Trump, Brilliance, Capitalism

Don't Dismiss Trump's Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity. We should assume they are darkly brilliant, says Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal in Time.

Both Trump and Stephens, who begins his piece in Time with ridiculous assertions about the integrity of his employer, the Wall Street Journal, which in reality has become just another right-wing Murdoch noise machine, should be seen for the morons they are. You've got to be pretty stupid not to see that Trump is stupid, or not to see how Murdoch has turned the Journal into a joke.

I'm tired of claims that Trump is brilliant. He's not merely pretending to be a buffoon, he actually is one, unlike many other leading Republicans, who, although certainly not rocket scientists, are also not the idiots they are currently pretending to be in their agonized efforts to argue that the President is making sense about something, and/or not really saying the idiotic things he obviously is saying. Kellyanne Conway is perhaps the most strikingly obvious example, in the way that she has said utterly different things about Trump before and after he hired her.

Many of the scientists and engineers who are improving solar and wind power and developing other green sources of energy, and many of the entrepreneurs getting them up and running, actually are brilliant. Trump, and his boss Putin, embody the stupid approach to energy policy: double down on petrochemicals. Artists, teachers, philosophers often are downright brilliant, and in the US we are pearls currently cast before the swine Trump.

Trump, along with the AIDS Medication Douchebag Martin Shkreli, embodies pure capitalism, and demonstrates that it requires crudity and insensitivity rather than intelligence. You remember the infuriatingly stupid grin on Shkreli's face as he confronted intense scrutiny by the media and by legislators after he obtained the manufacturing license for the AIDS medication Daraprim and immediately raised its price from $13.50 to $750 per dosage? Of course you remember. That sort of grin, in that sort of situation, is the sort of thing which sears itself into the memory. He was grinning because he knew that he had followed the rules of capitalism perfectly.

What he didn't know -- has he learned it in the meantime? -- is that becoming the most despised jerk in the US was going to have an effect on his life, no matter how closely he followed those rules.

Capitalism teaches that the person with the greatest amount of wealth has achieved the greatest amount of success. That's all that capitalism teaches about success: buy low, sell high, done. Most capitalists realize, sometimes consciously, often not, that there are many other factors in success and failure than the size of one's stack. When a person's ideas of success and failure are really, actually, exclusively about the bottom line, which is actually only rarely the case, the result is horrible and repulsive, like Shkreli, and like the current President of the United States.

Unfortunately, the realization that capitalism has some big problems is often not conscious. In the United States more than in some other places, the unwillingness to treat capitalism as something which can and should be examined critically, is very widespread. Capitalism is often talked about as if it were as inevitable as gravity, and as impossible to wish away, and that nothing better will ever be able to replace it.

It seems to me that the 2007-2008 financial crisis led more people to criticize capitalism as a whole than had done so previously. Maybe Trump will wake up still more people about it.

Trump And Alternative Energy

Bloomberg News, Nov 9, 2016: "Trump's Win 'A Disaster' for Plunging Renewable Energy Sector"

Bloomberg News, Nov 23, 2016: "Economics to Keep Wind and Solar Energy Thriving With Trump"

More headlines seem to agree with the second headline than with the first. A third headline, from fiverthirtyeight.com on Nov 14, seems to cover the prevailing opinion pretty well: "It's Hard To Tell Whether Trump Supports Renewable Energy — And That May not Matter Much"

It may not matter much, because wind and solar and other green energy options may very soon be so much more attractive economically than oil and coal that Trump and the petrochemical sector won't be able to kill them. The technology just keeps getting more efficient and cheaper. The tech geniuses just keep thinking stuff up, as Bruce Willis put it in Armageddon. Transparent solar panels, which can cover the entire exterior of a building because they double as windows. Rotating solar panels.

When I said "more attractive economically" above, I was referring to conventional economics, and to the kind of investor whose biggest hero is Adam Smith. Conventional economics or paleoeconomic theory, exemplified by Trump and Big Oil, create a theoretical model of the entire world in which things such as the environment are treated as "externals," as secondary factors, not to be treated as the primary things under consideration when investing. Of course, this is completely insane: conventional economics is an arbitrary way of doing things which functions only because enough people have agreed to do things that way. It can be completely scrapped and replaced by a totally different economic model whenever people agree to do so, and such a change will not harm the atmosphere or the oceans one bit. On the other hand, if the oceans die or the atmosphere becomes too polluted or temperatures rise too much, all of the people will die, and every form of economics on Earth will die with them. Conventional economic theory regards buying and selling and currencies and loans and interest and so forth as essential things, and environment and health as secondary. The plain and obvious truth is that conventional economics has this completely backwards.

It's dawning on more and more people that conventional economics has this completely backwards. Nevertheless, it continues to function in terms of rewarding those who follow its rules with greater accumulations of money than those who don't. It's either dawned on Democrats much more often than on Republicans, or Republicans pretend that it hasn't dawned on them because they're making money with that pretense. "We are what we pretend to be," as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out.

The ironic thing is that solar and wind energy and other clean energies are beginning to win, not because of their ecological benefit, but because of their appeal to those who continue to follow conventional economics and to treat the environment as if it were secondary to buying and selling and loaning and interest rates and wages and so forth. These clean energies are rapidly growing in appeal to those who seem to believe that conventional economics consists of laws of nature rather than completely arbitrary agreements between people, agreements which can be, and are, modified, re-invented or scrapped whenever people agree to do so. Green energy is growing in appeal to those appeal because it's making money and not because of anything to do with the environment or with the health of living things.

Presumably, if clean energies grow by several hundred percent in the next few years, resulting in petrochemical shrinking to a small fraction of the market share they now enjoy, Trump will take credit for the bluer skies and gentler weather and our greater ability to see the stars at night, and claim it was all his idea right from the start, whether he's still president or whether he was impeached and removed from office early in 2017.

Ecological Thinking Must REPLACE Economics

I've been reading Andre Gorz yesterday and today, not for the first time, and suddenly I had this epiphany: ecological thinking must replace economics. Gorz was brilliant at pointing out the ways in which some planning of economies was necessary, how deregulation led to chaos and failure, how microelectronics were shrinking the demand for labor -- in the 1980's he was ahead of where a lot of people are now on all of these issues, even after the huge lesson of 2007-2008.

I don't know whether Gorz himself would have said, simply and without qualification, that ecology must replace economics. Maybe he'd react by saying, "Duh! That's what I was saying, yes, and you read how much of my stuff before you got it?!" or maybe he wouldn't get it.

Plenty of people see that unrestrained, unregulated capitalism is unsustainable for ecological reasons alone, besides other reasons. Only hardcore libertarians are still too stupid to see that. But people keep tinkering with capitalism.

Enough with the tinkering. Capitalism itself is the problem. What do we need? Growth, competition? No, that's the stuff that's killing us. We need food, shelter, water, air, leisure, freedom, pleasure, love. Those are all ecological things. Money doesn't have to enter into it. Money is just something we've overlain onto what is actually essential.

Caring about each other, is that economical? No. It's ecological.

Am I ahead of the curve here? Or am I behind the curve to think that there might be anything at all new or original about this little mental breakthrough I've just had?

Optimism

I'd like to be optimistic about the prospects for the future of the human race. (I think believing that the human race has a future of more than a hundred years or so, that we will not kill ourselves off by then nor will we be obliterated by, say, a comet, or an unexpected plague or something completely unforeseen, is optimistic.) I don't think that people can predict the future as accurately as many people have claimed that they could. A good meteorologist can predict the weather for a given location a few days ahead with 80% accuracy or so. Farther out than that, things become decidedly murky, except for the long-term probability that the weather will get much, much, much worse unless people change their behavior very radically. And the latter: how radically people's behavior will change, and how soon -- that I don't think anyone can predict. The factors involved are far too complex. I choose optimism because it's more fun, and also because it gives me more energy than pessimism, energy which I can expend on constructive behavior which makes my optimism a self-fulfilling prophecy to a certain extent. And I think optimism just feels better. Any statement about what any creature other than oneself, human or otherwise, actually thinks or feels, is ultimately guesswork, but let me engage in some guessing: let's look at the case of that arch-pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer.He had so many advantages: he grew up wealthy in Weimar. As a young man had Goethe,for crying out loud, as a mentor, but he broke off that relationship for no good reason at all, and told himself that he had good reason, that the break was inevitable, that it was his only honorable choice; he sabotaged what might have been a brilliant career as a professor, putting who knows how big a dent in the nonsense spread by his bête noire Hegel --a self-sabotage plain to see to anyone today, with our advantage of Freudhaving pointed out to the world in the meantime a few elementary things about how the human mind works; he never married, he had no known grand passionate flings, he always expected the worst of people and was seldom disappointed; he wrote many very wise things (and some stupid things), he's very much worth reading, but the thought of being someone remotely like him must send great chills of No-thank-you-PLEASE! down the spine of anyone paying attention.

Nietzsche,on the other hand, had such horrible health problems that few could have blamed him for being very gloomy, but instead he chose to think and write like a Superman bursting with every kind of health, and showed his readers a way toward greater passion and greater joy. Seems to me like it was fun to be him.

And so I choose to believe that we have a chance to change our behavior so radically that the weather will once again become less extreme, and there will no longer be wars started by shortages of drinkable water, and that high finance will change to something more humane and constructive than deliberate thievery and fraud -- that in general we have a chance to become smarter, and nicer to one another, and to thrive.

Paradigms

The other day I was reading some things by André Gorz --his political-economic, or ecological writings, as he sometimes referred to them. Not Letter to D: A Love Story,which might be really great for all I know, but I'm not interested in it right now -- and not for the first time I was exhilarated by Gorz' great good sense, and at the same time deeply discouraged by what seems to me to be the great distance between such good sense and most people's even allowing themselves to consider such topics, let alone agree with Gorz. I'm a very enthusiastic reader of Gorz, and I would encourage everyone to take a look at such books as Ecology as Politicsand Farewell to the Working Class,although I am not a Gorzist in the sense that many people have been Marxists, inasmuch as they have treated Marx's writing as holy texts, claiming that All The Answers Are In There. (Marx himself said that he was not such a Marxist, but the Marxists have overlooked that passage in Marx just as other believers overlook whatever they have to so as not to have to actually think for themselves.) You don't have to agree with Gorz about everything, but I think it would be very helpful if more people began to think about the topics he raises.

Among these is setting limits to economic growth. This is already quite a familiar topic to ecologists (and meteorologists), but it does not compute for many economists, because much of economic theory still is predicated on constant growth. Well, we're beginning to burn the Earth to a crisp, and so we need to start thinking about this. Soon. Now. Ecologists have been thinking and talking about it for decades, but they haven't been getting through to most economists and leaders of politics and industry. Al Gore is one of the exceptions, and for his trouble he got the Nobel Peace Prize and became a laughingstock among most economists and politicians, even as the effects of global warming he and other ecologists have warned about have been coming to pass. The problem is that there is such a separation between ecological and economic thought. Gorz, unlike most ecologists, including Gore, unfortunately, has a profound grasp of the economic theories which have been put in place by the world's leaders, he understands their jargon, he understands their concerns, and he responds to them in ways they can readily comprehend. It's not very often you see an ecologist who is also an economist.

What Gorz writes about -- along with some other New Leftists -- is a paradigm shift in economics, away from the obsession solely with quantity and toward the deeper concept of quality. To this day economics is dominated by the concern with quantity and with growth and ever more growth. We've come to realize that we are endangering ourselves by burning too many petrochemicals and clearing away too many forests and wetlands and paving too much of the Earth -- but we keep on doing it. The economic markets continue to behave as if no-one had ever heard of air pollution or global warming or extreme weather, because they continue to be based on the criterium of quantity, that more is always better. This mentality is not merely absurd: it also often rewards people who frankly are just not bright enough to realize that it is absurd. William Gaddis' novel JRunderscores this point by making its title character and odious protagonist an 11-year-old boy -- and not even a remarkably bright 11-year-old -- who becomes a financial titan by observing other Wall Street titans and doing what they do. (He's surrounded by highly-cultured and sensitive adults, and when they occasionally notice and are appalled by what JR is up to, he replies, "That's what you do!")

A paradigm shift in economic thinking, from quantity as the goal to quality, would make this a much better and more satisfying world. Oliver Stone's second Wall Streetmovie, with Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin, makes this point in Stone's typically un-subtle way. The original Wall Streetfrom 1987, in which Charlie Sheen dueled with Michael Douglas, had more subtle hints of this conflict between a paradigm of quantity and one of quality -- more subtle perhaps because at the time Stone was only subconsciously aware of it. I don't mind Stone not being subtle: he's trying to make people think, and in such an effort subtlety is not always called for. The examples of the Soviet bloc have shown us that it's extremely difficult to force entire nations to behave in their own self-interest. I don't believe that broad-scale paradigm shifts can be brought about in such a top-down forced manner. I think that education has to be improved, that that's the only way that the human race can be saved from itself.

Climate and Psychology

It's very green where I live: there's a lot of rain in the summer, and the leaves on the trees and shrubs grow in very thick and deep green. And there are an awful lot of trees and shrubs. and many people let their lawns grow kind of long before they mow them. Some people around here don't mow their grass at all, not because they're distracted or disturbed, but in order intentionally to add to the already-abundant plant life, pumping out all that oxygen for us.

Politically it's very green around here too: many of the cars are Priuses or other hybrids. Many people don't drive at all or walk or run or bicycle a significant part of the time. The city buses run on bio-diesel. The city collects recyclables along with the trash every week. Until recently they provided different-colored bins for different kinds of recyclables: paper and cardboard, plastic, glass, etc. Then they replaced all of those with one recyclable bin. I was confused, I called the city and asked but what about the sorting? Should we put different categories of stuff in separate bags inside the bins or what? They said: no, just throw it all in there, throw it all in together in your new recyclables bin. Our new recyclables collection trucks sort it all automatically.

Boy hoydy.

When I moved here and saw all the Priuses -- they're the top-selling hybrid vehicle here as elsewhere, and the only ones I can readily identify as hybrid -- my only thought was that it was great. That if more place were like this we humans would have a better chance of not killing ourselves.

I recently saw the movie The Other Guys,and although I liked it, it clued me in to what some other people think of Priuses, and it was harsh. Will Ferrell plays an NYPD detective who happens to drive a Prius. Mark Wahlberg's character, Ferrell's character's partner, in the passanger seat of the Prius, remarks, "Wow, I actually feel like I'm riding in a vagina." Other detectives ask whether the car came with a dental dam, and so forth.

Wow. Excuse us for riling up your subconscious sexual insecurities by trying to save your lives, guys. Excuse us for trying to save you and the other hairless apes from yourselves.

All that lush plant life around here, pumping out all that oxygen -- which came first, the abundant plant life or the green focus in local politics? Does the extra oxygen help our brains function better? Like the nasty little Republican kid in Everyone Says I Love Youwho, it turned out, was only Republican because a blood vessel in his brain was obstructed, and once normal blood flow to his brain was surgically restored, he became a healthy liberal Democrat like the rest of his family?