Nothing wrong with capitalism, the capitalists are the problem

In March 1964, a group including Linus Pauling, Gunnar Myrdal, Tom Hayden, Ben B. Seligmanm and computer pioneer Louis Fein sent a letter to President Lyndon Johnson covering their report on “The Triple Revolution.” The letter began: “We enclose a memorandum... prepared out of a feeling of foreboding about the nation's future. The men and women whose names are signed to it think that neither Americans nor their leaders are aware of the magnitude and acceleration of the changes going on around them. These changes, economic, military, and social, comprise The Triple Revolution. We believe that these changes will compel, in the very near future and whether we like it or not, public measures that move radically beyond any steps now proposed or contemplated.” They were right about the changes but underestimated our ability to drift towards the iceberg most would not see until much later.

The three revolutions were in cybernation, weaponry and human rights. The nuclear and other new weapon systems threatened peace. The African American struggle for equal rights in the US was part of the rising demand around the globe for full human rights. But the report focused on the affects of the cybernation revolution (their term). The combination of the computer and automation was issuing in a new mode of production as different from the industrial as that was from the agricultural. It would result in “almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.” Yet the current economic model awarded access to this production, to the wealth it created, unequally to those with capital and those who earned their keep through labor. The cybernation of production would mean increasingly less of good paying industrial jobs. The US was experiencing this process first but it would spread throughout the world we dominated.

The report argued that having access to the collectively produced wealth of society could not any longer be tied to labor. Maintaining and improving individual wellbeing across society – through making maximum use of the potential of automated production – would have to transition from depending on good paying jobs. Income would have to be separated from work. This would require some form of guaranteed individual income and vast investment in public goods. Left to itself, the market would not move in this direction, it would require government action.

As it turned out, capital figured out a way to exploit the new cybernetic economy by shifting production to automation (and now AI) and to areas of cheap labor. Some developing countries – like China – followed suit using their cheap labor to industrialize. This form of globalization produced cheaper goods and did lift many from poverty, worldwide. But it mostly benefited capital rather than labor.

The Western democracies did little to ensure the political sustainability of free trade globalism. This would have required providing those reduced to un- and under-employment or low-paying service sector jobs with the decent income and public goods (including improved education, free healthcare and jobs created through spending on updating infrastructure) that we could have begun 60 years ago. The Western European democracies did a bit better than the US with their social welfare programs but still found themselves in this 21st Century facing the political drift to the right fueled by those left out of the wealth creation.

In the US, we got Trump and his MAGA movement. This virulent form of the anti-globalism reaction has plunged the world into Trump’s tariff war on the very foundations of the world capitalist order.

Nothing wrong with capitalism, indeed there seems to be no good alternative to markets coordinating supply and demand. Free trade to maximize market functioning is part of this (with some measures perhaps needed to ensure fair trade). The World Trade Organization could expand its trade liberalization agenda to include mandates to improve local living standards alongside fair labor standards. Rather than make war on the system of rule-based trade that we have benefited from, the US government would encourage foreign investment in our productive sector as part of a rational approach to whatever re-industrialization makes sense. (This could include China.)

The monopoly capitalists at the top of our cybernetic economy are the problem. They need to be taxed at levels considerably greater than their workers. Their ability to wield political power through money needs to be ended. Government must be empowered to ensure that everyone benefits from market functioning even if this means a form of guaranteed minimum individual income. The Democrats need to do more than wait for Trump to fail. Railing against the billionaires must be accompanied by explaining the need for change and advocating the policies laid out in that report to Johnson.

The Virtual Crowd

 

Social media and the Internet enable the formation of virtual crowds. Crowds may always be, or become, dangerous.

A friend recently asked me to explain why such large numbers of people – in this case Americans – have come to accept the same body of extreme beliefs. In my mind, this meant the extreme white nationalist and anti-government sentiments that erupted on January 6, 2021. I immediately thought of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. For Freud, society rests on the coercive agency of the Superego (das Uberich) implanted as the child faces its dependency on the world beyond it. This explained for him the peculiarities of crowd psychology – the ready response to Leaders, the need for authority and the eagerness to use or accept repression.

For Freud, the Leader defines the crowd (Masse), taking the place of the internal agent of outside authority (the Superego) left behind by childhood. A crowd is a collection of people mobilized not around a common interest or purpose per se but around a stand-in for the father, be it a collective Superego (ideology or belief/faith instrumentality), a Leader, a hero or a personalized god. This state of dependence is based upon shared feelings of fear and guilt that give outlet to the ambivalence the child directs at the father. Erotic ties (Eros) bind together individuals to each other and to the Leader, around whom all revolves.* The Leader serves as the object for this longing and defines, as father-surrogate, the relation in which all are united as "brothers" in submission to him.

The erotic tie between Leader and follower takes the form of an identification that brings the former into the psyche via the Superego, repeating the process that established it through identification with the first parental authority. Individuals in a crowd thereby come to share the same Superego, submitting to it, in like manner, their individual selves. Crowds, says Freud, are made up of "a number of individuals who have one and the same object in the place of their ideal self and have consequently identified themselves with one another sharing the same [surrendered] self (das Ich)." This bond through identification denies the crowd any critical faculties the individuals, as individuals, may possess and leaves them vulnerable to control by "suggestion."

The crowd represents a return to the primitive horde; in both we find "an individual of superior strength among a troop of equal companions." Freud suggests that fear and anxiety are always at the edge of crowd behavior, tending to increase, not decrease, in the face of challenges to the ties that bind individuals together. The individual in a crowd feels a need for authority that manifests in the submission of his self to the Leader. The Leader has this role because in "...the mass of mankind there is a powerful need for an authority who can be admired, before whom one bows down, by whom one is led and perhaps even ill treated."

For Freud, the principle phenomenon of mass psychology is the individual's "lack of freedom." Civilized man has exchanged a portion of his liberty for a portion of security. Submerged in a crowd, people behave like a collective neurotic. Freud saw such behavior as symptomatic of society, with its origin in the repression of desire and the consequent implantation within each individual of a Superego serving as the internal agent of that repression. The individual is directed toward submission to a Leader or to the over zealousness of compulsive morality continuing the infantile relationship to authority. Over a lifetime, the individual's character and identity are built, largely unconsciously, around that ready submission. The exercise of consciousness is never fully developed and the self is never free to author its rational being.

Culture's reliance on repression (and the other forms of psychic defense) and its extraction of surplus control subjects the individual to an ever increasing burden of guilt even as actual control of desire diminishes. As culture – especially in its Western, capitalist guise – affords humanity more and “better” ways of gaining satisfaction, it creates a larger and larger realm of potential satisfaction it must control. Control inevitably weakens and results in a situation where the erotic drives are only weakly held in check. The aggressive drives, always hard to restrain, become ever more difficult to control as they are increasingly deployed to master the erotic drives. The individual, trapped in this escalating conflict and spiral of anxiety, suffers increasing existential unease (Unbehagen). For we Americans – with a shallow history, a consumer-oriented culture and relatively vast riches unequally distributed – many are ready to "break loose" at any time.

I’ve taken this dive into Freud to get to my further point. In the age of mass social media, crowds may now form virtually. Without direct face-to-face contact, people can come to share a collective consciousness built around submission to some shared beliefs personified by a Leader. The social media niches where such virtual crowds mingle can intensify these beliefs into extreme forms. When the members of these groups actually do come together, they are vulnerable to the Leader’s suggestion and to the apparent dictates of their shared belief system, rational or mostly not. Then all hell can break loose.

* For Freud, Eros is more than sexuality, it’s a longing for something we do not have, for completeness, for other, for beauty, for the good.

The Senior Citizen Event Horizon

A friend at work today mentioned a news report he saw about some driver-less car going up a mountainous road with no guard rail and with passengers on board but with no one actually driving. This comes as part of a blitz of developments in smart cars and appliances, bots, the Internet of Things, wireless everywhere and Artificial Intelligence. I recently bought a smart TV mostly because I finally wanted HighDef. The TV is a 2015 model so not so smart. As far as I am concerned, this is a good thing. With OPM, the DNC, banks and businesses, etcetera, falling victim to an alarming array of professional and military hackers, I really am comfortable with all the inanimate devices I use being dumb and unconnected. I've come to realize that the ever-increasing wave of technological change has swept by me and that's okay. I'm comfortable in the world of pre-2016 things. I really don't need to live in the world of future tech. It's beyond my event horizon. I don't mind doing my own shopping list and don't see myself buying a fridge that will do it for me. My washer and dryer have settings I can set. The house thermostat responds directly to my pressing its buttons. My car does allow hand-free calls and hooks my music through Bluetooth from my iPhone. But I like driving it myself. (I even have stick.)

Those who have grown up after the time when users could write his/her own programs – I used Basic to do a recipe program on my Commodore 64 – and even more those now getting iPads in school will feel quite comfortable traveling through a world best captured in the sci-fi series of The Golden Age. Hopefully, it won't all collapse into a singularity.

Rise and Fall

Been reading an excellent history of Egypt, Greece and Rome. We sometimes forget that there were three thousand years of fully human history BC (and of course tens of thousands of years of human life, love and struggle before that). During the past several days – reading on the Esplanade in Darwin – it was the rise and fall of Rome. Very instructive. The reality was much more complex than simple rise and decline and Rome left an immense lasting legacy. But in reaching imperial heights – though its movement to empire was not in any sense planned, sort of like the rise of America as a “superpower” – it surpassed its ability to maintain itself. Is this what is happening to us too?

The world we live in offers an entirely new level of complexity (what John C Wright calls the Era of the Second Mental Structure in his excellent The Gold Age Trilogy). The many aspects of modern technology – the Internet and our growing ability to manipulate matter and biology – offer many more opportunities to correct, and also cover up, our shortcomings. So maybe decline can somehow be put off. Perhaps all this new stuff that we have seen grow into our civilization before our eyes will provide new forms of monasteries, hermitages, walled communities and the like for the next dark age (which was not so dark anyway). Maybe even some cyber urban centers where the barbarians won't be able to get us?

What can we do to keep the barbarians from the gates? Fully support those leaders who lean more toward empathy and adaptability even when they are imperfect, as they must be to be leaders in the world we live in? This means supporting guys like Obama and doing all possible to avoid the Republican dogs who just want to eat our bones while preaching at us.

Another may be to keep trying to be heard by talking with those who will stop to listen and talk back. This approach has not made great headway since Socrates tried it but the Internet provides more street corners to stand at. The other side of this is the need to be persistent, civil but persistent, in order to be heard. And then we must build on what we find with whom we find. (Socrates got hemlock for persistence so we do need to watch where we step even if we step anyway.)

These Tea Party folk show a possible further step. A movement of the civilized for civilization. Possible?

The Prosthetic Gods

Our technology has begun in earnest creating a “prosthetic god” in the form of the Internet/globalized economy that we experience as a force over and above us. We feel the need to gain control -- or in some cases, to free or protect ourselves -- from this power. We have become like the ancients confronting a fickle fate we barely understand. Our mobile devices help us intercede with these new “gods” and we pray through them incessantly.

The best way to do work through this dependency -- to bring the gods to ground -- is to ensure that we pay attention to everywhere that there is no love and to try to fill them somehow. The absence of love we know as evil. The Christian philosophers understood this: God the father was the prime mover; god the spirit was the mind reaching toward the good through reason and science, Christ was the necessary element of love in the universe.