Properties of Successful Failed States

[maradydd]

I've honestly never found much to get worked up over about neoreaction, one way or another. To some of my more rightish acquaintances, it's a breath of fresh air, while some of my more leftish acquaintances think it's the next great bogeyman (one wonders if the spectre of a Koch brother stumbling across Moldbug keeps them up at night). I just

Comments

[whswhs]

Your primary topic made me think about James C. Scott, and especially about his The Art of Not Being Governed, which discusses a wide swath of territory across parts of Asia where the state has only a marginal foothold and local customs enable resistance to it. At a different level, I'm reminded of Tolkien's portrayal of the Shire, which has a regular business of government headed by the Mayor, but also has a nearly completely separate system headed by the Thain and embodied in the Shire-Moot and Shire-Muster.

However, I don't think what you have in Belgium is what is meant by "failed state." I think what you describe is "failed government," which is not the same thing.

[q_pheevr]

To me, it feels like something in between. "Failed government," at least the way I understand it, is something that happens pretty routinely in a multi-party parliamentary democracy (whenever a government loses the confidence of the house), and which is normally recovered from by holding new elections (although it could also be repaired through the formation of a new governing coalition within the current parliament). The Belgian situation of going for over a year and a half without even being able to form a government in the first place, is different from a normal failure of government at least in degree, if not necessarily in kind.

The fact that the Belgian bureaucracy is able to go on providing basic services even when a year and a half goes by without anyone being in a position to draft and pass a proper budget is a fine testament to the robustness of the system-more so, I think, than the role of the monarch in repeatedly appointing formateurs. (I think things might work out pretty similarly if the party leaders all just

[maradydd]

I confess my use of "failed state" here comes from a friend's description on Twitter of Belgium as the most successful failed state in history. (I think it was in response to some slow-news-day bit of hyperbolised international coverage.)

A Facebook acquaintance remarked the other day:

In physics, power is the rate of doing work. It's fair to say that, since Congress seems incapable of doing any work, it is actually powerless. What it does instead is produce friction - waste heat. Enough heat and friction will collapse any mechanical system.

Failing to recognize this isn't anything as fancy as being anti-science. It's just ignorance in engineering.

Obviously there is a good deal of snark in this, but there's a useful observation here: physical work gets wasted in all kinds of ways (heat, sound, deformation of the tool/surface/&c), and there's more than one thing we mean, or should be meaning, when we talk about government waste.

[maradydd]

Incidentally, I have since read The Art of Not Being Governed, and have found myself referring to it often. Thanks again for the recommendation!

[augeas]

Alternatively, "God save Mrs Ethel Shroake..." http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0064074/plotsummary?ref_=m_tt_ov_pl

The death blow to transhumanists' pipe dream?

[tatzelbrumm]

It is ironic that you, of all people, should deliver the death blow to the transhumanists' pipe dream about immortality (which they share with every other sufficiently powerful and oppressive ruling class for the last one? two?? five??? millennia): humans themselves are a crash-only design.

Re: The death blow to transhumanists' pipe dream?

[ext_776811]

Now this is decidedly untrue.

Human body and mind are very demonstrably a kind of systems that, upon suffering a failure, would very much do its best to skeedadle towards some semblance of operational state (oftentimes it does not succeed and is left in a state of reduced functionality/stability till eventual termination)

Also, the question of "immortality" gets interesting if you can "quickly restart" (is the "restarted" you, uh, "you"? Is there any meaningful difference between waking up and being restored from a backup? What if every time we go to sleep our mind "crashes", and whatever "starts up" next morning is an entirely new thing that just happens to think it is the same as "yesterday-us" due to sharing the predecessor's memories?) :p

[jsl32]

this post is better than anything coming out of actual "nrx" discussion and writing.

[selenite]

I suspect Belgium does better because its bureaucracy is designed to work without political oversight. The USA would rather most agencies NOT keep functioning in the absence of politicians giving explicit permission to keep going (in the form of budget authority). We're more afraid of tyrrany-failure than anarchy-failure.

[jsl32]

eh, we let 'crats run amok without politician oversight, though. The American 'crat-cy has evolved to smoothly subvert any wishes of specific politicians. Foseti of all people had some interesting posts on this on his defunct blog (if it's still up).