House of Eratosthenes

Liberalism is a bad sales job, and therefore will always have a division in its midst between those who are being duped and those who are doing the duping. Just like an ass will always have a crack.

I was expounding on this point last night on my Hello Kitty of Blogging account.

Left-wing policies hurt the very people they’re supposed to help; right-wingers know this, by-n-large, but do the lefties? The answer to THAT question is key to understanding the left-wing movement in modern America.

It is the Pareto Principle in action. Eighty percent of this knowledge that left-wing policies are bad, is monopolized by twenty percent of the left-wingers, with the remaining eighty percent of them doe-eyed, innocent, mostly well-intentioned. And there’s some selfishness in there too: They figure if we have some sort of wealth-redistribution scheme underway that isn’t underway already, they stand to benefit.

This mixture of good intentions and soft selfishness, is worthy of discussion. At the very heart of this thought process, this “bigger half of the ass,” the duped-people subscribe to a number of articles of faith:

1. Capitalism — and there is remarkably little confusion about what exactly that word means — doesn’t work. It is a sucker’s game.
2. It is like multi-level marketing. It will pay off, for those who are in early and out early; the ones who fail to bail out will be left holding the bag.
3. HOWEVER…individuals cannot make the decision to bail out, it takes a certain number of people to pool their resources and bail out together, stiffing everyone else.
4. So, fuck everyone else and let’s get ours! Are you with me?

So these eighty percent of the liberals who possess no more than twenty percent of the understanding, seek to form a community. It is greater in size than a single individual, but it is less than everyone, because someone has to be left holding the bag. They feel like they’re in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: “If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison…” That’s the plan, A is going to betray B, they figure they’re A, except there is some antecedent action in the story — B has already stuck it to A in some fashion, so B has it comin’. That would explain all this chatter we’ve been hearing for the last couple of years about “the ninety-nine percent,” “one percent,” et al. One percent of the people have 99 percent of the wealth and vice versa…massive inequality…they seem to inwardly sense that these stats are made-up and can’t be trusted, but it doesn’t matter because there is some inequality there, of which the homily is only tangentially representative, the way an ancient fable might be only figuratively connected to something that actually happened. The inequality directly translates to injustice. You have more than me, that somehow can’t possibly mean you did something to earn the loot that I didn’t do — that is, in some way, preemptively eliminated as a possibility. If you have something I don’t have, there must have been an equal allotment of whatever it is, and then when I wasn’t looking you must have stolen my share.

So they’re in the prisoner’s dilemma, but it isn’t a dilemma for them at all, because, payback. The only “dilemma” is to do the getting-out, right now, and screw that other guy before he figures out what’s up. And they can’t do it alone. They need to do it as part of a group.

The dupers — well, they’re easier to study, even though they’re deeper thinkers. They’ve simply found a way to provide this temptation and take their cut. The more the dupees are duped, the easier it is to dupe them some more, so you have to ask yourself: Why would the dupers ever stop? Of course they wouldn’t and they won’t. There’s no incentive to make an honest living here. We can’t make them listen to reason. The way to save the country is to ram something up that ass, split it in half. Separate the duped from the dupers who are duping them.

There’s a trick there. Clearly, if what’s motivating them is “fuck everyone else and let’s get ours” then they aren’t entirely well-intentioned. Nor can it be said they’re entirely missing the capacity for good intentions, either. What they’re missing is maturity. They don’t trust capitalism. Maybe they feel they’ve been given the shaft by it. And they probably have. Capitalism does give a lot of people the shaft. The case could be made that it gives everyone the shaft. Look into the lives of the people who win at it all the time; look closely, and you’ll find they haven’t always won. They lost here and there, it’s just nobody ever talks about it. As you gather more and more information, you see a pattern emerge strongly suggesting that that’s the real secret to success. You just get up after you’ve been knocked down. Acquire new relationships, get rid of others, after you find out some people are going to do right by you and others aren’t.

But you find this all out after you have paid attention. Our modern society’s current infatuation with hardcore liberalism, the extremist techno-liberalism that pretends to be building great and grand new things while it does nothing but wreck the wonderful things that were already there…it is rooted firmly in a case of cultural ADD. Few-to-no people can pay attention to anything for too long. Liberalism is an easy sell in this landscape, because “get that guy before he gets you” is such a short and seductive message. The rebuttal against it is considerably longer, lacking that adrenaline surge associated with sweet, sweet revenge. It’s boring. And it consists mostly of unanswerable questions, like “If you’re building something great and grand, then what exactly is it? And how well does it work?” That doesn’t excite the attention-span-deprived, and it doesn’t draw in the selfish, because it doesn’t offer them anything.

To save the country, we need statements.

And we have to aim them at the early-recruits. The ones who are not quite yet at the stage of “fuck that other guy before he fucks with us.” That’s too late.

The target audience has to be the “centrist” who has just read some sad-sack story. Gay guys who can’t get married, single mom with breast cancer losing her health insurance, young dude who can’t get a job, Yale law school slut who has to pay for her own contraceptives…

I’m coming to be aware of a lot of this fresh-recruit propaganda has to do with economic classes. That’s been going on since at least the 1930’s, but with a hardcore liberal President we’re living under a renewed push. So-and-so works really, really, super duper hard, and yet he only makes one eight-hundredth as much as the boss. Or one ten-thousandth. So unfair!

How do you talk to people who are falling for this? After all, we all know how it plays out: If it isn’t fair, we need some external influence to make it fair, involving student subsidies, minimum wages, more regulations, and higher taxes. By the time someone asks the obvious question of “Waitaminnit, how do these things actually improve anything for anybody, long-term?” everybody’s lost interest and moved on to something else. What a short path it is between sympathetic murmurs and destructive impulses. Actually building something is pretty tedious. Takes a year to build the barn and a day to knock it down.

I went on to suggest the following…

Here’s how you talk to the ignorant, mostly-innocent, mostly-well-intentioned majority:

“I notice, Republicans [conservatives] do not seem to want to hurt poor people, nearly as much as democrats [liberals] want to hurt rich people…”

“Yes, they want fewer poor people the same way democrats want fewer rich people, but they don’t want the poor people to go away the way democrats want rich people to go away. They seem to want the poor people to stop being poor, which, I think, for the most part, those poor people would be just fine with that…democrats, on the other hand, appear to want to bring ACTUAL harm to rich people.” And discuss from there.

Of course, we don’t know any of this for sure. It’s an easy thing to target a class and say there’s something wrong with it being there. Much more difficult to say what exactly you want to have happen to the people who are in it. Adolf Hitler did manage to get that done, eventually, but what about the rest of us. I think if we can all agree on anything, we can all agree that’s not a good model for us to follow.

The right-wing has a ready solution for this, and quite a lot of distance between them and Hitler’s final solution, because our poor people don’t want to be poor. Well, by-n-large they don’t. Lots of people who can’t get jobs, want to be able to get a job. It’s not so easy to say the same thing about rich people. Isn’t this just obvious? Rich people would rather be rich than poor…poor people would rather be rich than poor…

While we’re still in “no duh” territory, it becomes obvious that the lefties want to do something destructive to the rich people, while they’re observing worriedly that there, ya know, are some rich people. More rich people than they’d like. How do they intend to thin the ranks? Load them up in boxcars? Banish them? Vaporize them? Make them poor? Does it really matter which one it is? It’s all destructive.

A right-winger wanting poor people to be rich, is not similarly destructive. That’s, like, uh…the way it’s supposed to work. Remember that?

Great stuff here, Morgan. Nicely written.

So-and-so works really, really, super duper hard, and yet he only makes one eight-hundredth as much as the boss. Or one ten-thousandth. So unfair!

I’m starting to wonder if this isn’t the key to everything. It used to be taken as given that life isn’t fair. Because, you know, life’s not fair, and there it is. Time was, an appreciation of the unfairness of life would combine with religious or philanthropic sentiment to cause individual A to do something tangible directly for individual B. Then it shifted to “voting for the government to do something tangible directly for B’s social class.” And then to “signing a petition that says the government ought to do something for classes like B’s.” And now we’re down to clicking “like” on Facebook posts expressing abstract sympathy for anyone anywhere who might be construed to resemble B, and “dislike” on anything that might be construed as a criticism of those who abstractly support those who abstractly sympathize with anything vaguely resembling B.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that people have mistaken feeling for doing.

Our individual scope is pretty limited. A Facebook example: A lot of my friends put up stuff about rescue animals, puppy mills, etc. All of which are horrifying and make me feel bad. Buuuuuut, what can I actually do about it? I can, and do, refuse to buy a pet from a pet store. I can, and do, get my pets from animal shelters. I can, and do, encourage people I actually know to do the same. And that’s it. Even if everyone I know takes my words and deeds to heart, I’ve directly affected a few dozen people. Tops. That’s the limit of an individual’s power.

But so many people refuse to recognize it. It’s shocking how many people get upset that I won’t sign a petition to end puppy mills. So we all agree to click a thumbs up button on a Facebook page that says “end puppy mills.” And this accomplishes….what, exactly? There’s no proposed course of action. There’s no pledge of personal reform. It’s just an expression of assent to the feeling that puppy mills are bad. Worst of all, since the types of folks who gin up these petitions tend to believe that all corporations are inherently heartless, “liking” one is consciously futile. You’re doing something that by definition makes no difference whatsoever… and then getting mad at other people for not doing it too.

We need to break this somehow. Tie feeling to action. If you must have a petition, make it like those old temperance pledges — “by clicking like, you promise never to buy a pet at a pet store.” If you really think person B got screwed by life, do something to help him, with your own sweat and out of your own pocket. Pretty soon you’ll learn the scope of your own power to affect change. You’ll still feel horrified at those ASPCA ads, but at least you won’t persist in the the illusion that you’re helping one single animal by shedding a tear then switching the channel.
- Severian | 01/15/2014 @ 09:57
OT
Along with my usual drivel about Classic “childrens” stories superiority in describing the human condition
in contrast to “Latest (& alia, ad nauseam) Studies PROVE….”

Fiddler on the Roof is ONE of the movies I often cite for describing ALL it’s conflicting aspects.
In case anyone’s um…forgot..I often ALSO ramble on about
The Full Monty
Second Hand Lions
They Live
Idiocracy

Of course, none of these are deemed “popular” by flash folks.
- CaptDMO | 01/15/2014 @ 17:22
[…] to Morgan’s thoughts on the duped (with which I 100% […]
- Idiots Ruin All the Good Theories | Rotten Chestnuts | 01/16/2014 @ 08:37
I love, love, love this! I am going to forward it to my son and hope he reads it. I am sure he will snark about it but I am sending it anyway.
- jeniferbrd | 01/16/2014 @ 14:38
I like very much your passage on the liberals wanting the hurt the rich but the conservatives don’t want to hurt the poor. I think it was Ted Kennedy who said something to the effect that both sides in the political arena want the same thing, but they just have different means by which to get there. I think that used to be true, but I believe that now the Liberals want something very different, that they truly do want the fundamental transformation of America that Obama promised, an America where endowed rights and freedoms are a quaint thing of the past. An America where individuals cannot work hard to better themselves and society, for that is the job of the Government
- IcelandSpar | 01/18/2014 @ 10:26
This is a crucial thing to understand, and it’s at the root of why most limited-government “libertarians” have no choice but to accept the very premises every commie on the planet uses, and ultimately, when pushed to it, will soon enough start arguing just like a commie.

It’s inevitable.

The root of the problem is laziness and dishonesty, both a product of two of the basest human emotions/motivations: fear and greed. To state it another way: humanity involves, most simply, the conscious and principled discipline and control of fear and greed, which one has no choice but to experience as a higher biological organism.

A good way to think about how the non-human homo sapiens respond to fear and greed is that they seek to hoard profits and spread losses. The chief motivation is laziness and chief tool to satisfy all is dishonesty. The interesting thing about dishonesty — self, other directed, and institutionalized — is that the better one is at it (the more dishonest) the less detectable and more powerful it is.

What’s interesting about laziness is how hard people work at not producing tradeable values. Consider a bum on the exit ramp day in, day out. I’ve seen some of them work their asses off at begging in the hot, cold, and rainy for years on end. How much easier it would be to work at a job?

It’s the labor theory of value. The lazy look to a world where raw physical activity, disconnected from any other requirements, is of paramount value.

To look at it in its plainest form, there are those advocating that some fears are just too great not to force others to pay for general anesthesia, and the argument turns on which anesthesia and in what dosage is most “efficient” and “useful.” Hey, maybe we can “privatize” the production and delivery of it, which still doesn’t address the root laziness, dishonesty, individual responsibility or accountability.

Then there are those, “the nouveaux ancaps,” who rightfully understand that you can’t hold consistently to individualist principle and advocate any degree of state coercion, but have failed to understand that the state is an effect of a deeper problem (as outlined above). They think that you have to win friends and influence people by trying to explain that life would be so much better without the state.

But you can’t truly understand anarchism until you accept that it doesn’t matter what society “would be like” without the state. It’s not the issue. The issue is that nobody has any right to chain me to their fears or satisfy their greed at my involuntary expense and anyone who thinks otherwise, even just a little tiny bit can just go fuck right off and there’s simply no kind way to put that.
- ghostsniper | 01/18/2014 @ 20:15
“Dangerous levels of schmaltz“
- Zachriel | 02/07/2014 @ 09:30
Oops, wrong thread.
- Zachriel | 02/07/2014 @ 09:31

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Talk to the DupedWednesday, January 15th, 2014

Talk to the Duped
Wednesday, January 15th, 2014