Lincoln opined that useful debate required an agreement on first principles. He must have observed that without common goals people talk past one another as if they were speaking in different tongues. People cannot agree on means without first agreeing on ends. The failure of democratic institutions in America evolved largely out of a failure to even discuss first principles, without which problem solving dissolves into power struggles and the erosion of trust. Freedom of speech has little meaning when people only speak to gain a result. Deception becomes the norm. Opinion and self-interest trump facts.
Religion offered a location for first principles and many still cling to faith to fill the void left without these principles. But belief in an omnipotent creator does not satisfy the need for first principles. Authority, as the dispenser of reality, does not recognize any truths other than its own. The people who benefit most from a lack of first principles are authority figures, the wealthy and the powerful, or what I call “The Money Tribe.” The power they possess permits them to make policy uninhibited by a standard for judging that policy. Hence, the money-controlled media discourages any debate on first principles. Money, as the first principle, is divisive. The competition for it creates a war of all against all and another form of tribalism—the Money Tribe versus everyone else in the great zero-sum game.
How do first principles function? The mind generates a great many thoughts, some of which will come into conflict with one another. Without prioritization, confusion will trouble our thoughts. First principles are the ideas given the highest priority. They become the absolutes to which everything else relates. As such, they become the basis for making decisions as well as the basis of fundamental political conflict. Does good government protect the poor from the rich or must it protect the rich from the poor?
Some hold that government protects the poor from the rich by enforcing civil rights and protects the rich from the poor by protecting private property. Civil rights have little to do with the economy but private property has everything to do with the economy. The propagandists of greed have managed to suppress any real discussion of class. Creating today’s primary value in America, the ability of the ambitious to make it really big, justifies the silence. According to that paradigm, God rewards the righteous with financial success as well as spiritual fulfillment. Government regulations are therefore unnecessary, if not evil. The market knows best. The foregoing beliefs are seldom disclosed, certainly not in the press, because they provide only a thinly disguised apology for stealing other people’s labor.
The consequences of government’s withdrawal from regulation, particularly of the means of production, and a lack of prioritization of human needs has permitted a successful war on labor that threatens to turn America into a land of beggars. Marx presciently observed that the means of production determines the fabric of society. In the years of America ’s vibrant economy, wages supported discretionary spending. People could buy things they did not need. A real economy, the production of necessary goods and services, provided the foundation. Thanks to the Marshall Plan, Europe enjoyed a similar experience, which supported international trade.
And then came the technologies, digital production and huge transports, that permitted manufacture of almost anything almost anywhere. Labor found itself bargaining for lower wages to compete with third-world labor costs. Discretionary income shrank and America no longer, outside of agriculture, produced many necessities. People went into debt to continue buying what they did not need. Government went into debt bailing-out the failures, making the rich richer, and supporting a military-industrial-complex that has become a significant portion of the economy. Unemployment insurance and permanent warfare compete for tax dollars. Now that labor has been successfully cannibalized, the middle class is next. The price of schools, health care, insurance, and government will destroy their savings and reduce the number of high-paying jobs.
No one, including the far left, will discuss the systemic problems facing the economy: exporting the real economy, exhausting resources, automated means of production, and allowing growth, growth, growth to evolve into the supremacy of oligarchies. How do we avoid the evolution of corporate feudalism where a handful prospers and the rest endure poverty? This will occur if the present downward spiral continues. Depressed buying power, higher costs, and less employment create schemes for getting money from people without giving value. Someone wins and someone loses when nothing of value is produced. Only money changes hands in zero-sum games.
There is a reason for the dramatic transfer of wealth in progress. For 200 years, industrial economies have employed the algorithm I call the “Ethic of the Machine:” Take as much wealth from the earth as possible with as little labor as possible. Technology has successfully applied that algorithm to the point where most people produce nothing while the side effects of the machines do much harm to the environment. The enemy may not be the politics of the people next door. Modernity’s curse is its success. Machines produce more with less labor but the remaining labor does not share in the increased productivity. The owners of the machines have to recover their costs and expect more profit as their reward for the investment.
Automated means of production create other problems. Millions of years of evolution taught us, among other things, how to use our hands. Work that satisfies marries craft and intellect. Mass production and games played for money produce little satisfaction. Worse yet under the dominance of the machine, labor lost its bargaining power as well as satisfying work. The right of financiers and owners to most of the profits has replaced the moral right that Lincoln saw as the right of one to the profits earned by the sweat of their brow. Metaphorically, the machines provide the sweat. Therein lies the seed of industrial feudalism. Labor subsidizes the true cost of machines.
The new feudalism is made possible by ignoring in economics what the Constitution recognizes in government: No branch of government is allowed overriding power. Yet, individuals (and corporations) are permitted overwhelming economic power, enough to buy small governments and materially influence big ones. Only taxes and regulations can prevent such distortions of power. Capitalism does not work without massive redistribution of wealth and the suppression of oligarchies. The economy functioned at its best in the 1950s when progressive taxes were the norm. At that time, no one could own more than a handful of radio or television stations. Campaign spending was much smaller. Power was not as centralized. Significant taxes and regulations provide part of the fabric of a democracy in a market economy. Government should protect people from the excesses of wealth and poverty.
Instead, we have a Supreme Court which holds that money talks and that political spending must go unregulated. The media has fallen into a few hands. “No taxes, no government” comprises virtually the sole agenda of conservative politics. The new feudalism has arrived. Americans are so misinformed by the media that they live in a fantasy world sown by the propaganda that money is wealth and God’s reward, government and taxes are evil, and making it big is the purpose of life. Nothing may interfere with that purpose in a free society. These are not the first principles of a free people. They provide the constructs justifying a few getting rich at the expense of the many. Social and economic justice requires first principles based on equality and the well being of as many people as possible.
Mr. Stroud is the author of the book, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religions of Money, and the Origin of Evil. His essays written after publication are found in the blog: naturalselectionsparadox.blogspot.com.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
It's The Culture, Stupid
Muckraking is the art of pointing out truths so obvious that none should miss them. So why have so many people in today’s world missed so many obvious truths, necessitating the muckraking that few news organizations still pursue? Most news media have allowed themselves to become part of the deception visited on the public daily. However, the disconnections in American’s perceptions of events go beyond any failure in media or education. They defy the innate logic that most of us inherit from our parents. The answer lies in the software, not the hardware.
I observe two diametrically opposed construct programmers at work. One program relies on authority as the basis of truth. There authority takes many forms: the Word, the Leader, or an Ideal applied with the purity of zealots. Perceptions of reality must conform to the authority regardless of the level of denial required to accomplish that result. Square pegs do fit in round holes.
The other program lacks that certainty. It weighs experience through the lens of trial-and-error experiments and tests algorithms for their ability to predict outcomes—a strategy referred to in some contexts as the scientific method. Learning never ceases. The objectified facts lead to reliable conclusions on one hand and to more questions on the other. The truth remains provisional. The Money Tribe hates that program. It does not fit the agenda for making it big. Las Vegas does not want to hear that its casinos will soon run out of water. Growth is everything.
The culture preaches that the key to our greatness lies in American culture’s ability to provide the ambitious with the opportunity to make it really big. The first hundred million dollars is just the beginning. That culture would sacrifice many of us to poverty rather than support a government that would end the games that make a few very rich. A lotto mentality has liberal politicians hiding in the closet, petrified of a public that expects a free lunch as well as a chance to grab the golden ring. Obama’s retreat into standard tests of merit (another authority) provides the measure of how impotent the culture has rendered liberals and how little help Obama can expect from the people under him who must administer policy.
Having exported our economy to slave labor venues, little but games played for money remains. More people work for minimum wages while the moneyed and politically connected few grow exceedingly rich. But, as Abbey Lincoln sang, “The people in the houses ain’t got long.” The diminishing purchasing power of labor will support fewer and fewer people making it big. Labor and the union movement have already been cannibalized, robbed of pensions and decent wages, for corporate profits and Wall Street bubbles. The middle class is now under siege, and its disposable income (which fueled the post-war boom) is rapidly disappearing.
Bill Clinton famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid,” ignoring the major influence the culture has on the economy. If America’s mantra were small is beautiful, we would have a much different economy. SUVs and pickup trucks would not get bigger every year. However, unceasing growth is impossible, and its pursuit will destroy our environment. Natural selection provides the key to understanding this suicidal mentality.
People actually are not naturally self-destructive. They behave that way when adapting to the wrong thing, which is usually the result of natural selection’s paradox. Natural selection’s paradox metaphorically expresses natural selection’s inability to distinguish short-term adaptations from long-term adaptations in the short term, a critical phenomena science has completely overlooked. Natural selection will eventually weed out the short-term adaptations, but by the time that happens, the resources necessary for long-term adaptations may be exhausted. In a nutshell, that dynamic defines our future under present modes of production. Corporate planning does not go beyond quarterly profit sheets. Few of the means we use to provide housing, transportation, energy, and food production are sustainable.
Our machines and artifacts succeeded so dramatically in the short-term that we now adapt to them rather than to the environment that designed our genome. We assume that nature will adapt to our machines and artifacts in ways not harmful to us. When the machines change the environment enough, our genome will no longer provide an adaptable organism.
Short-term adaptations trade real wealth (resources) for virtual wealth (money). Capitalism turns resources into money (oil into petrodollars) and then uses the money to do it again rather than use the money to devise a sustainable resource. Conservation just gets in the way of creating virtual wealth. That myopic view fails to recognize that electricity generated from the sun is just as good as electricity generated by oil, but the people who control oil have no short-term interest in conserving it.
The culture reinforces short-term thinking. Natural selection may function in subtle ways. When we lived off animals, we worshipped animals. Now most of our livelihood depends on money. We worship that which sustains us. While it has become for many a measure of God’s love, proof of virtue, and the justification for any means of acquiring it, money has no intrinsic value. The mere possession of virtual wealth provides nothing but a fantasy of security. To have any value, money requires real resources it can retrieve and a government that legitimizes its use—a social contract, without which extortion becomes the means of obtaining it. As wealth crumbles under the machine, means of extortion, like other short-term profiteering, increase. Current financial institutions come to mind.
The most insidious short-term adaptation, what I metaphorically term the outlaw gene, exploits other people’s labor. There are two ways to obtain the energy one needs to survive. One can join a collective division of labor based on merit, or what each individual does best, and share the product. Alternately, one can simply steal other people’s labor by extortion or fraud. In my view, history proves the first method the most efficient. Slavery wastes individual talents and creates expensive conflicts. The outlaw gene references killing the competition before the contest begins. Hence, class has proven the most efficient way to steal other people’s labor. Class defines who can or cannot compete in any activity.
Capitalism makes a virtue out of exploiting labor. Maximum profits require minimal labor costs. The propaganda against labor unions, social programs, and civil rights financed by the religion of money has reached staggering levels over the last few decades. The lies told through the media owned by those who believe they have the right to exploit other people’s labor multiply exponentially.
What changes in the culture do these chilling revelations suggest? First, a new definition of wealth needs to filter through our institutions. So much follows from the definition of wealth. The only definition of wealth I have seen that provides a comprehensive anticipatory strategy for the future was published by Buckminster Fuller decades ago. He defined wealth as the ability to support more people on less for longer periods of time. Natural selection favors the efficient. From that judgment there is no appeal. Fuller’s strategy requires, as society’s ultimate value, an ethic based on the survival of the species. No shorter period is sufficient to avoid short-term adaptations. For our species to survive, other genome must also survive.
We have reached a turning point in history. The planet and means of production have already changed irrevocably. Old solutions no longer serve. Politicians, educators, and administrators often do not have a clue. Following those who preach, like the Tea Party, that all we need to do is be pure again (observe the Bible, the Constitution, etc.) only raises the level of incompetence and justifies wide-spread suffering. The poor will increase and be abandoned under the auspices of the religion of money’s precept that poverty is God’s punishment for lack of purity.
Adapting to the dictates of making money may seem like a good adaptation at the moment but it is absolutely the wrong strategy for our long-term survival. Money does not measure efficiency. Letting money do its thing will not bring prosperity. The market does not function as one of natural selection’s algorithms. Its corruption by virtual wealth renders it useless as a means of identifying long-term adaptations.
Mr. Stroud is the author of the book, Natural Selection’ Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religions of Money, and the Origin of Evil. His essays written after publication are found in the blog: natural selectionsparadox.blogspot.com
I observe two diametrically opposed construct programmers at work. One program relies on authority as the basis of truth. There authority takes many forms: the Word, the Leader, or an Ideal applied with the purity of zealots. Perceptions of reality must conform to the authority regardless of the level of denial required to accomplish that result. Square pegs do fit in round holes.
The other program lacks that certainty. It weighs experience through the lens of trial-and-error experiments and tests algorithms for their ability to predict outcomes—a strategy referred to in some contexts as the scientific method. Learning never ceases. The objectified facts lead to reliable conclusions on one hand and to more questions on the other. The truth remains provisional. The Money Tribe hates that program. It does not fit the agenda for making it big. Las Vegas does not want to hear that its casinos will soon run out of water. Growth is everything.
The culture preaches that the key to our greatness lies in American culture’s ability to provide the ambitious with the opportunity to make it really big. The first hundred million dollars is just the beginning. That culture would sacrifice many of us to poverty rather than support a government that would end the games that make a few very rich. A lotto mentality has liberal politicians hiding in the closet, petrified of a public that expects a free lunch as well as a chance to grab the golden ring. Obama’s retreat into standard tests of merit (another authority) provides the measure of how impotent the culture has rendered liberals and how little help Obama can expect from the people under him who must administer policy.
Having exported our economy to slave labor venues, little but games played for money remains. More people work for minimum wages while the moneyed and politically connected few grow exceedingly rich. But, as Abbey Lincoln sang, “The people in the houses ain’t got long.” The diminishing purchasing power of labor will support fewer and fewer people making it big. Labor and the union movement have already been cannibalized, robbed of pensions and decent wages, for corporate profits and Wall Street bubbles. The middle class is now under siege, and its disposable income (which fueled the post-war boom) is rapidly disappearing.
Bill Clinton famously said, “It’s the economy, stupid,” ignoring the major influence the culture has on the economy. If America’s mantra were small is beautiful, we would have a much different economy. SUVs and pickup trucks would not get bigger every year. However, unceasing growth is impossible, and its pursuit will destroy our environment. Natural selection provides the key to understanding this suicidal mentality.
People actually are not naturally self-destructive. They behave that way when adapting to the wrong thing, which is usually the result of natural selection’s paradox. Natural selection’s paradox metaphorically expresses natural selection’s inability to distinguish short-term adaptations from long-term adaptations in the short term, a critical phenomena science has completely overlooked. Natural selection will eventually weed out the short-term adaptations, but by the time that happens, the resources necessary for long-term adaptations may be exhausted. In a nutshell, that dynamic defines our future under present modes of production. Corporate planning does not go beyond quarterly profit sheets. Few of the means we use to provide housing, transportation, energy, and food production are sustainable.
Our machines and artifacts succeeded so dramatically in the short-term that we now adapt to them rather than to the environment that designed our genome. We assume that nature will adapt to our machines and artifacts in ways not harmful to us. When the machines change the environment enough, our genome will no longer provide an adaptable organism.
Short-term adaptations trade real wealth (resources) for virtual wealth (money). Capitalism turns resources into money (oil into petrodollars) and then uses the money to do it again rather than use the money to devise a sustainable resource. Conservation just gets in the way of creating virtual wealth. That myopic view fails to recognize that electricity generated from the sun is just as good as electricity generated by oil, but the people who control oil have no short-term interest in conserving it.
The culture reinforces short-term thinking. Natural selection may function in subtle ways. When we lived off animals, we worshipped animals. Now most of our livelihood depends on money. We worship that which sustains us. While it has become for many a measure of God’s love, proof of virtue, and the justification for any means of acquiring it, money has no intrinsic value. The mere possession of virtual wealth provides nothing but a fantasy of security. To have any value, money requires real resources it can retrieve and a government that legitimizes its use—a social contract, without which extortion becomes the means of obtaining it. As wealth crumbles under the machine, means of extortion, like other short-term profiteering, increase. Current financial institutions come to mind.
The most insidious short-term adaptation, what I metaphorically term the outlaw gene, exploits other people’s labor. There are two ways to obtain the energy one needs to survive. One can join a collective division of labor based on merit, or what each individual does best, and share the product. Alternately, one can simply steal other people’s labor by extortion or fraud. In my view, history proves the first method the most efficient. Slavery wastes individual talents and creates expensive conflicts. The outlaw gene references killing the competition before the contest begins. Hence, class has proven the most efficient way to steal other people’s labor. Class defines who can or cannot compete in any activity.
Capitalism makes a virtue out of exploiting labor. Maximum profits require minimal labor costs. The propaganda against labor unions, social programs, and civil rights financed by the religion of money has reached staggering levels over the last few decades. The lies told through the media owned by those who believe they have the right to exploit other people’s labor multiply exponentially.
What changes in the culture do these chilling revelations suggest? First, a new definition of wealth needs to filter through our institutions. So much follows from the definition of wealth. The only definition of wealth I have seen that provides a comprehensive anticipatory strategy for the future was published by Buckminster Fuller decades ago. He defined wealth as the ability to support more people on less for longer periods of time. Natural selection favors the efficient. From that judgment there is no appeal. Fuller’s strategy requires, as society’s ultimate value, an ethic based on the survival of the species. No shorter period is sufficient to avoid short-term adaptations. For our species to survive, other genome must also survive.
We have reached a turning point in history. The planet and means of production have already changed irrevocably. Old solutions no longer serve. Politicians, educators, and administrators often do not have a clue. Following those who preach, like the Tea Party, that all we need to do is be pure again (observe the Bible, the Constitution, etc.) only raises the level of incompetence and justifies wide-spread suffering. The poor will increase and be abandoned under the auspices of the religion of money’s precept that poverty is God’s punishment for lack of purity.
Adapting to the dictates of making money may seem like a good adaptation at the moment but it is absolutely the wrong strategy for our long-term survival. Money does not measure efficiency. Letting money do its thing will not bring prosperity. The market does not function as one of natural selection’s algorithms. Its corruption by virtual wealth renders it useless as a means of identifying long-term adaptations.
Mr. Stroud is the author of the book, Natural Selection’ Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religions of Money, and the Origin of Evil. His essays written after publication are found in the blog: natural selectionsparadox.blogspot.com
Friday, July 23, 2010
Why Capitalism Provides a Poor Adaptation for Survival
I observe a duality in human behavior so pronounced that it may even originate in the genome as two different modes of survival. There are those who believe that the source of all knowledge and the key to understanding reality resides in some form of authority: the Word, the Leader, the Father figure, or divine revelation. Everything and everybody must conform to the dictates of that authority. Here, society measures the ability to adapt by obedience to authority’s dictates. True believers do not recognize any other world that might intervene. One dies, if necessary, for the cause.
The other point of view is harder to describe. It recognizes that literal depictions of reality stifle discovery. This view employs interpretations of energy and experience to develop constructs from which evolve the mirrors of reality that allow us to adapt to the world in which we live. Change is inevitable. Mistakes will occur. This point of view holds that we must adapt to the natural world’s algorithms and not expect everything to adapt to our ways.
The first point of view only recognizes its orthodoxy. The other view relies on something akin to the scientific method: the creationists versus the evolutionists. After centuries of inquisitions based on orthodoxies that fought the rise of liberal democracy, the struggle for supremacy of one paradigm over the other continues. It may even be the overarching dynamic in politics and a cause of war.
I observe another duality with similar functions. One side of both dualities embraces hierarchy as the inevitable way to govern. This duality concerns the means of production. Society may organize itself on the basis of social classes or society may institute divisions of labor based on merit and ability. The former wastes talent and the latter produces synergies. Individuals seek the energy they need in the context of this duality. They may cooperate with the synergistic divisions of labor or they may appropriate other people’s labor in whatever ways the class system permits. This appropriation forms the biological basis of evil.
As resources diminish and populations grow, the pressure to return to the hierarchies of feudalism increases. In that future, well-paid technocrats employed by a moneyed elite will produce lucrative goods and a marginalized work force will provide labor-intensive services. Health care and education will become too expensive for many. Government will exist only to protect private property and to guarantee an elite’s profits. That is the vision of the would-be “masters of the universe,” which comes closer to reality with every election of either a dedicated usurper (Bush) or a pretend liberal (Clinton).
We do not live in a liberal democracy. A corporate oligarchy decides the limits of politics and the means of production. Liberal politicians went into the closet decades ago (since Carter’s one-term presidency) and now pursue a policy of offending no one regardless of how their policies offend nature and humanity. Otherwise, the corporate oligarchy will cut off their campaign money. It seems that many have abandoned hope of a better future for all. Talk is cheap; reform is expensive. To what do we owe this reversal of evolution?
After much research and thought, I conclude that we are what we adapt ourselves to. Natural selection provides the context for understanding the human condition. That which seems impossible to imagine makes sense upon discovery of what that behavior adapts us to. The environment changes people. We need to be very careful about how we change it. Technology creates dangers and unintended consequences, not the least of which follows from adapting to our artifacts instead of to the natural world and the genetic instructions created by millions of years of adaptations to the natural world.
In more and more contexts we find ourselves adapting to the values of hierarchy. It is becoming second nature, even for people who suffer most from those values. How many unemployed by the exportation of American jobs supported George Bush and Bill Clinton?
Most of us find ourselves adapting to the business of making money. This is the focus of our adaptation. The corporate oligarchy, through its chosen means of production, largely determines the nature of work. Many spend their energies, even genius, protecting an elite from those with good reasons for making demands on their profits.
Adapting to the hierarchy that worships profit usually results in adapting to the wrong thing—reversing evolution. People worship that which appears to sustain them. Once it was animals; now it is money. Unfortunately, the religion of money hardly acknowledges the requirements of life. The CEO of British Petroleum’s suggestion that the damage done by its giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be redressed with money tells the tale. Such ignorance at the top predicts the ultimate failure of capitalism and the impotence of neo-liberal government (under corporate hegemony) to enact life-preserving limitations on technology inconsistent with the religion of money.
Economies of scale include unintended consequences. Measuring costs exclusively in dollars and not resource depletion produces pseudo-economics. Among other things, it increases dependence on hierarchy. Decentralizing the means of production would reverse that trend. The solar roof-panel, the neighborhood garden or windmill, river paddlewheels, geothermal heat pumps, biomass, and other local food and energy producing technologies free people from dependence on mega-corporations. Much has been done to discourage such technologies while the pretense of support for them comes from many mouths. Deception is the rule.
The ultimate failure of capitalism and its current means of production follows from natural selection’s paradox. Natural selection does not distinguish short-term from long-term adaptations in the short term. Short-term adaptations now use our resources at such a high rate that insufficient resources will remain for the long-term adaptations whenever society can no longer ignore the consequences of the short-term adaptation. For example, damages to the ecosystem caused by the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will cost more in the long term than the value of the oil spilled had it not been lost. Generations of fishing losses alone will be staggering.
Capitalism produces “wealth” by turning real wealth (resources) into virtual (paper) wealth. That process discourages efficiency in the use of wealth. Wasting energy can actually be profitable for purposes of converting it into cash. If we do not invent accounting systems that preserve real wealth, we will move to the head of the endangered species list.
Only a morality based on survival of the species will produce the necessary changes. Survival of our children’s children provides the timeframe for applying strategies consistent with the algorithms of natural selection, which we must understand in order to survive.
The other point of view is harder to describe. It recognizes that literal depictions of reality stifle discovery. This view employs interpretations of energy and experience to develop constructs from which evolve the mirrors of reality that allow us to adapt to the world in which we live. Change is inevitable. Mistakes will occur. This point of view holds that we must adapt to the natural world’s algorithms and not expect everything to adapt to our ways.
The first point of view only recognizes its orthodoxy. The other view relies on something akin to the scientific method: the creationists versus the evolutionists. After centuries of inquisitions based on orthodoxies that fought the rise of liberal democracy, the struggle for supremacy of one paradigm over the other continues. It may even be the overarching dynamic in politics and a cause of war.
I observe another duality with similar functions. One side of both dualities embraces hierarchy as the inevitable way to govern. This duality concerns the means of production. Society may organize itself on the basis of social classes or society may institute divisions of labor based on merit and ability. The former wastes talent and the latter produces synergies. Individuals seek the energy they need in the context of this duality. They may cooperate with the synergistic divisions of labor or they may appropriate other people’s labor in whatever ways the class system permits. This appropriation forms the biological basis of evil.
As resources diminish and populations grow, the pressure to return to the hierarchies of feudalism increases. In that future, well-paid technocrats employed by a moneyed elite will produce lucrative goods and a marginalized work force will provide labor-intensive services. Health care and education will become too expensive for many. Government will exist only to protect private property and to guarantee an elite’s profits. That is the vision of the would-be “masters of the universe,” which comes closer to reality with every election of either a dedicated usurper (Bush) or a pretend liberal (Clinton).
We do not live in a liberal democracy. A corporate oligarchy decides the limits of politics and the means of production. Liberal politicians went into the closet decades ago (since Carter’s one-term presidency) and now pursue a policy of offending no one regardless of how their policies offend nature and humanity. Otherwise, the corporate oligarchy will cut off their campaign money. It seems that many have abandoned hope of a better future for all. Talk is cheap; reform is expensive. To what do we owe this reversal of evolution?
After much research and thought, I conclude that we are what we adapt ourselves to. Natural selection provides the context for understanding the human condition. That which seems impossible to imagine makes sense upon discovery of what that behavior adapts us to. The environment changes people. We need to be very careful about how we change it. Technology creates dangers and unintended consequences, not the least of which follows from adapting to our artifacts instead of to the natural world and the genetic instructions created by millions of years of adaptations to the natural world.
In more and more contexts we find ourselves adapting to the values of hierarchy. It is becoming second nature, even for people who suffer most from those values. How many unemployed by the exportation of American jobs supported George Bush and Bill Clinton?
Most of us find ourselves adapting to the business of making money. This is the focus of our adaptation. The corporate oligarchy, through its chosen means of production, largely determines the nature of work. Many spend their energies, even genius, protecting an elite from those with good reasons for making demands on their profits.
Adapting to the hierarchy that worships profit usually results in adapting to the wrong thing—reversing evolution. People worship that which appears to sustain them. Once it was animals; now it is money. Unfortunately, the religion of money hardly acknowledges the requirements of life. The CEO of British Petroleum’s suggestion that the damage done by its giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can be redressed with money tells the tale. Such ignorance at the top predicts the ultimate failure of capitalism and the impotence of neo-liberal government (under corporate hegemony) to enact life-preserving limitations on technology inconsistent with the religion of money.
Economies of scale include unintended consequences. Measuring costs exclusively in dollars and not resource depletion produces pseudo-economics. Among other things, it increases dependence on hierarchy. Decentralizing the means of production would reverse that trend. The solar roof-panel, the neighborhood garden or windmill, river paddlewheels, geothermal heat pumps, biomass, and other local food and energy producing technologies free people from dependence on mega-corporations. Much has been done to discourage such technologies while the pretense of support for them comes from many mouths. Deception is the rule.
The ultimate failure of capitalism and its current means of production follows from natural selection’s paradox. Natural selection does not distinguish short-term from long-term adaptations in the short term. Short-term adaptations now use our resources at such a high rate that insufficient resources will remain for the long-term adaptations whenever society can no longer ignore the consequences of the short-term adaptation. For example, damages to the ecosystem caused by the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will cost more in the long term than the value of the oil spilled had it not been lost. Generations of fishing losses alone will be staggering.
Capitalism produces “wealth” by turning real wealth (resources) into virtual (paper) wealth. That process discourages efficiency in the use of wealth. Wasting energy can actually be profitable for purposes of converting it into cash. If we do not invent accounting systems that preserve real wealth, we will move to the head of the endangered species list.
Only a morality based on survival of the species will produce the necessary changes. Survival of our children’s children provides the timeframe for applying strategies consistent with the algorithms of natural selection, which we must understand in order to survive.
Monday, May 10, 2010
A Summary of Natural Selection's Paradox
To many a respected analysts,
I have long admired your analysis of the economy and the culture. I have analyzed the forces behind what you have observed. Any discussion of the economy or culture must start with natural selection. The genes are God in the sense that they define the limits of our ability to adapt. If these limits did not exist, we might reasonably have less concern about global warming.
What Darwin did not analyze is as important as what he did tell us. Natural selection does not distinguish between short-term and long-term adaptations in the short term. It is a neutral algorithm. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources necessary for long-term survival, the species faces extinction. Most, if not all, of our troubles stem from short-term adaptations. Corporate balance sheets only look at the next three months. A sustainable morality can only stand on the search for long-term adaptations. Survival of the species provides the moral imperative for judging adaptations.
The other point not addressed by Darwin is the dichotomy in adaptations for the acquisition of the energy individuals must have to survive or rise to prominence. One employs synergetic divisions of labor based on merit, where all share in the result and the other appropriates the labor of others. The fight for freedom has always been a class struggle, class being the most effective way of enforcing relative slavery. The modern version of slavery employs, as outlined by Community Action’s Porter, a system of keeping a labor force so intimidated that it will do the bidding of an elite for little or nothing. A large part of the workforce is employed, in Samuel Bowles term, as “Guard labor” to keep the poor from appropriating from the rich.
The environment suffers from the same mentality. Capitalism is the business of turning real wealth into paper wealth as fast as possible, usually at the expense of the future generations. There is a great deal of mythology and history involved in this evolution. I think you could use what I have to say in my book, Natural Selection’s Paradox; The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil. It is available on Amazon. Keep hunting.
I have long admired your analysis of the economy and the culture. I have analyzed the forces behind what you have observed. Any discussion of the economy or culture must start with natural selection. The genes are God in the sense that they define the limits of our ability to adapt. If these limits did not exist, we might reasonably have less concern about global warming.
What Darwin did not analyze is as important as what he did tell us. Natural selection does not distinguish between short-term and long-term adaptations in the short term. It is a neutral algorithm. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources necessary for long-term survival, the species faces extinction. Most, if not all, of our troubles stem from short-term adaptations. Corporate balance sheets only look at the next three months. A sustainable morality can only stand on the search for long-term adaptations. Survival of the species provides the moral imperative for judging adaptations.
The other point not addressed by Darwin is the dichotomy in adaptations for the acquisition of the energy individuals must have to survive or rise to prominence. One employs synergetic divisions of labor based on merit, where all share in the result and the other appropriates the labor of others. The fight for freedom has always been a class struggle, class being the most effective way of enforcing relative slavery. The modern version of slavery employs, as outlined by Community Action’s Porter, a system of keeping a labor force so intimidated that it will do the bidding of an elite for little or nothing. A large part of the workforce is employed, in Samuel Bowles term, as “Guard labor” to keep the poor from appropriating from the rich.
The environment suffers from the same mentality. Capitalism is the business of turning real wealth into paper wealth as fast as possible, usually at the expense of the future generations. There is a great deal of mythology and history involved in this evolution. I think you could use what I have to say in my book, Natural Selection’s Paradox; The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil. It is available on Amazon. Keep hunting.
Monday, May 3, 2010
A Liberal Rant
I wrote a book, Natural Selection’s Paradox, wherein I examined some crucial aspects of natural selection that Darwin’s epic discovery does not address. I do not fault Darwin for that. Finding acceptance for natural selection was difficult enough—still is— without discussing what that algorithm does not accomplish. Having done as much research, reflection, and writing as objectively as I could, I now vent my frustration with some of the more disturbing aspects of the current effort to dethrone reason.
Rant number one: that there can ever be such a thing as no government.
Indeed, we can dispense with civil government overnight, as many have done. Somalia comes to mind. The conservative rant against civil government, particularly an elected government, causes the blood to boil. Is Somalia the model we want to follow? The rule of the gun has always provided the alternative to civil government. Warlords sell their services to the highest bidder. Money rules the gun and the gun is not the only means of exploiting other people. Money itself provides an effective means.
Much of what I witness coming out of Washington appears to foster just that: the supremacy of money. Civil government becomes an instrument of repression when ruled by money. For the Supreme Court to give corporations the status of citizens and lobbyist a First Amendment right to buy government favors an elite more effectively than the gun. Under these circumstances, we do not live in a liberal democracy.
Hence, liberals find themselves impotent because they must pretend that they live in a liberal democracy, ignoring the post Civil War sub-rosa fight to maintain white, male, Christian, heterosexual supremacy. That counter-revolution against all things liberal, starting with the Constitution itself through the Civil Rights Acts, cannot be defeated by compromise or bipartisanship. Revolutions take no prisoners.
Rant number two: Managing money can solve all problems.
The mantra of conservative economics since Milton Friedman has been deregulation, privatization, and cutting taxes—the road to no government, in which all money ends up in the hands of an elite. Under that plan, money trickles up. The economy becomes a giant monopoly game.
The fallacy of neo-liberal economics follows from the fantasy that money is wealth, not just a credit mechanism. If wasting resources makes money, guess what will happen to resources. Instead of managing resources for survival, money manages resources for its own purposes. The elite that wants no government, outside the protection of private property and guarantees for their profits, reaps the benefits.
Rant number three: no taxes.
I would prefer the system in Venezuela where the government owns everything below ground and makes its money selling oil and minerals and collects no taxes. That way one pays according to how much they consume rather than how well they play the game. But that is not where we live.
We live in a capitalist economy. Capitalism is the business of turning real wealth into paper wealth as fast as possible. The new capital accumulates in the direction of bigness. Money makes more money. At the same time, technology is employed to reduce costs, mostly labor costs. The result is a giant monopoly game that eventually ends with so many chips in so few hands that the economy stalls.
Capitalism fails absent a serious redistribution of wealth—trickle-down in a big way. The monopoly game does not do that. If machines put people out of work, the machines must pay a tax (through the owners) to support the unemployed and to provide infrastructure for new work. Only taxes can provide timely, sufficient funds for that purpose. That brings me to the next rant.
Rant number four: hope lies in the service economy, buying new gadgets, and creating bubbles.
The service economy is supposed to take up the slack in employment created by exporting manufacturing overseas. More lawyers, real estate agents, administrators, nail polishers, stockbrokers, bankers, and a host of other services provide the answer. Beyond a certain point, that yields a lot of middlemen and other inflationary skimming off the top. Service employment creates inflation when it does not serve people who actually produce necessities. No assets, like lumber, are produced to justify printing more money.
And then there is the famous entrepreneur. Just give the inventive, new idea people their head and they will invent something everyone will want to buy and we will all be saved. Forget that most of those things will use up huge amounts of energy and materials and add nothing but ways to kill time, increase credit card debt, and force women out of the home for jobs to pay for it.
Rather than free up our time, technology has us working ever-longer hours to create more capital (money). Budgets increase while it gets harder to keep up with what you have, let alone the new things you must have. Few have any time for their children. Everyone has to have a job, regardless of how useless it is. Pooling resources to produce maximum efficiency and sharing the results would allow for more time to educate, exercise, and enjoy life. Instead, we have a victim economy where people’s misfortunes or errors become cannon fodder for a “service” economy.
Creating more service jobs and selling nonessential gadgets goes hand-in-hand with bubble economies. The ever more powerful computer, the ever increasing in value house, the ever larger automobile, and keeping up with the Joneses supports growth—the answer to all economic problems. Never ending growth posits a world without gravity.
We will never evade entropy but we can minimize it with synergetic designs. Divisions of labor based on merit and on what individuals do best, where all share in the result, provide an environment where efficient use of resources may flourish. We are what we adapt to. Competition for money brings out the ruthless, wasteful side of our nature.
Rant number five: the trashing of the welfare state.
As in communism and socialism, the welfare state provides the devil responsible for all evils. Communism never existed outside of theory—was co-opted by despots—and socialism never existed in a pure form. Those theories are used as foils for scaring people away from a collective solution. The American pathology consists of the belief that making it possible for people to make it really big—the second hundred million dollars—fosters excellence and prosperity. Instead, the ruthless and greedy prosper. Adequate regulations for stopping that result are suspect. We are what we adapt to.
The followers of Ayn Rand loathe the idea that survival requires collective endeavors. A society that provides the infrastructure, education, and health care needed for all to survive frees people to improve themselves. The ethic of everyone for himself or herself creates a war of all against all, wasting peoples’ potential and lives. If not for the welfare of all, what good is a state, other than to serve an elite? Who is the richer: the one who can depend on their neighbors, or the one who must, to feel safe, carve out a fortune by any means?
Rant number six: We are the chosen of God.
Nothing excuses the war of all against all like the belief that one belongs to a group chosen by God, my tribe over all others.
The thesis of my book addresses a critical fact that Darwin did not address: natural selection does not distinguish short-term adaptations from long-term adaptations in the short term. That algorithm picks no favorites. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources required for the long-term adaptation before people discover their error, extinction follows. Only survival of the species, not the tribe, provides a time frame adequate for deciding the efficacy of an adaptation.
Final rant: Capitalism is a miserable failure.
This heresy flies in the face of current opinion that capitalism has bettered all contenders, provides the basis of freedom, and is responsible for prosperity. None can draw these conclusions as anything but transient if they adopt survival of the species as the foundation of ethics and survival; the signs of failure are everywhere.
Sophisticated and complex divisions of labor that accompanied the Industrial Revolution required a means of exchange—money. Barter no longer served as it did in agrarian societies. Money provides the means of preserving ones labor, a means of barter for whatever one needs. Those who control physical wealth use it for the same purpose. Sell your oil for money and you have something you can barter for almost anything else.
“Capitalism” trades resources for money and then treats the money as something equivalent to resources. The means of that conversion can be very subtle. The use of public transportation by most people would save huge amounts of resources and energy. The use of millions of cars creates more money and big cars command bigger profit margins than little ones. Strategies for creating virtual capital increase entropy.
All economies in the industrial world, whether called capitalist or not, employ the turning of wealth into money paradigm. People were forced to adapt to making money and became capitalists involuntarily. Capitalism did not prove itself the better adaptation for the future. It physically co-opted everyone by elevating money to the status of real wealth, not just a medium of exchange. Money played some very dirty tricks in its rise. Liberalism did not fail. It was sabotaged. In America, politicians measure everything in terms of dollars, not survival of the species. One’s prosperity often turns on whom that government subsidizes in its calculations for distributing wealth. One person’s freedom to make money can be another person’s burden.
The virtual economy cannibalizes the future (as well as people’s misery) by turning everything into virtual wealth that has no intrinsic value. Treating money as capital, equal if not superior to labor and resources, fuels an expansionism that cannot be sustained. Survival depends on equilibrium, not on the prominence of artificial wealth.
The ultimate rant: People suffer fools by fooling themselves.
If the meek shall inherit the earth, they have been waiting a long time. Instead of demanding fairness, many in our country meekly accept more work for less pay and higher costs for fewer services while an elite becomes exponentially richer. One fears the specter of a population so demoralized by the primacy of money that society has accepted lords, ladies, and serfs as the natural order of things, just as our recent ancestors accepted hereditary kings as the natural order of things. Crowns are no longer made of gold. Crowns are made of paper that burns those who resist its hegemony.
The new natural order has put the American Revolution in reverse. No longer being a nation of farmers, a “tea party” protests the very taxes we need to survive, in the process serving a private elite that taxes us with impunity through exorbitant credit card interest rates and other means. Wall Street is allowed to gamble with other people’s money, which only the government can stop but government is on the chopping block. Fools suffer from their own delusions. Good government does not come cheap. People have to pay for it and, more to the point, fight for it.
Rant number one: that there can ever be such a thing as no government.
Indeed, we can dispense with civil government overnight, as many have done. Somalia comes to mind. The conservative rant against civil government, particularly an elected government, causes the blood to boil. Is Somalia the model we want to follow? The rule of the gun has always provided the alternative to civil government. Warlords sell their services to the highest bidder. Money rules the gun and the gun is not the only means of exploiting other people. Money itself provides an effective means.
Much of what I witness coming out of Washington appears to foster just that: the supremacy of money. Civil government becomes an instrument of repression when ruled by money. For the Supreme Court to give corporations the status of citizens and lobbyist a First Amendment right to buy government favors an elite more effectively than the gun. Under these circumstances, we do not live in a liberal democracy.
Hence, liberals find themselves impotent because they must pretend that they live in a liberal democracy, ignoring the post Civil War sub-rosa fight to maintain white, male, Christian, heterosexual supremacy. That counter-revolution against all things liberal, starting with the Constitution itself through the Civil Rights Acts, cannot be defeated by compromise or bipartisanship. Revolutions take no prisoners.
Rant number two: Managing money can solve all problems.
The mantra of conservative economics since Milton Friedman has been deregulation, privatization, and cutting taxes—the road to no government, in which all money ends up in the hands of an elite. Under that plan, money trickles up. The economy becomes a giant monopoly game.
The fallacy of neo-liberal economics follows from the fantasy that money is wealth, not just a credit mechanism. If wasting resources makes money, guess what will happen to resources. Instead of managing resources for survival, money manages resources for its own purposes. The elite that wants no government, outside the protection of private property and guarantees for their profits, reaps the benefits.
Rant number three: no taxes.
I would prefer the system in Venezuela where the government owns everything below ground and makes its money selling oil and minerals and collects no taxes. That way one pays according to how much they consume rather than how well they play the game. But that is not where we live.
We live in a capitalist economy. Capitalism is the business of turning real wealth into paper wealth as fast as possible. The new capital accumulates in the direction of bigness. Money makes more money. At the same time, technology is employed to reduce costs, mostly labor costs. The result is a giant monopoly game that eventually ends with so many chips in so few hands that the economy stalls.
Capitalism fails absent a serious redistribution of wealth—trickle-down in a big way. The monopoly game does not do that. If machines put people out of work, the machines must pay a tax (through the owners) to support the unemployed and to provide infrastructure for new work. Only taxes can provide timely, sufficient funds for that purpose. That brings me to the next rant.
Rant number four: hope lies in the service economy, buying new gadgets, and creating bubbles.
The service economy is supposed to take up the slack in employment created by exporting manufacturing overseas. More lawyers, real estate agents, administrators, nail polishers, stockbrokers, bankers, and a host of other services provide the answer. Beyond a certain point, that yields a lot of middlemen and other inflationary skimming off the top. Service employment creates inflation when it does not serve people who actually produce necessities. No assets, like lumber, are produced to justify printing more money.
And then there is the famous entrepreneur. Just give the inventive, new idea people their head and they will invent something everyone will want to buy and we will all be saved. Forget that most of those things will use up huge amounts of energy and materials and add nothing but ways to kill time, increase credit card debt, and force women out of the home for jobs to pay for it.
Rather than free up our time, technology has us working ever-longer hours to create more capital (money). Budgets increase while it gets harder to keep up with what you have, let alone the new things you must have. Few have any time for their children. Everyone has to have a job, regardless of how useless it is. Pooling resources to produce maximum efficiency and sharing the results would allow for more time to educate, exercise, and enjoy life. Instead, we have a victim economy where people’s misfortunes or errors become cannon fodder for a “service” economy.
Creating more service jobs and selling nonessential gadgets goes hand-in-hand with bubble economies. The ever more powerful computer, the ever increasing in value house, the ever larger automobile, and keeping up with the Joneses supports growth—the answer to all economic problems. Never ending growth posits a world without gravity.
We will never evade entropy but we can minimize it with synergetic designs. Divisions of labor based on merit and on what individuals do best, where all share in the result, provide an environment where efficient use of resources may flourish. We are what we adapt to. Competition for money brings out the ruthless, wasteful side of our nature.
Rant number five: the trashing of the welfare state.
As in communism and socialism, the welfare state provides the devil responsible for all evils. Communism never existed outside of theory—was co-opted by despots—and socialism never existed in a pure form. Those theories are used as foils for scaring people away from a collective solution. The American pathology consists of the belief that making it possible for people to make it really big—the second hundred million dollars—fosters excellence and prosperity. Instead, the ruthless and greedy prosper. Adequate regulations for stopping that result are suspect. We are what we adapt to.
The followers of Ayn Rand loathe the idea that survival requires collective endeavors. A society that provides the infrastructure, education, and health care needed for all to survive frees people to improve themselves. The ethic of everyone for himself or herself creates a war of all against all, wasting peoples’ potential and lives. If not for the welfare of all, what good is a state, other than to serve an elite? Who is the richer: the one who can depend on their neighbors, or the one who must, to feel safe, carve out a fortune by any means?
Rant number six: We are the chosen of God.
Nothing excuses the war of all against all like the belief that one belongs to a group chosen by God, my tribe over all others.
The thesis of my book addresses a critical fact that Darwin did not address: natural selection does not distinguish short-term adaptations from long-term adaptations in the short term. That algorithm picks no favorites. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources required for the long-term adaptation before people discover their error, extinction follows. Only survival of the species, not the tribe, provides a time frame adequate for deciding the efficacy of an adaptation.
Final rant: Capitalism is a miserable failure.
This heresy flies in the face of current opinion that capitalism has bettered all contenders, provides the basis of freedom, and is responsible for prosperity. None can draw these conclusions as anything but transient if they adopt survival of the species as the foundation of ethics and survival; the signs of failure are everywhere.
Sophisticated and complex divisions of labor that accompanied the Industrial Revolution required a means of exchange—money. Barter no longer served as it did in agrarian societies. Money provides the means of preserving ones labor, a means of barter for whatever one needs. Those who control physical wealth use it for the same purpose. Sell your oil for money and you have something you can barter for almost anything else.
“Capitalism” trades resources for money and then treats the money as something equivalent to resources. The means of that conversion can be very subtle. The use of public transportation by most people would save huge amounts of resources and energy. The use of millions of cars creates more money and big cars command bigger profit margins than little ones. Strategies for creating virtual capital increase entropy.
All economies in the industrial world, whether called capitalist or not, employ the turning of wealth into money paradigm. People were forced to adapt to making money and became capitalists involuntarily. Capitalism did not prove itself the better adaptation for the future. It physically co-opted everyone by elevating money to the status of real wealth, not just a medium of exchange. Money played some very dirty tricks in its rise. Liberalism did not fail. It was sabotaged. In America, politicians measure everything in terms of dollars, not survival of the species. One’s prosperity often turns on whom that government subsidizes in its calculations for distributing wealth. One person’s freedom to make money can be another person’s burden.
The virtual economy cannibalizes the future (as well as people’s misery) by turning everything into virtual wealth that has no intrinsic value. Treating money as capital, equal if not superior to labor and resources, fuels an expansionism that cannot be sustained. Survival depends on equilibrium, not on the prominence of artificial wealth.
The ultimate rant: People suffer fools by fooling themselves.
If the meek shall inherit the earth, they have been waiting a long time. Instead of demanding fairness, many in our country meekly accept more work for less pay and higher costs for fewer services while an elite becomes exponentially richer. One fears the specter of a population so demoralized by the primacy of money that society has accepted lords, ladies, and serfs as the natural order of things, just as our recent ancestors accepted hereditary kings as the natural order of things. Crowns are no longer made of gold. Crowns are made of paper that burns those who resist its hegemony.
The new natural order has put the American Revolution in reverse. No longer being a nation of farmers, a “tea party” protests the very taxes we need to survive, in the process serving a private elite that taxes us with impunity through exorbitant credit card interest rates and other means. Wall Street is allowed to gamble with other people’s money, which only the government can stop but government is on the chopping block. Fools suffer from their own delusions. Good government does not come cheap. People have to pay for it and, more to the point, fight for it.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
The Triumph of Engineering and the Failure of Capitalism
In the struggle to understand the forces that shape our lives, few functions challenge our imaginations more severely than economics and government. They form a reciprocal and inseparable relationship. What government does not control economics will control, if not usurp the power of government. Players in the economy may find ways to impose taxes greater than those of government. When private entities are able to impose unfair costs on society through their sheer economic and political power, this acts as both a form of extortion and as a privately enforced tax on the citizenry. Such extortion has become a primary characteristic of our capitalist society.
Classically, “extortion” meant the acquisition of money or value by duress, physical or psychological. Supply and demand paradigms ignore the extent to which extortion corrupts an objective basis for determining value. Ignoring the impact of extortion avoids the burden of making certain value judgments. When are profits excessive? When does advertising prey on our emotions? When does one have enough? What is productive? How are we impacting the future? We do our best to avoid making those kinds of decisions. The ‘free’ market paradigm provides cover for our escape from ethical judgments. The competition for profit relieves most decisions of such concerns.
While the struggle for money may appear democratic, in that it knows no race, gender, or nationality, the reality proves quite discriminatory. Money supports class systems that exclude certain people from the competition. In a society that likes to think it does not entertain class strictures, one dare not speak of the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. I will break that taboo.
For multiple reasons, class is returning with a vengeance. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing. I characterize the consequences of modernity as the triumph of engineering and the failure of capitalism. As technology and greed destroy resources, the affluent and powerful have determined that a return to lords, ladies, and serfs provides the logical and proper adaptation to diminished resources, not efficiency and sharing. Competition for capital will eventually put everyone where they belong.
There are no satisfactory definitions of capitalism. I use turning real wealth into social (virtual) wealth as the most comprehensive description of how capitalism works. Trees become lumber. Lumber becomes houses. The people selling the houses receive money (virtual wealth) they can use to obtain more trees or houses. Their purpose is not to provide efficient housing but to receive more money than it costs to build the houses or cars or whatever. In the search for profit, producers seek ways to reduce labor and material costs and the cost of extracting resources.
Producers employ and therefore pay for the technology that reduces costs measured by virtual wealth. Resource efficiency does not necessarily parallel cost efficiency. If energy is cheaper than materials, producers will use energy to save materials—like particle board instead of lumber. Once 90 percent of labor produced food. Now less than 10 percent produce food. Technologies have driven most people out of manufacturing goods. The ‘increased’ productivity means that fewer workers produce more goods, thanks to machines. As if that were not difficult enough for labor, corporate America exported production for cheaper labor, particularly where machines were not available (like sweat shops), to further decrease production costs. The result downgraded labor, reducing wages in the process of rendering labor less valuable to the production process.
Service employment replaced production employment. The number of bankers, lawyers, sales people, administrators, health care providers, beauty salons, and other services multiplied. Those jobs are not supported by the conversion of hard resources and goods into cash—capitalism. Too many service jobs cause inflation. Most of those jobs also pay less than manufacturing and the costs of middlemen increase dramatically as HMOs, for example, hire clerks and administrators to find ways to maximize profits, not health care. Too many people get a piece of the action, but they have no place else to go. The skimmers find ways to insert themselves into a victim economy like health care where people have little choice whether or not to use the services.
Capitalism has always functioned as an engine of inflation that periodically crashes. Much profit comes from leveraging: borrowing money now and paying it back with deflated dollars. The process did little harm when inflation operated across the board. The bubble economy, created to compensate for labor’s decline, employs hyper-inflation. Inflation in health care, education, and finance have outstripped other areas of inflation dramatically. At the same time deflationary forces made possible by the internet, technology, and mega-stores further damage labor, even creative labor. Some benefit from the deflation of mega-stores and internet sales and the higher inflation. Some are hurt by both. The mega-stores and internet cut their wages or profits while the costs of improving oneself and health care spiral.
How does a broader definition of extortion help the understanding of our economic malaise? One needs some way to compare values in order to judge when pricing has exceeded the bounds of ethics. For this, we need a concept of intrinsic value, the most difficult judgment and hence the one most studiously avoided. The value of water, for instance, is priceless. Life does not exist without it. Yet, we waste it and pay very little for it. Credit cards only provide short-term borrowing to even out cash flow. The service is not invaluable and it is fraught with pot holes for the unwary. Yet, interest rates on credit card debt exceed long-term debt rates and short-term interest rates paid on savings accounts.
Once, charging interest was considered immoral. For decades, interest higher then 10 percent, including fees, was deemed usurious and one paid a penalty for charging it. The free market provides no such constraints. Extortion here takes the form of got-to-have-it-now advertising and easy access to credit cards that allow one to pay very little on the debt so that over time the interest may even exceed 100 percent of the original debt. This is a drag on the economy—a tax because it far exceeds any intrinsic value and is not really voluntary. It reduces money available for the discretionary spending necessary for money to circulate in a world of digital production. The lords and ladies get rich from the extravagant interest, not workers.
Capitalism requires constant redistribution of virtual wealth. Sound economies are based on trickle up, not trickle down. Money must find a way to the bottom of the food chain in a big way. Taxes are the most effective way of doing that where they do not deprive the tax payer of enough to live on by some decent standard. People complain about government taxes while paying the taxes imposed on them by corporations. There are plenty of corporate imposed taxes. As with interest rates, the government has done more to permit extortion in health care than to stop it. The huge amount of administrative costs, much of which goes into denying eligibility or coverage, creates another corporate tax. Denying health care has no intrinsic value for anyone. A single payer, nonprofit system with controlled drug costs and salaried doctors would again free up much money for discretionary spending.
I will not provide further examples of corporate taxation. The reader probably has several others in mind by now. A government not controlled by special interests and their lobbyists would soon end them. However, let us not fool ourselves into believing that greed is the only problem. Marx got one thing right. The means of production determines the character of society. One does not have to be a Ludite to appreciate how our choices in the use of machines may create systemic problems for the economy.
Labor has intrinsic value. People must work for both physical and psychological reasons. When machines displace labor, the machines impose a form of taxation on labor if they do more than just change the form of work available. They may even eliminate any place for labor to go. The machine can function as a means of extortion by reducing the value of labor outside a small number of operators. Owners of machines consider their contribution more valuable than labor. Downgrading labor reduces wages. If the machines do not pay a tax (government taxation) to compensate workers for their loss, the extortion is complete and the idea of “higher productivity” becomes a fraud.
The price of the upward mobility necessary to maintain a middle class, a certain level of security, education, and health care, has risen sharply. My insurance bill for all the risks that need insuring now runs over $18,000 a year. I went to law school for $250 a year. It would cost my son over $20,000 to go to the same school. At the same time, the cost of goods produced by ordinary labor have risen very little in comparison to energy, health, education, and housing. One does not have the option to forego these items without destabilizing results. They make good venues for extortion.
An economy based on selective inflation now discriminates against more and more people, as does selective deflation. We may all have the right to shop at mega-stores but they control more than retail prices. They also set wages and suppliers profits through their huge share of the market. If you can only shop at the cut-rate stores you do more to depress than stimulate the economy. Being the biggest by far is a founding principle of extortion.
Capitalism produced dramatic results when resources were cheap and plentiful. No more. Turning coal or oil into dollars now costs more and, due to volume, causes greater damage to the environment. This environmental damage will hurt the economy as much as it hurts the ecology. The Money Tribe, those who accumulate dollars from the transfer of wealth to capital (money), have no interest in efficiency. The faster they pump oil the more they make from it. The professed fixes are mostly illusionary. I bought a Honda vx in 1995. It got 50 miles to the gallon and my son drove it 400,000 miles. Neither Hondo nor anyone else in America, including hybrids, gets that kind of mileage today. It is common in Europe by the simple expedient of using lightweight diesel engines that are not exported to America. Why not? More corporate taxation of Americans? The economy will never recover if we do not end the excess profits of extortion, inefficient use of resources, and downgrading labor.
Private taxes use up the revenue necessary to finance the commons that preserve life and the economy. Going back to feudalism will certainly finish off capitalism. The lords and ladies intend to enthrone the primacy of money in the place of civil government, except for a police function to protect their property and government guaranties of their profits. A growth industry provides guard employment for those willing to keep the rabble bare foot and pregnant—the Rush Limbaugh brigade. An anti-government crusade is being waged with big bucks for propaganda and candidates for office who promise to destroy the government they blame for everything, a government they make impotent with that self-fulfilling prophecy. Without civil government the government of money takes over. There is no such thing as no government. Bodies have brains and societies have leaders. Which kind do you want?
Classically, “extortion” meant the acquisition of money or value by duress, physical or psychological. Supply and demand paradigms ignore the extent to which extortion corrupts an objective basis for determining value. Ignoring the impact of extortion avoids the burden of making certain value judgments. When are profits excessive? When does advertising prey on our emotions? When does one have enough? What is productive? How are we impacting the future? We do our best to avoid making those kinds of decisions. The ‘free’ market paradigm provides cover for our escape from ethical judgments. The competition for profit relieves most decisions of such concerns.
While the struggle for money may appear democratic, in that it knows no race, gender, or nationality, the reality proves quite discriminatory. Money supports class systems that exclude certain people from the competition. In a society that likes to think it does not entertain class strictures, one dare not speak of the struggle between the haves and the have-nots. I will break that taboo.
For multiple reasons, class is returning with a vengeance. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and the middle class is disappearing. I characterize the consequences of modernity as the triumph of engineering and the failure of capitalism. As technology and greed destroy resources, the affluent and powerful have determined that a return to lords, ladies, and serfs provides the logical and proper adaptation to diminished resources, not efficiency and sharing. Competition for capital will eventually put everyone where they belong.
There are no satisfactory definitions of capitalism. I use turning real wealth into social (virtual) wealth as the most comprehensive description of how capitalism works. Trees become lumber. Lumber becomes houses. The people selling the houses receive money (virtual wealth) they can use to obtain more trees or houses. Their purpose is not to provide efficient housing but to receive more money than it costs to build the houses or cars or whatever. In the search for profit, producers seek ways to reduce labor and material costs and the cost of extracting resources.
Producers employ and therefore pay for the technology that reduces costs measured by virtual wealth. Resource efficiency does not necessarily parallel cost efficiency. If energy is cheaper than materials, producers will use energy to save materials—like particle board instead of lumber. Once 90 percent of labor produced food. Now less than 10 percent produce food. Technologies have driven most people out of manufacturing goods. The ‘increased’ productivity means that fewer workers produce more goods, thanks to machines. As if that were not difficult enough for labor, corporate America exported production for cheaper labor, particularly where machines were not available (like sweat shops), to further decrease production costs. The result downgraded labor, reducing wages in the process of rendering labor less valuable to the production process.
Service employment replaced production employment. The number of bankers, lawyers, sales people, administrators, health care providers, beauty salons, and other services multiplied. Those jobs are not supported by the conversion of hard resources and goods into cash—capitalism. Too many service jobs cause inflation. Most of those jobs also pay less than manufacturing and the costs of middlemen increase dramatically as HMOs, for example, hire clerks and administrators to find ways to maximize profits, not health care. Too many people get a piece of the action, but they have no place else to go. The skimmers find ways to insert themselves into a victim economy like health care where people have little choice whether or not to use the services.
Capitalism has always functioned as an engine of inflation that periodically crashes. Much profit comes from leveraging: borrowing money now and paying it back with deflated dollars. The process did little harm when inflation operated across the board. The bubble economy, created to compensate for labor’s decline, employs hyper-inflation. Inflation in health care, education, and finance have outstripped other areas of inflation dramatically. At the same time deflationary forces made possible by the internet, technology, and mega-stores further damage labor, even creative labor. Some benefit from the deflation of mega-stores and internet sales and the higher inflation. Some are hurt by both. The mega-stores and internet cut their wages or profits while the costs of improving oneself and health care spiral.
How does a broader definition of extortion help the understanding of our economic malaise? One needs some way to compare values in order to judge when pricing has exceeded the bounds of ethics. For this, we need a concept of intrinsic value, the most difficult judgment and hence the one most studiously avoided. The value of water, for instance, is priceless. Life does not exist without it. Yet, we waste it and pay very little for it. Credit cards only provide short-term borrowing to even out cash flow. The service is not invaluable and it is fraught with pot holes for the unwary. Yet, interest rates on credit card debt exceed long-term debt rates and short-term interest rates paid on savings accounts.
Once, charging interest was considered immoral. For decades, interest higher then 10 percent, including fees, was deemed usurious and one paid a penalty for charging it. The free market provides no such constraints. Extortion here takes the form of got-to-have-it-now advertising and easy access to credit cards that allow one to pay very little on the debt so that over time the interest may even exceed 100 percent of the original debt. This is a drag on the economy—a tax because it far exceeds any intrinsic value and is not really voluntary. It reduces money available for the discretionary spending necessary for money to circulate in a world of digital production. The lords and ladies get rich from the extravagant interest, not workers.
Capitalism requires constant redistribution of virtual wealth. Sound economies are based on trickle up, not trickle down. Money must find a way to the bottom of the food chain in a big way. Taxes are the most effective way of doing that where they do not deprive the tax payer of enough to live on by some decent standard. People complain about government taxes while paying the taxes imposed on them by corporations. There are plenty of corporate imposed taxes. As with interest rates, the government has done more to permit extortion in health care than to stop it. The huge amount of administrative costs, much of which goes into denying eligibility or coverage, creates another corporate tax. Denying health care has no intrinsic value for anyone. A single payer, nonprofit system with controlled drug costs and salaried doctors would again free up much money for discretionary spending.
I will not provide further examples of corporate taxation. The reader probably has several others in mind by now. A government not controlled by special interests and their lobbyists would soon end them. However, let us not fool ourselves into believing that greed is the only problem. Marx got one thing right. The means of production determines the character of society. One does not have to be a Ludite to appreciate how our choices in the use of machines may create systemic problems for the economy.
Labor has intrinsic value. People must work for both physical and psychological reasons. When machines displace labor, the machines impose a form of taxation on labor if they do more than just change the form of work available. They may even eliminate any place for labor to go. The machine can function as a means of extortion by reducing the value of labor outside a small number of operators. Owners of machines consider their contribution more valuable than labor. Downgrading labor reduces wages. If the machines do not pay a tax (government taxation) to compensate workers for their loss, the extortion is complete and the idea of “higher productivity” becomes a fraud.
The price of the upward mobility necessary to maintain a middle class, a certain level of security, education, and health care, has risen sharply. My insurance bill for all the risks that need insuring now runs over $18,000 a year. I went to law school for $250 a year. It would cost my son over $20,000 to go to the same school. At the same time, the cost of goods produced by ordinary labor have risen very little in comparison to energy, health, education, and housing. One does not have the option to forego these items without destabilizing results. They make good venues for extortion.
An economy based on selective inflation now discriminates against more and more people, as does selective deflation. We may all have the right to shop at mega-stores but they control more than retail prices. They also set wages and suppliers profits through their huge share of the market. If you can only shop at the cut-rate stores you do more to depress than stimulate the economy. Being the biggest by far is a founding principle of extortion.
Capitalism produced dramatic results when resources were cheap and plentiful. No more. Turning coal or oil into dollars now costs more and, due to volume, causes greater damage to the environment. This environmental damage will hurt the economy as much as it hurts the ecology. The Money Tribe, those who accumulate dollars from the transfer of wealth to capital (money), have no interest in efficiency. The faster they pump oil the more they make from it. The professed fixes are mostly illusionary. I bought a Honda vx in 1995. It got 50 miles to the gallon and my son drove it 400,000 miles. Neither Hondo nor anyone else in America, including hybrids, gets that kind of mileage today. It is common in Europe by the simple expedient of using lightweight diesel engines that are not exported to America. Why not? More corporate taxation of Americans? The economy will never recover if we do not end the excess profits of extortion, inefficient use of resources, and downgrading labor.
Private taxes use up the revenue necessary to finance the commons that preserve life and the economy. Going back to feudalism will certainly finish off capitalism. The lords and ladies intend to enthrone the primacy of money in the place of civil government, except for a police function to protect their property and government guaranties of their profits. A growth industry provides guard employment for those willing to keep the rabble bare foot and pregnant—the Rush Limbaugh brigade. An anti-government crusade is being waged with big bucks for propaganda and candidates for office who promise to destroy the government they blame for everything, a government they make impotent with that self-fulfilling prophecy. Without civil government the government of money takes over. There is no such thing as no government. Bodies have brains and societies have leaders. Which kind do you want?
Thursday, January 7, 2010
God, A Question of Adaptation
Atheism versus religion has become topical of late. Celebrated intellectuals engage in verbal fisticuffs over the existence or nonexistence of God. I find the contest a fool’s errand. Arguing over the existence of a literal God ignores questions about the God that cannot be denied, how that myth should function. God, as a concept, evolved as a universal artifact in virtually every society. To deny the concept denies history as well as some fundamental human need. “God” addresses mysteries and ineffable questions that the intellect cannot fathom through means other than art. As such, it plays a vital part in the strategies people use to adapt. When it produces the epiphany of brotherhood, it serves the interests of survival.
Given the uncertainties surrounding concepts not supported by reproducible facts, constructs based on “God” easily become a playground for charlatans. A priesthood that uses literalism to turn blind faith into fact for its own purposes exploits believers. Theology becomes fantasy turned to the service of an elite. A science that denies mysteries and the ineffable may function as another priesthood. The fact that God mythologies have been used to justify the vilest behavior does not negate the need for a universal belief system. The ideas that reside in the nervous system may have no mass but they carry the burden of civilization.
Arguments for or against God are not likely to change anyone’s mind. Neither side adds ideas useful to survival. I see natural selection as the means of reconciling the conflict. The concept of God evolved as a means of adapting to a problem that plagued humanity throughout history—tribalism. The construct of a common father enlarged the scope of the tribe. The tribes grew bigger and stronger through religion and nationalism. Unfortunately, so did problems when those groups sought hegemony.
Rather than deny God or deify dogma, we should be assessing which beliefs will serve survival. Does our chosen God help or hinder our adaptation to reality? This may be seen as the religion of Darwin. What happens on the ground matters, not dogma. Murder remains murder even if you say your god approves it. Natural selection may not take sides but it is not neutral. That algorithm favors efficient use of energy, which requires a set of values that make the best use of resources and of individual skills that follow from divisions of labor based on merit.
Many of our failures and misunderstandings occur, in part, as a consequence of natural selection’s failure. I term the failure Natural Selection’s Paradox: Natural selection does not distinguish short-term from long-term adaptations in the short term. The success of short-term adaptations can use up the resources needed for long-term survival. The failure is so obvious and so simple that it has eluded science. Survival requires a long-term ethic, a God that addresses the failure of natural selection and does not leave us at the mercy of the paradox.
The obvious consequence of the paradox manifests itself through adaptations to the wrong thing, such as energy-wasting technology that destroys the environment that our genes require. Our genes define the limits of our ability to adapt.
Another consequence of the paradox I term the outlaw gene: the exploitation of other peoples’ labor. One can acquire energy in two ways. We can use divisions of labor based on merit where all share in the product or we can steal other peoples’ labor. The permutations run from equality to slavery and in simpler times spawned tribalism. The methods of obtaining energy from others run from brute force to deception. Class stigmatization provides the most efficient means of socializing people to their status in the food chain. Survival of one tribe may justify exploitation of other tribes. The tribal dynamic runs from ancient associations and races to modernity’s money tribe.
“God” as the answer to the self-destructive consequences of tribalism and the outlaw gene only functions through the application of a transcendent value. Belief in a literal God has not succeeded. Only ‘survival of the species’ as a first principle will serve. Only that time frame and the breadth of empathy embraced by this value can bring peace to the global community. Survival of the species also provides the basis for addressing adaptations to the wrong thing.
Richard Dawkins observed in The Selfish Gene that genes must reproduce themselves, and therefore carry on a war to beat the competition. Mark Ridley observed in The Cooperative Gene that divisions of labor often provide the most efficient way to acquire energy. Cooperation requires a social contract, which depends upon the genetic dispositions Matt Ridley observed in The Origins of Virtue. I observe through the concept of the outlaw gene that the short-term efficiency of stealing other people’s labor may turn off the cooperative gene cluster and its instincts. ‘God’ only has value if He speaks to us as a brotherhood that seeks survival of all generations. If we borrow from the future, we mortgage our children to a world without resources. We can commit no greater sin under the genetic imperative observed by Dawkins.
To keep the faith, humanity must believe that we can survive without making other people and the earth pay the price. We are what we adapt to. If we continue to adapt to our own artifacts, like money, instead of the environment that designed our genes, we will create an environment to which we can no longer adapt.
For a complete discussion of these and related matters read my book, "Natural
Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil," and my blog, naturalselectionsparadox.blogspot.com.
Given the uncertainties surrounding concepts not supported by reproducible facts, constructs based on “God” easily become a playground for charlatans. A priesthood that uses literalism to turn blind faith into fact for its own purposes exploits believers. Theology becomes fantasy turned to the service of an elite. A science that denies mysteries and the ineffable may function as another priesthood. The fact that God mythologies have been used to justify the vilest behavior does not negate the need for a universal belief system. The ideas that reside in the nervous system may have no mass but they carry the burden of civilization.
Arguments for or against God are not likely to change anyone’s mind. Neither side adds ideas useful to survival. I see natural selection as the means of reconciling the conflict. The concept of God evolved as a means of adapting to a problem that plagued humanity throughout history—tribalism. The construct of a common father enlarged the scope of the tribe. The tribes grew bigger and stronger through religion and nationalism. Unfortunately, so did problems when those groups sought hegemony.
Rather than deny God or deify dogma, we should be assessing which beliefs will serve survival. Does our chosen God help or hinder our adaptation to reality? This may be seen as the religion of Darwin. What happens on the ground matters, not dogma. Murder remains murder even if you say your god approves it. Natural selection may not take sides but it is not neutral. That algorithm favors efficient use of energy, which requires a set of values that make the best use of resources and of individual skills that follow from divisions of labor based on merit.
Many of our failures and misunderstandings occur, in part, as a consequence of natural selection’s failure. I term the failure Natural Selection’s Paradox: Natural selection does not distinguish short-term from long-term adaptations in the short term. The success of short-term adaptations can use up the resources needed for long-term survival. The failure is so obvious and so simple that it has eluded science. Survival requires a long-term ethic, a God that addresses the failure of natural selection and does not leave us at the mercy of the paradox.
The obvious consequence of the paradox manifests itself through adaptations to the wrong thing, such as energy-wasting technology that destroys the environment that our genes require. Our genes define the limits of our ability to adapt.
Another consequence of the paradox I term the outlaw gene: the exploitation of other peoples’ labor. One can acquire energy in two ways. We can use divisions of labor based on merit where all share in the product or we can steal other peoples’ labor. The permutations run from equality to slavery and in simpler times spawned tribalism. The methods of obtaining energy from others run from brute force to deception. Class stigmatization provides the most efficient means of socializing people to their status in the food chain. Survival of one tribe may justify exploitation of other tribes. The tribal dynamic runs from ancient associations and races to modernity’s money tribe.
“God” as the answer to the self-destructive consequences of tribalism and the outlaw gene only functions through the application of a transcendent value. Belief in a literal God has not succeeded. Only ‘survival of the species’ as a first principle will serve. Only that time frame and the breadth of empathy embraced by this value can bring peace to the global community. Survival of the species also provides the basis for addressing adaptations to the wrong thing.
Richard Dawkins observed in The Selfish Gene that genes must reproduce themselves, and therefore carry on a war to beat the competition. Mark Ridley observed in The Cooperative Gene that divisions of labor often provide the most efficient way to acquire energy. Cooperation requires a social contract, which depends upon the genetic dispositions Matt Ridley observed in The Origins of Virtue. I observe through the concept of the outlaw gene that the short-term efficiency of stealing other people’s labor may turn off the cooperative gene cluster and its instincts. ‘God’ only has value if He speaks to us as a brotherhood that seeks survival of all generations. If we borrow from the future, we mortgage our children to a world without resources. We can commit no greater sin under the genetic imperative observed by Dawkins.
To keep the faith, humanity must believe that we can survive without making other people and the earth pay the price. We are what we adapt to. If we continue to adapt to our own artifacts, like money, instead of the environment that designed our genes, we will create an environment to which we can no longer adapt.
For a complete discussion of these and related matters read my book, "Natural
Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil," and my blog, naturalselectionsparadox.blogspot.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)