The Theory of Willful Blindness

A while back I took a look at "Marx's Five Big Mistakes," five big things that Karl Marx got wrong.  I mean things like the immiseration of the working class, the alienation of workers by the division of labor, the labor theory of value, the idea that bureaucracy would wither away under socialism, and that people would abandon the division of labor under socialism.

But then I got to wondering about the willful blindness that keeps people even today believing in these discredited notions.  I mean this.  You have to be really determined not to see if you believe still in the immiseration of the working class.  Yet tons of people fall for it every time that some new technology wipes out some industry of neo-buggy-makers.  It's the end of the world, they say, and soon nobody will have jobs.  

Or the division of labor.  Even the career coach mavens, people like the crazed Penelope Trunk, tell us to forget being a generalist.  Specialize on something, something you will find by trial and error.  Deadly serious sociologists like Emile Durkheim write that the division of labor is a manifestation of the nature of humans as social animals.  In social setting some individuals specialize on one task and others specialize on another task.  That's why it makes sense for them to cooperate.  So how could this be alienating?

I've suggested, following Anthony Giddens, that Marx came up with his stuff because the generation of Germans in the 1840s was beside itself about the backwardness of Germany.  Here were France and Britain with modern governments and there was Germany stuck in the feudal past with its little states and its disunity.

It wasn't just Marx.  Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her 1984 book The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, suggests that the feeling of existential panic was widespread.  Things were changing so fast that people were convinced that disaster was just around the corner.

Obviously this sense of existential panic is a very human thing.  In our own time we have the panic over global warming.  Experience a trend in increasing temperature over a couple of decades and you'll get a ton of people panicking.  End of the world!

Now, the situation in England around 1800 is epitomized by the Rev. Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population first published in 1798, in which Malthus predicted that population would always outrun the resources available to sustain it.  Food increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically.  The poor were doomed.  At the time that Malthus published his first edition many people thought that Britain was losing population.  Then the Census of 1801 showed that population was increasing.  Who'd have thought it?

Actually it has turned out that Adam Smith was probably the best forecaster of those troubled times, according to Himmelfarb.

He made poverty remediable, not by interfering with the operation of natural laws but by the natural expansion of the economy that was the inevitable result of those laws.  Instead of pitting man against nature, labor against machine, class against class, worker against worker, he presumed an essential harmony of interests, in which everyone would benefit from the "natural progress of opulence."

That's what actually happened.  In 1800 the modern progress of opulence was just getting started, and still, it may be that you ain't seen nothing yet.

To Himmelfarb, it appears that a concern for the poor is a consequence of prosperity.  Alexis de Tocqueville went to England in the 1830s and was astonished both at the prosperity he encountered and also the numbers of the poor.  Himmelfarb writes of his opinion:

While "the English poor appear almost rich to the French poor; and the latter are so regarded by the Spanish poor," the number of paupers in each of these countries was in inverse relationship to the actual condition of the poor.

It's as though we experience things as worse the better they get.  And why not "do something" about the poor once you have the level of opulence to do it?

This is the real existential challenge for conservatives.  Elites are always going to panic over something or other.  It's what a ruling class does to justify its importance.  It panicked over the poor in 1800.  Over the working class in the 1840s.  Over the deserted farm in the 1930s.  Over global cooling in the 1970s.  Over "peak oil" in the 1990s.  Over global warming in the 2000s.

It's the job of conservatives to dampen these wild pendulum swings.  Because whatever the panic around the next corner, what in the world is going to improve things better than the natural human adaptability implemented in the price system and the credit system?  Certainly, it cannot possibly be another bureaucratic program run by the ruling class.

There's probably a deep reason why people are always so willfully blind.  It may be because every living thing must ignore most of the stimulus it receives through its five senses and only respond to things that are genuinely life-threatening.  So we are blind to most of the things in the world.

But the trick is to make sure that we aren't turning away from the one important stimulus that really is going to kill us.

And that's not easy to deal with.  It's probably why we humans are so diverse.  Some people respond one way to a crisis and some respond another way.  Chances are that one of us will be right, and the human experiment will continue.

The Greater Pigford Problem

Big Whoopee.  The New York Times has finally done a bit of investigating into the Pigford scandal, and found it a cesspit of corruption.



The original scandal was the the US Department of Agriculture had discriminated against some black farmers in the awarding of crop loans.  In 1999 the Clinton Administration agreed to pay $50,000 to each farmer that had been discriminated against in the period 1981 to 1996.  But it turned out that the cure was worse than the disease as tens of thousands of blacks signed up for free money.



Even Barack Obama got into the act, in 2007.

In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama pushed for allowing late claims to be processed and setting up another billion-dollar payoff fund, in what became known as Pigford II, setting off a free-for-all. As of February 2006, “over 97,000 people had filed claims under the consent decree or requests to file late claims.”

How many black farmers had been discriminated against?  One USDA administrator reckoned, in testimony to Congress: "about fifty."



The problem here is not merely corruption, or the use of race to beat up on people making accusations about corruption.  It is the bigger problem of retributive politics.  Let alone redistributive politics.



What good does it do to hand around free money to any politically favored group when the group as a whole is cratering in the larger economy?



Here we have President Obama, the First Black President.  You'd think he'd really concentrate on formulating policy and executing on it so that the lives of black people would really improve.



You'd think.



But the results are now coming in.  Blacks are doing worse than the average American in the Obama economy.  Much worse.  In January 2009 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent.  In March 2013 it was 7.6 percent.



For whites the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 7.1 percent.  Now it is 6.7 percent.





For blacks the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 12.7 percent.  Now it is 13.3 percent.

For black youth the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 34.8 percent.  Now it is 33.8 percent.

What we are seeing is same old same old.  From a president that promised to transform America.

You can check the numbers here.

So, what's the point of a First Black President if he can't do anything at the macroeconomic level for blacks?

Let's assume that the president really wants to help people of color.  Let's assume that he really wants to improve the lives, and especially the economic lives, of black people.

Given such a record of failure, you would have to assume that the president has pursued exactly the wrong policy to make life better for blacks.  Assuming that he honestly wants to do the right thing, you would have to assume that he doesn't have a clue what the right thing is.  Or worse, that the policy he thinks is the right thing is in fact tragically mistaken, and doesn't help blacks in the least.

In fact we had a curious confirmation of that last week when it turned out the sector that did best economically in the first two years of the Obama administration was the top 7 percent.

Why was that?  Well, the rich did well because their stocks rebounded from the 2008 crash while the home prices for the 93 percent didn't rebound.

Gee now, I wonder why?  Could it be that the average person was encouraged by the government to get way overleveraged by government programs that subsidized home mortgages?  And that the government subsidies led to a bubble in home prices?  And that the government in particular encouraged loans to sub-prime borrowers, particularly minorities?  And that minorities were hardest hit by the subsequent crash in home prices, because they had the least equity in their homes?

Do you think that maybe, after President Obama is gone and that racial minorities no longer have their racial pride to look after, that minority voters will respond to a political meme that declares the Democrats just don't have a clue what they are doing?

Because, really, the economic policy of the Democratic Party is really Pigford writ large.  Democrats believe that the way to help minorities is to find a racial scab and scratch it.  Find a racial wrong and pay reparations to the victims.

But the problem is that after the wrong has been righted and the reparations paid and the free stuff handed out to the Democratic Party supporters, the problem is still there.  

The victims have to get out and get a job.  How would they do that when the Democrats have been training them fo decades to believe in winning the political lottery as the meaning of life?

What End of Entitlement?

Now he tells us.  The age of entitlement is over; the promises are worthless.  That's the word from the Washington Post's sensible Robert Samuelson.

We had a grand vision. We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. We expected business cycles, economic insecurity, poverty, and racism to end. We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. For those who couldn't live life to its fullest (as a result of old age, disability, or bad luck), we expected a generous social safety net to guarantee decent lives. We blurred the distinction between progress and perfection.

There were four big assumptions at the heart of this, according to Samuelson: first, that we could control the business cycle; second, that we could enjoy lifetime jobs at big corporations; third, that improving productivity could pay for bigger government; and fourth, that lifestyle choices came free.



All wrong.  So now what do we do?



No answer, of course.



Let's put it this way.  There is no way we can avoid a crack-up, because people have been told, and believe, that all you need to do, as Samuelson quotes Bill Clinton, is "work hard and play by the rules, [and] you’ll have the freedom and opportunity to pursue your own dreams."



People interpret that to mean that all they have to do is sit on their butts, doing whatever they are doing, and they deserve to get supported by government.  The system will take care of them.



But life's not like that; it never has been.  The idea that hard work and following the rules is necessary and sufficient for the good life is a political chimera.  Yeah!  I put in my time.  I got my benefits coming.  I earned them.



It is not true that all we have to do is design and build a system, whether a corporate system at General Motors or a government system for Social Security and Medicare.  That's not how the world works.  And the neo-Marxists at the Frankfurt School understood that when they said that reason was domination.  Reason is always trying to impose a system on the world, whether it is a system to understand the world, a system to dominate the world, or a system to make the world go away.



You can't reduce the world to a system.  The world changes and adapts and surprises every moment.  To live in the world you have to be willing to change, adapt, and get surprised every moment.  If you don't submit to that then you are setting yourself up to be slapped upside the head.



Like right now.



So now we must start again.  We must wipe away the tears of disappointment, and cool the rage of ill-usage.  We must clear our minds and start to deal with the world as it is, not as we were taught.  Almost all religions call on their adherents to surrender to the world.  You can see why.  You can hope for salvation and for enlightenment, but first you have to live in the world as it is.



Now, of course, we already have remarkable adaptations that humans have developed to cope with the world as it is.  One of them is the family.  Another is the division of labor.  Another is the price system. Another is the credit system.  There is the tapestry of voluntary associations and civil society.  All of these are human social constructs that fall short of rigid system, but wonderfully facilitate human cooperation and sociability.



Think of it.  People care most for those nearest and dearest by blood.  So all societies down the ages have encouraged healthy families.  All except our modern progressives.  People prefer to become master of one rather than a jack of all trades.  But Marx said that the division of labor caused alienation of the worker from his species-essence.  The price system and the credit system are wonderful devices for channeling human labor into the ways that get people what they want and need.  So liberals do everything they can to attack the price system and subvert the credit system.  And civil society is much kinder and more compassionate to human needs and suffering than the force matrix of government.  So liberals destroyed the safety net of fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century.



Why don't we go there and embrace the social adaptations from family to civil society?  Because the serpent tempted me, and I did eat.  Everyone is a sucker for a shortcut; everyone is convinced of his own virtue and his own right to the good things of life.  Everyone likes a birthday gift, a cadeau, a regalo: free stuff.  Hey, we're owed, we're entitled.



Well, now the god of system has failed.  Now we have to pick up the pieces and start again.



The only question is whether we will suck it in or continue to squabble over the fast disappearing spoils of the administrative welfare state up to the very day that the last goodie, the last benefit, the last chunk of free stuff is gone.  Cue the Fram oil filter guy.



Nobody knows how it will all turn out.  But we can work, and we can hope.

The Age of the Scrounger

If you are a conservative or Republican, chances are that you are a member in good standing of the People of the Responsible Self.

Nothing remarkable here.  The Responsible Self was invented during the Axial Age, according to Robert Bellah.  The idea developed that humans were not simply the helpless chattels of the gods but individuals, responsible before God for their lives.  It's the difference between the world of the Iliad in which the Greek warriors win or lose battles according to the politics on Mount Olympus and the world of the Hebrew prophets in which the Jews are urgently advised to get themselves straight with God.

But what about the rank-and-file Democratic voter?  I've been cudgeling my brain for weeks on this, just like dear old Alger Hiss back in the glory days of liberalism.  The key thing about a Democratic voter in the administrative welfare state is that she is not responsible.  She is marginalized, oppressed: a victim, so how could she be blamed for anything?

But what is the word, the one word, for someone like that.  Indignant? Malingering? Childish? Shameless? A day or so I came up with "subordinate," but that doesn't quite do it, because subordinates can be loyal and devoted, and the person I am thinking about is someone that doesn't think of themselves as part of a team but as an ill-used wife.

Wait!  That's it.  We are talking about the People of the Ill-used Self.  She is someone just sitting there, expecting to be taken care of.  Because she has been so ill-used.  Meanwhile she is scrounging off society for whatever is out there going for free.

I am not proposing this lightly, but as part of a comprehensive world view.

You see, back in the old days, humans were all happy campers living a cooperative collective life in the agricultural village.  Life was hard, but the risks and the perils were shared in the primitive communism of e.g. the Russian mir.

OK, in reality it wasn't like that at all because at all times some peasants had a fairly strong title to the land they farmed and others were practically slaves.  But the average agricultural village did pay its taxes in common and did reapportion land periodically in accordance with family size.

Enter the "enclosure" movement.  Our lefty friends like to represent this as the murrain of 1760 to 1850 but it is clear that it started hundreds of years before, as landowners started to acquire exclusive rights to land that had previously been held in common.

What was enclosure all about?  I suspect it had to do with an evolution in agricultural technique so that fewer hands were needed to farm and produce the crops.  But the downside was that people who lived on the margins of a village found themselves unable to access the land they were used to and were thrown on the scrapheap.

You'd expect that people like that would feel ill-used.  And they would be reduced to the life of a scrounger.  The fabled working class and the proletariat were, of course, the people that were thrown off the land in the late 18th and early 19th century and ended up working in textile manufactories and coal mines.  They felt ill-used.  They were right.

Right about then a great social revolution occurred in which the old landed ruling class got replaced by a new ruling class.  People like Karl Marx maintained with great fanfare that the new ruling class was the bourgeoisie, but really, he got it wrong.  The new ruling class was the rising intelligentsia of the 18th century, the coffee-house crowd like Samuel Johnson in England and the Encyclopedists in France.  The new ruling class was a class of educated publicists.  I call them the People of the Creative Self, or the Romantic Self, or the Educated Self.

This new class saw its opportunity and it took it.  It put itself at the head of the great mass of the ill-used, and declared them to be the salt of the earth.

There is no doubt that the folks getting pitched out of the agricultural world during the industrial revolution had a pretty hard time, although just how hard is difficult to determine through the fog of special pleading.  After all, it was in 1800 in Britain that all of a sudden the children of the poor started doing better than their parents in a world of rising expectations.

But the new class turned the worthy People of the Ill-Used Self into the deracinated People of the Scrounger Self, as they transformed the natural fear and rage of a people dispossessed into the institutionalized scrounging of the dependents of the administrative welfare state.

And that is the world in which we live:  the Age of the Scrounger.

Bush's Legacy

As the good and the great attend the opening of President Bush's presidential library people are suddenly discovering that Bush wasn't so bad after all. No kidding!  You mean he wasn't a complete failure and extremist as we have all been ordered to believe?



I suppose that President Bush's biggest failure is that this decent and cooperative president didn't do enough to counter the Democratic campaign to make him into a crazed warmongering extremist.



Because the fact is that the overwhelming majority of his policies were mainstream and bipartisan.  He pushed No Child Left Behind, a centralization and federalization of education that Democrats had to love.  He passed the Medicare Part D drug bill, that had been a Democratic issue for years.



He pushed back on 9/11 to spank the mullahs in Afghanistan, and did regime change in Iraq, which you may recall was Clinton administration policy.  What he did not do was cut and run in 2006 when his Iraq policy was in ruins.



If we turn to the financial crisis, that wasn't about "fighting two wars on a credit card. "



Earth to Democrats: all wars are fought on a credit card.  Ever heard of the National Debt?  What is really bad is running the whole welfare state on a credit card.  As in trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see.



No, the big problem was the easy credit policy that had obtained ever since the Plaza Accord of 1985 ended the hard money policy of the Paul Volker Fed and ended in the Fannie Freddie sub-prime mortgage orgy of the mid 2000s.  What should Bush have done about that?  Hard to say, because the rest of the political establishment was pushing cheap credit right up to the last minute, from Nancy Pelosi complaining about a "jobless recovery" in 2002 to Barney Frank calling for another roll of the Fannie dice in 2004 as the Bushies pushed for reform.



Many conservatives fault Bush for not being conservative enough.  They forget that the country wasn't in a mood for conservatism when Bush ran.  That's why he called himself a "compassionate conservative."  People were all jazzed about the federal budget surplus in 1998 and were ready to loosen the budget strings a little.  So Bush went with the consensus.  After 9/11 Bush felt that he should work on unifying the country for a long twilight war against Islamic extremism, and didn't want to create division.  That's what he meant with his line that he was a uniter not a divider.  Pity that Democrats had other ideas.



The fact is that Bush was a mainstream president, pushing a little to the right, and that is what the nation wanted at the time.  What it needed is something else.



What the nation needs is to get off the death-ride of the administrative welfare state.  What conservatives need to do is persuade the American people that the conservative prescription of limited government and unlimited civil society is a good thing that will both be good for them as individuals and families and good for the nation as a whole.



The problem is liberals.  They own the culture, and they will demonize anything that conservatives propose to "do something" about the mess we are in.  They are the ruling class and that's what ruling classes do.



When we talk about a "pre-revolutionary" situation we mean a situation in which the authority of the ruling class is coming into question.  It means that ordinary people are beginning to question whether the ruling class knows what it is doing.



Think France in the decades coming up to 1789.  The old ruling class of the monarchy and the Church and the nobility went from disaster to disaster and people started to coalesce under the leadership of a new class of thinkers and publicists.  It was the "new class" that is still today the ruling class in the West.



Nothing can change until the present ruling class has staggered from disaster to disaster for a decade or so and had lost its "mandate of heaven."  Then we shall see.



By then, of course, President George W. Bush will be remembered practically as a saint.

People of the Subordinate Self

You and I, we are the People of the Responsible Self.  We think that we are responsible for who we are, what we do, and what we accomplish in life.

But this kind of human is fairly new on the world stage.  According to chaps like Robert Bellah, the Responsible Self appeared during the Axial Age when the great world religions were founded. Notoriously, this movement is exemplified by the Hebrew prophets, who told the Jews over and over again that each one of them stood responsible for their lives before God.

I've been having an email conversation over the past week with a person who doesn't believe that.  I've been toying with ways of describing such people, to contrast with the notion of the People of the Responsible Self.  I've tried People of the Victim Self, People of the Marginalized Self.  But I don't really want to make the name for "other" guy into too much of an insult.

So for today, I am coming up with "People of the Subordinate Self."  Such a person does not think of adversity as his own fault, or even his bad luck.  He thinks of it as society's fault.  It's because of exploitation or inequality.  Or robber barons, or Koch Brothers.

Do we as a nation want to take care or our elderly and disadvantaged and sick and poor or start more wars and continue to allow our nation to deteriorate in education, in infrastructure, in healthcare and in income disparity de[c]imating the middle class even more. 

Of course, my correspondent is not proposing that he should do anything about that.  He thinks that the nation should do something about it.  And the main problem is that the rich don't pay enough.

As I see it, America should be having a revolution to equalize the income disparity and the tax code so the top 1% does pay its fair share!  You ask how much is enough and I told you that the Eisenhower tax rate was 91%, and that is about right.

So I think that the right word for my liberal friend is People of the Subordinate Self.  You have seen people like him where you work.  "Why don't 'they' fix the pot holes around here?" Why doesn't management fix things?  Why don't the rich pay their fair share?  Why do they "continue to allow our nation to deteriorate in education, in infrastructure, in healthcare and in income disparity"?

In a parallel world, one Penelope Trunk is pushing the latest idea that you shouldn't go to college.  Here are the bulleted tips:

1. Skip college
2. Internships instead of school
3. Start a company, not a resume
4. Don't be linear

Most people react with enthusiasm, but some complain that not everyone can be a self-starting entrepreneur.  For, to make her idea work, you have to have a Churchillian obstinacy, and never, never, never, never give up.  Like her.

But that's the difference between the People of the Responsible Self and the People of the Subordinate Self.  It is between people that think that they are responsible for getting on the world, and people that think that the other "they" are responsible.

Mind you, I've always lived curiously in the middle of all this.  I'm not a hard-charging entrepreneur that works, works, works, until something works.  But I've never been someone to sit in a cubicle and whine about the management.  After all, management is human too, and muddling through like me.  

And I've always accepted the basic idea of "employment at will."  Because who would want to work for someone forced to keep you on the payroll by government force.

One thing the People of the Subordinate Self don't seem to get their minds around.  Suppose the political party or the political vision you have adopted fails.  As in: runs out of money for pensions, healthcare, education.  You got a backup plan?

But that is the whole point of the Subordinate Self.  You wait around for the boss to move.  And then you complain when he gets it wrong.

Watching Obama Fail

It's been a grueling 10 years, since the Dems went on the Bush offensive.  It has seemed as though nothing conservatives could do would stop the onslaught.



And the worst of it is that Democratic failures are all put on President Bush.  You can blame Bush all you want for Iraq, but everything else is bad Democratic ideas, from No Child Left Behind to cheap mortgages to stupid stimulus to cheap money and gargantuan deficits.



So conservatives can view the end of the Big Push with relief.  Now, maybe, as the Obamis fumble and bumble, the American people will be willing to listen to a conservative message.



The trouble is that it's not enough.  It is not enough for the American people to give up on liberals about once a generation and vote, sadder and wiser, for a Reagan or the Great White Hope of 2016.  We have seen what ended up after the rebirth of the Reagan Revolution.  It ended up with the locust years of Obama.  The American people voted twice for the most left-wing president since Roosevelt, twice.  And they are getting the same economy as the Roosevelt economy.  Twice.



We know what the problem is.  It's the culture.  No matter what conservatives put forward, it gets buried by the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, the educated class.



It's said that if you have to explain your position you have already lost.  Yes.  No doubt.  But it's important to realize that the Democrats have the media and the schools and Hollywood to do their explaining for them.  The only thing they need to add are the talking points.



Can conservatives ever hope even to an equality in the culture wars?  Probably not.  That is why people like me are reduced to predicting a moral revolution.  It is our only hope.



A moral revolution means that a critical mass of people in America make a moral turn in their lives and coalesce in a religious movement that starts to carry the rest of America with them.  It would not necessarily be a church-based movement, but something more like the civil-rights movement or the pro-life movement.



You can see right away the problem such a movement would have.  It would have to bulldoze through all the attacks from the liberal ruling class.  It would have to be Churchillian, and never, never, never, never give up.  In my view it would have to be a movement of young-to-middle-aged women.  They would have to be insisting on a woman's right to live a woman's life: a life based on love, devotion, chastity, and family.  Why?  Because anything else ends up brutalizing and objectifying and marginalizing women.  Or emptying woman's life of meaning.  I mean life as a career, sex as recreation, life without children.



As we see Obama fail, as he must, because of the poverty of his ideas and the emptiness of the liberal ruling class, we hope for better days.  But until women -- who usually do what they are told until it is too late -- rise up and demand a modern world that respects the life of women and things that have meaning for women, the years after Obama will only be a respite from the reduction of social life to an administrative life, and from association to domination, from society to state.



Until the revolution, then.