Nomos/Class Action

If I had the ear of any billionaires, I would try to persuade them to stop wasting their money on political candidates and even most of their think tanks and divert it towards developing a large-scale legal strategy for bankrupting the left (of course some money would still need to go to candidates to ensure the judges needed to support the strategy are in place). I work on the assumption that the left is essentially a criminal organization—as Michael Walsh puts it, the Democrats are a criminal organization masquerading as a political party—running various blackmail, money laundering and protection rackets. It’s easy enough to see that without allowing for all kinds of criminal activity, from petty (vandalism, trespassing, assault, etc.) to major (money laundering through countries like Ukraine) the left would essentially cease to exist (I assume, but set aside for now, that something like this was always the case since the birth of democracy). It's a vendetta against civilization, which is effective because it has learned how to use the means of civilization, in particular the juridical. This last weapon, in particular, needs to be taken away and re-weaponized so as to de-weaponize it. One vector is, of course, working to replace DAs and other politicians who see the criminal element as leverage to be used against the population, but that’s difficult, considering that most of these politicians are in cities tightly controlled by the leftist cartel. But one approach that is completely within the power of a pro-civilization coalition of the rich and powerful would be to use the domain of law essentially dealing with speech and agreements, like fraud, slander, incitement defamation and so on, to attack organizations and individuals who cannot continue to exist without committing all these violations. Several benefits would result from a sustained and intelligent strategy: first, an important body of law would be reconstituted and a significant civilizational imperative addressed; second the media, as we know it today, would almost completely cease to exist, because today’s media cannot exist without constant violations of these legal norms; third, the intelligence and other state agencies would lose a crucial means of controlling public opinion and would have to resort to doing their jobs; fourth, the right-wing would clean up its own side, as no doubt the Republicans contain significant degrees of criminality as well, as does the conservative media; fifth, it could be a profitable venture, while effecting a significant redistribution of resources from leftist organizations and donors (and, why not, a few rightist ones as well) to the investors in what should be a trust-busting litigation company. The media would be replaced by records of court cases, along with summaries and analyses of those cases—what will be presented as fact will at least have gone through an evidential process—along with announcements of the means by which judicial decisions will be enforced.

The title of this post is a proposed name for this company which would aim at putting itself out of business and transitioning into becoming a governing agency, part of a larger security system. It would create a new market for anti-leftist and just adventurous lawyers, and for the disciplines, from laboratory to textual analysis. It will give new direction to the humanities, the originary vocation of which, I would say, is authenticating texts and accounting for their provenance (which by now would mean the way any given text is a product of a large pool of intentions interacting with generic conventions, literary traditions, the economics and politics of publishing and so on, going back as far as necessary), now invigorated by corpus-searching technology and the study of automatically generated texts. This project would be drawing upon deep legal traditions and would lead to studies of the moral and ethical underpinnings of those traditions, underpinnings which are in turn translations of the norms of governance implicit in those legal traditions. Studies in the history of fraud, incitement, slander, negligence and so on, as both legal categories and modes of human interaction, would lead to inquiries into the anthropological roots and implications of these categories—ultimately, these categories are the best evidence we have of the history of resentment. An exchange with a correspondent has pointed out to me the translatability of these categories into concepts of game theory, and I would add to that their implications for the adjacent field of cybernetics. An early point along the way of my thinking along these lines was the suggestion that one should be able to sue someone for calling you a “racist” without them being able to provide a coherent definition of “racism” and explaining how whatever you have said and done can be classified as “racist” according to that definition. It seems to me that this would shut down an entire front of the left and force a great deal of scrambling on that front—if they couldn’t call their enemies racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., what, exactly, would they have left to say? (We would also in this way be sharply refining discussions of damages, harm, reputation and its value—in a sense all the talk about “political correctness” and then “cancel culture” was a very degraded form of what are deeply rooted and urgent concepts enabling us to speak of what speech does.)

It would also be good to break the right’s fetishization of “free speech” which, obviously, never included slander, incitement, fraud and so on (I’ll also mention “obscenity,” which might become a focus of the kind of campaign I’m discussing but seems to me of secondary importance—for one thing, was obscenity ever something one could be sued for, rather than being a question of local ordinances?). The reconstruction and repurposing of all these legal concepts would involve a great deal of intellectual work, but this would be very productive, civilizationally clarifying work, that would furthermore be subject to constant practical testing. It would give existing forms of power a channel that could redirect it from corrupting and debilitating pursuits. It would exacerbate divisions among the governing class while providing a conduit for the peaceful resolution of those disputes and the attainment of an elite settlement. No doubt the left would respond with their own lawfare strategy, a continuation and intensification of current efforts. My proposal is predicated on the assumption that a proper legal regime is deadly for the left while only being purgative for the right. Maybe some on the left could be induced to develop legal means of controlling financial and corporate rapacity through well planned fraud, breach of promise, negligence and other lawsuits that could direct compensation to documented victims (with, of course, a cut to the attorneys) so as to cut out regulatory middlemen and the protection racket regulation always devolves into. We might converge on abolishing the entire left-right distinction, which is anyway implicit in destroying the left.

It is worth pointing out that such a company would provide for lots of victories and humiliations of leaders of enemy forces and therefore a kind of festival atmosphere, thereby fulfilling one of the more important of Alinsky’s rules for radicals: make sure your people are having fun. It would convert “anti-woke” sentiments (for starters) into teams of private investigators, gathering and supplying evidence along with lots of insider knowledge. Wars on social media would be transformed from exchanges of insults and spite into evidence collection missions. Social media companies could themselves be sued from blocking or de-platforming people for posts that don’t reach the threshold of actionable offenses—I’m not sure exactly how this would work (i.e., establishing a legal regime under which you’d be liable for something like slander for closing accounts for posts that are not, in fact, slanderous), but that’s what an inventive and hungry team of litigators is for—to make new law. There’d be defeats as well, sometimes due to leftist entrenchment within the justice system but also due to poorly chosen and planned lawsuits—it would be a way of putting to the test the assumption that the right is fundamentally a defender of civilization and the left ultimately civilization’s nemesis, and we might be surprised at some things we find out. We would be setting in motion a pedagogical and learning process, training a new generation of leaders. My own agenda here would be to force a convergence between juridical and originary anthropological thinking, a convergence that would open paths within the disciplines. I’m also assuming that much of our existing juridical order, in particular those parts sheltered from media scrutiny and essential for infrastructural purposes, is intact, so that we already have a foothold within the system.

We could think of this project, somewhat more “ideologically,” as a rolling class action suit on behalf of the law-abiding or, better, the nomos itself, against antinomic lawbreaking. There is always an originary distribution, rooted in ritual and something akin to sacrifice, where some land is conquered and property titles distributed to the leaders of the conquering team by the occupant of the center. Every last piece of property can be traced back to this, and the best use of historians and the social sciences more generally would be to trace back title deeds, with an eye to their subsequent courses through sales, appropriations, etc., even raising questions about the legitimacy of certain transfers along the way—it’s a question of establishing something like chains of custody for the sake of adjudication. The “Big Man revolution” might take some other path as data exchange comes to replace exchange via currency and assets, but, so far, what I am describing here is the only way of defending the Big Man revolution right now and making that future path possible. Almost everything the left does is a violation of this kind of order—all leftist thinking, what I would join with Eric Gans in calling the “epistemology of resentment,” is ferociously directed against such an order. If, on occasion, it serves some purpose of the left to defend, say, some local community against environmental damage caused (and maybe covered up) by some corporation, we should be capable of restraining our partisan impulses and join in (and maybe take over) such pro-civilizational actions. In fact, the kind of company I’m proposing here would privilege security firms, in particular those concerned with data security, over those kinds of “late industrial age” corporations more likely to spill chemicals into rivers (or fill fast foods with poison), so that it would be possible to take action against the latter.

Such a company would be far less esoteric than Thirdness with a clear path to profit—fleecing the left and retrieving its own ill-gotten gains. It would vindicate center study as a fork-off of the originary hypothesis away from GA, with the distinctive argument I’ve been making for the juridical as a provisional space between the ritual and disciplinary. “Resentment” has always been a weakly theorized concept in GA, despite its centrality (a word search in Gans’s works would, I imagine, locate thousands of instances)—it remains on the level of “I know it when I see it” or, to be a bit blunter, “resentment is when you’re against things I like.” But the juridical provides measures of resentment in very specific historical conditions, while providing us with a vocabulary for distinguishing between more and less justified expressions of resentment and creating forms or remediation. And such measurements can get increasingly precise, moving us away from vague discussions of ethics and morals (which are anyway just second or third order reflections of the juridical itself, if not derived from terms and codes of loyalty to superiors) as the juridical becomes a site of knowledge production. How, exactly, has person A been harmed by person B calling him a “racist” on a particular platform? Instead of surrendering to the counter-productive reflex of trying to invent some way of calling the accuser the “real racist” we get into questions of who, exactly, is A, who is B, what kind of reputation has A so far earned, how capable is B of harming that reputation; what, exactly, counts as a harmed reputation in this case, and how much is it worth, monetarily? “$250,000 settles my resentment” gives us an exact measure, which then serves as a precedent for future exercises in such measurement. In this way center study promotes more complex understandings of resentment than “you took something that was mine,” even if that remains at the root of all resentment. So, maybe someone can find a way of packaging this proposal for some billionaire out there who wants to leave a legacy of helping to preserve our civilization, and maybe get some retribution as well. I would probably be happy with a consultant role.