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."

Source

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