Global Dominion

Every sovereign title can be traced back to a conquest, wherein the leader of the conquerors divided the land amongst his subordinates, in accord with the contribution each made to the conquest and will make in preserving its fruits. Insisting on the legitimacy derived from conquest (and then inheritance) is far more peaceful than insisting upon other forms of legitimacy, like popular will. Popular will, consent, and so on, change all the time and can’t be measured in any reliable way; who controls a territory is always clear enough—it’s always easy to design tests to check for sure. Troublemakers can always agitate to produce some new simulacrum of the popular will, but if only conquest legitimates rule you’d better make sure you’ve got substantial numbers and resources ready to go, if you’d like to make a bid.

Legitimacy by conquest alone explains the decline of civilization. Civilizations decline when they have ceased conquering, need not maintain any high alert to preserve what they’ve won and, eventually, want to deny that conquest provides legitimacy so as not to encourage more energetic challengers—at that point, sections of the elite, and eventually the entire elite, will be attracted to theories of legitimacy that depend upon the affection of the ruled. My assertions here don’t imply a morality of “might makes right,” or even the reality of “might makes right.” Not just anyone can conquer anyone else—in some sense, God has to be on your side. The problem with nationalism is that it doesn’t address the question of how to protect yourself once you have broadcast your renunciation of all conquest. What do you do when your neighbor, who issued no such renunciation, starts raiding border towns, chasing your ships out of waters it deems to be under its sovereignty, makes alliances with your neighbor on another border, etc.? Reprisals? OK, but how do you make the reprisals stick, without instituting permanent dominion over your neighbor? And how can permanent dominion not include, say, insistence upon at least tacit approval of your neighbor’s government. Unless we imagine that all nations remain equally powerful or equally principled in their anti-imperialism forever, and that all nations are certain of this symmetry, nationalism gives way to empire sooner or later. So, why go through the routine?

At lot of the dispositions so heatedly denounced today are really side effects of empire—“racism” is just the feeling of superiority over a conquered people (ultimately, so is “classism”); “sexism” is a privileging of the male-female relations suited to a conquering people, etc. Even nations are imperial, based on conquest by one ethnic group over others. If ceasing to conquer leads to decline, decay and degeneration, then the answer must be to never stop conquering. And we can see that no one ever does stop conquering until they start being conquered. To speak in neo-absolutist terms, the implication is that power is only secured when new regions are opened up for conquest. This is because the securing of power means mobilizing your people, and organizing them, so as to be conquerors. “Values” get sorted out rather easily under these conditions: whatever keeps the people primed to conquer and defend their conquests is good; whatever weakens them and undermines their belief in the rightness of their conquests is bad. To the accusation, again, of asserting that “might makes right,” I will say that what keeps people primed is going to vary in different situations—staying primed means being able and ready to rule and obey when necessary, to plan, to inspire, to reassure, to distribute properly, to intervene in distracting disputes, to prepare for succession on every level of the social order.

So, politics entails encouraging the political order to which you owe allegiance to keep conquering, and to keep doing so more intelligently; or, if you happen to live in a social order with very limited imperial prospects, to encourage your rulers to make themselves a useful and reliable bulwark of whatever imperial order seems most likely to prevail. Keep conquering until you’ve conquered the entire world—that’s the only way it can end. The Babylonians, Persians, and Romans could never get anywhere near global conquest, but it’s certainly possible today. Once you’ve conquered the entire world, what then? Let’s set aside the possibility of finding new worlds to conquer in space—conquest must turn inward. A great deal of self-mastery must have already gone into forging an empire that could conquer the world, but that can only whet the appetite for the kind of self-mastery that would be entailed in reducing all human activity to rigorous practices. Everything that everyone does can always be made more definitively and demonstrably that kind of thing; even the bad things people do, once they become habitual and compulsive, need to made more that kind of thing until it is undeniably exposed as that kind of thing (but a more advanced form of discipline would involve playing such consequences out in the imagination). And making space for such self-exposure, or confessions in practice, is itself a practice. Desires are to be immediately caught up in hypotheses: what does it really mean to want that thing, what would the world have to be so as to provide it, and what would that world actually give you? Teach yourself and others to want that.

We are well past the point where conquest is conducted solely, or even primarily, through force of arms. It might actually be possible to conquer through force of example—has anyone ever made an honest effort to do so on a large scale? Conquest today would involve the creation of “zones”: areas, not necessarily geographic, organized around a series of exemptions and privileges that distinguish the zone from other areas so as to allow for some practice to be exercised and perfected. A zone can be a space where trade is carried out under conditions that exclude bureaucratic obstacles; it can be a space where research is conducted free from security precautions, patents, residency requirements and other restrictions. Among the restrictions zones transcend are those associated with the nation-state, which means they will ultimately need to be defended by a single state that can organize others under its hegemony. It’s impossible to avoid imagining possible zones once one considers the logistics of a particular slice of the Stack, requiring raw materials from one place, scientific knowledge from another, labor from another, applications in yet another. Large scale practices would call zones into being; the conqueror of the future will be in a relation of exchange with the Stack—the future ruler will be a kind of Stack whisperer.

As is always the case, radical proposals such as this are really nothing more than an honest exposition of what’s already going on in obfuscated and dishonest ways. The various European nations vied for global dominion for quite a while, then the US and USSR did, now it’s the US and China. Speaking of, and to an extent for, the US, we can easily see that ever since the US entered the global stage with pretensions to dominion every single decision its rulers have made have been with an eye to conquest. The most hyped, propaganda-wise, of post WW II political transformations, above all civil rights and its continual unfolding, have all been nothing but instruments of conquest: first of all in the replacement of European empires with American rule, based on economic growth rather than the white man’s burden, and in immunizing the US from communist charges of racism; and, now, in providing pretexts to intervene anywhere and everywhere. The dissident, as usual, simply wants to make open what is concealed so as to, as someone once said, turn what has been set on its head back on its feet.

Aiming at global dominion is really no different, morally, than founding a start-up which always wants to go, as Peter Thiel says, from zero to one. Nobody loves competition for its own sake—everyone wants to win—and, if you’re right, or you’re the best, why shouldn’t you win? We don’t have to be Kantians to insist that your victory is likely to be more enduring and beneficial if you actually deserve to win, which is to say if you prove best at synthesizing scattered practices into a new stack. There’s no other way to win today, which is why we can set aside the fear of hearing anyone say they want to win, thereby setting in motion a destructive circle of violence—once we say you can only win by instituting “best practices,” through education, training, delegation, and anti-fragility, then there is no more need to fear the conquering spirit. All the virtues we value as civilized beings, such as generosity, kindness, helpfulness, and so on will have a secure place within the new dominion, as they will all be synthesized into enabling people to do more and more exactingly what they’re already doing.

The odds are very much against you becoming king of the world, but the odds shift dramatically in your favor if you aim at perfecting your practices, so as to be worthy of being recruited into a project of conquest. To obey the imperative to make your practices interoperable with other practices of conquest, you should, to dip into academic jargon, make your practices transdisciplinary. There’s a kind of dialectic between the disciplinary and transdisciplinary—transdisciplinary projects, with cosmic ambitions, get broken down into disciplinary specializations, which reach their limits in what they must exclude by maintaining disciplinary boundaries, giving way, in turn, to new transdisciplinary projects. Think about what, in your practices, cuts across disciplinary boundaries, will therefore be accused of lacking rigor by the guardians of those boundaries, but will nevertheless expose and resolve the anomalies invisible to those bunkered into the discipline. If you use their language consistently and systematically, albeit idiosyncratically, because you use it to describe their own practices, their attempts to exclude you will give you further leverage over their discourses. The disciplinary relies upon established institutional, bureaucratic power; the transdisciplinary is necessarily in search of other sources of power, and is able to preserve its conquests by addressing the problems of state power, or dismantling dominant ideologies for marginal dissident groups. I, of course, consider the originary hypothesis to be the foundation of the quintessential, non-transcendable transdisciplinary discourse—I am right here and now trying to make it conquer the world.

This all falls within the framework of being an interface between power and the user. To aim at global dominion is to work out the relations between powers and responsibilities. Just like empires often develop as one power steps into vacuums left by the decline or unpreparedness of other powers, a lasting global dominion can only be developed through intervening in sites where power is being exercised without corresponding responsibilities, or where one has to seize the power to exercise one’s responsibilities. And what makes dominion last is that rulership takes succession as the primary question: everything you do is done in such a way as to ensure the continuance and further perfection of what you do by others. Choosing your successors, both literally and in the sense of constructing the profile they will have to match, in terms more or less vague depending upon the practice, is built into, and constitutive of the practice itself. You become irreplaceable precisely by creating a space for your replacement. The future ruler of the world will be mapping out power/responsibilities lapses by auditioning, more or less explicitly, his own successor. Each shift in his assessment of the candidates indicates a more precise mapping of such lapses, a mapping that becomes a modeling for remedying them.

For mimetic theory, attention directed outward must always be seen as a deferral of potential violence within the community, This is, in fact, a very familiar critique of imperialism and militarism—it is a way of distracting attention away from internal problems. (Do those who advance this critique wish to see it conquer…?) The assumption is that, rather that expanding abroad, the society should take care of its “real” problems. This is a progressive, utilitarian perspective—the real problems are feeding the hungry, increasing wages, eliminating discrimination, etc. At that point we leave off mimetic theory, for which the real problems derive from the increasing incommensurability of desires, between those who have, just as much as between the haves and have-nots. For a country or its rulers, to look outward in an effective way, those incommensurabilities must have become both increasingly dangerous and increasingly generative: conquest, whether in the form of exploration or war, must be seen as a way out of some impasse (countries can’t be obliged to consume themselves, which would be the consequence of the anti-expansionist critique if the ameliorative approach proves wrong, as it surely will). The way things look to the rulers and the most adventuristic in a given social order is that their own little corner of the world has grown too small, and they need room to roam. This is not false, because, if you get to the point in a social order where every desire meets its complementary desire around the next corner, things have, indeed, gotten too crowded. The question, then, is whether you can conquer in such a way as to provide other orders with ways of deferring their own, perhaps imminent, crises, and perhaps even to refine the means of conquest you have brought upon them. Both the libertarian and nationalist would like us all to leave each other alone, but perhaps there are reasons why those with the power to live and let live have, often enough to discredit the desire, decided not to do so.

Intersecting dominions, then, produce a stack—there are many ways of totalizing the world, and, thinking technologically, so the trick is to turn some other totalization into an infrastructure supporting your own; it would even help to ensure that your own totalization, or dominion, can be turned into an infrastructure for another’s dominion. Incommensurables can co-exist this way—rather than states within enforced boundaries, which have to make patently insincere professions of desiring peaceful co-existence, we have zones alongside and within other zones that openly assert their absolute dominance of the zone as a model for all other zones (with each zone simultaneously submitting to and incorporating on its own terms the other dominions). Single military powers will exercise sole responsibility for, and brook no opposition to or super-sovereign subversion of its power over, demarcated territories, while incorporating and mimicking on the boundaries equally absolutist but qualitatively incommensurable zones. No one, then, need fear the one who insists everyone must bow down to his universal truth, because everyone can ask to see the practices aimed at institutionalizing that truth and entertain that truth insofar as it produces transferable practices that would have to be taken up on other institutional terrains that would read it back to the original, insofar as it has actually been made to register. Only those who absolutize in this way can be taken seriously: and then a practice of properly bowing down in such a way as to advance your own practice can be designed. Political, militarized power might very well always be a privileged zone, but it will clarify and fortify itself by creating an environment for, and acclimating to, other zones. Only by declaring your goal of global dominion will you win an absolute zone within and infrastructurally indispensable to, the Stack. You can start by declaring your intent to eliminate and incorporate all who share the same zone as you by providing a new infrastructure for solving what they take to be their problems.