Why U.S. Conservatives Are Abandoning Their Values

Justice & Tradition


The wrong-headedness of the latest SCOTUS ruling in favor of evangelical web designer Lori Smith is obvious to thoughtful Constitutional and Biblical scholars -- as it doesn't reflect the values, sentiments, and standards embodied in either document. The previous day's ruling on affirmative action at Harvard is likewise transparently oblivious to the racial realities of American culture and history. But the question to my mind is: Why is this happening? Why are folks who say they are committed to longstanding principles of the U.S. Constitution, the New Testament, and indeed civil society itself so eager to abandon those principles?

Well, I think it is all about fear. A deep, abiding terror that one's status and privilege of being "White and Right" is severely threatened by the natural, normal evolution of a morally maturing culture. It is a knee-jerk grasping after the power and wealth that will inevitably be lost as a more equitable arrangement of civil society is achieved.

And I don't see an end to that grasping. As long as this fear-powered conservatism energizes our electorate and our government officials, these irrational and hypocritical patterns will continue to amplify themselves. What the U.S. Constitution and the New Testament actually promote are concepts like equitable justice, inalienable and universal human rights, the criticality of a strong and democratic civil society, and the unfailing power of a generous and accepting spirit, a reflexive willingness to help others, and an unconditional compassion for our fellow human beings.

Will the overarching principles of love and equality, so venerated by some previous generations, prevail...? Or will we continue to slide backwards into selfishness and prejudice?

Well I suppose we will see how folks decide to vote in the upcoming 2024 elections and beyond...and who decides to abdicate their responsibilities and not vote at all.

The Hallmarks of Bad Information – Misinformation, Disinformation, Propaganda & How We Can Manage It

We live in a world where lies run rampant, where public figures consistently misrepresent the truth, and where once trusted news sources are no longer viewed as reliable. More than ever before, it is now our individual responsibility to discern what is true and what is not, and to recognize when we become the target of deliberate hoodwinking. It is no exaggeration to claim that the durability of our political systems, the stability of our society, and the health of our planet increasingly depend on our vigilance in this arena. What follows is a brief but detailed overview of how to identify bad information, how we can protect ourselves from it, and how we can best respond to its increasingly loud and invasive presence in our lives.


First, what constitutes “bad information?”

Here are some of the hallmarks that help us quickly and reliably identify misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and manipulative deception:

1. Partial truths that rush to a sweeping conclusion. One of the most common techniques of communicating bad information is to offer only a small portion of cherry-picked facts for a given situation, deliberately omitting additional information that could provide a more balanced or measured perspective, and then quickly rushing into what is usually an extreme and unreasonable conclusion fueled solely on that partial information.

2. Fear or hate mongering – often involving conspiracy thinking and demonizing particular individuals or groups – followed by urgent and imperative calls to action. Negative emotion can be profoundly persuasive, even when the accusations being made have no evidence to support them. And once we have been caught up in strong feelings of foreboding or dislike, our rational faculties tend to shut down, and we may make decisions or take action based on strong emotions alone. And propagators of bad information know this, deliberately using it to their advantage to persuade us to conclude or do things we normally wouldn’t.

3. Visceral and vehement rejection of any reliable sources of information. Those who perpetuate bad information cannot tolerate or allow sources of more accurate information to be consulted by anyone, so they will attack them endlessly – though here again often without evidence to support their accusations.

4. The illusory truth effect. The illusory truth effect is when everyone begins to believe falsehoods are true simply because they get repeated by lots of people – because we are hearing them from multiple sources, the untruths begins to feel familiar and acceptable. Mainly as a consequence of the Internet, enduring falsehoods can now be spread very quickly all around the globe and become accepted into the mainstream as widely believed “truth” in this way.

5. Tribal conformance and groupthink. This technique relies on peer pressure and perceived threats to identity and belonging within a given group to generate lockstep conformance – often within a rigid set of values, priorities, and beliefs. Members of that tribe must, of necessity, conform to a given conclusion or course of action, and endlessly parrot particular talking points, to avoid being kicked out of their tribe. As inherently social creatures who crave acceptance and belonging, these are powerful pressures to keep us in line and make us feel we must propagate bad information…or else.

6. Reliance on a cult of personality or an idealized self-image. In an age of media celebrities who boisterously portray themselves as champions and heroes without any real evidence or history of their actually being that, adoring followers are lured into accepting falsehoods without question and then vehemently defending those falsehoods. They are, after all, defending a champion and hero that has inspired their adoration and made them feel important and “part of something,” perhaps even making them feel better about themselves and closer to an idealized version of who they want to be.

7. Projection, false equivalence, and whataboutism. These techniques attempt to paint the opposition with the flaws, faults, mistakes, and failings of the person trying to defend themselves or make their case. For example, someone who is profoundly corrupt or immoral asserting that their opponent is actually the one who is corrupt or immoral; this is projection. Or a politician claiming that an opposing party’s policies or practices have been just as flawed and destructive as their own, when this is only partially true; this is false equivalence. And, finally, when cornered with undeniable evidence of their own misdoings or malfeasance, someone may counter that their accusers have done something similar, when once again this may be only partially true or even false; this is whataboutism.

8. The constant promotion of other logical fallacies – such as ad hominem attacks, straw man arguments, the bandwagon effect, slippery slope fallacies, appeals to authority, appeals to emotion, false dilemmas, appeals to ignorance, false cause, manufacturing a “big lie,” and many others. Getting to know what these logical fallacies look and sound like can be very eye-opening – but they do take a bit of time and effort to fully appreciate (see References and Resources section below for more). In brief: ad hominem is simply attacking the character of a person rather than responding to their actual arguments; straw man is misrepresenting the opposing viewpoint so that refuting it doesn’t address the actual argument; bandwagon is claiming that because “everyone already knows” something to be true, is common knowledge, or will succeed, then it must be so; slippery slope is claiming that even a small admission, concession, or seemingly insignificant course of action will inevitably lead to much broader and disastrous results; appeal to authority asserts that because a trusted person or source claims something is true, it must be true; appeal to emotion is just that – there is no rational reasoning or factual evidence involved; false dilemma is insisting the only available choices are between two black-and-white extremes, when in reality there are more nuanced alternatives; appeal to ignorance takes advantage of our not having contrary, factual information to contradict the appeal; false cause links an incorrect cause to a given outcome; a “big lie” is a distortion of factual reality that is so grandiose and extreme – and repeated so often – that uncritical hearers begin to believe it.

9. The appearance of reasonableness. This is, for me at least, one of the more insidious techniques used in bad information. The objective here is to make an argument – usually one based on partial information, logical fallacies, or distortions of fact – in a reasonable, logical, and confident way that makes a given opponent or their viewpoint seem extreme, irrational, or hyperbolic. This technique is often combined with other methods meant to provoke the opposition into emotional reactions or overstatement of their position, and thereby undermining the credibility of their viewpoint.


How can we best respond to and mitigate these influences?

As you can see, there are a lot of tools in the bad information toolkit. And, unfortunately, once we become conditioned to respond to these tools, it is very difficult to free ourselves from their influence and not react impulsively or reflexively when they are used. In fact, one of the most effective ways to manage our immersion in bad information is simply to delay our response. To create a healthy space – in terms of time, emotions, and reflexive thinking – between the initial information we are receiving and how we choose to react to it. It’s a lot like creating space between other kinds of reflexive reaction. For example, if someone aggressively shoves me out of their way to cut past me in line, I might feel a reflexive urge to shove them back, or grab hold of them, or yell out “Hey, you can’t do that!” But if I instead insert a pause in my reaction, take a calming breath, and reflect for a moment about how best to respond, I can short-circuit my own visceral reactivity. Dealing with bad information can benefit from the same kind of patience and self-discipline.

Of course, being well-informed is also highly advantageous, so that when we are presented with partial truths, logical fallacies, or deceptive arguments we can more easily dismiss them because we know what the actual truth is. Amid today’s 24/7 fire hose of mass media – and with digital devices as our constant companions, delivering this firehouse with algorithmic amplification designed to keep our interest – the deluging clamor for our attention can be very challenging to manage.

So here are some helpful ways to buffer ourselves from the onslaught of such unfiltered, often questionable information:

1. Be proactive in how information is consumed. For example, avoid remaining logged into social media or receiving social media notifications on your digital devices. If we allow algorithms to decide what information we should receive, then most research indicates (see References and Resources) that we will receive what provokes our emotional engagement with that social media platform. Why? Simply because more engagement from us results in more ad revenue for those companies. This, in turn, results in what researchers call “computational propaganda.” So instead, if we deliberately choose to seek out specific information more proactively, we can protect ourselves from these profit-driven algorithms.

2. Be proactive in our selection of information sources – and even then, check the facts. This can take some effort to figure out, but eventually we can gather together a number of sources that provide high quality, factual information about our areas of interest. One way to vet the bias and factuality of potential news sources is https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/. And for reliable, in-depth research on many cultural and political issues, we can consult https://www.pewresearch.org/. To verify questionable information, I recommend consulting http://snopes.com/, https://www.politifact.com/, or https://www.factcheck.org/. And to appreciate how money intersects with politics in the U.S., https://www.opensecrets.org/ is an excellent resource.

In terms of the current political landscape in the U.S.A., it can quickly and easily be confirmed (see References and Resources) that the most prolific perpetrators of bad information practices are conservative pundits; the Republican Party and its political candidates; right-leaning U.S. media, bloggers, think tanks, and talk-show hosts; the official state-run media of Russia and China; and the efforts of social media troll farms and other “active measures” maintained by those same countries. Of course, you will want to evaluate and verify these claims yourself, but I think it is important to call out the most nefarious and destructive influences in U.S. politics right now.

Has this always been the case? With respect to Russia, this has definitely been the case since the Soviet era, but China seems to be a relative newcomer to the media-shaping game. Regarding the GOP in the U.S., it hasn’t always been this bad. In my opinion there have previously been reputable and responsible conservative-leaning media and pundits in the U.S. that would have called into question many of the claims being made by Republicans today. At the same time, conservatives have also executed long-term, well-funded efforts to discredit inconvenient facts that threated corporate profits – often through relentless “science skepticism” attacks (e.g. regarding tobacco risks, climate change, acid rain, pesticides, etc.). With equal fervor, conservatives have assaulted government programs and policies that protect consumers, workers, and the poor, usually with some flavor of fear mongering. These efforts include “red scare” anti-socialist propaganda techniques, as well as amping up rhetoric over “culture war” hot button issues (gay marriage and transgender rights; abortion rights; family values; parents’ rights; etc.) to agitate and motivate the Republican rank-and-file.

Do Democrats and those on the political left use similar tactics to persuade and manipulate people? And are left-leaning media, think tanks, and pundits as prolific in their propaganda, misinformation, or disinformation? Again, you will want to research and confirm the realities for yourself. But currently, although the left-leaning side of the political spectrum has sometimes been guilty of using similar tactics, it would be a grossly exaggerated false equivalence to say that Democratic politicians fabricate lies at the same rate as Republicans – or that Democrats rely on misinformation, disinformation, and logical fallacies to the same degree as the GOP. Left-leaning think tanks also tend to approach issues in a more even-handed, evidence-based, and scientific way than conservative ones. And in this moment of history, mainly driven by the extraordinary antics of Donald Trump and his “MAGA” followers, the GOP has gone down a rabbit hole of creating its own alternative realities. We could even say that, to exemplify the most potent examples of every “bad information” technique outlined here, we need only observe the copious pedantic claims uttered by Mr. Trump and his political supporters and media pundits.

As just a handful of examples of what right-leaning America has consistently gotten wrong, yet promoted as “truth” in order to win elections, sell ads, and raise donations:

• Joe Biden really did win the 2020 election, and zero evidence has been presented to the contrary despite repeated lawsuits.

• Donald Trump really did break the law in the willful hoarding of classified documents after he left office – and no, his evasive and obstructive behavior regarding those documents goes far beyond anything Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or Mike Pence did by comparison.

• Climate change is a real, scientifically validated event, and not a liberal conspiracy.

• Immigrants had nothing to do with the decline in jobs or wages in the U.S.A. over the last few decades. Instead, it was mainly corporate greed and the natural consequence of those corporations seeking cheaper labor and resources abroad and automating production and services.

• Tax cuts have never “paid for themselves;” that is, conservative trickle-down economics has never helped the poor or working class, but only enriched the owner-shareholders of big business and other wealthy folks.

• Vladimir Putin is not an underdog victimize by “western aggression” who nobly aims to preserve Russia’s status in the world – he is a brutal, murderous, megalomaniacal dictator hell-bent on expanding his own political power and the economic and political influence of Russia so that he can increase his own personal wealth and that of the oligarchs who enable him.

• Obamacare has actually helped millions of people obtain health insurance who couldn’t do so previously, and has helped reduce health care costs overall. And there were never any government “death panels” triaging patient healthcare.

• Deregulation has not helped American consumers or saved U.S. industries – with very few exceptions, it has consistently hurt both.

• There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein had zero ties to the terrorists responsible for 9/11.

• Neither the recent escalation of inflation, nor the ballooning federal deficit, can be laid at the feet of Democrats or Joe Biden. While the legislation and executive policies of both parties have certainly contributed, the lion’s share of irresponsible spending, overly aggressive tax cuts, and disastrous economic and public health policies contributing to both inflation and the federal deficit can be laid squarely at the feet of Republicans – and indeed Donald Trump.

It is therefore not surprising that the GOP is so profoundly committed to false narratives and misinformation – because the facts on the ground make them look really bad.

But 70+ million voters in the U.S. continue to be utterly conned and hoodwinked into believing these lies and many more – and into consistently voting against their own expressed values and best interests.

These are truly extraordinary times.


References and Resources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_techniques
https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/problem-solving-and-decision-making/logical-fallacies/1/
https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/c.php?g=849536&p=6077643
https://www.grammarly.com/blog/logical-fallacies/
https://www.propwatch.org/propaganda.php
https://demtech.oii.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2017/06/Casestudies-ExecutiveSummary.pdf
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/radical-ideas-social-media-algorithms/
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/conspiracy/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/big-lie
https://realmajority.us/files/stacks-image-d301f1f-1142x1600.jpg
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/apr/01/cato-institute/cato-institutes-claim-global-warming-disputed-most/
https://level-7.org/Challenges/Neoliberalism/Attacks_On_Science/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2014/11/conservative-nonsense-political-history
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/27/inflation-blame-game-sorting-out-the-culprits-00035712
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/10/03/republican-tax-cuts-fail-record-debt-and-inequality-gap-column/3833546002/
https://www.budget.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/GOP%20Policies%20Caused%20the%20Deficit%20REPORT%2010-15-18.pdf
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-war-criminal-inhumanity-syria/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/24/republicans-parents-rights-education-culture-war
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_war

Is the “tyranny of the majority” an unavoidable weakness of democracy?

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.

I have a million dollars and you don't. Are we really "equal under the law?"

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.

What are some things conservatives are right about?

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:



How can we fight disinformation and misinformation without censoring people?

There are a number of approaches that have worked in the past in the U.S. and in other countries, and they very likely could help now. I’ve listed some below. However, defensive tribalism around conspiracy groupthink has progressed to a level where it will likely take a generation or more to fish the crazies and their families out of the rabbit hole they’ve chosen to inhabit.

Some helpful tools:

1. Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine for anyone who claims to be a “news” outlet (including Youtube channels, etc.) AND have the FCC oversee something similar for moderating social media.

2. Educate people about how to identify state-sanctioned disinformation techniques, partisan propaganda, logical fallacies, and the human psychology behind things like Dunning-Kruger effect and the illusory truth effect. At the same time, educate them about how to find more reliable sources of information. I’ve written about much of this here: https://level-7.org/Challenges/Opposition/

3. Increase critical thinking skills training at all levels of education.

4. Use humor to expose and diffuse false information

5. Hold people (and companies) criminally accountable for hate speech or any misinformation they propagate that results in people being injured, targeted, shamed, etc.

6. End privately funded political campaigns and all political advertising funded by superPACs, and instead allow only publicly funded campaigns for political office, with equal and balanced time for all candidates across all media (part of what the Fairness Doctrine used to promote).

I think that’s a start. But it is important to appreciate that there is a deep and abiding hunger among a lot of folks to sustain and amplify gossip, prejudice, anger, dissatisfaction, and “Us vs. Them” rhetoric. Unhappy people like to collect others with similar grievances and fears around themselves. It’s a very old and enduring human trait. And in order to combat that, humanity just needs to grow up a bit — morally and culturally. We all need to become a bit more prosocial as a species, and cultivate conditions that promote what I call “moral creativity.” I write about this here: https://level-7.org/Philosophy/Prosociality/

My 2 cents.

What does freedom mean to you, and what do you expect from your government?

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.

Do progressives have a limiting principle, a point where "this much change is sufficient" or is progressivism simply a direction without a limit?

Digging into the assumptions behind this question we discover some interesting contradictions — and likely a misunderstanding of the causality in play regarding certain outcomes.

The greatest drivers of change in the developed world actually do not include “progressivism.” That is a complete misunderstanding of causality in both history and current conditions. The biggest drivers of change include:

1.The profit motive as expressed in corporate commercialism — which has completely changed both the political power structure in the U.S. and globally through concentrations of wealth and plutocratic influence, and completely changed culture through “newer is better” Kool-Aid and commercialized homogenization across previously diverse cultures as well. When cookie-cutter legislation written by and for corporations (via A.L.E.C.) is passed in every state legislature, and every U.S. consumer is using the same products, listening to the same corporate-controlled media, and working under conditions and wages dictated by corporate investors, then “progressive” agendas really represent just a tiny drop of influence in the hurricane of dynamic capitalism — it is capitalism that is the juggernaut instigating and steering the direction of much of our culture and politics.

2. Technology — the industrial revolution, the information age, the rise of automation, and complex systems managed by algorithms and AI…you really can’t place any of these at the feet of progressives either. Our species is addicted to technological innovation. And it is a pretty unstoppable force at this point in terms of the impact it has on culture, learning, information propagation, and indeed human development. Progressives may celebrate technology in their policy proposals — but no more than conservatives celebrate and reinforce technology with their spending habits.

3. Scientific inquiry and knowledge — this has created enormous common sense incentives for changing certain traditional practices and revising traditional views about how the world works. When science discovers that a new way of doing things (or a new way of thinking about things) is advantageous and beneficial to everyone, then this creates tension with previous conceptions, habits, and beliefs. Here progressives do tend to be more emphatic than conservatives about promoting science and scientific understanding, that is true. But it is scientific discovery itself that is most often introducing and propagating the change.

These three forces have accelerated cultural shifts that likely would have taken decades or centuries to occur in pre-industrial mass societies. Have progressives often championed certain themes, practices, perspectives, and values that were accelerated by the breakneck growth of capitalism, science, and technology? Well sure…but saying progressives were responsible for these changes is putting the cart before the horse.

I noticed in some of the comments in this thread that critical race theory was raised as a concern. Let’s put that into the context I have sketched out here. Slavery was a key component in the development of capitalism (see Beckert, Baptiste, Johnson, et al for this linkage) — but in particular it was integral to the economic strength and success of Southern states. Technology (industrialization) was responsible for the economic strength of Northern states — and for an alternative to slavery in the production of goods — both of which rapidly undermined the usefulness of slavery and its economic status and preference. And of course industrial production was also integral to the development of capitalism. Interestingly, it was conservative Christians who were frequently at the forefront of championing equal human rights and emancipation of slaves in the first anti-slavery political movements. However, you’ll notice there aren’t any progressives involved here…in fact the progressive movement hadn’t even started yet. So the cultural shift away from slavery was driven by technology, an evolving economic system, and conservative values in this instance…and not progressives.

And this is the pattern that repeats itself even when progressives came on the scene: it was other primary forces that sparked changed, rather than progressivism itself. Progressivism arose in part as an affirmative response to some of these forces (technology and science in particular), and in part as a countervailing response to the abuses of capitalism. Progressivism was itself a consequence of these forces — one of many changes they inspired.

With respect to the evolution of CRT, all that progressives did was apply scientific inquiry to history in an attempt to identify patterns that kept occurring over time. That’s it. In the case of critical race theory, the understanding of history around the oppression of people of color seemed to indicate that white people sought to maintain their privileged advantage in society simply — this wasn’t always a conscious thing, but it seemed evident in many civic institutions and cultural practices. But this pattern of tacit prejudice did become an enormous blindspot in mainstream understanding, with even the history and practice of slavery being an example of this oversight. Unfortunately, there are a lot of other institutional, political, and legal examples of oppression that can also be explained as protecting the social and economic advantages of white people — so the hypothesis (which is really all CRT actually is) has gained a lot of traction over time. It’s just a pretty good explanation of certain dynamics in U.S. history.

But is the approach valid? I think the point is that CRT can be reasonably discussed and debated. But as the current anti-CRT movement also vehemently opposes any examination of racism in the U.S., we could say that, whether intended or not, the anti-CRT movement is itself an example of (mainly) white people suppressing any exposure of their own privilege and advantage in society — both historical and current — and/or the prejudice they may perpetuate without even being aware of it.

So, on the one hand, progressives do tend to promote technology and scientific understanding as solutions for longstanding problems. But, on the other, they often oppose corporate commercialism’s influence on how things change, even as conservatives tend to promote unchecked growth and change when it benefits the profit motive. So no one is innocent of advocating for change. In a way both progressives and consrervatives are equally both promoters and gatekeepers of change.
Lastly, trying to claim progressivism is some sort of Marxist academic takeover of America (i.e. the “cultural Marxism” attack) is utter hogwash. A thoughtful and observant person doesn’t have to be Marxist to see the problems inherent to capitalism, neoliberalism, and plutocracy.

So, as usual, such things are more nuanced than any black-and-white rhetoric. Putting a more nuanced spin on it, this question could be restated this way: “Does the runaway innovation and cultural change fueled by technology, science, and capitalism have no limits? Will the hunger for constant change inspired by these forces remain unchecked? Do conservatives recognize that their opposition to cultural change is contradicted and undermined by their support of commercialism, corporate agendas, and expanding the political power of owner-shareholders? And do progressives recognize their role in moderating the corrosive influence of plutocracy as inherently ‘conservative’…?“

My 2 cents.

Which policy preference do you feel progressives are on the wrong side of history with and why?

I’ll restrict my comments to progressives in the U.S.A. as that is what I know the most about.

At the granular level, there have been a number of progressive policies that started out with good intentions but eventually led to unintended consequences — especially when there were major economic and/or cultural shifts over time. One example is recycling: it used to make a lot of economic sense because the U.S. exported its raw recycling materials to China, but China has long since shut that gravy train down, leaving certain types of recycling like plastics completely untenable. Additionally, the early recycling of post-consumer paper waste actually produced a lot of toxic pollution that was potentially more ecologically damaging than harvesting trees. Then again, recycling programs have reduced landfill materials and extended the life of many dumps in large municipalities for decades…so it’s a mixed bag. But because recycling remains popular as a virtue-signaling activity among progressives, progressive politicians are hesitant to champion new policies that correct for new conditions on the ground. I think there are several examples similar to this, but it is by no means a majority of progressive policies, just a select few that remain problematic.

In terms of overarching policies, however, I think there are three areas where progressive ideology (or at least the beliefs of most progressives who hold public office) has been corrupted by neoliberal propaganda in very destructive ways:

1. The idea that corporations should be treated as “persons” in terms of free speech, political contributions and lobbying, receiving welfare, receiving aid when they are in distress (i.e. bailouts), and so on — when this is clearly the most toxic and corrosive thing that can happen in democracy, as it allows huge concentrations of wealth to create huge concentrations of influence and power (i.e. super PACs funded by dark money, the astonishing reach of the American Legislative Exchange Council, etc.). It has already turned the U.S.A. into a plutocracy, with really no end in sight.

2. The idea that a progressive arrogance or superiority complex has alienated rural white voters — when that alienation is instead clearly the result of rightwing propaganda around an invented “culture war,” along with the economic suffering created by rightwing economic policies like supply side economics, opposition to minimum wage, dismantling of unions, etc.

3. The idea that radical rightwing distortions of fact, deliberately manipulative disinformation, and extreme and hateful views need to somehow be “heard” or incorporated into our political dialogue — when in reality this far right ideology (anti-government, anti-democracy, seditionist, xenophobic, racist, religious fundamentalist, Trump cultist, willfully ignorant, etc.) is profoundly opposed to the values expressed by the U.S. Constitution and to democratic civil society itself…and really shouldn’t be honored, acknowledged, or accepted as “reasonable” within a sane political discourse. Instead, this increasingly deranged extremism should be called out — and dismissed — for what it really is: spastic wackadoodle wholesale destruction of democracy fomented in broken brains by the plutocratic masters of hoodwinking propaganda.

Essentially, then, progressives do make errors in some policies that they then fail to correct because of the virtue-signaling popularity of those policies….But the much more significant failure of progressives is buying into the idea that plutocracy, disinformation, deception, hate-centric beliefs, strident proclamations from ignorance, liberal-shaming, and outright lunacy should be “welcomed” on equal footing into our political discourse. This greater mistake of tolerating and engaging with the far right’s broken brain ideas — if it continues —will inevitably lead to the final downfall of the United States itself.

My 2 cents.

What do you think about the Cato Institute (their policies and proposals), and can they be considered an influential think tank?

Yes, CATO is extremely influential — often because they do credible and interesting research. However, they are part of the movement started in the early 1970s, inspired by the 1972 “Powell Memo,” that sought to combat the influence of socially liberal movements in the 1960s that constrained corporate power in politics, regulated industry, strengthened civil society, and undermined reckless profit seeking. CATO pretends to be pro-capitalist “right-libertarian” (historically a bit of an oxymoron, as libertarianism had been anti-capitalist for a century until Friedman, Rothbard, et al distorted its principles in service to corporate profit) but really CATO promotes crony capitalism — just like Milton Friedman did. And of course the ongoing influences of wealthy neoliberals like Koch, Bradley, and Scaife have just made that trend continually worse.

As to what I think of them, as I mentioned they actually have produced some interesting research — sometimes revealing counterintuitive causality or unintended consequences regarding certain policies and practicies (along the lines of Freakonomics). But these occasionally interesting and factual insights are overwhelmed by a mission to disrupt civil society and effective governance as we know it, and perpetuate deceptions on various topics (such as climate change, the effectiveness of government and government solutions, the ability of free markets to solve complex problems like health care, education, social security, and so on). On these and other topics that serve a neoliberal agenda, CATO consistently promotes deliberately deceptive or skewed data, and sometimes even misinformation, that transparently serves their donors’ capital accumulation. Below is just one example of deliberate deception — please note that this was from a full page newspaper ad that CATO created, promoted, and paid for:

"We, the undersigned scientists, maintain that the case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated. Surface temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now. After controlling for population growth and property values, there has been no increase in damages from severe weather-related events. The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to explain recent climate behavior. Mr. President, your characterization of the scientific facts regarding climate change and the degree of certainty informing the scientific debate is simply incorrect."

For more, see:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/apr/01/cato-institute/cato-institutes-claim-global-warming-disputed-most/

And here is more info on the broader and deeper neoliberal trend that CATO aims to serve…basically, we just need to “follow the money” to understand CATO’s tactics and motivations:

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

My 2 cents.

Which concepts do you think politicians should champion that would improve the economy?


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.

Why is the West so sure they know what's the best for China more than Chinese themselves?

Thanks for the question. In answer to “As an outsider, can you accept China don't want democracy as they value unity, prosperity & stability much more important? Why is the West so sure they know what's the best for China more than Chinese themselves? What the West really want from China?” I think it would be helpful to break the question into parts. So…

1. “As an outsider, can you accept China don't want democracy as they value unity, prosperity & stability much more important?” There are a number of challenges with this question. The first is the false dichotomy between “unity, prosperity, and stability” and “democracy.” The two are not mutually exclusive. To insist that they are seems a bit like propaganda to me. That is not to say that unity, prosperity, and stability can’t be achieved without democracy — or that they always exist in a democracy. It’s just not a mutually exclusive choice.

The second challenge with this question centers around what the people of China “want.” Hong Kong is now subject to China, and the people of Hong Kong overwhelmingly want democracy. Taiwan desires independence from China, and its people want to continue their democracy as well. The Tibet “government in exile” is democratic, and some proportion of people of Tibet would like to regain their independence from China. So to say that “China doesn’t want democracy” is actually not a complete or true statement.

2. “Why is the West so sure they know what's the best for China more than Chinese themselves?” This a little trickier to answer. I believe there are two primary issues in play. The first is that folks in Western developed nations are generally pretty arrogant about their way of life being superior to everyone else’s. This is cultural to a large degree, but it is also economic because of the West’s historic relative wealth and privilege, and its historic military strength.

The second issue centers around compassion and concern for other human beings. Now there will always be people who judge other cultures without really understanding them, and so their concerns may sometimes be misplaced. But in China’s case, there really are some very dire conditions for some segments of China’s population. The rural poor in China — certainly as compared to much wealthier city dwellers — have a comparatively rough time of it. This is true even for those who travel to cities for work, but must leave their families and children behind for months on end. From the outside looking in, the way the rural poor are treated looks a lot like the very sorts of capitalist oppression and exploitation Marx decried.

Religious and cultural minorities also have a tough time in China — especially those like the Uighurs who ended up in Xinjiang “re-education” camps. This treatment looks just as bad as the “ethnic cleansing” and degradation that has occurred throughout history in other parts of the world — for example, what happened to many Native American tribes in the U.S.A.

And of course many of the people of Tibet and Hong Kong feel very oppressed by China — and many people in Taiwan live in constant fear of oppression issuing from China.

Taken altogether, it is I think fair and reasonable for a caring and compassionate person to have concern for some segments of China’s population, and want to help or advocate for them in some way. Yes…this can seem a bit arrogant — especially when folks advocating may be pretty ignorant about China in most other respects — but I do think it honestly comes from a genuinely charitable mindset.

3. Then we come to “What the West really want from China?” That is probably the easiest part of the question to answer. There are really two very different expectations that many folks living in the West have regarding China. The first is that the Chinese people succeed and thrive — regardless of the political economy in which they live. For example, there is real worry that climate change will cause profound damage in China — especially it terms of its water supplies and its ability to grow food. And that is a very worrisome prospect, so there is hope that China will engineer a way out of this impending disaster. There is also a fair amount of awe and inspiration in seeing China progress in its Belt and Road Initiative — and I think many people have been rooting for China to succeed there.

The second expectation is that China not become more aggressive militarily, or attempt to expand its territory and maritime control, or become so dominant economically that it dictates trade policy across Asia and the rest of the globe. This is a very real fear — and unfortunately China has poured fuel on that fear in some of its expansionist behaviors and rhetoric of late (i.e. South China Sea, Taiwan, India’s Ladakh region, Hong Kong, Himalayas, etc.). To make things worse, conservatives in the West have tended to trump up the threat China poses to the West, which has only made things worse. Of course, countries like Japan and India have expressed much more concern and unease about China’s recent behaviors and rhetoric than anyone in the West has done.

4. Lastly, we need to talk about Xi. There is no escaping that he is behaving more and more like a dangerous authoritarian dictator. His creation of a cult-of-personality around himself; his removing anyone in opposition from power; his ending his own term limits in office; his increase of mass surveillance, censorship, and highly coordinated human rights violations; and so on. I think that history has taught us that such behaviors from a leader are incredibly toxic to the ultimate well-being of a nation and its citizens. Xi’s rule will not end well. In the West, we have our own failings in leadership, but can be very grateful that democracy has removed some of them (such as Donald Trump). If Chinese government offered another civic mechanism besides democracy to remove Xi from power, I wonder if the advocacy of democracy for the Chinese people would be as great as it is.

My 2 cents.

Is there left-wing liberal indoctrination in American universities?

As a student (briefly) at the University of Washington in Washington State, and then as an employee of the same institution for many years — working in several different departments on campus — I can honestly say that the whole “left-wing indoctrination” diatribe of the right-wing conspiracy theorists is absolute bunk.

The reality is that there are all sorts of personal bias and political leanings among professors, students, and staff. Sometimes there is a bit more right-leaning bias in some departments (like the Business School, which is one of the places where I worked). And in some there is a sort of enforced neutrality that may have leanings one way or another among faculty and staff, but tries very hard not to let it show — this was true at the Graduate School of Public Affairs, where I also worked for a time. And yes, sometimes there is a left-leaning bias, such as in the fine arts and literature departments. But you couldn’t generalize too rigidly about any of these places, because there were almost always exceptions.

What DOES happen, and I think this is what upsetting to conservatives, is that tacit assumptions and culturally adopted ideas students bring with them to university DO get challenged and sometimes upended or contradicted with a preponderance of evidence and a little critical thinking. That is very scary to some folks, who hold on a little too tightly to a certain way of thinking for their sense of security and identity.

My 2 cents.

What would you say is the role of education in reinforcing, revealing, and dismantling various forms of oppression?

I am a big fan of Paulo Freire’s views on the power and purpose of education. Here is an overview that captures much of that — with the expressed aim of providing tools for self-liberation:



And if education is to empower us toward self-liberation — providing the tools, resources, and vision for any kind of positive change — a central emphasis will need to be an underlying philosophy that supports active participation in society. A constant drumbeat of the importance of civic responsibility, if you will — as well as how to avoid non-participation and tokenism. Arnstein’s “Ladder of Citizen Participation” provides an outline of such personal and collective agency:



But at the core of such an education model, there must be an acceptance of the necessary evolutions and divergence of critical thinking from any presumed norms. This is what so upsets traditionalists and conservatives…but it is absolutely essential to navigating nuance and complexity. An example of this cognitive process:



Of course, there must also be truth-telling about systems of oppression. This is also distasteful for those who value and even revere those systems — and who may conflate them with tribal loyalties, patriotism, or even religious devotion. But again, it is absolutely necessary to reveal the man behind the curtain (or behind the bread and circuses, as the case may be…).



And, lastly, as part of a participatory landscape, education must itself model equality, democracy, diffusion of authority, subsidiarity, collaboration, egalitarianism, and so on. We cannot teach liberation from oppression within a system of education that is rigidly prescriptive, proscriptive, hierarchical, and authoritarian.

My 2 cents.

What is your stance on people with mental illness, that are a danger to themselves and others, refusing to take their medication?

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.

Why do people oppose opening the economy with social distancing guidelines?

It’s pretty simple: physical distancing isn’t enough to stop an explosive spread of coronavirus. In order to open the economy back up at all, we need to be able to contain, track and treat COVID-19 so that overall disruption and fatalities can be reduced. To do that will require:

1) Better, faster, more widely available testing of COVID-19 infection and antibodies.

2) Adequate supplies of effective masks for everyone who is out in public.

3) Financial support for folks who are at high risk and aren’t able to do their job.

4) A treatment that reduces lethality and permanent injury from infection.

5) And, ultimately, both a vaccine that works and broader herd immunity.

Right now, we have NONE of these things. So this is simply going to take time.

However, folks are also increasingly realizing that there is a larger issue in play: that we may not really want to “go back” to what we had before, and instead have an opportunity to address some pretty nasty systemic problems. Here is a great article about this:

We Are Living in a Failed State

My 2 cents.

Is it just to scuttle the livelihoods of 10's of millions to save the lives of thousands?

This is a false choice.

The impact on jobs and the economy is temporary, not permanent. Also the numbers used aren’t even close to correct. The question would be much more accurately stated: “Should tens of millions of people experience a temporary loss of income — for perhaps a few months — so that a few million people’s lives will be saved?”

That is a bit closer to the mark in terms of tradeoffs. As to whether that is “just” or not, I suppose it comes down to the morality you are operating on — whether temporary economic suffering somehow trumps careless and avoidable death in your worldview. In reality, the economic impact of COVID-19 is much worse because we have structured our society to funnel all the wealth to a few people, while leaving the majority of the working population in debt and without much savings or assets. So the bigger question really is:

“Is it just that tens of millions of millions of people are so vulnerable to COVID-19’s economic impacts, mainly because a few thousands have accumulated all the wealth in society?”

My 2 cents.

Do Americans make everything political?

Unfortunately, at this point we have to.

This wasn’t always the case. At one time, you could live in a small community that was insulated from other communities, from the rest of the country, and from the rest of the world.

That really isn’t true anymore. A single national election can determine (and has determined) the following — as have the critical mass of our daily purchasing decisions, the media we consume and support, where we decide to live and pay taxes, how we raise our children, and so on:

1. Whether or not the women in your community can get an abortion.

2. Whether or not you and your family will have healthcare.

3. Whether or not your community has more than one employer — or any at all — due to trade policies (voting in elections) and consumption habits (voting with your dollars).

4. Whether or not you can own a gun, carry a gun, the type of gun, etc.

5. Whether or not a local business can pollute the air or water nearby, or be held accountable for the illness and death that pollution causes over time.

6. Whether or not the BLM land or National Forest near your town becomes primarily an industrial center for raw materials extraction, or primarily a recreational area now and for future generations, or some balance of both.

7. Whether or not you and your children receive a decent education — or any college education at all.

8. Whether or not mass media can fabricate news or be required to provide balanced viewpoints (i.e. the Fairness Doctrine…gone now)

9. Whether or not you can buy something made anywhere but China.

10. Whether or not countless species of animals go extinct each year.

11. Whether or not future generations have anything left of the Earth to enjoy or thrive in (i.e. responding to climate crisis, avoiding nuclear war, etc.).

12. Whether or not someone who lives next door or very far away — even in another country — has a say in any of these matters in their own lives.

I could go on…but I’m sure you see the point. Because of the massive complexity and interdependencies of our current economic and legal systems, it is almost impossible to remain isolated and pretend that how we act (and vote, and consume) individually or locally doesn’t have a cascading impact on everyone else — both in our immediate community and all around the world, and both now and in the future. This is a de facto condition of modernity…to ignore it is just to remain willfully ignorant.

Therefore, everything really is political, now more than ever, and the question becomes: Will I pretend to be an atom who can act any way I please, engaging in life as merely a series of impersonal transactions, without acknowledging the impact of my choices on everyone and everything else, and fantasize that I have no responsibility to consider that impact? Or will I accept the impacts and influence of my choices on others and the world around me, the persisting and expanding relationships between my life and everyone and everything else’s, take responsibility for those relationships, and live more carefully and caringly…?

My 2 cents.

Is the United States at a point in its existence where the people are just going to have to give socialism a try to demonstrate that it does or does not work?

The U.S., along with most of the rest of the developed world, has already proven that “mixed economies” (mixing socialism with capitalism) can be very productive, as long as corporate power and wealth can be moderated by civil society (civic institutions, democracy, the rule of law, regulatory enforcement, etc.). Most other experiments (including those with socialism) have succeeded most when democracy and actual diffusion of power and wealth were strong. So really, what the U.S. needs to “try” is a return to this sensible balance. Right now, big money and big corporations pretty much own the U.S. outright — the voice of the people, and any real distribution of power and wealth, has been defeated by relentless neoliberal policies, leaders and politics…since about the time of Reagan. But if we can take a clear, propaganda-free look at the negative externalities of capitalism (like climate change), and work hard to rein in the influence of the owner-shareholder class, then the U.S. just might be able to regain a healthy trajectory. Does this mean “more socialism?” From the perspective of conservative, free market fundamentalists — it sure does seem like a bit more public ownership and control over things the plutocrats would rather keep for themselves. In terms of enacting Soviet-style Communism, absolutely not. Fear of that outcome is pure propaganda. But those wealthy owner-shareholders just don’t want to let go of the control and influence they have right now…and that could in fact bring the U.S.A. to its knees.

We shall see….

Which principle should a society put as priority first, freedom or equality?

This is a funny question. Why? Because:

1. You can easily have lots of freedom without equality — if you are rich, or if you exit society altogether. So a society that places “freedom” first, without establishing equality, could just be an oppressive, classist, plutocratic society that alienates all the poor people into running away from it.

2. Although it is much more difficult, it is possible to engineer a society that has a lot of equality, but a lot less freedom — to the point of being oppressive. This is what science fiction novels about dystopian futures warn us against, and what propaganda about former Soviet countries has harped upon.

3. Therefore, the only formula that will really work for those who want a society that has both freedom and equality is to place the highest priority on “equality of freedom.” If everyone’s freedom is equal, then that constitutes true equality…and maximizes freedom to the greatest degree. As to how to achieve this, here is an essay that discusses a possible approach: The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty: A Proposed Method of Differentiating Verifiable Free Will from Countervailing Illusions of Freedom

My 2 cents.

Does equal opportunity lead to equal outcomes?

One way to approach this question is to ask: “Do outcomes differ based upon available resources, opportunities, conditions and relationships?” And the answer to that is an unequivocal “Yes!”

Okay, then if we aim to “level the playing field,” so that everyone in society has (roughly) equivalent quantities and qualities of resources, opportunities, conditions and relationships, will this result in a greater “equality of outcomes?” Well, it will — and does — tend to provide a higher probability that more people will achieve the same fulfillment of personal agency in measurable accomplishments. Essentially, it helps remove barriers that otherwise would — and do — exist. At the same time, this aim is a rather herculean task in the context of deeply persistent cultural racism, classism, sexism, ageism, and tribalism. It is, frankly, nearly impossible to “level the playing field” when any of these cultural prejudices are in play — because they will override and negate any and all “equality of opportunity.”

So then the question becomes: how can we encourage attenuation of these deep-seated prejudices? And for me, that is the much more interesting (and relevant) question.

My 2 cents.

Can liberty and justice be quantified? If yes, what units could we use to measure them?

There have been several attempts to do this already, using different approaches and metrics (influenced by different ideological preferences). Some examples below.

Freedom House offers three different reports on different measures of freedom — political freedom and democracy; freedom of the press/media; and freedom of the Internet: Reports | Freedom House

Reporters without Borders offers a “World Press Freedom Index:” 2019 World Press Freedom Index | Reporters Without Borders

The Heritage Foundation offers an “Index of Economic Freedom:” Promoting Economic Opportunity and Prosperity by Country

The CATO Institute offers a “Human Freedom Index” that combines their metrics for civil and economic freedom: Human Freedom Index

I have been playing with ideas about individual and collective agency, and how we might approach creating metrics for them — this is related because both liberty and justice seem directly tied to this. Here are two essays that explore these ideas:

The Underlying Causes of Left vs. Right Dysfunction in U.S. Politics

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

I hope this was helpful.

What are some writers similar or complementary to Noam Chomsky?

Thanks for the question. In no particular order, these writers explore many of the same problems that Chomsky identifies, and with a similar level of complexity and supportive evidence:

- Naomi Klein
- Chris Hedges
- Yanis Varoufakis
- Greg Palast
- George Monbiot

And here are some folks who also explore these problems, and offer some remedies — mainly on the economic side, in answer to what could broadly be called “neoliberal, crony capitalist oligarchy:”

- Thorstein Veblen
- E.F. Schumacher
- Thomas Picketty
- Amartya Sen
- Elinor Ostrom
- Alec Nove

Here are some writers who look more deeply at the systems-level problems of industrial capitalism, and propose some ways out of the mess:

- Howard Odum
- David Holmgren
- Peter Pogany

And here are two folks who recognize many of the challenges described or addressed by many of the above authors, and offer their own unique take on either the nature of the problem, or a route to positive transformation of what is broken:

- Paulo Freire
- Paul Piff

And then their are the origins of the libertarian socialism that Chomsky subscribes to — the names and ideas of whom you will hear Chomsky reference from time-to-time:

- William Godwin
- Murray Bookchin
- Peter Kropotkin
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Mikhail Bakunin
- Rudolph Rocker

Lastly, there are my own writings and proposals, which you can find available for free on this website: L e v e l - 7 Overview (https://www.level-7.org).

My 2 cents.

The term "intellectual" is increasingly used in a derogatory sense, evoking a certain left-wing elitism. What should intellectuals do to escape this stereotype?

The really humorous thing about this dynamic (i.e. stereotyping “intellectuals” — or subject experts — as elitists who are out of touch with common experience) is that the folks usually using that stereotype it are even more out-of-touch with reality than “intellectuals” are. The anti-intellectual sentiment coming from right-wing propaganda is quite deliberate in this respect: it wants to villainize anything that is grounded in critical thinking, science, evidence and data — usually in favor of ideological principles that are routinely undermined by that data. Hence climate crisis is a left-wing conspiracy invented by academics to get grant money; solid historical economic data that shows how “trickle-down” theory (supported by the laughable “Laffer curve”) and austerity policies fail utterly can likewise be dismissed as “elitist” fabrication; statistics that prove how abortions decline wherever Planned Parenthood has a well-funded presence is crushed by hateful vitriol from pro-life folks who fervently believe Planned Parenthood should be defunded; science that proves cigarette use is linked to cancer becomes part of a “liberal anti-business agenda;” and so on ad nauseum. Such has been the relentless drumbeat of conservative think tanks since the early 1970s.

But can you see the problem? The folks who attack intellectualism (and/or left-wing elitism) have to do so to defend their completley-detached-from-reality beliefs and distortions of fact. Which is of course advantageous to the wealthy conservative owner-shareholders who benefit the most from voters, politicians and talkshow hosts parroting right-wing lunacy. Hence voting Republican in the U.S. has become synonymous with supporting unicorn policies and practices that maintain plutocracy and insulate the wealthiest elite, while effectively knee-capping scientific counter-narratives that could actually benefit everyone else. Critical thinking and actual evidence-based approaches simply cannot be allowed!

So I will proudly say “Yes, I tend to trust well-educated experts who’ve spent their lives researching and testing ideas with real-world data.” You say these are “intellectuals?” I say they are simply competent — much more so than armchair bombasts who believe in unicorns.

As to why folks who decry intellectualism are so confident in their armchair fantasies, I recommend reading up on the Dunning–Kruger effect.

What part of "Shall not be infringed" does the government not understand?

Well I’d say that, considering the level of debate around the 2nd Amendment over many decades now, no one really understands in any absolute sense what isn’t supposed to be infringed — and that includes governments at all levels. The wording of that single sentence is not clear. On the one hand, Amendment II seems to indicate that the federal government can’t infringe upon the right of states to have militias made of ordinary citizens. On the other, it also seems to indicate that citizens should be allowed to individually keep and carry arms — ostensibly for service in such a militia. But it really isn’t very clear beyond that what other conditions “shall not be infringed.”

Now, mainly as a consequence of military firearms manufacturers needing a new market as their military product orders declined, the debate about the 2nd has shifted. Should AR-15s be purchased by individual citizens, so they can participate in state militias to resist federal government tyranny? Well…okay, sure. But that’s not why they’re being purchased — and the original intent of the 2nd (if we in fact can discern it) doesn’t work very well as justification to sell military weapons to individual civilians who aren’t participating in a state militia. Which is why the propaganda and marketing focus shifted to a more absolute right than what is actually stated: the right to “keep and bear arms” for personal protection — or for personal resistance to government as a more general principle.

The problem, of course, is that the “personal protection” argument — which can in fact be supported by the many of the discussions, practices and documents from the period in which the 2nd was written — can rationally only be applied to non-military weapons. Individual citizens don’t need to protect themselves from the incursions of other nation states, or brigades of rogue soldiers that happen to show up at their door. That’s what the state militias are for. And indeed the “individual resistance to tyrannical government” argument really doesn’t have any historical basis…it’s quite an imaginative invention that has no support in documents and reports contemporary to the writing of Amendment II.

So…we have a right to personally bear arms that are suitable for personal defense as one possible thing “not to be infringed;” and we have the right to personally keep arms in readiness for participation in a state militia as the other thing “not to be infringed.” And therein lies the problem: because at the time of the writing of Amendment II, those two separate conditions were served by the very same firearms: muskets and pistols. You see the problem? It made complete sense at the time the 2nd was written not to differentiate between different weapons for different purposes…because they were one-and-the-same at that time.

Within a century, however, the two groups of weapons increasingly diverged, in both their specialized application and their lethality…and continued to do so more and more over subsequent decades. Hence individual citizens didn’t own machine guns for personal protection, and the military didn’t rely on compact 25mm purse pistols to defeat enemy combatants in the field. At the same time, a common sense distinction between the two types of weapons endured right up through the 1960s — and various laws (1934 NFA, 1968 GCA) were written to clarify that distinction. Interestingly, these laws also identified a third category of weapons and modifications: those designed for or associated with criminal activity — such as sawed off shotguns, silencers, explosive devices, etc. And so we arrived at the rather extreme separation in categories of weapons and specialized functions that we see today, ones that common sense can still discern: explosive devices, missiles and poison gas are not the same thing — and simply do not serve the same purposes — as a handgun.

But then, when it became clear by the early 1970s that public sentiment and national politics were opposed to large scale wars, and sales of military weapons by firearms manufacturers began to plummet, those companies strategized a new tactic that they continue to employ today: Every American had a Constitutional right to own military weapons! (see articles below) By the the 1980s, that tactic was in full swing, and the “common sense distinction” that had existed for two centuries evaporated. So that’s how things got so confused…or rather, that’s how the firearms manufacturers were able to muddy the waters. These companies lobbied for the ability to sell military firearms to civilians in order to enlarge their market — ignoring what had become a very large difference is weapons specialization, and using the 2nd Amendment and an implicit threat of government oppression as a smokescreen for their deceptive manipulations. And of course influential groups like the NRA, which were initially supportive of moderate gun control measures, were then taken over by those who supported the loosening of restrictions that benefited gun manufacturers (see 'Revolt at Cincinnati' molded modern NRA).

And, as it turned out, a spirit of Constitutional righteousness combined with fear of oppression and the “helplessness” of not owning a gun was a great sales tool. Gun profits soared.

Then, after firearms manufacturers had “militarized” the civilian U.S. population, they obviously needed to militarize law enforcement to match that rising firepower — and another juicy market for their products was born.

All of this has been, essentially, the perversion of the Constitution — and the annihilation of common sense — just to make a buck.

My 2 cents.

How it started: Militarization of Civilian Market.pdf

Using fear to sell guns: Fear Is the NRA and Gun Industry’s Deadliest Weapon

Gun profits soar: Gun boom: Smith & Wesson profits double, sales soar 40%

How it all fits together: San Bernardino shooting: US gun sales soar as new front opens in push for gun control

How it keeps happening: How Military Guns Make the Civilian Market

The militarization of law enforcement: We now have a terrifying, militarized law enforcement system

Comment from Ben Andrews: "I would say that the distinction between military and non-military weapons is facile. Like so many distinctions with regard to firearms, this military/ personal one is drawn after the fact, at a point convenient to the classifier."


LOL. I think everything posted on social media is facile, Ben. :-) The level of complexity of most topics on Quora goes far beyond what brief statements can capture. I still try to add supportive links for folks to follow up and explore with more depth, but I find very few fellow Quorans actually take the time to read them. Everyone seems to want neat, easy-to-chew packages of info. This is understandable, given the firehose of information coming at us from all directions in the current age. But for the purposes of real, substantive discussions…well, it’s a little frustrating, to be sure.

That said, specialization occurs in every industry, and has snowballed with the industrial and technological revolutions. There are tools and gadgets in each profession now that are totally unrecognizable to every other profession. The same thing has happened with specialized language. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that society itself is fragmenting: people literally can’t understand each other. The only force countervailing this is mass media, which tends to overly simplify and gloss over any level of detail or specificity, in order to achieve a lowest-common-denominator stream of easily-digested communication. The only real remedy is…again…for folks to take actual time and effort to more thoroughly research something.

In this case, firearms have not been immune to specialization across different fields. Although there have always been specialized applications (neither deck cannon nor dueling pistols would likely be used for hunting in the 1700s, for example), those specializations have snowballed like everything else. The ~$1,300 SSK Contender, MOA Maximum, or Freedom Arms 2008 are single-shot pistols or hunting game. No one would ever consider these practical for self-defense or military applications. And yet this highly specialized style of firearm has a growing market. Likewise the Rheinmetall MG3 really only has one purpose: mowing down humans at 1,300 rounds per minute — again, not really useful for plinking, target practice or game. There are firearms that have some history of multiple specialties, like certain hunting rifles used for sniper applications (Remington Model 700, for example), but even here you won’t see any hunting rifle listed in the top choices for snipers nowadays — instead, you’ll see highly customized firearms like the Steyr SSG 69…which, again, isn’t generally used for anything else.

So this is the state of affairs for most technology. Just buying a tool in a hardware store can be overwhelming to folks who don’t know what specific type of hammer, wrench or saw they need for their specific application. The same is true of paint for a specific surface or condition. Or clothing for a specific activity. And so on.

So this is really not an “after-the-fact” distinction. In reality, companies spend tremendous $$$ on R&D to develop new specialized lines of products that appeal to experts, hobbyists and professionals in a given field or activity. And, of course, this intended, planned and executed differentiation is why civilians can’t easily purchase an M16, and must make do with an AR15.

Hopefully this is a slightly less facile explanation of specialization.

Why does California have high taxes, high poverty rates, and so many homeless despite all its wealth?

I don’t mean to be flippant, but deepening income inequality is a problem everywhere there is capitalism.

As to California specifically, “high taxes” is a bit of an incorrect stereotype. If you look at a combined burden of local sales tax rates, state income tax rates, estate and inheritance tax rates, and property tax rates, California is actually pretty low compared to many other states (NY State, for example) — especially for middle and lower income folks. And, in fact, there have also been tax revolts over time — everything from Prop 13 (limits property tax increases) to revoking a luxury tax on expensive vehicles statewide. In both cases, these taxes used to pay for a lot of public programs and services…and now that money is gone.

What is really burdensome in CA (especially where I live, in San Diego) is the overall cost of living — food, medical expenses, gasoline, water, energy, apartment rental, home purchases…pretty much EVERYTHING costs more in CA (Sperling’s Best Places puts San Diego at 160% of the U.S. average). And, let me tell you, 160% is painfully high. Now combine this with the fact that wages are very depressed in California — and especially SoCal — to the tune of about 65% of similar metropolitan areas. So you pay more to live here, but earn less. They call this the “sun dollar” tax: because it’s sunny, beautiful weather, you have to pay extra for it. It’s also a consequence of having a LOT of cheap professional labor from Mexico making daily trips across the border to fulfill routine business and consumer needs — this takes a sizable chunk out of local business revenues in some industries, and depresses prices across the board for many goods and services.

Homelessness happens because of many of these economic factors…but the homeless population in California has also grown because people will come here from other places in the U.S. due to the climate year-round. It’s really a great place to be homeless — you aren’t likely to freeze to death.

But again…the reason all of this happens DESPITE really successful wealth production in California is because capitalism doesn’t distribute the wealth it generates — instead that wealth accumulates with owner-shareholders (many of whom may not even live in the state), who don’t necessarily spend that money in California either…and certainly not a lot of it on poor and homeless folks.

My 2 cents.

If corporations create jobs and pay people who then pay taxes, how would/is increasing the taxes corporations pay help the economy?

Thanks for the question. A positive relationship between corporate tax cuts and “encouraging investment” that leads to economic growth is a fairy tale unsupported by data. It is, in fact, very similar to the fairy tale regarding supply side “trickle down” theory, which has also been soundly debunked (see The IMF Confirms That 'Trickle-Down' Economics Is, Indeed, a Joke).

Just let the data speak for itself. Take a look at Corporate tax rates and economic growth since 1947. Although there is a superficial correlation between higher(not lower) corporate tax rates and better GDP growth, there is not much evidence that lower corporate tax rates increase GDP growth. The net effect is statistically pretty neutral.

However, how those tax dollars are spent (and when in the business cycle they are spent) can result in highly variable impacts on the economy — which is why there is such a wide range of “multiplier” estimates for government spending (frequently between 1 and 3). In general, government expenditures during recession have a much larger positive impact than during an economic boom. Expenditures on infrastructure may provide an immediate boost to certain industries, but then a much longer and more gradual multiplier as new business expansion is built upon that infrastructure. In the same vein, government spending that results in free education can have a substantial impact on economic growth many years after those students graduate and become productive contributors to the economy.

But probably the highest “multiplier-friendly” activity the government can do is research: there is lot of research the private sector simply won’t do — and hasn’t done in the past — which leads to new innovations, technological advances, and even entire new industries. Many of the things we rely on today (cell phones, the Internet, computers, life-saving drugs, etc.) were mainly the consequence of government research that was then used to deliver products to the marketplace by private companies. And of course whenever government programs are able to put more money into the the hands of consumers, while at the same time government is directly spending on goods services, this can stimulate aggregate demand (and, consequently, GDP) much more than business investment alone ever could.

At the same time, there are of course lots of things government spends money on that aren’t really all that great in the multiplier department. A good example is defense spending. Some research (see Mercatus Center study at George Mason U) suggests that the multiplier impact of defense spending on the U.S. economy is less than 1. The hypothesis is that in defense industries specifically, government spending “crowds out” private sector spending. So again it does make a difference how the money gleaned from corporate taxes is spent.

But if government doesn’t have money to spend, then clearly either there is going to be less of a multiplier, or there or going to be government deficits. Now the impact on deficits on the economy is a bit more complex, so I’m going to duck that one for now. But suffice it to say that long-term deficits can actually mess up the economy in a number of unsavory and dramatic ways.

My 2 cents.

How will the US's democracy be affected by its citizens not being able to trust the media to report the truth?

This question smacks of political propaganda and disinformation. Vladimir Putin’s “active measures” — propaganda that aims to disrupt and confuse people in target countries — include just this sort of message: “You can’t trust the press. They’re lying to you. You can’t trust the government. You can’t trust each other….” and so on. The way this question is phrased presumes that Americans don’t trust their own media…which actually isn’t true of ALL Americans…just the ones who’ve bought into that Russian propaganda.

The reality is that major conservative media outlets like Fox News do lie to their viewers all the time. However, those viewers still “trust” FOX to tell the truth…which has indeed been fairly disastrous for our democracy. In other words, because some people DO trust fake news, they are woefully misinformed and make very bad decisions. Unfortunately, it is mostly right-leaning media that tend to have the strongest bias and the least factual reporting (see http://mediabiasfactcheck.org (http://mediabiasfactcheck.org)), and indeed far-right media that has the highest conspiracy and propaganda tendencies. It is also right-wing media that parrots Russian propaganda that mass media can’t be trusted. The irony of this situation is pretty extreme, don’t you think…?

According to the most recent Gallup data, 69% of Democrats trust mass media, but only 15% of Republicans do. And liberal-leaning media actually has much higher factual reporting, and less extreme bias (again see http://mediabiasfactcheck.org). So you can see the effect here: Republicans distrust factual reporting in mainstream media with a left-leaning bias, but trust fake news outlets like FOX that peddle Russian conspiracies! They’ve got things upside down! So sure…the Republican mistrust in news media is having a negative impact on U.S. democracy. It’s how Donald Trump — likely the worst President in U.S. history and a truly awful human being — was elected and remains popular. And this horrific presidency, with its corrosive policies and fear-mongering, continues to be very damaging to America and the rest of the planet.

With that said, here is a Pew Research article with a deeper look at perceptions of media trustworthiness and democracy, with several relevant links:

An update on our research into trust, facts and democracy (https://www.pewresearch.org/2019/06/05/an-update-on-our-research-into-trust-facts-and-democracy/)

For more on Russian disinformation, check out these links:

From Russia with Likes (Part 1) | Your Undivided Attention

The disinformation age: a revolution in propaganda

https://www.europeanvalues.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/What-We-Know-about-RT-Russia-Today-1.pdf

My 2 cents.

Is communism fundamentally incompatible with democracy?

Here are some democratic (or, better yet, consensus-driven) communist mass societies:

1. Free Territory of Ukraine
(1918 - 1921)

2. Rojava (in Northern Syria)
(2012 - Present)

3. Revolutionary Catalonia
(1936–1939)

4. Korean People's Association in Manchuria
(1929–1931)

5. Morelos Commune
(1913 - 1917)

You will find other examples here: List of anarchist communities

Now one could nit-pick that these aren’t nation states…but they are certainly self-contained autonomous regions, some of which being quite large. One could also argue that many didn’t endure for very long — but that wasn’t a consequence of any inherent lack of viability, but instead most often the result of violent, authoritarian rulers who didn’t want them to exist. So either argument would be splitting hairs IMO.

In any case, these and many other examples throughout history (such as the Paris Commune, which Marx himself admired) demonstrate that communism (and socialist anarchism) are not incompatible with democracy…at all.

My 2 cents.

What does personal liberty have to do with individualism?

Individualism and personal liberty can intersect, but they can also contradict and interfere with each other. So this can be a complex subject to parse. If I insist, for example, that my individual liberty always outweighs my social or civic responsibility, then I may end up interfering with other people’s liberty (and, consequently, invite interference with my own liberty, if I support such a society). Maybe I want to drive on the wrong side of the road, or take things from stores without paying for them, or pee in my neighbor’s fountain. To assert that I have the “right” to do these things despite social agreements not to do them is an extreme individualistic assertion.

In reality, no personal freedom would exist at all unless everyone else in my community or society agrees that it should — this is the error of much individualist thinking. When individualism places personal agency above everything else, it defeats the conditions that permit freedom to exisst at all.

At the same time, if I sacrifice all of my personal agency in service to collective systems and expectations, then I have also extinguished my personal liberty. By denying any importance of my own individuality — and supporting such a view as the status quo of my community and culture — I have done just as much harm to freedom as if I overemphasized my individuality.

So perhaps you can see the conundrum.

There is a balance between too much individualism and too much collectivism — both of which can extinguish personal liberty at their extremes — and a correlation between too little personal liberty and too little collective agreement.

I wrote an essay about this topic a while back that may be of interest: The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty: A Proposed Method of Differentiating Verifiable Free Will from Countervailing Illusions of Freedom

My 2 cents.

The Underlying Causes of Left vs. Right Dysfunction in U.S. Politics

STOP

To support a new framing of this longstanding issue, my latest essays covers many different facets and details that impact the polarization of Left/Right discourse. However, its main focus centers around the concept of personal and collective agency. That is, how such agency has been effectively sabotaged in U.S. culture and politics for both the Left and the Right, and how we might go about assessing and remedying that problem using various tools such as a proposed "agency matrix." The essay then examines a number of scenarios in which personal-social agency plays out, to illustrate the challenge and benefits of finding a constructive solution - one that includes multiple ideological and cultural perspectives.

Essay link in PDF: The Underlying Causes of Left vs. Right Dysfunction in U.S. Politics

Also available in an online-viewable format at this academia.edu link.

As always, feedback is welcome via emailing [email protected]

What is the moral basis for the existence of government?

Thanks for the question.

First, I would say that government has no moral basis (or authority) unless it has been granted them by its citizens. There are various mechanisms to do this — to temporarily transfer collective moral agency to elected representatives and civic institutions, for example — that are grounded in an ongoing collective agreement, and allow adjustment, accountability and malleability over time. It is in these cases that we can say that the moral will of the populace is being expressed by its government, and thereby providing its “moral basis.”

Second, as a fine example, I would encourage examining John Rawls’ “original position” argument as one morally framed approach to governance (i.e. one that promotes fairness, justice and equality according to the most generous definitions of those terms as broadly accepted values). His thought experiment is very simple, very clear, and very “reasonable.” And within his arguments, the moral authority of representatives operating behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance becomes self-evident.

Third, I would say that the morality of government must therefore reflect the moral maturity of its populace. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of the equation, because once the two (collective will vs. civic institutions) starts getting out-of-synch, the the moral agreements that justify government break down. Such an unfortunate state of disequilibrium is pretty much where we are today in the U.S., where some 30% of the electorate has regressed to a level of moral immaturity that is aggressively corroding more advanced civic institutions.

Fourth, I would loudly assert that this isn’t the end of the conversation — not even the beginning of the end — because there are so many other considerations. For example, there are additional features that bolster the intimacy and harmony between collective will and civic institutions: things like subsidiarity, direct democracy, egalitarian efficiency, critically reflective participatory action, reducing interference with liberty…and many more. These really must be considered in the context of any “moral basis” for government, because they directly impact the efficacy, stability and continuity of the collective agency that governance manifests.

For more on how I would propose approaching all of this (and why), consider checking out L e v e l - 7 Philosophy and “The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty” at Essays by T.Collins Logan.

My 2 cents.

Why haven't (seemingly obvious) foreign policy perspectives like those of Noam Chomsky's gained mass popularity in the United States?

For anything to gain “mass popularity” usually requires concerted marketing efforts. Americans — perhaps more than any other population in the world — have become conditioned to externalize all authority and “truth,” and wait rather passively for guidance in the form of sales and marketing entertainment (or the memes swarming their social media bubbles, as the case may be). This is, I think, a natural consequence of two centuries of commercialistic capitalism where most media was slowly but inevitably enslaved to the will of corporate profit-seeking and neoliberal propaganda. More recently, those avenues of mass influence have been further coopted and corrupted by nefarious players like the Koch Brothers, the Mercer family, the Heartland Institute, etc., or by conspiracy-mongering nut jobs like Alex Jones. All of these folks — whether actively or tacitly — have worked in concert to disrupt the ability of the average American consumer-voter to parse reality in any sensible way…let alone to navigate complex foreign policy issues with anything but the most oversimplified, knee-jerk rhetoric. In many ways Donald Trump is a perfect example of what happens to someone shaped by such media: childish, irrational, paranoid, uninformed, reactive, incoherent…but somehow utterly sure of himself. We could, of course, lay all of this at the feet of capitalism itself, but the U.S.A. has developed a uniquely destructive model in terms of creating highly tribalized, infantilized conspicuous consumers who are invested in delusional nonsense for entertainment’s sake, and who consistently vote and make purchases that are highly destructive to their well-being, while serving the interests of wealthy owner-shareholders quite nicely.

Enter into this landscape Noam Chomsky, who sees very clearly the tragic distortions of crony capitalism and its neoliberal policy disasters, as well as the horrific effect of market fundamentalist politics and war profiteering around the globe, and of course Chomsky has identified and explained the mechanisms of a complicit mass media in furthering these nefarious agendas. So Chomsky doesn’t get interviewed on that same mass media anymore. And his observations are ignored by the neoliberal power brokers who shape self-serving policy and jam it down the gullet of elected legislatures (via. A.L.E.C., etc.). In fact most Americans today don’t know who Noam Chomsky even is…because there is no propagation of his ideas by the “authorities” people have come to trust or admire — you know, like Fox News, or Breitbart, or Info Wars. Even left-leaning media are scared to have Noam Chomsky on their programs for fear of losing funding; did you know the Koch Brothers were instrumental in Ken Burns’ last documentary about Vietnam on PBS? And that, as a predictable consequence, the “facts” of that documentary series were horrifically distorted…? And that the very false narrative that Chomsky has debunked over and over again (in book after book, and lecture after lecture) over decades was revitalized in dramatic form on PBS?! And yet, a majority of lazy-minded, ignorant, comfort-seeking Americans gobbled up the bullshit unquestioningly. This is a microcosm of the macrocosm: just follow the money, and you’ll quickly see why Chomsky is ignored, minimized or derided in the mainstream.

Now…with that said, I don’t necessarily agree with everything Noam Chomsky believes or pontificates. And he has, in fact, made some glaring mistakes (Pol Pot was a biggy). I also sense that his ego sometimes gets the better of him. But NONE of this has to do with why Chomsky isn’t more well-known or appreciated, or why Americans aren’t rallying in the streets to shift U.S. foreign policy away from neoliberal imperialism. Just look what happened to Bernie Sanders in the last election: very little media coverage, no DNC support, a drumbeat of “he’s a communist” hate speech from the right, nearly all funding was from the grass roots, etc. The powers-that-be all conspired to shut him down — and Bernie was a milk toast centrist compared to Noam Chomsky!

So for U.S. citizens to appreciate Chomsky on any level, they would first need to wake up from their stupor of toddlerized consumerism and externalized authority, and start actively learning about the world around them via information sources that don’t have a brainwashing/hoodwinking agenda. And that’s probably not going to happen until things get a lot more uncomfortable (economically and materially) for the U.S.A. — and even then, the more immature Americans will still search for a scapegoat to blame for their own failures (you know, like illegal immigrants…).

My 2 cents.

Update: In response to a question about Chomsky's statements about Pol Pot, here is one helpful and well-researched link regarding the Pol Pot issue:

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman: Averaging Wrong Answers

I think the writer overstates his own case…using some rhetoric that paints Chomsky in a worse light than he deserves. However, if you remove that rhetoric and focus on the evidence, he documents the underlying disconnect fairly well.

The Problem of Virtual Causality: Superagency, Cognitive Errors, and the Nature of Good and Evil



(Special thanks to Petyr Cirino, whose thoughtful exchanges with me inspired this particular essay.)


As daily events around the world illustrate, we have unquestionably arrived at the age of human superagency — in terms of both positive and negative impacts. On smaller scales of individuals and groups, there are the negative impacts of mass shootings, suicide bombers, toxic waste leaks, chemical plant explosions, contamination of water supplies with heavy metals, contamination of local food chains with pathogens or harmful chemicals, and other disruptions of limited scope. And of course the positive side of this local superagency includes the complex interdependent systems and services that support burgeoning municipalities and allow them to thrive. So in both constructive and destructive ways, we can easily see how complexity, technology and superagency are linked. On the national and global scale, a more collective superagency manifests on the one hand as disruption of everything from infrastructure and commerce to news and elections by a small group of dedicated hackers or activists, to the accelerating extinction of well-established species all around the planet as a consequence of human activities, to the radioactive contamination of vast swathes of air and water after a nuclear power plant meltdown, to the extreme temperatures and chaotic weather patterns resulting from over a century of human industry. On the positive side, humanity has been able to extract and distribute limited resources far and wide on a global scale, linked and negotiated disparate cultures and language around the planet to the benefit of many, and generated and shared huge amounts of knowledge and information to an impressive degree. At these larger scales, complexity and technology are also intimately entangled with superagency, but such impacts seem to depend more on the collective habits and influence of huge populations than on individuals or groups. Ultimately, it seems to have been the aggregate of individual, group and global population impacts that constitute a tipping point for the blossoming of human superagency on planet Earth.

But why does this matter?

One conventional answer is that this matters because our superagency has far outpaced our moral maturity; that is, our ability to manage superagency at any level — individually, tribally or globally — in a consistently beneficial or even sane fashion. Of course this is not a new observation: social critics, philosophers, prophets and artists throughout history have often observed that humanity is not very gifted at managing our own creative, acquisitive or political prowess; from the myths of Icarus and Midas, to the admonitions of Aristotle and Solomon, to tales of Frankenstein and Godzilla, the cautionary narratives of precipitous greed, clever invention and unabashed hubris have remained virtually unbroken across the span of human civilization. But should this perennial caution be our primary concern? Don't civil society, advancing education, widespread democracy and rigorous science mitigate the misuse or overreach of personal and collective power? Don't such institutions in fact provide a bulwark against an immature or degraded morality's ability to misuse humanity's greatest innovations and accomplishments? Aren't these the very failsafes intended to insulate society from its most irrational and destructive impulses...?

First, I would attempt to answer such questions by observing that moral maturity — along with all the societal institutions created to maintain and protect it — has been aggressively undermined by capitalist enterprise to an astonishing degree: via the infantilization and isolation of consumers, the substitution of internal creative and interpersonal riches with external commodities, the glorification of both greed and material accumulation, and the careful engineering of our addiction to comfort. But these concerns are the focus of much of my other writing (see The Case Against Capitalism), not to mention the more deft and compelling writings of countless others, so I won't dwell on them here. Instead, I would turn some attention to what is perhaps an even more pernicious tendency in human affairs, one that has persisted for just as long as all these other degrading impulses and influences. Yes, in a globally collective sense, our moral maturity and capacity for positive moral creativity has seemingly regressed or stagnated even as our superagency has increased — and yes, capitalism is largely to blame for the most recent downward spirals. But there is something more basic and instrumental in our psyche that energizes greed, hubris, arrogance and reckless destruction...something fundamental to our being that needs to be called out. Something that, by any measure, reliably contributes to all sorts of evildoing.

And of course attempts to explain the nature of evil are also not new. Many have attempted to ferret out the source of our darkest impulses, accrediting them to supernatural beings — Aite, Eris, Angra Mainyu, Satan, demons and mazzikim, bhoot and Pishacha, etc.— or describing it in terms of psychological phenomena like selfish compulsions and egotism, death drives (Todestriebe), maladaptive behaviors, severe mental disorders, and so forth. But identifying a more accurate underlying causal pattern will, I think, require a departure from these traditional frameworks. Instead, perhaps we can evaluate a series of straightforward cognitive errors that supportively interconnect, amplify and then calcify over time to create a specific, deleterious and measurable impact on both human interiority and society. Perhaps "evil" can, on some basic level, be defined as a simple cognitive mistake, and "good" as the correction of that mental error.

A Corrosive Troika Defined

With respect to causality, there appear to be three consistent factors that continually surface across the vast terrain of human affairs:

1. Misattribution of causation (as an unintentional mistake or conditioned response)

2. Intentional masking of causation (as deliberate and targeted distortions that reinforce misattribution); and

3. Willful forcing of causation (designed to support and reinforce deliberate distortions)


Together these create a virtual causality — that is, causality that is almost completely disconnected or substantially insulated from reality, while still imitating certain believable elements of the real world amid elaborate rationalizations. It is this pretend causality that entices a willing suspension of disbelief — for those who are vulnerable, coerced, deceived or conformist — that perpetuates self-insulation and additional supportive distortions. So let's take a careful look at each of these components, in order to appreciate just how instrumental they are in everything human beings think, feel and do, and how the modern age is shaping them.


I. Misattribution

Humans make this cognitive mistake so often it seems almost ridiculous to point it out: we blame the wrong culprit for our problems, and consequently pursue the wrong solutions to fix them. Add some additional, deleterious unintended consequences to these kinds of mistakes, and the resulting conditions could easily be described as "what leads to much suffering in the world;" that is, what has perpetuated much of the destruction, unhappiness, suffering, pain and annihilation throughout human history. The dangers of misattributed causation are identified in many if not most wisdom traditions — we can discern this in admonitions about judging others to quickly, gossiping about our suspicions, bearing false witness, words spoken in anger, living by the sword, throwing the first stone, revenge, showy public worship, etc., along with repeated encouragement to forgive without conditions, be patient and longsuffering, generous and caring, humble and trusting. Such concerns are certainly echoed in more recent empirical and rationalist approaches to both knowledge and socially constructive behaviors as well; for example, research in psychology around the misattribution of arousal to incorrect stimuli, or the application of the scientific method in understanding and resolving complex empirical challenges. But sometimes the obvious and longstanding begs restating, so we'll briefly address it here.

Let's consider a few relatively neutral examples, then drill down to a few more compelling, nuanced and disturbing details. For example, most reasonably perceptive adults might agree from their own direct observations, fairly straightforward and simplistic reasoning, or trusted sources of learning that:

1. Sunlight warms the Earth.

2. Submerging crusty pots and pans in water for a time makes them easier to clean.

3. Regularly and violently beating a domesticated animal will eventually induce behavioral problems in that animal.

4. A sedentary lifestyle, devoid of exercise and full of rich foods, will lead to chronic health problems.

5. Smiling at people with genuine openness and affection generally encourages openness and a positive emotional response in return.

6. A heavy object dropped from the second floor of a building onto someone's head is likely to kill them.

7. Really awful things happen to perfectly decent, undeserving people with some regularity.

8. Choosing "the easy way out" of a given situation — that is, a choice that seeks to fortify personal comfort or avoids personal accountability — is often much less fruitful or constructive in the long run than making a harder, more uncomfortable choice that embraces personal responsibility.


There are probably hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of such causal chains that most people have internalized and rely upon to navigate their day-to-day lives. We may not always be consistent in our reasoning and application of them, and there are often exceptions or special conditions that moderate the efficacy of our causal predictions, but on-the-whole we usually learn over time which causal attributions are correct, and which are mistaken. That is...unless something interrupts that learning process.

And this is where I feel the discussion becomes interesting. For it is my contention that many characteristics of modern society not only disrupt our ability to learn and predict accurate causal relationships, but actually encourage distortions and misattributions. How? Here again we will see how complexity, technology, and superagency strongly facilitate the disconnect...but also that we can add isolation and specialization to the mix as well. If, over the course childhood, my entire reference set for understanding causal relationships is defined by television and video games, and I have never thoroughly tested any of the assumptions inculcated through those media, how will I ever escape their fictional depictions? At around age eight or nine, I myself attempted to duplicate some of the crazy stunts Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner performed in Warner Brothers cartoons. I quickly learned that gravity, momentum, inertia, the velocity of falling objects, and host of other principles of physics were grossly misrepresented in those TV shows. I also learned that I did not recover from serious injury nearly as quickly as Wily Coyote did. But what if I hadn't learned any of this through experience? What I had always been insulated from real-world testing and consequences? What if I kept assuming that the fiction I was being shown for entertainment was the actual truth...?

I find this a handy metaphor for modern society, because, throughout most early stages of development, human beings can now remain completely insulated from experiences that shape our understanding of actual causality. Over the years I have witnessed young people trying to ride a horse, play an instrument, write a story, draw a picture, shoot a gun, drive a car, run a race, play a sport, build a tree house, use martial arts...and a host of other activities or skills...simply by imitating what they saw in a movie, played in a video game, or read in a book. And of course that doesn't work — because they do not understand the subtleties of the causal relationships involved. This is what competently learning a skill most often represents: appreciating all of the causal relationships that influence a given outcome, and practicing each one in turn until they are mastered individually and conjointly. What application of force, in which direction, using which tool at which angle and with what kind of finesse, results in unscrewing a rusty bolt on an old bicycle? Knowing the answers to all the steps in a causal chain, especially through personal experience, is what most reliably produces predictive efficacy over time. But if I've never actually ridden a horse, or hiked a mountain, or slaughtered a chicken, or grown food in a garden, or learned to shoot a bow and arrow, or installed a fence, or built a house, or felled a tree, or any number of other activities that might have been the common experience of folks a mere generation or two ago, how can I presume to know how the world around me really works, or how to accomplish the simplest tasks without the aid of technology, advanced tools or specialized workers on which most of the developed world has now come to rely?

Well I can't, and no amount of assistance from my iPad, smartphone or virtual assistant is going to help me develop a felt, somatic-intuitive understanding of basic causal principles — let alone more complex causal chains. I will remain blissfully ignorant of how things work. However, these same technologies also provide an ever-advancing level of virtual pseudoagency — by turning home appliances on or off, monitoring a child's activities, video conferencing with coworkers, ordering groceries to be delivered, recording a threatening phone call, troubleshooting a vehicle's error codes, managing finances, donating to a charity or political campaign, signing a petition, etc. — so that I begin to believe that I really have no need to grasp those causal principles. In fact, the increasing scope of that virtual pseudoagency begins to feel a lot like superagency itself, even though the only causal relationship I am required to maintain is the one with my iPad, smartphone or virtual assistant. Here again, complexity, technology, superagency, isolation and specialization conspire to support my entanglement with virtual causality. And if I confine myself to the same routines, the same environments, the same social groups and virtual communities, the same homogenous culture and mass media...it is possible for me to remain disconnected and insulated from authentic causality for my entire life. So, just hold that thought if you will.....

Let's now examine a second set of causal relationships that are a bit more abstracted from direct experience, rely on more complex reasoning, or encourage us to develop greater trust in authoritative sources of information:

1. Human industry has been accelerating the warming of the planet to levels that will likely destabilize human civilization, and eventually endanger all other life on Earth.

2. Travelling through space at velocities approaching the speed of light slows down time for the traveller relative to the space being travelled through.

3. Gun ownership may make people feel safer, but as a statistical reality it places them at much higher risk of being shot themselves.

4. One of the best ways to mitigate the most pernicious negative impacts of drug addiction on individuals and society is to legalize, tax and regulate drugs, and then allow them to be administered in a controlled environment with medical oversight, and by folks who are also trained in providing treatment and resources to anyone who is willing and able to overcome their addiction.

5. Quantum entanglement (what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance") indicates an immediate relationship between particles over vast distances, potentially negating the speed of light as a limiting factor of data transmission.

6. Educating people from an early age about safe sex, family planning and child rearing, and allowing them easy, affordable access to reproductive healthcare and choices, is one of the most effective ways to reduce unwanted pregnancies, teen pregnancies and abortions.

7. Corporate monopolies can often be much more inefficient, coercive, exploitative and corrosive to civil society and individual well-being than the bureaucratic or cumbersome institutions of democratically elected governments.

8. Educating and empowering women to become more economically self-sufficient, and more intellectually and emotionally self-directed, is likely the single most effective means of raising a culture out of poverty, slowing overpopulation, and strengthening local civil society over a short period of time.


Now you will notice that this second set of causal relationships has some notable differences from the first set. Each statement has required more words for an accurate description, for example, and a deeper and broader contextualization. The causality being described can also be much larger in scope, and causal chains much more subtle, abstract or tenuous. And even as these relationships are increasingly distanced from direct experience and observation, they also tend to involve more complexity and interdependency, making them that much more difficult to grasp. Still, any reasonable person who has carefully and thoroughly educated themselves about each of these issues will eventually acquire a justifiable level of confidence in the stated conclusions, because, with sufficient attention, diligence and effort, the causal relationships actually become just as obvious as the ones in the first set.

But wait....let's return to the problem of lacking experiential (felt, somatic-intuitive) understanding about the real world. As very few people will have the chance to experience any of the causal relationships in the second set in a subjective, firsthand way, an additional challenge is created: we will then often be forced to rely on the few people who have the specialized knowledge, expertise and experience to educate us about these causal relationships. And we will need to be able to trust their judgment — and often their exclusive agency — at least to some degree, even though we may not fully comprehend what they are describing in a fully multidimensional way. And, as we shall see, this whole enterprise is subject to a host of additional influences and caveats, so that we may once again find ourselves relying on our iPad, smartphone or virtual agent to support our understanding. Once again our technology, isolation, specialization, superagency and complexity conspire to add more distance and effort to clear or accurate causal comprehensions. Now consider the accelerating complexity of every gadget, tool and system upon which we rely to navigate the complexity of our world to levels beyond our basic knowledge, and the distance increases further still. And as we anticipate the imminent expansion of virtual reality technology itself into more and more areas of our lives, we can begin to imagine just how disconnected human beings will inevitably become — from each other, from themselves, and from the causal workings of the world.

With this is mind, for many people there is also a pronounced gap of doubt between these two sets of causal relationships, with the second set seeming much more tentative, conditional or questionable. For these skeptics, it often will not matter how much evidence is presented in support of any given conclusion...especially if that conclusion contradicts their values system, or challenges certain fundamental assumptions they hold about the world, or is perceived to undermine their preferred information authorities, or pokes and prods at their sense of identity or place in society. Given the choice, the skeptic may instead opt for tolerating higher and higher levels of cognitive dissonance. Of course, the highest level of understanding about these topics may again just be armchair expertise, with no real-world experience to back it up. In such cases, it might seem easy to attribute what are essentially irrational or ill-informed doubts about complex but verifiable attributions of causation to ignorance alone — or to cognitive bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect, tribal groupthink, being intimidated by complexity, ideological brainwashing and manipulation, abject stupidity, or some other equally dismissive explanation. In fact I have made this judgmental error myself, often amid roiling frustration that someone really seems to believe that, to paraphrase Asimov, their ignorance is "just as good as" rigorous investigation and knowledge.

But this has been, I now suspect, a glaringly lazy oversimplification; itself yet another misattribution of causation. Instead, what I now believe is actually happening is something much more intricate, and much more intriguing.


II. Masking

There are plentiful reasons why an individual or group might be strongly motivated to persuade themselves or coerce others into believing that one thing is responsible for certain outcomes, when it is really something else entirely. Consider such real-world conditions as:

1. I want to sell you something that you don't really want or need, and in order to part you from your money, I fabricate causal relationships to facilitate that end. For example, claiming that if you purchase a certain supplement, you won't need to exercise or change your diet to lose weight. Or that if you make a given long-term investment, you will be able to retire from your job decades earlier than you would otherwise. Or that if you trust in the products, services or advice I am selling you, you will achieve happiness, romance, social status, or a desirable level of financial success. And so on. This is perhaps the most pervasive example of intentional causal masking and deliberate deception — except of course when the salesperson (or friend, or coworker, or public official, etc.) may actually believe that the causal relationship is real, in which case they were just hoodwinked into complicity.

2. I am confused, fearful, insecure and frustrated by an increasingly complex and incomprehensible world — a world in which my identity is uncertain, my role in society is uncertain, my existential purpose has come into question, and I am simply unable to navigate the complexity around me with any self-assurance that I have any real agency or efficacy. I am also feeling increasingly lonely, isolated and disenfranchised by fast-paced, constantly changing urbanization and leapfrogging technologies, in combination with the pressure-cooker-effect of burgeoning population density. I feel I am in desperate competition — for both resources and achieving any personal value to society — with everything and everyone around me...and I feel that I am losing that race. So I latch onto a group, belief or ideology that helps relieve the panic, and inherent to that process is my masking away the actual causes of my existential pain and suffering, and investing in much simpler (but inaccurate) causal relationships through which I can imagine that I have more influence or control. And thus I may join a religious group, or political party, or online community, and actively surrender my own critical reasoning capacity in favor of comforting groupthink or ingroup/outgroup self-justifications.

3. Some impactful life experience or insight has inspired a reframing of all of my consequent observations and experiences according to a new paradigm — a paradigm that radically departs from previous assumptions, and applies a new filter for causation across all interactions and explanations. For example, after surviving a brutally violent event, I feel the need to protect myself and everyone I care about with elaborate and oppressive safety rules, rigid communication protocols, expensive security technology, and a host of lethal weapons. After my experiences, I simply view all interactions and situations as potentially dangerous and requiring a high degree of vigilance and suspicion. In my revised worldview, everything and everyone has become a potential threat, and I must always be prepared for the worst possible outcome. In this way I have masked all causal relationships with potential calamity and catastrophe — and actively persuade others to do the same. In this sense, I have become conditioned to partial reinforcement — similarly to a gambler who wins intermittently, or a mouse who receives a chunk of cheese at arbitrary intervals for pushing on a button in his cage; whether that partial reinforcement invoked positive or negative consequences, I will insist on maintaining masked causation in order to prop up my compulsions.

4. I have made an error in judgment tied to investment of emotions or efforts, which was then followed by other errors required to support that initial error in judgment, until a long series of decisions and continued investment has created its own momentum and gravitational mass, and now seems an inescapable trajectory for my life and my identity. Perhaps I became invested in some logical fallacy or bias (confirmation bias, appeal to authority or tradition, slippery slope fallacy, vacuous truths, courtesy bias, hot-hand fallacy, etc. — see more at Wikipedia), or initially overestimated my own knowledge or competence in some area, or trusted the advice of some cherished mentor, or took on some tremendous risk or commitment I didn't fully understand, or simply fell into a counterproductive habit that initially seemed acceptable...but has led me down an ever-darkening road. Whatever the case, I now find myself rationalizing each new decision in support of a long chain of mistaken judgments, and must of necessity consciously or unconsciously mask all causal relationships to protect my own ego or self-concept.

Regardless of the impetus, once this masking process begins, it can rapidly become self-perpetuating, a runaway train of misinformation and propaganda that eventually acquires institutional structures like rigidity, bureaucratic legalism, self-protective fervor, a dearth of self-awareness, and so on. In fact, potent beliefs and indeed entire ideologies have sprung forth from such synthesis, to then be aggressively propagated by adherents, with all provable causes forcefully rejected in favor of fabrications that conform to the new, hurriedly institutionalized worldview.

Recalling the two sets of causal relationships mentioned previously, our modern context of isolation, complexity, technology, specialization and superagency certainly seems to lend itself to both the masking process and its runaway propagation and institutionalization. It has become much easier, in other words, to mask the second set of seemingly more abstracted and complex causal relationships — or to invoke vast clouds of hazy interdependencies in either set —so that causation can be craftily shaped into an occluded, subjective miasma of "alternative facts." And although deities, fate, synchronicity, mischievous spirits and superstitious agency may still be credited with many bewildering events, there is now an industrial strength, global communications network that can instantly shape and amplify false explanations for a wide array of phenomena. Via social media, troll farms, sensational journalism, conspiracy theorists, pedantic talk-show hosts and the like, we have a well-established, widely trusted platform to breed outrageous distortions of the truth. And we can easily discern — from the consistency of the distortions over time, and by whom and what they vilify — that the primary aim of nearly all such efforts is to mask the actual causes of countless economic, social, political and moral problems, and redirect the attentions and ire of loyal audiences to oversimplified explanations, straw man arguments, and xenophobic scapegoats. It is professional-grade masking at its finest.

That said, in the age of instant information access and pervasive mass media aggregation and dissemination, I would contend it has now become critical for these propaganda engines to excel beyond spinning evidence or cherry-picking supportive data, and to begin engineering events that align with a given narrative in order to secure enduring conformance. In other words, to reach past merely masking causation into the realm of actually reshaping it. This is what the deliberate, willful forcing of causation seeks to accomplish, and why extraordinary amounts of effort and resources — at least equivalent to those being expended on causal masking itself — have been spent in its pursuit.


III. Forcing

Willful forcing in this context is primarily about the intentional, frequently sustained manufacturing of causal evidence. For example, lets say I am seething with jealousy over a coworker's accomplishments, and I am filled with a petty lust to sabotage them. At first, I might attempt to mask the cause of their success with malicious gossip: what they did wasn't all that great, or they must have cheated along the way, or the boss was favoring them with special help, or the coworker must have been performing favors for others to achieve such results. But if masking the actual cause of their success (that is, their credible competence, talent, hard work, etc.) isn't having sufficient effect, and I am still raging with vindictive spite, well then perhaps arranging some fake proof of my coworker's faults or failures will do the trick. Perhaps leaking a confidential memo from human resources about accusations of sexual misconduct? Or feeding them subtly incorrect data on their next project? Or maybe promising them cooperation and assistance in private, then denying it in public when it sabotages their efforts? If I keep at this long enough, I just might induce some real failures and shatter the "illusion" of my coworkers success. This is what willful forcing looks like, and is sort of connivance we might expect from TV dramas. But nobody really does this in the real world...right?

Unfortunately, it happens all the time — and increasingly on larger and larger scales as facilitated by the global reach of technology, capitalism, media and culture. We've seen such tactics used in the take-downs of political leaders, in the character assassinations of journalists and celebrities, in carefully orchestrated attacks on government and corporate whistleblowers, in how various activist movements are dismissively characterized in mass media, and in the billions spent to turn public opinion against beneficial public policies and legislation that might undermine established wielders of power. But is any of this "forcing" creating a causal relationship that wasn't already there...? Well, as one example, if reports of what happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential election are accurate, then forcing did occur, via DNC efforts that deliberately undermined Bernie Sanders in favor of Hillary Clinton; Republican state legislatures that deliberately suppressed Democratic voters with voter ID laws, restricted polling times and places, and other such tactics; and Russian hackers that aimed to alienate Blue Dog Democrats and independent voters away from voting for Hillary Clinton. Assertions that any individual or party who appeared to be leading in the polls actually did not have enough votes to win was...well...carefully engineered to be true. This is what causal forcing looks like on a larger scale.

In a more sustained forcing effort over a longer period, the Affordable Care Act has also become a particularly potent example. In this case, there was a pronounced lack of initial cooperation from conservative state legislatures, relentless and well-funded anti-Obamacare propaganda to maintain negative sentiments across the electorate, and dozens of efforts in the U.S. House and Senate to repeal the ACA itself — all of which has now been followed by the even more deliberate defunding and insurance market destabilizing efforts from the Trump administration via executive action (eliminating ACA cost-sharing subsidies, etc.). And all of this contributed to fulfilling the causal masking that was broadcast from those opposed to government oversight of U.S. healthcare — during the ACA's creation and passage, and every day since then. In other words, years of carefully planned and executed sabotage have been forcing the invented causality of claims like "Obamacare is a total failure and will collapse on its own" to become true.

It isn't always necessary to force causal relationships, of course, to maintain lockstep conformance. There are plentiful examples in politics of people continuing to vote for a candidate or party who never fulfills any campaign promises...ever. But we must remember that masking — and all individual and collective investment in masking — only requires partial reinforcement from observations and experience, an ongoing emotional investment, a blindness to our own hypocrisy or groupthink, and a conditioned receptivity to deceptive salesmanship. So as long as there is occasional proof that some authority we trust got something right, or some attitude we hold is justifiable, or the ideology we have chosen will still offer us acceptance and community, or the rabbit hole we've ventured down with an endless chain of bad choices has few or delayed palpable consequences...well, then those who wish to influence the masses only need to effectively force causation in the rare now-and-again.

Still, I would contend that a consistent pattern of fabrication has been emerging over many decades now: first misattribution, then masking, then forcing, all eventually leading to calamity and ruin in human relations and civil society — and disruption of our relationships with everything around us — thereby generating a closed loop of virtual causality. But in case these assertions seem contrived, let's take a closer look at additional real-world examples.


Virtual Causality in Action


Initially, I considered using "trifecta" to describe this particular trio of causal entanglements, because the motivations behind it appear to be all about winning; that is, it is employed primarily to shape a status quo that either directly benefits those who crave more power, influence or social and material capital, or directly injures or oppresses anyone interfering with that desired status quo. Thus the troika often becomes the trophy, the prize-in-itself, as its inventions and propagation become emblematic of such self-serving success — in other words, a trifecta. But really, this need not be the specific intent behind causal distortions; in fact I would say that the virtual causality troika is unwaveringly damaging in human affairs, regardless of its intent. Let's examine some evidence for this....

If out of fear, discomfort, confusion, ignorance or social conformance I begin to misattribute homosexuality to a personal choice — rather than the innate, genetic structures and proclivities, which are almost certainly the reality for most gay people — and then link that assertion to tribal groupthink and an appeal to my favorite authorities, an almost effortless next step is intentionally or reflexively masking the actual causality with my own preferred beliefs. That mask may be projected into many shapes: perhaps an unhealthy or perverse interest was encouraged in a person's youth that led them to "choose" being gay; or perhaps they were sexually abused by a parent, older sibling or family friend; or maybe there are emotional, social or cognitive impairments that have led them to fear the opposite sex; and so on. There can be quite elaborate masking narratives if the need for self-justifying beliefs is strong enough. From there, perhaps because the misattribution itself is so heartbreakingly mistaken, there is a corresponding urge to force the desired, invented causation. Which leads me to author studies that "prove" early sexualization of children and/or permissive parenting somehow encourages sexual deviance, promiscuity or gender instability; or to engineer "gay deprogramming" efforts that "prove" gay people can become straight; or creating dogmatic propaganda that authentic marriage can only be between "a man and a woman," that gay parents can never be allowed to adopt children because it is "unnatural," that gay people can't hold jobs where they could potentially "corrupt" children, and other such constructions that create an environment where gay people are in some way prevented from becoming successful and happy in their relationships, families, and jobs — and indeed their overall integration in society — thus adding to my "proof" that being gay is not natural, healthy or wise. And this is how misattribution easily leads to masking, which then begs the reinforcement of forcing.

So in such a potent and seemingly enduring real-world example, the deleterious effects seem closely tied to fearful and dismissive intent. But what about the other end of the spectrum? Consider the beliefs of many people in modern culture regarding the desirability of wealth, and in particular the necessity of commercialistic capitalism to create a thriving and happy lifestyle for everyone. Much of the time, this isn't a nefarious or malevolent intent — folks may actually believe that everyone aggressively competing with each other for more and more wealth is "a good thing," and, further, that such pursuits are morally neutral; in other words, permissive of an "anything goes" mentality with regard to wealth creation. And if I truly embrace this belief, I will tend to mask my own observations about the world, about history and economics, about social movements, about government and everything else in accordance with that belief. In my unconsciously reflexive confirmation bias, I will only recognize arguments and evidence that seem to support my beliefs. That is, I will mask the actual causality behind events and data that embody my preferred causality, assiduously avoiding empirical research that debunks the travesty of "trickle down" economics, or that proves most conceptions of the Laffer curve to be laughable.

Then, because my beliefs are not really supported by careful analysis of available evidence — and are in fact thoroughly contradicted by a preponderance of data — I will eventually go beyond seeking out research, media and authorities that amplify my preferred causation, and begin to force that causation in my own life, the lives of those I can personally influence, and via my political leanings and spending habits. On a collective scale, I will vote to have judges appointed who favor corporations in their rulings, or for legislators who create tax breaks for the wealthy, or for Presidents who promise to remove regulatory barriers to corporate profits. On a personal level, I will explode my own debt burden in order to appear more affluent, and constantly and conspicuously consume to prop up growth-dependent markets. And, on a global level, I will advocate neoliberal policies that exploit cheap labor and resources in developing countries, and the ruination of my planet and all its species of plant and animal, in service to the very few who are exponentially increasing their personal fortunes. In these ways, I can help generate short-term surges of narrowly distributed prosperity that do indeed reward those who have already amassed significant wealth, and who will vociferously confirm that everyone else in society is benefitting as well...even when they are not.

In this second example, there can be a truly optimistic and benevolent intent in play — a person may really believe their misattribution, masking and forcing will have a positive impact. But the results of the disconnect between actual causality and invented causation still wreaks the same havoc on the world. For in this case we know that it is not wealth alone — operating in some sort of market fundamentalist vacuum — that lifts people out of poverty or liberates them from oppressive conditions. It is civil society, education, democracy, accessible healthcare, equal rights protected by the rule of law, the grateful and diligent civic engagement by responsible citizens, and much more; this cultural context is absolutely necessary to enable freedoms and foster enjoyment of the fruits of our labor. Without a substantive and enduring matrix of these complex and interdependent factors, history has shown without exception that wealth production alone results in callous and brutal enslavement of everyone and everything to its own ends, so that to whatever extent we fuel our greed, we fuel destruction of our society and well-being to the same degree.

Here again we can recognize that isolation, complexity, technology, specialization and superagency tend to obscure causality even as they amplify our ability to mask or force causal relationships. So on the one hand, it is more difficult to tease out cause-and-effect in complex, technologically dependent economic systems, but, once certain key effectors are identified, human superagency then makes it much easier to manipulate temporary outcomes or perceptions of longer-term outcomes. And this is precisely why the troika we've identified can maintain the appearance of victory within many dominant mediaspheres, noospheres and Zeitgeists — at local, national and global levels. To appreciate these dynamics is to have the veil between what is real and what is being sold as reality completely removed — in this and many other instances. Otherwise, if we cannot remove that veil, we will remain trapped in a spectacle of delusion that perpetuates the greatest suffering for the greatest number for the greatest duration.

As to how pervasive and corrosive virtual causality has become in various arenas of life, that is probably a broader discussion that requires more thorough development. But, more briefly, we can easily observe a growing body of evidence that has widely taken hold in one important arena. Consider the following example and its consequences:

Perceived Problem: Social change is happening too quickly, destabilizing traditional roles and identities across all of society, and specifically challenging assumptions about the "rightful, superior position" of men over women, white people over people of color, adults over children, humans over Nature, and wealthy people over the poor.

Actual Causes: Liberalization of culture, education, automation, economic mobility and democratization have led to wealthy white men losing their status, position and power in society, so that they feel increasingly vulnerable, insecure and threatened. And while their feelings of entitlement regarding the power they are losing have no morally justifiable basis — other than the arbitrary, serendipitous or engineered advantages of past traditions, institutions and experiences — these wealthy white men have become indignant, enraged and desperate. So, rather than accepting a very reasonable equalization of their status and sharing their power with others, they are aggressively striving to reconstitute a perceived former glory.

Misattributions: Recreational use of illicit drugs, sexual promiscuity, homosexuality, lack of parental discipline, immorally indulgent entertainment media, immigrants or races with different values, governmental interference with personal liberty and moral standards, and liberal academic indoctrination have all contributed to the erosion of traditional family values and cohesion, resulting in an unnatural and destructive inversion of power dynamics in society and the easily grasped consequences of interpersonal and group conflict, increases in violent behaviors and crime, and general societal instability.

Causal Masking: Establishing think tanks and funding research that supports these causal misattributions with cherry-picked data; using mass media with a dedicated sympathetic bias to trumpet one-sided propaganda about these same causal misattributions; invoking religious sentiments and language that similarly cherry-pick scriptural and institutional support for sympathetic groupthink and activism; generating cohesive political platforms and well-funded campaigns grounded in these misattributions — and in the dissatisfaction, resentment and anger they evoke; and, via populist rhetoric, generally emboldening prejudice and hate against groups that threaten white male power.

Causal Forcing: The strident dismantling of public education and access to higher education; cancelling or defunding successful government programs; capturing or neutering regulatory agencies; destroying social safety nets; rejecting scientific and statistical consensus in all planning and policy considerations; and engineering economic, social and political environments that favor the resurgence of wealthy white male privilege and influence. In other words, removing any conditions that encourage equitable resource distribution, sharing of social capital, and access to economic opportunity, and restoring as many exclusive advantages as possible for wealthy white men.

Consequences: A renewal of income inequality, race and gender prejudices, lack of economic mobility, and cultural and systemic scapegoating of non-white "outsiders;" pervasive increase in societal instability and potential for both violent crime and institutional violence; mutually antagonistic identity politics and class conflict that amplifies polarization and power differentials; coercive use of force by the State to control the increasing instability; and gradual but inevitable exacerbation of injustice and systemic oppression. Adding superagency, isolation, specialization, complexity and technology to this mixture just amplifies the instability and extremism, increasing the felt impacts of ever-multiplying fascistic constraints and controls. Ultimately all of this results in increasing poverty and strife, and in pervasive deprivations of liberty for all but a select few.


Countering Virtual Causality with a Greater Good


In response to the dilemmas created by the troika we've discussed so far, I 've been aiming to work through some possible solutions for several years now. I began with a personal realization that I had to address deficits in my own well-being, deficits created by years of conforming to toxic cultural expectations about my own masculinity, and the equally destructive path of individualistic economic materialism which I had thoughtlessly followed throughout much of my life. I encountered an initial door to healing through studying various mystical traditions and forms of meditation, which resulted in my books The Vital Mystic and Essential Mysticism. However, I also realized that this dimension was only part of the mix; there were at least a dozen other dimensions of my being that required equal attention and nurturing. As I explored these facets of well-being, I arrived at the Integral Lifework system of transformative practice, my books True Love and Being Well, essays exploring compassionate multidimensional nourishment (see the essays page on this website), and the onset of an Integral Lifework coaching practice.

But something was still missing — something more causally fundamental that was hinted at in my previous experiences — and that is when I expanded my attentions to larger cultural, political and economic concerns. I began writing about the failures of capitalism, the distortions of religion and spirituality in commercialistic societies, the need for more holistic appreciations of liberty and knowledge, and the imperative of constructive moral creativity — offering a handful of what I believed to be fruitful approaches in these areas. Much of this culminated in the book Political Economy and the Unitive Principle, and then in my Level 7.org website, which explore some initial ways out of the mess we have created. Throughout these efforts, I presented what I believed to be some of the central causal factors involved in our current systemic antagonisms and failures, and some proposed next steps to actualize and sustain positive change. Of course what I have outlined in my work is just one way to frame all of these situations and factors, and, regardless of intentions, there will likely be many details and variables yet to be worked through. This is why piloting different participatory, distributed and egalitarian options will be so important in the coming decade. The main point, however, is that, just as so many others have recognized, humanity cannot continue along its present course.

So this essay regarding virtual causality is an extension of this same avenue of considerations and concerns by burrowing through more layers of the onion — just one more piece of the puzzle, one more way to evaluate the current predicament...and perhaps begin navigating our way out of it. It seems to me that recognizing the cognitive distortions behind causal misattribution, masking and forcing are a central consideration for any remedy in the short and long term. These are the specific drivers underlying much of the evil in the world, perpetuating false promises that will only lead us over the cliff of our own demise. And in order to operationalize more constructive, prosocial, compassion-centered values, relationships and institutions on any scale — that is, to counter the corrosive troika and promote the greatest good, for the greatest number, for the greatest duration — we must address those cognitive distortions head on. We must end the reign of lies, and reinstate a more honest, open and well-reasoned relationship with causality. We must resist the false reality we are being sold, and open our eyes, hearts, spirits and minds to what really is.

How do we do this? Well, my own life's work describes one avenue, through which I advocate specific individual and collective efforts to reverse our downward spiral. But as I cruise around the Internet from day to day, I encounter countless and varied ideas, practices and resources supportive of positive change. Really, the answers are already out there (and within ourselves), just waiting for us to embrace them. All we really need to do to begin this journey is let go of the causal misattributions, masking and forcing that intrinsically fuel our perpetual fear, mistrust, anger and groupthink, and turn instead toward what is verifiably true — as complex, nuanced, ambiguous and counterintuitive as that truth may be. And there are already meaningful efforts along these lines within some disciplines — Freakonomics comes to mind, as do websites like politifact.com, factcheck.org, opensecrets.org, and snopes.com — that model ways to peek through the veil of our mistaken assumptions and beliefs. We just require more of these, across all disciplines and all media, along with open accessibility and the encouragement to seek them out. How hard could this be...? Even the most concerted efforts to deceive, distract and medicate us into conformance with virtual causality will fail, if we stop consuming them.

Lastly there are a handful of feasible personal practices that will help resolve part of this challenge. I discuss them in more detail in my writings on Integral Lifework, but essentially they include reconnecting with aspects of ourselves and our environment that modern life often encourages us to neglect. For example: spending alone time in nature; creating a disciplined habit of meditative introspection; investing regular time and energy in a supportive community that shares our values; shifting how we consciously process our experiences, from fast-paced analytical decision-making, to slower body-centered felt experience, to even slower heart-grounded intelligence; making sure we have space and time in our day for creative self-expression; and additional personal patterns that unplug us from electronic dependencies, naturally attenuate modern compulsions and addictions, and encourage both holistic self-care and compassionate engagement with others. Such practices are a powerful means of revitalizing the innate resilience, intelligence and creativity that millions of years of evolution have gifted our species. By returning to our authentic selves, we can regain an inner compass to help navigate these complicated and often alienating times.

When I was a technical consultant, there was a term for carelessly hurtling forward to keep pace with current technology, implementing the latest trends as soon as they emerged: we called it "riding the bleeding edge." The allusion was deliberate, because new tech could be risky, could fail, and might lack both support and future development. Instead, in my consulting I advocated a different approach: extending legacy systems and future-proofing them, or adding new technology that would integrate with legacy systems (or run in parallel with minimal cost) that offered extensibility for future technology integration — a bridge if you will. There was nothing particularly flashy about what I was doing, but this approach solved some fairly complex challenges, lowered hidden costs (such as retraining staff on new systems, or hiring expertise to support new technologies), and leveraged institutional knowledge and existing technical competencies. In my view, we need to do something similar for modern society, slowing down wide-scale deployment of "bleeding edge" innovation, and revisiting basic legacy components of human interaction and well-being. We need to create a bridge to our future selves that leaves as few people behind as possible, while preparing us for new ways of being and doing.

But our very first step must be to abandon virtual causality altogether, and reconnect with the real world in whatever ways we can.

-------------------------------------

Following up on some feedback I received after initially posting this essay....

Petyr Cirino pointed out that a powerful influence in modern society is our immersion in the 24-hour news cycle, which often results in a strong identification with the same. To be connected at-the-hip with nearly every noteworthy or sensational event around the globe, within minutes or hours of its occurrence, has come to dominate our sense of the world around us, what demands our emotional investment and prioritization from moment-to-moment, and is a determining factor in how we interact with people we know and familiar threads of thinking, how we view the people or thinking we don't know or understand, and how we feel about our lives and ourselves. The deluge of information and "newsworthy" events also tends to distract us from more immediate causality, contributing to an ever-expanding insulation from the real world and the abstraction of our interpersonal connections. Along with other mass media, the 24-hour news cycle consequently helps fuel, shape and sustain the causal troika to an astonishing degree. So it follows that divorcing ourselves from that cycle would be a helpful cofactor in first slowing, then remedying the perpetuation of misattribution, masking and forcing — for ourselves, and in how we amplify the troika in our relationships, social interactions, thinking and learning.

Ray Harris observed that limited cognitive capacity — along with a need to protect that capacity from too much information — may also play a role in evoking and energizing the causal troika. I think this is undoubtedly true, and would include it as a feature or consequence of complexity. Specifically, I think there is a snowball effect where complexity drives specialization, specialization generates insular language and relationships, and insular language and relationships contributes to isolation via homogenous communities and thought fields. These specialized islands barely comprehend each other, let alone regularly dialogue with each other, and cognitive capacity certainly plays a role in this phenomenon. I would also include other aspects of mind that contribute to troika formation, and which are also entangled with complexity, specialization and isolation. For example: how gullible someone is, how disciplined they are in their critical reasoning, how educated they are in general, how tribal their thinking becomes, etc. Addressing these tendencies may also become part of a long-term remedy, but of course there are genetic, dietary, cultural and relational factors involved here as well. It seems that any attempts to manage the troika tendency, or compensate for it in media and communication, would therefore require consideration of a sizable matrix of interdependent factors. Or maybe a majority of humans just need to become smarter, better educated, and learn how to think carefully and critically...? Certainly, we can encourage this through ongoing cultural liberalization — we just need to attenuate the influences of capitalism in order for that liberalization to take its fullest course.





The Venus Project: What do people think about the Resource Based Economy predicted by Jacques Fresco?

I see lots of encouraging intentions - in fact I was delighted to find intersections in some of Fresco's work and my own - but I also encountered quite a few problems with Fresco's proposals.

The main problematic issues as I see them:


(I)

Fresco frequently alludes to the idea that we can't solve resource scarcity issues using the same old tools that got us into the current mess. Unfortunately, he does not approach technology and science with exactly the same rigor, instead elevating them to a vaunted "solution"s status rather than acknowledging that they are really inherent to many of the challenges in modernity. Alas, this is magical thinking.

Breaking this down...As a former IT expert with some twenty years of experience with complex computing technologies, I would say that relying on computing and technology to manage production and resource allocation is extremely foolish. Technological determinism - or "technology as panacea" in this case - is a consequence of not knowing how fragile and easily disrupted technological systems inherently are, especially as they increase in complexity. A la Kurzweil and others, it's become a bit of religious conviction that some sort of tipping point "is bound to occur" that frees humanity of its labors and existential challenges. From the perspective of someone who has spent nearly half of his life installing, building, programing and maintaining all manor of technology-dependent "cybernetic solutions" to complex problems, I'm here to tell you it simply will not work. Certainly not in our lifetime...and probably not ever. It is instead a romantic religious conviction cradled in a love of science fiction...and nothing more. Well, actually, it is something more...because such reliance (on any scale) inevitably leads to abrupt and calamitous unintended consequences.

Along the same lines, the scientific method should certainly be part of a larger toolbox in problem-solving...but we shouldn't place it on a pedestal. It has been much too easy to "capture" scientific research and decision-making and processes with opposing values sets, so that science can be used to justify completely different conclusions or reinforce preexisting biases. This is in large part because - in the same spirit as Fresco - many folks romanticize "logical" deductive reasoning, imagining that it is somehow independent of emotions, interpersonal relationships, spiritual perceptions, cultural conditioning, or indeed somatic patterns and proclivities. But it isn't - reason is one small part of a larger organism we call "consciousness." The reductionism inherent to Fresco's investment in science is just a problematic as relying solely on reading pigeon entrails - it excludes too much of the human experience. To appreciate what I'm alluding to, consider reading my essays on Sector Theory and Managing Complexity.

Which leads to the next point...


(II)

Values hierarchies are a reflection of moral development; without specific attention to how we mature our ethical frameworks individually and collectively, there will be no stable solutions available to replace the current self-destructive maelstrom. Human beings will undermine any and all systems whenever their values diverge from it. This is a central consideration of my own Level 7 proposals, and unless I’ve missed something, Fresco seems to rather polyannishly sidestep it (i.e. saying instead that it “will emerge naturally” as resource abundance is actualized - see Values | The Venus Project). I don’t entirely disagree with his sentiment here, but I also think moral development itself should be a more consciously and carefully considered facet of any effective proposal.


(III)

There is very little acknowledgement of the current population problem in the Venus Project. Our planet actually can't sustain the Earth's current population at developed countries' consumption levels - even if we "build everything to last" and maximize the efficiency of production as Fresco proposes - and certainly not for the population projected over the next hundred years. Sorry...it's just not possible. So reducing population has to be part of the mix...which again invokes issue #2 above. It's also a fundamental test of Fresco's target to produce "only what is needed;" folks routinely confuse needs and wants for all sorts of complex psychosocial reasons. Until families around the globe embrace the reality that it is immoral and reckless to have more than one or two children, all proposed systems will inevitable be under tremendous pressure to stratify the "haves" and "have-nots," simply out of practical necessity. Fresco tries to brush such concerns aside with his conviction that people will change their minds when presented with "scientific proof" of what they need...but again, this is more evidence of romantic idealism.

With these prominent exceptions, I actually agree with much of what Fresco says about property, currency, democracy, pilot projects and so forth. I just have different ways to address the same challenges. And that raises one last critical concern: the distributed and diffused nature of human social function. I think one reason many libertarian socialist proposals encourage reliance on community-level organization is because that is where humans are most comfortable - their circle of relationships can only be so big, and their engagement in self-governance and indeed productive activities can only extend as far as our wiring for emotional and social intersubjectivity. This sidestepping of subsidiarity is a major flaw in Fresco's understanding of human beings, which frankly presents to me a bit like how someone with Autism Spectrum Disorder might see the world; again, it misjudges the relationship between moral maturity and prosocial choices.

(See my Level 7 website for further discussion of many of the issues alluded to above….)

My 2 cents.

From Quora: https://www.quora.com/The-Venus-Project-What-do-people-think-about-the-Resource-Based-Economy-predicted-by-Jacques-Fresco/answer/T-Collins-Logan

Why did the Supreme Court decline to hear the case regarding the right to bear arms in public, Peruta v. California?

Thanks for the A2A. So here’s the really funny thing about this situation….

You’ve got two Constitutional originalists/textualists who wanted to proceed with these cases - Justices Gorsuch and Thomas. The assumption of pro-gun-rights folks is that, because these two Justices are hard-right-leaning, then “obviously” they would uphold District of Columbia v. Heller’s distinction that the 2nd Amendment need not apply strictly or exclusively to militia (which contradicted U.S. v. Miller and some 70 years of stare decisis), and perhaps expand upon it. Which is actually a really, really funny assumption, because that is what the U.S. Constitution says the “right to keep and bear arms” is for: a well-regulated militia. That was indisputable - both in a historical context and in any reasonable originalist or textualist reading of the 2nd Amendment…until Heller in 2008. And yet…well, there’s the rub…because really Gorsuch and Thomas are what we would call “fair-weather” originalists/textualists, in that they mainly apply that standard when it suits their conservative ideological bias, just as happened in Heller. In the current instance, however, authentic textualism/originalism clearly would NOT serve gun advocates.

In any case…aside from this rather humorous irony, I suspect the main reason SCOTUS sidestepped this issue is because it would be inherently “activist” to issue a ruling on these laws that potentially could spawn a reinterpretation of every gun restriction on the books around the U.S. - and years of litigation along with that. Again, though…judicial activism is SUPPOSED to be something that conservatives dislike. And yet…not in this instance. :-0

So basically, it was a reasonable and sound decision to avoid a de facto rewriting of established law, while also avoiding exposure of an underlying hypocrisy among right-leaning judiciary and citizens in the U.S. It’s really a win-win for everyone involved.

But of course hypocrites understandably tend not to see it that way. :-)

My 2 cents.

Comment from Andrew Mateskon: "Take a look at the hilarity of the most famous textualist, Scalia, in Green v. Bock Laundry. Suddenly, the written word as known by the authors doesn't matter, but the context and surrounding law does."


Well at least he’s being partly intellectually honest in admitting that strict textualism “produces an absurd, and perhaps unconstitutional, result.” LOL. But to then invent his own arbitrary “benign fiction” for what the word “defendant” really meant in 609(a) is of course equally absurd. It seems textualism is a bit like the literalism of religious fundamentalists: “Since this is what we want the text to mean, this is what it literally means. Then we need not have any doubts.”

Comment from Matthew Moore: "Actually read DC vs Heller. You will be enlightened. The individual (non-militia) view is based on the 14th Amendment and the speeches and writings of it’s authors and ratifiers."


Oh I’m pretty familiar with it. The point is that Scalia’s majority decision is not remotely justifiable purely on a textualist basis. Instead, it’s a fishing expedition for a particular ideological reading outside of the actual text itself. It’s the epitome of hypocrisy in that regard. I’m not saying the favorable arguments don’t have merit…that is a different discussion… I am saying that they just don’t have textualist merit, not by any stretch of the imagination. That is what I mean by “fair-weather” textualism/originalism.

What does the end-game for critics of gun-control look like?

Unfortunately many such “debates” in the U.S. have been cast in really extreme, black-and-white polemics. It’s sad…especially because a functional democracy depends on people working out their differences…but IMO the folks at the top who have pretty much all of the influence and power are quite happy to keep it for themselves, and let the rabble fight tooth-and-nail over issues like this one. I’ll expand on this point in a moment, but first….

To break down the “endgame,” I think you have to look at it from multiple angles. Here are a few of those:

1. As I have friends and family who are lifelong NRA members, I can say that, for them, this is really about government staying out of the average person’s business. When pressed (by me) on this issue, a lot of the high-minded rhetoric they might use in public kinda flies out the window, and we get down to a heart-felt statement like: “I just want to be left alone.” Usually there are a few more colorful ways they might express this idea…but that’s really at the core of their feelings about gun control. So for them, the “endgame” is…well…to be left to their own judgement and desires. As long as no one is being harmed (by them), the government should just leave things be.

2. From the research I’ve done on the U.S. firearms industry, a very different endgame is in play. They want to sell weapons. And the larger the variety that can be sold, the more money they will make. In fact that’s pretty much why we have the AR platform for civilians now: after military sales began to drop off, firearms mfrs worked hard to change laws so that modified versions of military hardware could be sold to civilians. Also, the more fears about guns or ammo scarcity can be stoked, the greater the rush to buy more guns and ammo - so that has also been a factor in increased sales. And all of this worked - the weapons industry made a killing (so to speak). If you follow the money behind the lobbying, legislation and elected officials who expanded military-style weapons sales into America’s heartland, or who funds radio talk shows that stoke people’s fears about gun and ammo scarcity, you’ll find some owner-shareholders of U.S. gun makers who are now very happy with their investment in this…er…marketing and advertising.

3. From the perspective of the NRA, I’d have to say the endgame is at least in part about maintaining that organization’s political capital - their institutional status and influence. It doesn’t really matter who is beating the drum on a given weaponry issue, if the NRA membership comes to believe in the rhetoric, then the NRA has to snap to attention and lobby on behalf of the new trend…or they will lose their position of authority regarding guns.

4. Remember those “folks at the top” I mentioned? Well they have another endgame in mind that often involves techniques like dividing and conquering, engineering lots of “panem et circenses,” and offering us a heaping bucket of nationalistic populism on the side. It’s become pretty clear that their endgame is to keep large portions of American citizenry so at odds with each other that we can never see the forest, and keep beating our heads against the trees. These elite are delighted to stoke the fires of passion for the Constitution at one end of the spectrum, while at the same time generating propaganda about how “the liberals are going to take away all our guns,” and then funding lobbying efforts to - for example - restrict the data that law enforcement collects on gun usage in America, so that everyone can remain completely in the dark on the real statistics. It’s not that those statistics would necessarily benefit one side or the other…that’s not the point. The point is that it keeps us ignorant and therefore at each other’s throats. And what’s really interesting is that, when you discuss gun control anywhere in the U.S., you will hear EXACTLY the same arguments from the pro-gun crowd, and EXACTLY the same arguments from the anti-gun crowd. And how can this be? Well, I think it’s because the wealthy elite have worked hard and long to ensure polarization in the populace, spoon-feeding everyone their lines in a farcical play, so that they are so distracted by each other they don’t see the man behind the curtain. And what’s the endgame of those particular wizards? To remain unnoticed as they play puppet master to us all….

So that’s what I think the endgame is, from a number of different perspectives. There are some other positions in the mix…but they seem pretty rare. I think mine is one of them. The “endgame” I’d like to see, as someone who enjoys plinking on the back 40, is that the culture of violence in the U.S. be healed, those who are disenfranchised and oppressed be re-integrated as a valued part of society, and mental illness be addressed very early on in people’s lives (in other words, approached like physical illness, and proactively treated). Ultimately, I think such measures will lead to a world where guns no longer have such a destructive impact on society. But we have a long way to go…and for now, the proliferation of weapons that are becoming more and more lethal isn’t going to do anything - IMHO - but fan the flames of polarization and destruction.

My 2 cents.

From Quora: https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-end-game-for-critics-of-gun-control-look-like

Post-Postmodernity's Problem with Knowledge

Sell Sell Sell


This may actually be a pretty straightforward problem, with a challenging but nevertheless obvious solution. Here's my take....

I would propose there are nine primary forces at work in present-day knowledge generation, dissemination, evaluation and integration, which I would sketch out as the following inverted values hierarchy:

A. Titillation to entertain or make money.
B. Arrogant ideological agendas.
C. Tribalism and groupthink.
D. Extreme, self-protective specialization of informational domains and language.
E. Democratization and diffusion of knowledge.
F. Appreciation of an ever-increasing complexity and interdependence of all human understanding.
G. An understandable fluidity of exact knowledge.
H. Critical self-awareness.
I. The humbly inquisitive ongoing search for truth.


What seems immediately evident when looking these over is that personal and collective values have tremendous influence on the efficacy of a given approach to knowledge - and, perhaps most importantly, this influence can and does defy any institutions created to sustain a more diverse or fruitful values system. For example:

1. If the profit motive reigns supreme, then titillation to entertain or make money will trump all other variables. This has clearly had a role in news media, where entertainment and sensationalism have far outpaced accuracy or depth. More subtly, this has also had an impact on scientific research, where competition for grant money has distorted methodology and data in order to attract sufficient funding.

2. If a particular belief system is venerated above everything else, then arrogant ideological agendas destroy truth in favor of persuasive propaganda - especially when combined with tribalism and groupthink. We see this with religious indoctrination and exclusionary bias (i.e. denial of empirical evidence), with conservative news media that promote neoliberal political and economic agendas, and with the refusal of institutions of higher learning to allow truly diverse or controversial perspectives among their events and curricula.

3. When democratization and diffusion of knowledge is prioritized above every other value, then we end up with the armchair Dunning-Kruger effect, where folks believe they have mastered a complex discipline after reading a few Internet articles, and are then able to confidently refute (in their own estimation) the assessments of more educated and experienced practitioners in that field. Social media seems to provide considerable reinforcement of such knowledge-distorting self-importance - as do participatory systems and institutional dialogues that refuse to qualify or evaluate sources of information or their veracity, and give all input equal weight.

4. With extreme self-protective specialization, we end up with isolated islands of understanding that do not fully comprehend or appreciate each other - and in fact often can't function harmoniously together in society. One consequence of this are graduates of universities who are preoccupied with scholastic performance at the expense of actual learning, or who cannot understand their field in a way that actually adds value to its execution in the real world. In other words, an education system that rewards one narrow flavor of performance, while devaluing creative productivity in order to generate compliant specialists.

There are also some nasty values combinations in the post-postmodern era that seem increasingly pernicious in the destruction of knowledge, mainly because they deliberately exclude F, G, H & I - that is, the humbly inquisitive ongoing search for truth, fluidity of exact knowledge, critical self-awareness, and appreciation of ever-increasing complexity and interdependence. Really, whenever these four characteristics are deprioritized or absent, insight and understanding tends to be thoroughly crippled. But let's briefly take a closer look at each of these fundamentals....

What is "critical self-awareness?" I think it could be summarized many ways, such as taking one's own opinion with a grain of salt, or having a healthy sense of humor about one's own understanding, or being able to effectively argue against one's own position and appreciate its flaws - i.e. some of the central themes of postmodern thought. The "humbly inquisitive ongoing search" is certainly a kindred spirit here, but also implies that our journey towards the truth is never-ending; it's not just humility about conclusions, but about the process of seeking itself. Appreciating the "fluidity of exact knowledge" is an additional variable to balance out other, less rigorous impulses. It means there will be few black-and-white conclusions that are accurate; that ambiguity and imprecision are inevitable; that assertions should be tested in small arenas for limited periods, rather than as sweeping revisions; and so on. This fluidity does not, however, insist on a nihilistic or dismissive orientation to qualitative truth; on the contrary, it can recognize and integrate absolutes while remaining keenly aware of context. And, finally, "complexity and interdependence" means that we will of necessity be synthesizing a collective understanding together - there isn't much opportunity for elitist leadership or vanguardism, except perhaps in a few highly abstracted or technical areas. In other words, functional truth is perpetually intersubjective. At the same time - again as a balancing factor to the diffusion and democratization of knowledge - we will also need to appropriately weight the insights of experiential "experts" to help us navigate complexity.

These four characteristics can be viewed as attitudes, character traits, virtues, priorities, beliefs, operating assumptions, etc. The point is that if we prioritize these four above all considerations - subordinating our other beliefs, reflexes and desires to them - we can begin to formulate a healthy, fruitful relationship with knowledge, both culturally and interpersonally. If we don't prioritize these characteristics...well, then I suspect we'll keep making the same kinds of errors that have led us into our current state of apoplectic befuddledom. We simply can't afford to constrain the four essential qualities of truth-navigation in a straight jacket of what really should be extraneous and subordinated values and habits. And thus we arrive at a proposed values hierarchy that maximizes the utility of any approach to true and useful knowledge:

A. The humbly inquisitive ongoing search for truth.
B. Critical self-awareness.
C. An understandable fluidity of exact knowledge.
D. Appreciation of an ever-increasing complexity and interdependence of all human understanding.

E. Democratization and diffusion of knowledge.
F. Extreme, self-protective specialization of informational domains and language.
G. Tribalism and groupthink.
H. Arrogant ideological agendas.
I. Titillation to entertain or make money.

As you can see, this is simply an inverted version of the current status quo. Okay...if we can entertain this thesis, how do we get from here to there? Well I think education about this issue will help, but really we need to evaluate what is generating the memetic force of competing values hierarchies, and disable or de-energize that force wherever possible. How is it that titillation to entertain or make money has gained such prominence? Or that arrogant ideological agendas or tribalism and groupthink have usurped both the scientific method and common sense? Why has extreme, self-protective specialization so often shattered collaborative, interdisciplinary exchanges and synthesis? And how has the democratization and diffusion of knowledge rallied itself into such a farcical exaggeration...? Is there a common denominator for all of these trends...?

Well I think the answer is pretty straightforward, and I along with many others have been writing about it for a long time - it was Aristotle, I believe, who most clearly identified the same core issues we face today. The central problem is our highly corrosive form of capitalism. But perhaps I should forsake my own confidence for a moment and - applying the very virtues I've exalted here - humbly offer that a culture of acquisitiveness, infantilizing consumerism, competitive egotism and blindly irrational faith will likely not facilitate the four essential qualities humanity requires for thriving and productive knowledge. And I do believe this is a cultural decision - one in which we have all become complicit, and have all reinforced through tacit acceptance of the status quo. To break free of our shackles, we will need to let go of some of the habits and appetites we most covet and adore. But I could be wrong. Perhaps we can achieve equilibrium through our continued bluff and bluster, through ever-greater fabrications, self-deceptions and carelessly conspicuous consumption. That seems a risky bet to me...but again, I might be mistaken.

What are some great reasons for protecting the environment?


It depends on your moral orientation. For example:

1) If your moral orientation is doing everything for I/Me/Mine, then you could justify protecting the environment because it supports your individual existence, health and goals. For example, polluting the air and water where you live will make you sick. Unfortunately this leads to NIMBY attitudes that ignore pollution or destruction of “other people’s” environments.

2) If your moral orientation is more about your family or tribe/community, then you could justifying protecting the environment to create a safe and healthy place for your family to grow up and thrive, or your tribe/community to flourish. Unfortunately this can still lead to NIMBY attitudes that impact other families and tribes.

3) If your moral orientation is around the well-being of the human species as a whole, then clearly you could justify protecting the environment for all of humanity’s continued life and well-being. However, this can still lead to unintended destruction - and harm to humans - if the connection between a given environmental impact and human well-being over time is not fully understood.

4) If your moral orientation embraces a love and appreciation for all life on Earth - inclusive of humanity - then it becomes easier to justify actions that contain or restrict environmental destruction of any kind. When all life is valued and appreciated, it is much clearer and more imperative to protect it. As you can imagine, however, this tends to create tension with the I/Me/Mine, tribal and all-humanity moral orientations, because those are not interested in containing or restricting their own behaviors for anyone or anything else.

For more about this, see: Integral Lifework Developmental Correlations

My 2 cents.

From Quora question: https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-great-reasons-for-protecting-the-environment/answer/T-Collins-Logan

Which is more useful for society to believe in, free will or determinism?

Thanks for the A2A Robert.

Historically speaking, the answer to this question has generally depended on what utility is being sought, and by whom. For example:

- Theological determinism and religious fatalism have been quite helpful in pacifying followers within many different religions over time. So from the perspective of the religious elite who are interested in the conformance of followers, it has been quite a useful tool.

- In the same way the Divine Right of Kings - which has a similar flavor to theological determinism - helped stabilize the right of succession and pacify the unruly masses. So again, for Kings and Queens it was extremely useful.

- In any form of democracy, if the people believe that they have “free will,” this can provide a similar pacifying utility when the democracy doesn’t really represent the will of the people. Here again, it is quite useful for anyone in an elected position of power - and for the folks who bankrolled their campaign - to encourage this belief among the electorate in order to maintain an oligarchic status quo.

- It is also quite handy for owners of corporate monopolies when consumers believe they have “freedom of choice” - that market competition is providing better products at lower prices, whether or not that is actually the case.

- In the U.S., we routinely see the enhancement of free will promoted in competing political ideologies. Quite often, however, the outcome of persuading voters that one ideology is better at promoting or providing free will than another is usually increased oppression and exploitation of those same voters. In other words, just as with the previous examples, the “belief in free will” is most useful for the hucksters trying to establish or maintain their own influence.

Now, lest anyone think I am being overly pessimistic, I personally think it is vitally important in a democracy for the electorate to both believe in and insist on free will. Because whenever voters become fatalistic or begin to think their vote doesn’t really matter, they tend to abdicate their civic responsibility and obligations, and disengage. The greatest corrosive force to democracy is apathy - which is essentially letting other forces determine outcomes, instead of actively participating to shape an outcome. The challenge, however, is to protect and educate democracy sufficiently for the voice of the people to be artfully expressed using their own judgment…instead of their just being conned by snake oil salesmen.

My 2 cents.

From Quora: https://www.quora.com/Which-is-more-useful-for-society-to-believe-in-free-will-or-determinism/answer/T-Collins-Logan

To what extent is the intrusion on our privacy for the sake of the society's security ethically justifiable?

This is a great question.

First I would ask: what are we trying to protect with security measures that invade privacy?

If it’s about identifying threats to the existential safety of citizenry, the most effective way to do this is likely not through surveillance, but through strengthening interpersonal relationships, interculturalism, community engagement and dialogue, other methods to encourage social and cultural interdependence and communication, and education about what developing threats look like and how to diffuse them. There is a recent video that highlights how a shift in social awareness could be key to helping someone who is at risk of perpetrating radical violence:



At the other extreme, there is a reliable history of governments making errors in both identification and punishment of people suspected of destructive threat. In fact you could say that the track record there leans strongly in the direction of oppression: false imprisonment, religious persecution, targeting political opponents, irrational fear-mongering, enforcing lockstep ideological groupthink, disenfranchisement of non-conformists, etc. Which is what the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 9th and (more broadly) 14th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution were written to counter. (Along these lines, for those interested in the subtleties of how a “right to privacy” has played out in U.S. history specifically - and how it is has been viewed from a legal and Constitutional perspective - I recommend reading this brief but concise overview: Is it Protected by the Constitution?)

There is also an increasing body of evidence that identifies the root causes of violent extremism around the world - things like poverty; lack of education; suffering under oppressive regimes; disinformation and propaganda that demonizes “the other” to deflect blame away from the actual causes of shared suffering; lack of personal hope 0r economic mobility; and so on. I should think investing in addressing these underlying issues would go a long way towards attenuating conditions that lead to violent extremism, and thereby remedy threats.

So if you are trying to prevent catastrophic violence, there are probably much better ways to go about it that spying on people - and most of them seem like a much better approach in terms of “bang-for-buck” as well.

In addition, if intrusions to privacy are intended to protect or ensure individual and collective liberty, then I think there is an ironic contradiction there. What is liberty if not an ample degree of personal sovereignty; control over one’s own destiny; the same opportunity to improve one’s lot in life that everyone else has; freedom to think and say one’s own thoughts; freedom to travel everywhere; freedom to associate and assemble with others, regardless of their views; freedom from persecution, bullying, violence or hate speech simply because of personal beliefs, skin color, gender, social status or nationality; freedom to feel safe from unjustified intrusion when inside one’s own home, or from invasive searches while walking around or driving in public; and so on? Once we begin sacrificing some of these liberties for the sole purpose of allowing ourselves to “feel safer” from any boogeyman the government identifies on our behalf…well, where does it end? How much freedom are we willing to sacrifice to receive such uncertain (and often unsubstantiated) benefits…?

This speaks to a basic cost/benefit calculation. Consider a law that mandates, while driving on public roads, we wear a seatbelt “for our own safety.” This came into being from many years of statistics that showed not wearing a seatbelt clearly and indisputably increased injury and death from car accidents. Of course, there were still many people who refused to wear a seatbelt because they thought such a law was too invasive - it infringed on their personal sovereignty, and they didn’t want a “Nanny State” reaching that far into their personal habits or choices. There are a few of these rugged individualists still around, to be sure. But in this instance the cost/benefit calculation is very clear, in terms of being supported by a wealth of data: a small personal sacrifice in freedom - and one that has little impact on one’s driving ability - creates substantial benefit. Add to this that car accidents - both serious and small - have a high frequency and nearly universal probability, and the decision becomes a no-brainer.

But what are the cost/benefit variables for intrusive surveillance? How much freedom is being sacrificed, and for how much substantive gain in safety? The odds are infinitesimally small that any individual will be harmed by acts of terrorism…and yet every individual is expected to sacrifice their expectation of privacy “for their own safety?” It is a bit like insisting every person who gets onto a plane provides a DNA sample to the Airline and takes out an expensive life insurance policy - after all, the plane could crash, investigators often have difficulty identifying crash remains, and airlines can be held financially liable for damages. Wouldn’t that seem a bit extreme? Sure, because not that many airplanes crash…in fact, it’s extremely rare and is the safest form of travel. Still…it’s a lot riskier to fly on a plane than to expect to be killed or injured in a terrorist attack. So why isn’t the same logic considered around national security? Why are greater sacrifices expected for low-probability events, and for less provable benefit? I think these questions are at the heart of the balance between individual freedoms and individual responsibilities regarding collective security - this is how civil society is constructed after all.

There are many subtleties to the question of what liberty is and how to promote and protect it, and for those interested in that discussion I would offer my essay: The Goldilocks Zone of Integral Liberty. At the end of the essay, there are the beginnings of an evaluation method for freedom using the variables, metrics and principles outlined in the essay - I think this is the (eventual) approach we need to take to evaluate various cost/benefit arrangements throughout civil society regarding liberty.

My 2 cents.

(From Quora question: https://www.quora.com/To-what-extent-is-the-intrusion-on-our-privacy-for-the-sake-of-the-societys-security-ethically-justifiable)