Work Does Not Work Anymore

WORK DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE Humans have always worked in order to survive. In the beginning, physical exertion required most of our energy. Without tools even plentiful resources were hard to reach. Invention could make the difference between life or death. The evolution of tools has reached the point where physical exertion can no longer compete with the energy now harnessed by technology. Our new-found abundance elicits praise for technology and higher standards of living. The cost of that increase has not been measured, though the side effects may prove lethal. Work provides the focus of our lives. How we feel about ourselves, how we relate to others, and the means of survival all turn on how we work. Natural selection has prepared us for certain tasks. The most satisfying work calls forth our genetic capacity. The mercurial rise of technology has replaced much of that capacity. Few of us were designed to spend our days staring at computer screens. We can even adapt to that but at a cost to health and sanity. The sea change in the distribution of tasks also foresees a radical change in economic and social organization. Labor has lost so much bargaining power that it can scarcely defend itself against exploitation. A new form of slavery awaits us. Abuse of real wealth, the environment, is and will continue to reduce the standard of living. The war of all against all for the scraps has begun. It will be fought with deception and labor- saving devices, which will again reduce work and make more waste and another lower standard of living for most people. An economic downward cycle will create more pressure against social justice. Capitalism has failed to provide a future and the answer so far has been more capitalism—turning real wealth into paper wealth. Democracy requires economic support. Shifting wealth into fewer and fewer hands eventually destroys equal opportunity and equal social justice. Loss of traditional work that most people could do and employers could not do without is creating a new feudal state—the economically powerful and the serfs who toil for them. The technology that once freed people is now making them powerless again. Look at what is happening to work. Not so long ago, half the population worked on the farm. Less than one percent toil there now. First they left for the factories, many of which have now gone to some other country. With robot technology, fewer people work in the remaining factories. Mega stores have replaced small retailers and the internet has replaced some mega stores. Fewer people who left the factories to become sales people can find that work. Some of them worked in book stores and music stores where people asked them questions about what was new and who played or wrote best. Those jobs are gone. More people work in finance than ever before but service industries require the production of goods that provide the wages for discretionary spending. Someone has to build the house before a mortgage is created to buy it. Occupations that once provided employment are disappearing. No amount of stimulus money from the government can stimulate growth when wages continue to stagnate or decline and more people need government help to survive. Taxes necessary to feed the helpless put a drag on the economy when businesses cannot pick up the slack, continue to avoid hiring, and cut benefits. The trend is fewer good paying jobs, fewer people who can afford the support of the health insurance and retirement that keeps people out of bankruptcy when things go wrong. The independence that once supported democracy and free enterprise is losing to a shift in wealth to the top. Government spending has hidden the fact that the market can no longer support a middle class. Ironically, the government gets the blame, even when it provides the funds for saving those businesses. Government employment has had to take up the slack in the labor market. Without it, the crash would have occurred much sooner. The redistribution of wealth downward through taxes and benefits kept capitalism alive. Now, thanks to billions in propaganda financed by conservative think tanks, redistribution down is a communist plot and distribution up is on God’s agenda. The budget deficit that borrowing money to fight two wars instead of raising taxes created is now the conservative excuse for further tax cuts for the top. Politicians did not raise taxes because that would create an outcry against the wars so profitable to the military-industrial complex. Blaming the deficit on so called entitlements like social security that people worked all their lives contributing part of their wages excuses further desecration of labor. Conservatives do not care about the outcome. They either get their tax cuts or they allow government to fail and money takes complete control, preferably both. On whose back will deficit reduction fall? That is the big question no one touches. Obama is trying to spread the pain. The top wants to put it on the rest of us. Liberals are at a great disadvantage. They cannot make the promises we all want to hear because the economy is not merely suffering a cyclical downturn. The problems are systemic. The constant reduction of wages and degradation of resources in a competition to be better than other people creates the war of all against all that blocks the kind of sharing and cooperation needed for future generations to survive. The big debt we are creating goes beyond numbers in a budget. Our means of adaptation are at risk. People’s short term memories have already forgotten that the problems addressed here were accelerated under eight years of Bush and his conservative friends. Only a sea change in our ethics and morality can save our children. Most reforms fail as a result of greed. As in George Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, it does not take long for the new leaders to take up the tricks of the old leaders. That will continue until we change peoples’ relationship to resources. That requires a fundamental change in the concept of property. Basic resources must not be held as private property. Oil, steel, water, coal, natural gas, and other commodities required for manufacturing and universal support are too precious for distribution under the profit motive. Private ownership creates a divisive conflict of interest that fuels the war of all against all. Capitalism here undermines the efficiency required by natural selection for survival of the species. Capitalism’s fundamental premise turns real resources into ephemeral (paper) wealth. The more consumed, the more money generated. No incentive for conservation is possible. Competition turns on reducing the cost of extraction of the resource which in turn mitigates against labor and often other resources, like water, used in industrial processes. Management of resources for long-term adaptations would require a panel of experts on the best use of a resource, a constitutional guarantee of equal rights to purchase the resource from the government for approved uses (making taxes unnecessary), and a political system that oversees the legitimacy of the administration, the public being the shareholders of the peoples’ resources. There may be better ways to organize distribution but all ways require the ethics and morals of people who resist white supremacy in all its class rendering forms. Greed kills everything. Since we are what we adapt to, killing greed requires an environment where none can exploit anyone else or accumulate the property that all need to survive. Only the few who create (the Beethovens and the inventors) do not rely on resources contributed by government and other people. Taxes should level the opportunity field with free education, health care and retirement, all of which everyone needs. Private property—your house and the things you can use exclusively—will be influenced by the market, as will the use of public resources. Markets that waste resources must be taxed accordingly. Again, ethics are everything for success of the public good. An independent judiciary (under separation of powers) and a bill of rights are essential. Leaders must work within the rule of law. This is particularly important because extortion is profitable where morality and government do not overcome it. Price fixing, price gouging, inadequate wages, and Ponzi schemes create inequities that also fuel the war of all against all. What I reference as skimming contributes to the income gap. Multiple layers of organization or management, like HMOs and similar organizations, only manage money. They contribute nothing to the delivery of services. They receive big rewards for designing schemes that deliver less for more. A sea change has already occurred and it drives the conflicts that stand in the way of long-term survival. Technology has made it possible to access resources once out of reach and it has destroyed a good deal of real wealth in the process. The means of feeding and housing people in numbers once unimaginable cost a great deal in critical resources. The short fall is reflected in budget deficits and poverty. The present means of production and distribution cannot be sustained. The question now is who will suffer the consequences of our destruction of wealth. The answer for a would-be elite is the creation of the old feudal class system of lords and ladies owning everything worth owning and everyone else living at subsistence levels. Historically, that has happened to many cultures old enough to exhaust their resources through overpopulation even without technology. Their current embrace of technology will exhaust their more difficult to extract resources. After a short period of prosperity for some, overpopulation supported by technology will return the culture to poverty. Overpopulation is the source of most conflicts and greed insists on growth. To insure survival of the species, natural selection tends to propagate excess births and then eliminates the excess in a remorseless competition. This once drove genetic evolution in the direction of improved adaptations. Thanks to technology’s ability to destroy species and traits without regard to long-term consequences, civilization has little chance without limiting population to sustainable levels while all share in any shortfall in resources. The New Deal did not end the Great Depression. Roosevelt only partly succeeded. WWII created the employment needed to end the depression. Politicians fearful of losing their jobs to a new depression have kept us on a wartime budget ever since. The New Deal support systems were, and are, still needed. The economy has never really been sound. War budgets end up undermining an economy. It is a very inefficient form of socialism. Instead of spending billions on a fighter plane that performs poorly in terrorist conflicts and produces very few fobs, the money should be spent on efficient housing, transportation, education, and the nonpolluting fuels that make efficiency possible. The source of our confusion about these obvious conclusions is our adaptation to the wrong thing, our technology instead of the environment that designed our genome. For that discussion, I refer the reader to my book, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud.

THERE ARE MORE SINS THAN MEETS THE EYE For centuries, the construct of original sin has influenced, if not governed, societies’ judgment of individual behavior. Lincoln provided one of the clearest examples in the context of exploitation: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’” I broaden the concept of sin here to include adaptations that threaten the survival of the species. Theological concepts of original sin condemn mankind to a hopeless struggle with evil that only obedience to a priesthood can mitigate. A priesthood claims itself the only link to God. A priesthood can be as vulnerable to the evil of exploitation as anyone else. Such authority presents its own temptations. We see that with Catholic priest pedophiles. Lincoln’s version of original sin reflects one of the downsides of natural selection discussed elsewhere—short-term adaptations by exploitation.1 Lincoln’s approach provides an understanding that may lead to ways of overcoming sin that do not require submission to authority. As in all things human, natural selection provides the starting point for understanding the need to broaden the concept of sin beyond the confines of sex. Simply put, natural selection expresses the truism that those able to adapt to their environment may survive, absent disease, superior enemies, or natural disasters. Through the mechanism of the genome, the species may evolve further adaptations that meet changes in the environment, including the competition. Strangely, science has said very little about the systemic features of natural selection—the temptations to sin—that inhibit more effective adaptations. Scientists tend to look at such observations as value judgments not within the scope of science. They are of great interest to humanity all the same because overcoming the systemic limitations of natural selection provides a basis for establishing an objective and sustainable moral code. For that purpose, I would include in the concept of sin errors in adaptations, often for financial profit, that weaken long-term survival, including the justice that brings peace. The three dimensions of life, biology, intellect, and society, require a balancing mechanism to prevent one dimension from overwhelming the others, such as the intellect’s ability to reduce everything to a narrow formula, biology’s ability to engage in indiscriminate competition, and society’s nascent support of class exploitation. Morality’s purpose is the preservation of life, which only an ethic like survival of the species can provide. What are the systemic limits of natural selection that morality must guard against? To begin with, species produce more offspring than needed to maintain a population as a hedge against unpredictable consequences to sustainability. If too successful, the species will overpopulate its environment and strain the resources it needs. That creates a moral dilemma mankind has yet to come to grips with. Nature provides several limits to overpopulation, like disease and natural disasters. Medicine and technology have severely reduced these population levelers. It may be speculation, but I often feel that when overpopulation reaches some critical point some recessive gene kicks in and people go to war—humanity’s natural disaster that unfortunately destroys more resources. Morality is suspended for a competition that does not necessarily produce the genetically superior as the survivors. As often as not, the ruthless prevail and the wise are decimated. Similarly, intra-species competition may reduce the ability to adapt. Take those species where an adaptation for genetic improvement consists of male competition for a harem. For one example, male deer with bigger antlers have an advantage in such competitions. Under natural selection, antlers have gotten bigger, heavier, and more easily caught in brush. If all male deer had the same smaller antlers, the competition would depend even more on strength. The arms race produces the sacrifices the algorithm of natural selection may require where there is no feedback (morality) to evaluate the result. Natural selection does not distinguish between individuals and the species. Here lies the basis of government regulations. Arms races occur in a plethora of contexts, from advertising to five-car garages. Regulations that do not advance survival of the governed, but the interests of certain individuals instead, ignore Lincoln’s wisdom and discredit government. Corporations are not people regardless of the Supreme Court’s travesty of logic that holds corporations have the rights of people under the Constitution. There are arms races that natural selection does not instigate. People shoot rattlesnakes when they hear the rattle. Those snakes with recessive rattle genes survive. Now we cannot hear the snakes coming. Hunters like to kill the big bucks. Now some pretty scrawny males can have a harem. We interfere with natural selection in a myriad of ways. At some point in the extinction of species it will be our turn. How we use technology will make all the difference. The greatest irony inherent in natural selection I reference as natural selection’s paradox—the trap natural selection holds for all species. Natural selection does not distinguish a short-term adaptation from a long-term adaptation in the short term. It makes no value judgments and supports no ideology or elite. If the short-term adaptation uses up all the resources needed for a long-term adaptation, the species can no longer survive. The only time frame sufficient for avoiding that result requires sustainable adaptations. In the West, we do virtually everything on the basis of short-term profits. Money has no intrinsic value and its use as the measure of good or bad results leads mostly to adaptations to the wrong thing—our technology instead of the genome that defines the limits of our ability to adapt. Natural selection favors the efficient, not the profligate. Without the ethic of survival of the species, the abuse of technology as a means of exploiting nature rather than as a tool for greater efficiency, will continue. The most telling example in my opinion concerns our use of water. Once we were limited to annual rainfall. Pumps now go down miles to recover water that is thousands of years old. We adapt to the pump by using more energy instead of adapting to annual rainfall by creating more efficient uses of water, which is not sustainable. We cannot survive without the water. One would expect a reaction to things like global warming that demands a resolution of the problem. Why is the response so tepid? When given the facts, the people usually make the right decision. However, a new class war that started after adoption of the civil rights acts has succeeded in deceiving the public. Millions have been spent by an elite to discourage fact-based decisions. Conservative talk radio even denies global warming to forestall any regulations. The nonsense that there are two sides to every disagreement ignores the facts. Some ideas are just nonsense or worse and others cannot be denied by anything but denial. We have learned something in the last few centuries. The elite invite us to ignore science and the rights gained in the fight for justice, as if facts have no place in discourse and only the powerful dispense justice. Given our biological limits for adaptation, the intellect’s ability to deceive itself, and society’s ability to advance class exploitation, how do we avoid the sins described here? Traditionally, the answer has been education or adherence to a code. Education, what is taught, usually controls codes. Nothing challenges us more than maintaining intellectual honesty, without which truth becomes the servant of agendas. Agendas have virtually buried any interest in intellectual honesty. Proofs, consistent logic, and selfless appraisal do not appeal to agendas. The denial of global warming provides a good example. The fact that certain gases trap heat and that we produce million of tons of those gases cannot be denied. Two and two is still four. Measurements confirm the fact. Given what is at stake, any doubt should be resolved by avoiding the risk. The same goes for atomic energy. Endless arguments over what cannot be denied lead to adaptation by default to agendas. Long-term strategies remain impossible. Intellectual dishonesty inhibits debate by misrepresenting what people say. Politicians avoid debating the merits and specifics of programs for fear of ridicule and confusion. All kinds of litmus tests replace debate on the merits. Are you American enough, or conservative enough, or red-headed enough to be president? Natural selection provides the starting point in the search for truth. It teaches the facts we need to construct a sustainable moral code. The genome and the structures that support it reflect the results of natural selection. Introducing elements into the environment that the genome cannot tolerate (poison) is a sin under the ethic of survival of the species. We all do it, particularly in conjunction with technology. Reducing this sin must become a major purpose of science and all people. The other cardinal sin disclosed by natural selection concerns inefficiency. Driving oversized, overpowered cars may increase one’s status in the money game but the waste of energy and materials does not enhance survival of future generations. Improved gas mileage for personal cars will never match the efficiency that the universal use of public transportation provides. The number of examples provided by consumerism is endless. How we measure efficiency presents the difficult question. Again, money does not provide the best test. It merely avoids value judgments. For example, if it costs less to use more energy than to use a new material in a manufacturing process but the material is renewable, which choice do you make? Today it would be to save the money, not the energy. What if the material used to generate the energy is far more important to survival then the material saved by using the energy? Do we still save the money as the first choice? Is the energy undervalued? Should an added tax correct that situation? No one asks these questions or makes a decision based on survival of the species. Few regulations address the long term; few receive scientific input based on all the impacts involved. Politics decides. How to maintain the species must become the political question. One of the things Marx got right is the preeminent influence that means of production of goods and services has in human affairs. The means has changed so significantly that much work has become marginalized. The old jobs are disappearing or paying a lot less. Hence the huge rise in unemployment that stimulus by government no longer cures. Keeping people employed now requires the sacrifice of resources to maintain growth—capitalism’s only answer to economic disaster. Capitalism has failed to provide a future. Turning resources into cash and making it big mortgage future generations with debts to the environment that cannot be repaid. Anticipated technological miracles provide the apologies for taking the risk. Technology, in fact, played a major role in creating the danger. It provided the means for upsetting the equilibrium that millions of years of natural selection established. Systems that require never-ending growth to survive must, in the long term, fail. Survival requires an anticipatory design strategy (see Buckminster Fuller) that employs technology for increased efficiency, not financial profit. The fact that we can build it and profit from it does not justify its use. Only advancing survival of the species can justify a technology. 1. Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the basis of these assertions and related matters.

White Supremacy Is What It Is All About

For 100 years, the deeds and words of Abraham Lincoln provided the template for American politics and for campaigning for office. His speeches served as the measure of the man. Their greatness, and his, the product of a literary and political genius, disclosed an understanding of human nature social sciences have yet to appreciate. He recognized slavery as a symptom, not the disease, in the struggle with evil. He fought the Civil War to free everyone. He made the point in his usual succinct and comprehensive way: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity, and the other is the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’”1 As he predicted, the struggle continues. Only the divine right of money has replaced the divine right of kings, a far more insidious evil than slavery itself because technology creates so many subtle ways of stealing other people’s labor. I include finance as part of technology. Lincoln saw that coming after the Civil War made America an industrial power: “It has been a trying hour for the Republic; but I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands, and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of the war.”2 Lincoln was killed by a white supremacist for holding such views. I use “white supremacy” as a generic term for the belief that, by some natural law (an apology for greed), an elite class has the right to exploit the labor of others (and the resources), even to the extent of slavery. Those who believe in that divine right hold (in secret) that the purpose of advancing the elite sanctifies any force or deception. “Slavery” is a relative term. The extent to which people are required to work for less than just compensation provides the measure of relative slavery. The machinations in Washington have more to do with who will be the elite than how to govern the nation for the benefit of all. That intrigue is masked by the claim that an all- encompassing “market” determines who will join the elite because, by unspoken assumption, success in making money determines whom God loves. No human morality is required to govern. The market will always do the right thing, as if it were a form of natural selection without anything like the impediments inherent in natural selection that I discuss elsewhere.3 America stands at a cross-road. Will the outcome of the Civil War and 100 years of social evolution in care for everyone, including the poorest among us, and the earth, be abandoned in favor of a free-for-all competition for the right to exploit other people and the world‘s resources—all under the rubric of fiscal and personal responsibility? The grand deception that there ever was a time when people survived on their own without any help from the community and that women can revert to a strictly homemaking career fantasizes the past and ignores the future. (Treating woman as second-class citizens is one of white supremacy’s strategies.) An even bigger issue concerns Lincoln’s prediction that the Republic could be destroyed by concentrating money in too few hands. Our three-part division of government at the federal level, administrative (the president), legislative (Congress), and judicial (the Supreme Court) prevents any one from exercising absolute power. That is the genius of the Constitution. If all three branches of government accept the ethic of money as the measure of all things, separation of powers will no longer exist. Money and its priests will succeed in coalescing all three functions of government, the separation of which provided a defense to white supremacy. White supremacy has its origins in the adaptations available for acquiring the energy required to survive. Lincoln identified the cruelest choice. It has everything to do with the design of society. The choices are, looking at the poles between which the choices fall: divisions of labor based on merit where all share in the production and distribution of the product or, the alternative, stealing other people’s labor by violence, deception, or social edicts. The former (pure socialism) is the most efficient and just way to organize society. It has enjoyed little practice because those aspiring to elite status are very resourceful and ruthless. The South fought the Civil War to preserve an elite’s right to exploit black labor, if not all labor. That is why the war had to be fought. All states would not protect labor but the majority would. The hope America inspired everywhere was founded on a constitutional government that would protect the right of people to the fruits of their labor. The fight continues. Thanks to the seniority system in Congress and a lock on electoral politics by white supremacists in the South that followed the North’s abandonment of reconstruction, exploitation continued by terror (lynching) and segregation and the failure of Congress and the courts to support the Constitution. It took 100 years more to make civil rights a fact. But the struggle continues. White supremacy did not give up. It went into the closet and became more subtle. Support for public education and support for people in need have declined since enforcement of the Civil Rights Acts. Jails are overflowing, mostly with minority people. Means of disqualifying poor and minority voters are emerging again. Election fraud, made easy by very close electoral races, will increase and little is being done to prevent it. Changes in demographics based on immigration threaten white supremacy to a point where desperate measures are required to protect elite’s privileges. Unemployment and deceptive antigovernment propaganda distract people from seeing the direction elite supporters pursue. If they succeed in making government appear the enemy and redistribution of wealth upward continues, money will finally achieve unlimited power and the Republic will surely be destroyed. Some see destruction of government as the way to place money in control, making necessary compromises and governance for the common good impossible. Everything is for sale. Only government, big government, can take on big money. How people who fear big government fail to fear money big enough to buy government amazes me. The elites no-tax mantra does not balance the budget. Without taxes the debt will increase. Government has for some time filled the void created by the elimination of jobs by technology and outsourcing. Government spending and a continuous wartime economy (how we got out of the great depression) hid the failure of capitalism to provide work for all. A bankrupt government means a lot more unemployment. We will become indentured servants of big money. For moral justification, white supremacy employs what I reference as the religion of money. Under the religion of money promulgated by the likes of Ayn Rand and early Calvinism, money provides the proof of God’s love. Those who cannot keep up are lazy or worse and God’s judgment should not be ignored by government programs. President Reagan invented his welfare queens to discredit the support of single mothers. The result is a kind of social Darwinism that condemns the weak and crushes the empathy necessary to support a just society. Ironically, adaptation to the wrong thing4 created the religion of money. God is that which we think we must obey to survive. We went from hunter-gatherers to complete financial dependence in a few short centuries. The change from adapting to stewarding real resources to creating paper resources changed everything and made us believe that something with no intrinsic value creates wealth. Because we must adapt to making it, we all worship money to one degree or another as part of our strategy for survival. Given our biological limits for adaptation, the intellect’s ability to deceive itself, and society’s ability to advance white supremacy, how do we combat white supremacy? Only an ethical construct can mitigate the conflict competition to survive generates. While people do not all have the same genetic gifts or educational opportunities, the peace required for the cooperation of all in the quest for a pollution free, efficient, and just world requires that all have an equal right to contribute to and to share in the earth’s bounty—equality under a rule of law. This will not happen if the few hold most of the power, and accumulating wealth has become a habit that knows no limits for some. A one-hundred-percent tax on income or profits over some reasonably high figure in return for free education and health care for all would create a great deal of peace. It would encourage divisions of labor based on merit. Equal access to the system of justice and free speech go without saying. Government will not work unless all conflicts of interest and the insider trading now rampant in Congress cease. Lobbying by corporations often proves more influential than the wisdom of the people. Money biases too many elections. Meeting the corruption that follows the religion of money and making it big (the American pathology)5 require an ethic that recognizes the subtle means employed to steal other people’s labor. Unfair competition, price gouging, and substandard wages may be legal but they will never be ethical. Those who believe that crucial resources should be held communally and used to support the population are labeled communist, an ideology that never developed and its failures committed most of the same sins in the means of production that capitalism committed. Trading resources for cash and energy for power dominated the last six centuries. In this context one has a difficult time finding an ethic for dealing with exploitation of other people’s labor. The market appears to alleviate the need for an ethic, as if there were no alternative. Capitalism harbors at least one fatal flaw. Under the market, whatever can be done to suppress wages will be done. Getting people to consume things they do not need to drive the economy creates a competition that also drives down wages and wastes resources. Different living standards around the world make it possible for business to shop for the lowest wages. Trying to keep up, people work much harder and longer for less. The economy is failing for lack of adequate wages. If profits were shared and the technology used to reduce labor were made to support labor, people could work and waste less. If the machine cannot support the labor it replaces, it is not more efficient. People have a psychological need to work at something besides computers. The market does not provide the solution; it is part of the problem. It replaces a sense of fairness with an algorithm for reducing avoidable costs, such as labor, safety regulations, health care, and environmental safeguards—profits for the few. People who cannot depend on their neighbors must hoard wealth. Communally-held wealth and a promise to help your neighbor is the ethic that will make waste unacceptable and fear of failure less a drag on peoples’ ability to move on. It is all about white supremacy. The earth must be treated like a brother. 1. Paul M. Angle, ed., Created Equal? 390, 393. 2. Letter to William F. Elkins, Nov. 21, 1864, Hertz II, 954. 3. See, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the basis of these assertions and related matters. 4. See, note 3 and author’s blog at natural selections paradox. blogspot. com. 5. See, note 4.

SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES: THE BASIS FOR A SUSTAINABLE MORAL CODE

The search for a universal God is as old as humanity. Ethnic, geographic, and ideological loyalties have frustrated that effort. Inevitably, the creation of a religion evolves a theology that fractures into sects. The WORD acquires multiple meanings. I believe that Darwin offers a solution, now clarified by genetics: Survival of the species provides the sustainable basis for ethics and morality that all may, indeed must, embrace. Two domains direct behavior: biological and intellectual. Each influences the other. Genome define biology and the nervous system hosts the intellect that various biological relationships induce. The genome developed through natural selection and the genes promulgate the result of that competition. What succeeds is passed on to the next generation. Some scientists quip that the competition is in the gene pool. The body merely provides the host for the genes. The altered genes must reproduce themselves. Darwin’s critical discovery in this context does not often appear in discussions of natural selection. Inter-species competition may reduce the ability of the species to adapt. The most prominent examples are arms races. Male animals that compete for harems evolve things like huge antlers that weigh them down and get tangled in brush. If antler size was restricted, the competition would not change and the species would be better off. Given the critical role of the genome, biological behavior must embrace survival of the species, the ability to adapt to an environment. Had the intellect drawn that conclusion, technology would not be employed in ways that damage the earth’s ability to provide the environment our genome requires. Natural selection takes huge amounts of time to alter the genes. Technology moves too quickly. Arms races do not foster biological or social evolution. They usually resorts to murder or exploitation. Natural selection does not follow a philosophy or moral ethic outside of efficiency. Critically, it cannot distinguish a short-term from a long-term adaptation in the short term. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources needed for the long term, the species disappears. The intellect provides the ability to distinguish long-term from short-term adaptations. It will not make that effort absent a moral imperative based on survival of the species. Treating the genome as God, the commandment that we must obey, reflects more than a metaphor. The intellect carries the burden of identifying what serves survival. Under that commandment, we would employ technology differently. The short-term solutions favored by most technologies result in adaptations to the wrong thing, like making money. If Darwin proved anything, it was that those who adapt to the wrong thing do not survive. The most dramatic example is the use of water, the most critical resource now in danger of exhaustion. No technology can replace it. Before technology we could only use rainfall stored in rivers and lakes and shallow wells. Modern pumps go down miles and, at great costs, bring up water stored for centuries. We now mine instead of harvest. We adapt to the pump instead of the rainfall. When the aquifers have been sucked dry, the problem of adapting to a world without water will prove beyond the scope of the intellect. See, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the bases of these assertions and related matters.

Survival of the Species: The Basis for a Sustainable Moral Code

The search for a universal God is as old as humanity. Tribalism has frustrated the effort. Inevitably, the creation of a religion evolves a theology that fractures into sects. The WORD acquires multiple meanings. I believe that Darwin offers a solution, now clarified by genetics: Survival of the species provides the sustainable basis for ethics and morality that all may, indeed must, embrace. Two domains direct behavior: biological and the intellectual. Each influences the other. The genome define biology and the nervous system hosts the intellect that various biological relationships induce. The genome developed through natural selection and the genes promulgate the result of that competition. What succeeds is passed on to the next generation. Some scientists quip that the competition is in the gene pool. The body merely provides the host for the genes. The altered genes must reproduce themselves. Darwin’s critical discovery in this context does not often appear in discussions of natural selection. Inter-species competition may reduce the ability of the species to adapt. The most prominent examples are arms races. Male animals that compete for harems evolve things like huge antlers that weigh them down and get tangled in brush. If antler size was restricted, the competition would not change and the species would be better off. Given the critical role of the genome, biological behavior must embrace survival of the species, the ability to adapt to an environment. Had the intellect drawn that conclusion, technology would not be employed in ways that damage the earth’s ability to provide the environment the genome requires. Natural selection takes huge amounts of time to alter the genes. Technology moves too quickly. Tribalism functions like the arms race described above. That competition does not foster biological or social evolution. It usually resorts to murder. Natural selection has no philosophy or moral ethic outside of efficiency. Critically, it cannot distinguish a short-term from a long-term adaptation in the short term. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources needed for the long term, the species disappears. The intellect provides the ability to distinguish long-term from short-term adaptations. It will not make that effort absent a moral imperative based on survival of the species. Treating the genome as God, the commandment that we must obey, reflects more than a metaphor. The intellect carries the burden of identifying what serves survival. Under that commandment, we would employ technology differently. The short-term solutions favored by most technologies result in adaptations to the wrong thing. If Darwin proved anything, it was that those who adapt to the wrong thing do not survive. The most dramatic example is the use of water, the most critical resource now in danger of exhaustion. No technology can replace it. Before technology we could only use rainfall stored in rivers and lakes and shallow wells. Modern pumps go down miles and, at great costs, bring up water stored for centuries. We now mine instead of harvest. We adapt to the pump instead of the rainfall. When the aquifers have been sucked dry, the problem of adapting to a world without water will prove beyond the scope of the intellect. See, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the bases of these assertions and related matters.

INTRODUCTION [To “Natural Selection’s Paradox”] In my mid-fifties, I found myself stranded 400 miles from home on what proved to be a temporary job. In the long nights away from my loved ones, I began to write a book for the education of my sons. I called it “To My Sons, Conversations We Never Finished at the Dinner Table.” It began as an attempt to unravel a mystery that haunted me then and now: Why were perfectly rational and well-educated people employing irrational and unsustainable means of adapting to their environment? The answer to my question appeared when I realized that we are what we adapt to and that how we adapt to an environment changes that environment. People from the prosperous West will find it difficult to believe that their adaptations may have dire consequences. They do. The first great root of our sorrows inhabits the ground on the dark side of our most compelling success—the ability to create and employ tools. Presumably, technology can fix anything. Therefore, we overlook the most dramatic consequence of populating our environment with machines and chemicals and the other artifacts, like money, developed by industrial economies. We have begun adapting to our inventions, which is not the same as adapting to the natural world that formed our genome. For example, water usage was once limited to the annual rainfall that filled rivers and lakes. Now we can pump millions of gallons of ancient water from aquifers thousands of feet underground. When they dry up the annual rainfall will not be sufficient. Adapting to the water pump instead of the annual rainfall, a short-term fix, will be part of our undoing. Adapting to the rainfall would require ever increasing efficiency, not ever increasing use of energy. We also assume that nature’s adaptations to our inventions will not harm us. However, nature has its own algorithms, which do not bow to our welfare. For instance, global warming occurs as a result of nature’s response to our technology. Nature does not view the human race as an exceptional species, one to whom its rules do not apply. Unfortunately, most people do not yet appreciate the profound implication of natural selection: A species that adapts to the wrong thing will not survive. In this context, we can discern an objective purpose for morality and therefore what values to employ in its application. The way technology has evolved lies at the heart of adapting to the wrong thing. Technological designs often ignore natural selection’s algorithm of resource efficiency, and the impact on the environment that we are adapted to, in favor of designs that produce virtual wealth—such as money. This surrogate for intrinsic value has gained control of real wealth for its own purposes, turning resources into cash without reference to the intrinsic value of what is produced or the real cost of methods of producing it. Money has become the objective of production rather than simply a medium of exchange—another example of adapting to the wrong thing. Similarly, technology’s ability to produce surpluses raises the bar on greed. If everyone produces surpluses, not everyone can sell theirs in the resulting zero-sum competition. In the desperate capitalist competition that results, ethics just get in the way. For thousands of years people were well, if not perfectly, adapted to their environment. It took centuries of cultural evolution to work out those adaptations, which, thanks to technology, we now erroneously view as obsolete. Adaptations the environment cannot sustain have taken their place. We have traded wisdom for a machine. As part of the regime that justified reversing evolution, evangelism in America evolved from God not mammon, to God and mammon, to God is mammon. The complexity generated by the irreducible algorithms that govern the forces we must survive encourages a reductive analysis of those forces. We have a limited capacity for isolating and identifying governing algorithms. Assumptions are employed to fill in the gaps. For example, Adam Smith’s “invisible-hand” is assumed to redirect a multitude of individual self-interests in the market place into a coalescence of interests that serve the general good, as long as the market remains free to “do its thing.” Aside from the fact that no data supports that assumption, Darwin discovered in his research on natural selection that when individual interests conflict with general interests, a common occurrence, individual interests usually prevail. Intra-species competition goes on all the time. The most dramatic example is the competition for males to mate with as many females as possible. What attracts females or defeats other males doe not necessarily produce by way of natural selection a characteristic that favors the species as a whole. Most of those competitions are based on relative rankings. The male only has to be better than his competition. Huge antlers may help the dominant male but they do nothing for the specie’s ability to run faster or through dense bush. The species has nothing to say about those competitions. All this is set out definitively in The Darwin Economy by Robert H. Frank. The point to be made here is that the fallacy of the benevolent market parallels, or could be a result of, the systemic blind side of natural selection I reference as natural selection’s paradox. Natural selection is probably the least reductive of all science’s memes because it describes how all things biological, and often social, acquired their design. The forces behind all human activity appear more clearly if natural selection provides the context for analysis. Frank even predicts that Darwin will someday supplant Smith in economics. I hope we can survive that long. Natural selection fails in one critical context. It does not, indeed cannot, distinguish a short-term adaptation from a long term-adaptation in the short term. That algorithm makes the future. It does not decide it. It makes no value judgments. How science has missed the paradox amazes me but the concept of natural selection is less than 200 years old and remains poorly understood and not often discussed outside of academia. Natural selection (evolution) and the invisible hand (the market) are both algorithms describing how things obtain their shape. The paradox embraces both the tendency to go with the short-term adaptation (profits) and Darwin’s observation that competition between individuals may produce adaptations not in the best interest of survival of the species. Clearly, the market may evolve adaptations favorable to some individuals at the expense of a great many other individuals. The significance of the paradox remains unrecognized. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources needed for the long term, the species will become extinct. Natural selection has done its thing, which is probably why science has ignored the paradox. That makes sense in relation to other species whose adaptations are local and fairly limited. In the case of humans, whose adaptations create world-wide, earth-shaking consequences, the paradox makes all the difference. Our short-term adaptations threaten to change our environment to the point where our genes, which define the ability to adapt, may not survive. The short-term adaptations, like the individual interests that create market failures, usually prevail. People do not worry about the long term as much as they do about the short term. Virtually every decision made today only deals with the short term. As a matter of survival, the paradox creates the necessity for ethical constructs based on survival of the species. No other time frame suffices for curtailing short-term strategies. The genes know best. If they do not survive, we do not survive. Adam Smith, the founder of the invisible-hand, acknowledged that ethics are critical for the success of markets. Ethics can prevent the corruption that self-interest creates at the expense of public interests. The invisible hand requires a conscience when individual interests do not coincide with general welfare. The pretense that some invisible objective force will make everything right merely justifies the failure to make the difficult choices that the short term verses the long term creates. The short term prevails, along with other apologies for greed. The choices engendered by the paradox raise ethical questions, not the least of which is our responsibility to future generations. Those questions often arise in the context of how individuals procure the energy required for survival, including which means of production to employ. Two choices exist at each end of that spectrum. (There are degrees and variances.) One may cooperate in a division of labor based on merit where everyone shares in the production and distribution of the product, or they may appropriate other people’s labor by means that may or may not be equitable. Historically, the former has produced the most efficient societies, which may deteriorate by virtue of the conflict between individual and collective interests that Darwin observed, which leads to adaptations through means employing something like the second choice. Without ethics, that will probably happen. Stealing other people’s labor requires force, deception, or a regime for stigmatizing some people as inferior and therefore subject to a higher class’s right to exploit their labor. Part of that regime includes the accusation that all those who recognize the pervasive role of class in all societies are fomenting “class warfare.” America is not exceptional in this regard. Class is more subtle here but it exists in crucial ways. We were the last civil society to ban slavery and we still exploit immigrants and the poor. Exploitation of other people’s labor is embedded in capitalism. The less you pay for labor the more you profit from it. Like natural selection, the market makes no value judgments outside of profit—measured by the virtual wealth of money. The market may discourage merit-based divisions of labor, encourage short-term strategies, and in other ways produce inefficient and wasteful practices. Deception suppresses relevant information to a point where agendas, not research, determine views of reality. Science becomes the enemy. Government stands by while the public suffers the extortion (like health care costs) of a privileged elite who pay very little for the public benefits they receive, insisting all the time that they have a right to keep all their money and be free from taxes. Within this world view, ethics only get in the way of the righteous pursuit of profit. How the ethical questions raised by the paradox Darwin identified (community versus individual interests) are answered will determine whether a culture will prosper or end up like Somalia and other places where corruption and intimidation prosper. We are what we adapt to. No invisible-hand exists for ethics. If natural selection cannot sort out the short term from the long term at the outset, the market certainly cannot. Competition is a sacred cow in America, but natural selection demonstrates how destructive it can become when contests between individuals damage the wealth we all require to survive. Survival requires a set of norms for internalization by individuals and for public policy that limit destructive competition. No market exists for that purpose. The market cannot, in light of the paradox, resolve the conflict between individual aspirations and community needs. These points remain obvious, uncontestable by anything but denial, yet propaganda by extreme conservatives has blocked all discussion and substituted slogans for facts. When crippled by manipulation, the market serves that purpose by ignoring the obvious lethal consequences of our present means of production and distribution—putting aside these consequences as so called “externalities.” Another overlooked feature of natural selection defines what we worship. It defines “God” as the thing we believe we must obey to survive. Natural selection dictates that result. Those who make the right choice survive. When we were hunter-gatherers, we worshiped animals. We only killed what we needed and what we needed was clear. Later we observed the mathematical certainty of the stars and worshiped the heavens. Math made technology possible—including virtual wealth like money. Virtual wealth has the unfortunate feature, unlike food, of not disclosing how much is enough to satisfy its holder. Today few possess any hard assets. Most people survive on wages or income from small businesses. Their sole means of survival depends upon money. Consciously or unconsciously, they worship money. The logic and mythology of money governs their decisions. The world’s oldest con game establishes a priesthood that claims all knowledge of God—a very marketable commodity in the context of worshipping idols. The world of finance is filled with people who play the role of priests to a public made slaves to money. They invent all sorts of mythical algorithms that are supposed to disclose the logic of money—the idea being that money has its own invisible-hand that they can divine. While considerable controversies arise over what constitutes the logic of money and the meaning of its myths, several precepts provide bedrock for the extremes the religion of money fosters. They reflect the marriage of Calvinism and virtual wealth. As God, money may determine how we perceive virtue. Those who have money God loves and those who do not have money God does not love. Therefore, any support from government interferes with God’s judgments. Like athletes on steroids, it distorts the competition to prove God’s love. Only self-made men need apply. With some obvious exceptions, acquiring money serves God’s purposes. Those who make it need not concern themselves with decency. The unintended consequences, the externalities, and the impact on the needs of others are all forgiven by God’s love. The act of making money is sanctified. How you make it and how much you can get of it that way provides the basis for class in America. Money as God becomes self-validating. So goes the logic and myth of money at its extremes. As extreme as this sounds, no other algorithm explains the irrational behavior that has gridlocked all solutions to what are becoming insurmountable problems, such as global warming. The use of taxes to provide equitable reallocations of wealth that are necessary to finance changes in production and to discourage harmful means of production have become unthinkable even to those who claim liberal credentials. I refer the reader to Robert Frank’s definitive exposition of these points (The Darwin Economy). He discloses how some transfers of wealth, unthinkable to many conservatives, can make needed changes possible, affordable, and equitable. His research leads him to conclude that a society that does not transfer some income from the rich to the poor (by taxes) always ends up addressing the needs of the poor in much more costly ways (p 111). While few will admit their fealty to money, everyone is consciously or unconsciously infected by it to some degree or other. We are what we adapt to and much of what we must adapt to turns on money. It is a matter of survival. Nothing will change until the means of production and distribution change and that will not happen without an accounting system that reflects the real costs, including externalities of the way we do business. We cannot design sustainable means of production without full accounting. If wasting makes money, there will be waste. One can underestimate the value of money as a facilitator of commerce. The mistake more frequently made assigns intrinsic value to money. It is a tool not to be worshipped, as in the Bible’s First Commandment, as a craven image. One of the great mysteries for me, which I can only explain through the religion of money and the common individualistic goal of “Making It Big,” the America pathology, is how people can fear big government but not fear excessive wealth in the hands of so few. These concepts justify the strange idea that power in the hands of a representative, democratically-elected government is somehow more dangerous than power in the hands of a largely unaccountable financial oligarchy. This oligarchy has decided that the way to address the shortfall in real wealth caused by technology and by the population explosion is to return to an industrial form of feudalism rather than to increase efficiency and sharing. Their vision of the future is one in which a small elite hold a monopoly on wealth and knowledge. The masses attend substandard schools and lack access to health care or higher education without crippling sacrifices to pay for extraordinary costs. Most will work, until the day they die, for what do not amount to minimum wages today. I have concluded that nothing can change as long as people continue to adapt to the wrong thing. As long as money provides the measure of all things, corruption will continue. Change requires a different accounting system, one based on resource consumption. Taxes on damaging activities and consumption are more effective than regulation and are better for the economy than traditional taxes. Frank, The Darwin Economy, outlines the ways various consumption taxes can help the economy that put the lie to many assumptions about the market. Survival of the species provides the sustainable basis for morality and ethics. Morality not based on the survival of our children’s children, as a first principle, only serves the agenda of the Religion of Money. Our true moral imperatives have more to do with resource efficiency, conservation, and the cooperation of brotherhood than with what often passes for social mores. What we observe in Congress today more resembles an inquisition than a deliberative body studying the facts and arriving at solutions. The high priests of the Word demand fealty to a catechism supporting their agenda regardless of the consequences on the ground. The things that really matter, such as feeding, clothing, housing people, and a future for the generations to come take a back seat to philosophical purity. A society that fails to put the children first may not claim moral superiority. Ethics that do not provide for the future fail. If we abandon the wisdom of our genes, God will abandon us. Unbridled competition between individuals merely decides who dies last. This work is designed to address these points at many levels, from natural selection to religion and mythology to the natural and social sciences. A great many of the best interpreters of current science are cited. This work updates our knowledge.

THE CHOICE: SOCIALISM OR FASCISM The means of production now evolving will inevitably outstrip our ability to sustain an environment that can support us. Economic collapse follows ecological collapse. At the same time, current means of production will also fail to provide sufficient work to sustain incomes and employment. Increased productivity and reduced resources will mean fewer jobs, and particularly living wage jobs. Insofar as means of production and distribution largely define societies, one of two means of organizing society will follow the shortfall in resources and viable labor: socialism or fascism. This conclusion follows from the apparent failure to meet the problem with more sharing and efficiency, both of which enjoy little status in a culture that endorses “making it big” in the money games. I use the terms, socialism and fascism, in the broadest sense, as the poles between which social ideologies fall. Those ideologies have been mortal enemies for over 100 years, which explains the hostility now evident in American politics. While both sides claim freedom and equality as their goal, that deception only conceals the consequences of the on-the-ground policies being advanced by warring ideologies. Socialism looks at the proper relationship between individuals and between individuals and government as a cooperative effort to provide for all. Individual responsibility includes the general welfare. The means of supporting safety nets requires a sustainable economy and broad public support. The question of who pays for what takes a leading role in politics. Fascism leans more to “winner take all.” The corollary is that losers deserve no support, regardless of their circumstances. Fascism looks at the proper relationship between individuals and between individuals and government as a Darwinian struggle for supremacy, usually for money, first between individuals and then between tribes. Since even fascists cannot make it alone, belonging to the most powerful tribe provides the magnet for politics. Insofar as virtual wealth (money) has gained control of real wealth (resources), the money tribe enjoys an increasingly powerful magnet. Membership is highly coveted and very expensive. Conditions for the rise of fascism in America have never been better. The ground was laid by decades of multimillion dollar programs, facilitated by technology, to suppress empathy and intellectual honesty. Fascism cannot develop when people regard each other as equals, when people feel the pain of others, and when people help rather than take advantage of others’ misfortunes. Well-financed think tanks, talk radio, and managed news reporting blames the victims and never discusses collective solutions. Even without the animus of those who believe that God despises those without money, digital production and distribution isolate people from the kind of contacts that develop empathy. Shared experience of the workplace revolves around computer programs. If you do not understand those algorithms, you are just not keeping up. Instead of sharing the effect of poor weather on crops, we share a war of all against all for money. If you cannot play that game, you are negligent. The kind of youth protests that made civil rights happen in the sixties have succumbed to self-interest and internet gossip. Facebook does not generate change. The other shoe that is falling on America’s greatness is the ever expanding grip of propaganda that technology makes possible, along with concentrations of power. In the search for truth, two diametrically opposed forces compete. One is curiosity that leads to strategies like the scientific method, an effort to determine facts and understand relationships. The other is the sanctity of agendas. What serves the agenda determines the facts and relationships, irregardless of observable incongruities. Science, ostensibly, avoids agendas. Tribalism lives by them. Fascism cannot survive reality. It can only live on propaganda. Hence, the critical role of intellectual honesty. Without it, we have no means of unmasking propaganda or designing sustainable means of production and functioning institutions. Intellectual honesty requires that everyone and every program be judged on the same bases and employs objective means of verification. There is no truth absent a system of logic that can describe reality in the context of its origins—natural selection—and its consequences. Millions are spent on a project to eliminate objective facts from consideration in order to enthrone agendas. Rant, trivia, and deception prevail on the airways. News provides more distraction than inspiration to think. The facts take a back seat to entertainment values. The fraud called “balanced news” makes no distinctions, as if all ideas were equal. Every issue does not have two sides. Some ideas are lousy and some are worthy of our closest attention. Pretending that everything has a justifiable basis serves to mask agendas. The socialist/fascist dichotomy has its counterpart in the DNA of civilization. Individuals may engage in cooperative endeavors where divisions of labor are determined on merit and everyone shares in the product or people may employ force or class stigma to exploit other people’s labor. Abraham Lincoln viewed the distinction as the never ending struggle between good and evil. The Civil War tested, for the moment, whether class distinctions as gross as slavery would continue. Slavery was defeated, not evil. Countless ways of exploiting other people’s labor remain. Herein lies the major building block for fascism. The Civil War merely went underground, as the backlash from electing a black president reveals. The Religion of Money provides another building block. Darwinian Calvinism sanctions whatever it takes to prove God’s love by the simple expedient of conflating the discipline it takes to love God with the discipline it takes to succeed. The syllogism goes like this: Making money is the measure of a man; the fittest will acquire the most; God must love them. Under the Religion of Money, legitimate proof of God’s love requires unrelenting competition. One must succeed by her own devises without any help from government. Therefore, government must not interfere with the process of converting anything that can be converted into money. Institutions like the Environmental Protection Agency defy the proper order of things. Exploiting the environment goes along with exploiting labor. Both lie at the heart of capitalism and, as a matter of fact, government does more for the rich than for the poor. Fascism embodies a kind of feudal slavery. A master race, the lords and ladies, hold life and fortunes at their pleasure. The sanctioning of the Outlaw Gene (exploiting other people’s labor) and the Religion of Money (money as the supreme value and the proof of God’s love) reduces government to the support of an elite class and its corporate profits. I define elite as those with the power to make the rules or ignore them. Racism, limiting advanced education to a an elite, justice at the service of power, huge differences in income, privatization that reduces most people’s access to public services, control of the media by propaganda, taxes that favor the rich, and a system of logic that turns empathy on its head (pity the billionaire and his struggle to avoid regulations and taxes), accelerate as resources dwindle. One morning we wake up and wonder how democracy evolved a virulent strain of fascism that places democratic institutions at the service of money and produces an economy that goes from bubble to bubble with no regulation of fraudulent schemes that cheat most people. This backdoor approach to fascism is exactly the program conservative republicans hope to advance. The core beliefs of the form of conservatism described here resembles the nineteenth century misapplication of natural selection referenced as social Darwinism, if not a continuation of that perversion of ‘survival of the fittest.’ The accusation usually leveled against socialism argues that it saps initiative, makes people lazy, and robs the producers of their just profits. If one sees life as a Darwinian struggle for a place at the top, the accusation appears logical. The flaw in the argument ignores the fact that “initiative” silently refers to the initiative to make money. Getting rich does not produce things of value, although making things of value can make one rich. Few long-term socialist governments exists and they differ in one degree or another. The enemies of socialism, the Outlaw Gene and the Religion of Money, have managed to undermine any attempts at building a viable form of socialism. All too often, a professed socialist government only provides another means of establishing an elite. The enemies of most liberal reforms are leaders looking for a new constituency to make themselves the elite as the keepers of the new faith. Socialism remains a largely undefined term. Certainly, it can be designed to encourage initiative in the context of that which makes everyone richer in ways not dependent on accumulating money. Moreover, we evolved as social animals who only survived through cooperation. It is in our DNA. The movement to suppress that part of our heritage is well financed. I see ‘greed is good for you’ written on walls everywhere. Tribes fought over short resources. Technology increased resources but increase population as well. We became infected with the hubris that technology could replace nature and greed therefore no longer creates excesses. Given the coming shortfall, only socialism provides an alternative to a victim economy, where the powerful live off of the weak. To draw that conclusion, one has to have the courage to admit capitalism’s failures. I say courage because capitalism has been advertised as the creator of freedom and prosperity. Indeed it did, for awhile, support liberal reforms. However, it did so in wasteful ways that created economic elite. Capitalism is the business of turning anything and everything into money. It worked in a resource-rich world with a modest population. It has misdirected technology and required endless wars to create consumption, jobs, and to allocate resources. We have been on a permanent war economy ever since WWII ended the great depression. Capitalism cannot be sustained. The sacred market only measures short-term consequences. How do we create long-term markets that do not favor an elite? To start with, we need a set of regulations critics will brand as socialism. So be it. Many of them were in place not long ago but both political parties repealed them. Clinton did as much damage as Bush—all in the name of profits for speculators and those who create monopolies. The greatest enemy of reform is the American Pathology: making it big at all costs. Our ancestors limited political power with a tri-part government: separation of administrative, legislative, and judicial functions. Making money the central purpose of life bridges that separation. All functions coalesce. Anti-trust laws, graduated taxes, limits on the number of television or radio stations one could own, laws against conflicts of interest, and other measures designed to limit power have been gutted. Why do Americans take no notice of big money but worry about big government? Is it that making it big is more important than social justice? The message seems to be, “Do not mess with anyone’s game, it will be our turn someday.” And indeed, a shocking percentage of Americans do believe that they will be wealthy someday, which helps keep our current “winner take all” system in place. Propaganda has created mistrust of government to such an extent that many are prepared to commit the suicide of destroying it. The result would be the absolute rule of money enforced by its own police force—victims everywhere. Natural selection determines what survives on the basis of efficiency. Those who process energy with the least expenditure of resources prevail. The synergy of merit- based divisions of labor provides an advantage in the competition for resources. Subsidies for those left out of production are cheaper than police, jails, and emergency rooms. Making the most of individual talents requires access to education, health care, and equal opportunity. We are what we adapt to. If we adapt to making money at the expense of those adaptations required to survive in nature and those that serve social justice, much damage will be done in the name of profit. Entrepreneurs are the backbone of economies that require people to buy things they do not need. Creating markets of no intrinsic value does not preserve wealth. Using technology merely because it is there and profitable exhausts the planet. Allowing unlimited wealth will defeat democracy. Socialism provides the only answer. See, Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud, for the bases of these assertions and related matters, including how survival of the species may provide the basis for a sustainable morality.

How the Market Fails

In my mid-fifties, I found myself stranded 400 miles from home on what proved to be a temporary job. In the long nights away from my loved ones, I began to write a book for the education of my sons. I called it “To My Sons, Conversations We Never Finished at the Dinner Table.” It began as an attempt to unravel a mystery that haunted me then and now: Why were perfectly rational and well-educated people employing irrational and unsustainable means of adapting to their environment?
The answer to my question appeared when I realized that we are what we adapt to and that how we adapt to an environment changes that environment. People from the prosperous West will find it difficult to believe that their adaptations may have dire consequences. They do. The first great root of our sorrows inhabits the ground on the dark side of our most compelling success—the ability to create and employ tools. Presumably, technology can fix anything. Therefore, we overlook the most dramatic consequence of populating our environment with machines and chemicals and the other artifacts, like money, developed by industrial economies. We have begun adapting to our inventions, which is not the same as adapting to the natural world that formed our genome.
For example, water usage was once limited to the annual rainfall that filled rivers and lakes. Now we can pump millions of gallons of ancient water from aquifers thousands of feet underground. When they dry up the annual rainfall will not be sufficient. Adapting to the water pump instead of the annual rainfall, a short-term fix, will be part of our undoing. Adapting to the rainfall would require ever increasing efficiency, not ever increasing use of energy.
We also assume that nature’s adaptations to our inventions will not harm us. However, nature has its own algorithms, which do not bow to our welfare. For instance, global warming occurs as a result of nature’s response to our technology. Nature does not view the human race as an exceptional species, one to whom its rules do not apply. Unfortunately, most people do not yet appreciate the profound implication of natural selection: A species that adapts to the wrong thing will not survive. In this context, we can discern an objective purpose for morality and therefore what values to employ in its application.
The way technology has evolved lies at the heart of adapting to the wrong thing. Technological designs often ignore natural selection’s algorithm of resource efficiency, and the impact on the environment that we are adapted to, in favor of designs that produce virtual wealth—such as money. This surrogate for intrinsic value has gained control of real wealth for its own purposes, turning resources into cash without reference to the intrinsic value of what is produced or the real cost of methods of producing it. Money has become the objective of production rather than simply a medium of exchange—another example of adapting to the wrong thing. Similarly, technology’s ability to produce surpluses raises the bar on greed. If everyone produces surpluses, not everyone can sell theirs in the resulting zero-sum competition. In the desperate capitalist competition that results, ethics just get in the way.
For thousands of years people were well, if not perfectly, adapted to their environment. It took centuries of cultural evolution to work out those adaptations, which, thanks to technology, we now erroneously view as obsolete. Adaptations the environment cannot sustain have taken their place. We have traded wisdom for a machine. As part of the regime that justified reversing evolution, evangelism in America evolved from God not mammon, to God and mammon, to God is mammon.
The complexity generated by the irreducible algorithms that govern the forces we must survive encourages a reductive analysis of those forces. We have a limited capacity for isolating and identifying governing algorithms. Assumptions are employed to fill in the gaps.
For example, Adam Smith’s “invisible-hand” is assumed to redirect a multitude of individual self-interests in the market place into a coalescence of interests that serve the general good, as long as the market remains free to “do its thing.” Aside from the fact that no data supports that assumption, Darwin discovered in his research on natural selection that when individual interests conflict with general interests, a common occurrence, individual interests usually prevail.
Intra-species competition goes on all the time. The most dramatic example is the competition for males to mate with as many females as possible. What attracts females or defeats other males doe not necessarily produce by way of natural selection a characteristic that favors the species as a whole. Most of those competitions are based on relative rankings. The male only has to be better than his competition. Huge antlers may help the dominant male but they do nothing for the specie’s ability to run faster or through dense bush. The species has nothing to say about those competitions. All this is set out definitively in The Darwin Economy by Robert H. Frank. The point to be made here is that the fallacy of the benevolent market parallels, or could be a result of, the systemic blind side of natural selection I reference as natural selection’s paradox.
Natural selection is probably the least reductive of all science’s memes because it describes how all things biological, and often social, acquired their design. The forces behind all human activity appear more clearly if natural selection provides the context for analysis. Frank even predicts that Darwin will someday supplant Smith in economics. I hope we can survive that long.
Natural selection fails in one critical context. It does not, indeed cannot, distinguish a short-term adaptation from a long term-adaptation in the short term. That algorithm makes the future. It does not decide it. It makes no value judgments. How science has missed the paradox amazes me but the concept of natural selection is less than 200 years old and remains poorly understood and not often discussed outside of academia.
Natural selection (evolution) and the invisible hand (the market) are both algorithms describing how things obtain their shape. The paradox embraces both the tendency to go with the short-term adaptation (profits) and Darwin’s observation that competition between individuals may produce adaptations not in the best interest of survival of the species. Clearly, the market may evolve adaptations favorable to some individuals at the expense of a great many other individuals.
The significance of the paradox remains unrecognized. If the short-term adaptation uses up the resources needed for the long term, the species will become extinct. Natural selection has done its thing, which is probably why science has ignored the paradox. That makes sense in relation to other species whose adaptations are local and fairly limited. In the case of humans, whose adaptations create world-wide, earth-shaking consequences, the paradox makes all the difference. Our short-term adaptations threaten to change our environment to the point where our genes, which define the ability to adapt, may not survive. The short-term adaptations, like the individual interests that create market failures, usually prevail. People do not worry about the long term as much as they do about the short term. Virtually every decision made today only deals with the short term.
As a matter of survival, the paradox creates the necessity for ethical constructs based on survival of the species. No other time frame suffices for curtailing short-term strategies. The genes know best. If they do not survive, we do not survive. Adam Smith, the founder of the invisible-hand, acknowledged that ethics are critical for the success of markets. Ethics can prevent the corruption that self-interest creates at the expense of public interests. The invisible hand requires a conscience when individual interests do not coincide with general welfare. The pretense that some invisible objective force will make everything right merely justifies the failure to make the difficult choices that the short term verses the long term creates. The short term prevails, along with other apologies for greed.
The choices engendered by the paradox raise ethical questions, not the least of which is our responsibility to future generations. Those questions often arise in the context of how individuals procure the energy required for survival, including which means of production to employ. Two choices exist at each end of that spectrum. (There are degrees and variances.) One may cooperate in a division of labor based on merit where everyone shares in the production and distribution of the product, or they may appropriate other people’s labor by means that may or may not be equitable. Historically, the former has produced the most efficient societies, which may deteriorate by virtue of the conflict between individual and collective interests that Darwin observed, which leads to adaptations through means employing something like the second choice. Without ethics, that will probably happen.
Stealing other people’s labor requires force, deception, or a regime for stigmatizing some people as inferior and therefore subject to a higher class’s right to exploit their labor. Part of that regime includes the accusation that all those who recognize the pervasive role of class in all societies are fomenting “class warfare.” America is not exceptional in this regard. Class is more subtle here but it exists in crucial ways. We were the last civil society to ban slavery and we still exploit immigrants and the poor. Exploitation of other people’s labor is embedded in capitalism. The less you pay for labor the more you profit from it. Like natural selection, the market makes no value judgments outside of profit—measured by the virtual wealth of money.
The market may discourage merit-based divisions of labor, encourage short-term strategies, and in other ways produce inefficient and wasteful practices. Deception suppresses relevant information to a point where agendas, not research, determine views of reality. Science becomes the enemy. Government stands by while the public suffers the extortion (like health care costs) of a privileged elite who pay very little for the public benefits they receive, insisting all the time that they have a right to keep all their money and be free from taxes. Within this world view, ethics only get in the way of the righteous pursuit of profit.
How the ethical questions raised by the paradox Darwin identified (community versus individual interests) are answered will determine whether a culture will prosper or end up like Somalia and other places where corruption and intimidation prosper. We are what we adapt to. No invisible-hand exists for ethics. If natural selection cannot sort out the short term from the long term at the outset, the market certainly cannot.
Competition is a sacred cow in America, but natural selection demonstrates how destructive it can become when contests between individuals damage the wealth we all require to survive. Survival requires a set of norms for internalization by individuals and for public policy that limit destructive competition. No market exists for that purpose. The market cannot, in light of the paradox, resolve the conflict between individual aspirations and community needs.
These points remain obvious, uncontestable by anything but denial, yet propaganda by extreme conservatives has blocked all discussion and substituted slogans for facts. When crippled by manipulation, the market serves that purpose by ignoring the obvious lethal consequences of our present means of production and distribution—putting aside these consequences as so called “externalities.”
Another overlooked feature of natural selection defines what we worship. It defines “God” as the thing we believe we must obey to survive. Natural selection dictates that result. Those who make the right choice survive. When we were hunter-gatherers, we worshiped animals. We only killed what we needed and what we needed was clear. Later we observed the mathematical certainty of the stars and worshiped the heavens. Math made technology possible—including virtual wealth like money. Virtual wealth has the unfortunate feature, unlike food, of not disclosing how much is enough to satisfy its holder.
Today few possess any hard assets. Most people survive on wages or income from small businesses. Their sole means of survival depends upon money. Consciously or unconsciously, they worship money. The logic and mythology of money governs their decisions. The world’s oldest con game establishes a priesthood that claims all knowledge of God—a very marketable commodity in the context of worshipping idols. The world of finance is filled with people who play the role of priests to a public made slaves to money. They invent all sorts of mythical algorithms that are supposed to disclose the logic of money—the idea being that money has its own invisible-hand that they can divine. While considerable controversies arise over what constitutes the logic of money and the meaning of its myths, several precepts provide bedrock for the extremes the religion of money fosters. They reflect the marriage of Calvinism and virtual wealth.
As God, money may determine how we perceive virtue. Those who have money God loves and those who do not have money God does not love. Therefore, any support from government interferes with God’s judgments. Like athletes on steroids, it distorts the competition to prove God’s love. Only self-made men need apply. With some obvious exceptions, acquiring money serves God’s purposes. Those who make it need not concern themselves with decency. The unintended consequences, the externalities, and the impact on the needs of others are all forgiven by God’s love. The act of making money is sanctified. How you make it and how much you can get of it that way provides the basis for class in America. Money as God becomes self-validating.
So goes the logic and myth of money at its extremes. As extreme as this sounds, no other algorithm explains the irrational behavior that has gridlocked all solutions to what are becoming insurmountable problems, such as global warming. The use of taxes to provide equitable reallocations of wealth that are necessary to finance changes in production and to discourage harmful means of production have become unthinkable even to those who claim liberal credentials. I refer the reader to Robert Frank’s definitive exposition of these points (The Darwin Economy). He discloses how some transfers of wealth, unthinkable to many conservatives, can make needed changes possible, affordable, and equitable. His research leads him to conclude that a society that does not transfer some income from the rich to the poor (by taxes) always ends up addressing the needs of the poor in much more costly ways (p 111).
While few will admit their fealty to money, everyone is consciously or unconsciously infected by it to some degree or other. We are what we adapt to and much of what we must adapt to turns on money. It is a matter of survival. Nothing will change until the means of production and distribution change and that will not happen without an accounting system that reflects the real costs, including externalities of the way we do business. We cannot design sustainable means of production without full accounting. If wasting makes money, there will be waste. One can underestimate the value of money as a facilitator of commerce. The mistake more frequently made assigns intrinsic value to money. It is a tool not to be worshipped, as in the Bible’s First Commandment, as a craven image.
One of the great mysteries for me, which I can only explain through the religion of money and the common individualistic goal of “Making It Big,” the America pathology, is how people can fear big government but not fear excessive wealth in the hands of so few. These concepts justify the strange idea that power in the hands of a representative, democratically-elected government is somehow more dangerous than power in the hands of a largely unaccountable financial oligarchy.
This oligarchy has decided that the way to address the shortfall in real wealth caused by technology and by the population explosion is to return to an industrial form of feudalism rather than to increase efficiency and sharing. Their vision of the future is one in which a small elite hold a monopoly on wealth and knowledge. The masses attend substandard schools and lack access to health care or higher education without crippling sacrifices to pay for extraordinary costs. Most will work, until the day they die, for what do not amount to minimum wages today.
I have concluded that nothing can change as long as people continue to adapt to the wrong thing. As long as money provides the measure of all things, corruption will continue. Change requires a different accounting system, one based on resource consumption. Taxes on damaging activities and consumption are more effective than regulation and are better for the economy than traditional taxes. Frank, The Darwin Economy, outlines the ways various consumption taxes can help the economy that put the lie to many assumptions about the market.
Survival of the species provides the sustainable basis for morality and ethics. Morality not based on the survival of our children’s children, as a first principle, only serves the agenda of the Religion of Money. Our true moral imperatives have more to do with resource efficiency, conservation, and the cooperation of brotherhood than with what often passes for social mores.
What we observe in Congress today more resembles an inquisition than a deliberative body studying the facts and arriving at solutions. The high priests of the Word demand fealty to a catechism supporting their agenda regardless of the consequences on the ground. The things that really matter, such as feeding, clothing, housing people, and a future for the generations to come take a back seat to philosophical purity. A society that fails to put the children first may not claim moral superiority. Ethics that do not provide for the future fail. If we abandon the wisdom of our genes, God will abandon us. Unbridled competition between individuals merely decides who dies last.
This essay is the introduction to the book, Natural Selection's Paradox, which explains this material and helps define a way to understand behavior that seems inexplicable.