Category: How to think Page 7 of 22

The simplest decision making loop is “only do things you like.”

Sometimes getting something we want (presumably something which will let us do things we like) we must do something we dislike, or wouldn’t otherwise do.

So the next decision is “is what I get from doing something I don’t like worth doing this thing I don’t like?”

Close to the state of nature, this might include hunting, gathering, planting crops and so on. Without food, water and shelter we can’t do anything else, because we’re dead.

In modern societies this means finding a way to get money. Most of us probably wouldn’t do our current job if we didn’t need money.

But what I see is that many people hate their jobs, spend all their time working, and buy stuff they don’t have time use to do things they like.

That big house in the suburbs, with a 2 hour commute either way, so they’re hardly there and can’t enjoy it.

A spouse, who they never see, but who (let’s be honest) they make money so they can have.

Various toys they rarely actually use.

Children they never see. (Presumably you got children because you thought you’d like having children? I mean, clearly many parents don’t actually, but…)

The problem of subsistence is complicated by the fact that we live in capitalist societies. What capitalism means is that a few people own the means of production: land, machines, the right to create money out of thing air, etc… So most of us can only sell our labor. Yeah, a few people can get around this, but most people can’t, or our society would stop being capitalist, since capitalism requires this concentration.

Since someone else is taking most of the surplus we produce, we have to work longer than we otherwise would. (There’s a long argument here about whether capitalism leads to being more productive and therefore less labor, we’ll pass that by for now.)

Even if you want to bugger off and set up a little subsistence society, you usually can’t, both because you can’t just go take some land, even if it’s not being used by anyone, and because taxes will destroy you. (This is what taxes are for, to force you into the capitalist economy because you need money to pay them. This is why many wars were fought over the right to pay taxes with goods or labor, and not money, or vice versa.)

And then there is the question of coercion. Police, tax collectors, the military, private security like the Pinkertons.

People who are there to stop the hoi polloi from using force against people who have a lot of stuff, and got it without other people really approving of how they got it. Natural societies are egalitarian because there are no cops, armies or private retainers, so if other people don’t want you to have it, you don’t. (This isn’t always a good thing, but sometimes it is. It varies.)

Still, at the end of the day, the natural human impulse, which we have buried under a mountain of cultural conditioning about how wonderful work is, and to not be lazy and so on, is to work only to fill needs and to spend our time doing things we love.

Mind you, I know people who love hunting, fishing and farming (never got loving farming myself, but I’ve met ‘em.) It’s not like you can’t love doing what also gets you stuff.

But maybe you don’t. And I’m not sure that it’s wrong to not want to spend most of your life doing things you don’t want to do (and often evil things) to get stuff you may not even have time to enjoy much.

Just a thought.

So perhaps remember the basic loop. And ask why we’ve set up our society to spend tons of time doing work we hate, so a few people can be very rich and the rest of us can have stuff we don’t have time to enjoy.

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MANDOS POST

Take a look at Joe Biden: He appears to have, for now at least, considerable staying power in the Democratic primary opinion polls (although, of course, this may change as the actual primaries come through). If your model of political psychology can predict a strong core of popular support for Trump without also predicting a strong core of party grassroots support for Biden, you should really rethink it from the ground up. For a core of US voters, the presence of Trump in the White House is an unprecedented emergency and an enormous well of anxiety and real, day-to-day stress.

You can call it Trump Derangement Syndrome or whatever, but the feeling is there, and implicit in this feeling is that Trump is an anomaly, a hiatus in the proper march of American institutions, that should by rights have gone to Clinton, and if not, to one of Trump’s Republican primary competitors. And the advantage of Biden, from this perspective, is precisely that Biden presents an opportunity to force the recalcitrant portions of the Democratic party and, yes, the American left (insofar as it plays electoral politics), to once again choose explicitly whether it will acknowledge and ratify that feeling, or whether it will die on a hill of particular material policies to the neglect of vital institutional decorum.

But for many left-wingers, it seems that even to admit that this is the dynamic is too much to bear. It requires admitting that the Neera Tandens of the world do not merely represent a type of think tank class traitors in cahoots with the rich, but they are actually the genuine grassroots representatives of a large portion of American society, large enough to make a big difference as to who will win the primary and the presidency.

A similar dynamic is taking place in British politics. In its Corbynite incarnation, Labour sits now on the horns of dilemma, or worse: It is perceived as too “Brexity” by enough Remain voters to make a difference, and too “Remainy” for enough Leave voters to make a difference. (As of this writing, the votes for the EU parliament elections haven’t been counted yet, but it is likely that this dynamic will remain stable until any sort of general UK election.) No matter what it does, it is very likely now that the prospect of a truly left-wing prime minister of Britain is galloping off to the distance, when it once felt so close. Let us leave aside the issue of whether Brexit itself is or can be good policy with a good outcome for most people in the abstract; it’s rather fascinating how the Brexit issue is precisely designed to press on the most divisive and ambivalent internal left-wing wounds.

I get the impression from looking at Labour’s representatives online that there exists a core of them who really, desperately wish to change the channel, to austerity and the environment–but especially austerity–but however many “deaths of despair” there may be, that is not the issue. Brexit is. And future policy outcomes, even if not directly related to EU membership, have nevertheless (and for a long time) driven through the underlying cultural cleavage represented by Brexit. Only by choosing a side at the outset, rather than engage in constructive ambiguity (Brexit, but not too much, please), could Labour have avoided the current electoral dilemma and had a shot at dealing with austerity.

A Customs Union is not the issue. How soft or hard the “deal” is–is not the issue. Nationalization is not the issue. How the Eurozone treated Greece is not the issue. Not even Ireland is the issue. Rather, immigration, free movement, and Britain’s self-perception are the issues. That remains true even if austerity and economic breakdown may be one cause of the Brexit phenomenon. The issue is a deep cultural, social cleavage of worldviews.

But who knows? Perhaps information may come to light that disqualifies Joe Biden. Perhaps on a hard Brexit, Remain voters will quickly forget what they protested against, and rejoin the Labour austerity–reversal cause in a Britain hemmed in by closed borders. Perhaps they will do so even before Brexit, giving in to the referendum in the hopes of fighting for…rejoining the EU? Restoring free movement? These seem both risky assumptions at the moment. (Admittedly the former is less risky than the latter!)

So now, what my readers may tell me is that they want to deal with austerity and they want to fight the environmental crisis and save lives and so on. And I agree! But the road to those goals runs through co-operation with parts of society that may have a different listing of priorities. They are always going to exist in some form or another; true, full social unity of purpose will never exist. We’re going to have to find a modus vivendi with those for whom Trump represents a fundamentally-threatening aesthetic emergency (as well as a material one but that seems to be secondary here). And with those for whom Brexit is not a hurdle to be gotten over in pursuit of a more urgent domestic agenda, but rather both a pressing question of material well-being and an even more pressing question of cultural priorities. The alternative is to throw up one’s hands as say, “My way, or the highway to the apocalypse,” that the world is too emotionally decadent to be saved. That, too, is a choice. But not necessarily a good one.

You go with the politics you’ve got, not the politics you want. Some of you might complain that that is simply acquiescence. No, it isn’t–it’s about recognizing first where you are, before you figure out how you’re going to get where you want to be. And folks, you’ve taken too long to figure that out.

**This Post Is By Eric Anderson**

The overwhelming majority of Americans simultaneously live in two states of denial. The first, psychological denial, enables the second – the illusion we live in something other than a State of denial.

We live in psychological denial because we continue to think that we all share the equal right to opportunity, when in fact, the profit held by the 400 richest people in America exceed the profit held by two-thirds of American households. We live in denial because we continue to think those 400 people earn their profit, when in fact, by externalizing the byproducts of production they are subsidized at the expense of our safety, health and well-being. And we live in denial because we continue to think our politicians democratically represent us, when in fact it’s far from hyperbole to say 400 oligarchs represent us.

Collectively these issues — and too many more to mention — equate to living in a State of denial. The State denies our right to financial well-being. It denies our children their right to an ecologically sustainable future. And it denies we, the people, our right to collectively choose the rules by which we govern ourselves.

But if we are the State, which our Constitution tells us that we are, then how did we get here? How did we allow the few the right to amass such obscene wealth at the expense of the many? How did we allow the few the right to condemn our children to ecologic disaster? And how did we come to allow the few the right to represent the many?

I submit that we arrived at this sordid chapter in American history because we collectively forgot that there are no rights, without attendant duties. Simply put, the many failed in their collective duty to ensure that the few uphold their duty. We failed by obsessively focusing on our own rights. We allowed the few to profit at the expense of the many before looking to our well-being. But for the sake of our progeny, it is time the many force the few to do their duty. That duty is to place the precaution principle before profit.

The precautionary principle states: Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm.

The principle’s wisdom is demonstrated by the resilience of several age-old adages. We have long been warned to look before we leap. Warned to save nine stiches, by making one in time. Warned to avoid a pound of cure, by taking an ounce of prevention. And warned that it’s better to be safe, than sorry.

For example, beginning in the 1970’s many economists and business leaders began a thought crusade promoting market efficiency, proceeding on the untested theory that, if allowed to become obscenely wealthy, the benefits afforded the rich through deregulation would “trickle down” to everyone else. In hindsight, however, it’s not difficult to argue that the theory presented “an uncertain potential for significant harm.” And indeed, we have been harmed by the political backlash ensuing from the unprecedented economic inequality that has resulted. Would the many not have been better served by a policy prohibiting this neoliberal agenda until it’s proponents had shown it presented no appreciable risk of harm?

So too, in response to overwhelming public dismay over the ecologic destruction wrought by a century of unbridled capitalism, Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into law on January 1, 1970. Unfortunately, NEPA is all sound and no fury. It requires only Federal agencies to take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of their actions, and to engage all practicable measures to prevent environmental harm. A hard look? All practicable measures? Would we be facing the civilization threatening crisis we call anthropogenic global warming if, instead, we had required the prohibition of all activity posing a risk of significant ecological harm unless the proponent of the activity showed that it presented no appreciable risk? Would we really be worse off today for having placed precaution for our delicate ecology, over profit for the few?

And finally, we hear no end to the furor over the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United vs. FEC. But the process of rubber stamping rule by oligarchs arguably began in 1976 with the Court’s ruling in Buckley vs. Valeo. There, it was decided that money and speech are synonymous under the 1^st Amendment. And two years later, in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the Supreme Court recognized corporation’s right to put that money where their mouth is, concluding that the value of speech in the course of political debate does not depend on the identity of the speaker. But two issues go unspoken in these decisions. The first is the volume of speech. The many are only allowed to turn the volume of their speech up to 1. But the few richest among us are allowed to turn the volume up to 11. The second is the duration of speech. The many only speak as long as they live. While the few, through their corporations, are allowed to speak in perpetuity. Would not the many be better served by a policy that prohibited such legal assault by the few until it’s proponents had shown that it presented no appreciable risk of harm to our democracy?

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau states “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil for one who strikes at the root.” Make no mistake; there is no greater evil than a society that allows the few to profit at the expense of the many by exacting our equality, our ecology, and our democracy. Surprise, surprise — money is the root of the evil that bedevils us. But the good news is that the time tested, common sense cure has been right in front of our faces all along. We must demand a Constitutional Amendment forever enshrining the precautionary principle in the Constitution as a shield for we, the people, against the incessant pursuit of profit by the few. No better remedy for our ills exists. The many must begin to do their duty, and force the few to place the precautionary principle before profit.

The best short definition I’ve heard, courtesy of my friend Stirling, is that morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.

Your morality is what makes you a good wife or husband, dad or mother. A good daughter or son. A good friend. Even a good employee or boss to the people you know personally in the company.

Your ethics are what makes you a good politician. It is what makes you a statesman. It is also what makes you a good, humane CEO of any large company (and yes, you can make money and pay your employees well as Costco proves.)

When you’re a politicians or a CEO, most of what you do will affect people you don’t know, people you can’t know, people who are just statistics to you. You have no personal connection to them, and you never will. This is at the heart of Stalin’s comment that “a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” Change the welfare rules, people will live or die, suffer or prosper. Change the tax structure, healthcare mandates, trade laws, transit spending–virtually everything you do means someone will win, and someone will lose. Sometimes fatally.

Ethics is more important than morality in creating a functioning society. This comes back to what I was discussing earlier, that it is worse to kill or harm more people than to kill or harm fewer people.

Morality dictates that you take care of your family, friends and even acquaintances first. It is at the heart of the common admonition to “put  your family first.” Whenever I hear a politician say “I put my family first,” I think “Then you shouldn’t be in public office.”

We call the family the building block of society, but this is nonsense except in the broadest sense. The structure of the family is entirely socially based, generally on how we make our living. A hundred years ago in the US and Canada, the extended family was the norm, today the nuclear family is, with single parent families coming on strong. In China, this transition, from extended to nuclear family, took place in living memory, many adults still in their prime can remember extended families, and were raised in them. The wealthy often have their children raised by servants (I was for my first five years), tribal societies often put all male children into the same tent or tents at puberty, and so on. A hundred and fifty years ago, children were taught at home, by the extended family, and not by professional teachers. They spent much more time with family until they were apprenticed out, if they were. To be sure, children must be born and raised for society to continue, men and women must come together to get that done, but there are many ways to do it, and God did not come down and mandate the nuclear family.

This may seem like an aside from the main point, but it is not. Family is not fundamental, it is not first.  Society is first, and family is shaped by the needs and ideology of the society.

For a large society–a society where you can’t know everyone–to work, ethics must come before morality, or ethics and morality must have a great deal of overlap. By acting morally, you must be able to act ethically.

Our current ethical system requires politicians to act unethically, to do great harm to people they don’t know, while protecting those they do. This can hardly be denied, and was on display in the 2007/8 financial collapse and the bailout after. The millions of homeowners and employees politicians and central bankers did not know were not helped, and the people the politicians and central bankers and treasury officials did know, were bailed out.  Austerity, likewise, has hurt people politicians don’t know, while enriching the corporate officers and rich they do know.

The structure of our economy is designed to impoverish people we don’t know. For developed nations’ citizens, this means people in undeveloped nations. For the rich, this means cutting the wages of the middle class. For the middle class, it means screwing over the poor (yes, the middle class does the day to day enforcement, don’t pretend otherwise.) We are obsessed with “lowering costs” and making loans, and both of those are meant to extract maximum value from people while giving them as little as they can in return.

We likewise ignore the future, refusing to build or repair infrastructure, to invest properly in basic science, and refusing to deal with global warming. These decisions will overwhelmingly affect people we don’t know: Any individual infrastructure collapse won’t hit us, odds are, and global warming will kill most of its victims in the future. The rich and powerful, in particular, believe that they will avoid the consequences of these things. They think it will affect people other than them.

To put the needs of the few before the needs of the many, in public life, is to be a monster. But even in private life, if we all act selfishly, as our reigning ideology indicates we should, we destroy ourselves. If we all put only ourselves and those we love first, and damn the cost to everyone else, our societies cannot and will not be prosperous, safe, or kind.

The war of all against all is just as nasty when it is waged by small kin groups as when it is waged by individuals.

(Reprinted from 2013: this is the most popular article, by traffic, I ever wrote.)