Here's a rich foreshadowing of my interview with one of the "Politics Guys," Michael Baranowski, a generous, whip-smart professor who also read Underthrow, the book.
While I agree with many of your points Max, there seem to be some incongruencies in your arguments that (imho) undermine your purported desire of peace & equity for all people.
Regarding the first of your 3 articles of the Church of State:
"1. Prosperity is Immoral, which is to say material abundance is somehow the product of sin"
I would love to see any nation state adequately address the issue of shared prosperity, but from my vantage point this is not (and likely will never be) the case as long as the nation state is locked into a blood pact with the neoliberal capitalist order, as it stands today. Nation states are quite literally the violent backstop to the seemingly unending accumulation of private capital, and they are quite a privileged player in the process so I don't think they mind all that much (I don't think many of them even see an alternative). All efforts of wealth redistribution, however meager and insufficient they are today, have been hard fought in days past by citizens banding together in solidarity - the very same people who are the supposed heroes of your story! 😬 A final point here, I would posit that all windfall profits come at the cost of unpaid externalities - oil profits come from carbon externalities, logging profits come from biodiversity externalities, social media profits come from data externalities. So, in many cases, extreme material abundance for some does imply large costs for everyone else - the rich privatize their profits and socialize their losses, all while their private property rights are reified by the state in order to protect them in doing so. This would completely undermine article #1. #2 and 3 I don't disagree with (other than the fact that *someone* has to be a designer in every system, a detail we have discussed in the past).
Moreover, regarding your "Big Three Problems" of the "people in power":
1. Wealth inequality: a much studied topic with plenty of historical precedence, with relatively clear outcomes that higher inequality leads to higher social instability. (This is not taken anywhere near seriously by the people in power, or we might see actual policy put in place to address it - as it stands, we do not).
2. Climate emergency: this is only a problem for the people in power?? You're going to have to fill in some gaps for me on that leap. Are we allowed to pick & choose which aspects of reality we agree with and don't, when we form our political opinion? (Also, this is not taken seriously enough by anyone in power, especially when incumbent corporate lobbyists exert such inertia)
3. Social Justice: It is difficult for me to read a piece by an author claiming to speak for the common person, yet scoffs at those same people's pleas for equity in the face of historical and ongoing oppression. I imagine you may be referring to the polemic & politically-manufactured debate over social justice issues, rather than aiming to diminish the voices of the forgotten peoples in our societies - but this is a line that must be walked carefully, lest you become the oppressor you seek you escape. (This is also not taken seriously by people in power - evidenced by ongoing colonial practices of oppression against indigenous populations, as one of many historically under-represented groups.)
To be honest, it seems like you are taking some of these points to the polemic extremes of the extant political spectrum, and I don't see that lending any credence to your otherwise very well made points. I am glad you make such a ruckus about resisting oppression, because on occasion your very next sentence might seem to imply visiting that oppression on another societal group, which I am sure you do not intend!
Moreover, regarding your "Big Three Problems" of the "people in power":
1. Wealth inequality: a much studied topic with plenty of historical precedence, with relatively clear outcomes that higher inequality leads to higher social instability. (This is not taken anywhere near seriously by the people in power, or we might see actual policy put in place to address it - as it stands, we do not).
>> I don’t take this seriously either. The Spirit Level is one of the worst books ever written and it’s evidence is, well, self-evidently bad. But don’t take my word for it. Consider that some of the worst, least stable countries in the world have low Gini coefficients, and some of the most peaceful and prosperous places on earth have high Gini coefficients. Concerns about income inequality are a fetish that I believe is born out of certain people’s hunter-gatherer instincts. Put another way, if you could magically ensure that everyone in the world had a comfortable and fulfilling life, but that there would be 10000 more billionaires, I would accept that in a finger snap, particularly as wealth exists in a vascular system similar to every other vascular system on earth.
“2. Climate emergency: this is only a problem for the people in power??”
>>No, it’s that those who have such religious zeal about the matter tend to appeal to the poweful to “Do something!!!!” The authorities respond by taking more power away from the people.
You're going to have to fill in some gaps for me on that leap. Are we allowed to pick & choose which aspects of reality we agree with and don't, when we form our political opinion? (Also, this is not taken seriously enough by anyone in power, especially when incumbent corporate lobbyists exert such inertia)
>> Which aspects of reality? We’re talking about faith/zeal, not reality. But even if we were talking about reality, indeed, we have to ask which aspects? For that is rather the problem with the Climate Collapse Thesis: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/the-climate-collapse-thesis
“3. Social Justice: It is difficult for me to read a piece by an author claiming to speak for the common person, yet scoffs at those same people's pleas for equity in the face of historical and ongoing oppression.”
>> Where do I claim to speak for the common person? I don’t. I’m certainly no populist. I have suggested that we listen to the voices of common people, but I sure don’t claim to SPEAK for them. I do agree with this, though: "The rule-ruler-ruled relationship is the most fundamental source of inequalities in human societies."
“I imagine you may be referring to the polemic & politically-manufactured debate over social justice issues, rather than aiming to diminish the voices of the forgotten peoples in our societies”
>> In the book, I refer to “radical social justice,” or “critical social justice.” I’m referring specifically to the cultural outgrowth of neo-Marxist, critical theorists of the early twentieth century and/or to the adjacent postmodernists who have said very plainly that they do not care a jot about liberal justice or neutral principles of law. I have no time for people who, for example, get paid to do seminars called “decentering whiteness,” or who claim that the “only remedy for past discrimination is future discrimination.”
“- but this is a line that must be walked carefully, lest you become the oppressor you seek you escape.”
>> I cannot abide any doctrine that carves up groups into oppressor/oppressed and proceeds to regard all matters through the lens of victimology. It’s like the cognitive distortions of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) applied as a political strategy to turn whole groups into default victims to justify illiberal means of seizing various means of production.
“This is also not taken seriously by people in power - evidenced by ongoing colonial practices of oppression against indigenous populations, as one of many historically under-represented groups.”
>> Weirdly, I think I agree with you on this one. I am about to release a modest proposal that would grant reparations to indigenous peoples. I even think these tribes should be allowed to form their own independent nations within the contiguous US. However, I suspect we will disagree about the means by which natives (and blacks) can be made whole.
“To be honest, it seems like you are taking some of these points to the polemic extremes of the extant political spectrum, and I don't see that lending any credence to your otherwise very well made points. I am glad you make such a ruckus about resisting oppression, because on occasion your very next sentence might seem to imply visiting that oppression on another societal group, which I am sure you do not intend!”
>> In my cramped, narrow-minded worldview, justice is not a cosmic scoreboard of aggrieved groups that must rectify the problems of the past by creating new problems in the present. When you depend on hypostatization in your conception of justice – i.e. groups versus individuals – you almost always compound injustice by oppressing or harming new individuals. As time passes, new generations do inherit some of history’s baggage, distortions, and even echoes of past injustice. But new generations also manage to overcome them. It’s no accident that the objects of collective pity are the groups who have received the most in redistribution. It’s no accident that those who have received the most in redistribution fare the worst when compared with other groups who did not. Pity or sanctimonious outrage about the behavior of dead generations is a terrible basis for social policy. If I happen to agree with partisans about that, I don’t know what to say. Justice is too precious to distort with qualifiers. Individual growth and empowerment is too important to turn people into victims by group membership.
>>Thanks for this, Jeff! As always, I appreciate your feedback, pushback, and commitment to good discourse. I am not surprised that the more I write, the more you'll find to disagree with. But I hope whatever we disagree about challenges us both when w
“While I agree with many of your points Max, there seem to be some incongruencies in your arguments that (imho) undermine your purported desire of peace & equity for all people.”
>> I am NOT committed to equity for all people and I don’t see peace and equity being commensurable at all. There is equality before the law. Otherwise, I am not an egalitarian.
"1. Prosperity is Immoral, which is to say material abundance is somehow the product of sin"
I would love to see any nation state adequately address the issue of shared prosperity, but from my vantage point this is not (and likely will never be) the case as long as the nation state is locked into a blood pact with the neoliberal capitalist order, as it stands today.
>> I agree with this in the abstract, but the devil is in the details and definitions. “Neoliberalism” is a term without much light and a lot of heat. If neoliberalism means being a proponent of market entrepreneurship, then count me in. If neoliberalism means corporatist/fascism, then count me out. The latter is the unholy alliance between corporations and states = Today’s America. However, redistributive states have a terrible track record for mistreating people and creating poverty, and I generally consider them fundamentally wrong.
“Nation states are quite literally the violent backstop to the seemingly unending accumulation of private capital, and they are quite a privileged player in the process so I don't think they mind all that much (I don't think many of them even see an alternative).”
>> The accumulation of private capital sans -- externalities or cronyism -- is okay by me. But I agree that accumulation of private capital via authoritarian means (or with political cover) is a deadly combo. I see no problem with the honest accumulation and stewardship of private wealth, just like I see no problem with the mahogany trees of the rainforest holding more sunlight and water than the rest of the flora and fauna.
“All efforts of wealth redistribution, however meager and insufficient they are today, have been hard fought in days past by citizens banding together in solidarity - the very same people who are the supposed heroes of your story! 😬 “
>> Not sure what you mean by the heroes of my story. I'm sure I'd be okay with a bunch of people heroically starting a successful, private cooperative. Otherwise, wealth redistribution as a means of rectifying the distortions of crony capitalism is a necessary evil at best, but it still compounds the evil. Redistribution is fundamentally wrong in my mind, not only because it shores up the power of what is essentially a protection racket (the state), but it sometimes removes capital from good stewards and creates whole classes of people who are dependent on the expropriated largesse. Over the long term, that perpetuates poverty, rather than mitigating it. It amounts to pulling the boards off a ship at sea to make a cook fire for one night.
“I would posit that all windfall profits come at the cost of unpaid externalities - oil profits come from carbon externalities, logging profits come from biodiversity externalities, social media profits come from data externalities.”
>> I can agree that some of these are externalities and unjustified profits, though not others. I think it would be far better for us to exist in a robust common law regime – civil torts – in which people can prove with a preponderance of evidence the imposition of some external cost. More courts, fewer regulators. Courts are far more difficult to corrupt than legislators. I think the big difference between our worldviews, respectively, is that I tend to place the locus of blame on authorities and corporations in collusion with authorities. I suspect you tend to blame the corporations and the angels in government merely for their inaction. (Not in each and every case, mind you, but I’d say these are our tendencies, respectively.) But governments are angelic fixers and corporations are evil polluters is linear thinking. The dynamics of public choice economics are very real. I want to persuade you that the power of guns and jails is much more difficult to un-entrench than the power of wealthy CEOs and their products/services. (Both combined are truly evil.) And I really want to disabuse you of the idea that angelic regulators are going to improve matters for people or the planet.
“So, in many cases, extreme material abundance for some does imply large costs for everyone else - the rich privatize their profits and socialize their losses, all while their private property rights are reified by the state in order to protect them in doing so.”
>> On this we can lock arms in solidarity: It’s truly evil. It happens all the time. But it's BECAUSE of the dynamics of public choice, not DESPITE those dynamics.
“This would completely undermine article #1. #2 and 3 I don't disagree with (other than the fact that *someone* has to be a designer in every system, a detail we have discussed in the past).”
>> First, no one has to be a designer in every system. Who designed the English language? The Lex Mercatoria? English Common Law? One might argue, as do I, that someone can design good or better protocols, but it’s an enormously problematic conceit to think anyone can design a society – particularly one with 330 million people.
Dear Max - perhaps we do have less in common the more we discuss. Perhaps (at least I hope) we can also change that?
I think it is important to distinguish between equity and equality, because those are two very distinct concepts. Perfect equality is a naive and unnatural (as in, we do not see it in nature) desire for uniformity across a discrete population that will never be uniform. It is silly everywhere except maybe in theory - when you grow a garden of roses, you wouldn't expect that they will all grow to be the exact same height - there are just too many environmental variations! Equity, on the other hand, is more like ensuring that the whole garden gets sufficient access to water, not just the 10% of the roses who are closest to the tap. If you lionize private wealth accumulation, then you idolize the tallest roses - but do you pay homage to how they managed to grow that way, with privileged access to key resources (and the ability to deny those resources to others)? Who is to say who gets that privileged access? (You may claim no one should decide that, yet in our private capital/nation state system today it is decided every day by those with power==capital.) Is this not yet another form of oppression that we should mitigate? If the most powerful 1% can drink freely at the tap of (manmade) private finance, and everyone else must wait to subsist on an insufficient trickle, is this not itself an imposed distortion that obstructs the potential emergence of that collective?
I am surprised you do not have a better grasp of neoliberalism - perhaps a fish in water issue. In a pinch, Neoliberalism is "privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending" - in other words, subject the public sphere to domination by private capital, which seems to be the logical outcome of some of your arguments as well. Similarly, the people who push for these kinds of policies seem to claim some form of natural "free market" force that will deliver us from our problems - yet these "forces" have only seemed to make our societal problems exponentially worse since we entered the neoliberal era in the 1970's. I would highly recommend checking out the theory of "Capital as Power" by Nitzan and Bichler, or any of the work by Mariana Mazzucato and her colleagues at the IIPP. (Here's a talk on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtkJ-AgLuY). The influence of capital as power are distinctly missing from your perspective, whether purposefully or incidentally. State bureaucracy is only one way among many that humans have devised to oppress each other, and your arguments (and proposed solutions) would be made stronger in the acknowledgment of other forms of coercion outside of the oppressive bully of the nation state.
I am so glad you brought up trees & natural ecosystems as an example! Forests are perfect examples of polycentric redistribution, although it cannot always be seen with the naked eye. You may see a tall, proud and independent mahogany in your yard, but rest assured it is in continuous redistributive solidarity with its environment. New research tells us that up to 25% of the sugars produced via photosynthesis in a given tree are intelligently redistributed via mycelial networks to a wide network of interconnected plants. 25%! That's higher than the marginal tax rate on someone earning $165,000+ in the US. Analyzing nature's redistributive cycles further, what is autumn but a massive annual debt jubilee? Every fall, that mahogany drops its entire bounty of accumulated leaf biomass back onto the younger trees & plants below, so that they have the resources to continue to grow and nourish themselves over time, so that one day they may even compete with that Mahogany. This is reminiscent of the cyclical debt jubilees you will see throughout the historical evolution of human economics, aside from the anomalous system of artificially enforced wealth disparity that we live in today. Nature is a long-term sustainable system due to the very nature of its redistributive cycles, not because of it's lack of them. Human systems are likely on the verge of collapse for the opposite reason.
If humans are going to find "natural principles" of large scale coordination that we can abide by, perhaps we should indeed pay more attention to the evolutionary patterns we observe in nature - particular the redistribution of resources (they call them nutrient "cycles" for a reason!) that are part & parcel of nature's sustainable ecosystems. In fact, your concept of individual wealth accumulation without consideration for anything else in the environment also has an analogy in nature (although it is anything but sustainable) - cancer. The reason hoarding (aka excessive private wealth accumulation) is a problem in nature is because when one part of an ecosystem monopolizes the nutrients and all the other parts starve, the outcome is often that the host ecosystem becomes unstable and dies. If all the blood is hoarded in the head, the legs cannot carry that head to water. When an individual cell grows indefinitely without appropriate feedback-response with its neighbors and ecosystem, the inherent unsustainability of such a system ends in death of the host and the collapse of higher order complexity (i.e. us).
You seem to have narrowed in on "individual vs collective" as a narrative. However, this is an innate duality and ongoing tension in all ecosystems that cannot be wishfully solved with a simple optimization for one over the other. The presumption that the individual should in no way be beholden to the collective is no different than a petulant child who insists on the freedom to swing his arms wildly about in a crowded room, without regard for whose nose his fist may come into contact with. It also makes all sorts of false presumptions - one of which being that you or I are an "individual" at all! Each one of us are collectives of trillions of different parts working in polyphonic unison, many of those parts not even human. That scales up and down, and the "individual vs collective" tensions exist at each fractal layer. These tensions can and should be explored of course, but it would be foolish to advocate for one to dominate the other.
I am not sure where you read my perspective as a government apologist, but you would be mistaken there. You are not wrong that the nation state is a problem. What you seem to miss is that it is not the *entire* problem - our systems of extractive finance and private capital are also heavy contributors to the mess we currently find ourselves in (at least as much so as government, but as I have mentioned before, they really are one and the same hydra). And if you are not a fan of the human design of systems, then you REALLY won't like our current economic system, because it was heavily designed to siphon the majority of the garden's water to the top 1-10% of roses, only allowing a mere trickle through to the other 90% of the garden. This unhealthy ecosystem is then protected and given legitimacy by nation state governments - if that isn't systemic oppression that needs to be rectified, I don't know what is. If you only seek to address a part of the problem, your policy recommendations could risk sending us out of the firepan and right into the fire.
Languages are indeed designed, albeit over long periods of time and by many participants in a co-evolutionary fashion. (Although many are designed over much shorter periods and by fewer participants! Look at programming languages or even Bahasa, for example.) Languages follow consistent grammatical rules that evolve over time and usage - keep in mind those rules didn't exist in some 'natural state' before humans existed, so humans must have been involved in their creation process, even if you can't pinpoint a single designer! Legal systems and frameworks are absolutely designed, and also copied and iterated. Economic systems are 1000% designed. These systems can all also be re-designed. Here you might say "well hang on, any system designed by a human shouldn't be forced on others, because it may not represent their interests!" - and there we might be in complete agreement.
Now let us return to our current economic system. It was absolutely designed - and very poorly designed at that - by a small subset of humans (almost exclusively old, white, male, and rich, although you could swap in any societal group and it would likely still be rather unrepresentative). That system actively prevents polycentric emergence and financial evolution on a daily basis, by restricting the flow of economic nutrients to the rest of the 90% of the garden that would utilize them. I would never propose that someone should design a single system for 330 million people (we will reserve that folly for the nation state) - perhaps instead there should be 330 million systems designed as voluntary opt-in systems, and may the best one win! For that matter, why speak of the folly of a monolithic system of government for 330 million people, when we can talk about the folly of a monolithic system of economics for 7 billion? How brittle and non-resilient is our current (and very human designed) economic system? It would be foolish to think that someone must design the singular perfect system that can save us from our problems. As a corollary, it would be foolish to continue to impose the singular dollar-denominated political-economic system that we are stuck in today, on a world that is not adequately served by it. If we are concerned about the propagation of insufficient manmade systems, perhaps our first step should be to stop imposing today's insufficient economic system on the entire population of the planet, and let people innovate for themselves, because we now have new tools with which they can do just that!
I would encourage you to examine vascular systems in more detail, if that is among your interests - particularly the ratios you find repeatedly throughout these kinds of systems. If you were to compare the scale disparities between natural systems and manmade economic systems, I believe you would find that our ratios of wealth inequality resemble unhealthy and unsustainable ecosystems. Even the metrics we have chosen to measure that wealth are misleading (likely on purpose) - you might think that "GDP going up" is an indication of more wealth created in a nation, but GDP going up may be just as indicative of 1 person becoming infinitely richer, and everyone else dying off. Perhaps this would be an acceptable scenario for some, but I find it highly distasteful and I hope you would too, given your respect for natural laws (which tend to be sustainable, given their long evolutionary history). As to your hypothetical scenario of "eradicating planetary poverty but also adding another 10000 billionaires" - unfortunately this is a flight of fancy, since poverty is an intentional systemic outcome of the current economic order.
One of the main issues I take with some of your viewpoints is that you seem to presume natural law can reign freely within a severely distorted, man-made economic system. I would rather see us learn from the laws we observe around us in nature, and apply those (as evolutionary co-designers) in an iterative, emergent and exploratory fashion to the economic substrate of our reality - which of course, is illegal today (as decreed by the nation state in order to protect the interests of private capital accumulation). I also believe you would benefit from a deeper understanding of systems thinking and complexity theory, especially as it relates to sustainable circular economies (https://medium.com/disruptive-design/why-the-circular-economy-needs-systems-thinking-d91acb323436) - while there are an infinite number ways to do systems design wrong, the relatively few ways that it might be done properly will require the continuous advancement of replicable empirical disciplines that can help us understand and navigate the complexities of our future. Without better tools to improve our collective systemic understanding, we are all but doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
You seem to be making a lot of unjustifiable assumptions about my views. For example, I would never say that the individual should never be accountable to "the collective," much less to other individuals (which is what any collective is composed of). Indeed, I'm referring to methodological individualism, which reminds us that ONLY individuals act. People can act in unison and individuals are interdependent. Furthermore, individuals can impose externalities on others. But there is no such thing as a collective. As I have said that involves a fallacy of hypostatization that people have used to justify state power you and I both resist.
What I am trying to point out, though, is that--historically--collectivism as a doctrine rests on the idea of a monopoly on violence, which bans private ownership and controls the means of production (and therefore the population). This is nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marx-Engels collectivism. The syndicalists (socialist anarchists) thought workers could assume control of the means of production without authoritarian power, but Engels was right to say that is impossible. The problem for both Marxists and the syndicalists lies in banning private property. This might be our point of divergence, as you seem more open to a Chomskyite view of syndicalism, which both prohibits private property and capital accumulation. I'm very much for capital accumulation, especially to the extent that it can be more distributed, but that the distribution tracks with value creation. One accumulates capital to the degree one deploys it to create value in society (i.e., for individuals) -- but NOT to externalize costs. On that latter point, we agree.
I wish I could share your view of humanity as a polyphonic collective of souls enmeshed, or whatever, but I worry it goes too far unless you're being metaphorical. Now, with respect to the human design of systems, neither of us can equivocate when it comes to what he means by "system." To me, a system is a set of rules or protocols, but it is NOT a set of directives by one person over another. We might decide everyone follows the rule DRIVE ON THE RIGHT, but that would be profoundly different from the central directive GO TO YOUR HOME. Both of these would result in systems, albeit of different kinds. Only one would result in a complex system in full flower. One system is the consequence of directives, the other is the consequence of good protocol design. So, yeah, I'm okay with system design of this sort. I also see our current economic system has attempting to reconcile both types, but it amounts to a mongrelized muddle that tends to benefit the rich and the powerful. On this I suspect we agree, too.
In terms of roses, I chose the rainforest metaphor very deliberately, because rainforests are emergent ecosystems that are not designed at all. Gardens are designed and I think too many people think people ought to be part of a "garden" of their design. This too lapses into twentieth-century collectivism and dirigisme.
In terms of language and the law, people use English, not Esperanto. In terms of law, common law is not designed at all. It is a consequences of evolutionary iteration cycles and caselaw accumulates wisdom in shale layers to resolve interpersonal conflicts, frictions, and tensions. By contrast, statute law is designed by legislatators. I'm not so fond of that latter form because it assumes members of deliberative bodies have more knowledge than they do.
Finally, I have to close with pushback against this: "I also believe you would benefit from a deeper understanding of systems thinking and complexity theory, especially as it relates to sustainable circular economies." I assure you that systems thinking and complexity theory are incommensurable, not only because I am very well acquainted with complexity theory, but because "systems thinking" cannot be carried out at scale. I pick on systems thinkers here, https://underthrow.substack.com/p/introducing-metapolitics
"Perhaps you’ve met her. Whether she’s haunting the corridors of the EU buildings in Brussels, or sent off to Davos to expound on her ideas before the WEF elites, she spends her days in deep reflection, rigorous analysis, or synthesizing information from various disciplines. She sees possibilities that escape the notice of the laity, trapped as they are in linear thinking.
In the realm of “systems thinking,” she stands apart. Not only can she appreciate complexity and interconnection, but she can also plan such systems for others through intelligent design. While most are content with a surface-level understanding, she perceives the underlying dynamics that govern reality. To her, everything is woven into a tapestry of relationships and patterns—transcending the ordinary, penetrating the superficial. She is the weaver.
In her eyes, only those with a truly exceptional intellectual curiosity can hope to walk the path she has carved. In her mind, she’s no authoritarian. She’s a servant leader capable of making decisions for the common good. And she’s getting noticed. Her grasp of systems thinking is not just a pursuit. It’s a way of life. Her global outlook promises to heal a benighted world.
We should beware of this person. But why?
One word: humility."
As I have suggested elsewhere, Jeff, Elinor Ostrom knew that local systems of commons management could be designed, but they cannot be scaled. And they too evolve. Most people who love Ostrom don't realize that she was a liberal anarchist like me. As far as sustainable, circular economies go, try those locally all day long. But keep them voluntary and keep them local. Otherwise, they will fail.
While I agree with many of your points Max, there seem to be some incongruencies in your arguments that (imho) undermine your purported desire of peace & equity for all people.
Regarding the first of your 3 articles of the Church of State:
"1. Prosperity is Immoral, which is to say material abundance is somehow the product of sin"
I would love to see any nation state adequately address the issue of shared prosperity, but from my vantage point this is not (and likely will never be) the case as long as the nation state is locked into a blood pact with the neoliberal capitalist order, as it stands today. Nation states are quite literally the violent backstop to the seemingly unending accumulation of private capital, and they are quite a privileged player in the process so I don't think they mind all that much (I don't think many of them even see an alternative). All efforts of wealth redistribution, however meager and insufficient they are today, have been hard fought in days past by citizens banding together in solidarity - the very same people who are the supposed heroes of your story! 😬 A final point here, I would posit that all windfall profits come at the cost of unpaid externalities - oil profits come from carbon externalities, logging profits come from biodiversity externalities, social media profits come from data externalities. So, in many cases, extreme material abundance for some does imply large costs for everyone else - the rich privatize their profits and socialize their losses, all while their private property rights are reified by the state in order to protect them in doing so. This would completely undermine article #1. #2 and 3 I don't disagree with (other than the fact that *someone* has to be a designer in every system, a detail we have discussed in the past).
Moreover, regarding your "Big Three Problems" of the "people in power":
1. Wealth inequality: a much studied topic with plenty of historical precedence, with relatively clear outcomes that higher inequality leads to higher social instability. (This is not taken anywhere near seriously by the people in power, or we might see actual policy put in place to address it - as it stands, we do not).
2. Climate emergency: this is only a problem for the people in power?? You're going to have to fill in some gaps for me on that leap. Are we allowed to pick & choose which aspects of reality we agree with and don't, when we form our political opinion? (Also, this is not taken seriously enough by anyone in power, especially when incumbent corporate lobbyists exert such inertia)
3. Social Justice: It is difficult for me to read a piece by an author claiming to speak for the common person, yet scoffs at those same people's pleas for equity in the face of historical and ongoing oppression. I imagine you may be referring to the polemic & politically-manufactured debate over social justice issues, rather than aiming to diminish the voices of the forgotten peoples in our societies - but this is a line that must be walked carefully, lest you become the oppressor you seek you escape. (This is also not taken seriously by people in power - evidenced by ongoing colonial practices of oppression against indigenous populations, as one of many historically under-represented groups.)
To be honest, it seems like you are taking some of these points to the polemic extremes of the extant political spectrum, and I don't see that lending any credence to your otherwise very well made points. I am glad you make such a ruckus about resisting oppression, because on occasion your very next sentence might seem to imply visiting that oppression on another societal group, which I am sure you do not intend!
Moreover, regarding your "Big Three Problems" of the "people in power":
1. Wealth inequality: a much studied topic with plenty of historical precedence, with relatively clear outcomes that higher inequality leads to higher social instability. (This is not taken anywhere near seriously by the people in power, or we might see actual policy put in place to address it - as it stands, we do not).
>> I don’t take this seriously either. The Spirit Level is one of the worst books ever written and it’s evidence is, well, self-evidently bad. But don’t take my word for it. Consider that some of the worst, least stable countries in the world have low Gini coefficients, and some of the most peaceful and prosperous places on earth have high Gini coefficients. Concerns about income inequality are a fetish that I believe is born out of certain people’s hunter-gatherer instincts. Put another way, if you could magically ensure that everyone in the world had a comfortable and fulfilling life, but that there would be 10000 more billionaires, I would accept that in a finger snap, particularly as wealth exists in a vascular system similar to every other vascular system on earth.
“2. Climate emergency: this is only a problem for the people in power??”
>>No, it’s that those who have such religious zeal about the matter tend to appeal to the poweful to “Do something!!!!” The authorities respond by taking more power away from the people.
You're going to have to fill in some gaps for me on that leap. Are we allowed to pick & choose which aspects of reality we agree with and don't, when we form our political opinion? (Also, this is not taken seriously enough by anyone in power, especially when incumbent corporate lobbyists exert such inertia)
>> Which aspects of reality? We’re talking about faith/zeal, not reality. But even if we were talking about reality, indeed, we have to ask which aspects? For that is rather the problem with the Climate Collapse Thesis: https://underthrow.substack.com/p/the-climate-collapse-thesis
“3. Social Justice: It is difficult for me to read a piece by an author claiming to speak for the common person, yet scoffs at those same people's pleas for equity in the face of historical and ongoing oppression.”
>> Where do I claim to speak for the common person? I don’t. I’m certainly no populist. I have suggested that we listen to the voices of common people, but I sure don’t claim to SPEAK for them. I do agree with this, though: "The rule-ruler-ruled relationship is the most fundamental source of inequalities in human societies."
“I imagine you may be referring to the polemic & politically-manufactured debate over social justice issues, rather than aiming to diminish the voices of the forgotten peoples in our societies”
>> In the book, I refer to “radical social justice,” or “critical social justice.” I’m referring specifically to the cultural outgrowth of neo-Marxist, critical theorists of the early twentieth century and/or to the adjacent postmodernists who have said very plainly that they do not care a jot about liberal justice or neutral principles of law. I have no time for people who, for example, get paid to do seminars called “decentering whiteness,” or who claim that the “only remedy for past discrimination is future discrimination.”
“- but this is a line that must be walked carefully, lest you become the oppressor you seek you escape.”
>> I cannot abide any doctrine that carves up groups into oppressor/oppressed and proceeds to regard all matters through the lens of victimology. It’s like the cognitive distortions of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) applied as a political strategy to turn whole groups into default victims to justify illiberal means of seizing various means of production.
“This is also not taken seriously by people in power - evidenced by ongoing colonial practices of oppression against indigenous populations, as one of many historically under-represented groups.”
>> Weirdly, I think I agree with you on this one. I am about to release a modest proposal that would grant reparations to indigenous peoples. I even think these tribes should be allowed to form their own independent nations within the contiguous US. However, I suspect we will disagree about the means by which natives (and blacks) can be made whole.
“To be honest, it seems like you are taking some of these points to the polemic extremes of the extant political spectrum, and I don't see that lending any credence to your otherwise very well made points. I am glad you make such a ruckus about resisting oppression, because on occasion your very next sentence might seem to imply visiting that oppression on another societal group, which I am sure you do not intend!”
>> In my cramped, narrow-minded worldview, justice is not a cosmic scoreboard of aggrieved groups that must rectify the problems of the past by creating new problems in the present. When you depend on hypostatization in your conception of justice – i.e. groups versus individuals – you almost always compound injustice by oppressing or harming new individuals. As time passes, new generations do inherit some of history’s baggage, distortions, and even echoes of past injustice. But new generations also manage to overcome them. It’s no accident that the objects of collective pity are the groups who have received the most in redistribution. It’s no accident that those who have received the most in redistribution fare the worst when compared with other groups who did not. Pity or sanctimonious outrage about the behavior of dead generations is a terrible basis for social policy. If I happen to agree with partisans about that, I don’t know what to say. Justice is too precious to distort with qualifiers. Individual growth and empowerment is too important to turn people into victims by group membership.
>>Thanks for this, Jeff! As always, I appreciate your feedback, pushback, and commitment to good discourse. I am not surprised that the more I write, the more you'll find to disagree with. But I hope whatever we disagree about challenges us both when w
“While I agree with many of your points Max, there seem to be some incongruencies in your arguments that (imho) undermine your purported desire of peace & equity for all people.”
>> I am NOT committed to equity for all people and I don’t see peace and equity being commensurable at all. There is equality before the law. Otherwise, I am not an egalitarian.
"1. Prosperity is Immoral, which is to say material abundance is somehow the product of sin"
I would love to see any nation state adequately address the issue of shared prosperity, but from my vantage point this is not (and likely will never be) the case as long as the nation state is locked into a blood pact with the neoliberal capitalist order, as it stands today.
>> I agree with this in the abstract, but the devil is in the details and definitions. “Neoliberalism” is a term without much light and a lot of heat. If neoliberalism means being a proponent of market entrepreneurship, then count me in. If neoliberalism means corporatist/fascism, then count me out. The latter is the unholy alliance between corporations and states = Today’s America. However, redistributive states have a terrible track record for mistreating people and creating poverty, and I generally consider them fundamentally wrong.
“Nation states are quite literally the violent backstop to the seemingly unending accumulation of private capital, and they are quite a privileged player in the process so I don't think they mind all that much (I don't think many of them even see an alternative).”
>> The accumulation of private capital sans -- externalities or cronyism -- is okay by me. But I agree that accumulation of private capital via authoritarian means (or with political cover) is a deadly combo. I see no problem with the honest accumulation and stewardship of private wealth, just like I see no problem with the mahogany trees of the rainforest holding more sunlight and water than the rest of the flora and fauna.
“All efforts of wealth redistribution, however meager and insufficient they are today, have been hard fought in days past by citizens banding together in solidarity - the very same people who are the supposed heroes of your story! 😬 “
>> Not sure what you mean by the heroes of my story. I'm sure I'd be okay with a bunch of people heroically starting a successful, private cooperative. Otherwise, wealth redistribution as a means of rectifying the distortions of crony capitalism is a necessary evil at best, but it still compounds the evil. Redistribution is fundamentally wrong in my mind, not only because it shores up the power of what is essentially a protection racket (the state), but it sometimes removes capital from good stewards and creates whole classes of people who are dependent on the expropriated largesse. Over the long term, that perpetuates poverty, rather than mitigating it. It amounts to pulling the boards off a ship at sea to make a cook fire for one night.
“I would posit that all windfall profits come at the cost of unpaid externalities - oil profits come from carbon externalities, logging profits come from biodiversity externalities, social media profits come from data externalities.”
>> I can agree that some of these are externalities and unjustified profits, though not others. I think it would be far better for us to exist in a robust common law regime – civil torts – in which people can prove with a preponderance of evidence the imposition of some external cost. More courts, fewer regulators. Courts are far more difficult to corrupt than legislators. I think the big difference between our worldviews, respectively, is that I tend to place the locus of blame on authorities and corporations in collusion with authorities. I suspect you tend to blame the corporations and the angels in government merely for their inaction. (Not in each and every case, mind you, but I’d say these are our tendencies, respectively.) But governments are angelic fixers and corporations are evil polluters is linear thinking. The dynamics of public choice economics are very real. I want to persuade you that the power of guns and jails is much more difficult to un-entrench than the power of wealthy CEOs and their products/services. (Both combined are truly evil.) And I really want to disabuse you of the idea that angelic regulators are going to improve matters for people or the planet.
“So, in many cases, extreme material abundance for some does imply large costs for everyone else - the rich privatize their profits and socialize their losses, all while their private property rights are reified by the state in order to protect them in doing so.”
>> On this we can lock arms in solidarity: It’s truly evil. It happens all the time. But it's BECAUSE of the dynamics of public choice, not DESPITE those dynamics.
“This would completely undermine article #1. #2 and 3 I don't disagree with (other than the fact that *someone* has to be a designer in every system, a detail we have discussed in the past).”
>> First, no one has to be a designer in every system. Who designed the English language? The Lex Mercatoria? English Common Law? One might argue, as do I, that someone can design good or better protocols, but it’s an enormously problematic conceit to think anyone can design a society – particularly one with 330 million people.
Dear Max - perhaps we do have less in common the more we discuss. Perhaps (at least I hope) we can also change that?
I think it is important to distinguish between equity and equality, because those are two very distinct concepts. Perfect equality is a naive and unnatural (as in, we do not see it in nature) desire for uniformity across a discrete population that will never be uniform. It is silly everywhere except maybe in theory - when you grow a garden of roses, you wouldn't expect that they will all grow to be the exact same height - there are just too many environmental variations! Equity, on the other hand, is more like ensuring that the whole garden gets sufficient access to water, not just the 10% of the roses who are closest to the tap. If you lionize private wealth accumulation, then you idolize the tallest roses - but do you pay homage to how they managed to grow that way, with privileged access to key resources (and the ability to deny those resources to others)? Who is to say who gets that privileged access? (You may claim no one should decide that, yet in our private capital/nation state system today it is decided every day by those with power==capital.) Is this not yet another form of oppression that we should mitigate? If the most powerful 1% can drink freely at the tap of (manmade) private finance, and everyone else must wait to subsist on an insufficient trickle, is this not itself an imposed distortion that obstructs the potential emergence of that collective?
I am surprised you do not have a better grasp of neoliberalism - perhaps a fish in water issue. In a pinch, Neoliberalism is "privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending" - in other words, subject the public sphere to domination by private capital, which seems to be the logical outcome of some of your arguments as well. Similarly, the people who push for these kinds of policies seem to claim some form of natural "free market" force that will deliver us from our problems - yet these "forces" have only seemed to make our societal problems exponentially worse since we entered the neoliberal era in the 1970's. I would highly recommend checking out the theory of "Capital as Power" by Nitzan and Bichler, or any of the work by Mariana Mazzucato and her colleagues at the IIPP. (Here's a talk on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtkJ-AgLuY). The influence of capital as power are distinctly missing from your perspective, whether purposefully or incidentally. State bureaucracy is only one way among many that humans have devised to oppress each other, and your arguments (and proposed solutions) would be made stronger in the acknowledgment of other forms of coercion outside of the oppressive bully of the nation state.
I am so glad you brought up trees & natural ecosystems as an example! Forests are perfect examples of polycentric redistribution, although it cannot always be seen with the naked eye. You may see a tall, proud and independent mahogany in your yard, but rest assured it is in continuous redistributive solidarity with its environment. New research tells us that up to 25% of the sugars produced via photosynthesis in a given tree are intelligently redistributed via mycelial networks to a wide network of interconnected plants. 25%! That's higher than the marginal tax rate on someone earning $165,000+ in the US. Analyzing nature's redistributive cycles further, what is autumn but a massive annual debt jubilee? Every fall, that mahogany drops its entire bounty of accumulated leaf biomass back onto the younger trees & plants below, so that they have the resources to continue to grow and nourish themselves over time, so that one day they may even compete with that Mahogany. This is reminiscent of the cyclical debt jubilees you will see throughout the historical evolution of human economics, aside from the anomalous system of artificially enforced wealth disparity that we live in today. Nature is a long-term sustainable system due to the very nature of its redistributive cycles, not because of it's lack of them. Human systems are likely on the verge of collapse for the opposite reason.
If humans are going to find "natural principles" of large scale coordination that we can abide by, perhaps we should indeed pay more attention to the evolutionary patterns we observe in nature - particular the redistribution of resources (they call them nutrient "cycles" for a reason!) that are part & parcel of nature's sustainable ecosystems. In fact, your concept of individual wealth accumulation without consideration for anything else in the environment also has an analogy in nature (although it is anything but sustainable) - cancer. The reason hoarding (aka excessive private wealth accumulation) is a problem in nature is because when one part of an ecosystem monopolizes the nutrients and all the other parts starve, the outcome is often that the host ecosystem becomes unstable and dies. If all the blood is hoarded in the head, the legs cannot carry that head to water. When an individual cell grows indefinitely without appropriate feedback-response with its neighbors and ecosystem, the inherent unsustainability of such a system ends in death of the host and the collapse of higher order complexity (i.e. us).
You seem to have narrowed in on "individual vs collective" as a narrative. However, this is an innate duality and ongoing tension in all ecosystems that cannot be wishfully solved with a simple optimization for one over the other. The presumption that the individual should in no way be beholden to the collective is no different than a petulant child who insists on the freedom to swing his arms wildly about in a crowded room, without regard for whose nose his fist may come into contact with. It also makes all sorts of false presumptions - one of which being that you or I are an "individual" at all! Each one of us are collectives of trillions of different parts working in polyphonic unison, many of those parts not even human. That scales up and down, and the "individual vs collective" tensions exist at each fractal layer. These tensions can and should be explored of course, but it would be foolish to advocate for one to dominate the other.
I am not sure where you read my perspective as a government apologist, but you would be mistaken there. You are not wrong that the nation state is a problem. What you seem to miss is that it is not the *entire* problem - our systems of extractive finance and private capital are also heavy contributors to the mess we currently find ourselves in (at least as much so as government, but as I have mentioned before, they really are one and the same hydra). And if you are not a fan of the human design of systems, then you REALLY won't like our current economic system, because it was heavily designed to siphon the majority of the garden's water to the top 1-10% of roses, only allowing a mere trickle through to the other 90% of the garden. This unhealthy ecosystem is then protected and given legitimacy by nation state governments - if that isn't systemic oppression that needs to be rectified, I don't know what is. If you only seek to address a part of the problem, your policy recommendations could risk sending us out of the firepan and right into the fire.
Languages are indeed designed, albeit over long periods of time and by many participants in a co-evolutionary fashion. (Although many are designed over much shorter periods and by fewer participants! Look at programming languages or even Bahasa, for example.) Languages follow consistent grammatical rules that evolve over time and usage - keep in mind those rules didn't exist in some 'natural state' before humans existed, so humans must have been involved in their creation process, even if you can't pinpoint a single designer! Legal systems and frameworks are absolutely designed, and also copied and iterated. Economic systems are 1000% designed. These systems can all also be re-designed. Here you might say "well hang on, any system designed by a human shouldn't be forced on others, because it may not represent their interests!" - and there we might be in complete agreement.
Now let us return to our current economic system. It was absolutely designed - and very poorly designed at that - by a small subset of humans (almost exclusively old, white, male, and rich, although you could swap in any societal group and it would likely still be rather unrepresentative). That system actively prevents polycentric emergence and financial evolution on a daily basis, by restricting the flow of economic nutrients to the rest of the 90% of the garden that would utilize them. I would never propose that someone should design a single system for 330 million people (we will reserve that folly for the nation state) - perhaps instead there should be 330 million systems designed as voluntary opt-in systems, and may the best one win! For that matter, why speak of the folly of a monolithic system of government for 330 million people, when we can talk about the folly of a monolithic system of economics for 7 billion? How brittle and non-resilient is our current (and very human designed) economic system? It would be foolish to think that someone must design the singular perfect system that can save us from our problems. As a corollary, it would be foolish to continue to impose the singular dollar-denominated political-economic system that we are stuck in today, on a world that is not adequately served by it. If we are concerned about the propagation of insufficient manmade systems, perhaps our first step should be to stop imposing today's insufficient economic system on the entire population of the planet, and let people innovate for themselves, because we now have new tools with which they can do just that!
I would encourage you to examine vascular systems in more detail, if that is among your interests - particularly the ratios you find repeatedly throughout these kinds of systems. If you were to compare the scale disparities between natural systems and manmade economic systems, I believe you would find that our ratios of wealth inequality resemble unhealthy and unsustainable ecosystems. Even the metrics we have chosen to measure that wealth are misleading (likely on purpose) - you might think that "GDP going up" is an indication of more wealth created in a nation, but GDP going up may be just as indicative of 1 person becoming infinitely richer, and everyone else dying off. Perhaps this would be an acceptable scenario for some, but I find it highly distasteful and I hope you would too, given your respect for natural laws (which tend to be sustainable, given their long evolutionary history). As to your hypothetical scenario of "eradicating planetary poverty but also adding another 10000 billionaires" - unfortunately this is a flight of fancy, since poverty is an intentional systemic outcome of the current economic order.
One of the main issues I take with some of your viewpoints is that you seem to presume natural law can reign freely within a severely distorted, man-made economic system. I would rather see us learn from the laws we observe around us in nature, and apply those (as evolutionary co-designers) in an iterative, emergent and exploratory fashion to the economic substrate of our reality - which of course, is illegal today (as decreed by the nation state in order to protect the interests of private capital accumulation). I also believe you would benefit from a deeper understanding of systems thinking and complexity theory, especially as it relates to sustainable circular economies (https://medium.com/disruptive-design/why-the-circular-economy-needs-systems-thinking-d91acb323436) - while there are an infinite number ways to do systems design wrong, the relatively few ways that it might be done properly will require the continuous advancement of replicable empirical disciplines that can help us understand and navigate the complexities of our future. Without better tools to improve our collective systemic understanding, we are all but doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
You seem to be making a lot of unjustifiable assumptions about my views. For example, I would never say that the individual should never be accountable to "the collective," much less to other individuals (which is what any collective is composed of). Indeed, I'm referring to methodological individualism, which reminds us that ONLY individuals act. People can act in unison and individuals are interdependent. Furthermore, individuals can impose externalities on others. But there is no such thing as a collective. As I have said that involves a fallacy of hypostatization that people have used to justify state power you and I both resist.
What I am trying to point out, though, is that--historically--collectivism as a doctrine rests on the idea of a monopoly on violence, which bans private ownership and controls the means of production (and therefore the population). This is nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marx-Engels collectivism. The syndicalists (socialist anarchists) thought workers could assume control of the means of production without authoritarian power, but Engels was right to say that is impossible. The problem for both Marxists and the syndicalists lies in banning private property. This might be our point of divergence, as you seem more open to a Chomskyite view of syndicalism, which both prohibits private property and capital accumulation. I'm very much for capital accumulation, especially to the extent that it can be more distributed, but that the distribution tracks with value creation. One accumulates capital to the degree one deploys it to create value in society (i.e., for individuals) -- but NOT to externalize costs. On that latter point, we agree.
I wish I could share your view of humanity as a polyphonic collective of souls enmeshed, or whatever, but I worry it goes too far unless you're being metaphorical. Now, with respect to the human design of systems, neither of us can equivocate when it comes to what he means by "system." To me, a system is a set of rules or protocols, but it is NOT a set of directives by one person over another. We might decide everyone follows the rule DRIVE ON THE RIGHT, but that would be profoundly different from the central directive GO TO YOUR HOME. Both of these would result in systems, albeit of different kinds. Only one would result in a complex system in full flower. One system is the consequence of directives, the other is the consequence of good protocol design. So, yeah, I'm okay with system design of this sort. I also see our current economic system has attempting to reconcile both types, but it amounts to a mongrelized muddle that tends to benefit the rich and the powerful. On this I suspect we agree, too.
In terms of roses, I chose the rainforest metaphor very deliberately, because rainforests are emergent ecosystems that are not designed at all. Gardens are designed and I think too many people think people ought to be part of a "garden" of their design. This too lapses into twentieth-century collectivism and dirigisme.
In terms of language and the law, people use English, not Esperanto. In terms of law, common law is not designed at all. It is a consequences of evolutionary iteration cycles and caselaw accumulates wisdom in shale layers to resolve interpersonal conflicts, frictions, and tensions. By contrast, statute law is designed by legislatators. I'm not so fond of that latter form because it assumes members of deliberative bodies have more knowledge than they do.
Finally, I have to close with pushback against this: "I also believe you would benefit from a deeper understanding of systems thinking and complexity theory, especially as it relates to sustainable circular economies." I assure you that systems thinking and complexity theory are incommensurable, not only because I am very well acquainted with complexity theory, but because "systems thinking" cannot be carried out at scale. I pick on systems thinkers here, https://underthrow.substack.com/p/introducing-metapolitics
"Perhaps you’ve met her. Whether she’s haunting the corridors of the EU buildings in Brussels, or sent off to Davos to expound on her ideas before the WEF elites, she spends her days in deep reflection, rigorous analysis, or synthesizing information from various disciplines. She sees possibilities that escape the notice of the laity, trapped as they are in linear thinking.
In the realm of “systems thinking,” she stands apart. Not only can she appreciate complexity and interconnection, but she can also plan such systems for others through intelligent design. While most are content with a surface-level understanding, she perceives the underlying dynamics that govern reality. To her, everything is woven into a tapestry of relationships and patterns—transcending the ordinary, penetrating the superficial. She is the weaver.
In her eyes, only those with a truly exceptional intellectual curiosity can hope to walk the path she has carved. In her mind, she’s no authoritarian. She’s a servant leader capable of making decisions for the common good. And she’s getting noticed. Her grasp of systems thinking is not just a pursuit. It’s a way of life. Her global outlook promises to heal a benighted world.
We should beware of this person. But why?
One word: humility."
As I have suggested elsewhere, Jeff, Elinor Ostrom knew that local systems of commons management could be designed, but they cannot be scaled. And they too evolve. Most people who love Ostrom don't realize that she was a liberal anarchist like me. As far as sustainable, circular economies go, try those locally all day long. But keep them voluntary and keep them local. Otherwise, they will fail.
yeah, whew, Leyla Acaroglu is the EXEMPLAR of a "systems thinker."