Capitalism = Proletarianism

Definitions of capitalism stress freedom of trade. But trade has always existed. Well, trade is a necessary condition of capitalism, as is industrialization (mass production), but the other necessary condition — which is much too often omitted — is the existence of workers, who are drawn from the proletariat class. Proletarians are people who do not have a free access to land on which to subsist.

I don’t know any writer, other than Shaw, who understood and emphasized this existence of proletarians, and wanted to substitute for the term “capitalism,” the more appropriate term “proletarianism.”

In chapter 28 of his book, he makes his reasoning quite clear. (I have taken the liberty to emphasize some words.)

 

Bernard Shaw, The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, 1928

28
CAPITALISM

Nobody who does not understand Capitalism can change it into Socialism, or have clear notions of how Socialism will work. Therefore we shall have to study Capitalism as carefully as Socialism. To begin with, the word Capitalism is misleading. The proper name of our system is Proletarianism. When practically every disinterested person who understands our system wants to put an end to it because it wastes capital so monstrously that most of us are as poor as church mice, it darkens counsel to call it Capitalism. It sets people thinking that Socialists want to destroy capital, and believe that they could do without it: in short, that they are worse fools than their neighbors.

Unfortunately that is exactly what the owners of the newspapers want you to think about Socialists, whilst at the same time they would persuade you that the British people are a free and independent race who would scorn to be proletarians (except a few drunken rascals and Russians and professional agitators): therefore they carefully avoid the obnoxious word Proletarianism and stick to the flattering title of Capitalism, which suggests that the capitalists are defending that necessary thing, Capital.

However, I must take names as I find them; and so must you. Let it be understood between us, then, that when we say Capitalism we mean the system by which the land of the country is in the hands, not of the nation, but of private persons called landlords, who can prevent anyone from living on it or using it except, on their own terms. Lawyers tell you that there is no such thing as private property in land because all the land belongs to the King, and can legally be “resumed” by him at any moment. But as the King never resumes it nowadays, and the freeholder can keep you off it, private property in land is a fact in spite of the law.

The main advantage claimed for this arrangement is that it makes the landholders rich enough to accumulate a fund of spare money called capital. This fund is also private property. Consequently the entire industry of the country, which could not exist without land and capital, is private property. But as industry cannot exist without labor, the owners must for their own sakes give employment to those who are not owners (called proletarians), and must pay them enough wages to keep them alive and enable them to marry and reproduce themselves, though enough to enable them ever to stop working regularly.

In this way, provided the owners make it their duty to be selfish, and always hire labor at the lowest possible wage, the industry of the country will be kept going, and the people provided with a continuous livelihood, yet kept under a continuous necessity to go on working until they are worn out and fit only for the workhouse. It is fully admitted, by those who understand this system, that it produces enormous inequality of income, and that the cheapening of labor which comes from increase of population must end in an appalling spread of discontent, misery, crime, and disease, culminating in violent rebellion, unless the population is checked at the point up to which the owners can find employment for it; but the argument is that this must be faced because human nature is so essentially selfish, and so inaccessible to any motive except pecuniary gain, that no other practicable way of building up a great modern civilization stands open to us.

This doctrine used to be called the doctrine of The Manchester School. But as the name became unpopular, it is now described generally as Capitalism. Capitalism therefore means that the only duty of the Government is to maintain private property in land and capital, and to keep on foot an efficient police force; and magistracy to enforce all private contracts made by individuals in pursuance of their own interests, besides, of course, keeping civil order and providing for naval and military defense or adventure.

In opposition to Capitalism, Socialism insists that the first duty of the Government is to maintain equality of income, and absolutely denies any private right of property whatever. It would treat every contract as one to which the nation is a party, with the nation’s welfare as the predominant consideration, and would not for a moment tolerate any contract the effect of which would be that one woman should work herself to death prematurely in degrading poverty in order that another should live idly and extravagantly on her labor. Thus it is quite true that Socialism will abolish private property and freedom of contract: indeed it has done so already to a much greater extent than people realize; for the political struggle between Capitalism and Socialism has been going on for a century past, during which Capitalism has been yielding bit by bit to the public indignation roused by its worst results, and accepting installments of Socialism to palliate them.

Do not, by the way, let yourself be confused by the common use of the term private property to denote personal possession. The law distinguished between Real Property (lordship) and Personal Property until the effort to make a distinction between property in land and property in capital produced such a muddle that it was dropped in 1926. Socialism, far from absurdly objecting to personal possessions, knows them to be indispensable, and looks forward to a great increase of them. But it is incompatible with real property.

To make the distinction clear let me illustrate. You call your umbrella your private property, and your dinner your private property. But they are not so: you hold them on public conditions. You may not do as you please with them. You may not hit me on the head with your umbrella; and you may not put rat poison into your dinner and kill me with it, or even kill yourself; for suicide is a crime in British law. Your right to the use and enjoyment of your umbrella and dinner is a personal right, rigidly limited by public considerations. But if you own an English or Scottish county you may drive the inhabitants off it into the sea if they have nowhere else to go. You may drag a sick woman with a newly born baby in her arms out of her house and dump her in the snow on the public road for no better reason than that you can make more money out of sheep and deer than out of women and men. You may prevent a waterside village from building a steamboat pier for the convenience of its trade because you think the pier would spoil the view from your bedroom window, even though you never spend more than a fortnight a year in that bedroom, and often do not come there for years together. These are not fancy examples: they are things that have been done again and again. They are much worse crimes than hitting me over the head with your umbrella. And if you ask why landowners are allowed to do with their land what you are not allowed to do with your umbrella, the reply is that the land is private property, or, as the lawyers used to say, real property, whilst the umbrella is only personal property. So you will not be surprised to hear Socialists say that the sooner private property is done away with the better.

Both Capitalism and Socialism claim that their object is the attainment of the utmost possible welfare for mankind. It is in their practical postulates for good government, their commandments if you like to call them so, that they differ. These are, for Capitalism, the upholding of private property in land and capital, the enforcement of private contracts, and no other State in interference with industry or business except to keep civil order; and for Socialism, the equalization of income, which involves the complete substitution of personal for private property and of publicly regulated contract for private contract, with police interference whenever equality is threatened, and complete regulation and control of industry and its products by the State.

As far as political theory is concerned you could hardly have a flatter contradiction and opposition than this; and when you look at our Parliament you do in fact see two opposed parties, the Conservative and the Labor, representing roughly Capitalism Socialism. But as members of Parliament are not required to have had any political education, or indeed any education at all, only a very few of them, who happen to have made a special study, such as you are making, of social and political questions, understand the principles their parties represent. Many of the Labor members are not Socialists. Many of the Conservatives are feudal aristocrats, called Tories, who are as keen on State interference with everything and everybody as the Socialists. All of them are muddling along from one difficulty to another, settling as best they can when they can put it off no longer, rather than on any principle or system. The most you can say is that, as far as the Conservative Party has a policy at all, it is a Capitalistic policy, and as far as the Labor Party has a policy at all it is a Socialist policy; so that if you wish to vote against Socialism you should vote Conservative; and if you wish to vote against Capitalism you should vote Labor. I put it in this way because it is not easy to induce people to take the trouble to vote. We go to the polling station mostly to vote against something instead of for anything.

We can now settle down to our examination of Capitalism as it comes to our own doors. And, as we proceed, you must excuse the disadvantage I am at in not knowing your private affairs. You may be a capitalist. You may be a proletarian. You may be betwixt-and-between in the sense of having an independent income sufficient to keep you, but not sufficient to enable you to save any more capital. I shall have to treat you sometimes as if you were so poor that the difference of a few shillings a ton in the price of coal is a matter of serious importance in your housekeeping, and sometimes as if you were so rich that your chief anxiety is how to invest the thousands you have not been able to spend.

There is no need for you to remain equally in the dark about me; and you had better know whom you are dealing with. I am a landlord and capitalist, rich enough to be super-taxed; and in addition I have a special sort of property called literary property, for the use of which I charge people exactly as a landlord charges rent for his land. I object to inequality of income not as a man with a small income, but as one with a middling big one. But I know what it is to be a proletarian, and a poor one at that. I have worked in an office; and I have pulled through years of professional unemployment, some of the hardest of them at the expense of my mother. I have known the extremes of failure and of success. The class in which I was born was that most unlucky of all classes: the class that claims gentility and is expected to keep up its appearances without more than the barest scrap and remnant of property to do it on. I intrude these confidences on you because it is as well that you be able to allow for my personal bias. The rich often write about the poor, and the poor about the rich, without really knowing what they are writing about. I know the whole gamut from personal experience, short of actual hunger and homelessness, which should never be experienced by anybody. If I cry sour grapes, you need not suspect that they are only out of my reach: they are all in my hand at their ripest and best.

So now let us come down to tin tacks.

 

Comments on the Cenk Uygur and Tucker Carlson “debate”

The exchange between Cenk Uygur and Tucker Carlson was prompted by the Honduran caravan heading towards the United States.
The whole exchange was dominated by Tucker Carlson who made the following observations:

Carlson made a number of claims, which Uygur, by not disagreeing, tacitly agreed with.
There is poverty everywhere in the world.
Is it the role of the US government to deal with global poverty?
No. The primary role of government is to safeguard the interests of its own citizens.
These interests are, at least in theory, supposed to be safeguarded by the elected politicians who make and execute laws.
Now, there are existing laws about immigration and they should be executed.
It is another question whether these immigration laws should be changed.

By Carlson’s reasoning, immigration laws should not be changed. Why? Because of the principle of supply and demand. At one time in America, during the Industrial Revolution, there was a great demand for workers, and the US welcomed immigrants by the thousands. But this demand no longer exists. Industrial jobs have gone to places like China and elsewhere, and because of automation, even less workers are needed. In other words, we have a surplus of workers. The existing illegal immigrants compete for available jobs, and cause wages to drop. Adding more immigrants will only worsen the situation.

Carlson also brought up the issue that too much change is disruptive to societies, citing the work of Robert D. Putnman. Carlson mentioned that in the past we underwent an economic revolution from an agrarian to an industrial society, and now we have another major revolution due to technological changes based on computers, resulting in automation.

Carlson also claimed that multi-culturalism does not work. He noted that a country in order to be a country, must have some unifying principles, among which the most important is language; otherwise, the country will eventually break apart.

Uygur did not respond to any of Carlson’s main claims. He offered what I would call red herrings. For one, he complained about Fox news reporting in such a way as to suggest that the the Honduran caravan was about to sneak in or break through the border. Whereas, in fact, these are people seeking asylum. And then he went to say that Trump is planning to reject the request for asylum. And he reminded the audience of how some Jews were refused asylum during World War II —  the case where one ship was returned, with the result that a quarter of the passengers of that ship died in German concentration camps. His position is that asylum seekers should be listened to, and not rejected out of hand. Fair enough.

As to the main issue of supply and demand, Uygur had no comments. Instead he went off the track to point out that America is a country built on immigration, and that illegal immigrants are not responsible for most of the crimes. In response, Carlson said that he assumed that immigrants are fine people, but that this has nothing to do with the economic problem of supply and demand. Carlson also agreed with Uyger that undocumented immigrants may very well be innocent, but that there are 20 million of them. And he asked who benefits from this? Uygur gave no answer, but the answer is that it is employers.

The only remotely relevant answer to this problem  of supply and demand which Uygur gave, was to claim that there are certain kinds of jobs which Americans are reluctant to do. He cited cases where in the South, illegal immigrants were removed by ICE from chicken plants, resulting in employers complaining that there was no one to replace them. Carlson’s answer to this was that if employers paid more, they would find the workers among citizens.

Commentary on the Jordan Peterson – Sam Harris discussion


A major problem when criticizing or commenting on someone’s position is to avoid misrepresenting their position, resulting in an attack on a straw man. I will therefore try to restate their position in such a may as not to misrepresent them, and then add commentary.

Jordan Peterson presented their overall problem as the problem of grounding morality in facts. He further added that the grounding should avoid dogmatism, on the one hand, and relativism on the other; and Harris agreed.

As it turned out, both agreed that there are different categories of “facts.” There is, first, the category of empirical or experiential facts; second, the facts of mathematics and logic; third, the realm of subjective facts: such as likes and dislikes, desires, consciousness; fourth, there is the realm of social facts, including religions. I leave open the question whether there are other types of facts.

Sam Harris’ thesis was that many people base their morality on religions as expressed in sacred books. The narratives of these books can be taken literally (as by fundamentalists) or in some non-literal interpretation. And his position was that some of the prescriptions, taken literally,  in some of these books are not only harmful, but atrocious. The harmful ones are predominantly sexual in nature, as, for example, forbidding masturbation. The atrocious one are those which prescribe killing either of individuals or groups.

Harris adds that those who take the religious texts in a non-literal way, obviously have some extra-textual criterion for their reading. That criterion is an independent understanding of morality. Thus, the grounding of morality in texts is not necessary.

Peterson did not disagree with this. His interest was to understand religious texts from an evolutionary perspective, and that since any cognition requires a priori categories, he wanted to know what were these evolutionary a priori categories. [For the reader — a priori categories are those concepts or structures which are independent of experience, but which make human experience possible. Such categories include the concepts of time, space, causality, and substance.]

Harris said that morality is grounded in the fact that people avoid pain and seek contentment and flourishing. And from this we can generalize to see that life is a possible continuum from a miserable life, on the one end, to  a happy one, on the other. Peterson saw this as the religious distinction between hell and heaven.

Although Peterson agreed with Harris’ grounding of morality in the distinction between good and bad, he wanted a more solid grounding in some a priori structure. When pushed to elaborate, he insisted on what both of them called a “metaphoric truth.” The example Harris gave was of how one should handle a gun. The proper or heuristic manner of handling a gun is to pretend that the gun is loaded even if you know it is not. In other words, handle the gun as if it were loaded. [To the reader: Hans Vaihinger wrote a book, The Philosophy of ‘As If’]

Peterson tried to use this idea of metaphoric truth to make, what he claimed to be, a deeper insight into human behavior, namely, that people — including Harris, and other so-called atheists, in fact, act as if God existed.

When pushed to give a definition of God, it turned out to be a prescription or recommendation of how to understand the concept of God. God, as Peterson understands it, is some kind of a priori evaluative apparatus whose tendency is, like that of Medieval scholastics, to strive for the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. [I hope I did not misrepresent.]

Harris’ reply was that people normally do not think of God in this way.

During Peterson’s search for a grounding of morality and religion in an evolutionary framework, they found themselves focusing on the widespread practice of human sacrifice by primitive people. Peterson pointed out that historically, because of harsh living conditions, people had to sacrifice babies, especially crippled one, as well as useless old people — all for the sake of survival. And he tried to extract from this the principle that a sacrifice brings some greater good, and he offered the example of parents sacrificing things for their children.

By contrast, Harris’ position on the religious narratives was that they reflected a vacuum in knowing how nature worked, but a vacuum which, I may add, was filled with an imaginary narrative — using the technique of “as if” thinking.

Here is my answer:
What is the nature of this as if? Appealing to anthropology, primitive people have a picture of the universe as if totally composed of persons — a radical animism. Using the model of humans as well as animals, it is evident that all living things must eat to live, and that at some point when hunger is satiated, the animal will stop eating. There are visible animals like crocodiles, wolves, and lions which kill humans to eat them, and there are other tribes which kill human beings in order to take their possessions, and some of them are even cannibals.

Given the power of imagination, humans can envision by a process of extrapolation,  generalization, and idealization that there is a chain of beings — an evolutionary continuum — stretching from insects to some beings even superior to humans. These extraordinary beings are heroes and gods. Since humans eat and want goods, these superior beings — primarily, the gods — must want to eat also. Being choosy, they want the best of food — humans. And they do not want to eat old human meat, but young and tender children, just as we prefer suckling pigs.

I saw no disagreement between Peterson and Harris — but a difference in interest. Harris, believed that regardless of the origins of a belief or practice, it could be judged on its own merits on the basis of our present knowledge and practices. Peterson did not disagree with this, but insisted on finding an explanation in both evolution and a priori structures — a structure which he called God.

My disagreement with both of them concerns the foundations of morality. Both dismiss ethical relativism. This is their mutual error. What Harris describes is the ethics of Robinson Crusoe on an island without Friday. But by adding Friday to the island, the nature of ethics cannot be limited to what is good and bad for one person because there are different hardships being avoided and different goods pursued by different people; so, it must include inter-personal behavior. There is even a position that holds that morality is exclusively social — and what a person does with his own life is irrelevant, except when it impinges on the lives of others, which almost invariably it does.

The foundation of morality is to be found in agreements. These are either implicit composing customs and traditions, or explicit as formulated in moral precepts and laws. [Without further elaboration I send you to the writings of Gilbert Harman.   Here is one piece: Moral Relativism Explained. Here is another: Moral Relativism Defended The Philosophical Review, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan., 1975), pp. 3-22]

Given the history and taxonomy of ethical theories, and the strain between the good and the right, Harris is giving priority to the good. Talk of what is good and bad is totally intelligible for a Robinson Crusoe on an island without Friday. Even talk of right and wrong is intelligible relative to things pursued, what Kant called Hypothetical Imperatives.  These are things which are prescribed on the condition that you want to achieve some goal X. For example, projects can be more easily and efficiently done by the use of tools, and even better by the proper or “right” use of tools.  However, on the island, Robinson Crusoe, in my view, has no Categorical Imperatives, despite what Immanuel Kant would say.

My reason for grounding morality in human agreements can be gleaned from sports and even games involving mortal combat. In these activities there are injuries and deaths. But the person who does the injury or causes the death is not held to have done anything immoral. Why? Because as long as he did everything by the agreed to rules, the consequence is irrelevant. The Categorical Imperative is to abide by your agreements.

Bullshit as Unclarity

John Searle recommends four maxims on the manner of writing:

    1. Don’t be too wordy
    2. Be brief
    3. Be orderly
    4. Avoid obscurity

John Searle – Foucault and Bourdieu on continental obscurantism

Curt John Ducasse wrote: ” . . . every assertion made is to be sufficiently clear and precise to be capable of being definitely disproved if false.” (Preface to Causation and the Types of Necessity)

Sincere Bullshitters or True Believers

As I was watching the Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris discussion, which, by the way, had some very important examples of methods to use in a discussion; and as I tried to understand what Peterson was after, the idea came to my head that a person could very well be sincere but deluded. To put it in another way, a person can be the victim of a myth or illusion.

When I first started thinking about bullshitters I took as my models sales people, politicians, and lawyers. From one perspective, they are all con men, trying to win by whatever strategy will work. They are all insincere in what they are doing. And so, I was not thinking of people who are sincere in what they are selling or advocating, but who, however, are mistaken — who are advocating something erroneous.

My model for the sincere bullshitter, or true believer, is the religious guru — the priest, the minister, the rabbi, the mullah. I say this because they are making incompatible religious claims, and I know that incompatible religious claims cannot be true together, and therefore, most of them — if not all of them — have to be wrong. By the same line of reasoning, most philosophies are erroneous as well — inasmuch as they are incompatible with each other. As to theologies, inasmuch as they are trying to systematize a set of dogmas or axioms, they are innocuous, but trivial, having the same status as an attempt to systematize Greek, Babylonian, or Scandinavian mythologies.

I believe that most religious apologists and most philosophers are sincere in their endeavors. But as it is said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The problem with sincere bullshitters, or true believers, is not in the fact that they are trying to propagate what they think is true or correct, but the fact that what they are, in fact, propagating is bullshit — error.

An interesting question to ask is: What are the psychological factors which lead one to erroneous beliefs? I have in mind — among other factors — cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias.

P.S. Here is the Peterson-Harris discussion. The admirable methodological point is that each of them — call them A and B — was to restate what the other claimed.  Thus, A was asked to state what A thought was B’s position, and what B objected to A’s position. And vice versa. They did not debate; instead they tried to understand what each was claiming.


Dana Ward on Anarchism

Dana Ward, to me, is the most dedicated and influential promoter of anarchism on the internet. For many years he has uploaded with the assistance of his students the classics of anarchism on his website at Anarchy Archives. I was pleased to find the following videos of three of his lectures.

“Anarchist, Insurrection, and Revolutionary Memory,” at the 2011 Clark Symposium: Pissarro’s Politics in Context – Anarchism and the Arts, 1849-1900.

2017 Classical Anarchism: An Overview

2018 “Anarchist History of Thought from Godwin to Occupy”

Chris Hedges, “America, the Farewell Tour”

I have watched Chris Hedges giving lectures and interviews on his recent book America, the Farewell Tour (August 2018). Watch the two below and find others to watch.

Hedges talks about many things, but the main thesis which he is advancing — in my view — is that American civilization is in decline. This is caused by the failings of corporate capitalism and the State. Hedges cites the idea of  Sheldon Wolin that America lives in an “inverted totalitarianism” — the control of the State by corporations, otherwise called “fascism.” The symptoms of the decline of the American State are a bloated militarism and a rising national debt which will result in a collapse of the dollar.

One of the causes of these failings is the dis-industrialization of America causing massive unemployment and poverty, especially among Blacks. Another failure is the ecological disaster, which now is practically inevitable. The socio-psychological symptom of this decline is, what Emile Durkheim called, anomie — a disintegration of a feeling of face-to-face community, leading to a sense of loneliness and despair, resulting in many cases in suicide, affecting mostly middle-aged white males. Hedges’  response to this situation is not to hope, but to resist and rebel — even in the face of the seemingly inevitable.

It appears to me that Hedges is a social democrat who thinks things can be changed by political reform and, if necessary, by revolution. He sees that both the Democrats and the Republicans are both an appendage of corporate power. He cites various abuses by the government, especially such measures as the Patriot Act which justifies violent methods in dealing with non-violent protests, such as the Occupy Movement or the Water Protectors.

The resistance which he has in mind is to go out into the streets to participate in massive protests against government policies, as, in fact, has and is happening, and should continue to happen. He says this frightens those in power to comply.

Corporate Totalitarianism: The End Game

Anarchism: The Unfinished Revolution

If my readers have not figured it out yet, I am a self-conscious anarchist.   Since people who call themselves anarchists have different interpretations of what anarchism is, I will be blunt and tell you what I mean by anarchism.  Anarchism strives to do everything through actual — rather than through delegated — agreements.  This means that it is based on direct democracy; not on a representative democracy. These agreements start with a small community of people, of such a size that everyone can know everyone else.   And the first thing that has to be agreed to is that anyone who wants to live independently of others may do so through receiving a free homestead adequate for subsistence.  It would, of course, be wiser to pool resources together for mutual benefit.

Now, given that the unit of government is a small face-to-face community which elects a council or councils for different functions,  grouping  of communities are organized through delegates to a higher level council of some workable size, and so on until the highest council is formed.  This is bottom-up democracy; rather than a top-down democracy, which exists everywhere in democratic States, where thousands or millions vote for a political candidate.

In order for people to learn and understand what anarchism is, I have tried to collect as much literature as I could find into one comprehensive bibliography, with links as I found them. Here is the link:

Anarchism: The Unfinished Revolution

Three Conditions for a Better Democracy Everywhere, with an eye on the government in Ukraine

People who run for office are — I suspect — most likely doing it out of self-interest. Their universal message is: “Elect me and I will straighten everything out.” But they know very well, that single individuals cannot do much for the good of the people — even if they want to. They have to have the cooperation of a whole bureaucracy and the sources of money. So, a candidate who says that he will fix everything is either naive or a fraud. And if he says that he will fix things by laws, you know he is bullshitting.

I suggest that all politicians when running for office  acknowledge that the following three things are required to improve the condition of the government.

1. Eliminate Corruption
2. Alter Voting
3. Decentralize
—————————————
1. Eliminate Corruption: I do not have to give you concrete examples of corruption (bribery, extortion) to convince you that corruption exists. To me it is almost self-evident that if a person is in a position to be bribed or for him to use extortion, these tactics will be used. And they will be used in secret.

As I see it, the problem is to eliminate the possibility or likelihood of both bribery and extortion. This requires, minimally, that at least two persons are required to make a decision or carry out some action. This is simply the principle of dividing power.

In ancient Republican Rome, the executive power was in the hands of two consuls, elected for a year, and each had veto power over the other. One would be in charge of making decisions for a month, while the other had veto power over him.  Two kings  also ruled ancient Sparta,  followed by Ephors to ensure their dutifulness.

It is because of the vulnerability of a single individual to being bought or threatened, that I am against the offices of a President or Prime Minister, but favor a collegial executive as they have in Switzerland. In Switzerland there is a Federal Council of seven individuals, nominated by the four dominant political parties and conferred by the joint bi-cameral parliament. And such councils should exist on all levels and departments of government.

Consider the expose of John Perkins in his book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. He tells us that as long as a country has a king, a president, or prime minister, such a person can be bribed or threatened, or assassinated.
Here is the audio production of the book:

2. Voting and Democracy: But there is another problem: the nature of voting. Given a system of voting in which thousands or millions vote for a candidate, the candidate with the most money is likely to win. Why? Because when large masses of people are voting, what is needed are techniques of persuasion — sophisticated advertisement in term of quality and quantity, which money can buy. Or, as is sometimes said, votes can be bought with some kovbasa (sausage).

So, the problem is how to get money out of the electoral process, and I cannot think of any alternative but a complete change in the system of government from a top-down one — as exists almost universally — to a bottom-up one.

The unit of government should be something no larger than a village of, lets say, 100 families — a size allowing everyone to know everyone else — face to face. These communities or territories elect a council of, say, five members who execute the will of the people through direct democracy.

This council chooses a delegate to a higher level council of some workable number of delegated– let’s say 20. These in turn choose a delegate to a still higher council — until we reach the highest council.

Such a system of government has been proposed by Stephen Shalom by the name “participatory politics” or “parpolity.”

3. Decentralization: You may not know it, but Ukraine has the features of a democratic dictatorship. It is symbiotic dictatorship of a President and a Party. The President is elected by a national popular vote. His powers are the following:
(1) He appoints and dismissed all the Governors of the Oblasts. In other words, the Governors must do the will of the President.

A former Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, was given Ukrainian citizenship by the President, and appointed by the President as the Governor of the Odessa Oblast; and then, because of not having the power to fight corruption, he resigned. Subsequently, by fiat of the President, he was deprived of Ukrainian citizenship and forced to leave the country.

(2) The President is also the Commander-in-Chief of the Military. He nominates the Minister of Defense, and the Minister of Foreign Affairs, as well as the head of the Security Service.

(3) The President also nominates the Prime Minister. Here the President is almost forced to nominate the choice of the dominant Party in the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament). This is so because any other candidate will not be conferred by the Parliament.

(4) The Prime-Minister, in turn, nominates all the remaining Ministers.

Thus, between the President and the Prime-Minister (who represents the interest of the ruling party), the whole country is ruled.

If a Council-System of government is not chosen (i.e., parpolity), then I would recommend that the country adopt a decentralized system in which the Governor is either elected by the residents of the Oblast (or, better, that the Oblast council elects an executive council to act as the Governor).

Also, each Oblast is to appoint their own Procurator and chief-of-police, answerable to the Oblast government; not to the national government.

Also, on the Municipal level, the mayor, or a mayoral council should appoint a Procurator and a Chief-of-Police.  Unless these changes are made, a mayor with good intentions, such as Michel Terestchenko of the city of Hlukhiv in Ukraine, will be paralyzed by the system.  Listen to a podcast with the mayor, titled “The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly.”
——————————

Unless these measures listed above are introduced, a country will be ruled by oligarchs or an Oligarch.

Neil Postman, “Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection”

Neil Postman, also in 1969, published Teaching as a Subversive Activity.

Bullshit and the Art of Crap-Detection
by Neil Postman

(Paper, Delivered at the National Convention for the Teachers of English [NCTE], November 28, 1969, Washington, D.C.)

With a title like this, I think I ought to dispense with the rhetorical amenities and come straight to the point. And I almost will. Almost, because I want to make two brief comments about the title. For those of you who do now know, it may be worth saying that the phrase, “crap-detecting,” originated with Mr. Ernest Hemingway who when asked if there were one quality needed, above all others, to be a good writer, replied, “Yes, a built-in, shock-proof, crap detector.” I am sure he was right; as I am also sure that his reply is equally applicable to at least two dozen other questions, among which is the question, “What is the one thing you need in order to survive a professional conference?” If any of you requires further information on the origins of the word “crap,” may I refer you to the December 1st issue of  Newsweek Magazine, p. 63, in which there is a full page story devoted to Thomas Crapper, the father of the modern toilet.

As for the word in the first part of my title, it has no such illustrious beginning. So far as I can find out it was spread, if not originated, by Gypsies about a hundred years ago, and may be having its most glorious moment at this convention — for, as you can well imagine, this is the first time it has appeared in print in an official program produced by and for the English teachers of our nation. I trust that lexicographers of all persuasions will take not of that fact, since in that way, I might, at long last, make some contribution to the subject of linguistics.

Now, to the point. As I see it, the best things schools can do for kids is to help them learn how to distinguish useful talk from bullshit. I think almost all serious people understand that about 90% of all that goes on in school is practically useless, so what I am saying would not require the displacement of anything that is especially worthwhile. Even if it did, I would still be able to argue that helping kids to activate their crap-detectors should take precedence over any other legitimate educational aim. I won’t attempt such arguments here because of the lack of time. Instead, I will ask only that you agree that every day in almost every way people are exposed to more bullshit than it is healthy for them to endure, and that if we can help them to recognize this fact, they might turn away from it and toward language that might do them some earthly good.

Thus, my main purpose this afternoon is to introduce the subject of bullshit to the NCTE. It is a subject, one might say, that needs no introduction to the NCTE, but I want to do it in a way that would allow bullshit to take its place alongside our literary heritage, grammatical theory, the topic sentence, and correct usage as part of the content of English instruction. For this reason, I will have to use 15 minutes or so of your time to discuss the taxonomy of bullshit. It is important for you to pay close attention to this, since I am going to give a quiz at the conclusion.

Now, there are so many varieties of bullshit and, again time is so limited, that I couldn’t hope to mention but a few, and elaborate on even fewer. I will, therefore, select those varieties that have some transcendent significance. Now, that last sentence is a perfectly good example of bullshit, since I have no idea what the words “transcendent significance” might mean and neither do you. I needed something to end that sentence with and since I did not have any clear criteria by which to select my examples, I figured this was the place for some big-time words. Thus, we have our first variety of bullshit — what some people call, pomposity. The title or theme of this conference — Dreams and Realities — is another good example of pomposity. In the first place, I find it very difficult to believe that any group of English teachers can be all that familiar with what most people call “reality.” It is a fair guess that there are very few people living on this planet who regard as “real” the things most English teachers like to talk about and the fact that English teachers have not generally noticed this may be of transcendent significance.

In the second place, I don’t know what “dreams and realities” is intended to mean. I do not deny that it is a classy phrase, but it does challenge one to task, whose dreams? And whose realities? Surely not those of the thousands of black kids who go to school in this city. Or for that matter, kids any place. Perhaps it refers to the dreams and realities of English teachers, in which case, we probably should translate the phrase to read, “Our aims and our failures.” Not classy, but more to the point. In any event, the phase is not worth dwelling upon except to say that it is a good example of the triumph of style over substance, which is the essence of pomposity.

Now, pomposity is not an especially venal form of bullshit, although it is by no means harmless. There are plenty of people who are daily victimized by pomposity in that they are made to feel less worthy than they have a right to feel by people who use fancy titles, words, phrases, and sentences to obscure their own insufficiencies. Many people in our profession dwell almost exclusively in the realms of pomposity, and quite literally, would be unable to function, if not for the fact that our profession has made respectable this form of bullshit. With the possible exception of the field known as educational administration, English teaching probably includes more pompous language than (you ready for this?) any other “discipline.” If you have some doubts about this, may I suggest that you review the NCTE Convention programs of the past ten years. I may be mistaken, but I am under the impression that some years ago someone gave a speech entitled, “The phoneme — Whither goest?”

A much more malignant form of bullshit than pomposity is what some people call fanaticism. Now, there is one type of fanaticism of which I will say very little, because it is so vulgar and obvious. I am referring to what is called bigotry. With a few exceptions, such as Spiro Agnew, most people know that statements like, “Niggers are lazy” or “Fat Japs are treacherous” are deadly and ignorant, and not to be taken seriously. I want only to remark here that some of us who should know better have been slow to recognize that at least as much bullshit is generated by H. Rap Brown as by, say, Agnew. Statements like “Cops are racist pigs” make no more sense than any other form of bigotry. And I would include in this the statement that “Black is beautiful.” That is bigoted bullshit no matter who it comes from or how righteous his cause. I can assure you that the great proletarian revolution will be hastened, not retarded, by acknowledging that black men are as capable of generating bullshit as white men.

But there are other forms of fanaticism that are not so obvious, and therefore perhaps more dangerous than bigotry, and one of them is what I can Eichmannism. Now, Eichmannism is a relatively new form of fanaticism, and perhaps it should be given its own special place among the great and near-great varieties of bullshit. At this point, I would judge it to be a branch of fanaticism, because the essence of fanaticism is that it has almost no tolerance for any data that do not confirm its own point of view. Here I want to provide an example of Eichmannism so that you will see why I think it is essentially fanatical. The example also points to, I think, some singular characteristics of Eichmannism.

Some months ago a young man presented himself to me requesting to be admitted to a Masters Degree program in communications offered by my university. He is the author of an intriguing book on the subject of media and cybernation. He has written a half-dozen articles on the subject, has lectured at major universities in this country and abroad, and was the principal investigator of an extensive research effort into the relationship of television and sensory bias. There was one difficulty. He does not have what is called a Bachelors Degree. I was not entirely sure why he wanted a Masters Degree, but it seemed perfectly clear that he was “intellectually capable” of pursuing such studies. I will not report on the various episodes that followed my request that he be accepted into the M.A. program. They are both boring and hideous. Here was the result: His application was denied because, and I quote, “by definition, one cannot be qualified for an M.A. program unless he holds a Bachelors degree.” And there you have the essence of Eichmannism. Eichmannism is that form of bullshit which accepts as its starting and ending point official definitions, rules, and categories without regard for the realities of particular situations. It is also important to say that the language of Eichmannism, unlike other varieties of fanaticism, is almost always polite, subdued, and seemingly neutral. A friend of mine actually received a letter from a mini-Eichmann which began — “We are pleased to inform you that your scholarship for the academic year 1968-69 has been cancelled.”

In other words, Eichmannism is especially dangerous because, as Hannah Arendt has shown us, it is so utterly banal. That means, among other things, that some of the nicest people turn out to be mini-Eichmanns. When Eichmann was in the dock in Jerusalem, he actually said that some of his best friends were Jews. And the horror of it is that he was probably telling the truth, for there is nothing personal about Eichmannism. It is the language of regulations, and includes such logical sentences as, “If we do it for one, we have to do it for all.” Can you imagine some wretched Jew pleading to have his children spared from the gas chamber? What could be more fair, more neutral, than for some administrator to reply, “If we do it for one, we have to do it for all.”

One final point about Eichmannism, and I would like to state it as Postman’s First Law — so perhaps you will want to write this down: “Everyone is potentially somebody else’s Eichmann. So be careful.” Postman’s Second Law is: “Everyone is already somebody else’s Eichmann. You weren’t careful enough.”

There are two other dreadful varieties of bullshit that require more than a word or two of explanation, and one of them is what may be called inanity. This is a form of talk which pays a large but, I would think, relatively harmless role in our personal lives. But with the development of the mass media, inanity has suddenly emerged as a major form of language in public matters. The invention of new and various kinds of communication has given a voice and an audience to many people whose opinions would otherwise not be solicited, and who, in fact, have little else but verbal excrement to contribute to public issues. Many of these people are entertainers, such as Johnny Carson, Hugh Downs, Joey Bishop, David Susskind, Ronald Regan, Barbara Walters, and Joe Garagiola. Before the communications’ revolution, their public utterances would have been limited almost exclusively to sentences composed by more knowledgeable people or they would have had no opportunity to make public utterances at all. Things being what they are, the press and air waves are filled with the featured and prime-time sentences of people who are in no position to render informed judgments on what they are talking about and yet render them with élan and, above all, sincerity: like Joey Bishop on the sociological implications of drugs, Ronald Regan on educational innovation, Johnny Carson on campus unrest, David Susskind on anything, and Hugh Downs on menopause. “Menopause,” he said once, “is a controversial subject.” (This statement prompted a postcard from me on which I asked if he was for it or against it.) Inanity, then, is ignorance presented in the cloak of sincerity, and it differs from the last variety of bullshit that I want to mention, namely, superstition, in that superstition is ignorance presented in the cloak of authority. A superstition is a belief, usually expressed in authoritative terms for which there is no factual or scientific basis. Like, for instance, that the country in which you live is a finer place, all things considered, than other countries. Or that the religion into which you were born confers upon you some special standing with the cosmos that is denied other people.

Our own profession has generated, of course, dozens of superstitions, on which, incidentally, many professional conferences have been based. Among the more intriguing of these are the beliefs that people learn more efficiently when they are taught in an orderly, sequential and systematic manner; that one’s knowledge of anything can be “objectively” measured; and even that the act of “teaching” facilitates what is known as “learning.” By far, the most amusing of all our superstitions is the belief, expressed in a variety of ways, that the study of literature and other humanistic subjects will result in one’s becoming a more decent, liberal, tolerant, and civilized human being. Whenever a professor of literature alludes to this bullshit in my presence, I invariably think of the Minister of Propaganda for the Third Reich and the ideological head of the Nazi Party, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, who at the age of 24 received his Ph.D. in Romantic Drama at the University of Heidelberg. Sometimes, I even think of the professor of literature himself, and wonder if he would dare offer his own life as an illustration of the benefits that will accrue from humanistic studies. In any case, I have not noticed that English teachers are any more humane than, say, garage mechanics or certified public accountants.

There are, as I said earlier, dozens of other forms of bullshit, including several varieties I have been using in this speech. Perhaps my most obvious is what might be called earthiness, which is based on the assumption that if one uses direct, off-color, four letter words like crap and shit, one somehow is making more sense than if he observed the proper language customs. Earthiness is the mirror image of pomposity, and like it, rarely advances human understanding although, naturally, there are times when it does, as in the present instance. In any event, I must now refrain from mentioning any other varieties because inevitably we must come to the question: What, if anything, can be done about all this bullshit? Well, the first thing to say is that we should not expect too much to be done in school, no matter what teachers do. As Carl Rogers has said, teaching is a vastly overrated activity; and any impression to the contrary is, in my opinion, mostly superstition.

In the second place, teachers — especially English teachers — have not shown up to now a serious interest in educating children in the rational, functional, or human uses of language, which is probably why we know so little about how to do it. When teachers do take an interest in language at all, they are usually drawn to something like phonemics or tagmemics, which serves the purpose of providing them with a respectable exemption from dealing with what language is about. Such teachers usually say things like, “I am interested in studying language qua language.” I will resist the temptation to comment on that, except to say that when I hear such talk by own crap-detector achieves unparalleled spasms of activity. In the third place, even if teachers were to take an enthusiastic interest in what language is about, each teacher would have fairly serious problems to resolve. For instance, you can’t identify bullshit the way you identify phonemes. That is why I have called crap-detecting an art. Although subjects like semantics, rhetoric, or logic seem to provide techniques for crap-detecting, we are not dealing here, for the most part, with a technical problem. Each man’s crap-detector is embedded in his value system; if you want to teach the art of crap-detecting, you must help students become aware of their values.

After all, Spiro Agnew, or his writers, know as much about semantics as anyone in this room. What he is lacking has very little to do with technique, and almost everything to do with values. Now, I realize that what I just said sounds fairly pompous in itself, if not arrogant, but there is no escaping from saying what attitudes you value if you want to talk about crap-detecting. In other words, bullshit is what you call language that treats people in ways you do not approve of.

So any teacher who is interested in crap-detecting must acknowledge that one man’s bullshit is another man’s catechism. If you will keep in mind that I understand this perfectly well, I will venture to say what are some of the attitudes that both teachers and students would have to learn if they are to help each other to recognize everyone’s bullshit, including their own.
It seems to me one needs, first and foremost, to have a keen sense of the ridiculous. Maybe I mean to say, a sense of our impending death. About the only advantage that comes from our knowledge of the inevitability of death is that we know that whatever is happening is going to go away. Most of us try to put this thought out of our minds, but I am saying that it ought to be kept firmly there, so that we can fully appreciate how ridiculous most of our enthusiasms and even depressions are. I am not saying, of course, that nothing matters; but if the thought keeps crossing your mind that you will be dead soon, it is hard to work up any passion for such questions as: What are the implications of transformational grammar for the teaching of writing? Reflections on one’s mortality curiously make one come alive to the incredible amounts of inanity and fanaticism that surround us, much of which is inflicted on us by ourselves. Which brings me to the next point, best stated as Postman’s Third Law: “At any given time, the chief source of bullshit with which you have to contend is yourself.” The reason for this is explained in Postman’s Fourth Law, which is that almost nothing is about what you think it is about — including you. With the possible exception of those human encounters that Fritz Peris calls “intimacy,” all human communications have deeply imbedded and profound hidden agendas. Most of the conversation at the top can be assumed to be bullshit of one variety or another. For instance, if you think that my main reason for giving this talk today is to make some contribution to the teaching of English profession, then your crap-detector needs to go back to the shop. If it doesn’t get fixed, you may even get to believe that the main reason you came to this conference was to learn something that will be professionally valuable to you. You have to keep remembering that that is only what you told your boss in order to get a few dollars and/or permission to come. Now, there is no problem here as long as you recognize all that as bullshit, and yourself as its source. This is why, incidentally, it is almost always better to deal with a corrupt man than with an idealist. A corrupt man knows all about bullshit, especially his own; which is another way of saying, he has a sense of humor. An idealist usually cannot acknowledge his own bullshit, because it is in the nature of his “ism” that he must pretend it does not exist. In fact, I should say that anyone who is devoted to an “ism” — Fascism, Communism, Capitalism — probably has a seriously defective crap-detector. This is especially true of those devoted to “patriotism.” Santha Rama Rau has called patriotism a squalid emotion. I agree. Mainly because I find it hard to escape the conclusion that those most enmeshed in it hear no bullshit whatever in its rhetoric, and as a consequence are extremely dangerous to other people. If you doubt this, I want to remind you that murder for murder, General Westmoreland makes Vito Genovese book like a Flower Child. Another way of saying this is that all ideologies are saturated with bullshit, and a wise man will observe Herbert Read’s advice: Never trust any group larger than a squad.

So you see, when it comes right down to it, crap-detection is something one does when he starts to become a certain type of person. Sensitivity to the phony uses of language requires, to some extent, knowledge of how to ask questions, how to validate answers, and certainly, how to assess meanings. But if that were all there was to it, S. I. Hayakawa wouldn’t now be one of Ronald Regan’s best friends. What crap-detecting mostly consists of is a set of attitudes toward the function of human communication: which is to say, the function of human relationships.

Now, I said at the beginning that I thought there is nothing more important than for kids to learn how to identify fake communication. You, therefore, probably assume that I know something about now to achieve this. Well, I don’t. At least not very much. I know that our present curricula do not even touch on the matter. Neither do our present methods of training teachers. I am not even sure that classrooms and schools can be reformed enough so that critical and lively people can be nurtured there. For all I know, there may be so few English teachers interested in the matter that it is hardly worth talking about. Nonetheless, I persist in believing that it is not beyond your profession to invent ways to educate youth along these lines. I’m not quite sure why I believe this except that one of my own cherished superstitions is that breast-fed babies grow up to be optimistic adults, and I was prodigiously breast-fed; in fact, until an age that most of you would consider unseemly. If you will keep in mind that my optimism is based on pure bullshit, then I will close by stating Postman’s Fifth and final law: There is no more precious environment than our language environment. And even if you know you will be dead soon, that’s worth protecting.