[Nettime-bold] Re: Don't Fuck With Democracy.

["Lachlan Brown" <lachlan@london.com>]

Thank you MCKenzie,  Kermit, and Mikael for 
pointing out the source for ‘the tragedy of the commons’.
"The Tragedy of the Commons," Garrett Hardin, Science, 
162(1968):1243-1248.

Hmmm…

One might have expected Malthusian
biology combined with in the equation
of Mass Destruction Game Theory
and validated by a retrenching scholarship 
compromised by the military industrial 
complexes reaction to counter-cultural 
social innovation would crop up somewhere
around the question of ‘the commons’.


I see Hardin, citing J.B. Wiesner and H.F. 
York ‘the dilemma of steadily increasing 
military power and steadily decreasing 
national security’, is not writing about 
'the commons' at all, but about Nuclear 
Arsenals in 1968 during an intensely insecure 
cultural period in which scholarship became 
deeply compromised by the institutionalization
 of education as a mere element and resource 
in a new social contract and a new form of
 government, that of The National Security State. 
He was writing not about ‘the commons’ at 
all but about ‘Mutual Coercion Mutually Agreed 
Upon’ the necessary basis for 
suspension of the social contract and democratic 
rights and an apology for a ‘new social contract’ 
in which the balance between estates of The State, 
The Market and Ethics mediated by the Public 
was to be suspended for the sake of Cold War 
emergency contingency.

Was he one wonders writing to posterity an 
apology for his time from the fall-out shelter 
to which 


What relevance does ‘R-Complex thinking’ 
of the National Security State have for the rich, 
complex, diverse, contradictory nature 
of our common wealth, our culture(s), how 
is it to anticipate and assure the longevity 
of our culture(s) and why do we
continue to accept this imbalance to the 
social contract? 

Scientific Rationality among herdsmen is 
an unlikely scenario. Some of us have higher 
brain functions than those governed from 
the brain stem, and any argument 
based upon assumed behaviour with no 
empirical basis may make interesting
economic theory, and might make what 
appears to be a fairly interesting game 
simulation but... 

‘The Commons’, our democracy, is not 
a given, an ideascape to be colonized, 
it is an outcome of  democratic thinking.
Behaviour in a 'commons' is comparative 
and cultural, governed by best use of land 
and resources for a 'community', ‘how do 
we make best use of what we’ve got” governed 
by ‘tradition’ or what has worked well in the 
past and carried a community across unremembered 
unrecorded events -- long term cycles of climate 
change, pestilence, war, --“kinship” trust in 
unpredictable as well as predictable behaviour 
among co-‘herdsmen’’/wimmin, as well as 
well as openness to the memes of other cultures, 
in a forum where all matters affecting the commons, 
and the common wealth, our culture(s), may
be raised, discussed, and commonly understood.
.This is democratic thinking. Historically, managing 
‘the Commons’ or communal land of the 
community was how we
got democracy.

Alexander Wilson’s The Culture of Nature 
is helpful toward an understanding of a 
'new social contract', and of course
Serres had something to say about 
'the Natural Contract'.

About my subject line, I apologise but Hardin
provides validation for it:

'Coercion is a dirty word to most liberals now,
 [1968] but it need not forever be so. As with 
the four-letter words, its dirtiness can be 
cleansed away by exposure to the light, by 
saying it over and over without apology or 
embarrassment. ' Hardin.

I repeat, don't fuck with democracy.

“The only way we can preserve and 
nurture other and more precious freedoms 
is by relinquishing the freedom to breed, 
and that very soon. "Freedom is the 
recognition of necessity" -- and it is the role 
of education to reveal to all the necessity of 
abandoning the freedom to breed. Only so, 
can we put an end to this aspect of the 
tragedy of the commons.” Hardin 68

Nazi.

Make love not war.

Lachlan Brown
Thirdnet

Cultural Studies 
Goldsmiths College

-- 

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