DEFINING GOD

                                     ECONOMIC SLAVERY

In the search for the energy required to survive, two strategies compete for dominance. One strategy employs cooperation by divisions of labor based on merit (who can do the job best) where all share in the labor and the distribution of the results. Historically, this has been the most efficient means of production and of achieving a democratic social order. Social justice is difficult to achieve (or even agree upon) and easily corrupted.

The other strategy employs the appropriation of other people’s labor by force (slavery), deception, or class systems that define who has the right to steal other people’s labor (sanctioned extortion). The contest between cooperation (and sharing) and extortion has driven the struggle for social justice for centuries. Does natural selection determine which strategy dominates or are there other factors?

I ask that question because the argument between social justice advocates and free market advocates effectively renders people helpless to act on anything. Many consider the free market an independent force that government or anything else cannot and should not restrain. The fallacy of a free market as an independent force (like gravity) that governs economic realities has long been exploded.* In fact, markets do not define forces. They are defined by forces instituted by governments and those with the resources that private property and contracts create.

Clearly, markets do not define intrinsic values, the very thing needed to keep markets free of abusive practices that power can easily exploit. As the founding fathers expressed it, without a moral code of ethics, democracy would fail again.

The argument that government must be kept at a minimum offers no solutions because the market does not define any intrinsic values—only money. Profit provides the measure of all values. Making money is sanctioned regardless of how it is done. As a result, the folklore, the stories we tell ourselves to justify a culture of greed, acquire the authority of a religion—disclose God’s plan.

One must prove themselves worthy of God in a merciless competition for money. God loves the winners and spurns the losers. Like natural selection, such contests may improve the specie’s short-term adaptations. The losers provide the sacrifice necessary to maintain inequality. Comparisons with natural selection miss the point. Natural selection has no favorite value. It has rules, like diversity, that determine survival in any given environment. Short-term algorithms that use up long-term resources result in extinction.

Life is the only value that may serve as a means of identifying intrinsic values. The culture now in command blasphemes. It sacrifices life for power. Despair  follows because the Faith requires a belief that we can survive as individuals without making others pay the price of our survival. Most religions treat despair as the cardinal sin. Without the Faith, there is no hope of social justice.

Natural selection provides an explanation for these unfortunate propensities. Define God as whatever we believe we must adapt to in order to survive and the result explains despair by way of the religion of money. Until recently, people were forced  to adapt to the real world of finding food and fuel. Now that virtual reality and other technologies has us adapting to the business of finding money for everything we need (a games economy), money is the thing we must adapt to. Nothing serves that purpose better than the free market theory. We are what we adapt to. We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

I will not repeat the well-established facts demonstrating just how prevalent sanctioned extortion has become in America.* I marvel at the fact that stand-up comedians do not joke about turning the government over to the mafia as a way of improving efficiency and a better distribution of wealth. Legal extortion far outstrips illegal extortion; hence the general ill-feeling in America. Something is wrong and we feel it. Big money gets supported and the poor pay.

As with comedians, what happened to the hue and cry we observed in the civil rights movement? The explanation lies in the culture described at the beginning of this essay. Culture has the power to shape thought, even to the point where people will abandon logic and self-interest—­like ending social security and universal health care. If God tells us that something is bad for us it overrules the mere laws and understandings of humans—a perfect environment for despots to invade.

People seldom recognize the motivation behind such inconsistencies. For many, they merely provide apologies for greed. Conservative think-tanks spend millions on propaganda to convince people that the poor deserve their fate and that government aid weakens the race. The result has been a serious erosion of the empathy supporting the Faith, social justice. and participation in public affairs. Most people do not even vote.

Herein lies the explanation for the power a small group of conservatives have gained in the last 60 years. They have taken over school boards, local governments, publishing and civic organizations to make grass root appeals more effective. Teachers are not allowed to teach anything not agreed upon by everyone. Logic and science are pre-empted. Children are bored to death and everyone is afraid because these conservatives take no prisoners.

Every election cycle the Republican party provides, for your amusement, candidates less convincing than the last group that they know anything at all. But they know their catechism well. The God of money prevails and  not a word is spoken of social justice or the survival of the species under the ravages of technology.

The basis for judging social justice flows from our experiences with other people and the consequences of our and their actions. Given that we do not inherit the same genes or families, statistics do not produce a clear means of comparing the well-being of individuals. Many people do not need a second car.

We all develop a sense of fair play that governs our view of what is right and who behaves accordingly. To gain our acceptance, laws and other protocols must not violate the standards we set for justice that our experience has determined is fair. Many relationships today break that rule. In particular, I refer the reader to the religion of money described here. It makes the new relative slavery ethic that I discuss here acceptable in spite of its failure to treat everyone as an equal under God.

Equality lies at the center of social justice. Counting possessions does not measure equality. Social justice requires equal treatment under the law, a right to the fruits of our labor, and the right to express our beliefs. A marketplace permits simplistic answers to the kind of questions equality raises. Markets have little to say about ethics or morality. There is a market for stealing other people’s labor which generates a good deal of conflicts and great loss, not the least of which is the ability to trust the people you rely upon.

Equality means little where some people possess the right to appropriate other people’s labor, which often occurs when someone takes an unreasonable share of the profits of someone else’s labor. Slavery is obvious. Relative slavery is hidden in the games elites may play for money.

People or enterprises that must accept insufficient compensation to maintain the laborers or their children suffer a slave relationship. The recipients of the undervalued results of that labor simply argue that the market for labor dictated the result, even where the profits for the recipients were enormous. The forces of greed manipulate that market to justify the extortion ethic. Capitalism is moving in that direction for the sake of a handful of people able to accumulate wealth.

Labor, like other means of production, requires some level of capital to function. In the case of labor—food, cloths, heat, and education. Slaves work for less. Their masters make huge sums of money by gaming finance produce nothing at all except more money games.

I cannot help asking the question why anybody needs the second hundred million dollars for any other reason than ego and power—power to manipulate finance and labor. CEOs, among others, do not make corporations successful any more often than they make them fail for their own profit. The masters of the game have given us an extortion-based economy that now depends on bubbles to keep the money flowing. Yet a huge military budget is  still needed to keep the money flowing.

Wall Street’s need for cash has fathered high risk instruments of credit supported by huge conflicts of interest and tax-payer bail-outs when the schemes fail. Regulators retire from government and become lobbyists for the industry they were regulating—not a good environment for social justice.

Those games have developed so quickly and the power that they impose on finance and politics is so great that it casts doubt on the ability to reverse the trend. The resulting disparity of wealth that damaged the greatest economy ever was accomplished by reductions in taxes and increases in subsidies for the rich. The disparity in wealth is so great that only increases in taxes and reductions in subsidies can restore the general welfare now in danger.

Politically this is no longer possible. Big money can buy too much. What is missing, that which restrained such use of power in the past, is a moral compass and intellectual honesty. Intellectual honesty must overcome the lies that increase the chances of winning the game. Intellectual honesty is not infallible. A moral compass must resolve the critical issues. What should the moral compass define?

We are what we adapt to. I cannot say it too often. We change when it is necessary to adapt. Failure to adapt may produce harsh consequences. Adaptions for on-the-ground problems and adaptions based on philosophy and ideology may conflict with one another—the pragmatic versus some view of purity. Necessarily, the first commandment must be that no adaptation may harm people or the environment that sustains them. Science has made it possible in both the physical and mental world to identify what is harmful. Politics is working very hard to silence a good deal of that information to avoid limitations on extortion and exploitation of the environment. We need regulations that require scientific vetting of all industrial processes and agriculture. Technological fixes can do more damage than the problem they were intended to cure. The choice of fixes often turns on which one is cheaper or who controls it—seldom the best test.

The next commandment must spread power broadly. At the time that the American Constitution was being drafted many thought that power would soon corrupt the separations of power that the founding fathers designed. Madison observed that there were so many divergent interests and wide-spread distribution of  property as to discourage monopolies and other accumulations of wealth. Indeed, the prominence of many interest sectors fostered a kind of intellectual honesty and moral compass that served to spread power which lasted to the end of WWII. The spread of power provided the glue that bound the nation together. Everyone relied on help from their neighbors and their government. The war of all against all followed the decline of independent businesses and the rise of financial institutions and huge corporations.

Human nature has not changed. People will still take power any way they can. To allow anyone access to the kind of power that creates despots eventually leads to the government of despots. Instead of people working to solve community problems, the war of all against all looks at inequality for advantage. Too many people have a vested interest in other people’s misery. We are what we adapt to.

Individual accumulations of wealth should not exceed people’s needs and what comforts the community can support. People fear big government and ignore the impacts of big money which can do as much damage as any government. There will always be a government. The issue now is whether it will be the government of money or the general welfare.

Congress was once a great deliberative body. Real problems were solved by looking at the facts and the conflicts to make a coherent policy. Campaign costs have risen to the point where legislators spend more time and money on running for office than on listening to the needs of the people. The great incentive to govern now turns on who will have rights to appropriate other people’s labor and how. That also follows from the religion of money. Congress now spends more time on lobbyists to determine how the pie will be divided. Lobbyists now write the laws and ignore the facts.

The incentive to create an elite who gain power by rigging the market so that some profit from their labor while others receive far less for their labor requires a limit on anyone’s accumulation of wealth. It matters little if the amount is one million or two million annually. It will limit the ability to accumulate wealth that overpowers the majority by removing the incentive to accumulate excess wealth. The same is true of private property. Excessive accumulation of property creates another elite.

Some ancient cultures hold that no one person can own the earth and its treasures. They belong to everyone. Private property is not the problem. The problem with real property lies in the failure to properly value its uses. The tree next door gives you shade. You do not pay for it.

Water, the most important resource, is plentiful some places and scarce in other places. If people are allowed to own it, they can make other people pay large sums for what is rightfully  a community asset, thus stealing other peoples labor. People who own property must pay the community the community value of that property. Hoarding or wasting water would soon become too expensive. Such forms of taxation would finance schools, medical care, and most government functions. Ignoring the value of property to the community creates another elite.

Stealing other people’s labor has many applications, some very subtle. Monsanto sells seeds for farmers to plant. Monsanto was permitted to patent seeds that do not reproduce themself. Farmers cannot use seed from their own crops. Part of their work has been appropriated by a supplier whom they cannot ignore. Monsanto is huge and aggressive. Such abuses of technology run rampant. Contracts and laws deny people access to the courts. Big business will not deal with you if you do not agree to waive the right to the protections the judicial branch of government provides. The free market is anything but free.

What about the self-made man or woman? Should they be allowed to keep what they have created? The self-made person is one of the myths greed created. The things needed to be self-made are endless and mostly communal—from streets to schools to everything else the community pays in one way or another.

American government was founded on separation of powers—legislative, administrative, and judicial. The separation means nothing if all three branches of government apply a single value. Absent a moral compass and intellectual honesty, money as the measure of all things follows, which dissolves any difference in values between the branches of government. I witnessed the process over the 30 years I practiced law. In the beginning, judges would admonish lawyers to stop posturing and get to the merits. As the years went by, courts became less and less interested in the merits on the law and facts and more and more on who had the money. Off the record I had a judge tell me that the law was “bullshit anyway.”

Another consequence of modernity yielded similar results. For the better part of humanity’s time on earth people did their best to keep up with nature. Their inventions, physical and intellectual, made the keeping up easier, at which point people starting spending most of their time keeping up with their own inventions. These inventions also were not regulated by intellectual honesty or a moral compass. Their value again had more to do with what they could create in dollars and cents, usually at the expense of nature.

The true costs of technology remain incalculable. How much of our intellectual honesty and moral compass come from our experiences with nature? What is the impact of spending most of your day staring at a screen that knows nothing but algorithms? What do we learn from imitating machines that tolerate no errors, reduce everything to a formula, cannot nurture any life, and has no interest in it. What is the difference between a ninja turtle and a real turtle? You have to feed a turtle. The chase for money serves no purpose without a moral compass.

Unlimited financial power has corrupted government with the injunction that the “free market” will make everything right. One supreme value puts everything in the same frame thus dissolving separation of powers and abandoning intellectual honesty and a moral compass. Everything must serve the religion of money. The result is a struggle to accumulate wealth in a financial form. Virtual wealth controls real wealth. Such struggles support class distinctions and more corruption.

No one can be trusted with unlimited wealth and the advantage it bestows. The market does not purify financial manipulation, which must be regulated for the common good.

* See ”Saving Capitalism” by Robert B Reich, ”One Market Under God” by Thomas Frank, and “Natural Selection’s Paradox” by Carter Stroud—the author of this essay.

Economic Slavery

ECONOMIC SLAVERY

Intellectual Honesty and the Absence to the Sacred

   INTELLECTUAL HONESTY AND THE ABSENCE OF THE SACRED

Once again humanity faces a threat to its continued existence. The first, the atomic bomb, remains in the jug but may escape at any time. Unfortunately, global warming has no jug to contain it. Under present practices, global warming will occur sooner than anyone predicts. Once the critical temperature arises, humanity will no longer find it possible to adapt to the resulting environment. Millions of years of experience in adaptation will no longer apply. We will become refugees in our own land—our genome alienated from the new environment.

There is no credible controversy in the scientific community about the consequences. Unfortunately, instead of the facts we get a media game that obfuscates any conclusions. Everything is in dispute. Intellectual honesty remains impossible when determining what the facts mean remains out of reach. Agendas rule instead. The agenda for those who wish to continue burning fuel that contaminates everything, and makes them rich, includes any means of denying global warming.

Without intellectual honesty, we cannot resolve conflicting agendas and opinions. Means of validating constructs [like E= MC²] that describe reality where it cannot otherwise be seen lie at the center of the science now under attack by agendas that cannot survive intellectual honesty. The billion dollar campaign to discredit global warming attacks the means of vetting discoveries that will help us adapt to a sustainable environment. Ignoring earth science is the most dangerous game anyone can play.

Intellectual honesty requires an agenda so inclusive that only the sanctity of life can serve as its guiding light. The global-warming debate shows no signs of applying that bottom line. Mostly, the arguments rely on magic thinking like the coming of new technologies that will do huge amounts of work with little side-effects in spite of the laws of physics and chemistry that govern the production of energy.

We have been using up the earth and ignoring the bill. Nature does not hand out free lunches; governments provide subsidies that hide the fact. New technologies praised as solutions are more likely to make the problem worse. That hypocrisy, ignoring nature‘s rules when it supports an argument, is one failure of intellectual honesty. These failures appear in all walks of life. During the life of my law practice of over 30 years I witnessed an increasing tendency for the trier of fact to rely on something other than intellectual honesty. Opinions get the facts right or the law right or both but come up with a wrong result, which does not follow from the facts or the law. Some agenda pre-empted the way conclusions were once drawn. All the math and experimentation science relies upon is worth nothing if the conclusions do not match the findings or the findings do not match the facts.

The unfortunate consequence of that discourse makes it easy to deny what someone does not want to hear. I have some difficulty with the denial of global warming on the most basic level. The ability of carbon deposits to generate heat is not in question, nor is the fact that we are dumping millions of tons of it in the air. One and one makes two.

People have tried many means of overcoming bias. The scientific method has contributed much to that effort. Some see pragmatism as an answer. The President sees himself as a pragmatist, not an idealist or a man of faith. Pragmatism has its uses but in the absence of the sacred it can abandon the all important sense of proportion and adopt agendas that serve the status quo. Compromises that sacrifice one life support for another (like clean air at the expense of clean water) will not save the planet any more than bombing accused terrorists will end terrorism. Terrorists may be hard to track down but bombing their friends and families to get them makes no friends and puts the whole operation in a morally reprehensible light—safety at the expense of justice.

For a lot of people, the fact of terrorism justifies any response. The same pragmatism supports global-warming fixes that will do great damage to some for the benefit of others. If we do not view the earth and its treasures as anything other than a means of making paper wealth, nature will have the last word. Science, all too often, quite innocently, plays God because it assumes that we control nature when the reverse is true.

I define God as that which we believe we must obey to survive—be it priests or natural selection. In capitalist cultures, we must adapt to making money. We are what we adapt to. When people grew their own food, all manner of things were central to existence. One could not buy eggs in a grocery store. The value of seeds was a matter of life and death. Water did not come out of a pipe that seemed to have no end. People experienced the results of poison first hand.

Technology cannot change nature’s rules. When the parameters of those rules have been exceeded, time will have come to pay the bill for ignoring the sacred. All those things which support life are sacred and require protection from the things that diminish life. Oil and water do not mix. The oil must be kept away from the water. In many cases technology has not managed to do that. Reliance on oil and coal must end for the sake of global warming and its impact on weather and water supplies. We can develop non-polluting means of producing the energy needed. What is holding that advancement down?

We are at war; a war more dangerous than anything history offers. The outlaw gene (a metaphor) defines the basis of the conflict. Darwin did not anticipate the two most important side-effects of natural selection that create evil. First, if short-term adaptations use up the resources needed for the long term, the species will become extinct. It may take a long time. A million years counts but a moment in geological time. Capitalism has been around for a few seconds. In that time it has done incalculable damage to our chance of surviving the next hundred years. Turning real wealth into paper wealth exhausts real wealth. The money, otherwise worthless, controls which adaptations we use—most of them short term.

Second, the evil men do evolved with the choice natural selection leaves to each generation: Will we accomplish the production and distribution of wealth by divisions of labor based on merit where all share in the production and distribution, or will people take the short-term strategy of steeling other people’s labor by force, fraud, or class. Will society support democracy, freedom, and equality or white supremacy (a metaphor). Lincoln did not fight the Civil War to free the slaves. He fought it to free all humanity. Color is only one convenient way to stigmatize a class of people.

White supremacy has become more subtle. Slaves and masters have been replaced by underpaid, uneducated, poverty-stricken people with no insurance or life support who have no bargaining power and who do the dirty work for overcompensated elite. The battle remains: Who will prosper and who will pay the price for other people’s success? Poverty endangers civil rights as well as the biosphere. Poverty destroys democracy by eliminating choices. Starving people take what the elite grant them and that is not very much.

The increasing distance between the rich and the rest of us today leaves us fewer and fewer choices. At the center, oil and coal and gas produce so much money that the corporations that control them can buy almost anything, including good government. The scale of money invested in elections alone has reached a level best characterized as evil for it supports white-supremacy and outrageous favoritism.

The struggle to enjoy elite status centers on energy. Those resisting the destruction of the real wealth that supports their lives are being jailed, murdered, and otherwise marginalized by the evil of corrupt government and ruthless corporate culture. For years people tried to work with the “system” to address the danger of new means of extracting energy, without sufficient success. Corporations refuse to recognize the evil they do. They lie.

Wars are fought on the ground. Only a mass-supported revolution in production and distribution can change our direction from dangerous energy to safe energy. Those profiting from and protecting the old market will not give up without a merciless fight. We need to create an environmentally friendly energy market. That would reduce the old market’s ability to hold the new market down and thereby reduce the casualties that inevitably follow the inequities that huge discrepancies in wealth, along with environmental degradation, create.

Markets create nothing. People create markets. The fallacy that they function like a law of gravity independent of human intervention allows the exploiters of other people’s labor to plead no contest. We can do nothing about the course of markets. We must obey them. We do so at great risk.

The ignorance of the elite and super rich defy reason. How can they advocate life-threatening extractions of energy that threaten their own lives and property? No amount of money can save us from global warming and poisoned water. At best, money can only decide who dies last. What supports such a level of denial? Even intellectual dishonesty seems hardly up to the task.

I believe that evils of capitalism have reached a point where profit is more important than life itself. In the absence of intellectual honesty and the sacred, money will defeat all challenges. God will save the righteous; just as white supremacy will reward them—the people who obey money, their God. The on-the-ground problems of energy conservation are not nearly as difficult as the ethical revolution required to achieve consensus in time to halt global warming.

Recognizing the sacred requires the guidance of intellectual honesty. Life is sacred, not theology. Clean water, not words, supports life. Words as markers, identifiers, do not function without a consistent logic supporting their relationships. Logic evolves from experiences that disclose what makes the world work. Justice starts out with lessons in fairness, something we feel in our gut. Huge discrepancies in wealth do not seem fair. It takes a good deal of propaganda to make people ignore their understanding of the basic tenants of life.

Water is sacred. Trees are sacred. The temperature of the oceans is sacred to the life it supports. Small changes can destroy breading grounds and cycles. We have to rely on science to understand what is obvious only to the trained eye.

Oil is not sacred. It feeds machines, not living creatures. Therein lies the problem. We adapt to our machines instead of nature’s rules—we defy our genome. The machines rain destruction on the life givers on a scale the earth can no longer process. Poisons remain poison after their release. Our way of adapting to machines kills the biosphere, as well as a good deal of labor.

Take water. Once we could only use what annual rainfall lakes and rivers stored. Now we pump water miles under the ground from centuries of storage. When it is gone, all is gone. The earth is also sinking because of it. Instead to adapting to the requirements of our genome that millions of years designed—like adopting to annual rainfall—we adapt to the pump.

By Carter Stroud, author  of Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil.

carter.stroud@gmail.com

THE UNSPOKEN APOLOGY FOR GREED

The Unspoken Apology For Greed

                                     

Economists have taken considerable interest of late in the growing disparity between the top 1% of the wealthy and the rest of us. Professor Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, presents the data disclosing what creates the disparity. The causes parallel the old aphorism of the self-fulfilling prophecy. When the income from more valuable assets exceeds the growth of everyone else‘s income, people with the better assets have more disposable income to re-invest thus ever widening the gap. Without government intervention, them that has is them that gets.

Danny Darling clearly states the consequences in Inequality and the 1%. The most vulnerable people are being punished for their poverty so that extremely wealthy people can continue their disproportionate access to more wealth. The very wealthy tell us poverty exposes those lacking in initiative—another self-fulfilling-prophecy. Deprived of assets, the poor get poorer. Ultimately, the disappearance of disposable income in the majority will wreck the economy for everyone.

The bubbles the rich create to make themselves richer always explode. Everyone’s economy is in jeopardy, except the super rich who often find a way to profit from it. Even more perplexing, is the fact that the solution is clear: taxes on the rich (recently repealed with more cuts coming). The real problem is not the government’s failure to manage money, but how to keep the rich from managing it.

Hence, politics becomes the issue, but raising taxes is no longer politically correct. The rich have won the culture war. There is a class war going on based entirely on money. Racism and the rest of the civil rights agenda are pre-empted by millions of dollars donated by the super rich for propaganda discrediting anything liberal and painting empathy as cowards.

In the debate between those who would distribute wealth horizontally and those who would distribute it vertically, there lies, sub-silentio, the question whether or not the biosphere can support horizontal distribution (a large middle class).
Social Darwinism conflates biological and economic evolution. The very rich speak in tongues to hide their Darwinian position, namely, that the poor, lacking in the ability to adapt to the rule of money, must be allowed to starve to death. Nature is a cruel master. We must obey it. This unstated apology for greed can only avoid condemnation under the propaganda so adroitly managed by those who control the media to. Guess who that is.
See Natural Selection’s Paradox—The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the science and history for this proposition.