Think about a private citizen or group creating an advertising campaign as large as this one stunt. What would it cost? I don’t know, simply because search as might, I couldn’t find any numbers about how much national advertising actually costs by the minute. All I know is it would cost a lot—millions of dollars, perhaps over a billion given the length of time these stories take up, the huge audiences, clips shown on social media, etc.

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Techno Colonialism and the Attention Economy

The actual cost of this ‘product placement’ on the world’s media might seem something silly to think about. But I’m trying to explain something that I suspect has never occurred to a lot of people. We are living in a time where people’s consciousness has become something that is increasingly being colonized by businesses, governments, and politicians. There are several sides to this.

Large Language Model programs—ie: what’s called ‘AI’—harvest the products of human consciousness. That includes all the books written, news stories, blogs (like this one), conversations over social media, etc.

Social media companies also harvest data about what we read on line so they can personalize advertising. If we look at a mattress on-line, for example, we start getting adverts for them everywhere we look.

Add in AI, and eventually we will start getting individually-crafted advertisements that specifically respond to our individual concerns and beliefs. If you doubt that this is possible, consider the information I dug up for the article link below about the Brexit campaign waged by Cambridge Analytica. Campaigners got viewers to take a very detailed survey (so they could enter a football lottery) and then targeted specific pro-Brexit advertising (most of it based on lies) to specific individuals based on the answers given. (Nowadays, it would be much easier to do this sort of thing because AI could automate many of the steps that were done by hand in the Brexit referendum campaign.)

What I’m saying is human cultural artifacts plus the content of human consciousness itself have become commodities that are being used by ‘tech lords’ to extract wealth and power from society. They do this through manipulating what’s called the attention economy.

This process of colonizing and monetizing something that was once part of the public domain has happened repeatedly in history. For the First Nations, to cite an example, land was simply a place people lived—not a commodity that could be bought and sold. Similarly, in medieval Europe, land was something that belonged to the king and was awarded to nobles in exchange for services rendered, who in turn loaned it to peasants in exchange for both a cut of the crop and services rendered. But as capitalism arose around the world, land became colonized, which meant it began to be bought and sold, and thus became part of the market economy.

Similarly, people used to mostly grow their own food, cook their own meals, raise and educate their own children, etc. Each of these aspects of life has made a transition from being based on self-reliance, through informal mutual aid (people helping one another ‘just because’—like my neighbour who gave me some cucumbers the other day), to small, independent craft producers (mom and pop restaurants, independent groceries, tailors and dress makers, etc) to huge companies (fast food chains, national grocers, international fast-fashion, etc).

In the same way human culture and consciousness has transitioned from local amateur artists, story-tellers, mummer’s plays, to traveling musicians (bards), traveling paid theatrical companies, and authors selling self-published books and then independent publishing houses and local bookshops—to huge media empires like Disney, Spotify, Amazon, Netflix, etc. And in each case where a traditional non-market aspect of human life became something much bigger and more centralized, a class of individuals came along to extract wealth from the process (capitalists).

The same thing has happened with the attention economy. The marketplace transfers wealth to techlords like Mark Zuckerberg because he gets to control the information that flows through Facebook. On a much lower level, it also helps ‘influencers’ make money off social media—both sleazy like Andrew Tate (the guy who suggests unhappy young men should exploit women like pimps) and virtuous like the Green brothers (who help educate the world with shows like Crash Course and who are committed to help eradicate the scourge of tuberculosis) . Think of these content creators as being ‘subcontractors’ in the information economy.

Let’s Not Throw Out the Baby With the Bathwater

It’s tremendously important readers understand what I am and am not suggesting in this article. A lot of people have made similar observations to what I’ve written above—and come to the conclusion that modernity is a terrible problem. These are the folks, for example, who joined the ‘back to the land’ movement when I was young and made heroic efforts to learn how to grow their own food, etc. Nowadays it fuels a social media genre which includes things like people cosplaying as farmers for people nostalgic for a type of life they’ve never known and totally misunderstand. (I grew up on a very old-fashioned family farm and I know all about that way of life. To be blunt, it sucked. People who live that way spend just about every minute of their waking lives working.)

Moreover, with the huge population increase that’s happened in the last 100 years we simply can’t go back to some semblance of ‘the good old days’ without driving a huge fraction of the population into dire poverty and starvation. ‘Back to the land’ was only a fantasy for well-off middle-class people who could afford to buy the land and deal with the huge insecurity and brutal workload that farmers grow-up with and take for granted—and which often destroys them. (Farmers have one of the highest suicide rates of any occupation in the world. I know—my father was one of them.)

We can’t turn-back the clock, but what we can do is bring in government regulation to rein-in the worst excesses of the attention economy. There was a total free-for-all in just about every other new iteration of economic modernity. Industrialization began with child labour and horrific working conditions. The first centralized food production industries sold tainted meat and poisoned flour. Land sales started off as little more than expropriation at gun point both in Europe (the enclosures) and North America (broken treaties with First Nations). But now we have laws, inspectors, trade unions, social welfare programs, and other mechanisms to protect people from some of the worst ravages of the free market. They aren’t perfect, need to be expanded, and are constantly under assault—but boy howdy how people would miss them if they disappeared overnight.

We need the same thing with social media. For example, there need to be laws that allow government inspection and regulation of algorithms to ensure they aren’t doing things like encouraging hate speech. We also need mechanisms to discourage the spread of lies and fake news to designed to manipulate gullible people. And social media companies need to be governed by the same regulations with regard to hate speech, misinformation, and libel that traditional media like newspapers, magazines, broadcast news, etc, have been governed by from before I was born. Facebook and YouTube are publishers—and they need to be treated that way by the legal system.

Flooding the Zone

In a Wikipedia article, I found the following quote from the media influencer and Trump ‘grey eminence’ Steve Bannon:

What Bannon means is the real journalists are the only people in society that have a professional commitment to reporting the truth. (Please note, I am not referring to propaganda outlets that cosplay as journalists—I’m looking at you, Fox News.) The Democrats bye-and-large seem have lost the ability to actually engage with their base, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into. (Although there are signs this may be ending—such as the nomination and election of social democrats like Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York.) And anyone using social media who is foolish enough to put the truth ahead of their ratings (like me) is inevitably going to be fighting a loosing battle against anyone who sets out specifically to game the algorithms and tell whatever lies will result in the most eyeballs on the screen.

Bannon isn’t wrong. The way to neutralize the legacy media is to create enough ‘man bites dog’ stories that they eat-up the news cycle. That’s why Trump made a big fuss about changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. It changes the conversation from things like the war that the US seems to have lost against Iran, the bond market losing faith in the long-term prosperity of the USA, the destruction of America’s system of alliances, inflation and unemployment, etc—to a meaningless series of breathless stories about names on a map.

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The Man Who Was Programmed to Flood the Zone

Please note, I am not saying that Donald Trump is a genius. In fact, I think he’s an idiot with one foot in the grave. It’s just that his whole life has programmed him to get ahead by exploiting the attention economy.

One of the flaws in the way modern people look at human behaviour is the need to decide a person’s intent. This misses the point that a huge amount of what people do is totally spontaneous—without any conscious intent at all. And a lot of what people believe they consciously choose to do is based on delusional assumptions. This is why the punishment for crimes fails so badly as deterrence.

Hanging people for murder never stopped people from committing murder. That’s because most murders are committed by people who are so out-of-control emotionally that the consequences of their crime weren’t considered while it was taking place. And those rare individuals who do try to think things through are generally so delusional about their own abilities that they think they will never get caught.

It’s the same thing for Donald Trump. He just acts, probably with almost no forethought at all. And what he’s done are all things he was programmed to do by the two key mentors in his life: his father, Fred Trump and his long-time lawyer Roy Cohn.

Fred Trump appears to have been a shady real estate developer who, amongst other things, was accused by government officials of profiteering from government contracts aimed at providing housing after WWII. He was also arrested at a KKK rally. And he also discriminated against potential black tenants for properties that were built with government money specifically to desegregate housing. Indeed, he has the dubious honour of being the subject of a song written by Woodie Guthrie:

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his Beach Haven family project^[4]

He was also a shameless self-promoter who worked to create the aura that he was a ‘self-made man’—even though his father made a fortune running saloons and brothels in the Klondike gold-rush, and he then parlayed that money into even more by taking advantage of (and profiteering off) generous New Deal housing programs after WWII. He even went to the extent of lobbying successfully for the Horatio Alger Award—presumably because of his hard life transitioning from the merely well-off to the super-rich by profiteering off programs meant to help the poor while at the same time discriminating against them.

Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, wrote a book titled Too Much and Never Enough about her uncle’s childhood that showed how Fred Trump poisoned Donald by teaching him to treat every interaction with other people as being a brutal, fight-to-the-death for dominance that needs to be based on public relations, legal chicanery, and an attempt to follow the Gilded Age motto of ‘Whatever isn’t nailed down belongs to me—and whatever I can pry loose isn’t nailed down’.

After Fred’s death, the next mentor in Donald’s life was Roy Cohn. For those of you who don’t know about him, he was the right-hand man of Senator Joseph MacCarthy when he conducted his witch-hunts against supposed ‘communists’ in the US government, academia, and movie industry. He was also notorious for the strategy of winning legal battles by relentlessly attacking and appealing until the other side gives-up out of either emotional fatigue or because the legal bills become far too high to justify continuing. (Sound familiar?)

When you learn about the influence of both Fred Trump and Roy Cohn on the young Donald Trump it’s easy to see how his worldview was shaped into the twisted, shuddering mass of delusion we see before us. The next stage is to understand how his business life involved throwing away a huge inheritance through a series of pretty awful business deals. (He is notorious for actually driving a casino into bankruptcy.) It appears, that his only real source of profits in real estate has come by catering to shady business people who appear to be laundering ill-gotten money. (According to a 2018 Buzz-Feed article, one-in-five of Trump’s US condominium sales were done for cash. Who buys a home for cash?)

Beyond that, he found his feet by hosting a wildly-successful ‘reality’ program titled The Apprentice. This experience helped him make the transition from being merely dabbling in the attention economy to becoming a professional. And he rode this wave all the way into the White House.

What I think we all need to do, therefore, is recognize that Trump is another crazy old man that has been coddled by wealth all his life. He’s surrounded himself with ‘yes men’ who have built their careers by currying his favour. On some level he has to understand ‘the jig is up’, but instead of rethinking his life he will inevitably try to blame everything on other people. And because he cannot conceive of a world without him in it, he doesn’t care who he brings down with him. That means he doesn’t care about either the Republican Party, the group tech-lords who supported him, or the American people.

My operating prediction is the November mid-term elections will become the ‘Twilight of the Gods’ for both MAGA and the Republican party. The polls show the Democrats will end up with enough power to have real investigations launched at Trump and co. This will be the end. The details will be different, but I suspect the end of neo-Fascism is coming and it will bear some emotional similarities to the end of the original version.

From the movie Downfall. I’ve edited it for brevity. (I know this violates Godwin’s Law, but even Godwin agrees the similarities between Trump and Hitler are profound and apt.)

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Mark Zuckerberg is an especially egregious example of a tech lord who has created untold misery around the world. And I’m not just talking about creating products specifically designed to addict children so they will compulsively use his social media products. Although that’s pretty bad in itself.

To really understand the depth of Meta’s depravity it helped me to read a ‘tell-all’ book by someone who once worked at the highest level of the company. I’m referring to Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book Careless People.

Emotionally-Targeting Teens

Wynn-Williams discusses how Facebook knew exactly what it was doing when it was working to exploit teens.

In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure”, “stressed”, “defeated”, “anxious”, “stupid”, “useless”, and “like a failure”. Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state.

Careless People, Chapter 44 Emotional Targeting, p-708

Wynn-Williams found herself appalled by this news, but Facebook actually promoted this ability to advertisers in order to get them to buy advertising and data from the company.

But apparently Facebook’s proud of it. They’ve placed a story in Australia explaining how the company uses targeting based on emotions: “How Brands Can Tap into Aussie and Kiwis [sic] Emotions: Facebook Research”, which touts how Facebook and Instagram use the “emotional drivers of behaviour” to allow advertisers to “form a connection”. The advertising industry understands that we buy more stuff when we are insecure, and it’s seen as an asset that Facebook knows when that is and can target ads when we’re in this state.

Careless People, pp-709-710

‘Free’ Internet Services that Created a Pogrom

In 2013 Meta started a program called ‘internet.org’ (later renamed ‘Free Basics’) which was designed to provide free, limited networking services to people with cell phones who live in countries without basic internet access. The business model was if Facebook provided this service, they would be able to decide which particular websites and services the people using this system would be able to access (thus violating the principle of net neutrality), and would be the sole company able to harvest the data and sell advertising to the people using the system.

A report released today by activist group Global Voices found that not only does Facebook’s Free Basics violate net neutrality principles, it’s not even very helpful to those who use it. Free Basics, an app that provides free access to specific services in parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, was already banned in India last year for violating net neutrality rules.

Upon opening the app, users have to get by with a Bing search engine, a Johnson & Johnson-sponsored baby advice app, and a number of other sponsored apps. Facebook is usually the only popular social media app available on Free Basics, predictably, while smaller, language-specific apps like ConnectAmericas for Mexico and Colombia were found in certain cases. Free Basics doesn’t have an email platform.

The Verge, Facebook’s Free Basics violates net neutrality and isn’t even that good, says report, July 27, 2017, by Shannon Liao

This was designed to be a way that Facebook could continue its extreme growth curve that was beginning to flatten-out as it saturated more industrialized nations.

Many nations of the world were deeply skeptical about this service—including Brazil and India, which denied Facebook the ability to offer this service either before it was introduced or shortly afterwards. This turned out to be prescient, as the example of what happened in Myanmar (Burma) illustrates.

Beyond the basic unfairness of forcing people who use the service to only use those parts of the Web that serve Facebook’s interests, the company didn’t build the infrastructure necessary to both understand what was happening on it, or, to deal with problems as they arose. And in the case of Myanmar, this led to extreme persecution against the country’s Rhohingya minority.

Myanmar is the one country where Mark’s dream for Internet.org kind of came true. Since my time there in 2013, it went from having virtually no internet to everyone on mobile, totally skipping desktops. And on mobile phones, Facebook is the internet for nearly everyone. Facebook made deals with the local telecoms to preload phones with Facebook, and in many plans, time spent on Facebook wasn’t counted toward your minutes.

So in Myanmar, if you’re on the internet, you’re on Facebook, and because of this, Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it’s truly ubiquitous. The best way I can describe what’s happened there is a kind of lethal carelessness. At every turn, when Facebook’s leaders see how Facebook is inflaming tensions and making an unstable and frightening political situation much worse, they do….nothing.

We got our first real glimpse of how badly things can go in 2014, nearly one year after I met with the junta. In April 2014 I and some others on the policy team hear that there is virulent hate speech circulating in Myanmar. Most of it is targeted at the country’s Muslim minority, the Rohingya. Mobs are burning down mosques. We go to the content team that’s responsible for removing hate speech and ask if there’s more we can do to address it, and we’re told no. They’ve just hired a new Burmese contractor to manage this: everything is fine Facebook’s head of content policy says, “i can confirm our Burmese rep has plenty of bandwidth.” We push for more details and they provide a breakdown showing they only have four or five reports of hate speech in the queue, which is nothing.

A few months after this exchange with the content team, a riot is triggered by a Facebook post and the junta blocks Facebook on July 4, 2014. The post claimed a Buddhist woman had been raped by a Muslim man, a tea shop owner. Much later a UN report concludes that the story is fabricated. But it went viral after it was shared by a Buddhist monk who’s often described as the “Burmese Bin Lade”, Ashin Wirathu. Wirathu had been jailed in the past for inciting religious hatred, and he was beginning to figure out how to weaponize Facebook.

Careless People, pp 734-736

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Algorithms That Promote Hate

Beyond providing mechanisms that could track and moderate dangerous misinformation on the Internet.org system, the basic nature of Facebook actually enhanced the hatred and violence being spread in Myanmar. Here’s an Amnesty International video that explains what I’m talking about.

And Pervert Democracy

After the 2016 election that brought Donald Trump into power, Wynn-Williams said Mark Zuckerberg vociferously disagreed with the idea that Facebook had had anything to do his election. Mainly, she ascribes this to his tremendously uninformed, naive view of how politics works.

“Mark Zuckerberg is in denial.” I agree. Mark still stands by what he said. He believes it! It’s remarkable that a person who founded one of the most powerful companies in the world, a business premised on the notion that it can influence the brand of toothpaste you buy, has such difficulty accepting that the platform where the president-elect spent vast sums of money had any influence on the election.

Careless People, p-566.

But eventually someone on his staff gets the opportunity to explain in detail how it was done.

Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, describe it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.”

Careless People, p-567

(This is just the intro to a much longer, dense description of all the ways Trump’s campaign was aided and abetted by the Facebook team. Anyone interested should really find a copy of Wynn-Williams book. It’s horrifying reading.)

Mark quietly takes it all in. At first, he’s skeptical and pushing back, but that gradually turns into curiosity. He starts to ask question, trying understand the mechanics of it all. He doesn’t seem upset that the platform would be used this way, not in the slightest. If anything, there’s admiration for the ingenuity of it. Like, these tools were there all the time for anyone to use this way. How smart that they figured it out.

Careless People, p-572

Mark isn’t the only person at Facebook who sees Trump’s election purely as an exercise in tactical messaging devoid of any ethical impact. Sheryl Sandberg, the Chief Operating Officer at Facebook from 2008 to 2022, is also described as refusing to see the election of Trump through a moral lens.

When all of this was explained to Sheryl at that business operations meeting, once she grasped what Trump’s campaign did, her immediate response was not horror but that it was brilliant and innovative and do you think we might have a shot at hiring Trump’s guy Brad Parscale to come work at Facebook? No one said anything. After an awkward moment, chastened, she shifted gears: “Of course that’s silly. He can have his pick of jobs right now.” A pause. “But maybe there are others from the Trump campaign we could bring inside Facebook?”

Careless People, p-573

Moral Cretinism and the Banality of Evil

I could go on and talk about Facebook’s attempts to cosy-up to the Chinese government to gain access to their huge market in exchange for handing over data not only about Chinese citizens, but the people of Hong Kong and Taiwan, and even the rest of the entire world. But any one of the above issues I have discussed is more than enough to suggest the moral bankruptcy of Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and all the other people running Facebook. And that sets the table for what I really want to talk about in this article.

In 1963 a book was published titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It was written by the philosopher Hannah Arendt and was based on the documentation she studied from the trial of Adolf Eichmann—who was a key bureaucrat of the Holocaust.

What Arendt took away from her research was Eichmann wasn’t someone who consciously decided to ‘make good his evil, and evil his good’. Instead, he was a not terribly intelligent bureaucrat who did what he was told and was more concerned about building a career than anything else. Indeed, if memory serves, she came across some detail of his life where he met with the chief rabbi of a major city who was begging to save some of his people and who had to listen to Eichmann complain about how his career was stalled and he’d never get promoted above his current rank in the SS.

I don’t want to get too involved in any discussion about Arendt’s book, but just wanted to mention where the phrase ‘banality of evil’ comes from.

Recently another book was published titled Making a Career in a Dictatorship by Christian Gläßel and Adam Scharpf. I haven’t read it, but I did read their discussion of it on Substack.

They did careful research into the personnel who worked in the secret police during Argentina’s ‘dirty war’ of 1974 to 1983 and came to the conclusion that the people who did the raping, torture, and murder mostly weren’t ‘true believers’ or ‘sadists’. Instead, they were just officers who’s careers had stalled and were facing early retirement because they just didn’t ‘cut the mustard’ for further promotion.

When we combed through the personnel archives of Argentina’s Intelligence Battalion 601 — the secret police unit that orchestrated the disappearance, torture, and killing of thousands during the country’s so-called Dirty War — we were not looking for monsters. We were looking for patterns. And the pattern we found was strikingly mundane: the officers who joined Battalion 601 had, in the main, performed worse than their peers at the military academy. They had graduated toward the bottom of their cohorts. They had stalled in the lower and middle ranks. They were men whose regular career paths had quietly closed.

These were not the most extreme officers in Argentina’s army. They were the most stuck.

In management theory, this is the Peter Principle at work: people rise to their level of incompetence and then stop rising. In most organizations, those people simply plateau. Military “up or out” systems, including in the US, eventually push out those who fail to advance.

But in Argentina in the 1970s, the military dictatorship offered another option: a parallel unit that needed staffing, valued loyalty over competence, and offered career-pressured officers a second chance. The dirty work of state terror — kidnapping, torture, disappearing people — was psychologically repugnant enough that high-performing officers with smooth career trajectories had every reason to avoid it. But for the men at the bottom of the cohort, it was a ladder.

A ladder that paid off in terms of higher positions at the end of the career, more salary, and better pensions. The worse an officer’s academic record, the more likely he was to join the secret police. Once inside, the worst performers were assigned to the most brutal departments, where the work was most repugnant and the career reward for doing it most valuable.

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The Banality of Being a Tech-Lord

I’m not saying that Mark Zuckerberg or Sheryl Sandberg map completely onto the profiles of either SS officers or members of the Argentinian secret police. But I do think the insight that Arendt, Gläßel, and Scharpf have had about who does the ‘dirty-work’ of brutal regimes bears consideration.

Throughout the book, Zuckerberg sounds like someone who has spent so much of his life writing computer code that he effectively knows just about nothing about anything else. Consider the following memo he sent to Wynn-Williams while she was off on maternity leave.

I’d like to learn more about this area—how the UN and the different international governance institutions came into existence, what power and levers do they have to get things done, what are their limitations and whether these are intentional or these organizations are being marginalized, why they’re set up as a federation of nations as opposed to a democratically elected international body, etc?

One specific topic I’m interested in is why no one is arguing for a significantly stronger international government or system. That is, today’s system seems relatively weak—it has a small budget, it is beholden to nations as opposed to being elected or controlled directly by people globally, etc. Today it seems there two primary proposals for how large countries want to interact with the international system: continue as is, or increasing isolationism. I’m curious why there isn’t a serious third option of strengthening this system further, and what would be potentially required to make that happen. I'm looking for any recommendations on how to learn about this: book recommendations, people to talk to or invite over for dinner, or other resources to check out.

Careless People, pp 554-555

That’s right, one of the richest men in the world. One who’s company has had a huge effect on business, politics, etc, is wondering why no one is pushing the UN to have their delegates elected by popular vote.

It’s not just the fact that Zuckerberg has no formal education outside of computer science or that he probably has no life at all outside of Facebook. It’s also that he is so rich that he is totally separated from the friction, cares, and concerns that stretch ordinary people to see the world in new ways. Whenever something goes wrong—for example when he forgot to bring a passport on a trip to Peru—he is genuinely surprised that this actually affects him. Moreover, he gets angry when something he wants doesn’t get done—simply because he expects his ‘staff’ to do whatever he wishes.

that’s what it’s like to live in a bubble, like Mark does. But a bubble implies flimsy transparency, a diaphanous space where you can see a normal life just beyond your grasp. And what Mark inhabits is more like a thick opaque dome, a murky fortress that separates him from the rest of the world. When you have so many other people doing things for you professionally and personally, you stop taking responsibility for any of it. Max Weber said that dealing with unintended consequences of your actions is what political responsibility is. This guy can’t even take responsibility for leaving his passport at home, let alone influencing the US election.

Careless People, p. 559

Reading this I immediately thought of Orson Well’s lines from the movie The Third Man.

As a general rule I dislike to use the word ‘evil’. That’s because I see it as an empty word that doesn’t mean much of anything at all. It implies some agency and choice—whereas all I see around me seems to be the result of delusion and systems that reward certain types of behaviour and punish others. For whatever reason, the people running Facebook labour under the delusion that they need more and more money, and they are serving some sort of nebulous public service simply by ‘connecting people’ all over the world. What happens to the ‘little dots’ is something they don’t notice from within the opaque dome created by their extreme wealth. And if they didn’t do what they do, some other tech lord would fill the gap.

And that’s going to continue to happen until governments step up to the plate and regulate social media the same way they regulate any other dangerous technology. At least that seems to be happening from the clip that began this article. (Even in Canada which has a Digital Safety Act now before Parliament.) But if we stick with this old, misleading term, I’d suggest that Zuckerberg and co are evil. Moreover, I’d suggest they are just as evil as any other character from history who pursued his personal goals at the expense of people they’ve never even met.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

The military understands this. That’s why it creates things like obstacle courses in their ‘boot camp’ training. Beyond the obvious physical exercise tests, the main value is to get recruits over the fear they impose on themselves about what they can and cannot do. In addition, they learn to trust both their officers will not to ask anything of them that they simply cannot do, and, their fellow soldiers will not let them down if they do get into trouble.

This isn’t just a military thing, as there are special schools that follow a similar process to educate children. For example, I once knew someone who taught on a wooden ‘tall ship’ where high-schoolers were pushed beyond their self-imposed limits by the rigours of life at sea.

The stories we tell about ourselves include more than just fears. They also define us as members of a community, a tradition, a way of looking at the world, etc. It’s so common that it seems to almost be part of what it means to be a human being. But this can be a dangerous. It fuels tribalism, and that can create prejudice, discrimination, and even war.

The problem isn’t just tribalism, though. People who build their self-identity around the stories they tell themselves begin to see any attempt to undermine those beliefs as an attack on them personally. I noticed this during COVID when a dear friend fell victim to the ‘dark side’. At first she started sending me links to various articles on-line and asked what I thought. They were about Muslims taking over Europe, trans people redefining what it means to be a woman, why masks and vaccines were worse than useless, etc. At first I put a lot of effort into pointing-out that the sources she was using were fake news, Russian propaganda, or just the ranting of a few very extreme people who were being given a platform by media that hoped to boost their ratings through outraging viewers.

Approaching her this way turned-out to be a bad move on my part. After a while, I suggested that I simply didn’t have enough time to repeatedly deconstruct story after story she threw at me. I asked why she insisted on constantly fixating on stuff that I had shown was errant nonsense. After that, she just faded out of my life. Whenever I tried to connect with her, her response was generally on the lines of ‘what do you want from me?’

In retrospect I should have understood that she thought of herself as a well-informed, elegant, woman of the world (which in some ways she was). But my attempts at debunking her news sources were perceived as an attack. I went from being a friend to someone who was trying to belittle her for being an old, poor, not-very-with-it woman (which again, in some ways she was). She stopped connecting with me. And when she died a couple years later, I felt great sadness that during the last years of her life I hadn’t been able to be her friend.

Was she mentally ill? I don’t know. She didn’t seem particularly so. And this story has been told over and over again so many times during these MAGA times that it seems she was a victim of a social movement more than a clinical illness. At least partially, I blame social media and opportunistic politicians. They’ve created extremely effective propaganda tools that have been able to convince a great many isolated, poorly-educated people that their identity is directly connected to a range of bizarre beliefs. And just like my friend, they feel threatened every time someone suggests such controversial ideas as vaccines are safe and effective, Europe isn’t a hell-hole filled with gangs of immigrant rapists, trans people are just a tiny fraction of the population who are suffering from a real issue, and/or climate change is real and a threat to everyone.

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The Ego Myth

Again, a chunk of the problem comes from the social media companies that refuse to take any responsibility for promoting extremists in order to sell data and advertising. But there’s an underlying issue that bears some thought. Western society believes that human beings have something called an ‘ego’. That’s the story my friend was telling to herself—and it was what I was attacking when I pointed-out what she believed was fake news hatched by some malefactor in Russia and promoted so Mark Zuckerberg could make yet another billion dollars off FaceBook.

This idea of the individual, atomic ego is something people take for granted in the West. But there are cultures in the world that don’t believe the ego is basic to being a human being. Instead, they suggest it is a social construct—just like how my friend had new ideas grafted onto her sense of self by social media during the COVID lockdown. Daoists and Buddhists don’t believe that the ego is an intrinsic part of what it means to be a human being. In Buddhism, this is called the doctrine of Anattā.

Oddly enough, the 18th century Scottish philosopher, David Hume, came to exactly the same point of view through the same process of self-reflection—although I doubt if he’d ever heard of the Anattā. Here’s part of an on-line cartoon that illustrates the point.

What would it be like to actually believe that there’s no such thing as ‘the ego’ or ‘self’? One thing that comes to my mind is people would be a lot less wrapped-up in self-definitions—especially ones that are based on external notions like whether or not Muslim immigrants are taking over Europe or that vaccines cause autism. If people didn’t define themselves according to a set of controversial ideas, I suspect that a lot more of our opinions would be governed by evidence and logic. After all, if you have no personal ‘skin in the game’, there’s no real reason to dig your heels in—one way or the other. At that point, ‘identity politics’ ceases to be something you can rally your base around.

Of course, there’s no way our entire culture is going to all become Zen Buddhists, Daoists, or any of the other flavours of people who have discovered this interesting facet of human existence. So don’t think of this post as being a stirring call to arms. But I do think anyone who despairs for the human race while contemplating the news might benefit from considering the idea that the problem is cultural, not genetic. Some of us might be conditioned to become MAGA—but it’s not part of what it means to be a human being.

And that means to me that if governments around the world start reigning-in social media and biased news sources, we might eventually be able to put authoritarian populism back into Pandora’s box. And that, at least, gives me a little hope for the future.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

There are at several problems facing Canada right now where failure isn’t an option. The two most obvious are the Climate Emergency and the trade/sovereignty war with the USA. But there are lots of others—the Housing Crisis, Alberta separatism, and so on. But after the article I published suggested Canada is in much better shape than the USA, I thought it might be useful to discuss something a bit less tangible. Hence this one about ‘muddling through’ a crisis.

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Muddling Through the Climate Emergency

A lot of people have attacked the prime minister because he seems to have back-peddled on his concern about climate change. Mainly, they point to his decision to end the personal carbon tax. To understand why this is an example of muddling, let’s take a look at the whole picture.

First, the personal carbon tax’s reputation had been irrevocably destroyed by a disinformation campaign. If Carney hadn’t scrapped it, he would have certainly lost the election to Pierre Poilievre—a climate change denier who would have destroyed any attempt by Canada to transition to a post-carbon economy. That’s just a fact. And anyone who says Carney scrapped the personal carbon tax because he never really believed in the Climate Emergency doesn’t understand this point.

Second, Carney has been renegotiating the Industrial Carbon tax. According to a Globe and Mail article by Adam Radwanski titled Canada’s industrial carbon pricing system is a mess. Here’s how Carney can fix it, the old system created by the Trudeau government had been pretty-much rendered worthless because it was a patchwork of provincially-administered systems that had been sabotaged by some provincial governments.

Alberta has twice this year taken major steps to weaken its approach, to the point that it may no longer provide companies with much impetus or incentive to make clean-technology investments. And Saskatchewan has suspended industrial pricing altogether, with no known consequence – raising the question of whether other provinces with systems that are weak or unstable, including Ontario, need to worry about the federal requirements at all.

While environmentalists have been complaining about Carney turning his back on his long history of supporting attempts to limit climate change, right-wing commentators have been screaming about how the new Industrial Carbon Tax will destroy the oil industry. Here’s a sample by Ross McKitrick titled Carney’s Industrial Carbon Tax imposes real costs on Canadians in the Financial Post:

Alberta already has its own pricing system, called the “Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction” or “TIER” fund. Like the federal ICT, it levies a charge on emitters based on the difference between their emissions and a threshold determined using benchmarks for low emission-intensity performance. Unlike in the federal system, firms can choose between paying the TIER charge or buying credits generated in a separate market by firms engaged in abatement-related projects. Because of a market surplus in recent years, the credit price has been far below the federal carbon charge. Were this to continue, Alberta firms could merrily ignore the rising ICT. But the understanding with Ottawa contains language signalling that Alberta will have to bring its TIER prices into line with the ICT.

Although the language is vague and the compliance timeline is not specified, it’s reasonable to suppose Alberta will have to give up the right to have a separate lower carbon price in exchange for … well, whatever they get in return. So our working assumption is that by 2030 Alberta’s TIER price will equal the federal ICT rate, namely $170 per tonne.

There’s another thing to consider. Carney’s plan involves tax write-offs for carbon capture. Sometimes this involves pumping CO2 deep underground where it stays isolated from the carbon cycle above ground. More generally, however, it gets pushed down and then it, in turn, pushes more oil out of the ground. A lot of environmentalists have argued that saying that carbon is being ‘captured’ is sorta like robbing Peter to pay Paul if it just results in more fossil fuel entering the global economy. But there’s a subtlety in the new system that rarely gets mentioned. Here’s a quote from an article titled Carney will give tax breaks to oil companies that capture carbon … to pump more carbon by Drew Anderson in the Narwhal:

There is one important distinction: the tax credits for enhanced oil recovery aren’t as lucrative as those for storage alone: the amount of money an oil project can recoup is half of what a company that simply stores carbon permanently underground can receive.

For that reason, the federal government estimates credits for enhanced oil recovery might actually save some taxpayer dollars — $395 million over four years, starting in 2027, according to a federal Department of Finance official responding to questions from The Narwhal.

The official said the savings would come from companies deciding to store carbon for enhanced oil recovery rather than dedicated storage, and receive less public money for doing so.

And, of course, there’s the argument that Carney is selling-out the environment by simply wanting to export more oil and gas. What this misses is the fact that global demand for oil has changed dramatically since Russian invaded Ukraine, and, the USA declared war on Iran. I say ‘changed’ instead of ‘increased’ advisedly.

Ukraine is effectively driving Russia out of the fossil fuel business. Europe increasingly refuses to buy oil and gas from Russia. Her tanker fleet is being sunk. Her refining capacity is being wiped-out by drone attacks. And Iran has shut down both the Persian Gulf and Red Sea. What this means for the future is oil will no longer be totally price-driven. Instead, many nations are going to be willing to pay a premium for dependability, ethical sourcing, and—eventually—lower carbon intensity. And Carney is priming Canada to be the world leader in exactly those terms.

The whole point of the consumer carbon tax wasn’t to raise money, it was to ‘nudge’ people so they changed the way they traveled, heated their homes, spent their vacations, etc. And right now the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are doing a very good job of telling both nations and individuals that it’s not a good idea to be so dependent on fossil fuels. So why make a fuss about removing the consumer carbon tax?

Also, the point of the industrial carbon tax with regard to oil wasn’t ultimately about reducing the amount of oil Canada pumps out of the ground. Instead, it’s about reducing the amount of oil being produced around the whole world. And if Canada can replace part of the oil coming out of Russia and the Middle-East, then no harm, no foul. Just remember, anyone with two synapses to rub together and the financial ability is already moving towards electrification anyway.

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Muddling Through the Trade War

As I write the post, it looks like there’s been a break-through in the latest round of negotiations between Canada and the US. This might result in egg on my face, but I think not.

A lot of people have been saying that it doesn’t make much sense to negotiate with Trump and co. because you can’t trust him to honour whatever he signs. I get that. But in response, I’d argue it makes sense to go through the motions if for no other reason that it wastes time that Trump doesn’t have. Unless the US is literally going to become a totally undemocratic police state over the next few years—and Trump finds a cure for mortality—there is going to be a big change in the White House in a few years, if not shortly after the November mid-terms.

This means that anyone dealing with Trump doesn’t need to create some sort of long-term relationship with him. Instead, he just needs to play for time and wait for his replacement by a less deranged administration. In the long run, though, it is important that Canada never again find itself being so dependent on the US. And Carney is certainly doing as much as anyone could expect on that front, as I documented in my last post.

Muddling Through is Jazz, Pursuing a Formal Treaty is a Symphony

In the above I hope I’ve illustrated a bit what it looks like for a government to ‘muddle through’. It’s like playing improvisational jazz instead of reading a score as part of symphony orchestra. Written music follows a set formula that allows everyone to work together. Various international trade deals, like CUSMA or the one with Europe, are designed to work predictably over the long term. But any agreement we sign with Trump isn’t going to be either predictable or long term.

That means the Carney government can’t just sign a deal and move on to the next thing. Instead, he’s going to have to continue to improvise and play things by ear. He’s still going to have to tweak inter-provincial trade, massage an oil pipeline, do some horse-trading to get the provinces to lift their ban on American booze, etc—while at the same time keeping his eye on the clock to remember how much time there still is until Trump gets either muzzled or replaced.

I suspect part of the reason why the term ‘muddling through’ has died out recently is because we have become a society that is much more dominated by ideologies and political polarization than we were back in my youth. Nowadays a lot of very loud people don’t like to judge individual issues according to their own merits. Instead, they follow some set of pat answers and rote viewpoints—like neoliberalism, or Marxism, or libertarianism, or fundamentalism, or white nationalism, or whatever. I don’t think Carney’s cut from that cloth. I believe he has a long term plan (the Jazz chord progression and basic melody), but he observes what everyone else is doing and adapts how he plays to the opportunities that present themselves. The result is he is able to stall for time, limit the immediate damage from our present conflict, and make the long term changes needed to protect Canada in the future.

It might look like he’s without a real commitment to things like fighting climate change. But I’d say he’s just trying to get things actually done rather than trying to reinforce his credentials as a ‘true believer’. Is it surprising that someone who’s built their career as an insider and top bureaucrat would run a government this way?

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

This is especially true as America is quickly approaching mid-term elections and polling suggests Trump and company are going to lose large to the Democrats. This might be the last hurrah of the tariff war. If the Dems get a majority in Congress the days of giving the executive branch of government carte blanche will be over. Of course it’s important to not count your chickens before they hatch, but the worst of the Trump years may be over come November.

With this on my mind, I came across a story from Bloomberg news that I think needs to be shouted from the rooftops. The Canadian economy is doing really well—and a lot of it has come about due to the work of Mark Carney.

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First, let’s look at foreign investment in Canada.

What these numbers show is foreign investors have decided that Canada is a good place to park their money in uncertain times. And this money can be spent building factories, mines, infrastructure, etc, that will employ Canadian workers and generate tax revenue to support government programs. This investment has resulted in very different GDP numbers between the US and Canada:

The bullishness is being rewarded, with signs that Canada’s economy is starting to accelerate. A preliminary estimate released Friday suggested real gross domestic product expanded at an annualized rate of 3.4% between April and June, according to Statistics Canada’s industry-based output data. The report came a day after the US Bureau of Economic Analysis said GDP growth in America slowed to 1.5% for the same period, falling below the 2% median estimate of more than 40 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.

Follow the Money All the Way to Mark Carney’s Canada, Bloomberg, Aug 4th, 2026

At the same time, Canada has a significantly lower inflation rate than either the US or Europe. (Please remember, this is the rate of inflation—that’s the rate at which prices increase. It’s not about prices actually going down. That’s something else entirely.)

At the same time, investors are throwing far more money at Canadian businesses than those in the world’s other major economies.

That’s right, our stock market’s value has increased by 41% since Carney became the prime minister, whereas at the same time both the US and China have only grown by 36%. Again, as a company’s stock value increases, so does it’s ability to borrow money to invest in new machinery—which raises productivity. And increased productivity could be the basis of wage increases.

Of course, that’s if the new money isn’t siphoned-off by the oligarch class—which is traditionally slightly less of a problem in Canada than the US because of our tax policies. This is measured by something called the Gini coefficient. Here’s a graph that shows the relative differences in inequality between Canada and the USA, plus some other nations. They show that the USA has a special problem with wealthy elites siphoning off the productivity improvements caused wealth created by increased productivity. This is another way the Canadian economy out-performs the American.

Beneath these numbers, there’s something else people need to understand. According to a July 22 article in the New York Times, that 36% increase in the US stock market was caused pretty much only by the AI bubble.

“The thing that has been holding everything up is the A.I. story,” said Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management.

A.I. related stocks account for roughly half of the rise in the S&P 500 this year, said Adam Turnquist, the chief technical strategist for LPL Financial, adding that growth in the economy is also increasingly dependent on A.I. infrastructure spending.

“It’s becoming one big A.I. trade,” he said.

If you follow AI like I have, I find that extremely dangerous. I simply cannot understand how the enormous amounts of money being poured into it will ever be paid back. And if investors wake up some morning and realize they’ve thrown away hundreds of billions of dollars, that will have nasty consequences for everyone.

I couldn’t figure out what’s happening with the Chinese stock market because I couldn’t find a sectoral break-down of it. And I haven’t a clue about which companies do what in China. But because China doesn’t sell cutting-edge computer chips and it has also decided to focus on lower-cost AI systems aimed at specific niche applications, I think it stands to reason it is less vulnerable to a collapsing AI bubble.

Canada isn’t a major player in AI, so it’s safe to say our stock market isn’t at much direct risk of a AI collapse. And when you see where the value is based, it makes Canada look like a much safer, more diversified market. Take look at this chart from Insider Monkey.

So it isn’t just a question of Canada having more investment than the US, it’s also about it being more balanced and less vulnerable to a collapse of the AI bubble.

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This doesn’t mean that Canada no longer needs to trade with the US. They still account for the majority of our exports. But a large share of what’s sold to the US are things they simply cannot do without—for example energy.

And aluminum:

And Potash (from the Library of Parliament Hill Notes.

Now let’s see an overview of Canada’s entire export market in 2024.

As you can see from the above charts, a huge percentage of things the US imports from Canada are simply not optional. American refineries, pipelines, and electrical corridors are built around Canadian oil, gas, and electricity. And there’s no way the USA can smelt enough aluminum to serve it’s own needs—it simply doesn’t have the cheap electricity. And there’s just no equivalent for Canadian potash either. There are also integrated manufacturing sectors where US industry is heavily dependent on Canadian parts. Added all together it appears that the US needs Canadian exports a whole lot more than Canada need American ones.

So the next time someone suggests that Canada needs to quickly get a ‘deal’ with Trump, I’d suggest that they calm down. Canada has a much better hand to play than most people realize.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Recently I’ve been spending some time thinking about ideology. The above definition presents the term in the best of all lights. But I think this is stuff and nonsense. Instead, I’ll offer an alternative one:

Some Ideologies Totally Ignore Historical Evidence

I recently found this meme in my social media feed. It’s just a silly piece of clickbait. But looking at it illustrates some important points. In particular, it is based on the ideology of hard-line communists. These are the people who believe public ownership of the means of production is the only answer to all problems from global warming to the common cold.

The thing to remember about the above is it is totally devoid of any understanding of the history of human attempts to create a utopian society. That line, for example, that says in a communist society—

We built enough homes for everybody including every unhoused person, there’s no more homelessness. Plus we saved a ton of work by not building an extra 15 million houses to let sit empty and rot.

Humanity has gone through generations of attempts at Utopian political reform. These range from the American and French revolutions, to the Russian and Chinese ones, plus many other smaller attempts—such as Yugoslavia and Cuba. I will admit that some did make improvements and that most of them had to deal with outside pressures that no doubt stunted their development. But in none of these cases did the citizens get anything even remotely near a perfect (or even above-average) society. Instead of creating a worker’s paradise, they generally made just as many—if not more—mistakes as the system they replaced.

How come?

If you make the effort to read through the history of these experiments, you always find problems based on various flaws in humanity. As many people besides me have already argued, the American revolution foundered on the original sins of the United States: racism and slavery. In France, Russia, and China political in-fighting between members of the revolutionary leadership led to show trials, purges, and mass executions. None of them seemed to be able to avoid the sort of corruption, cronyism, and sheer incompetence that would have driven the revolutionaries crazy if they had happened in any other type of society. In far too many cases, the revolutionary governments eventually descended into nothing more than dictatorships, kleptocracies, and brutal police states.

Of course, there will obviously be ‘come backs’ by the people who pass around these sorts of memes. Most of these are variations on the ‘they weren’t true communists’ or ‘they never had a chance because of the filthy imperialists’. These miss the point that in the world we inhabit nowhere are there huge majorities of people who are ‘true communists’. Instead, we just have humanity—with all it’s flaws and imperfections. And if the only way you can have a just society is if no outside power ever tries to meddle in your affairs, then again your political theory posits the existence of a world that has never existed and probably never will.

I’m not saying that humanity is hopeless, just that the idea that the fundamental problem facing humanity is who owns the means of production is false. The issue is important—it just isn’t the only problem, or even the most important one. Not taking other issues seriously doomed all these utopian experiments to spectacular failure.

And that’s where the ideology of this dumb cartoon falls apart. It’s taken an extremely useful tool—Marxist analysis of the relationship between how work is organized and how society operates—and insisted that is the only possible way of understanding the world. It’s as if someone really liked their 15mm crescent wrench and then insisted that it be used to hammer nails or as a plumb bob too.

Just to reinforce what I’m saying, look at the text next to the stereotype capitalist in a top hat.

I own their company, I keep those extra homes empty to create scarcity and drive up costs so I make more profit. The unhoused deserve to die.

There are layers of problems with this statement. In Canada, in most cases it isn’t rich capitalists who own housing—it’s working people who are trying to build some investment income for their retirement. And scarcity exists mostly because city councils make it extremely difficult to build new housing—which means that more rundown housing gets ‘gentrified’, which pushes low income people off the bottom rungs of the ‘housing ladder’. Moreover, I’d like to see some concrete evidence that there actually are huge amounts of housing that’s not on the market to encourage price gouging—simply because I’ve never seen any credible evidence that this is actually happening.

Indeed, there’s good evidence that it isn’t. Here’s a graph from Stats Canada that illustrates what I mean. As you can see, it suggests that the majority of rental housing in Canada is owned by individuals and small businesses—that’s every colour except light blue. As you can see, the majority of rental accommodation isn’t owned by top-hatted refugees from a monopoly board. Instead, it’s people like school teachers and unionized workers trying to make a few investments on the side to help them survive retirement.

People who only own one or two retirement properties, or a small apartment building are not going to be keeping their properties empty in order to jack the rents on buildings other people own. But I suppose putting an image of a grey-haired, retired, school teacher in a meme just doesn’t have the ‘zing’ of a cartoon capitalist in a top hat—.

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I picked on doctrinaire communism in the above. But I could have done exactly the same thing with a libertarian, neo-liberal, alt-right—whatever. The problem isn’t a particular type of ideology—it’s the whole idea of ideologies. I just don’t think that any of them do anywhere near an adequate job of explaining human society and how we could improve it.

Democracy Versus Ultramontanism

Years ago I had something like a mini-realization while reading the book Hitler’s Pope. It was something of a bombshell when it first came out in 1999. The author, John Cornwell, had access to the Vatican archives and what he found out about Pope Pius the XII (Eugenio Pacelli) was deeply disturbing. Here’s a quote from the book in the Wikipedia article that suggests my memory of the text seems to be at least somewhat accurate:

Near the end of my research I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli's life, amounted not to an exoneration but to a wider indictment. Spanning Pacelli's career from the beginning of the century, my research told the story of a bid for unprecedented papal power that by 1933 had drawn the Catholic Church into complicity with the darkest forces of the era. I found evidence, moreover, that from an early stage in his career Pacelli betrayed an undeniable antipathy toward the Jews, and that his diplomacy in Germany in the 1930s had resulted in the betrayal of Catholic political associations that might have challenged Hitler's regime and thwarted the Final Solution. Eugenio Pacelli was no monster; his case is far more complex, more tragic, than that. The interest of his story depends on a fatal combination of high spiritual aspirations in conflict with soaring ambition for power and control. His is not a portrait of evil but of fatal moral dislocation – a separation of authority from Christian love. The consequences of that rupture were collusion with tyranny and, ultimately, violence.^[23]

I especially remember Cornwall’s discussion of the German Christian Democratic Union (CDU). This was and is a center-right political party that is currently the largest party in Germany. (A coalition of it plus the Social Democratic Party (SDU) now forms the government.) The CDU was a major force in 1930s Germany and it was ready and willing to create real opposition to the NAZI party. But Pacelli (Pope Pius) sold them out by promising Hitler that if he made certain concessions to protect the church, the Pope would agree to the church forbidding all priests and other church officials from having anything to do with politics.

It occurred to me when I was reading this that I had never actually understood what a tremendous thing democracy really is. And, as I think about the book now, I think I understand why Pacelli was willing to sign a deal with the Devil instead of encouraging the CDU to resist.

Pacelli was a staunch supporter of the Ultramontanist idea that the Pope’s power is absolute over all aspects of the church. This is where the doctrine of Papal Infallibility comes from. And it is also a perfect example of the saying “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Lest readers think I’m misapplying the saying here, here’s the passage in the letter where it comes from. I sent by the historian Lord Acton to an Anglican Bishop. And it specifically mentions the Papacy as one of the powers that gets corrupted by absolute power.

But if we might discuss this point until we found that we nearly agreed, and if we do argue thoroughly about the impropriety of Carlylese denunciations, and Pharisaism in history, I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. [Emphasis added WDH] Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position, like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greater names coupled with the greater crimes. You would spare these criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them, higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice; still more, still higher, for the sake of historical science.

Ultramontanism came about as reaction against the democratic idea that ordinary people should have a say how not only a local government, but also the church is run. This isn’t just about how decisions are made, but just as importantly who government policy is supposed to serve.

Four years ago I wrote a review of a 1907 science fiction novel titled The Master of the World that came highly recommended by two recent popes: Benedict and Francis. It was written at the height of Ultramontanism and I believe reflects its values. In it the future peoples of Europe and North America live in social-democratic societies where people have full democratic rights plus a functional type of socialism that has removed all poverty, most crime, and where science has solved a great many other problems. In fact, it didn’t seem like a dystopia to me, but rather a utopia. Yet the author, a Catholic priest by the name of Robert Hugh Benson seems to have believed it a Hell on earth. Why? As near as I can tell, because most people no longer believe in God—and have no respect for the Roman Catholic church and it’s clerical hierarchy.

That’s the viewpoint of Ultramontanism. And for an Ultramontanist like Pacelli, doing a deal with a dictator to protect the church hierarchy would probably always seem better than encouraging a political party devoted to democracy to fight for people’s rights. It’s simply a case of working with another autocracy instead of encouraging a radical alternative that might eventually threaten the authority of the church. Could it be Pacelli believed Catholicism was more threatened by democracy than the genocidal regime of the NAZIs?

Of course, it is possible that Pacelli simply believed that the SDU was being hopelessly naive and there was nothing it could do in the situation except capitulate. But I would point out that as a Catholic cardinal he had become very successful in an institution where people did not get ahead by making waves—and where obedience to authority was a strong signal of one’s holiness. I’d suspect the vast majority of people in his position would never support Catholic opposition to secular authority—unless perhaps it was a threat to the church hierarchy.

Is Democracy Just Another Ideology?

As I said, reading Hitler’s Pope got me thinking about democracy in a new way. When I contrasted it with the ideologies of hard-core Marxism and Ultramontanism, readers would be right to wonder if it is just another “pat answer to a complex problem”. It certainly can be. But I don’t think it has to be.

A lot of people would define ‘democracy’ in terms of a specific system—generally whatever’s used in their country. That’s what I’d call a destination definition. But that’s a lazy way of thinking about the term. First, there’s a tremendous spectrum of democracies around the world Canada’s system is different from America’s, which is different from Germany’s, which is different from Ukraine’s—and so on. And each of those systems has flaws and/or strengths that add up to make one system more or less democratic than any particular other one. Indeed, for example, I’d say that America’s system is significantly less democratic than Canada’s.

If you wonder what I’m talking about, I’d say that the reason why I think the American system is less democratic than the Canadian one isn’t because it cannot be more democratic than it currently is. Instead, it’s because a whole set of political norms have been undermined in our lifetime. For example, the Supreme Court of the US has become far, far, far too partisan—to the point where the conservative majority has pretty much given up on following any precedents they don’t believe in. Another example is the way Trump consistently ignores the division of powers between Congress and the Presidency—and the Congress and Supreme Court let him get away with it. If not completely, at least until a long, drawn out court battle with lots of appeals finally tells him he cannot do something. At which point, he simply does something else—probably just as bogus as the first thing, but which he can still use until another long courtroom drama works its way towards a judgement. Rinse and repeat.

Another important point to realize is that democracy comes with a suite of important associated features that allow it to work. For example, even if people vote during elections is it accurate to call a nation a democracy if there is no freedom of speech, assembly, press, etc? How important are campaign financing laws to a real democracy? How about proportionality? Does everyone get a vote? Or are some sexes, races, orientations, etc, excluded? What if there is a quote ‘free press’—but it’s all owned by a very small number of very conservative businesses that have zero qualms about pushing their own partisan agenda? What is the impact of Gerrymandering or voter suppression?

If democracy isn’t an ideology, then what is it? I’d suggest that it’s more a tendency or a moral value. It’s a lens that people either do or do not see the world through. And important people always have an opportunity to either support or undermine it, in any system they choose to use. The process where local people are consulted about a proposed project can be a real sharing of minds—or it can be just a box that gets checked-off in the final report. The chair of a meeting can assign order to issues according to some objective criteria—or he can shove everything he doesn’t like to the end and then waste time until the meeting ends. After decades of being involved in politics, one of the few things I can say with any authority is there are always ways to subvert any democratic process if someone has the will and the power to do so. The world’s experience with Donald Trump should have spread this insight much farther and wider than it was when I figured this out.

I have a tip jar too.

The Absolute Bottom Line of Democracy

Ultimately, the most important part of democracy is it allows for the transition of power without violence. That’s the acid test. If whoever loses the election packs it in and hands over the government to the people who won—the most important part of democracy still works. Once that part is gone, then any justification for the status quo has left the building. And that’s when the hard men with guns enter stage right—.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

A long time ago I had a conversation with a Zen priest. It was when I was still much more engaged in “cloudwalking” (ie: finding out spiritual people from various traditions to see what I can learn from them) than I am today. Someone mentioned him to me, and it turned out that he worked as a sculpture technician in the fine-arts building right next to library where I work. So there was no excuse not to seek him out.

He was a gruff old man who was very close to retirement. He’d gone to Korea as a soldier during the war and ended up staying-on in one of the Temples. I mentioned that I was interested in Zen and he did his best to discourage me. Transcendental meditation was, he opined, a much easier way to find some wisdom in life. He said that there was a temple in Toronto, but I had to be “hard core” or they’d simply throw me out the front door. This is a fairly standard trope from Zen---it’s not supposed to be an easy way to gain realization.

Teachers have tended to create easier forms of gaining wisdom “for the masses”. These include things like reciting mantras

and performing devotional rituals.

These are very standard moves across all religions. Christianity emphasizes devotional practices, but it also has most of the others too. For example, there is a tradition of chanting in Eastern Orthodoxy that is focused on repeating the mantra “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a poor sinner”. (I’ve read comments from the Eastern Church that says this is nothing like Eastern chanting—but that’s nonsense.)

Mention “yoga” to most people, and they will probably think of something like the above picture. This is what is known as hatha yoga, which has recently become something of a fad. (I will speak of it no more.) But the actual word “yoga” means something like the word “kung fu”, a diligent practice that is used to gain insight and knowledge. It has a slightly different emphasis, though. “Yoga” comes from the same root word as “yoke”, so the emphasis is on committing yourself to a certain practice or path. (Sanskrit and European languages come from the same source, so there are similarities like this for certain words.) “Kung fu”, in contrast, emphasizes the individual’s hard work leading to personal excellence or realization.

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Indian spiritual teachers have codified the different spiritual “tactics”, or “yogas”, or “kung fus” one can follow in pursuit of spiritual insight and named them accordingly. Chanting correlates with Japa Yoga, devotional practices correlate with Bhakti Yoga, the route of good works (think Gandhi) is called Karma Yoga, ritual is covered by Tantra Yoga. I’d suggest that philosophy and Zen are most like Jnana Yoga, or, “the path of knowledge”.

The path of knowledge exists in opposition to the path of devotion or ritual. It’s about actually knowing the truth instead of loving or having faith in God (or something similar). This is an important point, and one I rarely see spelled-out in any detail.

Personally, I’ve always been consumed by wanting to know things. This isn’t just a question of curiosity. More importantly---for me at least---it’s a strong commitment to the idea that we shouldn’t make decisions without finding out the truth that underlies the situation. This has made me the “odd man out” for most of my life because I tend to get absolutely furious with people who are quite happy to “fudge the facts” or even lie in order to get their way. This recently came home to me in an argument I had with some folks about a Canadian academic who has been spreading a bald-faced lie about an abstruse part of Canadian governance in order to whip right-wing Americans into a frenzy. The result has been that this guy seems to have made a fortune on social media and public speaking engagements convincing people that Canada is on the verge of being taken-over by radical trans-rights people.

My argument is that this sort of behaviour should be grounds for dismissing this guy from his tenured university position and revoking his Phd---along the lines of taking away a doctor’s license for malpractice. The response by most people has been to suggest that I have a screw loose and I simply don’t understand the importance of freedom of speech and tenure. What I’d argue is that yes, I do understand the importance of free speech, but these folks don’t understand how much damage fake news can have on the lives of innocent people. A small percentage of people actually believe this stuff when they hear it and believe that they need to take action. The result can be terrorist attacks, like the recent one in Quebec City that killed six and wounded nineteen others.

I raised the above example not because I want to rehash the issues of “fake news” and the tremendous resurgence of Fascist demagoguery. Instead, I want to point out a strange way in which my mental processes are different from almost everyone else. That is, I do not blame the person who picks up a gun and shoots others nearly as much as I blame the person who bombarded the shooter with propaganda about the perfidy of the victims in order to raise money or promote a political agenda. At least the shooter has the courage of his convictions. But the propagandist may not---and I suspect often doesn’t---really believe what he is saying, but just out to take advantage of the gullible.

In effect, I am making the same point that the Gospels make in Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.”

Later on, Christ also makes a very strong statement in a similar vein. When asked “Who is the greatest in Heaven’s domain?”, he replies that saying that it is the people who are like little children. But then he goes on to say that

“Those who entrap one of these little trusting souls would be better off to have millstones hung around their necks and be drowned in the deepest part of the sea!” (Matthew 18:1-6, Scholar’s Version of the Gospels)

If this wasn’t strong enough, Jesus goes on to curse the people who try to fool the gullible.

“Dam the world for the traps it sets! Even though it’s inevitable for traps to be set, nevertheless, damn the person who sets such traps.” (Matthew 18:7)

Looking at these quotes from the Gospels has got me thinking. I’ve never wanted to put a millstone around the neck of one of these Alt-right propaganda types---but I have contemplated tying cement blocks to their necks before tossing them through holes cut in the ice covering Lake Ontario. (I was actually startled to realize that Jesus’s level of rage is comparable to my own. Wow!)

The point I’m trying to make is that the sort of deep, crazy anger that I (and presumably Jesus, too---I can’t get over that) have against the “Grima Wormtongues” of politics and social media is actually quite rare. In fact, I’ve found that most people not only can’t understand why I get so upset about this stuff, they are sometimes genuinely concerned about me and the “crazy ideas” that I hold. I suspect that part of the reason is that people simply cannot see the incredible damage this sort of thing can cause. It’s like a good chess player who can see how awful a play is because he looks several moves ahead. The bad player simply doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about. In the same way, for example, I get crazy angry about what is going to happen in the future because of climate change, antivaxx ers, MAGA, etc, whereas the folks who can’t see this just think I am flipping out about absolutely nothing.

So what has this got to do with Zen Buddhism and Jnana (path of knowledge) yoga?

Well, the path of knowledge really is too difficult for most people to follow. It involves a constant struggle to fight against your preconceived notions and to stare honestly into the face of reality and accept what you see---no matter what. In Zen the story of Bodhidharma staring at the wall of cave for years in order to deepen his understanding illustrates the tremendous effort that you have to put into tearing away all your illusions.

This sort of horrible, painful effort is commonly mentioned in many religious stories. Christ on his cross, Daoist stories about students being boiled alive by their masters, even Gandalf’s fight with the Balrog from Lord of the Rings, are all metaphors for the enormous struggle that has to be fought in the pursuit of knowledge. But where the path of knowledge parts from others is the people who follow it often do not encourage their followers to embark on the same journey---they suggest something easier. That’s what my neighbour the Zen priest was doing. He was trying to discourage interest in Zen and suggested something easier: transcendental meditation.

Even transcendental meditation is too hard for many people. That is why religions instead turn towards the paths of faith and devotion. ‘Faith’ is the idea that we simply have to hope that it all makes sense in one way or another. If life is a terrible horror for most people, faith suggests that there is a life after death and everyone gets their just rewards there. Or if that doesn’t work, faith says there is a great God in the sky who’s intelligence is far beyond ours and he sees a way in which everything makes sense. If faith doesn’t work for you, there’s always devotion. You school yourself to love god or the church or the rituals so much that everything else becomes of secondary importance. The point of faith and devotion is to stop even trying to make sense of things, because it just hurts too much to make the effort.

I can understand this. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to put their entire life into following the path of knowledge. I put in ten years studying academic philosophy. I’ve spent enormous amounts of time meditating, meeting with spiritual teachers, going on retreats, reading sacred and philosophical texts, studying martial arts, etc. Most folks would rather have a career, raise a family, travel, etc. For them the path of knowledge is simply not a “live option”.

A proud young man came to Socrates asking for wisdom. He walked up to him and said, “O great Socrates, I come to you for wisdom.” Socrates, recognizing a pompous fool when he saw one, led him down to the sea and took him chest deep into the water. Then he asked him, “What did you say you wanted?” “Wisdom, O great Socrates,” said the young man.
Socrates put his strong hands on the man’s shoulders and pushed him under. Thirty seconds later Socrates let him up. “What do you want?” he asked again. “Wisdom,” the young man sputtered, “O great and wise Socrates.” Socrates pushed him under again. Thirty seconds, thirty-five, forty – then Socrates let him up. The man was gasping. “What do you want, young man?”
Between heavy breaths the fellow wheezed, “Wisdom! O wise and wonderful…” Socrates jammed him under again – forty seconds passed then fifty – then he let him up. “What do you want?” “Air!” the young man yelled. “I need air!” “When you want wisdom as much as you have just wanted air, then you will begin to find wisdom.”

(Quoted from a blog that I don’t endorse, but this is a widely used apocryphal story and this version is just as good as any other for the purposes of this post.)

When I was “cloudwalking” with Roman Catholics this commitment to pursue knowledge instead of faith was an unbridgeable crevasse that separated me from them. They simply couldn’t understand my commitment to knowledge, and for a long time I couldn’t understand their insistence on faith.

I have a tip jar too!

Knowledge is a funny thing. My experience is that it always comes at the price of suffering. I have found that deep realization often comes from a period of something very like depression. What happens is that for days I feel deeply introverted and unhappy with life, but then a moment comes when the clouds part and I understand some deep mystery that has perplexed me for a long, long time. John of the Cross called this “the dark night of the soul”, Saint Ignatius called this process “desolation followed by consolation”. My wife simply calls it the alternation of Yin and Yang.

The question of happiness and the pursuit of wisdom is something that a lot of people have thought about. It is especially relevant to Utilitarians, or, the school of philosophy that says that moral issues can be settled by creating the greatest amount of good (ie: “utility”) for the greatest number of people. One of its founders, John Stuart Mill, raised the wisdom question in the following way:

“It is indisputable that the being whose capacities of enjoyment are low, has the greatest chance of having them fully satisfied; and a highly endowed being will always feel that any happiness which he can look for, as the world is constituted, is imperfect. But he can learn to bear its imperfections, if they are at all bearable; and they will not make him envy the being who is indeed unconscious of the imperfections, but only because he feels not at all the good which those imperfections qualify.
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question.” (Utilitarianism)

The important point here is “they only know their own side of the question“. That’s why realization is so mysterious. You either get it or you don’t.

It’s even worse than that. A few people are “fated” to seek knowledge, but most aren’t. When I was talking to that Zen priest all those years ago, I mentioned something about having had a wild, violent childhood that shattered any illusions I might have had about ordinary life. He instantly responded with “that’s just the price of admission” and mentioned his time in the Korean war. (No specifics, but I suspect that he saw some bad craziness. My understanding is that the Canadian contingent got more than it’s fair share.) This is where the issue of “fate” or “karma” kicks in. Some people are like Socrates and need wisdom the same way most people need air. Most folks aren’t like that. They are content to rely just on faith or devotion.

I understand why people lean upon faith. A lot of very bad things happen in life and if it doesn’t make any sense (and, to be honest, a lot really doesn’t---life is absurd). It can be a tremendously useful strategy to simply force yourself to assume that it all makes sense and go from there. And devotion is simply a variation in that theme. “Jesus loves me this I know, ‘cause the Bible tells me so---”. You can’t love God unless you have faith that he exists and gives a damn about you and your petty concerns.

But if you hear a particularly scary story about climate change, or you get bummed-out because of some horrible atrocity being committed against people on the other side of the planet, see a horribly-trained police officer kill someone on YouTube, read about some corporation fudging research to get a dangerous medicine put on the market—let alone something truly awful happens to someone you love—you still have to wake-up in the morning, put your boots on, and, head off to work. Lots of people don’t bother paying attention to the world around them. Others don’t care all that much about what happens to other people. But there are still lots of sensitive types who get upset about this kind of stuff and they don’t know how to deal with the pain. For them, faith can be a tremendously good thing because it helps them continue to be functional in a world they experience as a never-ending horror show.

I finally get the appeal of faith. But it simply doesn’t work for me. My mind just isn’t designed to work that way. That’s why I’m a philosopher and a Daoist who seeks realization instead of faith or devotion. I believe humanity needs people to seek-out knowledge and wisdom because that is how our society moves forward. But I also suspect that we also need people who have faith to keep the the wheels of society moving too.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

In the second part, I showed how current orthodox economics generally espouses a fake analysis of how money works mainly to scare governments and populations into being afraid of running deficits. I also cited evidence that suggests that even though orthodox economics says that deficits and debt are inherently bad, the experience of the world’s economy since the 1960s would indicate that instead deficits can and actually have been good for many nations. And even though national governments routinely preach the necessity of fiscal prudence, in actual fact almost none of them seem to actually try to eliminate deficits and debt. Conservatives run deficits so they can cut taxes. Liberals so they can provide people with services.

I also pointed-out that even though debt isn’t always a bad thing, governments still need to levy taxes in order to ensure that too much money doesn’t cause inflation and to also end wealth stratification.

In addition, I pointed-out that MMT only applies to governments that issue their own national currency. This means that cities, provinces/states, and members of currency unions (like the nations of the European Union) still have to be careful to not run unsustainable deficits.

Finally, I looked at a couple historical examples of governments that got into problems with deficits and which are usually mentioned by people who are afraid of deficit financing: Greece and Weimar Germany. I suggest with supporting evidence that they weren’t examples that contradict MMT. In Greece’s case, because it is part of the EU and no longer issues its own currency. And in the case of Weimar Germany, the government of the day created hyper-inflation on purpose in order to wipe-out a huge national debt left over from the First World War.

In this article I want to discuss the objective limits that govern MMT. And what this understanding has to tell us about what Prime Minister Carney (or any other world leader, for that matter) might do to deal with the problems Canada (or any other nation) now faces.

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Economics in the Real World

A key part of MMT is that economics should deal with the real world. By this, I mean that economics shouldn’t be exclusively about fancy mathematical equations and a dogmatic belief in the marketplace’s ability to solve any and all problems. Instead, economic policy should be about how productive farms, forests, mines, and factories are. And also about how well-educated your workforce is. And, how well all of these are linked together by transportation networks, electrical power, and so on.

Going back to the local currency system I ran decades ago in Guelph (as discussed in my first article in this series), the underlying idea was there were people with skills and assets that weren’t being used because potential customers didn’t have the money to pay for them. The local currency allowed people to bridge that gap. For example, one of our members was a farmer and another was a sheet metal worker. The farmer wanted a milk-room built in his barn. The metal worker was out of work and needed things for his family. They found each other in the system and negotiated a deal. The Local Currency bank loaned the farmer the money hire the tradesman (interest-free), and the tradesman did the work, and then used the local currency to buy stuff for his family. The farmer then paid off his debt to the bank by selling eggs to other members in the system.

One way I’ve heard this system explained is by saying money is like the measuring units on a construction site. People would think it odd if work on a house ground to a halt because the tradesmen had run out of meters, liters, and kilos to measure materials. But we routinely accept that work grinds to a halt because there’s not enough money to measure the amount of work or quantity of materials used on site. That’s the genius of MMT. It shows that if a nation doesn’t have enough currency to easily flow between businesses, natural resources, and workers, the economy progressively slows down—even though objectively there is still work that needs doing, people who want to do it, and materials ready to be used by them. (This is what happened in the Great Depression.) If the problem is just a lack of money—MMT says the government should run a deficit to inject more currency and get the economy working.

It also explains why MMT isn’t a horn of infinite plenty. If the government puts more money into the system than there is potential for economic activity, it will lead to inflation. For example, if a hypothetical nation had only a very limited amount of lumber and the government ran a large deficit to build new housing, contractors would inevitably start a bidding war over the scarce wood. And this would increase the cost of the housing being built, which would help create an affordability problem. So a proper government policy would identify the lumber shortage and bring in programs to either create access to new sources of wood or fund development of some alternative made out of some underutilized resource—such as Oriented Strand Board (OSB), which is made out of what used to be mill waste.

This is why economics under MMT stops being theoretical and instead becomes practical. The government doesn’t wave it’s hands over an equation that is based on assumptions and then make some theological assertion about ‘the invisible hand’. Instead, it looks for under-utilized aspects of the economy to get a feel for whether or not they should increase the money supply by funding some program, or, increase taxes to get inflation under control or reverse wealth stratification.

Carney was a Banker

One of the interesting things I found and shared in my first article on this subject were several examples mentioned by MMT economist L. Randall Wray where American Fed Chairs admitted that they knew where money comes from and that a lot of the rhetoric used by conservatives—such as social security is going bankrupt or deficits always cause inflation—is total nonsense. Mark Carney was the head of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, so he also knows where money comes from. And when both nations were hit with real economic threats, he was willing to expand the money supply to keep people working and businesses from going bankrupt.

You don’t have to trust my words, Pierre Poilievre says so too.

Of course PP is not mentioning that there is a housing crisis in nations all over the world and that post-covid inflation happened everywhere too—which suggests to reasonable people that they had nothing to do with any individual nation’s monetary policy. Moreover, Poilievre doesn’t even mention the impact of Brexit on the British economy. (In fact, I see this speech as a classic example of someone who’s accusations seem to actually be confessions.) The main take-away from the above clip I want to emphasize is Carney doesn’t buy into conservative economic scare tactics. And I think this should give reasonable people some hope that his policies are on the right track.

And that’s the other thing that gives me hope. Carney isn’t just signing trade deals with other nations. He’s also actively working to build-up the infrastructure of the country. The legacy media has tended to focus on the oil and gas pipelines, but there are a lot of other projects too:

• a new nickle mine was just announced

• high-speed rail from Toronto to Montreal

• a new electricity corridor from the South to the North of British Columbia

• an all-year road being built that links Nunavit to the North West Territory

• that road would end up at Grays Bay where a deep water port and airstrip is being proposed that would serve both military and commercial interests

• a program to increase the number of skilled trades people

• incentives to create a prefab home industry that would allow for cheaper homes being made by people without specialized skills

• the creation of up to 40 food hubs across the nation to remove the functional oligopoly that a small number of large grocery chains have in much of the country

These are just a few that came immediately to mind and which I could easily find links to support their existence.

And these are exactly the sort of investments in infrastructure that MMT says will help build up the Canadian economy—as long as there’s enough unused capacity in the economy to stop a bidding war between projects. And, I suspect that Carney is filling the hopper with potential projects because it might be that the Americans will leave a big hole in Canada’s economy if they decide to pursue a worst-case strategy. (I’m not saying I know what that would be—but it’s certainly the government’s job to prepare for all plausible scenarios.) Some of these will probably ‘fall by the wayside’—but I certainly get the vibe that Carney fully intends to spend a lot of money on developing infrastructure.

I have a tip jar too.

Is Carney a Believer in MMT?

I’m not about to speculate about what the Prime Minister does or does not believe in his heart. I do think that it’s safe to say that he is a consummate pragmatist. He repeatedly says that we have to work in the world we have instead of the one we’d like. And because of this, I think that even if he was a died-in-the-wool believer in MMP I don’t think he’d ever say he was. It would just paint a huge bull’s eye on him so every right-wing nutjob can start taking potshots. And it’s not something that either reporters or voters would understand. And as we all know, most people’s response to the unknown is to immediately take a dislike to it.

But as an economist who’s also been in charge of two nations’ money supply, he certainly does have a different understanding of money than probably almost all of the political classes anywhere in the world. (I know running my rinky-dink little bank all those years ago blew-up most of what I thought I knew about money, deficits, and banks.)

The thing to remember is people can come up with all sorts of great ideas about how the world should be run—but the world has a mind of its own. The genie is out of the bottle now and most politicians realize that deficits really aren’t the boogiemen people once thought they were. That doesn’t mean that some of these same people won’t get up on a soapbox to proclaim how government debt will blight their children’s future—if it will help them get elected. But I think the number of true believers is small, and I suspect it gets smaller every day.

The problem is, however, what these deficits are being used to finance. If it’s a war of choice like the current fiasco in Iran—no thanks. And the American penchant to cut taxes for the wealthy has just resulted in the creation of class of Bond villains who want to end democracy so they can be free to create dystopias both here and in outer space. Myself, I’d like to see the money spent on the things that Carney is talking about simply because it would increase Canadian productivity. And productivity is the basis of good wages for workers and better social programs for the poor and sick.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

I recently watched two movies for “old souls“: Logan, and, Arrival. For those of you who haven’t watched the films, here’s a brief synopsis---spoilers follow, if you care about such things.

Logan is set in the Marvel X-Men universe, and the title refers to Logan Howlett: the Wolverine. The twist is that this is a dystopian version of that universe, one in which private corporations have released a genetically engineered virus into the environment to stop any new “mutants” from occurring naturally. This allows them to use their stockpile of samples from the existing mutants to create their own altered human beings to use for experiments to create “super soldiers”.

At the same time, Charles Xavier (”Professor X”) has developed a debilitating form of brain disease that manifests itself in occasional seizures that affect the people around him because of his psychic abilities. In the past one of these seizures killed off most of the remaining mutants. This left only Wolverine and Caliban---who have to keep him doped-up on heavy meds to prevent future seizures---to take care of him in an isolated, abandoned metal recycling facility in Mexico. Logan supports this crappy lifestyle by working as a limo driver for bored, rich teens from the USA.

For those of you who have never read Marvel comics (I suppose some of you still exist), the Wolverine has the ability to heal almost instantly from any wound. He is also very, very strong. The ability to heal has kept him from aging, which means that he is at least a couple of hundred years old. Through most of that time, he was used by a government in one way or another. During both world wars, for example, the Canadian government used him as a soldier. When the American government learned of his abilities, they performed experiments on him to learn how to control him, and replaced his bones (and claws) with a fictional super-metal called “adamantium”. This made him into a weapon that is impervious to almost anything. It was Charles, “Doctor X”, who saved him from this life.

Unfortunately, the adamantium is also poisonous. And at the time of this movie, it is finally over-whelming Logan’s innate healing ability—making him an old man. It is also killing him. Logan is in constant pain, which he tries to deal with by almost constant drinking. He also limps. And coughs, almost constantly.

A plot and drama ensued, but that’s really not what I’m interested in.

I said that this is a movie for “old souls”. What I meant was that I can really identify with Logan. I am in significant pain at times, which I do self-medicate with by alcohol. I also limp. And I also cough, a lot.

One other thing that matters in the movie is the relationship between Logan and Professor X. Charles Xavier (played the incomparable Patrick Stewart), is a paraplegic and confined to a wheel chair. Underneath the gruff, macho exterior it is very obvious that The Wolverine loves this man very deeply. He works at a job he loathes to provide for him. And no matter what happens in the movie, the first thing he does is look out for Xavier’s needs. When Xavier is eventually murdered by one of the super-soldiers (who looks just like a young version of Logan), he collapses emotionally. At this point, he ends up being taken care of by a young girl who was also created to be a super soldier, but who managed to escape due to help by nurses at the research facility.

The old macho guy who’s always had to fight turned into a nurse maid for a beloved father figure. And who also ends up being nurtured by a young girl. Like I said, a story for old souls.

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Eventually, Logan dies. And in the process the girl he’s the genetic father of, and who he’s saved, is crying at his side---calling him “daddy”. His last words are “so this is what it feels like”. When I heard the words I knew that on one level the script was referring to dying. But my immediate response was to think that this is what it feels like to be vulnerable, to care about others to the point of making yourself vulnerable to extreme, horrible emotional pain, and, to accept that others can feel the same way about you.

As I said, a movie for old souls.

For those of you who haven’t seen Arrival, it deals with a linguistics professor who’s been asked to help the government learn how to communicate with an alien species that has just arrived on the planet. They’re called the “Heptapods”---for their seven tentacles. Unlike most science fiction shows that gloss over the difficulty of learning the language of a totally different intelligent species, this movie bears down on that issue and comes up with an innovative plot driver.

Basically, the movie is based on two interlocking premises.

The first one is that learning a language involves changing the way our brains are “wired”. To understand this idea, consider the fact that English only really has one word for “love”, whereas Greek has a great many (”eros”, “agape”, “philia”, “storge”, etc.) What this means is that when an ancient Greek philosopher was talking about “love”, he could do it a lot more accurately than a modern English speaker. To understand the point, consider this sentence that an obnoxious child might make to another: “If you love pancakes so much, why don’t you marry them!” This wouldn’t make any sense at all to Plato, because he wouldn’t use the same word for “liking a lot in the sense of enjoying the taste” and “wanting to spend the rest of your life living with someone because of a deep interpersonal bond”.

The argument is that the complexity and precision of your vocabulary has an impact on how we see the world around us. A better example beyond the word “love” comes from the history of chemistry. At one time people tried to explain the nature of material objects by referring to the four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and, fire. This really doesn’t work very well to explain a broad range of events, so we now accept that the atomic theory works much better and most folks would probably have a hard time trying to figure out how you could use the four states system to understand much of anything.

The second idea that the movie is based upon is that it is possible to create a totally non-sequential language. Western languages like English are based on the sounds that our spoken language makes. We start out sounding out the letters that make up the words, and then connect a certain sequence with specific words. But some other written langues don’t work like that. Chinese, for example, is not “sounded out” from letters. Instead individual characters represent specific ideas. It is true that some characters are composed of different simpler characters and added together, but these too are representative of ideas instead of sounds. Having said that, however, Chinese characters are written sequentially one after another.

But Arrival posits that the aliens don’t have a sequential sentence structure, but a holistic one.

As you can see, the writing looks like a coffee ring stain. But the different “splotches” aren’t random, but convey a specific meaning. The issue that the movie hinges on is that there is no beginning or end to a circle, so the only way to really understand it is to just grasp the meaning all at once.

This is an important issue, because it talks about the limits of ordinary human consciousness. I remember as an undergrad a beloved professor—Jacob Amstutz—explained in a lecture that there appears to be a limit to how much a person can grasp holistically. He explained this using an example from English common law. A pub used to have a cup with a bunch of wooden matches in it that people could use to light their pipes or cigars. The owners added a sign that said “take some home with you, if you like”. An individual---what we would now call a “street person”---took advantage of this to take a lot of matches that he then used to sell for a half-penny a piece on the street to people who wanted to light a pipe or cigar, but didn’t have any matches on them at the time. The pub owner called a bobby to stop this person from doing this, but the individual in question told the magistrate that the sign said he could do it.

The judge did some research in the literature and found out that when people look at a random pile of objects, on average, the most a person can count at a glance (ie: without having to mentally separate into different groupings and add together) are seven. So the judge ruled “some” (as in “take some home with you”) means seven or less.

This is important to the movie because in Arrival’s universe this isn’t an intrinsic property of the human brain. Instead it’s the result of how our language has organized our minds. In other words, when the judge defined the word ‘some’, he was dealing with an issue of “software” instead of “hardware”. If our brains simply cannot holistically absorb more than seven items, then we will never be able to learn the heptapod language. But if this is instead an artifact of how our language has modified our brains, it might be possible to learn the language. But in doing so it might radically change the way we perceive the world around us.

The people who made the movie didn’t stop at the circle sentences. Towards the end, the heroine says that she understands their language and asks them to tell her more. So they present her with what I can only surmise is their equivalent of a book. (Actually, this image is only the same sentence repeated over an over again---but assume that the coffee rings are all different and you get the notion.)

The important thing to understand is the sentences aren’t in any order---they are thrown all over and the reader has to understand them all holistically---just like the sentences.

The movie is filled with flashbacks, but ones that aren’t identified or labeled. At some point, the linguist (Louise) had a child, who died of an incurable illness. She also had a husband that she dearly loved, but left her. At first, I assumed that she had had all of this heart-break before the arrival of the aliens. But as the movie progresses and she learns the language, you begin to realize that this is the future. The man she falls in love with and marries is her colleague working with the aliens, and, the child is their soon-to-be conceived daughter. Learning the alien language has rewired her brain to the point where she no longer experiences her life sequentially, but rather as a holistic unity. (Presumably she started having dreams and memories before she met the aliens because the process reveals that causality works backwards in time as well as forward---how about that for an alien concept?)

This would be a really, really scary prospect for most people. Would you marry someone and have a child with them if you really knew in your guts---from direct experience---that both would end in extreme heart-break? Louise believes that she has the choice of choosing not to marry and conceive, but she does anyway because she doesn’t want to lose the experience of having a man and child that she loves dearly. And you also see in the flashbacks that knowing how it will all end means that she never misses an opportunity to be as “real” and “there” as she possibly can for these two people. She really does savour every sweet drop from the cup of life---even though she knows that at the end there will be nothing but bitter dregs.

(Oh, and bye-the-way, this explains why the heptapods came to earth in the first place—even though they knew a terrorist bomb would kill one of them. Because of their circular experience of time, they know that in the far, far distant future the human race saves them from a potential extinction event.)

I also have a tip jar.

How does any of this fit into Daoism?

What is it we do when we read books of wisdom and meditate? We are trying to deepen and expand our theoretical understanding of the world around us. We are fighting against the illusions that bind us to the here and now. We start out in life like the Wolverine---believing that we can live forever and if we get hurt, healing will come fast. But learning from others teaches us that this isn’t the case, we do get old and die. Not only this, but the people we love suffer and die too. And that hurts, a lot.

Daoism offers to help people with this problem through many different mechanisms.

For one thing, it offers us stories that help us understand the most practical, best way to navigate life. Consider the story from both Zhuangzi and Liezi where Confucius meets an elderly man who has learned to swim across raging cataracts by only swimming a few strokes when the river is pushing him where he wants to go and not fighting when it pulls him away. This is how one survives in a chaotic, violent world according to Daoist wisdom.

It also helps us by offering us practices like “holding onto the One” that teach us to not get too caught up in the moment-by-moment activity around us. Instead, we learn to remind ourselves that we need to always try to understand the Dao (or “One”) and how it is operating both in the processes that govern our mental activity and the world around us. If we are able to do this, for example, sometimes we are able to remember that the other person we are dealing with may be being grumpy towards us not because they hate us, but rather because they may be sick, worried about a loved one, etc. We might also remember that giving that person a smile, or asking a personal question that shows you care, etc, may totally transform your interaction into something more useful and pleasant.

It also helps us by reminding us to remember “the big picture” when we feel especially sad, angry, or, perplexed. When Zhangzi’s wife dies, for example, he is very sad. But when he realizes that she herself has ceased to feel any pain at all, and has instead merely returned to the undifferentiated Dao that she emerged from when she was born, he can understands that he is really sad for himself because he knows he will miss her. And at that point, he can choose to dwell on missing her, or, simply move on in life and find someone else to love. Much pain is caused by delusion, and the cure for delusion is a better understanding of how things really are.

In a very real sense, studying Daoism is like when Louise starts having those memories of her child. I am not the old man swimming in the cataract or Zhuangzi banging on a pot and singing after the death of his wife. But those events are the memories of men who have died long, long ago in a distant land. And by integrating their insights and experiences into my life, I am just like Louise having memories of the death of a child she hasn’t had yet. I know that I too will find myself beset by awful, painful problems---just like swimming the cataract. And I too will find myself deeply hurt by the pain or even death of a loved one.

We aren’t heptapods who experience our personal lives holistically. But we are eusocial animals who live our lives mediated by culture. And culture does exist holistically, and we can experience it as such. Zhuangzi and Confucius are long dead---and yet they are still alive every time we wrestle with the ideas that they have passed onto us through their writings and the traditions that they founded.

I got thinking about this because I was worried about whether my wife was entering into a psychotic episode. She is going through a stressful time right now as she has decided to sell her house and apply to be an immigrant to Canada. But in the interim, she is in St. Louis and I am living and working a thousand miles away. There is almost nothing I can do to make her life better other than offer some words of encouragement. And when she enters into an episode, she simply disappears off my radar. She has no support network (she does live in the USA, after all), so all I can do is accept that she’s “gone away” for a month or two, and wait for her to come back.

At times like this all I can do is remember how much I love her and I wouldn’t trade the good times for not having the bad. I also try to remember, like Zhuangzi and his wife, we are all part of a larger process and that ultimately we come from and end-up in the same place. I also try to hold onto the One and do what helps me cope with my feelings of helplessness and sadness. Writing this blog is one of those things.

JovertonCan said...

Great post, Bill. I really enjoyed it.

The Cloudwalking Owl said...

Thanks. Any feedback is appreciated---especially positive!

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

• $1 billion in investment in the Essex Engine Plant (adding a third shift by 2029) and Oakville Assembly Complex (to support creating ‘super duty’ pickup trucks)

• wage increases of three per cent in each year of the three-year contract

• restores the cost-of-living allowance and raises top production wages to $50.20 an hour and skilled trades wages to $62.71 an hour by the end of the agreement

• a $10,000 productivity and quality bonus and a $2,000 December bonus for eligible workers, improves pensions and retiree benefits and renews the no-closure agreement

If things are so up in the air with the USA, why would Ford agree to this sort of contract with its Canadian workers? I’d suggest it has something to do with the way the automotive market is evolving in North America.

The Big Three Automakers Have Given-Up on Fuel Efficiency

If you go to the Ford Canada website and look at the what the company is selling in 2026, something odd jumps up and bites you on the nose. Ford has pretty much given up on selling cars! Here’s the list:

Sedan:

• Mustang $41,400

SUVs:

• Bronco Sport 41,900

• Mustang Mach-E (EV) 46,600

• Bronco 54,000

• Explorer 55,000

Trucks:

• Maverick 38,000

• Ranger 46,000

• F-150 53,700

• Super Duty 64,000

Vans:

• Transit 61,000

• E-Transit (EV) $70,000

In the second Trump presidency the regulations that attempted to force American automakers to build more efficient cars were ripped-up and thrown away. This means, there’s no longer any regulatory reason for American car companies to even offer a fig leaf saying they are concerned about the environment. And that means, their sales become totally about selling the most profitable items in their catalogue—which means SUVs, trucks, and vans. Those never were subject to the same efficiency standards as sedans anyway—but even those no longer exist.

What this means for companies like Ford is what they are selling now is much more profitable than it was before. And that means they can offer better contracts to their workers.

Like the way I write? Buy a book!

The Automaker’s Decisions are Making the Affordability Crisis Worse

American auto companies like Ford are more profitable than they’ve been for a while, but unfortunately part of this is the result of the trucks they sell being more expensive than the sedans they’ve discontinued.

The first thing to remember is the listed price I put up above is often not the real price for the buyer. Consider the Ford F-150. The Ford Canada website listed it as starting at $53,700. But the days of the Model-T, where you could have any colour you choose—as long as it’s black—are over. Now you choose from a pallet of options and Ford builds you a specific vehicle. According to the Driving.ca website, there are a wide range of differ F-150 trucks to choose from:

The 2026 Ford F-150 model comes in 26 trim levels. Canadian pricing ranges from $52,690 to $110,625 MSRP [Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price, WDH]. The entry-level, XL Regular Cab 141 in model starts at $52,690 Canadian dollars for the Gasoline: 2.7L V-6. The price for the mid-range XL 4x4 SuperCrew 145 in trim is $64,905 MSRP. The most expensive in the lineup, Raptor 4x4 SuperCrew 145 in is priced at $110,625 Canadian dollars. Freight and PDI (also called Destination or Delivery charges by some brands) is $2,695 Canadian dollars but this can vary between provinces and dealers.

This is how dealers make real money off selling you a car. Indeed, I have a friend who who always insists on purchasing the absolute most basic model of any car he buys. He says once the sales people realize there’s no way he’s going to budge on that, they usually get angry with him because this means they aren’t going to get much of commission on the sale.

The other thing to realize is North American car companies make a significant fraction of their profit off financial services instead of the vehicle. This can take two forms: leasing and borrowing from Ford to finance the purchase. According to the on-line American magazine Jalopnik, in 2024 the average American F-150 leasing one of these trucks is paying over $900/month (that’s almost $1300 Can at today’s conversion rate).

As for the interest rate, it was really hard to find any numbers for that as they seem to be different for different models, different features packages, people with different credit scores, and often come with variable rates (eg: special sales that offer 0 interest for the first six months). Moreover, it looks like a random person like me can’t just go to an official Ford website and run the numbers unless I’m already engaged with sales staff. With this in mind, I used the Brave LLM to come up with a range which it did by going through Reddit and looking at the answers people came up with when discussing this with others: between 5.0% and 8.0%. With that in mind, I’m just going to stick to the 5% rate as all I’m trying to do is illustrate what’s going on. I also decided to assume the buyer was going to pay off the loan over six years—simply because unlike a house, cars depreciate significantly as they age. Here’s the range I got:

I was able to find a succinct discussion of Ford’s current financial situation at a website that provides information for investors: StockDividendScreener.com. Here’s what it had to say:

Financial Services has become an increasingly important and faster-growing revenue contributor. Total Financial Services revenue grew from $10.4B in 2023 to $13.5B in 2025, with a 3-year average of $12.1B and 14.3% average annual growth — meaningfully faster than the Automotive segment’s 5.4%. Financial Services’ share of consolidated revenue expanded from 5.9% in 2023 to 7.2% in 2025, with a 3-year average of 6.6%. This is a modest but directionally significant shift. Within Financial Services, the composition has undergone its most dramatic structural change in the dataset: Financing Income has displaced Leasing Income as the dominant contributor. Financing Income grew from $5.98B (57.7% of FS) in 2023 to $8.21B (60.7%) in 2025, with a 3-year average growth of 25.5% — driven by higher interest rates lifting yields on Ford Motor Credit’s loan and lease portfolio, as well as portfolio growth from Ford Pro commercial financing. Leasing Income has grown more modestly at 3.1% 3-year average, reflecting the industry-wide shift away from consumer leasing as residual value uncertainty increased post-COVID. Insurance Income, while small at a $137M 3-year average (1.1% of FS mix), grew 46.7% on average — the fastest growth rate in the dataset, albeit from a very small base.

As I hope readers can see, North American automobiles are following the same pathway as housing—they are becoming increasingly unaffordable for lower middle-class people. The obvious question is why would any business just write-off a significant fraction of the potential customer base? I’d say, again, that there are similarities to the housing crisis at work.

To understand that, I dug up some information about household income from Statistics Canada. In effect, what follows splits households into six different income ranges and shows what percentage of the population are living in each.

I would suggest that companies like Ford have decided that they are only going to focus on selling cars to people in the top 40% of household income. In Canada, that is still a market with over 6 million potential customers, so I can understand that might be enough to sustain a business model. (After all, there is also a market for extreme luxury cars—like Porsche and Ferrari.) But North America has build a society where most people absolutely need to own a car.

Personally, I believe in public transportation. But we haven’t built our cities around it, and most Canadians still believe only losers ride the bus. That means we desperately need a source of affordable cars for the majority of Canadians.

I also have a tip jar--.

Cheap Chinese Cars Won’t Compete With the Big Three

A lot of people are terrified that if inexpensive Electric Vehicles (EVs) from China come to Canada this will destroy the Big Three—and the really good-paying jobs of the people who work for them. My read, however, is the companies like Ford have decided that they’ve already lost the competition war, which is why they are bailing on both EVs and sedans. BYD and Cherry are never going to build trucks like the F-150. And the sort of people who buy monster trucks aren’t the sorts who care about the big price tags or the low fuel efficiency.

I’ve heard people say that most of the Chinese EVs will be Teslas, but I’m not sure if this is true. Here’s a website that would suggest that a lot of different cars are coming plus 16 Chinese dealerships in 10 cities. Here’s a sample of their sales pitch:

And here I’ve cherry-picked the lowest cost cars on the extensive list of Chinese vehicles that will be on offer in Canada:

The thing to remember about these cars is they not only cost less to buy, they are significantly cheaper to operate. That’s not just because electricity is far cheaper than either gasoline or diesel. EVs also have many fewer moving parts: around 20 to 25, whereas an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car can have as many as 2,000. Fewer moving parts means fewer to break down, diagnostics are easier, and parts inventories are easier to maintain.

These new autos are ‘game changers’ in much the same way that the Volkswagon Beetle and the Austin Mini were in my childhood. And they will fit the same gap that the big three left open for these two cars to fill back then. If the government allows these EVs into the country, they will fill the gap left when the Big Three decided to totally ignore both the environment and lower income workers.

Moreover, China’s decision to open up dealerships across the country suggests to me that they view the current quota of cars as being ‘the nose of the camel in the tent’. Once people learn how good they are (and the reports are universal that the quality is very good) and how inexpensive to both buy and operate, I suspect pressure will grow quickly to allow more into the country. And once China knows there is a good market here for their cars, then it will be time for the government to come up with a strategy to develop partnerships that will allow Canadian workers to build at least some of them here.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

In a previous post I mentioned the how modern society no longer gives many people an emotional feeling of “connection” and how neo-Fascists have exploited this to build support for noxious agendas. I thought I’d expand a bit on this issue in this post.

People Aren’t All the Same

I think it’s important to remember that the people reading this post are going to come to it from different perspectives. All people are not “created equal”, and any individual person’s particular life experience simply cannot be used to extrapolate about how every other person experiences the world. This lack of a universal experience is absolutely key to what I want to talk about in this post.

In my own case, I have what is called an “anxiety disorder”. This came about as a result of a chaotic, violent childhood in a dysfunctional family. What this means is that during the time when my brain was growing, outside stresses caused the genes I inherited from my parents to develop in one of the several potential ways allowed. In other words, my genes might have created an “out-going”, adventurous, trusting person. But because of the environment I was raised in, I instead developed into someone who is always looking out for potential dangers.

It’s as if each person at birth is dealt a set of playing cards for a “turn-based” game like Eucre or Bridge. Those are the genes that they are given by their parents. But when it’s time for your body to physically develop (or “express” those genes), it’s as if your body has to decide which particular card it wants to play. Friendly, out-going, and, adventurous could be the ten of diamonds, whereas, stand-offish, introverted, and, cautious could be the ace of spades. Each of these behaviours have pluses and minuses in different contexts. For example, in a time of prosperity where there are lots of opportunities out-going risk-takers have an advantage. In a time of chaos and declining prospects, in contrast people who are cautious and avoid risks are better off.

Consider the two rabbits below. Each of them has the same genetic inheritance for colouration. But because each was raised in different circumstances---namely average temperature---they developed different coloured fur. It’s the same thing when we talk about people’s disposition. And the average temperature would affect how much snow there is on the ground where one is hiding from things like eagles and weasels. In exactly the same way, children reared in warm, loving homes by supportive parents have brain wiring that is substantively different from those that were raised in homes where they spent a great deal of time legitimately scared for their safety. (What I’m talking about is environmentally-conditioned gene expression.)

These different ways of experiencing the world can manifest themselves in different ways of living. For example, when most of my friends were heading out and taking risks like going overseas on development projects, starting up small NGOs, applying for grants, etc, I was looking for a secure job with benefits and a pension. That’s why I got my job at the University---which is just about the only place in my town that has never laid anyone off and still has a gold-plated, defined-benefit pension with a built-in cost-of-living adjustment. As I approach retirement age, most of my friends have expressed some degree of envy to the retirement benefits that I will enjoy as compared to their situations.

Like the way I write? Buy a book!

How I experience the world has a huge impact on the political worldview that I find appealing. I suspect that this is why I am increasingly attracted to Confucianism. It specifically posits a world that consists of reciprocal relationships between different parts of society. It says that people should look out for one another instead of competing. Bosses should keep people on, even if there really isn’t enough work to justify their retention---because it’s the benevolent thing to do. Workers

should be diligent and not expect too much pay because they need to take into account the interests of the company. The government should assume that it needs to intervene in the lives of ordinary people, because it has a similar obligation towards its citizens that a parent has to each of its children. A perfectly Confucian world would give everyone of its citizens the feeling that they are home, as in the sense of Robert Frost’s statement “‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” (If you haven’t read Frost’s poem The Death of the Hired Hand, I would recommend you do. It perfectly encapsulates many of the emotions that I am discussing in this post.)

In contrast to my anxiety-disorder-fueled neo-Confucianism, I recently was listening to someone espousing a form of Libertarianism that suggested that we should rely upon free choice and competition to solve major social problems---such as racism. In effect, he suggested that there should be no laws against discrimination based on race or gender because this interferes with the constitutional right of “freedom of assembly”. How this works, according to him, is that any business that doesn’t hire blacks or women would be out-competed by other companies that do, either because it would be artificially limiting its talent pool, or, because consumers would organize boycotts against it. I won’t go into why I think that this is naïve, other than by suggesting that social change has never arrived by this mechanism.

I suppose I’m suggesting an expansion of the saying by Tom Wolfe that “If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested”. That is to say, our politics is informed by our life experience. Moreover, I’m going one step further and suggesting that our early childhood--to some extent--”hardwires” us to have a tendency towards one type of politics versus another.

This isn’t to say that people are doomed to either be cautious Confucians or reckless Libertarians. I’ve done some very risky things---suing Walmart comes to mind. But in those instances I was pursuing social goals instead of personal ones. I was willing to risk losing my house, my pension, and, my entire life savings in order to help preserve my community. This is Confucian risk taking, not Libertarian. It is very different from, for example, someone who hops into an airplane and goes up to the far North in search of employment and big bucks in the tar sands. Or, who borrows a lot of money to start a business.

Up until this point, I’ve made it sound like I’m something of a damaged individual because I support Confucianism. Actually, I don’t think that this is fair, but rather an artifact of our society’s language. (Another big issue for Confucius was the “rectification of language”, but that’s a topic for another post.) I identified myself as having an “anxiety disorder”, which is quite true. I have had all the classic symptoms of PTSD---reoccurring nightmares, disassociation, flashbacks, etc---but I’m also high-functioning and it has never really caused major problems in my day-to-day life. But in this post I’m trying to work through how this issue may have affected my political worldview.

Having admitted this, I want to suggest that our society “loads the language” against the Confucianist worldview. In the language I used above, I described a person from a non-dysfunction family as being “friendly, out-going, and, adventurous”. These are all positive attributes. But all of them can be part of a personality that is shallow, self-centred, and, reckless. Being friendly and out-going can be shallow and insincere---nothing more than the “would you like a cherry pie with your Big Mac?” script. And being “adventurous” can be nothing more than running away from the obligations that would hold someone in a specific place.

Years ago I lived in an old townhouse with a student from Shanghai. We had a neighbour named Lena, who was in her eighties and had (as near as we could tell) no friends or family. Her flat stank like sewage, and was over-run with cockroaches. (I looked at her recycling container once---it was literally covered with the things.) The only time we ever saw her was twice a day when she went out to buy a local and national newspaper. The last we saw of her was a police officer breaking in her door in order to get her into an ambulance and off to the hospital. My student boarder was with me when this happened. He said to me “this would never happen in China”. The tone in his voice told me he was absolutely disgusted with this aspect of Canadian society.

Would someone from a future era or different society identify Libertarians as suffering from “freedom poisoning”, or, being “borderline psycho-paths”, because of their indifference to the problems of the people around them? How would people who really, really, really care about their world feel about people who set out on “adventures” without considering the consequences for the natural environment? Would they be disgusted by people who unleash huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere for unnecessary jet airplane trips? Would they think anyone who put the ideal of “freedom” ahead of the real, concrete problems facing other people as being somewhat sick in the head?

I also have a tip jar.

One last point. Confucianism is more than just a philosophic theory, it is a practical way of living your life. To this end, it prescribes practices that help you integrate its insights into your day-to-day living. It puts forward benevolence as an ideal, but the way it suggests that a person can really learn to manifest this behaviour is through study and ritual.

As for study, I’d suggest that the sort of self-analysis I’ve done in this blog post would fit that framework. But as for ritual, I’m a little hard-pressed to come up with an example. I recently listened to a podcast that helped explain why this is. It comes from a Western apologist for Confucianism by the name of Michael Puett. In it, he argues that what Confucian ritual does is train a person to understand the importance of inter-personal habits and patterns of interaction, and sculpt them to be able to create harmonious interactions. Unfortunately, translations of Confucian texts---like The Analects---have tended to edit out the descriptions of ritual because Western scholars have tended to think of them as irrelevant. As a result, I’ve never had much chance (as a non-Chinese reader) to expose myself to Confucian ritual.

As a result, it’s hard to come up with an example that I can put on a blog post, but one thing does come to mind is from a delightful Japanese television show that I recently binge-watched on Netflix: The Samurai Gourmet.

One particular episode involved a flashback to when the retired “salary-man” (who is the hero of this show) was starting out. As a young man, he had wanted to quit his job and go do something else---which would have been career suicide for him. He hands in his letter of resignation to his boss, who instead of accepting it takes him out to his favourite restaurant.

When they are there, the boss suggests that the young man take a good, careful look at the people working there. He points out the tremendous attention to detail that everyone is manifesting in every aspect of their work---from the chef to the busboys. Indeed, the owner spends some time training a young person in how to carefully clear and clean a table so not a spot of dirt is left from one customer to the other. The boss then tells the young man something to the effect that it isn’t important what a person does to make a living, it’s the attitude that they bring to the job that makes her a success or a failure. Moreover, the implication is that a “success” or “failure” comes from within---a person can be a tremendous success in a failing business, or, a complete failure even if they are making a ton of money.

The point I want to raise isn’t the wisdom of the specific message, but rather how it is conveyed. The boss took his underling out for a special meal to make the point. I suspect this is a thing in both Japanese and Chinese society, where meals are an integral part of the relationship between people. In effect, this is a ritual that is used to get people to stop and reassess exactly what they are doing and to build a sense of “community”. Moreover, it is important to realize that the boss wasn’t just trying to convince his young employee about how he should approach the job---he was also illustrating how much the boss considered it his duty to do everything he could to help the new guy adapt to the “salary-man” culture that he had just been accepted into. This is the two-way sense of social obligation and community that is the essence of Confucianism.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched, consider how common communal meals are in other cultures to build a sense of solidarity. In the early Christian church communion literally was a real meal---the body and blood of Christ were not just a sip of wine and a cracker, they were literally a big meal where even the poorest person could get a full belly. Sikhs still do something like this at their temples. They have a communal meal, called “langar” where absolutely anyone---regardless of race, religion, or, anything else---can have a free, vegetarian meal. The Sikhs in my town---even in far away Canada---serve it. And many were the times I ate together with the other members of the taijiquan school and temple where I was initiated into Daoism.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

In my last article in this series, I talked about exactly what money is and how it was created. I pointed-out that it appears that mostly it came about because a sovereign did two things: create a currency that he forced people to accept for goods and services—and then levied taxes that could be paid with it. I also showed evidence that this continues to this day, only the money that’s created is mostly in the form of bits and bites on a computer in the Bank of Canada/Federal Reserve that flow through a series of intermediary banking systems. In this article I’m trying to explain what I think MMT believes a country’s deficit really is—and why it shouldn’t always be something people fear.

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What Exactly Does Money Do?

I talked about where money comes from in the last article and in this one I’m going to suggest what money does. Of course, all people know that money makes it easier to buy and sell. That’s the individual person’s experience, but what does it do in terms of the big picture?

When it’s managed properly, money helps mobilize economic activity. To illustrate what I mean, let me create a hypothetical example. I have a group of people who use a currency to exchange goods and services. Let’s consider a group of 100 people with a total of $1,000 worth of currency. Let’s also say that this money starts out being equally distributed—everyone has 10 dollars. Those 100 people can use that money to buy from one another. A lot of different things are going to happen. Some of them are going to end up with more than $10 and some are going to end up with nothing at all. (Let’s ignore that for now—I’ll get back to it.)

Assume that this tiny little economy is functioning more-or-less OK, but then think about what would happen if the number of people grow and/or the amount of economic activity the group does gets bigger. In other words, the tiny hypothetical economy is expanding. If the amount of money in the system still stays at $1000, it’s going to cause problems because the relative value of the money to buy all the goods and services is going to go up as the tiny economy grows—simply because there are more things to buy but the same amount of money is still in the system.

When that happens, the conventional wisdom is to hold onto your money because it keeps growing in value. No one buys anything today for $10 when they know it will only cost $9 next week. And no one is going to make risky or cheap loans if they know that their savings are going to grow in value just sitting in the banks (or even under their mattress). This phenomenon is called ‘deflation’—and it was what caused total havoc to the economies of the world during the Great Depression.

So what’s the solution? The government needs to create more money as the economy grows. If the population increases, the national bank will have to dump another $10 per new person into the economy to keep things steady. Also, if people start increasing the value of the goods and services in the community by finding more efficient ways to do things, then the banker will have to inject some currency into the system to stop the money from deflating.

So how does a government increase the money supply?

It does it by running a deficit. That is to say, the government decides to do something—build a bridge or hydroelectric dam, create a new program like a child tax credit, etc—and pays for it by creating new currency. That’s pretty much what Canada, the US, Japan, etc, are doing when they run up a deficit. A deficit in a national budget is a measure of how much the government has increased the money supply that year. And the national ‘debt’ is a measure of how much the government has increased the money supply over a given period of time.

If this is so, then why are so many people constantly banging the drum about deficits? Here’s another clip from the L. Randall Wray video I quoted in my previous article on this subject. I think it suggests a reason why.

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article about Paul Samuelson. I’d never heard of him before, but he was a very well-regarded economist! (He won the first so-called ‘Nobel Prize’ in economics—among other things.) And here’s what I assume to be the video clip that Wray mentions.

If we look at the nations of the world right now, I’d suggest that the ‘old tyme religion’ of economics has stopped scaring governments into avoiding deficit spending.

According to the above map, Canada, the United States, Japan, and Great Britain have national debts (ie: have created extra currency for their economy) that amounts to over 100% of the Gross Domestic Profit (GDP). Following behind them, are India, China, and Brazil, which had deficits of between 75 and 100%. (I’m not going to talk about Eurozone for reasons that will become obvious later one.) It looks to this lay person, therefore, that Dr. Samuelson’s nightmare future has arrived—increasingly, politicians around the world have begun to believe ‘deficits don’t matter’.

Is this true? I’d say yes and no. If people believe deficits really are inherently destructive—and for the reasons usually stated—I’d suggest in rebuttal by talking about the massive growth in wealth that has occurred at the same time that the consensus about balance budgets has begun to fall apart. Take a look at the following three-dimensional (X, Y, plus time lapse) graph that shows the growth of government spending over time. It comes from an article titled Historical poverty reductions: more than a story about “free-market capitalism” (Pay attention to the two huge spikes during WWI and WWII—and the higher ‘new normal’ that arrives with the 1960s.)

And in the following graph from the same paper the researcher has parsed out the amount of government spending/year/country that is specifically aimed a social programs like old age security, subsidies for the disabled, unemployment insurance, etc. (That’s why it shows no spike in activity during the two world wars.)

Yes, governments have expanded money supply a lot starting in the late 1950s and carrying on to today. As Samuelson would say, 19th century politicians like Gladstone would be rolling in their graves to see how willing modern governments are to increase their currency (aka ‘running up deficits’). The thing to remember, though, is during this time of easy access to currency the people of these nations have found their standards of living increasing in ways that were unheard of by previous generations. Here’s an easy-to-understand graph I found at a blog that shows long-term economic growth in both the USA and Canada.

Again, note the time where things really kicked into ‘over drive’—the late 1950s and early 1960s.

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If Deficits Don’t Count, Why Do We Have Taxes?

If the evidence seems to be overwhelming that running up pretty hefty deficits not only doesn’t hurt the economy—but actually helps it—why bother with things like taxes and spending cuts? Couldn’t a government pay for everything with deficits?

No. That’s because there are real limits on how much money an economy needs. It’s sorta like Goldie Locks and the three bears. If you don’t have enough money for the economy—it encourages stagnation and deflation. If you put too much into it, you get inflation and people’s incomes erode. (There are other causes of inflation—which we saw after COVID and now during the latest Gulf War—but that’s another story.)

Lets go back to my hypothetical mini-economy of 100 people and $1000 dollars between them. What happens if the sovereign bank doubles the amount of money people have overnight? If lack of money is all that’s been stopping a business from building a new machine that can double the number of shoes it can make, and they can find workers, and there’s a demand for more shoes—the money could end up helping the economy grow and cut the cost of living. But if instead there were enough shoes to go around, and everyone already had a job, and there was nothing else that needed doing, then the extra money would just lead to a bidding war for both products and workers. And that would cause inflation.

Another problem that societies can face (and we are right now) is money can get ‘trapped’ in the hands of a small number of super-wealthy individuals. These are the people I tend to call ‘bond villains’—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, etc. All the extra money they have damages society. By that I mean these individuals start having far, far too much influence on society. Because they can dump huge amounts of money into the electoral process, hire armies of lobbyists, create 3rd-party political advertising, pay for so-called ‘think tanks’, etc, their wishes often over-ride what’s best for the majority of citizens.

A well-run government pays more attention to these two issues—inflation and wealth stratification—than they do the mere size of the deficit. And the way to control both problems are changes to the tax codes.

In the case of inflation, the government wants to cut down the pool of money in the hands of middle-income people. That’s because there’s a lot more of them than the wealthy, and they tend to spend their money instead of just investing it (or hide it in a tax haven).

With regard to wealth stratification, the government needs to pull money from the very wealthy in order to reduce their ability to manipulate government and society. This is not an impossible task, as it has been done in the past by using a mix of very high tax brackets plus an inheritance tax to stop families from moving wealth from generation to generation. Take a look at the income tax rates that existed over time in the USA. As you can see, from 1941 to 1965 there was a tax rate of around 90% levied against individual annual incomes over a quarter million dollars. And since then the rates have declined dramatically to today where they are a little over 30%.

At the same time, the estate tax has become increasingly meaningless in both Canada and the USA as various exemptions and ‘work arounds’ have it pretty much useless as a mechanism for redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor.

So taxation is tremendously important to governments. It shouldn’t be used to pay for everything—sometimes deficits are called for. But it can be used to reign in inflation and also to prevent unhealthy wealth stratification that will threaten the existence of democratic governance.

One of the reasons why I think it’s so important to discuss what Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has to say is fixating on deficit spending as something inherently bad diverts attention from the terrible problems we have created by refusing to use the taxation tool in a way that would benefit society-as-a-whole instead of a small number of people who already have far, far, too much wealth and influence.

Important Points to Understand

Only Governments With Their Own Currency Benefit from MMT

There are a couple of important caveats that people need to understand about MMT. The first one is only federal governments that issue their nation’s own currency can use deficits to manage their economy. That means municipal and provincial/state governments cannot help their citizens through deficit spending. It might be that the federal government will create programs that help lower levels of government and finances them through creating more currency. But the upper level of government makes the decision, not the lower one.

The second point to understand is not all countries actually have the ability to create currency to help their economies. Some people might thinking about Greece, which had a problem with deficits a few years back. The thing to remember is Greece does not control it’s own currency—it’s more of a province of the European Union than an independent state. They use the Euro, not their old currency, the Drachma.

There are other nations of the world—for example Equador and El Salvador—that have adopted the US dollar as their domestic currency. This means that they also cannot create more money to help their economy grow.

But What About Weimar Germany?

Everyone’s heard of the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s. At one time, a loaf of bread cost 200 billion marks by the end of 1923. What they generally don’t know was that this was the result of the treaty that ended WWI which required the new German government to pay astronomical war reparations to the Allied victors.

What it did was require huge payments in both currency and kind (coal, for example). According to historians, the people running the government encouraged hyperinflation so the country could pay off big chunks of the debt with worthless money.

British and French experts stated that this was in an effort to ruin the German currency and, as well as escaping the need for budgetary reform, avoid paying reparations altogether, a claim supported by Reich Chancellery records showing that delaying the currency and budgetary reform that could have addressed hyperinflation was seen as advantageous. Whilst ruinous to the economy and politically destabilising, hyperinflation had advantageous aspects for the German government as, although the war reparations were not listed in paper currency, domestic debts owed from the war were listed, meaning that inflation greatly reduced this debt relative to revenues.^[5]: 239

^Wikipedia

At the same time, France occupied the Ruhr Valley in order to force Germany to pay the in-kind reparations they felt they deserved. (German troops had occupied and destroyed large parts of French industry, whereas most German factories and mines emerged unscathed by war’s end.) The occupation was met with resistance by workers, which also lowered productivity.

Because of this decline in industrial capacity (let’s also not forget the decline in skilled workers because of war casualties), the actual economy shrank—which meant that there was too much money sloshing around. The cherry on the top of this sh*t Sunday was the old Imperial government had decided to fund the war exclusively by deficit—which meant that even before the victors decided to bleed Germany dry, it had far, far too much money already in the system.

In other words, German hyperinflation of the 1920s was an extremely bizarre exception caused by unique events that has no bearing on a modern, moderately well-governed nation.

This probably more than enough for one article, so I’m going to stop here. In my next in the series I hope to talk a bit about the policy implications of MMT.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

In Chapter VII of David Hinton’s translation of Mencius, the sage is quoted as saying

Imagine all beneath Heaven turning to you with great delight. Now imagine seeing that happen and knowing it means nothing more than a wisp of straw: only Shun was capable of that.
He knew that if you don’t realize [sic] your parents you aren’t a person, and that if you don’t lead your parents to share your wisdom you aren’t a child. He fulfilled the Way of serving parents completely until Blind Purblind, his depraved father, finally rejoiced in virtue. Once his father rejoiced in virtue, all beneath Heaven was transformed. Once his father rejoiced in virtue, the model for fathers and sons was set for all beneath Heaven. Such is the greatness of honoring parents.

Mencius, Chapter VII, section 28, David Hinton trans.

There are two elements to this quote, and I find it hard to connect them. The first is indifference to fame, which I understand can be enormously hard. I certainly find it very hard to be personally uninterested in it---even though I have tried mightily my whole life to live that way. I’ve always worked at menial jobs, and routinely tried to “do the right thing”, even if that means sabotaging whatever sort of career I might have been able to garner. And without some sort of fame, most careers are impossible. (Think about how much more popular this blog would be if I was a famous person.)

For example, I was once organizing a slate of candidates for local Council elections and I had a fairly good shot at getting elected in Ward One. But two other people who also had a good shot at winning a seat were running in Ward Two. Since there was only one slot open for their “flavour” of politics, the odds were that if they both ran they would split the vote and neither would get elected. Since neither one of them were willing to back out, I approached one and told her to run in my ward and I’d not run. Both of them ran and won, and the woman ended-up becoming a very successful Mayor for my city. It was the right thing to do, but it meant that I never got elected to public office and instead have supported myself moving furniture and being treated like a moron by management. Objectively, I can see that this is irrelevant, but emotionally, it annoys me. I am not like Shun---fame is still far more than a “wisp of straw” to me.

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The next bit deals with what is routinely called “filial piety“, or, “xiào”. People might find it weird that I would write a post about filial piety for a blog about Daoism. Most Westerners who have been exposed to Daoism tend to have this idea that it’s followers have nothing but contempt for stuffy Confucian nonsense. Actually, this is a profound misunderstanding. The Temple that I was initiated into (part of the Dragon Gate Sect of Quanzhen Daoism) has three core texts that they suggest people should study. They consist of the Daoist Jade Emperor Mind Seal Classic, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, and, the Confucian Classic of Filial Piety. (More about these in future blog posts.)

Filial Piety is a very complex subject to understand, and I don’t want to overwhelm readers with their first introduction to the concept, so I’ll just raise a few aspects that most people probably haven’t thought about just so they can start getting prepared to think about it in depth.

It is important to understand that Confucianism bases its morality not on reason, but rather emotion. So to understand filial piety you don’t suggest an argument in favour of pursuing this as an ethical standard, you put forward an example that illustrates the innate human emotional tendencies it is based upon. And this is the point that Mencius refers to when he says “if you don’t realize [sic] your parents you aren’t a person”. That is to say, if you don’t feel some sort of emotional connection to your parents, your lack of those emotions disqualifies you as a member of the human race.

Perhaps a psychopath has no feelings one way or the other about family, which would mean that they aren’t a “person” according to Mencius. But the feelings that arise around family are not always positive. Indeed, the language associated with filial devotion always sounds really strange to me---(and I suspect a lot of other people too). It also sounds odd to me when Christians recite the Lord’s Prayer and say “Our Father who art in Heaven---”. It’s even worse when union leaders talk about members as being “brothers” and “sisters”. That is because my father killed himself when I was a child after a long, horrible illness. I also spent a very important part of my childhood being beaten by my older brother; and, my mother had an out-of-control, crazily emotional streak that terrorized me as a child. “Family” has a very strong emotional connection for me---but it is negative, not positive. So I am a “person” according to Mencius, but not one that is terribly “filial”.

But it is important to remember that for Confucians like Mencius filial devotion is not just one directional. Parents have an obligation towards their children that is just as important as the child’s obligation to their parents. And if the parent fails in that obligation, the child has as much of a duty to instruct the parent as the parent has to instruct the child:

“if you don’t lead your parents to share your wisdom you aren’t a child. He fulfilled the Way of serving parents completely until Blind Purblind, his depraved father, finally rejoiced in virtue”

Think about this passage. Mencius is putting forward Shun as a paragon of filial piety because he patiently taught one of his parents the difference between right and wrong.

So what exactly is xiào (filial piety)? It doesn’t seem to be the stereotypical ideal of children “shutting up and doing what they are told”. Right now I’m reading a new translation of the Xiaojing by Henry Rosemount, jr, and Roger T. Ames that translates it as “family reverence” because the scholars believed that the English word “piety” carries too many resonances with self-righteous, unfeeling, religious fanaticism. Instead, they believe xiào refers more about the feelings of someone who is in a genuinely warm, reciprocal relationship based on real emotion. It’s unfortunate that so many people---like me---have had such bad experiences with our families that the emotions we feel are negative. But that doesn’t mean we don’t still long for that connection—not that we think it doesn’t (or even shouldn’t) exist. I see this as evidence for the basic value of Confucian family reverence, not evidence against it.

Filial Piety on the National Level

This longing for a sense of “family reverence” might begin in the family, but for Confucians it is not supposed to end there. The entire culture of a nation is supposed to function like a family for Confucians. The leader of any grouping---such as the Emperor---is supposed to exist in a dynamic with his subjects much like that of a family. Leaders are supposed to actually care about what happens to their followers, and the followers are supposed to not only be able to engage with leaders when they are acting improperly, they are actually obligated to do so in some circumstances. Shun was expected to gently reprimand his father, “Blind Purblind”. In the same way, the court officials of the Emperor were expected to disagree with the Emperor and try to change his opinion when they believed he was acting improperly.

In ancient China this could often be a very dangerous thing to do, as many Emperors were half-mad with power and were quite willing to torture and kill any scholar who had the courage to criticize an imperial policy. But that was the role that a scholar was supposed to play. Indeed, during the reign of the second Qin emperor there was an incident where a stag was brought before the Emperor. The Prime Minister (who was the real power behind the throne) declared it to be a horse and then asked the court scholars what they thought it was. The ones who were afraid of him, agreed that it was a horse. The others, who had a greater commitment to the truth, said it was a stag. The latter group paid a heavy price for their statements, as not only they themselves, but their families too were punished (some executed) for their independence of thought.

I learned about this incident while watching a modern Chinese drama titled “The Legend of Chu and Han“, but which on Netflix Canada is called “The King’s War”. It is based on the collapse of the Qin dynasty and the founding of the Han. (I’d highly recommend it to anyone who likes a really good story that also tries to explain ancient Chinese wisdom at the same time.)

I’m fascinated by the character Liu Bang, who became the first Han Emperor, Gaozu. This is because the show is playing around with different conceptions of what it means to be a great man. Gaozu’s ability isn’t so much his brilliance as a general, but rather his ren, or benevolence. He is able to attract and inspire people to serve him, because it is obvious that he really does want the best for everyone.

One scene where the director really pointed this out was where Liu was on the march with his army and he fell sick with the flu. His mistress had rolled him up in a quilt and was plying him with hot water to keep him hydrated. A Confucian scholar insisted on seeing him, even though the guards said he was too sick to see anyone. Eventually, he sneaked in to see Liu, who heard him out. After introducing himself, he started talking about how he was going to get Liu’s army into some key city without a fight. Liu was not interested (because he felt awful and had heard it all before), so he showed his contempt by taking a pee in the scholar’s special, groovy hat. He then make the guy leave and take his hat with him.

This peeved the scholar, but after throwing his hat away, he came back and then told Liu that he was really an expert at drinking wine. Instead of having the guy dragged off and punished (which really wasn’t Liu Bang’s style), he asks his girl friend to bring in two pitchers of wine. (Liu was a bit of a drinker.) The scholar downs one without a pause, and then suggests that Liu drink the other. Liu refuses, saying he’s too sick to be drinking wine. But he says he’ll hear out the scholar. (If you believe the Roman saying of In Vino Veritas—this wine drinking thing is a shrewd move.)

The scholar says he’s friends with the Qin prefect who rules the town and can get him to surrender rather than force a fight. Liu asks why he is interested in helping him. The scholar says that he noticed that on the line of march Liu’s soldiers are very careful to not trample the peasant’s crops, and, that in general they are careful not to abuse ordinary people. (Not to mention that Liu has put up with some pretty strange behaviour by the scholar himself---even though he’s not feeling well.) The scholar is saying that he’s spent his whole life trying to find a benevolent, filial ruler to serve, and as near as he can tell, Liu Bang is it.

In the show, this is Liu Bang’s “secret weapon”---he is able to attract people of real talent, inspire them with tremendous loyalty, and, get them to perform amazing things for him. This contrasts with his main rival, Xiang Yu, who is portrayed in what Westerners would recognize as the “heroic” model of someone like Alexander the Great. He has the strength of a Hercules, is absolutely fearless in battle, and, has the martial arts skill of Bruce Lee. But he lacks ren (benevolence) and xiào (filial piety).

The director of the show actually underlines this point through a scene where Yu orders the execution of 5,000 captured Qin soldiers because they didn’t surrender as fast as he said they needed to in order to be spared. Yu places a great emphasis on keeping his word---something that Confucianism says should always be tempered by benevolence. When Yu’s uncle find out about this act he is so angry that he slashes Yu across the face with a whip and punishes him with house arrest. He informs Yu that this is a catastrophic mistake to make, because it means that he has no ren---and that there is no way he can become Emperor without it. A leader who cannot build a sense of trust in both his followers and the people that he will act benevolently towards ordinary folk is doomed to fail. It is this lack of trust that has doomed the Qin dynasty, and Yu’s actions show why he failed in his competition with Liu. That is why Liu became the first Emperor of the Han dynasty and Yu ends up killing himself after losing.

I also have a tip jar!

So what has this got to do with modern life?

I recently read about a movement called “the New Optimists“. In a nutshell, their argument is if you use objective measurements of things like life expectancy, global poverty rates, death by violent crime, warfare, etc, people around the world have never had it so good. But at the same time, lots of people really feel awful about their lives and the future. How come?

Well, there are lots of good suggestions as to potential reasons. For example, just because people on the other side of planet are doing better than ever before that doesn’t mean you are. Moreover, just because things have been getting better over the past 200 years doesn’t mean that it couldn’t all go to Hell in a few years because of something like climate change, nuclear war, or, an economic catastrophe.

All of these are legitimate concerns, but I wonder if maybe part of the problem is that human beings are suffering the effects of a catastrophic decline in our generalized sense of “family reverence” as described by Confucianism.

No, I don’t mean that we all need to embrace some sort of fundamentalist nonsense like that spewed by groups like “Focus on the Family“. Instead, I’m talking about the more generalized sense of emotional connection that Confucians found within the family but said also needs to exist in the state. The key point of “family reverence” isn’t the family, it’s the emotional sense of connection and belonging that is most often identified within families. (Please don’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon with the moon itself!) People who cannot find this emotional connection within a family seek it in other aspects of life, like their community. For many people it is absolutely essential to their well-being and all leaders ignore it at their peril.

What is this sense of “emotional connection”? Like Mencius, I can’t really define what it is, I can just point to examples and ask the reader to think about whether or not I am right when I say that these seem to be indicative of an intrinsic human quality. People during wartime often develop very strong interpersonal connections that they hold onto for the rest of their lives. It’s also why some people have such a strong emotional connection to the university that they studied at while young. I know that in my case I had a very strong emotional connection to the school and Temple where I learned Taijiquan and was initiated into Daoism. I also had a similar attachment to the Green Party where I learned the “nuts and bolts” of political activism. They were all like “families” for me. I also have very strong friendships and a significant other that also provide that sense of emotional connection for me.

I might suggest, however, that for many people (if not most) our modern society undermines and attacks this sense of emotional connection. For one thing, families and friendships are shredded when people are expected to travel all over the world in order to pursue their career paths. Even worse, the temporary nature of jobs means that people routinely get picked-up and tossed into a task for a short period of time then discarded like a rented tool---which makes it impossible to develop anything like an emotional connection with co-workers. Increasingly, even that shrinking pool of people who do have permanent jobs are denied the stability of even having their own personal work-space. Instead, they are expected to just grab whatever computer is free at any given moment, or, park their laptop at whatever desk is free. These are called “back pack” offices. (My job just transitioned from one where I had a office to being one of these “migrants”, and I can attest to how much it makes me feel like I’m no longer a valued part of the workplace!)

I believe that the alt-right has been very good at manipulating the vague, inarticulate sense of emotional loss that comes from this lack of emotional connection in work, community, and, family by playing up people’s sense of emotional connection through patriotism. In particular, I’ve seen a fair amount of this being done on-line. For example, there are lots of videos on YouTube. Here’s one that illustrates my point.

(The clip I used for the original article was a piece of overtly neo-fascist propaganda, but it’s been removed by YouTube and I couldn’t find it anywhere. This is good for the world, but bad for my article. What I’ve done, therefore, is just post a video by the heavy metal band Sabatan. It’s the song that was used in the original video and shows clips from the same movie that previous video used. Remember, what I’m talking about are the emotions that these sorts of ‘national patriotic myths’ bring out in people. The siege of Vienna is probably the strongest myth that supports the alt-right’s idea that Europe is in a life-and-death struggle with Islam right now—which is why I posted this particular video. WDH)

Just a few things to explain about this video. According to the right-wing, patriotic history of Europe, ‘Western civilization’ was in danger of being wiped out by Muslim invaders at the battle of Vienna. In that fight after a long, heroic siege, the city was about to fall to the forces of the Turkish Sultan but at the last minute an attack by the Polish Winged Hussars destroyed the Turkish army and permanently removed the Ottoman empire as a threat to Western Europe. This story has tremendous emotional resonance with people who feel like Europe is in threat of being over-whelmed by hordes of Muslim refugees, and the Battle of Vienna is the sort of story that helps create an emotional, filial bond between fascists who want to cleanse Europe of all non-white immigrants.

My belief is Fascism has re-emerged as a force in Western society specifically because the mainstream political leadership has mostly turned its back on the Confucian ideal of benevolence (ren) and building an emotional sense of community (filial piety or xiào) and instead decided that competition in a free market and regulation by faceless technocrats are all that is needed to deal with any of the problems our society faces. This has worked to undermine and destroy the sense of emotional connection that people have with both their community and where they work. And in turn, this has created an inarticulate and deep sense of longing for re-connection in the greater community among the citizens. Neo-Fascists in the alt-right have learned how to exploit this to spread their hate. In my humble opinion, this is why Britain voted for the Brexit and it’s how Donald Trump got elected President of the USA.

Oh, one last point. I started off this crazy post with a quote from Mencius where he mentions a guy named Shun and says that he was indifferent to public acclaim because of his devotion to filial piety. I found it hard understand this point. But now I do. If you have a vague need to feel the support of a real emotional community, you will have a real hunger for acclaim. But if that need is being met by genuine relationships built on real benevolence (ren) and filial relationships (xiào), you will no longer have that hunger. Not because you have transcended this human desire, but rather because you have satiated it.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

This was something of a wild ride and I wouldn’t advise anyone else to do the same thing. But two very good things came out of it. First, I built connections in the community that were to prove extremely important for political things. Second, I personally learned a lot about how the world actually works.

Money is Psychology

Ultimately, money is nothing more than a collective decision by people to accept something inherently worthless—like a scrap of paper or plastic, a split stick, bits and bites on a computer screen, or coins made of metal—in exchange for things that do have intrinsic value, like a dozen eggs, an hour’s work mending clothes, etc. That’s literally all it is. If you can convince people to use it, it has value. If you can’t, it doesn’t.

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I won’t speculate how I was able to get so many people to use the money I created, but traditionally people talk about ‘barter’ and how money was created to make it easier to buy and sell. The problem with this hypothesis is there doesn’t seem to be any evidence that this is actually how money came about.

Actually, we don’t have any written evidence of how money came about—mostly because it appears that money created writing in the first place! We know this because the very first writing of any sort comes from the discovery of old tax and accounting records.

Without having any written records of the first money, we can probably assume that it was created the same way that almost every other type of money was—through taxation.

Many years ago I took a course titled ‘Intro to the 3rd World’. One of the many interesting things I learned from the instructor (may she be doing well—I remember her fondly) was how colonial governments forced subsistence farmers to grow cash crops for export to Europe. Simply put, the administration started taxing the people and refused to accept anything but government currency. This meant that peasants who were self-sufficient until then had to find some way to get hard currency or else risk some sort of punitive action against them. And that could take the form of taking away their lands, burning their food crops, cutting off people’s hands, etc—depending on how brutal the colonial authorities wanted to be.

The same sort of thing happened in Europe. A king would start levying taxes and when people had to find the money to pay him, they’d have to accept the money he created when he wanted to buy things from them. And in Europe up until surprising recently, many rulers were able to buy things using split pieces of wood, known as tally sticks.

Here’s a modern recreation:

If you look at it, it’s a piece of wood that has a larger part (the ‘stock’) and a smaller part (the ‘foil’ or ‘stub’). The larger part was held by whomever sold the product or service. It was something like an IOU. The marks on the tally stick tell you how much it is worth:

a curved notch, about the width of a thumb, represented £100. To the right of this in the picture, a ”V” is incised. This represents £20. To the right of that, with “the width of a ripe barleycorn” is a notch representing £1. Two further notches to the right, of diminishing widths, represent 1 shilling and 1 penny respectively. The total value of the tally in the picture is £121 plus 1 shilling and 1 penny.

The Secret History of the Tally Stick

The back of the tally stick would have writing on it identifying the person who sold the goods, who bought it, and other details that allowed the tax man to figure out which stock fit which foil:

Because of the splits, grain, etc, on the tally stick it was impossible to change the amount on either stick without it becoming extremely obvious when it was time to match them together. This prevented fraud. The people who held the ‘stock’ (yes, this is where the term ‘stockholder’ comes from) were able to transfer them to a third party in exchange for goods or services—which is what makes this money.

This is how it would work. The king decides to buy grain, pigs, swords, wood, etc, with tally sticks. Because he’s the king—well, people have to accept the tally sticks whether they like them or not. At the same time, he is taxing people in his country. Because he accepts transferable tally sticks (although he’ll take gold if people have and wish to use it—which most won’t because people like to hold onto precious metals if they can), people who have more tally sticks than they need for taxes can then use them to buy stuff they need from other people who either don’t have anything at all to pay the taxes, or they have gold but don’t want to give it to the king unless they have nothing else.

When the tax collector comes around, he gets a tally stick in payment and makes a record of who used it to pay their taxes and which foil or stub this stock was split from. That way, he can check the records to see whether or not this is a real tally stick and not a fake. And, whether or not the amount on the stock matches the amount on the foil. This system was remarkably effective and only completely ceased to used in England in the early 19th century (Secret History).

The only place where this system falls apart is with regard to international trade. The tally sticks of England weren’t worth much to a mercenary or merchant from Flanders. They wanted to be paid in gold. I assume that’s the part of medieval finance that involved Kings going into debt with money traders and gold smiths. (Which is what most history books fixate upon.) But in actual fact, while this was important for the parties involved—the actual currency of the kingdom, tally sticks, were more important to the economy of day-to-day life.

I have a tip jar too!

Beyond Tally Sticks and Paper Money

It isn’t just tally sticks that get pulled out of thin air by the government. Nowadays it’s numbers on a computer. I’ve posted below a clip from a YouTube video by L. Randall Wray—who is a leading academic proponent of a school of economics called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The whole video is an introduction to Modern Monetary Theory for lay people. It’s over 1 hour long, so I won’t try to put it into this article. But here’s a short clip where he describes how money actually gets created by the US government—the same way other countries with their own currencies (like Canada) do too.

I suspect the above is a lot for most readers to process. (I know I had to watch this short video several times to begin to really understand what he’s saying.) I don’t want to overwhelm people, so I’m going leave things at that. If you have the time and inclination, I’d suggest taking a look at the full-length video. You might find it mind-blowing.

In my next article in this series I’m going to try to explain the policy implications of this new way of looking at money and government spending. When I started doing this research I found it totally exploded my understanding of what government can do. And I mean in an extremely good way.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Of course, it’s a mug’s game to care about what a total stranger might think about you. The fact is, I could have been totally missing what she really meant. Moreover, I don’t think I need to take any grief from someone who wrote press releases for big businesses. But the experience got me thinking. Why exactly do I write these articles? Am I really a journalist—or something else?

First things first, take a look at the following clipping from the now defunct Guelph Mercury. (If you click on the photo, you’ll get something big enough to read.)

This is one of the weekly columns I wrote for three years. I had a 800 word hole to fill in the paper, and I found I could generally fill it quite nicely by doing a little background research.

Generally the source of my inspiration was an article I’d read somewhere that espoused some ‘conventional wisdom’ that fit into the current Overton Window—but really pissed me off. I found that if I went back to original sources or did some simple back-of-an-envelope math, the narratives that I read in newspapers and magazines would often turn out to be nonsense. This isn’t a type of writing that most reporters or journalists usually do. They tend to be running pillar to post hammering out stories that are based on quotes from experts or the people involved. This sort of workload doesn’t give journalists the time to think about what exactly is being said, or to look up info from a source book to test it’s truthfulness. (Indeed, years ago I bumped into an editor from the old Mercury and he mentioned that I was ‘the conscience’ of Guelph for many years. I had no idea that he thought about me that way.)

Moreover, at that time it was very much not allowed for a journalist to come up with information that contradicted a quote or implied someone being quoted was lying or didn’t know what he was talking about. I think most editors would have said doing something like that would be evidence of ‘bias’—and that was a total no-no in mainstream journalism. Indeed, in retrospect, I probably only got away with what I did because I gave the paper those columns in exchange for nothing more than a subscription to the paper and because it was just considered ‘opinion’. Mainstream editors generally think ‘anything goes’ on the Op Ed (Opposite to the Editorial) page—which for once worked in my favour. (I still get outraged by the nonsense I read in Op Eds—they are often liberally salted with lies and ignorance.)

So as a columnist and Op Ed writer I was allowed to do a type of critical research that, for one reason or another, wasn’t part of conventional reporting or journalism. I think I do much the same thing now with this blog. Sometimes I dig up numbers, graphs, and quotes from experts to poke holes in confabulation I routinely see being spouted by politicians. Here’s an example:

Other times, I dig into my main source of personal inspiration—ancient Chinese philosophy. In these articles I talk about how basic ways people think about life, the universe, and everything (to quote Douglas Adams) can totally trip-up or make sense of their understanding of complex modern issues. Here’s an example:

Like the way I write? Buy a book!

I think the above says what I do, but the obvious next question is why do I do it? I only have a small number of paid subscribers (10 on Substack, plus a 2 or 3 on Patreon)—so it’s not for the money (although what I get helps). I do have a growing readership that is ever so slowly closing in on 200. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to famous people who can bring in many more. (Naomi Klein recently joined Substack and she already has over 45,000 readers.) In the attention economy, I’m a pauper.

The short answer is probably because I have to write every day. It’s a spiritual practice for me. It forces me to learn new skills such as sound and video editing, and how to dig up information using ‘open source’ techniques. If I didn’t do this I’d have never learned about the Wayback Machine or how to access time-stamped satellite images using Google Earth Pro. Learning new things keeps me young and humble.

It also forces me to think issues through clearly and precisely. The old adage says ‘if you can’t explain yourself you don’t know what you are talking about’—and it’s true. Good writing is all about this. Early on, I decided to follow the writing style used by three people: George Orwell, Mohandas Gandhi, and Leo Tolstoy. The thing about all three of these people comes from their intrinsic idealism. They never let themselves get in the way of what they were writing about. They weren’t pushing an agenda. They weren’t trying to be ‘artistic’. They weren’t trying to be outrageous to sell more books. They didn’t try to be ‘witty’. They didn’t use big fancy words to show their erudition. They didn’t try to show themselves in the best light. They didn’t even try all that hard to be consistent. They were just trying to make sense of the world they saw around them and explain it to their readers.

One thing I learned while I was an activist is genuine, honest effort is rarely wasted. I’m not about to suggest some sort of mechanism for this—like karma. But I have found time and time again that even when I thought what I was saying or doing wasn’t appreciated by anyone, a person would come along and set me right. For example, I met my beloved wife through my blogging. As I said above, one of the editors at the paper I used to write for called me ‘the conscience of Guelph’. This always kinda creeped me out, as I have always shied away from praise. That’s simply because I wasn’t raised with much of it and can be extremely ‘needy’ if I’m not careful. But after an initial flash of anxiety, I always felt really good when someone said I’d helped—at least a little.

I once had an economics professor from Japan contact me out of the blue. He was in Canada for some reason and he wanted to interview me. (He’d heard of me, read some stuff on-line, and wanted to meet me face-to-face.) I mentioned that I was a little burnt-out from my experience running various community development projects—including a local currency scheme (his area of interest). He told me that I should never consider what I was doing a waste even if I couldn’t get it to be self-sustaining. He said that any attempt to raise people’s consciousness or help them learn how to work together creates positive energy in a community. And that will lead to unplanned and unexpected benefits.

When I remembered this talk and wrote down the above I immediately thought of that scene from the movie Schindler’s List where the people Oscar Schindler had saved from the Holocaust made a ring and engraved on it a piece of Talmudic wisdom: Anyone who saves a life is as if he had saved an entire world. I’ve saved at least one person’s life for sure and possibly a couple more. I know what a rush it can be. But there are more ways to help people than simply saving them from death. Being in the grips of a delusion is a kind of ‘mini-death’. And I’d like to think that at least once in a while I’ve been able to disperse some delusions.

I have a tip jar too!

I don’t particularly like the word ‘faith’. It’s been so horribly misused by people that it’s developed terrible associations in many people’s minds. ‘Hope’ also has been twisted by cynical people who sneer about it and suggest it’s a delusion of the weak. But I don’t know how to explain why I keep on trying to do the right thing other than to say it’s the only way I know how to keep my sanity and self-respect. As long as I have the strength I will probably continue to hammer out these articles. Maybe that’s just inertia on my part. But it is what gives my life meaning.

One last thing. I’m trying to figure out what people who read this blog like. I’m not about to start twisting myself into a pretzel to try to become ‘big’, but a certain amount of feedback might help me come up with something that people enjoy more. To that end, I’m going to try to use a new feature on Substack to ask questions once in a while. If you have anything in particular you’d like to say—just use the comments feature on the post.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

[I originally wrote this because of a dumb argument I had with one of my significant other’s friends when I was visiting her in the US. It’s not really terribly topical now in any direct sense, but it does illustrate something that is really important. That’s the way a lot of people in public office and online twist words in strange ways to promote ideas and behaviours that would never pass the ‘sniff test’ if people were clear and precise in their language. As a result, I think this issue is definitely something that fits into what I’m trying to do with this blog. I also think it’s important to understand that this has been going on for so long that Confucius talked about it! WDH]

Recently I did an experiment where I used two social media sites---FaceBook and Quora---to ask why so many Americans say that they don’t live in a “democracy”, but instead a “republic”. That is to say, why do many Americans believe that there is a contradiction between the two words---that a country can be a “democracy” or a “republic”---but not both at the same time.

I ask this because if you look up the Google definition of both terms, you will find the following:

de·moc·ra·cy
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives
re·pub·lic
a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives, and which has an elected or nominated president rather than a monarch

If anyone knows much about systems of government, it is obvious that these two terms are orthogonal. That is to say, they refer to fundamentally different issues---which means that they aren’t the sort of concepts that can contradict each other. An example of two orthogonal concepts are the class of an vehicle and the company that made it. So two classes of vehicles are “car” and “pickup truck”, and, two companies that make them can be “Datsun” or “Ford”. That is, a car can be either a Datsun or a Ford, and, both of these companies produce both cars and pickups. It simply isn’t a case of “either it is a Datsun or it is a pickup”, or “either it is a Ford or it is a car”. So, China is a republic, but not a democracy. Canada is a democracy, but it is not a republic. And, the USA is both a democracy and a republic.

If you try to explain this in an American context, you get a bunch of responses. One of the more common ones is to suggest that the only real meaning of “democracy” is “a government without any form of elected representation”. The word “democracy” for them means “a system where every single issue is decided directly through popular referendums”. Another popular statement that they make is that in a “republic” there are constitutional laws that protect the rights of individuals against the capricious will of the majority.

When I try to work through the implications of these idiosyncratic definitions of both terms, I find that there are lots of strange results. For example, what is a “representative democracy” if you simply define “democracy” as only being exercised through referendum? Does that mean that all the nations of the world that have elected representatives aren’t really “democracies”? Wouldn’t arguing this case be committing tremendous violence to the common understanding of the concept?

In addition, the idea that only a “republic” has legal protections for minorities against the fickle decisions of the majority is also a bizarre reading of the term. Nations that specifically say that they are not republics---such as Canada, Sweden, Great Britain, etc---do have things like constitutions, Supreme Courts and so on that protect individuals from bad legislation. In contrast both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China---both of which call themselves republics and fit the dictionary definition---have terrible reputations when it comes to protecting the rights of individuals when they annoy the powerful. Moreover, what exactly is it about the difference between elected legislators and popular referendums (if we accept that this is the distinction between a republic and a democracy) that ensures protection of minorities? Surely it is just as possible for elected legislators to deny individual rights as the general public in a referendum? The Jim Crow laws in the Southern US that kept blacks under the thumb of the white majority were not passed by popular referendum, but rather by elected representatives in a state legislature governed by a constitution based on recognized law.

Most of the responses I got from my question were of the sort mentioned above. I found this interesting, but the real issue I was trying to deal with was “why do so many Americans believe this?”, not “how do they justify this way of thinking?”. As far as I know, no one outside of the US uses the words “democracy” and “republic” in these ways. They use the standard dictionary definitions that I gave in the beginning of this essay.

When I asked one person why his definition was so different from a standard dictionary one, he replied that the new dictionaries are wrong, and it is necessary to check older ones. When I went on to ask him where specifically he got this idea from, he said that he got the info directly from the “Founding Fathers”, although he didn’t suggest a specific document. Another woman simply said that America has a different “culture” than other nations, and she likes it that way---. Several others just agreed that it is an idiosyncratic definition, but it helped people understand the limitations of extreme democracy, so it is a good way of understanding the terms.

One person who understood what I was trying to learn from the question said that these odd definitions come from the Republican party because it wants to justify ignoring the opinions of the majority of voters. Another said that this is a distinction dreamed up to encourage people to think the names of the two major parties represent really different ideas about how the country should be run: Republicans support the rule of law, and, Democrats support mob rule.

Like the way I write? Buy a book!

Finally one fellow suggested that “point zero” for all of this can be traced to a video tape put out by the John Birch Society. He provided me with a link that ended in a pay wall, but a little more effort and I found the following video which seems to get to the heart of the issue. (I’m going to be discussing a lot of what goes on in this video, so take a good look at it if you can.) [I’ve edited-out some tea-party nonsense at the end—simply because it has nothing to do with the point I’m trying to make and it verges on being racist. WDH]

Let me start by stating that the above is a piece of very effective propaganda. And like all very good propaganda, it doesn’t work by telling the viewer absolute falsehoods. Instead, what it does is manipulate the way people think about issues by leaving out crucial issues while at the same time suggesting that they have completely explained the state of affairs. Propaganda is often most effective by what it doesn’t say, instead of what it does. To understand this point, consider one of the first ideas introduced in the video.

At about the 0:35 point, the narrator discusses what people routinely call “the political spectrum”---communism on the left, fascism on the right---and suggests that it is all wrong. He says at about 1:15 that people who call NAZIS and fascists ‘right wing’ “never define their terms”, and instead argues that the key issue in left versus right is the amount of power that a government has over an individual.

The video is correct to a limited extent. It is true that some people often throw around the words “left”, “right”, and, “fascist” without really clearly defining what they are talking about. But the John Birch solution is no answer either. The idea of “left” versus “right” comes from a specific moment in the French revolution where the representatives of various political factions were seated either to the left or right of the President of the Assembly. As such, it has continued as a very rough way of articulating where a specific individual or party sits in relation to others. The problem that arises, of course, is that politics is so complicated that it is impossible to accurately map any particular political system on one single axis. Indeed, I’d suggest that it is probably impossible to accurately map all human political tendencies in any sort of two-dimensional map.

The left/right spectrum that is introduced in the video suggests that communism should be on the left and fascism on the right. But it is important to understand that this only deals with one or two variables: nationalism and corporate ownership. The Axis powers of WW2 gave great power to the major corporations in their countries: for example, Krupp, Fiat, and, Mitsubishi. In addition, all three were tremendously involved in an extreme nationalist colonial agenda: Lebensraum for the Germans, recreating the Roman Empire for the Italians, and, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere for the Japanese. In contrast, communism believes in state ownership of the means of production, which means elimination of all privately-own corporations. It is also internationalist in orientation, which means that it doesn’t support the creation of empires specifically for the benefit of one particular nationality. (I know—Stalin and Eastern Europe. But I’m talking here about what the of each says instead of the actual behaviour. And what Communist Russia did to Poland was nowhere near what NAZI Germany did.)

The spectrum that video introduces is based on a totally different set of criteria: relative power of the state versus the individual. This is a perfectly legitimate move---but only if you understand that you are switching what is being measured. What makes this video propaganda is the subtle move to suggest that the first spectrum is wrong and the second one right, instead of saying that they each measure something totally different. Political scientists are quite aware of the problems of the left/right way of measuring different tendencies, which is why they have attempted to come up with various other ways of encapsulating differences in easily understood graphics.

This map separates out the role of ownership in differentiating Marxism from Fascism on one axis, but on another one it brings them together on how each deals with personal freedom. Please note, that this particular graphic doesn’t deal with the relative role that nationalism plays in various political tendencies. That’s the problem with these sorts of things---no matter how hard someone tries, they end up leaving something really important out. The problem with the video’s depiction of this spectrum isn’t that it says anything particularly wrong, it just leaves out an enormous amount of complexity and implies that what has been said pretty much exhausts the issue.

The video goes on to make an argument in favour of there being a radical split between democracy and republicanism that brings in several similarly wildly over-simplified descriptions of reality. I hope that I’ve already shown how whomever posted this video is manipulating the naive into believing something false in order to promote their agenda.

I also have a tip jar!

I’ve put forward this modern example to illustrate a point from Confucius’ Analects that has direct bearing on modern society. In Chapter XIII, part three, of David Hinton’s translation we read:

Adept Lu said: “If the Lord of Wei wanted you to govern his country, what would you put first in importance?”

“The rectification of names,” replied the Master. “Without a doubt.”

“That’s crazy!” countered Lu. “What does rectification have to do with anything?”

“You’re such an uncivil slob,” said the Master. “When the noble-minded can’t understand something, they remain silent.

“Listen. If names aren’t rectified, speech doesn’t follow from reality. If speech doesn’t follow from reality, endeavors never come to fruition. If endeavors never come to fruition, then Ritual and music cannot flourish. If Ritual and music cannot flourish, punishments don’t fit the crime. If punishments don’t fit the crime, people can’t put their hands and feet anywhere without fear of losing them.

“Naming enables the noble-minded to speak, and speech enables the noble-minded to act. Therefore, the noble-minded are anything but careless in speech.”

Chapter XIII, part three, Analects, David Hinton trans.

To a certain extent, I’ve tried to do a little “rectification of names” in this post with regard to the terms “democracy” and “republic”. I’m concerned about the confusion that surrounds these words, because how ordinary people understand these two concepts has tremendous impact on what they expect from their society. If people associate “democracy” with mob rule, they are not going to be as upset if the influence of ordinary people declines in society. And if they believe the existing legal structure should trump the aspirations and needs of common folk, it will be easier to convince them they shouldn’t expect help from government for their problems. The John Birch Society definitions ultimately support an elitist vision of society where the legal right of the wealthy to own property effectively trumps every other value that people support. If they can control the definition of words that people use to understand politics, they will have already won half the battle to convert the USA into a Plutocracy or Fascism.

3 comments:

Galen Pearl said...

Wow, you are not kidding about researching your posts! This was quite educational. I also read your last post about tai chi sword practice, which I do myself and really enjoy. Watching Game of Thrones does make me wonder how my sword skills, such as they are, would serve me in battle. I think I would rather have a dragon!

The Cloudwalking Owl said...

Thanks for your kind comments. I suspect dragons are very expensive to feed, so I’d pass on having one myself.

Steve Higgins said...

Re-posting this.

One of my Republican friends made that distinction: republic vs. democracy.

I only appreciated the distinction when I read that James Madison, primary framer of the Constitution of the U.S.A., stated that the function of the Electoral College was to protect the perquisites of the opulent from the political will of the masses.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

• the new proposed pipeline that would bring more Albertan oil to ships in Burnaby, British Columbia

• a new pipeline from Alberta to Sarnia, Ontario

• a new natural gas terminal in Churchill Manitoba to ship liquified natural gas to Europe (as part of the deal to buy new submarines from Norway and Germany)

In the past, I’d have raised some issues about the viability of all of these projects. I would have suggested

• it makes no sense to build a new pipeline to BC because the only way to use it would be by dramatically expand production of tar sands—and that would raise the cost of the oil to the point where it would be the ‘first dropped’ from the global market once total use of old declines due to decarbonization

• there’s no sense building a pipeline to Sarnia when we need to get off fossil fuels in the long haul, and the current pipeline through Michigan works just fine

• why would anyone go to the trouble of shipping gas through Hudson’s Bay when massive pipelines already exist connecting Europe to Russian gas and the Suez Canal makes shipments by sea fast and convenient?

I won’t raise those now because the rules of the game have effectively changed.

The three fossil fuel delivery systems that I’ve itemized above all have one thing in common—they are placing resilience and independence ahead of efficiency.

Getting rid of Canada’s Oil Discount

As you can see from the above chart, the US imports a lot Crude oil from Canada.

But recently, we’ve started shipping to some other places.

Part of the reason why this is important to consider is because the US tends to purchase Canadian oil at a significant discount. There are several reasons for this:

• transportation costs: it costs more to ship oil through a pipeline than it does through an oil tanker

• the pipelines to the refineries travel through several different state jurisdictions, many of which charge money for the right-of-way

• US refineries tend to operate in a saturated market, which means they have a lot of leeway in choosing which oil to buy—which places Canadian oil in a negotiating disadvantage

The creation of a second pipeline to British Columbia would allow sales to diversify and let Alberta’s oil to chase the world price instead of selling at a permanent discount because it’s ‘locked into’ a relationship with American refineries. That’s more money for Canada plus less leverage by the US over our future.

Protecting Sarnia From American Politics

The pipeline through Michigan that allows Canadian oil to get to Sarnia has been under threat of closure by politicians who are concerned about potential leaks in an underwater pipeline that runs under the Strait of Mackinaw. There are also issues with US First Nations who are concerned about the on-going effects of the pipeline on their communities.

Building a new pipeline that runs exclusively through Canada will remove all the uncertainty that arises from running such a critical part of the economy through another nation. This is not a trivial issue, because if the American government decides to screw-around with that pipeline (like it’s currently doing with the Gordie Howe bridge), Canada’s manufacturing ‘heartland’ could face some very difficult times.

Protecting Europeans From Freezing in the Dark

One of the ‘inducements’ that Canada has gained from it’s recent agreement with Norway and Germany to purchase a fleet of submarines is that Germany is committed to building a liquified natural gas terminal so Canadian gas can be shipped to Europe through Hudson’s Bay. Building these ports will require long-term commitments by European nations to buy the gas, but since they are already negotiating to buy gas shipped through British Columbia, it doesn’t stretch the imagination to believe that they would be happy to buy it from a much closer source. Europe needs to diversify it’s supply because it has been hit by ‘double whammies’—first because of Russia’s war on Ukraine and then by American’s war on Iran. The idea is Canada is a source they can trust a lot more.

I have a tip jar!

Resilience and Independence are the New Efficiencies

The thing tying all three of these proposals together is the idea that nations and peoples have needs that are simply not being met by a purely market-driven energy supply.

The first of these is the need for resilience. We first became aware of this during the COVID pandemic when we realized that Canada no longer had an ability to mass-produce vaccines, we also had no local suppliers of more mundane medical items—like respirator masks. This left us having to bring in crash programs to fill gaps and also the need to beg other countries for things we should have been able to produce ourselves. This is especially ridiculous as there was no objective reason for this situation. It was simply a case of the government leaning on the old canard that ‘the market will come up with a more efficient solution’.

This also came up during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Europe found itself in the absurd situation of being staunch supporters of one side of the conflict while at the same time paying tens of billions of Euros to the other side in order to heat their homes and power their industry. A lot of this has been scaled-back, but there was a lot of Russian gas heating European homes until quite recently.

“Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Europe has made significant progress in terms of energy independence. Imports of Russian oil and gas have decreased substantially, with gas imports dropping from 45% in 2021 to 18% in 2024,” said Thomas Pellerin-Carlin, EU Parliament member, in a comment for the report.

“However, a quarter of Russia’s fossil fuel export revenues still come from Europe.”

EU imports of Russian fossil fuels exceeded aid to Ukraine in third year of the Russian invasion, report says, Kyiv Independent, Feb 24, 2025

Ukraine blew up the Nord Stream pipeline to Europe—which ‘helped along’ the situation, but there are still parts of Europe using Russian natural gas.

Russia’s share of EU imports of pipeline gas dropped from around 40% in 2021 to around 6% in 2025. For pipeline gas and LNG combined, Russia accounted for around 12% of total EU gas imports in 2025.

In January 2026, the Council adopted a regulation to prohibit both LNG and pipeline gas imports from Russia starting from 18 March 2026, with transition periods for existing contracts. By the end of 2027, all Russian gas imports will be prohibited.

Where does the EU’s gas come from?, from the European Council website

Europe went through a difficult winter as it attempted to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels. And now Europe finds itself in a similar problem because their new sources—much from the Middle East—is cut off because of the on-going war between the USA and Iran.

The thing is, free markets define ‘efficiency’ totally differently than most people would. A system that leads to a country not being able to count on having vaccines or other critical medical supplies during a pandemic isn’t ‘efficient’ in human terms. Nor is one where you are forced to send tens of billions of Euros every year to an enemy while it’s engaged in a bitter war with an important ally. But in short-term, capitalist, thinking any sort of ‘preparing for a rainy day’ is just wasted productivity. Well, we’ve all been learning lately that no matter how long the sun shines upon us, rainy days are sure to come.

We’ve also all learned that we simply cannot trust old friends to continue to be old friends. As Mark Carney said in the much-viewed speech at Davos,

But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Canada and Europe have learned that it is foolish to put short-term ‘efficiency’ ahead of long-term ‘resilience’ and ‘independence’. That’s why we are all trying to quickly pivot away from the great powers and the free market, and instead build a political, military, and economic alliance of the middle-power democracies of the world. Part of that includes Canada being seen as the ‘safe, dependable’ source of fossil fuels. And that means nations in both Europe and Asia are becoming willing to lock-in contracts with us in order to create a fuel source that won’t evaporate when some lunatic with a huge army decides to play Risk with real people’s lives.

The End of the Neo-liberal Consensus

I suspect the reason why Carney’s speech at Davos was so galvanizing was because he ‘said the quiet part out loud’. For decades people have been assuming that free-market capitalism had finally proved that it was the best system for increasing human happiness. Our Prime Minister hasn’t come out and said the second part—I’m not even sure he would like what I’m about to say—but neo-liberalism is coming to an end.

There’s no capitalist argument for any of these projects coming down the pipeline. We already have pipelines to US refineries. Alberta oil is already getting to Sarnia. And the Europeans can buy all the oil they need from Russia and the Middle-East. The problem these projects answer isn’t economic, it’s political. Canada simply cannot trust the USA anymore. That means we need to get our important infrastructure unhooked from them ASAP. Similarly, the Europeans can’t trust either Russia or the Middle-East anymore. But they do trust us. That’s Canada’s ‘value added’ we bring to the table—we aren’t jerks who push around others (probably, simply because we couldn’t if we wanted).

When trust becomes such a rare commodity that people are willing to pay extra for it, Canada starts becoming a ‘player’ on the world scene. Nations all around the world trust Canada in a way they will never trust the US. We’re like the corn farmer in Field of Dreams. All we have to do is build the infrastructure and ‘they will come’.

People sometimes go on about the ‘miracle of capitalism’, how the ‘free hand’ of the marketplace will solve all problems. Well, no. What capitalism is good at is reductionism. That is, they can take complex human phenomenon and abstract-out a lot of important issues (like, for example, human rights, inequality, and the environment), and then change society without considering all the harms that will happen in the process.

The job of predicting and trying to either avoid or fix social harm from economic activity is the task of democracy and politics. And politicians since the time of Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Regan, and Brian Mulroney have retreated from their responsibilities and instead handed-off their power to the marketplace. That, in a nutshell, was neo-liberalism. And what Mark Carney has been doing with his endless trips around the world in his government jet is effectively ending neo-liberalism and replacing it with agreements between democratic governments that are creating an international trading system that actually includes important issues like trust, independence, and resiliency.

But What About the Environment?

The more I think about it, the more I think that a lot of environmental good can come out of these things.

When I was a ‘mover and shaker’ in the Green Party of Canada (moderatedly-sized fish, tiny pond) I came up with a proposal to deal with the Climate Emergency through a consumer carbon tax. (I might have been the first Canada in any party to do so.) At the time, I was a little less disgusted with capitalism. But mainly, I didn’t see any other proposal that even had a hope of being adopted by any of the other parties. It eventually was. (This is the value of ginger parties—like the Greens—they can float new ideas and if they gain traction might get adopted by a government some day.)

But a consumer carbon tax turned out to be simply too hard to explain to ordinary voters. The idea that the tax was just to get them to change their behaviour never seemed to be something a lot of people could figure out. They just saw it as yet another tax. I’ve since come to the conclusion that it was asking too much of someone who is just getting by to think about changing how they live to save money. And a lot of people who actually would have a lot of disposable income if they didn’t waste it on geegaws believe they are just hanging on too—so they won’t even try either.

And the idea that poor folks would eventually get more back than they paid for with the carbon tax doesn’t connect. If every poor person could figure out how to make not getting something NOW work so they get more LATER—there’d be no pay-day loans or companies that fill-out your taxes for a percentage of the return. As in so many of my ideas, my carefully-reasoned, brilliant policy idea foundered on the fact that people’s lives are, well, complicated.

It’s the same thing about what happens between nations. We’ve tied our auto sector to the United States, which means they effectively get a veto over any attempt to transition away from internal combustion engines in cars. If anyone has any doubts, what do you think would have happened if Canada hadn’t agreed to president Biden’s insistence that we slap a 100% import duty on Chinese cars? I suspect I’d see a lot of cheap, excellent, Chinese EVs on the roads right now. Of course, a lot of Canadian auto workers would have screamed bloody murder even without Biden’s tariffs. But that’s an artifact of being dependent on another nation too. Wouldn’t Ottawa have a lot more room to maneuver if so many workers in Ontario didn’t work for the American automotive industry? When we’re joined at the hip with the USA, we don’t get to choose where we’re headed.

Time and time again in my lifetime, the USA has been one of the agents sabotaging anything like a move towards a more sustainable world. It’s like a giant lamprey eel sucking the life out of every transnational agreement. We won’t be able to really move on the climate file until they stop sabotaging every agreement we try to get done.

Paradoxically, if Canada, Europe, and the democracies of the world get the independence to forge their own vision of a sustainable world economy we might actually get things moving in the USA a lot faster. That’s because I believe that more efficiency, less wealth stratification, and a better quality of life are integral to a sustainable future. And once one group of nations gets down that path towards a better future, the pressure will build among ordinary folks to try to have the same things in the USA.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Friday, May 26, 2017

In Hinton’s translation of the Mencius I’ve gotten to chapter VII, or, Book One of Li Lou. I think it’s especially apropos to what is currently happening in Washington.

Mencius starts off by emphasizing the importance of tradition to a good ruler. It isn’t enough to just set out with good intentions, a ruler has to follow the “Way”---or traditions---that has been set by previous leaders. He quotes an unattributed saying:

Virtue alone isn’t enough for government,

and law cannot alone put itself into action.

The point is emphasized by an analogy with skilled craftsmen. Even the best of them rely upon tools like a compass or square to draw their circles and right angles. In the same way, a leader needs to rely upon the traditions of his predecessors in order to get things done. I’m going to argue that what Mencius is talking about is also directly applicable to government bureaucracies. Those are the ‘compasses’ and ‘squares’ that rulers us to govern their societies.

I’d ask readers to try to understand how a government bureaucracy works. Ultimately, it is a huge collection of people who have been hired to make sure that certain policies will be acted upon. And the problem is that getting something done is always a lot more difficult than people think. This requires expertise and myriads of individual choices being made by individual bureaucrats. And to do this, every government requires honest, patriotic high officials who have a great deal of authority delegated to them by the sovereign. In effect, every complex society requires a class of Mandarins.

“Mandarin” is the Portuguese/English word that we use to describe the scholar/officials that governed ancient China for centuries. When I was young, it was also the word that Canadians routinely use to describe the higher officials in our government bureaucracy, though I’ve never heard an American call any of their officials “Mandarins”. Even so, the United States also has had it’s own officials who were supposed to put the good of the nation ahead of their own personal interests—or even their loyalty to the president or political party.

Like the way I write? Buy a book!

While it true that this is sometimes more of an ideal than an actuality, this was something a lot of mandarins—both ancient and modern—probably lived up to in one way or another. If you want to know how deep this notion goes in Chinese society, consider the example of dragon boat races.

This is one of those Chinese cultural things that has become popular all over the world. But I doubt if many of the Westerners manning the paddles know where this tradition comes from. As the story goes, during the warring states period after a lifetime of striving for the good of his kingdom, a mandarin named Qu Yuan drowned himself in despair after being repeatedly thwarted by his king. The race supposedly recreates ordinary working boatmen who saw what he was doing and raced to the scene as quickly as possible in an attempt to save him.

This tradition encapsulates the idea that ideally mandarins—and by extension, all bureaucrats—shouldn’t work for the head of state, but rather the entire citizenry, like Qu Yuan.

It’s a commonplace nowadays for people to be upset with bureaucracies and believe that they get in the way of governments ‘doing things’. I often bitch about this myself. But as I see it, the problem isn’t bureaucracy itself, or even the people who work for it. Instead, the friction comes from the often impossible goals and rules that our governments saddle them with—and/or because of chronic under-funding. The fact is, without bureaucrats nothing the government does anywhere would be possible. We’d have no socialized medicine, military, schools, unemployment insurance, roads, etc. When I think about all the different services I use as a citizen of a moderately social-democratic state it’s obvious that I am lucky to have as good mandarins as I do in Canada.

This only works if society follows the ideal that the sovereign is not above the law. No one---not even the US President---is supposed to be able to stop an independent official from doing his job. This is essential if we are going to have a world where the head of state needs to be watched over so he doesn’t commit crimes while in office.

Unfortunately, during Donald Trump’s second term of office it appears that the Supreme Court believes that in at least some ways the president really is above the law. First, in 2024 they ruled that he has immunity from prosecution for any wrong-doing he does as part of his ‘official acts’. (They didn’t specify what that means.) And in 2026 they ruled that he has the authority to remove department heads (ie: mandarins) without just cause from almost all the independent agencies of government. What this means is, in effect, they have dramatically reduced the ways the mandarinate can reign-in the power of a president like Trump when he wants to do something illegal, immoral, dumb, or venal.

The principle that the sovereign is not above the law, came about at least in part because it is the only way to stop officials from using their power to make themselves rich at the expense of the general public. And if you look at what’s currently going on in the White House under Trump, without any sort of legal or bureaucratic checks on executive actions the corruption seems to be genuinely gob-smacking. It includes:

• selling pardons to whomever can pony up the cash

• using his own crypto currency to create an invisible way for people to channel money to him

• accepting enormous gifts (like a 747 jumbo jet that Qatar gave him), even though this is expressly forbidden by the US constitution

• insider stock trading based on his knowledge of proposed policy announcements

Added all together, some researchers have estimated that he has increased his personal wealth by a jaw-dropping $3 billion since he took office in 2024.

I have a tip jar too!

Beyond the basic corruption, it is tremendously important for an efficiently functioning society to create institutional “firewalls” between the politicians and the bureaucracy (eg the Mandarins). If you do not, you will have government officials “pulling strings” in order to get special favours for wealthy “friends”. This is not only unfair, it damages the economic life of a society. Business people need consistency to be able to make long-term plans. And if they have no idea how to tell if something is going to be accepted by a planning commission, for example, because the issue is settled not by legal precedent but by bribing the local official---it becomes very expensive to do many types of business.

If you wonder what I’m talking about, consider the Gordie Howe bridge. It stands completed joining Windsor to Detroit. It was built in order to clear-up a bottle-neck that slowed down the busiest international border in North America. Detroit and Windsor want it. Michigan and Ontario want it. The truck drivers want it and the auto companies want it. So why is it closed? The consensus is that the private owner of the existing toll bridge simply paid $1 million to a Trump Political Action Committee (PAC), and now the president won’t let it open.

Mencius understands the importance of following the “Way” of society to the point where he suggests that it is not only necessary, it can actually be sufficient to sustain it.

If city walls are unfinished and weapons scarce, it doesn’t spell disaster for the nation. If people aren’t plowing new fields or piling up wealth, it doesn’t spell ruin for the nation. But if a leader ignores Ritual and officials ignore learning, the people turn to banditry and rebellion, and the nation crumbles in less than a day.

This is an important point. What is at stake in the Trump Presidency isn’t the economic or military might of the United States. It isn’t even it’s influence on the world stage. These are ephemeral. What makes America “America” are such esoteric principles as the rule of law instead of the sovereign. And because these only exist insofar as the bureaucracy keeps them in existence, something that keeps America being America are the Mandarins---who should refuse to put loyalty to the President ahead of loyalty to the law.

Once the United States completely and permanently loses its ability to find and appoint honest, competent, and patriotic Mandarins to high office, it will be totally destroyed as a nation. Mencius said:

---only after a person has demeaned himself will others demean him. Only after a great family has destroyed itself will others destroy it. And only after a country has torn itself down will others tear it down. The “T”ai Chia” says: Ruin from Heaven we can weather. Ruin from ourselves we never survive.

If the USA cannot continue to find Mandarins of integrity and place them in positions of responsibility, the nation will be destroyed. It is that simple. We have to see who will win in this battle between demagoguery and integrity.

3 comments:

ArtDeco said...

Hello

Thank you for a well thought out essay on the present drama from Washington. I know the Tao Te Ching but not so much the works of Mencius ... was he also speaking from the warring states period like Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu ? That seems like a period of decline much like what we face from here on out. The Chinese have a history of going up and down the path of empire so many times that I can often find they have wisdom stories that sound a lot like advice for our present times.
ArtDeco

The Cloudwalking Owl said...

Yes, Mencius does come from the time of the warring states. I’ve been working through his book in this blog because I think a lot of people who are interested in Daoism are told that it is a response to a hide-bound, and idiotic philosophy known as Confucianism. I’m trying to point out that the truth is a lot more subtle. There is a lot of worth in the Confucian worldview, and Mencius is one of its key exponents. As Westerners wrestling with the ancient Chinese tradition of Daoism, it helps us to understand it if we can learn something about the context it came from.

Jun 12, 2017, 6:54:00 AM

ArtDeco said...

OK. My impression of Confucianism is probably biased by my reading Chuang Tzu who pokes fun at Confucianism (of course) as a rival philosophy - but the quotes you posted seem quite rational. I think I will find some translations and attempt to tie it together. I came at Chinese thought through the lens of Kung Fu and Tai Chi so my knowledge is very spotty. Anyway, nice post, will follow.

ArtDeco

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

Why Condominiums?

The first point to understand is while Canada is in the midst of a genuine housing crisis, it also has an oversupply of condominiums. Why?

The first thing to understand is these condos were not built for people to live in—that was just meant to be a by-product of people profiting from speculation in the housing market. If you wonder what I’m talking about, consider the following quote from a Bank of Canada report titled: What’s behind the slowdown in Toronto’s condo market.

Let’s say an investor bought a presale condo worth $1 million in 2016, putting down the $200,000 deposit up front. Just before construction wrapped up three years later, the value of the unit had increased by 40% to $1.4 million. The investor sold the unit at this new price and earned a profit of $400,000, doubling their initial investment. This average return is much stronger than more traditional investment vehicles like stocks or bonds.

But this strategy could also lead to large percentage losses. Let’s say that same condo investor in 2022 put down a $200,000 deposit to buy a presale unit valued at $1 million. Three years later, the prevailing market price had dropped to about $700,000. Despite this decline, the investor still legally owes the builder $1 million, as per the initial contract. An investor choosing to sell would then lose about $300,000—the initial deposit and then some.

As you can see, speculators were making crazy investments on the assumption that the price of housing would continue to increase to the point where they could get a huge return before the condo was even ready to live in. But, just like in a game of musical chairs, there was a point where the music stopped playing and the people who hadn’t already pulled their money out got stuck losing a lot more than what they put into it.

The people who’ve been hammered the most appear to be ‘mom and pops’ trying to save money for their retirement and who were suffering from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). They didn’t have the financial literacy to understand that they were buying into the tail end of a speculative bubble, so they ended-up ‘holding the bag’ after all the ‘slick Willies’ had already squeezed-out the last possible bit of money from the market.

As you can see, presales of condos no longer exist in the Toronto market. The speculators drove out everyone who just wanted a place to live, and now the last hogs to get on the truck are now being processed into bacon. As you can see below, anyone who bought a presold condo in hopes of selling it for a quick profit are now stuck with something they cannot sell without taking a significant loss.

These numbers are for the Toronto market, but I suspect that similar processes are at play all across the country—including British Columbia.

In response to this situation, the British Columbian and Canadian governments have announced the creation of a fund to take advantage of this situation and add some of these condos to the pool of more affordable housing. The idea is for the government to step in and buy condos at a big discount from failed speculators and then pass on the savings by selling them through rent-to-own to people who can’t afford a down-payment. This would create new a pool of housing with a lot less lag time than if they built from scratch. And it would create another source of downward pressure on a housing market by creating another option for the people who can take advantage of the program.

Like the way I write? Buy a book!

What Carney Wants to Do

Take a look at the following video from the CBC.

What’s clear to me from the above is BC and Ottawa aren’t committed to buying any particular condominiums. Instead, they are setting up a fund and a mechanism for the government to purchase distressed condos at fire-sale prices that can then be used to offer affordable housing to the public. In effect, what they are doing is trying to head-off the sort of ‘financialization’ that people say happened after the subprime mortgage crash of 2008. At that time banks had foreclosed on a lot of houses and supposedly various investment funds snapped them up for either resale or rent—simply because they had the cash reserves to take advantage of the crisis. (I’m hesitant to say that this actually happened because I’ve read some articles that suggest that this is mostly an urban myth instead of something that actually happened.) David Eby (premier of British Columbia) and Prime Minister Carney are simply saying ‘why shouldn’t the public housing pool benefit from this unique situation instead of private investors or large corporations?’

To be able to do this, however, the government has to first set-up an agency that is empowered to purchase specific individual properties when they deem the price is right. They also have to create a pool of money so this agency can snap-up a good deal when they see it. This isn’t about some sort of heavily bureaucratic program with all sorts of checks and balances that are designed to achieve specific, predictable goals by following a rote formula. Instead, it’s about empowering trusted government agents so they can be nimble enough to step in and take advantage of a deal before a speculator steps in and does it first.

The Spin We Hear

What I find interesting is the reaction by other politicians, some elements of the public, and the media. Here’s the response from the leader of the opposition Conservatives, Pierre Poilievre:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is calling on Parliament to probe Ottawa’s proposal to convert unsold condominium units in British Columbia into affordable housing.

In a letter to the House ethics committee, Poilievre says a program to possibly help finance the purchase of 2,200 vacant condos amounts to a “condo bailout” for developers, bankers and investors.

Prime Minister Mark Carney says the idea is to support Canadians needing housing, but Poilievre says the Liberals are intervening in the market to help developers who built too many condos that didn’t fit demand.

from, Poilievre asks Parliament to probe B.C. ‘condo bailout,’ says it’s blocking ‘a price correction’

And here’s the response from Avi Lewis, the leader of Canada’s federal New Democratic Party:

Finally, here’s the original question that the reporter asked in the clip I posted above where Carney explains what’s going on.

In all three cases, there’s the same assumption—that Mark Carney is just going to bale out greedy business people because that’s the way he rolls.

I’m not going to waste much time on Pierre Poilievre. As anyone who’s read my blog already knows, he lies all time. His goal is to smear Carney and get elected Prime Minister. And he sees his path to this by way of appealing to the prejudices and anger of Maple MAGA. Since he treats the voters of Canada with such contempt, I will return the favour.

Avi Lewis is more disappointing. I understand the fact that he’s trying to raise the profile of the federal New Democrats, but I’d think he should be more supportive of a provincial NDP program instead of just using it to push his riff that Carney is just a neo-liberal banker and cannot be trusted to do anything good because he ‘cares more for corporations’ than ordinary citizens.

It’s interesting that Lewis started off by describing his interview as a ‘dance’. That’s kinda revealing as that’s pretty much exactly what he does through his whole answer. Notice the words throws into his comments:

1. family housing

2. financialization

3. non-market housing

4. Brookfield, investment trusts, major corporations—as part of a lengthy word-salad tap solo

5. algorithmic pricing, surveillance pricing

Let’s take the time to deconstruct this language.

First, it’s profoundly misleading to fixate on one type of housing and suggest that any effort put into creating anything else is just a waste. I follow an excellent blog titled Vancouver Needs More Housing that uses an analogy to explain why creating more affordable housing for one strata of the population helps make housing more affordable for everyone else:

I’ve heard this idea dismissed as ‘trickle-down housing’, but once you work through the different elements of the analogy, I don’t see how anyone can’t see the point. The idea is when housing is scarce and expensive, people in different classes tend to buy or rent housing that they wouldn’t consider when things were cheaper. In effect, people start to cannibalize the housing of people who are slightly less well off. This in turn pushes those lower income people into cannibalizing the housing of those who have less money than them.

It’s like a long line of densely-packed people on a set of stairs. If someone on the top step gets pushed down to the next step, he creates a chain reaction that pushes everyone else behind him down one step. In the real estate market this manifests itself as gentrification—that’s when people higher up in the housing ladder can no longer afford to live where they’d like so they move to some other place where poorer people currently live. When the poor folks can no longer live in the gentrified building/neighbourhood, it’s their time to move somewhere poorer and push out the folks who live there. And just like a regular ladder or staircase, there’s a bottom step where people can’t go any lower without getting pushed totally off. That’s what happens when housing of last resort—’welfare hotels’, crummy rooming houses, run-down apartments, etc—gets gentrified. Really desperate people like drug addicts, the mentally-ill, etc, end-up with no place to live but on the streets.

All of these people live in a continuum. And if any particular rung or step on the ladder has it’s housing inventory increased, it’s going to have an impact on everyone on rungs below it—simply because it will lower the pressure to gentrify the existing stock of relatively lower-cost housing. This means that even if all of these units are not much more than shoe boxes, they will still incrementally help affordability for families. This is because larger apartments and whole homes are routinely used to house groups of individuals either through shared rent, or, by being made into rooming houses.

(I once lived in a single-detached home that had been made into a rooming house. On the outside, it looked just like every other single-detached home on the street. But the owner had installed an illegal apartment in the basement that was only accessible through the kitchen. The enclosed back porch was a rented to someone to sleep in—chilly in the winter! As was the living room. It was a gruesome place to live. So yeah, there are people who would rather live in a shoe box condo than a place like that.)

Second, it’s not fair to talk about ‘financialisation’ in this context because what Eby is proposing is specifically not about a large corporation buying-up these unsold condos. In fact, that is what might very well be what happens if the BC government (with federal support) doesn’t buy these units.

Lewis also talks about the need to build ‘non-market housing’—and talks about things like ‘supportive housing’ and ‘co-ops’. I understand this idea because wealth stratification has created a huge number of people who simply cannot ever reasonably be expected to afford to live in any for-profit housing. But raising this point in this context is a ‘whataboutism’. That is, it’s responding to one particular problem (ie: working people who can’t afford to buy a home) by pointing at another one (ie: distressed folks who cannot afford any housing at all). It’s like saying to someone suffering from malnutrition that they should be glad they haven’t starved to death.

In addition, there’s a side to non-market housing that most people don’t think about. People who live in Canadian housing co-ops never get any equity. That means they end up paying rent their entire lives. And if they need to move to another place for work or any other reason they won’t get a penny of equity for all the years they lived in a co-op. This is a tremendous burden on people because owning your own home is probably the most important hedge against poverty available to most people. In contrast to living in a housing co-op, the people buying those small condos will be getting equity which will eventually help them put a down payment on something better in the future. That’s a whole lot better than living in non-market housing.

(There are equity co-ops—I lived in an informal one for years. But when someone like Avi Lewis talks about co-ops he doesn’t mean them. That’s because there’s never been any support by any government programs for equity co-ops. Banks don’t recognize them, etc. It’s an extremely strange part of the progressive culture of Canada that they’ve never become popular enough to develop any standing under the law. What we have instead are provincial condominium acts that do somewhat similar things, but by for-profit corporations with zero interest in any organized solidarity between owners.)

Finally, Avi throws around the boogieman words: “Brookfield”, “investment trusts”, “major corporations”, “algorithmic pricing”, and “surveillance pricing”. This is rich because it misses the point that none of this probably applies to these condo units. That’s because most large corporations have in-house economists who were well-aware that these shoebox condos were not good investments. Instead, the people who bought them tended to be gullible middle-class people who decided this was a chance to convert their meager savings into enough to retire on. These owners are probably just as much victims of the housing crisis as anyone else!

If you doubt this, take a look at this quote from a Stats Canada report that spells-out just who it is that owns housing and rents it out.

If we look more broadly to all property owners in Canada with rental income (not exclusively condo owners), we find that the typical landlord in 2020 is not a faceless corporation, but a middle-aged, middle-class couple.

In 2020, just over four in five rental income earners owning any type of property were in couple families (81.0%), close to half were aged 45 to 64 years (46.7%), with approximately one-third living in the metropolitan areas of Toronto (21.2%) and Vancouver (10.7%).

Approximately two out of three rental income earners (66.0%) also received wages, salaries and commissions, similar to the share of tax filers without rental income (64.6%). However, the median wage, salary and commission income of rental income earners with wages was almost two-thirds higher in 2020 compared with tax filers without rental income ($59,800 versus $38,570).

The condo market in Toronto and Vancouver: A home, an investment and increasingly a rental property

If I can believe the above, it looks to me like financialisation is a problem. But it hasn’t been caused by huge corporations—it’s more like your aunt Hilda and uncle Ted. I suspect a documentary that showed a middle-aged school teacher in a cardigan sitting at his kitchen table as the villain just wouldn’t make as good an exposé as a corner office tycoon in a power suit.

As for the CBC reporter who insinuated that Carney is helping the provincial NDP government because his ‘developer friends’ asked him to—I’ll be generous and think that she didn’t really believe this. Instead, she was just giving Carney an opportunity to set the record straight for naive viewers.

I have a tip jar too!

Ideology and Vibes

What’s going on here? I’d suggest that Eby and Carney are trying to get some less-expensive housing onto the market ASAP. Why are so many people quick to assume they are up to something nefarious?

I assume that Poilievre is just being a jackass—that’s who he is.

I don’t assume Lewis is a jerk, so my operating hypothesis is he’s so focused on the survival of the NDP that he doesn’t think he can do anything else but pander to his base’s preconceived notions and repeat established talking-points. That’s too bad. I don’t think it helps anyone to dumb-down public discourse to memes, vibes, and ideology. I realize a lot of politicians believe that it’s impossible to explain complex issues to the public. But I would point out that part of the huge appeal of Mark Carney is he doesn’t dumb things down or randomly repeat talking points. Instead, he answers sincere questions with what I consider forthright, detailed, informative answers.

I joined the NDP because I wanted to support Avi Lewis in his attempt to make the NDP a genuine grass-roots party based on raising the consciousness of average Canadians. But part of that has to involve moving away from spouting talking-points and genuinely trying to engage with other people’s ideas—especially those put forward by provincial leaders of the same damn party! Lewis is a successful film-maker so he has to understand the importance of repeating simple, easily repeated slogans in order to create a ‘vibe’ that sticks in a viewer’s head. What I think he’s doing is bringing the same technique to federal politics. I wish he’d stop and just be a little more ‘real’. (And don’t call interviews ‘dances’—that’s a ‘tell’ that pretty much announces that everything he’s going to say from then on is an attempt to spread a predigested message instead of engaging in an honest conversation.)

People used to get furious with Justin Trudeau because he always seemed to put how he said things ahead of what he actually did. He was always so hyper-aware of how presented himself to people—right from the very beginning with his ‘sunny ways’ and the fawning CBC story about him showing his children where ‘grandpapa’s office was, and having a gender-balanced cabinet ‘because it’s 2015’. At first, I thought this artifice seemed intelligent. Now I just find it cloying and phony. He’s retired from politics. I think the attempt to use vibes and ideology to spin the news should be retired too—‘because it’s 2026’.

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!

[I’ve done a bit of editing to this post to make it more contemporary. WDH]

I’ve been thinking a lot about politics and society lately. I did an interview with a Vermont radio station as part of my feeble attempts to promote my recent book, and in the conversation a question about the idea of ‘success’ came up. In terms of radio shows and podcasts, as well as blogging and book publishing, the important issue is how many “subscribers” or “readers” you have. By that metric, both my interviewer (KMO from the C-Realm Podcast) and myself are abject failures. He has spent long periods of his life interviewing people and only has a relatively small number of subscribers (including myself.) And I have spent many years writing---first for newspapers, then blogs, and, now books and have a very small number of followers too. (My last count for Hulet’s Backgrounder is 186—one 10 paid.)

I answered this question by suggesting that this obscurity is why I call myself a “hermit”. People often get hung up on the idea that I am a hermit by pointing out that I have a job, friends, a wife, live in the city, etc. To their way of thinking, to be a hermit exclusively means living in a cave on some remote mountain top. Well, most people only see the surface of things and not the core, so I generally ignore this opinion when it gets raised.

What a word, phrase, or, idea “means” is a very slippery thing---especially if it has any sort of depth to it. The book Zen Flesh, Zen Bones gets its title from a story told about Bodhidharma (the supposed first “patriarch” who “brought” Zen from India to China). According to the story, after nine years of teaching, he wanted to go home. So he tested his disciples to find out about their understanding of the “Void”.

Dofuku said : “In my opinion, truth is beyond affirmation or negation, for this is the way it moves.”

Bodhidharma replied: “You have my skin.”

The nun Soji said: “In my view, it is like Ananda’s sight of the Buddha-land---seen once and for ever.”

Bodhidharma answered: “You have my flesh.”

Doiku said: “The four elements of light, airiness, fluidity, and solidity are empty [i.e. inclusive] and the five skandhas are no-things. In my opinion, no-thing [i.e., spirit] is reality.”

Bodhidharma commented: “You have my bones.”

Finally, Eka bowed before the master---and remained silent.

Bodhidharma said: “You have my marrow”.

I’m not directly interested in what the “Void” is in this post. Instead, I’m concerned about what society makes of someone who is interested in it in the first place. This is important to Daoists, because the things that make Zen Buddhism “Zen” are elements that it has borrowed from Daoism.

The “skin” of the Void is the idea that there are truths that step outside of conventional dichotomies such as “Left” and “Right”, or, “Moral” and “Immoral”. The “flesh” of the Void is the idea that once you get a glimpse of this different way of looking at the world, it changes how you see everything. The “bones” is the idea that once you understand that the unconventional truths exist, and, having seen them, you reassess how you view everything, and, your evaluation of what is or is not important changes. And the “marrow” suggests that when this re-evaluation takes place, your behaviour changes profoundly---especially how you interact with the rest of society.

Toss something in the tip jar!

Understanding this point, a hermit isn’t just someone who lives in remote physical locations. It can also mean someone who lives in a remote ethical, spiritual, or, metaphysical space. If someone lives in the middle of a bustling city, there is still the question of how much she is engaged with the world that surrounds her. Doe she see it as being inherently valueless? Irrelevant to her life project? Does she think that there is any future to it? How she answers these questions says to me whether or not she is a hermit. Physical location is irrelevant.

There’s a saying attributed to Confucius that has a more one-dimensional take on this issue. But since that one dimension was crucial to him, I think it is apropos of the same point that Bodhidharma and I are making.

In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of.

I would suggest that being “not successful” is not something to be ashamed about. It may be caused by many things, but in some cases it is simply the result of having a deeper insight into how our society---if not the very universe---operates. In those cases I would suggest that it means that someone has a “hermit’s soul”.

As for me, even though I have worked at a job, have a spouse, and I even take part in some elements of society like politics—I still have a hermit’s soul. I am not conventionally successful and that’s never been something I cared to pursue.

Having said the above. I still have bills to pay and a family to support. I have both a subscription and tip jar button. Both of which rarely get used. That’s OK, I have my garden, my home, and a pension. But if you have the money and you find my words of value, I can always use a little more—if only to buy more books. ;-)

Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!