P R O S P E R

addressed to the

written by john folly

my country is the world and

my religion is to do good.—PAINE

of

INHABITANTS

EARTH

 —— When I am pruning the lilies I am often minding my catch, if catch is what I can, if mind is what I mean— too many self-indulgent mouthings in the pond glass before a nascent strider startles it with ripples, whereby some semblance of self-image is shattered  — and my chance at conviction gone with it. So we turn to prosperity, safe in the lit shrine of this garden, trope of tropes: place of rib-giving; or Borges’ forking paths; or Mary Lennox exhaling cholera like a vase full of wind and leaves, or earthquakes, or whatever it is this time; or Adonia coteries of dark-eyed women veiled in mauve exchanging yellow promises in their elate routine: tending the quick germinators  —  wheat, barley, lettuce, fennel  —  all sowed in shallow baskets to grow rapidly and without roots so that they might be pitched off rooftops and into the ocean, their hectic lives reflecting that violent bloom of Adonis himself —  these folks are often put aside to make stories of and then are never made stories of, while their gardens are left to grow or die, us standing in the glade trying to decide which gerund might signpost us towards a state of wealth and comfort.

Our country supplies us with opportunity, if nothing else, and for that I am eternally grateful — and that opportunity has been leveraged by many in their various acts of human progress: autonomous cars free our time so that we might have more of it to give to our passions and be safer in the passing of location, vertical farms use less resources while increasing annual yields twofold, medical technologies wage efficient wars with all manner of enemies and win regularly enough. There is something like optimism here that should not be immediately discounted. That said, your opinion on whether or not you think all of this  —  a government, media, and military built on a bedrock of greed —  works is more often a question of price. Each tax bracket preaches its own creation myth.

Thus, while the world has become a better place it has also failed to live up to our expectations. Our grand technological renaissance has not yet been followed by a moral one. I say this at the risk of over-repeating a phrase, whereby relegating it to the banal oblivion of the common platitude: No man at present begins with an equal footing in this world. Opportunity abounds, yes, but the account of each inflection of the new generation is derivative of what the previous left for him or her. As such, the benefits of our improvements have not been doled out in equal portions, and fairness in opportunity, the least common denominator of the myriad kinds of prosperity that can be afforded to us, continues to go unhandled.

It is the aim of this essay to study some less-spoken-of architectural achievements of these flailing institutional structures in the hopes that this critical consideration might inspire change or discussion that steers us toward a new prosperity. In a universe that holds no expectations of its own save entropy, it seems solicitous to deny that our own expectations have any real importance  —  yet to do so is to hold a bird in one’s hand and deny its trembling, even when its chirping gives rise to harmonies beyond belief, even when its beak-pricks begin to break tendon skin in blue ornate brief plungings-up  —  to deny that I met this bird is to deny that I could have is to deny that I could have expected to  —  hope and faith, these are contained in and consumed by the universe, if nothing else.

1

So, with hope and faith, I ask you to consider prosperity: The individual sees the word as a regular confirmation of choice presupposing purpose, and so societal prosperity must presuppose societal purpose. In a universe of many worlds, each of the infinite number of states exists at some level of societal prosperity relative to the cohesive expectations of its population. The question arises: can we somehow force our current society into a higher state of prosperity? The debate on how best to balance freedom and safety is an eternal one, but there are reasons enough to continue it.

At the birth of any new disobedience against the current society in power, three qualifiers must be present to generate purpose: a system worth editing or abandoning, a space to go, and a common vision of the new society to be enacted. This is a neutral and adjective-free attempt at the notion  —  so keep this in mind: morality gives prosperity its valence and it is my intention to hide some clumsy version of ethics within my summarizing statements on the speculative uprising at hand:

The initial has been stated —not only have we allowed inequality of initial opportunity to exist, we have nurtured it to a state of insipidness. Entire generations sleep comfortably in the ignorance of systemic injustice. The incentive to generate discrepancies between folk is great for a select few and they have done well to grow fat off the spinning of stories that make dinner-side discrimination easy — we are told our neighbor is such and such and so he must be.

Of a future place, I must talk in the future tense, as I believe such a place exists that is not currently reachable but will be in short time. For the entirety of human history we have been concerned with a spacial distinction: that of known land and frontier. Each new disobedience requires frontier  —  for as we stake claims to it and develop it into known land, it in turn acts upon us in provision and animosity, molding our expectations as they react to new surface. Santayana says: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, and in this the frontier is implied —  if our history stagnates it is the result of stagnation in our context. A new environment has enough power to reframe ugly history as romantic mythology. I posit that the red planet Mars stands as our next frontier. I must admit I often hover close to its fire in dreams, then, seeing that it won’t eclipse, up and go like the incarnation and withdrawal of a god, a trail of bombast unfurling out after me like the angelic secretariat in heavenly discourse.

Finally, we must approach a shared vision of the future system, and here I must be somewhat paradoxical  —  my vagueness is an attempt to protect the very vision I wish to proselytize. Let me say at present only this: all rights extended to persons by the government are essentially wagers of opportunity. Philosophy is often critical of arguing tradition as reason, but many of these rights seem to belong in a societal system. For this, I must posit that the bets are good and the bookies are bad — and it is these particular criminals, inhuman as they are, that we will examine.

This essay is not an attempt at reinventing the foundations of government; I incite no rebellion or revolt—only movement. Rather, consider it an examination of the alleyways between these foundations and the crimes that are committed in them.

This is the concern of every man to whom nature has given the power of feeling; of which class, regardless of censure, is

THE AUTHOR

2

Each moment of the present is in a way a funeral for itself—and a funeral is a kind of refrain—a structure with two shapes like Wittgenstein’s rabbit | duck—refrener from refrenare: re- (expressing intensive force) + frenum ‘bridle,’ or: Refraindre from refringere: ‘break,’ based on Latin refringere ‘break up’. From the east the word lets us start over; from the west it lets us leave. I’ll let you do either here, as my ignorance is again reduced to jotting with sandgrain and stylus to thorn the raw March wind—it mutters, “Spread your tail, incubus, we’re listening. Make the story good.” Hume begins:

Take any action allowed to be vicious: Willful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In whichever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no other matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn your reflection into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action. Here is a matter of fact, but it is the object of feeling, not of reason. It lies in yourself, not in the object. So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it.

To understand what we mean when we call an action “vicious,” by which he means “wrong,” Hume examines the case of murder. He finds that whenever we consider a murder itself, all we see are the “passions, motives, volitions, and thoughts” of the people involved. For example, we might see that the murderer feels the passion of anger and is motivated by a desire to make his victim suffer, and that the victim feels the passion of fear and is thinking about how to escape. But no matter how hard we look, we don’t see “viciousness” or wrongness—we see an action taking place, and people with motives and feelings are involved in that action, but none of these things seem to be what we mean by “viciousness” or wrongness. Hume next turns his inquiry inward, and considers what is happening inside a person who calls a murder “vicious.” The person who thinks or says that murder is wrong always seems to be feeling a certain “sentiment of disapprobation.” That is, the person disapproves of the action and blames the murderer. When we say “murder is wrong,” we usually think that we are saying something about murder itself, that we are describing a property (wrongness) that the action of murder has. But Hume thinks what we are in fact describing is a feeling in us, not a property of murder—the “viciousness” of a vicious action is just an emotion in the person who is thinking about or observing that action, rather than a property of the action itself.

I bring this passage to your attention, not to pass judgement on any method of moral evaluation, but to highlight the act of self-reference that is masked as observation in the presented scenario. This concept is critical to our understanding of environment—and the ways in which these notions interact is, while simple, paramount to defining social interactions of any type. Any act of self-reference generates as detritus an environment. Without a point of self-reference, what we think of as the space “outside ourselves” is meaningless—utter nonsense tantamount to chaos. This cognitive loop of individual self-reference is the lowest in a hierarchy of loops that will be expounded on further. Several rules meter this relationship, that David Seidl explains in great detail:

3

In the late sixties and early seventies, two Chilean cognitive biologists, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, were trying to answer this question: What is life? Or perhaps more accurately: What distinguishes the living from the non-living? Their answer was concise: A living system reproduces itself. This self-reproduction they referred to as autopoiesis from the greek autos = self, poiein = to produce. They defined the autopoietic system as a system that recursively reproduces its elements through its own elements. This is to say that the different elements interact in such a way as to produce and re-produce the elements of the system. A living cell, for example, reproduces its own elements, like proteins, lipids, etc—they are not just imported from outside. Thus, all processes of the autopoietic system are produced by the system itself and all processes of this type of system are processes of self-production. In this sense, one can say autopoietic systems are operatively closed—there are no operations entering the system from outside or vice versa.

A system’s operative closure however, does not imply a closed system model. It only implies a closure on the level of the operations of the system in that no operations can enter nor leave the system. Autopoietic systems are, nevertheless, also open systems: all autopoietic systems have contact with their environment (interactional openness). Living cells, for example, depend on an exchange of energy and matter without which they could not exist. Contact with the environment, however, is regulated by the autopoietic system; the system determines, when, what and through what channels energy or matter is exchanged with the environment. This simultaneous (interactional) openness and (operative) closure of the autopoietic system becomes particularly important when considering cognitive processes. For Maturana and Varela the concept of living is directly linked to the concept of cognition.

The operative closure of the cognitive system means that the environment cannot produce operations in the system. Cognitions are only produced by other cognitions of the same system. The operative closure does not, however, imply a solipsistic existence of the system, on the contrary. As Maturana and Varela argue: Operative closure is a precondition for interactional openness. On the level of its operations the autopoietic system does not receive any inputs from the environment but only perturbations (or irritations), which then might trigger internal operations in the system. In other words, external events may trigger internal processes but they cannot determine those processes.

For example, if one puts one’s finger in the flame of a candle, the rapid movement of the atoms in the flame will trigger an electric impulse in the nervous system, which will lead to the cognition of ‘heat’. Thus, what can be seen very clearly in this example is the clear distinction between cognitive system and environment. The events in the environment do not enter into the cognitive system; the rapid movement of the atoms triggers qualitatively completely different operations in the system. This triggering is only possible because the system has produced specific structures, i.e. nervous sensors which can be stimulated by rapid movement of electrons (in the same way as it would be stimulated e.g. by acid). From this the nervous system constructs the sensation of heat – the heat does not exist in the flame, in the flame we only have the rapid movement of atoms. If the eye, for example, was moved into the direction of the flame the nervous system would due to the specific structures of the nervous system in the eye construct the experience of light and specific 4 colours; again light and colours as such do not exist in the flame, in the flame there are merely electromagnetic waves.

The theory of autopoiesis clearly distinguishes between on the one hand the reproduction of the system as such and on the other hand the structures according to which this reproduction takes place:

4

In order to ‘survive’ an autopoietic system constantly has to produce further elements. If this (re-)production stops the system disappears; e.g. if a plant stops producing its cells it is considered dead. For this it is irrelevant what concrete cells are produced; whether the plant produces a new leaf, extends its roots or grows a blossom does not matter – as long as any new elements are produced the plant is still alive. The fact of the reproduction as such – independently of the concrete elements reproduced – is referred to as the autopoiesis of the system. The likelihood of the continuation of reproduction, however, depends on the concrete elements reproduced. For example, if a flower stops producing leaves and instead only extends its roots it looses its viability, i.e. its ability to produce any further elements at all. What concrete elements are produced at any moment is determined by the structures of the system (the system in this sense is structure determined); e.g. the stem of the plant restricts where new leafs can be grown. The structures themselves however are not pre-given in any sense, as in structuralist theories, but are themselves the product of the autopoietic system. In other words, in its reproduction the system produces and reproduces its very own structures of reproduction. This aspect, i.e. the self-determination of its own structures, is referred to as self-organization. Thus, while autopoiesis refers to the reproduction of the elements as such, self-organisation refers to the determination of structures.

A central element within the theory of autopoiesis is the concept of structural coupling which refers to the relation between systems and their environments. As explained above environmental events can trigger internal processes in an autopoietic system but the concrete processes triggered (and whether any processes are triggered at all) are determined by the structures of the system. For example, some animals have certain neuronal structures that allow certain electromagnetic waves in their environment to trigger internally the sensation of certain colours; other animals again possessing other structures might not be stimulated by such waves or might be stimulated by them in other ways. A system is said to be structurally coupled to its environment (or other systems in its environment) if its structures are in some way or other ‘adjusted’ to the structures of the environment (or systems in the environment), i.e. if the structures of the system allow for reactions to ‘important’ environmental events. For example animals living above ground are structurally adapted to another environment than those living under ground. The former have structures that can be stimulated by electromagnetic waves leading to different impressions of colour, while the latter might have structures that can more easily be stimulated by vibrations leading to equally differentiated impressions corresponding to them.

There have been many attempts by social scientists to apply the concept of autopoiesis to the social domain. In contrast to most others, sociologist Niklas Luhmann did not apply the original concept directly to the social domain but tried to abstract from the originally biological concept of autopoiesis a general, trans-disciplinary concept of autopoiesis. Luhmann suggests we speak of autopoiesis whenever the elements of a system are reproduced by the elements of the system. This criterion, as he points out, is also met by non-biological systems. Apart from living systems Luhmann identifies two additional types of autopoietic systems: social systems and psychic systems. While living systems reproduce themselves on the basis of life, social systems reproduce themselves on the basis of communication and psychic systems on the basis of consciousness or thoughts, their elements are not physical substances but elements of meaning.

Let’s pause here to unpack what all this means for an individual. Self-reference is an act of distinction that begins from a blind spot. The initial action distinguishes the individual and generates the environment. The labeling of a thing creates the space of distinction—the difference between labeled and unlabeled space. This initial distinction allows the next

5

operation to be executed in the labeled space. As operations are executed, further distinctions are leveraged to control connecting operations. In the individual’s case, the initial act of self-reference generates an autopoietic, operatively closed psychic system that is beholden to all of the general rules of this system type as stated above: it’s elements of reproduction are thoughts; these elements must continue to reproduce themselves according to the self-generated structures of the system, else the system ceases to exist. This system is operatively blind to its environment but interactionally open to it, which can be thought of in terms of hierarchy: the psychic system structurally couples with its environment (the body) via a mechanism of communication not fully understood by current neuroscience, which allows the system of thought to quantify and store perturbations from this environment (like the electric impulses in the nervous system mentioned above), while also permitting the system of thoughts to perturb this environment. A direct example of how this outward-facing perturbation might work might be found in speech: certain thoughts in the psychic system startle certain structures of the of the autopoietic system of the body (for instance, the mouth and vocal cords), these structures in turn leveraging the coupling mechanism of speech to perturb the the autopoietic system that makes up the body’s larger environment: society. In this action, no thoughts operatively enter the body system and likewise no operations of the body system enter the society system. This works in reverse when society perturbs the body by providing it with language, which in turn perturbs the psychic system via neurological communication, which in turn generates more thought, each of these remaining operatively closed to each other as the act of listening occurs. The most basic structure of the psychic system is the act of self-reference, as we’ve stated—which might be quantified via the body as: “Am I still alive?” by the body to the body’s environment, which in turn comes back to the body and then to the psychic system as something that might be quantified as “Yes”—in which case the psychic system progresses temporally and asks the question again, “Am I still alive?”—until the answer comes back “No,” or more accurately not at all, and the psychic system finds itself unable to continue generating thoughts (as it can no longer self-reference). As this simple psychic system’s environment becomes more complex, it develops structures to deal with this new complexity--for instance, the thought that translates to the question “Am I alive?” might be met by the environment with a “Yes, but—” which in turn might perturb a new self-generated structure of thought—something that might be translated from body to psychic as hunger and back out as the act of eating. All of the mental concepts we associate with humanity, desires and dislikes, even narrative, seem to be more and more complex thought structures generated by the psychic system to deal with an environment of ever increasing complexity until a point is reached where survival, for most of us with some societal advantage, ceases to be the main question of self-reference (as it became more ensured), instead relying on something like “What do I want or need?”

This notion is a powerful one, an explanation that can be used to justify our actions as equally as it can delineate their failings. Our purposes with it in particular are twofold: 1) we can use it to study the notion of individual prosperity and 2) it can be used to extrapolate a social model that functions in a similar way, which can then be used to study the notion of societal prosperity.

As stated, individual prosperity can be thought of as confirmation of choice presupposing purpose—put another way, we are individually prosperous when expectations surrounding our purpose are met. Expectations offer us an internally minded process in the psychic system, as they are meta-observant of other ongoing psychic processes. For example, in our most basic individual loop: “Am I alive” | “Yes” | “Am I alive” | “Yes” | “Am I alive” | etc, adding a thought structure of

6

expectation provides us with the opportunity for prosperity: “Am I alive” > [Expectation of “Yes”] > “Yes (or ‘No’)” > [Prosperous (or not)]. This is all of course assuming the specific purpose of survival. If a purpose could be defined as ending survival, one is prosperous when it expects a “No” and receives one. It follows that if one’s decided purpose is to obtain great wealth and luxury, they are prosperous when they achieve whatever their idea of such is. If their decided purpose is human progress, they are prosperous when the species progresses.

As stated, transferring the concept from the field of biology into the field of sociology requires abstracting toward a general concept on a trans-disciplinary level, before re-specifying it into social autopoiesis and the autopoiesis of particular types of social systems. Two particular changes made by Luhmann are worth noting:

Luhmann's general concept of autopoiesis radicalises the temporal aspect of autopoiesis. While Maturana and Varela originally conceptualised the elements of their biological systems as relatively stable chemical molecules, which have to be replaced “from time to time”, Luhmann conceptualises the elements as momentary events without any duration. Events have no duration but vanish as soon as they come into being; they 'are momentary and immediately pass away.’ Through this shift from a reproduction of relatively stable elements, to a reproduction of momentary events, Luhmann radicalises the concept of autopoiesis. Because the elements of the system have no duration the system is urged to constant production of new elements. If the autopoiesis stops the system disappears immediately.

In addition to temporalisation, Luhmann deontologises the concept of element. Elements are defined as elements merely through their integration into the system. Outside or independently of the system they have no status as elements; i.e. they are 'not ontically pregiven'. Elements can, of course, be composed of different components, which could be analysed independently of the system, but as elementary units they are only defined through their relation to other elements and in this sense through the function they fulfill for the system as a whole. As a consequence of deontologising the concept of element, the concept of “production” (as in ‘self-reproduction’) gets a functional meaning. Production refers to the use of an element in the network of elements. The important point in this conceptualisation is that the element and the use of the element are not two different issues, but two sides of the same coin. It is not that we first have the element and, then, the system makes use of it, but only by making use of the element, i.e. by relating it to other elements, it becomes an element. Thus, one can say: the element is produced as a result of being used.

Luhmann establishes these elements in a social setting as communications: “Social systems use communications as their particular mode of autopoietic reproduction. Their elements are communications which are recursively produced and reproduced by a network of communications and which cannot exist outside of such a network.” His notion of communication includes 4 parts: (1) information, (2) utterance, (3) understanding, and (4) acceptance, where information is conceived as a selection from a repertoire of possibilities. Every communication selects what is being communicated from everything that could have been communicated. With utterance Luhmann refers to the form of and reason for a communication: how and why something is being said. One can say, the utterance is the selection of a particular form and reason from all possible forms and reasons. Understanding is conceptualised as the distinction between information and utterance.

7

For a communication to be understood the information has to be distinguished from the utterance: what is being communicated must be distinguished from how and why it is communicated. For example, if alter says to ego: 'I am tired', ego has to distinguish the information ('I am tired' and not e.g.: 'I am very energetic') from the utterance (the words alter is using and the reason why alter is saying it: e.g. alter wants to indicate that ego should leave him alone; he is not saying it in order to get any advice on what to do about his tiredness). Thus, understanding can be understood as a selection of a particular distinction between information and understanding. It should be noted, though, that Luhmann’s notion of understanding is, due to the operative closure of the communications system, an operation separate from any “understanding” that the psychic systems involved in the communications come up with. Thus, within a system of communication, the meaning of a communication, i.e. what difference a communication makes for later communications, is only retrospectively defined through the later communications. Again this is not to discount the psychic system’s potential to affect social systems, only that, as autopoietic systems, the two operations must be considered separately. With understanding, a communicative event as the synthesis of the three selections (utterance, information and understanding) is complete. However, if the social system is not discontinued a fourth type of selection will take place: acceptance or rejection of the meaning of the communication. This fourth selection is already part of the next communication. It is important not to confuse the third and fourth selection: understanding does not imply acceptance! For example, a pupil understands when the teacher says: 'do your homework', but he might still reject the communication, answering: “No, I won’t”. There might be communicative structures which make acceptance more likely than rejection, but the concept of communication is not focused on acceptance. On the contrary, every communicative event provokes the selection between acceptance and rejection. This distinction between understanding (as part of the first communication) and the selection acceptance/rejection (as part of the ensuing communication) adds a dynamic element which bridges the gap from one communicative event to the next.

This leads to a very important point: the (re-)production of communications. In accordance with the general concept of autopoiesis, communications do only ‘exist’ as communications through their relation to other communications; as explained above a communication is only defined through the ensuing communications. This does not mean that without the relation there is nothing at all (there are, for example, words and sounds), but they have no status as communication. In this sense one can say that it is the network of communications that ‘produces’ the communications. In other words, it is the context of other communications that makes it count as a communication at all. Luhmann thus famously said: “Only communications can communicate.”

So far we have explained the autopoiesis of social systems, i.e. the reproduction of communications through communications. We have explained how communications produce communications but not what communications are produced, which is a question about the structures of social systems. Luhmann conceptualises social structures as expectations. In every situation certain communications are expected and not others. For example, a question about one’s wellbeing is expected to be followed by an answer on this issue and not by a statement about the latest weather forecast. The expectation to a certain extent pre-selects the possibilities for further communications: it makes certain communications more likely than others (it does not however exclude any possibilities completely). These expectations are

8

recursively reproduced through the communications. Whenever a specific expectation is met by an adequate communication the expectation is confirmed and thus likely to continue to function as a structure. However, if the expectation is repeatedly not met the expectation might be changed. An important form of social structures is the topics of communication. Topics provide pre-selections of all in principle possible communications: certain possibilities of communication fit a specific topic and others do not. For example, in a conversation about social theory one would not expect a communication about cooking. However, if such a communication came about the topic of communication might be changed.

Again, let’s stop and begin to unpack the consequences of this content. In the individual breakdown we defined a least common denominator binary code for self-reference, our “Am I alive? yes/no” loop. As stated, the structures built on this loop became increasingly complex as the psychic system’s environment (the body) did parallelly, this development in turn a reaction to the increasing complexity of the body’s environment (society, or “the world out there”). As these psychic systems begin to come into contact with each other through perturbations in their environments (speech), there seems to be some survival incentive to develop autopoietic systems of communication that mirror a sort of predictive and collective “Are we alive? yes/no” loop. As this collective society became increasingly more complex, it splintered into smaller systems (what Luhmann refers to as organizations) to answer increasingly more complex questions that arose out of agent reactions to environment (these organizations, when considered in total, are thought of as ‘society’). Like all other autopoietic systems, each of these organizations operates according to a binary code that keeps them operatively closed. That is to say, all communications taking part in the reproduction of a particular functional subsystem ‘carry’ a specific code. For example, the code of the legal system is justice/injustice; the code of the economic system is payment/non-payment; the code of the system of science is truth/untruth; the code of the political system is power/nonpower. Each of these systems communicates about itself and its environment according to its specific code: for example, for the legal system something is either just or unjust or it has no relevance at all; for the economic system something is either a payment or a nonpayment or it has no relevance to it, i.e. whether something is just or unjust is irrelevant for the economic system. Each communication of a functional system relates to other communications of the same function system on the basis of the function-specific coding. For example, a communication of the legal system relates to other legal communications as either just or unjust communication. A legal ruling refers to another legal ruling (as a just ruling) in order to substantiate itself – it can not however refer to some payments being made (economic system). These functional systems are operatively closed in the sense that only communications carrying the function-specific code can take part in the reproduction of the function system. Thus, only legal communications can reproduce the legal system - economic, scientific, political, etc cannot; only scientific communications can reproduce science, etc.

Much like the evolution of increasingly complex psychic structures in response to an increasingly complex environment, an organization’s act of self-reference generates increasingly complex structures as its environment (consisting of other organizations) becomes increasingly more complex. Luhmann charts these evolutions over three major structural changes; i.e. changes of how the societal communications were structured. In archaic times society was differentiated into equal subsystems (segmentation), e.g. different tribes, clans or families. This was replaced in the following by a differentiation

9

according to the logic of centre and periphery: the differentiation between city and country. In the late medieval times a hierarchical form of differentiation emerged with different social strata or classes (stratification). With the emergence of the modern society, around the 18th century, this has been replaced by the current, functional differentiation, where we find several societal subsystems specialised in serving specific societal functions; e.g. law, science, economy, art, religion. Each of these primary forms of differentiation can be combined with the other forms of differentiation on a secondary level; e.g. in stratified society the different strata were often differentiated internally into equal subsystems (segmentation) or according to the difference centre/periphery.

As a simple example, consider the psychic structure mentioned earlier: self-reference is met by the environment with a qualifier: the question “Am I alive?” responded to with “Yes, but—” resulting in hunger and eventually eating. A parallelism in the legal system begins with the same act of self-reference—a communication is made and the code is implemented: “Is this communication legal-oriented? yes/no”. In the simplest version of this system, the answer needs no considerations and so the system either continues or it does not. The task of the legal system consists of distinguishing interests protected by the law from interests to be suppressed and combatted. This distinction cannot be derived from the environment of the system, nor can it be “seen” as an inherent quality of systems. This system has to combine internal and external references and, to the extent that generalizations are useful, may refer to well-tried concepts and to well-known interests. Concepts articulate the self-referential aspects of legal decisions; interests, on the other hand, are environmental facts to be taken as given. In this simplest manifestation, if the moment of systemic self-reference generates a “Yes” and the external interests are predictable, than the legal system continues on by consulting and using tried and true concepts to impart a furthering of the generative society. In a more complicated system (say, one based on functional differentiation), the answer might come back “Yes, but—”, implying that the system will continue but that the general facts of the environment have changed. This distinction must be constructed by the internal operations. This is not to say that the dividing line separating protected from suppressed interests can be drawn arbitrarily. The guarantee of “justice” is not the correspondence with external qualities or interests, but the consistency of internal operations recognizing and distinguishing them. It is this requisite of consistency which, under conditions of sufficient complexity, leads to the elaboration of concepts. In this way the system evolves itself via itself through structural couplings, which exist between social systems to manage the shifts in external interests that occur in an environment exposed to entropy, thus reinforcing or re-informing legal concepts to better fit the new external environmental facts as given.

In short, the system generates itself through self-reference, performs its task (Is this legal or not?) by consulting historical concepts (one’s that might match the current one) and external facts as given. When the facts are consistent, the concept is applied. When the facts have changed, the concept is updated or modified. It is in how the system knows that the facts have changed that we are most concerned with, as the emergence of this type of closed system requires a specific form of relations between systems and environments which presupposes such forms and is a condition of their possibility as well. The structural coupling of system and environment does not contribute operations (or any other components) for the reproduction of the system. It is simply the specific form in which the system presupposes specific states or changes in its environment and relies on them. Walking presupposes the gravitational forces of the earth within very narrow limits, but gravitation does not contribute any steps to the movement of bodies. Communication presupposes awareness states of

10

conscious systems, but conscious states cannot become social and do not enter the sequence of communicative operations as a part of them; they remain environmental states for the social system. Structural couplings are forms of simultaneous relations. They are analogical coordinations.

The system in its normal dealings does not observe its structural couplings, but it has to contend with perturbations, irritations, surprises, and disappointments channeled by its structural couplings. It must also assimilate and accommodate such ambiguities. But perturbations are purely internal constructs because they appear only as deviations from expectations; that is, in relation to the structure of the system. The environment does not contain perturbations or anything that in a semantical sense is similar to them. Nor is there any transmission of perturbations from the outside into the system. The twin concepts of closure and structural coupling exclude the idea of information entering the system from the outside.

Without structural coupling there would be no perturbation and the system would lack any chance to learn and transform its structures. Hence, structural coupling, together with sufficient internal complexity, is a necessary precondition for building up regularities to construct order from noise or redundancy from variety. In this way, structural couplings provide a continuous influx of disorder against which the system maintains or changes its structure. Systemic memory is not a storage of past facts, but a form that can be called and recalled to mediate order and disorder—very frequently by forgetting, in other cases by constructing a spatial or temporal order to dissolve incompatibilities. However, this is not possible if the structural coupling in question is not able to exclude most of the environmental facts from immediate relevance. In this sense, coupling has to be conceived as a difference, a form with two sides: an internal side that admits irritation and an external side to which the system remains indifferent. Structural couplings arise with systems; they are not biological facts that exist before systems emerge.

Applying this complex conceptual apparatus at the level of societal differentiation, and in particular to the differentiation of a legal system, we immediately see the structural coupling of social communication reproducing society on the one hand, and special legal meanings as normative projections claiming legal validity—the legal code and the special programs (laws, regulations, contracts)—on the other. Communication is the domain in which differentiation of a legal system becomes possible. This does not require a communication of the legal system to the society as a relation between sender and receiver. The legal system cannot communicate as a unity and the society has no address. However, by operating within its own boundary, the legal system reproduces itself and the societal system without making this simultaneity a topic of communication.

Given this account of the structural couplings of the societal system and its legal system, we might see how further structural couplings can evolve between the legal system and other functional subsystems, each of which co-inhabits the domain of communication. Luhmann’s example: the economic system depends on the codes of property and money. Without a clear divide between having and not having property rights, no transaction would be possible, Nevertheless, the economic and the legal consequences of a transaction are completely different because they occur in different systems in different recursive networks under different criteria and concrete conditions. The economic and legal systems are and remain separate, and both operate under the condition of operational closure; but this needs a specific mechanism of structural coupling: the form of property and contract.

11

There is much historical evidence that, beginning in the in the fourteenth century, the legal system adapted to these requirements and enlarged—slowly, and with many scruples—the permitted degrees of freedom in property and contract. The core meaning of property has included in addition to defense and use and enjoyment, the right of disposal. The same improbabilities deform and generalize the institution of contract, providing a legal instrument not only for solving actual conflicts, but for regulating and avoiding them. During the transition from stratification, based on real estate, to functional differentiation, the society created needs, motives, and legitimation for enlarging the scope of employing property and the scope of possible contracts with legal protection. The limitations of access to courts which the traditions of civil law and common law vanished, and finally, contracts became legally valid. Modern concepts of property and contract do not integrate or even de-differentiate the legal and economic systems. As mechanisms of structural coupling, they organize the reciprocal irritation of these systems and influence, in the long run, the natural drift of structural developments in both systems. In particular, the regulatory state presupposes this connection and uses it as a medium of political intervention into both systems by limiting once again the degrees of freedom for using property and contract.

If we look for a parallel mechanism coupling the legal system and the political system, we find it in the form of constitutions. This historical innovation, the mutation of legal forms, had been occasioned by concrete political circumstances and by the possibilities they provide for an instrumental use of conceptual variations. This has been favored by the modern concept of the “state,” which suggests a unity of political and legal “sovereignty.” This unity makes it difficult to see the distinction, but the political system and the legal system are separate, operationally closed, autopoietic systems. A political operation as such never has legal relevance if not endowed with it by the legal system and vice versa. Otherwise no political discourse, no political bargaining, and no policy planning would be possible without immediate legal effects. The constitution separates the systems and provides for their structural coupling. The ultimate paradoxes and tautologies of the legal system (that law is whatever the law arranges to be legal or illegal) can be unfolded by reference to the political system (for example, the political will of the people giving itself a constitution), and the paradoxes and tautologies of the political system (the self-inclusive, binding, sovereign power) can be unfolded with reference to the positive law and by supercoding the legal system with the distinction of constitutional and unconstitutional legality.

The institutional justification for constitutions cannot be reduced to either a political or a legal function, and it does not lie in the value-laden language of the constitution itself, nor in the value of its values. The constitution serves the dual function of including and excluding reciprocal perturbations of political and legal operations. Its two-sided form of including and excluding influence maintains the separation of the systems and allows for separate autopoietic reproduction without any confusing overlap. It also characterizes the ways in which the legal system (and on the other side, the political system) avoids isolation and constructs on its internal screen what can serve within the system as information. As previously discussed, the system operates as a non-self-transcending system on the level of its operations, and as a self-transcending system on the level of its observations; this in spite of the fact that observations are operations, in that the observations made by the system are translated to other subdomains of communication via the structural coupling mechanism of the constitution. This understanding of how constitutions function allows us to approach the construction of a new one from a place of honesty about systemic limitations and the foundations of past attempts that we will build upon. To do so, I’d like to leverage a somewhat elaborate analogy:

12

Greek legend insists that Daedalus was the first architect, but this is hardly the case: although he built the Cretan labyrinth, he never understood its structure. He could only escape, in fact, by flying out of its vortex. Instead it may be argued that Ariadne achieved the first work of architecture, since it was she who gave Theseus the ball of thread by means of which he found his way out of the labyrinth after having killed the Minotaur. Thus while Ariadne did not build the labyrinth, she was the one who interpreted it; and this is architecture in the modern sense of the term.

Noted designer and architectural theorist Bernard Tschumi hit on something similar in his Manhattan transcripts, which diagram a fictional murder in Central Park, implying that the crime could be used to reveal previously unknown or repressed forensic insights about how people really want to use the city, whether or not what they choose to do there is legal.

Tschumi would call the predictable repetition of events inside an architectural space a sequence: a linear series of actions and behaviors that are at least partially determined by the design of the space itself. Tschumi’s idea rests on an architectural truism: that, for example, you probably wouldn’t convene a weekly congregation inside an underground parking garage. Why? Because it’s designed for parking cars, not for prayer. Or you wouldn’t graze a herd of cows inside a church.

Traditionally, a building gives clues as to how it is meant to be used—thus all those empty, perfectly car-size parking spots. Buildings call for certain behaviors—even if their spatial demands are often so subtle that, at first glance, we don’t realize we’ve been obeying them.

Tschumi’s larger point is that if the design of a space or a building tends to influence what occurs within it, then the role of the avant-garde designer is to push past this, to find new ways of challenging or disrupting architecture’s behavioral expectations. Why not graze cows inside a church—or at least design barns to look like churchyards?

For Tschumi, what we think of as a "crime" typically occurs when a user of architecture does something radically out of sequence, breaking with the pattern that a building might imply for example, sneaking past security at an airport to board a plane without following the traditional sequence of approach, entering the vault of a bank without first being granted the manager’s permission, or, to cite a recent real-life example, jumping the fence outside the White House to enter the president’s home by the back door. These are crimes of sequence. They are crimes of space.

Crime, for Tschumi, was just another way to use the city. Looked at in a specifically architectural context, crime reveals how people try to use or misuse the built environment. Criminals are more like rogue usability experts, analyzing architecture for shortcuts, hiding spots, and other spatial tricks.

Motivated individuals or groups, he observed, could use "the complexity of the city against itself," uncovering the possible behaviors that a building or space unintentionally allows, then adapting them to stage a protest, overthrow a government, demand political representation, or, yes, simply to commit a crime.

13

In these sorts of events, Tschumi pointed out, the architecture is always involved. In every heist film, he said, "The vaults and corridors and elevator shafts are just as important as the characters in the story; one cannot exist without the other. The space itself becomes a protagonist of the plot. There is no space without something that happens in it; and nothing happens without a space like this around it." The same thing is often true for grand public plazas in the hearts of cities: these can be used as nothing but picturesque backdrops for tourists to take photos of each other or as insurrectionary platforms for starting a revolution. It’s all about how you use the city—or misuse it, turning the fabric of the city against itself.

So this is my next request of you—let’s together become architects of the constitutional space and in turn study the ways in which our last attempt was taken advantage of via its design, and how we might go about minimizing (or encouraging) crimes of space and event in our own future iterations.

First, some clarification on terminology: the word ‘crime’ in the context of spacial and constitutional interpretation should not be considered to have a moral bent in this paper. This use of crime presupposes an intended sequence of progression through the space such that to betray this sequence would be criminal but not necessarily immoral. Further, if the space does not dictate an intended sequence, then no crime can be committed as only an infinite number of undesignated routes and events exist.

For instance, the smallest legal system with a social component (I add this caveat because I might argue that personal ethics are a form of legal system) requires two agents. Let’s say that an extremely minimal legal system is generated by the two, with the only concept being generated within the legal system is that there is a monolith that has been declared illegal to touch. As this legal system is generated via legal communication, a political system emerges with it—one demands the other, as laws cannot be enforced without policy. Let’s say that the policy for punishment associated with touching the monolith is to spend one month in a small cell. The generation of these two systems requires the generation of a structural mechanism to couple the two domains—and our earliest constitution is born, something which might read “Any agent is free to do as he or she pleases, as long as he or she does not touch the monolith.” To place this scenario in our architectural analogy, imagine an infinite, flat plane, split in two by a wall that is infinitely long and infinitely tall. The plane on one side of this wall denotes the legal domain and the plane on the other side denotes the political and the wall between represents the constitution. On the legal side of the wall, only legal matters can be discussed, and policy on the political side. Let’s call our two agents Agent A and Agent B and let’s assume Agent A has touched the monolith. If the pair approaches the wall from the legal side (equivalent to invoking the legal domain), they might read the wall, which says, “Agent A has touched the monolith.” Now, the two agents may debate the legality of this action on the legal side, but the result is that, according to a strict reading of constitution, the act taken by Agent A is illegal. The agents then pass through a door in the wall and approach it from the political side, where it again reads: “Agent A has touched the monolith.” Similarly, the two agents may debate the policy in place on the policy side, but the result is, according to a strict reading of the constitution, Agent A must spend one month in a small cell. This is how the most basic constitution functions.

Here we already begin to see problems. Imagine that each agent, when not in jail, is able to generate X amount of some resource. Two scenarios present themselves: there is incentive to place another member of society in confinement, say, to

14

overtake that person’s resource generation; or instead, there is incentive to keep another member of society out of confinement, say, to keep oneself free. Both of these scenarios offer those involved in the generation of these societal systems incentives to shift the narrative, or worse craft a fictional one. Already we meet the first weakness of the working constitution: a pragmatic reading adds more questions—what is our semantic interpretation of the word “touch”? Does touching only refer to hand contact? What about poking it with a rod, your foot, throwing a rock at it?; an originalist reading risks outdating the constitution in the future—if, a century later, touching the monolith is no longer of relevant harm, does punishing anyone for doing so serve any societal benefit, or does doing so only provide power of one individual over another? In this minimalist example of a constitution, these are the main problems we deal with—yet they are only crimes of interpretation as our analogical space around the constitution remains devoid of architecture and as such the only sequence dictated by the space is: approach the wall, or don’t. Expanding this scenario out across several familial or tribal societies reaches something like Luhmann’s first societal structure—that of archaic segmentation (and eventually, with enough population increase, the shift to segmentation by centre and periphery).

As our crimes of interpretation begin to arise, our agents must begin to host new legal conversations on the legal side of the constitution that generate new legal structures and political conversations on the political side that generate new political structures to mirror the legal, both in an effort to become more consistent with the new facts of the environment (what Luhmann refers to as interests). In the most basic of societies, those who were in a position to be educated enough to hold legal conversations and resource wealthy enough to enact policy did so and another one of Luhmann’s structural shifts occurred as a result: a hierarchical form of differentiation emerged with different social strata or classes (stratification). In our analogy, this would be equivalent to erecting a large room around the spots where one might read the wall on either the legal or political side, then locking those rooms off to anyone not from the tribe, family, or present body of power. Here we see the second weakness of the working constitution: when the same people who profit off the government hold unlimited sovereignty and the normative power to void the authority of their government, the constitution becomes meaningless. It no longer matters what the constitution says, as those responsible for interpreting the legal and political system have blocked it from the view of the population.

Modern society was birthed on the back of this question: “Why can’t I have what they have?” The answer was, in general terms, the rooms that blocked the wall, and so we tore them down and built up a formalized system of functional differentiation—new rooms, which anybody could enter to read the wall, the final interpretation of which was entrusted to people elected by the population, who would shape law and dole out punishment fairly—at least, this was what the utopian agenda promised. Trouble with this agenda arose when the problems of past constitutional efficacy continued to persist: the constitution is not a moral instrument, but may have morals applied to it in generation and interpretation—a poor man has morals because he has nothing else; a rich man has morals when they further his wealth. Again, the incentive of power displayed itself, this time to those elected, and primary forms of differentiation were stratified on a secondary level. This was done cleverly by leveraging existing structures of legal and political communication to validate further ones based in inequality, this inequality existing as the moral or manufactured interests of those who held elected power. Imagine our all-access room now still all-accessible, but via different hallways depending on who is doing the accessing. Depending on race, religion, gender, sexuality, financial situation, or any manner of other qualities that differed or aligned with the established norm, a person’s hallway might meander endlessly back in on itself, might have checkpoints and chokeholds and violence along the way, might deadend for no reason.

15

Or, it might be simple, short, and straight, with no obstacles. This is the new stratification of the institutional man, and the design is prime—the advantaged individual arrives in the room through a door identical to his disadvantaged peers and wonders what they’re so angry about—is almost offended at their anger. The advantaged man hears stories of the trial-filled hallway excursions of his fellow man and rolls his eyes, approaches an elected official who looks just like him and generates some legal communication past requested, before he passes through the wall to an easy walk through the domain of policy—this action reinforcing the schism between strata. Worse than progressing in the legal domain is progressing in the political—disadvantaged members of the population find themselves lost in mazes of policy in which they are robbed of property, relation, and dignity before being dumped into a space that loops back in on itself as incarceration or back into society at a further disadvantage than before; and worse than living at the bottom of a stratified society is speaking to someone blind to their own advantaged status—or worse, aware of and happy for it. This is not only injurious, it is insulting. In response, those in disadvantaged groups began to dismantle their hallways with all manner of tools, busting holes through to the hallways of other classes, banding together into a fist of action until they reached the hallway for advantaged men and busted a hole through it as well, some of the advantaged realizing their folly and picking up hammers and axes and battering rams and joining the fray, committing manifold crimes of space, their actions only labeled as such because the men who held power over the word had labeled them as such.

This is a simplified version of where we find ourselves today, attempting to reinstate segmentation over stratification and on the precipice of beginning to do so. The concept of ‘the people’ has become very much a fabrication. Instead of being composed of a group of individuals united in their concern for basic rights, western societies are now comprised of various groups competing either for domination (e.g. the advantaged, traditionally white and wealthy males) or for recognition and the elimination of oppression (e.g. the disadvantaged, traditionally the poor, women, and racial minorities). The law, including constitutional law, is a powerful tool which has, historically, been utilized by dominant groups to secure and maintain their superior status. As such, a constitution is anything but the protection from unwarranted governmental power that its champions have heralded over the centuries. What is taken to be the obvious meaning of a key term like ‘equal before the law’ is what the dominant group understands or claims it to be. What is taken to be the obvious original understandings or historical intentions of the constitution's authors are whatever understandings or intentions fit the ideologies of the dominant groups. What is taken to be the best articulation of the right to equality emerging from a fair and disciplined common-law analysis of that right, is nothing but a rationalization of current social structures, all of which systematically oppress the interests of those disadvantaged.

I worry and wonder if this cycle of oscillations between segmentation and stratification is permanent. Worse—I wonder and worry if this latest attempt at reintroducing segmentation will only be superficially successful. There is no way to remove the incentive of individual power and the impression of immunity from government without rendering the laws and policies of that government irrelevant or greatly neutered. There also exists a large portion of the population who want our government to be powerful and through the support of these people arsenals have grown, megalomaniacs have been imparted celebrity, and the content of this new regalia has displaced a platform based on beliefs for a platform based on advertisement. The inspired foolishness of our politicians has been given a dollar amount, one that grows with each new folly. We’ve entered an arms race with ourselves and somehow both won and lost it—our government has become the most powerful in the world, and in the process of achieving this status the people have lost the will and ability to control it.

16

That said and as stated, none of this should be taken as motivation for rebellion or revolution. Camus like Hume and Tschumi believed that in an age of ideologies, we must examine our relation to murder. The final conclusion of ongoing existence is the repudiation of suicide and the acceptance of the desperate encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe. To continue being is in itself a judgment call—to choose and enter into a state of being which delivers rebellion or revolt is to become disenchanted with contemporary applications of justice and give oneself over to raw violence, to take life for a reason other than protecting one’s own or that of another innocent, to abandon the human mind’s unceasing quest for clarification, finally falling victim to the general absurdity of chaos, an arbiter of meaningless choices or an inheritor of an early death. Yet, in the inborn impulse to rebel we can deduce values that enable us to determine that murder and oppression are illegitimate—though impulse is where the urge must stop: to work against oppression entails having recourse to social values, and at the same time joining with others in solidarity. Violence in the name of rebellion or revolution is not freedom but a new set of shackles—temporary enslavement in the name of future liberation. Faced with the manifest injustices of human existence on one hand, and the poor substitute of revolution against a force we cannot compete with on the other, this new rebel seeks to fight for justice without forgetting transcendental values, including the principle of the intrinsic value of human life, by abandoning this fight for a place bereft of villainous authority--a place in which we might forge a system that works to return us to that old battle for victory over the universe, rather than victory over each other. Our expedition is our vessel of revolt, our victory the new frontier.

Greater than our innovations in the art of destroying each other stands our ability to make new spaces for ourselves. Mars is coming, and with it the promise of new expectations—new endeavors for prosperity. I choose to set my expectations high and believe that they will only be reached with great preparation and progress here at home on Earth. This document expresses many ideas about the riddle of constitution, and I am not sure if this problem is solved by crafting a better document or by raising a better man—perhaps both, but I might suggest that the failures of both the former and latter can be reduced to a shared and human problem: language is a beautiful and imprecise tool. Any communication offers the opportunity for misinterpretation—and this phenomena is precarious and regular. If i fail to offer any solutions to the weaknesses of man and constitution, I hope I can at least offer some thoughts on language that might inform our future considerations of constitutional architecture in the interplanetary age.

First: We must wipe away the exaggerated diction of documents meant to serve the public. The popularization of obfuscated language in legal and political parlance is at best an attempt to sustain outdated formalities and at worst an attempt at generating popular incertitude that might be manipulated for gain.

It seems particularly apparent in the case of legal and political discourse that conveying meaning, including the communication of referential content and speaker intention, may not often be the central goal of interlocutors. Bloch’s work on political oratory suggests that the referential function may be highly subordinated to indexical and iconic elements when discourse is saturated with authority. A ready example of this exists in the specialized lexicons associated with high prestige occupations, such as law and medicine, which are generally justified as means of creating precise meanings  —  but they also make non-specialists painfully aware of the constraints they face when participating in the production and

17

reception of successful discourse. O’Barr and Conley suggest that the legal system’s monopoly over the discourse practices through which meaning is generated produces confusion and alienation even in small-claims courts, where discourse is supposed to be maximally accessible to laypersons. Cicourel and Mishler have argued that serious misunderstandings often arise when professionals use specialized terminology and highly asymmetrical discourse routines while interviewing patients  —  and thus jeopardize the diagnostic process. Clearly, narrators often do seek to specify meanings and convey them to their interlocutors. When one set of interpretations comes to be accepted as the authoritative account of a conflict and as the basis for shaping outcomes, however, this outcome must be seen less as a natural product of communicative processes than as a particular social construction; attention can thus be directed toward grasping what types of material and symbolic capital were mustered in achieving this result and the ways in which they were deployed.

Basso, Brenneis, and Herzfeld argue that narrative discourse presented in settings of legal and political discourse don’t necessarily provide revealing insights into the social order. Rather, they argue that lay litigants fail to perceive the systemic and pervasive nature of the control that legal professionals exercise over their participation in the court system. O’Barr and Conley suggest that even as litigants learn to present their narratives in ways that reflect the ideologies and discursive forms that are predominant in the legal system, they may continue to be motivated by contradictory ideologies  —  such as the idea that courts exist to right social wrongs. When this discrepancy between lay and legal ideologies leads to discontent on the part of litigants, they are more likely to blame a particular judge or other court official than to hold legal institutions and procedures themselves responsible, whereby the gap between layperson and expert is further widened by personal frustrations.

I believe that the opportunity to understand how your person is governed is a basic right of all humans. This is a question first of education and language by derivative, and there are those who out of choice or disability will not achieve any level of necessary competence to do so—still, I believe there are measures which might be taken to provide for wider understanding in the population and a general increase in the goodwill of discourse as a result. Beware any man who disagrees in principle with this idea (though my method is untested and therefore debatable). If the language of a constitution is impenetrable to the average man then that language is not for him but against and only exists to create an inchoate contrast that might be shimmied into stratified advantage and disadvantage. The suggestion I offer is not a proposed solution to this paper’s fuller problem, but one that might assist in constructing a more legible constitution: when and wherever possible, limit the words used in writing the document to the 1,000 most common words in the native language. This, in practice, is an idea that received some traction in the general writing world over the past several years, with the media coverage of Simple Writer and Cleartext. Further, the principle has precedent in popular culture, the quote “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” bantered as ballast for discourse to the point of semantic satiation.

Second: I believe that the privatization of campaign finance remains one of the most ironic crimes conceivable in modern society. In 2008, candidates for office, political parties, and independent groups spent a total of $5.3 billion on federal elections. The amount spent on the presidential race alone was $2.4 billion, and over $1 billion of that was spent by the campaigns of the two major candidates: Barack Obama spent $730 million in his election campaign, and John McCain spent $333 million.

18

The total amount spent by Obama and McCain was a record at the time. In the 2010 midterm election cycle, candidates for office, political parties, and independent groups spent a total of $3.6 billion on federal elections. The average winner of a seat in the House of Representatives spent $1.4 million on his or her campaign. The average winner of a Senate seat spent $9.8 million. In 2012, the two main candidates, Obama and Romney, spent $2.14 billion on their presidential campaigns alone in what is now the most expensive election in available history. Why is the word “expensive” even applicable to elections? The money for campaigns for federal office comes from four broad categories of sources: (1) small individual contributors (individuals who contribute $200 or less), (2) large individual contributors (individuals who contribute more than $200), (3) political action committees, and (4) self-financing (the candidate's own money). Candidates in the past decade have spent tens of billions of dollars telling us how their plan, their guidance, and their leadership holds the key to prosperity. If the numbers were not so high this would be almost comical. A system of private funding for elections exists as a racket to launder money, profit off the voting population, and buy power by attaching a dollar amount to the interests of the executive branch. Specific language removing the legality of private funding from federal elections is a good place to start undoing this injustice. A mechanism for public financing is already available for qualifying candidates for President of the United States during both the primaries and the general election. Eligibility requirements must be fulfilled to qualify for a government subsidy, and those that do accept government funding are usually subject to spending limits on money. It is my belief that this is the only funding that should be made available to candidates, with disqualification and harsh penalties for violating parties. This protects the population and the process of election. To be clear: I have no issue with private support of public services and organizations. Candidate support buys interest, programmatic support buys action.

Third: Positions of public service provide excess rights to holders of these positions, yet violations of the law and people by these holders are often not met with punishment equal to those who do not possess these advantages. A 2009-2010 study by the CATO institute tracked 8,300 credible reports alleging police misconduct in the U.S. From those 8,300 allegations, 3,238 criminal charges were brought against law officers. Of the 3,238 criminal charges, 1,063 officers were convicted. Of the 1,063 convicted cops, 383 went behind bars. On average, 70 percent of convicted non-police officers — the so-called “general population” of Americans — go behind bars, a difference of 33 percentage points. During this window, the cops that did go to jail also went for shorter periods of time than other comparable convicts: An average of 34.6 months for police officers, compared to an average 49 months for everyone else. Over 900 people were shot dead by police in 2015, 10% of which were unarmed, 25% of which were deemed mentally ill or unstable. This is not new data, this is not a new cause, this is not a new fear. I am not in support of lynching the law enforcement system or abandoning for these people extension of the rights granted to all citizens. I am in support of fair scrutiny and fair punishment—which is not the current status quo. Excess rights merit excess scrutiny of action and excess clarification of procedure. Language will not end brutality overnight, but it can offer specific guidance to officers, public defenders, judges, politicians, and other public servants that will instill hopeful inhibition of abuse and an increase in parity throughout the legal and political domains. An example: Four years after Las Vegas police in 2009 adopted a use-of-force policy requiring officers to put the highest premium on “the sanctity of human life,” the city’s officer-involved shootings had fallen by nearly half. I stand by proportionality on both sides of the act of shooting: Is my action proportional to the act being committed? Is my punishment or reward proportional to the damage or benefit I have brought about by doing so?

19

In closing: I am aware that the three topics discussed above are in no way a full summary of the troubles our constitutionalism must overcome in becoming ideal. I am also aware that the notes I have offered are in no way consummate solutions. They should rather be taken as seeds to be cultivated by further work. That said, I do believe they are of the most pressing quality in that they continue to damage daily the tissue of society here on Earth. I am frustrated by how often human progress is stalled by human pettiness. If a constitution exists to meter the free will of citizens, I’d ask those same citizens to mirror the document with their own status of free won’t. Rather than beginning from a place of what you will do, begin from one of what you won’t do. Let the baseline be to never bring harm on another. The beginnings of a mantra: Any difference you might find dangerous in another is in the eyes of progress either an irrelevant fact or a damaging fiction afforded to you via the narrative of your own culture. The sanctity of human life is transcendental and I do not mean in a religious sense, but a transitory one—the value we place on things must be challenged and renewed else they are lost to history. I place transcendental value on human progress and hope that prosperity is enough incentive to inspire it.

However strange it may appear to some, or however unwilling they may be to think so, matters not, but many strong and striking reasons may be given to show that interplanetary travel is coming. We are at present crawling, but our walk will lose its wobble and the quicker gait comes swiftly after. This new frontier affords us a chance at material wealth, scientific gain, and a fresh start at improving society far away from old questions and dead ideas. I have never seen a world so united as when new progress is made in space exploration—when, for a moment, all of our small and simple quibbling is drowned out by the deep hum of the universe whispering back hints at our biggest questions. As stated, the individual sees the word as a regular confirmation of choice presupposing purpose, and so societal prosperity must presuppose societal purpose. I posit our societal purpose is progress toward other worlds—our sun and time demand it—and though these proceedings may at first appear strange and difficult, like all other steps which we have already passed over, they will in time become familiar and perhaps agreeable; and, until this time, this world will continue to feel itself like a person who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity. I leave you now, in the terminal prettiness of some generic city, each storefront lit up in the last of a broad sunset strung with gems, hoping that you are as anxious as I am. Walk like you are wary of collecting dust, forget for now your phone, your plans, your neuroses, embrace instead a wandering devoid of adjectives like your presence signals the first symptom of a new movement. As though the very here and now were becoming a kind of heaven to sit in, listening, largely mindless of the risen, cloudy brilliances above. A shower of self-lifting grate-smoke falls and our character shifts towards the old, abandoned patterns; of joy eventually, and self-forgiveness—segment by segment, nonetheless a mind made up of taste and sunlight—hoping that the next planet we drink of be satisfying, disposing gently of Earth’s empty rind. All the old poets know to make wanderings into a homecoming of sort and here is where we do so, leading outward into the bright spin of things. Our separate routes. Each atom of the noise beginning to learn what it will ripen into.

This concludes a most CIVIL and MORAL DISPATCH with DEFERENCE to the PRINCIPLES of TRUTH, CLARITY, and PURITY.

20