Racism Egregiously Misunderstood

© Charles D. Hayes

When I was growing up in the South during the 1940s and ’50s, I had no idea I was internalizing a racist attitude. During this period, Gordon Allport, one of the preeminent social psychologists of the twentieth century, was studying the nature of prejudice, and in 1954, he published The Nature of Prejudice, which remains a classic. He defined prejudice as follows: “Prejudice is a pattern of hostility in interpersonal relations which is directed against an entire group, or against its individual members; it fulfills a specific irrational function for its bearer.”

 Today it is not unusual to hear declarations by white men claiming no responsibility for slavery because, they argue, they have never owned slaves. Others make adamant assertions that they are free of racial bias. Although my memories are mercifully vague, I don’t doubt that I spouted similar views as a young man. But years ago, when I realized how wrong I had been about the real nature of racial prejudice, the subject became a major focus of my scholarship, and I have been studying the pathology of prejudice ever since.

A common mistake in characterizing the nature of prejudice is to attempt to describe it as a conscious sense of awareness— a front-page choice that requires overt acknowledgment. To say, for example, “Since, at this moment, I bear this or that race no prejudicial thoughts, I am therefore not prejudiced” is a complete misunderstanding of racism.

Bias is often hidden. Culturally internalized bias doesn’t stand out as a discernibly educated opinion—it looks like straight-up reality. When we view the circumstances before us, our perception appears to be, as Allport described the process, a “single act of cognition.” If you are a bigoted cop, you will have no trouble rationalizing racial profiling because you will be able to give all kinds of reasons for profiling that have nothing at all to do with your hidden assumptions for doing so. As an ex-cop, I know this to be true from countless observations and personal experience.

That Mayor Michael Bloomberg attributes a decline in New York’s City’s murder rate solely to its stop-and-frisk policy is absurd. There are myriad reasons for the falling rates of violent crime. Even in large cities that don’t follow the practice, murder rates are down. Stop and frisk is an example of discrimination in its most refined form because, without a second thought, the mayor has given a pass to the humiliation minorities incur from being randomly detained and searched.

Seeds of contempt find fertile soil in acts of disrespect. Simply put: Stop and frisk legitimizes hidden bias. Supporters of stop and frisk argue that 94 percent of crimes against black people are committed by black citizens. Big deal. They neglect to mention that 86 percent of crimes against white people are committed by white people. Moreover, if you were to randomly stop and frisk more and more white people, their arrest numbers would go up accordingly. 

If you are a prejudiced employer, you aren’t likely to perceive you are turning someone down for employment because of the person’s race. What will happen is that your subconscious will come into play, and it will offer rationalizations for not hiring the individual that simply seem like common sense. But in reality, those rationalizations might very well be conclusions based on a personal history of thousands of subtle observations and inferences.

Prejudicial judgments are something we internalize from life experience, and they can be so subtle that we don’t realize we are learning anything. When in our youth we hear friends or family members make prejudicial statements, we notice their body language at a level somewhere beneath our conscious awareness. Then at some point in the future, such experiences will have been repeated so often that they’re likely to be set in cement and will require a jackhammer of dissonance to alter.

Allport observed that prejudice is most often acquired via blind conformity. He noted that “not every overblown generalization is a prejudice,” adding that “prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.” Understanding this is crucial. Most people who have not studied how our minds operate assume their perception is unadulterated reality. Research has made clear, however, that it’s anything but.

Learned prejudice is like read-only software. It can take a long time to become written into a program, but once it’s set in gray matter, altering the code will take an enormous emotional and intellectual effort. You probably know scores of people, as I do, whose views on racial matters could not be changed with waterboarding.

Assertions by individuals who claim to bear no responsibility for racism bring to mind the work of Henry David Thoreau, who accepted the premise: That government is best which governs least. When used by itself in political arguments, the assertion completely misses Thoreau’s point about government. What he went on to advocate was better government, and the great misfortune in failing to realize the substance of his argument comes simply from not understanding Citizen Thoreau. If most people were like him, citizenship would be viewed differently and so would our expectations of government.

Thoreau assured us that we are clearly not responsible for what happened in the past, but we are unequivocally responsible for what is. If we grow up in a system that is unjust by design, Thoreau considered it our duty to make it right, because to benefit from an unjust system without working to correct it is to be an accomplice.

For Thoreau, just because we never owned slaves doesn’t absolve us of the current legacy of inequality that owes itself to centuries of oppression. We have made progress in race relations among many diverse groups of people, but it takes many generations of families who’ve made incremental but necessary advances into the middle class to provide the foundational stability for the future success of the generations who follow. Personal failure without an established family to fall back on is a roadblock to success. Social capital is extremely important. And if you don’t believe this, you simply haven’t thought it through or examined the statistical evidence.

Children are not born prejudiced. Prejudice has to be learned. Myriad psychological studies have demonstrated that children internalize the subtleties of race early on. We should find it hurtful and morally unacceptable that we cannot correct an environment in which young black children prefer white dolls because of what they’ve learned about living. Beneath their consciousness they’ve noted that white is good and black is not.

It’s hard to overstate how important it is to fully understand the way our worldviews are viscerally connected to our attitudes about race and identity. At a subconscious level, we compare ourselves continuously to those whom we perceive as different. Indeed, the fact that we are intuitively adept at discerning slight signs of otherness prompted Sigmund Freud to write extensively about the narcissism of minor differences.

All human beings are keen about noticing dissimilarities. This is why we tend to vote our identities and not our pocketbooks, as evidenced by the irrational antics of those who can’t relate to the president of the United States in any given administration. Patriotism, as Allport noted, is “often a mask for bigotry,” and “extreme bigots are almost always super-patriots.”

The current political obsession with freedom has very little to offer regarding the responsibilities of citizenship. The freedom slogans we hear so often today say nothing, whatsoever, about the role individuals must play in order to obtain and sustain a just democracy. Bigotry feeds on illiteracy. It’s long past time we stopped being slaves to ignorance and began to relate to all Americans as Americans, regardless of race, religion, creed, or color. 

 

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes

New Fiction: The Call of Mortality

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE

My Other Blog

http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/

Follow me on twitter: @CDHWasilla

 

 

Belief and the Residue of Honor

© Charles D. Hayes

Wouldn't it have been great if, when we were growing up, there had been an audible signal when each of our beliefs achieved the rigidity of concrete? Imagine hearing inspirational music with announcements declaring, "Listen up, this is important. This is going to be your opinion from now on." Of course, this doesn't occur. Instead, our respective cultures play a strategic role in shaping our views without notice for most of our lives.

We don't grow up making up our minds about the world independent of our communities. Quite the contrary: we carry many of our customs, beliefs, prejudices, and aspirations with us to our graves. Each new generation, however, rejects some things learned from their elders while internalizing others wholeheartedly. The pendulum of liberal-versus-conservative politics is always at sway in the wind, but it never ventures so far in one direction that it doesn't at some point reverse course.

America would benefit tremendously if each and every one of us would routinely take the time and effort to examine our own beliefs genealogically and follow them all of the way back to ideological bedrock. It is incredibly powerful and insightful to discover how and why we view the world as we do. Much of what we come to believe as straight-up reality is the residue of past events and customs that bear little resemblance to the world we live in today.

I grew up in the South, in Texas and Oklahoma, in the 1940s and ’50s. As a teenager, when I went to movies and saw an example of, say, a New York cab driver shouting obscenities at a male passenger or a pedestrian and nothing happened as a result, it didn't seem real. This didn't seem possible in my community because you could not shout insults in another man's face without an obligatory fistfight. Being publicly humiliated required immediate redress.

 There was no music or voice-over announcement when I absorbed the notion that an in-your-face insult had to be answered with a physical response. Nevertheless, this ethos is still so much a part of my psyche that no amount of intellectual rigor can rid me of the felt need to respond to an egregious insult in this manner. At my age, though, I imagine the offender might yet go unscathed.

Now, when you take customs like this to their ideological foundations, things get really interesting. In their book Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South, Dov Cohen and Richard E. Nisbett report research showing that when men of the South are insulted, they experience rapidly escalating increases of testosterone and cortisol. And yet, this is not usually the case with men raised in the North. Stated simply: we absorb our culture with congealed emotion that sets up like cerebral cement.

Historically the culture of defending oneself as a matter of principle traces back to the antebellum notion of Southern honor. From there, it goes all the way back to herding cultures and then back further still to the male dominance expressed in sacred religious texts. In other words, this ethos is about pious behavior ensconced in the values of protecting the flock against any and all comers with a posture aggressive enough to ward off all those who might be tempted to trespass or bring harm.

If you are old enough to recall the 1950s and ’60s, you will recognize the residue of herding culture psychology combined with a hybrid notion of Southern honor and the stoic resolve of Native Americans as fundamental to a major theme of Western movies: A rugged, unshakable stranger comes to town and is not to be offended or affronted without grave consequences that, more often than not, result in a gunfight. The core cultural thread that holds this attitude together is the unspoken declaration that it is a man's world and men are meant to be in charge. Millions of Americans still feel the influence of this cultural pressure on our identity.

This ethos continues to prevail across the country, especially in politically red states, where an established sense of patriarchal authority reigns with regard to how people—especially women—should behave. The gentility of the Old South, in particular, is steeped in a historical connection with the philosophy of herding cultures and the protection and sense of ownership of both women and slaves. Above reproach, ladylike behavior and demonstrated subservience by both women and slaves amplified the resident white gentlemen’s sense of honor. All actions or behaviors to the contrary were, and still are, suspect.

When we hear people say things like, "I have nothing against homosexuals, except when they shove it in my face," what they are really expressing is the angst of a threatened worldview. Their identity is at risk, and this is a really scary situation for them. If they discover a rip in the fabric of what they consider reality, especially what they revere as moral truth, then the fissure has the potential to grow wider and could ultimately include their religion, their politics, and even their simple prescription for what constitutes a meaningful life. Moreover, the older one is, the greater the threat, since the thought of having lived one's whole life in existential error is as psychologically devastating as facing the end of the world. 

 If people are increasingly defying norms and behaving more and more in ways other than are commonly considered acceptable, or if their actions fly in the face of local expectations, such behavior will be experienced as existentially frightening by those who revere custom. An endangered worldview portends mortal peril, and the visceral response is to fight such change as something evil.    

In the antebellum South, it's hard to overestimate the amount of influence men were expected to have over the behavior of women, especially when it comes to being seen as protecting them and their reputation. Thus, every aspect of feminism was and still is a threat to traditional patriarchy, and those who conform and behave as expected resent those who resist.

Take the issue of abortion. What interests me most is that many of the people who are most vocal about being pro-life appear to hold their belief, not so much because of an actual concern for unborn children, but more out of a desire to protect a parochial and patriarchal worldview. Now I'm sure there are exceptions, but regardless of your gender, if you are aggressively pro-life ask yourself this question: If you take this issue clear to its core, do you really care all that much about unborn children, or could this have more to do with the way you were raised and how you were taught women are supposed to behave? How much concern do you show for children, other than your own, when the subject of abortion is set aside? How do you reconcile the deep irony in the scientific admonition that the exponential growth of human population threatens our very existence?

On the other hand, if you believe absolutely in a woman's right to choose whether or not to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, where do you think this assumption originates and how did you come to believe it? What sense of a woman's freedom do you think enables you to readily discount the life of an unborn child? At what point do you think ending the life of a fetus is wrong?

 Reflection of this kind takes a formidable amount of soul-searching. Our desire to be honest with ourselves has to be stronger than the concrete in which our foundational beliefs are set, if we are to venture far enough to see the issue from another point of view, let alone change our minds.   

 This is precisely why learning about our history is so important for deciding who we really are and how we are to behave. We typically use all sorts of expressions that bear little resemblance to their origins. For example, it is not uncommon today for people to refer to someone during an argument as an SOB. But few, I suspect, mean this in the way it was used in the Old South, when the worst possible insult was to literally demean another person's mother with the term. When we fail to understand how and why we hold our beliefs about the world, we are too easily manipulated politically and the emotional fallout shows itself as a surplus of arrogance and contempt. 

Most of the things that we believe constitute our worldview are deeply imbedded in our sense of identity. Very often the main reason we take sides on an issue has much more to do with the fact that our respective identity group has already taken the position and we feel obliged to join in. This, in my view, helps no one because, until we do the kind thinking that gets us beyond the simple notion of identity, we have little hope of achieving the kind of objectivity that would assure a sense of honor for ourselves as individuals and our respective groups.

 A genuine sense of moral objectivity becomes possible only when we delve deeply into the genealogy of our beliefs and discover things that, had we known earlier, would likely have caused us to honorably change our viewpoint. But here is the really hard part: Even when we do change our minds, intellectual effort alone is not enough to neutralize the deep-seated emotion in which our beliefs are set. To truly change our minds, we have to override the old conviction with a passion more powerful than the emotion that enabled it to establish itself as belief in the first place.

 To accept one's culture without question is to spend life as a prisoner of the past.

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes 

New Fiction

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE

CEOs Assert the License to Loot

© Charles D. Hayes

Three decades ago, futurist John Naisbitt asserted that "it is easier to ride a horse in the direction it is already going." A slightly modified version can aptly be applied to the egregiously exaggerated value of CEOs in America. That is to say, it's easier to be viewed as a wunderkind executive, if the business one has been selected to run is already booming.

 

There are, in my opinion, few more counterfeit notions than the overstated hype about CEO expertise on the global business stage. To command obscene compensation requires that there be an ongoing public relations effort to keep the mythic notion of exceedingly rare talent in the air. It ought to be called "The Great Duping of America," because this is precisely what has happened and is continuing to occur as a way to prevent the rate of exploitation from being impaired.

 

No doubt there are many CEOs with good management skills, but it is a stretch far beyond credulity to say their special expertise is worthy of the right to loot a public enterprise and to persist in doing so even when the venture is losing money. This is going on right before our eyes, and yet we watch silently in awe like nothing more than a bunch of uninformed fools. It's as if we have, as Erich Fromm put, it "swallowed the principles of power."

 

In this case, we’ve tacitly endorsed the right of certain individuals to collect unlimited compensation based on a brand of inflated expertise so special and so utterly unique that few of us are able to say precisely what it is. Not to mention the corporate missteps and blunders that occur daily, or the criminal malfeasance behind the 2008 Wall Street meltdown, for which virtually all of the executives responsible have gone unpunished, though, of course, they did get their bonuses.

 

The plain truth, if we simply think it through, is that when business is on the upswing, you could pick as the new CEO any warm body off the street with a demonstrated penchant for good judgment, and business would continue to thrive. For every Steve Jobs there are scores of performers who are mediocre at best, unless their particular business happens to be stuck in an upward cycle. We have a tendency to remember the successful examples and forget the failed performances. 

 

Reality is harsh, though, as the many CEOs who are not so well endowed with good judgment prove day in and day out. A Google search on the term CEO incompetence will produce more than a million hits. These executives can make blatant management errors, and yet the prevailing fairy tale of extraordinary expertise still awards them astronomical compensation.

 

One of the advantages of getting old is that pretentiousness gets easier to spot. I say, there is no more excuse for stratospheric reward at the top of business than there is for slave wages at the bottom. The license for executives to loot is no more necessary or justifiable in a nation that calls itself great than is the license for businesses to exploit labor with the full expectation that taxpayers will subsidize via food stamps the employees whose compensation is below the poverty line.

 

Shame on the successive generations of us who grew up learning and discussing the parable of the emperor who had no clothes, but who demonstrate through our actions today that we have learned nothing from it. It might be accurate to say that America has become the laughing stock of the developed world, except that our ignorance-based subservience to powerful myths of excellence and Ayn Rand notions of self-interest on steroids is anything but funny.

 

The Cold War fear of Communism conditioned millions of our citizens to recoil in a kind of panic-paranoia at the mere suggestion of anything containing the word social. The result is that millions of people can be relied on to vote against their own interests and, worse, to stand by and actually cheer on the looting, as Wall Street skims the cream off the stock market each day using supercomputers with which no individual investor can compete.

 

If America is to save its middle class, we must put ideological fantasy aside and face the reality once and for all that nations with a strong middle class have never existed anywhere on earth without an enormous ongoing investment in both hard and soft infrastructure.

 

The conservative ethos for frugality and stopping wasteful spending is of great value, but we should apply it judiciously across the board without exception. Instead, America's military industrial complex, the private prison industry, and our healthcare and our financial systems have been purged of the ability to accomplish anything on a broad economic scale except to satisfy the greed of a few well-placed individuals. This is not freedom. These people aren't really winners. But the rest of us are indeed losers.

 

It's insane to believe we can maintain a viable economy and a strong middle class with lower and lower taxes at the same time a class of privileged executives, empowered by their governmental and legislative connections, ransack corporate finances whether they are successful managers or not. Their real managerial expertise is too often beside the point. It's quid pro quo all the way, as these executives and their boards plunder the public trust with enough sleight of hand that everyday citizens mistake larceny for strategy.

 

Today John Naisbitt's horse representing America's middle class is headed for the abyss, unless average citizens begin to demand a change in direction. 

 

 

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes 

New Fiction

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CIGJFGE

       

   

Wingnuts of America, I Salute You

© Charles D. Hayes

In the movie Gladiator, at the opening of the games, an arena combatant says, "We who are about to die salute you." Having entered my eighth decade on the planet, I can relate to his assertion, hopefully with a bit more time left than an imminent contest. I am, though, nearing checkout time, and I am concerned about the future that subsequent generations will inherit when my mine has fought its last battle. That said, here are some political behaviors and beliefs that I find encouraging:

 

o   If you are one of those people who have nothing but contempt for the government and who never tire of trashing everything public, while championing everything private—with the exception of the Pentagon— by all means keep it up.

o   If you never miss a chance to disparage immigrants, especially those whose labor makes it possible for you to eat inexpensive fruit and vegetables, I encourage you to pick up the pace and increase the audible decibels of your rhetoric.

o   If you constantly harp about ending a woman's right to choose whether or not she will give birth to a child against her wishes, for whatever reason, please don't stop. Instead, put more effort into upping the level of vitriol about reversing Rowe v. Wade.  

o   If you are one of those people who think Ayn Rand hung the moon with her declaration that selfishness is our greatest virtue, please spread the word and give my regards to John Galt.

o   If you think that one person, one vote is an antiquated notion and that whatever you can do to gerrymander and rig election laws to prevent your political opponents from voting is legitimate, then by all means continue and send out frequent press releases.

o   If you think Wall Street has been shackled with unnecessary regulations, please raise your voice and make yourself heard. Start gathering donations for the next bailout.

o   If you if think gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, please don't miss an opportunity to make your point with all of the supporting reasons you can muster about how it will adversely affect your own marriage.

o   If you think we need a military that is bigger than it is now, please tell us why at every chance you get.

o   If you think we should do away with the minimum wage so that more people can be employed at slave wages, please print up some handbills and put an ad in your local newspaper. Then get a burglar alarm for your home. 

o   If you think insurance companies should be completely in charge of medical treatment, speak up.

o   If you believe there should be no restrictions, whatsoever, on the private ownership of firearms, including background checks, please say so. Show us pictures of your bazooka.

o   If you believe that America is a bastion of socialism, where government deregulation is all we need to reenergize the economy, tell your legislators, but don't forget your neighbors.

o   If you believe that Social Security and Medicare should be abolished, please shout it out. Then subscribe to the Hemlock Society newsletter because you may need it.               

 

If you agree with any and especially all or most of the points above, I salute you. I do so because this means there is hope for the future. There is hope because you and your party are hell-bent on self-destruction. It means that your narrow views and the bigotry and contempt you spew forth toward those you deem to be pathologically different (calling it plain old common sense) is finally being seen for the shallow thinking that it represents.

 

American demographics are changing the political landscape toward a more thoughtful and tolerant society. If you persist with your vitriol, your political party will soon be small enough to drown in a bathtub.   

 

Over time, perhaps, some of you will wake up and realize that you don't have ideas so much as ideas have you—that the totality of your worldview comprises shallow assumptions that you cling to in spite of never having studied any relevant subject in depth. Worse, your opinions are not well reasoned. Instead, they amount secondhand insecurities borrowed from ignorant individuals whose major concerns in life are best described as identity-based paranoia. The world is moving on and away from overt racism and bigotry, which in the past were routinely passed off by your fellow travelers as patriotism. These attitudes are anything but.

 

The vast majority of extreme right-wing rhetoric that has been so prominent in America for the past two decades is a strain of populist contempt that bears no relation, whatsoever, to the ideas upon which America was founded. The movement to make abortion illegal has much more to do with protecting an authoritative masculine worldview than with an actual concern for children. This is easy to confirm if you get close enough to see what most of the proponents really value when it comes to the choices they make in life.   

 So go on. Sip your tea, wear funny hats, shoulder muskets, and carry placards with hateful slogans, because you and your ideas belong with the flintlock era. Once again, I salute you farewell and wish you and your ilk good riddance. Don't let the Constitution hit you in the face on your way out the door.

 

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes

 

Websites

Autodidactic Press Website

 

September University.org Website

 

Putting Worldviews in Perspective

© Charles D. Hayes

Imagine visitors from another planet landing on the earth and drawing up a profile of human beings to send home. Surely one of their main reporting points would be that this is an incredibly diverse species with an immeasurable range of individuals, and yet, if the neural matter in each of their heads doesn’t form similar patterns, they are prone to set about killing one another. As a footnote the visitors would likely observe that once certain brain patterns set up and become deeply ingrained they are difficult or nearly impossible to change or alter.

 

Unless they regarded such behavior as normal, I suspect the aliens would leave earth trying to figure out how a species that seems to defend individual initiative so strongly would strive so hard to emulate the regimented behavior of insects. It would puzzle them that so many individuals could insist on bee-like or ant-like behavior from their fellow man and would readily condemn those who are reluctant to conform as being unpatriotic or subversive in some way. Returning to their own planet, our visitors could easily speculate that if these human beings were only secure enough in their own views to be able to tolerate contrary views, the killing might stop.  

 

My own inquiry suggests that once a person’s fundamental beliefs are formed, they are very much like snapshots or still photos, and extraordinary efforts will be required to justify a reshoot. On the one hand, this propensity ensures our survival because it enables us to make instantaneous decisions based on confirmation with our photographic assumptions. But this propensity also threatens our existence for the very same reason. We are too quick to make up our minds, since we require only a hint of confirmation from our stored mental picture to confirm the views we already hold. In too many instances we make no room for alternatives or exceptions, and we ignore or reject contrary evidence.

 

All human beings, regardless of where we are on this planet, are born into reality shelters that we commonly refer to as our culture. The late cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that cultures amount to codified hero systems in which members are aided in seeming to transcend death through deeds and their reverence for icons and symbols. And thus we grow up with a take on reality given to us in such nuanced and discreet ways that we remain unaware that we are internalizing an off-the-shelf worldview. If we aren’t careful, it can stultify and set up like software that can't be overwritten or reprogrammed.

 

After more than 30 years of dedicated self-education, and now at age 70, I’m confident that educator Neil Postman was right when he said, “Education is a defense against culture.” It’s that and more. We live in our heads. What we do with the knowledge that our respective cultures insist we put there, and how we deal with it, set the tenor, tone, and trajectory of our lives. What we learn and come to know is important, but it’s what we strive hard to understand beyond our culture that determines the essence of our character, what we do with our lives, how we relate to others, and how and for what we are likely to be remembered.

 

That things are often not as they appear is one of life’s most important lessons—so glaringly self-evident, in fact, that few of us doubt it. Unfortunately, even fewer of us heed the lesson. From an early age, we are taught that appearances are deceiving, and yet we do not hesitate to take a firm position on matters we’ve never really looked into beyond a superficial appraisal. We are quick to make baseless snap judgments that diminish our potential for achieving a just democratic society, even as those judgments add to our personal angst and inflame our contempt for matters we haven’t yet investigated.

 

A willingness to learn can trump our predisposition to act tribally and selfishly. It can dispel our mistrust of those whose politics, religions, traditions, and lifestyles we’ve not previously made an effort to understand. It adds quality to our lives, making the term golden years something more than a cliché. A willingness to learn and to continue learning is our best chance to leave the world a better place.

 

Computers are not much help unless we have many rewritable programs. In similar fashion, our lives are much less enjoyable if the software in our heads has solidified and our minds can't be changed. It is an unfortunate trait of our species that we are predisposed toward an ethos of the fewer the facts, the stronger the opinion, and that we will argue vociferously over subjects we know nothing, whatsoever, about.

 

All one has to do to verify this is read a sufficient number of letters to the editors of magazines and newspapers. Popular talking points serve as substitutes for in-depth knowledge, and arrogance stands in for a willingness to do one's homework before commenting. Limited worldviews lead to misunderstanding and to the warring conflict that follows.

 

Extraterrestrial visitors could understandably have a hard time getting their minds around our egotism and our unwillingness to learn beyond our cultural indoctrination. I can imagine them scratching their heads on the way home, wondering if there are any other species in the universe who reach adulthood and think they already know everything they need to about everything important without a purposeful intention to continue learning.

 

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes

Websites

Autodidactic Press Website

 

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog

An Exploitation Tax Is Past Due

© Charles D. Hayes

Many full-time employees of some of America's largest employers need government assistance, including food stamps. Guess who picks up the tab? Right: we do, the taxpayers. I say it’s long past time for the repatriation of work, and it’s time to impose an exploitation tax on those whose compensation strategy ensures that their employees will experience long-term poverty. Job creators should not be poverty enablers.

 
Young people find it hard to believe when I tell them about growing up in the 1940s and ’50s, when an entry-level job, even at a gas station, made it possible to earn a decent living. It was a time when working man was synonymous with virtue. Not so anymore. Working men and women today are considered chumps by those who preach the high-finance version of success. That people don't earn enough to support a family is considered a character flaw instead of what it is: contrived inequality. 

 Over a period of four decades, the essence of work has been systematically devalued, while the worth and legislative influence of capital in the financial sector has soared. Wall Street functions more and more like a casino.

 

This is an economic perversion, undermining the truth of what one of our Republican presidents once made clear in this statement: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” So said Abraham Lincoln.

 

But today, instead of having a much higher consideration for labor, we give it little or none. Right-to-work laws are a euphemism for the right to lower wages and to stifle dissent.   

From the early 1900s until 1970, wages for working people kept rising. We were one of the most equal opportunity countries in the world (unless one was a minority, but that’s another article). When I was in grade school, corporate taxes amounted to about $1.50 for every dollar from individuals. Today corporations pay about 25 cents in taxes for every dollar paid by individuals. The tax burden has shifted dramatically because of lobbied influence. Wages for working people have suffered stagnation since the 1970s while CEO compensation has increased more than 725 percent. The result is that about a third of our citizens are now poor.

 There is nothing divine about wages or free markets. These numbers do not come from God. They are not shaped by virtue. Wages in many cases are not remotely in sync with the actual value of the work they represent. Wages express relationships of power, or a lack of it. Those with authority and control are insulted by hourly wages—they get salaries, bonuses, and stock options.

 In Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes a compelling argument that some aspects of our society thrive on disorder and some failures are necessary in order to compensate and thus grow stronger. He makes clear in clinical fashion that actions have consequences and that we learn more from failure than from theory. Fragile systems weaken with error. Anti-fragile systems gain strength from stressors in the same manner that our bodies protect themselves by building up immunity from exposure to germs. America's workforce should be anti-fragile too, but it's not. Let me explain why.

I grew up with a generation that paid great heed to the parable of the ant and the grasshopper. The ant worked hard storing up for the coming winter, while the grasshopper played. When winter came, the grasshopper asked the ant for food and shelter but was turned away. Lesson learned.

If one were to rewrite that fairy tale today, however, it would be wise to include buzzards appearing and raiding the ant’s storehouse. The financial sector operates under the guise of being a crucial component of the economy, but its increasing propensity to gamble recklessly with other people's money amounts to scavenging off of the labor of the men and women who keep our economy in gear.

 We human beings are viscerally wired to be wary of free riders. We are so sensitive about the issue that we are easily manipulated emotionally. This is why we overreact with penalties for failure that cost the public more than they cost the individuals we think we are punishing. It's why stinginess prevails when it comes to helping impoverished families.

This is why generations of children grow up lacking the resources that enable them to function economically and emotionally. This is why we spend more to keep people in prison than in school. And this is why we are so easily distracted by the disingenuous rhetoric of buzzards when they try to scare us with tales about ravenous grasshoppers. Taleb reminds us that never before in history have so many people with so little downside exposure exerted so much control over our economy. People with no skin in the game, as he puts it. I prefer to call them buzzards.

The real chumps today are those of us who have watched the greatest transfer of wealth in history, from the bottom up to the top two percent, and have remained silent. Taleb provides us with an aphorism that should become the primary functional app for navigating the twenty-first century: "If you see fraud and you do not say fraud, you are a fraud."

 Elsewhere I have ridiculed Newt Gingrich as being a hypocritical politician with bad ideas. But just as Taleb has provided us with a face-saving aphorism, Gingrich has given us the operative metaphor to redress raging inequality. During his run for president, he said we need to replace the social safety net with a trampoline. It was, and is, the most sensible and stupendous thing said about inequity in decades. We need to see to its creation before the buzzards strip us clean to the bone.

Taleb offers us another great word: optionality. Options, indeed, are what’s missing at the bottom rungs of society in order to make it anti-fragile. This subject warrants aggressive exploration. An option is what happens on a trampoline with each bounce.

 But for now, nothing is more important, in my view, than the repatriation of work. We begin by imposing an exploitation tax. Here is how it works:

Any company whose full-time workers qualify for food stamps or public assistance would pay an exploitation tax. And so would the companies who arrange their work schedules in a way that categorizes their employees as part-time to avoid paying additional benefits. The amount would be determined by that expression that grates on my nerves but is appropriate in this case: it is what it is. In other words, the tax would cover the cost of the taxpayer subsidy with enough additional penalty to inspire just compensation to begin with. 

We Americans are the chumps for ever having let inequality get so egregiously out of control, and we will be chumps as long as these people laugh all the way to the bank while letting taxpayers subsidize their employees. The executives who run businesses that can't pay a living wage and stay in business need to close shop. Fiefdoms demanding that workers be paid wages commensurate with indentured servitude belong in history books. Such work is better left undone.

Moreover, if executives and entrepreneurs can donate hundreds of millions of dollars to political candidates, then, as Alaska writer Shannyn Moore points out, they can easily pay higher taxes. Better yet, let them pay their workers a living wage directly, thus regaining their own self-respect and effecting the repatriation of work in the process.

In 1914 Henry Ford shocked the nation when he more than doubled worker wages to a record five dollars a day. But he didn't do it for benevolent reasons. Paying a living wage solved his high turnover problem, improved production quality, and inspired company loyalty. His workers gained the respect of their community, and they were able to purchase the products they produced, which increased demand. Treating workers with respect and paying them well was good business a century ago and it still is today.

The notion that raising wages costs jobs is a myth sustained by unrelenting mantras, but it's still a myth. If business owners want to avoid taxes, let them do right by their employees and avoid an exploitation tax. It's long past time for American citizens to rescind the right to exploit without penalty.    

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes

Websites

Autodidactic Press Website

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog

Driven Apart: Failure in a Land of Plenty

© Charles D. Hayes

A plethora of new books suggest America has entered a state of rapid decline. Two recent works on this subject, both heavily footnoted, are worthy of attention. One is by an elitist on the right and the other by one on the left. In contrast, a third new book is full of hope.

The first to consider is Coming Apart: The State of White American, 1960-2010 by sociologist Charles Murray, whose work I've been reading for years. He refers to himself as a libertarian, although a better characterization might be that he is an ideologue's ideologue. For decades he's argued in a subtle and often guarded tone that some of us are just morally and genetically inferior to others, and he has become rather adept at appearing to stumble accidently onto his biases. In other words, his narratives contain a thinly disguised philosophy that is implied rather than stated outright. 

Coming Apart offers lots of good data, and the contents could make a really good book if the author had been intellectually honest about what has driven us apart. Murray, however, has never been quite smart enough to avoid the transparency of his biases, even when they are cloaked in his data. He submits a two-pronged account of how America is fracturing into enclaves of upper class and lower class, portrayed as Belmont and Fishtown respectively. We are asked to pay no attention to the cause. Instead Murray lays the book out so the unsuspecting will discover his predetermined conclusions embedded in his statistics along with him. He wants us to ignore the greed and lobbied power that have in effect looted the country from the top down. He wants us to concentrate instead solely on the moral failings of inferior folks and to recognize once again that big government is destroying the moral fiber of America.

New York Times columnist David Brooks declared Coming Apart the most important book of the year and said he would be "shocked if there's another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society." This should be tempered by realizing how easily Brooks is shocked. That Murray does not want to discuss the reason for society’s coming apart is what is shocking. For more on Murray's book, check out Joan Walsh's brilliant review at salon.com.

The second work is Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline by social critic Morris Berman, who throws all subtlety out the window. He’s concerned not with moral failings of the poor, but with what he regards as the mindless aspirations of those we deem successful. He characterizes the New Deal not as a restructuring of the economy, but as "a few concessions to the poor and working class." He warns us that when hustling and technological innovation become the purpose of life, there is no purpose, and he sees little hope for course correction. According to Berman, we are a country where people throw their lives away for toys. Our obsession with connectivity results in social isolation as we destroy the planet through what amounts to disingenuous acts of trivial pursuit.        

Now contrast the views above with another recent book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler. They write: "Humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them. Or desire them. Abundance for all is actually within our grasp." They lay out their argument in nineteen impressive chapters.

So, we have here two cases for a dystopian future due to moral failure and one utopian argument that, even if such a future were possible, would require an ideological remaking of society that goes far beyond simply offering a few concessions to the poor and the working class. The first order of business is to favor work over capital, or Main Street over Wall Street, and that would take an effort just short of a political revolution.

Our dilemma comes to this: The only way to a future worthy of our highest ideals is to get beyond our Stone Age political mindsets, in which millions of people are so fearful that someone else might get something underserved that they would rather see most have nothing. The biggest obstacle to a bright future is adolescent politics. As I advocate in September University, it is time for adults to speak up or forever lose the opportunity to do so. What a predicament: to choose spite or infinite possibilities.  

 

My Books and Essays on Amazon

http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes

Websites

Autodidactic Press Website

September University.org Website

Blog Sites

Self-University Blog

September University Blog