The Efficiency of Being a Dick

What's the difference between the relationships you have with your close friends and the relationships you have with people you barely know, who you just meet on the street everyday?

Are you nicer to friends than to strangers?

If so, I can't help but to feel a little sorry for you.

When addressing this topic, be forewarned: I approach friendships and relationships as networked connections which exist for the sake of the benefit of the subject. This might be distasteful, as terms like "network" are heavily de-sanctified illustrations of relationships that are extremely important for people. Or, you might like the idea that I have no respect for: that people can be universalist and truly treat all other people equally.

Not true. People treat each other with caution or trust in accordance with experience of those people, their relationship with them. Dunbar's number illustrates that people do not have an endless capacity for relationships. The typical mind seems capable of only maintaining relationships with about 200 people at a time. We are not built to have close, intimate relationships with everyone on Earth. We don't have the capacity, and when I talk about capacity, I mean we don't have the information capacity or the attention. Information capacity matters because humans are complex and understanding who they are requires significant amounts of memory. Attention matters because attention is the interactive connections we make to gather that information, our choices of who to notice and how much to notice them. Depth is essential, and depth takes time and focus.

So, let's structure your friendships a bit. You probably have a handful of relationships that are very close, intimate, where you know this other person as well as they know him or herself. Then there are probably a few good friends that you know well enough to be comfortable around. Then there are a mess of people you know who you are acquainted with in a straightforward, functional manner. Everyone else is essentially a stranger, although certain signals, like clothing or verbal accent, can make you comfortable in the presence of strangers as a result of displayed, shared identity. That's completely normal.

Each of these relationships represents a degree of investment. As I said, depth requires time and focus, and said time and focus are investments made of attention and information capacity on the time dimension. Your best friends and relatives are the most deeply invested in you, and vice versa. With people you just see on the street, once and only once, you just need to maintain a demeanor that defuses conflict. Those behaviors are called "manners".

And there's nothing more irritating than having a close friend who treats you with their "best manners". It means that they look at you like a stranger. It means invested time, attention, and capacity has been wasted.

Intimate Assholes

To some degree, politeness and constructive honesty are inversely related. Unless you are in the middle of a heavy game of emotional warfare, giving a friend information they don't want to hear is probably the strongest indication that you care, that you value them and want to see them succeed so strongly that you are willing to deliver short-term emotional pain for the sake of long-term benefit. 

Is your friend acting like a rude prick to people who could screw up his life? Does he dress terribly or use terminology that will make him look bad? Is he letting himself go, not using the proper level of formality and not maintaining himself when dealing with others, making him look like shit? Is alcohol consumption or drugs ruining his life? (the TV show Intervention exploits this situation for ratings) Is he giving up? Is he overconfident? Is he out of touch and delusional about what life has to offer? Does he have any problem where his subjective interpretation of what's going on is fucking up his prospects for whatever goals he gives a shit about?

You, as a friend, have the invested emotional capital to call him on it and be believed, and hopefully this person will also see what you're doing and appreciate it. This is what friends are for. The individual's awareness of what's going on is extremely fallible to flawed interpretation and misplaced attention. People in tight relationships are supposed to watch out for each other in order to defuse this.

And sometimes, that requires breaking through the ego by calling this person a fucking retard when they aren't seeing reality.

This trust is the wellspring of loyalty. We do not value each other equally, and we cannot. The most trusted are the most valuable, and the interpersonal structures that matter in our lives are the hierarchies of value that we place on one another. From family and tribe outward, they make us who we are, because they control the most relevant and reliable feedback we get from the world. When you really internalize this, you will also internalize just how ludicrous the concept of equality is when extended to our personal lives and evaluations.

Trust in Hierarchy

There is a certain kabuki theater that people play when in social circumstances beyond the intimate that most of us know very well. We nod or say hello as we pass strangers. We chat with new people who might be useful. We love our pleases and thank yous. And we can't stand to be ignored. Such are the expectations when dealing with those we don't know well, or don't know at all. Manners reduce friction when the parts are not used to lining up. 

Think about this in contrast to a group of people who know each other. Specifically, think about a group of men who know each other, where the roles and ranks have been worked out and expectations and actual behaviors DO line up.

Men, specifically men, are wired to deal with hierarchy and its rigors extremely well, because men have had important shit to do for a very long time. Efficiency is key. When legitimate orders are given, you obey. You don't question the judgment of someone who is ostensibly in charge for a good reason and is trying to lead everyone in the same direction. You certainly don't go off Vincent Vega-like and say, "A please would be nice."

Fuck nice. 

Men with some kind of camaraderie give each other shit and test each other all the time when the pressure is off, they haze newbs so that they will be invested in the group by paying dues, but the shallow appearance of meanness underlies real bonds, and an understanding that they're on the same team. For the over-polite individual, they are truly an individual alone and their politeness is bred of caution, fear and uncertainty. "Polite" is what you are when you might get your ass kicked at any time. Women and weak, obsequious men are polite, but men with both strength and character are simply brusque or blunt and don't take any shit. They behave in a way that communicates an expectation that they should be trusted, that they're used to authority and that, with continued trust comes a consistent reinforcing feedback that their actions, words, and judgments have value. This matters: being nice about it does not. Being nice means dancing around the issue at hand, be it social dominance or practical necessity. When these things are worked out, all that is left is to do what needs to be done. Pussies want a nice boss. Men prefer a trustworthy asshole. Men prefer a guy who's right and shows it through confidence to a guy who's nice about being wrong. If you're right, then why phrase your orders as a polite request, as if it would be sensible to decline or argue?

Just say it, man.

This dickishness is economically efficient. Time has a value, and hierarchy which can simply say "go" and expect that shit will happen like it's supposed to runs like a fucking clock. Efficiency comes from trust, understanding, shared values, and the kind of relationships where stopping to talk about the weather and ask how mom 'n them are doin' is a complete waste of time. Manners are not efficient. Manners are like a tax you have to pay in order to minimize the chances of confrontation, or better, like an insurance policy taken out on a day-to-day basis when you live on a flood plain and are particularly vulnerable to the weather. It would be better to live in a place where you know a tornado isn't coming through tomorrow and you can just do what needs to be done without paranoia.

If you want organically reactive speed and you have the self-esteem to do your job without demanding constant emotional support, then you want blunt honesty. You don't want to play the theater of niceness all the time in order to get anything done. You don't want to have to constantly concern yourself with politics. If everyone is on the same page and knows that everyone respects everyone else in their position and capacity - if there is trust - then a chain of command can function smoothly simply by having a boss give an assignment and have it carried out without sweating details. The details are the job of the underbosses. There need not be any pleases, thank yous, chatting about your kids in order to put people in a mindset to where they want to listen and be inspired to do their job. A task is understood to be important if you trust the judgment of the boss, as proper hierarchical attention distribution means that he's looking at the big picture, and dedicating his resources - his employees - to getting it done. The employee focuses on handling the mechanics of the job; the boss assigns the job because the boss' role is to figure out what needs to be done in order to achieve larger goals.

And yet, today, we would prefer there be no hierarchy, or that our understanding of leadership should look like what's on the bottom:

Now, we want to be inspired.

Of course, this is impossible. The boss can't be on the ground with you: he has other employees, too. The boss can't spend time explaining himself and personally motivating every swinging dick that handles the actual grunt work; it would completely subvert the entire concept of specialization. A boss on the ground pretending to do menial labor is a politician looking for a photo op: God help the idiot culture that comes to value such naked bullshit.

The idea behind it, of course, is that you will work harder for someone you like, that you will empathize with someone who empathizes with you. And wow, can you ever tell women are in the workplace these days. This is what a woman thinks of as "making it personal". Not men.

Getting men to accept the hierarchy requires one of two things: trust, or a sense of duty. No boss in charge of more than 200 people has the time or attention to go around gaining some deep personal trust from every one of them individually, or explaining the logical necessity of every action. That doesn't mean that a good boss won't listen to concerns from his subordinates, but even this must be a matter of his judgment. There is an opportunity cost to spending time and attention listening to someone talk, and most people, consciously or not, will be serving their own interests more than the larger body's interests if given an audience. In organizations with thousands of people, no one can afford to listen to all these issues in any kind of truly personal fashion. The boss must be the boss. There are middle managers, supervisors, and sergeants to handle the personal elements of leadership, although eventually, that will chafe too, as the powerlessness of your immediate supervisor will only remind you of the greater powerlessness you have as an individual.

So duty - an expectation based on rank with justification beyond personal interests - is the go-to drive that motivates obedience in groups larger than the 200 limit of Dunbar's number. Intimacy drives personal actions at the tribal level or lower. Duty, with a built-up sense of legitimacy, drives actions for a society at a larger level. It has taken thousands of years of conditioning, the innovations of organized religion, and the occasional use of blunt force trauma to make societies bigger than the tribe work. Napoleon was not just being an asshole when he gave the Parisians a taste of grapeshot. He saw a society disordered and broken, and fixed it with extreme prejudice. There was no time for anything else.

And that works. We live in an era when hierarchies at work and elsewhere are supposed to be getting leveled and where the boss is trying to be one of the guys. It's an unmitigated disaster that sets the ego of every fool into overdrive and cuts down the ability of every boss, no matter how skillful or knowledgeable, to get anything done without having to be an ass-kissing politician. If the Japanese proverb is true and business is war, then Western society is setting itself up for a degree of failure it has never known before.

Excessive Manners Reflect Alienation

In a society becoming more global and less local, our understanding of justice is becoming far more depersonalized, and there is a certain price to pay in efficiency for that. Not financial efficiency, but interpersonal efficiency. Interactions between the genders, the races, old and young, rich and poor, politician and politician, and all the groups that have any cause for animosity become more and more strained as they know each other less intimately and their demonizing imaginations take over. We align official justice with our sense of empathy, the feminized position; in a society where expectations are neither clearly understood nor rational, this is all that can really exist.

The intense alienation of the modern West comes from undeveloped relationships, due to attention distribution well outside of the parochial. There are few things sadder than someone with an intense interest in world issues but no personal life. Among the things that are sadder are people who care about celebrities without knowing their neighbors or being able to count on their friends. The bigger the circle of awareness becomes for people, the more global in scope, the less intimate and, of course, the more flawed the perspective, as no one can really understand anything of these larger issues outside of what they "learn" through the media. Attention is a scarce resource.

This, among other reasons, is why democracy sucks. You don't know that asshole you just elected. You know that asshole's media image. How do you know the difference between the ones who are competent and hard-nosed, and the ones that are just assholes? Because you watched a debate and saw the look in their eyes?

The look in their eyes has been focus-grouped within an inch of its life, you dumbshit.

That delusional sense of intimacy only finds traction in a society where close relationships are lacking. Some people on the left literally do not understand the difference between localized social support systems and centralized welfare bureaucracies. They want to see America as one big happy fuckin' family. 

This attitude leads to a people who are entirely too sure of their rights in the larger world, despite their low contribution to the big picture, but who are deeply insecure in their personal lives. They know people judge them, but they don't know how. They don't know what people like or value. They don't know what the hell they're doing.

The normal, natural way of life for people is to live in a world that is environmentally insecure, that requires work, but with secure relationships. Today, that's been reversed: our relationships are insecure as we live in a world that is excessively secure. That shouldn't be surprising. As the world becomes more secure, those relationships end up with a lower value, because they are less necessary. Secure relationships are built on mutual need, and if the only needs we have are emotional, then only the ass-kissers thrive in the larger world by winning PR games, while real friendships become more and more rare. We're looking at relationships like women: our interactions exist to promote our self-esteem, to make us feel good about ourselves. That makes our relationships shallower, just like it leads to a more shallow knowledge of the self, given how little fully honest feedback we receive. This can only happen in a world where reality can be safely ignored, a world under too comprehensive a state of control.

Somewhere in here, we crossed a threshold into solipsism where we believe it to be just that the world exists to serve our emotional state, instead of being participants in a society fighting to ensure the continued survival of something more than our individual self. We lose connection to the world as a result. 

The identity of the individual relies on the parochial. You are who you are as a member of a group of people who values you, in the sense of real, instrumental value, because you DO something. If you have value just because you are a human being and all human beings have value the world over, then your bullshit alarm should be blaring right in your ear. There are over seven billion people in the world. The value of anything is reduced the more of it there is. With that many people around and no role to differentiate you, no characteristics that make you uniquely worthy of investment by others, how much value do you actually have?

Because of this, I celebrate the assholes. I celebrate real friends. I celebrate the Sancho Panzas and the disillusioned prick with Truth Tourette's. I celebrate real bosses. I celebrate the hard-nosed father, the coach who yells when you fuck up the play, the teacher who calls you out and embarrasses you to prod you into doing homework, the boss who gets right to it without asking if your needs are being met, the no-bullshit drill sergeant who will not only tell you that you're doing it wrong, but will smoke the shit out of you in order to reinforce the point. They will make you feel bad, because they assume you can do better. And in most cases, you can.

Seasteading and Independence

Happy 4th o' July, kids!

To celebrate this, our glorious American Independence Day, I'm going to talk about one of the more interesting ideas that I've become smitten with since hanging around with libertarians: seasteading. Just look at this idea porn!

Awesome.

Seasteading basically means creating more-or-less permanent societies in international waters, outside the direct jurisdiction of any given national government. It's colonizing the oceans. It's government, hell, it's society through the ethics of a start-up business. Libertarians are in love. So am I, for totally different reasons.

This guy here seems stricken with the idea that a society on the water would need to have infrastructure as if it was on land, because obviously, we would need to have cars, and therefore highways, to seastead. That's much better than boats. Then there's electricity: it's so incredibly difficult to run power lines out to new members of a community or withdraw them from those who are leaving. Same for internet, because wireless hasn't been invented yet.

Then there's his idea that an ocean community would wake up one day to find itself having been moved to a totally different aquatic location, because people in positions of power just do goofy shit like that all the time, especially when no one's looking. I think Mr. Lee might be mentally retarded. Either that, or, as a young child, he fell down and fractured his imagination, which never healed properly. Until it became truly massive, any seasteading community would probably look more like Venice than NYC, and thank God for that.

Other commenters have brought up a more sensible worry, at least for them: these seasteading communities would be basically akin to either manors or medieval towns, and the result of all this would be some form of neo-feudalism. I agree. I just don't think that certain ideas like lifetime indenture or pure slavery would be making a comeback, and otherwise, I don't see feudalism as an insult. Feudalism basically meant a system of authority by property instead of by democratic fiat. Fine by me!

As I've said before, I have no problem taking capitalism over democracy.

What I don't pretend about seasteading are a couple of points that libertarians seem to really be in love with that I think are absurd. One is increased economic welfare due to non-involvement by the government. The other related point is that seastead communities would be so easy to leave, the frictional costs of uprooting so low, that an almost boundlessly fluid individualism would be created.

Nope, and nope.

With the first, it depends on who you talk to. Feudalism comes to mind because anyone who is not landed - aka, anyone without a boat capable of indefinitely long-term living - would be at the mercy of those who had the infrastructure to survive. Those with said infrastructure might bring people in with work and pay, into safe arrangements (like villeins on manors). That's not always a bad way to live, but it would not be a material improvement over our current society, unless you happen to be the one in possession of the infrastructure. Voters like the easy life, and we've given it to them. It would be no easier to find on the ocean, and given the rigors of living with no arable land, no fresh water, dealing with barnacle and salt corrosion and the occasional massive storm, seasteading would certainly be more difficult.

You don't go out and live on a man-made hunk in the middle of nowhere, with no resources, because you're a utilitarian and you want your life to be easier. You go for some other reason.

For the second point, there would have to be ideological commonalities between people to get them cooperating long enough to make this work. That could easily develop, because frictional costs to leave would not be lower than they are on dry land. Probably quite the opposite, which would help to establish some hierarchical stability. The libertarian set might not like it, but if seasteaders turn out to be the kind of brats who will pull up anchor and break off their personal relationships for "greener pastures" every time they feel "oppressed" or their mutualism costs go up by 3%, then they will never be able to invest in a community and establish a damn thing, and not being able to do that would mean getting their economic and military ass handed to them on a very regular basis. The only way a seasteading community would have a chance in hell is to be economically strong, trading with other societies on beneficial terms. Any advantage of low taxes is probably offset by the complete lack of exploitable natural resources other than fish and sea salt, so you'd need a hell of a work ethic and a willingness to cooperate. If you think this happens without infrastructure, including social infrastructure, then you're a fool. If you think the government is hurting its own people in these areas now by wickedly and horridly oppressing them, then you might be a paranoid schizophrenic and you need to shut up and take the meds.

The people who are best equipped for this sort of thing are not libertarians. Getting cooperation out of libertarians in the face of political disagreement, for the sake of some greater good, usually turns out to be like herding cats, and it would take someone with all the bullshit tolerance of a drill sergeant to put them in line, defeating the purpose from their perspective. No, the people best equipped for this are A) the devout religious types, and B) men who are tired of paying for the feminist welfare state. In other words, the people who could make this work are the people who have a problem with modern liberal society in principle.

This brings to mind those sexy Puritans, with their belt buckle hats and pimp shoes.

For the faithful, no rigor is too great for the freedom to build a society according to the perceived wishes of their God. For men, we might have to pay through the nose for mail-order brides until we dominate trade with the withered husk of the landlubber societies, but we can deal with it. The prostitution business will probably explode, but it's better than the current state of things if you want respect more than comfort.

But that, of course, is why this hasn't happened yet. The vast, vast majority of people very strongly prefer comfort to respect, or anything else. The technologies for seasteading exist. It could have been done decades ago. But it hasn't been done, because that shit is hard. Not enough people hate the status quo enough to really make it happen and tolerate the incredible amount of work and risk necessary to really break contact. It will be hard, very hard, to make this happen.

I'm interested in it, but I don't see it as likely really soon. The Seasteading Institute is supposed to have something up and running in 2014 in the San Francisco Bay area. We'll see.

Anyway, it is Independence Day. So for all of you for whom freedom means living on easy street, take some time this 4th of July to hoist a beer to America for taking care of your fat ass. For those for whom freedom means having something of your own, the prerogative to create a new culture built on ideas that are worth taking a chance for, then start drafting your boat plans. TSI might be a good option for you. You will be in a minority, but it won't be boring. Would you really want anything else?

Secular Humanism and the Belief Problem

The term "secular humanism" has had a colorful history in law, which is appropriate given that it's America's dominant ethical perspective.

There is a formal secular humanist organization in America, and it has very few members. They act like a church, in the sense of having services and an ethos, but they don't subscribe to any Godly metaphysics.

Now, immediately forget about them. That's not who I'm talking about, and that tiny, pointless organization provides nothing but distraction on this issue. I'm talking about people who are secular humanists, not just the people who self-identify as secular humanists. Which means liberals.

And liberals are secular humanists. Just think about the terms. Do they support secular policies? Clearly. Do they subscribe to a moral view that could be considered humanist? Definitely.

Espousing effective utilitarianism, for lack of any other social goal? Check.
Occasionally getting pissed at other people's judgmentalism? Check.
Extremely excitable about the separation of church and state, even where the issue doesn't exist? Check.
Totally unconcerned about the relationship of religion to science, taking science's side when conflicts come up, saying religion must "evolve" or lose relevance? Check.
Preference for "underdog" religions, if any religion must be tolerated? Check.
Hears stuff about "be fruitful and multiply" and hates it, because something something global population is too damn high? Check.
Conflates freedom of religion with freedom FROM religion? Check.
The occasional, casual comparison between religion and military brainwashing research? Check.
Uses the term "open-minded" a lot, especially when talking positively about people like themselves? Check.
Does not actually refer to himself as a humanist, but wonders how anyone could possibly have a problem with humanism, as it's so obviously a sensible view? Check.

Lots of people hold these opinions, and don't think of their worldview as secular humanism. They think their worldview is just reasonable, the modern view, unimpeachable, everything else is based on hocus pocus. That's secular humanism. Like any successful faith, it becomes so dominant that people do not really question it. They just absorb it from their interactions with the world, and think every sensible person thinks the same way. Of course, it's a cultural phenomenon.

Their concepts bear some resemblance to what Hayek called "scientism". But scientism is somewhat different: a purely scientific view posits that people are organisms which operate as any other organism that can be studied, understood, and controlled in that context. These are the people that view the mind as the byproduct of brain functions that occasionally misfire, the kind of people who have no problem looking at a sociopath or Cluster B personality and prescribing drugs. Somehow, this point of view does not make it impossible to take human authorities who pretend to impossible wisdom seriously.

The decision not to actually call themselves secular humanists is strategic. When you define a group, you allow it to be attacked as a group, and that's the problem. The left in America knows perfectly well that, were their views to take on a name, they could be grouped up and stereotyped and pounced on, with far greater ease than they are now. They won't let themselves be labeled. This is a propaganda war. They would rather be seen as neutralists, taking no side at all, making no principled judgments at all, being pragmatically interested only in utilitarian welfare for all, above the fray. And there is no such thing when talking about matters of not just whether you go to church, but whether you see the world the same way those around you do. There is no "none of the above" position. Everyone looks at the world in SOME way, and the best term in existence that describes the ideology and worldview of modern liberals is secular humanism.

Their unwillingness to identify themselves as such is dishonest and dishonorable, and that's what I despise in them. They will not stand for anything.

The activist atheist wing of liberalism is its own set of problems. This excellent article by Jim Goad pretty much expresses my point of view.

The longer I look at the debate going on here, the more I agree with John Locke, for once: atheists are troublemakers.

You can bring up the first amendment if you like, but it really doesn't say much about interactions between people. It limits the government... and just the government. The first amendment gives people peace of mind when it comes to the government taking action against them for their beliefs. But that's it. It doesn't imply overwhelming public secularism, and any investigation into the intent of the founders will make that clear. If a community has a dominant religion, then it's allowed to have it, and those who disagree are protected from having the local government jail them or charge them with a crime for not believing. That's all. If you try to extend the principle out to mean that all religious practice should be kept out of the public sphere, then you have to understand that the public sphere comes into existence any time people interact anywhere except on their private property, meaning in most of their day to day interactions. Were "freedom of religion" to be enforced here, meaning no one "pushing their religion on others", then it means that religion is not free but effectively outlawed and talking about belief is on its way to becoming taboo. Atheists win. Of course, they know this.

The real issue for these atheists, these secular humanists, is not avoiding the formal establishment of religion but in altering the religious marketplace. Religions with high subscription have an innate advantage over religions that are smaller, and also over non-religion. The secular humanists want government to play the same role with religion that they want it to play with business: anti-monopoly, promoting the highest possible level of choice, forms of regulation. Any form of social influence from religion is to be squashed, which nullifies the positive, binding effects of religion. That is explicitly what the founders did not want government doing: interfering with the religious marketplace. Hegemony, or lack thereof, is not the government's business from this perspective, but in the modern world, where government provides structures like schooling, the issue becomes much more difficult because of the tremendous degree of interference the government plays in people's lives.

The separation of church and state, for the modern atheist, means an outward hostility towards religion as a civil matter, and as a public choice, from the government and through the government to the populace. Now, if you view atheism as just another choice of beliefs in the maisma, then it's gained a degree of power that IS a violation of the separation of church and state. An economist might call this "regulatory capture": the simpler term is "corruption".

But that may be going too far as to their intention. They aren't looking to monopolize atheism. What's more likely is an attitude towards Christianity specifically which places it in the same vein of consumer goods. They don't want to get rid of it exactly, just de-institutionalize it. Christianity has been a social institution for centuries here, which in the way of a powerful corporation, should mean influence but not by government fiat, rather through the aggregated choices of individuals. A Christian society may not establish religion in the same way the English government did with the Anglican church, but if the religion describes a worldview, then the beliefs will show themselves in the behavior of the people, including through the vote. That's what the atheists want gone, and they've already succeeded to a great degree.

There are secular humanists who go to church on Sunday and call themselves Christian in conversations or questionnaires. They go to church, but don't view church as what it says it is, a belief system; they view it like a club. They do not see it as being truth in a way which morally demands that they defend its position in the world. They do not promote it, which makes their "faith" something less than a faith. It's merely a preference, at most a symbolic element for their otherwise rationalist, secularist modern worldview. A true Christian is morally obligated by their worldview to spread the Word; when you see how archaic this position is, you might realize how much ground Christianity has lost since at least the 1960's, and really, since the Protestant Reformation half a millenium ago. Evangelizing for religion, just about any religion, is currently looked down upon by cultural tastemakers. Evangelizing for no faith at all is perfectly acceptable.

I'm not a Christian. Even if I really wanted to be, I couldn't; my mind simply will not take the metaphysics seriously. I've been tempted to call this the rational viewpoint, but really, it's just my subjective viewpoint and it's a product of living in the society I live in. For those genuinely interested in open-mindedness, start here: it's all shakier than you think it is, the certainty of the modern world, the control we think we have over it, the comfort with which we think we get how things work... Dig in a bit, and realize that we know very little, and our way of life is not only unproven, but continually causing problems.

Are you sure you know what you know? Are you sure that the secular humanist way, where God is relegated to the role of a product on the shelves, is really an improvement? Or does the lack of a shared worldview beyond the consumerist have a hand in the alienation and constant inability to agree on anything that our current society is dealing with now?

A question that occurred to me came from reading the law history of secular humanism at the top of the page, and seeing the case where the Bible may be studied for its "literary and historical" qualities in public schools. Since Christians view this book as sacred, the question should be asked: does this constitute harm to the faith, to take a sacred text and analyze it or read it without affirming or even mentioning its possible sacredness? In other words, would a young Christian who study the Bible in school as simply a book end up with a perspective that undermines the high value placed on that book by his faith? This is one of those areas where the inherent conflict between religion and secularism seems very bright to me. If you have a view on this, email me or comment.

Defending the One Percent... Poorly

I guess this had to happen. At a time when income inequality is back on the table for discussion, economist M. Greg Mankiw, author of a couple of well-known beginner's economics textbooks, decided to write a paper defending the reviled "1%".

There aren't many surprises here. The notion of there being a trade-off between equality and efficiency is very old and I've addressed it myself; Mankiw chooses Pareto efficiency, like any other fairly conservative economist, as a starting point for distributive justice. He references Stiglitz' work on equality of opportunity, and paints it as a legitimate goal before pointing out that it's basically impossible because of both tangible factors like IQ and intangible ones like behavior of parents in the household.

The beginning analogy, which he writes as if it's revolutionary, is a direct copy of Nozick's Chamberlain Argument as applied to well known contemporary names like Jobs, Spielberg, and JK Rowling. And yet, he doesn't mention Nozick at all, despite later bringing up Nozick's arch-competitor, John Rawls. Why? Possibly because he doesn't want to remind the reader that his argument is less original than a paint-by-number portrait of a sailboat.

Naturally, plenty of people aren't buying this. A featured comment at The Economist points out a number of problems with the paper from a perspective more sympathetic to Rawls and without the parroting of Nozick; this seems to be the standard response from those on the left. But a particular irritant of the entire business to me is the constant referencing from both commentators like this one, and from Mankiw in his paper, about "just desserts".

We know this idea intuitively: you earned what you have because of your contribution to society. Mankiw thinks the markets reflect this. The left thinks it's a crock of shit. (also on that page: CEO's that look like movie villains! Gotta love the Huffington Post.)

This is one reason I was on the left for so many years. The just desserts concept is garbage.

You know perfectly well that you did not choose the circumstances you grew up in, the upbringing you got, the genes you inherited, the experiences you lived through. The "distribution" of all these things both makes us who we are and is completely arbitrary, lacking in metaphysical justification. We are products of circumstance. That doesn't affect the reality of the equality-efficiency trade-off or the need to legitimize a hierarchy to preserve order and get shit done, but it makes for a tremendous propaganda line to get people riled up about how they aren't getting "what they deserve".

Here's the thing, though. Just because our place in the world stems from arbitrary circumstance doesn't mean that it implies egalitarian wealth distribution or some other institutional policy is in order to ease people's pain. Nihilism doesn't imply anything. If we're talking helping people who are in a bad spot as a matter of personal ethical principle, institutionalizing help just depersonalizes the entire experience of altruism. That altruism has value precisely because it was a choice, not because it was a gun-to-the-head requirement of a mob-rule government. The people who say differently have chosen to place their preferred institution - government - above the institutions built on consent, like business, religion, and family. They've chosen populism over individual rights... when it suits their purposes. It's a power grab, and nothing more. In the big scheme, there are no "just desserts", and manipulating that concept is equally disingenuous on both sides.

A Better Defense

The liberal perspective is the one related to social justice ideas. The anchor for these ideas has been driving egalitarians for years: the economy exists to create maximum utility for all involved, and the benefit of an extra dollar of income for those making very little is much greater than for those with serious wealth. From the Rawlsian "original position", this is intuitively fair.

We need not discuss how ad-hoc and deceptively unimaginative the Rawlsian original position is. Basically, it's an endorsement for government by empathy, and therefore, government with equality as a perpetual goal; there is no built-in limit of how far you can take redistribution for the sake of people's utility. Rawls didn't say that, but that's how it works out when you place things like "self-esteem" as entitlements your culture owes you; the wealth gap can shrink to a fraction of what it is now, and still, that CEO earning twice your fast food income might just make you feel bad about yourself.

And that has to be an issue here, because this debate features some of the worst elements of relativism on both sides. I can say with confidence is that the American people are not getting ripped off by the private sector in their economy. The vast bulk of this country's population, including those in low-level occupations, can afford a home of some kind with power, running and heated water, HVAC, plush carpet and plusher beds; they can afford two cars with insurance; they can afford to frequently eat out two meals a day; they can afford Starbucks lattes and two dollar bottled water, web-connected iPhones and clothing that costs 200% more than comparable stuff because of the name on the label. They waste enough to keep the storage unit industry, a business made up largely of storing crap people buy and don't use, earning $22 billion annually. Think about all the places this money could be going, but isn't. Meanwhile, they expect someone else, employer or government, to handle their education, healthcare, and retirement expenses as a matter of living in a civilized country. The recession hasn't affected this very much that I can see.

The 1% typically invest their money into new industries, and that's a standard feature of a capitalist system. They aren't doing it now because spending is down. If the idea here is to boost spending through redistribution using Keynesian logic, and supposedly kick off a recovery, then we've tried it already. The price tag was $787 billion dollars. The liberals complained that it wasn't enough. Sorry, I'm not shedding any tears about the government not having enough economic influence. But the upside of our increasing taxes and stinginess with government money is that we've made progress in trimming this year's projected deficit to just $744 billion. If there's a reason to raise taxes, that's it. I don't really object to more taxes on the rich; the actual number is also arbitrary and people get used to it, whatever it is. But I object to the leftist thinking used to justify changing it.

The real reason why the distribution of wealth isn't "unjust" is much simpler and much more devastating and it will never sell. It's because justice is subjective, and we are not supposed to impose self-serving, subjective viewpoints on individuals here, as a matter of the system's philosophical consistency. This country's entire legal structure is based on individualism. Markets are the way our economy creates wealth, and markets operate individualistically. Whether or not it's "just" for people to get out of the markets what they can is irrelevant so long as they do so under conditions of consent.

The justice question will always come down to the personal opinion of whoever you ask, and that gets really messy, really quick. Your opinion can be affected by whether you grew up in LA or Kentucky, by whether your third cousin got laid off last week, by your decision to skip breakfast this morning. It's just a personal opinion; you wouldn't know enough about these people to determine what they deserve, even if you had a consistent ideal. The government doesn't exist to serve your personal opinions. It exists to preserve order, and everything else is a matter of convincing people to take action within the context of consent. If people wanted to take money away from the 1%, they should organize and stop buying the wares that the wealthy are peddling; if they can't stop, then it's time to accept that they've been bought and paid for, or that the system is working. Every purchase is a stamp of approval on what that business is doing.

Liberals hate this kind of individualism, which they consider an excuse to not care about people. But when the conversation shifts from economic policy to social policy, that goes right out the window. The family can get burned to the ground to give women more social power, and the losers in this situation are told "tough shit". Religion can get beaten into submission by secularism, undermining the value of religion in culture and probably dooming it in the long run while implicitly encouraging the ostracism of its followers, and they think they're doing the world a favor while destroying not only centuries of tradition, but a huge part of the basis for community identity. Old people can rot in nursing homes, as long as they get their fucking Medicare; no one, including their children, has to treat them with respect, as the prevailing culture of raw narcissism undermines the values of the elderly at a rapid pace. You can believe what you want, say what you want, fuck who you want, speak out against everything, no matter who it offends or alienates. Individual obligations to others have gotten no help from liberalism.

Only by looking at "caring about people" as a matter of giving them comfort and material possession, the most vapid possible definition of care imaginable, can liberals square this circle. They have to become hedonistic nihilists, allowing a culture of pure permissiveness out of a sense of compassion, in order to "do the right thing" here. The right thing is, invariably: prop up the weak, attack the strong, burn your traditions, abandon cultural identity, let everyone do what they want.

Liberal social policy is ALL ABOUT creating a totally individualistic society. It's ALL ABOUT protecting the most repugnant people from criticism and picking winners as a matter of attention span rent-seeking from media and education institutions. Liberal social policy has enabled more people to look at their society's values and tell it to go fuck itself than any other force in American history. So explain to me why I should give a shit, why I should be required to give a shit, about some people's subjective understanding of what constitutes "social justice" in the economy, by all means.

Having said all this, I wish Mankiw would have kept his mouth shut. In the game of public relations, hierarchy simply loses today and nothing this twit has said will make the slightest difference to that. In fact, by saying his little peace, he's thrown gasoline on the liberal self-righteousness fire, giving them something to point to and scream about. From a strategic perspective, it's stupid and counterproductive.

Mankiw's an idiot, although his ideas can be hilarious. That guy writing at the Economist was right: the 1% needs better defenders. ANY other defenders would do, really.

Two Stories: The Graduate and Family

I spend most of my blog space writing about Western culture, but here and there, I manage to post something about Japan or China, as I'm just as fascinated with the East. I'm going to do a simple comparison of two stories the Western and Eastern cultures have produced at times of upheaval.

Both stories highlight the perceived failures of the past order and the uncertainty and newness of the breakout generation in terms of personal struggle. The American book is The Graduate, by Charles Webb, which was turned into an extremely beloved movie starring Dustin Hoffman. The Chinese book will be Family, by Pa Chin, which I had the good fortune of being introduced to in a class on contemporary east Asian history, otherwise I may never have heard of it.

The Graduate

The plot and purpose of The Graduate revolves around the main character, Ben Braddock, and his struggles to build his life in the face of his traditionalist family's expectations. It's a celebrated work of the American counterculture movement in the 1960's. The movie launched Hoffman's career and the Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack turned the name Mrs. Robinson into something... weird.

The plot serves the interest of describing a state of mind that's reacting to the old ways. Ben, for those of you who haven't read the book, is a recent college graduate who goes home to discover that he has little in common with his family and hometown friends, and doesn't want the life he's being offered by them. He is pulled into an affair with the vaunted Mrs. Robinson, who is extremely unsatisfied with her marriage and really her entire life. Ben doesn't like sleeping with her, and decides he wants her daughter, Elaine, which creates some heavy drama. All these characters are, in some sense, looking for authentic, existential meaning. Ben is essentially being offered the blue-blooded dream, to include social connections and a place among the kind of people who were then still America's elite. He has opportunity, by the conventions of the time, but he doesn't like those conventions and wants something different for himself.

A couple of points to make from a more recent perspective. First, a recent college graduate might look at Ben with envy just for having any comfortable opportunities; graduates today, particularly undergraduates, don't always get jobs of any kind, let alone jobs they are passionate about. So that perspective gets an update, although there's still plenty of entitlement in today's kids. Also, for those who haven't read the book and have only seen the movie, Hoffman does miracles with Ben's character, because the guy is a flat-out douchebag in the book. He's too much of a prick to even bother trying to justify his disinterest in meeting the family friends in the book's opening scene, where they've thrown him a party; he just wants to be alone with his emptiness, and he feels no sense of obligation to go down and thank all these people for coming and wishing him well. Hoffman makes Ben polite and concerned to a much greater degree, and it helps that he is an approachable, Jewish-looking kid in the film. Ben was actually written as a tall Aryan; this would not have worked in the film, as movie-going audiences don't really like entitled, blue-blooded Aryan assholes. Hoffman softened this considerably and made the character empathetic and likable.

The movie is, quite simply, better than the book as a matter of consumer entertainment. David Fincher used it as inspiration for the movie version of Fight Club, which is my favorite film and makes for an interesting contrast. Existential authenticity is basically its own genre now: the great period for films of this nature in my memory was 1999, the year of three highly anti-establishment films that entered the pop culture lexicon with distinct force. The first was, of course, Fight Club. The other two were American Beauty and The Matrix, the first a deconstruction of the new establishment lifestyle in the suburbs in search of meaning, and the second a pure escapist fantasy which presented the mundane as a trap, built by machines, sucking the energy from the populace as awakened freedom fighters kicked ass in the most stylish possible way.

These movies came less than forty years after The Graduate, and turned the seeker mentality up to eleven. American establishments don't last long. The anti-establishment ethos of the baby boomers never did vanish or get comfortable with order. It's worth mentioning that 1999 was the peak of dotcom hubris and of the net generation's power in earnings and culture.

David Brooks pointed out how much of the boomer attitude can be found in The Graduate when he wrote Bobos in Paradise: whatever that generation wanted, it wasn't what was being offered. There was a deep loathing of family obligation and ancestor worship, ordered patriarchy, the soft prejudices of the time, and various forms of stoic restraint heaped onto America's hierarchical masters. This was a generation seeking a more existential satisfaction from work, relationships, and life generally. The movie's ending scene, with Mrs. Robinson telling her daughter, "It's too late!" and Elaine responding with "Not for me!" tells much of the thematic story: the kids saw the old world as oppressive death, and would walk away from their elders to save themselves from it.

Family

The plot and purpose of Family revolves very loosely around the main character, Kao Chueh-hui, and his struggles to build his life in the face of his traditionalist family's expectations. It's a celebrated work of the May 4th Movement in China, although it's unknown to the vast majority of Americans. There is a long list of characters, including Chueh-hui's two brothers, a couple of cousins, servants, mom and patriarchal dad, etcetera. Pa Chin was a radical who was influenced by Western ideas quite strongly, a great speaker for a society squirming upon the introduction of different perspectives.

The similarities outweigh the differences, but the differences are instructive. The characters in Family also held a deep loathing of family obligation and ancestor worship, ordered patriarchy, the hard prejudices of the time, and various forms of stoic restraint heaped onto both China's patriarchs and those subject to them. Family is a classic and a more complete book, and the attitude is different, but still recognizable.

It's incredibly emotional writing; you'll eventually lose track of all the characters that break down and cry, and there are several deaths, including by passion-maddened suicide. But much of the plotting is about issues we know very well; young love abounds and the oppression of the old on the young, the "traps of conservatism", are shown in the lives of essentially every character. Chueh-hui, the most rebellious and aggressive proponent of the new ideas, saves himself while other family members typically fall into the traps or die trying to escape them.

Chueh-hui is something of a little bastard, smart-mouthed, having all the answers at a very young age. The character is not exactly stock, but fits well enough into a mold that he makes a good contrast against his eldest brother, Chueh-hsin, who took on the duties of filial piety and hates them, but lives with his head bowed. Chueh-hsin's fate is sealed, but other characters occasionally fight back, or try to find various ways to scheme the lives they want into existence.

The book exemplifies the period when the first elements of Western-style individualism come into vogue over the established, familistic Confucianism, and there's a huge gulf to bridge. Restrictions and obligations are far more severe here: arranged marriage tragically befalls several characters, the girls want to go to school but cannot, and class holds an importance we simply would not understand in our society. The young characters all hold strong ideals, and the conflicts between them and their elders is fundamentally cultural but intimately personal. The imagery is superb when it needs to be: hearing of her own impending marriage from her mother, a female character, Chin, produces a startlingly powerful vision of her society's treatment of her sex and the cost in happiness women pay for tradition:

Before her eyes there suddenly appeared a lengthy highway stretching to infinity, upon which were lain spreading corpses of young women. It became clear to her that this road was built thousands of years ago; the earth on the road was saturated with the blood and tears of those women.

Chin seriously considers allowing herself to end up on this road, with her mother, just to keep her company, and while there's no shortage of strident disgust with the status quo in this book, there's also no shortage of love for the elders who push the cultural rules that are so hated. It's both strident and complex. The excesses of Confucianism, especially in regards to women, are not exaggerated. Foot-binding is contemporary to this period, as is practical slavery for many people, albeit not quite the cruel and base slavery practiced in the ugliest Western periods. My continued respect for Confucian values can't make an emotional argument in the face of this, only a coldly rational one; such views will never be popular in a world of mass media.

Final Summation

Both stories center on wealthy households, true to the life experiences of the authors and symbolic of the richness of the old culture they fight. Both stories happen at a time of significant cultural change. Both stories have characters caught in generational struggles and celebrate the ideals of youth. They're both good stories, in a significant but limited sense.

Compared to the story of Family, the struggles of the characters in The Graduate are more abstract and less convincing. "Spoiled" doesn't quite cover it; there's a real degree of thanklessness and the worst case examples of relativity in quality of life operating in the West. If you think of social progress as being incremental stages towards equality and ease, then it's easy to think of the state of Western culture as superior to that of China; the time difference, 1920's versus 1960's, doesn't account for it all. If you think of social progress as being more about ultimate meaning, then the crisis is deeper in the West, precisely for the pitfalls of ease which are being overcome on the road towards satisfaction. The Americans have so much, and the price paid is rather miniscule; fighting it can only be done as a matter of pure intuition.

The Chinese characters are bound by a unified love of new ideas that create some shared identity among them; they are rebels with a cause. In the West, the characters are isolated; they are facing, and participating in, something much uglier, a more total collapse of outward-focused duties and obligations of inherited civil society.

About the authors: it's worth mentioning that both men held strong convictions and seemed to have stuck by them where they could. Charles Webb, clearly seeking his own brand of authenticity, has lived a hell of a life, to say the least, not at all the charmed success story you would expect from the author of a book that became a film with serious box-office revenue. But nevertheless, he's owned his life, denying responsibility for nothing. His existence has been an almost goofy mess, but it's been his mess.

Pa Chin was an anarchist, and his personal story is intense. His real name was Li Yaotang, and he lived to be 100, with a generous portion of those years spent being harassed by the Communist Chinese government. His wife was denied medical care and died as a result. Yaotang was forced to renounce his anarchism, then changed his mind when China opened up just enough for this to be safe. He was eventually given some dues as an elder statesman of the written word by his people. The man saw some shit, most of it after the book was published.

As a personal matter, I admire both works and the men who created them. And I understand: I've lived with my own stultifying expectations. Of course I understand. I've been young before. I've wanted to break out. I've been certain that there was more, much more, than a life lived within the confines of my culture; that's an important justifying element of rebellion. But I've also considered that I could be wrong about all of it, that this urge to throw off the shackles comes from nothing more than my own deep-seated desire for empowerment, and there's nothing more noble to it than egoism. The attitudes of the sympathetic characters in both of these books comes down to a myopic emotionalism masquerading as enlightenment.

Digging deep and being realistic leaves you with the sour reality that this is not a complete social ethos and cannot be. The hippies were wrong; existentialism can only be a reaction, not a status quo. The characters in both books were optimists, as kids often are; such an attitude makes a character engaging, relatable, and promises endearing conflict, great for fiction and real-world activism alike. But likable and enlightened are two different things.

It's hard to tell, with both books, if the underlying ideal is the choice of love or the love of choice. The choice of love is taken for granted by modern generations who know they should pursue their desires in matters of relationships and career, and the joblessness and divorce of modern America has to give a sensible person some pause as the ideas spread to the rest of the world. The love of choice is so core to what we consider morally and personally right that it's impossible for most people to imagine a world without it, let alone a good life.

But the struggle defines the individual, and these stories are not of high quality because they have happy endings; that's a disgustingly bourgeois idea. These stories are tragedies, and they can only belong in that category. 

Innocence

Your birth certificate is proof of guilt.   -George Carlin

It will not surprise anyone who frequents this blog to know that I don't think much of the concept of innocence. It may be slightly more surprising to know that my distaste for the concept is fairly new. I didn't realize that innocence was a problematic concept until about a couple of years ago.

Up until that point, innocence had little grand meaning for me; it was merely the word describing a state of affairs in which someone was accused of something that they did not do, a legal definition. You could be innocent of walking the dog in the morning, meaning that you simply didn't do it. Whether or not this was a good thing would be totally circumstantial and subjective. Such an attitude reflects my own understanding of justice: there's nothing metaphysical to it, no objective good and evil, just positive and negative action when viewed through a lens of a culture's values.

I was unaware of how radically different my perspective was from the perspective of so many others. I'm not at all convinced now that I should be the one to change my view, either.

Inactive Ideals

Innocence is a moral ideal, and core to innocence is not doing. Consider an image you have in your head of someone who is innocent by nature. The innocent are not aggressive, do not pursue whatever pridefulness or vices characterize many other people. They're just living and not doing anyone any harm. They do not play the dirty games of the real world. They might work but they are not the boss. They might love, but they are not jealous or possessive or cunning in any way. They are the embodiment of the most generous possible interpretation of what normal people are. They live by faith, if not in God, then in other people. They don't break out of the mold, but go with it, doing what they're supposed to be doing. They are perpetual bystanders.

They do not know much; in fact, ignorance is very much bliss from this vantage point, distinguishable from naivete only by the inclinations of the viewer. They are normal and relatable enough to apply for credit cards and take out mortgages, but in our recent financial chaos, few would characterize those who over-leveraged themselves as guilty of anything. They simply weren't financially savvy enough to protect themselves by knowing about contracts and risk and bubbles. That actually looks good, that they were dumb on the subject. It draws out pity. These are the kind of people that might stroll into the wrong side of town, then are shocked when they realize that's someone might mug them. They use drugs, but lack the strength to get off them when the shit screws up their life. They key is, they were manipulated, misled, trusted too easily. This kind of stupidity is what legislators and preachers of social justice want to protect. The innocent deserve support, don't they? Don't people deserve to be able to live without fear? Can't people be carefree?

The dependency of the innocent on the proactive guilty defines both groups. If you aren't watching your back and being at least a little suspicious of other people, you're an easy target; someone must help you. So those who subscribe to an innocence-heavy ethical system but still want to lead interesting lives with some sense of purpose often end up trying to valorize themselves as the shield-bearers to the downtrodden. Law enforcement officials, parents, activists, regulatory agency bureaucrats, lawyers, spokespeople of various types all seem to really enjoy the notion of being defenders of innocent people. This is deep in the nature of what we call "idealism".

The perception of innocence draws empathy with intense, religious fervor.

It's defending innocence that's the obsession, not being innocent. Almost no one sees themselves as being innocent until they're accused of something that could be problematic for them, and even then, they're more inclined to justify it instead of disowning the action outright. Being innocent can be incredibly boring, so while we idolize it, we do not pursue it. Despite our protestations of corrupting the innocent, we prefer to be the rough-but-noble fighter in their stead. There's an interesting pathos of distance going on here: the innocent person is an image with little connection to reality, as often the people who are held up as innocent victims are in fact much more like us than we think. They are aware of how the world works, they can understand risk and responsibility, and they take chances. They'll take help when it's offered, and can even come to expect it. But they are not who their supporters make them out to be.

You can tell someone balls-deep in this ethic by their constantly emotional portrayal of innocent people. They will portray a victim group as helpless every opportunity they get, and use this portrayal to empower themselves. It isn't cynical; they believe in what they're doing as much as the next guy. But they are more likely to be heroes in their own heads, whose contributions are crucial and required, than to see helping people as a matter of respectful mutual exchange. They need a needy recipient for their efforts. That's what they live for, and a world filled with more "innocent" people is practically their definition of progress.

Kids

 

The most obvious example of this innocence worship is the attitude so many people have towards children. There continues to be a perception that small children, uncorrupted by the greed and avarice of the world, are exemplars of innocence and that grown-ups should yearn to be more like them, with their awed and harmless wonder opposing the rapacious activities of the adult world. Kids are supposedly never bad; they're just made that way by adults.

This is ridiculous. First of all, the bullying issue gives lie to this thesis, and there seems to be no clear pattern of adult behavior that prods children into becoming little bastards. One popular way of explaining this has been finger-pointing violent video games, which turns out to be a bust. With violence, genetics are relevant, a result of uneven domestication of the human populace.

Some people need to be reminded something here: little kids are often bossy, aggressive, totally self-absorbed creatures. They see the world their way: they want things, they cry for them, they hit, they grab, they are exhausting. They're little bastards, with no natural sense of concern for the welfare of others out of the womb; that's something that gets trained into them by adults. One dad created an interesting way of showing this: having a grown man portray his 2 year old daughter in a series of viral Youtube videos.

Innocence, here, is a very intuitive thing, a perception mostly shallow in its realization. Little kids fit the superficial mold because they are so obviously harmless; when they get bigger, they're terrifying. England in particular seems to experience paedophobia or ephebiphobia as a cultural trend. Check out the "Mosquito" device; kinda neat, like a teen punk dog whistle.

That Guardian article, of course, finger-points the adults for not being tolerant enough of the children, as if they were fully developed human beings who just need love and unquestioning respect from their elders to be be good citizens. The cry of children being little bastards is incredibly old, of course, but in the past, the ways of civil society handled it with heavy doses of reality. When kids get older, they have real problems and must adapt to adult challenges. Now, we seem to think that the challenges are the problem, and what they need is greater support. Maybe it's a defensive reaction: in a culture that has lambasted fathers like Western society has, lots of people should be expected to refuse the idea that what children need is a father's discipline and authority, or to take on the responsibility of being fathers themselves. But we would never admit such a thing.

Now, don't get it twisted: I actually like kids and get along famously with them. But I'm not very protective of them and I have no problem telling them when they're doing something stupid. I'll swat one on the butt occasionally. Some parents like this about me, some parents don't. But whatever: I'm pretty sure it's helping them more than hurting them. They aren't delicate. Regarding the "tiger mom" controversy, I would identify as being more pro-authority than pro-fawning, and decent cases have been made for both approaches despite a media that can't shut up about self-esteem.

Kids are undeveloped. They don't come from the factory with perfect settings. The attachment to the notion of innocence today sometimes seems to have gone so far that parents won't develop them. Evidently, we're stifling children, refusing to let them bloom however they like, painting them as victims. Is there any place here for an expectation that these innocent little kids learn to deal with the world instead of constantly trying to remake in to their desires? This is a cultural problem that's more prevalent in the West than elsewhere, so can you really separate it from the moral heritage of this society?

The Christian Influence

The reason it took me so long to come around to the importance of innocence is because I hadn't come around to how deeply Christianity affected our moral worldview. When I read Nietzsche early on, his blatherings about Judeo-Christian ethics didn't seem to be all he made it out to be. I saw morality as being, in a roundabout way, rational self-interest.

But the cultural dominance of Judeo-Christian moral ideas becomes all too obvious after you really start to look at all we do morally and figure out why in rational terms. Until you do, it's one of those things that's so obvious and omnipresent that you never notice it. Judeo-Christian ethics remind me of the Taoist story of two fish talking to one another, and one asks, "What is this 'ocean' I keep hearing about?"

In the years prior, I did not understand that a scientifically enlightened society could view aggression as something freakish, despite its obvious evolutionary value in any but the most controlled circumstances.

I did not understand that people had such deep issues with empowerment, simultaneously hating it and being obsessed with it.

I did not understand that so many people saw their moral outlook as Natural Law universal.

I did not understand, at the time, that "good versus evil" was something so many people took so seriously. I thought the dichotomy was a narrative device, a storytelling mechanism that reinforced society's conventions as to what cultural trendsetters thought people should do. I thought people saw this.

I was kind of oblivious back then. And I had a lot more faith in the intelligence of people. Now... well...

Today, stupid people can call anything they want good or evil, innocent or guilty, and their pronouncements just enter the propaganda stream of culture with no vetting. Whether people buy it has to do with the design of the packaging; there's no standards.

It's one thing to say that your ways are better than the other guy's, and quite another to say that the other guy's ways are evil. Innocence is a core concept in the kind of mentality that breeds stridency, crusades, and a false faith in a form of legitimacy that somehow reaches beyond the realities of power in this world. The cause of defending the innocent adds to that power, fuels it, feeds into the mythos of righteousness that prop up the stupid with their own unwarranted egotism.

It isn't an insult to religion that people take some of its ideas too seriously. It's a credit to religion that it has a history of putting an individualistic society on the same moral page. But the very context of the concept of innocence requires institutional control, with the regulation of some kind of ideological supervision; it's too easy and too risky to use it with no rational grounding at all, no sense for consequences. Of course, supervising moral ideas is antithetical to modern moral ideas, but that's in the nature of innocence, too: the powerful are not innocent and therefore not good. We might end up paying for such ridiculous ideas for a long, long time yet.

Inflation 2: The Necessity of Growth

They be like, "Oh, that Gucci, that's hella tight,"

I'm like, "Yo, that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt ."

 -Macklemore, Thrift Shop

This is an expansion on the Inflation and Hierarchy post. To get an understanding of the situation, I think additional investigation of the tactic of "growthsmanship" will be needed.

If you want a good perspective on why growth has been so popular in economic policy talk, one good place to start would be Robert Collins' book on the subject, which specifically addresses growth policy in the contemporary American context. The point is straightforward: pro-growth policy has been a stalwart platform of both parties since World War 2, with Keynesian demand-side policy characterizing the Democrats. Republicans were restrained Keynesians up until Reagan, when neo-classical economics started to make a comeback and growth was encouraged from the supply side. Voters simply have no interest in policies that restrain consumption in any way.

Beyond this, both the problems and the virtues of growth economics have been interestingly stated for public consumption. Democrats have had the pleasant advantage of using Keynesianism in league with environmentalism as a policy matter, and a different post will address this. Suffice it to say, I am pro-environmentalism but not in the Democratic sense. Quite the opposite, I don't think democratic politics and environmentalism mix well at all, even if you discard the conventional party platforms.

The Mechanics

When I was talking about Bitcoin a while back, I mentioned that growth economics and currency held some relationship, and that relationship is fairly easy to define. Strong economic growth requires increases in the money supply, or at least, it significantly benefits from it.

With an inflationary currency - assuming the inflation is stable - the incentives for investors line up towards using their money instead of saving it. The concept is simple: inflation means that dollars buy less, so in order to keep your dollars from buying less, you have to invest them. Preferably, investors use it to create businesses that profit at a rate higher than the rate of inflation, and will create jobs in the process. Sometimes it doesn't work out that way, but that's the general idea. This isn't a political salesmanship idea; the trend is well-documented. In the 16th century, the volume of gold coming in from the New World via Spain helped lead to significant growth. Prices rose by a factor of four over the century, which isn't nearly as inflationary as it seems, given that we're talking about a hundred frickin' years. And in the process, the economy expanded quite nicely.

Now, assume that you have a slower-growing currency. Because money is more valuable and can be expected to stay more valuable, people are more inclined to hide the money in a Mason jar buried in the yard for a rainy day. Good for them, not so good for everyone else; a slower rate of exchange is bound to happen. People spend less. There's less economic growth. We want expansion, dammit!

Now, one of the criticisms of Bitcoin is that the slow growth of the currency would stifle economic growth in this manner. Similar things have been said about the gold standard. 

This doesn't mean that growth stops, but banking mechanics create some problems here. Assuming a hard currency, banks loan out money while keeping less of it on hand than they say they have; it's in the process, a risk that banks take based on the predictability of the demand for money at their bank and the expectations about economic growth. It's a confidence game. In good times, banks hold little reserves and loan out with some enthusiasm, regardless of the nature of the currency. But if the loans fail, or if the customers make a "run on the bank" and demand all or most of their deposits be returned to them, then you get panics and collapse. The result is a tendency for economic fluctuation, aka the boom-and-bust business cycle. 

Crashes generally create deflation; prices drop as businesses become more desperate to sell their inventory to more reticent consumers, trying to stay afloat. Deflation exacerbates the cycle. With a fiat currency like we have now, one where the banking system can print more money in case hell comes to pass, there is a bit more control.

You can look at this situation and ask the obvious question: why the hell don't we just try some other way to restrain the business cycle, other than killing the value of currency? Does nothing else work?

Well, we don't really know, but probably not. Society's attitude about investing is weird. When there's a boom, the majority of people get caught up in the attitude, and go on a borrowing and spending binge. This helps push the growth. In a recession or depression the opposite happens. Optimism and pessimism are difficult to politically deal with, especially in a democratic society. There are already enough people in this country who think that the Fed is a destroyer of worlds, and all Bernanke has really been trying to do is exactly what the textbook response to a recession is supposed to be: make sure there's no deflation. The point is, any different solution would require something that democratic governments will never produce: a more disciplined consumer and investor marketplace.

You might also ask, what the hell is so wrong with deflation?

That's a better question. Falling prices sound awesome. But the answer is, if you're an employee, a LOT is wrong with deflation. Say that a depression comes along and your company sees a reduction in business to the tune of 20-30%. That's not the end of the world, but a reduction of 20-30% in revenue does not result in employers paying their employees 20-30% less. No employee would stand for it; that's not their fault, as they're as productive as they ever were. It's the business owner's responsibility to handle it, and they generally handle it like this: they fire 20-30% of their workforce. 

That's what they have to do. Some companies are more loyal to their employees than others, but for many of them, there's little choice if they want to stay in business. Times are tough. This isn't a knock on them; that's how things have to be. But as the unemployment numbers rise, perspectives do not favor the employer.

As a consumer, falling prices sound great, until you realize that you're in debt and you haven't been saving your money. Debt becomes more expensive when there's deflation: if you owed $20,000 on credit cards and there's 10% deflation, you now owe the equivalent of $22,000. Plus, you might be out of a job: the fate of the average voter in the world is much more dependent on there being employment available than on there being low prices.

To put it simply: it's perceptually and politically better for the system to encourage inflation. It's better because more people are in debt than are saving, and therefore it's politically more advantageous to support debtors than savers in a democratic system.

I've figured this out opening a small business. I'm going to do the bulk of my production in-country, but some accessories will be bought from foreign companies found on Alibaba.com, and let me tell you, the cost of many goods wholesale today is so stupidly minuscule that one may reasonably wonder why the hell we pay so much at the register here. That Super Soaker you paid $19.95 for likely cost about a dollar to produce. Some products I could concievably carry would grant me well over 500% on margins. For a businessman, this is ludicrous; all I have to do is take a relatively minor risk by carrying a significant inventory, buying hundreds of units at a time. One would think economics would have driven down the cost of everything by now, with such cheap production available.

But it doesn't; the margins are what pays the wages of most people in this country. Everything eventually costs the labor required to produce it, plus rent-seeking. So there's a rent-seeking element that is responsible for many, many people having a job, and that comes from the relative stability of the business sector. You get used to going to Wal-Mart and Target for your crap. Your local shoe store lets you try them on first. And then there's brand loyalty, a form of trust built on return policies, threats of legal action, and location. It's convenient. You don't have to think too much, just compare the prices at the store at most. You sure as hell aren't going to spend hours of your life finding the absolute lowest price on something that costs twenty bucks; nickel and diming is for losers. The field of economics looks at consumers as demanding low prices all the time, which they certainly prefer, but holy shit the American consumer is lazy as hell.

The status and behavior of the consumer does not depend on thriftiness. People have plenty, as a matter of volume. What this has evolved into is a cultural situation where people go in for goods that describe who they are as a person, attaching themselves to brand identity. You can call someone a Wal-Mart person and mean it as derogatory; you move up a bit at Target, then get into "real" retailers and brands. Gucci is just the beginning; how much of our identity gets bound up in cars and homes? Ask my mother when she gets done watching House Hunters. This has become who we are as a people: consumers. Modern capitalism is consumerist, not "producerist", and all this excess choice exists to create a place where you can become who you want to be through your consumer decisions. You need to work to finance your lifestyle; rebellions against this find some light counter-identity in urban farming, living off the grid, and other hipster fads... and brands are moving to exploit the new trend.

Big name retailers and well-known brand names have a form of market power that's quite significant today, with our over-crowded marketplaces: they can draw people into the store, and when people think that they need to buy something, they almost automatically go to these places and brands. They have power in the attention economy. The low-ball online retailer does not, although amazon.com and other aggregated one-stop-shops are reducing this market power very slowly. Still, you should hope that they don't do it much faster; millions of people depend on the rent-seeking power of big name stores and brands to provide them with jobs. Those are institutions in this culture. With a big company, you usually get job stability, which is about the last bastion of cultural expectation that empowers employees. That creates standards which are held in contrast to small businesses, forcing those small businesses to treat their employees comparatively. This means, of course, that they keep charging high prices relative to manufacturing costs for their goods. Job insecurity results in employees more desperate to take what they can get, and the market power of big business, with their significant market power, eases that pressure.

This is all possible because the system encourages expansion as fast as possible. The restraint comes only from consumer hesitation, which vanishes in good times, when credit is cheap and jobs are at least available enough to justify charging it now and paying for it later. It helps for people to feel rich; that's how we do individualism today. The pressure to economize still exists to some extent for retailers and manufacturers, but low price is less important than image and advertising skill. The consumer sphere is where we show our value in the hierarchy. Work is the primary way we acquire that value. We need high-growth economics to be useful and valuable as employees, and thus we need a growing economy and currency. Without it, even if we have good jobs now, they might not exist long and they might not have existed at all without the last seventy years of American economic history focusing on expansion. It makes everything easier.

Basically, the system as it stands, inflationary tendencies and all, can be traced back to your unwillingness to get your ass off the couch to find a better deal, and the employment made possible by your sloth. The system must adapt to you, wise voter. So by all means, stay on that couch until an ad on your iPhone tells you that Gucci T-shirts are on sale.

Class by Choice

Question: why isn't every employee an independent contractor?

On the surface, the benefits of being independent seem strong. You have a degree of control over your activities, assuming that they're strongly demanded enough to garner interest from those hiring you as a contractor. You can hold on to your money instead of essentially paying for an interest-free loan that the government will pay back next year. Basically, it wouldn't be wage slavery.

But then, wage slavery has its advantages. You probably don't have strong demand for your services most of the time, but wage jobs get you a paycheck anyway; don't complain about being bored when you have the privilege of being bored on the clock. A halfway decent employer will help cover all sorts of benefits, since it gets them a tax write-off, and consistent schedules have advantages when you have other shit you want to do and need to schedule your life. Being a conventional employee is a matter of convenience for all involved: you work a solid number of hours and the employer pays a solid wage, and it becomes comfortable. People generally like comfort. The modern struggle is the struggle to be valuable for the individual acting in a market society, and being an employee means that you have an arrangement that grants stability. You can adapt to your wage with just a little discipline, and more and more, even that discipline seems redundant as Social Security, public education, food programs, and government health care assures the individual that they can only screw themselves so badly. The struggle becomes the drudgery: it gets old after you're used to it, and you want more variety. But historically, that's a very small degree of discipline that the working world requires of you. 

What the government really encourages is large-scale, stable employment. The government can regulate large corporations more easily than many small businesses, and since large corporations usually have enough market share to assure some financial ability to consistently pay more for employees, they can expect corporations to pay well and provide big fringe benefits that look good on paper. Unions have enjoyed this for decades, albeit with gradually reduced political and economic influence. People don't really want to handle savings, insurance, and looking for work any more than necessary, even if the potential benefits are great. Most people suck with money.

And really, it's not wage slavery. It's more like the remains of serfdom, without the clarity or permanence. Remember a few paragraphs ago, when I was talking about the 16th century in Europe? Back then, being a peasant was a very normal way for people to survive. You generally got food, shelter, and clothing at the least, with a slight spending allowance from your own marketable projects, even in eastern Europe where conditions were the worst. Feudalism sounds ugly, but that's just our way of looking at it, of course: the reality is one of a relationship between landowner and subject imbued with a near-religious sacredness that is completely lacking today. The arrangement was one of responsibilities of one party to another, taken on with much ceremony and social pressure on all parties to conform to roles. It was institutional and expected. There were good lords and bad ones, good serfs and bad ones, healthy relationships and unhealthy ones. 

Conversely, the 16th century was the period in which the serf/lord relationship started to fall to the wayside and the merchant class took on a new and more powerful role. The century after the sixteenth was the century when things were going worse, with less Spanish gold and more Malthusian population limits and war; the lords made a slight comeback, but it was strictly economic convenience, people needing to eat so they went back to the being land tenants. The attitude was changing. That goes along with the individualism of the era, which was in part a product of the Protestant Reformation.

Many of the complaints from that time would sound familiar today. The difference today is that there is no straightforward agreement on who owes what to who. The general idea that employees owe the employer the respect of coming in on time every shift and doing the job is about as elaborate as it gets, and that comes in for heavy revision when you think the boss is being a dick. The idea that the employer owes the employee any kind of loyalty is just as sporadic. Most people would say that employers are worse than employees in these situations today, but of course they would say that: most people are employees. Jack Donovan's recent article sums up an attitude that's already well established out of most people I know. That attitude is not so much being wrong as failing to recognize, for whatever reason, the reality that we are not as necessary to employers as we'd like to think we are most of the time. We have no leverage, so why not see the system as mercenary? There are no institutional obligations anymore; we call this freedom.

The Need for a New Structure

Institutions are not physical things. They are arrangements, formalized into social expectations, roles to play with defined privileges and responsibilities. You look at any stable arrangement for a while, and you can begin to gather an appreciation for the organization of it, for the sense of identity and place that a well-ordered society can provide. 

At least an ordered society can function predictably and with some semblance of justice. Justice is, after all, really a matter of expectations. Today, we want and expect equality, which is ludicrous and pathetically short-sighted. The expectations have become radical; we expect government to do what is necessary to give us value as economic actors, expect big business to sacrifice some of its power to help us out of sheer Christian decency, even as the population at large abandons Christianity with enthusiasm. The individualism is such that our eccentric lifestyle choices, our behaviors and style which might come off as a middle finger to others, is expected to be tolerated without question. Meanwhile, when the business classes blow us off in the name of them pursuing their self-interest, we hate their guts. We want noblesse oblige, but have no moral justification for it in an individualist culture. Say what you want about our shitty behavior not being on the same level as people unable to find work and eat, but no one owes any of this to us. You want individualism, then the responsibilities must be measured with the rights. 

In the first Hierarchy post, I talked about explicit and implicit hierarchies, and I stated that explicit hierarchies have serious advantages. This kind of thing is what I was talking about. Explicit hierarchies hold the security we want, by dividing up responsibilities explicitly. The implicit, market-based hierarchies we operate on now, counting on values expressed in the markets to fuel our world, turn against us when we want stability, when we find that we aren't nearly as valuable as we think we are to others. You can call it oppressive fear that drove people to accept aristocracy and its rigors before, but any time you fear for your economic welfare, you experience that fear yourself. It is tremendously, metaphysically wrong that this happens? It probably feels like it, but it's not. A lion chasing a tasty human on an African plain millenia ago might have felt unfair to the human, but it was also reality. Fairness is a luxury of a society that develops systems to ensure that expectations meet reality. The more individualistic we get, the less structured our world becomes, the less fair we should expect it to feel.

We should feel lucky that the system tries, with its inflationary currency and democratic suckup tendencies, to help us out. We don't, we never give any thanks, but we should, because given our behavior, this system provides what we want. It has kept food cheap, integrated huge numbers of women into the workforce over the last half-century, its tax revenues have been harnessed to turn over significant public benefits, and you can be pig-ignorant about money and know that the government won't allow you to be exploited "unfairly". But it can't change all of reality to work for your benefit. And it doesn't owe you that.

If you want the benefits of noblesse oblige, then we should start that conversation honestly. I've been thinking it for a while. If you don't, then it's your life and you should be thankful that the system you have to deal with works as well as it works.