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‘Development?’

July 21, 2021

I wonder if we can still use the word ‘development’?

This is because ‘development’ has been a word that has excused much abuse of the world, and much harm.

While ‘development’ clearly has had many good consequences, such as better medical attention, longer average life spans and so on, it has also been the term for the change in a ‘nations’ orientation from working with the ecology and people, to unrestrained use of coal, massive hydropower, industrial farming, mining, over-fishing, deforestation, militarisation and so on. It has not been an unmitigated good.

Development formed a track which nations were almost forced to take into significant levels of destruction to gain their place in the modern world, and avoid more colonialist imperialism from others. It is a form of ordering which produces a disorder which is often easy to ignore or dismiss, because of the good being attempted.

One of the moral dilemmas of the last 20-30 years has focused on the argument as to whether India and China, were excused in the massive and dangerous amounts of emissions they released, and ecological destruction they engendered because they were ‘developing’. Objection by the developed world could easily be seen as imperialist and interfering, and as aiming to try and prevent them gaining power and influence and helping their people out of poverty.

Similar events have happened in South America, where forests have been stripped to boost development, and this too has affected the world. The Amazon forest is so devastated, that it may now be releasing more CO2 than it stores.

Development has led to massive pollution in countries and dispossession of people who lived well with forests.

Indeed, development seems to seek sacrifice. Who is it that that gets removed, or suffers so the nation may develop and become powerful? Are people who resist the changes to their landscape reduced to being mere ‘backward’ ‘obstacles’, who can be treated with patronisation, contempt or brutality? Is development a site of ‘class war’? Or even of ‘race war’ when, as in Australia, the Aboriginal people are continually dispossessed for development (even sometimes for development elsewhere in the world – a frequent argument seems to be that our fossil fuels are being sold to charitably help development and end poverty).

Likewise some development of Renewable Energy can also operate in the same way as development through coal, although perhaps less destructively in the long term. This should be born in mind to avoid ill-consequences.

Development has grown to include destruction, when it should involve consultation and political involvement of those who are being developed, and change of path when (or before) the destruction begins to have an effect.

But if development was to be abandoned as a term for attempts at improvement, what should replace it, that does not have these conventions around it?

Tags:development, disorder, politics
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Climate change in the Marshall Islands

July 20, 2021

Recently a colleague suggested I read Peter Rudiak-Gould’s article published in 2014. “Climate Change and Accusation: Global Warming and Local Blame in a Small Island State”. Current Anthropology 55(4): 365-386.

This is a wonderful article. It might be out of date now but it suggests how we can learn from the inhabitants of the Marshall Islands in terms of their response to Climate Change. There is far more to the article than I am going to cover, so read it yourselves if you can…

Rudiak-Gould begins by pointing out there are two traditions of climate change blame in the West:

Some are more at fault than others, usually the industrialised or industrialising world
Everyone is to blame. Humanity is self-destructive. With the implication there is not much we can do alone.

The Marshall Islanders are clearly not to blame for Climate Change. They contributed 0.0002% of world CO2 emissions in 2008. Yet it is (was?) common for the Islanders to clearly take on the blame. People rarely mention the culpability of other nations for their severe climate problems, and insist they have to do something about their own problems before facing the world. One person, for example, says

“How can we ask the bigger nations for help, when we are [also] a contributor to climate change?”
p.368

While they agree they make a contribution to climate change, they don’t think they have much ability to affect climate change in total. Rudiak-Gould writes:

“It is never suggested that Marshall Islanders can stop climate change, only that they contribute to it…”
p.371

They don’t have delusions of grandeur, and the idea is not a defense, against action.

Rudiak-Gould explains this situation, by seeing it as related to a wide spread realisation of a decay in traditional life, which they see as the fault of the Islanders themselves: “We follow American culture;” “we have too many things from outsiders… We don’t grow our food anymore.”

RG writes, that for the Islanders Climate change is “the final proof of modernity’s folly, [and] a powerful inspiration to revitalize older ways.” By saying they are responsible, they reassert cultural continuity and distinctiveness, and a course of action.

They are using recognition of their responsibility for climate change to help themselves, not just trying to solve the problem.

Taking responsibility is not an “empty performance.” Islanders try to reduce dependency on foreign oil through solar; restart traditional shoreline management practices; stop throwing plastic onto the beaches and into the sea, and aim to take control over their society’s cultural future.

Taking responsibility says they have a right to speak to each other and to the world. It champions local citizen action, and challenges the dominance of the state, high tech and elite high science, all of which assume people know little and cannot act by themselves.

Taking responsibility also undermines assumptions that a nation cannot act, through ‘people power’. It shows even a small nation can act for itself, and by itself, without any constricting fear that action will ruin the economy or destroy a people’s way of life – it even assumes that a way of real and desirable social life can be revitalised and improved by climate action.

Finally, it challenges common ideas in the rest of the world that pacific islanders are the victims of others. They assert they can help the world and themselves, even if they cannot solve the problem completely, and their action sets an example others might follow.

Taking responsibility and acting the best we can casts doubt on the supposed necessity for a top down solution driven by State or business occurring first. It asserts climate change can be affected by people taking on their own responsibility in a practical way. We do not have to wait for the State or for business to get on board and act.

In a relatively large State, like the ones most of the people reading this will live, this local responsibility and action is possibly the only way that the State will get the message that the people care enough for it to take on the forces that oppose action.

The Marshall Islanders set forth an agenda we can all learn from.

Tags:activism, climate change, politics, social action, Social change
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There is no such thing as climate denial????

July 18, 2021

There seems to be a number of people making the rather silly argument that there is no such thing as climate denial any more [not that the article referenced actually does that]. Presumably people do this to imply that as long as a person says “climate change is occurring” then no matter what else they say, or agitate for, they are supposedly not denying reality – they can be trusted.

‘Accepting climate change’ without accepting the causes or consequences of climate change, seems to be a strategic assertion to do nothing, or do little to challenge the current circumstances causing climate change (Greenhouse gas emissions). This may be accidental, or it may be because people can lie strategically…. This is life. So how do we tell if people are doing something we might call climate denial?

First off

What does acceptance of climate change involve?

Acceptance that the agreement of the vast majority of climate scientists about the evidence for climate change is our best guide to climate reality. This scientific agreement, on the whole, asserts:
a) Climate change is happening
b) Climate change is harmful and serious and getting increasingly serious
c) While there are many possible causes, the main cause is the growth in greenhouse gases (GHG) from: the burning of fossil fuels; concrete use and manufacture; and agriculture
d) The most important of these causes is the burning of fossil fuels
e) We cannot predict the exact course of climate change, because it forms a set of interlinked complex systems. For example, some places such as the UK, may get colder if the gulf stream changes its pattern. However we can make the general prediction climate change, as it is progressing, will be intensely disruptive.

Scientists can be wrong of course, but they usually squabble over areas of doubt. If there is doubt, then there is not that much agreement. On the other had people who deny what is agreed at present, can be wrong as well as opposed to leading the new science.

What acceptance of climate change leads to is the realisation that climate change forms a major threat to the continuance of current forms of social organisation, through many different pathways

collapse of food supplies
problems with water supplies
increased death from heat
wild weather
increased droughts
increasingly destructive floods
rise of sea levels and loss of habitability of islands and low lying coastal areas
intense storms, cyclones and hurricanes.
etc…

These events will pressure economies, supply chains, security of living and so on. The cumulative effects will be very hard to deal with. Again the exact form of collapse in different places is very hard to predict, because of the complex system problem

However, we can predict pretty solidly, that the effects will not be good for humans.

This is the basic level. Then there is the level of action. Are people attempting to act on this knowledge? Are they attempting to reduce GHG emissions, encouraging GHG reductions to the best of their ability, or to render GHG less necessary? If not, then they are effectively denying what they are supposed to be recognising.

This border between recognition and action, means that climate change denial is a much more sprawling beast.

Climate change denial involves some of the following:

Assertions that the ‘consensus’ of climate scientists is unreal (as there is supposedly lots of dissent about climate change), or the result of widespread fraud.
Lots of reference to non-climate change scientists, or non-scientists, who disagree with the ‘consensus’
Assertions that science should not be about agreement, when the absence of large scale dissent in the field, implies there is no recognised cause for disagreement over the presence and source of climate change
Assertions that climate scientists are conspiring to impose a dictatorial left wing government on the world [attempts to make climate change political rather than an agreement as to evidence]
Assertions that climate change is not happening
Assertions that climate change has nothing to do with human actions: “There’s been billions of years of climate change,” without explaining why if climate change is natural, humans cannot be a factor in causing it, and we should not do anything any differently
Assertions climate change is happening, and there is an anthropogenic component, but there is no point lessening the effect of that component.
Assertions that climate change is happening slowly and is nothing to worry about, or that we will easily adapt
Assertions that climate change will be beneficial – it will increase plant growth, or stop deaths from cold etc. [While Climate change may appear beneficial in some places, it will not be in general, because of the systemic disruption, and the imbalances generated]
Assertions that extreme, highly unusual, or unprecedented weather events are absolutely normal and happen every so many years
Assertions that tiny increases in CO2 levels cannot significantly change the climate
Assertions that we can continue to burn fossil fuels with no ill effects
Assertions that we can increase the burning of fossil fuels with no ill effects
Assertions that burning fossil fuels ‘we’ have sold somewhere else in the world, is irrelevant to our situation
Attempts to enforce, or encourage, the emission of greenhouse gas emissions
Attempts to argue that reduction of ’emissions intensity’ is wonderful even if GHG emissions increase
Attempts to avoid targets for GHG emission reduction
Assertions that action against climate change will harm the economy and should be performed in such a way that it does not affect the economy at all
Assertions that everyone else should act before we act to prevent climate change
Some people may claim they are doing something to hinder climate change, but their actions reveal that they are not, or their actions increase GHG emissions. Yes people lie.
Attempts to silence or threaten climate scientists, or prevent public servants from mentioning climate change
Attempts to remove climate data from public websites

Resolution

Acceptance of climate change, means acceptance of climate action

At a minimum, that means:

Steady reduction of fossil fuel use.
Stopping new fossil fuel use and new fossil fuel mines, unless it can be shown that newness reduces the total amount of GHG emissions in practice
Steady reduction of all other sources of greenhouse gas emissions
Regeneration of ecologies
Encouraging change in lifestyles that need fossil fuels

There are many other solutions which may need to come into play, but these are basic factors in moving towards a solution, and which come from the scientific agreement about what is happening.

Supposed acceptance of climate change but rejection of climate action, trying to hide the lack of climate action, or trying to maintain or increase fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions means that a person does not accept the reality of climate change and its causes. They are essentially in denial, whatever they might want to call it.

In this sense, whatever they say, the Australian Coalition Federal government is engaging in climate denial. It does not act to reduce GHG, and it encourages more emissions by supporting more coal and gas power and exports. It pretends extreme weather events or bushfires [1], [2] are normal, and denies the Great Barrier Reef or the inland river systems [1], [2], [3] are in unprecedented trouble. The Canadian government is similar.

Tags:climate change, politics
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Disorder again – or against eternal order

July 14, 2021

This is just a reply to a comment on the previous blog post, lifted up into the main blog. This answer is slightly longer, with some deletes…

It does seem correct that people like Plato and most Christians theologians, saw the world as messy, but they denied that this was real reality. They possibly even fled from the idea it was real reality. Real reality, they appear to have asserted, had to be extremely ordered and unchanging. That is one reason, I suspect that they became idealists. There was little evidence of this ultimate order in the material world so they had to find it in the intuited real spiritual world; in God and/or the Archetypes.

This meant that everyday life, material life, real life was a fraud or at best a fall from reality, or a shadowy image of reality (the cave argument). The disorderly world is nothing (non-existent) when compared to the totally orderly ‘real’ reality they imagined. Our disorderly or contingent life was to be despised, other than as a preparation for reality. The lives of those who did not prepare for the eternal order were of no consequence. Change was threatening; change meant failure, imperfection and unreality, and was to be denied as being real. God was perfection and perfection could not change – in their eyes. Neo-Platonism, Gnosticism, self mortification and ecological destruction, all seem to be consequences of this position.

This may stem from what Plato implies was Socrates’ method.

Socrates would ask for a definition of something, say ‘justice’, and demonstrate that another person’s definition was incoherent, and then say that, because of this disorder of incoherence, that person, however functional they were as a citizen, knew nothing at all. The implication of Socrates procedure is that justice has to be the same in every situation, or at worst, share similarities with every other incidence of justice, or it was misunderstood and unreal. The Sophists disagreed with this approach, which is why they are Plato’s villains. To the sophists, virtue and justice seem to have been situational and variable, depending on the people, the problems, and those judging the case. They could list different virtues, rather than make them the same. In other words they did not accept that something had to be the unendingly the same to be real.

If we accept the Sophist argument the whole platonic edifice falls over, and we could realise we are just dealing with a particular view of how words should work, not of practice or reality.

While Sophists could cope with the disorderly justice of the moment and the world, for Plato reality had to be uniform, eternal and orderly. And, as we cannot find real orderly justice, it too is only real in the archetypal realm of static order, or in a static authoritarian State which enforces lack of change. For Plato, surprise is not beneficial, and control is always good, when it is control by the Good.

This even infiltrates supposed philosophers of change. As far as I understand Hegel, which is not much, it appears to me that the change process of the dialectic stops when Geist reaches its pinnacle of unchanging understanding, order and reality, famously (?) in the philosophy of Hegel himself. That fixity constitutes supremacy is emphasised, because even Marx seems to think that the dialectic stops when the worker’s paradise eventuates. Whitehead, despite proposing ‘process’ and dynamics as the fundamental of reality, has to invent “eternal objects” to feel complete and to preserve the required lack of change.

While I clearly agree with the proposition that reality is (usually) not predictable in depth, I do not see how this is compatible with eternal sameness or eternal order. It may be that humans are incapable of predicting accurately at all times, but God should be able to know the prediction if the reality is orderly. None of these orderly people seem to suggest that God’s reality is chaotic, or beyond God’s understanding. So, according to them, we have to have faith in the order and justice, even if it is imperceptible. And this again proves the unreality of the everyday world and the superiority of the ideal.

Evolution and complexity theory suggest that the world makes itself up as it goes along, in massively complicated and sometimes accidental interactions which do not head in a particular direction. If that is the case, then order is not guaranteed beyond the situation or the moment. Order is flowing rather than eternal. If we accept this, then we then may well come to re-recognise the beauty of the creative and destructive disorder which the imagined eternally, unchanging, orderly reality was supposed to protect us from. That this interaction produces some order, and paths taken my limit future paths, does not show that there is only order. The apparent reality that my lungs seek air would not seem to be a belief or proposition my lungs hold and operate by. They just do what they evolved to do. And if there is no air, then I die. The lungs fail, and the disorder and joy of life terminates.

The orderly philosophers seem to have seen mathematics as a symbol of divine real predictable order, not of the intermixture of incompleteness and chaos. Probability theory would not be acceptable to Plato as a fundamental rule of order, any more than it was to Einstein, who could not believe that god threw dice; their assumption is that the word is non-probabilistically ordered, or that given all the information we should be able to predict what would happen.

What we call disorder is interesting and part of any life that is real.

Tags:disorder, philosophy
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Skepticism and order

July 12, 2021

I’ve been interested in what happens when you don’t posit uniform order as the prime directive of the universe for a fair while now.

Almost all philosophies after Plato have been obsessed with imposing an order on reality, and seeing that as a guarantor of truth. This even affects the idea that a good scientific academic article presents a clear and coherent single argument, usually with a single causal factor/process. However, I am skeptical of the proposition that what we call order is inherent to the universe, is equivalent to truth, is unchanging, and that what we call disorder is negligible. This proposition seems contradicted by evolution to begin with. The world seems to be in constant flux and change, but I’m not dogmatic about this. I’m equally skeptical of the proposition that the universe is entirely random. Skepticism of one does not have to lead to the other.

I often find that people cannot understand what I’m getting at, which is interesting as its all rather simple.

There seems to be no perfect order in the world which is not disrupted or which does not self-disrupt.
Prediction always seems to have limits. The further ‘away in time’ the prediction refers to, the more likely it will turn out to have been incorrect. This is clearly demonstrated by most science fiction, and by economics.
Perfect order could be the same as death, as mess and unpredictability is associated with life.
To explain most events we may need multiple perspectives. Sometimes we may even need a single minded perspective.
Most, if not all, human understanding seems to involve degrees of uncertainty. Probably even mathematics, as attempts to find an impersonal non-subjective basis for mathematics, seem to have failed; but again my understanding is not certain.
Uncertainty should be recognised if at all possible. There may be specifiable or non-specifiable probabilities to the likelihood of accuracy.
We should not just be skeptical about things we already don’t believe, or don’t want to believe. I have noticed that many self-called skeptics are not skeptical at all about some political dogmas. “Directed skepticism” is not skepticism, it seems to function as another way of trying to impose order on the world.

‘Pre-platonic’ philosophy attracts me, because I don’t think it is as obsessed as post-Platonism with order as ‘truth’ or ‘life’. Take Heraclitus who asserts eternal flux and struggle (apart from the Logos, the meaning of which is unclear), or Sophism which asserts the importance of rhetoric to understanding. I was intrigued to find sophism seemed far more sophisticated than Plato claimed it was – that his philosophy seemed based on a lie, which made me even more skeptical of Platonism.
⁠
My interest in Skepticism came about because it often is a skepticism about order and its importance. I began with David Hume, who is extremely hard to classify, and then went back again to its apparently underlying ‘base’ of Pyrrhonism. Looking at Pyrrhonism I have learnt many other things such as how the desire for theoretical order can produce misery and suffering – skepticism and uncertainty as a practical philosophy of life – which transformed my views of the possibility of skepticism. I also like the crossing between East and West because of Pyrrhonism’s apparent connection to Buddhism. Taoism is skeptical about humanly imposed orders and stability. Chavarka or Lokāyata is an Indian philosophy seemingly skeptical of spiritual order.

Order and chaos may need to be balanced as the Western Philosopher Michael Moorcock seems to be arguing, but perhaps without making them forces as such….
⁠

Tags:disorder, philosophy, skepticism
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How can ‘Conservatives’ own Environmentalists?

July 12, 2021

Believe it or not, this is a real question from someone.

“Owning” is a weird term. I gather, from the way it is generally used, it means completely destroying the arguments and existence of the people you are opposing. It seems a violently anti-civic position and hence an anti-real-conservative position.

But let us assume it can mean winning over the other side…. in which case it is easy.

Conservatives could show they are more concerned about conserving the environment than they are concerned about conserving corporate profits.

They could openly wonder whether environmental and climate science might be correct enough for us to accept it in general.

They could ask whether humans can keep destroying the global ecology (or God’s creation, if you prefer) forever with no consequences.

They could wonder whether burning fossil fuels at the rate we are doing is necessary or helpful to conservation.

They could think about opposing new drilling sites for oil, new mines for coal, new gas fields, especially new extreme sites like coal tar, deep ocean drilling etc, and ask people to make do with what we already have. This would mean that some companies might have to change, which could make it awkward, but sometimes you have to stand up for what its right.

They could wonder if leaving environmentalism to the market has worked well enough over the last 30 years, and wonder whether, if it works in some cases, which are those cases and why.

They could wonder if markets better at producing upheaval than they are at producing conservation?

They could propose constructive solutions that they know are likely to be acceptable to the population in general and plausible. Not, for example, massive upgrades of nuclear power, or carbon capture and storage, which sadly are enormously expensive, seem to take a long time to set up, and if they have disasters have maximal disasters.

They could wonder why the environmental solutions my conservative government is promoting include: tree clearance; koala destruction; removing more water from almost dead rivers; more coal power and more methane power; more money for carbon capture; while opposing emissions targets and renewable energy targets and pretending the Great Barrier Reef is not in decline. This does not seem like environmentalism of any sort whatsoever.

Conservatives could decide that while it is difficult to be virtuous and go first, the developed world, including the US, the UK and Australia, should go first, because it is the right thing to do, and sets an example. If a group of countries won’t do it, then you have to stand up for the right thing anyway, rather than mutter about losing advantage, or it being unfair.

So all Conservatives have to do, is to take environmentalism seriously as a conservative task, engage in dialogue with other people, and there you are… We might even get something done.

Tags:conservatism, ecology, politics
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The right and imperialism

July 6, 2021

Any discussion of this question should probably consider why countries and organisations are imperialistic, and the relationship between this and right wing politics.

Right wing politics

Lets assume that there are four dominant varieties of right wing politics in the modern world… [This may get expanded later, like most of these blogs, this is a work in progress]

Nationalist
Pro-capitalist, pro-corporatist,
Theocratic, And
Militaristic

Obviously, organisations and countries can appear to be a combination of some, or all, of these varieties, and they are not completely exclusive to the ‘right’, but they are extremely common in the right. All of these varieties of right wing politics tend to be imperialistic.

Nationalists can be imperialistic because they:

consider they are better and stronger than others
consequently others are inferior and deserve to be ruled by them,
they need more land to support their population,
they need cheap, or slave, labor,
they want to protect the homeland from everyone who is envious of their superiority and wants to bring them down
they need to rescue their ‘own’ people who live in another country from that country, and bring them into the national fold.
Imperialism becomes a continuation of successful national politics

Pro-corporate rulers can be imperialistic because:

they want guaranteed markets for their corporations,
they want guaranteed resources for their corporations,
they want cheap labor or production for their corporations,
they want to protect or control their corporations’ trade routes,
they want to protect their corporations’ private property in other places,
they wish to extend regulations which benefit corporations over people throughout the world,
they see themselves as rugged individualists, and hence better than other people,
like nationalists, they like proving how superior they are.
Imperialism is seen as a continuation of successful trade

Theocrats can imperialistic because:

they have the true religion and other people must share in it to be saved,
it is sinful if they don’t make sure other countries have the true religion,
to make sure its the true religion they have to control that religion,
they are really virtuous, or more virtuous than other corrupt places, because they have the true religion, and that will be decisive in any struggle,
they are better than other people,
God is on their side, so they will be victorious in the long run.
Imperialism is seen as a temporary and necessary part of obedience to God, spreading his word, and bringing about his will. It is, ultimately, a source of good. etc.

Militarists are imperialistic

because the point of a military is to have wars, to compete with others in matters of arms, etc.

Now there may exist some right wing governments who think that extending power is dangerous, and that they have no business interfering with other people, but these people are rare and they are usually happy to interfere with the lives of their own people to make them virtuous, and that interference is easy to extend to others elsewhere as a matter of national pride.

We can also note that most of these forms of politics tend to be authoritarian.

Nationalist because some one has to represent the nation and tell others what that is, suppress those who disagree and reinforce whatever they approve in the nation’s hierarchies. Nations tend to be identified with ‘kinship’ and race, so they devote a fair amount of energy making sure that non-kin and non true-race people are kept down.

Pro-corporate tends to be authoritarian because they have to enforce property laws, massively unequal incomes and privileges, force people to work for others, and defend the hierarchy and crony capitalism that evolves. They also have to defend whatever makes money that serves them. So they can support companies that corrupt, or destroy the whole system, as is illustrated by the current support for fossil fuel companies and attacks on IT companies. They may also need support for the trade wars which support certain companies profits.

Theocrats are authoritarian because they have to enforce the word of God, or the conventions which have grown around God’s laws, they need to stop other religions and ideas taking off and seducing the innocent and, because some people are considered to be particularly expert or holy, the religious hierarchies need enforcing against sinners.

Militarism just comes with authoritarianism.

The ‘Left’

There are also ‘Liberals’, may tend to try and build alliances through promoting their own political and economic systems in other countries, but this is often hard to distinguish from imperialism as far as the ‘victims’ are concerned – their world and culture is being changed to resemble that of another another place, often without consultation, especially consultation with the less powerful.

Left wing workers paradises may also be authoritarian and imperialistic to protect themselves against the rest of the world (as when facing the war against the Soviets after WW1), and to extend the supposed virtues of their system outwards to others to stop the challenge against them – this usually helps confirm any dictatorial tendencies they have.

So most of the common forms of government have imperialistic tendencies. All organisations which need to suppress opposition to survive, tend to become authoritarian or imperialistic, whatever their primary reason for being. This imperialism is magnified because common forms of government in the world today are competitive with other governments.

The End of Western Imperialism?

Given this, the most likely end for imperialism is to be defeated by another rising set of imperial powers.

This option in the contemporary world is made more likely because of the exhaustion of US power, and economy, in a pointless set of imperialistic wars started under GW Bush probably for reasons of nationalism (“New American Century”), Pro-corporatism (protecting US oil interests), Theocracy (Bringing Armageddon and the new godly world closer) and Militarism (we have the best and most expensive military in the world, and have to show it off).

There is some evidence (see Naomi Klein) that there was no plan for the aftermath of conquest of Iraq because the Bush admin hoped that with no government and no regulation the libertarian free market paradise would emerge and be a showplace for the world. If this was intended, it obviously did not happen.

Collapse is the fate of most imperialisms:

It is harder to hold onto territorial gains than to destroy those powers holding territory, especially with modern weaponry
The expense of conquest eventually becomes greater than the gains
Supply lines and back up gets exhausted, stretched or becomes too expensive
Information becomes more distorted as it passes up the chain of command, and nobody knows what is really going on
The conquerors get fed up of the effort of maintaining conquest and the cost in lives loses popularity back home
Without massive local support, conquerors can find themselves in an endless guerilla war
The harder the conquerors impose their order, the easier it is to see as imposed, annoying and incompetent
The wider the front or border, and the more expanded the empire, the more enemies it encounters or generates and the fewer resources it has to fight them all

Tags:disorder
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Nazis and Socialists

June 30, 2021

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

What did the Nazis promote?

Lets look at what the Nazis were. They were:

Nationalists

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

Racists

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

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

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

Authoritarian and Hierarchical

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

Hierarchy was officially, about race, ability and heroism.

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

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

Statist

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

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

Ideological

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

Heroes

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

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

Militarist

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

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

Sexist

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

Corporate

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

Mystical

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

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

“The völkisch-minded man, in particular, has the sacred duty, each in his own denomination, of making people stop just talking superficially of God’s will, and actually fulfill God’s will, and not let God’s word be desecrated. For God’s will gave men their form, their essence and their abilities. Anyone who destroys His work is declaring war on the Lord’s creation, the divine will.”
Mein Kampf p.562.

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison.
Speech delivered at Munich 12 April 1922; from Norman H. Baynes, ed. (1942). The Speeches of Adolf Hitler: April 1922 – August 1939. Vol. 1

Propagandists

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

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

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

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

Of course Nazis are unlikely to claim that they lie.

Support

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

Conclusion

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

Appendix Some extra remarks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags:fascism, history, social category theory
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Wage Labour in Capitalism

June 27, 2021

The Capitalist view of wage labour

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

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

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

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

Objections to the Capitalist view

Self-sufficient Labour?

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

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

Suppression of connections across hierarchy

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

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

Capitalist team-ups

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

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

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

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

Fundamental liberty?

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

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

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

Connections

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

Workers and working conditions

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

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

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

Hierarchy and the value of labour

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

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

Marxism – to some extent

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

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

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

Tags:economics, free markets
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Information disorder

June 19, 2021

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

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

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

On top of that we have the following problems.

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

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

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

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

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

Tags:depth psychology, Disinformation
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