Ian Welsh

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

Category: Ethics Page 6 of 9

Clio, the Muse of History

Heaven on Earth: The Kindness Maxim

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On December 19, 2016

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In the past, I have noted that kindness is generally the best policy and always the best policy default. If you don’t have an ironclad reason not to be kind, be kind.

Let’s run through this.

People who are treated badly, become bad. The abused grow up to abuse. The sick make others sick and cannot contribute to society. Happy people are better to be around. Prosperous people can afford your products and services.

Happy, healthy, loving, and prosperous people are the people we want in our societies.

We evolved in bands. Forty to fifty people running around the Savannah. We would have been friendly to some other bands (those with whom we shared ancestors) and we were hostile to most other humans, who were our competitors. The level of hostility varied with carrying capacity; if resources were short because of too many humans, quite hostile, otherwise not very.

We did not evolve to take into consideration the needs of large groups of people. In order to do so, we evolved cultural methods: fictive kinship, culture, story, myth, and religion. These things created fictional identities which went beyond people we knew of or saw every day.

Theses are all hacks for a fundamental evolutionary problem: We’ve evolved to be pretty good to those we see all the time, and not to care much about people we don’t.

This was fine when were just a particularly clever animal. Even when we got to the point of making wholesale changes to the environment (usually through agriculture), the worst we could do is ruin a local ecosystem–we couldn’t mess up the world.

But, today, for good or ill, we live in that “interconnected world” and the “global society” everyone talks about. What happens to someone in Nigeria, Brazil, or China matters to me. Their happiness, their health, their prosperity affects mine.

And how they affect the environment affects me, too. How I, a first-worlder with a huge carbon footprint, affect the environment, affects them.

Their well-being affects mine. It is in my interest for them to be better off.

This isn’t what you’ve been told. Economics treats the world as a zero-sum game, a matter of managing scarcity.

The world has scarcities: resources, dumps for pollution like carbon, etc. But civilization isn’t, usually, a zero sum game. Instead, it’s usually negative sum or positive sum, or both. For some time for Westerners, and a few other developed nations, it has been positive sum, and there have been many other periods of positive-sum games.

My win is everyone else’s win.

Creating a good society requires both managing actual scarcities and understanding that actual scarcities are scarce, and that most things people want to do are positive sum. It requires turning most of what we do into positive-sum games. A good society is one in which “your win is my win” is made true far more often than not.

“We win together” is a prescriptive statement which must be made into a descriptive statement. (It is also a descriptive statement in general, because if my win isn’t your win more often than not, we don’t live in a good world.)

So humans must see beyond their identities, their tribes, and their nations, to treat all humans as people whom we want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, and loving. For their sakes and for our sakes.

But there is an additional step required to create a good society, a good world, a good civilization.

We must care for non-human life.

The mass-death of trees and plankton affects you, it affects me. The mass death of fish affects you, it affects me. The destruction of marshlands causes floods and reduces water quality; it affects you, and it affects me. Ecosystem collapse—well, you get it.

The problem here is that I’ve given you the rational argument.

Rationality is marginal. It’s not that humans can’t be rational, it’s that rationality is the lesser part of why we do things or how we make decisions. We make decisions based on emotions, and those emotions are based on our ideologies and identities.

Rationality, or “reason,” allows us to weasel out of doing the right thing too often. It is a tool for our emotions; emotions which right now scream: “My interests, my ideology, my identity, my people matter MOST!”

For a good world to exist, we must feel that other humans should be treated kindly simply because it is the right thing to do. We should be revolted by anyone going hungry, anyone being tortured, anyone being raped. The moment we think “They had it coming,” we’re on the wrong track. (Punishment is not the point, removing the ability of bad actors to continue to act badly is.)

And this principle needs to be extended to non-human life. We need to feel bad when animals are dying in large numbers and going extinct–bad enough to do something about it. We need to instinctively, by default, move to protect them. We should be as revolted by images of dolphins being slaughtered as we are by humans being slaughtered. If we kill for meat (and I eat meat), we should insist it be done humanely.

This must be based on values, principles, and identity, of feeling that humans and animals and even plants are all alive–and because they are alive, they must be treated with respect.

There are sound, pragmatic reasons for doing so; there are also sound moral reasons for doing so (read the Hidden Life of Trees). Anyone who doesn’t think most animals don’t feel pain, or don’t suffer, is on a profoundly unethical, immoral track.

This is the right thing to do, morally and pragmatically, and if we don’t figure out how to do it, we’re little better than bacteria that grow until they destroy their own environment and experience a great die-off.

Be kind. It creates the world you want to live in, and it may well save your life and the lives of those you claim to care about. By granting life the love you reserve only for a few, you give those few (and yourself, as it happens) their best chance at long life and prosperity–and grant it to your descendants as well.

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The White Opiate “Epidemic” Is Not About Pain Killer Prescriptions

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On June 22, 2016

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I’ve spent a lot of of my life in pain, and often in a LOT of pain. I’ve taken a lot of pain killers.

The best, in most cases, were opiates. Codeine and morphine (forget all the fancy pills designed to cost more, morphine does the job).

Now, in the US, white middle class people are getting addicted to opiates in large numbers and there are screams to make it harder to get opiate prescriptions for pain.

But the simple reality is this: According to the large, annually repeated and representative National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of all opioid misuse starts with people using medication that wasn’t prescribed for them–obtained from a friend, family member or dealer.

…

In general, new addictions are uncommon among people who take opioids for pain in general. A Cochrane review of opioid prescribing for chronic pain found that less than one percent of those who were well-screened for drug problems developed new addictions during pain care; a less rigorous, but more recent review put the rate of addiction among people taking opioids for chronic pain at 8-12 percent.

It is already hard to find a doctor who will prescribe opiates for chronic pain. They’re worried about law enforcement coming for them, and they’re paranoid about addiction. When I was in my 20s and in a lot of pain, it took me seven doctors to find one who who would prescribe opiates, and I was in so much agony, standing from sitting down was nearly impossible and I often didn’t sit at all, knowing I might be stuck for hours.

This level of pain, in Canada, and it took seven doctors before one was willing to chance that I might not be lying. One asshole rushed me out of his office after screaming at me that I was a fucking addict who just wanted a fix.

In one of those neat catch-22’s, if I hadn’t been in so much pain, I would likely have beat him to a pulp.  (Yes, yes, I said that someone like that is someone I would have broken if I could. It took almost a month for me to find a doctor who would help me, that man put me through agony most people cannot even imagine.)

People who are in serious pain need serious pain killers. That often means opiates, sometimes it means cannabis. People who stop chronic pain sufferers from getting the pain relief they need are responsible for huge amounts of suffering.

Don’t do that.

When I was in hospital, in so much pain I could not even push myself up in bed, I said to my doctor at the time, “What if I get addicted?”

He replied, “Take the pain relief you need and we’ll worry about the addiction later.”

Later I was slightly addicted–I couldn’t sleep without a pill. One night I simply stayed up until I slept without it. As it happened, that was about a 40 hour day. But the addiction was broken, and it wasn’t much of an addiction to begin with.

Even if it had been a terrible addiction, I still would have said that the pain killers were worth it, because without them I was in so much pain I could barely walk. I remember taking well over ten minutes to walk a single block. I once ate breakfast at a restaurant standing up, because I knew if I sat down I might not be able to stand again.

Pain.

It sucks.

Don’t deprive people who need pain killers of them.

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Third World Nation: 33 Cities Cheated to Pass Lead Tests

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On June 3, 2016

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And not just small cities, either:

  • Despite warnings of regulators and experts, water departments in at least 33 cities used testing methods over the past decade that could underestimate lead found in drinking water.
  • Officials in two major cities – Philadelphia and Chicago – asked employees to test water safety in their own homes.
  • Two states – Michigan and New Hampshire – advised water departments to give themselves extra time to complete tests so that if lead contamination exceeded federal limits, officials could re-sample and remove results with high lead levels.
  • Some cities denied knowledge of the locations of lead pipes, failed to sample the required number of homes with lead plumbing or refused to release lead pipe maps, claiming it was a security risk.

Straight up cheating was not uncommon:

At least 33 cities across 17 US states have used water testing “cheats” that potentially conceal dangerous levels of lead, a Guardian investigation launched in the wake of the toxic water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has found.

Of these cities, 21 used the same water testing methods that prompted criminal charges against three government employees in Flint over their role in one of the worst public health disasters in US history.

Lead poisoning is not a minor health problem. It can chop 20 points off someone’s IQ.

Straight up, this indicates cover-your-assdom from the highest to lowest levels, including regulators. No regulator worth its salt, who is doing their job, could have missed entire States and large cities cheating, because any regulator worth its salt does its own audits and testing. Only a fool believes the results handed to them by internal testing and audits. I’ve been on the internal side of regulation (in the life insurance industry) and companies cannot be trusted. Period.

Once you start concealing, you have to keep concealing. Because if something like lead contamination comes to light, figuring out where it is and why will include figuring out how long the water has been contaminated, how long you should have known about it, and how long you’ve been concealing it.

In many of these cities I’ll bet the concealment has been going on for decades, handed down from generation to generation of bureaucrat. Someone, when it was first discovered, didn’t want to go public and didn’t want to fix it, and from that point, the bureaucracy was locked in to their decision to keep cheating.

This doesn’t mean bureaucracies can’t run such systems; they were created in spite of the great objections of private industry, who also opposed municipal sewage for all they were worth. But it does mean you need to stay on top of it, and be willing to pay and be scrupulously honest about issues which matter.

I hope that those who have covered up are charged, and in cities where this has been going on for a long time, I hope investigators look back as far as necessary to charge those who covered up in the past.

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Pure Utilitarianism and Capitalism

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On March 5, 2016

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Hilary Clinton recently tweeted the following.

On the face this is unexceptional. A business exists to do certain things, and employees are hired to contribute towards those actions. We hire an employee because we think they will do a good job.

Except that in our current system, we distribute goods through money, and most of how we distribute money is through corporations. You have a good life if you have a good job, pretty much. There are exceptions and they are exceptions.

Hilary has also said that she doesn’t favor a $15/hour minimum wage.

This is what happens when you think of people as assets. Some people don’t deserve $15/hour because they don’t “add enough value.”

But they are still people, and they still need to eat, sleep in a warm place, and have the occasional bit of entertainment.

They have value that cannot be reduced to their economic utility.

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If we had a society where everyone lived well whether they had a job or not, then we could make pure utilitarian arguments about employment. But when employment is required for people to be able to live decently, or even live at all, such arguments lead to treating huge masses of people as disposable, and consigning them to awful lives.

Again, this might be ok if we lived in a scarcity society, but we don’t. We produce enough food to feed everyone, we have the ability to house everyone, and so on. This would be especially true if we would dump the doctrine of planned obsolescence and produce goods meant to last pretty close to forever.

There are other arguments, of course, like “What is utility?”, bolstered by findings that blacks, say, get half the interviews as whites with identical resumes. Those are important arguments, but they pale next to, “Everyone should have a decent life, and that shouldn’t be contingent on whether they can make money for a billionaire.”

The economy and corporations exist to serve people, not the other way around. When they do not do so, the problem lies with them. This is not a subsistence farming community, it is not, “You work, you eat.” We’d be better off, in fact, if a lot of the work we are doing wasn’t done, because so much of it does more damage than good, even if it does generate a “profit.”

The core of any decent system of ethics, and thus of any political and economic order, is Kant’s maxim that people are ends, not means. When you forget that, you inevitably descend into monstrosity.

How Much Property Is Ethical?

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On March 1, 2016

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Mine. It’s mine. No one has the right to take anything from me. That’s theft.

It’s mine.

Property rights. What a mess.

In this age of oligarchy, the question of how much a few people, or corporations can own, or can control, is thrown into highlight again.

The novelist and priest Father Andrew Greeley used to write that the poor were not poor because the rich were rich. By the end of his career in the mid 2000’s, he was railing against greed as one of the seven deadly sins.

Property, taken widely to include money, is control. It confers the right to decide how both resources and people will be employed. It confers the right to choose a large chunk of social direction. For instance, under Jobs and Cook, Apple is a fiefdom; so long as the company stays solvent, it decides how a great deal of the activity of the best and brightest is spent. iPhones and Apple’s other innovations are great, but one can certainly imagine scenarios in which Apple employees’ time was better spent.

A more clear-cut case comes in the case of CitiBank, or any of the big banks and brokerages. These people have a LOT of money, and they control a huge chunk of the world’s resources and people–directly and indirectly. They do far more harm than good.

Property is the right to choose how resources, including people, are deployed.

Allowing private individuals and large groups to have large amounts of property is a decision to allow them to control large numbers of people and resources.

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It may be justified if they make the world a better place. It is hard to justify if they don’t. We may like what Jobs, or Cook, or Musk have done (or add your favorite tycoon, and yes, I know all of those are problematic), while admitting that most billionaires and large corporations are a pox on the world economy, restricting innovation and free enterprise; crushing wages and strangling growth until they get their share. Few will defend Monsanto or most pharmaceutical companies, most large banks or brokerages, more American health insurers, large agriculture, and so on.

Those who do defend them are generally either on the payroll or have been trained in the ethical discipline of economics, which is meant to justify concentrations of wealth and capital.

Justice Brandeis famously noted that America could have great concentrations of wealth, or democracy, but not both. Jefferson said he feared banks more than standing armies as an enemy of liberty, which is a radically strong statement if you think about it for two seconds.

It is worth understanding that our definition of property, which is historically close to maximal, is a historical, and pre-historical, outlier. In many hunter-gatherer bands, if you want something another person has, you admire it, and they hand it to you. The idea that one could own ideas, and disallow other people from using them is something which would have struck most of humanity, for most of history, as insane.

And it is not so long ago that land which was not being used could be taken by anyone who would use it productively, be damned whoever owned it on paper. You could not leave resources unused, this was considered anti-social; even evil.

Property is entirely a social construction, and for most of history, justifications for the concept of property came down to, “We got here first, so it is ours,” and, “It is to everyone’s benefit that we use it.”

Capitalism is the bestest system ever, and therefore, the inequality it mandates is acceptable. People who have more money deserve it because they work harder, and are superior people who make superior decisions. Other people wouldn’t work at all if they didn’t have to, they must be compelled by Marx’s whip of hunger, or they’d sit on their lazy asses. If they are poor, they must not work hard enough, possess poor character, are stupid, and don’t make good decisions. They haven’t followed the approved steps.

They do not DESERVE money.

The actual value of money is almost entirely a social artifact. A dollar’s value, what it can buy or what opportunities it makes available in the US, is not located in any individual or in small groups, but in society as a whole; in many cases, this value was created by decisions made and work done by individuals long dead. (For the full argument, read “It’s Not Your Money.”)

But at the end of the day, this is the bottom-line truth:

Property is what society says it is.

What you can own and how much you can have of it, and when it is taken away, is entirely a social decision.  It is the acquiescence of your neighbours, in the broadest sense, which allows you to keep what you have–especially when it grows to include far more than your dwelling, tools, clothes, and the land on which you actually work.

Libertarianism is an attempt to take a socially granted license to use resources which are primarily a result of society’s efforts, not yours, and say that it is an intrinsic, individual human right.

But you did not train the workers you employ. You did not raise them or bear them. You did not educate them. You did not build the roads you use. And so on. The value, the advantage, of living in an advanced society is having access to all the infrastructure and institutions you did not build.

Let us bring this back to ethics.

To create a good society, that work is all necessary. It’s necessary that we build institutions, that we have infrastructure, that we support scientists (all the key research and inventions which created the internet were publically funded, for example).

It is also necessary that the people who are making the decisions are making good decisions. Bankers were making bad decisions. When they lost their money, it should have stayed lost. They weren’t harmed, like GM, by a crisis caused by other people, they were wiped out by a crisis of their own creation.

For a society to run well, we must be able to say, “You are not using society’s resources and people well, therefore, we are going to take away your ability to command so much of society’s resources.”

The larger we expand the sphere of property, as with intellectual property and the right to patent genetic codes, the more we say, “Only person X can make decisions about what to do with these resources.” We had better be damn certain that that one person, or corporation, or whoever owns these resources, is at least making good decisions, and ideally making better decisions than would be made if those resources had stayed in the commons, available for use by many.

And when we give a very few individuals and corporations the right to control a plurality or majority of our resources, locking out virtually everyone else from real decision-making beyond the anemic level of “consumer” and the neutered level of “voter,” we had, again, best be sure that those few people are making better decisions, for everyone, than would be made if a larger number of people had control over those resources and were making the decisions.

In short, if oligarchs want to control what people do, they need to make a strong case that their stewardship creates better results than those arising from people making these decisions themselves.

This is a rather high bar, and the genius of capitalistic ideology is that it’s not usually understood this is the case which must be made. Instead we are told, “Everyone is free to sell their labor,” as if that is freedom. Freedom to make your own decisions means not needing to work for someone else, and having the resources available to do what you want.

Freedom is not possible if you spend your life working for others when you’d rather not, knowing that, if you don’t, you will lose your shelter, go hungry, be without health care, and probably eventually die from lack of resources.

Freedom is the ability to choose what you do from a range of meaningful choices. The choice to work for Oligarch A or Oligarch B is not a meaningful choice.

Maximal property definitions and maximal acceptance of property concentration, deprive most of the population of their freedom. It is that simple.

They also show a vast distrust of the people, suggesting that if people had resources they would use them badly. This argument has been made by every tyrant since the beginning of agriculture: “I know better, and I will not lead by choice, but by coercion.”

The choice to starve if you don’t work for an oligarch is not much of a choice.

A sane property definition allows people to own the resources they need to do their work and take care of themselves and any dependents. Larger concentrations of property, meant for big projects, are necessary, but they must not be allowed to balloon in oligarchical control of politics and economy.

And I will suggest to you that this is both a much nicer world to live in and a more vibrant one. A world in which we are not slaves, but have freedom, will burst with creativity and projects. A world where ideas can be used by anyone will be a world in flower.

If you want freedom, look hard at property. The larger the sphere of property, and the more it is concentrated, the narrower most people’s world will be.

 

Practical Theoretical Ethics

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On February 29, 2016

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No, no, it’s not an oxymoron.

The problem with most philosophical ethics is that it takes a single rule and wants to rule the entire world with it.

This is noticeable in utilitarianism. “The most good for the most people.” This rule, applied, can lead to ethical abominations, to treatment of minorities and so on which is beyond the pale.

The story “The Ones Who Leave Omelas,” by Ursula LeGuin, is an examination of this problem (and highly recommended). In the real world, this leads to things like torture (what is a few people’s pain compared to the benefit for all?). It leads to accepting dire poverty as the result of our economic system due to an assumption that our system is the best and because, after all, the system benefits those in charge and in core nations the most. Call it hypocritical utilitarianism, but it’s real enough as a justification.

The discipline of economics, as it stands, is an exercise in hypocritical utilitarianism. Capitalism produces the best outcomes, therefore its shortcomings should be overlooked. It’s not clear it produces the best outcomes (certainly not if you are an Ethiopian or Congolese), but the point is larger than that. Even if it did, can a system which appears wedded to so much poverty, inequality, violence, and so on really be acceptable? By utilitarian standards it might well be.

And yet utilitarianism has a core of hard truth in it. It is easy to see the cases where utilitarian reasoning leads to horrible outcomes; it is intuitive to think that society should be run for the most benefit for the most people.

Again, the requirement to have one rule is what kills philosophical ethics. You must have bright lines, duties, and principles and you must know what the good is.

The first step is to have those bright lines. Do not rape. Do not torture. Stuff you do not do, no matter what. You unilaterally take some behavior off the table. You establish a minimum. If you do not, utilitarianism will always descend into barbarity, usually through specious argumentation, though not always.

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The second thing you do is establish positive duties. These are meant more for the social level than the individual, but cannot exclude the individual if they are to have efficacy. You might say here that everyone should eat if there is enough food in society and agree on how to triage in the very rare case that there is not. Women and children first, perhaps. Or workers in manual trades first. Or whatever. It doesn’t really matter, so long as it is generally regarded as fair.

You can extend this. If society has the means, everyone should have housing and clothes. Everyone who wants to work, and is capable of working, should have a job, perhaps. In a society which requires more work (not ours, we need less, too much of our work is harmful), you can say that everyone who is able should work. Add to this much of civil liberties: the right to jury trial and face your accusers, maybe.

Most of this boils down to an ur-rule. People all deserve to be treated with dignity, and everyone deserves the basics of life when they can be provided, which, in a society with vast over-surplus like our global society today, is the case.

A duty is something that applies to everyone. Everyone gets to face their accusers. Everyone gets to eat.

Having established your bright lines and your duties, you add your principles.

One of them might be: Civilians should not be targeted in war and every reasonable care should be taken not to harm them.

Another one might be: War is acceptable only in self-defense might be another one.

Yet another one: Everyone should have equal access to the determinants of success like education.

And so on.

Principles are about things you can’t achieve. You will never have a totally equal society, nor would you want one. We might want no war, but giving up the right of self-defense puts us at the mercy of the worst people in the world. If war is necessary, some civilians will be killed, but we should strive in every way to keep that to a minimum.

After having completed these steps, you are ready to add utilitarianism. Given meeting all the above, “the greatest good for the most people” is now the goal. You can use utilitarianism at this point because its worst associated problems have been taken off the table. You do the above things even if you think they don’t produce “the most good for the most people.” They are non-negotiable.

If you wish, you can order the above principles for triage, from most important to least important. But save in grave periods of crisis, it is almost never true that you can’t do all of them. You can both feed people and give them fair trials. If you can’t, you’ve gone wrong somewhere, as in the US, where the drug war has led to locking up millions of people who should never have been charged with a crime. You can’t give everyone in the US a fair trial, because there aren’t enough judges, juries, lawyers, prosecutors, and so on. That is an indication you need to be arresting less people, not that you need to compromise their right to a fair trial.

When making utilitarian calculations, you must always resist the urge to turn common sense and basic decency on their heads. If you find yourself excusing cruelty, in any way, you have gone wrong. If you find yourself excusing fraud, you have gone wrong.

There is no one ethical rule to rule them all. But at the same time, this need not be particularly complicated. Be kind. Treat everyone with dignity. See to everyone’s needs. Fight only in defense.

The further you extend this, the better your society will be. A decent concern for the fate of both other humans and other living beings would have served us well, and likely led to us avoiding much of the worst of the environmental disasters which have already come and which are yet to come, while avoiding almost the entire mess in the Middle East.

Do not descend to sophistry. Do not defend the indefensible. And if you want the most good, extend your circle of belonging out as far as it can go.

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.

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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.

The Culture of Meanness

By

On February 23, 2016

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One of the most striking things about much of American culture is the simple meanness of it. The cruelty.

Most of this seems to come down to three feelings:

  • My life sucks. I have to work a terrible job I hate in order to survive. I have to bow and scrape and do shit I don’t want to do. You should have to as well.
  • Anyone who doesn’t make it must not be willing to suffer as I do, therefore anyone who doesn’t make it deserves to be homeless, go without food, and so on.
  • Anybody who is against us needs to be hurt and humiliated, because that’s how I see my superiors deal with people who go against them.

“Life is shit, therefore your life should be shit.”

“What you’ve got is what you deserve.”

There is also a culture of punching down, as commenter Lisa has observed. America has a high-violence, high-bullying society. As Lisa noted you can have a high-violence society in which it is considered unacceptable to attack the weak (doing so is viewed as cowardice), but that’s not the case in America.

In American culture, the weak are the preferred target. Failure is punishable by homelessness, suffering, and death.  Sick people sure don’t deserve proper pain medication. Poor people are poor because they “don’t add value.” If you’re poor, you definitely shouldn’t have good healthcare, because if you don’t have money, you don’t deserve money, and that’s because you’re a waste of space.

This appears to be a result of something simple: At every stage of American life, it’s a zero or negative sum game, and who gets ahead is decided by authority figures. Need to get into a good university? You need good grades from adults, you need to have done the right extra-curricular activities, you need references from adults.

On the job, only a few people will be promoted, and the competition is fierce. But worse, in many fields, people are often let go, and the competition to avoid getting fired or laid off is severe.

Who decides? Your boss. You’d better get down on your knees and do whatever your boss wants, because if you’re fired or let go you may never work again, and if you do hang on at a bottom-wage job, well, your life will suck.

When dealing with police, the constant American attitude is OBEY. If you don’t obey, then whatever the police do to you is justified. The police are like bosses in a way. One cop can ruin your life, even if you aren’t killed, beaten, or raped by them. A criminal record means you will never have a good job again.

OBEY.  ACQUIESCE.

On your knees, citizen.

(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.)

And as my friend Stirling once noted, the next demand after, “Kneel!” is, “On your belly, worm.”

Failure to comply means your advancement is over, and maybe your job.

Americans are desperate for the approval of those in power, because without it, they are destroyed. This is true to a lesser extent in many other Western societies, certainly in Britain.

Having learned that the right way to treat anyone who is weaker than them is with demands for acquiescence and dominance displays, to many Americans, to interpret any sign of weakness as requiring them, as a moral duty, to dominate and hurt the weak person.

People become what is required of them. They learn from authority figures how to behave.

The desperate need of certain demographics to keep, say, women or certain minorities down is part of this. These people need to know that there are some people who, no matter how degraded their own situation, are always lower than them, can always be beaten down.

Contrary what many right-wingers think, dominance structures aren’t innate to humanity. Evidence supports that, for most of human existence, we were hopelessly egalitarian. But surplus combined with scarcity changes that, as do large populations.

Still, while high-density agricultural and industrial societies are innately more inequal than paleolithic hunter-gathers, there is plenty of variation, and within that variation plenty more variation as regards to the level of meanness and cruelty–how much a culture can be defined as “bullying.” In the modern, Western world, America ranks high as a mean, bullying culture.

The effects of this cascade, and can be seen as high up as America’s constant wars, drone assassinations, and the routine torture in prisons, and as low down as cities passing by-laws that the homeless can’t be fed or the desperate competition amongst parents and school-children for those few elite university slots which virtually ensure one’s future.

The entire process makes America a far more unpleasant place to live or visit than is necessary. The structure of dominance, meanness and cruelty is palpable to the visitor, and distressing; even as it warps the best inhabitant.

I find myself without a real conclusion. Obviously (I hope), this is BAD. Obviously it should change. But it’s hard to change something that people have taken and turned into a moral imperative: Be mean to the weak and poor, who deserve their fates. Kick down, kiss up, because a failure to pucker up can have you thrown out of the charmed circle, and obviously higher-ups want to see you acting like them, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery.

It’s all very depressing, all very unnecessary, and all very much in the interests of the people who run your society.  Meanness in the chattel means they can rarely get together to challenge the masters, because they hate each other more than they hate the masters.

Kindness is a revolutionary act.

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