The shift from the Bronze Age to the post-Classical Christian age marks a significant change in human society’s understanding of power and authority. In the Bronze Age, might and strength were associated with power, and those who could conquer their neighbors were considered the most powerful and successful. This was evident in the Myceneans’ expansion (Bronze Age), as well as the Delian League (Classical Age) overtaking the Aegean.
During the Classical era, Socrates’ acceptance of his trial, and his subsequent execution, showed his commitment to submitting his life in accordance with higher ideals, while also recognizing man’s need’s are dependent on the polis.
The subsequent conflict between Athens and Sparta disrupted Athens position as leader in the Aegean, which thinkers like Plato (who admired Socrates as well as Spartan society) and Aristotle responded to by seeking to reconcile this former focus on might and power (adopted from the Bronze Age), with a more idealized vision of what society could and should be, through the discussion and application of virtue (as this would properly drive a focus on how man could live well together with one another, The Republic, Aristotle’s Wisdom of the Crowds, Athenian Constitution). (Although Aristotle did believe war was imminent between Macedonia and ‘barbarian’ states when advising Alexander).
Eventually, Greece too was overtaken (not just Athens to Sparta, but now all of Greece), by Rome, which caused a diffusion of Greek culture and ideas beyond just the East (following Alexander), but also further into the West.
During this time, Jesus emerged (sic. Decopolis) as the quintessential figure of Christianity (sic. Chrestos). His contribution is a shift in focus from the former intrinsic value of physical might (as a response to Roman rule) to an agrarian way of life submitted to virtues such as truth, humility, and self-sacrifice as the blueprint for how mankind should efficiently operate.
By willingly submitting himself to the authorities and accepting his own crucifixion, Jesus showed that, while still respecting the power of man (sic. ‘give unto Caesar, what is Caesar’s’, yet acknowledging, ‘those who live by the sword die by the sword’), he recognized that true authority of man lay not in the power and authority of the state (sic. might, phusis, political entities, Rome), but in submission to virtuous principles such as humility, and self-sacrifice, God’s set of ideals, and that served sociologically as man’s blueprint for how to live properly. This effectively respecting–yet resting away–man’s authority from the State and unto divine virtues, which in turn set the tone for a more productive (i.e. such as a market based economy) and agrarian way of life.
The sacrifices of Socrates and Jesus demonstrate that true power and authority come not from the might of men (power of the state), but from virtuous principles guiding one’s life, to include accepting the consequences that may come from living in accordance with those principles (sic. Cynic). Christianity is a Greek (sic. Koin) response to Rome (latin), the Second Temple’s destruction, and Rome’s eventual fall, and the idea of living a life in accordance with virtuous civic ideals such as those posited by Plato and Aristotle (which itself was a response to Socrates and Athen’s fall from grace (power).
The shift from the Bronze Age to the post-Classical Christian age saw a transformation in humanity’s understanding of power and authority. From the bloody conquests of earlier civilizations, there emerged a new focus on moral and ethical living, on humility and submission to a higher power, and on the pursuit of truth and wisdom. The sacrifices of Jesus and Socrates stand as powerful examples of this new understanding, demonstrating that the right path lies not in conquering one’s neighbor, but in submitting to virtuous ideals and dedicating oneself to the higher values of morality, compassion, and wisdom.
Category Archives: Politics
Orwell and Cognitive Dissonance
TL;DR
Political divides and the manipulation of public opinion can be understood through the works of George Orwell and Noam Chomsky, as well as by examining the role of intuitive biases in shaping our beliefs. Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War led him to be concerned with the manipulation of truth in politics and the dangers of totalitarianism. His works, like Animal Farm, criticized the use of propaganda to control the masses and suppress individuality. Similarly, Chomsky argues that the primary function of mass media in the United States is to manufacture consent for the interests of the dominant elite groups in society, such as major corporations and investment firms.
These manipulations of truth and public opinion are further exacerbated by the inherent biases that shape our social and political judgments. Our intuitive flashes heavily influence our preferences on various issues, leading us to selectively look at subjects in ways that confirm our pre-existing views. This selective perception reinforces the media’s ability to control public opinion and perpetuates political divides, as individuals become more entrenched in their own beliefs and less open to alternative perspectives.
In conclusion, the combination of media manipulation, political agendas, and our own cognitive biases contribute to the persistence of political divides and the difficulty of finding common ground in today’s complex world. It is important to be aware of these factors and strive for open-mindedness, critical thinking, and understanding of diverse perspectives in order to overcome these divides and work towards a more cohesive and informed society. By recognizing the influences that shape our beliefs and questioning the information presented to us, we can better navigate the challenges posed by political manipulation and biases, ultimately contributing to a healthier and more democratic discourse.
…
Original
Orwell’s writings serve as a warning of the dangers of propaganda, and the manipulation of truth present in todays politics because this phenomena directly correlates with totalitarianism strategies. This serves as a reminder of the importance of defending individual liberty and a willingness to be self-critical even of ones own convictions.
Uncritically deeply held beliefs, such as those sourced from religion or political divides (of which materialist work-ethic sprang forth from), are rooted in the needs and views of historical agrarian/nomadic communities (Greek Demes, Levant, Arabian) are a modern cognitive reflection of these pasts, retold through the epic cycle of archetypal stories (myths and ideals), and as a result of these propagated ideas, we have policies that do not necessarily align with objective truth and/or offer the best path forward in terms of efficiency and fairness of government, especially in areas of personal liberty.
These beliefs are in essence bubbles of evolving ideologies and methods of social engineering influencing today’s judicial policies. Women and social minority groups have been targeted more recently, such as with pro-choice, homosexuals (homosexuality is starting to be distanced from within the Republican party), and transgender rights.
Skepticism, a 2nd century idea, is the ability to be self critical of one’s held beliefs (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, “know thyself”), and has seen revivals such as during the Renaissance and Enlightenment (which has led to the birth of modern day nations such as the US, France, and Mexico), and paved the way for new ideas such as Evolution, where-as before religious dogma mandated perceived reality.
As a result of these worldviews that people are predisposed to, when people encounter salient political or religious ideas, their minds are already partial to one of the answers regardless of what objective ground truth (reality) is.
In order to critically evaluate objective truth in a reality of where political propaganda exists (Chomsky*), the modern citizen must reserve the ability to suspend disbelief, even of personally held convictions.
The control of people’s minds through social engineering goes back for centuries (Lycurgus is a good example), and today is expressed most prominently in our political polarization.
By recognizing the centers of our own personal points of view and to suspend disbelief of opposite views, will better enable us to objectively and impartially evaluate ideas and counter the effects of the social engineering Orwell’s work touches on.
ideas sourced after watching these two youtube videos
What Orwell Actually Believed
The Drawing That Explains Political Divides
Manufacturing_Consent * Noam Chomsky
*Noam Chomsky argues that the primary function of mass media in the United States is to mobilize public support for special interests that dominate the government and private sectors. These interests include major corporations and investment firms that control resources and hold significant influence over political and ideological systems. The media’s role is to manufacture consent from both the political class and the majority of the population. This is achieved through the selection of topics, distribution of concerns, emphasis on certain issues, and the filtering of information. The media serves the interests of the dominant elite groups in society by shaping history and framing issues in a specific manner.
The calm before the storm
I’m worried this is the calm before the storm.
The storm being WW3.
Iran is having problems (riot’s, religion killings). China’s leader is being protested against. Russia (and Ukraine crisis).
We seem to have it under control, but do we really? That’s just an armchair analysis (in terms of control). But add a Trump 2024 to that mix. I’m not even saying Trump would do a good or a bad job, I’m just saying his actions would vary considerably from the current status quo, and this situation is very volatile.
Right now the US seems to be maintaining their trajectory (no spike in unemployment), but a recession (which I don’t think is going to happen from rate adjustments alone) could make US interests different in terms of how they want to respond to world events (especially, especially if oil pipelines are disrupted).
Hijab
To me, the hijab (including burqa and/or hair coverings in church) is about men’s own anxiety projected as a need to control while scapegoating personal accountability while under the amalgamated guise/ruse/pretext of modesty and faith (i.e. an internal unconscious anxiety is projected back onto a social structure, namely religion to support this narrative).
Men view women as vexing so they mandate they cover their hair, but what’s really happening is socially men are projecting their own anxieties about the other sex onto their laws. Anxieties stemming from their own internal Jungian unconscious anima mixed with shadow.
“We have economic problems, with a high inflation rate and huge unemployment. But all the government focusses on is the Islamization of society, and women, and what women wear, and what children do in school. That kind of tells you how far the regime and the public are from each other. They don’t hear each other at all, and therefore this movement is not a reform movement. I think a social revolution has happened. Whether it becomes a political revolution or not—that remains to be seen. But the fact is that people have basically given up on this regime.”
“That men and women, young and old, of different ethnicities—which is very important in the context of Iran—are joining as a united front makes it very different. It’s hopeful and inspiring, but also very worrisome, because I know that this regime will use extreme violence. The previous regime was certainly violent, but it was very careful about its image, both among the public and outside the country. This regime has passed the state of caring.”
“There’s a united front about not wanting this regime, and that sentiment is held by religious people, too. Some religious people would rather have a secular regime because they realize that, when you have an Islamic regime, one segment of the population takes over, and it ruins our religion.”
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/iranian-feminism-and-all-these-different-kinds-of-veils/amp
Trump 2024
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave
There was a scene in Game of Thrones where Baelish is talking to the Varys about the story of Westeros and the lie.
HRC said once that if you tell a lie long enough it becomes the truth (an old quote. Might be sourced from Nazi Germany WWII).
The point I’m trying to make is about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
I was thinking about how all my opinions of politicians is shaped and fed to me from the media (Plato’s Cave Wall and the puppeteer’s that control the shapes over the fire).
Chomsky said that a lot of money in our country is spent shaping people’s opinions.
Which ties back to what I say in Game of Thrones.
How much of our society is propaganda (of all societies) that we don’t even realize is a lie, but it’s just part of a palatable story (a collective mythos if you will) we tell ourselves to maintain power structures. (What really drove this point home was an article I read about Persia’s history https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIh1v7MiyVM).
That I think is what Plato’s allegory of the cave is about.
I think the US has a lot of transparency, but with freedom of speech has come the cost of loss of free time to study things to even become aware. Ignorance is bliss when it comes to EULA’s and the rights we give away when we choose something simply because it’s convenient (hard to explain that one succintly).
We are the helot’s of Sparta trapped on the Peloponnese, but we don’t’ serve Spartans, we serve Corporations (board members) while we ply for their work to pay our landlords or mortgages (the US is a plantation, I heard that as a quote once) because we don’t own the land we live on while being told by politicians we are free while running between job to job to make ends meet.
The freedom we think we have is equated with free speech, and consumerism. The latter is used to appease us but also drive innovation, but we don’t realize it’s also what keeps us in our perpetual state of need (the churn of consumer commodity capitalism drives both the corporations which we seek to be employed by, but also become our lords in a way). We jockey for prestigious positions and titles to outcompete each other which is what our lords want to drive innovation.
That’s the puppeteering.
How the Economy Works
Read two great articles today. I’d like to synopsis the main points later, but merely wanted to post the articles for the time being
Timeline
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/income-tax-rate-wealthy.html
The American Economy is Rigged
The American Economy Is Rigged – Scientific American
And what we can do about it
By Joseph E. Stiglitz on November 1, 2018
The American Economy Is Rigged
Credit: Andrea Ucini
Americans are used to thinking that their nation is special. In many ways, it is: the U.S. has by far the most Nobel Prize winners, the largest defense expenditures (almost equal to the next 10 or so countries put together) and the most billionaires (twice as many as China, the closest competitor). But some examples of American Exceptionalism should not make us proud. By most accounts, the U.S. has the highest level of economic inequality among developed countries. It has the world’s greatest per capita health expenditures yet the lowest life expectancy among comparable countries. It is also one of a few developed countries jostling for the dubious distinction of having the lowest measures of equality of opportunity.
The notion of the American Dream—that, unlike old Europe, we are a land of opportunity—is part of our essence. Yet the numbers say otherwise. The life prospects of a young American depend more on the income and education of his or her parents than in almost any other advanced country. When poor-boy-makes-good anecdotes get passed around in the media, that is precisely because such stories are so rare.
Things appear to be getting worse, partly as a result of forces, such as technology and globalization, that seem beyond our control, but most disturbingly because of those within our command. It is not the laws of nature that have led to this dire situation: it is the laws of humankind. Markets do not exist in a vacuum: they are shaped by rules and regulations, which can be designed to favor one group over another. President Donald Trump was right in saying that the system is rigged—by those in the inherited plutocracy of which he himself is a member. And he is making it much, much worse.
ADVERTISEMENT
America has long outdone others in its level of inequality, but in the past 40 years it has reached new heights. Whereas the income share of the top 0.1 percent has more than quadrupled and that of the top 1 percent has almost doubled, that of the bottom 90 percent has declined. Wages at the bottom, adjusted for inflation, are about the same as they were some 60 years ago! In fact, for those with a high school education or less, incomes have fallen over recent decades. Males have been particularly hard hit, as the U.S. has moved away from manufacturing industries into an economy based on services.
The Science of Inequality
Read more from this special report:
The Science of Inequality
DEATHS OF DESPAIR
Wealth is even less equally distributed, with just three Americans having as much as the bottom 50 percent—testimony to how much money there is at the top and how little there is at the bottom. Families in the bottom 50 percent hardly have the cash reserves to meet an emergency. Newspapers are replete with stories of those for whom the breakdown of a car or an illness starts a downward spiral from which they never recover.
In significant part because of high inequality, U.S. life expectancy, exceptionally low to begin with, is experiencing sustained declines. This in spite of the marvels of medical science, many advances of which occur right here in America and which are made readily available to the rich. Economist Ann Case and 2015 Nobel laureate in economics Angus Deaton describe one of the main causes of rising morbidity—the increase in alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicides—as “deaths of despair” by those who have given up hope.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Sources: “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Income Mobility since 1940,” by Raj Chetty et al., in Science, Vol. 356; April 28, 2017 (child-parent wealth comparison); World Inequality database (90% versus 1% wealth trend data)
Defenders of America’s inequality have a pat explanation. They refer to the workings of a competitive market, where the laws of supply and demand determine wages, prices and even interest rates—a mechanical system, much like that describing the physical universe. Those with scarce assets or skills are amply rewarded, they argue, because of the larger contributions they make to the economy. What they get merely represents what they have contributed. Often they take out less than they contributed, so what is left over for the rest is that much more.
This fictional narrative may at one time have assuaged the guilt of those at the top and persuaded everyone else to accept this sorry state of affairs. Perhaps the defining moment exposing the lie was the 2008 financial crisis, when the bankers who brought the global economy to the brink of ruin with predatory lending, market manipulation and various other antisocial practices walked away with millions of dollars in bonuses just as millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes and tens of millions more worldwide suffered on their account. Virtually none of these bankers were ever held to account for their misdeeds.
ADVERTISEMENT
I became aware of the fantastical nature of this narrative as a schoolboy, when I thought of the wealth of the plantation owners, built on the backs of slaves. At the time of the Civil War, the market value of the slaves in the South was approximately half of the region’s total wealth, including the value of the land and the physical capital—the factories and equipment. The wealth of at least this part of this nation was not based on industry, innovation and commerce but rather on exploitation. Today we have replaced this open exploitation with more insidious forms, which have intensified since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the 1980s. This exploitation, I will argue, is largely to blame for the escalating inequality in the U.S.
After the New Deal of the 1930s, American inequality went into decline. By the 1950s inequality had receded to such an extent that another Nobel laureate in economics, Simon Kuznets, formulated what came to be called Kuznets’s law. In the early stages of development, as some parts of a country seize new opportunities, inequalities grow, he postulated; in the later stages, they shrink. The theory long fit the data—but then, around the early 1980s, the trend abruptly reversed.
EXPLAINING INEQUALITY
Economists have put forward a range of explanations for why inequality has in fact been increasing in many developed countries. Some argue that advances in technology have spurred the demand for skilled labor relative to unskilled labor, thereby depressing the wages of the latter. Yet that alone cannot explain why even skilled labor has done so poorly over the past two decades, why average wages have done so badly and why matters are so much worse in the U.S. than in other developed nations. Changes in technology are global and should affect all advanced economies in the same way. Other economists blame globalization itself, which has weakened the power of workers. Firms can and do move abroad unless demands for higher wages are curtailed. But again, globalization has been integral to all advanced economies. Why is its impact so much worse in the U.S.?
The shift from a manufacturing to a service-based economy is partly to blame. At its extreme—a firm of one person—the service economy is a winner-takes-all system. A movie star makes millions, for example, whereas most actors make a pittance. Overall, wages are likely to be far more widely dispersed in a service economy than in one based on manufacturing, so the transition contributes to greater inequality. This fact does not explain, however, why the average wage has not improved for decades. Moreover, the shift to the service sector is happening in most other advanced countries: Why are matters so much worse in the U.S.?
Again, because services are often provided locally, firms have more market power: the ability to raise prices above what would prevail in a competitive market. A small town in rural America may have only one authorized Toyota repair shop, which virtually every Toyota owner is forced to patronize. The providers of these local services can raise prices over costs, increasing their profits and the share of income going to owners and managers. This, too, increases inequality. But again, why is U.S. inequality practically unique?
In his celebrated 2013 treatise Capital in the Twenty-First Century, French economist Thomas Piketty shifts the gaze to capitalists. He suggests that the few who own much of a country’s capital save so much that, given the stable and high return to capital (relative to the growth rate of the economy), their share of the national income has been increasing. His theory has, however, been questioned on many grounds. For instance, the savings rate of even the rich in the U.S. is so low, compared with the rich in other countries, that the increase in inequality should be lower here, not greater.
An alternative theory is far more consonant with the facts. Since the mid-1970s the rules of the economic game have been rewritten, both globally and nationally, in ways that advantage the rich and disadvantage the rest. And they have been rewritten further in this perverse direction in the U.S. than in other developed countries—even though the rules in the U.S. were already less favorable to workers. From this perspective, increasing inequality is a matter of choice: a consequence of our policies, laws and regulations.
In the U.S., the market power of large corporations, which was greater than in most other advanced countries to begin with, has increased even more than elsewhere. On the other hand, the market power of workers, which started out less than in most other advanced countries, has fallen further than elsewhere. This is not only because of the shift to a service-sector economy—it is because of the rigged rules of the game, rules set in a political system that is itself rigged through gerrymandering, voter suppression and the influence of money. A vicious spiral has formed: economic inequality translates into political inequality, which leads to rules that favor the wealthy, which in turn reinforces economic inequality.
FEEDBACK LOOP
Political scientists have documented the ways in which money influences politics in certain political systems, converting higher economic inequality into greater political inequality. Political inequality, in its turn, gives rise to more economic inequality as the rich use their political power to shape the rules of the game in ways that favor them—for instance, by softening antitrust laws and weakening unions. Using mathematical models, economists such as myself have shown that this two-way feedback loop between money and regulations leads to at least two stable points. If an economy starts out with lower inequality, the political system generates rules that sustain it, leading to one equilibrium situation. The American system is the other equilibrium—and will continue to be unless there is a democratic political awakening.
An account of how the rules have been shaped must begin with antitrust laws, first enacted 128 years ago in the U.S. to prevent the agglomeration of market power. Their enforcement has weakened—at a time when, if anything, the laws themselves should have been strengthened. Technological changes have concentrated market power in the hands of a few global players, in part because of so-called network effects: you are far more likely to join a particular social network or use a certain word processor if everyone you know is already using it. Once established, a firm such as Facebook or Microsoft is hard to dislodge. Moreover, fixed costs, such as that of developing a piece of software, have increased as compared with marginal costs—that of duplicating the software. A new entrant has to bear all these fixed costs up front, and if it does enter, the rich incumbent can respond by lowering prices drastically. The cost of making an additional e-book or photo-editing program is essentially zero.
ADVERTISEMENT
In short, entry is hard and risky, which gives established firms with deep war chests enormous power to crush competitors and ultimately raise prices. Making matters worse, U.S. firms have been innovative not only in the products they make but in thinking of ways to extend and amplify their market power. The European Commission has imposed fines of billions of dollars on Microsoft and Google and ordered them to stop their anticompetitive practices (such as Google privileging its own comparison shopping service). In the U.S., we have done too little to control concentrations of market power, so it is not a surprise that it has increased in many sectors.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Sources: Economic Report of the President. January 2017; World Inequality database
Rigged rules also explain why the impact of globalization may have been worse in the U.S. A concerted attack on unions has almost halved the fraction of unionized workers in the nation, to about 11 percent. (In Scandinavia, it is roughly 70 percent.) Weaker unions provide workers less protection against the efforts of firms to drive down wages or worsen working conditions. Moreover, U.S. investment treaties such as the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement—treaties that were sold as a way of preventing foreign countries from discriminating against American firms—also protect investors against a tightening of environmental and health regulations abroad. For instance, they enable corporations to sue nations in private international arbitration panels for passing laws that protect citizens and the environment but threaten the multinational company’s bottom line. Firms like these provisions, which enhance the credibility of a company’s threat to move abroad if workers do not temper their demands. In short, these investment agreements weaken U.S. workers’ bargaining power even further.
LIBERATED FINANCE
Many other changes to our norms, laws, rules and regulations have contributed to inequality. Weak corporate governance laws have allowed chief executives in the U.S. to compensate themselves 361 times more than the average worker, far more than in other developed countries. Financial liberalization—the stripping away of regulations designed to prevent the financial sector from imposing harms, such as the 2008 economic crisis, on the rest of society—has enabled the finance industry to grow in size and profitability and has increased its opportunities to exploit everyone else. Banks routinely indulge in practices that are legal but should not be, such as imposing usurious interest rates on borrowers or exorbitant fees on merchants for credit and debit cards and creating securities that are designed to fail. They also frequently do things that are illegal, including market manipulation and insider trading. In all of this, the financial sector has moved money away from ordinary Americans to rich bankers and the banks’ shareholders. This redistribution of wealth is an important contributor to American inequality.
Other means of so-called rent extraction—the withdrawal of income from the national pie that is incommensurate with societal contribution—abound. For example, a legal provision enacted in 2003 prohibited the government from negotiating drug prices for Medicare—a gift of some $50 billion a year or more to the pharmaceutical industry. Special favors, such as extractive industries’ obtaining public resources such as oil at below fair-market value or banks’ getting funds from the Federal Reserve at near-zero interest rates (which they relend at high interest rates), also amount to rent extraction. Further exacerbating inequality is favorable tax treatment for the rich. In the U.S., those at the top pay a smaller fraction of their income in taxes than those who are much poorer—a form of largesse that the Trump administration has just worsened with the 2017 tax bill.
Some economists have argued that we can lessen inequality only by giving up on growth and efficiency. But recent research, such as work done by Jonathan Ostry and others at the International Monetary Fund, suggests that economies with greater equality perform better, with higher growth, better average standards of living and greater stability. Inequality in the extremes observed in the U.S. and in the manner generated there actually damages the economy. The exploitation of market power and the variety of other distortions I have described, for instance, makes markets less efficient, leading to underproduction of valuable goods such as basic research and overproduction of others, such as exploitative financial products.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Sources: World Inequality Report 2018. World Inequality Lab, 2017; Branko Milanovic
Moreover, because the rich typically spend a smaller fraction of their income on consumption than the poor, total or “aggregate” demand in countries with higher inequality is weaker. Societies could make up for this gap by increasing government spending—on infra-structure, education and health, for instance, all of which are investments necessary for long-term growth. But the politics of unequal societies typically puts the burden on monetary policy: interest rates are lowered to stimulate spending. Artificially low interest rates, especially if coupled with inadequate financial market regulation, can give rise to bubbles, which is what happened with the 2008 housing crisis.
It is no surprise that, on average, people living in unequal societies have less equality of opportunity: those at the bottom never get the education that would enable them to live up to their potential. This fact, in turn, exacerbates inequality while wasting the country’s most valuable resource: Americans themselves.
RESTORING JUSTICE
Morale is lower in unequal societies, especially when inequality is seen as unjust, and the feeling of being used or cheated leads to lower productivity. When those who run gambling casinos or bankers suffering from moral turpitude make a zillion times more than the scientists and inventors who brought us lasers, transistors and an understanding of DNA, it is clear that something is wrong. Then again, the children of the rich come to think of themselves as a class apart, entitled to their good fortune, and accordingly more likely to break the rules necessary for making society function. All of this contributes to a breakdown of trust, with its attendant impact on social cohesion and economic performance.
There is no magic bullet to remedy a problem as deep-rooted as America’s inequality. Its origins are largely political, so it is hard to imagine meaningful change without a concerted effort to take money out of politics—through, for instance, campaign finance reform. Blocking the revolving doors by which regulators and other government officials come from and return to the same industries they regulate and work with is also essential.

Credit: Jen Christiansen; Sources: Raising America’s Pay: Why It’s Our Central Economic Policy Challenge, by Josh Bivens et al. Economic Policy Institute, June 4, 2014; The State of Working America, by Lawrence Mishel, Josh Bivens, Elise Gould and Heidi Shierholz. 12th Edition. ILR Press, 2012
Beyond that, we need more progressive taxation and high-quality federally funded public education, including affordable access to universities for all, no ruinous loans required. We need modern competition laws to deal with the problems posed by 21st-century market power and stronger enforcement of the laws we do have. We need labor laws that protect workers and their rights to unionize. We need corporate governance laws that curb exorbitant salaries bestowed on chief executives, and we need stronger financial regulations that will prevent banks from engaging in the exploitative practices that have become their hallmark. We need better enforcement of antidiscrimination laws: it is unconscionable that women and minorities get paid a mere fraction of what their white male counterparts receive. We also need more sensible inheritance laws that will reduce the intergenerational transmission of advantage and disadvantage.
The basic perquisites of a middle-class life, including a secure old age, are no longer attainable for most Americans. We need to guarantee access to health care. We need to strengthen and reform retirement programs, which have put an increasing burden of risk management on workers (who are expected to manage their portfolios to guard simultaneously against the risks of inflation and market collapse) and opened them up to exploitation by our financial sector (which sells them products designed to maximize bank fees rather than retirement security). Our mortgage system was our Achilles’ heel, and we have not really fixed it. With such a large fraction of Americans living in cities, we have to have urban housing policies that ensure affordable housing for all.
It is a long agenda—but a doable one. When skeptics say it is nice but not affordable, I reply: We cannot afford to not do these things. We are already paying a high price for inequality, but it is just a down payment on what we will have to pay if we do not do something—and quickly. It is not just our economy that is at stake; we are risking our democracy.
As more of our citizens come to understand why the fruits of economic progress have been so unequally shared, there is a real danger that they will become open to a demagogue blaming the country’s problems on others and making false promises of rectifying “a rigged system.” We are already experiencing a foretaste of what might happen. It could get much worse.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz is a University Professor at Columbia University and Chief Economist at the Roosevelt Institute. He received the Nobel prize in economics in 2001. Stiglitz chaired the Council of Economic Advisers from 1995–1997, during the Clinton administration, and served as the chief economist and senior vice president of the World Bank from 1997–2000. He chaired the United Nations commission on reforms of the international financial system in 2008–2009. His latest authored book is Globalization and Its Discontents Revisited (2017).
Credit: Nick Higgins
[AOC Thinks] Concentrated Wealth is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders
AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders.
By Eric Levitz@EricLevitz
No Paine, no gain. Photo: White House Collection; US House of Representatives; National Portrait Gallery
In 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville produced one of the earliest accounts of the American dream. In his famous study of the Jacksonian U.S., the Frenchman wrote that Americans possessed “the charm of anticipated success” — a ubiquitous optimism that he attributed to our country’s democratic character, and to the “general equality of condition” that prevailed among its “people.”
On Wednesday night, Sean Hannity took de Tocqueville to task. In the Fox News’ host’s telling, general economic equality is not a precondition for the American dream, but rather, an insurmountable obstacle to it — because the American dream is (apparently) to earn more than $10 million year without having to pay a top marginal tax rate higher than 37 percent.
Of course, Hannity did not actually frame his argument as a rebuke of de Tocqueville. His true target was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
After popularizing the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate earlier this month, the freshman congresswoman recently suggested that the mere existence of billionaires was both immoral, and a threat to American democracy. “I do think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong,” Ocasio-Cortez told the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, during an interview on Martin Luther King Day. One day later, the congresswoman approvingly quoted an op-ed by the economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, which argued that the purpose of high taxes on the wealthy wasn’t merely to generate revenue, but rather, to safeguard “democracy against oligarchy.”
Hannity’s not buying it. The Fox News host informed his audience Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez had “called the American dream immoral,” and that she wants to “empower the government to confiscate” said dream. “Better hide your nice things,” Hannity advised his audience (whom he ostensibly believes to be composed primarily of billionaires), “because here come the excess police.”
Hannity was hardly alone in deriding AOC’s antipathy for billionaires as fundamentally un-American. But in reality, there’s nothing foreign or communistic about the idea that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy, or all-too compatible with mass poverty. Republicans might call such notions radical. But many of our republic’s founders would have called them common sense.
Compare AOC’s first argument — that the simultaneous existence of billionaires and poverty is immoral, and thus justifies steeply progressive taxation — with Thomas Jefferson’s reflections in 1785. During a visit to the French countryside, Jefferson found himself scandalized by “the condition of the labouring poor.” In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that the extremity of European inequality was not only morally suspect, but economically inefficient. Aristocrats had grown so wealthy, they were happy to leave their lands uncultivated, even as masses of idle workers were eager to improve it. Thus, these proto-billionaires undermined both the peasants’ ability to transcend mere subsistence, and their society’s capacity to develop economically:
[T]he solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands…I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured.
Here is how Jefferson proposes to address the obscene coexistence of concentrated wealth and underemployed workers:
I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right…It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state. [Emphasis mine.]
If Ocasio-Cortez’s views are un-American, then surely these words from our third president’s are, as well.
To be sure, Jefferson’s views on the propriety of wealth redistribution were hardly consistent. And, of course, the slave owner was never concerned with minimizing the number of landless African-Americans or women in the United States. What’s more, the bulk of America’s founders regarded wealth redistribution as a species of majoritarian tyranny, and designed the Constitution to guard against such despotism.
My point here isn’t to suggest that AOC is channeling the sacred wisdom of our republic’s founding racists. Rather, it’s that she’s channeling one deeply rooted strain of American thought on economic morality. And while that strain might have been marginal among the leaders of the American Revolution, it was pervasive among its foot soldiers (there’s a reason the leading propagandist of the war effort, Thomas Paine, was one of the earliest champions of an American welfare state).
Regardless, Ocasio-Cortez’s second argument against the existence of billionaires — that concentrated wealth is incompatible with genuine democracy — was something close to conventional wisdom among the founders (including those who opposed democracy).
America’s first political theorists took these truths to be self-evident: that a person could not exercise political liberty if he did not possess a modicum of economic autonomy, and that disparities in wealth inevitably produced disparities of political power.
The notion that political freedom has a material basis did not originate with Karl Marx and the creed of Communism; it was a core idea of the 17th-century British political theorist James Harrington, and his formulation of classical republicanism. A man who does not own the means of his own reproduction can never exercise political freedom, Harrington argued, because “the man that cannot live upon his own must be servant.” Likewise, the man of immense wealth — whose fortune consigns great masses of men to servitude — is inevitably a kind of tyrant. After all, “where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth.”
These premises deeply informed the American founders’ conception of republican liberty. The Jeffersonian ideal of a yeoman’s republic derived from the conviction that only independent landowners were politically free — and only a (very) rough equality in the distribution of land could preserve such freedom. Even a consummate elitist like Alexander Hamilton couldn’t help but echo Harringtonian thinking, writing in the Federalist Papers, “A power over man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”
Critically, relatively few of the founders saw these premises in a progressive light. To many 18th-century American elites, the fact that the propertyless lacked the capacity to exercise genuine political freedom was not an argument for giving them property, but rather, for denying them the franchise. Similarly, the notion that true democracy couldn’t coexist with wealth inequality struck many leaders of the early republic as an argument against democracy.
“Power and property may be seperated for a time, by force or fraud — but divorced never, ” Benjamin Leigh, a conservative legislator in Virginia’s House of Delegates, argued at that state’s Constitutional Convention in 1830. “For, so soon as the pang of separation is felt … property will purchase power, or power will take property.” Being a man of property, Leigh concluded that the poor should therefore be denied political rights, saying, “it does not follow that, because all men are born equal … all men may rightly claim, in an established society, equal political powers.”
Thus, Ocasio-Cortez’s belief in the moral necessity of mass democracy (and women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery) would have struck many a Founding Father as radical. But her insistence that true democracy is incompatible with America’s present distribution of property — in which the richest 0.1 percent of Americans command as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent — would have struck Jefferson & Co. as tautological. And a large body of political science research suggests that their shared intuition is correct.
All of which is to say: If the right to self-government is an inextricable component of the American dream, then it isn’t AOC who regards that dream as immoral — it’s Sean Hannity, and every other multimillionaire who believes that legislators should not invent “many devices for subdividing property.”
Pretext
What was just a wild stab in the dark guess turns out to be true like lightning bolt hitting an idea. Religion is a tool to give the populace a pretext as well as a faith to find meaning, but it divorces epistemology from theology aside from wisdom (universal maxim’s are okay, but empirically based science needed to be divorced from theology to make theology modular and able to be used as a pretext, i.e. mold, then serve to populace). Why? Ascetics, control of Fruedian Id (collective image representation), jealousy, ethics. Basic anthropological stuff that serves the betterment of society without the need to think about it too much.
What’s my point?
Conspiracy Theory. Sometimes if it’s true. You shake people up. If religion is a tool to control people’s behavior. Then being outside of said system… people will find universally dangerous. I think that was my point. Maybe not dangerous, but a source of anxiety as one is not bound by the normative ethics those that observe the faith abide by.
Oh yes. I remember now. The lightning strike Eureka moment.
The pretext serves more than one purpose. The purpose I originally envisioned was merely to control ethics from a religious perspective, but it ALSO serves the point to condition people to not question their employer’s or military if given a plausible pretext… wartime division, no question of authority past a pretext.
So having a religion based in an epistemology that is based on reasoned universal maxim’s might be considered outside of the realm of control visa pretext (collective image representations meant to control things like Fruedian Id collectively through common denominators that religion provides) because people are expected to break it down all the way to it’s constituent 1st principles or axioms. Something they may not do with religion and reality because they are divorced from one another. Unlike something that Descarte’s system or Spinoza or Plato which are all rooted in some logical proofed 1st principle that is universally undeniable and not to be asked on a matter of faith like say a miracle of resurrection or afterlife.
What am I getting at? Conservative swing
Gender differences in society
so society has been structured where women receive and can be more carefree overall for it and men give and are therefore more hard pressed about life. I see it with the way women graduate college at higher rates than men. I think women rely on the system more where men try to differentiate themselves by it. These are all off the cuff remarks. I assume the two gender’s are not exactly alike and there are some differences, and those are the ones that I’ve noticed over the course of my life. I think it has everything to do with the system.
Symbolism and martyrdom
I never understood the use and need for saints in a religion. Christianity venerated Jesus and Greece with their Heracles. Both are [demi]god’s (low christology to high christology), pointers or symbols to the divine, sure. Both similar in end result (form): veneration and symbolism, yet different in mode of acquisition (sacrificed vs heroic). Like how (and why), by what mode or process does this form follow? Other examples are Apollonius and John the Baptist. If they died, chances are they were venerated. I imagine the loss of such a figure which create a power vacuum/need to co-opt their followers (related ideas: book: ‘the true believer’, covert narcissism need to boost another’s ego, book ‘fantasy bond’, abandonment anxiety, disillusionment/illusion (James Masterson work)). Martyrdom was good for a faith unless their faith looked down on it (like if a Roman emperorer were crucified, or how the Jews are expecting a valiant saviour not a crucified one). Sainthood also comes into play as a tool to co-opt other people’s followers. If they become a saint in your faith, then you get access to their followers. Almost like a corporate merger.
After reading the chapter on symbolism in Theophany, I now see how martyr’s and saints can quickly become powerful symbols for a faith and I now see that they should be used… correctly (see below), because people desire these symbols, which shows a need for their use. Martyrs serve as a locus for the pain of losing an idol for one’s passionate ideas of which an attempt was made at stamping them out symbolically.
Point being. Hypatia immediately stood out to me as a martyr worthy of veneration, as an ideal mean. The closure in Athens went with little fanfair, but the closure in Alexandria, well… it’s worthy of Martyrdom.
Symbols serve to conceal and reveal at the same time. They are not meant to be the actual object of focus, but point to an ideal elsewhere. This is what Hypatia is to me. She represents the neoplatonic ideal that knowledge is bliss, to study the beautiful.