Trove of Free Neuroscience Papers Investigating Sex Difference

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jnr.v95.1-2/issuetoc?platform=hootsuite

An Essay called "A Complicated Attempt to Clarify the Relationship between “Gender” and Sex”, with Particular Reference to Transgenderism"

A Complicated Attempt to Clarify the Relationship between “Gender” and Sex”, with Particular Reference to Transgenderism

Few people seem to realise that the traditional – and still most popular – feminist usage of the word “gender” (as a technical term separate from the specific feminist definition of biological “sex”) is polysemous, having at least two senses worth demarcating. That is to say, the standard first-and-second-wave, pre-queer-theory feminist (including ‘radical feminist’) usage of "gender", used most popularly in the construction “Gender is a social construct”, seems to combine a conception of the concept gender as:

a)      The totality of behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated or bound up (in popular culture, high culture and in our mental models, to varying extents) uniquely with each biological sex (/with the much smaller group of intersex or trans-people readily perceived as women and the much smaller group of intersex or trans-people readily perceived as men),

&

b)      The totality of behaviours and mannerisms actually practised more often by one biological sex (/people successfully performing in the distinguishing way that biological sex performs) plus the totality of preferences actually held more often by one biological sex (/people successfully performing in the distinguishing way that biological sex performs).

There might even be a third, ‘internalist’ sense worth demarcating, namely, “gender” as referring to many people’s folk-psychological essentialism about males and females, as two ‘Platonic’ types. This is related to conception (a), because the essentialist categories ‘male’ and ‘female’ in people’s minds are a distillation of all the behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences associated with each sex. It is different because it is not a conception of gender as an ‘external’, ‘social’ entity, but a type of mental category.

 When non-queer-theoretic feminists advocate that we should “smash the gender binary”, I think the majority of them are probably using all these conceptions of gender. That is, they are saying:

i)                    that there should no longer be any behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated with each sex in popular culture, high culture or our mental models (which covers the third sense)

&

ii)                  that (as a means to achieving this end) we should eliminate the average statistical differences in behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences between the two sexes.

Now, even though the word “smash” is a very strong one, I assume that some of these feminists do not even mean anything this extreme when they use this language; some of them probably just mean that we should reduce the number of behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated with each sex (or reduce the strength of the associations), and that we should reduce the extent to which men and women behave differently and have different desires.

I will now discuss another feminist usage of the word “gender” that conflicts with this one. In order to facilitate the comparison, I will henceforth call this conception of the relationship between gender and sex the ‘classical gender doctrine’, and call its proponents ‘classical feminists’ (despite the fact that many different types of feminists have held this doctrine).

As the classical feminist Rebecca Reilly-Cooper notes [https://sexandgenderintro.com/], the standard ‘queer theory’ or ‘trans’ usage of “gender” (very popular on Tumblr and among young people generally, used in constructions like “gender comes from within”), unmistakeably implies something very different: that gender is a metaphysically absolute, phenomenological phenomenon logically independent of sex (sex and gender may typically align but there is no necessary relationship between them). Interestingly, whilst many people who adopt this conception of gender along these lines may also talk of “smashing the gender binary”, Reilly-Cooper is, it seems to me, correct in her argument that this conception of gender crucially depends upon the existence of the gender binary – more precisely, on an ‘essentialist’ or ‘Platonic’ conceptualisation of ‘men’ and ‘women’ as two fundamentally separate types. Why? Because, without the assumed framework of gender binarity, it is impossible to make sense of this usage at all: in particular, it is impossible to make sense, without the gender binary, of a severely gender dysphoric trans person’s claim that they are “in the wrong body”. Both a trans woman’s claim that she has “always been a woman” or a trans man’s claim that he has “always been a man” assume that there is an essence of each gender, because the conception of gender involved is not merely (b) from above. That is, the gender dysphoric who makes such claims is never merely saying that they enact behaviours and mannerisms more often enacted by the biological sex they “want to be” and have preferences and moods more often held by the biological sex they “want to be”. Clearly, that is not what these people mean by these locutions (after all, there are highly camp man and highly butch women who are not gender-dysphoric). Instead, these people are adopting the essentialist conception of gender.

So even if some people who use what I’ve called the ‘queer-theoretic’ usage of gender might also advocate the smashing of the “gender binary” (in favour of a societal adoption of, say, the understanding of gender as a “spectrum”), no sense can be made of this. In any case, the idea of the gender binary being replaced by a gender spectrum is incoherent. It can only be understood if one understands that “gender” is really being used to mean something very close to “personality”.

In my view, the biggest locus of confusion in all feminist debate is over the question of to what extent “gender”, on the classical feminist definition, can be separated from “sex” on the classical feminist definition – which is often very poorly rephrased as the question of whether gender is partly “innate” or merely “socially constructed”. I think that once we get clear on this, we will see that both groups of feminists are in error.

It seems to me that most people who weigh in on this debate think that there ae really only two possible doctrines. The first of these doctrines is what many feminists call "biological determinism" and advocates call "realism": that there are "innate" differences in psychological traits (which manifest in differing behaviours) between the two sexes. The second of these doctrines is what everyone calls "social constructionism about gender". Unfortunately, this notion is very difficult to explicate with any degree of precision. Probably the best way of explaining it is to observe that it is committed to the following counterfactual: if we somehow raised a generation in a society without any “gender” in my first sense (without any behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences routinely associated with each sex), then there would be no “gender” in my second sense (average differences in behaviours, mannerisms and psychological preferences between the two sexes).

I will claim that these doctrines are not the only possible options, that both are too vague to be taken seriously, and that the best doctrine on this question requires a significantly more expressive vocabulary than is used in the standard discourse.

Both the idea of a trait being “innate” and the idea of something being “socially constructed” are crude notions – although the latter is far cruder than the former.

First, innateness. As Paul Griffiths has argued in a paper called “What is Innateness”? [http://philpapers.org/rec/GRIWII], innateness is really a folk-biological concept which yokes together a cluster of biologically independent properties, which he calls “developmental fixity”, “species nature” and “intended outcome”. There are, of course, scientifically respectable descendants of these ideas: developmental canalisation, species-typicality and adaptiveness. But, obviously, these are still biologically independent properties.

In the paper, Griffiths quickly runs through some of the complexities of developmental biology and ecology which make a mockery of the idea that this folk concept of “innateness” is a scientifically serious term. He points out that, whilst the traditional notion of “universality” (which he says should be re-phrased “typicality” in any case) conflates “the two very different properties of being monomorphic and being pancultural”, “many pan-cultural traits, such as hair colour or susceptibility to early onset diabetes, are polymorphic” [74]. He observes that “neither being monomorphic neither being pancultural has any very strong connection to being the result of adaptive evolution” [74].  Different cultural environments, for example, “can systematically induce different developmental outcomes”, and “in this respect different cultures can resemble the different ecological zones which induce the same species of plant to develop into different ectomorphs, for example, a low-growing shrub at high altitudes and an upright tree at lower altitudes” [74]. He then notes that “The relationship between having an evolutionary explanation and exhibiting developmental fixity is equally problematic” [74]. As he writes,

“Developmental psychobiologists since Lehrmann have documented innumerable cases in which evolved developmental outcomes require a rich and highly specific developmental environment.  In rhesus macaques, for example, the recognition of emotional reactions in conspecifics and the ability to cooperate in agonistic interaction depend on infant social interaction for their development (Mason, 1985)” [74].

Finally, he points out that it is an accepted orthodoxy in developmental science that “universality and developmental fixity cannot be equated” [75].

 Now, it’s important to be clear about what exactly this means: it certainly does not mean that anyone using the word “innate” is saying something meaningless or incoherent (Andrew Ariew’s influential analysis of innateness as developmental canalisation does seem to be sufficient to defend the Chomskyan claim of the ‘innateness’ of the language faculty), but it does mean that the term itself, at least when left unclarified, is not fit for serious, scientific discourse. It is true that the well-known popular scientist Steven Pinker uses the term without much clarification in all his books. I think Pinker probably doesn’t worry about it too much because he’s an adaptationist rather than an Extended Evolutionary Synthesiser: he basically assumes that all developmentally canalised, species-typical or sex-typical psychological or behavioural traits are adaptive. But this is a mistake in any case.

Now “social construction”. The idea of a trait or set of traits being “socially constructed” is hideously unclear. It also seems to imply commitment to the related false dichotomies of biology versus culture, and nature versus nurture. I’m not a greedy reductionist, but it seems to me that claiming that a given trend in human psychology or behaviour is “socially constructed” as opposed to “innate” is basically just a way of avoiding any serious, scientific debate. It’s a slogan. Invoking this vocabulary is a way of jumping up to a higher level of abstraction where biology doesn’t exist (despite the fact that we are biological creatures, not angels, and “society” is a creation of our collective intentionality as biological creatures).

But I know what you’re thinking: surely I would accept some claims involving this vocabulary of “social construction”, for example, the claim that sport is a social construction, or the claim that at least certain features of gender according to conception (b) are socially constructed, like the wearing of dresses by women and the wearing of pants by men.

My response to this line of objection is, by necessity, quite complicated. When I don my analytic philosopher’s cap for the claim about “sport” – treating the statement as a serious academic-grade truth-claim rather than an everyday assertion (a speech act) – I really do think that the vocabulary is still too vague. What does it even mean to say that sport is a social construction? From what I understand, sport or sport-like practices (eg ritualistic warfare in hunter-gatherer societies) are common to a vast number of cultures. Moreover, I see a very high level of plausibility in the common claim that sport exploits the same basic human urges, instincts and proclivities as practices that we are much less inclined to call “social constructs”, like hunting and tribal warfare (male aggression, male belligerence, in-group-out-group psychology (tribalist psychology), as well as exploiting various other basic human desires (the urge for camaraderie and community, loyalty,  thrill-seeking, etc) that nobody calls social constructs. So what does this mean? Well, it means, I think, that to say that “sport is a social construction” is to tell you nothing.

I don’t think that the claim that the association between women and dresses, and the association between men and pants, is “socially constructed” is as unhelpful as that about sport being socially constructed. The reason is that I think this one is easy enough to analyse counterfactually: there is overwhelming reason to think that this gendered sartorial association might easily have been reversed, both because dress (like car-driving) presumably played no role in our evolution, and because the gendered sartorial associations have been different in other cultures (think kilts). It’s more like saying that a specific sport – say, cricket – is “socially constructed”, which similarly admits of easy counterfactual analysis. But “gender”, on the classical feminist definition, is a lot more than just clothes. Ask a slightly different question and suddenly the verdict is very fuzzy, and suddenly this vocabulary of “social construction” begins to seem too nebulous again. Is women’s greater (average) preoccupation with fashion socially constructed? Is it a social construction that makes women more attracted to, say, floral patterns? Is it a social construction that women are more preoccupied with appearance in general? From what I understand, a greater preoccupation with appearance among women – a greater interest in self-decoration and self-beautification – is by no means culturally specific to “the West”. And, of course, there are some plausible evo-psych explanations for why this might have been selected for. This should be enough to give us pause about applying the same straightforward counterfactual analysis in answering these questions.

So, seeing as both these terms are unhelpful, let’s try to actually investigate the question of the relationship between gender and sex without using either.

In The Blank Slate, the main consideration Steven Pinker adduces in favour of the existence of “innate sex differences” is the existence of certain allegedly pan-cultural behavioural and psychological differences between the sexes (and pan-cultural gender stereotypes). Obviously, he also thinks that the hypothesis of innate sex differences is supported by other considerations, like the evolutionary significance of sexual dimorphism (this gives us a reason to expect some average sex differences in behaviour and psychology), and the obvious role of sex hormones in affecting not only contemporaneous behaviour but in affecting the brain over time (prenatally and then again in adolescence) [http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jnr.23809/epdf]. Pinker may also discuss the extremely compelling evidence of developmentally canalised average psychological sex differences that comes from cases of male babies born with the rare condition known as cloacal exstrophy and surgically “re-assigned” to the female sex at birth (I can’t remember if Pinker discusses this (and I only ever listened to the audiobook version of the work, on Youtube)). Here’s what I wrote about this in my “Formal Defence of Feminism”:

“One of the most compelling pieces of evidence that male and female brains really are different from birth comes from babies born with the extremely rare condition known as cloacal exstrophy. Male babies born with this extremely rare condition are typically reassigned to the female gender at birth. William Reiner, a child psychiatrist and urologist at John Hopkins Hospital, was one of these unfortunate babies. As his name gives away, his role as a girl caused him great anguish, leading him to re-reassign as soon as he could. No doubt influenced by his own history, Reiner started doing research on the psychology of babies born with cloacal exstrophy in 1993. A longitudinal study he conducted on male-born, female-assigned children brought dramatic results. Of the 14 male-born, female-assigned children he followed, 7 had declared they were boys by their teenage years, 5 spontaneously. In the non-spontaneous cases, the change merely came after the parents came clean about the birth. There may even have been more cases of gender dysphoria that emerged later; I don’t know, because my information comes from 2003, in Michael J. Bailey’s controversial book The Man who would be Queen. In any case, it is astronomically unlikely that this massive anomaly (7 out of 14 with extreme gender dysphoria) is a coincidence.”

 Pinker’s main source for pan-cultural sex differences in psychology and behaviour (along with a host of other things) is what appears to be his favourite anthropological conspectus: a 1991 book called Human Universals, by a man named Donald Brown. A summary of the absolute cognitive (emotional, intellectual), and social generalisations Brown thinks one can make about human beings can be found here: http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversals.pdf. Crucially, for our purposes, Brown claims that in all societies ever documented by anthropologists or found in the historical record, there have been gender roles, males have dominated the political sphere, males have been more prone to violence (particularly young men), women have been more liable to gossip, and women have been more involved in child-rearing. This does give us good reason to think that there’s something about the male Y chromosome and testosterone that encourages traits of dominance and aggression, and something about the female biological endowment that encourages traits of empathy and sensitivity and possibly greater sociality or geniality.

 One interesting theory that I have about sex differences, which seemingly no-one else ever entertains, is that our very consciousness of the different bodies of males and females – women’s consciousness of being smaller, on average – may help to shape our psychology in a gendered way. It is a very real possibility (in fact, I think it's a probability) that the very fact of men's being taller, more muscular and having deeper voices than the other, softer and smaller sex, affects male psychology to a nontrivial extent – subtly encouraging males to feel more confident and act in a more dominant way – and affects female psychology to a nontrivial extent also – subtly encouraging females to feel less confident and act in a more meek way. One might take it as a falsification of this hypothesis that the very shortest males are often the most cocky, but even if this is true, I don’t think it counts as a falsification, because my claim is subtler: I think that the more abstract idea of the male being bigger and taller, and the female being smaller and weaker, may affect our own self-perceptions as specific instantiations of one of these two Platonic forms, even if we don’t share the attributes of the forms.

So what’s my conclusion about sex difference? I think that there almost certainly are at least some developmentally canalised, species-typical average sex differences, the majority of which are probably adaptations. Environment obviously matters a massive amount in biology generally, but I think the evidence does suggest that biological females are, on average, across socio-cultural environments, more likely to be caring and nurturant, and males are, on average, across socio-cultural environments, more likely to be cocky, cold and violent (incidentally, evidence suggests that males in the West are at least three times more likely to be psychopaths). This further suggests that these traits may be adaptive.

Relatedly, it does seem to me that the role of ‘cultural environment’ (gender apartheid in toys and kid’s clothes, and the massive role of gender stereotypes in popular culture) in shaping gender is very likely overestimated by classical feminists. Consider these extracts from my “Formal Defence of Feminism”, in which I adduce the evidence which seems to impugn this thesis:

1.) “One reason for being sceptical about the power of corporations to shape gender roles and stereotypes is that there is some evidence that the more you try to eliminate old-fashioned gender stereotypes within a free society, the stronger they become. In fact, there is a fairly strong statistical link between a country’s success in reaching feminist goals and the divergence of its citizen’s preferences along gendered lines. This article is a concise, even-handed exposition of the evidence for this: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/do-women-really-have-it-better-in-sweden/article15552596/. The most important point is found at the back-end of the article, and I’ll quote it here:

“Studies of people in more than 60 countries around the world have found that much of gendered behaviour is culturally universal – men in all cultures tend to be more assertive and less emotionally expressive, while women are more nurturing and co-operative. But according to one startling research report, the divergence between male and female personality traits is more marked in highly developed countries.

The researchers believe the reason is that people in rich and educated societies are freer to be self-expressive. As writer Christina Hoff Sommers speculated a few months back in The Atlantic, “What if gender difference turns out to be a phenomenon not of oppression, but rather of social well-being?”” 

2.) “There are more female science undergraduates in Sweden than America, but they fall away at postgraduate levels quite dramatically. A nice paper from Leibniz University in Hannover analyses the data on gender representation in STEM across the world: http://www.genderandstem.com/fileadmin/user_upload_genderstem/docs/KathrinLeuze_GenderSTEM_Berlin2014.pdf. The authors of this paper ultimately find four correlates of higher female STEM aspirations: better school performance of girls relative to boys; a small service sector; less progressive social norms (Japan does extremely well, for example); and lower general occupational sex segregation. So the picture is complicated.”

I would clearly not want to claim that socialisation and enculturation are not important (no, boys are not innately attracted to blue, and we should certainly not be nihilists about getting more women into STEM subjects, or reducing rape or domestic violence). But I do think that the case for the existence of some developmentally canalised, species-typical sex differences is pretty strong. I think Cordelia Fine is very successful in arguing that evidence of cognitive differences between men and women is extremely questionable in her book Delusions of Gender, but I am not sold on her total scepticism about all differences. Given all the considerations in favour of the existence of some developmentally canalised, species-typical sex differences, I think that the inference to the best explanation is that there are some species-typical, developmentally canalised sex differences.

So what does this mean for my position on the conflict between the classical feminists and the ‘queer’ feminists? Well, as I said before, I reject both positions. I reject the classical feminist idea that gender is “socially constructed” because it’s too vague. I also reject a metaphysically absolute conception of gender identity which I attributed to ‘queer theorists’, because I am not an essentialist. I don’t think there’s an essence to being a woman, or an essence to being a man (no scientific naturalist does). I therefore don’t think it makes any sense (strictly speaking) to say that one has “always been a woman” or “always been a man”, and I definitely don’t accept the idea of a “gender spectrum”, which, as I said, is incoherent.

On the other hand, I do think that the idea that individuals can be fundamentally more masculine or more feminine makes perfect sense, because there are average developmentally canalised psychological sex differences – because there are neuroarchitectural and neurochemical features that men are more likely to be born with and neuroarchitectural and neurochemical features that women are more likely to be born with (I discussed neurosanatonomical evidence of sex differences in my “Formal Defence of Feminism”). I think that being born an effeminate man or a butch woman has a very large amount to do with prenatal hormones (Baron-Cohen has some compelling evidence of this). I do think that we will probably find some genetic correlates of homosexuality, and I think that sexual orientation and “gender identity” very likely are linked [https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV261Bailey_UQ_Copy.pdf].

Crucially, I think that accepting this basic idea that there are developmentally canalised average sex differences is the only way of making sense of the psychology of strong gender non-conformists: the psychology, that is, of ‘camp’ men, ‘butch’ women and gender dysphorics. The best way a classical feminist could try to explain the existence of camp men, butch women and gender dysphorics would be to say that all humans are born with different psychological and behavioural dispositions (i.e. rejecting some kind of extreme empiricism or blank slate doctrine) but to insist that there is no average grouping of these dispositions by sex. On this view, gender non-conformists would have to be the group of people who are harder to socialise into the gender norms by virtue of the fact that they just happen to be born with a set of dispositions that strongly match the socially constructed norms for the opposite gender. But this is an unnecessarily convoluted explanation (completely defying Occam’s Razor) and, crucially, implies commitment to the false dichotomy between nature and nurture – imagining that it could be the case that a whole gender system could be essentially divorced from biology, which is odd given that we are biology; we are organic systems, built up molecule by molecule in haphazard, stochastic processes, constantly affected by environmental inputs, according to genetic ‘instructions’ which have been altered by aeons of evolutionary history. There is no personality without a brain, and, whilst it is fair to say “the brain is shaped by culture”, it is also fair to say, on another level of abstraction, neurochemistry is independent of “culture”, because on the neurochemical level of abstraction, all there is is chemistry. Chemical reactions aren’t socially constructed. Genetic mutations aren’t socially constructed. Phenotypic expression isn’t socially constructed. Epigenetic effects aren’t socially constructed. Hormones affect gene expression and alter brain chemistry, and hormones do this in complete obliviousness to pop music video clips or children’s toys.

One must never lose sight of the fact that we’re not that different from any other biological organism (culture isn’t some magical cloud that overrides biology), and the classical feminist doctrine seems to entail that we are very different.

So whilst I don’t think that it really makes sense for a trans person to say “I have always been [the gender which doesn’t match my sex]”, I think it may almost makes sense, if they are a trans person belonging to the group Ray Blanchard calls “homosexual transsexuals”, rather than “auto-gynephiles”. Most homosexual transsexuals probably do have a brain that is more likely to be possessed by the opposite sex. Obviously, it is something in their biology that makes them want to transition (it might not be genetic but it could be prenatal), because we are biological creatures. And it is something that resisted all the social conditioning that says that we should conform to gender norms.

Exhibit A, Exhibit B: Two mysticist, counter-Enlightenment extremists

https://twitter.com/sam_kriss
Sam Kriss: PoMo extremist, conty, self-described 'communist' (I discovered him through entertaining attacks on Neil deGrasse Tyson, Nick Cohen, Alain de Botton and Richard Dawkins, but I knew he was an idiot as soon as I got to the end of the funny vignette at the beginning of his Dawkins piece, when he started gibbering madly about Dawkins' epistemic naivety in a way that shouted, "I am a typical pre-Enlightenment, deranged English Lit Major who has forgotten that some people really do know things (with numbers and equations and all the rest of it)"). Basically, he is dangerously deranged (he is also very emotionally volatile, as one should expect from ideological extremists). He probably thinks that it is impossible to be a lunatic and have a vocabulary as large as he does, and know as much continental (German-Idealist and Parisian) philosophy as he does, but, if so, he is (need I say) wrong. He has never tried to think clearly about anything, and doesn't know how to. Indeed, he is such a muddled thinker that he thinks that there is no such thing as thinking clearly, and has described himself as an "epistemological nihilist". Obviously, it makes no sense to confidently declare oneself an epistemological nihilist, because asserting that no human knows anything is straightforwardly paradoxical, as any smart 8-year-old knows (of course, he'd probably deny that that's even what he means by "epistemological nihilist" (strictly a category error) but there is no other non-incoherent interpretation).  Kriss no doubt thinks that logic is a social construct (why would other cultures worry about coherence?). When I say "no doubt", I am only using slightly hyperbolic language: after all, in his Dawkins piece he talks contemptuously of Dawkins' faith in the "juridical categories" of "proof and evidence". It's both tragic and terrifying that he doesn't realise how (literally) insane this is.
He probably thinks that Bertrand Russell was a 'logocentrist', I know that he mocks "analytic philosophers" (yes, all of them), and I am sure he knows nothing of Bayesian epistemology. If he ever reads this, he will think it laughably Fedoraish, caricaturish, 'analytic' and epistemically naive. Just like a schizophrenic being told that the voices in his head aren't real.
Of course, Kriss also thinks everything is a joke, and spends almost all his time being sardonic and wry. No doubt being an epistemological nihilist is itself a joke. No doubt it doesn't matter to Kriss that it doesn't make any sense; indeed, that is probably part of its appeal...
Kriss rejects science and scientific scepticism (he probably thinks that the Enlightenment is "a myth" agrees with Sandra Harding that the Principia Mathematica is Newton's "rape manual", and thinks Galileo discovered nothing - or at least thinks it funny to adopt such positions, just as he thinks it's funny to be a flat-earther), he doesn't believe in interrogating his positions for weaknesses, and he doesn't believe in trying his best to proportion his beliefs to the evidence. In short, he's a PoMo lunatic.

https://twitter.com/kantbot2000
This is the Twitter profile of the guy who, in a video filmed in the centre of New York, uploaded to Youtube recently, claims that "Trump is a Kantian" who is going to "complete the system of German idealism" and raise "Thule" and "Atlantis" (with some help from "global cooling"). He is a full-time ironist (so much so that I suspect he no longer can tell the difference between his 'ironic' positions and his 'real' ones), a clever Alt-Right troll, a German idealist (who uses his apparent erudition as a means of trolling), a Trump supporter (I suspect there might have been an element of irony in this to start, but I think he enjoys being a Trump supporter (in particular, using his knowledge of German philosophy to exalt Trump)), and misogynist (this is transparent in his early blog posts). He is clearly a person who went off on the wrong path a long time ago, and has been unable to get back.

The Twitter feeds of these two young men are remarkably similar. They make similar ironic tweets and make similar quips. They have a similar sense of humour. They like appealing to esoterica in incongruous contexts as a means of generating laughs. They both know German idealist philosophy. They are both uninterested in rationality, and instead indulge radical mysticism.
They are both extremists.
Are they so different?

I hope that Sam Kriss read this, and I hope he doesn't laugh. But if he does read this, I know he will laugh. Until that preceding sentence, whereupon he will suddenly stop reading and experience a terrifying, earth-shattering epiphany. Upon the conclusion of this epiphany, he will immediately seek out the nearest book by B. Russell.

A Slapdash Bricolage of Reasons to Hate Sam Harris (mostly links to other critiques)

Why I do Criticise (and Despise) Samuel Harris

I think Sam Harris is highly intellectually lazy, appallingly illiterate (for a public ‘intellectual’, especially such a brash and vociferous one), highly delusional about his own rationality, unjustifiably arrogant in general, a very facile thinker, and an extremely specious, incompetent arguer. I do not think of them as an intelligent man, but an intellectual fraud. Incidentally, most of his acclaim and celebrity derives from young male fools between the ages of 13 and 20. He is the intellectual icon of pubescent male imbeciles.

In my time, I have gathered together a vast number of articles on Sam Harris’ intellectual and moral failings, and I have grouped them under headlines below, with accompanying thoughts. What follows is poorly structured and uneven, but it is still better than anything ever produced by Sam Harris (this is a joke).

Harris Taking Audaciously Strong Philosophical Stances without Serious Argument (The Moral Landscape and Free Will):

In his 2010 book, The Moral Landscape, Sam Harris argues that utilitarianism is right[1]; and that morality is objective and can be made scientific and empirical, by becoming (literally) a branch of neuroscience (which he claims will provide us with profound new insights into right and wrong, and will be able to cast a decisive vote on various fundamental dilemmas (giving the key to both explaining why FGM is wrong, and why US foreign policy is fine)). As it happens, the book is utterly atrocious, and his attempt to defend these idiotic theses is dismal.

Not all of the following reviews of this book exactly agree, and I don’t think I exactly exactly agree with any one of them. But together they paint a devastatingly clear picture of just how unbelievably sloppy, stupid, crass and arrogant Harris’ book really is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html
http://www.artisresearch.com/articles/Atran_Sam_Harriss_Guide.pdf

https://newhumanist.org.uk/2538/test-tube-truths

https://newrepublic.com/article/78546/the-facts-fetish-morality-science

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/blackburn-ethics-without-god-secularism-religion-sam-harris

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703882404575520062380030080

http://counterpoint.uchicago.edu/morals.html

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/05/12/science-right-and-wrong/

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com.au/2010/04/about-sam-harris-claim-that-science-can.html

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/be-wary-of-the-righteous-rationalist-we-should-reject-sam-harriss-claim-that-science-can-be-a-moral-guidepost/

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/review/the-moral-landscape

In 2012, Sam Harris published a monograph called Free Will in which he defends incompatibilism and the view that “free will is an illusion”, but without engaging seriously with any philosophical literature or indeed any serious counter-arguments whatsoever. Daniel Dennett wrote a sterling, highly scathing review of this stain on philosophy:

https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/reflections-on-free-will

Sam Harris’ Views on Foreign Policy, World Affairs and Islam:

One of the many reasons why Harris’ infamous email exchange with Chomsky should be considered as nothing more than a total humiliation for the party under discussion is that, in the correspondence (or battering), Harris doesn’t make a single argument that Chomsky hadn’t answered in print countless times going back literally decades. Harris only has one point to make, that we should make exceptions for US war crimes because of his state’s “benign intentions”. But even if Harris had even just read Chomsky’s famous 1967 essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”, he’d have answers to his concerns. Consider this passage from near the end of Chomsky’s famous piece:

“AS A FINAL EXAMPLE of this failure of skepticism, consider the remarks of Henry Kissinger in his concluding remarks at the Harvard-Oxford television debate on America’s Vietnam policies. He observed, rather sadly, that what disturbs him most is that others question not our judgment, but our motives—a remarkable comment by a man whose professional concern is political analysis, that is, analysis of the actions of governments in terms of motives that are unexpressed in official propaganda and perhaps only dimly perceived by those whose acts they govern. No one would be disturbed by an analysis of the political behavior of the Russians, French, or Tanzanians questioning their motives and interpreting their actions by the long-range interests concealed behind their official rhetoric. But it is an article of faith that American motives are pure, and not subject to analysis (see note ¹). Although it is nothing new in American intellectual history—or, for that matter, in the general history of imperialist apologia—this innocence becomes increasingly distasteful as the power it serves grows more dominant in world affairs, and more capable, therefore, of the unconstrained viciousness that the mass media present to us each day. We are hardly the first power in history to combine material interests, great technological capacity, and an utter disregard for the suffering and misery of the lower orders. The long tradition of naiveté and self-righteousness that disfigures our intellectual history, however, must serve as a warning to the third world, if such a warning is needed, as to how our protestations of sincerity and benign intent are to be interpreted.”

If Harris had read just one passage like this, he would have seen that there was no point to the debate, because he would have realised that Chomsky has been facing this same kind of objection to his radical foreign policy stance (usually in far more sophisticated form) going all the way back to the very beginning of his political-activist turn. And it is Chomsky’s utter disgust to have to engage with Harris’ trite, incompetently presented arguments which explains the tone of complete contempt he adopts with Harris throughout the exchange, reaching a peak in the vicious mordancy of the longest email he sends:

“I am sorry you are unwilling to retract your false claim that I “ignore the moral significance of intentions.” Of course I did, as you know.  Also, I gave the appropriate answer, which applies accurately to you in the al-Shifa case, the very case in question.

If you had read further before launching your accusations, the usual procedure in work intended to be serious, you would have discovered that I also reviewed the substantial evidence about the very sincere intentions of Japanese fascists while they were devastating China, Hitler in the Sudetenland and Poland, etc.  There is at least as much reason to suppose that they were sincere as Clinton was when he bombed al-Shifa.  Much more so in fact.  Therefore, if you believe what you are saying, you should be justifying their actions as well.  I also reviewed other cases, pointing out that professing benign intentions is the norm for those who carry out atrocities and crimes, perhaps sincerely – and surely more plausibly than in this case.  And that only the most abject apologists justify the actions on the grounds that perpetrators are adopting the normal stance of criminals.

I am also sorry that you evade the fact that your charge of “moral equivalence” was flatly false, as you know.

And in particular, I am sorry to see your total refusal to respond to the question raised at the outset of the piece you quoted.  The scenario you describe here is, I’m afraid, so ludicrous as to be embarrassing.  It hasn’t even the remotest relation to Clinton’s decision to bomb al-Shifa – not because they had suddenly discovered anything remotely like what you fantasize here, or for that matter any credible evidence at all, and by sheer coincidence, immediately after the Embassy bombings for which it was retaliation, as widely acknowledged.  That is truly scandalous.

And of course they knew that there would be major casualties.  They are not imbeciles, but rather adopt a stance that is arguably even more immoral than purposeful killing, which at least recognizes the human status of the victims, not just killing ants while walking down the street, who cares?

In fact, as you would know if you deigned to read before launching accusations, they were informed at once by Kenneth Roth of HRW about the impending humanitarian catastrophe, already underway.  And of course they had far more information available than HRW did.

Your own moral stance is revealed even further by your complete lack of concern about the apparently huge casualties and the refusal even to investigate them.

As for Clinton and associates being “genuine humanitarians,” perhaps that explains why they were imposing sanctions on Iraq so murderous that both of the highly respected international diplomats who administered the “Oil for food” program resigned in protest because they regarded them as “genocidal,” condemning Clinton for blocking testimony at the UN Security Council.  Or why he poured arms into Turkey as it was carrying out a horrendous attack on its Kurdish population, one of the worst crimes of the ‘90s.  Or why he shifted Turkey from leading recipient of arms worldwide (Israel-Egypt excepted) to Colombia, as soon as the Turkish atrocities achieved their goal and while Colombia was leading the hemisphere by far in atrocious human rights violations.  Or why he authorized the Texaco Oil Company to provide oil to the murderous Haitian junta in violation of sanctions.  And on, and on, as you could learn if you bothered to read before launching accusations and professing to talk about “ethics” and “morality.”

I’ve seen apologetics for atrocities before, but rarely at this level – not to speak of the refusal to withdraw false charges, a minor fault in comparison.

Since you profess to be concerned about “God-intoxicated sociopaths,” perhaps you can refer me to your condemnation of the perpetrator of by far the worst crime of this millennium because God had instructed him that he must smite the enemy.

No point wasting time on your unwillingness to respond to my request that you reciprocate by referring me to what I have written citing your published views.  If there is anything I’ve written that is remotely as erroneous as this – putting aside moral judgments – I’ll be happy to correct it.

Plainly there is no point pretending to have a rational discussion.  But I do think you would do your readers a favor if you presented your tale about why Clinton bombed al-Shifa and his grand humanitarianism.  That is surely the least you can do, given your refusal to withdraw what you know to be completely false charges and a display of moral and ethical righteousness.”

As Harris admits in the exchange, he had indeed done no reading on Chomsky beyond Chomsky’s essay on 9/11. As Chomsky might say, “this is scandalous”. Even leaving aside the incredible intellectual laziness and arrogance of this failure to read up on his rival’s voluminous writings (and voluminous published speech- and interview transcripts), it was extremely imprudent. After all, Chomsky’s IQ is two standard deviations above Harris’ and he is far more erudite and far more knowledgeable. Harris should have known that he was going to get an almighty ass-whooping. The reality is, of course, that Harris wasn’t even equipped with the intellectual tools to understand Chomsky’s position. He clearly didn’t (and doesn’t) understand Chomsky’s ‘Leninist’ views about the dominant role of the military-industrial complex and the interests of US capital in determining foreign policy and foreign policy objectives for the US state (Chomsky, like all left-wing radicals, is an exponent of institutional analysis and sees world affairs as a complex interplay of various competing institutional incentives, with individuals being little more than cogs, and “intention” certainly not being an individualistic affair (it doesn’t matter if Bill Clinton is a good man or not)). Harris clearly didn’t (and doesn’t) understand Chomsky’s historical perspective on US atrocities and their propagandistic analysis by patriotic intellectuals; Harris clearly hadn’t read Chomsky’s endless tracts about how US imperialism is not all that different from that of the British Empire or other empires form history, and how the intelligentsia within imperialist regimes always employ the same propaganda and take the same highly hypocritical stances, failing to apply even a semblance of moral consistency in analysis (Chomsky has often discussed John Stuart Mill’s writings about the unprecedented enlightened justice of the British occupation of India). In fact, it seems to me highly likely that Harris was (and is) just massively ignorant about the things his state has actually done in the world since 1950: in particular, the devastation his great nation has wreaked in South-East Asia, Central America and the Middle East, resulting in roughly 40 million deaths (a conservative estimate) [http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066]. I find it hard to believe that Harris would hold the views he does (“US is a well-intentioned giant”) if he knew the true horrors of Agent Orange and the US bombings in Vietnam, and the vast numbers of civilian deaths caused by his great benevolent nation; if he knew the facts about the US carpet bombings of Cambodia and Laos, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and led directly (in Cambodia) to the rise of Pol Pot; if he knew about the US-backed Indonesian occupation of East Timor and genocide; if he knew what it was like to be a Palestinian living in the hellscape of the Gaza strip; if he knew about the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala on behalf of the United Fruit Company; if he knew about the obstruction of democracy in Chile culminating in the 1973 CIA-backed coup which established Augusto Pinochet’s murderous military dictatorship (a dictatorship which was advised on economics by Milton Friedman and his Chicago Boys); if he knew about the obstruction of democracy in El Salvador throughout the 1970s; if he knew about the US support from 1979 of the deadly right-wing Contras against the economically successful left-wing socialist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government in Nicaragua; if he knew about the invasion of Panama in December 1989; if he knew about the immensely destructive consequences of the ‘liberalisation’ policies foisted on the Third World and post-Soviet Russia by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, organisations run in the interests of US finance capital; if he knew about the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, which resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and led to a brutal response by Serbian forces on the ground; if he knew the massively counterproductive and horrifying consequences of the War in Afghanistan (“Operation Enduring Freedom”); and if he knew the reality of the Iraq War, in the main three-year phase of which possibly 665,000 Iraqis died (etc).

The fact that Harris did initiate this dialogue with Chomsky in such a state of abject ignorance has always pissed me off.  Did Harris really think that his asinine counterfactual thought experiments (imagine if circumstances were radically different from the actual circumstances in which the bad act occurred (and the bad act is ever likely to occur), then maybe the act would be morally justified) and his repetitive employment of the word “intention” (and refusing to actually engage with statistics, facts and evidence, refusing to even enable the falsification of his treasured assumption of US state-benignity) was going to change Chomsky’s mind? Was he really that arrogant? Was he really that deranged?

The most bizarre thing about the exchange is, of course, that Sam Harris adopts an outright anti-utilitarian, anti-consequentialist position in order to conduct his apologetics for the US, effectively saying that statistics of dead and maimed, and facts about the devastating consequences of US bombings and invasions, don’t matter. This blatant contradiction of the stance he takes in The Moral Landscape represents irrationality and hypocrisy at an almost unbelievable extreme.

Harris has clearly never made any effort to try to adopt the perspective of a non-American, in order to avoid the abject moral hypocrisy that characterises the imperialist attitude. Harris has clearly never considered how his views might differ if he were raised in the Middle East – whether he might care about violations of International Law, perhaps, and be angry at US war crimes. Harris has never considered how he might react if an ‘Arab’ writer suggested that a nuclear first strike on the US should be seriously considered. Harris has never adopted the perspective of anyone other than US government officials and US or Israeli soldiers. He is the ultimate propagandist.

Here are two articles on the Harris-Chomsky exchange from authors who share similar views to mine:

http://www.alternet.org/books/what-happened-when-sam-harris-tried-and-failed-embarrass-noam-chomsky

https://newmatilda.com/2015/05/16/noam-chomsky-and-sam-harris-revealing-lesson-religious-fundamentalism/.

Here are articles on Harris’ view of Islam, foreign policy and world affairs generally (the first two are by a guy called Theodore Sayeed, whom I think is brilliant):

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/06/sam-harris-uncovered.html

http://mondoweiss.net/2012/09/sam-harris-in-full-court-intellectual-mystic-and-supporter-of-the-iraq-war/

http://www.salon.com/2015/12/28/sam_harriss_detestable_crusade_how_his_latest_anti_islam_tract_reveals_the_bankruptcy_of_his_ideas/

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/07/my_secret_debate_with_sam_harris_a_revealing_4_hour_dialogue_on_islam_racism_free_speech_hypocrisy/

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/10/sam_harris_dangerous_new_idiocy_incoherent_islamophobic_and_simply_immoral/

https://evolution-institute.org/article/here-he-goes-again-sam-harriss-falsehoods/

Finally, here’s an article specifically on Harris’ laughable Israel podcast, written by Sayeed again:

http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/defends-silence-slaughter/

I also want to say something about this podcast. Mercifully, it will be quite brief.

When I first read the transcript of “Why I don’t Criticise Israel”, I was shocked: it is entirely factless, no-skin-in-the-game, hollow, smarmy, massively distortionary, moralising BS. That is to say, it is complete intellectual trash. People trying to defend Israeli atrocities resolutely avoid statistics (or include statistics highly selectively), but in this podcast Harris goes to the extreme of talking about the conflict without including any statistics at all. Of course, this failure makes perfect sense; the statistics are horrifying and blood-curdling without ornament or embellishment, and no amount of casuistry can alter their awesome effect. Now, I’m not saying that Harris thought about including statistics and then backtracked because he realised they were inimical to his position, but I think that it is absurd to make the claims Harris does without sourced evidential support in any case. And the defence that Harris actually musters of Israel is another one of his astonishingly moronic counterfactual thought experiments. Literally the argument goes like this: Israel’s atrocities are defensible because if Hamas, overnight, somehow came into possession of Israel’s weapon capabilities, they’d probably do something way worse. This is so bizarrely stupid and irrational. One cannot even begin to understand the nature and dynamics of the conflict, or its horror, without understanding the massive power and military imbalance. Imagining that the imbalance didn’t exist in order to defend Israel is deranged. It’s like defending the US invasion of Vietnam by suggesting that if the Vietcong had the weaponry at LBJ’s or Nixon’s disposal then America would have been bombed even more viciously. It is completely irrelevant – it is featherbrained propaganda.

One More Thing:

http://www.salon.com/2013/01/10/why_does_anyone_take_sam_harris_seriously/

The title raises a pertinent question. I contend that we know the answer:

Because there are drooling imbeciles with even more catastrophic cognitive disabilities than Harris himself: his fans. They are everywhere on the internet, and they spread further every day. I fear for this species.

---

[1] Although he’s not clear on what kind of utilitarian is right; he simply adopts an extremely vague half-rule-half-act, sub-Millian utilitarianism which conveniently spits out his pre-formed moral views (enabled by the vagueness).

TRUMP HAS ALL BUT WON

HOLY SHIT

In Praise of Political Mutability

I think it's foolish to have synchronic political labels for oneself, or to adopt a narrow synchronic political identity ("I am a socialist", "I am an anarchist", "I am a social democrat", "I am a liberal", and so on). I know almost everyone takes this for granted, but the vast majority of people are fools. There are, in fact, many reasons why it is a bad idea to adopt a narrow synchronic political identity (with the caveat that this argument assumes (rightly) that the majority of the population will maintain narrow synchronic political identities, and the caveat that this argument is really only addressed to broadly left-wing people like me (being 'left-wing' is not a narrow synchronic political identity)).
Persuasion:
If one is trying to convince a right-wing person that they have mistaken beliefs, one is going to have far more success if one identifies oneself as a centrist who merely wants to chip away at the edges ("You're so right about the problem of welfare dependency, but I'm just not sure that's the right way of going about fixing it"/"Yes, Islamic extremism is a big problem and a lot of Islamic immigrants have regressive social views that are incompatible with liberal democracy, but I think some of the anti-Islamic rhetoric goes too far and might actually help fuel terrorism"). If one wants to convince a self-professed "socialist" that they have mistaken beliefs, one is going to have far more success if one identifies oneself as a comrade, a fellow socialist who simply takes a slightly different position on certain matters ("I know, I am also fucking disgusted by the hold the Neoliberal establishment has on politics - I am appalled at the inequality in America, the corrosion of democracy, inaction on climate change, the toll of US imperialism abroad.. But I still don't think it's a good idea to preach "revolution". A better world requires a hell of a fucking lot of work and highly broad-based co-operation."). And so on. Strategy is important. Diplomacy is key. It is, of course, extremely hard to repress one's passion, zeal, indignation, and despair at injustice, and there are obviously many circumstances in which it is not right to do so (making people furious, zealous and indignant is crucial for getting them to actually do things, like joining protests, which is something that Popper ignores and Pinker ignores (and most liberal and all right-wing intellectuals ignore)). But in all circumstances where you do really think it might be both possible and desirable to persuade someone - or at least get them to budge a bit on some of their hard-line stances - it is obviously desirable to drop as many ideological trappings and identity signals as possible.
Political labels always have poisonous connotations to some that one cannot control:This is related to the above point. If you call yourself a socialist, you will immediately alienate and repel vast numbers of people. It doesn't matter if you completely reject Stalinist totalitarianism - it doesn't even matter if you completely, unequivocally, passionately reject state socialism and Stalinist or Maoist central planning (perhaps you just use socialism to mean "social democracy" or you're a "libertarian socialist" who has extremely high (unjustified) hopes for humanity) - because the vast majority of people will not give you the opportunity to explain yourself. If you call yourself an anarchist, you will immediately be regarded as literally a complete idiot by 95% of the population, because you will associate yourself with low-IQ teenagers who put graffiti on walls. If you call yourself a conservative, the reaction among roughly half of the population will be disdain or hostility.
Circumstances in the World Change:
This is by far the most important point. I have come to the conclusion that, in every time and place, there are always issues on which anti-establishment activism is admirable and right. Right now, I think it is morally laudable and makes perfect sense to be a climate-change activist. I think it is morally laudable and makes perfect sense to be a Greens party member in the US who does lots of door-knocking and such (although I think it is better that even Greens party members vote for H. Clinton in swing states). I think that, when it was still clearly possible that Corbyn's popularity could be revived, it was morally laudable and made perfect sense to join Momentum. I think it was morally laudable and made perfect sense to be part of Occupy Wall St. I think that in the sixties, it was morally laudable and made perfect sense to assist the Civil Rights movement, and to join resistance to the war in Vietnam, and to become a feminist activist. I think that Russell and Einstein's anti-nuclear activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that Bertrand Russell's conscientious objection was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that Gandhi's activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that Mary Wollstonecraft's activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that Thomas Paine's activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that Martin Luther's activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that St Francis of Assisi's activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. I think that Jesus Christ's activism was morally laudable and made perfect sense. An anarchist might say that makes me an anarchist. A revolutionary socialist might say that makes me a revolutionary socialist. But I will only ever call myself an anarchist if I encounter a reasonable person who herself identifies as an anarchist, and I am definitely not a revolutionary socialist, because I don't believe in revolution (well, I mean, I think the Spanish Revolution might have been justified, but the situation in Catalonia at that time, and the anarcho-syndicalist movements that existed in that time and place, has no other 20th Century parallel, so far as I'm aware).
Here's the thing: whether or not one is an activist, one must also spend a lot of one's time living and talking and arguing as anything but an activist. When it comes to defeating Trump, I think that people like me might often be justified in literally pretending to be Neoliberals (or at least more Neoliberal than we actually are), especially if we want to persuade Trump voters to vote for Clinton (because Trump is seen by many Trump voters as a lesser evil, just as the Left sees Clinton as a lesser evil). When it came to Brexit, I am still agnostic about whether being a Lexiter (like Steve Keen or Michael Hudson) or a reluctant Remainer (like Yanis Varoufakis) was the better strategic move - but either way, both involved significant and necessary ideological compromises. Whilst I certainly agree with the sentiment of Einstein's famous line that "nationalism is the measles of mankind", I think that it may be necessary to tap into nationalist sentiment in order to make social democracy appealing and move people away from right-wing nationalist parties towards left-wing economic-nationalist parties. I think that Greens parties all over the world should try to limit their infection by cosmopolitan Identity Politics as much as possible (without alienating too many of their cosmopolitan constituents or becoming callous towards important issues of race and sex), and spend as much time as possible simply talking about the devastation of Neoliberal economics and their alternative Post-Keynesian vision. I think that we have to actually stop mass immigration, and that anti-Neoliberal leftists should accept that multiculturalism does corrode social capital and cohesion, and talk about it when in forums with the target audience (in a maximally sensitive, though still recognisably "honest", way).
Different times really do call for a significant readjustment of political goals. I think that, in the late 60s or early 70s, it made sense to see as a relatively short-term ideal vision an anti-imperialist world with social democracy and a growing degree of workplace democracy. But the Neoliberal assault of the intervening decades has made this a literally insane relatively short-term ideal vision (yes, one shouldn't even entertain this as an ideal vision for the relatively short-term, because ideal visions still have to be minimally plausible). Social democracy itself - deficit-spending economics, funding for public education and healthcare, private debt relief, re-regulation of the financial sector, investment in green technology - is now the relatively short-term ideal vision. This vision is not at all a likely one, just as it wasn't at all likely that the Western world was just going to keep becoming more just and free in the late 60s - but at least it's a short-term ideal vision that one can rationally strive towards without feeling oneself a totally delusional Utopian. In the early 1930s, it made little sense and was dangerous for radical leftists to still see establishment liberals as their enemies, and in the US today, as the election approaches, the same thing obtains. One must downgrade one's zeal when the occasion calls.
The fact is, civilisation is tenuous. Sometimes we ought to cling to the establishment against chaos. It is always the right time to chip away at parts of it, but only if one can manage this without creating chaos. Things are tricky. Politics requires dynamism, changeability.
To put it as pithily as I can manage: in politics, we should be Heracliteans not Parmenideans.

One finds similar arguments made here by the excellent (although definitely flawed) political philosopher, John Gray: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/07/john-gray-friedrich-hayek-i-knew-and-what-he-got-right-and-wrong

A Very Long Work called "Political Investigations"

Political Investigations

On the Development of my Evaluation of the Political Doctrines of Noam Chomsky, On the Little Understood but Highly Significant Contrast between the Chomskyan Meaning of Anarchism, which I call “Moral Anarchism”, and the Quarter-Baked Political ‘Ideas’ of most Radical Leftists, who are Usually Very Irrational, like most Human Beings, On the Details of how a Viable “Libertarian Socialist” Society might have looked, in Another Possible World, On the Various Meanings of the Terms “Capitalism” and “Socialism” and the General Uselessness of Conventional Political Labels and Terminology, On Karl Popper and Marxist Utopianism and Social Democracy and how this relates to “Moral Anarchism”, and On the Terrifying and Uncertain Future in which, whatever happens, the Human Species as we know it will probably Cease to Exist, Meaning that there is No Hope  

Part I: On the Development of my Evaluation of the Political Doctrines of Noam Chomsky, and On the Little Understood but Highly Significant Contrast between the Chomskyan Meaning of Anarchism, which I call “Moral Anarchism”, and the Quarter-Baked Political ‘Ideas’ of most Radical Leftists, who are Usually Very Irrational, like most Human Beings:

In a short space of time at the beginning of 2015, Noam Chomsky significantly re-moulded my political beliefs and my ‘worldview’^[1]: he simultaneously filled out and transformed my understanding major global political and economic institutions (for example, the IMF and the World Bank, which, it turned out, were servants of US global power and economic interests, with the US possessing veto power in both these major economic organisations, and the upper echelons of both these institutions being filled with Western financial elites and Wall St crooks educated into pseudoscientific neoclassical economic theory at Ivy League universities (Chomsky was also probably an inspiration for my reading Globalization and its Discontents by Joseph Stiglitz, which, though much less rhetorically radical than Chomsky and praising the World Bank (for which Stiglitz worked) made very clear that Chomsky wasn’t just making shit up, and allowed me to understand Chomsky’s own claims and historical references better)); he made me realise that (many features of) the design of our political and economic institutions creates massive selection pressures for certain bad characteristics (like servility to power and ruthless pursuit of institution-serving objectives) and for the adoption of certain opinions and attitudes which serve elite interests, and that the selection pressures of this institutional structure helps to explain why the more florid and ideologically extreme statements that Chomsky makes are not nearly so crazy as they seem (“America is not a democracy”, “You can’t have a capitalist democracy”, etc), and also helps to explain his deeply hostile view of US foreign policy and his total dismissal of state-professed ‘motives’ (why should we listen to claims about humanitarian impulses when there is an entire military-industrial complex which profits from adventurism and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel?); similarly, by drawing attention to the research of other academics, like Thomas Ferguson (with his Investment Theory of Party Competition) and Martin Gilens (with his 2014 paper “Affluence and Influence”), he made me realise the power of corporate and financial elites to exert pressure on political decision-making (that is, the incredible influence of money in all political systems, especially America’s); similarly, although I was initially quite wary about the kinds of highly dramatic, seemingly simplistic or hyperbolic claims he made about propaganda in American media and “the doctrinal system”, he transformed my understanding of the way the media functions to reinforce elite (state and corporate) interests and marginalise dissident voices and opinions by drawing my attention to the five “filters” operative (the most significant of which are the first three), and (more generally) the fundamentally corporate and therefore profit-seeking, rather than truth-seeking, character of all major media organisations (this obviously relates to the insight about institutional design creating selection pressures that serve elite interests); and (unsurprisingly) he had more direct effects on my political beliefs and attitudes, for example, strengthening a kind of weak impression that the United States has been a tremendous cause of suffering in the world since it rose to empire status and became world hegemon following World War II, and making me far more pessimistic and cynical about ‘change within the system’, and even more contemptuous and contumelious about politicians than I already was, intensifying my repugnation of their everpresent spin and doublespeak, their everpresent unctuous P.R. inauthenticity, and (more generally) the ethical and philosophical hollowness typical of politicians (that is, lack of principle or earnest vision, or serious political/economic commitments) which commonly manifests itself in flagrant girouettism (conforming themselves rhetorically to whatever they take away from focus groups, although usually not changing their policies to meet this rhetoric).

Now, I should say that I did think (and still do think) that Chomsky’s rhetoric on indoctrination by means of the education system and the media, and on intellectual conformity and obedience, was often rather extreme, and did often sound a little conspiracy-theoretic (although I knew it was not in actuality, especially since the writing in the book Manufacturing Consent is very muted), which reflected a general tendency of Chomsky to espouse reductive or even simplistic explanations for political events or phenomena,[2] and to exclude certain complexities or nuances (Chomsky often talks as if everyone who disagrees with him is either a victim of brainwashing or some kind of mindless servant of state power (a “commissar” or “mandarin”), and a lot of his radical rhetoric does seem to imply an underestimation of the stupidity of the average human, and an overestimation of human goodness (that is, a generally excessively romantic picture of human beings, who are mostly corrupted by “systems”)))). Now, I did (and do) largely forgive this, believing (with good grounds, judging from other comments he has made about epistemology and so on) that Chomsky is usually aware of nuances or complexities he is omitting (it is probably silly to hedge every big claim you make with a multitude of caveats when you are delivering a political speech, although in writing it is somewhat less acceptable) – but it did give me reason to believe that the man, although freakishly intelligent (as even his sternest critics typically acknowledge), often wavers from the sober, extremely careful rationality that his main intellectual hero, Bertrand Russell, always practised (of course, if Chomsky really was as persistently intellectually sober as Russell, he could never have written all those scorching polemics and had as big an impact as a political activist as he has had).[3]

Another thing that has occasionally troubled me about Chomsky, along with most far left-wing radicals, is his total failure to discuss the incredible advances in terms of health (lifespan, freedom from disease, leisure) and security (absence of crime and war) that have been made by our civilisation since the end of the World War II (marking the start of what Pinker calls “The Long Peace”). At least on conventional ways of thinking, these advances would seem to give one very good reason not to subscribe to any kind of ideology which states as its aim as ‘destroying the system’, especially given the almost uniformly horrific historical precedent for such ideologies, once they begin to actually ‘succeed’ (and we’re not just thinking back to the French Revolution here, but back to the Western Roman Empire, or perhaps beyond)[4]. Even if Naomi Klein is right that capitalism is preventing us from averting ecological (and ultimately political) disaster, and even if Chomsky is right that we have been extremely lucky just to escape nuclear annihilation to get to this point (https://chomsky.info/06122016/), an anti-radical could just say, “However bad climate change is going to get and whatever risk still remains from nuclear weapons, as long as you’re not sure that ‘civilisation is doomed’, then you do not have grounds to become a revolutionary; that is just shitty epistemology, because it assumes that a revolution is highly unlikely to fuck things up even worse, which is really unfounded”.[5] I know I myself have a nontrivial degree of epistemic respect for very intelligent political centrists (who often call themselves “classical liberals”) like Steven Pinker who are strong supporters of the liberal-democratic, capitalist ‘status quo’[6] and believe that the overarching political priority of rational people should be to maintain the stable and (in historical terms) anomalously just global political and economic system under which we live, because such people are right that things have improved a lot under “capitalism”. As they love to point out, since World War II, we have seen a constant steady rise in the standard of living across the world (infant mortality, life expectancy, general quality of life (in terms of leisure)), a fairly steady decline in the rate of citizen violence, a historically anomalous paucity of wars (which Pinker calls “The Long Peace”), a tremendous decline in abject poverty (overall, even if poverty has risen in the West since the start of the Neoliberal period), an incredible rise in literacy and education (overall, even if the quality of education might also have declined in the West since the start of the Neoliberal period), stupendous technological advances which have transformed our lives, a wonderful expansion of the ‘moral circle’ (huge leaps forward in women’s rights, civil rights, and gay rights), and so on. I will return to this point much later, when I bring in Karl Popper.

Probably the biggest thing that troubled me about Noam Chomsky’s politics, even a few months after he had begun to change my beliefs in the ways just outlined, was his self-identification as an anarcho-syndicalist/ libertarian socialist/ anarchist. Although I constantly second-guessed myself on this point, it did seem to me, when I thought hard about it, that calling oneself any one of these labels was probably silly, and that anyone who did give themselves such a Utopian political label was probably not ideally rational. Of course, I did also come to recognise that Chomsky’s personal species of anarchism, at its core, just involves a commitment to the (eminently reasonable, almost truistic) ethical principle that all forms of hierarchy and subordination have a burden of justification (that is, they are unjustified by default) and ought to be dismantled if they can’t meet it. As he puts it himself:

“Anarchism is, in my view, basically a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics.  Primarily it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and hierarchy.  It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say, imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified” [http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians].

But whilst this may be truly how Chomsky views his commitment to anarchism, I think I also realised that the principle itself is oddly permissive, in the sense that pretty much everyone, right across the political spectrum, would accept it. In fact, this definition of anarchism would seemingly permit even Thomas Hobbes to regard himself as an anarchist, since the whole point of The Leviathan is a justification of the ethical necessity of a particular kind of hierarchy  – absolute monarchical authority.[7] Likewise, since it’s impossible to find any political philosopher who claims that we should accept or make do with x kind of authority or y kind of hierarchy without at least trying to justify this, it would seem that all political philosophers ought to regard themselves as anarchists, too. I’m not exaggerating on this point: you’d be hard-pressed to find any political philosopher who would say that we ought not to dismantle forms of hierarchy and subordination that are unjustified, since working out what kinds of authority and power are justified is pretty much the central task of political philosophy.

With that said, the reason that one would (obviously) be crazy to infer from this that political philosophy is a fundamentally anarchist discipline, is that what really distinguishes anarchists (like Chomsky) from statists (the vast majority of people) is that anarchists have a larger inventory of unjustified forms of hierarchy and subordination than statists do. So whilst Chomsky’s anarchism can indeed be summed up in that simple principle about unjustified forms of hierarchy and subordination, what actually makes his political position unique are the more specific doctrines to which he is committed.

Anyhow, to return to what I was saying earlier, I did a lot of thinking about Chomsky’s anarchism in the months after I became obsessed about him, and I did usually find myself opining that, whatever else he got right, he was somewhat of a Utopian. Reading The Better Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker last year (a really terrific read, though I do have several points of disagreement (this is my favourite review, https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-steven-pinker-a-left-enlightenment-review/, and this one, though extremely hostile, correctly points out that there's a massive amount of statistical massaging to fit Pinker's thesis and ideology, http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066)) induced in me very strong scepticism about Chomsky’s radicalism, which eventually led to what is arguably the best long essay I have written, “Are Things Overall Good or Bad in the Modern World?” (basically, a synthesis of the thesis of Chomsky and the antithesis of Pinker). However, just before I started writing the essay “What is the best possible society for our wretched species?”, I came to discover that Chomsky’s self-identification as an anarchist really wasn’t nearly as Utopian, irrational or ‘romantic’ as I thought. More precisely, by watching yet more Youtube videos of Chomsky, I learnt that, unlike most of the extremists and Irrationalists who adopt such labels, his anarchism only really denotes the following above the core moral principle I mentioned before:

a.)    His conviction that wage labour, that is, the “renting” of human beings by wealthy people with the means to do so (which, on the original definition of capitalism (it may surprise you to learn that Marx is the figure most responsible for bringing the word “capitalism” into use, not Smith or Ricardo who never used the word) if we want to say there is a defining feature of “capitalism”, is generally held to be the defining feature of “capitalism”), is morally intolerable.[8]

b.)    His conviction that the existence of states, that is, central administrative bodies which rule over a large territory by monopolising violence, justice, and the supply of money (with the currency they distribute being kept in demand primarily by the mandatory extraction of taxes), is morally intolerable.

c.)    His belief that a morally tolerable world would have to be one without a state, where people are equal and run their own lives (that is, an anarcho-syndicalist world, where people work in minimally hierarchical, democratic organisations, without bosses or managers who take a significantly greater share of the profits of such organisations than others).

d.)    His belief that such a morally tolerable world would be viable in the sense that, if the social and economic institutions were established in the right way and the conditions were right, it wouldn’t necessarily devolve into anarchy in the more conventional, idiomatic sense, and would lead to a greater wellbeing for all than our current system.[9]

Although such doctrines are still very radical (and I think most people would disagree with the extreme morality of a) and b) (and therefore have a problem with c), and be highly sceptical of d), the key point is that they are not at all revolutionary doctrines. And it is this fact about Chomsky’s anarchism that explains why he is not like the millions of those delusional, utterly irrational radical leftists (and there are really way too many of them) who think that “the system” is so bad that anything at all would be better, that there’s no point ever voting for the mainstream parties, that social democracy and Neoliberalism are almost as bad as each other (since the problem is ‘capitalism’), and that all right-thinking people should therefore be organising in radical groups with the goal of bringing down the state and capitalism in some grand, rapturous, purifying revolution which will usher in a new Utopia of peace, tolerance, love and prosperity.[10] Chomsky is violently against any kind of “accelerationist” lunacy (that is, he thinks it’s always better to make the world better, even if it’s ‘within the system’), unreservedly endorses so-called “Lesser Evil” voting, and unreservedly supports and endorses social democratic policy (and clearly affirms (eg in Requiem for the American Dream) that the inclusive capitalism of the Golden Age was far superior to the Neoliberal capitalism that we’ve had since the 80s). The reasons for Chomsky’s practical subscription to social democracy are not hard to grasp: he realises, like any reasonable person, that you can’t possibly get people organising in unions and trying to make their workplaces more democratic – let alone get anywhere near destroying the state(!) – without massively bolstering the power of labour, and raising consciousness, ‘within the system’ [see this for yourself by looking up videos where Chomsky is answering questions about anarchism]. He realises that one can’t create a new, better world through a violent revolution, but that instead one must slowly begin to create new possibilities within the existing system, through labour organising and the establishment of small islands of workplace ownership and participatory democracy [same as above]. In other words, he realises that we can only create a new world ‘in the shell of the old’ – and gradually (presumably over decades or centuries, rather than in one transformative revolution). As he puts it in this 1998 interview [https://chomsky.info/199808__-2/]:
"I’m not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there’s a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there’s a justification for cages. That doesn’t mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called transnational corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage."

I personally call this doctrine “moral anarchism”, to distinguish it from lunatic doctrines that take the anarchist name (it’s sad that one has to make such compromises, but, in politics, strategy (pragmatism) is key).[11] I think that to qualify as a moral anarchist, one probably has to adopt highly radical rhetoric and a highly radical posture, and to engage in serious activism, while strongly supporting the welfare state, and accepting some kind of Keynesian, deficit-spending economics. This is exactly what Chomsky does. I don’t really know what percentage of people who call themselves anarchists are moral anarchists; I suspect it might be disturbingly low (almost certainly <50%[12])) , because if you are a moral anarchist (meaning you almost certainly don’t believe that your society will be significantly restructured, and that change must be very gradual), it would, it seems to me, be rather foolish to call yourself an anarchist in any setting where you don’t get to explain yourself, since “anarchism” sounds to most people like a form of childish extremism which involves dressing like a goth, disobeying your parents, listening to Rage Against the Machine, and going out late at night with your goth anarchist friends to spray anti-authoritarian graffiti on walls (“Stop buying the propaganda… THEY don’t care about you”) and throw bricks through old buildings. Of course, for Chomsky himself, it’s fine, for the most part, because people know he is not like this – but it is probably still true that people misunderstand Chomsky’s politics in the way I originally did because of the connotations of the labels he has applied to himself.

I like to call myself a “moral anarchist” primarily because of my radical Chomskyan opposition to power: my Chomsky-influenced views on the fundamental problems with our political system, on the massive corporate and elite biases of the media (and the mendacious language and rhetoric used to discuss policy), on the vicious, elite-serving Neoliberal policies of (for example) the IMF and the EU, on the evils committed by the world hegemon, the US, and my generalised contempt for politicians. I also believe in activism and ‘organisation’, although, as yet, I haven’t joined any radical organisations and certainly don’t want to join the ones at my university (I generally fear groups because of the danger of groupthink and confirmation bias, and the near-impossibility, in a radical political group, of the slightest approximation of rationality (I also have an outsize ego, a love for public speaking and logorrhoea, which means that I would inevitably become a Lenin)).

The big question, though, is whether I believe, like Chomsky, that a well-functioning anarcho-syndicalist society is possible, and that it would result in greater wellbeing for all humans. This is the subject of part two.

Part II: On how a Viable Libertarian Socialist Society might have Looked, in Another Possible World:

One of the things that prevented me from even taking anarcho-syndicalism fully seriously until roughly the beginning of this year is that, above the broadest details, I didn’t really know what it was. Clearly, there are massive constraints on any human’s ability to imagine an entire society structured in a way totally unlike the way our own society is structured – but it’s a lot worse when you don’t even have an idea of the basic political structure of the society, and I didn’t, because I was really only going off Chomsky and Chomsky (like Marx) doesn’t believe in trying to present detailed blueprints for his ideal society. All I really had to inform me was the slogan that anarcho-syndicalism is about “worker ownership of workplaces” (and that there are modern economic institutions, like Spain’s Mondragon Corporation which realise this principle), and Chomsky’s description of his ideal society in the Foucault debate as “a federated, decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions […] the appropriate form of social organisation for an advanced technological society in which human beings do not have to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine […] a society of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that [is] intrinsic to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will.”

A number of months ago, as a result of my desire to eliminate this uncertainty, I started thinking really hard about how an anarcho-syndicalist, fully democratic, stateless, technologically advanced (NOT PRIMITIVIST) society would have to be structured, to have a chance at viability (there’s obviously a limit to the kind of thinking we can do about such things, but you’ll see that I ended up with a surprisingly detailed picture). Although a lot of anarcho-communists on the internet seem to think it would be a good idea if we “abolished money”, I realised that that could only work in a tiny collectivist community, and thus that, whether or not they realise it, people who say such things are really endorsing anarcho-primitivism (it is not an accident that all large-scale societies have had a form of money (lol)).[13] Needless to say, I am not very keen on anarcho-primitvism.  More importantly, my thinking, inspired by both my experience and some perfunctory research on the Spanish Revolution, led to some important realisations about the importance of scale in political possibility. My conclusion was that there’s no doubt that communistic or collectivist relations are perfectly possible (and have successfully materialised in innumerable human societies) on scales small enough that everyone regards everyone else as kin, however, on larger scales, as Bruno would say, Ich don’t think so![14] My thinking also led to a silly email to Chomsky himself, to which he replied with a summary dismissal.[15] A couple of months ago, I, as it were, ‘completed’ my thinking by writing a long post about anarcho-syndicalism (calling it “libertarian socialism”), as part of a longer Facebook post (on this blog) in which I laid out my taxonomy of the four types of socialism. The following is a heavily edited, massively extended version of that original post, in which I lay out a detailed, carefully considered vision of what a viable Libertarian socialist society would look like:

I define Libertarian socialism to encompass any industrial or post-industrial society[16] in which the major means of production (where "production" is understood to encompass all major industrial, technological and agricultural production) are not held by any centralised authority or state (indeed, as I will shortly explain, a Libertarian socialist society can in principle be stateless), but by corporations (like Mondragon in Spain) which are "worker-controlled" – democratically organised, and run in the interests of all the employees – which exist within a larger social system of participatory democracy. Such a society would have a non-capitalist “market system”,[17] with (internally democratic) corporations and (internally democratic) smaller businesses competing with each other to sell their goods to make profits, which would be used only to purchase more capital (that is, machines, equipment, factories, etc) and to hire more workers.[18] A Libertarian socialist society could, in principle, be of two kinds: centralised or decentralised. I will discuss the decentralised version first.

A decentralised Libertarian socialist society could only mean a "federated" system of directly democratic, highly egalitarian polities (it will gradually become clear why the political and economic structure would necessitate a high level of egalitarianism, despite the system not being collectivist or communistic).[19] Each of these polities would, I would think, be large enough to have a few different, directly democratic local councils (each council overseeing at most 20,000 people, in order to ensure the possibility of directly democratic administration), which, when convened,[20] would make very local administrative decisions and (more importantly) elect temporary representatives from within their own number^[21] for the polity’s central administrative council. This central administrative council would (in a decentralised  Libertarian socialist society, without an overall federal treasury) supply currency, collect taxes in that currency, oversee trade with other polities (which I’ll discuss in a couple of paragraphs) and carry out whatever actions it is necessary to carry out for the wellbeing of the polity (as in our own society, this would no doubt involve creating and maintaining public spaces, maintaining public amenities, regulating immigration into the polity and emigration out of it, organising garbage collection and sanitation, supporting schools and hospitals, and distributing social security to those incapable of work and the retired (if there are any)).

Since scale is inherently a major danger for both social cohesion (because the larger the community the fewer kinship connections and personal ties) and democracy (because the larger the society the more the administration becomes removed from people’s daily lives and protected from scrutiny, and the more power it wields), there would ideally be a cap on each polity’s population size – somewhere, I posit, in the region of 100,000.[22] As we will see, there would be immigration and emigration between polities in a Libertarian socialist society, but it would have to be very well co-ordinated. People would have to have polity passports, which they would also use to go on holidays. This population cap would have the effect of putting a natural limit on the growth of any one corporation, since the number of staff they could hire would be strictly limited, and, at this point of maximum growth, they would be forced (by law) to divert their profits to the community in a fully collectivist process (this explains footnote 15). There could be no franchises spanning multiple polities, or corporations with multiple factories in different polities, because both these structures necessitate a significant degree of hierarchy and bureaucratisation which cannot exist in a Libertarian socialist society (such organisations will necessarily have a central, air-conditioned office with executives controlling the whole show in a completely non-democratic (authoritarian) fashion).  

Each polity would be far more self-sufficient than a city of the same size in our own society (that’s why I chose the word “polity” (meaning “city state”) rather than city): each one would have to have its own banking system (ideally, the banking system would either be public or heavily regulated by the central administrative council, and therefore devoted entirely to productive investment rather than usury and rent-extraction) and justice system (including a police force (hopefully minimal, and with a better institutional structure than our own police force)[23], judiciary, and prison system), along with strong healthcare and education, and hopefully a strong local media. However, crucially, each polity could trade with the other directly democratic, Libertarian socialist polities within their federation – and we can imagine such a federation consisting of only five polities or we can imagine it consisting of 100 polities across the planet – to enjoy a significant degree of specialisation and "comparative advantage".[24] One imagines polities in fertile territories specialising in agriculture, polities specialising in household goods, polities specialising in high-tech gadgetry (not totally unlike Silicon Valley), polities specialising in transport technology, polities specialising in entertainment (not totally unlike Hollywood), and so on. One also imagines that each of these polities would have tertiary institutions catered to these specialties, which young people from all over the federation who had interests in the relevant line of work could attend. If there were widespread trade between the polities, the power of specialisation would guarantee a considerable rate of technological advance, and the wider the trade, and the more polities participating in the trade network (if one wants maximum technological advancement, one would probably want the whole word to be part of a gigantic Libertarian socialist federation), the more the rate of technological advancement would resemble that of our current society. Of course, if the trading network became big enough, that would very possibly force the emergence of major economic institutions to co-ordinate and regulate activity – and, once again, scale is coming back to bite our dreams of freedom from powerful institutions.[25]

On the subject of education, the schools in a Libertarian socialist society would be unconstrained by a state-imposed curriculum (although there would have to be some kind of federation-wide uniform examination system, in order that universities could impose certain entry standards), and would be Deweyite in nature, to prepare the children for a life in a direct democracy. There would thus be minimal educational authority, hierarchy and regimentation, and this would help foster creativity and free thought. Since there would be no “bullshit jobs” (as David Graeber calls them) in a Libertarian socialist society – no investment bankers, no hedge-fund managers, many fewer corporate and commercial lawyers, possibly no P.R. agents and advertisers,[26] etc – there would also be no bullshit degrees at the universities. There would be accounting degrees but not finance degrees, and there would likely be no need whatsoever for business degrees, seeing as no person would ever be managing a business on their own but instead always making decisions with others.

A centralised Libertarian socialist society is not hard to imagine once you have imagined a Libertarian socialist society without a state like the one I just sketched. The essential difference between the two versions would, of course, be that, in a centralised Libertarian socialist society, there would be, for every collection of ten or so polities (whether or not these polities belong to a complete federation or a sub-federation), a central bureaucracy or government located in one of these polities (or some middle location, as in Canberra in Australia) which would be responsible for supplying the currency for all the polities, collecting taxes from all the polities in that currency, performing some redistributive functions, perhaps funding (at least part of the) social security for some or all of the polities, probably overseeing immigration and emigration, probably helping to co-ordinate trade, probably creating some kind of federal police force, and, if the region was under attack from a non-Libertarian socialist society, creating a military.[27] Each polity would probably hold a general election to elect a number of presumably self-nominated representatives to head to the central parliament. Over the course of several years, it may be that political parties form in each polity (I have no idea if that’s ultimately desirable or not). If we’re again deciding to imagine a world where there’s a massive Libertarian socialist federation spanning a large chunk of, or most of, the planet, then there would probably end up being trade directly between the central governments within the overall federation. From there, one can’t help thinking that an overall global government might develop. This may sound completely antithetical to the principles and anti-state ideology that motivates Libertarian socialism – it may sound as if such a society has strayed too far from the original vision – but it is also true that one crucial feature of the society has not been abandoned, even once these greater and greater institutions have been imagined: the anarcho-syndicalist idea of workers owning their workplaces. This is preserved because the corporations are democratically structured. Moreover, there is still a pretty strong “Libertarian” element because of the strength of the democracy within each polity, and the smallness of each polity (within a giant fucking network). Even if political parties did arise, they hopefully wouldn’t be allowed to become corporate agglomerations like they are in today’s society, because the institutional structure of the corporations would make the purchasing of favours much less likely (and there could also be laws put in place against corporate donations to political parties (I do keep returning to laws because I am not a Utopian idiot (a polity of even 100,000 is too big for people to feel strong social obligations to their fellow citizens; it just seems to me a good compromise (size is, of course, very important for industrial and technological progress, which is why the ideal compromise on the population figure might be higher than 100,000, perhaps significantly higher))).

Ignoring, just for the moment, the massive problem of how to bring this vision about, and ignoring every single possible “externality” (by which I mean all the complicating factors I haven’t included, which are infinite in number (climate is a big one)) – instead just adopting the unrealistic synchronic and idealised perspective of the theorist (basically imagining that this aforedescribed society just ‘popped’ into existence one day fully formed) – it is my opinion that such a society would indeed ‘work’[28]. It certainly doesn’t seem insane to think that both the centralised and decentralised versions of such a society could function quite well (clearly, I have to be vague, though), as long as the institutions were established in the right way (again, vague). Of course, we probably should talk about the “externalities”. Disaster could afflict this society in the same way that disaster can afflict any society; there would have to be no environmental or ecological disasters, and no military conquest from a league of powerful capitalist states, and no epidemics of disease, and so on.

But here’s the thing:

·         I am not imagining a society without law and order; it is nowhere near anarchy in the conventional sense (I included a police force, and I imagine the legal system to be extremely similar to the one we currently have (I think it’s only possible to dispense with these things if the scale of the community is very small)).

·         The society I’m imagining is a dynamic one, because it is a market system which allows firms to fail and new ones to rise up (with the only constraint for a new firm the principle of democratic ownership). Now, you might worry that really undesirable work wouldn’t get done in such a society, because, to put it simply, who’s going to set up a co-op corporation to do garbage collection, waste treatment, mining (and all the tricky or unpleasant stuff like that)? But the solution to this is not very difficult: the public sector (the local councils and the central council) would set up (internally democratic) organisations for all these things, and they would entice workers by offering high wages. Of course, you might be surprised that I just lumped together “garbage collection” and “mining” there (only one of which is publicly overseen in our own societies). I do think that resource-extraction would be one tricky area for a Libertarian socialist world because resource-extraction needs to happen on a massive scale to be profitable, and scale, as we keep finding, is inimical to democracy and the central anarcho-syndicalist principle of worker ownership. However, I think that democratic resource-extraction could work if polities collaborated on it – and perhaps the same would be true of agriculture (that is, assuming it was hard to find people willing to become farmers of their own accord in a Libertarian socialist world). As we will see, I think that if we imagine a more automated Libertarian socialist world, this ‘resource-extraction problem’ would become trivial.

·         To head off another foreseeable objection, we know that internally democratic corporations can work, because there are examples of them in the world today (the best example in the West is the one I keep mentioning, Mondragon).

·         The direct democracy that I have imagined is also not too ‘excessive’, and the general political structure I have imagined seems exceptionally resistant to despotic devolution, because of the temporality of the power I have granted the decision-makers in the local councils and the central administrative council.

All in all, therefore, it really doesn’t seem insane to me to think that a society structured following something like this blueprint really would, as it were, ‘have a chance’. There are about a million details that I haven’t worked out, and couldn’t possibly work out, and wouldn’t come to pass even if I did work them out – but the blueprint itself seems at least non-harebrained, in my humble opinion.

Admittedly, there is one objection that seems quite serious, namely, that the rate of technological advance would be a fair bit slower in a society where, by capping the populations of polities to 100,000, you put strict limits on the maximum size of firms. I think this is a correct objection, so I’m going to segue straight from this objection to a discussion of something I keep hinting at: how our vision of a Libertarian socialist world could be made yet more beautiful if we inject into it more advanced technology.

If we imagine a world with the same kind of political structure that I elaborated above, but also envision that the technology has got to such a point that there now exist highly efficient, versatile industrial robots,[29] we can make the world into a veritable Utopia. Basically, the idea is simple: the robots are like the slaves of Periclean Athens who worked in the hellish silver mines; the robots do all the shit jobs, while the humans are free to explore their creative urges, debate philosophy, and generally enjoy the finer pleasures of life (to use an insufferable cliché!). Maybe it does help if we assume that the humans are cognitively enhanced in this scenario, because I know that most humans today, if they lived in an egalitarian society with robots doing all the shit jobs, would just waste their time wanking to violent pornography, watching trash TV, drinking themselves into oblivion: in sum, contributing nothing whatsoever to human civilisation, merely exploiting it to carry out their disgusting, animalistic urges (the reason I recently renamed this blog “Human Dignity” is essentially because I see the idea that all humans have an essential dignity as a really beautiful and beautifully irrational idea, an unreasonable, quixotic hope that I sometimes find myself clinging to when trying to motivate myself to a higher plane of morality and philanthropy, in the strictest Greek sense (love of humankind)).

Interestingly, at the end of Yanis Varoufakis’ Ted talk, he basically outlines exactly this robot-assisted Utopian vision for “Libertarian Marxism”, which he sees as the telos we must all fight for against the neo-Feudal dystopia that seems far more likely to be our future (I’ll spend the last part of this essay worrying about this myself).

You may have noticed that there are some interesting syntactical features in the title of this section of my essay. I used the epistemic modal verb “might”, and the Kripkean-modal-logic phrase “in another possible world”. You might be wondering why. Well, the answer is grimly simple: I am pretty confident that there will never be such a society. I’m not going to present an extended justification for this; in fact, I think it’s almost obvious (that the generation of such a society would be extremely unlikely). How would it start? How does it ever get to happen that we make polities with only 100,000 citizens and set up all these wonderful institutions? On current projections, the Earth’s major cities are only going to get bigger and bigger over the next few decades as fewer and fewer people live in rural or isolated regions; there’s no way in hell it could ever come to pass that a significant chunk of the Earth’s population decides to set up the kind of polities that I’ve described.

Now, it is both logically and practically possible that workplace democracy could start taking over our societies even as they are now (workplace democracy is perfectly compatible with big cities), and once the vast majority of firms in our society were internally democratic, it would be bizarre to still call this society “capitalist”. Despite the necessary persistence of states and parliamentary democracy in a world with massive cities, perhaps it really would be justified to call such a society an anarcho-syndicalist or Libertarian socialist society, just by virtue of the near-ubiquitous or ubiquitous workplace democracy. But anarchists don’t like states, so this is clearly not what Chomsky is imagining when he imagines his Utopia (although I think my Utopia is probably just a social democracy where there’s lots of workplace democracy).

Of course, I don’t think the purer vision is quite a Platonic vision; that’s why I claimed the society could ‘work’.  But what I’m saying is that I don’t think it will come about. We’ll either become an interplanetary civilisation before this happens (and fuck, I haven’t talked about space travel – although I think that space travel could be another thing on which lots of polities could co-operate together to realise), or Enlightenment civilisation will end (climate change will fuck things up completely, or some other awful shit will happen, like nuclear Armageddon or a catastrophic AI explosion).

Optimism, strictly speaking, is just a systemic bias.   

Part III: On the Various Meanings of the Terms “Capitalism” and “Socialism” and the General Uselessness of Conventional Political Labels and Terminology:

I mentioned in the last part how Marx is probably the main person responsible for inventing the idea of “capitalism” as a distinct economic ‘system’. This is one of the reasons why I think it makes most sense to define capitalism not as the economic system of markets, but as the economic system defined by the existence of capitalists and wage labour. Near the beginning of Part II, I mentioned a Facebook post I made on Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism a couple of months ago where I outlined my rough, crude, simplistic taxonomy of how I understand types of “socialism” and how they relate to “capitalism”, which I defined in exactly this Marxist way (no doubt there are similar and far superior political-system taxonomies to my taxonomy of four socialisms and capitalism, but I can’t be bothered to find them). My ‘exposition’ of Libertarian socialism was derived from this post, which, as I parenthetically mentioned, is on this blog already. But since it’s useful here, here is an edited version of the taxonomy (excluding my definition of Libertarian socialism, obviously):

I believe "capitalism" and "socialism", and the different types of socialism, all need to be defined interdependently.

Observing this principle, I have decided that the best taxonomy of the different types of "socialism" is as follows:

State socialism: this is any political system where the state fully owns the major "means of production" where "production" is understood to encompass all major industrial, technological and agricultural production [the phrase "major means of production" will continue to have this meaning every time I use it in the rest of this monograph]. This full state ownership of the major means of production secondarily entails (necessarily) state control over a vast number of assets, (necessarily) a state legal and prison system, (inevitably) a fully public system of healthcare and education, and (inevitably) a nationalised financial and banking system. Commerce (by which I understand all kinds of buying and selling of goods and services), along with more minor kinds of production, are still (in an important sense) private in such a system – it's just that the state has a massive role in orchestrating basically all of this private (non-state-managed-but-state-enabled) economic activity, because of its control over major resources and major production (except for artisanal and luxury goods, the state would be creating almost all of the things that get sold in private shops), and it is guaranteed that the only large commercial corporations in such a society would be public, government-owned ones (if there was a supermarket franchise, it would necessarily be a government one)). In principle, a state socialist society can be representative-democratic, oligarchical or dictatorial. In theory, a representative-democratic state socialist society with a very strong representative-democratic system might be able to develop a relatively free, uncensored media (thus bolstering the "democratic" part of their representative-democratic system). Nevertheless, since this would require the people of such a society to apply massive pressure on a very powerful state, the existence of a state socialist society with a relatively free, uncensored media is unlikely in practice. The following are some examples of state socialist societies: the USSR (dictatorial/oligarchical), China before Deng Xiaoping (dictatorial/oligarchical), and Chile under Allende (representative-democratic (short-lived because of what Chomsky calls "the first 9/11" – the CIA military coup which installed the murderous dictator Pinochet (friend of M. Friedman and R. Reagan))).

Command economies[30]: this is any political system in which the state partly owns the major means of production (there is a degree of vagueness here deliberately, and I make no mention of banking because banking may or may not be nationalised in a command economy), and allows for a restricted capitalist "market system" in which the state nevertheless has massive control over assets, imposes heavy regulations and capital controls, and engages in massive planning. It is likely that education and healthcare will be fully public in such a system. In principle, a command economy can be oligarchical or representative-democratic (but probably not dictatorial like state socialism). The following are some examples of command economies: China since Deng Xiaoping, Vietnam since the mid-1980s, Venezuela under Chavez, and perhaps Britain in World War I and World War II, along with Nazi Germany.

Fabian socialism (or social democracy): this is any political system with a representative democratic government that does not own the major means of production – which are instead controlled by hierarchical, internally tyrannical profit-making entities (that is to say, companies and corporations operating under the capitalist model), which compete with each other in a capitalist "market system" – but that has a progressive tax regime (including strong corporate tax), that has more public assets than just utilities (e.g. railways), that has strong corporate and financial regulation (and environmental protections), that has a strong welfare and pension system, that has free or heavily subsidised education and healthcare, that significantly invests in science and technology, that nontrivially invests in the arts, and that practises expansive fiscal policy and deficit spending. It may or may not be a society with a nationalised banking system, it may or may not be a society with a domestic manufacturing base, it may or may not have porous borders (though having less porous borders does, of course, help to protect the welfare state, which poses a serious dilemma for leftists (and few of them recognise it)), and it may or may not have a regulated press. The examples of such societies are the Scandinavian countries – but they were, of course, more perfect examples of Fabian socialism before the 80s.

A capitalist society is any society where the major means of production are owned privately by hierarchical, internally tyrannical profit-making entities. That is why I say Fabian socialist societies are still capitalist (but command economies are not well-described as capitalist, unless the state only owns a tiny slice of the major means of production). A capitalist society, on this conception, can have a progressive or regressive tax regime, it can have a nationalised banking system or a fully liberalised one, it can have a big financial sector and a highly financialised economy or it can have the more productive and limited financial sector like that of post-WWII Europe and America, it can have public education or fully private education, it can have socialised healthcare or fully privatised healthcare, it can have a strong welfare system or none at all, it can have one or several public media services or none at all, it can have a strong manufacturing base or none at all, it can have a state which pours money into scientific and technological development whose fruits eventually get fed into the private sector (à la the US) or it can have a state that makes no scientific or technological investments, it can be representative-democratic with fairly equal distribution of power and influence (à la the Fabian socialist societies) or completely oligarchical, it can have a big military or no military, it can have open borders or very little immigration, it can be multicultural or monocultural, and it can be highly economically protectionist or highly economically 'liberal'. So capitalism, in my book, covers everything from Libertarianism to Fabian socialism.

I am now going to post an edited and extended version of another Facebook post I made a couple of months ago, which is also on this blog (as part of a composite entry with the previous Facebook post). It is basically just a short rant on, as the title of this Part III implies, “the general uselessness of conventional political labels and terminology”. As with a lot of my political writings, it bears the mark of Chomsky.

 There's not a single commonly used political term today which is useful in either one of the following (related but distinct) two ways: its contemporary usage connects back to the roots claimed for the term in the political philosophy academy; its contemporary meaning possesses some intellectual cogency, with a logical relationship between the actual etymology of the term and the doctrines of its contemporary adopters. I will now give several examples in support of this claim. The first example (“liberal”/“classical liberal”) will be an example of the contemporary usage not connecting back to the roots claimed for the term in the political philosophy academy, and the next two (“conservative” and “libertarian”) will be examples of words without intellectual cogency in the above defined sense (I will also discuss the term “socialist”, whose usage is more complex).

Liberal: Whatever "liberal" means in the modern day, it has nothing to do with the doctrines of the figures known as the ‘Liberals of the Enlightenment’ in the political philosophy literature (in the literature, it is generally said that the "Liberal tradition" is that which links Locke to Madison to Montesquieu to Bentham to J.S. Mill (although, for what it's worth, Chomsky claims that someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Classical Liberal)).The group known as "liberals" today are basically all those people who either accept the Neoliberal economic status quo or ‘don’t know any economics’ (deferring to Neoliberal “experts”), are either passionately or vaguely socially progressive, and vote for the left-of-centre or centre party in their country. There's not really any direct connection there to the Classical Liberal ideas (certainly not Lockeian ideas about the primacy of private property), and, as much as we like to celebrate the democratic instincts of the “Liberal” Founding Fathers, as best expressed in The Federalist Papers, the “democracy” that aforesaid Founding Fathers actually implemented was really a patriarchal, racist oligarchy or aristocracy (I, of course, mean these terms in the most literal sense possible, not in some diluted Postmodern sense). Madison (who of course called himself a “Republican”, not a “Liberal”, although he is one of the paradigmatic “Liberals” in the literature) is held up as one of the great proponents of democracy, but he said things like this:

“In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority” [from the Secret Debates on the Federal Constitution of 1787, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Madison (& Chomsky often uses the last part of this quote)].

The only connection I can discern between modern-day “liberals” and the Englightenment Liberals (as defined in the political philosophy literature) is the extremely tortured one that the political system we have today is in large part the legacy of the ideas of these thinkers, and modern-day "liberals" accept and promote this political system ("The West is great," liberals can be heard saying, "Because of our grand tradition of "liberal democracies""). Meanwhile, people who call themselves "classical liberals" today (a group that strongly overlaps with "liberals" simpliciter) seem typically to see the "free-market" advocacy of Mill and believe that this directly 'maps on' to modern Neoliberalism (one thing that deceives them is the fact that Mill was influenced by Smith and Ricardo, and these guys are the fathers of neoclassical and Austrian economics and all other forms of market funadmentalism (even if they (especially Smith) don’t deserve it, because they were living in a world radically different from our own)). Anyhow, this is a childish mistake. Mill's support of free markets was radically egalitarian for his day: as Michael Hudson explains in one of the most earth-shattering books I’ve ever read, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (2014), bound up in J.S. Mill’s concept of a free market was the principle that all participants ought to earn their income, not be in the business of extracting it from others (like usurers or landlords (or, in our own economy, the entirely destructive, pointless parasites of the tumescent tumour that is Wall St, the epicentre of our own parasitised rentier economy, whose too-big-to-fail mega-banks do nothing but expropriate more and more land and resources to extract more and more rent, indebting the real economy more and more, and securitising loans to trade around (along with “engineering” various other financial “products” and “instruments”, and engaging in entirely destructive “corporate raiding”) to create obscene fortunes for themselves in an entirely non-productive fantasy, all of which then gets fed into GDP figures as if it is genuine production, even though it is just a oneiric, virtual charade helping to make rentiers rich and the rest of us debt paeons)). Mill sought, by this advocacy, to eliminate the "unearned income" of the idle aristocracy – the major rentiers of his day – and create a far more fair and equal social order (the distinction between earned and unearned income was central in classical economics but has been expunged from neoclassical economics). This was a pretty revolutionary stance, as was his backing of an anachronistically strong version of democracy (if you really want to compare it to the contemporary era, we're talking Bernie Sanders kind of shit, or perhaps more radical). It’s not an accident that J.S. Mill is one of the central figures associated with Ricardian socialism (and he became gradually more socialistic over his lifetime, in a sense that I won’t try to define (unsurprisingly, Mill’s socialism corresponds best to what I called “Fabian socialism” in my taxonomy)). And the bigger point is that the world was just fucking fundamentally different then (which is why the Sanders comparison was itself facile): Mill was in an era before modern corporations, before state-funded healthcare, before welfare, and before Wall St, whose denizens are the parasitic rentiers of the modern day (as I just made clear). This was a world without "markets" anything like ours. It was a world without most of the institutions we tend to take for granted. So saying that you are the intellectual heir to J.S. Mill because you support Neoliberal policies of privatisation, deregulation, dropping of capital controls, union crushing, permission of corporate tax evasion, and support for "free trade" is just bizarre (especially since Neoliberal policies have the cumulative effect of atomising society (turning us into the utility-maximising consumers modelled by neoclassical economists), which is in radical conflict with Mill’s vision of a society with a high degree of civic democratic participation, where everyone (even labourers) are made to cultivate their faculties of reason). Political ideologies are inherently temporal and contingent; they belong to particular times and places. The reality is that the political, economic and social conditions of the world are constantly changing, and ideologies change along with them. What's radical in one era is reactionary in another, et cetera. Politics and economics are not like the natural sciences.

Conservative: Modern-day "conservatives" do not generally conserve. Sure, they often want to take us back to the social arrangements of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), and they also seem to want to take us back to the more obedient culture of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), but, except for a few rare free thinkers like Roger Scruton or Peter Hitchens, modern-day conservatives since Thatcher have been extremely unconservative in so many ways: they seek to wreck the great tradition of the welfare state, they seek to wreck public assets and utilities, they seek to wreck regulations and regulatory institutions, they seek to wreck the grand Liberal Arts tradition of education by corporatising universities, they seek to wreck social cohesion and civic-mindedness by destroying public spaces and increasing inequality, they seek to destroy democracy (democracy as epistemic populism rather than democracy as elite competition) by fostering inequality and enabling massive political donations and abject corporatism, they seek to wreck the free press by suppressing public news organisations and supporting Murdoch corporate hegemony, they seek to wreck the environment and the planet by not putting any impediments in the way of industrial pollution and degradation, and they seek to destroy Western manufacturing and industry in favour of an internationalist regime of technocrats and financial traders (in other words, they seek to wreck the nation state in favour of "small government"). The people who most deserve the label "conservatives" in my opinion are Keynesian social democrats. Indeed, it is, I think, no accident that Keynes was a big admirer of Edmund Burke – the man whom modern-day conservatives typically claim as their intellectual inspiration.

Libertarian: Libertarians do not care about freedom for all; indeed, their ideology is about securing the exact opposite, as I have written again and again, at length (another example of etymology not matching reality). And, as leftists are wont to point out, the very word "libertarianism" was exclusively used by the radical left and by socialists until Murray Rothbard hijacked it.

Socialist: Socialism is problematic for different reasons – reasons implied by the fact that I needed to make a taxonomy distinguishing four types. Basically, it is a word that has been thoroughly poisoned by modern-day right-wing loonies. Until Austrian-school lunatics and toothless hicks started calling regulation and progressive tax "socialism", socialism actually meant one of two things: state control or oversight over all production and industry (as in the USSR), or libertarian socialism (which has only existed in tiny pockets of the world for short periods of time), which entails a system whereby workers reap the fruits of their own labour by having a democratic stake in their own workplaces or corporations (corporations which are non-hierarchial or democratic, not islands of Soviet-style tyranny). And once upon a time (roughly speaking, before Stalin and the start of the Cold War), socialism had no authoritarian connotations whatsoever, so the first usage didn’t exist.

It is because of the massive ambiguity and lack of cogency of all these terms that I don’t use any one of them to describe myself. Instead, I invented a new term to describe myself: Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism. The Post-Keynesian part is pretty obvious: economically, I belong to the Post-Keynesian school; my current main influences are Steve Keen and Michael Hudson, whom I read before reading any of the original literature, but I am also now reading The General Theory and Marc Lavoie’s Foundations of Post-Keynesian Economics, and I have (naturally) read up a fair bit on “Modern Monetary Theory” (neo-chartalism), mainly through L. Randall Wray. I hope to eventually get to read Sraffa, Robinson, Kalecki and Kaldor, and I have Minsky on Keynes in my bedroom, along with all three volumes of Das Kapital. I’ve also already given a bit of a hint about the “Moral Anarchist” part, but there’s much more to say. I’ll only say a little of this now. One thing that’s important to point out is that, although I also called Chomsky a “moral anarchist”, I think I have fairly significant disagreements with him (I did already make this clear in Part I). I believe I could encapsulate my fairly significant disagreements with Chomsky in the following two sentences:

I’m more or less happy, when explaining myself, to call myself a “social democrat”, because, in conventional terminology, that is probably the best description for me. Chomsky could not, and would not (I believe), accept this designation; he’s been an anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist from the age of 10, and he will stay one until he dies.

Perhaps another way of putting this is to say that I’m really not sure about doctrine no. 4 that I attributed to Chomsky, whereas I attributed this doctrine to Chomsky because I think he is very confident about it (you probably don’t remember what doctrine no. 4 was, so why don’t you scroll up to remind yourself?).

Part IV: On Karl Popper and Marxist Utopianism and Social Democracy and how this relates to “Moral Anarchism”:

Karl Popper’s major political work, The Open Society and its Enemies, is a rather excellent book, in my view. It was apparently strongly criticised at the time of its publication for sloppy exegesis of many of the philosophers it cites, but, even if true, that doesn’t bother me (and the exegesis of Marx is excellent). I haven’t read it all (and I’ve only ever accessed it from online PDFs), but, in what I’ve read, he does make some very good points, and he makes them pretty well. Just like Alan Haworth in this article (https://philosophynow.org/issues/38/The_Open_Society_Revisited), I think that many left-wing people have Popper somewhat misplaced: they know about his strident criticisms of the historicism of historical materialism and of the dangerous irrationality of forms of left-wing idealism and socialism, and they see that modern-day conservatives often profess their love for Popper, and, without reading the work, they infer that he’s more reactionary than he actually is. The reality is that Popper presents a highly nuanced, ambivalent view of Marx himself in The Open Society and its Enemies, and most (if not all) of his points about left-wing idealism are, in my opinion, very good ones (they certainly don’t enrage me, and I am, of course, a “leftist” of some kind or other).

As will become clear, however, I do have a couple of criticisms to make of the book. These criticisms stem from what I call the problem of time-blindness: as with pretty much all of the great political philosophers from history, many of Popper’s arguments are exclusively a product of his terrifying and turbulent, extremism-darkened, existentially jeopardised time and place (and, as far as I know, he didn’t change his tune much, if at all, as society changed post-war). The deeply pessimistic mood of the book, the vigour and acid of his opposition to socialism, and the extremely conservative attitude (in a literal and non-pejorative sense) it takes towards the system of representative democracy of Popper’s day status does, to me, make the book somewhat dated as a guide to today, and (as I will argue) had already made the book somewhat dated as early as the 1950s, when the relative solidity and harmony of the new post-war social democratic order established the conditions for the significant, positive social change of the 60s and 70s (civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights), which did not damage Popper’s beloved, falsification-compatible system of Western democracy, but instead made the society more just. Now, it should be said that this in itself is by no means a contradiction of Popper’s ‘conservative’ attitude towards capitalist representative democracy, however, it is certainly a contradiction of some of Popper’s corollary claims and doctrines. As we will see, much of The Open Society consists of acerbic critique of political idealism (or “romanticism”) and grand political visions in all their forms, yet these 60s ‘rights’ movements couldn’t have achieved any success without a high degree of political idealism and lots of bitter anti-establishment sentiment.

I also think there’s one really crucial “collective action dilemma” pertaining to left-wing zeal that Popper ought to take account of in the book but never does – and I’ll explain what this collective action dilemma is later, because I think it’s an extremely important insight of mine.

Since I think context is very important to Popper’s views, I’ll start my discussion of Popper by quickly going through his biographical background:

Popper was born in Vienna in 1902, a Jew by birth. As all non-ignoramuses would know, early 20^th Century Austria was a place of tremendous political and economic turmoil, and his youth would have been passed in an extremely unstable and politically charged world.  Vienna at that time was the sort of place where demagogues lurked around every street corner, each preaching their own remedy for society’s ills. As a teenager, Popper rode the zeitgeist somewhat, joining the Association of Socialist School Students and later the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, which at that time was a fully-fledged Marxian organisation. However, after a street battle in the Horglasse on 15 June 1919, when the police shot eight of his unarmed comrades from the party, he began to question his trust in Marxist doctrine. Soon after, he completely abandoned Marx’s “pseudoscientific” historical materialism. In 1928, he earned a doctorate of psychology. After that, he became a secondary school teacher in maths and physics. In his early 30s, while still working as a teacher, a new worry entered Popper’s life: the rise of Hitler and the threat of Anschluss. Popper was so worried by Hitler it motivated him to begin writing his first book, The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, recognising that a published book would give him a chance of getting an academic position in a country where Jews could live safely. In 1935, he took unpaid leave for a study visit to the United Kingdom, and in 1937 he secured a post as a philosophy lecturer in a total backwater, far away from Europe and Fascism: the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote Open Society and its Enemies [all of this can be discovered on Wikipedia].

It’s no surprise that all of this turmoil in his formative years left a lasting impression on poor old Popper. More than anything else, it left him with a deep suspicion of political idealism in all its forms. His personal development in this direction is strongly reflected in the book. In chapter 7 of the work, “Principle of Leadership”, he famously writes:

“It is my conviction that by expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political philosophy. […] It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked, it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General Will’ or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a reply, convincing as it may sound—for who would advocate the rule of ‘the worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’?—is, as I shall try to show, quite useless. First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that some fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently ‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms), and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government; whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?”

As this passage shows, Popper believes, like I believe, “that we are all frail”: that there are no really “great men” (or even great women, though of course nobody ever talks about them), and that those most attracted to power will most likely be ruthless, callous, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, zealous, unphilosophical, glib, mendacious, greedy and venal. It is on this basis that he supports democracy – not because it has any intrinsic value (or because it is a system that promotes equality), but simply because it provides a nonviolent, institutionalised and regular way to get rid of bad rulers. In this way, democracy mirrors the trial-and-error process that he held up as the scientific ideal in all his books and used as the basis for his famous epistemological theory, Falsificationism. More specifically, the democracy that he supports is orthodox Western capitalist ‘liberal’ ‘democracy’. The reasoning is that democracies like England (at least as they were in the late 30s and very early 40s) are “the best of all political worlds of whose existence we have any historical knowledge” [admittedly, this quote is from a later collection of lectures/speeches/interviews called All Life is Problem Solving, but this is an assumption crucial in The Open Society]. Another major justification he has for being quite conservative (in this literal sense) is his belief that we should only ever seek change through “piecemeal engineering” of concrete social problems (for example, poverty, violence, unemployment, environmental degradation, income inequality). He regards piecemeal engineering as a far more ‘scientific’, rational and safe process than lofty utopian engineering according to abstract ideals, because of the way it also leaves room for experimentation and takes proper heed of uncertainty. In Chapter 9, “Aestheticism, Perfectionism and Utopianism”, he writes, “This—and no Utopian planning or historical prophecy—would mean the introduction of scientific method into politics, since the whole secret of scientific method is a readiness to learn from mistakes”. Finally, the basis on which piecemeal social engineers should assess the urgency of problems is something Popper called “negative utilitarianism”, meaning a utilitarianism where the concern is not maximising happiness but minimising suffering. He defends this both on the ground that it offers clearer policy objectives and because this kind of negative telos is a corrective to the slide into the overweening ambition of utopianism or romanticism. 

It’s worth quoting some of what Popper says about utopianism and romanticism in Chapter 9, because it’s really rather good (mostly hard to disagree with), and very relevant to the beliefs and attitudes of probably the vast majority of radical leftists. Of course, in my view, the best points are not highly relevant to Chomsky, who, as a critical, scientific rationalist himself, basically shares Popper’s epistemology. This is certainly not to say that Popper ‘approved of’ Chomsky’s politics when he was alive; he probably didn’t, if he was aware of Chomsky’s politics (I imagine he had some awareness). Nevertheless, I don’t think Popper’s harsh critique of dangerous idealism is addressed to leftists like Chomsky (who, on top of having never been a revolutionary, has never been a historicist (eg a doctrinaire Marxist or historical materialist), and never supported Lenin or Stalin or Mao, like many Marxists (particularly those French Marxists Chomsky has himself so often vituperated)). The more important point, which I’ll properly examine after I finish laying out the quotes, is that, while Popper’s worries about Utopian fanaticism are certainly not irrelevant today, I happen to think that the left-wing, socialist utopianism that he incorporates under this general category of Utopian fanaticism does not actually pose any danger to civil society in today’s world, because the kind of radical left that Popper worried about simply does not exist today, while the radical left that does exist seems to be made up primarily of middle-class university students who don’t (and shouldn’t) scare anyone.

(A brief digression where I elaborate the claim I just made about the contemporary radical Left.) In Marxist language, “Labour” in today’s society is atomised, fragmented and, most importantly, impotent. It is this very fact that helps explain why the Marxist vocabulary used to describe the fact sounds so silly. Although most still seem to agree that there is an identifiable category of “working-class” people (as one might say, a proletariat), this is only because working-class has been re-defined from “factory workers” (who were always unionised) to “people who have low incomes or no income” (who usually, in today’s society, belong to no union). And, crucially, of the political radicals in this “working-class”, the vast majority seem to be right-wing (Fascist) extremists: supporters of UKIP/Front National/Trump/Alternative Fuer Deutschland/Jobbik/Golden Dawn/Freedom Party of Austria/Party for Freedom (in the Netherlands)/One Nation (in Australia).

Naturally, the rise of these right-wing extremist parties since the GFC itself testifies to the importance of Popper’s indictment of Utopian fanaticism – but my point is that the critique suffers in today’s context in its aggregation of left-wing and right-wing extremisms into this one category of Utopian fanaticism, because the left-wing version today is flaccid.[31]  

Anyhow, here are the quotes:

Popper on utopian design:

“Social life is so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social engineering on the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what may be the means for its realization.” (Funnily enough, Chomsky expresses exactly this view near the end of Requiem for the American Dream, as I cursorily mentioned in Part I. Although it seems to contradict my own attempt at a ‘final-stage blueprint’ in Part I of this document, I also completely agree with the thrust of this passage: I don’t believe in creating a blueprint for the “social engineering” per se (only the ‘final stage’), and, in any case, my blueprint of the ‘final stage’ is schematic, and in several areas, tentative. I already implicitly acknowledged that I don’t know “what may be the means for its realisation” and I will freely admit that I have no idea “what kind of suffering it may involve”.)

Popper on the crucial importance of the ‘time factor’ that I myself brought up in Part I, along with some extra insights:

“The very sweep of such a Utopian undertaking makes it improbable that it will realize its ends during the lifetime of one social engineer, or group of engineers. And if the successors do not pursue the same ideal, then all the sufferings of the people for the sake of the ideal may have been in vain. A generalization of this argument leads to a further criticism of the Utopian approach. This approach, it is clear, can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint, perhaps with certain adjustments, remains the basis of the work until it is completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both political and spiritual, and of new experiments and experience in the political field. It is therefore to be expected that ideas and ideals will change. What had appeared the ideal state to the people who made the original blueprint, may not appear so to their successors. If that is granted, then the whole approach breaks down. The method of first establishing an ultimate political aim and then beginning to move towards it is futile if we admit that the aim may be considerably changed during the process of its realization. It may at any moment turn out that the steps so far taken actually lead away from the realization of the new aim. And if we change our direction according to the new aim, then we expose ourselves to the same risk again. In spite of all the sacrifices made, we may never get anywhere at all.”

Popper on the (historically well-supported) danger of factional violence among revolutionaries:

“Since there is no rational method for determining the ultimate aim […] any difference of opinion between Utopian engineers must therefore lead, in the absence of rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence.”

Popper on the latent danger of Utopian fanaticism:

“The Utopian method must lead to a dangerous dogmatic attachment to a blueprint for which countless sacrifices have been made. Powerful interests must become linked up with the success of the experiment. All this does not contribute to the rationality, or to the scientific value, of the experiment”.

Popper on the irrational psychology of excessive political idealism:

“This sweep, this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach (and of the Marxian as well) is, I believe, connected with its aestheticism, i.e. with the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness: not a crazy quilt, an old garment badly patched, but an entirely new gown, a really beautiful new world. This aestheticism is a very understandable attitude; in fact, I believe most of us suffer a little from such dreams of perfection. (Some reasons why we do so will, I hope, emerge from the next chapter.) But this aesthetic enthusiasm becomes valuable only if it is bridled by reason, by a feeling of responsibility, and by a humanitarian urge to help. Otherwise it is a dangerous enthusiasm, liable to develop into a form of neurosis or hysteria”.

“Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell—that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.”

Anyway, that’s enough of Popper on political romanticism (and note that he sees this as a tendency on both the Left and the Right). Now I will include some quotes which show that rational left-wing people have no grounds for reviling Popper (most of them are illustrative of his sympathy to Marx, and his strong criticisms of Marxism).

Popper against laissez-faire and for social democracy:

“We must construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement out of fear of starvation, or economic ruin. This, of course, means that the principle of laissez-faire has to be given up; if we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention by the state. We must demand that laissez-faire capitalism give way to an economic interventionism. (This is precisely what has happened. Laissez faire, the economic system described and criticized by Marx, has everywhere ceased to exist. It has been replaced, not by a system in which the state begins to lose its functions and consequently to ‘wither away,' but by various interventionist systems, in which the functions of the state in the economic realm are extended beyond the protection of property and of 'free contracts'.” [Chapter 17: “The Social System”.]

Popper making his best critique of Marxists but in sympathy with Marx, focussing on their own time-blindness (failure to recognise gradual progress):

“Neither Marx nor anybody else has ever shown that socialism, in the sense of a classless society, of 'an association in which the free development of each is the warrant for the free development of all,' is the only possible alternative to the ruthless exploitation of the laissez-faire economic system which he first described nearly a century ago (in 1845), and to which he gave the name 'capitalism'. And indeed, if anybody were attempting to prove that socialism is the only possible successor to Marx's laissez-faire 'capitalism,' then we could simply refute him by pointing to historical facts. For laissez faire has disappeared from the face of the earth, but it has not been replaced by a socialist or communist system as Marx understood it. Only in the Russian sixth of the earth do we find an economic system where, in accordance with Marx's prophecy, the means of production are owned by the state, whose political might however shows, in opposition to Marx's prophecy, no inclination to wither away. But all over the earth, organized political power has begun to perform far-reaching economic functions. Laissez-faire capitalism has given way to a new historical period, to our own period of political interventionism, of the economic interference of the state. Interventionism has assumed various forms. There is the Russian variety; there is the fascist form of totalitarianism; and there is the democratic interventionism of England, of the United States, and of the so-called Smaller Democracies, led by Sweden, where the technology of democratic intervention has reached its highest level so far. The development which led to this intervention started in Marx's own day, with British factory legislation. It made its first decisive advances with the introduction of the 48-hour week, and later with the introduction of unemployment insurance and other forms of social insurance.

How utterly absurd it is to identify the economic system of the modern democracies with the system Marx called 'capitalism' can be seen at a glance, by comparing it with his 10-point programme for the communist revolution. If we omit the rather insignificant points of this programme (for instance, ‘4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels'), then we can say that in the democracies most of these points have been put into practice, either completely, or to a considerable degree; and with them, many more important steps, which Marx had never thought of, have been made in the direction of social security. I mention only the following points in his programme: 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. (Achieved.) 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. (Partly realized by heavy death duties. Whether more would be desirable is at least doubtful.) 6. Central control by the state of the means of communication and transport. (For military reasons this was largely achieved in Central Europe before the war of 1914, without very beneficial results. It has also been achieved by most of the Smaller Democracies.) 7. Increase in the number and size of factories and instruments of production owned by the state. (Achieved in the Smaller Democracies ; whether this is always very beneficial is at least doubtful.) 10. Free education for all children in public (i.e. state) schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. (The first demand is fulfilled in the Smaller Democracies, and to some extent practically everywhere; the second has been exceeded.)

A number of points in Marx's programme (for instance: ‘i. Abolition of all property in land') have not been realized in the democratic countries. This is why Marxists rightly claim that these countries have not established 'socialism'. But if they infer from this that these countries are still 'capitalist' in Marx's sense, then they only demonstrate the dogmatic character of their presupposition that there is no further alternative. This shows how it is possible to be blinded by the glare of a preconceived system. Not only is Marxism a bad guide to the future, but it also renders its followers incapable of seeing what is happening before their own eyes, in their own historical period, and sometimes even with their own co-operation.” [Chapter 18: “Socialism”.]

Popper against those vulgar critics of Marx who claim that he inspired everything that has happened in his name:

“In Marx's view, it is vain to expect that any important change can be achieved by the use of legal or political means; a political revolution can only lead to one set of rulers giving way to another set a mere exchange of the persons who act as rulers. Only the evolution of the underlying essence, the economic reality can produce any essential or real change a social revolution. And only when such a social revolution has become a reality, only then can a political revolution be of any significance. But even in this case, the political revolution is only the outward expression of the essential or real change that has occurred before. In accordance with this theory, Marx asserts that every social revolution develops in the following way. The material conditions of production grow and mature until they begin to conflict with the social and legal relations, outgrowing them like clothes, until they burst. ‘Then an epoch of social revolution opens,’ Marx writes. 'With the change in the economic foundation, the whole vast superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. New, more highly productive relationships' (within the superstructure) ‘never come into being before the material conditions for their existence have been brought to maturity within the womb of the old society itself.' In view of this statement, it is, I believe, impossible to identify the Russian revolution with the social revolution prophesied by Marx; it has, in fact, no similarity with it whatever.” [Chapter 15: Economic Historicism.]

Popper expressing admiration for Marx’s profound moral critique:

“The task which Marx set himself in Capital was to discover inexorable laws of social development. It was thus not the discovery of economic laws which would be useful to the social technologist. Neither was it the analysis of the economic conditions which would permit the realization of such socialist aims as just prices, equal distribution of wealth, security, reasonable planning of production and above all, freedom. Nor was it an attempt to analyse and to clarify these aims. But although Marx was strongly opposed to Utopian technology as well as to any attempt at a moral justification of socialist aims, his writings contained, by implication, an ethical theory. This he expressed mainly by moral evaluations of social institutions. After all, Marx's condemnation of capitalism is fundamentally a moral condemnation. The system is condemned, for the cruel injustice inherent in it which is combined with full ' formal ' justice and righteousness. The system is condemned, because by forcing the exploiter to enslave the exploited it robs both of their freedom. Marx did not combat wealth, nor did he praise poverty. He hated capitalism, not for its accumulation of wealth, but for its oligarchical character; he hated it because in this system wealth means political power in the sense of power over other men. Labour power is made a commodity; that means that men must sell themselves on the market. Marx hated the system because it resembled slavery. By laying such stress on the moral aspect of social institutions, Marx emphasized our responsibility for the more remote social repercussions of our actions; for instance, of such actions as may help to prolong the life of socially unjust institutions. But although Capital is, in fact, largely a treatise on social ethics, these ethical ideas are never represented as such. They are expressed only by implication, but not the less forcibly on that account, since the implications are very obvious. Marx, I believe, avoided an explicit moral theory, because he hated preaching. Deeply distrustful of the moralist who usually preaches water and drinks wine, Marx was reluctant to formulate his ethical convictions explicitly. The principles of humanity and decency were for him matters that needed no discussion, matters to be taken for granted. (In this field, too, he was an optimist.) He attacked the moralists because he saw them as the sycophantic apologists of a social order which he felt to be immoral; he attacked laissez-faire liberalism for its self-satisfaction, and for its identification of freedom with the formal liberty then existing within a social system which destroyed freedom. Thus, by implication, he admitted his love for freedom; and in spite of his bias, as a philosopher, for holism, he was certainly not a collectivist, for he hoped that the state would ‘wither away’. Marx's faith, I believe, was fundamentally a faith in the open society.” [Chapter 22: “Marx: Historicist Moral Theory”.]

I said much earlier I was going to criticise Popper for a major collective action problem that he overlooks. I will do this presently – first I have to lay some more groundwork.

I believe that Popper was right that pre-Neoliberal, Western constitutional parliamentary (capitalist) "liberal democracy" (social democracy) was the most just and liberal governing system for a complex society that us humans have yet been able to develop and sustain (especially in its Scandinavian incarnation). In saying this, I do not mean to give the impression, of course, that I imagine this “Keynesian” “Golden Age” in the West as a kind of Utopia. I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the world’s biggest social democratic country, the US, spent the entire period carrying out brutal military adventures to serve its national and economic interests, in Korea, in Central and South America, and finally in Vietnam and Cambodia (resulting in millions of deaths and untold misery and despair). I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the US was an extremely unfree and unopen society in the McCarthyist 1950s (as were many of its allies). I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the culture encouraged by ‘Keynesian’ capitalism was one of sterile, mind-numbing, soul-deadening consumerism and moral emptiness. I certainly don’t ignore the fact that, in this period of population explosion and massive industrial growth in the West, we massively accelerated the rate of carbon emissions and inflicted massive ecological degradation – a reality which may ultimately spell the downfall of civilisation as we know it as, over the next few decades, entire cities become submerged, tens of millions of climate refugees appear, and extreme weather destroys our key agricultural regions. Finally – and most importantly – I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the world almost ended in this period as a result of Cold War hostilities inflamed mostly by that same social democratic superpower, the United States.

But none of this affects the truth of the specific claim made. Furthermore, the reason that we saw such tremendous social progress in the sixties and early seventies was probably the mass public education provided during the Golden Age (young people were, for really the first time in history, almost universally literate) and the relative economic stability of the period (they had enough time and opportunity to question prevailing social norms and the institutions which ruled them). One certainly can’t ignore that.

That was basically the “groundwork”, so I can now introduce the collective-action problem. Truth be told, it’s fairly simple and goes as follows: I believe that Popper didn’t realise (or properly assimilate) the fact that the existence of strong radical left and labour movements in the 1930s and extreme Labour movement was actually key in forcing the essential ‘class-compromise’ that characterised the Western social democracy of 1945-1970[32], and that such a system cannot be maintained without the persistence of such strong radical left and labour movements – no matter how irrational or delusional these movements may be in their stated goals and ambitions. In other words, I think Popper didn’t realise that it is impossible to maintain his beloved “open society” if too many people adopt a Popperian attitude towards this society. If too many people begin to accept that any major attempt at radical change is highly dangerous, and too many people stop being radical activists and flee from unions and the like – instead embracing “negative utilitarianism” and Popper’s doctrine of “piecemeal change” – then the elites will begin to take the upper hand again and make the society worse.  

(Explication of this claim.) All forms of capitalism are inherently unstable in their own way, and the state capitalist social democratic system that characterised the Golden Age was the result of a very delicate balance of popular pressures for democracy (+ the pressure of domestic capital to support domestic manufacturing) and elite, internationalist-capitalist and finance-sector pressures to just fuck it all up – deregulate, slash taxes, privatise everything, and completely offshore manufacturing. The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system with Nixon’s floating of the dollar in 1971 (the “Nixon shock”) set off a chain of events in the global political and economic system that would eventually usher in the Neoliberal era,[33] characterised structurally (in the West) by deregulation (financial and other), privatisation, offshoring of manufacturing (facilitated by the role of the IMF and World Bank as facilitators of Western capital movement into Third World countries and brutal opponents and repressors of sui generis Third World industrial development), tax-slashing for the wealthy, the repression of unions, inflation-targeting monetary policy (abandonment of real-economy deficit-spending in pursuit of “full employment”), and characterised in consequence by stagnant wages, growing inequality, the corporatisation of the university, a significant rise in “bullshit jobs”, an explosion of private debt (facilitated by the introduction of credit cards), and the general financialisation and ‘bubble’-isation of Western economies, which created the higher financial instability which culminated in the GFC. If there were enough radical leftists around in the late 1960s to bring an early halt to the Vietnam War and thereby prevent the bloating of the government deficit which led Nixon to abandon the gold standard, then this whole thing could have been prevented. Similarly, if there was a sufficiently powerful labour movement around after “stagflation” had been brought under control to fight the ascendancy of Milton Friedman and Chicago School economics (seemingly powerfully vindicated by stagflation) and to fight the rise of Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK, then the Neoliberal rise could have been largely thwarted. But this obviously did not happen.

The crucial point is that the problem here was exactly the opposite of the kind of problem Popper worried about: instead of there being too many people with irrational Utopian fantasies, there weren’t enough irrational people. That is, there weren’t enough zealous leftist activists – not enough impassioned warriors for lofty, romantic, aesthetic ideals like Justice, Freedom and Absolute Democracy. The new era of financialisation and inequality thus became inevitable, and this further attenuated radical left and labour movements, and thereby further strengthened itself. The reason for this, of course, is that increasing inequality inevitably creates a vicious cycle. As Chomsky says, "Inequality is, by its very nature, corrosive to democracy" [from Requiem for the American Dream]. Once you have one increase in inequality, this disparity between rich and power then makes it easier for the wealthy elites to maintain and strengthen their power through donations, through regulatory capture (which leads to rules benefitting these elites, eg financial deregulation or Citizens United), through corporate-media propaganda and so on.

So Popper overlooked the fact that strong social democratic system requires that the populace constantly push back against elite powergrabs and attempts at wrecking democracy. That is, he overlooked the constant ‘tug-of-war’ between the proletariat and the bourgeois (he overlooked Marx).

Ultimately, this huge oversight Popper means Popper's political philosophy cannot deal with the following meta-problem (more precisely, meta-collective action problem):

Say lots of people accept Popper's argument: because of their historically unprecedented checks and balances on tyranny, war and chaos – because of their unprecedented capacity to prevent reckless rulers from doing truly major damage – the majority of the population (or even just a large chunk of the population) takes a more Popperian-conservative (literal conservative) view on Western parliamentary democracies. They all say, "Western parliamentary democracy, though imperfect, is the best system us humans have been able to develop and now that we are in one, all we should do is aim for piecemeal change -- after all, history tells us that rapid change and revolutions are highly risky, and things are better than they've ever been." The great irony is that we're now suddenly in trouble. If the populace stops applying democratic pressure on the capitalists (if people stop protesting, and the population starts voting increasingly for the If the populace stops applying democratic pressure on the capitalists (if people stop protesting, and the population starts voting increasingly for the Tories/Conservatives/Republicans or favouring Right Labour/Labor/Democrat members) – the wealthy elites, the CEOs, the Wall St kings, etc – suddenly have much more freedom to move, buying elections, causing deregulation, tax slashing, privatisation (neoliberal policies).

This all leads us to a convenient punchline. I think that a self-respecting Popperian critical rationalist about politics could, for this reason, also be a moral anarchist (Oh no he didn’t). The reasoning is not hard to grasp: we should organise as far leftists, socialists and anarchists – spread radical ideology, try to convince people to protest and stand up to power – not because we are idealists, but because we are conservatives. That is, because we love the paltry freedoms we have now, and we don't want to see them lost.

Part V: On the Terrifying and Uncertain Future in which, whatever happens, the Human Species as we know it will probably Cease to Exist, Meaning that there is No Hope 

I think the future of civilisation is extremely bleak indeed. We need immediate, unified, decisive action on climate change (https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math; https://www.theguardian.com/profile/georgemonbiot+environment/climate-change) to avoid a Biblical disaster within the next few decades. If we don’t move away from fossil fuels and transition as rapidly as possible into a clean-energy future, we face, in the next few decades, a colossal, literally existential crisis. As sea levels rise, settlements are submerged, and environments that are currently barely hospitable become completely inhospitable, we can rest assured that there will be a massive increase in the number of climate refugees. It seems highly likely that within only the next couple of decades, we will be seeing literally millions, even tens of millions, of such climate refugees – either cramming into already over-burdened refugee camps, or simply wandering the ravaged Earth in (most likely futile) search for a place to live. In any case, such refugees will be starving, miserable and probably diseased. It is certain that many thousands will die, and probable that many hundreds of thousands will. If one thinks this is hyperbole, simple consider what will happen to a country like Bangladesh over the next few decades – already a nation afflicted by flooding due to its extremely flat terrain, with a massive population who will have nowhere else to go but India (not exactly a country well-equipped to cope with such an influx of refugees).

This mass movement of people will lead to a humanitarian crisis for the fortunate countries far greater than any humanitarian crisis such countries would have dealt with before – far greater, for example, than the crisis the West has been facing over the last couple of years with refugees fleeing the horror in Syria. It will inevitably create an immense moral dilemma in the fortunate countries, of a kind unprecedented in human history. How will we react? I really do not know.

But this isn’t even half of it. Crucial agricultural regions will also be – in fact, have already been (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/drought) – affected by an increasingly volatile and unpredictable climate. Ethiopia has recently endured its worst drought in decades, resulting in mass starvation and thousands of deaths, and East Africa, in general, seems in a particularly dire situation as the globe warms. Various other agricultural regions across the world are in danger of becoming increasingly infertile or in-arable as the climate changes (either through drought, as in Africa (and probably Australia), or just other kinds of extreme weather). This might well lead to a severe food crisis – perhaps so severe that it affects even the West (what a thought, Western children with malnutrition instead of obesity).

One of the scariest prospects of all is that the rising sea levels will begin to cause serious damage to major coastal cities, eventually submerging entire districts. Of course, rising sea levels have already begun to destroy entire communities and towns in the Pacific Islands, and it is not too long before major coastal cities throughout the world – New York, Sydney, Miami, Los Angeles, Tokyo, etc – start facing massive damage from flooding in their more coastal regions. This will have a colossal cost, both human and literal, and will again lead to more migration.

I remarked at the beginning that we need urgent and decisive action to combat climate change and transition to a new clean economy, but the simple fact is that this is not happening. The official line of the Republican Party is that climate change is a liberal conspiracy, and Trump’s line is that it is a Chinese conspiracy. This insane denialism is coming from one of the most powerful organisations in the world. Chomsky has not been hyperbolic in his recent statements that the Republican party “the most dangerous organisation in human history” [easily accessible from the internet]. Conservative governments from other places around the world are barely different - for example, my own government in Australia is doing almost literally nothing, and many members or ex-members of the Australian government are, in my friend Hector Ramage's words, "in fact abetting the deplorable pleonexia of mining company executives" [https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/november/1477918800/richard-denniss/feeding-beast]). Meanwhile, the Dakota Access pipeline looks set to go ahead despite the inspiring protests of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, under the watch of the Democratic Party. It should, of course, not be surprising that the Democratic Party is also being recklessly recalcitrant on climate change; after all the Democratic Party is just one other faction of the Business Party, and therefore basically a giant corporate agglomeration (in the pockets of fossil fuel companies just as they are in the pockets of Big Pharma or other major corporate sectors).

Naomi Klein is right: our entire political and economic system militates against protecting the planet for future generations and the long-term viability of our civilisation. We fucked up as humans.

The destruction of the Amazon continues unabated, and the Great Barrier Reef has just undergone its worst bleaching event in recorded history. More and more species go extinct every day. Environments everywhere are poisoned, polluted, ravaged.

And in the final presidential debate, climate change wasn’t mentioned once.

Another thing to worry about is the threat of war. As Einstein famously remarked, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stone”. And as Scott Atran writes, “Steve Pinker, in The Better Angels of Our Nature, documents how everyday violence between people has declined markedly since the Stone Age. But this underplays another well-documented trend (known as a “power law distribution”) that big wars (as well as large terrorist attacks) over the last couple of centuries, though increasingly infrequent, are very many times more murderous and catastrophic than those preceding. Each bigger event generates more world-shaking consequences than the last: politically, economically and socially. Lacking the will and means to consistently impose a universal moral code across all peoples (and the human evolution and history of intergroup rivalry says “Don’t hold your breath” on this score), perhaps the only way to ultimately outwit the bad beast of our nature from doing all in all of us in the Space Age is to ignore how nice or not are the guys who prepare the killing, or how good or not may be the guys who do it, and focus mainly on treating the consequences of killing” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/robert-bales-afghanistan-shootings_b_1355651.html].

The growing neo-Cold War tensions over Syria are a cause for serious concern currently, as is the general disintegration of Europe and the rise of Fascist parties across that continent. It’s the fault of the Neoliberal design of the EU, of course, (the Maastricht Treaty’s injunction against budget deficits of over 3% of GDP is the main thing), but that doesn’t change the fact that the disintegration we’re currently witnessing is terrifying.

Then there’s also the threat of AI. God knows why anyone thinks that it’s likely that we’ll program AIs which have a high degree of general learning ability and which can alter their own code (which is, when it comes down to it, what the entire Bostrom argument for being scared of an AI takeover is based on)[34], but, you know, certainly there are some scary things about AI. Mostly, in my view, they have to do with the threat of massive inequality and neo-Feudalism as tech companies become increasingly powerful over the next few decades. I wrote about this in my essay, “More VERY dark thoughts on Automation”, which I would recommend reading as a nice finish to this epic.

I have finished investigating now.

   

---

[1] The start of my Chomsky obsession can be pinned roughly to the Christmas of 2014, when I started reading The Science of Language, his conversations with James McGilvray, although I had first become interested in him (watching one or two Youtube videos) at least a year earlier, and I think I had read my first article on him when I was a kid.

[2] One classic is Chomsky’s claim that critical thinkers in the educational system are the ones said to have “behavioural problems” (as if there are no kids with actual behavioural problems); another is that the “function” of sport is to foster irrational attitudes of “jingoism” [both of these can be found in multiple sources easily accessible on the internet]. In Requiem for the American Dream, he also appears to explain the entire Neoliberal transformation of the late 70s and 80s in terms of the desire of the “elites” to crush the democratic uprising of the 1960s.

Incidentally, I am not completely sold often on Chomsky’s complete nihilism about the possibility of benign US military intentions in the Middle East. At least the Americans are funding the Kurds, even if they also help Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen into rubble and Obama assassinates people at will.

[3] To clarify, when I talk about “rationality” here, I’m not assuming that there are intrinsically valuable ends (I’m not referring to “moral rationality”), but (roughly) to the following: successful avoidance of massive bias and blatant motivated reasoning, the successful practice of a (vaguely) ‘Bayesian’ attitude (that is, in Hume’s terms, the proportioning of one’s beliefs to the evidence), scrupulous acknowledgement of complexity and nuance in analysis, and the defence of all one’s claims and arguments with requisite evidence from reliable sources (not cherry-picked).

[4] Of course, the anarchist revolution in Catalonia wasn’t horrific, but it probably ended up being pointless (because it was crushed and so many died).

[5] Don’t worry: we will much later deal with the ambiguity of the word “revolutionary” here.

[6] I think the (mainstream, neoclassical) economic theory these people assume is decisively wrong on just about everything – I think neoclassical macroeconomics is total pseudoscience – but I can see at least the logic of this so-called ‘classical liberal’ position if you don’t realise this. When I say “nontrivial degree of epistemic respect”, I mean I don’t think they’re highly irrational in the way that many far leftists are (and I don’t include Chomsky in this, obviously).

[7] Incidentally, Hobbes makes a mistake that’s fucking endemic to political philosophy: he treated what was not an unreasonable conclusion in his own super-turbulent political context as some kind of timeless, transcendent truth about politics. The reality is that different forms of authority are justified in different periods of history. This tendency of political theorists throughout the ages to ignore the inherent temporality (that is, contingency) of what is possible in a given era is a theme I will return to again and again.

[8] For those not schooled in Marxist doctrine, when I say wage labour is defined as the “renting” of human beings by wealthy people with the means to do so, I mean that wage labour is defined as just work for the majority of people in  a capitalist economy. If you’re not a manager, or boss, or CEO, or CFO, or entrepreneur, or investor, and you’re not working for yourself – if there’s someone “above you” to whom you must submit completely to earn your living – you’re a wage labourer on this definition.

[9] To be clear, I’m not claiming that these four bulletpoints completely encompass everything bound up in Chomsky’s identification as an anarchist. What these bulletpoints are, I believe, are just the key tenets.

One element of his politics not covered in those points which is nevertheless explicitly related to his anarchism is his (rather Ghandian) stated opposition to “persuasion”: in particular, his belief that, irrespective of one’s rhetorical gifts, one should always try to speak in a boring, unexciting way, because appealing to the emotions and base instincts of one’s audience is just a kind of manipulation, and one should be trying to make one’s audience think critically.^{a, b}

^a At this point I should apologise for my lack of citations of the propositional attitudes I have attributed to Chomsky; I can only assure you that, as someone who has spent tens of hours listening to his voice, and read three of his books, and read several of his articles, I know my shit (I have been careful to use close paraphrases too). I am 90% confident that Chomksy would not have yet accused me of any distortion, although no doubt he would disapprove of my intellectual slovenliness.

^b Also worth (regretfully) observing that, even if Chomsky often or always tries to follow this rhetorical principle, most still seem to find him really compelling and impressive speaker (eg me), which is part of the reason why he inspires literally millions, and part of the reason why he is the object of a cult of personality (needless to say, being the object of a cult of personality is extremely awkward for an anarchist). I don’t think that he wants to be the object of a cult of personality, by the way, although it is (as technocratic as this may sound) actually a very good thing strategically.     

[10] Whilst this obviously a Straw Man in the sense that no-one has ever expressed belief in all those things in those words, I can assure you that there are really lots of people who think in exactly this way. Of course, to be fair, many of them are teenagers, and teenagers are idiots (I say this as a 19-year-old).

[11] Incidentally, one of the things that made J.M. Keynes such a great (efficacious) activist was that he was a master of compromise – the ultimate pragmatist. Radical leftists tend to hate the word “pragmatism” (rightly, because it is so often abused), but we really can thank Keynes for a lot of shit. If Keynes wasn’t well-respected within the economics profession and the political establishment, it literally might have been the case that the Golden Age of Capitalism never happened (which, to be clear, is certainly not to say that the policies Western govs followed between circa 1945 and 1971 were following the letter of The General Theory).

Today’s world desperately needs a Keynes. Today’s media is unfortunately an immense obstacle to this, however, because corporate journalists seem to start frothing at the mouth whenever anyone proposes any anti-neoliberal economic policy, decrying the person as a “mad socialist” etc, as if social democracy is Soviet socialism and Keynes was a socialist. Two good candidates for our modern-day Keynes are Joseph Stiglitz and Yanis Varoufakis, but (to illustrate my point about our fucked oligarchical media) they’re tarred as socialist loonies.

[12] The only other prominent self-described “anarchist” I know is David Graeber. Reading his most recent book (The Utopia of Rules) has given me the distinct impression that he is not quite a moral anarchist in the sense that I’ve outlined. I really loved Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I completed only a couple of weeks before I started The Utopia of Rules, but this latter work is not nearly as good (though it certainly has its moments, and many really wonderful insights).

One example of Graeber’s irrationality in this latter book is, funnily enough, precisely his discussion of “rationality” in the third essay, “The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really Love Bureaucracy After All”. Graeber spends several pages in this essay arguing that it is silly to say that you base your politics on “rationality” or that other people’s political beliefs are “irrational” because, given that you clearly don’t mean a Platonic conception of rationality (a conception of reality which encompasses moral rationality, or rationality applied to ‘ends’, which assumes that there are objectively valuable ends and that you’re irrational if you don’t value them), then you must be using rationality to just mean logical coherence + vague correspondence of beliefs to empirical reality. And this means, Graeber says, that you’re really claiming that everyone who has different political views to you is insane. But this is an atrocious argument. People who are not clinically insane often hold inconsistent beliefs, people who are not clinically insane often hold political beliefs that are completely untethered from the available evidence, people who aren’t clinically insane often engage in highly motivated reasoning when it comes to politics (clinging to dogmas in the face of all evidence), and so on. Furthermore, it is perfectly clear that some people are better at avoiding cognitive biases and motivated reasoning than others (Popper and Russell are better than any Libertarian, for example), and have, as a result, more ‘reality-based’ political beliefs. It is evidently justified for these more careful political thinkers to say that they try to base their politics on “rationality” and to accuse others of being irrational, if those others are not meeting their own standards. That’s why I can justifiably say, for example, that I think Graeber is less rational than Chomsky.

[13] The fact that people believe such things is why I believe in eugenics (no, seriously, I do believe in eugenics; I think that, if and when we know enough about genetics to do gene-editing relatively safely, we should have no reservations about designing babies for greater intelligence).

[14] This is, by the way, a very standard and widely recognised conclusion among people interested in such things.

[15] Basically, I started out the email, which I titled something like “Questions about what an Anarcho-Syndicalist Society would “look like””, by asking Chomsky why, unlike Marx, he hadn’t tried to expound a vision of his ideal society. I then presented a brief bullet-point sketch of what I thought would be the basic institutional structures in an anarcho-syndicalist society, and asked him what he thought. Chomsky replied to me by pointing out (in one sentence) that I was wrong about Marx (who basically never talked about the Communist utopia, except elliptically, and was more preoccupied with presenting an account of the moral failings of his current society). There was nothing else to Chomsky’s email, and no mention of my blueprint. I was hideously embarrassed.

[16] I make this stipulation (which I won’t attempt to disambiguate – at least not now) because my point is to try to imagine a society that is as technologically advanced as our own society, but without the systems of hierarchy and concentrations of power. As I said before, I’m not interested in anarcho-primitivism, and (more generally) I don’t believe in the desirability of any society significantly less technologically advanced than our current one.

Before we go any further, I should also point out that my initial description of this Libertarian socialist world will be ‘conditionalised on’ the level of technology we had in the West circa. 2000. In other words, I will assume minimal industrial automation and no service sector automation. Fortunately, I will later explore the question of how automation and robots might be integrated into the vision, which I think is very important, given the direction we’re heading in in 2016, an examination of which will make up the last part of this essay. 

[17] Yes, there is such a thing as a non-capitalist market system. It’s just a market system, where, because of the internally democratic nature of the firms, there are no “capitalists”. There would be no lone entrepreneurs in such a system, but groups of people (entrepreneur-groups) setting up new co-operative corporations.

(Ironically, neoclassical economists model the ‘capitalist economy’ (and Neoliberals/Libertarians think of the capitalist economy) in a way that better matches this vision than the actual world.)

[18] As I will later explain, crucial features of the immigration policy in a Libertarian socialist society will mean that none of these corporations will be able to become as large as corporations are in our own society, and when they do reach ‘peak-growth’ (a hard limit), they will be forced to perpetually channel their profits to the community.

[19] Yes, believe it or not, the society I’m describing is not communist or capitalist. 

[20] In a not dissimilar fashion to democracy in 5^th Century Athens, I imagine that about 500 adult citizens from within the council’s jurisdiction would be chosen by lot at some suitable fixed interval to decide questions for their 20,000-strong local community. Either these 500 citizens would set their own agenda, or perhaps academics from a nearby (democratically organised) university would. I am, of course, completely alive to the possibly (in fact, probability) that there is a better set-up for the direct democracy than this.

[21] Temporary because that temporality is a check on power and a good way of ensuring that incompetents don’t linger too long.

[22] As we will see, there are reasons to think that it might be better to make a compromise at a higher number –say, 250,000 or higher still – even if this will likely negatively impact the anarchist/direct democratic element of the polity.

[23] Ideally, the police force would be set up in such a way that it didn’t primarily attract authoritarian personalities the way it does in our current society.

[24] Of course, Ricardo’s beautiful idea of “comparative advantage” doesn’t usually apply to the world we actually live in, for the main reason that countries specialising in manufacturing have a huge advantage over those specialising in agricultural goods (and often those countries who are specialising in agricultural goods are being prevented from becoming manufacturing centres by the wealthier and more powerful industrial countries who benefit from the current arrangement of almost entirely one-sided advantage). http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/mises-on-ricardian-law-of-association.html. http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/the-cult-of-free-trade-in-nutshell.html. http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/erik-reinert-versus-ricardo-on-free.html. http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2016/08/ha-joon-chang-on-history-of.html.

As a result of these truths, it is likely that some polities would quickly gain an advantage over others, based on the nature of their specialisation. This, as I will discuss, is one motivation for a centralised Libertarian socialist society, since a central body (or state) could perform a redistributive function, ensuring that each polity has a similar quality of public amenities, healthcare, education, etc. It is also part of the explanation as to why one wouldn’t want specialisation becoming too total; the other part is that overly specialised polities would be very boring places, and for young people, unless their dream was to do the kind of work in which their own polity of birth specialised in, it would induce a massive desire for emigration to the polities most concordant with their respective ambitions. This mass movement of young people would be hard to co-ordinate.

[25] Does one want to bite the bullet on this?

[26] This depends on whether the internally democratic corporations are allowed, by the legal system, to use some of their profits to advertise. There would obviously be no point once they reached the point of peak expansion.

[27] Of course, this is kind of a confusing thought because it’s hard to imagine how a Libertarian socialist society could get to the point that I’m imagining except by the world becoming almost entirely peaceful.

[28] At least to the extent that our own society ‘works’

[29] Without simultaneously imagining that people have cognitive enhancements, or cyborg bodies, or live forever, or spend their whole time in virtual reality, because that’s too scary and too difficult (even if it seems extremely plausible that if our own society gets to a ‘robot stage’, it will be simultaneous with exactly these kinds of things).

[30] The term “command economy” is often used synonymously with “mixed economy”, but “mixed economy” also seems to be commonly used to describe Keynesian-type, robustly regulated but definitely capitalist economies like those of the Scandinavian countries. As will be very clear, I am not using “command economy” to refer to such societies.

[31] But what about Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum? I categorically deny that Jeremy Corbyn is an ideological extremist, or in any way a threat to any democratic institutions in England, which means that he is not the kind of figure Popper is talking about. Corbyn is not a highly intelligent man, which causes problems, but if I were in England, I’d be supporting him.

[32] Obviously, the very existence of the 8-hour working day is the work of unions early in the 20^th Century. Similarly, F.D.R’s New Deal probably couldn’t have occurred without massive working-class pressure either. Most pertinently, it does appear that the design of the equitable economic arrangements of the 50s and 60s (high wages, pensions, cheap healthcare and education) was largely compelled by the elite fear of labour movements and the working classes turning communist. And there wouldn’t have been such a fear if there weren’t at least some left-wing radicals around – which illustrates their importance.

[33] In his work Super-imperialism, Michael Hudson explains how the abandonment of the gold standard meant that the US dollar became the world’s reserve currency, which meant that developing countries had massive incentives to buy US bonds and securities (especially since they wanted to compete with US exports), which basically serviced US military deficits as well as keeping the value of the dollar high, which played a major role in causing manufacturing to move offshore to the very Third World countries who were trapped in this pernicious cycle of servicing US deficits by accumulating US dollars. The US desire to limit the ability of these countries to compete with its own experts began the Washington Consensus (market liberalisation for you (our banks and multinationals invade your country and become the main rentiers, preventing any sovereign economic development) and protectionism for us).

[34] We should only worry about an intelligence explosion, if you think there's more than a minuscule chance that we'll make genuinely creative and autonomous machines (or creative machines explicitly programmed to alter their own code or make other intelligent machines) in the relatively near future (I don't think there's more than minuscule chance of this).