Monthly Archives: April 2009

Frenemies: Freedom and equality

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Marianne, above, did not flash her boobs to all those corpses for nothing. She did it for the trinity (as in the tricolore she carries) of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Let’s leave fraternity, which is a rather mushy notion, to one side. That leaves liberty and equality. Do those two belong together?

I knew I would have to address this issue sooner or later in my ongoing ‘freedom lover’s critique of America‘. But the fascinating debate in the comments below this post brought it to the fore. Fortunately, that comment thread neatly summarizes the entire spectrum, across the world and history, of views on the subject. As I see it, the three options are:

  • You can’t have freedom without equality.
  • You can’t have freedom with equality.
  • It’s complicated.

The Classical Liberal view

Broadly, classical liberals (as properly defined) are passionately in favor of equal opportunity and just as passionately against enforced equal outcomes, exactly as “Hizzoner” paraphrased Friedrich von Hayek here.

Which is to say: If you (ie, the government) predetermine that everybody will be the same (think the same, dress the same, drive the same car, live in the same house…) then nobody in your society can be free, if ‘free’ means being able to be yourself, ie different than others. Why create, why achieve, why risk, if the fruits of your effort and ingenuity will be confiscated (“redistributed”) in the name of equality?

I personally glimpsed the extreme form of just such a dystopia when I peaked into East Germany months before it crumbled (although I didn’t know that it would crumble, of course). They were all driving, or on the waiting list for, the same damn Trabi. And while I was ogling their Trabis, many East Germans were already flooding into the West German embassy in Hungary, trying to escape and eventually forcing their leaders to let the Berlin Wall crumble.

That same example, East Germany, also showed what Hayek correctly predicted would happen in reality in an ‘egalitarian’ society. As Orwell might put it: Some were more equal than others. The difference was that the ‘more equal’ ones didn’t use wealth to assert their supremacy but more nefarious means–party connections, or what the Chinese call guanxi. The resulting horror was captured intimately on screen here.

And so, to those of us, like me, who were devotees of Ayn Rand, the answer was clear. Equality is the enemy of individualism, and thus of freedom.

How it got complicated for Liberals

Even at the time, however, there were some contradictions that gnawed at me. Even in the ‘free world’, we were often invoking equality. For instance, democracy, which we (perhaps wrongly) associated with freedom seemed to be based on the equality of one citizen = one vote, even as capitalism seemed to be based on the opposite, ie unequal outcomes.

Then there was the bit about equal opportunity, which we were all supposed to be for. Well, this was messy, because, inconveniently, we were biological organisms and as such insisted on looking after our offspring. Anybody who ‘makes it’ devotes his entire life, and all his resources, to ensuring that his offspring get a head start. And who can blame him?

So if ‘we’ (the government) really wanted to preserve equal opportunity, we would have to get heavy-handed and stop ‘him’ from looking after his kids. We would have to stop him not just from sending his kids to better schools and doctors, but from reading his kids all those bedtime stories, paying for all those piano lessons and SAT prep courses, building all those Lego houses with them–ie, from doing all those things that give kids ‘unequal’ opportunity. In short, we would have to take his freedom away! Obviously, a non-starter.

The triumph of biology

And then I saw a documentary. I tuned in somewhere during the middle and never saw the title, so I can’t be sure it is this one, but it might be. It was based at least in part on Sir Michael Marmot’s Whitehall Study from Britain. Here is how I remember it:

Stress: It is not the same as pressure, which we all feel from time to time. Instead, it comes from ranking low in a hierarchy and lacking power over your own time, your own self (=not being free). You who are at the bottom are at the whim of others. You suffer. And not ‘just’ psychologically, but biologically. You tend to get fat in your mid-section, and your heart, blood vessels and brain change visibly, with entire neurological circuits shriveling up. Meanwhile, the brains and hearts of top dogs expand and thrive.

The most poignant moment came when they cut from our species, Homo sapiens, to monkeys. The researchers observed packs of primates, and sure enough: a monkey at the bottom of the hierarchy got fat in his mid section, had hardened arteries and heart walls and a a shriveled brain.

Equally poignant: One group of monkeys, led by particularly aggressive alpha males, played in a trash dump and was decimated by an epidemic. Another group, more female and egalitarian, moved in and absorbed the survivors of the first group. The egalitarian culture prevailed. And voilà, the health of the surviving monkeys from the first group recovered and improved! They were slim, their hearts and arteries pumped, their brains fired on all neurons.

Let’s take this one more step toward generalization: You recall that I criticized Ayn Rand for getting individualism wrong (which took me many years to figure out). Well, I now know how she got it wrong. She did not allow or understand how inviduals, when forming groups, pick up signals from one another that change who and what they are.

Watch this amazing TED talk by Bonnie Bassler as a mind-blowing illustration of what I mean. It is not about humans per se, but about bacteria. That’s right. Stupid, single-cellular strings of DNA and surrounding gunk. The trick to understanding bacteria (→all biological critters?) is to grasp how they chemically detect the presence of other bacteria, and then suddenly change their own chemistry. Upshot: No bacterium is an island.

The case of America

Let’s now look at America. Without getting into the academic weeds, there is a proxy for social equality called the Gini Coefficient. If the coefficient is 0, everybody has exactly the same; if it is 1, one person has everything, and everybody else has nothing. So countries fall somewhere in the middle between 0 and 1. Now look at this world map:

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The first thing you will notice is that the darkest blues and purples–ie, the greatest inequality–tend to be in poor countries, even in nominally “Communist” ones such as China. That’s because poor countries tend to be corrupt and feudal, with a few lords and many serfs. It is hard to consider these countries “free”.

But the second thing is more interesting. If you look at just the “developed” countries (let’s say those belonging to the OECD), you notice that one country stands out.

All the rich countries are in shades of yellow or green, meaning that they are fairly egalitarian societies. Only America is blue. America, in short, is the least egalitarian of all the developed countries.

And so? I’m not sure. The old Hayekian in me would chalk this up as a possible sign of more freedom in America than elsewhere. The new bacteriologist and epidemiologist in me wants to ring the alarm bell. This is not healthy! Sure, the Americans on top of the pecking order might show up at Party Conventions every four years and proclaim that ours is the freest country in the world. But many other Americans are simultaneously dying from their serfdom, whether they are aware of it or not.

For the time being, let’s consider freedom and equality neither friends nor enemies, but frenemies.

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Ancient scroll worms

As a writer, I am naturally interested in reading. That includes all the ways in which technology changes reading habits. How is reading different on a Kindle? Do you retain more if you “delete through a text“?

And: What if we were still reading scrolls?

That was the fun insight in this piece by Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. She takes us on a tour of reading and writing in ancient Rome. Some aspects of the trade were eerily familiar, but others quite different:

The ancient equivalent of the printing press was a battalion of slaves, whose job it was to transcribe one by one as many copies of Virgil, Horace or Ovid as the Roman market would buy. And it was a large market. Imperial Rome had a population of at least a million. Using a conservative estimate of literacy levels, there would have been more than 100,000 readers in the city. The books they read were not “books” in our sense but, at least up to the second century, “book rolls” – long strips of papyrus, rolled up on two wooden rods at either end. To read the work in question, you unrolled the papyrus from the left-hand rod, onto the right, leaving a “page” stretched between the two. It was considered the height of bad manners to leave the text on the right- hand rod when you had finished reading, so that the next reader had to rewind back to the beginning to find the title page.

Reading was a very different experience with this technology. You could not really skim, for example. You could not easily go back to check something you had forgotten. And you really had to concentrate, because often the Romans did not separate words with spaces but wrote in one continuous stream of letters.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering where papyrus came from: It came from Phoenicia, the mother country of Carthage and thus Hannibal. The Phoenician city that did the briskest export trade was Byblos. Hence: Bible, bibliography, bibliophile, etc.

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What’s in a word: Rostrum

When you speak in front of people, you “take the rostrum“. Literally, you are “taking the beak”. The what? Why would you do anything so odd when everybody is watching?

It turns out that, like so much else in our lives, our phrase for pulpit or lectern–ie, rostrum–has everything to do with the story that forms the historical backdrop for the main characters in my forthcoming book. Recall that we left off describing the foolish and tragicomic cock-up that led to two world wars and then a genocide. Well, the first of those wars “produced” quite a bit of flotsam, which the Romans called rostra.

We are talking now about the 23-year-long First Punic War between Rome and Carthage that started in 264 BCE. This war was about the island of Sicily. Both the Romans and the Carthaginians rather wanted it. There was a lot of fighting on the actual island, but the most dramatic and spectacular battles were sea battles. In fact, one of these may have been the single largest naval battle in all of history, involving 200,000 sailors and soldiers!

If you’ve been reading The Hannibal Blog for a while, this might strike you as odd. Yes, Carthage was a great naval power, so that makes sense. But Rome was not. In fact, Rome had no navy at all at the start of the war.

Well, the Romans changed that. At one point, they captured a Carthaginian ship, studied it, and copied it again and again, until they had an entire fleet. This was the ‘reverse-engineering’ part.

517px-corvussvgNext came a bit of innovation. They added an ingenious weapon to their ships. This was the “raven” (corvus), a large swivel bridge that the Romans brought crashing down onto an enemy ship when they pulled up alongside of it. The two ships were then tied together as a large floating platform, and the Roman soldiers stormed across. In effect, the Romans had thereby found a way to turn sea battles into land battles, and they tended to win land battles.

Now to those rostra, or beaks: It’s what the Romans called the prows of galleys. After their first big naval victory, the Carthaginian ships were sinking or floating in the water in pieces, so the Romans fished out the prows, brought them to Rome and stuck them onto the speaker’s pulpit in the Forum, as in the image at the very top of this post.

It was the equivalent, you might say, of an Indian hanging the scalps of his enemies above his tent.

And so, ever since, speakers in Rome and elsewhere have been taking the beak.

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Humor, education and creativity

You probably remember the old chestnut of Philosophy 101, Metaphysics: If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound?

Well, enjoy Ken Robinson’s twist on it, 14:40 minutes into the talk at the end of this post:

If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears it, is he still wrong?

The talk is another great example of the British humor that I love and am often surrounded by at The Economist. But humor is best with substance, as a vehicle that delivers a serious point more memorably.

Does Robinson have such a point? Yes. It is:

Schools kill creativity.

As he says,

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re never going to be original.

But we–first in our schools, then in our companies–stigmatize “mistakes”. We do, don’t we? Even on this blog, I am sometimes so worried about saying something stupid that I end up saying nothing at all. As Robinson says, we “educate people out of creativity.”

Well, let’s stop doing that, certainly here on The Hannibal Blog. Watch the whole thing:

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Tax day thoughts on complexity in American life

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April 15. Tax day. All over America today, people are amusing themselves with “tea parties“. And that is great fun, to be sure. Part of our creation myth is that the country started with a tax revolt, as we rugged individualists stood up to those imperial tyrants. So let’s put on our costumes and play.

But let’s then talk seriously about taxation as part of our ongoing ‘freedom lover’s critique of America‘. To do that intelligently, I feel I must remove one important distraction upfront:

I don’t believe we are overtaxed in America. I believe that some of us could pay even more. But the amount or rate of American taxation is not the problem.

What, then, is the problem? Make no mistake that there is a problem. America’s tax system is a scandal. It is incompatible with freedom.

The problem is complexity, and its effect, opacity.

Today I heard the IRS commissioner say on NPR that America’s tax code is four times as long as War and Peace. 5.5 million words, apparently. The wordcount, however, is a very abstract and bad way of grasping the complexity of the system. We don’t read the code.

The complexity begins hurting, and enslaving, us as we live–that is, as we participate in our society and economy, have children, work and save, and so forth. Young Americans probably don’t know what the fuss is about. That’s because they are not yet participating fully in society. Some adult Americans–probably the spouses of the one “doing the taxes” in any given household–might also feign surprise. That is because they have chosen not to inquire into this scandal. But they are fooling themselves.

The only legal American way to keep things simple in matters of tax paperwork and hassle is not to live. That’s the only way. Don’t work, save, have children, move, and so forth. (Above all, never ever contemplate hiring a nanny!) So I think we can agree that a country that torments its citizens just for trying to make their dreams come true (might I say, for “pursuing their happiness”?) is not … free!

Short meditation on complexity and simplicity

Regular readers of The Hannibal Blog already know how important simplicity is to me, in all things aesthetic, creative, or administrative. Simplicity to me accompanies freedom. I feel free when I am free of clutter.

But I also recognize that nature is full of complexity. and that complexity can be beautiful. However, it comes in three very different kinds:

  1. Natural. Our bodies, for example, are extremely complex. The two nervous systems, the immune system, each organ, each cell, each organelle within each cell–all these are beautifully and mysteriously complex. However, this complexity has evolved, and comes with a “user interface” that remains extremely simple. We do not compute how to attack a virus in our body or how to inhale, we just do it. The complexity is hidden.
  2. Manmade, but following the path of nature: Our cars, for example, are constantly getting more complex. I might have been able to fix a Model T, but I can’t begin to comprehend the 20-odd computers that together represent my Prius. However, just as our bodies hide their complexity from us with a simple user interface, my Prius hides its complexity, so that driving (and bluetoothing, GPSing, etc) is simpler than it was in a Model T. Such complexity is actually sophistication. It works for us, and thus is humane.
  3. Manmade, and going against the path of nature. This is the bad one. This is where our bureaucracies reside. They get inexorably more complex, as surely as entropy increases anywhere in nature, but away from sophistication and toward oppression. They are inhumane. Our tax system is the best (meaning worst) example.

Symptoms of denial

So they arrive, the W2s, W4s, W8s, the 10this and 10thats, the Schedules A, B, C, D, E, F, the worksheets and other papers, and above all, those truly weird, out-of-nowhere, can’t-even-indentify, forms of the sort that we just got and now have the pleasure of disputing and investigating.

People respond in one of three ways.

  1. Take deep breaths, fire up TurboTax and just do it. Those of us who are youngish tend to do it, because we are the do-it-yourself generation, or don’t trust that a tax preparer would do it as meticulously as we will, or actually want to understand (gasp) our affairs.
  2. Get an accountant, forward all that dreadful crap to him, sign whatever he produces, and push the whole thing out of our consciousness.
  3. Break down and give up completely, not filing at all.

In my opinion, 3 is the worst, 2 is the second-worst, and 1 is merely bad. Why? Because all those in Number 2 are fooling themselves. They are accepting that they cannot, and never will, understand their own relationship to government. They are acquiescing in a subtle form of serfdom.

Summary

We can say, speaking for adult Americans who participate fully in life, society and economy, that:

Nobody truly understands why they pay what they pay

The tax system, in short, has become a black box.

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Black boxes are profoundly and inherently illiberal. Propaganda about “lands of the free” is empty when you’re shouting it over black boxes. (And there are other black boxes in American life, to which I will get.)

Finally, recall my two comparisons to Hong Kong: 1) There, my tax return was two pages, counting the bilingual translation, and I understood exactly what it contained. 2) This despite Hong Kong not being a democracy. How intriguing. As it turns out, it is our peculiar American brand of democracy that has caused this mess.

Of that, and of the possible ways out of this mess, more in posts to come.

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Bureaucracy and alienation in American life

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The Hannibal Blog continues its multi-post and cumulative ‘freedom lover’s critique of America.” In recent posts, I reflected on Hong Kong, and how very differently–read: freer–I felt when I lived there. Now I want to start exploring what it is that makes me feel unfree in America.

Let me define the direction of my posts (in the comments you can go wherever you please). I won’t be talking about America’s role in the world at large. I won’t be talking about whether or not the world owes America for saving it from totalitarianism in the past (it does). I’ll be discussing only what it feels like to be inside of America today, after having known life in other developed and comparable countries. More specifically, I will concentrate on what it feels like to interact with the organs of official America. (That individual Americans will comfort one another and make life livable is obvious, but no more so than in any other country.)

In essence, this becomes a discussion of American bureaucracy.

God knows other countries have a lot of it, and often more of it, than America. But America has a peculiar brand of it. It has many and overlapping bureaucracies. These share data but do so awkwardly and antagonistically. Democracy does not help but often hurts, because electoral politics (people campaigning in poetry, then governing in prose) add to these bureaucracies. America’s legal tradition, often praised, hurts too, because it is adversarial (as opposed to inquisitorial). It is based on the clash of two parties, each trying to win, with the hope that truth and justice are on the side of the winner. This pervades all of official life in America: You prepare for clashes, you arm for war, then climb down when possible. (Hong Kong also has an adversarial system, but without the rest of America’s bureaucracy.)

Let’s make this concrete. Watch Barry Schwartz talk about our loss of what he calls “wisdom”. It meanders a bit and will strike you as only tangentially relevant. But pay attention to some of the anecdotes. They are peculiarly American. In one, a father takes his son to a ballgame, buys him some lemonade, doesn’t realize that it is a brand that contains some alcohol, is observed by a guard who (yes, preparing for war, using the bureaucracies) calls an ambulance and the cops. The son ends up in the emergency room (procedures and rules are being followed, you understand) and is declared safe. One bureaucracy (something with “welfare” in the name) sends the child to a foster home for three days. A judge (in another bureaucracy, the court system) sends the son home, but now orders the dad to move into a motel. The ordeal goes on for two more weeks. All bureaucrats involved eventually say “we have to follow the rules”.

America is all about rules. It is the land of ever more disclosure statements, ethics training seminars, pieces of paper (often with a notice at the bottom about a “Paperwork Reduction Act”!).

Schwartz says these procedures and frameworks of officialdom are meant to “spare us from thinking”, to relieve us of spontaneous and moral judgment. They “assure mediocrity”, he says. To me, they contribute to making me feel less free.

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Dear Economist; REALLY dear

A truly shocking notion: If your numbers are shrinking from one of your two revenue sources, raise prices for the other revenue source.

Not so shocking perhaps, but we’re talking about the magazine industry. A lot of magazines have been charging subscribers far less per issue than a Starbucks anything, and lowering that price in the hope of getting more subscribers and thus, in theory, higher advertising revenues.

Fast forward: Depression → Ads go poof. So what to do?

They’re suddenly paying attention to … us. As this piece says,

The Economist is leading the charge on expensive subscriptions, and its success is one reason publishers are rethinking their approaches. It is a news magazine with an extraordinarily high cover price – raised to $6.99 late last year – and subscription price, about $100 a year on average. Even though The Economist is relatively expensive, its circulation has increased sharply in the last four years. Subscriptions are up 60 percent since 2004, and newsstand sales have risen 50 percent, according to the audit bureau.

Will it work for others?

Let me tell you how I buy wines.

In normal circumstances, economists talk about something called the price elasticity of demand, because when something gets more expensive, people tend to buy less of of it. But there is a quirky exception. The demand for certain things has an inverse price elasticity. As the price goes up, you buy more of it.

This explains why I, occasionally capable of rationality, have nonetheless found myself reaching for the more expensive of two otherwise indistinguishable bottles of Napa Cabernet Sauvignon. It must be …. better. How do I know? I don’t. The price led (fooled?) me into thinking it.

But: For this to work, the product must be something that is not fungible and that I value intrinsically. Having bad wine at my age is worse than no wine. Ditto my reading time: Reading crap is worse than not reading at all. By contrast, I would not reach for the more expensive of two otherwise indistinguishable rolls of toilet paper.

We may soon find out how the reading public views its news magazines.

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Mid-fives, low sixes, mild sevens

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That is how, according to Michael Meyer in the New York Times, authors talk about their advances.

Amounts are coyly described like cigarette brands – the “mid-fives,” the “low sixes,” the “mild sevens.”

Thankfully, I already know my advance, which was negotiated when I got my book deal with Riverhead, and have the first installment. But it’s always fascinating to get a peek into the world of other people’s advances.

Meyer says that 7 out of 10 books do not earn back their advance. That sounds familiar. I have compared publishers to venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, who back ten start-ups, expect to break even on two, and make their killing on one. As an aspiring author, I never cared about the advance for its own sake, but I did want it as high as possible to make the publisher “bleed” early on so that they would feel more compelled during the launch to spend even more in order to make it back.

The blockbuster advances get the press, but, says Meyer,

most publishers I talked to cited $30,000 as a rough average. In standard contracts, the author receives half up front, a quarter on acceptance of the manuscript and a quarter on publication, though that model is changing, said the literary agent Eric Simonoff … “Now we see advance amounts being paid in thirds, fourths and even fifths.

He quotes a publisher saying that

It used to be that the first book earned a modest advance, then you would build an audience over time and break even on the third or fourth book… Now the first book is expected to land a huge advance and huge sales. The media only reports those, not the long path of writers like John Irving, Richard Ford, Anne Tyler and Toni Morrison. The notion of the ‘first book with flaws’ is gone…

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Freedom lessons from Hong Kong (2): democracy

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How liberating

Recall, for a moment, the famous lad who went out one Friday night, ordered gin with orange juice and got tipsy. He went out again Saturday night, ordered vodka and orange juice and got tipsy again. He loved being tipsy so much, he went out and bought himself a whole liter of … orange juice.

Let’s now look at the role of democracy in freedom. Is it the gin or the orange juice?

Last time in this thread–an emerging ‘freedom lover’s critique of America‘–I shared with you my experience of living in Hong Kong as an instructive way into understanding life in today’s America. In brief: I felt freer in Hong Kong than anywhere else I have ever lived; I feel less free in America than anywhere else I have lived.

Even as my fingers still touched the keyboard, I started bracing myself for some inevitable rejoinders. Of which the first and most obvious is: Hong Kong is not a democracy, whereas America proudly is!

Coming clean

I once belonged to a salivating pack of expatriate journalists in Hong Kong who loved to scrutinize every Asian government we covered based on its minute-by-minute body language toward democracy.

  • More democracy = approve
  • Less democracy = disapprove

It was an evergreen topic for us, easy to pitch to an editor, easy to write, easy to be smug about. Hong Kong, during its suspenseful transition from British to Chinese rule, was a particularly good place for “democracy” stories. If an errant Falun Gong meditator from Ohio or Liaoning so much as got stuck in his Lotus pose, I was ready to suspect sinister interference from the Mainland.

On the Mainland, whenever I got stuck in an interview, I whipped out that word, democracy. In Taiwan and the Philippines, officials occasionally played the trick on me: They whipped out the word to buy time. After all, what else could I possibly demand as long as the place was, you know, democratic and thus surely free.

In America, George W. Bush was composing entire inaugural addresses around just two words–freedom and democracy–as a way of explaining wars and himself. Very few people called him on that particular association. The two do seem to go together.

Hell is other demos

Actually, they do not. They can, but they need not. In Foreign Affairs, twelve years ago, Fareed Zakaria coined two powerful memes: Illiberal democracy and liberal autocracy. (That’s liberal as properly used.) He simply observed that there are an awful lot of democracies–ie, countries whose governments are chosen in elections–today whose citizens are anything but free. And there are quite a few autocracies whose people are free. Hong Kong is one of them.

Another free (ie, liberal) autocracy in history was colonial America, before the British started imposing exotic new taxes. The king was far away and left the colonials alone. They had no say in government, but did not care because they were free to live their lives. I once read somewhere (if anybody could point me to the link, I would be grateful) that this was the freest period in American history.

Next came taxation. Then the call for none of it without representation. Then the constitutional convention. And how did our founding fathers approach the issue? James Madison, possibly thinking of ancient Athens, said that:

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and conflict; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

In general, the founding fathers believed Polybius: the best government balances monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Without such balance, monarchy becomes tyranny; aristocracy becomes oligarchy; democracy becomes mob rule. Today, this skepticism about democracy lives on in a small circle of libertarians/liberals such as Ron Paul, who worry about “majoritarian” oppression.

If you read this to mean that I am against democracy, you have misunderstood this post. I am not necessarily against it. And yes, I do love Winston Churchill’s wit. I am merely pointing out that democracy can coexist or conflict with freedom. Some of us have got used to seeing the two together, like orange juice and vodka in a screwdriver, and have made an inappropriate association.

But democracy is irrelevant to our topic. The origin of freedom is to be found elsewhere. And we will look for it.


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Freedom lessons from Hong Kong (1)

From late 1999 to 2003, I lived in Hong Kong. In personal terms, I had some ups and downs there, but that is of no interest here. What’s interesting is that Hong Kong is the freest place I have ever lived in.

In Hong Kong, the authorities and bureaucracies leave you alone.

And this–being left alone–is one simple first definition of freedom. How much time do you spend defending yourself against weird paperwork that shows up in your mailbox? In America, a lot. In Hong Kong, at least when I lived there, almost none.

Let me summarize what I recall to be my interactions with Hong Kong bureaucracies (not counting the ones that I interviewed as a journalist):

  • I had to get my visa when I moved there, and to renew it once during my stay. Since I have two passports, I even made some paperwork mistakes that needed to be corrected. I personally showed up at the immigration agency each time. Total time spent in 4 years (filling out paperwork, waiting in line): 9 minutes!
  • I had to file Hong Kong taxes. (Not German or British taxes, since those countries do not harrass their former residents or citizens when they go abroad; but also American taxes, since the United States, like North Korea (!), asserts global jurisdiction over its citizens.) Total page count of my Hong Kong tax forms, including bilingual translations into English and Chinese: 2 pages! Number of boxes filled in with a money amount: 1! Estimated time spent in 4 years filling out my Hong Kong tax returns: 13 minutes!
  • Then, of course, there were all those other forms that I had to…. Oh, wait. No, there weren’t any. That was it.

Those of you living in America or the European Union, but especially America, might be starting to guess where this is going. Think about the crap that you get in your mailboxes, look at your file cabinets, weigh the paper of your correspondence with your bureaucracies. Read their tone (“on penalty of perjury”). Observe how bureaucratic and official America makes you feel.

Two questions:

  1. Do you feel free? (I am not asking you to enumerate the usual lists of freedoms in the plural–speech, press, association, etc. I am asking you how you feel. Beleaguered or free?)
  2. Do you understand your affairs and interactions with official bureaucracies? (I am not asking whether you can point me to the relevant file for each bureaucracy; I am asking whether you comprehend why your are paying this tax rate and not that, why this form showed up and not that, whether you have set up everything optimally or not, et cetera.)

I am guessing that quite a few of you are already inhaling to inform me that I could not have, should not have, must not have felt free in Hong Kong, that colony of first the British and then the Communist-Chinese empire. China! What about democracy?

Ah. Let’s re-examine that particular issue anon.