sketching alternatives to straw realism (international and group relations) [draft!][2500 words]

[This is a really compressed draft. Some stuff is introduced or “marked” really abruptly and isn’t given time to breath.]

I’m just pulling a bunch of this stuff off of wikipedia, quick first-pass, and indiscriminately mixing in… other stuff. If you’re a Great Power, don’t take advice from me about international relations. (<– Yes, this is a joke. –>) Just saying.

So let’s consider (my hasty conception of) a straw realist. Jumping right in, you may have to re-read this or click some links, and I’m mixing wikipedia-grade international relations with crackpot psychology, the straw realist seeks to be the stably uncontested leader of a hegemon, because being the leader of a hegemon is the greatest personal/familial/tribal protection against (totalizing?) subjugation or annihilation.

It’s probably a good idea to highlight the distinction between (a) the straw realist and (b) the straw hegemon. A hegemon can change leaders while remaining a hegemon. And, there’s at least two perspectives one could take when abstractly conceiving a straw hegemon. First, one could simplify things by conceiving of a (perfect/ideal/abstract/straw) hegemon as having a unified will/intention. But one could also profitably conceive of a hegemon as “fractal power relations all the way down to the level of straw realists.” That is, one could conceive of a hegemon as being composed of straw realists vying for total power. In this latter case, in some sense, this “hegemon” is maybe technically no longer a (perfect/ideal/abstract/straw) hegemon. The left hand might not know what the right hand is doing. The “entity conceived as such” may act against itself at times or just kind of blob out, in a lot of wasted time/money/energy/trust/something, because everybody is sort of fearfully, myopically striving for total power. (Again, this is a straw conception.)

So, now let’s unpack and critique the “straw realist.”

Again, the straw realist single mindedly seeks total power because they believe it’s the best plan for being safe. Note that the straw realist is a fearful pessimist and doesn’t believe they’ll ever actually be safe. They are resigned to deep-down, terrified paranoia, forever. But, even given that resignation, seeking total power is still the best plan under a tiniest sliver of hope for safety. The fear of a straw realist is perhaps a fear of psychological, social, and/or bodily annihilation, with no hope of salvation.

But! What if!

• Sender criteria:
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently competently enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently credibly, sincerely signal ability, willingness, and desire to sufficiently competently enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions
• Receiver criteria:
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently recognize signs and signals of ability, willingness, and desire to sufficiently competently enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently accurately, confidently evaluate whether sufficient sincerity and competence underlie apparent signs and signals of ability, willingness, and desire to enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions (including accounting for coincidental or disendorsed apparent countersigns and countersignals)
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently metabolize or recover from imperfect or partially harmful nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions

Let’s call a person (or group) that has all of both the sender criteria and the receiver criteria a “straw enlightened person” (or group).

So! What if!

What if all people and thus all groups were straw enlightened? Then there would be nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative synergy! We could then solve suffering, health, coercion, energy, mortality, and existential risk! (Oops, circularities abound!)

“Ah ha!” says the straw realist! “But there is no button to push to have that! One way or another, we ended up with warlords and tribes, and then we ended up with global competition and great powers! Anarchy yields global competition and great powers! And I, the straw realist, will even admit that no one necessarily wants this! I might even admit that our very actions cause it! But, there is no other way, because people are not naturally altruistic beyond family or tribe. Even ‘self-interested altruism,’ strategic generosity, grace, magnanimousness, isn’t really ‘intrinsic,’ isn’t really ‘sincere,’ and is unstable. And so we have the world today. At the bottom of everything is threat of violence and fear of suffering and death. That is what power is, threat or actualization of violent coercion, and it’s the only thing that matters.”

There’s a lot of circularity and confirmation bias in the straw realist position directly above, but it’s good enough, for our purposes. (Heh.)

International relations theory has of course thought about all this stuff (and more thoroughly and completely than I have, that could go without saying). This blog post isn’t even a survey; there’s a gazillion concepts and buzzwords (and shibboleths) that I haven’t mentioned. Somewhat relevantly, here, there’s ideas like “decentralization” and “nonpolarity.” These terms can be used very precisely within a particular paradigm, but decentralization might be something like spreading out power inside of group. And nonpolarity might be something like power spread out between groups, to the point that no single group has particularly dominating power, along maybe a single dimension or net across all relevant dimensions. Decentralization and nonpolarity are critiqued in a straw realist paradigm, maybe using straw liberalism as the containing foil.

Anyway, so, as we look at the world, at the time of this writing, we arguably don’t see hot wars (arguably, because proxy battles/wars are a thing, if you know where/how to look). And, arguably, we do see, maybe, cold wars, depending on how the term “cold war” is defined. But… like… maybe things are chilling out, overall? Proxy stuff aside (and that’s a big aside), I think it’s at least (contentiously) argued that democracies don’t go to war with each other? And, roughly speaking, with some dips, poverty is being alleviated to a greater degree with each passing year?

So maybe things are “fine,” modulo continued human suffering, and getting reliably “more fine,” with each passing year?

The straw realist might say that all the “fine” and “getting more fine” is a veneer or at least very fragile: “At the bottom is fear, threat, and selfishness or tribalism, and everything is held together, barely, by bluff or commitment to credible violence, nuclear weapons, domestic police or peace officers, or otherwise: USA/Russia/China/whoever, these visions of the world are different–goodness and especially safety LOOK DIFFERENT to different powers, and irreconcilably so. Heck, deep-down, some people think the best way to ‘save’ the world is to ‘destroy’ it, first! So trust is naive. Nuclear weapons, space weapons, and unstoppable, undetectable micro-drone assassinations, that look like naturally caused death are all there is. [non-straw-realist/editor’s note: As far as I know, the latter micro-drones don’t currently exist and maybe can’t practically exist or be worthwhile.] And global warming, pandemics, fast global travel, and globe-spanning weaponry are only making things more fragile.”

***

If one would like to gaze into the abyss, one can even dive into a deep well of fear and paranoia. One might even think they have only two choices, between (1) a “normal,” intimate, safe life. (A powerless life???????? An ignorant life?????????) And then (2) some sort of abyss-gazing thing that, extreme worst case, accidentally gets themselves “disappeared,” through maybe some impulse to act in the face of seeming-otherwise meaninglessness or feared-inconsequentiality.

And, so…

• What is the world?
• Is the world safe or unsafe?
• Is the world good or bad?
• What is a life?
• Are you, personally, safe or unsafe?
• Is your life good or bad?

How do these questions get answered?

On the one hand, we are products of our environment: tv, influential peers and elders, google filter bubbles, one’s personal propensity to google…

We practically don’t even ever know there’s ever even a there, there, unless, sort of, someone points it out, hopefully in a gentle or uncoercive way.

[Side note: And, it’s good to ask, how does the person who does that pointing-out benefit from doing that pointing out, and from doing the pointing-out in that way, with that framing, in that context? And, it’s also good to go another layer up–who else, besides ostensibly you and the person doing the pointing-out, benefits from that person doing that pointing-out… As in, what led to that person being someone who does that pointing out? Causal history, years, decades, centuries, millenia back, grounded in relatively accurate conceptions of synchronic human nature.]

On the other hand, through the grace of serendipity, imperfect friends and mentors, that crazy google search, the spontaneous, inherent nature of our mind and will, there’s this other sense in which we are not products of our environment; we are something discontinuously more than the products of our environment, ever always striving towards transcendence of contingency and limitation, towards safety and wellbeing, perhaps in some causally consistent sense.

***

The way it can kind of go, is that some people are living an actually, truly, really good (enough) life. The whole world, at the moment, breaks down without machinists, truck drivers, automators, programmers, lawyers, doctors, stockers, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, something. It’s not perfect, but, right here, right now, there are so many roles that are keeping the thing going. Sometimes it’s actually not that fragile, and sometimes it is. But all these roles are, at least in part, positively impacting other people, at least locally and partially. (And sometimes these roles are part of an actually, truly, really good (enough) life, and sometimes these roles are a part of life “led in quiet desperation.” When life is hard, it’s hard; And, it often is. It just depends.) And/but, with these roles being enacted, the world keeps going, with a chance of getting to a better thing.

And then, for some other people, lots of people, it’s not an actually, truly, really good (enough) life: something is bad, somewhere. Maybe they determine that badness is in themselves, the world, or both.

And, as a solution to that badness, maybe they seek to escape or alleviate that badness, through, say, or spiritual enlightenment, or worldly power, or all sorts of less extreme things.

And some people find peace or intimacy or security along the way.

And some people might fall into an abyss, trying to figure out how they work, or people work, or the world works: One might get stuck, at least for a time, thinking that the world can’t work or the truth is too terrible. And, they might inadvertently, circularly be confirming to themselves the very seeming badness they wish to solve.

Sometimes, maybe often, people mistake childhood hurt or misinterpretation as the way the entire world works, the way the entire world must work, without remainder or alternative. And this straw trauma survivor is the straw realist.

But, through therapy, journaling, meditation, long walks in nature, friendship, intimacy–bottleneck can become process-in-context. Therapy, meditation, etc.–these are privileges, to be sure. They require just enough health, just enough money, just enough space, just enough time, if not an abundance, of all of these, and these things are unevenly distributed, and hard choices might be needed to determinedly acquire them.

***

Whatever the world is, what ever a life is, safe or unsafe, good or bad, desperate or secure–the heart beats, the lungs breath, gravity and oxygen and warmth and atmosphere persist and nourish, in this moment, and the next, and the next. In some sense, we will only ever know this.

So how do we live, in this world good/bad/safe/unsafe world, that, in any case, carries us in each moment of our lives?

We do so, perhaps, by just living, and, perhaps, also, self-transforming as we have time and as makes sense.

Only we can decide whether dark terribleness, is in us or in the world, and only we can determine how it got there in the first place. The is epistemic agency and also well-being agency.

Is the world good or bad? Now or later? Is your life good or bad? Now or later? And do the answers ultimately depend on self or world?

In SOME nontrivial sense, maybe the only sense that ultimately matters, it’s up to you.

And what of international relations? Or inter-group relations? Escalations and security dilemmas? And impulsive, fear-driven violence that has already happened, tit-for-tat, an eye for an eye, over and over again, personal and generational histories of trauma?

Can we all be straw enlightened people or groups? Is it too late?

There’s maybe a piece left out of the criteria above. I know they’re phrased awkwardly, but I chose the words pretty carefully, single pass, if you’ll look at them again. I’ve copied them again, here, exactly:

• Sender criteria:
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently competently enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently credibly, sincerely signal ability, willingness, and desire to sufficiently competently enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions
• Receiver criteria:
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently recognize signs and signals of ability, willingness, and desire to sufficiently competently enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently accurately, confidently evaluate whether sufficient sincerity and competence underlie apparent signs and signals of ability, willingness, and desire to enact nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions (including accounting for coincidental or disendorsed apparent countersigns and countersignals)
  • a person (or group) could sufficiently metabolize or recover from imperfect or partially harmful nonviolent/peaceful/collaborative intentions

Ok, but then, one more time, the straw realist says, “Well, I hate people, and/or I think your culture is disgusting, and/or the world must be burned to the ground to save it. Or, if I don’t think that, someone else will. So what of your ideals or beautiful aspirations? Violent power is what matters; violent power is security. And then the whole thing is just waiting to blow up.”

So there’s maybe one more point to make, with the sender/receive criteria. (And, again, this is draft. There could be so many issues.)

The better one embodies the sender/receiver criteria, the safer it is to become recognizably and actually strong. You will be less likely triggered into doing impulsive, destructive things that are hard to take back, even if you have some capability to do so. You’ll be less likely to trigger other people into doing impulsive, destructive things that are hard to take back, even if they have some capability to do so. And actors with the propensity to lead with violence will think twice, because of credible capability or at least a carefully measured, adequate response. And, all the while, the sender/receiver criteria maximize the possibility for diplomacy, communication, synchronous de-escalation, collaboration.

The details matter, to be sure. Getting erroneously triggered doesn’t always feel like getting erroneously triggered. Seeing threat where there is or isn’t threat is deeply contingent and has to be meta managed by personal transformative practice or norms or formality, etc. Signs and signals are deeply contingent. Something that feels nonviolent to one party may initially feel very violent to another party (and actually be contingently violent). Something, somewhere, needs to be sensitive and responsive. Someone, somewhere will need to grow and change, and there can be strong initial disagreements about who/how/when/where. And the world is weird. There are dragons and surprises.

But there is always a way forward. You can have 200% responsibility, including making up for regrettable mistakes.

And, sometimes, the option space is very large and good, given enough time…

Some might find, through service or practice, the sense, compatible with materialism, physicalism, naturalism, in which humans are, deep-down, at the very bottom, spontaneously compassionate, kind, loving, while simultaneously being discerning and strong, in a way that allows them to interact closely and intensely with others, despite differences, in the service of valued mutual goals and live-and-let-live.

One might keep asking, what does the best safely reachable world look like? And, it might look very different from this one. And the way to get there might look very strange, while maybe necessarily being a path that is humane, non-authoritarian, and non-coercive, nonviolent while still self-recognizably requiring challenging growth and change for many. All the details matter; if you’ll permit me: we’re all paranoid, indignant humans, myself included. And there are real predators among us and within all of us, though they deserve compassion and a recognition of the sense in which this is not our true nature. And/but, while the stakes are real, in any case, so much is so good, now; and, in this exact very moment you are safe; and nothing is required of you; you have no duty, there is no judge; and that best safely reachable world might look very good, indeed…