The phrase open-air prison has been in the air for the last week. It seems to have some salience. It's stuck in my head, anyway. It represents a certain model of how the world works that has been very powerful for some time now, but may be starting to fade. Outside of that prison a big, beautiful world awaits. We must leave that prison behind.
When I hear Gaza described as an open-air prison, that image seems familiar. It reminds me of the needle-strewn downtowns of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other West Coast cities. The hard-drug-addicted prisoners of the Tenderloin are not physically constrained, but they are utterly stuck in a miserable state and scene. Under the strange norms of harm reduction there is more support for the sustenance of their addiction than there is for their recovery.
The people in Gaza are also stuck in misery due not to unchangeable physical barriers but human-created circumstances. Israel walled them off because they keep saying and showing that they want to destroy Israel and kill all its inhabitants. Egypt, on the other side of Gaza, doesn't want them to come in either, nor do any of the other countries that have at least ostensibly supported the cause of Palestinian liberation.
When you step back, and look at the situation without an extremely partisan lens, what the Palestinians are doing isn't leading anywhere good, and yet it goes on and on, one miserable decade after another. Why hasn't it been resolved one way or another? Israel is richer and more technologically advanced, so why hasn't Israel just decisively defeated Palestine and established a lasting peace? That is what usually happens when one neighbor is much more powerful than the other.
Of course, it's because the Free Palestine project is propped up by outsiders. In an interconnected world, the Israel-Palestine conflict is symbolic. It is an abstract arena for far-left ideologues who see one last chance to "decolonize" and Muslims who want to defend their coreligionists.
So really, the people in Gaza have a bad habit of trying to "liberate" themselves through genocide instead of building a prosperous society. This self-destructive habit, in isolation, would not last long. It would lead to either self-destruction or decisive reform. But there is a third option: play the part of an oppressed, colonized people for a global audience and continue the never-ending cycle of reckless attacks, crushing defeats, and global assistance, providing the means to re-arm and self-defeat all over again.
The cycle might finally break since the actual reality of the situation has played out in such gory detail across the world this time. The dramatic performance of the last oppressed colony may be winding down. Hamas supporters are in the unenviable position of providing nuance to reports of murdered and mutilated babies.
Back in San Francisco, anarchy apologists are backed into the corner of saying crime isn't that bad, and besides, it's bad everywhere (everywhere their radical DAs are). These ideologues' fantasy of a socially just utopia has been shattered by a thousand pictures and videos from citizen and professional journalists of abject misery. Now, they're always on the defensive.
The far left essentially perceives the world as a prison where unfortunate, saintly people, pure victims, suffer at the hands of cartoonishly evil oppressors. This model is more delusional every decade. It offers nothing but a fantasy of revenge followed by utopia, somehow. It tends to get a surprising amount of support until it inevitably collapses into mass murder, anarchy, or destruction.
At the same time, an alternative vision is taking shape. It is a perfectly opposed vision of building a better future with science and technology in open markets. It is a vision of superabundant artificial intelligence, energy, food, water, and shelter. It is a call to venture into the frontier with faith that human ingenuity and goodwill will always prevail. This vision makes the open-air prison look like a relic of a harsher past, not the central feature of existence, forever.
This vision is forming under the banner of effective accelerationism, though it's still early. The idea is simply to push into the frontier of scientific and technological progress, to challenge ourselves to build more, to self-actualize, to dream of a much better, wealthier world and create it. This is the way forward. We are not in prison. We are at the cusp of a boundless frontier.
Love this piece! Found your perspective, analogies, and parallels to be very helpful in trying to make sense of an all too common problem around the world…