cross-posting of a lengthy response in David Brin's Blog

The following is a lengthy response to something David Brin posted about the other day.

(eta: two small corrections in brackets)

Recently, I was thinking about this mental disorder I heard about. It is very, very widespread, but like many diseases, it doesn't always impact the patient in the same way. There are mild cases, and very severe cases, just as with other mental and physical disorders. We don’t all die from the flu, and some small minority of folk even manage to come through HIV infections without developing AIDS. Some folk who become depressed are able to pull through with the support of family and friends, while others take years of medication and therapy to overcome a bad hand of genetics and/or environment. We wouldn’t say that AIDS, depression, or the flu were harmless (or beneficial) simply because some folk get through just fine, or that schizophrenia is completely benign just because a sufficiently mild case of the disorder can have a positive impact on art, and this scourge is much the same.

Before I can tell you more about this disease, we should review some famous and recent psychological experiments which deal with how ordinary people deal with certain circumstances. In particular, I’m thinking of the work of Milgram and Zimbardo, as well as recent fMRI work by Sam Harris et al. (caution, pdf). Milgram conducted research into how people respond to authority. In his most famous experiment, under the guise of working as lab assistants studying the impact of pain on learning, subjects were led to deliver progressively greater electric shocks to another individual. Zimbardo conducted another experiment in authority. Individuals were assigned roles as either prisoners or guards. Once given such roles, they behaved in a manner most succinctly describable today as “like Abu Garaib.” Harris indicated that people find it very difficult to question statements they believe to be true, that different brain areas are involved in belief and disbelief, and that it takes less time to evaluate a statement we hold to be true than one we believe to be false.

If most ordinary people were exchanged with the guards who ‘just followed orders’ at Dachau, or Auschwitz, we know now that they would act in much the same way. Every-day evil is a product of environment, though that is not the same as saying that these people aren’t sick—they’ve simply been made sick by their environment. (Sick in the sense that we define mental illness in terms of behavior we find incompatible with accepted societal values.) From Harris, we may add that if they already believed in the authorities in question, in that case the German government, they cannot be counted upon to reliably evaluate whether that authority is just; they’re too invested in that system of belief. To evaluate that system would require a conscious effort on the part of those who were already a part of it.

It follows that the systems by which we arrange ourselves, the authorities we agree will govern our behavior, are critically important if we wish to see a change in results. If you take completely ordinary people and tell them that authority says you are legally and morally obligated to maximize profits to maximize shareholder value, that this is what everyone does, and that those who are opposed to this system are wicked and evil and it is for the greater good that sometimes this system has problems… it stands to reason ordinary people can do terrible things. Suppress information about the dangers of smoking. Enforce slave-like conditions. Pollute the environment. Produce products which break, requiring replacement. Deny healthcare. Arrange surveillance to break strikes. Have labor organizers harassed, and perhaps even killed.

Producing defective products and lying about cigarettes can easily become the –industry standard- of behavior, and no quantity of ‘competition’ is going to make one firm standing up and ratting on the industry a competitive advantage for that firm. There is, further, no apparent incentive for an upstart cigarette company to start up which bucks the trend, conducts expensive research on their own dime, then publishes results which show that, if used as directed, their product will eventually kill the subject. A private individual seeking to do such research would a) be paper-bombed by counterfactual claims by mercenary scientists and b) much cheaper for cigarette companies to arrange an accident for. His actions in pointing out cigarettes=cancer sticks, in any event, would hardly be capitalistic.

This disease I’m talking about is, of course, really existing Capitalism. Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not all of the good and bad companies listed are, in fact, what we think of as capitalist (Toyota spent a –significant- portion of its early life with heavy support from the State. State owned corporations may be unfashionable, but they’re hardly rare, as Cheng discusses in Bad Samaritans), the simple fact that some companies can, or must, be more open does not tell us very much about companies in other industries, and it tells us even less about Capitalism as a system. It is my contention that externalities like cigarette cancer and fraudulent mortgage dealings (with a healthy degree of corporate welfare thrown on top… after all, we’re talking about a system which privatizes profits and socializes costs) [are a direct conseuqence of the capitalist system.]

Let me be blunt and repetitious: No degree of competition is going to address externalities under Capitalism. To the extent that something deals with these issues (eg. government regulation fighting uphill against lobbyists), that something is not capitalist. It is worth noting, as well, that “As much Congress as money can buy” isn’t democratic either, it is plutocratic.

Now then, just because a system produces differential results, just because there are open companies and larger, less open companies who sell different things, this does not mean that the cause isn’t that system, or that the system is benign. Capitalism can be like schizophrenia—it can have positive effects, but they might be outweighed by the negatives… and that doesn’t mean that there isn’t something worse that it might serve to inoculate against. There are areas where competition in capitalism produces beneficial results, but ‘big winners’ soon become able to collude and are then able to shape their environment. Capitalism is not the pursuit of competition, it is the pursuit of profit, and I freely concede that competition is good…But like Gandhi, when he was asked what he thought about western civilization, “Sounds good in theory… can you show me some[?]” (I’ve doubtlessly paraphrased. Google the exact quote if you like.)

Our fine host, Dr. Brin, has indeed attempted to show us some. Here is a list of companies which are indisputably ‘less evil’ than another list of companies, and the less evil companies are indeed more open. I’m certainly no opponent of openness, and openness is one of the crucial elements that the soviet system lacked. (In contrast, openness within is one of the strengths of democratic centralism.) I just don’t think we’re seeing a head-to-head competition to provide greater openness. Openness, instead, is a consequence of other factors… and if you always pick ‘less evil,’ you’ll wind up with a pile of evil at the end of the day… sooner or later, you need to sweep the stables. Just because Toyota came through the pox without scars doesn’t mean smallpox isn’t bad for you.

Now, lets get one thing clear before someone starts comparing me to Marx… (and really, if you want to slander me, the devil you’re looking for is spelled “S-t-a-l-i-n”). There were four, not two or three or one, political-economic philosophies which emerged as a consequence of the Enlightenment. (I deliberately did not say “from” the Enlightenment.) All four, of course, have earlier threads you could trace back to Greece and earlier, but that digression is for another time. They are: Fascism, socialism/communism, republican capitalism, and anarchism… and there are and were, of course, hybrids… there is a great deal of cross-pollinization between them (anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-socialism, neocons are basically fascist/capitalists, etc.)

No anarchist governments survived very long, as all of the other three tended to gang up against them. Fascism is thought to have been defeated in WWII, though of course helpful fascists (Franco, those in Operation Gladio) persisted a bit longer, and the neocons Strauss and the possible actions of Bush’s grandfather demark a rather straight line from the fascism of the past to the problems of the present. The USSR fell (and good riddance). But… is the ability of a newborn state to fight all of Europe and win really the way we ought to decide which political philosophy shall dominate? Not very participatory. Not very democratic… and it selects strongly for states with an interest in “more war.” I’m of the opinion that this last trait isn’t something we can afford at this stage of societal development. (Yes, violence at an all-time low. I’m not too stupid to spot progress, but I also remember what happened when Athens had democracy at home and hegemony abroad.) The Thatcherite TINA (There Is No Alternative [except free-market capitalism]) is perhaps the most galling phrase imaginable. If you think driving the ostrich conservatives out of the public light in America, already a conservative country, is bad… imagine the consequences of continuing to insist to the left that they’re mad for thinking there are a few bugs in this ‘capitalist’ system. I’m no fan of propaganda by the deed, I assure you… but men with no alternatives are dangerous, and criticism is the only known antidote for error.

Returning to those four cousins from around the time of the Enlightenment, I don’t trace my pedigree through Marx-Lenin-Trotsky, or M-L-Stalin, or M-L-Mao… I’m from that other branch over there, the one with “Bakunin” and “Chomsky” on it… there is, of course, the occasional grafting, like Eugene Debs and his Fellow Workers in the IWW (some of whom trend more towards socialism than anarchism), of which I’m a proud member. As others, our fine host included, have pointed out… the “Right/Left” axis/axes is/are quite vague. Don’t go trying to tar me with Mao or Stalin, and I won’t try to tar you with the CIA’s long list of ‘valuable allies,’ agreed? I’m not an apparent supporter of the left because it is the left, out of some pseudo-patriotic impulse… I think I see more gold on that fork in the stream, is all.

I know you don’t like cancer sticks or global-warming-denying energy companies, and I know that you don’t think this is an inevitable consequence of capitalism. I believe that the pursuit of profit, by completely normal people, leads them to do great evil, and that the externalities produced are ineradicable under that system. These problems we all want to solve are all, or almost all, externalities.

(That is the rock you’re headed for, and I do hope you’ll consider what might happen if it isn’t a seagull that is going to move.)

My question for you is… supposing we could come up with a system which had healthy competition and openness, but not externalities, wouldn’t there be some value in that system, even if it wasn’t capitalism?



Finally, I dug up the correct quote I tried to reference earlier, and I think it will help to close things out.

The following is a direct quote from A FEW NOTES ON THE CULTURE.

Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces.

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what- -works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be - to some degree - channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned lases, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them.

Of course, there is a place for serendipity and chance in any sensibly envisaged plan, and the degree to which this would affect the higher functions of a democratically designed economy would be one of the most important parameters to be set... but just as the information we have stored in our libraries and institutions has undeniably outgrown (if not outweighed) that resident in our genes, and just as we may, within a century of the invention of electronics, duplicate - through machine sentience - a process which evolution took billions of years to achieve, so we shall one day abandon the grossly targeted vagaries of the market for the precision creation of the planned economy.