Ideologies of betrayal - several cogent essay/articles you might not want to miss. Oh, and a distilled "Marx for dummies!"

A decade ago, I joined a small mélange of folks trying to revive interest in Adam Smith the enlightenment thinker and fierce opponent of feudalism and aristocratism, whose best-known work in 1776 accompanied the US Revolution. This should not have been necessary, as Smith made repeatedly clear that the truest enemies of fair markets were always cheaters at the top, always (across 6000 years and all continents) conniving to rob hardworking competitors in the middle, in order to favor their own inheritance-brat sons. 

(Soviet nomenklatura ‘commissars’ and their unmasked Putin versions were no exceptions.) 

By that light – as even F. Hayek said – maximizing the number of skilled, confident competitors absolutely requires mass education/health/nutrition and rights for poor children, lest their diverse talent be wasted, instead of surging happily into creative markets.  In other words, today Smith would be a 'liberal' in both the old and the new senses of the label.

Lately, Smith has won a bit of a revival, as seen here: The Betrayal of Adam Smith by K. Phillips-Fein: 

“Smith had a deep and abiding dislike for nobility, aristocracy, and the leisured rich. In his view, these groups influenced state policy in ways that betrayed the larger interest. As historian Robert Heilbroner has proposed, material productivity was important to Smith because it could occasion “that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people.” For Smith, the “butcher, the brewer” and “the baker” were the people who mattered.”

Well worth reading!  Though my own insights into Smith still have some freshness. ‘Adam Smith - Liberals, you must reclaim him!’ 

== Roots of autocratic lying ==

Let me start this section with some paragraphs from 'Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality’ by Bard College Prof. Roger Berkowitz. “Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated, it no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”

“In 1949, when Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) went to Germany as part of the New York-based Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Commission, she was struck by the way the Germans showed an “at times vicious refusal to face and come to terms with what really happened.” This “escape from reality,” as Arendt named it, meant that the reality of the Holocaust and the death factories was spoken of as a hypothetical. And when the truth of the Holocaust was admitted, it was diminished: “The Germans did only what others are capable of doing.”

“The Germans, at times, simply denied the facts of what had happened. One woman told Arendt that the “Russians had begun the war with an attack on Danzig.” What Arendt encountered was a “kind of gentleman’s agreement by which everyone has a right to his ignorance under the pretext that everyone has a right to his opinion.” The underlying assumption for such a right is the “tacit assumption that opinions really do not matter.” Opinions are just that, mere opinions. And facts, once they are reduced to opinions, also don’t matter. Taken together, this led to a “flight from reality.”

“The focus of Arendt’s lifelong engagement with the human flight from reality was her encounter with ideologies, specifically Nazism and Bolshevism. In The Origins of Totalitarianism and other texts (especially her essay, On the Nature of Totalitarianism), Arendt defines an ideology as a system that seeks to explain “all the mysteries of life and the world” according to one idea.”

Of course these passages are redolent today, as some on the far-left and nearly the entire American right strenuously denounce any recourse to factual validation or falsification. Their narratives - or ideologies - are paramount, over-ruling mere objective reality. Indeed, to that fringe left and entirely-mad right, the most-hated common foe are the nerds of fact professions, especially science.

… "As ideologies, both Nazism and Bolshevism insist on explaining the events of the world according to theories “without further concurrence with actual experience.” The result, Arendt argues, is that such ideologies bring about an “arrogant emancipation from reality.” … 

...“The modern lie is ideological in that it rejects all contrary evidence and all inconvenient facts. It involves, as Arendt writes, the “mass manipulation of fact and opinion” toward the totalizing end of rewriting history and the present to fit one idea.”

The first half of this article is so perfectly on target and diagnostic of the same flaw in human nature that I often point-to - our propensity for self-satisfying delusion, (a flaw that is also a taproot to our greatest gifts, like art and love).  Ideologies, especially, can be ecstatically masturbatory, simplifying all of those who disagree into mistakes, to be corrected with erasure.

I concur, while adding that another (or overlapping) common element is romanticism. Nazism, Stalinism, the American Confederacy (in all of its manifestations) were all romantic movements (Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott.) We see many common features in the works of Tolkien and George Lucas, as innately superior beings are elegantly admirable (and pretty) while opposing orcs or robots or clone soldiers or masked storm troopers can be mowed down without qualm, as none of them have faces or mothers.

== We are experimental exceptions to the rule ==

I go into this in Vivid Tomorrows. And oh sure, I have earned most of my income by penning tales that have strong romantic elements! I write such passages mostly at night, when the wind rustles tree branches and I feel thrumming echoes of the caves. 

Still, I know what kind of civilization made me and gave me everything I have. I have always tried to push the notion that romanticism has no business - after 6000 years of calamities - getting involved in the daytime pursuits of politics, policy, science, justice and negotiation based on pragmatically verifiable facts.

Alas, the second half of Berkowitz's essay dives into Arendt’s dyspeptic growl at modernity and science accusing them of the same ideology-driven delusion as Marxism! An assertion that I deem easily refuted.  If any of you do read the Arendt essay - it was not ‘reconciliation’ that defeated Nazis or Leninist romantics or the many phases of confederatism. It was a spirit of courage to face the ‘loneliness’ that she describes as the cost of escaping romanticism. Courage in alliance with different and varied others, whose very differences contribute to a healthy and wholesome tribe/nation/humanity.

A courage that westerners don't like to gather, unless hard-pressed! But that they showed at Cowpens and Kings Mountain and Gettysburg and Midway and in alliances that stabilized the recent 80 years of the American pax into the least violent and most prosperous of the last 60 centuries. A courage and unity - in the face of blatant resurgence by neo-feudalist neo-Nazis attacking Ukraine and the entire Enlightenment Experiment, as we speak.

So no, Hannah. We are not all so terrified, all the time, that we must clutch demonizing ideologies. There are other emotions, like courage, patience and humor. And curiosity, God's second greatest gift, just after love. 

And yes, an appreciation of facts and willingness to change our contingent models of the world (despite Plato’s yammers about the hopelessness of that wondrous pursuit.)

Putting aside the fact that - despite my respect for Hannah Arendt - I feel no need to heed desperately nasty and insane "insights" by either Nietzsche or Hegel - where I chiefly disagree with Arendt is over her outright dismissal of human provability.

Sure, I do not take seriously today's pathetic immortality fetishists... or nutters who think they can promote themselves - via miraculous technology - to godhood. On the other hand, I do recognize that we stand on the shoulders of generations who struggled to make us better than them…

… and we are!  Better than them. Each generation of Americans - for example - has struggled over demands that we expand our horizons of inclusion. And slowly - (far too grindingly slowly) - we have done so, in too-small increments, but still ratcheting forward, each generation. And science, disproving ten thousand folk assumptions, played a major role in that.

== Guy who gets it ==

Swinging to another article you might want to look at...

In Defense of Democratic Capitalism: From the Financial Times (possible paywall), Martin Wolf offered a cogent essay that makes my own point - that our struggles today are not about ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ per se, but about rediscovering the careful navigation achieved by the Rooseveltean Compact, which led to the greatest era of hope and progress and (relative) peace in all of human history. A compact whose spectacular successes – greater than ALL feudal or Marxist regimes put together, put an onus - a burden of proof - on all those now raging against it, whether ‘left’ or ‘right.’

In “Defence of democratic capitalism,” Wolf’s interesting "thesis is that it is impossible to sustain a universal suffrage democracy with a market economy if the former does not appear open to the influence — and the latter does not serve the interests — of the people at large. This, in turn, demands a political response rooted not in the destructive politics of identity, but of welfare for all citizens — that is, a commitment to economic opportunity and basic security for all."

Or as I put it - paraphrasing Adam Smith and even Hayek - we need our competitive institutions of democracy, markets and so-on to be positive-sum across an effectively level playing field.

Martin Wolf continues: "Building on FDR himself, domestic policy goals should be rising, widely shared and sustainable standards of living, good jobs for those who can work, equality of opportunity, security for those who need it and ending “special privileges” for the few."

Amen, Though it's hard to achieve, given that so much power has, the last few decades, flowed into the hands of a world oligarchy of what the author calls "rentier" lords (after Adam Smith). Especially since that caste has proved - relentlessly and consistently - to be far less intelligent - or even sapient - than their sycophant flatterers keep telling them they are.  

(Inability to perceive the dangerous poison of sycophancy is clear in fools who yowl stuff like: "I no longer believe democracy is compatible with freedom." Whatever, Gilgamesh.)

Even a scintilla of understanding would awaken them to the savvy shown in the 1930s by old Joe Kennedy, who backed the Rooseveltean reforms, saying that he'd rather half his wealth were taken to uplift a contented middle class, 'than lose it all to revolution.'

"Growth remains essential. So does the welfare state, which makes economic as well as social sense. It can insure risks the private sector will not insure. Properly designed, it can offer everybody a leg up and so promote equality of opportunity."

What the author doesn't mention is that the most fundamental ethos and logic of market competition - as propounded by Smith and even by conservative doyens like Friedrich Hayek - is that markets work best with the largest number of skilled, knowledgeable, empowered and confident competitors. And hence, any liberal 'program' that helps convert poor children into skilled, knowledgeable, empowered and confident competitors is utterly justified and even required, in purely Smithian market terms. 

Those who oppose even that kind of social intervention are not pushing for creative markets. 

They are reaching desperately for the same tired pattern of 6000 years. Good luck with those harems, guys. Only get to know the word "tumbrel."

== More on (not moron) Karl Marx ==

Final essay to appraise here, I promise.

My earlier riff comparing Isaac Asimov’s Hari Seldon to Isaac’s influences – Gibbon, Toynbee, Marx, Spengler and so on, led to a lot of discussion. See “Isaac Asimov, Karl Marx & the Hari Seldon Paradox.”

And as always happens nowadays, folks popped up some of the most-wrongheaded and just plain wrong popular notions. Especially about Marx. Let me therefor try to encapsulate a hugely simplified distillation re Marx:

1) First, any citing of Hegelian 'dialectic' automatically knocks anyone down five pegs. Hegel was a flaming horror, detestable and disprovable on any level. Fortunately for Marx, his lip service to Hegel was just a sop to German philosophy-mystics. It was aside from his chief focus on the historic evolution of power and capital.

2) Marx was a Historiographer. And by far his greatest contributions regarded advancing from Smith and Ricardo the notions of capital formation that he saw going on the the previous 300 years. 

At some level his description of human advancement through phases dependent upon technological level and society's capital (roads, factories, etc) was simply and obviously true. From tribal societies to feudal to monarchy allied with tradesmen, to bourgeois revolution, to industrial capitalism, it was clear to even his opponents that Karl was onto something with his models of past development. 

As was his notion that capitalists played an important role by retaining much of what workers created, in order to invest it into new capital. Hence the word capitalist.

And so the first surprise. True Marxists believe capitalists have a big historical role to play and are not inherently evil! That is, until their final phase, when wealth hierarchy peaks under a narrow clade of uber lords, á la Ayn Rand. Marx and his fans thought they saw that phase rapidly approaching, just ahead, in the giant steel mills and smoking railroads of the last 19th Century. But - like predictions of the Second Coming - that forecast proved to be a mug's game! It turned out a lot more 'capital' needed to be built... or 'formed'... than just steel mills and railroads.

3) Alas, Marx also tried to systematize that insight (capitalists steal some from workers in order to use profits to make capital) with an insanely dumb notion called the Labor Theory of Value. Still, in the most general sense, his appraisals of historical patterns were pretty on-target...
... that is, up until his actual present.

At which point...

4) ...at which point we see (for the millionth time) that explaining the past does not make you a prophet of things to come. In fact, there were almost zero Marxian predictions that came true! Leaving Lenin, Mao and others utterly puzzled. Till they concocted rationalizations to make themselves czars /emperors, with Marx serving as their validating prophet.

No, Marx's greatest effects were in the WEST! Where he was read as a gifted Science Fiction author spinning plausible tales of a near future that terrified enough powerful men that they decided to try staving it off with reform. And that was where, by being canceled by reform, Marx actually changed the world.

And I will eat a bug if more than a couple of you knew any of that. I say that with no rancor or smugness. No one seems to know shit, nowadays.

Anyway, if you actually read all the way here, maybe you actually are an exception. Sorry about that. Tired from a recent airplane trip....

And finally...

"It's easy to be right about what's wrong, while being wrong about what would be right." - attributed (aprocyphally?) to Karl Popper.  

Popper was talking specifically about Marx, but also more generally about those who denounce bad things (e.g. repression or prejudice or poverty), only to loudly prescribe tactics and methods that are at-best futile or counterproductive ...

...and all-too often replicate the denounced crimes! It's one of Santayana's 'repeated mistakes of history' ...

...only, again alas, hardly anyone knows any history, anymore.

Oligarchy and aristocracy and power

Much discussion is erupting across the West about a rising demand to do something about wealth disparities and skyrocketing debt. At Davos (we are told) it's all they talked about, including “the likelihood that a 70 percent (high end marginal) tax rate becomes policy." Ray Dalio, one of the wealthiest investors in the world, also sees such ideas gaining serious traction. Mohamed El-Erian, the long-time oracle of bond markets, writes in The World Post this week that what is most required to avoid a “synchronized” global slowdown “is a broad-based effort to bolster growth and address deep resentment about the inequality of income, wealth and, most importantly, opportunity.”

Essentially, we are seeing a split among billionaires over IQ and long range self-interest. Those who are smart enough to read up on past revolutions -- like Gates, Bezos and Buffett -- are saying "raise my taxes!"  Many others. Mark Cuban, Nick Hanauer, who warns "Beware, fellow plutocrats, the pitchforks are coming." 

Some are actually loyal to an enlightenment civilization that's been very good to them, and to the hundreds of engineers whose company they enjoy more than spoiled inheritance brats. Others are simply pragmatic, like old Joe Kennedy supporting FDR: "I'd rather lose half my wealth supporting reform than all of it and my head to revolution."

Evonomics has once again featured my assessment of Why Adam Smith and even Friedrich Hayek would be democrats today, given the almost 100% record of better outcomes for markets and competitive enterprise, versus the monopolistic and oligarchy-serving policies of the Republican Party.  “Even conservatives now admit that conservatism has changed.  Take the Ronald Reagan who Republican activists idolize in abstract; in real life he raised taxes, increased regulations, signed environmental laws, and (worst of all) negotiated countless compromise give-and-take, pragmatic measures in tandem with a Congress run by the other party. As did Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley, giants who argued with genteel courtesy and who revered both knowledge and intellect, especially science.  Even the most fervid Tea Party aficionado would avow that today’s GOP has little room for such things—as Goldwater and Buckley themselves proclaimed, to their dismay, before they died.”

(See a more recent appraisal of the economist Hayek - who made major contributions - vs. the polemical Hayek whose "Road to Serfdom" has proved diametrically opposite to correct in every prediction, down to the last detail.)

Highly correlated: “They Don’t Just Hide Their Money. Economist Says Most of Billionaire Wealth is Unearned: The concentration of wealth from rent-seeking.” by Didier Jacobs in Evonomics. 

And this clear revelation that concentrated wealth and inequality crush economic growth... as Adam Smith and anyone in the Greatest Generation would have told you.

== What do skyrocketing trade and budget deficits mean? ==

Ol' Two Scoops brags about the "economy," but which parts? Look at economic trends -- deficits and GDP and trade -- and ask: which items would have been affected by major GOP /Trump actions? Also, which saw no affecting GOP/T actions, and therefore likely just continued Obama era trends? Um, look at the trend lines and tell me who deserves the credit?

Elsewhere I show charts revealing that the second derivative of federal deficit is always negative across democratic administrations and positive across GOP ones. Less obscurely stated: anyone calling for 'fiscal responsibility" who remains a Republican is an utter-fool hypocrite.

The only actual, actual major effective actions by the GOP/T since inauguration were (1) mammoth tax cuts for the rich and corporations, under standard voodoo (never-ever right) supply side predictions of lower deficits, (2) a chaotic, roller-coaster, uncontrolled trade war, (3) demolition of our alliances and a war against fact-using professions. None of these have directly (yet) affected US core domestic economic/commercial activity and thus all of the curves regarding unemployment etc. are simply carrying on momentum of the fantastic 2009-present recovery from the Bush super-recession.

What those listed GOP actions have directly affected are both budget and trade deficits, which have skyrocketed. And wealth disparity.

Confederate Syndrome: getting “anti-elite” prols to fight for aristocracy

We’re all raised on Suspicion of Authority (SoA) - which is  a healthy message delivered in every Hollywood film. Alas, we're also taught to murmur “I invented it! My elites can be trusted, but not the elites who my elites tell me to hate! I'll aim my SoA only at them!” The central mission of Fox News and Steve Bannon and Robert Mercer and all of that crowd has been to rile up a lumpenproletariat into raging against cities and professionals and universities and science and especially the very concept of government, all of which stand in the way of the real elites re-establishing feudalism. This is precisely the playbook used by

plantation-lords who got a million poor white southerners to fight and die for them, in the 1860s phase of our civil war. This article shows the how and why of the oligarchy’s all-out funding of anti-modernist propaganda:

“When Steve Bannon - now fomenting populist revolution across Europe -called for “deconstruction of the administrative state”, he specifically targeted the systems of taxation, financial oversight, and public accountability that constrain the ultra-wealthy. The American hedge fund manager Robert Mercer, whose $60m offshore “war chest” bankrolled both Brexit and the Trump campaign, only began donating to political causes after the US Internal Revenue Service fined his firm $6.8bn for tax evasion. Arron Banks, the UK businessman with substantial offshore holdings, may have had a similar motivation: he became the largest financial backer of Brexit’s Leave.EU campaign following the imposition of costly international regulatory requirements on his insurance companies…. Populist ultra-nationalism is a project bought and paid for by global elites and their tax haven wealth.”

“Through the Paradise Papers we also learned that Donald Trump, who campaigned against the “corrupt globalism” of Hillary Clinton and proudly proclaims himself a “nationalist”, had surrounded himself with cabinet members whose vast fortunes are stashed in tax havens around the world. Some of these tax haven schemes link them to foreign adversaries of the United States.” writes Brooke Harrington in The Guardian. 

Not mentioned? The number of GOP officials and donors who have been buying up bolt-hole ranchita hideaways in Patagonia, New Zealand and so-called "seasteads." (Interesting: while Peter Thiel was enraged by this analysis of Seasteading I published, he went ahead (apparently) and followed every piece of my advice! The new plans - which I pre-illustrated in EXISTENCE - have a better chance of working... assuming the world goes to hell as much as these guys want.)

== WODI Time ==

WODI = "What if Obama Did It?" Like what if Clinton or Obama tried to force security clearances for unqualified and compromised relatives? Or coerced foreigners to buy up whole floors of hotel rooms as blatant emolument bribes? Or reported for debriefings with communist or "ex" communist dictators many times without any US professionals present? 

Or Donald Trump actually excusing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistanas having been "fighting terrorism." Seriously, or his giving Putin every single thing, always. WODI. Of course the list of hypocrisies is endless. But you may not know this one:

The Senate Leadership Fund (super PAC run by McConnell's former Chief of Staff) got $3.5m from Russian oligarch Blavatnik. "Possible conflict of interest"?? Good grief, the GOP is taking bribes from foreign agents in plain bloody sight.

Speaking of which, had any Clinton or Obama official been 1% so blatantly compromised as Steve Mnuchin - lifting sanctions on his Russian oligarch pals - there would have been riots. … yet they howl outrage over Kyrsten Sinema’s thigh-high boots. See other examples of distraction outrage. Hilarious!

Even more uproarious is this visual meme, which implies that the 'socialist-sounding' quotation came from the right's bête noirs Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, when in fact...

...the author was Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part II On the Expence of Justice. 

Um... gotcha.

== Your hopeless “decent” neighbors ==

There are so many moral turpitudes of today's gone-insane, treasonous right. (And most of you know I used to skewer lefty zealots too, till we needed to unite against a death cult.) But of all the go-to-hell travesties, nothing beats the maniacal Alex Jones hatred of the Parkland kids.

But set aside the mad, confederate uncles, racists and Kremlin-loving boors. They aren’t important, compared with one group that could save us all, if ostriches pulled their head out of a holed-of-denial. All of us know some RASRs (Residually Adult-Sane Republicans) – decent folks who know their party and movement have gone stark-jibbering insane, but who keep chanting “I must keep supporting this horror show, because…. Democrats!”

I know some of these guys, who must have giant shoulders by now, from hourly shrugging off the latest Fox/GOP/KGB monstrosity with "that's terrible and sure the entire leadership caste of the Republican Party is a pack of lying traitors but… but… but… here’s an anecdote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez!."

Which brings up… “What Does Tucker Carlson Know That the Republican Party Doesn’t?" His populist "attacks on the priorities of the “ruling class” have set off a maelstrom.” Carlson’s recent rant against out of control capitalism has a lot of folks all over the spectrum scratching their heads.

Me? I think the explanation is simple. Positioning. He wants to have cred as an “independent” voice - when Trumpism collapses. More and more center-right Americans are clinging to one straw: “I know my side and my party have gone insane-evil-treasonous. But… but liberal socialists are as bad!” Carlson is only stating this aloud, with the net effect that “I can trust Tucker, when he says to vote GOP just one more time.”

Take the stunning, despot-serving moral turpitude of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Lee Atwater (at that same swamp-lobbying firm!) and all their clients, including Trump and other casino lords and Mafia dons. See below for details. But RASRs shrug that off.

Likewise the sexual perversion of so many of these guys. Stone famously "sold" his wife several times to other men, on the sex-swinger scene. It's a trend: from Larry Craig and Roy Moore and Dennis 'friend to boys' Hastert on down the line, to the normalization of high rates of gambling, drugs, pimpery, all the way to a divorce rate double that of Democrats. And paying off porn stars. And David Pecker. Family values. Huh.

Shrug. No, all that matters is "judges and tax cuts." Two Good(?) Fruits from a tree that’s proved 99.99% poisonous. RASRS will continue to hold their noses - ignoring the war on science and the Putin putsch, the destruction of our alliances and the ongoing assassination of our entire planet - saying it’s worthwhile, just to get those two things... 

...even though it's now proved that every single Supply Side largesse to the aristocracy had diametrically opposite-to-promised effects, pumping passive-parasitic rentier asset bubbles while dragging money velocity down to almost-zero while spurring NO added R&D or industrial investment... as Adam Smith would've warned you. As the Greatest Generation would have told you.

Any patriot would deem the Putin stuff alone – relentlessly-proved outright and open-glaring treason -- sufficient to get down into the streets with pitchforks and torches, chasing Rupert Murdoch and his shills out of the country. But not our poor RASRS, who clutch Fox sobbing, begging to suckle the latest rationalization incantation. “Tucker! Hannity! Rescue me with another anecdote about lefties!”

Careful guys. Even today’s TVs emit some radiation. Also, your desperate tears will soak into the LCD screen and give you a shock.

Economic Inequality: opportunity vs outcomes

Our last posting -- extensively  shared by thousands -- offered long, verbatim quotations from epic science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, revealing his amazing prophecy of an America falling into perilous failure mode.  

Now let's back off from our immediate crisis and try some perspective.

== The Equality Problem ==

This article - Is Inequality Inevitable? — asks a fair enough question, whose answer is “Sure, inequality is inevitable. So?” 

That don’t mean we can't always make things better.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry starts with studies showing that the children of elites have always stood a better chance of becoming elite, themselves, and that efforts to equalize outcomes by force - such as Maoist cultural revolution - always fail. Indeed, in Europe, the same surnames have been elite for 400 years.

True enough.  Only then M. Gagny calls all liberal efforts at mitigation futile and useless -- an assertion that amounts to stark-jibbering toilet raving.

One refutation is to point out the staggering amounts of cheating and repression that inherited oligarchies and other elites have engaged in, across all eras, to ensure advantages for their offspring. Nearly all of recorded human history reveals the lengths that lords and masters went to, using law and religion and sheer economic bullying to prevent sons or daughters of the poor from competing fairly with their own children. 

If aristocracy were self-replicating on the basis of simple, inherited quality, why then the relentless frenzy of desperate repression that we see across all annals, in all nations and eras?

Further, if inherited lordship were a matter of genuine superiority, then why - across the long epochs before our egalitarian experiment - were nearly all kingdoms and oligarchies so delusional and so horrifically-governed?  There is a name for the cosmically stupid way that 99% of post agricultural societies were governed. In a general sense, that name is feudalism. Another word for the endless litany of insipid and lethal errors committed by aristocrats is -- history.

Or, in more modern parlance: Idiocracy.

In my novel, Existence, I portray a meeting of uber-trillionaires in 2048. They can see they are going to win, that their putsch against liberal democracy is about to succeed, and looming success has them worried.  They can also see that feudalism is vastly less productive, innovative and far more error prone than open systems like transparent republics. Is there a way out of this dilemma?

At their conference, they earnestly seek ways to imbue the rule of inherited oligarchy with meritocratic and competitive elements, weaving in some of the powerful synergies of the Enlightenment... without its egalitarianism.  Kind of like what the Chinese ruling caste has been desperately trying to achieve, for decades. There are inherent flaws to this plan. But at least these oligarchs are smart enough to see the alternative:

Paris: 1789. And tumbrels.

(See my earlier posting: Class War and the Lessons of History. Oh and ponder this: why have Google searches on the words "Karl" and "Marx" been skyrocketing of late?)

== Easing our way out of a lethal attractor state ==

Sure, our egalitarianism has been flawed, often corrupted and always imperfect. Yet, our ongoing enlightenment experiment does correlate with a singular society that has been vastly more creative, productive, fair, scientific and happier than all others… and yes I mean absolutely all of them… combined.

If the grandchildren of rich people do tend to be rich, and the kids of scientists may somewhat tend to replicate that success, then liberal-minded folk will cite favorable circumstance as a chief reason. Nurture over nature. And so far, that presumption seems more right than wrong. 

But even if there is also a strong, genetic component, we still seem well-served by at least addressing those unfair inequalities that do cause disparities. And make each generation of favored kids work to prove it. To earn what they achieve.

We must do this for one reason, above all others — in order to stop wasting human talent.  Expanding opportunity for the children of the poor, of all races, genders etc., is simply logical and a vast improvement over the institutionalized, reflexive and wasteful bigotries of the past. 

Any excuse-making in the opposite direction is not only morally vile, it is also deeply impractical! Because it rationalizes reducing the number of skilled, eager, confident and competent competitors to enter our markets.  In other words, those who rationalize inequality of opportunity for children and youths are betraying the very essence of Adam Smith, of Friedrich Hayek and all other icons of competitive enterprise.

Hypocrisy -- by their own standards.

And sure, yes, inequality (for children and youths) is also immoral. But notice that some people find it easier to shrug off that appeal, than when you base your argument on the practical benefits of equalization. Remember -- oh remember -- that the American founders seized up to a third of the lad in the former colonies from elite-lordly families and redistributed it! An act of "leveling that made FDR look tame. And they did it for pragmatic reasons. In order to keep the revolution one of a calm, middle class, not a rabid mob.

Why emphasize children and youths?

Elsewhere I explain in detail the difference between interventions that aim to equalize opportunity and those that aim at equality of outcomes. Foolish  reactionaries like M. Gagny seem to agree with radical levelers on the other side, that liberal interventions aim at outcome-equalization. Indeed, if that were the case, perhaps I could see a point to the ravings of the far-right and the far-left. 

If that were the aim, then call me a rebel-libertarian.

But that vile, lobotomizing “left-right axis” is built upon shavings of stupidity. In fact, I assert: if state actions concentrate only on raising up possible opportunities for children of the poor, then outcomes will manage themselves. Contra-wise, those who slash investments in the children of the poor aren't just evil people, they are traitors to our revolution.

== The context for it all: The Fermi Paradox ==

Many of you know that I am the principal tabulator of hypotheses and proposed explanations for why we seem to be alone in the cosmos -- the Great Silence... also called The Fermi Paradox.  Of the hundred or so theories that have been offered, I rank a Top Ten.  And high on my list is...

... feudalism.  The chief attractor state of human governance, sucking in 99% of all human societies that ever got metals.  Feudalism rewards big males who act like elephant seals and bash other males to take their women and wheat.  We are all descended from the harems of guys who pulled that off.  

Moreover, the Darwinian logic probably applies on other worlds, perhaps most other worlds. And if so, we get a powerful "fermi" hypothesis: that all over the galaxy kings and feudal lords and priests suppress science and advancement and environmental care, because they are focused on short term battles to stay on top.  

Only our enlightenment experiment broke away from this pattern and found another, in which equalization of opportunity, plus rights and transparency and love of science, opened up all the positive sum games that utilize competition -- markets, democracy, science, justice courts and sports.  The resulting cornucopia has been dazzling!  But humans who rise up high will always be tempted by urges to shut down competition and become lords.

That is the grand context.  Our current struggles may matter even on a galactic scale!  If we are the first to rise up to Star Trek levels of enlightened maturity, then we could rescue all the others, out there, trapped in cycles of feudalism.

Oh but let's get back to Earth. Literally.

== Climate denialism is a symptom ==

Did I say feudalists suppress science? We've reached the point where denialists are frantic. Having invested in raging contempt for science and scientific civilization, while claiming the opposite, they must now double down -- trying desperately to prevent cognitive dissonance. They must avoid doing that almost-impossible thing for human beings... but the act that science teaches.  

To admit: "maybe I was wrong."

I could link to sage articles and scientific studies till the sun burns out and they would have no effect. Cultists will answer with nostrums and "talking points" concocted by Koch-financed shills who could not parse the gas vapor laws if their lives depended on it. But jpegs re sometimes convincing. Here are four images that make the point fiercely.

First the rate at which humans have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere of a world that skates the inner edge of our sun's continuously habitable zone. And that's a crucial aspect!  Because it answers the cultist line: "How could measly humans affect habitability of a giant planet?"

Let me reiterate: our Earth skates the very inner edge of our sun's continuously habitable zone. Because of that, our world must have a very transparent atmosphere with a Gaia Balance that has only just enough CO2 for plants to live.  Needing to allow heat to escape, we can afford very little greenhouse gas. 

Indeed, some time soon (less than 100M years) we will have to move the Earth!)

But saying "humans can't change an atmosphere" can easily be measured.  That is: if we're allowed to!  The Bushites sabotaged satellites and hampered scientists, but the Trumpists have taken things to a whole new level, cancelling programs and ordering NASA to never look down at a planet called Earth.  

You denialists who have long proclaimed "the jury is still out!  We need more data!" are now exposed as hypocrites. The truth is the very last thing you want.

But none of this is as horrifically dishonest as the standard riff used by Ten Cruz and other fanatics, claiming "there's been no net warming for 5 years!" Then 6 years. Then it was 7! Always increasing by one.  

Why so specific?  Look at our third jpeg and note the spike in 1998. The general slope of temperature has increased relentlessly, but fools and liars used that spike as a "before" to claim subsequent years were 'decreases.'  That is, till new peaks came in 2014... and 2015... and so far 2016, with all but one of the last seven months breaking records. Oh, so much to be proud of.

But the kicker is the ocean. Not one of the cult's shill "think tanks" has been able to concoct an incantation to answer the damage we are doing via ocean acidification. There are no even hypothetical causes for the effect that is killing coral and replacing fish with jellies, in all the regions depicted in our third jpeg, as well as helping to eutrophy (choke) the Black Sea and Mediterranean and Caribbean.

So what can we conclude?

Nothing new.  I made this list to arm you with talking points, because all that America needs to do, in order to win this phase of our recurring Civil War is to just peel off just 10 million still somewhat sane and reluctant and uncomfortable members of this weird-confederate coalition.  

     

You can do your part by hammering one, just one nervous aunt out there. (Your uncle is probably hopeless. Unless he's ex military; stay tuned for ammo that will work with him!)

Peel away one, then another. It's your assignment. Start with ocean acidification. I mean it. They cannot run from it or explain it, and Fox doesn't even try. They shout "squirrel!" and point offstage.  But use it, over and over again...  ocean acidification. ocean acidification.ocean acidification.