Return to Cloud-Cuckoo Land

 

It's definitely not because of the quality of the ideas under discussion.  It's due to how widespread belief in such idiotic drivel exists in our society that I feel I have to engage with more of Bob Bishop's essay.

I'm meeting someone for lunch, I want to draw two personalized Christmas cards, and I've got some other shit to do, so I'm only going to try to finish critiquing one paragraph today.  This has become a multi-parter.  Here are links to One, Two, Three, Four and that's all.

Today I shall deal with the italicized section of this paragraph:

The modern-day Jacobins are a Malthusian death cult. Their goal is about control of your mind and behavior; not submitting makes you a dissident. They exclusively focus onfulfilling Maslow’s hierarchy of physiological needs of survival and safety (i.e., North Korea) to control the masses, leading to idleness and moral decay. At the same time, it ignores the human psyche that strives for psychological and self-actualization (top of Maslow’s pyramid), which creates a more vibrant and prosperous society.

So, um, Bishop decides to use North Korea as an example of a country with a welfare state so expansive that it has led to nationwide idleness and moral decay.  This is a new one on me.  I thought that North Koreans were starving because of the inefficiencies of authoritarian collective agriculture as well as crippling economic sanctions.  According to Bishop, the reality is that the North Korean socialist state provides the physical needs with a super-generous welfare state so that nobody has to work and Lo and Behold! Nobody works! ("Duh!!!")  And because nobody works, nobody produces any food and so they starve.

You really have to be crazy or stupid or both to actually believe that human beings are so corruptible and irrational as to literally starve because they think they're getting a free lunch.

[BTW: If you hadn't heard of Maslow's "Hierarchy of Needs" before, Bishop has provided a link to Psychology Today where it's fairly well described.  Suffice to say, it's a pyramid shape with our needs for animal survival are at the bottom and the ones for self-actualization (creativity, personal growth, etc.,) are at the top.]

Bishop (and many other right-wingers) believes that the majority (or at least a sizeable minority) of human beings will surrender their freedom to anyone who promises to (and hopefully delivers on) the provision of food, shelter, and income thereby relieving them of the hassle of having to provide these things for themselves.  Such people are the electoral base of socialist parties.  The "something for nothing crowd."  Afraid of hard work.  Lazy, incompetent, stupid, unfit for the struggle of life.  "The botched and the impotent." (As opposed to "the strong, the just, the beautiful and the righteous.")

On the other hand, decent, hardworking folk reject handouts.  Both out of self-respect AND because they reject the loss of freedom entailed in the contract offered by the pinko-commies offering the handouts.  They vote conservative or fascist to fight back against the freedom-destroying socialist politicians and the degenerates and the mud-people who are their constituencies.

In so doing, these conservatives reveal their historical ignorance, their economic illiteracy and their delusional political-economic beliefs.  

First of all, North Korea is poor because it was a poor country that was robbed blind by Japan from 1910-1945.  It then suffered from a ruinous civil war/great powers proxy battle from 1950-53.  Up until the 1990's its economy was hobbled by the limitations of authoritarianism (which is not to say that state-socialist programs cannot have some successes).  The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990's and economic sanctions produced an economic crisis that has lasted until the present day.

Whatever the case, Bishop's contention that North Koreans are poor because their government provides everything for them and they're all lazy is complete loony-tunes, shit-for-brains-ism.

Secondly, European capitalism arose out of feudalism.  Feudalism arose out of barbarian warlords conquering a territory and having political and legal supremacy over everyone with their fiefdoms.  Each feudal ruler in a territory owed their allegiance to a higher ruler in the pecking order all the way up to the king.  The majority of people in the feudal order were peasants or serfs who were tied to the land and who were often viewed as chattel or slaves.  In Western Europe this status was improved somewhat from the 16th Century onwards, whereas in Russia, the slave-like condition of serfs persisted into the late-19th Century.

But it was in Western Europe (especially Britain) where capitalism began to really develop.  And one aspect of this was the Enclosure Movement.  Peasants were tied to the land.  But they also had a right to the land.  The Enclosure Movement put an end to that.  Under capitalism, everything is up for sale.  "All that is solid melts into air."  Newly emergent agricultural capitalists (this included any noblemen/aristocrats who embraced the latest ecomic theories) took the land that the peasants depended on for subsistence and left them with absolutely nothing to support themselves with.  It was legalized theft.  This is what forced many poor peasants to become the landless proletariat and to have to go to the factories to find work.  (Laws agains "idleness" and sleeping out of doors and anything else poor people could do aided in this compulsion.)

Under capitalism human beings are held to have no rights to subsistence.  We are "free" to sell our labour to whomsoever wants to buy it.  We are (if we have property) to be "free" to use this property as we see fit.  We should be free to pollute. To take our capital out of the country. To create fraudulent products ("Buyer Beware"). To pay as little as anyone will accept. To allow working conditions as dangerous almost as we please.  But nobody has a RIGHT to food or shelter.

But this is a problem even for capitalism because capitalism goes through boom and bust cycles.  And when there is no floor under people's feet besides the job they currently have and whatever savings they've accrued, their ability to consume in the marketplace evaporates.  A contraction in one area of the economy can spread like a contagion across the entire economy leading to widespread economic collapse and ruin up and down the class structure.

That is why, after the Great Depression revealed the dangerous insecurity of income insecurity and World War Two showed the capabilities of state-financed demand, that income security programs such as welfare assistance, unemployment insurance, retirement pensions, and worker protections such as trade unions were allowed.  These all combined to produce the best years ever for the USA's economy.

Bishop's moronic choice of North Korea as the example of the dangers of socialism could have conceivably been forced upon him by the reality that many countries with more developed social-welfare states than the USA's are actually prosperous, well-run societies with better standards of living than his own.  Sweden, Japan, Denmark, France, even Canada.

I don't know where these shit-heads get it into their heads that socialism produces laziness and economic ruin.  The evidence is just so overwhelmingly against it.  I can sort of understand it when a wealthy asshole believes that poor people need to feel the lash to work.  But when ordinary people believe in something that is so diametrically opposed to their self-interest, and when they vote for parties that agree to keep them impoverished, and they do so out of this ridiculous delusion, ... it boggles the mind.

That'll be it for today.