INNUMERANT CAPITALISM

Michael Erard is the author of an essay on Aeon, an online feed of valuable thought and entertaining observation that is slightly more sophisticated than many outlets.  The authors are often high-prestige and worth following in other venues, like YouTube lectures.

https://aeon.co/essays/the-roots-of-writing-lie-in-hopes-and-dreams-not-in-accounting?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b0c7e6cf67-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_05_04_01_15&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-b0c7e6cf67-71327272

The premise of this essay in Aeon is that though most people learn that the roots of modern literacy are in math, keeping track of transactions and developing the geometry of land ownership after floods of the Nile River, there is another early use of symbolism (preliterate) that is in painted caves or arranged circles of stones meant to record astronomical phenomena like midsummer.  Clearly the division between the use of math and words -- both symbolisms that began the creation of cultures and nations -- is real and defensible.

Almost as soon as the test for “innumeracy” was devised, I had to admit that my score was low, which was a quick blow to my arrogant pride in my IQ.  (It's not very big.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29

The next blow came from repeatedly flunking a college course in Statistics.  I finally passed the first of a two part course, but the professor I could understand retired before I mastered the second part.  The residue of this struggle is in realizing that most of the numbers that dominate the news, particularly about the pandemic, are bogus.  Evidently people who become reporters never passed statistics either. 

The third humbling realization came from moving to Valier.  Everyone here is an expert at arithmetic — the guys from doing constant back-of-the-envelope figuring about managing wheat fields or stock outcomes and the women from bookkeeping and comparative shopping, often online.  This is not a culture that values poetry, though they enjoy a good story. I am a person who finds numbers toxic, not a good fit and a worse employee.

The Aeon essay claim about the “religious” uses of words is valid in my experience, even if you consider patriotism to be a formal religion, based on national allegiance and the similarity of the group, which is reinforced by credos, pledges of allegiance, and singing in unison.  Much of our “feeling” about what is right and successful comes from watching the guy next to us — never more than in an agricultural community.  Chanting in a group wearing the same hat is part of Trump’s successful strategy in this red state, even if we have a blue and honored governor.

I take a slightly different approach to capitalism than most people.  I see bureaucracy as needing numbers as a guide, which makes bureaucrats controllable by simply miscounting or by hiding actual numbers.  Thus, the fairly successful illusion that this pandemic is less widespread than it really is.  Luckily, resourceful people have learned that if they are prevented from testing individuals, they can still measure sewage to figure out how much the virus has infected the population.  And to discover the extent of a-symptomatic infection at the level of fatalities, it is possible to graph death rates for various periods and places.  Maybe not all the isolated deaths have been properly reported, but it’s hard to hide rotting bodies, even when the dead were living rough because they were homeless.

If bureaucracy is always seen as capital maximization, its value as “venture capitalism” to start new businesses is lost.  “Capitalism, economic system, dominant in the Western world since the breakup of feudalism, in which most means of production are privately held and production, prices, and incomes are determined by markets.”  But the exchangeability of money and land have created a major opportunity for corrupt forces to “launder” the bookkeeping that lets them steal ownership of assets.

It’s not just the unreality and exchangeability of capital that open the door to games, but also the dependence on credit with interest.  Even the altruism of venture investment is denied when interest is too high, a practice so old that it’s in the Bible.  “Usury (/ ˈ j uː ʒ ər i /) is the practice of making unethical or immoral monetary loans that unfairly enrich the lender. The term may be used in a moral sense—condemning, taking advantage of others' misfortunes—or in a legal sense, where an interest rate is charged in excess of the maximum rate that is allowed by law.  (American Heritage dictionary).”

Many games have been devised: bundling assets of various quality, convincing mutual funds for retirement to be entrusted to companies that could go bankrupt, mincing ownership into small parts but running the whole by a corrupt and secret committee.  

The use of credit and even of interest is effective and even benign or necessary unless it is joined with the governmental ability to set up "situations", like wages that are not high enough to meet the cost of living, to force people to borrow at high rates.  This is easier to recognize when mafia indulges in protection rackets — pay us or we’ll wreck your store and kill your family — or drug dealers create a craving for both the drug itself and a means of paying for it that is illegal, so that the government’s management of law enforcement is made the source of extortion.  Pay or be turned in, maybe to corrupt courts.  This is one reason our prisons are crammed, giving rise to a new capitalism racket, the private monopolization of public duties with a secret element.

Another aspect of capitalization operates in plain sight — indeed, where gambling is made a celebration and addiction — is the stock market.  This has become a major management tool of capitalism that aggregates the actions of many into profit and loss as though the consequences could be known.  When controlled by computers, worldwide, and enormous numbers refer to things that don’t exist in reality — like monetary compensations for loss — it has the ability to force people into borrowing with usury level loss.

In fact, because of the ability of computers to handle money or other elements in such enormous quantity as rivals the human genome with its billions of genes, we are on another level of reality.  We have as different an understanding of what things are as we did when the genomic identity of species began to be compared with the taxonomies we had previously assumed.  We are challenged to explain the nature of land ownership, the basis of nations, and what wealth means, if they are only marks in a journal of transactions.  To finance a nation on the basis of taxation when the reports are so skewed and rearranged by the definitions, those tricky words, and so based on wealth that is not land, begins to seem foolhardy.  The rule of law means nothing if it is in pencil on flammable paper, but even less if it's only a computer algorithm based on demographics of domination and revenge.

If a number idiot like myself can see this, partly because of wrestling with pledges to support congregational church budgets, how do others stand for these games?  Are they hooked or merely deluded?

SNOW JOBS, REAL AND FIGURATIVE

Dmitri Rybolovlev and Elena, now divorced, at least trying to.

National news, much less international news, has never been a focus of mine, but things are so crazy now that I’m checking the news hourly, even though it contradicts itself all the time, and revelations go deeper and deeper, layer after layer.  The more I chase explanations, the more I get suspicious and resistant.  I’m torn between thinking I have insight and just getting stuck.

On a psychiatrist’s newsletter, the doctor says that if Trump were his patient, he would hospitalize him at this point.  Blow, a NYTimes writer, suggests that Trump needs to be “paused.”  That is, no more flourishes of the pen or dawn Tweets until he stabilizes.  

At bedtime, in search of reassurance, I stumbled upon Rachel Maddow, a program I’d never watched before and I began to at least see the strings on the puppet.  It’s about money, it is Russia-focused but involves global finance, and it is not Trump’s program at all.  In fact, Trump is a victim.  One must be very careful where one borrows money, because the “bank” can call it in and the interest may be very high.  More than knee-capping.

Now that Trump has become so obvious a nut case, he’s of no use to his financers.  He should not let anyone approach him waving a cloth or carrying an umbrella.  He’s now expendable.  But it is much more clever to push him over into madness then to assassinate him.  If he were not crazy, he might be in danger of something like suicide or just resignation or blowing the whistle because of realizing his situation.  It would call for scrutiny.  But I think he’s truly an Alzheimer’s victim or someone is slipping him crazy-juice.  Probably Bannon, who partakes to the point of wanting only destruction and saying so.

For days and weeks various people have been hinting that something big was coming, something far beyond disliking a cheesy guy who got into office by a structural glitch and clever use of Big Data and gerrymandering.  It may be that Trump has been an ATM for Russian oligarchs, which is not the same as the nation of Russia.  The oligarchs now own what was previously the wealth of their nation.  They need to park the money somewhere.

One of Maddow’s convincing notions (to me) was about the incredibly wealthy man (see heading) who was trying to hide his own wealth from his divorcing wife by purchasing very expensive things (like art) and stashing them in big trucks that can be moved around (the way we once proposed moving nuclear weapons to keep them from being targeted).  

If you’re at the Russell Auction, take a look around.  It used to be a major selling point that Western art was a great place to invest in a commodity that would increase in value.  It was true and not true.  Scriver art is not selling at auctions for high prices, but most of the pieces on the market are late works commissioned by entrepreneurs.  Of the thousands of bronzes and hydrocals Bob created and sold, there is only one at the Russell Auction.  I’m saying, investing in art means that a lot of it goes off the market.

But Maddow’s real meat was about the economic connectedness of the world “1%” and their need to keep wealth hidden.  Trump was the money pimp.  Most of this is bookkeeping.  Bob used to joke about the ranchers who both had thousand-dollar stud horses, because they each sold the other their horses for a thousand dollars.  It was factual once the purchases were recorded.  She began her program by noting that big money is not bales and suitcases of paper bundles, but rather book-keeping.  No one can pack around a trillion dollars in bills or even gold.

So it seems clear to me that money, BECAUSE it is book-keeping done on computers now, is money that is interceptible by hackers, and also that wealthy people above a certain level are no longer individuals and MUST have an organization and a relationship with nations.  Money is national.  The units of measurement are national and their relationships among each other are negotiable.  Therefore money is political.  Everything political has a secrecy dimension because no polity is monolithic and sub-groups are playing poker.

So what does it have to do with Valier?  Ranchers are dependent on loans from banks which will be affected by any international banking systems.  The food in our stores comes from merchandizing systems that reach out across the continent.  What we have here to send back is beef, pork, wheat and barley.  This system network is always dependent on “bookkeeping” and credit with interest.  That’s not even mentioning our health care systems, our pension plans, or our social subsidy money.  If my Social Security check doesn’t hit the bank once a month, how do I survive?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX8dgbr5EI8  This link is to Maddow at 9AM on Monday, which is what I saw last night.  I had never watched her before, but I find her more clear and intelligible than most commentators.  She names names, which is necessary because no formal systems have much to do with the dynamics.  It’s all handshakes, no paper, “friendship” (meaning people who can’t risk ratting each other out), and a big facade of sex, glamour, prestige, doing good for others, and the arts.  Patriotism has very little to do with it.  Pre-existing marital and inheritance law has little to do with it.  The Trumplets haven’t really figured that out yet.

Access to info can be a wealth, something valuable a person can “sell.”  With the Internet, teenagers in their basement bedrooms can download the equivalent of secret nuclear plans as well as messing with the neighbors’ refrigerator.  Except that there’s no necessity for them to be in the kind of neighborhoods that have cyber-home systems.  They could be squatting in an abandoned warehouse or warming a chair in the local library.  VERY few old white golfers with big collar sizes can even understand computers, much less operate one.  Trump’s Oval Office, when the desk has anything on it besides a phone, holds piles of newspaper clippings, probably articles about Trump.  You can see them there, next to the Diet Cola on its coaster.

One COULD argue that this puts society back into the hands of individuals and that is the ultimate democracy.  Is that a good thing?  Considering the performance of schools preparing kids to be citizens?  AAAAEEEUUUGH.  I don’t really care who pees on whom.  In fact, I’ve given up on the idea that “who” is the subject form and “whom” is the object form, though that was once a signal of education.  So was voting, but these days a near majority of people now fail to vote.

"HI THERE! WANNA . . .?"

This month’s Vanity Fair includes an article describing hook-up culture in terms of the new sortware programs.  The idea is a pic, thirty words or less of self-description, and an address.  Maybe it starts out a date, maybe it starts frankly with a question about whether things normally considered perversions are okay with you.  It sounds like prostitution, but without any money.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating.   “Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse” by Nancy Jo Sales.  According to their own computer records, some of these men have slept with a hundred women a year.

What echoed in my head all the way through the article was San Francisco in the first wild gay freedom days after penicillin and before HIV.  Someone asked, “How much sex would men have if they could?”  The answer was “more than you can imagine.”  

Close contact (I’m not saying “intimate”) is related to disease because the best vector for human diseases is another human.  That’s sort of like the best food for humans, the one that includes all the basic elements, is other humans.  But cannibals end up eating the other person’s diseases as well as their vitamins.  So the brain disease called Kuru was not cured but was avoided when people stopped eating human brains.

Scientists are working hard to find ways to eliminate HIV virus from the human body.  They can do it with monkeys’ parallel SIV virus.  Well, some of the time.  They’ve got a number of strategies going, some of them as ingenious as a chess game.  But monkey behavior, when the monkeys are in cages, is pretty easy to predict and control.

The one element of every disease that can never be brought under control is the behavior of human beings.  The people who are into serial shagging are adult, well-educated, gainfully employed, attractive, etc. etc. and they are destroying their ability to form relationships long enough and reliable enough to raise children.  They know that.  But they do it anyway.

I’m guessing that most places are not as dominated by glamour and status as Manhattan and it’s Manhattan or similar urban centers that seem to be “into” these hook-up games.  I mean, there’s a certain amount of bed-hopping that goes on everywhere, but then the chief of Great Falls police says that drugs reach into every community in the state.  He says that today he sees the arrests of the children of the people he arrested when he first started out.  But it’s quiet and behind the scenes.  The game of hooking-up isn’t so much fun if no one is watching.

Both of these are related to economics.  In a money-based society where marriage or extra bucks for a really good car or house can make the difference between success and just-getting-along, sex is not just Tinder, but also illegal or legal tender.  The question is, like the state of the environment, is it sustainable?

In a society as malleable by media as ours is, we come up to these sudden culture pivots every now and then.  This one is much defined by the conviction of movie writers that a man/woman relationship is the center of the universe.  They also believe that sex and love are the same.  

The problem is that social scientists in the real world, as well as scientists working at experiment benches (who may like their work because they’re antisocial) are finding that sex, like most things, is a continuum.  I was explaining to the Trash Roll-Off Lady who is generally “hip” but hadn’t yet gotten past the idea that male “homosexuality” is real and inborn and that there are only two options, like a questionnaire: M or F.   Instead, research suggests that the desire dial evidently is set early in gestation of the fetus -- anywhere from male, to a mix, to female, to children all the way down to null.  None.  But that’s just a potential.  Add environment, personality, circumstances, etc.  Add the molecular influences on sex as one goes along: self-generated, purchased, by-products in food, recreational drugs, infections, gut bacteria.  

Just now I read an article from Aeon.com about how cells form a film.  It was about how adjacent cells attach to each other.  In my simplistic version, there are potential sites for attachment spaced out along the surface of the cell.  Inside the cell there are filament structures, sort of bones or frames.  If the tip of one of these filaments contacts a point of attachment, then a connection is formed and the sheet of cells widens.  It seems to me that’s a nice metaphor, because it relates the internal world of the entity to the many potentials for connection.  But it’s still basically random.

What if a person ideally suited for a lifelong attachment full of joy and fulfillment is standing next to you at the bar in the illustration for this story, but you’re so busy hooking up on your iPhone that you never notice her or him.  (Do these services include both sexes -- um, I mean the array of possible desire modes and genital configurations?)

Another new concept is that of the person as a process, a constantly renewing and developing entity, shaping according to the forces it meets, even defying or departing from the double helix, through the epigenome.  What if this person is the love of your life, not because of decades shaping and being shaped by you, but because they happen in a random world to turn out just like you.  But then along comes a major plot twist and neither of you is the same anymore.  I guess you can’t blame a computer for that.

So where is the line between guessing compatibility by a flash on the tiny screen of a smart phone, and enough actual time together to discover whether you can make a real connection?  I think it’s a moving boundary and it all depends and nothing is forever.

But the potential for real damage in this half-roulette, half cyber-game, sort of approach is pretty high.  Naturally for the men and maybe even some of the women, that might be part of its attraction, flirting morbidly with the idea that this might be Jack the Ripper.  Or that this might be someone who will give you HIV.

IDENTITY LOOPS

My little loop of identity starts with the sensory body and ends with the cosmos.  I used to quote Tillich and Eliade even more then I do now.  Xians love to use the cross as a talisman and develop a lot of ideas around it, like Tillich’s idea of the actual “real” world being the horizonal element, and the transcendent upright vertical part being the access to a higher reality.  Eliade and Joe Campbell pointed out the ladder that goes into the Hopi Kiva (down) and, as well, Jacob’s ladder with angels on the rungs (up).  Very geometric.  Very virtual.

Someone said to my friend, “Climb down off your Cross!”  But the human skeleton, when arms are extended, IS a cross.  None of us can climb down off it.  Some skeletons are subject to an internal crucifixion.

One of those philosophical fellows, or maybe me myself, developed a notion about a circle or sphere with oneself at the middle (the axis mundi) and the farthest reaches of what the mind could grasp out there in the star nurseries,  the nearest and the farthest, were where the most sacred was.  In between was a kind of commons, though complexified with human and geographic differences and responses.  

The key to this whole area, what we know in our lives, is ecology.  It’s not survival of the fittest, it’s the survival of those who find a little niche where they fit.  Enough food, enough protection, enough ease for procreation are basic.  But the mind builds castles.

It’s almost impossible to realize that we’ve only been in historical memory for ten thousand years.  Over and over we read the analogies about how a string miles long is the world-time and we’re just a little snippet at the end.  Much as we rummage around in our genomes and polish up the lenses on our biggest telescopes, there seems to be no end.  But time is various and dynamic enough that every few centuries -- lately much more often -- we have to regroup.

Lobster dance.

Alice in Wonderland:  “Clean cups!  Everyone move down!”  “Change lobsters and dance!”  Even in Valier we get whiplash:  a peaceful wheat-based village; oops, no water for irrigation.  A respectable white town: oops, the Indians are moving off the rez and down the street.  On the lip of a giant oil boom just like the Bakken, everyone started planning where to put the man-camp.  Then the worldwide network of oil sales goes into the tank, and you’d best put your money in beer sales.

The trouble with Xianity is that is that their crossword puzzle was composed two thousand years ago.  It just flat doesn’t fit anymore.  When the Pope points that out, the people on the tightrope of denial look down and freak out.  When the little backwater tribal villages of the big continents realize that they’ve been stumbling around in a fun house that has fuzzed out or blown away or collapsed on their heads, they get really really mad and go out with their scimitars to smite somebody -- anybody.

Nations on continents and denominations (within Xianity) were invented to keep order -- not very long ago.  They’re grievously outdated now, unable to find new terms and processes even as the old ones collapse.

In particular we need to draw up a new moral order.  Most of it will have to do with money.  Some are proposing a guaranteed annual income for every household.  Some are proposing a cap on how much money a person can make.  Many urge a change in lifestyle.  We thought a big house was good, we thought every child would want a room of his/her own with his/her own computer and TV set.  That way an adult could slip into the room at night with a little privacy/secrecy and no one would be there to interfere.  The baby, that noisy/stinky creature could be isolated with only a monitor feed down in the rec room where the wide-screen, flat-screen, rainbow-ray (wider, wider!) movies are streaming.  (OMIGOD!  LOOK at that!)

The kids responded.  They put their computers in their pockets, walked out the door, and found a pack to join.  “You like sex and violence?  We’ll show you sex and violence.”  They say, “Everyone is doing . . . “  fill in the blank.  They listen to peers, not parents.  They are “norming”.  Social norming is almost always imaginary.  

Over and over in the thoughtful media  reporters say, “Everyone,” when they mean “everyone like me,” meaning everyone who lives in an expensive apartment in a megacity with a risky job dependent on a rarefied education which mostly amounts to a piece of paper.  They assume everyone has a cell phone, that cell phones can always be reached, that if someone “likes” your post they can be added to a list of hundreds of true friends.

A major domain that needs redrawing is, of course, sex.  The first thing we need to address is the idea that the big and strong have a “right” to fuck the small and weak -- in prison, in families, in the army.  The problem is that this impulse may be embedded in our wiring: violence right next to coitus.  What social channeling or capping can control that?  

Jefferson was in debt most of his life.  He had a number of children by a slave he owned, 

who was his wife's half-sister.  His wife's father owned the mother of this slave.

Smart and dedicated people have been reflecting on all this for a long time, but it seems nothing sticks -- there’s no handle, no point of entry.  The following quotes are from a paper by Cass Sunstein, a formidably intelligent person -- whose whole context is either Hyde Park or Washington, DC.  Close to Obama.  That’s a handicap, a blindness.  Nevertheless, he thinks good things.

Cass NEEDS a guide dog in his office.

“Social states are often more fragile than might be supposed, because they depend on social norms to which—and this is the key point—people may not have much allegiance. What I will call norm entrepreneurs—people interested in changing social norms—can ex- ploit this fact; if successful, they produce what I will call norm bandwagons and norm cascades. . . 

“Norm bandwagons occur when the lowered cost of expressing new norms encourages an ever-increasing number of people to reject previously popular norms, to a “tipping point” where it is adherence to the old norms that produces social disapproval. Norm cascades occur when societies are presented with rapid shifts toward new norms. Something of this kind happened with the attack on apartheid in South Africa, the fall of Communism, the election of Ronald Reagan, the rise of the feminist movement, and the current assault on affirmative action.”

“Collective action—in the form of information campaigns, persuasion, economic incentives, or legal coercion—might be necessary to enable people to change norms that they do not like. . .

“Some norms are obstacles to human autonomy and well-being. It is appropriate for law to alter norms if they diminish autonomy by, for example, discouraging people from becoming educated or exposed to diverse conceptions of the good. It is appropriate for law to alter norms if they diminish well-being by, for example, encouraging people to risk their lives by driving very fast, using firearms, or taking dangerous drugs.

“Thus government might try to inculcate or to remove shame, fear of which can be a powerful deterrent to behavior.”

Did you get that?  Not that shame is a problem, but the fear of shame.

http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/36.Sunstein.Social.pdf

SEARCHING FOR VALUES

Obnoxious as a value (Avril Lavigne)

Sometimes new ways of finding value depend upon the collapse of the old ways and sometimes they are pressed into our lives because so many phenomena are upon us that have no names and aren’t well-enough known to fit them into the old categories.  Consider music videos, which began as a sort of kids’ entertainment and has now become not just an art form, but a whole new genre of “writing.”  Some colleges have hastened to teach people how to make them, but what do you do with them?  They are often too ecstatic and chaotic to mean anything traditional, particularly since we are used to making the oldest people judge the work of the youngest -- which is nonsense in this case.  I’m 76 and can’t even “see” fast enough to follow the tachistoscopic contents, much less any context in sex/drugs/rocknroll -- which some people consider demonic.  But I'll figure this out.

Consider the emptying of Ph.D.’s to the point where the letters after one’s name mean little unless one knows the institution, the specific discipline, the reputation of those professors, and the current status of the field.  A gray area has formed around people who have finished all but their thesis, but find it impossible to get the actual thesis past a committee formed of rivals and graybeards.   The past has become a burden.  But is that worse than awarding Ph.D.’s for the equivalent of “basket-weaving,” which is code for something worthless?  Something similar has developed with professional journal acceptance, to the point where a contingent simply accepts everything online in “open” journals.  We end up resorting to “cloud curation”, basically a popularity contest.  Or turn to money, the great shared value system.  No one asks "is the movie any good"?  Instead we ask what was the gross?

Prizes and promotion are susceptible to our great interest in gaming the system and our dependence on friendship or convenience circles can replace serious literary recognition with Oscar award night.

Oscar.

Ideas are insidious.  The construction/deconstruction/post-construction thought system that was once as hard to figure out as non-Euclidean geometry, has now slid into our language and assumptions.  They have been particularly effective in undercutting status that depends on precedent, dominance, elitism, meritocracy.  Our professionals -- doctors, lawyers, theologians -- are now joined by professional manicurists and mechanics while others -- for instance, public school teachers -- get no longer get respect nor a decent paycheck.

In a world where kids are schooled at home, publishing is done by oneself, and music is mostly free, we can often see lasting value only in retrospect.  Not very helpful.  And yet uncertified, unqualified, off-the-wall, individual nonconformity can be the most effective strategy for value that there is.  Follow your star.  (It's not on Google.)   People talk about passion.

“Value” in the sense of practical usefulness, something that sustains life (food, water, shelter), is a separate matter from what I’m talking about here.  But even in that case there are different views.  Moral relativity.  For instance, few things have more felt value to individuals than their pets, since attachment gives them almost the value of another human life.  But the law finds dogs of negligent value unless they can be leveraged into some kind of money through popularity or uniqueness or usefulness. 

Competitions and awards supposedly based on absolute value do not just enhance the reputations of those receiving them, but also lifts up the importance of those awarding them.  These factors can depart cruelly from what is good for life.  Consider prize-winning pugs and bulldogs who have been distorted by breeders into walking sufferers, barely able to breath and unable to give birth without human intervention -- partly because this distortion is seen as desirable in fancier’s terms and partly because a dog with a shoved-in face looks like a human baby -- it’s “cute.”

But this essay is about the values of behavior -- best action, ethics, moral standards.  Here’s a list of factors that make “values” problematic and a source of conflict.

God in the cloud.  No longer an old man -- and what has He done with His robe?

1. Value is emergent from experience and tradition, not imposed from above (an authority figure or god) but it is often "felt" as a powerful entity said to have the ability to punish or reward humans.  This point of view usually assumes the Power controls all human lives, not just believers -- but non-believers might not agree. 

2.  The values of the group and the values of a sub-group or individual may be in conflict, even between siblings.  By definition, one’s values emerge from experience and two children in the same family might be treated very differently.  Sometimes a family is so chaotic that no rules can emerge except the ones the child deduces, which may be pretty negative in terms of consequences.

3.  For a child, values have sharper edges than for an adult.  Shop-lifting candy might seem dubious but barely okay (if you apologize), or cute.  Even for an adult, shop-lifting food in order to survive means something different from stealing food as a political statement, maybe not even eating it.  Acting in a political way that prevents food from sustaining starving people in a famine might not feel like stealing food at all, but righteous participation in punishment from God.

4.  A feeling of entitlement always interferes with justice.  If any separate but allied group can feel they are exclusive (because of either superiority or inferiority like drug gangs), that will affect their understanding of ethics.  For one thing, the signals they perceive as signs of value -- special clothing, jewelry, privilege of access to social events, identification with beloved people -- become values in themselves.  Kindness, generosity, political effectiveness, membership in religious groups, are all value signals as much as tattoos are.

5.  Strangely, not caring about value signals is often a value signal in itself!

6.  One might not be seen as valuable in one’s own time, either as an individual (a teacher, an artist, a religious leader) or as part of an admired group later.  (Consider Vietnam-era veterans.) but not seen as very admirable until after time has passed.  So that means that social value is shifty and one might struggle to reach the heights, only to discover that social change means no one thinks the achievement is admirable anymore.  Even in practical terms of money value, we are on the verge of respecting plumbers more than philosophers.

7.  Even as values shift, some people are left behind with an earlier generation’s experienced feelings, while the youngsters don’t even think the same qualities exist anymore.  Think of the deep and consequential changes in our ideas of valued sexual behavior.   Marriage is ignored here, yearned for there, irrelevant other places, made into an expensive social marker, seen as a form of capture, or clearly enacted as a violent act of war.

Many people use some form of the “Golden Rule” as a marker for value.  Was it Bertrand Russell or George Bernard Shaw who pointed out that such a principle is all very well unless one is a liver fluke -- all situations are not equal and not everyone wants what you want.  I think of my favorite counseling joke:  “Hurt me,” said the masochist.  “No,” said the sadist.  In some contexts, NOT being hurt is the same as being hurt.

Dinosaur ethics.

The problem is ambiguity.  And the time-context.  What is done to a person now might be painful, unwanted, and controversial -- but result in a few years in something beneficial.  Or it could be the opposite.  

So value systems, besides being emergent from experience, are often a gamble really.  They can pit the individual against a group.  They can change over time, for the better or for worse.  They can be enforced with violence or simply ignored until they are useful.  They can make you rich or get you crucified.

"Corpus Hypercubus" by Salvador Dali

YOUR MONEY OR YOUR TIME

I’m being nibbled to death by ducks.   I get the mail and the first thing is a notice:  Your Extra Help with Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Costs Notice of Termination. (It’s not much money, but still . . .)

The second thing is another notice:  “You owe $50 on your account with the GF Clinic and we are sending it in for collection.”  AFTER the “extra help” my co-pay was $100, which I was paying in pieces.  They want me to use a credit card.   The doc spent about three seconds max with me and never told me the results, though he discussed his diagnosis with the assistant.  When I asked, he left.  I hounded the office for months before I got a printed diagnosis.  I’m right on the dividing line for glaucoma treatment.  My advice was not asked.  HIS time is valuable.

There are other nibbles, too similar and boring to recount.  Takes too much time.

I call my pharmacist for more glucose diagnostic strips.  She tells me what the price is in her computer -- some mystery app that is a collaboration between Big Pharm and Medicare -- and she says the strips are free.  But when they come, the bill is $35 for fifty strips.  No explanation.  Already deducted from my bank account.  I’ve had refunds as big as $75 and debits as much as $50, all totally mysterious.  The pharmacist never knows why either.  It’s just bookkeeping.

Then I go by the only grocery store in town.  My order has come in.  The cat food cases are 25% more expensive than if I’d bought them in the county seat thirty miles away.  I ordered them when the road was perilous.  When I unpack them, one case is the wrong kind.  The rest of my order was canceled.  The peanut butter I want cannot be had unless I buy twelve jars at once because no one else in town buys it.  (Adams: half as much sugar in it.)   

As directed in order to sort out the first problem with that termination, I get on the phone.  I sit through all the usual advice to push this and that, to use a computer, to leave a phone message, to fill out a form I don’t have, etc.  Then I find another more local phone number with all the same information about stuff I don’t need to know.  I get a person, who is very nice and looks everything up and says I didn’t send in something I was supposed to and I was asked to call them weeks ago but I didn’t.   I did, but got put on hold, left a voice message that was not returned, etc.  Until I just gave up.  

She is sending me a form.  She asks if I’d like to come in in person:  she’s eighty miles away over icy roads and my pickiup is undependable, aside from the cost of gas.  There is no bus.  I’m fairly polite until she asks for time while she looks something up and I say,  “Oh, sure, go ahead.   I’m reading an article on left-handedness on the computer.”  Two things: immediately she wants me to do everything online and then she remarks lightly,  “Oh, the things we do to fill up our time.”  (ie.  I’m a little old lady who is wasting her time.)  Click.   As we used to say in Ms. Mag about feminist moments.

I’m nudged to think of Cass Sunstein and Clay Shirkey, two on my list of heavyduty thinkers.  I google Sunstein and the U of Chicago Law School says they’ve reorganized -- the Sunstein page is gone.  So I google “Nudge.”  This is what Wikipoopia says:

“The book received mixed reviews. The Guardian described it as "never intimidating, always amusing and elucidating: a jolly economic romp but with serious lessons within." But The Sunday Times called it a "very, very dull read" and others contended that the many policy proposals it contained became "a bit wearisome". It was named a "Best Book of the Year" by The Economist.”

And Shirkey?  “Cognitive Surplus” proposes that computers have released so much unused time that used to be sunk in watching stupid TV that we are in a veritable renaissance of creativity on the Internet.  Like starting Middle Eastern revolutions, I suppose, until they shut off the Internet.

Here’s another book to think about (I never buy them -- I just bounce off reviews):   “The Googilization of Everything” by Siva Vaidhyanathan.  It’s about (in part) the secret algorithym by which Google decides what to put on their lists and in what order and this new deal about the “quality” of what’s there.  Evidently, good website design will get you higher on the list which can make a big monetary difference if you’re using Google to sell.  Of course,  you can pay Google to be at the head of the list.   Most people never google past the first page.  


I’m fascinated watching my own name go up and down.  Sometimes someone will pick out a “hook” sentence from the body of the day’s post and put it at the beginning of the entry about my blog.  I try to write a good enough one of my own.  When I tell people this happens, they are shocked.  They think that the stuff that runs like water through a pipe across the Internet is never seen by anyone.  They’ve evidently never been in a tech room with a screen somewhere showing what’s flowing.   


In the early days of blogging, they used to post on the blogger website the titles of blogs as they posted online.  I was always surprised by how many were not in English.  Now, of course, thanks to Homeland Security and Pediapanic, there are filters that can pick out individual bloggers on the basis of their views and vocabulary.  Even their faces.


Evidently some people have just realized that they are being manipulated by their computers, even though Shirkey thinks it’s an active pursuit that lets us be creative.  And Sunstein/Thaler have pointed out that simple small percentages in the way we make decisions can change elections, start waves of popularity, determine your income tax, etc. etc.  (But then along comes the Big Dog of the U of Chicago School of Law and erases your carefully designed website so that Google can’t find it.)  


I see a pattern where banks and retailers (and other bureaucracies) deliberately overcharge or underprovide, knowing that the consumer will probably not have time to check closely and -- if the error is perceived -- will find it too small to spend time correcting.  On the other hand, there are women in this town who spend an hour or two on the phone every single day correcting small errors and injustices.


Getting back to my original experience, which is only a sample of miniature ongoing struggle, minor as it may be when compared with my real work of writing and thinking, it is clear that our world has been particle-ized in the service of commodification.  A million little rules and decisions are guiding things so simple as buying a jar of peanut butter.  I don’t grudge the money so much as I do the time.  I retired early, meaning poor, in order to have the TIME, and I resent that being drained away by trivia in the name of profit.  I keep thinking about the guy who programmed a lot of ATM’s to round off all deposits downward to the nearest dollar and deposit the extra cents to his account.  He picked up millions.  I forget what finally happened to him.  Too bad we can’t reprogram time.

THE COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYTHING

The commodification of everything continues to grow and spread.  Today I read about a new trend in Arizona.  Emergency responders and fire fighters are proposing that the people they rescue be billed for the cost of doing so.  Imagine someone you don’t know leaning through the smashed window of your car crash, trapping you inside, smelling leaking gas, your consciousness much compromised -- and this guy asks you whether you can afford the Jaws of Life.  Maybe he reaches into your clothing to check for your bank book.

I ran this past Paul, who has done his share of emergency response.  He said:  “I can understand the issue with the fire department needing to get paid. What most folks don't realize is that 75% of this country (in terms of space, not people) is served by volunteer fire and EMS services, and frequently, they are set up as voluntary subscription services, not supported by tax dollars. Folks that subscribe and pay their annual fees to that particular service get served, others that haven't paid either don't get served, or have to make payment arrangements. I sell fire and rescue equipment to all our county volunteer units at cost, so I know exactly how much all that junk costs and it ain't cheap. Somebody's got to pay for all that stuff. 

“Two of my kids are firemen now, and they'll donate hundreds of hours every year for training and responding to calls. They don't get a dime for their time, nor all the gas they burn. Half the time if there's no handed down turnout gear, they're forced to buy their own. On top of that, they're all the time setting up fundraisers and baking cookies trying to make ends meet. Folks get all upset when they see those shiny trucks with all the lights and sirens, thinking their tax dollars are paying for it, but that's often not the case at all. Even when you try to explain it to them, they still seem to think the volunteers are the ones that should dig deep in their pockets to fund equipment purchases, and fuel and buildings to house it all.

“I subscribe to two separate departments, each about 15 hilly miles away. There's no way in the world that they'd ever be able to save a structure here, but they might be able to keep the fire contained to private property, and not spreading to USFS land that I would be responsible for paying damages on. Pretty cheap insurance if you ask me.”

Part of this is a rural/urban split.  The problem in a city is a growing population of indigent people living in perilous conditions while the tax base withdraws outside the city limits to houses that are regularly safety checked and maintained.  This split and other budget shortfalls are so troublesome now that some people are predicting that the cities will begin to implode in this decade, sending Somalia-style lines of refugees to the small towns of rural America, searching desperately for food.  

We are now to the point of troika economics.  Many are the stories of Russian troikas racing through the snow ahead of wolf packs, only able to escape by throwing someone out the back to lighten the load and keep the wolves busy for a little while.  (Cartooners: should the wolf be labeled “banks” or “debt” or “forecloser”?)  

A troika is a kind of Russian sled that is pulled by a team of three horses, evenly hitched to the sled, rather than two-behind-and-one-ahead.  What I’m after in this image is the dire hardship of a Russian winter (not that different from a Montana winter, especially this one) and the conceptual echo of triage.  Triage is the practice, esp. in war or after a disaster, of separating victims into three groups: one that will be all right anyway, one that needs care to survive, and one that is simply hopeless or already dead.  At this moment governments at every level across the county are struggling with budget triage.

It has become clear that we are willing to throw out the old, the ill, the disabled, the children, the unemployed -- hey, all that stuff costs a lot!  We exploit them for money first.  But that has its advantages to them. Anyone who thinks a drug subsidy is for the benefit of the old and ill is not paying attention.  It is the big pharma companies who rake in the profits from subsidized drugs.  If the only people who buy them are those who can afford them, the sheer quantity will drop abruptly.  Of course, the other dark side of the selling is that big pharma has every motivation to keep prices high, the consumers hardly care so long as they can get what they need, and there is little reason to find cures so that the drugs become unnecessary.  The terms of housing foreclosure are presented in terms of loss to deserving families, but the real “victims” are the developers and financiers.  Those are the people sending lobbyists to Congress.  

Morality/ethics is crucial to the acceptance of triage.  If those who are thrown out are labeled drug addicts, criminals, sexually unconventional, “other” as in foreign, or possibly “useless” or offensive artists, then we don’t feel so badly about doing it.  Those who don’t want their friends and children thrown out must then get busy trying to defend them from abandonment.  Still, drunk drivers should have to pay for their crimes and what’s more effective than leaving them in the wreckage unless they can buy their way out?

But the world is not like a troika.  Many of those people excluded from the ride survive somehow -- maybe by killing and eating a wolf -- and they begin to deeply resent troika drivers.  Let’s kill and eat a horse.  They start walking, just like those apocalyptic movies.

We’re all on the same planet.  In spite of people constantly trying to arrange things so that they don’t have to put out the effort of fighting fires or attending governance meetings, which is the essence of democracy, we all have to take the consequences of decisions made by people who get tired of having to organize bake sales to improve the schools.  Or the manipulation of corporations raiding our pockets while assuring us that it’s for our own good.  If we’re trapped in wreckage, we don’t have much leverage.  Of course, that’s very good for the insurance industry.