ShrinkWrapped

Signs of Large Group Regression

Since our society is composed of "large groups" (ie, Liberals, Progressives, Conservatives, Republicans, etc) it is useful to think about American societal regression as a progression from large group regression to larger and/or multiple large group regression. 

One of the signs of large group regression, number 6 on the list established by the American Psychoanalytic association panel on symptoms of large group regression, discussed in Terror and Societal Regression is

Magical thinking, blurring of reality, and new or modified societal patterns.

Magical thinking is ubiquitous.  There remain considerable numbers of Americans who do not believe we ever went to the moon; there are significant numbers of Americans who believe that HIV was developed by government scientists in order to kill minorities; there are significant numbers of Americans who believe the Bush administration engineered the attacks on 9/11.  What matters is how such paranoid and magical thinking spreads, or is encapsulated, by the body politic.  Like an infection, if such thinking spreads to the larger society, ie multiple large groups become infected or a threshold number of individuals become recruited into the conspiracy of fear, it can be both a symptom and a cause of societal regression.

Consider the fate of two different magical ideas.

Anthropogenic Global Warming hysteria is clearly based on magical thinking.  There is quite simply no evidence in the paleogeologic record of a runaway green house effect on the planet Earth.  (If such had occurred the planet would have been cleansed of all life long, long ago.)  Further, we know that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have been significantly higher during past epochs.  Yet, many people became convinced that we were headed for catastrophe based on the possibility of a rise in ambient temperature of a few degrees. Even if human activity generated enough CO2 to effect climate change, our ability to adjust is more than adequate to handle a few degrees; the hysteria reflected in such silliness as The Day After Tomorrow, a movie in which the scientific pretensions were simply laughable, was the result of irrational thinking.  The UN approach to climate (to beggar the developed world in order to save the planet) and such lunacy as Cap-and-Trade reflects the magical thought that if only we treat Gaea well, she will not harm us. 

Contrast the fate of AGW with another potential danger that has claimed the attention of a different large group, the threat of an EMP attack (the subject of One Second After, which I discussed here.)  The potential danger of an EMP attack is significant yet it has not become the subject of widespread hysteria.  Because it has not become part of a media campaign, the ability of those concerned to address the question in more rational terms has been enhanced.  Robert Farley, at Information Dissemination does an excellent job offering some perspective:

I think it would be fair to say that there is no clear scientific consensus on a) the amount of damage that a concerted EMP attack could cause to the United States, or b) the size of the nuclear warhead(s) needed to cause a substantial EMP effect. One key reason for this uncertainty is simply that there are hard limits on what can be learned about the effect of EMP in the absence of an actual EMP attack, and certainly in the absence of atmospheric nuclear weapon testing.

Because of the limitations of the science, I'd like to focus on the strategic question. EMP awareness advocates argue that an EMP attack provides the perfect opportunity for China, a rogue state, or a terrorist organization to strike a devastating blow against the United States. Rather than simply destroying one city, the story goes, an EMP attack could wipe out the entire US economy, and even (according to the wildest estimate) lead to the deaths of 90% of the US population within a year. The EMP attack probably wouldn't eliminate the ability of the United States to respond, but because of the initial lack of lethality, the story goes, it would be difficult to launch a devastating nuclear counterstrike. While the US could respond with its own EMP attack, China and the various rogue states have economies less dependent on modern technology than that of the United States, and accordingly could weather a counterattack.

Alright, deep breath. Here are the parts of the story that I find strategically implausible:

Robert Farley points out that the science is not yet fully informed on the question (which is similar to AGW) and that the risk of an adversary obtaining the ability to attempt an EMP attack in a situation of such uncertainty must be considered lower than many other more pressing concerns.  Read the entire post for his reasoning, which I find persuasive.  (Be sure to read the comments as well for some plausible explanations for why this issue continues to find some expression.)

The obvious point of departure between the two stories is how they have been approached by the MSM.  Reporters generally have minimal scientific expertise; they do know how to create stories, however.  They work, more than any other large group in our society, as a force multiplier for magical thinking.  A scientifically illiterate population is particularly susceptible to hysteria generated by a press in thrall to magical thinking that supports their industry and their political inclinations (for the government to "save us.")  It requires firm determination to maintain or return to a rational stance in the face of the hysterical regression to magical thinking, but the ability of the American people to retain and/or regain their rationality (consider the polling on cap and trade and AGW) is heartening.

Learning From Reality

Victor Davis Hanson writes today about another inexperienced politician who was suddenly thrust into the Presidency armed primarily with a Wilsonian Utopian view of the world:

Upon entering office, Barack Obama knew little about foreign policy. But then neither did Vice President Harry S. Truman when Franklin Delano Roosevelt died suddenly on April 12, 1945.

President Obama often invokes the supposed mess abroad—especially in Iraq and Afghanistan—left to him by George W. Bush. But Mr. Obama's inheritance is mild compared to the myriad crises that nearly overwhelmed the rookie President Truman.

All at once Truman had to finish the struggle against Hitler, occupy Europe, and deal with a nominally allied but increasingly bellicose and ascendant Soviet Union. Within months of taking office he had to make the awful decision to drop atomic bombs on Imperial Japan.

At war's end, Truman was faced with a global propaganda nightmare. Stalin's victorious Soviet Union—soon to be nuclear—cynically posed as the egalitarian leader for millions of war-impoverished and newly liberated colonial peoples. In contrast, America accepted the difficult responsibility and expense of rebuilding the destitute former European colonial powers and rehabilitating ex-Axis Japan and Germany.

Some of Truman's initial military decisions proved nearly disastrous. After the atomic bombs forced Japan's surrender, he was stubbornly convinced that a nuclear air force could ensure American security on the cheap.

The result was that between 1946 and 1949 Truman tried to emasculate the Marine Corps. He mothballed much of the Navy and slashed the Army. Only the Communist invasion of South Korea in the summer of 1950 finally woke him to the reality that there would still be plenty of limited conventional threats in the Cold War, and that he'd better rearm if the U.S. was going to protect its interests and allies.

...

No matter: Truman constantly learned from his mistakes. Gradually, the president shed his Wilsonian trust that there would be a postwar global consensus under the aegis of the new United Nations. Instead, he came to believe that too many trans-Atlantic diplomatic elites had been terribly naïve about Stalin's murderous agenda.

Against the advice of his angry State Department, Truman supported the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. The Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, the salvation of Greece and Turkey, and success pushing the Communists north of the 38th parallel in Korea all established the parameters of the next half-century of bipartisan American foreign policy. To craft a strategy of communist containment, Truman brought in conservative advisers like Paul Nitze, while working closely with Republican Sen. Arthur H. Vandenberg.

Truman's no-nonsense Secretary of State Dean Acheson summed up the president's doctrines: "Released from the acceptance of a dogma that builders and wreckers of a new world order could and should work happily and successfully together, he was free to combine our power and coordinate our action with those who did have a common purpose."

Harry S. Truman was derided by contemporaries as a machine Democrat with no special qualifications or abilities, yet he is now a highly respected President to whom history has been very kind (despite the recent efforts of left wing revisionists who have never forgiven him for using American power to advance American interests.)

In many ways the current discontent being evoked by Barack Obama depends upon the related questions of how he understands America's interests, especially as distinct from the interests of others, and whether or not he can learn from reality, which requires he undertake the effort of questioning his assumptions.

Thus far, learning from experience and questioning his weltanschauung have not been conspicuous elements  of Obama's behavioral repertoire.  His ability to accept/tolerate criticism is very limited and his intellectual modesty is relatively minimal. 

If Obama is a typical politician, ie cynical about power and its workings, then altering course in the service of personal success (re-election) can be expected.  If he truly believes and is committed to his weltanschauung, he will have trouble altering his course and all of us will suffer his growing pains.

While We Sleep

One of the great motivating forces in human events is inertia.  In the geopolitical realm this is a most powerful force that causes nations to slide inexorably into disasters that hindsight predicts 100% of the time. 

In 1980 the USSR was expected to be a rival for the foreseeable future and Ronald Reagan was derided as a cowboy likely to lead us to disaster.  Instead, within a decade the Berlin Wall crumbled and the monolith shattered in short order, to the surprise of all the Solon and commentators.  Once the USSR fell, its disintegration, in retrospect, was noted to be inevitable.

The Executive can only focus on a limited number of problems at a time.  If Obamacare is the primary concern of the administration, there is less energy and attention available for other problems, such as the war in Afghanistan.  Less pressing troubles fall off the radar completely.

There is little doubt that unless there is an intervention Iran will soon have a nuclear weapon.  This will certainly empower and embolden Islamists everywhere, yet there are a couple of brewing crises that may yet make our troubles with Islamic expansionism exponentially worse. 

The first bit of bad news for the West is that the model of a moderate Muslim state is no longer  operative, from Daniel Pipes: 

Lion's Den: Turkey: An ally no more

"There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's government - for six decades the West's closest Muslim ally - since Erdogan's AK party came to power in 2002.

Read the whole thing, and try to imagine the near future when Turkey has become, more overtly, an Islamist state.  Too many "sophisticated, enlightened" Westerners, sadly over-represented in the diplomatic corps, simply cannot believe that another nation can be motivated by deep religious beliefs which are in conflict with their (assumed) rational national interests.  Why would Turkey go down the Islamist pathway when we see in every instance that it causes a decrease in freedom and economic vitality?  Since our elites assume that only primitives believe in irrationalities like religion, the assumption is that the Turks, who after all wear business suits to meetings, are just like them; ie, they imagine the Turkish leadership uses religion to acquire legitimacy among their constituents, but don't really believe in that nonsense.

Barry Rubin gets it just right in his depiction of the fecklessness and provincialism of our leadership: [All emphases mine-SW]

Turkey's Islamist Regime: Who Will Stop the Reign?

As for foreign policy, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone out of his way to make it clear he stands with Tehran, not Washington, on the nuclear issue. He called Iran’s nuclear program a peaceful one and said that the country has a right to have nuclear weapons. This statement was cheered by Iran’s client, Hizballah, and shocked European Union diplomats who called the Turkish leader clearly pro-Iran.

This is not the Turkey we have known for decades. The dissidents—people who were in the mainstream for many decades and now find themselves marginalized--are desperate to find some way out. The democratic margin is steadily narrowing. Ideally, the opposition parties would forget their differences, unite, make a broad appeal to the nation and stop the slide toward a Turkish version of Islamism.

In fact, though, the Turkish opposition politicians are among the world’s most incompetent. The social democratic party is led by an arrogant buffoon—every time his party loses an election he blames the voters—while the nationalist right is narrow and unimaginative. There is no international lobbying effort against the AKP regime to inform the West what’s going on in Turkey.

The traditional hope is that the army would step in to preserve the secular republic but it has been too weakened (ironically, in large part due to European Union pressure to get it out of politics) and knows it wouldn’t enjoy Western support. The AKP is also popular enough to make the prospect of a coup seem like the road to civil war. And as time goes on, perhaps the army will not be able to depend on its own troops and officers.

What about decisive U.S. action? ...

... one of the underappreciated aspects of the contemporary world scene is the extent to which there are many people like this Turkish liberal who are feeling deeply concerned or even abandoned by current U.S. policy.

While a lot—too much, actually—of focus has been put on Israel, the same thing can be said to an even greater extent of Central Europeans and Caucasus people (Azerbaijan, Georgia) who , fear being appetizers for the Russian bear, pro-democratic Arabs, freedom-seeking Iranians, desperate Turks, and many others. There are also Arab rulers and regime supporters who wonder if they can depend on America to defend them from Iran.

Even in British, French, and German ruling circles there is more concern than is being generally appreciated. True, they saw President George W. Bush as a cowboy, but now they see Obama as a cowed man.

Then there are those who are neutral or antagonistic who just can’t quite believe what they are seeing. I was told by a good source that a non-government person who works for Obama a lot showed up in Pakistan and gave the Pakistanis a lecture about how they should give up nuclear weapons and everyone in the world also wouldn't have them any more.

Can you imagine how Pakistanis thought of this proposal when they see nuclear weapons as their trump card against India, and don’t necessarily trust Iran or China that much either? Such people either think, the Americans are engaged in some incredible conspiracy or are so naive that it defies belief.

Americans are used to the idea that others may see them as irresponsible, overbearing imperialist bullies. Yet just as powerful a stereotype is that idea of Americans as sweet, well-meaning childlike creatures who are too nice to survive and have no idea what the real world is like.

Few understand that when Graeme Greene wrote a book entitled The Quiet American about why Americans are so often held in contempt it was the latter stereotype, not the former, he presented. The main character an American who is well-intentioned but makes a mess out of things holds the philosophy that the United States encourage underdeveloped countries to pursue a third way, different from capitalism or communism and based on local traditions. He sounds more like Obama than George W. Bush.

Barack Obama and those who surround him grew up during an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.  They came of intellectual age in an environment where it was simply assumed that most of the world's problems were caused by American imperialism and over-reach.  There was rarely a challenge to such naivety in academia, that place where 1 + 1 = precisely whatever you want it to equal, and cause and effect are routinely deconstructed.

Losing Turkey to Islamism will have reverberations.  It is possible that out of the Turkish dialectic will evolve a new form of liberal, tolerant Islam, but there is no evidence of such a development on the horizon.  Much more likely is that as freedoms are curtailed in the new Turkey, the economy will suffer, and Turkish society will regress further.  This is not a happy thought.

Finally, John Robb notes that it is often only the stupidity of our enemies that prevents them from attaining their goals:

Pakistan.  Attacks on government/military personnel continue while ignoring the fact that Pakistani infrastructure is past the breaking point (which makes it easier to disrupt).  If the "Taliban's" current level of effort at blood and guts terrorism were redirected against urban infrastructure -- all Pakistani cities would be inoperative, the national economy would be in free fall, and social fragmentation would be inevitable.  Unlike blood and guts terrorism, system disruption would minimize backlash/opposition (both at the national and global levels) and likely manufacture a plethora of open source allies rather than foes.

Consider, if the Taliban were smart, they could easily destabilize Pakistan by attacking its infrastructure yet they insist on terrifying people by murdering women and children, the surest way to mobilize opposition to their advance. 

As our President dithers on Afghanistan, desperate for a way to "square the circle" there, consider that as we race to abandon the fight against expansionist, radical Islam, there are trends appearing that do not bode well for the West.  We can only rely on the stupidity of our enemies for so long; at some point we need to get smarter.

Inertia in international affairs works as a guiding principle right up until the time it no longer works.

Health Care Mantra

With permission, I have lifted this post in its entirety from Dave at Classical Values.  As with Dave, I am tired of the repeated meme that we pay too much for relatively poor outcomes.  Apparently those in support of government run healthcare imagine if they repeat this often enough it will mean it is true; it is not.

Health Care Mantra

Advocates of socializing health care have asked: how can America's relatively free market spend the most money on health care, yet have among the worst outcomes?

The answer is, we don't. The oft-cited WHO rankings don't really measure quality of health care, preferring to judge things like "fairness of financial contribution" and measures like life expectancy (which is more strongly correlated to lifestyle than health care) or infant mortality (other countries use different standards and so generally record more infant deaths as stillbirths than we do, perversely making their numbers better even though they sometimes let marginal infants die).

American health care is simply the best in the world, and by many measures ithe competition isn't even close:

U.S. does 2x as many transplants as OECD average

U.S. has best cancer survival rates in OECD

Death panels in Britain are putting people to death who could have recovered

Death panels: now in kids' sizes too! Infants being left to die.

U.S. has more MRIS "it was found that Canada had 4.6 MRI scanners per million population while the U.S. had 19.5 per million"

U.S. has about twice as many MRIs as OECD average

The U.S. gets new drugs 1 year sooner "On average, the FDA approval came 1 year ahead of clearance by the European Medicines Agency (EMEA)."

"Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the United Kingdom and 457 percent higher in Norway."

"The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other developed country"

U.S. performs more operations than any country in the world.

Lower U.S. life expectancy does not argue U.S. has worse health care due to lifestyle factors and differences in how infant mortality is reported

Please feel free to steal, share and cite any or all of these links early and often. If anyone else has links to add, please share in the comments! Don't let them take the best care in the world away from us without a fight!

See if You Can Spot the Contradiction

From Bob Herbert in the Times this morning:

Changing the World

... over the weekend ... I was thinking about the sense of helplessness so many ordinary Americans have been feeling as the nation is confronted with one enormous, seemingly intractable problem after another. The helplessness is beginning to border on paralysis. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, nearly a decade long, are going badly, and there is no endgame in sight.

Monday morning’s coffee was accompanied by stories about suicide bombings in the heart of Baghdad that killed at least 150 people and wounded more than 500 and helicopter crashes in Afghanistan that killed 14 Americans.

Here at home, the terrible toll from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression continues, with no end to the joblessness in sight and no comprehensible plans for fashioning a healthy economy for the years ahead. The government’s finances resemble a Ponzi scheme. If you want to see the epidemic that is really clobbering American families, look past the H1N1 virus to the home foreclosure crisis.

...

Americans have tended to watch with a remarkable (I think frightening) degree of passivity as crises of all sorts have gripped the country and sent millions of lives into tailspins. Where people once might have deluged their elected representatives with complaints, joined unions, resisted mass firings, confronted their employers with serious demands, marched for social justice and created brand new civic organizations to fight for the things they believed in, the tendency now is to assume that there is little or nothing ordinary individuals can do about the conditions that plague them.

I wonder if it ever occurred to Bob Herbert that the liberal approach to governance, which essentially consists of the government expanding to fill as many niches as possible, with the implicit message that government will take care of you, might, just might, have a role in producing the passivity he finds so troubling?

Societal Regression: On Splitting and Re-Fusion

In my writings on Societal Regression, I have made the point that societies regress in the face of powerful stressors.  This can occur during time of war (the confinement of Japanese-Americans during WWII) or during periods of intense economic stress (Germany during the Depression.)  We are currently in a time of significant stress, though our economic woes have not yet approached the extremes of the 1930s and our current military involvements do not come close to the existential struggle of WWII, and the evidence of regressive tendencies can be found if one looks. 

The clearest evidence for societal regression, as noted in my original post on Terror and Societal Regression, include:

3) Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.

10) Dehumanization.  Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process.  Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans, as in the Hutus' degradation of the Tutsis, referred to as cafrads, or insects.  Interestingly, the Tutsis were also called the "Jews" of Rwanda.

(It might be worthwhile to review the entire panoply of signs of large group regression because there is so much of it going on today; that could be a future post.)

The tendency to splitting is ubiquitous.  The healthiest societies always need to work to maintain awareness of such tendencies to divide people between "us" and "them."  We accept as a necessary part of the functioning of our democracy that, especially during election times, political opponents will be characterized as "them" while allies are defined as "us" yet traditionally, the attempt to re-fuse into a single polity is made post-election. 

[Under duress such attempts at re-fusion can fail or can be covertly or overtly sabotaged; such efforts are one of the reasons that the current administration is losing support.  People recognize we are in a stressful time, yet the administration seems to spend more time and energy demonizing its opponents than working to restart the economy.  The lack of any discernible effort at re-fusion is a potentially dangerous omission by the Obama administration.  This can be contrasted with George Bush's work with ted Kennedy early in his administration on No Child Left behind.  Thus far, Obama has found no area for compromise with his political opponents.]

In ways large and small, signs of splitting are becoming troublingly evident.  Consider Jeffrey Goldberg's post, Anatomy of a Smear:

Dalia Mogahed, the executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies and a member of President Obama's faith-based partnerships advisory council, is in a bit of a pickle these days for speaking on a British television show hosted by a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an extremist Muslim group. Fox News, and others, have been after her for this appearance, in which she said, "I think the reason so many women support sharia (Islamic law) is because they have a very different understanding of sharia than the common perception in Western media... The majority of women around the world associate gender justice, or justice for women, with sharia compliance."

...

One key difference between American Muslims and British Muslims -- and this is a massive over-generalization, of course -- is that American Muslims seem to like their country very much. Obviously, there are pockets of Muslim extremism in America and I'm all for watching the extremists, and arresting them if needed -- but Dalia doesn't live in one of those pockets. In fact, she is quite often criticized by Muslim radicals as a "sell-out." Most recently, she was attacked for speaking at an iftar (the Ramadan break-fast meal) at the Pentagon. She's stuck in the responsible middle, in other words. Right where many thinking people find themselves these days.

Compare this to the comments of Wafa Sultan to Andrew G. Bostom:

The final chapter of  "A God Who Hates" includes Wafa Sultan's devastating critique of remarks Colin Powell made during the latter phase of the 2008 US Presidential election campaign. Appearing on NBC television's "Meet The Press," Powell glibly asserted nothing would be wrong with Americans choosing a Muslim President. Wafa Sultan's analysis of this comment exposes both the terribly dangerous flaws in Powell's limited, naïve understanding of Islam, and how that ignorance is compounded by obligatory allegations of "anti-Muslim prejudice" (or "Islamophobia"), precluding any rational discussion of the very real threat mainstream Islamic doctrine poses.

I know that Mr. Powell, who lives by the American moral code on which he was nurtured, refuses to judge people on the basis of their religious affiliation, and that is his right. But he does not have the right to be ignorant or to disregard the fact that Islam is not just a religion: It is a political doctrine that imposes itself by force, and we have to subject to microscopic scrutiny any Muslim in America who ascends to the heights of this sensitive and supremely important post.

I would not want anyone to regard what I am saying as anti-Muslim prejudice. Muslims, like any other national group, can be either good or bad, and the best among them do not act in accordance with the teachings of their religion, either because they are not familiar with them, or because they have deliberately progressed beyond them; but to understand what it would mean for a Muslim to become President of the United States, one must search through Islamic history-the history of the Arabs, which is my own history-for a Muslim leader and look at his actions.

The first and most obvious Muslim leader we meet in our search is Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam. Had Mr. Powell read the life of Muhammad, as it is recounted in the Arabic sources and as I learned it in my schooldays, he would fall down in a dead faint. In third grade at primary school I read with pride in our religious primer how Muhammad had beheaded 800 Jews from the Bani Quraiza tribe in one night, then taken their wives and children hostage, and spent the same night with the Jewish woman Safia, whose husband, father, and brother he had just killed. This is only a drop in the ocean of what was written about the crimes of Muhammad in the Arabic sources, but, unfortunately, Mr. Powell-it seems-has never troubled to familiarize himself with the most malicious enemy ever to have confronted him or threatened his safety. Once Americans understand that the Koran insists that Muhammad is the ideal that every Muslim male should imitate, they will realize that a Muslim candidate for the American presidency is a very serious matter.

I do not know if Dalia Mogahead is in "the moderate middle" (though I am willing to take Jeffrey Goldberg's word for it) and I do not know if Wafa Sultan is correct with her implication that the Koran is the ineradicable source of Islamic terror, but the ideas both express suggest that the tendency to splitting into all-good versus all-bad is percolating below the surface of the current and previous administration's insistence that Islam is a religion of peace.  By Bush and Obama both insisting that Islam is all-good, we have lost the opportunity to press the Islamic world to confront their own Manichean tendencies and as a result, even as we remain targets of radical Islam, the stresses which press toward splitting remain underground, to grow over time.

The sense of subterranean movements along regressive fault lines can be found both here and in England, in two recent articles.  First, Thomas Sowell worries about a President who he believes does not privilege America's ethos or history:

Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year-- each bill more than a thousand pages long-- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question-- and the biggest question for this generation.

Second, Shannon Love worries about The Collapse of the British Liberal Order, apparently much further along in its regression:

Via Instapundit comes a disturbing report that one-fifth of the British electorate would consider voting for the British Nationalist Party (BNP), which is considered by almost everyone left or right to be a genuine fascist party.

How did Britain come to this state?

Simple, the current liberal order has proven itself ineffective in addressing many of the major problems that Britain faces. As I wrote three years ago, liberal orders don’t slowly evolve into authoritarian ones. Instead, they become less and less effective until they suddenly collapse into an authoritarian order. People simply lose faith that the liberal order can function and they throw their support behind an authoritarian order just to survive.

The major problem in resisting authoritarian orders is the simple fact that they usually work quite well in the short term. In the 1920s, Mussolini was widely admired across the political spectrum for saving Italy from imploding after years of red socialist strikes and violence had all but shut down the country. Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression spectacularly. The communists did manage to rapidly industrialize peasant economies (albeit at a staggering cost in lives). Less dramatically, authoritarian corporatist/state-capitalist regimes in South Korean, Taiwan and Singapore raised the population out of poverty and led to democracy in the former two.

The BNP could very well rise to power by quickly and easily fixing problems that many Britons see going unaddressed by the left.

For both fascism and socialism/communism, splitting is the sine qua non.  Regression to such totalitarian, even soft totalitarian liberal fascism, is facilitated by societal stress.  The longer untoward trends continue, the more likely the worse outcome and the more difficult the task of re-fusion. 

As Richard Fernandez notes in his response to Shannon Love's post

What the Left and Fascism share is a belief in the transformative power of the state. Both regard government as the “high ground” of society and not, as some Americans still believe, simply a necessary evil. It is a prize to be seized by main force; the castle to be stormed. In the long run there is little reason to think that Nick Griffin will allow any more freedom than Gordon Brown. What is likely to happen is the substitution of one set of sacred cows for another. When the Left and fascists contend for power, the surveillance cameras are in every case fully employed.

Regression always includes a move back from more mature to less mature functioning.  A regressed society is one which looks for a powerful leader to rescue and protect it.  The greatest problem with one party rule in a democracy is that the one party never recognizes its own tendencies toward authoritarianism when stressed, which is how we lose freedom "for our own good" during such times.

On the Way to the Singularity

From time to time I allow myself to freely associate and speculate.  Consider this a highly speculative post written without any particular view on where it is going...

There are many different conceptualizations of the Singularity, the one I find most salient is, as described by Michael Anissimov at Accelerating Future, defined by that moment at which an AI becomes recursively self improving.  Shortly thereafter the intelligence of the AI(s) will begin to exponentially surpass the intelligence of Homo sapiens and it is impossible to predict what will ensue.

As others, exemplified by Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) , have pointed out, if we think in terms of the speed and cost of information processing, the history of our planet/universe/species has been punctuated by a series of discontinuities.  For example, the beginning of the biosphere (emergence of life) on the planet can be thought of as a Singularity.  Once life began its long march, nothing was ever the same again.  In more human terms, the invention of Movable Type was a Singularity whereby the ability to process information expanded exponentially as, in an historical eye blink of time, the number of people able to read and process data went from a relative handful to several orders of magnitude larger.  The internet has once again increased by an exponential level the number of people involved in processing data and, even more importantly, the number of connections available for data processing, which is probably on the order of N X 10³ (assuming each person on the internet has connections to 1000 others, who have connections to 1000 other, a very conservative estimate; the information transmission will propagate as the cube of the number of people in the network.  I welcome other estimates by anyone who has some expertise in information science.)

With each mini-Singularity there was a subsequent economic dislocation as suddenly archaic methods of adding value were swamped by the new economies of scale.  Where once a book had to be painstakingly written by hand and were so rare and precious that only the wealthiest individuals and institutions could afford them, once the printing press was invented, the cost of the book became substantially reduced, making it possible for even those with modest wealth to accumulate tlibraries.  With the advent of the internet the marginal cost of "printing" a book has descended to as near to free as to make the distinction invalid.  As this mini-Singularity has overwhelmed those industries that were based on controlling the creation and distribution of printed material, their business models have begun to crumble.  In fact, every industry that depends on disseminating information has found their business model failing.  For the newspaper business, network news, the music industry, and a host of other industries, the economic Singularity has effectively already happened.

The next mini-Singularity is already in its nascent stages, as noted by Kevin Carson in his review of Cory Doctorow's  Makers: [HT: John Robb]

The major themes I’ve written about here lately — the decline of traditional mass-production industry, the crisis of value and shift of production outside the cash nexus, the rise of micromanufacturing (see “The Homebrew Industrial Revolution“), the digital/network culture — are all central to Makers.  And given my research and writing interests, it’s a foregone conclusion that any work of cyberpunk or other near-future sci fi is going to wind up marked and dogeared beyond belief.  Just about anything I’ve read by Neal Stephenson or William Gibson has ended up that way, as did the machine shop material in the first volume of S. M. Stirling’s Nantucket series.  So after just one reading, Doctorow’s book looks like it’s had the living shit beaten out of it.  It’s that good.

...

The story begins sometime in the second decade of this century.  It’s set against the background of the kind of economic clusterfuck I’ve written about a lot recently (for example, “The End of Economic Growth“  at this blog, and my paper “The Decline and Fall of Sloanism” at Center for a Stateless Society).

Doctorow’s near-future scenario is the culmination of a long trend that began in the 1970s, with Japan’s development of cheap CNC machine tools scaled to the needs of the garage factory and job-shop.   Since then we’ve seen progressively larger shares of total industrial production shifted from the old mass-production core to a periphery of flexible manufacturing networks like those of Emilia-Romagna and Shenzhen, and the growing shift of contract production to independent supplier networks.  By 2000, a majority of transnational corporations’  industrial production took place not in their own facilities, but in the job-shops of Asia.

The rise of the micromanufacturing and Fab Lab movements in recent years has taken things an order of magnitude further in the same direction.  According to Doug Rushkoff, the destructive effect of the desktop computer on the old information and culture industries resulted from the imploding cost of the means of production.    As Yochai Benkler described it, in a few decades we went from conventional radio stations, music studios and printing presses costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, to desktop publishing and podcasting operations that were two orders of magnitude cheaper.   When the initial capital outlays for information and cultural production fall by a factor of a hundred, all the capital previously absorbed by those industries becomes superfluous.

We’re seeing the same thing now in the realm of physical production.  We’re seeing the development of homebrew CNC cutting tables, routers and 3-D printers that can be built for a few hundred bucks.  A Fab Lab with homebrew machine tools and RepRap — essentially a factory — can be built for $5000.  The desktop manufacturing revolution is in the process of making the majority of investment capital superfluous, the same way the desktop computer revolution has destroyed the information and entertainment industries.   If there’s an analogue of Moore’s Law for industrial hardware, you can stand it on its head and get a general rule:  if capital outlays for micromanufacturing fall exponentially, then every so many years the amount of stuff that requires mass production industry to make will be reduced by half.

The review is long but well worth your time.  The key graph is that as more and more actual stuff* is manufactured locally, in garages and warehouses of now defunct industries, the economic dislocation will be profound.  Our current Recession/Depression, with lost jobs which will never come back, is a foretaste of the kinds of dislocation that abundance can create.

Read the entire review and keep in mind that the current, first generation, desk top fabricator can make simple plastic models, but not too far down the road are vdesk top printers (now in the laboratory) that can create printed circuits to order and fabricators that will be mini-machine shops able to work with metals, plastics, and composites.  It is possible to imagine some of the attributes of an economy that is based on a growing percentage of economic activity taking place at the most local level, but the impact on the state and the largest corporate structures is not so easy to predict.  Where will the state get its tax money when the marginal cost of new stuff is minimal? 

A current TV commercial touts the fact that there are already >83,000 iPhone apps available.  What happens when there are >83,000 iPhone iterations available?  Right now, to make a knock-off cell phone costs pennies but requires a large investment of capital to set up the plant to make them; soon enough a smart teenager will be able to use his allowance money to buy a decent functioning fabricator(or more likely fabricators) and build his own customized cell phones for costs approaching free.  If economies are based on managing scarcity, how will  we manage abundance?

The future is getting closer by the minute and it is likely to be fascinating but the dislocations are going to create more than their share of vertigo.

Beware of the Self-Destructive Core

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Euripides, Greek tragic dramatist (484 BC - 406 BC)

There has been a tremendous amount of discussion of the Obama administration's assault on Fox News.  Yesterday, they took the battle to a new level by their failed attempt to excommunicate Fox News:

Bullies’ Overreach

In its mindless war against Fox, the White House tried to ban Fox News from the White House press pool that was to interview the “pay czar,” Kenneth Feinberg. (Yes, it was a nice touch of imperial irony that the effort to cut off access to a particular news outlet came in the context of an interview of an administrative official who is not subject to congressional confirmation or oversight and whose job it is to dictate compensation rules to private firms that were bullied into taking government bailouts.) The mainstream media’s collective spine stiffened, and the administration was forced to back down.

The MSM should be commended for showing some solidarity with their colleagues at Fox.  As Jennifer Rubin noted in the body of her post, the administration's behavior is troubling for a number of reasons:

This is hugely revealing for several reasons. First, the administration is digging in and doubling down even though its conduct has invited scorn from pundits of every political persuasion and become the object of ridicule. The belligerence is remarkable and suggests that the White House behaves in illogical and self-destructive ways. (Attention pundits: stop looking for rational explanations for the Obamis’ irrational behavior.)

Second, the administration is doing the impossible — offending the mainstream press and forcing some of Fox’s toughest critics to ride to its defense. Nice work, fellas.

Third, it’s disturbing that at a time when we still lack a strategy decision on Afghanistan, unemployment is sky high, and health-care reform is in disarray, this is what consumes the White House. For an administration that was supposed to transcend petty partisanship, it has become, yes, the spitting image of the Nixon White House — defensive, vengeful, and self-destructive.

It’s a cringe-inducing moment, both for those who oppose the White House on policy grounds and those who cheer its every move. As surely as Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton allowed their personal flaws to erode the office of the presidency, Obama seems bent on allowing his own flaws (thin-skinnedness, hubris) to do potentially grave damage to the office as well.

The analogy to Richard Nixon, whose preoccupation with his political enemies verged on paranoia and whose indulgence of his insecurities destroyed his Presidency is warranted and of great concern.  This episode tells us a great deal about the character of our President.

One of the basic tenets of the model of the mind that has been constructed through 100 years of work in Psychoanalysis is that the mind contains a multitude of conflicting impulses, some positive, some negative.  Among those impulses are many completely unacceptable impulses that we normally inhibit, including self-destructive impulses which often emerge in well disguised ways.

[It is not a coincidence that much of the output of the highest cortical levels of the brain are inhibitory of the lower levels.  In other words, in order to behave rationally, we need to inhibit our irrational impulses.  An infant acts when he has an impulses.  If he is hungry, he screams; if he feels an urge to move his bowels, he moves his bowels.  He does not care where he is or if his behavior is acceptable at the moment.  These are things he must learn in order to be civilized.  When he learns them well, he becomes a civilized, decent human being.  Those who learn to inhibit their impulses less effectively may have difficulty modulating their aggressive and libidinal desires, usually with problematic outcomes.]

Recently we have been treated to the public self-immolation of a number of rich and powerful people.  Perhaps the classic blend of hubris, unregulated desire, and self destruction seen most recently was embodied by the former governor of New York.  When we fail to appreciate the potential outcomes of surrendering to our desires, or when we believe that we are immune to consequences, we make the likelihood of disaster much greater.  Eliot Spitzer was a politician with a great deal of money and power and felt himself to be above the law.  He most likely had a relatively unmetabolized grandiose self as part of his character (a form of enhanced narcissism, possibly innate, possibly acquired with his easy success.)  Such a politician may believe he can flaunt the laws he enacted (eg, money laundering) and pleasure himself with attractive young prostitutes and never worry about consequences.  It is not hard to see the self destructive core in Eliot Spitzer's behavior.

The picture of Barack Obama that is emerging from the first year of his Presidency is that of an overtly arrogant man who believes his own press, ie, a man who contains some unmetabolized grandiosity.  He is intolerant of criticism and experiences criticism as an attack.  There is no way to know how much of this behavior is fueled by character issues and how much emerges from a (poorly) calculated political posture.  Certainly, it is "the Chicago Way" to demonize opponents and reward supporters and a case can be made that the inexperienced Chicago politicians in Washington DC simply have failed to recognize that such an approach works poorly in national politics where so many fancy themselves to be so smart, crafty, and powerful.  A little finesse works better in Washington than a lot of overt pressure.  In many ways this is the best case scenario because it suggests that Barack Obama and those around him do not have a characterological inability to learn from their mistakes but rather can eventually adopt a more Machiavellian approach to getting parts of their agenda enacted.

On the other hand, if their behavior reflects the character of the President and those around him (and the evidence unfortunately points in that direction at the moment) here is considerable cause for worry.  In such a case, Obama's poorly contained anger can lead him to make errors of judgement which are consequential.  Further, those who cannot tolerate criticism cannot learn from their mistakes.  They believe that all criticism is based on a personal repudiation and animus and as a result, never hear the content of the criticism.  As a result those who criticize them become enemies who must be crushed in order to remove the stain on their escutcheon. 

Richard Nixon developed an enemies list because he had many genuine enemies but could never differentiate between personal enemies and political opponents.  He allowed his preoccupation with his enemies to define and destroy his Presidency.  There was no one among his trusted inner circle to tell him that he was veering into dangerous and self destructive territory.  That is the danger for Barack Obama and the country.  He does not appear able to differentiate personal enemies and political opponents and there is little reason to believe any of his closest advisers recognize the danger.  An isolated, effectively paranoid President is not something the country can afford at this time.  Let us hope that the MSM refusal to continue to go along with every excess of the Obama administration is taken as a bit of friendly criticism rather than a tactical maneuver or temporary setback, or worse, a personal attack.  If the Obama administration fails to learn from this episode, we will be left hoping that someone can intervene before too long.

Note well that the Nixon comparison is becoming widespread, and that Nixon's administration didn't end well:

MSM Does The Right Thing

There was one MSM reporter who sees an ominous connection between the psychology of this administration and one long passed into history

How do you know that the White House's anti-Fox News campaign has gone seriously wrong? When CNN, let alone Anderson Cooper, begins to compare the Obama and Nixon administrations

As I recall the Nixon thing didn't end well. Nixon was forced to resign and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew, was convicted on corruption charges. Leaving Gerald Ford to baby sit the country until Jimmy "incompetent" Carter's election.

The Open MInd II: Wrap Up

As usual, the comments to Jay's riposte were excellent and basically allow this Wrap Up to write itself.  In response to Jay's unhappiness with my use of the term Obamacare, I partially agree with his criticism.  It would be nice if each time we addressed an issue ont he "left" or "right" that we specified where partisans stand on the issue, how the issue is presented and framed, and refrained from such shorthand as "left" and "right."  However, that would lead to posts that are book length and unwieldy and both jay and I already write long enough posts.  besides, as Wacky Hermit noted, we have to call "it" something and whatever healthcare bill emerges from Congress, it will belong to President Obama as his legacy.

Shrink Reader thought we were discussing apples and oranges:

You believe that every individual is absolutely entitled to full health care – that should something degrade the health of a citizen, every feasible option must be pursued to restore it.

ShrinkWrapped, near as I can tell, would not argue that everyone should be allowed health care – but he stops short at making others pay. His argument seems to be that while everyone should be able to exhaust every option available to them to restore their health, it is a step too far to demand that others pay to make these options available to them.

SR almost gets it but misses something crucial.  I would like everyone to have access to the finest medical care our nation has to offer.  Unfortunately we cannot afford to make such care available.  As Neil notes:

When you argue for universality rather than letting market forces increase the supply, you are implicitly saying that it is better that we all make do with less, rather than let anyone have more. People will die from this. Almost certainly more people than will be saved by universality.

The next best option is to create a system which allows "good enough" care for the maximum number of people while also enabling the innovation that will continually make such care cheaper and better over time.  The current iterations of Obamacare will do neither.

As usual, MaxedOutMama lays out the problems in our healthcare financing better than anyone (and why isn't she in Congress writing this bill?) and her comment should be read and appreciated in full:

Jay, you say you want to examine fundamental assumptions, but some of your own seem to be terribly flawed.

First, most insurance is not gambling. It is a means of saving which allows individuals to save less by spreading risks across a group than those individuals would have to save if they had to save enough to deal with just their own likely risks. As such, it is economically efficient. When insurance programs become a method of providing access to care that most of the insured can pay for without insurance, insurance becomes economically inefficient and wasteful. Because insurance is not at all a gamble but an actuarially determined savings program, it serves a function. Currently we do not save (provide adequate resources) for any of our federal public programs.

You state that insurance can be used as a method of managing risk for those who are wealthy in poor societies. Actually, that is not true. When you are wealthy in a poor society without any mechanism of funding medical care for the poorer majority, the impact of the price-demand function is such that YOU WILL HAVE ACCESS TO WHATEVER MEDICAL CARE EXISTS REGARDLESS. The problem often is that you could pay for care which does not exist, which is why the Saudis keep showing up at hospitals in Europe and the Americas. There is never medical insurance in societies with a small middle class. The wealthy do not need it, the poor cannot afford it. The only group that benefits from health insurance (without welfare) is a middle class which can save for medical care but cannot save enough for all the medical care they might need individually without spreading the risk across a group.

Widespread insurance programs and/or subsidization of high-end medical care for the poor do work for the wealthy, but only because they increase the amount and variety of services available. But widespread insurance or even an ethic requiring provision of services will always increase medical costs for persons with significantly higher incomes, because no matter the method of paying for the care, a significant amount of the cost is shifted to those who are able to pay – whether it is taxation, private insurance combined with welfare, a private/public mix or an ethic requiring the provision of free care by professionals and institutions.

Further, because it is such a high burden, the majority of the cost is shifted to the middle class. The more uniform the standard of care, the more burden is shifted to the middle class, and the higher the overall spending level per capita. You appear not to grasp this, but in fact the standard of care provided to poorer people in the US is on average much higher than in countries with “universal” care. The young, the injured and the relatively healthy receive generally excellent services under these systems, but the old, disabled and the chronically ill are extremely shortchanged in comparison to the US.

That is because there is no such thing as universal care. The wealthy can always exit. The middle class can often exit, and usually do if their circumstances become pressing enough. The poorer people live with whatever is generally available. The standard of “universal” care in each society evolves to match the resources devoted, and there is a breaking point at which the middle class simply cannot afford to pay for care for everyone.

There are a number of other awful economic errors in your post, but just the two above show that insurance and medical care systems are not a zero-sum game. There is some X range of funding which will generate more medical resources and cheaper overall access because the cost per service is related to the number of accesses/fixed cost. There is another X level of funding which will generate superb medical resources but a growing pressure on the middle class. That is where we now are, and the reason is the massive cost-shifting onto the private sector from Medicare/Medicaid.

German insurance rates are currently set at 15.75% of payroll (cut as a stimulus measure on a temporary basis to 14.75% of payroll), which is not very different from what we would require to institute Medicare across the board. However, to do that, individuals now on Medicare would have to accept a lesser standard of care, and so would people on Medicaid, and so would people now on private insurance.. Because of the disproportionate payments coming from the 50% of society covered by private insurance, our standard of care has evolved to meet their high demands as well as the high demands of those getting a free ride (Medicare and Medicaid). When you have 40% of the population paying 80% of the costs for the entire population, a very high incentive exists for the rest of the population to demand good medical care.

But German medical standards include not treating a number of conditions we treat, especially terminal or severe chronic disease. Just as public plans in say, Oregon, have totally different standards of care (and much lower) than those pertaining to most privately insured persons, or NHS standards of care.

You also seem to have completely missed the point of SW’s writings on this topic. The US has created a bizarre mixture in which the bulk of medical care provided is paid for by others, PRECISELY BECAUSE OUR GOVERNMENT MEDICAL INSURANCE PROGRAMS DO NOT INCLUDE ADEQUATE FUNDING.

So if we switch to a public single-payer option (which is not used by the majority of western countries which have universal care – most use insurance funds) under our current system, we won’t have access to care at all. That is his concern. If we jack up taxation rates to fund it, the general level of care will absolutely have to drop. The way this will be accomplished will be by cutting care provided to the most vulnerable, which is not exactly a progressive option.

Your point about the taxation of high-end plans is good and economically sound. Both employers and employees already have a strong incentive to cut costs, and the steady shifting in the private sector towards higher deductibles, etc, is proof of it. There is nothing such a tax can effect except injustice upon smaller groups with disproportionate risks and thus higher premiums.

As to why Obamacare is all about insurance and avoids the issue of public insurance like the plague, it’s because the average college professor would pay very much more for his medical insurance under such a system than he or she does now. The upper middle class now votes disproportionately Dem, and it is a demographic group the Dem leadership does not want to lose. Under such a plan, a person earning 100K would be paying from 17.5K to 20K a year for his or her coverage, whereas that Walmart worker would be paying at most 4K.

So since you favor single payer, are you willing to pay 17.5% to 20% of your salary for it? If your answer is no, you are not really in favor of single payer. The rich cannot pay for it, the companies cannot pay for it. The only group that has the money to pay for it is the upper middle class. Mind you, on top of that payroll tax you would also be covering 20% copays.

The reason it would cost more than in Germany or France is that we have such a high percentage of recent immigrants working low-pay jobs.

This is not a knock on Jay, but academics (and Psychiatrists) typically have no clue how economies and markets work.  We cannot indefinitely pay less than the true cost for goods and services, artificially held below market by government edicts, and expect our system to function long term.  We should all spend some time at Maxed Out Mama's and John Opie's sites, among others, and learn something about how the real world works.

Finally, Jay reports some "facts" that continually wend their way around the MSM and the blogosphere:

 I don’t know what long-term studies have been done specifically focusing on variant aspects of care between the U.S. and universal systems demonstrating a clinically supportable cause and effect relationship between those variant aspects and outcomes, but the U.S. has a long cultural, political, business, and philosophical tradition of pragmatism: nose around at length among the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development statistical reports (Health Consumer Powerhouse is a good site for only EU comparisons) where varied comparisons are made among the members, and note the glaring deficiencies of the U.S. in life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity (cultural, indeed – an aspect of a health system). The U.S. not only ranks low, but often below the mean, above, sometimes only nations like Russia and China or former Eastern Bloc countries such as the Czech Republic or former Third World countries such as Brazil.

The only problem with these "facts" are that they are wrong.  For example, most countries count premature babies who die shortly after birth as stillborn; they do not make efforts to rescue such infants and do not count them in their statistics for infant mortality.  In the United States, on the other hand, all efforts are made to rescue such infants (at tremendous expence) and even the most premature are counted as live births.  Needless to say this makes our statistics look much worse than other nations.  Please note, there are far more neonatal ICU beds in America per capita than any other country in the world, which should be clarifying.  As well, life expectancy, once accidents and murder are removed, is higher in the United States than almost everywhere else.  In fact, if you are an 80 year old, you have a much better chance making it to 90 in America than anywhere else in the world.  And that doesn't even take into account the cultural variants that increase mortality among many sub-populations and skew our statistics.

There is a reason that wealthy people (and middle class Canadians) come from all over the world to America for medical care, not least that a very high percentage of medical innovation comes from America.  (It used to be 90% of all medical innovation came from America; with Israel making major efforts in biotech, they are making some  inroads in our lead in this area, exact figures are unavailable to me.)

There are lots of problems with our healthcare system and there are many ideas out there for making it work more efficiently and responsively.  The problem is that Obamacare will address none of the major problems and will worsen the system for almost everyone, despite the claims of its proponents, most of whom understand neither medicine nor economics.

The Open Mind II: Riposte

Jay has responded: Ensuring Healthcare or Insuring against the Loss of Health?