GOOD AND EVIL: TAUGHT AMERICAN STYLE

[Morpheal]

GOOD AND EVIL: TAUGHT AMERICAN STYLE

Let’s examine a simple instance.

The example is the Wall Street stock exchange, as it exists now, with all of its functions, processes, and purpose.

Capitalism of any type will almost invariably dictate that Wall Street is good.

Communism of any type will almost invariably dictate that Wall Street is evil.

Each system has its own beliefs as to why that is the case, but the system points to that answer and really allows no alternative response other than the response it dictates concerning the value of Wall Street. We see that beliefs tend to dictate value judgements. That then closes off thinking as to any other alternatives. Why consider alternatives if you have arrived at the good. You have nowhere else to go if you are there already. How devilish of you to even try to usurp the throne of God in heaven. Mutiny is not an option. So the question is not even considered.

Now, let’s take it a step further.

If we happen to be capitalists agreeing that Wall Street is good. (We must agree or we would not really be capitalists, would we ?) Then we have two basic variant visions or positions concerning Wall Street available to us.

We have a regulated system or a free market unregulated system defining Wall Street’s spectrum of possibilities as to the character of its processes and functions. The absolutely regulated and the completely unregulated, totally free market, systems stand at opposite poles of a spectrum of possibilities. It is like a grey scale ranging from white to black. You might be anywhere along the spectrum but the spectrum does divide into two basic camps. The one is more white than black and the other is more black and white. Invariably everyone falls on one side or the other of that fundamental divide. The trend then is for those on one side of the fence to believe that more regulation is evil, while the other group claims more regulation is good.

What we know from experience is that those positions are not based on scientific, rational, dispassionate, analysis, where beliefs are all put aside in favor of the true facts. It really is a matter of belief that tends to predominate and persuasion tends to draw some who are near the fence closer towards one pole or the other. Sometimes someone even gets convinced to jump the fence. Nevertheless they are all capitalists. Wall Street cannot be evil, it must be good, so that tends to sway the balance towards unregulated, deregulated, Wall Street. Why regulate the good, as it is good already.

What factor works most closely along with persuasion ? Self interest. When the self interest, ie profits, of a capitalist are served consistent with their belief that belief is reinforced and strengthened. Amazingly such Pavlovian conditioning is as effective as Pavlov’s original experiment with its token rewards. The typical capitalist eventually salivates when the bell rings even if there are no immediate rewards. There is the belief that rewards will eventually come. It is a product of psychological conditioning. And self interest must be good as we know we cannot divide out self interest from Wall Street and Wall Street is good.

The main point is that good and evil tend to be defined again as the dual polarity of regulated and unregulated. What that means is that there are fewer advocates of the shadowy areas in between, and more people holding to extremes. Once the question of good or evil enters into something it tends to be more of an all or nothing gambit. You either choose heaven or you choose hell, but you cannot choose both. If regulation is believed to be hell to self interest and profitability, the choice tends to be forced towards a heaven of self interested profits freed from regulation. Good and evil tend to have that much sway once brought into the belief based equation. We have already seen how the balance is tilted away from regulation. Let’s delve further.

Factored into this is the belief as to unfettered human nature being essentially good. Though fewer people really believe that nowadays than did before, the system includes a belief in promoting that idea as what is true. People are good, so self interest is for the good, and unregulated free market systems are therefore good and for the good. Without a belief in the fundamental goodness of human nature the rest of that equation collapses into ruin. So you have to keep pushing that idea and dread its demise. Everything depends on that. It is a cornerstone of the system as it exists.

Communism on the other hand is accused of holding the view that unfettered human nature is essentially evil. So human self interest is essentially evil, and unregulated systems are essentially evil in consequence. It is debatable whether this view really originated in communism or was later superimposed by communism’s opponents. Marx himself began as a Protestant preacher, worried about how profit motives might one day destroy all other values, and how this effects society and the individual. We do know that religion is itself a fetter meant to constrain human actions, so in that we have some basis for the accusation against communism. He started from the Bible, worrying about what we might today refer to as family values and individual human freedoms. He saw economic evolution going in a dangerous direction jeopardizing those values and really wondered how to save and preserve them. That isn’t how it ended up even if it started there in the pulpit. A treatise on how things are going and how they are evolving, as well as interpreting what that really might mean to people, does not necessarily lead to realization of ideals. It is too easy to force that vision onto a world that is hungry for coherent explanations for what is otherwise chaotic struggle in day to day life amid all of its conflicts of competing wants and needs, and to impose that vision of what is as if it is gospel avoiding any possible variant future. Marx is one example. Capitalist theorists are another. The debate rages as to which side is heaven and which side is hell. Which side is good and which side is evil. Each must be absolutely one or the other. Taken in that way economic and social science too easily become dogma, merely ideology of one species or the other, twisting facts to support their own vision, invoking a vision of unavoidable destiny, commanding belief, losing their true power to facilitate positive progress, ie facilitate real positive change. Preservation of the absolute good manifest as the system, the ideology, takes precedence. That preservation itself becomes believed to be an absolute good.

It would be wrong to say that Marx wanted to see every human relation devalued to a purely economic commerce, but that is what Marxism ends up being accused of. On the other hand we see Capitalism living up to the Marxist prophecy with ever increasing zeal. It too has failed to learn from Marx’s warnings concerning the increasingly nihilist future we now live within, and it failed to find alternative solutions to the destruction of all values into one value of an economic commerce concerning fiscal value, ie profit, as determinant of all meaning, in all relations. That is the direction that the world has been headed in recent years. Marx understood the nihilism in that better than most people today do. It was part of the philosophical conversation of his time period, when less was taken for granted as massive changes swept across Europe and beyond its borders. This is why nihilism tends to sneak up on us so readily now. Few people are trained in philosophy. It is an increasingly taboo subject. After all it brings about questioning. It brings in doubt rather than belief. It reasserts a purified scientific reason as opposed to a science and lived practice based on ideological beliefs.

Now, we begin to see something different.

Regulation is good or evil.
Capitalism is good or evil.
Communism is good or evil.
Free market is good or evil.
Human nature is fundamentally good or evil.

Oh.... what do we really have here ? An endless debate ? The start of a duel to the death with each side defending the honor of its own unyielding position ? A Cold War ? An apocalypse engineered by a god and a devil with human pawns stranded in the wastelands in between ?

Mostly people are expected to hold to a relatively unquestioned and unexamined belief, to internalize it, and to live it in their own lives in terms of how they think, what they say, and what they do. They adopt assumptions upon which most of their worldview about right and good is subsequently based. To do so they must become closed minded to anything inconsistent with those foundational assumptions, those fundamental beliefs.When called to fight for those beliefs, they must fight for them without questioning that too. We could outline a number of other economic beliefs, similar to those outlined, but we will leave that to others to delineate and ponder. The example is enough.

What is almost never seriously brought to light is the idea that neither side in any duality of beliefs, about good and evil, such as those issues we used as an example, is right or wrong, but it is only in the application of principles to circumstances that right and wrong have meaning based on their discernable and measurable effects. There is no good and evil deciding the matter from the start, but only the good or evil of how the rules, which are part of the tools, of a system, are employed and when and where. It is situational, not absolute, even though the twentieth century chose to push the idea that we are dealing solely with absolutes. This absolutism is largely to be blamed on America. Europe was not as certain. Dialectic was America’s first love, and imposed on the rest of the world, borrowed straight from Marx, but badly misused to create blind contention, based on the promotion of beliefs about absolute good and evil. America refused to learn from others, refused to cooperate with others, and refused to compromise with others, based on that absolute dichotomy of good and evil. It chose instead to dominate and force an absolute polarity without truly understanding the potential common ground. In fact American politics rejected any possibility of any common ground prior to any such consideration.

We must return for a moment, after realizing that fact, to that question of human nature. We have our deepest doubts nowadays about the American assertion that “we” believe unfettered human nature is fundamentally good. On the other hand our examination of the twentieth century problem of a forced dichotomy between absolute good and evil warns us that unfettered human nature is not fundamentally evil either. This is not a struggle between the evil of a devil and the good of a lord as some in power would still have us blindly believe. Instead we soon see the common ground. Human nature’s expressions as actions are a product of learning. If the wrong lessons have been learned we get more evil. If the right lessons have been learned we tend to get more good. Clearly then the quality of education versus the levels of ignorance have a major impact on how much regulation is required for the good to be possible and realized as opposed to evil.

What we see in the world situation, particularly in the financial sector, is failure of education for the good. Education has failed to teach adequate values. While it might have taught something about profit, and might have promoted self interest, it failed to inculcate higher values, as much as it failed to inculcate sufficient ability to reason scientifically, without assumptions, putting aside all beliefs, to see the facts of the world as they really are. Education must have taught beliefs, and it must have pushed the idea of absolute good and evil. We can see the results of that in the recent fiscal demise as in many other manifestations of die hard extremism where absolutes are set up to collide without any chance of any real dialogue. Education must have taught a dialectic that is a duel to the death, where one polarity in the dual equation of two systems, two viewpoints about what is right, has to destroy the other and declare itself absolutely true and absolutely good. Is that real education or is it brain washing propaganda ? At best it is a religion and tainted with generous doses of systemic abuse to make anyone exposed to it afraid to go against it due to the social and psychological consequences of doing so. Systemic abuse as enforcement is a common trait in extremist ideologies, inclusive of religion. Thus we know we live in a dark ages of economics. We are forbidden the heresies of questioning such things as globalization, supply and demand, free market, Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and particularly capitalism. Burned at the stake might be a less painful penalty than the lingering agonies that can be imposed on those who put capitalism to question and particularly those who begin to question its absolute goodness and rightness. The results of right wing politics, and right wing education.

However, we see that we must put everything into question.

We can no longer afford, as a world, as a species, as a global village, to simply accept such imposed systems of beliefs. We must return to the questions of what is good and what is evil with open minds, purged from all ideological poisoning and we know we are severely poisoned by ideology. We can scarce think outside of it and without it. When we recognize that fact, and realize that the existing, given, absolutes, the dictatorially imposed absolutes concerning economic good and economic evil, along with all that that entails, are failing, and that they are not the gods and devils ideology and dialectic of ideology have made them to be, we might begin to free ourselves, towards a truly progressive future. A progressive future for the preservation of the highest value which is the good of humanity, now and for the future.

Robert Morpheal

This article may be copied, distributed, reproduced by any means, in any form, and in fact anyone is encouraged to do so.

[mckara]

1. Interesting Thesis, I Haven't Completely Read, Yet

It reminded me of this quote:

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

--- H. L. Mencken

[mckara]

2. Interesting Argument

"This absolutism is largely to be blamed on America. Europe was not as certain. Dialectic was America’s first love, and imposed on the rest of the world, borrowed straight from Marx, but badly misused to create blind contention, based on the promotion of beliefs about absolute good and evil. America refused to learn from others, refused to cooperate with others, and refused to compromise with others, based on that absolute dichotomy of good and evil. It chose instead to dominate and force an absolute polarity without truly understanding the potential common ground. In fact, American politics rejected any possibility of any common ground prior to any such consideration."

First of all, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel created the dialectic from which Marx and other Western philosophers developed their arguments. Dialectics consist of an original thesis, its antithesis, and finally, a synthesis, an end point that by definition produces agreement. Polemic arguments develop between the thesis and the antithesis, but that is not an entire dialectic. How can dialectic be America's "first love" if she ignores an argument's synthesis?

"Education must have taught a dialectic that is a duel to the death, where one polarity in the dual equation of two systems, two viewpoints about what is right, has to destroy the other and declare itself absolutely true and absolutely good. Is that real education or is it brain washing propaganda?

Plato envisioned democratic societies characterized by "unruly passion and pervasive ignorance." Our challenge as human beings has always been to place value on the virtue of enlightening education. Currently, we suffer from the acceptance of ring-wing principles that Cornel West describes as "the economics of greed, a culture of indifference, and the politics of fear." It would be difficult to blame our education system as solely responsible for what our society accepts as truthful byproducts of society. Certainly, better awareness of American history and civics would make the work of right-wing propagandists more difficult.