The Century of the Self

The very sharp Marie Snyder shares — and more importantly summarizes, for us video-challenged folk — the documentary film, The Century of the Self - A Brief History of Psychoanalysis and Corporate Control. She concludes,

The fact that Bernays and others are able to manipulate society is testament to Freud's original theory hitting a nail on the head in determining how our drives affect us. But what some people do with that understanding is frightening. This clarifies a pivotal role for schools (complete with lessons on Freudian theory) to ensure we wake people up to their own decision-making as well as to their internal drives. We need to demand a democracy based on collective will for the benefit of society, not individual desires for the benefit of the self.

Privilege

There's a good article in Jacobin: Why the Right Loves Privilege Politics.

First, one fundamental characteristic of capitalism is cutthroat winner-take-all competition: "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." The marginal value of one more point (e.g. one more dollar) is usually negative; however, the marginal value of the winning point is the whole prize: the winner gets everything, and the loser gets nothing. The trouble is, we don't know what the winning point is until the game is over, so we have to fight to the death for every point.

Not only that, but being in the lead confers an advantage. First, there's the gambler's ruin property of statistics: in an interated fair game that's played until one player goes broke, the player with the larger bankroll has a larger probability of winning everything, even though each iteration is perfectly fair (zero expected value for each player). Second, there's the meta-game advantage: if the players make the rules, and the player with the most points/money gets more say in the rules, then players can use a slight advantage to tilt the rules in their favor.

In the context of cutthroat winner-take-all competition, even a tiny advantage is momentous. Regardless of whether the advantage really is "fair" or "unfair" (even granting that "really fair/unfair" is even a coherent concept), it pays to fight to the death to both obtain for one's self or negate for others the tiniest advantage, by any means possible.

Second, historically, capitalist competition has used sex, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, physical (dis)ability, etc. ad nauseam to confer competitive economic (dis)advantage, and therefore political, social, and cultural (dis)advantage. It doesn't really matter to this analysis whether or not capitalist actually created these distinctions; what matters is that sex, race, etc. has been used for so long to construct competitive (dis)advantage that they are baked deeply into capitalism.

Thus, an important conclusion follows: We cannot eliminate sexism, racism, etc. unless we eliminate capitalism.

I want to be crystal clear about what I am not saying here. I am not saying that if we eliminate capitalism, we will automatically eliminate sexism, racism, etc. And I'm not saying that, within a capitalist system, it is pointless to ameliorate excessive sexism, racism, etc.

I am saying that if the goal is to eliminate sexism, racism, etc., then at some point we will have to eliminate capitalism, and replace capitalism with something (i.e. communism) that is not fundamentally based on cutthroat winner-take-all competition.

A corollary to the above: Even if capitalism were perfectly "fair," it would still be bad.

The fundamental problem is not that capitalism has sexism, racism, etc..* The problem is that cutthroat winner-take-all competition, even if it is perfectly fair, is bad in and of itself.

*Again, I'm not saying that sexism, racism, etc. are not problems; I'm saying that they are not fundamental problems.

I personally use utilitarianism as an ethical framework; therefore, by "bad", I mean that capitalism, and any other cutthroat winner-take-all competitive political economy, increases the suffering of the many for only the most dubious happiness of the few. But that even perfectly "fair" capitalism is bad is not particularly sensitive to one's ethical framework. Indeed, the only ethical framework I can see where capitalism is good is a framework that presupposes the value of cutthroat winner-take-all competition.

The point is, rather than fighting to the death about every small (dis)advantage, we should create a system where every small (dis)advantage is not potentially a matter of winning or losing, of life or death, of dignity or degradation. Dignity, happiness, satisfaction, well-being belong to everyone, not just to an ever-narrowing circle of "winners". When small (dis)advantages are no longer momentous, perhaps then we can work more calmly to actually eliminate them.

The Physiology of the Employee

balzac’s physiology of the employee:

In the war against the specific sufferings induced by office life, Herman Melville’s Bartleby is revered as saint and martyr. In the sacred literature of the office genre, his death is the office worker’s call to arms. But it’s a mistake to think that before his sacrifice, the literary universe wasn’t waging such a war against office ennui. Bartleby’s sacrifice is still honored and “I would prefer not to” remains our great rallying cry, but the more his followers understand the history of their war, even if it means recognizing how little ground has been gained, the more allies they find, the better suited they are to continue the fight. Honoré de Balzac’s The Physiology of the Employee (1841) is a guidebook, and it is not outdated. In its relevancy yet seeming strangeness, it fits with the rest of Wakefield Press’s catalog. His description of the climate in which he wrote sounds little different from the economic recession of recent years, and the lack of change since: “Personal expenses were examined with a fine-tooth comb. Benefits were chipped away at.” In its careful organization and laying out of office principles, The Physiology of the Employee serves as a work that grounds the spirit of Bartleby.

Political economy, the Chicken Game, and hard work

The Chicken Game (a.k.a. hawk/dove or snowdrift) is a particular game theoretic payoff matrix:

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	(4,4)	(5,2)
Defect	(2,5)	(1,1)

If player 1 chooses to cooperate, player 2 should defect, and vice versa. However, if player 1 chooses to defect, player 2 should cooperate, and vice versa. So there's no dominant strategy.

In the dialectic between capitalists and workers, for capitalists, "Cooperate" means paying high wages; "Defect" means paying low wages; similarly, for workers, "Cooperate" means working hard, "Defect" means slacking off. If both defect, if capitalists pay low wages and workers slack off, then the workers will starve (because they don't have enough money to buy food), and civilization will collapse. Contrawise, if both cooperate, there is a higher overall payoff (4+4=8) than if one cooperates and the other defects (5+2=7). However, because the individual payoff is better, there is an incentive for one player to defect if the other cooperates. In essence, whoever gets to defect "first" (or most credibly) will win; there's no incentive (as there is in the Prisoner's Dilemma) for one player to defect if the other has already defected.

Thus we can create the political economy payoff matrix:

	Capital
Labor	High Wages	Low Wages
Work Hard	Erehwon	Capitalism
Slack Off	Socialism	Disaster

Let me be blunt: workers are no more altruistic than capitalists. If high wages are more or less guaranteed, workers will consume more leisure — leisure is a normal good, n'est pas? Economically, the effect of laissez faire capitalism is to make sure the workers consume as little leisure as possible. And, economically, the effect of socialism (the first stage of communism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as distinct from welfare-state capitalism) is that workers will consume more leisure: they will, as compared to capitalism, slack off.

(It may be more socially efficient under capitalism to have workers work harder than is strictly economically efficient; we don't want the workers to get the idea that they deserve leisure. And it is arguable that many of the problems of Communism of the Parties (USSR/PRC) was caused by their attempt (probably necessary to resist the capitalist West's unapologetic desire to annihilate communism and commit genocide against the USSR and PRC) to "square the circle" and try to get both hard work and high wages.)

The project of socialists and communists, therefore, should not be to argue that socialism and communism will get us to some sort of utopia where and the workers get paid well and everyone works as hard as they do under capitalism. That's an economic contradiction. Instead, we should valorize leisure.

One theme of capitalism is to valorize hard work. Most of our common phrases for hard work — initiative, can-do spirit, commitment — are positive. Most of our common phrases for leisure — slacking, laziness, goofing off — are negative. They may be vices we indulge ourselves in, but they are vices nonetheless. But why should this be so? Why should hard work be good for its own sake? Some goals require hard work instrumentally (I work harder as a student than I ever did as a middle-class professional, for a third the pay) but why should goals that require hard work be considered better just because they require hard work? Why is the Dude a bum just because he works only enough to live and indulge his relatively inexpensive passion for bowling? (The Big Lebowski works only because it subverts the preexisting trope of hard work and wealth good/laziness and poverty bad; the film would make no sense under communism. In contrast, Downton Abbey is sterile and boring because it fails to subvert the trope.)

Valorization of anything is only partly a project to convince people to value it. Valorization is more importantly a social construct to justify the punishment and coercion of those who do not valorize it. If hard work is a value, then those who do not work hard are "vicious"* and deserve to suffer. (Similarly, sobriety is a virtue; those who are not sober deserve to suffer just because they are not sober.) Hence the major argument and justification for capitalism's tendency to keep wages low is that low wages promote the virtue of hard work. If the working class received higher wages, they would not work as hard (at least not for long), and would therefore descend into the vice and decadence of lazy, unproductive activity. The capitalists are just virtuously trying to save the working class from their own vice! How can we not give such a project our most enthusiastic applause? And how can we not condemn (true) socialism as inherently and ineluctably vicious?

*virtue : virtuous :: vice : vicious

I say fuck hard work.

Not only should hard work not be a virtue, it should be something of a vice. If you want to indulge yourself in the vice of hard work, well, you're an adult and can do as you please, but don't act like you're any more proud of your hard work than you are of any of your other vices. We want a society where it's good that people have a lot of leisure.

Crisis of capitalism

Thomas Rodham Wells has a decent essay, The Crisis of Capitalism: Income in the Post-Employment Age. As more and more jobs are replaced by automation, labor is losing its traditional claim (i.e. productivity) on the goods and services produced by an economy increasingly dominated by capital. The crux of the biscuit is Wells' claim, "Most modern economists view the economy not as a moral drama in which it makes sense to talk of good and evil or right and wrong, but rather a complex machine that can produce more or less of what we value depending on how it is set up and maintained." Wells, however, is not exactly correct. Most modern economists try to disguise a view of good and evil with seemingly objective, descriptive language. The notions of good and evil are still there, and still strong. Although it's a nontrivial task, the key to a better society is not really figuring out how to operate under conditions of abundance that renders markets irrelevant. They key is removing our deep emotional reliance on Veblen's "invidious distinctions." I think that in their heart of hearts, people would rather lock up or even entirely forego abundance rather than allow evil people — the lazy, the nonconforming, the iconoclastic, the insufficiently grateful — to prosper. The erasure of invidious distinctions shocks our sense of justice; erasure shocks us so deeply that it will require a truly revolutionary transformation, not of "society" but of individuals' minds, to build a society where abundance is not a curse but a blessing.

The evidence is all over the place. In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin makes the strong case that the truly fundamental character of conservatism is opposition to (true) democracy, opposition to the idea that people can and should actually rule themselves. (Conservatives are not necessarily opposed to the idea that the people can exercise the right to choose between which of the privileged ruling has official power du jour, but even that limited power slips the camel's nose a little too far into the tent for comfort.) In Failure of a Revolution, Sebastian Haffner documents the the people's revolution in Germany immediately after the First Imperialist War; the revolution was betrayed (to those who would become the Nazis) by its own socialist leaders, leaders who found the revolution far too democratic for comfort, and found fascism preferable to democracy. I was once turned down for a job because I explicitly stated at the interview that I would not take a drug test; even though the company did not use drug tests, the idea that I would not categorically submit myself to the power of management was offensive and subversive. In one of the best episodes of Community (and the best episode of its fifth and sob! final season), a trivial mobile app leads to the immediate and total stratification of the college into castes.* The corporal will submit to the entire military hierarchy for the sake of exerting power over his squad.

*The explanatory value of a work of fiction is not, of course, factual, but in its emotional resonance.

The capitalist class did not create this deep desire to create invidious distinctions, to separate people into good and evil, more precisely, superior and inferior, as a matter not of power but of justice. Although capitalism is its own thing, it is still a human institution, and shares characteristics of other human institutions. Invidious distinctions go back to the first human societies after hunter-gatherers, and it's possible (although we know little of actual early societies) that even our long history as hunter-gatherers was characterized by the struggle between equality and inequality. I don't know who said it (Orwell?), but it really is true: to get socialism, we need better people, but to get better people, we need socialism. Of course, "better" is itself a value judgment; I am not myself prepared to say that people more adapted to socialism are "better" than those adapted to capitalism. I will, however, say that I think people more adapted to socialism will be happier than those adapted to capitalism.

The Long Con: Mail-order conservatism

The Long Con
Mail-order conservatism
by Rick Perlstein

Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity. . . .

Pundits—that is to say, the ones who aren’t stitched into their profession’s lunatic semiology, which holds that it’s unfair to call a Republican a liar unless you call a Democrat one too—have been hard at work analyzing what this all says about Mitt Romney’s character. And more power to them. But that’s not really my bag. . . . In my view, powerful men are but a means to the more profound end of sizing up the shifting allegiances on the demand side of our politics.

All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?

Good and evil

I am attempting here to channel how "conservatives" think. I am not a conservative, so you should not see this post as in any way authoritative. I am trying to be as charitable as I can manage.

I believe that a lot of the kind of thinking I describe here is common to progressives and left-radicals. Deciding whether such commonality is good or bad is left as an exercise for the reader.

The only thing that really matters is good and evil. Everything else is minutia.

The human struggle is, and has always been, a struggle between good and evil. It is not a struggle against nature; it is the struggle between good and evil that exists in men's minds. (I use the gendered term advisedly.)

Material prosperity doesn't really matter. Knowledge doesn't really matter. Progress doesn't really matter. They're all kinda nice, I suppose, but they're not what it's all about. It's all about good and evil.

Good is difficult. Good is uncomfortable and often painful. Good is rare. People don't want to be good.

Evil is easy. Evil is pleasurable. Evil is common. People want to be evil.

The only reason evil does not immediately triumph over good is that good is, well, good. Good has an intrinsic power that evil does not. In any society, however primitive, however corrupt, there will be some men who will choose good, no matter how painful, no matter how difficult, simply because it is good. These men are the architects of civilization.

Good and evil exist in men's minds, thus it is intrinsically social. The fundamental purpose of human society is to be the struggle between good and evil. This point bears repeating: human society is not for the struggle, it is the struggle. The struggle between good and evil is eternal. It cannot be "won" (although it might be possible to be lost). What it means to be a human being is to be a part of the struggle; with apologies to Aristotle, any man who is not part of the struggle is either a beast or a god. Without good and evil, without this struggle, it would mean nothing to be "human"; man would be nothing more than an unusually clever animal.

We are always refining our understanding of good and evil, so there is always some controversy over what exactly is good and evil. Still, it is generally agreed that good has to do with hard work, self-denial, personal responsibility, frugality and saving, sexual continence; evil is laziness, self-indulgence, parasitism, profligacy and debt, and promiscuity. The good looks always to the future; evil always only to the present.

It is not strictly necessary to be religious to understand and endorse the struggle between good and evil. However, most of the world's great religions, especially Christianity, are directly built around the struggle. Not all Christians are conservative, of course, but religion, especially Christianity, is a natural springboard for conservatism.

There are three key social elements to the struggle between good and evil.

First, society must discover good and evil. We cannot see directly into the hearts of men, so we need to look at means and results to discover good and evil. That's why sports are really important. If athletes don't cheat, success in sports is dependent on all of the virtues of conservatism: hard work, self-denial, etc. Cheating in sports is reprehensible not because of pragmatic concerns, but because it corrupts the "good-detecting" function of sports.

Second, society must reward good and punish evil. Again, there is no underlying "reason" to reward good and punish evil; there is always good and evil, and good must be rewarded just because that is what a reward is fundamentally for; evil must be punished because that is what punishment is fundamentally for. Trying to search for a fundamental reason is to miss the point. Like the struggle between good and evil, rewarding good and punishing evil isn't "for" anything; it just is.

Third, society must force most people to be good, because they won't do it on their own. Every individual's life must be guided by society; without such guidance, they would be evil. Even the rulers must be governed; indeed, the moral restrictions on the rulers must be stronger than those on the ruled. When these moral restrictions on the rulers are removed, they become weak and eventually lose their rule.

Some corollaries emerge from the above principles.

First, although the rulers are, to a certain extent, more good than the ruled, the most important criterion of rule is not virtue but strength. The rulers must have the strength to force the ruled to be good. Because virtue is not the defining characteristic of the rulers, it is not really hypocrisy when some ruler is found to be less than perfect. The rulers, just like the ruled, are struggling with good and evil, and their success in that struggle is not foreordained. What is more important to determine when some ruler indulges in evil is whether he has the strength to overcome it, and the strength to enforce the good on the weaker and more evil.

Second, authority is a fundamental element of society: authority is the act of the strong forcing the weak to be good. To argue against authority is not to argue for a different kind of society or civilization; it is to undermine the very essence of society and civilization.

Finally, the status of women presents two specific challenges. First, women have to be forced to bear children. Childbirth is such a difficult, painful, dangerous task that without strong social coercion, only the few, rare women capable of being good for its own sake would have children, and the human race (or a society that does not force women to have children) would become extinct. More importantly, the natural* role of women is to rear children. Girls have to be nurtured to become nurturing women, and boys have to nurtured for a while before they become men and step up to struggle between good and evil. Nurture, however, is antithetical to the adult male struggle between good and evil, so women (with some exceptions), because they are by nature nurturing, cannot fully participate in the struggle between good and evil.

*Not necessarily biological nature; the role of women might be socially constructed. However, the role of women as the bearers and rearers of children is so pervasive and deeply embedded in all civilized cultures that it might as well be biological.

What conservatives fear about liberals is not that they think liberals have different ideas about what is good and what is evil, it is that liberals abandon the struggle between good and evil. They want to make the rulers decadent and weak so that they cannot perform their primary job of making weaker people, who are more prone to evil, act and be good. Liberals do not argue for a different kind of society, they wish to undermine what it means to be a society, a society of human beings at least. They say they want a society of gods, but men cannot be gods; all we will get is a society of beasts, living in the moment, with no thought for the future. Elite and common alike will abandon the struggle between good and evil, beinging a society of parasites and hosts, all equally morally bereft.

It is precisely because conservatives are trying to uphold the fudamental nature of society that social mores that seem silly and irrelevant to liberals take on such importance to conservatives. Any corruption of the soul makes more corruption easier; steal a dollar and it's much easier to steal the next \$10, \$100, and so on. To say, "It's only a dollar," is to miss the point completely: the amount doesn't matter; the principle matters.

If you don't understand good and evil, and the every-day, every-second struggle as the foundation of society, you don't understand conservatives.

Thinking like a conservative

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part One): Mass Shootings and Gun Control

Despite a continuous flow of examples to the contrary this spring, summer and, now, autumn, our side keeps on wishfully, willfully and rather ignorantly denying the plain evidence in front of their faces about how conservative politics works. Namely, I keep seeing predictions that this, that or the other signal from polls or the political establishment or a traumatized public will “finally” “break the spell” of right-wing extremism on a certain issue, or even on all issues—and then we see that prediction spectacularly fail.

We can’t keep on going this way, my friend. You have to finally come to terms with how conservatism works. Now, that guy in the White House, Obama—I’ve given up hope that he’ll ever get it. I still have faith in you, though. Stop judging conservative by the logic of “normal” politics, or by the epistemology of the world as you, a liberal, understand it. Or as Poli Sci 101 understands it. Every time you do that, you denude us of strength for the fight. Grasp the right on its own terms. Stop trying to make it make sense on your own. . . .

[On gun control,] if you think like a conservative, and you think in terms of good people and evil people, the predominance of evil people makes you want less gun control, and more guns. And if the bad guys have a machine gun, you need a bazooka.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Two): Biding Time on Voting Rights

[A]s Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book The Reactionary Mind, [conservatives understand] that the direction of human history is not on their side&emdash;that is why they are reactionaries&emdash;because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism. They could not survive as a political tendency unless they clothed reaction in liberal raiment. You’ve seen that happen over and over again—like when people like Grover Norquist, whose aim is to roll back the entire welfare state, including Social Security, says what he’s really trying to do is save Social Security.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Three): On Shutting Down Government

This is war for them, folks. Stop pretending to try like it isn’t. William Baroody, head of the American Enterprise Institute, October 1972: conservatism is a “war for the minds of men.” Ralph Reed, November 1991: “I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.”

Perlstein quotes Brent Bozell Jr. who ghostwrote Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative,

“Any election of Barry Goldwater would presuppose a sea change in American public opinion,” as if American society, “prisoners of all those years, succeeded in passing blithely through the walls of Alcatraz and tripping lightly over the shark-infested waters and treacherous currents, to safety on the shore.”

and notes,

Yes: if you were a conservative, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society—Medicare,the National Endowment for the Arts, etc.—was the equivalent of incarceration in Alcatraz. And this was conservatism’s grown-up.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Four): Goalpost-Moving

I’m worried . . . that Obama might not grasp the fundamental nature of the entire modern conservative project. They really do believe that a smoothly functioning federal government is the enemy—a Satanic enemy, for the more theologically minded among them.

Thinking Like a Conservative (Part Five): Epistemology and Empathy

Have you ever noticed how conservatives who say the most controversial things imaginable think no one actually disagrees with them?

They will admit that, yes, people might claim to disagree. But they will explain, if pressed, that those who do so are lying, or nuts, or utter the non-truths they utter out of a totalitarian will to power, or are poor benighted folks cowed or confused by those aforementioned totalitarians. (Which, of course, makes the person “finally” telling “the truth” a hero of bottomless courage.) Or the people who disagree are simply stupid as a tree stump. This is why “agree to disagree” is not a acceptable trope in the conservative lexicon. A genuine right-winger will be so lacking in intellectual imagination—in cognitive empathy—that imagining how anyone could sincerely reason differently from them is virtually impossible.