WHY THESE POLEMICS?

Actually written JANUARY 8, 2023 - 

I don’t understand why the right and left constantly demonize each other. It honestly seems rather bizarre to me. And I can’t fall in line and take a side, so I end up feeling alienated by both sides.

Each side finds a villain in the other. I find the same villains, but in both sides. Both sides are right about the villains they see in their opposition. But each side refuses to acknowledge the villains spotted by their opposition. It’s all like, “Naw, our side is nothing but heroes – y’all are the only villains!”

Here are the villains the right find in the left: the power hungry corrupt bureaucrat/politician. Their motivation is not to protect us all from the harms of dog-eat-dog capitalism. No, their real motivation is only to act out on a certain insidious “glee of the destroyer” and an “envy against achievement”; and to enact this upon large populations, and therein to feel a perverted kind of power that compensates for their lacking the ability to produce anything of value to humanity. They invent hoax problems with the free market so they can have something to protect us all from – thus inventing problems only they can allegedly solve. At the extreme, they end up murdering millions in their alleged attempts to solve the problems.

I too, think such villains exist. They create more suffering than prevent.

Here are the villains the left find in the right: the greedy hoarding robber-barons, too-big-to-fail, pay-half-of-us-to-kill-the-other-half-and-profit-from-the-weapon-sales, fascist monsters of free enterprise. Their motivation is not to experience the dignity and self-esteem of knowing that they survive and flourish by means of their own productive powers to create valued goods and services, and trade their’s for the values that others produce. No, their real motivation is to get more orgies per week by a mix of creating real values non-coercively (if we’re lucky), but also by oppression, theft, swindling, hurting, and even murdering folks – if they can get away with it.

[Cue: Dead Milkmen - Right Wing Pigeons]
[Cue: Consolidated - America Number One]

I too, think such villains exist. They create more suffering than relieve.

Now, why can’t either side acknowledge the existence of both villains?

The neuroses I’ve been speculating everyone else has – that’s why.

The neurosis of the left is the ressentiment described by Nietzsche and Stephen Hicks. The neurosis of the right is narcissistic elitism.

(My own neurosis is fetishized abstract compassion.)

Anyway, I have this notion that neuroses come from suffering; they are myths and half-truths that compensate our suffering. So I’m sayin’ that everyone is suffering; both sides are suffering and coping with it through neuroses of mutual blame.

[Cue: Propaganda - Ignorance]

I have this “Nazi gas chamber Jew corpse pile” image of humanity. I think I got it from reading something Elie Wiesel or Victor Frankl wrote (whether or not Wiesel/Frankl saw this or just made it up). Wiesel/Frankl described how the Jews in the gas chambers climbed upon one another to get closer to the air vent in the ceiling and thus escape death. Humans, reduced to the will to kill and hurt one another to escape suffering.

The only cure for all this neurosis is to eliminate suffering for real. That likely won’t happen in our lifetimes.

I gotta say things about capitalism and socialism in this context. Both these social systems provide opportunities to hurt people. And if my “Nazi gas chamber Jew corpse pile” image of humanity is valid, then both capitalists and socialists will hurt others to get closer to the ceiling vent.

I hear defenders of capitalism raging on about how capitalism actually prohibits coercion. (and that appearances to the contrary arise from confusing true capitalism with state-controlled pseudo-capitalism, and so on). First of all, I totally agree. I fully understand that true capitalism prohibits coercion.

But there are ways to hurt others for profit (or for sport) without coercing them. And I call it “death-leverage capitalism”. Death-leverage capitalism is when the elite class practices what I call “death leveraging”, wherein they use a non-coercive strategy to acquire ownership and control of everything people need to survive, such that everyone must either work for the elite, or die. Once able to death-leverage everyone, the elite literally set the terms for everyone else’ survival. They can pay you literally nothing, make you toil and live in dangerous and unhealthy production centers, and let you die when you get sick or otherwise unable to work. They can even whip you to make you work harder. And the whipping is not coercion because you are free to stop it instantly by quitting on the spot. Only problem is, you can’t find any alternative means to survive. To live, you must work for them on whatever terms they want.

On a technicality, I doubt actual death-leverage capitalism has ever existed. The practice requires the elite class to use only non-coercive strategies to acquire ownership and control of everything people need to survive. In reality, the elite class likely resorts to some degree of coercion for acquiring such ownership. This I would instead call “death-leverage pragmatism”. And so a defender of capitalism would claim that true capitalists never death-leverage. My reply: the elite don’t practice death-leverage capitalism because they don’t have to. It’s easier and more efficient to practice death-leverage pragmatism. But if the elite for some reason had to practice full non-coercive capitalism, they could still death-leverage. Real, non-coercive capitalism allows for death-leveraging.

But no matter how the elites manage to acquire everything everyone needs to survive, doing so allows them to death-leverage everyone into practical slavery, under conditions perceptually indistinguishable from literal slavery. But the elite can keep harping on how this practical slavery is not coercive.

I have no idea the extent to which death leveraging has ever been fully implemented. My guess is that some colonizing nations have come close to full implementation on their colonized people. The rest of us who live in pseudo-capitalist nations are probably subject to some degree of partial death-leveraging. Such partial death leveraging would more precisely termed “misery-leveraging”. Because the elite don’t quite own everything yet, you may not die if you quit. But you will likely suffer a bunch. So they can still misery-leverage you. (And maybe what I call “misery-leveraging” is just what classic anti-capitalists have been calling “exploitation”.)

What I have established here is that coercion and hurting people don’t track one another exactly. The absence of coercion does not necessarily mean an absence of hurting others for profit or sport.

Therefore, it is conceivable that coercion can actually prevent practices like death and misery leveraging – when it is directed at the elites who would otherwise opt to use them. I suspect that such is the intended use of coercion under socialism. Too bad it still fails to prevent an elite class from hurting others for profit or sport.

But, enough of this. I return to my original sentiment. These polemics upset me. I’m dismayed that both sides refuse to empathize with one another. Can we just sit down with one another and start by asking one another what it is they fear from their opposition – and then really listen? Listen with our hearts – much more than our minds. Feel the hurt of the other. Perhaps even trivialize the actual meaning of one another’s words and focus way more on the feelings behind the words. And tell each other that we hear them for once. You’ve reached me. I feel you. Tell me more. I’m here for you now. And I won’t interrupt if you must pause for a long time to search for the right words. I’ll make time for you.

Nel Noddings suggests, in the context of public debate over abortion, that we discuss the matter as we would discuss such things within a caring family. (“A Woman’s Answer to Job”, in They Shall Not Hurt, P84) And I think she means to expand this idea to all polemics. I agree.

I know I myself fall significantly short of this highly sympathetic ideal. I too would probably need training to better approach it. But I’d be willing.

[Cue: Dar Williams - The Christians and the Pagans]
[Cue: Rush - Closer to the Heart]

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