Copyright: The Way of Anger. Hardly an appropriate approach to a talk the night before a talk on gentleness, but that’s the way it might turn out. I just had a preliminary (unrecorded) conversation with a very friendly local journalist, and I found myself get quite animated as I went over some of my issues with performing rights. This issue still really annoys me in so many ways. The more I think about it (and I haven’t thought about it for a while) the more it seems like a massive web of delusions and fantasies, upheld by coercion and unquestioned ideologies. What becomes more and more clear to me over time is that there is little to performing rights other than the politics of obedience. It would be quite fun to interrogate the details of a philosophy of performing rights, if there was one, but there are no explicit basic assumptions that can be openly questioned. The underlying logics are either a mess, or simply not there. Smoke, mirrors, and money. In my reckoning it works as a system based on vague fantasies and desires, upheld by persuasion, coercion, and self-righteous evangelisation. At least if the logics were explicit we could have a good scrap over the whys and wherefores, but it’s the lack of articulation of logics at all that can leave people feeling totally at sea in these debates. The logics of rampant capitalism and communism can be explored, dissected, debated, and interrogated - there are millions of words that seek to justify the underlying logics of those system. There are barely hundreds to justify the underlying logics of performing rights, and those that are there are normally gobbledeegook. A coercive system based on complete gobbledeegook that has complete legal, economic, and governmental, and intergovernmental sanction.
It’s a complete system based on an ideas version of the Paul Principle. The Peter Principle is the idea that “In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence.” The Paul Principle (“robbing Peter to pay Paul”) is something I came up with, whereby “in every hierarchy certain employees rise above the level of incompetence to reach the level of their unassailability”. Performing rights are like the bosses son who has never been able to do anything right who suddenly finds himself in a position of absolute authority. Unassailability built on incompetence, and nobody cares, because the authority of authority ends up being more worthy of respect than something more human.
