It's the stupidity, stupid! (The economy does in fact suck.)
Hello friends,
I feel like we haven’t corresponded since last y- [my children rush into the room, wrestle the keyboard from me, pin me to the floor and make me promise not to make that joke. I believe this is what is known as the cunning of history?]
I was about to follow that up with the joke “I hope you good people all had good holidays, and that the rest of you got what you deserve -- you know who you are” but then it occurred to me that truly, they don’t know who they are, and that’s sort of what’s on my mind at the moment. Regular Open Mode readers (in full sincerity I thank both of you from the shallow bottom of my small, shriveled heart) will know that I’m periodically captivated by what is known in fancy terms as agnotology, the study of not-knowing -- how do certain institutional and social processes create situations where something relevant is left unknown, silent, not represented, etc -- and how patterns in what is not known tent to track with patterns of power and privilege. Put very simply, a lot of people who hurt other people or benefit from other people being hurt don’t have to know that they do so.
I recently learned the term ‘desk murderer’ which appears in this talk by the philosopher Theodore Adorno - https://josswinn.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/AdornoEducation.pdf - and in the introduction to this book - https://merton.bellarmine.edu/files/original/8b9d929eb37d58a2acc4b869ea6abc3a7c832cc5.pdf - by the writer Hannah Arendt (she wrote the intro, not the book). Fair warning, they’re both about the Holocaust, so look at it (or not!) when that makes sense for you. One thing that occurs to me about that is that I suspect hurting another person tends to have some conditions of possibility, meaning some things make it harder for people to bring themselves to do so and some things make it easier, and it also can have costs or effects on the perpetrator. The division of labor in institutions that commit such violence make it easier, providing resources and training so to speak, and reduce those costs and effects: many people’s consciences aren’t as clean as they feel. They don’t really know who they are or what they deserve.
This is in part the subject of a song I love by a band I love:
“Donald wept through the proceedings. His tears soaked through the canvas that cloaked his twisted face and they stained his orange jumpsuit where with such rare distinction he once displayed the evidence of his outstanding contributions to the maintenance of a kingdom come. But those days are gone. He’s nothing more than a number on a docket thick with shareholders, engineers, PR firms, politicians: war-profiteers. How the fuck did I end up here? This just isn’t fair. Ain’t no place for a millionaire. He searches for the words to stop this table in mid-turn, like “we are but old men” and “we only did what we were told,” but the laughter from the gallery drowns out these vestiges of a profession’s oldest defense. The court will direct the record to reflect compliments from the bench; you sir, are central casting’s crowning achievement. And for your outstanding performance in a comedic role, I’d like to dedicate the findings of the jury to the dead. But how can one man ever repay a debt so appalling? Can’t gouge 10,000 eyes from a single head so I think we should observe a sentence that will serve to satisfy both a sense of function and poetry: so you will spend the rest of your days drenched in sweat, with your face drawn in a rictus of terror as you remove another buried land mine fuse. Meanwhile, 100 yards back behind the sandbags, a legless foreman pulls the trigger on a red megaphone. Squelching feedback. Drunken laughter. Broken English. His dead daughter’s picture. Time and tide, no one can anticipate the inevitable waves of change.”
That’s “Iteration” by Propagandhi. Lyrics from their web site: https://propagandhi.com/lyrics/iteration A recording here: https://propagandhi.bandcamp.com/track/iteration at a link where you could give them money (money can be used to buy goods and services, and artists need goods and services to live!)
These are rabbit holes down which I regularly fall (I tried to make an Alice In Wonderland joke here but I got distracted by how much I love that book, always have, all the more so since reading it to some of my kids - and I’m currently for the first time ever reading Silvie and Bruno with one of them, it’s good! Anyway, I keep falling down rabbit holes, learn no lessons, stop no mistakes, that’s my motto!) and since that’s a habit I’m primed to do it at the slightest prompting.
Today’s prompting was this column by the left-wing economist JW Mason. The gist of the column is that the economy is, in fact, bad for a lot of people, despite the efforts of statistics-armed sophists to suggest otherwise. I have nothing smart to add about it, just go read it: https://jwmason.org/slackwire/are-people-better-off-than-four-years-ago/
In my opinion the column’s a good pushback against something that drives me up the fucking wall, namely that graphguy courtiers have been insisting for a while that, if you squint right and aren’t a dipshit pleb with ideas above your station, in fact the economy is good actually (hence you all owe Joe and Kamala a big apology for letting them down). This is liberalism in Stalinist costume:
“After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts.
Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?”
(Brecht, The Solution https://allpoetry.com/The-Solution)
Liberal commentary of the sort Mason is writing against exists in large part to create a rhetorical permission device to foster condescension (about which I’ve ranted herehttps://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension). Nothing good about it whatsoever. I suspect there’s also something going on right now as follows: there’s been a kind of hollowing out of institutions and a sort of breakdown of capitalist class and state personnel organization. When this happens to our side it’s often via police and layoffs and so on: our side gets atomized as the result of defeat.
Our defeat, their victory, two sides of the same coin but what I’m trying to get at here is that the coin itself is disorganizing, decomposing, which is to say, their victory atomizes them. That’s because their social positions involve a significant centrifugal force (there’s some scientific complexity to centrifugal force that goes over my head, especially because I’m usually lying on the floor lazily so my head’s really quite low, but I’m only interested in it here metaphorically), meaning a tendency to fly off alone anomically, a tendency to atomization or disembedding. That force is overcome periodically through organization prompted by our side getting organized (my friend Chad Pearson’s written a great labor history book that gets at this through a lot of empirical detail, it’s called Reform or Repression. His book Capital’s Terrorists is great too and, you’re in for a treat, he’s working on a third book at the moment - can’t wait, must wait, what the FUUUUCK...). When our side gets defeated our organization, writ large including informal cultures and so on, all gets scrambled, such that we stop being the external pressure prompting their side’s organization. A bit schematic and lacking in nuance, there are other factors and pressures too etc etc but in my humble opinion, basically correct or at least containing a rational kernel which could be edifying if popped in the heated oil of the critique of political economy... Anyhow I suspect we’re in one of those ‘they fell apart because they beat us’ moments in a various ways, and these graphguy courtiers are to a significant degree selling stupid shit to anomically individualized rich dipshits who want lullabies and to remain what they are, namely rich dipshits anomically individualized at exactly their current degree, wanting neither more nor less anomie and individuality. (A Stuart Lee joke again: I don't understand what's going on. If you want certainties, you have to go and see Roy 'Chubby' Brown, in his new touring show, An Evening Of Certainty. The advertising strap-line, "Leave the same as you arrived, only more so.”)
One other thought that clicked in place in my head today reading Mason’s column (which, my interest in it notwithstanding, is good, definitely worth the time to read), it occurred to me that the graphguys implicitly picture the world as made out of lots of isolated individuals. (It’s Thatcherism - society doesn’t exist, only individuals! Now the actual quote is a bit more complicated as are Thatcher’s ideas but that’s irrelevant here.) From that perspective, if we take the fate of each isolated individual person, who cares only narrowly and appetitively about their own isolated well-being, and we add them all up then we should get a picture of how people think - or would think if they weren’t stupid dirty entitled plebs. That is, from this perspective, if the number of individuals doing well in the economy or as a result of policy rises, attitudes approving that policy should also rise, end of story. What this does, however, is smuggle in a meaning of well-being as the most important one while dodging any inquiry into what that category actually means for many people and any inquiry into what that category ought to mean - it just takes Thatcherite Democrat common sense and makes it normative. And whatever else there is to say about that (to be clear, much of that else which involves a lot of swearing and derision; these motherfuckers stand as substantial evidence weighing in favor of a return to tar and feathering), it’s just not an accurate picture of how a lot of actually existing people assess their well being.
In considering questions like ‘am I doing well? am I doing well enough? is my life getting better?’ many people bundle multiple questions like that together, holistically, and also many people’s unit of analysis for thinking about these questions is not an atomized individual defined by, say, money in the bank and buying power, but rather is a network of some sort - family, friends, neighbors, etc. I’ve had loved ones fall into serious economic hardship of various kinds in ways that is partly effect of how the economy is going, partly effect of policy, and partly an ugly reality which economy and policy do not positively address - no rope is thrown to pull them out, so to speak, certainly not an adequate lifeline anyway, except at most something thrown to them by fellow social nobodies. Whenever this happens I feel a host of negative feelings about how economy and policy are right now and I also feel more insecure in two senses: one, since the network of relationships that is my unit of analysis is also a unit of feeling and perception, distress experienced by the network (which means any significant context-derived distress by any individual in the network) is distress I experience, and two, I worry about myself even as an atomized individual. Seeing a loved one run out of money in the bank, struggle to keep housing, etc, I start to think I too might have that happen to me, so that even if I was in the dipshit graphguy headspace of being an atomized individual, my knowledge of the fate of other atomized individuals in similar circumstances means I think of my prospects differently than they assume. Of course, they’re not serious intellectuals figuring anything out about the world, they’re courtiers crafting compliment to pay the naked emperor on his clothes. It’d probly be for the best to just write them off fully, their words just the barking of the palace dogs, but I don’t know how to do that (maybe it’s contextual and will become possible once our side is on the march again?). I find that shit gets in my head a little leading to painful cognitive dissonance, in the form of mild doubt, and it also drives me up the fucking wall that anyone else buys it. So I find work like Mason’s debunking the courtier stories helpful. So again, check it out.
Alright crew, I’m gonna run some errands now - getting low on pickled onions, among other things. Between now and the next time I darken your inbox I hope you all get exactly what you deserve, and because good people basically never do I hope you also have comfort and solace to offset that unjust denial. For real - happy new year. Cheers!