Why Read or Write About the Grand Affairs of Humanity?

I’ve been thinking hard about why I write. It started as an attempt to fix the big things, by explaining what was wrong and how to fix them.

That didn’t work.

Really didn’t work. Almost 100% failure.

Unfortunately much of my writing has continued in this mode: explain the big wrong things. Didn’t work in the 00’s. Didn’t work in the 10’s. Unlikely to work in the 20s.

I’ve lost a lot of my heart for it. Explaining the world to people makes very little difference to the world, at least when I do it. Predicting trends and events years in advance, same.

You need to go back to the Tao…it all flows from there…

V, I had the same thought for Ian.

Ian, I love watching your progress. It is easy to get caught up in people being attracted to your writing, but it only attracts people who know or will know. And there are so many more people who cannot know. This is why writing never changes the world. The Dao moves at its own pace.

If you have a moment, take a look at this segment from “The Writings of Chuang Tzu”

http://nothingistic.org/library/chuangtzu/chuang26.html

Ian:

As someone who has followed your work for many years now and has had many discussions both online and offline with you, I would like to say something frank. I think you have very good goals and a very good model of the world, but it’s a good model in the sense of making a very good telescope and then attempting to see the stars by looking through it at the wrong end, which I think maybe explains at least a little bit of the cause of your frustration. Where I think you went wrong was that you confused your moral aims with the starting point of your analysis and attempted to reason people into feeling differently, paying attention to different things, and acting differently based on that moral analysis of world affairs.

I’m convinced that the model of the world you’re using would have been more effective if you had looked through it from the perhaps less satisfying perspective of people’s emotional and cultural make-up, how people pay attention to the world, etc. Look through people as a natural object.

I think you succumbed to a moral dualism about nature and people that is very common on the left — taking the idea of people as moral agents too literally. One of the neoliberal perspective on the world is precisely that they don’t do this — that’s why they can talk about “nudging” etc. and run circles around the left from the perspective of practical politics, whereas the present-day left can’t heap enough opprobrium on that way of approaching people and the world: a fatal weakness.

There’s this thing people do where they tell a story about the past, and the story makes sense and gives meaning to events and experience, and then they turn around to expect a story to predict or control the future. And, in a way, stories do control us, if not so much the outcome of events: culture consists of little else than the stories we tell to dress the rituals of social and political life.

Most of us want to believe the story so badly that even when we know perfectly well that mechanics must be involved in determining the material outcome, we remain baffled when we witness a contradiction between the story told to distract us and the apparent result. A stage magician demonstrates this as a phenomenon to amuse us. A priest paints over the cycle of a fearful and fragile life with solemnity, while imploring faith in absurd stories.

I don’t even want to say what an economist does with story. Or, an historian. Scientist? Hmmm. Science is a challenging case, because we want true stories of cause-and-effect, or at least that’s a story we tell about ourselves, seekers of truth and knowledge: science would seem to be replacing superstition, revealing the magician’s “secret”, and gaining actual technical control where we previously only dreamed — those are stories about science. Actual science?

I flirted with an academic career in economics after an unaccomplished career in economics as a profession. It always irritated me that academic economists would so often insist that we were in the business of seeking explanations, which did not seem very scientific to me. The refusal to be critical of the stories economists sold as doctrine gave away the game in the end. But, I digress.

And, then there’s politics. Politics is not only about stories. There are authority, rules, laws and institutions, not to mention distribution of power and goods. But contested storytelling is a big, central part of it and often seems to control the path politics takes and the outcomes it achieves. “Seems” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, which may be the case where ever story is doing a lot of work.

I greatly valued Edmund S. Morgan’s Inventing the People for making the fictionalizing an explicit part of political history in a way that did not demand putting aside his reader’s critical faculties. The mastery that figures like Lincoln, FDR, or Churchill demonstrated at historical junctures came down in part to storytelling skill remembered as rhetorical bravado. I know an uncelebrated man who had a role in gay liberation who calls his deliberate sowing of rhetorical seeds over decades a kind of magic.

I have witnessed in recent years the ability to foist increasingly absurd narratives into American politics from the “center” and the inability of what passes for the left to see or take responsibility for the consequences of their rhetoric. Something is wrong with our critical sense, that the stories we are offered can be of such poor quality and still find consumers. to be continued, no doubt

Has there been much effort put into exploring how they do it? With “they” being the corporate persuaders. How do the persuaders coax common people into becoming so materialistically greedy that they’ll completely ignore their own religious strictures, the needs of their children, their own oncoming reality?

If you’re like me, you consider yourself nothing special, just a regular guy. Yet you have to walk around all day through this idiocracy like some hapless Joe Bauers, feeling like nobody else cares or even knows. I feel like I’m constantly explaining simple things which I’d hoped that other people should easily figure out on their own.

I think most people here are immune to corporate tactics. We aren’t addicted to shopping on Amazon. We don’t drive the latest dark colored SUV. We don’t sit through endless TV commercials waiting for our next few minutes of movie content to arrive. We know a crappy product when we see it, and a greedy, corrupt and stupid man posturing as some great world leader is painfully obvious to us.

But if you’re like me, you have a hard time realizing that most people just are aren’t like us. They’re different.

I’d like to hear about all the mistakes you’ve made and all the predictions you’ve gotten wrong.

As for “materialistically greedy”: it’s not, I think, a sound premise. Without wading too deeply into the murky waters of philosophy, everything that we can see, use, touch, consume, know is “material”; one might argue this holds true for even thought, light and the void itself. We are all inescapably bound to matter, anyway. There’s no negating the needs this creates.

Acquisition and desire are amoral. I doubt they are subject to abolition, at any rate. So, if we (whomever that turns out to be) are going to create (a) world(s) that don’t produce capitalist commodities and their captive end users, we have to make sure to stop judging, blaming and moralizing those end users. The rich feed off the capture, the labor, and the conflicts. They monetize and weaponize *everything*.

Moral fervor and passion plays won’t, don’t and can’t stop them. And we do have to stop them. They are burning the world.

@Willy

Adam Curtis, “The Century of the Self” will show you how most Westerners are persuaded to be constant consumers. Or at least they were until the virus… Blame Bernays.

Adam Curtis’s YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAWxZyfEPejhGJv8Z4wbKBw/videos

Dan, the other Dan named Marino threw a lot of bad passes. But we don’t remember those so much now do we?

Do you know somebody who we should be reading who’s right far more often?

Long time reader, Thanks for all the words over the years. It does help to hear some one tell you that you aren’t nuts, the world really is going off the rails.

Best wishes with whatever you choose to do.

@ Krake,
Well, the commodity users, I do forgive them. For they know not what they do. But could somebody get me off this goddamned cross already?! They seem to mindlessly make the best of whatever opportunities are promised to them, even if the opportunities never happen or could ruin them in the end. Damned sheeple.

As for extraction technicians, I do have a cousin who was a staunch Humphrey supporter as a kid, who now gives speeches as a guru of neoliberal style supply chain management. Her less aggressively temperamented siblings haven’t changed much though. Bernies according to their Facebook pages. How she herself changed, I dunno. Damned status jobs that pay well.

People around here speak of the incompetency of our leadership caste. I’ve known a few who might fit that description. ESTJs they be. Fearless, driven, rational, traditional, tribal-minded, sometimes bullying, and often way out of their depth when it comes to complex problem solving. Their kind may not be heroically leading the tribes defense from wolves anymore, but the ones I know seem to have retained all that innate chutzpah. I find myself walking on eggshells around them, having to pay fake homage to their ‘superior’ abilities which are often not up to a lot of tasks in our complicated society. Damned stuffed shirts.

Then there are the more intellectual of leaders, like the Clintons and Obamas, who are so (rationalizing?) in their positions that they’re blind to all the statistics. Maybe they have idealistically nutty and/or corrupt advisors, who wear so many merit badges that they’ll always have a job, somewhere. Or maybe these leaders just don’t care because they don’t have the ability. So it’s all a game for them, the only one they’re any good at. Players.

I’d give all candidates for anything powerful all kinds of public tests for them to prove their abilities. We don’t let just anybody play in the NFL or drive a 797F, now do we? But then I remember that most people like candidates just because of the way they look or make them feel. The guy who can make everything better by raising their taxes usually makes them feel uncomfortable. It’s one less status toy they think they’ll get to buy, one less corporations think they’ll have to sell.

I’d rather struggle, because it gives me a hobby that fits my personality better than going around playing pooter pranks. And dancing around saying “I told you so!” might be cathartic.

Ian, “Yours is one of the voices I think with”, also. I’m guessing there’s anyways a hundred people like Joan and myself out and about. That’s a pretty good ripple, for starters.

It’s also useful to think of “success” or lack thereof within context.

Where would the world be now if there were no ongoing legions of people giving it a go because they care, but still “losing”. Damage control is winning, kinda. Sorta.

Looking forward to your explorations.

December 12th, 2000

I was a big fan of the Daily Howler in early days of political blogs. (Wikipedia says 1998!)

I actually thought criticism mattered then. I believed in caution about the consequences of being foolish, collectively as well as individually.

The left used to be conceited about having higher standards, morally and intellectually; they still have the conceit, but the standards went out the window a long time ago. I was shocked twenty years ago when people shrugged off having an election stolen with only the most cynical legal justification. Now, they want me to vote for a dementia patient — I am not at all confident that much more than half the votes claimed by him were actually cast.

And, I am less shocked that the DNC would cynically steal an election than that they would be so feckless as to steal it for someone so clearly incapable of doing the job and not feel the least embarrassment.

Talk about leaders NOT being willing to do the right things!

That moral agency thing — whether ordinary people possess much moral agency — is a delicate thing. Even the “empathy” construct. I am a scrupulous person ethically, and sensitive to social expressions of emotion. But, I have known criminals and a couple of true psychopaths, who I only recognized because I was instructed by a sympathetic conman. People can have great empathy and use their empathy to manipulate, sell, defraud others. The idea that sociopaths lack empathy is foolish. And, I doubt that it has much relevance to leadership in hierarchical societies. Effective leaders in bureaucracies have enormous emotional intelligence; they have the talents of great novelists tracing out the dynamics of character and drama. The distinction between the sociopath, who may actually be more emotionally attuned to others and the psychopath who is fantasizing gruesome deeds or may just be angry and self-loathing can be vital. No small businessman who has had to operate a public restroom can be in any doubt that minor psychopathy is pretty common among the poor and working class and even middle class. Its expression might be vandalism rather than tax cuts, but there are lots of people who are not happy to go along to get along.

What seems to me to have changed in my lifetime in American politics is the bedrock sense of self-governance, of being a participant in a community of shared responsibility. As government has become unresponsive to all but the very wealthy, the possibility of participating and the payoff has faded.

I do not think it is entirely about television.

There are a whole set of stories beloved on the left about what the Right did to build the neoliberal dystopia. But, the left lost interest in fighting for the working class against the rich, too. Adam Curtis, in one of his classic documentaries focuses on how New York City was brought to heel by Wall Street with a failed bond issue. The new left could not have cared less and socially progressive people were doing art criticism. Contempt for racists excluded essential elements of a coalition that could govern from anywhere below first percentile. The “deplorables” is a political strategy first and foremost.

I wish Ian had won more battles. I appreciate that he was always committed to the truth. I wish Bernie Sanders had won more battles, too, and that he had stuck to the truth more.

To me, in a world of uncertainty, seeking to tell the truth is more important than winning power. Preserving testimony to the truth is the most important thing to fight for.

–The big stuff is pretty much locked in now–

This is true, I fear, but that doesn’t mean that large-scale trends [and their smaller-scale, community-and-individual consequences] aren’t worth chronicling.

As a newish reader (past couple of years), for me it’s been comforting to realize I’m not alone in my understanding of the Big Picture, even though I arrived at your basic conclusions via a very different path. You provide people who see things in a way similar to yours moral support, even if we don’t acknowledge this as often as we ought.

I totally get the sense of frustration (maybe sadness, too?) that your work doesn’t appear to have had much influence, or at least as much as you’d hoped 20 years ago. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. It is.

The single public event that signaled to me the end of the Republic was the mass pardons on Iran-Contra that Bush issued in 1992 and the failure of Clinton to prosecute Bush. By national and international law those toads were criminals. There had been plenty of criminality in U.S. government previously, brought to full flower under Nixon, but at least Nixon was ejected from the government. Ford’s pardon was wrong but one could argue that it was anti-climactic and affected only the head. Bush’s pardon effectively said, “We follow no laws and you are protected.” And then Clinton said, “Yep”. And then the Obama dismissed the entire criminality of the second Bush’s crimes with “We will look forward, not back”. Too bad we tortured some folks. And promoted the torturers.

Bruce, are you confusing empathy with observational skills? Both bird watchers and duck hunters are often good observers. Yet one admires and the other kills. I think the difference in behavior involves empathy, culture, and rationalization.

Psychopathy is a subset of sociopathy. The latter is a behavior, the former is a born behavior which is considered incorrigible by the experts.

Everybody has some psychopath inside of them, given the right circumstances. It’s the ‘drive for best survival’ instinct, which is usually held in check by innate empathic emotions and by environmental circumstance.

For personal example, as a young adult I had a ‘pet’ garden slug which I enjoyed observing. I ate summertime dinners outside my rental home and I noticed that slug emerging every evening from its hidey hole. I’d throw a scrap of food like a watermelon rind near it to see how long it would take to detect it. I called it Sluggy. One day I found it squashed into the ground. My visiting cousin admitted to the murder of my slimy little friend, and a part of me loathed him for doing such a terrible thing. Years later, with a home and garden if my own, I was exasperated by all the slug damage I was experiencing and commenced to squashing them myself. I noticed that they’re cannibals and will eat the remains of their own kind, so I’d use the carcass piles as bait and would repeatedly go out to crush them. I felt pretty good about all the slug mass murder I was doing, to such a disgusting creature. I’d even cackle to myself about crushing them all and hearing the lamentations of their women-men. The exercising of personal power feels good. And mine wasn’t being held in check by empathy anymore, having been rationalized away.

I’ve seen true psychopaths in the workplace. A true psychopath is born to enjoy creating chaos. It’s the common theme amongst them all. The smart ones never make it obvious because they know they’re so vastly outnumbered by normals, so they fake empathic displays. They care nothing about society or culture. But the socially successful ones have learned how to camouflage themselves by mimicking the behavior of their prey. Like a good duck hunter. The ones I knew in the office were also pretty good at changing office societies and cultures, to bring out the worst in people. Very bad apples they were, a cultural poison.

Just because bias is a strategy for conserving cognitive resources, doesn’t mean predators aren’t out to use your own biases against you.

I went down the dark path of studying psychopathy when I did the big WTF?! after dealing with one in the worlkplace. I tried guilt, empathy, reason, negotiation… you name it. And every little strategy I tried to resolve our conflict and modify his behavior was, the end of the day, only ever used by the other against me. He’d pretend to be my new best friend, to want to reconcile for really real this time, and then wack me over the head when I gave in. Even if it got totally irrational, with at great personal risk to themselves, it didn’t matter. It was like some kind of obsessive game or something. It seemed that the only thing in it for the other was the thrill of the hunt. And then the light bulb in my head turned on.

As a kid I remember a commotion outside my bedroom window. It sounded like a bully and a victim. I looked outside and sure enough, saw a big kid and a small kid. But then I realized that the small kid was the bully. The big kid kept yelling at the small kid to “Just stop it!” “I don’t know who the hell are but you’re frickin crazy!” And then the big kid would push the little kid down or headlock him or punch him. But the little kid would just keep getting right back up and throw rocks at his head again. Apparently, the big kid was just walking home from the playfield and happened to walk in front of the wrong house. And now he was a target for a bored psychopath. I knew of the little kid. He was TR, the one nobody was allowed to play with. In later years I got to know his cousin, who said that his was the weirdest family. As a 16 year old his sister who I worked with at a grocery store enticed a 35 year old manager into cheating on his wife and ruined his relationship, family and career, before moving on to somebody else. She had an strange manipulative coldness about her. TR wound up in prison. Bad parenting or financial stress? Not according to the cousin. Their father was a moderately successful attorney.

Speaking of psychopaths, I couldn’t help being amused at Mark Zuckerberg getting on his high horse criticizing Jack Dorsey of twitter for putting a pretty anodyne factcheck up on another attempt by Trump to fix the 2020 election by squelching mail-in voting.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg would sell children online if they thought they could make a buck at it. I am sure there have been other duos as evil, Bush-Cheney comes to mind, but those two rank way up there.