A Response to Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence published a piece in Scheerpost called Becoming Who We Are. Here I'd like to criticize it. Lawrence's philosophy is, how should I put it, annoyingly "mandarin." For all of his good attitudes, he still needs a better utopian dream than the one he's got. As for becoming who we are, we already are who we are. What we need to become is someone better than who we are.
Here's a biography of Patrick Lawrence. I guess he's done a lot as a journalist and is now writing books. That's cool. It was bizarre, though, to see the recent "mask off" moment for the Alexes who form "The Duran" in which they argued two things about the news of the world: 1) the "collective West" is now in a moment where it needs a revolution, and 2) there is at present no prerevolutionary situation in the "collective West." We are all, then, in a pickle. It would have been nice had Lawrence addressed this situation with a call to revolution. But we can't have everything, I guess.
The argument that appeals the most about Lawrence's spiel is that there's this genocide going on in Gaza (you think?) and, as George Carlin would have put it, nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Here's Carlin:
But Lawrence doesn't go past an echo of a downer about the public's apathy about Gaza:
We must honor those many who have demonstrated in London, New York, Washington and other cities, but this does not contradict my point: The vast majority of people in the Western nations have watched what is perpetrated in their names with a shocking apathy.
Let me put it this way: it's a good thing to note that the First World isn't just yet up in arms about all this. When they do arise, things will look post-apocalyptic maybe. It's still getting bad at a far greater rate than anyone cares to guess. The problem is that the multitudes have been reduced to silence. The First World multitudes are not going to be drafted to put down Hamas or commit mass suicide against Russian artillery; we have proxy thugs doing that for us. And who would they vote for? Jill Stein? There's no bandwagon effect around her. I suppose if there were a military draft we'd be up in arms about it.
In the current reality, however, those who know what's going on have shut off the mainstream media and actively sought to find something liberating on whatever channels still permit it. Even that's a struggle now. And even they know that their standard of living could be made far, far worse -- and probably will be made so at some point soon. So they cling to what they've got. If you want to see quiet desperation, look at how the under-30 population lives.
What Cornelius Castoriadis called "heteronomy" is now the norm. Sure, it would be nice for the multitudes to take some responsibility for the state of the world, but how are they going to do that? The activists have been blocking freeways right and left, now, but Gaza is still dying.
And so we go about our daily lives—watching films, shopping, taking holidays, going out to dinner, and so on as if nothing at all has happened to disturb us.
I'd really like to have a daily life like that. Lawrence continues in his criticism:
a moral depravity has infected our cultures, our societies.
It's kind of disgusting, isn't it. Here, I'll quote from a draft of my forthcoming book:
The United States was founded on two genocides: the genocide of the Middle Passage, in which Africans were imported to this country as slaves, and the one committed against native peoples beginning with the conquests of the Spanish and the consequent smallpox epidemic in the Americas and continuing through the “Indian Wars” and the cultural depravity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
So America's moral depravity has been going on for awhile now. Lawrence continues:
The issue here is the West’s long-standing claim to superiority over the non–West, which is to say most of humanity. This assertion of superiority is half a millennium old, and our leaders simply cannot surrender it.
People around the world like our music, our culture, and our technology. They're getting all these things from the Chinese, now, because all the West has left on offer are threats, mostly threats to collect on past debt or threats to hire proxies to destroy their nation-states. And, thanks to the Biden administration's foreign policies, the rest of the world is a lot stronger now than it once was and can safely ignore the West's embargo threats even though things have gotten considerably more vicious overall. Lawrence continues by noting:
Listen to any speech President Biden gives: It overflows with worn-out platitudes that have nothing to do with what America under Joe Biden does either at home or abroad.
Well, okay, here it would be nice if Patrick Lawrence would mention the average American's one clear way forward: don't vote for Genocide Joe. It really hardly matters who would replace him; the problem is that he's -- as Nick of RBN noted -- already established himself as a "bottom five" President. And there's no redemption available.
And now Lawrence starts in on his philosophy. Sadly, it's about self-interest:
At bottom these actions and inactions reflect the value at the core of self-interest: This is the assertion of power.
Feh. Self-interest is part of the defective package of Western political philosophy. We've been following our self-interest now for centuries, and our problems are no closer to being solved. Thomas Hobbes thought your self-interest was in supporting an absolute monarch; Crevecoeur thought you should move to the New World where you could buy a slave to do your hard work for you. John Locke advanced the cause of American slavery. Continuing:
As to America’s conduct abroad, President Biden still speaks of the U.S. as “the light of the world,” but again, you see just how right Veblen was a century ago in the matter of hollowed-out ideals and their distance from reality.
America has always sucked as a foreign-policy agent. Think of how thoroughly our doom would have been sealed if Hillary Clinton had won in 2016. The problem is that American foreign policy has never been so obviously stupid and so obviously murderous as it is now under Joe Biden. Well, at least not since the days of the genocide in the Philippines (1899-1902) or the days of Patrick Buchanan. At any rate, large portions of the rest of the world are taking advantage of that obviousness, and revolting while they still can. We, on the other hand, are waiting for the blowback from Biden foreign policy to bite us in the collective ass. Don't worry, it will. Yeah, it hurts a lot to wait. Summarizing:
It is well-known and often said that America has never lived up to its ideals. But this is not to say America’s ideals are not to be striven for. To put my concluding point today in the context of this history, it is ours now to advance genuinely toward our unachieved ideals, to treat them as something more than objects of ritual as Veblen saw them to be—to give them substance, again or for the first time.
Cool culture is where you find it. It doesn't have to be American. It could, for instance, be Zapatista. Or it could be like Occupy, or Food Not Bombs.
Comments
Here's a "champion of American values":
"Our representative in Congress." Eh gjohnsit?
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
And, as for the conscious:
Here's some cold water of reality, colder than anyone in the Collective West really wants to admit. And that includes you, Patrick Lawrence. The Germans have brought back the Gestapo, but it's all for Israel, so it's all kewl and bitchen. Identity politics reveals its real reason: genocide waged against those with the wrong identities. Joe Biden, believe it or not, is actually worse than what the "far Right" says he is, and the "far Right" is in fact softballing Biden to protect their own crap agenda.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
Listening to Sabrina and Max
just affirms how rare meaningful conversations are any more.
We don't have self interest
If we had self interest we would have a huge safety net, would be voting for things that benefit all of us. Instead of that we have cliques of special interest groups, from the wealthy to religionists to unions striving for their own special piece of the pie. All these specials look inward for what they want, cut themselves from the rest of us and remain ever vigilant outward in protecting their gains. If everybody had what they have, that would mean something would have to be taken from them.
All I see is economic warfare. Why do we have the treaties we do, the trade agreements, the mutual defense pacts if not to protect the flow of profit. The age of exploration was an international land grab and plunder party. It's still going on, just the venue and party favors have changed. We're still eyeing land to plunder, natural resources to turn into goods soon to be turned into scrap and refuse. It's an International Monopoly game with shifting alliances and WMD.
The wealthy choose our government. The government supports their gain of wealth. Is there any reason to think the rest of the worlds countries governments operate much differently? We're sheep by design. Keep chipping away slowly at rights, and in two generations all you have is some old cranks telling you things used to be different and better, like $.25 gas and grocery stores that used to give away dishes.
Whatever we get as "news" is what they want us to have. What they fail in reporting is just as important what they report, so the bits of truth that come through sound like rumors. Same as all the misinformation pumped to us daily.
What I find most distressing is the "you're badly off because you're dumb, or unlucky, or god hates you" line of crap. Eventually people are going to take it to heart, and not even care anymore.
"Self-interest" can be configured any way you please.
This is, of course, why theories about it are generally mere reflections of their authors' states of mind. Thomas Hobbes thought self-interest was homo homini lupus, man is wolf to man, and so he thought it was natural for people to kill each other. One recalls, however, that Hobbes was 30 when the Thirty Years' War began, and 54 when the English Civil Wars began. So such events might have colored his thinking.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
I apologise
I know I don't follow along well.
I guess I see the common self and the narrow self interests as the two paths. The common interests would be the benefits citizens create for all, using our agreed on system of fairness. Why many in Europe have decent wages, health care, pensions and other benefits. This is for all citizens. Here we have the opposite, when we had the means to do so much more. Small special interests grabbing benefits for themselves, using politicians to do the work.
All I see is a closed system. There is no one politician or philosopher or journalist that's going to find and pull the thread that will open it all up. China, Russia, Europe, Asia, the US all play the same game, with the same goals using pretty much the same system. We rant about communists, but use China and even slave labor to produce our goods. They must rant about us the same way, but that's for our benefit. They can't stop producing and selling to us. Russia? I think the biggest rivalry is they have oil and compete with us directly. So stink eye Putin.
A nation as wealthy as ours shouldn't be as threadbare as it's become, a morally bankrupt bible waving flag worshipping chunk of land for the benefit of the few. I just don't see a way out that doesn't rival WW2. Even then, 50, 60 years later we'll be right back where we are now.
You open many flawed areas to expose.
Your argument against Patrick Lawerence is never made clear. I don't understand the disagreement. Is it one of terminology, attitude, motive, willingness to compromise? Is the meaning of "self-interest" the trigger to discord? Are you thinking of the self interest of the seat of power in the nation? Or are you thinking of the exercise of self-interest by individual citizens?
I do understand the self interest of the nation, as it exists today. I even understand why the genocide of the Palestinians is in the interests of the United States. Anyone who can see the Big Picture understands this. When the US casts the sole vote to continue the ongoing genocide, how can it be made any clearer to observers that this is the top priority of the United States. If you do not understand why this is true, it's probably not a good idea to frame this discussion with this example?
Is the discord with Patrick Lawerence caused by a difference in attitude? Does he seem too passive or indifferent to the extremes in current event? Does his philosophy lack guidance or direction for moving forward? Does he fail to give examples of how to vote with self-interest in mind? Did he fail to explain how to strive for the ideals that people thought were once the ideals of the nation?
If this last is the complaint, I would agree with you.
However, it ought to be clear that one cannot vote for one's self-interest in the United States. That option is not on the ballot, except as an illusion. If one wishes to vote for the nation's self interest, then either candidate will do just fine. If your ideals lie to the Left, wake up. There is no left in the United States. If you try to change that, you will be gently silenced. If your papers are not in order or you are hiding something you may be overwhelmed by adversity. These processes have been largely controlled by American industry and the corporations since the 20th Century. The people are no longer the beneficiaries of the government they formed. They are merely consumers, tax payers, and underpaid labor. Or, they are incarcerated. One in three adults in the US has a criminal record.
If this scares you, or has you fearing for the future, the solution is simple — and it is part of your family history. Help your family begin the process of immigrating to a better nation. Choose a nation with a modern constitution that grants all declared Human Rights to citizens. Begin traveling. Select a nation where the people have benefits personal economic security that you would like to have; where the people are treated with respect; where your fellow citizens are not ignorant about world affairs and are not armed to kill when a stranger rings their doorbell.
This is what those who are seeking a better life do. They start looking and they persist. All nations have expat communities happy to help you get settled.
For a long time, I've been looking for a better sig-line than the one I have. I have not yet found one that better describes the fundamental problem that holds this nation back from achieving a level of human decency.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
I guess it's the dawning character of his realizations.
He's identified stuff that's been there for quite some time, but as something "new." As a consequence, the necessary remedies are more severe than what he thinks they are. Nonetheless I appreciate the spirit of his criticisms. Here's a central one:
That's been there for quite some time now. Your typical American, to the extent to which they are willing to speak up, is the guy described in that Pink Floyd song "Dogs," originally recorded in 1976. Everyone else has been, as I've suggested, reduced to silence. The last time they weren't reduced to silence was the Sixties, and the Establishment response was to shut down the Sixties: assassinate a few leaders, co-opt a generation, and create a new economics based on neoliberalism and the Petrodollar. Doubtless the reason it took so long was due to the complexity of the "solution" they adopted.
As for morality, your standard American response to morality is to reduce it to a talking point for a sales pitch. They didn't call it the "Moral Majority" for nothing. But that was the Eighties.
What's different now is that America's difficulties with responsibility have developed some pretty severe consequences. The main antagonist in the now-time drama, in terms of ignoring said consequences, is Joe Biden. He, like the previous antagonist Hillary Clinton, is a creation of Barack Obama, who was himself, as Wikileaks pointed out, a creature of the banks. (And then you have George W. -- now there was a villain for the ages.) The action getting Biden in such trouble is, of course, the Ukraine scam, and the consequences mostly flow from Biden's empowerment of Russia. America now has an empowered competitor on the world stage.
As for your main argument, sure, get out if you can. A lot of people can't get out. A lot of people -- also -- like the nonhuman world here. And then there was the excuse given by Mohammed Shahid Alam, author of "Poverty from the Wealth of Nations," who argued that the reason he moved to the US was because at least the US was not a nation-state the US was itself oppressing. It's probably still a valid excuse in a lot of places.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
I see the situation exactly as you so lucidly describe it.
And, honestly, I am relieved. It means a lot to share an observation of something that is too large in time to see the beginning and the end at the same time. (As a side note, I've become aware after years of observation, that the average human lifespan is about 40 to 50 years too short to experience the complete cycles of many human events. This is a big problem that causes repeating mistakes. Modest life extension would go a long way to solving many of our most threatening problems. When this nation was founded, the average human lifespan was 45 years. Such an extension is well within our reach.)
There is something new, afoot. A new kind of failure. A new kind of betrayal. Or perhaps its the demise of a support in our social infrastructure that changes the value of everything. The monsters in our midst have lost a great deal of sanity since the 1980s. Over the past two decades, they have lost much of their self-awareness. And, of course, American society has taken a huge intellectual hit. The impact is uneven, but there's not much to work with.
The scariest part is that our leaders are too dumb to problem-solve today's complex systems and accurately predict outcomes. They don't understand society. Things like TikTok go right over their heads. They cannot grasp the technology infrastructure. They think religion has a place in government. But especially, they do not have the intellectual capacity to deal with the complexity of modern economics. They believe in the old remedies of dead economists. All of their economic decisions since the 1980s have harmed the nation and society. They simply could not anticipate that tariffs and sanctions and trade wars and chip embargos cause inflation in the US (since the $$$ penalties are passed on by all countries and parties involved to US consumers as price increases. No one in the supply chain paid any penalties). In the US, the spike in consumer prices was called 'inflation' the old useless remedy of hiking interest rate was applied. The prices are still too high, throwing millions of Americans into financial jeopardy. This, alone, is enough to permanently cripple the US economy, as we know it. The US will soon have to choose between maintaining its global military presence or nation-building and feeding its people at home. The Neocon government will make the wrong decision and all hell will break loose.
The reorganization of the world was kick-started by the US invasion of Iraq. In 2003 I wrote numerous essays proposing that foreign nations discard the dollar as a Reserve trading currency in order to disempower the US. They took their damn time about it, but China and Russia were already talking about a gas and oil pipeline deal when the doomed War of Terror began. The US had spent the previous decade looting Russia and creating the country of Ukraine.. China and Russia were already drawing closer, although both countries are very slow and cautious and meticulous in their approach to international agreements. It took 15 years of formalities before the oil deal was signed, and another 7 years to launch de-dollarization. And still the China-Russia deal and the establishment of the BRICS alliance was jolted along by stupefying US military aggression in their regions and developing US threats against them.
It is a known-known that the US is mounting a miliary approach to control of the oceans and shipping, and consolidate its control over all countries in the world. Yet every day it exposes itself as uniquely unfit for such a role. So, while everyone else prays for peace, I find myself praying that the US and Israel keep doing what they are doing until the world is filled with an enduring rejection of them both in all international matters..
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
And I wanted to say something about "self-interest"
self-interest, you see, is fundamentally something out of a doctrine. One doctrine of self-interest is economics, which argues that your behavior is that of "maximizing utility," whatever that means, and that your behavior can be predicted by rational choice theory, which it can't.
In reality, you choose from socially-circulating ideas of how you ought to behave. You can, then, convince yourself that any behavior is "self-interest." It's an open question whether or not any version of self-interest will benefit you, then.
What's fun is critique, questioning how you look at the world and thus giving you more freedom from socially-circulating ideas of how you ought to behave.
“When there's no fight over programme, the election becomes a casting exercise. Trump's win is the unstoppable consequence of this situation.” - Jean-Luc Melanchon
The something about self-interest you comment on
resonates with my thoughts. Thank you for the condensed clarity.
Your ideas about self interest
....emerge from the culture shock of the Anglo transition from a Feudal economy to an economy of Free Men in the American colonies. The only choice in the former was to labor in order to survive or to die impoverished. In a Feudal economy, self interest and basic survival are the same thing. The American Colonies offered a similar choice about survival, but there was a "promise" about Liberty and self determination (voting). These ideas bloomed on the new continent, where the land was free as far as the eye could see. The very first act of self interest among the Colonists was to own a parcel of the bountiful land, in order to secure their survival and expand their choices. The Colonist's determination to stake a claim — and the Anglo investor's determination to achieve extraordinary profits — launched the most massive genocide in human history — the American Genocide.
Predatory capitalism and working class wage-theft came later. As did a limited democracy that worked well for the plutocrats. Democratic voting for all citizens didn't see the light of day until 1920 and its been steadily rigged and revoked and suppressed since 1980. Voting in a hopelessly flawed pseudo-democracy (at the Federal level) is a futile act in any event.
I also hear what you are saying:
The problem with hyped ideas, like "Liberty", is that it is useless vapor-ware — unless you have the money to do something with it.
IMAGINE if you woke up the day after a US Presidential Election and headlines around the the world blared, "The Majority of Americans Refused to Vote in US Presidential Election! What Does this Mean?"
The terms have simply been
redefined, you see.
Money is freedom (to speak and be heard, to live beyond the absolute minimum required to sustain life, to travel, and perhaps even to expatriate if needed).
Debt, on the other hand, is slavery. Pure and simple. And the genius of the banking cabal has been to lead everybody to believe that having a mortgage is actually the "Key to Freedom®™".
Once again, Goebbels would weep. All you have to experience is becoming upside-down on your property, and then abruptly losing your livelihood and being unable to recover it, to understand the utter viciousness of that splinter of the Amurican Dream.
Sure, people who bought in long ago, and managed to pay it off before any of the various bubble-poppings and bottoms-falling-out left them paying ungodly sums on something with little remaining value, have won at the table. For the many of you here who fall into that category: good for you. Well played! For the rest of us: equity? That exists only at the whim of The Market, and it must be understood that that can be made to completely disappear at a moment's notice.
There is no way in hell that I will ever buy into that game of roulette again. As the saying goes, I started out with nothing, and after a lifetime of work, I now have less than I started with. I don't need The Market to help me along down that path again.
I do have one thing I'm looking forward to, though. At the end of this month, I will pay off the very last debt I have outstanding. And, as Alanis Moreupset would say, the ultimate irony is that the bombs will still fall. But at least I'll go out not owing anybody a goddamned dime. So perhaps I'll get the chance to die a free man. You gotta look for the silver lining, you know...
Twice bitten, permanently shy.
Heh, people have become petrified whilst looking for
evidence of our so called ideals.
"Me first and fuck the rest" is the only real, truthful, US ideal. Look to the founding fathers and original settler colonists behaviors and our ideals become clear.
be well and have a good one
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
Speaking of education and apathy,
no one says it better than Carlin.