Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Creating Reality Page 4 of 6

The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo

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On July 13, 2020

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Last week I wrote an article lampooning the idea that people are only following incentives and therefore are not bad people.

Let’s spell this out clearly.

The system, whatever the system is, whether it is New Deal capitalism, Stalinist communism, English high feudalism, neoliberal capitalism, or French late medieval feudalism, is a creation of humans.

Our system is always a choice.

It doesn’t feel like a choice to you as an individual, because it is a collective choice which weights a very few individuals’ preferences much higher than yours. Not being Barack Obama (who had a choice to end neoliberalism) or FDR (who did choose to create a new type of capitalism) or Khrushchev (who created a different type of communism, recognizably different from Stalinism–and much more pleasant to live in), you have never had much of a choice.

So, being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not a man-made construction.

But the system is always made and is always the result of choices. Sometimes, individuals at key junctures get to make a choice or a difference, and most people only make choices as part of large groups. But it is a choice.

Even within a system, different results are produced. English feudalism was far kinder than French feudalism, with far more free men and far fewer villeins or serfs. England produced common law and even non-free men and women had rights. Russian serfdom by the end of the Czars was known for its cruelty, but it wasn’t always thus, and so on and so forth.

More recently, and if not within your memory (though it is within my memory), then certainly within the memory of people you know, the previous form of capitalism running the US and most of the “free” world produced the following results:

  • steadily increasing incomes after real inflation was measured;
  • steadily decreasing share of income being made by the richest in society;
  • steadily increasing prices (but slower than wages).

It did all those things because it was designed to do those things. A choice was made in 1933, and made again pro-actively every four years after that to keep doing it. After a while, people became wishy washy about its continuation. You can trace it in stages: the post-war Congress weakening unions, Truman deciding to keep the war time state running, Kennedy deciding to lower top taxes, qualified immunity in the 60s, Nixon deciding to start the war on drugs, and so on.

But it didn’t really end until Reagan. Reagan was a choice, that’s why there were elections. He had been worked for, hard, by various rich people who could see that the current system was slowly siphoning away their power, and they found, with racism and the fear engendered by the oil shock crises, enough of a wedge to get a voting majority of Americans onside.

Then they systematically changed how the system operated so that it would produce:

  • stangnant income for the majority of the population (really decreasing if inflation were properly measured);
  • steadily increasing share of income and wealth controlled by the wealthiest in society;
  • steadily decreasing prices of production of goods. At first some of this was passed on, but most of it was kept as profit.

Neoliberal capitalism produced different results from New Deal capitalism because it was designed to do so. It had different incentives, to use econo-speak.

To say “people just follow the incentives” is driveling idiocy when dealing with large social matters, because in large social matters, the incentives are dependent variables; they are chosen by the leadership and the mass of the people (who, yes, do have power in large enough groups–Reagan was not possible if enough Democrats hadn’t defected, they were called the “Reagan Democrats”).

Nor are people ex-nihilo. We are shaped by the society we live in. Reagan’s revolution could not have happened while the Lost Generation still had large numbers because the Lost Generation remembered not just the Great Depression, but the roaring 20s. Knowing that the wealthy had caused the Great Depression, most Lost believed in keeping the rich poor. Those who came afterwards, not properly remembering the 20s, did not feel this in their gut, and they were willing to sell out.

Neoliberals said, “You can have a suburban home, away from the blacks, and we’ll spike the value of housing and stocks, so you’ll be rich, and you won’t even have to work for it.” Sub Voce: “Because you’ll get it for doing nothing, you won’t care about wages, which we’ll crush.”

More than this, a system selects for people who will do what it requires. You cannot join many gangs without murdering someone first. You cannot be in power in DC, or almost any state capital, if you are not onside with crushing wages and making the rich richer. You will not be allowed in power. You will not want power, because you will quickly find out that you can’t do what you want, you can only do evil.

The system doesn’t so much turn people evil as it selects for evil. The “incentives” don’t work on everyone, what matters is that, if they don’t work on you, you don’t get into power. Or, if you somehow fluke in (like Corbyn) you don’t stay in power. You won’t compromise enough.

People worked hard to create neoliberalism. Once they were in power, they worked hard to create a system which excludes those who don’t want to crush wages and make the rich richer. The rules of the system, the incentives, were created by men and women and are maintained by men and women.

They are not unchallenged, but so far every challenge has lost. Corbyn was a challenge. Sanders was a challenge. There have been other challenges. They all lost. This was true of every challenge to the New Deal Order from 1936 to 1976. All challenges lost. It looked unbeatable.

One day, the New Deal Order lost. One day Neo-Liberalism will lose. The questions are only, “When?” and “To what?”

Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin defeated older orders too.

So, the people who run the US and the developed world are almost all very bad people. They were selected to be very bad, and they also worked very hard to ensure that only evil people could get power, because only evil people will do what their system requires and it is the system that makes them powerful and rich. (Reminder: Nancy Pelosi is worth $120 million.)

The systems selects for evil, the system was created, and is maintained, by people who worked and are working hard to make sure it selects only evil people to run it.

Just like Soylent Green, the system is people.

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Who Gets to Be Violent and Why?

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On June 4, 2020

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The people who need to a good shit-kicking are most politicians, CEOs, and senior civilians.

Well, and cops, obviously.

And they need to know the cops can’t protect them from another one.

The President, the mayor of New York, the Governor of New York, almost everyone who works for the Federal Reserve, all senior Wall Street Executives, every senior executive at Google and Facebook, every executive at a private equity firm is on that list. (Even if they are personally “good,” they work to make evil more powerful.)

Yeah, this is the Rubicon, shit we’re not supposed to actually say. Powerful people routinely arrange to have weak people (98 percent of the population) killed, beaten, impoverished, and effectively enslaved by debt and fear of debt.

But the weak are told that if they resist all the things done to them under the threat of violence (and it’s all under the threat of violence), they must never be violent.

It’s the logic of the bully, of the coward: “My victims must not fight back, they must lie there and take their beating, and not resist. My violence is legitimate because I am powerful, but the weak must not use violence. If they do, we’ll escalate and escalate and escalate. We won’t just kill them, we’ll take everything, rape and torture; lock them up for years, deny them healthcare. There is nothing we will not do to those who resist us.”

So, for your own sake, understand in your bones that the violence your lords and masters (and they are your masters, and you are their slaves) do is legitimate, and that you have no right to resist.

If you do resist, and, worse, if you dare be violent, you are a bad slave, a bad peasant. Violence is reserved for the master class and their enforcers; it is something that they have the right to do. It is good when they do it, and it is bad when you do it.

This is a social fact: It is true because it is made true.

Be violent to the master class or their lackeys and the penalties are huge. It’s better to just sit there, and become homeless, go into debt, spend your entire life at a job you hate, doing what a petty tyrant tells you to, until you’re too old to work.

Because as bad as all those things are, they are better than what they’ll do to you if you really fight; if you do to them what they give themselves the right to do to you.

The only time you have the right to be violent is if you are violent against their enemies: domestic or foreign. Angry? Full of hate? You can get it out. Put on a uniform, or just play vigilante against a mutual enemy.

But never, ever, strike at the actual masters. The lords. The people making your life hell.

Because they control violence, they control money, and they will hurt you. If somehow they can’t get you under the rules, well, they’ll hunt you down like a dog, like they did the Ferguson protesters, killing them over years.

Who gets to use violence is a social fact.

You don’t.

The people who rule your life and make it hell do.

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Who I Bleed With and Why Bernie Is Trusted

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On March 6, 2020

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So, identity is and always has been one of the most important forces in politics, the rise and fall of empires, etc. This was true long before “identity politics” or intersectionality and it will be true long after they are forgotten.

Identity is who you feel with. Who you bleed with. If people like you are hurt, you hurt. You can see this in degrees in terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes. If it’s the Brits being hit, Americans care. French? Somewhat less. Baghdad market bombing? Don’t give a shit. (Yes, you are special flower and do actually care, which may well be true, as you are one of my readers and self-selecting for caring more about people not like you, but most people don’t. I wish they did, but they don’t.)

This is also true for good things; they matter more if they happen to people I identify with.

My primary political identification is with the precariat: The working class who aren’t even stable working class. They can lose their jobs at any time, they live in bad housing, they are one bad bounce away from the street. In the US, they can’t afford healthcare even if they have insurance, in most countries they can’t afford dental care and you can see it as they get older in their yellow teeth.

These are the people who are always scared, who will work until they die or physically just can’t, and who will push far past what “can’t” would be for most other people. They work through pain and illness because, even in most countries with sick days, a week isn’t enough if you’re precariat: When you eat badly, and you work hard, your health breaks at some point.

I’ve been precariat a lot during my life. I’m precariat now. I’ve belonged to other classes, I’ve even been well off, upper middle class. I’ve hobnobbed and lived with the upper classes plenty, I grew up with them in boarding school. I can fit in with most classes, as long as I have the wardrobe, though as I get older and look older it becomes a bit harder: I don’t have the shiny well-cared for, calibrated, drugged look the upper classes have at my age.

Some of my identification with the precariat is simply that I often am one. But I could choose to identify with other classes or groups, I’ve been among many of them at some time. People can be stubborn about identifying with a class they no longer have the material circumstances for–they can hold on to that until they die, acting as if they still belong and often getting away with it. It’s worth doing, because lower class people are treated worse.

Period. They are treated worse, always. I put on a suit and clean up and I see the change. I change my manners and act middle class, and how I am treated changes, always for the better.

Lower class people have manners and attitudes which are recognizable, and higher orders, even the people only a little higher, shit on them the moment they recognize those manners. Exceptions exist, and I’ve gone out of my way when my circumstances are good to be an exception (which is why service staff anywhere I go regularly always like me), but they are exceptions.

But while some of my identification is simply positional, a lot of my political identification stems from the fact that the precariat, more than anyone except those who have fallen out of the system completely, are the ones who need the help. They tend to work very hard and get very little for it. I’ve done office work, construction work, retail and food prep, among many, many jobs, and the psychological stress of office work can be real, but it’s not the same as a hard physical job, where in any case the bosses are often still assholes. (This is especially true in retail in my experience. Never did manufacturing.) Office workers also tend to have a bit of protection from the most abusive behaviour, because of a certain shield of civility which does not apply to those at the bottom.

So, I am for Bernie, and I was for Corbyn, because they will do the most for those who need the most help. I can argue that most of what they want to do will also be excellent for everyone but the very rich, even if many of those people don’t recognize it, and it’s true, but I don’t care very much. The self-identifying middle class, the upper class, and the rich (three separate classes) are mostly either actively scum, or passively scum. The “middle class” has thrown everyone, including their own weaker members, under the bus in a pathetic attempt to keep their perceived status. The upper class are the rich’s close retainers, executing their policies and about one member of the rich out of a hundred who has power is doing more good than evil.

Identification is a matter of feel. When the precariat are hurt, I hurt. I feel their pain. This isn’t theoretical, you can see it on brain scans. When something good happens for them, I am happy. This is true even if it has no effect on me; I’m Canadian, and have universal health care–yet I have spent much of my career advocating for the US to adopt universal care.

One reason that Warren never had a hard core of supporters the way Sanders does is simple: She doesn’t identify as lower or working class or precariat. She doesn’t feel like one of the body. She doesn’t actually seem to feel the pain. Bernie, despite having been in Congress for ages, has a lot of Jewish working class feel. The anger that turns off the technocrats as inappropriate for the office is real to working class types. If there’s reason to be angry, be angry. And Bernie is angry because their bosses are treating them like shit.

Warren wants to be the good boss; the good intellectual. The savior.

Bernie feels like one of us and he’s angry with us.

He may or may not win the nomination (though I think he can win the election.)

But it’s why there’s a core of people who trust him through thick and thin.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

 

How Capitalism Makes Evil Rational

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On February 14, 2020

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It’s always worth understanding an important ideology’s ethical calculus.

Capitalism’s is brilliant.

If someone is willing and able to give you money to do something, you are improving their life.

The corollary is:

If you have money, you have it because you have improved someone else’s life. The more you have, the more lives you have improved.

There are assumptions embedded in this logic: That people know what improves their lives, for example, and that everyone involved is buying and selling voluntarily.

Demand isn’t desire, mind you. If you want something that would improve your life a lot, it doesn’t matter if you can’t command enough money to get it. Adam Smith pointed out that bums may want coaches complete with horses, but this does not translate to “demand.”

Still, basically, the theory is that you get money by helping other people.

Roy Dalio, the fund manager famous for his book on principles, believes this one hundred percent.

Now, it’s important to understand that capitalism is an ideology and organizational principle sitting on top of a series of technologies. We can call those technologies “industrialization.” Industrialization is not capitalism; we can imagine there might be other moral and organizational principles which could work with industrialization. We tried, as a species. We called it communism, which was centralized industrial control, and it didn’t work out in the end. Some say that’s because it couldn’t work, others say it’s because the USSR had less people and resources than capitalism, along with a weak strategic position.

I’ve argued parts of both. The truth is we don’t actually know.

Both systems are ideologies which determine who gets to control a certain amount of other people’s time, and who got to tell people what to do. That’s what money does, and anyone who has spent their entire life working for money by doing what other people tell them to do should understand this (though remarkably, many people don’t).

Capitalism is also an argument based on scarcity. It says: “There isn’t enough, so we need to make sure the people who get what we have use it to help others.”

That’s the actual moral argument: Capitalism is the best way to use people and resources to help the most people. It’s why whenever someone suggests there might be another way, someone else will say “Venezuela, Venezuela, neener, neener.”

Here’s a strange thing, though. Every time I look into homelessness I find that there are more empty homes than homeless people. There’s probably an exception, but I’ve never found one in the Western world.

We also throw out far more more food than is needed to feed everyone.

So at the very least, we know that capitalism isn’t distributing goods to everyone who needs them. The capitalist argument to this contradiction isn’t, “That’s false!” It’s that, “Communism failed, so you’re stuck with this.”

Then there’s another issue: Capitalism has turned out to be terrible at managing scarce resources. We could make a lot of things we use more durable so they’d last longer. Instead we make them so they won’t, deliberately. We make them so they’ll break or wear out, and people will have to buy another set, because companies need to make a profit. It’s not that cell phones couldn’t be created to last much longer, it’s that the people who make them don’t want to. The same is true of light bulbs, clothes, almost all electronics, cars, and so on.

We’re wasting vast amounts of resources, and that waste also shows up as vast amounts of pollution and huge destruction of the environment.

Pollution, including pollution involving carbon, methane and other climate change gases is an important example of not managing limited resources. There’s actually a limited amount of room to pollute, and beyond that, the environment starts changing in ways which are dangerous to us and the rest of life. This is a genuine scarcity “pollution sink,” and capitalism isn’t managing it.

It turns out that capitalism (and state communism before it) isn’t very good at managing scarcity. Perhaps it’s better than an opposition which doesn’t exist any more, but it’s not good enough to avoid wiping out island nations and changing the climate catastrophically.

So what we have is a technology which is theoretically capable of managing scarcity (industrialization/science) and an ideology and organizing principle (capitalism) which can not.

We produce way more than we need, vast amounts are wasted, we still have people without homes or going without food, and we’re destroying the environment and changing climate in disastrous ways.

That’s an ideology which is, well, evil. To produce more than we need, and then say, for ideological reasons, “But some people have to sleep on the street, and others need clean out sewers by hand, and still others have to go hungry” is a simple failure. To destroy the ecosphere is another failure.

Capitalism doesn’t do what it is supposed to do: It doesn’t use resources efficiently or distribute them in a humane way. In fact, it uses resources inefficiently, vastly so.

It turns out that “if it makes money” isn’t a good proxy for “does good while using resources efficiently.”

By capitalism’s rules, destroying the world is rational. Not feeding people is rational. Having homes sitting empty while people freeze on the streets is rational. Making way more goods than people need, through planned obsolesence, is rational.

And these aren’t corner cases. This is what the logic leads to. This is the system running on its core logic loops. Someone is paying for all of these things, so it must be making them better off, so therefore doing these things is good. More, the people doing those things are given MORE resources (money) so they can perpetuate same behaviours, because the system assumes the behaviour must be good, or someone wouldn’t be paying for it.

This isn’t just, well, evil. It’s insane.

When your ideology says: “Destroying the world’s climate and environment, starving people, and making people homeless is rational”? There’s a problem with the ideology.

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“Construction of Reality” First Draft Sent to Editor

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On February 10, 2020

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The stretch goal in 2016 was a booklet, “Construction of Reality” (CoR) about how, as individuals, groups, and societies, we create reality.

The first draft is done, 58,887 words and has been sent to an editor. This is more than I expected and more than planned.

I apologize to 2016 donors and subscribers, this took way longer than I intended. Part of that is that I’d never written a book before, part of it is that the topic was more difficult than I expected (especially to write CoR without it feeling like a textbook), and part of it is that my health was trash, but the fact remains you’ve waited a long time and will wait a bit more. I’m sorry about that.

(As an aside, my health has radically improved in the last three months. What finally did the trick was a 100 day “juice cleanse.” I did it because someone suggested it, and I’d tried everything else. Didn’t expect it to work, but it did. I’m not 100 percent, but the improvement is huge.)

Back on topic, when the book comes out will depend on whether the editor thinks it’s the sort of book that the publishers would be interested in. This has little do with quality, it’s a judgement about how they perceive it will sell. If so, it’ll be at least another year, if not, you should see it sooner.

“How To Think,” which I promised in last year’s fundraiser will not take nearly so long. Though not an easy topic, it’s a lot easier than how we construct reality. I’m a lot healthier, and I’ve written a book now, and know better what I’m doing. (Blogging, article, and essay skills translate poorly.)

I do think you’ll find “Construction of Reality” (CoR) to be worth the wait. One advantage of the long writing time is that I’m able to be fairly objective about it. Contrary to what non-writers think, writers usually aren’t happy with their books when they’ve just finished them (and at various stages I wasn’t), but I am with CoR. Almost no one, myself included, can claim unique ideas, but the synthesis of ideas in CoR is unlike any book I’ve read.

One reason writing CoR took so long is that I stopped, threw out most of what I had and restarted because I wanted you to receive a book which was actually useful, not a dry tome, however accurate. I think and hope this book will be something which will actually make some readers’ lives better. (Not all, no one can write that book!)

I’m looking forward to sharing CoR with you.

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Christianity as a Religious Ideology

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On December 27, 2019

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Religions are ideologies. They are little different from something like capitalism, or Marxism, or the divine right of kings, or humanism.

That is to say ideologies are sets of statements about how the world and people are, and how they should be.

Christianity takes humans as fallen. We are innately bad, and we must be reformed by good education, including punishment. “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” This is different from classic Confucianism, which assumed that humans were essentially neutral slates, or the Confucianism of Mencius, which believed that humans were innately good, similar to Rousseau. The Chinese Legalists, on the other hand, assumed humans were bad, and the Imperial justice system tended to run on their ideas, not those of Mencius.

If you believe humans are bad, you must change them; fix them. Such ideologies tend to be punitive. If you think humans are good, on the other hand, you have to mostly avoid screwing them up, and such ideologies try to avoid punishment and negative reinforcement.

Christianity’s caused a lot of suffering down through the ages, a statement I hope isn’t controversial. A lot of that comes down to Christianity’s metaphysical beliefs for most of that time.

  1. The only way to go to Heaven is through acceptance of Christ;
  2. If you don’t go to Heaven, you will wind up in Hell. Hell is eternal torment.

The combination of these two beliefs means that, logically, anything is acceptable if it leads to someone becoming a Christian. Charlemagne once force-converted ten thousand pagans, then executed them. They died as Christians, with no chance to sin, doubtless they went to heaven. Spanish conquistadors would burn heretics, because they believed that would send them to heaven. Conquering a country to convert its people was not only moral, it was the only moral thing to do. To do otherwise would be to condemn everyone born there to hell, which is to say to torture which never ends.

Christianity is a form of hegemonic ideology. “Everyone should follow this ideology.” Democracy is another hegemonic ideology, “Everyone should be able to vote for their leaders.” Oh, there are exceptions, but they are minor. A country that is not a democracy, to a believer in democracy, isn’t ruled legitimately. Plenty of wars have been justified by hegemonic democratic principles, and plenty of non-democratic governments have been overthrown when democratic powers defeated them (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War I, for example.)

But remember that, after the Napoleonic wars, aristocracy was re-instituted in France. The hegemonic philosophy of the day can differ.

Islam is also a hegemonic religious ideology: everyone is supposed to eventually become a Muslim. That’s the goal, although it’s sort of okay for the other monotheists to stick around.

Hegemonic philosophies which get traction change the world. They evangelize. They conquer. When they go bad, they go really bad.

Religious hegemonic ideologies have the extra oomph of “God said.” If “God said,” well then, you can’t override that, because obviously “God is right.” The best you can do is to say “Well, perhaps we misunderstood part of this.”

Non-hegemonic ideologies find hegemonic ideologies horrifying. Hegemonic ideologies breed fanatics, people who aren’t willing to say “it’s okay for other people to live differently.”

Don’t think this is always a bad thing: Our ideology may radically oppose slavery, for example, or starvation, or torture or rape, and say “No one should every do these things!”

Is that bad?

Well, is it worth fighting wars over? That’s really the question. Is it worse using violence to stop this? How much violence? At what point are the evils of the violence you’re using worse than whatever it is you oppose, or whatever good you intend to impose?

Christianity’s monster state ruled by crusades and inquisitions and insisting that women bear the children of their rapists–that sort of thing. This isn’t in question, because we have a lot of Christian history.

This doesn’t make Christianity uniquely monstrous, or more evil than many other ideologies, but it is baked into the set of beliefs required to be Christian (forced conversion, death to pagans and heathens) or is easy to pervert a hegemonic ideology towards (abortion is murder, murder is always bad, unless you’re murder a non-Christian to force conversion of their society).

Other ideologies have other monster modes. We’re beginning to see Hinduism’s right now. We’ve been seeing how Islam goes wrong for many decades now. Communism regularly gets vilified for its crimes and I trust people know the crimes of capitalism, though they tend to be understated–because it is our ruling ideology.

But religious ideologies are always particularly dangerous, for the simple reason that one cannot admit God was wrong, because God can’t be wrong. (The Hindu Gods, oddly, can be wrong. Pagans are usually pretty clear that gods aren’t always right.)

Beware the consequences of monotheism with infallible Gods, and beware the consequences of hegemonic ideologies.

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Social Facts Create Reality

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On December 20, 2019

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When I write longer works, like the booklet “The Construction of Reality,” I put aside pieces that are good, but don’t work in the context of the book.

I’ve now re-written the entire first chapter twice. The first time was way too dry, but looking at it now, I see that it’s still interesting and makes some important points, so I’m going to post it here.

Reality is constructed.

It is constructed first by our bodies–our senses and universal emotions like fear and lust, anger and love. Being human orders the world for us before we take our first breath.

This is true of all animals, who, like humans, also change the environment to suit themselves. But humans have created a reality far, far from that of our forebears who ran in bands on the Savannah.

We have created a human world.  Most of us live in cities, artificial environments created by us. We walk on streets laid out by humans, work, sleep, and cook in buildings, drive in cars or take buses, trains, and planes. We talk on cell phones and surf the internet. Even those who live in the country live on land which has been altered by agriculture and pasturing of animals humans domesticated. A farmer grows wheat which was bred over millennia (or genetically altered, more recently). The farmer raises animals humans have been raising for thousands of years. We eat the meat of cows, pigs, and chicken and we dine on rice, wheat, or vegetables we have tended for millennia and which we have bred to suit us.

As individuals, we did not create almost any part of this physical world. We did not invent the techniques for caring for domesticated animals, growing vegetables, or making smart phones.

We live in a physical world created by humans, many of whom are dead. Human life is human in a way that animal life is not animal. Animals have an effect on the environment, but it is minor compared to what humans have done to the world.

And this is just the physical side of the world. Just as important is the world of ideas, of social facts.

Look at the words you are reading right now. You didn’t invent writing, typing, any of these words, or language itself. You spend your life thinking most of your thoughts in a language or languages created by humans, for humans–and mostly by dead humans.

You almost certainly receive your daily food in exchange for something called money which is probably either plastic woven to look like paper or electronic bits. Money has no intrinsic value; a million dollars in the middle of Antarctica would do nothing for you, most money isn’t even paper any more–you couldn’t burn it for heat. Yet most of us spend most of our waking day working for someone who gives us “money” and exchanges it for most everything else we want.

In times of war and famine, money may lose most of its value. Food, cigarettes, or sex may be worth more. Money’s value is a social fact.

When someone is killed by another human being, whether it was murder or not is a social fact. In war, if a soldier kills someone it is probably not murder. If the state is executing someone it is not murder. When police kill someone it is usually not considered murder. Social facts.

The quality and amount of health care provided to individuals is a social fact; it depends on where they live.  In some countries, it depends on how much money they have. In other countries, it depends on how much power they have.

The amount of melanin in someone’s skin is a physical fact. That having a “black” name in America leads to half the interview requests than those received for an identical resume with a “white” name is a social fact.

Cannabis is almost certainly less physically harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but selling or possessing cannabis is far more likely to get you thrown in jail. In the US, during alcohol prohibition, this was not true. Alcohol is alcohol, its legal status is a social fact.

Social facts rule most of your life. They are layered on top of physical facts and tell you how to understand those facts, and how to act towards them. There are few more consequential decisions than, “When should I kill someone?” or, “When should someone receive health care and how good should it be? or “Should I hire someone and for how much?”

Not all ideas are social facts. You may believe something “ought” to be true, but often other people do not agree. You think your girlfriend shouldn’t cheat, she doesn’t agree, the state doesn’t care. But if you act on that idea, and so do other people, it’s a social fact. They may call her a cheater, ostracize her, and so on. If no one acts on it, it is not a social fact.

A gang or mafia may believe that their members shouldn’t inform to the authorities, and they may enforce this as best they can, but obviously the state does not. It is still a social fact if they can make it one, however.

You may also believe in ideas which are contrary to the ideas currently enforced by the state or other people. Perhaps you do not believe in intellectual property. Perhaps you think confessions obtained by torture shouldn’t be used in criminal proceedings. Perhaps you believe that women should or shouldn’t be able to have abortions.

These ideas may fall short of being social facts if no one acts on them. They are just ideas; musings on how the world “ought” to be.

This social world is layered on top of the physical world created by our bodies and how they perceive and interact with objects around us. No amount of social facts will alter the solidity of a rock, or our need to breathe.

Each of us lives inside these two worlds, worlds which were largely given to us.

Imposed on us.

At most, we’ve made a few choices from the worlds and realities available to us, but most of our fundamental choices have been made for us.

The reality, I, a Canadian urban male, live in is different from that of a female Mexican subsistence farmer, let alone that of a plains Indian 700 years ago, a prole in the Roman Republic, or an Egyptian priest under the Pharoahs.

This is before we get to the differences that seem important to us today: say, the difference between a conservative Republican Christian and his counterpart progressive Democratic atheist. A thousand years from now, those may seem like rather similar people, today they seem quite different.

Our bodies make us alive, but they make us different as well: To be tall or short is to experience the world differently. To have a strong constitution or a sickly one is to experience the world differently, as well.

And to be a woman or a man, likewise; so much so that men and women in some societies (Saudi Arabia today, Victorian England, or Manchu China) can be said to have such different experiences in life that they might as well live in different worlds; different realities.

Reality is inside-out, first, because we have bodies and senses which organize our experience of the world, and do so before the first drop of parental interference, training, or culture.

But it is outside-in in most of the ways which make us different from each other and from other humans who have lived in the past.

Each of us is formed by time, place and position. Even if we were both male, with similar bodies, in Republican Rome, were I born to a Plebeian family and you to a Patrician family, our worlds would part, and even if both of us were born to Patrician families the particulars of our parents, tutors and other incidentals would leave us different. Position within a place and time, added to different bodies, makes up most of the individuality which divides us from our peers.

In this book we will swoop from the heights of macro-history; of the effects of great ideas, of technologies like gunpowder and farming, or organization and vast tribal identities, to the depths of our inner experience; our thoughts, our feelings, our urges and beliefs.

Reality is an experience. Each of us lives in a reality, feels it, and thinks about it. As we live, we change the reality we live in, or it changes around us, and again, our experience of the world changes.

To write a book on the construction of reality while neglecting how we can change reality would be barren.  Though careful examination reveals that most of human reality is imposed on us from outside, by time, place, and position, none of which we choose, we do not have to accept this passively.

While even in the great struggle to change our shared world, our shared reality, all of us can change the reality we live in, by taking some control of our own circumstances–or, denied that, by changing how our bodies and brains interpret the world.

So we will cover the vast currents of history and prehistory, of identity, organization, technology and ideology. We will speak of human empathy, human violence, and human limits, because it is human limits which have the greatest effect on the world we create and our acceptance of the world that we are given.

But in so doing, we will not neglect the personal.

Killing Herd Animals

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On December 4, 2019

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One of the great crimes and tragedies of our world is how we treat the animals we eat (or whose milk, eggs, or other products we eat and use). Factory farming keeps them in tiny enclosures, feeds them monotonous foods, and then when they’re slaughtered, it’s a terrible experience–they’re terrified and die in pain.

There’s been a kerfuffle in Britain, where the Green Party leader said he’d bank Halal meats.

There’s an argument for this based on Nassim Taleb’s tyranny of the committed minority. If enough people simply won’t buy something unless it’s done their way, it makes sense for capitalists to just produce all of whatever it is that way. “Just butcher them all Halal.”

Halal killing is a cut to the jugular vein, and then all blood is drained. In part it’s fairly clear that the intent is to spare animals pain, same as it is in Kosher butchering, where the carotid and jugular and windpipe are all cut in one smooth motion.

So both these things seem good to me, but it seems that there’s a third style of killing herd animals that is even more painless: the Mongolian one. They make a small incisition in the neck, then pull out a vein. The animal dies quickly and painlessly (though it’s messy, as you’d expect.)

I have little respect for religious rules just because they’re religious, and that includes rules about how animals are treated. Animals, especially mammals, clearly have emotions and suffer. If you want to obey “God’s” rules yourself, knock yourself out–as long as it affects no one but you. But when it effects other people, those rules get no extra points because “God” said so.

Both Halal and Kosher killing is better than what happens in most slaughterhouses. But if Mongolian butchering is painless, then that’s what we should use. It should be mandated by law, everyone who kills animals should be trained, and slaughterhouses should be inspected.

And if that means some Jews and Muslims (or anyone else) decide not to eat meat, they can go howl.

The point here isn’t really about slaughtering animals (though we should do it humanely, and yeah, I’m willing to see prices go up if that’s required and I’m poor enough that means I’d eat less meat), but about religions, ideologies, and policies.

Religions are ideologies which claim special status. “God said,” usually.

Those claims are laughable. It’s not that God may or may not exist, it’s that there are too many religions all claiming “God” said different things.

Obviously, most of them are wrong. Heck, they’re probably all wrong, even if God does exist.

So that means they’re just ideologies: a series of assertions about how the world is, how the world should be and how humans should think, feel, and act. As such, they are due no more deference than any other ideology, whether capitalism, the divine right of kings, the Pax Romana, or democracy. They are simply provisional sets of ideas, from a particular time, with a particular history, and they can be wrong, or more to the point, harmful. Some will be good, some bad, and so on.

As such they must be evaluated by the good they do, versus the harm, and if better ways of doing things, in terms of the welfare of humans, animals, and life in general are found, what some guy centuries or millennia ago said about what God wanted should be thrown out the window.

Religion, all religion, including yours, is just ideology in supernatural drag.

Treat it as such.

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