Archive for June, 2021

Nazis and Socialists

June 30, 2021

Introduction

I often encounter people who say the Nazis were socialists. It seems a standard part of current day rightist theory. supporters of the proposition don’t generally present much evidence beyond the name Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist, German Workers Party), this implies that they will then tell me that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea shows how bad democracy is.

Historically, the party did grow out of Anton Drexler’s Deutsche Arbeiterpartei which seems to have been both authoritarian and anti-capitalist, blaming Jewish people for the problems of capitalism, but after Hitler essentially took over (the original party lasted just over a year) any focus on the rights of German workers declined considerably, although Otto and Gregor Strasser did tie the nationalism to socialist rhetoric, perhaps to drag workers away from communism. In 1926 at the Bamberg Conference Hitler denounced the remaining socialist-inclined members as “communists” and ruled out land expropriations and popular decision-making or consultation. Otto Strasser either broke away from the Nazis in 1930 after Hitler allied with the German aristocratic and corporate elite, or he was pushed, or both. After Hitler was appointed Chancellor, through Conservative support, he soon had Gregor Strasser murdered during the Night of the Long Knives. In the 1930s the Nazis openly told business that democracy and business were incompatible, and received about two million Reichsmarks in funding from big industrialists as a result. Hitler was also financed and supported by American Corporations and the British Aristocracy because of his anti-communism and the fact he was not socialist.

Hitler was a fan of Henry Ford, and vice versa, probably because of their shared anti-Semitism. In July 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. Henry Ford helped lead the America First Committee, which sought to keep the United States out of World War II. Ford had a car company in Germany, helped provide war material for the Nazis, and may have used Nazi provided slave labour.

As far as I know, Hitler never seems to have been interested in supporting worker power, or redistribution of wealth to the general populace. The Nazi critique of capitalism seems to have been largely confined to criticism of international bankers (ie a code term for Jews). Inequalities in property ownership were supported and sanctified.

So we can say that even if the Nazis once had been socialists they were not before or after they got into power.  

What did the Nazis promote?

Lets look at what the Nazis were. They were:

Nationalists

Making Germany great again. Germany first. Germans are the master race etc…

Racists

Comes with the Nationalism and the master race stuff. Everyone who they defined as non-German or non-Aryan, was inferior no matter how long they had been living in Germany.

Inferior races, at best, deserved to be slaves under the control of the white Christian German people. Inferior races had no rights, they could be shot and detained at whim.

The “jewish threat” gave them internal people to hate and blame for anything that went wrong, gave them a scapegoat to produce unity, and provided an excuse for theoretical inaccuracy.

Authoritarian and Hierarchical

The Fuehrer was top of the heap. Everyone should honour and obey him. His immediate circle came next. All of life was a chain of competitive authority. Zealous obedience was a key to success. Of course non-Germans and inferior races where at the bottom of the chain, and of little value except as labour. If they could not labour then death was the reward.

Hierarchy was officially, about race, ability and heroism.

Having a hierarchy means people need to have an easy way to identify those inferior to them, so they don’t get mistaken for those inferiors and can attack them.

Nazis abolished Trade Unions as these were incompatible with Party Authority, and likely to be socialist and disrupt corporate power.

Statist

The Reich/State was the Nation, and the Nation the State – and the State was a hierarchy of obedience. The Fuehrer and the State should master everything. People should serve the State, not the State the people. State is unified by race. Self-governance by those lower down, was not acceptable. Autonomous non-government zones where not acceptable.

It is true that Hitler did not believe in rule by corporations, but he did protect them.

Ideological

Education exists to promote “Aryan values” whatever they are. The values were said to be under threat by degenerates, and foreigners, and such people must be silenced as much as possible. Education was to aim at producing people for the workforce, the military and the party. Any university person who disagreed with these values, or this position, was to be removed as a marxist or as non-Aryan. Obviously Jews should not teach – Heidegger, for example, got rid of Jewish lecturers. Aryan students should spy on their teachers and report those who deviated. Only Aryan research which supported the official ideology was to be allowed. No research which openly checked on the accuracy of party policy, economics, authority, hierarchy, racism etc. was acceptable – it was to be denounced.

Heroes

Heroism was important. This involved self-sacrifice for the Fuehrer. It involved perpetual struggle against those who would undermine the Fuehrer. It involved leaping into combat with degenerates without thinking. It meant fighting for the Reich and one’s fellow fighters without question. It meant group loyalty. You should never be disloyal to the party. Disloyal people should be punished. Heroism was also about the survival of the fittest, most talented etc. Strangely it often involved official denials that they had engaged in the violence they promoted.

Cultivation of heroism, in this case, leads to the unheroic being despised and open for slaughter.

Militarist

Another consequence of Nationalism, and the implied inferiority of others. The Germans where the supreme fighting force in the world. They were only defeated by betrayal. All Aryan men should contribute to the military effort. All other Nations where inferior and deserved to be conquered, to provide land and resources for German heroes. Military combat was the supreme expression of heroism.

There is no evidence that Hitler espoused anti-colonial policies, other than in an attempt to conquer the colonies of his enemies. He certainly did not support self-determination and independence for people Germans conquered.

Sexist

This was reinforced by the militarism. Women exist to please men, to be obedient to men, and to produce more soldiers and breeders for the Reich. That’s it.

Corporate

German corporations where the backbone of the German State. They should produce the resources and equipment needed by the State, when the State commanded. As long as corporations realised their place they were given authority, and slave labour. No workers rights or unions were to disrupt production or wealth extraction, so corporations were relatively happy.

Mystical

The Fuehrer was close to God or Spirit, mysterious and inspired with an understanding beyond that of mortal men. If you could not understand him that was to be expected, but you should should still obey. Germany was dominant because of its spirit and its fate. Many Germans seemed to find Hitler a source of religious and mystical comfort. They had a special relationship with him, even if they had never met.

Aryan Christianity was the official religion (with as much relationship to real Christianity as evangelical prosperity preachers), although the elites may have had their own rituals. They found it easy to accommodate with most Churches, who helped support them as they represented authority, and the choice of God.

“The völkisch-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.”

Mein Kampf p.562.

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. 

Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1942). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922 – August 1939. Vol. 1

Propagandists

They lied about the forces against them, to build support. They did not like people checking their ‘truths’. They repeated slogans endlessly to give them the certainty of truth. They made ‘agreements’ for as long as it was convenient. This may have been a mistake as it gave Russia and the UK time to prepare for the inevitable war. Deniability was high. You may have had to divine what the Fuehrer wanted and give it to him, especially if it could be disreputable.

The truth of any statement was a matter of how much it supported the Party, Reich and triumph etc….

For what it is worth the U.S. Office of Strategic Services claimed:

His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend

Of course Nazis are unlikely to claim that they lie.

Support

Nazis were supported by many conservatives in Germany, and by many Republicans and US corporations (even after it was made illegal to trade with them), because they were not communist or socialist, and recognised property hierarchy. This helped keep the US out of the war and gave the Nazis freedom to strike.

Conclusion

Non of these features of Nazism has any necessary connection to socialism, unless you define socialism in a very odd way so as to try and make the connection ‘true’.

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Appendix Some extra remarks

The ideologies and theories of communism and fascism are completely different as a little research in reading the original materials should show you.

Communism aspires to the withering away of the state, the birth of people power, and relative economic equality under the control of the workers. It begins by attacking the power of bosses, plutocrats, aristocracies, established churches, and bureaucrats. Its contradictory failing, is that after the revolution it needs a strong State to demolish the previous social arrangements and to defend the revolution against attack. This has always been the point of fracture between communitarian anarchists and communists.

Previously powerful and wealthy people, often have their money offshore and keep trying to undermine progress, while other states which fear revolution attack it, just as the US, Australia and the UK fought against the Soviets after the revolution, or just like Cuba has been attacked and isolated ever since the revolution, even though they initially tried to ally with the US.

Given this, the people who come to control the State then have no real inclination to give up their power and make the new state vulnerable, so the revolution never comes to fruition, even if it could.

Without fail, given this kind of situation, dictators have always arisen, even though the fundamental aim of communism was to remove authoritarian aristocrats, monarchs or plutocrats.

On the other hand, fascists aim to establish an authoritarian nationalism. Dictatorship is part of the scheme from the beginning. Usually the would-be dictator is the focus of the party, the policies of the party are whatever the leader says, the leader is proclaimed to be a genius with an indissolvable tie to the people. The only issues are how to apply the leader’s wishes, and how to purge the party of those who still cling to ideas of democracy, worker’s revolution, or fairness.

The Dictator and the party are usually supported by some of the existing power elites, such as the aristocracy or the corporate wealth elites – often, ironically, as a bulwark against communism. As they are nationalists, usually aiming to restore the nation’s greatness in the eyes of the world, and to restore discipline and obedience amongst the people, they are often supported by conservatives. Eventually the aristocracy, corporate sector and conservatives find they have supported an effective, as opposed to bumbling, dictatorship and have to go along with it to keep their positions. However, capitalists almost never find collaborating with a force that helps them make money a problem.

To keep its momentum, fascism depends on finding an internal enemy, which is not that powerful but which can be pretended to be powerful: whether it be people they can call communists, jews, blacks, academics, gays, liberals etc. This enables fascism to justify its policies, excuse its failures, and give its people something to hate and distinguish themselves from. As a result, fascism tends towards racism, incarceration or mass murder as a normal process, although it always pretends not to, as people are generally just not hard enough to want to murder whole classes of other people. Without a created enemy, it withers. The enemy gives it legitimacy when the leader challenges election results, or ignores elections altogether, as the enemy is duplicitous by definition. Constant denunciation of the enemy helps get its supporters angry and motivated – it liberates violence and a sense enemies are being defeated.

Eventually, finding internal enemies leads to finding external enemies and the use of warfare to keep the people together. Fascism tends to be militaristic in orientation: it likes uniforms, parades and mass rallies to build unity amongst the favored, and strike fear into the unfavored. This is part of its building discipline, order and lack of empathy towards victims. Initially, warfare also means more money for large parts of the corporate world, so it helps to keep corporate support.

So they are quite different in approach and hopes, even if the result is similar.

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Wage Labour in Capitalism

June 27, 2021

The Capitalist view of wage labour

The ideology is simple. In an imaginary free market, both employer and employee only ever sign voluntary agreements. There is never any differential of power or need, and the market always values labour and skills at exactly the right value, or the contract would not be signed by either party, who are perfectly free to turn the contract down.

No contract, no matter how exploitative, can in this sense be defined as unfair or exploitative – because it is ‘voluntary’.

In neoliberalism, the same kind of argument is used to try and persuade people that everything they do in a free market is voluntary; from being homeless, having no access to education, not being able to afford medical treatment, to having to risk covid to earn an income.

In reality this is a largely motivated delusion. It suits employers and helps make them virtuous almost no matter what they do.

Objections to the Capitalist view

Self-sufficient Labour?

The capitalist argument about employment contracts might approach truth where the worker has a guaranteed source of food and shelter independent of their labour for an employer. But in capitalist societies this is exceedingly rare. Indeed capitalists have historically tried to stop that situation of freedom from arising, especially in colonial societies because they have repeatedly found that people will not submit to work for hire if they can avoid it. People’s apparent reluctance to hire out their labour and skills, if they don’t have to, is important to acknowledge.

Working for bosses, only possibly becomes voluntary where workers can survive without having to work for others. An aim of capitalism, particularly neoliberal capitalism, seems to be to make workers precarious, with as little support and independence as possible, so that they do have to work for bosses. This inability for most people to control their own labour is one of the primary causes of lack of responsibility, lack of self-reliance, lack of care, and what Marx called ‘alienation’.

Suppression of connections across hierarchy

This worker ‘precarity’ is reinforced if there is no other kind of relationship between worker and boss, other than the contractual relationship – no friendships, no obligations of wealth, no protections. That is, there is no mutual obligation on the bosses’ part to support workers in hard times. Conservatives like GK Chesterton were, as a result, often nostalgic for feudalism, where lords did have obligations towards their workers. This, fundamental human obligation to each other, is something which is usually suppressed in capitalism and reduced to contracts. When capitalists talk about mutual obligation, it nearly always means the obligation of the poorer person to the richer person (in return for an income, or even potential income, no matter how small). In Neoliberalism, any ties between non-related, non-elite, people are a potential impediment to the market.

This suppression of human ties and mutuality, is a break up of community responsibility and another cause of lack of responsibility, lack of self-reliance, lack of care, and what Marx called ‘alienation’. Max Weber seems to argue that Protestantism tended to make this breakage of connection much easier, because in extreme Protestantism you had no responsibility to others, and all that counted was your own salvation, which was won by faith not by charity.

Capitalist team-ups

Employers in a town (or country if they are big enough) can team-up to decide wage ranges. As Adam Smith wrote:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the publick, or in some contrivance to raise prices.

There is no reason to assume they will not keep this agreement between themselves unless, perhaps, there is a labour shortage and they get desperate for workers. If there is a labour shortage in an area, workers elsewhere then have to decide whether it is worth losing contact with their friends and support networks, and familiarity with the local system to get a job which may not last more than a week or two, or run the risk that enough workers have also moved and turned up to compete to run wages down again.

Most, perhaps not all but certainly most, employers have more capital than workers, enough to borrow money anyway. That is why they can employ people. So they have more power, and more ability to hold out. So they tend to win in negotiations, unless workers can organise. At the least workers who try and organise to get decent wages or conditions will be blamed, through the capitalist media, for any problems that arise. The bigger the corporation the more power it normally has. Smaller businesses are much more desperate, and find organised labour much harder to deal with.

Fundamental liberty?

All this appears to mean that the fundamental capitalist social relation is between boss and worker. It requires that the worker obeys and submits to the boss in exchange for survival. That is capitalist liberty, and some libertarians argue that people should be free to sign contracts of slavery, presumably if they are desperate enough to work for nothing but food and shelter. Remember, in capitalism, no wage work contract can be exploitative if the winner can say you did not have to sign it. In general, your only choice is between who to submit to, if you manage to change, or get, other work.

Socialists usually require that it be relatively easy to obtain unemployment benefits so people can survive unemployment, and get some power of choice over who they decide to sign up with – a basic provision for liberty. Capitalists usually oppose this, just as they oppose workers organising and striking, to get better wages and conditions, but don’t actively business people organising to suppress wages, or support their own power and influence. In practice, pro-capitalists usually do not object strongly to tax payer subsidies for business, even if not needed, even if the companies were corrupt and stupid, and even if it interferes with the market. This has been demonstrated over and over again; recently from the 2007-8 financial crisis to Covid.

Socialists also try to encourage workers (and everyone else in a low power position) to self organise, to balance out the power differences, but these workers’ organisations always run the risk of selling out to big business if the members are not actively involved and resistant to such sell outs, and media demands for such sell outs. On the other hand, capitalism rarely encourages democracy or self-governance for everyone. It pretends we are like it should be (individuals without ties beyond our families), just as it encourages deep hierarchies and inequalities to avoid the possibility of challenge to wealth and profit.

Connections

Because some employers are much, much, wealthier than workers, they tend to have better political and economic connections, so they have much more influence over regulations and the use of state violence. They buy the regulations which make it easier to protect their property and lifestyles from workers who get fed up with the system. They make it harder for workers to organise. They control the media so they largely control the workforce’s ideas about the world. They make the system of exploitation part of every day life, and enforced by the rules, the law and people’s understanding. It is hard for workers to challenge this ‘everydayness’, with their own experience and interests. There is, nowadays, little in the way of media which is not tied to capitalist forms of organisation, and which can give people non-capitalist ideas – especially not Fox, Breitbart or OANN etc.

Workers and working conditions

Workers are a cost on business, so the general (not everyone but general) business drive is to get as much out of them for as little as possible in expense, to get maximum profit. Hence the urge for cheap dangerous working conditions, hence workplace injuries, insecure work and so on. Capitalists usually try to deskill, or AI, work as much as possible so they can hire anyone for any job, which results in a race to the bottom for wages as well as higher profit. Conservative Adam Smith famously argued that repetitive, cheap labour destroys the moral, intellectual and other ‘human’ capacity of workers – but that, apparently, is a consequence of profit and so cannot be challenged. It may also render workers less capable of figuring out what the contracts they are signing actually mean for their lives, which further benefits employers.

As a result, capitalists generally support cutting back workplace inspections and health regulations as it is a supposedly unnecessary interference in business. Again this is capitalist liberty. Just as it is capitalist liberty for pollution to be dumped on poor areas of town without cost to them – it helps increase profit. Anything which restricts profit is an interference with the market.

Your contract to work in murderous, exhausting conditions, is still fair by capitalist definition, even if you did not know about those conditions in advance. Socialists tend to want more equity in working conditions, and ensure (as best as possible) that people are not incapacitated or poisoned by work.

Hierarchy and the value of labour

This downwards pressure on wages and conditions is not always the case. People higher up the capitalist hierarchy such as high level executives, usually have enough power to be able to transfer some of the savings brought about by cheapening most people’s labour to increase the value of their own labour, and give themselves class luxuries even when these luxuries are a cost on business. Conservative David Hume argued, the value given to labour is a function of the labourer’s power as much as, if not more than, the value of what they contribute.

If such high up people lose a position through company failure or their own incompetence, they are likely to have enough money to hold out for a while, rather than have to rush to the meat packing works for income, and they probably have good elite social networks that they can use to ensure they get another well paid job of roughly the same level. So they are much more immune than the average worker to precarious conditions.

Marxism – to some extent

The Marxist argument is that capitalism is inherently exploitative, as workers have to produce more value than they get paid for, otherwise business could not make a profit. In other words, capitalist business needs to steal some of the fundamental human resource of labour from workers to be viable. This is not because bosses are inherently malicious (even though capitalism may encourage selfish malice and promote sociopaths who feel no obligations to others), but because it is what the system demands from them. They cannot act in any other way. In capitalism, labour is essentially extracted by violence, and the property and capital which results from this theft or extortion is then protected by the State.

Capitalism requires a State. There has never been a form of capitalism which has existed without a State, and it is rare for the wealth elites not to be dominant in that State, making sure the legislation and arrangements help preserve their power from challenge

This Marxist argument, it strikes me, is not entirely fair. The employer risks capital and their own labour and that risk could require some kind of return to make it worthwhile. If the employer does not succeed in making profit then (assuming they were not wealthy to begin with, with the right connections), they risk having to sell their own labour and becoming a worker themselves and being subject to the exploitation that other workers face. With that risk it is no wonder that employers are prone to authoritarianism, to cheating and malice, whatever their intentions otherwise. Hence the permanent presence of class warfare, directed from employers downwards towards people who have to seek employment to survive….

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Information disorder

June 19, 2021

Complexity is one driver for information disorder and confusion. Complex systems, such as social systems (politics, economics, information) or ecological systems, or weather systems, are so complex they are impossible to describe with complete accuracy, so it is hard to test theories about them. They are often impossible to observe in total, and it is hard to interact with them, or the interactions are so continuous that it is hard to tell what actions have what effects. This is pretty standard for human life – we develop unconsciousness along with consciousness – the theories that allow us to understand the world, may also hide it from us. Humans attempt to establish continuity and order, but sometimes change is happening anyway, and the order they try to establish no longer works and the world bights back, in the same kind of way that personal unconsciousness may produce symptoms that demand attention, and may distract us from our real problems.

It is normal to be confused, but still retain some kind of insight. However, in the modern world there is so much information, that it is even harder to navigate towards information that is correct, and the prime driver for the spread of information is rarely accuracy. It is whether:

  • It appeals to people’s emotional bias – it gets you angry with the right people. Confirms how you feel etc.
  • It confirms your identity as ‘whatever’ (White male Christian; Left activist; Australia etc), and confirms that whoever you define as the “other people” are lesser beings in some way. Empirically, it seems that political identity is the number one factor here in the contemporary world.
  • It reinforces your existing world view, or stretches it in an acceptable direction.


On top of that we have the following problems.

  • Information stays around without much in the way of ties to its refutation, so its easy to find discredited information without any awareness of it being discredited.
  • Information can be appealing because it is partially true [For example: Right voters often seem to think they have been abandoned by the elites which is possibly true. Left voters think corporations have too much power and are trying to crush them or kill them, which is also possibly true.]
  • Status tends to be tied up with ‘knowledge’ so higher status people tend not to admit when they are wrong, and they fight to hide their wrongness or attack those who insist they are wrong. Other people try to gain status by not being wrong. [Quick experiment: how often do you like the idea of being wrong in public…. add to that the idea that others who have proved you wrong are dancing in triumph. If that causes you any discomfort, then you have demonstrated the point….]
  • Whole organisations can go down the path of delusion, because of peoples’ fear of what will happen should they deny the organisation’s ‘truth’ – they can be expelled, loose their power, loose their income loose their friends etc. as well as feel the discomfort of being ‘wrong’ in public. They will eventually agree with the falsity, or behave as if they do, and persecute others who do not agree with that falsity.
  • The people at the top of an organisation can be fed whatever it is those beneath them think they want to hear, irrespective of reality, and this then lurches the organisation in a particular direction.
  • People can be instructed to seek for information that does not exist, and punished if they don’t find it, so they do find something…. or they make stuff up to satisfy those higher up. They may come to a point where their whole status and being is tied up in defending this nothing, against challenge, and punishing those who think it is nothing.
  • Much media exists for the simple purpose of maintaining power by spreading interpretations and propaganda that benefit “their side”.
  • This propaganda media is usually marked by opinion masquerading as news, shouting, name-calling, rousing of passions to help guide people’s thinking (generating emotional bias), confirming your virtue for siding with them, convincing you that their elite have the same interests as you, branding the other side as evil, and telling you that the identity you have is under challenge.
  • This set-up stops people from wondering what the “other side” thinks, because the other side is evil, inferior and dangerous to self-image etc.
  • This has the advantage of keeping people’s eyes on this propaganda media, which allows more advertising profit, which also may destroy less biased media which does not raise passions to persuade people of things.
  • The disbelievers are held to believe what they believe because they are biased and evil (and even conspiring against you), and you believe what you believe because you are smart, virtuous, practical etc….
  • Often those who follow propaganda media, officially do not believe it, so if it is shown to be false, they can declare “all media lies” so they can go back to following the lies they believe, and fake their status – they were not taken in, even though nothing shifts.
  • Anyone can be fooled, especially those who think they cannot be fooled. This is the basis of the best cons. People think they are smart enough not to trust a particular politician, but they accept that his policies are what they think he says they are, and that he has implemented them, and has not deceived them.
  • Everyone sees patterns in random events, faces in the sky, landscapes in ink splashes etc. Indeed it is hard not to. These patterns may prove nothing. Q followers have great pattern detection and are encouraged to detect particular patterns and ignore others which might be more relevant, such as the failure of Q predictions. Encouragement of pattern detection is rarely connected with pattern evaluation, and testing. The issue is whether the patterns noted are real or useful, or lead them to fantasy and delusion, and isolation from anyone who doubts the patterns.
  • Because destructive power often tends to depend on false information, there are campaigns to discredit those people who actually have studied particular subjects for a long time to reinforce the idea that disbelievers in the others are virtuous. Even agreement between people who have studied the subject for a long time becomes evidence of conspiracy, not of the likelihood of what they are arguing.
  • Anyone with a youtube channel can claim to have as much of the truth as those who study the subject, provided they say what you want to hear.
  • With conflicting information and too much information, people tend to judge information by the information given by those they trust, who will share political, identity and other propaganda biases. This trust, and identification, forms an information group, that filters out information which does not express group biases. In other words what you accept (or even hear of) tends to become more limited, and that restricts information even more intensely.
  • Because the social dynamics of information encourages to think/feel that information is a matter of status and identity, they tend to think that because they are competent in some fields they are competent in all fields, but they are actually depending on their information group for competence, not their own abilities
  • Eventually everything collapses, because hardly anyone has any relationship to reality, just to their information hallucinations…


Fact checking and education may not help, because these actions are already framed politically and in terms of identity. If you don’t hear the results you want to hear, then it is easy to conclude the fact checkers and educators are biased, evil and part of the conspiracy against you.

Social information processing can be seen as a form of ‘defense mechanism’. Rather than admitting the world is complex and hard to understand, and that it is difficult to find adequate information to allow the definitive solving of complex problems, people defend the hard limits of their egos, by defending against (or denying) these difficulties. We pretend information and understanding is simple, that problems are simple (we only need more of what we have defined as good), and that confusion is generated by evil others (perhaps in a conspiracy), and by stupidity of others. If we shout at the others we are doing something useful. If we suppress something, we are doing so for general benefit. We are good sensible people. We understand everything important. Life is not the meaningless chaos, despair and threat, which it would be if we were wrong. We have found solid ground rather than shifting uncertainty.

This is unreal. Understanding is frequently provisional and difficult, and we are inevitably often wrong. We often look stupid because we believed something which turned out to be false. It is only an ongoing problem if we persist with that falsity. That is reality, and that is what we have to admit and deal with, and its hard.

However, the tendency to see information conspiracies to protect and make sense of what you believe, does not mean there are no information conspiracies at all… 🙂

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The idea the Right is logical, and the Left emotional?

June 6, 2021

Do many people primarily think logically, rather than emotionally?

Readers may remember David Hume’s comment to the effect that reason is the slave of the passions. I suspect he may be right. In other words, we think to justify our feelings, or express our feelings, and that intensifies those feelings and makes the ideas and thinking seem even more real and confirmed.

Furthermore, logic is not a guarantor of truth. If the axioms your logic is based upon are incorrect, then no amount of logic will give you a correct answer or working political policy. Garbage in, Garbage out is a common computer programmer saying, and it seems true.

People probably accept the axioms they make deductions from, because those axioms are emotionally appealing, or help make the world make sense in a way that does not challenge them too much. If so, there is no real distinction between logic and emotion; the logic is being directed by the emotions.

How often do people seriously check whether their axioms are in fact true? Not often as far as I can tell.

As a general principle, I suspect humans cannot often deduce reality logically from axioms; not just because our axioms are probably wrong, but because reality is too complex. You have to discover reality, and that requires more than just logical deduction, it requires exploration, encounter with the world, and testing.

So my guess is that few people are rational and non-emotionally biased. On top of all this, I have not noticed that people of a right wing persuasion are particularly logical and not swayed by their emotions in general.

For example, most rightwing media I have seen or read, involves a lot of shouting, abuse, heavy sarcasm, put-downs, incoherence, contradiction and a dedicated cultivation of anger and hostility towards the opposition. There is much assertion of what appears incorrect common sense or, in other words, what is taken as obviously true often seems improbable to me, and rarely has it been tested adequately to say it is true. There is, more or less, no play to real reason, or exploration. It seems to be primarily about asserting that “We” are good, and that “The Enemy” (those who disagree with us) is evil. The same is true of many rightwing politicians and intellectuals.

I’ve also noticed, that people on the right tend to be very sensitive to left wing abuse of them, and don’t even notice the perennial haze of hostility in their own media. I presume something similar happens on the left, although its not as obvious to me.

As a result I would tend to hypothesize that people notice the emotional bias of those *not* on their side with greater ease than they notice the emotions of those on their own side, perhaps because they share those emotions, and emotional biases.

Another thing that suggests it is hard to think unemotionally or unbiasedly, is the difficulty of doing science.

While science is based on common thinking and exploratory methods, it seems uncommon as a practice. It does not flourish in many cultures for long, away from day to say survival issues.

Science is about checking up your ideas to see if they are correct. Pretty basic, you might think, but this habit appears unusual. Most people seem to search for confirmation of their ideas, not to explore where their ideas do not work.

Science also regularly involves other people checking your ideas to see if they are false, without that much hostility. It involves making predictions and changing ideas if those predictions do not come true. This seems very unusual. Outside of science we seek ways of explaining why our predictions do not work, and why we are still right despite those failures, and more to the point, we then do not test those explanations. If we have a persuasive idea outside of science, it often appears that we keep running with it, even as disasters seem to pile up, rather than exploring if it is correct….

While the ideas that Einstein deduced which led to Relativity theory where logical, it was the fact that they worked in the world, and passed tests, that made them significant, not the fact they were logical.

Nowadays, in politics, if scientists generally agree on something we don’t like, we just assume we know better than they do. Sometimes we might be right, but it is not an assumption that we should have much faith in because it probably comes from emotions, such as fear of “what if the science is right?”

My bet is that if anyone thinks they are arguing entirely from reason on a social issue (in particular), they are probably being swayed by propaganda, emotion and bad thinking.

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Populism and Nationalism

June 5, 2021

What is ‘Populism’?

Populism has nothing to do with popularity. You can have popular movements which are not populist.

Populism differs across the world, but as far as I can see it starts as a movement which pretends to be for the people, but ends up being for the bosses; either established bosses or for an authoritarian party and its leader.

While populist leaders promise the people power and wealth, they act to increase the power and wealth of the established, or themselves, quite ruthlessly. For example, Donald Trump recognised the crisis of the American Wage earner, and gave tax cuts to the wealthy (including himself), cut back services to the wage earners and subsidised large corporations.

In order to distract the people from this sleight of hand, populists conduct culture wars.

  • They pretend minor philosophies are inherently corrupting will lead to social collapse (especially if they identify the believers in these minor philosophies as being opposed to them);
  • They pretend there is some kind of devious and evil infiltration from outside, which is allied with a relatively powerless minority;
  • They pretend social minorities are subversive criminals who are incredibly powerful;
  • They pretend that the nation’s ‘race,’ biology or ‘blood’ is particularly significant, and sets one group of people with the right race against others with the wrong race;
  • The pretend the country is being overrun by immigrants or refugees;
  • They pretend to support tradition, while ripping tradition down – especially any tradition which hinders their power;
  • They pretend to support real Religion against terrible or Satanic enemies, or against heresies and behaviour which will draw down the wrath of God;
  • Real religion is religion which supports them;
  • They misdirect claiming that only they are standing against the forces of oppression while boosting those forces of oppression;
  • They can pretend to be for free markets, because that means that they can support the victors in the existing markets and stop people interfering with the freedom of those bosses who have succeeded;
  • They lie repeatedly because they think that whatever gives them more power is true;
  • Lying allows them to be flexible and always generate a persuasive answer. Falsity is quicker than truth which takes research, and this leaves their opposition stumbling;
  • Because they are wedded to lies, they try to suppress all those who disagree, no matter how little;
  • Obedience and virtue is shown by how much rubbish the follower can swallow;
  • The leader of a populist party is often the face of the party, the point of the party and the party autocrat. The leader is the one who sees the party’s Truth through his (or more rarely her) special insight;
  • Populists purge the party of those who openly disagree with the leader to show the consequences of thinking for yourself or attempting to follow the truth;
  • Populists in power often attempt to purge the media, or suppress hostile coverage as being biased; and
  • Populists never have to listen to anyone else, because those who are not aligned with them are inferior.

Populists apparently need to manufacture enemies out of nothing, so that they can look to be good, and they can use the fury they whip up in their followers – angry people don’t always think well, and are more likely to go along with them.

The secret of populism is that its leaders think that the people are fools, or sheep, who need to be led to the paradise of total obedience and uniformity.

Populists eventually fail, because

  • No one tells the leader, or the upper echelons of the party, the truth because they know what will happen to them;
  • You can only ignore the truth for a relatively short period of time, before it bites back fiercely; especially if there is a real crisis you wish to ignore – such as the ecological crisis.

Nationalism

Nationalism is not about love of one’s home, or homeland – it appears most people feel love for their home, to some extent.

Nationalism has historically been used to produce conformity or a sense of belonging “as long as you are like us”. In the US, nationalism seems to be used to support capitalist exploitation as representing American values and American supremacy. Nationalism is used to obliterate recognition of class difference (as the recognition that classes do not always have the same interests is a usual part of the left orientation) and by obliterating that recognition aims to help the triumph of the capitalist class by reducing opposition to the power of that class. It tries to tell the inside-people they are more important than everyone else in the world, simply because of the place of their birth. People are told they can ignore oppression by their bosses and masters, because they are ‘American’ or ‘French’ or ‘Chinese’ and special – they are part of a crowd. Nationalism often makes one ‘race’ dominant and suppresses all others because, even if they have lived there for hundreds of years, those others are not ‘really’ part of the Nation – they are considered natural victims, primitives, or enemies. Nationalism often leads to war, to demonstrate that the idea of national supremacy is justified, and because of the need of the nation’s leaders to fuse people into one through a hardship they can blame on others.

Nationalism is particularly dangerous when we have to fight global problems such as ecological catastrophe or economic dominance and failure, as it factions the world. You need co-operation between states, as well as state rivalry.

One reason we have probably failed so dismally with respect to climate change, is this sense that States are just rivals, and that they are not going to co-operate but seek their own national benefit alone.

It is probably sensible to recognise that States are rivals who need to work together, more than they need short term victory.

Conclusion

Populism often uses nationalism, because it provides an easily triggered sense of group identity, which can then be set against other identities, and build a sense of us or them, which pushes people to identify with the leader.

Nationalism and populism, often seem to be forces of oppression which, in the modern world attempt, to enforce capitalist domination and destruction.

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