Lessons from a Commie
Many of you may not know, but part of my work involves editing computer-generated video and audio transcripts for captioning. I get some really interesting files across my desk sometimes, and one of them not too long ago was of an interview with the scion of a wealthy industrialist.
The following is a long ramble I'm going ahead and putting up, unedited. I'll probably at some point edit these various thoughts down into a tight piece, but not today. Read it if you want, if it bores you, you were warned.
Continuing on, the kid--now adult--was originally intending to follow in Daddy's footsteps and take over the moderately large family business. He was also very religious, and did a lot of volunteer work growing up and in college.
He ended up taking a vow of poverty and moving into what amounts to an urban monastery, of sorts, that serves the poor and homeless.
I'm not naming the guy or the organization because there are many things I disagree with him/them about, vehemently. However, one thing he said did strike a chord with me, and it was apparently the thought that was fundamental to his giving up his inheritance and applying his skills and talents in direct service.
Apparently, his turning point came in college, in his economics class. I figure most people reading this will have had enough macro economics to know that in a market economy, an economy at full employment that's booming and ticking along just great has, what, maybe 4 to 6 percent unemployment? And that's "unemployment" the way it's defined in the national statistics. It doesn't count under-employment or people who have just given up towards that 4 to 6 percent.
Most of us look at that and see it, reasonably, as that 4 to 6 percent being people who are in the middle of changing from one job to another, and just reflects the grease that keeps the economic gears from locking up. And there's a lot of merit to that POV, because if unemployment gets lower than about 4 percent, historically the gears do seize up one way or another and we go from boom to bust.
This guy, from his perspective as an employer---someone who grew up knowing his dad didn't have a job hired by someone else, his dad hired other people, and knowing that he himself would never be dependent on a job working for someone else, that he would be management and hire people--this guy looked at the system itself, not just his family company, from the POV of management. And from the POV of a very high-empathy, high-conscience guy who had a lot of direct experience with the poor. His experience was not casual anecdotes from others, or knowing one or two people. His experience was knowing a lot of poor people.
And what he determined was, "There is something wrong with a system that, by design, requires 6 percent of people to be jobless in order for the system to function--a system that depends on having that pool of 6 percent desperate people."
He didn't say he had a better system. He didn't say there was a better system. He didn't say he had a solution to the problem. He just said, "Hey. What about those 6 percent? The system requires that at any given time, for 94% to have some value of winning, 6% be actively losing."
His implication and perception was that people like his family, although they were running the business in as moral and compassionate a way as they could, were still operating at the expense of the 6 percent.
And his conclusion of what to do about it wasn't to stop working and smoke dope, it was to go actively spend his full time living and working with that 6 percent. He made a voluntary, personal choice.
Now, I can't say I idolize or idealize this guy, because there are soooo many other things about him that piss me off. Again, why I'm not naming him.
Sometimes we--and I've usually been among the 94% winning at any given time--blame the 6% for their plight.
We take the attributes characteristic of losing and sniff, and look down our noses, and say that if only those people weren't engaging in those behaviors, they wouldn't be losing.
Only--it's not exactly true. The mythology behind the blame is that everybody could be winning if they just behaved right. It's not true. Because even if everybody was behaving right, there would still be that 4 to 6 percent at the bottom of the competence and functionality bell curve who would be losing. There has to be. Because if there weren't, the gears of the system would seize up and it would crash.
People being human and imperfect, if we postulate that everybody somehow managed to miraculously cut all their flaws in half starting tomorrow. The people who were late would be late half as much, half as often. The people who drank too much would drink half as much, on average, half as often. Because we aren't just cutting a single flaw by half. We're cutting everyone's flaws in half. Swear, lie, overspend, fail to reconcile your checkbook, procrastinate---some blessed hand from on high reaches down and smites us with self-improvement and we're all, across the board, half as flawed as we have been up until today.
Right.
There are still 6 percent of people who are not the best guy for the job, it's still the same larger range of people that spend a much higher than average part of their lives in that 6 percent at any one time. At any one time, there are still 6 percent losing. And they're the same folks.
They're twice as good as they were before. They're genuinely less flawed people. They're as good as lots of people who currently have jobs and are doing jobs in reality today. It's obviously not that they're to blame for their flaws and could do just fine if only they'd behave better.
At least a large part of it is that somebody has to lose, or we have no game.
Notice that this observation isn't a prescription for what to do about this problem. It's just an observation on the nature of blame and the nature of people with a higher than average share of flaws, and the nature of the system.
I do not have a better system to suggest. I do not have a better answer.
Somebody has to lose for this system to work. It's a myth that if everybody behaved well enough nobody would be losing. It's a utopian myth--an absolute of, "The system would be paradise on Earth if those people weren't lazy bums, or infidels, or running-dog capitalists, or [pick your system's scapegoat]."
I support the market economy. I don't think I need to go into listing all its positives. I think it's better than anything else we've got.
But when we stereotype the poor as lazy, dishonest, lacking self-discipline, lacking moral character, etc.---recognize that we're doing it to make ourselves feel better. We feel better about the flaws inherent in the system if we tell ourselves that the people who are losing deserve to lose.
It's better to be a winner than a loser---no question.
There are people among the poor who are lazy gits---no question.
But we all have a natural human tendency overestimate the percentage of the poor who are [insert stereotypes here] because we're nice people and we feel bad about the flaws of the system, and when nice people are faced with suffering they can't fix, they tend to salve the pain of irrational guilt by pretending those problems don't exist. That the suffering is the fault of the sufferers and is just.
It's not that we believe the suffering is just all the time, or that all poor people are lazy or whatever. It's that we vastly overestimate how often the suffering is deserved. And, ironically, we make this error because we are nice, and it's so painful to face the hard truth.
People lose and suffer. Their suffering is overwhelmingly undeserved. We cannot fix that. There are no good solutions to this problem.
Conservatives aren't just mean when they overestimate blame onto the suffering--they're just being human. Liberals are not right when they tell us they could solve the problems if only the meanie conservatives would get out of the way. The problem is fundamentally unsolvable. Conservatives--nice people--alleviate their own pain over the truth by Denial. Liberals--nice people--alleviate their own pain over the truth by a different kind of denial. The liberals try too hard to fix an unfixable problem, with the result of self-destruction.
The nasty truth? There are no good answers, and even though the best system we can put together will still have losses we have to hold people personally responsible for, they are very frequently not to blame for their suffering.
There are no good answers to deal with reality perfectly, or even close to perfectly. But some answers are less bad than others.
Here we get to the "so what" part of this ramble. To get the least bad responses in dealing with reality, you first have to accept and acknowledge reality. Even when reality is painful.
So conservatives? The suffering of the poor is overwhelmingly not their fault. Quit kidding yourselves.
Liberals? The suffering of the poor is not conservatives' fault. Quit kidding yourselves.
It's not conservatives' fault through causing it, and not through getting in your way when you try to fix it. It's not fixable, and you take your efforts to fix it anyway to levels that are self-destructive to society. If the conservatives didn't get in your way and slow you down, the results would be disastrous. We'd get to disaster a lot faster, anyway.
Fellow voters? Any politician who tells you he has solutions is a liar or a fool, or both. Same for political parties.
Our country is in the shit. Big time. There are no solutions. However, there are some strategies that are better at managing the problems than others.
So fellow voters? Every time you look at a politician, from your party or the other or whatever, don't look at who thinks who is stupid or evil or mean or naive. Don't look at who just sees the world all wrong. Look at the concrete problems and the specific strategies for approaching them.
For liberals? Your spending is way beyond self-destructive. Your environmental solutions are way beyond self-destructive. Approve some damn refineries and wells and nuke plants and coal exploitation--enough to take into account our demand growth, China's demand growth, and replace this whole ethanol business. People are starving because you decided it was a good idea to burn food--40% of the US annual corn crop. It was a lousy idea. The only way out of it is domestic energy development writ large. Or some other really hard and painful sacrifices of what you'd rather do--sacrifices that will seriously harm real people. Unavoidably.
For conservatives? There's got to be a safety net. It's got to include a lot of help for people who are poor kids, or fully disabled, or partially disabled, or disabled by old age, or knocked out of the market by discrimination. Funding it hurts. A whole lot more of those fully or partially disabled people really are fully or partially disabled than you think. A whole lot of drug and alcohol addictions are secondary conditions in people who already have major psychiatric disabilities. Whether drug and alcohol addictions should be considered diseases or not, a whole lot of addicts and alcoholics have diseases that--even if the alcoholism or addiction came first--had the genes for their other disabilities. Blame is the easy way out. Think cost/benefits, not blame, because yeah, the problems still aren't fixable, and you still have to tell the liberals "no" on overspending.
The following is a long ramble I'm going ahead and putting up, unedited. I'll probably at some point edit these various thoughts down into a tight piece, but not today. Read it if you want, if it bores you, you were warned.
Continuing on, the kid--now adult--was originally intending to follow in Daddy's footsteps and take over the moderately large family business. He was also very religious, and did a lot of volunteer work growing up and in college.
He ended up taking a vow of poverty and moving into what amounts to an urban monastery, of sorts, that serves the poor and homeless.
I'm not naming the guy or the organization because there are many things I disagree with him/them about, vehemently. However, one thing he said did strike a chord with me, and it was apparently the thought that was fundamental to his giving up his inheritance and applying his skills and talents in direct service.
Apparently, his turning point came in college, in his economics class. I figure most people reading this will have had enough macro economics to know that in a market economy, an economy at full employment that's booming and ticking along just great has, what, maybe 4 to 6 percent unemployment? And that's "unemployment" the way it's defined in the national statistics. It doesn't count under-employment or people who have just given up towards that 4 to 6 percent.
Most of us look at that and see it, reasonably, as that 4 to 6 percent being people who are in the middle of changing from one job to another, and just reflects the grease that keeps the economic gears from locking up. And there's a lot of merit to that POV, because if unemployment gets lower than about 4 percent, historically the gears do seize up one way or another and we go from boom to bust.
This guy, from his perspective as an employer---someone who grew up knowing his dad didn't have a job hired by someone else, his dad hired other people, and knowing that he himself would never be dependent on a job working for someone else, that he would be management and hire people--this guy looked at the system itself, not just his family company, from the POV of management. And from the POV of a very high-empathy, high-conscience guy who had a lot of direct experience with the poor. His experience was not casual anecdotes from others, or knowing one or two people. His experience was knowing a lot of poor people.
And what he determined was, "There is something wrong with a system that, by design, requires 6 percent of people to be jobless in order for the system to function--a system that depends on having that pool of 6 percent desperate people."
He didn't say he had a better system. He didn't say there was a better system. He didn't say he had a solution to the problem. He just said, "Hey. What about those 6 percent? The system requires that at any given time, for 94% to have some value of winning, 6% be actively losing."
His implication and perception was that people like his family, although they were running the business in as moral and compassionate a way as they could, were still operating at the expense of the 6 percent.
And his conclusion of what to do about it wasn't to stop working and smoke dope, it was to go actively spend his full time living and working with that 6 percent. He made a voluntary, personal choice.
Now, I can't say I idolize or idealize this guy, because there are soooo many other things about him that piss me off. Again, why I'm not naming him.
Sometimes we--and I've usually been among the 94% winning at any given time--blame the 6% for their plight.
We take the attributes characteristic of losing and sniff, and look down our noses, and say that if only those people weren't engaging in those behaviors, they wouldn't be losing.
Only--it's not exactly true. The mythology behind the blame is that everybody could be winning if they just behaved right. It's not true. Because even if everybody was behaving right, there would still be that 4 to 6 percent at the bottom of the competence and functionality bell curve who would be losing. There has to be. Because if there weren't, the gears of the system would seize up and it would crash.
People being human and imperfect, if we postulate that everybody somehow managed to miraculously cut all their flaws in half starting tomorrow. The people who were late would be late half as much, half as often. The people who drank too much would drink half as much, on average, half as often. Because we aren't just cutting a single flaw by half. We're cutting everyone's flaws in half. Swear, lie, overspend, fail to reconcile your checkbook, procrastinate---some blessed hand from on high reaches down and smites us with self-improvement and we're all, across the board, half as flawed as we have been up until today.
Right.
There are still 6 percent of people who are not the best guy for the job, it's still the same larger range of people that spend a much higher than average part of their lives in that 6 percent at any one time. At any one time, there are still 6 percent losing. And they're the same folks.
They're twice as good as they were before. They're genuinely less flawed people. They're as good as lots of people who currently have jobs and are doing jobs in reality today. It's obviously not that they're to blame for their flaws and could do just fine if only they'd behave better.
At least a large part of it is that somebody has to lose, or we have no game.
Notice that this observation isn't a prescription for what to do about this problem. It's just an observation on the nature of blame and the nature of people with a higher than average share of flaws, and the nature of the system.
I do not have a better system to suggest. I do not have a better answer.
Somebody has to lose for this system to work. It's a myth that if everybody behaved well enough nobody would be losing. It's a utopian myth--an absolute of, "The system would be paradise on Earth if those people weren't lazy bums, or infidels, or running-dog capitalists, or [pick your system's scapegoat]."
I support the market economy. I don't think I need to go into listing all its positives. I think it's better than anything else we've got.
But when we stereotype the poor as lazy, dishonest, lacking self-discipline, lacking moral character, etc.---recognize that we're doing it to make ourselves feel better. We feel better about the flaws inherent in the system if we tell ourselves that the people who are losing deserve to lose.
It's better to be a winner than a loser---no question.
There are people among the poor who are lazy gits---no question.
But we all have a natural human tendency overestimate the percentage of the poor who are [insert stereotypes here] because we're nice people and we feel bad about the flaws of the system, and when nice people are faced with suffering they can't fix, they tend to salve the pain of irrational guilt by pretending those problems don't exist. That the suffering is the fault of the sufferers and is just.
It's not that we believe the suffering is just all the time, or that all poor people are lazy or whatever. It's that we vastly overestimate how often the suffering is deserved. And, ironically, we make this error because we are nice, and it's so painful to face the hard truth.
People lose and suffer. Their suffering is overwhelmingly undeserved. We cannot fix that. There are no good solutions to this problem.
Conservatives aren't just mean when they overestimate blame onto the suffering--they're just being human. Liberals are not right when they tell us they could solve the problems if only the meanie conservatives would get out of the way. The problem is fundamentally unsolvable. Conservatives--nice people--alleviate their own pain over the truth by Denial. Liberals--nice people--alleviate their own pain over the truth by a different kind of denial. The liberals try too hard to fix an unfixable problem, with the result of self-destruction.
The nasty truth? There are no good answers, and even though the best system we can put together will still have losses we have to hold people personally responsible for, they are very frequently not to blame for their suffering.
There are no good answers to deal with reality perfectly, or even close to perfectly. But some answers are less bad than others.
Here we get to the "so what" part of this ramble. To get the least bad responses in dealing with reality, you first have to accept and acknowledge reality. Even when reality is painful.
So conservatives? The suffering of the poor is overwhelmingly not their fault. Quit kidding yourselves.
Liberals? The suffering of the poor is not conservatives' fault. Quit kidding yourselves.
It's not conservatives' fault through causing it, and not through getting in your way when you try to fix it. It's not fixable, and you take your efforts to fix it anyway to levels that are self-destructive to society. If the conservatives didn't get in your way and slow you down, the results would be disastrous. We'd get to disaster a lot faster, anyway.
Fellow voters? Any politician who tells you he has solutions is a liar or a fool, or both. Same for political parties.
Our country is in the shit. Big time. There are no solutions. However, there are some strategies that are better at managing the problems than others.
So fellow voters? Every time you look at a politician, from your party or the other or whatever, don't look at who thinks who is stupid or evil or mean or naive. Don't look at who just sees the world all wrong. Look at the concrete problems and the specific strategies for approaching them.
For liberals? Your spending is way beyond self-destructive. Your environmental solutions are way beyond self-destructive. Approve some damn refineries and wells and nuke plants and coal exploitation--enough to take into account our demand growth, China's demand growth, and replace this whole ethanol business. People are starving because you decided it was a good idea to burn food--40% of the US annual corn crop. It was a lousy idea. The only way out of it is domestic energy development writ large. Or some other really hard and painful sacrifices of what you'd rather do--sacrifices that will seriously harm real people. Unavoidably.
For conservatives? There's got to be a safety net. It's got to include a lot of help for people who are poor kids, or fully disabled, or partially disabled, or disabled by old age, or knocked out of the market by discrimination. Funding it hurts. A whole lot more of those fully or partially disabled people really are fully or partially disabled than you think. A whole lot of drug and alcohol addictions are secondary conditions in people who already have major psychiatric disabilities. Whether drug and alcohol addictions should be considered diseases or not, a whole lot of addicts and alcoholics have diseases that--even if the alcoholism or addiction came first--had the genes for their other disabilities. Blame is the easy way out. Think cost/benefits, not blame, because yeah, the problems still aren't fixable, and you still have to tell the liberals "no" on overspending.