Ian Welsh

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

Category: Creating Reality Page 3 of 6

Schooling Kills Creativity And Then Work Buries It

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On February 14, 2023

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So, there are different measures of creativity. One of them is divergent thinking, the ability to come up with lots of different ideas. George Land created a famous test for NASA, then applied it to children. Test-takers were given a problem and then had to come up with many different ways to tackle it.

Land’s dead now but before  he died he gave a Ted talk. Generally loathe them, but this one is interesting.

As for the results of his test…

Yeah. Woops. The reason for this is simple (and I can hear some regular readers eyes rolling, since this is a subject I’ve talked about a lot.) School is about coming up with the “right” answer the “right” way. There aren’t 50 right ways. I have many memories of coming up with the right answer in math, for example, using different methods than the teacher and being downgraded for it.

In math there’s often a “right” answer but in other disciplines, there isn’t one. What caused the French revolution or World War I? There isn’t a right answer.

Now, perhaps you’re thinking “but the social sciences and humanities are different.”

Oh, somewhat.

Back in the 90s I used to tutor university students. I’d tell them I could teach them to consistently get a B, but not an A, because the extra step from B to A was knowing the person who is marking your tests and essays, and both working them so they like and respect you and tailoring your answers to their prejudices. It’s actually harder to get get an A in the humanities and social sciences than in the sciences and in math. I’ve gotten 100% on a chemistry or physics test. I have never done so on a paper or non multiple choice test in the humanities or social sciences because there isn’t a correct answer.

But you will get higher grades if you learn to give the marker about what they want.

In the sciences it’s about getting the right answer the right way. In the humanities and social sciences it’s a social game of “please the market” or in very rigid standardized tests of “please the test designer.”

In realm of the real world this leads to the something called “best practices”, which I loathe. There are no such things as best practices. That doesn’t mean you can’t teach workers what is known to work, but if you enforce “best practices” then they can’t innovate. If you tell people “how” to do something, rather than say “I need you to accomplish X” you shut down learning and creativity and you also strangle advancement.

People have to be free to try new things. There are degrees of this, of course, in some cases the task still needs to get done. But mandating how and not what stiffles progress and creativity faster than almost anything else.

What we do to children and adults is psychologically cripple them. It’s better, in our society, to be wrong with the pack or in the approved fashion than to be right against the pack or  using non-standard methods.

Very, very much better. In the pack, wrong with the pack, or more accurately wrong in the way leader-teacher wants you to be, you’re safe.

But get it right the wrong way, or get it wrong trying something new, and you’re toast.

We all know this, but many of us refuse to admit it and this is especially true with regards to school. We spent more awake time in school for twelve to sixteen or more years than we did anywhere else, except in some cases home. That creates strong identification. We either want to believe school is good, or we rebel against it, but very few people can remain neutral. If something “must” be then it must be good.

But school teaches (eye-roll time) us to be a bunch of conformists, giving teacher what they want in the way they want, sitting down and not even talking or using the bathroom without permission.

That’s school and denying that is what school is is rank stupidity.

It’s also most workplaces. You replace teacher with boss.

And then you think you’re free when you’ve spent most of your life doing what you were told, the way you were told to do it.

(By the way, one corollary of Land’s test is that you started out as a creative genius. Perhaps you can be one again? It’s not nature that made you un-creative. Nature started you as a genius.)

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None of This Had to Be: The Two Paths

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On November 2, 2022

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There are broadly two views of the situation we humans are in.

The first is that what is happening is just a result of human nature. It is who we are. We are stupid, short-sighted, and profoundly cruel to each other and to other living beings. Our history is one of war, rape, and torture. In Tudor times, we would cut open a person’s belly and burn their intestines while they were still alive. Crowds would gather, and turn the occasion into a celebration.

Environmental destruction is old, too. Mesopotamia was not a desert once, but we made it into one.

There are those who look to the time before agriculture made possible the rise of kings and nobles and see it as better (and there is some truth to that), but there was violence then, too. The kings domesticated us, turned us into sheep, and except when they turn us on each other, there is less violence now. But, then a shepherd doesn’t want his animals to fight each other; they exist to be shorn, and die to feed the shepherd.

Humans are, in this view, too stupid, mean, and short-sighted to be considered more than animals. No smarter than bacteria in a petri dish, who expand until we choke to death on our own waste.

It may be that this view is correct.

There is a second view, however, which says that humans might be able to learn wisdom, foresight, and kindness — that we might be able to make that scale in both space and time. That we might be able to avoid the generational cycles of rise and fall; that we might learn to shape ourselves into a race which isn’t stunningly cruel, stupid, and foolish.

This isn’t a utopian view. It doesn’t pretend that the demons of human nature don’t exist. It says that we may be able to control them; that we may learn not to let predators and parasites run our societies, and that we might understand that what happens to the least of us, and to the least of the animals and plants, matters most, because whatever we do those without power is what we will do, in the end, to ourselves.

In prisons, rapists get raped, and those who do so become rapists. Those who laugh and consider it part of the punishment are rapists by proxy; their approval makes them monsters. When we say “this person deserves it,” we indict ourselves.

The penalty for abuse of power, in this view, is only to be permitted no power. To abuse the abusers is to become abusers, and those who are abused, themselves abuse later.

We live in cycles of abuse and powerlessness, and have given away our responsibilities to the worst among us. No serial killer is as evil as a President, or the CEO of a major bank or oil company. They have not killed nearly as many people, after all, nor hurt as many. But a serial killer’s killing, their cruelty, is that of a sheep against other sheep, and the sheep cry out that only the shepherd is allowed to kill and indulge in cruelty.

We are faced, today, with our the power we have created through technology, science, and our own domestication. We have become instruments of a few people — the cruelest and worst of us. But they rule because we have been made tame, and we have learned to see the world they way they do: that their power is legitimate and that we must acquiesce. They could enforce none of it if we did not acquiesce, and if they did not have their sheepdogs.

In this second view, we took the wrong path a long time ago, and followed it to self-destruction, misery, and powerlessness. We let the first kings and the first warrior castes rise, and we let the scribes become their servants, who turned into our modern scientists and engineers, forever crying out that what is done with their creations is not their fault.

When we take the wrong path, we must first recognize that we have done so, and that where we are is not where we want to be. We must understand how we came to walk that path, why it seemed reasonable.

Then we must change and find new ways of navigating.

In human society, this means a new culture. A new way of interacting with each other and with the animals and plants with whom we share the world.

Because we have gone so far down the path of (forgive the word) “evil,” almost everything will have to change.

Is that possible?

The second view claims that it is — that human nature possesses a range of possibilities, and that range emphasizes choice, and as we have choices, we can choose.

Is the second view true? Is the first? Are we evil because of an invariant human nature we will never be able to shape into something wiser, kinder, and longer-sighted?

The answer is, for now, unknown.

I choose to work for the second view, that what we have now is not the only possible expression of human nature at a global level, and that we can change, that we can be better.

It’s not the easy path because if it’s true, we’re going to have to have to give up almost everything we believe and are; everything we have shaped ourselves into over the millennia. Simply shrugging, living one’s life, and dying is easier.

And, perhaps, it is better. False hope is a sickness, not a blessing.

So I’ll not condemn those who shrug and say, “This is just who we are. Cruel, stupid, and short-sighted. The masses are nothing but sheep, the sheepdogs are the masters’ self-congratulatory tools who make serial killers look like children.”

We’re here now, just past the peak of our civilization (a cursed word, for almost all have been worse than the savages they scorn). This is the time we, you, must decide which of the two views you hold, and if you will work for the second path.

Is there a way to the good, or are we doomed to evil, for evil it is?

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The Core Social Principles of Ideologies

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On February 22, 2021

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Every ideology has a few core principles: guiding lights, or pole-stars, which believers should use to guide themselves.

The fundamental proposition; the IDEAL, of Confucian government, is that the rulers should govern as if they are benevolent parents. If they do not do so, they are not legitimate, but tyrants.

The fundamental proposition of feudalism and related ideologies is that some bloodlines are better than others, and those from those bloodlines deserve to rule.

The fundamental proposition of capitalism is that money is earned by providing “utility” and that those who have money have it because they have done the most good. This easily turns into oligarchy, “those with the most money are the most virtuous & should rule.”

The fundamental proposition of democracy is that all legitimacy comes from the citizenry (people) and that they should rule, sometimes by selecting others; sometimes directly.

The fundamental proposition of Westminster style democracy (parliamentary) is that “Parliament is Supreme!” It can do whatever it wants, and one Parliament cannot tie the hands of another one. (Treaties have been used to try to get around this, doing so is illegitimate.)

The fundamental proposition of American enlightenment democracy is that everyone is equal. It was originally phrased as “all men”, but that is an error requiring correction, and much of American history is about the attempt to properly live up to the proposition.

The fundamental social teaching of Jesus, was that we should help the least of us, and that great wealth is an evil.

Buddhism, to my knowledge, doesn’t have a great deal of governing philosophy, but the proposition is that life always involves suffering and that we should try and end or reduce suffering as much as possible, including in animals.

Communism’s core proposition is that the means of production should be controlled by the masses: that power should not be a consequence of wealth or property.

Once you’ve identified the core proposition of an ideology, you use that as your pole star, moving ever towards it. You’re not a communist if you allow private concentration of wealth to control the economy or don’t keep control of economic activity in the hands of the workers in specific and the people in general.

All founders make mistakes and their disciples and heirs make more. It is your duty, if you follow a great ideology, to correct those errors. In Confucianism this includes Confucius’s treatment of women. In American democracy, systematic inequality and disenfranchisement.

In Buddhism this would be indifference to suffering because, hey, there’s no self anyway, amiright? In parliamentary democracy, it is believing the supremacy of Parliament either can be used against the people’s interest OR trying to bind Parliament and thus the democratic will.

If you have an individual philosophy or code of conduct/honor, it too may have a polestar. Mine is truth. In matters of public import, I try not to lie, because I believe we can’t make good decisions if we believe wrong things.

I also try to correct. I try to be open to being wrong, without being so open-minded I accept nonsense. Just had a long conversation with a friend that convinced me I had misunderstood some important things about the modern left. I was grateful to learn where I had been wrong.

Use this post as a spur for thought. What are the polestars for various ideologies? What are your polestars in various parts of your life.

Bonus: if there’s more than one polestar, where do they conflict or help each other and when?

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Staying Happy in Self-Isolation

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On January 18, 2021

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A reader wrote me to say this article had been helpful to them. Given that the pandemic and self-isolation is ongoing, I thought it would be worth putting back up. (Originally published March 2, 2020.)

There are a lot of guides for this going around, so I’m going to skip most–but not all–of the more obvious advice. You know how to watch shows online, play games, and read books. Catch up on all that reading!

Problems fall into three broad categories: lack of people, other people, and emotional self-regulation. I’ll speak briefly on the first two, but this article is mostly about learning to create your own emotions on demand.

The first issue is if you’re by yourself. People, even most introverts, do need human contact. Isolation is harmful, and long periods of it show as brain damage. The internet isn’t much of a substitute, but as much as it is, make an effort: Don’t stick to text. Get on voice or even video and voice. The more channels you have, the better. I’ve had people I haven’t talked to in ages reaching out to me, this is a good time to reconnect to old friends and relatives you like. Even better if you can do something online together–games or puzzles or whatever. Set up a camera to show the kitchen and talk while you cook, etc.

The second issue is you’re with other people: People are great, but people also suck, and even if you like someone being in the same place as them for two or three weeks when you’re used to seeing them only the evening and the morning can get on your nerves. At the extreme end, I’ve seen anecdotal reports from police that domestic violence calls are increasing.

This is easiest to handle if you’re honest with each other than you need some alone time. Have the conversation, be clear it doesn’t mean you don’t like or love the other person, and consider even scheduling both alone and together time. Some people won’t need this, we all know best friends and couples who love being in each other’s pockets, but if that isn’t you, it doesn’t mean you aren’t real friends or don’t love each other.

The third issue is emotional self-regulation. Most of us have routines, things we do every day. Get up, coffee, light breakfast, drive to work, work, chat with co-worker, have lunch, work a bit more, goof of on the internet, etc, etc. We’ve figured out routines that keep us mostly in the same set of emotional spaces throughout the day. This is like walking with a cane: You’ve set up mood assists throughout the day, week, and year.

When you lose that routine, you lose those assists. You’ve been walking with a cane: Leaning on it, threatening kids on your lawn, and suddenly a dog thinks its a stick and races away and it’s gone.

So you need to learn how emotionally self-regulate without so many assists or you need to find new assists.

Write down things you love doing during the day that you can do at home. Those are your assists. When  your mood is low, look at the list and do one of them.

To emotionally regulate without assists you have to accept that a lot of your moods can be directly controlled. I’m not saying it’s always easy, but it’s mostly not easy because you never learned how; it’s not something our society trains us to do.

Let’s say you want to feel loving. Stand up, close your eyes, and imagine a child you love or a puppy. They’re mad glad to see you, and dash to you, and throw themselves into your arms. Open your arms in a huge hug, then mimic hugging them. Imagine it as best you can.

Practice this both with the physical movements, and entirely in your mind, until you can do it whenever you want and bring up that feeling.

Say you want to feel excited or gleeful. This is an arousal emotion, and can be used to change fear into something positive. Open your eyes as wide as you can, concentrating on lifting them up, and grin! Think of something exciting: Jumping out of an airplane with a parachute, jumping over a wall, playing frisbee with your dog, that time you snuck into some place you shouldn’t have and it was a gas, the first time you learned about something you loved (I remember how excited I was when I first read D&D books in the seventh grade), or remember bombing down a hill on your bike or a toboggan.

The feeling you’re looking for is WHEEEEEE!

When I do this, I often remember the TV show Pinky and the Brain. It always starts with Pinky asking, “What are we going to do today, Brain?” To which Brain replies, “Same as every day! Take over the WORLD.” I say that out loud or mentally.

Any emotion you can normally feel can be activated in this way: Imagine the situation, and either mimic the physical sensations of it happening, or feel them in your imagination. Ideally do both.

So find a memory or experience that reliably brings up the emotions, and watch your body as it moves into that emotion. What does it feel like? What is the face doing? The body? What are you thinking?

Once you know what it feels like, and what the change feels like, you can learn to bring it under conscious control.

There’s nothing wrong with using props here, especially in the beginning. If a piece of music reliably brings up the mood, use it. Just be aware as the emotion arises, then try and do it without the prop later.

Like most skills, there’ll be fumbling. New skills take time. Keep at it. You’ve got plenty of time and this is a chance to learn a skill that will make your life immeasurably better long after social distancing is done.

(If readers like this article, I may put together a post on emotional self-regulation while dealing with other people. Other people can be the greatest help or hindrance, but working together in this way is the among the greatest experiences in life.)

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.

How to Protect Yourself from Doomscrolling & Bad News

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On November 18, 2020

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This is an excerpt from a section in my upcoming book, Construction of Reality on how to change one’s personal reality. I hope it will help some readers deal with the current media barrage.

Emotional Performance

We discussed this before, how when objects we identify with, whether people, material objects (holy books, flags, your car), or ideas (the Bill of Rights, the Prophet’s words) are treated in ways we see as bad or good, we have an emotional reaction.

Thousands of miles away, perfect strangers are hurt, or do something we like, and we react. A flag is burned, a Koran desecrated, a bombing goes off, and we have emotions.

We have those emotions in large part because we believe we SHOULD have them. We believe that to not have them makes us bad people. “What sort of person isn’t upset when a bomb goes off in the London Subway/someone burns a flag/a dog is hurt?” etc.

We react because to not react, in our minds, makes us a bad person. It makes us not of the tribe. Remember, the tribe is whoever we share an identity with. In the distant past, that might have included ancestors and Gods and stories about our tribe. Today it is our ideology, our religion, our race, our nation, and so on.

But the mechanism is the same.

(I am fundraising to determine how much I’ll write this year. If you value my writing and want more of it, please consider donating.)

And if a tribe’s identity was attacked, its beliefs attacked, that means the tribe was attacked, and if you didn’t react emotionally, other members of the tribe will notice that and they’ll distrust you. And if they distrusted you, that near the state of nature, well, that might go badly for you.

So these sorts of reactions are built deep into the human psyche. To not react to violations of the tribe’s identity, ideology, or to the harm of fellow tribe members is dangerous to you.

But that near the state of nature, the tribe could be under a hundred people. Maybe a thousand or two in extended tribal groups.

Not millions or billions of people.

Outrages, harm, and good events, came when they came, and were immediate; in your presence or in the presence of the person telling you about them.

They weren’t coming at you in an incessant drumbeat, from people you don’t know, about people you don’t know, all day long, from an endless well. In a world of seven billion people plus with instant communication, there’s always an outrage or atrocity.

These endless pinpricks jerk us around, never allowing us to relax, and our identities and ideology are constantly reinforced by atrocity and tragedy.

Identities and ideologies, I remind you, that are not intrinsic to you, and generally not chosen.

So to start dis-identifying, you need to break yourself of this sort of emotional performance.

Read the following and return to it often.

Feeling bad about a situation you are not in and which you can do nothing about, hurts you and doesn’t help anyone else.

If you are angry at a terrorist attack a thousand miles away — or a war, or poverty, or anything — that anger is bad for you. It kicks adrenaline into your body, keeps you in a state of arousal (not the good type, sorry) and causes stress.

And it isn’t helping anyone else.

So don’t do it. Start breaking the cycle. Make it a rule that if you can’t do anything about a situation, you won’t get upset about it, won’t worry about it, and so on. Do whatever you’re going to do, then stop reacting to it. Or decide you’re going to do something, and once the decision is made, don’t think about it until the time comes.

“Tomorrow, I’ll take some food to the food bank.”

Great, do that tomorrow, meanwhile stop feeling bad.

This is moral. This is ethical. Hurting yourself and helping no one is bad. It is immoral. So don’t do it.

This doesn’t mean don’t be empathic when you’re with a mate who’s suffering (or even with a stranger), but put it down when you leave. Help, but don’t carry the emotion with you.

This is the right thing to do practically and morally.

Break this bond. At first, it will seem impossible, but if you practice each time such situations come up, you will eventually find yourself calmer and calmer and less reactive.

You will also be more effective, because you will no longer believe that “thoughts and feelings,” absent action, do anything for people who aren’t in your presence.

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This is a reprint: It was originally published Nov 8, 2018, but I think people need it again & there are a lot of new readers.

The “System” Did Not Appear Ex Nihilo

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On July 13, 2020

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Last week I wrote an article lampooning the idea that people are only following incentives and therefore are not bad people.

Let’s spell this out clearly.

The system, whatever the system is, whether it is New Deal capitalism, Stalinist communism, English high feudalism, neoliberal capitalism, or French late medieval feudalism, is a creation of humans.

Our system is always a choice.

It doesn’t feel like a choice to you as an individual, because it is a collective choice which weights a very few individuals’ preferences much higher than yours. Not being Barack Obama (who had a choice to end neoliberalism) or FDR (who did choose to create a new type of capitalism) or Khrushchev (who created a different type of communism, recognizably different from Stalinism–and much more pleasant to live in), you have never had much of a choice.

So, being weak and only one person, to you the system feels like a force of nature or God, given, not a man-made construction.

But the system is always made and is always the result of choices. Sometimes, individuals at key junctures get to make a choice or a difference, and most people only make choices as part of large groups. But it is a choice.

Even within a system, different results are produced. English feudalism was far kinder than French feudalism, with far more free men and far fewer villeins or serfs. England produced common law and even non-free men and women had rights. Russian serfdom by the end of the Czars was known for its cruelty, but it wasn’t always thus, and so on and so forth.

More recently, and if not within your memory (though it is within my memory), then certainly within the memory of people you know, the previous form of capitalism running the US and most of the “free” world produced the following results:

  • steadily increasing incomes after real inflation was measured;
  • steadily decreasing share of income being made by the richest in society;
  • steadily increasing prices (but slower than wages).

It did all those things because it was designed to do those things. A choice was made in 1933, and made again pro-actively every four years after that to keep doing it. After a while, people became wishy washy about its continuation. You can trace it in stages: the post-war Congress weakening unions, Truman deciding to keep the war time state running, Kennedy deciding to lower top taxes, qualified immunity in the 60s, Nixon deciding to start the war on drugs, and so on.

But it didn’t really end until Reagan. Reagan was a choice, that’s why there were elections. He had been worked for, hard, by various rich people who could see that the current system was slowly siphoning away their power, and they found, with racism and the fear engendered by the oil shock crises, enough of a wedge to get a voting majority of Americans onside.

Then they systematically changed how the system operated so that it would produce:

  • stangnant income for the majority of the population (really decreasing if inflation were properly measured);
  • steadily increasing share of income and wealth controlled by the wealthiest in society;
  • steadily decreasing prices of production of goods. At first some of this was passed on, but most of it was kept as profit.

Neoliberal capitalism produced different results from New Deal capitalism because it was designed to do so. It had different incentives, to use econo-speak.

To say “people just follow the incentives” is driveling idiocy when dealing with large social matters, because in large social matters, the incentives are dependent variables; they are chosen by the leadership and the mass of the people (who, yes, do have power in large enough groups–Reagan was not possible if enough Democrats hadn’t defected, they were called the “Reagan Democrats”).

Nor are people ex-nihilo. We are shaped by the society we live in. Reagan’s revolution could not have happened while the Lost Generation still had large numbers because the Lost Generation remembered not just the Great Depression, but the roaring 20s. Knowing that the wealthy had caused the Great Depression, most Lost believed in keeping the rich poor. Those who came afterwards, not properly remembering the 20s, did not feel this in their gut, and they were willing to sell out.

Neoliberals said, “You can have a suburban home, away from the blacks, and we’ll spike the value of housing and stocks, so you’ll be rich, and you won’t even have to work for it.” Sub Voce: “Because you’ll get it for doing nothing, you won’t care about wages, which we’ll crush.”

More than this, a system selects for people who will do what it requires. You cannot join many gangs without murdering someone first. You cannot be in power in DC, or almost any state capital, if you are not onside with crushing wages and making the rich richer. You will not be allowed in power. You will not want power, because you will quickly find out that you can’t do what you want, you can only do evil.

The system doesn’t so much turn people evil as it selects for evil. The “incentives” don’t work on everyone, what matters is that, if they don’t work on you, you don’t get into power. Or, if you somehow fluke in (like Corbyn) you don’t stay in power. You won’t compromise enough.

People worked hard to create neoliberalism. Once they were in power, they worked hard to create a system which excludes those who don’t want to crush wages and make the rich richer. The rules of the system, the incentives, were created by men and women and are maintained by men and women.

They are not unchallenged, but so far every challenge has lost. Corbyn was a challenge. Sanders was a challenge. There have been other challenges. They all lost. This was true of every challenge to the New Deal Order from 1936 to 1976. All challenges lost. It looked unbeatable.

One day, the New Deal Order lost. One day Neo-Liberalism will lose. The questions are only, “When?” and “To what?”

Hitler, Mussolini, and Lenin defeated older orders too.

So, the people who run the US and the developed world are almost all very bad people. They were selected to be very bad, and they also worked very hard to ensure that only evil people could get power, because only evil people will do what their system requires and it is the system that makes them powerful and rich. (Reminder: Nancy Pelosi is worth $120 million.)

The systems selects for evil, the system was created, and is maintained, by people who worked and are working hard to make sure it selects only evil people to run it.

Just like Soylent Green, the system is people.

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Who Gets to Be Violent and Why?

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On June 4, 2020

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The people who need to a good shit-kicking are most politicians, CEOs, and senior civilians.

Well, and cops, obviously.

And they need to know the cops can’t protect them from another one.

The President, the mayor of New York, the Governor of New York, almost everyone who works for the Federal Reserve, all senior Wall Street Executives, every senior executive at Google and Facebook, every executive at a private equity firm is on that list. (Even if they are personally “good,” they work to make evil more powerful.)

Yeah, this is the Rubicon, shit we’re not supposed to actually say. Powerful people routinely arrange to have weak people (98 percent of the population) killed, beaten, impoverished, and effectively enslaved by debt and fear of debt.

But the weak are told that if they resist all the things done to them under the threat of violence (and it’s all under the threat of violence), they must never be violent.

It’s the logic of the bully, of the coward: “My victims must not fight back, they must lie there and take their beating, and not resist. My violence is legitimate because I am powerful, but the weak must not use violence. If they do, we’ll escalate and escalate and escalate. We won’t just kill them, we’ll take everything, rape and torture; lock them up for years, deny them healthcare. There is nothing we will not do to those who resist us.”

So, for your own sake, understand in your bones that the violence your lords and masters (and they are your masters, and you are their slaves) do is legitimate, and that you have no right to resist.

If you do resist, and, worse, if you dare be violent, you are a bad slave, a bad peasant. Violence is reserved for the master class and their enforcers; it is something that they have the right to do. It is good when they do it, and it is bad when you do it.

This is a social fact: It is true because it is made true.

Be violent to the master class or their lackeys and the penalties are huge. It’s better to just sit there, and become homeless, go into debt, spend your entire life at a job you hate, doing what a petty tyrant tells you to, until you’re too old to work.

Because as bad as all those things are, they are better than what they’ll do to you if you really fight; if you do to them what they give themselves the right to do to you.

The only time you have the right to be violent is if you are violent against their enemies: domestic or foreign. Angry? Full of hate? You can get it out. Put on a uniform, or just play vigilante against a mutual enemy.

But never, ever, strike at the actual masters. The lords. The people making your life hell.

Because they control violence, they control money, and they will hurt you. If somehow they can’t get you under the rules, well, they’ll hunt you down like a dog, like they did the Ferguson protesters, killing them over years.

Who gets to use violence is a social fact.

You don’t.

The people who rule your life and make it hell do.

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Who I Bleed With and Why Bernie Is Trusted

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On March 6, 2020

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So, identity is and always has been one of the most important forces in politics, the rise and fall of empires, etc. This was true long before “identity politics” or intersectionality and it will be true long after they are forgotten.

Identity is who you feel with. Who you bleed with. If people like you are hurt, you hurt. You can see this in degrees in terrorist attacks and natural catastrophes. If it’s the Brits being hit, Americans care. French? Somewhat less. Baghdad market bombing? Don’t give a shit. (Yes, you are special flower and do actually care, which may well be true, as you are one of my readers and self-selecting for caring more about people not like you, but most people don’t. I wish they did, but they don’t.)

This is also true for good things; they matter more if they happen to people I identify with.

My primary political identification is with the precariat: The working class who aren’t even stable working class. They can lose their jobs at any time, they live in bad housing, they are one bad bounce away from the street. In the US, they can’t afford healthcare even if they have insurance, in most countries they can’t afford dental care and you can see it as they get older in their yellow teeth.

These are the people who are always scared, who will work until they die or physically just can’t, and who will push far past what “can’t” would be for most other people. They work through pain and illness because, even in most countries with sick days, a week isn’t enough if you’re precariat: When you eat badly, and you work hard, your health breaks at some point.

I’ve been precariat a lot during my life. I’m precariat now. I’ve belonged to other classes, I’ve even been well off, upper middle class. I’ve hobnobbed and lived with the upper classes plenty, I grew up with them in boarding school. I can fit in with most classes, as long as I have the wardrobe, though as I get older and look older it becomes a bit harder: I don’t have the shiny well-cared for, calibrated, drugged look the upper classes have at my age.

Some of my identification with the precariat is simply that I often am one. But I could choose to identify with other classes or groups, I’ve been among many of them at some time. People can be stubborn about identifying with a class they no longer have the material circumstances for–they can hold on to that until they die, acting as if they still belong and often getting away with it. It’s worth doing, because lower class people are treated worse.

Period. They are treated worse, always. I put on a suit and clean up and I see the change. I change my manners and act middle class, and how I am treated changes, always for the better.

Lower class people have manners and attitudes which are recognizable, and higher orders, even the people only a little higher, shit on them the moment they recognize those manners. Exceptions exist, and I’ve gone out of my way when my circumstances are good to be an exception (which is why service staff anywhere I go regularly always like me), but they are exceptions.

But while some of my identification is simply positional, a lot of my political identification stems from the fact that the precariat, more than anyone except those who have fallen out of the system completely, are the ones who need the help. They tend to work very hard and get very little for it. I’ve done office work, construction work, retail and food prep, among many, many jobs, and the psychological stress of office work can be real, but it’s not the same as a hard physical job, where in any case the bosses are often still assholes. (This is especially true in retail in my experience. Never did manufacturing.) Office workers also tend to have a bit of protection from the most abusive behaviour, because of a certain shield of civility which does not apply to those at the bottom.

So, I am for Bernie, and I was for Corbyn, because they will do the most for those who need the most help. I can argue that most of what they want to do will also be excellent for everyone but the very rich, even if many of those people don’t recognize it, and it’s true, but I don’t care very much. The self-identifying middle class, the upper class, and the rich (three separate classes) are mostly either actively scum, or passively scum. The “middle class” has thrown everyone, including their own weaker members, under the bus in a pathetic attempt to keep their perceived status. The upper class are the rich’s close retainers, executing their policies and about one member of the rich out of a hundred who has power is doing more good than evil.

Identification is a matter of feel. When the precariat are hurt, I hurt. I feel their pain. This isn’t theoretical, you can see it on brain scans. When something good happens for them, I am happy. This is true even if it has no effect on me; I’m Canadian, and have universal health care–yet I have spent much of my career advocating for the US to adopt universal care.

One reason that Warren never had a hard core of supporters the way Sanders does is simple: She doesn’t identify as lower or working class or precariat. She doesn’t feel like one of the body. She doesn’t actually seem to feel the pain. Bernie, despite having been in Congress for ages, has a lot of Jewish working class feel. The anger that turns off the technocrats as inappropriate for the office is real to working class types. If there’s reason to be angry, be angry. And Bernie is angry because their bosses are treating them like shit.

Warren wants to be the good boss; the good intellectual. The savior.

Bernie feels like one of us and he’s angry with us.

He may or may not win the nomination (though I think he can win the election.)

But it’s why there’s a core of people who trust him through thick and thin.

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.

 

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