(1) Why no warning? In part, because every time one sends out a warning, the "civil disobdience for its own sake is my favorite hobby" crowd on a list gets a little more accustomed to hearing warnings from one, and the warnings (however serious) begin to lose their impact. In part, because by not giving a warning, we're doing what we can to set up a beneficial prisoner's dilemma situation.

The "prisoners dilemma" is a not entirely hypothetical situation sometimes offered as a rebuttal to the popular oversimplification of the "invisible hand" concept of Adama Smith ("The Wealth of Nations"), that holds that the rational pursuit of selfishness will always lead to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. (Let's note that, contrary to popular opinion, Mr.Smith never said that - note his comments on why the road system in Britain should not be privatized, while the canals could be, without detriment to the quality of the service). The usual illustration is this - two suspects are brought into a police station, about to be charged with a crime, but the police haven't been able to find enough evidence on their own to convict. So, what they do is take the suspects into seperate rooms, far enough apart that they can't communicate with each other, and make each of them an offer. "You're facing fifteen years in prison if you're convicted of this crime, but if you testify against your partner, we'll drop that to two years". If both suspects stay silent, they'll both walk out of the police station as free men. But each is left wondering if the other will crack, because if the other one talks and he doesn't, he has just lost fifteen years of his life. Honor being scarce among thieves, fear drives both to cooperate - a rational pursuit of what one perceives to be one's own self-interest leading to a decidely suboptimal outcome for all of the parties involved, except, perhaps, for the police.

In the particular case of the noncooperation on the old chi-burning list, experience there gave us good reason to suspect collusion. When the non-participation was defended, not only was it almost invariably defended on the same basis, but the defense offered used almost the exact same wording. Had we seen this occur many times, the probability of such a match occuring purely by chance, assuming that each wrote his passage purely independently of the others, would be so low as to leave little rational doubt that this would be the case. In fact, we saw this happen a few times, almost everybody continuing the stonewalling, with the few speaking up, as we said, phrasing their defense in exactly the same way. This, while not proof beyond the doubt of any reasonable man, is grounds for reasonable suspicion and a decent basis for a plan of action.

I wrote of setting up a prisoner's dilemma situation for the offedning parties, so this would suggest that what I have in mind is a method of depriving them of something that they perceive to be a good, something that they want to hold onto and should be deprived of. In the illustration above, the good that the suspects are denied is the freedom to walk out of that station. In this case, we must emphasise the difference between the perceived good - that which motivates strategic calculation, and a true good - that which defines righteous conduct. Once a healthy community is established, the benefits accrue to all, even those who had to be goaded into action, should they still be around in that community, but one has to bring people to that point, quite possibly kicking and screaming should one find oneself working in a dysfunctional cultural setting, as indeed we did, and as our successors on the new list shall as well - that of Chicago, itself.

What the perceived good is, for the purposes of this analysis, depends on who it is that is perceiving it. For those engaging in the civil disobedience game, the "good" consisted of being able to continue in violation of the unpopular "no lurking" rule without being thrown off of the list. This is where the lack of warning comes into play - if you send out a warning telling people "you now have this many days to come into compliance", then you've given them that many days to discuss the new situation and how best to deal with it, in addition to giving them a chance to rest and catch their virtual breath until that warning comes. You don't want to let them have these things, because the key to the success of the prisoner's dilemma is to be found in the thwarting of communication between those being frustrated, allowing the uncertainties each holds regarding the actions of the others to undermine the trust needed for collusion between the misbehaving parties to work.

In particular, while the list is in lassez faire mode, events might start being announced on it, some of which might not always be announced elsewhere. Getting thrown off the list may result in some inconvenience for those tossed to one side, in a purging of the non-cooperative membership. The thought you leave in the back of the minds of those playing the civil disobedeience game ,is that unless they start to cooperate (and do their part, we'd add), this could happen at any moment, and they'd never see it coming. A situation bound to raise some nagging, chronic anxiety, which may undermine resistence, especially if our spectators start wondering how their friends are holding up. Just as in the standard prisoner's dilemma, the greatest loss falls upon the one holding out last.

Those we are trying to push into doing the right thing might, perhaps on some subconscious level, understand that they have relatively little reason to trust their own allies. These guys have, after all, shown themselves willing to engage in a little scheming behind somebody's back (the moderator's), again, judging from the duplication of comments sent in from presumably independent sources. Sneaking around like that is not an action that makes anybody look particularly trustworthy, even to the other people he's sneaking around with, and if the unpleasant surprise can hit one of the offending parties in a flash? Then slight, semi-reasonable anxieties can grow into greater ones. Some may end up doing the right thing, in the end, because the right course is the easiest one, and making the two one and the same is a solid step in the direction of creating a healthier local social setting than the one that existed before, where reform is being attempted.

None of this should be taken as a prediction of inevitable success. The Political Correctness era, with its expectation that the individual will submit without resistance to even the slightest whims of the mob or become the socially outcast target of untiring malevolence, has been with us since the late 1980s and at the time of this writing, it is 2005. While the damage may not be irreversible, it is certainly deeply ingrained. What one is trying to do is sow a little dissension among a herd of sheep, so that at some point they might start to remember that they were born human. There are no guarantees that this will work, only approaches that may maximize the probability of a favorable outcome. Looking back, we see that experience is telling us that these are things that we should have tried, but even if we had, we might still have found ourselves where we are now, needing to get rid of almost our entire membership and start from scratch with new people, if they can be found.

Perhaps, though, it would be better to say that what is not inevitable is immediate success, if one is willing to work hard enough and look far enough, and can get away from the gossips. The world is a big place and there are a lot of people out there, raising the possibility that the potential number of tries may be effectively infinite, given enough persistence on the part of the one trying. Think of the experiment of rolling a pair of dice and trying to come up "boxcars" (a pair of sixes). On any given try, one's chances of success (with a pair of honest dice) are low, but if one keeps trying, eventually success in rolling those two sixes at least once, is inevitable, or at least very close to being so. In this case, we would argue, the moderators only need to succeed once, because for the reasons we give, the rules you see listed are the ones needed to make the kind of experience many people are looking for a possibility, and no radically different set of rules is likely to work, given the current realities. Certainly, any set of rules allowing people to take without giving will fail altogether; the problems caused by the rise of spectatorship at the Burns is nothing more than the well-known failure of socialism, appearing in a new form.

Once the organizers of such a group get past the initial hurdle of getting going, they'll have the opportunity to build something relatively stable, a pleasant experience that's going to get noticed, and word does spread. The current mindless, soulless cultural era has lingered on, far past its time, not because it works so well but because it has succeeded in choking off all alternatives to going with the flow of the current lifeless moment, for far too many people. It's like knocking a hole in a dam, guys - where a real alternative appears and managed to hold on, business as usual will start to die out.

There will always be those who wish to behave in a destructive fashion, but as long as the rest of us have the sense to put the mindless doctrine of "radical inclusiveness" to one side long enough to exclude those people from our midst, we're going to find that collective decency can provide its own rewards. Our fundamental moral instincts, including the one that holds that each should feel obligated to do his part, are not just things that give us a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. They're basic instincts that have evolved over millions of years, in a highly social species, that allow the members of the species to work together in a more productive and more harmonious fashion in the long run, and less likely to kill each other in the short run. If the shadier and more unreasonable members of the community are left with nobody to work with but each other, the non-postmodern reality that there is indeed such a thing as absolute right and wrong will make itself felt, as these people succeed in driving themselves off. This is what is wrong with the concept of radical inclusiveness, as it is stated. (How it is hypocritically applied is another matter). By conditioning people into denying them the freedom to walk away from those who make life gratuitously unpleasant, they insure that the less honorable members of the community can retain the more honorable ones around them as a buffer that keeps them from having to deal with others of their own kind, undermining the natural process that would (on its own) keep the disease which issues out from their souls from running out of control in the community, quarantining those who carry it until they try to recover.

(In some cases, those of people who might change for the better, one might think of this as being something like giving a bad little child a "time out". If you can get the child to improve, you've lead him to a better life, and that is a loving act. If discipline can't reach him, then he was lost, anyway)

Are we any better than some of these, though? Are we not suggesting that one might build a community that begins in fear and distrust? How is one to move from the distrust we've encouraged to the sense of comfortable ease with the other that community implies? By first noticing that one can't lose what one never had. The only kind of trust the PC, slacker subculture ever had in the first place was fear-based to begin with, with even slight variance from groupthink being punished with ostracism and harassment. There is, after the fact of broken down resistence, no injury to be forgiven. To those naturally inclined to do the right thing on their own, there is no discomfort as there is no threat of penalty, and there is the added comfort of being shielded from a certain amount of anti-social behavior. For those to whom genuinely civilized behavior will be a novelty, however, the experience, if embraced will be the transforming one that comes to a child being properly socialised; in this case, the socialization is coming rather late, but being exposed to a different, better way of living is bound to have an emotional impact on anybody but a sociopath. One almost becomes a new person, and as we say, the goods whose seeking motivates each of us are the perceived ones, not the real ones. As the former change into something more like the latter, the mind will redefine the terms it uses as it writes the narratives of its past experiences, and the experiences themselves will thus be transformed. What was once anxiety, as viewed from the past, will become the memory of growth, as the one who has made a change for the better looks back to the memory of the experience in the future.

Such are the possibilities for change. As for myself and the other moderators from the old list, we've done our part and now others can do theirs. The personal choice of the main author of this article is to do no more seeking in the Burning Man community. Intellectually the place is fairly dead, thought stopped before it usually even has a chance to start by the dead weight of Postmodernism, in people who seldom would have been inclined to do much thinking anyway, the product of an educational system that has since forgotten the distinction between "teaching people what to think" and "helping them learn how to think". Postmodernism's rejection of the primacy of reason leaves the dissident with no recognized basis on which to challenge the group consensus, and so all ends up as a matter of dogma, all questioning that dogma being seen in the dim light heretics have usually be viewed in, by the members of the cult that Burning Man has been evolving into.

For those stuck in the American cultural mainstream, there might not be any better alternatives, and so those of us born to better things might offer them a few suggestions as to how to pursue reform which, no doubt, will be greeted with the shrill hysteria the members of that supposedly "modern" culture usually greet any criticism of their hidebound ways. But while we may wish the best for those few who have enough vision to see the need for a real change, while we may offer our best wishes, each of us, in his own time, will feel the need to depart and go back to the better places he remembers. That's where the old moderators went, and in time, where the new moderators are likely to follow - home, to a place where "community" is more than a buzzword, among people with whom one does not have to fight over that which shouldn't even need to be a matter of debate.

(return)