“Underdog metaphysics,” coined by sociologist Alvin Gouldner, def.

On the assumption that truth is nothing more than the point of view of resourceful groups—imposed by these elite groups on everyone else—the conclusion ensues that powerlessness is more truthful than truth itself. That is, the absence of power becomes the new touchstone of what is true and valid. The new foundation is the group affiliation of marginalized identities. The “view-from-nowhere,” idealized by positivists, is replaced with a “view-from-the-margins.”

C. Wilén and Johan Söderberg (2025). “Against Underdog Metaphysics: Alvin Gouldner and the Marxist critique of post-theory.” Acta Sociologica (accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00016993251356339)

And let’s not forget just who finds powerlessness to be an elite position:

American intellectual and literary culture may or may not abandon its deference to power and wealth and go to that necessary war against itself in order to salvage its dignity and purpose. But there is some cause for hope in the certainty that the best and brightest in the American intelligentsia won’t go looking for crumbs from the presidential table. Spurning breezy despair and jovial resignation, they might even assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.

P. Mishra (2025). “Speaking Reassurance to Power.” Harpers (accessed online at
https://harpers.org/archive/2025/08/speaking-reassurance-to-power-pankaj-mishra-easy-chair/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email)

–The remittance-sending household member is no more at the geographical periphery of a network whose center is an Africa rangeland than was Austria’s Prince von Metternich in the center of Europe when he said, “Asia begins at the Landstraße” (the district outskirts of Vienna closest to the Balkans).

You can stipulate Asia begins here and Africa ends there, but good luck in making that stick for policies!

(This notion that boundaries change as the units of analysis change would be banal, were it not for this: Both household migrants in Europe and household members in African drylands frequently turn out not to have occupancy rights to where they live and work.)

–It isn’t just that pastoralist households have off-site activities with household members elsewhere who contribute from there to rangeland pastoralist activities.

Rather: It’s more appropriate to say that in some cases a great deal of the pastoralism is done off-rangeland just as what was once platform trading on the floor of a stock exchange is now done elsewhere (as in the case today of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange).

–Isn’t it odd that on one hand, conventional economic growth and its national measurements are excoriated for a wide range of sins (promoting environmental destruction, rising inequalities), and yet the very same nations are excoriated for having marginalized vast portions of their populations by excluding them from that economic growth, and measurably so?

Isn’t it odd that on one hand there are more and more calls for revising macroeconomic statistics because they don’t take into account all manner of labor (e.g., care or digital work), while on the other hand we quite sensibly continue to take seriously measured declines in economic growth in developing countries, even though we all know household labor is under-accounted for there.

It’s as if we’re to assume that excluding Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands from the infrastructure development of 1960s economic growth in the Highlands was, well, less deplorable than many of us thought.

–Do you see that disturbing parallel between those who want to save Planet Earth from further harm and pain by means of seductively straightforward “treatments” like getting rid of fossil fuel or methane-producing cattle and, on the other hand, Purdue Pharma’s promotion of OxyContin for reducing chronic pain while masking the lethal addiction to such “straightforward” treatments?

In late 2020, the Stop Ecocide Foundation, created by the late British jurist Polly Higgins, convened an independent expert panel as part of their ongoing efforts to amend the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to create a new, stand-alone international crime of ecocide. Chaired by international lawyers Dior Fall Sow and Philippe Sands, the panel published its proposed amendment defining “ecocide” in June of 2021, the full text of which is as follows:

Article 8. . .Ecocide

1. For the purpose of this Statute, “ecocide” means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.

2. For the purpose of paragraph 1:

a. “Wanton” means with reckless disregard for damage which would be clearly excessive in relation to the social and economic benefits anticipated;

b. “Severe” means damage which involves very serious adverse changes, disruption or harm to any element of the environment, including grave impacts on human life or natural, cultural or economic resources;

c. “Widespread” means damage which extends beyond a limited geographic area, crosses state boundaries, or is suffered by an entire ecosystem or species or a large number of human beings;

d. “Long-term” means damage which is irreversible or which cannot be redressed through natural recovery within a reasonable period of time;

e. “Environment” means the earth, its biosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, as well as outer space.

(accessed online at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5273187)

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It’s common enough today to recognize the huge environmental costs of the military (e.g. https://www.securityincontext.org/posts/entropy-economics-of-military-spending). Far less recognized are those ongoing discussions and debates over military strategies as if the environmental damages were irrelevant to the merits or not of the strategies.

Take a 2025 article published in Foreign Affairs by Andrew Lim and James Fearon, “The Conventional Balance of Terror: America Needs a New Triad to Restore Its Eroding Deterrence” (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/conventional-balance-terror-lim-fearon). Here the authors argue for a US defense strategy of heightened deterrence similar to its USSR strategy in the Cold War but now with respect to the Peoples Republic of China’s military build-up in the Indo-Pacific:

[M]any of the United States’ conventional assets in the Indo-Pacific, such as its surface ships, are highly visible or heavily dependent on fixed facilities that could easily be targeted. If a crisis were to break out, the United States might have to threaten escalation to compensate for its lack of conventional response options—potentially up to the nuclear level. To remedy this problem, the United States should develop a “conventional triad” modeled on its successful nuclear strategy. Such a force structure would both increase U.S. combat credibility and decrease first-strike incentives on both sides.

Threats are mentioned, but the only occasions environment is referenced is with respect to the “threat environment” of China’s precision-strike missiles and related capabilities.

Not a scintilla–not a homeopathic whiff–of the massive environmental costs associated with this new balance of terror, let alone on the US side:

To build an effective conventional triad, the United States must invest in more submarines, bombers, and mobile launch vehicles. This would entail, for example, redoubling current efforts to increase the production of Virginia-class attack submarines; increasing the production of B-21 bombers; accelerating air force efforts to deploy a “palletized” munitions launch system, which enables transport aircraft to launch conventional cruise missiles; and expanding the range and capacity of the Marine Littoral Regiments and the U.S. Army’s Mid-Range Capability, a land-based missile launcher system that was recently deployed to the Philippines.

And so here we are, once again, in a world whose MOST BLISTERINGLY OBVIOUS FACT is that it’s no longer the 1960s and 1970s where military strategies can be debated as if ecocide were beside the point.

1. The language of risk is now so naturalized that it seems the obvious anchor point of analysis, as in: “Ok, the first thing we have to do is assess the risks of flooding here. . .”

No. The first thing you do is to identify the boundaries of the flood system you are talking about as it is actually managed and then the standards of reliability to which it is being managed (namely, the events must be precluded or avoided by way of management) and from which follow the specific risks to be managed to meet that standard. (Note a standard doesn’t eliminate risks but instead identifies the risks that have to be managed in order to meet the standard.)

2. Economists, engineers and system modelers with whom I’m familiar tend to conceptualize interconnected critical infrastructure systems (ICISs) along the lines that Garret Hardin did 50 years ago for what he called the Tragedy of the Commons (“imagine a pasture open to all”).

In our case, imagine an ICIS open to all manner of vulnerability and complex interconnectivity. Our research insists that this too is precisely what you cannot assume empirically or conceptually. Rather, another anchor point is that these systems are far more differentiated than they are alike when it comes to “interconnectivities” by virtue of their different configurations and shifts from one configuration to another.

3. Just as a major work of art is always in excess of a single interpretation, the major management of a critical infrastructure is in excess of its technology. And “excess” is exactly the word, as its use here is antithetical to any claim that “excess capacity undermines technological and economic efficiency.”

4. Real-time infrastructure management requires very, very smart people, and ones who are decidedly not automated ciphers that need only know the difference between two prices in order to act rationally. What is irrational are those leaps from macro-design to micro-operations or back that ignore, when not altogether dismissing, the unique knowledge bases and learning of the reliability professionals that anchor operations in between.

If the US Civil War over southern separatism is our guide to any forthcoming break-up, most state constitutions will remain in place as governing documents, while any interstate confederation would most probably be modeled on parts of the current US Constitution—though with the significant changes.

Constitution-making in the Confederacy witnessed not just further entrenchment of unconscionable chattel slavery, but also the first Department of Justice, a national citizenship requirement for voting, no functioning supreme court, a six-year term limit for president, civil service reform, strictures against protective tariffs, a district court structure, disavowal of the Monroe Doctrine, and provisions for a presidential item veto, executive budget, and no recess appointments.

Am I recommending all that? No.

What I am doing is asking this question: How else are we to get a parallel version of this range of substantive change without breaking up the country? (And those appalled by any reference to the Confederacy might want to remember that four states—Vermont, Texas, California and Hawaii—opted to give up their sovereignty to join the Union. So why is the reverse out of the question?)

The immediate decline in security and economic growth that comes with the break-up means priority would have to be to keeping the control rooms of our critical infrastructures in hospitals, energy, water, telecommunications, transportation, and public safety operating as reliably as possible. These systems frequently cross current state borders, and the challenge will be to continue inter-regional collaboration for their operation until alternatives—if needed and on the fly—are devised.

Principal sources

My Confederacy material draws from: (1) W.B. Yearns (1960), The Confederate Congress, University of Georgia Press: Athens, GA; R. Bensel (1990), Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK: Chapter 3; P. Van Riper and H. Scheiber (1959), “The Confederate Civil Service,” The Journal of Southern History, 25(4): 448-470; C.R. Lee (1963), The Confederate Constitutions, Greenwood Press Publishers: Westport, CN; and E. Thomas (1979), The Confederate Nation: 1861-1865, Harper & Row: New York, NY.

–Yes, earthquakes with unimaginable impacts are predicted all the time. So too are other disasters and doing so is no more oxymoronic than “thinking the unthinkable.”

There is also the predictably unimaginable that comes with the open faucet of new categories and concepts. Think of “violent crime” as a legal category in the US that didn’t by and large exist prior to the 1970s (Sklansky 2021). “Talking about ‘political prisoners’ had become such an important political criticism that it was no longer possible to imagine it as a legal category,” concludes another (Hermann 2020).

So too hitherto-unthought-of analogies are always being used to redescribe current policy problems. Not only was Green New Deal, in its fleeting notoriety, likened to Roosevelt’s New Deal; it was also compared to the Civil Rights Movement, 19th century abolitionism, and the war economy of the Bolshevik Revolution. There should be no doubt that the Climate Emergency and responses will be compared to many other events you and I won’t imagine until those comparisons have been made.

–So what? In answer, turn to an insight of literary critic, Christopher Ricks, drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):

‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.

Christopher Ricks (2021). Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240

The notion that some humans started with “unthinkable” is suggestive: We first confront unthinkable disasters and then think our way to making them more or less imaginable.

Current practice is we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then argue that the Magnitude 9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. In this way, we end up with disproportionate contingencies and aftermaths about which we have no real causal understanding.

Let’s suppose, however, we started with disasters so indescribably catastrophic that we need to narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order even to think about the worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have happened. Here we can end up with possibilities, instead of contingencies, and impacts instead of aftermaths, about which we have some knowledge even if little causal understanding. Possibilities and impacts aren’t equivalent to risks and uncertainties, but closer nevertheless.

–Again, so what?

It’s one thing to say a catastrophe today is “the unimaginability of an alternative to the neoliberal status quo.” It is quite another thing to say this complex tangle called neoliberalism generates such contingency and side-effect as to undermine any status quo. If we are meant to suppose the absence of a status quo or status quo ante is dangerous or even catastrophic, then to paraphrase the international relations theorist, Hans Morgenthau: Excuse me, but just what status quo have the people committed themselves to?

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Sources

Hermann, L. (2020). 50 Unimaginable Criminals: The Disappearance of “Political Prisoners” in Spain and the West after 1945 (accessed online at https://ruidera.uclm.es/items/011230ff-b807-4fdc-9b14-273f83590066)

Sklansky, D.A. (2021). “An American Invention” (accessed online at https://inquest.org/an-american-invention/)

Assume that evidence can be generalized as follows: Unionized firms as compared to nonunionized firms have lower rates of productivity, employment creation and investment, other things equal. Even putting aside all the contrary evidence, we still ask: So what?

These are generalizations only. Localized scenarios in which the opposite holds are possible and counter-cases available. Considerable evidence suggests that the ‘‘union/nonunion’’ dichotomy masks great variability in collective bargaining laws and wage arrangements across countries and regions.

That variability, in turn, suggests taking a deeper look at the macro-design standpoints with respect to unions or not. What human rights, for instance, are at issue when one talks about unionization? In reviewing the literature, one quickly realizes that the rights concerned relate less to any ‘‘right to unionization’’ and more to traditional rights of collective bargaining and freedom of association.

Focusing on different rights, in turn, means the earlier starting focus on empirical generalizations about unionization and economic growth is too narrow. We should also be looking at the evidence related to economic growth and collective bargaining arrangements, both generally and specifically. We would then better understand why local conditions are so variable with respect to unions.

–Take a peek at the track record of advisers to their leaders:

• Plato and Dionysius II;
• Aristotle and Alexander the Great;
• Seneca and Nero;
• Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf;
• Petrarch and Emperor Charles IV;
• Montaigne and Henri IV;
• Descartes and Sweden’s Queen Christina;
• Leibnitz and the Dukes of Hanover;
• Voltaire and Frederick the Great;
• Diderot and Catherine the Great; and
• in case you want to add to the list, Adam Smith and the Duke of Buccleuch or Goethe and Prince Carl August, and so on through the centuries. . .
• Or if you really want to cringe, consider André Gide recommending against publishing Marcel Proust, Edward Garnett against publishing James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot against publishing George Orwell. . . .

I mean, get real: If these guys didn’t advise effectively, who are we to think we can do better? (And, puhleeese, don’t throw up Kissinger and Nixon as a working template!)

–So what? Two things. It’s hard to imagine two words scarier in English than “designing leadership.” And we should take to heart the extensions of, “It was beyond our mental capabilities to predict Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in 2016.”