Ian Welsh

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

Category: Creating Reality Page 5 of 6

Breaking Your Chains

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On September 17, 2018

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I started blogging in 2003. Since then, I’ve written well over a million words. There was a time when I wrote two or three articles a day.

I thought that the writing mattered, that it made a difference. It did to some people, but not to many. Seven billion people have a lot of momentum, and stopping them or even turning them is close to impossible, especially when the lever you have is just blogging.

Oh well.

Various bad stuff has happened. More bad stuff will happen. As I’ve written before, this stuff is now baked in. It will happen, it cannot be stopped. When you’re going 200 miles an hour and ten feet from the wall, everything is over except the casualty report.

You should probably still slam on the brakes, though.

A few years ago, I turned my primary emphasis from, oh, let’s call it political economics to more fundamental issues.

Why do people believe in what they do? Why do they do what they do? And how can that be changed?

Because, as I’ve written before, the primary problem isn’t that we don’t know what our problems are, or even how to fix them (in technical terms). It is that we aren’t fixing them even though we know they exist and have a pretty good idea how to fix them.

I mean, to repeat myself yet again, we’ve known about climate change, undeniably, since the late 70s at the latest. And we did, well, basically nothing. We know that inequality is terrible for everyone, and people were warning back in the late 80s about it and we, well, slammed our foot down on the accelerator.

And so on.

Now, this isn’t a new pursuit for me. I wondered about it when I was a teenager, but I examined it, mostly, the wrong way–through anthropology, sociology, linguistics, history, neuroscience, and so on.

Oh, it’s not that these disciplines don’t have important insights, but they are all fragmentary and none of them tell you the most important thing, not really: How to change.

I mean, it’s nice to have some insights into why you’re fucked up, but if those insights don’t lead to the ability to become less fucked up, the exercise is somewhat sterile.

There are a group of people who have, over millennia, spent virtually all their time examining  how the human mind works, and why it believes what it believes. Spiritual people.

Not religious people, understand; religion is what people who want pat answers to the insights of spiritual people. They suck the insights dry, and turn them into set rules.

You’ve got someone like Mohammed, say, whose first followers are mostly slaves, women, and poor people. And Mohammed, well, he made their lives better; he made new rules which were not as bad as the old rules. Sure, women still weren’t equal to men, but they had more rights than before.

And poltroons and fools think that the new rules are now set in stone for eternity, rather than considering that he was making things as much better as he could under the circumstances and given his own, unbroken conditioning.

Then there’s poor Jesus. Good God, what his followers have done to his teachings! They’ve turned them into, with some exceptions like the social gospel (now dead), an utter force for evil.

This is the fate of the great spiritual figures–to be misunderstood. Sometimes that misunderstanding doesn’t do too much harm (Buddha, yes, some); sometimes it does a lot, as with Mohammed and Christ.

Or, as Marx, a great ideologue, though not a great spiritual figure, said: “I am not a Marxist.”

Or Jesus: “I am not a Christian.”

Anyway, there’s a type of spirituality which basically involves learning to examine one’s mind, until the way it really works becomes something one can’t deny any more.

Jiddu Krishnamurti tried to teach this. Failed miserably. Maybe got one person enlightened, despite spending his entire life working at it.

The problem he had was that he really wouldn’t give instructions. He was scared of the founder effect; he wanted people to learn to think for themselves and not reify a bunch of new rules.

So, yeah, that didn’t work too well.

The simplest rule of the mind is that everything in it is stuff given to you by other people. Your religion, your nationality, your love of sports, whatever… it’s all conditioning and while it isn’t precisely all garbage, it’s close to it. You didn’t choose it, but you think it is “you.” You think your personality is you, or that you are American or Chinese or Hindu or Christian or Jewish.

You’re full up to the brim with stinking garbage; realities created by “wise” men of the past, which served their purposes and which has been, usually, completely unsuited to living a healthy, happy life with other humans in such a way that you don’t, well, destroy the ecosphere, for one.

And the humor of it is in the identification with it–that you, that we, think that all this garbage is actually us. It’s closer to a sickness, a virus, passed from sufferer to sufferer.

And it’s why we’re ten yards from a wall, going 100 miles an hour.

If you want to stop being sick, and a vector for sickness, start by just resting and examining the contents of your consciousness as they come and go.

And be ready to be really unhappy, as you realize you’re a slave.

But it is the slave who believes they are free who is most chained: You can’t break invisible chains.

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 We Are Conditioned To Be Slaves

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On August 3, 2018

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Every ideology makes statements about human nature.

  • Capitalism: people are greedy;
  • Christianity: people are innately sinful;
  • Confucianism (Confucius original), people are neither good or bad, but pliable;

They make statements about how people should be treated. In capitalism, since people are greedy, they must be motivated with rewards. In Catholic Christianity, since people are innately sinful they must be forgiven, sin is natural. In original Confucianism, they must be trained to be good people.

All systems of learning are also conditioning processes. Take the discipline of economics. Economics believes  the idea that humans pursue self interest, know what it is, and make rational decisions to achieve it.

Studies have shown that there is only one group of humans who reliably act as economics predicts: people with economics degrees.

They learn how to think like an economist, and they make decisions like an economist.

For example, in sharing games.  One person is given, say,  $100 then has to give some to another person. That person decides whether to accept the offer. If they refuse, neither participant gets anything.

Economic theory says that the recipient should accept even a cent: after all, they’re better off than they would have been otherwise. But normal humans don’t do that. The less they are offered, the more likely they are to refuse.

Economics majors, on the other hand, take the offer.

Every discipline is like this. You learn to think like an economist, or sociologist, or political scientist or engineer, or doctor, or… whatever.

But life, overall, is like this.

Think about school. School is a place where you sit down, speak only when called on, do what you’re told, in the way you are told to do it. It is brutal indoctrination in obedience to teacher.

If it doesn’t work with you, what happens? Well, unless you’re very smart, you don’t get good grades. If it really doesn’t work with you, you get kicked out.

Higher education, required for almost all good jobs, cannot be received without good grades.

Indoctrination has failed, you will never have a good job, and thus you will never have power in society.

School exists to teach people to be obedient to power. It exists to make sure that when bosses tell them what to do, how and to be quiet unless boss gives permission, they do so.

Grab the kids at age 6, indoctrinate them while they’re young and almost helpless, deliver the results.

Kids are conditioned to act like employees. Like, frankly, wage slaves.

This is a very effective social system, because it does what it must: it makes sure that people who effectively resist the conditioning don’t get power later on.

The rare exceptions get power by going thru the capitalist system, outside the job system. They are extremely rare, but they are also conditioned, because capitalism has another conditioning set, where if you don’t do what is required to make a lot of money, no matter how bad (see how Bezos, in Amazon, treats his employees or Steve Jobs acted) you will never have a lot of power in that system.

Systems often break down when they either start letting thru the wrong people, or when they stop letting thru too many competent people.

Or they break down when the requirements of the system start producing results so bad it breaks the system (see Climate Change.)

To bring it back, why do Economists act like monsters when they become central bankers?

Because they’ve been trained to act like monsters: to take into account only self-interest. And being long time products of the education system (PhD + school = 22 years or so), they also know that, even if they don’t have a direct boss, they are to do what bosses and teachers would want them to.

After 22 years of conditioning, well, they just do it. It isn’t about rational thought, it’s about conditioning.

Meanwhile, the rest of us, conditioned to be slaves from childhood, sit there at our shitty jobs and just take it even if we’ve broken enough of the conditioning to walk. Because if we don’t, if the conditioning is shown to have failed, well, soon we won’t have a job, and then we won’t have a house or enough food.

This is how successful societies and ideological systems work.

It is also, a small piece of what you will learn in my book, “The Creation of Reality”, which is almost complete its first draft.

More later. In the meantime, you’ve been conditioned to be a slave. Recognize that, but be careful how you rebel, lest you suffer the consequences the masters have in mind.

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 Our Everyday Life Creates Our Character and Our Destiny

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On October 19, 2017

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We are what we do. What we experience during our daily lives creates our habits, both of action and thought and those habitual actions and thoughts are our character. The character of men and women, and the shared character of a society is destiny. It determines how we respond to what happens, it is as close to fate as exists in a world awash in choice, where we make the choices we are expected to.

The defining characteristic of growing up in the modern world is school. In school, we are taught to sit still, speak only when we are allowed to by an authority figure, and do meaningless work that is not suited to us. For the bright kids, school is stultifying. They sit there, bored out of their skulls by how slowly the class proceeds. For the active child, school is stultifyingly boring because they are told to sit on their butt for most of the day, when they’d rather be doing something physical. For the creative child (which is all children, till they have it schooled out of them), school is, yes, stultifyingly boring, as it is all doing what someone else tells  you to.

Outside of class, school is about nasty peer pressure and fitting in. Even if you aren’t a loser or a loner, even if you belong to a clique, you quickly understand what happens to someone who doesn’t fit in, who doesn’t do whatever it takes to belong to an in-group. Our society is rife with comments about how something is “high school all over again,” and we don’t mean anything good by that, we mean a horrible game of cool kids and jocks and geeks and fitting in or getting ostracized at best, or possibly beaten down, or worse for the truly unlucky.

By the time we get out of school, most of us have been trained to do what authority figures tell us, had the creativity taken out of us, lost all real intellectual curiosity (because intellectual pursuits are associated with the horrors of school), learned that nothing is more important than fitting in and that popularity matters more than virtually everything else. We have come to accept that we don’t make choices except those on offer to us: “You may write an essay from the following list of topics/you may select from the following list of electives.”

Our adult life is little different. We have some more choices, but most of us will work for someone else, and that someone else will tell us what to do, how do it, where to do it (at their workplace), and when to do it. Our consumer existence, in which we appear to have choices, mostly involves choices between Brands X,Y, and Z, and the choice between brands is almost always completely minor: The differences are not substantial. More importantly, again, we choose from choices offered us, we do not create our own choices.

This issue has arisen since most people have entered formal schooling as children and since people have moved into wage labor. Before the late 19th century, you did not see this type of conditioning (though they had their types) in the majority of the population. Mandatory regimented schooling, and wage labor, in which we do not decide what we do with our time, has made things very different from the previous society.

One of my uncles lived in, let’s call it, the pre-industrialization lifestyle. He was a farmer and a fisherman (and hunted on the side, for food for his plate). He had huge lists of work to do, but he chose when to do it and how to do it. He controlled his own life. This is how free farmers and artisans used to live. In the day-to-day detail of their lives, believe it or not, even many peasants had more freedom than most industrial and post-industrial workers do.

This has grown worse over the last three decades.

Free play time, as a child, was when we used to have choice. As a child, outside of school, I had to be home for meals and bedtime, otherwise I was my own boy. I had very few toys, and I and my friends made our games of make-believe. I created the rules to my own games, made my own pieces, and played them. I ran wild through the neighbourhood, living a hundred different imaginary lives from books and movies, but also ones I made up myself. My parents did not try to control the details of my life beyond making sure I got to school and got fed, so long as I didn’t cause (too much) trouble.

Oh, it was still a regimented life, but it was a much less regimented life than today’s helicopter children experience. The conformity of that late industrial society, oddly, was less than the conformity pushed on children for the last couple decades by their own parents.

The workforce has in some respects also become worse. The sort of micro-control that is commonplace in Amazon warehouses, with a supervisor electronically watching you every second, was almost impossible in the past. The sort of micro-measurement of productivity was also impossible in most jobs, though certainly, assembly lines were hell. In most jobs, your boss had to give you the work and check in later to see if it was done and how well. As long as it got done, you were fine.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

Again, to be sure, there were micro-supervised jobs even then, but technology has made it possible to micro-supervise the sort of work which simply could not be supervised then.

And when you left work, there were no cell phones, no pagers, no laptops. For the vast majority of workers, once they left work, work was done for the day. They were not, for all intents and purposes, on call 24-7.

High surveillance societies produce conformity, because we are what we do. What we do forms our habits, our habits form our character. If you are constantly under your boss’s thumb, you learn to act reflexively in ways that will satisfy your boss. Of course, we all rebel where we can, but the margins for rebellion are growing smaller and smaller.

We have created a society where people live regimented lives, doing what they are told, choosing from choices given to them, learning that nothing matters more than popularity, and constantly under supervision or at the beck and call of their teachers, bosses, and other lords and masters (including their parents; sorry parents).

This is not a society that makes people happy. There is good reason to believe (Diener) that rates of depression are about ten times higher than they were one hundred years ago. But more to the point, it is a society that creates people with the type of character that does not produce better futures, because they are conditioned to choose only from what is offered them, to sit down, shut up, and do what they are told, and to play popularity games. If you don’t, well, no good job for you, or no job at all, and in this society having very little money is very unpleasant. We do not think up our own options, create our own politics, choose options outside of the limited ones offered by our lords and masters.

We have been created this way, conditioned this way, trained this way, by the everyday experience of our lives, starting from a very young age. To be sure, this is far from the only reason our societies are dysfunctional and careening from disaster to disaster; there are very real material constraints on what people can do in this society, largely through control of who is given money and credit, but it is a major reason for our problems. We have been shaped into people our lords and masters sincerely hope are not fitted to freedom, not able to make choices outside what they offer, not able to challenge them effectively, and well suited to the trivial jobs they want us to perform, mostly by fighting over which billionaire is the richest.

If you want a free people, you must free your minds, but free minds come from the exercise of practical everyday freedom.

Originally Published November 11, 2013.

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Ends Versus Means

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On October 6, 2017

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You want something.

You have to do things to get that something.

Because most of our ends are never-ending: money, happiness, sex, love, and so on, including at the social level, means quickly become as important as ends.

If we want a prosperous society, say, we must keep creating that prosperous society, day in and day out. Even if we were to one day reach a society which was prosperous enough for everyone (possible in principle), that day does not allow rest: the crops must still be planted, new goods and services created, all of it must be brought to the people who need it.

(Note that I don’t say “brought to market”, because markets are only one way of distributing what people need.)

So HOW you are creating a prosperous society matters. The means by which you create the society are the actual daily life of the society.

If your means include poisoning the water table or degrading the quality of the soil, for example, your means are destroying your prosperity in the long term.

If your means include damaging the ecosystem to the point of collapse, your means are destroying prosperity in the long term.

If your means include changing the climate system in ways which will lead to sea level rises, changes in rainfall patters and so on, your means are destroying prosperity in the long term.

If your means include using aquifer water far faster than it is replaced, then your emans are are destroying prosperity in the long term.

If your means include dumping vast amounts of largely non-bio-degradable substances (plastic, among others) into the environment, your means are destroying prosperity in the long term.

And one day, the long term becomes the short term, and another day the short term becomes today.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

All means are, in effect, systems.  A system which does not make both people and the world better will destroy its own ends.

If a system is meant to create prosperity, but the means by which it creates prosperity destroy the basis of prosperity, then that system is is not a good one.

Beyond the obvious physical issues, such as the environmental issues discussed above, there is pollution of people.

Greed and selfishness are bad. They are bad because they make people bad people.  Our current system runs on greed and selfishness. If you have a lot of money, you have responded to monetary incentives, and in most cases (yes, you’re the exception) that degrades you as a person. Innumerable studies show that the more money someone has, the less empathy and compassion they have, the more cruel they are and the less they help other people proportionate to their means.

A means of “be greedy and selfish” creates a people who suck to be around, and who cannot actually deal with any of the other problems created by the system, such as all those listed above, because they have been trained, by their everyday life, to be selfish and greedy.

Further, all systems fail. No system works all the time. When a system has good means, if it fails, it still does good. If it has bad means, and it fails, it just does evil.

Your means are as important as your ends, and means which work in the short run, often have long run consequences which are absolutely terrible.

This is, by the way, as true in one’s personal life as in the structure of society.

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“The Construction of Reality” Booklet Report

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On August 11, 2017

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One of the stretch goals for my 2016 fundraiser was writing a booklet on “The Construction of Reality” between 30 to 50K words.

As of today the “good” first draft stands at about 31,000 words. Feedback from alpha readers has been positive (albeit they are a self-selecting group, similar to donors.)

I hope to have this out by the end of the year at the latest, and hopefully rather sooner. It still has some writing to go, will need editing, and then conversion to formats other than Word.

When it’s done, codes for free copies will go out to all donors who donated during my 2016 fundraising drive. For others there will be a sample available for free download (I’m currently thinking of making it large—about 40 percent of the entire booklet) and the booklet will be available for purchase for probably $5.

As the title suggests, it will cover how we create the realities in which we live: How those realities come to be, how they are preserved, transmitted, change, and die.

Thanks to everyone who donated to my 2016 fundraising drive for making this possible. I hope you like the end result.

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.

The Kindergarten Ethics We Need

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On February 28, 2016

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When I first started blogging, some 13 years ago, I blogged about sophisticated matters. Economic theory, military theory and practice. Lots and lots of charts.

As time went by, I noticed that these posts, even when they did well, were not what my readers needed. Most of my readers were not at the level of maturity and reasoning that allowed sophisticated policy posts to be useful to them.

Their problems were deeper; they were ethical and moral problems. My readers seemed unable to reason from first principles, they did not understand the relation of ethics to politics and politics to economics. The first principles they did have were axioms whose results, if too many people followed them, would create widespread suffering.

They had grown up crooked. Their adult lives had made them more crooked. They did not think, they engaged their prejudices.

There is no point in sophisticated analysis of how to be kind to large numbers, if people prefer something over kindness.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing, and want more of it, please consider donating.)

As a result, I started descending the ladder of reasoning. I found that I had to explain that killing civilians was worse than killing soldiers, and that killing less people was preferable to killing more people. I had to explain the difference between ethics and morality. I had to explain why and how they had grown up twisted.

I found myself trying to teach, in effect, versions of the Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be kind. Kindness is the best policy.

I came to understand that the sages, from Confucius to Buddha to Hillel to Jesus, taught these rules–these simple rules–because they met people where they were. This is the level of teaching people require. Most, I fear, are not capable of learning even this, not innately, but because they have been twisted by their upbringing.

If you want some econo-speak, variations of the Golden Rule produce strong positive externalities and when enough people in a society use the Golden Rule and unite to take away the ability of predators to do harm, that society prospers.

The Ancient Greek version is as follows.

When old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit, a society is great.

All economic theories are ethical theories. They are theories about how one OUGHT to act. Under capitalism, one should react to profit and price signals, and seek to maximize personal “utility,” for example, while living in a manner which deprives one of the ability to meet ones own needs.

This is an ethical theory. It is not scientific, it is based on axioms which can’t be proved, and which are highly questionable (people aren’t rational, don’t maximize utility, and I’ve yet to encounter a useful definition of “utility” which isn’t circular).

It is about HOW people should live.

As such, economics is also a political theory. Capitalism requires a great deal of executive and legislative work to set up, starting with depriving most people of capital. You probably don’t believe me, because you were never taught history properly, but this is well understood by sociologists who study capitalism. Start by reading Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation.” This process happened both at home, and in great waves of imperialism which disrupted and impoverished much of the world.

All political theories are ethical theories. People OUGHT to have rights and those rights are inalienable. Legitimacy comes from the people’s consent, or it comes from God. A person who gets there first owns what was there. We should be able to own more than we can use. We should obtain the goods required for our survival from the market (not true for most of history.) A man or corporation who files a patent or copyright should have exclusive use of that creation. Corporations should shield their owners from liability.

These are prescriptive statements. They are ethical propositions about how the world should run.

All politics and economics, boiled down, is either OUGHTS, technical details about how to get to those oughts, or moralizing about why these oughts and means are good, and why other systems’ oughts and means are bad.

What we have today in the West is a mishmash of systems, with neo-liberal capitalism and representative democracy as the foremost. Some areas have technocratic bureaucracy as their foremost value, like the EU and Singapore.

You can throw in words like “enlightenment values” and “humanism” as well.

It’s hard to disentangle all this. So many different ideologies have been created and so many of them still have strong influence on us.

So I’m going to simplify. Cut through the knot.

Greed, selfishness, and pride, combined with tribal identity.

You love your child, yes? You would let a hundred people die to save your child?

You are a monster.

Most other people would.

They are monsters.

You would kill for your group. They would kill for their group. Your group may be a religion, a nation, an ethnicity, a neighbourhood, or a wide variety of other associations or identities.

You are a monster.

You work to make sure your child has a “competitive advantage” over other children. Those parents work to make sure their child has a “competitive advantage over your child.”

You are monsters.

In every way, your needs and wants are more important than anyone else’s. Then your family’s. Then your friends.

This worked when humans lived in bands or even smaller tribal societies. This included almost everyone, and it allowed an easy apportionment of work. “Feed yourself and your family then everyone else.” (Though, in fact, the nuclear family wasn’t usually prioritized in hunter-gatherer bands.)

It sort of worked in agricultural societies, but only sort of. Which is why you have the above sages with their various golden rule variants.

It doesn’t work in the modern world. The interconnections are too dense. You affect too many other people. Societies have too much violent and coercive power.

The sheer volume of negative externalities created by a culture of “me first” and of meanness overwhelm the positive externalities, creating vast hell-zones. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about most of Sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh, most of India, all the Chinese who hate the new economy and loved their villages, the inner cities of America, or the exurban wastelands, or the hopeless neighbourhoods in London or Paris which occasionally riot.

They are all overwhelmed by this “me first, my family second, my friends next, my identity only after all that, and fuck everyone different.”

It is impossible to overstate the damage “me first” has done to the world. It includes all the damage that will be done by climate change, imperialism, and vast amounts more.

To be sure, the so-called altruists have done great harm. But when you liquidate entire chunks of the population, you aren’t an altruist in fact, only in rhetoric. Just as capitalism, properly understood, has not proved to be the best system for most people in the world.

I’m going to tell a slightly perverse story. When I was a child, I read a science fiction military story which was half fantasy. The protagonist has a vision in which he bombs a city from orbit, and sees that his child is in that city.

The protagonist is determined to avoid that war if possible, but he is not determined not to bomb his own child. He says, “Were I to decide whether or not to bomb a city based on whether my own child was there, I would be a monster indeed.”

So let us come down to our first axiom:

Your life is not worth more than anyone else’s. Your pain does not hurt worse than anyone else’s.

Some time back there was a book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

This is kindergarten level ethics we are dealing with here. This is what is broken–the stuff you should have learned when you were five and had reinforced as you grew up.

  • Don’t hurt other people.
  • Share your toys.
  • Don’t take more than your share.

And if someone doesn’t live by those rules, what do you do? You give them a time out. During that time out, you don’t torture them, you don’t allow the other kids in time-out to beat them or rape them. Instead you try to help them so that after the time-out, they won’t do it again.

Perhaps everyone in the world should just sit down and for one day, heck, one hour, just not hurt anyone else. Just do nothing.

You can get rich, you can get famous, you can get what you want by being a mean and violent bastard. Let us not pretend otherwise. But the knock-on effects of doing that, for everyone else, are terrible. True democracy will happen when the population is ethical enough, and willing enough, to simply not allow this. “No, no, off to your time-out you go.”

This will be sneered at as Utopian. No doubt it is. But this is the Pole Star, the guiding light you aim towards. The closer you sail to it, the closer you come to some semblance of a world worth living in for the majority of people.

If we do not aim for this, we may solve some temporary problems for a temporary period, but there will be no remotely stable good society.

Everyone’s life has equal value to yours. Everyone’s pain is equal to yours.

Oligarchs & Criminals: Reward and Punishment After the Unmoved Mover

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On January 21, 2016

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Our conception of human nature rules most of our social decisions, including those centered around economics and justice.

One of the primary concerns of Theology and Metaphysics was to find an “unmoved mover,” or, a “first cause.”

Our ancestors were not stupid. They noticed that effects seemed to have causes. Even when the cause was not evident, they assumed there was a cause because of how the rest of the universe worked.

In one sense, this is a search for “the creator,” or “the first,” or “God” (though it need not be God in any monotheistic sense).  What created the universe runs very quickly into infinite regress. If X created the universe, what created X?

You needed, then, to find a cause which itself had no cause. You needed to find an unmoved mover: Something that could move other things, but was not itself caused by anything.

To many moderns, this seems like a pointless pursuit, but the most brilliant people in many cultures pursued it for thousands of years, precisely because the oddest thing about existence isn’t any one part of existence, it is that there exists existence at all.

Why should there be anything?

What does this have to do with morality, ethics, reward, and punishment?

If everything has a cause, then how can anyone be morally culpable for their thoughts or actions?

This is not an inconsequential thought, it is at the heart of the prison and justice reform movements of the late 19th century, and the heart of secular efforts to help the unfortunate.

Fault requires agency. If everything you do has a cause, then how can you be blamed for anything. (Indeed, what are you? Just a collection of causes and effects, which is what some Buddhists mean when they say there is no self.)

In a pure cause and effect universe, there is no choice. Any appearance of choice is an illusion. It does not exist. Intellectually, this reached its highest point with Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which attempted to show how conditioning created behaviour and which was (unfairly, in my opinion) demolished by Noam Chomsky (whose work in other areas I admire).

Choice. Agency. These things require an unmoved mover. They do not require God, but they require something to happen which does not have cause.

A soul, perhaps. But if you don’t believe in such “nonsense,” then where is the choice? Absent the choice, where is the blame? Clarence Darrow, the famous jurist from the Scopes Monkey Trial, argued this in his book Crime: Its Cause and Treatment. He also wrote a book called The Myth of the Soul.

No soul. No unmoved mover. No culpability, no blame.

If people aren’t to blame for their behaviour, punishment makes no sense. You’re going to hurt someone because he hurt someone else? He didn’t have a choice.

There are no choices.

This is why prison departments are often called Corrections departments.

The criminals’ behaviour is harmful to society (well, in theory). That’s not their fault, but it does need to be corrected. Since behaviour has causes, changing the environment (which determines the causes of behaviour) can change the behavior.

Those who sneer at this should note that Nordic prisons, which concentrate on rehabilitation and avoid violence and punishment, have recidivism rates about half that of American prisons.

Most violent crimes, and especially sex crimes, are committed by people who were themselves abused. Abusing them more does not fix them. And for those criminals who were not abused, putting them into a system which will virtually ensure their abuse makes them worse when they get out, as a rule.

Once they get out, if they can only associate with the underclass and criminal class, if there are no opportunities for them because no one will hire an ex-con, well, that will cause more crime.

But this article isn’t just about criminals, it is about all of us.

Much social policy in the 20th century came out of the insight that all effects have causes combined with statistics: “Oh, people who are born poor have worse outcomes.”

That is either due to environment, or it is due to genetics.

There is NOTHING else in a pure materialistic view.

Thus, in addition to the reformers, you had the eugenics crowd, because it was either environment or it was genetics.

Eugenics basically says “this is inferior stock.” It should not be allowed to breed, because inferior stock leads to worse outcomes: more crime, more poverty, etc, etc.

Environment says that while there may be some genetic issues, most of the causes are social. What are your parents’ social position, who are you peers, what opportunities do you have?

If we want better outcomes, we have to improve the environment for people who tend to have bad outcomes.  Therefore we provide free healthcare, free education, improve their housing, put libraries into their neighbourhoods, and so on.

So much for the consequences on action. Consider the ethical consequences.

If you are not responsible for your crimes, or your position in life (it all comes down to a birth lottery and no choice you ever made…because you have no choices), then neither are you responsible for whatever wealth or success you have accrued in any ethical fashion. You never made a choice that lead to whatever you had.

Thus the statement: “I made the money, I deserve” is nearly nonsense in this paradigm.  The only utilitarian case which can be made for it is: “I will spend it in better ways than the government/poor/middle class will.” There is no deserve.

We thus have a large project through the 20th century to say that rich people WILL use their money better than government would, or than poor or middle class people would if they had it.

“Rich people create jobs.” “Rich people make superior investment decisions and those investment decisions improve the world.”

You get the idea.

Everyone wants to think they deserve what they have. It gratifies the ego, and it assures one that one will continue to be prosperous, powerful, or healthy.

The “continue to be” is important, because fitness is relative.

You can certainly make a case that the winners of any society are more “fit.”

But that fitness is for that society. Change the society, and those who are fit change. What is rewarded in Medieval Europe is not what is rewarded today in America, is not what was rewarded in Mandarinate China, is not even what is rewarded today in Japan, and various other societies.

As societies change, through changes in ideology, social facts, technology, and material base, what is “fit” changes. The genetic endowment and circumstances which guaranteed success become less and less relevant over time.

Fitness is thus not exactly arbitrary, but it is relative, and to a remarkable degree it is socially chosen. The Age of Faith rewarded monastics and hermits with great prestige, for example. Heck, it rewarded monastics with great wealth. We do no such thing; in this age, we do not value contemplatives.

In Japan, the ability to fit in and get along is far more valuable than it is in America. Mavericks are hardly tolerated. What will get you ahead in a police state like Egypt is different from what works in Europe and so on.

There is no end of history (unless we wipe ourselves out). What cultures and societies reward will always change. It has changed in my lifetime in the West: The rewards for skills in finance and technology were not nearly as large in my youth, manual labor was worth much more, and so on.

So: No unmoved mover, no free will, and you are thrown back on purely utilitarian arguments for what people “deserve” because there is no choice. What you do to people who aren’t “fit” in your society changes as well. They aren’t making bad choices, because they don’t make choices and neither do you. They are simply responding to biology and environment, and you’d act the same way if you had been born with their biology, to their parents, at the same time.

You want better outcomes? Change the biology or the environment. Everything else is a waste of time, and moral exhortations to do better are only useful if they change behaviour, but are bullshit in explanatory terms.

This is a cold universe. It contradicts our everyday feeling that we do make choices. But it is hard to argue against it.

The notable materialist attempt has been to find choice and consciousness in quantum effects. Roger Penrose, who worked often with Stephen Hawking, wrote a very dense book on this. It’s true that cause and effect don’t work in quantum mechanics the way they do in Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. The Quantum God is not a watchmaker’s God.

Consciousness, or observation, seems to effect quantum outcomes. This is spooky to us. Perhaps here we will find some room for choice, for free will.

But I do not know that it has been shown yet, and I’m not sure what Quantum free will would mean in practice.

For now, if you do not believe in an unmoved mover, there is little to no room for free will, for actual choice. And if that is true, it is also true that there is no room for blame–or congratulations–for individual outcomes beyond, “Congratulations on your fitness, which you made not one choice to create!” or, “Gee, it’s too bad you aren’t fit for this society, have defective genes, or experience!”

Look on this argument and understand what it means. Look on it and understand what it means for our social policies.

Even if you think there is an unmoved mover, this view should be of interest to you, not just because it has been influential but because statistics supports that most people perform just about how you’d expect they’d perform, given their physical endowment and their environment. Individual variation exists, and you can use free will to explain some of it, while noting that if free will exists, most people don’t seem to use it very much.

Social change comes from changing the environment people are in. It comes from very little else.

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Social Facts Rule Your Life

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On August 20, 2015

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The most deadly forces in the world for most people, for much of history and certainly today, are not physical forces.

If you are homeless in America, know that there are five times as many empty homes as there are homeless people.

If you are homeless in Europe, know that there are two times as many empty homes are there are homeless.

If you are hungry anywhere in the world, know that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, and that the amount of food we discard as trash is, alone, more than enough to feed everyone who is hungry today.

It is very difficult to argue that the current refugee crises are anything but social facts: War and famine are social facts, straight up.

How likely you are to be in jail is almost entirely based on where you live, plus race and ethnicity. Born black in the US? Too damn bad.

How much money you make is almost entirely a social fact. Yes, that includes billionaires. Born back when the top tax rates were eighty or ninety percent? You wouldn’t be nearly as rich.

The value of the money you have is determined almost entirely based on where you live. For most people, this is based on where they were born.

North Americans and Europeans have better standards of living than most of the rest of the world because they conquered or subjugated most of the rest of the world. And I do mean most. Americans and Canadians do well because they virtually wiped out the original residents of North America (and the remaining Native Americans live in conditions that are generally as bad as third world countries).

Most of the prisoners in American jails are there for selling or using a prescribed substance which was not prescribed–nor stigmatized–for most of history. Social fact.

If you don’t have a job, well, that comes down to how many jobs there are. If your job is shitty, it has less to do with you than the time and place in which you live: 40 years ago, the largest employers in the US were car companies, who paid much better than the largest employer today: Walmart.

Even most environmental facts are social facts. Climate change, the collapse of ocean stocks, the terrible pollution in China: These are all a result of human action.

If you live in China, how happy you are is partially based on a social fact: Those still in traditional villages are happier than those who moved to the new cities with the new higher paying, but shitty, jobs. (In terribly polluted cities, to boot.)

Virtually everything that matters in your life is a social fact. It was created by human decisions. That’s the good news, of course, since it means human decisions could make it better.

It’s also the bad news, for what it says about human decision-making.

I want to emphasize something here: Progress is not always good for the people caught in it. The people who lived through the industrial revolution were mostly worse off than those before it. Idiots who sneer at the Luddites, who wanted to smash the machines, are clueless; the Luddites were right for themselves, for their children, and for their grandchildren. It took a long time for industrialization to pay off.

A great deal was lost with industrialization, including, and most importantly, community. The loss of community increased with the rise of the car. Community, my friends, is practically the most important thing when it comes to life satisfaction (about tied with equality), so long as basic needs, including safety, are met.

Heck, agriculture was a goddamn disaster for 95 percent of the world’s population. Hunter-gatherers lived better in almost every way than peasants, and peasants were most of the world’s population under agriculture.

We can remain victims of social facts, including our dominant technology, or we can decide that social facts are choices and make choices.

This is becoming more possible, not less, because of the rise of global culture. I’ll discuss this later. But for now, remember, while biology determines we all die, society generally determines how and when. (Including when you have a heart attack, how likely you are to get cancer, and so on.)

Social facts.

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