Ian Welsh

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

Category: Power Page 6 of 14

The Psychopathology of Human Leadership

By

On April 13, 2021

Comments

All American Presidents in my lifetime have acted like psychopaths. Not one of them did not do things that killed people they had no true need to kill. (The only ones I think come close are Ford & Carter.) Noam Chomsky, back in 1990, looked at which post-war Presidents hadn’t done something that would have gotten them hanged at Nuremburg.

The weird thing is that most of these actions hurt the US more than they helped. Blowback is a bitch, and the US keeps interfering where they have no business, and it rarely works out well in the long run.

If the US mostly minded its own business, Americans would be better off. More countries would be democratic (America supports anti-democratic coups regularly), and more countries would have secular or enlightened religious views.

There was also no need for the US to immisserate its own working class so some rich people could make more money by helping China. China would have still industrialized, it would have taken a bit longer and we wouldn’t be cruising for Cold War 2.0.

A US that minded its own domestic affairs better (ie., hadn’t crushed the middle and working class) and managed every other nation’s affairs less, would be a better US in a better world.

Of course, what this really suggests is that the main problem in the US is the ruling class and the Americans who are foolish enough to support it.

The US ruling class kills and impoverishes people to make money, and since 1980 at least (really, about a decade earlier) that has included American people.

The US needs to be better — for its own sake and for the sake of others.

I’ll tell you a secret: In the not-very-long run (a generation), making other people richer and healthier is better for you than taking their stuff, hurting them, or killing them.

That’s a TRUTH.

For much of history, the standard mode was to kill people and take their land and stuff where possible and, where not, to conquer them and take their stuff.

But people with a boot on their neck don’t contribute as much as free people.

It’s time for us all to grow up.

Now this doesn’t just apply to the US, of course. I live in a colonial country based on genocide — just one that isn’t powerful.

Nor is this a “white” only thing, as the slightest perusal of history (including recent history) will show.

Europeans got a big advantage and used it. When the Mongols did, they did.

China is built on the Han exploiting an advantage for over 2k years. The Japanese industrialized first in their area of the world and went on a rampage. Etc…

This is a human problem.

That said, Americans and Europeans are descended from the most recent group to get a huge military advantage over a long period (about 500 years) and use it for mass conquest, and that has had effects on our culture, including on how we pick leaders.

Warlike leaders seem “good,” because for a long time it seemed like conquest and raiding was the easiest way to get rich, and people who were bad at fighting had real bad things happen to them.

But our current problems cannot be solved by war, raiding, and armed theft.

There are some who think otherwise; they want to reduce the world’s population to about a billion people.

Not only is that monstrous, the sort of war that would do would cause so much environmental and climate damage that it would cancel out, and then some.

If we want out of this we need to find a primary mode of being that isn’t “hurt or threaten other people so they do what you want.”

If we try to solve our problems with violence, and the threat of violence, this time, or with the deliberate immiseration of billions of people, the world at the other end (assuming humans survive at all) will be apocalyptically bad — even for the ruling class.

A good society is one in which everyone is prosperous. Healthy, happy people with enough stuff create good societies and good economies. Immiserating entire classes or countries may make a few people rich, but it is a negative sum game. We need to stop playing negative sum games, both with ourselves, and with the rest of life on Earth. Everyone: Plant, animal, human, and other life forms need to win on aggregate.

If they don’t, we are either going to drive ourselves and lot of other species to extinction, or create a world that is is much, much worse for everyone, though, alas, some of the second possibility is already locked in.

As humans we must change how we pick our leaders and how and why we make collective decisions. Nothing we have tried so far has worked, so we must be open to radical change.

All the content here is free but food and rent aren’t, sosubscriptions and donations do help, a lot

Making the Rich and Powerful Work for Everyone

By

On April 12, 2021

Comments

The philosopher John Rawls suggested that the only ethical society is one which we design before we know what position we will hold in it. If you don’t know whether you’ll be born the child of janitor or a billionaire, black or white, you may view social justice differently than when you know that your parents both went to Harvard or Oxford.

Rawls’s point is just in the sense that though none of us choose our parents, very few of us are able to see the world except through our own eyes. What I am going to suggest is something different: A society works best if it treats people the same, no matter what position they hold. This is hardly a new position. The idea that everyone should be treated equally is ancient and many a war has been fought over it. But despite a fair bit of progress, we don’t really understand what equality means, how it works, and why it works.

Let’s have an example. Based on international testing, at the time of this writing, the Finnish education system is arguably the best in the world. Its students do better than those of any other nation.

What is interesting about the Finnish school system, though, is this: When they decided to change how it worked, they did not set out to try and make it the best in the world. Instead their goal was to make it so that everyone was treated the same. Their goal was not excellence, their goal was equality. Somehow, along the way, and very much to their surprise, it also became arguably the best school system in the world.

There are a number of reasons for this, the main one being a well-established fact: People who are treated as lesser don’t perform as well and are less healthy–even after you take into account other factors.

But another reason is that if you are rich or powerful, you can’t buy your child a better education. Testing results between schools are not made public and the very few private schools are not allowed to use selective admissions. In a system where your child will be treated the same as every other child, you must make sure that every child receives an excellent education, otherwise your child may not receive one.

Let’s engage in another thought experiment. In the United States, airport security is extremely intrusive. Recently, new procedures for physical examinations were put in place which include touching the genitals (I’ve personally experienced it and it definitely included genital contact, albeit with my clothing on.) Most security experts consider this to be security theatre, along with such things as taking your shoes off and the new 3D scanners. They believe that the two most important improvements in airline security were locked cockpit doors and passengers knowing that if they remain passive and allow hijacking, they could all wind up dead.

Coincidentally, the 2000s have seen an explosion in the use of private jets. The most powerful, rich, and important people no longer fly on the same airplanes as the hoi polloi and, as a result, they do not go through the same security screenings.

Do you think that if the most important people in the US had to endure the same security as ordinary Americans that it would be as intrusive as it is? How many billionaires would have to be groped before something was done?

While we’re on the subject of private jets, consider the following: A private jet still has to use a runway. If a private jet is using the same public airport you are, it takes up a take-off or landing slot. Next time you’re waiting for a take-off slot, or wondering why your flight is delayed, think on that. Less than ten people on a private jet are holding up over a hundred people on a passenger jet.

No part of society will continue to work properly if the powerful and rich have no interest in its doing so. There are three parts to this:

  1. If there is a public system, there cannot also be a private system which can be used to opt out of the public system.
  2. If there are limited resources, whether those are airplane flight slots at airports or medical care, then no one can be allowed to use either wealth or power to jump the queue, nor must they be allowed to use more resources than those without power or money.
  3. Any part of the economy where there is a monopoly or an oligopoly must either be publicly run or must be heavily regulated for quality, level of profits, and reinvestment.

(Ian-a fundamental article, originally published March 31st, 2015. As it will be unfamiliar to most current readers, re-upped.)

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

When You’ll Get a More Equal Society

By

On March 10, 2021

Comments

So, it seems that the salaries of junior bankers are being cut so that senior bankers can have bigger bonuses. At UBS, the average bonus for senior bankers is $2.1 million.

Niiiiice.

Unless you’re a junior banker. Or a customer.

A given means of production, combined with a resource base, will throw off some amount of surplus. That surplus is divided among the population based entirely on their power. Sometimes that power comes from scarcity, often managed scarcity as in the Medieval Guild system, or un-managed scarcity during the first decades of a technological change (hello, programmers!), but most often it comes out of the barrel of a gun, from the point of a spear, or from the edge of a sword.

In Against the Grain, about the rise of early kingdoms after agriculture, the author points out that in agricultural systems where the farmer produces a single major crop, it is really easy to take away all but the bare minimum for the farmer’s survival; you know how much land, how much rainfall, when the crop is harvested, and where the farmer lives. The farmers mostly can’t run away, and they can’t win a fight against professional warriors, so you can just take their crops. In the Middle Ages, there are accounts of knights fighting peasants who outnumbered the knights a hundred to one and the knights came out not just victorious, but with nothing but minor injuries. The peasants, well, they got massacred.

Our own society is similar. Bankers have, along with various adjacent industries and central banks (somehow given “independence”), a monopoly on creating money (which they create as debt). This monopoly, of course, is enforced by the government, and the government’s enforcement rests on men with guns (and, these days, a few women), plus prisons where they brutalize you. Opening a new bank is very, very hard.

Then, within banks, the seniors take most of the gains, as one would expect.

None of this would work without those men with guns and ugly prisons, though.

There are variations on this, of course. After WWII, when a huge percentage of the male population knew how to fight effectively in groups, why, by coincidence the deal was more even. When those men aged out, why, somehow the deal got worse. (This isn’t the only factor, but it’s a big one.)

Inequality tracks with force being unequal. When a few men are superior to a huge mass of other men, then inequality soars. The feudal knight was genuinely superior to peasants. Greek Hoplites were equal to each other, but ruled over a huge mass of slaves. The same goes for the Roman legionnaires — but notice the Equites (who could afford a horse to bring to the fight) had higher legal status and rights.

Mercenary armies and police, like most armies and police in the world, are wonderful for this. They’re loyal to whomever pays them. Most revolutions happen when there is a financial crisis for a reason.

So, get control of force and use it to control money/means of production, or get control of money/means of production and use it to create force. Obviously it’s really about some of both, but you use whichever one you have more of to get control over the other one. Wall Street bought DC so that it could have control over the police and courts, which is why Obama immunized them from their crimes and bailed them out — including from really raw and obvious crimes like illegally signing a document saying the bank owned someone else’s house. Absolute fraud and straight robbery: That’s what Obama made go away for the financial industry.

Some of those people who had their houses stolen, in a society with less police and military and nasty prisons, might have taken retribution and recompense into their own hands, but in the US, well, no, that’s really not possible. You might get retribution, but then the cops will imprison or kill you, which they didn’t do to the men who stole your house and probably your job, car, and future.

In raw terms, this is the situation in the US and a lot of other countries (certainly in Britain). A small minority has control over force and money, and as they feel more and more secure in their control of those two things, they take more and more of what the society produces.

The 2008/9 Obama and the Fed was a watershed incident. The rich had lost everything. Absolutely everything. It didn’t matter if they had “won” the bet like Goldman Sachs, because if I win a bet with you and you lose all your money, I’m fucked too. The Fed and other central banks bailed them out to the tune of trillions; Obama and other political leaders immunized them from their crimes (and the entire bubble was based on fraud), and our elites then KNEW, without a doubt, that they were in complete control and that they could do anything, and that the violent authorities would bail them out and protect them from their victims.

And that, my friends, is where we are now. There will be no significant downward redistribution until elites either lose control of the violent apparatus, or genuinely think they are about to, or can’t win their side of an oncoming revolution.

Or, of course, until the fact that there is a real economy and environment, and they aren’t just mismanaging it, but effectively burning it down to make money, causes an economic collapse where suddenly money can’t buy the mercenaries’ loyalty any more.

Fun time to be alive.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

Our Society, the Slave Factory

By

On March 2, 2021

Comments

Near the start of the pandemic, I wrote a brief guide on how to emotionally handle isolation. A chunk of it was about self-regulation in terms of schedule:

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

When you lose that routine, you lose those assists.

But the issue of self-regulation, indeed, of self and routine is much larger.

The fact is that between helicopter parenting and school, most people today have never had to learn how to self-regulate meaningfully beyond the self-regulation required of any good slave or servant. Their schedules, from childhood, were all determined for them. Their self was created by other people, and their fundamental choices boil down to reactions for or against it.

Then, when they become adults they have university (a bit more freedom) and on to jobs, where for 40 of the most useful waking hours, a boss tells them what to do.

Most people have thus never learned to truly manage their own time, thoughts, and emotions without schedules and activities imposed by other people. It’s no wonder that some people retire in their sixties and promptly die, with “nothing to do” absent an overseer.

You can’t be your own person, not truly, without unstructured time, and I would argue, alone time. There’s a study that found most people would rather give themselves electric shocks than be alone with nothing to do.

They rely entirely on the environment, an environment controlled and structured by other people, for emotional regulation.

Without work/school/internet/tv/games, etc… they’re lost. I’d say without those things they stop being a self-regulating person, but the point is that most people have never been self-regulating people.

Worse, activities like school and jobs, despite the lies you have been told, and which some believe (especially, oddly, about school) aren’t designed with your interests at heart. School is a slave factory. You may get some knowledge out of it, but the UR lesson is: “Do what you’re told, when you’re told, the way authority wants it done. Ask for permission to even talk or go to the bathroom.”

That’s what children are trained to do for 12 years. Then university trains them some more: At elite universities, they’re trained to have a bit more freedom to meet goals (deadlines are negotiable at Ivy league universities, but not at most State universities), and you’re released into the job market, where those who went to elites have to make some decisions, and those who didn’t are expected to be good little slaves, and sure as hell not to think or feel for themselves.

We have a society that endlessly talks about freedom, but in our daily lives, the vast majority of us are not free and never have been. We have spent almost all our lives with our primarily daily activity is determined by other people, who often also tell us what to think and how we should feel.

Such a people are not, and cannot be, suited to freedom.

Forget all the other criticism, the fundamental problem with capitalism is that it allows only a small percentage of the population to live free lives, and makes the rest into either slaves or (if they don’t have work) so poor that they have no effective freedom because of their poverty.

Our society is a slave factory and until we recognize that and reorganize it so it isn’t, it will produce slaves.

What we call freedom today is simply the ability, sometimes, to choose who our master is.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

The Betrayal At The Heart of Sanders, AOC and Corbyn’s Refusal To Use Power

By

On February 24, 2021

Comments

You’ve probably heard of Manchin. Conservative Democratic Senator. With a 50/50 Senate and few Republican Senators willing to cross the aisle, Manchin has been having a field day: he’s been determining much of what can be done by Democrats, since without him they can’t get votes thru the Senate.

Manchin’s mostly using this for evil, but recently he decided to oppose Biden’s budget chief pick, Neera Tanden. Neera’s a famous twitter warrior, who was viciously anti-Bernie, but she also famously shut down Think Progress, a media site she ran, because the workers unionized. She punched a journalist in the chest, and outed a sexual assault survivor.

Now Machin isn’t opposing Tanden because of stuff like the union, but he is opposing her and there’s a good chance she won’t get in. What he’s really doing, though, is trying to stop Hillary Clinton’s primary proxy from being in the Biden administration, because that’s what she is.

Bernie, who chairs the committee she has to get by, has not opposed her even though she’s been his savage enemy, and he is opposed ideologically to her.

Manchin is using his power, and Sanders is not.

Let’s think back to when Nancy Pelosi was running for Speaker. It was a close run affair and AOC and the squad had the votes to stop her. Yes, the person who got in would have been very slightly worse, but the difference is marginal and Pelosi is almost done in politics anyway, given her age. The Squad voted for Pelosi and got nothing for it: they tried to claim that the organizing resolution not including Covid and the environment as requiring budget neutrality was their win, but that doesn’t pass the laugh test, because those are Biden’s priorities. Pelosi’s always been very willing to work with the priorities of Presidents: Democratic or Republican.

They had power, didn’t use it, got nothing. AOC didn’t even get the committee assignment she wanted. It wasn’t Pelosi who made sure she didn’t get it, but she didn’t lift a hand to help AOC either.

Let’s consider a third situation: the first Covid stimulus bill. Progressives could have stopped it. They didn’t. But that bill had the key bailouts for the rich. Once they were done, Progressives had no leverage. Future Covid relief bills, centrists and right wingers didn’t care: it wasn’t important to them if ordinary people got relief, so they’d just hold firm for really crazy stuff.

Sanders and AOC had a chance to hold what the rich needed in order to get something for the poor. They didn’t.

This is a pattern, and a nearly constant one. It is related to Sanders being unwilling to call out Biden on his record because “Biden was his friend.” (Gagging sounds. Their friendship isn’t worth millions of Americans in poverty because a Biden admin won’t help them.)

But what I want to examine now is the use of power.

Here’s a rule: power everyone knows you won’t use, you don’t have.

Left-wingers are not credible because they never use their power. We saw this with Corbyn in Britain when  he repeatedly refused to throw out MPs who challenged him or allow MPs to be re-selected (primaried, in effect.) There was nothing they couldn’t do to his cause or him that would get him to retaliate.

If AOC had taken down Pelosi people would remember. Pelosi did not and does not want her last political memory and piece of  history being defeated for the role of Speaker. AOC and the Squad had the ability to take something away from Pelosi that REALLY mattered to her, and everyone would have noticed that they did so and would take their threats seriously in the future. Including the guy who won the Speakership, who, if they controlled the margin next time would know they’d take HIM down if they didn’t get something important to them.

When Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of Britain some Conservative MPs voted against his most important project: Brexit. He immediately threw them out of the party, and went on to resoundingly win the election.

Voters don’t like wimps who won’t use their power and they are correct in this: if you won’t fight, it doesn’t matter what you believe. Corbyn was the man who could take any punch, but would never throw one, no matter what his opponents did.

Using power tells both your enemies and your friends that you are serious, and that your demands must be met or you will make them pay.

Progressives (not necessarily AOC/Sanders/Corbyn, but those who justify their behavior) are like bullying victims who have forgotten that you end bullying only by hurting the bully (win or lose) not by giving in to them. Progressives who support them are often similar, they’re scared “but if we oppose Tanden won’t Biden retaliate?”

Let the fucker retaliate (though he probably wouldn’t much care, she’s Hillary’s servant, not his.) It’s a 50/50 Senate, and Bernie is a powerful committee chairman. He can make Biden’s life Hell AND, more to the point, Biden already isn’t doing most of what Bernie wants despite Bernie being super nice to him. Being nice doesn’t work. Threatening Biden’s legacy might. Sanders can have exactly the power Manchin wields, and more, the second he wants it: the second he decides that making them remember that if the poor people he represents don’t get something, neither do the rich.

A compromise is where you get something and so do I. What progressives do far too often is capitulate: they get nothing.

Use your power, or you don’t have it.

I’m going to return to this and the reasons, which go beyond a misunderstanding of how to use power or cowardice (Corbyn is not in any way a coward) , because it’s important. I like Bernie and AOC, and I admire Corbyn, but their refusal to use power is a betrayal, and I use that word deliberately, of the people they represent and who trust them.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

The Simplest Explanation For Not Breaking Covid Vaccine Patents

By

On February 15, 2021

Comments

The faster we get everyone immunized, throughout the world, the more likely we can stop Covid from going chronic, becoming the new flu (but more deadly, unless/until it mutates to become less fatal, which the untried models say it should.)

However, if Covid is cured, well, you can’t make money off Covid any more, can you?

Chronic Covid, mutating constantly, means more and more vaccines, and more and more and more money for vaccine makers.

Ghastly, and I know that many readers are probably, “that’s absurd”, but consider, does it have both explanatory and predictive power?

Does, “Covid makes the rich, richer so they want it to keep going” have explanatory and predictive power?

Qui Bono? Who benefits? Since the people who run our societies profit from Covid, why would they actually want it over (remember, billionaires have become vastly richer.)

I, too, dislike living in a society where this explanation has stronger predictive power than “our leaders don’t want us to die in large numbers, and become poverty-struck, just so they can get richer,” but that statement, well, look at it closely. If that was true, how would our rulers behave? Not just during Covid, but at other times?

Yeah.

I mean, I’ve been saying this sort of thing for a while, because it’s obviously true, but I’m embarrassed it took me so long to realize it applied to vaccine creators as well, especially since Pharma has a well-known bias towards medicines that are palliatives, not cures. Someone who needs your medicine again and again is much better than someone who needs it only once.

Gotta admire the pure predator instinct in our rulers. They’re the wolves, we’re the sheep and God, do they love mutton.

It’s them or us, and so far, it’s us.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

The Logic Of Bootlickers Is The Logic Of Too Many Americans

By

On January 21, 2021

Comments

This is sweet and lovely in the purity of its boot-licking authoritarianism:

The account then goes on to insult those who do not worship at the Biden altar.

The authoritarian personality is simple: it slurps up; kicks down. You know the type. You’ve seen them wherever you’ve worked, and you loathe them.

What is true is that Biden, Harris and Pelosi people are good at politics. They are good at seeking and getting political office.

But this is a category error; a profoundly stupid and harmful one.

First, this says nothing about their intelligence. Trump became President, is he smarter than you? (Or, if you’re dumb, smarter than many philosophers, scientists and so on who never earn any political office?)

What about George Bush Jr. smarter than you?

These people are good at getting political office, that doesn’t mean they are good at anything else. Pelosi is good at raising money and intra-caucus politics, but the House Democrats haven’t had a great electoral record while lead by her. She also passed almost all of Trump’s bills, including terrible ones like massive tax cuts and so on. She has renewed the Patriot Act multiple times. She refused to reign in George Bush when she got a majority in 2006.

She may be a good politician, but so what?

Harris did terribly in the primaries. She attacked Joe Biden as a segregationist (he was) and earned the VP slot, as best I can tell, by a campaign of backstabbing all the other possible candidates. She helped keep people known to be innocent in prison when a prosecutor.

Biden, in addition to being a segregationist, was one of the main Democratic boosters of the Iraq war. He was a driving force behind the bankruptcy bill which made it impossible to to discharge student debt. The Patriot Act was based on a bill he tried to pass in the 90s. He threatened Cuba with devastation if they dared give Snowden asylum. He’s apparently a great boss and a loving family man, but he’s filth. He’s also a known plagiarist.

Being able to get political power implies nothing more than an ability to get political power. Becoming rich implies nothing more than an ability to become rich.

Being good at A does not mean you are good at B to Z.

It certainly doesn’t mean your getting political power or money is good for anyone else. In most cases, the rise of most billionaires has been bad for other people. They have made money because they found a way to impoverish other people. Of course, there are exceptions, but they are exceptions.

Grow some self-respect and a spine. Your leaders are only better than you in one sense: they are better predators than you are.

“Oh, I so admire the wolf,” simpered the sheep.

In fact, much of why you aren’t them is because you have morals. You aren’t willing to lock up people who know are innocent, like Kamala. You aren’t willing to destroy a foreign country and kill a million people like Biden. You wouldn’t go along with Trump’s massive tax cuts like Pelosi.

You have some ethics; some morality. You wouldn’t run a huge scheme to defraud millions of people and/or steal their homes like almost everyone senior on Wall Street. There are limits on the evil you are willing to do for money or power, and that means, in America, you can’t have either.

Whenever someone who has ethics gets anywhere near power, (Corbyn or Sanders) everything possible is done to destroy them. The media lied over 75% about Corbyn. Every single candidate dropped out in a period of a day to deny Sanders the Democratic nomination; an effort coordinated by Obama (who may well be smarter than you, and whose evil was carefully concealed behind his smiling sociopathy.)

The elites have spent the last 50 or so years driving 97% of Americans into the dirt, and rewarding themselves with billions. They are predators, and nothing else. You are the sheep, and the cops and military are the sheepdogs: still animals, and discarded the moment they aren’t useful. (Check those military veteran homeless stats.)

Biden, Harris and Pelosi (who cares about Carville?) aren’t smarter than you, odds are, and unless you’re Stalin reborn, they’re worse people than you in every way except their ability to get and hold power and use it against the American people and foreigners.

Hopefully they’ll be less evil rulers than Trump (though note, he didn’t start any new wars), but that’s not a bar.

Have some self respect. Your system elects not the best of you, but the worst.

Thinking the worst are the best: that’s the problem. They’ve indoctrinated you like farm animals “they feed us, and I’m sure the beating are because they love us, and I’m sure when they loaded Thelma and Fred and George on the truck last week and they never came back, well they were taking them to a better place.”

Except you don’t even get that good a deal, since they’re happy to see you starve and don’t try and heal you when you’re sick.

Grow up.

These people feed on you, and that’s all you are to them.

All the content here is free, but subscriptions and donations do help, a lot.

 

 

Abundance Mindset, Scarcity Economies and the Great Game Of Musical Chairs

By

On November 29, 2020

Comments

Like a lot of older Gen-X I remember the good times without having every participated in them. By the time I was an adult stagflation, the Federal Reserve, Reagan and Thatcher had done their work and the decline had begun. Everything kept getting shittier for most people in the western world and it has kept doing so for about 40 years now. Depending on what group you’re in, it might be fifty.

This has given rise to a whole body of how to get rich works. They rival those of the gilded age: Napoleon Hill’s “How To Think and Get Rich” is a good example. (The best of them is still “How To Make Friends and Influence People,” its advice will work as long as humans are human.)

The catchphrase these days is “abundance thinking”. There’s a ton of good stuff in the world, and you just have to figure out how to get some. The world isn’t full of scarcity, it’s full of too much.

This is, of course, true. There are money spigots, like various central banks, early entry to crypto, being attached to important resource economies like oil (though that’s ending) and so on. There are people who have way more money than they need, for whom money is a trivial concern, a way of keeping score, and those who just have too little.

You want to move to a position of abundance. You want to find a spigot. On the right this selling is courses on how to get fit or slim or rich or whatever. Sometimes the courses are bogus, sometimes they’re pretty good stuff, but they price them high and find desperate people to buy them.

So it is, so it always has been. Sell the dream to desperate people and you’ll get rich. Attach to a money spigot and you’ll be fine. It’s why the fights are so savage these days. Corbyn in Britain threatened the money-spigot attachment of Labour elites and they hate him for it and will do anything they can to destroy him. Nothing was too low to do to stop Sanders, because he would have brought in his own administrative class into the Democratic party. Democrats used many of the same vote suppression tactics against Greens and Sanders as they squealed about Republicans using against them.

It’s all about position. This is why the standard advice in prosperity circles is to ditch your loser friends and hang out with successful people. They’re attached to some spigot, or have found some vein of insecurity to mine and they can cut you in or show you how to get in.

(It’s my annual fundraiser (and going slower than normal this year.) If you value my writing and can afford to, please consider donating.)

But this is the larger issue: it’s all about position.

It’s a giant game of musical chairs. Some people are in abundance economies, other people are in scarcity economies (these have little to do with national economies, though it’s easier to get into an abundance economy in some places, obviously.)

But there are only so many money spigots and only so many people who can mine veins of insecurity. There aren’t enough good seats.

So the abundance stuff focuses on how you can become one of the winners, one of the people in an abundance economy. If you do it ethically, you help others get inside. If  you do it unethically, you’re just a parasite and you reduce the number of prosperity chairs. (Jamie Dimon, for example.)

The issue with all this, even when done ethically, is that even the “good” guys are rarely increasing the number of seats in the abundance economy. They’re just redistributing who gets them.

In econo or math-speak that’s a zero sum game. But because most of the people attached to money spigots like the Federal Reserve are actually reducing the number of good seats, it’s actually a negative sum game. Every dollar someone like Dimon earns hurts other people.

Abundance thinking could be a good thing: there’s no reason the world can’t be abundant. I am perfectly aware of limits to growth, but  every human could have a good life if we wanted them to. But right now it’s all about winners and losers. It’s about each of us, perhaps on team with the other “winners.”

You can win such games, of course, but they produce a world that is hell, and worse a world that keeps heading towards worse hells. This is how downward spirals happen: when we’re concerned only with a few people’s well-being, rather than the well-being of all.

Eventually the hell becomes so bad that practically everyone is in hell, with perhaps a few lords of hell still enjoying life (almost every post-apocalyptic story still has some people doing fine.)

This is the treadmill we’re on, as we seek to save ourselves from the horrible fates we see around us.

So we resort to “I see what it takes to be successful and I’m going to do it and I have those characteristics or can get them. I’m not a loser. I’m a winner!”

The worse things get, the more we focus on what it takes for individuals to grab onto a money spigot.

We grab a prosperity chair (or we don’t, I haven’t!) And that’s great, but the number of chairs relative to the number of people keeps going down, the carbon goes up, and every day more species go extinct.

And hell looms.

A solution that just works for a few is a solution: but it’s only a partial solution unless you don’t care about others, about the future, or about non-human life.

Not everyone, as we’ve designed the modern world, can live in an abundance economy.

Perhaps we should try for a world where people don’t have to do everything just right, or be born to wealth, to live well?

DONATE OR SUBSCRIBE

Page 6 of 14

Previous

Next

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén