Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Author: Ian Welsh Page 78 of 436
This is the third chapter of my book “The Construction of Reality.” It’s first draft, so not completely edited, and is a reward for reaching a milestone in our fundraiser. The next milestone is $8,350 (a little over $2,000 from the last milestone), and will include chapters:
5. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)
6. The Ritual (how we create identification)
7. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)
Being Aware
If you’re like most people, you have a memory which runs as follows. You left your home meaning to go somewhere, only to suddenly realize that you were actually heading to work, school or somewhere else you go often.
During the time you were travelling to the wrong place, you were conscious: your mind was preoccupied with something unrelated to where you were going.
What you weren’t, was aware of what you were doing. If you had been aware of where you were going, you wouldn’t have headed in the wrong direction. The sooner you became aware that you were going to the wrong place, the sooner you corrected.
Our bodies are automating machines. Perhaps you remember learning to tie your shoelaces? I don’t know about you, but I found it hard. Yet I don’t even think about it today. Every day I put on my shoes, and I can’t tell you which shoe I put on first, because I do it automatically.
Deliberate learning is about automating, and so is non-deliberate learning, as when we burn our hand on a stove and learn not to touch hot elements. Our bodies build it in.
The examples we’ve used so far are cases where if you want to be aware of what you’re doing, you can, but experts in how we use our body tell us that the body and brain are even more ruthless: if you aren’t using a perception, the body stops paying attention at a deeper level(x). Body-workers such as massage artists and physical therapists know that many people cannot feel parts of their body without extreme force applied and even when they can feel, it is extremely coarse.
Someone with good body sense may be able to pinpoint a pain exactly, while someone without it may simply have to say “my right upper back”. That’s all they can sense.
For them to learn to use their body in a better way, the first step is to teach them to sense the exact muscles. Thomas Hanna describes, in one example, pressing on the muscle around the shoulder blades, to bring those muscles into conscious awareness(x).
Awareness comes in grades. To really fix something, you need to not just know feel the problem, but to know the mechanics of the problem. “I tend to lean forward and hunch my shoulders.”
Until you know what you’re doing, you can’t change it. And generally, it helps to know why you’re doing something, as well.
Trying to change without awareness is as likely to make the problem worse as better.
This is just as true of what we call mental processes; of thoughts and feelings and beliefs, as it is of those we associate with the body.
We use the words emotion and feeling interchangeably because every emotion is actually a sensation in the body. It will be paired with an interpretation, which might be verbal. It’s quite possible to have a sensation and be confused. “Am I scared? Lightheaded? What is causing this feeling?” In many cases we have to learn what emotion a sensation is, and then we interpret if it’s good or bad. Desire for a carrot, good. Desire for black forest cake, maybe not so good.
Some of this is natural: a fear of heights seems wired in to humans, but most of our fears are learned. No one is born hating or fearing people with a different skin color, for example. No one is born a Muslim, Democrat, socialist or secularist.
Everything you once learned, you can change.
That doesn’t mean it is easy. It is often very hard, though there are techniques which make it easier. (If you really want to end your racism, go live where there are almost no people with your skin color or culture. Make yourself live there for a couple years, make friends with them and so on. That’ll do the trick for almost everyone.)
But before you can change something, you must be aware of it, and in most cases, to change it, you must be aware of its mechanics: of how it works now.
Humans tend to take how things are, for them or for others, as how things should be. Even when we don’t, we lack awareness of the processes which created the world we live in and which sustain it, and we lack belief that we can change those processes.
Much of this is poverty of imagination. We accept something like money as natural, though it isn’t. We accept all-day schooling of children by strangers even though the vast majority of humans never did any such thing. We are so used to buying everything we need that we can’t imagine producing it even though small groups of humans for most of human existence produced most of their own needs. If we have a religion it is almost certainly the religion of our parents, whether or not that religion would be best for us as individuals or for the world.
We… accept. And we often don’t really understand that our suffering is optional. We hate our jobs but every other job looks terrible or hard to get and we spend 40 years living for the weekends, then when we’re old, we retire and are often too sick or too used to working to enjoy the sudden influx of free time.
As individuals we have broad latitude to choose what reality we live in. The first step is being aware it is possible. The second step is being aware of how reality was created and chosen for us. The third step is a deep awareness that in most respects, the reality we live in is arbitrary. Other people live or have lived in very different ones. Ones we might like a great deal more. Why not change?
Societies are recipients of the decisions, mostly unaware decisions, of those who came before us. We are often unhappy with our societies, but when we try and change them we often fail, and when we succeed we often change society in ways that make many of us worse off.
Actual awareness of the mechanics which make our societies as they are is lacking. We don’t, as a group, really know. We flail around in the darkness “tax cuts will make the wealthy create more and better jobs!”
We try that.
Nope.
We rarely ask, for example, “Should we organize our lives around jobs? Is that the best way for humans to live?”
If we wish, as societies, to create a better reality, we must understand how we create the realities we live in today.
This book, then, is about that awareness, both for individuals and groups.
Become aware of how reality is created, and you can change it. This is more true today for individuals than for society, but with enough understanding, we can make it true for society as well.
I’ll publish the next chapter on Monday or Tuesday and if we get to $8, 350, we’ll do the next three. At $10,500, there’ll be three more chapters.
9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)
10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)
11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)
If you’d like to subscribe or donate, I’d appreciate it greatly. This blog is 100% supported by its readers, though it’s free to all to read.
As part of the annual fundraiser I promised to share some of the chapters of my book “The Construction of Reality.” At $6,200, we have the first four chapters (originally it was 5, but I’ve done some editing and combined two), “The Introduction”, “The Social Facts Which Rule Us”, “Being Aware”, and “Human Alone.”
If we make $8,350 we’ll have:
5. Identity and Identification (how we expand our bodies beyond our physical selves)
6. The Ritual (how we create identification)
7. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)
Introduction
I wonder if you have a memory of when you first realized many people are miserable or suffering.
I don’t.
I remember the time before. When I was six or younger the world just seemed open and fascinating and almost everyone was really nice. Well, some of the other kids weren’t, but the adults were.
I remember after, around age seven or so. I knew a lot of people were in pain, even if they tried to conceal it. My father and mother were two of the sufferers.
Soon enough I became one of them, because what makes the world good or bad is largely other people. The people closest to me lived in Hell, and they took me with them.
But I do remember the day when I realized humans were making humans suffer.
I grew up in Vancouver, a lovely coastal city on the west coast of Canada. These were the days when it was still a working class port for lumber from the interior of BC and not a third class world city.
Like all cities, essentially everything in it was created by humans. The roads, the houses, the schools. The trees were planted where humans wanted them planted. The teachers were there because of human decisions; the booze my parents drank was made by humans; the jobs my father, a forester went to, because humans had decided to chop down trees.
I liked trees a lot more than humans. No tree had ever done me wrong.
So many of these people were miserable.
But we; we humans, had created all of this. Not just the physical world, with its ugly asphalt roads, but the daily lives that made them miserable: the schools; the businesses; the money they squabbled over; the booze they used to cover the pain.
When I was a teenager, my father took a job in Bangladesh, then possibly the poorest country in the world.
Vancouver and Bangladesh were different levels of Hell. One better than the other, but both Hell
I didn’t get it.
Why, when we made all the decisions, would we choose to create hell for ourselves? Didn’t we all want to be happy? Didn’t we like being around happy people instead of miserable people? Since we made it, if it was making people miserable, why didn’t we make it different? Better?
The book you are reading today is part of a life-long quest to find out the answer.
We create the reality we live in.
Since we created it, we can change it, but first we have to understand what it is, why and how we made it the way it is.
Let’s start with what. Let’s look at what we’ve constructed in more detail.
Chapter 2: The Social Facts Which Rule Us
Reality is constructed first by our bodies. By our senses and universal emotions like fear and lust, anger and love. Being human orders the world for us before we take our first breath.
This is true of all animals, who, like humans, also change the environment to suit themselves. But humans have created a reality far, far from that of our forebears who ran in bands on the Savannah.
We have created a human world. Most of us live in cities; artificial environments created by us. We walk on streets laid out by humans, work and sleep and cook in buildings, drive in cars or take buses, trains and planes. We talk on cell phones and surf the internet. Even those who live in the country live on land which has been altered by agriculture and pasturing of animals humans domesticated. A farmer grows wheat which was bred over millennia (or genetically altered recently). The farmer raises animals humans have been raising for thousands of years. We eat the meat of cows and pigs and chicken; we dine on rice or wheat or vegetables we have tended for millennia and which we have bred to suit us.
As individuals we did not create almost any part of this physical world. We did not invent the techniques for caring for domesticated animals, growing vegetables or making smart phones.
We live in a physical world created by humans, many of whom are dead. Human life is human in a way that animal life is not animal. Animals have an effect on the environment, but it is minor compared to what humans have done to our world.
And this is just the physical side of the world. Just as important is the world of ideas: of social facts.
Look at the words you are reading right now. You didn’t invent writing, typing, any of these words or language itself. You spend your life thinking most of your thoughts in a language or languages created by humans, for humans and mostly by dead humans. The very structure of your thoughts was imposed on you.
You almost certainly receive your daily food in exchange for something called money which is probably either plastic woven to look like paper or electronic bits. Money has no intrinsic value, a million dollars in the middle of Antarctica would do nothing for you, most money isn’t even paper any more: you couldn’t burn it for heat. Yet most of us spend most of our waking day working for someone who gives us “money” and exchange it for most everything else we want.
In times of war and famine money may lose most of its value. Food, or cigarettes or sex may be worth more. Money’s value is a social fact.
When someone is killed by another human being, whether it was murder or not is a social fact. In war, if a soldier kills someone it is probably not murder. If the state is executing someone it is not murder. When police kill someone it is usually not considered murder. Social facts.
The quality and amount of health care provided to individuals is a social fact. It depends on where they live. In some countries it depends on how much money they have. In other countries it depends on how much power they have.
The amount of melanin in someone’s skin is a physical fact. That having a “black” name in America leads to half the interview requests for an identical resume compared to someone with a “white” name is a social fact(x).
Cannabis is almost certainly less physically harmful than tobacco or alcohol, but selling or possessing cannabis is far more likely to get you thrown in jail. In the US, during alcohol prohibition, this was not true. Alcohol is alcohol, its legal status is a social fact.
Social facts rule most of your life. They are layered on top of physical facts and tell you how to understand those facts, and how to act towards them. There are few more consequential decisions than “when should I kill someone?” or “when should someone receive health care and how good should it be? or, “should I hire someone and for how much?”
Not all ideas are social facts. You may believe something “ought” to be true, but often other people do not agree. You think your girlfriend or boyfriend shouldn’t cheat, they don’t agree; the state doesn’t care. But if you act on that idea, and so do other people, it’s a social fact. They may call her a cheater, ostracize her and so on. If no one acts on it, it is not a social fact.
A gang or mafia may believe that their members shouldn’t inform, and they may enforce this as best they can, but obviously the state does not. It is still a social fact if they can make it one, however.
You may also believe in ideas which are contrary to the ideas currently enforced by the state or other people. Perhaps you do not believe in intellectual property. Perhaps you think confessions obtained by torture shouldn’t be used in criminal proceedings. Perhaps you believe that women should or shouldn’t be able to have abortions.
These ideas may fall short of being social facts if no one acts on them. They are just ideas: how the world “ought” to be.
This social world is layered on top of the physical world created by our bodies and how they perceive and interact with objects around us. No amount of social facts will alter the solidity of a rock, or our need to breath.
Each of us lives inside these two worlds, worlds which were largely given to us.
Imposed on us.
At most we made a few choices from available worlds; available realities, but most of our choices were made for us.
The reality, I, a Canadian urban man live in is different from that of a woman Mexican subsistence farmer, let alone that of a plains Indian 700 years ago; a prole in the Roman Republic, or an Egyptian priest under the Pharoahs.
This is before we get to more differences that seem important to us today: say the difference between a conservative Republican Christian and his counterpart progressive Democratic atheist. A thousand years from now, those may seem like similar people, today they seem quite different.
Our bodies make us alive, but they make us different as well: to be tall or short is to experience the world differently. To have a strong constitution or a sickly one is to experience the world differently, as well.
And to be a woman or a man, likewise; so much so that men and women in some societies (Saudi Arabia today, Victorian England, or Manchu China) can be said to have such different experiences in life that they might as well live in different worlds: different realities.
Reality is inside-out, first, because we have bodies and senses which organize our experience of the world, and do so before the first drop of parental interference, training or culture.
But it is outside-in in most of the ways which make us different from each other and from other humans who have lived in the past.
Each of us is formed by time, place and position. Even if we were both male, with similar bodies, in Republican Rome, were I born to a Plebian family and you to a Patrician family, our worlds would part, and even if both of us were born to Patrician families the particulars of our parents, tutors and other incidentals would leave us different. Position within a place and time, added to different bodies makes up most of the individuality which divides us from our peers.
Even the thoughts we think, and many of the emotions we feel happen because of social facts and ideals. No one was born loving God and Country, or hating certain religions, or believing that people have a right to happiness or that we should obey teacher.
Our thoughts, our emotions, come from other people. From social facts and learning and conditioning. They may be the most intimate things we own, sometimes even more than our bodies, and yet… in a real way, they are not ours.
So to understand how reality has been constructed we will have to swoop from the heights of macro-history; of the effects of great ideas, of technologies like gunpowder and farming, or organization and vast tribal identities, to the depths of our inner experience: our thoughts, our feelings, our urges and beliefs.
Reality is an experience. Each of us lives in a reality, feels it and thinks about it. As we live we change the reality we live in, or it changes around us, and again, our experience of the world changes.
To write a book on the construction of reality while neglecting how we can change reality would be barren. Though careful examination reveals that most of human reality is imposed on us from outside, by time place and position: none of which we chose, we do not have to accept this passively.
While even the great struggle to change our shared world; our shared reality; all of us can change the reality we live in, by taking some control of our circumstances; or denied that: by changing how our bodies and brains interpret the world.
So we will cover the vast currents of history and pre-history. Of identity, organization, technology and ideology. We will speak of human empathy, human violence, and human limits, because it is human limits which have the greatest affect on the world we create and our acceptance of the world that we are given.
But in so doing, we will not neglect the personal.
Let us then, start from the inside. Let us start with you.
I’ll publish the next two chapters this week and if we get to $8, 350, we’ll do the next two. At $10,500, there’ll be three more chapters.
9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)
10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)
11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)
If you’d like to subscribe or donate, I’d appreciate it greatly. This blog is 100% supported by its readers, though it’s free to all to read.
It has become clear that Israeli forces are not succeeding at taking out Hamas. Israel’s own estimate of Hamas casualties from October 7th to the ceasefire was one to two thousand Hamas deaths. This is almost certainly an overstatement, for obvious reasons.
Maps of the Israeli invasion show control of a fair chunk of Northern Gaza, but it isn’t full control: they still get attacked by Hamas in most of these areas. Videos of Hamas attacks often show amazing levels of Israeli incompetence, most often lack of infantry screens for tanks.
The reason is simple. For decades the Israeli army has primarily been used as a paramilitary occupation force: they shoot, bomb and beat up civilians who can’t fight back. You become good at what you do, and when it comes to terrorizing civilians, the Israelis are top-notch. It’s why they train police forces and paramilitary forces around the world, including in America and India.
(This is a 100% reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.)
But if you specialize in beating up people who can’t fight back: in sniping civilians, bulldozing houses, raiding civilians homes and so on, well, you aren’t going to be good at fighting military forces.
On top of this Hamas’s military wing has only one real job: to fight Israel. So a force optimized for beating up civilians (the IDF) is fighting a force which while woefully under-equipped, is optimized for fighting them.
Israel’s main reason for damn near indiscriminate bombing is because they want to ethnic cleanse and/or genocide Palestinians. But another reason is that they suck at fighting Hamas, and so “mowing the grass” is all they really can do: it’s all they really know how to do. For a couple generations now, the IDF’s main strategies against enemies in areas they don’t control has been bomb, bomb away and their strategy in areas they do control has been raids, beatings, snipers, bulldozers and so on.
The IDF is just hyper-optimized for fighting people who can’t fight back effectively, and unfortunately for them, Hamas is optimized for fighting the IDF.
It should be added that this is a specific example of a general rule: occupation armies become weak (they also become brutal and stupid). It’s one of the reasons why you should never use your army as an occupation force for any significant length of time.
If you must occupy for long periods, you should have a separate organization which is not under the same command. And your military should despise that organization and consider them dishonorable scum. If it’s any other way, your military will be useless when you face a real enemy.
Update:
This is astonishing. Hamas fighter using a tunnel (I guess) amidst an IDF camp. No attack is filmed but he's within meters of 10+ IDF soldiers relaxing. pic.twitter.com/Sx7on9ZoUW
— Dan (@DanFmTo) December 5, 2023
The next Al-Qassam update. Probably what happened next after the video above. pic.twitter.com/0DzwnKoJ2B
— Dan (@DanFmTo) December 5, 2023
In Ontario, Canada:
https://twitter.com/DGBassani/status/1730640262169297324
Meanwhile, in China there’s a huge respiratory disease outbreak that the Chinese government refuses to give details on. Could be something new, but it equally it just could be standard respiratory disease: a LOT of standard respiratory disease.
I hate to keep hammering this issue, but it’s important. There is NO immunity debt, what there is is immune system damage from Covid infections. Every Covid infection has a chance to degrade your immune system and to damage basically every organ, including your brain.
Every additional Covid infection can and often does do more damage. This damage is often imperceptible (until it isn’t): your body is hurt, but you can’t feel it—yet. When you do, well, that’s Long Covid.
Meanwhile you get sick more often. We’ve also seen huge increases in children with heart and respiratory ailments, since schools are a primary vector for infection.
(This is a reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.)
When China stopped their Zero Covid policy, I said a lot of people would die and suffer. We don’t know the immediate death toll because China isn’t talking, but estimates put it between 1.4 and 2 million people in the first two months. But, as I wrote at the time, it was the long term consequences which would really matter.
They show up easier in China because China has fewer hospital beds per capita and it’s harder to conceal when hospitals become swamped.
We could still wipe out Covid if we really wanted to, though it would be a big and worldwide effort, but so far we’re mostly just pretending it’s over “because we say it’s over.”
Alas “because I say so” doesn’t work with respect to nature and the knock-on effects of the pandemic continue, and they are very very nasty.
The signs of American collapse are everywhere. The Russians are out-producing not just the US, but the West in missiles, tanks and drones. The Chinese have a larger navy than the US and can build three ships in the time it takes the US to build one, and yes, their domestic arms industry is larger and more productive than America’s. They and the Russians are also ahead technologically in missiles, and arguably drones. (America has more expensive larger ones, but Ukraine shows what works is swarms of smaller ones.)
What’s really damning is the Western inability to ramp up production for the Ukrainian war. The Russians vastly increased production, the West hasn’t and can’t. De-industrialization is real.
I’ve gone over this in a number of articles, but the bottom line is that China is the largest trade partner of most of the world, is providing the loans for much of the world (at cheaper interest rates); is doing far more development work and so on. It is aligned with Russia. Major conferences are now lead by China: both the Iran/Saudi deal and the major Palestinian peace effort—and neither were discussed in English. They’re equal in most techs and catching up in those they are behind in like semiconductors, satellites and commercial aircraft.
But it’s the naval bit I keep coming back to. China will have a much, much larger navy than America: it already does and the American navy is shrinking while the Chinese one is growing.
The rise of China has been concealed by inertia and by the overhang of dollar being the unit of trade, but everyone is going to see and acknowledge this soon, especially as trade is increasingly settled in local currencies and alternatives to the Western banking system grow.
It just doesn’t make sense to go to the US any more if want most goods, military gear or even to move up the industrial chain. (See “How to use China to make your left wing government successful.”)
It’s all over but the shooting. In Thucydides Trap, Graham Allison’s book and article, he notes that usually the rise of a new power leads to war, sometimes multiple wars.
This is a reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.
We’re about a thousand dollars out from the first reward, the first four chapters of my book “Creation of Reality”, which will be published right after we make the goal.
On a personal level, this feels weird, in that all the things I’ve been warning about for decades are now happening. De-dollarization, industrial hollowness leading to military incapacity, and the Global South abandoning Europe and American en-masse.
Slowly, then quickly.
I mean, it’s not weird, these things were obvious. But 30 years is a long time in a human life. To see it all happening now, just as I (and others) predicted feels really weird.
Same as climate change: for a long time we were warning, and not it’s here in ways only fools can deny. Exactly as predicted. I always said it would happen sooner and worse than the IPCC claimed.
The Chinese are going to get in the neck, of course. They’ll get lead-trace and then be gutted by climate change and ecological collapse like everyone else. Their time in the sun will be brief.
It’s Chinese bad luck to make it to the top of the industrial heap at the moment when the entire industrial stack is about to become impossible to maintain. They played by the industrialization rules, and they’re going to die by them.
Still, unless the North China breadbasket gets wiped out an early inundation, the Chinese will probably hold on longer than most. Big if, though. My money is that a big inundation will hit far sooner than most models say.
Some facts have become clear over the duration of the Israeli/Gaza conflict of 2023.
- The initial Hamas attack did not have a lot of atrocities committed, despite Israeli claims. No widespread rape, no baby killing and few civilian casualties caused by Hamas. Hamas’s targets were military, plus grabbing hostages and most of the civilian casualties seem to have been caused by indiscriminate Israeli fire, some due to calousness, some due to panic and some due to the Samson doctrine that states Israel will not allow hostages to be taken.
- Hamas treated its captives humanely. Israel routinely tortures and sexually humiliates theirs.
- Israel attacked multiple hospitals and deliberately forced them to shut, while cutting off all water, power and food. The population pyramid of known casualties very closely follows the Gaza population pyramid, and the most common age of those killed was five. Most dead were women and children, which means they weren’t soldiers and couldn’t be.
- Israel is clearly engaging ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Support for Israel has come primarily from the West: the US and most European nations, with Ireland and to a lesser extent, Spain, being exceptions. The US sent tons of aid, appears to have had soldiers on the ground, and aided in targeting of civilians. They intercepted missiles from Yemen and generally did everything they could to help Israel kill as many Gazans as possible.
The Europeans have cracked down heavily on any pro-Palestinian protests, with the Germans being worst in class. The Germans have learned the exact wrong lesson from the Holocaust, they believe it means they must support Israel no matter what, not that genocide and ethnic cleansing are bad.
Only two large groups have really supported Gaza: Yemen and Hezbollah. Yemen has fired missiles and captured shipping ultimately owned by Israel. Hezbollah has attacked many military targets in Northern Israel and forced Israel to keep about a third of its army, including many of the best units on its border.
No one else has done anything meaningful. The Arab countries and Turkey talked a big game, but they had the leverage of oil and refused to use it.
This is a reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.
So, who are the “bad guys?” Pretty clearly those committing and supporting the genocide. In order, Israel, the US, and Europe/Canada.
Who are the good guys? We’ll leave out Hamas, though frankly, I consider them an armed liberation movement: freedom fighters, and they should probably be on the list. Remember the Israeli mass murder didn’t start October 7th.
So: Hezbollah, Yemen, Ireland (since they were under a lot of pressure). And that’s about it.
Civilians around the world and especially in America who protested in vast numbers are due a lot of credit. It’s fairly clear that the ceasefire occurred because Biden couldn’t take any more popularity loss.
I think it’s important to point this out. If you’re helping commit a genocide, you’re bad. If you’re trying to stop one, you’re good.
Back in 2016 I wrote a piece called “Seven Rules For Running a Real Left Wing Government.” It proved to be one of my most popular pieces, particularly loved by activists. Since then I’ve often been asked for an more and I’ve finally written a partial update and companion piece.
The Sixth Rule was “Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System.”
This rule is still true, but how it is applied has changed — you can use a relationship with China to, over time, reduce your dependence on the old system which required you to stay poor and dependent..
Back in 2016 China was massively important, but the rules of the system were still all-powerfully American. Those rules are breaking down now and your government can take advantage of that. Though the title of this piece is about China, much applies to bilateral relationships with other countries. China’s the biggest and most advanced and most useful right now, however.
What working with China can do for you.
- Movement up the industrialization chain;
- Modernization
- one time infrastructure
- cheap loans
- Training and teching-up your scientists, engineers and designers.
All of these benefits are available, but you have to be smart and structure your deals to give you a long term advantage, China won’t do that for you, but they are open to such deals and won’t sandbag you. To use modern bargaining speak win/win deals are available if you seek them. There are limits, of course, but those limits are far higher than they were and are under the old WTO/US system.
How The World & China Have Changed And How You Can Use Those Changes
China is now the largest trade nation in the world and caught up to the West or surpassing it in most, though not yet all, technologies.
Post-Ukraine war it has been structuring many non-dollar deals.
These deals settle outside of the banking system controlled by America and Europe and thus you are not forced into structures which automatically try to keep you from moving up the value chain without being a US satrapy (like South Korea and Japan and most of Europe) or seeking moderate economic independence. (See the original 7 Rules article for how the old system works.)
De-dollarization and a nascent non-Western banking system make it possible to break the stranglehold the old international trade and finance regime put on left wing governments.
To take advantage of this opportunity you need to understand China’s domestic issues:
- China has far more construction and development capacity than it needs. It has built most of the buildings, roads, ports, hospitals, schools, power plants and so on it requires. China could get rid of those jobs and cut the industry in half OR it could use it overseas and not throw a pile of people out of work and destroy half an industry. This means, among other things, that China is willing to put up infrastructure for very low prices in order to keep the people employed.
- China has a vast need for resources: food, fuel, minerals and so on. If you’ve got it, odds are they need it and they want long term secure deals.
- China is moving up the manufacturing value chain and moving into services. In many cases the Chinese government has forced industries to shut down low value manufacturing plants that are still profitable. They want the lower chain industry out of their country, and over time what counts as “lower” moves further up the chain.
What all this means is that China is willing to build your country what it wants for cheap in exchange for deals for your resources and, more importantly, to relocate industry to your country.
You have to take advantage of this in the right ways, or it is just another trap, but it’s still a big opportunity because the US offered this deal to only a few nations and required satrapy status in return. Think South Korea and Japan and Taiwan.
This isn’t to say that China doesn’t have some non-negotiable requirements if you want to be cut in on the good deals, however, they’re just less onerous than the old US and European deals were. Let’s discuss that next.
China’s Non Negotiable Requirements
These are simple. You will not recognize Taiwan and will stay out of the Taiwan/Mainland dispute. You will stay out of anything relating to Tibet and that will most likely include not hosting the Dalai Lama at the senior government level. If you are not in the South China Sea, you’ll stay out of that dispute.
These aren’t particularly onerous, though you may find they stick in the craw slightly. Still, it’s a lot less than what the US and Europe require.
What You’ll Lose By Aligning With China
Simply, good treatment from Europe and the US. That means reliable and fair access to the western financial system, the ability to buy Western military gear and expect to get parts and ammo when you actually need it, and to a lesser extent, access to western goods and services.
The financial aspect is the most important, but will become less and less important. The whole point is bilateral or multilateral deals outside of the Western financial system anyway, and it’s that financial system which has been primarily responsible for keeping the global South down for the last 70 years.
The military aspect is negligible at this point. It’s clear that the West’s military production system is sclerotic and can’t keep up with major demand spikes: we’ve seen that in the Ukraine where they can’t even keep Ukraine supplied with enough dumb artillery shells. You’re better off getting your military supplies from China, Russia and Iran. There isn’t even much of a quality gap and in some areas, like missiles, you’ll receive better.
As for goods and services, increasingly, outside of pharmaceuticals (which they’ll withhold from you in a crisis anyway, as Covid proved), China can supply what you need, including advanced telecom equipment and more of the production stack than the West can these days. You’re giving up very very little and in ten years it will be essentially nothing.
What Types Of Deals To Cut
There are three types of deals you want beyond the basic “we sell you stuff and then buy goods from you.” There’ll always be some of that, but the idea is to make your country more independent and more prosperous and your people better off over time. That will not happen if you just sell resources and then turn around and buy goods.
Bilateral up the chain deals.
This means “we give you resources or low chain goods and you help us move up the chain.” If you’re not already on the chain, that’ll mean starting with textiles, most likely, but you have to start somewhere.
Bilateral Cartel Deals
In these deals you agree that you’ll own a particular industry and the other country won’t compete with you. In exchange there’s an industry you won’t compete with them in and both of you will buy the others products. These deals take a lot of trust: both sides have to believe the other side won’t cut them off in the future. One “semiconductor ban” and the deal is shot, and most likely shot permanently.
China’s capable of taking over most industries if it really wants to, but there’s an opportunity cost to doing so, and they need and want good relations. In many cases these deals will be cut with a side “and if you let us keep or have this industry, and buy from us, we’ll keep selling you grain/oil/nickel/whatever.”
China wants secure deals. Give them that security and be rewarded in exchange.
One Time Infrastructure Deals
As discussed earlier, China’s the infrastructure King. If you needs roads or ports or hospitals or power plants or almost anything, they can build it fast and cheaper than anyone else and the quality is good. Maybe not Japan good, but good enough.
You’ve got to cut these deals, all of them, right, though, or you’ll wind up not receiving what you want, or in the case of infrastructure deals wind up with white elephants you can’t afford to maintain. So—
How To Structure Deals To Ensure You Benefit
The objective here is to gain local knowledge, skills and capacity. This means a few things.
No Branch Plants. You want partnership deals, 49% China, 51% you. The plants or whatever get set up in your country by their engineers and managers, in partnership with your managers and engineers. At first the foreigners take the lead, but over time they are largely phased out, the capacity becomes indigenous.
Move the parts and repairs. You don’t want to just be putting goods together from pieces made elsewhere. You want the parts moved to your country too. Lots of small companies usually support big companies. You want that network. Without that network in your country, you don’t actually have industry. With it you have the culture of industry which is required to start making your own advances, to create new products and types of work. You have the chance to get a dynamic economy which innovates.
Buy Infrastructure you can maintain. If you’re going to constantly need the Chinese to come back and fix your power infrastructure, or roads, or ports or anything else, or to constantly buy parts from them, then you haven’t really bought anything. All deals must include the necessary training for your locals to maintain the infrastructure and that most of what is needed for maintenance is made in your country.
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Be very careful about large asphalt and concrete deals. Concrete and asphalt does not last and needs constant and expensive maintenance cycles. The world which supports that is going to go away as climate change and environmental collapse do their damage. Find ways to increase the lifespan of infrastructure and make it easier to maintain, ideally with as unskilled labor as possible.
If you can’t maintain it, you don’t really own it and it won’t be there when you need it.
Educational Exchange
Let’s be clear here, sending students overseas to learn from more advanced societies isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A lot of them stay, others become compromised with values which are inappropriate to your society and much of what they learn at university isn’t all that useful in industry, unless they’re in real engineering or science and even then, less than you’d think.
Still, do some of that. It’s not a hard deal to cut, because it’s flattering to the Chinese and thanks to Chinese culture, you’ll see less of the students stay in China than used to stay in America. They’ll have to learn Mandarin, but that’s good. English will stay the lingua franca for a while, but the gravity is to Mandarin and if you’re following the advice herein, well, China’s your big trade partner.
The other exchange you want is to get your engineers and scientists and managers into partner companies in China so they can get real world experience with how industry and business works. Get them from the lowest levels where they see the factory floor to the highest levels. Have them make contacts, have them work on real products. Again, some are going to stay, but many will come home and you will benefit massively.
Most of the most important information about how products and businesses and societies work is never written down. You need your people to learn it.
So get those exchanges going. And if you need to flatter the Chinese a bit, swallow your pride and do it.
Concluding Remarks
China’s still on the rise. Countries on the rise are much more generous than countries in decline or even mature countries, economically speaking. There’s still tons of possibility and present and future surplus to share. The emphasis is on increasing the size of the pie and not fighting over a static or shrinking pie. On top of this China needs and wants friends and wants desperately to be admired. If someone wants admiration, it’s cheap and there is plenty that can be admired without hypocrisy.
Take advantage of this opportunity but remember, the goal is to increase your own country’s real prosperity by increasing your indigenous production ability and the skill and knowledge base of your own people. It is not to gain fleeting prosperity from selling resources or bottom tier products.
And remember also, this economic age, the age of heedless industry, is coming to an end. Build smart: lots of passive solar, for example. Trains and rapid transit, not expressways. Infrastructure that is easy to maintain. Goods that aren’t frequently replaced.
Learn from China but don’t be just like them, use them to create a non car-centric, non-disposable economy. If you do so, you’ll be one of the nations who prospers in the next age.
China is an opportunity to get on a ladder. Choose the right ladder.