Episode 13
TRANSCRIPT
Good afternoon, good evening, and good morning, everybody, and welcome to the December 16th episode of Revolution Now! My name is Peter Joseph, and today we're going to go through some selected questions, particularly dealing with the subject of communication and, perhaps one of the most difficult problems in philosophy, the matter of degree fallacy, and if there's time, some pragmatic transition concepts that fit well into a new kind of activist and lifestyle network, something that I've been thinking about for a while and, as I said before, I hope to give a talk on in late January with similar activist and community ideas. So, let's just jump into it, shall we?
Question one, and please know that I'm paraphrasing some of these. "Peter, how can we get these ideas to gain more exposure? What kind of strategies are best to reach a mainstream audience? How do we win the hearts and minds of Instagram generation folks and beyond, and what other communication projects are you working on?"
Well, first and broadly, you've touched upon the ultimate problem we face, communication, and communication in society, regardless of context, is far more complex than many people seem to realize, as we all kind of assume that when we say something to another or present some kind of media, others are going to understand it in the exact same context we do. Some may be familiar with a book written in 1938 called Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase. Chase gets to the heart of the issue of language in the context of semantics, semantics being the study of meaning and language, a subcategory, if you will, of linguistics, which is, more generally and broadly, the study of how language is structured.
Stuart Chase's book well argues that much of the language commonly used is so clouded with ambiguity, metaphor, and implication that it becomes virtually useless and oftentimes destructive. This notion of tyranny is perhaps best exemplified by political language, which is generally very cloaked and vague. For example, if you look at pretty much anything Donald Trump has said during his presidency, he weaponizes his intent through overly simplistic and highly nondescript language, which is very common to other politicians, by the way, but he's particularly acute in that example. And it opens the door to a range of interpretations, particularly dangerous when people are primed with their own bias, looking for confirmation in the ambiguity.
So, for example, in regard to this recent Supreme Court deal, where he tried to get the courts to overturn the US election in his favor, he tweeted out, "All we ask is courage and wisdom from those that will be making one of the most important decisions in our nation's history." And what you see in that statement is that those words, courage and wisdom, are code for basically, "Please give me the election. Stand up for me and just give me the election." He is invoking terms that have such a wide range of meaning, are so ambiguous, they function as self-serving weapons or propaganda. He does this so often it's cliche. The racism that's cloaked, telling the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." It's all very obvious, but it's important to understand the technique and, in the case of Trump, the pathology of it, and I'm not trying to attack him, as everyone else has done, into oblivion. He just is a classic case study in the use, the expression, of tyranny of words, because it's in everything he says.
Generally, we see semantic problems everywhere in society, and organizationally, you can view it as a stratification when it comes to objective meaning, a spectrum. So, a chair is a chair, and most agree, and then you more general categorizations, such as an the economy. We all think we understand what an economy is, but if you were to go out and randomly ask people what it is, most likely, you're going to get a range of answers. I know if I define the word economy, it would be very different than pretty much every libertarian's definition of it.
In fact, specific to that point, think about the word efficiency, economic efficiency. To a market economist, economic efficiency is about saving money and maximizing profits. From an earthly or a technical standpoint, economic efficiency is about optimizing a product's output with the greatest conservation, reusability, standardization, and other technical factors that relate to the actual physical habitat and principles of human sustainability on that habitat, things, of course, I've talked about before. Market efficiency, hence, is extremely different than technical efficiency.
And then at the farthest end of the spectrum, you have words that pretty much have no functional meaning at all, words like love or freedom or honor or truth or duty. Yes, we all sort of understand what we're saying when these words are used. If I tell someone I love them, that person knows I have a strong, emotional caring for them. However, if I say something like, "All the world needs is love," or, "You have to have love in your hearts," stuff like that, there's really no functional utility, because there's no shared, tangible reference. It just sort of floats in a kind of poetry, though I think the one that takes the cake in modern culture, or at least in America, is the word freedom. We see this abused all over the place right now with the subculture of people that can't handle basic responsibility when it comes to public health and COVID-19, millions of people that have decided that they are being oppressed by having to put on a little mask when they walk around around other people. Right-wing politicians have weaponized commonsense public health measures and turned it into a political issue through the invocation of this language.
A couple more of these. Another example is the word socialism. The most textbook definition is public ownership of the means of production, which is actually vague in and of itself, of course, because it's never been tried, but that is not the way contemporary society uses the word, and there is no consistency in it whatsoever. Same with Marxism. There's no information in that word because the body of Karl Marx's work covers a range of philosophical conversations. Aside from some highly internalized, abstracted academic community, tightly knit, the phrase Marxism has no shared reference, and hence its use in language is fundamentally pointless.
I mean, the closest approximation of Marxism being defined in pop culture use simply is to say it deals with ideas that are opposed to capitalism to whatever effect. Well, why does anything opposed to capitalism suddenly have to be Marxist? And even if you invoke a very particular concept that is novel to Marx, such as the idea of surplus labor, surplus value, conceptually, it still doesn't matter who came up with it. Why can't we evaluate concepts on their own merit, as opposed to attributing them to some figure or group polluting the conversation?
And as a final example of all this, we now have the ubiquitous phrase "conspiracy theory." This one is particularly strange because it sits in an awkward middle ground. The pop-culture use of this phrase just barely has anything to do with those words. If you want to speak about the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, if I remember correctly, the phrase "conspiracy theory" applies because the speculation is that Lee Harvey Oswald, the claimed lone shooter, simply did not act alone, and it's an event with particular criminal characteristics. In other words, the general definition is that two or more people commit a crime in secret. It is a legal concept.
The sloppiness of this language is very obvious. The events of September 11th have been attributed to all sorts of wild conspiracy theories in the media's eye, and yet the very story put forward by the government is technically a conspiracy theory by legal definition. Today, that phrase is thrown on pretty much anything that is fringe or hints of secrecy. "Oh, you believe in aliens? You must be a conspiracy theorist. Elvis is still alive? What a conspiracy." No, someone faking their own death and still living isn't necessarily a conspiracy. So, if we're to be intellectually sound, when people say the words "conspiracy theory," what they're actually saying, or trying to say, is non-evidence-based belief with the assumption of malicious intent on the part of two or more people in a given act. I'll say that again. Non-evidence-based belief with the assumption of malicious intent on the part of two or more people in a given act, criminal act, ultimately.
And as an aside, it really makes me laugh, and I look at all these articles being written about so-called conspiracy theories and conspiracy culture today. It's ubiquitous. You see these headlines like, "Why people believe in conspiracy theories," and then the articles proceed to overgeneralize a huge range of ideas in vast vagueness, lumping in all sorts of esoteric subjects and concepts and events into one assumed distorted psychological drive, which is ultimately, almost every case I've read, a logical fallacy of overgeneralization.
So, all of that said, this is why I always encourage people to drop broad categorical distinctions, because they don't have proper utility in communication. As easy as it is to use words like left, right, liberal, conservative, anarchist, socialist, or whatever, these overarching concepts ultimately do a disservice to intellectual communication and development because of the generalized nature and hence subjectivity.
As a general rule, the higher up the categorical semantic hierarchy, the more ideas become collapsed into a single word, the more dangerous things become. And it's not just dangerous because communication becomes poor. It's dangerous because the very schema of people's minds become molded into these completely arbitrary frameworks, and in turn, they can act upon those frameworks, which on a certain level actually creates a kind of brainwashing. It sets up a limit of debate, which is establishment preserving.
So, if a criminal event happens in society, and the government or media pitch one story or narrative, and analysts and the public pitch another story, and the government or media turn around and call that a conspiracy theory, you're going to have a whole subculture, now, of people that have a knee-jerk reaction to not believe anything that has that label. And while I certainly agree, with the rise of QAnon and all of this lunacy, that there is definitely something to be addressed in this non-evidence-based paranoid culture out there, it's also dangerous to have a situation where the general public has been so conditioned to disregard anything labeled as a conspiracy theory that they won't even consider the idea in question, they just dismiss it. In fact, most people are terrified of being labeled a conspiracy theorist, and they run for the hills because they know their reputation will be in question.
When you think about it, it's a very, very powerful way of keeping people in check, the tyranny of words, creating taboo categories that if you're to entertain anything within that category, you will be reduced to an irrational person speaking irrational things and more or less dismissed, if not attacked. Powerful tyranny in that phrase.
Now, coming back to Stuart Chase, he expands this conception uniquely to the idea of physical symbols, as well, such as money. What is money? Does money have a shared defining referent? What defines the value of money? Chase states as follows: "Money is not edible. It is not wearable. It is a symbol without industrial utility. A large part of all dollar transactions are accomplished by a transfer of numbers from one ledger sheet to another. A small part are accomplished by handing out pieces of paper and metal. Perhaps the most important thing about money is the human willingness to accept it. On the 10th of the month, I take out my checkbook and I mail around some scraps of paper with my name on it, covering furnace oil, tennis balls, seeds, electric current, and the tradesman profess themselves satisfied. It's all very strange, but there you are. We agree to take money even if we cannot agree as to what the word means. The value behind the symbol is indoctrinal. A piece of paper money is like a word. It has no value in itself. Money in one's pocket helps to secure a hat, but a $5 bill is not that hat."
This is why, if you really think about it, capitalism functions as a religion. The only reason money has value is because we pretend it does, create an extremely loose references to material resources of the planet and the fruits of labor, and like much language, we use the symbol of money all the time without question, and yet the conception of it has no objective referent. It's a complete abstraction only relevant to itself in circular logic.
Now, moving on. Semantics aside, expanding on this subject of communication, once again, we humans are also faced with cognitive biases. A cognitive bias occurs when one's psychology interferes with how information is analyzed. One notable cognitive bias today, due to the nature of social media, is bias confirmation. The central problem with the algorithmic structure of social media is that it creates pockets, bubbles. People get constantly confirmed in their views by others over and over and over again, reinforcing their belief systems. As some may know, there's a new social media outlet that opened called Parler, which claims to be for free speech and no moderation, and, as expected, to a strong degree, it's populated with the crème de la crème of irrational thinking, folks constantly reinforcing their own delusions, racism, QAnon, and so on.
And nothing confirms bias more than an environment that promotes groupthink, which is another cognitive bias that is perhaps even more problematic. Groupthink isn't just a cultural problem, it's a biological one, as I've talked about before. Our limbic system responds when social exclusion occurs, and how an individual perceives social exclusion is unique to them and their identity. The vast majority of irrational, non-evidence-based belief out there, from traditional religion to the Flat Earth Society to QAnon to the entire Trump cult, is largely predicated on confirmation bias through groupthink environments. It's not difficult to see. People then become immune to new information when they are involved in these two cognitive bias processes.
And the final element I want to talk about in this microdissection of language, linguistics, and perception has to do with logical fallacies. Logical fallacies are errors in the processing of information logically in a chain of reason reaching erroneous conclusions.
So, since I've reinforced Trump a few times already, I'll keep this theme because his expressions and resulting effects embrace all of this. Case study. If you ask somebody how you know that Trump was robbed of the US election, as he has claimed, in many cases, they're going to say simply, "Because Trump said so, and he's the only one I believe, because everything else is fake news." And this is, of course, an appeal to authority fallacy, probably amongst a bunch of other fallacies buried within that I can't identify.
We also have the straw man fallacy. A person makes a claim, someone counters that claim by distorting the original person's context, giving the illusion the person is correct when in truth, nothing has actually been addressed. I don't know how many times I've been in conversation talking about these ideas, sustainability principles, and the logic of human industrial organization, as suggested through this train of thought, and invariably, someone just comes right back around and just says, "That's communism, and communism has never worked." And of course, what I'm talking about has nothing to do with communism, but that's the way the fallacies arise.
And it's not just debate tactics, as a lot of people talk about. You're in a debate training. People set these things up, and the dark art of debate, people learn how to do that. They deliberately do that to throw the audience off, but it actually overlaps with cognitive bias. If someone is so uneducated and the references they have are so narrow in respect to how they interpret the world, when someone hears the phrase, say, "collaborative economy," the only word that they can think of is communism. That is the range of their understanding on the subject matter, sadly enough.
So, all of that said, needless to say, when you step back and look at how communication unfolds in society, and society's most natural common settings, you realize that between semantics, cognitive biases, and logical fallacies, it's a wonder we have any understanding of what anyone is saying or thinking at all at any time.
And in truth, we don't. It's more of an illusion that we understand each other at this point, because of how poor our use of language actually is. There is such a deep need for a rigid discipline in early education to get this kind of framework going so people have the proper tools to digest information as objectively as possible and not fall victim to fallacious arguments and irrational personal bias that goes unseen.
Now, back to the broadness of your question. It may seem like a lot of minutiae has been presented here that seems secondary, but this is really what we're dealing with when it comes to any kind of communicative approach, which is why I focus on diversity in style and in message, in many ways, as best I can within the bounds of my own ability. I am only one person, which means I stick with my comfort zone, even though I'm very ambitious within that comfort zone. And I hope other communicators out there do the same.
I have done the gamut of writing technical books, having formal lectures, my own multiple podcasts over the years, debates, interviews, other people's podcasts. I've made feature films, both narrative and documentary, a online web TV series–type show that was satirical, comedy. I've done live stage performances with music and multimedia, and pure abstraction with instruments. I've run the gamut, as far as I know, but that doesn't mean I'm going to be the most successful in this form of communication. And when it comes to youth culture, speaking to your question, Instagram, social media, TikTok... Maybe somebody can go out there and try to make a TikTok account that talks about structural change to get the youth aboard. I don't think I'm the kind of person that can do that. I frankly hate social media across the board, but that's irrelevant to this conversation, but it's going to take a mixture of people, young and old, with different disciplines, to get out there and find their niche. That's all I can really say about that, because what you're dealing with is a statistical problem of communication, since this pollution of semantics, fallacies, and so on is so replete, it's basically random, in terms of who is going to absorb information and continue to carry the torch versus others.
What I do know is that straight intellectual treatments, formal expressions of those treatments in books and lectures, and the most academic approach is not going to work. It has to be something different in terms of getting behind people's egos and fears and trying to plant ideas in their mind as opposed to imposing them. But I really believe the arts and intellectual development have to be hand in hand. I don't think people change based on reason. They changed based on experience.
The fundamental problem is that people's daily life, their experiences, the values that have been ingrained, the practices, the repetition of this way of thinking in this kind of social system, is so much more powerful than a fringe subculture that's presenting new ideas, regardless of how defendable and logically sound and beneficial and critical those ideas are.
Question number two. "Hi, Peter. I understand your point that extreme monetary wealth today creates structural violence. The billionaires of the world could end poverty if they wanted to. However, is it possible to identify where this symptom ends as we go down the socioeconomic ladder? In other words, is it also violence if a middle-class person buys a new pair of shoes instead of using that money to buy a meal for a homeless person on the street? If so, should we all just walk around in rags for the sake of making sure our less fortunate population has a roof over their head?"
A great question, because it highlights what could be called a matter of degree fallacy or a continuum. So, you have billionaires on one side, and you have people in destitution not getting their most basic nutrition and other needs met, homeless on the street. Where is the moral line in how much wealth one can have as compared to another? Put another way, where in a person's interest to improve their own quality of life materially does it become socially negligent or even violent when accounting for others' economic or material deficiencies in the spectrum of economic inequality?
I think most would agree that Jeff Bezos having 170 billion, or whatever it is now, with grand material wealth, mansions and so on, is rather grotesque when we are simultaneously, today, seeing a resurgence in extreme poverty due to COVID-19, not to mention the preexistence of over half the planet being in relative poverty, living on less than $5.50 a day.
But let's reduce those extremes. How about, say, a common middle-class person? They have a house and a car and a white picket fence, yet around the corner from them is a subsidized housing project with people deeply struggling every day to simply put food on the table. What degree of responsibility or moral aptitude relates to this more fortunate middle-class person in contrast to the lower-class person, and hence, what degree are they negligent if they increase their standard of living without helping others?
And there's no simple answer. There can only be a gray area, but on each side of that gray area, the moral sensibility becomes far more clear due to many other justifiable public health reasons. In other words, the problem with reasoning matter of degree or continuum problems is that they can't be solved by simply considering the abstraction itself. They have to be put into reality. In other words, there's a continuum of relativity here, and within the confines of that, as if it's in a vacuum, there is no answer, but that's not the way things work in the real world. And it speaks to one of the most fundamental problems of philosophical writing, the use of abstraction and only abstraction, when the truth is, we live in a systemic reality with integrated, overlapping factors.
And before we continue that particular subject, let's jump to a parallel example to get this framework a little bit more clear, at least I hope it does. The debate on abortion. The debate on abortion asks the question of where, from conception to death, does civilization recognize human life as a protected entity? What is life? The most extreme conservative position is that human life begins at conception, when sperm meets the egg, and then life terminates when a person's body ceases to function and dies. That's the continuum. And if that's all you're willing to take into account, if that's all you're willing to recognize, the narrow, myopic abstraction as if life exists and ends in a vacuum, then no lines, obviously, can be drawn.
But again, that's not how things work in the real world, as much as religion would like to believe that it does. There's a whole range of intersecting, socially relevant factors, such as, say, the health of the mother. If we're going to be absolutist with the conception of life, what happens when the fetus threatens the life of the mother in the process, for example? How does that moral dilemma get solved?
And the answer is very straightforward. The mother is more important. The fetus has no social responsibility or conception of it. It has no bonds outside of the mother in abstraction. It has no one to rely on it. The death of a mother could mean immense suffering for friends, extended family, and if the mother happens to have other children, obviously the ramifications are clear. In this particular scenario, and I know this is going to sound controversial, human value is assessed by the importance of that person in the social sphere, in the society and the relationships they're in. You can't compare an average complex adult with responsibilities, taking care of this, having an occupation here to society, and all the other ramifications, to a fetus that has absolutely no connection to any of that yet.
I would even go so far, just to make this point in extreme, I would define a human being as a social relationship, as opposed to a biological one. And again, I say that to make a point. I'm not explicitly saying that's the way we should view human life, because there's a subjective gray area in that very concept, as well. But in the extremes, once again, it's absolutely preposterous to equivocate a fetus that's unborn to an adult with responsibilities, social connections, relationships, and so on.
So, going back to the main point here, there is the overlapping quantifier. There is the thing that brings it out of the vacuum of the philosophical or moral abstraction. So, with that in mind, let's now jump back to the question of this range of inequality and what is appropriate or not. So, what interceding qualifier, so to speak, draws the lines to clarify what can be considered moral or not? And the answer rests in epidemiological study, the study of public health. Instead of trying to draw rigid lines, let's simply analyze the entire phenomenon of economic inequality itself.
Public health research has shown definitively that there is a litany of negative public health outcomes in societies with high levels of economic stratification, and the lower you find yourself on the economic ladder, the worse your health becomes on average for many complex reasons. I have talked about the negative effects of socioeconomic inequality a great deal over the years, so I'm not going to repeat myself too much, but it's not fringe. Well-established, multi-decade-long studies have been done on various attributes related to sociological conditions of economic inequality. Naturally, I recommend the book The Spirit Level and other works by Richard Wilkinson to start, but there are many other theorists at this time. It's common knowledge in the academic community.
The bottom line is that the more economic inequality in any society, the larger the spread, the lower the general health of that society, including the structural violence that ravages the lower class disproportionately. More unequal societies have more violence, more drug addiction, worse educational scores, less trust, as compared to more equal societies. And the factors are too numerous to list here. So, what does that mean? It means that any person that willfully positions themselves, because of their good fortune, to make disproportionately more than others, maintaining that disproportional wealth is distinctly harming that society, and specifically, the lower class, who suffered the brunt, naturally, of the negative side effects of inequality, as per the epidemiological research.
Jeff Bezos, in his position, is not just a selfish prick. He is an active feature of general societal sickness on the epidemiological level. The decision the rich make to maintain this economic elevation is a truly toxic phenomenon and a danger to society. It's destabilizing, it is toxic, which means that any interest we have across all walks of life, across all gray areas, to reduce economic inequality by all actors is always going to be the morally appropriate thing to do if you have any consideration for the wellbeing of others. The public health ramifications are crystal clear.
So, it becomes a general gesture, a moral gesture for the sake of the health of others, to pursue equality in whatever way we can. And I know what the Ayn Rand libertarians would say to such a comment. Well, everyone's going to live in a carbon copy house and have a number. Everyone has the exact same thing and some kind of propaganda reel of Soviet communism, or whatever. And it's not the way you frame this. It's not the way it's going to be. Everyone has different needs and wants. There's no "one shoe fits all" in the complexity of civilization, but those variants do not justify the cost of inequality we see today.
And as a general attitude, people need to feel the moral obligation to be generally materially equal, as you're going to improve your society and your own health by extension, which is why, in my new film InterReflections, I refer to socioeconomic stratification as an allergy to human society. We are allergic to it. It simply makes us sick. It's the general ethic to see more economic, and hence socioeconomic equality in society, because that is what is going to help civilization move forward in a positive way. Everything else is creating sickness.
And that does it for me today. I apologize for only getting to two questions, but I'll be back next week for more. Thanks a lot, everybody.