Ian Welsh

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

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Power, Pleasure, and Evil

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On December 6, 2021

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I am human, and nothing human is alien to my consideration

– Publius Terentius Afer

Perhaps the most fundamental human experience is that of weakness. We are born completely helpless and our childhoods leave us at the mercy of other humans who are stronger and outnumber us. Everything we need, we must get from them, and there is little to nothing we can do to stop them if they choose to hurt us.

The physicist and physical therapist Feldenkrais wrote of being a child a seeing two men grab, kill, and butcher a small pig; almost exactly the same size as him. He realized he was defenseless, and spent decades trying to overcome that experience. He wrote a self-defense manual, figured out from first principles, and later he became the first western Judo black belt, before WWII, and when it was still a powerful combat art.

Even as adults, we know that there are many who are stronger than us, and society decides what we can and can’t do. This is more obvious to women, but even the strongest man knows he isn’t invincible. Most of us have to work for others, doing what they say, often on a minute-to-minute basis, and even those who escape close supervision still must please others for their daily bread. Few, indeed, are the genuine hermits.

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And then there is the body, which so often betrays us with injury, illness, and pain. There is the mind, over which we have so little control: we have thoughts and emotions we’d rather not experience all the time, and often feel like our own minds and bodies are tyrants.

So, humans are weak, and we feel weak. We often deny this to ourselves, because feeling weak is awful, frightening. A full admission of how much is beyond our control means admitting we can die or be in horrible pain at any moment, and the most we can do is influence the odds of it happening. We can never rule something awful happening out entirely.

The feeling of power is thus one of the strongest feelings available to humans. I remember reading a review of a book by a torturer in the Lebanese civil war. He wrote that torturing people was the most intense experience he ever had; so intense, in fact, that it ruined everything else for him. Food was tasteless, even sex was meaningless. After the rush of power from torture, the ultimate violation of social norms and one of the ultimate expressions of control over another person, nothing else ever came close.

This may horrify you. Perhaps you think you would be different (though it is best to never find out, by never torturing), but I think that most people would find the same.

Now, torture is an obvious extreme, but it’s done all the time. It’s routine in prisons in most countries, police even in “civilized” countries regularly inflict beatings severe enough to qualify, and when the US officially tortured in the 2000s there was no punishment for it beyond rapping on the knuckles of a few low-level grunts. The most severe penalty anyone received was given to the CIA whistleblower who revealed the details of the CIA torture — not the people who perpetrated it or ordered it.

Power comes in gradations. There’s the simple bully, which we’ve all experienced, I think, as children. “Do what I say, or I’ll hurt you.” Most authority is ultimately based on this, including routine authority of parents, teachers, and bosses. If you think otherwise, do the thought experiments of what happens if you just refuse to do what people with power want you to.

When a bully pushes you around, they feel powerful. It’s a good feeling, it’s pleasant. If you say otherwise, you’re lying to yourself. You must understand how the world actually is, even if you personally don’t enjoy forcing other people to your will.

But schoolyard bullies or screaming bosses — or even muggers and serial killers — are the Deltas of the world of power. They’re nothing, insects.

Real power is what top-level politicians, generals, executives, and ritual leaders have. There was an Indian guru who told some of his male followers to castrate themselves. They did.

Then there’s political power. Bill Clinton cut welfare, passed a terrible prison bill, and did many other horrible things, and he was beloved by so many of those he hurt. Obama, the first Black president, was terrible for African Americans, but they love him anyway. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s selfishness on staying on the Supreme Court when she was old and sick with cancer helped pave the way for the loss of abortion rights, but many women who support abortion rights consider her a hero.

George W. Bush sent the children of poor whites off to Iraq and Afghanistan to die, get PTSD, or get maimed, and the parents of those he sent and many of those he sent love him. Politicians, for generations, have pursued policies which impoverished 90 percent or so of Americans, and each of them was loved by millions.

Power is hurting someone, and having them love you anyway. Power is “believe me, not your lying eyes.” The sheer rush of being Clinton, Obama, or Bush and crushing your supporters — hurting them terribly, and having them worship you; this is pleasure.

Don’t think that they don’t get off on it. Don’t think they don’t enjoy it. Bush had brain damage by the time he was President (listen to him talk in ’92, then in ’02), but all three men were smart, and Clinton and Obama were borderline geniuses. They knew what they were doing; they knew who they were hurting.

And those people loved them for it.

That’s power. And for some people, that’s pleasure. They do it because they enjoy doing it.

Then there’s the executives. The ones who raise insulin prices so high that thousands die. They know. They know they’re killing you. They like it. They have that power, and even as you’re dying, begging for insulin money (or cancer money, or whatever) online, they’re laughing, because they know you’re powerless and will do nothing to hurt them, even while they kill  you.

Power. Pleasure. The groveling of the weak before the strong.

If someone does something and doesn’t actually need to do it to survive, they do it because they want to. When a very rich person decides to kill thousands to millions of people to get more money, they’re doing it because they like it. When Jeff Bezos treats Amazon workers like animals, having ambulances parked outside to take the fallen away, he does it because he wants to.

We humans are weak. The feeling of power is one of the ultimate experiences, and power over other humans, animals, and the world (destroying the world for money, knowingly) is pleasurable for a lot of people. It isn’t just that they don’t care, it’s that they like it.

Now, despite everything, power isn’t innately evil. It can be used for good, and there are cases and times when it has been. It’s been hard to do so for most of human history since the advent of agriculture, because we set up systems that incentivized cruelty, in which more cruelty led to more power. Capitalism is almost explicitly such a system, and certainly agrarian civilizations were almost uniformly evil, with few exceptions.

But power can be used for good, and you can get as much pleasure from using your power to help others as you can from using it to hurt people. I suspect there is even more pleasure, honestly. I think Obama, who had the opportunity to be the next FDR (who did some evil, but much more good), was a fool to choose the pleasures of elite regard and cruelty over what would have been a vast tide of love and loyalty from the majority of Ameircans.

We’ll talk about that in a followup piece.

But for now,  you’re ruled by evil people who hurt you because they like how it feels.

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The Perceived Self-Interest Of The Rich And Powerful

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On October 28, 2021

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Yesterday I had a brief article, which noted a general rule, “only things the rich and powerful believe will benefit them will be done” and applied it to shortages, suggesting that if the rich and powerful are benefiting from them, no serious action will be taken to end the crisis in countries where that is true.

I wanted to note that this is a general rule. It applied to Covid (70% increase in the wealth of billionaires) and it applies to climate change: most powerful people are old, they’re going to die before climate change gets bad, or that’s their bet, and for those who aren’t, they seem to assume their money will protect them. In Britain there’s a debate over forcing private water companies to stop spewing sewage, but so far, the government is resisting making them do so: after all, because dividends and stock option are more important.

Without a change in who runs government, who’s rich, and who runs the big firms, this sort of calculus, “does it affect we few powerful and rich?” will continue and I’d suggest using it as a heuristic for if something will be done. Sometimes it’ll be wrong, but the vast majority of the time it will work out.

It’s not impossible for this rule to get you something you might like. For example, there’s a push in some corporate circles towards a guaranteed income, simply because they need customers and are aware that too many people are becoming poor. Those businesses which want to sell mass quantities of goods without extreme markups thus need the working and middle class not to be completely impoverished.

But, overall, the rich and powerful are different, in the sense that they don’t see their interests as the same as those of ordinary people, and they have the ability to act on those perceived interests.

Take it into account. Build it into your worldview.

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A New Ideology

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On October 9, 2021

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There is no reality which is not mediated by perception. This is not to say that there is no reality; the famous “I refute you thus,” kicking a rock, applies. It does not mean there are no natural laws, no physics, chemistry, or even truth—or Truth. It means that we decide what reality means through a thick lens of belief. This lens picks out what is important, obscures the unimportant, and distorts everything, and most people are hardly even aware that it exists.

Keynes once wrote that most politicians are slaves of some defunct economist, generally whose name they don’t even know. That we should regulate the world through markets is an idea which would have been absurd to virtually everyone three hundred years ago, even as the divine right of Kings is absurd to us today. That corporations should shield their owners from liability is an idea which was bitterly opposed by most capitalists two hundred years ago. That greed leads to better outcomes was laughable to virtually everyone, including Adam Smith, who thought it worked only in very specific circumstances and lamented that tradespeople were constantly in conspiracy against the public.

That goods, including food, should be primarily divided based on market success is another idea that most of the world, for most of history, has never held.

What is oddest about our modern ideology is the same thing that is odd about virtually all ideologies: It contradicts itself. We do not have either free or competitive markets, and not one in a hundred free market ideologues could define a competitive market, nor would they want one if they could, as an actual competitive market reduces profits to nearly nothing. Free markets cannot exist without government coercion, yet we have come to assume that it is government which makes markets unfree, which is a half truth at best. It’s markets that make governments unfree when they buy government–and the first thing any good capitalist does upon winning a market is try to eliminate the free market, since an actual free market threatens a monopolist or oligopolist.

An ideology tells us what is thinkable and what is unthinkable, what is moral or immoral, ethical or unethical. Right or wrong. It either says that 90 percent taxation is right and good when imposed upon great wealth, or an unthinkable burden on “value” creators. It further defines value, for instance, privileging financial innovation which actually destroys genuine good production. It says that food that makes us sick is acceptable and that banning such food is unethical. It says that it is right and proper that men and women meet their needs by working for other people, without any ability to meet their own needs if the market deems them surplus beyond private or public charity. It says that land that lies fallow is not available for anyone to grow food, that pumping poison into water and food and air is acceptable, that rationing health care by who has the most money is the best way to organize health care. Or, it could say that healthcare is too important to allow people to buy their way to the front of the line.

People think that their individual decisions matter, but so much of what happens is dictated by social contexts. A man goes to war, or not, and that has little to do with him personally. A college student has a huge debt and that is because she is a Millennial, not a Baby Boomer. A generation has fantastic success, but that is because they are the GI Generation in America. These circumstances are not the results of individual decisions, even if it feels like it. Born 30 years earlier, the exact same people would have stagnated on farms. A generation raised in affluence undoes all the protections put on the economy by those who experienced the Great Depression, because they think they know better, really, and they never experienced the Great Depression or the Roaring ’20s.

One of the most important books of the past 200 years was a pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. You should read it. Virtually every demand in the Communist Manifesto has been met by Western Democracies. Conservatives like Otto Van Bismark looked at it and said, “Oh, you want pensions? We can give you that if it means you don’t rebel and cut our heads off.”

A credible opposing ideology, a credible existential threat to the reigning ideology, creates a reaction. That reaction can be, well, reactionary, but it tends to blend towards that ideology. When the main ideological and material competition to Western Capitalist Democracy is a nasty form of Islam and Chinese Totalitarian State-run crony capitalism, that leads nowhere good, not least because they aren’t credible threats (no, Islamism is not going to conquer Europe, Japan, North America, or South America, sorry).

But an ideology organizes things. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Akkadians, the ancient Egyptians, if they wanted to do something, set up a new religion, with a new God. They were quite brazen about creating Gods, really. They ran the banks out of the churches, and indeed, ran some truly terrible usury, with interest rates as high as thirty to forty percent (which is why debt holidays were instituted, it didn’t take long before people owed more grain or silver than existed in the entire universe, with rates like that).

When we want to do something, we fiddle with market design, with little incentives here or there. We make bureaucratic rules, create new laws, set up secret courts and bureaucracies to run them, make small adjustments here or there to make sure things work out as we want. A little tax here or there, a subsidy here or there, a patent or IP law change, a law requiring millions of dollars before one can set up a bank, laws allowing corporations to monetize public research by universities, and all the right people make money and the wrong people don’t, and all is good in the world.

The fundamental idea of our current regime is one that most people have forgotten, because it is associated with Marx, and one must not even talk about the things Marx got right, because the USSR went bad. The fundamental idea to which I refer is that we are wage laborers. We work for other people, we don’t control the means of production. Absent a job, we live in poverty. Sure, there are some exceptions, but they are exceptions. We are impelled, as it were, by Marx’s whip of hunger. It took a lot of work to set up this system, as Polyani notes in his book The Great Transformation, but now that it has happened, it is invisible to us.

A new ideology that leads to prosperity should insist on changing this relation to the means of production. This doesn’t mean a Marxist proletarian “communist” paradise, but it does mean giving ordinary people back real economic power, which means the real ability to say “no” to wage labor, and freedom from needing to take the next job that comes along regardless of what it is. Not only will this lead to a different, much more fair division of goods created by society, it will lead to much better treatment of wage labor workers. The experience of the dotcom boom should be instructive in this regard: When you can walk out because you don’t need this job and it isn’t clear you can be replaced, bosses suddenly start treating you very, very well indeed.

I’ll talk about what that ideology looks like and what that society looks like, at a later date, certainly in my non-fiction book. It will be, not a consumer society, but a producer one, in which most people feel that they can make things, feel that they can provide for much of their own needs. Though many people sneer at the idea that technology matters, in actual fact, technological change makes possible new modes of production, along with new social arrangements. The assembly line and factory imply a type of social arrangement, the heavy plow implies a type of social arrangement, hunter-gatherer implies yet another. Within each of these technological tool kits, however, there are choices: Some hunter-gather bands are the sweetest, most kind, peaceful people you could ever want to meet. Others are high practitioners of torture and head-hunting. Central planning of the Soviet variety and industrial democracy of early to mid-twentieth century America are both within the possibilities of industrialization. Radios were originally used much like the early internet till the government used the excuse of the Titanic sinking to seize the airwaves from the early pioneers and sell them to large companies.

There are, ultimately, two dominant strategies: cooperate or compete. If you want widespread prosperity, the dominant strategy in your ideology must be cooperation, though competition has its place. And ultimately the difference between the right and the left is this: The right thinks you get more out of people by treating them badly, the left thinks you get more out of people by treating them well.

An ideology that believes in treating people well is a lot better to live under. And as a bonus, happy people are a lot more fun to be around. And societies with that ideology, all other things being equal, will tend to out-compete those who believe that fear, misery, and the whip are the best way to motivate people.

Finally, an ideology that succeeds is always universalist. It asserts, for example, that all people have certain rights and does not admit exceptions. This may bother the relativists, but a powerful ideology admits no doubt on core ethical concerns: Democracy is how everyone should rule themselves, no exceptions, or, everyone has a right to a trial and to see the evidence against them, or, anyone who doesn’t worship the True God is going to hell.

A powerful ideology is a scary thing. If your ideology isn’t strong enough, doesn’t create fervent enough belief that people are willing to die for it, then it won’t change the world. But if it does create that level of fervent belief, then it will be misused. The question is simple: Will this do more harm than good?

An ideology which leads to us killing a billion or more people with climate change, allow me to posit, is a bad ideology. At the end of its run, neoliberalism will kill more people than Marxist-Leninism did, and our grandchildren will consider it monstrous. Most of them will be no more able to understand how or why we submitted to it (or even believed in it) than we can understand how Hitler or Stalin or Pol Pot or Mao came to power. Hyperbole? Not in the least, because the body count is going to be phenomenal.

When faced, then, with a monstrous ideology, our duty is to come up with a better one, an opposing one. Because ideology determines what we do. It is both the lens through which we see the world, and the motor that pushes us forward.

(Originally Published October 22, 2013. Back to the top in 2017 as most current readers won’t have seen it, and it’s foundational. Back up again, October 9, 2021, for the same reason.)

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The Advantage of Permission & The Fall Of Oligarchies

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On September 28, 2021

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One of the main advantages of capitalism is “permission.” It gives more people permission to do things than oligarchical or state capitalism. This was, actually, a lot of what Adam Smith was complaining about in “The Wealth of Nations”: that state monopolies and controls were limiting who could effectively participate in the economy: you might have a great idea, but you couldn’t do anything with it.

Capitalism, as a Western system, also has other features, of course, including wide-scale theft of capital from the majority of the population, of which the enclosure of the commons was one part (the commons were property rights). Society becomes divided into those who have capital, and those who don’t, who are compelled by Marx’s “whip of hunger” to work for wages. (Thus wage-slavery, a term coined in the 19th century when this process was happening in America.)

Still, the explosion of businesses of all sizes is much of what drove the success of capitalism: the ability to DO things, and not be stuck in old forms.

This is also at the heart of much of the success of China. What Westerners don’t realize is that, despite all the cries of totalitarianism, the Chinese government is one of the most decentralized in the world: over 70% of spending decisions are made below the national level: this makes it the most decentralized national government in the developed world.

China’s central leaders make decisions and laws, to be sure, but much of how that is implemented in any locale is up to the local party, and definitely not micro-managed.

If China had tried to micro-manage everything, they would never have succeeded in becoming the World’s largest economy, or lifted so many people out of poverty. Instead they would have succumbed to the same diseases that did in the USSR. (Which had its own successes, but stalled out for a variety of reasons.)

Some years ago, in an old book I can’t find, I read an introduction where the author, who had lived thru WWII, noted that the idea that fascism was the superior form of government had been proved to be absolute nonsense: when the Allies turned their economy around and pointed it at war production and mobilization it produced miracles precisely because decision making wasn’t bottle-necked at the top. A dictator and his few trusted cronies can be decisive, but their unwillingness to extend trust down the chain cripples them.

This requires social consensus and trust, however. America and Britain and Canada and Australia had to be behind the war at a population level: but they were, and while guidance was needed and often correction, it is precisely that many people could make decisions which made the war effort possible and helped crush the Nazis.

The problem we have now in the West is dual-barreled; we both have improper direction from the top and bottlenecking. New enterprises can start, and do, but if they are successful they can’t run: they are bought up or sold out. This is a result of the structure of financing these days: founders generally don’t control the majority of their company’s voting stock, and are forced to sell or go public by investors (most often, sell.)

Money itself is bottle-necked: there’s tons of it pooling at the top, but there are radically fewer banks than ever before, and access to money has to go thru the already rich. The old middle and even upper (not rich, but upper classes) are relatively poorer: the famous “check from Dad” investment is available to fewer and fewer.

Regulatory hurdles are massive. Everyone knows, for example, how to make insulin, and you’d think someone would get into the business and undercut producers. Insulin costs about $4 to make, and sells for over $300. In economics this looks like the sort of situation that would automatically lead to competition.

It doesn’t. For one, getting permission to produce is hard and expensive. For the second, if you did manage to, it would be costly to setup the initial factory and supply chain, and that means the current producers would simply step in and undercut the new entrant till they went out of business (people would buy the cheapest), then push prices back up once they had driven the challenger out of business.

The second bit is also a regulatory issue. A properly functioning government wouldn’t allow undercutting: but then a properly functioning government would not allow the sort of predatory pricing and abuse of oligopoly power.

There are only three insulin producers in the US: they are obviously in collusion (which older anti-trust law would have said is clear given how their prices are all so high and uniform, and thus it did not require proof of meetings and so on to set prices.)

And this is the next problem: if there were a hundred pharma producers in the US, one of them would break ranks. But when there are so few, they don’t: collusion is easy. You don’t even have to get together,  you just have to follow the price increases and be willing to commit mass murder. Since it is a requirement of membership in modern capitalist elites in the West to be so-willing, of course no one in charge of Pharma in the US isn’t willing to mass murder to get richer, as Covid has also proved.

This inability to really do new things or even old things (insulin ain’t new) unless they benefit and are controlled by incumbents is rife throughout Western societies: it is by design. Even international trade law is designed to ensure this: tariffs and subsidies are how companies that don’t already lead an industry used to develop, but we’ve made that basically illegal, leaving only “pay your workers dirt cheap wages and we’ll let you in, if you cut us in on those delicious exploitation profits.”

This is what China did, at first: they cut Western and American elites in on the profits. But they also were very aggressive about obtaining the manufacturing knowledge (called “intellectual property” in the West”) for themselves. The price of the profits was that you had to give up your secrets. This was the deal, I was told this decades ago by people familiar with business in China and offshoring, but there’s a lot of pretense now that Western elites didn’t know it. They sold their countries good manufacturing jobs and middle classes down the river for Chinese gold.

I don’t blame the Chinese for this: I’d have done the same in their shoes, because industrializing by the “rules” hasn’t ever worked unless one was willing to be subordinate (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc…)

The Chinese sized up Western, and especially American weaknesses shrewdly and took advantage of them. American elites did get most of the profits they had been promised, they just didn’t get to own the Chinese economy, which is what they really wanted.

China is, thus, the great exception: the one who made it out. Almost everywhere else, however, what has happened is that a few companies in each industry have come to predominate. Their production facilities are scattered, but at the same time bottlenecked, with parts production in various locations final assembly in others, so that if any part of the chain is taken out the entire chain can experience shortages.

They are protected by vast “barriers to entry”. They can undercut at will, and regulators won’t stop them. The structure of starting new businesses means upstarts have to sell out, and often to their competitors, as one can see by watching internet giants gobbling up strong competitors like YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp and so on. Law is against them, up to and including international law.

And so a few companies, controlled by a very small elite compared to the population, control most of the developed world economy. Where there might have been dozens or hundreds of viable large firms, now most sectors are controlled by a few conglomerates. These conglomerates then own national politicians, and those politicians write the laws to suit them. (A perusal of major extension of copyright law in the USA, with the original expiration dates on copyright on Mickey Mouse will be educational.)

Oligarchy is always stupid and unproductive. The great oligarchs are made out to be heroes, but almost all of them exist by making more activities impossible than they make possible: they do their best to allow nothing to succeed unless they will profit from it, as app stores, with their 30% rates, show at the most retail level.

All things human end. All oligarchical ages end, just as do all democratic ages, aristocratic ages and so on. The question is when and how? The ideal is to use what remains of the machines of effective democracy and government to end this oligarchical age. China has recently cracked down on billionaires and tech exploitation of workers (for example, they made abuse of app delivery workers illegal). They did so because the CCP understands its interests: it doesn’t want opposing power centers, and because the CCP wants the Chinese economy to work for everyone because they don’t want serious dissent.

The need for survival concentrates the CCP’s minds. Whatever one thinks of them, they can, as Matt Stoller points out, still govern.

Our elites, on the other hand, are pigs at the trough. There is nothing they will not do to become richer, and they have no eye for the longer run, only for power and money and now.

This has worked well for them for so long they do not believe it will ever end.

It will. It will either end because the populace ends it (led by a chunk of fallen elite or elite who decides to betray the other elites) or because the necessary conditions for its success crumble. This can be an end to geopolitical supremacy (which Western elites are scared of, which is why the onrushing Cold War with China) or collapse of the environmental conditions and resources necessary to continue this mode of production, which is something our elites are not scared of (no, they aren’t scared of climate change.)

Unfortunately, at this time, it seems most likely that this configuration will end because of environmental and societal collapse.

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Rationality Is Not A Way Out Of Group Action Problems like Climate Change and Covid

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On July 26, 2021

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One: “The system is interdependent and what I do is damaging it, but it doesn’t matter because I will die before it breaks in a way that hurts me.” This is rational. Rational thinking will not get you out of issues like climate change. Rational thought is a means, not an end.

Two: The system is interdependent and what I do is damaging it, but by doing so I am becoming more powerful, rich, or otherwise benefiting. If I was not damaging it I would not benefit as much, and might even suffer.

A lot of people worship rationality in our society. We think that rational is a synonym for “good” and that if we are rational, we will do the right thing.

This is incorrect for a variety of reasons, but it is extremely incorrect in group action problems. If 90% of society, and 95% of people born 50 years in the future will suffer because I do something, but I benefit greatly, it is entirely rational to cause that harm.

Covid has made the rich much richer, fast. Statista has a nice little graphic:

As for Climate Change, business as usual worked fine for the world’s elites. We really started paying attention to global warming in the 70s, and since then, by not just ignoring it but increasing it, they’ve done brilliant.

(The top .1% and .01% and .001% numbers have risen even faster.)

Rationality does not work for ethical decisions. It can help you determine means, “what’s the best way to do this” but it can’t determine ends.

It isn’t even that great for means. The rationalists (epitomized by Stars Slate Codex) tend towards hard utilitarianism: the most good for the most people, and sneer at virtue ethics.

Seems smart: what you want is the most good, right?

But the problem is that instrumenalism “the right thing is whatever gets you where you want to go” often doesn’t work because humans are both stupid and very good at motivated reasoning. “Well, people will obviously be better off if we tax rich people less, because rich people give jobs and they can give more jobs and pay more for them!”

Or, “if we pay people like CEOs more if they raise shareholder value, they’ll do more of the right thing!”

Or, in general terms, “people help others because of greed, not virtue, so we have to bribe them to do the right thing and micro-manage incentives.”

None of this stuff worked, of course. It never has, and it never will. The eras where you tax the rich heavily and keep executive compensation relatively low had better behaviour by executives than the post Thatcher/Reagan era. Faster economic growth, too. (Better isn’t necessarily the same thing as good.)

The problem with instrumentalist thinking, which utilitarianism tends to fall into, is that “means are ends.” If you bomb the village to save it, or invade the country, you’ve done a shit load of evil. If you lock people up in prison for victimless crimes, you’ve created victims: the people being brutalized in prison. If you let cops take people’s property without proving a crime, you’ve increased theft. If you torture, you’ve tortured. If you lower wages to increase efficiency, you’ve lowered wages. If you surveil workers to get the most out of them you know that’s bad (Bezos would never let someone else determine when he can take a shit.)

The means are always most of what we do.

We know that being greedy, or selfish, or cowardly, or sadistic are bad. We know that rape is always bad. We know that killing people is bad. We know that beating people is bad.We know that hunger is bad. We know that homelessness is terrible. We know lack of water kills. When the IMF removes food subsidies we KNOW more people will go hungry. When we sell bombs to Israel and Saudi Arabia, we know they’ll be used to murder innocents.

Instrumentalism and utilitarianism allow you to say to yourself “well, I know virtue ethics would say this is bad, but actually it’s good because it’ll lead to a better world.” Meanwhile there you are with policies that lead to the Amazon being clearcut and dumping so much CO2 and methane into the world that eventually the world’s forests just start burning down and permafrost methane starts exploding like bombs.

Virtue ethics and bars on behaviour like “no torture or rape ever” exist because we know we tend to find excuses to allow us to engage the worst parts of ourselves: to be greedy and selfish, to force others to do what we want, and to live like Kings and Queens because we exploited others. Bezos goes to space, workers in his warehouses piss into jars or wear diapers and walk around in shit before they pass out or die from heat stroke: these things are related.

Rationalism just says “how do I get what I want?” Virtue ethics and red lines say “you can’t get it by doing evil.”

This is why straight utilitarians and instrumentalists are either hypocrites or fools. Either they know that their ethics allows for monstrous behaviour and doesn’t guarantee results, or they know it produces subpar results for a lot of people, even most people, but they expect to be in the minority who benefits (which, by the way, is very rational.)

Don’t worship at the cult of rationalism or instrumentalism. Virtue ethics and red lines have their own problems, and there are reasons for being way of them too, but at the end of the day, if getting what you want requires you to hurt a lot of people, perhaps you aren’t doing it because you truly believe it’ll make the world a better place?

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Quarantine Matters

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On July 21, 2021

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So, compared to a lot of other countries, Australia has done a pretty good job on Covid.

But they just had a Covid breakout in two major cities: Sydney and Melbourne. Those breakouts required them to then go back to shutdowns: closing and restricting businesses and movement.

Both outbreaks come from failures in the quarantine system: from hotel quarantine not working because hotels are not set up properly for quarantine due to not separately ventilating.

On July 7th I wrote that quarantine should be mandatory, with criminal penalties for violation, and…

We also do quarantine badly. Hotel quarantine is ridiculous in most hotels, because Covid is airborne and most hotels spread air between rooms.

This isn’t a difficult problem, however. Build a bunch of small huts in a field (you can even stack them), each with its own ventilation, and put people in there.

How has this been proved across the board in Australia?

I am tired of living in societies where we know how to do the right thing and simply refuse to do so because our elites are psychopathic, selfish and greedy and our population refuses to discipline or control the elites.

We KNOW what to do to stop Covid. We KNOW how to do it. We just fucking refuse.

This is goddamn pathetic. It’s just like climate change, but on a faster timeline so you can see it in weeks to months rather than decades. We may go extinct, we are certainly going to kill and impoverish billions and probably wipe out half the world’s species (which will hurt us terribly, not just them) all because while we KNOW how to do the good, non psychopathic, non criminally insane things, we REFUSE.

You discipline your elites, or most of  you and your children will die or be impoverished by their actions and lack of actions.

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The Lords of Hell (and Their Slaves)

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On June 14, 2021

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Most people spend their entire childhoods and adult lives until they are really too old to work, doing shit they don’t want to do and would never do absent coercion.

This is the ur-fact about capitalism. You cannot leave. If you do not submit to slavery, you will wind up homeless and eventually dead, and suffer a lot along the way.

This is built into the system: The “whip of hunger” is used to make people work. The threat of homelessness.

Homelessness, despair, and so on are required; without them people would not bother working at bad jobs. Indeed, without them many people would not work any more than required to feed and house themselves.

Now, understand clearly, rip a hole in your skull, and put this in: There is more food than needed and way more homes than homeless people in all of the developed countries and more food than needed to feed everyone in the world. We could easily feed and house everyone in the world. It is almost a trivial problem. We simply have to do it.

Industrialization, plus modern agriculture, produces easily more than we need. Automation should mean that less and less hours need working. We should be living in a paradise of free-time and choice.

We do not because a small minority has captured power and enslaved the rest of us.

These people are monsters on every possible level, including in their depraved indifference to what will happen to their children and grandchildren under environmental collapse and climate change.

We have a surplus, but it is generated in the stupidest ways possible — with planned obsolesence, soil degradation, and pollution causing environmental collapse.

If we had built everything without planned obsolesence, we wouldn’t be where we are. If we had not degraded the soil and dumped so much pollution into the air we would not be where we are. We made a bunch of choices to do things the fast, “profitable” way that actually led to people being sicker (all that pollution and soil degradation means you are undernourished and full of unhealthy chemicals) and having to work longer.

We had the knowledge to have a manageable, sustainable cornucopia by just looking at the effects on people, animals, and plants, and the environment in general and correcting. We did not.

School, if you will put aside your prejudices for a couple minutes and look at it coldly, is a process whereby you are made to sit still, talk only when teacher allows, piss only when teacher allows, stand only when teacher allows, and do all sorts of things you don’t want in the way that pleases teacher or you get bad grades, and if you get enough bad grades, you will almost certainly never have a good job or any power in society.

You were trained to be a slave by school then you went to work and acted like a good slave. Some few proved themselves psychopathic enough to ascend to the elites (though the few open routes are rapidly closing down), though most elites come from the already-elite (check out who Bill Gates father was).

Since creating a utopia in which people don’t have to obey their masters is no fun for psychopaths or functional psychopaths and narcissists (our ruling class), keeping the majority of the population firmly in a form of slavery they could tell themselves was freedom, “I get to CHOOSE MY MASTER who tells me what to do! I am free!” is what our master-class has done.

We run around on treadmills, working for them to get what we need, and the various drugs (including entertainment) we use to ease ourselves and pretend it’s all worth it. The internet, which looked like it might increase freedom, has simply set up more hedonic treadmills, optimized for us to tell our masters everything about ourselves, so they can sell us our next drug, and continue their removal from us of all real assets. (Private equity is now buying up single family homes, the middle class’s last real asset.)

If you work at a normal job, you are a slave. If you have ascended to the ranks of high executive, CEO, or board member, you are Lord of Hell. There are some other seats, rather nice places: the independent best-selling author or musician, for example. The high paid consultant, the big Twitch streamer and so on. They are rare, and like becoming a pro-sports player, they exist for the majority of the population more as a way to blame themselves for not “making it” than as a real possibility.

This is our society: A society which had the technology to create a near utopia without destroying the world (yes, some people will argue this was always impossible; let us say that we never even tried) and which chooses instead to run a master/slave society which is so advanced it convinces most of the slaves they are free.

You WISH you had “Brave New World” because at least then you’d think you were happy.

It is odd, and sad, that this world will end because the masters, abetted by their slaves (who, remember, have not revolted in any meaningful way and have chosen the master-class through voting), have mismanaged the environment so badly.

When that happens, the powerful are betting they will become even more powerful, so that they can use their resources to be masters in an even greater hell.

Let me suggest, that as you or your children are scrabbling for survival in the world to come, you take the time to ensure that the masters don’t “win” by destroying the environment.

The hell they will create in a collapsing environment will make the present hell look wonderful by comparison, and they will never stop creating hells unless it is made clear to them that their perpetual hell creation will soon become unprofitable for them as well; even if it has to be with their lives.

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The Squad and Kabuki Votes

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On June 1, 2021

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Back on May 20th, a bill passed to increase funding for the Capitol police. The idea is that the events of January 6th mean they need more funding. They’re already VERY well-funded, and the failure was not due to lack of funding, but lack of preparation for a forseeable event (as it was announced and organized on social media), and failure to call in help. The capitol will become even more locked down, and access of ordinary citizens to it and to their representatives and senators will be more restricted.

This bill passed by ONE vote.

Whenever you see this, you should suspect absolute and complete bullshit.

The progressive defectors have all called to “defund” the police in the past: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) voted present, while Reps. Cori Bush (D-MO), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), and Ilhan Omar (D-MN) voted against the bill, which includes funds for the Capitol Police.

This is an arranged vote. House members who need to be seen to oppose the bill were given “walks.” Because they needed the Squad to note vote against it, three didn’t, and the three who wanted/needed to keep their cred were allowed to vote against.

I am thinking back, and I can’t remember a time that the Squad, when they had the margin of victory, has ever cast the deciding vote against a bill that Democratic House leadership wanted passed. It may be that they have, and that I missed it; I don’t follow legislative matters super-closely.

But this vote was Kabuki, and unfortunately (I really did want to believe) I’m coming around to the view that the Squad is now basically onside. At a guess, I’d say a combination of co-option and punishment/threats have made clear to them their position, as when AOC didn’t get the committee assignment she wanted.

This is a genuinely difficult problem. People who go to Congress and want to play spoiler — to actually use their power when they have a veto, have to be willing to withstand both gestures of kindness and real punishment, along with the genuine hatred of their colleagues. If you’re not a “team player,” if you don’t do what leadership wants, there are prices to be paid.

It appears that those prices are too high for the Squad. Again, I may be wrong, but this isn’t a conclusion I come to anything but reluctantly. Nor, of course, does it not mean they aren’t “better” in some ways than other members. But there appears to be a fundamental dishonesty here that is disturbing, and a lack of willingness to use power when they have it.

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