An Outsourcing State
I
once heard an interesting analogy on the comparison between Communist North
Korea and Capitalist America. He would say that North Korea is a Darwinist
competition society while America is a socialist one. His rationale was that
North Koreans compete to climb mountains for tree barks and grass roots to eat
and Americans wait in line for federal-issued free lunch boxes. This
half-humorous half-sour joke gives something beyond poking fun at the
ideological confusion in two countries; it seems to hint a Hegelian notion that
in order for an idea to sustain, it must have its complementing (and at times
binary) substance within. This can be signified by the white dot in yin and
black dot in yang in the Taoist Taiji
symbol.
Reading
More’s Utopia gave me a similar impression of the anecdote above. In a place
where ‘everyone’ is meant to be happy without any need for private property,
people prepare gold to hire mercenaries that would fight for them, and although
they think war should be avoided, they engage in it when they have to. In order
to maintain a ‘clean’ ‘state,’ the utopia outsources uncleanliness that is
essential to the sustenance of the state. Formal-logically speaking, utopia can
never be a universal form of society, for it has to have a complementing part
of the dystopian society for its sustenance.
And
I see a modern-adaptation of this kind of community in one country: America. It
is very indicative that More places in Amerigo Vespucci as the founder of such
a place. Not to mention the outsourced manufacture of Nike shoes in African
sweatshops, Blackwater private military company is a modern version of
mercenaries. Completely multi-national and external to any sovereignty, there
is practically nothing that could stop this company nominally other than UN
Security Council in which its hirer holds the veto power. When Blackwater USA
agents massacred a native town, US government was free from its prone
criticisms. When more human rights and less collateral damage is expected from
the sovereign government, it can simply outsource it. Same goes to tortures; we
have an International Herald Tribune op/ed that asks for a stricter human
rights measure for US government while demanding more torture for terrorists
outside the borders. There has to be filth to keep the cleanliness, so we can
just kick it out and leave it to barbaric states who are willing to this for,
literally, ‘gold.’
More
was somewhat very insightful in how the future would come, but not how it
should have come. Outsourcing had surely induced better lives, or has it?
Mega-corporations like Samsung outsource high-risk works by setting up a paper
company and making manual laborers toil. When human rights issue or industrial
accidents should take place, it is something that the employers of the paper
company should be responsible of. More’s utopia is menacing because it not only
functions as a state but as a corporate, or any group that needs some filth but
is unwilling to be responsible for it. Thinkers and social philosophers other
than More were busy how to solve the problem; More found a way to sweep it
away. As a result, we now have a contradictory state where it discriminates
between humans in and humans out of the community, which hardly bear any
difference. A reason why EU is building up electric trenches against North
African immigrants, and US builds immigrant blockade against Hispanics. But
unless this outsourcing and filth-ing the outward societies doesn’t cease, such
desperate immigration will not stop. And one day these utopias would have to
pay the price for all the dust they swept underneath the carpet.
And
here comes a million-dollar question: how could More even think of corrupting
foreign political leaders with gold, when he thought it was such a corrupting,
evil substance for the utopians to use as building material for toilets and handcuff
chains? Or has nationality or race already become a major dividing line between
entities of the Homo Sapiens Sapiens
species by More’s era?
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