A. Law as a Battle Inside a Hallucinated Cartoon Imposed on Reality<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I. The Deceptive Simplicity of Law<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Compared to physics, law seems pretty mundane. Like sitting at a restaurant, reading a menu and talking to your friend. You don’t have to think about how if one twin flew on a rocket going 1\/1000th the speed of light, he would come back younger than his twin brother. Dunbar’s number isn’t mentioned in Supreme Court opinions, the way the Dirac limit or Planck length are important to physicists. Law seems more about memorization than such mystery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’m probably the only one who will tell you that the battles people fight in law every day, are shaped by a Matrix-like problem that law’s practitioners are living in a hallucination. This is at the root of why five Supreme Court Justices say one thing and four say another, and why innocent people spend their lives in prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine if you worked at NASA, and every day you had to do battle with people who thought that after a rocket launches, it will have to keep turning like a car going in a circle, to orbit Earth. Your job would not just be to solve simple calculations proceeding from the assumption that objects drift in a straight line through curved space. Your job would be to do battle every day, with people who attempt to sabotage and undo your work based on the human hallucination that space is Euclidean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They would rewrite your computer programs to fit this hallucination. When you locked them out of the system to prevent this, they would get around it by feeding your program fake position data to trick the rocket into turning because they think it needs to. The criminal hackers who did this would be seen as heroes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bad model input in law, is assuming people share a single vantage point more than they do, and that information is therefore cheaper and more perfect than it is. And then rewriting law to proceed based on this assumption, rather than to do law’s actual job, which is to solve the problem that we don’t share a vantage point and perfect information. Law evolves to make use of the fact that each person sees only a little bit of information, and no conscious mind sees all of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The way this is perceived by the people hallucinating, is that there’s a collective mind that can see things and make decisions. And that this nonexistent entity has traditional “sovereign” rights under law even though this isn’t written anywhere. So that the rights of any other decision-maker to oppose it are required to be written somewhere. “Collective wisdom” in City of Grants Pass, “chain of dependence” in Trump v. Slaughter, “it can decline to enforce waivers” in Hunter v. United States, and “the broader public interest” in Imbler, are all based on this hallucination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The implication is that by using informal social communication, private institutions and spontaneous social patterns have greater information-processing capacity, than individual human minds or specified networks of distributed decision-makers formally allocated specific domains. To say political speech shouting in some metaphorical town square can decide (and act on) who is guilty of crimes, or what medicines work, not just propagate lies and war. Without any formal process specified, other than occasional majority elections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Law requires a model of the physical world as much as launching a rocket or editing DNA. But it’s complicated and obscured by people’s self-perceptions — by the brain’s built-in instinctive way of thinking about other people — more than those other fields. Similar to autism or object permanence, but a reflex belief about what the social group knows and sees. These model assumptions are not the product of logic but of instinctive ways of perceiving things. These assumptions are rarely directly questioned by logic in policy debates, because pretty much everyone shares them and proceeds from the same assumptions. To different degrees, and projects them onto different subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
II. Imagining the Group as a Single Mind<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagining multiple people see the same thing is a vestigial simplifying assumption, used for efficiency in the paleolithic mind. It’s produced by dedicated neurological structures for perceiving groups of multiple people and social organization, from when people lived in small groups. For 99% of human history, when the human brain supposedly evolved from monkeys to what we are today, men lived in groups of around 30 people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They suffered more than benefited from competing populations of strangers, who saw different information or visible surroundings. And therefore, they had little use to think about multiple-vantage-point complexities, that we have today when millions of people interact and coordinate and serve each other over large distances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When everyone in the group has nearly the same vantage point and perfect information about other members, there is less use for the brain tracking vantage points (and information in them) individually like billiard balls or other physical objects. At the same time, there is a need for tracking or imagining things you will never see, the contents of the minds of others, the common circumstances of the tribe. The collective-mind hallucination imagines something you will never directly see, the contents of the minds of others. The way object permanence works for things after you no longer see them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So for efficiency, the brain adapted to thinking of members of the social group as a single mind. And grew physiologically separate parts of the brain for thinking about physical objects with individual momentum, and the single “will of the people”. This created two separate coexisting perceptions of the world. One for the (visible) locations of physical objects. And another for what other people think and see, which is imagined like a single collective mind which sees and controls the larger world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that even today, people say things like “courts and the executive branch”, as if “the” executive branch is a single decision-maker. Where thinking about multiple courts forces them to use a different part of the brain. And to think of courts as a physical force outside the hallucinated collective will. This physiologically predisposes people to thinking about courts (and businesses) as benighted independent adversaries of some “will of the people”. Even though the second one doesn’t exist — it is a hallucination. And courts are the only place the will of “the people” is actually expressed, through legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This neural machinery for constructing perceptions is prone to errors and misinformation, when it attempts to work on thousands of people at different locations. And inserts a constant reflex of thinking of a person’s role in them in some distorted incorrect way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Perhaps when astronauts go to space, they imagine released objects dropping for a second. Before realizing they are just drifting. The human impulse to incorrectly perceive that multiple people share the same information, is never compared to any visual observation of what’s actually going on in the minds of millions of strangers. So the false perception doesn’t stop after a second, and get replaced with something people can actually see. It never ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today this perception is a hallucination in the literal sense, of being something projected onto the physical world that isn’t there. And while it doesn’t perceive any physical reality that actually exists, it is still a ready machine to perceive things. Into which machine all kinds of nonsense can be poured by demagogues. So that thought leaders centrally create, and people try to live and participate in a cartoon world, divorced from the unobservable physical world they are actually participating in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
III. Information-Network Details Aren’t in the Common-Perception Cartoon<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In primitive tribes the group had all information and evolved morals, who then directly socially regulated individual experts, such as in hunting or clothing. In large societies, established preferences are conveyed to domain experts as prices, and as laws with local compliance monitors. Compare these abstractions of the macro processes of human decision-making in small versus large societies. Where the social network is replaced by the unconscious information network, as an influencer of individual behavior in large societies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(regulator) –> individual<\/p>\n\n\n\n
99% of human history:
(30-person tribe with religious habits and conscious social communication) –> individual role<\/p>\n\n\n\n
instinctive abstraction built into the human mind:
(collective mind) –> expertise<\/p>\n\n\n\n
large-population paradigm:
(personal benefit –> prices –> middlemen) –> expertise
(public benefit –> legislation –> formal or judicial process) –> domain task<\/p>\n\n\n\n
communist revival:
(collective mind –> virtuous state economic administrators) –> virtuous experts
(collective mind –> direct democracy –> unitary executive) –> virtuous experts<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Primitive people were given an information system they didn’t design, and which they participated in without reflecting on what they were doing. They used simplifying assumptions such as that two other people knew the same thing, where information problems were solved without them ever thinking about it. Leaving them only to think about expertise, and morals (applied to common information).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Human designs generally gloss over the information-processing component, assuming it will be filled in somehow. People say something like “we’ll collect money from farms to finance irrigation canals”. Or “we’ll require flags purchased by government be made in America”, or “prosecutors will tell judges which defendants are a risk to society”. They just assume the information upon which this decision will be made, is readily available. And then imagine making the beneficial decision will simply be regulated by the social group, or by some experts under its control, whom the collective mind can directly observe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some collective mind will spontaneously develop the expertise and give it incentives to make the necessary decisions, of who is kept in prison, and what flags will be purchased. People think about the costs and benefits weighed by decisions, but not the costs of and processes for weighing them; the costly information and incentives and structures of the decisions-makers who will actually make them. Who will decide, under what incentives, and how will information be produced for that person at what cost?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Communism is the instinct to think the collective mind still doesn’t have these problems to solve. Communism is the instinct to attack the new processes that solve these problems, prices and formal judicial process, as costly and corrupting. Based on the vestigial hallucination that a collective mind exists which can perform the same information-processing job, basically for free. And more virtuously, from being socially regulated by morals and empathy, and by reasons the collective mind can see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that information-processing institutions have had to evolve independent of, and defended against, human designs and impulses. But participants don’t even really know what they’re defending. So that defenders against communism recognize the importance of prices and private property in commerce. But still don’t recognize something similar in law, such as that a jury has “freedom” compared to communism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Information-processing networks evolved largely without participants perceiving or thinking about them. Even today, people who study economics in great detail still describe them in an incredibly simple way by just referring to it as “freedom”. Even though a legal system restricting people to make decisions on allocated domains called private property, is highly structured and not at all free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Decision-makers like property owners (and jurors), aren’t viewed as being confined to local domains in a distributed information-processing network. They’re viewed as being free from control by the single mind that doesn’t exist in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s recognized simply that when people operate independently of the collective mind, a lot of things happen. To say when people have freedom, they do a lot of cool things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While opponents of this so-called “freedom”, recognize that workers and people in cubicles are more like slaves to the factors that coerce their behavior. Where they think the collective mind would be kinder, and then try to embody it in some sort of institutional design run by “the will of the people”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IV. Law Expands Information-Processing Beyond Conscious Purpose<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When a person imitates another person by finding a particular kind of stone, and breaking it to make a cutting tool, the purpose of the decision is known entirely to the person making it. People imitate moral commands without knowing their useful end result (other than teenagers), to where it’s hard to distinguish morals from instinctive impulses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But when a Sumerian applied a rule to information by handing over 10 sheep because there were 10 tokens in a sealed clay jar, he became a mere neuron in a structure. Whose workings were not the product of conscious human reason of any person living or dead, much less of any collective social process. And which decision and action he may have found morally distasteful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why did a person in Uruk give another person 10 sheep? Not because he woke up and decided it was a good idea, or because anyone voted on it, or because he was an expert on sheep. But because a repetitive task, using a number recorded in clay as an input, dictated this action. Even though the day the number was written and the reason for it, or what the sheep would be used for, could not be known to the person whose actions were dictated by it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And more important, the reasoning of all people in the room might be to do something other than what law applied to information would dictate. The recipient might say “How about you do the moral thing, and give me eleven sheep because my community is starving. And in exchange I will tell you a secret you didn’t know about your wife.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Such corruption would reduce the ability of the Temple to make long-term investments in irrigation infrastructure. Even though no Sumerian may have remembered a time when there wasn’t irrigation infrastructure, or believed that such infrastructure depended on his own following the law (even against his own reasoning) rather than a gift from God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The purpose of law is to make people do things and participate in systems which human reason cannot verify. Aristotle wrote in Politics 7 that a society cannot function when its population is too large for human reason to verify all activities. But 3,000 years earlier, Sumerians had already developed writing to process information too large for a human mind to remember, to do things for reasons not consciously knowable to the participants. Humans could only try to understand what they were participating in, and write books like Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations”, after they had already been participating in it for 100’s of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aristotle was wrong that millions of people could not be coordinated without a conscious mind, instead using prices, laws, and specialist institutions. But he was right in a way he didn’t mean. Because people would attempt to destroy the unconscious information-processing machine even though it worked. And replace it with a conscious one that didn’t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And people would harm strangers whose existence they benefited from, but where the benefit was not implied in and protected by their instincts or morals, or their conscious reasoning. For the same reason chimpanzees attacked untrusted and useless strangers when the population got too big for social connections, in the Ngogo chimpanzee civil war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aristotle’s oversized city would not be too big too work. But it would be too big for people to understand the evolved system they were participating in, and to want to conserve rather than reduce and destroy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Writing was cost-justified when people coordinated with groups larger than people they knew, to track information larger than their brain could hold. But because they did not design or understand this network of information-processing and coordination, they didn’t want it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The machinery it ran on could be destroyed by a single generation of rational thought, where participants designed laws to suit their instincts to harm strangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
V. Human Reason Tries to Seize Back Control by Rewriting Law<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The human mind contemplates abstractions of detailed information. A person might understand a nation’s economy as producing $10 billion in manufactured products, and $10 billion in services each year. But this cannot operate in reverse, this connection between the human mind and reality. The most powerful dictator cannot directly supervise every citizen, so that the product of their activity is $10 billion in goods and $10 billion in services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Replacing all private business managers with a central planner or committee who orders citizens to reproduce this pattern — who simply orders half of people to produce manufactured products, and the other half to produce services — would not produce the same details of goods and services that human reason can only perceive an abstraction of. Making the committee larger still doesn’t solve this problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Similarly, a policeman or prosecutor may believe a crime has occurred based on his limited information about events he is not a witness to. And is also myopic and simplifies the effects of his actions. So that his discretion is relatively useless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Law and writing enabled people to form like neurons, into a machine capable of processing more information than any single individual or social group could recall or contemplate. But people are always fighting to make human activity conform to the simplified cartoon in their mind, in effect to destroy civilization.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And so the purpose of law is to divorce information processing from conscious human reason. So that the product of their activity and the vision of their reason are two different things, like pod people in “The Matrix”. And people who practice law will always be fighting against this purpose of law, against their very role in the world. Madison’s “ambition” is not to be a slave to a machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The results can be quite bizarre. Such as Chief Justice John Roberts recently saying “those of us in the judicial branch\u2026 we do not speak for the people”. The only practical written definition of “the people”, from Roman times to Federalist 10, is the legislature. The way they speak is by recording preferences in written legislation. And the only person who then says those preferences to anybody out loud as commands, is judges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A cop doesn’t go door-to-door asking people if he should arrest someone, or hold an election. The only and last person whose voice a cop needs to hear to before arresting someone, is a judge. Judges are literally the people’s designed and only way of speaking to cops, the only voice a cop will hear that speaks for the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Justice Roberts hallucinates that there is some universal mind out there which the cop is wired into. Because voters share the cop’s vantage point. And can know what he is doing and should do, and tell him what to do, through some unspecified social process. Roberts thinks there is a collective mind and courts are outside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
VI. Justice Thomas Sees Collective-Mind Virtue in Cops, Harms, and Big-Business Lawyers<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Justice Clarence Thomas combines assumptions that government is evil, men are flawed, and individuals have rights, with a hallucination that there’s a collective mind which is virtuous, and which has “sovereign” rights to act through government (to harm individuals).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas bends this into some logical knots accommodating other accidents, such as Democrats and communists being evil, local cops not harming rich people (not even illegal casino districts thriving on main streets in Florida), and his lawyer peers being bad at advocating for non-cash rights injuries. And does some rearranging between courts and executive employees, and states versus federal government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To end up saying government is evil communists when it’s laws enforced by federal courts. But cops doing whatever they want under narrow and corrupt backroom social influence, and non-cash harms to individuals by government, are good “the people”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that government protecting business against social currents is virtuous “the people”, government protecting individual nobodies against social currents is “evil government”, government harming nobodies accused of crimes is virtuous “the people”, broke nobodies petitioning federal courts to enforce legislation on executive-branch employees is “evil government”, federal courts are evil communists, and all state government is good, despite states having larger populations than the entire British empire at the time of the Founding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas knows government is evil because communism is evil and individual rights are good. Except police claiming to represent the collective mind attacking individual rights are good. And their targets, as well as federal courts enforcing legislation to stop them, are evil. Which conveniently isn’t done to local businesses by local governments which are influenced by local rich people (not directly by prices or voters). Fitting into Thomas’s concept that federal courts are evil communists. And corrupt, insular, self-interested local=government actors are virtuous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beyond harms to criminal defendants and businesses and states and courts being good and evil, Thomas just inserts the collective mind and its virtuousness anywhere he wants and doesn’t want. And the fact the Founders assumed government would be allowed to do good, means the collective mind (actually some person) doing what it wants must be what was consented to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas’s underlying logic is that what the single mind of the social group wants must be virtuous. Cops are imagined to be wired into the universal mind and thereby regulated to be virtuous. Despite this mind not existing, and 99% of voters knowing no details of any criminal case. So anything federal and appellate courts impose on “the” executive branch must reduce decision quality and add costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But since there is no single mind much less any way of expressing what it wants in a particular case (other than abstract legislation), and because harms from individual government employees to private individuals are what private individuals petitioning to enforce law have standing to stop, Thomas makes the leap that harms to individuals must automatically be what the collective mind wants. “The” executive branch is just ordinary individuals with their own opaque agenda and activity. But Thomas uses a psychic trick to see the collective will in the bird entrails of a bunch of lying cops and lawyers, as any harm caused by a cop that individuals complain about. Which must therefore be the just and virtuous collective will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because blocking non-cash harms to individual nobodies is a typical petition that comes across federal judges’ desks, so that federal courts’ typical action is subverting non-cash harms to individuals sought by virtuous autocrats, on behalf of legislation external to the collective will. So all non-cash harms to individual nobodies which arrive on Thomas’s desk chosen by government-employee discretion are presumed to be the virtuous will of the collective mind. With the exception of non-cop harms to Christians and virtuous groups, and harms that cost businesses money. And therefore stopping those can promote Thomas’s values and enrich Thomas’s lawyer peers in private practice, where suddenly the collective mind becomes evil communist government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that a criminal defendant being forced to take drugs in Hunter v. United States must be virtuous because the defendant’s own dislike of it means it must be a harm, and therefore by reflex is assumed to be the will of the collective mind. Despite such mind never existing much less saying this. Where such harms are in reality the expedient agenda, whims, and theater of insular executives. And even though no voter believes drugs can cure crime or knows the specific drug the defendant will be forced to take.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s just random for Thomas to assign such great virtue with great certainty to coerced plea bargains, creating outcomes of such dubious value while sweeping actual facts under the rug. Where coercion is able to nuke facts and produce a cartoon that satisfies social regulation, while harming clueless innocents and letting the guilty go free. It’s just the self-interest of participants corrupting logic, while pretending a collective mind has validated their utility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Thomas really hallucinates that the product of a bunch of lying lawyers letting police run wild in exchange for money, and using prison to manufacture fake facts, is the sacred will of a virtuous collective mind. Thomas is a sleep-walker, with a constituency of literal criminals and utopian fools, who is only stopped from destroying society by others stepping in to stop him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas says government is evil, but there is a virtuous collective mind which is good and whose will government employees virtuously enact, when they use discretion. As long as fits into Thomas’s arbitrary virtue-detection scheme. Meaning just specifically federal courts are “evil government”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And because this boils down to cops doing what they want while legislation and courts stand aside, and because people at the Founding either lived under, observed, or advocated for monarchy, anything Thomas wants can be called the will of the hallucinated mind, with a right to be enforced as the unwritten original meaning of the Constitution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
People who like communism today are able to find historical communists — people in old times who hallucinated a collective mind — and call it “originalism”. The collective-mind hallucination goes back thousands of years. There were always people who thought it is how government worked, a kinship to communist saboteurs across time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thomas has never run for sheriff, been wrongfully arrested by a cop, or appealed to politics to defend himself from one. But he hallucinates a collective mind which is virtuous, romanticizing the wisdom of the local (non-Democrat) torch mob (perhaps tamed by Christianity when they’re not burning witches and people of different denominations). Largely because Democrats hate the same people, and think their decisions can be replaced by wise Democrats using discretion. (The third way of courts enforcing legislation has no constituency.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas if Thomas removed the collective mind (as well as wise individuals with conscious plans), he’d be left with a simpler world where interested parties enforce dead legislation on executive-branch employees by petitioning courts. Which is exactly what the text of legislation actually says. Because legislators may believe in a universal mind (or wise individuals), but they’re outside of it. They know the legislation they write is always the exception, which will only be enforced by petitioners in courts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
VII. History of The Collective Mind in Law<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Political philosophy has always tried to find a physical location to insert the ghost into the machine. To logically reconcile the hallucination of a collective mind, with the observed autonomy and opacity of individual activity and real-world decision structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They began writing about the collective mind and winding sophistry to defend it, from the first moment when people noticed it obviously wasn’t there or had lost control. When they saw society expanding and subdividing beyond any such possibility. At the same time as people observed mobs are terrible at processing information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Plato and Aristotle saw wise individuals and mobs, but not so much unconscious systems like Hayek. Madison reflected on this in Federalist 55.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote about a “general will” which individuals enter into contracts with. Followed by Physiocrats saying a natural order will emerge (at least in agricultural commerce) that is different from and superior to anything contrived by conscious human reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Montesquieu wrote of three distinct powers, and individuals being regulated by virtue (rather than fear or honor). When in reality there were millions of independent decision-makers externally puppeted by prices and laws, for reasons which nobody could be conscious of to morally judge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the 1900’s people spoke of judges using their own wisdom and reasoning rather than law, motivated by virtue and honor. Today people have reverted even further to write about “the unitary executive” manifesting the calculations of a universal mind. Through some unspecified mechanism which it is not the job of minds to inquire into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When New Federalists say “unitary executive”, they are imagining something like a single consciousness, for which voters are the eyes and government employees are the hands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Various books have tried to describe reality, to people who begin with this hallucination. Such as “Human Action” by Von Mises. And Hayek in “Use of Knowledge” saying “not the\u2026 problem which society faces”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you ask people on the street, few will know what the 8th Amendment says, prefer that there are 50 states rather than 51, or want to be at war with Iran like we presently are. So it would be hard to say in what sense these things are the product of a conscious will, or any will, of some number of living people. Nevertheless, everything elected officials do will be defended in court as the will and calculated benefit of this mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Courts and executives were originally delegated in the United States, to enact the will of living legislators. Where executives were their hands and courts their conscience, one to do and the other to monitor and verify. Like executive officers, courts were given original jurisdiction by legislators in Article III and the Judiciary Act of 1789, to make sure the will of Congress was enacted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Until a competing mind was elevated in Marbury. Despite federal courts being designed in Federalist 78 to exclude any such mind from influencing decisions contrary to legislation. So that a judge insulated against social currents to instead enforce legislation, simply interprets legislation as saying he must abdicate to let executives enforce social currents disregarding legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This (“chain of dependence”) is not matched with any explanation of why we would ever need legislation, under what set of exceptional circumstances. What are the things which a universal mind can and cannot regulate? Only actions infringing individual liberties? Judges have given those to the universal mind, through immunity and other tricks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a universal mind, and the Founders must have consented to it being allowed to do good. So cops can come into your house and courts and legislation can’t stop them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
From the first moment, judges were used not to enforce legislation, but to argue for action of a collective will contrary to legislation. Judges say people will do good needing only that they be wired into the universal mind. Government employees will do good needing only that they be elected. So the Founders must have consented that they be allowed to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Therefore, executive-branch discretion contrary to legislation and courts must be what the law means, even though this isn’t written anywhere. Even though nobody advocated for an Executive-Branch Bill of Rights, or that any executive had a will beyond that given to him by Congress, when the Constitution was ratified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But because unchecked power once existed somewhere, was observed by people, and at times advocated for by people, then it must be what people consented to even though they didn’t write this in their contract. Because there were initially people who didn’t know whether we had a republic or a monarchy (so that someone had to ask Ben Franklin), and we didn’t enumerate that we nowhere had a monarchy, we were unable to keep it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Poliricians have always cited the collctive will to defend their actions. So judges who like communism find historical communists and call it “originalism” or “tradition”. Direct democracy is impossible. But imagining that it is possible, through unspecified psychic mind powers, lets people call communism “democracy”. Which in practice means cops can come into your house and courts and legislation can’t stop them. Because they are sent by the democratic will of the collective mind to do good, by telling you how to spend your life and property.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judges rule that there is some single mind through unspecified social processes, which has rights to make decisions. Which mind the people who believe in it cannot document is aware of 99.9% of human activity, but conveniently only the exact activity which they themselves are aware of. So that because courts are aware of the facts presented to courts in their cases, the universal mind must also be aware of them (even in the cases and details courts don’t see) and can take care of them. All information which is known to or discovered by courts (or could become so) is also known socially to someone, so social majority mechanisms can take care of all information and decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Law would be quite simple if there was a universal mind that could make good decisions, and people could be wired into it simply by being elected. But replacing the Constitution piece-by-piece to move in this direction using sophistry, while fighting the counter-currents from people who suffer from such utopianism, gives people like Justice Thomas a more complicated task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The imagination that there is a single mind — the very non-existent formlessness of which mind, enables it to be inserted anywhere in logic — turns political debate into sophistry and intractably complicates governance. It enables “what I would like” to be called “democracy”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
VIII. Collective Mind an Ubiquitous Ghost, Not A Subject of Debate, But Must Be<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inserting the collective mind into law isn’t an overt policy disagreement. It’s more like sneezing, which people do in the middle of their activities without intending to. It’s a mischievous force always lurking in the shadows, waylaying human thought, and turning arguments into conflated mush.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagining voters (or any social group) can regulate police or something isn’t just a policy disagreement, where I think A works better and someone else thinks B works better. Because they never rigorously analyze and debate whether A is true. Both sides think it is, they just use their bias to stick it in different places. And neither side is able to effectively debate this, for being blind to what the other side has done and what’s wrong with it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They basically start from “assuming voters (or some social group) can see what government employees are doing, and can be rationally debated with”. Rather than designing law to solve the problem that they can’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They assume social groups are collective minds that can make decisions. They just argue whether voters are evil or monarchs are evil or states are good or federal judges are good. They argue about which is the informed or wise group with the right values, that should make the decision. If they like grass or small balls, they say the collective mind of golfers is the best decision-maker. And they hallucinate that some other inferior or competing collective mind has control, which must be taken away from them and given to the right collective mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They literally cannot see when the other side inserts a false assumption right in front of them. Because they accept the same idea, and argue about something else, like whether the inserted collective mind is good or evil (whether it be monarchs, federal law, state government, local voters, police, businesses, or whatever). Not even knowing what they’re arguing about, leaves both sides of the debate with little idea what’s wrong or how to fix it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Everyone is myopic and evil. Every social group is myopic when their choices affect outsiders. Businessmen are myopic and evil, except that they are regulated by prices. Government employees are evil, except that they are regulated by legislation and process. But in most political debates, both sides begin by assuming social groups under social influence of virtue or morals, can make good decisions and influence members to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Any political debate spontaneously degenerates to saying “assuming we’re a rational collective mind we should do this policy and it will be profitable”. Basically “This is a good policy which we should enforce”. Rather than focusing on legislation and information process, and how this process will actually be enforced. And how the profitable decision in each instance (or where each case indexes into legislation) will be discovered by who. And how information, and incentives to do the right thing, will be transmitted to that person. Given that he is not wired into a collective mind that solves this problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Usually the bad outcome isn’t because of bad policy choices or disagreements (whether murderers should get death or rehabilitation). It’s from removing process, as a result of assuming a universal mind has information and incentives and can decide to enforce policy, without the middlemen of legislation and process. The same as communism is bad not because they chose a policy of starving people. But from removing private business (prices providing information and inncentive, and middlemen operating autonomously from the goal they serve).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But they blame the bad outcome on a policy choice, or bad people or anything, not a lack of process. And then try to pick the right collective mind, or inform it, or fight over who it will be. They say “let’s elect a new prosecutor, with different experience, who promises a policy of not putting innocent people in jail any more”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
IX. Communists Give Up on Voluntary Money Transactions, Retreat to Everything Else<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s acknowledged that some activities need to be supervised by prices using money (everything where people pay in cash for items they consume themselves). Because people have a logical understanding what prices do. Which logic and observation competes with and displaces the vague hallucination that social groups of hundreds or millions of people know common facts and encourage good decisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s harder to hallucinate away the individual money transactions which comprise the information stream. Especially when businesses pay lawyers and politicians to shout about them. And the individual parties seem to consent to cash purchases, giving local individuals some sort of “freedom”. While everything else not involving individual cash profit (such as when people are punished) can be controlled by a collective mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that a county will have thousands of businesses rather than one Fidel Castro. But only one elected sheriff and prosecutor, preferably voted for once every four years. Rather than being regulated by multiple process petitions and cash lawsuits in individual cases. Where economist Thomas Sowell will tell you the quality of their job depends on their expertise, and needs no more detailed feedback than being elected once every four years by a 51% majority, with the collective mind filling in everything else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Justice Neil Gorsuch will complain that the Federal Register of regulations has grown, but not that the variety of products sold by retailers has grown. US judges actually believe people can transmit all their preferences, as a 51% vote for President every four years, which implies all the preferences and monitors their service in a “chain of dependence”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They think the collective mind can’t directly supervise how much bread the baker should bake, but can supervise who should be arrested. So that government activity takes place behind a ritual of following law to make decisions, but where the actual practice of doing so is minimized. Where the use of law is reduced to protecting things that are supervised by prices. And everything else is corrupted to thinking the collective mind should decide. From the moment people begin thinking about them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Voters can never rationally choose to do profitable things in each case (or for police and prosecutors to), only legislation and process can. No matter how much you persuade voters to put more or fewer people in prison, or make more or fewer cars versus medicine, or whatever. The devil is always in the details of actually doing it, not simply a majority wanting it. Not monitoring case details produces wasted inputs. Whether steel or human resources. You can’t fix the policy outcome if it’s monitored by 51% votes. Assuming there can be a universal mind of social regulation is the underlying policy error, shared by both sides.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can never persuade voters to regulate the prosecutor to act profitably because most don’t have case-specific information. It’s a mirage that prosecutors and judges will enforce any policy in a way that’s profitable to society, under regulation by a collective mind. The result of this mirage is lying to voters, and lying and obfuscation in court records as a standard institutional practice, lying in court about the law and the facts to obtain outcomes that serve personal agendas and political expedience. Which results in unprofitable activity the same as in the USSR. The manager just lies to the regulator that he is doing a great job optimizing profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagining rational regulation by direct democracy, is a commonly-shared initial assumption, passed on by genes rather than social imitation. It’s a perception the way object permanence, or “mind blindness” for autistic people, are perceptions, not products of logic. Sort of like a failure to perceive distance perspective, and always thinking a tree can fit in your hand. It’s thinking society can fit in a human mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Religions protect things that instincts aren’t built to do, but which are also not the product of reason. But the collective mind instinct, rather than caution against it, is our prevailing religion that infects and twists everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
X. Market-Price Economist Sowell Projects Universal Mind Onto Government Transactions<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The supposed greatest living economist on “decentralized” decision-making Thomas Sowell, still hallucinates a collective mind. Sowell uses a confused shell game to insert his collective-mind hallucination into economics. Similar to how Justice Thomas switches between executive employees, courts, states, and “the people” to insert his collective mind into law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell does this with a trick of using the words “knowledge” and informal “tradition”, rather than “sovereign will” or other collective-mind terms. Sowell’s shell game is then switching between information and “knowledge”. So that what his collective mind has is scarce “knowledge”. While information of the specific case details they must apply their knowledge to, is assumed to be free.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell says decisions are supposed to be given not to the person with information — courts — but to the person with knowledge — whomever Sowell wants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell’s “knowledge” means patterns from past experiences, which create domain knowledge, such as how to grow corn. While information is the details of specific instances, such as how much rain fell in particular location today. Which case information Sowell glosses over, to say local voters have the general “knowledge” of local crime, to give police feedback and tell them what to do. Even though this actually requires information. Such as what happens in each traffic stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under Sowell’s model, a business owner like a pencil factory or commodity middleman doesn’t process constant new price “information” from suppliers and customers to make his decisions. Rather he has expertise in his field called “knowledge”. And while a collective mind such as 51% of local voters could never discover and process the details of every local criminal case or traffic stop, they are able to have general cultural knowledge of crime in their area (which may be secondhand hype and gossip).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And using this trick, Sowell is able to say local voters, not federal courts, should regulate the activity of local police. And thereby avoid some sort of supposedly evil communism, that happens when federal judges (rather than insular local administrators) process local case information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell’s view, that local voters and police are experts on crime patterns in their area, and therefore local voters should decide facts and punishments for local crimes, is pretty much just imagining something exactly appropriate to a paleolithic group of 30 people. Where there are no case instances the majority of the tribe isn’t aware of. And no tradition knowledge stored in writing like legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that all knowledge is possessed by the collective mind of the local paleolithic group, which also knows all the details of every case. So that police can be socially regulated by a collective mind, the same way a paleolithic hunter is regulated by his tribe. Without legislation or division of labor or legal specialists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
a. Switching from Business Information to Scientific Knowledge<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell read Friedrich Hayek’s “Use of Knowledge in Society” (which could have been called “use of information”). Sowell was inspired to write an entire book about who makes decisions under what incentives, titled “Knowledge and Decisions”. But Sowell still imagines information is cheaper than it is and people are wiser and more virtuous than they are, to imagine information is basically free through some unspecified collective social processes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hayek specifically said only prices — not pattern knowledge — could solve the “socialist calculation” problem. Hayek wrote “organized knowledge which cannot possibly be called scientific in the sense of knowledge of general rules: the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place”. (Which applies to both prices and other case facts, even though Hayek was focusing on prices.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But after reading that, Sowell misses the whole point. So that Sowell talks about local vantage points as an expertise problem, not an information problem on each case or instance. At least in transactions that don’t use money prices, but rather use legal supply chains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell hallucinates a collective mind in a non-specific location or mechanism, that knows all case information for free (or conveniently requiring only geographic proximity). And combines this with the incredible fact that perhaps because Sowell has never run a business and has only ever been an academic, Sowell manages to think Hayek’s “particular circumstances of time and place” refer to the shape of a cornfield, not the varying price of corn in a particular city on a particular day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Sowell further romanticizes this shape of a particular cornfield to be some sort of virtuous street smarts of ordinary people rather than academics, because commoners “know how the real world works”. So that Sowell incorrectly thinks this local knowledge is what Hayek is talking about when Hayek says “not scientific knowledge”. Hayek means the constant fire hose of unexpected random daily occurrences. But Sowell conflates all kinds of facts and abstractions, into something simple that can be processed by a collective mind in the geographic area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell criticized the concept that there is some vantage point from which a virtuous universal mind can see things and operate, in “Vision of the Anointed”. Sowell wrote “This reasoning presupposes that there is some identifiable group of decision makers — you — who have such cosmic control that this question can be meaningfully addressed to them.” But Sowell then goes on to imagine that a collective mind of local voters has a vantage point superior to federal judges and juries and trials — through some unspecified process — to regulate individual actions of local police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
(Which information and decision seems to often coincide with what Sowell personally knows and wants as a remote observer. They pretend some universal mind has a perception of justice and finality which prosecutors are representing, when prosecutors are just representing their own myopic whims and their backroom clique.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
b. Sowell’s Local Knowledge Rather than Information Advantage<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell considers the information advantage of local managers over central planners in the USSR not as a daily information problem, such as stopping serving hamburgers when the price of beef goes up and then starting when it goes down, but an expertise problem that people who have run a restaurant for years learn the price of hamburgers. Sowell completely misses Hayek’s point. You don’t need to be an expert to serve chicken when beef prices go up. Any Democrat Congressman or federal judge could figure this out. You just need to be there at the junction of customer and supplier (and to benefit from the choice).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Sowell plays this shell game, switching fluidly back and forth between knowledge and information. To use the fact that Congressmen don’t know local case details, and judges don’t know local crime areas, to generally call them idiots for not being Sowell’s virtuous yokels. And then do a quick switcheroo of what they’re idiots about and get it backwards, by saying that legislation lacks knowledge or incentives, and courts lack information. (While pretending local prosecutors personally lose from locking up the innocent, resulting vaguely from geographic proximity.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell romanticizes this “expert knowledge” that if beef prices go up a restaurant owner should sell pork, to say a non sequitur “you liberal elites in your ivory tower have never run a business or walked down a street in a bad neighborhood”. Even though any Congressman or federal judge could make the same obvious choice between products at different prices. Because in fact it’s the case or instance information that’s being used by the local actor, and which is scarce and local. Where only police and courts and defendants, and restaurant suppliers, owners, and customers — not voters, not Sowell’s virtuous torch mob in the town square or local church congregation — know the information in the case or instance upon which each transaction-decision is made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that police must go to courts, and courts to police and defendants, to get feedback from their customers. The way pig farmers must go to commodity traders who go to restaurants as middlemen, to get information on what to do each day in each specific case. Where the information coming from each node is the information going into that node, combined with the expert knowledge. And the macro pattern can’t be fully understood at the local vantage point, or viewed from the vantage point of any collective mind of voters. Where most legislators in their own lifetimes, touch only a tiny part of the elephant in the dark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell admits local voters don’t know what restaurant managers are doing or should do, but know what cops are doing and should do, despite the knowledge and information being opaque (and voluminous) in both domains. Because Sowell thinks voters have “knowledge” of criminal justice (and perhaps even monetary theory), but not French cooking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell perverts his logic the whole way from distributed decision-making to communism, with his simple trick of replacing and conflating information with “knowledge”. So that a restaurant owner has knowledge of the general price of beef, and voters have knowledge of local crime. Even though only the restaurant owner knows the price of beef on a given day or a specific customer’s order, the same as only police know the facts of a particular case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And only law knows the long-term profit to society of punishments, and which criminal processes can create a decision-maker to serve that profit. Which processes are the only way for police to know what their customers prefer to eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
c. Glossing over the Costly Path from Knowledge to Conveying Incentives as Prices and Laws<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell conflates knowledge with incentives to make good decisions in each case, which incentives actually come from prices and from laws in judicial procedures. Sowell imagines local administrators who have local knowledge, then only need discretion to do what they know is right (like “ordinary Germans”). Rather than needing price and law penalties for doing what they think is right. Because some vague social influence, or being chosen by voters for their innate virtuous nature, makes government employees virtuous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas in reality, a farmer’s local land knowledge will go to waste if he plants flowers rather than wheat because he likes them and no price forces him to do otherwise. And government employees (and their backroom friends), will serve their own agenda, absent law in costly formal procedures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell blurs over how this supposed wisdom and virtue of voters, become incentives of police in individual traffic stops, if not through courts. A cop has some expertise, the same way a baker may in theory know how to make good bread. But the baker is not going not going to make good bread or anything customers want, unless some external incentive such as prices forces him to do so. Just as neither police nor anyone else has much personal incentive to figure out who is guilty or innocent, and to not give too great or too small a penalty for it. Except that incentives codified in law are conveyed and enforced through formal court processes required by law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell never mentions how local prosecutors and judges are supposed to become experts at figuring out who’s innocent, when they serve no clientele by producing this information, and can’t be sued. They don’t get any reward from calling the sheriff from their same political party a liar. (Especially not after their judge friends have selectively immunized local publishers, to only publish falsehoods in proportion as they glorify police in arrests).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The prosecutor, judge, sheriff, and local publisher, are all rewarded by a local community that wants witch trials and concentration camps. So that the history of law controlled by the discretion of local officers, has been contriving fake witnesses. Whose reliability is not allowed to be confronted honestly in front of juries. If you insult the magistrate as a coercer of lies, you become the next accused witch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While defense lawyers get paid for plea bargains, and for colluding in coercing such false testimony as is politically expedient. Lawyers are not rewarded for going to trial and calling local government officials liars, and thereby representing the law on behalf of society. Lawyers are rewarded for getting their clients to swear in court that the sheriff is right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Sowell wouldn’t know all that. Because he’s an academic who’s never spent a day in a courtroom. And lawyers don’t write what they know in books for Sowell to read, because judges and The Bar would punish them for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The problem isn’t whether voters are virtuous or not. It’s that courts and competing businesses are needed to make sure executives apply voters’ preferences, rather than the preferences or the agenda of the administrator who makes the decision, to local case-specific information. While voters are too busy doing something else to watch what police and businesses are doing, or try to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The wisdom is not that cops know case facts and what punishments should be, based on personal experience and oral tradition. The wisdom is that cops must be regulated to enforce legislation using formal process in courts, contrary to cops’ (and voters’) own values and beliefs (which are often violent and myopic). And incentivized. So that we won’t “lack trousers” as Engels said in Marx’s “Poverty of Philosophy”, while potential trouser-makers instead flood the prisons and protests, and hate and fear their nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if Marxists like Sowell and Thomas tell voters no, it’s up to voters to supervise cops using direct democracy, voters will quickly discard 1,000 years of tradition in pursuit of a mirage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
d. Informal Knowledge of Local Voters versus Legislation<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell conflates between geographic proximity and information advantage. As if the information-processing capacity of the human mind expands with population density. Disregarding that neighboring businesses have different information, and the population of Florida is larger than the British empire at the time of the Founding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Local courts are local measured in miles. But they’re close as a practical matter — socially close — only to cops and the lawyer’s clique. And they’re a thousand miles from most voters who don’t know or care. Using Dunbar’s number, local courts are socially more distant than a trial “beyond Seas” at the time of the Declaration of Independence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell noted steel production can be remotely supervised by government central planners, because it has simple standardized inputs and outputs that can be better monitored from a distance (short lists of standard information), revealing the manager’s contribution. Sowell compares this to French restaurants which do unique things, which Sowell characterizes more as needing general locale expertise, rather than moment-to-moment local prices and information. This is then basically used to say remote federal courts can’t enforce the Constitution, because federal laws are wrong for not being local, and it’s too costly for courts to look at what police are doing in every case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell then implies that crime and human nature are vastly different from Cleveland to Saginaw, the same way mines or farmland or tastes in food are different. So that federal law is as futile as USSR central planning. Never mind that courts are needed to apply any knowledge to case information, regardless whether it’s local or national, the same way businesses are needed. (Prosecutors alone don’t personally care.) And the only way to convey that knowledge to courts is detailed written legislation, not a 51% election victory every four years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then based on nothing more than geographic not social proximity, Sowell is able to say like Justice Gorsuch in City of Grants Pass, that some collective mind of voters (but not judges or legislation) possesses the knowledge. Based on vague collective social processes not needing courts and law, though not using prices either. Rather using local expertise called “knowledge”, rather than case or transaction-specific “information”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And even though no voter knows his personal benefit or cost, or society’s, from police harming a stranger on the other side of town. Even if every voter knew the case facts, never mind that he doesn’t and can’t. Because no voter has the personal experience of being a civilization. The historical experience of which civilization, is conserved in legislation not local oral tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell even quotes Burke calling this established wisdom the “bank and capital of nations and of ages”. But then goes on to suggest local voters as a general rule, are wiser than federal courts enforcing ancient legislation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the benefits from not harming strangers without regard to costs, can’t be judged reliably from the vantage point of an individual in his lifetime. And isolated groups who are wrong or reckless about these things, are insulated by the costs of their recklessness being externally dispersed. (Without courts, there’s not even a useful record of their folly.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that relying on his own wisdom or “common sense”, the average voter (“the man on the Clapham omnibus”) would be unlikely to think we need jury trials any more than he thinks we need private businesses. And relying on his own virtue, the typical voter might prefer that most strangers simply didn’t exist. Civilization wasn’t built to enforce instinctive human or tribal impulses, but to mitigate and protect itself from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The benefits of doing a good job in the criminal-justice decision are so diffuse and long-term, that the preferences have to be represented in law. So the cop’s customer is not the whims of a local torch mob in a few cases, it’s the law that conserves the civilization, in every case. The court is where the cop talks to this customer, the civilization. And the cop’s harm-target, not the local voter — the criminal “suspect” — is delegated to represent the interests of civilization as the customer (its knowledge in legislation), to regulate the cop in court. (Despite no defense lawyer getting paid in proportion as he does this.) But all this is lost, if you imagine a geographically-localized collective mind knows what to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
e. Collective Mind Imagined to be More Efficient than Judicial Process<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell implies the reason we need private businesses isn’t because it’s efficient to delegate the task of applying the preferences of strangers upon local information, to multiple distributed decision-makers with specified domains. Not because there’s so much information to process and apply domain knowledge to, that it’s best to put one individual at each vantage point or information stream, to cover as many vantage points as possible, to non-redundantly process as much daily local information as possible. Using other delegated individuals at the same vantage point, to monitor and penalize with prices and laws, to make sure they process on behalf of the established preferences of strangers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rather, Sowell argues decision tasks should be given to whomever has wisdom or experience to know general patterns. Which Sowell often sees as a group or a faction, exerting conscious social influence, such as through elections. Thus requiring more people to participate in processing each information stream — the conscience of the community, like peer review. Even if this means it takes 10,000 people to make a decision once a year instead of 1 person making 10 decisions a day, so that we can only process one zillionth the information. Sowell’s model ends up able to process less information by committee, the problem the USSR economy and Continental Congress faced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell glosses over this inefficiency, when it takes so many people to process the information of a single case instance, when they apply their values to the case facts using unspecified social dynamics. And ends up thinking delegates and monitors such as courts are costly and corrupting, when they are a practical necessity just based on the workload of the committee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell doesn’t argue any practical details of how direct democracy can function as a regulatory information system on the actual caseload. And states today have bigger populations than the entire British empire at the Founding. But Sowell just glosses over that by considering local voters to be a single mind with local expertise. That can supervise police what to do on each transaction, even though they can’t supervise bakers what to do in each transaction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
f. Bias in Selecting Knowledge Targets<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because the universal mind doesn’t exist or have a specific physical form requiring details of who has what information, Sowell’s “knowledge” can be plugged in to make decisions anywhere that people can’t directly observe what’s going on. To say “local knowledge” will take care of it, as spontaneously as local businesses respond to prices.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell is thereby able to insert a collective mind anywhere that prices aren’t used, in all non-cash transactions and harms. To pretend that the person Sowell wants to make the decision, is virtuous. Not because he is regulated by prices and laws in how he responds to information, but regulated by knowledge (expertise).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Sowell generally just applies collective “knowledge” to argue people he doesn’t like should have power taken away from them. Like saying government schools don’t respond to special circumstances like gifted students, and parents are more virtuous. Despite government schools existing because most parents will no more take the time to educate their own children, than to find out the facts of a single criminal case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell believes some students are too unique for government schools. And that some unnamed utopian actor not only has this information, but has some special wisdom, and incentive to educate gifted children for the benefit of society that government schools don’t have. So that Sowell is able to randomly romanticize the wisdom of the common man over evil government institutions (other than police, like Justice Thomas). Even though most parents in Florida did zilch to educate their own children when schools were closed during the COVID pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell plugs in a collective mind in place of prices to increase virtue, which not even Marx could get away with. Sowell plugs in a collective mind in place of prices — rather than the actual information-processing domains of due process — when switching from commerce to criminal law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell could probably apply his utopian collective-mind regulation using “knowledge”, to anything which doesn’t involve prices, or which involves laws rather than prices. But he generally only plugs it in to get where he wants to go, which is police doing whatever they want based on some imagined utopian regulation by voters in direct democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
While similarly corrupt, insular local executive-branch administrators in fields other than criminal-justice, could just as quickly become the targets of Sowell’s criticism. For being aloof and not facing “feedback”. By Sowell saying their collective mind doesn’t have the virtue and wisdom called “knowledge”. Even if they actually have something Sowell’s preferred collective mind or voter faction doesn’t have, the case-instance information-stream relevant to their domain. (Like the FDA or Federal Reserve.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the reason why, is because what voters want local police to do, has the greatest difference from what the wisdom of civilization stored in legislation would tell them to do. Local voters want witch trials and concentration camps. Crime and human nature are not much different in two different states, that federal law should be wrong (on rights and process). Sowell just believes that some kind of oral tradition is superior to written legislation and (“designed”) formal process enforced by federal courts (“the collective wisdom the American people possess” City of Grants Pass).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like Justice Thomas, Sowell jumps between states and federal government and courts and “the people”, to just plug in a collective mind wherever he needs, to get the logical result he wants. (While Sowell claims like Thomas that he is protecting individual freedom against communism or something.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Voters are no more experts on jury trials (or plea bargains) than on monetary theory to regulate the Federal Reserve. But somehow of all things, Sowell is nevertheless confident that prosecutors and voters can sort out who is innocent almost perfectly (“the non-existent needle in the ever-larger haystack”), much better than commodity traders can figure out when they are going to go broke. So that jury trials and appellate review are scarcely needed, before even getting to whether they are cost-justified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tulip prices can get pretty hyped up. But I have never heard of anybody being dunked to change the price of corn, and neither has Sowell. But Sowell is quite confident of his general position on criminal guilt not from rigorous study, but based on gossip. There is only one profession where lies are not simply generated through normal social processes, but which adds an assembly line to mass-produce lies through coercion. For the specific purpose to prevent formal process improving on social process. At the same time as Sowell rails against price fixing other than in criminal guilt, when government doesn’t like the outcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The reason we need federal appeals courts, is not because states with millions of people lack the raw capability. It’s to find the first person with an incentive both to bother and to be honest. In other words, to operate outside and independent of the social cartoon, which people like Sowell and Justice Thomas have designed local criminal processes to serve. Sowell and Thomas think the evolution of society stopped conveniently at the exact moment before legislators “designed” appeals courts, freezing us in common law (and witch trials).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
g. Collective Mind Makes Sowell Overweight Knowledge versus Information-Processing<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The evolution or accumulation of knowledge, is an inevitable byproduct of processing information (exposure to repeating patterns over time). Given potatoes and enough time, you’ll eventually stumble on how to make french fries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since knowledge is the repeating patterns in information, knowledge is smaller than information. Put differently, I can learn how to make french fries in one day. And then do it eight hours a day for a year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
More importantly, the special knowledge of how to make French fries can be transmitted to me in a day. But all the information that knowledge will be applied to, from customer orders to visual information on how brown each batch is and the daily locations of bags of frozen fries, cannot be transmitted to me in a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So we see that the problem of processing information — producing and transmitting it to apply knowledge to — is bigger than the problem of transmitting knowledge. So the design of our system is not to develop and transmit knowledge by sending clueless people into unique kitchens. It is to scale information-processing. By transmitting the knowledge of how to make fries to five people in one day in one training session. So that they can process five simultaneous information streams at five vantage points (fry stations).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other problem our system has to solve, is conveying the incentive to the people at those vantage points to actually apply the knowledge. Meaning to make fries all day, rather than sitting and eating them. We have to monitor them every day, and reward them for making fries and penalize them for not making fries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We could add the final problem of evolving the knowledge system, which in this case is evolving how a McDonalds works. So the work of our system will be mostly 1) transmitting information, followed by 2) transmitting incentives, and with a minor job of 3) occasionally transmitting knowledge to new employees. Plus 4) replicating the evolved knowledge system one time by building a new McDonalds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell in “Conflict of Visions” has this weird way of always thinking from a single abstract vantage point at a time (not an individual human boundary). And looking from the eyes of God at a spectrum of vantage points, each with totally unique experience or pattern knowledge. The only sort of distinction Sowell adds to the collective mind, is that every abstract (not individual) vantage point has a completely unique experience (which isn’t true, it’s mostly standard patterns like two fry stations, even on the opposite side of the world).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell doesn’t even think about processing the information stream inside which the patterns repeat, as a separate problem. So when Sowell actually advocates or reasons upon system design, he overweights allocation of decision domains to knowledge not processing, or to overlap with the same location or sphere where the spontaneous local human experience meaning pattern knowledge developed (and therefore is presumed to still be located).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that Sowell would say the job of making french fries, should go to the one guy who found himself in the unique situation of being in a kitchen with potatoes, and figured out how to do it. And nobody else on Earth can ever know what that person knows. Sowell therefore underweights to using multiple vantage points with the same knowledge, to process as much information as possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But this unique local experience isn’t projected by Sowell, onto individuals or experts in fields. It’s projected onto collectives of multiple common men with shared experience (“decision-making units”). To say their collective mind is smarter than experts. As if knowledge itself is difficult to transmit outside a collective, despite being freely shared inside it. So that knowledge is tied like a ghost, to some unique vague group or location. (Sowell thinks of intellectual movements, not trade schools.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell then conflates experience with incentives at the same (vague) vantage point. Like a person (or group) who knows it rains every day at 4:00 then has an incentive to go inside at 3:59. Sowell just thinks more of people who experience things, as obtaining an incentive to not make the same mistakes twice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And because Sowell tries to allocate the decision-maker to overlap with the sphere of the knowledge learned, and doesn’t think of or underweights that the problem is using parallel information processors applying the same knowledge at multiple vantage points, and tends to think of incentives as coming from past experience, Sowell also underweights the problem of transmitting incentives to different vantage points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell therefore wants to give decisions to one experienced group, not to multiple incentivized individuals at private vantage points. To Sowell’s mind, it’s easier to match the sphere of decision-making to the sphere of knowledge than it really is. When in reality they can only be in the same place if it’s multiple people in a collective mind. Sowell blurs individual human vantage points when convenient. And never thinks of transmitting the sphere of knowledge to multiple (socially or geographically remote) parallel decision-making vantage points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So Sowell sees the relative problems as 1) knowledge (including evolved system design), but not so much 2) transmitting incentives, and least of all 3) processing information in which the patterns repeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell basically only diverges from the single-mind hallucination, with the modification that there are multiple separate (and completely unique) experiences. Which is true in the small details. But most of the work of the physical world is information processing done on the parts of that experience that are recurring patterns. (Little of that work can be done collectively by groups.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then in criminal justice, Sowell projects this unique vantage onto multiple people who share it collectively, the local community. Who have shared experience (virtues) and abundant cheap information, when it comes to crime and punishment. Despite this being 30 million people not 30.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell is right that knowledge does evolve spontaneously. You can never guess when you are about to discover how to make french fries. But scaling up to use the same knowledge to process information at multiple vantage points is very much a design. As is intentionally replicating knowledge systems like a McDonalds franchise, once you see they work. So no, we don’t have to start from scratch evolving a spontaneous social system to deal with criminals in every city. And yes, federal courts can tell them to enforce criminal process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell somehow manages to even see prices as past experience (“Knowledge as conceived in the constrained vision is predominantly experience — transmitted socially in largely inarticulate forms, from prices\u2026”). And is only dragged to recognizing the necessity of money prices to create incentives in commerce. But still sees the decision-maker and consumer being more a single overlapping entity in criminal-justice. So that their incentive to get it right is that they eat their own food.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell basically says the only incentive people can have (outside prices and cash profit) — the only one in government at least — is if they eat their own food. Which requires voters, and the people who make their food, all be a part of a single collective mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And Sowell thinks that this basically happens automatically — it evolves. In local communities without needing your meddling. Without needing to specify some complex external incentive-transmission network. Without needing federal courts, in other words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell goes further, to basically assert that it’s impossible to convey incentives to “experts”. Never mind that the Administrative Procedure Act lets people sue if they are harmed by government “experts” violating the legal boundaries of their assigned discretion. People like Sowell say a lawsuit can’t provide feedback, it has to be voters electing a common man like the sheriff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So to Sowell, experience, knowledge, information, and incentives, are all in basically the same place. Which is the single mind of local voters and police, aka “the unitary executive”. Whereas in reality, the legal system solves the problem that information, knowledge, and incentives, are all in different places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But what we begin to understand, is that Sowell’s entire game is not economic analysis and design. Not so much an analysis of the experience of the common man, like Marx or Hayek. It’s more just a war on competing academics and intellectuals. Where Sowell shares the collective-mind hallucination, and says it’s a vague blob of unique experience-knowledge, a snowflake, which is smarter than any evil government expert or intellectual or judge or court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The challenge of society is using knowledge on a fire hose of information, not evolving knowledge or systems to do it. Put differently, it’s scaling the use of knowledge into parallel processing of as much information as possible. Everybody wants to scale up his business. Achieving this scale is the central day-to-day problem of most industries and economies. But not to Sowell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell knows local businesses know things that he doesn’t, whether about bricklaying or babysitting. He knows they have “domain knowledge”. The same as a college professor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Sowell has never done what they do all day. Not any more than he has probably traded commodities or anything else. Sowell sees their knowledge is different from his, but doesn’t see the real difference, their daily information the knowledge is applied to. So Sowell doesn’t think about what they have that college professor’s don’t have, which is Hayek’s daily highly-localized private information stream to apply their knowledge to. Sowell doesn’t see their job of applying knowledge to daily information is different from what intellectuals do, what he does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell really may have never imagined what it’s like to do a repetitive job processing information each day. He doesn’t know or care what most people do, they don’t read his books. They are just cartoon props portrayed in his little intellectual circus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell views local decision-makers more like academics who learn about a subject, not processors applying simple rules to a constant stream of random information. Where the power comes from the details of the information, not from the simple wisdom applied to it over and over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas in reality a complete idiot could decide whom to give sheep to, his first day on the job as a Sumerian clerk, without any domain experience. Just by having the information and following the law. Where no universal mind of “the community” would even know whom he was giving sheep to. Even a doctor imitates things from books not his own experience, and his main contribution is doing the processing on case-specific information. In private, but with local monitors also operating independent of any collective mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But if information is free inside the group, and people are virtuous not needing external signals from unknowable reasons in legislation, because local social processes can see everything they are doing and man can see the consequences of his actions, then Sowell thinks all decisions can be made by local experts (specialists) under social regulation by a local collective mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under Sowell’s model the Sumerians would not have needed to invent writing, because local social groups would know how many sheep each person should get. The way running a French restaurant or running for mayor, doesn’t need much writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And the Stela of Hammurabi would be unnecessary. Because the actual most beneficial punishments would be passed on by oral tradition through some spontaneous social process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Understand that Sowell’s knowledge group, that never processes information, that never copies its knowledge to another group, is just Sowell thinking about a competing intellectual. Sowell’s distorting obsession with abstract knowledge, is because he’s not commenting on society, he’s attacking fellow intellectuals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
h. Sowell Just A Communist Agitator Against Competing Intellectuals<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell says in “Knowledge and Decisions” that human behavior is not about replacing the bad guys with the good guys, but created by the incentive-structures built into institutional processes in which those people operate (“To ignore the specific nature of the decision-making units is to expect improvement by trying to substitute ‘the good guys’ for ‘the bad guys'”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell then instantly advocates replacing evil leftist academics with good-guy local voters. And replacing bad-guy federal courts using a specific process, with good-guy local police using a vague social process. Not specifying the local institutional process but through some cloudy social magic that they will do good because they will suffer if they do bad. With the “specific nature” of that process presumably being nothing more than geographic proximity (with otherwise unbounded social capacity), not any specific institutional topology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell makes the error of assuming people’s information-processing capacity expands in proportion to the population around them. By blurring voluminous information into single knowledge, held in some unspecified location even as society and knowledge multiply and subdivide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What Sowell is trying to do is not go from remote to local knowledge, or promote the development of expertise. It’s to replace the structured process of courts and legislation, with a collective mind. Sowell is a luddite, not an economist. He is celebrated as an economist, by luddites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell romanticizes that local social groups are so much more wise and virtuous than formal knowledge institutions like universities, that pattern knowledge is discovered and passed on automatically in some unspecified way. By local rubes, preachers, and noble factory workers, not needing legal institutions and rigid networks of middlemen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Federalist” today equals “federal government is the bad guy, California government is the good guy”. Never mind both Cuba and Sparta are smaller than California, and neither is a utopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then every group member who has this free spontaneous pattern knowledge, also has all the daily case-instance information to apply it to, automatically for free (whether through gossip, local papers 10 inches thick, or simply trusting demagogues). And can communicate the details of his decision to executive-branch employees. And thereby regulate everything from police to the FCC to the FDA to the Federal Reserve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like Justice Thomas, Sowell views any decision not made by academics or Washington or law in courts as more virtuous. Not because they are better at processing voluminous information streams which they are not, but because of “knowledge”. In effect, the supposed Christian morals of the noble factory worker versus legislation, making it justified to subvert courts and execute the imagined virtuous will of the local mob.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They view this imagined collective decision-making by local voters as decentralized and anti-communist, just because it’s not enforced by federal judges. Despite local judicial circuits being almost as large as the entire US population when the Constitution was ratified. So that sending a case to the Florida Supreme Court is like sending a colonial case to India.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell is not promoting any kind of functional process or institutions other than Marxism, in his efforts to take status away from leftist academics and give it to people he thinks have a better religion. Sowell is himself a communist academic. Hayek observed this, that the socialists, communists, and fascists, all share common underlying assumptions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dr. Sowell, like Justice Thomas, is just another Marxist on a revenge tour against competing academics, costuming it as some defense of freedom against communism. Sowell hallucinates or postulates a collective mind with great capacity for virtue. Then using the same logic as people who attack private business and everything else, Sowell uses comparisons of actual decision-makers to this non-existent utopia, to portray actual decision makers as comparatively benighted and evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
XI. Sowell Wrong about Narrow Location of Cartoon in Broader Reality<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In “Vision of the Anointed”, Sowell talks about people who are blinded by perceptions of themselves (their role in a socially-organized society) as cartoon superheroes saving the world (“not simply a vision of the world and its functioning in a causal sense, but is also a vision of themselves and of their moral role in that world.”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Sowell somehow thinks this is only vain Democrat politicians, and exempts virtuous common people. Sowell assumes that ordinary people in the street and laborers and local sheriffs don’t think about things this exact same way. Perhaps from Sowell not seeing that side of the relationship on TV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell does this even though he celebrates Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”, which characterizes vain common men as wishing to participate in a cartoon of the broader world. Sowell still assumes the ordinary state of the common man is not to imagine a cartoon of the world around him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It may be that a lot of common laborers don’t pay attention to or even think about the world beyond their own stove. But the moment they do, they step into a cartoon the same as everyone else. The moment Sowell’s virtuous common man stops “minding his own business” and tries to think about the world around him, he instantly thinks about a fake cartoon in which he participates. It may just be that he rarely talks to Sowell as a third party, about his relationship with the cartoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell characterizes Democrat politicians and popular thought leaders as living in this cartoon and trying to sell it to people. But this cartoon doesn’t exist in the mind of the politician, it exists in the minds of his audience. The cartoon is created in the minds of the people they sell it to, whether the politicians themselves actually perceive it or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A cop planting drugs in a car knows no collective mind can see him. A crooked prosecutor may not imagine there is a “collective will” that can see and regulate him. They may both lie that they think there is a collective will monitoring them, as a scheme to get away with things. Both may only claim they represent the nonexistent “collective will”, as part of a scheme to do whatever they want.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But it’s still necessary for their crimes to be enabled by others hallucinating there is some collective will, which they gullibly imagine the crooked cop prosecutor are wired into. Somewhere in the chain of logic, in the political support necessary to enable their lie, is an incorrect perception of information cost and vantage points.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This cartoon was not invented by leftists in the 1700’s, as Dr. Sowell suggests. This cartoon always existed. What happened in the 1700’s, is societies became so large and complex, that their divergence from the cartoon and people wanting the cartoon became a problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This cartoon is not created by evil intellectuals, as suggested by Sowell. Rather ordinary people seek out and tune into garbage to fill the cartoon in their minds. And long after the time in history when a complex society no longer remotely fits it. It’s the common man that keeps the cartoon alive, and makes stars out of hero participants in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Local policing becomes less about influencing human behavior and more about presenting a false cartoon, the less it is regulated in court and the more it is regulated socially. Like many government programs, it’s a machine cranking out populations who will never be Supreme Court justices. And whose productive contribution to society is significantly reduced by government. Because social regulation of benefit is in effect no regulation, but allows politicians to throw up a mirage of benefit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sowell’s imagined rational participation in direct democracy regulating the sheriff in a county of 400,000 people doesn’t exist. Local voters who participate in this virtuous regulation of police will be no different from Sowell’s vain Democrat politicians saving the world from evil: Forever virtuous and forever wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is not an exaggeration. In Brevard County, it was standard practice for years to use a fake dog tracker John Preston to put on a theater of solving crimes and send people to prison. Which dog could tell you who solved a crime years later and even under water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I personally watched that same judicial circuit give two people life in prison for events that never took place, that were socially invented by people who weren’t witnesses. Which narrative contradicts a mountain of physical evidence. And where it’s easy to show that 17 people committed perjury to construct the fake cartoon (but you will only go broke and make enemies doing so).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
XII. Majorities Don’t Monitor Expertise, Instances, Violations, or Networks of Monitors<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What you know about another person’s behavior is an average. This works pretty well because the world is a repetition of patterns; people wake up and do the same things every day, as much as one car or one planet is similar to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But even though people may buy the same coffee from the same retailer every day, they don’t buy a 10-coffee package, they wait in line every day. People who pay for cups of coffee one-at-a-time monitor every bad cup of coffee individually, and catch every exception. People who vote for prosecutors do not. When you pay for things consumed by other people — like when you pay to educate other people’s children — you monitor averages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The less socially-intimate you are with someone, the more your knowledge of his behavior becomes an average of only the data points he chooses to show you. And the less you share a vantage point with him, the harder it becomes to separate out the product of his own behavior, and random events from the world around him. An employee who comes out of a diamond mine with no diamonds may be a great miner in an exhausted mine, or may be pocketing all the diamonds for himself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This works fine when there are two sandwich shops facing the same rent and meat prices, so that you know the one charging twice as much for a sandwich should be fired. Regardless of the reason, whether he is making a huge profit or just bad at making sandwiches. This doesn’t work as well when there is only one prosecutor, and you don’t get to directly eat his product. You can only look at averages, or hire someone to see if he is cheating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An individual, a torch mob, and a government prosecutor, can all reduce crime and obtain revenge. And can increase the number of people who are in prison rather than out making sandwiches. And can increase the number of people who see no point in trying to make tacos when they lack protection against the sandwich-makers. And who are instead on a life mission to destroy the sandwich-makers, who send police to harass them all the time, in a cycle of revenge and destruction rather than food-making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However it’s decided to optimize these tradeoffs — crime reduction versus lack-of-security for people without political connections and revenge cycles — requires monitoring some small part of the behavior of police and prosecutors which you can see. To make sure they are implementing the designed scheme. (Nations where police have more discretionary leeway generally have more crime, as police doing whatever they want are corrupted to corrupt agendas.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Making the employee wear a body camera doesn’t work, because there is no “you” who can look over his shoulder every second of the day. And he can also do things out of view. So what is needed is an exception-catching system; not the number of diamonds he brings out of the mine, but whether he occasionally puts diamonds in his pockets. And then a large enough penalty for the one time he is caught.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A penalty for one bad event is not as costly as a constant behavior monitor, but more like a random drug test. This holds for judges also. Appellate courts have the capacity to review narrowed-down legal disputes. But if judges lie to obscure what those disputes are and make review impossible — if they put on a fake theater for the body camera using superficial reasons that pass as law — they need a penalty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This exception-catching cannot be accomplished by a 51% vote of local citizens, most of whom will never enter the mine or meet the miner. So that never more than 1% of citizens would be aware of any one violation. Even as they all shout in the town square that there are 1,000’s of exceptions, and call each other liars. And even if 51% of voters knew about a particular exception, they might like a cop burning down an unpopular business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A pocket-searching employee-monitor can himself be corrupted with stolen diamonds. And those you hire to monitor the monitors will lie that diamonds are being stolen when they are not. To where all the profit goes to the people on-site, making remote monitoring, investment and ownership impossible. Just as every lawyer can benefit from fixing court cases in quid pro quos, rather than powerlessly having the law enforced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But then nobody outside will care if these on-location insiders exist or not, and will destroy and plunder them. (Which is beyond the foresight of any individual insider to care about.) Such systems cannot be fixed by conscious supervision, but destruction can fix them through natural selection. Eventually a scheme of monitors and incentives and penalties emerges by accident, which is profitable enough, to enough outsiders who want to protect it, that it becomes stable. Then it’s replicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
No pattern of 51% majority elections can achieve this task of a detailed information-processing network, to optimize the behavior of government. Rather some sorts of laws have to conserve its design, and protect it against human reason that doesn’t see its usefulness. People have to protect laws and systems that emerged by accident, and which they can’t understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not even that voters perceive obfuscated averages manufactured as theater. It’s that they perceive almost nothing beyond their own stove. Most voters have no idea what most government employees are doing most of the time. They don’t even know there is a Federal Reserve or FTC, much less having an abstract idea what it does or needs to. Not even a demagogue can get the average voter to imagine there is a collective mind controlling such decisions or needs to be. Under the supervision of voters, all the functions of less prominent government offices would turn into performative cartoons, would be corrupted to insiders, or would cease to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When some people exploit the hallucinations of others to say this can be fixed by electing their prosecutor every few years, their goal is to protect the corrupt insider network in the short term. To create a theater that voters can fix and regulate things. Leading to war and poverty in the long term. Gradually everyone hates their government and their nation. But they are told they must try to fix it by chasing the mirage of direct democracy. Which just leads to more discontent and desire for revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Direct democracy (Gorsuch’s “chain of dependence”) leads to disappointment and more democracy, to forming factions to shout common interests, and finally to the great leader and the People’s Republic. When what they need is an opaque network of exception-catchers. To conserve the naturally-selected topology. Not direct supervision by the reasoning of a single mind, which is made up as the least common denominator not the sum, of multiple human minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Domain decision-makers don’t apply expertise to averages, they process instances which monitors can’t perfectly observe. And they attempt to insert their own agenda without monitors knowing. By pocketing a few big diamonds here and there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So you have to have specifically people whom they harm, raise exceptions to the rules for compliance examination. By petitioning courts to penalize those exceptions, for a bounty. You don’t monitor every detail of a delegate’s behavior. Rather, people on-site who are selected and appointed by a separate\/independent process, try to sometimes catch behavior when it goes outside of a certain boundary. And then have a large penalty, rather than a large daily monitoring cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whereas a remote monitor can rarely even see the average of the instance outputs, at diffuse locations. And requiring a vote of 51% of those remote monitors, filters out and loses any exceptions a few of them can see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s where we are today, in a nation that millions of people perceive as unresponsive, threatening, or just completely useless to them. And the people to whom the nation is useful — the insiders in various institutions — everyone wants to destroy them. Because they have been told they can destroy them by voting, but it never works. Voting just installs different insiders putting on a theater of averages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
XIII. The People’s Republic becomes a False Cartoon<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The physical world cannot be constructed of averages or summaries. It needs individual human actions to fill in the details. When the reasoner and the observer are two different people, the first person presents a cartoon of his activity to the second. By choosing to leave out some data points, the average diverges from reality to become a false cartoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Social processes form common perceptions, that generally capture society as a whole. There evolves a divergence between the perceptions of a collective mind, and reality. A society cannot see a full-detail reflection of itself, but a common simplification, a cartoon built from the false theater of all the local actors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that in the USSR without a process to monitor and regulate every single event, the abstract nature of the event was completely changed, even as it appeared the same to the monitor. So that the idea of there being a car manufacturer in the US versus the USSR was as different as a jury trial and a plea bargain are different. Despite the result appearing similar to the “collective” of remote observers. Where they see raw materials and experts going in, and products coming out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every person’s activity is the sum of millions of events. The only way to determine their average activity, is by adding every single event without leaving any out. The average is the product of his action, plus random external events. Making it difficult to separate out and weigh the merits of the local actor upon the physical world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The object of monitoring — of social coordination — is to filter out and give feedback to the quality of individual contributions, on top of this background noise. But most actors leave out the exceptions, the outliers. Because the details of individual events were not monitored and regulated, only the abstraction is. So the task of monitoring is to create an exception or violation-catching machine. Not an average-monitor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Just as every car and every planet looks pretty much the same, people do the same thing every day. So monitoring is about catching divergences. Or more specifically divergent behavior, camouflaged within random variations in external inputs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A 51% vote of whether football games should be at noon or 3:00 discards information. When you make a rule of discarding information — when you do this intentionally by using 51% votes rather than violation-catchers — your averages are intentionally designed to be a fake cartoon enabling local corruption. Such as by asking 51% of voters what happened in 10,000 police interactions, while rejecting robust feedback on exceptions as “costly” (using “immunity”).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you miss some events the average is wrong, and the abstraction no longer matches the reality. Judicial immunity is a device for corrupt insiders to create a cartoon. By asserting that monitoring details to catch corruption is too costly, when such details are monitored socially by a collective mind. Designed to produce a false cartoon by the time the perception reaches 51% of people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When two people have different agendas, everything person A does fits person A’s agenda, but he only shows person B the subset of things that fit person B’s agenda. So person B’s cartoon abstraction of what person A is doing, is incorrect. And you end up with a situation where most of the things that cops and politicians say are lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When individuals can publish cartoons of their activity, society becomes a fake mirage. Which is essentially what everything from plea bargains to cases like Ortega v. Post-Newsweek do. They give lawyers and judges and publishers a financial incentive to promote a government-preferred cartoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Government offices become the most influential voices, and the Great Leader the loudest, in the construction of this cartoon. At sufficient size, a social system is able to produce an entire cartoon depiction of itself which is false.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In a paleolithic tribe, if one hunter spent 10 arrows every day and rarely came back with a rabbit, everyone would know it. But in the USSR, factory managers were basically able to tell central planners they had year after year of bad weather, and the central planners couldn’t say otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If a tribal elder punished children who had not misbehaved, eventually the group would figure it out. If the tribe liked punishing children who hadn’t misbehaved, the tribe would soon perish. But in a place like Brevard County Florida, they can convict the innocent and give them life in prison over and over. And over time the perceived net loss in the average person’s quality of life compared to having honest courts, will be fairly small. So that both the effect and its source will be unrecognizable to the average person, much less 51% of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The larger a society gets, the more the people who benefit — the insiders, the lawyers — are able to lie to the people who lose. Until society becomes a network of lies and the collective mind perceives a fake cartoon of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So that only a few people said the USSR “bears within it the seeds of its own decay”, while most observers were blinded to this by the rhetoric and GNP abstractions. The same way most people imagine the US criminal-justice system — designed by utopian academics as Supreme Court justices — is as productive as ever. When the people living inside it, and not wired into any benefit or status from the gravy train of corruption, can tell you it is run through with lies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because social influence can only penalize people you know closely, the only ways to fix this with strangers is prices and laws enforced in formal court processes. The people who enjoy power in US courts no more want to give it away to true facts and juries, than those with power in the USSR (e.g. party members working as corrupt factory managers) wanted to give it away to prices. So local police and prosecutors, like economic planners in the USSR, crank out a daily cartoon of their activities. While their actual activities are hidden away from the public in stacks of dusty papers filled with lies that will never be brought to light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They claim they are saving money or increasing control, but it’s a mirage. By substituting spontaneous social processes run by wolves over sheep formal court processes, they are inserting a fake-cartoon machine in place of an information-processing machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All this is enabled by people who seek direct social control through a collective mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Above the scale of a few thousand people, the perception of political democracy doesn’t produce control but a false cartoon of itself. While actual control is corrupted to competing factions of insiders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Social processes destroy secondhand information. Including by mixing it with agendas, where people tell other people things based on expecting it to produce a resulting action based on the other person’s agenda. Not to communicate information. And secondhand recipients have difficulty separating source agenda from information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A drug trial that wasn’t double-blind would produce a fake cartoon. Because the social pathways would displace the information which formal process attempted to produce and transmit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A nation perceived socially, rather than through the neural monitors of price transactions and court cases, is a fake cartoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
XIV. Beware The Collective Mind Hallucination in Information Design<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The collective mind (or “social regulation”) is like dark matter or a cosmological constant. Because it can be plugged into any unknown part of a social model to seemingly make it work. But it doesn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The purpose of writing has always been to process information, which the human mind in social processes cannot store and process. Writing enabled men to do things which are not the product of their own reason or informal social speech. To make people instead run a program like an unconscious computer, to create a result of value to someone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If your job involves writing, whether rules or information, you’re making a decision that neither voters nor any conscious mind can make. But which is made by an unconscious dedicated network, the design of which is also specified in writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Civilization advances by trial and error, without the consent of those participating, using imitation without reason, divorced from rational pursuit of instinctive impulses. People contemplate patterns not instances. But they cannot fully contemplate the patterns they are instances in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Man is always trying to reduce human action to things he can see a reason for doing, or social groups can see. And throw away information that can’t be processed this way. Law is basically rules and institutions to stop people reducing information-processing to what can be done socially. And to make people do things they consider unreasonable and don’t like. Law makes people participate in an information-processing machine. Law makes reality pass through human hands, without their brains knowing why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But people don’t see the information-processing machine, and project conscious decision-making onto its output.
And so law has to deal with not just a mathematical disagreement, but a hallucination. And one which so many people share, they don’t even realize their initial assumption could be debated. And a big part of law is attempting to secure itself against such people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Law, like The Matrix, makes people participate in something that is not the product of human reason. And attempts to lock human reason out. And takes on the greater task of trying to lock human reason out, to stop people from breaking civilization. Not because it was designed to do this. But because it evolved to do this by accident. And like an independent organism, it survives to the extent it locks human reason out, and uses their hands while it divorces action from human reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This gives men many luxuries, but deprives them of doing things and controlling the world the way their instinctive impulses want to. It gives them every luxury except conscious control and satisfaction — pillows and ice cream, while they can go running or rock-climbing and watch football — but total helplessness to shape the larger world pursuant to their own perceptions. And they still hate it and would rather fight wars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They will choose to live in a cartoon with a mirage of control, while starving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The primary goal of judges and legal academics is to reverse this evolution, and have human behavior governed by social influence rather than written preferences. To reverse the evolution of distributed decision-making using delegates and monitors, and enabled by writing to process huge quantities of information. Judges are communists trying to destroy the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Christianity instructed people to not harm strangers. I am instructing you to not hallucinate a collective mind. Don’t imagine a non-specified process will make decisions. Assign decisions to clearly-specified domains and topologies and layers of review. Monitor individual violations with local adversaries, not using 51% votes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Legislators figured this out a long time ago. But judges still live in a fantasyland catering to “the people”, and have taken over the world to destroy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The neolithic hunter-gatherer mind has largely accepted prices and private property, but they are still at war with courts, chasing a mirage of direct democracy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They are fighting a hallucinated battle against agricultural settlements, while they are trapped in an unconscious machine whose only purpose is to process information. So they choose to destroy the machine, and up not in a utopia. But as exiles sitting far from the campfires dotting the landscape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By favoring social processes, we end up as a world of exiles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A. Law as a Battle Inside a Hallucinated Cartoon Imposed on Reality I. The Deceptive Simplicity of Law Compared to physics, law seems pretty mundane. Like sitting at a restaurant, reading a menu and talking to your friend. You don’t …<\/p>\n