From Tablet Magazine:
The Cathedral or the BizarreAmerica’s experiments with democracy and oligarchy have both failed, leaving only one option
In 1999, the year of the Linux desktop, Eric S. Raymond wrote an influential essay called “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”
Raymond, a stereotypical programmer-libertarian, saw two architectural archetypes of software-development organization: the cathedral, a closed, corporate, centralized project planned for profit, and the bazaar, an open, volunteer, centerless organic community of patches crafted from love.
Nothing binds these labels to the land of Linux. Any centralized organization is a cathedral. Any decentralized movement is a bazaar. The cathedral is a single coherent building with a single purpose; the bazaar is a chaotic covered souk of alleys and stalls.
Close your eyes; the cathedral is one soaring, enclosed hymn with one clear message; the bazaar is a medley of hot, buzzing auctions for silk, opium, and broiled kid-goat.
The bazaar: Linux. The cathedral: Microsoft. We know which feels better to the modern, sophisticated soul. Yet SpaceX, too, is a cathedral. Yet SpaceX runs tons of Linux.
Cathedrals and bazaars are different tools. They solve different problems. Neither replaces the other (or has, in software development, replaced it). Either may prove itself fair or foul, useless or essential, elegant or messy.
In 1899, the final year of the century of yesterday, Gaetano Mosca wrote a much-forgotten book called Elements of Political Science.
Mosca, founder of the "Italian elitist" school, arguably the Darwin of his field, today known only even to specialists as a precursor of fascism, saw that within every governed society, all human beings can be divided into three clear sets.
One is the officials, people “in the loop” who have the power to control or affect government decisions. Anyone who isn’t an official is a subject. The set of all officials is the regime. The set of all nonofficials is the public.
Subjects are divided into two sets by a simple accounting: clients, who are economically dependent on the regime; commoners, on whom the regime is economically dependent. Clients naturally admire the regime; commoners naturally resent it.
Individual human opinion is never deterministic. But these three human perspectives—regime, commons, and clientele—nourish three kinds of political cultures, classes, or traditions. And while there may be many distinct common and client cultures, there is almost never more than one official culture: the people who govern, plus the people who think like them. Every objective political theory is a theory of this official class.
Sovereignty, the absolute power of all officials over all subjects, is conserved. All government is unconditional. All “freedoms” are conditional privileges granted by the regime—what are “judges” but officials?
While functional democracy—in which the subjects are the ruling officials, and even the permanent full-time employees of the government are their obedient public servants—is possible, functional democracy is historically rare. Most so-called democracies are only ceremonially so—and the few historical exceptions actually worked quite badly. One test for this condition is whether the so-called masters could replace their so-called servants. If this is unthinkable, the servants may be in charge of the masters.
While there is no limited government, there is incomplete government; incomplete government means a vacuum made of anarchy; true anarchy is not even nothing, it is the billion tiny bubbles of local power we call crime; you don’t want to be anywhere near it; so, counting anarchy as governance, government power is absolute. A regime that tolerates crime has just chosen to share its absolute power with crime.
Who wanted to hear this message? Dear reader: Do you want to hear it?
It followed, saw Mosca, that sovereignty is not just physical but also psychological. Every regime is an autocracy. Every regime, outnumbered by its public, must obtain its psychological consent. While in theory the best way to obtain consent is to do a good job and tell the truth, in practice this strategy is not always available—or even optimal.
Organic consent is never guaranteed, even if genuinely deserved. And as regime quality declines, organic consent disappears. Therefore every regime, good or bad, must engineer its own consent. Every regime controls its subjects’ minds by managing the stories told to those minds.....
....MUCH MORE
*What's it gonna be? Sorry, thinking about Karla DeVito with Meatloaf on Paradise by the Dashboard Light (lip-synching Ellen Foley's vocals) starting at the 4:30 mark:
