The Unfreedom of Scarcity

One of the real problems of the liberal model of freedom is in situations of extreme scarcity, where there is not enough for not only everyone, but for only a few people at most.

This is most common in “lottery” professions, where a few very successful people present the face of the profession, and the vast majority are exploited and holding out for their one shot at greatness. So we’re talking Academia, Startups, Acting, Professional Sports, Publishing, Politics… really way too many fields that define success in our world.

Only some people can make it. To some degree this will be determined by merit, but luck and networking play a very large role in that. Ask anyone in that field and getting a mentor is a HUGE HUGE deal (okay I don’t know much about pro sports, but I know people in every one of the other listed fields.) To go from toiling in obscurity and starving to “this one person you respect actually likes your work and wants to help you” is the biggest relief you can imagine.

And the mentor, or any networking connection like that, really does help. They introduce you to people who can help your career get started a little, who are happy to help you if it means impressing Big Name Mentor. It makes you feel like you actually have a shot to prove yourself, and it can not be underestimated how psychically valuable this is.

It’s kind of nice, sure, but it exists entirely outside formal ethical networks and so there is nothing obligatory about it. A mentor has the right to be friends with whoever they want, and to introduce their friends to whoever they want, and they haven’t crossed any moral lines. And they have the freedom to NOT be friends and not introduce you around as well.

You can see where the power dynamics of this go.

If you displease your mentor in any way whatsoever your ladder out of the abyss will just curl up and disappear. If you disagree politically with your mentor, they may not introduce you to that photographer. If you stop laughing at their boring jokes, they may not use their leverage to get you that internship. If you don’t sleep with your mentor, they may stop returning your calls (and soon everyone else will too.)

And this can all happen without any malice! To the famous mentor, you were a fun person to pal around with, things cooled down, and they’re moving on with their life. What’s wrong with that? In fact if you were to criticize their behavior, you’d be criticizing their liberal freedom to do whatever they want so long as “their fist doesn’t reach someone else’s face.” You’d be putting some sort of unasked for moral obligation on them. (Ew.)

But losing them means giving up on your dreams, just as they are in sight. Hell, it means finding an entirely new professional identity to base the rest of your lifepath on.

So instead you know you have to keep the mentor interested in you. What was initially a fun flirtation with someone impressively accomplished (and success is HOT in any field) can evolve into unending attempts to keep them “interested” in you, and the sort of joyless, obligatory sex no one benefits from. Or an unwillingness to even consider political points of view that may be uncool to the people you are trying to impress.

This is where the sex scandals in a lot of the lottery professions seem to come from (start with Bill Cosby and google any of the above fields.) It’s not superiors saying “sleep with me or else”, but famous people assuming all the young hot things want to sleep with them, and the young exploited proles going along with it until things have gone so far they explode from the tensions (which are complete surprises to the increasingly dense mentors, who don’t think there’s anything wrong with all the people desperate for their approval.)

And I think these scandals are just the tip of the iceberg, the rare cases where someone is so hurt by the affair that they go public and potentially give up any career in that field. Much more often is the case when the junior person goes along with it, gets in too deep, has a shitty few months of feeling used, and then pulls away or is kicked away, to a diminished future. (Of course, this pattern probably plays out often with every party feeling satisfied afterwards as well.)

Like this sort of power imbalance is just unhealthy and wrong. Marx wrote that no one is free when they are hungry, and I don’t think that just means “hunger is really bad” but that “people will do anything, give up anything when they are truly desperate.” They’ll give up their sexuality, their political independence, their dignity, anything to just get a bit of hope - and no one has to force it away from them, people do it wholly willingly under extreme scarcity. So what does free speech, or consent, or private property even mean in such situations?

(Even the masters are fucked over, because it’s impossible for them to have equal, healthy relations under a system of oppression. Imagine not being able to be friends with anyone because you don’t know if their laughter at your jokes is ever genuine? So they become emotional idiots who have to convince themselves that no one needs them that much and no one is trying to use them, exploding at the slightest narcissistic injury to this illusion.)

You can’t just make up a bunch of rights that people have protecting them, when there’s a power structure that asks people to give up anything for just a bit of hope. Class power analysis matters, or else you just end up like the Hollywood dating scene.

***

@balioc

This seems correct.

And very very very hard to solve, from a cultural-engineering perspective, short of sledgehammer solutions like “we are going to clamp down on technology so hard that no one knows anyone outside his own little hunter-gatherer tribe.” You can redistribute resources all you want, you can work your ass off to make the masses more materially secure…but it’s not like people are desperate to break into movies or publishing for the material security. So long as there are large human networks, there are going to be implicit social hierarchies, with the concomitant incentives to rise. That’s pretty damn fundamental.

…I guess there are a lot of proposed solutions that amount to “make people more enlightened so that they don’t feel the urge to climb.” I tend to be skeptical that anything in this vein is at all plausible.

And then there’s my pet “solution,” which involves reconstructing such urges (rather than eliminating them) so that they can be more easily satisfied by low-level personal interactions. But even to my fond eyes that’s obviously going to work only to some extent, some of the time.

Bluh. I dunno. This is hard, man. Let’s go shopping.

***
It is hard, but I’m not aiming to *fix all these systems now.* More, our knowledge of that dynamic should affect our understanding of the phenomenon around it. For instance. 1. This is a reason to be very leery of extreme inequality. Even when the baseline material well being of the exploited class isn’t that bad (say, computer programmers looking at startups), the social dynamics between extreme havenots and them is still inimical to human well being. Which is why a period of widening inequality is going to lead to people “voluntarily” giving up their rights more and more just to get a shot at getting ahead, and render liberalism meaningless if it goes too far. 2. When considering creating or joining a lottery profession, this should be a cost you are aware of. Tech geeks tend to celebrate Silicon Valley and its superstars, and want it to have a more prominent place in America’s culture, but there’s really a lot of toxic exploitation that is inevitable under it. And you may think going into academia or hollywood is at worse, a gamble you might lose - but it can be even worse than that, where it’s several years where you have every incentive to sell your dignity to get ahead. (The namesake TV show, Silicon Valley, actually offers wonderful illustrations of this phenomenon.) 3. These are systemic problems, not personal moral ones. Whenever we see an explosive scandal of some high-powered mentor sleeping with/stealing from/exploiting some ingenue, the story is usually the same:

“the mentor had idea this was going so badly, and thought themselves “one of the good ones” because they certainly never threatened the ingenue in order to get them to do whatever. In fact, the ingenue came onto them, so it’s all a horrible misunderstanding. Yeah it got kind of pressurey or stalky towards the end, but what relationship doesn’t? It started so innocent, etc etc.”

These mentors aren’t lying, they really believe it, it’s just they were in a system where people felt making them happy was required for career success, and the mentor blithely went along with it. We must resist the temptation to cleanse the field of One Perverted Dude, and to look at all the systemic contributions. And if you think people having sex they don’t fully want, or falling into line politically when they have doubts, are really that bad, then yes you should want to smash the whole system with a sledgehammer. I’d love to see all our modern liberal culture’s rage about sexual exploitation aimed at Hollywood and to just wreck it until they can build some other more egalitarian system. Maybe that’s not realistic, but it still means we are making a choice that we tolerate that exploitation if it gives us a film industry. We are complicit - don’t push this all on the one idiot you caught today. (My frustration with most social justice causes is not that they go too far, but that they don’t go far enough whenever it comes to eliminating the systemic causes of most of the evils they rightly see. They burn a few witches then forget the problem.) 4. The thing the idiots who get caught are guilty of is ignoring power dynamics. Don’t sleep with someone you have a lot of power over. Don’t expect them to be your bosom friend, or turn to them for political agreement. You may not think you are coaxing them, but at some point they don’t have a choice even if they wanted to. Consent is the beginning of sexual ethics, not the end of them. 5. Full communism, etc, not just in money but in social status, so that we know people who are interacting with us are doing so genuinely out of their care for and enjoyment of us.

Ironic Humor

How do we define it?

This is not simply dramatic irony, but rather, when someone we respect says something we would consider stupid or cruel but they say (or rather, we just know) they are being ironic.

This comes up because of the constant newsflashes around pewpewdie’s latest joke and overreaction to it, or Milo Y talking about pedophilia, or god knows what other “joke” taken awry *and also* the return of this thread about Baby It’s Cold Outside.

***

A really interesting post that is marxist-without-knowing it, is here. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/ I recommend reading it when you get the chance. But I'll summarize.

The post posits that fashion tastes act like a celluar automata ladder. Celluar automata are models where a single cell, or space on a board, only cares about the spaces next to it, and follows rules based on those spaces. And yet, from these simple rules, large complex patterns can emerge across the entire board.

The post asks us to think of a class ladder of 4 cells: upper, middle, lower, underclass. Each cell has the same two rules: First priority, to imitate the cell above it, second priority to not be like the cell below it. The scenario starts off with all cells being white. Or, all members of society wear white clothes. All the cells that have someone above them are imitating the ones above them, so all is stable.

But the upper class wants to differentiate itself from the middle class. So it changes to black clothes. Next year, the middle class also changes to black clothes, so they can appear upper class. Important note: this really really happens. Look at baby names http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/2005/04/trading_up.html

In the third year, two things happen: the upper class stops wearing black, and the lower class start wearing black. The upper class have no one to imitate, but they really don't want to be viewed as the middle class. But note that in changing to white, they imitate the lower and underclass.

Why is it worth being similar to the lower class and underclass just to be different from the middle class? Because the cell is confident. The way they were raised, the way they talk, the way they *wear* their clothes, means they could never be mistaken for someone as distant as lower class. Their only threat is being mistaken for middle class, who could pass as them and vice versa. (Similarly the lower class don't aspire in the first year to look upper class, it wouldn't work. Their best hope is to pass for middle class.)

So we see this cycle continue, until the upper class – being annoyed at being constantly imitated - hits on a new idea. *Purposefully dress like the lower class*. The middle class can't risk dressing like that, because they fear being mistaken in the wrong direction. The upper class style isn't the exact same as lower class, there are subtle differences they can use to reassure themselves, but it's the subtle differences that the middle class aren't expected to pick up on and will reveal themselves as poseurs. So the subtler, the vaguer, the less defined the better.

This lasts longer, until the middle class really feels safe imitating this style so associated is it with the upper class. The more punishment there is for being mistaken for lower class, the longer this stability will last.

The ideas about imitating those you want to be associated with (but plausibly could pass as), and changing to be different from those you fear being associated with (but plausibly could be mistaken for) are decent important lessons we can all reflect on.

But what really gets me is the result that: the upper class purposefully imitates the lower class as a way of shoring itself up. This is fascinating.

Mark Zuckerberg is famous for being a billionaire who wears a hooded sweatshirt a lot. This is supposed to be a sign that he doesn't care about his appearance. It is instead a sign of *how much* he cares about appearance. He could wear any random thing he wanted, but wears what the other people he interacts with can't get away with. (And this is true for many dressing-down computer geeks in good jobs.)

***

It is important to remember that all class, all status, all appearance is an illusion. There is no essentialist truth of whether you are "at heart a rich person", that means you can't ever be truly poor. Only a series of subtler signals you trust to defend you from being seen as poor. Similarly for charisma, what works to clearly and boldly distinguish you from the awkward people in some situations will fail you in others.

But these illusions are very real and matter a lot. They determine how people treat us. And we've internalized them as true, so when we fight for them we feel we are fighting both for the tangible benefits, and the sanctity of our identity. And because of the relative class ladder, any gains we make make some others feel they are losing something (damn middle class stop thinking they are as good as us.)

It's also important that this constant struggle makes us constantly unhappy.

***

Now the way tribal slurs work make a lot more sense. We all know how oppressed groups have taken words that were used to insult them, and instead use them affectionately with each other. The controversy of the racist and sexist terms I think obscures how common this is. Nerds use the term geek, military folks use the term jarhead, midwesterners use hoosier, extreme christians use the term fundie. All these are at once insults from the enemy, and affectionate monikers among each other.

This is sometimes described as appropriating the terms, and showing your power by taking possession of a word (like the enemy's gun) is one aspect of what's going on. But that overstates the process I think. If the word's meaning was changed, then that would apply to everyone. By acknowledging that the word is still a slur when it comes out of the mouths of people outside your tribe, you acknowledge the meaning hasn't really been changed. So that's not the (full) dynamic that's going on.

But under fashion theory, it makes perfect sense.

Imagine there are three groups in ascending moral order. Martians (who have been persecuted since they fled their exploding planet), friends of Martians who now feel guilty for all the persecution Martians have suffered, and anti-Martian bigots. The bigots used the term "redder" to refer to Martians. And one day, the Martians start using the word redder too. So some friends of Martians, wonder why they can't use redder. After all, they aren't bigots so when they use the term it won't have that slur meaning. How could you possibly mistake the friend of Martians for a bigot? Their best friend is Martian.

The Martians know you aren't a bigot. You aren't lower class. But you are middle class pretending to be upper class. And they would like you to know, that instead you are a middle class at risk of being seen as lower class. If you continue to try to rebel against the class structure, then they will eventually decide you actually lower class. And by the nature of appearance, the judgment of others that you are lower class will make you lower class.

You own internal beliefs about Martians and bigotry don't enter into it. No one can directly observe them.

And for now, no matter what your beliefs are, you can't pass as upper class. You will never be an actual Martian.

But, ahha, you the middle class friend thinks. You have so much credibility with some Martians – so many friends, so many hours spent fighting for their cause, you know how to cook their recipes, you adopted a Martian daughter – that many of them do consider you one of them. So you can safely use the term redder, and have used it meaning the better meaning on many occasions. Other Martians were fine with it.

That was elsewhere. This is here. You thought you could pass with others, but those "subtle signals" you trust don't actually shield you in all situations. There is no truth to whether, deep down, you are a Martian or a bigot. There is just the appearance, and at this point, you appear as a middle class person looking lower class.

Stop imitating us or we will get very angry.

(The Martian case is understandable here too. Tribal cohesion and identity is important to people. The Martians these days rarely interact with bigots. But they do interact with middle class friends of Martians all the time. They need to ruthlessly patrol the boundaries between their tribe and the closest.)

This becomes an identity fight (am I Martian or not) and everyone is miserable.

***

Irony at this point should be obvious. I can write a blog praising Jar Jar Binks, a character associated with childish writing and lack of intellect. But no one thinks of me as someone who likes those things (I'm not lower class), so by praising him I separate myself from all the middle class people who merely dislike Jar Jar Binks. I like him at a higher level, thus elevating my perceived intellect. The real risky thing for me to do would instead to talk about how much I loved Lord of the Rings.

Check out how many film critics and academics love pro-wrestling and bad slasher horror movies.

(Hilariously, from a distance, I look just like someone who non-ironically appreciates Jar Jar Binks, and arguments about the different reasons we like the character look like two comic book nerds arguing:  http://www.theonion.com/articles/i-appreciate-the-muppets-on-a-much-deeper-level-th,16208/ )

When someone is being ironically sexist, they are not just talking about themselves versus the sexists. They are positing a middle group that is not an obvious bigot, but needs to watch themselves and toe the line.

Liberal egalitarians rebel against this analysis. A joke should be the same whether it comes from a female mathematician or a male mathematician, right? There must be something inherent in the joke that if we break it down, we can find the sexism or lack thereof.

But we're not really talking about the joke. In fact the joke (whether sexist or ironic) has trivial impact on like anyone at all. What it does is tell us about the person who said it. And there's nothing egalitarian in using signals to analyze who someone really is, we are by definition judging and ranking them already. So yes, an ironic joke has to mean something different coming from someone with real credibility. (Where by "mean something" we refer solely to "what it says about the speaker".)

We at once believe there is a difference, and yet will always resist it. It must be definitionally indistinguishable, and undefinably distinct. If you defined an element of a joke that makes it ironic (it has to be satire, or not delivered in this specific way, or…) then the middle class could safely start using it. And that is very much against the point. But if you said "nope it's entirely about who said it" then you would give the lie to liberal egalitarianism. A lie we can't resist right now.

Liberals barely manage to struggle with the idea that certain four and six letter words are off limits to them when talking about other races. How could they accept that a whole sphere of jokes is disallowed to them?

(Ideology is contradiction. The rules must neither be too clear, nor too opaque.)

***

The point is that under our current social system, this type of dynamic is constant. The upper class (whatever group is respected most in any particular scenario) will imitate a lower class behavior, and some of the middle class will think they can imitate that, and they will get *smacked down hard*.

And because appearance is very different based on perspective, people go into these status contests with very different assumptions, and other people fight to disabuse them of their perspective and instead enforce the moral rightness of their own perspective.

This is of course, not the only dynamic going on in any social situation. But it's a common one and one designed to lead to misery. Thinking you are trending upper class but being told you're actually at risk of lower class is a huge source of anxiety, and will cause fierce arguments and internal anger.

***

The scandal referred to as #Shirtgate (haha, I am ironically using a phrase that MRA types used to describe it, only because the reader knows for certain I don’t think it’s actually a scandal worthy of the word gate) is a perfect example of this.  

In short, a scientist who was part of the team that landed a rover on a comet, did a televised interview wearing the shirt you’ll see here http://www.newstatesman.com/sites/default/files/styles/fullnode_image/public/blogs_2014/11/shirtgate.png?itok=HZIEUWip .

It has half dressed women on it. Accordingly, he thought it was ironic. As evidence for his good intent, he has many signals typical of being a liberal hipster. In particular the shirt was made for him by a feminist female friend, and with all of that he presumably thought he was secure in the shirt being read as a signal of the upper class (unimpeachably not sexist) instead of the lower class (very sexist.)

If Ruth Bader Ginsburg had walked in wearing that shirt, we would have laughed. We should have laughed, because the image of her in that shirt is pretty funny. A bearded middle aged hipster guy, is less convincing of irony and thus less funny. (Even if his has other traits and history that might make him think him being sexist is as absurd as RBG).

Shirtguy publicly apologized, and vocal critics accepted this. This was shown as evidence of mercy, but is in fact entirely the point. He admitted that he is middle class (not blatantly sexist, but potentially so) and stopped fronting as upper class, and the upper class was glad that this boundary had been policed. That is the ideal class sustaining outcome. If Shirtguy rebelled and fought to prove his irony, he would have been relegated to lower class (assumed bigot), but it would have created an enemy and more dissatisfaction with the class system.

The public claim for this criticism was that the shirt showed how women are objectified in science and why many women stay out of science. This is entirely fitting. By objectified, the critics mean “the shirt reveals that the guy has intent to view women as objects”. If the shirt was worn by someone (like Ruth Bader Ginsburg) who was unimpeachable, then it couldn’t represent that. The shirt is saying that to them because of who wears it, and the other signals he flies.

His actual, true inner intent is irrelevant of course. It can’t be measured objectively, and is just something people use various signals to theorize about.

He thought (in another context) he was upper class enough to wear irony. In the more public context, he was not.

***

Reading this, it’s easy to blame the upper class (of any particular scenario). But even the upper class is oppressed by this. Mark Zuckerberg’s dress style is still determined. And even when enforcing these class boundaries, they are unhappy - afraid, angry, and even paranoid. The cycle demands sympathy for everyone involved.

And the band for the middle class, the distance between unimpeachably pure and possible bigot is much thinner than we expect, especially when we add in variance for different perspectives. We are all surrounded by class anxiety, even those at the top.

***

So now I have to reevaluate how I use irony. I like irony, it makes me laugh a lot. Jon Bois is one of the funniest writers I know, and he's clearly "separating himself from middle class writers by showing he can write like a lower class (stupid) person but with subtle distinctions so we know he doesn't really mean it.”

Even if you think Jon Bois subtly distinguishes his work from the targets that his irony is mocking (and there is real skill in his writing), I’ve read other convincing ironists who simply copy paste what someone from the lower class wrote, but under their handle. It’s still funny.

But I'm also uncomfortable being part of the status cycle of misery. It's possible that there's no way I can escape status and can never be 100% pure. We have to make choices. But this honestly feels like a fairly direct instantiation of the class ladder, too direct to just ignore.

Seinfeld and God

Seinfeld was the most successful sitcom of the 90's, and has since been denounced as one of the most morally bankrupt pieces of art of the generation. The "show about nothing" to many critics became "nothing matters."

This is completely wrong, and instead Seinfeld provided a valuable contrast between morality and ethics, two words often used interchangeably but importantly different.


There are endless articles about the nihilism of Seinfeld. This is the conclusion from the most well written one by Chuck Klosterman. 

Seinfeld was never a show about nothing, even when nothing happened. Seinfeld simply argued that nothing is all that any rational person can expect out of life. It was hilarious, but profoundly bleak. By consciously stating it had no higher message—the creators referred to this as the “no hugging, no learning” rule—it was able to goof around with concepts that battered the deepest tenets of institutionalized society. It was satire so severe that we pretend it wasn’t satire at all.Most episodes of Seinfeld circuitously forward two worldviews: The first is that most people are bad (and not very smart). The second is that caring about other people is absurd (and not very practical).

This all sounds very convincing, but also feels completely wrong when watching the show. It's easy to say "there was no moral in that episode" or whatever, but that fails to investigate what is actually going on, scene to scene. In what way were these people being bad, what were specific examples, how did the scene make us feel? Give me an example where Jerry was just greedy and caring about someone was just absurd, and is that all that was going on in that scene?

(The entire point of this blog is to subject media to "atomic analysis" - instead of saying something like "Star Wars means classism", it's to zoom in on an individual scene, character, or shot and say "What is going on in this image? Oh, classism.")

And watching Seinfeld, this definitely isn't a universe without rules. Every goddamn episode has several rules of society the cast obsessed over. The third episode contained an extended scene about the rules of rock paper scissors and how you claim dibs on a New York apartment.

Perhaps an episode will find Jerry falsely accused of picking his nose. Or Elaine considering rules of contraception. Or George will be trying to gift a damaged sweater. Or Kramer will more often break a rule, and the others will have to explain to him why it was bad of him.

And this, more than the "nastiness" of the characters seemed the eternal appeal of the show. We all live in a society with countless unwritten rules that define whether you are a good person, or a bad person. And Seinfeld was a show where these rules were dissected, and played with, and discussed openly. That is about as fun and addictive as TVtropes to many people. These "rules" were the heart of the show.

And the cast did not take these rules lightly. Quite the opposite, they lived in constant fear of being caught breaking a societal rule. Sure, they knew they were good, reasonable people who should be considered polite members of society, but they were worried that at any moment someone else would think they were rule-breakers, the worst of the worst. Like Jerry just scratching is nose, but it looked like it was nose-picking from the side, and so someone might think of him as a nose-picker, and this would cost him a relationship with a hot model.

***

The wikipedia definition of morality is "the differentiation of intentions, decisions, and actions between those that are distinguished as proper and those that are improper"

Morals are the set of rules you follow to be a good person. Seinfeld talked more about "morals" more than any other television show in its decade.

Despite taking them very seriously, the characters would frequently be talking about how to find loopholes in the rules, or why their motives to evade the rules were pure and acceptable, or how unjust it was to be treated like a rulebreaker by the good members of society. They were like tax lawyers, who took it very seriously never to violate the letter of the law, but had zero investment in the spirit of the law. This sort of perspective was helped by all the times they were falsely accused of rule-breaking, or when an episode would start with one of them making a faux paus that broke some rule they didn't know about, but the other cast would condescendingly inform them of.

What was the source behind these rules? It was never religion, or a reasoned philosophical system, or what their heart told them - all rules were just social constructs, supported by the entirety of Society, in all of its terrifying ubiquity. When a rule was broken, every person the cast member encountered would begin treating them harshly, like some sort of unconscious outcast. The characters were entirely motivated by some Big Other who was judging them - and often judging them incorrectly ("I was only scratching my nose!")

Of course, never breaking a rule was impossible. Either you might not know it (there were hundreds, enough to feed eight seasons of episodes, after all), or you might be misperceived as having broken a rule, or you might have thought you could get away with it but you embarrassingly got caught. This just led to a constant anxiety, which fed the spirit of the whole cast.

The show wasn't just amoral, it was outright anti-moral. Why would it be okay, or at least sympathetic, to treat morals like this?

***

The wikipedia definition of ethics is "the branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct."

Ethics are the why behind any rule. And in the Seinfeld universe, the answer to every why is "because God says so". Not literally, these were all Jewish atheists, but they were appealing to a source of authority that was as vague and inscrutable as God: "other people," with no specificity or limit. Sometimes they would throw in "without rules everything would be chaos!" type justifications, but that's no explanation for why this specific rule.

In fact, Seinfeld gave us the fantastic Moops rule of legal interpretation:

The plaintiffs’ argument is that the direct language in that single line is all that counts, and the language in the rest of the law does not. This is a legal argument that has no chance to win over judges who aren’t desperate to latch on to any rationale to gut Obamacare, and only a tenuous chance to win over even judges who are. The argument is, Democrats in Congress made a typo when you wrote Obamacare, so ha-ha, you lose. The card says “Moops.”

Lesson: rules of morality without deeper justification are just fucking terrible.

But this does not mean there is no right or wrong in the Seinfeld universe. The scene above clearly indicates George is behaving wrongly: he is ignoring truth, and he is being a jerk to a medically disabled kid. But neither of those things are written in the rules of the game, so they are not the focus of his morals.

But the moral rules in Seinfeld are worse than arbitrary, they are enforced by the social order. They are a source of fear and anxiety for the cast, and actively push them to adhere to letter-following instead of spirit-following. There is no room for compassion, or truth-seeking, or whatever fundamental ethical drive should motivate human behavior, when they already have a labyrinth of strictures to keep track of.

And this is the existentialist problem with God. It's not that God couldn't exist. It's not that God couldn't even provide rules for human behavior. But what if He did? Humans would just be obsessed with trying to follow these rules, in fear of when they'll be caught or misperceived (by God!) for breaking a rule when they really didn't mean to. Humans would quickly go from Jesus' message of universal compassion to, well,the last 1500 years of the Catholic Church.

This is not a post to laugh at silly Christians worshiping a false idol. For almost every culture, something as big and vague as God comes to stand in for that judging force, the one who gives us these arbitrary rules and is waiting for us to slip up. In communist Eastern Europe it was the State, in 1990's New York it's the Other of society, when we are children it is our parents.

Star Wars: The Most Insidious Evil

Who is Darth Sidious?

He is the revenge of the Sith.

***

Earlier I mentioned characters who get a lot of description, and characters who purposefully get very little. It is amazing how little attention as a person Chancellor/Emperor Palpatine gets. His agenda dominates all six movies, after all, yet he doesn't even appear in one movie (Episode 4) and is unnamed in another (Episode 5). And for those four movies he does act in... what do we know of him?

We don't know where he came from, how or why or when he became a Sith, or anyone he cares about or knows outside his schemes. Most of his dialogue is as Chancellor, dripping with lies and condescension to the "good guys". Anyone else who had his screen time, we would know a heck of a lot more about. Three movies were made to tell us the backstory of Darth Vader, but we still know almost nothing about his master.

Palpatine is one of the most depersonalized characters in the entire series, which is interesting for someone who is the primary villain.

Which ties into the greatest concern about the Original Trilogy that I mentioned before. Is Star Wars describing a universe were "killing the one bad guy" solves everyone's problem? Or does defeating that one bad guy, actually stand for a far more comprehensive process?

So if he is more symbol than person, what does he stand for?

***

One of the few genuine things we know about Sidious is that he loves conflict. His plans always involve a ridiculous amount of "getting two sides to fight it out, while he maneuvers in the background", from Endor's moon to the Separatist war. He exhibits this especially on a personal level, taking an almost sexual satisfaction when he watches two potential apprentices fight each other for him (at the beginning of Episode 3, and the end of Episode 6).

One reading of these scenes are that he knows who will win each war or duel and has orchestrated their success, but I find it much more plausible that he set up a "No matter who loses, I win" methodology.

The scene where Anakin kills Count Dooku is one of the best scenes in the entire six movies.

It contains the endlessly repeated trope of a dismembered hand. We see Sidious's mask fall, as he hideously orders Anakin to kill. The look of betrayal on Dooku's face speaks volumes, which we will discuss later. Anakin uses *two* light sabers - his and Dooku's - to deliver the deathblow, symbolizing how Sidious always controls both sides of a fight. And of course, killing this enemy does nothing to solve anyone's problem. All of this is portrayed within a fairly swashbuckling laser sword fight.

Darth Sidious is conflict.

***

Conflict is inherent in the system.

From the very beginning of the series, conflict is there, and Palpatine is here, savoring and orchestrating these pointless battles. He is a sort of lawful chaos, insisting there will be competition and determining how it goes. (Whereas the heroes in the Original Trilogy are a sort of chaotic lawfulness, showing infinite trust in each other despite no one making them do so.)

Another one of Palpatines rare lines of honesty is when confronted by Mace Windu and his squad of Jedi.  

MACE The Senate will decide your fate. 

PALPATINE (burst of anger) I am the Senate!

And at this point, who's to say he is wrong?

Not that Palpatine has respect for the Senate. He takes a maniacal glee in throwing pieces of the Senate around as Yoda during their duel, creating a pretty blatant image for the fall of democracy. But then, he's always cast off his tools to replace them with something even more powerful.

There are many names for what Sidious represents. Hatred. War. Capitalism. Evil. Distrust. Class and status. He is vengeance incarnate. This is the Dark Side of the Force and he is one with it. He is it.

(The Jedi would throw in "Anger". This is wrong. The Jedi focus on emotion and attachment as someone's undoing is repeatedly shown as incorrect. Luke is correct to ignore Yoda's advice to be indifferent. Darth Sidious is just as happy to use cool necessity as the reason to abandon someone to death as the Jedi are.)

To defeat Darth Sidious then, you can not merely strike him down (as he taunts Luke to do at the end of Episode 6.) It takes a genuine act of cooperation and trust to overcome conflict. A radical act of love.

A son giving up everything for the father he never knew, and his father giving up everything for this son. That is the trust Sidious cannot predict, and is conflict's only undoing.

***

One of the greatest complaints of the Prequels is that they make Darth Vader "uncool". Vader was one of the greatest badasses of cinema, voiced by James Earl Jones, and fans were looking forward to him as a Jedi. This was the man Luke had faith in after all, that could overcome his Dark Side programming when it mattered.

But Lucas didn't need to make Anakin Skywalker "cool". He already was one of the most celebrated figures in pop culture, let alone genre fiction. Making him a cool Jedi who succumbs to the Dark Side in one moment of weakness, would only glorify his whole fascist schtick.

Instead Anakin is a punk. He is whiny, badly-tempered, and incredibly insecure. He's right about most of the things he disagrees with the Jedi about, but gosh does he come across as an unworthy jerk.

In this light, now the trust shown at the end of Return of the Jedi makes no sense. Luke is desperate to believe that his father is still inside that suit somewhere, the "Jedi" he used to be? Now we know that man never existed, there never was some supercool Jedi who was the "true" father of Luke Skywalker. Hell he was barely a Jedi. There was just a whiny proto-fascist. If Luke had seen the Prequel movies, could he have put his life in the hands of Darth Vader? Could you?

No.

But trust does not make sense.

Demanding to see the "cool" Anakin Skywalker is demanding proof of the goodness of the people you love. It is demanding his midichlorian count before you believe he is the figure of prophecy.

Radical faith is believing in the father you need even though he never existed in the first place. Darth Vader knows he was a horrible human being, but at the end he believes he can be something greater, when his son refuses to kill him.

That is the Light Side of the Force.