Blurts & Spasms

My latest essay: "The Moonshot of Overcoming Cultural Resistance: Parallel Institutions, Grounded in Community and Mutual Aid, That Offer Lived Experience of Desired Change"

It's taking the long road, but it's one way we can navigate our of our current downward spiral....

Click on blue text above to read full essay on www.level-7.org.

 

First, what are some of the chief symptoms and causes of our totally fucked future…?  Let’s begin with the U.S. specifically:

1. According to the most recent Presidential approval polls, some 40% of the U.S. voting population appears to be hopelessly stupefied by either blind loyalty or willfully ignorant and delusional thinking – as evidenced by an unshakeable devotion to bloviating con-artists in government and media, and to policies that directly amplify their own suffering, destroy democracy by promoting an increasingly totalitarian flavor of fascism, and endanger the human species and indeed most life on Earth.
   
    
2. A majority of Americans also seem deeply committed – if not behaviorally addicted – to a form of commercialistic crony capitalism that concentrates wealth and power in the upper 1-10%, and impoverishes, oppresses, and even threatens the lives of everyone else. In support of this addiction, a particularly pathological, toxic, and cruel style of business leadership has continued to dominate several American industries, leaders who harmonize overwhelming largesse for shareholders with callous disregard for workers and customers. Just take a look at corporate profits vs. nominal wages in the adjacent chart as proof (from Trickle Down Economics).
    
3. As a consequence of these first two conditions, the most ruthless forms of profit-seeking have created a runaway train of economic exploitation, instability, and risk in the U.S. The results are unsustainable, caustic, often inflationary balloons across multiple sectors, including:
   1. Soaring healthcare costs with poor patient outcomes relative to other peer economies;
   2. A social media ecosystem that addicts its users, isolates them from real relationship and community, ideologically radicalizes and polarizes them, and undermines their mental health and self-esteem;
   3. Overinvestments in harmful AI technology that is replacing jobs across many industries, supercharging military conflicts, amplifying the agency and reach of criminals, terrorist groups, and hostile state actors, and undermining human agency, relationships, and well-being;
   4. Energy policies that are amplifying the climate crisis beyond recoverable tipping points through increasing overall demand and reliance on fossil fuels; and
   5. A financialized economy built on leveraged speculation that will, of necessity, crash and burn to the detriment of everyone in society.
4. As everything in our globally interdependent world becomes more and more complex, U.S. citizens, consumers, and political leaders have become less and less informed, less thoughtful in their deliberations, and more and more entitled in their attitudes and expectations at the same time. The consequence of this self-magnifying trend is an overconfident but perpetually angry and dissatisfied idiocracy that executes increasingly reckless, counterfactual, and counterproductive decisions – while ignoring or dismissing negative outcomes. There could be no better examples of this than the woefully incompetent clown car leadership in the second Trump administration on the one hand, and the increasing abandonment of proven science (efficacy of childhood vaccinations and face masks, legitimacy of climate science and evidence-based solutions, rejection of factual current and historical data, skepticism of subject matter experts, etc.) across the political spectrum’s grass roots on the other.
5. Increasingly extreme ideological polarization and motivation have infected modern beliefs, discourse, media, and politics with excessive hate and rage, disallowing meaningful dialogue and solution synthesis, and exacerbating political violence.

Expanding to a global focus, we also have these well-established trends:

1. Increasing risk of nuclear catastrophe. In January, 2025, the atomic scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” was set to 89 seconds to midnight – the highest risk ever estimated. With Iran’s fissile refinement still underway and the government destabilized by internal and external pressures, Russia’s suffering catastrophic casualties and oil revenue losses in its war with Ukraine, and North Korea and China receiving a green light from the Trump administration that invading other countries for natural resources is completely acceptable, I suspect we’re now even closer to midnight.
2. Erosion or elimination of liberal democracy around the world, often by nationalist, xenophobic autocracies, resulting in the destabilization of political economies and impoverishment and oppression of local populations.
3. A feverish, caution-to-the-wind race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), without any substantive safety guardrails, that will not only rapidly replace all human cognitive labor, but presents the real possibility of catastrophic outcomes – including existential threats to humanity itself.
4. A steady march past multiple planetary boundaries into conditions of highest risk (see adjacent 2025 chart), resulting in irreversible ecological damage, public health crises, resource scarcity and conflicts, ballooning socio-economic inequality, and erosion of human welfare on a global scale.

 

An argument can certainly be made that humans have navigated both natural calamities and crises of their own making in the past. So…what’s different now?

Mainly we’ve exceeded the tipping point in too many areas at once, inviting a cascading polycrisis that amplifies adverse effects. In other words, we’re coming up against the outward-most boundaries that human civilization and Earth’s current ecosystems can survive. And those boundaries are becoming increasingly thin, fragile, and brittle. Allow me to illustrate….

Imagine for a moment if just one or two of the following factors manifest over the course of the next two years. For the purposes of this discussion, the likelihood of each of these events has a widely varying probability, but they are all conceivable, plausible, and increasingly predictable within a near-future timeframe.

1. Stagflation. The U.S. economy enters a full-blown stagflation recession concurrent with a collapsing dollar, resulting in an enduring period of extreme economic uncertainty and hardship in the U.S., and major political and economic realignments around the globe.
2. Slowing AMOC. The Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which has been weakening since at least 2015 as a consequence of human-driven climate change, exhibits accelerating slowing. This disrupts the availability of fish stocks around the globe, and triggers more extreme and destructive weather patterns in the Northern hemisphere. A slowing AMOC's disruption of economic, social, political, and existential security around the globe is inestimable, but almost certainly severe. 
3. Narrow AI risks. Bad actors successfully utilize narrow AI agents perfected for cyberattacks to take down supply chains, banking systems, energy grids, transportation systems, communication networks, and the Internet itself. Alternatively, bad actors use narrow AI to engineer another pandemic virus, this time much worse than COVID, and release it into the wild. Either of these scenarios results in widespread panic, civil unrest, government destabilization, violent conflicts over remaining resources, and potential collapse of civil societies and economies around the globe.
4. AGI risks. The race to Artificial General Intelligence is won, but only temporarily. Shortly thereafter, AGI proliferates the globe in competing camps, with some projects successfully aligned with human objectives and safety, and others not. The resulting multi-agent failures completely reshape the world economy and centers of power, with devastating short-term consequences for a majority of the world’s population as all fundamental technologies, systems, and structures are reconfigured, replaced, or realigned.
5. Russia. A deranged and desperate Vladimir Putin increasingly finds himself in an economic, military, and political corner. After four years of massive causalities and economic losses due to his war on Ukraine, he is running out of willing soldiers – along with the money to pay them – and his weapons and oil production capacity is likewise crippled. And yet he still tests Ukrainian and European resolve with past antics like incursions into NATO airspace, deployment of more hypersonic Oreshnik missiles in Belarus which are capable of targeting European cities, and nonstop attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian populations. In the face of humiliating losses and ceding more occupied territory in Ukraine, a panicking and delusional Putin then escalates his lust for destruction and power on multiple fronts at home and abroad.
6. Trump. The Trump administration continues to implement disastrously reckless and ill-informed (as well as notably fascist and racist) economic, international, and domestic policies, which in turn lead to economic hardship and civil unrest across the country and instability around the globe, thereby introducing political peril for Republicans at every level of government. Then, in anticipation of losing the U.S. Congress to Democrats in the 2026 midterm elections, Trump invents a reason to implement martial law against “the enemy within” in all democratically run regions, specifically to disrupt elections and prevent yet another impeachment – this time one more likely to result in a Senate conviction. This destabilizes the entire country and its relationships with the rest of the world, amplifying chaos, suffering, and uncertainty at every level of society in the U.S. and abroad.

Okay. So if we’re really and truly fucked, what can we do about it…?

Historically, there have been a few different options that have succeeded for civilian populations in such dire situations. Here’s a quick rundown of some proven choices, together with some more experimental ideas:

1. Nonviolent resistance. This actually works surprisingly well, even when dealing with oppressive, authoritarian regimes. Here is a link to an excellent list of 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action.

2. Multipronged sociopolitical activism. I've assembled my favorite accumulation of techniques to achieve political and economic evolution. They range from grass-roots populism to exposing misinformation to promoting legislation to disrupting the status quo…a total of eleven prongs of revolutionary activism. You can read the list at https://level-7.org/Action/.
3. Replacing the Trump administration via joint impeachment prior to 2028. If a sufficient majority of progressive Democrats and Independents are elected to both houses of Congress in the 2026 midterms, and enough sufficiently brave Republicans in Congress fulfill their oath to the U.S. Constitution, we can initiate a trial and convict Donald Trump and J.D. Vance under joint impeachment proceedings. Then a new, more progressive Democratic majority House Speaker can become acting POTUS until the 2028 Presidential election.
4. Republican lobbying of Congress. There is a large constituency of responsible, thoughtful, and patriotic conservatives in the U.S. who could, if they chose to break with their MAGA brothers and sisters, place significant pressure on their representatives in Washington D.C. to change the fascist course of our country and rein in the Trump administration. There is also some percentage of MAGA who, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are feeling increasingly unconformable with Trump’s policies, and could also contribute to Congress recovering the oversight responsibilities it has advocated. The most recent bipartisan efforts to push back on Trump’s tyranny indicate this trend has begun – but is there courage and determination of more Republicans to follow through?
5. Violent protest and revolution. This is an unfortunate default throughout human history, but it can often result in the installation of just another violent and oppressive government to replace the old one. Also, it’s now pretty clear that the Trump administration routinely invents civilian violence, and would benefit from more of it – likely to justify an expansion of militarized crackdown as we approach the 2026 midterms. Just look at how ICE agents are being deployed if you have any doubts. So violent protest and revolution is not an ideal option in the short or long run. It is better to exemplify the outcome we want to see in the world as an inherent part of our activism (see options #1, #2, #3, and #4).
6. Thoughtful media consumption. To participate effectively in politics and socio-economic activism, we must be well-informed. This can be a challenge in an algorithm-driven world of media that aims to enrage and addict us even as it extracts profit from that compulsive engagement. But it is possible to be more thoughtful. First, it is helpful to cultivate a starting point of credible news and information sources, and to appreciate the agendas and techniques at work in modern disinformation campaigns. I have assembled resources specific to Russian and far-right propaganda – and our means of inoculation against it – in this link:  https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/. And here is another helpful cheat sheet for examining sources of information more critically: https://www.wikihow.life/Consume-Media-Critically. I recently also had a friend advise me on the best way to avoid algorithmic distractions on YouTube. His advice was to actively “subscribe” to credible, vetted sources for podcasts and informational videos beyond the mainstream, and primarily follow and watch those subscriptions, rather than watching what the YouTube algorithm or corporate mainstream media feeds.
7. Prayer and meditation. Personally, I am heartily committed to prayer and meditation, though not as standalone options. As with many spiritual traditions, my belief is that action – or “praxis” – is an inherent component of faith. For me, this means I will employ skillful compassion, or what Christianity calls agape, in all of my choices to promote positive change, which are in turn supported by prayer and meditation. As for some recommendations on specific meditation and prayerful practices, here is a free online book for you to peruse: Essential Mysticism.
8. Promoting an alternative vision. This is big-picture stuff, but it is probably essential to humanity’s thriving, so that we can depart from the status quo on multiple fronts. We need to have a plan. In fact, I think one of the reasons we are increasingly mired in a crony capitalist dystopia is because movements like Occupy Wall Street did not offer any clear alternatives for us to embrace. Here is website I’ve dedicated to an alternative vision, assembled in largest part from real-world successes around the globe: https://level-7.org/. You can also read an introduction of the central ideas of Level 7 in this AI-assisted overview.  
9. Other ideas. Although I believe that we must remedy the underlying issue of our commitment to a toxic profit motive in virtually every arena, there are nevertheless some helpful half-measures that may be able to mitigate capitalism’s harshest (but inevitable) consequences – at least for a little while. One set of such thoughtful half-measures for the U.S.A. can be found here: UNFTR’s 5 Non-Negotiables. But again…these efforts will not stave off the worst outcomes of those six disruptive factors we just outlined above. I believe we need to be a lot more radical in both our aspirational vision and our real-world activism.

That’s a start. Whatever we decide to do, let’s not wait too long to begin our critical next steps. Perhaps you can pick just one of the areas above and try it on for size. Commit right now to exploring your chosen role over the next month or two, and see how it feels. If it's not your thing, then try another approach. Personally, I'm in favor of all of these activities except violent revolution, so I put some thought, planning, self-education, promotion, financial support, creativity, political action, or other supportive effort into many of them nearly every week. I mean...what have we got to lose? If we do nothing, then we could lose everything.

I've just posted a current draft of my strongest arguments to date for a final departure from capitalism, the prosocial imperatives of a post-capitalist political economy, and strategies for immediate activism.

It's about 100 pages, and includes supportive links, charts, and some of my photos. There are plentiful anecdotes as well. After playing with artifical intelligence for the past year, I decided not to use any generative AI tools or elements in this piece.

PDF download here: The Bad Seed: How The Profit Motive Ruins Everything

Enjoy!

Below is a link to the latest summary of Level 7 political economy key concepts, resources, and action plan, with a section at the end of each chapter to reflect on personal notes, questions, and actionable next steps. AI tools were used to assist with organization and illustration of this document — basically I asked a chatbot to summarize my www.level-7.org website.

AI did a great job with organization and finding supportive examples, but fell far short of adequately representing many Level 7 concepts. Still, it was a useful excercise. In particular, it helped me better define certain ideas, and then present them within a more approachable structure and conicise focus, and in a simpler language. It might be too simple, in fact, but time will tell. 

Level 7: Blueprint for a Sustainable and Equitable Future

 

 

Don’t worry, it’s coming. Markets will likely react much sooner to the current instability than the on-the-ground effects of Trump’s policies…so it will be a 1–2–3–4 punch. First a “major adjustment” as investors lose confidence and abandon equities, then a steady uptick inflation trend will become evident, then a resulting constriction of economic activity that further tanks markets and triggers layoffs and jobless claims, then additional instability and weakening GDP as downstream impacts of tariffs disrupt productivity…and the downward spiral will continue. Internationally we already see major (former) U.S. trade partners moving away from the dollar and acquisition of U.S. debt — if that turns into a runaway selloff we could see the U.S. Treasuries market spiral as well. I’d estimate no more than six months before we see serious and lasting consequences for Trump’s mismanagement of the economy — a year at most. But by then the real structural damage will be done, which will then mean a very slow recovery (much slower than usual) from recessive stagflation even if policies are reversed. So I suspect we’re in for a rough ride for the next 6 years at least — and maybe more — if Trump and his appointed incompetent crazies keeps this up.

One could hope that at least some of the right-leaning voters in the U.S. will be able to place the blame for the impending calamity at Trump’s feet, and realize that MAGA is actually toxic to them and their families in time for the mid-term elections. Then again, those conservatives and independents seem to be pretty gullible, so they might believe whatever new con-job Trump and his crazies cook up to deflect blame from him.

We have to wonder, though, why Trump is so intent on destroying America on every level, weakening the U.S. economically, militarily, and abandoning America’s soft power. The appointments Trump has made to every part of government are unqualified, clueless clowns — choices that are as reckless and dumb as Trump’s executive orders. It almost seems like he wants to neutralize U.S. global status and reach altogether, so that his dictator buddies (Putin, Xi Jinping, Orban, et al) can step in to claim economic, political, and military advantage out of the vacuum Trump is creating. Hmmm…..

My 2 cents.

Some likely reasons for the U.S.A.:

1. The success of neoliberalism has been carefully engineered. ***See essay at the end of this post for more on this.***
2. A majority of mass media has been overwhelmed by well-funded propaganda, so a lot of folks believe in things like trickle-down economics.
3. Because “corporations are people,” and “money is free speech,” huge amounts of money have regularly been expended to get pro-corporate candidates elected.
4. Human gullibility and lack of critical thinking skills persist.
5. A conflation of liberty with greed and selfishness is pervasive.
6. The artful use of the illusory truth effect (i.e. repeating things enough that people think they are true, even if they’re just invented falsehoods) by proponents of neoliberalism.
7. Something I call “the broken brain effect.” You can’t really believe in the ludicrous garbage that Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman or Murray Rothbard come up with unless there is some faulty wiring up there. Unfortunately, there is a not-so-fine line between doubling down on delusional thinking that has zero evidence (i.e. neoliberal economic theory) and a diagnosable mental illness.
8. Incredible affluence compared to other parts of the world — and most of human history. Having so much affluence leads people into feelings of entitlement, and the most entitled folks in the U.S. are the wealthy. Even for the middle class and the poor, America’s above-average affluence has lead to embracing silly mistaken beliefs like individualistic materialism.

There are many more reasons, but here is an essay that offers more detail about how the neoliberal movement — which I call the great deception — has been engineered:

http://www.tcollinslogan.com/resources/The_Rise_of_Demagogues_in_Democracy.pdf

It was time.

This essay draws on many different ideas, from writers spanning Plato to Habermas, and offers an explanation and proposed remedy for the travesty of democracy – and tragedy for the U.S. and the world – that has just occurred with the reelection of Donald Trump. It focuses on what fifty years of a conservative political and social agenda has accomplished for America, and how its consequences were predicted over the past 2,400 years. Then the essay tackles what we can do to restore sanity and the common good in concrete and pragmatic terms. Introduction below.

DOWNLOAD PDF OF "The Rise of Demagogues And Tyrants in Democracy" HERE

Introduction

We were warned, but we did not listen. Several conditions have converged to create the perfect seedbed and fertilizer for demagogues and tyrants to spring forth and flourish in modern western democracies, while we seem to have passively expected that our civic institutions would be strong enough to resist or contain them. And, despite growing evidence to the contrary, many well-educated experts continue to assure us that existing tools to collectively prevent the sabotage of our civil society remain potent. But this essay proposes that such mechanisms and institutions are in fact not strong or potent enough – and predictably so – while also offering possible escape hatches from what has become a dire and accelerating downward spiral.

As a starting point, the explanations, accusations, and insights about what swayed the outcome of the U.S. 2024 Presidential election have been plentiful. They are wide-ranging, but include:
 

• The stoking of grievances and anxiety about an inflation economy that weren’t adequately addressed by Democrats.
• The unexpected but potent rise of podcast influencers and “Bro” culture.
• The electorate’s craving for simplistic, black-and-white solutions to complex problems.
• Frustrated finger-pointing at Joe Biden’s resistance to an open Democratic primary.
• A well-worn trope that the U.S. electorate is “just not ready” for a female president…let alone a woman of color.
• A lack of cogent response from the Left to the Right’s campaign against transgender rights.
• A bizarre confidence that Donald Trump’s policies will somehow be more favorable to the working class that Kamala Harris’ would have been.
• The clear observation that Harris did not sufficiently differentiate herself from an unpopular incumbent, or adequately appeal to working voters.
• The fundamental reality of worsening income inequality….

Are these explanations valid? I think a persuasive case can be made that each of them had a measurable impact on 2024 outcomes. But none of these can be singled out as the primary cause of Trump’s victory. In fact, even in combination these simplistic factors are a distraction from what should invite much more concern and scrutiny – and it is this larger, considerably darker storm that we’ll be exploring. It is storm that has been decades in the making, with a force and scope that might have been delayed, but not countered, by this or any other single national movement. I would even speculate that, with so many threads of history coming together at once, and with so much accumulated energy and momentum behind them, those conditions made the outcome of the 2024 U.S. elections inevitable.

What are those historical threads, then, and why have they converged right now? Here is a quick summary of those threads, each of which will be explored with more depth before weaving them into what has become a toxic whole.

1. Erosion and rejection of the rule of law
2. Celebration of greed, selfishness, and opportunism as acceptable cultural norms
3. Confusion about the nature of liberty, equality, and justice
4. Pervasive isolation, disconnection, and alienation across society
5. Cultural strife, discord, and division
6. Economic stress and worsening inequality
7. Willfully persistent ignorance

Although all of these influences have existed in human civilization for millennia, it is critically important to appreciate just how carefully, deliberately, and successfully they have been engineered and amplified over the last few decades. The amplification was the result of well-funded and coordinated efforts that were not arbitrary or accidental. And although many technological, cultural, and ideological developments could have lent themselves to any cause, it was one synthesis in particular that seems to have taken greatest advantages of these tools in current times: the marriage of free market fundamentalism, cultural conservatism, Christian nationalism, pro-white racism, and neoliberalism. This synergy has generated one of the greatest deceptions ever perpetrated on the U.S. electorate – and others around the globe.

Our hypothesis is that as these destructive conditions were carefully cultivated through methodical and sustained right-wing messaging and activism, they contributed to our cultural susceptibility, en masse, to the emotional appeals, deceptive manipulations, and empty promises of demagogic would-be tyrants – eventually coalescing in our current global reality as an unstoppable storm.

The through line of the underlying causality has become obvious, reinforced by the repeated warnings from both advocates and critics of democracy itself, and illustrated by unmistakable patterns in history. It seems, however, that we are an inattentive and forgetful folk, and have become acclimated over successive generations – like the metaphorical frog in a pot of boiling water – to adverse and degrading influences. Despite a chorus of reminders, we have relaxed our vigilance, and that is what allowed the opportunists first to plot, and then to strike.

This leads us to an obvious question: what is the best strategy for an effective and comprehensive response? We will aim to answer that question as well, not only addressing effective forms of resistance, but offering a path forward to building a stronger democratic civil society – on foundations of truth, justice, kindness, and caring – that can resist future storms and return a modicum of sanity to our world. 

The real issue has to do with “real wages,” or wages adjusted for inflation. That is, how far each dollar earned can actually go (including those items we “can’t skimp on”), and how many of those dollars we’re actually earning. The chart below (from econbrowser.com) illustrates what’s been happening in that regard:

You can see that there can be high variability from year-to-year, and especially recently (since COVID). In the past couple of years, wages have been slowly beating inflation…so “real” wages have been rising. With more recent statistics, however, the softening of the job market indicates a possibly deceleration of these wage increases. So U.S. workers may have peaked.

For lower income workers, the reality is that certain types of inflation (in particular food, energy, and rents) have the potential to affect that group’s “real wages” differently than U.S. workers as a whole. Why? Because folks in the lowest 10% income bracket have 35% of their budget allocated to these items, while folks in the highest 10% income bracket have only 13% of their budget allocated to these items.

But here’s the rub: that lowest income bracket has received recent wage increase that have actually outpaced those inflation-sensitive goods and services. Which means that, at least up until very recently, they are actually still getting ahead. You can read more about this here:

https://www.employamerica.org/blog/energy-food-rent-how-will-rate-hikes-help-the-poor-face-their-rising-costs/

That said, every situation is different. For folks on fixed incomes, like a retirement pensions, disability, or social security, there has not been the same rapid offset. Even with annual inflation adjustments to social security (COLA), money simply does not go as far for these folks, and they tend to be more susceptible to “inflation shock.” Here is an article that discusses the impact of inflation on retirees:

https://crr.bc.edu/how-does-inflation-impact-near-retirees-and-retirees/

My 2 cents.

You could say that a large number of populist movements throughout history have arisen from very similar conditions and narratives — and that holds true of current fascist movements around the globe. These shared conditions and narratives include:

• Enduring and increasing economic inequality and lack of economic mobility.
• Anxiety over a perceived loss of status and influence among groups who formerly considered themselves to be among society’s more privileged.
• Frustration with the status quo, and mistrust of existing methods of remedy, equalization, and empowerment (i.e. government, civic institutions, political leadership, democratic elections, etc.).
• Deteriorating economic conditions — or fears about deteriorating economic conditions.
• Deep mistrust — usually racist at its core — about outsiders polluting or corrupting an otherwise “pure and good” society.

What makes fascism unique in its response to these common factors is that fascist movements tend to make fundamental errors about the underlying causes of these undesirable conditions and narratives. For example, fascism tends to blame a particular group in society — such as immigrants, or a “corrupt elite,” or certain racial, religious, or political groups — for all undesirable conditions and felt realities, without establishing a factual bases for those accusations. But the false narratives are extremely effective in uniting angry adherents in an “Us vs. Them” influence campaign of nationalistic and often religious fervor. Historically this can spread like wildfire across society without mass media, but today mass media and especially social media effectively fan those flames and accelerate the spread of fascist ideology.

It should be noted that fascism has never been spontaneous — it is carefully cultivated through disinformation and emotional appeals. Yes, the conditions (the frustrations, the inequity, the dissatisfaction, the fears) are real, but they are manipulated with carefully crafted misleading narratives and false promises to empower opportunistic leaders.

There is also usually a central leadership figure — often a pedantic strongman gifted in hateful rhetoric — offering themselves as the “only solution” to society’s woes, and constantly keeping folks angry, fearful, and motivated. These fascists leaders have nearly always promoted overly simplified solutions to complex problems, and successfully vilified certain members of society as scapegoats to take the blame.

We see all of this being replicated around the world today in various movements — and in the style and rhetoric of what are most often populist far-right political leaders. In the U.S., the strongest fascist tendencies were traditionally held by white supremacist groups, but we have now seen those tendencies infect and overtake the Christian nationalism in the MAGA movement as well.

I hope this was helpful. Here are some links to explore this topic further:

https://www.theindiaforum.in/society/why-fascism-rise-world-over

https://www.eesc.europa.eu/en/news-media/news/fascism-rise-where-does-it-come-and-how-stop-it-common-european-response

https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17847110/how-fascism-works-donald-trump-jason-stanley

https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2021/february-web-only/what-is-christian-nationalism.html

 

This is an interesting question, and yes, there are a lot of examples of this occurring. One that springs to mind is the devolution of classical liberalism. Concepts of “liberty” and “fee markets” championed by proponents of classical liberalism in the 17th and 18th centuries were initially dependent on a strong civil society, but became more and more distorted and disconnected from that prerequisite over time. By the late 18th thorugh early 20th centuries, the initial ideas of a strong civil society with “good government” (Adam Smith) as a counterbalance to corporate malfeasance, capture of government by the wealthy, and abuse and exploitation of workers were completely abandoned by those claiming to be the disciples of classical liberalism (such as the authors of the “Austrian School”). By the time Milton Friedman and the Chicago School came into vogue, the wanton abandon for individualistic enrichment and empowerment had completely discarded any concerns at all for civil society, and actually encouraged corporate capture of government and other characteristics of crony capitalism in order to amplify self-enrichment. Randian objectivism then just added fuel to the same solipsistic fire. “Laissez faire” evolved into a sort of joke that every credible economist and social scientist understood to be a toxic delusion. This is how we arrived at what we call “neoliberalism” today.

There are many other examples of this sort of bizarre distortion of first principles in favor of grossly self-serving and destructive “opposites” — often ones that somehow retain the same name. Christianity is a potent poster child. Democracy is another. Hegelian dialectics, Existentialism, concepts of patriotism and nationalism…there seem to have been many such flip-flops over the years, where what was claimed to arise out of certain concepts, practices, and ideals ended up representing countervailing antagonism to those very same original principles. This seems to have been a very common pattern throughout human history, alas.

My 2 cents.

So a guy goes to a car dealership, and the salesman convinces him that this one car he’s interested in gets 50 mpg, does 0–60 in 4 seconds, and has a 5-year worry-free warranty. The dealership has one in a sweet metallic red, and so the guy buys it. He loves the car. Shows if off to his friends. Sometimes he just drives it around town for no other reason than because he’s enjoying driving it so much. But pretty soon he realizes that the salesman was…let’s say not quite telling the truth about the car. It only gets 15 mpg. It does 0–60 in about 7 seconds. And when the fuel pump quits after just two months…it turns out the “worry free” warranty doesn’t cover that (or much else that is likely to fail on the vehicle). The thing is, though, he still really loves the car. He’s willing to deal with all the problems because he still enjoys the pure pleasure of driving it around. Even after the dash instruments start failing one by one. Even after the timing belt breaks after 50K miles and the engine requires a total rebuild. Even after the chrome flakes off of all the detail work. Even after the squeaks all around the car get so loud that he can’t drown them out anymore with the car’s underpowered stereo system. This has been a pretty a common American experience. And the thing is, getting angry at politicians or one political party isn’t going to fix this situation - because it has nothing to do with them. The guy should have done his research. He should have listened to some friends who told him to avoid this particular brand of car. He should have been more careful and thoughtful and maybe not believed a salesman who just wanted to make a quick buck. But he didn’t. And he has no one to blame but himself. But…instead of owning up to his mistakes and admitting he was hoodwinked, the guy is furious with anyone who points out he was deceived, or corrects him for trying to blame his bad choices on “government regulation,” or tries to explain that the problems with his car really have nothing to do with unions, but instead were decisions made in corporate board rooms so that shareholders could line their pockets with just a little more profit. But the really sad thing is that, when the car finally breaks down completely after 100K miles, guess where this guy goes to buy another? The same dealership? The same salesman? A later model of the same shitty car…? No way! He’s finally “wised up” and gone to the competing dealership across the street, where the salesman welcomes him with open arms and convinces him to buy the latest model of THAT brand…which gets 50 mpg, does 0–60 in 4 seconds, and has a 5-year worry-free warranty (all of this isn’t true, just as it wasn’t the last time, but he doesn’t check the facts…). And so he buys the car - without doing the research, or listening to his friends, or questioning whether the salesman is telling the truth. And as he drives away, he shakes his fist out the car window at the dealership where he bought his first car, yelling “This is my ‘fuck you’ PROTEST VOTE!” So…really, what’s the point of trying to listen to the concerns of such a mindless, irrational consumer who is so easily and perpetually hoodwinked by lies and deceptions? I mean, really it’s on him to recognize his own mistakes, and to take responsibility for all the bad stuff that has happened to him. And until he takes responsibility and stops blaming others for his problems…well, things are not going to change. Not for him, and not for anyone else like him in America.

Thank you for the question. Here are what I believe are some contributing factors that have gained increasing prominence in the past couple of decades:

1. A deliberate, carefully planned effort on the part of political activists, think tanks, and corporate media to divide, polarize, and demonize across the political spectrum in order to secure votes, increase campaign contributions and media viewership, and secure political status. It is much easier to appeal to fear and anxiety, play the blame game, and energize “Us vs. Them” polemics than to thoughtfully explore nuanced political philosophy and policy positions.

2. A downward spiral of biased media reporting that was instigated by ending the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. As a consequence of that very ill-informed decision, consumers of news media are simply often not presented both sides of the argument on political issues in any meaningful or reasonable way.

3. Social media echo chambers, the illusory truth effect, and consequent groupthink. When algorithms and like-minded groups of users amplify extreme, biased, and often false information that confirms their worst fear and mistrust, there is no longer room for discussion. Political topics become too highly charged with emotional rhetoric to allow moderating (or even true) viewpoints.

4. An unfortunate dumbing down of the U.S. voting public. There are likely a lot of factors contributing to this — poor nutrition, increased collective stress and anxiety, incomplete education, epidemic levels of ADHD, cultural opposition to “intellectualism,” etc. — but it is increasingly obvious that a lot of folks cannot reason critically at all, and instead quickly race down a rabbit hole of logical fallacies and contradictory assumptions.

5. Overwhelming input streams that folks often just don’t know how to manage, leading to feeling paralyzed, confused, and consequently more vulnerable to the influencing factors listed above. For example: way too much information funneled at all of us 24/7 from all directions at once; increasing complexity in nearly every decision we need to make; equally increasing pressure to make important decisions at much higher quantities and at much faster rates than many previous generations; accelerating technological and cultural changes that are increasingly difficult to track, let alone accept or fully incorporate on cultural and interpersonal levels.

6. A consumerist culture than encourages us to “bandwagon.” We are conditioned from early childhood to be guided by advertising and cultural norms that basically say “Hey, you don’t need to have your own agency or be thoughtfully informed, instead you just need to buy this or that and we’ll solve all your problems for you.” This conditioning runs so deep in U.S. culture that many folks simply conform to the latest cultural fads — which often originate at the fringe extremes of the political spectrum — in order to feel a sense of belonging and empowerment.

7. State-funded disinformation from hostile foreign actors that takes advantage of all-of-the-above and makes them much worse to serve the agendas of that country.

My 2 cents.

When very large and powerful government institutions are not held accountable by a functional democracy, then those institutions will certainly run amok over the citizenry and compromise other freedoms and rights in civil society — including the right to vote. This has tended to happen either where citizens are apathetic about their participation in the democratic process (as has been the case in the U.S.A. for many decades), or in places where a populist strongman deliberately consolidates their own power and undermines democracy itself (as has been the case of late in places like Turkey, Russia, Hungary, India, and multiple nations in Africa and Latin America).

But if the democratic institutions and public participation in democracy are strong, and authoritarian/autocratic leaders are voted out of office before they can wreak substantial damage on civil society, then the size of the government is not relevant, IMO. In the U.S.A., where the government is very large, Trump’s elevation to POTUS definitely woke up the country in terms of stimulating a more passionate participation in democracy…and his being voted out after one term likely saved U.S. democracy. But the size of the U.S. government did not really play into these variables.

What is much more critical in the preservation of democracy is carefully mitigating large concentrations of wealth and power and their impact on democratic institutions. The greatest erosion of democracy in the U.S. can easily be laid at the feet of the largest corporations, corporate media organizations, and wealthy campaign contributors. Their level of interference with functional democracy in the U.S. is truly astonishing — and it’s getting worse. To appreciate how organized and extensive this interference is, take a look into the history of American neoliberalism, which has relentlessly and systematically sought to consolidate wealth and power in the hands of as few people as possible (see link below), and effectively crippled democracy in the process.

https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/

https://freedomhouse.org/article/new-report-global-decline-democracy-has-accelerated

No, the tyranny of the majority is not an unavoidable weakness of democracy. In fact there are so many welll-practiced and time-proven ways to effectively diffuse and countervail this possibility that its ascendence is really the exception rather than the norm.

Successful mitigation includes things like:

1. Implementing subsidiarity, so that democratic decisions are diffused down to the community level. At the same time avoiding concentrations of centralized political and economic power becomes a critical countervailing strategy.

2. Ensuring the electorate is well-educated about its responsibility to govern for the good of everyone in society, and is operating at a level of moral maturity that reflexively supports and enhances this view.

3. Strengthening egalitarian rule of law, and egalitarian civil society generally, to support an equality of rights, opportunity, ability, and enforcement across society — all of which inherently aim to compensate for existing inequalities and at least attempt to level the playing field.

4. Institute truly independent checks and balances to ensure no single institution, governing body, or system has absolute authority over any aspect of society. Interestingly, one way to accomplish this is by implementing direct democratic controls over representative bodies as some constitutions allow.

Sadly, what has become much more problematic is the “tyranny of the minority,” where a smaller group that has gathered an inordinate amount of economic and political power to itself runs roughshod over democracy and civil society to maintain its own privilege, influence, and wealth.

My 2 cents.

This question seems focused around whether folks have equal rights when they have different resources. And yes of course in practice the haves and have-nots are not really equal “under the law” or in many other contexts. Some examples:

1. Your million dollars can buy you an excellent lawyer, whereas my lack thereof may mean I must rely on an overworked and underpaid pubic defender. Any reasonable and observant person knows that many innocent poor people go to jail simply because they do not have a competent defense, whereas many rich people avoid court judgements altogether because they have excellent and expensive attorneys. In addition, due to how cash bail laws work in reality in the U.S., a poor person is often not able to post cash bail, and thus loses their job because they remain absent from work (and then their housing after that, etc.) before they have even gone to trial. In essence, then, a poor person is often punished as “guilty” with pretrial incarceration, where a rich person is not. That is certainly not “equality under the law.”

2. If circumstances beyond my control (natural disasters, pandemics, economic downturns, a physical disability, a sudden illness, etc.) cause me to lose my job and become homeless, my choices will be very limited if I don’t have someone to advocate for me or help me with my situation. Statistically, I am very likely to remain homeless, jobless and/or sick. You, on the other hand, can much more easily relocate, stay in a hotel, buy a new home outright, get the healthcare you need, and so on. You have a much greater probability of recovering or adapting — much more easily than me. But the point is that “under the law” we may appear to have equal opportunity to rent or own a home, or be protected in some way from further calamity, yet in reality we really don’t.

3. If you start a family and end up with a special needs child, that million dollars will come in very handy in assisting your child with special education, custom equipment, therapies, and so on, so that they may actually be able to become functional and independent over time. If my family suffers the same challenges, the likelihood that my child will gain the same level of independence and function is (statistically and realistically) much lower. Once again, “under the law” both of our children may have a right to equal levels of education or healthcare…but in reality your child will effectively have “more rights.”

I could go on, but these examples will hopefully shed light on the reality that a paucity of personal resources has very clear negative impacts on personal liberty, and an abundance of personal resources has very clear positive impacts, even under laws designed to treat them equally. To believe otherwise is the result of either ignorance of the realities of being poor, or ideological convictions that also have no basis in fact.

My 2 cents.

Question from John Anderson:

I am decidedly in the “poor person” category. I have also been on the losing end of a court case against a wealthy person. I am not blind to the advantage of having wealth, especially as it applies to the ability to hire better lawyers. That doesn’t change my view on the nature of my equality under the law with that person. I had as much right as he did to hire better lawyers even if I hadn’t the ability. The fact I could not afford to do so is not proof of a lack of the right to do so. Both he and I had to make our case before the judge. The very fact that we both did so is in fact proof (in my mind, anyway) that we were both equal under the law. I was not barred from appearing before the judge to argue my case. There was no assumption of guilt for me, nor prohibition against making whatever arguments I could to defend my position. And of course, like everyone who goes before the judge, I thought my position just and his unjust, and felt wronged by the judge’s decision. I also admit that the other man felt every bit as justified in his position as I did, and was gratified that the judge ruled with him. Our sense of justice is often subjective.

I can’t afford to purchase a new house on the beach, but I have the right to do so. No law forbids me from doing so or permits only those with a certain level of wealth to do so. I can’t act well enough to be the next Batman, but I have the right to do so. No law forbids me or allows only actors of a certain ability. I can’t run fast enough, catch well enough, etc. to play in the upcoming Superbowl, but I have the right to do so. No law forbids me from doing so or permits only those with a minimum physique, etc. If I wanted to, I could take acting lessons, I could hit the gym, I could invest wisely, and gain the skills to be the next Batman, or the muscle to be the Superbowl MVP, or the wealth to buy that beach house. There is no law that forbids from doing any of those -I am limited only by my current bank accounts, skills, fitness.

Wealth, like skill, good looks, physical strength and intelligence, conveys advantages or privileges, not rights. Beauty, physical stature and abilities, natural intelligence, aptitude and ingenuity, are all often inherited from our parents. Why shouldn’t wealth be, if they have it to give? Who has the right to decide how to dispose of their wealth?

You argue your point very well! And I do appreciate the distinction between “ability” and “availability” that you are making. If rights are only meant to convey equivalent “availability” rather than equivalent “ability,” then my side of this argument has no merit.

Except protected rights ARE also meant to convey equivalent ability, and not just the same availability. We are not talking about sports, or fame, or in fact the earning of wealth itself — all of which could fairly fall within the “ability” framework of your argument. We are instead talking about equality under the law, which has always expressly implied more than just equal “availability.” Some examples:

1. If I can’t afford an attorney, one will be appointed on my behalf. Why? Using your argument, I should be able to bone up on the law and defend myself, or take out a loan against my house to hire a good attorney, etc. Right? Except that’s not a realistic expectation, and so public defenders have been part of proposed equal ABILITY of an adequate self-defense. These attorneys would not exist if equivalent ability was not part of the equation of equal justice.

2. In the same way, a variety of special protections exist under the law for the disabled, children, the elderly, and so forth. Why? If these individuals are expected to somehow rise to the occasion when given the same “availability” of their protected rights — regardless of their objective abilities (or lack thereof) — why should they receive any special treatment at all? Because part of equal rights under the law is to attempt (successfully or not) to level the playing field with respect to one’s ability to execute or achieve those rights.

3. In an admittedly extreme extension of logic, if I am accused of vehicular homicide but subsequently end up in a coma from a brain aneurysm, according to your reasoning I should be tried in absentia for my crimes. It’s not the court’s fault (or the victim’s family’s fault, or society’s fault) that I can’t stand trial. Justice must be served. Except, as I’m sure you would agree, I must be “competent to stand trial” before that trial can proceed. Ergo: I must have adequate “ability” to answer for my alleged crime.

So, to put a very fine point on it, in any court of law, if my advantage in ability is extraordinary, and my opponent has profound deficits in their ability, there is not going to be anything close to “equality under the law” unless a judge makes special provisions on my opponent’s behalf, or both parties are forced into one of many leveling processes (such as mitigation, expedited jury trials, etc.). This is a well-known problem with many imperfect solutions. And, unfortunately, a hefty wallet can almost always find ways around these leveling approaches.

In reality, corporate officers of corporations who have knowingly killed tens of thousands of people through deliberate malfeasance (tobacco, pharmaceutical, and petrochemical industries for example) have never been held accountable for their genocidal profit campaigns. But innocent people who can’t afford a good defense have ended up on death row with alarming frequency. So anyone sincerely concerned with justice must ask: “Why is this so?”

Well…it’s for precisely the same reason that the wealthiest corporations often pay little to no taxes: they can afford the expertise to skirt “equality under tax law” and tilt the scales in their favor.

I hope this clarifies things a bit.

Sadly, almost nothing. I’m not talking about the values that conservatives espouse — such as the importance of family and personal responsibility, the importance of the rule of law and being fiscally responsible, the valuing of the U.S. Constitution and expectations of personal liberty, etc. — many of which I myself agree with. No, the real problem is how conservatives allow themselves to be hoodwinked into believing utterly false claims about causality and therefore into promoting policies and praxis resulting in outcomes that completely undermine and contradict the values they espouse.

Take the example of abortion. Reducing the frequency of abortions seems like a good thing to almost everyone, regardless of where they are in the ideological or political spectrum. The problem is that the conservative approach — to overturn Roe v. Wade and, ultimately, to ban abortions altogether — simply isn’t effective. In fact, decades of data demonstrate that communities where Planned Parenthood has a long-term presence have evidenced a steady reduction in total abortions over time…even as populations in those areas grow…so that per capita abortions steeply decline. So this “liberal/progressive” approach to reducing abortions actually works, even though it flies in the face of conservative claims about “how liberals just want to kill more babies,” or that Planned Parenthood is an evil emblem of this baby-killing frenzy. And we know that, historically, women will still seek abortions whether they are legal or not. Lastly, SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade in the way that it did essentially threatens several longstanding protections of personal liberties (gay marriage, mixed race marriage, parental decision-making, right to contraception, etc.). So despite the rhetorical “virtue signaling” of the abortion bans we see being legislated in conservative states, real-world evidence and outcomes tend to contradict what conservatives claim the root of the problem to be, and their solutions undermine the very personal liberty conservatives claim to support!

And this is true across the board — in the flavor of crony shareholder capitalism that conservative policies promote, in the level of government corruption and law-breaking that politicians elected by conservatives carry out, in the failure of conservative economic policies, in their persistant undermining of democratic institutions, etc. The way conservatives go about reifying their values nearly always either falls short or makes things much worse — often smacking of hypocrisy and invoking high levels of cognitive dissonance within the conservative tribe. Thus conservatives seem to demonstrate a really terrible track record in areas where they are constantly accusing or attacking liberals and progressives. And this hypocritical spiral has extended all the way up to conservative Supreme Court Justices, who are shamelessly “activist” in their revision of 200 years of stare decisis (yet only regarding conservative hot-button issues, and little else). It’s more than a little astonishing.

Why does this happen with such frequency? Why are conservatives so often mistaken? Well…because the folks who work very hard (and spend lots of money) hoodwinking conservatives are benefitting from the false narratives about causality and preferred policy approaches.

Let’s look at just one potent example that spells this out really clearly. Consider that firearms manufacturers — via intense lobbying, funding of pro-gun candidates, generation of endless Second Amendment propaganda and fear-mongering, and long-term intimate relationships with “gun rights” organizations — have been very successful in persuading conservatives that civilians “need” to own lots of weapons, including military weapons. According to gun makers, owning a military weapon is a Constitutional right that is constantly under threat from gun-fearing libtards and the nanny state! But wait…who is this really benefiting from these endless and well-funded persuasion efforts? Well the firearms manufacturers of course! All that propaganda and lobbying directly increases firearm manufacturer profits in a world where starting wars that enlist mass armies has become much less popular, and the sale of military weapons to such armies has consequently become much less profitable. Gun manufacturers just needed to find a new market…and by hoodwinking conservatives, they did just that.

And this is how almost all conservative groupthink is generated…and how the conservative voting base is “energized:” it’s mostly just simple hoodwinking for profit. When we follow the money behind any conservative propaganda, it always leads to folks who want to enrich themselves directly — or empower themselves politically so that they can further enrich themselves.


REFERENCES/FURTHER READING

Some additional examples of conservative hypocrisy illustrated below from this website: www.realmajority.us




On the agenda and tactics of neoliberalism: https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/

On the nature of conservative “culture wars” and conning Christians into supporting right-wing agendas:

You’ll notice there isn’t one simple answer…but unfortunately that’s what a lot of folks would like — and certainly what political pundits and talkshow hosts are willing to sell us.

Recent causes for inflation in the U.S. — really none of which can be “blamed” on any one political party or candidate — include:

1) Government stimulus spending during the COVID pandemic. This put more $$ in people’s hands to spend and many of them did.

2) Reluctance of Federal Reserve to address inflation sooner. Many influential economists (and folks in Fed itself) believed initial spikes of inflation were “transitory.” But they were wrong.

3) Russian aggression against Ukraine and consequent sanctions. The war itself was hugely disruptive to supplies of everything from oil and natural gas to grain, palladium (used in fuel cells and catalytic converters) and potash (a component of fertilizer production) — and the sanctions levied against Russia then amplified this effect.

4) Supply chain and transport problems around the globe. In addition to the war in Ukraine, a lot of this of this was COVID-related on a global scale, but some of it was also more localized. For example, there were oil refinery problems in the U.S. that added to oil production woes, a particular region of China that couldn’t produce microchips for several months, etc. Regardless, even as demand ramped up, supply chains remained choked…and many of those conditions continue to persist.

5) Pent up demand during COVID. This is actually a biggie, because that pent up demand is still in play — folks are still spending gobs of $$$ on things they couldn’t do during the pandemic, like travel and eating out.

6) Conspiracy thinking. This is actually a pretty nasty feature of U.S. culture that is really hurting the U.S. economy. As just one example, the resistance to COVID vaccination was really, really stupid and probably prolonged the negative economic impacts of COVID on the U.S. economy — and extended all COVID-related inflationary factors — for many more months than necessary.

7) Global economic shifts and expanding excessive consumption. Some twenty years ago the U.S. was able to source really cheap labor and raw materials from developing countries like China, Korea, India, etc. This resulted in much cheaper prices for U.S. consumers. But, as a consequence, Americans who make up only 5% of the global population were using some 50% of global resources. But now, the economies of the developing world have grown tremendously, and billions of their citizens are now much wealthier and expect a higher standard of living — along with higher wages. And of course those new consumers now have need of those same resources that were previously dedicated to supplying goods to Americans. Add to this that, globally, those raw materials are becoming more scarce even as demand for them grows around the globe. So…do you see the problem here? Americans can no longer expect cheap goods from China in particular the way they once did…so prices would have risen in the U.S. regardless of any of the other factors listed here. And the cost of doing business in the U.S. is just rising…period. Developing countries aren’t even willing to buy our garbage anymore! So guess who has to pay more for dealing with that garbage? We do.

Anti-immigrant policies and sentiment in the U.S.. This is actually one of the dumbest “let’s shoot ourselves in the foot” developments in American politics. Blaming immigrants for our problems isn’t just mistaken, it’s really harmful to the U.S. economy. Particularly in agriculture, the U.S. relies almost entirely on immigrant workers to keep Americans fed…and big ag really has never cared if those workers were legal or not. So when politicians amplify fear over a “crisis at the border” and enact policies that keep immigrants from supplying U.S. companies with much-needed cheap labor, guess who pays the price? American consumers of course.

9) OPEC oil production policies. On the heals of oil sanctions against Russia, OPEC’s decision to cut back production was a really, really bad idea — basically a “punch in the gut” to the global economy at the worst possible time.

10) Corporate greed. This includes things like reluctance of banks to pass on increased interest rates to consumers. You may have noticed that mortgage lenders are happy to charge 7%+ on 30-year mortgages, but savings accounts in banks are still only providing less than an unchanged 1% interest. Then you have oil companies raking in ridiculously high profits (the highest in their entire history!) just because they can. This level of greed has plagued corporate America for a long time, but it seems particularly bad right now. And of course it’s not restricted to the U.S. And all of this opportunistic greed is what’s helping make prices on everything very high…and likely will keep those prices from going down even when all of the other inflationary pressures are relieved.

11) Labor shortages and consequent increases in salary. This has been falsely blamed on COVID stimulus and folks choosing not to work because they were receiving COVID relief and unemployment benefits. In reality, this is a much more complicated situation that involves a host of factors — things like folks leaving the workforce due to burnout (especially among what we discovered to be “essential workers” during COVID), early retirement, a sea change in attitudes about work commitment (i.e. “the great resignation” and other gen z attitude shifts), worker deaths and disability from COVID, and major career path shifts due to COVID impacts on certain industries (for example, restaurant workers who were laid off during COVID choosing new careers).

12) Some unfortunately timed fulfillments of campaign promises. On one side, student loan forgiveness could likely become an inflation stimulator if those are allowed to proceed. On the other side, any and all tax cuts have almost certainly helped induce inflation. Here we really can blame the politicians on both the Left and the Right…even though they are just following through on their campaign promises to voters.

13) Financial “psychologics” that are disconnected from reality. This is more subtle, but the U.S. stock market is a very good example. As a consequence of both institutional “build it and they will come” optimism and a huge spike in irrationally exuberant retail investors, the stock market has almost zero correlation with real-world economic indicators. This has been a long-term problem for sure, but essentially the opportunity to make a lot of money in speculative investing, which in turn supercharges valuation and reduces perceived risk, leads to everyone (consumers, corporations, government agencies, etc.) operating as if everything is golden and wonderful…when really the Emperor isn’t wearing any clothes (or is wearing moldy rags…!). This false optimism and misplaced enthusiasm actually places a lot of upward pressure on everything from consumer prices to worker salaries, even as it encourages company’s to spend gobs of money because, well, they falsely believe in their own inflated valuation. It’s a pretty nasty cycle!

There are additional factors (after I finished writing this post I realized several more that should have been included) but this captures some pretty substantive issues. And, as you can see, we can’t really pin things on any one thing. It’s complicated. And we certainly can’t blame any one party or individual political leaders for inflation. That’s just a really ignorant knee-jerk response out fear and frustration.

My 2 cents.

Absolutely.

It’s difficult to summarize just how extensive the impacts of consumerism on the individual and society are. I think the easiest way to begin that conversation is to list some semantic containers that encompass negative aspects of consumerism. Three of the most well-defined containers are economic materialism, conspicuous consumption, and commodification. Here is a brief overview of each:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_materialism

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conspicuous-consumption.asp

http://neolib.uga.edu/commodification.php

In essence, these three habits alone contribute to an accelerating amplification of deleterious “non-material” impacts on the individual and society, which include:

1. The general devaluing of human trust relationships in favor of transactional relationships — in other words, the eroding of interpersonal trust and, by extension, community and societal trust. This of course expands into regional, national, and international attitudes and practices as well, so that we come to rely solely on transactional evidence of trust, rather than a more cultural cooperation, interdependence, and exchange.

2. The “externalization” of all personal and collective priorities, growth, meaning, and power, rather than development of internal qualities. For example, the belief that one’s possessions, material wealth, and physical characteristics are more important in attracting friends and romantic partners than internal qualities like honesty, compassion, empathy, generosity, and so forth. Or that one’s self-worth is likewise dependent on consuming and owning material things, rather than on the qualities of one’s own character. Or that social status and popularity propelled by such externals are more important than the quality and depth of our interpersonal relationships (that is, the shared feelings of connection and commitment our friendships evoke). This externalizing attitude is then expanded to include all of society and our national identity: instead of demonstrating good citizenship (in our community, or as a nation in global affairs) we become more concerned with clawing after power, status, and control, as those are our “external” proofs of success in the world…rather than the quality of relationship our nation has with other nations.

3. The overall cheapening of human life and disrespect for our fellow human beings — or anything in life that doesn’t achieve sufficient “exchange value.” This is perhaps the most egregious impact of consumerism, when our prioritization of acquiring material things, reliance on consumption for social status, and projection of material valuation and standards on others erodes our fundamental respect and compassion for others and any valuations of the intangible benefits of being live. Consider that commodification intentionally erases the constructive societal value of everything in favor of its “exchange” value in the marketplace — what better way is there to cheapen and denigrate the intrinsic value of everything in life (art, love, joy, intimacy, humanity, compassion, etc.) than to force everything into tidy, sterile boxes of monetary valuation? Paul Piff at UC Berkeley has done some interesting research related to this, documenting the negative impact of personal wealth on prosocial behaviors.

4. An undermining of happiness as individuals and society as a whole. The vast majority of long-term research in this arena has demonstrated that enduring happiness does not rely on consuming or possessing material things. Instead, happiness is primarily dependent on strong interpersonal bonds with other people — and the deepening trust, intimacy, and contentment this produces. Consuming things does stimulate short bursts of dopamine, but not oxytocin, which loving human relationships stimulate. Interestingly, healthy oxytocin levels actually reduce our need to consume calories. Perhaps it also reduces our “need” to consume other material things….?

5. Interference with spiritual, emotional, and moral development (again as individuals and society as a whole). This is a more subtle principle, and I can only speak from personal observation and experience on this matter. A materialism-consumerism orientation to the world will reliably retard our spiritual, emotional, and moral growth, keeping us “infantilized” and forever dependent. This is really an extension of the “externalization” principle alluded to earlier, but with a much more insidious and profound impact. I think this is why nearly every spiritual tradition encourages relinquishing our acquisitiveness and our trust in material possessions for any sense of self-worth or existential security. If we can’t learn to “let go” of our need to acquire and possess stuff, we will never cultivate the internal growth necessary to be spiritually, emotionally, and morally mature. Why? The mechanisms become intuitively obvious to anyone who has practiced such “letting go” with persistent discipline, but I would equate the process to a child’s individuating from their parents. There is a quality of interior self-sufficiency and an independence of will that is unattainable if we remain attached to material things. We simply cannot become mature adults if we are forever suckling at the teat of consumerism.

Some additional reading related to this topic, in no particular order:

https://www.academia.edu/4233302/The_Stupefaction_of_Human_Experiencehttps://www.academia.edu/4233690/A_Mystics_Call_to_Action

https://www.level-7.org/resources/Developmental_CorrelationsV2.pdf



My 2 cents.

Freedom is a type of cultural currency — a coin with two sides.

On one side of the coin is insulation from economic insecurity, acute lack of opportunity, and deprivation of social capital. I call this “freedom from poverty,” where poverty comes in many forms but always has the same effect: it robs us of the operational capacity to exercise most freedoms, and interferes mightily with exercising liberty. Another way to describe this is for everyone in society to be provided the same existential foundations and available choices — a level playing field across many dimensions of life that liberates us from being oppressed and restricted in real terms.

The other side of the liberty coin is collective agreement to support the liberty of others, regardless of who those others are and whether they are “just like me.” This equates a high level of tolerance and acceptance of differences between people. However, the presumption is that many core values are shared across all differences, so that this collective agreement is not too onerous, distasteful, or amoral. We agree to operate a certain way as a society so that everyone else’s freedoms are maximized. This is the basis of the rule of law.

Good government’s role is to facilitate both sides of the freedom coin when society is not able to do so on its own. When societies are culturally immature — as is the case with the U.S.A where I live — they require a bit more involvement from government to create both freedom from poverty and an effective rule of law. When the citizenry is morally immature and generally ignorant, government intervenes to create “civil society” by bolstering these two arenas. Over time, as societies mature into a more morally advanced arrangement and all citizens acquire broader foundations of knowledge, government’s role can attenuate as both sides of the liberty coin become the de facto reality of cultural practices and standards; that is, civil society can be supported increasingly by perversive culture rather than by government.

The common denominator for all such arrangements is progressive democracy, where citizens have increasingly direct control over how both freedom from poverty and the rule of law are implemented in their community, region, and nation. Democracy becomes a sort of banking system that stores up and protects this wealth of liberty and regulates how it is exchanged and shared within society. But again, democracy can only be effective in this regard when citizens are maturing morally and accumulating sound knowledge.

How to effectively encourage, fortify, and enhance the moral creativity of society so that our “freedom coin” is actually increasing in value has been a long-term aim of my research and writing. For more on this and all-of-the-above, please see the resources below.

Prosociality

Level 7 Philosophy

The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty

Private Property as Violence

My 2 cents.

What Aristotle wrote about some of the weaknesses of democracy is summarized here:

Was Aristotle right when he said "democracy inevitably degenerates into despotism"? Why?

His conclusion covered in that post, however, is this: “Yet possibly these objections are to a great extent met by our old answer, that if the people are not utterly degraded, although individually they may be worse judges than those who have special knowledge — as a body they are as good or better.”

It’s tentative, but this is really the basis for a functional democracy. In the same vein, Thomas Jefferson famously said: "An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people," which is really a variation on the same themes that Aristotle opines about regarding democracy.

The greatest argument against democracy, therefore, is an ignorant and ‘utterly degraded’ electorate. And, unfortunately, we have seen strong evidence of this in far-right populism around the globe, rather profoundly in the MAGA movement in the U.S., and in the blindly unquestioning support of murderous dictators like Putin by a majority (roughly 70%) of the Russian people. We are living through a period where exactly what Aristotle and Jefferson warned us about is taking place.

My 2 cents.

Comment from David Daniel

"Very educational. But it doesn't really address my question. What is the argument against democracy? Is there one to be had? It is obvious to me that our current democracy has been degraded in a way that Aristotle predicted but is this, in itself, an adequate argument against undertaking the project of democracy.?

I suppose it can be said that many have predicted the failure of democracy but, if it does fail it will be the failure of the participants who make it so. Does that mean that it was a bad idea in the first place? Does that mean that we are not socially and politically evolved enough to run a democracy? Have we just failed at this run through and it should be tried again? Or are we all just better off to live in our misery and let someone else make the decisions for us?"

Good points and here is how I would address them…

1. The problems we are having with democracy (and which indeed were predicted) are not an inherent flaw of democracy itself. They are, rather, a problem of implementing democracy without paying attention to the ongoing education of citizens and moral evolution of a given culture. Without attention to and investment in education and moral maturity, democracy will ultimately fail.

2. In our current landscape, the biggest challenge has been implementing democracy in concert with capitalism. Despite neoliberal rhetoric to the contrary, democracy and capitalism are fundamentally at odds with each other, and that tension has currently resolved in favor of empowering the owner-shareholder class, rather than the worker-consumer class. Why? Well because the very “education” and information available to most of society — and the perpetuation of many cultural institutions — arrives via a mass media that is completely subjugated to the profit motive. And these de facto sources of plutocratic influence are intensively engaged in distorting information and education to deceive and manipulate the voting public to vote against their own best interests, and support self-serving plutocratic agendas instead.

3.We could say that a “perfect” democracy is as romantic an ideal as a benevolent dictatorship, that is true. But IMO a democracy will inherently be more agile, responsive, resilient, and ultimately successful…IF (and only if) other forces don’t interfere with it. Currently, those with the highest concentrations of political, social, and material capital have far too much influence over executive governance, legislation, elections, education, advertising, mass media, and persuasive information in the world’s democracies. We essentially have subjugated democratic institutions to “crony capitalism.” If we could diffuse material concentrations of wealth and political concentrations of influence, democratic institutions could easily begin to recover on their own.

4. How can we know any of these assumptions are valid? Because of research by folks like Elinor Ostrom and the broader examples of successful left-anarchist societies. Ostrom documented countless organically-arising examples of what she called “common pool resource management” all around the globe. In these examples, there was no government involvement, and no property ownership, but instead self-directed, democratic or consensus resource management of common natural resources by small communities. Likewise, the examples of left-anarchist societies (List of anarchist communities) that deliberately diffused political and economic power, and again made all decisions democratically or via consensus, show us that democracy can thrive when it is not corroded and corrupted by the profit motive and generational accumulations/concentrations of capital.

My 2 cents.

LOL. Really? Well let me first say that the door to much propaganda in the world today is something very sneaky, something called “reasonableness.” In the case of neoliberal market fundamentalists like Mankiw, that “reasonableness” is describing “principles of economics” that, taken individually and in (academic and ideological) isolation, may seem reasonable. In fact one could debate each of Mankiw’s principles ad nauseum, and still be operating within his ideological framework — because of how he restricts the scope of the conversation. You see the problem? If you ask me “what are the principles of a stable romantic relationship,” I could respond: “Well, first off both people in the relationship need to buy the right kind of clothing. Second, they both need to listen to the same kind of music. Third, there needs to be a clear, preexisting understanding of what each person’s role should be….” And so on. And I could keep elaborating on these “principles” as if they actually correlated with every dimension of a human relationship…when clearly they would not. They would, in reality, be confined by a very narrow perspective on relationship that I was effectively imposing on the conversation. And the more emphatically I insisted that nothing else need be included — while I actively excluded very important additional or alternate factors — the more I could perpetuate a discussion that is boundarized by my own biases. And that is precisely what Mankiw is doing…just like many neoliberals before him. I often flag this sort of behavior as ideologically fascist, with the poster child of the technique — in economics at least — being Milton Friedman.

That said, what issues do I have with Mankiw’s 10 principles themselves? That would be a very lengthy conversation. At a 10,000-foot level, I would say they are “half-truths that add up to delusional bupkis.” More specifically, behavioral economics has clearly demonstrated that consumers are not rational operators, and that principles 1–4 are not only oversimplifications, but actually distort or distract from the microeconomic dynamics that are really in play. Human decision trees are not analytically neat-and-tidy, they are messy, impulsive and emotional; and, in fact, marketing knowingly exploits that unstable irrationality to condition completely counterfactual, counterproductive, unhealthy, demeaning and dangerous consumption patterns in consumers. For crying out loud…this is obvious to anyone who observes or researches real-world consumer responses to corporate coercion and manipulation.

After 1–4, Mankiw gets a bit more sneaky with 5–7. He uses the phrasing “trade can,” “markets are usually,” and “governments can sometimes,” and of course we can’t really argue those points, because…well…they are in fact reasonable. Except…well…are they? It is when Mankiw elaborates on these points further (in his writings, etc.) that we see the depth of his blindness — how he does not appreciate or address the complex interdependencies involved, or the widely demonstrated externalities and causal chains, or in fact the well-established track record of what actually works in the real world…and what really doesn’t. This is where we can get lost in the weeds, but suffice it to say that Mankiw doesn’t begin to fully enumerate all of the inputs and outputs of trade, or the complex landscape of variables that influence those inputs and outputs, or, indeed, the disastrous consequences of what can fairly be described as “Mankiw-esque” market fundamentalist policies we have witnessed in the past. His ideas live in a bubble — applicable to what I call “a unicorn market,” one that has never and will never exist.

Principles 8–10, along with most of Mankiw’s thinking, are just more conceptual trickle-down from outdated classical economics. But (and this is pretty ironic IMO) unlike Smith, Ricardo et al, Mankiw fairly reliably excludes the common good from being part of serious deliberation. In other words, he drifts into the realm of laissez-faire that classical economists actually warned about. Where, as Smith wrote: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” But are points 8–10 accurate in any way? Sure…again if you exclude all sorts of other factors, causes, variables, evidences, etc. that are critical to a complete macroeconomic picture, Mankiw’s points provide a partial, highly tailored framing of causal relationships. So, if a person ignores how markets actually function, the corruptive influences of crony capitalism, how boardroom decisions are actually made, why financialization has displaced production for massive wealth generation, why monopolies occur, where Keynes was proven correct (and what monetary policies actually work), why growth-dependent economies boom-and-bust, etc…and instead pines away for a juicy young unicorn to sate their every neoliberal appetite, well then: Mankiw is the porn for them!

Let me just call out one specific example of Mankiw’s delusional approach. His prescription for most resource allocation challenges is to privatize them — like many neoliberals, Mankiw believes private property is the panacea for all ills. However, Elinor Ostrom demonstrated in her common pool resource management research that the tragedy of the commons need not exist where self-organized, self-managed sharing of common resources is approached a certain way, and she goes on to enumerate observed principles that have been successful. Essentially, there are widely employed systems of access to and utilization of common resources around the globe that completely sidestep the tragedy of the commons without private ownership or government intervention. Hmmm. How could this be? In Mankiw’s unicorn universe, it can’t be, since there will always be free riders and excessive inefficiencies when privatization is absent. But again, Ostrom was just documenting what she observed in the real world, so Mankiw is just, well…wrong. Hence the nature of the problem with most of Mankiw’s thinking — and indeed most market fundamentalist thinking (i.e. Randian objectivists, anarcho-capitalists, individualist economic materialists, Austrian School evangelists, etc.).

My 2 cents.

Here is a previous answer to this question that covers most of the basics, describing how much of the innovation that capitalism often takes credit for has actually occurred in non-profit environments (academia, government research, unpaid internships, hobbyists inventors inventing for the pleasure of doing so, etc.):

https://www.tcollinslogan.com/tclblog/index.php?/archives/380-Socialists-How-would-you-deal-with-the-incentive-problem.html

More generally, human beings are not primarily motivated by greed — and, even when they are, other complex motivations are also in play. The fans of “market fundamentalism” really do believe a desire for material gain and security dominates human behavior and choices…but that simply is contrary to all research on our intrinsic motivation (see link below). But a romantic view of the profit motive bolsters their blind enthusiasm for capitalism, and distorts how market fundamentalists understand all causality in human systems.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5364176/

In reality, most innovation throughout human history — and even during the rise of capitalism — has been a product of natural desires in human beings to imagine, problem-solve, impress others, or just be clever. In fact, nearly all of the most impactful innovations in the 200 years have been a result intrinsic, non-materialistic motivations (Edison’s invention of the light bulb and phonograph; Einstein’s theory of relativity; Marie Curie’s work on radioactivity; the Atanasoff–Berry computer; and so on). That’s who we are as a species. The linked Quora answer above covers some of the more recent examples of this natural tendency to innovate without profit, but any student of anthropology, archeology, or history can educate folks about how amazingly innovative human beings have always been…long before making a profit was a factor.

“One might think that the money value of an invention constitutes its reward to the man who loves his work. But speaking for myself, I can honestly say this is not so…I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.” —Thomas Edison

Does the profit motive actually incentivize innovation at all? That’s a very interesting question. What the profit motive seems to be really good at is incentivizing efficiencies and cost savings in production and distribution — and in developing new ways to persuade people to buy new things, whether those those things are useful or have any intrinsic value. In other words, capitalism has a knack for inventing value out of thin air, and then convincing consumers the invented value is real. It also is pretty good at recognizing the profit potential of other people’s inventions, capitalizing on the ideas of those not motivated by profit, and then taking credit for the innovation.

In any case, consider the consumer fads that have driven the most massive surges in sales in the U.S. — are any of the clothing, toys, electronic gadgets, convenience appliances, etc. all that innovative? Not really…they just become popular because they are the “latest and greatest” version of something that everyone is persuaded by advertising they “must have.” This lemming effect of keeping up with artificially induced popular demand drives a lot more sales than actual innovation. So in terms of what is being produced, advertised, and sold, most new ideas in the commercial marketplace are a lot more focused on convincing people they need something they really don’t.

In addition, many mature industries aggressively resist innovation — because a truly disruptive new idea will undermine their profit. This is why ExxonMobil spent millions to spread doubt about both climate science and the feasibility of alternative energy production. In fact, this practice of disinformation to keep innovation from occurring has been a massively funded and well-coordinated activity of big business for many decades. See this web page for examples:

https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/Attacks_On_Science/

As much of the low-hanging fruit of substantive innovation and market disruption has already occurred across many industries over the past 50–100 years (i.e. how many new, meaningful variations of “toaster” or “hair dryer” or TV can their really be…?), profit-driven product and service innovation increasingly tends to put new veneers on old ideas — just asserting that something has new value when it really doesn’t, or making sure consumers have to replace what they buy on a regular basis. This is one reason we see the durability of all goods plummeting even as their prices soar.

So this is how the profit motive works in the real world, and how its linkage with real innovation is tenuous at best. Don’t be fooled by the market fundamentalist propaganda.

Lastly, regarding socialism. First, here is a link on the different types of socialism…and how they are not at all cookie cutter replications of Marxism-Leninism as the anti-socialists would like you to believe:

https://www.tcollinslogan.com/tclblog/index.php?/archives/618-What-are-the-different-types-of-socialism.html

But even in the case of Soviet era communism, there was a lot of innovation and productivity occurring in the U.S.S.R. As “inefficient” as the anti-socialists want us to believe the Soviet model was, it produced some astonishing innovations that the capitalist world came to rely upon. As just one example, the Soyuz rocket has the longest, most reliable track record of delivery supplies and personnel to space — including the International Space Station.

https://www.space.com/40282-soyuz-rocket.html

But Soyuz was just the tip of the iceberg. The Soviets were actually pretty damn innovative, and their inventions had a measurable influence on the rest of the (capitalist) world. Here is one quick overview:

https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-greastest-inventions-made-by-the-soviet-union.html

So again…don’t be fooled. The truth is always more nuanced than the (unfortunately numerous and widespread) pedantic declarations of the brainwashed and the ignorant. Just because something gets repeated over and over again doesn’t mean it’s true…but the market fundies (right-libertarians, fans of Ayn Rand, neoliberals, neoconservatives, etc.) often fall victim to this illusory truth effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect

My 2 cents.

There are a number of reasons why technology innovation has the appearance of slowing down — and in some cases really is slowing down. Among them are:

1. Much of the low hanging fruit (technological solutions to universal human challenges) has already been invented, developed, and refined.

2. Much of what remains is more complicated, takes more time, and costs more to research and develop.

3. There are efforts by well-established industries that dominate a given sector to discourage or constrain innovation — the most obvious example being the petroleum industry’s funding of climate change and alternative energy skepticism.

4. Over the past fifty years, commercialism has created tremendous downward pressure on technology costs while generating extremely high expectations of technology benefits. That’s simply not a winning formula.

5. Complexity and massive interdependence across complex systems in modern technology itself is interfering with both rapid development and disruptive innovation. It just takes longer to ensure integration, compatibility, and even moderate levels of future-proofing.

6. Another consequence complexity is a lack of extensibility, and how that impacts costs. A simple example of this is writing a piece of software that is backwards compatible with several iterations of hardware. At a certain point it becomes too difficult to accomplish in a profitable way, which in turn places an increasing cost burden for innovation on consumers — not just monetarily, but also in new learning curves. Buying a new smartphone or laptop every year is a pretty hefty expectation. Therefore a balance has to be struck between rapidity of innovation based on technology, and rapidity of deployment based on consumer acceptance and willingness to bear all of the costs.

Hope this helps.

Yes of course. Throughout human history innovation and social responsibility — which I would define more broadly as creativity and prosociality — have existed and thrived without the profit motive. In fact the profit motive interferes mightily with both more often than not.

On the one hand the profit motive channels innovation and creativity into a very narrow focus of only what increases profit, abandoning anything that doesn’t promise return on investment. For example, we often see real innovation crowded out by “cheaper and more efficient” forms of production and service delivery, because those types of innovation guarantee greater profitability. Most of the big leaps forward in more creative and life changing innovation, in fact, have arisen through academic and government research, by inventors fiddling in their workshop for fun, artists creating masterpieces for their loved ones, philosophers struggling to answer complex moral questions, or mathematicians solving challenging equations — all because that particular mountain was simply there to climb, not because they would make a buck off of it. The results were then put into production by for-profit companies who reap all the rewards from someone else’s creativity. The profit motive doesn’t have much at all to do with the innovation, just its mass production. This is the case with everything from cell phone technology to medical advances to major changes in the structure of society.

The profit motive has also long demonstrated it can often be at odds with social responsibility and prosociality. There have been countless instances where the profit motive has created oppressive or life threatening conditions and consequences for workers and consumers — and the history of capitalism has mainly been about civil society correcting those abuses (child labor laws, worker safety laws, consumer protections, environmental protections, strengthening democracy against cronyism and plutocracy, etc.). And the oppressive and exploitative conditions created by the profit motive have often threatened the stability, liberty, and thriving of civil society itself. Although it is true that capitalism and the profit motive have provided an extraordinary engine for productivity and economic growth, it has been civic institutions, democratic reforms, educational institutions, and the expansion of civil rights that have established or strengthened conditions that support creativity, innovation, social responsibility, and general societal cohesion — particularly in the face of a countervailing atomistic individualism and commercialistic materialism inspired by the profit motive.

This is not the narrative that the “market fundamentalist” or pro-capitalist folks appreciate or even understand. They are often blind to the antagonisms of liberty, creativity, and civil society that the profit motive has wrought.

But again, if we study the grand arc of human history, most of the greatest innovations, and the greatest evolutions in civil society itself, have been utterly divorced from the profit motive. Humans just love to create, to connect with each other and create community, and to build institutions and civic structures that support those impulses. The profit motive is tolerated because it has lead to a rapid expansion of material wealth and technological conveniences — it has facilitated creature comforts and material security. But it has also eroded society at the same time, which is why it has had to be constantly managed and constrained.

My 2 cents.

It would be utterly absurd to assume this dispute isn’t settled. Such doubt would be equivalent to asserting the “debate” between humorism and modern medicine isn’t settled, or the “debate” between flat eartherism and the established scientific view of planetary formation is still being “debated.” There are no such “debates.” There are simply ideologically brainwashed adherents who are lost in tribal groupthink on one side, with zero empirical evidence to support the vast majority of their suppositions (i.e. freshwater folks)…and those who rely on an ever-evolving body of evidence and real-world observations to shape their worldview on the other side (saltwater folks). The irony, of course, is that freshwater folks really do believe they are promoting a “rational” view. LOL.

Now, to be fair, there are a handful (but only a handful) of instances where individual aspects of freshwater theory has — historically at least — seemed to align with reality. I’m not going to elaborate on specifics because it will only feed the crazies. How does it feed them? Through a joyfully deranged marriage of partial reinforcement and the illusory truth effect.

Suffice it to say that data supporting most freshwater hypotheses are not only sparse, but completely overwhelmed by the avalanche of data that support most (though not all) saltwater hypotheses, and refute freshwater assumptions in the process.
In essence, to assert that there is still a “debate” between freshwater and saltwater perspectives is really just invoking false equivalence — for example, elevating the unicorns and fairy tales of the Chicago School to be (falsely) equivalent to time-proven Keynesian efficacy, only because they are both described as “macroeconomic theory.”

My 2 cents.

That would be an almost accurate statement, yes. The challenge (as with almost all attempts at summarizing complex philosophy) is that Popper uses a lengthy, layered sequence of arguments to explain why utopian thinking is problematic — or rather, tends to lead to self-defeating outcomes. Essentially, he argues that it is impossible to fully anticipate or predict how humans will actually behave within a given utopian structure or system, and that, without the ability to modify or evolve such a structure or system in response to those unpredictable events, there will inevitably be unanticipated consequences that undermine the utopia. Which is why, he insists, utopian “central planning” will inevitably lead to totalitarian/authoritarian oppressions — thereby ‘choking its own refutations’ and any chance of healing itself and fulfilling its vision.
Whether this is a valid argument has a lot to do with one’s view of historicism — i.e. whether there is a predictable (at least in the broadest strokes) progression of human society over time — and whether it is at all possible to fully anticipate or accelerate that evolution. My own view is that both assumptions are valid, but that imposing a top-down hierarchical structure or system is the wrong way to go about encouraging change, and indeed can lead to the sorts of problems Popper identified (especially when there are no strong, resilient democratic institutions to check authoritarian tendencies). However, IMO it is possible to encourage societal evolution by facilitating and expanding what I call the “moral creativity” of society — that is, an environment that encourages moral maturation individually and collectively. This is, however, an organic grass roots process centered around community-level relationships, rather than a top-down program that can be imposed on people. You can read more about my thinking on this here: https://level-7.org/Philosophy/Prosociality/

Thanks for the question. Here are some reasons why I think authoritarianism is on the rise:

1. White men have lost status in society. This is frightening. So, in their insecurity and fear, they turn to strongman leaders who seem like carnival mirror imitations of masculinity but whose pedantic, overconfident, authoritarian style reassures these insecure white men that someone is still on their side.

2. Modernity is increasingly complex, confusing, overwhelming, and scary. Rapid change — both cultural and technological — is increasingly alienating many people who feel excluded or left behind by those changes. Authoritarian leaders can appeal to this disorientation, confusion, and anxiety, and create scapegoats that have nothing to do with the actual causes, but are very useful in ginning up votes. These leaders also tend to appeal to nationalism, which helps restore pride.

3. There is increasing exploitation, abuse, and enslavement of the have-nots by the haves everywhere around the globe. This makes people want to rebel, to regain agency and self-respect, and some authoritarian candidates have a knack for hoodwinking people into believing that they (those candidates) have all of the answers to restore freedom and dignity to folks who feel beaten down. In reality, however, authoritarians usually oppose the real remedy democracy itself — and good government and civil society — making these the “bogeyman” that have caused all the problems for the have-nots. In reality, it is big business, crony capitalism, and capture of elections and government itself by wealthy owner-shareholders that have created this imbalance and oppression. But authoritarian leaders are usually in bed with those same plutocrats, and not at all interested in addressing the underlying problems. So in fact the problems just get worse.

4. The masses have been numbed into complacency, indifference, and apathy by a moderate level of wealth, entertainment, constant calls to action (from politicians, advertising, etc.), poor diets, lots of propaganda and disinformation, a decline in IQ and education, and other things that distract or impede them from taking appropriate action or even clearly understanding the problem. I see this as a modern version of “the spectacle,” with many other characteristics and contributing factors that you can read about here: L7 The Spectacle

My 2 cents.

My top 10 list for the U.S.A.:

1. Encourage alignment of our political economy with basic prosocial values and strong civil society — instead of promoting lowest-common-denominator animalism, individualist materialism, and tribalism.

2. Criminalize crony capitalism and corruption of democratic institutions in service of wealth, and jail the worst offenders.

3. Replace “corporate personhood” with another legal entity status for corporations that has more limited rights. Corporations aren’t people, and don’t deserve the same rights and privileges as people.

4. Give up on for-profit market solutions for certain complex problems that can be solved in better ways — healthcare is a good example, as many other countries have demonstrated.

5. Don’t treat advocates of the Chicago School, Austrian School, Virginian School, or Randian objectivism as anything but mildly deranged ideological cranks chasing after unicorns. And definitely don’t let anyone mistakenly believe that the policies and practices promoted by these folks have led to anything but abject and repeated failures and thoroughly debunked theories….

6. Look seriously at commons-centric solutions that do not rely on private ownership but instead promote communal responsibility and collaboration.

7. Focus on evidence-based, scientifically informed, carefully piloted policies with clear metrics to measure their success.

8. Promote broad, frequent, and well-documented education about economics itself and what has really worked well in the real world.

9. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine so that propaganda outlets can no longer call themselves “news organizations.”

10. Hold social media accountable for propagation of toxic content that deceives and manipulates folks into voting against their own best interests (economically and otherwise).

For more ideas, see L e v e l - 7 Overview

My 2 cents.

There are so many reasons to make socialism a reality. Let me count the ways…

1. To counter and eventually heal the horrific exploitations, injuries, and lethalities of capitalism — for workers, consumers, the poor, etc.

2. To counter the unsustainable economic growth-dependencies of capitalism that cannot persist indefinitely anyway.

3. To counter the extractive devastation and depletion of natural resources under capitalism that is exhausting the planet.

4. To counter the many negative externalities of capitalism — most acutely and emergent ecological and societal damage from climate change.

5. To introduce democracy into economics and ownership in the same way, and for the same reasons, that modern democracies (and especially direct or semi-direct democracies) aim to make government more egalitarian and inclusive for everyone.

6. Because concentrations of wealth ALWAYS lead to concentrations of power, and to the oppression and even enslavement of those who have less.

7. Because there are many examples of socialism working quite well over long periods of time — most notably in its non-Statist, anarchist/libertarian forms. You can read about those here: List of anarchist communities - Wikipedia

8. If you are a spiritual person of any faith (or no faith at all), and you practice a bit of spiritually-based discernment and wisdom, you will come to realize that socialism follows the spiritual principles taught in all spiritual traditions, and is the wisest course of economic organization for human beings to follow.

9. Common sense.

My 2 cents.

Of course it depends on what types of regulation we are talking about, and in which industries — and, more than that, which specific regulations are being discussed. Broad generalizations are troublesome here because they often seem ideologically driven, and are pretty easy to nitpick into dust. At the same time, to do this topic justice we would probably get lost in the minutiae of specific examples in specific industries at specific junctures in history, and miss the forest for the trees…
So after several years researching this topic I’ll shoot from the hip on this and offer what I suspect to be a few “somewhat sound” overarching principles:

1. Deregulation for its own sake is almost always a bad idea — unless something else (incentives, new technology, new business models, new civic institutions, etc.) is deliberately and thoughtfully considered or generated in place of the regulations being retired. In other words, if there is a provably better way to achieve a given outcome, then by all means let's abandon regulations perceived to be holding us back. But “the market” does not — and never has — offered those solutions on its own, and too often the result of deregulation is a Wild West with excessively unpredictable results. The religious conviction that markets can solve complex problems without any oversight or constraints is just that: a religious conviction, with very little basis in observable fact.

2. In reality, there have to be carefully engineered metrics that evaluate outcomes in order to understand what is required to anticipate and manage externalities and social risk. That is where complexity is killing us right now — our systems, technology, and relationships are evolving quickly and incredibly difficult to grok, and it’s even more difficult to craft adequate policies to address them (and the larger the scope of such policy, the more difficult it becomes). And because all of society is morphing so rapidly, it can be counterproductive to apply rules and metrics we used in our past analysis to what we can only vaguely predict for the near future. It’s like trying to catch a train while riding on a bicycle, only to have that train turn into a rocket that launches itself into space. So, without actually deliberately slowing all this progress, growth, and innovation, most regulation is a shot in the dark — a necessary shot (if we lack other structures to achieve similar ends), but less and less likely to have predictive efficacy.

3. That said, costs of deregulation are generally easier to predict than benefits. Why? Because very often there were pragmatic “learned from experience” reasons regulations were put in place initially. Not always, but nearly so, deregulation is a knee-jerk right-libertarian/neoliberal response to bureaucratic interference with profit, and rarely if ever attempts to fully appreciate or understand benefits beyond profit — or costs beyond loss of profit. Have there been some measurable additional benefits for narrowly focused examples of deregulation? Of course. It’s easy to cherry-pick positive examples — but again that’s missing the forest for the trees. On the whole, deregulation without a thoughtful substitute has been disastrous in terms of negative externalities and measurable loss of benefit to society. And that social cost is the more nuanced outcome that pro-deregulation folks don’t want to acknowledge or address.

4. It’s okay to be inefficient. It’s another tangential discussion, but large corporations are not any more efficient than government is — and sometimes they are much worse. Regardless, if inefficiency means, for example, that innovation happens a little more slowly and deliberately, then that’s actually okay if we frame things with concepts like “the precautionary principle.” Again, we have to decide on our metrics — and what outcomes we really value the most.
If I attempt to use some examples to support these broad statements, they can (and will) be easily picked apart. But I would encourage anyone interested in this topic to carefully evaluate the following points to gain insight into what the true costs and benefits of deregulation really are:

1. The deregulation of the airline industry in the U.S. and its impact on rural America in particular.

2. Various deregulations of the banking industry in the U.S. and the measurable consequences of socialized risks for privatized gains.

3. The health impacts on U.S. citizens from the countervailing efforts of coal, tobacco, agriculture, and petroleum industries to rid themselves of regulation and/or achieve regulatory capture of government.

4. Now…who benefited from the deregulation in all of the above instances? It generally wasn’t consumers — or, if so, only a narrow slice of consumers. It also wasn’t workers (or, if so, again only a select few). It wasn’t society as a whole. So….who benefited the most? Well, owner-shareholders of course. And let’s not pretend that “trickle down” supply side fantasies have ever been realized — it has never happened. The benefits remain neatly with those owner-shareholders, their families, and perhaps a few lucky charities, favored financial institutions, and the more loyal and obsequious politicians.

5. Lastly, amplifying the “folllow-the-money” theme, who will benefit most from deregulation of (or lack of regulation for) the Internet? Public lands? Air and water quality? Obamacare? The stock exchange? It’s really not that difficult to understand what (and who) is really motivating most deregulation. It’s just really easy to obscure those causal sparks with distracting rhetoric about “liberty” or “efficiency.”

In any case, these examples would be a good place to start. I can happily offer more upon request.

My 2 cents.

Funny thing is…in the original thought experiment Hardin uses the variable of cattle that are privately owned. And, because the cattle are privately owned, the common resource used for grazing is abused by those private owners. If the cattle had also been collectively “owned” (i.e. considered an extension of the commons) this thought experiment would not have resulted in the same tragedy. So, contrary to the popular misconception that the lack of regulation of that commons was the problem, it was actually the private ownership of cattle and the unenlightened self-interest of the cattle herders that lead to the tragedy.

Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel prize-winning research on common pool resource management demonstrated that the real-world versions of the commons (i.e. not a flawed thought experiment) actually worked quite well all around the globe — and without either private ownership or government regulation intersecting those arrangements. The collectively-managed commons that disallowed private property and State oversight worked just fine — in fact it flourished, and demonstrates a way forward for us all.

You can read more about the criteria she discovered worked best in common pool resource management here: Ostrom Design Principles

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the question. Here are some of the top reasons why folks in the U.S. are so “fervently capitalist” and suspicious of “socialism” and social liberalism:

1. Our commercialistic and religious fundamentalist cultures have made us a lot more gullible. We respond to advertising and marketing as if it is truth — which is great for companies selling products, and great for ideologues, con artists, and cult leaders selling lies. Consequently, when right-wing propaganda (Red Scares, “cultural marxism,” McCarthyism, Trumpism, Jordan Peterson, and other neoliberal disinformation) demonizes socialism and liberalism — or makes socialists and liberals scapegoats for outcomes that are actually caused by capitalism (like unemployment, income inequality, influx of immigrants, etc.) — Americans are just more likely to believe the hype. When I lived in Germany, I was stunned by how much more informed and cautiously critical even German kids were than most American adults.

2. Partial reenforcement is powerful. It is absolutely true than one-in-a-million people in the U.S. can work their way from poverty into affluence, and an even smaller number can become extremely wealthy. America really is the land of opportunity. But those are the exceptions, not the rule. Most businesses fail. Most people do not realize their dreams. And most people who try to become wealthy remain poor. Psychologically, though, this reality doesn’t matter, because if even one person in the U.S. wins a major national lottery and becomes a millionaire, people will still believe becoming a millionaire by playing that lottery (or starting a business, or inventing something, or writing books, or performing music, etc.) “is a real possibility.” Which, of course, it is…it’s just not very likely at all.

3. Americans actually don’t reject socialist/liberal policies — or, rather, they are raging hypocrites about it. The regions of the U.S. that are the most heavily pro-capitalist and anti-socialist are also reliably where the largest dependency on government programs can be found (see PolitiFact - 'Red State Socialism' graphic says GOP-leaning states get lion's share of federal dollars). It’s pretty funny, actually. Also, according to most polls, whenever socialist and liberal policies are described to respondents without loaded trigger language (for example, describing features of the Affordable Care Act but not calling it “Obamacare”), the response from a significant majority polled is positive. Most Americans actually like “liberal” policies — until they are told by right-wing media outlets and authorities that they shouldn’t (see Majority of Americans support progressive policies such as higher minimum wage, free college, and Working-Class Americans in All States Support Progressive Economic Policies - Center for American Progress Action).

4. Lastly, there are nut-job market fundamentalist outliers who are very vocal. Just like Twitter “cancel culture” doesn’t represent most left-leaning folks, there are frothing-at-the-mouth far-right crazies who get a lot of attention on the Internet and in mass media, but who don’t represent a majority of more centrist right-leaning Americans. I’m speaking of course of fans of Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, James Buchanan, and other thought leaders for the broken brain crowd — many of whom subscribe to the right-libertarian movement funded by the Koch brothers.
As a consequence of one or more of the above influences, U.S. citizens have the appearance of being rugged individualists who conflate freedom with laissez-faire capitalism. But that really isn’t true. In the U.S., as elsewhere, the embracing of socialist and liberal policies has actually made capitalism much more successful and enduring (see ). At least…they have up until now…

My 2 cents.

Thank you for the question.

There are many ways to mitigate the harmful practices of capitalism. There have been the injections of socialist ideals into mixed economies (you can read more about this here: How Socialist Contributions to Civil Society Saved Capitalism From Itself). There have been left-anarchist experiments — see List of anarchist communities - Wikipedia. There have been authoritarian communist experiments (U.S.S.R., China, etc.) which have drawn a lot of criticism, mainly because they haven’t been very democratic, and have been equally exploitative — a sort of “state capitalism” run amok. There have also been what Elinor Ostrom called “common pool resource management” arrangements that have worked well for managing the commons (see Ostrom Design Principles). And there have been many additional proposals as well that offer an alternative political economy (here is my own: L e v e l - 7 Overview).

In many of these experiments, some combination of worker-ownership (of the means of production) and public ownership of natural resources (e.g. the commons) have been in play. The challenge, though, is that when these systems are competing with capitalism — or embedded inside global capitalism and subjugated to it — the negative externalities of the global capitalist system are still wreaking havoc on people’s lives, on the environment, and on the planet as a whole. Growth-dependent industrial capitalism is simply too caustic and destructive to continue at such a large scale.

I personally am not a fan of “statist” solutions (see graphic below), and would rather see democratic institutions thrive in a more horizontally collective way. Any concentrations of power end up also concentrating wealth and privilege…that is just how humans get corrupted. Without strong democratic institutions participating in all decisions — at every level — there will always be those who game the system to their own advantage, and to the detriment of everyone else. So diffusion of power and diffusion of wealth must go hand-in-hand (this is why right-libertarian solutions will never work, and why statist governments tend to get “captured” by special interests).

The last issue is that of private property itself, which tends to undermine both personal and collective liberty, and a strong civil society. I’ll offer two essays regarding this:

Private Property as Violence: Why Proprietarian Systems are Incompatible with the Non-Aggression Principle

and

The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty: A Proposed Method of Differentiating Verifiable Free Will from Countervailing Illusions of Freedom

I hope this was helpful.

Thank you for the question.

My advice: don’t get sucked into arguments with anyone who promotes the Austrian School (or the Chicago School, or the Virginian School, or Ayn Rand style laissez-faire). If someone identifies as subscribing to these ideologies, just smile and politely exit the conversation. Why? Well, for one, these are what I call “unicorn” economic theories — they have no basis in the real world, have never been effective when implemented, and nearly all of their tenets have been repeatedly debunked. For another, anyone who subscribes to these idealogies is probably a) not the sharpest tool in the shed; b) brainwashed by market fundamentalist groupthink and not susceptible to reason; c) trapped within malicious logical fallacies and half-truths just as Friedman, Mises, Rothbard and Buchanan were; and/or d) suffering from mental illness or serious childhood trauma. From many years of personal experience attempting to bridge the divide between evidence, reason, and the Austrian School fantasies, I can tell you it’s pretty pointless. You’ll just confuse them at best — or enrage and alienate them at worst.

So, if you want to look at some more interesting and valid critiques of socialism (with some interesting solutions included), read Alec Nove’s The Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited. And if you want to become conversant in a more sane and rational approach to market fundamentalism that acknowledges its inherent flaws, read Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.

My 2 cents.

Thank you for the question.
There seem to be multiple issues and assumptions in this question, so I’ll try to tease those apart….

1. The “West” is not monolithic. So although many of the points below apply elsewhere in the western world, I will concentrate mainly on the U.S.

2. Is there a cultural revolution goin on in the U.S.? Yes, though it’s been a very slow moving one. Essentially, the wealth, status, and cultural relevance of a more conservative rural and blue collar white America is being usurped by urban, high-tech, more progressive and multicultural America. The rural and former industrial areas of the U.S. are getting hollowed out, and populations are increasingly concentrated in urban centers.

3. Socialist ideas, as implemented alongside markets in Western countries (see mixed economy), have always help fix the worst problems and abuses of capitalism. You can read more about this here: How Socialist Contributions to Civil Society Saved Capitalism From Itself. Marxist-Leninist forms of authoritarian communism, however, eventually were perceived as threats to the U.S. This was framed as an ideological and cultural clash (around liberty, economic opportunity, collective morality, etc.), but really was much more about economic competition between Western crony capitalism where corporations held much of the economic and political power, and communist “state” capitalism, where officials in the Communist Party held that power. This competition over control of capital has been the source of most anti-communist rhetoric in the U.S. (see Red Scare).

4. A separate — and more legitimate IMO — conflict between Marxism-Leninism and civil society in the West centers around the issue of democracy: the empowering of people to self-determination. This has been playing out acutely in Hong Kong. The fundamental difference between a Communist Party with a “president for life” and governments with officials who can regularly be voted into and out of office is profound — in both perception of a lust for power, and its actual diffusion. Of course, there are differing levels of democracy, too: Switzerland’s semi-direct democracy empowers the local and national electorate much more than the representative democracy of the U.S., for example. What the people of Hong Kong are resisting is losing even the semblance of local democratic self-determination.

5. Mao Zedong was actually, in the early stages of his ideas about communism, more attracted to Kropotkin’s anarcho-communism than to Marxism-Leninism. If Mao had followed his initial leanings regarding revolution, China would be a very different place — and Hong Kong would not be rebelling against centralized control. A main difference with Kropotkin is that there are no centralized controls — or any possibility of an authoritarian government — because decisions are made locally and more democratically.

Taken altogether, the main contrast and conflict in this context between “the West” (mainly the U.S.A.) and “communism” (mainly as implemented in mainland China) centers around two tug-of-wars:

1. In the economic system: Between plutocratic crony capitalist controls and centralized authoritarian controls over capital (really this means between private ownership of the means of production by a select few vs. public ownership of the means of production that is also controlled by a select few…so interestingly the end result is strikingly similar).

2. In the political system: Between democratic civil society and authoritarian, non-democratic centralized controls (again, though, the ultimate outcome in plutocratic crony capitalism in the U.S. ends up looking very similar to communist China in real terms…just with the constant threat of disruption to plutocracy, as Donald Trump is finding out firsthand).

If China became more democratic — with more diffused and distributed power across a strong civil society, and as Mao initially envisioned via Kropotkin’s influence — then “the West” would have a much weaker case when arguing that China is “less free.” Even allowing Hong Kong more self-determination, as China initially agreed to do when it took over from Great Britain, would go a very long way toward easing tensions. But, as throughout most of human history, concentrations of capital and concentrations of political influence nearly always go hand-in-hand. Greed for wealth ends up marrying itself to greed for power. Some of the most notable exceptions have, again, been anarcho-communist and other libertarian socialist experiments. For examples of those, see: List of anarchist communities.

My 2 cents.

Thank you for the question. The problem the OP is facing is the second part of the question: “to convince liberal friends of more radical change.” Remember what happened to the Occupy movement? The problem wasn’t that folks needed to be convinced — I think most left-leaning people understand that capitalism is hugely problematic and increasingly unsustainable. The problem is having a clear vision about what to do about it.

To that end, I came up with this website: L e v e l - 7 Overview, where I outline twelve “Articles of Transformation” — proposals for how a new political economy that replaces capitalism would look and function. Intrinsic to those twelve articles are the many flaws in capitalism that need to be addressed. Again, though, the main objective is to propose a workable alternative. I would also recommend taking a quick look at this page on the website, which describes various forms of activism with links to resources: L e v e l - 7 Action

Lastly, it would probably be helpful to share how Noam Chomsky discusses the flaws of the capitalism that exists today, as he does such a great job:



My 2 cents.

This is probably the most widely propagated misunderstanding in modern times about Aristotle’s thinking — a longstanding misuse of what Aristotle wrote in Politics about the different forms and flavors of democracy. You can read a translation of what Aristotle actually wrote here: The Internet Classics Archive. Basically, Aristotle is most critical of certain manifestations of democracy, and actually praises other variations, though of course he places his vision of polity above them all as the best form of government to serve the common good. But the gross generalization one often hears today that Aristotle disdained all democracy as “mob rule” is not accurate. Aristotle’s thinking on democracy is nuanced, and he often will answer his own objections about it.

I’ll offer just two sections in Politics for consideration. The first is this, from Book Three, Part Eleven, in which Aristotle seems to extoll the benefits of “the wisdom of the multitude,” as long as special knowledge isn’t required to make a judgement — or, alternatively, if those who vote are well-educated! — and the crowd making the judgement isn’t “utterly degraded” (i.e. mindless brutes): (my emphasis added below)

“The principle that the multitude ought to be supreme rather than the few best is one that is maintained, and, though not free from difficulty, yet seems to contain an element of truth. For the many, of whom each individual is but an ordinary person, when they meet together may very likely be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse. For each individual among the many has a share of virtue and prudence, and when they meet together, they become in a manner one man, who has many feet, and hands, and senses; that is a figure of their mind and disposition. Hence the many are better judges than a single man of music and poetry; for some understand one part, and some another, and among them they understand the whole. There is a similar combination of qualities in good men, who differ from any individual of the many, as the beautiful are said to differ from those who are not beautiful, and works of art from realities, because in them the scattered elements are combined, although, if taken separately, the eye of one person or some other feature in another person would be fairer than in the picture. Whether this principle can apply to every democracy, and to all bodies of men, is not clear….For a right election can only be made by those who have knowledge; those who know geometry, for example, will choose a geometrician rightly, and those who know how to steer, a pilot; and, even if there be some occupations and arts in which private persons share in the ability to choose, they certainly cannot choose better than those who know. So that, according to this argument, neither the election of magistrates, nor the calling of them to account, should be entrusted to the many. Yet possibly these objections are to a great extent met by our old answer, that if the people are not utterly degraded, although individually they may be worse judges than those who have special knowledge — as a body they are as good or better.”

Later on, in Book Four, Part Four, Aristotle opines that the rule of law and equality of participation permit a successful constitutional democracy to flourish. The problem arises when there is no justice — no supreme rule of law — and the will of the majority begins behaving like a monarch. Aristotle further warns that, in such conditions, demagogues tend to rise to power. Of special note is the following section — please read it carefully:

“At all events this sort of democracy, which is now a monarch, and no longer under the control of law, seeks to exercise monarchical sway, and grows into a despot; the flatterer is held in honor; this sort of democracy being relatively to other democracies what tyranny is to other forms of monarchy. The spirit of both is the same, and they alike exercise a despotic rule over the better citizens. The decrees of the demos correspond to the edicts of the tyrant; and the demagogue is to the one what the flatterer is to the other. Both have great power; the flatterer with the tyrant, the demagogue with democracies of the kind which we are describing. The demagogues make the decrees of the people override the laws, by referring all things to the popular assembly. And therefore they grow great, because the people have all things in their hands, and they hold in their hands the votes of the people, who are too ready to listen to them. Further, those who have any complaint to bring against the magistrates say, 'Let the people be judges'; the people are too happy to accept the invitation; and so the authority of every office is undermined.”

Sound familiar? This is, after all, what has been happening in the U.S. of late: the rule of law has been undermined, there is no equality of democratic participation or representation, and a flatterer has been enabled by a popular assembly to exercise despotic whims and override a more deliberative democracy subject to the rule of law.

With Politics having been available for the past 2,370 years, perhaps we should have seen this current devolution coming….?

My 2 cents.

First, I think this speaks directly to the fundamental failures of both a medical system focused on profit, and the diseases of consumerist society that externalizes is agency and happiness into commercialized dependencies (on technology, pharmaceuticals, titillating self-distractions, self-medicating behaviors, etc.). Not only can we lay the epidemic levels of unhappiness at the feet of these causes, but also the horrific mishandling and counterproductive treatment of both serious and debilitating genetic or epigenetic psychological disorders (bipolar disorder, various personality disorders, schizophrenia, etc.) and what we could describe as more environmentally exacerbated or triggered conditions (PTSD, depression, anxiety, etc.). For-profit medicine and a culture of commoditized well-being have been disastrous amplifiers of mental illness in the modern world. To understand these impacts, check out:

1) Reviewing the Evidence for Mental Illness Being Epigenetic,

2) Epigenetics, Stress, and Their Potential Impact on Brain Network Function: A Focus on the Schizophrenia Diatheses, and

3) Consumerism and Well-Being in India and the UK: Identity Projection and Emotion Regulation as Underlying Psychological Processes.

So part of the answer to this question is addressing those underlying amplifiers: if we attenuate or eliminate these causal factors, there will be less mental illness in society — both in terms of stress-induced phenotypical expression of genetic disease, and crippling cognitive behavioral responses to stress. The principles of what is basically a preventative approach to mental illness have been demonstrated by a number of success stories. Check out 'Care BnB'- the town where mentally ill people lodge with locals and Soteria (psychiatric treatment) - Wikipedia, both of which essentially replace a transactional, commercialized model of treatment with a relational, community-centric one.

In addition, in my own L e v e l - 7 proposals, access to mental health resources is treated the same way as access to physical health resources: it’s integral to civil society and part of a “Universal Social Backbone” available to everyone without cost.

This is similar to a left-libertarian approach to criminality in society: by reducing the incentives to criminal activity, diffusing and reversing dysfunctional cultural norms that promote violence and coercion (including, and perhaps most especially, the concept of private property — see Private Property as Violence: Why Proprietarian Systems are Incompatible with the Non-Aggression Principle), and strengthening community-centric civil society at the same time, we may not be able to eliminate criminal behavior altogether, but we can greatly reduce it to the point where enduring interpersonal relationships and strong expectations of prosociality have a greater regulatory effect than policing ever could.

That said, the issues of personal agency and selfhood are also at the center of this question. I lean in the direction of personal agency trumping societal or institutional impositions of will. At the same time, I have a right-libertarian friend who was institutionalized and medicated under a 5150 (involuntary psychiatric commitment here in California), after planning and nearly executing his own suicide. I helped him through that time and afterward, and he has been thriving ever since and has been very grateful that others intervened as they did. He had been on the wrong medication (another consequence of a profit-driven medical system) that worsened his depression, but during his 5150 stay he received much more competent assessment and a much better treatment plan. Even as a lifelong libertarian, he has no problem with his involuntary commitment, because he knows he was not in his right mind at that time. In such cases, sanity is a more critical standard than agency, even (by most accounts) according to the perspective of the personal deemed “insane.”

My 2 cents.

This is a perfect example of a significant problem endemic our modern world, and that is that “easily explained” theories are usually inadequate, and do not capture reality — even partially.

There are sometimes notable exceptions, where gifted presenters capture fairly complex ideas using simple analogies, word pictures, graphic illustrations, etc. But these instances are pretty rare (for example, I’ve seen only a handful TED talks that actually pull this off), and usually limited to fields of study that can be communicated in a “concrete sequential” way. Particularly dynamic or fluid areas of study with many competing or conflicting dimensions and interdisciplinary dependencies really can’t be represented well in infographics — or, when they are, those representations can end up overly abbreviated and inadequate.

Economics is one of those complex and multifaceted areas of study. It is nearly impossible to shoehorn the complex thought of many accomplished economists’ theories into a simple, easily-grasped infographic. To do so would simply be an injustice to the original ideas. And this is becoming more the case, rather than less so, because so many disciplines have come to intersect with economics. Consider attempting to summarize how Marx, Keynes, Rawls, Veblen, Schumacher, Sen, Picketty, Ostrom, and many others who have contributed to “progressive” economic theory interact with and amplify each other’s observations and proposals! It would be a daunting task…and likely a fruitless one if we attempt to keep things “easily explained.”

At the other end of the spectrum (i.e. conservative/neoliberal economics), we have the Laffer curve, drawn on a napkin in a restaurant, which had no empirical basis or application but “made intuitive sense” in the political sphere, and so became part of an easy sell for trickle-down, supply side economic theory (which has since been debunked by real-world evidence). And we have catchy phrases like “rational actors” in the Austrian School, also without empirical basis, which nonetheless folks can easily grasp and agree with. In fact the list is pretty long for neoliberal economic tropes that have broad popular appeal, but no real-world evidence to support them.

This fundamental problem — what we might call the “pop-psych dilemma,” because it results in similar pseudoscientific consequences — can be found in many different disciplines. Some complex concepts are just really difficult to understand and communicate, and as our scientific framing of the world (or a particular area of study) becomes more and more complex, the ability to effectively communicate those concepts and their supportive evidence becomes increasingly difficult…certainly for anyone who wants simple, easy answers, and doesn’t want to spend time learning the subtleties of something new.

And that’s why sound bite emotional-appeal political discussions rarely go beyond the superficial catch phrases for a given topic. A sales pitch is hardly ever substantive — and that’s really all such policy discussions in mass media, social media, and the political sphere usually are.

Do you see the problem? The minute we make an “easily digestible” explanation of a complex topic (in economics, climate science, epidemiology, etc.) we are almost certainly going to get it wrong. We are going to distort truth to shoehorn complexity into an easily appreciated talking point.

Which is of course precisely what the champions of conservative/neoliberal economic policy tend to do: they convey simple, watered down word pictures of a worldview that is persuasive and sells well, but is ultimately just misleading and false. Milton Friedman was perhaps the greatest master of this technique: he just kept lying and distorting reality — passionately and entertainingly — until a lot of folks just started to believe him and parrot his words.

With all of this said, there are a few “progressive economists” who have tried to provide simplified representations of economic theory. I’m not a tremendous fan, for the very reasons I’ve just outlined here, though I do still find them entertaining. Some examples would be Ha Joon Chang and Robert Reich. Here’s a pretty good sample:


https://youtu.be/E9EzXHVYClI

IMO what we somehow need to do is encourage people to enjoy learning, enjoy being “intellectual,” enjoy rich and complex language and ideas — as part of our cultural norm. Then we might actually be able to make decent democratic decisions about these complex issues. Until then…well…we’re likely to just be hoodwinked by the slickest salesman.

My 2 cents.

First off, it’s much worse than this question supposes. Majority Republican states in the U.S. are by far the largest beneficiaries of ALL government programs. There are some exceptions to this pattern, like New Mexico (which is more of a swing state), but in general it is Republican-majority “red” states who rely the most heavily on socialized support systems. Some detailed recent data on this can be found here: Most & Least Federally Dependent States. There are many simple comparisons you can find around the web, and here’s an example:



Essentially, the higher taxes paid by “blue” states subsidize the populations of “red” states that pay lower taxes (discussion of that here: AP FACT CHECK: Blue high-tax states fund red low-tax states).

Now, many of the posts in this thread quibble over what “socialism” actually is. In short, it is widely acknowledged by everyone who studies political and economic systems and history that there are many different forms of socialism, and the strict and narrow “dictionary definition” of socialism (or capitalism, for that matter) that folks like to use in their arguments simply isn’t sufficient. The fact is that the U.S. and most other affluent, developed countries in the world are “mixed economies” of both socialism and capitalism. I’ve broken things out into a bit more detail here: What are the different forms of socialism?

So the reality is that, yes, Republicans who claim to be opposed to “socialism” regularly depend on socialism to survive and thrive.

BUT — and this is a pretty major caveat — those same Republicans are also constantly working to dismantle and/or privatize any and all forms of socialist institution in the U.S.A. Whether it’s Obamacare, Medicaid, Social Security, or the U.S. Postal Service, Republicans have been trying to obliterate many manifestations of socialism in the U.S. as a central plank of a conservative political agenda. But why are they doing this, if the vast majority of the Republican rank-and-file voters rely on these programs…? Well because what Republican leadership (and think tanks, and wealthy campaign donors, and right-wing propaganda media outlets) really want to do is eliminate what they call “the halo effect” of any successful government programs, a positive perception among voters which — horror of horrors — threatens to make “socialism” look attractive! You can read about this here: Opinion | Covid-19 Brings Out All the Usual Zombies

This does seem a bit contradictory, to be sure, but it gets even more interesting when we look at the kinds of “socialism” that Republicans actually promote — and rarely oppose. These are things like subsidies to big corporations, huge government bailouts of entire industries, tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans, and lucrative no-bid military contracts. You can read about the GOP’s affinity for corporate welfare here: Corporate welfare state: GOP tax plan showers millionaires with $17 billion tax break and here: How Scott Walker and the GOP Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Corporate Welfare | Michael Rieger

So we’re left scratching our heads…Is all of this a sort of disjointed, self-contradictory hypocrisy without any guiding principles at all? Or does U.S. conservatism have an ideological anchor? Some core values that steer its ship? Well…there really is only one central theme that aligns with all Republican praxis, and that is a devotion to socializing risks and costs, and privatizing benefits and profits. That is, distributing costs and risks across all of society (i.e. all taxpayers), while concentrating profits and benefits in a select few (i.e. wealthy owner-shareholders), with horrific consequences for civil society. You can view videos of Noam Chomsky interviewed about this here: Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges discuss the history of neoliberalism and Chomsky's new book "Requiem for the American Dream" And also read more about this here: How to Prepare for the Next Pandemic.

There is, of course, another way to describe this behavior, and that was a phrase Adam Smith coined in his Wealth of Nations: “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

So, in essence, conservatives love and support socialism when it benefits them, and vehemently dislike socialism when it benefits anyone who doesn’t vote Republican.

My 2 cents.

The question behind your question is, I think, really about hierarchies and the abuse of those hierarchies via concentrations of power. Once a hierarchy is in place, it just tends to be abused to accumulate power, and then either used for direct oppression and exploitation, or becomes corrupted/captured — as with crony capitalism, clientism, etc. So all traditional forms of left-anarchism and left-libertarianism (which are the same thing btw) have sought to minimize hierarchies, and replace them with diffusions of power — direct democracy, nested councils, subsidiarity, and other form of highly distributed self-governance — and diffusions of wealth (i.e. no private property rights, the commons, public ownership, etc.). There are many historic and present day examples of such left-libertarian experiments, all of which have worked pretty well.

Right-libertarianism, on the other hand, creates inadvertent hierarchies by allowing corporations, monopolies, and concentrations of private property ownership and wealth that ultimately behave just like State institutions (in terms of capacity for oppression and exploitation). Which is likely why there aren’t as many right-libertarian real-world examples — and certainly none on a large scale.

Now even when the objective is to avoid hierarchy and potential tyranny, some left-libertarian and right-libertarian proposals have included minarchist systems. The idea is to create dual systems of power that check-and-balance each other. And we actually see such dual systems working fairly well, even where the State is large — such as in the semi-direct democracy of Switzerland. Really, all that matters is that a political economy be designed so that power and wealth cannot concentrate anywhere, and will always be countered by democratic will.

One such hybrid option is my own L e v e l - 7 proposal. Eventually, the goal would be to attenuate the power of whatever vestigial State is left in place to coordinate things like infrastructure, technology standards, essential goods and services, etc., while strengthening direct democracy and localized civic institutions. But guarding against concentrations of power will, I suspect, always be a perpetual concern…..

My 2 cents.

Thanks for the question.

Personally I appreciate the simplicity of Raworth’s model (pictured below, from https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/). There are undoubtedly nuanced variables within her “shortfall” and “overshoot” trajectories that require much more detailed elaboration, but this is really about vision IMO — and the ability to project that vision out into collective consciousness. The doughnut graphic is really helpful in that regard. So, as a fundamental re-framing of socioeconomic activities away from “infinite growth” (inherently unsustainable) to “living within our planetary boundaries,” I think this makes perfect sense.

So there are a number of facets with the OP’s question: “Why did the left follow Marx and not Bakunin? Wouldn't the world have been better off if a stateless form of socialism had been tried instead of a totalitarian one?” I’ll attempt to address those facets as we examine some possible answers….

1) The “Left” is not monolithic now, nor was it ever…from the very beginning. There were (and are) many forms of socialism — and many of them have been (and are being) tried in different parts of the world, and on different scales. This includes many forms of left-anarchism/libertarian socialism that aligned itself with the stateless vision that Bakunin promoted. In particular, societies inspired by Proudhon and Kropotkin fall into this category. For some of the many successful stateless examples of these, see: List of anarchist communities.

2) The thinking of these two influenced each other — there was a lot of cross-pollination between them. Much of Bakunin’s thinking is reflected in Marxism.

3) As to why Marx was generally more popular that Bakunin during their lifetimes and thereafter, there are a number of compelling theories, and frankly I don’t know which of them is correct. It could be that Bakunin was over-invested in leveraging the “educated elite” of his day to start a revolution and tended to ignore the working class, whereas Marx appealed more directly to the working class instead. It could be an issue of personal charisma. It could be that it was difficult for folks to envision Bakunin’s stateless society (as it still is today), but much easier to entertain the more gradual transition to communism that Marx proposed, along with his very catchy “dictatorship of the proletariat.” It could be that Engels’ eloquent and persistent championing of Marxism furthered it in ways with which Bakunin’s legacy and alliances simply couldn’t compete. Again, I don’t know. There has been much written about this…so perhaps doing more extensive research on this will help.

4) Yes, the world would be better off with stateless socialism. For a glimpse of that world, take a look at the list of anarchist communities in the link above. Some of them are still around and going strong.

My 2 cents.

Absolutely and without question, YES, as Marx was arguably one of the most important and influential thinkers of the last 200 years.

That said, I would recommend beginning with some of his shorter pieces of writing, just to get a flavor and overview of his thought, prior to attempting Capital. And, when approaching Capital, I would take it in small chunks, rather than all-at-once.

But yes, for anyone who wants to understand much of what the past couple of centuries of human history — and especially the impact of industrial capitalism — are all about, Marx is an essential read. To not read him (or discount him, as some have done in posts here) is simply to remain ignorant and/or deceived about both the nature of capitalism and the nature of Marxism.

Interestingly, in reference to Adam Smith, Smith raised many of the same concerns about unfettered capitalism that Marx addresses in his writing — Marx just did so to a much more detailed and rigorous degree.

As to where to begin, I recommend the following links (to be read in the order they are listed). I think anyone who reads them with an open mind will be duly impressed with Marx’s clarity and accuracy of insight:

Marx 1844: Wages of Labour

Profit of Capital

Marx 1844: Rent of Land (note that Marx cites Smith extensively here)

Estranged Labour

Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I

And of course it also helps to read a bit of Engels, particularly this:

Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy

Lastly, for a well-organized collection of — and access to — Marx’s work, I recommend this link: Marx & Engels Selected Works. It includes “a short list for beginners” which covers a lot of ground. However, I would still begin with the above-listed links first, before diving into anything else, as they provide helpful context for everything else.

My 2 cents.