Thoughts on Effective Politics

When people try to tone down the circulation of conspiracy theories in a social circle, they often have a palette of cliches at the ready. You've heard them all before. They usually involve pathologizing an imagined fool and/or explanations that assume out-of-hand their own premises; the falseness of conspiracy theories is taken as an a priori rather than a posteriori truth ( true regardless of the facts).

None of this is anything. You’ve done the research and you know that the above are pleas of opinion against record. Accounts downplaying the notion of decades-or-centuries-old Deep Steering Committees that exist above and prior to states and corporations are not just wrong, but wrong in a way, either maliciously or not, that threatens their followers' abilities to protect themselves from the encroaching threats of 21st century political realities.

The way we do politics is based on the way that we understand that historical change is effected. Depending on whether we think that the effective driving force of political change is party politics, Left/Right ideology, economic laws of motion, or the imperatives of National Security, our own courses of political action will differ. A question often arises: why does X happen? Was it out of economic necessity or political-military-diplomatic necessity? Or was it Leftism? Rightism? Out of these debates come the various attempts at systematizing history: looking at what happens historically and then trying to tease out a morphological principle like one would with an acorn or a spore. Spengler, for example: things happen without the need for articulating a cause. Civilizations die because that's what they do. Isms do things, history does things; intellect and strategy are the blind victims of self-arising historical ideological fashions. It goes on and on while the written record (a tutorial on effective politics) waits patiently.

A small morphing clutch of families and networks with variously overlapping interests have had their hands on the levers of investment and policy (the primary motive social forces) of the western world for a two-centuries-long unbroken continuity. Where you want to draw the lines in/around that clutch is up to you. They have recorded and allowed records for our benefit (although undoubtedly there were unflattering accounts that were not allowed to survive). A crumb of understanding in this direction indicates why philosophizing or systematizing views of history are not only wastes of time but paralyzing handicaps for anyone seeking political power; effective political agents are deceivers and dialecticians. Their effectiveness is based on their ability to commit actions against opponents such that their opponents cannot conveniently negate them, or more importantly, negate the source of their action-making power. For some reason we assume that the wielders of political power must be as stupid as we are; that they must say what they mean, contrive and put easily-identifiable plans into action, and present themselves for public view as the ones responsible. Whoever subscribes to the cargo-cult idea of history, where political events follow from clashes of self-sufficient self-arising Isms, cuts themself off from doing effective politics.

What is politics? The pursuit of enacting one's desired policies to the exclusion of others and their policies. Political power is the capacity to put one's desired policies into effect. Politics assumes conflict as a categorical human reality; the pursuit of aims not shared by others implies that actions must be taken against those others to reduce their political power and vice versa: they are pursuing aims to the exclusion of you and your policies. When opponents are all destroyed or brought under control, there are no obstacles to enacting one's policies; power is absolute then. When opponents are strong, policies can't be enacted or can only be enacted in highly roundabout, glancing ways; opponents will move against you and your designs and your power is weak.

Purposeful acts of aggression expose the aggressor to his opponents. When one remains still and seeks out nothing, he is invisible and in this invisibility he is safe. When a political agent takes action, he is either visible or leaves visible traces. When he makes moves, he becomes visible to his opponents who can then, based on the moves he is making, identify him as a threat. The aggressor's intentions, either in terms of policy-goals he is seeking (use of political power) or aggressive moves against his opponents (accumulation of political power – power is zero-sum), are made visible by his actions. He must then expect a response from those against whose interests he has been working. Are they obligated to sit back and be undone, while he exposes both himself and his intentions against them? 

We all recognize the operation of this principle in the post-nuke proxy-warrior mode of warfare. When no action can be taken without exposing oneself and provoking an annihilating response, actions can only be taken mediately, from a distance and behind a cover of plausible deniability. The projection of force from behind a cover of plausible deniability (or secrecy) secures key advantages over the open and self-identifying projection of force. When one takes action secretly and/or by the use of mediate resources, the worst that can happen is that one's opponents will destroy the mediate resource. When one takes action openly, the worst that can happen is that he himself will be destroyed by his responding opponent. The advantages of indirect warfare over direct warfare are clear: one is able to advance towards one's goals without risking anything. If we recognize this as the mode of post-WW2 American military power, then why don't we recognize it in politics, where it has been the definitive mode of operation for all-time?

An e-celeb once put the plea for exoteric politics thus "You do not see any centuries-long secret political plans in history. Any power capable of this wouldn't have to hide." For any intelligent person the alarm-bells should be clanging violently. A simple paraphrase illustrates why: "Any group that has sought power for centuries would be so powerful that it could give up much of its power and still be powerful enough." The gaps in reasoning are obvious. Why would a group that seeks power decide to relinquish its power? Wouldn’t it want more power rather than less? Who is this person to decide how much power is enough for them? How powerful is powerful enough? Aren't they who seek power the ones who decide how much is enough? It's gibberish.

Secrecy is power. It allows one to approach goals such that only the political resources being used to advance that goal are jeopardized. The opponent may grab a hold of it, torture it, interrogate it, but if it was compartmentalized in its mission – if it received its orders from a person it doesn’t know or a force it doesn’t understand –, the opponent will not be able to use that resource as a ladder to the force that set it in motion. With forthright politics, on the other hand, all political resources are jeopardized in the approach of any goal, as none of the connections between the parts of the political machinery are obscured. The strategic advantage that secrecy confers on a political power places it in a tier above the open and self-identifying political powers; if a secret power and an open power were to lock horns in conflict, the former would risk only those resources it chose to mobilize, while the latter would categorically risk all of its resources no matter what its course of action was. The politically capable have always known this since it’s only a matter of taking a moment’s time to stop and think strategically. Take the following diagram of a naive political organization that operates in a forthright way.

B and C are the resources of A, which is where decisions are made. If this organization gets into a conflict with another one, A, B, and C will all be at risk, as they will be visible to the opponent. If it loses the conflict, it may potentially be extinguished entirely. Thus it is relatively weak, as it risks its entire existence with every assertion of its own interests. Now take an example of a shrewd organization that only operates remotely.

B and C are still the resources of A, which is the apparent center of political and decision-making power, but A really receives its agenda from X, the Deep Steering-Committee. X is an organization whose existence is known only to its members; to the rest of the world, it doesn’t exist. All of the policies of A are informed by decisions made upstream of it in X. This form of political organization is more robust than the former one, since even if A, B, and C are destroyed in a conflict, the heart of the organization (X) – those with the vision, ambition, and capacity for strategic thought – still survive. If they lose all their resources, they can pick up the pieces and try to start over. Compare this with the former model, where losing all one’s resources and total extermination are indistinct. What was impossible under the previous model now becomes possible: the ability to work safely toward the achievement of limited goals. The secret organization does not need to attain overwhelming and total victory in any of its conflicts, because it only risks those resources that it allocates for the achievement of specific goals. It is able to create resources to achieve a goal and then, after the goal is achieved, dispose of those resources and create new ones for a new goal. The open organization is incapable of doing this because, with every goal it seeks out, it identifies its own existence with the attack-vector which that seeking entails. Every move is an existential risk. Thus overwhelming victory is necessary as anything short of that fails to bring it out of existential crisis back into safety. Secrecy is the only mode of organization that allows a prey-animal to eventually one day become predator. By creating resources, mobilizing them for specific ends, and then letting the provoked parties respond and destroy those resources, the deep steering-committee can move piece-meal toward ultimate victory without its mission ever being seriously jeopardized. There’s still one other mode of organization worth considering. 

Like the previous mode, strategic planning is ultimately done from an apparently non-existent point and visible expendable resources are used to pursue goals. But unlike the previous mode, there is no point that apparently does the strategic planning. In the 2nd model, X was the actual center of strategic planning and A was the apparent center of strategic planning. As an example, this might be the case in a National Political Party like the DNC or RNC. There are Deep Steering-Committees (Crime syndicates, bureaucracies, banking families, etc.) behind each of these but the formally acknowledged centers of decision-making are the parties themselves. In the 3rd model, there is no formally-acknowledged center; there is only the organization, which has its goals, and its resources, which it disperses out into the world. For example, A is a group of people with a political program that is not represented by any single party in the party-system but which is, in the aggregate, represented across a plethora of special-interest groups and lobbying organizations. A could send out its resources B and C to these lobbies and use them like a distributed exoskeleton, nudging them in particular directions and attempting to fold them into an over-arching strategy, even if to the naked eye they were apparently contrary organizations with contrary types of people, affinities, party-allegiances, and so on. If either B or C were discovered by one of the partisans of any of these lobbies, either a partisan of the lobby’s own interests or a partisan of the larger organization dominating the lobby, to be acting in the interest of some mission not formally associated with the lobby (i.e. trying to use the lobby as a means to an end which it hasn’t consented to) then they might be cast out or harmed, but as long as A remained secret no existential harm would be done.

It’s not necessary for A to restrict itself to sending resources to groups that can possibly be nudged toward achieving its own goals. A can also benefit by sending resources to groups that have zero overlap in interests or goals (implying a conflict of interests – enemy-status) and collecting intelligence on them. Intelligence can never be a weakness. It’s up to A to decide how best to use its resources.

The 2nd and 3rd models each have their pros and cons. The advantage of the 2nd model is that it has an apparent (but ultimately symbolic) center of planning which can be used as a rallying point for sympathetic people. Those sympathizers can be folded into service of its objectives without ever becoming ‘part of the organization’; resources are thus more plentiful. The disadvantage of the 2nd model is that, even if the real center of planning is secret, the apparent center of planning gives a clue that a real center exists somewhere out there. If there is a political organization apparently seeking power, those savvy enough to operate in secret must also be savvy enough to realize that there is always an actual organization behind an apparent one.

The advantage of the 3rd model is that there is no hint or clue of an agenda being set at an actual center of planning anywhere; it is much more safe. The disadvantage is that, once that actual center of planning has been formed in secret, its supply of resources is locked in at a fixed level. It cannot create or accumulate any more without incurring a massive existential risk. If there were somehow an organic proliferation of 3rd model organizations whose goals were all in adequate sympathy with each other, then that would be a mode of politics that was both secure, capable of working safely towards its goals, and not hamstrung by a lack of resources.

In an environment where established dominant political power is savvy and both pro-actively seeks out and neutralizes potential threats while provoking and teasing out would-be threats into expressing their grievances, intentions and possible strategies, and folding all of this information into a counter-intelligence apparatus that is continuously and recursively refined, there is no win-scenario for forthright or open models of political organization; with every breath it breathes it gives away all that is necessary to destroy it. Only organizations that don’t exist are able to make safe and gradual progress toward their goals.