Episode 09
TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon. Good evening. Good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph. Welcome to Revolution Now, November 10th, episode number nine. So last week, among a handful of related subjects, we focused mostly on morality and how moral decision-making can't be an absolutist affair, meaning it's completely irrational to have a belief system where you behave a certain way in a given circumstance, regardless of the nuances of that circumstance. In other words, there are far too many conflicting moral dilemmas. Likewise, history shows great cultural relativism, and hence, what is moral to one group of people might very well be immoral to another. So if moral behavior is relativistic in this way and dependent on circumstance, there has to be a more specific way to evaluate moral conclusions, which is ultimately a rational process, an intellectual process, with no need to elevate moral thinking to be beyond us in any way as if external to us as religion in some secular philosophy suggest.
As many I'm sure are familiar, it's been a long standing spiritual, religious, woo-woo idea that ethics and morality exists outside of us in some way from a higher place or whatnot, and that has no foundation. Empathic feeling is one thing, as I'll touch upon a second, moral philosophy is another, and morality as somehow transcending normal intellectual reasoning is an untenable superstitious assumption. Now, I mentioned empathy, and one could argue that things like mirror neurons serve as a kind of biological basis for moral intuition or moral feeling, which could influence our intellect. As studied in many primates species, mirror neurons tend to fire when one observes an event endured by another, generating an empathic response. This kind of response is physiological, not logical, even though there's probably conditioning inherent to some degree, but it occurs in most people as an automatic reaction to observing other people's behavior or experiences. So, you know, if you observe somebody in great emotional distress, unless you're a sociopath, you tend to mirror that sympathetically.
You feel it, and you become sad yourself. You see this effect in movies, obviously, as the viewer becomes identified with a character and feels his or her experience, even though the character is clearly fictional. So generally, if there was ever evidence for something of a human nature related to moral sensibilities, mirror neurons are a pretty good argument, I suppose, which are fascinating subjects anyway, as these neurons, apart from also assisting learning, seems to be a means to bond people, creating a sense of connection and compassion. So anyway, there's that. And always remember everything related to human behavior is an interplay between nature and nurture, no doubt. But when it comes to what we uphold as morally appropriate values or behaviors, versus what we condemn, there has to be some kind of intellectual justification, not just a feeling. At the end of the day, morality has to be functional, right?
And for it to be functional, there has to be an outcome that's sought. That outcome can be specific to an individual circumstance, like not killing somebody one day, or it can be a broader social outcome seeking to achieve some kind of broad social goal, such as perhaps the interest to eradicate racism and bigotry, as racism and bigotry can lead to direct violence, as we have seen over and over again. Overall, I think the purpose of moral philosophy is to help continue a society in a particular direction that is assumed to be beneficial on the whole. So if the goal of society is to be sustainable, equitable, and peaceful, then morality toward those goals can be rationally inferred. And consequentially, any ideologies, behavior, institutions, and systems that do not promote that end can be deemed immoral in that light because they detract from the goal.
All of this is to say that moral sensibilities or general moral loyalties, an overarching sense of loyalty to act in a certain way, obviously has value. Living our life with integrity, principally, expressing and defending those principles in general, such as not lying, cheating, harming others, et cetera, does have a cultural effect.
And what I'd like to do today is delve into the inner workings of the market system to show its fundamental, built-in immorality, which has been touched upon before, but we're going to take a different approach this time. Specifically in regard to the generation of inequality, deep social stratification, which is no doubt, a true public health crisis at this point in time and only getting worse. And as an aside on this subject of a structurally immoral system, we could easily apply this to the state of nature and its effects. If the systemic destruction of our habitat unnecessarily due to market incentives and behaviors isn't immoral, particularly when it's going to be leading to the cause of many deaths in the future as we coalesce with all of these negative forces, then I don't know what immoral is. But again, we're not going to go down that road.
And part of the reason I bring this up is not just to philosophi, but to look at moral persuasion as a activist tool. People tend to react very differently when you call them immoral as opposed to irresponsible or an asshole. There's something more serious about the accusation of immorality. And while, as I'll argue in this logic, the entire system is immoral, the easiest thing to hone in on, on debate would be the existence of billionaires, the winners of the game of capitalism. The rich folks at the top of the hierarchy, who almost universally find no reason to object to anything the system does because they been so rewarded by it, operant reinforcement. You find me a billionaire that is apologizing for the system, calling it immoral, and I will be quite surprised. Of course, lots of lip service is given, but it's not what people say.
It's what they actually do. It's how they live. Yes, Mark Zuckerberg once stated that billionaires shouldn't exist, I'm paraphrasing, but he said that, but then what did he do? He goes back to his lavish lifestyle. He doesn't do anything to challenge the system, when the billionaires are the ones who have the most resources to begin to challenge and buck the system, if they really wanted to, but that is way too paradoxical in their limited minds. And again, more broadly, the attack here isn't necessarily on any given individual, even though there should be moral persuasion against them. It's about the structure of the system that they accept. Would you yourself feel morally justified to have more wealth than millions of others, knowing full well that the same system that provided that wealth to you is the exact same system creating extreme deprivation and premature death for millions of others?
I suspect everyone is familiar with the concept of a zero sum game, where a gain or loss of one player or actor or agent is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of another. This is common in basic gambling with a fixed amount of money. And when it comes to market behavior, of course, it's far more complex, even though at the heart of market economics is still a zero sum effect. An effect I'm going to go into some detail with here in a little while, but coming from a moral standpoint, if this is true, we are all participants in an immoral game that harms people by structural default. Some may remember the Milgrim experiment where a guy is instructed to press buttons that seemingly shock somebody in another room. He is told that he has no responsibility, no moral responsibility, since he has been instructed by the experiment.
He's just a tool to follow orders in this machine, if you will. And they examine how far people were willing to go when they thought they were actually shocking people at ever increasing severity, listening to their screams. Of course, they were not actually shocking them. It was an actor pretending, but it was very interesting in regard to moral responsibility. The same kind of context, such as the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi leaders stood up and said they were just following orders.
And while not equivalent, we are today faced with a very similar circumstance in this debate about the moral value of capitalism and our participation. The problem is the systemic relationships that create inevitable harm, unnecessary harm, in our social system are not readily apparent because they are systemic. And while I'm not going to come down on the average person struggling to survive to make ends meet in the competitive market economy, since they are fundamentally coerced to be there by the system, as there's no other global option, I do see the value in shaming the winners of the game as they have such publicity and such power as well. Moral shaming needs to be part of the arsenal of activism.
It may be a small part, but I think it has value to shift the tide, especially when it comes to the allowance of ongoing socioeconomic inequality, a deeply destructive force. I know I've touched upon the detriments of socioeconomic inequality in the past, but let me just reiterate things a little bit here for context. As widely corroborated in epidemiological research, socioeconomic inequality appears to be the greatest driver of behavioral violence in general. In the words of James Gilligan, a Harvard violence researcher who was also a clinical psychologist that actually spoke daily with murderers, analyzing the phenomenon socially as well, he states, and I quote, "Worldwide, the most powerful predictor of the murder rate is the size of the gap in income and wealth between the rich and the poor. The most powerful predictor of the rate of national or collective violence, war, civil insurrection, and terrorism is the size of the gap between income and wealth between the rich and poor nations."
This is a troubling finding, as wealth inequality as a textbook characteristic of capitalism, of course, effectively making capitalism itself a precondition for war and violence. Such correlations between population level, statistically consistent negative health outcomes, and various socioeconomic preconditions are abundant. There's the work, The Spirit Level, which I have talked about and featured in my films. It's a book called The Spirit Level: Why Equality Is Better For Everyone, by Wilkinson and Pickett. And a large amount of epidemiological data is explored and correlated. And what's found is that many public health and social problems are highly correlated to economic inequality. And the conclusion is that, the more equal a society is, the more stable, happy, healthy, and productive they are.
On the other hand societies with large income gaps, such as the United States, suffer disproportionally across a range of problems, including higher incidences of heart disease, obesity, homicides, infant mortality, imprisonment, teen birth, mental illness, poor education, and much more. Socioeconomic inequality is also correlated to a gradient of health and wellbeing such that those with higher socioeconomic status have better health than those with lower status.
While this may seem like common sense due to things like differing lifestyle options, researchers have recently found that a critical component is actually stress. Both general survival insecurity and psycho social stress have been found to take a powerful toll on people's health in the lower classes, in addition to their lifestyle choices regarding food due to a lack of education, which is common to low socioeconomic status, smoking cigarettes, high sugar, and sodium intake and so on. The stress of simply feeling poor and inferior, which is a direct socioeconomic consequence given how personal success is currently measured in material in class terms, has emerged as just as relevant a health detriment as a poor diet or polluted environment and so on. So in effect, you have this inherent structural violence to the existence of social stratification. And as I say in my film, Into Reflections, humans are allergic to socioeconomic stratification.
If we were not allergic to it, we would not react on the population level so negatively. Something in our evolutionary psychology finds great hostility in feeling unequal. So why should we create and reinforce a social structure environment that leads precisely to that when there are other options for social organization? So coming back now to this shame morality idea, there is good reason to criticize and condemn those people that continue to hold up the system, as they are ultimately agents of structural violence. I don't object to the wealthy class as an abstracted outcome, a natural system level consequence of economic market behavior, which is exactly what it is. It doesn't matter what these people have created or where they came from or how well-meaning they claim to be. It's the very nature of their reaction to that gain itself.
I certainly understand the logic behind the phrase, love the player, hate the game, which I agree. If you have an economy that's literally designed around the competitive self-interest persons or groups entrenched in a reality of artificial scarcity, you are going to have a degree of inherent apathy and total disregard that goes unrecognized due to the very nature of the game, what's required? But that reality doesn't give a pass to our semi-conscious selves. We can learn to do better and to be better. Until proven otherwise, we do seem to have basic volition, a basic freewill, and hence a basic moral compass we can influence and control to a degree. And while I certainly disagree with the entire legal and judicial system, which singularly condemns people for their actions, because it's never that simple in the chain of causality, on the other side of the equation, we can indeed learn, change, have discipline and so on in our volition. And that is where this moral communication comes in.
In fact, as a slight aside, I have yet to meet a person who holds a strong moral belief who isn't socially active on some level, seeing the need to try and persuade others to share his or her belief as a moral obligation. Philosopher of science, Michael Ruse argues in his book, Evolutionary Ethics, that humans evolved to think of morality as rather objective, to motivate us to act.
And if we do not feel the need to act and influence others, it could be then argued that the very purpose of moral conviction or morality in general as an idea, is rather useless. Some may be aware of Thorstein Veblen's famous book, Theory of the Leisure Class, an excellent book about class relationships and the nature of the wealthy class in the mid 20th century. He introduced unique terms that are used commonly today in economics, behavioral economics, such as conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure, highlighting a unique kind of status driven social apathy. An excellent book, and I point that out because it's simply gotten worse today. The rich walk over homeless people to enter into their $30 million penthouses to drink $5,000 bottles of wine with absolutely no real concern, where they revel in their success feeling elevated, not to mention being psychologically reinforced by an entire culture that sees the rich as heroes, envying their wealth, status, and power.
Coming back to my film Into Reflections, I had a Simon character who represents a socially Darwinistic, Malthusian worldview, who argues that humans are fundamentally corrupt. And he says to the John protagonist character, "Deep down, John, the slaves don't want to be free. They want to be slave owners." And that embraces the sentiment. The fact is, when elevated to the context of moral philosophy with the stated goals, once again, at equality, peaceful coexistence, general freedom, the only emotion that should be felt when observing the wealth hoarders of our world is disgust. The only expression they should experience from the public is shame. A morally oriented social psychology should be the opposite of what we continue to see today with the glamorizing of the rich. Even though everyone is doing the same thing, far more care and concern and respect should be put upon the working poor, the people that actually make things move in this world, believe it or not.
And a great deal of disrespect and shame and humiliation should be thrust upon the disproportionately wealthy. They should be made to feel guilt when they get out of their Lamborghinis. They should feel demoralized when they enter their $14 million home. We have to destroy the cultural psychology that climbing to the top of this hierarchical pyramid is the ultimate goal of the individual. Winning generates losing in this system. The entire model of markets as again, a near zero sum game makes it fundamentally immoral, given the clear fact that society can itself in a far different way, limiting or removing such negative externalities and structural violence as I've argued for you.
So let's move on now and shift gears and step back in fact, and ask the question of, do we really know that the economy in its inherent workings is generating this lack of equilibrium, grave income in wealth and balance? Are we missing something? Is there some other force of government or some kind of external manipulation that's forcing the inequality to persist when the natural state of market economics, if allowed to be truly free, would just generate a nice, happy population with everyone mostly employed and so on? A couple years back, a study was published out of Tufts University Department of Mathematics headed by Bruce Boghosian, and they did a formal mathematical analysis of market behavior. For those that are unfamiliar, formal analysis has to do with math, as stated, while in contrast, empirical analysis has to do with real life observation. And the best kind of formal analysis and empirical analysis is when they converge and they compliment each other.
And needless to say, before I began, Tufts University Department of Mathematics is not a Marxist institution. They're looking at this scientifically. And in this work, they were able to mathematically model the outcome of billions of transactions based around free market principles, incentives, and so on, examining the degree of equilibrium in wealth distribution market behavior generates. Is poverty inevitable? Is inequality just a subtle side effect? Should we blame something else? And what they've found is that inequality is absolutely inevitable as, if the system is left unrestrained, it concentrates pretty much everything to one side of the playing field, to one agent. The head of the research program said, and I quote, "Our work refutes the idea that free markets, by virtually leading people up to their own devices, will be fair. Our model, which is able to explain the form of the actual wealth distribution with remarkable accuracy, also shows that free markets can not be stable without redistribution mechanisms.
The reality is precisely the opposite of what so-called free market fundamentalists would have us believe." Now, of course mathematical modeling should always be taken with a grain of salt because they're always going to be variables and dynamics that can't be accounted for that exist in the real world. But based on their analysis, they were actually able to mirror with incredible accuracy, real life inequality outcomes in major nations. Now, folks can easily read this for themselves. There was a detailed Scientific American article called, Is Inequality Inevitable from 2019, which I'm going to reference here, and you can see the method they used, which I felt was pretty sound. And they start with a singular transaction where there is wealth created or removed through profit or loss, and then they expand it out to many agents. And each transaction is done through a coin toss for random distribution to decide when somebody is going to win or lose on each side of the transaction in terms of wealth gained or lost.
The author writes in regards to the model using a thousand agents, "If you simulate this economy, you will get a remarkable result. After a large number of transactions, one agent ends up as an oligarch, holding practically all the wealth of the economy, and the other 999 end up with virtually nothing. It does not matter how much wealth people start with. It does not matter that all the coin flips were absolutely fair. It does not matter that the poorer agent's expected outcome was positive in each transaction, whereas that of the richer agent was negative. Any single agent in this economy could have become the oligarch. In fact, all had equal odds if they began with equal wealth. In that sense, there was equality of opportunity, but only one of them did become the oligarch and all the others saw their average wealth decreased towards zero as they conducted more and more transactions. To add insult to injury, the lower someone's wealth ranking, the faster the decrease." And the ultimate conclusion by the researchers is that we have a serious problem, that there is nothing free and fair about this kind of arrangement.
And once again, they found tremendous correlation by empirical comparison to actual real life unfoldings as they detail. And of course, when you add other factors that are more commonly known about the inequality debate, such as tax loopholes, inheritance, or special interests, corruption and so on, in terms of favoring the existing wealthy, you add those in and it just amplifies the effect. And it's also complimentary to Thomas Piketty's work, as I'm sure many are familiar with, where he concludes, just as the researcher of Tufts University, that there is no other choice if you're going to maintain this system than massive wealth redistribution. So when you add this little tidbit of research, which really is obvious intuitively, when you look at this and you look at the class war in this society that's going on in the long-term through consolidations of power and wealth. And then you look at the actual mechanism, that's creating all this that is completely unstable and can't find equilibrium, which translates of course, into vast swaths of people that are going to decay in low socioeconomic status and poverty, you're faced with a deep moral decision.
And when you combine modern phenomenon of say, technological unemployment, when you see all of the other modern variables that are now compounding socioeconomic inequality even more, coupled, of course, with the immutable fact that governments of the world will always be compromised by business interests because the whole society is run by money. And I hate repeating myself, but it's completely naive to think that the special interests are not going to buy politicians and legislation just like they buy loaves of bread. We are faced with a very, very difficult trajectory, and ultimately, a deep moral conundrum, for lack of a better expression. I hope that if you can communicate this sort of moral realization to people, they'll be more open to such conversation and not fall back on isms and all the general defenses that we see, or conservative arguments that say, well, without inequality, there would be no innovation, which is just silly.
Or even worse, the people that think there can never be an alternative to capitalism, of course, and if you want to eliminate inequality, suddenly you're in an Ayn Rand dystopia and so on. All right folks, that does it for me. I'm going to bring on guests soon. I know people keep asking for that and believe me, I don't want to sit here and torture myself talking like this forever. However, we're getting these foundational episodes under my belt, I think is a productive thing. And it gives incentive for folks that maybe want to talk. If you'd like to suggest something, there is a sub Reddit that can be accessed through revolutionnow.live. I'm Peter Joseph, peterjoseph.info, and this program is brought to you by Patreon. All right, everybody. I appreciate it. Talk to you later.