The salient fact of human cognitive error is that, thanks to our logical minds, we see with the perspective of an omnipotent viewer, but we are trapped in bodies, so must project a self — and consequently, defend it.
The defense of self, in society, takes the form of a non-aggression pact with all other selves which says, “Unless I am actively killing, maiming, raping or stealing, you will not interrupt what I do, or actively criticize me personally.” No aggression means the peace is kept and we all feel secure.
However, like all clever one-step solutions, this creates more problems than it fixes. First, and most importantly, conflict is how we achieve change without conscious design. One party prevails and then incorporates the ideas of the defeated — a faster process than waiting for someone with the genius and patience to design The Ultimate Plan, which is a lost cause in itself since most of the best human plans were gradual evolutions from working archetypes in the past.
Second, avoiding conflict means we take on a new beast — the obligation to avoid conflict, which then in itself becomes a goal instead of a method. It’s like drug addiction: suddenly, every other life activity becomes a subset of finding and consuming drugs. This cripples our minds so we ignore solutions waving in our faces.
This “peace at all costs” mentality has one strong suite however: it sounds good to just about everyone, so if you’re selling a product, trying to get votes, trying to make friends or just trying to pick up that drunk slightly thick-bodied but sensual friend of a friend, it works. Every time.
Here is this psychology in the wild:
When I say that you can judge the quality of a society by the way it takes care of its weakest, many if not most Americans will immediately think of the word “socialism”, even as they don’t know what it means. But it’s not about partisan political choices, about freedom, or the pursuit of happiness, or about big government. It’s very simply about minimum requirements for a functional society, period. You can’t have tens of millions of people being unemployed and/or living below the poverty line for extended lengths of time without resorting to oppressive measures of physical force aimed at keeping down those who have landed in your gutters. And if you would choose that option, one that many Americans would, knowingly or not, support, then freedom takes on the meaning of “the freedom to repress others”, or even “the freedom to repress whoever you can”, and down the line, as the single logical outcome, Orwell’s “some animals are more equal than others”.
Here the author makes an assumption: we can have peace, and we should pacify those who might break it in order to have peace.
This is his thesis:
You can’t have tens of millions of people [in poverty] without resorting to oppressive measures of physical force
He is correct.
However, he commits the passive-aggressive fallacy: he assumes that by avoiding aggression or direct action against a person or persons, we solve a problem. What we’ve really done is defer that problem.
Today’s impoverished people become four in the next generation. And they’re even more desperate, because they have existed in the vortex of poverty for too long.
Here I am “supposed to” — by social conventions, politeness and the common sense to flatter your audience by assuming that they’re altruists like yourself — say how tragic it is these people landed in poverty.
Yet I’m bound by my experience, of knowing impoverished kids growing up and working in poor communities, and here it is: people aren’t disorganized because they’re impoverished; they’re impoverished because they’re disorganized.
We inverted logic by starting with a passive assumption, which is that all people are equal and keeping the peace is essential, and so as a result we had to assume that poverty was randomly imposed and not a response to a pre-existing condition.
The truth in my experience is that, as any society grows, it produces an increasing pool of people who didn’t fit any particular role. By lacking of having no direction, and thus nothing they’re particularly good at, they become the randomly allocatable workers who serve in menial roles.
The article quoted above is correct in that as this group grows, increasing force is required to keep it in line.
The author then carefully avoids discussing the salient fact, which is that there’s no antidote to this.
If you pander to them, they take and then want more, because they have become dependent on your aid, and resent you as a controller because you dole it out to them piecemeal. And what none of us want to say is that if you give it to them in a lump sum, like most lottery winners they’d be destitute a year later.
It’s our protecting our weakest from themselves that makes our society moribund. Nature is wiser, and not passive: she makes an environment where success is possible, and then lets things settle as they may.
The recent surge of interest in libertarianism is a direct response to the passive-aggressive fallacy regarding the poor. Libertarians want a lack of obligation to take care of our weakest so that natural selection can sort the functional from the dysfunctional.
Let’s be brutally honest: the poor, who are generally of IQs below 100 thus can never be doctors, lawyers, or police officers. They are destined to be burger flippers, day laborers, shelf stockers and so on. There may be a small percentage of them who are poor through the alcoholism or drug abuse of a parent, or other calamity.
The libertarian and conservative response is to offer opportunity; the leftist response is to offer a handout, a guaranteed “keep the peace” bribe. They assume that since they are not acting directly against the poor, they are taking care of the problem. But that’s a passive-aggressive fallacy, designed to imply that the rest of us are selfish bastards for not offering a handout. It’s guilt coercion in action.
People who study the environment, however, have never forgotten about it. “I think most people that think seriously about the environment and work on issues with the environment would argue that one of the most critical factors driving environmental degradation is overpopulation,” Roulet says.
Arguing to reduce population creates a “visceral reaction” in people, Roulet reasons, “because it requires a reflection on ourselves.”
So instead, “We think of carbon-dioxide emissions as the problem of climate change, but really it’s the number of people whose lifestyles require the level of energy consumption and production that is 95 per cent based on fossil fuels.”
…And it hurts us, every day. We can’t make the decisions we need because they require us to tell someone somewhere NO and to back that up with force. We cannot keep the peace at the price of everything else. We need to use peace, and war, both to keep that “everything else” healthy, and anything else is the tail wagging the dog.
But that requires we buck the passive-aggressive fallacy that says any action is OK so long as it doesn’t act directly on another, even if that means the problem just gets worse over time.
The passive-aggressive fallacy ties our hands. We the good people are afraid to act aggressively against people who do bad things, because we know the rest of the crowd — our society — will attack us for being aggressive, even though we were avoiding sins of omission.
Think of it this way: if you know someone is a rapist, and he moves into your town, your instinct is to go beat his ass until he leaves. But you can’t because then, in the witless wisdom of society, you attacked him and he has rights too! But two weeks later, after he has raped your best friend’s sister — because anyone committing rape the first time is unhinged enough to most likely do it again — you regret not clubbing him and throwing him in the river. Tolerance for the bad means victimization of the good.
Here’s another example:
The Obama administration is shelving a European missile defense plan that has been a major irritant in relations with Russia, a U.S. ally said Thursday. The Pentagon confirmed a “major adjustment” is planned.
He said the change comes in part because the U.S. has concluded that Iran is less focused on developing the kind of long-range missiles for which the system was originally developed.
This missile shield was never about Iran. It was about using the one advantage the USA has over Russia, which is advanced technology, to remove the Russian ability to have a guaranteed first strike nuclear attack on the USA. The missile shield would have kept Russia in check because if Russia did anything untoward, the Americans could counter her militarily without being worried that the conflict would escalate to a nuclear level.
Conservatives since Reagan have used the strategy of paralyzing the Russians with advanced technology, and forcing them either into subservience or an arms race they can’t win, to great success. It has kept Europe safe from the regime that didn’t mind sending tanks in to shoot college age boys and girls in Hungary, for example. Seeing those rambling through the Fulda Gap would have marked an end for Europe as we know it, and as East Germany and every other territory that was under Soviet control still lags behind, it might have been more than just a political adjustment.
But Barack Obama is dedicated like all people of social logic to the idea of keeping the peace. It is the popular decision. People are already rejoicing over the lack of the complex, expensive and “unnecessary” missile shield, and congratulating themselves for keeping us farther away from war.
Yet like tolerating a rapist, tolerating a violent regime is a sin of omission. It means that instead of risking conflict to confront a bully or an opportunist, we tolerate them — which means they grow bolder, and will soon victimize others.
Back to the first article, you can see the truth of the passive-aggressive fallacy in this one sliver of truth: yes, we will need to oppress our poor, like we oppress anyone else who has not found a path working with us. That is how survival happens, and while backing down from that position seems like a magnanimous gesture, it’s actually a sin of omission that guarantees worse future conflict.
The Russia of today is not the Russia of yesteryear. There was never a need for the missile defence to be fully built. You’re not thinking practically.
Coincidence: now that Russia agrees that some sort of action against Iran is necessary, the missile shield is down.
The missile shield was never realistically going to be built, even under Bush, but instead was always intended to be used as a stick to bring Russia in line with the much more important American plan for the Middle East.
A major supporting point of this argument is:
-Poor people are poor because they are worthless to society in an irredeemable way, and their children will also be poor and worthless, except for like 2% of them.
For anyone to support this idea of ‘let the poor people sort themselves out’, you would need to be very sure of that point, because what you’re talking about is literally letting millions die based upon it.
In my experience I don’t believe that is true, but our experiences are anecdotal bullshit really, and to make a decision that is a death sentence for millions, the experiences of one person who has personally observed at most 0.2% of the poor is not enough.
This whole line of reasoning isn’t that different from ‘lets stop all the stupid people from breeding’ or ‘the jews are ruining society, lets kill them all’.
To support any kind of immoral decisions like these, the amount of proof you need should be very high, and I don’t think you have it or you would have presented it here.
Given that we don’t truly have enough evidence for a firm decision either way(and the amount we would need is significant) you have to agree that we should stray on the side of caution, and decide not to kill millions.
At this juncture it is not clear that poor people will just spawn more and more poor people in a destructive cycle, it is very possible that given the right kinds of help many or even most of their offspring could slowly climb out of poverty and end up being a boon to society. At one point in history it was only upper class and lower class. The middle class came from the lower class. This idea of poor people climbing out of poverty is neither unreasonable nor unheard of.
I urge you to rethink your ideas. Humans, even poor ones, are more complex creatures than you are giving them credit for. The world is gray, not black and white.
They’re not being actively killed, we would be letting them die. You would need to prove that they are redeemable in order to convince others to feed and clothe the poor.
The burden of proof rests on those who assert the impoverished are valuable, despite the appearance that they are not. Since we don’t have enough evidence either way (as you said), then it would make more since to let them live or die. We should stray on the side of caution and stop supporting them.
INDIVIDUAL humans are complex creatures, maybe, but large groups of humans are just like groups of any other animal.
So it isn’t immoral for you to sit there and watch another man bleed to death when you could easily save their life?
If you did a quick search I have no doubt that you could find a lot of people who came from nothing to make some valuable additions to society. I wonder how many we kill through inaction.
You are the one talking about taking the more drastic action of letting millions die based upon nothing but your experience with a statistically insignificant fraction of poor people.
I have a hard time understanding why given an immoral and a humane choice, neither of which side has enough evidence to draw a conclusion(though there are quite a few examples of poor people becoming not poor throughout history) you would pick the immoral choice over the humane choice.
Morality is for children. Instead, think about which choice makes more sense in the long term. Keep in mind that morals came to exist as a way of explaining to people what behaviors make for the best society. It’s possible that those morals have lost their goal and don’t work or don’t apply.
Sure, it’s possible for a poor person to become rich, no one suggested we rob them of this opportunity to overcome their place in life. There have always been great people who didn’t come from affluent backgrounds, but that’s no reason to assume that every prole could be the great philosopher, leader, scientist or artist.
quote: “You are the one talking about taking the more drastic ACTION of LETTING millions die” – This is an oxymoron. Charity/Welfare/Free Healthcare is the action. I say we not take it since there is no evidence that it will help in the long-term.
I don’t think personal experience with individual poor is really that important. If they currently live in an environment where it’s possible to overcome their poverty, and after several generations they have not, they have demonstrated their value to society.
This is an exaggeration, but seriously entertain this idea for a moment: If we euthanized everyone in the prisons (even though some may turn out to be innocent) and everyone in the ghettos (even thought some may be good, productive people), what would the total effect on the world be tomorrow. Don’t think whether it’s morally right or wrong based on what you’ve been taught by TV, think about what the actually effect would be. Fewer dumb, destructive, parasitic people?
+ And to your earlier post, the world is complicated and gray, I know, but at the end of the day, you make one choice or another and one thing happens or another (black and white).
Don’t you realize that this is the exact line of reasoning that led to the holocaust and countless other atrocities through history.
Claiming morality “is for children” is strange because if morality doesn’t matter then what does matter? I mean is it more important that we can afford a tv that is 1 inch larger than some kid getting food to eat? I’m not suggesting we put our own security at risk for the sake of morality here, but I do think we should try to make this world better for other people if we can. I mean, the other choice is really doing greedy/selfish things, and I guess if that’s what people want to do then saying morality is for children is a good way to justify that.
If you killed everyone in the ghettos and prisons you would create a huge vacuum of the people who do the undesirable jobs. All the mexicans who stand on the corner every day waiting to be offered construction jobs wouldn’t be there, people who work at circle K’s, walmarts, etc. Janitorial work, the list goes on and on. This would make everything more expensive because employers would be forced to pay the people who would come and do these jobs more.(supply and demand)
but anyway, back to the point. Many, or even most poor children wouldn’t necessarily stay poor if they were given similar opportunities to middle or upper class children. The valedictorian of Fortier(the public high school for basically the poor in new orleans) failed the graduate exit exam because while i’m sure she’s not bright she definitely was given a terrible education. As it stands many poor people are being trapped in their poverty by the system. They have to pay more than us for laundry, to cash checks, and to buy nearly any commodity. They don’t have vehicles so they can’t easily access a bank, can’t afford a laundry machine, are forced to use the corner store to buy their food which is much more expensive then wal-mart. Because of their poverty they sometimes are essentially forced to resort to cash advances that have like 700-3000% interest rates. Also they have to buy many things on credit which is far more expensive then it would otherwise be. I’m not suggesting that these people would otherwise be rocket scientists, but they could provide useful services to society like being a cop or a firefighter or a secretary. This article i think referred to poor people’s IQ’s being too low to be cops, but peoples IQ’s improve with education.
My point is that its not a fair system for these people who are trapped in poverty, because it is very hard to escape from it if you never learned how to speak correctly or even read necessarily. If you can’t speak the way educated white people do it would be pretty difficult to succeed in a job interview. To write them off and just say it’s 100% their fault isn’t true, and we could do things to fix the system so that people could escape poverty and contribute to society.
Somehow the entire modern world except for America can afford to give everyone health insurance. These plans right now to expand health insurance cost very little compared to the Iraq war which few people had a problem paying for at the time.
Also wasn’t one of the reasons we used to justify invading Iraq because Saddam was doing immoral things to Iraqis like testing weapons on the kurds, torturing people and suppressing dissent through force?
On the other hand, many people who arent poor are mercenary in their pursuit of careers & money in this age when much of the middle class is divorced, cultureless & individualistic, so Poor vs Non-poor is a false dichotomy TODAY. Killing the poor doesnt help get rid of negative people. Its not like before Women’s Lib, when all you needed to make it was to work hard, live a modest family life & accumulate savings & only the neurotic were poor. They still are but today they are also our elites.
I’d have to agree with much of this. There are knuckleheads all over the socio-economic spectrum. Look at our celebrity culture. People are making millions being a**es and narcissists. And many people with money are supporting this reality by buying into it for their own emotional needs. And many others are the support networks that sustains such a messed up system because they are getting rich off it, and also feeding their own egos.
Basically, I think we’ve come to a point where the masses have no depth of being and are short identities and senses of self so the pop-culture reality has manufactured these for sale that countless people are sopping up, and collectively it is a detriment. And rich and poor alike are buying into this game because inside they are missing something.
People are hosed all across the board, and the greedy are raking it in because emotional desperate and lost people are an easy sell. Just give them an identity to grab onto that feeds their shallow ego and narcissistic needs and they’ll pay you all you ask as long as you keep feeding them their fix.
Welcome to the modern digital world.
http://www.amerika.org/2009/ecocide/global-warming-controversy-is-a-problem/comment-page-1/#comment-766
[...] the obvious logical fallacy argument applies, along with the defensive individualistic rant. One hundred billion (cue Dr. Evil [...]