Dadirri, Complexity and social pain

February 6, 2021

One of the things I like about complexity theory, is that it admits what we can observe, namely that the world seems largely and beautifully ordered, yet it also seems chaotic and random: that life is painful and joyful. We of course cannot prove the world is random, because there could always be an order that is hidden, but we cannot just argue that because there should be an order that is hidden, there is no randomness. I’ve previously suggested that we don’t know whether the sense of multiple possibilities and unpredictability is in the nature of reality or in the nature of the tools we use to make sense of reality. The main point is that there is a lot we cannot fully understand, we may just have to live with it as best we can, and this can be hard.

If God exists, then God likes and wants variety, disruption and surprise for us. The best we can do is to make islands of order, by working with the unpredictability, or the nature of the world, rather than against it. That is we recognise limits to our control.

Emotional Pain

One of the problems complexity points to, as does depth psychology, is that if you suppress pain, disturbance or chaos, the relief will only be temporary. The chaos will surface somewhere else, perhaps in another form, and very likely will be more disruptive. We do not solve a long term problem by hitting it or ignoring it. This seems particularly true of emotional pain.

Chaos and emotional pain need a different approach, they appear to need Dadirri. Pain needs to be listened to. Not magnified, not feared, but attended to. Sat with in the context in which it is found. If it is pain at work, then sit with work, listen to work, and so on. Do not ignore the pain.

It may be the case that long term emotional pain comes when we are suppressing something essential for us. Keeping this something in check may be necessary, or it may be purely artificial and social (a matter of suppressing to fit in with our groups), but in either case, suppressing awareness of pain is bound to lead to chaos of some sort. We may be driven to do what distresses us, and what makes no sense to us. The pain may shield us from the pain of being suppressed by others, and perhaps makes us complicit in suppressing others.

Gently listening to the pain without criticism and retreat, can lead to what we have made unconscious. The pain can be shielding us from our deep wisdom, which would cause us to change our life, or change our approach to life.

Emotional pain can feel like ours alone, but it can also be collective, and shareable. When it is consciously shared it can become a public movement. The problem here is when that collective pain is used by a leader to control their followers, and to scapegoat others who have little to do with it, not to follow it to its source.

Social Pain

Black Lives Matter was a protest which grew out of shared pain. Pain that people were being shot by police apparently because their skin colour meant they did not matter. Pain that black lives in general did not seem to matter. Pain after long series of recurrent abuse. Sometimes this abuse may seem trivial, but the point is that it was repetitive, and it seems black people are generally not respected by the dominant groups. And of course, the response of many white people, was that this was all trivial or exaggerated: “All lives matter” implying “we suffer as much as you.” Indeed this may even be true, but it still implied there was no need to listen to black people, to sit with them and share their pain; their specific histories and experiences were being made socially irrelevant.

President Trump could have lead the way. He could have said there is a problem which we need to solve. He could have said to his followers, “let us listen to these protesters, as we are all Americans. We need to take what they tell us seriously, we must make sure we are with them on this”. People could have sat together, and shared presence. That might not be perfect, it might not have worked, but at least it would have been a recognition, and a start.

Of course Trump did not do this. He did not listen. He did not even offer rapport. He blamed Democrats and protestors for disorder. He portrayed their pain as a threat to the USA, and tried to shove what he saw as disorder down. He offered himself as the only person who could restore order, and that the way forward was repression. He appears to have decided that his power depended on being seen as strong and suppressing disorder. This probably worked to an extent and gained him respect in white supremacy movements, but ignored the problem. He did not solve the problem, and tensions between black and white Americans have probably intensified.

This is not just a Trump issue. This is how Western culture has worked for a long time. This is how we react to what we fear.

President Biden appears to face a similar problem with Trump supporters. They are clearly showing emotional pain. Now you may say an important difference is that the explanation for the pain of BLM protestors was based on real events, while the pain of Trump supporters seems based on fictional events. They think an election was stolen, when it seems more likely that Trump tried to steal it himself and lie about the results.

Nevertheless the pain of loss is genuine, and expresses other pains. The chaos should not just be suppressed, or hidden and left to flourish were it can be used by those who are unscrupulous, which is what has happened before. Yes listening is a risk, and it may not work, especially if the listening does not seem genuine, or seems like an attempt to denigrate them.

Those who support Trump, support him because they saw him as one of them, and as someone who listened to their concerns. Someone who recognised the pain they felt. The pain of declining, or stagnant, incomes and status. The pain of medical debts and bankruptcies. The pain of being ignored or mocked by elites. The pain of feeling their country was no longer theirs, that it no longer made sense. The pain of life being unpredictable, but usually without return. The pain of feeling victimised. The pain of knowing their children will probably have it harder than they do. The pain of complete frustration. The pain of wanting revenge.

These are all real pains, and they are pains shared by many Americans. And sure Trump is never going to do anything about the causes. He continued the pattern of increasing the wealth of the wealthy, and poisoning the Earth and its peoples. He also tried to shut down dissent. But it appeared they could vote and act, and something precious, and lost, might return.

Biden would be wrong to follow Trump’s lead, even though desire for justice is probably strong. America needs a path of reconciliation. This means listening to people and sitting with them. Finding the causes of pain, and facing the pain, and helping people reconnect with their wisdom, and helping people to find a way to act and deal with their pain and problems. This will be difficult because some media and politicians find more power in stirring up that pain and forcing it to be unresolved, than they do in healing it; this is perhaps the visible part of the neoliberal conspiracy to boost corporate power, and it will be active. Dadirri will be difficult, but that does not mean it is not necessary.

The emotional. perhaps spiritual, pain of normal Americans has been ignored.

Furthermore, the results will be unpredictable but, we can more or less guarantee that, if we do not listen then the situation will get even worse, and much of what makes the US valuable will collapse, as the pain returns, less able to be pushed down..

The same is true of climate change. That is an emotional pain for those who see the world being destroyed, and its an emotional pain for those who deny the world is being destroyed, but fear their way of life is being destroyed for political gain. We need to listen rather than to shout, and we may need to listen to the world as a whole.

Dadirri means we take others seriously and we listen. It is more important to listen than to speak, until the insight comes.

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Why is social theory often ‘leftist’?

February 6, 2021

Despite the tendency for easy answers this is a difficult question, partly because there is no simple distinction between left and right. There can be hard distinctions between, fascist, conservative and pro-corporate thought for example, or the utilitarian liberal and socialist trends of the left.

In general (but not always) the right is pro-existing-hierarchies and authority, and the left is against those hierarchies and authorities. As I’ve said before, parties can switch position, depending upon who is winning, or how radical they wish to appear. Trumpism for example did not challenge corporate dominance in general, the capitalist system, the power of wealthy people, the sense of hierarchy in the US, or the idea of authoritarianism – it just challenged the power of corporations who were not wildly pro-Trump, ‘elites’ who were not pro-Trump, wealthy people who were not pro-Trump, media which was not pro-Trump, attacked protest by non-Trump supporters, and excused racial and sexual discrimination. On the other hand, a non-US citizen might say that the US democrats are largely a party of the Center-Right. In terms of the questions, there is also a real distinction between social theories such as sociology and economics.

It is reasonably obvious that mainstream economics is dominated by pro-corporate thought and aims to justify corporate power- and we could say, “well that is the type of thinking the corporate sector pays for, approves of, and that’s what it gets.” As a result, we end up with ‘social policies’ that reduce social life to a particular type of economics only, which make business the only relevant part of social life, naturalises corporate power and wealth, and aims to break up any opposition to corporate dominance – partly by suppressing consideration of any power or structural dimensions or, if you prefer, by the suppression of any ‘social considerations’ at all. In my view, Libertarian social thought tends to be of this type, although there are libertarians who don’t fall for that particular trap all the time (see C4ss), but they are rare. As opposed to standard economics, there is also political economy which tends to be more left in orientation, but it is extremely marginalised in mainstream thinking, even if it describes economic processes much more accurately (again in my opinion), and refuses to arbitrarily separate economic from political and social processes.

Given right-wing dominance of economics, then why is sociology, by comparison, more left-wing in orientation? Why is it not almost completely bought out like economics?

Partly because it is really hard to study corporate, or wealth elites, without being part of them or just flattering them. Even a person who has worked for years to be a trusted servant will be left out of all kinds of events. And the wealthy can take revenge, if they don’t like what is said about them.

As a result, historically, sociology and anthropology have developed studying people who are workers, marginalised, ‘colonised’ and so on. Given this happenstance, you would expect the studiers to develop a degree of sympathy for the people being marginalised, oppressed, impoverished or subject to arbitrary authority. This sympathy is intensified because the dominant groups rarely, if ever say they are being oppressive; they say they are carrying out their oppression and theft in the name of a greater good, because they are more talented, because God placed them there, or because they are looking after the oppressed. This tends to make the studiers somewhat cynical about the dominating classes, and any social ideology which asserts all is well and that the powerful deserve their power and privilege (which means the researchers tend to be leftish or centerist).

One response to this in the early days of anthropology was to argue for a derivative of conservatism, which was called ‘functionalism’. This asserted that no matter how irrational some indigenous behaviour looked to the colonisers and the military and western business, it was actually really important to the functionality of the society. You could not go around disrupting things and expect people to remain happy, content, or accepting of colonial domination. You really needed to understand people and respect them, to rule well. The best form of rule was largely to leave people alone.

We can see such conservative thinking in Edmund Burke – the idea is that society develops customs, traditions and behaviours which have a social use and contribute to social stability. With this attitude, Burke could also see the oppression and criminality of the East India Company in India and fight against it for years. This kind of conservatism does not take a pro-corporate position, because on the whole corporations will profit wherever they can, and if that profit is destructive of society or environment that consequence becomes entirely secondary – something no real conservative would believe.

Indeed, we might need to explain why it is that destructiveness has become so acceptable to pro-corporate people, especially when in some cases it seems suicidal.

Interestingly enough in the early to mid 20th century there were many social analyses which were conservative – things like ‘social credit’ (Douglas), ‘distributism’ (Chesteron, Belloc), ‘guild theory’ (Penty) and so on, but they were not pro-corporate and got wiped – although the people introducing GK Chesterton’s collected works for the Ignatius Press, pretend Chesterton would have approved of modern US capitalism – which is not at all likely. These movements stretch back to nineteenth century ‘patriarchal conservatives’ like Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin; the latter of whom insisted that a socio-economic system which did not increase wealth of the soul and beauty as part of its values and processes would be destructive. Ruskin seems to have ended up more influential on the left than on the pro-corporate right for what seem like reasonably obvious reasons… but Ruskin does tend to be a bit patronising and this gets in the way of reading him sometimes.

There is also the conservative social thought which argues that an elite or aristocracy should be trained to rule, because most people are not capable or interested in ruling. Once you have started to argue who this elite should be, and what they are protecting, the interest is more or less over, and this position is hard to justify to outsiders. Louis Dumont argued that Western Sociology was inadequate because it took equality as its starting point (which is disputable) while human beings are naturally hierarchical. I’d agree humans tend to be hierarchical; the question is how different the levels of hierarchy are, how immobile they are and what kind of conditions reinforce extreme authoritarian, exploitative or harmful hierarchies – which I guess are leftist questions, although they seem neutral enough 🙂

Sociology has been more left in orientation because the dominant pro-corporate form of the right, wishes to deny relevant social facts such as class, oppression, misery and so on, and claim that the current form of social life, only needs less control by the people over ‘the market’, together with more corporate power and all will be well again….. Sociologists tend also to be suspicious of ‘nationalist’ social theory because there is a documented tendency for ‘the nation’ to be a historical construct rather than an eternal reality, and because nationalisms have tended in the past to lead to authoritarianisms (proto fascisms), victimisation of outgroups, and war, because most nationalisms seem to need to construct outgroups, who can be slandered, or treated with contempt, in order to reinforce the idea of the national race being an important and superior group.

You could simply say that on the Right, pro-corporate social thought is false and only aims at building and justifying corporate dominance; conservative social thought was taken over by the left, or largely abandoned by conservatives; and fascist social thought is oriented towards getting people to follow the leader and attack some approved out-groups to make ingroup loyalty. That is it.

Despite this, there are many varieties of social thought in sociology and anthropology departments. My original professor in Anthropology was a well known anti-Marxist, an ideational functionalist and an early explorer of network theory, before it had been named. He was also a source of great encouragement to me.

One of my thesis markers was also a conservative expert in the work of Norbert Elias whose work I deeply respect. There are plenty of other people I have no idea of their political voting patterns, but they do tend to sympathise with people who are ripped off by the system.

So the reason why sociology tends to be leftist, is because of history, because of who they work with, and because right-wing social thought tends to support established authorities, the suppression of those people studied by sociologists and anthropologists, or is abandoned and rarely thought out persuasively in the Anglosphere because it conflicts with corporate power.

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Responsibility for climate change: Companies vs. people

February 2, 2021

Are customers of fossil fuel companies more to blame than fossil fuel companies, themselves, for climate change?

I almost think this is a distracting question.

I guess there is a possible argument, that the poor little fossil fuel companies are just satisfying customer demand and should not be held responsible for anything they do, as they are complete victims and slaves to the market, but I don’t hear that very often. It is, for example, not as apparently common as refusal to acknowledge there is a problem.

However, if we think ecologically at all, then we know that companies and customers are bound together in systems. Without people buying the stuff which the companies promote and try to sell, then the system collapses, or transforms. Without people selling, promoting and profiting from the stuff, then people could not use it.

If customers move into electric cars, or ‘green energy,’ then demand will lower, and ideally fossil fuel companies will move into more profitable areas, or go bust – especially as it gets harder to find profitable fossil fuel sources (as it becomes more dangerous and more polluting, with more energy required to get the fuel).

In this case, customers include large customers, like factories, steel makers, aluminium manufacturers, coal powered electricity generators and so on. So the economic system that supports fossil fuels does not just involve people who put petrol in their cars, but other large corporate entities. Change (should we want it) has to involve them as well.

Unfortunately, we know that, if companies own the government (or significant politicians), are established and seem respectable, they will get massive taxpayer subsidies and bailouts to allow them to continue trading. Or they may get government support for continuing fossil fuel use, such as governments buying supply in the national interest, or subsidising purchasers – this is, after all, how capitalism works in practice, and the more pro ‘free market’ the government, the more free they often seem about transferring taxpayers’ wealth to the big corporate sector to keep the market going.

It should also be reasonably obvious that over 100 years of fossil fuel usage, will have set up systems of habit, regulation, distribution, technology and so on, that favours the use of fossil fuels and the happiness of high level people in fossil fuel companies and stock holders.

If you want to change the system, then you need to look at all components of the system, which includes consumers, companies, government, technologies, energy availability, pollution, ecologies (and undoubtedly other factors) and try to work out the least painful and quickest way of avoiding mass damage, or total system failure.

This is difficult, and often unappealing, because there is:

  • huge uncertainty in change
  • usually a large cost in change
  • powerful people and groups who don’t want to risk loss of that power or profit
  • a media which tends to support established corporate power
  • the possibility that, if we go first, other people will take advantage of us
  • huge cultural and symbolic resonance with fossil fuels, the founders of modernity. Heroic miners and entrepreneurs, lucky breaks, huge riches and so on.
  • potential acknowledgement that we, ourselves, are partially responsible for the problem, which can be morally unnerving
  • hope that we really don’t have to risk anything, or suffer anything, to get by.

Few people would want change from fossil fuels, if it was not for:

  • increasing difficulty finding and extracting fossil fuels (it is possible ‘peak oil’ has already occurred)
  • wanting to clean up poisonous pollution and smog
  • wanting to lessen environmental damage
  • wanting to stop climate change.

If you don’t care about these factors, or are taught not to care about these factors, then moving out of fossil fuels is low priority, and the potential loss seems extreme.

The problem is, in this and many other cases, if we don’t attempt controlled change, then we will have uncontrolled change thrust upon us, as the existing system breaks down.

As I have argued previously, in working with systems, we cannot proceed by dogma. We have to proceed experimentally, and observe what the results of actions are, and change our actions and responses as we go along. This is something people, in the West, seem to find difficult. That is another reason why practicing Dadirri might be useful, as is the joined process of sitting with our fears and griefs so we do not run away from them and the problems they know about.

Allocating blame is not the answer, but helping the system to change could be.

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Dadirri and US politics

February 1, 2021

This post probably won’t make that much sense if you do not read the previous post, Dadirri and complexity.

I am not a US citizen, so take this as you will.

The US is, in my opinion, broken. Trump and the Republicans, again in my view, have broken it.

While I think Republicans should probably acknowledge this (given what they claim about being the party of responsibility), and it would make life easier for all if they did, it seems highly possible they will never do so. It would mean admitting they were wrong.

In our society, that seems hard for anyone to do. Admitting error no longer seems to mean mean you can now move on, and refrain from doing it again. Nowadays admitting error, is admitting a grievous sin and moral failing. It means loss of status and condemnation from your own, as well as the others. It is, effectively, wrong to admit being wrong. If you admit one thing you did was wrong, then everything you ever believed and did could also be wrong. People would laugh and mock you. You would be swept away by those who are more confident. If it feels good, do it again.

This is a kind of pathology of positive thinking: admitting a ‘bad’ supposedly makes for more bad to come. This means the ‘bad’ is never faced, and never acknowledged.

However, allocating blame, and contradiction, is far less important than acknowledging the brokenness, and sitting with that brokenness and all we feel and all that is. Blame, or reasoning it all out at the start, is not Didirri. Didirri or receptivity is openness to the reality of what is. It represents a pause, a being with whatever is present, an acknowledgement of reality, so we may proceed or carry on.

One possibility is that the US may never be repaired.

Perhaps some may not want it to be repaired, because it is useful to them for it to be broken, or because repair would admit the damage they caused. But this does not matter. Blame does not explain, nor does it heal, it may just reinforce the brokenness – especially if we start with blame.

The reality seems to be that Americans will have to live with that brokenness. They can be still, and open to possibilities that arise from that brokenness, or they can rush on and say things are not harmed or brush the harm to one side. What if we were open to that brokenness? To the possibility it may never be repaired, but we still have to live?

If we refuse the brokenness, we may never be receptive to solutions. We may never sit with those who do recognise the problem, or with any others. We may not be able to face the silence, and the possible confusion, or pain, of recognising complexity. But those who wish to move on peacefully have to respond to the situation and its full complexity and respond fully. We have to respond healthily to wounds, not ignore them or punish them. That takes Dadirri.

The problem is probably never the ‘them’ but always the ‘we’. We can act, but we cannot peacefully make ‘them’ act.

This is difficult. Society is not geared for silence. The media does not like silence, as they exist for noise, they exist for advertising, they exist for your involvement, they exist to tell you things. Politics exists for drama and noise, displays of conviction and condemnation, not for being together. Business exists to tell us what to do, and what to buy, and how important business is, not for a peaceful soul.

What in the US leads back to silence, to shades and complexity, to perception?

Americans supposedly believe in prayer. Can they sit with God and wait for silence to speak? Can they admit life’s complexity? Can people admit there is something to heal, which does not mean the others become like them? Can we surrender a desire for control, or to only see the ‘positive’?

Can people stop rushing? Will they listen, and by example of that listening, show the way?

Receptivity may not be easy, but we can all stop and start to listen, and be open, without demanding a result.

Anyone can start.

That might be enough to start something new.

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Dadirri and complexity

February 1, 2021

This comes from the discussions in the ‘mythos’ group, and celebrates that thought.

I want to start by quoting Aboriginal Elder, Ngangikurungkurr woman, Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr.

The whole piece is short and can be found at:

https://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-dadirri

Its a bit odd to speed it up, so please read the whole if you can. She writes:

What I want to talk about is another special quality of my people. I believe it is the most important. It is our most unique gift. It is perhaps the greatest gift we can give to our fellow Australians. In our language this quality is called dadirri. It is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness….

When I experience dadirri, I am made whole again. I can sit on the riverbank or walk through the trees; even if someone close to me has passed away, I can find my peace in this silent awareness. There is no need of words. A big part of dadirri is listening.

In our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn – not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting. Our people have passed on this way of listening for over 40,000 years…

There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.

My people are not threatened by silence. They are completely at home in it. They have lived for thousands of years with Nature’s quietness….

Our Aboriginal culture has taught us to be still and to wait. We do not try to hurry things up. We let them follow their natural course – like the seasons. We watch the moon in each of its phases. We wait for the rain to fill our rivers and water the thirsty earth…

We don’t like to hurry. There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.

I’ve also been reading Raimon Panikkar on receptivity. A similar point is being made. It is helpful to humans just to be open, to listen, to be aware of whatever is happening, with no rush to judgement, no interruption, no necessity to understand immediately. To refrain from our words, and our criticism of what is – even when what is, seems to someone else presenting what we think is a misunderstanding.

Dadirri, or receptivity, is just listening and being, not judging, not interrupting, not interfering, not even attempting control or to get a ‘good’ result.

It seems possible to suggest that this is the first call of complexity – when we realise the world is too complicated to fully grasp. Just to sit with it, and listen, without thinking we understand, or even trying to understand.

By this listening we allow the complexities to exist with us. If we are split, we allow our split without shutting it down for what we think is the best result. We accept any dark thoughts or fears that arise, without condemning them, and without obsessing over them. They are there, they are part of what is. Without judgement. We accept cheerful, good thoughts, without praising them and without obsessing over them, or trying to stop them from passing. They are all thoughts. We sit and listen. We accept the noise of cars and drills, and jackhammers. They are part of what is. They may not be the wind in the trees, or the calls of birds, but they too exist. We cannot separate from what is, however much we wish to. We cannot understand everything, however much we wish to. Some understanding will be symbolic, and need not to be foreclosed.

What we might call ‘bad’ is present and a judgement. What we might call ‘good’ is present and a judgement. Recognising either can be a mode of force, if we push one side and suppress awareness of the other. In Dadirri, we just be open and receptive to what is, and what flows, and what becomes. As the Elder states: “There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware.”

It seemed to me that many of our problems stem from a refusal to be receptive or to practice Dadirri. From a desire to separate from, or control, what appears to be the case.

In politics we rush to condemn, rush to argue, rush to self-defense and justification, before we have even heard what other people are saying. We perceive people as opponents rather than accept them as just being. We take them as bad, as harmful. Indeed we will probably rush to condemn our opponents for rushing to judge.

We don’t just sit together, listening and feeling and receptive, leaving aside desires for control or victory. Perhaps this seems impractical, but as long as it seems impractical, the longer we will refuse to try it out.

One person, I’m sorry but I forget who, recently asked something like; “What if the Australian prime minister just sat with Elders, rather than told them what his policies were, or told them what to think. Wouldn’t that really indicate a change and a new mode of being together?”

Another story I remember, which I may have got wrong, was that a mining company was talking to Aboriginal people about what the company offered, and they were getting more and more worked up as the Aboriginal people did not speak. Eventually one person said something like “How can we reply till we have properly heard what you say, and thought about it?” They might also have added “and heard what country has to say”. Maybe the latter is just romanticism, but that is the point – there is a lot to hear, to be open to. And this is so, nearly everywhere.

You can’t make urgent decisions urgently, without full listening to all beings involved, and the web of their interactions, as best you can. And that takes time, and lack of pressure, lack of push to conclusions. Life is complex. That is its nature and life needs attention, openness.

“There is nothing more important than what we are attending to. There is nothing more urgent that we must hurry away for.”

It also means that you may change your course, as more listening proceeds and you hear what was previously silent or ignored by accident.

It is not entirely silly to say that the uninvited, or the excluded, will come back strongly and unwelcomingly, unless we are ready for them, or welcome them in advance.

Sometimes, we may have to recognise that something is broken and cannot be fixed. We still have to be, and be receptive to that brokenness. We may never be able to ‘fix it’, but we still may have to live with it, and not always automatically force it together when it is unwilling or incapable.

Receptivity means being open to the possibility that events appear unpleasant. It does not mean denial of what is. We cannot fix things if we deny there is a problem, or if we fixate on what we think is the problem, or jump straight into what we think is the solution, rather than being open to the complexity of the problem and its branching out all over the place first.

This slips into caution about positive thinking. Positive denial, is simply denial of what is. This is a refusal to listen, a refusal to learn, a refusal to accept what was unintended, or to acknowledge the ignored that came back offended. It denies complexity and life.

Denial is not receptivity. Denial, as I understand, is not Dadirri. Useful positive thinking is listening, and assuming that something will arise that can be enough at this moment. It is assuming no difficulty is too great, although recognises it may be difficult the less we listen. Receptivity does not deny difficulty, it allows what is to be what it is, and for us to feel the way forward slowly and quietly, and be open to the responses that are engendered by what we do.

It allows complexity to be, and finds the best way through.

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Paying for Links

January 28, 2021

The Australian Government is proposing legislation which means that google, and Facebook, and presumably anyone else will have to pay for ‘using’ media items.

The problem for me is that Google and Facebook, do not (as far as I know) take media items and put them on their websites without acknowledgement, or steal articles as the government and its media backers allege. They put up headlines, possibly a lead image, perhaps the first couple of lines of text and a link.

Providing a link to a news media item does not seem to be stealing the product; it is linking to it – it is in effect providing a free advertisement for the content.

If a person clicks on that link they get taken to the site (unless it is behind a paywall). This then gives the publisher the eyeballs. It gives the publisher the advertising revenue and so on. If its behind a paywall then it may indicate to the clicker that the news is worth paying for.

Every article I’ve ever clicked on, on Twitter, Facebook etc works like this. Yahoo news may work differently, but I’ve always assumed they do pay- perhaps they don’t – that should be solved.

News sites who don’t want to get these free adverts can easily incorporate a piece of code into their web pages, and google, for example, will not collect the information and report it in searches. That way they easily get rid of the sense that google is stealing their news.

Most of the items, I see on facebook, are put there by people who think the articles are interesting and useful, and they, again, are encouraging people to go and read the article on the article owner’s website. This also counts as very effective advertising. It means that people I like recommend something, and that tends to be the most trusted advert.

Likewise, I can see that many online news stories use twitter posts as ‘evidence’. These link to twitter etc, but there is generally no need to travel to twitter to read them. This could be considered to be theft, and perhaps news should stop doing it. But I still think its a primarily a link, and it tells people that twitter is important and is good to use.

If I personally link to something someone wrote, I don’t think I’m stealing their work, I’m acknowledging it, or giving them some advertising.

The real problem is that if google and facebook have to pay for every item they link to, then surely every article online should also have to pay for similar links, links to evidence etc, then the sites will shut down. I cannot afford it for one.

The internet will die.

I guess Murdoch will be happy.

Endnote

There might be lots to complain about with google, such as it often does not appear to pay taxes on revenue generated in the country in which it sells the advertisements it carries. But that is a real objection. The Australian government does not seem to be interested in reality, just in stopping people from finding the news.

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The 12 steps of neoliberal problem solving

January 26, 2021

If there is a problem which disturbs the established corporate sector and their hangers on, then try and deal with that problem as follows:

1) First: deny there is a problem.

2) Scream, shout at and slur those who say there is a problem.

3) If 97% of those who work in the field (economists, scientists, medical practitioners, ecologists etc) say there is a problem, then insist that the 3% who don’t, be given equal time. Hell, give that 3%, 80% of the time.

4) Call for problem recognisers to be dismissed from positions of employment. Call for the removal of problem data from government websites.

5) Hinder any attempts to do anything useful about the problem.

6) Complain solving the problem involves socialism and tyranny.

7) If the problem is so obvious it needs to be solved, then get the solutions to the problem to involve tax-payer subsidy of established industries and tax cuts for the wealthy.

8) Insist any other solution to the problem involves insufferable limits on peoples’ personal liberty to make the problem worse. Resisting recognition of the problem is vital and radical.

9) Fail dismally.

10) Argue that the failure to solve the problem, shows the Governments are useless and should not attempt to solve any problems at all.

11) Argue that everything should have been left to the private sector that did not want to recognise the problem in the first place.

12) Keep on as if nothing had happened.

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QAnon?

January 20, 2021

This is an attempt to explore Q, and to write about Q, somewhat in the manner of Q.

First off, I’m not an expert on QAnon, so there is no need to take this seriously.

What was the Conspiracy?

Q does seem to be pro-Trump. However, Q does not seem to have had either Trump, or the Trump re-election committee, behind them, because it seems that Trump had little idea of what Q was talking about until relatively close to the end, when he could have taken advantage of it all along. He did occasionally retweet Q memes, but the memes were ubiquitous in the sources that Trump might read or see, so that does not mean he knew much about it. This is what he said when asked:

Trump: Yeah. I know nothing about a QAnon…. I know you told me [about QAnon], but what do you tell me doesn’t necessarily make it fact. I hate to say that. I know nothing about it. I do know that they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it….

I’ll tell you what I do know about, I know about Antifa and I know about the radical left and I know how violent they are and how vicious they are, and I know how they are burning down cities run by Democrats, not run by Republicans….

Savannah Guthrie: Just this week, you retweeted your 87 million followers a conspiracy theory that Joe Biden orchestrated to have SEAL Team Six, the Navy SEAL Team Six to kill — cover up the fake death of bin Laden. Now, why would you send a lie that to your followers? You retweeted it.

Trump: I know nothing about it. It was retweet. That was a — an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I put it out there. People can decide for themselves to take a position.

Interview: Savannah Guthrie Leads a Town Hall With Donald Trump in Miami – October 15, 2020. Fact base

Given Trump would seem to take advantage of anything popular which favoured him or attacked his ‘enemies’, there is no reason to think that he would refrain from using Q, if it was connected to him and he knew about it. Unless Trump was in deep cover; which means he would confirm nothing of Q, although him confirming nothing, does not confirm anything.

Trump’s display of ignorance could suggest that Q was trying to take advantage of Trump and his followers for some purpose. Is there reason to think this untrue? Q had more to gain than Trump did. They could influence Trump’s followers, while binding Trump to promises he could probably never carry out such as capturing and trying Hilary Clinton as she tried to escape, engineering mass suicides of his enemies, perhaps announcing that the Mueller Report had unearthed pedophilia in security agencies, get John McCain to resign, expose Pope Francis and so on. Trump was also expected to hold ‘the Storm’ and arrest hundreds (maybe thousands) of satanic pedophiles, which may well have proven difficult if he had tried to do it – which he does not seem to have done. Trump was even incapable of triumphing over coronavirus, which was supposedly not really that deadly. Did the prophecies fail, did Trump fail, or was he pushed by Q? Were the prophecies codes for something less palatable to Trump’s people? Who are the secret manipulators?

Was Q even designed to discredit Trump and his followers, by demanding the impossible, and then letting the followers see it all fail? Q could have been the deep state in action, only pretending to be against itself. Was Trump was doing this himself? If Q was Satanist running a false flag operation, then allowing 100,000s of innocent Americans to die, because no coherent action was taken, could count as a major success.

The background: ‘drops,’ and black magic

The idea was clever. Q is supposedly a person with a Department of Energy clearance for Top Secret information (why Department of Energy?). We don’t even know Q is a real person, or how many people post as Q. The people playing Q basically issued questions, random snippets of information, made predictions and let people construct their own fantasies (or do a lot of learning as they might put it), so they provided the data and fantasy to back Q’s assertions, and spin the Web Q started. This is one supposed Q drop from near the beginning:

Mockingbird
HRC detained, not arrested (yet).
Where is Huma? Follow Huma.
This has nothing to do w/ Russia (yet).
Why does Potus surround himself w/ generals?
What is military intelligence?
Why go around the 3 letter agencies?
What Supreme Court case allows for the use of MI v Congressional assembled and approved agencies?
Who has ultimate authority over our branches of military wo approval conditions unless 90+ in wartime conditions?
What is the military code?
Where is AW being held? Why?
POTUS will not go on tv to address nation.
POTUS must isolate himself to prevent negative optics.
POTUS knew removing criminal rogue elements as a first step was essential to free and pass legislation.
Who has access to everything classified?
Do you believe HRC, Soros, Obama etc have more power than Trump? Fantasy.
Whoever controls the office of the Presidecy controls this great land.
They never believed for a moment they (Democrats and Republicans) would lose control.
This is not a R v D battle.
Why did Soros donate all his money recently?
Why would he place all his funds in a RC?
Mockingbird 10.30.17
God bless fellow Patriots.

Qposts 29-Oct-2017

There is no ‘secret information’ here, just questions with no answers. It is all references to things people would already have heard of, if they watched Alex Jones or similar parts of the Right0Sphere – Huma, for example is a close associate of Hillary Clinton, who is supposed to have peeled faces off children in a Satanic ceremony – is there any evidence of this? It doesn’t matter as she is not being accused of anything; people are just being told to watch her.

Here is another drop. Note the repetitions between posts, which might build up truth (‘What I tell you three times is true’):

Some of us come here to drop crumbs, just crumbs.
POTUS is 100% insulated – any discussion suggesting he’s even a target is false.
POTUS will not be addressing nation on any of these issues as people begin to be indicted and must remain neutral for pure optical reasons. To suggest this is the plan is false and should be common sense.
Focus on Military Intellingence/ State Secrets and why might that be used vs any three letter agency
What SC decision opened the door for a sitting President to activate – what must be showed?
Why is POTUS surrounded by generals ^^
Again, there are a lot more good people than bad so have faith. This was a hostile takeover from an evil corrupt network of players (not just Democrats).
Don’t fool yourself into thinking Obama, Soros, Roth’s, Clinton’s etc have more power present day than POTUS.
Operation Mockingbird
Patriots are in control. Sit back and enjoy the show.

Qposts 30-Oct-2017

This primarily states that Trump will not say anything about what Q is saying, so overt confirmation is not to be expected. Is silence confirmation? Trump is also not a target, but a target of who? Perhaps that means he is a target of Q (because it is denied). Of course both these posts could be fake, but they show the style…. it seems like a textual Rorschach blot. We might wonder if, like Trump’s speeches, whether the ‘drops’ interrupt and disrupt ‘rational’ (Mind 1) thought processes and critical thinking? Why do they make so few connected propositions which can be challenged? Could they be acting as incantations, black magic, hypnotic effects, replacing rationality, with repeated phrases about how great we are, how persecuted we are, how we can overcome everything, how those who disagree with us are traitors? How better is life, if we just hand over our will and our trust to the black magician? To the Satanist who pretends to expose Satanists, but never does. Mind 2 finds the patterns which are hinted at within the hypnotic suggestions, and that becomes hypnotic truth…

Q as liar? Fantasy and community?

Q also claimed that sometimes they would issue false information deliberately, some say to misguide the real criminals. This admission protects everything Q says. False information could be said to not really come from Q, or was a deliberate deception for some reason. This meant that any vaguely clear statement which turned out to be so obviously wrong, that even Q followers could not believe it, was easy to explain away, or forget. If Q says straight out sometimes they lie – who knows what to trust? This is just like Trump. People no longer know what is intended to be true, what is just ignorance and what is deceit. How many times does Q have to lie, before it all seems untrue, more untrue than not, only accidentally true on occasions, or people bed down with a hypothetical truth that they will protect from challenge?

The end result is that whatever takes off amongst readers is what what they elaborate, what people need to hear to make sense of the world, and which gave them a sense of accomplishment – people issue youtube ‘news’ videos – “You are the news now,” “Do your own research,” “Have faith in you own research”. While this further engages the participants, it could lead to a situation where if a source disagrees with Q on anything it seems obviously false, and cannot be trusted. If you don’t hear anything that Q is talking about in the mainstream media, that is because that media is part of the conspiracy and is actively suppressing the information. If you do hear something that confirms, or makes sense of, Q it must be true. So QAnon the movement became, more or less, completely self-referential and self-reinforcing. What was true would be what other Q followers said was true. And some of them might think “disinformation is necessary,” and just lie for some higher purpose – whatever that was? Supporting Trump? Supporting the swamp Trump cultivated? Supporting the take down of Trump?

These processes of trust and distrust build community and closeness amongst those who hang out for more drops from Q or who attempt to make sense of Q. The community builds up the sense that something important is happening here concerning the future of the USA, and ‘we’ are participating. People accepted what they were told because others they respected did, while saying that was only something that happened to those outside their community. Sadly, what is to say we cannot be conditioned by any media/information, unless we are critical of it? As they say “where we go one, we go all” or “WWG1WGA,” which sounds a bit like the sheep they condemn others for being, but let’s assume that is not true, and it just indicates following where the ‘evidence’ takes them, as long as it does not invalidate Q.

Satanic pedophiles

Opposition to Q, further proves Q had something, because wouldn’t the Satanic pedophiles oppose Q in all possible ways? “Many in our govt worship Satan.” “These people worship  Satan_ some openly show it.” Although Q mentions Satan relatively little, it seems to be elaborated by followers; its a meme they magnify.

Q promises action is being taken, even if we don’t see it:

The pedo networks are being dismantled.
The child abductions for satanic rituals (ie Haiti and other 3rd world countries) are paused (not terminated until players in custody).

QPosts 1 Nov-2017

It certainly attracts attention, and I’ve certainly met people who think Trump is warring against organised high level pedophiles, despite the fact the only publicised arrests have been of friends of his, who previously escaped because of friends of his.

The elite pedophilia thing is not impossible. Organisations like the Catholic Church have behaved as if they were run by pedophiles to protect pedophiles and other rapists, so we cannot assume that no other high level organisations would be run in the same way. We also know that hidden pedophile rings do exist online. Online, anyone can find anything if they search hard enough, and police do break some of them. This is reported in the mainstream media, easily.

The odd thing is that Donald Trump could be seen as the person fighting pedophile rapists. That is hard to believe. He is a person who reveled in sexual assault, even if it was largely imaginary. Many women allege he behaved ‘inappropriately’ towards them. He seems to be a serial adulterer and user of prostitutes. He not only at one time had largely unreported, but real, charges against him of raping a thirteen year old girl. These charges were dropped as he became president, because the woman involved received death threats. He was a friend of Epstein’s who knew about Epstein’s tastes and did nothing about it, not even break off friendship, for years. He also knew, and hired, various other people who favoured Epstein. He specifically shouted out to Maxwell, when she was arrested, to wish her well. He deliberately had a woman who was repeatedly raped as a child unnecessarily executed for murder. We might as logically expect him to run a pedophile ring as be against it. Perhaps Q provides cover for this? Do the research….

The ‘Secret of Media’, is hidden

Some of Q, is not unreasonable:

What happens when 90% of the media is controlled/owned by (6) corporations?
What happens when those same corporations are operated and controlled by a political ideology?
What happens when the news is no longer free from bias?
What happens when the news is no longer reliable and independent?
What happens when the news is no longer trustworthy?
What happens when the news simply becomes an extension/arm of a political party?
Fact becomes fiction?
Fiction becomes fact?
When does news become propaganda? [more]

Qposts 22-Nov-2019

‘Of course’, there is no analysis of the normal process of monopoly, oligopoly and control in capitalism. The post relies on the standard uninvestigated rightwing meme that the US media is ‘liberal’ or pro-Democrat, rather than pro-corporate, or biasedly pro-Republican and geared at benefitting its owners and advertisers. Q does not suggest Right wing media bias. News could equally become propaganda when it belongs to Murdoch, or other ideologically committed billionaires, who stack their media with propagandists who promote the idea that any news which disagrees with their position is both lies and politically motivated. Q suggests that bad news stories about Trump, no matter how well documented, show there is a conspiracy against Trump and against decent Americans, not that Trump might be bad. Q people have to stand outside the supposed group-think of those who think Trump is a problem, and join the group-think of denying that Trump is incompetent, corrupt, not clearing the swamp, etc. – no matter how clear Trump’s failings would seem if you investigated him with an open mind. By all means, “do your own research,” but don’t assume that only pro-Trump sources are genuine, lest you want to be mindwashed.

Just remember the lamestream media could not be bothered to report the charges of Trump raping adolescents or many of his war actions, before thinking it is inherently anti-Trump.

If Trump was a Satanist, we might ask, does Trump enjoy other people’s deaths? Is this why he had people executed on his way out? Is this why he pretended Covid would not kill many Americans, even now when over 400,000 Americans (current figures, likely to get bigger) have died? Is this why he ignored Covid after the election, to pay people back for not voting him in? Is this why he allows companies more freedom to pollute and poison people? Is this why Trump media also pretends the virus is not real? It is sacrificing its watchers to some ‘higher cause’?

Did Trump pardon those who entered the Capitol Building for him, or did he pardon politicians who were convicted for defrauding people for money, or convicted of tax or financial fraud, people who committed war crimes, or high level people who were convicted for illegal acts protecting him? Is this defending the swamp and casting aside the principled? What does your media say?

Q is dead, but Q is not dead

That Q was, at best, largely fake, should be relatively clear to everyone by now. The Storm never happened. There never were any mass arrests carried out by Trump, even at the last minute. There never was any outside evidence of the plots that Q generated awareness of. There were no trials. Three years of promises with nothing to show, except winding up support for Trump. But who knows, perhaps Q can be saved by pretending the failure of the prophecies was a necessary step towards later success, that so many good people could not have been sold a line so it must be true, or that people misread the drops (not hard) and that Q did not bother to let anyone know…. In which case Q is at best unreliable, and we still are not certain Q was other than a complete fake.

Acknowledged failure does not mean Q will not start up again, or that people who are dedicated will not keep it going, but it needs a new rationale. And that may take a while to get going…. So don’t give up on it yet, only 4 years till the next attempt (at best).

Because QAnon was so widespread in the ‘Right0sphere’, the domain of dedicated Right wing theory and propaganda, people who frequent that zone are almost certainly influenced by Q memes and Q provoked fantasy, even if they have never knowingly directly engaged with the Q community, and even if they thought Q was loopy. They share some things in common to begin with, so increasing that sharing may not be hard. In that case, is the spread of Qdom limited by the presence of Q, any more? It may have its own self-generating base, and so will probably continue, even if it drops in popularity, and it may well resurface later on, when all the disproving factors have been forgotten.

Q and real politics

Part of Q’s success involves what I have called ‘shadow politics’. That is the ability to displace evil on to outgroups, or the ‘other side’ in a binary political system. Because the other side is not us, and we are good, they become the repository of all our suppressed, or unacknowledged desires. Through this thoroughly human process, we are able to truly identify the evil and fight it. Fighting that evil, and hopefully expelling it, bonds us together in community, while also making the separation between the groups sharper and more intense.

As it is harder to talk across groups, it becomes easier to believe they are deluded and evil. Because this separation is so involved in fantasy, there is no limit to what can seem to be true, in terms of their evil and our good. You can see this in action with people condemning those others involved in QAnon, almost as much as you can see it in the QAnon movement itself.

Politics and economics also tend to become caught in fantasies and projections which are collective and cultural, and indeed even make collective culture. It might even be the case that effective politics is about the creation of effective fantasies – which can then obstruct people from attending to the reality they are dealing with, and lead to destruction – because they seem so true, and they are so easy to communicate. One important thing in research is to attempt to prove you are right, the other is to explore how much you can be wrong. This is difficult when fantasies are involved, and is almost never encouraged by leaders, whose power often depends on you accepting their truth.

What Q does indicate, and what should be taken seriously, is the shear amount of alienation in the US population, and how deeply uninvolved, or frightened, at least 30% or so of potential voters feel about political process. How they feel the ruling elites do not listen to them, the intellectual elites despise them, and the media is untruthful – and, sadly, there is real point to that feeling. This is significant. For many people, it feels as if the current world is being run by evil geniuses (or evil morons), who have no morals at all.

We can assert that the ideologies of capitalism have let people down, because those ideologies have no capacity to explain what is happening to people, or give consolation. People have little hope – nothing indicates that doing what they are supposed to do (like ‘work hard’) actually works for them. They are losing money and life chances. Life is going downhill, for them and their children. It shows they feel they are the victims of forces they cannot control – and this is probably correct. It may also show they feel that God has abandoned them, or needs a lot of placating to be on their side.

QAnon also shows people’s own heroism, they were prepared to stand up for change, if they thought that change was true. They were prepared to separate from families and community for this truth. That it may not have been true, does not diminish that heroism, or their determination to find things out and take the consequences.

Do Q’s satanic pedophiles exist, at any really important level, any more than the Pizzagate ring existed? Probably not. However, it is important symbolically, as it again could represent the idea that people experience themselves as being at the mercy of predators in their daily lives, which could well be true – they are all subject to the forces of predatory capitalism, and a system which sacrifices normal people for taxcuts for the wealthy, fossil fuels, run down housing, and subsidies for the hyper-wealthy.

If this alienation from politics and from social life, is not taken seriously by people in politics (and religion) and they do not work to fix it, but continue to work to take advantage of it, or dismiss it, then the US will continue to head for tyranny, persecution of innocents and collapse. Everything may well unwind. If steps are not taken, the future could be every bit as horrific as Q suggests.

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Summary of Mirowski’s thirteen Commandments of neoliberalism

January 17, 2021

See The Thirteen Commandments of Neoliberalism and Mirowski Road from Mont Peleron, pp. 434-40 (slightly shorter list). The originals are much better of course. My comments are in ‘>>’ marked paragraphs.

I’ve changed the names of the commandments, Mirowski is even less pithy than myself….

1) Neoliberal markets have to be constructed.

Neoliberal markets will not arrive naturally. They have to be constructed.

As Michel Foucault presciently observed in 1978, “Neoliberalism should not be confused with the slogan ‘laissez-faire,’ but on the contrary, should be regarded as a call to vigilance, to activism, to perpetual interventions.”

Neoliberalism is not Conservatism, or liberty in action, but a mode of authority – whatever it pretends. Society and the State have to be transformed to build the right conditions for, and maintain, their kind of ‘free markets’, and the kind of power they prefer.

2) The Market is a paradoxical God

The ‘free market’, is more or less a holy non-describable object – which has to be protected and constructed, but which has existed since the dawn of humanity, and in Mises’ arguments can be deduced from a priori principles. For Hayek, the market is the ultimate information processor – it could be seen as an abstract (perhaps all knowing) brain – no humans can understand it, influence it, or plan for it – other than to set it up and enforce it. [This sets up a paradox, how do you enforce the rule of something you cannot understand?]

Despite these difficulties, the aim of neoliberalism is to make society subordinate to the market. This will supposedly bring liberty and, in popular presentations, prosperity for all.

  • It appears to me, that neoliberals use a really naïve Marxist argument to assert that society is totally conditioned by economic structures, ie. the market. So if the market can be defined as “free”, then people will be free. They conveniently ‘forget’ that groups of people in markets exert power through the market, especially with enough wealth. We need to remember that determinism can be confused, and multi-factorial, in complex systems.

3) Markets make a virtuous spontaneous order

Neoliberals assume ‘free markets’ are adaptive evolutionary forces, and always produce the best adaptations for humans. Markets are the natural, and dominant, condition of human existence.

  • They don’t allow the idea that (free) markets, like other evolutionary systems, can be maladaptive from the point of view of some of the creatures participating in the System. Many creatures die out through evolutionary processes. Humans could be one of those creatures that die out in markets, for example, when profit unintentionally undermines the conditions of planetary existence.

Neoclassical, and most other forms of, economics can admit that markets fail, are incomplete, or produce strange and harmful results. Neoliberals cannot, because if we believed maladaptation was possible, we might be tempted to try and prevent harmful behaviour by corporations, and impinge upon that corporation’s liberty to do whatever it liked, even its its actions destroyed the possibility of healthy relatively stable life.

Neoliberals conventionally reject all such recourse to defects or glitches, in favor of a narrative where evolution and/or “spontaneous order” brings the market to ever more complex states of self-realization, which may escape the ken of mere humans. 

  • In other words, market perfection becomes an article of faith. There is no argument, or evidence, which could, even in theory, be used to convert neoliberals to reality. All problems in the Market are, by fiat, laid at the feet of government, no matter what business people do, or how much business organisations have bought the government in the market.

4) Keep the State, but pretend otherwise

Whatever they might say, Neoliberals do not want to abolish the State. They want to make a strong State exist solely to protect the ‘free market’ and its players. The State establishes the conditions for neoliberal markets, and attempts to prevent disruption of those markets by ordinary citizens, or politicians, calling for equity or fairness.

Under neoliberalism, the State becomes subject to, and judged by, auditing and financial accountability processes. Financial accountability is more important than moral accountability, or responsibility for the effects of policies on citizens. Citizens become customers, with no impact on how they are governed. All possible Services become contracted out to the private sector, including services which monitor the market for possible corruption, and the bad decisions of large companies which are overly risky for the whole market. This renders these monitoring services open to corruption and misinformation. While deficits are bad, in practice deficits which arising from subsidies to big business can largely be ignored.

The neoliberal State does not shrink, whatever they claim:

if anything, bureaucracies become more unwieldy under neoliberal regimes…… In practice, “deregulation” always cashes out as “reregulation,” only under a different set of ukases [or arbitrary strict commands].

  • In particular the State exists to protect the big players; oligopolies and monopolies. Small players are of little interest.
  • The State keeps property in the hands of the deserving, and enforces contract.
  • In neoliberalism, ordinary citizens are to have no impact on how they are governed. This is neoliberal liberty.

5) Treat politics as if it were a market.

The abstract “rule of law” is frequently conflated with or subordinated to conformity to the neoliberal vision of an ideal market…. there is no separate sphere of the market, fenced off, as it were, from the sphere of civil society. Everything is fair game for marketization.

  • This time we get bleak Marxism. There is nothing safe from the market. Every single thing or process, and all values, should be monetarised.
  • However, you must never admit that markets are political, and involve political action by companies to get the best regulations for themselves, and to gain subsidies for themselves.
  • In this set up, any action that makes a profit is good. There is no responsibility outside of making a profit. Hence all political and legal acts and decisions are likely for sale. Corruption is the norm.

6) Labour is unimportant

Classical liberalism identified “labor” as the human act that both created and justified private property. Neoliberlism:

lays waste to older distinctions between production and consumption rooted in the labor theory of value, and reduces the human being to an arbitrary bundle of “investments,” skill sets, temporary alliances (family, sex, race), and fungible body parts…. Under this regime, the individual displays no necessary continuity from one “decision” to the next. 

Mirowski argues that individuals are not important to neoliberals. Individuals are just conglomerations, projects, ready to be broken up when needed. The corporation is a person, the person is a corporation. No one has any interests

  • I’m not sure I entirely agree with this. I think is is possible that this is what neoliberals aim for, for the plebs, or the workers. You are what you are paid for, no more, and you are subject to the flows of the market, and if you cannot cope with that, or object to that, then tough. I suspect individual interest exists at the managerial and stockholder level, where market power exists, provided that personal interest is submerged in the corporate interest, or the owners’ interest.
  • The problem for me, is that, it seems that for neoliberal rights come directly out of ownership. You have the rights of ownership of your body, for example, and no more rights than that. Which in practice means you can be bought, polluted, disposed of, paid off, and so on. If you cannot defend your property or cannot protect yourself against disposability in a court case, you have nothing.

7) Liberty has nothing to do with politics and democracy

Freedom is hard to define, but it has nothing to do with democracy, and absolutely nothing to do with cooperating in acts against the ruling class, or the ruling market.

Hayek feels he must distinguish “personal liberty” from subjective freedom, since personal liberty does not entail political liberty. Late in life, Milton Friedman posited three species of freedom — economic, social and political — but it appears that economic freedom was the only one that mattered. 

In neoliberal theory, coercion can only come from governments, never from markets, corporations, or lack of money. There is no form of human freedom which might require support, help, or a useful context. Freedom is simply the absence of any restrictions, other than market restrictions – which are considered to be natural.

They suggest that resistance to their project is futile, as going along with it is the only freedom that exists.

  • As suggested by Slobodian, the only real neoliberal freedom is submission to the market, as constructed by neoliberals, and to the results it generates. Again they pretend the results of human action are as inescapable as the ‘laws’ of nature – indeed the laws of nature are apparently far more flexible than the market, which is one reason why they do not worry about market effects on the planet.
  • Freedom usually becomes a choice between priced options, or products.

7a) Knowledge is limited

Knowledge is limited, except for knowledge about how good the market is. There is no real information outside the information processor of the market. We could never effectively do anything knowledgeably other than act in the market. “Knowledge can be used to its fullest only if it is comprehensively owned and priced.” Education is not aimed at being transformative, or cultivating a personal good independent of the market, but to be geared at fitting into jobs and subservience to the market.

I don’t understand the following sentence but here it is anyway:

Meditation upon our limitations leads to inquiry into how markets work, and meta-reflection on our place in larger orders, something that neoliberals warn is beyond our ken. Knowledge then assumes global institutional dimensions, and this undermines the key doctrine of the market as transcendental superior information processor.

  • The fact that, if there is such a thing as a universal information processor, it is not the market but the global ecology (which gives severe feedback to people who act contrary to its dynamics), is irrelevant. In neoliberalism, markets rule over everything and this is not only supposedly a fact, but supposedly a moral good.
  • Everything, and everyone, is only worth the price it can command on the market. Free stuff (like air) is only good if it can be made saleable.

8) Capital must flow globally.

No government has the right to stop the flow of its countries’ money or products. To support this lack of rights, neoliberals invented non-democratic institutions “for the economic and political discipline of nation-states.” That is, they made national attempts at financial sovereignty, or market governance, weaker still. The idea was to impose neoliberal political principles on all people engaged in trade.

  • Neoliberal institutions enforced lowering of social security and social safety nets, attempted to prohibit any attempt to favour local producers or entrepreneurs. They favoured paying back debt to overseas lenders above local prosperity. They favoured the resources of small, or ‘underdeveloped’, states being plundered by overseas companies, as that is what happens in an open market. They appeared to want to free the market up for the biggest players, which would remove the smaller players who did not have the economies of scale.

This series of action probably also furthered “the growth of shadow and offshore banking”, the growth of tax shelters and so on.

  • This development is helped considerably by the development of the internet and communication networks.
  • This development also furthered the neoliberal protection of corporate monopolies. The bigger the company, the more effective it can be at suppressing other commercial developments throughout the world. Of course, ‘the market’ may lead to incompetent monopolies collapsing, but that is not evidence that the monopoly was great, or satisfying its customers, in the first place.

9) Massive inequality in wealth is entirely natural and beneficial

If some people starve or stagnate while others accumulate sizable proportions of the world’s wealth, it is not a failing of the market. This result is all about ability and shows the vibrancy of capitalism. Massive inequality is supposedly a force for progress, not a force for oppression; “the rich are not parasites, but a boon to mankind.” They, and only they, generate wealth. Demands for greater equality, or constraints on inequality, are just the result of envy, and come from people who are sore losers. Neoliberals pretend that inequalities of wealth do not lead to inequalities of power, life satisfaction or survival. If they did admit this, it would not bother them.

“Social justice” is blind, because it remains forever cut off from the Wisdom of the Market. 

  • Indeed, any residual attempts to support ordinary people are going to be blamed for economic hardship and market collapses. In practice, the State exists to bail out the already hyper-wealthy from their mistakes and hardships. This shows the real politics of the “free market”.
  • Neoliberalism insists on inheritance of wealth, but does not factor it in to its analysis of the workings of the market and the concentration of wealth. Everyone supposedly has equal opportunity to participate.

10) “Corporations can do no wrong, or at least they are not to be blamed if they do.”

starting with the University of Chicago law and economics movement, and then progressively spreading to treatments of entrepreneurs and the “markets for innovation,” neoliberals began to argue consistently that not only was monopoly not harmful to the operation of the market, but an epiphenomenon attributable to the misguided activities of the state and powerful interest groups. 

As corporations can do no wrong, it was also argued that Corporate heads needed bigger salaries, share options, and bonuses, together with golden handshakes when they stuffed up and were asked to leave.

  • This excess wealth acted as a signal to the market that the firm was hiring the very best possible, while the wealth the high level executives earned showed how good they were and, by comparison, how useless ordinary workers were. It was a way of transferring wealth away from the workers, and legitimising that transfer.
  • Corporate success indicates corporate virtue. They worked with the market, which is the measure of value

11) Markets always supply the best solution

“Any problem, economic or otherwise, has a market solution, given sufficient ingenuity.” In effect this means transferring power and solutions to those who are successful in the market and wealthy, and as pointed out earlier, ignoring any suggestion that systems are not always beneficially adaptive for all participants.

pollution is abated by the trading of “emissions permits”; inadequate public education is rectified by “vouchers”; auctions can adequately structure exclusionary communication channels;  poverty-stricken sick people lacking access to health care can be incentivized to serve as guinea pigs for privatized clinical drug trials; poverty in underdeveloped nations can be ameliorated by “microloans”; terrorism by disgruntled disenfranchised foreigners can be offset by a “futures market in terrorist acts.”

This tends to make financial securitisation even more complicated – as was seen in the 2007 financial crash. And it does not matter if no one understood what they were doing as the market would sort it out for the best. If the market collapsed with massive pain for those who were supposed to be served by the market, that was acceptable, as long as those who profited from the market were helped out. Thus in the financial crisis, many American Citizens lost their homes, because banks called in the loans which were geared to be unpayable. The banks then put the houses on the market and the house market collapsed, which threatened the banks, and the bank executives were looked after, not the home owners.

Neoliberals argued that:

the best people to clean up the crisis were the same bankers and financiers who created it in the first place, since they clearly embodied the best understanding of the shape of the crisis. 

  • Taxpayer’s money could have been given to home owners to help pay off the loans, and the loans made less penalising. This would have prevented homelessness and kept the banks in business, but that was not even a visible option. Money had to go directly to the bankers, and many neoliberal politicians complained when Obama insisted that the money was merely a loan, not a gift which could go straight to executive bonuses and parties.

12) Expand the prison system

[N]eoliberal policies lead to unchecked expansion of the penal sector, as has happened in the United States…. [I]ntensified state power in the police sphere (and a huge expansion of prisoners incarcerated) is fully complementary with the neoliberal conception of freedom. In the opinion of the neoliberal Richard Posner, “The function of criminal sanction in a capitalist market economy, then, is to prevent individuals from bypassing the efficient market.” In other words “Participate in the market, or else!”

Criminal law applies to the people. Tort law, or escaping the law, applies to the wealthy (unless, perhaps, they have defrauded the wealthy). The poor or dispossessed need to be ordered and punished, to protect the market.

economic competition imposes natural order on the rich, because they have so much to lose. The poor need to be kept in line by a strong state, because they have so little to lose.

Again, amongst the commercial class, nobody was found guilty of any fraud or crime in the financial crisis, despite multiple appearances of deceptive behaviour, but thousands of ordinary Americans were found guilty of being behind on their mortgages and thrown out of their homes.

  • Private prisons have no profit incentive to rehabilitate prisoners. They have an incentive to get repeat custom, and thus make more money, or at least stay in business. They increase crime for profit
  • They also have an incentive to use prisoners as cheap slave labour, and thus compete with normal workers, to lower wages.

13) Tolerate Supportive Authoritarian movements.

Neoliberals will support whatever will support the authority of wealth and corporate power. Hence, neoliberals developed a deliberate policy of courting the religious Right, so as to justify the ‘morals’ of the market and keep votes.

  • The ideal religions were those who asserted that wealth was good, that God rewarded the virtuous and ‘the saved’ with wealth, and that those without wealth were without faith, otherwise immoral, or being tested by God.
  • This has now morphed into an acceptance and support of authoritarian fascism, as with Trump and the promotion of white power, to support corporate power. This will have the same consequences as it did in Nazi Germany. The initially controllable will prove not to be controllable, and wealth will be preserved by accommodation to the fascism and murder.

Conclusion

Neoliberalism provides ersatz liberty, bounded by mass imprisonment. It promotes faith in the “free market”, and denies the possibility that free markets can ever have, or do have, destructive results.

Destruction only arises through government acting on the market to make the market fairer.

Liberty is defined as having nothing to do with political participation for ordinary people. It ignores the participation of the wealthy in the State.

It pretends corporations cannot, and do not, have political power.

It disciplines workers, and rewards executive incompetence, through the State.

It is a political movement which exists to support corporate power, and plutocracy, acting within the market and the State.

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Trumping peace

January 15, 2021

As we know the Republicans are calling for Trump to be left alone, to make peace and not dangerously rile his followers.

By this we know two things which should have been blindingly obvious for a long time.

Republicans, as seen in Congress, not ordinary American members of the party, are:

  • not the party of law and order and
  • not conservatives.

The are the party of law and order for everyone other than themselves. They seem to think they are the sacred elite who can do anything and never have to face up to responsibility for their actions.

They spent years upon years chasing the Clintons and failing to get anywhere, but with one of their own who is blatantly and repeatedly corrupt they are prepared to look the other way to “make peace”.

With the last impeachment, they decided not to hear the evidence and not to bring Trump before them to testify; well he might have perjured himself out of habit and that would have been bad – for them.

There would be screams if the Democrats had done this with either of the Clintons, but the Democrats believed that law applied to everyone. So the Clintons stood before the bar and the committees to answer questions. Republican elites apparently don’t have to do that.

It also seems perfectly ok to these Republicans to demand long prison terms for BLM rioters, but to excuse Trumpists and neo-fascists. Is this a surprise, or is that the normal policy of privileging their own side?

We know these Republicans are not conservatives as they have spent the last forty years ripping down the checks and balances that protect ordinary people from capitalism and the misfortune which can affect anyone, while making sure the wealth made by workers goes to the hyper-wealthy in a truly vast piece of social engineering. We can also note that because of their media, they have been able to use the justified discontent of majority America at the results of these policies, to get support to do even more of this social engineering.

Here they seem to be simply demonstrating they have no respect for truth, impartiality, tradition, responsibility or anything other than their victory, and the victory of the hyper-rich they represent. Victory is all. Obliteration of opposition is all. This is not Conservatism.

It is true that Republicans would face difficulties if they impeached Trump for lying about the election to overthrow the result and for his stirring of ‘insurrection’ to impose more neoliberal dominance. If Trump is impeached for this, then what do they do about the 130 or so other Republicans who also lied about the election and attempted to overthrow the result, or at least cast doubt on the result? Should those Republicans be cast out of office as well, with fresh elections for their seats, or should we just go along with the idea that Republicans can do anything and its ok?

Its clearly a moral quandary.

Given this lack of respect for law and tradition, the Republicans do appear to be a party of proto-fascists. That could well be why they don’t want to offend those neo-fascists who support Trump, as those people could form Republican shock troops.

The real question remains whether Republican Elites will bring peace by standing up for principles, and making sure that the message is given that it is not acceptable to lie, cheat and threaten violence, or whether they will just protect themselves, and declare anything is ok if it could bring Republicans more power to oppress everyone else.

The request for peace, is a request to let their bygones and failures be bygones, so they can keep steaming ahead to more of the same.

Anyone who was conservative and in support of law and order, should recognise this.

*****************

Endnote:

There are people commenting that some Republicans want to impeach Trump, but their and their families lives have been threatened if they do [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6]. I clearly don’t know the truth of these allegations, but they are not improbable. We should remember that Trump was refused the rights to a Sydney casino because of his ties with the NY mafia. We should also remember the Right’s Stochastic Terrorism, anyone could be being threatened, when news commentary says “if we don’t stop the impeachment of Trump, then people might get hurt” – rather than “we should stand up to intimidation”.

Sadly this shows where Trump has led the Republicans. While it is easy for me to say, it is probably true that if you yield to terrorism and threats of terrorism, then you will face more terrorism, and the demands will get more and more intense.

You have to stand up for principle, or you will be chained by violence.

It is also true that a Republican Party which was in favour of Rule of Law, and was Conservative, would publicize the threats, and their stance against them, to show they could not be swayed in this manner.

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