The Ideology of Climate Justice

In the news because of the #GreenNewDeal and various right-wing attempts to bait its proponents (do they notice that by paying so much attention to an absurd GND while ignoring many more technocratic proposals, they fulfill the exact raison d’etre of this platform: at least you’re talking about it?) But it’s really an evergreen topic.

Any student of ideology should be very concerned about the way climate change is talked about among the progressive set. While most policy matters on the left really are talked about in material terms and how much benefit people will immediately reap (which contrasts positively against both Republican policy proposals and progressive *cultural* discourse), climate change is an arena where discussions tend far more towards the uncertain and symbolic than the concrete. And that should be a concern.

For this discussion, assume I already believe everything quote unquote “all environmental scientists believe” (as if there isn’t plenty of disagreement even when they are to the left of current policy.) Human causes are changing the atmospheric makeup enough that over the next century the temperature will rise by 2 degrees C or more, which will have massive changes in local ecosystems, and devastate coastal cities. One can agree with this, but also think progressive discourse around climate change is terrible.

The problem is that even with this empirical backing, climate change concerns can become like other causes motivated by distant future threats - extremely ideological and symbolic. If you think about movements defined around “okay if you keep doing this thing now you won’t notice anything bad, but generations from now it will lead to collapse so we need to crackdown now”... they are often pretty reactionary. Homosexuality, immigration, atheism or religious tolerance are all things that demagogues have warned “will eventually destroy society, you just can’t see it yet.” Because you can’t see if you’re having any beneficial effects or not, the “cause” easily becomes entirely symbolic and immaterial, dominated by status games among its leaders to see who can be the most pure/extreme/politically savvy.

You see this most with changing environmental issues to “climate justice” and other methods of making it part of the overall social justice alliance toolkit. It becomes one more way to beat down the “greed” of corporations, aligned with a dozen other causes, rather than about “does it have a proposed policy measure that will change material conditions of the world?”

(There’s nothing wrong with opposing corporations of course, but emphasis on the greed of the Other is pathological and generally prevents you from contemplating structural reform, and instead focuses on replacing “bad” actors with “good” ones and hoping it produces change. It will not.)

It helps to split our discussion into moderate measures, and radical measures, meant to address climate change. Moderate measures are those already implemented by many developed nations, and include carbon taxes, credits into research of renewables, etc. Radical measures are ones that would have a large impact on the economy and dramatically reduce greenhouse related outputs immediately.

In terms of radical measures, we should be honest that no government is contemplating them (certainly the GND is not on a sufficient scale). One should not blame democracy - historically authoritarian governments are even *worse* on environmental matters than bourgeoisie republics, if only because they tend to reap the full gains of exploiting the environment. (Do not forget how often environmental preservation was considered a bourgeoisie cause, valuing pretty parks over the defense of the state and feeding the masses.)

We should also be honest that’s probably what is necessary. Scientific estimates of greater than 2C temperature rise usually come with “based almost entirely off of what we have already set in motion.” Very few researchers believe that we can just stop the train now. If the Earth is to be doomed, we have already doomed it. But activists do not promote that message, because it leads to defeatism and nihilism. Which may be true from a political perspective, but that means everything you hear downstream of that is motivated by politics, not truth. The truth is nihilist despair: the world might end or at least displace billions in the next century, and it’s too late to stop it.

That being said, moderate measures are still possible, to reduce what damage we can, and reducing harm remains our moral obligation.

The next lament of the modern tumblr anti-capitalist becomes that capitalist is incompatible with any attempt to reign in pollution, because it is too short sighted and greedy. So it’s important to remember how untrue this is. Most capitalist nations have happily passed laws regulating greenhouse emissions - in fact in most of those nations the conservative party supports at least some version of them. In fact if capitalism was not so adaptable to so many different circumstances, it would not be nearly so damaging an ideology - it lurches from crisis to crisis where theocracy or dictatorship would fail, never fully failing nor fully fixing its problems.

It’s really only America that is the standout, with the dreadful combination of: a right wing party that has gone all in on denialism, and a veto-heavy system that has prevented moderate measures from being passed even when the left-wing party was in control. Which is terrible and has led to dysfunctional policy. But then the lesson has changed to “America has a broken system of checks and balances” and not “capitalist democracies are inherently unable to confront global warming.”

Geeks, MOPS, and Sociological Essays

David Chapman wrote a famous essay called Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths that looks at the lifecycle of geek subcultures as an arc from innocent creators to being overtaken by cynical exploiters.

This concept was also expanded by Benjamin Ross Hoffman http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/construction-beacons/ and Aella https://knowingless.com/2017/05/02/internet-communities-otters-vs-possums/

These essays are all hitting on *something* but doing so in such a morally loaded manner that they start missing the Real early on. The best form of essay like this starts with an idea based on their observations, but instead of just inductively growing from that idea, sees how it can lead to explaining OTHER observations. They just sound pretty judgy and tell us why we should dislike the sociopaths etc so much (even if they nominally say “I’m not saying these people are evil.”)

Here is instead the bambamramfan modification:

1. Geeks are obsessive creators who make a new thing, that every so often catches fire with other obsessive creators, and they make a super-charged circle of people making awesome stuff. It can be a new artistic movement, or people playing with computers in their garages, or competitive rubix cube solving. This category includes people who aren’t creators, but just really love that thing.

If you have read the famous Infamous Brad essay, this includes both Dream Nazis and Authenticity Policy https://bradhicks.livejournal.com/128514.html

2. Mops are people drawn to the POSITIVE ENERGY of this. Being around a bunch of people who are excited about something is itself very exciting. There’s just a magic in the air, the group is breaking boundaries and forming bonds and it is all very intense and creative. Even if you don’t care about the thing qua the thing, it can be fun to just be around that community. This includes the third part of Bard’s trichotomy, the Fun Mavens.

Hakim Bey talks a lot about this in his landmark essay Temporary Autonomous Zones. https://hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont

Note this really applies to political groups too. It’s *fun* to be in a revolution. It’s fun to think you’re overthrowing the patriarchy/the SJW bureaucracy. This is all the dark-web or pirate-radio stuff. They are not only exploring new intellectual territory, but they’re also having fun while doing it. This attracts people who… just like fun.

On a purely economic level of course, you can see this as the transition from “people who program for the love of programming” to “people who realize you can make a fuckton of money from this.”

3. Systematizers. (Shockingly, “sociopath” is a really bad word here for any hope of clear communication.) These people see the geek subculture, and the positive energy and think… this could be better if only they got organized. The political geeks could actually be organized into activists. The tech geeks could get venture capital and HR. The art geeks could modify their product just a little and then I could sell it on the mass level.

This is usually not experienced as a cynical ploy. They see something wonderful, that’s just ordered dysfunctionally, and they want to help by bringing their logistical skills. Maybe they’ll take a cut for the value add they bring, but it’s not the primary motivation: the motivation is to “spread BLANK to the masses.” And of course, the original geeks and mops love that. Being part of an organized thing means validation after all.

But one can not serve God and Mammon. Once you’re doing what the Systematizers advise, then you become more dependent on the value they’re trying to mine, and anything that threatens that value (money or public acclaim) has overwhelming pressure to make the geeks shut up and get in line.

(Even social justice, I believe, is a very good geek idea that has been completely taken over by systematizers who use it to sell their website and increase their twitter presence. Let alone how this played out with say, comic books.)

***

This is the part of the essay where all the above authors say “and HERE is how you can stop it, and keep your group pure.” Well go back and read TAZ more closely: you can’t. It’s an endless process of creation, rise, and decay. Either you group dies or it ossifies. Die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Am I cliche enough yet? There’s no stable system where you don’t grow like that, anymore than you can tell a colony of fruit flies “don’t eat all the nutrients in your environment or else the colony will die.”

What you have to do is embrace the rise and fall. Don’t tie yourself to rationalism or battle-bot-building, thinking “it will always be about the music.” Enjoy the Mops and their energy. Resist the Systematizers for a while. But once they’re deep enough in… just go somewhere else. Make a new geek source of energy. Enjoy it while it’s small, and don’t spend all your time dreaming of how great it would be if EVERYONE was part of it.

Three Types of Economies

We discuss capitalism, communism, and anarchy a lot, which are both modes of society, but also references to types of economic exchange. The critique of society often gets confused for the economy type, even though these are rather separate things. So for the sake of simplicity and clarifying, let’s talk JUST about the type of economy today.

The thing people forget about the economy - because we get caught up in accusations of selfishness and assumptions of power - is that it is at heart an information problem, or rather, a method of solving this problem. We have some Stuff, it is distributed among different people, with different degrees of making it or acquiring it, and we would like it to be distributed to the people who need and want it the most, or can make the most productive use of it. Even if we solve every human sin regarding selfishness and power, we will still need to solve the problem of “where does stuff go.”

(Most people are in fact good, and willing to work for the overall good if there’s a solid plan - but just being altruistic isn’t enough to figure out how to feed the hungry.)

There are three different types of economies based on how much information you have. The information is in the form of “what resources do you have? How hard is it to extract them? What do you want? How much of it do you want?” You generally know all of this for yourself, and only some of this information for other people. Ie, you know how hungry you are and how much food from McDonald’s you want, but you are less likely to know how hungry your friend is, or what they are in the mood for.

***

Trust Economy - this is the type of economy where you have TOTAL INFORMATION about everyone (relevant to the problem in question.) Picture a family who has known each other for a long time, sitting down for a meal with food closer to some than others. They know who likes what dish, who needs more food, and they can see what is already on each other’s plates. They can quickly just give each other the food other people want, and judge what a fair allotment is weighed for how important things are to each people there.

We don’t think about this much, as it’s the behavior we do instinctually when the problem is so small we don’t even see an economy is going on. But whenever you are with a group of people who get along, and you’re distributing a limited resource (a turn at the videogame, snacks, conversational space) in a manner that’s trying to be considerate of everyone but is so easy you don’t even think about it -- that’s trust economy.

This is most associated with anarchy. Who needs rulers when people can just help themselves and each other?

Command Economy - This is for situations where a MODERATE amount of information is known by some parties. This means the capabilities of people, the total resources at play, the rough size of demands people need met, etc. But not everything, like “how will widget A fit into device B, who is sick today” or just because one person has a lot of information that does not mean everyone is informed. Most people’s workplaces - be they corporations or the government (especially the military) operate like this. There is one central unit who establishes the group goals and directs where resources go and who should be in which departments… and then lets the individual departments figure out their own structure and how they will use those resources, and those departments will usually just give their managers targets, and let the managers command employees to figure out how best to meet those targets.

(Or it’s just when Dad orders for the whole family at the restaurant.)

The advantages of this are great - you can focus everyone on an important goal, and just because one person happens to start with a lot of resources, those can still be driven to where they are needed the most. The disadvantages are obvious - the bottle-neck of any centralization, where if the leader is dumb or selfish or otherwise inefficient, they screw up the entire economy around them (and insulated leaders tend not to be responsive to changing conditions.)

This is associated with communism and war-time economies, though somewhat unfairly, as a communism will often have sub-markets for areas under it where the government lacks information -- just like as capitalist countries always have various command economies under them, within the corporations that make up the economy.

Market Economy - This is for situations for people share NO INFORMATION with each other, and yet you need to figure out how to disperse stuff. People just announce “I will trade X for Y”, and other people who themselves value Y over X can take that, making both better off, without having to know how important or plentiful X and Y were for any people other than themselves.

This is associated with capitalism, though as said above, you find markets in any type of country, and capitalist countries contain many different types of economies within them. Capitalist ideology just focuses on market economies as the type of ideal to attain.

They are kind of magic, because market economies can make large decentralized systems act incredibly efficiently without any central information processing. Economists are in love with this miracle, and it can indeed be pretty great.

But the magic is that they process all this in the adverse situation of limited information. It’s very impressive that they can do that, but that does not make them always the best. They are a good solution to the problem of lacking information, but if you have information, then they might just be inefficient. Resources might be squandered because the person who has them no longer has any reason to trade them away, etc.

***

The point is that none of these economies are universally better than others. They are optimized responses to different situations, and should be used as such. Using a market economy when you have enough information for a trust economy creates a dreadful waste of time and effort as every exchange is negotiated and verified. Using a trust economy when people don’t know anything about other people, will just lead to mismanagement disaster.

So when discussing capitalism, communism, and anarchy (as social models) we understandably make reference to the economy types we associate with them, but each of those ideologies are more about exalting one particular tool as the social ideal, even as it makes use of all three. We should instead take the detached view of tools, not looking at them as moral imperatives, but useful responses to different situations.

The SMG Gamergate Thread

In 2014, when the geek internet was blowing up with the controversy Gamergate, the forums at SomethingAwful.com were no exception. It was such a toxic subject that it was confined to one thread. SA’s resident communist movie critic, SuperMechaGodzilla, entered the fray – condescendingly lecturing everyone on capitalism, the fun of videogames, Christianity, anti-semitism, and media studies.

It was fantastic, and extremely educational. A point of view on GamerGate that was neither social justice totality, nor liberal/libertarian defensiveness.

His posts from the thread have been copied here for posterity.

Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. Posts are separated by quote bubbles, or an asterisk.

What is Capitalism?

This is a long explanation of capitalist ideology, in response to threads like these.

And direct asks for clarification by @jadagul, @silver-and-ivory, @not-a-lizard, and @kenny-evitt

(And a nice coda here )

Okay so what is capitalism.

Well sometimes people are just talking about the economic system. Goods are distributed according to markets, people have control of their private property, and we manage a global financial network by means of far-flung capital deciding what seems like a wise investment. This can be described in the positive sense with no value judgments - although it’s a very complicated system that is usually drastically simplified by anyone without a degree in economics or relevant profession.

But, much more relevantly for discourse, capitalism refers to the thinking that this is for the best. As @jadagul proposes:

Like, if you asked me to define “capitalism”, I would point to the idea that the means of production should be owned privately, and most economic activity should be privately contracted and transacted. And secondarily, I might talk about the ideological underpinnings of divorcing personal, private views from public, economic considerations, which I wrote about here. (Though properly speaking that’s liberalism rather than capitalism, the two synergize).

Emphasis on the word “should.” Which is why we can talk about capitalism in America, and Sweden, and Singapore, all countries with every different economic models and results. In all of them the dominant ideological strain is that a complex system of private exchange is for the best.

Like any belief, there’s a lot of luggage that goes with it.

There are two fundamental arguments for capitalism:

1. People’s stuff is their stuff. They should be allowed to do whatever they want with it, which includes selling it to other people who want it for whatever price they can get. We’ll call this deontic reason.
2. Markets are the most efficient distribution mechanism for our current stuff, and encouraging more production of it. We’ll call this the consequentialist reason.

These are both compelling reasons, and many tumblrs have made persuasive arguments based on them. But putting them both up there next to each other, we notice something.

…they don’t play nicely together. Like you can’t accept both of these arguments. Either people deserve true control over what they own and it’s okay people starve in order to support this principle – or goods should be distributed based on who will benefit the most from them, and your own claim over them is ethically irrelevant.

(You can try to explain that in our world it just so happens that both of these things are true. That would be very convenient – especially, as noted, this is the dominant belief of those in power. This is extremely unlikely, and in general you should practice skepticism towards claims that sacred values also are practically optimal.)

It’s true that some iconoclasts will bite the bullet, and pick only one of these arguments. Rationalists are pretty good about putting primacy on argument #2, and there are principled libertarians who put #1 above all. But by and large, what do most ideologues say, including “every Republican politician and most of the Democratic ones?” They claim both arguments are true at once.

And when you think of this, especially in the context of “Republican politicians justifying something” you realize that it’s really… just fatuous rhetoric in defense of something. They don’t really care if it’s the most effective system, not enough to test that claim in a falsifiable setting. And they aren’t really committed to deontic property rights. It’s just these are two powerful arguments throw out to win the debate and defend something.

So, to defend what? The naive radical here says that they’re just making these spurious arguments to defend the rich and powerful, but I don’t buy it. No one can buy toadies that passionate, that ubiquitous. They’re defending capitalism the same way you’d expect them to defend American actions in the Vietnam War - ignorantly, but with innocent faith.

So that’s what capitalism is. Capitalist ideology is the thing that people are defending when they make bad, contradictory arguments for capitalism.

The market is not always the worst way of deciding things. But it’s not always the best either. And we need to be able to make reality-based decisions about whether it’s the right principle to follow in any particular policy – but the intellectual forces made to defend capitalism in general, will rear their head to argue that “taxation is theft” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” no matter how pragmatic and necessary the left-wing proposal under discussion is. You have to resist that.

You have to ask yourself “okay, but in this area, is mandatory licensing a useful idea? What does the evidence really say?”

***

This concern is not limited to the policy realm, which is why we (who have so little influence over policy) end up discussing capitalism so much.

The biggest area where this comes up is the value of people.

Under capitalism, we believe that the value of a person is based on how much money they have. Oh, sure we don’t say this straight out. Every life is equal, etc etc. But whose judgment do we trust?

Who are we more impressed by: our unemployed friend, or the one on a hot track career that affords her a house and fancy vacations, and always buys everyone dinner? What’s the common demand of Republicans: get successful business people into office so they can run government like a business? And when you see someone, how good are you at resisting making assumptions about them based on the niceness of their clothes, their general health and hygiene, and other signifiers associated with class?

Even our judgment of our own productive activities is dominated by this. Here’s an increasing scale we are all familiar with:

• Oh you’re an artist. That’s cool.
• Where you hired by someone to make your art?
• Does it pay?
• Does it offer benefits?
• Is it enough to raise a family on?

… and on and on into even higher scales. The central question of your art (or whatever you do) should be “is it good?” But instead we establish sources of external validation. And capitalism manages to subsume all those definitions of validation, boiling them down to “will someone give you money for them.”

Now, there is often some logic behind these conclusions. The friend who treats everyone to dinner is at least benefiting you. And people paying for your work sometimes means it’s popular which we think sometimes signifies whether it’s good. But these are often short-cuts our mind makes, without thinking about whether that chain of logic really is supported by evidence.

The person who inherited a lot of money, and parlayed that into CEO jobs in their 20’s, and then used that experience as the basis for future claims of expertise, has an opportunity no one else did. And a lot of the companies trying to create media these days are throwing darts in the dark, hoping something hits. There’s a lot of luck, personal connections, and outright immorality that can go into making money, but we still have that shortcut “gets money = valuable.”

So usually what I am getting at when I rail against capitalism, is that I firmly believe unemployed people are valuable too. Not just in some utilitarian calculus, but that their work is interesting, their effort is meaningful, and I enjoy their ideas and think they have a real contribution to society. The fact that at the moment the market won’t pay for it, does not concern me as to the value of their work.

***

Obviously central planning and government can also fuck up. Stalinism and Chavezism can convince people to judge everything based on what the dictator thinks, and that is just as wrong. And statistical evidence shows that a minimum wage boosts income at some levels, and reduces take home pay at higher levels, and efforts to ignore either result are sticking your head in the sand.

But we don’t live under Stalin or another communist dictator. We live in a world where the richest are the most powerful and highest status, and they determine the class ladder. So the ideology we have to be on the watch for is “this that justify the existing capitalist system.”

Regardless, in all such cases - judging policies, or people - we can’t delegate our decisions to ideological short cuts. We must do the hard work ourselves of reading situations and forming our own reactions to them.

Accelerationism: Dos and Dont's

Accelerationism is the word for the political tendency among radicals to encourage the worst among their enemies, and to be dismissive of short-term material gains that fall short of a revolution. It's a form of logical argument, and you can see this form replicated among many political movements with different concrete values.

It's leftists who argue that Trump will be good for revealing the ugly face of nationalism; it's right-anarchists who thought the ACA would be so bad it would undermine support for all of big government liberalism; an environmentalist would rather a park become polluted and ugly and get people to focus on corporate actors who contribute to climate change.

The current society is mired in a capitalist ideology dedicated to making everyone miserable. It cannot be redeemed or purified. Should measures like increased Medicaid funding, or a cool black man as President, be supported as making lives better and the oppressed happier, or should we withhold our support because they distract from the only goal that will get us out of this system: anti-capitalist revolution?

That's the question of accelerationism in a nutshell. Things are getting bad, do we make them get bad faster to bring about the inevitable end state sooner? It's an accusation that gets through around between center-leftists and far-leftists a lot.

But we are really talking about two different things, and that is key.

***

In purely material terms, should you help the worst off, or should you refrain in order to stoke the fires of their anger?

This is obviously a dumb question.

There is no guarantee the revolution is coming. There might never be a revolution. Or the revolution might just empower a totalitarian dystopia. Or your neglectful immiseration of people might be entirely irrelevant to that revolution.

The world is very large, and very complex, and incredibly uncertain. Especially when it comes to political tactics. Who the fuck knows what works. Who knows if your long-term goal is really a good idea. We're not talking "a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush," we're talking "a bird we're about to catch is still better than two thousand birds in a bush on top of a high mountain in another country that someone told you about once."

Your ethical responsibility is to proximate results. Help the people you can, do things that you know will work and that you can see the results of. Resist ideologies and political theories that say "actually doing this mean or easy thing serves the greater good in the very long term" and who never seem to actually pay out the greater good. Focus on specificity.

So yes, increased Medicaid funding is great. No ethical left should oppose it.

***

But there's a difference between helping everyone, and making a situation smoother and more pleasant.

For instance, David Simon, creator of the Wire which dramatizes amazingly well how the drug war hurts black communities, is opposed to marijuana legalization.

"I'm against it," Simon told his stunned audience at the Royal Institution on Thursday night. "The last thing I want to do is rationalise the easiest, the most benign end of this. The whole concept needs to be changed, the debate reframed. 

"I want the thing to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off the hook, that's very dangerous. If they can find a way for white kids in middle-class suburbia to get high without them going to jail," he continued, "and getting them to think that what they do is a million miles away from black kids taking crack, that is what politicians would do."

(Yes, I'm assuming everyone who reads this is pro-legalization, at least in terms of ending the brutal Drug War.)

If you think Simons is being too blinkered here, let's imagine a more extreme scenario: What if we legalized heroin and instituted addiction-rehabilitation programs for the families of Congresspeople?

Now, the families of Congresspeople are people too. Their pain is real. If one of them goes to jail for possession, that is bad. And if they are addicted, humane and effective rehabilitation is better than jail. So from a pure harm reduction stance, how can you object to this?

But we of course know the incentives it sets up. It is good that Congress labors under the same laws as the rest of its citizenry. They should pay the cost for these laws like the rest of us, so that if the laws are cruel and unjust they will notice and get rid of them. A world where their kids don't go to jail for possession is more pleasant to them, but it's not beneficial for everyone.

That may be absurdly extreme, but it's not very different from "legalizing the drug white people do." The Drug War is cruel, invasive, and counter-productive - exempting some upper classes from it allows them to forget that experience, and to Other the people who do experience its vicissitudes.

This is, for instance, the problem with tax deductions for employer sponsored healthcare. It guarantees healthcare to the people our ruling class interacts with, leaving out and isolating the people our rulers avoid anyway, making it even harder to get any help for them. This is why universal programs are so important.

That accelerationism, to pull down the benefits some people enjoy that allow them to ignore the pain of the larger masses, is good and just. It is right to pull off the pleasant mask of capitalism or state violence, so that everyone sees its obscene underneath.

So, when faced with the question of, "do I want to make things worse in order to encourage far off radical solutions", we need to figure out whether it's a policy that helps everyone, or a policy that merely covers up the existing harsh reality, and then decide our accelerationism.

----------------------------------------------

@balioc replied:

I strenuously object to this framing. 
The “actually helping” versus “just making things smoother” dichotomy is not a real thing.  Or, rather, it is – but, seen for what it is, it is not a thing that you would support as a foundation for ethics or policy.  I certainly don’t.   

***** 

The examples of “anti-smoothing” policies that you support, on an abstract level, function exactlythe same way as the examples of “just causing pain” policies that you despise.  They hurt people unnecessarily, on the grounds that the hurting will spur the world to productive action, while relieving the hurt would lull the world into a sense of undeserved complacency.  As you say yourself: the white stoner kid, and the heroin-addicted Congressman’s child, are enduring real and morally-salient suffering at the hands of the legal system.  By choosing to let that happen to them rather than patching the system to prevent it, we are saying “we care less about your suffering than about some hazy unknowable distant prospect of greater systemic change.”  We are deciding that “allowing the upper classes to forget [the systemic problems],” which is a very abstract sort of problem that may not result in anything concrete at all, matters more than the ruination of kids’ lives.  Calling it “anti-smoothness” is a hypocritical fudge.  It is accelerationism, pure and simple.   

And on the flip side…well, if you really want to ensure that the rich-and-powerful aren’t allowed to forget about the big systemic problems, the best way to make that happen is to get the non-rich-and-powerful to riot.  Which works better if you take away all their stuff.  It doesn’t have to be a vague, heighten-the-contradictions “maybe things will hit rock bottom and then start going up again” kind of plan; it can be very tactical and very concrete.  This is the strategy espoused by all manner of radical groups back in the ‘60s, and today.   

***** 

So…what is the actual difference between the examples on your first list and the examples on the second list?  Who the victims are.  That’s it.  In the “unacceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “worst-off.”  In the “acceptable” cases, the suffering is endured by the “powerful.”     

You’ve reinvented the concept of privilege here.  You have divided people into classes and said “these people’s suffering is deontically unconscionable, but these’s people’s suffering doesn’t matter as much, it can be countenanced for the greater good.”  Bad universalist, no biscuit.   

***** 

The actual answer that yields the result you want is something you’ll like a lot less.  It’s not a Supreme Ethical Principle; it’s a calculus.  It’s the rationalists’ “shut up and multiply!”  Usually accelerationism is bad, sometimes it’s good, and the difference is (a) what the costs are and (b) what the expected payout is.  If we’re talking about laws that apply only to save Congressmen’s kids, well, the costs of not implementing them are (relatively) low and the amount of acceleration that you gain is relatively great.  If we’re talking about laws that give much-needed healthcare to millions of poor people who are not right this moment in the process of fomenting revolution, the costs of not implementing them are almost certainly too high.  

----------------------------------------------

So if you only paid attention to the two (point five) examples, and not to the abstract description, then yes I can see how you would arrive at that conclusion. It is in fact wrong to go “haha, the suffering of privileged people like Congressional kids, white UMC dope smokers, and employed people (??) does not matter.” That would not be ethical, and so you can be pretty sure that’s not what I meant, especially as it also contradicts the thesis (which you didn’t directly address, except by noting the absence of applicable examples.)

I should provide more examples then. But first, let’s go back to the beginning.

Accelerationism is an attitude we see frequently in political disputes. (Even Trump today is rejoicing that the AHCA failed, because its explosion will create pressure for future repeal.) It comes up often enough that saying accelerationism is always wrong (or always right) seems overbroad. There are too many cases of sick systems that need to be broken, rather than given short term balm. We need a differentiator.

Your solution is to “do the math.” But our ability to make these sort of cause and effect calculations is incredibly bad. And all attempts at making the sort of super-complicated predictions this requires just open our thinking to the sort of biases Less Wrongers know so well. We’ll choose the most comforting narrative and tell ourselves we are doing cold, hard math.

Consequentialism is hard, yo. If you’re talking trolley problem thought experiments where you know the probablistic outcome of all actions to the third significant figure, yeah go do that. But we don’t usually know it, but must usually make decisions anyway.

The different option I offer is an aesthetic differentiation. Is the harm you are preventing (or not) primarily material deprivation, or is it just a disruption of harmony? Is it unpleasant?

An example might be the election of Trump. Besides the possibility of nuclear oblivion, most of the histrionic liberal reaction to him was how unpleasant he was (at least relative to most other Republican candidates.) He said racist things, he said sexist things, he was cavalier about assault, he lied blatantly, it was just an endless parade of obscenities. And so when evaluating “Trump vs Cruz” (or even Kasich) we have to ask will he make the policy results that much worse, or will he just make political life more unpleasant, uglier, and rough?

And if we admit it’s the latter, is that really inaccurate? It’s more likely that Trump represents the truth of Republican positions (contradictory idiocy motivated by gut feeling that flatters white, rich Christians as the center of the world), and will accelerate the proper reaction to that. Not Trump as “easier to beat in the general”, but Trump as an acceleration President. The commentators who predicted that Trump would be hugely offensive but on material consequence not very different from a responsible, moderate Republican… have so far not been very wrong.

As @redantsunderneath mentioned in his film taste recently (which I share), the great thing difficult and visceral movies can do for us is to teach us to lean in to discomfort. We can differentiate between something that is actually hurting us and evil, or something that is disgusting or disharmonious. 

Sometimes this aesthetic improvement means “we have cleaned up the area around the powerful decision makers”, like kicking the homeless and porn shops out of Times Square, or legalizing drugs their kids are using. Even if there is some material component to that, we can tell the difference between what the primary vector is: actual broad harm reduction, or adding rosy tints to the windows of the subjective actors.

Sometimes it’s just a matter of asking “is that friend or commenter who I am very annoyed at hurting me, or just making me uncomfortable?”

To return to one of my original examples: I am not actually saying “repeal the employer-based tax deduction for healthcare to see what universal program Congress passes in its place.” We know the harm that would come from that. It was just an example of a policy that reduced harm, but did even more than that by reducing all the harm of being uninsured within sight of the wealthy and influential, and so also stalled further progress. We can understand this dynamic, and in the future try to build our programs around the dispossessed rather than around the affluent and hoping they work their way down to everyone. 

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.

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.