About Ideology (Including Yours.) And roots in Romanticism.

First some announcements: 

1. On my other - more formal - blog, I ask "Does government-funded science play a role in stimulating innovation?"  There I refute rising incantations that science, productivity and inventiveness would all do so much better if we revert them all back to the whim of plutocrat lords. (Yeah, that worked great for the 6000 years of stagnant feudalism!) with guest appearances by Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Adam Smith and... Jonas Salk.

2. Want the perfect gift for that professor or student of Anthropology or Paleontology? 

3. Appearances (see the regularly updated schedule):

        - Nov 7 my new play  - The Escape - will premiere at the Caltech Atheneum.

        - Nov 9 I speak at the Future In Review (FiRe) Conference in Palos Verdes, before flying to Tucson for the Tus-Con sci fi convention.

        - April 8 - two Texas events for the April 8 eclipse - more later

And now... having a little trouble with your clogged dogmas? Let's have a look and see if we can get things flowing again!  I'll start by quoting an exceptionally sapient article.

== Ideology as a refuge from practical problem solving ==

“Because an ideology “looks upon all factuality as fabricated,” it “no longer knows any reliable criterion for distinguishing truth from falsehood.”

— From Arresting Our ‘Flight From Reality by Roger Berkowitz

I recommend you visit this linked essay which continues:

“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.”

…” 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.”

*

Do have a look at Roger’s article in Quillette, because the first half is so perfectly on target - diagnosing 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 mass delusions that are 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 eight of its manifestations) were all romantic movements. (Mark Twain blamed the Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott!) 

SF is not innocent! We see many common romantic features in the works of Tolkien and George Lucas and George R.R. Martin and Frank Herbert, wherein innately superior beings are portrayed as elegantly admirable (and pretty) while opposing orcs or robots or clone soldiers or masked storm troopers or hovering Harkonnens can be mowed down without qualm, as none of them have faces or mothers. 

(More seductively subtle, the gifted, eloquent and deeply anti-enlightenment O.S. Card relentlessly pushes romantic notions of rule-by-demigod, in place of decadent democracy.)

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

== Hatred of Modernity ==

Alas, the 2nd half of Roger's essay dives into a completely separate Arendt obsession, her dyspeptic growl at modernity and science which I deem easily refuted.  For example, it was not ‘reconciliation’ that defeated Nazis, or Leninist romantics or the many phases of confederatism. 

What's been our great strength? It was a spirit of courage to face that ‘loneliness’ in alliance with different and varied others, whose very differences contribute to a healthy and wholesome tribe/nation/humanity.

We are not all so terrified, all the time, that we must clutch demonizing ideologies. There are other emotions, like fortitude, patience, curiosity and humor. 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.)

Despite my respect for Hannah Arendt, I feel no compulsion to heed in the slightest either Nietzsche or Hegel, whose incantation spells I particularly detest. Where I disagree foremost is over the outright dismissal of human provability. 

Like Roger Berkowitz, I do not take seriously the pathetic immortality fetishists or those nutters who think they can promote themselves - via miraculous technology - to godhood. But unlike him, I recognize that we stand on the shoulders of generations who struggled to make us better than them…

… and we are better!  Each generation of Americans - for example - has struggled over demands that we expand our horizons of inclusion, beyond the horizons that were new to our parents. And slowly - (far TOO grindingly slowly) - we have done so, each generation. And science, disproving ten thousand pat and comfy folk assumptions, played a major role in that!

Indeed, if we do keep improving, our wiser heirs will almost certainly realize that we've only shown how very much farther there is to go.

== Civilizational Competition? ==

Western nations and allies, e.g. Japan and S Korea ("W+") are actually doing very well, overflowing with creativity, invention, science, productivity and the sort of moral rediscovery that has engendered a very active younger generation, fizzing with criticism and eagerness to save the world... traits that were squelched across those 6000 feudal/futile years. Traits that are utterly repressed in 'civilizational" rivals like China, Russia, radical Islam, etc.

Let's be clear. Only those nations with habits of self-critical error discovery have been at all active at addressing potentially existential problems, like the environment, or justice, or rule of law. It is either W+ habits of error-discovery or extinction. Period. I stand ready to show that in any arena, from debate to wager.

There is one reason for cultural anomie by Western+ citizenries. That cause is the most aggressive propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, cleverly leveraging the reflex toward criticism that's been trained into W+ citizenries, igniting healthy Suspicion of Authority into paranoia toward their own institutions.

In Europe and the U.S. this campaign has been augmented by cynically evil despots herding millions of victims to EU and U.S. borders as refugees, successfully sparking rightward 'populist' political reactions.

There is no 'civilizational' bullshit. One imperative - and just one - unites China, Russia, radical Islam, etc. into common cause. That unifying drive - propelled by male reproductive strategies a billion years old - is to re-establish the feudal pyramids of power that dominated 99% of human societies for 60 centuries or much more.  

Squint and you can see it in all enemies of the W+... justifying pyramids of power. Some base it on religion, or tradition, or romanticism, or 'civilization rivalry.' But that is decoration.

The worldwide oligarchic putsch unites all enemies of the W+ Enlightenment Experiment (W+EE) for one reason: because the W+EE will likely succeed within the next 20 years at inculcating critical habits in ALL world youth! And when that happens, a return to feudal pyramids will be impossible, no matter how much money you have or political foes you defenestrate.  

This may be their last chance. And they are pulling out the stops.

Liberal societies will not co-exist with any of that. As happened to Athens and Florence, liberalism will be crushed, burned, the atoms incinerated and dropped (this time) into the sun... and the experiment will never be allowed, again.

Or else, what will happen is what the cabals fear most. We may decide to save the world and the future despite them. By growing up.

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.

Inconvenient facts: The future of news.. and "otherness" has been stolen!

I recently spoke (via Beam robot) at a conference on “The Future of News Media” hosted by the Institute For The Future (IFTF), in San Francisco. An erudite gathering of concerned men and women from around the world discussed problems of Fake News, declining advertising revenues, state interference, self-censorship, and the web’s tendency to corral individuals into self-isolated pocket universes that reinforce their prejudices. In the short time allocated to me as kickoff speaker, I tried to give (ahem) ‘unusual perspectives’ on each of these topics.

Make no mistake, the survival of independent and professionally trained news media is vital to our civilization, just as undermining such experts is essential to the agenda of our rising caste of would-be masters.

I always have lots of unconventional things to say, but one stands out and you will see it repeated forever, till it’s tried on a large scale. Wagers.  Dares! Bets. Putting money on actual verification or disproof.

It is the only approach that will work, in an era when romantics have declared that all is subjective. That incantation works for macho guys… till something tangible is on the table. Then? Recall that most of these fake-news slathering fellows are also sports fans. And they know, deep down, that there comes a time when you can no longer talk your way out of comparing actual facts.

They grasp the idea that a wager has to be resolved. And it will turn on what can be proved. And now machismo becomes our friend, since it over-rules subjectivity!  If you flee from a bet, you are shamed. And if you refuse to pay-up, you are un-manned, period.

I broached this at the conference, as one of many observations and speculations about the future of news. It only got blinks of confusion from those erudite folks, showing how alien is their elite, mature, fact-loving world from that of the Confederacy that gave us this tsunami of fake-news. But give it time. Experiment with it. Because something has to be done. And this approach will go to the root, the heart of the problem.

== "Otherness"... redefined by monsters! ==

Ouch! Do we never get to keep nice things? Way back around 1990 I coined a term that later became the title of my 2nd story collection: OTHERNESS. It stood for the trend - in our recent, enlightenment renaissance - to be fascinated with horizons. To look beyond the immediate and near and familiar. And, yes, this manifests in many of us - those with some confidence - in a willingness to expand our boundaries of inclusion, to encompass "others."

Extending my essay "The Dogma of Otherness" (in OTHERNESS), I later showed how this process is inversely proportionate to fear, and has been, across most (maybe all) human cultures. It explains why the calmly confident society crafted by the Greatest Generation became one obsessed with expanding horizons.

Alas, all that has been sabotaged. Instead of rising in confidence - as Americans and all advanced and advancing nations should be doing now, amid very good times - we are letting ourselves be talked into quaking, quivering terror.

That I find upsetting. But want to see me really pissed off? Now my optimistic and brave term - "otherness" - has been stolen! Appropriated not only without credit or provenance, but given diametrically opposite meaning!

It's like the way they took the term "fake news" - which stood for their tactic to rile up an unsapient confederacy - and grabbed it as one more polemical weapon to use - in stunning irony - against real news media.

Alas, even those writing cogently against the madness keep falling for these traps, as with this fellow, who blithely accepts the alt-right definition of "otherness," ceding ground, even while whining about it. We can do so much better.

== Teaching the young – and old farts ==

Stanford professor Sam Wineburg lays out the steps educators need to take to help students discern what is fake news or not. “The tools we’ve invented are handling us,“ he says, “not the other way around.”  

A commenter suggested that the way to counter “alternative-facts may be to use their own s### against them: “When Trump says that 3 million illegals voted in the last election, tell them it doesn't matter because a majority of them voted for Trump! If he asks where you got the information, just say it was from the same source that he did. Or that it is common sense. Or that you "heard it on the internet." Or all the other lame excuses they use.

“When they make up stuff, make up stuff about their stuff. Be truthful about our stuff, but for their stuff, let you imagination run wild. Without facts to back up their claims, there is no way they can disprove any claim you make.”

It is a very, very dumb proposal.  We have other ways to win.

== The fact people ==

Evonomics is the place for erudite and fact-rich proof that inequality and huge wealth disparities are NOT healthy or faithful to fair-competitive market enterprise or even capitalism. 

An article online about cheating in economics explains how we are rediscovering the wisdom of Adam Smith and how parasite “rentiers” are not the friends of capitalism. Monopolists, “finance wizards” and passive lease-collectors create nothing and certainly do not compete. See both how Smith denounced the vampire effects on markets… and how it’s played out - to Dracula proportions - today.  

The Real "Takers" in America: Michael Lind’s article in Evonomics shows the kind of rooseveltean thinking that the oligarchs deeply fear might take hold. “An Anti-Rentier movement would oppose unproductive, ill-begotten wealth, not the rich in general. Wealthy individuals who get richer by investing in start-up companies or funding long-lived, creative blue-chip firms provide a valuable benefit to society, even as they risk losing their own money. Such risk-taking investors are the opposites of financial sector rentiers who seek to bribe policymakers into letting them privatize their gains while socializing their losses.”

Radical? A bit, sure. But what’s the alternative? Do the rentier-oligarchs actually believe they can crush us back into inherited-nobility and feudalism?  If the coming re-set is not a moderate-pragmatic, rooseveltean one - as instituted by the Greatest Generation - then it will be something much more radical. Already, search results for Karl Marx” have skyrocketed, in recent years.

Finally, someone else is pointing out that "Obamacare" was always the Republicans' own plan, all along! This young, democratic Congressman lays it out so clearly that even a Fox-watcher would understand… and perhaps start scratching his head, asking: "So what was all the screaming about? And why did I ever watch Fox?" 

Oh, I am gonna keep my eye on this Rep. Brendan Boyle fellah.

== Other things that got (a lot) better ==

Expect a new section in these missives: Bad News/GoodNews.

The Bad News: Obama’s Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is an example of the brainpower and expertise that we lose. He’s a nuclear physicist for MIT who has been involved in government energy projects for two decades. His designated successor, former Texas governor Rick Perry, has no comparable educational or business background that would equip him for the job.

(To be clear, I am miffed that our present situation leaves me delighted to see Perry in the cabinet. For all his faults and awful limitations, RP seems at least to be an American of normal IQ and no cultist. Such a low bar.)

The Good News:  Read how Moniz says that our accomplishments in developing efficient, sustainable and non-carbon technologies are irreversible. Despite treasonous obstruction by The Cult, these techs have now taken off, reaching beyond break-even, drawing every utility and energy-using entity away from carbon sources. “Smart government policies have encouraged and reinforced this evolution, but it now has a life of its own, studies suggest.”

Filthy coal has collapsed as U.S. supplies of much cleaner natural gas burgeoned, with America attaining effective energy independence under Obama, for the first time in 40 years.  The Energy Department estimates that 61 percent of the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in the power sector from 2006 to 2014 came from switching from coal-fired plants to gas-fired ones. (A side effect no one seems to have reported: even with our troops helping governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no longer a U.S. aircraft carrier battle group in the Middle East. We just don’t need that region for our own survival, anymore.)

Gas is a stopgap. “Continuing declines in the costs of alternative energy sources are making them increasingly competitive. Since 2008, costs have fallen 41 percent for land-based wind power and 64 percent for utility-scale solar power. The cost of efficient LED light bulbs has fallen 94 percent since 2008. The cost of battery storage has declined 70 percent over that period, making electric vehicles more affordable. As of last August, there were 490,000 electric vehicles on the road.”

Want another? Chart some national statistics and how they did across the Obama administration. In only one case was there not a huge improvement… the national debt.  But the size of the debt is a huge lagging indicator.  Far more significant is the rate of change of the rate of change of debt. By that metric, any fiscal conservative can see on a single chart (that I provide) how they would be insane ever to trust a republican with a burnt match.

Ah, but PrezDon screamed that all favorable statistics under Obama were lies... but now that the momentum on jobs is continuing... it's all real!  

The ultimate answer to government is useless: Evonomics chose my essay as ideal to cap off a tumultuous year, and to welcome one that might be much better. That is, if we choose to remember where all our good stuff came from. It came from a civilization that (once) encouraged negotiation based on facts. One that benefited from educating millions. One that developed the fantastic tool known as science.

One of you wrote in to comment about how intense public reaction stopped Paul Ryan’s reavers from: 1- neutering the Congressional Ethics Office, 2- rushing Trump’s confirmations before ethics reports come in, and 3- canceling the ACA before a new health plan is ready.  Sayeth Stefan: “Calling and emailing your representative and senators WORKS.  You look up their contact information here. 

And if you want to get involved in organized resistance, you read the Indivisible guide and join one of their local groups.”

And yet, while I will write letters and even sometimes march... that is not how we'll win.  It's yummy and satisfying, but only entrenches civil war. This sumo is what they want. It's necessary, but if we only do sumo, we lose.

Victory will only come via Judo.

== The expert on despotism ==

Populism and Totalitarianism: Roger Berkowitz Sheds light on probably the greatest expert on despotic regimes, Hannah Arendt. In her chapter on “The Totalitarian Movement” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt notes that the leaders of movements are marked by their “extreme contempt for facts as such.” The reason for this contempt for facts is that the world is complicated and uncertain. For the masses of people who are suffering dislocation, instability, and meaninglessness in their lives, “movements conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself; in which, through sheer imagination, uprooted masses can feel at home and are spared the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.”

The great danger in all movements is that they can have no firm goal; as movements, they continually need to stir up their supporters who drive them forward. If any goal is met, a new one must be contrived. So movements are motivated less by a firm end than by a promise to fulfill a deep spiritual need. That is why movements mobilize masses who are longing for a “completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world.” There is a “desire to escape from reality because in [the mass of the people’s] essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects…”