It's Our Space! Get Out Of It!

A corespondent who is unwilling to post comments has requested the Geek to dilate upon the role of self-organisation. The Geek is happy to oblige, hoping he is usefully elucidating rather than merely bloviating.

Political science has a very useful concept: The division between public and private space. Public space is open to intervention and regulation by the state through law and regulation. Private space exists for the self-organizing social and political groups of both formal and informal nature. The blunt (and brutal) reality is that public space--the space in social, political and economic activities liable to regulatory control by the bureaucratic state--has expanded at the expense of the private. The proponents of government owned (or at least regulated, policed, and controlled) public space argue that such is necessary for the accomplishment of the commonweal.

There is a powerful irony at work in the seeming triumph of public space. In the pursuit of lofty and seemingly utterly necessary goals such as assuring that no group is "victimized" and no group "privileged," the expansion of the public space has resulted in a private space push-back through the formation of self-organizing groups.

Self-organizing social, political, and economic groups are an ancient and honorable tradition in human experience. Their formation and dynamic stability as well as capacity for evolution, flexibility, and long duration are and have been universal--even in the most centralized examples of the bureaucratic state. Indeed, history demonstrates that in any tightly controlled venue, unless the organs of repression are highly effective, every increase in public space is countered by evasion and resistance oriented self-organizing groups.

Of course, not everyone living in a public space dominated environment will be part of evasion or resistance oriented self-organized groups. Some will collaborate as is the case with populations in territories occupied by a foreign enemy. Others, perhaps the majority, will duck and cover hoping to stay invisible to those who control the expansionist public space. Some few, again as is the case when the outsider conquers and occupies land, will self-organize so as to evade the regulated public space and resist its further expansion.

Regulatory, bureaucratic states practicing centrally controlled public space predominate in Europe, particularly in the West. Evasion and resistance are and have been commonplace. Consider, for example, the wide spread tax avoidance and flat out cheating which is of legendary proportions in Italy and France but far from absent elsewhere.

Admittedly, centralized bureaucratic states can extend public space to the extent that virtually no private space remains. Further, some such states can possess internal police mechanisms of very high efficiency. But, as the example of the former German Democratic Republic shows, the slightest weakening of either resolve or capacity to efficiently repress results in the very rapid implosion of the state. The same may be seen in the former Soviet Union, which quickly dissolved into a vast array of self-organizing entities of sizes ranging from the microscopic to full fledged states.

In short, the human impetus to self-organizing can be delayed but it cannot be denied. It is so deeply rooted in our very nature that it cannot be expunged, it cannot be extinguished, it cannot be conquered by threats, coercion, force, or violence. It is the basis of all our resistance movements of whatever size, nature, or opponent.

In the US ever since the emergence of the progressive movement and agenda over a century ago, both major political parties have shared a progressive belief in the supreme efficacy of the bureaucratic, regulatory, and centralized state. The two parties may disagree on the goals of the ever expanded public space, but they subscribe to the notion that the extension of public space at the expense of the private is both desirable and necessary for the benefit of all Americans.

For the majority of the past half-century and more, the available private space has steadily contracted as have the number of established but initially self-organized groups both formal and informal which mediated between the individual and the public space. Much of this dynamic occurred for reasons which may be seen (and were) as laudable: economic justice, equality of opportunity (and, in many cases, outcome,) internal security, and so forth.

While many, if not all, the posited goals would have been achieved through the interplay of the mediating groups of private space, it is important to recognize that the expansion of public space was brought about from the top down. It was an imposed expansion, imposed often not by political processes but by judicial fiat. Legions of litigators not precinct captains, squads of judges not divisions of citizens, decreed the public space with its regulations, controls, and dictates must supersede the messy, inherently chaotic emergent systems of the private space.

It is and has been argued that the very nature of the United States, its large and quite heterogeneous population, its mixed economy, its complexly organised structures and institutions, demand the expanded public space. It is and has been argued that without the regulated and controlled public space the people of the US would be at the mercy of the darkest emotions--greed, fear, exploitation, inequity.

Proponents of the ever larger public space view human nature with the most dour of Calvinist eyes. To them the individual and his private space is the residence of evil. This evil must be both exposed and constrained by the ever vigilant government operating bureaucratically in the public space.

Of course, being True Believers, these proponents are indifferent to the base desire for power, even total authority, which their agenda brings with it. These proponents of the expanded public space always understand their motives and goals to be of the highest, purist, and most lofty sort.

It doesn't matter if the motives and goals are secular (from neocon to Marxist) or religious (from Evangelical Christian to Islamist Muslim), the True Believers are always morally certain of the correctness of their intents. They impose from on high as did Calvin in Geneva with the sureness of the saved working to save all others from their own evil.

This delusion is powerful and pervasive. It might even be seen as universal. It is also wrong. That is why it is ultimately doomed to fail just as certainly as the Soviet Union and the DDR collapsed.

Humans will and always have evaded and resisted the imposition of public space upon them. They have evaded and resisted the reduction of their private space, the creation and operation of their self-organizing groups.

It is also why "nation-building" in Iraq or Afghanistan will fail. The well meaning outsiders including those from the US all represent states with expanded public space and a deficiency of self-organizing groups. They are in the process of attempting to impose these views on people who have no desire to give up the messy, chaotic dynamics of self-organization and the emergent systems which the interplay between self-organized groups must produce.

The dour view of human nature held by the advocates of an all-inclusive public space, their sincere belief that such will protect people from their own worst aspects, is not generally shared in non-Western cultures. While the Islamist may have an expansive understanding of evil, it is not the same as the Western proponent of the centralized, bureaucratic state. Nor is the bleak view of the Islamist or the Western state-lover shared by the vast mass of people in the world.

Europe and later the US have been on a century long voyage into the world of all-inclusive public space. The faults, the weaknesses, the failures of the public space orientation have already made themselves evident. Nonetheless, we press on both in our homelands and in our foreign adventures.

Perhaps the clear failure of "nation-building" which is unfolding in both Iraq and Afghanistan will give impetus to reexamine what we are all about in our well-intended effort to defeat the deep rooted human need to self-organize, to tell the powers that be, the powers on high, to get the hell out of our lives.

Well, one can hope. Can't one?