Category: How to think Page 2 of 22

On December 16, 2022

There are two main types of coercion in the world.

The first is violence. If you don’t do what someone else wants, they will do something physical to you.

So, imagine if that was impossible. Imagine that if you chose no physical object could affect you. Bullets don’t work, fists don’t work, no one can grab you or put you in handcuffs, and that’s true of everyone.

What would change about society if this were true? What would change about how individuals act?

The second is need. What if you didn’t need to eat or drink and you cold and heat didn’t bother you or harm you and you didn’t get sick? You might still want shelter or a home or objects like books or computers, and objects like cosmetics would exist, but not medicine. But you would need nothing.

(This is half the conception of a pagan God: they can be harmed, even killed, but they don’t need anything. Except they can also, usually, create what they need without other Gods or people.)

Banquet of the Gods by Jacques de Gheyn II

What would you be like, and what would the world be like if you; if people, didn’t need anything?

These are serious questions. Think about them.

Now, question 3 is what if both of these things were true?

These questions matter because they tell you what you put up with because of need and fear. They tell you what other people; what society does that it couldn’t do if people weren’t, in effect, vulnerable.

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It’s also important to do them separately. The first is about violence, in effect, and that’s not the same as the human need for cooperation, which is much (but not all) of what the second question is about.

This is what what Donne was getting at with “no man is an island.” It is also what is related to Aristotle’s observation “But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god…”

There are things I want to say about these questions, but I’m not going to do so in this article. Instead I want you to think about them. Think about them in general and in particular: think about what you would and wouldn’t do in these three cases.

Mini Electronic Vacations

On September 1, 2022

All right, this off-topic and not the sort of thing I usually write, but may be of use to some people.

Oddly despite being “very online” I’m sort of a luddite about certain things. I didn’t have a smart phone till 2015 (and at the time had no cell phone). A friend gave me my first one, and my second is a very nice hand-me down Pixel 4 from another friend.

As a rule I don’t take my phone with me when I go out. I get by on cards. Of course, sometimes I need my phone or a laptop, especially when traveling, but otherwise, they’re not on me.

I do this because I want periods when I’m not online, and not available to anyone. In particular, I often hang out at coffee shops and unless I have specific work I want to do, I don’t take any electronic devices with me except my e-reader. I often pack some paper books and a writing pad, and that’s it. I take notes on paper, and keep the notebooks.

I find this relaxing. It’s nice to not be online and it’s easiest if the device isn’t even with me: if it is, I may think “I should check…” and get sucked in. It’s simply a matter of making a habit unavailable. There’s rarely anything in my life so urgent it can’t wait a few hours.

Of course, I’m in my 50s. I grew up before cell phones. I remember before answering machines, even, and when pagers were rare and only truly essential, 24 hour on-call workers carried them.

I’m used to being out of touch. In a sense, I’m used to being alone. You can be very alone, even when surrounded by people in a big city, if you want to be, and I often do.

The studies are clear: social media is bad for you, and the more you do the worse it is. Being constantly connected, I’m almost certain, is likewise bad for you. You need space, you need time with your own feelings and thoughts when they’re not being jerked around. And if you want to think well, you need time to think alone as well in addition to time to think with other people.

This is, I guess, more of the sort of article written in lifestyle magazines and sections “how I spent 1 week unplugged” and whatnot, but I really do believe it’s healthy and if you can do it, you’ll find, once you get over the twitchy need to constantly check your phone or watch videos, or whatever you do, that it’s relaxing. It’s also a necessity for any sort of deep thinking.

How To Think Clearly About Political and Social Issues

On July 11, 2022

One of the most useful things you were probably made to do in school is argue for points of view you disagree with. Make the choice case if you are pro-life, make the pro-life case if you’re anti-abortion.

Write the Palestinian case or the Israeli case, whichever you oppose.

Make the best case you can that Russia was right to invade, or the best case you can that Russia was wrong. Make the case that NATO was responsible, then make the case it had nothing to do with it. Make the case Ukraine is Nazi-infested, make the case it isn’t.

Honestly making the best argument you can for the other side is a very useful exercise. I rarely write such articles any more, but I still do it informally quite often and I couldn’t write what I do if I hadn’t been trained this way.

To really make this work, though, you have to be able to empathize: to feel what people feel. David Ben-Gurion once said that if were Palestinian he would be in the violent resistance. That was a man who wasn’t so caught up in his own world that it blinded him.

And don’t rush to disagree with the case you’re making. Make it first. FEEL the case. Get self-righteous.

It’s not hard to feel self-righteous about being pro-life for example, to feel you’re a paladin for justice and anyone opposing you is evil.

But it’s also easy, as a Russian, to see the Russian invasion of Ukraine as justified and feel righteous about it. If you can’t do it, you don’t really get the argument.

The same can be done for the Ukrainian side (somewhat easier, if you’re a westerner.)

Because some arguments are illogical, you always have to be able to feel. There is no question Israelis took Palestinian land and are still taking it, so you have to feel what makes them think that’s good.

Same with understanding our genocide of natives in N. America.

Or, for that matter, truly understanding the emotions behind the Holocaust (which, remember was not just Jews.)

If you’re authoritarian (most Americans are, most Westerners even) you need to learn how to feel in egalitarian modes.

If you’re egalitarian, you need to learn to think in authoritarian mode (Authority is GOOD, it makes you feel safe and loved and taken care of.)

One problem with all this is that doing this engages the disgust emotion, or even contempt (contempt is the most dangerous emotion to other people, it gives license for violence.) I can’t count the number of times I’ve explained a position I don’t agree with and people have hated me.

This is especially so when you start dealing with questions of “evil”. Why are people cruel? Well, a lot of it is that pushing people around and hurting them engages the feeling of having power, and feeling powerful is enjoyable. To understand this you have to feel it.

But you’ve now felt the emotional drive-train of a certain type of evil, and others will hate or despise you for it (especially if they get a flicker), then deny it.

If you truly want to understand the world and other people, you have to be willing to engage your emotions.

It actually takes bravery, because you will feel things you really don’t want to.

Failures of Democracy & the Original Intellectual Fascist

On June 23, 2022

Bertrand Russel once called Plato the original intellectual fascist (in “A History of Western Philosophy,” which is well worth reading.)

In The Republic, Plato tries to come up with the ideal form of government and decides on a caste system, where children are educated, and then, based on their character and aptitude are divided into workers, enforcers, and rulers. The rulers are to be those who are philosophers by nature and training — those who love wisdom and are uninterested in wealth.

It’s easy to sneer at Plato, but there’s a reason why Whitehead’s line that “All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato” has a lot of truth to it.

And one has to remember the context: Athenian democracy, the most famous in the Grecian world (and the most famous in Western history) had failed and been defeated by Sparta, after a reign of abuses which turned its allies against it. Entire cities were destroyed, with men killed and women and children sold into slavery. The most glorious city in their world, conquered and occupied.

Plato was never a democrat, and he hated Athenian democracy for killing his teacher Socrates, but he was looking at a real problem: those who became leaders in democracy were very often unsuited to rule. Pericles was great, aye, but he led Athens into a war it lost.

There are really two problems: the selection of leaders, and how they are treated. Lord Acton said that “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Tends is important; it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to most. When you’re powerful, you don’t have to care about other people without power, and over time, most people tend not to.

Further, powerful people spend time with other powerful people as equals or near equals and, in time, they become their own faction, and look after their own interests and not those of people without power.

The story of “crusading politician goes to the capital and gets corrupted” is ancient. A cliche. It’s a cliche because it happens most of the time; there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

So, for any and all societies, the question is: How should we select leaders?

As I’ve said before, there can be no question that all societies on Earth have failed the leadership selection test (with the possible honorable exception of tiny, powerless Bhutan). We have failed because we knew of climate change and ecological collapse and we did nothing; indeed, we put our collective foot, hard, on the accelerator.

There’s an argument that this is just how humans are. There have been multiple collapses in history, including ecological, and we never seem to do anything to stop them.

But there’s another argument that we can find a better way.

Leadership and followership are related. I had this first brought home to me when I was in elementary school. From the third grade to halfway through sixth grade, I was in a class where the boys had two leaders. They were best friends, and they were friendly, inclusive of everyone, and tolerated no bullying. It wasn’t that they stopped it, though on a couple occasions did I see them step in, it was that their example was so much the opposite that it just didn’t happen.

Then, halfway through sixth grade, I went to another school and the leader of the boys was himself a bully, and bullying was rife.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen how groups and organizations become like the people who run them. Leadership is incredibly powerful, just by example, even before any “power” is used.

So the most important question in improving human society and groups is improving how we select and treat leaders, and by this measure, representative democracy has rather obviously failed.

This is noted often by conservative neo-reactionaries, but such folks are misguided at best. The eras of nobles or aristocrats (two different things), or of kings, were not better — they were often awful. The rise of agricultural kingships lead to cruelty of a type and scale hard for us now to imagine, and that continued throughout their history. One common punishment in Tudor England was opening someone’s stomach, pulling out their intestines and burning them while the person was alive; crowds would gather, treat this as entertainment and have a party while it was going on.

The answer to democracy’s failures isn’t some foolish nostalgia for a time which was worse; we need to find something genuinely new, or we will keep stumbling from catastrophe to catastrophe, and at some point said catastrophe will wipe us out.

So I suggest to readers to consider the question, which Plato tried to answer, of how to select, train, and treat rulers — and I would add that they should act in the best interests of all, especially including those they don’t know, both who are alive at the same time the leaders are, and those who will be alive after they are dead.

This is the human problem. If we can’t solve it, we can’t have good societies — save by chance and for brief periods.

The Superpower of Admitting the Obvious

On March 15, 2022

It really is weird to have the “superpower” of being able to see the obvious.

Obviously, Iraq did not have WMD. Obviously, neither the Iraq nor Afghan occupations would succeed.

Obviously, letting Covid rip will cause a mass disabling event which will severely damage our societies.

Obviously China does not regard the US, in specific as a friend, as for 12 years the US has publicly stated, over and over again, that China is Enemy #1.

Obviously, Russia would not let Sevastapol be taken away from them.

Obviously, Russia would not let Ukraine join NATO.

Obviously, offshoring our industrial base to China would make them stronger and us weaker.

Obviously, immiserating our working class would make them hate the liberal order and vote against it when possible (Brexit/Trump, etc.).

Obviously, China has food and energy problems, and obviously, having Russia as a friend helps China fix those problems.

Obviously, China cannot trust the West for supplies, as the West has sanctioned China.

Obviously, the West hates China’s government and wants it replaced, and obviously, the Chinese government doesn’t like this and prefers Russia, which does not want to overthrow their government.

Obviously, Putin must win his war, or he will lose power and be killed.

Obviously, bailing out the rich in 2008 led to a sclerotic economy which cannot fix problems because central banks made a rule that incompetent rich people will be allowed to stay incompetent.

Obviously, not charging rich people with the crimes they committed which caused the financial crisis, but hitting them with fines which cost less than what they made would make them commit more and more crimes.

Obviously, if the rich control government (as per the Princeton Oligarchy study and common sense), and if Covid makes them much richer faster, the government will not seriously try to control Covid.

Obviously, if logistics and supply chain issues make the people who run the logistics and supply chain richer, they will not, themselves, try to solve the supply chain problems.

Obviously, the Ukrainian government’s statements about the war can be trusted just as much, or rather, just as little, as the Russian government’s statements.

Obviously, Democrats are going to lose the mid-terms, and Joe Biden will be (even more of) a lame duck.

Obviously, Biden doesn’t really mind Manchin spiking his program, or he would have gone after Manchin’s coal business or his daughter’s Epi-pen crimes.

Obviously, it will be to China’s huge, long-term advantage that they didn’t let Long Covid disable a huge percentage of their population.

Obviously, in ten years or so, almost everyone will admit that letting Covid rip was a mistake, just like most Iraq war boosters now admit they were wrong about Iraq.

Obviously, Israel is an apartheid state.

Obviously, most American, British, and Canadian politicians are terrified of the Israeli lobby and unwilling to cross it.

Obviously, the US is one of the most corrupt societies in the world, it’s just that US corruption is either legal — or if illegal, not prosecuted.

Obviously, Canada’s rich benefit from sanctions against Russia, because they sell the same things.

Obviously, having oligopolies control most of the US economy has led to inflation being much more than it would have been otherwise.

Obviously, Western central banks have spent 40 years crushing ordinary people’s wages relative to inflation.

Obviously, ex-Federal reserve governors, treasury secretaries, and most Presidents are rewarded for their services after they leave office with huge post-facto bribes, and obviously, they know they will be.

Obviously, Sinema & Manchin are being paid well to spike progressive policies.

Obviously, most European nations are American vassal states.

Obviously, giving in to American demands to reject Huawei 5G networks convinced China that European states are not trustworthy trade partners.

Obviously, Biden, who was a key driver of the bankruptcy bill which made it nearly impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, was not going to cancel student loan debt.

Obviously, China does not want to accept world rules made when it was its weakest.

Obviously, India is trending dangerously authoritarian, and is in danger of eventually engaging in ethnic cleansing.

Obviously, climate change is now past the point of no return, because we clearly won’t do anything to stop it until it is too late. (Sorry, just obvious.)

Obviously, most Western elites don’t care if people they don’t know in their own societies die or are impoverished.

Obviously, our massive “shock therapy” looting of Russia in the 90s was going to lead to a strong man taking over. (I expected military, turned out to be secret police.)

Obviously, drowning the government in a bathtub would create vast corruption among private contractors and lead to an inability to handle crises like Covid which require state capacity (if we wanted to, which mostly we don’t — see above).

Obviously, Bangladesh will be one of the first non-island states to be destroyed by climate change.

Obviously, making the rich even richer will never lead to improvements for the middle and working classes, as opposed to controlling the wealth and power of the rich.

Obviously, massively inequal societies turn into oligarchies of some sort, even if they are nominally democratic.

Obviously, repeatedly invading other countries in violation of international law would make international law weaker, and make countries not inside the blessed Western circle cynical about Western law and leadership.

Obviously, sanctions never cause regime change and only hurt ordinary people (this is the record for sections, 100 percent of the time).

Obviously, Venezuela and Iran will never trust the US or the West.

Obviously, China doing most of the world’s development would make developing countries prefer them to the US.

Obviously, the Chinese would be mistrustful of Western nations and Japan for humiliating them for a century.

Obviously, many Indians prefer Russia to the US and Europe, because Russia has been a reliable ally to them since their independence, when no Western nation has.

Obviously, the invasion of Ukraine is not a worse war crime than the invasion of Iraq.

Obviously, if Putin should be tried for war crimes so should George W. Bush (and many others who never will be).

Obviously, getting the Saudis to spread their noxious form of Islam and to arm guerillas against the Soviets has blown back horribly and has caused mass devastation far beyond Afghanistan.

Obviously, centrists agree with right-wingers on most issues, because they never roll back what right-wingers do while in power.

Obviously, centrists hate left-wingers much more than they hate fascists.

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CDC Jumps the Shark & Experts Die Another Death

On December 29, 2021

So, days after American Airlines asked for a reduction in quarantine length, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reduced recommended quarantine length to five days.

Remarkable.

The CDC, the WHO, and many other health organizations have repeatedly disgraced themselves. At the start, they advised against masks. Masks clearly do help, and because, at the time, they thought that Covid was spread by droplets, masks were completely indicated. The CDC took too long to admit that Covid was airborne, recommended children go back to school, and so on.

In general, health authorities in too many countries have not recognized that airborne spread requires improved ventilation and filtering. School boards have forced teachers to keep windows closed. Vaccine approvals have been political — Sputnik V was an excellent vaccine pre-Omicron, but it was Russian, so, not approved in most Western countries.

Health authorities in many countries have not tracked and traced, have not quarantined properly, and so on.

All of this has broken trust with public health organizations and with experts in general.

People want scientists in organizations like the WHO and CDC to be non-political, to say what the best science says, and they haven’t and now trust is broken.

In general, the idea of expertise has been broken over the last few decades, because experts acted badly or weren’t experts.

This requires a bit of unpacking and “expert” is a bad word. Economists are experts, but they are not scientists, they’re ideologues. They study how the world should be and try and force the world to be like that.

Economists are moral philosophers, in effect — or theologians. If they presented themselves like, “We believe in markets and utility maximization and utility is a metaphysical concept for us, and we think this is the best way to organize society,” that’d at least be honest.

If they were honest, you could sort of trust them. “Oh, so macro-economists are like Christian preachers who say that society should be based on their beliefs of what an ideal society is like!!” That’s not at all the same sort of “expert” as a biologist or physicist.

Over 99 percent of economists didn’t predict the financial collapse. They didn’t realize there was a housing bubble. When economists, and other fake scientists, presented themselves as scientific experts (whose advice, when followed, was CRAP), they discredited the very idea of expertise.

Then actual scientists let themselves be politically compromised and now, they have completed the job.

I read a lot of people who say, “Trust the experts.” Shut up.

The experts disgraced themselves. The economists, the psychologists, the biologists, etc, etc. Too many of them have either presented themselves as something they’re not (scientists) or are actual scientists whom have fudged the science.

This even goes down to hedging things that are well agreed upon. Climate change, for example.

The consensus forecasts have almost been universally too optimistic, for decades, because scientists were playing political games and trying to be palatable.

Actual scientists need insulation from politics. People who are playing politics need to not be insulated from politics. Central bankers and economists are not scientists, they are political actors whose actions hurt some people & help others.

Central banks should be under direct control of elected officials. Scientists in the CDC and WHO should be heavily insulated from political power. Climate scientists need insulation as well.

Expertise has to be politically disinterested. For example, with the initial mask guidance, honest communication would have been:

The best science is that masks help protect us from Covid. Surgical and N95 masks are currently in short supply, so please use cloth masks right now. Here’s how to make them yourselves.

That’s honest, and it doesn’t break trust.

And that, along with not allowing people like economists, psychologists, and even psychiatrists, to pretend to be scientists is how you avoid loss of trust in experts.

Once you lose trust, you’re screwed. Real experts, who can be trusted, are now tarred with the same brush as those who have betrayed trust, and a plurality of the population has decided they don’t have to believe what the “experts” say, because in the past they’ve lied, been wrong, or perverted the science for political or business reasons.

Today’s Center Is Yesterday’s Extreme

On December 20, 2021

And tomorrow’s center will be today’s extreme.

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In the 1950s US, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. In 1925, the idea of such a rate was an extreme position. Today, it is an extreme position.

In 1935, the US had a small standing army and believed that was the way to be. After WWI, it had demobilized a huge army, but after WWII it chose to keep a large standing army.

Segregation was the normal position for much of the country before the 1960s; today it is theoretically illegal.

Women could not, effectively, hold most jobs in the 1950s; today they can. Married women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts without permission from their husbands; today they can.

Before the 1940s, almost no countries had universal health care, now virtually all developed countries (except the US) do.

Limited liability corporations didn’t exist throughout most of the history of capitalism, and were opposed by many capitalists when introduced; now they are the norm.

Most land was owned and managed by the commons for most of history; now, most of it is private land or government-owned. The idea that every local shouldn’t have access to local land and resources was EXTREME for almost all of human existence.

(Capitalism, generally speaking, is an extremely radical ideology when viewed through the lens of human history and pre-history.)

The center, of any period, is the extreme of a previous period. Truly, new ideas start from the extremes, then, when radicals win, they become centrist ideas. Adam Smith did not agree with the orthodoxy of his day, any more than Karl Marx did (though he had the advantage that he was championing a wealthy minority, not a poor one ,and thus didn’t live his life in poverty and misery like Marx.)

Confucius was an extremist who could not get hired by those in power. Jesus was an extremist. Muhammed was an extremist. Thomas Paine was an extremist. Luther was an extremist, and so was MLK.

The center does maintainance and refinement of ideas, but they have few if any truly new ideas. It is radicals who create new ideas, and centrists support them only afterwards.