Archive for August, 2021

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Why is action on climate change difficult?

August 31, 2021

The problem of climate change can appear unsolvable for a number of reasons:

  1. Contemporary society was built on fossil fuels, which are one of the main source of the greenhouse gases which cause and accelerate the current round of climate change, global heating, or climate turmoil whatever you want to call it.
  2. Contemporary society has also been based on free pollution, and largely free ecological destruction.
  3. Often the free pollution and ecological destruction is performed in places where it is difficult to see; in poor areas, overseas, with hard to perceive substances, etc., so the people consuming it don’t realise. However, it can be quite visible.
  4. All the evidence suggests that we now, need to reduce emissions quickly, to avoid climate change as a severe threat. Reducing quickly adds to the challenge, to the turmoil an disorder produced, and to the resistance.
  5. The fossil fuel, free pollution and ecological destruction system has brought about a technological system which benefits many people all over the world, and hence if we change it (especially if we change it rapidly), those people might lose out on something (whatever that is).
  6. Developing countries want to catch up with developed countries in terms of prosperity, and be militarily secure. The only exemplary path is through using fossil fuels, pollution and eco-destruction. If developing countries use this path, it will send everything over the edge, no matter how fair it is for them to use it.
  7. The developed world is not setting a good example of restraint, why should the developing?
  8. Changing a whole system is really difficult, as the system will resist. Many powerful organisations in society will resist. Technologies are locked-in, and hard to change. Previous investment of money, time and energy in destructive technologies will be ‘wasted’ if we change. Social habits, such as excessive consumption by those who can afford it or world wide travel, support the system.
  9. Powerful organisations benefit from ownership of fossil fuels, and free destruction and they fear change. Change may destroy their power and wealth.
  10. Because these people tend to be hyper-rich, they seem to think that they can survive climate change, and other people are expendable – there are so many of those other people.
  11. Because these people tend to be hyper-rich, they can buy media, they can buy politicians, they can buy think tanks; they can confuse the issue, and console themselves.
  12. Many people think CO2 is harmless, because it is a ‘natural’ product. The problem is that we emit too much of it, for the surviving ecology to process and remove.
  13. People don’t understand non-linear systems, in which small changes can lead to huge changes, and in which events in one place can effect events in another. Complex systems theory, or ‘ecological thinking’, is essential to understanding the world and giving a change of survival.
  14. Many people think it is obvious they know more about climate than people who have worked in it all their lives.
  15. Information society encourages feel-good ignorance, and the judging of information by political alliance.
  16. Action on climate change has been tied into political polarization, and hence it is hard to be on the Right and think about potential solutions without feeling you are betraying the party or your fellows, or that there is no problem to solve. Hence there are few solutions coming from the Right, that appeal to people on the Right, and this lowers the availability of plausible solutions in general.
  17. The media has generally been ‘even handed’ to escapist about climate change. Even now most people do not know how bad it is, or how much the world has been ‘on fire’. Ongoing, depressing news does not sell, and besides most media organisations are part of the corporate sector which appears to benefit from pollution and eco-destruction etc., so they are unlikely to try an undermine the system they grew out of.
  18. It is always easier to run away from problems and pretend everything is ok, or hope that because a system has worked well it will continue to work well.
  19. If we are going to change enough to survive climate change, we have to change the energy system. That is difficult because of established interests. It is also costly, and sets up new problems of energy supply, backup and energy organisation.
  20. Gas does not solve emissions problems. It could be better than coal, but its not better enough: it still has continuing emissions when burnt. Gas mines and gas pipes leak. Unburnt methane (‘natural gas’) is worse for global heating than CO2. Gas is no solution to the current problem or the need to lower emissions quickly.
  21. Nuclear energy could possibly solve the problem, but it seems too expensive. Taxpayers usually end up subsiding insurance, waste disposal and decommissioning. It is also possible reactors may not be quick and easy to build – they often run over cost and over budget. Going with nuclear may prolong fossil fuel emissions while we are waiting for the power stations to be built.
  22. While nuclear accidents seem infrequent, they have the possibility of affecting large areas, and they do. Few people want to live next to a nuclear reactor, so there will be resistance.
  23. Fracking usually makes the climate problem far worse, and runs the risk of poisoning local people. Ask almost anyone who lives in a fracking zone, if they will risk talking to you because of legal issues.
  24. If renewables are primarily installed by a corporate sector which likes free pollution and eco-destruction, then the chances are high that the companies and their renewables will bring these features with them.
  25. If renewables are installed by the kind of businesses that routinely exploit people, override local people, and lower wages and working conditions to increase profit, then they will likely continue to exploit people, override objections and probably not replace the jobs they are destroying.
  26. If renewables are to replace fossil fuels, we have to manufacture them. This could mean either using the energy from fossil fuels, or lowering the energy usage, so we have spare energy for manufacture.
  27. If we are going to survive climate change, we have to change the agricultural system, which has grown up with big farms, artificial fertilisers, economies of scale, free pollution, free eco-destruction and so on. Big agriculture is a source of GHG, deforestation and desertification. Big ag will resist any change, as the current situation seems profitable, even as the land becomes precarious. Change may also disrupt food supplies.
  28. If we are going to prevent climate change then we have to lower deforestation and desertification rates. These both reduce the Earth’s ecological capacity to process CO2 and thus make heating worse. This is hard because there is a continuing demand for both timber and land.
  29. If we are going to stop climate change in the long term, we probably have to shift out of a framework that requires continual economic growth, increasing consumption and increasing extraction. This will be difficult, given the world’s current wealth distribution

The main thing is to do what you can, whatever that is – even small changes can make a difference, as they rocket through the system.

If you can, organise to try and lower pollution and ecological-destruction in your neighbourhood, or by companies who exist in your neighbourhood.

Get on company boards, and try and shift the emphasis.

Lobby your pension fund to avoid destructive and polluting industries. Better still participate in an organised lobby.

Tell your politicians you do not support free pollution (including free greenhouse gas pollution), or free ecological destruction.

If you can afford it, buy real green power, or put solar panels on your roof.

Organise with other people in your community to see if you can arrange a community energy program or share power.

Consume electricity when its cheap.

Consume as little electricity from the grid as possible.

Use as little fossil fuel transport as possible. Covid has shown that many people do not need to travel.

If you can obtain it and afford it, buy as much organic food as you can/need. In many places some organic food is not that much more expensive than non-organic food.

If you can, don’t buy food that has travelled a long way.

Recognise climate change is not a simple problem, and help change as many of the points above as you can….

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Marx, class conflict and society

August 26, 2021

I’m not particularly trying to convince anyone of anything here, just to make Marx’s position relatively clear and simple.

Firstly Marx argues that what people have to do to survive in society is more important for understanding historical processes than ideas are. Popular ideas are frequently just ways of justifying the actions of the dominant classes, and the modes of hierarchy – people tend to do what they have to do.

This is why his theory of history is sometimes called ‘historical materialism’. It is primarily based on what people have to do, and the material basis of that action, rather than on what they think.

Capitalism and wage labour

Capitalism engineers a mode of life, or arises out of a life, in which the majority of people depend on wage labor for survival. In other words, capitalism destroys self-sufficiency amongst the majority of the people it encounters as soon as possible. It may dispossess people from their land, or insist upon taxes so that people have to earn money through labor.

This process means most people have work for somebody else, starve or live a very precarious life as a beggar. In employment, they have to do as they are told – the first rule of capitalism is not liberty, but obey your boss (or ‘master’ as they used to be called in Marx’s time). Workers produce goods and ideas that legally belong to their employer. They have little to no control over what they produce, or what happens to those goods. They generally have little control over the working day, or the times they work. Holidays (or control over the worker’s own time) are relatively rare. So called flexibility, usually means the worker has to be flexible to suit their employer.

This separation from involvement in, and control over, the products of their labor and their labor time Marx, in his earlier works, calls ‘alienation’ and it usually appears to produce dissatisfaction with life.

It is a hallmark of capitalism. For example, crafts people controlled their own time, designed and made their own wares, and sold them to merchants, or other locals etc. Feudal peasants may give part of their crop to the lord, or spend some time working on their lord’s fields but generally what they grow, how they grow it, how they dispose of it, and when they work is up to them and the demands of nature. As long as they fulfil their obligations, their time and produce is their own. So while the labor set up may not be great, it is different from that in capitalism, and small farmers may have even more self-sufficiency.

Another way of phrasing this is that the imperatives of capitalism subtract from human satisfaction in work. Capitalism attempts to fill this hole, through encouraging consumption, which is capitalist materialism in action, and probably will never work for long. However, pressures to keep wages low, mean that consumption runs against limits, or encourages destructive debt.

Transfer of wealth

Capitalist, employers vary from good to terrible, but the dynamic for any employer, to help survive in the capitalist market, is to get as much labor out of the worker as they can for as little cost as possible. They may also automate production, so that they are less dependent on employee skill and crafting ability, so work becomes even more alienated, and workers more interchangeable and more disposable should they make trouble, times are hard, or whatever.

Rather than being recognised as people, the capitalist dynamic tends to make workers into impersonal energy to be used at the Master’s whim. Some employers recognise that this is not the best way to get work out of people, but they are still generally constrained by the necessity to make labor as cheap as possible.

Marx also argues the employer essentially ‘steals’ value from the the employees’ labor. That is the employee has to be paid less than their labor actually contributes to the product or service, or there can be no profit.

While this latter point may ignore the risk to the employer, and the organisational work they contribute, in general capitalism skews the market so more return goes to the owner and controller of labor than goes to the actual makers of goods. The greater this differential, the more capitalists are in charge of politics and society.

As successful businesses get massive benefits in terms of scale of production, discount sales or purchases and so on, they usually drive smaller businesses out of business, and gain even more wealth and power. You can think about what happens when a chain like wal-mart, or another big supermarket, comes to town. Independent businesses often close down, and small employers get to lose their capital and become precarious wage laborers. The same happens as agribusiness moves into a farming area. Small farmers get squeezed out.

In other words capitalism destroys small business, as well as exploits workers.

There is some argument as to whether managers, nowadays, are workers or representatives and controllers of capital. I’d suggest many try to pretend that they are part of the dominant elites, but usually end up finding out they are disposable workers. At the pinnacle, however, even incompetent CEOs get severance packages that would support normal people for a life time. The elites support their own.

Power and class war

On top of this, wealthy capitalists get to own and control the State, because wealth in capitalism buys anything from information and ideologies, to politicians. Therefore the State tends to represent their interests in keeping labor cheap, disposable and bound to employment, than it tends to represent the interests of workers, who have much less money to buy power.

Because the two classes have competing and opposed interests within the system, what we can call class warfare arises, which, in general, the powerful classes win.

Marx thought that eventually the workers would experience unity in their work experience, classify themselves as a group, and co-operate to overthrow the ruling classes, who would be weakened by the inherent tendency of capitalism to destabilise and destroy itself (which might be another blog post).

So far he has been wrong about this.

For a while between the 50s and the 70s driven by the fear of revolution amongst the dominant classes, there was an attempt to declare peace in the class war, by providing easy unemployment benefits, which allowed people to change jobs freely. This freed them from being stuck in jobs that have bad wages and conditions, and encouraged employers to share the wealth. Most countries supplied some kind of free health care, to keep workers free and functional, and they used the Keynesian insight that more money going to the workers will drive the economy. Hence we seemed to have massive growth of prosperity, social mobility and creativity in that period. With the threat of revolution gone, these ‘advances’ have gradually been withdrawn and we seem to be getting back to pure class warfare, and the concentration of employer power.

Historically, since the ascendency of capital, this full on alienation, and disposability, leads to fascism and war. That seems to be coming, but we shall have to see.

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Consensus in Economics

August 22, 2021

The impression given by the media and politicians, is that there is a large degree of consensus on economics, but there isn’t.

There are many different forms of economic theory, and if you ever find a cross section of economists arguing you will see they disagree significantly. They are also notoriously unable to predict crashes or other economic events. Large numbers of mainstream economists claimed that business and finance had solved the problem of crashes just before the last big crash. Few warned against it, or were taken notice of, if they did.

Given there is this level of disagreement and that economics frequently fails to be useful, why are non-economists given the impression that there is unity and truth in that unity?

The Orthodoxy

This is where the politics comes in. Probably, because of the power arrangements common throughout the world, in which wealth elites dominate and structure the economy in ways which they think benefit them, voters have to be persuaded that:

  • We have a free market economy, or things would be even better if we had a really free market in which governments, or people, had no control of the wealthy.
  • We don’t need to regulate, or interfere in business, because The Market, represents the invisible hand of God, and does everything close to perfectly.
  • Free markets work for everyone.
  • Free markets bring liberty.
  • People who rise to the top in a free market have special talents which others do not have, and which benefit all.
  • There is no need for a minimum wage people can live on, because if people deserve to live, and work hard, they will be ok.
  • If you are low paid or unemployed, it’s your own fault, and you just need to work harder, because The Market is good at distributing benefits.
  • We need to protect business, and listen to it, before anyone else, as business is the really important important part of society.
  • Wealthy people and corporations need more in tax cuts because that will lead to more business.
  • Business rarely does anything wrong collectively, and if the economy fails it is because of ‘the government’, even if the government is owned by business.
  • Booms, busts and bubbles are aberrations, or the consequence of avoidable human folly.
  • Crony capitalism is an aberration, easily rectified by less government intervention.
  • Everything is going as well as it possibly could, without imposing dreadful impingements on your liberty.

This persuasion is the main feature of mainstream neo-classical and popular economics. They may not say any of this directly but that is what mainstream economics comes down to.

This is generally what we might call “right wing economics” – or economics which supports existing relations of power and wealth.

Non-mainstream economics

Many other economists might disagree with all of these kinds of propositions, but you won’t hear that much from them, and what you do hear is probably distorted to help support mainstream economics. I’m not an economist, so there is much I am missing out here but some simple examples include the ideas that:

  • Economies cannot continue to grow, in a finite ecology, without running against the limits of the world and permanently damaging themselves and the Earth.
  • There are limits to possible pollution without producing disastrous change and we are hitting them.
  • Capitalism constantly destabilizes itself. Booms, bubbles and crashes are part of its normal workings.
  • Business is pretty obviously wrecking society and the natural world, as part of its normal activity. It brings goods and harms.
  • Capitalism is not just trade, but a form of class warfare.
  • Mainstream economics is a form of politics and about supporting power as much as it is about trade.
  • Capitalism tends to produce monopoly and diminish competition.
  • In capitalism, crony capitalism and plutocracy are the norm, and to be expected.
  • Capitalism always exists with a State, and uses the State to maintain its functioning.
  • Capitalism destroys the ability of most people to be self-supporting outside of waged labour. It rewards obedience to a boss and dependency.
  • When business controls the spread of information, information is geared towards markets (what appears to sell the news to people), propaganda (what appears to preserve the system or increase the power of some favoured players) and commercial hype (what produces more sales of ‘our’ commodities) rather than accuracy. Almost everyone in such a market has little idea about what is going on, and the markets will likely collapse.
  • Strong unions increase the relative power of workers and increases their share of profit.
  • If people live in capitalism they need protection from the cycles of the economy, and unemployment.
  • Distributing money to the poorer classes stimulates the economy, as they spend the money. Distributing money to the wealthy takes energy from the economy.
  • Human beings exist best and with the most freedom in a ‘gift economy’, rather than an ‘accumulation economy’.

These opinions tend to be less visible in the media, or distorted by the media and politicians.

Conclusions

I’m not trying to convince you of the truth of any proposition here. The main point is to know that there is a lot of variation of economic theory, and little consensus about the right thing to do, despite the confidence with which politicians and media people speak in favour of orthodoxy.

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Empathy vs Compassion

August 20, 2021

This is an argument that derives from my reading of Bregman. He proposes a binary distinction between empathy and compassion and argues that empathy is harmful.

I think there is a possibility of getting distracted here by arguments over definitions, so let us propose two ideal types.

  • ‘C’ is when you feel love or care towards the pain of another, are sympathetic, but don’t identify with the other’s suffering
  • ‘E’ is when you take on the pain of another, and feel it in yourself, the sympathy can be overwhelming or painful.

I would suggest that you are not going to do E if you have no C, as why suffer for nothing? Without C you may not respond.

I’d also suggest that you cannot do C, without some E, or you would have no idea what is happening with the other person, and thus not respond either.

This suggests there is what I will call a ‘sympathy continuum’ between E and C, which seems more realistic to me.

The problem with being close to the E end is that the E feeler may suffer uselessly, feel too drained to act, or privilege the person they are Eing towards (say putting them ahead of other people in similar predicaments, and thus ‘punishing’ others), or they may seek people to blame for the E’d person’s condition more than they might seek to help the other person. The problem with the C end, is that the C feeler can just feel good and soothed, and do nothing to help those in pain, because there is no impetus.

One argument I’m generally keen on, and is now modified, is that Ethics are generally based in, or originate from, the E/C continuum. Without feeling for others, concern for others, and understanding of what others are going through, we might not be that motivated beyond contractual, or exchange, ethics. That is “I do the bare minimum to let people know I’m ok”, or “if I do something for you, what’s in it for me?” Much ethics might be like this, but we certainly recognise that much ethics does go beyond this.

What the continuum idea suggests is that while we may start with pure E or C we need to seek an appropriate place in the C-E continuum, depending on what is happening. So we start off with feeling but decide what to do with it, and where to end up, and that is the first step towards action – even if that action is to do nothing.

Ethics as usual becomes a decision, but the first decision is how one reacts to the other person on the sympathy continuum.

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Bregman’s Humankind

August 18, 2021

I have just finished reading Rutger Bregman’s book Humankind. It is quite simply well worth reading – and is eminently readable.

Our standard view of humanity, probably influenced by Christianity, hierarchy, capitalist economic theory and the writings of ‘statesmen’, is that humans are savage. That without the social restraint provided by religion and hierarchy we would erupt in an orgy of uncontrolled sex and violence. However, one of the problems for early anthropology was precisely why peoples without one of the ‘religions of the book’ and without generational hierarchy, a state, police and other enforcers were often (but by no means always), relatively harmonious, with quite strong sexual rules, and not human vs human – especially inside their own groups. Indeed, violence towards others tends to come with established hierarchies, such as hereditary chieftainship and ‘aristocracy’, and not always even then.

In other words the Hobbesian proposition that life without the force of hierarchy was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, was largely wrong – the ‘solitary’ part was completely wrong. Similarly, the classical to neoliberal economic view that we are all brutally selfish and greedy, and that order arises entirely by an act of God, from this stark competitiveness, through his invisible hand, is also not true.

Bregman argues at length that the idea of human unpleasantness is exaggerated, and that humans left alone are primarily co-operative and indeed kind to each other (hence the title). Bregman does not deny humans can be violent and deeply unpleasant, but this is not our default state, although it can be induced.

He shows that most of the evidence for the primary nature of human violence (such as the Milgram experiments, the Stanford Prison experiments, or the ‘broken window theory’) is deeply flawed; it often derives from experimenters pushing people towards violence when it was not being delivered. While this does not demonstrate humans cannot be violent, it shows the importance of context to the production of violence, and sometimes shows that people are over-easily persuaded by evidence for what they are attempting to prove, especially when their belief has deep cultural roots.

Likewise, when there are disasters and people cannot rely on help, most people generally don’t descend into looting, violence, or looking after themselves first; they work together to rebuild and help each other (despite the ‘evidence’ of novels like Lord of the Flies). This is not surprising if you think about it. What one human can do is extremely limited, we have to co-operate with others nearly all our lives; achieving almost anything requires others. We are a friendly beast, easily provoked into empathy and compassion, and this helps us survive.

As well as being a friendly beast, humans have spent most of their existence in relatively small, hunter gatherer groups, and these groups tend to be fiercely egalitarian and co-operative, trying to pull down the establishment of hierarchy and resist the enforced authority of others. This does not mean that they don’t recognise ability, or praise ability, but that praise is within bounds; they use shaming techniques to remind people that they are mutually dependent, should the person with ability think the ability entitles them to more privilege than the group agrees to. Decision making is a long and slow group affair, often requiring unanimity, and groups may relatively peaceably split, forever or for a while, if this cannot be attained.

Bregman shows that most evidence for warfare amongst hunter-gatherers, as opposed to fights, comes from people coming into contact with ‘civilisation,’ being slaughtered, having to defend themselves, or losing territory that sustained them. That includes the Yanomami who are often referred to as an exemplar of human violence. The book that argued they were continually violent was a best seller (probably because of cultural appeal), while the books arguing that that “violence is sporadic,” “never dominates social life for any length of time” and that “one cannot say that Yanomami culture is organized around warfare,” did not. The famous author also distributed steel weapons amongst the tribes people so that well may have changed behaviour, as previously injury rates may have been low. Anyway, the point is not that humans are incapable of high levels of violence, but that it is not primary and usual.

Bregman suggests that the thing that changed humanity was settled agriculture. This allowed surplus. It allowed population increase. It stopped people from wandering away if they needed to. It made land size important. It allowed raiders to take food. It forced inheritance laws to keep land in the control of someone, and thus pushed people away from being self-supporting. It allowed hierarchies to develop. It allowed hierarchical religions to develop, as explicit modes of domination and genocide. Along with all this we get the hierarchical state, to control people, hold them down, mediate all the new disputes that evolved, and to conquer more land to feed their populations and provide enclosed land for those who now need it. States are generally not friendly to hunter-gatherers wandering freely – I guess it sets a bad example. I also suspect the State and ideas of property are intertwined. I’m adding a bit to Bregman here, but his argument seems plausible.

Even with State encouragement, most humans are not good at warfare, without intensive training and bastardisation. We have to overcome our friendliness and our empathy and compassion. At Gettysburg most muskets seem not to have been fired. People seem to have spent a lot of time reloading so as to avoid shooting, and avoid getting in trouble with officers. The same in WWII. We all know the stories of the Christmas truces in WWI, in which soldiers found the opposing soldiers to be like them and surprisingly friendly. This soldier based truce was suppressed by those more distant from the battle. Truce and spontaneous friendliness had to be prevented from ever happening again. Who knows, without the officers’ efforts, the war could have stopped? Soldiers fight, not to kill the enemy, but to support each other.

So why wars? Because hierarchies select for sociopathology. Hierarchies select for people with no shame, for people who find deceit easy, for people who are nasty and brutish. In a large scale society they can hide from the knowledge of others. The idea that humans are generally brutish and need enforced discipline not only seems natural to such people, but can help them maintain their power by justifying harsh treatment of potential rebels.

I’m going to argue that social category theory can be important here. That is, the more that social categories are defined as existing in opposition to other social categories, the easier it is to have co-operation between members of a category and violent relationships between ‘opposing’ categories. If we are prevented from social participation by some other group, which happens almost as soon as we have agricultural States, then we also tend to develop either apathy or anger against others. Anger is easy to work up, because it is anger against the perceived persecution of one’s group. Working with others in one’s category to express or purge the anger leads to violence against those defined as being in the persecutory group.

The challenge for a hierarchical leader is to misdirect people’s anger away from the leader who might benefit by people’s real suppression towards someone else – another social group, another country, another religion etc. We are continually bombarded with propaganda about how all other humans endanger us, and how we have to keep the hierarchy to protect us from those evil others, when it is generally the hierarchy that increases the problems. We can see the Trump issue here – the US Right depends upon the idea that evil outgroups (Democrats, communists, immigrants, black people, professors and so on), are stripping away liberty and livelihood of those who are in-groups, so as to deflect attention away from how the party allows established corporations to continue their hierarchy and pillage of ordinary people. Without that manufactured conflict the party does not have much to offer. The idea that people are violent and selfish, helps justify the ruling groups and their violence against others.

Bregman spends the later chapters of his book explaining that strict policing, intense imprisonment, and so on, make the situation worse. We are teaching people to be violent and to fear others. This goes back to an earlier point, the more people believe that other people are selfish and violent, the more they feel justified in their violence. A warfare society will encourage this belief.

The suggested remedy is to hand power and responsibility back to the local level, to diminish the hierarchies, let people organise themselves and encourage hostile groups to intermix and work together. Bragman does give some examples of this in action. He does not discuss how capitalist economics is inherently hierarchical, depends on a State, and is prone to the destruction of liberty and opposition, but perhaps he wanted to keep a US audience.

The main problem is getting rid of hierarchy, and remove a whole slew of institutions that are based on submission of others, massive inequality, and suppression of friendliness, empathy and compassion. We may also need to get rid of religions that portray God as a tyrant, who harshly punishes people for disobedience or disbelief – that simply justifies tyranny and violence, and promotes emulation of sacred violence.

Removing these obstacles to a peaceful and settled life is difficult, as those who benefit will not go easily, and effective violence against hierarchy will probably lead to more hierarchy to re-impose peace. This has been the perennial problem of revolution.

We also have to deal with the problem that State based organisations, such as corporations, seem hostile to self-governing and egalitarian small groups and it is hard for these small groups to win conflict against a State.

Yet these are all problems worth facing. The first step may be to ask yourself, if the other people you are hostile to, are really as violent as you might think? How do you ‘know’ they are violent? Is that violence being exaggerated for political purposes?

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Decline of the West 07: A typology of problems

August 15, 2021

This leads to a possible typology of problems – there is no need to assume a problem is of only one type. They can be of multiple types.

1) Normal Engineering problems

With apologies to engineers. These are the kinds of problems, where people have a standard method for producing solutions which testably work, and a standard solution set (such as roads, tunnels, bridges, buildings etc). The environment may be complicated, but its not over-complex. It is a matter of solving a series of relatively simple problems. There is little political disagreement which has to be factored in to the solving; although there may be politics about whether the project should go ahead, who is employed to do it and so on, but these arguments do not affect the project. It is just a matter of achieving the aims of the project, and there is large agreement about how that should be done, and that process generally works.

2) Stretched Engineering problems

These are problems in which the solvers may be using new materials, lacking perfect resources, or having to build something slightly outside of normal. The problems may be difficult, and failure is possible, but there is an agreed set of knowledge and procedures to build upon. Surprise, within limits is acceptable, and largely predictable.

After these kinds of problems we hit problems with large disruptive social, or ecological, components.

3) Problems that regularly affect individuals and cannot be solved so far

There are problems which haunt human existence like death. They may affect large numbers of people, but not all at the same time, and the problem is normal and ongoing. Obviously if the death rate rapidly, or noticeably increases that turns this kind of problem into another kind of problem.

4) Problems which primarily afflict the powerless, and the powerful have no incentive to care, or see the problem.

Things like class based hunger, poverty, racial or sexual discrimination, etc. Society is often organised so pollution is dumped on poorer people, and the rich don’t notice it, as they do not travel in those regions, or they can blame those living in those regions for the mess: “how could they live like that?”.

Problems often have a political or economic aspect which makes them worse, and harder to solve.

5) Problems which are generated by the previous solutions to problems, and which appear to have brought what we consider success

Development and capitalism appear to bring about ecological damage at greater rates than ecologies can repair. This is a cause of climate change. Not only success, but wealth and power have been built around these solutions, and this makes it hard to change. It is harder to change the more the elites become smaller, control ideas and prevent new strategies from arising. What will happen if we change is unknown and feared by those elites.

6) Problems for some, which may help others

Freedom from responsibility for pollution, industrial accidents, workplace deaths help increase the profits and success of those who so not see themselves as being at risk of being affected.

On the other hand, trying to solve problems of oppression frequently brings problems for those who previously benefitted, or thought they might benefit from that oppression.

7) Largely preventable problems which are just accepted as part of life

To some extent things like traffic accidents. Gun deaths in the US. Homelessness. Again the cost of fixing them may affect people who cannot be bothered, or who profit from the status quo.

8) Compounding problems

Where one problem makes another worse. For example, it costs money to fix something, and we may not have that money, or it may need to be spent elsewhere. This then allows problems to accumulate, get worse and cost more money. Climate change is such a problem. The longer we leave it, because its too expensive to fix, the worse the damage and decline becomes, and the less spare finance we have to fix it.

9) Wicked Problems.

Problems arising in complex systems, may not appear to be the same problem from different perspectives. There is no definitive knowledge. There may be no easy solution, and it may be hard to recognise when the problem is solved. Solutions may cause other problems. The problems, and solutions, may spill from one field to another. We cannot test the solution before we start using it. Wicked problems are to a degree unique, there is nothing quite like them that we have faced before. There are political struggles which are affected by the most likely solutions.

For example: Climate change is a wicked eco-social problem. We do not understand societies and ecologies very well. They are interconnected. Different people see the problems differently. Stopping fossil fuel burning could cause economic collapse. Continuing fossil fuel burning could cause economic collapse. Ecological collapse makes dealing with climate change more difficult. In general we do not know what side effects our solutions will have before we apply them. Fossil fuel companies don’t want to stop making money from what they know how to do, and have a lot of capital invested in fossil fuel infrastructure which could become valueless, if a solution is found. Politics is geared to support established business, and is generally highly influenced by established business or power centres – there is a high risk in going against that business.

10) Climactic Problems

Problems which have the possibility of destroying any capacity to solve other major problems. These are problems that change everything, and have no precedent in the people involved’s experience. Climate change could be such a problem if it is not solved, so could collapse of the US or British State for people in those countries, a huge meteor strike, the rapid end of oil supplies with no alternatives, etc., but a classic example would be nuclear war. These are problems which need to be prevented from occurring or circumvented, as much as is possible.

11) Ameliorable but non solvable problems

It is possible Covid is now such a problem. That is, it has become a problem which can be made worse or made a little more endurable. It cannot be solved. If states, politicians and big business had not run away from the issue, then it may have been containable, or even solvable, in that sense it was a compounding problem. Given enough time, humans may adapt to live with the disease.

In general

We always need to look for obstacles to problem solving as they are part of the problems we face.

Power and Wealth

Obviously, one of the arguments being presented here is that established patterns of wealth and power can obstruct problem solving, and even depend for their ‘success’ on the problems those patterns generate, not only because those patterns support hierarchies and privilege of various types, but because those patterns have previously (under different circumstances), generated solutions for previous problems.

New strategies for attaining or retaining power can also involve ignoring, dismissing or generating problems.

Arguments over whether the problem is solved.

Whether a problem is solved or swept under the carpet, can be a cause of political fights, as people try to demonstrate they did the best they could, or that they solved the issue and other people disrupted the solution.

Sometimes the fights over the solution, can be more disruptive than the problem.

It is useful to have some kind of agreed benchmark, to say whether the problem is solved. It may be discovered that the benchmark was not adequate, but that is another problem that calls for new agreed benchmarks… However, if agreement cannot be reached, then the problem may become unsolvable, or never be recognised as solved, as it is clearly caught in some kind of social struggle.

STEEPLE

This is simply a mnemonic, a memory prod, to suggest that it is good to get an idea of the contexts of your problem. These contexts will almost certainly involve the following kinds of issues

  • Sociological
  • Technological
  • Ecological
  • Economic
  • Political
  • Legal
  • Ethical

This is just a list. It is supposed to be an aid, not a delimiter of all you might have to look at.

Ambiguity

Complexity implies the world is necessarily ambiguous.

If you look at a situation from one way, you might perceive X, looked at another way you might perceive Y. The different perspectives might not be limited by two – difference can go on to Z to A etc… This is what ‘ambiguity’ means. Politics and ethics exist because of ambiguity.

The different perspectives may conflict and staying with that conflict might give a more real perspective on the situations.

Accepting ambiguity, allows you to be open to more of reality and be less likely to be taken by surprise.

For example: you can see that tackling climate change quickly may lead to economic disadvantage, it may lead to collapse. If you don’t deal with it quickly, it may also lead to collapse. In each case the collapse may affect different people. If you try to replace all fossil fuel energy with renewable energy, where do you get the energy to build the renewables from? If you keep burning fossil fuels what levels of disaster are you heading for? What else needs to change to end ecological destruction?

This recognition of ambiguity and conflicting priorities can be overwhelming, but its real. And it allows a recognition that if we are to live with or halt climate change, we might have to change a great deal more than we want to at this moment.

It also lets us know the path is not going to be smooth, or unresisted. In some ways it is as rational to resist traumatic change, as it is to negotiate it. We don’t know what will happen.

Ambiguity is a problem, but it is a real problem, and it does not help to suppress it and try to make the world process unrealistically simple.

Some problems are urgent but even so

It is usually beneficial to take some time to find out information, although you may not be able to find all the information.

It is often beneficial to pause.

It is often beneficial to observe your dreams and spontaneous images.

It is often beneficial to listen to the world.

It is often beneficial to try things out while being prepared to abandon them if they don’t work.

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Decline of the West 06: Rise of Authoritarianism

August 15, 2021

The trend towards authoritarianism, or increasing authoritarianism throughout the world, seems to be noticed by quite a lot of people. Of course it may be exaggerated, but nevertheless marked countries include:

Hungary, Brazil, Russia, China (especially Hong Kong), Venezuela, Cambodia, The Philippines, Myanmar, Turkey, Syria, India etc. I’m sure any reader can find more.

Democracy under Siege

What’s Driving the Rise of Authoritarianism and Populism in Europe and Beyond?

Authoritarian Regimes Seek To Take Advantage of the Coronavirus Pandemic – Center for American Progress

The real reason authoritarian populism is on the rise: it’s simple

The rise and rise of Australian authoritarianism

Whether we think the US is headed that way, or not, is obviously a matter for dispute. I hope I am wrong but many features of authoritarian, neo-fascist rhetoric seem to be becoming more popular in the US, including undermining electoral processes and complete contempt for disagreement.

This is a list of why people might think the Right in the US has fascistic tendencies:

  • Denial of reality in favor of ideology. Climate change, Covid, economics, history…. The hallmark of authoritarian parties is to attack knowledge, and enthusiastically accept the party’s declarations of what is true. Nothing is to get in the way of the party and its power.
  • Destruction of polite discourse
  • Attack and slur those who disagree with Republican Machine. This is joined with continuously shouting, rude, name calling media, which attempts to work up anger and contempt to get people unable to think rationally, and which attempts to scare people off other people, so they don’t get other perspectives and they keep the shouty media prosperous.
  • Support for Moral dogmatism – unless the party breaks the morals, in which case it is ok (massive double standards). The party is always morally correct, and those opposed to the party are evil.
  • Insist that religion is part of the State, and largely support autocratic and dogmatic religion that essentially worships neoliberalism or submission to Mammon, if you are more biblically oriented. In return, this religion gives Republicans the claim they are always doing God’s work and that opponents are devils, and thus treatable with contempt and hostility.
  • People are to be taught that not having the official sexual orientation approved by Republicans will not only lead to social disapproval but hellfire. The Republicans are watching to make sure you meet their conditions of sex virtue.
  • The Republican machines’ idea seems to be not to have discussion, or investigate truth but to manufacture enemies and obliterate them. This has been their policy for years. This is now unnoticeable by most Republicans; its become normal Sadly after years of being abused, the mainstream left has now joined in, although they still appear to largely try and present evidence rather than commonsense slurs.
  • Manufacture of immoral enemies.
  • Republican cultivation of largely powerless enemies, who they can damn. Black people, feminists, professors etc… They ignore the largely powerful social groups such as the wealth elites, which they support. If Republicans attack wealth elites then they attack those who are outsiders, self-made, and who might indicate capitalism needs some fixing up (like Soros).
  • Pretend that any opposition to them is ungodly, communist, socialist whatever, something that is widely disliked even though people are not familiar with it. When it should be clear all opposition is not like this; it can be pro-liberty, pro-responsibility, pro-capitalist, Christian and so on – like mainstream Democrats.
  • Attempt to cancel any known person who protests against their ideology, like trying to drive people who ‘take the knee’ out of a job. Threaten scientists and academics when they don’t praise Republican ideology.
  • Purge the party of those who oppose the leader. Threaten people in the party who claim the elections where not fraudulent.
  • The Republican ideal seems to be to generate irreconcilable polarity, with them on top as the good. There are no shades of grey, and nothing to be learnt from the others.
  • Find minority scapegoats
  • No matter what happens the Republican Machine is never wrong and failure always comes about because of others. Preferably relatively powerless others. Republicans rarely take responsibility for mistakes.
  • Deny that racism, or sexism, is a problem at all, unless it is black racism towards whites, or women being hostile to men. Those positions are apparently common, terrible and unfair. In other words blame the relatively powerless for their problems or for drawing attention to their problems, and proclaim the dominant are superior.
  • Appear to approve of minorities getting shot. Cheer police who murder people. Show no sympathy towards the manufactured enemies, because obliterating enemies is the way to go.
  • Support police violence against peaceful demonstrators and violent demonstrators unless the demonstrators are pro-Reublican in which case… the police become left-wing activists or something, who need to be tossed aside and abused. Something similar happens to James Comey.
  • Argue that if you purge the country of ‘illegals’ then everything will be ok.
  • Support for real and dominant elites
  • Support the wealth elites through regulation, through tax cuts, through making sure tax payer’s wealth gets transferred upwards. Make life precarious for people in general, and use the anger at that precarity to impose more neoliberal reforms that shaft people even more.
  • Sacrifice people to the economy and the prosperity of the wealth elites.
  • Regulate the economy so it is easier for the wealth elites to harm and hurt ordinary people, and make even more money to protect themselves from ordinary people. For example, free up pollution.
  • Support profit seeking as a primary virtue, so the wealth elites appear to become elites through wonderful virtues and abilities (unless of course they publicly wonder about neoliberalism, in which case they can be denounced until they learn to shut up).
  • Pretend vastly unequal shares of wealth do not produce vast inequalities of power or worth, or shape policies.
  • Support any Authority with the right ideology (Orban, Bolsonaro, Putin).
  • Support for a fraudulent and lying leader and suppression of democratic process.
  • Support a leader who has a long record of lying and convictable fraud. And insist that he is well intentioned and telling the truth, and that people who don’t agree are mentally sick enemies.
  • Refuse to allow evidence to be presented for impeachment cases and refuse calls for the Leader to testify – twice.
  • Label any attempt to investigate the Leader’s behavior a witch hunt, despite having carried out far more strenuous investigations against supposed Republican enemies over years and years.
  • Ignore evidence of the leader’s repeated attempts to obstruct justice, as the leader can do no wrong.
  • Try and steal elections, largely by lying and threat. The main evidence apparently being what the leader with a history of lying and fraud tells you, even after he has failed in 60+ lawsuits to demonstrate a sliver of relevant evidence.
  • Support the leader even when, in private, he has tried to persuade governors to find votes for him, and has requested the DOJ to proclaim the election a fraud and leave the rest to him – again with no evidence.
  • Support a leader who appears to use a 4th July speech to denounce his perceived internal enemies.
  • Support a leader when you know he has tried to use Russian forces to discredit his opposition – the Trump tower meeting should be enough, and would be enough if it involved the other side – but again the Republican leader can do no wrong.
  • Support rioters who try to overturn and election result.
  • Try and pretend Capitol Hill rioters were opposition figures under a false flag, or that the riot was completely peaceful and friendly. Yes both can apparently be true.
  • Refuse to support an impartial multi-party inquiry into the riots, who organised the riots, who helped the rioters from the inside, why there was not an adequate police or National Guard presence given plenty of warning, or try and make the Capitol safer.
  • Support the curtailment of the right to vote in ways that look like it primarily affects the other party.
  • Support Texas Republicans who ask other states to ignore the vote and return pro-great leader people to the Electoral College, to vote for him.
  • Support a leader who has encouraged violence in his speeches’, beating up the opposition at his rallies and so on.
  • Support armed militias occupying public political spaces. t
  • Openly support groups who claim to be neo-nazi and bask in the support of those groups.

If the USA goes fascist then many others will follow.

The problem here is that authoritarian regimes, tend to suppress evidence of problems and failure rather than publicly admit to it, or publicly deal with the problems. People under the Regime soon learn that problems are to be ignored, or blamed on the Regime’s enemies. As a result leaders of the Regime may have little idea what is going on. This may be fine under stable conditions, but the problem is that current authoritarian regimes will not face stable conditions.

Authoritarian regimes also tend to be corrupt in that they tend to take money for approvals of actions or interest in problems. It becomes expected that any business requires finance. However they may also have the second order of corruption in that they do not stay bought. This makes any business, or policy, precarious. This is not restrained to authoritarian regimes as plutocratic regimes may behave similarly, but plutocrats may react to second orders of corruption quite punitively.

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Decline of the West 05: Failing infrastructure

August 15, 2021

Infrastructure is the name given to the material structures which underlie social functioning, in particular economic functioning. Things like roads, bridges, tunnels, ports, waterways, sewerage systems, phone lines, communication systems, electricity supplies and supply lines. I’d also include social organisations like police, firefighters, health, disaster recovery, social welfare provisions, and defense forces.

Infrastructure does not have to be entirely beneficial for everyone. For example, roads can dispossess people, or split communities.

There are a number of useful articles on the problems of: see The State of U.S. Infrastructure

and the main document it refers to:

ASCE’s 2021 American Infrastructure Report Card | GPA: C-

Also see: The Global Infrastructure Outlook

These document how infrastructure is both failing and not being repaired.

The question is not really how much it would cost to repair failing infrastructure, because that can be relatively little, but whether this repair is likely to happen before it gets completely out of hand.

As the people in the US point out, repair has not been happening until after the damage occurs, for a long while. Consequently, quality of infrastructure will probably keep on declining.

If extra stresses occur such as devastating storms, then the repairs are likely to be put on hold to repair more immediate problems, and even those repairs may become overwhelming. Some say repairs from Hurricane Katrina were sill ongoing 14 years later. Damage has not been repaired and the traces of the storm remain. Some even suggest that the main construction and organisational reasons for the damage have not changed. So the next big storm will not leave the place in good shape.

Repair is not a glamorous occupation in capitalism. It is a cost, an inhibitor of profit, so tends to be delayed. Furthermore people get used to the idea that they should replace things rather than repair them, because that is how contemporary markets work.

As infrastructure is a public good, it probably requires public funding, and if the wealth elites resist taxation, and have the power to prevent taxation, then ongoing decline is probably inevitable.

A failing infrastructure limits what a society can do to face further society wide challenges when they arrive – and arrive they will.

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Decline of the West 04: Normalising anger and abuse

August 15, 2021

Important people in the media both encourage and normalise abuse by repeatedly engaging in it and demonstrating that is how argument should work. ‘Owning people’, trying to gain ‘tears’ seems to be what it is about. This is again much more common than it used to be 60 or so years ago. While I have no evidence, I would date the surge of abuse from the success of Rush Limbaugh, and the attempt to build a support base that did not realise what neoliberal policies meant for ordinary people.

Normalised abuse, attempts to dehumanise others, making it possible to ignore them, or treat them badly, helps build an “information group” or in-group, which is impervious to the other side.

While this is an entirely subjective argument., when I watch, or read transcripts from Fox, it appears that most of their time is spent in abuse, and this behaviour normalises abuse and probably provokes abuse, promoting further lack of discussion. The main aim of rightwing news seems to be to make people angry. This is useful because

  • People are angry. They have been left behind. They do have problems dumped on them. The world feels like it is declining. It feels better to be angry than to be despairing, depressed or apathetic. It is energising.
  • A manipulator wants people not to be angry with them, or angry with the real cause of problems (especially if the dominant elites are the cause of their problems), so needs to deflect anger elsewhere and get people angry with the manipulator’s enemies.
  • Being angry means a person is easier to manipulate.
  • Angry people are not thinking calmly or in complex ways.
  • Angry people connect things which are largely unconnected because of the similar anger feeling tone between topics
  • Angry people are less likely to wonder whether articles actually do make the connections the articles are claiming. Or they may misread articles so that they appear to say the opposite of what they are really saying
  • It is easier to cultivate anger against an outgroup than it is to come up with solutions. For example it is easier to say people are stupid or biased, than it is to listen to them describe their problems.
  • Angry people will generally not listen to people who are identified as enemies, hence they will not pick up different ideas, and they will try to intimidate those identified as enemies, which is more likely to create enemies. Anger tends to mean people interpret others in ways that make them more angry. Anger is a self- reinforcing loop.
  • Anger can be addictive, so people become more likely to listen to those who manipulate them into being angry.

One recent example of this, apart from encouraging the idea that Republicans could not have lost the election, is that after the BLM protests, we can see an apparently coordinated attempt by Republican media to make it impossible to discuss race relations in the USA in a way which might offend anyone who thinks the real problem is black racism. The discussion also completely dismisses anyone who might think there is a problem as a supporter of terrorism, violence and crime.

Racial problems in the US and elsewhere in the English speaking world, will not be solved, because it is more convenient, for some, to have Republicans suspicious of, or hostile towards, black people who protest, than it is to admit there are problems. Likewise it is easier to accuse disgruntled workers of being rednecks, than it is to listen to them and help solve their problems.

The aim and effect of normalised abuse is simple: Divide and conquer.

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Decline of the West 03: Falsehood and fantasy

August 14, 2021

I have written many blog posts on how the structure of the ‘information society’ leads to massive distribution of disinformation and misinformation.

While I agree that falsehood and fantasy have always been rampant, see Charles MacKay Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds for example, some of the things discussed in Mackay’s book are perfectly normal and understandable.

Tulip Mania and the South Sea bubble, are standard financial bubbles. The prices of goods and stock did rise, and with skill and luck a person could have made a fortune if they got out at the right time. That people appeared to be becoming rich, was not a fantasy. That the economic fundamentals were bad is not an obvious reason for not participating. When Amazon launched onto the stockmarket, its economic fundamentals were terrible, but anyone who bought shares then might be worth a fortune now. It seems odd to blame people for normal market behaviour.

Likewise, if you have ever fiddled with chemistry you will know that chemical combinations can have surprising and transformative results even when the textbooks can tell you what to expect because of 100s of years of experience. Weird things happen quite naturally. If you have impure substances then weird things will happen even more, or nothing might happen. Alchemy had a coherent and logical set of theories. For the alchemist there was no necessary boundary, or distinction, between psycho-spiritual experience and action in matter. Spirit was as much part of the world as matter. That some people believed in it is not surprising. That some people lost their health and livelihood is also not surprising. How many crowds were obsessed with it is debatable – probably few.

Magnetisers were possibly demonstrating hypnosis or the placebo effect, in an era without even vacuous words like ‘placebo’ to explain mysterious healing away. Again not a big deal, I’m doubtful it affected political rule that much.

Fantasies have always had the potential to seize politics, that is true. But in my long years of watching politics, I have never seen a situation in which a US party is pretending it had an election stolen from it, without any reasonable evidence. I take the lack of reasonable evidence to be demonstrated by the recounts, and by the courts refusing the evidence and legal arguments over 60 times, and the apparent refusal of many of Trump’s lawyers to even allege fraud.

Sadly this denial of loss has not been just a momentary aberration, it appears to be one that is strengthening, despite the growing lack of evidence. And it has consequences: if a side keeps telling people the election was stolen, then it jacks up hostility towards those who accept the election and justifies desperate, and possibly illegal, measures to combat the ‘fraud’ – nothing is out of play. Purging the party of dissent is not a good sign for liberty

We should also note that Republicans did not, as far as I know, allow the presentation of evidence at either of Trump’s impeachments. This could indicate they have little intention of being evidence based.

For instance can see an apparently coordinated attempt by Republican media to make it impossible to discuss race relations in the USA in a way which might offend anyone who thinks the real problem is black racism. Again they demonstrate that Black lives do not matter, and that real problems can be avoided rather than faced.

And big tech/media censorship used to be approved and even gloated over by the Right when it did not affect them, but now it affects them they are trying to make it a left wing thing, even if facebook and twitter helped Trump to win the 2016 election by delivering continual streams of positive misinformation to people interested in Trump.

This is by no means an attempt to defend the Left. The mainstream left is almost as frightened of and addicted to plutocracy and problem avoidance as the mainstream right.

The great thing about fantasy is that fantasy avoids problems. It allows us to think that by not discussing problems they go away. We can feel we have solved the climate crisis by proposing fantasy technology, and doing nothing to bring that technology about, as the fantasy serves its purpose by providing an imaginary solution.

And we can just abuse anyone who disagrees because they are contemptable, and not one of us.

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