Family State

Discussion

Mark Whitaker:

"To continue other examples of mental dichotomies that are rejected, an idea in many authors or political narratives is that ‘the family is different or versus the state.’ This can be seen in the false dichotomy set up by Habermas’s ideas of a ‘public sphere’ versus his ‘private domesticity.’ However, this kind of dichotomized assumption is a mental projection and is rejected, since there is a deep inductive and empirical record of the dynamics of how particular strategies of leadership in states attempt to define conditions under which families form and are legally accepted to make or to have legitimate children (which will be called later the hybrid ‘family-state’ research agenda).

Another dichotomy widely seen in historiography is the idea that history has a dichotomy between corrupted informal families versus incorruptible formal institutions, or at least seeing formal institutions as checks and balances versus informal corruption. Both of these are rejected as another projected false dichotomy, since there is an equally deep inductive and empirical record of particular informal political dynasties in formal institutions of states that rely on occupying such formal positions as the seat of their ongoing informal clientelistic power (which will be called later the ‘family/state’ research agenda, contrasted with the ‘family-state’ term), and since formal institutions are hardly always clearly institutions that oppose informal clientelism, and more regularly formal institutions are used to extend the scale of informal clientelism to make it more aggregately manageable as scale expands—managing wider aggregated and merged informal-formal clientelisms (which will be called the research agenda on ‘jurisdictional alliances’).

Another dichotomy that should be rejected is ‘representative’ versus ‘unrepresentative.’ For why this is so, there are plenty of examples of jurisdictional designs of formal institutions and formal policy that are designed to be unrepresentative for some and representative for others simultaneously (which once more is the ‘jurisdictional alliance’ research agenda). When terms representative and unrepresentative are used throughout this book, I will mean representative as further removing that internalized colonialism upon others that is unrepresentative, at the same time that unrepresentativeness is indeed ‘representative’ to other more limited jurisdictional alliances that benefit from it. I will mean ‘unrepresentative’ as basically all forms of these ‘pseudo-representative’ arrangements.

To belabor the point, as said above, another mentally projected dichotomy is the idea that formal institutions are versus informal politics or interests, when instead there is a deep empirical record of how particular informal politics want to sculpt formal institutions and formal policy to their informal politics, while other informal political groups wish to do the same to design formal institutions in their own way as well.

Later, in the scheme of trialectics, please avoid even the false dichotomies of aristocratic versus royal, citizens versus elites, urban versus rural, public versus private, or cyclic versus linear. Even all one-way kinds of claims of causality are falsely dichotomized in a sense, so they are rejected — as if one variable laughably is always independent in all cases and one is always dependent in all cases! (This is point six below, which is rejected as well as doubtful).

Other (in)famous false dichotomies that get rejected would be the rotting bouquet of many mentally projected false dichotomies that organize the thought of Norbert Elias: like the claim there are ‘warrior societies’ or ‘pacified societies’ (in which imply some kind of violence to maintain it in the latter, as well as how the deduction ignores that mutual parity in violence empirically does tend to lead to greater reduction of violence) or his claim that our social options are only ‘control of emotions’ or ‘control by emotions’—another clear mentally projected dichotomy that is doubtful. A whole series of Eliasian false dichotomies interact in his thought to stop him from doing more empirical research. Interactive dichotomies he promoted were the idea of a ‘warrior society’ moving to a ‘pacified society’ predictably; his idea of ‘control of emotions’ moving to control by them; long term planning versus short term planning; planned and unplanned; self-control versus external control; a monopoly of power versus the ‘primal contest’ (in his thought experiments, xxxx); physical violence confined to military and police versus a pacified society, etc. [Calhoun reader, Elias, xxxx]

Plus, there are many false dichotomies that get rejected in modernist European historiography, particularly in ideas of both Smith or Marx, both in retrospect stemming from the inherited false dichotomy that organized the earlier sandy foundational thought of John Locke—as if a category called the ‘economic’ was an autonomous and separate arena of civil action from ‘social or political’ issues as he dichotomously posed). Following out that thought-world of a false dichotomy, you see its equally bad fruit later in other rejected dichotomies like the idea that there is a ‘feudal/mercantilist vs. capitalist’ set of social relations, or the idea that there are different clear ‘modes of production.’ Both claims rely on deductive dichotomies more than clear empirical history [city of capital, xxxx]. In summary, all of these examples rely on a mental projection of a false dichotomy, and thus should be rejected as an ontological groundwork for claims about generalized causalities and predictions about the world for empirical social scientific thought. Instead, it is important to accept more conditional causalities and conditional feedback issues in comparative retrospect, with an additional element of probabilistic/stochastic issues of likelihoods to how certain kinds of contextual choices more regularly in comparative retrospect yield to certain kinds of implications from those conditional choices, at least so far." p. 48 of the draft

"As other chapters will discuss, in comparative retrospect, regularly such ongoing self-acculturation into a jurisdictional alliance is particularly reproducible so if family relations and thus biological reproduction of children get brought into teaching them the current jurisdictional behavioral and jurisdictional administrative standards are expected. "

"As implied by the ‘family state’ argument, within jurisdictional alliances and their ongoing contingent designs and administrations, there is a winnowing pressure for some kind of standardized version of tactical relationships in social life to be able to administrate attempted uniformity, against other standardized versions in competition with it, against a lack of uniformity, and against regional optimization and/or personal freedom of multiple choices in social life. Any of these singular jurisdictional assemblages are always with and against other plural versions of the same, instead of existing in their singularity. So any singular jurisdictional assemblage is a very competitive and adjustable jurisdictional pattern of aggregates versus other aggregates equally strategizing to extend their own versions of cultural reality into hegemonic positions over other options. In this dynamic trialectical way, there are always plural versions versus each other in each category, in aggregate interactions.

"[1] The first point is how social stratification is best analyzed in one piece as a jurisdictional assemblage of multiple tactics versus other ongoing jurisdictional assemblages of multiple tactics in their actual trialectical dynamics, instead of capable of being universalized from singular factors. Plus, inclusive in these tactics of social stratification, social stratification is built through shared and interactive ideological narratives and many categories of shared and interactive behaviors, all with symbolic values.

[2] The second issue is dynastic power in history, past or present, called here ‘family/states.’ Particularly, unrepresentative kinds of jurisdictions and social stratification regularly have ‘family/state’ dynastic powers that attempt to self-sponsor themselves, their marriage clients, and their sponsored clients into the positions of leadership power repeatedly over generations, and this ‘family/state’ acts as a kind of ongoing merged public and private oligarchic power without power being clearly public or private, though as a creation of ongoing private occupation of public positions of power. This is a source of much of the ongoing psychopathic behavior of history, as they attempt to keep their unrepresentative power against more representative arrangements, strategies, and tactics.

[3a] The third point is a argument about the ‘pseudo-functionalist’ purposes of many jurisdictional design strategies: they are strategized and designed to provide regularly for aggregate consumptive ambivalence. Material tactics that attempt to aggregate people into ambivalence toward leadership, and thus to be passive participants in jurisdictions, and are easier to aggregate and to manage than attempts at ideological or violent tactics aiming respectively for internalization and active participants of loyalty support or aiming at maintaining repression over time.

[3b] Connected to the above issue of aggregate consumptive ambivalence, another major tactic of more durable jurisdictional alliances over time in comparatively retrospect, is regularly to encourage follower self-policing of and ongoing reproduction of the jurisdictional alliance into the next generation via sponsoring particular kinds of ‘family state’ alliances (and banning others). This ‘family state’ issue is the various jurisdictional inroads of how formal institutions and formal policy sculpt particular kinds of family relationships and inheritance arrangements, and attempt to demote other arrangements, as an ongoing means of aggregate consumptive ambivalence with those particular kinds of followers that wish to create such family state relationships. This makes for rather durable ongoing leadership/followership jurisdictional alliances along a particular way of defining how to create or to manage jurisdictional power though family creation and self-reproduction biologically. So wider jurisdictional alliance relationships that are social and political come to piggyback upon particular patterns of ongoing biological reproduction in human families, versus other ways of doing it. By encouraging particular family organization only this maintains an ongoing simple way to assemble many different jurisdictional tactics in one cultural package that is easily understood and clearly defended by ones followers, as well as in which ongoing family relations actively or tacitly acculturate people into the same political jurisdictional alliances as the ‘right way’ to organize social relations versus various ‘wrong ways’ to do it.

[3c] Both of the two previous points help explain the macro-private quality of such unrepresentative dynastic states where informal families are embedded within intergenerational positions of leadership and followership across multiple formal institutional and formal policy venues, instead of it being possible in all cases to really find a ‘formal’ arrangement distinct from the sponsored private informality of ongoing jurisdictional alliances.

[4] In conclusion, making good on the last chapter’s promise to discuss social stratification tactics differently than others in this chapter, with the promise to reframe what we mean by social stratification and in equality, the last novel issue to be discussed are 19 different categorical kinds of tactics in social stratification in which leaderships have to appeal through to others in formulating jurisdictional alliances. All of these points come together."

Family/state versus Principles of Jurisdictions

"Dynastic politics is a topic ignored or tabooed in ‘modern’ political science, despite it being equally modern and involved in past politics instead of relegated to the past alone. [xxxx, political dynasties]. This tabooing of the topic of political dynasties is odd because past or present it is a prevalent an organizing principle of informal leadership, clientelism, and ongoing intergerational power relationships regardless of the differences of formal institutions and formal policy around the world, and regardless of past or present cases in which it exists.

In comparative retrospect, all delocalized positional elites, whether dynastic or otherwise, tend to agree on their own survival and thus their own political primacy and informal independence of action versus any ‘formal rules’ that, in their estimation, should more regularly help them administrate and tame behavior of unpredictable others for their own interests, instead of be used against them to tame themselves of their unrepresentative, recidivist, and elite deviant behavior. Thus, there is a clear continuity, even into the hyperpresent, of aristocratic dynasties and royal houses or other dynastic arrangements in banking, corporations, or religion and education refusing the ‘modern’ suggestion of resigning themselves to destruction as mere representatives of others, instead of strategizing to be true overlord rulers of jurisdictions beyond all laws.

If such political dynasties are ‘repressed’ at home into more representative jurisdictional dynamics, they may choose to work with unrepresentative others outside their home countries/jurisdictions to find greater powers or capacities to get back such unrepresentative autonomies of action and policy in their lives, or to get quiet or open revenge against those more representative aggregated forces within their own countries. [japan, yakuza, xxxx]

Regardless of the success or failure at maintaining such unrepresentative jurisdictions for themselves in the past, such dynastic unrepresentative jurisdictions are closer to large scale informal clientelisms that conveniently and simply use formal institutions and formal policy to manage the wider informal aggregations. Thus it is another false dichotomy to argue that the mere existence of formal institutions and formal policy mitigate against such informal clientelistic use of them, particularly when there are few stops on both co-existing in the same jurisdictional arrangements as a ‘family/state.’ A ‘family/state’ is meant as a slightly more nuanced term than simply dynastic politics, because it concentrates on the ongoing informal politics of their choice of dynastic clientelisms that co-exist and only exist through their ongoing occupation of the positions of formal institutions and formal policy.

Particularly when such ‘family/states’ are involved in larger scaled jurisdictions, as delocalized elites they regularly attempt to find novel ways to insinuate themselves as a gatekeeper (having a veto power) or a catalyzer (co-opter/sponsor) on various more representative processes when of course they have little interest in such different jurisdictional tactics at all. [Blum, xxxx; queen in Australia overthrow government in it] Being modern gatekeepers and catalyzers of representative jurisdictions is how they attempt to survive from the past, or, how they redevelop in the present into the future. Therefore, they regularly keep pushing themselves upon local social relations as if they were required for others’ leadership, instead of admitting such alliances may be only required for themselves to survive as unrepresentative forces. However, there is nothing predictable about such dynastic powers. Some are dedicated democrats and were crucial in developing (or being positionally installed as part of) a third-party mediated democratization while others are ongoing sources of disruption of it like the coup-removed Jacobite dynasty in England between the 1650s-to 1747.

However, whether unrepresentative or more representative, building and maintaining delocalized family/states’ desired ‘vertical’ arrangements of elite-to-localized aggregated clientelism defines their common hegemonic power. In comparative retrospect, jealously, they regularly hate other delocalized elites attempting to do the same by attempting to outflank them strategically and spatially (as well as thus economically and culturally as well). Equally in comparative retrospect, delocalized elites regularly dislike ‘horizontal’ arrangements of local jurisdictions autonomous enough or un-deferential enough to develop their own self-representative and self-driven futures and capacities that have little desire or incentive to form or to conform themselves behaviorally into such a wider delocalized and deferential—and yet still accommodative and combative—elite alliance with others.

Next as one of their principles in comparative retrospect, since they are innately unrepresentative informal insertions into formal institutions and formal policy, such delocalized alliances opportunistically require (and most unfortunately work to maintain) suffering, inequities, dependencies and blocks on political feedback instead of only work to solve them. So such regional autonomy and capacity of autonomous jurisdictions destroys any elite and delocalized ability, and destroys any regional incentives for seeking such wider clientelism because it has destroyed their very positions of power—created only by such extensions of clientelism in the first place. Such extensions of ‘family/state’ unrepresentative clientelistic power are premised on the required dearth of any other aggregated, interpreted ideological-cultural, material, or violent self-capacities of those on the more regional level. So, such larger delocalized family/state elites tend to arise opportunistically in conditions of disruption and despair on the regional level in these asymmetries of power, and thus equally tend to be more openly opposed only under jurisdictional parity when regional conditions get better.

Therefore, instead of only fairly yet opportunistically taking advantage of such unsettled and dangerous conditions to extend their jurisdictions, sometimes such delocalized elites act unfairly and actively attempt to seed terrorizing disruptions in already unified regions. This is in order to break up ongoing aggregate support for regional autonomy, destroy material capacities, change and delegitimate political and cultural hegemonies of support, and confiscate weaponry or render it ineffectual. Family/states may attempt to expand their unrepresentative clientelistic power in a jurisdictional design that is honest and open about enhancing a slow conspiratorial subversion of formal representative jurisdictional trends, via tactical changes of formal institutions and formal policy on that local level to remount themselves, as recounted by a complaining Thomas Jefferson in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Equally, family/states may attempt a feint with many alibis for the encirclement that is happening. Plus, at the same moment that this attempt at curtailing or sabotaging their clients’ options or capacities is occurring openly or covertly, family/states can simultaneously offer a fresh public jurisdictional alliance at the same time as “an offer you can’t refuse”—as the mafia-phrase goes.

Regardless of whether ongoing stratagems of such family/states are merely unrepresentative elite opportunism or intentional attempts at creation of suffering or divisions in others on the regional level, this division on the regional level and delimited regional choice options without other capacities are two autonomous and external background contexts (or are the result of intentional tactical creation) upon which such external delocalized elites depend to (re)establish themselves more securely over such multiple divided and dependent regions. Therefore, regularly such unrepresentative elites dislike ‘completely solving’ regional problems through their leaderships though only prefer solving them to the extent that it keeps others using them as durably ongoing problem solvers, information processors, or material or violence coordinators of leadership that regularly intervene to fix issues, of course as well aiming to keep up situations for others without options in order to provide themselves deferential service in a jurisdictional alliance that is the basis of their external power, wealth, and leadership.

In comparative retrospect, most delocalized trialectical elites are hardly completely parasites as some authors overstate [xxxx, mcneill], and they are hardly completely functional representatives or heirs of future functional trends as some sociological theorists delude themselves into deducing a theoretical purity in the opposite narrative and the equally false dichotomized position. [Elias, 1991, xxxx; parsons, xxxx] Instead elites are real people. They walk a delicate and contingent line with others unpredictably, artfully dodging between both extremes in the attempt to avoid being labeled completely as either. Whenever they veer closer to the former parasitical behavior upon their followers or such interpretations are more popular regardless of their actions, such hegemonies may collapse by greater interpretations toward acts of rebellion. Therefore, they may choose to repress even more deeply or they may choose more patrimonial and beneficial policies for a time until the aggregate upset is diminished or at least well divided in its opposition to them. Whenever they veer closer to the latter representative behavior with their followers, their more personal hegemonies and political primacy (as sources of power and regularly inherited wealth and position) may collapse as well. Their followers may get the idea that their particular clientelistic leadership position can be made into an ever more neutral and replaceable functionary for the followers. Therefore, they may act on incentives to aggregate more unrepresentative followers or institutions for their own more personal clientelism once more to demote aggregated support for such representative trends whether by encouraging greater clientelistic ambivalence to themselves alone and/or by the same choice of repression administered in equal parts simultaneously. If tactics are just actions, there is little difficulty with family/state’s employing both representative and unrepresentative tactics simultaneously instead of the past theoretical difficulty of assuming that ‘conflict theory’ and ‘functionalist theory’ are either totally right or totally wrong. Ending all past deductive and dichotomizing mental basis of any social theory is perhaps the best offering of a more comparative historical and empirical trialectical dynamic analysis.

This is the important point that we rejoin in the next chapter on historical trends and processes that are unrepresentative. Thus regularly in comparative retrospect, crony clientelistic and mostly family-sponsored intergenerational leaderships and the asymmetries of powers that they attempt to create and to extend are the heart of ongoing unrepresentative jurisdictions and thus trialectics in history. To keep surviving, as argued above, such ongoing intergenerational networks of dynasties regularly attempt to avoid either extremes of parasitic or representative behavior in their jurisdictional design or administrative excesses, or at least they attempt to avoid others’ aggregated interpretation or awareness about their behavior as becoming one or more of these extremes—since communication media historically has been far easier to manipulate than reality. Rhetorically speaking, which elites desire their own replacement regularly in history? Unfortunately, very few Cincinnatus’es exist in history ready to retire back to the farm immediately when their leadership is over, and there are far more Clintons, Bushes, Kennedys, and Roosevelts that hate the idea of ever truly solving any problems instead of milking them, since creating solutions might make them replaceable and truly unrequired.

In comparative retrospect, to touch on the topic of unrepresentative jurisdictions is to touch on actual people who seek to maintain it strategically, tactically, and intergenerationally in themselves and their followers instead of abstracted ‘social forces’. Mere choices make the present, and mere choices make the future. Durable powerful dynasties in history exist as ongoing systemic historical actors, many with durable acculturations of psychopathic pride in breeding and lineage at being so unrepresentative, instead of simply a world of abstract and anonymous sociological forces. [paris in the terror, xxxx; political dynasties, xxxx] However, the phenomena here is hardly really ‘dynasties’ per se, though the ‘family/state’ since ongoing informal dynastic power is hardly autonomous though is only maintained on the positional pinnacles of more interactive aggregates of people and their aggregated decisions and receptiveness to such clientelisms, that call forth such positions of leadership that such informal dynasties may attempt to monopolize for themselves and their clients. So the ‘family/state’ in addition to being informal political dynasties are the assortment of ongoing formal institutions and formal policies that keep them in place, sponsored and responsored into such positions without much meritocracy, generation after generation. [cheney guns and silk; bush the unauthorized biography, xxxx]. Thus the ‘family/state’ is more a mix of ongoing informal intergenerational reproduction of clientelistic inserts and sponsorships into formal power, instead of informal and formal being different sociological phenomena when analyzing such dynasties."

The ‘family state,’ aggregated consumptive ambivalence and the ‘macro-private’ aspects of jurisdictional alliances as intertwined

"To continue the above, in comparative retrospect, there are a wider four regular tactics to unrepresentative jurisdictional alliances: the ‘family/state,’ aggregated consumptive ambivalence, the ‘family state,’ and the ‘macro-private’ aspects of jurisdictional alliances. IF the ‘family/state,’ relates to the leadership positions of unrepresentative jurisdictional alliances, then these other three interrelated points relate to the strategies and tactics pitched toward followers in the attempt to maintain unrepresentative jurisdictional alliances strategically and tactically in this manner, which results in trialectics. "...

Source

Footnote from an upcoming book on Trialectics and Jurisdictional Alliances, by Mark Whitaker.

More information

• [Is Japan Asia's Next Autocracy?

Feb 20, 2015 9:00 AM EST Noah Smith https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-02-20/japan-s-constitutional-change-is-move-toward-autocracy;

• “The True Story of the Bilderberg Group” and What They May Be Planning Now:

A Review of Daniel Estulin's book http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-true-story-of-the-bilderberg-group-and-what-they-may-be-planning-now/13808 by Stephen Lendman; Global Research, May 25, 2014]