PART THREE: The Dystrocrats
CHAPTER VIII

MISCONCEPTIONS OF DEVELOPMENT

Numerous misconceptions have sprung up from the tribulations of the dystrocratic world. Its vast and varied social terrian challenges all consistency of mind and policy. "At the end I am humble," wrote Gunnar Myrdal when the tenth year of research saw the completion of his 2300-page work on southern Asia in 1968. Indisputable is the enormity of our ignorance about the working of Asian and other worlds.

But even the European West is a mystery full of surprises. The outbreak of World War I surprised most experts. Post World War II prosperity surprised most economists. The Sino-Soviet rupture was a shock. The behavior of Gaullist France bewildered many authorities. That Portugal, which is among the least technologically advanced of European states, should maintain the last great empire is a continuous surprise.

Ignorance is profound and universal. We must move, nevertheless, or be moved. The best cure for ignorance is a policy, for men can learn fastest whatever must be known in order to act.

Probably the most widespread of all illusions is that Kalotic conditions are generally improving in the dystrocratic sectors of the world. On the contrary, people are not "better off than they used to be."1 They are not much better off even in other types of regime. Once modern man realizes his material plight he will be more disposed to do something about it. He must reject the frequent claims that "the solution is in sight." They feed a dangerous smugness and apathy.

An international Affairs report, for example, states that twenty years earlier, 29.8 % of the world's people lived in colonial territory, whereas in 1966 only 1.1 % did. However, we have already asserted that a large part of the world's people still are infected by a colonial psychology. One cannot accept physical boundaries as the definition of colonialism.2

Furthermore, these figures are emptied of most of their meaning when one begins to enumerate the victims of the new colonialism. If the peoples of Tibet, Latvia, Estonia, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Panama, Okinawa, Guatemala, East Germany, Kashmir, Taiwan, "Kurdistan," Black South Africa, and the Israel-occupied Near East are counted, it becomes evident that a new colonialism embraces many people. Nor do we speak of the numerous nationalities and linguistic groupings that seek out pneumos and dikeos, such as the Ukrainians, Ulster Catholics, the Flemish and Indian-Americans. Colonialism remains then a problem for the Kalotic Revolution to be resolved in the course of toparchic and comsarchic reorganization. Self-determination refers to several areas of life-space, and not the least of the references is to ethnic, cultural, and linguistic self-0determination. Dignity is part of Kalos, especially of dikeos; we can prepare a list of dignities (and indignities) that is as long as the list of dietary sufficiencies (or insufficiencies) that make up emos, or as elaborate as the check-list of health and well-being that compriseemos.3 For instance, in South Africa, blacks and colored men, women, and children suffer continuously from the indignities of the so-called Apartheid system, which is neither separate for equal, but a cleverly contrived caste system.4

Since 1939 most areas of the world have suffered a decline in tood production per capita: Latin America by 5.7 %; Africa by 4%; the Far East except Red China by 28%; Oceania by.9%; Red China itself by some factor the exact measure of which is unknown. Of the dystrocratic regions only the Middle East appears to be better off in this one element of Kalos, but this is doubtful also in Egypt and the average per capita food production remains at too low a level to approach the emotic minimum. North America and Europe, the most emotic areas, have nevertheless progressed the most in this regard.5

Generally in the dystrocracies, basic education is failing to keep up with population growth. In Morocco, for example, 150,000 out of 500,000 children reaching school age attend the first grade.6 The United Nations Economic Commission for Asia and the Far East reported in March, 1968; that agriculture was on a treadmill and that only in a few areas could an absolute increase in agriculture and manufacture, regardless of population increase, be recorded.

Less developed countries, reported the New York Times on January 17, 1969, were registering and ever smaller share of the total of world exports and were suffering from ever more unfavorable terms of trade, in relation to the already developed countries. When a group of bankers and industrialists met in Amsterdam in February of 1969, they were told by Dr.Dirk V. Stikker that " by 1975 virtually all of the outside money now reaching the developing countries from both governmental and private sources will be required to meet annual interest charges and to pay installments of money already borrowed."7 We could not gather together more illustrious and influential leaders that attended to these words, but the results of this conferences like those of many similar ones, when measured against the size of the problem registered imperceptibly above "zero".

Unless the shape of what is now happening economically the dystrocracies is radically revised, no betterment can be expected for as far as in the future as the eye see-except through genocidal war, plague, or famine. Israel has raised its Gross National Product by 6% per year in this past decade or more; its standard of living leaves a great deal to be desired; the increase was based upon an abundance of skills and much foreign private and public capital. Assuming recent conditions continue, Indonesia will take 593 years to reach the GNP per capita of the U.S.A. in 1965.8 India China would require centuries to raise themselves to decent emotic levels even if their GNP's were growing at the Israeli rate. And we see that Italy, also moving at a high rate of speed towards greater per capita productivity has yet to solve the problems of very large "pockets" of proverty. So also the United States, the U.S.S.R. and the other relatively rich countries. There is no use pretending that the present domestic and world organization can achieve what people everywhere are now demanding.

As if to apologize for stagnation in many places, it is often claimed that poor soil, aridity, and lack of mineral resources are responsible for a country's economic backwardness. However, favorable natural conditions contribute very little to the economic welfare of Switzerland and Denmark. And "natural poverty" used to be claimed for Palestine and Italy, to pursue the previous examples. Yet in these countries, since World War II, a remarkable development has occurred. Hence no one with a pretense of learning can assert these once widely held beliefs about the causes of material backwardness.

Portions of the United States and the Soviet Union that were once regarded as hopeless for economic development have come up rapidly even within the past generation. It is long-forgotten that competent travelers and naturalists to America even as late as the eighteenth century said that the natural conditions of prosperity were wanting even in those parts of the Americas that now form productive megalopolises.9 So this too is a misconception of the problem of dystrocracy. New forms of industrial products and agricultural inventions combine with the organizational factor to permit well-being anywhere.

But there are other myths. It is widely believed that political corruption is a formidable barrier to economic development. This belief, too, is poorly supported by fact. Britain's industry and commerce developed most rapidly amidst widespread corruption. It would be difficult to find a more amoral and "free-wheeling" group than the motley crew that steered England into its age of world empire Victorian morality.10 Piracy, suppression, "sweating" of domestic and foreign labor alike, bribery at home and abroad, private and public peculation, slavery and forced labor, and impressment were their hall-marks. The late Winston Churchill is supposed to have retorted, when reproached for upsetting a naval tradition, "Tradition of the Royal Navy! Bah! Rum; prayers; sodomy; and the lash!"

The economy of the United States Flourished from early times upon corrupt land speculation, political bribes, special statal privileges, and patronage. Even Czarist Russia showed signs of economic vitality under almost completely hostile political configurations, and the Soviets took many years to equal the pace of the ancien regime.

It is observation of many investors and industrialists that where regulations might otherwise strangle their activities, tricks and cheats may bring about material progress. Behind thousands of the most progressive projects in the world today are hidden the infamous "little black bags" of cash brides. Corrupt means may be the only means of "getting things done" in many dystrocracies.

Whosoever wishes to devote great resources to "rooting out corruption" had better prove to himself that he is not committing a double offense against economic progress -- first by blocking useful initiatives and secondly by consuming personnel and funds in the prosecuting process. "Preoccupation with corruption can itself become an impediment to development." Reformers need to take a calloused view: is the "corruption" contributing in fact to the progress of a Kolotic Revolution or is it unproductive, wassteful, and immoral. It is not wise to accept uncritically the conventional or authoritative definitions of wrong in a society whose very convention and authoryty are being challenged.

Often rigid and prudish types who fight "corruption" to the exclusion of dynamism are subscribers to an absurd opinion that apart from the crooks in the ruling circles, the mass of people is ready to follow sweeping directives for political and economic reform. Actually the mass subsides abruptly into lethargy confusion, and old habits of life unless exhorted and enthused by a considerable boby of politists.

Nor is it true, though widely believed, that the mass of people in dystrocracies recognize or allege that their ruling classes, or even foreign plutocracies, are the source of their woes. These ideas, too, have had to be pounded into their heads. At leastas many ordinary men and women everywhere are ready to accept what authority says is possible or impossible as are persuaded of the iniquity and inequity of authority. A great deal of propaganda and agitation is required to teach the population of most countries that rapid radical change is possible, that it can only be done by kalotic techniques, and that they must not despair but should work precisely along consistent and direct lines.

The variety of techniques for invigorating kalotic practices is large. Writes Dr. Harold H. Mann, who was Director of Agriculture in Bombay from 1921-27, "it would really seem to be true that a readiness to adopt new methods is the characteristic of the Indian cultivators, provided they are proved to give a return which will warrant the borrowing of capital at high interest."

And, again, Erawati Karve writes in 1958, "when opportunities for some work other than hereditary occupation arise and are more paying, full advantage is taken of them by all castes."15 By all castes! What more can be asked in the way of readiness to change? The key is motivation.

Dystrocracies are also capable of representative government. The rules of Kalotic Toparchy (see pages 00 below) are clear, simple, and universallly applicable. The Vietnamese, for instance, are quite the equals of Americans as popular politicians, legislators, and administrators. One need only study carefully a case in extremis, the elections conducted by the South Vietnamese in 1967 in the middle of war and those of the United States in 1864 during its Civil War, asking the question, "Which elections were more democratic?," to reconsider and shatter the superficial remarks of many "expert observers" of the Vietnamese.

There is no more reason to believe that representative government, positioned properly and backed up, will fail in dystrocracies than that the American government will fail.

The old notion that representative government comes out of a "chosen people" with a "special culture" is widely held. The new version is "first feed everybody, then you can have representation."16 The same statement could be made on the political apathy and economic preoccupations of a bustling crowd of well-to-do British, or French, or American, or German commuters.

Practically every nation has a tradition of representative government at bottom; the task of kalotic historians and nation builders is to transliterate the indigenous version of Kalotic Toparchy into reality. The foundations are always present in West Africa, in Southeast Asia, in South America but they must be dug up and reconstructed. Certainly, details of representation are unlike but one who judges by details is not only a fool abroad, he is a fool at home. It is a logical sickness of perception for western-trained "social doctors" to go abroad with a bag of legalities, calling these gadgets by the name of representative government, and amputating and disemboweling the indigenous representative institutions that they find "to prepare the patient for a modern operation."

Foreign Aid and Self-Help

Still another misconception of the dystrocratic condition relates to the theory of foreign aid. It is a favorite myth that "foreign aid", that is, advice and funds granted by foreign governments to dystrocratic governments or through "people-to-people" techniques, can achieve rapid material development.17

This has never happened. One need only look at the experience of the United States, which has dispensed many billions of dollars to poor countries, with regard to the American Indians.The Indians, close neighbors and intimately known to Americans through an experience of three centuries, constitute a pocket of "underdevelopment" as bad as many a dystrocratic country in this world. Yet the United states federal government alone has been spending about $600 per Indian a year on reservation Indians and programs for their benefit. One federal bureaucrat is occupied with Indian affairs for every 25 Indians.18 Many state officials and agents of private charitable and educational associations are also employed in dealing with Indian problems. These are welfare expenditures and exclude the Indians' share of defense and other national and state spending. At this rate, there would have to be eighty million technical and administrative personnel to service welfare activities of like kind for the people of the world who live on the level of the Indians. An expenditure of $1,200,000,000,000 annually would be required. And the problem is not at all solved or being solved except through the attrition of the Indians.

One has to conclude with Chairman Mao that only "regeneration through one's own efforts" is the cure for dystrocracy. To quote another ruling poet, King Mahendra of Nepal:

Adorn the country now With the sweat of your brow; Time once past is always past, No one knows What lies beyond

The Great Cultural Revolution of Mao's Red Guards was largely a failure,19 but it is possible to understand why many people admired it. The Red Guards -- rash, pathetic, untrained-were unleased to destroy the taxocracy that was destroying Mao's vision. He had hoped for a people's revolution that would break the huge centralized country into an infinite number of small groups, exercising initiative, training themselves, and co-ordinating horizontally and vertically with each other throughout the land. Mao's magnificent concept was of a vast community of "self-helpers" and his enemies were time and bureaucracy. But he did not have the human instrument to effect the revolution that he truely wanted.19 He lacked the Kalotic Tutors. Dystrocratic countries usually respond to the offer of foreign aid in two ways. When aid is proffered by better-off pluto-cracies of taxocracies, dystrocratic governments will accept it, after suitable gestures of independence. Sometimes this aid serves only to escalate expectations. Whatever is available in the form of grants and loans will be considered necessary and essential. In this case, the dystrocratic nation has accepted the worldly definition of need, definition which may bear little relation to the nation's real situation.20 Foreign aid becomes vicious circle : more aid, higher expectations,greater disparity between expectation and fulfillment, and more demands.

Dystrocracies can also respond to the stimulus of foreign aid by objectifying their own lower subjective standers. They will do this as a defense against denials of aid. Or they may use this as a device for banking the aid, carefully calculating it distribution according to their own definitions of need, making sure they do not employ aid for ends that might conflict with expected prevailing conditions.

In numerous cases, such as India foreign aid is steered by general taxocratic policies (increased centralization of government, education, and the economy) so as to be "much more likely to retard the rise of general living standards... than to accelerate it, and to obstruct rather than promote the emergence of a society resistent to totalitarian appeal".21 The Kalotic Revolution does not intend to abandon the idea of aid. It goes, in fact, far beyond existing schemes,22 as shall be described. It aims above all, at setting basic minimal standards, placing a friendly sky of security over the heads of the poor, targeting large-scale plants and distribution systems directly, and giving the seeds of self-help in every country every chance to spring up. Without these radical measures,dystrocratic economies will remain forever "goat economies", where the goats eat everything that peeps above ground but the people cannot afford to get rid of them.

As still another example of a misconception about dystrocracies, we may point out the seemingly logical opinion and fear that the world is being divided into "haves" and "have-nots". These alignments will then destroy the peace.23This belief is a remnant of the age of Fascistic threat, but, of course, Germany lacked little materially in relation to her neighbors and had more than practically die ganz welt. Italy spent more on her colonial wars than she ever gained back: Mussolini's officials sat on all the oil of Libya, while lamenting their barren lot.

True "have-not" countries are rarely a position to fight the "haves". Red china cannot touch the United States except along its own borders. If a dystrocracy of 600 millions cannot, which smaller one can ? Moreover, "have-nots" rarely influence decisively the outcome of struggles between two "have" nations or an allied "have-not" nation and a "have" nation.

"Have-nots" are defined in terms of money and production, but money and production do not cause wars so much as do issues of prestige, hostilities, and power. More important is the rise of a governing group whose subjective inclinations and/or objective interests impel them towards war. The spirit of war is the spirit of a regime.

Finally, beyond all the previous eight misconceptions, lies the mistaken belief that no proposition dealing with dystrocracies as a whole can be true, since each unique; and since no proposition is true, then no applied proposition, that is, no principle, can be valid. But the people and cultures of the world are alike as the flora, fauna, and terrains of the world are alike (And they are different in the same way.) Each statement about dystrocracies has to be accepted or rejected on its merits.

To repeat, dystrocracies are all alike in one fundamental respect. They are misorganized. That is, they are not organized with respect to the consensual goals the goalswhich the country's and the world's politists would ascribe to them. The shape that the world is taking today is indicated by the Kalotic elements as they were introduced in the beginning chapter and as they will be detailed in chapters to come. The Kalotic formula is what each country and the world community both can accept and achieve.

But to all or most dystrocratic expertise, a negative value has been ascribed, at least according to world consensus, to the consensus of the country itself, of to the beliefs of some of the people, numbering among them usually the intelligentsia of the country. They may be expertly organized for purposes of religious observances, terracing land, care of cows,personal relations, fashioning baskets and canoes, cuisine, and many other ways. Every culture, in fact, is about as complicated as any other.

For example, India is organized well in many ways. Few ceremonies are quite so complicated as a Hindu wedding which may take place over a period of three days and involve hundreds of rituals, with all kinds of friends and relatives in attendance, and with roles played by all kinds of people. The whole affair is at least as difficult as many a business operation or a convention of political scientists in America. But yet it is claimed without qualification that the Indians are disorganized or cannot organize properly.

They may be misorganized for the special purpose of achieving high emotic productivity. In some cases they are unorganized or disorganized because they simply do not desire the goals involved. They may lack interest in working or sacrificing for long-term goals, or may refuse materialistic goals. Often Indian technicians berate themselves and their countrymen for being unorganizable when really what they mean is, "We are unorganizable for the purpose that I say is good, namely, to build ware houses and run factories." Once the Indian population were to understand and agree with their principles, a tremendous energy would be released; a "miracle of organization" would occur.24

A great mystery of Christianity is that it began as a sect that "live to die" and not to furnish pleasantly the transient home on earth. Suffering in this world was supposed to be a treasure stored away for redemption in the next world. These are the anti productivity beliefs; yet, in the course of time, they were twisted around and tied to an ideological dynamo so that, in certain centuries, far from keeping people from expanding their energies and actively participating in the world, it incited them to ever more vigorous participation and aggressive social behavior.

The Unequipped Elites

In practically every case, the cure for dystrocracy is at hand in the garden of one's own country. Unfortunately, however, the leaders usually follow a damaging pattern of behavior. They become intent upon centralizing their societies. They seek to subjugate minority elements of an economic, religious,ethnic, geopolitical, tribal and political kind.

In the end, they eliminate the sources of cross fertilization of ideas, of skills, of capital, of specialization, of foreign contacts, of much commerce, and of course of the rule of law, freedom of opinions and press, and much of higher education. (So Egypt, Cuba, Venezuela, Turkey Indonesia, Algeria, Tanzania, Burma, China and others, just during the past decade.) The expulsion of the Jews, and the Italians, and the French, and the Greeks, and the Lebanese (to a degree) lost for Egypt some considerable part of the culture and economic enterprise of the country. Restrictions on the country's ancient Christian Coptic group is adding to the damage. Venezuela admitted Italian immigration freely until the skilled working classes in the cities numbered a very high proportion of Italian masons, bricklayers, mechanics and others. Restrictions placed upon the amount of Venezuelan money that immigrants might export to their relatives in their homeland caused a great many of the immigrants to leave the country, thus depriving Venezuela of its necessary trained and disciplined labor supply. Examples of this behavior can be multiplied indefinitely in time and space.

The Elite often have private wants that a bear little relevance to mass desires. They want powerful cars, opera houses, travel permits, high of return on local capital, the right to invest abroad, monopolies of many kinds inside the country, classical. educations, absolute title to property and office, and so forth. They want plenty of modern guns, warships and airplanes.

The elite also want power and respect within the country. The dystrocrats are as opportunistic as politicians everywhere. The majority of the intelligentsia, if not of the elite, espouse rapid change, usually under the slogans of populism and socialism. But in the heart and mind, they are enough like the conservative elements of their own regimes and of the regimes they wish to emulate that they also separate themselves from their own people in policies and tastes. Often, sadly, they are profoundly ignorant of their own countries, while they can quote Lincoln, Bolivar Marx, Mao,and the Popes. They are often incompetent economists. They are often crushed by stratocratic force. They cannot contain the withdrawing passive tide of the masses in whose name they seek to operate.

The domestic economic and social foundations of their power usually disqualify the dystrocratic elites from achieving Kalotic motion by international arrangement, The elite end up basing their policies upon domestic economic and power considerations, thus reducing the possibilities of world order. Though world order requires social mobility, they subscribe to outmoded educational and administrative system that nurture stratification. They do not redistribute wealth They destroy it and by destroying it create the illusion of redistribution; they give everyone the opportunity of becoming equally poor.

The elite have a primitive belief in the efficacy of laws as laws (just as most masses and many elite of the world's plutocracies and taxocracies do); they over-regulate; they add to all the mercantilism of the old system the hyper-mercantilism of Keynesianism and Marxism together. All initiatives become stifled in the atmosphere of official and political threats and warnings; "Unless this is regulated, bad men will spread harm." Sometimes foreign protectionism and domestic traditional laws may contribute to the general welfare, but more often these "good" laws serve to justify a host of bad.

How can dystrocracy and the elite that perpetuate it be transformed into something more resembling a world Kalotic consensus? Not through the education offered by western universities, definitely not in the antiquated classical universities of Europe, where bureaucratic scholars are hard at work making a generous parliamentary world order impossible.

Nor do their policies of minority reductionism, of private indulgences, of military jingoism, and of sloganized socialism guide them and their peoples into a new kind of regime. The solution of dystrocracy must be found in the formulas of Kalos. Those few dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of Tutors who can be located and placed into communication with the whole-world community to Tutors are the only hope.