Criminal Underworld and Criminal Overworld

Friday 17 March 2023

In last week’s newsletter I discussed defection from the central project of a civilization, analyzing the process of defection as it manifests itself among distinct social classes. A correspondent has pointed out to me that it would have been better to refer to an “underclass” instead of the poor (and “the dregs of society”) as I did, as well as bringing my attention to demographics of the underclass that I failed to note, such as minor criminals involved in the culture of urban gangs, as well as NEETs, which two groups represent distinct ways of checking out from shared social ideals. I suppose that one could go on like this, observing further distinctions within each social class, each of which will manifest their own unique process of defection. We discussed the rise of organized crime during the prohibition era, and how some of crime syndicates formed during prohibition managed to survive into contemporary times, and some were able to pivot to new forms of crime as the opportunities arose.

The existence of organized crime, and its historical continuity, are interesting from a civilizational standpoint. I can’t name a civilization that has succumbed specifically to escalating crime rates, though I wouldn’t rule this out as an existential threat to civilization. The organized crime that has its roots in the prohibition era, moreover, does not strike me as a symptom, or as a mechanism, of defection from the central project, though it contributes significantly to conditions (viz. unlivable urban areas) that contribute to other groups defecting from the central project. During the prohibition era the US economy was expanding and, one might even say, irrationally exuberant, so that the rise of organized crime during this period is a more-or-less straight-forward appearance of an organized black market in the wake of the banning of alcohol, and this sort of activity can persist as a form of social parasitism. As long as the social parasite doesn’t kill the host society, this arrangement can continue indefinitely, and is not necessarily a mechanism that is conducive to central project defection.

Recent sudden increases in crime rates in the US strike me as something rather different, and as a clear symptom of central project defection. Beginning with the riots of 2020, cheered on by politicians and the media (I almost wrote “bad actors within politics in the media” but I have gotten to the point that I think almost everyone in politics and the media are bad actors, not least due to positions in politics and the media attracting bad actors during a period of social decay), many cities have experienced increasing crime coupled with decreased policing and decreased prosecution. Portland, where I live (much of the time), has become a national poster child for this problem. It is personal to me. If you have heard that three major restaurant chains have pulled out of Portland, and that Walmart has closed their two Portland stores, well, all three of these restaurants are within walking distance of my home (and I have eaten at all three), and one of the Walmarts is also within walking distance to my home, and I have shopped there on occasion. Indeed, the day after I heard that the Walmart was closing I went there, figuring that it would take them a month or so to shut it down. Not so. Already about a quarter of the shelves were bare, and there were employees taking products off the shelves as I was trying to find the things I formerly purchased there.

It is a bit hard to believe that I used to walk, long after dark, to the Delta Park Walmart, to buy a few things without having to make a drive to a store I might have otherwise preferred. It gave me a nice hour’s walk in the fresh air, and got me a few grocery essentials. Since that time Delta Park was transformed into one of the largest homeless encampments in the city, with tents and broken down RVs by the hundreds, and during the summer the campfires in the homeless camps would spread into the dry grass causing significant fires. I think I wrote in a past newsletter about how I was driving home one night and there was a car on fire in Delta Park, with no one around, and no one fighting the fire. That evening definitely had a post-apocalyptic feel to it.

Since that time Delta Park has been partially cleaned up, and when I went to Walmart a few nights ago there was a sports game going on at the large sports field there. The sports fields have been kept picked up, but no one has returned to the Delta Park dog park, which is now mostly mud even though most of the campers have been chased out. In the past, there were always a few people with their dogs in the dog park, but now no more, and I no longer walk through Delta Park.

The reason most often given for large stores like Walmart pulling out of Portland (though this is not usually the reason cited in legacy media reports) is organized retail theft. One could argue that organized retail theft is a form of organized crime, and it may be continuous with the organized crime in the past. I would not be surprised if the fences for stolen goods have been continuous over the past hundred years or so (do pawn shops stay open for a hundred years as multi-generational family businesses?), but my guess is that there is a lot of churning in the organized crime “market,” and that players come and go over time — like an ecosystem in which one species and then another takes is place in the trophic pyramid. The ecosystem can remain intact even while the individual species come and go.

The problem with my attempt to analyze organized crime as a mechanism for central project defection is not only my lack of knowledge about organized crime in Portland (and other US cities — Chicago is also experiencing a significant increase in crime, and the city was the most famous for prohibition era organized crime), but also that it is difficult to get anyone to be honest about exactly what is happening. When law enforcement agencies take down a major organized crime ring, they tend to overstate the depredations of the crime syndicate in order to magnify their achievement, and of course they don’t talk about the parts of the criminal underworld that they allow to continue to function, whether because it is recognized as being inevitable or because the criminals are paying bribes to avoid being arrested and prosecuted.

Say, as an enterprising young reporter, you wanted to tell your readers about the criminal underworld of your city. Say you set up interviews with known criminals. What kind of story would you get? Not a very accurate picture. Say you go about this in a more subtle way, befriending low level street criminals, individuals who are part of the urban culture of casual drugs and violence, and you get them to introduce you to more people. Here you might see a bit more — much more than a social worker interviewing people under manifestly unnatural conditions that are not conducive to an honest account of the seedy underbelly of life — but you certainly won’t see enough to get a clear picture. I think you would have to become a participant-observer in the criminal underworld to really get a sense of what is going on, and this would be a barrier for most people who would want to study the criminal underworld, since they would mostly not want to become criminals themselves.

Probably the only way to get a thorough and honest understanding of the criminal underworld would be to devote one’s life to it, entering somewhere near the bottom, at a young age, and working one’s way up through the ranks, acquiring the street cred necessary to penetrate the diverse criminal networks that flourish largely unseen in large cities. But to do this would be to be part of the criminal underworld; it would be to be a member of the criminal underclass, and so to have the perspective of this class. And, if you are a member of the criminal underclass, sharing in the attitudes and worldview of the criminal underclass, you could not give an honest (and comprehensible) account of this to an outsider. You would hold back. Few people give the unsparing truth of the darkest parts of their lives to others, even when in a confessional mood. We keep these to ourselves, either from a sense of privacy, or out of a desire not to traumatize the other person who has never been exposed to such things.

One can think of these limitations on the possibility of authentic social science research as part of the intrinsic limits on scientific knowledge, which is a theme that I have come back to time and again in the past few years. While science today is an enormous undertaking, as long as civilization continues to develop (i.e., granted no failure condition obtains) science will be able to continue to develop for hundreds of years yet, and this despite all the low-hanging fruit of scientific knowledge that has already been plucked. Science and scientific knowledge can continue to expand because science is subject to a great many intrinsic limitations — most of which we are not aware of, and must make a concerted effort to recognize — that we will eventually make explicit, and will eventually find creative ways to overcome and circumvent. Science has at least a thousand years of development in it, and we are about halfway through the scientific millennium.

In any case, to return to central project defection, I also should have noted last week that people don’t defect from the central project out of pure cussedness, or due to some moral flaw in their character. At least, demographically significant numbers of people do not defect for these reasons, and if a scattered number of individuals do defect from their civilization for such reasons, and there is always a trickle like this, civilization continues on without missing a beat. It would be nearer the truth to say that demographically significant numbers of individuals (say, entire social classes) are driven away from the central project, sometimes after a good faith effort to live up to the expectations that a given society has for a given individual of a given social class. People will only bang their head against a wall for so long before they give up, which in this context not only means giving up on their personal effort (say, a personal effort to live the American Dream), but also giving up on society, checking out, and no longer feeling a part of anything larger that oneself, or perhaps one’s family or one’s immediate network. (A relevant book here, which I have previously cited, is Edward C. Banfield’s The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.)

Any account of central project defection, whether for individuals or for coherent groups of individuals with shared motives and shared outlooks, must incorporate both “push” factors that drive people away from society’s ideals, and “pull” factors that draw people to alternative ideals. Probably, push and pull motivations differ in distinct cases of catastrophic social failure, with one or the other dominating, but both present to some degree. With the later Western Roman Empire, we can identify the “push” factors as economic dysfunction that marginalized large swathes of the population and the related decrease in social mobility that arrested society in a dysfunctional state that could not but collapse; the “pull” factors must include the rise of the Christian church (and other mystery religions) with alternative ideals.

I said above that I have come to the point of view that most people in politics and the media have become bad actors because these professions attract bad actors as a society is breaking down. In such cases, we can observe that the criminal underworld that I have been describing then has its mirror image in a criminal “overworld” populated by self-aggrandizing politicians, pathological journalists, irresponsible academics, and rent-seeking businessmen all engaged in a kind of performative malevolence. Again, as with the criminal underclass, it would be nearly impossible to get an honest insider’s view of the world of the criminal overclass. With both the underclass and the overclass (here I am assuming that you were not born into either), their instinctive code of silence protects them from outsiders to the point that outsiders can’t really understand what is going on within these classes.

We can, however, catch glimpses of what goes on in these other worlds. We find these glimpses in our personal experience, when we have witnessed something we were not supposed to see, but we also gather clues from literature that peeks into the lives of others. Most of this is probably dishonest and inaccurate, but there are enough genuine and revelatory moments that it is worth the effort to try to winnow them from the chaff.