ANS -- How Predatory Capitalism Made America the World’s Dumbest Country

  Here's another one by umair haque.  It's about what believing in Capitalism is doing to us.  It's about telling what we value by how much we pay for it -- teachers get little, while hedge fund managers get untold wealth -- because we no longer value knowledge or well-rounded people, only money.  Those of us who still believe in the old values are aghast, but powerless to change it.

Find it here:  https://eand.co/how-capitalism-made-america-the-worlds-dumbest-country-ed33f15d1100

--Kim

Well, it won't let me copy and paste it -- on my computer all the letters are on top of each other.  So, follow the link above to read it -- there are comments too.

Okay, I have one more thing to try:  

It worked!

 

 

How Predatory Capitalism Made America the World's Dumbest Country

(Why) The Best Way Exploit a Society is to Get it to Exploit Itself

 

umair haque

Follow

Sep 6 · 10 min read

 

You don't have to look too hard to see it. There's an American President…marking up maps with a Sharpie…like an infant…so he's not humiliated by a foolish lie. LOL. Yet there's the British PM, lampoonishly wrecking democracy. What the? America, and it's little brother, Britain, are currently in a heated competition to win first place for being the incredibly dumbest country in the world. It's neck and neck, my friends. Nobody knows which nation of idiots will edge out the other, and win the gold medal for sheer head-pounding stupidity.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate for effect, so let me anticipate a few objections. I don't mean "dumbest country in the world" the way pundits might mean "smartest" — the average level of education and so forth. Clearly, all those degrees haven't translated into much. Nor do I mean it in the simplistic way of "not having schools and universities" — sure, we've got schools universities. They don't seem to be educating people much, though, do they?

I mean "dumbest country in the world" in a simpler — yet more humane and nuanced — way. I'll define it precisely shortly. First: do you see any other nations committing social suicide on these epic scales? Where else do people put up with mass shootings and not having insulin? Who else wants to shred democracy for the sake of…feeling "great" again? Where else do people constantly, consistently vote against their own "best interests"…their own happiness, prosperity, safety, stability…so much so, so predictably…that merely trying to point out that they act like fools has become a whole subject of national debate in itself?

Those things don't happen anywhere — anywhere — else in the world. Sure, we make iPhones. So what? As I often point out, America and Britain are the only two places in the world where life expectancy, incomes, and savings are falling in tandem. Yet they're also two of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Both those things can't be true…unless these have somehow become nations of colossal idiots, who think backward is forward, up is down, and dumb is smart. Pardon my French.

(Maybe North Korea and Saudi Arabia currently outdo us — but that only proves my point, I think. And sure, there are plenty of countries that struggle to become wealthy and powerful. But that doesn't make them dumb. It just makes them poor and powerless. Only we're dumb enough, it seems, to squander our immense wealth and power.)

So. How did it happen? How did we become the dumbest country in the world? I think the reason is hidden in plain sight. The incentives for knowledge and thoughtfulness and reason and and decency have been corroded and corrupted — so much so that they've turned upside down. Hence, what "dumb" means precisely is that capitalism has made societies that don't even need to exploited anymore — they are too busy exploiting themselves.

Let me explain all that.

How much does a teacher make? Barely enough to earn a decent middle class living. I read the other day that teachers are paying an average of about $500 from their own pockets…because our educational system is so impoverished. But that's money they can scarcely afford to begin with. How much does a professor make? The ugly truth is that our higher education system is full of "adjunct" professors — aka intelligent people who've studied long and hard to earn PhDs…but are something like the Uber drivers of academia…earning minimum wage or less for piecework. Do you see the theme yet? We undervalue knowledge as a society profoundly, systemically, chronically, catastrophically.

But that's hardly all. If we undervalue knowledge, how can there be any accountability or responsibility for truth versus falsehood, wrong versus right, reason versus folly, wisdom over sheer idiocy? When we undervalue knowledge — the real thing — we must also be overvaluing puffery, folly, stupidity, and superficiality, to put it bluntly.

Hello and welcome to the nightly news! Hence, we have a pundit industry now. People who masquerade as experts, constantly giving their opinion, on TV, in the papers…and yet have no basis for having an educated opinion to begin with. Just open the NYT op-ed page. It's full of people — Bret, Ross, David — who've literally been wrong about every major event in our adult lives, from endless war being righteous, to economic stagnation ensuing, to middle class implosion, to the rise of authoritarianism as a result of all that.

And yet…there they are. They're untouchables — a mafia of smug, unbelievably stupid white dudes, who'll never pay any price whatsoever for being so incredibly wrong that they ended up leading a society hurtling off the cliff edge of ignorance into the abyss of jaw-dropping stupidity. In any sane society, a Bret Stephens — a denier of climate change, fascism, stagnation, inequality — would have been exiled from being a columnist years ago, publicly disgraced, a national humiliation. In ours, a Bret Stephens fails upwards to the august pages of the NYT. In any sane society, a Morning Joe — who spent all election long supporting Trump — would have paid a price for his astonishing mistake. In ours — because he's a good ole boy — he's right where he was, only even richer. Tucker Carlson makes millions for spewing the most vile kinds of thoughts straight into half a country's brain every night.

So the guys that self-evidently don't know anything…not a thing…make millions — while a teacher can barely scrape together a middle class living…and even so, takes care of the kids in his or her charge on his or her own dime. Do you see a little bit what I mean by "incentives for knowledge being corroded so badly they've been twisted upside down"? I'm not speaking metaphorically. I'm speaking quite literally. The Bret Stephenses and Morning Joes of our society are paid colossal amounts. The teachers and adjunct professors of our society can barely make ends meet. The "hedge fund managers" and "traders" of our society are paid massive fortunes. The teachers and adjunct professors can barely raise families. Real incentives. Real money. Real lives. Real social outcomes, too.

It's often said — especially by people from collapsed societies — that you can judge the fortunes of a society by how it treats it teachers. That's because such people have seen firsthand that teachers and how they're treated are perhaps the ultimate leading indicator of social collapse — they point to incentives for knowledge turning upside down. I digress — this essay isn't just about teachers. But I think it's a telling observation. About what, precisely?

(Now, American pundits will point out the obvious at this juncture. Educated Americans make more than uneducated ones! How can you say incentives for knowledge have been corroded!!Calm down, Ezra. It's true that educated Americans make more. Why is that, though? It's largely because kids with Ivy League degrees head off to Wall St and Silicon Valley…where they rake it in. For…doing precisely nothing of any real value to society. Targeting ads more finely…finding cleverer ways to pump and dump stocks…these things have no benefit whatsoever, they just accrue profit. It's not "education" per se that's being employed here. It's just that a specific kind of technical knowledge is worth more to capitalism than anything else.

Hence, if you have a PhD in physics, Wall St will pay you a fortune. But if you have a PhD in English…nobody will pay you much at all. But hold on: it's the PhD in English that might have helped explain how the rhetoric of authoritarianism erodes the norms and values of a democracy, how today's demagogues echo yesterday's dictators, how to fight back against them using words and concepts. See my point? Nobody will reward you for having a PhD or even a Masters' in our society outside a set of very, very narrow disciplines — mostly mathematical, mostly technical, all corporate. That's because that kind of narrow skillset can be employed to maximize profit, to write more efficient algorithms, to optimize the code. Of what?)

Capitalism. That's what we've really been talking about. Of the predatory kind — not the bars-and-restaurants-in-my-neighborhood kind. Capitalism the Goldman Sachs way.

What unites all the following observations? Teachers and adjunct professors make a pittance, while pundits make a killing. That most PhDs in subjects society desperately needs can't make a decent living — because only by being a hedge fund manager or a trader or a corporate VP can you get there. That making it for a kid in America today means becoming a boat-shoed Ivy League frat-dork who sells out to Wall St at the first opportunity to slaver like a starved Doberman. That our society is totally incapable of any accountability or responsibility for getting basic facts or truths about anything right or wrong anymore so our President wields Sharpies like a four year old. That Tucker and Bret and Ross and David make millions for spreading sheer ignorance if not outright hate. That nobody much has an incentive anymore to act like a decent, civilized, reasoning human being — what else does it mean when teachers are paying money they can barely afford out of their own pockets to keep our kids educated? What does that say about the rest of us?

It says we've become something like capitalism's greatest fools. What does capitalism want from society? It wants a pool of pliable, manipulable proles — who can't figure out what's good for them, or not. It wants violent idiots, greedy dummies, self-interested fools, pinheaded ignoramuses quicker to draw a gun than read a book. Yes, really. People who are constantly not just at each others' throats — but at their very own. Why? If you're holding the knife to your own throat…well, nobody needs to crack the whip, do they? They're the cheapest, most disposable labour of all. They're not capable of democracy. You don't need to work very hard to exploit them — they exploit themselves for you.

And that's exactly what happened to Americans. They internalized capitalism's most toxic lessons — so much so that there isn't much else left in the American mind. Maybe you yourself didn't — but America as a culture certainly did. So much so that those lessons are part of everyday culture now, as little homilies.

Let's recite a few of capitalism's commandments. Greed is good. The only point of human life is to maximize one's acquisitions. Weakness and vulnerability can't be tolerated and must be punished. People who show any humanity, like compassion and empathy, are liabilities. A strong person is ruthless and violent and power-hungry. Any price to anything else is OK as long as one's own profit is maximized. A person who is not totally "self-reliant" is a burden and a parasite. The strong should survive, and the weak should perish. See how close to fascism we're getting? And isn't fascism history's ultimate form of stupidity?

Americans — enough of them, anyways — really believe these strange myths. They've become their own slavemasters, in a very real sense. Having internalized capitalism's commandments…they constantly vote against their own interests…deny each other healthcare, medicine, education…they put capitalists and capitalism first…and themselves last. Why else does America's discourse always ask: "how can we save capitalism?!" — not, say, "how can we save our democracy, society, middle class, planet"?

And the reason Americans internalize capitalism's lessons is that their society mostly only consists of capitalism — and capitalism has no interest in making an educated, decent human being out of anyone. So there sits the hedge fund trader…earning hundreds of millions…for playing with the shares of a media company like a toy…the media company employs the pundit…who earns millions…to repeat the commandments of capitalism over and over again…the average person is bombarded with all that a thousand times a day…and their only escape is into the arms of more megacapitalist dreck, Facebook, Tinder, and so forth. Meanwhile, the teacher and the professor are barely able to feed their kids. It's hardly a fair fight.

Capitalism has created a structural set of incentives for knowledge that are broken and corroded. Even that's putting it kindly. It's truer to say that capitalism has created incentives to replace truth, beauty, goodness, kindness, and decency with misinformation, disinformation, poverty, greed, despair, hate, and trauma. Nobody much has any incentive, really, in America, to create healthy minds: ones rich in knowledge, truth, happiness, reason, sanity, wisdom, intelligence. Where those incentives exist — like for our teachers and our professors — they are so weak and diluted that they are feeble. They barely stand a chance against the huge machine that spends billions to keep Americans dumb, ignorant, violent, and afraid. And so that's exactly what Americans still are.

America doesn't understand, I think, even at this late juncture, that the reason it's the dumbest country in the world is that capitalism made it so. Capitalism's commandments — greed is good, never show any empathy or compassion, the purpose of life is to profit, and so on — are so jaw droppingly repellent and wrong and foolish that literally nobody else in the world believes them. But nobody has much of a reason to want to believe anything else in America. To do anything else. To enact, express, live anything else. The alternative to living out capitalism's commandments is poverty, disgrace, squalor, and probably an early grave. And so mostly, we do.

And that, my friends, is how we became the dumbest country in the world. What I mean by that should now be clear. We're the only country that doesn't even need to be exploited by capitalism — because we're too busy exploiting ourselves. We had to bomb much of the rest of the world into acquiescing to that. But ourselves? We only had to go on believing the lies.

Umair
September 2019

 

You don't have to look too hard to see it. There's an American President…marking up maps with a Sharpie…like an infant…so he's not humiliated by a foolish lie. LOL. Yet there's the British PM, lampoonishly wrecking democracy. What the? America, and it's little brother, Britain, are currently in a heated competition to win first place for being the incredibly dumbest country in the world. It's neck and neck, my friends. Nobody knows which nation of idiots will edge out the other, and win the gold medal for sheer head-pounding stupidity.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate for effect, so let me anticipate a few objections. I don't mean "dumbest country in the world" the way pundits might mean "smartest" — the average level of education and so forth. Clearly, all those degrees haven't translated into much. Nor do I mean it in the simplistic way of "not having schools and universities" — sure, we've got schools universities. They don't seem to be educating people much, though, do they?

I mean "dumbest country in the world" in a simpler — yet more humane and nuanced — way. I'll define it precisely shortly. First: do you see any other nations committing social suicide on these epic scales? Where else do people put up with mass shootings and not having insulin? Who else wants to shred democracy for the sake of…feeling "great" again? Where else do people constantly, consistently vote against their own "best interests"…their own happiness, prosperity, safety, stability…so much so, so predictably…that merely trying to point out that they act like fools has become a whole subject of national debate in itself?

Those things don't happen anywhere — anywhere — else in the world. Sure, we make iPhones. So what? As I often point out, America and Britain are the only two places in the world where life expectancy, incomes, and savings are falling in tandem. Yet they're also two of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Both those things can't be true…unless these have somehow become nations of colossal idiots, who think backward is forward, up is down, and dumb is smart. Pardon my French.

(Maybe North Korea and Saudi Arabia currently outdo us — but that only proves my point, I think. And sure, there are plenty of countries that struggle to become wealthy and powerful. But that doesn't make them dumb. It just makes them poor and powerless. Only we're dumb enough, it seems, to squander our immense wealth and power.)

So. How did it happen? How did we become the dumbest country in the world? I think the reason is hidden in plain sight. The incentives for knowledge and thoughtfulness and reason and and decency have been corroded and corrupted — so much so that they've turned upside down. Hence, what "dumb" means precisely is that capitalism has made societies that don't even need to exploited anymore — they are too busy exploiting themselves.

Let me explain all that.

How much does a teacher make? Barely enough to earn a decent middle class living. I read the other day that teachers are paying an average of about $500 from their own pockets…because our educational system is so impoverished. But that's money they can scarcely afford to begin with. How much does a professor make? The ugly truth is that our higher education system is full of "adjunct" professors — aka intelligent people who've studied long and hard to earn PhDs…but are something like the Uber drivers of academia…earning minimum wage or less for piecework. Do you see the theme yet? We undervalue knowledge as a society profoundly, systemically, chronically, catastrophically.

But that's hardly all. If we undervalue knowledge, how can there be any accountability or responsibility for truth versus falsehood, wrong versus right, reason versus folly, wisdom over sheer idiocy? When we undervalue knowledge — the real thing — we must also be overvaluing puffery, folly, stupidity, and superficiality, to put it bluntly.

Hello and welcome to the nightly news! Hence, we have a pundit industry now. People who masquerade as experts, constantly giving their opinion, on TV, in the papers…and yet have no basis for having an educated opinion to begin with. Just open the NYT op-ed page. It's full of people — Bret, Ross, David — who've literally been wrong about every major event in our adult lives, from endless war being righteous, to economic stagnation ensuing, to middle class implosion, to the rise of authoritarianism as a result of all that.

And yet…there they are. They're untouchables — a mafia of smug, unbelievably stupid white dudes, who'll never pay any price whatsoever for being so incredibly wrong that they ended up leading a society hurtling off the cliff edge of ignorance into the abyss of jaw-dropping stupidity. In any sane society, a Bret Stephens — a denier of climate change, fascism, stagnation, inequality — would have been exiled from being a columnist years ago, publicly disgraced, a national humiliation. In ours, a Bret Stephens fails upwards to the august pages of the NYT. In any sane society, a Morning Joe — who spent all election long supporting Trump — would have paid a price for his astonishing mistake. In ours — because he's a good ole boy — he's right where he was, only even richer. Tucker Carlson makes millions for spewing the most vile kinds of thoughts straight into half a country's brain every night.

So the guys that self-evidently don't know anything…not a thing…make millions — while a teacher can barely scrape together a middle class living…and even so, takes care of the kids in his or her charge on his or her own dime. Do you see a little bit what I mean by "incentives for knowledge being corroded so badly they've been twisted upside down"? I'm not speaking metaphorically. I'm speaking quite literally. The Bret Stephenses and Morning Joes of our society are paid colossal amounts. The teachers and adjunct professors of our society can barely make ends meet. The "hedge fund managers" and "traders" of our society are paid massive fortunes. The teachers and adjunct professors can barely raise families. Real incentives. Real money. Real lives. Real social outcomes, too.

It's often said — especially by people from collapsed societies — that you can judge the fortunes of a society by how it treats it teachers. That's because such people have seen firsthand that teachers and how they're treated are perhaps the ultimate leading indicator of social collapse — they point to incentives for knowledge turning upside down. I digress — this essay isn't just about teachers. But I think it's a telling observation. About what, precisely?

(Now, American pundits will point out the obvious at this juncture. Educated Americans make more than uneducated ones! How can you say incentives for knowledge have been corroded!!Calm down, Ezra. It's true that educated Americans make more. Why is that, though? It's largely because kids with Ivy League degrees head off to Wall St and Silicon Valley…where they rake it in. For…doing precisely nothing of any real value to society. Targeting ads more finely…finding cleverer ways to pump and dump stocks…these things have no benefit whatsoever, they just accrue profit. It's not "education" per se that's being employed here. It's just that a specific kind of technical knowledge is worth more to capitalism than anything else.

Hence, if you have a PhD in physics, Wall St will pay you a fortune. But if you have a PhD in English…nobody will pay you much at all. But hold on: it's the PhD in English that might have helped explain how the rhetoric of authoritarianism erodes the norms and values of a democracy, how today's demagogues echo yesterday's dictators, how to fight back against them using words and concepts. See my point? Nobody will reward you for having a PhD or even a Masters' in our society outside a set of very, very narrow disciplines — mostly mathematical, mostly technical, all corporate. That's because that kind of narrow skillset can be employed to maximize profit, to write more efficient algorithms, to optimize the code. Of what?)

Capitalism. That's what we've really been talking about. Of the predatory kind — not the bars-and-restaurants-in-my-neighborhood kind. Capitalism the Goldman Sachs way.

What unites all the following observations? Teachers and adjunct professors make a pittance, while pundits make a killing. That most PhDs in subjects society desperately needs can't make a decent living — because only by being a hedge fund manager or a trader or a corporate VP can you get there. That making it for a kid in America today means becoming a boat-shoed Ivy League frat-dork who sells out to Wall St at the first opportunity to slaver like a starved Doberman. That our society is totally incapable of any accountability or responsibility for getting basic facts or truths about anything right or wrong anymore so our President wields Sharpies like a four year old. That Tucker and Bret and Ross and David make millions for spreading sheer ignorance if not outright hate. That nobody much has an incentive anymore to act like a decent, civilized, reasoning human being — what else does it mean when teachers are paying money they can barely afford out of their own pockets to keep our kids educated? What does that say about the rest of us?

It says we've become something like capitalism's greatest fools. What does capitalism want from society? It wants a pool of pliable, manipulable proles — who can't figure out what's good for them, or not. It wants violent idiots, greedy dummies, self-interested fools, pinheaded ignoramuses quicker to draw a gun than read a book. Yes, really. People who are constantly not just at each others' throats — but at their very own. Why? If you're holding the knife to your own throat…well, nobody needs to crack the whip, do they? They're the cheapest, most disposable labour of all. They're not capable of democracy. You don't need to work very hard to exploit them — they exploit themselves for you.

And that's exactly what happened to Americans. They internalized capitalism's most toxic lessons — so much so that there isn't much else left in the American mind. Maybe you yourself didn't — but America as a culture certainly did. So much so that those lessons are part of everyday culture now, as little homilies.

Let's recite a few of capitalism's commandments. Greed is good. The only point of human life is to maximize one's acquisitions. Weakness and vulnerability can't be tolerated and must be punished. People who show any humanity, like compassion and empathy, are liabilities. A strong person is ruthless and violent and power-hungry. Any price to anything else is OK as long as one's own profit is maximized. A person who is not totally "self-reliant" is a burden and a parasite. The strong should survive, and the weak should perish. See how close to fascism we're getting? And isn't fascism history's ultimate form of stupidity?

Americans — enough of them, anyways — really believe these strange myths. They've become their own slavemasters, in a very real sense. Having internalized capitalism's commandments…they constantly vote against their own interests…deny each other healthcare, medicine, education…they put capitalists and capitalism first…and themselves last. Why else does America's discourse always ask: "how can we save capitalism?!" — not, say, "how can we save our democracy, society, middle class, planet"?

And the reason Americans internalize capitalism's lessons is that their society mostly only consists of capitalism — and capitalism has no interest in making an educated, decent human being out of anyone. So there sits the hedge fund trader…earning hundreds of millions…for playing with the shares of a media company like a toy…the media company employs the pundit…who earns millions…to repeat the commandments of capitalism over and over again…the average person is bombarded with all that a thousand times a day…and their only escape is into the arms of more megacapitalist dreck, Facebook, Tinder, and so forth. Meanwhile, the teacher and the professor are barely able to feed their kids. It's hardly a fair fight.

Capitalism has created a structural set of incentives for knowledge that are broken and corroded. Even that's putting it kindly. It's truer to say that capitalism has created incentives to replace truth, beauty, goodness, kindness, and decency with misinformation, disinformation, poverty, greed, despair, hate, and trauma. Nobody much has any incentive, really, in America, to create healthy minds: ones rich in knowledge, truth, happiness, reason, sanity, wisdom, intelligence. Where those incentives exist — like for our teachers and our professors — they are so weak and diluted that they are feeble. They barely stand a chance against the huge machine that spends billions to keep Americans dumb, ignorant, violent, and afraid. And so that's exactly what Americans still are.

America doesn't understand, I think, even at this late juncture, that the reason it's the dumbest country in the world is that capitalism made it so. Capitalism's commandments — greed is good, never show any empathy or compassion, the purpose of life is to profit, and so on — are so jaw droppingly repellent and wrong and foolish that literally nobody else in the world believes them. But nobody has much of a reason to want to believe anything else in America. To do anything else. To enact, express, live anything else. The alternative to living out capitalism's commandments is poverty, disgrace, squalor, and probably an early grave. And so mostly, we do.

And that, my friends, is how we became the dumbest country in the world. What I mean by that should now be clear. We're the only country that doesn't even need to be exploited by capitalism — because we're too busy exploiting ourselves. We had to bomb much of the rest of the world into acquiescing to that. But ourselves? We only had to go on believing the lies.

Umair
September 2019

How Predatory Capitalism Made America the World's Dumbest Country

(Why) The Best Way Exploit a Society is to Get it to Exploit Itself

umair haque

Sep 6 · 10 min read

You don't have to look too hard to see it. There's an American President…marking up maps with a Sharpie…like an infant…so he's not humiliated by a foolish lie. LOL. Yet there's the British PM, lampoonishly wrecking democracy. What the? America, and it's little brother, Britain, are currently in a heated competition to win first place for being the incredibly dumbest country in the world. It's neck and neck, my friends. Nobody knows which nation of idiots will edge out the other, and win the gold medal for sheer head-pounding stupidity.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate for effect, so let me anticipate a few objections. I don't mean "dumbest country in the world" the way pundits might mean "smartest" — the average level of education and so forth. Clearly, all those degrees haven't translated into much. Nor do I mean it in the simplistic way of "not having schools and universities" — sure, we've got schools universities. They don't seem to be educating people much, though, do they?

I mean "dumbest country in the world" in a simpler — yet more humane and nuanced — way. I'll define it precisely shortly. First: do you see any other nations committing social suicide on these epic scales? Where else do people put up with mass shootings and not having insulin? Who else wants to shred democracy for the sake of…feeling "great" again? Where else do people constantly, consistently vote against their own "best interests"…their own happiness, prosperity, safety, stability…so much so, so predictably…that merely trying to point out that they act like fools has become a whole subject of national debate in itself?

Those things don't happen anywhere — anywhere — else in the world. Sure, we make iPhones. So what? As I often point out, America and Britain are the only two places in the world where life expectancy, incomes, and savings are falling in tandem. Yet they're also two of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. Both those things can't be true…unless these have somehow become nations of colossal idiots, who think backward is forward, up is down, and dumb is smart. Pardon my French.

(Maybe North Korea and Saudi Arabia currently outdo us — but that only proves my point, I think. And sure, there are plenty of countries that struggle to become wealthy and powerful. But that doesn't make them dumb. It just makes them poor and powerless. Only we're dumb enough, it seems, to squander our immense wealth and power.)

So. How did it happen? How did we become the dumbest country in the world? I think the reason is hidden in plain sight. The incentives for knowledge and thoughtfulness and reason and and decency have been corroded and corrupted — so much so that they've turned upside down. Hence, what "dumb" means precisely is that capitalism has made societies that don't even need to exploited anymore — they are too busy exploiting themselves.

Let me explain all that.

How much does a teacher make? Barely enough to earn a decent middle class living. I read the other day that teachers are paying an average of about $500 from their own pockets…because our educational system is so impoverished. But that's money they can scarcely afford to begin with. How much does a professor make? The ugly truth is that our higher education system is full of "adjunct" professors — aka intelligent people who've studied long and hard to earn PhDs…but are something like the Uber drivers of academia…earning minimum wage or less for piecework. Do you see the theme yet? We undervalue knowledge as a society profoundly, systemically, chronically, catastrophically.

But that's hardly all. If we undervalue knowledge, how can there be any accountability or responsibility for truth versus falsehood, wrong versus right, reason versus folly, wisdom over sheer idiocy? When we undervalue knowledge — the real thing — we must also be overvaluing puffery, folly, stupidity, and superficiality, to put it bluntly.

Hello and welcome to the nightly news! Hence, we have a pundit industry now. People who masquerade as experts, constantly giving their opinion, on TV, in the papers…and yet have no basis for having an educated opinion to begin with. Just open the NYT op-ed page. It's full of people — Bret, Ross, David — who've literally been wrong about every major event in our adult lives, from endless war being righteous, to economic stagnation ensuing, to middle class implosion, to the rise of authoritarianism as a result of all that.

And yet…there they are. They're untouchables — a mafia of smug, unbelievably stupid white dudes, who'll never pay any price whatsoever for being so incredibly wrong that they ended up leading a society hurtling off the cliff edge of ignorance into the abyss of jaw-dropping stupidity. In any sane society, a Bret Stephens — a denier of climate change, fascism, stagnation, inequality — would have been exiled from being a columnist years ago, publicly disgraced, a national humiliation. In ours, a Bret Stephens fails upwards to the august pages of the NYT. In any sane society, a Morning Joe — who spent all election long supporting Trump — would have paid a price for his astonishing mistake. In ours — because he's a good ole boy — he's right where he was, only even richer. Tucker Carlson makes millions for spewing the most vile kinds of thoughts straight into half a country's brain every night.

So the guys that self-evidently don't know anything…not a thing…make millions — while a teacher can barely scrape together a middle class living…and even so, takes care of the kids in his or her charge on his or her own dime. Do you see a little bit what I mean by "incentives for knowledge being corroded so badly they've been twisted upside down"? I'm not speaking metaphorically. I'm speaking quite literally. The Bret Stephenses and Morning Joes of our society are paid colossal amounts. The teachers and adjunct professors of our society can barely make ends meet. The "hedge fund managers" and "traders" of our society are paid massive fortunes. The teachers and adjunct professors can barely raise families. Real incentives. Real money. Real lives. Real social outcomes, too.

It's often said — especially by people from collapsed societies — that you can judge the fortunes of a society by how it treats it teachers. That's because such people have seen firsthand that teachers and how they're treated are perhaps the ultimate leading indicator of social collapse — they point to incentives for knowledge turning upside down. I digress — this essay isn't just about teachers. But I think it's a telling observation. About what, precisely?

(Now, American pundits will point out the obvious at this juncture. Educated Americans make more than uneducated ones! How can you say incentives for knowledge have been corroded!!Calm down, Ezra. It's true that educated Americans make more. Why is that, though? It's largely because kids with Ivy League degrees head off to Wall St and Silicon Valley…where they rake it in. For…doing precisely nothing of any real value to society. Targeting ads more finely…finding cleverer ways to pump and dump stocks…these things have no benefit whatsoever, they just accrue profit. It's not "education" per se that's being employed here. It's just that a specific kind of technical knowledge is worth more to capitalism than anything else.

Hence, if you have a PhD in physics, Wall St will pay you a fortune. But if you have a PhD in English…nobody will pay you much at all. But hold on: it's the PhD in English that might have helped explain how the rhetoric of authoritarianism erodes the norms and values of a democracy, how today's demagogues echo yesterday's dictators, how to fight back against them using words and concepts. See my point? Nobody will reward you for having a PhD or even a Masters' in our society outside a set of very, very narrow disciplines — mostly mathematical, mostly technical, all corporate. That's because that kind of narrow skillset can be employed to maximize profit, to write more efficient algorithms, to optimize the code. Of what?)

Capitalism. That's what we've really been talking about. Of the predatory kind — not the bars-and-restaurants-in-my-neighborhood kind. Capitalism the Goldman Sachs way.

What unites all the following observations? Teachers and adjunct professors make a pittance, while pundits make a killing. That most PhDs in subjects society desperately needs can't make a decent living — because only by being a hedge fund manager or a trader or a corporate VP can you get there. That making it for a kid in America today means becoming a boat-shoed Ivy League frat-dork who sells out to Wall St at the first opportunity to slaver like a starved Doberman. That our society is totally incapable of any accountability or responsibility for getting basic facts or truths about anything right or wrong anymore so our President wields Sharpies like a four year old. That Tucker and Bret and Ross and David make millions for spreading sheer ignorance if not outright hate. That nobody much has an incentive anymore to act like a decent, civilized, reasoning human being — what else does it mean when teachers are paying money they can barely afford out of their own pockets to keep our kids educated? What does that say about the rest of us?

It says we've become something like capitalism's greatest fools. What does capitalism want from society? It wants a pool of pliable, manipulable proles — who can't figure out what's good for them, or not. It wants violent idiots, greedy dummies, self-interested fools, pinheaded ignoramuses quicker to draw a gun than read a book. Yes, really. People who are constantly not just at each others' throats — but at their very own. Why? If you're holding the knife to your own throat…well, nobody needs to crack the whip, do they? They're the cheapest, most disposable labour of all. They're not capable of democracy. You don't need to work very hard to exploit them — they exploit themselves for you.

And that's exactly what happened to Americans. They internalized capitalism's most toxic lessons — so much so that there isn't much else left in the American mind. Maybe you yourself didn't — but America as a culture certainly did. So much so that those lessons are part of everyday culture now, as little homilies.

Let's recite a few of capitalism's commandments. Greed is good. The only point of human life is to maximize one's acquisitions. Weakness and vulnerability can't be tolerated and must be punished. People who show any humanity, like compassion and empathy, are liabilities. A strong person is ruthless and violent and power-hungry. Any price to anything else is OK as long as one's own profit is maximized. A person who is not totally "self-reliant" is a burden and a parasite. The strong should survive, and the weak should perish. See how close to fascism we're getting? And isn't fascism history's ultimate form of stupidity?

Americans — enough of them, anyways — really believe these strange myths. They've become their own slavemasters, in a very real sense. Having internalized capitalism's commandments…they constantly vote against their own interests…deny each other healthcare, medicine, education…they put capitalists and capitalism first…and themselves last. Why else does America's discourse always ask: "how can we save capitalism?!" — not, say, "how can we save our democracy, society, middle class, planet"?

And the reason Americans internalize capitalism's lessons is that their society mostly only consists of capitalism — and capitalism has no interest in making an educated, decent human being out of anyone. So there sits the hedge fund trader…earning hundreds of millions…for playing with the shares of a media company like a toy…the media company employs the pundit…who earns millions…to repeat the commandments of capitalism over and over again…the average person is bombarded with all that a thousand times a day…and their only escape is into the arms of more megacapitalist dreck, Facebook, Tinder, and so forth. Meanwhile, the teacher and the professor are barely able to feed their kids. It's hardly a fair fight.

Capitalism has created a structural set of incentives for knowledge that are broken and corroded. Even that's putting it kindly. It's truer to say that capitalism has created incentives to replace truth, beauty, goodness, kindness, and decency with misinformation, disinformation, poverty, greed, despair, hate, and trauma. Nobody much has any incentive, really, in America, to create healthy minds: ones rich in knowledge, truth, happiness, reason, sanity, wisdom, intelligence. Where those incentives exist — like for our teachers and our professors — they are so weak and diluted that they are feeble. They barely stand a chance against the huge machine that spends billions to keep Americans dumb, ignorant, violent, and afraid. And so that's exactly what Americans still are.

America doesn't understand, I think, even at this late juncture, that the reason it's the dumbest country in the world is that capitalism made it so. Capitalism's commandments — greed is good, never show any empathy or compassion, the purpose of life is to profit, and so on — are so jaw droppingly repellent and wrong and foolish that literally nobody else in the world believes them. But nobody has much of a reason to want to believe anything else in America. To do anything else. To enact, express, live anything else. The alternative to living out capitalism's commandments is poverty, disgrace, squalor, and probably an early grave. And so mostly, we do.

And that, my friends, is how we became the dumbest country in the world. What I mean by that should now be clear. We're the only country that doesn't even need to be exploited by capitalism — because we're too busy exploiting ourselves. We had to bomb much of the rest of the world into acquiescing to that. But ourselves? We only had to go on believing the lies.

Umair
September 2019

ANS -- Mean world syndrome

this is a very short entry to Wikipedia, but it's good.  It's about how seeing all the violence that appears in media makes us believe the world is more violent than it is (when is the last time you saw violence in person? How often do you see it in person?). that produces fear, which changes our attitudes.  

If you want to see references, go to the page:

Find it here:  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome?fbclid=IwAR32jS3rfRbOsq6Gt5GTtw_wAHpJNXEvalxPpsyGrXUYFRytKJvXlBFb9sc 

--Kim

Mean world syndrome

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Mean world syndrome is a term coined by George Gerbner to describe a phenomenon whereby violence-related content of mass media makes viewers believe that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. Mean world syndrome is one of the main conclusions of cultivation theory. Gerbner, a pioneer researcher on the effects of television on society, argued that people who watch television tended to think of the world as an intimidating and unforgiving place. A direct correlation between the amount of television one watches and the amount of fear one harbors about the world has been proven, although the direction of causality remains debatable in that persons fearfulof the world may be more likely to retreat from it and in turn spend more time with indoor, solitary activities such as television watching.^[1]

The number of opinions, images, and attitudes that viewers tend to form when watching television will have a direct influence on how the viewer perceives the real world. They will reflect and refer to the most common images or recurrent messages thought to affect their own real lives. Gerbner once said: "You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell."^[1][2]

Gerbner says that the spread of the syndrome has become more intense over time. He describes how newer technologies such as VCR, DVD, and cable television do not disturb the cultivation theory, but actually allow more complete access and spread of recurrent messages, although widening access to the Internet world of information can counteract that. The 1930s behaviorism models, the Payne Fund Studies, show that the effect that mass media has on our behavior is considerable. This is called the hypodermic needle model: people are injected with appropriate messages and ideas constructed by the mass media.^[3]

ANS -- What “Buying Greenland” Really Means

trying again -- It wouldn't paste the first time.  It's about what happens when capitalism runs its course.  From Umair Haque.

Find it here:  https://eand.co/what-buying-greenland-really-means-714cfa7ccaf 

--Kim

What "Buying Greenland" Really Means

What Happens When Capitalism Runs Out of Things to Exploit — and Implodes into Regress?

You've probably heard by now that America's lunatic President wanted to…stifle your laughter…buy Greenland. Only it's…not for sale. Once the entire world made fun of him, which was richly deserved, including Denmark, to which Greenland belongs he then proceeded…to throw a giant baby tantrum and call off his upcoming visit to Denmark.

LOL. What the? It's the stuff of high comedy. Yet another level, there's in fact a deeper significance to this whole bizarre, ludicrous episode. Here's what "buying Greenland" really means: it's what happens when capitalism implodes into regress.

On the simplest level, American capitalism is out of things to exploit. And so it new needs new "resources" to tear apart and abuse. In case you haven't noticed, China and India — both exploited for their cheap labour pools by American capitalism — are now experiencing a severe backlash against it. The rise of Indian hypernationalism and the rise of Chinese technofascism are both reactions to the failures of American capitalism, to elites signing masses up to be the fuel in America's capitalist machine, which ended in inequality, despair, social fragmentation, discontent, resentment, and stagnation.

American capitalism can't so easily exploit these things anymore — and the truth is there isn't much left to exploit. Indian and Chinese incomes haven't risen enough to buy the things capitalism makes — because capitalism relies on making them cheap by underpaying those very people in the first place. As a result, "trade wars" and "tensions" have arisen, in the anodyne parlance of American economists. What that really means is that the system isn't working, so everyone's defecting from it now, breaking up with it.

Then there's the planet. American capitalism has been on a decades long spree of abusing it and exploiting it, too. Usually, military might is involved. Wherever people in countries rich with natural resources wanted to be social democracies — which was most nations — America's stepped in to make them capitalist. Quick, call the CIA — install a dictator: at least we can do business with him. Can't topple him? Bomb them all! That was the story of an endless list of countries, which Americans still aren't familiar with. Nicaragua, Iraq, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Afghanistan, and so on.

America's made war on more than half the world at this point — and the point of that hidden world war was to make capitalism the world's economy. Hence, America did absurd things, like installing the very dictators, Saddams and Gadhafis, it would later bomb. Whether it was for oil, for minerals, for timber, for rare earths, for cheap labour — the story was the same. You'd better sell that stuff to us — or else we'll make you. The bombs will fall and the armies will invade.

But the planet, too, is now out of things to exploit. At least the planet as we know it. The oceans are running empty of fish. The world is running out of water. The skies are so polluted that the climate is changing rapidly. The animals are undergoing the very first unnatural mass extinction in biological history. It's no overstatement to say that American capitalism has literally torn through the geology, biology, and chemistry of the planet, destabilizing them all, exploiting them past their breaking points.

And yet capitalism is an insatiable machine. It is the strangest thing in the universe: a thing which turns other things into nothing. All the forests and oceans and rivers and mountains — where are they now? They "made money." They were made into money. They were literally turned into capital. They are sitting in the bank accounts of the ultra-rich…doing nothing.

But that's still not good enough. Capitalism wants more, more, more. More stuff to turn into capital. To "make" more "money." So where will it find resources to transform into capital? Where will it find the things to transform into yet more money to stuff into the bank accounts of the ultra rich?

Enter Greenland. The climate is changing. The balance of the planet is altering. Beneath all that ice sits a veritable fortune. In oil, in minerals, in sand, in stone. There's plenty of "money" to be "made" from all those things. And now that the ice is melting, "making" that "money" is suddenly "economical", because all those resources can be gotten to more easily.

Hence, "buying Greenland." Imagine that you're a kleptocrat. What would be better than owning a giant island packed to the gills with natural resources…in an age where the planet is desperate for more, running out?

Maybe, if you could just "own" that island…you could dole out this mountain to that crony…this lake to that minion…this canyon to that henchman. That way, you could go on building your power base — using these natural resources, which are now in shorter and shorter supply every single year, to reward those who were craven enough to do your bidding.

But maybe they won't sell it to you? Ah, here's an interesting fact. America probably won't bomb Denmark. But it has bombed a long, long list of other countries. Poorer ones. Less white ones. Do you see the point a little bit? Denmark is protected by belonging to a league of rich and powerful nations. If America bombed Denmark, nobody would invade America — but all of Europe would instantly close itself off to American tourists, businesses, financial markets, etcetera.But what about countries that aren't protected by virtue of union, power, history, and fortune, like a Denmark?

Well, my friends, the truth is that this episode — "buying Greenland" — gives a us a tiny portrait of the future. Demagogues, of the authoritarian-fascist variety, will decide that resource-rich countries — the most valuable prizes of all in a world whose resources have been exploited to the bone by capitalism — will belong to them, at least the relatively powerless ones. They will do whatever it takes to have them. Who will stop them?

And so the age of resource wars is now dawning. Wars for the basics of life, which capitalism has abused, misused, depleted, eroded, and corroded. Water. Air. Soil. Food. Less powerful countries that are made rich in these things — or rich again in them, made so by climate change — will be contests of a global prize for power and possession.

In that way, the world is regressing to a past age. An age of empires, battling over harvests and conquests. A zero-sum world, where Greenlands can only belong to one of us. A time of demagogues and increasingly poor peoples seeking new Lebensraum — "living room", or basic resources to live. The world is reverting to tribal lines, to violence, to aggression, to greed — and you can see it around the globe, from India to China to Italy to America. The world is turning predatory.

It's the end of the predatory age of human history. But the end of such an age is the most cruel and violent one of all — because it is when the predators battle for the last remaining bits of prey…and then consume one another, too. The end of the predatory age is going to be its climax — not its denouement.

Trump has floated a little "trial balloon", as the Americans say — in the same way that mafiosi might "joke" about "buying" your restaurant. He's laughing. But he's not kidding. Why should he be, though? America has a long, long history of "buying" territory it needs for Lebensraum, living room, with beads and fur — and severely harming, totally destroying, nations who won't sell it what it wants…cheap.

So Trump isn't a pioneer in craving Greenland. He's the culmination of a trend, a very American way of thinking, seeing, wanting. America's the country that's made resource war for centuries now. It is the original predatory state. But now the predatory attitude America pioneered is going to become much more aggressive, visible, open, strident, in America, in others, in a depleted, eroded world where the last few resources are prized, needed, contested all that much more.

Trump's hunger for Greenland tells us this tale in no uncertain terms. It reveals what the world's kleptocrats, fascists, authoritarians, are really thinking. What they crave. How they see the future. They see a world in which ecological devastation and social destabilization are only sharper scalpels with which to prey further. They are more predatory than ever. Even the idea of an age of chaos doesn't concern them one bit. There is money to be made.

It also reveals that many societies will feel they need their fascists and authoritarians and demagogues, turn to them, not away from them. If you need to become a society of predators to win the resources you need to survive…who better to lead you?

So what better time to "make money" — to turn what's left of a bruised, battered, bleeding world into capital — than when that world can't defend itself at all? When it's veins and muscles lie exposed, naked, and vulnerable? That is what ecological devastation and social destabilization do. One melts the ice beneath which treasures are buried. The other frays the institutions of democracy that keep the bad guys at bay. Everything that's left on the withered husk of a planet — now it can be "made" into "money."

What does "buying Greenland" really mean? It is at these precise moments, in these precise ways, that capitalism implodes — having eaten through everything else — into authoritarian-fascism. Stopping along the way at kleptocracy, robber barons, violence, shakedowns, and mafias.

The Trumps of the world — and there are many of them, in many countries — would be overjoyed to live on a dying, suffocated cinder — as long as everyone else in the world was their slave, everything was their properoy, and they lived in a palace of cheap, fake gold and jewels atop the heap. The question, my friends, is whether that is the future the rest of us want.

Umair
August 2019