How to rule the world

I’m actually getting a bit tired of talking about Tibet, so let me talk about something related.

How does a group manage to stay in power and end up ruling the world?

In the 19th century, there were two groups that were elites that managed to control their bit of the world. The Protestant Ascendency in Ireland and the Boston Brahmins in New England. No one hears about the Protestant Ascendency anymore (even in Northern Ireland, the Church of Ireland Ascenency lost control to the Prespertyerians that run it now), but it turns out that the ideological heirs of the Boston Brahmins managed to end up ruling the world.

The center of Brahmin power was Harvard University, and rather than fight the inclusion of new groups (like the Irish), the people running things came up with a new definition of “elite” that ended up incorporating any group that could possibility challenge them. Gradually, one ended up with an institution that ends up being one of the centers of power for the groups that rule the world.

Conspiracy theorists are right that the world is basically run by a rather small number of people (at most 10000 people on a planet of 6 billion). Where they get things wrong is they underestimate the ability of the people that run the world to get the cooperation of the remaining people in the world. Most middle class parents in the United States (and in fact most in China) are trying to get their kids in Harvard rather than trying to overthrow it. Also the most successful conspiracies are “hidden in plain sight.” Harvard has a website, with rather detailed instructions on how you can have your son or daughter join the people that run the world.

Stanley Fish shows how awful academia has become…

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/humanities/2008/01/06/

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/the-uses-of-the-humanities-part-two/index.html

There are these sad and awful writings by Stanley Fish that I think illustrate how out of touch and useless academia has become, and why we really need to rethink the entire system of higher education.

I happen to come from an intellectual tradition that believes that the role of the intellectual in society is to serve as leaders and examples for the community and to carry the eternal flame from past generations to future ones. The fundamental belief is that if people think about what they are doing, and learn from the past, that in the end society benefits. One reason I find myself outside of academia and in the world of business and commerce is that I find far more people on Wall Street who are trying to use their skills to make the world a better place than I’ve ever found in academia. Something I find shocking is that academics don’t really try to use their skills and their learning to make even academia a better place.

You can’t argue that a state’s economy will benefit by a new reading of “Hamlet.” You can’t argue – well you can, but it won’t fly – that a graduate who is well-versed in the history of Byzantine art will be attractive to employers (unless the employer is a museum). You can talk as Bethany does about “well rounded citizens,” but that ideal belongs to an earlier period, when the ability to refer knowledgeably to Shakespeare or Gibbon or the Thirty Years War had some cash value (the sociologists call it cultural capital). Nowadays, larding your conversations with small bits of erudition is more likely to irritate than to win friends and influence people.

Utter nonsense.

Great art and great literature let’s people try to answer or at least ask the really important questions. For example, “why do I want to be attractive to an employer?” “what does an employer find attractive?” Reading Hamlet to be personally very useful because it gives you an appreciation of irony and of tragedy which is really useful for day to day official social interactions. How is Byzantine art useful to an employer? I don’t know, maybe an expert in Byzantine art can tell me, but one thing that I’ve found is that creative people are always on the look out for something new and different and you can often find something new in something old. As far as the Thirty Years War and Gibbon, it might not be that useful when you are at parties, but it is deadly serious that you know something about history when you go to vote.

It’s a pretty idea, but there is no evidence to support it and a lot of evidence against it. If it were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.

That says something really, really bad about literature and philosophy departments and not something bad about literature and philosophy. Academia nowadays actually discourages people from thinking big thoughts and coming up with great ideas.

As far as the usefulness of literary analysis. Prof. Fish points to an example where he analyzes a line an in old poem. Interesting. Now the ability to do that sort of analysis comes in to be *really* useful if you start using it on a 30 second television commercial or if you are writing a 30 second television commercial. Look at any campaign ad or ad for orange juice. It’s in effect a poem that wants to get you to feel something and once you feel that something, it makes you want to go out to do something. If you can analyze what it trying to make you feel and why, then you can make more intelligent decisions about whether you really do what to do that something.

Do humanities courses change lives and start movements? Does one teach with that purpose, and if one did could it be realized?

If the answers to these questions are (as I contend) “no” – one teaches the subject matter and any delayed effect of what happens in a classroom is contingent and cannot be aimed at – then the route of external justification of the humanities, of a justification that depends on the calculation of measurable results, is closed down.

That says something bad about humanities professors and not about humanities.

Assuming that if they had been schooled in the right texts (Paul Krugman rather than Milton Friedman, Cornel West rather than William Buckley) they would have devised better policies is a fantasy, and indeed, it is the same fantasy the neoconservatives buy into when they argue that if we were to introduce radical Muslims to the writings of Jefferson, Madison and J.S. Mill, they would learn to love freedom and stop wanting to destroy us. The truth is that a mastery of literary and philosophical texts and the acquisition of wisdom (in whatever form) are independent variables.

No. This isn’t true. I doubt that anyone who has read Aristotle, Thucycides, or Gibbons would have make the same mistakes that the neoconservatives made. Also if you are widely read, you would have read the Koran and the writings of Islamic jurists to understand the culture and the mindset of the middle east. As far as introducing radical Muslims to Jefferson, Madison, and Mill, I don’t know how they would react. Give them some of those texts and start having a dialogue. Find some suicide bomber, give him a copy of Jefferson, and ask “what do you think about this?” I’m pretty sure that the answer to that is going to be more useful than if you try drowning him.

I should point out that this is a shockingly simplistic notion of what it means to be educated. Because educated means *reacting* to texts, not merely passively absorbing them. It means being part of a conversation with the author even if the author has long since been dead. Someone who is educated makes what they read part of them, even if they disagree with it.  It’s not a matter of the “right texts” or the “wrong texts”.  It’s a matter of being exposed to a wide variety of contradictory information and trying to make some sense out of it.  Someone really can’t claim to have been educated in economics for example, unless they’ve tried to read both Adam Smith and Karl Marx (Marx is more fun to read the Smith).

Comments on David Brooks

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/opinion/04brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Some notes:

You are truly a golden child, because you succeed in university as well. You have a number of opportunities. You could get a job at an American multinational, learn capitalist skills and then come back and become an entrepreneur. But you decide to enter government service, which is less risky and gives you chances to get rich (under the table) and serve the nation.

The part that Brooks misses is the trip to the United States in which the Chinese kids gets exposed to forms of education that don’t involve rote learning.  Getting into Chinese undergraduate school involves a lot of rote memorization and passing a test.  However, it’s important to recognize that the reason the system is set up this way is to avoid corruption and to have some objective means of getting people into the social elite.

In one sense, your choice doesn’t matter. Whether you are in business or government, you will be members of the same corpocracy. In the West, there are tensions between government and business elites. In China, these elites are part of the same social web, cooperating for mutual enrichment.

In the United States government and business elites are part of the same social web also.  Yes government and business elites will end up arguing with each other in the United States, but the same happens in China.  There are a lot of good things about the United States, and I think that the US has a much better form of government than China.  But the business, academic, and political elites work largely the same in both the United States and China.

You feel pride in what the corpocracy has achieved and now expect it to lead China’s next stage of modernization — the transition from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. But in the back of your mind you wonder: Perhaps it’s simply impossible for a top-down memorization-based elite to organize a flexible, innovative information economy, no matter how brilliant its members are.

It’s not impossible.  Singapore has done it.  Whether it can be done on a continent wide scale and whether the Communist Party of China can do that is another question.

I’m not sure what point David Brooks is trying to make.  If it is that a system of memorization limits flexibility of thought, well, yes.  That’s why Chinese end up in American graduate schools.

That’s a thought you don’t like to dwell on in the middle of the night.

I don’t see why.  It may turn out that China is just not very good at this innovation and creativity thing in which case the obvious thing to do is to outsource that sort of stuff to the United States.  But I don’t think this is going to be a problem.  China is experiencing a massive “brain gain” in which people with American experience and ideas are coming back and changing the ways things are done there.

The United States has one big advantage over China that will help it with the “innovation thing” and that is that you just have a larger diversity of people in the United States.  The United States is an immigrant nation whereas China just has too many people living there already to be as throughly diverse as the United States.  You come up with new ideas when you meet different people doing different things and while I can imagine some “international centers” in China, it’s unlikely that the entire country is going to be the meeting place for the world.

I don’t think that people have come to grips with this globalization thing.  People still think in terms of the United States versus China, but that is going to grow as silly as thinking in terms of New Jersey versus Connecticut.  OK, the US might be better at coming up with innovations than China, but Silicon Valley is better at coming up with technological innovations than Sioux City, Iowa.  So what?

Where did we go wrong?

A discussion about the sorry state of academic activism….

I do think that Ph.D. programs should prepare students with the expectation that they will not be full time academics, and despite my dislike over some aspects of my education, by and large, I think my education was very good at doing that, and in talking about the world of adjuncts, we need to have that discussion.  This is part of a larger social discussion about what we need to do to prepare students in general for an uncertain world, since adjuncts make up only one part of the “new proletariat.”  If we can’t figure out how to get decent wages to English Ph.D.’s then we are totally cooked when it comes to high school dropouts.

I’m fascinated by the development of late 19th century history.  In most developed nations, the social revolution that Marx predicted did not come to pass, but that only happened because people with power got scared and passed a series of social reforms that prevented revolution.  One thing that I find interesting is that people in the business elites really do have a social conscience because they know better than anyone, that if they don’t make people wealthy, that the poor are going to take their wealth.  I don’t seem people in academia doing this in any way that is effective.  I think the main problem is that people in academia are in their own little world that is disconnected with the lives of most people.

I’m curious that academics at least on the Chronicle of Higher Education forums don’t seem to take a wider more active role at social activism.  It’s interesting to go back to the late-19th and early-20th centuries, when it seemed that American intellectuals did self-consciously realize the power that they had, and it is sad to see that this no longer seems to be the case.  Who are the Charles W. Eliot’s and William Barton Rogers of our time?

My guess is that people with tenure don’t see a reason to change the system in any fundamental way, and are frightened of any change that will reduce their status and job security.  People without tenure are so busy just trying to survive that they can’t do anything,

Another note on the 17th Party Congress

Just one point that has been missed. Hu in his speech about Taiwan said that Beijing would negotiate with any party under the condition of that there is “one China.” Something about the DPP candidate Frank Hsieh is that he has in the past mentioned his theory of the “one constitutional China” which is that the ROC constitution states that there is one China and while the DPP doesn’t think that this is the way things should be, these are the way things are. That I think is enough for talks to begin if DPP gets elected.

The problem that DPP has right now is that there are two people trying to run the campaign who don’t seem to agree on what to do.

http://news.chinatimes.com/2007Cti/2007Cti-Focus/2007Cti-Focus-Content/0,4518,9610160141+96101609+0+174729+0,00.htm

Here you have Frank Hsieh explicitly not requiring Beijing to drop the insistance on “one China” whereas Chen Shui-Bian insisting that Beijing does.  (Again, you have the problems here of media lensing.  China Times leans toward the KMT so obviously they are going to highlight any discord in the DPP.  I tried to look for these statements in the pro-Green press and I couldn’t find them.  Pro-green has been really quiet, which I think is a good sign being pro-blue.)

As far as why the condition of “one China” is important to Beijing it has to do with the details of international law. Under international law, it is legitimate to use force to prevent internal secession but it is a war crime to use force against another state. One can get into deep arguments as to whether Taiwan is a state or not, but as long as Beijing or anyone else important doesn’t recognize Taiwan as a state, then one can argue that the situation is ambiguous. Once Taiwan does something that clearly indicates that it is a state and Beijing does not object, then Beijing loses any ability to try to argue under international law that the threat of force is state self-defense. As it is, it is some thing you can argue about, but if Beijing says Taiwan is independent then there is nothing to argue about anymore.

It also works the other way. If Taiwan were recognized as under the sovereignty of Beijing (as is Tibet), then arms sales to Taiwan by the United States would be a violation of international law.

This comes up with one difficulty of dealing with law. When you do something legal, you have to understand and respect a different legal theory while at the same time promoting your own. One problem in getting into nationalistic discussions involving international law, is that people tend to regard arguments that support their side as “obviously right” and those that support the other as “obviously wrong.” However, this is bad approach, if you are trying to use the law to get something done. In that case you have to respect and understand other people’s arguments, and in many situations actively work with people who you disagree with in order to come up with a solution to a problem. It’s this sort of thinking that I think does a lot to promote what I think of as “democracy.”

In this particular situation, since I think that talks between the Mainland and Taiwan are a good thing (since they promote economic interaction which I think will contribute in the long run to national unification), part of the challenge is to arrange the situation so that neither side has to compromise their legal theories to talk to each other. This actually is quite a bit more difficult than it sounds since even the act of being publicly seen talking to someone has legal and diplomatic ramifications.

Disaster Capitalism - Comments on Naomi Klein

http://www.naomiklein.org/main

Interesting book that is worth reading.  However, there are some important points here.

First of all, it always fascinates me that the people who are most in favor of privatization and lassiez-faire capitalism are people that have spent most of their lives outside of business and finance, just like the people who are most in favor of military intervention are people who have spent most of their lives outside the military.  There’s something ironic and disturbing that the economists of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund that are telling third world nations to privatize everything are people who generally have never worked in a private company in their entire lives.

It’s also telling that the people who were the most skeptical about military intervention in Iraq were people who were the professional soldiers, and the people who are some of the loudest voices against the excesses of capitalism are professional finance people like George Soros and Warren Buffett.

“Being there” changes your perspective in a lot of ways.  For example, pretty much everyone who has worked in a private corporation has lost their job at some point, and knows in an emotional way, the consequences have being unemployed.  So when I see angry people on the streets of Baghdad and Jakarta, I know what they are feeling because I’ve been there in a way that I doubt most of the economists in the World Bank or IMF have.

I do think that Klein is a bit too much a believer of “incorrect” conspiracy theories, and doesn’t quite appreciate the breathtaking amount of incompetence there is out there.  There are people in this world that truly, honestly believe that government is the problem, and that totally privatized world will create a utopia.  These people are for lack of a better word, dangerous idiots.  Private corporations and private capital can do a lot of good, and the profit motive and pure greed can do some incredibly wonderful things, but you have to consider the entire social system.

I seriously doubt that anyone in the Bush administration intended that New Orleans and Iraq would be in such the awful mess that they are in.  Even in cases where there is obvious greed and cronyism, then attitude of the people getting the checks toward society is neutral.  People who are making big money off New Orleans and Iraqi reconstruction, frankly don’t care if New Orleans or Iraq prospers or burns, as long as they get the checks, so the trick in getting something useful done is to set up the incentives so that people make more money if New Orleans prospers.  This is one reason why you really want local people running things.  A corrupt political boss that is located in New Orleans at least spends the proceeds of their corruption locally and has some connection between their political/economic well-being and those of the community.

Finally, I think that Klein totally misses the really, really, really scary implication of her work.  One thing that you learn to ask yourself in business is “Who is the competition and what are they doing?”

So who is the competition and what **are** they doing?

Hezbollah and the Islamic Brotherhood has managed to capture the support of large numbers of people because they run schools and services that are competently run.  The reason that Islamism has become such a powerful force is because they provide a lot of social services and reconstruction aid.  The United States promised freedom to Iraq, and it brought devastation.  Meanwhile Islamist groups are getting the job done.  If things go on the way that Klein says they are going on, then we are going to lose this war……  And let me say something obvious, in the Middle East, we are losing this war….  We haven’t lost, but we are losing……

Systems of social control - How Chomsky is right — and wrong

In George Orwell’s 1984, Winston Smith asks O’Brien whether the things that Smith has read in the secret banned book are true. O’Brien’s reply is “As description, yes. The programme it sets forth is nonsense.”

I keep thinking about this in relation the writings of Noam Chomsky

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/Noam_Chomsky.html

who I think is a wonderfully lucid and accurate description on how the power elites in developed nations keep their control by corporate control of the media. My big difference with Chomsky, is that he assumes that there is a better system out there, and I’m skeptical. Part of the reason I’m skeptical is that I’ve been in academia. Presumably the academics that write about systems of social control want to model society in the image of academia, and in any case they have the power to model academia after their vision of a perfect society. However, my first hand experience is that the world of academia has a rigid caste system and is exploitive in a way that is unheard of in the “corrupt world of business and politics.” Let’s be brutally honest about this, academia is a world of lords (tenured faculty) and serfs (adjuncts and graduate students). The one nice thing about the academia is that academics don’t run society, and there are enough social limits to keep the dysfunctions of academia inside of academia, where they are harmless. In cases where academics have free rein to run a society, the results have invariably been disastrous. The one clear modern example where you had academics running a society was the Khmer Rouge.

Let me give you an obvious example of how the power elite in the United States maintains control over society, and why it isn’t such a bad thing. I want to invite you to a speech by Chomsky. Except that you can’t go because you have to work. Why do you have to work? Just quit your job, and join the revolution. Well, because you have this mortgage and you have car payments, and you just bought this big giant big screen HDTV and you want to catch the latest episode of Lost. Well why don’t you get rid of these things, become a hermit, quit your job, and join the revolution. Well, I just saw this commercial that makes me want to buy this bigger HDTV and I don’t want my neighbors to think that I am a “loser” for having a small HDTV or a small house. Why do you think you are a loser if you aren’t a business success and have a small television? Well, there is this commercial that I saw while I was watching Lost….. And….

So who ends up joining the demonstration. It’s people who don’t care about money and status, and these people generally have no money and connections and so are harmless. The US doesn’t have political prisoners, because anyone that wants to change the system in a way that is unacceptable to the power elite either by bought out or ignored. I’m a good example of this. I say good things about the power elite, because the power elite dumps enough money in front of me to keep me happy and controlled. If the checks stop coming, I become unhappy and uncontrolled, and seeing that I have some useful talents, the people that run the United States don’t want to see me uncontrolled. And this is true for most of the people living in the United States.

So what the hell is wrong with the system????

Personally I don’t think that there is much wrong with the system (and that’s largely because of those semi-monthly paychecks that I get from it that allow me to satisfy the urges that the system makes me thing that I have). Basically what is happening is that the rich and powerful are bribing the less rich and less powerful with wealth and goodies so that the rich and powerful can keep their wealth and goodies.

Chomsky does have a problem because he has a model of economics in which the wealth that the developed world has has to come from exploitation of the third world. That HDTV? Where did it come from? Chomsky would argue that it came from a slave labor factory in China. But that is not what is happening.

The Chinese government is bright enough to know that they just can’t stay in power through tanks and torture. There aren’t enough soldiers and police to keep control, and then you run into the problem of keeping control of the soldiers and police. So the Chinese government has copied the American government and is trying to stay in power by bribing the masses. People work in Chinese sweatshops because *they* want their goodies, *they* want to be seen as a success, and *they* want a bigger house and motorbike than their neighbors. And as long as the checks keep coming, people are too exhausted to demonstrate. If you look in situations where people *are* demonstrating in China, it’s largely because of economic issues. Their checks aren’t big enough. So people make noise, and when they get a fat enough check, they stop making noise. The system isn’t quite as developed in China, so the government has to sometimes resort to jailing dissidents, but what the government is trying to push for is a system like that American system in which the dissidents are harmless and jailing them causes more problems than ignoring them.  The ideal system would be one in which anyone who wants to destroy the system, gets to join the party.  *wink*

For this system to continue to work both the US and Chinese economic and political elites need to generate enough wealth to keep their populations satisfied, and they need to be open enough so that people (like me) that could be threat to the basic stability of the system, get bought out. That’s not a bad thing, and it’s a heck of a lot better than what the academics have come up with…….

Let be close by pointing out the fatal flaw that academics have that I think causes them create such hellish systems. Academics think that they are smarter than everyone else. The people who get a paycheck, buy a high-definition TV, and then relax to watch Lost, they are stupid sheep in the eyes of academics. They should be reading about Chomsky or joining the revolution. The trouble with this attitude is that it means that academics ignore the ideas and perspectives of non-academics, and so when they get into a position of power, they know what is right, everyone else is wrong, and this causes hell to happen…..

So now that I’ve told you all of this, are you going to go out and revolt…… I don’t think so. I think you are just going to go into the refrigerator, pull out a cold beverage and watch TV….. which is exactly what the power elites wants you to do…..

More about the real world

http://www.chinalawblog.com/2007/09/china_corrupt_me_corrupt_me_no.html 

The reason that I think democratic societies have lower corruption indices is that democratic societies tend to be richer and also tend to have working administrative systems and bureaucracies. This means that there is the wealth available to prevent corruption and the systems in place to prevent corruption.

Also, curiously I don’t think that the average person in the United States has more control over their lives than the average person in China, and I don’t think that power in the United States is more evenly distributed than in China. In both societies, the number of people that actually run things is in the neighborhood of two to three thousand people.

However, people in the US have the *belief* that they have more control, and that matters a lot. There are lots of processes and rituals in the United States system of government designed to give people the belief that what they think really matters, even when it doesn’t.

In your typical mid-term House election, about 90% of the seats have already been decided, and the remaining 10% you are choosing between two parties that agree on about 90% of the issues. Senate elections are more open, but that is because the larger districts allow more campaign spending. Your chances of getting elected to Congress are nil unless you have money and connections.

But still it is a much better system than China’s, for a number of reasons, not the least of which it is that is more stable. If something really bad happens in the US, and the Republicans are in power, they get blamed, voted out, and the Democrats come to power, and vice versa. Whatever happens, the system as a whole doesn’t collapse or really change in a fundamental way.

Yes, you need money and connections to get elected to anything, but it is not impossibly difficult to get money and connections, and in the process of getting money and connections, you have to agree to play by some rules. This means that people who seek to challenge the system get absorbed by it and end up strengthening it.

In China, if something really bad were to happen, people get angry, they can’t take their anger out by “voting the bums out” and so they get even more angry. This makes the system unstable. Also because there are isn’t a firm system of rules, it sometimes becomes difficult to absorb challengers into the system. This also makes the system unstable.

Having the power elite in the United States maintain control by “manufacturing consent” (lawyers, lobbyists, and media consultants) is a lot better than maintaining control via using tanks and torture, and also more effective in the long run.

The more the Communist Party of China relies on “effective propaganda” (I’m thinking here of Fox News and CNN) and less on brute force, then better things are……

There is a weird sort of “doublethink” that some people have when it comes to democracy. On the one hand, people promote “democracy” but what they have in mind is a not a real system but some imaginary ideal system that doesn’t exist, and quite possibly can’t practically exist. I’m not interested in imposing a theoretical ideal system. I want to see real political systems in action.

Caveat Emptor

One of the things that I’ve learned is that history doesn’t end, and problems don’t end.  You get what you want, and that resolves some problems, but the world changes, and you end up with new problems.  They might be better problems.  But unlike a movie or a novel where you reach the end, there is end to history.

One new problem that I’ve found is that I’m now in a position that I’ve giving advice to people, mostly about careers and strategy.  That worries me a lot because anything that I say is going to be incomplete, and I hope it is not incomplete in a way that will get people into trouble or which is misleading.  People thing in terms of “scripts” and “stories.”  There’s the “American dream” script, the “model student” script, the “patriotic overseas Chinese” script, and what I’m often asked to do is to basically help people conform their lives and efforts to a script.  Recently, it’s usually the “successful person in business” script.  What worries me is that a script is an incomplete description of a human being.

What I found is that sometimes you get a better idea of reality by asking the right question. If you ask enough questions and design an experiment well, you get answers. If enough people ask the right questions, you can make a huge amount of progress.

And sometimes the right question is something completely obvious?  Why do I write some much?  Why do I have such a strong urge to help people in their careers?  I think I have a vague understanding of my motives, and it’s a story I don’t want to tell you, and in some ways I can’t tell you.  But it’s something that doesn’t quite fit into the “successful person in business” script or in the “classic immigrant story” script.  Behind my motives, there is a lot of things that most people would consider “negative.”  There is fear, pain, anger, hate, shame, sadness, and guilt.  There are shadows all around me.  When you have lots of bright lights in the big city, shadows are difficult to avoid.

Let me talk about a recurring nightmare that I often have…..

There is a brick floating in mid-air.

That is frightening to me.  Brick don’t float in mid-air, they fall to the ground.  Maybe, one day I will see a brick floating in mid-air, and if that happens, then there is something very, very wrong.  That’s why I care a lot of about physics, math, economics, and law.  They provide certainty or at least the illusion of certainty.  If I see something, it should explainable by the laws of conservation of mass and energy, or it should be consistent with the Peano axioms of natural numbers, or it should be explainable via judicial precedent and constitutional law.  But what it doesn’t.  What if I see a brick floating in mid-air without any explanation.  They I know something is very wrong with the world, and it’s a deeply uncomfortable feeling.  If a brick floats in mid-air, and the laws of physics no longer hold, then what keeps me from falling into the center of the earth.  If I’m in a situation where there is no constitutional, legal  or economic framework, then what keeps “them” from doing nasty, unspeakable things to me.

I want to know that I’m sane, and that the world around me is sane.  That’s why it is important that 2+2 keep adding up to be 4, because if it ends up adding to be something else, then I’m not safe any more, and much of my life has been to deal with the horrible reality that things are not as safe and secure as I would like them to be.  And if they world starts going crazy, at least I want to know how crazy it is.  Maybe when I add 2+2 I don’t get 4.  Do I get 3.99999, 1, -2, or is the answer that I get when I add 2+2, magenta elephant or something that else that is not even a number.

The annoying thing is that the world being as confusing as it is, that I often don’t get 4 when I add 2 and 2.  Sometimes I get 3.999, sometimes I get nothing.  Sometimes I get -3.   Maybe I added wrong.  Maybe there is something I’m ignoring.  I don’t know.  But I find those moments very frightening and disturbing, because when I add two numbers and they don’t come out exactly right, I get the glimpse of that brick floating in mid-air.  And my strange insecurities and frustrations about numbers, gets me to the social embodiment of numbers….. Money…..

Money is a funny thing in that I found that people who seem to care a lot about money, really care about something else.  I care a lot about money.  For me, money is a sign that I am sane and that the world is sane.  In business there are so many things that can go wrong, and it is a constant struggle against chaos.  Being able to make money is hard, and making a profit demonstrates that in some way, you are connected to the rest of the world, and that you aren’t in your own little reality disconnected from the reality in the rest of the world.  Having money and making money allows me to convince myself that I am sane.

I say this because one day I might end up labeled as a “business success” and that happens, your story gets repeated, and like all stories, it is incomplete.  Descriptions of reality are always incomplete, but they can be incomplete without being misleading.  Just be aware that there are shadows following me.  I don’t want to tell you what they are, and pretty much everyone who finds out wishes that they didn’t know.  Just be aware that they are there…….

The Real World

http://www.rgemonitor.com/content/view/216478/86/ 

Exxon-Mobil has record profits, but if Iraq were online, they’d be making even more money. China and India are increasing demand for oil, and the oil companies are making large amounts of money off of this. This puts big oil on the side of China. The whole Chevron-CNOOC thing, that was a bit of hardball.

to guest:

You left off a zero. Cheney’s assets are about $90 million, most of which came from options he had in Halliburton stock. Funny thing. Once he was VP, people wanted him to sell his Halliburton stock, which he did, right before the stock plumetted.

Halliburton made about $13.5 billion of revenue. US$90 million net worth for a CEO of a Fortune 500 company is typical (and I think it’s actually on the small side). One problem with the US system is that because public official salaries are capped, all of the really talented people try to go into business or law, and having talented people go into business rather than government makes things unbalanced. The Goldman-Sachs model, where people make money then run for office, is one way of getting around that problem.

Also, once you make about $3 million/year and have about $10 million net worth, (i.e. managing director level at a bank) money no longer matters. Above that level, it’s not about the money. It’s about the power and the status.

guest: Did you mean like the “sleazy operator” George Schultz, or the “sleazy operator”,turned neocon warmonger, Donald Rumsfield? When Cheney and Rumsfield were unsuccessful with the carrot, they use the stick (”shock and awe” rather than shlock and gnaw). Is this what you mean by sleazy?

Yes exactly. If it was just about money, there are lots of deals that could have been made with Sadaam. Lots of deals *were* made with Sadaam. The whole “oil for food” sham.

Cheney and Rumsfeld went wrong when they stopped being sleazy operators and got convinced by the neo-conservatives that they could build a democracy in Iraq. If it’s about money, you can make a deal. Go to Sadaam, ask him what his price is. $1 billion? $2 billion? $10 billion? $50 billion? $100 billion? Write the check and then have the lawyers and lobbyists make sure it is all legal, and the PR people make sure that the story gets buried in the press.

If they were just in for the money, then they wouldn’t have gotten the US in nearly the amount of trouble that they’ve gotten. The US is going to be dealing with the Iraq mess for *at least* the next decade. Realistically, the next two or three. Everyone with half a brain knows it, but no one is talking loudly because they don’t know what to tell the spin doctors to say.

But I still think that the US has a good economic and political system. The thing I find interesting about ideologues on both the right and the left is that they are interested in “selling democracy” but what they are trying to sell is some system that exists only in their minds, and not some real world system.

The basic reality is that people with money get power, and people with power get money. If you try to build a political or economic system that ignores that fact, you are ignoring basic human desire and emotion, and what you come up with will be a mess. However, you can build a system that acknowledges human desire and still manages to do social good. Arrange things so that the people with money have to spread some of it around to get more money. When people complain about corruption, they usually are just upset that they aren’t getting any of the good stuff. Give it to them.

When I say that I think that there are some parts of the US system that China should adopt, I’m talking about the real world, not some imaginary system. Even with the spin doctors, the lobbyists, the lawyers, the overpaid incompetent CEO’s, there is still a lot of good stuff in the US economic and political system. With all of the damage that Cheney and Bush have done, it’s still recoverable. Not anything like the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution.