Under a neoliberal framework, the criminogenic and anti-social effects of poverty must be denied and/or re-conceptualized as failures of institutions such as schools, criminal justice, corporate polluters, or government. While corruption at various levels in each of these institutions is clear, they are the mere band-aids of a capitalism that refuses to reckon with poverty. What’s more, this capitalism has strong levers over each of these institutions via lobbying and other forms of political capture, making even their attempts at triage ineffective at best. But the neat trick neoliberalism does, in vainly trying to reconcile itself with free market conservatism, is allow for basic assumptions about property and employment. Conservatism: poverty is caused by choice
Each assumes that our underlying economic system is either good or good enough, with varying degrees of quality institutions. Yet even in this perfect world, we still have massive wage inequality and poverty. Good schools, quality policing, racial, religious and gender harmony, strict environmental regulations will still not impede the fact that our economy runs on poverty level wages. The experience of poverty might be a little better - healthcare, small class sizes with social supports, humane policing, environmental hygiene. But capital will be so limited for so many that their housing will still be restricted to certain neighborhoods. Spending will be limited and therefore stress high due to precarity. Expendability will be high as low specialization/skills means their labor will be easily replaceable. Political advocacy will be low due to social ostracism intrinsic to the economic devaluation of their work. All of this raises stress and promotes indignation towards those born to more capital who live as if their worth is greater due to all the privileges life has subtly afforded them. Wealth provides exponential access to agency. Paying rent, investing, taking vacations, sending your happy kids to college, having nice things, not worrying about pollution or crime. And if your wealth comes from your own labor, a great sense of pride reinforces one’s sense of worth, or social praise within one’s skin. And should you require any additional help in reinforcing pro-social instead of anti-social behaviors, all these added reinforcing stimuli are available as well. If human freedom can be limitedly defined as access to reinforcement, a certain level of relative capital is by far the determining factor in this phylogenic growth across the lifetime. From William Baum’s Understanding Behaviorism: A group's culture consists of operant behavior shared by the group members, acquired as a result of membership in the group, and transmitted from one group member to another. Evolution of culture occurs in a manner parallel to shaping of operant behavior and biological evolution—by variation coupled with selective transmission. In cultural evolution, the pool of cultural practices possessed by a society, analogous to a gene pool, is the culture pool. The traits that produce culture are behavioral specializations, imitation, and social reinforcers and punishers. The replicators of culture (practices) are the activities of group members passed along by imitation and instruction. They include nonverbal practices like dietary selection and manufacturing, and also verbal practices like stories, sayings, and rules. Practices of social reinforcement and punishment are fundamental replicators of human culture. Group selection and cultural group selection resulted in evolution of cooperative breeding and other cooperative activities This basic process is fundamental to our phenotype and so will exist in every social system. But a social system that radically reduces wealth inequality so as to maximize access to reinforcers to the most number of people is the most just according to a moral principle of a human right to freedom and dignity. To the extent that any system devalues this access, it is consequently immoral.
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The bump-stock ruling occasioned me a brief social media dialogue with a gun pedant today. This is a weird sort of guy with a weird sort of rhetoric. I get the fetishization of hobbies. You have the crafters, the motorheads, the bicyclists, the videogame dorks, the foodies, etc., etc. They all get really into something and know all its ins and outs. But guns are different because they are lethal - literally designed to kill. Their ultimate purpose is war, or to stop personal violent crime. Or to commit crime. Many books have been written about the messy psychological valley that has grown over the past century between sport and war. The NRA’s transformation in that time from an enthusiast organization to one emphasizing violent threats not only from crime but from some future totalitarian government. (In a bizarre twist, their zealousness has molded literally any gun regulations as primo fascia evidence of totalitarianism – for which more and more powerful guns are needed to defend from the state. Fear is loaded right into the clip. As a string of progressive civil rights triumphs on race, gender equality and sexuality played out over the years, gun culture shifted further and further from hunting and target practice and towards personal protection. It’s hard not to draw parallel tracts between the legal and social deconstruction of white male, Christian, heterosexual patriarchy and it’s declining assumed superiority, and the rise of a gun culture in which there are more guns than people in the United States The gun is the ultimate fascist signifier. It is the monopoly on violence allowed to the state by democracy placed in an individual’s hands. When empathy has failed, when communication has broken down, when you feel your enemy has you and your family in the crosshairs, violence becomes reasonable. After decades of losing the “culture wars” (aka respect for pluralism and human rights), the gun has become a totem of this New Lost Cause. In the 1970’s, mostly weirdos with vigilante fantasies subscribed to guns and ammo and studied diagrams of how to booby trap your front porch. I recently watched Taxi Driver, and the Travis Bickle character couldn’t portray better the peculiar lump of roiling insecurities that is the modern gun fetishist. Yet his character was a lonely Taxi driver living in the slums of NYC, eating popcorn at pornos and crafting DIY concealed gun contraptions before arguing with ghosts in the mirror. The modern 2nd amendment warrior is the face of the GOP, gathers by the thousands in megachurches, votes for a speaker of the house who flies the Appeal to Heaven flag outside his office and wears the face of an ex-con grifter conspiracist ex-president on his T-shirt while watching a slew of right-wing news porn peddling lies about violent immigrants, vaccine denialism, election-rigging, and trans-groomers hunting down children. But there is something deep in that psychology. When an appeal to tradition supplants academic, scientific, and a simple, empathetic listening to other people’s stories about their real lives, your epistemology is severely neutered. A complicated re-routing system gets built that is designed to alleviate the cognitive dissonance between reality and your ancient assumptions. When biblical inerrancy faces the staggering evidence of evolution, or the fact that when you meet gay people they are perfectly normal, the machine must go into overdrive. When nearly every last scientific expert on the planet describes how climate change works and predicts massive storms, and your city floods. When they describe how germ theory works and that you should wear a mask and you see the bodies piling up in make-shift morgues outside hospitals, doctors breaking down in tears, and a million of your countrymen dead. When all crime statistics show the illegal aliens you fear so much actually have dramatically lower rates than US citizens and when you meet them they are normal, hard-working people whose first thought is their family. When 60 cases of election interference are brought before the courts and all are thrown out. When cities are not flaming hellholes but generally pleasant places most Americans live in happily. It goes on and on. What is it like to live with a constant media and cultural diet of fear and paranoia, but then to have to always be working against the tide of reality to make everything align. It’s got to be exhausting. And now you’ve got some egg-head leftie who wouldn’t know a Coltrane X950 from a Weenus-Corrector 600. This is YOUR turf. You’ve trained for this. You’ve got him in your sights. Dead to rights. Let him try and take it. Oh, he has arguments. The senseless urban violence. (Well, we all know who those people are). The suicide rates. (Not my fault if you’re a weak-willed nervous-nelly). The endless stream of mass shootings. (Not if everyone was armed). The dead little kids, limbs blown off at Sandy Hook. (The sanctity of life is… wait, did you say little kids?) OK, tactical retreat. Code red. Does not compute. A guy kills scores from a window over-looking a Las Vegas country concert. The Pedant finds his stride. See, what these pinko types don’t understand about guns is, well, everything. They’ve come to my house. Oh, it’s on. I never finished a Tom Clancy novel, although I’ve enjoyed the silly action movies they spawned. But I remember opening a copy of one once and was intrigued by the way in which Clancy went into great military detail. If I remember correctly, there would be a chunk of dialogue between two characters, and then one would start to describe – in minute detail – the various types of tanks, their combat suitability, their equipment, their make and model numbers. Now, I realize the Clancy audience is really into this stuff. There’s a whole thing with war history buffs and almost cosplay devotion to the genre. Maps and lists and coffee table panzers. Miniature models meticulously painted and placed in little dioramas of sand and faux-scrub brush. And these were real weapons of war, used by real soldiers who fought and died and did unspeakable things to one another. Is there not some thread here, some deep sinew in the male psyche that weaves together notions of God, country, family and the implements of war? When empathy is gone, when communication has broken down, you have your oily lists that only you and your kind really understand. Really appreciate. Because this isn’t just a hobby anymore but an identity. You, Pedant, are naked here in this place of machinery and technical details. Like the Ur man standing before his cave, the big bear before you behind the flames, your woman and child hiding behind you. Your loincloth is the pages of True Crime and Handgun Magazine, tied together with tank treads only used on Dewy-Nukem half-tracks from 52’-53’ and the frames of Aviator glasses that remind you of being up in the clouds somewhere drinking beer in a Cessna-Sable B92. Your club is a large bundle of Rush Limbaugh’s Signature Series cigars. And the bear is, well, everyone who isn’t just like you. Everyone who isn’t a real American. Who isn’t real.
> Is everyone responsible for their own success because opportunities are equal?
> Behaviors are learned from our environment. Both what is modeled for us and what resources we can access. You can’t play piano, speak another language, etc. without the opportunity for people to teach you. You can’t take piano or language lessons if you don’t have the money or of no one is available to teach you.
> Why do some marginal cases succeed despite socially independent variables for marginalization (dependent) (e.g. poor, broken home, parent education, etc.)
> Our society has built in economic structures (real estate, professional wages, reliance upon education for future earnings, etc.) that require/ force a certain percentage of people into poor neighborhoods and low wage jobs.
> Our culture has built in racial structures (ethnic (white) cultural normalization, media role-models, etc.) that require/force a certain percentage of people into wealthier neighborhoods and high-wage jobs.
> Until both economic and cultural systems are changed, hierarchies will continue to be perpetuated.
> Unequal outcomes with equal opportunities is not possible.
I drempt last night (this morning) that I was with my family and my neck pain was unbearable. I didn't know what to do and just kept crying. Guilty because this was all I could offer them. Hopeless because the pain would never end. I woke up and laid in bed, the pain terrible. It was 4:30am and I had planned to put in a full day of work. If I got up I knew I wouldn't be able to go into work. I already am missing maybe 1 day a week. We need the money. I finally got up because lying there in pain was pointless. I made a heatpack and grabbed a soda. I ignored the option to make a bowl of cereal, which often makes me feel better but I could lose the weight. I sat down at my computer and put in a nicotine pouch. I read the social media site in which people frtted over the impending fascism of the right wing party inexorably denying anything is wrong with the authoritarian sociopath who they seemingly follow like a cult leader. They've allowed themselves to get worked up into a froth of anger and resentment which I don't understand. More so because I don't know any of them in my personal life. I sometimes think up pithy bumperstickers that I could put on my car, desperate and futile little messages I might send out hoping to persuade sometone of something. But bumperstickers are so futile and desperate. I think of one that says "Pithy Slogan Against Fascism". I have a music project that I can barely get to because I am so often sore and lacking the energy. As it is a large source of meaning and redemptive valor in my life, not being able to make progress on it leaves me forlorn. I've been thinking a lot about Dannegal B. Young's description of how Social Identity impacts our ability to acquire new truths about the world that she summarized recently in this presentation. According to Dannegal, identity shapes our Values/Theories/Beliefs, which in turn shape our observations about the world. Our observations are thus motivated by what she calls "the Three C's": comprehending the world to feel good about our "team", control the world to benefit our team, and create community centered around our team. As we sort more and more by identity, strong "mega-identities" form that include strong political and ideological stances. These mega-identities are then target rich environments for politicians and propagandists to manipulate, providing us observations about the world designed to align with our identity-based hopes and fears. This further reinforces our identities in a virtuous cycle of activation and control. Her final slide shows the recursive way in which identity-targeted observational propaganda input realigns and shapes identity to allow for more coherence to ideological control.
I once came across an argument on social media that the historians of fascism had all gotten wrong due to their liberal biases. Today I came across an interesting post that basically lays out this case, and argues for a view of fascism that find more in common with left wing thought. The thesis of this brief paper is that postmodernism, an attitude and a way of seeing reality which thoroughly permeates our western culture, is a direct descendant of fascism, and still contains many of its key elements. As an ideology or world view, fascism is an important ancestor of postmodernism that should not be ignored. That there is a strong family resemblance one barely dares suggest, though more and more brave souls are speaking out. Originally written in 2005, it doesn't seem to have aged well in 2023, with the ascendancy of the global right as being profoundly and often explicitly illiberal, as Victor Orban, a darling of the MAGA intelligentsia, proudly proclaims. The threats to democracy across the world come not from the left, but from Traditionalist Nationalists in Europe, Russia, India and of course the US. These movements are incredibly reactionary, finding the modern instantiation of progressive values so triumphant that the only possible course of action is anti-majoritarian illiberalism: voter suppression, executive supremacy, gerrymandering and authoritarian legal maneuvering designed to dictate K-university education. Conspiracies of course, fundamental to fascist movements, provide epistemological means to design a world in which academia, science, the media, and government are all corrupt and to be distrusted. Post-modernism and relativism - and this article is a good example - have long been straw-manned and misunderstood as being about the non-existence of truth and morality by defenders of a hegemonic conception of Traditionalist truth and knowledge. However, they missed its core critique - that knowledge and truth, by empirical fact, are relative to social and institutional thought. In other words, we choose our morality. To religionists who would view their dogma as the ultimate authority, this is seen as turning man into God. But when one makes God the ultimate authority, one is literally doing exactly this: all religious dogma is a matter of interpretation, no matter how stubbornly one clings to the narcissistic notion that one's own interpretation is correct and all others are incorrect. This is an obvious logical fallacy. The only way to claim yours is the only correct authority is by *making yourself the ultimate authority*, i.e. putting yourself in the place of God. This is the basic logical flaw in all fundamentalisms. Post-modernism and relativism merely point out this error. OK, then, if there is no ultimate authority, won't we all determine our own morality? Exactly. We cannot but do any differently. So, its anything goes then, right - everything is OK, even murder? This is evidence of the perils of fundamentalist thinking, as it projects its own critical deficits onto others. If one takes as a given that all is relative to historical place, time and society, the onus is on the individual to do the difficult work of radically examining one's prior assumptions. Why is murder wrong? Why is stealing wrong? It's not actually that hard to develop very solid arguments that end up aligning quite well with most traditional moral claims. The difference is that these claims are based not on a blind obedience and historically decontextualized fancy one chooses out of ignorance and uncritical social inertia, but rather of introspection, analysis, reading listening, learning, and above all humility that no, I am not a God. Fascism is about the imposition of power over dialogue. It is the making of man as his own ultimate authority, as his own God, and thus all debate and subservience to democracy as a form of collective understanding are shunned in favor of imposition of one's beliefs over others by brute force. And so, we return to Religious Nationalism, in which subjugation of others to its own authority is the paramount agenda. It is anti-pluralism, anti-multi-cultural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-intellectual because all of these require the humility to live and let others live according to their own moral interpretations. This is not to say that everything is true and moral - democracy is messy! It is rather a basic recognition that other people have ways of seeing the world that are different than I, and I am not in a position to impose my specific interpretations, assumed authorities on them carte blanche. Rather, we all work together to establish *minimum* moral rights that we can at least live with together, with the caveat that our civic duty is one of assessment, analysis, dialogue and argument with our fellow citizens as democratic equals. I recently had to mute a thread that had followed on me making the observation that there were a lot of good things about conservatism. My main point was thinking of conservatism as an impulse of caution, but read more specifically as principled positions, to which I must have been arguing the existence of which were good. My intent was to take a deeper view, as conservative positions (as have those of progressives) have always changed, and so the best-faith position would be to think of the almost psychological political disposition, and principles that follow most immediately as such. Specific positions such as low taxes, deregulation, pro-life, anti-LGBTQ, etc. are easy for a progressive to identify as wrong. But if the impulse is caution, and then critiques of progressive over-reach, one can easily find positions that progressives would stop short of, and thus might be thought of as conservative. Cautious, yes, but in practicality following a logic that I think could be described as conservative. To illustrate, from a hard left position, the liberal position would be "more conservative", even if not exactly a conservative position per-say. For instance, the ACA is a liberal approach to health care policy, but quite conservative compared to single payer. Indeed, it was a position that had previously been advocated a conservative position in the past. The same could be said for carbon taxes, or 3rd trimester abortion. Many conservative principles, such as limited government, tradition, or free markets, are generally the basis for downstream policies. However, it may be difficult to determine whether policies are in fact downstream from principles, as policy outcomes may be primary preferences that in turn lead to larger principles. This is exemplified in historical examples of conservatives arguing for policies in bad faith, citing higher principles as a way of hiding social outcomes that they are otherwise loath to honestly advocate. One thinks of States' Rights: a preference for segregation was morally difficult to support publicly, and so an appeal to States' Rights was a way of determining such outcomes by an appeal to republicanism and limited government. Progressives have learned to be skeptical of supposed conservative principles for just this reason, as true policy outcome preferences seem to have a history of being hidden by broader appeals to principles that seem offered up post hoc. Another example, a progressive might say, is pro-life conservatives advocating state-enforced pregnancy, which would seem antithetical to the notion of limited government. Of course, the pro-life view of the fetal personhood would be argued as a superior ethic consideration of individual freedom (that of the unborn) that trumps limits on state power. Thinking back - and I'm out of my depth here - but to the origins I believe of modern conservatism versus progressivism falling along the split over how best to deal with European aristocracy. Conservatives felt the French Revolution went too far too fast, and as such were more comfortable or sympathetic to the status quo and favored a measured winding down towards something like egalitarianism. They professed a belief in human rights and individual freedom, but stopped somewhere short - in the progressive view - of truly challenging structures of power and wealth that would continue to be the source of debate ever since. The question then becomes one of principal versus pleasure - how much does a measured approach actually signify a preference for social outcomes that preserve hierarchies in which one's own position is more secure? The rights of the traditionally marginalized, by definition on the oppressed rung of hierarchy, must be sacrificed to gradualism. The left and right have different motivations, clearly. In our current moment, with science, journalism and academia showing a generally liberal ideological bent, the mainstream right has all but forsaken these pillars of institutional democracy. The twin right wing bases of Christian Nationalism and Elite Capital have their reasons for doubt. Religious skepticism of any authority outside their fundamentalist biblical interpretation has long put them at odds with evolutionary theory, and in the 20th century the social sciences challenged their beliefs about sexuality, the family structure, and a tacit view of White cultural supremacy. As they adopted a hardline anti-abortion position in the 1970's, this deepened a sense that biblical purity was directly contradicted by scientific authority to the degree that it took a nuanced view of fetal personhood. Elite Capital, from the 1% to small business owners, mainly interested in avoiding progressive taxation and government regulations, emphasized private property protections and the maintenance of existing economic structures in which labor power was reduced and resources were freely accessible so as to be more easily exploitable. Thus, the two essential pillars of social power and order - economic and cultural hegemony - were felt to be under threat by the basic processes of science, journalism and the academy. The tension at the heart of democracy is the historical tendency for power to accumulate in fewer and fewer hands. To avoid despotism and plutocracy, democratic institutions are required to act as a check on power and to level the playing field such that each citizen is born with an opportunity to live as an equal with his fellow man. Journalism has long lived by the maxim "comfort the afflicted and afflict the powerful". This follows from the press' role as the "Fourth State" in providing to the public a means for preserving an egalitarian, pluralistic democracy. In 1897, the owner of the New York Times declared his paper's purpose in the line "all the news fit to print". Implicit in this declaration was the duty of the press to make decisions as what is and is not important for the public to know; it would be absurd to report on events with no consideration to importance. But what then becomes important? If a free press is essential to a democracy, then importance becomes lifting up the voices of the powerless and applying scrutiny to the powerful. Science can be defined broadly as a search for truth via empirical means. The veracity of a claim must be born our by rigorous testing, and subsequent argument and counterargument. Multiple levels of confirmation have been designed to attempt to produce high levels of confidence, ranging from empiricism, parsimony, philosophical doubt, skepticism, accuracy in testing, controlling of variables, peer review, publication standards, and institutional reputation. Given the almost limitless boundaries of the natural world, the scientific method remains one of the clearest paths to truth as humanity has developed. From particle physics to molecular chemistry, cell biology to geology, medicine to behaviorism, and countless other fields of research, the scientific ideal is to operate with no other goal than to expand human knowledge. As such, it is fundamental to the democratic ideal, in that nothing is more critical to decision making than to have all the facts about a particular issue. Similarly, the broader academy - the humanities, the arts, mathematics, history, economics, political science, engineering, social sciences and philosophy - seek to add in their own way to humanity's greater understanding of itself and the larger world. Though often dealing with an array of variables vastly larger and more nuanced than the hard sciences, as well as methods that approach inquiry not via randomized trials but forms more subjective, poetic, theoretical, and experiential, these disciplines more than pull their weight in answering questions that cannot be resolved merely through experimental analysis. They inform not only the facts about the world, but also moral, political and economic questions in a complex pluralistic democracy. While some more or less have explicitly egalitarian aims, others provide essential context for what egalitarianism might mean, what is has looked like in the past, and what it may in the future. The academy serves a metaphysical role for society to better understand itself, its wants and needs. To Christian nationalists who seek cultural hegemony for their particular religious ethnicity - historically dominant in the US over every other group - the fundamental role of these three institutions present a grave threat to their project. Journalism, science and academic analysis that scrutinizes the unfair results of their dominance serve to promote in the public sentiments that would weaken their grip on cultural power. To Elite Capital, these institutions present a threat to their economic power to the degree that they inform egalitarianism. Externalized costs of deregulation that pollutes the commons, harms workers, or solidifies plutocracy serve to weaken those who would seek to maintain unfair capitalized positions. Progressive taxation that seeks to redistribute profits more equally amongst the public through the power of government law diminishes their strength. To the degree that science provides evidence, journalism exposes, and the academy scrutinizes these harms and inequalities, Elite Capital is threatened. These institutions are the first things to go under authoritarianism and autocracy. With mendacious claims, dictatorships realize that, as threats to their legitimate authority, public trust in them must be weakened so as to distract and obfuscate any pushback that might arise from honest inquiry. Poets are imprisoned, science budgets are slashed or channeled into regime-friendly projects (often with puppets installed to ensure only certain results are confirmed), and media is either nationalized or placed under strict laws that ban what types of stories may be published. Liberalism and conservatism are not inherently good or bad. Thought of as a push and pull between progress and tradition, experiment and experience, both political impulses are necessary in a healthy society. But the modern right - which in many ways is more progressive in its own twisted way than classically conservative - is more interested in maintaining power and supremacy than anything else. A proper conservatism is in dialogue with liberalism. Think of what an honest conservatism would be in journalism, science and the academy: stories on the marginalized would be complemented with scrutiny of over-reach in proposed left wing policy proposals, science on gender or behavior would be studied, as well as the positive effects of traditional family structures or testing of pro-growth pollution remediation, histories of left-wing totalitarianism and musical compositions that present consonance and modern art that elevates traditional technique. Of course, these conservative dispositions do exist in these institutions. However, as human knowledge and inquiry flourishes, they require a deftness of thought and a humility in the face of an ever-changing intellectual and social landscape. They must be willing to acknowledge new truths, and when it conflicts with their received and well-worn notions, to adapt and adopt. Sadly, the over-representation of liberal thought in these institutions represents not corruptive discounting or marginalizing of conservative views so much as conservative views not being able to compete. Instead of holding forth with their own steady inquiry, modern conservatism has been a project of leaving the battlefield and encamping to the fringes. Instead of honest, good-faith argument, they have retreated to stubborn refusal and conspiracy. And yet from this position, having ceded multiple essential pillars of democracy, egalitarianism and pluralism, they have found themselves on an unfortunate path that has historically come in the form of fascism and mass violence. Because when one gives up on honest debate and intellectual co-determinism, all that is left to maintain power is brute force. Bad day kind of caught me off guard today... went home early from work. Took half a gummie... tried to nap but too sore... got up and began writing this.... listening to Bonnacons of Doom and finding it one of the more interesting pieces of new music I've heard lately. Saw this on Bluesky and thought: this is what AI was made for. Celebrity para-social reality porn in which sophisticated TV episodes are is crafted specifically for you, starring life-like digital versions of who you imagine celebrities to really be. This will be followed shortly after by Remakes™, where previously created properties are digitally altered to the famous personality of your choice. Think the Titanic starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya. A marketplace will provide Kameo-style pricing options. ---- Up to about track 15 out of the 38 or so to go as I slowly write the beats, guitar chords and vocal melodies for my next project (tentatively titled International Sirens) to midi. Something I've never understood about conservatism has always been the way it seemingly embraces both a behaviorist/determinist, and at the same time a free-will view of human behavior. Conservatives often talk about rewarding or punishing good or bad behavior, and yet at the same time speak of the importance of personal responsibility: people being "self-made" or only having themselves to blame. They often refer to social welfare programs as the "Nanny State", invoking dynamics of the citizen being treated as a child by a coddling, feminized government figure. Instead, they would presumably favor the strong hand of a masculine figure who performs tough love by forcing them to go it alone. This parenting metaphor relies on a theory of learning, more specifically, operant conditioning, in which bad behavior becomes habit through a process of reinforcement and is extinguished through punishment. Aside from the fact that behaviorism as public policy is far more complex than this simple equation, what is striking is how conservatism then throws this deterministic view out the window. When it valorizes the idea of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" as the morally justified way of earning one's fortune, or speaking of crime or poverty as being the result of poor personal choices that people could have made otherwise, they are relying not on a theory of learning but rather a notion of free will that requires only one's innate desires and reason to make good instead of bad decisions. The only way I can make coherent sense of this is if they follow a sort of compatibilism in which a behaviorist account is responsible for part of one's decisions, with free will making up the rest. The problem with compatibilism, apart from it not being based in any science or empiricism, is that it allows one to basically pick and choose how to establish the causality of any human action. Where do you draw the line between determinism and free will? Is there an age at which one gains this special innate efficacy unrelated to environment or learning history? Or does one gradually develop it until, maybe by adulthood, when it is fully formed? But then how much of it do you have? Under what conditions would you ascribe all or part of an action to free will, and not determinism? Rather, it feels like an arbitrary myth that, given the complexity of any one individual's environment and genetic learning history, you can sort of toss out as a reasonable hypothesis that you can get a free pass on to justify your particular justification as to why someone is deserving or not of any specific circumstance. A millionaire can have made his money through freely choosing hard work and sacrifice, and so deserves to keep it as property. A poor man chose not to work hard and thus deserves his poverty. But if the government provides welfare (using part of the rich man's wealth to pay for it), the poor man's bad behavior of sloth and vice will be reinforced. If a criminal is not punished he will not learn to change his ways. If the government allows a man to keep his riches, it will reinforce his strong work ethic, but if he is taxed, his behavior will be punished. The beauty of behaviorism is that it has decades of strong research supporting its conclusions about human behavior as determined by learning history. Sadly, it is poorly understood by the public, not just by conservatives but by liberals as well. However, because liberalism is far more concerned with fairness and equality than traditional and hierarchy, it is less allergic to being clear eyed about structural, environmental contingencies that undermine libertarian free will - if not in belief, at least in practical social policy. |
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