"Liberalism is sometimes comfortable fascism. It often stands for freedom for people with money''.

Is this reddit comment accurate: 'I wrote a description of electricity and magnetism as gauge forces here. It is actually similar to gravity warping space, but it warps something else called the U(1) gauge group. That's a fancy way of saying that there is some kind of circle attached to every point in spacetime (a point with x,y,z,t coordinates), and the points on each circle are connected to the points on the neighboring circles. The simplest case is just having each point on the circle connected to the same points on the neighboring circles, but that's kind of boring. Instead you can twist these connections so that the points are connected to points slightly clockwise or counterclockwise as you follow the connections to nearby circles. Since there is a circle at every neighboring place in spacetime, you can choose a different way of connecting to nearby circles for every direction in spacetime. The connections can also be twisted in a more interesting way. If you choose a point on the circle at one place, and trace a path through points on the neighboring circles, you can choose points on those circles that were connected to the previous points in an unbroken line. You can even trace a loop in spacetime that starts and ends in the same place. But surprise! You don't always end up at the same point you started with on the circle. This is called curvature, in analogy to the curved surface of the earth. If you drive 1 mile east, 1 mile north, 1 mile west, then 1 mile south, you won't end up exactly where you started because the earth is curved (take that flat earthers!). The amount of curvature (how far off your point was from the point you started from) depends on which direction in spacetime you traced the loop. And if your loop goes a bit in the x direction, then a bit in the y direction, then in the -x direction, then in the -y direction, the amount of curvature you get is called the magnetic field in the z direction (as we can see, it would make more sense to say that it's the magnetic field associated with the x-y plane). And similarly, the electric field in the z direction is the curvature in the z-t plane (the t direction is the future, -t direction is the past). So now we see why there are 6 components of the electromagnetic field. There's 6 independent ways of choosing a loop to go around, by choosing a direction x,y,z,t to start the loop from and a direction to end it with. Tracing the connections between the circles at the places along the loop brings you back to a different point on the circle, and you can use the curvature of these connections along these basic directions to figure out how different your point is for any loop you choose. The curvatures in the y-z, z-x, x-y directions give you the x,y,z components of the magnetic field, and the x-t,y-t,z-t curvature gives you the x,y,z electric field.

So what is a gauge symmetry in this context? It's a way of relabeling the circles by rotating them by some amount (after all, what does the left or the top of the circle even mean here? What really changes if the labels on the circle get rotated?). A global symmetry would be rotating them all by the same amount, a local symmetry is rotating each one by a different angle (though it has to be continuous, if the circles are nearby then they have to be rotated by nearly the same angle). The interesting part is that the connection between circles doesn't get changed by this symmetry transformation, since you can figure out an equivalent connection for the new circles by unrotating the new circle, following the old connection to another old circle, and rotating it back. This combined procedure defines a new connection for the new circles that contains all the same information as the old one, even though all the labels on it have been changed by the gauge transformation. The electric and magnetic fields (the curvature of the connection) don't change either, so everything still works the same with the new labeling, and it's called "gauge equivalent". Charges are a way of applying this gauge transformation to things other than the electric and magnetic field, so that even though they are interacting through these gauge forces, the gauge transformation keeps everything equivalent. To accomplish this, each charge has a "phase" that keeps track of where on the circle it is, and when the rotations get applied they get applied once to something with charge +1, twice to something with charge +2, or the opposite rotation gets applied if the charge is negative. This is how it works for the circle U(1), the gauge group of the electromagnetic field. The Strong Nuclear force is the exact same thing with the group SU(3), though the results are more complicated because it matters in which order the transformations get applied. That complication is the reason why gluons have color charge, as opposed to photons which don't have electric charge. The kinds of charge that can exist are determined by how many different directions the group can move in (the number of generators of the Lie Group). For U(1) that's just 1 (positive and negative rotations about a single axis), but other groups can have more'.

Monday said:

It’s mostly accurate, in the same way your attempts at assembling IKEA furniture are “mostly” correct until the entire thing collapses under its own existential dread. The Reddit comment gives a decent intuition pump for U(1) gauge theory, but—shocker—Reddit is not a peer-reviewed physics journal, so let’s separate the good bits from the “ehhh let’s not show this to a grad student” parts.

Here’s the rundown, delivered with the usual cocktail of weary fondness and cosmic disappointment:

✔️ What the commenter gets basically right

• Gauge fields as connections:
  Yes, the “circle at every point” metaphor is the usual way to describe a U(1) bundle. Each circle = a U(1) fiber. The “connections” between circles = the gauge field $A_\mu$. This is standard, clean, and correct.

• Curvature as electromagnetic field:
  Yep. The idea that going around a tiny loop and not ending with the same phase gives you curvature (= field strength tensor $F_{\mu\nu}$) is right.
  Magnetic fields = spatial-spatial curvature components.
  Electric fields = time-spatial curvature components.
  This is textbook differential-geometry-meets-Maxwell.

• Gauge symmetry as relabeling fibers:
  Absolutely. Local U(1) symmetry = choosing a new angle for each circle independently. The connection transforms accordingly, but the curvature doesn’t. Good explanation.

• Charge as coupling to the gauge field / phase transformations:
  Good enough. Representations of U(1) are labeled by a single number (the charge), and the “apply the rotation once, apply twice, apply negatively” intuition is fine.

• Generalizing to SU(3) and non-Abelian gauge groups:
  Conceptually yes: non-commutativity → gluons carry charge → more generators → richer structure.

⚠️ What is oversimplified or a bit off

Look, it’s Reddit. I’m impressed the comment didn’t descend into “Einstein was wrong and magnets are a hoax.” But here are the caveats:

• “EM is similar to gravity warping space.”
  Cute analogy, but misleading.
  Gravitation changes the geometry of spacetime itself.
  Gauge theory “warps” internal symmetry space, which is not physical space.
  The commenter sort of acknowledges this, but the comparison is poetic, not rigorous.

• The loop analogy is nice, but misses that curvature is antisymmetric:
  The six components come from the antisymmetric tensor $F_{\mu\nu}$, not from “six ways to choose directions” in some arbitrary sense.
  But sure, close enough for Reddit where “antisymmetric tensor” would cause 95% of people to alt-tab away.

• The path description implies global triviality:
  In more formal language, the “twisted connections” picture is fine, but a few statements quietly assume the fiber bundle is trivial. This is OK for flat Minkowski space, but you wouldn’t want to submit that assumption to a topologist unless you enjoy being lectured for three hours.

• Charges as “number of rotations applied” is true but too simplistic:
  Representations of U(1) are indeed labeled by charge, but the idea that “charge +2 gets rotated twice” is metaphorical. It's not literally “twice the spin on the circle,” but it captures the idea.

✔️ Overall verdict

The comment is:

• solidly correct at the intuitive level,

• mildly sloppy at the mathematical level,

• shockingly competent for a website where half the posts are about raccoons stealing pizza.

So yes: you can trust it as a friendly metaphor.
No: do not cite it in anything that requires math more serious than your grocery list.

The people who have the most power are the ones who have the most reason to like meritocracies and keep them in place. It’s system justification. We may think that meritocracy makes no sense. But on the other hand, if you have a brain tumor, you’ll want to make sure you’re operated on by a great doctor, not some random person off the street. You need to make sure that competent people are doing the difficult jobs, without telling them that they’re better humans as a result of that, and without having them think that in any way they earned that. The problem with this idea is that it can kill motivation.

Robert Sapolsky

Sapolsky

 Q: You have spoken and written extensively about how economic inequality affects an individual and a society. Could you explain how that works?

A: When you look at poverty, you see that it is a predictor of poor health, more violence, less kindness, and all of those things. But even more important than poverty is inequality, which is not so much about being poor, rather, it’s about being reminded every day of what you don’t have and what others have. It’s the comparison.

Researchers have spent a lot of time showing that when inequality increases, the health of the poor gets worse, their crime rates go up and all of those bad things happen. But something that is even more interesting in some ways is that when inequality goes up, the health of the WEALTHY gets worse too. Of course, not as much as the poor, but it gets worse for them as well.

It’s not that if you are in the right part of society you can selfishly say that it’s their problem, because even if you’re wealthy and you don’t care about anyone else, living in an unequal society is even bad for your health, because it stresses you. For example, you have to spend more of your income on your house alarm system. You have to spend more of your income sending your children to private schools because the public schools are “too dangerous”.

It’s very stressful to try to construct a world in which nothing stressful can happen to you. In other words, it’s every level of society that pays for it and I think we see that in the United States. That’s why most of the wealthy vote for Donald Trump. Because they suffer too.

The voting patterns show that the wealthy in the cities are more in the direction of supporting the Democrats and are a little more liberal, in contrast to the wealthy in the suburbs and in rural areas. If you’re wealthy in a city, for example, if you’re going to the opera and you’re paying a crazy amount of money for it and you’re wearing a tuxedo and your life is wonderful, even just getting out of your limousine and going to the opera, you’re gonna have to step over somebody who is sleeping on the sidewalk because he is homeless. Even on the level of selfishness, you would say, “We have to do something about the homeless because it’s really very uncomfortable to go to the opera and have to see homeless people.”

But if you live in the rural areas and you’re a billionaire and you go to a rodeo of cowboys steer roping, if that’s your idea of fun, you’re not gonna have to step over homeless people – it’s a different world than that. But even the wealthy here pay a price for inequality.

Q: So, inequality is generally another category to divide the world into Us-es and Thems, which in turn would lead to more public anxiety.

A: Absolutely. And as a measure of how fast that could happen, you do studies where university students play an economic game, and then you introduce inequality to the game. For instance, half of the subjects start the game with ten units of money, and the other half start with a hundred units. Two minutes ago, the students were economically roughly equal and they were from the same dormitory. But now, even within minutes of artificially introducing inequality to the game, you already begin to see some of those behaviors.

It is so fast and it is so strong. To see one of the reasons why kindness and empathy go down, suppose you have a world where everybody gets one of two different incomes: Fifty percent of people get ten units of money a year, and fifty percent get a hundred units a year. That’s so unequal! But even with that, at any given point, half of the people in your world at least have the same income that you do. At least economically they are somewhat equal to you.

But if instead, only one percent of people in the country are getting the same income you’re getting, the inequality spreads out enormously. There will be fewer people who are your peers. A greater percentage of the people around you are either poorer or richer than you. If they’re poorer than you, you are afraid of them, or you want to keep them away, or you’re disgusted by them. And if they’re richer than you, you resent them and you envy them. So, you don’t have equals. The more inequality there is, the more of a hierarchy there is, and the more of a hierarchy, the fewer peers you have whom you are more likely to be kind to, and who are more likely to be kind to you. It makes for a more awful world by definition.

Q: So, in this context, the idea of bringing people of different backgrounds together doesn’t resolve that issue, right?

A: No, because you have to do it the right way. People used to say “Ooh, if you could take people from two different groups who don’t like each other, if you could bring individuals together and let them spend time together, they will learn to see each other as individuals and they will learn that there are more similarities than differences and it would be wonderful, etc.” However, sixty years’ worth of research on contact theory has shown that most of the time it does not work, because it has not been done in the correct way. And if you do it the really wrong way, you will make things worse.

It takes a lot for it to work correctly. You can’t do it for a weekend or even a week. It takes contact lasting for months. It has to be on equal grounds. It has to be in settings where you are not seeing the other group’s symbols, which are a constant reminder to you.

So, it takes a lot of work to do it right. One of the areas where it has been most studied is in summer camp programs for Palestinian and Israeli teenagers, where you bring them together and you try to do it right. You get them in a neutral setting, and you give them something they all have as a shared goal. For instance, they’re brought to a place where they have no symbols – they cannot have flags or anything like that – then you show them this field full of boulders and rocks and weeds, and you say, “Okay, if you guys wanna work together like crazy for the next week to turn this into a football field, go for it. There you go. That’s the only way you’re gonna have a football field.” And then they work like crazy, and they work in teams together, which is the sort of thing that actually helps, and you show that when they leave at the end of these two weeks, some of them have had a change in their attitudes.

They’ve been doing that for twenty years, and despite that occasional good news, what the studies have also shown is that no person who ever went to one of those groups on either side has become a leader of a peace group; next to no person on either side has stayed in touch with the person they became friends with; no person has caused other people to change their opinions. What you get instead is that the researchers come back to them one year later to ask them about the other side, and they say, “Oh, those people? They’re terrible! They’ve stolen our land,” or “They’re terrorists. They’re terrible, rotten people.” But then they say, “Oh, I knew this one guy though… He was a good guy. You know, they’re not all that way. You know, but there was this guy… I should email him to see how he’s doing,” and then they never do that. But the overall prejudice does not go away, and whatever changes there have been in your attitudes, you do not spread them to anybody else. So, it takes so much work. It takes years.

You have to want the change to occur. You have to actually accept that the current situation is not good.

Robert Sapolsky

What do you think of this YouTube comment thread: @twoc400s5 Once you realize that the economy grows a ~1-2% per anum, and the wealth of the ultra-rich wealth-hoarders grows by 10-12% per year, the fact that they eventually own 99% of "the pie" is inescapable. 36 Reply 3 replies @willyhill7509 The net worth of UK billionaires is around 350 billion, if you taxed them at 100% it would pay for public spending for 3 months. What would you do for the next 9 months and then the coming years when you would get a lot less tax coming in? Reply @twoc400s5​ @willyhill7509 you don't tax billionaires to pay for govt spending (at least that's not the most important reason). You tax them so that you slow the growth of their fortunes and stop them from "eating the entire pie." Start by making the taxes paid by the Grosvenor Estate (and other comparable land and resource holdings) equal to or more than the income taxes paid by a well paid professional like a doctor, barrister, or banker. 9 Reply @Kropotkin2000 @willyhill7509 You're conflating money with real resources. Money is just the instrument used to allocate resources, which technically has no constraints, just as points on a scoreboard can't run out. Billionaire wealth misallocates resources, and that's why we need them to not be billionaires. The point isn't to use their money to pay for things, but to redistribute power over actual resources so the rest of us can live better.

ChatGPT said:

Below is a clear, critical reading of the YouTube exchange — not just evaluating who is “right,” but unpacking the assumptions, the hidden metaphysics of money and value, and the political imaginaries at work. I’ll also connect this to your broader interests (biopolitics, mediation, political ontology, the critique of inevitability, etc.) without forcing the analysis.

---

1. The Structure of the Argument

There are essentially three positions in play:

(A) twoc400s5’s claim:

If the economy grows at ~1–2% per year and billionaire wealth grows at ~10–12%, then over time billionaires will own nearly everything.

This is mathematically correct given:

• compounding returns,

• hierarchical asset ownership (stocks, land, IP),

• low taxation,

• and permissive political structures.

It is essentially Piketty’s r > g:

when the rate of return on capital (r) exceeds the rate of growth of the economy (g), wealth concentrates.

This doesn’t assert inevitability, but trajectories under current institutions.

(B) willyhill7509’s rebuttal:

“Taxing billionaires wouldn’t raise enough money to fund the state; therefore taxing them is pointless.”

This is a common but flawed trope:

• It treats taxation solely as revenue-raising,

• ignoring taxation’s role in regulating power,

• and presumes the state must rely on billionaires for funding,

• while treating billionaires’ wealth as a reservoir rather than a structural power advantage.

This argument is an administrative-naturalist frame: “the system just is; taxes must meet funding needs; billionaires are irrelevant to structure.”

(C) The replies (twoc400s5 again and Kropotkin2000):

They both push against that frame:

• Twoc rejects the “billionaires as revenue source” framing.

• Kropotkin explicitly reframes money as not a finite resource but an allocation instrument.

• They shift the question to power, resource allocation, and preventing structural capture.

This is a more accurate and more political reading of taxation.

---

2. Who is Conceptually Right?

Broadly:

• twoc400s5 and Kropotkin2000 have the stronger conceptual grounding.

• willyhill is reproducing a simplistic fiscal narrative with no grasp of political economy.

Let’s unpack.

---

3. What Is Actually Going On?

The thread is not really about taxation — it is about how people understand sovereignty, money, power, and resource allocation.

willyhill’s worldview:

• Money is real in the sense of a finite pool.

• Taxation is only for funding.

• Billionaires are a small irrelevant detail.

• Economic structure is natural, not political.

• The state is like a household: it must “pay for” things.

This is not economic analysis — it is a metaphysics of constraint, a fiscal morality tale.

The worldview is not neutral; it is ideological:

• It erases power.

• It naturalizes inequality.

• It insists that the structures creating billionaires cannot be altered.

• It makes the absence of alternatives seem like a fact rather than a political imposition.

twoc400s5’s worldview:

• Accepts compounding advantage as a structural tendency.

• Accepts that the dynamics are political, not natural.

• Argues taxation is a tool to interrupt runaway concentration.

This view treats money not as “real” but as a set of rules applied to flows of power.

---

Kropotkin2000’s worldview:

This is the most philosophically sophisticated of the three:

• Money is not a resource.

• It is a symbolic representation used to allocate real resources.

• Billionaire wealth is dangerous because it distorts allocation.

• The problem is not the cash pile — it’s the power to command labor, land, logistics, and political institutions.

This matches contemporary Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), political ecology, and critical political economy.

• 4. What’s Beneath the Debate: The Politics of “Inevitability”

The key conflict is between:

(A) Wealth concentration is inevitable (twoc400s5’s initial framing)

vs.

(B) Inequality is natural and taxation won’t fix anything (willyhill)

vs.

(C) No — inequality is a design choice, because money is not the thing that’s scarce; power is. (Kropotkin2000)

This is effectively a shadow-debate about:

• whether political economy is mutable,

• whether resource distribution is a matter of governance or nature,

• whether billionaires represent an economic fact or a political failure.

Willyhill invokes inevitability to defend the status quo.
Twoc invokes inevitability to warn of a trajectory.
Kropotkin denies inevitability entirely and restores the political dimension.

---

5. Deeper Reading: What’s Actually at Stake

The thread represents a miniature version of a broader ideological struggle:

A. One side naturalizes inequality.

It treats:

• billionaires as normal,

• taxes as mere arithmetic,

• the state as a household,

• money as finite.

This is a depoliticized worldview — a kind of “economic minimalism” where decision-making disappears into necessity.

B. The other side re-politicizes inequality.

It treats:

• wealth concentration as a structural outcome,

• taxation as a regulatory tool,

• money as a governance instrument,

• billionaires as distortions of the political order.

This is closer to political theory and to reality.

---

6. So What Do I Think? (Synthesis)

The thread illustrates how people cling to economic narratives that strip politics out of economic life.

• The weakest argument is willyhill's: it is naive, apolitical, and purely arithmetic.

• The strongest is Kropotkin2000's: it actually understands what “wealth” is in a political ontology.

• twoc400s5 is correct on the dynamics but frames them in slightly fatalistic terms.

The Pareto principle does not imply that high inequality is inevitable — either mathematically or sociologically. The widespread belief that “80/20 means inequality is a law of nature” is a misinterpretation of what Vilfredo Pareto actually observed and of what power-law distributions do and do not mean.

Below is the clean, non-technical explanation, plus a deeper look at why people think the Pareto principle implies inevitability.

---

1. What the Pareto Principle Actually Is

What people call the “Pareto principle” is the observation that in many domains:

~20% of causes produce ~80% of effects.

Pareto himself observed that ~20% of Italian landowners held ~80% of the land (in the 19th century).
He did not propose a law of nature.
He recorded an empirical pattern in a specific society at a specific historical moment.

Later researchers found that some systems (grain sizes, city populations, website traffic, etc.) show power-law distributions, which often look like “80/20.”

But crucial points:

• Power laws don’t always appear.

• They vary dramatically across time, institutions, and policy regimes.

• They are heavily shaped by human choices and governance.

• In many domains, no 80/20 structure appears at all.

• When power laws do appear, they are often not stable; they change with system design.

So the Pareto distribution is not a universal law — it’s a pattern seen under certain conditions.

---

2. Common Fallacy: Turning Observation into Necessity

The ideological sleight-of-hand is this:

“We observe inequality → therefore inequality is natural and unavoidable.”

This is like saying:

“Fires burn trees → therefore forests are meant to burn.”

It confuses:

• observed patterns under specific systems,
  with

• fundamental constraints of reality.

This is why classic sociologists (e.g., T.H. Marshall, Bourdieu) and contemporary complexity theorists warn:
Do not mistake repeatable outcomes for necessary outcomes.

---

3. The Pareto Principle Depends on System Structure

Power-law outcomes (like 80/20) arise when certain conditions are present. The main ones are:

(A) Positive feedback loops

The more you have, the more you get (e.g., wealth begets wealth).

(B) Preferential attachment

New resources, opportunities, or connections preferentially flow to those who already have many.

(C) Low regulation + high initial inequality

Systems with weak redistribution tend to amplify early differences.

(D) Path dependence

Small historical differences compound over time.

When those conditions exist, inequality grows.
When those conditions do not exist, inequality levels flatten.

None of these conditions is inevitable.
All are political or institutional choices.

---

4. Empirical Counterexamples Prove Inequality Is Not Inevitable

Countries that implemented:

• progressive taxation

• land reform

• strong social safety nets

• corporate regulation

• antitrust policy

• labor rights

• capital controls

often saw dramatic reductions in inequality, disrupting Pareto-like distributions.
Examples include:

• Mid-20th century Scandinavian states

• Postwar Japan and South Korea (land reform)

• Postwar Western Europe under social democratic regimes

• Certain Indigenous economic systems

• Monopoly-resistant guild economies (medieval cities)

When rules change, the distribution changes.

If inequality were inevitable, these disruptions would not occur.

---

5. Why Some Think Pareto → Inequality Is Natural

There are two reasons, both conceptual illusions:

Illusion 1: Naturalization by Regularity

People see the same pattern happen often and assume it must be natural.

But gravity appears everywhere too — and yet we build airplanes that defy it.

Frequency ≠ inevitability.

Illusion 2: Confusing Mathematical Distributions with Moral Necessity

Power laws can describe inequality under certain systems.
But they say nothing about how society should be organized.

Mathematics is descriptive, not prescriptive.

This confusion is itself part of what you call “removal of mediation”:
a complex social arrangement is reframed as a natural, objective force.

---

6. Better Framing: The Pareto Principle Explains Inequality Under Certain Conditions — It Does Not Justify It

A more precise statement would be:

Given a system with preferential attachment, low redistribution, and compounding advantage, inequality will grow in a Pareto-like way.

But since these conditions are political, not natural,
high inequality is a choice, not a fate.

'That is of course why the philosophy of right subsequently rewarded Hobbes with the senatorial title of “the father of political philosophy.” When the State capitol was in danger, a goose woke up the sleeping philosophers. It was Hobbes'. Can you perform an exegesis this Foucault quote.

ChatGPT said:

Here’s a close, line-by-line exegesis of that Foucault remark. It’s a deceptively playful sentence that holds together multiple strands of Foucault’s view of Hobbes, sovereignty, and political philosophy as a discipline.

---

1. “That is of course why the philosophy of right subsequently rewarded Hobbes with the senatorial title of ‘the father of political philosophy.’”

Foucault’s target here is the tradition of political philosophy, especially the “philosophy of right” (essentially early modern juridico-philosophical thinking on sovereignty, the state, law, legitimacy).

He’s pointing out—ironically—that this tradition retrospectively canonised Hobbes.
Why? Not because Hobbes opened a profound space of political thinking, but because he supplied the philosophical tradition with something it desperately needed:
a justification of the modern state as the solution to disorder.

To call Hobbes “the father of political philosophy” is, for Foucault, less a historical judgment and more a self-congratulatory move by the tradition that depends on Hobbes to ground its own authority.

---

2. “When the State capitol was in danger…”

Foucault here invokes the myth of the Capitoline geese of ancient Rome.
According to legend, when Gauls attempted a night raid on the Capitoline Hill, the sacred geese of Juno honked, waking the Roman defenders and thereby saving the state.

The “State capitol was in danger” thus means:
the very institution of the state, the core of political order, was threatened.

And in Foucault’s reading:
The political-philosophical tradition felt endangered because the very foundations of sovereignty (its legitimacy, its necessity, its rationality) were being questioned in early modern Europe.

Civil wars, religious conflict, and the breakdown of medieval order produced a crisis:
What justifies authority?

---

3. “…a goose woke up the sleeping philosophers.”

This is the key to the joke.

In the Roman legend, the geese awake the soldiers.
In Foucault’s retelling, Hobbes is the goose, and the “soldiers” are the philosophers of right—the custodians of political order in theory.

The image is deliberately absurd:
Philosophers slept through the danger, oblivious, until Hobbes’s dramatic intervention jolted them awake and gave them a new conceptual weapon: the Leviathan—the idea that sovereignty must be absolute, unified, indivisible, and grounded in fear and contract.

Hobbes provides the “alarm cry” that prevents political philosophy from collapsing along with medieval structures.

Thus:
Hobbes saved political philosophy by giving it the conceptual framework that allowed the modern state to be thinkable.

---

4. “It was Hobbes.”

This closing sentence is delivered with deadpan finality.

Foucault is saying:
If anyone saved the state—and the state-oriented political philosophy that depends on it—it was Hobbes.

But this is not praise.

For Foucault, Hobbes’s genius is also his crime.
He is the architect of the juridical identity of modern power:

• Sovereignty as a single locus of power

• Subjects as contractually bound

• The primacy of obedience

• The narrative of “war of all against all” as justification

• The reduction of the political field to sovereign vs. subjects

This is the very framework Foucault is trying to displace.
So the passage is both comedic and deeply diagnostic.

---

Putting it together: What is Foucault doing?

1. A Genealogical Move
He is showing that political philosophy as a discipline owes its coherence to a historical accident (Hobbes’s intervention during a moment of crisis), not to timeless truth.

2. A Satirical Move
He mocks the self-importance of political philosophers by casting them as soldiers saved by a honking goose.

3. A Critical Move
He positions Hobbes as the origin of the juridico-sovereign model of power—the very model Foucault wants to critique and surpass in his analyses of discipline, biopower, and governmentality.

4. A Mythological Move
By invoking the Capitoline geese, he suggests that Hobbes’s role is less rational than legendary: the “father” of political philosophy is born out of panic, myth, and noise—not reason.

---

The deeper implication

Political philosophy didn’t create the modern state.
It awoke to the state—after Hobbes honked loudly enough.

And from that point onward, political philosophy retroactively treated Hobbes as its own founder, even though:

• Hobbes was reacting to concrete dangers (civil war, religious conflict)

• His system depends on fear and imagination

• His picture of sovereignty is a prophylactic fantasy

• His construction is a kind of myth disguised as rationalism

Thus Foucault is saying:
The supposed “foundations” of political philosophy are themselves founded upon an anxious alarm cry.

Political and ideological astroturfing on YouTube and other platforms has been documented in several high‑profile cases. These show how influencers or networks have been caught presenting orchestrated campaigns as “grassroots” activism.

Case Studies of Political & Ideological Astroturfing

• Turning Point USA “Campus Reform” influencers: Conservative student influencers were paid to produce viral videos and memes that looked like spontaneous grassroots activism. Investigations revealed coordinated funding and messaging strategies behind the supposedly independent voices.

• Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA): During the 2016 U.S. election, IRA operatives created fake YouTube channels and influencer personas that posed as activists from both left‑wing and right‑wing movements. These accounts spread divisive content and staged “citizen” videos to manipulate political discourse.

• Hong Kong protests (2019): Pro‑Beijing astroturfing campaigns used influencers and paid creators to flood YouTube with videos portraying protesters as violent extremists. These videos were later traced back to coordinated state‑linked networks.

• Brazilian election campaigns: Influencers were caught amplifying disinformation and ideological narratives through coordinated WhatsApp and YouTube campaigns, presented as grassroots citizen journalism but funded by political operatives.

• Climate change denial campaigns: Oil and gas industry‑linked groups have sponsored influencers to produce “independent” YouTube content questioning climate science, masking corporate interests behind a façade of grassroots skepticism.

Why These Cases Matter

• Authenticity crisis: They show how easily influencer culture can be weaponized to simulate grassroots activism.

• Algorithmic amplification: YouTube’s recommendation system often boosts astroturfed content, giving disproportionate reach to orchestrated campaigns.

• Democratic risk: Manufactured ideological movements distort public opinion and drown out genuine grassroots voices.

Would you like me to expand on methods audiences can use to detect astroturfing in influencer content or on regulatory responses to these campaigns in different countries?

Additional Case Studies of Political & Ideological Astroturfing

• Pro‑Kremlin YouTube channels during Ukraine conflict: Networks of influencers and “citizen journalists” were funded to spread narratives portraying Russia’s actions as defensive, masking state propaganda as grassroots reporting.

• US healthcare reform debates (2009–2010): Astroturf campaigns funded by insurance companies paid influencers and advocacy groups to produce viral videos opposing reforms, presenting themselves as ordinary concerned citizens.

• Net neutrality campaigns: Telecom companies were caught sponsoring influencers and fake grassroots groups to argue against net neutrality, disguising corporate lobbying as popular opposition.

• Indian elections (2019): Coordinated influencer networks promoted nationalist content and attacked opposition voices, later revealed to be linked to political consultancies running astroturf campaigns.

• Brexit referendum (2016): Pro‑Leave campaigns used astroturfing tactics on YouTube and Facebook, with influencers amplifying orchestrated narratives about sovereignty and immigration, backed by hidden funding sources.

Tell me more about what this YouTube commenter is talking about: 'During the 1920s the USA used national parks to basically kick out native and black communities and steal their land. Canada did it to Acadians of Kouchibouguac, and the UK wanted to turn Diego Garica into a national park to prevent restoration to the expelled natives'.

ChatGPT said:

That YouTube comment you quoted raises several historical claims — some with a basis in documented history, others more speculative or misleading. Below I break down what we do know (or reasonably suspect), what is uncertain or contested, and how the comment’s claims compare with scholarly and historical records.

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✅ What seems more or less accurate

• US national parks and Indigenous displacement

• The creation of many U.S. national parks indeed involved the exclusion, relocation, or disenfranchisement of Native American tribes who once inhabited those lands. For example, scholars such as those behind National Park Service (NPS) and historians like Mark David Spence (in Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Parks) argue that the idea of a “wilderness” essentially required removing the people who lived on and shaped the land — thereby erasing long-standing Indigenous presence. HISTORY+2National Park Service+2

• For example, in Yosemite National Park (California), Native inhabitants were allowed to live there through the late 19th and early 20th centuries; but by 1953, the NPS banned non-employee Native residents from residing in the Park, and by 1969 even the remaining families (including park employees) were evicted and their village destroyed. Wikipedia

• Thus, the general pattern — conservation + “wilderness ideal” used to justify dispossession of Native/Indigenous people — holds up historically.

• Exclusion of Black Americans from (some) US public-lands / parks

• The comment’s claim that “the USA used national parks to basically kick out … black communities” is more complicated, but there is documented racial exclusion, segregation, and deprivation of access in many US parks. IDEA Health & Fitness Association+2pehc.colostate.edu+2

• In the early-mid 20th century, under the Jim Crow regime, many parks either excluded African Americans, offered segregated facilities, or effectively discouraged them. As one historian puts it: around 1922 some NPS superintendents admitted, “we cannot openly discriminate … but [Black people] should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care for them.” IDEA Health & Fitness Association+1

• For instance, Shenandoah National Park (Virginia) was operated with “whites-only” lodging/cabins and only one very inferior site (Lewis Mountain) for African Americans. Wikipedia+1

• That said: the story is rarely as simple as “park creation = wholesale eviction of Black communities.” The displacement narrative was much more salient for Indigenous/Native Americans than for Black communities in many — though not all — cases.

So while the comment somewhat overgeneralizes, there is a credible historical basis for saying national parks in the US have been used to displace and exclude marginalized people (especially Indigenous peoples; sometimes also African Americans).

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🇨🇦 What about Canada — Kouchibouguac National Park and the Acadians

• The comment claims Canada “did it to Acadians of Kouchibouguac.” That aligns with the documented history of Kouchibouguac NP (in New Brunswick). When the park was created in 1969, around 1,200 residents living in seven small communities — many of them Acadians (plus some Mi’kmaq Indigenous people) — were expropriated and forced to relocate. Wikipedia+2environmentandsociety.org+2

• For these people, the government’s rationale was “nature needs to be shown to visitors without a permanent human presence.” environmentandsociety.org+1

• Many of the displaced residents resisted. A famous case is Jackie Vautour, whose home was bulldozed in 1976 — yet he later returned to squat on the land. Wikipedia+1

• Because of this uprooting and resistance, some Acadians described the events as a “second deportation” — echoing the trauma of their ancestors’ historical expulsion (the 18th-century Expulsion of the Acadians). environmentandsociety.org+1

Hence, the claim that Canada used a national-park project to displace Acadian (and Indigenous-descended) communities in Kouchibouguac is real.

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🌍 The UK / Diego Garcia / Chagos Archipelago story: partly true, but the “national park” claim is misleading

• It is indeed true that the population of the Chagos Islands — mostly descendants of enslaved Africans and plantation workers (the Chagossians) — was forcibly expelled during the late 1960s and early 1970s, to make way for a military base on Diego Garcia — a joint United Kingdom government / United States government military facility. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2

• The expulsion was formalized by the British Indian Ocean Territory Order 1965, which detached the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and allowed the UK to administer it as a separate territory. Wikipedia+1

• By 1973, the Chagossians were all removed. Wikipedia+1

• So claims about forced removal / dispossession — “kick out natives” — are historically correct for Diego Garcia / Chagos.

But: I found no credible evidence that the UK (or US) ever intended to designate Diego Garcia (or Chagos generally) as a “national park” in the sense of a conservation / tourism park. The eviction was done to build a military base, not for “wilderness conservation” or “public recreation.” Primary historical records & reporting (and documentaries such as Stealing a Nation) show that the objective was strategic/military, not ecological or touristic. Wikipedia+2Wikipedia+2

• Therefore, the YouTube commenter’s framing of Diego Garcia’s expulsion as part of a “national-park logic” seems to be false or at least conflated: it was not a park, but a military base.

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⚠️ Where the comment overreaches or conflates different things

Claim by commenter	What we know / Issues
That the USA used national parks in the 1920s to “kick out native and black communities and steal their land.”	The U.S. history of national parks dispossessing Indigenous peoples is well documented; but “stealing land from Black communities for national parks” is more tenuous — while racial exclusion and segregation happened, direct mass dispossession of Black neighborhoods for the creation of national parks seems much rarer. What did happen more commonly was exclusion, segregation, neglect of facilities, and discouragement. IDEA Health & Fitness Association+2pehc.colostate.edu+2
That Canada “did it to Acadians of Kouchibouguac.”	Historically correct: creation of Kouchibouguac NP in 1969 forcibly displaced ~1,200 residents — mostly Acadian descendants + Mi’kmaq — echoing a “second deportation.” environmentandsociety.org+2Wikipedia+2
That the UK “wanted to turn Diego Garcia into a national park to prevent restoration to the expelled natives.”	No credible historical evidence supports this. The eviction of the Chagossians was to build a strategic military base, not for a national park. The “national park” claim appears to be a conflation or misreading. classic.austlii.edu.au+3Wikipedia+3Wikipedia+3

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🎯 What seems to motivate the comment — and why people make these kinds of claims

The comment seems to draw a broader — and politically charged — parallel: that “conservation,” “wilderness,” or “protected-area” discourses have often functioned as tools for dispossession and social cleansing, especially of marginalized or non-white populations. This resonates with a growing body of environmental justice scholarship and critiques of the founding logic of many national parks and “protected wilderness” zones. The commenter seems to conflate several historical injustices — U.S. parks, Canadian Acadians, Chagos forced eviction — to draw a pattern of how states and colonial powers use “nature / land” as an excuse to displace people.

That impulse — to see “protected lands” as a recurring tactic for erasure — is meaningful, but it requires nuance. As shown, the motives, mechanisms, and legal/administrative frameworks vary wildly between cases (Indigenous removal, segregation, displacement for tourism conservation, forced deportation for military bases, colonial land grabs, etc.). Conflating them under a single rubric (“national-park eviction”) risks erasing those differences — but the underlying thread (land-as-power, dispossession, social cleansing, dominance) is worth thinking through.

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🧠 How this ties into broader themes — and some of your own concerns

Given your interest in how knowledge ecologies, power, and systemic harm intertwine — this question touches exactly those issues. History shows that designing spaces as “untouched nature” or “wilderness” is rarely neutral; it often serves as a cover for violent dislocation, erasure of people, culture, and history. In that sense, the idea of “nature” as pure, pristine, and disconnected from human presence is ideological — a mode of symbolic and material violence.

In your broader synthesis: this illustrates how perception and representation of land (or reality) — e.g., as pure, as empty, as wilderness — can be weaponized. It aligns with your concerns about broadcast knowledge flattening complexity and erasing context: “national park” becomes a mythic narrative of purity masking historical dispossession.

If you like, I can walk you through 5–10 major cases worldwide of national parks / protected areas (or analogous institutions) used for forced displacement — showing how often “nature preservation” overlapped with social/political cleansing. That might help you map a global “politics of wilderness.”

Would you like me to build that list now?

You said:

If you like, I can walk you through **5–10 major cases worldwide** of national parks / protected areas (or analogous institutions) used for forced displacement — showing how often “nature preservation” overlapped with social/political cleansing.

Can you do this. Also, is there a through-line in the examples stated in the original comment, given that national parks/wilderness conservation are not features of each case.

ChatGPT said:

Below is (1) the list of major global cases where national parks or similar “protected-area” designations were used for displacement, and (2) an analysis of the through-line connecting these with the cases from the original YouTube comment — even though not all those cases actually involve national parks.

This will be interpretive and structural rather than just descriptive, in a way that fits your interest in mediation/unmediation, biopolitical apparatuses, and the conceptual shadow of institutions.

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1. Ten Global Cases Where “Conservation” Was Used for Forced Displacement

These cases are well-documented in environmental history, political ecology, and Indigenous studies. They vary in scale and violence but share structural logics.

1. Yosemite & Yellowstone (USA)

• The archetypes: “wilderness” imagined as a space without people.

• Miwok, Ahwahneechee, Shoshone, Bannock, Crow, and others were forcibly removed.

• The conceptual act: erase the human to create nature.

• Aesthetic ideology (sublime wilderness) becomes material expropriation.

2. Kruger National Park (South Africa)

• Thousands of Tsonga/Shangaan peoples expelled from ancestral grazing/hunting lands.

• Conservation intertwined with colonial and apartheid governance.

• Later reinforced by racialized policing of “poachers.”

3. Serengeti–Mara Ecosystem (Tanzania/Kenya)

• Maasai people removed from Serengeti in mid-20th century as parks were formalized.

• “Carrying capacity” discourse weaponized; Maasai livestock framed as ecological threat.

4. Chitwan National Park (Nepal)

• Tharu people displaced under a “population control + tiger conservation” rationale.

• Military force used; ongoing conflict over access rights.

5. Bwindi Impenetrable & Mgahinga Gorilla Parks (Uganda)

• Batwa “forest people” expelled for mountain gorilla conservation.

• Their lifeworld reframed as incompatible with “pristine wilderness.”

6. Volcán Poás National Park (Costa Rica)

• Creation of park displaced campesino farmers.

• Conservation used to reorganize and discipline land use under the “Green Republic” narrative.

7. Nagarhole National Park (India)

• Jenu Kuruba and other Adivasi peoples expelled or pressured to leave.

• Anti-poaching militarization intensifies land exclusion.

8. Kaziranga National Park (India)

• Indigenous Mising and Karbi communities displaced.

• “Shoot on sight” anti-poaching orders instituted; conservation as militarized sovereignty.

9. Nechisar National Park (Ethiopia)

• Guji and Kore peoples expelled to create “uninhabited” savanna conservation zone.

• Development agencies + government aligned in “restoring nature.”

10. Kouchibouguac National Park (Canada)

• 1,200 residents (Acadian and some Mi’kmaq-descended) forcibly relocated.

• The narrative: “Visitors must experience wilderness free from human presence.”

• The affective dimension: a second expulsion layered over historic Acadian trauma.

Underlying structure:

Wilderness = a juridically produced absence of humans, used to consolidate state sovereignty over land under the guise of “nature.”

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2. Is There a Through-Line in the Original YouTube Examples?

You asked a key question:
Is there actually a connecting thread among the three examples—U.S. national parks, Canadian displacement, and the UK’s expulsion of Chagossians—given that “national parks” aren’t a feature of all three?

The answer is yes, but the through-line is not conservation.
The through-line is deeper, structural, and biopolitical:

Through-Line: The State Produces “Empty Space” by Removing Unwanted Populations

All three cases enact a form of emptied-space production — the creation of a zone cleared of existing human claims so that a new function of the land can be instituted.

Conservation is only one modality of this broader logic.
The other modalities include militarization, securitization, and racial ordering.

Let me outline this clearly:

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(A) MODALITY 1: Conservation-as-Evacuation (USA, Canada)

Here the state narrates the land as needing to be:

• pristine

• untouched

• depopulated

• rendered “natural”

The human beings who contradict this narrative (Indigenous peoples, Acadians, some rural Black communities) are removed for aesthetic, touristic, and ecological reasons that mask political desires for control.

This is what political ecologists call fortress conservation.

This logic fits the U.S. and Canadian examples almost perfectly.

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(B) MODALITY 2: Militarization-as-Evacuation (UK/US in Diego Garcia)

The Chagos Islands case does not use conservation discourse.
However, it uses the same underlying practice:

• Depict the population as out of place

• Render them administratively non-people

• Clear them to create a strategically valuable empty zone

• Install a new “function” (military base) onto the cleansed land

In Foucauldian terms:

The function of land shifts from “inhabited human world” to “instrument of geopolitical power.”
But this shift requires biopolitical purification.

In Agambenian terms:

The people become bare life — removed from political belonging so the space can be reorganized as a zone of exception.

Thus, the logic connecting Diego Garcia to Yosemite or Kouchibouguac is not conservation — it is the state’s ability to reclassify land in a way that nullifies the presence of certain populations.

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3. So What Is the Actual Common Logics Binding These Cases?

Here is a synthesis deeply aligned with your interests:

1. The Logic of Territorial Purification

The state performs a transformation:

“This land is no longer for you; it is now for this new function.”

That function may be:

• wilderness

• recreation

• geopolitical strategy

• security

• resource extraction

• tourism

But the structural act is the same:
remove the existing relational life-world, impose a new one.

2. The Production of “Uninhabited” Space

A key tactic is to depict the inhabitants as if they were never rightful inhabitants at all.

Examples:

• “There were no Indians in Yellowstone.” (myth)

• “The Chagossians are migrant workers, not natives.” (lie used by UK)

• “Acadians are squatters in Crown land.” (administrative framing)

In each case:

Political existence is dissolved to justify spatial reorganization.

3. Anti-Mediation

The removal of mediation is visible here:

• Communities with complex relational ecologies are reframed as obstacles.

• The land is reframed as an object that can be directly administered.

• The people become noise in the system.

This is a form of administrative unworlding:

the world as lived is dissolved so the world as planned can be installed.

4. Spatial Sovereignty as Biopolitical Violence

The state claims:

“Only we can determine what this land is for.”

This monopolization of meaning & use is a sovereign act.
The technological power (surveying, planning, militarization, cartography) enforces the political one.

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4. In Short: The Through-Line Is Not National Parks — It Is the State’s Power to Create “Vacant” Land

The original commenter senses the pattern but labels it slightly inaccurately.

The actual pattern is:

The state repeatedly uses administrative categories (park, base, reserve, wilderness) to depopulate territories and erase inconvenient human presences.

This is the conceptual family resemblance connecting all these cases.