Malefactors of Great Wealth

Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses —whether these uses be to speculate in stocks and wreck railroads himself, or to allow his son to lead a life of foolish and expensive idleness and gross debauchery, or to purchase some scoundrel of high social position, foreign or native, for his daughter. Such a man is only the more dangerous if he occasionally does some deed like founding a college or endowing a church, which makes those good people who are also foolish forget his real iniquity. These men are equally careless of the working men, whom they oppress, and of the State, whose existence they imperil. There are not very many of them, but there is a very great number of men who approach more or less closely to the type, and, just in so far as they do so approach, they are curses to the country. (Forum, February 1895.) Mem.Ed. XV, 10; Nat. Ed. XIII, 9.

It may well be that the determination of the government (in which, gentlemen, it will not waver) to punish certain malefactors of great wealth, has been responsible for something of the trouble; at least to the extent of having caused these men to combine to bring about as much financial stress as possible, in order to discredit the policy of the government and thereby secure a reversal of that policy, so that they may enjoy unmolested the fruits of their own evil-doing. . . . I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this free country—the people through their governmental agents, or a few ruthless and domineering men whose wealth makes them peculiarly formidable because they hide behind the breastworks of corporate organization. (At Pilgrim Memorial Monument, Provincetown, Mass., August 20, 1907.) Mem. Ed. XVIII, 99; Nat. Ed. XVI, 84.

Those are the words of Theodore Roosevelt over 100 years ago. If Teddy were alive today I cannot help wonder if he would be talking about the Koch Brothers, or their minions like Rick Perry, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell and others.

Reflecting on the recent events of the Republican Congress risking the entire economy and economic reputation of the United States by (self-admittingly) holding hostage the government debt ceiling — when Senate House Minority Leader Mitch McConnel said “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president” he was foreshadowing what he would say in the future: “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” he said. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.” This is clearly the most blatant form of political malfeasance possible. It does not take a rocket scientist to conclude that these republicans care more about undermining the efficacy of a sitting president, and deliberately sabotaging the economy and job growth in order create the worst possible situation for re-election.

What is interesting is that all federal government officials take an oath (to God) to to work in the best interest of the county. The fact that these sitting officials flaunt their disregard for this oath so brazenly only points out how meaningless such an oath is, and that there is no entity in the country to hold officials accountable to their oath. Personally I think such acts warrant an indictment of corruption, or even treason. Can anyone else see the hypocrisy in the republicans spending millions of dollars, upsetting countless lives, and misdirecting the resources of government simply to impeach a sitting president for getting a blow job; yet the next president starts several wars which lead to the death and injury of tens of thousands of Americans, hundreds of thousands of others, brings the debt to record levels by not creating the revenue to pay for these wars; the US and world economy tanks because of right-wing deregulation policies allow malefactors of great wealth to engage in gambling trillions of dollars of other people's money on toxic investments rated AAA; and now the current minority of republicans terrorizes the entire country so that they can deliberately ruin the economy in order to make it more difficult for the president to get re-elected?

This irony only grows when you consider that the republican base is propped up by self-important, self-righteous, punitive right-wing Christians who are more interested in punishing women who get abortions, or even think about getting abortions; marginalizing and demonizing gays, lesbians, transgenders, etc.; and hastening the end of the world so they can “be there” when the rapture starts — than, well, being Christian — and showing some compassion for children who are unplanned and unwanted; showing tolerance to people whose lifestyle in no way harms anyone but the intolerant; accepting the fact that the rapture will come in God's time and not theirs; or maybe actually care about the economy, the attack on the middle class, the fears of the jobless, the despair of the poor, and the increasing numbers of the homeless. The irony I mean is that mainstream Christians stand quietly by with nothing to say about these malefactors of faith, because “evil can only flourish when good people are silent.”

The point I am trying to make, is that in over a hundred years, we must still endure the same malefactors of wealth that Teddy Roosevelt described, only now they have partnered with malefactors of politics and malefactors of faith as well, and what are we to do about it?

Lying 101

With lies you may get ahead in the world - but you can never go back.
~Russian proverb

Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited.
~James Cardinal Gibbons

A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on.
~Winston Churchill

If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we would be more on equal terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.
~Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
~Henry Louis Mencken, A Little Book in C Major, 1916

Lying 101

So, why do we need a collage course in lying?

1. To learn how to tell a better lie
2. To learn to know when you are being lied to

Basics:

• If you always tell the truth, you can never be caught telling a lie
• If you always tell the truth, you can always be convicted of telling a lie, by a liar
• If you always tell the truth, the easier it is to remember the details
  
• If you want to tell a lie, the closer to the truth it is, the easier it is to remember the details
  
• If you want to tell a lie, the closer to the truth it is, the harder it will be to be caught
  
• Credibility based on successful lies is indistinguishable from credibility based on truth
• The more scared people are, the easier they are to lie to
• The greedier people are, the easier they are to lie to - greed is just a different form of fear
  

Intermediate:

• If you are a wolf who wants to catch a sheep, is it better to dress as a wolf or a sheep? This goes to credibility. It can be costly to build credibility directly, but it is much less expensive to counterfeit it. For example, if you are Satan, is it better to wear horns and a pointy tail, or the cloak of the clergy?
• However, if someone is truly at peace with God and/or the universe, they have nothing to sell you or convince you of, and some smart people understand this. Consequently don't oversell the clergy clothes, unless you are convinced of gullibility of your audience. However, there are many techniques to improve the gullibility of your audience.
• Morals and ethics are a handicap to being a successful liar, except by learning to dress your lies as either moral and/or ethical
• If you are either moral or ethical, you will not be a good liar, but both morals and ethics can be cured, and once cured the incidence of relapse is rare
  

Advanced:

• To improve the gullibility of your audience you have to undermine their critical thinking skills.
  • Distract your audience. A pretty blond lady works very well with both men an women.
  • Speak quickly so people cannot employ logic to follow you arguments. A fast speaking pretty blond lady works extremely well.
  • Appeal to people's sense of morals or ethics. A self-righteous, fast speaking pretty blond lady can do wonders.

Homework:

• Search the internet for more quotes on lying, honesty, truth, etc. Humanity has amassed a wealth of wisdom on lying and it's all out there.
• Study logic, in particular logical fallacies. This is where wisdom must bow to philosophy.
• Practice lying. Lying to you friends, family and spouse will yield the best practice of all. Never lie to yourself, because if you believe your own bullshit you may become overconfident and make mistakes.
  

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

20 Years ago a friend took me to visit Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. For almost 6,000 years the people in the area were able to exploit the behavior of buffalo to stampede - they would startle the buffalo into stampeding over a cliff, and then just harvest the crippled or dead animals below. It was a lucrative amount of profit for surprisingly little effort.

By taking advantage of the predictable nature of majority of individuals, a minority of individuals was able to compel the majority to act against their own self interests, in fact their very survival.

Now try to imagine a handful of humans going up against a hear of buffalo on more evenly matched terms, who would you normally expect to win?

This is such a successful competitive strategy it is still in common use today. Imagine a minority of people who want a majority of people to act against their own self interest, in order to benefit the goals of the minority. To make the game more challenging assume the majority and minority belong to a democracy in which generally the majority of people get to vote on how things are decided - in principle you expect the majority to vote in their own best interests. I mean if there were an election and people and buffalo each got to vote on whether the buffalo should jump off the cliff, and the buffalo had a majority, how would you expect the vote to go?

In the real world minorities of people often face this dilemma - how to convince a majority of people to act against their own self interests; how to undermine their common sense or better judgment and actually act in a way that benefits the minority at the expense or disadvantage of the majority.

For example, lets say you and ten friends are exceedingly wealthy. How do you get a huge majority of people to vote in favor of lowering taxes on the wealthy while raising taxes on the not wealthy? How do you get the majority of peoples' to give up their personal or collective influence in society in order to give more personal or collective influence to the minority or wealthy people? In particular, how do you avoid the mechanisms of democracy to favor your own personal goals at the expense of the rest of society?

One way is to view the majority of people as buffalo. What in their nature can you use to make them act against their own interests or survival. If you scare enough buffalo, group mentality can be exploited to make the buffalo exercise poor judgment and leap before they look. Can this strategy be used on people?

What if the economy was so bad you could scare people into believing the ones in charge of the economy were incompetent and should be voted out of office, and they should vote your party in to office instead. You could literally promise them anything because they are scared. Once your party was in office in control of legislation, well then you could do pretty much as you pleased then (in spite of any promises) - raise taxes on the poor and lower them for the rich, cut funding for social programs which benefit the poor but not the rich, vote away peoples' rights to form unions and collectively bargain, etc. What if once you got into office you lowered taxes on the corporations and the wealthy, creating an economic crisis - well you could foster that contrived crises to scare the masses even more, and try to get them to support even more stupid decisions against their own self interests.

Welcome to politics in Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, Ohio, Arizona, and other right-wing states in 2011. You see, it's all really quite simple to understand when you just take it all step-by-step.

Faith and Science

Faith is hope and belief in the goodness or trustworthiness, of a person, concept or entity. Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.

Faith always comes first because when we are born we have little experience or grasp on reality so we have faith in our parents to feed and protect us, and to do right by us.

In this statement the word 'right' is taken to mean ethical behavior and not competitive agenda. I point this out because many people do not disambiguate sufficiently the various meanings of the word.

The word "ambidextrous" is derived from the Latin roots ambi, meaning "both," and dexter, meaning "right" or favorable. Thus, "ambidextrous" is literally "right / favorable on both sides." The term ambidexter in English was originally used in a legal sense of jurors who accepted bribes from both parties for their verdict. A good friend of mine always claimed he was ambisinister - or equally left handed. In historical terms the word "left" seems to have a bad reputation.

I take this editorial digression to make it clear when I say 'right' and 'left' I am really using just labels for competitive or right agendas and collaborative or left agendas and no deeper meaning. Any double entendre that may appear from time to time, I prefer you consider it ironic or comedic.

Science always comes later. After we develop the faith in our parents to feed and protect us we innately begin to explore and test the world - we touch things, we put them in our mouth, we try new things and develop opinions about what works best for us.

So what does this have to do with agendas?

My theory is that faith-based reasoning tends to favor competitive or right agendas, while science-based reasoning tends to favor collaborative or left agendas. I don't (yet) know of anyone else who has put forth this theory so I cannot support it by citing any references. Consequently I will have to try to evolve support it in the narrative of this blog.

What is the point of putting forward such a provocative theory?

If the theory is correct, it can help better explain in terms of agendas the current state of the world, our politics and our social and environmental situations. If the theory is not correct, well this just becomes yet another intellectual misadventure.

Competition Versus Collaboration

In our lives we are often faced with two contrasting strategies: competition or collaboration. In simple terms when we set goals we can either choose to exclude others from the goal - competition - or to include others in the goal - collaboration. The strategies are often combined when one group of individuals collaborates together to exclude another group from a desired goal.

This fact of life is so prevalent in our psyche that we devote much of our leisure time to the art, science and practice of it - also known as sport. Perhaps this is our racial memory at practice, a compulsion in our essence of being.

In the metaphysics of life these are the two agendas.

Not surprisingly most dimensions of faith, belief, reasoning and politics are roughly lined up along these agendas:

• the right doctrine favors competition
• while the left favors collaboration

To be sure, there is overlap and variation but for now let's just keep things simple. In practice for any particular agenda any individual or group has, these are the two basic templates for all agendas.

So which agenda is better? It's hard to say without defining 'better' but we should keep in mind:

• Without mechanisms like collaboration multi-cellular lifeforms would not have evolved and we would not be what we are.
• Without competition humans would not be the dominant species on the planet.

For now let's just assume that there is a natural tension and balance in our lives between competition and collaboration. By that definition then any agenda that is too competitive or too collaborative, that is too right or too left is consequently 'unbalanced.'

Why would some one or some group choose an unbalanced way of life? As a species humans are incredibly adaptable, but as individuals we are less adaptable and tend to specialize, especially as we get older and more experienced - most of us like to stick to what we know best, and what skills and talents emerge to support what we know best. Some people find it more satisfying to realize their goals by emphasizing a competitive or right agenda while other find it more satisfying to emphasize a collaborative or left agenda. Statistically individuals tend to line up in the middle, probably along he lines of a normal distribution. However, due to culture, entire populations of individuals may be entirely shifted to the right or the left - for example, Americans are generally seen to be more right shifted than Europeans who are generally seen to be more left shifted.

For the purpose of this blog, I am assuming only two frameworks or templates of agendas. This is not necessarily true or accurate, but it goes a long way to simplify the narrative.

Conspiracy Theories, Hidden Agendas, and Coalescent Ambitions

Do you ever wonder why things are the way they are? Why do people promise one thing and do something completely different? Does the world really work the way we think or the way people say it does, or is there something else actually going on? If there is something else going on, how can we identify it and reason about it to the point where we really think we do know what is going on?

This blog is not about Conspiracy Theories, but it may seem like it from time to time. No, I do not think there are alien bodies and spacecraft hidden in Roswell New Mexico - but I have no basis to disprove it either. Such thought only really has entertainment value.

The name hidden-agenda.blogspot.com was taken so I had to settle on latent-agenda.blogspot.com which is not as catchy. The point of a hidden agenda is that it is hidden, so any reasoning you try to make about it can really only be indirect. But you can reason about it and make theories that can actually be proven ultimately - good journalists and law enforcement officials do this all the time. One of the most successful principles they use is "follow the money."

In some cases a not only is a hidden agenda hidden, but no-one has actually defined the agenda - rather the agenda is simply a way to describe a pattern of behavior by a group of people that is similar and not necessarily coordinated. For example: there are many people who pretend to be politicians and seem to have similar campaigns, but they are in fact using the political system and media to increase the 'brand value' of whatever they are really selling - such as Sarah Palin and Donald Trump in recent times. There is no book on "Political Scams for Dummies" nor are the behaviors of such people necessarily coordinated, but it is quite likely when Donald Trump realized how Sarah Palin was using politics to increase her "Sarah Palin" brand and her celebrity success, he might have just copied her behavior too: no conspiracy, no agenda, just coalescent ambitions.

If you really do like conspiracy theories you might like this blog too. If you have an open mind and really want to explore how thing really may work, then you are my target audience. If you are an intellectual dweeb like me and like phrases like "coalescent ambitions" then that is just frosting on the cake.