Dystopian Oligarchy

[will]

Here's an interesting article by an economist (I think the author is an economist.) I wonder if the Ayn-Rand-o-bots who think increasing wealth concentration is good have ever thought of the logical conclusion.

www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/05/dan-kervick-the-political-economy-of-citadella.html

[kitkat]

bio of author: "Dan Kervick has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts, and is an active independent scholar specializing in the philosophy of David Hume. He also does research in decision theory and analytic metaphysics. He currently works in the book industry for the Baker & Taylor Corporation, and lives in Bow, New Hampshire."

phd in phil. I had a guy with a phd in phil from Berkeley working for me once...as a deckhand. amazing what our society does with people who are brilliant in most anything totally unprofitable...

[sookie]

You know, there's an amazing irony to the previous reply.

[baldrick]

Not really. Our greater society didn't value him for his education and ability to understand the world, so he had to take what he could get to earn some living. In this case, deckhand. What's ironic about that? There are far too many people in the same boat, and yet we cut the number of teachers in our schools, while cranking out Finance MBA's like gumdrops to create more and more "financial instruments", which do nothing but create debt and suck productive capital out of the economy...

[sookie]

1. How do you know he wasn't doing what he wanted?
2. Just because it doesn't command a high salary, does that diminish the work being done?
3. By what metric does a degree in Philosophy have higher value than a deckhand?
4. Aren't you judging this by the same criteria you criticize as immoral, wrong, etc?

[kitkat]

*I* know he wasn't doing what he wanted. He was my close friend before I got him that job. Baldrick has it right.

Having anyone (psychologically and physically healthy) with an IQ over 130 working in a menial occupation is a waste of social resources. Such people are a rarity--a 1% any society squanders at its own risk.

[will]

There are quite a few of those people, though. Some are very happy doing manual work, some are not. There are also those who find ways to support themselves so they can do other things. Then there are those who are members of the lucky sperm club and who are exalted for no reason other than the circumstances of their birth. Same happens the other way. The point of the article is that when wealth and power get concentrated too much, those people who have extraordinary capacities have no choices. They cannot choose to study philosophy and then work as deckhands or study business and climb the corporate ladder, because the peons, namely all of us, are a commodity to be exploited and discarded. No more, no less.

[sookie]

@ Will: I agree in theory with this. The construct is contrived but I think it does illustrate some truths. For example, European royalty have significant restrictions on what they can practically do/be despite their positions of privilege.

kitkat: 130 IQ huh? And he had to settle for a deckhand job? IME, people of high intelligence who end up in such situations NOT by choice either have major psychiatric problems (often schizophrenia or manic-depression) or they have other serious psychosocial problems (drug addiction, pedophilia, narcissism, etc). Not saying it couldn't be that life just beat him down, but honestly, I've not seen that (except in the current instance of talented middle aged/older workers losing their jobs because of the recession).

[will]

Some really smart people are just really odd and can't function in a commercial, commodified world. Yep, the construct is contrived. It's the absurd logical conclusion, but that's sometimes the best place to test the validity of an idea. If the idea is a good one, you can keep pushing it to greater extremes before unfortunate things happen. If it's a bad idea, those unfortunate things happen short of the absurd logical conclusion. Pushing an idea to its farthest conclusion is how I test whether my opinions are valid and consistent or not. It's not hard and fast, because, like most humans, I have wildly inconsistent opinions, probably most of the time, but at least I know they are inconsistent.

The construct is indeed absurd, but when you look at the way the world is headed, you can see echos of the dystopian construct in the current economic and political climate without even squinting your eyes very much.

[kitkat]

That friend of mine was poorly and inappropriately employed because his flavor of philosophy (Cartesian) was out-of-favor within his field. Within academia (liberal arts particularly) when your sub-field is out of fashion for whatever reason, you are unemployable at any but the lower levels (community colleges basically). This sub-field of academia was made worse by the recently (last 25 years) expanded practice of considering college instructors as 'private contractors'--which has made most of *that* field poor by extension.

This is the result of the choices that the macro culture makes, who society rewards and for what. In *my* experience, the _highly_ intelligent who *are* mentally ill (as in sociopathic, narcissistic) are among the *most* successful in this culture--which rewards greed, avarice, ethical compromise etc most generously. (as these vices are transmuted into virtues by capitalism.)

The rest, the *sane* intelligentsia, labor away at whatever their less compromised ethical set allows. And many are thus forced to pursue their passions as avocations rather than as vocations. More's the pity IMO.

==========

Everything that is considered a topic of discussion these days vis a vis our own & the global socio-economic-political-cultural malaise is a part of a symptom set; the disease itself is considered sacrosanct and is _never_ discussed. The disease is the dominant economic system, capitalism, which by definition is cannibalistic on every relevant reality level. It is a human created system which again by definition must consume both its creators and the only planet they can exist upon in order to continue to thrive. It is infinite growth within a finite environment. It is, by definiton once again, unsustainable.

Now virtually everyone will say that this system is the penultimate system, that it *fits* humanity best, that it was in effect naturally selected from among all its (now historical) competition. This prima facie premise is probably why this system is never challenged nor branded as the actual underlying disease in mass discourse.

Art is commonly said to reflect the society which creates it--and gives a window into its mass psyche. As virtually all art, for many years now, has become fundamentally dystopian, one could conclude that humanity indeed _knows_ where it is going...yet is somehow powerless to stop the progression. I cannot even imagine a deeper & more fatal flaw in a self-conscious species' concept of 'civilization'. In fact it meets our own cultural definition of insanity. As a SPECIES. There is no end to the number of functional paradoxes *that* will manifest.

[will]

Pure capitalism is just like any pure system - ultimately a failure. That's the point most Ayn-Rand-o-bod worshipers at the altar of private industry miss. I don't agree that capitalism is inherently bad or inherently the problem. It is the slavish worship of capitalism which is the underlying problem. Capitalism has to be tempered and regulated, because if it is not, the sociopaths who care nothing for humanity but are completely self absorbed and rapacious will eventually wreak havoc, as is happening in the economy now. All systems have to have checks and balances or they become cancerous.

[trash]

Good shit. I got nothin'.

[kitkat]

May 11, 2012 10:39:02 GMT -5 will said:

Pure capitalism is just like any pure system - ultimately a failure. That's the point most Ayn-Rand-o-bod worshipers at the altar of private industry miss. I don't agree that capitalism is inherently bad or inherently the problem. It is the slavish worship of capitalism which is the underlying problem. Capitalism has to be tempered and regulated, because if it is not, the sociopaths who care nothing for humanity but are completely self absorbed and rapacious will eventually wreak havoc, as is happening in the economy now. All systems have to have checks and balances or they become cancerous.

well, guess what? The sole check to capitalism, INDEPENDENTLY EMPOWERED nation state gov'ts, are _gone_. They have all been co-opted by the capitalists (sociopaths who care nothing for humanity but are completely self absorbed and rapacious). So enjoy the cancer.

Actually *individuals* are not really the primary problem. It is the modern corporate organism. It functions to allow the above sociopaths and non-sociopaths alike to *function* within society in a wholly sociopathic manner--and without consequence, to the organization or the individuals operating under its protection. The primary purpose of a modern corporation is to shield it's members from personal responsibility & liability. It has been this way for a long time and is reified in one of the most famous and embittering quotes in our entire culture: "It's nothing personal; it's just business."

And capitalism *is* "inherently bad". The reason is that the system allows profit without labor; profit without production. It is actually _built_ upon those concepts. It is gain without pain, the penultimate _free lunch_. A system such as that is antithetical to any moral/ethical system which has the public good at its heart. It corrupts, just as we are seeing it corrupt now and just as it corrupted society in the past (pre-WWII).

The tragedy is humanity is apparently helpless to change it into something sustainable and moral. Humanity isn't even looking; humanity doesn't even openly recognize what a fatal error this system represents for the species as a whole--and conceivably the whole damn planet.

Mores the pity. At least the universe is vast...there is hope of a sort in that as maybe something intelligent somewhere else managed to get it right...