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Yesterday, I said that this blog was to be my manifesto. Because the term manifesto carries alot of history and weight, I want you to be reassured that I’m not using it lightly. In fact, when I mentioned what I was doing to some folks I knew, the first thing that they all said was “like the Communist Manifesto?”
While that’s probably the most famous manifesto, there are many others. The Port Huron Statement is one example of a manifesto even thought it’s called a statement. It was a reaction by the Students for a Democratic Society to an earlier statement written by the Young Americans for Freedom. (And somewhere out there is a statement by the People’s Front of Judea I’m sure…)
Looking at these, it’s clear that the first risk that a manifesto must confront is that of utopianism. The Communist Manifesto could be said to have been felled by this risk. In it, Marx and Engels approach the problems of society through a lens of ‘class struggle’.
While this model of ‘class’ is useful, the ‘real system’ is impossible to model. ‘Class’ is really a way to explain how a group of people might act or be influenced by the system in which they live. But ‘class’ tends to be a strictly economic term and, as the Yugoslavian experiment showed, other factors like nationalism are as important to people as wealth.
And so, this risk is like the South Park episode 217 where a group of gnomes steals underpants in their search for wealth. Their plan looks like this:
- Collect underpants
- ?
- Profit!
The problem is step two, the question mark. The gnomes have a good idea and they have a great goal but getting from idea to the goal is a problem. And while this “plan” of the gnomes satirized the Internet boom of the late 1990’s, it really applies to any activity in which the ideal and goal are disconnected.
Of course, utopian ideals will always be disconnected from their goal of a perfect society. Utopia can only be reached when a system is stable, the value of all variables is known, and nothing fundamentally changes. Game theory and the economics of self-interest focus on these problems. That’s a discussion for another day.
The main question for this moment is this: how do I write a personal manifesto as a blog and avoid it becoming either
- Utopian babble which might really entertain and/or energize a few people but in the end is a dead end
- Words that are mildly interesting to read but that the author doesn’t actually pursue
Or, in other words, how do I know that this site isn’t following a plan that looks like this:
- Write a blog
- ?
- MANIFESTO!
I guess it might, until we fold some “integrity” into the mix…
