The Sociology Of Pre-empting A Security Agency's Going Rogue (And Reconstructing It If It Does)

• In Event: 237 - Informal Discussion Roundtable Session

Abstract

Edward Snowden revealed that security agencies of the U.S. government have god-like information on Americans and the potential to go supra-Orwellian rogue. Gangs evolve into protection rackets, protection rackets into crime syndicates, crime syndicates into tyrannies, tyrannies into feudalism, and feudalism into democracy: the evolutionary continuum of government from Hobbesian chaos toward Lincoln’s ideal of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”. This roundtable is a chat about applying sociology to preserving democracy from devolutionary backsliding or, worse: back-skipping, down that continuum.

It's open discussion. Not a sit-still-and-listen presentation. Potential topics:
1) cocoons of impunity and Lord Acton’s dictum about power;
2)“prince of the city” policing and the Samurai Privilege (with peasants);
3) apparent preference of security organizations for targeting intellectuals (from the Inquisition to Hoover's FBI (according to the B. Medsger book, "The Burglary" and other evidence) and Dirty War, Argentina): more bullying than fear of ideas?;
4) the socio-biology of parasitism, symbiosis, and hive society;
5) clues and “tells” of a security agency's going rogue: clannishness, separate sets of "books", similarities to organized crime: "extra-judicial" crimes, “making bones” rituals, Rubicons and Gleichschaltung, onion-structure;
6) resemblance between the Jade Helm 15 panic and the 1938 War of the Worlds panic: time for libertarians of the left and right to collaborate?;
7) Designing the reconstruction of a rogue security agency. Examples: the Federal Republic of Germany’s integration of East German police, and the U.S. Army’s post-WWII reconstruction of a police force in the American Zone of Germany.

Author

• John Angle, The Inequality Process Institute