Capitalism without Consumption = Collapse

Marx got the description mostly right and the prescription mostly wrong.  The proletariat's power was never physical and ever economic.  If the proletariat stops consuming what the bourgeoisie peddles, the bourgeoisie will cease to exist (at least as presently constituted).

Jim Quinn Demonstrates My Point

The more words you use to make a point, the more likely you are to prove you are a fool.

In a recent and typically long-winded post, Jim uses a lot of data and graphs to make many otherwise valid points.  Unfortunately, he does not understand what those data and graphs actually mean-- and that they don't actually support his arguments-- thus undermining (destroying) his credibility (at least with me).

For example, Jim uses the same exact data and graph that prompted my post here to argue:

A country that allows bankers to syphon off 35% of all the profits in the country without producing any benefits to society is destined to fail, with the dire consequences that follow.

But so-callled "Domestic Corporate Profits" are actually NOT generated "in the country."  In fact, there is no way to correlate these so-called "Domestic Corporate Profits" with the U.S. economy.  My best guess is that  substantially ALL of the profits indicated by data and graph were generated and continue to be held outside of the U.S.

I Don't Want to Be Convinced of Anything Other Than the Fact You Know What You Are Talking About and Have a Valid Reason to Believe What You Say

For whatever it's worth--which is probably nothing-- I prefer inquiry over advocacy.  For this reason, I have a high bar when it comes to accepting advocacy.

My last post was inspired, in part, by the propensity of many bloggers to rely on sources they clearly have not vetted in order to add weight to their arguments.  The problem is, when you spend any time exploring the validity and reliability of those sources, you find little or nothing.  (Of course, most people don't dig into cited sources, so there's little danger in being exposed as a fraud.)

When I see that kind of behavior, I assume the blogger is either a fool or a liar.  In either event, that blogger's thoughts are not worth taking seriously.

A major reason I respect bloggers like Russ and Toby is that they are independent thinkers who are capable of creating opportunities for inquiry through well thought-out advocacy.  Whatever you think of their positions, the debates they advocate are well worth embracing.

Continuous learning is what makes us human.

A Surfeit of Words, a Paucity of Meaning

The blogosphere is awash with those who believe the more words, the better.  A perfect example is Jim Quinn and his Burning Platform.  Another is RE over at  the Diner, of which (and whom) I remain a fan.

The problem with using a lot of words is that those who wish to ignore or undermine you can latch onto the words that matter to them and ignore the rest.

The better you are able to deliver meaning with few words, the more of what you mean to say will make it through the filters of others unhindered.

The irony here is that even this short post is capable of igniting an irrelevant and distracting controversy (over who v. whom).

The Truth Is Not a Fixed Thing But a Flowing Event

"A living body is not a fixed thing but a flowing event, like a flame or a whirlpool: the shape alone is stable, for the substance is a stream of energy going in at one end and out at the other."

   --Alan Watts, Does It Matter

A friend told me about Alan Watts about a year ago, but it's taken me awhile to get around to reading much of what he wrote.  I found his observation in the above sentence to be somewhat profound, perhaps more profound than Watts realized, as it can be used to bridge the gap between Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy by simply replacing the phrase"a living body" with "the Truth."

Be Wary of Government Statistics

Jesse has a post up today that, on balance, is great.  I like his simple, straightforward and tenacious moralizing a lot because, well, he's right.

The one glaring problem is his reliance on the BEA's "Domestic Corporate Profits" metric to make his point. Like Jesse, most people (including Simon Johnson!) believe that domestic corporate profits were earned domestically, i.e., in the United States.  That simply isn't the case: the BEA's NIPA Domestic Corporate Profits measures profits earned worldwide by companies headquartered in the U.S.  Thus, for example, the FIRE sector's share of "domestic corporate profits" says nothing about the FIRE sector's share of "gross domestic product," i.e., nothing about the U.S. economy, real or otherwise.

Karl Gets Punk'd. Hoists Self On Own Petard

Whenever a "cultural" issue pops up, Karl Denninger throws reason to the wind and embraces his inner nut-job.  This time, he seems to take what an anonymous poster on the internet says as indicative of their personal views and the views of the anti-gun lobby.  Take a look at the poster's history on that particular forum, and it is pretty clear he, like Karl, is a "conservative" pro-gun nut-job, although a full time one (instead of an occasional one, like Karl.).  Seems clear to me that "gizmo1942" is an agent provocateur specifically trying to drum up angst about gun control among his nut-job brethren.  Mission accomplished!

I think I'm done with Karl.

Full disclosure: I don't support further gun control.

Miscellany

I happened to run across a copy of the weekend Wall Street Journal today, which contained an article entitled "When the State Owns the Truth," which appeared to be book review.  What struck me-- which is what compelled me to jot this down-- was a floating quote/commentary stating something along the lines of "communism and fascism, history's two bloodiest political faiths."

But Abrahamic "religions" were the first states to "own the truth," and Christianity was far bloodier than its secular Western offspring. which are but the perfect reflection of the authoritarian religious faith that begat them.

The Double Lie of "Rationality" (or Rationality and the Mismeasure of Man)

Some of the most loaded words in the Western world are "rationality" and its derivatives.

Why?  Because, on the one hand, we insist on "rationality" as the proper measure of human behavior, even when we know that what we define as "rational" cannot be achieved by any human being.  On the other hand, those who rule understand this fact and because of it insist on continuing to use "rationality" as the basis upon which to measure humanity and, therefore, find it wanting and unfit to rule themselves.

This is the Double Lie (aka the Double Truth) of "rationality."

This piece from Jared Diamond claims "It's irrational to be religious" can be used to illustrate my point.

 For example, Diamond claims:

Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion.

By that definition, secular Western philosophy is a religion as it depends upon a definition of human "rationality" that does conflicts with our experience.  This is easiest to see in Western orthodox political economy, an applied form of Western philosophy, which is utilitarian in nature and assumes that a rational actor seeks to maximize his economic advantage.  This is based on the assumption that "happiness" = "economic advantage."  And yet we see people acting against their economic interests all the time, which demonstrates that happiness is something other than economic advantage.

Rather than questioning our model of "rationality" and adjusting it to reflect reality, we blame the poor misguided schmoes for not meeting our unrealistic expectations.  It's only one obvious argument from there to  deny the masses' ability to rule themselves because they are "incompetent," i.e., irrational.

By his own rules, Diamond is irrational.  But the rules are not Diamond's, they belong to Western philosophy, which has been the tool of the rulers for over two thousand years.

Reality Is What Reality Is (Slight Return)

Toby posted a comment to my prior post, which I responded to there.

I've given some more thought to things and felt it worth it to provide what I hope is clarification.

As a reminder, this is the language that I found so frustrating:

I believe we are transitioning from primarily ego-based interpretations of ‘reality’ – in which fear, control, ‘selfishness’ and ‘competition’ rule – to a paradigm in which we are far more consciously aware of the ego’s role in our perceptions and can therefore operate/react with greater consciousness and wisdom. A paradigm is emerging in which the sense that “our lives are not our own” is not reflexively dismissed as ‘socialism’, and money (whatever that is) is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a non-valuable record of economic transactions fostering cooperation and inventiveness in the interest of a growing commons which serves each ‘individual’. We are leaving behind one sense of what freedom is all about, and developing a different, perhaps more mature definition of freedom. Also up for redefinition are wealth, value and success; dessert, reward and punishment; obligation and responsibility; health and much else besides.

Toby's full post here.

This language springs from Western thinking.  The bedrock of Western thinking is Western philosophy, which assumes there exists an immutable, ascertainable Truth as a starting point for understanding reality through logic.  In the passage above, the applied Western philosophies of political economy and psychology are layered on top of that bedrock to form the foundation of Toby's analysis.  When I say that social "sciences" such as political economy and psychology are "applied philosophy," I mean that they are specialized applications of philosophy intended to reveal a specific aspect of "the Truth."  An important aspect of political economy and psychology (especially Freud's brand of it) is that both depend on the further assumptions that (1) society is merely the sum of the individuals which comprise it, so that we can fully understand society by understanding the individual, and (2) each individual in society seeks to maximize his utility, i.e., mainstream orthodox political economy and psychology apply some form of Utility Theory in their search for "the Truth."

Western thinking suffers from two major flaws.  First, its conclusions are only as good as its underlying assumptions, and the underlying assumptions described above have been proven empirically to be fundamentally unsound.  Second, it applies an iterative process of dividing a finite reality into an infinite number of either-or decisions that necessarily increase the perceived complexity of reality while simultaneously adding nothing towards understanding that reality.  This is the illusion of complexity.

While there is something like an "immutable" Truth (in that there is an objective reality whose future state is a function of its current state) it is not ascertainable by Western thinking because it fails to embrace the simple facts that the Western thinker, no matter how detached, is part of that objective reality, which obscures his ability to ascertain what "it" is because his interpretation of objective reality is subject to his personal biases and because his actions alter that objective reality, often without him understanding that to be the case (aka George Soros' "reflexivity").

I think Toby gets the rough outlines of my criticism of Western thinking, but he has been seduced by the lexicon of political economy and psychology, which themselves compound and perpetuate the fundamental flaws of Western philosophy.  For example, there is no such thing as an "ego."  The concepts of ego, superego, etc. were coined to create distinctions in theory where none exist physically in order to better understand how the human mind works.  This model of the human mind works to some extent, but it ultimately fails because how we interpret objective reality is not a function of ego but the basic cognitive function of human beings: all we are equipped to do is interpret reality by comparing what we perceive to what we expect.  You cannot change this basic function-- this paradigm, it is immutable.  You can, however, affect its outcome by altering its inputs (preferably both expectations and perceptions).  

Toby seems to get the rough outlines of this argument, as well, in that he understands that one of the major problems we have today is the extreme sense of "individualism" that seems to shout down any plea to consider anybody other than one's self as "collectivism."  Where he goes astray from my perspective is in confusing the societal values of selfishness and altruism as competing paradigms as opposed to them being mere inputs to the cognitive function that determines how we decide.

The sad fact is that the world has witnessed societies that exhibited far more altruistic societal values than we have today, and those societies were just as corrupt as the one we live in today because the values that social institutions espouse make no practical difference to those in control.  They merely change the language they use to collect and assert power.

Humanity will never find freedom so long as it is slave to a false certainty inspired by the belief that it lives outside objective reality and has any say in what it is.  I think that Toby basically agrees with the first part but not the last. In his comment, Toby says that he does not believe that we are separate individuals but "changing and repeating patterns/living systems embedded in complex networks and mysteriously capable of self-awareness."  Why can't we be both?  And how did he come across this particular either-or decision?  I think Toby has divided finite reality far beyond the limit of where doing so yields any real insights.  Reality is what reality is, and at some point you have to deal with it, especially the fact that you can never truly understand it.  I think this sentiment, which motivated my initial post, may be what came across to Toby as accusing him of solipsism.  I do get frustrated that intellectuals who are otherwise becoming aware of the limits of their ability to understand reality so often seem to retreat into the type of Western thinking that hid those limits from view for most of their lives.

Reality Is What Reality Is. If You Think Otherwise, You Are Not Being Realistic.

Toby has a new post up, which is unfortunate.  I prefer to think of Toby as insightful, but he is so caught up in the lexicon of philosophy and psychology that he blinds himself:

I believe we are transitioning from primarily ego-based interpretations of ‘reality’ – in which fear, control, ‘selfishness’ and ‘competition’ rule – to a paradigm in which we are far more consciously aware of the ego’s role in our perceptions and can therefore operate/react with greater consciousness and wisdom. A paradigm is emerging in which the sense that “our lives are not our own” is not reflexively dismissed as ‘socialism’, and money (whatever that is) is not a commodity to be hoarded, but a non-valuable record of economic transactions fostering cooperation and inventiveness in the interest of a growing commons which serves each ‘individual’. We are leaving behind one sense of what freedom is all about, and developing a different, perhaps more mature definition of freedom. Also up for redefinition are wealth, value and success; dessert, reward and punishment; obligation and responsibility; health and much else besides.

Actually, reality is not subject to a manmade paradigm, a model to be tinkered with.  Reality is what reality is.   The belief that mankind determines what reality is embraces the very "egoism" that Toby claims to abhor.  If the "paradigm" actually shifts, it will be akin to a mere change of clothing: those who control will remain the same, only the language of control will change.

Until you accept reality for what it is-- something that your ego cannot determine-- you will always be subject to control.