Lots of news this week: Steve Jobs, American iCon, has died, the Occupy Wall Street movement is finally getting lots of media attention, and the amazingly talented Cyndi Lauper, now appearing at the local House of Blues, continues to misspell her own first name.
Occupy Wall Street is the real story, and I say this even though I consider their claim to be “the other 99%” of Americans an exaggeration. This is because they don’t represent that roughly 28% who insist on voting against their own interests even when a stone blind bat could see the unhelpfulness of such a tendency.
The 28% I'm talking about includes those people who still approved of George W. Bush in 2008, after he had dragged us into two wars, (one of which was unnecessarily long and the other absolutely unnecessary), had shifted the tax burden away from his super-rich friends and onto the backs of the rest of us, and, finally, led the economy into the worst disaster we've seen since the 1930s. So, who are those 28% that still approved of Bush even after he brought about Mondo Catastrofico? I don’t know, but I don't think they sympathize with the Occupy Wall Streeters. In other words, these good Wall Street demonstrators might want to change their slogan to “We are the other 72 percent!” Admittedly not too catchy, but more accurate.
The 28 percent who tend to vote for and support the interests of the super-rich (i.e., the one percent) would benefit from a more enlightened understanding of human nature. Such an understanding might convince many of them to see the errors of their ways and, who knows, maybe even get them to admit that G. W. Bush did not deserve their unwavering devotion.
Ganz bestimmt, Herr Goethe!
From Wikipedia
The key feature of human nature that needs to be more widely understood is that which binds us, against our own will sometimes, to our fellow humans. This feature is rooted in our brain chemistry, which in turn is a function of evolutionary processes that have made Homo sapiens the all-time mammalian champions of mutual help and support. When we are behaving naturally, we tend to feel for each other, share the sufferings of each other, and strive to help each other.
Such a statement is likely to provoke denunciations of “Kumbaya singer!” from the ranks of the 28-percenters, but, let me assure you, I like Kumbaya no more than I like pickled pigs’ feet, which is to say, not very much.
What I do like are the neural and behavioral studies, now arriving in an endless stream, that have identified mirror neurons and other brain components that underlie our inability to separate ourselves from each other. Call me a socialist if you must, but current research proves beyond a doubt that we are, above all, social creatures.
Admittedly, we can be trained to disqualify certain fellow humans from any right to our sympathy (i.e., dehumanize them), whether they be racially, religiously, ethnically or politically different. But this takes training. Our natural impulse, particularly when we are face to face with each other, is to look out for each other.
But, you say, what about murder? War? Enslavement? Rape? Theft? Going through the express check-out line with more than 10 items? Yes, these things do happen, and they are anti-social, but they are, except in the most dysfunctional of societies, newsworthy aberrations. What is not news is the constant, neuron-based, tide-like pull of the social impulses, the ones that mark us as inescapably linked to each other.
Here’s another possible objection to the “We are social” model: What about the benefits of capitalism, the encouragement it gives to individualistic, competitive striving?
I grant that a measure of competitive striving is also natural to us, and can be constructive, but only when channeled along socially responsible paths. Our problems today stem from the all-too-numerous examples of destructive, anti-social striving, the kind of striving that has characterized, for example, Enron, Halliburton, BP, the tobacco companies, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and other outfits whose natural habitat is Wall Street. Their striving has been aimed at personal enrichment even at the expense of social devastation.
Which brings us back to the OWSers. The “99 percent” they promote is more an aspiration than a reality, but it still speaks to the fact that the American economy, since about 1980 has been steadily drawn into the clutches of the super-rich - that one percent who use their money to buy Congress and the White House and then engender laws designed for their own benefit and at our expense. Theirs is a destructively selfish competitive striving.
Eliminating, or at least drastically reducing, the influence of their money on our elections would go a long way toward compelling our elected leaders to pay more attention to us than to those who fund their campaigns. The most obvious device for accomplishing this would be publicly funded federal elections.
Of course these same moneyed interests would claim that publicly funded elections amount to a “government take-over,” but the truth is that government is where our democratic rights make their home. The main problem with our democratic house today is not that it is governmental, but that it has been steadily taken over by non-governmental, moneyed interests. Wall Street represents these interests, so the OWS movement is a big, fat, bold step in the right direction. Even though some of these protestors seem unfocused, and, this being New York, they bring with them a healthy dose of the theatrically bizarre, they still, in my opinion, deserve our praise and support. If they manage to effectively focus our sustained anger they will indeed be the people we have been waiting for.
I will start today’s cunningly incisive analysis with a quick review of the past dozen NFL championship teams. The Superbowl® winners in each year since 2000 were:
2000 St. Louis Rams
2001 Baltimore Ravens
2002 New England Patriots
2003 Tampa Bay Buccaneers
2004 New England Patriots
2005 New England Patriots
2006 Pittsburgh Steelers
2007 Indianapolis Colts
2008 New York Giants
2009 Pittsburgh Steelers
2010 New Orleans Saints
2011 Green Bay Packers
What leaps out from this list is the fact that no team has managed to win more than two Superbowls in a row over the past twelve years. In fact, no team in Superbowl history has ever won more than two Superbowls in a row. In other words, in the NFL, those on top are commonly overthrown by aggressive up-and-comers.
What accounts for this pattern? Close regulation and official intervention on behalf of the underdogs. Every NFL game is regulated by a swarm of referees who make sure that dangerous behaviors like clipping are kept to a minimum -- as are roughing of the kicker, late hits on the quarterback, kicks to the groin and brass knucklings.
If the NFL were to loosen its rules and reduce the number of refs to one per game, if it were, in other words, to deregulate, many of these brutal tactics would become commonplace. Furthermore, if the NFL were to deregulate even more by dropping the system that allows weak teams to have first choice during recruiting season, we would soon see two or three winning teams getting so rich and powerful that they would become permanently entrenched at the top of the NFL. All other teams would be driven steadily down the totem pole, some finally disbanding as they lost games, fans and financing.
Competition in the NFL works because it is so closely regulated as to be downright socialistic. In other words, Tom Brady may call himself a Patriot, but he’s obviously a Communist!
OK, that may be an overstatement, but still...
If careful regulation and a helping hand for those at the bottom work so well for the NFL, why don’t we apply these principles to our economy at large? Because...conservatism.
Since around 1980 and the rise of conservatism, Americans have been propagandized by well funded right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation and Fox News to believe that “deregulation” makes us free, and that providing help for people in economic distress is socialistic and therefore evil.
What we have seen in the U.S. economy over the past 30 years is the opposite of what we’ve seen in the NFL. In America, since 1979, the top 1% of earners have tripled their earnings in relation to those of the middle class and the poor. This top 1% now "earns" about one quarter of all the new wealth in any given year.
During this same period, the average CEO has gone from earning 42 times what the average worker earns, to earning 531 times what the average worker earns.
If the NFL were like our weakly regulated economy, the Patriots and Steelers would gradually attract the largest fan base, the biggest incomes and the best and meanest players until no other teams could touch them.
Of course, the fat cats who control Fox and other right-wing organizations can be said to follow a kind of air-tight logic, if we assume that they care more about getting rich personally than they do about abstract notions like “fairness” and “competitiveness.”
This logic: If millions of Americans are homeless, jobless and desperate for work, wages will go down, and therefore the profits of people like Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes will go up. It’s quite logical. And benefiting from the desperation of their fellow citizens is what the more ruthless of America's wealthy conservatives call “earning an honest living.”
Even Americans who are not coldly conservative are inclined to buy into the idea that regulation is inherently bad. Alan Greenspan is famous for touting the anti-regulation philosophy of Ayn Rand during his long years as head of the Fed. Of course, when our recent financial crisis almost threw us into a new Depression (and would have except government intervened to prevent it), Greenspan admitted that his anti-regulation philosophy was wrong, wrong, wrong.
It is a shame he didn’t come to his senses earlier, but how could he, having been brought up in privilege and, over the past few decades, subjected to a conservative drumbeat of anti-regulatory propaganda.
PBS ran a fascinating piece on Frontline recently called The Warning in which Greenspan and his anti-regulation allies were shown to have stymied public servant Brooksley Born. Born was the head of an agency that attempted to regulate the sale of derivatives, a task she tried to take on because, being very smart, and a dedicated public (i.e., government) servant, she saw that the unregulated derivatives market threatened to wreck the American economy.
Greenspan -- backed up by Robert Ruben and Larry Summers -- refused to listen to Born’s warnings for a number of reasons, one of which was that she did not have a penis. But despite her non-penile handicap, Born proved to be smarter than Greenspan and Company, a point which was brought home when the derivatives market brought the economy down throwing millions of Americans out of their jobs and homes.
It was at this point that Mr. Greenspan said, in effect, “Oops. I was wrong about regulation being bad for the economy. Sorry.”
He now presumably nurses his wounded conscience with mint juleps in some Park Avenue luxury apartment or Stamford mansion.
America would be better off if we treated our economy the way the NFL treats its teams. I know that critics of this view might argue that we can’t make this comparison because NFL teams are made up of skilled and ambitious professionals who can be counted on to strive, while ordinary people are sometimes striving-averse.
I have two words for these critics: Shut the #*@! up.
OK, perhaps a more nuanced counter-argument is called for here. It is true that the national economy will never be as neat or as intensely competitive as is the NFL. But it is also true that a national economy that is closely regulated and that offers advantages to the disadvantaged (like the NFL does) would be a more just and more genuinely competitive society.
Of course such a competitive and relatively fair system would make it harder for people like Roger Ailes to stay on top and to enrich themselves at the expense of the poor. But, in my opinion, this is not reason enough to reject government regulations.
The Great Tom Brady -
Power to the People!
About a week ago, John McCumber wrote a piece in the New York Times called “The Failure of Rational Choice Philosophy.” What I found most interesting about it was McCumber’s claim that the RAND corporation developed and promoted rational choice philosophy as a weapon in America’s fight against communism.
Rational choice theory’s essential notion is something like this: If an individual wants to buy hot pink lipstick, she will seek the path allowing her to get the most hot pink lipstick for the lowest possible price.
Well, duh.
McCumber makes the claim that such ideas have come to seem like common sense, not because they are obviously true, but because RAND and other government controlled or funded organizations propagandized relentlessly on their behalf until they were accepted as common knowledge. These ideas are among those that “everyone knows” -- even though they’re not true.
Of course rational choice theory is riddled with problems, beginning with the notion that "wanting hot pink lipstick" is a given that itself requires no investigation.
Individualism lies at the heart of rational choice theory and has come to be enshrined in American culture generally. And, not coincidentally, has also provided an enduring philosophical bulwark against Marxism.
According to McCumber, individualism and rational choice theory gradually became the unquestioned “common sense” of American life only because of behind-the-scenes efforts by powerful institutions.
“The overall operation was wildly successful. Once established in universities, rational choice philosophy moved smoothly on the backs of their pupils into the 'real world' of business and government …Today, governments and businesses across the globe simply assume that social reality is merely a set of individuals freely making rational choices.”
And:
“[A]nti-regulation policies are crafted to appeal to the view that government must in no way interfere with Americans’ freedom of choice. Even religions compete in the marketplace of salvation, eager to be chosen by those who, understandably, prefer heaven to hell. Today’s most zealous advocates of individualism, be they on Wall Street or at Tea Parties, invariably forget their origins in a long ago program of government propaganda.”
Individualism, he might have added, is also the premise on which many white people (who have long enjoyed the non-individualistic privileges bestowed on them by racial prejudices) base their claims of “reverse discrimination.”
Without wanting to claim that individual effort has no use or validity, I nonetheless happily cast my lot with those who argue that rational choice theory and the individualism with which it is intertwined are over-promoted in our culture. The result of this over-promotion is a kind of mass ignorance about some of the most important forces shaping our lives.
McCumber describes religions as portrayed as if they operated in a “marketplace of salvation,” yet clearly people do not, as a rule, rationally choose their religious beliefs. Such beliefs are usually instilled in childhood through the force of community and family attachments and accepted without rational testing.
The same could be said for the language one speaks. Those of us who speak English as our first language did not “rationally choose” to do so. English was programmed into us the way software is programmed into a computer. No reason, no choice, and very little individualism.
Granted, we are not automatons flapping our lips meaninglessly or acting mechanically and without individual agency. But we would be a lot better off if we were to recognize the limits of our individual “freedoms,” and the impacts of those forces that so often lift us up or send us crashing downward. Unfortunately, there are still quite a few influential opinion shapers working overtime to keep us from recognizing these limits, and they have succeeded in characterizing those who question individualism as anti-American.
So I'll wrap up with this quote from a pre-twentieth century observer of American single-mindedness:
I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. – Alexis de Tocqueville
De Tocqeville
