Posts Tagged ‘social category theory’

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Jordan Peterson’s ‘modes of silencing’

August 28, 2019

Having briefly discussed a lecture by Jordan Peterson on Foucault, we can now look at the way that the talk functions as an attempt to silence, or annihilate Foucault or anyone who might mention Foucault. Whether or not this lecture is absolutely representative of Peterson’s techniques is irrelevant. The techniques are present and apparently used effectively.

I suspect the reason these techniques are not immediately visible is that similar techniques are used across right wing discourse to suppress thinking, and people are so used to them that they become invisible. The main aim of the technique is to create a boundary between the in-group (us people who follow Jordan Peterson or the right in politics) and an outgroup of post-modernists and leftists. The in-group are good, and the out-group are bad. You need only listen to the in-group and despise the out-group. The out-group have nothing whatever worth listening to. President Trump is a master of this technique as well, although I’m not claiming his methods to achieve this are exactly the same as Peterson’s.

Technique 1: Accusations of moral turpitude and evil in the out-group. These accusations are unspecified, but severe. Perhaps the vagueness about the accusations inflates the possible evil, as it is absolutely unclear what it is, in the way the best monsters first appear as vague shadows, troubling hints or violent movements in the dark – things we had best not know. In this case, the aim of the lecture seems to be to keep the ingroup from curiosity, familiarity or discussion. Let’s keep ‘the others’ vague and messy. The more uninformed the audience is, and the more unformed the opposition are allowed to be, the more scary ‘the others’ are.

Technique 2: Accusations of incompetence and impracticality. Foucault is held to be an example of a person whose mendacity and stupidity would bring any structured organisation to its knees. This is, perhaps, why we have to be told later on that competence is vital to modern society. Something which might otherwise appear obvious. If we learn about these people in the out-group, or become contaminated by them, we too might destroy the hierarchy we belong to and are accepted by; we will certainly be rejected by our current in-group as incompetent or impractical or something…..

Technique 3: Guilt by association. Foucault is a Marxist (whether he was or wasn’t), he is thus responsible for mass-death, or for ignoring mass death. This man is clearly, at best, a hypocrite, but most likely evil. We don’t even really need to bother to find out what he, or Marx, thought, as people who claim to be Marxists. or who are claimed to be Marxists, are evil. Clearly Foucault is no better. You don’t really need to understand this person or the out-group in general, and everyone who says you do is simply a fellow traveler. By the same argument, clearly, every Christian is Torquemada.

Technique 4: Suppression of the out-groups ethical concerns. Peterson suppresses any audience awareness of the moral concerns of Foucault and other post-modernists, again to make it seem the out-group is composed of evil people. As they have no morals, again they can be dismissed.

Technique 5: Refutation by name-calling Peterson refutes by abuse, and establishes his ethics and authority by slander – which is disappointing as he has interesting remarks on ethics elsewhere, but here post-modernism becomes deployed as a category of abuse. “You postmodernist, you”. There are things people cannot discuss or defend without a high probability of reflexive abuse from those influenced by the authority of Peterson. He acts as an authoritative exemplar, for others to follow, of argument by abuse. Those put in the outgroup are only worthy of abuse. This helps separate the groups, generate mutual fury, and helps to prevent any real discussion occurring.

Technique 6: confusing the differences and making a mess. Peterson messes different thinkers together, saying different idea-sets are the same. This act turns his audience’s awareness of “post-modernism,” as a category, into an incoherent mush, which does not make any sense. This reinforces the idea that anything he can classify as ‘post-modern’ is not worth investigating, engaging with, or discussing. The techniques means what he is discussing does not make sense. Any people categorized as belonging to the post-modern out-group must be equally incoherent.

Technique 7: Lack of references and isolation. Peterson gives no references to texts by Foucault or anyone he is criticising. This helps to keep people away from the texts, by making it hard to find them or read them, and keeps the audience within his framework. People are much less likely to go and even look at something sympathetic to Foucault, or which tries to explain his ideas. They won’t come out of the lecture with a curiosity which might lead to questioning. They will, most likely, stay within the hierarchy and hear the teacher, obeying his authority by default and by lack of knowledge, and of not knowing where to go to check the teacher’s teaching.

All these steps hide and justify Jordan Peterson’s essential step which is not to expound or criticise Foucault in any detail. Foucault is clearly so messy, evil and incompetent, that making an effort to engage with his ideas would be a waste of time. It might even be corrupting in itself. Its dirty and filthy, lets avoid it like we might bypass a dead and decaying rat on the street. It is lazy, at best for someone who claims to be an academic.

Technique 8: Ignore any common faults or failings; blame them on one side alone . Peterson might make reference to a common fault like “science denial” but he only references the denial on the one “side” to condemn that side alone. He also does not explain the differences, between the two forms of “denial”. Some post-modernists could assert that there is always a social and historical aspect to scientific practice which influences what can be tested, theorised or accepted as true. Others might show how science has been embedded in social power structures and relations and been influenced by that embedding. To me, such ideas seem almost truisms. How would we be able to make knowledge outside of social processes and with total objectivity? This does not happen, or is difficult to ensure, but we might be able to become more or less involved in those processes. We can become aware of some of these ‘unconscious’ processes which guide our thought and possibly weaken some of them. Possibly that idea is threatening to his deliberate, or accidental, construction of in-groups and out-groups, and embedding his audience in them.

Technique 9: Relentless negativity. There is apparently nothing interesting or good in Foucault or any thinker who can be classified as post-modernist at all. This is almost certainly improbable for any group of thinkers. Even under Stalin and Hitler, with terrifying punishments for thinking ‘wrong thoughts’ there were still some interesting thinkers. For example Vygotsky, Bakhtin, & Bukharin under Stalin and Junger, Heidegger & Schmitt under Hitler. However, the technique helps silence Foucault and other post-modernists; they are simply made not worth listening to.

Technique 10: Refutation by unpleasant consequences. Part of the relentless negativity, is the repeated use of the argument that if some set of propositions (which apparently never need to be given precisely), appear to have unpleasant consequences, or disrupt our common sense, then they must be wrong. However, if thinking reveals possible unpleasant consequences, then perhaps we should think about, ot deal with, those consequences?

Technique 11: Avoidance of unpleasant consequences. This follows on from the previous technique. There is no sense that we might have to face up to the unpleasant consequences, we just avoid them by denying their possibility. This reinforces many kinds of right wing denial – not only of climate change or ecological destruction, but of the finitude of humanity on this planet, the effects of coal burning and pollution, the possibility that great tech will not arrive in time, the growth of plutocracy and the failure of ‘free markets’ to deliver liberty, good government, and unbounded good results for all. Through this technique, we can all live by asserting good things will happen if we don’t question the real hierarchies we belong to and the beliefs they encourage.

Technique 12: Always imply our hierarchies are good and necessary. Defending existing Western capitalist hierarchies seems to be important to Peterson. Hence, while many things can be good and bad, there is no sense in which the in-group’s hierarchies can be both good and bad. The implication is that because hierarchy might be necessary for the in-group’s functioning, the hierarchy is good and only questioned by evil and incoherent people in the bad out-group.

Technique 13: Our Good, is unchallengeable, because its Good. Finally, he implies that the outgroup can attack what the ingroup holds to be true and good, and thus should be ignored as this proves they are evil. For example, the out-group may attack Western Civilisation, or capitalism. But there is no attempt to understand why they might think like that. He can just be stunned by these propositions, as they are so obviously stupid. This is yet another example of the idiocy of these thinkers and another implicit explanation of why we should not even bother to find out what they say. We should just stay with our common sense and allow our teacher to tell us what we know to be truth.

Technique 14: Bold assertion. Peterson expresses no humility, or even doubt that he understands what he is talking about absolutely perfectly, even if he does not expound the thought he is supposed to be criticising. I presume if he were to mention that Foucault and Derrida can be difficult thinkers, this would be considered a fault in them, and further evidence they had nothing to say, presumably like Kant and other difficult thinkers have nothing to say. He cannot admit difficulty, because he aims at intellectual authority and, perhaps, admitting difficulty might suggest he is not superior. Personally, I prefer clear thinkers, but that does not mean I understand all difficult thinkers easily or completely. As I said, I’m not sure I always follow Peterson’s thinking, and I know he is more complex than is coming over in this lecture, but we are dealing with this lecture (which appears to be an excerpt from a longer lecture), and whether or not it is typical we can still learn from it.

Conclusion
His main message to his audience seems to be that “you guys already know Foucault is rubbish, I’m just about to confirm that for you.” He appears to perform a process of letting his audience think they are thinking, rather than encourage them to engage in actual thinking or discussion with other people who might disagree with them. Indeed, he appears to be saying, “such discussion is absolutely fruitless; stay here with me in our superiority and you will understand.” He creates the conditions of self-satisfaction and refusal to engage with others, other than through name-calling and dismissal. This is a form of silencing those put into the out-group category.

I suspect that the out-group is unbounded, there are no limits as to what can be placed there and messed together, while the in-group is pretty demarcated and cut off from the real world. One problem with this, is that all groups have interactions and permeations with their outgroups, and even with processes and things that are not recognized as in or out group. As a result, attempts to limit the cross-over, and make firm categories, are basically destructive of our ability to perceive reality. This is not a good habit to acquire.

If this analysis is correct, then Peterson appears to mesh well with the normal processes and techniques of right wing media and debate.

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Mess of information again

June 30, 2019

One of the problems when discussing communication is that we don’t recognise that communication is not primarily about exchanging accurate information. Communication is about persuasion, power, and building group loyalties and bonds so that cooperation occurs and things can be done. In the 1930s Malinowski described communication as phatic, by which he meant it was primarily about building relationships. While Malinowski concentrated on the positive side of this, building relationships can also involve destroying other relationships. We can reinforce our ‘ingroup’ by showing that some people (our ‘outgroup’) are evil or inferior. By doing this we show that they do not share our values, do not understand us, and they become less persuasive. We no longer have to waste time trying to understand them, we can get on with the action that is urgent.

Communication is primarily a social phenomena rather than a purely informational phenomena.

If people use communication to build bonds with those in their ingroups so things can be done, then they will tend to exchange ‘information’ that does precisely that. If they are building say political groups then they will tend to exchange information which confirms their identities and portrays those who criticise their point of unity as being outsiders, ignorant, stupid, slaves of hostile authority, whose information does not have to be taken seriously.

As people online have very little else (such as physical force, contact, unambiguous presence) to maintain unity, then these symbolic political factors become increasingly important to maintaining both group bonding/identification with a degree of trust and mutual recognition, etc. so communication is possible in the first place.

We can see the same process in climate ‘discussions’ online. People hostile to climate action will accuse those in favour of it of deceit, stupidity and political motivation, and usually appear not to have not read anything from their opposition. The same is often true of people supporting climate action – they routinely denounce people who oppose them as ignorant, stupid, and politically motivated. Neither position encourages discussion, but it does encourage righteous closure, identity group reinforcement and a tendency to accept almost any information if it comes from our own side. “Those [opponents] are really rude and won’t listen. They are bad people. We are good people.”

Therefore information which supports my and my group’s position is more easily seen as accurate or good (even if faked, because it still symbolically points to truth), and information which supports the outgroup’s position is more easily seen as lies.

Another problem with communication is that it is symbolic, it can be an expression of things that the person has no words for, but must point to or imply. At the best this leads to poetry, but at the worse it leads to incoherence. A person may express their sense of marginality, for example, by expressing their dislike of an outgroup which is even more marginal than them. They may talk about protecting their nation from some imprecise or unlikely threat. Much communication may offer this kind of expression, which is unlikely to be accurate in the normal sense of the word.

These kinds of conditions lead to high levels of suspicion of fakery. One way people have of dealing with this is not to see misinformation issued by our ingroup as disqualifying that side, but to say all sides are equally fake, or the other side is even worse. So even when we realise your side lies or is mistaken, then we can still stay with it. This position also demonstrates our media savvy, that we are not being taken in, and therefore demonstrates to that we are correct in supporting our side, because we can say we know when they are wrong!

These dynamics do not mean that both groups are equally inaccurate. It just means good communication does not happen, war is reinforced, and all becomes fair in war (including faking). Again this does not mean that both sides are equally prone to faking, just the conditions for such fakery are being established.

My own feeling, which is obviously caught in this tension, is that what we call polarisation encourages, or naturalises, this kind of bad communication, so it is handy for those who want to build support to encourage the idea that opponents are evil and will play any kind of trick.

In this view, the completely pro-corporate side of politics is promoting policies which cannot deliver what they promise, but do deliver misery, lousy conditions, and political marginalisation for the vast majority of people and huge profit for others. Consequently they have pretty deliberately used what we know about human communication to promote these splits and to keep their voters onside and immune to counter information.

The problem then becomes that this mode of communication and its fake news becomes normal; the mechanisms of generation spread everywhere, and nobody really knows (within a range of doubt) what is actually happening. So few policies can be based on reality any longer, few people can know what is really urgent and group reinforced faith and symbolic expression becomes the major determinate of truth. There are few to no places outside the information mess from which to make accurate judgements all the time. In which case, the plan to reinforce political dominance of the established corporate sector undermines it’s success in inaccuracy.

Communication happens all the time. It is primarily about building groups and persuading people to cooperate. Good accurate communication is difficult, when these other factors get in the way.

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Denying consensus

May 27, 2019

There was comment on the Guardian site recently which shows at least some of the problems with the Left.

It ran something like:

Three really good reasons to deny the science of climate change:

  • 1. Ignorance
  • 2. Stupidity
  • 3. Insanity

    • This formulation tells us nothing. It offers no strategy for persuasion or action. Perhaps, it makes the writer feel better, and heavens we all need to feel better, but it succeeds in making the likelihood of communication and problem solving even less, by name-calling and making barriers and reactions. It puts people who disagree with the speaker(and even some others who might be friendly to those speakers) into dismissible social categories and prevents people from hearing each other.

    It creates problems, it does not diminish them.

    Let’s look at some other reasons people might have for not being active, which are slightly less closed.

  • Fear. People don’t want to think about climate change, because there are no obvious things they can do. It threatens their children and grandchildren, and that is not easy to face. If correct it could be terrifying. Yet we have lived with the threat of nuclear war, population increases and so on, and so far everything is all ok. I spent my youth terrified and nothing happened. Maybe this will be ok, as well?
  • Lack of fear. Everything is in the hands of God. The world is too big to hurt. How is this tiny amount of a perfectly normal gas I breathe out every day going to massively disrupt the whole Earth? It doesn’t make sense. Humans are insignificant in the scheme of things. I cannot change what will be.
  • Sense of probable loss. Loss is painful, and over the last 40 years we have lost out over and over. The promises we were given have not eventuated. You guys trying to stop climate change could take even more away from me and my family. This is another loss. Let’s hope it is as unreal as the promises we were given.
  • Uncertainty as to whether remedies will work. Do we have any guarantees these remedies will work? No? In reality we don’t. It may even now be too late, and plenty of people assure us the costs are way to great to take action without certainty. What are you asking that we should give up again? Why is it always us that are giving up our prospects?
  • Uncertainty about change. Futures are not predictable any more. Who could have guessed this would be happening? Who would guess contemporary technology? Polls are always wrong. Guesses at the future are just guesses, and you are probably using your guesses to gain power over me, and persuade me to act against my interests, like everyone else. Why should I trust you?
  • Experts are often wrong. This is obvious. All of you promised that “free markets” would deliver liberty and prosperity but they haven’t. Even vaguely. They said war in the Middle East would be easy and successful, but its been a total mess, hurt lots of people, and made things worse. Even doctors change their minds every five minutes about what is good or bad for us. They promise cures that never come. These experts are just con-artists without common sense. Everyone makes mistakes you know.
  • Life is overwhelming. I have to make too many decisions. I have pressures from work all the time. My wages and conditions are being cut. I never get any holidays. My boss is a total dickhead. My company is corrupt. I’m not feeling well. My spouse is unhappy. I’m one or two pay days away from family disaster. My kids are acting weird, and I don’t know what to do to help. I’ve too much on my mind. Go away… I don’t need this climate bullshit.
  • Immediate pressures. [Pointed out by Alice Suttie] I have to provide for people around me today. I have to deal with real problems now, not decades, or even just years, in the future. My mother is really sick, I have debt collectors at the door, the electricity may be going to be cut off. I’m busy. I don’t have time to worry about irrelevancies. If you can’t help me now, or propose policies that help me now, then trouble someone else will you?
  • You people are just rude. You obviously don’t understand me. You are obviously not going to listen to me. Why should I listen to you? You are up yourselves, you f+@in alarmist morons

    • There is almost certainly more that could be said here. The advantage of some of these formulations is that the speakers are seen as relatively rational (as people are). We are not dealing with stupidity or insanity which cannot be altered. The statements are largely based on real remarks I have read from people. They are specific, not catastrophizing, not foreclosing of all solutions, like ‘madness’ is. They suggest that some of the problems might be generated by the activist approach, so the approach may need to change. They also suggest that there are specific questions and dialogues which need to be opened and pursued, and that people might be persuadable.

    Now these dialogues may not be easy. They may involved being abused. But the possibility of dialogue and failure also suggests the possibility of learning something new together.

    And that might get somewhere. At least further than thinking the opposition is ignorant, stupid or mad.

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    The Australian Election

    May 20, 2019

    I was uncertain for the whole last week that Labor would win. Partly because the movement of the polls was in the wrong direction, partly because of the relentless misinformation, and partly because Bill Shorten’s speeches were not precise, and did not say what Labor would not do – which was vital. Labor should also have broken with the misinformation that coal mines bring jobs…. but for whatever reason that seemed impossible.

    However the main reason for my despair was reading right wing internet groups. Some of this reading was deliberate and some of this was because I was getting quite a lot of promotional material on Facebook without asking for it. Please note, any remarks here are impressionistic and not a mark of extended research…

    The appearance of these groups is of seething hatred and dedication, together with apparent loathing of general uncertainty and uncertain boundaries in particular.

    Groups tend to argue by abuse and by flat statement as a way of reinforcing boundaries (if you can’t take it then you are not one of ‘us’), but expressions of disgust and certainty are not uncommon online. The point is that ‘we’ are the righteous, and need to expel the different to keep the boundaries going.

    According to participants, nearly everything bad that happens to normal people happens as a result of some left wing policy. Low wages and unemployment, because of restrictions on the economy, migrants, refugees, positive discrimination, green tape and so on. Corporate power is a problem, because the left is all on board and wealthy (a point Tony Abbott made in his retirement speech – it is wealthy electorates who are concerned about climate change, while real people understand the Coalition and know the Coalition is best). Cultural crisis occurs because of cultural marxists, radical homosexuals and transsexuals destroying ‘our culture,’ and weakening its self-preserving boundaries by insisting that foreign Islam, other races and gender constructions are acceptable. It is also felt that Leftists are snobs, hate ‘us’ and make no attempt to understand ‘us’ (or that such attempts are aimed at undermining ‘us’) – and indeed the common left lament that the people have failed has more than a hint of this. Green policies are further attempts to sacrifice working people to rich people’s needs, radical lies and snobbery. Taxation is theft, and its always the working people who get taxed by high taxing parties, which is pretty true; only its the Coalition that does this.

    It is common to see people in these groups blame corruption in the Church, the police or politics on leftist values, or the sixties. There is a single handy explanation for everything, despite 40 years of largely right wing dominance.

    This blaming merges with scapegoating of particular groups, as a form of avoidance of responsibility. And indeed, one of the problems of the modern world is that we are all responsible. Some more than others perhaps, but not ourselves ever – and we all often fight to avoid recognising that part-responsibility.

    The Israel Folau issue (the sacking of a very expensive footballer for claiming gays would go to hell) was surprisingly important because it clearly ‘showed’ oppression of religion, or at the least suppression of authenticity, while demonstrating that the left had joined with the corporate sector in attacking working people who expressed righteous anger with people who attacked gender roles, boundaries and certainties. Again the scare campaign that Labor was going to force our kids to be gender fluid only makes sense in this kind of environment, of existential boundary fear. However, it is a mistake to think that traditional gender roles have much support either, even if people claim they do. Its more complex and flexible than that.

    In a few academic articles I have got into trouble with reviewers for arguing that trust in authority has little to do with belief. While these groups fiercely distrust the left they don’t trust the political right either. If their own side is irrefutably shown to have lied or schemed against them, the response is not to consider the possibility of being wrong, but to state “all media lie,” “all politicians lie,” “both sides are the same” or something similar. This allows people to keep their opinion while dismissing evidence that it may be false. This is what contemporary skepticism (or ‘independent thinking’) means, being skeptical of counter-evidence to your own, or group’s, position.

    People seek to defeat the uncertainty of a complex crumbling society by being stable, righteous, and avoiding responsibilty by finding scapegoats, who, if removed would solve all the problems people face. For the left it might be capitalists or neoliberals, for the right it is leftists, feminists, gays, transsexuals and sometimes abortioneers. Obviously I think the first position is more likely to be correct

    The Coalition campaign made fertile use of these trends – they are much better than Labor at it, perhaps because it avoids criticising real power. More and more, Labor depends on the powers that undermine them, for funding, publicity and respectability.

    The basic assumptions of these groups were supported by the Murdoch press and other media promoting the general social fantasies they depend on such as ideas that the coalition manage the economy better, the economy is primary, virtue involves identifying or punishing out-groups. The Labor party ignored this part of life, or perhaps they did not see it or dismissed it as the work of a few fanatics, rather than of a relatively large group of people, who would support anyone who promised to get rid of what they perceived as the leftist challenge to their existence.

    Due to communication having to involve interpretation rather than transmission of meaning, it is more or less impossible for such groups to actually hear what people on the other side are saying. Once identified as from that other side, then the boundaries are to be reinforced: that person’s comments are to be attacked, and the person ideally driven away if they cannot be converted. This then leads to a shouting war which tends to reinforce the separation and the further rejection of ‘good communication’.

    What to do? The first thing is to admit these groups exist, and that they are powerful and real expressions of ordinary people’s lives. Even intellectuals can often be quick to blame the left for problems or for hostile fanaticisms… Rather than convert them intellectually, they need to be listened to and understood, and then argued with, with some understanding rather than just a condemnation which reinforces their boundaries and life worlds. This requires patience.

    It is another example of the paradox that if we are to do anything democratically it will be slow (perhaps too slow), but if we don’t do it democratically and bring people along, then we will fail.

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    Cardinals and Crimes

    February 28, 2019

    An Australian Cardinal has just been convicted of child abuse/rape. It is possible he may be acquitted on appeal but this is not a comment on the Cardinal, but a comment on some of his supporters. Please note it is not a call to stop Christians from offering him forgiveness if he is not acquitted, but there is something which needs comment.

    He has been roundly defended by members of Australia’s Righteous establishment. They have argued things like he was convicted by an atheist or left-wing conspiracy, the case was bad (despite the well-known difficulties of getting unanimous convictions in such cases, and their ignorance of the testimony or the records of testimony) and so on. They almost universally refer to his character as making the charges unlikely. One ex-prime minister called his character ‘exemplary’.

    I do not know the man and have never met him. However, he is on record as having led the Church’s denial response to priestly rape. He has defended rapist priests, been unaware of rapist priests (even when he lived with them), attempted to silence victims, successfully argued that the Catholic Church was not a legal body which could be sued, limited compensation to $50,000 dollars, and smeared people who challenged him or presented evidence of abuse. He has fought fiercely to protect the Church from the appearance of scandal, while allowing the scandalous acts to continue for years. This implies that for the Righteous, institutions exist solely:

  • to promote the authority of those who hold office in them;
  • to defend the reputation of the institution and its office holders;
  • to treat those with less authority in the institution, or those who complain from outside, as sub-human;
  • to crush, isolate and silence those who are hurt by the institution, so it may continue to pretend there are no problems and allow its members to carry on the abuse;
  • to minimize any expenditure on reparation for those hurt;
  • to deny any responsibility for harm;
  • To issue reassuring lies that allow the institution to carry on, and keep its authority secure; and
  • to crush any form of dissent, even if the dissent is simply an attempt to get the institutions’ office holders to recognize there is a problem.

    • That this is considered ‘exemplary,’ I think, tells you a lot about Right wing politics and morality. It is about maintaining their authority, supporting the powerful when they fall, and headkicking those hurt by the system. There is little else to it, whatsoever.

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    Individualism and the Right?

    February 24, 2019

    I’m frequently told that the division between Right and Left is between ‘individualism’ and ‘egalitarianism’. However, I remain unconvinced. Let’s ignore whether right and left are well-defined categories at this moment, but assume they mean something useful – they certainly operate in the contemporary English Speaking world.

    Certainly people on the Right, frequently describe themselves as ‘individualists’, that is true. After all, can individualism, be bad? “We are all individuals!”. We don’t want to be controlled by others. Maturity is a form of ‘individuation’. We should discover our individual talents, and so on.

    The problem is that people on the Right, seem to be more accurately described as ‘supremacists’. They nearly always imply things like: the wealthy are great and good, men are better than women, gay people are inferior, white culture is better than any other and needs to be protected and promulgated, and so on. People of the right type are dominant because they are superior and deserve it. We frequently hear how Trump is a great leader because he is a great man, successful at business etc. He is superior and even favoured by God.

    The current Right’s favourite policy of neoliberalism seeks to use the State to enhance powerful and wealthy interests, and suppress opposition through talk of ‘free markets’. Even in its individualistic forms this movement seeks to protect the powerful from the people and democratic regulation, but not the people from the powerful and what promotes their profit. It is implied that the corporately powerful are inherently better people; they do stuff.

    All of these people seem quite happy to join together to enforce their supremacy; they have little reluctance to put the rights of their group ahead of the rights of outsider individuals, especially individuals who they define as inferior.

    Indeed, it sometimes seems that they need inferior groups to denounce to make it clear that they are superior. These groups are nearly always groups which are not that powerful: unemployed people, unmarried mothers, drug addicts, refugees, racial minorities, sexual minorities, religious minorities and so on. Sometimes they denounce minor elites, when those elites disagree with them or say that their ideas are wrong: people like scientists, academics, non-neoclassical economists, post-modernists or so on. Often these people are people who have studied these areas of contention, but they can be denounced as inferior or corrupt. They don’t seem to worry that much about violence being directed at the inferior. It’s either necessary, provoked, or simply does not occur, whatever the evidence to the contrary.

    Sometimes people on the Right pretend they are the victims of these inferior people, and this proves how the inferior really need to be put back in their place. We can think of men claiming they are victimized by feminism, white folk claiming the only racism comes from black folk, wealthy people claiming they are being held down by envy, taxes or unions, and so on. The inferior folk are deadly cunning and deserve what is coming to them.

    It is this necessity for the construction and denunciation of the ‘inferior,’ that seems to lead to the ease with which people on the Right can join up with fascists, religious authoritarians, military authoritarians, racist groups and so on. It would be hard to explain how individualism merges with authoritarian collectivism if the Right were really individualists rather than supremacists.

    If they were individualists, then it would be illogical to condemn other individuals who live differently, but if they are group-supremacists then it is quite logical and even necessary.

    The group binding forces, also make it necessary for them to praise people on their side, even when it is clear they would be furious if people on the other side had done the same kinds of things – as is clearly shown by supremacist reactions to the Mueller inquiry. Does anyone seriously think that they would not be calling for Clinton to be executed if the evidence pointed to her being supported by Russians, trying to make contact with Russians, having commercial ties with Russians, and trying to suppress an inquiry into her contacts with Russians. But being a group promoting supremacy, it again becomes logical. Truth is irrelevant to supporting their power as is support for lack of corruption. They are superior and can do no wrong.

    There may be people on the right who don’t support supremacy, but they are not that easy to find.

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    More on Population and River flow

    February 22, 2019

    I have a somewhat cynical tendency to think that blaming population is a way that Western people (of a largely Protestant heritage) like dealing with climate change because it absolves them. Population growth is not happening because of ‘us’, it has happening because of people in India, China (now the one child policy is gone) and because of Muslims and Catholics who breed uncontrollably. This could be seen as an example of social category theory in action: it is an outgroup that is the problem, not us.

    It probably does need to be said population could become a problem. 100 billion people is probably too many for any kind of civilization to survive and it probably would alter nature irreparably however we lived or died. We need to deal with population, but it is not our primary problem at the moment. It just intensifies the problem – we would still be in a mess if population growth stopped immediately.

    A bigger issue is the question of how much in the way of resources people consume. The Murray Darling’s water was largely consumed by business, and these businesses were draining the water not because of population, but because of the demands that business always grow and because government values business over the environment (and everything else, we might add). Water could have been held back, but as we know through an article in the SMH yesterday, more water was allocated to business despite knowledge of the likely pressures faced by the river and its marginal safety. There was no consideration for the environment at all.

    We have this reinforced by the official Coalition sponsored report which surprisingly mentions the forbidden term ‘climate change’ to explain the problem. [“The fish death events in the lower Darling were preceded and affected by exceptional climatic conditions, unparalleled in the observed climate record“. and “The recent extreme weather events in the northern Basin have been amplified by climate change.”] However, it hardly mentions irrigation usage at all. It also does not mention the facts that these irrigation businesses appear to have stolen water and engaged in fraud to get more water. Business as a explanatory cause is even more forbidden to the Right than ‘climate change’.

    This has nothing to do with population – it has to do with an ideology that says business, and short term profit, must come first.

    However, if we are going to blame population then how many people do we have to kill to solve the issue? 2 billion? 3 Billion? Reduction cannot happen naturally fast enough.

    We as a population in Australia consume and destroy far, far more (massively more) than an equivalent population of people in India. Again this points to the fact that degree and style of consumption of resources by a population is the problem, not the population by itself. If the Average person in Australia or the US consumes 20 or more times what the average person does in China should we wipe out Australians or Chinese? It would clearly be more economic and easier to wipe out Australians and people in the US. Is that such an attractive proposition?

    However, if we could solve the Murray-Darling crisis by penalising or regulating a few inappropriate businesses who use way too much water, wouldn’t that be easier and better? If businesses cannot work with the Murray Darling flowing, then they should not be there.

    Clearly if we think that people in India or China have to consume as much as we have done, or as much as our businesses do, then there will be a problem in the future. Perhaps a solution is that we should consume and destroy less, rather than they consume and destroy more? But, in any case, lets not distract ourselves with future problems when we have problems which are being generated now, and can be fixed now through being aware of what they are.

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    SJW and the feared dystopia

    January 4, 2019

    The term ‘SJW’ (Social Justice Warrior) is usually deployed by people on the Right to stop themselves and other people from thinking.

    After all, how many ordinary people actively support Social Injustice?

    How many people demand that the wealthy should control all politics, that any taxpayer support for pensioners or people with severe illness should be shut down, that all health and safety provisions at work should be abolished (so workers can be injured and executed for profit), that racial discrimination should be compulsory, that some people should be free to rape anyone they want, that their local environment should be completely destroyed, that they have to drink poisoned water, that they can eat poisoned food, that their house will fall down (because that makes it cheaper to build and the market knows best), that their property should be taken from them so that some business can increase its profit cheaply,that they are unable to act freely as long as it does not hurt others, that they should not be able to read scientific data on government websites because it contradicts political ideology, and so on.

    I’d say the number of people completely opposed to ‘social justice’ is small. That is not to say that some of the people labelled SJW might not be discomforting or crazy; that’s life and not limited to any particular group of people.

    So are we headed towards what SJW would call dystopia, which features all of these repressions and suppressions, and the practical end of public liberty for anyone except wealthy corporate executives? I would suggest this is highly probable.

    It has seemed to be the main result of US politics since the rise of neoliberalism and the dominance of talk of free markets in the late 1970s. There has been a gradual removal of liberty and social justice from political consideration. Everything has been organized to support corporate power, and to pretend that whatever repressions arise are just rather than unjust. Ordinary people have been told to support this decline in their wages, standards of living, freedom and security, in return for the promise of some future utopia of capitalist liberty, which never seems to arise. People have been divided into conflicting social categories, so they cannot mutually support each other in arguing for the social justice they want.

    So yes the dystopia that SJW appear to fear may well be coming about.

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    Trump and Mueller

    December 23, 2018

    It is odd but nowadays even inquiries into possible crimes give evidence of the wide reach of the mess of information in (dis)information society.

    The Mueller investigation is not specifically a “witch hunt” into Donald Trump as should be clear by its terms of reference.

    The Mueller investigation was appointed to:
    “investigate Russian interference with the 2016 Presidential Election, and related matters”

    This does include “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump” (because evidence suggests that the Russians aided the Trump campaign).

    The Special Counsel is also “authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters”

    You will note that there is no special mention of Donald Trump, or ‘collusion’, as a subject of interest – despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary, and despite Trump’s evident attempts to stop the investigation and slur the investigators.

    The investigation is primarily into “Russian interference,” which seems absolutely real. Consequently, it is of no concern if Trump and his campaign is not implicated at all. In fact it is perfectly acceptable, as long as Mueller finds something out about Russian techniques of interference and helps the US protect itself from such interference.

    So we can only speculate as to why Trump has made it about him and about ‘collusion’ (he could easily distance himself from the investigation). Possible answers include:

  • a) To Trump everything is always about him…
  • b) He knows he specifically is guilty of the suggested links and coordination.
  • c) He has been involved in so much corruption, that he is not sure whether his behavior in this case is corrupt or not, but he knows there is a problem.
  • d) He was set up by the Russians and he knows it.

    • We know people in his campaign were involved in soliciting information and aid from Russia and they lied about it. There is no doubt of this – the Trump tower meeting for one. We also know the Russians interfered with the campaign. While many Republicans take the view that this interference is unimportant, it still needs to be investigated, and they would probably favour investigation if there was evidence that Russians aided Democrats.

    Trump’s behavior is evidence suggesting the corruption reaches to the top… or it suggests a deliberate ploy to make it about him, so as to help his followers see Mueller as hostile to their own interests. In this case portraying Mueller’s job as attacking Trump, shifts us into social category rhetoric. Mueller becomes an exemplar of an outgroup, attacking the exemplar of an ingroup, and is therefore less persuasive to ingroup members, who can dismiss anything he finds immediately without listening to it….

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Appointment_of_Special_Counsel_to_Investigate_Russian_Interference_with_the_2016_Presidential_Election_and_Related_Matters.pdf

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    More on Trump and ‘Fake News’

    November 1, 2018

    Anger is vital to understanding contemporary politics as is an ethics based on group loyalty and out-group hatred. Current politics shows something about the ways that humans engage in social self-deception through group bonding. Perhaps as a solution we need some kind of revitalised classical Skepticism.

    Non-social media is possibly the origins of this ‘syndrome’ of group bonding and ethical anger, in particular that mainstream media which belongs to Rupert Murdoch, such as Fox, but it has spread to most commercial social media and news sites.

    The original idea seems to have been that if you made viewers morally angry, then they would feel engaged and stay tuned. Similarly if you cast doubt on every other form of media, by implying those media were immoral, then you could further enforce loyalty to the anger makers, and stop viewers from gaining any information which might lead them to suspect that ‘their’ news was not entirely accurate.

    So it began as a marketing tool, which became a political tool, and got transferred elsewhere to keep other forms of media functional and profitable. And now we have a completely crazy political process in which the created ‘sides’ cannot talk to each other, have no sketicipsm about what they are told, and what used to be mainstream politics is completely marginalised.

    We even find the situation where after 30 years of abuse directed by ‘their’ media, politicians and celebrities towards ‘progressives’, self-proclaimed ‘conservatives’ wonder why those ‘progressives’ are now rude towards them. The rudeness they operated within, became part of the air they breathed and part of their identity and was rarely if ever perceived, or commented upon. Creating an out-group seems to have been part of the way people were encouraged to behave.

    Donald Trump seems to be a master manipulator of this syndrome. Now Trump’ political leanings are not random; they generally seem directed at benefiting some parts of the established corporate class. He has given corporations more rights to poison people and the environment for example, and actively fought to suppress information about Climate Change, removing it from relevant Government websites. However this factor about his politics is obscured by the now disguising categories of ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal/progressive’.

    While Trump is not remotely conservative, neither is he liberal. He primarily seems interested in destroying any checks and balances which might inhibit his power and action. We might characterise him, more usefully, as a vandal.

    However, because he is categorised as Republican, people who categorise themselves as conservative generally do not see this; they tend to see him as one of them, or as someone they should be loyal to, or support rather than support “the other side” (at least this is my experience listening to people). This process is helped by his incoherent speeches in which he refuses to lay out any policies other than he is great, everyone is doing great and people who oppose him are part of a vast evil conspiracy, and should never be listened to or engaged with. It is easy for ‘followers’ to get worked up and angry with non-Trump supporters, and assume that Trump is for whatever they want. The speeches may have a hypnotic quality as they constantly disrupt expectations of linear sense making narrative, but keep coming back to how great he is, and how great he is doing… etc.

    As part of his rhetoric, Trump appears to encourage the worst form of identity politics (as previously discussed on this blog), in which his followers are defined as morally superior, with the right to stop everyone else from participating in politics or from speaking – they are totally righteous, everyone else is wrong and wrong headed. They have the right to hate. This could be predicted to reinforce the lack of skepticism in his followers and the adherence to dogma.

    Educated people were generally too much in their own bubbles to see that Trump was a danger, or even likely to succeed, and contributed to his success by arrogantly abusing people who supported him, while forgetting the media environment they operated in, in which this arrogance would further confirm Trump supporter’s loyalties.

    In terms of Clasical Pyrrhonism people are being encouraged to abandon a skeptical position and quietude, in order to get worked up and believe that their dogmas are in place and working. Eventually the current process will end in the total fragmentation of society, and its disruption. The way that ‘the right’ has attempted to impose its corporate plutocracy, will eventually bring that plutocracy and way of life crashing down in ecological catastrophe.

    The opponents of Trump may find it useful not to feed into the binary hatred, but to transcend it with gestures of openness… I’m not sure.

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