A thoroughly evil business pattern
Well-meaning people often wreak more death and destruction than the evil guys. But the evil guys are quite capable of learning how to wreak death and destruction around the globe. In our world this is often viewed simply as doing business.
My father was a historian of religious revival movements. He noted that there was a cycle in the way good people viewed the poor and disadvantaged. At first there is almsgiving. The giver of alms to the poor is not looking so much to help the poor as to do good deeds that will reflect well on himself. Then there is charity. The charitable giver is more selfless and more focussed on the people he is trying to help. Then there is social policy. In social policy people try to alter the way society works so that the problem no longer occurs.
What my father concluded is that because social policy rarely works, or gets subverted for other ends, people end up at the start of the cycle again, looking to themselves the way some people today are avid recyclers or vegans.
That cycle is capable of being benign, capable of doing more good than harm. But the business version is more destructive. The business version goes like this.
First, the issue at stake is politicised. Perhaps health care in the US, where radically different “solutions” are put forward that have nothing at all to do with helping people access the care they need. The UK version of this is funding the incredibly wasteful NHS or making the NHS wasteful and risky so that it can be bought up by US corporations. Something that was capable of being a technocratic matter (not that we believe in technical solutions in this blog) becomes one where evidence and insight become completely irrelevant. Sensitive issues become political footballs.
Second, the issue is financialised. Once values have become thoroughly confused the whole issue can be couched in financial terms and fought out between corporations in terms of who can extract the most profit at the least risk. Think about the provision of care homes in the UK. This is often done by corporations with large estates of homes to give them economies of scale (and of profit extraction). However, they are not taking the risks. When it is not economic at the fees that they can charge to provide care, they simply shut up shop, with dire implications for the people “cared” for. In the US, I gather there is a chain of mental health “hospitals” where inmates are merely sedated and warehoused until their insurance money runs out.
These first two elements are tightly coupled. When politics amounts to buying influence and what is influenced is new laws and regulations that suit the influencers, then the very stuff of politics has been financialised. The regulators are so totally captured that they run in the interest of the corporations they are supposed to regulate. Clearly, from the corporate perspective, that is good business.
Thirdly, the issue is weaponised. A weaponised issue is used to destroy opponents. In much of the US, white people were not particularly comfortable with non-white people and communities owning property. When banks were forced to offer services to those communities they came up with sub-prime mortgage products designed to entrap and impoverish those communities. The sub-prime mortgage crash was the biggest ever single loss of Afro-American assets in the history of the US. It is because of the strange blindspot we have for certain sorts of slow violence that financial rationalisations are accepted for widespread looting of poor people’s assets.
Probably the outstanding example of a non-issue that was made an issue only because of the campaigning techniques that were developed around it is abortion. Abortion eventually became the definitive weaponised issue to make sure that the real programmes of relatively liberal campaigners and politicians were denied any oxygen or platform. Their position on abortion was used to obscure and deny literally anything else they said.
Relating to the cycle not the dummy issues
As I write this I have to distance myself from this all being a conspiracy theory. In the cycle that my father noted around charity, these are different people reacting to the stages of the cycle: in essence they have no awareness of where the cycle will go next. Each group in turn believe that they are doing what the situation demands.
In the business cycle, I think it is helpful to understand how politicisation (of which we have such a surfeit) opens up the world to financialisation. In our more compressed timescales, I think financial types are aware of how this can work and are very ready to support the destruction of proper political negotiation in favour of political tribal warfare. Maybe Robert Mercer is a good example here, but it looks as though Facebook have been fomenting discord such as the troubles in Myanmar.
Once an issue gets financialised and weaponised, the politics of it is poisonous. It is far from obvious where to intervene in the cycle. Each aspect of the cycle becomes a runaway loop.
Financialisation of all sorts has been shown to make the problems it purports to solve worse, in good fascist style. Worried about the future price of your crops? Let us turn that into a boom and bust cycle that will destroy you totally. Worried about the cost to the public purse of building hospitals and schools? We can make all your money and more disappear offshore and leave you with the problem. But how do you reverse the process and regain some control and sanity? And what happens to all the entitled financial types if you do oust them locally? They are sure to move on to make someone else’s life impossible.
Weaponisation makes it increasingly difficult to adopt collaborative approaches. To go literal for a moment, if gangs carry knives and want to make trouble for you on the streets, what are you going to do, really? The film Kingdom of God, about the systematic brutalisation of kids in Rio, is a perfect introduction. If the social pattern of weaponization forces you to take sides, individuals, and especially independent individuals, get ground down or destroyed.
This is a classic case of where the only hope is to relate to the pattern not the issue. People can organise against the way the pattern co-opts and coerces. William Stafford captures this in one of my favourite poems:
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
And I don’t know the kind of person you are
A pattern that others made may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god home we may miss our star
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind
A shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
Sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
Storming out to play through the broken dyke
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
But if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
To know what occurs but not recognize the fact
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
A remote important region in all who talk:
Though we could fool each other, we should consider –
Lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark
For it is important that awake people be awake,
Or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
The signals we give — yes or no, or maybe –
Should be clear: the darkness around us is deep
William Stafford
Stalinist science
We love to sneer at the style of science practiced by the old Soviet Union. From the disastrous pseudo-genetics in crop breeding that caused widespread starvation to the indiscriminate use of radiation therapy that caused an epidemic of cancer. But our own science in the US and the UK is also thoroughly Stalinist. There are political (and of course politicised) bosses who determine what can be researched, what can be published where, and what must be suppressed by various means.[1] It leads predictably to a science which cannot correct the errors of the past, which of course is no science at all.
If you want a thoroughly researched and documented example to check up on, you could read Nina Teicholz’ The Big Fat Surprise. Reacting in a context of high anxiety in the US about heart disease rates, Ancel Keys did some work on the epidemiology of heart disease around the world. He decided on the basis of very poor and already contradicted evidence that saturated fats were to blame. His reaction to criticism of his results was to double down again and again until finally some layperson produced the US food guidelines for Congress. There never was any decent science to support his conclusions that saturated fat was to blame for the US “epidemic”, despite repeated large scale and expensive experiments.
So it was that Dietary Goals, compiled by one interested layperson, Nick Mottern, without any formal review, became arguably the most influential document in the history of diet and disease. Nina Teicholz
Having politicised the issue to close out scientific progress, the food manufacturers could move in, and produce cheap vegetable-based oils and cheap carbohydrate-based foods. Although these were touted as healthy, they produced the actual epidemic we see today in obesity, diabetes, and yes, the heart disease that they allegedly cured. With cancer riding on the bandwagon. There is a very nasty undertow to these national guidelines around the world because of course the impoverished people that our economics produces can only afford food that will wreck their health. Even if they “choose” it.
We seem to be in the third stage now. Wild weaponised statements are being made that the world should be vegetarian and that cows are producing global warming. These statements are produced by national bodies and global bodies such as the WHO on the basis of regulatory capture. The people at WHO who claim to have done meta-analyses of the data and shown that meat is harmful to health are vegetarians. The issue has been politicised long ago, financialised by all sorts of dummy research bodies funded by the food industry and weaponised into the careers of anyone who wants to do real research.
The tragedy in all this is of course that the people caught up in the cycle, which is nearly all of us, think it is about the issue. What to eat and how to stay healthy. But it never was. It was about Ancel Keys’ giant ego. It was about Congress needing to act, which has its roots in President Eisenhower’s heart attack. It is about the self-protective nature of vast bureaucracies that need to tell people what to do, even when they really don’t know. It is about trendy and exploitative academics. It is about vast corporations all to ready to subvert anything to further their short term interests. None of them have any interest in food or health or real politics.
Gresham’s law for politics
Gresham’s Law says that bad money drives out good, which addresses our financialisation theme. All sorts of solid economic activity on which we all depend are undermined by large flows of dodgy money from Russia, from drugs cartels, from the 1%, from Arab oil money, from corruption the world over. Such money passes through tax havens (largely UK and US) through wholesale gold and diamond markets. It simply means that solid businesses don’t necessarily prosper as they should.
John Smith reckons there may be a second Gresham’s Law for politics. Bad politics drives out good politics. When lying becomes the expected mode of discourse we must necessarily be in bad politics, and I can’t remember the last time I experienced an honest attempt by politicians to build a constituency for a policy by educating people across the political spectrum. Too much like hard work I suspect and an obvious reason why social media shortcuts to foment discord are an attractive alternative.
Weaponisation is simply the mode that the bad money and the bad politics takes on. In my mind Margaret Thatcher was the UK politician who sought to destroy the political basis of her opposition, as she did with the miners, as distinct from winning arguments and governing in the interest of the country. Political standards seem to have headed downhill ever since. Which brings us to the final point: people who instigate these things never pay the price.
Boris Johnson, as a journalist, has over many years sought to undermine the EU apparatus and political legitimacy. There is zero prospect of him taking any responsibility of the mess he has made and of the lives he has scarred. I single him out only as an illustration of how people can set the patterns we are speaking about here in motion, find ways to benefit from the chaos and the carnage and never even take a hit to their reputation.
We will do well to observe how such manoeuvres put the blame on the helpless people who are minced up in the process. People choosing the wrong diet, inefficient workers, irresponsible strikers, a bloated public sector. If we are awake these abusive characterisations are signs that we are being played in a pattern that has nothing to do with responsible politics or ethical business.
[1] Scott Alexander has a parable that explores this situation. It begins, “mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov lived in the Soviet Union at a time when true freedom of thought was impossible. He reacted by saying whatever the Soviets wanted him to say about politics, while honorably pursuing truth in everything else. As a result, he not only made great discoveries, but gained enough status to protect other scientists, and to make occasional very careful forays into defending people who needed defending.” http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/
