Is occupy wall street rooted in an ‘evasion of personal responsibility’?

I can thank a facebook amigo of mine for the observation that the Occupy protests, and workers’ complaints in general, tend to be ‘completely misdirected and deflecting personal responsibility.’

This line of argument runs that, it is each person’s responsibility to better his or her situation, not by ‘complaining,’ but by ‘doing.’  I.e., work hard, and/or if the situation is stinky, leave and find another situation.  By ‘voting with your feet,’ workers will teach bosses that they cannot get away with certain abuses, and over time the worst of these will disappear.

This line of argument, it will be noted, has become most common amongst those citizens of the U.S. who:

a)  Are the unwitting beneficiaries of a unique confluence of economic factors which made it extremely easy for American citizens to earn a decent middle-class living during the 63 years between 1945 and 2008, but which will perhaps never again favour US citizens so much (these conditions included a very developed US, and a very poor India, China, Africa, and Russia, and a socialist Europe. – which made the US by default an economic powerhouse, with a unique ability to command and produce resources – like the Dutch and English in earlier centuries, who had advanced economies and few competitors but which then lost this advantage and melded into relative mediocrity.)

b) Are ahead of the IQ, education, and starting social network curve, and thus can always find a better-than-average-paying job with relatively little effort and/or luck.

c) Have ‘paid their dues’ buy buying into the system – working long hours, sacrificing many dreams and goals outside of work life, sacrificing many quality of life issues, but receiving in return a better-than-average remuneration, which gives them a decent amount of capital and ‘stuff’ to protect.  Thus both ‘survivors bias’ (meaning they are already good at/accustomed to working within the system), and also ‘sour grapes’ bias – i.e., the very real element of jealousy for those who haven’t had to make such sacrificies, inspired even by the thought that anyone might have their cake without having to make the same sacrifices– play heavily into their opinions.

d) And/or, have been influenced by a highly professionalized corps of demagogues, who in the US are overwhelmingly funded and maintained by the economic elite, whose primary purpose is to find ways to sell the agenda of the economic elite to the masses, by appealing to and systematically inflaming their commonest fears of ‘the other.’  This strategy has over the past 20 years worked incredibly well, and created an army of Limbaugh-zombies, who are highly suspicious of science and logic, and who, hypnotized by Rush’s admittedly skillful demagoguery, will now systematically vote against their own best interest, and that of the global community, virtually in lock step with the agenda of the corporate elite… gee, how did that happen?  Isn’t it strange that the will of a large block of the working classes should correspond almost exactly with the agenda of the ultra-rich?  Gosh… some coincidence, eh?

A bit of reflection will reveal that this line of argument, however, is based on the following fallacious assumptions:

1- The economy is inevitably ‘darwinist.’  It assumes that the system is essentially as fair as it will ever get, because the economy is naturally a ‘survival of the fittest’ type system.  Libertarians like to assume that ‘nature’ inevitably requires people to struggle against one another for a piece of a very limited pie.

The problem with this is, that as I have argued elsewhere, there are many, many laws in place which make everyones’ lives so much better than they would be in a darwinist situation, and many of these have been won by long-term struggling and protest, and also by legislation.  For example, it is illegal to own your own rocket launcher.  The reasons for this should be obvious, but true libertarians suggest that we should all own them, if we wish.

And what if all labour laws were uniform, and fair?

We’ve had a post about the “UN as a stepping stone to world government.”  I’ve noted that the American right seems quite paranoid about the notion of a ‘world government’ (and the UN)… and if the American right is paranoid about something, one can bet that this reflects the paranoias of the corporate elite… since, need I spell this out… the American right is basically the world’s best mouthpiece for global capitalism, i.e., the interests of the main global corporations.  (Like microsoft, who took over skype, forced you to accept multiple downloads per day, and then when you go to contact skype customer service, are directed to the microsoft website, which has ‘support options’ for about 16 different ‘products’, none of which is skype!!!)

Well, one reason why the American right (and thus the global corporate elite) is paranoid about any notion of world government is that it represents the possibility of having uniform global labour laws.  Now, friends, global corporations thrive, and make most of their dough, on exploiting legal loopholes which arise between different countries.  It’s interesting, because while feudalism thrived on having many local legislations, capitalism is seen as having broken down this feudal mentality.  But now we see that the global companies are actually happy with the current fragmented world system, insofar as it gives them major tax shelters, and also, employment loopholes.

Thus, when unions in the developed world got too strong, they moved to the third world, where they can exploit the workers much more handily, for much less dinero paid.

Some day, however, it is more or less inevitable that we will come up with some global labour laws – kind of like global bills of rights.  This is simply too logical, too scientific, for it not to happen;

Do bigger houses make for a healthier economy?

So here’s a little insight that one can only get from living in Europe after having lived in the US/Canada, which is this:  In the US/Canada, you have much more house per family; I’ve seen the statistics; it’s roughly double the square footage on average in the US.

This has a number of hidden effects that I don’t think that many economists plug into their primary equations.  In Holland, the houses are really small indeed, almost everyone lives without appreciable yards.  We stayed in the townhouse of this wealthy yuppie couple with a baby, and they had literally no garage, and one single storage closet.  The dude’s only tool area was one single toolbox stored in the cupboard where the brooms and cleaning stuff were stuffed.

So the point is that this dude cannot de facto be in the market for lots of dudely stuff, such as wheelbarrows, lumber, metal poles, chainsaws, giant tool benches, riding mowers, and a whole host of other things which for decades every middle-class American male took for granted as being part of his lifestyle.  Just think of all the things which the average American consumer buys  to fill up their garage space, their toolsheds, etc.  All of these things there is a huge market for in the U.S., and this in turn stimulates the economy.

In Europe, they literally do not  have space for more than a few smallish carpets, a few lamps, one or two framed pictures,  etc., and so there is little market for this, meaning that buying things, even for an uppery middle-class couple, is a relatively rare event.  Because normal household goods are de facto luxury items,  every single household thing is ridiculously expensive.  This is why anywhere outside of Ikea,

What the ‘occupiers’ should ask for.

What do they want?  The wealthy-owned media will ask.

Well, what do they want?

A problem is that the old Marxist ‘revolution’ model is dead.  A ‘revolution’ which does not involve democracy, i.e., one which is created by a few imposing their will through military means, will inevitably create a dictatorship of some stripe.  Democracy and capitalism are historically (before 20 years ago), entirely linked, and even today, it is my take that China (whose capitalism began with democratic, British-run Hong Kong), will become more democratic as a result of capitalism spreading there.  Thus, one cannot be rid of capitalism; as the chairman of the London Stock Exchange said yesterday, “it is self-evident that capitalism is the best way to produce wealth for the many.”  And this is true.  What this same chairman also said is also true:  the main way to ‘fix’ capitalism is to regulate it, so that it creates the most wealth for the most people.  That’s the key now.  The key is to figure out how, and what, is feasible.

Part of the reason the protesters seem to have ‘no message’ is because we now know that sloganism doesn’t work, that quick fixes don’t work.  What we want, as someone said, is no longer the basics, but the right to a solid middle-class existence.  And that has been written out of US life over the past 10 years.  While the internet boom was on, on one noticed; while their house values were steadily inflating, no one minded that they had to work more and more hours, and that their health plans, and retirement plans were being dismantled by an ultra-pro business government.  But now that the next bust cycle has sprung (which is inevitable in capitalism), everyone realizes that the safety nets they put in place in the 1930s are not just ‘for crybabies’ but in fact the only thing that stands between the average person and a bread line.

But, even lefties are realizing that too much social security breeds complacency.  While the right-owned media is very happy to tell us that teachers and everyone else needs to have a ‘highly competative’ job atmosphere to maximize productivity – you should have no job security they argue, or else you will become a lazy, bad teacher.  And the problem is, they are somewhat right.

So, we need to realize that the happy medium is what is needed.  Duh!!!! How hard is it for a pundit to say, gosh, we need a balance between too much and too little social security?  You never hear _anyone_ say that.  I guess it doesn’t sell papers or ads or something, and/or, really of course much of it is the private ownership of the media, which encourages sensationalism (vs. the so much more balanced, and sane, BBC, CBC, and PBS.).

History is now teaching us that it is legislation which creates the middle class.  The middle class has to protect itself, or else, it will not exist.  Big business does not want or need a middle class, per se; not in a globalizing world.  How do we legislate a middle class?

A)  Have a happy medium bewteen competition and job security and quality of life.

B)  Don’t be afraid of globalization.  Many jobs will stay right here despite the migration of manufacturing.

C)  Elect legislators on a specific platform of ‘maximizing opportunity, happiness, and wealth for the middle class.’  Why can’t we do that?  Well, we can.

D)  Agitate until those legislators can work freely, without their hands tied by a supreme court which is entirely pro-business, and lobbyists, and campaign donation laws which entirely favour a rich few.   (This is precisely what the ‘occupy’ people are doing.

E) Realize that we have to lower population, so that land is cheaper, and housing is cheaper, and so that we can all have our god-given right to property, space, fresh air, sunlight, and a decent slice of earth’s resources, for free, or for very little, like it used to be until the 1950s, about the time that earth reached 2 billion people.  This is the only way to have the middle classes guaranteed a share.  

Who eats better, europeans or north americans?

A few years ago I would, like many of us, have laughed at the naievete of such a question, and said:  ”well, europeans, of course!”  But now, having lived in the low countries for several years, both holland and belgium, and also having lived earlier in england and spain, and spent time in italy and germany, I am getting a pretty good sense of how people in various western european regions eat.

And I can state with confidence that until the early 1990s, europeans ate better than americans, or at least, many europeans did.  American food was fairly monolithic:  hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, spaghetti, and a bit of chinese food and some mexican thrown in to boot.

But then, the urban food revolution came to north america (both the u.s., and canada, that is), and by the mid-1990s, there was no cuisine that you couldn’t get ahold of in any urban centre or college town.  Thai was cool for a while but quickly became old hat.  Ethiopian, Kazakh, Indonesian, Yemeni, you name it, you could find a restaurant selling it.  And then, people started wanting to do this at home.

First came the garlic and spice revolution.  By the early 90s, people were using whole buds of garlic (i.e., 12 cloves) in their meals.  Through the mid 80s, all the recipies in your mom’s cookbook had the following spices:

 

-pinch of salt

-pinch of pre-ground pepper, 3 years old.

-1 bay leaf or 1/4 tsp dried oregano, 5 years old minimum.

 

Remember those days?  Vegetables were boiled until they fell apart under their own weight,

Are you good or evil? How do the moral codes of LOTR, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and co. fit into the ethics of real life? Where does religion fit in?

Does good and evil have any meaning in today’s society?  Haven’t we moved Beyond good and evil, according to Nietzsche and many would-be followers?

Many of our most cherished modern myths, including Star Wars, LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and the like, are based around a fairly obvious confrontation of good vs. evil.  But is real life like that?  When it comes to actual human functioning, many people who will unswervingly root for the good guys find themselves swamped in a morass of relativism, which makes it very difficult to see what is good and what is evil.  It used to be, that the church and religion gave us fairly strict rules on good and evil, and while many of these were fairly useful, others provided a strong framework for abuse–most of the wiser parts of society have realized that this kind of ‘absolute’ guidance, because it necessitates a hierarchical social structure and encourages people to obey rather than to be critical minded, is not really the best path towards personal fulfillment, let alone some notion of what ‘good’ might be.

At the platonist, we assert that in fact, good and evil are every much as important in ‘real’ or ‘daily’ life as they are in our modern fairy tales:  this is why we cherish these fairy tales so much.  We all instinctually know what is good and what is evil (as Plato taught):  much of this is due to the fact that some rules of ‘good’ behaviour are better evolutionarily.  Other aspects of this are not so easily explained by behaviouralism (though as a scientist I can’t really commit to anything genuinely ‘platonic’ as a cause of this).

What then is the practical definition of good and evil?  We might start with the Satanic Bible, which unequivocally states that being selfish is the essence of evil.  Ayn Rand and the Satanic Bible both attempt to make a virtue out of selfishness, which quickly ends up creating a rather illogical moral code that no serious philosopher can endorse.   With this as a basic guide, we can quickly create a slate of questions that can test our personal goodness and evilness.

1)  Are you most driven by empathy for others, or by selfishness?

2)  Does your work involve duping or exploiting people for personal gain, is it mostly neutral,  or does it involve helping people?

3)  Do you think that it is OK to dupe or exploit people for your gain, because the ‘system’ justifies it?

4) Do you, essentially, have hope that the human condition can be bettered, or do you essentially despair?

5)  Do you follow a creed or lifestyle because it gives you personal power, or do you follow a belief system which is genuinely based on a desire to see more good done for more people, whatever may be your role in the process?

6)   It is ok to wish physical comfort for yourself:  you cannot do good things or be good without it.  But, do you desire money simply as a means to personal comfort and actualization, or do you desire it to gratify base desires, such as gluttony, or to dominate others in terms of ‘showing off’ your superior physical possessions, or to dominate others psychologically or physically (i.e., to be a head honcho, to hire and fire people, to be a landlord in the sense that this gives you power)?

7)  Is your political philosophy predicated on your desire to see your own ‘in group’ remain, or come into, power, at the expense of ‘the other’?  Or do you seek to ensure your ‘in group’s comfort and safety, while seeking to exploit and profit from ‘the other’ as little as possible?  (Too much altruism, i.e., extreme tree huggers who would eradicate humanity to save this or that other species,  is a form of despair and so is also, technically, evil.)

8)  Do you believe in humanism? or some form of authoritarianism?  If you believe in humanism, then you will try to maximize the happiness actualization of the maximum number of people.  Your only enemies then are those who wish to do ill under the guise of their despairing, egomaniacal, or authoritarian beliefs.  If you believe in authoritarianism, then, in some way or another, you believe that certain groups of people should be discriminated against, or exploited,

9)  Do you believe that love is essentially egalitarian/shared, or essentially hierarchical/authoritarian/exploitative?

10)  Do you believe that friendships are essentially egalitarian/voluntary, or essentially authoritarian/dominance-based?

11)  When you argue, can you admit that you are wrong?  Good people realize they are fallible.  Evil people are so concerned with appearing to be right, so worried about losing dominance, that they will even argue with their wives over the composition of waffles, when their wives are obviously right and they were wrong.  This is perhaps the greatest failing that otherwise good people have in real life:  it’s a true test, of whether you can be more like Qui-Gon Jinn, or more like Darth Maul.    

The basic human motivators. Competition, dominance, and sex in an ideal society.

So it’s an ongoing project here at the Platonist, to come up with the ground rules for what would ideally become a book, setting out a Grand Unified Theory (if we may), of how to create an ideal economy, politics, and society.  This is essentially an update of Plato’s Republic, moving beyond earlier utopian or dystopian literature and taking into account what we’ve learned in the last few decades, since advances in the social sciences have been tremendous, and very inspiring if you know where to look.  This is especially true  in our advances in the theory of egalitarianism, and the discursive elements of this, since Foucault.  And of course our ‘system’ has to move beyond being a system, since one thing we’ve learned is that imposing systems doesn’t at all work.  What we would suggest in this rewriting of the Republic, would be a series of concrete policies that would be designed to maximize happiness, through existing democratic and legal institutions, and maximize opportunity, for those who would want it, without imposing anything on anyone (since this would never be better than our current system–freedom is key).  In essence, we’d be continuing the current and ongoing explorations in the social sciences, whose goal, we would argue, is to find ways to help us to live better.  To explain what has worked, and why, and what hasn’t, and why, with the aim of furnishing us with wisdom to make the right choices, ones that are of course naturally obvious.  For example, it’s quite obvious now that democracy works better than any true monarchy or one-man rule, for a whole host of reasons.  This was not so obvious 300 years ago.  This is the sort of thing, only using newer discoveries, that we are aiming to highlight here.  Economics, in particular, is a rich field for this, since  the marxist-capitalist conflict of the 20th century arguably blinded most economic thinkers by turning them into partisans, instead of scientists.  Economics has been dominated too much by polemics, and not enough with the business of maximizing happiness and opportunity.  It is still in the hands of the anti-marxist, pro plutocratic elite, and we need to reclaim economics from them –  - real economics, scientific university economics.  The book ‘prosperity without growth’ is part of this new trend.  It is happening.

At any rate, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks to any would-be set of principles for improving the way things work (since surely there are quite a few problems we have yet to address as well as we could if only we worked it through) is the fact that we’re still pretty much hardwired for hierarchy as I have said in another post – i.e., we still carry strong tendencies to act according to pack and troop principles, which got us through our millions of years living as beasts.  These instincts aren’t however often so great for creating an egalitarian, maximum-opportunity society.  Psychologists and anthropologists have now identified a lot of these, but let’s spell them out here, so that we can get them out in the open, and grapple with them as we discuss and shape our economic and political wish list.

1)  The desire to be cool.  This used to be called ‘honor.’   It’s probably our first instinct, once we move beyond toddlerhood, and stays with us until senility.  You want to have the people immediately around you like you, and act positively towards you.  This is because in primate troop society, this meant you were  ’alpha.’  Everyone fawns over you, does stuff for you, laughs at your jokes.  This translates into personal power.  The Fonz snaps his fingers, and people do stuff for him.  (Jeff Winger in “Community” being an updated version of the same).

2)  The desire to be sexy.  

The Owl vs. the Dove: Why do our bosses make us get up so early? Why does our economic system discriminate against those who function better later in the day?

Research is now finally beginning to confirm what some of us have known since teenagerhood:  some people have an innate proclivity to go to bed late and get up late, while others are programmed to go to bed early and get up early.  One can see the evolutionary advantages to a given tribe if you have people of both types on hand:  this way, you always have someone on watch.  They say that the ‘owls’ (those who incline to stay up late and get up late) are programmed for their afternoon ‘nap’ about 2pm, while the doves are programmed to have theirs about 12:30 or 1 on average.

Speaking as a certifiable owl, one of the most horrible things about almost every job is that it forces you to get up far too early.   It has gotten a bit easier for me as I have gotten older and have required less sleep:  as a late teen (when most people require their peak amounts of sleep at up to 9 or even 10 hours) it was absolutely brutal to get up for high school, which the administrators had perversely set up so that it began earliest, while elementary school began latest.   Thus high school started at 7:20, meaning we all got up at 5am!!!, while elementary school didn’t start until 9.  I have also seen studies saying that they should reverse this order:  elementary kids tend to get up early (which I also did:  I was up at 5 and 6 when I was 6-10 years old), while high school kids really want, naturally, to stay up late and get up late (this whether you are a dove or owl – you still have tendencies to do more sleeping in and staying up at that point).

Even though I need a bit less sleep now (8 hours to be fully functional, rather than 9 as a teen), the hours that almost every job forces you to get up at are entirely inhumane.  It should definitely go into the global declaration of human rights that people have a right to enough sleep, and therefore the right not to get up at 4:30 if they want to.  These days, however, it seems that insanely early waking hours are almost entirely unavoidable.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (parts 1 and 2)–an Ideal Review.

Here at the Platonist, where thousands of readers come to get their diurnal dose of idealism, and to fortify themselves in their pursuit of that scottish-latin ideal, transire beneficiendo (to go through the world leaving it better than when you left), we have a hallowed tradition of reviewing epic-genre movies, since epics are the ones in which Platonic ideals such as the Good, Truth, Justice, and Beauty are foregrounded.

So let’s get right to it.   The review of HPDH that I like the best so far is that of Salon’s andrew o’hehir, since he points out that Part 1 was a far better movie than part 2 (which is why we’re reviewing it now together with 2).   Many don’t seem to realize this, but the director and screenwriter made Part 1 as their ‘baby,’ their ideal of what would have happened in book 7, and they then, in a rather workmanlike fashion, stuck almost directly to the book plot in Part 2, delivering a rather standard but curiously morally and emotionally hollow boom-bang endup.  Predictably, the average audience and critic excoriated part 1, while they gushed about part 2.  This simply proves Plato’s notion that most of humanity remains in ‘the cave.’

Part 6 was already quite good; it’s my second favourite in the whole series.  The opening scene, and the magisterial music, with dumbledore’s hand on harry’s shoulder, just after the appearance of voldemort in the ministry finally signals to fudge that he’s been a chamberlainian dupe, sets a fabulously serious tone; slughorn functions as a fantastic exploration of ‘old boy’ hogwarts; his “all hands on deck, granger” as he spills butterbeer onto the table in front of hermione being one of the best lines in the series.  The elegaism is wonderful throughout, since it’s really the main theme of the series, and it is beautifully foiled by the theme of ‘young love’ which we really get to explore here.  The harry and hermione tower stairs scene being crucial.

So then onto Part 1; where suddenly, nothing is safe.  (And the score is also phenomenal throughout–the best music yet in the whole series).  

Do shorter work weeks make things more expensive in Europe? (Which part of socialism lowers standards of living?)

So people in North America, and in Europe I think, tend to assume that things are more expensive in Europe because of ‘socialism.’ This assumption is held by just about everyone, from the average bumpkin all the way up to the policymakers in the halls of power themselves.  The problem is, that the term ‘socialism’ encompasses a whole host of different policies and variables, across the spectrum of human society – from politics, to education, to economic regulation in a wide range of areas. I think that we owe it to ourselves, as interested parties, to break down this monolithic and really rather useless label ‘socialism,’ and see which parts of it, in particular, might be responsible for making things more expensive in Europe (which in general they are).

Now, most of us assume that the main, number one, numero uno reason why things in Europe are expensive is because those darn Europeans are so lazy. They take off six weeks of vacation per year, and often times they only work, gasp, 40 hour weeks, or even 36 hour weeks! They get generous terms for maternity and parental leave, and the list goes on. American workers would very much like to believe that this is why Europeans live in tiny houses, and pay tons for gas, food, electronics, clothing, and in short don’t have nearly as much ‘stuff’ as North Americans do.