. The closer your fiction travels these rails of reality, the closer you will come to writing in an authentic voice that others will trust and learn from.

Predictability like control is an illusion. Let it go. Don’t become attached to a world of certainty. Doubt is your friend, your ally, and keeps you researching, thinking, and feeling. When you feel yourself trying to be a hundred percent accurate in your choice of a word, a plot point, or a character development, you are guaranteed to get lost in one of those mental fun house filled with mirrors.

Learn to accept ambiguity and uncertainty as the natural state of all things. This will free you up to see reality in a different way, knowing that sometimes not all the pieces of the puzzle fit. That is the paradox of the Fiction and Non-Fiction Puzzle Boxes, there are an infinite number of pieces and you will never fit them altogether.

Self

The last of the Buddhist lessons for a writer is the idea of identity or self. The fear of losing self is a hard one to overcome for any writer or any person. It goes to the core of how we perceive self. Buddhists believe that our psychological construct of ‘self’ is an illusion.

For a writer, the concept of identity is the substitute for self. A writer’s identity, like everyone else, is shaped by many social forces from tribe, ethnicity, religion, place of origin to language. Our myths and memories all rolled up into the default image we see in the mirror.

There are a couple of problems for writers. To write about others is to enter their network of memories and slowly reveal the factors that give them identity. If we can’t get past our own identity, a writer can’t ever truly describe an identity that is alien without becoming judgmental. We are also misled by our desire for a ‘permanent’ self or soul. Our fear of death is a mighty motivator for perpetuating our sense of identity.

The act of writing requires an act of forgetting one’s personal set of memories, and substituting the memories of characters. Once you are free from yourself, it is much easier to enter the ‘self’ of your characters. Once you cast aside your ‘self’ your characters stop being clones of you—your thoughts, dreams, plans, fears, hopes, jealousy, and desires.

Once that happens it is possible to create a rich, authentic character whose identity lets the reader feel she’s in the story of lives that have come alive. The author fades away. He’s a storyteller. He’s not the story. And there lies a big gap. Especially for fiction, to find that sweet spot called empathy where you enter another’s persons mental processes means you need to shed your ‘self’.

Our overwhelmingly powerful sense of ‘self’ can contaminate our search to understand the interior life of others—and without such access to the workings of a character’s interior life, the characters in a novel will not be fully realized. Overcome your fear and let the ‘self’ go. Detach from it. As you are in the writing process, it is another attachment that prevents you from exploring all you can on your Beagle ship journey into the unknown.

Darwin didn’t set out on the Beagle to become a celebrity, write a book that would change the world, or a book about himself. He set out to explore, discover, record, and examine the world around him. That is his technique and process, in my view, what makes Darwin a good role model for all writers, fiction and non-fiction. Overcoming our sense of ‘self’ is one of the most difficult projects we confront. Without the ‘self’ ‘Who am I?’ rings as one of those existential questions we seek to avoid. You can read others much better qualified than me for a range of opinion.

The point of this essay, is that your sense of ‘self’ is a prison you need to break out of in order to fully appreciate that the book doesn’t have to be about you. That your sense of ‘self’ may be the major obstacle to your book. If you are writing a book to find your sense of ‘self’ or confirm your ‘self’ in the world, then you will have a lot of company. There are many such books written every year. You can write one if you wish and it might become a commercial success. With an infinite number of puzzle pieces and infinite time all kinds of books are possible. For certain kinds of books, another approach is useful. You sign on to the Beagle and go exploring.

This is a look into my writing process. Other writers will have their recommendations as to how the process works.  I love the sense of the unknown and the adventure of exploration. I find an idea, a character, a theme for which I have a passion. Without passion to sustain you, it will be a long, lonely and isolating voyage. Find a subject that you feel passionate about and then go sailing on your own personal Beagle.

We’ve lived in a statistical dark age when it comes to wealth. We are waking up to the reality of what gross inequalities bring. Like a dentist peering into the mouth of an elderly patient who never owned a toothbrush, we aren’t quite certain what treatment is appropriate but we’re reasonably clear there is considerable work and at great expense to be done.

It’s official. No Broken Windows has been adopted as policing policy to be taught in a senior-police training-course offered by the Central Investigation Bureau in Bangkok.

The Bangkok Post reported on the adoption of the No Broken Windows Theory for Bangkok. “The Central Investigation Bureau has sent its senior police back to school in order to learn about what it calls ‘sustainable’ crime reduction.”

It seems from the press report, that No Broken Windows training program for senior cops, as explained to the press by the police, means pretty much whatever the police say it means: stopping three or more people from riding a motorcycle, not using zebra crossings, and, of course, taking broken windows more seriously.

As the senior brass go back to school to learn about No Broken Windows, I have a few suggestions for extra reading on the theory.

No Broken Window Theory overlooks reality that in Thailand routine violation of minor traffic laws (not to mention murder, kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, trafficking) by the rich is a significant law enforcement issue. Ever notice those luxury cars speeding up as they approach a zebra crossing? Getting people to use a zebra crossing as a means to deter crime is indeed a challenge for several reasons. The most important of which is a zebra crossing doesn’t carry the same message for Thai motorists and pedestrians. To assume that using a zebra crossing in Thailand is the same as in England is a death sentence.

Zebra Crossing in Bangkok

Nothing quite highlights cultural and historical difference than a policy borrowed from another culture. New York City conceived a policing policy under the name—No Broken Windows. For whatever reason Bangkok is scheduled to adopt this policy. Let’s take a stroll together and talk about what this means, how it works, and if it works.

The No Broken Windows theory emerged from a 1982 article written by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling.

The basic idea of No Broken Windows:

“Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it’s unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.

Or consider a pavement. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of refuse from take-out restaurants there or even break into cars.”

Sukhumvit Road street bar (Courtesy: www.bangkokeyes.com)

After Rudy Giuliani’s election as Mayor of New York City in 1993, he hired a police commissioner to implement a no tolerance policy. Under the umbrella of that policy, NYPD began a strict enforcement program, targeting those engaged in subway fare evasion, public drinking, public urination, graffiti artists and the “squeegee men.”

The theory was also used to support the New York Police Department’s policy of “stop, question, and frisk.”

Having lived in both New York City in the mid to late 1980s, and in Bangkok since 1988, I have observed law enforcement efforts in both cities. The two urban environments are significantly different. For example, is the absence of an equivalent of the vast slums of Klong Toey curled up in the heart of Manhattan.

Typically windowless Klong Toey slum is situated right next to the richest part of Bangkok, Sukhumvit area, sometimes called “The Green Zone”

In the mid-1980s, New York City streets at night would have few people around. Bangkok streets overflow with hawkers and food vendors. CCTV camera coverage is widespread in Bangkok as well (although many of them as I written elsewhere may be “dummies” or fake), the tight-knit social organization in Thai society may have less traction in Bangkok than in the provinces but the bamboo telegraph remains operational and ensures most of the time that staying anonymous is more difficult than in New York.

The No Broken Window Theory rests on a neighborhood’s general appearance. If social norms tolerate a shabby and neglected appearance, No Broken Windows suggests this is an invitation for vandals to increase the chaos. The assumption is No Broken Windows will restore the city to an ordered and clean state and discourage minor acts of crime, which lead to further criminal conduct. It also makes implicit assumptions about the scope and degrees of relative poverty within an urban environment. I like Utopia as much as the next person but accept this state is an idealized fiction that never existed, and will never exist.

The contemporary Bangkok neighborhood scene is better known among foreigners for its glitz high rise towers and shopping malls but along the edges are hard core areas of poverty that you’d be hard pressed to have found in New York City thirty years ago.

Bangkok poverty

The police monitor the disorder in the environment and arrest those breaking windows, littering the streets, painting graffiti on walls, bridges, buildings and train cars. The idea is to reclaim the environment as a clean and ordered place. And put the vandals on notice that they are at risk of being stopped and arrested.

Bangkok graffiti

The central question is whether the New York City policing experience under the No Broken Window police brought about a reduction of crime? The researcher found no benefit resulted from the police targeting petty crime. The causal link between the theory and the dramatic drop in crime is also questionable as crime decreased across the United States, and in urban environments like New York, but which had no such policing policy.

Other factors such as the reduction of the number of young men between the ages of 16 to 24, the reduction of the crack epidemic, increase of prison populations, the fall in unemployment rates are more likely explanations for decline in crime rates. The theory hasn’t been supported by the evidence and alternative explanations.

There is another downside to No Broken Window—it allows for an inflation of policing powers. Researchers and scholars have documented the abuse resulting from vesting broad discretion in the police. The main conclusion is it results in repression of minorities within an urban community. (See: Levitt, Steven D.; Dubner, Stephen J (2005). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. New York, NY: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-073132-X.)

Others have written the theory results in criminalizing the poor and homeless who are mainly racial minorities. The policy was a way to use ‘science’ as a basis to expand the discretionary power of police to stop, frisk and arrest young black and Latino men. The racial divide, and the fear of minority criminals, is never far from the surface in American policing policy formulation or gun control legislation.

With No Windows Broken, the police are issued a free pass to arrest locals “for the ‘crime’ of being undesirable.” The policy becomes a fig leaf to cover racist profiling. In the context of Bangkok, dark skinned natives from Isan and migrant workers from Burma and Cambodia, would be more vulnerable to arrest. Their appearance makes them a convenient target for stop and frisk street operations. And their arrests would have the legitimacy of the No Broken Windows Theory behind it.

Joshua C. Hinkle and Sue-Ming Yang have questioned the methodology used to test the broken windows theory out in the field.

The perception of what is an acceptable level of disorder is not a universally agreed upon. Cultural and class attitudes play a large role in what is an acceptable level of litter on the street. “That is, people with different demographic backgrounds and life experiences might react to the same environment in very different ways . . . social disorder is a social construct, rather than a concrete phenomenon.”

Bangkok motorcycle taxis

Precisely. Not to mention the hiring, training and monitoring of the police and the widespread corruption make Bangkok’s law enforcement light years away from the broken windows in New York City. The culture of New York and Bangkok are vastly different, and that is reflected in street life, the slums, the culture of policing, the social hierarchy and the prevailing kreng jai system where important people are immune from the law. Count the illegal gambling casinos operating in Bangkok; then count the ones operating in New York.

Bangkok traffic police dancing

There are acts of behavior, that after many years seems almost normal, but they stop outsiders in their tracks such as a chorus line of synchronized women police officers dancing in the street. It is difficult to imagine this scene in New York. The point being not that Bangkok cops are breaking into dance and song as part of their daily rounds, but from the sub-culture, tradition, uniforms, and training they march to a different drummer than the one that leads the New York band of brothers. Indeed if the dancing scene above suddenly appeared mid-town Manhattan at lunch hour, tourists numbers would balloon, coop prices inflate, and hedge fund managers would spend more time on the street. Markets would suffer. No one would care about a broken window. A SWAT team and snipers dispatched to seal the area. Drones overhead. But I digress.

So how did the Thai police force, which excels in dancing around tough law enforcement issues, conclude that a 30-year-old policy called No Broken Windows, overloaded with baggage, was suitable for Bangkok in 2014? That is exactly the kind of question the authorities hate foreigners for asking. It might be worth asking the instructor at the police training seminar.

Let’s journey a bit down that theoretical road and stop now and again and see what we find.

New York City hired thousands of new policemen in the early to mid-1990s and regular patrols were conducted throughout the city. As a civilian observer in the mid-1980s I rode along with NYPD to see first hand how laws were enforced in tough, crime infested neighborhoods with high-rise slums and illegal immigrants. There was a major crime problem in New York during that time. I witnessed it first hand. New York City has changed dramatically over the last 30 years. Can we say it was the No Broken Windows policy that is responsible for that change? Many experts conclude that wasn’t the case.

As with most social engineering, the knot of complex features working in one environment at a particular time and in a certain culture yield a result. Others want the result and discount that complexity, believing that the policy alone will produce the same result in a radically different environment, culture and time frame.

From the local English press reports in Bangkok, there is no indication that new resources will be allocated to the Bangkok version of No Broken Windows. Given that an expansive and subjective interpretation of that theory as a kind of social control of behavior, i.e., use the zebra crossing (but don’t expect the person behind the wheel to stop) it does fit a cultural inclination to favor the vague over the concrete and fits a certain mindset that underwrites senior police training programs.

Part of Bangkok’s charm has been the crowded, broken pavements, motorcycles driving on the pavement or the wrong way on the street, the pure chaos of food vendors with bottles of gas cooking up Pad Thai to order as dogs beg at tables for scraps of food. Klongs (the canals) in most parts of the city are laced with an evil brew of refuse and sewage. Broken windows? You’ve got to be joking if you think that’s the way to solve the crime problem in Bangkok. Taxi drivers routinely stop along the road to relieve themselves against a wall or a bush.

Bangkok klong

No one denies the big difference in Thai culture inside Bangkok from American culture inside New York City. During Songkran white powder paste is traditionally used as a kind of graffiti to vandalize people’s faces – and sometimes the police are targeted.  Instead of replying with a Taser, they reply with a smile. Songkran is a special holiday where nearly everyone extends tolerance to total strangers who insist on throwing water on them and pasting their faces with white powder.

Bangkok policemen standing behind a banner that reads: “No power play on Songkran holiday. Violators may be found guilty. With best wishes from the Police Department.”

In that case, how did a two-decade old heavily criticized New York City policy called No Broken Window end up as a ‘new policy’ in Bangkok? It is as if Dr. Who arrived in a time machine and convinced the top brass he had a solution to their law enforcement problems. Sometimes things have no explanation. They just happen and you deal with that happening in the Thai way—wait a couple of months before it is shelved and Dr. Who arrives with another foreign policy that promises to make Bangkok streets and canals look like a version of Geneva.

I wouldn’t want to think what would happen to the teenager who rubbed wet powder on the face of a member of NYPD. I am guessing the probabilities are high that he wouldn’t respond with a smile.

Bangkok Cop celebrating Songkran

Summary answer for the final examination in the police training course: Even if New York and Bangkok were identical, a large amount of research that suggests that the No Broken Windows Theory has produced no evidence that it was responsible for reducing crime.

Meanwhile, an alert has gone out for Dr. Who to retrieve a law enforcement plan from the future, one that has gone through all the research and testing phase and produces jaw-dropping reductions in crime. He may come to alert us, as we need the reminder, that some foreign imported political ideas from the past have quietly been abandoned in the place where they were tried out and found to be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, disappointing.

We are violence prone species when expanding our territory in search of resources and mates. Like other primates, we lived in small groups. The size of our population remained relatively small and stable for 12,000 generations. It is the last 500 generations that a number of events happened that allowed an inflation of population size. And in the last 20 generations the way people clustered together and their lives inside that cluster expanded beyond the initial seed of our universe. In terms of evolution, the human species experienced something like a Big Bang in technological evolution only the brain has stayed much pretty much the same wiring configuration.

We’ve all had moments when tearing out our hair over red tape when we’d vote for anyone who would dismantle bureaucracy. The far right wants to do something like that in America and elsewhere. Getting entangled with bureaucrats makes a revolutionary out of many. Or have you ever wondered why elections, demonstrations and protest need layers of bureaucracy? Given the interconnected age of the Internet why haven’t we figured out a way to leave bureaucracy in the past?

The answer to this riddle is found in what might be called the Dunbar number: 150.   British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, discovered that the maximum of our cognitive abilities to keep straight the people we know and their relationship with us and each other. These are the people you know and keep in social contact with.

Our cognitive limitation is found deep in our 250,000-year-old brain structure. It’s a hardware limitation in other words. We evolved to live off the grid.

Others have argued that “the optimal size for active group members for creative and technical groups — as opposed to exclusively survival-oriented groups, such as villages — hovers somewhere between 25-80, but is best around 45-50.” 

The numbers are linked to brain size and grooming habits. What has made our species different from other primates, according to Dunbar, is we used language as a substitute form of grooming. Language, as it turns out, our species found a more efficient and effective grooming kit in words that largely replaced the hours of picking lice and fleas off the hair of our friends.In other primate social groups, 42% of the group’s time is spent on social grooming as a means to maintain social cohesiveness.

Language, as it turns out, is a more effective and efficient kind of grooming. We are in the next stage where digital grooming has replaced face-to-face language exchange. Press the ‘like,’ ‘share,’ ‘retweet,’ or ‘reply’ button, or the thumbs up vote icon act as grooming techniques. There are people grooming others all day on social media. We have our social grooming colonies that share our personal biases online. Rather than 150 groom-mates, many people have a thousand or more and we appear to have returned to a new environment where many spend 42% of their time digitally grooming other primates. Only we don’t think of it as ‘grooming’ any more than we think of ourselves as primates. We are as inventive as we are delusional and biased. We clutch these illusions as reality as we find them useful in making our way through the jungle of everyday life.

For the sake of argument, I am using Dunbar’s 150 as the upper limit on the number for the self-management of effective social relations among people that doesn’t require someone from outside the group to organize resource acquisition or distribution. Inside Dunbar’s world, things are done in-house. The group doesn’t need a manager. It is useful to note that the upper limit is not the same as the optimal number, which hovers closer to 60 people rather than 150 people.

How did we scale from small bands of less to 150 in number to living in cities like Bangkok with 12 million people—all of whom need, as some point, to use transportation, sewers, drinking water, food, hospitals, schools, and jobs. That required creating a ‘grid’ and this work in progress of creating, refining, managing the grid in the face of technological destruction of our history.

This is a massive scaling problem and the experiments to ever larger numbers living in dense, concentrated areas has been going on for the last 10,000 years. But it is the last couple hundred years that management of resources and people with ever better technology, systems, management and logistics has permitted co-ordination needed to feed, cloth, house and control millions.

Bureaucracy has been the backbone of the system that distributes resources and benefits. From the beginning there was a conflict of interest between those governing the allocation of benefits and the people who received benefits. History is filled with slavery and oppression arising out of governing elites who used bureaucracy and threat of violence to domesticate people and use them as a resource rather delivering resources to them.

Why would anyone agree to such an arrangement? Rebellion and uprisings are a constant feature in our culture. Herding large numbers of people into close quarters and demanding that they to do things they’d rather wish not to do often requires threats of violence, a combination of tools such as genocide, displacement, starvation, exile, and territorial expansion through wars. It also leads to rebellion.

The question is who has the whip hand in running the vast enterprise of an entire culture, society, and economy? And how are individuals and groups under control of the whip treated? The elite members seek to give an appearance of grooming the rest of us. Our new social media grooming venues suggests that appearances no longer are sufficient. People want actual grooming. And what does that mean? It translates into demands for justice and fairness and liberties, and rights to participate in the decision-making process. They no longer like the old way of being treated like members of a grooming herd to be managed and culled for the benefit of the rulers. We don’t groom sheep. We sheer them for their wool. Modern economic models have adapted the sheep template to humans and packages it as grooming. A clever, sinister streak runs through our desire to dominate, acquire resources, mates and power.

The problem has been one of legitimacy of bureaucrats coercing people to do or not to do things. The threat of official violence underwrote their order. Originally bureaucrats, in religious or civil organizations, operated under the authority of religious leaders, kings, chiefdoms, warriors, or strongmen. They were sacred and objects of worship; they inspired awe and respect making following orders tied with loyalty, purity and honor.

Once the social setting requires organization that vastly exceeds the Dunbar number there is no going back. Society is organized along very different principles and the values and ethics evolve to reinforce authority and to punish unconformity. Our brain ware doesn’t give us any other choice. Our neocortical architecture is our cognitive prison. The grooming prison is egalitarian, housing everyone despite high IQ, status, birth, or abilities. No one, but no one breaks out of brain prison holding cell.

Democracy, in the modern sense, is a very late arrival—only about 500 years ago—when the sentiment shifted to asking whether the authority to devise and implement the policies that controlled the actions of the bureaucracy ought to come from the citizens. That was and remains a revolutionary idea. All of history had been either people living together in small bands where everyone knew one another or much later, forming into larger agricultural communities that had various degrees of tyranny to compel compliance with the allocation of resources according to the desire or whims of the top leader.

We live in a time where extremists seek to reinstate a council of elders, purists, who are truth believers in an ideology or faith, a strict hierarchy of authority beyond outside challenge or change.  That’s the Taliban model with the suicide bombers, oppression of women, hatred for gays, infidels, or foreigners. Inside the capitalist system: wealth is used to terrorize and control; the wealthy co-opt the bureaucracy like ancient caliphs for their own personal benefit.

Capitalism, in the gilded age mode, has produced a kind of suicide vest destruction leaving the people who most need bureaucracy unable to access it or, if access is allowed, the range of benefits available are reduced. The battles in the United States to expand bureaucracy into the field of universal, public health care in a way that many developed countries have done is a classic example of ideological beliefs undercutting distribution of resources to the wider population.

The old grid our parents were born into, one based on a monopoly of ‘state’ bureaucracy is threatened by a new grid built by the social media. You signal status, wealth, success and power through a registry of ‘likes’. A lot of companies and people pay for ‘likes’. They use wealth to generate authority. It is an illusion that ‘likes’ bought for likes have any meaning. But it is not an illusion that social media is causing a reorganization of how people accumulate into group with shared goals, values and interest. The center of management is returning to smaller groups who define themselves by affiliations to political, economic or social causes, charities, sports teams, or other interest.

Today it is difficult not to question Winston Churchill’s observation that “it is the people who control the Government, not the Government the people.” It is the very wealthy people who are retaking government, meaning the vast management system that runs the machinery of life for millions, and they are doing so with the intention of dismantling it.

It is utopian, as the Khmer Rouge demonstrated, to believe that millions of people living in large cities can be emptied into the countryside and coerced into a social system based on ‘self sufficiency’ or ‘self-reliance’ and survive as their ancestors had done. Such a time never existed, except in a romantic, idealized imagination. The Chinese disastrous Cultural Revolution miscalculated our capacity to form large coherent rural communities without the inevitable brutality, murder and oppression. The villain in both cases was the educated, urban person. Destroy that type and return the population to its roots was the policy. But the roots had died long ago. There is no going back to where we’ve come; that road washed away centuries ago.

We haven’t quite come to terms with the importance of having crossed a system threshold that has allowed more than 7 billions people to exist. How far can we scale before the whole system comes tumbling down? No one knows. Our cognitive abilities can’t take in those numbers. We can’t imagine the implications of that number on the overall population. We have and will continue to experience the collateral fallout from the large population and the economic system that and face the prospects of climate change that may well cause the population to crash.

Our weakness is for the benefits of scaling population, and convincing the population that the government is working for them. As Gore Vidal wrote, “The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return.”

The ruling class has its own set of grooming rules. When someone within the ruling class is perceived to have violated the elite grooming protocols, there is the risk of huge disruption as Thailand is experiencing. Thaksin’s problem was when he stopped grooming the ‘right’ people and brought in a new grooming tribe. Until the elite grooming system is revised, agreed upon, and implemented, expect more violence, disruption and instability. Nothing makes primates more irritable and insane with anger than having their grooming interfered with especially by another member of their band.

People pay for a system that watches them, controls their lives by pandering to their biases, feeds them propaganda, and uses them for the watcher’s purposes. To transcend our inability to keep track of people and their connections, we have put faith in a system of organization, logistics and management that woke up to its own power, and that is when the nightmare started. We haven’t woken up from the reality, that we’ve been captured, harnessed, domesticated by a system that herds the population and limits their grooming rights. We had a taste of coherence—social media has created the illusion that we’ve busted through the 150 Dunbar number. It has made us unruly, more demanding, more suspicious of authorities outside our grooming stables.

We’ve gone way beyond the 150-group member limit. Our cognitive abilities are flawed by cognitive biases, and have limited carrying capacity, but we are smart enough to look around and understand once we handed the keys to the bus to others they will ultimately drive us to whatever destination they have in mind. It will be a place that suits and benefits the driver. We have no choice but to go along for the ride. We are passengers riding together in one of those double-decker upcountry Thai buses at three in the morning with 150-meter ravines on a narrow road and a driver taking another large slug of whisky.

This is our transport. It isn’t really our choice of how we’d like to travel. It’s the way things turned out as the speed of change started to accelerate about 10 generations ago. There is no evidence that the pressure on our cognitive resources is slowing down. More friends, more data, same meat operating system to process it.

Look out the window, look over the edge into the ravine and ask yourself if the airbrakes will hold on the next hairpin curve. It’s too late to get out and walk. That is a definition of noir to keep us awake at night and force us to flee back to our computer and log on to our grooming station, looking for ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs up arrows’ for coherence, comfort and calmness. This is the source for the Hollywood ending where all that grooming leads to redemption, fulfillment and happiness. Our primate cousins made friends finding and eliminating head lice and ticks. We are trying something to do something similar with our relationship with our digital friends. It makes us feel far superior and worthy. Until you sit back and think about the implications.

After some thought, can I offer you, my friend, a Red pill, or blue pill? The choice has always been yours.

Understanding how these three threads are connected—violence, borders and management—opens a portal into the cultural, political, social and economic source code that computes most of the reality people experience. A great deal of what goes on around us in our daily life, from our safety and welfare to opportunities and livelihood, depends upon the right balance between these three forces. Disruptions through the forces of instability and random chance are what makes life ‘interesting’ often in the way Chinese use the word ‘interesting’—meaning chaotic and uncertain.

Passports, visas, refugees, work permits, occupation, red line, occupiers, invaders are among the terms that rise from the reality of boundaries, the kind that defines a recognized border, the edges measured, recorded, mapped. A world map is a visualization of those boundaries. I have a globe with lines etched in for the boundary lines of countries. What makes other planets and moons in our solar system so alien is the absence of any recognizable boundary marks? These alien landscapes go on and on with a tedious, mind-dulling featureless repetition.

It seems that you need a life form that evolves to defend its territory against outsiders. That life form creates and acts on a mental construct of borders as part of its evolution. Borders aren’t an organic part of nature. We invent them.

I’ve been thinking during the past two weeks about boundaries and how they set the human dimensions of movement, affiliation, and self. What they mean, how we define them, and our connections to them. Boundaries can be geographic term that we associate with a nation-state like Canada, Thailand, Australia or Indonesia. The last two countries are surrounded by water boundaries. Canada and Thailand share land boundaries with other countries and those boundaries have resulted in disputes with other countries. Land or sea acts as boundary demarcations. Boundaries are real, tangible as well as abstract and romantic.

I am a realist as a writer. The title ‘reality check’ as part of the title of this blog is no accident. I accept, though, the range of writing expands beyond the boundary lines of the ancient Roman and encompasses the mythical kingdom of Camelot where boundaries float in the imagination. Ordinary life is boundary contained and writers report the activities inside those boundaries, or they might rebel against boundaries and write about lives outside them.

I am also interested in other boundaries such as knowledge or experience. There are limits to what we can know and limits to what we can experience. You can’t experience x-ray frequency waves. You can’t know the physics that existed before the Big Bang. We have boundary gaps, although we live our lives as if all information and knowledge is accessible. That is a delusion that allows us to feel in control of our lives.

You were born inside a boundary. That act of birth plays a role in shaping your identity. You are a Thai, a Russian, a Canadian, a Japanese, etc. What happens inside those borders becomes a version of your own personal story. Boundary stories and personal stories inside a bounded area are something we take for granted when reading a novel, watching a film or TV drama.

All boundaries have an element of control. There is nothing in nature that corresponds to a boundary. Though primates, like our close cousin the chimpanzee, band into small groups to patrol territories. There border patrols are to chase away intruders, look for weaknesses in a boundary line where resources might be harvested, and cross the line into another bands territory. That is our heritage. Boundaries run through old bloodlines that predate our species. What we’ve managed to do is to use technical means to create weapons and transport systems that allows us to scale a geographical space, draw the boundaries (over the objections of others living there if need be), and install security forces to guard the borders.

Chimpanzee culture of border patrol shows the evolution of violence as a way of boundary enforcement and boundary encroachment. When those two collide amongst rival chimpanzee bands, violence is the likely outcome. Borders come at the cost of blood. The aggressor who is better equipped, led, organized and more violent, and more willing to put himself at the risk of death or injury, will likely emerge as having the upper hand.

Boundaries are never static for long. This digital map of Europe shows the changes of borders over a span of 1,000 years. In less than three minutes you watch a 1,000 years of borders twitching, receding, expanding, disappearing, in wave after wave of change. The chances are if you trace your ancestors back ten generations you would discover your relatives were born within boundaries that no longer existed in the same way they did at the time of your birth. You have no feeling for that ‘place’ as it was a location that existed in one time but failed to exist at some stage. May be it’s not unsettling for most people to view ten generations as not relevant to their modern life. The point is how boundaries are no more fixed than these ancestors who also thought their boundaries possessed an permanence which time proved to be illusory.

Borders are also an underlying reason for abuse and human rights violations against minorities. A recent example are the Rohingyas, an ethnic group inside the Burmese border, who have been systematically persecuted, killed, villages burnt, women raped as the authorities consider them as not ‘belonging’ inside Burma. What is ‘Burma’? The answer lies not in nature but in the boundaries drafted by British colonial mapmakers. There are many other minority groups considered as ‘outsiders’ or ‘aliens’ around the world born inside borders of countries that deny them identity or nationality. Stateless people are those not accepted by any country and who have no place to go. They face a dismal future.

The vast scale of migration around the world over the last 20 years, as people cross borders, is captured in this chart prepared by researchers at Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna.

photo credit

Your geographical connection is a leading piece of information about you.

When you meet a stranger, one of the first questions that you ask is: Where are you from? Your answer supplies a database of assumptions about your education, culture, language, wealth, religion, sports, and your attitudes about guns, abortion, health care, schools and university funding, war and peace. One word fills in a library of pre-conceived notions about what you find funny, sad, and the food you most like.

Thais are forever asking me where I am from. Canada. Snow, ice hockey, near America, cold, Neil Diamond, and Leonard Cohen. I receive responses along these lines as the listener tries to say something nice about Canadians. Foreigners will hear some Thais say that a farang doesn’t understand how Thai people think. There is a tacit, shared feeling among a lot of people that outsiders don’t quite get how they think, so Thais aren’t alone in this assumption based on geography (and race).

Of course race and boundaries have a close connection in the mind of many people. A person born in Thailand is expected to look different from someone born in Finland or Nigeria. This ignores the fact of ethnic and racial diversity that unites all members of the species. But people are raised to think ‘globally’ of a species, but specifically as a tribe of people coming from a certain location.

Globalization promised to free trade, commerce and finance of the traditional boundaries that restrained them. In a way, globalization has allowed powerful states the same kinds of advantages that empires exercised in the past. Our new ‘Rome’ is Washington, D.C., where those in control of the forces of violence make decisions about certain activities inside the borders of other states.

When Russia decided to size of the Ukrainian borders by assuming control over the Crimea, the reaction from Europe and America was condemnation. Modern states aren’t supposed to invade other countries and claim them as part of their own state. That’s the theory, but the practice, going back to the 1,000-year map shows a long history of land grabs and border changes. The American expansion into their western frontier in the 19^th century represented another example of occupying the territory of others, expelling the occupants into reservations and taking their resources.

When you live in a country in which you weren’t born, aren’t naturalized, or have a permanent residence in Thailand, you have regular reminders that you are inside the boundaries of a place that considers you an outsider with specific duties to perform in order to remain. For ten years I made 90-day visa runs mostly to neighboring countries in the region including Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam or Indonesia. I had to leave before the expiration of a 90-day visa, get a new visa and re-enter for another 90-day period and start the process over. I never complained about this feature of expat life.

I felt the requirement worked in my favor as it gave me enough time to concentrate on writing a draft of a book during a 90-day period, left the country, worked on the next draft for another 90 days, and so on until after 3 or 4 visa runs I had a finished book. I had a 90-day sword over my neck. I didn’t want it falling before I’d finished a novel. I convinced myself that this sword was actually a chance for an international holiday between drafts of a book; it worked like an incentive plan. I lived with that delusion. It kept me productive, focused and aware of how much there was to explore outside the borders of Thailand.

With a minimum of 40 international trips in 10-years (I often made trips more frequently than every 90 days), I had a chance to spend time in places where battles over borders were still fresh in the minds of people living there. Cambodia, Laos, Burma, and Vietnam provided me lessons of how boundary lines defined much about the people, and how their civil wars had often turned out identity issues of people who shared space inside a common border.

Years ago I switched to an annual visa but still must report my address every 90 days. That takes me back to where I started. Authorities take notice and keep track of ‘foreigners’ within their borders. There is a suspicion about foreigners that likely comes from our time in roving bands when a stranger was enslaved or killed.

Crimes such as smuggling of people, illegal logging, fishing across borders. Trafficking of people, drugs, weapons, logs, ivory, and other contraband is enticingly profitable precisely because of laws that control the movement of people, goods and services across international borders. There are organizations like Doctors Without Borders or Reporters Without Borders, which are the exception that proves the general rule of that borders are patrolled and regulated.

Life inside every culture is shaped by a shared heritage of what it means to be born, schooled, and employed within a certain political boundary. In the physical, geographical sense of a border that defines space in which authorities and law applies. Step out of that space and local authorities, local laws suddenly apply. Substantial difference in legal systems range from women excluded from the right to drive in Saudi Arabia, to legalized gambling in Macau, to a single payer health care system in Canada. To cross a border requires the foreigner to be alert as to the laws of that place.

In Thailand, it is common to find tourists who having left their country act as if the new space they occupy has no laws or rules that apply to them. And every year there are sad cases of foreigners arrested, tried and convicted for breaking Thai law (which in the vast majority of cases would likely be illegal in their home country).

That sense of anything goes, of freedom from constraints happens when our normal borders are erased through travel.

We lose our sense of perspective and comprehension once we are deprived of a boundary marker. It is strange to contemplate spaces without working out the boundaries that make up that space. The search for Malaysian flight MH370 gives us a glimpse of failure to understand the featureless huge expanse of the area in the Indian Ocean where the search has been concentrated. Or how, with climate change and the melting of the Northern ice caps, passage becomes possible and countries begin to assert arguments as to what portions of the geography they can rightfully claim as coming within their border. But other environmental disruptions caused by climate change may include mass movement of people seeking water and food who have been displaced inside established borders.

Geographical borders provide a sense of order, define a finite world that gives a feeling that, for their problems and arbitrariness, we have a need for boundaries. The infinite makes us recoil. Without a border the infinite simply has no meaning for us. Take the decimal points of pi 3.14, which are both infinite and random. A universe where there is an endless roll of the dice, with no winner or loser, or with no point or meaning. The infinite might have a ‘sound’. A mathematician/musician created a hauntingly beautiful piece for piano using the decimal points of pi a taste of the infinite nature of these random numbers.

I hear the music written from pi decimals when I read a news story about the search operation for MH370. It has become a substitute for the dark feelings that descend. I am forced to concede that borders are phony constructs I’ve been taught. Borders have always defined who I am and how I experience the world and will continue to do so.

As land and resources are finite and scarce, defining, guarding and defending a territory defined by borders will remain a natural part of political, economic and social life. We can’t imagine a life where borders are irrelevant except in a utopian fantasy. We listen to the music that pi writes, with its promise of infinite decimals, but without our geographical and psychological maps with the borders colored in, our sense of self disappears. That may be one definition of enlightenment. Or it may be the refugee where grief and madness write their own eternal song.

There has been a great deal of public discussion about the merits of an appointed ‘neutral’ prime minister to end the current political impasse. In Thailand there is a public discussion going on about a list of men (no women on the list) who might qualify as a candidate for “neutral PM” by the anti-government side. As expected this generated heat and political controversy. The Thai word for ‘neutral’ is à»ç¹¡ÅÒ§ /pen klang/, which literally translates to “being in the middle,” synonymous with ‘nonpartisan’ (according to Thai social commentator Kaewmala). Whether that middle is defined as geographic, ethnical, psychological or ideological raises a number of complex questions.

The news reports tend to orbit around speculations and rumors focused on personalities. Discussions on social media have begun to examine the idea of what it means to be a ‘neutral’ person appointed to high political office in a representative democracy to resolve a constitutional crisis. An examination of neutrality as a political fix in circumstances in a climate where the possibility of civil war is openly discussed may help shed light on whether is a way out or a deadend.

Howard Zinn, an American historian, had grave doubts about the possibility of being neutral in the midst of a struggle over the political forces to be trusted in the allocation and exercise of power and writing and implementing policy priorities. In Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology, Zinn wrote:

“Why should we cherish ‘objectivity’, as if ideas were innocent, as if they don’t serve one interest or another? Surely, we want to be objective if that means telling the truth as we see it, not concealing information that may be embarrassing to our point of view. But we don’t want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don’t play a part in the social struggles of our time, that we don’t take sides in those struggles.

Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now. It is a world of clashing interests – war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism – and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts.”

Howard Zinn’s skepticism about neutrality is shared by Nobel Prize winner, Elie Wiesel who said in his Nobel acceptance speech and later included in The Night Trilogy: Night/Dawn/The Accident:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”

On a more basic level Laurell K. Hamilton writes in Narcissus in Chains:

“Personally, I think neutral is just another way of saving your own ass at the expense of someone else’s.”

Neutrality means a country, a leader, or a person of influence does not takes sides in a dispute, conflict, war or disagreement between parties waging battle. That battle may be armed conflict or ideological battles that spill over from social media, TV, and the press to demonstrators and protesters in the streets. Such a person is seen by both sides as having no affiliation with the other party, group, tribe or faction to the dispute. Neutrality means no shared ideology that prefers one side’s principles and political values to the other sides.

The problem in some quarters in the Thai political debate, neutral is conflated with savior. That is an unreasonable expectation to arise from neutrality. The idea of a savior takes us back to the core problem of personality-centered politics. One person’s prophet is another’s heretic.

Neutrality is a distraction from the central problem, and one shared by other countries in the region including Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam is the weakness of rule of law and the corresponding strength of a culture of impunity. To possess true power translates into an immunity that rolls through the system from human rights violations, corruption, disappearances, extra-judicial killings, imprisonment or exile of critics. That makes the struggle for power an existential one. The winner, his friends, families and associates are elevated to life above the rule of law line that catches the rest of us. The loser slings off to exile, prison, assets taken, name blackened, disgraced.

In a culture of impunity, heretics are dealt with severely. Neutrality is difficult to take root in the thin soil of a culture with a strong tradition of granting the powerful immunity for their actions.

It is one thing for a country to declare neutrality in a war between two other countries and quite another for a person to emerge from a highly divisive domestic political ground where emotions are high, battle lines drawn, and a consensus amongst partisans as to whom they believe fits the bill of being ‘neutral’.

Appointing a ‘neutral’ person to lead conflicting parties to resolve their difference is a general problem that runs through all political systems. Who would be a neutral person for Sarah Palin and the Tea Party on issues of abortion or teaching creationism in public schools is likely a different person than one who would fit Al Gore’s definition. Which raises another question: can one be ‘neutral’ on certain issues like abortion or creationism?

Beyond these ‘social issues’ there are genuine disagreements over the allocation of resources between transport, social security, health, schools, and public safety. If one decodes the anti-government side, the neutrality argument is an alternative to democracy. If a neutral person can be found, someone fair, justice, honorable, wise and compassionate, what reason can justify the cost an election when there is a high risk of people elected that powerful people distrust? Elections, in Thailand, and most places choose a politician who isn’t neutral, never pretended to be neutral and ran on a party platform that promised benefits weighted toward the interest of those living in his riding. The purpose of an election isn’t to test the neutrality of a candidate. It is to test whether his or her views and opinions appeal more to the voters than his opponent.

The central purpose of representative democracy is to resolve the disagreement through a parliamentary process, which represents the majority view of voters. Voting is not a neutral act. It is a partisan choice. People are voting, in theory, out of their own self-interest as well as the larger interest of the country.

This analysis, you rightly say, is well and fine in a functioning democracy, but what happens when the parliamentary system comes to a standstill? There are a couple of answers. The most obvious one is that democratic systems are chaotic, messy and uncertain. That isn’t a bad thing. It means a politician who takes a position on an issue must persuade others that his or her policy or plan is rational, timely, and if implemented, with advance the interest of the people. It is utopian to believe any policy will coincide with the interest of 100% of the people.

Also, if the parliamentary system is paralyzed and becomes dysfunctional through actions launched by opposition forces seeking to remove an elected government, a larger issue is raised as to the nature and scope of democratic principles accepted in the system. If there is a systemic issue with the nature and process of governance, it is difficult to see how a neutral person can be chosen, and by whom, and if chosen, how such a person can proceed in resolving such a deep, structural issue.

Neutrality is another way to express ideas such as evenhandedness, fair-mindedness, impartiality, and nonpartisanship. Neutral is the opposite of biased, one-sided, partial, prejudiced or affiliated with a partisan side in a dispute. Power has a public face but there is also a deep power hidden like dark matter out of view that shapes and channels the flow of government activity.

Headhunting such an individual to fill the role of so-called neutral prime minister is difficult if not impossible to succeed. Who chooses such a person and who sets the terms of reference for neutrality? Who judges what records, private and public, are relevant for an assessment of neutrality. If that were easy, then those judging the neutrality issue would be neutral themselves and that doesn’t seem like an outcome anyone would be happy with.

What person with sufficient stature to break a deadlock between mortal enemies rises to that position without leaving record of public service, writing, speeches, or connection with the deep power? It is quite natural that even the most respected people have signaled their preferences about process or policy. Anyone distinguished enough to have the necessary gravitas will have taken a position or made a commitment that takes one side or another in an earlier policy debate.  The point of democracy is to take a side and defend a policy position and seek to attract public support for that position.

Ultimately politics is about making choices. Who makes the hard decisions? And how transparent the decision-making process is, and how accountable are the decision-makers for bad decisions. How do we get rid of leaders who make bad decisions is a question that is resolved by ballots or bullets. Neutrality is not a means of conflict resolution. It is a way of avoiding conflict and rallying cries for the neutral savior rises to the surface when people are seduced by the prospect of an easy way to kick the can down the road.

One of the recurring ideas one hears in Thailand is: Thais seek a middle-path to resolve problems. To take that metaphor in another direction, if those in conflict are playing a game of chicken, each on collision path, neither willing to blink or give way, the neutral person is unlikely to persuade both sides to park their ideological vehicles and shake hands and put their conflict behind them. There will ultimately be a way out of the current crisis in Thailand. It is unlikely though to be through the appointment of a ‘neutral’ prime minister.

The public democratic process must be re-engaged, minority rights secured against oppression, and government actions subject to restraint and accountability. And there needs to be an open discussion on how the tradition of impunity has thwarted democratic development and what needs to be done to end that tradition. This article in Prachatai  is an excellent examination of Thailand’s long record of extra-judicial killings, disappearance of lawyers and activists, mistreatment of minority groups, shakedowns, and corruption. No constitution to date has reigned in these abuses and no neutral person has been able to stop them from happening again.

The architecture of all institutions in a democracy must be designed to work not just for the good times but are resilient to turbulence when geology of political expectations and power start to shift. If the institutions are weakened, break down, and the parties refuse to talk to one another, one of the first casualties is the rule of law. Violence accelerates as the rule of law recedes and this loop further undermines institutions until instability become evident for all to witness.

There is no short cut to a Constitution that establishes institutions that can govern, co-ordinate their powers, and check and restrain one another. David Streckfuss, in a recent Bangkok Post opinion piece titled The Risky Road in Avoiding Civil War, recommended a referendum to ask voters whether they wish to revert to the 1997 constitution (annulled by the 2006 coup), with reforms leading to amendments or stick with the 2007 constitution.  The problem is that an opposition that obstructs and blocks elections would also likely see a referendum as another kind of existential threat to their view of the ‘correct’ or ‘righteous’ political path for Thailand. Just as an election, in theory should be the mechanism to resolve a political impasse, a referendum offers such a possibility. At this dark time, it is unlikely that the traditional mechanism will function to contain the conflict.

Sooner or later, the way forward likely will be leaders who are forced by circumstances to address the issue of what process is appropriate for constitutional change and the substantive nature of such change. Stripping the powerful of their unofficial immunity won’t be an easy task. Both sides want immunity and the ability to act with impunity for their interest while denying that right to its opponents. Not surprising, given what it is at stake, there has been a drastic polarization of political forces in Thailand. Meanwhile, one can expect political strife to intensify.

If there is to be a new constitutional framework, it will need widespread consensus among the powerful and the restive electorate caught in the middle of a power struggle. How that constitutional framework will deal with the culture of impunity remains unclear.

Political conflict, at this stage, is fueled by fear, anger and hatred, and that is no climate to write a constitution. The architects of the new legal structure will need to wean the players from their addiction to high emotions, easy slogans and learn an important lesson in designing a political system—it will need to install shock absorbers to survive future political earthquakes. The political geology of our times promises to deliver substantial seismic activity ahead. And sometimes the health of a system is when a powerful person isn’t able to subvert the course of justice with money and influence but must bear the full weight of the law like an ordinary citizen. That’s not going to flow from the words of a new constitution. When this does happen, something will have first changed in the mindset and culture. We are a long way from reaching that point not just in Thailand, but in the region and large parts of the larger world. Meanwhile, we remain hostages to personalities who will never be expected to pay for their crimes.

Crime novels are filled with guns, victims, criminals, police, prosecutors, judges, and prison guards. Flip through the pages of a crime fiction novel and you tune into some point in the continuum of violence. Crime fiction readers process violence through the vicarious experience of following the characters and story. Books, TV, and movies deliver the planning, execution, conspiracies, corruption and lies that propel violence.

Crime of the violent kind appeals to some desire or need deeply embedded in our nature. The fear of and fascination with violence are keys, which unlock the mysteries of our true nature. Hobbes built a philosophy on this cruel feature of the human psyche. He wasn’t alone. David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, argued there was no justice, equality, or fairness in nature. People invented these ideas, taught them with parable, myths, foundation of culture and people stories incorporating them as sacred text. We cling to these ideas as a shield against violence and conspire to maintain the illusion that they are innate rather than they are made up by people just like you and me.

Crime writers tap into a long tradition of writers and thinkers who chart the pathways of violence and the safe byways to block those paths. The noir writer, like Hobbes, believes nothing short of holding people’s true nature hostage by ceding authority to one powerful representative who maintains the peace to contain violence in society.

We are in the midst of a modern story of violence reported in many places, which shows how fragile our defenses have become. Social justice, fairness and equality need a political structure to have meaning. Without a structure, brute central force is the substitute offered to guarantee a certain level of peace.

When faith in a democratic structure loses its grip on a substantial minority of people, we lurch to non-democratic alternatives to keeping the peace in densely populated areas.

Such repression does little to prevent or contain violence. The bonds that bind begin to fall apart. Has Thailand reached that point? My answer is not yet. The fact remains, despite the increase in violence and the instability of the political process, we enjoy a mostly peaceful existence in most places.

Around the world, we find cities that have or in the process of collapsing into the black hole of violence as well as countries which have fallen into the category of failed state. These are isolated events. In Thailand we are a substantial distance from a failed state. But the potential for a rapid, uncontrollable expansion of violence remains.

In general, we should be worried about the early warning signs that our great experiment in domestication and huge, dense concentrations of people may fail. In other words, is the world doomed to become a massive crime scene?

Before I discuss weapons (essential instruments along with drills, routines, propaganda in the domestication process), I want to talk about the scaling of large concentrations of people.

None of our closest cousins the Great Ape,

Chimps,

Bonobos,

or

Orangutans

scale population concentrations beyond a small community. There are (no have there ever been) no cities of apes where thousands or millions lived side by side.

Our history is recorded in evolution allowing us to trace our mental and psychological roots to other primates.

Unlike our cousins in the primate world, in less than seventy years our population of 2.5 billion following WWII has exploded to over 7 billion in 2014. Millions of people shelter, feed, bath, play and kill each other in cities. Given our genetics that is an amazingly difficult thing given the density of cities, there isn’t more killing. It is evidence that domestication has been largely successful.

If you shoved one hundred chimps into a Sky train (BTS) carriage in Bangkok, closed the door and ran the train from Siam to On Nut and opened the doors, you’d find clumps of hair, blood, ripped-off testicles, missing eyes and noses, multiple wounded and dead bodies. And these chimps weren’t fighting over the merits of a political system. They have no political system or abstract ideals, or process for controlling anger, rage and violence when clumped together in a train. They revert to natural instinct and the lid comes off the bottled violence. These chimps were bad. They simply displayed their chimp-like nature. One that is very close to our own primate nature.

Civilization and modern big cities wouldn’t have risen without a number of other essential features such as fire, language, and tool making. But without a way to control our violence-prone species, the chances of scaling cities to populations of 12 million like Bangkok would have been impossible. My theory is that the big bang that drove that inflation in numbers and density was the role of the sacred and technological advance of ever increasingly powerful weapons.

The feeling of transcendence makes it possible for a person to feel part of a much larger collective or community. The experience of a sense of awe of the ineffable lifts a person beyond narrow borders of his or her own day to day life. Religion saw the opportunity to fill this space. In close quarter living, the goal is to strive for a domesticated species that believes that it is part of something larger than itself and fears exclusion from the community where this collective communion takes place.

One of our most powerful social constructs learnt from an early age is fueled by the strong desire to belong and fit in, to the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church. The sacred through religion provided the stories and rules for such belonging to a larger whole. The early sense of the transcendent has decoupled from religion and found voice through the arts, music, literature, dance, and painting. The same mechanism is at work run by a sprawl of sacred creators, who are our unofficial, unorganized secular priesthood. Celebrities and other snake oil sellers mingle, offering their visual and aural cathedrals.

No matter how widespread the sacred is, it isn’t enough to stop our inclination to use violence. It has never been zero. The idea of zero tolerance for violence is Utopian. It remains at the margin everywhere. When a political system halts through gridlock, an uptick in violence is one of the first things to notice. In Bangkok, as the government is under siege, there are scattered acts of violence.

The isolated shootings and bombing are absorbed in the day-to-day living. In Bangkok, we read daily news reports of violence. We read about them on the Internet or in the Bangkok Post, or watch them on TV. The sound of gunfire, the pictures of bullet holes in windows of cars and houses, or images of beat-up people remain outside of our direct experience. Life in Bangkok goes on pretty much as usual with trains and restaurants packed, offices filled with workers, and traffic jams along Sukhumvit Road. The general calm of the vast population indicates the increase around the edges of violence has not panicked the population.

For the domesticated animal there isn’t a clear and present danger sensed when going out the door. Bangkok remains far away from the levels of violence found in Bagdad, Kabul, Caracas, Nairobi, Cape Town, Peshawar, Sana’s, Ciudad Juarez or other cities on the top ten most violent cities.

One of the common threads that run through the list of violent cities is the breakdown of domestication especially of young unemployed men; the ability to control violent people, armed and ready to use their weapons, isn’t working in these cities. The danger is greater as the ability for fast, cheap communication and alliance building through social media creates instant communities fueled by anger and hatred. It is hard to have mass violence without those emotions infecting a significant number of people.

People are emotionally driven and our communication breakthroughs have enabled them to amplify anger and fear over vast numbers of people, and to organize and deploy angry people. We look around at the world, and there is no shortage of fronts where people attack each other, or strike out against neighbors who happen to accept a different view of the sacred, or come from a different tribe or ethnic group. Another feature of widespread violence points questions of legitimacy of authority, or lack of fear of the authorities.

In the top ten most violent cities, the legitimacy of the government is openly questioned by force of arms. Those challenging the authority aren’t deterred by any credible threat of state violence to stop them. A small minority that can create enough chaos to make a city impossible to live in and drives refugees to cross border destabilizing their neighbors and exhausting resources of international humanitarian agencies.

In my first novel, His Lordship’s Arsenal, I created a story about the invention of the Thompson sub-Machine gun and how that weapon changed the way violence was projected and distributed in a way that revolutionized the world. The idea of weapons and their capability was based on assumptions about the relationship of soldiers and officers and the State on the Eve of WWI. Modern weapons toppled political systems in Europe collapsed like a house of cards. I explored the theme of this technical/political change. The grunt with a machine gun capability had a weapon that could kill hundreds of the enemy, including their officers, heroes, and officials. Their trigger finger represented more power than any previous warrior who’d ever gone to battle. No longer did an officer distribute rounds to his troops in the field. The troops in the field had their own supply ammo fed by belts in to rapid firing weapons. A generation of young men, well-bred and lowly-bred, in Europe died in WWI trenches felled by other young men manning machine guns.

One hundred years later another technological change threatens to change power arrangements between those with a monopoly over violence and the domesticated populations who bow to these overlords.

Hovering above the future event horizon is another leap in weapon technology. Drones. What is in store for us is beginning to take shape. There is a window for the state authorities to retake control of violence and neutralize the egalitarian nature of automatic infantry weapons. The elites equipped the infantry with such weapons and feared that such weapons could be turned on them. If one could keep the firepower with the elites as in medieval times, this elite fear could be more easily managed.

Nuclear weapons and guided non-nuclear missile systems are overkill for this purpose. But a drone that can stay over head for hours, watching, waiting, for the digital command from an operational center 10,000 miles away is another kind of weapon entirely. The new infantry sits behind computer monitors thousands of miles away in ordinary cities, goes home at night to spouse and children, goes to school plays, shops at the mall, sees the latest film at the cinema. They don’t carry an automatic weapon home at night.

An essay that examines the implication of new drone-robotic weapon systems and concludes this generation of weapons represents a game changer. Why? Because a drone means the 1% no longer needing the 99% as muscle in the violence business. Owning the software and hardware does away with the need for heavy lifting by troops in the field. Weekly meetings to agree upon the kill list, expansion of surveillance to detect the violent troublemakers, and using, in essence, white-collar computer workers to pull the trigger creates a new weapons/violence paradigm. The idea is the 1% can use drones to subdue the 99% who are no longer essential as frontline troops. This not only reverses the equality earned through the use automatic weapons in WWI, it upsets the whole notion of projecting violence and re-domesticating the population with instruments to instill genuine fear.

If this premise turns out to be true, no matter how much oppression we feel from the authorities that administer the current state of weapon technology, 2014 will appear to be the end of the golden age of freedom and liberty enjoyed by billions of people. Policing, administration of justice, the process of controlling criminal conduct would be thoroughly disrupted. Crime novels would be an oddity from the distant past and read with the survivors by a degree of awe and disbelief.

The struggle over violence containment has inevitably called into balance the golden mean, the sweet spot between just enough tyranny to keep our primate violence in check so large populations whose members are competing for scare resources and mates can live in peace, but not so oppressive as to allow for outliers to convince the average person it was in his or her interest to risk life, limb, family, and property in order to turn violence against his neighbor or combine with his neighbors to challenge the authorities.

There are other possible outcomes. As autonomous robotic system integrate with artificial intelligence, it is likely that overtime the 1% may find the weapon systems pointed at them. The newly grouped 100% will have an overlord to ensure not the survival of the fitness but survival of the most domesticated human and once again the term ‘drone’ will apply to people rather than smart weapons.

Our social constructs will no longer be programmed by the 1%; they will be programmed by a machine world that will know better than us our biases, our weakness, and our primate nature. Such knowledge drawn from big data will be more effective than codes, stories, myths or sacredness penned by any ruler, philosopher, historian, psychologist or the smartest person working at Facebook or Google. Our sacredness will evolve into ways we can’t quite imagine. Our overlords will program our faith.

Past wars have had the collateral effect to cull the legions of angry unemployed young men. Artificial Intelligence may decide it is more efficient to cull the populations down to historical size where violence prone primates needed less managing.

Realistically, we have to face the fact that an AI system might question the wisdom of feeding, housing, controlling 7 billion people, large numbers of whom act on violent impulse. These numbers create a big management, logistical and environmental problem.

No country or leader has shown the resources or ability required to resolve conflict between and inside such large groups. At the same time, the population shows no signs of stabilizing.

We are finding our limits. When we can’t find a 250-ton plane with 239 people two weeks after it disappeared, we are learning a lesson in humility. For all of our advanced technology, we have large blind spots. It is only a matter of time before machine intelligence eliminates the blind spots and decides a general culling of the population would restore our primate species to the proper order from which we evolved and broke free on our journey out of Africa.

If you are reading this essay, you aren’t in motion. I have (so far) your attention. Along the way you pay attention to what you see coming and what find along the path. There is something deeply unpleasant in the way I pay attention. The shallowness robs me of not only depth but also ignores an opportunity. I noticed things that most of you also noticed like the disappearance of the Malaysian Air Flight MH370 less than two hours into a KL to Beijing flight. Like a missing person, it had vanished. The world watched officials who said nothing in the matter of robots programmed to avoid hard questions. I paid attention to officials who were cross that I along with millions of others were paying attention to a performance to distract from the existential questions of why and how something nearly 70 meters long with that many people and many tons of steel can just disappear? What child or adult wouldn’t pay attention to something that big that disappeared?

Airline and government officials squirmed, shifted, blinked as they stared into the TV cameras. When we pay really close attention to what someone says, especially if they are powerful, they become very, very careful. Officials in government, teachers, and employers all are in the attention paying business. It is a monopoly they’ve long controlled, nurtured, protected and lavishly funded. The powerful have a huge stake in what you pay attention to. Like all great magicians, they are masters of distraction. Most people fall for sleight of hand. We can’t help it. Our brains are easily distracted. Our attention easily bought and sold without stopping to think that attention shouldn’t be just another commodity.

But it is. All of the time this week, you sold your attention (if you had a job and wanted to keep it), handed it over to a pundit, or politician who gives you certain emotional awards in return for your attention. I was thinking about how this week the vision of the military bunkers set up throughout Bangkok—about 176 bunkers and checkpoints—are manned with soldiers.

In most places, people would pay attention to the appearance of military bunkers throughout the capital city. The photographs reveal that the freshly decorated bunkers fall somewhere between a shrine, spirit house or spa. So far no one has suggested a contest for tourists to submit their decoration ideas to the Bunker Decoration Committee.

People might well asked, who ordered that to happen? What are the orders given to the soldiers inside the bunker? Are they supposed to go out on patrol? Or do they just sit there and pay attention, observe and write down what they see? But pay attention to who and what, and if by paying attention, they see someone with a gun, what are they under orders to do? I don’t know, I am merely asking how bunkers are organized, staffed and instead most of the press reports have described how some of the bunkers have been decorated. We’re not told where the decoration budget comes from for the potted plants or flowers (perhaps they were donated) or whether each unit is allowed to decorate their bunker guided by their own ideas of good taste and beauty. But the flowers and potted plants have drawn international attention.

In summary, this week I’ve paid attention to a disappeared airliner flight MH370 flying from KL filled with passengers and crew and the appearance of military bunkers in Bangkok. What appears and disappears, like the 0s and 1s of digital language, communicate events, incidents, and movement that causes us to wonder about agency. What caused it? And meaning? How does one thing suddenly appear while another disappears?

The mystery of life is in these disappearance and appearances. The unscheduled events that evolution has wired us to respond automatically and quickly such as an elephant appearing out of nowhere. Six people and an elephant died this week in Thailand when the elephant suddenly appeared on the road causing a three vehicle crash.  Evolution hasn’t equipped us to react to elephants while driving cars on highways. We aren’t paying attention to elephants.

Disappearing planes, decorated bunkers, and elephants knock us out of our routine as we move through life processing our reality along the way. We shared this paying attention experience collectively this week. But sharing something only partially tells you how the attention was processed. We shouldn’t assume there is a one-size-fits-all processing for attention. For instance, the anti-government protesters’ attention more likely processes the Bangkok military bunkers in a different light than the pro-government supporters’ attention would. Each will argue the other side isn’t paying attention, or at least not paying proper attention. This kind of attention processing difference underlies social discontent, alienation and revolt as the agreed upon patterns, shaped by culture, language and history, lose their grip to define agency and meaning.

Airport security experts and authorities have taken our plastic bottles of drinking water and made us take off our belts and shoes. At the same time, in many places, it seems the authorities hardly glance at a boarding passenger’s passport. Given there are nearly forty million entries for passports lost in the vortex of global tourism which shares an airlock with global crimes, illegal smuggling, illegal immigration and terrorism, suggests that the authorities haven’t been paying attention to a potentially lethal flaw in the system. This large database of stolen passports is evidence a country-sized population with phony identities floating around planet earth. It took MH370 to go missing before we shifted our attention to this hidden nation in a database that no one but the Americans, British a couple of other countries regularly consult. Most don’t bother. That Interpol database simply doesn’t have their attention.

The Guardian writes that Thailand has been a hub for stolen passports. Incompetence, corruption, lies, lack of training and supervision, and laziness within responsible authorities are all candidates to explain why attention is not paid to the stolen passport database. They also explain why only now after MH370 disappeared with two men who boarded with passports stolen in Thailand (though it seems neither man was a terrorist but a couple of illegal immigrants on their way to what they thought was a new life with a fake identity) we are turning our attention to the matter of those stolen, fake or forged passports. Like the missing airplane, no one seems to have a handle on where they’ve disappeared.

A couple of years ago, a close friend and his wife arrived in Bangkok on a flight from London. They managed to mix up their passports. When my middle-aged friend, who is bald and wears glasses, presented a passport at immigration he was stamped in. The stamp was in his wife’s passport. I can assure you his wife isn’t bald and doesn’t wear glasses. When it came to the wife’s turn, the immigration official through a masterly of detective work looked at the husband’s photo in the passport and at the middle-aged lady in front of him. A conference was held. The supervisor finally sorted it out. The weak link is the lack of attention paid by those who are paid to give their attention to identity of others. It doesn’t always work out that way.

The business of authors, painter, mathematicians, and musicians to offer alternative ways of paying attention through words, images, numbers, and sound. They might even be so bold as to suggest that the State is wrong, lying, stonewalling or otherwise dishonest in diverting our attention to matters of grave importance. This explains why the State likes to be, if possible, the sole or most important sponsor of the arts. The money flows to those who fall in line with what the government wishes people to pay attention to. Censorship is the State’s way of warning artists and citizens to restrict the range of the ideas, events, personalities and institutions that may be paid critical attention to.

Sometimes those stories are contradictory to official stories and when challenging power, as Voltaire once suggested, is a dangerous activity. Artists, who tell the safe story, or one supportive of power, are rewarded and invited to give speeches, interviews and lunch. At some point, every author makes a decision on which side of the attention paying line he or she will patrol while seeking to tell the story of what has disappeared and what has suddenly appeared.

There’s a threshold all of us cross everyday as we explore our world. I was struck by Albert Sun’s “The Monitored Man”.

in the New York Times. The author tested a number of tracking devices that register motion and activity with readings on perspiration, heat rate, muscle heat, calories burned, skin temperature and level of movement or activity. The idea is the state of your health is connected with the nature and duration of your movement. Then came the bombshell. On weekends, the author’s tracker disclosed that he took 16,000 steps.

Compare that with the weekdays spend working at the office and the commute back and forth, including the time spent at home. Sun’s workday shrank his weekend movement from a high of 16,000 (which approaches a half-marathon in distance) to 6,000 to 7,000 steps, and most of that attention occurred inside the dome of an office. Someone pays him to concentrate on a task that benefited the employer. People assume this is natural or normal. But it is bizarre and weird that two-thirds of what we pay attention to in life is a product someone more powerful than us controls. And we find ourselves defining ourselves as an adjunct of our employer’s organization.

Our hunter-gather ancestors had a much larger range of motion. In modern Africa, the Hadza have a hunter-gather lifestyle and the men on average walk 11.2 kilometers a day (more than 14,000 steps). The Hadza men are paying attention in a much different way from the modern office worker.

Company uniforms or military uniforms are good ways to keep the attention focused in a unified, conforming range of motion. That is the life of most people. How they notice and how they hand over what to notice to others. Our attention is filtered, fracked, pipelined so that we hardly are aware that we’ve been socially engineered to channel certain types of information, form that information into a range of acceptable patterns, and to repeat that activity until further notice.

When I paid close attention to the story about trackers, I found another story buried under the surface, one that raised much larger issues about the range of our daily motion spectrum and where we fit in that spectrum will likely define how our attention paying is mortgaged to pay the rent and feed the family.

Employers are buying attention from their employees.  The most effective employees not only readily sell their attention, their identity is indistinguishable from the job to which all of their attention is vested. I’ve talked to lawyers who are rich enough to quit their law firms but couldn’t image what identity would be left once they were no longer practicing law. This state of enforced non-identity happens to many when they retire. Their motion is returned to them. Every day is a weekend of possible motions. Do they grab that opportunity? Some do, many don’t.

Paying attention is like a muscle. Use both or they both atrophy. The strength required to pay attention without the handrails of indoctrination, propaganda, or work rules is great. It’s you at the controls. If you can find that ‘you.’

After a lifetime of paying attention we have grown comfortable with outsourcing the edit feature of our reality through the filter of family, neighbors, teachers, officials, and employers. We use this edited version of our reality to form this fragile thing called identity. The fact that it is largely built by others doesn’t seem to concern us too much. We don’t really think about how those filters distill patterns from an unfathomable jumble of events, things, and motions washing over us.

We’ve been on an attention paying glide path from early school through a life time of employment, in early old age that glider lands on a park bench with a batch of memories that seem ours but are mainly off the rack memories shared by many others. The struggle is to understand new stories outside the context we’ve spent our entire lives. We seek a way to occupy all of that 66% of the lost time for our own movement. But it may not be that easy. If you’ve lived a lifetime in a circus, being freed in the wild is more terrifying than liberating. The jungle is an uneasy, dangerous place. The lion cage door is open. But the lion no longer wants to leave. He couldn’t make it in the wild. Outside the cage door, big airplanes disappear for days and days, military bunkers decorated with flowers and potted plants litter the city, as 40 million lost passports data entries circulate like El Niño racing along the surface of the planet.

We try to make sense of these mysteries. We seek a way to move through the world, which is stranger and more alien than the one we’ve left behind. What makes the old sad is the dangerous idea they were duped; there were other things in life they should have paid attention to and didn’t. We regret that we sold most of our attention in the name of love, faith, doctrine or profit.  We didn’t have enough motion to break free of the gravity of all of those filters. As there were so many other possibilities, and we envy those who kept in motion and managed to break free.

But it’s never too late. You don’t need to steal a passport. What you need is a plan for accelerating your current rate of motion and let it carry you across expanded boundaries you wish to explore. Fire the old script editors who have been running your performance. Take off on a journey where the editors no longer direct how and where and to what you can pay attention. This possibility of freedom may not survive the cyberworld a decade into the future. While social relations and political control will be less geographically bound; what comes next may impose even greater filters. The number of daily steps may continue to plunge. Our forward motion that brought us to this point in civilization may stall. The controls over how we our minds pay attention may define our brave new world where the Hadza, with their 11.2K daily walk, will take pity on us.

A Hadza Hunter Paying Attention.

If you’ve spent time in courtrooms in Canada, England, Burma, and America you’d find the same churchlike devotion to symbolism, ritual, gowns and reverence from those in attendance. Oaths are taken to tell them the truth. Lies made under oath are punished by fines and imprisonment.

Judges sit on an elevated bench looking down as from Olympus at those in the courtroom, and those below look up to them.

Judges are in a business not unlike a mystery author who must tie up the loose ends that explains the story. Unlike most writers they must also be public performers in the ritual of justice.

Edmund Burke wrote, “It is hard to say whether doctors of law or divinity have made the greater advances in the lucrative business of mystery.”

A crime fiction writer may entertain, enlighten, stimulate, provoke or expand our understanding of the psychology of criminal and victim. Judges have the heavy responsibility of knowing their finding of the ‘true’ story has great consequences for the liberty of the people in the courtroom and the society outside of the courtroom. Like all storytellers, judges write decisions that can’t help but reflect their own cultural and personal biases.

Is it reasonable to expect our judges to rise above the prejudices of their history, culture, class, and time?

That is a burning question asked in Thailand where there is talk of a judicial coup to oust the government. Many judicial systems not just in Thailand are bending under the weight of full-scale political conflict. In those parts of the world set on fire with violence and strife, people seek answers about who is judging the authorities inside a political system and who is judging the judges.

Most judges are drawn from the ranks of the ruling elites. They aren’t elected. Judges are vetted and appointed by a narrow spectrum of state officials. They serve for life. During their tenure on the bench, it is fair to ask: are judges main duty to protect the powerful and the system that confers power on them or are judges serving to mediate and protect ordinary citizens who challenge power, conventional wisdom, or dissent from the mythology that power cloaks itself for legitimacy?

“As long as you’re scared you’re on the plantation.”  ― Cornel West

To which I’d add, justice cages fear while injustice opens the cage door. Judges act as the gatekeepers, opening and closing the door on the actions of others and state officials who left to their own devices generate fear of among powerless people.

Unlike other storytellers, judges can send people to prison, ban them from civil rights and liberties and political office, overturn laws, regulations and edicts, and select among competing philosophies, norms, and values the ones that become the law of the land.

Judges in many systems exercise by their position considerable power over other institutions of state and over citizens. That is why their role has enhanced importance in times of great dissension and debate about the direction of society.

In the common law countries such as Canada, Australia and the United States (at the state level judges are often elected) and elsewhere in the Commonwealth judges are selected and appointed from the top ranks of lawyers. Lawyers who have proved themselves as not only versed in the law, but who have gained a reputation for qualities of restraint, honor, knowledge, experience, fairness and integrity.

In civil law countries such as Thailand, Japan, and most of Europe, judges enter the justice system soon after law school and work their way under the civil service ladder. The civil law system has a different tradition of recruitment, advancement, and cultural history.

In Thailand, the judges are an important source of power within the context of the political turmoil that has followed since the 2006 coup. A number of decisions on the constitution and laws have created controversy as to the neutrality of the courts to administer justice in light of powerful forces seeking to expel the government. The Thai political system and judicial system are going through a period of credibility crisis.

Distrust of politicians is acceptable if not necessary to ensure that decisions aren’t made for politicians and their cronies but for the people. But distrust of the courts undermines the last resort to monitor and hold the state authorities and those contesting those authorities to resolve their differences within the boundaries of the law.

The players may cheat but the referees are there to keep the game within the rules. If a referee appears, through his calls, to be favoring one side, the game is rigged and a free for all may follow. Thus if a judge is seen to appear at a demonstration protesting for or against the government, he or she has given the appearance of taking sides.

A judge’s authority rests upon the appearance of being neutral. If a member of the federal court in New York had carried a placard at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration, such an act would make it difficult for the judge to appear neutral in a hearing based on the legality of the demonstration and an application for an injunction against the rally organizers.

The quickest way to compromise a judicial system is for the judges to become associated with one faction in a political dispute. The friend of justice is seen as being no friend or enemy of either side to a dispute.

If that appearance of neutrality is shattered, the probability of attacks against the courts rises.

A number of recent stories reporting insurgent attacks on courts suggest they are becoming routine in a number of countries. Courts and court officials are being targeted as combatants on one side or the other in political struggles.

An extreme example of discontent with the court system spilling over into acts of violence is happened in Pakistan on Monday March 3, when a suicide bomber settled scores by blowing himself up in a courtroom, killing eleven and injuring twenty-four people.

In early April  2013, The ABA Journal reported 53 people were killed and 90 injured, including two judges, when suicide bombers attacked a court house in Western Afghanistan.

USA Today reported that in mid-April 2013, in Mogadishu Nine Al-Shabab Islamic extremists in suicide vests and firing rifles attacked Somalia’s main court complex. 16 people including all the attackers were killed

In February M79 the Bangkok Post reported an armour-piercing grenade was fired at the Criminal Court on Ratchadaphisek Road. An earlier this week on Monday 3March The Bangkok Post reported that two M-61 grenades were used in an attack on the Criminal Court in Bangkok by two men on a motorcycle.

It would be mistake to think such attacks are limited to judges and court personnel living in quasi-democratic or non-dramatic countries in the Middle-East, Asia, or Latin America.

Fourteen years ago, in a report titled Safe and Secure: Protecting Judicial Officials violence in the American judicial system was detailed. The report illustrated the rising threats and actual violence against judges, judicial personnel and others working in the court system. Measures such as designing the court building as a ‘harden target’ and the use of of metal detectors and x-rays to detect weapons, alarms, and CCTV cameras were installed as a response to the potential of an attack.

It is one thing to survey and describe the attacks on judges and court personnel, it is quite another to explain why such attacks appear more frequently and with substantial causalities.

One explanation is illiberal, traditional tribal forces are taking their insurgencies to the place where captured insurgents face justice. In Thailand, some have argued that the illiberal, traditional non-democratic forces are protected by applying a double-standard supported by the courts.

In other words, violent attacks on judges and their personnel may originate from deep-seated political conflicts in a society and judges find themselves in the cross-hairs as warring factions demand that court favor their interpretation of justice.

Another explanation is the absence of perceived fairness and impartiality of judges. Seneca confirms this is an ancient issue. “Auditur et altera pars–The other side shall be heard as well.” If one side to dispute believes their side is systematically, as a matter of policy, not being heard along with a perception the judges are automatically siding with the powerful, violence may well follow.

There is, in the Western tradition, a notion that courts, like free speech, are part of the safeguards needed to secure democracy.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote, “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.”

Courts are places where people in conflict go to obtain justice. And justice is in the quality of the assessment of what story most plausibility emerges from the competing stories told by the parties through witnesses, forensic evidence, and expert testimony.

In time of political chaos, the judges in a political system are called upon to resolve issues arising from the constitution or other laws. The problem is that what is argued as a ‘legal’ issue may have a significant political dimension and that draws the judges into the fray.

Each side of a political conflict seeks to convince the judges of the merits, fairness, common sense and justice arising from the assembly of facts, time lines, and role of actors in the political drama.

What is at stake isn’t found in the ordinary civil or criminal case. State authorities often have a horse in this race. Judges are by their nature also state authorities. The theory has been, while judges are state authorities, part of their job is to keep those authorities in check and to enforce civil liberties on behalf of those challenging what may be abuses of authority.

There is considerable gallows type humor about the courts that goes back many years. Judge Sturgess wrote, “Justice is open to everyone in the same way as the Ritz Hotel.” Raymond Chandler would have agreed as well as any noir fiction writer.

Ignzio Silone said, “An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain – the equality of all men.”

None of this jaundice about political systems or courts that are an essential part of a functioning political system is new. Tacitus reminded us, “The more corrupt the republic, the more numerous the laws.”

It wasn’t just the Roman who had this view, the author of The Art of War, Lao-Tzu wrote, “The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

And our cultural view of judges goes from admiration to suspicion as the often-quoted phrase indicates: “Good lawyers know the law; great lawyers know the judge.”

When it comes to the character of judges, one finds a range of opinions, including this one by David Dudley Field, “Judges are but men, and are swayed like other men by vehement prejudices.  This is corruption please.”

Corruption, a word that swarms around the hive of anti-government protesters in Thailand, has more than one sting in the tail. As Horace wrote, “A corrupt judge does not carefully search for the truth.” Even if that truth may discredit the actions of the powerful.

That raises the awkward question of what is the ‘truth’ and who is to be trusted with find the truth amongst factions each claiming the prize for themselves?

Even judges of American justice Benjamin Cardozo’s standing recognized the issue: “There is in each of us a stream of tendency, whether you choose to call it philosophy or not, which gives coherence and direction to thought and action. Judges cannot escape that current any more than other mortals. All their lives, forces which they do not recognize and cannot name, have been tugging at them—inherited instincts, traditional beliefs, acquired convictions; and the resultant is an outlook on life, a conception of social needs. … In this mental background every problem finds it setting. We may try to see things as objectively as we please. None the less, we can never see them with any eyes except our own.”

Cardozo isn’t along, Felix Frankfurter wrote, “No judge writes on a wholly clean slate.”

Each age recreates its own justice system and selects the judges and other personnel to run it. And in each age, the status, reputation, and standing of the judges is reinvented to suit the purposes of the day. Much in our world has been disrupted by technology. Including the courts.

America has a secret court with judges deciding on the scope of government surveillance of its citizens. Thai courts sometimes hold closed sessions in Lèse-majesté cases. Michael Ponsor wrote in The Hanging Judge, “If you want the best evidence of just how strong our democracy is, come into the courtroom.” That’s hard to do if it meets in secret.

Novelist George R.R. Martin had his own idea about the connection between a judge and the justice he administers, “The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword.”

History suggests that once the courts are drawn into political conflict, the seeds of doubt and suspicion are easily sown and fall on the fertile field of doubt in government institutions.

The search for truth, justice, and impartiality is difficult in the best of times, and at the worst of times, hard men take justice into their own hands, sometimes with the tacit approval of the courts, and sometimes for revenge for the suspicion of such back channel signals of approval.

In Thailand, all eyes are on the courts to deliver judgments on a host of legal cases with large social and political implications. In a judicial system where judges have the power to remove prime ministers, sack MPs, and dissolve political parties, the perception of good faith is essential.

Whether the Thai judges, through their decisions in fact-finding and legal reasoning clear a path that appears fair and reasonable is a question on the minds of many. Whether any court of law can be designed or recruit judges capable of making such political decision acceptable to most citizens is another question altogether. Go to Google and type in Thai courts and click on images. This visual montage tells a story about conflict, power, justice, anger, fear and hate, and in the midst of this narrative are the courts seeking a legal way out.

Power. Grab it. Earn it. Put it to a vote. The tango between power and violence is the stuff of literature.  Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined  illustrates a dramatic decrease of violence over the centuries. But the world I live in seems extremely violent making such a statement appear counter intuitive. Facts are facts. And “Which way you ought to go depends on where you want to get to…”

In part, this 30-fold decrease in violence means we are historically less likely to be a victim of homicide than our ancestors. But homicide, like the future (to use William Gibson’s clever observation) is unevenly distributed across countries and cultures. Richard Florida in What the Most Violent Nations in the World have in Common, cites three factors that explain why there are elevated homicide rates in some cultures and not others. (1) Social economic inequality, (2) gender inequality, and (3) the macho index based on levels of masculinity, testosterone, and aggression. Florida’s article focuses on private acts of violence that results in death. The question is whether these factors may also explain why some States are more ready to use of violence against their citizen or why protesters in these places resort to violence against State and its security forces.

It is public violence by State authorities and those challenging State authorities that is a common thread in the political struggles in Ukraine, Egypt, Syria, Venezuela and Thailand. Projecting violence has escalated in Thailand since January 2014. What is the cause of this surge in political violence in Thailand? There is no simple answer, though Richard Florida’s three factors are a guide to following precursors of violence. We had bombings and shootings. Twenty-two people are dead. Hundreds have been injured. Four children are dead from bombings and shootings.

What emerges when you drop down the rabbit hole is the world inside offers up a wide variety of possible sources to explain these deaths. It is one thing to describe violence. It is another to explain it. Pundits make lots of explanation that are convincing, plausible argument as to causation. But don’t be fooled. Plausibility and truth are two different matters.

What appears to fuel the current Thai power struggle is a controversy over who has the legitimate right to exercise power.  At the heart of the political turmoil is a perplexing issue: On what basis does the caretaker government support its claim to govern in Thailand?  Owning power, through an electoral mandate, tribal tradition, military coup, or a strongman, can be traced like bullet wounds in the corpse of empires and nations recounted in political history. Long before The Lord of Rings was written, Abraham Lincoln said, “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”

Power means that A can compel B to do or not do an act that B wouldn’t otherwise wish to do. For example, obtain a driver’s license, pay taxes, refrain from drinking and driving. You don’t have the option of refusal. You can be compelled with threat of violence to do something you don’t wish to. Objects of power are taught a script to perform and the best script makers don’t need guns to enforce their power over the actors. The actors patrol themselves for accuracy, which means loyalty.

Power, at its best, safeguards the larger interests of a community and individuals sacrifice a degree of freedom they would otherwise have to accommodate that interest. Power is a river with many streams. Elections are one way power is conferred as a communal agreement, the power holder has legitimacy in forcing others, within the law, to comply with new policies and law. Power also has other rivers where power flows from the barrel of a gun, from a family name, from a reputation for brutality, or according to cultural custom.

Power also means claiming privileges and immunities. Absolute power means the laws of the land do not apply to that person. He or she can bury alive hundreds of public ministers or court officials on a whim. Chinese history has a number of such examples to illustrate the dangers of concentrated power. Less dramatic, but still substantial, is the power that comes with vast wealth, through cartels and monopolies, through the accumulation of data about your private life, through the power to indoctrinate children to the ideology to support the powerful. True power has the capacity to make us fearful, grateful, or to silence us, and the power to use networks to defeat opponents.

Political power needs to be monitored and checked and for good reason. Over time, despite the best intention, the power holder will exhibit autistic behavior. His privileges become entitlements. The attitude spreads like a pandemic infection through the whole ruling class with hubris. Once the unrestrained power virus spreads through agencies, courts, armies and civil servants the capacity for empathy with the governed is destroyed.

The monopoly on violence is fragile. The State is many places is losing control over violence. The danger is that power and violence are being privatized like shares sold in a state enterprise in one of those rigged auctions.

People with power are mindful of those who would challenge their power, compete for it, or question it. Freedom of expression is the one defense ordinary non-powerful people seek; it exists as a peaceful way to limit the powerful. Free speech allows us to voice our suspicion of power abuses and make the powerful accountable. The two most hated ideas of the powerful are accountability and transparency. It means you can’t just shoot whoever you want without some due process preceding the firing of the bullet.

Criminalizing speech is one way the powerful push back to control their challengers. You can read a great deal about allocation of power arrangements from the degree of freedom or repression in the exercise of political speech. The more free the speech, the more accountable power holders are in the exercise of power. The powerful rarely attack the ideal of free speech. The really powerful aren’t quite that stupid. They have another argument up their sleeve. As Christopher Hitchens wrote, “What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation?” Thus political speech is restricted to prevent ‘enemies’ from attacking the institutions of State and those who are the face of such institutions.

The powerful need enemies, real or imagined, to give them a mandate.

“What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. ” ― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Sometimes the messy battle to merge democratic and non-democratic power centers spills over into violence. Power now stays stable because the aspirations, economic realities, and technology are constantly shifting and often faster than tradition institutions can adapt. This leads modern political forces to undermine the authority and status of existing power holders. These forces respond by abandoning the legislative assembly and take to the streets. Once in the streets, sooner or later violence surfaces. Violence is a weapon to recover lost power.

The purpose of a modern political process is to provide a mechanism to resolve conflict over the exercise of power within democratic institutions. Democracy is a peacekeeping patrol to keep the powerful forces in society from slitting each other’s throats. The worry is when one faction gets the upper hand and uses that position to put the knife in.

In every political system people have grievances. Not everyone is ever happy. What is sometimes ignored are the grievances of those who once exercised unquestioned power after they lose power in an election. When power is stripped away as a result of an election they are left vulnerable and feeling unprotected and their interest unjustly ignored. Anger and hatred, threats and intimidation, and breakdown of law and order follow. They plot to recover what has been lost. George Orwell in 1984 wrote, “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

In the struggle for power that a culture defines itself and the identity of its people are formed.

The never-ending struggle for power is something children need to learn early on. Some of the best books that children read prepare them to understand the nature of power, its dangers, seductions, violations, and corruptions. The Lord of the Rings is a classic for children and adults and the ring of power becomes a symbol for its corrupting influence, and the greed and excesses surrounding power struggles. Plato taught wrote, “The measure of a man is what he does with power.”

If we measure the probabilities of what people will do with power if left to their own devices, it is clear checks and balances are essential to prevent tyranny.

What literary influences have shaped your opinion about power and violence? And what books would you recommend to a child to learn about power? The books I’d recommend are: Alice in Wonderland, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Philip Pullman’s Dark Matter trilogy, George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Readers can add their own favourites to this short-list.

Here’s a brief reason for each selection:

Alice in Wonderland is a descent into the madness, capriciousness and arbitrariness of power. There is no better book to illustrate how whim couple with absolute power creates selfish, dangerous monsters. Once you slide down that rabbit hole, you enter an alien world of Mad Hatters.

Lord of the Flies illustrates the tribal nature of power, the symbolic nature of power attached to an object, and the horrible abuses that lead to violence and murder. Stranded on an island boys revert to a feral state where seizing power over others turns into deadly games.

The Dark Matter trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass) by Phillip Pullman is a portal into the corruption of mystical beliefs and ideology by the powerful to enforce conformity and to destroy freedom.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm a parable of power, violence, dictatorship, repression, hatred and injustice.

The best foundation for a crime fiction writer, or any genre of writing, can be found in children’s literature. You don’t need to be a writer to take in the profound insights that will guide your own way through a lifetime of political power plays and public violence. The saddest thing about arriving at adulthood is so many of these classics are tucked away, spine out in a forgotten part of our personal library, gathering dust.

I would like to walk you through the maze of the political power struggle in Thailand. The fact is I set out with a compass and map and a few steps along the path, get hopelessly lost. So I go back and read Alice in Wonderland, and ask how she did what she did? I am curious to know just how far the rabbit hole goes and what I will find at the other end.

Along my Thai journey of 25 years I have uncovered some clues. What I call clues are the things I stop to pay attention to. Do you ever wonder why you pay attention to something things and ignore others? Have you ever thought that just maybe people who live in different rabbit holes, with different culture and language might stop to look at different things? That’s what I seek to do in my books and essays—examine those different things.

I invite you to a journey of discovery of power and violence and ask how and why people pay attention to one thing and not another, and how we share many similarities on this journey but at the same time it is a winding, twisty road and sometimes we find people stop and look at things we’d rush right passed. How they manage love and hate, fear and hope, lying and truth, justice and injustice, and how we all put our nose against the window pane and seek a glimpse of who these people who control our lives and our freedom and liberty, and wonder if they see me, see us as people like them. Or are we invisible?

What happens when we see each other through the pane that separates us? How does it happen that I’m on one side and they are on the other? How can I see and understand what people using different languages in a different culture see? Do I know what deep passages inside their rabbit hole their language leads them? I try to follow but I discover it is hard work understanding life deep under this surface. I try the best way that I can and know that what I witness, describe and shape into words is a rough approximation of the reality.

I look around Bangkok where I live and I feel the pain of the Thais. I see the sadness and worry in their faces. I have heard their rage and frustrations. We all started as those four children killed in the past week. A child wants to be loved and to be free. Carefree. They want crayons and a coloring book. Even a child’s level of Thai fluency opens an expat’s heart to the suffering all of us experience each day.

The bombs and guns, the hate and the threats are on a page we should turn. Make it go away, a natural child’s request. One that I wish was in my power to grant. But it’s not. Instead we must face the violence as not some remote event out of sight, but as touching our lives, only then can we deal with it, and deal with ourselves.

Lucien Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, who along with Francis Bacon are two of the most important painters in England over the past 100 years. They specialized in portraits. They observed people and painted what they saw in others. Some say they painted images of themselves reflected in others. What of those who sat for these paintings? These patient sitters most of whom no one will remember spent many hours. What is their story of being observed? What of their observations of the painter observing them?

Think of these painters as emergency room doctors who took the pulse of their time.  The blood, bone, flesh are inside these artistic works. They embody a range of health and disease. They create an illusion of immortality.

In his brilliant Man with a Blue Scarf: On sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud (2014) Martin Gayford who sat for a period of one and a half years for a portrait painted by Lucian Freud, reminds us that in 1800 there were a billion people on the planet. Each and everyone one of them is now dead. Not a single survivor walks amongst us. Looking over some of the names on the list above to discover the ethics, morality, and temperament of those we will never meet. Our passions and emotions are no different. What moves us to tears and laughter may have changed (though As You Like It still makes us laugh), but the reality of tears and laughter is unaltered.

These artists have taught us how to look, what to look for, and what patterns bring understanding, joy, hope, terror, hate, anger and despair.  Mostly we don’t consult this list. We dart in and out of their worlds like we clean our teeth, and shortly thereafter we are greedily on to our next meal.

They have thrown us a life preserver to someone in the middle of a sea with no horizon but the sky on all sides. We are that dot floating, waiting for rescue.

In the world of noir, that rescue never arrives. We are abandoned inside our lives to struggling to keep our heads above water. We seek not truth, but allies. Others who experience life as we do and share with them a common emotional reaction to life, experience, others, and meaning.

Our looking is an experience of bias management. Like a thirsty wander in an undrinkable sea we search for drinking water. We reject any idea that such a search is futile or that we are going about it the wrong way. Our group feels its way toward the shared goal. Nothing can persuade us that we are deluded or looking in the wrong place.

We are prisoners of these biases. No one escapes from them. They are our black hole. The pull of their gravity is far stronger than reason, which acts as the weak force. What we see is all there is. What we want is confirmation of what we believe and feel. Contrary evidence is misinterpreted so we can maintain our illusions.  We all claim to be truth seekers. What we seek is the truth that makes us comfortable with what we believe to be true. We can’t accept there might be a contradiction. Cognitive dissonance makes us angry and dangerous. Our cure is to back into our corner with our community and turn up the sound and sights of what we know in our hearts to be right, truthful, honorable, and fair.

Our tragedy is we fail to train ourselves to pay attention to the fine details around us. We gain our identity, our selves, our information from instruments and machines. Not from nature or each other. That separates us from our ancestors, their lives, burdens, and social life.

It takes endurance to pay attention, and to seek clarity and definition in what we are attending to. If there is a single reason why I continue to write books and essays, it is to continue on a journey of exploration of what is in front of me, and the expression in words, pictures, and music of what is found along the way as we stopped to take in life.  Those who lived before our birth continue to dwell in our time through art. The presence of these ‘sitters” share our space along the river of time. We look over our shoulder and let them inside our minds. We try to see through their eyes. We seek a glimpse of ourselves in their faces. Mostly, though, I fear we suffer an illusion that we navigate on our own, that we captain our own boat, without much thought for those who lived before us.

It takes a large amount of psychological resources to pay attention. Basically we are lazy. Putting on filters and recharging our biases is our lazy way of idling through life. Imagination fires on distant shores hold no interest. We crave excitement but fear adventure. We take no risk. When our adrenaline rush is over we lose interest quickly. We move on like junkies looking for a new fix. What all great artists teach is the discipline to keep paying attention at those small details we no longer see, and to keep up that concentration for weeks, months, and years. Great art results when the artist channels his or her attention over time and emerges with an artifact that makes us feel larger than ourselves, expansive and connected.

[CAPTION] Lucian Freud, the artist, and his subject, Martin Gayford, “the man with the blue scarf” on the right and on the canvas

We avoid disorder, chaos, ambiguity and uncertainty. These things are unsettling and frightening. The great art doesn’t pander to this fear. Instead such art animates and discloses how our current of charged feelings passes through this invisible, unstable field.  We need an artist’s angle to view our own passage through life. Paintings, music and words are a psychic map to master new landscapes of the world inside and outside us. If we allow them in, we find that they’ve created a bridge between our everyday ‘us’ and the objects that surround ‘us.’ We are in harmony with those objects, and those others, people and animals, when we understand the nature and scope of our connection.

Here’s what Lucian Freud had to say about a visit to the Toulouse-Lautrec museum in Albi:

It is was very interesting, very exciting. That marvelous subject of the whores sitting round a circular pouf, when you look at it you realize that the one thing he couldn’t do was people together. To me, the most touching Lautrec in the museum is the one of the two girls, both whores, in a bed; you just see their heads. It’s so moving. They’ve finally finished their work and there they are; because they actually like each other.

Lautrec captured the most human of all moments: mutual liking of two people, and in a setting, which is commercial and people aren’t thought of as liking each other. It’s a fleeting moment. And it reminds us that liking, love, pain, hate and anger are constantly shifting in and out of our lives. None of this is stable; just the opposite, it is in constant flux. Five minutes later the two ‘whores’ could have been at each other’s throat. But that is not the moment in the painting. We choose our moments like an artist. What to record, what to remember and what to ignore. The two women in the Lautrec painting showed their liking. Now they would click the ‘like’ button on Facebook.

Gayford’s lesson in sitting for Lucian Freud is that we are different every day. Every hour of every day. Our mood, temperament, our interests fade in and out, cancelling one another, and that leaves us with the sinking feeling of unreality. It is not possible for the artist to capture the ‘real’ you because that person is in constant transition. Underneath the mask we wear is someone who is in flux. Persona from the Greeks was a reference to our mask. The one we put on at home, school, office, or inside the car or at a restaurant, or on Skype video calls. We have a certain face for the camera. For looking in the mirror. For displaying to our loved ones and for strangers.

Underneath the face is changing moment to moment. We look at paintings, listen to music and read books to find out what lies beneath the mask, to embrace it, to recoil from it, to recognize it inside us. It is the part of our psychology hidden from our own view. Gayford showed how Lucian Freud, like his famous grandfather Sigmund Freud, was in the business of reading the person hidden behind the mask. He waited, like his grandfather, until the sitter patient involuntarily revealed himself or herself. It might take hundreds of hours. Lucian Freud was a psychologist who diagnosed using paint. Every patient mood recorded deep inside the face as surely as daily notes by an analyst of the mental condition.

Artists pretty much do the same thing, treating their subject as a palimpsest to be decoded. They blend observation, memory, emotion, and imagination, and then find the right colors and shades and tones of paint to recreated these layers onto a flat surface. A writer or composer does something very similar with words or musical notes.  Artists see a wide range of possibilities that most of us overlook in the hurry of the day.

Gayford reminds us that we have 22 muscles on either side of our mouth. The muscles are tattered to our skin and not to bone. They can move like a 44-instrument-orchestra and the number of piece of music that can be played in huge.  Adams was off by two digits away. 44 was the actual number that the supercomputer called Deep Thought in Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy gave as the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. There is a near infinity of possibilities in the human face, body, attitude, mood, disposition and none of it stable for very long like clouds passing through. How to express the depth of that range? That’s always been the unanswered question. No one knows. The answer may well be in observing the human face.

I also recommend Alan Lightman’s The Accidental Universe. Lightman is an interesting author as he holds a dual position at MIT in humanities and the physics department, as well as a physics and novelist. He’s been on both sides of CP Snow’s Two Cultures.

Where scientist and non-science in the humanities seek to understand each other’s language and premises and to establish a line of communication. This has been a divide as large as any political divide. Near the end of the book Lightman talks about electromagnetic fields crosses a broad spectrum and how we perceive light is a very narrow range inside that spectrum. We know these other ranges not from our sensory system but through our instruments. Unplug the instruments, study them a thousand hours and you will see nothing. They could never painted as various positions of the 22 muscles around the right or left side of the mouth. The physicist in him notes that in the electromagnetic field at the upper range there are more than 10 trillion frequencies and in the lower ranges an excess of a 100 trillion frequencies. Those are number beyond our imagining.

Art is carried inside our sensory range. It is what we share as we pass through time and the electromagnetic fields pass through us. Lightman leaves open the possibility of mortality as a state of perception experienced along a narrow band nestled in a vast of infinity of possibilities that preceded and succeeds our brief experience inside the human band range. It is a comforting speculation. But it’s not provable. It’s a belief. So the debate will never end.

Meanwhile, Martin Gayford has left us with a testament to Lucian Freud’s artistic temperament and way of being that created portraits of the many layers within each of us and they be studied for expression of the many emotions and moods and vulnerabilities a face can hold so as long as there are people to care.

Lucien Freud had a burning need to closely observe, to understand what he observed, to find paints to explore the range of observations. Though as Gayford concludes, he wasn’t a man given to introspection. What an observation meant in the larger scheme of things didn’t interest him that much. He lost himself in that observer’s world where he was in control.

At the end of the book, Lucien Freud’s words make for a perfect closing, a way of making the debate largely irrelevant.

The notion of the afterlife is much he same, giving people the idea that this life – your actual life – is just hors d’oeuvre in comparison with what comes later. As far as I’m concerned, the whole idea is utterly ghastly. I’m not frightened in the slightest of death; I’ve had a lovely time.

This may be the most lasting of legacies. The final obit when wishing to remember a departed loved one or dear friend: “He had a lovely time.”

If you observe long enough, closely enough, Lucien Freud’s life suggests you will find your own key to Number 44. Time passes on this search but it is let go of without regret knowing the full of richness of life comes from observing the fine detail. There lies enduring satisfaction. It’s enough. For a lovely time.