Ian Welsh

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

Category: How to think Page 4 of 22

Abundance Mindset, Scarcity Economies and the Great Game Of Musical Chairs

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On November 29, 2020

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Like a lot of older Gen-X I remember the good times without having every participated in them. By the time I was an adult stagflation, the Federal Reserve, Reagan and Thatcher had done their work and the decline had begun. Everything kept getting shittier for most people in the western world and it has kept doing so for about 40 years now. Depending on what group you’re in, it might be fifty.

This has given rise to a whole body of how to get rich works. They rival those of the gilded age: Napoleon Hill’s “How To Think and Get Rich” is a good example. (The best of them is still “How To Make Friends and Influence People,” its advice will work as long as humans are human.)

The catchphrase these days is “abundance thinking”. There’s a ton of good stuff in the world, and you just have to figure out how to get some. The world isn’t full of scarcity, it’s full of too much.

This is, of course, true. There are money spigots, like various central banks, early entry to crypto, being attached to important resource economies like oil (though that’s ending) and so on. There are people who have way more money than they need, for whom money is a trivial concern, a way of keeping score, and those who just have too little.

You want to move to a position of abundance. You want to find a spigot. On the right this selling is courses on how to get fit or slim or rich or whatever. Sometimes the courses are bogus, sometimes they’re pretty good stuff, but they price them high and find desperate people to buy them.

So it is, so it always has been. Sell the dream to desperate people and you’ll get rich. Attach to a money spigot and you’ll be fine. It’s why the fights are so savage these days. Corbyn in Britain threatened the money-spigot attachment of Labour elites and they hate him for it and will do anything they can to destroy him. Nothing was too low to do to stop Sanders, because he would have brought in his own administrative class into the Democratic party. Democrats used many of the same vote suppression tactics against Greens and Sanders as they squealed about Republicans using against them.

It’s all about position. This is why the standard advice in prosperity circles is to ditch your loser friends and hang out with successful people. They’re attached to some spigot, or have found some vein of insecurity to mine and they can cut you in or show you how to get in.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

But this is the larger issue: it’s all about position.

It’s a giant game of musical chairs. Some people are in abundance economies, other people are in scarcity economies (these have little to do with national economies, though it’s easier to get into an abundance economy in some places, obviously.)

But there are only so many money spigots and only so many people who can mine veins of insecurity. There aren’t enough good seats.

So the abundance stuff focuses on how you can become one of the winners, one of the people in an abundance economy. If you do it ethically, you help others get inside. If  you do it unethically, you’re just a parasite and you reduce the number of prosperity chairs. (Jamie Dimon, for example.)

The issue with all this, even when done ethically, is that even the “good” guys are rarely increasing the number of seats in the abundance economy. They’re just redistributing who gets them.

In econo or math-speak that’s a zero sum game. But because most of the people attached to money spigots like the Federal Reserve are actually reducing the number of good seats, it’s actually a negative sum game. Every dollar someone like Dimon earns hurts other people.

Abundance thinking could be a good thing: there’s no reason the world can’t be abundant. I am perfectly aware of limits to growth, but  every human could have a good life if we wanted them to. But right now it’s all about winners and losers. It’s about each of us, perhaps on team with the other “winners.”

You can win such games, of course, but they produce a world that is hell, and worse a world that keeps heading towards worse hells. This is how downward spirals happen: when we’re concerned only with a few people’s well-being, rather than the well-being of all.

Eventually the hell becomes so bad that practically everyone is in hell, with perhaps a few lords of hell still enjoying life (almost every post-apocalyptic story still has some people doing fine.)

This is the treadmill we’re on, as we seek to save ourselves from the horrible fates we see around us.

So we resort to “I see what it takes to be successful and I’m going to do it and I have those characteristics or can get them. I’m not a loser. I’m a winner!”

The worse things get, the more we focus on what it takes for individuals to grab onto a money spigot.

We grab a prosperity chair (or we don’t, I haven’t!) And that’s great, but the number of chairs relative to the number of people keeps going down, the carbon goes up, and every day more species go extinct.

And hell looms.

A solution that just works for a few is a solution: but it’s only a partial solution unless you don’t care about others, about the future, or about non-human life.

Not everyone, as we’ve designed the modern world, can live in an abundance economy.

Perhaps we should try for a world where people don’t have to do everything just right, or be born to wealth, to live well?

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Know Your Enemies

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On November 23, 2020

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An enemy is someone who means you harm and has the means to inflict it.

A friend is someone who has wants to do good for you, and has the means to bestow it.

I once wrote primarily to predict and to change the world.

I now write to help a few people, those who listen.

So, listen, because other than understanding climate change is written in, won’t be stopped (can’t at this point, minus geo-engineering), this is the most important message I have for you.

You must know who wants to harm you and has the means.

Let’s start here:

“If America’s distribution of income had remained the same as it was in the 3 decades following the second world war… A low-income American earning $35K this year would be earning $61K. A college-educated worker now earning $72K would be earning $120K.

Everyone responsible for this is your enemy, unless you’re in somewhere between the top 4% to top 10%.

How much money, how much good, has the end of the post-war economic order inflicted on you? Adding in interest (because you wouldn’t be in debt, but have investments) it’s over a million dollar for almost everyone. You’d have a home and probably have the mortgage paid off if you don’t. You wouldn’t be drowning in student debt if young (especially since that order kept college costs down.)

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

So the people who are responsible have robbed you of a million or more dollars, and a good, prosperous life. These people had names. It started with with intellectuals like Milton Friedman and the oligarchs who funded economics departments to overturn the economic orthodoxy the old order ran on. It moved onto politicians, executive and CEOs. Margaret Thatcher, and Reagan; then Blair and Clinton, who made their victory complete. Thatcher understood that it was Blair who made her victorious, until Labour accepted “There Is No Alternative” they could have simply undone almost everything she did. Clinton, cutting welfare and smashing blacks and poor people in the face with punitive jail sentences, was Reagan’s heir more than George Bush Sr. ever was.(Biden, of course, was there for all of it and supported almost every shitty piece of it. Enemy. If you can’t manage “enemy, but perhaps not as bad an enemy as Trump, you can’t think.”)

This piece isn’t primarily about ideas and the influence of intellectuals and academics, but I do want to give another nod to Milton Friedman. Please remember, always, that in politics and economics ideas do usually come before action, despite everyone telling you otherwise.

1970, Baby! The sound you hear, to paraphrase Ross Perot, is your jobs going down the drain to every low wage countries around the world.

Now, here’s another fact: wage theft is almost equal to ALL other theft combined, except (get this) it isn’t considered a crime. That’s right, when your boss steals from you, it’s a civil/regulatory matter! 

Who’s the enemy?

Now, when it comes to dying, if you live in America or Britain or most of Europe, who is most likely to get you killed?

That dastardly Putin, twirling his metaphorical mustache and cackling about how much he hates the West, “muahahahahahaha, I hate democracy,” he cackles, or your own elites?  Did Putin send you or your children to war in Iraq or Afghanistan? Did he bungle your Covid response.

Did Putin do this?

It is very rare, unless you are an Iraqi, say, that the leadership of any country save your own is more dangerous to you than your own. On those rare occasions when they are, it’s because a great power is fucking you up (yes, sometimes that’s Putin, but not if you’re American or a member of the EU.)

Your enemies are you own elites. They are the people who price drugs so high you can’t afford them, fuck up a pandemic response so your parents and grandparents die, or send you to war. They are the ones who create economic policies which funnel money to the rich and impoverish you, and if you don’t think being poor isn’t bad for you, you ain’t ever been poor, that’s for certain.

So, when you prioritize the people to be wary of, to be scared of, and to hurt or harm if you ever can, remember, a wise person knows who their enemies are.

Be a wise person.

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Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-wing Government

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On October 23, 2020

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(With the Bolivian coup overthrown, back to the top.  I’ve noticed this is the article of mine front-line activists refer to most.  Originally published May 16, 2016.)

So, we have had a right-wing coup in Brazil. In Venezuela, the left still controls the Presidency, but has lost control of parliament. In Argentina, the right has won the election.

I have been asked how to stop right-wing reversals.

First, it’s worth noting that these three cases are somewhat different. Brazil is a coup in all but name. Venezuela saw massive, deliberate economic sabotage by internal right-wing forces. The situation in Argentina was the closest to fair; a reversal of electoral fortunes.

Still, there are lessons to be learned from their experiences:

It’s Not You, It’s China (or, the World System)

All three left-wing movements in Brazil, Venezuela, and Argentina were associated with rising commodity prices. When those commodity prices collapsed, it was only natural for their fortunes to reverse. They are in power when the economy goes bad, now people want them out. The populace is willing to be complicit in actions that get them out, which are dubious.

Don’t Run Your Economy on Resources

Yes, okay, this is easier said than done. It is hard to bootstrap into something else if you’re a non-core economy. Heck, even many core economies are losing their manufacturing bases and while finance can “work,” it’s a shit way to run your economy. So are “services.” We’ll discuss this in more depth below. But the bottom line is this: You have to develop (or have plans to develop) your economy into a mixed economy, so that it can survive during the inevitable downturns, and, thus, so that your movement can survive them.

People expect you to be able to maintain prosperity. Given the world order as it stands, that may be like asking you to swim with a hundred pound weight strapped to your back, but you still have to do it.

Your First Act Must Be a Media Law

Break them up. Take them over. Whichever. Ignore the screams about media freedom from the usual suspects in the West, this is a case of “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” In all three countries, the media conglomerates remained in the control of oligarchs (update: to be clear, Venezuela did eventually expropriate them, but only after many years), and in all three cases, the majority of the media remained relentlessly hostile to the left.

This is just as true in countries like Britain, Canada, or the US as it is in Argentina, Venezuela, or Brazil, by the way. There is a reason why the post-war liberal regimes put strict media controls in place–including size limits–and there is a reason why those limits were removed by the neoliberal regimes that replaced them.

You can win “against the media” for a time, but if you leave it in the hands of your enemies, they will eventually use it to bury you.

Take Control of the Banking Sector

The banking sector creates money. Money determines what people can and cannot do. This is the control mechanism for the economy in any state which runs on markets. You must control it. If you control it, you can use it to strangle your domestic enemies. If you do not, your enemies will use it to strangle you.

This is a great problem. The world economy has been designed so that countries need to trade, and they need foreign money. So, you can take control of your banking sector, but you can’t control England’s, or America’s, or the payment system (this is what killed Argentina), and thus you cannot tell creditors to go fuck themselves. You need foreign money for necessities.

It is also problematic because the people who know how to run the market economy are not your people. You have get rid of the people who ran it before, so who is going to run it now?

Who Is Your Administrative Class?

You must have a class of people available to run the state and those chunks of the economy over which you are taking control (whether formally or informally). You must know who those people are. FDR reached into academia for many of his people; he also pulled from the social gospel folks (who were used to administering large organizations), and he found a lot of fellow class traitors (for example, JFK’s father, whom he used to run the SEC–Kennedy knew all the tricks and was able to tamp down Wall Street’s BS).

Post-FDR, one of the reasons why factory line supervisors were made ineligible for union membership was so that union members couldn’t be used as easily to take over organizations–even the lowest level supervisors were no longer union members.

There are always people who know the business and believe the way it is being run is bullshit. But you have to know who they are, both as a class and individually. There are certainly people who can run TV stations and newspapers who are left-wing, but you’ve got to know who they are. There are heterodox economists and people who have worked in the finance industry who are class traitors and just itching for a chance to put the boots to the assholes they worked for. Again, you must know who they are.

Take Control of Distribution and Utilities

Yeah, sorry, but no one said this would be easy. In Venezuela, you had the economic elite deliberately exacerbating shortages. Huge stocks of consumer goods buried and hidden.

These people have power. They are your enemies. They will use their power against you. They will not “play fair.”

In Egypt, under the Brotherhood, the deep state did things like cause electricity outages and blame it on the Brotherhood. Of course, the same bureaucrats as always were running the electrical system.

Again, this comes back to control: You have to take control and you have to have competent people you can trust who can help you. Do you know who they are?

Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System

The world system as it stands now is designed so that no nation can stand alone: No one can make and grow everything they need. This was not always the case. In the past, many nations went out of their way to be self-sufficient. It was Keynes’ position, by the way, that nations should produce all their day-to-day necessities themselves, wherever possible, and import only what they could not produce and luxuries–but to strive not to need anything they couldn’t make.

This has been economic and political orthodoxy at various points.

But it isn’t now. You’re in hock to various foreigners for a lot of money, denominated in their currency. You probably can’t feed your own nation. You can’t make what you need (toilet paper, famously, in Venezuela’s case) and you can’t buy it without foreign currency. But the foreign financial system is not friendly to you if you’re genuinely left-wing, and the world trade system is set up to make it illegal to do what is required to produce goods domestically.

You’ll need subsidies or tariffs to make new domestic industries viable, and that’s illegal thanks to a web of trade deals meant to make you unable to control your own economy.

Venezuela tried to increase farming, but failed, precisely because the price of oil went through the roof, and foreign food was cheaper than domestic. The classic response would be tariffs, but the kinds of tariffs sufficient to work would not be tolerated by the world trade system.

It’s hard to overstate how huge a problem this is. It goes back to the commodity issue. Maybe you have enough foreign cash for now, but you won’t always, and you must have it. This vulnerability must be reduced, generally.

No one has managed this in the neoliberal era, not completely, and huge amounts of geopolitics are run based on this. Russia has its oil prices drop, so it moves to selling military goods to make up the difference, for example, and its Syrian intervention is, in large part, a venue to show off how well its weapons work.

Workarounds have been tried: Cooperation with other left-wing nations is the standard one. Venezuela with Cuba, and so on. But this is the “south” trading with the “south.” The stuff they really need, generally, none of them actually produce. If they do, they either don’t produce enough, or they don’t really, i.e. it’s produced by some multinational with no loyalty.

So then you try to appropriate the multinational, but that runs you into all sorts of problems from getting replacement parts for the machines, to the experts to run what you’ve expropriated, to effective embargoes (even if not declared as such).

Nonetheless, this is a problem which must be solved. A full description of how to bootstrap an economy is beyond the scope of this article, and I’m not sure I have a full kit, but I will say this: There are a huge number of highly-skilled first world workers, from the Ph.D.-level down to machinists who are unemployed or underemployed. They want to work. They hate their own system. You can bring these people in, give them new lives, and at least have the necessary expertise.

I know many extremely qualified pharma professionals who would love a chance to set generic factories and create new drugs without the pressure for palliatives they receive from their drug company employers (or ex-employers), as just one example.

This bootstrapping is a challenge which appeals to a lot of the very best and brightest.

Be Satisfied with What You Can Grow and Make

If your elites or population insist on fresh summer vegetables in winter, you’re done. What you can produce, you must have a taste for. This is especially true for elites. If they must have the latest Mercedes, a vacation in Paris, and a home in London, you’re screwed because to have those things, they must have foreign currency.

When Korea was industrializing they had huge campaigns to not smoke foreign cigarettes: It was considered unpatriotic.

You need what foreign currency you have to stay earmarked for capital goods, and you need your elites to be local elites, not global elites. If your elites consider themselves global, you will never be able to create the necessary self-sufficiency to buck the world system.

Obey the Laws of Purges

Let’s not dance around. Your first step will be to break the power of the current economic and political elites who are not willing to convincingly join you–or, at least, let you rule without trying to sabotage you.

You must do this all at once. When it happens, it has to happen to everyone to whom it is going to happen. This is Machiavelli’s dictum, and he was right. After it has happened, those who weren’t broken know they’re safe as long as they don’t get in your way.

If the breaking keeps going on and on, everyone who still has something to lose (and still, thus, has power) lives in fear. They must destroy you before you destroy them.

Let’s give a concrete example. Assume Obama was really a left-winger. He gets into power in 2009, and he really wants to change things. He needs to take out the financial elite: Wall Street and the big banks.

They’ve handed him the opportunity. Here’s part of how he does it: He declares all the banks involved in the sub-prime fraud racket (all of the big ones and most of the small ones) conspiracies under RICO.

He then says that all the individual executives’ money are proceeds derived from crime and confiscates it. (This is 100 percent legal under laws as they exist). He charges them, and they are forced to use public defenders.

They are now powerless. This is the second law of purges: Anyone you damage, you must destroy utterly. If you take away half their power, and leave them half, they will hate you forever and use their remaining power to destroy you.

Leave them whole, or destroy them. The financial executives would have been destroyed, and win or lose in the courts, the next five to ten years of their lives would be consumed by personal legal nightmares.

Again, this is a Machiavellian dictum.

All of this will make many readers uneasy. It seems “mean.”

Get out of the game. You aren’t fit for it. This is all mean. Millions of people die every year and millions more are ruined by the current system. If you’re in this game to win it, rather than feel good about yourself, you will have to play real power politics by the actual rules of the game.

Too many left-wingers try to play by what they think the rules are. “We have a fair election every X years and the losers accept the result and don’t sabotage the winner (or start a coup).”

Those aren’t the real rules. If the right is really losing, they will cheat and cheat massively. They will think nothing of running death squads, making a deal with the US to support guerrillas, and so on.

You directly threaten their wealth and power, if you are a real left-winger. Even if all you want is a 50s style social democracy with racial and gender equality, that would destroy almost all of what they have. They remember what FDR did to them, even if you don’t. They remember all the lost power and fortunes.

It is not possible to have a fair, egalitarian, prosperous society, and have very rich and powerful elites. It cannot be done. Brandeis was exactly right when he said you can have democracy or great wealth in the hands of a few, but you can’t have both.

Either you’re willing to do what it takes, including the ugly bits, or you aren’t. There are sometimes local exceptions, places where a lot of the ugly isn’t needed, but there aren’t a lot of those places left in the world. This isn’t the post-war era and even then, in the South (as opposed to Scandinavia), actual egalitarian, developed economies mostly weren’t allowed. You can ask Central and South America about that.

Most left-wing movements get into power without having properly thought out what they’ll do once in power and without a realistic understanding of how deeply their right-wing opponents lack any belief in democratic norms.

Break your enemy’s power. If you’re any sort of left-winger worth your salt, you ethically do not believe in huge concentrations of power and money in the hands of a few people anyway. Act on your beliefs.

And if they’ve committed a pile of crimes (and they almost always have), use those crimes against them.

Then remember the world system is set up expressly to stop what you are doing.

You’re trying to tackle the dragon, and most people who do that get eaten. We tell the stories of the dragonslayers because they are so few.

So, know the odds are against you and be willing to do what is required to improve them. If you aren’t, stay home.

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Are We Doomed to Live In Hell?

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On October 12, 2020

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I was in my 20s when I learned that the human body is capable of experiencing far more pain than pleasure, for far longer periods. I spent three months in the hospital, days screaming, weeks in pain, throwing up multiple times a day, crippled, and unable to move.

Recovery took years, and for months at a time I was in pain, near-crippled. The simplest movement would often occasion agonizing pain.

Earth isn’t hell, precisely. That’s a misunderstanding.

It is the human body, the vehicle through which we experience Earth, which makes this world Hell.

This isn’t to say pleasure and happiness and all the good stuff isn’t real, it surely is, but it is a pale shadow of the suffering that the human body can impose upon its resident consciousness.

People will say things like, “Pain exists to let you know there’s a problem,” but that’s a very partial explanation, so partial it’s wrong; you can experience pain so severe it is crippling, rendering it impossible to do anything to reduce the pain or address the underlying problem. If pain were strictly utilitarian, it would cut out far below, “Scream until you’re hoarse and don’t move at all.”

The human condition is, thus, biased towards evil. We have much more capacity to suffer than we do to experience pleasure and the pain we can experience is far greater than any possible justification.

There are those who take advantage of this. Civilization was built on it: The cruelties that various kings and governments have imposed, the tortures, are legendary. Civilization “domesticated” humans, but what is meant by that is similar to what we mean when we say we broke a horse. A small group of humans banded together, formed strong ties to each other, and then used unimaginable cruelty to force everyone else to do what they said, or else.

And they meant the “or else.”

(Christopher Columbus, having dogs chew the intestines of still-alive natives who didn’t bring him enough gold is the sort of thing we’re talking about. Or the Tudor habit of burning people’s intestines while they were still alive, and watching. Or various Chinese routine judicial punishment tortures.)

The human body has much more ability to experience hell than heaven, and some humans have taken advantage of that to rule in Hell, over the rest of us, using the most fiendish evil imaginable. If there is somewhat less of this today than thousands or hundreds of years ago it is only because, like a wild horse who now “willingly” carries a human on its back, we, too, have been domesticated; broken.

Our entire society, though more subtle than, “burn their intestines while they’re alive,” is based on nothing more or less than the fear of dying in poverty or homeless if one doesn’t do whatever various bosses (masters) tell us to do. This is, in the first world, nowhere more true than the heart of our modern civilization, the United States, with its record-setting incarceration rates and routine police theft, violence, and brutality — even as homeless people’s tents are destroyed.

This is, however, a choice. Oh, we (probably) don’t choose to live in human bodies. But how we treat each other, and what we tolerate from our elites, well, that’s a choice. The human body can experience good, and even a lot of it, if we organized our society around that instead of using terror to break entire civilizations.

The human body means that Hell is easier to experience here than Heaven is.

But both are our within our grasp, we have simply chosen the easy path.

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The Theocratic Mantra Of Our Age

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On September 16, 2020

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Article by Stirling Newberry

It is difficult reaching the impossible to critique the theocratic mantra of an age. This is true because the raison d’être for engaging in a debate must be that the joint assumptions of the political spectrum are true.

This is not, then, a political argument about two differing sides but about the ur-narrative. Certain assumptions cannot be questioned, those questions which are part of the theocratic mantra of the age. But this means that on any given issue, most members of the elite, whether intellectual, sociopolitical, economic, or literary, will not be able to oppose certain actions because they will not be able to articulate a reason why.

This was the case in 2001 when the bombing of the Twin Towers and assorted other targets was juggled into a war against Iraq. The Iraqi leader the time, Saddam Hussein he had escaped certain destruction in the previous war because the then-president counted in the costs and made a reasonable decision that, on balance, it was not worth the cost for the extraction of one leader, given what had to be the outcome in Iraq of chaos, which was then then the opinion of a great number of experts in the middle east. When in 2001 the chance of erasing the failure to eradicate a dictator was brought up again a very different president was in office, and a different equation was laid for the American public.

Remove Saddam Hussein, and set up a democracy.

This narrative had to be looked at as reasonable even though the premise was completely absurd. Several people left because they could not enunciate the fundamental absurdity of a democratic Iraq. There was no democratic Iraq on the table, nor was there a Democratic Libya—nor a Democratic Egypt.

Once one looked into the mouth of the dragon one would see that for a very long period the choices were an absolute dictator or some version of breakdown into madness. The only possible road was to create the preconditions for a dissolution of the Iraq state into more congenial regions. The results of the war to unseat a dictator was exactly this: since there was no dismantling of parts then the result was a controlled dissolution. The word ISIS had not been invented but it is concept was already staring back at anyone who looked at the map and who read the relevant papers.

In other words, the entire idea of removing a dictator and setting up a democratically elected alternative was simply not possible in any realistic sense. And as a result, the questions which had to be answered were never even asked. One could gloss over an op-ed but the real question was simply not to be considered in any believable way. The longest war in American history was spent avoid thinking the real question.

When I say the theocratic mantra, I mean that quite literally. We believe in a neoliberal neoconservative economic system which has as its roots a neoclassical vision of a mass of humanity making logical economic decisions. This vision is absurd and the vision must be taken on a force of logic to an unparalleled Truth. This does not mean that all other forms are rational: many of them are equally irrational in different ways. One can look at numerous Marxian ideas. They have a different irrefutable logic which is also wrong but to argue from 1st principles as to why it is wrong would take a dissertation.

What happens then is the realistic numbers of society drop away one after another when some specific rule that they know must be true and yet cannot be admitted has to be broken for the sake of the bedrock rules that govern debate. You must be Civil and reasonable within the context of an uncivil and unreasonable system. The men and women who can do this can write several articles a week or do a paper per semester or some other measure of output per unit input. However, the end comes when the substructure of debate is proven to be false. This has happened with the Great Recession over 10 years ago, but the system which runs debate has continued and only become more ornate and Byzantine as it has done so. There are enormous numbers of people who believe in a dead system because they want something which that system allows. Oftentimes that belief is not possible under the rules of scientific or practical elucidation.

When you have at least 40% of the population wanting to believe irrational things, and another 40% which wants a logic which is not functional, there is a great deal of logically valid and scientifically correct data which will not be allowed as a given.

In short, we argue over things that have already been proven to be true. I do not need to listen to President Trump to know that he simply lies. However, his overt lies are a result of the fact that there has been for 40 years a gradually building consensus for a covert set of lies.The system which created the confluence of events which led to him taking the oath of office is in no way related to any system of reality worthy of attention.

An example is the data that oil is producing negative value every single day.

The reason it does so is also well known: a few benefit tremendously while the vast majority pays a small consequence which when summed is far greater than the benefits to the few. On the scale of a global population, there is no other answer than to wind down most of the fossil fuel. But there is a large population of elites who own their tranche by holding some bottleneck in the fossil fuel economy, even though it may be several steps removed. The reason Americans are fat is that it is much cheaper to import vast quantities of calories than to do other things to make us happy. It is a gourmand oriented system rather than a gourmet oriented system.

This means that what qualifies as our society’s argument is anything but, instead it is trying to avoid the fundamental questions so that the argument can go on. This does not mean removing fundamental tensions and maladaptations will make everything harmonious or arguable. Europe has a great deal of tension in its debate and has a number of glaring errors in basic areas: health science, transportation, and locality in specific.

People who live in a particular area to not want to see their livelihood vanish in a puff of smoke, even though on the net they are actually producing devaluation. The reason they live where they do is that otherwise everyone would live in a few cities to the point where it would be a Metropolitan conglomerate separated by rural hinterlands. It is better to allow them to produce nonfunctional products and live outside the Metropolitan areas than to force them to agglomerate themselves into the hive, or at least a slow process is better than rapid progress.

Here in America, the basic problem with the system is the capitalization of non-capitalizable functions, such as public health and a basic living standard for individuals. There is a reason why the rest of the developed world realizes that only at the very low end of the spectrum is their profit to be made from such activities. The reason we do so is that there needs to be one military power to enforce stability. This is again a cost-benefits analysis subject: there are 3 methods.

A great powers systems rely on many factors and each one can secure, and this means by force, a coterie of followers who rely on a secured benefit. Then there is the duopoly most recently seen in the Cold War, where slightly over half of humanity is better precisely because the other half runs affairs in a different way. Then there is the superpower system where one country supplies the military stability. It is no accident that the British Imperial system has been duplicated in the American Empire – they are both superpower systems.

What this means is that the supreme military system actually lives worse outside of the various centers. This become especially true when the fundamental axioms of its argument are proved wrong but must still be abided by. This happened with World War I in the British Imperial system, and it happened with the Great Recession in ours. But as the saying goes “just because a problem goes away does not mean the people tasked with solving the problem go away as well.” Thus we have capitalizion of non-capitalizable assets as the road to financialization profits, even though it does not work. (A friend has written Goliath on just such a topic.)

The system itself will fall not because of its components, but by the nature of its assumptions. The assumptions are not just wrong but wrong-headed. And the way to keep one’s place in the melange of discourse is to bury one’s head in the sand to clear objections. One must also leave in place the substrata of the world economy and its intellectual basis, which are not wrong but they are assumptions, not facts.

Thus the world is changing from a single superpower to a duopoly even as we speak, it will be a long time before it makes the transition, but the time is a great deal shorter than it was in 2001.

 

The Principle of Elite Consequences

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On September 3, 2020

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Sometimes the comments on an article, like my recent post on reforming the justice system, reveal a deep misunderstanding of how the world works.

People with money and power run our societies. The Princeton/Northwestern oligarchy study found that what they want is what matters, and that the opinions of the rest of us don’t matter.

If they are not subject to how a part of society operates, they don’t care if it runs well, and it will run badly (or, in a way that profits them, which is generally the same thing).

The justice system, for the rich and powerful, works well. They have good counsel, because they can afford it. They can afford bail. They generally go to minimum security prison if they happen to be indicted, and they are never actually charged with most of their crimes — as was the case in widespread fraud leading up to the financial crisis or the robo-signing fraud used to steal people’s houses afterwards. (At most, they pay fines, which are less than the value of what they stole.)

The security systems in airports are hell. But rich people don’t go through it, they fly in private jets.

The medical system in the US is bad and overpriced for most people. But it’s very very good if you’re rich or powerful.

The US has been at war for almost 20 years now, but US elites don’t care, because they and their children don’t fight in it.

The US education system is bad, and worse in places which are poorer. US elites don’t care, because they either go to private schools or cluster in rich neighbourhoods where the schools are good, because they are funded through property taxes.

Covid-19 is not a problem, because it mostly kills poor people and minorities, and it’s making the rich much much richer, getting rid of their competition among small business-owners.

If you want something to work well, powerful and rich people must be forced to use it. They must have the same experience as ordinary people.

It takes an especially bad dose of capitalist ideology (or aristocratic or oligarchic ideology) to not perceive this point. If the powerful aren’t affected by how they run society (except to get richer and more powerful), if they don’t experience how the society runs for ordinary people, then society will be shit, AND, if you want society to be good, you can’t allow rich and powerful people to opt out of ordinary experiences.

They must have the same health care as everyone else, including the same odds of not receiving care, being bankrupted by it or getting bad care. They must go through the security lines at airports and be groped. Their kids must have the same odds of having shitty schools. They must have the same odds of dying of Covid-19. They must be given rifles after voting for a war in the Senate and sent to the front lines (or at the least their kids must be, though I see no reason why they shouldn’t be, and if they’re too physically weak to fight, they shouldn’t be allowed to vote on a war they won’t be involved in).

All of this is the most basic of common sense, a level of reasoning that a ten year old would be able to follow easily.

If you cannot follow this reasoning you are suffering from a very bad case of ideological poisoning or you identify with the rich and powerful class. Perhaps you belong to it, or perhaps you’ve just lost a sense of your own position.

I can hear many people now, “rich and powerful people deserve to be treated better, and everyone else deserves shit.”

You can have a good society when you are willing to do what it takes, and the most important rule of a good society is that important people don’t get to opt out of the world their class creates for everyone else.

9/3-20: article edited to reflect oligarchy study authors being at Princeton/Northwestern, not Harvard.

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The Extended Emotional Body

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On August 20, 2020

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The simplest way to think of identity and identification is that it creates an enlarged emotional body.

If someone I identify with is hurt, I hurt. This suffering shows up on brain scans, it’s not theoretical.

If, on the other hand, I completely don’t identify with someone else, their pain doesn’t both me. This is why, for example, most slave societies say that slaves are sub-human. Plato believed most slaves were meant to be slaves, and that slavery was only wrong if someone was not naturally a slave. Race theory and so on.

The Romans were refreshingly honest about this, “You’re a slave because you, or the people from whom you are descended lost a war.” They also made it very possible to stop being a slave, perhaps because they didn’t think of slaves so much as “other.” It wasn’t an intrinsic category, you just had bad luck.

This extended emotional body goes beyond people. You can identify with animals and feel pain when they are hurt (Nietzche went insane when a man whipped a horse savagely). You can identify with plants, or with objects and ideas.

People piss on Korans and Bibles and burn flags precisely for this reason: It hurts people they want to hurt. People tell you your ideals are wrong to hurt you or to protect their ideals from harm so they won’t be hurt. Be really aggressive to a believer about how “God isn’t real.” It hurts. Tell an American patriot his country is evil. Etc.

Conversely, if another person we care about does well, we’re happy. If the country we identify with wins a war we may feel good. Or, if we think the war is wrong, we may feel bad. The extended emotional body created by identification gives us vast possibilities for increased happiness. Check in on a sports fan when “their team” wins the championship.

Identification with people and objects and ideas we really have nothing in common with is a large part of how we scaled our societies to grow beyond the number of people we could personally know well. We’re all Americans or Germans; or we’re all descended from the same ancestor; or we all believe in Zeus, and thus won’t attack another worshipper of the greatest of all Gods, let alone the wanderers who are under his sacred guard.

Identity, however, leads to a wide variety of pathologies. We don’t actually know these people, they don’t actually know us, and as for the ideas, well, they may be bad for us, but because we identify with them, we can’t see that clearly.

Identity makes it hard to find truth, because when we discover that something we identify with isn’t what we thought it was, maybe it’s not good or even perhaps, that it doesn’t even exist, it hurts. Humans avoid pain.

Identity also allows us to be manipulated. Odds are, your interests have essentially nothing in common with those of the people who run the Democratic or Republican parties, or the CEO of the company you work for, or the leader of your religion. But many many people identify with these organizations or people and acquiesce to their authority, even when that authority is terribly harmful to them.

Identity is a prosthesis. It lets us do things we can’t do without it. But beyond identifying with people we personally know and like, it isn’t natural, and it is very easily abused.

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Appropriate Hate (and Other Negative Emotions)

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On August 18, 2020

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There are no human emotions which are always bad. Every emotion is useful in certain circumstances. Emotions are bad when they provide incorrect guidance or they hijack you.

Perhaps you had bad experiences with dogs as a kid, and now you’re scared of them, even though most aren’t dangerous. That’s inappropriate guidance, and, if the fear is strong enough and you can’t pet a friendly dog even though you think you should, you’ve been hijacked.

Chronic negative emotions are also bad. If you’re angry or scared almost all the time, that has negative effects on your health.

That said, even an emotion like hate has utility, if it’s correctly pointed. People like the person below have a problem.

Hate exists to tell you when someone is a threat, and you should do something about it. It often is hijacked, as with Americans thinking that foreign leaders like Putin are the primary threat, when it’s their own leaders who kill and impoverish them. When hate operates correctly, it points at actual threats.

Trump’s bungling of Covid and the economy has killed over 100,000 Americans. It’ll kill hundreds of thousands by the end. Somewhere around 30 percent of renters can’t make their payments; many of those will wind up homeless. That’s not all his fault, but a lot of it is.

Trump’s actually dangerous to a lot of people, and hating him is an appropriate emotion. Being consumed by it isn’t, but wishing that Trump would die of natural causes is entirely reasonable. (Granted, Pence might be worse, but you can hate him too.)

Emotions have purposes. Hate is meant to tell you who is a threat. Anger is meant to tell you that someone is doing something they really shouldn’t be doing. (This is one reason why, in spiritual communities which say one should never be angry, abusers manage to get away with abusing for a long, long time.) Jealousy tells you you’re falling behind and not living up to your potential.

All of these negative emotions can be inappropriate or hijacked or chronic and be bad for you, of course, but all of them also have a purpose in a healthy individual.

For that matter, positive emotions can be inappropriate. If you’re so happy you don’t notice a threat, that’s a problem that could get you dead.

Anyway, the main problem with hate and anger is that they are easily hijacked and hook onto targets who aren’t actually dangerous, but merely “foreign.” As with the companion feeling of loyalty, most of modern “leadership” is hijacking tribal emotions and pointing them in the wrong direction. Loyalty to Biden or Trump (both evil men who have done, and will do, horrible things) is insane unless you’re directly part of the gravy train.

We humans have very badly fucked up our emotional guidance systems. They’re supposed to point you towards what’s good for you and warn you about what’s bad for you. Trump is bad for almost everyone, and so is Biden. So are most Democratic and Republican politicians, almost all CEOs of major companies, and so on and so forth.

So go ahead and hate them, just don’t let it be chronic or hijack your ability to make decisions. It’s definitely appropriate.

The people who are dangerous to you and who have, over 40 years, impoverished Americans, are your own leaders. Hate threats, they are a threat.

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