Ian Welsh

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

Category: How to think Page 5 of 22

Understanding American Elites Means Understanding Predators

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On July 30, 2020

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American elites are not incompetent at what matters to them.

People constantly make ridiculous statements like, “The American government has been incompetent in its handling of Covid-19.”

Anyone who makes such a statement reveals that they do not understand how the US operates.

Fact: According the Princeton oligarchy study, almost the only thing that matters in what policies government pursues in the US is what elite factions want.

Fact: Covid-19 has made the rich in the US much, much richer.

US billionaires saw their wealth increase by 20 percent, or $584 billion, roughly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Covid-19 is enabling the consolidation of US industry. Small businesses have to shut down, large businesses keep running. The oncoming tsunami of renters being evicted (depending on state, 25 percent to over 50 percent of renters are in danger of eviction) will wipe out landlords, allowing the richest Americans to buy up rental properties on the cheap, consolidating them. They will then charge, not market clearing rental rates, but profit maximization rents, leaving many people permanently homeless.

If you’ve ever researched how to make money, you know the standard advice virtually always includes one thing: You must have other people work for you or passive income, or both. You must be making money when you, personally, aren’t doing a thing. Your money must make money for you, and so must other people. Any person worth employing makes more money for you than you pay them. You take the difference.

In kinder capitalist epochs, this is kept under control by wealth taxes, inheritance taxes, high progressive taxation, and aggressive anti-trust policy, along with a monetary policy intended to raise wages and prices, not crush them.

But our era is built on three ideological assertions.

  1. There is no such thing as society.
  2. Greed is good.
  3. There is no alternative (TINA).

Whatever makes a profit, according to this assertion, is good. There is no society, and no social goals. There are only competing people and whatever they get is fair. And this is the only way to run society, there is no alternative. Thatcher noted that her victory was not sealed by Conservative party elections, rather it was Tony Blair’s Labour party adopting neoliberalism that meant that TINA went from assertion to fact; no matter who was elected, the same basic policies would be followed, Labour would just try to thinly mitigate the effects of so many rich people and so many poor people.

In the US, the victory of Reagan was when Bill Clinton helped create the “Third Way,” which was an adoption of neoliberal principle. Again, it would not matter if Republicans or Democrats were in power, the rich would get richer and the social state would be defunded.

Our elites are predators. They are taught that they have no obligation to other people. Greed is good, and whatever makes money is good. If someone else has less money, that’s because they deserve less money, and because they create less good.

In their daily lives, the rich become rich through passive income and exploiting other people; paying the lowest wage or price possible (Walmart and Amazon both famously fuck suppliers over, though in different ways), getting as much government money as possible, and making sure that they don’t have to work to make money, and that the stock market always goes up in the long run, along with other asset prices–no matter what’s actually happening in the economy.

Neoliberal elites are predators. This is true in every neoliberal country. It is simply most advanced in the United States. They view ordinary people as prey or useful tools. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, banks set up assembly lines to sign false paperwork so they could seize people’s homes. The Federal government knew, aided them, and later immunized them by making them pay fines far less than the value of what they stole.

You are food or a money-producing asset to elites.

You are not human, you do not have a right to anything. Not due process of the law. Not food. Not housing. Not affordable medicine or health care. Those things are for people with enough money, and if that’s not you, you don’t deserve them.

This is THE most important thing you can understand about society today. You can’t count on US elites to care about you at all. If it is in their best financial interest to impoverish you, kill you or any other thing, they will do so.

This may seem hyperbolic, but it meets the most important test of truth: It predicts their actions with far more accuracy than any other hypothesis.

If it was just incompetence, like for example, the favorite excuse of liberals, “Never assume malice when incompetence will explain something,” then they wouldn’t keep getting more and more money.

Somehow their “incompetence” just makes them richer. Even the financial crisis made the elites richer overall–the drop was a blip which allowed them to control more of the economy than before.

Neoliberal elites are predators. Their food is ordinary citizens and anything else (animals, plants, the ecosystem which allows human life to exist).

And yes, it’s true, all neoliberal nations are not as far gone. But this is where neoliberalism leads, this is what its internal logic demands.

It’s not an accident that the best Covid-19 performance on the planet was probably in Vietnam, right next to China, with huge trade ties.

Zero deaths.

Anyone who tells you it was hard to avoid Covid-19 deaths is lying. All it required was seeing that a pandemic was underway and doing what the epidemiology textbooks tell you to. The introductory textbooks.

Nor is this all on one person. No one rules alone. Without a huge supporting apparatus, including Congress, Trump could not have done what he did (and didn’t). If his incompetence had been costing elites, you can be sure it would have been brought to an end.

It wasn’t. It was making them richer and furthering their plans. At the end of this, US elites will control a larger percentage of the US economy than before. They will be richer and more powerful. And if that means tens of millions of Americans are homeless and hungry, then that is a price US elites are willing for you to pay.

If you deserved better, you’d be rich. You aren’t, so you don’t.

Your lords and masters kill you for money. That’s their function.

Act on this knowledge, or don’t.

Everything I write here is free, but rent isn’t, so if you value my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Feeling and Acting Powerful in Catastrophic Times

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On July 15, 2020

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The United States is moving into a time of catastrophe. Thirty-two percent of people were unable to make either their rent or mortgage payments in July. Twenty-two percent of small businesses seem likely to go bankrupt. One-third of small independent farms are on the verge of bankruptcy. When these people lose their homes and wind up on the street, there will be tens of millions of homeless Americans, with widespread hunger.

All this and the pandemic is reaching new highs.

It is natural to feel powerless in times like these. Indeed it is natural to feel powerless in most times.

As I wrote on Monday, “being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not a man-made construction.”

Compared to the system, as an individual, you are weak. There are a few exceptions, but I doubt any of my readers are in that .0001 percent bucket.

But that assumes you act directly against the system, to change it.

You can’t fight a hurricane, but you can prepare for it. You can build your house in ways that mean it will hardly be damaged. You can flee before it arrives, perhaps, or at least take shelter. You can store food, make friends, and be ready.

In the 1930s, many people in Germany tried to stop the Nazis from taking power. They failed. Some stuck around, they wound up in camps and dead (and it wasn’t just Jews, they killed left-wingers, their direct opponents, first). Others said, “Woah, we lost that fight,” and left.

Those people survived, and they have descendants.

Now, I am not telling you to leave the United States. Right now, only about 20 countries will even let Americans in. I’ve been telling you for years, over a decade, to get the fuck out if you could (I know many people can’t). You either did that, or didn’t, and it’s too late now–at least for this catastrophe cycle.

What I am saying, instead, is this:

You can’t always stop history, but you can always decide how you act and react to history, and to catastrophe.

Martial arts instructors, the good ones, tell their students that the best thing to do in a fight is often to run or de-escalate. Fights are risky, and if you can run faster than the other guy, you don’t get hurt. Now, of course, there are times when you have to fight, but the point is, sometimes you don’t, and sometimes fighting is really, really stupid.

This is not counsel to not do what you can to change large forces. By all means demonstrate, organize, vote, and so on. But recognize that as one person, while you must contribute, you cannot determine the end result. You can only do your part, hope others do their part, and that it is enough. If it isn’t, it isn’t on you, unless perhaps you are leading the movement or are very senior in it.

When it comes to opposing large historical events, you should not put your ego or happiness on the line. You are not the determining factor, and feeling as if you are is foolishness.

The key to feeling powerful in bad times is determining what you control, and doing that. Perhaps you can stock up food. Perhaps you can move. Perhaps you can make friends with your neighbours so there is mutual aid right next door. Perhaps you can start a garden. Perhaps you can stockpile food and other essentials. Perhaps you have enough resources to go partially or full off grid. Perhaps you can create a bug-out bag and practice the route you intend to use if you need to leave. Perhaps you can get a new job in another part of the country. Perhaps you and some friends can live together and be safer and stronger and better prepared together. Perhaps you can learn practical skills which will help when things go bad.

Perhaps you can come up with many actions, unique to  your situation, which I will never think of.

When you concentrate on what you can do, and what you can control, instead of what you can’t control, you increase your odds of survival, prosperity, and happiness, and you cut away hard at the feeling of powerlessness.

The great forces of history are not yours to control, but if you understand them (or listen to those who do, and that may not be me, but others) then you can prepare. You can outwit them and prosper or at least survive well despite them.

In WWII, there were places which were untouched. During the Bubonic plagues, there were places that lost no one or very few people. There were people who looked at the circumstances and used them to not only prosper but to take care of others.

Look at your current situation and ask yourself, “What can I do to prepare?” Make a list. Do something on the list.

Measure yourself and your power against what you do that you can do, not in fighting history.

And remember, those who survive and prosper in a crisis are those who have power afterwards and can support a better world.

With rare exceptions (and they do exist), you don’t need to feel powerless, or be powerless.

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The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo

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On July 13, 2020

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

Let’s spell this out clearly.

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

Our system is always a choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin defeated older orders too.

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

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

Just like Soylent Green, the system is people.

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War Crime Apologia

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On July 2, 2020

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One is not required to bomb hospitals, to torture, or to engage in mass killing of civilians when one is a chief of state. “My favorite war criminal did less war crimes than your war criminal,” is not a defense.

That people feel the need to defend those who do such things when in power is why we live in Hell.

The pathetic need of people to identify with a leader to the extent where they apologize for their war crimes is a sign of ethical illness, and when a plurality or majority do so, it is a sign of a sick society.

You who do, deserve your leaders. They reflect you and your ethics, and they have created the world you actually want, whatever you may say. You cannot commit war crimes as state policy and expect the evil you do not to eventually reflect in your own society. The best you can hope is to be a lord of hell, living on the suffering of others, but insulated from it, or to die before the worst comes home.

This is as true as, “bad people often have virtues.” Putin is not all bad; he has done good. Trump is not all bad; he has done some good. Obama was not all bad; he did some good. Blair was not all bad; he did some good. Etc…

The good does not wipe out the war crimes. Both must be acknowledged. But the war crimes remain real, and the people who ordered them are still war criminals; these men (and a few women) have done far more harm and evil than any serial killer who has ever lived.

If you believe that torture, mass killings, destroying civilian infrastructures, and so on is required of leaders in order to do their jobs, then you have acquiesced to live in Hell and all you are quibbling over is the details of Hell’s hierarchy, hoping you and your preferred people can avoid the Hell you inflict on others.

Update. Apparently a 101 on when civilian casualties are a war crime and when they aren’t is required.

When the POLICY is to mass kill civilians that is unacceptable. That was the POLICY in Chechnya.

Why is this hard for people to understand?

Civilians die in war, that is why the bar for war is high. Same with insurrection.

There are quantitative and qualitative differences between “civilians die in war” (collateral damage) and deliberately killing civilians.

This should not be hard to understand, and I am dismayed that I have to explain it, and related issues, over and over and over again.

You can kill criminals if your society allows it. You can kill soldiers when at war. Some civilian casualties will happen in war, and while that’s not good, it isn’t a war crime unless your war itself is a war crime (like Iraq, the Nazi invasions, Libya, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and both nuclear bomb attacks on Japan).

Perhaps we need a war crimes 101 post, but I don’t have the heart to write it.

As for insurrections, these questions become blurred, but, even during the Terror, an attempt at at least pro-forma trials was maintained.

When you start killing civilians to create terror to break your opponents will as a government, you are worse than a terrorist, because you have the weight of a state behind you.

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A Small Insight About Power, Markets, and Post-capitalism

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On June 16, 2020

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Last week I wrote a brief post about the process of having insights: How we don’t control what insights we get, or when–we can only do the preparatory work, and then sit back and wait.

The insight I was writing about was really “Oh, this isn’t up to me, it happens when it happens,” but there was also an insight related to markets, capitalism, and really, post-capitalism.

A lot of what I’ve spent the last 30 years thinking about could be considered to be collective action problems–who, as societies, we let make decisions about what we’ll do. Feudalism did that one way, capitalism does it another; there have been other systems, and even within capitalism there are sub-ideologies: neoliberalism is very different from New Deal capitalism with its emphasis on increasing wages, decreasing inequality, and keeping prices up.

But the real issue is about power. Money is a type of power, it gives whoever controls it (not has it, but controls it), the ability to tell other people what to do. When you buy something or hire someone, that’s power.

There are so many issues with using markets to determine who gets power that you could write multiple books about them, but let’s review the positive argument for markets.

If someone pays you for something, they want it or need it. It has utility to someone.

The more people pay you, therefore, the more utility you are providing. Coincidentally, the more they give you, the more utility you can provide, as more money gives you more power to control people and resources. It’s a nice, positive feedback loop.

But one simple problem with it is that money can be used for things other than what people paid you for. Say you’re Bill Gates and you masterminded an operating system and productivity suite people use. (You did this using ethically suspect tactics, but let’s assume you still did more good than harm.)

Now you have a ton of money, and you use it to change how the US organizes education.

That’s what Bill Gates did.

Then it turned out, and Gates himself admits it, that his plan didn’t make things better. Arguably, it made things worse.

So the simple insight was only this: Money is too general a power. We want people who do something good to be able to do more of it, but to assume that, because they did one thing that other people want, means they are qualified to decide how people do other things is unwarranted.

We wouldn’t take the best teacher in the world and say, “Okay, Thelma, now you design the next universal operating system!” We wouldn’t ask the best surgeon in the world to design environmental policy.

We generalize the ability to make money doing one thing to assume it means you’re good at doing everything.

Maybe money shouldn’t be the sole metric we use to decide who will lead. Maybe Gates shouldn’t have been making education policy. Maybe the Koch brothers shouldn’t have decided what half the Republican party policy program should be.

Not a very startling insight, I’m afraid.

But I’m less interested in fixing capitalism than I am in thinking about post-capitalism. So what’s interesting about this isn’t the insight that this is one of the many ways capitalism fails, which I already knew, BUT that a feature of post capitalism needs to be avoiding power creep; just because someone is good at one thing doesn’t mean you hand him control of unrelated things. At most, you then put the best surgeon on the world on a committee to improve surgery, then maybe they start influencing hospital management, then maybe drugs, etc., etc.

A small movement to a related sector, without great power, but with influence, makes sense. Handing them huge power is stupid. A successful businessman isn’t necessarily good at anything but the specific business they were in, and generally isn’t good at economic policy beyond saying what’s good for him, or maybe, what’s good for their industry if what’s good for the industry isn’t also bad for them. (What was good for computers and software in the 90s was not, in my opinion, what was good for Bill Gates, and he wasn’t trying to make the best industry, but the richest Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Communism, with its central planners, had this same problem. Central planners didn’t know much about almost any of the industries they were planning.

Which leads us to a final note: I’m tired of people acting as if communism, social democracy (socialism in modern discourse), and capitalism are the entire acceptable spectrum.

Capitalists want this to be the conversation because they can say, “Hahaha, the USSR failed and Stalin was evil so you have to stick with us, there is no other alternative.

But all three systems have failed, because all three failed to handle climate change. They knew about a catastrophe for over 40 years and did nothing. That’s failure.

So the question isn’t, “Where on the communism to capitalism spectrum should we land?” The question is: “How do we create a third pole? Something new and better which avoids the known problems of previous systems?

And, along with, “It’ll come when it comes, and I’m not in direct control,” is the bigger insight I had while shopping for trout.

Something different, truly different, is needed.

Or we’re all cooked.

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Does Generational Character Exist?

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On June 15, 2020

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The answer is yes, unless you believe that the experiences people have don’t shape them.

At a given time and place, we experience similar things. In the US of the 30s, we experience poverty, desperation, and the hope of FDR. In the 50s, we have prosperity, but also stifling expectations of behaviour and a closing of possibilities for women. In the 60s, we experience the flowering of youth culture, traumatic assassinations, and civil rights victories. In the 70s, we grow up during inflation, terrorism, and the end of “the good times.” In the 90s, we grow up in helicopter households under stifling levels of supervision unknown to previous generations.

Character is formed by genetics and environment in concert. A generation which has one set of experiences is different from a generation which has another set of experiences. The average Boomer personality is different from the GI Generation, the Silents, Xers or the Lost Generation. They grew up in affluence, expected smooth sailing, grew up in a world which worked and in which their youthful experience was a bend toward justice. This is very different than the Xer or Millennial experience of growing up in an economy which was growing worse than that in which their parents had lived, and of the Millennial experience of a world where civil liberties beyond identity rights were actually constricting as they grew up.

To argue that generational differences don’t exist is to argue that nurture doesn’t matter, or to argue that there are no significant differences in the experiences of different generations in the 20th and 21st centuries. I will be frank: Anyone who believes either of those things is wrong.

Likewise, generations make different decisions at different points in their life cycles. The choice the GIs, Silents, and Boomers made in 1980 to abandon the  Democratic Party, either because they were racist southerners responding to the southern strategy (and yes, that was a racist strategy, and the people who created it have said so), or whether they voted for Reagan in  northern suburbs because they wanted those suburbs to stay white, and fuck the black people, made choices. White flight was a very real phenomenon; it is what those Boomers, GIs, and Silents did.

This does not mean all Boomers/Silents/GI Generation types made those choices, but enough did to  make the Reagan revolution possible. Being racist or keeping their suburban housing prices up was more important to them than anything else, and they voted those values. They voted repeatedly for tax cuts–again and again. You could not run except on tax cuts and expect to win. That was what they wanted, that was what they voted for, that was their character.

The massive deregulation of securites which took off in the 80s could not have happened while the Lost Generation were still the majority of decision makers and one of the largest voting blocks. They would not have allowed it, and in the early 70s when an attempt was made to get rid of the uptick rule (that you can only short sell on an uptick of a stock) was quickly abandoned because they came out ferociously against it.

Certainly they had their flaws. But that generation, having lived as adults not just through the Depression, but through the Roaring Twenties, understood that you don’t allow securities markets to get out of control.

There is far too much special pleading today, mostly from Boomers, that America just went to hell when they were the largest voting bloc and later, had the majority of politicians, “because of a few bad people.”

No, that doesn’t happen. They were complicit, they chose to vote racism and fear, they chose to vote, again and again, for tax cuts which hurt the weakest amongst us. They backed three strikes laws, they ate up Reagan’s bullshit about Welfare Queens. If they lost control of their political parties (a questionable claim in 1980), well that too was a choice: a choice not to participate actively in internal party politics.

Generations have character, tendencies in common, and they make decisions based on priorities shaped by their characters and tendencies. That some of them disagree with their peers does not change this, any more than the fact that many people in Democratic elections vote for the losing parties. A decision was still made and that decision reflects their collective values.

This does not mean there are not other causal factors: the failure of liberalism, the oil shocks, the strategies of the rich to fund an ideological apparatus outside the universities, the concentration of capital, the idiotic war in Vietnam, and so on. There are always plenty of factors, but generational character, and generational choice played a part, and until the Boomers have shuffled off the stage, and the Millennials move to the fore, our problems stand no real chance of being fixed.  (I leave GenX out, because while, on the balance, our generational character is abysmal, and our most prominent politicians are people like Rand Paul, we are too few in number to really matter: The Millennials will take over from the Boomers, in the same way that the poor Silents were essentially skipped over in favor of the Boomers.)

Character is destiny, for nations, individuals and generations. And character is formed by the experiences we have.

Originally published Jan 7, 2014.

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Your Responsibility for Insight, Understanding, and Creative Work

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On June 12, 2020

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Regular readers will know I’ve written about the logic of markets and capitalism many times. It’s one of my ongoing interests: How they work, what they do well, and where they fail.

And why.

Yesterday, at the supermarket buying a rainbow trout fillet, a thought popped up about one of the ways in which markets fail, giving people power outside their area of expertise; past where they can do good and turn to evil. It was a simple insight, though at the end of a chain of logic.

I was both very pleased and chagrined, it seemed to me that after spending 30 years on this subject I ought to have had this insight already, but I was happy it had shown up.

And then I thought something else, which was “It’s not my responsibility anyway, I get the insights I get when I get them.”

This is one of the fundamental truths of all non-mechanical creative and intellectual inquiry: You do the work, but you don’t control when you reap the results, or even what they will be.

You do the reading, you practice (I’ve written all those “logic of capitalism articles” in part as practice), you contemplate what you know, running through the links. You ask questions (and even the questions are more given than something you control) and the results are out of your hands beyond that.

You control the preparatory work. Reading, thought, conversation; you don’t control the crop.

This is even more true of creative work: You could study the great masters of painting, learn how to do all the brush strokes, spend endless hours contemplating how light, perspective, and symbolism work, but you can’t guarantee what work will come from it.

This is the great curse of such endeavors: You can put in all the work and not get a great deal as a result. The less mechanical the discipline, the less determined the results are.

But it is also a blessing: Your job is just to show up and do the work. Because you can’t control what happens after that, or what your body, heart, and spirit are doing with the material, there is no point in worrying about it; no point in self-blame. What shows up after you’ve mixed in the materials is not your responsibility.

You can relax and enjoy the process, the pleasure of ideas or aesthetics, the joy of a great idea or inspiration popping up.

Indeed, relaxation is necessary. You select a seed, plant it in the right soil, water it, ensure it gets enough sunshine, and weed it. Then, you leave it alone. The breaks, the times you don’t think about your art or area of inquiry are just as necessary as anything else. (In fact I recommend any creative workers or thinkers also be nappers.)

Generally, the more relaxed you are, the more you trust the process, the better the results.

This doesn’t mean you don’t turn your critical intellect or aesthetic sense on whatever pops into your mind. Not all ideas or inspirations are great or even good. But if you self-flagellate, you make the process slower, the results weaker. Treat every sprouted idea and impulse with joy, and you’ll get more of them, even if not all of them are as pretty or useful as you hoped.

That moment when inspiration strikes, those ah-hah moments, are one of life’s great joys. Treat them as such, nourish them, and understand you have no direct control, and you’ll have more of them.

They come when they come, their frequency and quality is not up to you–but nurturing them, evaluating them, and loving them is. They are all your children, all loved, but not all equal.

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

Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

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On May 25, 2020

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One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

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

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