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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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Decline of the West 02: Massive Inequality of Wealth

August 14, 2021

While general living standard matters, relative wealth inequality also matters.

The less wealth a person has relative to other people the more constrained their actions. The more wealth they have relative to other people, the freer they are to act, team up with others, and to shape politics to reinforce their wealth.

The more unequal the wealth distribution, the less chance of ideas which do not support the security of the wealthy getting much spread – especially given the media are corporately owned, or billionaire owned, and supported.

Many wealthy people seem safer in a pandemic than others, because they don’t have to go to work, they can do their work online, or rest, they can keep relatively isolated, they can flee to isolated islands and so on. Poor and middle class people people are forced into the danger to survive, or to keep their homes.

I suspect the wealthy also think they can move away from climate change, and set up their own enclaves in small safe countries such as New Zealand [1], [2], [3] or Tasmania, so there is nothing for them to worry about. If so, this is running away from the problems, and hoping to leave them for other people to suffer, but that is simply a suspicion. It may not be correct.

Solutions to economic problems often seem to benefit the wealth elites more than the benefit those who desperately need help. For instance my government is pursuing small people for extra unnecessary hundreds of dollars they may have got from Covid relief, while letting profitable big business, wealthy private schools or the right churches, retain hundreds of thousands to millions without question.

We learnt repeatedly how much extra wealth the billionaire class gained during the pandemic. [2] This may not be a problem, but how many of those billionaires used an extra billion or so to help protect their workers? Not that many as far as I can tell. They are the elite who set the tone after all. Not surprisingly, less wealthy people, without the monetary resilience, fell into poverty.

The problem here is that most of the English speaking West is a Plutocracy [3]. Ignoring wealth as source of power, which seems the standard approach, seems odd, and any honest economic praxeology would have to note the normality of crony capitalism and the likelihood of the wealthy teaming up to preserve their wealth and power, and to run things in a way that favours them. Fossil Fuel companies can buy Think Tanks, politicians, media presenters and even museums.

Some countries will have more plutocrats and others less. The extreme wealth elites are going to be small. And the smaller and more concentrated they are, then it seems probable that they will be more dominant. After all, wealth buys every other source of power – and the more relative wealth some groups have, the less wealth is around to counteract their propaganda and influence. The much fewer billionaires in India than in the US, does not mean they have less influence.

During the cold war, the West took the option of trying to increase the participation of ordinary people and provide a real saftey net for them, to protect against revolution. This incidentally gave people some extra freedom, as being sacked was less of a problem for survival – people could move out of intolerable working conditions, which helped improve working conditions. Governments did this partially by tax rates which look extraordinary nowadays, driving low unemployment rates, and partially by supporting union participation in government and workplaces. This was also a period of massive social mobility. You can think of the opening of public education to working classes, cheaper non-charity health services, public housing, yearly rising wages and so on.

It certainly made a huge difference to my family.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no longer any need to avoid revolution. Middle incomes declined relative to upper level incomes (and particularly to upper, upper level incomes, and people power seemed to diminish. No one paid any attention to the massive demonstrations against the second Iraq war, or in favour of climate action. Back to the gilded age, and the conditions and alienation which gave birth to Trump.

Plutocracy adds to the hardships of the poor and the lower middle class, because policies and ‘the rules’ are aimed at benefitting the rich, and assume that people have money, and that if they don’t they are inferior and exploitable, or should depend on the generosity of the rich, rather than be self-supporting. Hence things like Robodebt, which penalises those unemployed people who actually tried to support themselves, and the generosity of taxpayers to companies in crisis and harshness to those without money.

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Decline of the West 01: Run from problems

August 14, 2021

Climate change and ecological damage.

People have known, at a public political level about climate since the late 1980s and we basically have done nothing except increase the rate of producing greenhouse gases. Even now with year after year of temperature records, wild weather all over the world, major ice melts, and the UN calling for no new fossil fuel fields, the US, UK and Australian governments (among others) are promoting new coal and gas mines. The Australian government is enmeshed in fantasy.

Ecological damage continues to increase. The day by which we have estimatedly consumed all that the earth produces in a year keeps slipping back towards the start of the year.

Over fishing does not appear to have slowed in general etc etc.

One ongoing issue is the question of whether it is possible for Capitalism and developmentalism not to be destructive of the ecology?

We have to accept that these ideologies have been present during this period of ecological destruction. This may not be complete causation, for example capitalism and developmentalism have developed the way they have, precisely because they were able to freely destroy ecologies and pollute. If pollution and ecological damage had been factored into the system as costs, then they may not have developed the way they have….

However, it does possibly suggest that it is improbable that people will solve problems of pollution and ecological destruction within systems that have flourished by ignoring these problems.

Covid-19

The first year of Covid in the US, was pretty much a disaster. Apart, perhaps, from a roughly two week period in which people were cheering Tucker Carlson for persuading the president it was serious, which now seems to have been forgotten, the year was a mess. We know from the Bob Woodward interviews that the President knew Covid was serious in February 2020, but decided the American people needed to be cheered up and so he pretended the disease would vanish without much problem. Rather than face the problem, he engaged in positive thinking.

The President attacked quarantine and lock downs, he encouraged armed occupation of state buildings. According to some he thought the big cities would suffer worst and that they voted Democrat and so hindered their actions – does not appear to have helped (but part of the problem is the normalized abuse, which makes truth finding difficult). Simple things like using the pandemic plans, telling people the situation was dangerous, or coordinating PPE purchases would have helped. Sure he did help remove obstacles for vaccine production, although the vaccines were first developed overseas. He also seemed to have been caught in political bind about encouraging people to take the vaccine, and got his own shots in private.

Biden came along, and let’s disbelieve ‘sources’ who claim that there was no organisation from the previous administration for vaccine roll out. Despite the vaccines we now seem to face some Republican State admins not only distributing what appears to be misinformation, making it illegal for businesses to protect their customers and staff, and media saying that everyone should get back to work. This is odd as usually Republicans argue that businesses should be free to serve who they want and only who they want, and employ who they want etc.. I guess this is similar to the way it is ok for businesses to chose censor left wing thought and speakers, but terrible if they censor right wing thought and speakers.

The delta variant seems worse than the original form, and is spreading. The vaccines slow infection rather than stop it.

But with America now averaging about 113,000 cases a day, an increase of nearly 24% from the previous week, and hospitalizations up 31% from the week before, Republicans stand accused of causing the deaths of their own voters as the highly contagious Delta variant scythes through red states where vaccination rates are low….

In the past week Florida and Texas, states whose leaders take pride in riling the Biden administration, have accounted for nearly 40% of new hospitalizations across the country

Smith. Republican leaders fiddle while Covid burns through their own supporters. The Guardian 14 August 2021

In the UK, as far as I can see, the government has given up. The disease is rampant in India, Indonesia and South East Asia. People I know who live in those regions tell me that they hear of deaths of people they know almost every day.

Where I live the government is encouraging people from infected areas to go to the regions to buy real estate, and has contradictory rules, that make it hard for people to figure out what they should do, and was so overconfident that they blew their first serious challenge. Indeed it was so overconfident it seems to have had no plans for a problem. We have just heard from the Australian Medical Association that hospitals are not keeping up [2], and we have a long way to go before it gets really bad.

On top of that we seem to be ignoring long covid – well I have not seen any official stats – and pretending Covid is a form of flu rather than a new disease. While I’m ignorant it seems to be worth testing the hyporthesis, that in some cases Covid does long-term, or even permanent, damage to the body which produces long Covid.

In other words, the world as a whole, seemed to want to take the easy option, or even sabotage action, although it is true that some people did not. However, running around panic struck is not facing problems.

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The Decline of the West?

August 14, 2021

This is all a bit amateurish but it might be useful…. and it might get expanded. These strike me as the most obvious dangers for English speaking ‘civilisation’ in the short term.

We run away from major problems, like Covid, Climate Change and ecological destruction. Running away from problems, or pretending they don’t exist is a fundamental mark of decline

Wealth distribution is massively unequal, in most countries. Inequalities of wealth distribution generally mean poor health, and domination of politics by the wealthy, or plutocracy. This generally means that the middle class start sinking, and social mobility declines. The possibility of fresh ideas which do not benefit the wealthy alone, are minimalised. Again the likelihood of solutions to pressing problems diminishes,

Refusing to help the poorer parts of society is also a mark of decline, as it indicates they are not considered to be part of society, and that the rulers of society have given up hope for society as a whole

Falsehood and fantasy seem to be rampant. In many cases it seems hard for people to see the real problems. This arises because the real rulers are opaque and so form a blank space for fantasy and because they engage in distraction techniques, to keep themselves safe from those who rule. The rulers also are probably not getting real information from their underlings, who depend on flattery for their positions. This reinforces the tendency not to face problems.

Encouraging and normalising political abuse prevents people from talking about almost anything, and promotes internal splits, but it keeps enough people onside with the plutocracy. As real discussion does not occur, again problems do not get faced, they tend to be blamed on others.

Infrastructure is falling apart all over the world. The cost of maintaining a working society goes up, and the wealthy do not pay enough taxes to make repairing it possible. This makes it harder to deal with major problems.

Authoritarian states seem to be slowly replacing democracies. This could be a sign of forthcoming war, or forthcoming breakdown. Authoritarian states can respond in a disciplined manner but rarely care about sacrificing people, and may not respond to a collapse that might cost the rulers anything.

The final issue is being able to distinguish different types of problems. Problems often have social components which mean they are not faced and left alone, or are faced in harmful ways. It is useful to remember these social components.

***********

In a rare moment of optimism, I forgot to mention the effects of prolonged or total war. Even ‘cyber’warfare’ or terrorism – local or international. There is no reason to assume that people could not war over political, or religious, ideology, over a shortage of resources, over the inability of the planet to regenerate, over the need to move away from unlivable areas, over the failure of food supplies, for revenge, and so on.

War nearly always takes away a focus on other problems, as immediate survival is primary. This allows other problems to get worse.

I don’t think that such wars are improbable – and if they go nuclear, destroy more infrastructure, or destroy more of the ecology, they could be highly damaging to the ability of societies to survive.

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