Ian Welsh

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

Category: How to think Page 2 of 22

How To Think Clearly About Political and Social Issues

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On July 11, 2022

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One of the most useful things you were probably made to do in school is argue for points of view you disagree with. Make the choice case if you are pro-life, make the pro-life case if you’re anti-abortion.

Write the Palestinian case or the Israeli case, whichever you oppose.

Make the best case you can that Russia was right to invade, or the best case you can that Russia was wrong. Make the case that NATO was responsible, then make the case it had nothing to do with it. Make the case Ukraine is Nazi-infested, make the case it isn’t.

Honestly making the best argument you can for the other side is a very useful exercise. I rarely write such articles any more, but I still do it informally quite often and I couldn’t write what I do if I hadn’t been trained this way.

To really make this work, though, you have to be able to empathize: to feel what people feel. David Ben-Gurion once said that if were Palestinian he would be in the violent resistance. That was a man who wasn’t so caught up in his own world that it blinded him.

And don’t rush to disagree with the case you’re making. Make it first. FEEL the case. Get self-righteous.

It’s not hard to feel self-righteous about being pro-life for example, to feel you’re a paladin for justice and anyone opposing you is evil.

But it’s also easy, as a Russian, to see the Russian invasion of Ukraine as justified and feel righteous about it. If you can’t do it, you don’t really get the argument.

The same can be done for the Ukrainian side (somewhat easier, if you’re a westerner.)

Because some arguments are illogical, you always have to be able to feel. There is no question Israelis took Palestinian land and are still taking it, so you have to feel what makes them think that’s good.

Same with understanding our genocide of natives in N. America.

Or, for that matter, truly understanding the emotions behind the Holocaust (which, remember was not just Jews.)

If you’re authoritarian (most Americans are, most Westerners even) you need to learn how to feel in egalitarian modes.

If you’re egalitarian, you need to learn to think in authoritarian mode (Authority is GOOD, it makes you feel safe and loved and taken care of.)

One problem with all this is that doing this engages the disgust emotion, or even contempt (contempt is the most dangerous emotion to other people, it gives license for violence.) I can’t count the number of times I’ve explained a position I don’t agree with and people have hated me.

This is especially so when you start dealing with questions of “evil”. Why are people cruel? Well, a lot of it is that pushing people around and hurting them engages the feeling of having power, and feeling powerful is enjoyable. To understand this you have to feel it.

But you’ve now felt the emotional drive-train of a certain type of evil, and others will hate or despise you for it (especially if they get a flicker), then deny it.

If you truly want to understand the world and other people, you have to be willing to engage your emotions.

It actually takes bravery, because you will feel things you really don’t want to.

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Failures of Democracy & the Original Intellectual Fascist

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On June 23, 2022

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Bertrand Russel once called Plato the original intellectual fascist (in “A History of Western Philosophy,” which is well worth reading.)

In The Republic, Plato tries to come up with the ideal form of government and decides on a caste system, where children are educated, and then, based on their character and aptitude are divided into workers, enforcers, and rulers. The rulers are to be those who are philosophers by nature and training — those who love wisdom and are uninterested in wealth.

It’s easy to sneer at Plato, but there’s a reason why Whitehead’s line that “All of Western philosophy is but a footnote to Plato” has a lot of truth to it.

And one has to remember the context: Athenian democracy, the most famous in the Grecian world (and the most famous in Western history) had failed and been defeated by Sparta, after a reign of abuses which turned its allies against it. Entire cities were destroyed, with men killed and women and children sold into slavery. The most glorious city in their world, conquered and occupied.

Plato was never a democrat, and he hated Athenian democracy for killing his teacher Socrates, but he was looking at a real problem: those who became leaders in democracy were very often unsuited to rule. Pericles was great, aye, but he led Athens into a war it lost.

There are really two problems: the selection of leaders, and how they are treated. Lord Acton said that “power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Tends is important; it doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens to most. When you’re powerful, you don’t have to care about other people without power, and over time, most people tend not to.

Further, powerful people spend time with other powerful people as equals or near equals and, in time, they become their own faction, and look after their own interests and not those of people without power.

The story of “crusading politician goes to the capital and gets corrupted” is ancient. A cliche. It’s a cliche because it happens most of the time; there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

So, for any and all societies, the question is: How should we select leaders?

As I’ve said before, there can be no question that all societies on Earth have failed the leadership selection test (with the possible honorable exception of tiny, powerless Bhutan). We have failed because we knew of climate change and ecological collapse and we did nothing; indeed, we put our collective foot, hard, on the accelerator.

There’s an argument that this is just how humans are. There have been multiple collapses in history, including ecological, and we never seem to do anything to stop them.

But there’s another argument that we can find a better way.

Leadership and followership are related. I had this first brought home to me when I was in elementary school. From the third grade to halfway through sixth grade, I was in a class where the boys had two leaders. They were best friends, and they were friendly, inclusive of everyone, and tolerated no bullying. It wasn’t that they stopped it, though on a couple occasions did I see them step in, it was that their example was so much the opposite that it just didn’t happen.

Then, halfway through sixth grade, I went to another school and the leader of the boys was himself a bully, and bullying was rife.

Throughout my life, I’ve seen how groups and organizations become like the people who run them. Leadership is incredibly powerful, just by example, even before any “power” is used.

So the most important question in improving human society and groups is improving how we select and treat leaders, and by this measure, representative democracy has rather obviously failed.

This is noted often by conservative neo-reactionaries, but such folks are misguided at best. The eras of nobles or aristocrats (two different things), or of kings, were not better — they were often awful. The rise of agricultural kingships lead to cruelty of a type and scale hard for us now to imagine, and that continued throughout their history. One common punishment in Tudor England was opening someone’s stomach, pulling out their intestines and burning them while the person was alive; crowds would gather, treat this as entertainment and have a party while it was going on.

The answer to democracy’s failures isn’t some foolish nostalgia for a time which was worse; we need to find something genuinely new, or we will keep stumbling from catastrophe to catastrophe, and at some point said catastrophe will wipe us out.

So I suggest to readers to consider the question, which Plato tried to answer, of how to select, train, and treat rulers — and I would add that they should act in the best interests of all, especially including those they don’t know, both who are alive at the same time the leaders are, and those who will be alive after they are dead.

This is the human problem. If we can’t solve it, we can’t have good societies — save by chance and for brief periods.

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The Superpower of Admitting the Obvious

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On March 15, 2022

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It really is weird to have the “superpower” of being able to see the obvious.

Obviously, Iraq did not have WMD. Obviously, neither the Iraq nor Afghan occupations would succeed.

Obviously, letting Covid rip will cause a mass disabling event which will severely damage our societies.

Obviously China does not regard the US, in specific as a friend, as for 12 years the US has publicly stated, over and over again, that China is Enemy .

Obviously, Russia would not let Sevastapol be taken away from them.

Obviously, Russia would not let Ukraine join NATO.

Obviously, offshoring our industrial base to China would make them stronger and us weaker.

Obviously, immiserating our working class would make them hate the liberal order and vote against it when possible (Brexit/Trump, etc.).

Obviously, China has food and energy problems, and obviously, having Russia as a friend helps China fix those problems.

Obviously, China cannot trust the West for supplies, as the West has sanctioned China.

Obviously, the West hates China’s government and wants it replaced, and obviously, the Chinese government doesn’t like this and prefers Russia, which does not want to overthrow their government.

Obviously, Putin must win his war, or he will lose power and be killed.

Obviously, bailing out the rich in 2008 led to a sclerotic economy which cannot fix problems because central banks made a rule that incompetent rich people will be allowed to stay incompetent.

Obviously, not charging rich people with the crimes they committed which caused the financial crisis, but hitting them with fines which cost less than what they made would make them commit more and more crimes.

Obviously, if the rich control government (as per the Princeton Oligarchy study and common sense), and if Covid makes them much richer faster, the government will not seriously try to control Covid.

Obviously, if logistics and supply chain issues make the people who run the logistics and supply chain richer, they will not, themselves, try to solve the supply chain problems.

Obviously, the Ukrainian government’s statements about the war can be trusted just as much, or rather, just as little, as the Russian government’s statements.

Obviously, Democrats are going to lose the mid-terms, and Joe Biden will be (even more of) a lame duck.

Obviously, Biden doesn’t really mind Manchin spiking his program, or he would have gone after Manchin’s coal business or his daughter’s Epi-pen crimes.

Obviously, it will be to China’s huge, long-term advantage that they didn’t let Long Covid disable a huge percentage of their population.

Obviously, in ten years or so, almost everyone will admit that letting Covid rip was a mistake, just like most Iraq war boosters now admit they were wrong about Iraq.

Obviously, Israel is an apartheid state.

Obviously, most American, British, and Canadian politicians are terrified of the Israeli lobby and unwilling to cross it.

Obviously, the US is one of the most corrupt societies in the world, it’s just that US corruption is either legal — or if illegal, not prosecuted.

Obviously, Canada’s rich benefit from sanctions against Russia, because they sell the same things.

Obviously, having oligopolies control most of the US economy has led to inflation being much more than it would have been otherwise.

Obviously, Western central banks have spent 40 years crushing ordinary people’s wages relative to inflation.

Obviously, ex-Federal reserve governors, treasury secretaries, and most Presidents are rewarded for their services after they leave office with huge post-facto bribes, and obviously, they know they will be.

Obviously, Sinema & Manchin are being paid well to spike progressive policies.

Obviously, most European nations are American vassal states.

Obviously, giving in to American demands to reject Huawei 5G networks convinced China that European states are not trustworthy trade partners.

Obviously, Biden, who was a key driver of the bankruptcy bill which made it nearly impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy, was not going to cancel student loan debt.

Obviously, China does not want to accept world rules made when it was its weakest.

Obviously, India is trending dangerously authoritarian, and is in danger of eventually engaging in ethnic cleansing.

Obviously, climate change is now past the point of no return, because we clearly won’t do anything to stop it until it is too late. (Sorry, just obvious.)

Obviously, most Western elites don’t care if people they don’t know in their own societies die or are impoverished.

Obviously, our massive “shock therapy” looting of Russia in the 90s was going to lead to a strong man taking over. (I expected military, turned out to be secret police.)

Obviously, drowning the government in a bathtub would create vast corruption among private contractors and lead to an inability to handle crises like Covid which require state capacity (if we wanted to, which mostly we don’t — see above).

Obviously, Bangladesh will be one of the first non-island states to be destroyed by climate change.

Obviously, making the rich even richer will never lead to improvements for the middle and working classes, as opposed to controlling the wealth and power of the rich.

Obviously, massively inequal societies turn into oligarchies of some sort, even if they are nominally democratic.

Obviously, repeatedly invading other countries in violation of international law would make international law weaker, and make countries not inside the blessed Western circle cynical about Western law and leadership.

Obviously, sanctions never cause regime change and only hurt ordinary people (this is the record for sections, 100 percent of the time).

Obviously, Venezuela and Iran will never trust the US or the West.

Obviously, China doing most of the world’s development would make developing countries prefer them to the US.

Obviously, the Chinese would be mistrustful of Western nations and Japan for humiliating them for a century.

Obviously, many Indians prefer Russia to the US and Europe, because Russia has been a reliable ally to them since their independence, when no Western nation has.

Obviously, the invasion of Ukraine is not a worse war crime than the invasion of Iraq.

Obviously, if Putin should be tried for war crimes so should George W. Bush (and many others who never will be).

Obviously, getting the Saudis to spread their noxious form of Islam and to arm guerillas against the Soviets has blown back horribly and has caused mass devastation far beyond Afghanistan.

Obviously, centrists agree with right-wingers on most issues, because they never roll back what right-wingers do while in power.

Obviously, centrists hate left-wingers much more than they hate fascists.

CDC Jumps the Shark & Experts Die Another Death

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On December 29, 2021

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So, days after American Airlines asked for a reduction in quarantine length, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reduced recommended quarantine length to five days.

Remarkable.

The CDC, the WHO, and many other health organizations have repeatedly disgraced themselves. At the start, they advised against masks. Masks clearly do help, and because, at the time, they thought that Covid was spread by droplets, masks were completely indicated. The CDC took too long to admit that Covid was airborne, recommended children go back to school, and so on.

In general, health authorities in too many countries have not recognized that airborne spread requires improved ventilation and filtering. School boards have forced teachers to keep windows closed. Vaccine approvals have been political — Sputnik V was an excellent vaccine pre-Omicron, but it was Russian, so, not approved in most Western countries.

Health authorities in many countries have not tracked and traced, have not quarantined properly, and so on.

All of this has broken trust with public health organizations and with experts in general.

People want scientists in organizations like the WHO and CDC to be non-political, to say what the best science says, and they haven’t and now trust is broken.

In general, the idea of expertise has been broken over the last few decades, because experts acted badly or weren’t experts.

This requires a bit of unpacking and “expert” is a bad word. Economists are experts, but they are not scientists, they’re ideologues. They study how the world should be and try and force the world to be like that.

Economists are moral philosophers, in effect — or theologians. If they presented themselves like, “We believe in markets and utility maximization and utility is a metaphysical concept for us, and we think this is the best way to organize society,” that’d at least be honest.

If they were honest, you could sort of trust them. “Oh, so macro-economists are like Christian preachers who say that society should be based on their beliefs of what an ideal society is like!!” That’s not at all the same sort of “expert” as a biologist or physicist.

Over 99 percent of economists didn’t predict the financial collapse. They didn’t realize there was a housing bubble. When economists, and other fake scientists, presented themselves as scientific experts (whose advice, when followed, was CRAP), they discredited the very idea of expertise.

Then actual scientists let themselves be politically compromised and now, they have completed the job.

I read a lot of people who say, “Trust the experts.” Shut up.

The experts disgraced themselves. The economists, the psychologists, the biologists, etc, etc. Too many of them have either presented themselves as something they’re not (scientists) or are actual scientists whom have fudged the science.

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This even goes down to hedging things that are well agreed upon. Climate change, for example.

The consensus forecasts have almost been universally too optimistic, for decades, because scientists were playing political games and trying to be palatable.

Actual scientists need insulation from politics. People who are playing politics need to not be insulated from politics. Central bankers and economists are not scientists, they are political actors whose actions hurt some people & help others.

Central banks should be under direct control of elected officials. Scientists in the CDC and WHO should be heavily insulated from political power. Climate scientists need insulation as well.

Expertise has to be politically disinterested. For example, with the initial mask guidance, honest communication would have been:

The best science is that masks help protect us from Covid. Surgical and N95 masks are currently in short supply, so please use cloth masks right now. Here’s how to make them yourselves.

That’s honest, and it doesn’t break trust.

And that, along with not allowing people like economists, psychologists, and even psychiatrists, to pretend to be scientists is how you avoid loss of trust in experts.

Once you lose trust, you’re screwed. Real experts, who can be trusted, are now tarred with the same brush as those who have betrayed trust, and a plurality of the population has decided they don’t have to believe what the “experts” say, because in the past they’ve lied, been wrong, or perverted the science for political or business reasons.

 

Today’s Center Is Yesterday’s Extreme

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On December 20, 2021

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And tomorrow’s center will be today’s extreme.

(We’re coming towards the end of my fundraising. I write to explain the world and to help introduce the ideas that may change it for the better in the future. The more people who donate, the more I can do. Please DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE if you can.)

In the 1950s US, the top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. In 1925, the idea of such a rate was an extreme position. Today, it is an extreme position.

In 1935, the US had a small standing army and believed that was the way to be. After WWI, it had demobilized a huge army, but after WWII it chose to keep a large standing army.

Segregation was the normal position for much of the country before the 1960s; today it is theoretically illegal.

Women could not, effectively, hold most jobs in the 1950s; today they can. Married women couldn’t even have their own bank accounts without permission from their husbands; today they can.

Before the 1940s, almost no countries had universal health care, now virtually all developed countries (except the US) do.

Limited liability corporations didn’t exist throughout most of the history of capitalism, and were opposed by many capitalists when introduced; now they are the norm.

Most land was owned and managed by the commons for most of history; now, most of it is private land or government-owned. The idea that every local shouldn’t have access to local land and resources was EXTREME for almost all of human existence.

(Capitalism, generally speaking, is an extremely radical ideology when viewed through the lens of human history and pre-history.)

The center, of any period, is the extreme of a previous period. Truly, new ideas start from the extremes, then, when radicals win, they become centrist ideas. Adam Smith did not agree with the orthodoxy of his day, any more than Karl Marx did (though he had the advantage that he was championing a wealthy minority, not a poor one ,and thus didn’t live his life in poverty and misery like Marx.)

Confucius was an extremist who could not get hired by those in power. Jesus was an extremist. Muhammed was an extremist. Thomas Paine was an extremist. Luther was an extremist, and so was MLK.

The center does maintainance and refinement of ideas, but they have few if any truly new ideas. It is radicals who create new ideas, and centrists support them only afterwards.

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A New Ideology

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On October 9, 2021

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There is no reality which is not mediated by perception. This is not to say that there is no reality; the famous “I refute you thus,” kicking a rock, applies. It does not mean there are no natural laws, no physics, chemistry, or even truth—or Truth. It means that we decide what reality means through a thick lens of belief. This lens picks out what is important, obscures the unimportant, and distorts everything, and most people are hardly even aware that it exists.

Keynes once wrote that most politicians are slaves of some defunct economist, generally whose name they don’t even know. That we should regulate the world through markets is an idea which would have been absurd to virtually everyone three hundred years ago, even as the divine right of Kings is absurd to us today. That corporations should shield their owners from liability is an idea which was bitterly opposed by most capitalists two hundred years ago. That greed leads to better outcomes was laughable to virtually everyone, including Adam Smith, who thought it worked only in very specific circumstances and lamented that tradespeople were constantly in conspiracy against the public.

That goods, including food, should be primarily divided based on market success is another idea that most of the world, for most of history, has never held.

What is oddest about our modern ideology is the same thing that is odd about virtually all ideologies: It contradicts itself. We do not have either free or competitive markets, and not one in a hundred free market ideologues could define a competitive market, nor would they want one if they could, as an actual competitive market reduces profits to nearly nothing. Free markets cannot exist without government coercion, yet we have come to assume that it is government which makes markets unfree, which is a half truth at best. It’s markets that make governments unfree when they buy government–and the first thing any good capitalist does upon winning a market is try to eliminate the free market, since an actual free market threatens a monopolist or oligopolist.

An ideology tells us what is thinkable and what is unthinkable, what is moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. Right or wrong. It either says that 90 percent taxation is right and good when imposed upon great wealth, or an unthinkable burden on “value” creators. It further defines value, for instance, privileging financial innovation which actually destroys genuine good production. It says that food that makes us sick is acceptable and that banning such food is unethical. It says that it is right and proper that men and women meet their needs by working for other people, without any ability to meet their own needs if the market deems them surplus beyond private or public charity. It says that land that lies fallow is not available for anyone to grow food, that pumping poison into water and food and air is acceptable, that rationing health care by who has the most money is the best way to organize health care. Or, it could say that healthcare is too important to allow people to buy their way to the front of the line.

People think that their individual decisions matter, but so much of what happens is dictated by social contexts. A man goes to war, or not, and that has little to do with him personally. A college student has a huge debt and that is because she is a Millennial, not a Baby Boomer. A generation has fantastic success, but that is because they are the GI Generation in America. These circumstances are not the results of individual decisions, even if it feels like it. Born 30 years earlier, the exact same people would have stagnated on farms. A generation raised in affluence undoes all the protections put on the economy by those who experienced the Great Depression, because they think they know better, really, and they never experienced the Great Depression or the Roaring ’20s.

One of the most important books of the past 200 years was a pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. You should read it. Virtually every demand in the Communist Manifesto has been met by Western Democracies. Conservatives like Otto Van Bismark looked at it and said, “Oh, you want pensions? We can give you that if it means you don’t rebel and cut our heads off.”

A credible opposing ideology, a credible existential threat to the reigning ideology, creates a reaction. That reaction can be, well, reactionary, but it tends to blend towards that ideology. When the main ideological and material competition to Western Capitalist Democracy is a nasty form of Islam and Chinese Totalitarian State-run crony capitalism, that leads nowhere good, not least because they aren’t credible threats (no, Islamism is not going to conquer Europe, Japan, North America, or South America, sorry).

But an ideology organizes things. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the ancient Egyptians, if they wanted to do something, set up a new religion, with a new God. They were quite brazen about creating Gods, really. They ran the banks out of the churches, and indeed, ran some truly terrible usury, with interest rates as high as thirty to forty percent (which is why debt holidays were instituted, it didn’t take long before people owed more grain or silver than existed in the entire universe, with rates like that).

When we want to do something, we fiddle with market design, with little incentives here or there. We make bureaucratic rules, create new laws, set up secret courts and bureaucracies to run them, make small adjustments here or there to make sure things work out as we want. A little tax here or there, a subsidy here or there, a patent or IP law change, a law requiring millions of dollars before one can set up a bank, laws allowing corporations to monetize public research by universities, and all the right people make money and the wrong people don’t, and all is good in the world.

The fundamental idea of our current regime is one that most people have forgotten, because it is associated with Marx, and one must not even talk about the things Marx got right, because the USSR went bad. The fundamental idea to which I refer is that we are wage laborers. We work for other people, we don’t control the means of production. Absent a job, we live in poverty. Sure, there are some exceptions, but they are exceptions. We are impelled, as it were, by Marx’s whip of hunger. It took a lot of work to set up this system, as Polyani notes in his book The Great Transformation, but now that it has happened, it is invisible to us.

A new ideology that leads to prosperity should insist on changing this relation to the means of production. This doesn’t mean a Marxist proletarian “communist” paradise, but it does mean giving ordinary people back real economic power, which means the real ability to say “no” to wage labor, and freedom from needing to take the next job that comes along regardless of what it is. Not only will this lead to a different, much more fair division of goods created by society, it will lead to much better treatment of wage labor workers. The experience of the dotcom boom should be instructive in this regard: When you can walk out because you don’t need this job and it isn’t clear you can be replaced, bosses suddenly start treating you very, very well indeed.

I’ll talk about what that ideology looks like and what that society looks like, at a later date, certainly in my non-fiction book. It will be, not a consumer society, but a producer one, in which most people feel that they can make things, feel that they can provide for much of their own needs. Though many people sneer at the idea that technology matters, in actual fact, technological change makes possible new modes of production, along with new social arrangements. The assembly line and factory imply a type of social arrangement, the heavy plow implies a type of social arrangement, hunter-gatherer implies yet another. Within each of these technological tool kits, however, there are choices: Some hunter-gather bands are the sweetest, most kind, peaceful people you could ever want to meet. Others are high practitioners of torture and head-hunting. Central planning of the Soviet variety and industrial democracy of early to mid-twentieth century America are both within the possibilities of industrialization. Radios were originally used much like the early internet till the government used the excuse of the Titanic sinking to seize the airwaves from the early pioneers and sell them to large companies.

There are, ultimately, two dominant strategies: cooperate or compete. If you want widespread prosperity, the dominant strategy in your ideology must be cooperation, though competition has its place. And ultimately the difference between the right and the left is this: The right thinks you get more out of people by treating them badly, the left thinks you get more out of people by treating them well.

An ideology that believes in treating people well is a lot better to live under. And as a bonus, happy people are a lot more fun to be around. And societies with that ideology, all other things being equal, will tend to out-compete those who believe that fear, misery, and the whip are the best way to motivate people.

Finally, an ideology that succeeds is always universalist. It asserts, for example, that all people have certain rights and does not admit exceptions. This may bother the relativists, but a powerful ideology admits no doubt on core ethical concerns: Democracy is how everyone should rule themselves, no exceptions, or, everyone has a right to a trial and to see the evidence against them, or, anyone who doesn’t worship the True God is going to hell.

A powerful ideology is a scary thing. If your ideology isn’t strong enough, doesn’t create fervent enough belief that people are willing to die for it, then it won’t change the world. But if it does create that level of fervent belief, then it will be misused. The question is simple: Will this do more harm than good?

An ideology which leads to us killing a billion or more people with climate change, allow me to posit, is a bad ideology. At the end of its run, neoliberalism will kill more people than Marxist-Leninism did, and our grandchildren will consider it monstrous. Most of them will be no more able to understand how or why we submitted to it (or even believed in it) than we can understand how Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao came to power. Hyperbole? Not in the least, because the body count is going to be phenomenal.

When faced, then, with a monstrous ideology, our duty is to come up with a better one, an opposing one. Because ideology determines what we do. It is both the lens through which we see the world, and the motor that pushes us forward.

(Originally Published October 22, 2013. Back to the top in 2017 as most current readers won’t have seen it, and it’s foundational. Back up again, October 9, 2021, for the same reason.)

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Rationality Is Not A Way Out Of Group Action Problems like Climate Change and Covid

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On July 26, 2021

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One: “The system is interdependent and what I do is damaging it, but it doesn’t matter because I will die before it breaks in a way that hurts me.” This is rational. Rational thinking will not get you out of issues like climate change. Rational thought is a means, not an end.

Two: The system is interdependent and what I do is damaging it, but by doing so I am becoming more powerful, rich, or otherwise benefiting. If I was not damaging it I would not benefit as much, and might even suffer.

A lot of people worship rationality in our society. We think that rational is a synonym for “good” and that if we are rational, we will do the right thing.

This is incorrect for a variety of reasons, but it is extremely incorrect in group action problems. If 90% of society, and 95% of people born 50 years in the future will suffer because I do something, but I benefit greatly, it is entirely rational to cause that harm.

Covid has made the rich much richer, fast. Statista has a nice little graphic:

As for Climate Change, business as usual worked fine for the world’s elites. We really started paying attention to global warming in the 70s, and since then, by not just ignoring it but increasing it, they’ve done brilliant.

(The top .1% and .01% and .001% numbers have risen even faster.)

Rationality does not work for ethical decisions. It can help you determine means, “what’s the best way to do this” but it can’t determine ends.

It isn’t even that great for means. The rationalists (epitomized by Stars Slate Codex) tend towards hard utilitarianism: the most good for the most people, and sneer at virtue ethics.

Seems smart: what you want is the most good, right?

But the problem is that instrumenalism “the right thing is whatever gets you where you want to go” often doesn’t work because humans are both stupid and very good at motivated reasoning. “Well, people will obviously be better off if we tax rich people less, because rich people give jobs and they can give more jobs and pay more for them!”

Or, “if we pay people like CEOs more if they raise shareholder value, they’ll do more of the right thing!”

Or, in general terms, “people help others because of greed, not virtue, so we have to bribe them to do the right thing and micro-manage incentives.”

None of this stuff worked, of course. It never has, and it never will. The eras where you tax the rich heavily and keep executive compensation relatively low had better behaviour by executives than the post Thatcher/Reagan era. Faster economic growth, too. (Better isn’t necessarily the same thing as good.)

The problem with instrumentalist thinking, which utilitarianism tends to fall into, is that “means are ends.” If you bomb the village to save it, or invade the country, you’ve done a shit load of evil. If you lock people up in prison for victimless crimes, you’ve created victims: the people being brutalized in prison. If you let cops take people’s property without proving a crime, you’ve increased theft. If you torture, you’ve tortured. If you lower wages to increase efficiency, you’ve lowered wages. If you surveil workers to get the most out of them you know that’s bad (Bezos would never let someone else determine when he can take a shit.)

The means are always most of what we do.

We know that being greedy, or selfish, or cowardly, or sadistic are bad. We know that rape is always bad. We know that killing people is bad. We know that beating people is bad.We know that hunger is bad. We know that homelessness is terrible. We know lack of water kills. When the IMF removes food subsidies we KNOW more people will go hungry. When we sell bombs to Israel and Saudi Arabia, we know they’ll be used to murder innocents.

Instrumentalism and utilitarianism allow you to say to yourself “well, I know virtue ethics would say this is bad, but actually it’s good because it’ll lead to a better world.” Meanwhile there you are with policies that lead to the Amazon being clearcut and dumping so much CO2 and methane into the world that eventually the world’s forests just start burning down and permafrost methane starts exploding like bombs.

Virtue ethics and bars on behaviour like “no torture or rape ever” exist because we know we tend to find excuses to allow us to engage the worst parts of ourselves: to be greedy and selfish, to force others to do what we want, and to live like Kings and Queens because we exploited others. Bezos goes to space, workers in his warehouses piss into jars or wear diapers and walk around in shit before they pass out or die from heat stroke: these things are related.

Rationalism just says “how do I get what I want?” Virtue ethics and red lines say “you can’t get it by doing evil.”

This is why straight utilitarians and instrumentalists are either hypocrites or fools. Either they know that their ethics allows for monstrous behaviour and doesn’t guarantee results, or they know it produces subpar results for a lot of people, even most people, but they expect to be in the minority who benefits (which, by the way, is very rational.)

Don’t worship at the cult of rationalism or instrumentalism. Virtue ethics and red lines have their own problems, and there are reasons for being way of them too, but at the end of the day, if getting what you want requires you to hurt a lot of people, perhaps you aren’t doing it because you truly believe it’ll make the world a better place?

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Questions, Questions, Questions (For You)

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On March 22, 2021

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I’m not going to give my answers to these questions, they are for you to answer. I will, gently, suggest that you try and imagine yourself in the appropriate person’s shoes while answering them.

If the world’s sole superpower is hostile to your country and sanctioning it, causing great harm, is it your duty to interfere in the superpower’s elections if you judge that might get it to kill less of your citizens?

Alternatively, fearing the superpower’s great might, seeing the terrible things it has done to various countries, should you cower in fear and do nothing, hoping that your clear fear convinces them to not hurt you too much?

Ethically speaking (not pragmatically), would it be OK for a country whose weddings and funerals regularly get droned by America to attack an American wedding or funeral which senior White House or military officials are attending? It not, would it it be more or less unethical than US dronings?

If you were a country the US was setting up to attack and destroy next and you had the ability to set off some suitcase nukes and thought that might stop the attack, would it be right to do so, or should you let the US destroy your country without hurting American civilians?

In a strange world where the US would not retaliate by destroying Iraq, would it be justified for Iraq to “rendition” George W. Bush and Cheney to their country, give them a trial, then execute them for mass murder and aggressive warmaking (like the US did Nazis and Japanese?)

If you were Yemeni, and you had an opportunity to kill the majority of the Saudi Royal family, though some unrelated civilians would also die, would it be right, or at least justified to do so? Why or why not?

If you were Palestinian and you discovered some super secret magic or tech that would make you able to force Israelis into a small amount of land, and seize their homes and lands for Palestine, would it be your duty to do so? What about natives in the Americas?

And when do those who were conquered/settled, morally, have to say “well, it’s been so long now that I guess it’s no big deal.” If I were a native in the Americans, I don’t know if I’d say the time has passed. The Irish didn’t with the English, and the Scots are getting uppity.

Is running an autocracy domestically worse than supporting coups to take away other countries democracy? If so, why?

If Indian Dalits could overthrow the Indian state and abolish the caste system by force, at the cost of all the deaths a war and revolution would entail, would they be justified in doing so?

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