Category: Ideology Page 1 of 4

For those of us who want the purpose of government and society to be creating the best life for the most people there are two fundamental questions.

First: how to produce what is good for people and produces a good life.

Second: how to distribute what is good for people and produces a good life.

Among people of genuine good will there’s a lot of disagreement about how to do this.

The argument of capitalists is follows: if you produce something someone wants and is able to buy you’ve increased utility. If they didn’t want to buy it, they wouldn’t, so it must be good for them. Trying to figure out what is good for people is stupid: individuals know better than government or firms, so whatever they actually buy (or do) must be what they want, and what they want must be good for them.

Whoever sells the most at the most profit must be producing most utility, so if you have a lot of money this means you’re doing a lot of good and not only do you deserve your money, you should have it because money is the ability to command resources and you’ve proved that when you command resources you increase utility. Making money is the same as producing utility, in other words.

Now the smarter capitalists (non libertarians) admit that there are edge cases: people may want heroin, but we still make it illegal. They don’t think there are a lot of edge cases.

The counter-arguments are pretty simple: when we look at time periods where oligarchs are in control like the gilded era or the neoliberal era, they all end in disaster for the society. In the case of the gilded age, a direct road to the Great Depression (without which WWII probably doesn’t happen). In the case of neoliberalism, a multi-decade increase in inequality, and in the heartland, most social statistics turning negative. (Things like, oh, lifespan and child mortality.) Massive homelessness, hunger, all that stuff. (I’m old enough to remember when there were no food banks.)

Such people argue that “utility” is meaningless: it’s a circular definition, whatever people do is what they want to do and must be good. We all know that we often do things that aren’t good for us (mmm, a nice can of coke) and all of us who aren’t near the top of society have “freely” worked at jobs we hated because not doing so would lead to homelessness. Coercion is all thru the system, and it can’t operate without it. If it could, they wouldn’t need so many police.

Note that the idea that greed and wealth are good flies in the face of pretty much all traditional ethical teaching. Doesn’t matter if it’s Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Moslem or even most pagan faiths: they all condemn having much more than you need when others are poor or hungry.

But, say the capitalists, we tried that for a long time and what worked to create widespread prosperity was capitalism!

Was it?

Or was it industrialization, which we did in capitalist ways and can we imagine that industrialization could have been done in other ways?

Or perhaps the capitalists are right (Marx thought so) and industrialization required capitalism, but once we’re industrialized, we should find a better way, because we know that capitalism is unstable and tends to devolve into fascism, plus tends to create oligarchies over time which then cause massive economic problems.

Or, perhaps the argument is for certain types of capitalism: the New Deal variety worked pretty well, after all. Except that it devolved in neoliberalism and gave away an industrial base which it took the West centuries to build. (Not that China shouldn’t industrialize, but that doing so by wiping out Western industry seems pretty bad for Westerners.)

Then there’s the ecological argument: if capitalism can’t control its environmental destruction, and if that environmental destruction is so serious that it endangers hundreds of millions to billions of lives and is causing a mass extinction event, perhaps whether or not it creates, for a few centuries, prosperity for some people, is not all that relevant. I can keep myself warm by burning my possessions one by one, then burning down my house, but no one thinks that’s smart.

I think a fair reading of capitalism is that it failed to handle to industrialization’s negative side effects and that it regularly devolves into degraded political forms which do great harm.

The “well, it’s the best thing we’ve come up” with argument is foolish: if the best thing we’ve come up with will kill billions of people and keeps causing wars and impoverishing people even though there’s a surplus, we obviously need to come up with something better.

We’ve changed our governing forms and our economic forms many times in the past. We’ve tried new things. The idea that this is (or was) the “end of history” and capitalism and neoliberal democracy are the best we can do is argument for running ourselves off a cliff and after the rise of the CPC, the idea that oligarchy/neoliberalism or “liberal” democracy are the best systems even in their own terms is obviously bullshit. China’s crushing them.

That’s not a brief for China, precisely, it has its own issues and continues an over-consumption economy based on planned obsolescence. But it does demolish the idea that how we do things in the West is obviously superior and can never be replaced by anything better.

But this still comes back to the original two questions: how do we produce what is good and how do we distribute what we create?

Add to them “how do we live in prosperous societies with high welfare without destroying the environment or drawing down irreplaceable resources?”

And those are the questions we haven’t got a good answer to yet and which we urgently need answers to because right now we aren’t just walking off a cliff, we’re feeding ourselves into a chipper foot first.

China, as much as I admire them, and as much as they are doing more than anyone else for the environment (it isn’t even close) is just running an old playbook: the same one America ran, the same one Japan ran, the same one South Korea ran.

And while it’s good that they’re increasing electrification and finally getting carbon under control, it’s not enough by itself because there’s still far too much needless consumption in order to keep the profit feedback mechanism which runs markets (and the Chinese have very competitive markets, just ones that operate under general direction guidance).

I’m not giving answers to these questions today. If you have some, feel free to put them in comments. I have a few ideas, of course, but I think it’s more important for most people to start asking the right questions, and to agree that they are the right questions, than to leap to answers, because if we don’t agree on problems and goals, we won’t agree on solutions.

So start thinking.

What I write here is for the benefit of everyone, but alas, I live in capitalism and I, and the site, take money to keep running. If you value the writing here and can, please subscribe or donate.

We Live In Epochal Times

By Ian Welsh

On July 28, 2026

16 Comments

History has cycles. When dealing with ideas about how to organize societies there are ideological and sub-ideological cycles. Various nations have been capitalist since the 16th century, but what the means kept changing, usually every 50 to 80 years. Britain started very protectionist. It had periods where imperialism and capitalism were very intertwined. It had laisszez faire periods. All of these were forms of capitalism, but they were quite different from each other. The Roman Empire is an empire from Augustus to the end, but the Rome of Augustus is very different from future Romes, with their serfs (something Augustinian Rome didn’t have), their German legionaires, and so on.

In our times there are people alive who remember two and a half transitions:

The transition from laissez-faire (in America) to New Deal.
The transition of New Deal to Neoliberalism.
The transition of neoliberalism to whatever the new system will be called. (This is not the old system, Trump’s crazed tariffs, export controls to major buyers, the severe cutting of research, etc… all show that.)

In China they remember:

The change from warlordism and Republicanism to Maoism.
The change from Maoism to Dengism.
The recent change from Dengism to Xiism.

Globally we remember multiple transitions as well

The transition from the multi-great power world centered on America/Europe to the Cold War world dominated by the USSR and US. (Note this transition involved two world wars.)
The transition from the cold war world to the unipolar superpower world with the US the world hegemonic power.
The current transition from the American hegeomonic world to whatever will replace it.

In energy technology we have one and a half transitions:

The transition from the coal world to the petrochem world;
The current transition from the petrochem world to the electrical world based on other power sources.

Note that the technological cycle is a LOT slower. (And yes, I’ve left out the digital/telecom, but you could easily make the same sort of schema.

There is also the environmental question, and that’s part of various cycles. We aren’t different from other cultures in this regard: one thesis for the fall of Mesopotamia from the world’s leading region for six to eight thousand years is environmental. They aren’t the only ones.

We have multiple changes income all once:

Sub ideological changes in how capitalism and democracy run in Europe and the US.
A more or less complete change in China from Dengism to Xi-ism.
A change to the world political system, with the rise of China and the weakness of America.
Environmental collapse
Climate Change

All of these at the same times. Not only is “nothing ever happens” bullshit (as it always was) but we live in a period of radical change, and it’s only going to become more obvious over time.

But there are people alive, albeit not many, who remember the pre-WWII world.

Change is constant. It seems slow to humans, but those who live a long life have seen a great, great deal of change. And we didn’t even discuss the way daily life has changed due to the change from the analog world to the digital one. (A change I personally think was probably more bad than good, though I certainly love large parts of it.) And, of course, there’s the revolution in war making technology, strategy and tactics, as big as the change to trench warfare, then the change to blitzkrieg and air war.

Everything changes. And if you have a perspective longer than a couple decades, everything changes pretty fast, actually. Certainly the world I grew up in, that I remember from the 70s and early 80s no longer exists.

In human affairs nothing is constant save change.

Nothing Is Wrong With Transhumanism In Theory

By Ian Welsh

On June 15, 2026

24 Comments

Only in practice.

Transhumanism is one of those topics where I feel like Marx declaring “I am not a Marxist.”

Do I think transhumanism is basically a good idea?

Absofuckinglutely.

Do I like most of the people who call themselves transhumanists?

Fuck no.

I don’t like being human. I’ve spent days on end screaming in agony. I’ve lain in a mixture of my own puke and shit for hours, in so much pain I couldn’t move. I’ve thrown up more than many bulemics.

Then there’s aging.

Then there’s other people (see Israel, dog rape, genocide, etc, etc..)

Now don’t get me wrong: humans can be great. Someone did eventually come to my hospital room (an orderly, they do the real work) and clean off all the vomit and shit and a nurse did once save my life (I wasn’t entirely thrilled at the time, but she gave a damn.)

But the fact is that human life is often ass, aging sucks, illness sucks, being weak and powerless and pushed around by your own government or someone else’s government sucks, and so on. We’re stuck in bodies we didn’t choose, which often spend lots of time hurting us grievously and making us sick.

So if we could extend lifespans a lot while ALSO reducing the effect of aging, I’d be all for it. (We’ve done a bit of this already.) If we can reduce pain and suffering and disease and so on, I’m all for it.

If we can increase abundance and have a society where people don’t have to work but still have more than enough, that’s great!

And if someone wants to change their body so they like it more, I’m all for that. Good for them!

The problem with transhumanism is transhumanists counting virtual people who don’t exist and pretending their making decisions which will make trillions of people in an imaginary future better off while hurting people living today.

Silicon Valley morons who think they’re brilliant because they’re rich and who don’t get that improvements that don’t wind up helping the majority, but are gated behind massive fees are good for them, and no one else are the flag-bearers of modern transhumanism. It’s more likely the way we’re going that transhumanist technologies, as they are developed, will give us an elite that is smarter, healthier, fitter and lives longer while the masses live shit lives, suffer and die in droves.

It’s the problem with doing anything thru non-competitive markets. You want palliatives, not cures. You want a cure for cancer that costs 50K a pop, not to sell it just above unit costs so everyone can be cancer free.

If your first priority is being rich, and your second priority is helping people, your second priority doesn’t functionally exist.

Transhumanism is a great idea. I think human bodies basically suck. I think better bodies that hurt a lot less, age less and so and are modifiable so we can make our own choices rather than accept the result of evolution and the genetic lottery of who our parents are is a good idea. And while we’ve got a pretty good Pope right now, Christians can stick “suffering is good” where the sun don’t shine. They can have it, leave me out.

But too many modern transhumanists are obsessed with theoretical people who don’t exist yet and with getting rich, and not making sure everyone benefits.

If they can’t be trusted to even spread the wealth, how can they be trusted to share permanent genetic and technological advantages they could wealth gate to create a genetic (cybernetic?) aristocracy which is actually superior?

Transhumanism: great idea, despite what the trads say (If God made us so we suffer this much, that isn’t a good thing, it’s proof God is a piece of garbage.)

Modern transhumanists: mostly just people who want to be superior and gate it behind toll booths that make them wealthy and leave most people without the benefits.

(Aside: I’m putting off writing about the new Iran deal till we see the actual text of the agreement. Too many people saying too many different things. It sure does look like a US loss, but if so it’s a good thing even from a nativist perspective for the US to admit it rather than dragging out a situation which hurts them more than Iran.)

Character and Destiny

By Ian Welsh

On June 4, 2026

8 Comments

From 2012 to 2014 this blog’s project was a large number of pieces on ideology, and quite a few have been about character: how it is created by experience, and how specific types of character (like sociopathy) are selected for amongst our leadership classes. I want to reprint some of these, because they’re fundamental and at least half my readership has never read them.

We’ll star with “Matters of Character”.

Let’s parse this out:

1) Character (personality), determines how people act.

2) While part of character is clearly genetic, much of it forms out of our experiences. Different experiences create different types of character. As a simple thought exercise, you would be a very different person if you had been born five hundred years ago in, say, Central Africa, than you are today.

3) As children, our primary experience is of school. We are a very schooled society, with the upper classes starting school at age 5 or so, and continuing into their mid twenties. Twenty years of schooling is not uncommon. Fifteen to sixteen is completely normal.

4) This schooling takes place when we are forming much of our character, when we are most susceptible to having our character changed.

5) In addition to this, we are influenced by media of various kinds (including books), our parents, and our peer group.

6) Different time periods form different characters, as do different nations, because people born in those times and places have different experiences. The more synchronized events are, as Newberry has noted, the stronger this is. In a mass media society, with relatively fast technological and social change, it makes sense to speak of generations. The character of people born 20 or 30 years apart in modern societies will be different, and within cohorts similar experiences will tend to create somewhat similar patterns of character.

7) Society is nothing except people and their creations and interactions over time. Walk around an old neighbourhood one day, and look at the buildings, the road, the trees and think about all the people who made everything you see, and all the people behind those people. Read the laws, and know that people made those, and enforce those.

8 ) Because society is just people, past and present, the nature of society is formed by our character.

9) If we want a different society, we must deal with matters of character.

10) Because we should be leery of engaging in eugenics, for reasons which should be obvious, changing society involves changing character through changing our lived experiences.

11) Everyone’s character matters, but some people’s character matters more than others. The more power someone has, whether that power comes from political position, charisma, force, or money, the more their character matters.

12) Leaders inform the character of people. People tend to act up, or down, to their leadership.

13) Money is permission. The more money you have, the more you get to decide what other people do. This can be directly through hiring them, or indirectly by buying the products of other people’s time. As the market society has spread to more and more of our lives, what we do is what gets paid for.

14) Who we give money to, and be clear that what banks, government and financial institutions do is decide who gets money, and what they get to spend it on, determines much of the lived experience of adults, and indeed of children outside school, and with the rise of for-profit schooling, inside school.

15) Money positions are of three main types. Elected (taxes); officers (CEOs and so on who control a lot of money that isn’t theirs); actually rich (the money is their own).

16) In all three cases who gets that money is a social choice. Billionaires are a social choice, created by government policy including tax policy, and the entire structure of how profits are booked. Multi-millionaire CEOs are a social choice, created by tax and other laws as well as social norms. And politicians are a social choice, especially in a democracy, but even in autocracies, though in such societies few people’s active and passive consent is needed.

17) If we select for positions of power, whether monetary, political, or charismatic, people whose character is such that they do not insist on good outcomes for the majority of people, then those outcomes will occur only by chance, if the happenstance of technology and environment aligns in what amounts to random fashion. Having not been planned, having not been understood, any such prosperity and freedom will not last.

18) If society is just us, and is a matter of our character combined with environment and technology, then we must consciously choose what we want our character to be. If we look at how we raise children and see that it is not creating the sort of people required for a happy, free, healthy, and prosperous society, then we need to change how we rear children. This is a social decision, not an individual one: we can choose a different type of learning (not necessarily schooling), we can choose a different type of media, we can choose to encourage different types of parenting (parenting styles have changed massively over the last 100 years, more than once).

19) We can also change how we select our leaders, both political and economic, to whom we give money, and for what purpose. We already do: Who makes money is a social choice, embedded in our tax code, laws (like “IP”), and monetary system. We can make other choices and create a system where people make money because they do good, not because they do evil (see “bankers”).

20) We can change our adult experience of the world, and when we change how goods and services are distributed (note that I did not use the word “money”), we will change our experience of the world, and in so doing we will change our character.

21) We can do so even if our current character is flawed. The politicians who ended Jim Crow were themselves mostly racists. They were racists who knew that racism was wrong. It is possible to look at one’s own character and know that it is simply a product of experience: to say “I am racist and sexist but I still know that is wrong.” It is possible to be involved in corruption (Kennedy Sr., the first SEC chairman) and decide to help clean it up, to end it. It is possible to have all the accoutrements of privilege (FDR) and turn around and change society mostly for the better.

We are all products of our time and place. We are all products of our parents and our experiences; millions of small events which shaped our character, for good, for ill, for kicks.

All of us (except maybe a few enlightened sages).

The full realization of how shaped we are is one of the watersheds of any voyage worth having. If you cannot look at yourself, and see how shaped you were, then you are trapped by those experiences, an even more limited and finite being than you need to be.

Once, however, you see the shaping, feel it, know it, and acknowledge it, then you are not free, but you have the potential to be more free, to change what you are and who you are, both individually, and as a group.

Character matters. It is destiny. Change your character, change your destiny. Change the character of nations; change their destiny.

Change the character of humanity; change our destiny.

The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition

By Ian Welsh

On January 29, 2026

8 Comments

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live. The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect:

Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street.

Imagine that.

This is a reprint from 2015, but I think it makes an important point worth repeating, especially for all the new readers since then.

The right thing to do is almost always cheaper and gives better results, at least if the welfare of people is your concern.

If people are poor, give them money. If people don’t have a house, get them a house. If people are sick, get them health care.

The fact is, though, that you have to want to do the right thing. People tend to get down on the Church of Latter Day Saints, but for all their issues, I’ve always had a soft spot for them because I’ve heard many stories like this:

The church donated all of this,” Bate says. “Before we opened up, volunteers from the local Mormon ward came over and assembled all the furniture. It was overwhelming. For the first several years we were open, the LDS church made weekly food deliveries—everything from meat to butter and cheese. It wasn’t just dried beans—it was good stuff.” (The Utah Food Bank now makes weekly deliveries.)

I ask him if this is why the programs work so well in Utah—because of church donations.

“If the LDS church was not into it, the money would be missed, for sure,” he says, “but it’s church leadership that’s immensely important. If the word gets out that the church is behind something, it removes a lot of barriers.”…

….

“Why do you think they do it?” I ask(my emphasis)

“Oh,” he says, “I think they believe all that stuff in the New Testament about helping the poor. That’s kind of crazy for a religion, I know, but I think they take it quite seriously.”

A major driver of the social welfare movement in the United States was the social gospel. The ending of sweatshops, the huge work programs of the 30s, the provision of Medicare and Social Security was driven in large part by Christian crusaders who believed that what they did to the poor, they did to Jesus.

You have to want to do the right thing.

This is just as true when dealing with matters like inequality. FDR and the politicians of the 50s ran marginal tax rates for high earners at 90% or so because they, and the American people, genuinely believed that no one should have that much money. They believed that it was earned by the efforts of other people: a rich person is someone who gets rich on other people’s work, with very rare exceptions, and even they get rich because of the society they are in. (For a complete explanation of that, something most people refuse to understand, read “It’s Not Your Money.”)

Ethics and mores; belief, is why people do things. It doesn’t exactly come before material circumstances (the two influence each other, with material circumstances, including technology, determining a range of possibilities), but within what is possible, belief in what we should do determines what we actually do.

In the world today we have the resources not just to feed everyone, but to give them a decent life, with education, entertainment, and housing that is warm in the winter and at least not unbearable in the summer. We can cloth everyone well. We have had the ability to do this for at least a hundred years or so, in theory, we’ve had it in practice since the recovery from World War II.

To do so, however, we must believe that we should, and we must be willing to act on that belief. There will be sacrifices (a lot fewer billionaires, a lot less McMansions), but in the end even most of those who complain would be objectively better off, because inequality is robustly associated with worse health and less happiness, even for those who are the richest. The top .01%, if they were still the top .01% but had far less money and power, would be happier and healthier in such a world.

As such, the battleground of belief; of ideology, is as important as that of technology. It is belief, mediated by power and turned into behaviour, which determines what actually happens in this world.

The Black Book Of Capitalism: Sanctions Version

By Ian Welsh

On January 14, 2026

30 Comments

There’s a black book of Communism, which essentially claims that every death caused by a Communist government is the fault of communism.

A while back some people decided to put up an article on the death toll of Capitalism in Wikipedia, very carefully sourced. It was deleted.

Anyway, there is zero question that Capitalism has killed more people than Communism, no matter what number you use for Communism. It’s absurd to pretend all deaths caused by the Great Depression weren’t capitalist deaths and without the Great Depression (which, by the way, did not effect the USSR) there is no World War II, so you can add in all those deaths. Not to mention all the Imperialist wars and native genocides, which were definitely part of capitalism.

But even recently capitalism is a death machine:

I’d say that almost all deaths by hunger in the world are caused by capitalism, as are those from lack of shelter. After all, with very few exceptions the world is run on capitalist principles. Since there is more food produced than needed to feed everyone, and since capitalist markets the primary distribution method for food this is entirely reasonable.

Capitalism as an ideology is, in any case doomed. Climate denialism idiocy aside, as climate change and environmental collapse accelerates it and “democracy” will be blamed, as they should be, since almost all the damage occurred under their watch and what’s more they knew and not only did nothing but accelerated the process. We knew in the 70s, I remember the debates and the response wasn’t to do a big renewables push or try and seriously systematically reduce hydrocarbon use, it was to try and figure out how to pump more oil.

Obama famously bragged that he was responsible for the fracking boom and Trump is pro-coal, pro-oil and anti-renewables, while gutting EPA rules on environmental contamination.

Not to speak of over-fishing, destroying our soil, the collapse of insect populations and so on.

A system of production and distribution which runs on planned obsolesence cannot be good for the environment and is obviously stupid. “Let’s make things break quickly so we can make more” is insanity. It’s what capitalist markets require and if you don’t understand how moronic it is I don’t even know how to explain it.

(Aside: Related to the America’s fall I note that sanctions are the main reason the US is going to lose dollar hegemony so soon, it could have been kept for a few decades yet if it hadn’t been abused.)

Anyway, when it comes to mass murder the problem that Communists had is a combination of a weird sort of honest “just kill them” and getting blamed for things like famines that somehow capitalism isn’t responsible for.

No system in world history, no ideology will be near to capitalism’s final death tool. Not by at least an order of magnitude, and likely two orders of magnitude.

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Can You Just Out-Breed Your Domestic Enemies?

By Ian Welsh

On December 29, 2025

25 Comments

There’s a constant trope on the right that the best way to win is to have more kids because eventually you’ll outnumber your enemies?

Seems like it makes sense. It is part of why Christianity won in the Roman Empire: they forbade anal and oral sex and contraceptives (yes, they had clumsy contraceptives back then) and emphasized that sex was for having kids and out-bred the pagans.

But it wouldn’t have worked if the children had preferred the pagan life. Christianity at the time offered a ton of social support, including very practical support like food and housing. Most Romans were poor, and if you were poor you needed the community that Christianity (and some other mystery religions) offered. Christianity offered a better life and a better after-life, for that matter.

Christians today think “we’ll just out-breed them” but it only works if when your kids grow up they don’t go to the big city and discover that there’s a more enjoyable and dignified way to live. Women may realize they don’t want to have multiple children and would like to have sex without necessarily getting pregnant. Ideas of social justice and equality may appeal to both sides, and arguments for atheism and agnosticism start looking mighty convincing when you see how many different religions there are all claiming that they’re the true religion.

The same is true for political ideology. If you’re poor and have no hope for the future maybe socialism looks a lot better than capitalism or the day’s version of MAGA. Maybe communism or anarchism. Or even just standard liberalism with individual rights.

This is what has been happening for well over a century to religion in advanced countries. Fewer and fewer believers, even when the religious breed like rabbits, because secular society or ideologies offer more hope and self-respect. Same with the decline in belief in capitalism. Capitalism says that people earn what they deserve. If you’re not making it are you going to believe you suck and deserve a shitty life or are you going to find an ideology which says “actually, the game is rigged, you aren’t a loser and we can make the world better for people like us.”

I know which one I’d choose.

Breeding is fine, but it only matters if you can hold onto the kids you spawn. And you can only do that if you are seen to offer a better life. This is at the heart of the right wing hatred of universities: kids go to university and realize that a better life is possible if they don’t buy into right wing arguments. They also meet brown people and discover, “hey, they’re just people.”

For a long time, when each generation was better off than the one before it, liberalism basically took the majority of non-liberals and turned them into liberal capitalists. Why wouldn’t it? It was clear that if they bought in they’d have a better life than if they didn’t.

Now liberalism and capitalism are failing. The right is trying to offer an alternative, and a lot of people have gone for it, but it’s also failing to deliver. Watching Trump basically destroy farming communities is instructive. And when it fails and is seen to fail, well, it’s going to be hard to hold on to those kids.

Breed all you want. It’s irrelevant if what you offer isn’t better that the lives possible to people by changing their ideology and loyalty. True victory isn’t having the most descendants, it’s having people act as you would have them act.

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We Don’t Have To Live In Hell

By Ian Welsh

On December 18, 2025

29 Comments

A friend of mine once used the metaphor of “The Lords of Hell” to describe most of the world. There are a few people with lots of money and power, a few billion people who live in constant fear of not having enough, and a billion or so who don’t have enough. There is more than sufficient food in the world to feed everyone, but people go hungry. The entire western world has more empty homes than it does homeless people, yet there are increasing numbers of homeless. It costs less to give everyone health care than it does to “optimize returns” yet sick people go without medicine and help, and the disabled at left to rot with the least possible care in many countries. (Britain has literally stopped paying for wheelchairs for many disabled.)

Over the years my writing has had many themes, but they all boil down to one Ur-Theme.

We don’t have to live in hell. It’s a choice.

We have other choices. There are ways to make the economy work for everyone, and ways that we, the human species, can live well without driving mass numbers of other species to extinction. Indeed, by destroying the environment and extincting other species, we damage the very ecosystem which, long term, makes our own prosperity and well-being possible.

The worst lie in the world is always some version of “there is no other option. This is as good as it can be.”

It has many variants. “Capitalism is the only thing that can work.” “Some people must be homeless and poor for the economy to work.” “We need that oil no matter how many species die.” “People will only work if they’re driven by fear.” “Rich people are job creators”. “Human nature means we’ll always be evil and mean.” “Everything has to be owned by someone because commons don’t work.” (They have worked for hundreds of years at a time.)

Many, many more.

They are all lies. As humans we have an angelic nature as well as a demonic one. One of the most useful books to read in this regard is “A Heaven Made In Hell.” The author studied how people act after great catastrophes. Strangely enough behaviour like looting occurs far less than people helping each other, coming together and fixing things. In fact, people who go through this often find it was heavenly: for once almost everyone is taking care of everyone. Trust and community flourish.

There is great joy in helping. Great joy in care. Great joy in not being scared all the time. The best economies are always full of optimism and hope and have a rising tide that lifts all boats. (Rising tides don’t lift all boats unless we make sure that no boats have holes in their hulls.)

China has, recently, proved this yet again, despite some significant flaws. (FDR proved it before, and he was not the first.) We can take care of each other. We can live without fear that one bad bounce means homelessness, misery and death.

It’s a choice. We have made other choices far too often, but we can choose to be happy, prosperous and realistically optimistic because we take care of each other.

And while my writing often seems negative, this is the hope that underpins my criticisms. There is no point in criticizing something if some law of nature means that it must be so. But there is, despite claims otherwise, no law of nature which says we have to be bastards to each other or to the species we share this world with.

And in that is a genuine hope.

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

Category: Ideology Page 1 of 4

The Fundamental Political Question Of Production & Distribution

We Live In Epochal Times

Nothing Is Wrong With Transhumanism In Theory

Character and Destiny

The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition

The Black Book Of Capitalism: Sanctions Version

Can You Just Out-Breed Your Domestic Enemies?

We Don’t Have To Live In Hell