Category: How to think Page 5 of 22

War Crime Apologia

On July 2, 2020

One is not required to bomb hospitals, to torture, or to engage in mass killing of civilians when one is a chief of state. “My favorite war criminal did less war crimes than your war criminal,” is not a defense.

That people feel the need to defend those who do such things when in power is why we live in Hell.

The pathetic need of people to identify with a leader to the extent where they apologize for their war crimes is a sign of ethical illness, and when a plurality or majority do so, it is a sign of a sick society.

You who do, deserve your leaders. They reflect you and your ethics, and they have created the world you actually want, whatever you may say. You cannot commit war crimes as state policy and expect the evil you do not to eventually reflect in your own society. The best you can hope is to be a lord of hell, living on the suffering of others, but insulated from it, or to die before the worst comes home.

This is as true as, “bad people often have virtues.” Putin is not all bad; he has done good. Trump is not all bad; he has done some good. Obama was not all bad; he did some good. Blair was not all bad; he did some good. Etc…

The good does not wipe out the war crimes. Both must be acknowledged. But the war crimes remain real, and the people who ordered them are still war criminals; these men (and a few women) have done far more harm and evil than any serial killer who has ever lived.

If you believe that torture, mass killings, destroying civilian infrastructures, and so on is required of leaders in order to do their jobs, then you have acquiesced to live in Hell and all you are quibbling over is the details of Hell’s hierarchy, hoping you and your preferred people can avoid the Hell you inflict on others.

Update. Apparently a 101 on when civilian casualties are a war crime and when they aren’t is required.

When the POLICY is to mass kill civilians that is unacceptable. That was the POLICY in Chechnya.

Why is this hard for people to understand?

Civilians die in war, that is why the bar for war is high. Same with insurrection.

There are quantitative and qualitative differences between “civilians die in war” (collateral damage) and deliberately killing civilians.

This should not be hard to understand, and I am dismayed that I have to explain it, and related issues, over and over and over again.

You can kill criminals if your society allows it. You can kill soldiers when at war. Some civilian casualties will happen in war, and while that’s not good, it isn’t a war crime unless your war itself is a war crime (like Iraq, the Nazi invasions, Libya, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and both nuclear bomb attacks on Japan).

Perhaps we need a war crimes 101 post, but I don’t have the heart to write it.

As for insurrections, these questions become blurred, but, even during the Terror, an attempt at at least pro-forma trials was maintained.

When you start killing civilians to create terror to break your opponents will as a government, you are worse than a terrorist, because you have the weight of a state behind you.

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

A Small Insight About Power, Markets, and Post-capitalism

By Ian Welsh

On June 16, 2020

Comments

Last week I wrote a brief post about the process of having insights: How we don’t control what insights we get, or when–we can only do the preparatory work, and then sit back and wait.

The insight I was writing about was really “Oh, this isn’t up to me, it happens when it happens,” but there was also an insight related to markets, capitalism, and really, post-capitalism.

A lot of what I’ve spent the last 30 years thinking about could be considered to be collective action problems–who, as societies, we let make decisions about what we’ll do. Feudalism did that one way, capitalism does it another; there have been other systems, and even within capitalism there are sub-ideologies: neoliberalism is very different from New Deal capitalism with its emphasis on increasing wages, decreasing inequality, and keeping prices up.

But the real issue is about power. Money is a type of power, it gives whoever controls it (not has it, but controls it), the ability to tell other people what to do. When you buy something or hire someone, that’s power.

There are so many issues with using markets to determine who gets power that you could write multiple books about them, but let’s review the positive argument for markets.

If someone pays you for something, they want it or need it. It has utility to someone.

The more people pay you, therefore, the more utility you are providing. Coincidentally, the more they give you, the more utility you can provide, as more money gives you more power to control people and resources. It’s a nice, positive feedback loop.

But one simple problem with it is that money can be used for things other than what people paid you for. Say you’re Bill Gates and you masterminded an operating system and productivity suite people use. (You did this using ethically suspect tactics, but let’s assume you still did more good than harm.)

Now you have a ton of money, and you use it to change how the US organizes education.

That’s what Bill Gates did.

Then it turned out, and Gates himself admits it, that his plan didn’t make things better. Arguably, it made things worse.

So the simple insight was only this: Money is too general a power. We want people who do something good to be able to do more of it, but to assume that, because they did one thing that other people want, means they are qualified to decide how people do other things is unwarranted.

We wouldn’t take the best teacher in the world and say, “Okay, Thelma, now you design the next universal operating system!” We wouldn’t ask the best surgeon in the world to design environmental policy.

We generalize the ability to make money doing one thing to assume it means you’re good at doing everything.

Maybe money shouldn’t be the sole metric we use to decide who will lead. Maybe Gates shouldn’t have been making education policy. Maybe the Koch brothers shouldn’t have decided what half the Republican party policy program should be.

Not a very startling insight, I’m afraid.

But I’m less interested in fixing capitalism than I am in thinking about post-capitalism. So what’s interesting about this isn’t the insight that this is one of the many ways capitalism fails, which I already knew, BUT that a feature of post capitalism needs to be avoiding power creep; just because someone is good at one thing doesn’t mean you hand him control of unrelated things. At most, you then put the best surgeon on the world on a committee to improve surgery, then maybe they start influencing hospital management, then maybe drugs, etc., etc.

A small movement to a related sector, without great power, but with influence, makes sense. Handing them huge power is stupid. A successful businessman isn’t necessarily good at anything but the specific business they were in, and generally isn’t good at economic policy beyond saying what’s good for him, or maybe, what’s good for their industry if what’s good for the industry isn’t also bad for them. (What was good for computers and software in the 90s was not, in my opinion, what was good for Bill Gates, and he wasn’t trying to make the best industry, but the richest Microsoft and Bill Gates.

Communism, with its central planners, had this same problem. Central planners didn’t know much about almost any of the industries they were planning.

Which leads us to a final note: I’m tired of people acting as if communism, social democracy (socialism in modern discourse), and capitalism are the entire acceptable spectrum.

Capitalists want this to be the conversation because they can say, “Hahaha, the USSR failed and Stalin was evil so you have to stick with us, there is no other alternative.

But all three systems have failed, because all three failed to handle climate change. They knew about a catastrophe for over 40 years and did nothing. That’s failure.

So the question isn’t, “Where on the communism to capitalism spectrum should we land?” The question is: “How do we create a third pole? Something new and better which avoids the known problems of previous systems?

And, along with, “It’ll come when it comes, and I’m not in direct control,” is the bigger insight I had while shopping for trout.

Something different, truly different, is needed.

Or we’re all cooked.

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

Does Generational Character Exist?

By Ian Welsh

On June 15, 2020

Comments

The answer is yes, unless you believe that the experiences people have don’t shape them.

At a given time and place, we experience similar things. In the US of the 30s, we experience poverty, desperation, and the hope of FDR. In the 50s, we have prosperity, but also stifling expectations of behaviour and a closing of possibilities for women. In the 60s, we experience the flowering of youth culture, traumatic assassinations, and civil rights victories. In the 70s, we grow up during inflation, terrorism, and the end of “the good times.” In the 90s, we grow up in helicopter households under stifling levels of supervision unknown to previous generations.

Character is formed by genetics and environment in concert. A generation which has one set of experiences is different from a generation which has another set of experiences. The average Boomer personality is different from the GI Generation, the Silents, Xers or the Lost Generation. They grew up in affluence, expected smooth sailing, grew up in a world which worked and in which their youthful experience was a bend toward justice. This is very different than the Xer or Millennial experience of growing up in an economy which was growing worse than that in which their parents had lived, and of the Millennial experience of a world where civil liberties beyond identity rights were actually constricting as they grew up.

To argue that generational differences don’t exist is to argue that nurture doesn’t matter, or to argue that there are no significant differences in the experiences of different generations in the 20th and 21st centuries. I will be frank: Anyone who believes either of those things is wrong.

Likewise, generations make different decisions at different points in their life cycles. The choice the GIs, Silents, and Boomers made in 1980 to abandon the Democratic Party, either because they were racist southerners responding to the southern strategy (and yes, that was a racist strategy, and the people who created it have said so), or whether they voted for Reagan in northern suburbs because they wanted those suburbs to stay white, and fuck the black people, made choices. White flight was a very real phenomenon; it is what those Boomers, GIs, and Silents did.

This does not mean all Boomers/Silents/GI Generation types made those choices, but enough did to make the Reagan revolution possible. Being racist or keeping their suburban housing prices up was more important to them than anything else, and they voted those values. They voted repeatedly for tax cuts–again and again. You could not run except on tax cuts and expect to win. That was what they wanted, that was what they voted for, that was their character.

The massive deregulation of securites which took off in the 80s could not have happened while the Lost Generation were still the majority of decision makers and one of the largest voting blocks. They would not have allowed it, and in the early 70s when an attempt was made to get rid of the uptick rule (that you can only short sell on an uptick of a stock) was quickly abandoned because they came out ferociously against it.

Certainly they had their flaws. But that generation, having lived as adults not just through the Depression, but through the Roaring Twenties, understood that you don’t allow securities markets to get out of control.

There is far too much special pleading today, mostly from Boomers, that America just went to hell when they were the largest voting bloc and later, had the majority of politicians, “because of a few bad people.”

No, that doesn’t happen. They were complicit, they chose to vote racism and fear, they chose to vote, again and again, for tax cuts which hurt the weakest amongst us. They backed three strikes laws, they ate up Reagan’s bullshit about Welfare Queens. If they lost control of their political parties (a questionable claim in 1980), well that too was a choice: a choice not to participate actively in internal party politics.

Generations have character, tendencies in common, and they make decisions based on priorities shaped by their characters and tendencies. That some of them disagree with their peers does not change this, any more than the fact that many people in Democratic elections vote for the losing parties. A decision was still made and that decision reflects their collective values.

This does not mean there are not other causal factors: the failure of liberalism, the oil shocks, the strategies of the rich to fund an ideological apparatus outside the universities, the concentration of capital, the idiotic war in Vietnam, and so on. There are always plenty of factors, but generational character, and generational choice played a part, and until the Boomers have shuffled off the stage, and the Millennials move to the fore, our problems stand no real chance of being fixed. (I leave GenX out, because while, on the balance, our generational character is abysmal, and our most prominent politicians are people like Rand Paul, we are too few in number to really matter: The Millennials will take over from the Boomers, in the same way that the poor Silents were essentially skipped over in favor of the Boomers.)

Character is destiny, for nations, individuals and generations. And character is formed by the experiences we have.

Originally published Jan 7, 2014.

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

Your Responsibility for Insight, Understanding, and Creative Work

By Ian Welsh

On June 12, 2020

Comments

Regular readers will know I’ve written about the logic of markets and capitalism many times. It’s one of my ongoing interests: How they work, what they do well, and where they fail.

And why.

Yesterday, at the supermarket buying a rainbow trout fillet, a thought popped up about one of the ways in which markets fail, giving people power outside their area of expertise; past where they can do good and turn to evil. It was a simple insight, though at the end of a chain of logic.

I was both very pleased and chagrined, it seemed to me that after spending 30 years on this subject I ought to have had this insight already, but I was happy it had shown up.

And then I thought something else, which was “It’s not my responsibility anyway, I get the insights I get when I get them.”

This is one of the fundamental truths of all non-mechanical creative and intellectual inquiry: You do the work, but you don’t control when you reap the results, or even what they will be.

You do the reading, you practice (I’ve written all those “logic of capitalism articles” in part as practice), you contemplate what you know, running through the links. You ask questions (and even the questions are more given than something you control) and the results are out of your hands beyond that.

You control the preparatory work. Reading, thought, conversation; you don’t control the crop.

This is even more true of creative work: You could study the great masters of painting, learn how to do all the brush strokes, spend endless hours contemplating how light, perspective, and symbolism work, but you can’t guarantee what work will come from it.

This is the great curse of such endeavors: You can put in all the work and not get a great deal as a result. The less mechanical the discipline, the less determined the results are.

But it is also a blessing: Your job is just to show up and do the work. Because you can’t control what happens after that, or what your body, heart, and spirit are doing with the material, there is no point in worrying about it; no point in self-blame. What shows up after you’ve mixed in the materials is not your responsibility.

You can relax and enjoy the process, the pleasure of ideas or aesthetics, the joy of a great idea or inspiration popping up.

Indeed, relaxation is necessary. You select a seed, plant it in the right soil, water it, ensure it gets enough sunshine, and weed it. Then, you leave it alone. The breaks, the times you don’t think about your art or area of inquiry are just as necessary as anything else. (In fact I recommend any creative workers or thinkers also be nappers.)

Generally, the more relaxed you are, the more you trust the process, the better the results.

This doesn’t mean you don’t turn your critical intellect or aesthetic sense on whatever pops into your mind. Not all ideas or inspirations are great or even good. But if you self-flagellate, you make the process slower, the results weaker. Treat every sprouted idea and impulse with joy, and you’ll get more of them, even if not all of them are as pretty or useful as you hoped.

That moment when inspiration strikes, those ah-hah moments, are one of life’s great joys. Treat them as such, nourish them, and understand you have no direct control, and you’ll have more of them.

They come when they come, their frequency and quality is not up to you–but nurturing them, evaluating them, and loving them is. They are all your children, all loved, but not all equal.

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.

Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

By Ian Welsh

On May 25, 2020

Comments

One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

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.

Groups Only a Fool Trusts

By Ian Welsh

On February 18, 2020

Comments

Economists: The vast majority missed the housing bubble.

Intelligence Agencies: Remember Iraq? Part of the job description is lying.

Any Army’s PR: Enough said.

Life Insurance Agents: I worked back office dealing with agents. About ten percent of them were looking after their clients first.

Politicians: Yes, obviously.

Stock Brokers: As the book said, “Where are the client’s yachts?”

Media, in general: Most of them are owned by a few conglomerates. They do what’s in the interests of those big conglomerates or their job leaves. And remember the NYT and Iraq.

Private equity or hedge funders, any senior executive in any large bank: They were all in on the fraud leading up to the financial crisis, and yes, they would do it again.

Any senior executive in any large firm: They didn’t get there by being good people. Good people don’t become Senior VPs.

Central Bankers: They either missed the housing and financial bubble or didn’t care, then they bailed out the rich and fucked over the little people. No one will ever be hired for those jobs who wouldn’t do it again, and again, and again.

Etc.

(This seems like an important piece, so back to the top for those who haven’t read it or have forgotten it. Originally published December 29, 2016.)

My friend Charles Green, who co-wrote the book, The Trusted Adviser, loved to say “I trust my dog with my life, but not my lunch.”

Who you can trust depends on what you are trusting them with, and who you are. Charles can trust his dog with his life; I can’t trust his dog with my life.

Central bankers are the dogs of the rich. The rich can trust bankers to save their lives, no one else can. Perhaps if you were to fall in front of one of them and injure yourself, some of them would call an ambulance for you. You can’t trust them not take away your house, however, or pursue policies that crush your wages and make jobs scarce.

The point here is that just because someone is good in one part of their life, doesn’t mean they’re good in another part of their life. I learned this young: My father was a bastard to his family, but was respected by most of his employees for his loyalty to them.

People are not of a piece, and you need to understand what their jobs are to understand what they can be trusted with.

A politician’s job is to get voters to elect them, then to do things that rich people like, because rich people reward them both before and after they leave office; while in office, rich people take care of politicians’ families, invite them to parties, give them loans, and so on, and after they leave office, rich people reward politicians (and heir families) with lucrative positions in their companies. Rich people pay most of a politician’s salary: They work for them.

This is IMPORTANT. So if you want to know if a politician is one of the rare few you can trust, you need to see that they don’t take the rich’s money, and they don’t vote with the other people who have taken the rich’s money. And you can only really see that once they’ve been in office for awhile.

This is why I trust Corbyn. Because he doesn’t take their money; he barely even accepts money from the government for office expenses AND he has a track record of voting against or for the right things when it was against his personal interest. He has integrity. He is a very rare politician.

When I used to back-office for life insurance agents, I could tell the ones whom I’d recommend because they would sell insurance, often, that earned them less commission, if it was better for their clients. That simple.

For economists, look who they work for and look at their prediction record. Did they come out against the housing bubble early, for example? You can trust Stiglitz because he wrote a book attacking the World Bank that named names and turned other economists against him because he was more concerned about how poor people were being hurt than about what his fellow economists thought. He did something against his own interest. Plus, he’s been right on most issues. Integrity + competence.

If you happen to have a 100 million dollars or so, then you would be justified in saying, “I trust central bankers,” because they are looking out after your interests–though you might wonder if they are competent enough to do so. Still, they’ll do anything for you, they are your dogs: You can trust them. No one else can.

As for the rest: Never trust anyone on commission without doing extensive checks to see if they’re putting their clients’ interests first. If they’ll take a hit in pay to do the right thing, they’re trustowrthy. Remember, most of them work for firms which, whatever their “official policy,” strongly discourage getting lower commissions for any reason.

Intelligence agencies. Well, if you’re stupid enough or naive enough to trust an intelligence agency, I can do nothing for you. Even people who work for intelligence agencies don’t trust intelligence agencies.

With respect to the media, people are extraordinarily stupid. For example, I don’t trust Russia Today (RT) with respect to things that Russia cares about, but they’re very good on things Russia doesn’t care about. What you’re looking for is a media outlet which doesn’t care about the issue in question, which isn’t subject to pressure on that issues, whose owner doesn’t care. The US media is useful in regards to the US, of course, but it is not trustworthy.

Understand?

There are few things which will destroy you faster in life than trusting the wrong person or people, and the metrics you have for trusting individuals in your life don’t work when you try to scale them up to measure organizations, professionals, and so on–people who are not your friends, or in your social circle, or who are not being dealt with as friends and members of your social circle.

The interests of these people do not align with yours, they do not identify with you, and your well-being does not concern them in any meaningful way. Figure out what their interests are, who they identify with, and who they serve, if you want to know what they’ll do and whether you can trust them.

And if you’re looking for the rare politician, broker, or commissioned salesman you can trust, look for the ones willing to go against their own interests–and with a track record of doing so.

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.

Why People Don’t Learn: You Can’t Look It Up and You Can’t Give It Away

By Ian Welsh

On February 11, 2020

Comments

I have a friend who is a serious meditator. For many years, when someone asked him to help them become enlightened, he would teach them a simple meditation, then instruct: “Do that for six months, every day, for one hour. Then return.” He called it “the very minimum required.”

Over the years, people have come to me wanting some of what I have, intellectually. Not a lot of people, more than five, less than ten.

In every case, I have given them a list of books to read, and said: “As you read each book, get back to me, and we’ll discuss them.”

Only one person ever did, he is the only person I ever charged money for teaching.

You can’t give the good stuff, the actually valuable stuff, away.

He read five books or so, we talked about them, and I gave him assignments and we discussed the assignments. He then stopped, because he had what he wanted, which was to learn how to learn more effectively, and he had proved this to himself by using the skills he was taught, and I was charging him enough money that it mattered to him (not a lot, but he wasn’t rich).

Back when I did some consulting, in the 2000s, I noticed something similar: When I didn’t charge people enough, or said, “Oh, I’ll help you for free,” they never took my advice. If I made them bleed, they did what I said and benefited.

You can’t give it away. I really wish you could.

Anyway, this is a winding intro to my point, which is that if you want to actually understand certain topics, you have to read. A lot.

Let’s run some numbers. From the time I was eight through to age 12, I read at least two books a day. I know this because I went to the library once a week and took out the limit, and I also checked books out of the school library, and I read my father’s books. Actually, I read more than two books a day. Call it 700 a year, so 3,500 books.

From age thirteen to thirty-five, we’ll count it at a book a day. 7,700 books.

From 35 to the end of 45 (11 years), I read two books a week, because I was blogging and reading online articles (they are not a substitute, online content is mostly trash). So 1,100 books, though the proportion of non-fiction books was higher than before.

And for the last four years, I’ve been back to one or more a day, but we’ll count it as one a day. Add another 1,400.

Total? Thirteen thousand, seven hundred books. Put it at 90 percent fiction, and 10 percent non fiction, so about 1,370 non-fiction books.

This is an understatement, at every point I have gone with the lowest estimate. It is not unusual, even today, for me to read three books in a day. Sometimes I read four. The real number is probably close to twenty thousand.

This is not meant as a brag and should not be taken as such. By most people’s standards, my life is trash and I didn’t read so much because “discipline,” I did it because I like reading books and thinking about ideas. If I enjoyed making money, working out, meditating, and eating healthy as much as I liked books and games, well, I’d have a rather different life.

But I have read a lot of books. I have thought about what I read. I have discussed what I read with other people.

Because I have read those books, I can think using the knowledge they contained. You cannot think with knowledge you do not know, and you cannot even look up most Knowledge, because you have to know what you don’t know. The more you know, the more you know what you don’t know.

If you want to engage in the life of ideas, you have to read. You have to read a lot.

Yes, someone like me can make it easier. I’ve read a lot of not very useful books. I can say: “These are the most useful ones!” But you still have to go read them, think about them, and integrate them into your worldview. You need to be able to restate their arguments, and you need to understand the model they are using, and you need to know the assumptions upon which they are based, and you need to know the problems with all of those things, and why it matters and doesn’t matter.

There are shorter roads, but there are no shortcuts, if you really want to know. You just have to read, and then you have to work with what you read. (If this means math, you’ve got to do the math until it integrates. If it’s about human body movements, you’ve got to do the movements. If it’s about “spirituality” you have to actually meditate enough to get the basic insights.)

Discipline is shit. Discipline is only the main tool at the start. If you don’t start enjoying what you’re doing, why the hell are you doing it? The biggest mistake I made intellectually was spending years trying to figure out how economies work because I thought, “Shit, these people (economists, policy makers) are making things worse. I’d better figure it out!”

I did, but it was a lot less fun than the topics I really cared about. (Though it all came around in the end, because it turned out that the technical details were secondary to things like identity, ideology, organization, and all the stuff I write about in “Construction of Reality.”)

Most people have the curiosity and joy of reading and learning beaten out of them by our school system, which seems designed to be one of the most anti-intellectual, anti-wonder ways of “learning” one can imagine. It makes people into machines; spewing out the answer teach wants, talking only when allowed, sitting, and hating.

I mostly ignored school and would even read books in class when I could. My grades were middling, but I was learning.

You want to learn? Find the wonder in it. Find what’s cool and interesting. Yeah, you’ll have to power through some shit, but it’s worth it if you care.

But don’t think you can skip the actual work. Reading for intellectual work is like drills for athletic work, or whatever.

Just figure out why it’s worth doing.

Again, you can’t think with information you don’t know. You cannot look information up you don’t know you don’t know. Any system for which you do not understand the underlying axioms and assumptions, which you try to use, is actually using you. You are just a machine, doing what the creator(s) wanted.

So read and think.

And find it fun!

Money helps me write more. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

Responsibility in Democracies

By Ian Welsh

On December 17, 2019

Comments

The primary responsibility for what government is in charge of a democracy rests with voters.

This is fundamental. Voters have choices, they make choices. One can make the claim that the choices are often all bad (although in systems where anyone can join a party and vote in primaries that is weak), but when it comes to the actual choice on the ballot, voters are in charge.

This is fundamental. This is the basis of democratic legitimacy.

It also has to be understood clearly, because there is an exact relationship between power and responsibility. If you put all, or the majority, of the responsibility onto leaders or elites, you are saying you do not have any power to make change.

In Britain’s election, the British made a choice. The forseeable consequences will be a lot more death and suffering. There was another option. They chose.

Perhaps Corbyn did not run as well as he could have, but people who say it’s primarily his fault don’t actually understand democracies.

This is the same as when Americans chose Reagan, or the British chose Thatcher. There was a clear choice, they made it. Reagan ran a racist campaign, it was known at the time (I remember it), and it was also clearly one based on a project of dismantling the regulatory and welfare state. That was the choice, Americans made it, and Americans are responsible for making it. They then ratified the decision by re-electing Reagan.

The same is true of the Brits and Thatcher, especially when they ratified the choice by re-electing her after seeing her policies. (Thatcher also bribed them by letting them buy council housing below price. In the long run that was a bad bribe to take.)

None of this is to say that leaders don’t have responsibilities, or more power than individuals or even groups. But they do not have more power than the population as a whole, in a democracy.

If they do, then it is no longer a democracy. If that’s the case one wants to make (and I can see making it), then fine. After all, Corbyn was lied about more than 75 percent of the time, for example, by the media.

But if the country is still a democracy, then the ultimate responsibility for the government rests with the people.

To claim anything else is to throw away the power and responsibility the people do have and to retreat into leader worship and powerlessness.

Which, actually, is what we’ve done, over and over again.

It’s either your country, or it isn’t.

Brits are about to get what they voted for. That is as it should be. (The same is true of my own country, where we have made bad electoral choices, over and over again. So be it. We made those choices.)

(Data-based aside: In most of the ridings I saw where Labour lost, the swing was usually the Brexit Party vote. Those people who think that strategy for Labour was as simple as “Go Remain” miss the point: One-third of Labour party voters wanted Brexit. Labour had a genuinely broken coalition because of Brexit and there was no obvious way to fix it.)

Money would be rather useful, as I don’t get paid by the piece. If you want to support my writing, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.