Ian Welsh

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

Category: Ethics Page 6 of 8

Pure Utilitarianism and Capitalism

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On March 5, 2016

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Hilary Clinton recently tweeted the following.

On the face this is unexceptional. A business exists to do certain things, and employees are hired to contribute towards those actions. We hire an employee because we think they will do a good job.

Except that in our current system, we distribute goods through money, and most of how we distribute money is through corporations. You have a good life if you have a good job, pretty much. There are exceptions and they are exceptions.

Hilary has also said that she doesn’t favor a $15/hour minimum wage.

This is what happens when you think of people as assets. Some people don’t deserve $15/hour because they don’t “add enough value.”

But they are still people, and they still need to eat, sleep in a warm place, and have the occasional bit of entertainment.

They have value that cannot be reduced to their economic utility.

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If we had a society where everyone lived well whether they had a job or not, then we could make pure utilitarian arguments about employment. But when employment is required for people to be able to live decently, or even live at all, such arguments lead to treating huge masses of people as disposable, and consigning them to awful lives.

Again, this might be ok if we lived in a scarcity society, but we don’t. We produce enough food to feed everyone, we have the ability to house everyone, and so on. This would be especially true if we would dump the doctrine of planned obsolescence and produce goods meant to last pretty close to forever.

There are other arguments, of course, like “What is utility?”, bolstered by findings that blacks, say, get half the interviews as whites with identical resumes. Those are important arguments, but they pale next to, “Everyone should have a decent life, and that shouldn’t be contingent on whether they can make money for a billionaire.”

The economy and corporations exist to serve people, not the other way around. When they do not do so, the problem lies with them. This is not a subsistence farming community, it is not, “You work, you eat.” We’d be better off, in fact, if a lot of the work we are doing wasn’t done, because so much of it does more damage than good, even if it does generate a “profit.”

The core of any decent system of ethics, and thus of any political and economic order, is Kant’s maxim that people are ends, not means. When you forget that, you inevitably descend into monstrosity.

How Much Property Is Ethical?

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On March 1, 2016

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Mine. It’s mine. No one has the right to take anything from me. That’s theft.

It’s mine.

Property rights. What a mess.

In this age of oligarchy, the question of how much a few people, or corporations can own, or can control, is thrown into highlight again.

The novelist and priest Father Andrew Greeley used to write that the poor were not poor because the rich were rich. By the end of his career in the mid 2000’s, he was railing against greed as one of the seven deadly sins.

Property, taken widely to include money, is control. It confers the right to decide how both resources and people will be employed. It confers the right to choose a large chunk of social direction. For instance, under Jobs and Cook, Apple is a fiefdom; so long as the company stays solvent, it decides how a great deal of the activity of the best and brightest is spent. iPhones and Apple’s other innovations are great, but one can certainly imagine scenarios in which Apple employees’ time was better spent.

A more clear-cut case comes in the case of CitiBank, or any of the big banks and brokerages. These people have a LOT of money, and they control a huge chunk of the world’s resources and people–directly and indirectly. They do far more harm than good.

Property is the right to choose how resources, including people, are deployed.

Allowing private individuals and large groups to have large amounts of property is a decision to allow them to control large numbers of people and resources.

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It may be justified if they make the world a better place. It is hard to justify if they don’t. We may like what Jobs, or Cook, or Musk have done (or add your favorite tycoon, and yes, I know all of those are problematic), while admitting that most billionaires and large corporations are a pox on the world economy, restricting innovation and free enterprise; crushing wages and strangling growth until they get their share. Few will defend Monsanto or most pharmaceutical companies, most large banks or brokerages, more American health insurers, large agriculture, and so on.

Those who do defend them are generally either on the payroll or have been trained in the ethical discipline of economics, which is meant to justify concentrations of wealth and capital.

Justice Brandeis famously noted that America could have great concentrations of wealth, or democracy, but not both. Jefferson said he feared banks more than standing armies as an enemy of liberty, which is a radically strong statement if you think about it for two seconds.

It is worth understanding that our definition of property, which is historically close to maximal, is a historical, and pre-historical, outlier. In many hunter-gatherer bands, if you want something another person has, you admire it, and they hand it to you. The idea that one could own ideas, and disallow other people from using them is something which would have struck most of humanity, for most of history, as insane.

And it is not so long ago that land which was not being used could be taken by anyone who would use it productively, be damned whoever owned it on paper. You could not leave resources unused, this was considered anti-social; even evil.

Property is entirely a social construction, and for most of history, justifications for the concept of property came down to, “We got here first, so it is ours,” and, “It is to everyone’s benefit that we use it.”

Capitalism is the bestest system ever, and therefore, the inequality it mandates is acceptable. People who have more money deserve it because they work harder, and are superior people who make superior decisions. Other people wouldn’t work at all if they didn’t have to, they must be compelled by Marx’s whip of hunger, or they’d sit on their lazy asses. If they are poor, they must not work hard enough, possess poor character, are stupid, and don’t make good decisions. They haven’t followed the approved steps.

They do not DESERVE money.

The actual value of money is almost entirely a social artifact. A dollar’s value, what it can buy or what opportunities it makes available in the US, is not located in any individual or in small groups, but in society as a whole; in many cases, this value was created by decisions made and work done by individuals long dead. (For the full argument, read “It’s Not Your Money.”)

But at the end of the day, this is the bottom-line truth:

Property is what society says it is.

What you can own and how much you can have of it, and when it is taken away, is entirely a social decision.  It is the acquiescence of your neighbours, in the broadest sense, which allows you to keep what you have–especially when it grows to include far more than your dwelling, tools, clothes, and the land on which you actually work.

Libertarianism is an attempt to take a socially granted license to use resources which are primarily a result of society’s efforts, not yours, and say that it is an intrinsic, individual human right.

But you did not train the workers you employ. You did not raise them or bear them. You did not educate them. You did not build the roads you use. And so on. The value, the advantage, of living in an advanced society is having access to all the infrastructure and institutions you did not build.

Let us bring this back to ethics.

To create a good society, that work is all necessary. It’s necessary that we build institutions, that we have infrastructure, that we support scientists (all the key research and inventions which created the internet were publically funded, for example).

It is also necessary that the people who are making the decisions are making good decisions. Bankers were making bad decisions. When they lost their money, it should have stayed lost. They weren’t harmed, like GM, by a crisis caused by other people, they were wiped out by a crisis of their own creation.

For a society to run well, we must be able to say, “You are not using society’s resources and people well, therefore, we are going to take away your ability to command so much of society’s resources.”

The larger we expand the sphere of property, as with intellectual property and the right to patent genetic codes, the more we say, “Only person X can make decisions about what to do with these resources.” We had better be damn certain that that one person, or corporation, or whoever owns these resources, is at least making good decisions, and ideally making better decisions than would be made if those resources had stayed in the commons, available for use by many.

And when we give a very few individuals and corporations the right to control a plurality or majority of our resources, locking out virtually everyone else from real decision-making beyond the anemic level of “consumer” and the neutered level of “voter,” we had, again, best be sure that those few people are making better decisions, for everyone, than would be made if a larger number of people had control over those resources and were making the decisions.

In short, if oligarchs want to control what people do, they need to make a strong case that their stewardship creates better results than those arising from people making these decisions themselves.

This is a rather high bar, and the genius of capitalistic ideology is that it’s not usually understood this is the case which must be made. Instead we are told, “Everyone is free to sell their labor,” as if that is freedom. Freedom to make your own decisions means not needing to work for someone else, and having the resources available to do what you want.

Freedom is not possible if you spend your life working for others when you’d rather not, knowing that, if you don’t, you will lose your shelter, go hungry, be without health care, and probably eventually die from lack of resources.

Freedom is the ability to choose what you do from a range of meaningful choices. The choice to work for Oligarch A or Oligarch B is not a meaningful choice.

Maximal property definitions and maximal acceptance of property concentration, deprive most of the population of their freedom. It is that simple.

They also show a vast distrust of the people, suggesting that if people had resources they would use them badly. This argument has been made by every tyrant since the beginning of agriculture: “I know better, and I will not lead by choice, but by coercion.”

The choice to starve if you don’t work for an oligarch is not much of a choice.

A sane property definition allows people to own the resources they need to do their work and take care of themselves and any dependents. Larger concentrations of property, meant for big projects, are necessary, but they must not be allowed to balloon in oligarchical control of politics and economy.

And I will suggest to you that this is both a much nicer world to live in and a more vibrant one. A world in which we are not slaves, but have freedom, will burst with creativity and projects. A world where ideas can be used by anyone will be a world in flower.

If you want freedom, look hard at property. The larger the sphere of property, and the more it is concentrated, the narrower most people’s world will be.

 

Practical Theoretical Ethics

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On February 29, 2016

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No, no, it’s not an oxymoron.

The problem with most philosophical ethics is that it takes a single rule and wants to rule the entire world with it.

This is noticeable in utilitarianism. “The most good for the most people.” This rule, applied, can lead to ethical abominations, to treatment of minorities and so on which is beyond the pale.

The story “The Ones Who Leave Omelas,” by Ursula LeGuin, is an examination of this problem (and highly recommended). In the real world, this leads to things like torture (what is a few people’s pain compared to the benefit for all?). It leads to accepting dire poverty as the result of our economic system due to an assumption that our system is the best and because, after all, the system benefits those in charge and in core nations the most. Call it hypocritical utilitarianism, but it’s real enough as a justification.

The discipline of economics, as it stands, is an exercise in hypocritical utilitarianism. Capitalism produces the best outcomes, therefore its shortcomings should be overlooked. It’s not clear it produces the best outcomes (certainly not if you are an Ethiopian or Congolese), but the point is larger than that. Even if it did, can a system which appears wedded to so much poverty, inequality, violence, and so on really be acceptable? By utilitarian standards it might well be.

And yet utilitarianism has a core of hard truth in it. It is easy to see the cases where utilitarian reasoning leads to horrible outcomes; it is intuitive to think that society should be run for the most benefit for the most people.

Again, the requirement to have one rule is what kills philosophical ethics. You must have bright lines, duties, and principles and you must know what the good is.

The first step is to have those bright lines. Do not rape. Do not torture. Stuff you do not do, no matter what. You unilaterally take some behavior off the table. You establish a minimum. If you do not, utilitarianism will always descend into barbarity, usually through specious argumentation, though not always.

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The second thing you do is establish positive duties. These are meant more for the social level than the individual, but cannot exclude the individual if they are to have efficacy. You might say here that everyone should eat if there is enough food in society and agree on how to triage in the very rare case that there is not. Women and children first, perhaps. Or workers in manual trades first. Or whatever. It doesn’t really matter, so long as it is generally regarded as fair.

You can extend this. If society has the means, everyone should have housing and clothes. Everyone who wants to work, and is capable of working, should have a job, perhaps. In a society which requires more work (not ours, we need less, too much of our work is harmful), you can say that everyone who is able should work. Add to this much of civil liberties: the right to jury trial and face your accusers, maybe.

Most of this boils down to an ur-rule. People all deserve to be treated with dignity, and everyone deserves the basics of life when they can be provided, which, in a society with vast over-surplus like our global society today, is the case.

A duty is something that applies to everyone. Everyone gets to face their accusers. Everyone gets to eat.

Having established your bright lines and your duties, you add your principles.

One of them might be: Civilians should not be targeted in war and every reasonable care should be taken not to harm them.

Another one might be: War is acceptable only in self-defense might be another one.

Yet another one: Everyone should have equal access to the determinants of success like education.

And so on.

Principles are about things you can’t achieve. You will never have a totally equal society, nor would you want one. We might want no war, but giving up the right of self-defense puts us at the mercy of the worst people in the world. If war is necessary, some civilians will be killed, but we should strive in every way to keep that to a minimum.

After having completed these steps, you are ready to add utilitarianism. Given meeting all the above, “the greatest good for the most people” is now the goal. You can use utilitarianism at this point because its worst associated problems have been taken off the table. You do the above things even if you think they don’t produce “the most good for the most people.” They are non-negotiable.

If you wish, you can order the above principles for triage, from most important to least important. But save in grave periods of crisis, it is almost never true that you can’t do all of them. You can both feed people and give them fair trials. If you can’t, you’ve gone wrong somewhere, as in the US, where the drug war has led to locking up millions of people who should never have been charged with a crime. You can’t give everyone in the US a fair trial, because there aren’t enough judges, juries, lawyers, prosecutors, and so on. That is an indication you need to be arresting less people, not that you need to compromise their right to a fair trial.

When making utilitarian calculations, you must always resist the urge to turn common sense and basic decency on their heads. If you find yourself excusing cruelty, in any way, you have gone wrong. If you find yourself excusing fraud, you have gone wrong.

There is no one ethical rule to rule them all. But at the same time, this need not be particularly complicated. Be kind. Treat everyone with dignity. See to everyone’s needs. Fight only in defense.

The further you extend this, the better your society will be. A decent concern for the fate of both other humans and other living beings would have served us well, and likely led to us avoiding much of the worst of the environmental disasters which have already come and which are yet to come, while avoiding almost the entire mess in the Middle East.

Do not descend to sophistry. Do not defend the indefensible. And if you want the most good, extend your circle of belonging out as far as it can go.

The Kindergarten Ethics We Need

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On February 28, 2016

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When I first started blogging, some 13 years ago, I blogged about sophisticated matters. Economic theory, military theory and practice. Lots and lots of charts.

As time went by, I noticed that these posts, even when they did well, were not what my readers needed. Most of my readers were not at the level of maturity and reasoning that allowed sophisticated policy posts to be useful to them.

Their problems were deeper; they were ethical and moral problems. My readers seemed unable to reason from first principles, they did not understand the relation of ethics to politics and politics to economics. The first principles they did have were axioms whose results, if too many people followed them, would create widespread suffering.

They had grown up crooked. Their adult lives had made them more crooked. They did not think, they engaged their prejudices.

There is no point in sophisticated analysis of how to be kind to large numbers, if people prefer something over kindness.

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As a result, I started descending the ladder of reasoning. I found that I had to explain that killing civilians was worse than killing soldiers, and that killing less people was preferable to killing more people. I had to explain the difference between ethics and morality. I had to explain why and how they had grown up twisted.

I found myself trying to teach, in effect, versions of the Golden Rule. That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Be kind. Kindness is the best policy.

I came to understand that the sages, from Confucius to Buddha to Hillel to Jesus, taught these rules–these simple rules–because they met people where they were. This is the level of teaching people require. Most, I fear, are not capable of learning even this, not innately, but because they have been twisted by their upbringing.

If you want some econo-speak, variations of the Golden Rule produce strong positive externalities and when enough people in a society use the Golden Rule and unite to take away the ability of predators to do harm, that society prospers.

The Ancient Greek version is as follows.

When old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit, a society is great.

All economic theories are ethical theories. They are theories about how one OUGHT to act. Under capitalism, one should react to profit and price signals, and seek to maximize personal “utility,” for example, while living in a manner which deprives one of the ability to meet ones own needs.

This is an ethical theory. It is not scientific, it is based on axioms which can’t be proved, and which are highly questionable (people aren’t rational, don’t maximize utility, and I’ve yet to encounter a useful definition of “utility” which isn’t circular).

It is about HOW people should live.

As such, economics is also a political theory. Capitalism requires a great deal of executive and legislative work to set up, starting with depriving most people of capital. You probably don’t believe me, because you were never taught history properly, but this is well understood by sociologists who study capitalism. Start by reading Karl Polanyi’s “The Great Transformation.” This process happened both at home, and in great waves of imperialism which disrupted and impoverished much of the world.

All political theories are ethical theories. People OUGHT to have rights and those rights are inalienable. Legitimacy comes from the people’s consent, or it comes from God. A person who gets there first owns what was there. We should be able to own more than we can use. We should obtain the goods required for our survival from the market (not true for most of history.) A man or corporation who files a patent or copyright should have exclusive use of that creation. Corporations should shield their owners from liability.

These are prescriptive statements. They are ethical propositions about how the world should run.

All politics and economics, boiled down, is either OUGHTS, technical details about how to get to those oughts, or moralizing about why these oughts and means are good, and why other systems’ oughts and means are bad.

What we have today in the West is a mishmash of systems, with neo-liberal capitalism and representative democracy as the foremost. Some areas have technocratic bureaucracy as their foremost value, like the EU and Singapore.

You can throw in words like “enlightenment values” and “humanism” as well.

It’s hard to disentangle all this. So many different ideologies have been created and so many of them still have strong influence on us.

So I’m going to simplify. Cut through the knot.

Greed, selfishness, and pride, combined with tribal identity.

You love your child, yes? You would let a hundred people die to save your child?

You are a monster.

Most other people would.

They are monsters.

You would kill for your group. They would kill for their group. Your group may be a religion, a nation, an ethnicity, a neighbourhood, or a wide variety of other associations or identities.

You are a monster.

You work to make sure your child has a “competitive advantage” over other children. Those parents work to make sure their child has a “competitive advantage over your child.”

You are monsters.

In every way, your needs and wants are more important than anyone else’s. Then your family’s. Then your friends.

This worked when humans lived in bands or even smaller tribal societies. This included almost everyone, and it allowed an easy apportionment of work. “Feed yourself and your family then everyone else.” (Though, in fact, the nuclear family wasn’t usually prioritized in hunter-gatherer bands.)

It sort of worked in agricultural societies, but only sort of. Which is why you have the above sages with their various golden rule variants.

It doesn’t work in the modern world. The interconnections are too dense. You affect too many other people. Societies have too much violent and coercive power.

The sheer volume of negative externalities created by a culture of “me first” and of meanness overwhelm the positive externalities, creating vast hell-zones. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about most of Sub-Saharan Africa, Bangladesh, most of India, all the Chinese who hate the new economy and loved their villages, the inner cities of America, or the exurban wastelands, or the hopeless neighbourhoods in London or Paris which occasionally riot.

They are all overwhelmed by this “me first, my family second, my friends next, my identity only after all that, and fuck everyone different.”

It is impossible to overstate the damage “me first” has done to the world. It includes all the damage that will be done by climate change, imperialism, and vast amounts more.

To be sure, the so-called altruists have done great harm. But when you liquidate entire chunks of the population, you aren’t an altruist in fact, only in rhetoric. Just as capitalism, properly understood, has not proved to be the best system for most people in the world.

I’m going to tell a slightly perverse story. When I was a child, I read a science fiction military story which was half fantasy. The protagonist has a vision in which he bombs a city from orbit, and sees that his child is in that city.

The protagonist is determined to avoid that war if possible, but he is not determined not to bomb his own child. He says, “Were I to decide whether or not to bomb a city based on whether my own child was there, I would be a monster indeed.”

So let us come down to our first axiom:

Your life is not worth more than anyone else’s. Your pain does not hurt worse than anyone else’s.

Some time back there was a book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

This is kindergarten level ethics we are dealing with here. This is what is broken–the stuff you should have learned when you were five and had reinforced as you grew up.

  • Don’t hurt other people.
  • Share your toys.
  • Don’t take more than your share.

And if someone doesn’t live by those rules, what do you do? You give them a time out. During that time out, you don’t torture them, you don’t allow the other kids in time-out to beat them or rape them. Instead you try to help them so that after the time-out, they won’t do it again.

Perhaps everyone in the world should just sit down and for one day, heck, one hour, just not hurt anyone else. Just do nothing.

You can get rich, you can get famous, you can get what you want by being a mean and violent bastard. Let us not pretend otherwise. But the knock-on effects of doing that, for everyone else, are terrible. True democracy will happen when the population is ethical enough, and willing enough, to simply not allow this. “No, no, off to your time-out you go.”

This will be sneered at as Utopian. No doubt it is. But this is the Pole Star, the guiding light you aim towards. The closer you sail to it, the closer you come to some semblance of a world worth living in for the majority of people.

If we do not aim for this, we may solve some temporary problems for a temporary period, but there will be no remotely stable good society.

Everyone’s life has equal value to yours. Everyone’s pain is equal to yours.

The Culture of Meanness

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On February 23, 2016

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One of the most striking things about much of American culture is the simple meanness of it. The cruelty.

Most of this seems to come down to three feelings:

  • My life sucks. I have to work a terrible job I hate in order to survive. I have to bow and scrape and do shit I don’t want to do. You should have to as well.
  • Anyone who doesn’t make it must not be willing to suffer as I do, therefore anyone who doesn’t make it deserves to be homeless, go without food, and so on.
  • Anybody who is against us needs to be hurt and humiliated, because that’s how I see my superiors deal with people who go against them.

“Life is shit, therefore your life should be shit.”

“What you’ve got is what you deserve.”

There is also a culture of punching down, as commenter Lisa has observed. America has a high-violence, high-bullying society. As Lisa noted you can have a high-violence society in which it is considered unacceptable to attack the weak (doing so is viewed as cowardice), but that’s not the case in America.

In American culture, the weak are the preferred target. Failure is punishable by homelessness, suffering, and death.  Sick people sure don’t deserve proper pain medication. Poor people are poor because they “don’t add value.” If you’re poor, you definitely shouldn’t have good healthcare, because if you don’t have money, you don’t deserve money, and that’s because you’re a waste of space.

This appears to be a result of something simple: At every stage of American life, it’s a zero or negative sum game, and who gets ahead is decided by authority figures. Need to get into a good university? You need good grades from adults, you need to have done the right extra-curricular activities, you need references from adults.

On the job, only a few people will be promoted, and the competition is fierce. But worse, in many fields, people are often let go, and the competition to avoid getting fired or laid off is severe.

Who decides? Your boss. You’d better get down on your knees and do whatever your boss wants, because if you’re fired or let go you may never work again, and if you do hang on at a bottom-wage job, well, your life will suck.

When dealing with police, the constant American attitude is OBEY. If you don’t obey, then whatever the police do to you is justified. The police are like bosses in a way. One cop can ruin your life, even if you aren’t killed, beaten, or raped by them. A criminal record means you will never have a good job again.

OBEY.  ACQUIESCE.

On your knees, citizen.

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And as my friend Stirling once noted, the next demand after, “Kneel!” is, “On your belly, worm.”

Failure to comply means your advancement is over, and maybe your job.

Americans are desperate for the approval of those in power, because without it, they are destroyed. This is true to a lesser extent in many other Western societies, certainly in Britain.

Having learned that the right way to treat anyone who is weaker than them is with demands for acquiescence and dominance displays, to many Americans, to interpret any sign of weakness as requiring them, as a moral duty, to dominate and hurt the weak person.

People become what is required of them. They learn from authority figures how to behave.

The desperate need of certain demographics to keep, say, women or certain minorities down is part of this. These people need to know that there are some people who, no matter how degraded their own situation, are always lower than them, can always be beaten down.

Contrary what many right-wingers think, dominance structures aren’t innate to humanity. Evidence supports that, for most of human existence, we were hopelessly egalitarian. But surplus combined with scarcity changes that, as do large populations.

Still, while high-density agricultural and industrial societies are innately more inequal than paleolithic hunter-gathers, there is plenty of variation, and within that variation plenty more variation as regards to the level of meanness and cruelty–how much a culture can be defined as “bullying.” In the modern, Western world, America ranks high as a mean, bullying culture.

The effects of this cascade, and can be seen as high up as America’s constant wars, drone assassinations, and the routine torture in prisons, and as low down as cities passing by-laws that the homeless can’t be fed or the desperate competition amongst parents and school-children for those few elite university slots which virtually ensure one’s future.

The entire process makes America a far more unpleasant place to live or visit than is necessary. The structure of dominance, meanness and cruelty is palpable to the visitor, and distressing; even as it warps the best inhabitant.

I find myself without a real conclusion. Obviously (I hope), this is BAD. Obviously it should change. But it’s hard to change something that people have taken and turned into a moral imperative: Be mean to the weak and poor, who deserve their fates. Kick down, kiss up, because a failure to pucker up can have you thrown out of the charmed circle, and obviously higher-ups want to see you acting like them, imitation being the most sincere form of flattery.

It’s all very depressing, all very unnecessary, and all very much in the interests of the people who run your society.  Meanness in the chattel means they can rarely get together to challenge the masters, because they hate each other more than they hate the masters.

Kindness is a revolutionary act.

What Sort of Person Does Evil or Stands by While Evil Is Done?

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On February 8, 2016

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Last month, the media reported on a young man who refused to stand by while a classmate was having an asthma attack and was suspended as a result:

Anthony Ruelas watched for what seemed like an eternity as his classmate wheezed and gagged in a desperate struggle to breathe.

The girl told classmates that she was having an asthma attack, but her teacher refused to let anyone leave the classroom, according to NBC affiliate KCEN. Instead, the teacher emailed the school nurse and waited for a reply, telling students to stay calm and remain in their seats.

When the student having the asthma attack fell out of her chair several minutes later, Ruelas decided he couldn’t take it anymore and took action.

“We ain’t got time to wait for no email from the nurse,” a teacher’s report quotes him as saying, according to Fox News Latino.

And with that, the 15-year-old Gateway Middle School student carried his stricken classmate to the nurse’s office, violating his teacher’s orders.

What sort of person is Ruelas?

Mandy Cortes, Ruelas’s mother, told KCEN that she assumed her son–who has been suspended in the past–was to blame when the school informed her that he had been suspended again.

… “He may not follow instructions all the time, but he does have a great heart,” she said, noting that she was now considering home-schooling him.

The boy is, in other words, a troublemaker with authority issues. Thank goodness, eh?

I imagine most readers are familiar with the Milgram experiment, where university students were told to shock people by authority figures and most did so.

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I’ve always been curious what the people who refused were like, but oddly, that research did not appear to have been done.

Until now (h/t S. Brennan).

A new Milgram-like experiment published this month in the Journal of Personality has taken this idea to the next step by trying to understand which kinds of people are more or less willing to obey these kinds of orders. What researchers discovered was surprising: Those who are described as “agreeable, conscientious personalities” are more likely to follow orders and deliver electric shocks that they believe can harm innocent people, while “more contrarian, less agreeable personalities” are more likely to refuse to hurt others.

“The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial—disagreeableness—may actually be linked to ‘pro-social’ behavior,'” writes Psychology Today‘s Kenneth Worthy. “This connection seems to arise from a willingness to sacrifice one’s popularity a bit to act in a moral and just way toward other people, animals, or the environment at large. Popularity, in the end, may be more a sign of social graces and perhaps a desire to fit in than any kind of moral superiority.”

…The study also found that people holding left-wing political views were less willing to hurt others. One particular group held steady and refused destructive orders: “women who had previously participated in rebellious political activism such as strikes or occupying a factory.”

Most people who are popular and too agreeable do not have strong red lines. Their morality is set by authority figures and peer groups. Whatever seems okay with the people around them is okay with them.

I wrote about this in the past in my post on the Decline and Fall of Post-War Liberalism. One key part of breaking an essentially egalitarian economic order was finding and destroying the people who wouldn’t go along to get along, the people who would fight.

Graph of incarceration in the US over time

From Wikipedia

This was done by creating a set of bullshit laws: Drug laws. Consensual activity which harmed no one (especially in the case of marijuana) was made illegal.

The sort of people who wouldn’t obey rules, laws, or orders that didn’t make sense to them disobeyed those laws and went to prison in droves, where they were destroyed politically, economically, and personally. The vast majority had committed no violence.

The gut was ripped out of America’s working and lower class troublemakers.

Since then, our method of child-raising has become one of high-surveillance. “Helicopter parenting” means children rarely spend time doing anything not approved of by parents or other authority figures. Police patrol schools. Children have cell phones, allowing their parents to check on them any time they want. Houses increasingly have internal surveillance systems to keep track of children.

People who are under constant supervision with little time to be alone or to be with friends without authority supervision tend to become “go along to get along” people, unused to thinking for themselves, and used to jumping through hoops for the approval of authority. Their entire lives have been about doing so, after all.

This is especially true of our elites, and while it’s usually been truer of them than the lower orders, it has become even more so than it was in the past. You could get into an Ivy league school in the past based on pure genius and talent; today you need excellent grades, an extra-curricular record which precludes alone time, and an essay which hits all the proper, authority-pleasing conformist points.

Society does not work for everyone when it becomes authoritarian and conformist. People are what they do, to a remarkable degree. We already had a system designed to create conformity (school is nothing but a conformity producing machine: sit down, speak only when called on, and do what you are told to do in exchange for adult approval and a decent future). The system we have now is even more designed to produce people who won’t stand up when asked, frankly, to be Nazis. Or torturers (an activity of which most Americans approve).

The troublemakers are the guarantors of your freedom and prosperity. When they are are broken, both will soon follow.

They were broken. Both followed.

Ethics and Responsibility in Relation to Paris

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On November 14, 2015

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To say that the Paris attacks are terrible is easy. To follow the consequences of that statement is hard.

First, let us start with responsibility. Those most responsible are those who commanded the attacks take place, and those who carried them out.

This seems evident.

Let us make another statement: Absent the Iraq war, there would be no ISIS. If ISIS is responsible, then no Iraq war means no Paris attacks.

The Iraq war was an attack on a country which had not attacked the US, Britain, or any other coalition member. It did not threaten any coalition member. It did not have “WMD” in any meaningful sense of the words.

No Iraq war, no Paris attacks.

If you want to punish those responsible for the Paris attacks, on that list are George Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Tony Blair, among others.

Nor can a case be made that they did something defensible which had unfortunate consequences. The crime they committed was the same one for which the Allies hung most Nazis: starting a war without caususbelli. At Nuremburg, that was held worthy of death because of all of the crimes that follow logically from war.

It’s hard to tell how many deaths the Iraq war has caused, but put it from hundreds of thousands to well over a million.

Those people are just as dead as the Parisians. Most of them were civilians.

It should be, but isn’t, an unexceptionable statement to say that the people most responsible for their deaths are the people who ordered those deaths, and the people who killed them.

“Just following orders” should be out of style as an excuse, but it isn’t.

Legitimate violence, to many, is violence sanctioned by a state. Since Bush and Blair were heads of state, their violence is legitimate.

Yet the International Criminal Court regularly tries and imprisons Africans for killing people with the power of the State.

This ethical spiral goes nowhere good. It is impossible not to conclude that what matters in violence is only who commits it. We kill civilians in large numbers. We say that our soldiers are only following orders. We are still killing large numbers of civilians in foreign countries.

We would never accept this excuse of someone who carried out the attacks in Paris, that they “were only following orders.”

There is no way to cut through this knot that does not involve an appeal to authority, that does not come down to: “We’re okay with killing people with whom we don’t identify.”

ISIS claims to be a state, and claims the right to order violence. It claims the right to kill innocents. So does the West. The history of medical sanctions or of direct attacks on civilian infrastructure like sewage does not allow the argument for “collateral” casualties to be taken seriously.

I am unable to see, on the basis of any ethics that isn’t tribal, particular, or supine to authority that the Parisian attacks are more worthy of condemnation than either similar attacks that occur regularly in the Middle East. I am also unable to see what difference it makes to the dead if they are killed by a “terrorist’s” bomb or bullet, or a bomb or bullet used by a “soldier.”

Either civilians are off limits, or civilians aren’t. Either war crimes that got Nazis hung are war crimes for everyone, including Americans and British (or French, in Libya) or the Nuremburg trials were simply victor’s “justice”; simple vengeance.

We should expect propaganda from the state. We should expect hysteria. But we should not allow our own thinking or sympathy to fall subject to it.

The Paris attacks are terrible. They are not more terrible, or less terrible than other attacks of similar sort, no matter who carries them out.

I will accord “the West” the ethical upper-hand when I see Bush, Blair, and their cronies on the dock for their crimes.

Because I will tell you this: While every life has value, and every murder is a tragedy, more murders are worse than less murders.

If we want to avoid the next Paris attack, we will try our own criminals and cease our violent meddling in the affairs of other countries.  Because, for the time being, we will not, the regularly scheduled tragedies, here and abroad, will continue.

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Social Facts Rule Your Life

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On August 20, 2015

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The most deadly forces in the world for most people, for much of history and certainly today, are not physical forces.

If you are homeless in America, know that there are five times as many empty homes as there are homeless people.

If you are homeless in Europe, know that there are two times as many empty homes are there are homeless.

If you are hungry anywhere in the world, know that the world produces more than enough food to feed everyone, and that the amount of food we discard as trash is, alone, more than enough to feed everyone who is hungry today.

It is very difficult to argue that the current refugee crises are anything but social facts: War and famine are social facts, straight up.

How likely you are to be in jail is almost entirely based on where you live, plus race and ethnicity. Born black in the US? Too damn bad.

How much money you make is almost entirely a social fact. Yes, that includes billionaires. Born back when the top tax rates were eighty or ninety percent? You wouldn’t be nearly as rich.

The value of the money you have is determined almost entirely based on where you live. For most people, this is based on where they were born.

North Americans and Europeans have better standards of living than most of the rest of the world because they conquered or subjugated most of the rest of the world. And I do mean most. Americans and Canadians do well because they virtually wiped out the original residents of North America (and the remaining Native Americans live in conditions that are generally as bad as third world countries).

Most of the prisoners in American jails are there for selling or using a prescribed substance which was not prescribed–nor stigmatized–for most of history. Social fact.

If you don’t have a job, well, that comes down to how many jobs there are. If your job is shitty, it has less to do with you than the time and place in which you live: 40 years ago, the largest employers in the US were car companies, who paid much better than the largest employer today: Walmart.

Even most environmental facts are social facts. Climate change, the collapse of ocean stocks, the terrible pollution in China: These are all a result of human action.

If you live in China, how happy you are is partially based on a social fact: Those still in traditional villages are happier than those who moved to the new cities with the new higher paying, but shitty, jobs. (In terribly polluted cities, to boot.)

Virtually everything that matters in your life is a social fact. It was created by human decisions. That’s the good news, of course, since it means human decisions could make it better.

It’s also the bad news, for what it says about human decision-making.

I want to emphasize something here: Progress is not always good for the people caught in it. The people who lived through the industrial revolution were mostly worse off than those before it. Idiots who sneer at the Luddites, who wanted to smash the machines, are clueless; the Luddites were right for themselves, for their children, and for their grandchildren. It took a long time for industrialization to pay off.

A great deal was lost with industrialization, including, and most importantly, community. The loss of community increased with the rise of the car. Community, my friends, is practically the most important thing when it comes to life satisfaction (about tied with equality), so long as basic needs, including safety, are met.

Heck, agriculture was a goddamn disaster for 95 percent of the world’s population. Hunter-gatherers lived better in almost every way than peasants, and peasants were most of the world’s population under agriculture.

We can remain victims of social facts, including our dominant technology, or we can decide that social facts are choices and make choices.

This is becoming more possible, not less, because of the rise of global culture. I’ll discuss this later. But for now, remember, while biology determines we all die, society generally determines how and when. (Including when you have a heart attack, how likely you are to get cancer, and so on.)

Social facts.

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