Category: Understanding Page 2 of 4

Essential Insanity

On May 24, 2017

Image by Nesster

Walk with me a while and imagine you are mad. Crazy. Insane. It’s an interesting sort of insanity–you see the world as something other than it is. You are dead convinced that people are out to get you, but these people have almost no means to harm you and fear your retaliation greatly, because you’re a powerful person and they are weak.

You believe that you are hale and hearty; but in fact you’re ghastly, obese and ill. You think you’re rich, but in fact you’re poor. You think you have the best doctor around, but in fact your doctor is worse than almost every other doctor and charges 50 percent more than them. You think you’re tough, and you certainly haven’t let the fact that two ninety pound weaklings seem to be able to stand up to you get in the way of that.

You think that you have the most advanced technological toys, that what you have is the best, and once you did, but these days everyone else seems to have more advanced stuff.

The illness goes deeper though, a deep decay in your brain. The parts of your brain that make most of the decisions for your body think everything is wonderful. They seem only able to take in sensations from the taste buds these days, and for the last thirty years you’ve been on a rich diet. So they think everything’s great. Your once lean body, packed with muscles, has been replaced by a flaccid one, paunchy and fat, but somehow the key parts of your brain don’t know that. They don’t feel your sore back, they don’t hear the broken down breathing, and they don’t see the gut hanging over your belt.

The you I’m referring to, as I’m sure many have figured out by now, is the US. For years, I’ve been writing for the US and observing it carefully, and I’ve found it one of the most interesting problems I’ve encountered in my life. Because America and Americans are very unpredictable. Now, of course, the first thing I thought was, “It’s me,” and in a sense, that’s true.

But here’s the thing: I have a very good record of predicting what will happen in Somalia, or Afghanistan, or Iraq. And when I get it wrong, I can look back and easily figure out why. Yet, I’ve never visited any of those countries and, really, I know very little about them. On the other hand, I grew up imbibing American media, know American history well, have visited America a number of times and spent eight years in jobs that required me to deal with multiple Americans daily.

Odd. Very odd. And something I’ve discussed with other foreign observers of American society and politics.

The first clue to what was wrong came around the time of the Iraq war. It was obvious, dead obvious, to everyone outside of the US and to US citizens who were spending a lot of time parsing news, that the war was a joke and that Saddam had no nukes and was no threat to the US. Most Americans, however, didn’t get that. The reason, of course, was propaganda.

Fair enough. Every country whips its citizens into war hysteria with propaganda. But what was truly remarkable wasn’t that, it was that somehow the majority of Americans, over 70 percent, thought that Iraq was behind 9/11. Iraq, of course, had nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing.

Remarkable. Americans went along with going to war with Iraq then because they thought Iraq had attacked them and had nukes and could attack them again. A complete propaganda tissue of lies. But if you believe it all, well, of course Iraq needed to be attacked.

What looked to the rest of the world as crazy was entirely logical. It was, however, still insane. If I see a tentacled monster from the fourth dimension attack me and I respond by grabbing a knife and slashing apart my next door neighbour who’s waving at me, well, I had a logical, coherent reason for what I did, but I still murdered him, and I’m still insane.

This is the first type of insanity in the US and it runs deep. I often feel like I spend more time correcting outright lies, outright propaganda, than anything else. Just this week I had to explain to a left-wing blogger (who should know better) that single payer health insurance is cheaper and gives better results than private insurance system. Now in the US, this is somehow still in doubt, but that’s insane–this isn’t in question. Every other western nation that has single payer insurance spends about 1/3 less than the US and has as good health metrics or better either in most or all categories. This isn’t something that’s up in the air, this isn’t something that is unsettled. This is a bloody FACT.

Americans think they are the most technologically advanced society in the world, yet the US does not have the fastest broadband, the fastest trains, the best cellphones, the most advanced consumer electronics (go to Japan and you’ll see what I mean) or the most advanced green energy technology.

In the primary season, Ron Paul was repeatedly cut out of media coverage and John Edwards was hardly covered. The majority of Americans thought that Edwards was running as the most right-wing of the Democratic candidates. Huckabee was constantly called a populist when his signature tax program would gut the middle class and slap the poor onto a fiscal rack.

And, when all is said and done, politicians are still running on slashing taxes and having that make up for itself, while the US runs a balance of payments higher than any other country post World War II has ever done without going into an economic crash.

That’s one type of insanity–thinking the world is something that it isn’t.

The second type is worse, in a sense. When Diamond wrote his book on why societies collapse he came to the conclusion that it occurred when elites weren’t experiencing the same things as the majority of the society–when they were isolated from the problems and challenges the society was facing.

For 30 years, ordinary Americans haven’t had a raise. And despite all the lies, Americans are beginning to get that.

But, for the people in charge, the last thirty years have been absolutely wonderful. Seriously, things haven’t been this good since the 1890’s and the 1920’s. Everyone they know–their families, their mistresses and toyboys, their friends–is doing well. Wall Street paid even larger bonuses for 2007, the year they ran the ship into the shore, than they did in 2006 when their bonuses equalled the raises of 80 million Americans. Multiple CEOs walked away from companies they had bankrupted with golden parachutes in excess of 50 million. And if you can find a senator who isn’t a millionaire, (except maybe Bernie Sanders) you let me know.

Life has been great. The fact that America is physically unhealthy, falling behind technologically, hemorrhaging good jobs, and that ordinary Americans are in debt up to their eyebrows, haven’t seen a raise in 30 years, and live in mortal fear of getting ill–because even if they have insurance, it doesn’t cover the necessary care–means nothing to the decision-making part of America because it hasn’t experienced it. America’s elites are doing fine, thanks. All they can taste or remember is the caviar and champagne they swill to celebrate how wonderful they are and how much they deserve all the money federal policy has given them.

This is the second insanity of the US: The decision making apparatus in the US is disconnected from the results of their decisions. They make sure they get paid, that they’re wealthy, and let the rest of society go to hell. In the end, of course, most of them will find that the money isn’t theirs, and that what they’ve stolen is worth very little if the US has a real financial crisis.

The third insanity is simpler: It’s the wealth effect. At the end of World War II, the US had about half the world’s economy. Admittedly that’s because Europe had been bombed into oblivion, but even when Europe rebuilt. the US was still far, far ahead. The US was insanely rich and powerful. See, when you’re rich you can do stupid and unproductive things for a long time. There are plenty of examples of this but the two most obvious ones are the US military and the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs hasn’t reduced the number of junkies or drugs on the street in any noticeable way. It has increased the US’s prison population to the highest per capita level in the world, however. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It has gutted civil liberties (the War on Terror is just the War on Drugs on crack, after all). And after 30 years, does anyone seriously say, “Wait, this doesn’t work, it costs billions of dollars and it makes us a society of prisons?” Of course not, if anything people compete to be “tough on crime.” What’s the definition of insanity, again? Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results?

Then there’s the US military. It costs, oh, about as much as everyone else in the world’s military combined. It seems to be at best in a stalemate and probably losing two wars against a bunch of rabble whose total budgets probably wouldn’t equal a tenth of one percent of a US appropriations bill. And it is justified as “defending” America even though there is no nation in the entire world which could invade the US if the US had one tenth the military.

But the US could (not can, they are now unaffordable, but could) afford to have a big shiny military and lots of prisons, so it does. Lots of people get rich off of both of them, lots of rural whites get to lock up urban blacks and lots of communities that wouldn’t exist otherwise get to survive courtesy of the unneeded military bases and prisons which should never have been built.

Insane–believing things that aren’t true.

Insane–decision makers are cut off from the consequences of their decisions and in fact are getting reverse feedback, as things get worse for most Americans and as America gets weaker and poorer, they are the richest they’ve ever been.

Insane–so rich that no one will stop doing things that clearly don’t work and are harmful, because people are making money off the insanity.

All of this is what makes predicting the US so surreal. It’s not just about knowing what the facts are and then thinking “Okay, how would people respond to that?” You have to know what the facts are, what the population thinks the facts are, what the elites think the facts are, who’s making money off of it, and then ask yourself if these facts are having any real effect on the elites and if that effect is enough to outweigh the money they’re making off of failure (how many of them have children serving in Iraq? Right, not urgent to fix).

And then you have to go back to the facts and ask yourself, “What effect will these have even if they’re being ignored?” Facts are ugly things, they tend not to go away.

All of which makes the US damn near impenetrable, often enough even to Americans.

But here’s what I do know–you can get away with being nuts as long as enough people are benefiting from you being insane. When the credit cards are all maxed out, when the relatives have stolen even the furniture, suddenly all the enablers go away, and the kneebreakers or the men in white pay you a visit. At that point, you can live in the real world, or you can go to the asylum.

I wonder which way the US will go?

(Originally Posted at FDL January 20, 2008)

(Second repost, last one was May 5, 2009. This is, IMO, one of the more important posts I ever wrote.)

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

The Word Terrorism

By Ian Welsh

On May 23, 2017

33 Comments

This word still means nothing except “violence committed by non-state actors.”

Multiple states routinely target weddings, funerals, and hospitals.

I remain unable to see the difference, except that state actors kill a lot more people.

Oh, and people’s suffering is not less real or worthy of sympathy if they have less or more melanin than you–or are from a different religion or a different culture.

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

Get a Grip

By Ian Welsh

On May 17, 2017

39 Comments

And lower the drama.

Yeah, the world system is broken, and yes, we are due for a series of catastrophes which will be apocalyptic for many. It’s already been apocalyptic for a lot of species, and there’s no cosmic calculus which says that humans are immune: The top of the food chain usually dies in great die-offs, actually.

But this stuff is in the future. Today, the majority of people are substantially as well off as they were in 2015. I doubt anyone reading this is doing so from, say, Yemen.

Trump is not the worst leader to ever lead a country, and so far he hasn’t done anything as bad as what either Bush (Iraq) or Obama (Libya) did. Of course, you’re probably American and may be scared of losing your Obamacare, but war is worse than that. It’s just that, hey, you’re American, and America is supposed to do the worst crimes to people overseas or to blacks, hispanics, and poor whites in dank hole prisons where you can’t hear them scream, where you can’t see their agony and degradation.

Now, of course, if your personal life is going to shit due to your personal economy, health, or social relationships, well, that’s bad, and that may even be related to politics (in the broader sense, it almost certainly is), but most people are about as well off as they were before Trump.

As I have pointed out repeatedly, people during WWII still managed to love, find time to be happy, write novels, and so on. This isn’t WWII, it isn’t the Mongol Invasions or the An-Lushan rebellions (far worse than WWII compared to the world population at the time, by the way).

If you’re basically healthy, have food, a soft warm place to sleep, and aren’t ruled by a tyrant in your daily life, well, life is basically fine–assuming no one you love is suffering hugely.

That was true two years ago, ten years ago, and one hundred years ago.

Unless you’re reading from Yemen or Syria or something, get a grip on yourself. Things are going to get far worse than this, and if you’re not too old and reasonably healthy, you’ll likely be here for at least some of it.

If you’re flying apart at this, then how will you handle catastrophe when it actually arrives?

Use this as an opportunity to learn equanimity or toughness (the two are basically the same), and how to be good to those around you even when things are somewhat shitty. When everything does go bad for your part of the world, will you keep it together and be a source of warmth, love, and competence? Or will you be broken?

It’s perfectly human to fear, and sadly human to live in fear of a future that isn’t here yet.

But it’s no way to live.

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

Heaven on Earth: The Kindness Maxim

By Ian Welsh

On December 19, 2016

27 Comments

In the past, I have noted that kindness is generally the best policy and always the best policy default. If you don’t have an ironclad reason not to be kind, be kind.

Let’s run through this.

People who are treated badly, become bad. The abused grow up to abuse. The sick make others sick and cannot contribute to society. Happy people are better to be around. Prosperous people can afford your products and services.

Happy, healthy, loving, and prosperous people are the people we want in our societies.

We evolved in bands. Forty to fifty people running around the Savannah. We would have been friendly to some other bands (those with whom we shared ancestors) and we were hostile to most other humans, who were our competitors. The level of hostility varied with carrying capacity; if resources were short because of too many humans, quite hostile, otherwise not very.

We did not evolve to take into consideration the needs of large groups of people. In order to do so, we evolved cultural methods: fictive kinship, culture, story, myth, and religion. These things created fictional identities which went beyond people we knew of or saw every day.

Theses are all hacks for a fundamental evolutionary problem: We’ve evolved to be pretty good to those we see all the time, and not to care much about people we don’t.

This was fine when were just a particularly clever animal. Even when we got to the point of making wholesale changes to the environment (usually through agriculture), the worst we could do is ruin a local ecosystem–we couldn’t mess up the world.

But, today, for good or ill, we live in that “interconnected world” and the “global society” everyone talks about. What happens to someone in Nigeria, Brazil, or China matters to me. Their happiness, their health, their prosperity affects mine.

And how they affect the environment affects me, too. How I, a first-worlder with a huge carbon footprint, affect the environment, affects them.

Their well-being affects mine. It is in my interest for them to be better off.

This isn’t what you’ve been told. Economics treats the world as a zero-sum game, a matter of managing scarcity.

The world has scarcities: resources, dumps for pollution like carbon, etc. But civilization isn’t, usually, a zero sum game. Instead, it’s usually negative sum or positive sum, or both. For some time for Westerners, and a few other developed nations, it has been positive sum, and there have been many other periods of positive-sum games.

My win is everyone else’s win.

Creating a good society requires both managing actual scarcities and understanding that actual scarcities are scarce, and that most things people want to do are positive sum. It requires turning most of what we do into positive-sum games. A good society is one in which “your win is my win” is made true far more often than not.

“We win together” is a prescriptive statement which must be made into a descriptive statement. (It is also a descriptive statement in general, because if my win isn’t your win more often than not, we don’t live in a good world.)

So humans must see beyond their identities, their tribes, and their nations, to treat all humans as people whom we want to be healthy, happy, prosperous, and loving. For their sakes and for our sakes.

But there is an additional step required to create a good society, a good world, a good civilization.

We must care for non-human life.

The mass-death of trees and plankton affects you, it affects me. The mass death of fish affects you, it affects me. The destruction of marshlands causes floods and reduces water quality; it affects you, and it affects me. Ecosystem collapse—well, you get it.

The problem here is that I’ve given you the rational argument.

Rationality is marginal. It’s not that humans can’t be rational, it’s that rationality is the lesser part of why we do things or how we make decisions. We make decisions based on emotions, and those emotions are based on our ideologies and identities.

Rationality, or “reason,” allows us to weasel out of doing the right thing too often. It is a tool for our emotions; emotions which right now scream: “My interests, my ideology, my identity, my people matter MOST!”

For a good world to exist, we must feel that other humans should be treated kindly simply because it is the right thing to do. We should be revolted by anyone going hungry, anyone being tortured, anyone being raped. The moment we think “They had it coming,” we’re on the wrong track. (Punishment is not the point, removing the ability of bad actors to continue to act badly is.)

And this principle needs to be extended to non-human life. We need to feel bad when animals are dying in large numbers and going extinct–bad enough to do something about it. We need to instinctively, by default, move to protect them. We should be as revolted by images of dolphins being slaughtered as we are by humans being slaughtered. If we kill for meat (and I eat meat), we should insist it be done humanely.

This must be based on values, principles, and identity, of feeling that humans and animals and even plants are all alive–and because they are alive, they must be treated with respect.

There are sound, pragmatic reasons for doing so; there are also sound moral reasons for doing so (read the Hidden Life of Trees). Anyone who doesn’t think most animals don’t feel pain, or don’t suffer, is on a profoundly unethical, immoral track.

This is the right thing to do, morally and pragmatically, and if we don’t figure out how to do it, we’re little better than bacteria that grow until they destroy their own environment and experience a great die-off.

Be kind. It creates the world you want to live in, and it may well save your life and the lives of those you claim to care about. By granting life the love you reserve only for a few, you give those few (and yourself, as it happens) their best chance at long life and prosperity–and grant it to your descendants as well.

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

Reagan and George W. Bush Changed the World More than Bill Clinton or Obama

By Ian Welsh

On December 1, 2016

28 Comments

We have a problem.

Left wingers and centrist, technocratic types are enamoured of intelligence. Of being smart.

Smart is all very nice. I am smart. But smart is not a synonym for effective or competent or wise or, well, most other words. It isn’t even a synonym for clever.

George W. Bush, by the time he got to the White House, was not smart. You listen to him talk, and it’s obvious. This is not a smart man (he was smart when he was younger–something went wrong).

George W. Bush had his two terms, and he changed the nature of American government in ways that neither Clinton nor Obama did. Bill Clinton ran Reagan’s economy better. Reagan was not smart. Reagan changed the nature of American government more than any President since FDR.

Bill Clinton was Reagan’s butt-boy. Understand that. Internalize it. He ran the neo-liberal economy that Reagan had created, and yes, he ran it better than Reagan, but he was living in Reagan’s world.

Obama ran Bush’s government. He kept deporting people–he deported even more people than Bush did. He ramped up drones. He kept troops in Afghanistan, he attacked Libya, he kept extending the Patriot Act and AUMF. He was operating within a constitutional order set up by Bush, and he never challenged it. Not once.

Obama was Bush’s butt-boy. Understand that. Internalize it.

It was famously said of FDR that he had a second class mind and a first class temperament. FDR created a framework for the US that ran, substantially from 1932 to 1970 or even 1980. Even Nixon, who overturned the post WWII order, didn’t overturn the New Deal. Heck, Nixon wanted universal health care.

Every Republican President after FDR and before Reagan, was FDR’s butt-boy. They ran the country he set up and they did it largely by his rules.

FDR wasn’t stupid, by any means, but he wasn’t as smart as Clinton. He might not even have been as smart as Obama. But he was far, far more effective. He got his way, he changed the nature of America, and he made it stick with his enemies.

Smart is NOT a synonym for effective.

This is very important to understand when dealing with someone like Trump.

I’m going to pound this issue a bit more, in a bit more detail, but for now: Stop underestimating people because they don’t have the sort of smarts you were taught in school matter, and which mostly matter because school selects for them. If you don’t, people like Trump and Bush will keep winning.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Learning to Understand the World

By Ian Welsh

On May 4, 2016

17 Comments

I’m Canadian, but my father often worked overseas. My earliest memories are not of Vancouver, where I was born, but of Malaysia, where I spent my first five years. The person who took care of me then was not my mother, but Anna, the housekeeper.

She was a Chinese Malay and I spent most of my time with her. I ate the same food as her and thought that was great: The western fare my parents ate was not half so tasty as the fried noodles and soups that were her mainstay.

She had a son, maybe twenty or so, though it’s hard to say. He had a motorcycle and seemed to me the epitome of cool (though I didn’t know that word) and kindness. One of my clearest early memories is of him teaching me how to catch butterflies in the little net I had.

The secret is to not chase them, let them settle in the grass and put the net over them. It takes the challenge out of it, but it works.

My favorite person in the world was Dee, my father’s secretary, also Chinese Malay. She was wild, and young, and had a sports car and would seat me in her lap while she drove. When my grandmother came to visit, I steadfastly refused to call her Grandma or any such thing, until someone hit on the name of “Grand-Dee”. So she was ever after.

We moved back to Canada when I was six or so, after stays in Jakarta, Indonesia and in Singapore and I didn’t travel overseas again till I was twelve, when my father got a job running a project in Bangladesh.

We traveled extensively through the Indian subcontinent in those years: Kashmir before the troubles, Nepal before the troubles. Delhi. Calcutta where I had a great-aunt who had not left after partition. Darjeeling, where my grandfather had been police chief under the Raj. Many other places. My mother, having spent much of her childhood in India, spoke fluent Hindi. This always surprised Indians, often to hilarious effect, as she would putter along like a typical white woman, letting them say whatever they wanted, then break into Hindi herself.

I remember someone cursing out our driver, and my Mother listening for quite some time before she leaned over, a round, little white matron and said, “That’s not very nice,” in Hindi.

The reaction was both funny and touching.

My father worked for Food and Agriculture, a United Nations organization. He often had guests over to the house, and if he went to someone else’s house, I usually went along. His compatriots were other aid workers: foresters, geologists, economists, agronomists, and so on. They’d sit and discuss trying to help the Third world; what worked and what didn’t.

The “what didn’t” list was a lot longer than the “what did,” but of more interest was why. Between them they had hundreds of years of experience.

I sat, listened, and learned.

Because I spent so much time around people with different beliefs, I became fascinated with how people could believe such different things. The Christians. The Hindus. The Moslems. The Secularists.

My father had a weird mix of white paternalism and deep respect for the locals and they generally seemed to like him. He was an asshole, but he was a fair asshole–and that was a vast improvement over the people they were used to working for and dealing with. He didn’t assume they didn’t know their own lives and he gave respect where respect was due.

I remember, back in Canada, being approached by Christian evangalists and my father telling them where to shove their beliefs. “You tell me that these good people I know who aren’t Christian are going to hell because they don’t follow Jesus?! Get off my property, or I’ll throw you off.”

He was a large, red-faced man who radiated anger and menace.

They got off his property.

People believe all sorts of weirdness. They believe contradictory weirdness, which doesn’t stop many of them from being good people, even though their beliefs are different.

It doesn’t stop them from being bad people, either.

Western scientific knowledge clearly mattered, but our ideological beliefs always struck me as as dubious as any theology. I remember, in grade eleven, reading an economics textbook which talked about rational man and utility optimization.

This was theology. Moral beliefs about how people should act and about how the universe must be, little different from Medieval Church scholasticism. Later I was to discover that the more a social “science” tried to pretend it was a science, the more dubious its insights, the greater the corruption, and the more massive the harm it did–and had done.

Economics, being the most “scientific” had done the most harm. Psychology was close behind.

I was a reader. From the time I was seven, until perhaps age thirty-two or so, I read more than a book a day on average. Often I would read as many as twenty in a week–two or three in a day.

Most of it was fiction, but amongst that was a fair bit of non-fiction. It’s not clear to me that I learned more from the non-fiction.

My main interests were in questions of knowledge: epistemology, cultural anthropology, comparative religion. What did humans believe and why?

I didn’t really become interested in economics and political science (in the broadest sense) until the recession of the early 90s. It was so clear that those leading society, and most economists, had no idea what was going on that I turned my attention to learning how the economy worked.

They couldn’t fix it, so I’d see if I could figure out how.

I did not lack intellectual confidence.

And so I read the economists, trying to winnow some gems out of the trash and hoping to find the occasional economist who knew his (they were all men) discipline was an ideological garbage heap and thus was able to say something useful.

I went back to university, before illness and poverty drove me out, and while there I studied (and read) mostly philosophy, linguistics, and sociology. In sociology, I found a discipline which had a broad enough focus of view that amidst the crap (and there was plenty) were real insights into how society, power, and economics actually work.

This was because no one took sociology seriously and most had contempt for it. Freed from interest by those with wealth and power, some sociologists were actually able to do useful work.

Anthropology and cultural historians remained the best people to read to remind oneself that “It was not always thus,” “It is not always thus,” and, “People are really plastic and can believe all sorts of amazing stuff.”

Cultural anthropology remains the best antidote to the sort of fools who try and pronounce that everything a human does is because of selfishness, or utility, or any other one thing.

No one who is well read can believe such a thing without engaging in the sort of mental gymnastics which make a circus contortionist’s physical antics look like those of a gross amateur.

Sociology, anthropology, and the better parts of psychology and history are also excellent reminders that humans are only slightly rational, and that when they do manage to be more than slightly rational it is the irrational parts of their belief systems which determine whether or not the rationality will lead to anything good.

Any rationality which tries to rest itself entirely in rationality becomes monstrous, precisely because it fails to recognize its monstrous non-rational roots, or that rationality can never provide ethical ends, only means.

In the 2000s, I fell into the blog world. As I have said before, I started out writing about policy and war, often nerdy, weedy stuff. Twenty-seven mistakes made during the Iraq occupation (nine months in), and so on.

I should have remembered what Ian, at twenty-one, knew.

People can believe essentially anything. People are not rational. Knowledge systems are pre-rational, even if a huge mound of rationality has been piled up to bury the non-rational roots.

You can’t convince anybody of anything they don’t want to believe, and most people’s real need to believe is to believe in their tribe and the Gods of their tribe, whether those Gods are supernatural ones like YHVH and Zeus, or merely metaphysical entities like utility or pure reason shorn of ideology.

I came back, first, to try to explain the first principles of morality and ethics to people. Stuff like “killing less people is better than killing more people.”

That didn’t stick. Most people can’t get it. They believe what their tribe does is right and if a moral symbol has been violated, their anger and outrage is too high to do the math involved in “this ‘terrorist’ is far less of a criminal than George Bush or Barack Obama.”

Fine. Ethics and morality don’t work, shorn of tribalism.

This is where the great Axial reformers wound up, by the way. They tried to create universal religions which made everyone a brother (sadly leaving women largely out, with a few partial exceptions). They tried to extend the tribe to everyone.

Instead, they created super-tribes which spent the next 2,000 years fighting it out in bloody and spectacular fashion.

Then, we raised up national ideology as tribes and did the 19th and 20th centuries.

Because I promised in my fundraiser that I’d do twelve reviews of foundational books, I have spent the past three weeks re-reading some of them. To date, I have read mostly sociology, with a side of theories of justice and charisma.

I have been brought back to my early concerns with knowledge and belief: People can believe virtually anything, and they will do so well past the point where it kills them, or their entire society.

I have been hammering, for the last six months, the issue of the logic of capitalism: How it has destroyed the environment and will thus lead to the deaths of at least a billion people or more.

We knew it was doing so, and we kept on keeping on. We knew planned obsolesence was wasteful and we kept on keeping on. Lately, we’ve been engaged in economic austerity despite the fact is has worked for, maybe, one nation in the world (Germany).

Rational?

We are barely sentient.

We live inside knowledge systems in which we have created the world as very concrete (often literally–buildings are instantiated ideas). We are so enmeshed in them we are barely able to question their assumptions or where they are leading us. We will not stop till they lead to catastrophe, and, often enough, not even then.

Forget the present day; go read how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation went down.

So, I find myself today sifting through the books I have read before; the thoughts I have thought before. I look back at different Ians and each of their understandings of the world.

These grains have fallen through my fingers before, and I have stared at the sand looking to weave a pattern that explains the order humans create.

Leaving aside natural processes we mostly don’t control, what changes the human world in the most far-reaching way are ideas. Those ideas may be technological ideas, or scientific, or ethical. They may be religions or ideologies (little difference, really). But the change comes from ideas.

So many, many ideas. So many we could not even ennumerate them, though the encyclopedists and editors of dictionaries have tried.

These ideas were all created by us. Some are very close to the natural world; some are far removed, but they are our ideas.

And they control us. The hand of dead philosophers, scientists, and technologists rules us.

We thought Reason would free us. The Enlightenment project was to dispel illusions and hobgoblins and myths. But reason has not freed us, and by giving us great power without giving us that cliched great wisdom, it has led to a great extinction that may even claim us.

Answers?

I have a few. They seem to me inadequate against our vast will to believe in garbage and our unwillingness to admit that the garbage is all created by us, and corresponds little to effectiveness, let alone reality.

But I will write them. There will be the book reviews I promised. There will be the booklet on the Creation of Reality.

Perhaps we can point towards a way of becoming self-aware creators of our own reality. Because we already create our own reality, we simply do it like the blind men in the parable of the Elephant, save not describing what we feel but creating it with no mind to how it all fits together and what the consequences of adopting each idea will be.

Marx posited that we create our own chains, but denigrated the role of ideas. Nothing but our biology binds humans more than ideas, because, beyond the basics given us by nature, everything–including the power of the gun, comes from ideas.

Let us see whether my forty-eight-year journey has taught me anything useful about those ideas, and whether I can impart what I have learned to others.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

What the Infotech/Telecom Revolution Has Actually Done

By Ian Welsh

On April 23, 2016

28 Comments

Globe on Fire There’s a great deal of talk about how wonderful modern technology is. The internet, cell phones, and computers are the stars of this firmament. I believe such talk is somewhat overblown; the latest tech revolution is not as significant as many that have come before.

At least not in terms of doing good.

Let us examine what all this infotech really has changed.

Control. Massive control. Surveillance.

Just in time inventory. Not possible 50 years ago.

Second to second tracking of workers without having to have a supervisor physically watching them. Amazon warehouse workers carry devices which allow their workflow to be tracked to the second. And if they aren’t making their seconds, the supervisor is right on them. This wasn’t possible 30 years ago. If you wanted to have that sort of control, you had to have a supervisor physically watching them, and the cost was prohibitive.

This sort of tracking is used for clerical workers as well.

Outsourcing work that had to be kept domestic before. The massive call centers in Delhi and Ireland were not possible even 30 years ago. The cost was simply prohibitive.

Offshoring work, like manufacturing, was difficult to offshore before. Without real-time, high-density communications, cutting edge manufacturing overseas was very difficult in the past. You could offshore some things, certainly, but those industries tended to be mature industries: shipbuilding, textiles, and so on. Cutting edge industries, no, they had to be located close to the boffins or they were offshored to another, essentially First World country–as when Britain offshored much of their production to the United States in the late 19th century.

Commercial surveillance. Everything you buy is cross referenced. When you buy something at a major retailers, the store takes a picture of you and matches it with your information. All online purchase information is stored and centralized in databases. This information is shared. This includes, but goes far beyond, internet surveillance; witness Google or Facebook serving you ads based on what you’ve read or searched. Add this data to credit reports, bank accounts, and so on, and it provides a remarkably complete picture of your life, because everything you buy with anything but cash (and even some of that) is tracked. Where you are when you buy it is also tracked.

Government surveillance. Millions of cameras in London and most other First World cities. Millions of cameras in Chinese cities. Some transit systems now have audio surveillance. Because the government can seize any private surveillance as well, you can assume you’re being tracked all day in most First World cities. Add this to the commercial surveillance system described above and the picture of your life is startlingly accurate.

As biometric recognition system comes online (face, gait, infrared, and more) this work will be done automatically.

What the telecom and infotech revolution has done is enable wide scale CONTROL and SURVEILLANCE.

These are two sides of the same coin, you can’t control people if you don’t what they’re doing.

This control is most dictatorial, amusingly, in the private sector. The worse a job is, the more this sort of control has been used for super-Taylorization, making humans into little more than remotely controlled flesh robots.

It has made control of international conglomerates far easier; control from the top to the periphery far easier. This is true in the government and the military as well, where central commanders often control details like when bombs drop, rather than leaving it to a plane’s crew.

This is a world where only a few people have practical power. It is a world, not of radical decentralization, but of radical centralization.

This is a vast experiment. In the past, there have been surveillance and control societies. But the math on them has always been suspect. Sometimes they work, and work brilliantly–like in Tokugawa Japan, certain periods of Confucian Chinese bureaucratic control, or ancient Egypt.

But often they have been defeated, and fairly easily, by societies which allowed more freedom; less control, less spying, and supervision. Societies which assumed people knew what to do on their own; or just societies that understood that the cost of close supervision and surveillance was too high to support.

The old East German Stasi model, with one-third of the population spying on the other two-thirds was the ludicrous extension of this.

What the telecom and infotech revolutions have actually enabled is a vast experiment in de-skilling, surveillance, and control–beyond the dreams even of the late 19th century Taylorist movement, with their stopwatches and assembly lines. Nothing people do, from what they eat, to what entertainment they consume, to when and how well they sleep; let alone everything they do during their working day, is beyond reach.

This is not to say there are no good results from infotech and computers—there are plenty. But contrary to the idea that these technologies would increase freedom, they appear, on a daily basis, to have decreased freedom and privacy and promise to radically reduce them even more.

The second set of questions about any technology are how it can be used for violence, how it can be used for control, and how it can be used for ideological production.

(The first question, of course, is what is required to use it. More on that another time.)

Infotech may enable totalitarian societies which make those of the past look like kindergarten. We are already far past the technology used in the novel 1984 (Big Brother could not record, for example). That much of this surveillance is done by private actors as opposed to the government, does not reduce the loss of freedom, autonomy, and privacy.

Combined with making humans obsolete, infotech and the telecom revolution are as vastly important as their boosters say.

But, so far, not in a beneficial way. Yes, they could be used to make human lives better, it seems the real traction of the telecom and infotech revolutions remarkably began/coincided with neo-liberal policies which have hurt vast numbers of people in both the First and Third Worlds–precisely because they helped make those neo-liberal policies work.

Technologies are never neutral and there is no guarantee that “progress” will actually improve people’s lives. Even if a technology has the potential to improve people’s lives, potential is theoretical; i.e., not the same as practice.

Infotech and telecom tech are primarily control technologies, the same as writing was. They vastly increase the ability to centralize and to control a population’s behaviour.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

On Hate

By Ian Welsh

On December 26, 2015

14 Comments

My recent article on Hillary Clinton and the reasonableness of hating her caused some confusion, especially when I said I don’t hate Clinton, though surely there are good reasons to do so.

The issue is this: While it is reasonable to hate people who have done great wrong to ourselves or to other people, hating does the hater little good and much harm.

Hate, and its brother, anger, can supply energy and motivation, but they are like shots of adrenaline. Over time they damage the body and poison the mind. If used at all, they should be used in moderation, lest you hurt yourself more than the person you hate or at whom you angry.

Worse, this world is full of people it is entirely rational to hate. From those who run the corporations poisoning the world, to those engaging in wars which should not be fought, to those profiting from those wars, to—well, the list is, if not endless, long enough that no one can reach an end, though Dante tried in the Inferno.

Hate is thus never-ending, a poison cup which runneth over. No matter that you drink it to the dregs, it is ever full.

And, for me at least, hatred and anger are unpleasant. I do not enjoy the experience. Oh, like adrenaline or coffee, there’s that shot of energy, but it’s an ill feeling overall. It’s very hard to feel free and easy and happy and be topped up with hate.

Nor is hate necessary. There is no need to hate Clinton, or Bush, or Obama, or ISIS or anyone else in order to oppose them. Not hating doesn’t mean you have to be “nice” or “agreeable,” it simply means you are choosing not to allow a particular emotion to be your experience of the world.

Feel free to oppose evil with glee or happiness or delight. The evil doesn’t care about your hate, only the effectiveness of your opposition.

You can oppose evil without allowing it to control your mind or your emotions at all. If you find you can’t stop the anger or hate (or any other emotion), well then, you no longer control yourself, do you? Your enemies, in effect, are choosing your consciousness for you.

That seems like a very great power to give to one’s enemies, or to anyone else, for that matter.

So, no. I don’t hate Clinton, or even Bush, Jr. Not any more. Nor am I angry at anyone for longer than an hour or two, and rarely even that long any more. The last time I was angry for long was during the Greek crisis and I didn’t like it. So the question I asked myself was: “Is my being angry helping the Greeks in any way?”

No, it wasn’t.

So I stopped being angry, and was happy.

Letting anything in the world, let alone your enemies, control your consciousness, is foolishness. Again, if you think you’ve made a choice to hate, try to choose the opposite. Say: “Today, I will not hate or be angry, I will choose to be happy instead.”

If you can’t, you may have a problem.

If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.