Ian Welsh

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

Category: Ethics Page 2 of 8

The Totalizing Principle Of Profit, and the Death of the Sacred

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On October 13, 2021

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The UK is experiencing some of the worst shortages of oil. One contributing factor is that the old strategic reserve of oil was privatized, then when it was considered unprofitable to keep it running (repairs and maintainence were needed) most of it was gotten rid of.

A totalizing principle, or system, reduces every part of society to one value, or relationship.

In capitalism, the principle is profit.

In capitalism the assumption is that if something is making a profit, it’s also providing value. You should only do things that provide value and the more money something makes the more value it has. So, the strategic reserve wasn’t providing profits, and had to go, since it provided no value.

The next piece of logic is that someone who is making a profit obviously knows how to provide value. The more money someone has, the more control they have, and the more money they should have. The tendency of capitalism to lead to money concentrating in a few hands is good: those are the people who know how to create money and thus value.

Capitalism, like other totalizing systems, works best when it’s kept in check by something else: religious values, democratic values, enlightenment values, or whatever, backed up by forces powerful enough to resist totalization: governments or churches, for example.

When it doesn’t it tends to destroy the conditions for its own functioning: all the wealth goes to the top, for example, and you get a Great Depression due to a demand crash, as happened in the 30s.

Or capitalism makes massive profits based on damaging the environment, and you have an environmental collapse — ongoing and upcoming.

Capitalism tries to reduce all relationships to monetary ones. When you privatize trains, or healthcare, you’re following the profit motive. When you make everyone work, then have their childrens raised by strangers (daycare, and to an extent school) you’re totalizing it. When people say domestic and emotional work should be paid, they’ve bought into a totalizing system: since they’re creating value, money should pass hands.

Capitalism thus reduces everything to money: if it has value it should involve money, and if it pays little or nothing it obviously doesn’t have value. So if you’re low paid, and you want to be seen as valued, you want money.

Even when we try to fix the problems of capitalism we try to do so thru money: so we have carbon offsets (paid), and there is a movement for a carbon tax, and so on.

It doesn’t seem to occur to us that some things just shouldn’t be allowed: don’t dump more than X amount of carbon into the atmosphere, period, or you go to prison. Or make sure that insulin doesn’t cost $400, or you, yes, go to prison.

In properly functioning societies there are sacred objects: things which money is not allowed to control. Perhaps this is our relationship with God; perhaps it is “don’t cut down all the forests”, perhaps it is access to healthcare for all no matter how little money they have; or perhaps it is access to law, so we provide lawyers to those who can’t afford them (and not overworked lawyers who can’t represent well.)

Perhaps we have public financing of election and limits of private spending to influence elections, since we value democracy and don’t think that rich people should control the government.

When a totalizing systems destroys other values, and degrades sacred goods and values and items, it destroys the circumstances required for its own existence, but in so doing it also brings catastrophe upon the society is totalizing.

You can see this today, not just in the shortages (cause by over-optimizing supply chains to increase profit), or in the environment, or the lack of access to law for most of the population, or in huge prices for health care and a refusal to share vaccines throughout the world, but in almost everything that is causing our societies to degrade. Since nothing is sacred except money to us any more, nothing survives unless it makes maximum profits for the rich.

But the things we need most, like clean air and water, a liveable climate, affordable healthcare, healthy food, and loving family relationships not destroyed by the stress of overwork and poverty, are more valuable for short to mid term profits when sacrificed than when protected and strengthened.

The “solution” of trying to give everything a price and micro-managing incentives doesn’t work. The problem isn’t so much incentives, it is that some things have non-monetary value which cannot and should not have a price put on them. Some things are sacred: democracy, love and unspoiled nature, among many others.

Treated as sacred, these things allow markets to work. Treated as part of markets, their degradation eventually destroys the very environment capitalism needs to continue, and to be more beneficial than harmful.

A world where nothing is sacred, and where no value stands above profit, is a world that will be destroyed.

As it is being.

 

The Lack of Belief in Good

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On September 16, 2021

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Are humans good, bad, or neutral?

It’s an old philosophical debate and not just in the West. Confucius thought they were born neutral, for example, while the later Confucian Mencius felt they were good, noting that everyone who saw a child fall into a well would be horrified. Others, including many Confucians and the Christian church, with original sin, have felt that humans are born bad, and they have to be made good.

This is also the general view of the ruling ideology of the West: Ecnonomism. Humans are greedy, selfish, and only care for themselves. Popular biology, derived from books like Dawkins “The Selfish Gene” and 19th century social Darwinism has led to similar views.

If you think humans are bad, the question becomes how do you get them to do good? Traditional Christianity’s answer was, “Hit them while they’re kids, a lot, that’ll make them good.” (spare the rod, spoil the child), which can be judged fairly by Christianity’s record: “judge by the fruits” being reasonable when dealing with people who claim to follow Jesus.

Economism’s answer is, “If they’re greedy and selfish, give them rewards for doing what you want.”

Strangely, giving lots of rewards to bankers, CEOs, executives, and politicians has not made them better.

Now, of course, a pure selfishness/greed/incentives disciple might reply, “But they are the ones who decide what they get rewarded for, and that doesn’t make them good. You have to reward people for doing good!” But those same disciples are the folks, or descendants of the folks, who argued that the only thing corporate executives were responsible for was raising stock prices, and that giving them stock options was how to do that.

Didn’t work out. Teaching greedy people to be more greedy by rewarding their greed had the results one would expect: even more greed, in a lovely spiral upwards, while the middle and bottom of society had its heart cut out.

My own observation has been that when incentives are removed people are more likely to do the right thing. You don’t want doctors to own stock in drug companies, or make more money the more surgeries they do. Conversely, punishing surgeons for bad results actually lead to surgeons being unwilling to do risky surgeries which were still medically indicated: they wouldn’t want their success/fail rate to go down.

I’ve written in the past that I consider most humans neither good nor bad, but weak. They do more or less what their group wants. But really I’d say that humans, absent fear and incentives, have a slight bias to good. Most people like helping people, don’t like hurting people, and so on, as long as they themselves are not hurting or blinded by greed.

The moment a lot of people become chronically scared or greedy, however, that goes away. The scared are defensive and ready to be angry and hate, the greedy become sociopathic or even psychopathic, concerned only for themselves and, sometimes, a few people around them. Furthermore, incentives always cause tunnel vision — people pursuing incentives ignore everything that doesn’t get them to the incentive, and even well designed incentives leave out much that should be done.

As horrible as the idea is to us, the best thing to do with people is for leaders to be selected because they are kind and good, to set goals for oganizations without significant incentives (this doesn’t mean don’t track and correct), and remove fear from people. Make sure they know their needs will be met, and that no one wants to hurt them, and that help is available.

In such circumstances, strangely, people blossom. Happy people are more productive. About half of business literature can be summed up as, “If you treat employees well, they are way more productive, but most bosses are cunts who don’t want to do this, despite a huge preponderance of evidence.”

But when people are happy and not scared, of course, not only can you not get most of them to do evil, they don’t act servile and hop-to-it at your every command. For most bosses, ordering people around is the primary pleasure of the job (no, don’t pretend), even more than profit.

And since, with neoliberalism, they can be rich and have scared serfs jumping at their every statement of “frog,” recompense having almost no correlation with productivity or even profits, they can have the best of both worlds: rich and with what amounts to slaves, without the responsibility of caring for their servants.

This lies at the heart of all the screams about how Covid has made people unwilling to work at shitty minimum wage jobs, and government needs to stop giving them money, so they have no choice but to go groveling back to their masters for work they hate that may not even pay rent on a one-bedroom apartment.

If you insist on saying people are bad, then treating them badly, if you must be obeyed and show no concern for your slaves, then don’t be surprised if you live in Hell, and if the only thing keeping Hell from your own doors is having a TON of money.

There is another way, and maybe one day, having tried every evil thing, we’ll give it a shot.

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Three Simple Policy Heuristics

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On August 31, 2021

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A number of people (and most of those who run our societies) don’t understand the policy default: “Be kind.”

There is a widespread belief that life is shit, “hard choices” have to be made, and those hard choices usually involve someone else suffering and dying.

Life may well be lousy, but most “hard choices” don’t have to be made, and those hard choices are one of the main reasons why life is lousy for so many people.

The most important thing to understand is this: Harm ripples, kindness ripples. People you hurt go on to hurt other people. People who are treated with kindness become better people, or more prosperous people, and go on to help others. Yes, there are exceptions (we’ll deal with those people), but they are exceptions.

First: Do no harm.

Again, people who are abused, go on to abuse others. Rapists were often raped before they raped others. People who have no money can’t buy other people’s goods. People who are crippled physically, mentally, emotionally, or socially cannot contribute fully to society and tend not to make those around them happier or more prosperous. Rather the reverse.

While it is necessary to imprison some people for committing crimes (though far fewer than most societies imprison), it is not necessary to make having been convicted an economic death sentence. People who can’t get living wage jobs (or any job at all) when they get out of prison gravitate back to crime.

We don’t want people raped in jails, because many become rapists themselves and virtually all are damaged by it. When they get out of jail, we have to deal with that damage. We don’t want them stuck in solitary confinement for long periods of time because brain scans show this inflicts traumatic brain damage, and, yeah, we wind up having to deal with those people when they get out.

If someone runs out of money, we don’t want them to lose their primary residence. Even if you are soulless, you shouldn’t want a society that creates homeless people; it takes far more money to support someone on the street than it does to pay for almost anyone’s mortgage or rent. We don’t want people who are sick to be denied health care because they become pools for disease. We’re treating these people eventually anyway (when they turn 65 or become so poor they qualify for Medicaid), which is far more expensive than dealing with their illnesses when they first present themselves.

We don’t want to destroy other countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc.) because their people become refugees with whom we must then contend; this produces scads of angry people, some of who may wind up killing us, and it further ruins their economies, rendering them unable to buy our goods (except our weapons).

Damage to others who live on the same planet as you can comes back to haunt you. Damage to others in your own society will come back to haunt you.

So, first, do no harm. Yes, there are exceptions, but they are radically rare. Almost every bit of harm we do to others through government policy is a bad idea. The only common class of exception is covered in rule three.

Second: Be kind.

As the harm you do others comes back to you (insofar as you are “society”), so the good you do comes back to you. I almost don’t know what to say about this, as it is so brutally obvious. Happy people are better to be around. Prosperous people are better to be around. Healthy people are better to be around.

Only when goods are legitimately scarce is there reason not to help make other people better off, and, in those cases, it is only applicable to the scarce goods, and only until you can make the goods no longer scarce. Short on food? Ration and plant more crops.

But in today’s society, all the significant shortages of the goods which matter most are artificial; we have more than enough food to feed everyone. The US has five empty homes for every homeless person. Europe has two empty homes for every homeless person. Clothing is cheap as hell. Access to the internet is vastly overpriced. Our main sink is just carbon: We need to spew less of that, and we can do that. Our second main limitation is the destruction we are imposing on biodiversity, but we could produce our food with far less impact on the environment if we wanted to, and, even in the short term, we’d be better off for it.

People need stuff: food, housing, safety, education. None of these things should be in shortage anywhere in the world, including safety. They are in shortage because we choose to act greedy, violent, and selfish when we do not need to.

Third: Remove the ability or reason for people to do harm.

Humanity is not a race of saints. It does not need to be. Most people are neither good nor bad, they are weak. They do what the social and physical environment disposes them to do, with the social environment being far more important in the modern era.

Still, some people are bad. The hard core is probably around five percent of the population. And many other people are damaged, because our society has damaged them. They take that damage out on others.

The most dangerous class of malefactors are incentivized to do evil. Think bankers, corporate CEOs, billionaires (almost all of whom do evil as routine). These people do evil because they profit greatly from it, BUT (and most of you will not believe this) what makes a profit in the modern world is overwhelmingly a social choice. The government chooses who can create money, what counts as profit, who is taxed how much, who is subsidized how much, what is property, how much it costs to ship by rail vs. road, etc., etc.

There are independent technological and environmental variables, but they are overwhelmed by social variables. Change the variables and you change the incentives.

The policy is simple: Take away incentives for people to do evil. Take away their ability to do evil (a.k.a., their excessive access to money.)

Those who continue to do evil, lock them up. Do it completely humanely, no rape, no violence, no solitary confinement. But make it so they can’t do evil. While they are in prison, try to rehabilitate them. Norway has half the recidivism rate of the US for a reason: Rehabilitation does work for some people.

When they get out, bring them back into society. Make sure they have housing, food, clothing, and so on. If they do evil again, lock them up again.

None of this is complicated, in principle. This is simple. This is straightforward. It is work, mind you, we must stay on top of incentives and ability, and not allow anyone to become so rich or so powerful that they are able to buy the rule-makers or be above the law.

None of this should be controversial, though it is. None of this is new, these strands of thought go back to Confucius, Ancient Greece, and beyond. They are only controversial because it is in the interest of many for these ideas to be painted as such. And many people, having done evil, develop a taste for it.

Running a society well is hard, in the details it is complicated, but in principle, it is simple. Do the right thing. Make it so that people do well by doing the right thing. Make it so people who do things that are harmful to others stop doing them.

When you want a good society to live in, inculcate these principles. Until then, know that you will only live in a good society briefly and by chance.

Originally Published September 3, 2015. Back to the top for a new generation of readers.

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Who Deserves the Good Things in Life?

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On May 5, 2021

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On Wall Street, they have sayings. One of them is that they “eat what they kill.”

They mean this in a good way — that they earn their money by making the right bets or by landing the big clients. That money is theirs: They went and got it.

Of course, one could see it in another way: All the businesses, Private Equity, for example, has destroyed, buy buying them, paying themselves, loading the businesses up with the debt, and then letting them go under.

They earned that money by killing. ToysRUs for example, which was making a profit until they loaded it up with debt to pay for their takeover and the bonuses they gave themselves.

Or, say, causing the 2008 financial crisis, which had a bill that has to be at least 100 trillion and involved millions of people losing their jobs, homes, livelihoods, and in many cases, lives.

Finance, that is to say, demonstrably does more damage to everyone else than it does good, but it pays very very well, especially now that they own every government, so central banks are willing to print trillions of dollars to socialize their losses, while letting them keep the money they stole.

They don’t even actually win bets: If, in 2008, they had taken their losses, they would have all gone out of business.

It’s just a scam; a matter of brute force. They can print money and borrow money at rates ordinary people will never see and government makes sure they never take real losses and that markets go up no matter what is happening to the economy.

Then, there are the studies that show that the more money someone has, the worse their behaviour — the more sociopathic and less generous. Poorer people give more to charity as a percentage of income or wealth than rich people, which makes sense, as most rich people are rich because they care about money more than anything else.

The simple fact is that people like nurses, teachers, janitors, garbage pick up, farm workers, and factory floor workers are who create most value. On the intellectual and creative side, the designers, engineers, scientists, and other creators are the ones who create value, not the suits. In fact, suits often reduce value: It isn’t engineers and designers who wanted planned obsolesence (19th century engineers fought it bitterly) or to remove the right to repair.

Most financiers don’t even finance creation any more; they finance destruction. Most managers are, at best, a wash, any random person would do about as well and maybe better (management literature shows this clearly, it isn’t in dispute). As for CEOs, higher compensation correlates to worse performance, and during the 40s through the 70s, before the massive rise in CEO compensation, had far more growth than our era. CEOs eat what they kill, is all. They control who gets paid what, so they pay themselves the most. It has nothing to do with merit, except if merit means “you deserve whatever you get.”

“You deserve whatever you get.”

That’s really what we mean by merit, today, isn’t it?

Not, “you contributed to society,” or even, often enough, “you contributed to your organization,” but “whatever you have the power to seize, at whatever cost to anyone else, is what you deserve.”

It’s not even about “whatever you can get legally.” Wall Street’s entire 2000s run was based on extensive fraud, they then, with the help of Obama, stole millions of houses using fradulently signed statements. Wall Street currently makes huge amounts of money by front-running investors, simply paying to get faster access and information.

So much for deserve, as we use it.

My personal take is that there are awards that should definitely be merit based. Medals, titles, and so on. A lot of positions should only go to those who have shown they “deserve” them, though our ideas of what that means are really warped when the entire media weeps about how Hillary Clinton was “the most qualified candidate in history,” when she had displayed both terrible judgment (Iraq, Libya, pushing Trump) and incompetence (losing two campaigns as front runner, bungling Hilary-care.)

But I am heterodox. I don’t like incentives. I don’t think people should get more for doing more, because I think incentives usually warp behaviour in horrible ways.

Instead, in a surplus society, we should just ensure everyone has good quality of what they need: housing, healthcare, food. Take the fear and greed away, and send them to work without the whip of hunger. In such a world, oddly, by not doing what we do now, you’d see some of what orthodox economics says should happen, happen. For example, picking up garbage would be highly paid, because it’s not fun (though it is useful).

Let money buy anything that doesn’t matter: A fancy vacation, a TV so high-definition it looks like reality, a set of five-million thread count sheets so smooth you barely feel them, or an animatronic bear that loves you, really.

Deserve, in a surplus society, is really about FEAR. People who spend their entire lives operating from fear do not create good societies.

No one needs or deserves to be a billionaire (and if anyone ever did, it’s someone like Jonas Salk, not Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos.) Having such people costs far more than money, as Bill Gates has proven by restricting vaccines.

Forget deserve. Give everyone a good life, and see what world people who aren’t scared create.

We’ve tried everything else. Maybe it’s time to try and run a society not based on fear.

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Why People Bully & A Better Way

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On December 8, 2020

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Fundraising note: we’ve hit about $7,500 and are getting close to the end of the 2020 fundraiser. This puts a little over $500 short of tier 2 in the concepts series:

Three more articles, this set most likely on the conditions that create golden Ages, including one on how to create an ecological Golden Age (what we need next.)

We’re $3,500 from tier 3. It’s an amount we’ve raised in the past, but I know that this year has been very tough for people. If you value my writing and can afford to subscribe or donate, please do, if not, no worries. Take care of yourself and be well.

The Piece Proper:

As a child, when I first went to school and thus first encountered bullying and deliberate meanness, I remember feeling a sort of pure bewilderment, why would anyone hurt others?

I’ve been working thru this problem for most of the rest of the my life. Last year I read a book by the late David Graeber, “Bullshit Jobs.” Graeber was concerned with why people hate meaningless jobs and his theory was based on the human need to affect the world.

Babies, when they realize they can affect the world, even by something as simple pushing something are delighted. They get pure joy from the feeling of efficacy, or, if you wish, power.

Knowing we can change things, that we can affect the world, makes us happy. It makes us feel safe. It is pure, primal pleasure.

Humans are the most important thing to be able to affect. Humans have almost everything we want, especially in a society like ours, where most of us are very removed from nature and primal activities like hunting, gathering, farming and building things.

The easiest way to affect someone is to upset them. Make them angry, or sad, or hurt them. They react, the person doing it feels powerful, and feeling powerful feels good. No matter how shit your life is, if you can make someone else react to you, you don’t feel helpless and you get that little rush of primal pleasure.

(When I’ve pointed out similar things in the past, there’s always someone who writes a comment about how this makes me evil and a bad person and they, of course, never feel such emotions.)

Being mean is a way of proving you still have the ability affect the world and people in it. Bullying them, forcing them to do what you want though they wouldn’t without your threat or violence, is an even purer form of this. Imposing long term fear, so they do it even when you’re around feels even better. (Bullies in the mil-ind-police complex call this “tuning people up.”)

Being mean or a bully has a payoff. You just need to be careful not to try and bully the wrong person.

The problem with bullying is the same as most bad behaviour (long term readers know where I am going and can groan now.) You create bad feelings, and you have to live with unhappy people. Maintaining dominance is stressful, because one of your victims may strike back and you may mistake how powerful or vengeful someone is.

So you become a lord of Hell. You’re able to impose your will, but you make the world you live in hellzone.

There is another route to getting what you want. You can make people feel good and happy, or get them to like you. You can create positive emotions. You can be charming and kind. (I am aware that I don’t always do this, I’m not holding myself up as a paragon of good behaviour, would that it were so. I’m learning and sharing what I learn with my readers.)

If you predominantly act this way and keep would-be hell lords out, you will create a heaven around you: an oasis of positive emotions and happy people. You’ll get most of what you want, without most of the risk.

None of this means that even a heavenly person many never have to use threats or even violence. But that isn’t their go-to: it isn’t their default strategy.

When dealing with a would be hell-lord the strategy is to disarm them; to stop their strategy from getting what they want, and then only rewarding them for using heaven strategies. Like all such re-conditioning it takes time. First you remove their power to do harm; the rewards from being scum. Then you set it up so they can only win by being charming and kind.

This isn’t always possible, we’ve all been in settings where the leadership was so ensconced in their hellish ways that the only way to end hell was to leave. In some other places (one corp I worked for comes to mind) it is possible to create an island of heaven inside hell, carefully choosing who one lets on the island.

All of this scales. The mean we use daily to get what we want create the feeling of the world around us; the means are the end. Heaven is a place where people are kind and good, and hell is a place where people are mean and bullying  and don’t care what happens to other people.

Being selfish and mean is a strategy that works only if not too many people are doing it. If too many people do it, you hit a tipping point where the group or society as a whole turns toxic, and everyone loses. We can see this at the world level today in climate change and ecosphere collapse. When I worked in the US for a month, I saw it in the way people treated each other: scared and defensive and unwilling to trust, because they knew any trust would be abused.

Heaven and Hell are created by nothing more or less than how we treat each other, and how we treat the world around us.

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The Path Of The Great Prophets

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On November 30, 2020

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A religion is an ideology with supernatural elements.

We consider it OK to criticize Marxists or capitalists or libertarians or monarchists, but we tend to shy  away from saying that a religion has bad elements.

The Hindu caste system is evil. It needs to end, and it needs to end today. If The Laws of Manu sanctify it, they need to go or be reinterpreted, whether they are a holy document or not.

All religions which claim that non-believers automatically are damned need to change that because it leads to things like crusades and jihads and burning people at the stake to save their souls.

God also does not have a chosen people, and claiming it does leads to obvious problems.

Male “leadership” needs to go away as well.

Prophets are great men (there don’t seem to be many women prophets) and most of them did more good than evil.  Codified religion, however, generally winds up missing the point. Muhammad, for example, made the lot of women far better than it was before. He improved it. His followers took the better status he gave them (still less than men’s) and said “OK, this is it” or they backslid, rather than noting the direction of movement: forward.

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Confucius put human relationships at the center of his teachings, but denigrated women and put only one relationship involving women as important: the husband wife bond. His teachings, resting in the family, also had a tendency to lead to nepotism.

Jesus, poor bastard, had his teachings bastardized more than almost any great prophet I can think of: a Christianity which includes the book of Revelations has lost the plot, and I suspect the Old Testament should be ditched as well, because the God of the Old Testament acts in ways opposite to what Jesus teaches.

Great prophets are not perfect, they don’t get everything right. Their successors are usually their lessers, and get even more wrong.

Senator Carl Schurz once said, “My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right.” This is the correct attitude in religion, as well.

Religion is often wrong, and the great prophets were not always right. You take the good and jettison the evil. If a great prophet tells you to do evil: to enslave people, or to murder, or to oppress, it is still evil. To abnegate to them your moral responsibility is not the road to God or good, it is the road to Hell.

Religious followers who fall back on authoritarianism “my prophet/god said so, that’s why” are not due a pass because they have a religion. If what they’re doing is wrong, it’s wrong no matter what authority they claim. A God who is not good and does not want its followers to do good is no God anyone should follow.

What is especially ridiculous is that almost everyone who has a religion was born into it. Converts are actually quite rare. So people follow a set of beliefs they didn’t choose just because of where and who they were born to. (Not that this is unique to religion.)

The person of reason; the moral person, takes these beliefs as arbitrary and inquires as to what parts are good and bad, rather than bowing down before tradition and authority.

This is the path of respect for the great prophets, each of whom came into an imperfect world, was unwilling to accept it, and tried to make it better. Buddha saw suffering and sought a way to end it. Confucius saw rulers savagely mistreating their subjects and sought to bring better rule. Jesus saw people following “the law” and missing the spirit of love and care for fellow humans that was the essence of the love of God. Muhammad’s first followers were mostly women and slaves (as was true of early Christianity) because he offered them a better life than the one they had.

It is that spirit: the spirit of improvement, of movement towards the good, that is the legacy of the great prophets. If you are not doing that, no matter how pious, you are not following their example. By not striving to improve on what they got wrong, left undone, or their successors messed up, you disrespect them more profoundly than anyone who takes their name in vain but tries to do good.

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Our Society Is Built on Lying and Breaking Faith

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On November 17, 2020

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Came across a long story about a man’s military career. Basically, he was a West Point graduate and refused to lie: He wouldn’t sign forms that he knew were wrong. He lasted four years in the military, because almost everything he had to sign was a lie, and he wouldn’t do it.

This is worth a long quote:

Readers may regard the anecdotes above as mildly interesting, but trivial because rifle serial numbers and vehicle status are not that important in the grand scheme of things. They would be more impressed if I had refused to sign a document covering up an atrocity or something like that.

In corrupt organizations, whether it be Enron, the NY Police Department during the time that Frank Serpico was an officer, the Mafia, or the U.S. military, newcomers are tested before they are “trusted.” As Al Pacino said over and over in The Recruit, “Everything’s a test.”

Relatively new NYPD officers like Serpico, also played by Al Pacino, were invited to accept small bribes to show they were “one of us” before they were permitted knowledge about bigger stuff. Mafia wannabes are required to commit crimes confirmed by Mafia guys before they are allowed into the inner circle.

This has two purposes:

• to identify and screen out any “boy scouts” or undercover agents who are squeamish about corruption

• to get something on everyone so no one can later change his mind and snitch

Signing false documents is a court martial offense. It violates the Uniform Code of Military Justice. If you sign a false document, you both gain entry to the “club” and you put yourself in a position where you cannot get out because if you ever go over to the media or authorities, they can trot out the false documents they know you signed to discredit and court martial you.

He goes on to talk of applying to be a real-estate salesman. They wouldn’t hire him because he had a rental property himself, had money in the bank, and no dependents. In other words, he didn’t need the money and therefore couldn’t be coerced by his boss.

A vast amount of life is like this. In my old corporate career, I remember being in a legal compliance meeting (the most junior person there). There was a discussion of a law, and the senior VP wanted us to simply track possible violations, not stop and report them. I read out the key section of the law and said “I don’t see how that law can be read as “just keep a spreadsheet.” He insisted. I said, “Of course, you’re the Senior VP. Just write a directive telling us to do that and sign it.”

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We obeyed the law. But I was never invited to another such compliance meeting. Of particular note is that I was the only person who stood up, even though there were half a dozen people in the meeting, many senior to me, and I know some agreed with me. But they had careers, families, and were already compromised. In fact, of course, I protected them: They are the people who would have taken the blame, not the VP, if a regulator ever actually called us on it, because no way was that VP putting his John Henry on the directive.

This sort of thing goes all through modern life. We compromise (and I haven’t always stood up, though I’m pretty stiff-necked). Often it isn’t illegal, per se. It’s lying to employees (yeah, they actually probably are going to lose their jobs, but we can’t tell them that yet.) It’s hurting employees to make a number on a spreadsheet you know doesn’t actually matter, but senior management wants that number and standing up to senior management is a bad idea, you have to just give them what they want all the time so they think you’re a go-getter.

Of course, in many cases the best way to give senior management what they want is to lie. Move those numbers from one quarter to another; count future income now, or income that’s probably going to happen as for sure. If all that doesn’t work and it’s not something they can know without knowing more about operations than they ever do, just lie to them.

Sometimes this happens pro-actively, sometimes it’s a response to management who won’t listen. “I don’t care that it can’t be done, make it happens.” OK, buddy, if you won’t listen, I’ll just change the numbers.”

These things are rife. On Wall Street in the 00’s, everyone knew that whole classes of mortgages were based on lies. They were actualy called “liar’s loans.” It was common knowledge. Everyone knew that there was housing bubble (except a lot of economists, who are great at lying to themselves) and there they were  telling clients that real-estate is a sure thing. Goldman Sachs was telling their clients everything was fine while they placed a huge bet on the other side.

The entire economy, and most of politics runs on lies (Obama lied about everything of importance to progressives, to their faces. Trump of course, doesn’t tell the truth, and probably doesn’t know the truth. But no one cares because he’s just more extreme about what is normal.)

You make these compromises, over and over again, and they kill your soul. You must believe that this is okay, that it’s how things are done, that it doesn’t make you a bad person.

But it does. It makes you a bad person. Doesn’t make you nothing but bad, you, like Joe Biden, probably love your son or family or dog or something.

A society where you must lie, repeatedly, to get power, where you must do evil over and over again to get power (or even a decent living) will be shit, and the more the virus of dishonesty and meanness spreads, the more shit it will be.

This is why the one thing I try to do as a writer is always tell the truth as I know or believe it to be. Might be wrong, but I’m not lying when I say something. The only time I ever didn’t tell the truth as I knew it was for about two weeks around Obama’s victory period when I made the mistake of trying to influence his incoming administration by offering the sugar plum vision of how popular he could be if he was the next FDR. It was wrong to do, a moral failing and mistake, and I’ve never forgotten it.

You lie and you compromise yourself. It’s that simple. I was lucky, I could walk back, admit the wrong (I’ve written about this before), and continue on. But the more you do it, the harder it is, and, in many cases, if you’ve done serious wrong-doing, you’re compromised for life.

I don’t know an easy way out of this. The fact is that we have created a self-perpetuating hell. I do know that a lot of it comes down to fear; that the more we make the good life something only some people can have, with the price always being compromising yourself (don’t kid yourself, not one percent of corporations actually don’t require managers to compromise themselves in multiple ways), well, people crumble. They’ve got that dog or son to look after or they’re ambitious and hey, everyone does it, so if the price is lying and fucking every worker who reports to them, they do it.

So the first step, because people are weak and scared, is to create a society where everyone’s needs are met at a decent level; where losing your job doesn’t mean plunging into poverty. This is something almost no one has done, in Canada you certainly don’t want to be poor, it’s ass, let alone in the US where it means life in Hell, and then probably an early and degraded death.

Faced with a life of misery or an end to their integrity, most people will lose their integrity. When that’s almost everyone with any power, well, your society will be hell.

And those are the societies most of us live in. (Remember all the oil companies and tobacco companies lying? Yeah.)

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I Suffered, Therefore So Must Others

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On November 16, 2020

Comments

I want to expand on this idea, ably put my Amal El-Mohtar here:

This idea seems right: the first is better than the second.

But the actual correct stance is:

This bad thing never happened to me BUT I can imagine how horrible it would be, so I want to make sure it doesn’t happen to other people.

None of us, no matter how bad our lives are, have experienced all the horrible things that can happen. Conservatives are notorious for being terrible except about one thing, you dig and it’s “My child got esophagal cancer so now I champion that,” OR “Someone I care about was shot with an assault rifle so now I’m against that.”

Imaginative empathy allows us to imagine being a blood diamond slave in the Congo, or there during a school shooting, or suffering from grinding poverty even if we’ve had good lives. It allows us to be disgusted and horrified by people cleaning out sewers by hand (Indians euphemistically call this “manual scavenging”) or what it’s like to suffer from anti-black racism or caste oppression. We don’t need to have suffered something either to say, “Others should suck it up,” or “Others shouldn’t have to go through what I did.”

This isn’t a call to removing all risk and stress from life. Not all unpleasant events are bad. The general rule, now well-supported by various studies, is that short term stress is good, and chronic stress is bad.

When I went to school, we had exam hell week: one before Christmas, one at the end of the year. The final exam week usually determined 50 percent of our marks.

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This arrangement made for “good stress:” it was short-term and made you learn how to take high-impact tests. I’ve never feared a test since then: I assume I can pass any academic test, if given enough time to study, and my idea of enough time is a lot less than most people’s.

We don’t want to protect people from good stress — from short term challenges that teach them what they can do.

Chronic stress or traumatic stress, however, we do want to avoid. No one is improved by rape (prison administrators take note). No one is improved by being poor for years or even months on end. No one is improved by chronic hunger or fear.

The larger questions are why some people are unable to employ imaginative empathy: Why they must experience hell first-hand to realize “Oh! Hell is bad!” and why some can’t extrapolate this to “All hells are bad.”

Life is better with happy, healthy people. Heaven and Hell are both other people: if you’re surrounded by happy, loving people, odds are you’ll be happy. If you don’t start that way, you’ll almost certainly wind up that way. We shouldn’t want our fellow citizens to be subject to damaging long-term stress of traumatic events simply because we have to live with them.

The exception, alas, is that some people can’t learn that something is bad if it doesn’t happen to them. Their depraved indifference is a danger to everyone around them and a challenge to ethics. The people who need to be poor or spend time disabled or seriously sick are the people who think it’s no big deal. Some people, it seems, can only learn that “Hell is bad” if they or perhaps someone they love, spends time in Hell.

El-Mohtar’s tweet, of course, was about the possibility of Biden using an executive order to forgive $50k of student debt.

The good way to do it would be to get rid of the bankruptcy bill Biden pushed that made it impossible for student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy, which would sort the situation out fast (it is NEVER a good idea to make it so that creditors do not have to worry about non payment. NEVER.)

But Biden probably won’t have control of Congress, and this is better than doing nothing, even if some people who have paid off student loans feel it is “unfair.” It was unfair they had usurious loans, but just because they suffered doesn’t mean others should.

The best solution, of course, would be to go back to 60s-style universities where tuition is either cheap or non-existent. The cost is a lot less than any of the repeated bailouts of rich people and could be made even lower by doing something about university admin bloat (that’s an entire other article I may write one day) and a more complete solution would be to do something about credential inflation: Most jobs don’t need a degree and the idea that they do today is absurd.

But what Biden can do is forgive $50K with an admin order and he should. It’s a good thing he can do, and if it doesn’t relieve the suffering of people in the past, well, hopefully you are, at least, the sort of person who doesn’t want others to suffer like you did.

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