Bill Whittle and the Lotus Eaters

Bill Whittle wrote an excellent essay and published it this morning. If you have not read it, go here now and read. I'll be back when you return in about 10-15 minutes... . . . . Back? Great! Now, let's go to The Belmont Club where Wretchard introduces us to another tribe and ones we would not want as neighbors:

Bill Whittle and the Gotha Program
Bill Whittle has a new essay up called Tribes, where he defines tribedom as a state of mind, and how those states of mind -- the tribes -- manifested themselves in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

A few paragraphs more and Wretchard brings it home:

One interesting question, which Bill Whittle never answers, is how tribes are formed. Whatever the process, it must feature some retention of memory. To see why this is so, consider its opposite: memorylessness. A Brown University computer science paper defines memoryless behavior as a class of policies where "action decisions are made solely on this basis of the agent's current sensation." On the face of it, "it would seem that memoryless behavior makes little sense. What organism would possibly ignore recent events in deciding how to act?" Yet the Brown paper found that in circumstances where sensation encapsulate all the relevant past information "it is always possible to find a deterministic memoryless policy that is optimal; no other behavioral strategy is superior."

In Bill Whittles' scenario, a number of people find themselves trapped in Hurricane stricken Louisiana, such as in the "Superdome Concentration Camp" and find themselves dividing into tribes. Some loot and rampage, often destroying objects which if they had a memory of recent events they would realize would be useful for their future survival. Others husband their resources and forge alliances to maximize their chances of survival. Clearly the spontaneous division into Whittle's tribes occurs on the basis of some cognition of 'sameness', which can only be the outcome of memory. The sheepdogs recognize each other, and so do the sheep.

Then, one of Whittle's tribes having formed, it begins to behave as if it lived in a memoryless universe. 'Memorylessness' in this context means something slightly different. It is the property of arriving at the same state however you started out, so that the current condition gives no clue as to how things were in the beginning. Under those circumstances it is possible to ignore the history of your life-state because it is irrelevant. It is all collapsed into the present. And, as the Brown University paper concluded, when you have no past it is optimal to act solely on the basis of present sensation. I mention this because one of the historical goals of socialism was to precisely to create this memoryless state. "From each according to his abilities. To each according to his need." Which is another way of saying that you get to the same place no matter how you start out. One of the unintended consequences of encouraging dependency is that it annihilates the life history of the dependent. For him there is no memory and no exit.

Some of the comments at Wretchard's site are wonderfully thought out. Here is one (the backstory is that Marx was spending so much time writing that he failed to provide for his family -- two of his children died under circumstances that could only be described as malnutrition):

Common cents,
"Marx had no soul. How could any man choose not provide for his children?"

Wretchard
One of the most 'liberating' aspects of activism is that it frees you from such petty concerns as the fate of your children. Really good activism produces a rush; a continuous buzz of activity in the vague service of some higher good that helps you forget what you have done; what you are doing. Within the theme of this post, the purpose of activistic exaltation is to obliterate the past. I've often wondered why the phrase 'obliterate the past' occurs so frequently in revolutionary literature until I realized it was the historical equivalent of smashing mirrors and burning diaries. To be truly 'revolutionary' you must cut loose from the past. In other words have no memory.

I used to think this was great. But of late, having had to program stateless web pages, I realized it had certain disadvantages. But it was Orwell who really made the connection in 1984 when he described the Memory Hole and realized its true purpose was to swallow its user.