Evolutionary biologist slays the beast of Individualism
nautil.us
nautil.us
The default position of humanity is not individualism by the way, but rather group identity. Historically since time immemorial, rewards, guilt, punishment, rights (etc.) were applied at a group level. This resulted, predictably, in egregious crimes inflicted on huge swaths of people because of their group membership.
It's dismaying that there is a huge segment of academia that wants to revert to this more 'natural' state. It's dismaying to see arguments and ideas being dismissed based on the group identity of speaker in academia and mainstream culture. It's dismaying to see academia and mainstream culture level guilt on individuals because of their (immutable) group identity.
Individualism was one of the most radical ideas in the history of humanity that ushered our modern civilization. We lose it at our peril.
Individuals should have rights/value irrespective of group identity.
However, individual rights don't exist without a group in general. If you are the only living human, the concept of rights is meaningless to you in general.
I live in the US, so my rights are (supposed to be) protected by the state, in case anyone wants to take them from me.
If my neighbor decides I don't have the right to live anymore and murders me, then I lost my right to live. I only have the rights that everyone around me agrees to let me keep.
> It's dismaying that there is a huge segment of academia that wants to revert to this more 'natural' state.
The opposite is true. Academia is where we get much of the evidence that socially-constructed groups (based on religion, gender, race, etc.) are not biological and should not be the basis for granting value and rights.
In German language, dog breeds are called with the same word that can also be used on humans ("Hunderasse", "Rasse"), so i always understood it as a biological/taxonomical thing.
The question then isn’t whether you have the rights, but whether someone is violating those rights (which you still possess) or you have “given them up” by violating the rights of another. In a narrow practical sense, this is equivalent to “those around you deciding what rights you have.”
In an ethical sense, it isn’t. If people believe rights stem from the group then the group is ethically fine in deciding you don’t have those rights and acting accordingly. If rights are inherent to the individual then while the group may still violate those rights, it both remains a violation and is not ethically sound. This difference makes it far easier in the former case for groups to violate the rights of individuals and other groups.
Then in a broader practical sense, these are not equivalent ideas. Encouraging the belief that rights are inherent is in the best interests of those who do not want those rights violated.
Ethics of American and Greek will be different. Ethics of Christian and atheist will be different. Ethics of libertarian and conservative will be different. But then, what about libertarian atheist American for example? There might be thousands of axes, prioritized and changing during one’s life. How could any group create a shared ethics except a few obvious exceptions (theft, rape...)?
... what? No, that's is a massive misunderstanding of the right to life. There is a distinction between natural rights (normative ethical statements) and legal rights (what the legal system actually guarantees you). Natural rights are inalienable - they can neither be granted nor taken away by anyone.
If a state decides to commit genocide against a group of people, that group didn't lose their right to life, the state is simply violating that right.
If you are the last person on earth you may have no need for your rights but again they still exist. Your neighbor can't decide you don't have the right to live anymore, if he kills you that is a violation of your rights. Others will punish the murderer for that violation.
You can forego some rights in exchange for benefits like participation in certain groups, which is the basis of the social contract. For example I agree to temporarily forego the right to privacy in an airport in exchange for the privilege of being allowed to fly. Sometimes the decision to do so is very one-sided, but its still a decision.
If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?
> If people could unilaterally revoke your rights whenever they became inconvenient, what would be the point of rights at all?
They can and sometimes do.
The point in those cases (i.e. all cases) of rights is that they are a mutually agreed-upon boundary, just as you said.
If you are mutually agreeing, by definition it is not unilateral.
Then there is no such thing as a right.
Eh, kinda, but it's not that black and white. There's different kinds of rights, which is why the US Declaration of Independence specifically calls out the violation of "unalienable" rights as a reason to justify revolting. Some rights are unalienable, some are granted by authority.
But we don't even have agreement on what the unalienable rights should be, which is why Thomas Jefferson changed "property" to "the pursuit of happiness."
In the end, my unalienable rights are dependent on what other people think my unalienable rights are, which is to say, they are granted by society.
We may believe some rights that are unalienable aren't, and we may believe some that aren't are, but in either case it is we who are wrong. By definition, they are not granted nor revokeable by society. If society does not recognize an unalienable right as such, it violates it.
That's another of my issues with Rand. Trying to say that morality is true/false or that rights are true/false is the same as religion. It has no basis in reality. You can't prove that people have the right to do anything. It's an issue of opinion.
For example, you may believe people have the right to do anything they want to with their body (ex: refuse a vaccine).
If you take that to its extreme, they also have the right to get sick and cough on someone else.
So Rand (and most people) would say, OK, there's a limit. That person has the right to do anything they want to with their body unless it takes a right away from someone else.
But where do you draw the line? Couldn't you argue that an unvaccinated person might be sick all the time, so going anywhere crowded is inherently immoral and they have lost their right to do that?
It quickly gets very murky and very opinionated.
Every possible action limits in some way the possible actions of others. Your right to speak limits my right to not have my eardrums vibrated. The social contract negotiates how we choose to handle these conflicts. No one will give up their right to speak in general in exchange for the right to quiet, but most of us are fine with limiting how loudly we speak at certain hours of the night in exchange for the same curtesy.
Different people will have different opinions on how valuable various rights are. I'm fine with google reading my emails, so I'll let them in exchange for providing me a free email client with good tools. Others may value their right to privacy more highly and choose not to forego it for something trivial. In the end we all have a unique set of agreements with other members of society which limit what we can and can't do which we may wish to modify from time to time, there isn't one immutable, homogenous code imposed upon all of us by some vague, abstract entity called society.
Definitely citation needed here. I agree there is a nature vs. nurture question. But, I can't imagine any biologists are arguing that people are not tribal animals.
Biologists certainly would say that humans are social and tribal. They would disagree that the typical delineations of tribes (based on race, for example) are natural.
To put it another way: tribal behavior is biological, but decisions about who goes in which tribe are social and mostly arbitrary (beyond family relations).
Social Studies in general are frequently non-rigorous, sloppy and a mess. The academic areas where those ideas are promulgated are even more so. For example, I have yet to see any evidence, for example, that a girl who plays with dolls as a child is being socially conditioned away from STEM fields as an adult ... a claim that is repeated all the time and stated as simply a fact.
At this point, given how sloppy those academic areas are, I can only be skeptical of the crap they promulgate.
Unless you live in a self-sufficient homestead in the middle of a forest, there's no such thing as a "self-made man". Take Amazon for instance: they benefit from roads and infrastructure. But they also benefit from things like police and courts to protect their private property, just like they rely on a workforce capable of meeting their demands. Ultimately, they also benefit from a stable society and mostly wealthy enough population to afford their products! And finally, one can say that they benefit from the work of the people who invented the Internet, who invented computers, who made the American Revolution, the ancient Greek philosophers and the medieval mathematicians and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, in short: directly or indirectly from the combined work of every single human being which lived and has ever lived. That's what's hidden behind the simple word "society". And that's why no person is "self-made".
For this, Amazon reaps enormous profit. They need to pay what's due: they owe a debt to society, for it was society that enabled their profit.
In a more practical sense, individualism is often found in practice to be pulled as a justification for privatising our economic output in the hands of a lucky few, and for ever-greater concentrations of wealth and an unjust distribution of duties and rewards. I'm suspicious of it on that count as well.
Frederick Douglass considered[0], "Self-made men ... are what they are, without the aid of any of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results."
For Douglass, the self-made man lacked "favoring conditions by which other men usually rise." This doesn't mean the self-made man cannot rely on that which is available to everyone in a given society (e.g., courts, roads, existing scientific knowledge, etc.). It simply means the self-made man is not one privileged over others.
This being so, I would reason that your post doesn't really address the idea of the "self-made man."
I also think the evaluation of Amazon is unfair. It is presented as Amazon taking value from society and never giving back. But what value has Amazon given in return to people?
It is often more convenient to shop on Amazon. It offers a greater selection of products than local stores. It often offers lower prices. It also provides reviews to aid decision making. So, to frame it as Amazon only taking and never giving back is an unfair criticism.
Does Amazon take more than it gives? Possibly. That's a difficult discussion though.
As for individualism, yes it can definitely be abused. But, that alone is not sufficient grounds to reject the idea--particularly when one looks the benefits gained as described in the parent to your post.
Where did I argue individualism means you're in a "self-sufficient homestead in the middle of the forest"?? This type of straw man is employed frequently and is aggravating because OF COURSE we live in a society and we rely on others. Even hardcore libertarians don't make that claim.
Having said that, society is an ever-present constant, like the environment. An individual by themselves cannot really affect it. An individual, however, can certainly affect how they interact with it and the choices they make. In that sense, there sure are 'self-made men'.
>individualism is often found in practice to be pulled as a justification for privatising our economic output in the hands of a lucky few, and for ever-greater concentrations of wealth and an unjust distribution of duties and rewards.
We're way beyond debating whether we should live in pure capitalist-type of world with a tiny government and everything is privatized. We live in a mixed system, with a market-based economy and a social welfare state. There is no mainstream debate to change that. The political debate is centered around whether to move the dial a little towards the welfare state or the market-based side. So move on from that argument it's not relevant.
The attacks on individualism I'm talking about are ones that deal with attacks on basic enlightenment values like getting rid of due process (as was done on collage campuses when dealing with accusations of sexual assault) or treating immutable characteristics of an individual as boosting or discreding an argument they make ... you know, anytime an argument is taken more seriously when it is preceded with "As a member of identity group X here's what I think...".
How about the immoral idea of 'privilege' promulgated by academia and media, as a way to dismiss all individual experience in favour of group identity.
The idea in practice is that you pay taxes on profits, not revenue. People confuse the two. Not paying taxes on revenue is a feature not a bug. This is there to encourage reinvestment, which long term is good for society. If they didn’t reinvest and instead realized profits, a portion would be taxed and a portion would be paid out to investors. The taxes portion would be both invested and wasted by inefficient bureaucracy.
Either way, reinvestment in society is happening, but in one case it’s going back into reinvestment by a relatively unaccountable private entity and the other case a portion of it is going into reinvestment by a relatively unaccountable public entity. My personal observation is that the private entity, by virtue of earning the profit in the first place (especially if in a fiercely competitive market), has proven itself a more capable steward of reinvesting that money to produce things people in society want (which they demonstrate by buying that company's goods/services)
That’s not to say that there isn’t value in having public reinvestment, but that those in charge of public reinvestment should instead tax other activities (in my opinion conspicuous consumption by individuals via a sales tax) and they should earn that right to spend more by convincing individuals collectively to forego their conspicuous consumption in the present (via raising sales tax) because they will return more value for society through their proposed reinvestments.
Government should tax things you want less of (wanton indiscriminate conspicuous consumption) and not things you want more of: reinvestment
The one who is "self-made" is not truly self made because they had rely on many more resources and intellectual data by the group to succeed. Therefore there is no such thing as a truly self-made man.
There is only: those who can leverage existing infrastructure to improve the status quo or innovate.
Like if there were no public education or infrastructure and you still suceeded (in whatever, science, business), you are self-made. But why? Still, such a person didn't have to invent their own DNA, so they aren't really self-made.
"Society matters, not DNA, not personal initiative, not discipline, not habits..." is a form of bias.
And I just refuse this bias. All this matters. You can be self-made as a seventh child of poor Burmese farmer. Then, you could be maybe as rich as an average developer in Facebook. It is self-made. Or you can be a child of someone rich, inherit $1B and decades later leave the world with 1/10 and it not self-made, even when you still will be way better off that the child of that Burmese farmer. Self-made is relative, not absolute.
Also, you can grow a lot just by luck. Winning a lottery ticket is luck. But picking a career in IT is not. Thirty years ago, everyone knew computers are going to be ultra important. So not every vertical mobility is self-made.
It's complex, but they exist. People who decide to grow in their field. People with right habits, posessing great decision making skills, problem solvers, energetic people.
Not only that, but they see themselves as a leader in the group or imagine that the choices of the leader would always be consistent with their preferences.
> This inference became logically inescapable as soon as people began to ascribe to the state not only moral but also intellectual perfection. The liberal philosophers had described their imaginary state as an unselfish entity, exclusively committed to the best possible improve- ment of its subjects' welfare. They had discovered that in the frame of a market society the citizens' selfishness must bring about the sanic results that this unselfish state would seek to realize; it was precisely this fact that justified the preservation of the market economy in their eyes. But things became different as soon as people began to ascribe to the state not only the best intentions but also omniscience.
...
> A socialist advocates socialism because he is fully convinced that the supreme director of the socialist commonwealth will be reasonable from his-the individual socialist's point of view, that he will aim at those ends of which he-the individual socialist-fully approves, and that he will try to attain these ends by choosing means which he-the individual socialist-would also choose. Every socialist calls only that system a genuinely socialist system in which these conditions are completely fulfilled; all other brands claiming the name of socialism are counterfeit systems entirely different from true socialism. Every socialist is a disguised dictator. Woe to all dissenters! They have forfeited their right to live and must be "liquidated."
[1]: https://cdn.mises.org/Human%20Action_3.pdf pp. 688-689
I am a scientist, a really awesome scientist, I slayed Rand because of my awesome sciencey authority, Rand was wrong. Oh BTW rand was right about fiction being a good conveyor of morality, because it suits my narrative. So I wrote some fiction with no science in it, to slay her for being wrong. Did I mention I am a scientist so that gives authority to my fiction, being fiction it negates my need to provide the sciency bits to prove my point.
This authors hubris is at the L Ron ++ level.
I have found that her work has become a bit like the Bible: you can find a way to justify a lot of what you want to believe, and then you can discard the rest. Most of the Rand-lovers I know vote for Republicans and some vote for Democrats. Some (or all) of those votes must conflict with Objectivism, since so many of the parties' policies are opposite.
> Instead, the utopia in the book is one in which people voluntarily associate to form a society.
This is why I believe that governments should obsessively do two things: A) protect the rights and opportunities of children, who can't enter a social contract; and B) pay the costs of someone exiting the social contract.
For example, I believe the US government should offer people the cost to travel to any other country once. They would revoke their citizenship and their right to live in the US permanently.
After that, we can more honestly say that citizens have entered into the social contract and may be held to it.
Funny idea. An anarchist (left or right) would ask: why should I move? Why does the US government get priority here?
The answer would be this argument:
1. Land on Earth is finite
2. Most people want a social contract (trading freedoms, like stealing, for benefits, like personal property)
3. Social contracts do not work unless they are geographically bound (ex: traffic laws only succeed if they are enforced consistently across a geographic area)
4. Through no fault of their own, some people (including anarchists) will end up inside of a geographic area where a social contract is consistently enforced (e.g. a state)
The anarchist must move not because is some cosmic or absolute justice at play, but rather because they are at the mercy of the people around them. If they choose to assert their rights to A) stay within that state and B) violate the social contract, the other citizens will impose consequences on them.
Between you and me, though, I think most anarchists are just people who are able to ascribe the drawbacks of social contracts without being able to ascribe the benefits. They think that less government means similar comfort with more freedom, and we know from history (and currently examples in feudal places like Afghanistan) that that is untrue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism
> Rand described Objectivism as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".
Cooperation seems to be means to achieve personal goals. Which brings us to the thesis of the article.
Why would objectivist care about climate change which will have effect in 100 years, but requires them to sacrifice something today?
Climate change is something which infringes on another's rights and even in Libertarian circles government action isn't strictly out of the question.
I see a lot of compassion and action on individual level. But at society we leave more people behind. And as people who are capable to act (those who have enough both mental, time and other resources) tolerate such way of things maybe it's aligned with their system of values (i.e. capitalism and individualism).
Because one of the selfish personal goals of an individual is the thriving of their progeny. Heinlein defined love as the state in which another person's happiness is essential to one's own. Thus one can be utterly selfish during a single minded pursuit of another's happiness, because your own happiness depends on it.
It is typical of our species to sacrifice your own body's needs to achieve the intensely personal goal of making your childrens' lives better. This can be interpreted as a form of selflessness, but I see it as Randian selfishness, where the self is an extended phenotype that can encompass multiple organisms.
In this sense, altruism is about sacrificing to help others that you do not love.
...and yet, there is something inspiring (?) about the characters in her work. I don't know how to describe the feeling. Perhaps someone here knows what I'm talking about. They are brief glimpses of people with true character that don't sacrifice their values for anything. Roark in particular is (mostly) a very sympathetic character.
Ultimately, I think her mistake was in transporting her philosophy from art (Roark) to business (Galt). The rebel artist that never gives in to the market and the mob is inspiring. But the businessman and financier? Not so much.
That all aside, the sheer amount of angst and hatred thrown toward Rand is interesting in itself. As MLK said, the opposite of love isn't hate, it is indifference, and boy do people love to hate Rand.
Yeah it's quite interesting. I don't think I have ever seen another book or people who like it get so much hate, completely unprovoked.
Being honest, her books are not that good. The writing is bad to put it kindly; it is obvious the whole story is just a canvas used to paint her ideas onto. However, the ideas they present are really unique, which makes the works very memorable.
What sort of non-self-aware person terms their personal philosophy "objectivism"? AS-IF you were "objective", Ayn.
In my mind, Ayd Rands philosophies are immoral. Most of the problems life on earth faces at this junction in time are caused by human selfishness on the part of individual actors who actively seek to undermine humanities necessary collective corrections 1) environmental catastrophes of all sorts, including climate change 2) extreme poverty, folks without basic health-care, drinking-water, food, shelter, etc.
I see Ayn claiming that big bosses "earned it" but I question the extent to which Bezos, Musk, Gates, etc, "earned it"... certainly 6 figure salaries, but the equivalent of entire continents full of nations GDP? It seems like a broken system, bare-minimum.
The idea that one could propose the harshness of our economic failed-systems as the exclusive solution to every human issue = implausible at best.
"Standing on the shoulders of giants" - is this only true when you want to acknowledge our computing forebears, or does not society provide individuals with tools and materials they would never be able to individually obtain etc?
From arms-makers who push for specific foreign policies to oil companies who fund right-wing astroturf movements, the problem has the same origin: The economy and markets are what rule human activities on planet earth. Governments must cater to them, at their peril. The economy and markets treat environmental catastrophes like "the tragedy of the commons" like externalities.
Radical Individualism is not a philosophy, it's a religious conviction, and cannot allow any alternative ideas to exist, witness the discourse here and the dismissive manner folks treat a rather decent author (whatever your point of view on their conclusions), versus putting a rather technically-poor writer on a pedestal.
Her characters never develop or think a different thought from beginning to end, as the authors moralizing overpowers the frail thread of an attempt at disguising her viewpoint as a story, etc. I can't see how anyone can seriously pick on this Nautilus writer while giving Ayn Rand a free pass.
There was a brick factory in the old town I used to live in. The owner died and his son didn't want to run it. They liquidated it. They liquidated 500+ jobs and those 500+ folks went on the unemployment rolls and starting being a social drain in lieu of a social boon.
Does society not have an interest in keeping this brick factory running, for the sake of the local economy etc?
Could the Camera Municipal simply have insisted that they will find buyers for the factory but that liquidation is not an option?
Does society have no rights?
Ayn Rand grants society nothing. zero. zilch.
Clearly society exists. I have a real issue with the English-speaking worlds lack of reflection on etymology and the actual meaning of words.
Thatcher "given A, A does not exist" Teresa May "Diogenes coined a word I don't like" (never mind that cosmopolitan literally means citizen of everywhere, thus contradicting the notion that a cosmopolitan could ever be a citizen of nowhere. hello "words" and "meanings" for 10 points...)
But the hate is mostly for the ideas, not the writing. The worlds are certainly fictional. Things are not as black and white as she paints them. The heroes are small minority of supremely talented, hard-working people battling bureaucracy and incompetence. Rand assumes everyone is born on a level playing field and the choices people may determine where they land.
My advice is that anyone Atlas Shrugged is a must read for anyone with an ounce of entrepreneurial spirit. Take it with a grain of salt though.
Separate to that, her ideas are disliked with good reason.
But there are interesting characters in her novels that are heroic but undone by their flaws. E.g. Leo Kovalensky and Andrei Taganov in We The Living, Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead, Dr. Robert Stadler and perhaps Eddie Willers in Atlas Shrugged.
The left may espouse noble causes, but it is authoritarian in its execution and intolerant of disagreement. Rand threatens that.
The right is religious and more immediately rejects Rand at a surface level -- same thing, different authority.
People have a gut reaction to it as if it means putting on your own mask and letting others die.
If prosocial behavior is the best option for the individual, then the most selfish thing for the individual to do is that prosocial behavior.
Edit: The current gun rights debate in the USA is if making it more difficult for hobby marksman is worth the collective safety.
You should get some of that money back. Also, by not paying, you would be fined by the government. It's ultimately not overall a benefit to you.
>Edit: The current gun rights debate in the USA is if making it more difficult for hobby marksman is worth the collective safety.
Thinking about the collective, as suggested, doesn't make any sense.
Individuals responsibly owning and carrying firearms is self-beneficial and prosocial.
Individuals irresponsibly owning and misusing firearms is self-harming and anti-social.
This is the whole point of the Objectivist point of view.
What if I had to, for whatever reason, choose between me dying and fifty other people dying? Or me and some really socially valuable person?
For anyone who thinks "collectivism" is superior, think about employment. Do you really think people should take no pay and work on things they don't enjoy because it serves the collective (e.g. company)? If not, how do you decide which collective to join (e.g. Nazi Germany vs Charity Org), or does the collective decide that too? I argue deciding what collectives to voluntarily support is the ultimate act of individuality, and also keeps a check on the corruption by allowing a person to leave at will.
Moral philosophy breaks my head.
There's just so much missing from tit-for-tat, reductionist, game theoretic treatments. Fairness, context, identity, values.
But I'm not smart enough to resolve or articulate my confusion.
So I settled on a personal moral philosophy for my daily reality:
"Help people help themselves; help those who can't."
I purposefully omit anything about mitigating cheating (punishing free loaders). Though it's important, I just don't have the bandwidth.
Man, I am SO BORED today.
Rand's Objectivism is not mutually exclusive with Collectivist, nor is it always necessarily Individualist.
Personally I believe individuals are becoming more and more far removed from the benefits of "Collectivism" and therefore are wrongly believing their (in)abilities are a result of their actions solely. Your own actions, of course, have an effect on your life, but we don't live in a vacuum.
If we collectively pollute the planet and it turns out that pollution makes it harder for children to learn, is it the child's fault for not learning properly or our fault for creating such conditions? Of course, the answer is it's a little of both.
This. Modern individual can use something built by a group of collectivists and advance alone.
This is not AT ALL to say I don't enjoy cooperation and working / playing together with other people with different viewpoints or alternative perspectives. That's one of the best parts of living on this planet. So I'm not saying there's no value in others, or even that I could exist without others. But I AM saying I only value others for their individualism.
With that said, I'm not really sure I understand your position. Could you elaborate? I especially don't understand the "add more than one and limitations begin." That can definitely be true, but is not inherently so.
On the other hand, they were both built up by other people. They had their influences, their sponsors, their teachers and their friends. They lived in a society that put value on and supported individuals doing science.
So I think I agree with you, but with the addition that there needs to be a group that nurtures individuals for them to be effective. This is, I believe, the reason there was no scientific revolution in China despite the high level of development there for so long: individual accomplishments were inevitably done in service to the emperor, so revolutionary changes were discouraged, even feared, in favor of technology to maintain the harmony of society.
The introduction of radical new ideas? Committees don't change the world, they maintain it.
Excessive individualism leads to an unhappy, isolated, dilapidated society and ironically almost always presages excessive collectivism.
This is just one more area where we need to search for the golden mean.
Look at the Uighurs and the Rohingya. That's what happens when a group exists outside some political consensus in the absence of individualism. History is chock full of wars and genocides that are incomprehensible to us because we believe in individualism and those people didn't.
Why would the Catholic Church give a shit about the Cathars? It makes no sense to us, but they did, enough to kill as many Cathars as they could find.
It depends what you mean by Individualism. I think a good and often used definition of individualism is that individuals have inherent value and inherent rights. This notion seems like a deeply valuable part of modern ethics and has made our society stronger. Individualism is the basis for concepts like human rights.
At least from my perspective so much of the battle between the conservatives and the progressives is that the conservatives take a traditionalist view that individuals must subsume their will and happiness to the expectations of society; Often the traditional expectations of society. Whereas progressives and the left argue that individuals have an inherent right to live their lives the way they want assuming they aren't hurting anyone else. For instance gay rights is fundamentally built on individualist values, traditional western society expects gay people to not express themselves, whereas an individualist would say gay people have an inherent right to express themselves and social expectation be damned.
Where things go off the rails is when conservatives don’t understand why the system works the way it does and confuses it to be all good because it produces good outcomes. Where opponents of conservatism (revolutionaries?) go off the rails is that they only see the bad in the current system and have failed to understand what the current system was optimized for doing well.
If you don’t understand what an existing system does well, then you lack the qualifications to propose a new system since the new system won’t fix what is broken while simultaneously preserving what is working well.
In either case, whether you are in favor of an existing system or opposed to it, you need to dig deep and reflect on why things are done the way they are because you may be throwing out a kernel of brilliant insight and not know it or you may be correct about thinking that you’re dealing with an onion in the varnish.
"So, gradually and inevitably, to-day, to-morrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark." [0]
>In either case, whether you are in favor of an existing system or opposed to it, you need to dig deep and reflect on why things are done the way they are because you may be throwing out a kernel of brilliant insight and not know it or you may be correct about thinking that you’re dealing with an onion in the varnish.
Strong agree. It is unfortunate that so much is cast as being for or against an existing system. We should all want to improve the world. History has shown that resisting all change just results in turning a living system into a decaying one. On the other hand attempting to replace a living system with wholly new living system almost always results in second system syndrome [1]. We should reject both of these approaches and ask what sort of society do we wish to have and how might we get from here to there.
From where I sit the conservative answer to that is that they want a society which enforces strict hierarchies such that each person's role and place is society is pre-determined for them along traditional lines: the peasants work on farms or factories, families ruled by patriarchs, an elite ruling class, everyone obeys the church in their sexual life etc... The traditionalism that the conservatives seek is not the present state of our society, but rather their imagined fantasy of the past. Whereas the society I would like is one is which each individual is given the support to be the best person they can be __as defined by that individual__ (of course within the limits of the resources of the society and such that they aren't harming others). I see the current political divide in the US as a battle between those who wish to move the world closer toward traditionalist morality (conservatives) and those who wish to move the world toward an individualist morality (progressives).
[0]: Heretics by GK Chesterton https://www.gutenberg.org/files/470/470-h/470-h.htm
[1]: Second System Effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
Those people aren't conservatives though. The problem is the disconnect between what conservatism as an approach to doing things and capital C Conservatives which is a group identity. The philosophy and the identity are hardly related. It's the exact same with liberals and Liberals. Fewer and fewer self identified capital L Liberals these days hold liberal philosophical positions.
This identitarian present is extremely toxic because the group identity becomes more important that the original axioms that formed the original impetus for forming a coalition in the first place.
The important thing is not to confuse the thinking liberals and conservatives with the non-thinking, following Liberals and Conservatives.
"If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking." – Lyndon B. Johnson (also there is a similar but different previous quote from Winston Churchill)
While Liberals and Conservatives are two group identities at odds with one another, I would not consider liberalism and conservatism to be at odds with one another. Liberalism is about individual freedom and conservatism is about preserving what works. They are only in conflict on an issue by issue basis when increasing individual freedom is in conflict with preserving something that works. Their are plenty of things that work that don't harm individual freedom and many that do can be modified carefully to increase individual freedom without destroying the benefit of the thing that provides benefit that took a while to build.
Other than that slight disagreement, great contribution. Thanks for the reply.
I would say this is a symptom of what I said about things going off the rails when people no longer understanding why the system evolved as it did in the first place.
I think one of the great dichotomies of our time (and probably any similar time of turmoil) is thinking about things in terms of value to present life versus thinking of things in terms of life over multiple generations. Both are valuable. Do everything in service of future generations and you miss out on living life and do everything for the current generation and you diminish what you could have bequeathed to the next generation.
All these conventions such as hierarchies, places and roles have proven extremely useful for organizing society in the past to accomplish things. A lot of this was limited at the time, especially by communication. Before the advent of the telegram/telephone, a command and control hierarchy made a ton of sense as a scaling solution for a society, especially one in economic and sometimes wartime competition with other societies. It's something that worked and still works in certain contexts. As communication became easier, you needed less command and control hierarchy, but as competition became more fierce between societies, there was still value in centralizing things in competent "deciders" that looked at collected information and made decisions.
A lot of hierarchy has proven for generations to be of value in bequeathing a productive society to the next generation. Sometimes some of it becomes outdated because of innovations like the telegram/telephone and most recently the internet, but there is still value in maintaining that previous hierarchy under you perform a careful migration from the first system to the second system while preserving what the first system did well.
Sadly, most of society are not software engineers like you and I that have had the massive experience of working on massive systems that can be evolved in such short time frames with so much transparency. What we can learn about evolving, replacing, refactoring and migrating systems from large scale software projects can take decades to lifetimes to learn about in systems that are much slower to change as they deal with real world artifacts that can't be switched out with a git patch.
When so much of society lacks the experience working with systems that can be modified so readily and which have much more rapid and accurate observability, logging, metrics and alerts, it's not surprising that in that lack of experience that provides that understanding that some people would cling to possibly outdated ideas like hierarchies and roles.
A common complaint among some groups is that they worked really hard and built successful businesses, and they shouldn’t be taxed to pay for services that do not benefit them. But they neglect to account for the infrastructure, relative availability of educated workforce, and even regional economic stability which allows others to reliably consume their products.
I think this comes down to a fundamental miscommunication. No one is going to believe you are a heartless jerk for advocating for more efficient, effective practices in government. The values judgment comes in when the services being cut are those that provide tangible, critical value to individuals in society - think social welfare programs.
Because cuts are never accompanied by a plan for efficiency, cuts always mean services get worse. Therefore, individuals who receive vital services suffer. Then comes the 'heartless jerk' values judgment.
Maybe all budget cuts need to be precipitated by a process evaluation and bloat reduction.
The issue is, that game is too easy to rig and too tempting to play; for proof, see literally any large corporation's budget and planning processes. Fiefdoms abound.
I don't know how to fix the problem.
I have always said that I would gladly pay 75% of my salary in taxes, as long as everyone in society had easy, equal access to high quality education, quality, safe housing, nutritious, safe food, and high quality, timely healthcare.
The problem is, any society structured to provide those things will immediately be corrupted by greedy, power-hungry people.
Getting a little too philosophical, I think. Anyway. I don't know what the solution is, but I'm hopeful that there is one.
But inefficient and providing service to everyone are not necessarily the same thing. Planned inefficiencies is what are important.
For example - the college I work at knows that we're going to lose our shirts on every nursing student, something to the tune of 25k loss for every student, every year in that program.
And because that is what the area needs, that is what we do. It's massively inefficient. It would, at a for-profit, be the first program to get cut.
But we can plan for that loss, and make up for it in other areas.
That's an efficient and effective inefficiency.
Waste is not virtuous and you cannot prosper by continually breaking and repairing the same windows.
there's also the argument that it's worse for a government to waste money than it is for a business. if someone runs their own business inefficiently, they are just wasting their own money. if the executives run a publicly-traded business inefficiently, this is a bit worse as they are wasting the shareholders' money. but an inefficient government is wasting everyone's money that they are compelled to contribute.
>a business that wastes more than it profits will eventually be sold for parts
How many startups linked on this very site throw VC money into furnaces and have nothing to show for it (not even parts) after a few years? Where did all the Yik Yak money go?
>a government isn't subject to the same constraints and can raise taxes or print money for a long time to paper over the rot
Overall that may be true but individual departments and programs are certainly subject to those constraints.
>an inefficient government is wasting everyone's money that they are compelled to contribute
I'm not thrilled about the billions that have been wasted developing the F-35 but that's exactly how representative government works. I don't get a vote in the decisions of Google or Apple.
Do you have a source for your numbers?
https://www.ntu.org/foundation/tax-page/who-pays-income-taxe...
Besides, doing a trivial, quick Google search comes up with a few links to anti-tax lobby groups (such as the one you provided). However, a slightly less trivial, slightly less quick look at the topic reveals that the figures in the anti-tax lobby group reports do not include capital gains, or really anything outside of federal income. It doesn't even include payroll tax.
A few sources, admittedly biased the other way:
- https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/where-do-federal-t...
- https://theintercept.com/2019/04/13/tax-day-taxes-statistics...
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/08/first-tim...
- https://www.businessinsider.com/american-billionaires-paid-l...
Since payroll is proportional to income, that's even more federal revenue that is indirectly levied on the labor of the top 5% and 20%.
Once you include capital gains taxes, the top 5% and top 20% cover even more of federal revenue. The only portion of capital gains that isn't personal capital gains is corporate capital gains. A sizable amount of non-individual capital gains are hedge funds and retirement accounts, which once again are mostly funded by many people in the top 5% and 20%.
Any way you slice it, it's largely the top 5% to top 20% of so funding much of the operating costs of USA Inc. Everyone in the bottom 50% gets a 50% say while paying a mere 3% of income taxes and probably even less in taxes once you include all sources of federal revenue.
It seems weird to want to pivot to individuals being taxed and then comment on how much those individuals pay as a group, and not look at whether or not individuals being taxed are being taxed at a fair rate over time.
Yes, and if you look at my other comments here, I'm in favor of all individuals, regardless of wealth paying the exact same in taxes via a flat tax on consumption.
Whatever the flat tax percent is, it should be paid by everyone equally in proportion to their consumption.
For example, poor people have no choice but to eat, and their food costs won't be that much lower than a rich person's food costs (assuming artificially that everyone cooked at home).
Therefore, because rich and poor people will eat about the same amount of food, and the cost will be "about" the same, then the amount of tax paid will be about the same. But as a percentage of the person's income, the poor person will have a drastically higher burden of taxation.
And even if consumption tax proponents were willing to allow for luxury item tax rates, rich people would always have a way around it. For example, would renting an item be taxed the same as buying it? Or what if instead I receive access to my Ferrari as a perk of working for my hedge fund? The poor guy who buys the $2,000 used junker will have to pay consumption tax, but I won't.
For every rule there are probably multiple loopholes. And even if a fair system could be devised, it would never see the light of day because you could never get enough people to agree on what that system would be.
All of this is just pointless thought experimentation anyway; the current corporate-political structure likes the current system much better than they would like any radically different system. Therefore, nothing significant is going to change.
I wouldn't phrase it that way but I could see the argument for exempting only the most basic necessities from taxation such as very basic end-consumer foodstuffs (generic non-organic unbranded flour, eggs, milk, in-season domestic fruits and vegetables, etc, generic commodity processed food goods, if a company slaps a brand on it, it should not be exempt). For housing, maybe the first N dollars of housing costs where N is the median cost of the cheapest 10% of housing stock in a local market.
Whatever the decision that is made, the main thing that needs to be conserved is that everyone that votes should feel the pain of taxation for any consumption above and beyond mere existence. If we don't all feel the burden of paying for governance, how are we all supposed to take the same interest in making sure that that governance is spending taxpayer money wisely. This is especially important in a democracy where the majority can rule. What you can't have is a situation where the majority with the votes doesn't feel the burden of the governance they are voting for. That's a recipe for disaster.
> For example, would renting an item be taxed the same as buying it?
renting is consumption
> Or what if instead I receive access to my Ferrari as a perk of working for my hedge fund?
gifting is consumption. Stuff like this is already stuff that people have to include in their income taxes.
> For every rule there are probably multiple loopholes.
that's no different than for the status quo. loopholes are a fact of life in a system. the more complex the rules, the most loopholes there are
> All of this is just pointless thought experimentation anyway;
I disagree. It's important to identify the shortcomings of the current system and that is that it leads to voters that are drunk on transferism. If you don't identify such shortcomings, you can't fix them.
If everyone felt the burden of taxes equally via a flat tax based strictly on consumption and consumption alone, I could get behind it. Right now however it’s just robbing Peter to pay Paul. And when Paul is the beneficiary of taxes and relatively unburdened, not only are they supportive of more taxes because it’s not their problem, but they also care not about the efficiency of how wisely those tax dollars are spent because it’s Peter footing the bill.
It’s a massively regressive idea and pretty much by definition a flat tax based on consumption would not be felt equally at all.
that aside, my armchair economist opinion is that consumption is not a very good place to collect taxes in the first place. you want people to buy stuff from each other, don't discourage this!
You'd still end up with the middle paying proportionally a lot more than the wealthiest.
But yeah, in general I agree, I guess maybe that certain political mindset latches onto it as it appears to be an easy/straightforward place to apply it.
Again, everyone ends up paying proportionally the exact same on what they personally benefit from: consumption.
What isn't consumed regardless of income goes back into circulation in the economy via investment.
But they don't pay in proportion to what they earn or their wealth. Compared to the current system it would leave the poor paying a much higher proportion of taxes and a higher percentage of their income as tax, both compared to now and compared to those who earn more.
> What isn't consumed regardless of income goes back into circulation in the economy via investment.
Great, so the wealthy , who consume proportionally less, get to invest and grow their wealth unfettered, while those on low incomes get to increase their share of the tax burden.
Nice. Sounds 'fair'.
I agree it's an alternate way to approach fairness, I just find it a bizarre one. If taxes are to stay at roughly the same gross take as they do now in, for instance, the UK, VAT would have to rise from 20% to approximately 100%, which would be utterly ruinous for the poorest, but barely noticed by others.
The progressive taxation approach doesn't even leave those at the bottom better off. The market still uses price discovery to figure out prices. All the progressive taxation approach does is eliminate a cost and lower the price of labor to be equal to what labor is demanding. If labor had to also pay their fair share of taxes, they'd demand the amount they need plus the amount they need to pay in taxes.
An alternative that achieves fairness is to have no income tax and instead only have payroll taxes. This way no individual is bilked because they were successful.
I still prefer a flat sales tax because you shouldn't tax what you want to see more of in society, the labor to make society work, but only having a payroll tax would at least solve the fairness issue.
The only problem with the payroll tax approach is that the skin in the game expectation has one drawback. Those that are in most demand in the jobs marketplace is at the least risk of advocating for a higher payroll tax across the board. Raising the payroll taxes could make some roles no longer profitable and companies could cut those roles to achieve a better ROI.
Everyone has skin in the game, it's called 'life'.
> Contributing proportionally would give them skin in the game
They do contribute proportionally, they have very little so that contribution is low. In general this is done because if you take the same proportion from the worst off as you do from the richest, the poor starve.
> they would all of a sudden discover the importance of demanding fiscal responsibility from those that are governing.
While they starve because of the new tax regime. I imagine the first thing they'll demand is that their taxes get lowered so that they can live, so back to square one. If there aren't just food riots first. Also it looks like you're mooting introducing some sort of unbreakable, unchangeable law so that people would demand other changes. I'm not sure that's how democracy works...
> you shouldn't tax what you want to see more of in society
You don't want commerce?
You realise that to support your scheme, sales tax would have to go up to the region of 100%?
this is only true under a very narrow definition of "benefit". I benefit from a lot of things that are hard to account for with a system of taxes on transactions (what I assume you mean by "consumption tax", correct me if I'm misunderstanding you). I benefit from roads when I drive on them, police when I don't get shot on my way to work, the military when my country isn't invaded by a foreign power, etc. you could certainly expand the definition of consumption to include these things, but it would become very difficult to account for.
Yes, you do, but the goal of politicians is to convince the populace that their proposed larger collective reinvestments will be more valuable to taxpayers than the taxpayer's individual conspicuous consumption.
You want both consumption by individuals and investment by (1) companies, (2) the government and (3) individuals.
Investment in the future always comes from foregoing consumption in the present.
When you tax private investment to make a public investment, you're not getting more investment, you're actually getting less investment since the amount you collect to reinvest is diminished by the cost of the bureaucracy used to collect that tax money and divert those tax dollars to other investments. It wasteful massively wasteful to tax investments to make investments.
No, they would be taxed proportionally the same. You're starting from the assumption that income is what should be taxed. Income comes from productive activity (labor or investments) and is what you want more of, not less.
> and the richest few percent would love this as their proportion of income that goes on consumption is the lowest.
And what is happening with the rest of the money? It's being reinvested, which is something you want in society.
At the end of the day, the money is only ever used/enjoyed personally by rich (and poor alike) when they consume.
No, they wouldn't. The poorer you are, the more of your money goes towards consumption of the necessities of life and therefore the higher proportion of your available funds goes to tax under such a system.
> You're starting from the assumption that income is what should be taxed.
No, I'm starting from the definition of progressive taxation and telling you, accurately, that your scheme is a recipe for regressive taxation as it disproportionately affects the worse off.
Even the ludicrous "Fair Tax" proposals made 15-20 years ago made concessions to this, in proposing that the least well off would be refunded all or some of their taxes.
Absolutely hit the nail in the head. Unless you live in a self-sufficient homestead in the middle of a forest, there's no such thing as a "self-made man". Take Amazon for instance: they benefit from roads and infrastructure. But they also benefit from things like police and courts to protect their private property, just like they rely on a workforce capable of meeting their demands. Ultimately, they also benefit from a stable society and mostly wealthy enough population to afford their products! And finally, one can say that they benefit from the work of the people who invented the Internet, who invented computers, who made the American Revolution, the ancient Greek philosophers and the medieval mathematicians and Copernicus and Galileo and Newton, in short: directly or indirectly from the combined work of every single human being which lived and has ever lived. That's what's hidden behind the simple word "society". And that's why no person is "self-made".
For this, Amazon reaps enormous profit. They need to pay what's due: they owe a debt to society, for it was society that enabled their profit.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
Here's your problem.
The semitic word used where English uses charity means more like justice or "do the right thing". It also implies that the right thing may in fact involve giving to those who have too little ie: they "deserve" more because they were dealt a bad hand, not because of their achievements.
I didn't see anything in the article about slaying the beast of individualism.
Just some thoughts of person who misunderstood another author.
I guess I need a trigger warning for bombastic opinions.
Good grief. Tolstoy did his damnedest to ruin War and Peace on just that assumption, but was fundamentally too good a novelist to do so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolut...
[2] https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.ht...
If you want to convince people of how the world works, use real-world evidence. Make your case for why more individualistic societies have fared better/worse, dig out stats, and tell me how you see the connections.
As for economics, the more I studied it in and after college, there more I see that ecology is what economics courses actually need to contain. The interaction of agents with the environment, leading to changes in both, is just like the economy. All the weird stuff you see on Attenborough has a business-world analog. It's also a refreshing pause from applying inappropriate mathematical abstractions that eat up a heck of a lot of time.
the logic: 1. win = you pick: military, economy, etc (arguably) 2. winning economy/military = specialization, complex R&D, infrastructure, tools, etc = requires cooperation 3. cooperation = subverting personal desire for greater good.
Sure, on a short term basis offensive military/etc efforts can overtake collective ones, but the collective has a massive R&D advantage.
We all know Batman is not even close to being real, but sometimes it's still fun to watch him defeat cartoonish villains.
Any fiction can be stirring and have a motivational or aspirational effect on people. Just don't confuse mythology for reality.
I know that Rand did take it seriously, curated a cult following, and probably drank her own kool-aid, but that doesn't mean you have to.
Note: I did get some help with prepping my resume among other things.
She, in her lifetime, bore personal witness to the rape, slaughter, and enslavement that was not only allowed but encouraged by a moral philosophy that placed the importance of an undefinable "group" above any individual. She spent her life's work trying to take the strongest possible opposition to that philosophy. Her goal was to create moral arguments that could stand in opposition to any of the many tenets of group moral systems. She communicated her ideas brusquely, which is not an effective method of communication, because she was "over that shit".
The driving moral principle behind her beliefs was that the strength of a group of people does not have the moral right to abuse the freedom of an individual person, regardless of their practical power to do so. Furthermore, by respecting those individuals rights, society would be better served by those individuals. Allowing evolutionary competitive mechanisms to operate in social spheres would produce better results overall.
Was everything she said correct? Obviously not. But, that can be said of anyone that ever produced any idea. Her fundamental driving principle, and the way she explored it, are both interesting and useful to think about. Tens of millions of people have been subjected to democide in the last century, as a direct result of group-based moral systems. As it has been said, groups do-not and cannot suffer, only individuals can suffer.
As to your individual points, she might say that nothing so far has resolved the tragedy of the commons, that net-neutrality is only a problem because the government has granted ISP monopolies by force, that right to repair is only a problem because governments have granted IP monopolies by force, that any individual may contribute to OSS if they desire but should not be forced to if they do not desire, and that anyone may contribute to a forum if they desire but should not be forced to if they do not desire. I would personally have different answers for some of these questions.
Rand's work is like the Bible, fiction that has far more negative than positive consequences on our community-based democratic society. I'd happily debate the deleterious effects of either of these ouvres, not that they aren't "interesting" or thought provoking as you say, but that they're exerting negative consequences on American Life.
There is a lot points on which I would disagree with Ayn Rand, but she definitely did not think that an activity is pointless unless it makes money. She argued that people should live for themselves, so if someone enjoyed making art and never selling it or allowing anyone to view it, she would not view as pointless because it would be done for the individual's own enjoyment.
Go on, you're almost there.
As young man, I thought her ideas were provocative, but something feels wrong with Atlas Shrugged.
I later come to realize that rand is a bad novelist:
She is a little too self indulgent with her character’s speeches.
She has contempt for the antagonists in her books. She hates them. She cannot relate to them, so they are not relatable. Her antagonists seem to be over the top in their abandonment of logic and common sense. Her worldview is flawed. No one would behave this way. I come to feel like she has some good ideas, but her cynicism about moochers is not supported by the real world.
Then 2019 happened and I realize she is right and I can’t decide if I should be more annoyed with her, Americans or myself. SJWs are as bad as the moochers she presents. American politicians and almost everyone in the dc community are craven, awful, dangerous and petty.
Instead of recognizing that everything we are experiencing is a symptom of the ethical decline of the country, we are tallying the score of republicans and democrats. We are homogenized and too stupid to save ourselves.
Our finishing move is electing a man presenting symptoms of dementia. He seems determined to accidentally start combat between nuclear armed nations through unforced insults, if “nance” thinks it’s ok to do so.
I was wrong. Ayn is right. These people will present self destruction as the moral choice. They will rage when you point out why it won’t work. The worst of them default to violence and suppression. It does seem to accelerate. You don’t have to like her to respect her.
however it is harder to do, takes longer to get there, and there are some tough patches on the way.
because quality takes time and effort (and always encounters failure along its path). it's just more expensive to do things that way.
I don't see this, even slightly. Could you please flush out your thoughts a little more to help me understand what you're saying?
How so? You haven’t connected the dots between “individualism” and “result: stronger collective” so this seems like meaningless rhetoric.
Obviously a team made up of self-reliant individuals is stronger than a team made up of not-self-reliant individuals.
Inidividuals who don't neglect the resources of the collective (which is impossible), but need them as little as possible, seem pretty clearly preferable to the alternative.