Hugh Miller
Curiosities, quirks and obsessions continued.
“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.” ~Walter Savitch
There are many things in this world that are too familiar to be recognized and too obvious to be considered. Commonplace truths that everyone knows and nobody wonders about are often ideas that have been filed according to the automatic presets of the human operating system.
Communism in theory is a happy place where people are protected from economic injustice, free from want, and live in an altruistic egalitarian society.
Why does communism fail? Certainly it’s a virtual consensus that it does.
- It might fail because because it’s equivalent to classical Freudian theory applied to economics and class. It’s a weird made up collection of 18th century assumptions treated as revealed truth by those who’ve attempted it so far.
- It might be because those assumptions are so flawed that they innately fail, and generate an oppressive top down bureaucratic state.
- It might fail because the cultures that have attempted it have been premature, in a primitive aristocrat/peasant reality.
- It might fail because cultures generate a political reality that can only mirror the original culture, whatever it was.
Any of these or any combination is sufficient but it boils down to: The assumptions about human behavior were wrong. So what did the real people do that caused it to fail?
They behaved as people do everywhere at the same general levels of technology and population. Some people were in powerful positions, they developed strategies to remain powerful and profit from power. The people around them saw advantage in supporting this power and helped to protect those privileges. Powerful rulers grew power elites who might as well have been aristocrats. They in turn had bureaucracies filled with people protecting what they had and relishing any kind of insider status. Corruption became a natural part of accomplishing anything and all deals were insider deals.
Most of the population was lower class or proletariat. Despite being propagandized as the heart and soul of the system they had nothing. They were simply the huge pile of bodies holding up the higher levels of the pyramid, doing the grunt work and defending the structure in wartime.
In other words communism fails because there is a dominant economic program already running, the pyramid. The pyramid emerges from the daily choices of human beings. It is a bottom up growth. In communist states it was denied and hidden. A great show rolled on celebrating Marxism/Leninism while the actors within all lived as humans do, counter to those ideals. Communism fails because people are people.
As does capitalism.
Capitalism in theory is a happy place where companies are born to fill needs and everyone wins. Competition insures fair prices and variety. Consumers get what they wanted, entrepreneurs make money, jobs are created, and opportunity spreads. Innovation is encouraged and free markets insure that the best products are the successful products. Win/win.
But in practice capitalism is a place where successful businesses buy influence to crush competition and cooperate with other large companies to fix prices in a direct conspiracy against the consumer and all the supposed virtues of the free market. Ultimately prices are high, variety is what the big companies SAY it is and the richest become a virtual aristocracy, protecting their wealth and power by crushing upward mobility and change. New technologies are held back to protect old ones. The government, completely parasitized by these princes, becomes their agent opposing the happiness and well being of the majority. As is their nature, the majority of the lower classes support them in doing so.
Capitalism is a lie. Almost every description of it is a lie. Every failing of communism has a parallel failure in capitalism. The top down control of markets is mirrored in monopolies, and all policies to protect powerful businesses against competition. Do you think Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell think there’s really anything wrong with the insurance and pharmaceutical companies conspiring against Americans to make costs the highest in the world and completely disconnected from any free market? Do you think Ryan and McConnell think there’s anything wrong with protecting old energy against new? Paul and Mitch are there to insure that companies can conspire against the people. They are there to hinder any moves from the electorate to improve their own lives at any cost whatever to the 1%.
When they tell us to look to the marketplace for answers to health insurance and energy they might as well be corrupt Soviet bureaucrats promising the withering away of the state and a glorious new age of prosperity through hard work. The hypocrisy of working steadily to make things harder for the poor and then chiding them for not being able to afford the prices you protect against competition makes you into something so repulsive that you should be greeted with punches and spitting, not “Good morning, Senator.” To all such politicians let me tell you, you are contemptible traitors to the values you claim. While celebrating the genius of the free enterprise system and declaring it a success you devote your entire career to crushing it.
The nearest thing to a genuine free market would be a market with strict rules suppressing protectionism, cronyism and political representation of great corporate or personal wealth. The reason the powerful balk at regulation of industry isn’t to attain a purer version of capitalism, it is exactly and solely to prevent it.
By President Theodore Roosevelt
May 7, 1918
Kansas City Star
(…) Congress should deal drastically with sedition. It should also guarantee the right of the press and people to speak the truth freely of all their public servants, including the President, and to criticize them in the severest terms of truth whenever they come short in their public duty. Finally, Congress should grant the Executive the amplest powers to act as an executive and should hold him to stern accountability for failure so to act, but it should itself do the actual lawmaking and should clearly define the lines and limits of action and should retain and use the fullest powers of investigation into and supervision over such action. Sedition is a form of treason. It is an offense against the country, not against the President.
Free speech, exercised both individually and through a free press, is a necessity in any country where the people are themselves free. Our Government is the servant of the people, whereas in Germany it is the master of the people. This is because the American people are free and the German are not free. The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about anyone else.
During the last year the Administration has shown itself anxious to punish the newspapers which uphold the war, but which told the truth about the Administration’s failure to conduct the war efficiently, whereas it has failed to proceed against various powerful newspapers which opposed the war or attacked our allies or directly or indirectly aided Germany against this country, as these papers upheld the Administration and defended the inefficiency. Therefore, no additional power should be given the Administration to deal with papers for criticizing the Administration. And, moreover, Congress should closely scrutinize the way the Postmaster-General and Attorney-General have already exercised discrimination between the papers they prosecuted and the papers they failed to prosecute. Congress should give the President full power for efficient executive action. It should not abrogate its own power. It should define how he is to reorganize the Administration. It should say how large an army we are to have and not leave the decision to the amiable Secretary of War, who has for two years shown such inefficiency. It should declare for an army of five million men and inform the Secretary that it would give him more the minute he asks for more.
“To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.” Herman Melville
Master
Roy Cohn was a human scorpion. He personified the self-hating authoritarian personality. His face was locked in a permanent sneer towards a world that would never love him. He was an aggressive self-promoter who became highly visible while sitting next to Joe McCarthy at the witch hunt trials for communists in government. He was prominent in the effort to send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death row (they WERE guilty but he relished their deaths).
Like J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, he had that odd way of seeming a little TOO much on the side of good in a battle between a pure black and pure white morality. Hoover and Cohn were closeted gay men and Nixon was a black hole of shame and twisted ambition. What they had in common was tremendous self-loathing and an “Invisibility cloak” of moral righteousness to hide their shame. It’s just a variation on the strategy of pedophile priests. If someone takes tremendous trouble to place themselves beyond reproach, it’s certain they aren’t.
Cohn was a mobile inferno of rage and schadenfreude. He never came out as a gay man but he lived openly as a complete asshole his entire life. He never paid his bills or his taxes. If anyone inconvenienced or mildly offended him he would instantly and aggressively sue them with a ferocity that bordered on madness. He would hold to complete falsehoods shamelessly, asserting the same fakery but louder, and louder, never tiring or flinching. Sound familiar?
Student
When Donald Trump was young and hungry to define himself he met Cohn, who was defending him and his father in a housing discrimination lawsuit. Trump was hugely impressed with Cohn’s relentless style and Cohn became his mentor, adviser, and ultimately his personal template. Cohn gave him lessons in denying reality to assert your own story at all costs, those costs being paid generally by others. Cohn helped Trump learn the art of being a rigid empty shell of appearances and unyielding denial, he taught him to use any publicity, good or bad, to power his own pursuits. When Cohn was dying of aids and pursued by the US government for millions in back taxes, Trump dropped him without hesitation.
Many articles have been written about this strange relationship, but my point here is the fateful way that Cohn and Trump recognized each other and the way that Trump as an unfinished young man, accepted a piece of the black flint that Cohn used in place of a heart, to use in place of his own. Some kind of undistinguished black mass took place in a rococo upper east side penthouse. The power and strength of these two men are unarguable but it’s founded in weakness and emotional fragility, it grows from emptiness. Neither could find comfort in being close to people, neither could bear an uncomfortable truth about themselves and they both savored the cruel humiliation of whoever earned a frown from them. There is a viciousness here that is never found in healthy people. Their trajectory through the lives of others was always bent on diminishing, wounding and harming. Trump hasn’t changed, he’s just gained access to exponentially more lives to diminish in his passing.
Legacy
For the last few years, our politics have been dominated by the successful application of Roy Cohn’s bag of tricks. The media was utterly flummoxed by Trump, someone who never felt shame and never played the templated role of the contrite man publicly shamed by the press. The stages of the public media shaming ritual with its ultimate thumbs up or down are as stylized as Japanese Noh theater. In disbelief, the news media watched him repeatedly slip away, as if he was defying the laws of physics. This was one of many standard media set pieces that require a cooperative effort. Trump never cooperates or honors the rules, he flouts them strategically.
Trump has elevated Cohn’s rules to standard operating policy for the chief executive of the United States. Trump’s highest criteria for his staff is unquestioning loyalty to him and this requires them to embody untruth every minute without blinking. They reduce their living purpose to becoming tentacle-like extensions of Trump’s ego. Trump himself is a cipher, a soulless nothing frowning with his make-believe serious-man face. He struggles to look like a man who has even imagined compassion or the greater good.
Roy Cohn’s spawn fill every role close to Trump, protecting the central lie with an ocean of lesser, defensive lies: They are the hydra heads of the resurgent demagogue essence swarming the world stage, not one of them able to conceive a single earthly thing more important than themselves. There’s a baffling kind of evil in people who can survive happily without even a little truth or a single good wish for the world at large. Yet they persist, a pestilent raft of imitation patriots floating on an ocean of nationalistic enablers.
Canada contemplates ending freedom of speech.
Jordan Peterson
May you love and be loved.