| GOOD AND EVIL: TAUGHT AMERICAN STYLE |
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| Robert Morpheal, Bob Ezergailis, Morphealism (morpheal@yahoo.com) |
2008/11/16 15:08 |
GOOD AND EVIL: TAUGHT AMERICAN STYLE
The example is the Wall Street stock exchange, as it exists now, with
all of its functions, processes, and purpose.
Capitalism of any type will almost invariably dictate that Wall Street
is good.
Communism of any type will almost invariably dictate that Wall Street
is evil.
Each system has its own beliefs as to why that is the case, but the
system points to that answer and really allows no alternative response
other than the response it dictates concerning the value of Wall
Street. We see that beliefs tend to dictate value judgements. That
then closes off thinking as to any other alternatives. Why consider
alternatives if you have arrived at the good. You have nowhere else to
go if you are there already. How devilish of you to even try to usurp
the throne of God in heaven. Mutiny is not an option. So the question
is not even considered.
If we happen to be capitalists agreeing that Wall Street is good. (We
must agree or we would not really be capitalists, would we ?) Then we
have two basic variant visions or positions concerning Wall Street
available to us.
We have a regulated system or a free market unregulated system
of its processes and functions. The absolutely regulated and the
completely unregulated, totally free market, systems stand at opposite
poles of a spectrum of possibilities. It is like a grey scale ranging
from white to black. You might be anywhere along the spectrum but the
spectrum does divide into two basic camps. The one is more white than
black and the other is more black and white. Invariably everyone falls
on one side or the other of that fundamental divide. The trend then is
for those on one side of the fence to believe that more regulation is
evil, while the other group claims more regulation is good.
What we know from experience is that those positions are not based on
scientific, rational, dispassionate, analysis, where beliefs are all
put aside in favor of the true facts. It really is a matter of belief
that tends to predominate and persuasion tends to draw some who are
near the fence closer towards one pole or the other. Sometimes someone
even gets convinced to jump the fence. Nevertheless they are all
capitalists. Wall Street cannot be evil, it must be good, so that
tends to sway the balance towards unregulated, deregulated, Wall
Street. Why regulate the good, as it is good already.
What factor works most closely along with persuasion ? Self interest.
When the self interest, ie profits, of a capitalist are served
consistent with their belief that belief is reinforced and
strengthened. Amazingly such Pavlovian conditioning is as effective as
capitalist eventually salivates when the bell rings even if there are
no immediate rewards. There is the belief that rewards will eventually
come. It is a product of psychological conditioning. And self interest
must be good as we know we cannot divide out self interest from Wall
Street and Wall Street is good.
The main point is that good and evil tend to be defined again as the
dual polarity of regulated and unregulated. What that means is that
there are fewer advocates of the shadowy areas in between, and more
people holding to extremes. Once the question of good or evil enters
into something it tends to be more of an all or nothing gambit. You
either choose heaven or you choose hell, but you cannot choose both.
If regulation is believed to be hell to self interest and
profitability, the choice tends to be forced towards a heaven of self
interested profits freed from regulation. Good and evil tend to have
that much sway once brought into the belief based equation. We have
delve further.
Factored into this is the belief as to unfettered human nature being
essentially good. Though fewer people really believe that nowadays
than did before, the system includes a belief in promoting that idea
as what is true. People are good, so self interest is for the good,
and unregulated free market systems are therefore good and for the
good. Without a belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature the
rest of that equation collapses into ruin. So you have to keep pushing
that idea and dread its demise. Everything depends on that. It is a
cornerstone of the system as it exists.
Communism on the other hand is accused of holding the view that
unfettered human nature is essentially evil. So human self interest is
essentially evil, and unregulated systems are essentially evil in
consequence. It is debatable whether this view really originated in
himself began as a Protestant preacher, worried about how profit
motives might one day destroy all other values, and how this effects
society and the individual. We do know that religion is itself a
fetter meant to constrain human actions, so in that we have some basis
for the accusation against communism. He started from the Bible,
worrying about what we might today refer to as family values and
individual human freedoms. He saw economic evolution going in a
dangerous direction jeopardizing those values and really wondered how
started there in the pulpit. A treatise on how things are going and
how they are evolving, as well as interpreting what that really might
mean to people, does not necessarily lead to realization of ideals. It
is too easy to force that vision onto a world that is hungry for
coherent explanations for what is otherwise chaotic struggle in day to
day life amid all of its conflicts of competing wants and needs, and
to impose that vision of what is as if it is gospel avoiding any
possible variant future. Marx is one example. Capitalist theorists are
another. The debate rages as to which side is heaven and which side is
hell. Which side is good and which side is evil. Each must be
absolutely one or the other. Taken in that way economic and social
science too easily become dogma, merely ideology of one species or the
other, twisting facts to support their own vision, invoking a vision
of unavoidable destiny, commanding belief, losing their true power to
facilitate positive progress, ie facilitate real positive change.
Preservation of the absolute good manifest as the system, the
ideology, takes precedence. That preservation itself becomes believed
to be an absolute good.
It would be wrong to say that Marx wanted to see every human relation
devalued to a purely economic commerce, but that is what Marxism ends
up being accused of. On the other hand we see Capitalism living up to
the Marxist prophecy with ever increasing zeal. It too has failed to
we now live within, and it failed to find alternative solutions to the
destruction of all values into one value of an economic commerce
concerning fiscal value, ie profit, as determinant of all meaning, in
all relations. That is the direction that the world has been headed in
recent years. Marx understood the nihilism in that better than most
people today do. It was part of the philosophical conversation of his
time period, when less was taken for granted as massive changes swept
across Europe and beyond its borders. This is why nihilism tends to
sneak up on us so readily now. Few people are trained in philosophy.
It is an increasingly taboo subject. After all it brings about
questioning. It brings in doubt rather than belief. It reasserts a
purified scientific reason as opposed to a science and lived practice
based on ideological beliefs.
Now, we begin to see something different.
Regulation is good or evil.
Capitalism is good or evil.
Communism is good or evil.
Free market is good or evil.
Human nature is fundamentally good or evil.
Oh.... what do we really have here ? An endless debate ? The start
of a duel to the death with each side defending the honor of its own
unyielding position ? A Cold War ? An apocalypse engineered by a god
and a devil with human pawns stranded in the wastelands in between ?
Mostly people are expected to hold to a relatively unquestioned and
unexamined belief, to internalize it, and to live it in their own
lives in terms of how they think, what they say, and what they do.
They adopt assumptions upon which most of their worldview about right
and good is subsequently based. To do so they must become closed
minded to anything inconsistent with those foundational assumptions,
those fundamental beliefs.When called to fight for those beliefs, they
must fight for them without questioning that too. We could outline a
number of other economic beliefs, similar to those outlined, but we
will leave that to others to delineate and ponder. The example is
enough.
What is almost never seriously brought to light is the idea that
neither side in any duality of beliefs, about good and evil, such as
those issues we used as an example, is right or wrong, but it is only
in the application of principles to circumstances that right and wrong
have meaning based on their discernable and measurable effects. There
is no good and evil deciding the matter from the start, but only the
good or evil of how the rules, which are part of the tools, of a
system, are employed and when and where. It is situational, not
absolute, even though the twentieth century chose to push the idea
that we are dealing solely with absolutes. This absolutism is largely
to be blamed on America. Europe was not as certain. Dialectic was
straight from Marx, but badly misused to create blind contention,
based on the promotion of beliefs about absolute good and evil.
America refused to learn from others, refused to cooperate with
others, and refused to compromise with others, based on that absolute
dichotomy of good and evil. It chose instead to dominate and force an
absolute polarity without truly understanding the potential common
ground. In fact American politics rejected any possibility of any
common ground prior to any such consideration.
We must return for a moment, after realizing that fact, to that
question of human nature. We have our deepest doubts nowadays about
fundamentally good. On the other hand our examination of the twentieth
century problem of a forced dichotomy between absolute good and evil
warns us that unfettered human nature is not fundamentally evil
either. This is not a struggle between the evil of a devil and the
good of a lord as some in power would still have us blindly believe.
actions are a product of learning. If the wrong lessons have been
learned we get more evil. If the right lessons have been learned we
tend to get more good. Clearly then the quality of education versus
the levels of ignorance have a major impact on how much regulation is
required for the good to be possible and realized as opposed to evil.
What we see in the world situation, particularly in the financial
sector, is failure of education for the good. Education has failed to
teach adequate values. While it might have taught something about
profit, and might have promoted self interest, it failed to inculcate
higher values, as much as it failed to inculcate sufficient ability to
reason scientifically, without assumptions, putting aside all beliefs,
to see the facts of the world as they really are. Education must have
taught beliefs, and it must have pushed the idea of absolute good and
evil. We can see the results of that in the recent fiscal demise as in
many other manifestations of die hard extremism where absolutes are
set up to collide without any chance of any real dialogue. Education
must have taught a dialectic that is a duel to the death, where one
polarity in the dual equation of two systems, two viewpoints about
what is right, has to destroy the other and declare itself absolutely
true and absolutely good. Is that real education or is it brain
washing propaganda ? At best it is a religion and tainted with
generous doses of systemic abuse to make anyone exposed to it afraid
to go against it due to the social and psychological consequences of
doing so. Systemic abuse as enforcement is a common trait in extremist
ideologies, inclusive of religion. Thus we know we live in a dark ages
of economics. We are forbidden the heresies of questioning such things
as globalization, supply and demand, free market, Wall Street, Madison
Avenue, and particularly capitalism. Burned at the stake might be a
less painful penalty than the lingering agonies that can be imposed on
those who put capitalism to question and particularly those who begin
to question its absolute goodness and rightness. The results of right
wing politics, and right wing education.
However, we see that we must put everything into question.
We can no longer afford, as a world, as a species, as a global
village, to simply accept such imposed systems of beliefs. We must
return to the questions of what is good and what is evil with open
minds, purged from all ideological poisoning and we know we are
severely poisoned by ideology. We can scarce think outside of it and
without it. When we recognize that fact, and realize that the
existing, given, absolutes, the dictatorially imposed absolutes
concerning economic good and economic evil, along with all that that
entails, are failing, and that they are not the gods and devils
ideology and dialectic of ideology have made them to be, we might
begin to free ourselves, towards a truly progressive future. A
progressive future for the preservation of the highest value which is
the good of humanity, now and for the future.
Robert Morpheal
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