ENTRY
[ESC]DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT
Marx and the Death of the Author, Part IX: What is reality? (Part 1/2)
Pop psychology is often problematic, there's an entire podcast that inadvertently returns to this central argument, 'If Books Could Kill', since pop psychology often comes to us in the form of self-help books. Nonetheless, some pop psychology is born of a genuine desire to help, sometimes it really is one of those 'the road to hell is paved with good intention' things. (Although to assume good actors is a bit naive. Self-help is, and always has been, full of grifters). One of the signs of 'good intention' is giving people the vocabulary and tools necessary to help them assess very real problems they come across on a daily basis. For example, my autism and ADHD diagnosis came with a rather thick packet of papers to help introduce me to why I was diagnosed as such, as well as common symptoms. The subsequent research I've done has given me ways to vocalise things that are troubling me, as well as handle issues in a way that lets me keep my independence and dignity. My life has improved because I've been handed tools and vocabulary to help me better understand how my brain works, why, when, and how it works differently from neurotypical people, and how to better engage with my brain in ways that reduce burn out and anxiety. I've also been given medication to help me manage a lot of the latent anxiety that comes with AuDHD. In an 'austerity' economy, reality is that not everyone has access to the materials and resources I've had access to, and so popular education on autism helps undiagnosed neuro-diverse people navigate their lives, albeit without the full support that comes with a formal diagnosis. Still, we have to accept that, in present reality, something is better than nothing, whilst also continuing to campaign for a better future, where the NHS gets the funding it needs to extend support to all people in Britain, without extortionate 'public-private partnerships'.
The road to hell is in how language tends to work. Ironically, this is a very 'death of the author' moment, in that most people when they read damn near anything will interpret it in a way that relates to their internal biases and material realities. You do it, I do it, we all do it. I have a specific notion in my head of how this very blog is to be interpreted, but my history of publication and teaching tells me my intentions are irrelevant after a bit, as my words will be filtered through the various biases of whoever reads or hears them. One thing we've always done, as a species, is when a word becomes 'too useful', that is, becomes a particularly potent hammer, the whole world becomes a nail, and that word is used/abused until whatever initial meaning it had becomes lost to the malaise of popular culture. One such word that pop psychology gave to us that has gone through this process is the term 'gaslighting', a word which, according to Google Trends, exploded in usage sometime in mid-to-late 2014, carrying on through exponential growth in 2016 to just after 2023.
I'm not going to say that the concept behind the word 'gaslighting' is without merit. Its explosion in popularity suggests that a not insignificant number of people found it useful to explain their experiences at the time. Of course, some of its explosion is also due to people critiquing, mocking, or dismissing its usage, as is wont to happen in the current media landscape as everyone seeks publications/clicks/readers/etc. This very blog will, similarly, add yet another data point to Google's record on usages of the term 'gaslighting' online. But instead of critiquing the concept itself, I think it might be useful to examine why it exploded in popularity, and more importantly, why it exploded in popularity precisely when it did. Whilst I must remind everyone of the golden rule of maths and science: CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION, I still find myself unsurprised in its sudden surge in usage around 2016, thusly I'll borrow from statistics national treasure David Spiegelhalter and say that whilst every statistic is problematic, occasionally they're also useful.
2015 and 2016 were a wild time in politics in the two pushers of the Anglosphere, the United Kingdom and the United States. For a variety of reasons, that have been talked about in past, will be talked about in future blog posts, the neo-liberal political and economic consensus of the late 1970s onwards was collapsing. As is always the case during immense social, political, and economic upheaval, some people were handling it better than others. Even to this day, there are some who are desperately wishing that if they close their eyes, plug their ears, and hum loudly enough they can somehow make it so the last decade never happened and we all go happily back to the 'good old days' of the pre-2016 meltdown. Of course, the meltdown occurred because things were not, in fact, good for most people in the 'good old days'. So let us begin by acknowledging a part of reality: the pre-2016 consensus is dead, has been dead for a decade, and is about as likely to come back as the pre-1914 consensus was in 1918. Time and history have moved on, and so must we.
The pre-1914 consensus had been under siege for decades, but the 'straw' that finally broke the camel's back was the forceful and sudden rearrangement of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's brain by one Gavrillo Princip. The dead weight of decades of institutional stagnation and decline came to a head, and before we knew it a sizeable chunk of eastern France wasn't fit for human habitation, amongst many other parts of the world that rapidly became less healthy for man or beast to dwell in. The allegorical straw from 2016 was considerably less dramatic, but would still lead to a considerable body count, although not nearly as dramatic as the First World War's. The straw here was the dual occurrence of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. In both places,stagnant wages, union dissolution, and an overall measurable decline in the standard of living for a growing portion of the population had been harnessed by far-right recruiters and candidates to be turned into xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, 'anti-Woke', anti-Communist, misogynistic fury. Popular consensus began to shift and divide, and people who had previously thought themselves 'apolitical' were receiving a crash course in politics, often from bad actors on social media. What was left of mainstream media, after decades of budget cutting in newsrooms across the globe, even in once revered institutions like the BBC found themselves chasing after more popular, and often better funded, internet 'news' sites, and instead of improving their product, sought to normalise the new normal. Previously agreed upon 'facts' became open debate, and a rise in flat-earthers, vaccine 'truthers', and climate change deniers left many people indeed feeling gaslit, as mainstream news sources like The Guardian, The Times, and The Telegraph increasingly seemed to be running headlines and opinion pieces that previously would've been expected from The Daily Mail or, a certain paper named after a celestial body that as a Northerner, I am duty bound not to mention by name.
On reflection, I was one of the people feeling gaslit. I was a British person living in the states at the time, still at University of Washington in Seattle, finishing my first Master's degree. It was a real one-two punch, first Brexit, then Trump, and I remember the very surreal feeling at the time, something in the air had shifted. It was, honestly, the weirdest feeling. It wasn't long before the first violent attacks against a Muslim woman had occurred on campus, or a shooting at a far-right rally, also on campus, occurred. I'm white, shockingly 'Irish' or 'English' in appearance, thin, pale, freckled, with red hair. No one in Seattle knew I was an immigrant until I opened my mouth, but once I spoke, I was surprised that even I became the target of xenophobic feeling. Most of my friends were also immigrants, and most of them didn't have the benefit of being white. We all felt the change in the air. Soon The Stranger ran a piece on the spread of white nationalism amongst Microsoft employees. A lot of the assumptions, and the 'benefit of the doubt' that we could extend before 2016 came rapidly undone.
Part of my inability to handle the sudden undoing of the neo-liberal consensus was the fact that at that point I was a neo-liberal. Like most neo-liberals I didn't self-identify as such, preferring the 'cooler' label of 'neo-classicalist', and fancying myself an adept student of Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, and my mentor, Deirdre McCloskey. McCloskey self-identified as a libertarian, and in my time in Chicago, I frequently ran in circles near and around Ron Paul supporters, venture capitalists, and the NGO scene. Most of my work back then was on why the [British] Commonwealth of Nations was an inherently good thing for all members states, and the benefits in Dutch-British-American style capitalism, trying consciously to follow in the footsteps of Deirdre, who at this point was releasing her magnum opus Bourgeois trilogy, when I left Chicago in 2013, she had released two of the three, Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity, and was working on the third, Bourgeois Equality. I truly believed in Deirdre's 'hockey stick' interpretation of the innovation of capitalism, and believed that the market would inevitably correct inequality, it was just a matter of time, prudence, and good sense.
I would hope it's fairly obvious to long-time readers that I no longer hold this view. 2016 had proven to be a rude awakening that the system was not working, and was not self correcting. Further, in the bubble of Chicago academia it was easier to ignore the way that corporate America intruded, disrupted, and destroyed the lives of the average American. In Seattle, this was much harder to ignore as the ever-present elephant in the room was Amazon, which was actively remaking Seattle in its image, leading to record levels of homelessness, and a cost of living crisis that would shock even a Londoner. Frankly put, cities like Chicago and London have the luxury of size and history, allowing them to cushion some of the blow of corporate intrusion. Seattle is considerably smaller than either Chicago or London, and comparatively younger. (I mean, all American cities are younger than London, which dates back to the Romans, but Chicago also is older than Seattle). It took a lot of internal soul searching, reading, and research to admit that the system wasn't breaking, it was working as designed. The only shift, to borrow from Laskos and Tsakalotos was the post 2007/08 shift into hyper extraction by the bourgeois class, who seemed to know that the system was on its last legs, as there was less and less capital to extract from the proletariat, and so it was time to go more aggressively after remaining state assets (for my British readers, think of the way the Cameron, Johnson, and Sunak governments in particular seemed to be aggressively stripping the British state for parts, with Cameron even selling off Royal Mail, a state asset dating back to the 1550s...)
Capitalism, like nationalism, two things I used to be more fond of, necessitates ignorance. Even in my microeconomics modules in undergrad, I was taught how profit-maximisation requires information asymmetry. The modern economist who still clings to rational choice theory often modifies it, clinging instead to 'bounded rational choice theory', with information asymmetry being the key impediment to 'perfect rationality' in the internal 'cost/benefit' analysis that homo economicus makes whilst making any decision. The reason capitalism necessitates ignorance is that in order for you to accept capitalist logic, a certain amount of reality must be rejected. A large part of this, of course, is because capital is entirely a made up concept. Money is not a naturally occurring phenomenon, nor is the accumulation of capital a part of homo sapiens' natural state. Further, in order to 'sell' the notion of capitalism, the average person has to accept multiple compromises that are against their best interest. The average person here, in Marxist terms, is the member of the proletariat, whilst the 'devil' that they're making the deal with is the very bourgeois class that McCloskey focused on in her trilogy. Putting it more succinctly, especially in the context of post-colonial societies in Africa and the Caribbean:
The colonists were relatively successful in maintaining the exclusion of Marxist thought. More importantly, they created a generation of Third World scholars who where immersed in bourgeois theory and who peddled all of the understandings which they gained from bourgeois theory. And this usually meant, for instance, that they were automatically anti-Marxist; without even thinking about it, they were anti-Marxist. They had an idealist vision of the world and they assumed that what they had was a universalistic vision. They saw the capitalist system and they thought that the capitalist system always was, is and always will be. They saw the human being functioning within the constraints of capitalist society, and they said 'there is man'; and they began to talk about human nature and the like, and they did not and cannot perceive that they are speaking about human nature only in a particular social system.
(From this book)
For Millennials, here defined as persons born this side of 1984, the specific neo-liberal form of capitalism is literally all we've ever known. The so-called 'golden age of capitalism', the 1950s and 60s, might as well be a fairy tale, as equally inaccessible as the Victorian or Tudor eras. The Britain we have experienced has always been Thatcher Britain. The world order we have always experienced has been the neo-liberal order that emerged after the collapse of the Bretton-Woods system in the 1970s. For a good number of people reading this, the Soviet Union never existed, the only China they've encountered went through the neo-liberalish reforms of Deng Xiaoping (that led to the rise of Xi Jingping, so 'good work' there, Xiaoping). We cannot truly imagine a world where currency is metallic because our lives have seen nothing but fiat currency. We cannot imagine a world not dominated by credit scores because our entire lives have been one of post-industrial wage stagnation and 'free market solutions', including the marketisation of education, healthcare, even the rise of privatised police. The idea of comprehensive welfare programmes, forward looking housing policies, and grand plans for the future are relegated to 'retrofuturism', as we look back on past visions of what could have been, but never quite materialised, limping from one global crisis to another, as the very states that once protected us have continually been hollowed out our entire lives.
And neo-liberal capitalism, like the Keynesian capitalism it replaced, and the mercantilist capitalism before it presented itself as a system that 'always was, is, and will always be', to paraphrase Rodney.
When I was an undergraduate economics student, if I had self-identified as a socialist or a Marxist, I likely would've been laughed out of the room. In early 2010s Chicago, the understanding was, 'Bush broke the system, but Obama fixed it, capitalism is fine now, especially thanks to Silicon Valley'. Microsoft (or the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, for those more 'civic minded') was actively recruiting out of the department, as was McKinsey, the Cato Institute, the IMF, and the World Bank. Mentions of Marx and socialism were always followed by critiques, 'it works in Sweden because it's small and homogenous' (problematic assessment for a number of reasons), or dismissals, 'Oh yeah, that went well for the Soviets!' China was always a weird outlier that no one was quite sure what to do with. Economics was a science, the 'physics of the humanities' as one of my teachers put it, and the only failure we had was that we still hadn't come up with the right measurements.
To question neo-liberal or neo-classical thought was to question reality itself, and only a fool or a madman would do that.
Recently, The Elephant Graveyard's video essays on Joe Rogan and his comedy 'cult' popped up in my YouTube feed. I highly recommend these, not only because they're genuinely funny and entertaining, but also because 'Mr Graveyard', as I will describe him here, does a good job of explaining the idea of a false hyper-reality, a concept that Fanon and Sheehi also discuss when talking about meeting the modern socio-political system we meet today.
In these videos, he highlights the ways in which the comedians whose careers are most tied to Mr Rogan's have to constantly 'kiss the ring' or engage in an 'ego sooey' and become a 'new man' by killing everything inside themselves. They must do this in order to maintain the hyper reality that Joe Rogan is a talented stand-up comedian, on par with 'the greats' like Robin Williams, George Carlin, and Richard Pryor. Of course, like most podcasters, Mr Rogan may have talents, but stand up comedy is not one of them, and at the least we can all agree, is not what he's 'known for'. Mr Rogan, like many rich people, has built a 'hyper reality' around him, which reinforces his beliefs and his world-view, and which puts him as the most important person within. Everyone trying to use him to gain influence for themselves must 'kiss the ring', say nothing to challenge this hyper-reality, and even reinvent themselves to confirm with what Mr Rogan's definition of a 'comedian' is, which has led to countless critics pointing out the kind of derivative 'shock value' slop coming out of Mr Rogan's 'Comedy Mothership' comedy club, when the comedians have no choice but to reaffirm that Mr Rogan is the final word on comedy, and Mr Rogan's bar for comedy is so... not great, then of course the result is terrible content, and mostly rich people fretting about 'cancel culture', despite multi-million dollar deals with the considerably large platforms like Netflix and Spotify.
I'm probably not doing Mr Graveyard any credit, do go watch his videos, or since they're rather lengthy, treat them like a podcast, which I did whilst working on my garden. But it does strike me as similar to how we engaged with neo-liberalism in economics up until around 2016, when the majority of us dare not question the underlying assumptions, and how some who work for McKinsey, PWC, the World Bank, et al still engage with 'market logic' and the concept of money. To question it, to undermine their narrative, you are often met with scorn, bared teeth, hand waving dismissals, or, as we increasingly see in the US, but also in the UK with the dramatic increase in police funding and powers, state violence. To question the hyper-reality, to put the lie of neo-liberal capitalism under scrutiny, is to undermine the narratives the bourgeois have built to justify their actions and their place in society, and so dissent must be crushed, before the hyper-reality comes crashing down. Joe Rogan, in his own way, kisses the ring, constantly discusses how it must be his talent that got him to where he is, and so he subscribes to the 'meritocracy' narrative of capitalism, that has repeatedly been proven false. But his 'kissing' of the bourgeois ring has been rewarded by Spotify.
For better or for worse, that's where I'm going to end part I, since this is now sitting at nearly 3,000 words, my self imposed limit. Part II is where I'll discuss capitalist 'hyper-reality' and how it reacts to Marxist critique, as well as even Keynesian critique.
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