6 Heretic's Way

Builds Upon: Living On A Keynesian Playground

Many an old aphorism tells us that human desire is limitless.
Yet not so many tell us that human imagination is quite limited.

Humans can desire only what they already know of or are capable of imagining.
Thus kings in ancient times never had any desire for personal computers or i-pads.

Markets are like a genie that grants the wishes of a collective—anything that people want tends to manifest—but like a typical Arabian Nights style narrative, the moral of the story is the banality and short-sightedness of the wish-maker.

Somehow, we never see the ‘experts’ factor in shortcomings in human knowledge and imagination when they discuss the workings of capitalism. The theoretical customer seems almost like a Laplace’s demon with perfect knowledge of the universe.

In real life, imperfect consumer knowledge and foresight plus the influence of emotion makes planned obsolescence a more lucrative strategy than making high quality merchandise.
Furthermore, planned obsolescence is in part merchants’ response to increasing abundance. It is just one of many mechanisms that reinforce artificial scarcity.
Consumers, especially the millions living from paycheck to paycheck, buy the cheapest products available only to have them break in a short while. Over years, they actually end up paying more than if they had invested in a single high quality item.
This tactic works brilliantly for the sellers because most people do not have the critical thinking ability, requisite curiosity, or knowledge outside their narrow specialty to understand how they are actually being ripped off in the long term.

Ironically, quality merchandise that won’t break has become a rarity. Most products we find at major retailers have devolved into junk as consumer expectations have steadily eroded over the decades.
If the parents could be sold a toaster that broke after 8 years, perhaps their kids could be induced to buy a cheap toaster that breaks in 4 years…and so on. Now after several generations have grown up in our modern capitalism we see the market in its present state with the process of decay actually accelerating.

If we know the nature of the wish-maker we can predict the nature of the product. Thus we can predict that we will get ripped off if we shop in the same venues frequented by ignorant and apathetic consumers.

How do we shelter ourselves, then, from the nightmare market wished into existence by the tyrannical masses?

Why not find and follow those wish-makers who have a stake in getting the highest quality merchandise possible?
For instance, businesses that are very much motivated to look out for their bottom line:

Exhibit 1
Any more, a pair of jeans wears out very quickly. In particular, I notice that it’s usually the knees that give out, often within just a few months. Even sooner if there’s any actual physical work or rough handling.
Yet we still buy them just because we have a cultural memory of jeans as durable work clothing and all purpose casual wear. We keep coming back to get ripped off because we’re unthinkingly following the crowd.

Meanwhile, work clothing stores sell high quality pairs of pants that can absorb years of constant abuse. The knees are actually reinforced with an entire extra layer of thick fabric.
I think someday, I may well choose Dickies over Dockers and although unfashionable, it will be my fashion statement.

Exhibit 2
Most kitchen appliances any more break like cheap toys, even if the consumer buys a shiny tin-plated version of the same garbage that costs 25-50% more.
The only real solution: Find out what blenders, toasters, and mixers restaurants are using.
For in our present world, if it’s not ‘industrial grade’ it’s probably not worth buying.

Or, one might plug leaks by only keeping the most useful appliances. After all, couldn’t one toast a piece of bread on a stove or in an oven? In your average home how often does one actually need an electric mixer?
To be worthwhile each additional appliance must not add to the hundreds of financial thumbtacks of Damocles hanging over one’s head.

Exhibit 3
As if by royal decree, schools and instructors create a monopoly for text book companies. Not only are prices exorbitant, the publishers keep their cash cow alive by frequently ‘revising’ their books. ‘Revision’ of course mostly consists of changing the page numbers, the order of the chapters, and the assignable homework problems. Thus, everyone has to buy each new edition and discard the previous one.

Given absolute power, these companies create as much artificial obsolescence as they can. So advanced is the decay of this market, that all pretence has been dropped and the vendors overtly, ruthlessly, and arbitrarily milk their precious captive consumers.

As quality merchandise becomes less available in the wider market, we can expect an increasing resemblance to the monopolistic text book industry.

Conclusion:
For those who sing praise unto capitalism, the principle of planned obsolescence invites us to reflect on one of the most glaring paradoxes of free markets.

The perfect product that never breaks puts its manufacturer out of business.

This conundrum shows us that capitalism alone cannot be a foundation for a society that works in the best common interest.

A better society clearly must be animated by some kind of higher legitimacy and intrinsic defining purpose that encourages every item to be made in the best possible way.
We’re often told that modern production is very efficient. Yet needless waste on a mass scale is a defining trait of our system.
Surely the enlightened society is one that makes every single effort, whether by worker or machine count for as much as possible—not to perpetuate slavery of the masses but to open up increasing amounts of leisure time and emancipate the human mind.

Final Note: I would invite readers to contribute their ideas for Obsolescence Shelters in the comments section.

Builds Upon: Breaking the Iron Law, A Game of Social Arbitrage

The emergence of tent cities across the industrialized world has been met with outrage and confusion. The inhabitants of these impromptu towns have been repeatedly dismissed as “dirty hippies” and “troublemakers.” Yet neither this shaming language nor the intervention of law enforcement has done much to reduce the appeal of these encampments.

The tents should come as no surprise.
Tent cities are a reaction to the shrinking buying power of wages in proportion to basic living expenses such as rent.

Presently, paying even the cheapest of rents can easily devour over half of a month’s earnings.
The cost of being able to camp in a 12×12 box without being beaten up or jailed strips people of most of the fruits of their labor.

So why is it surprising when people begin to camp in parks for free under the threat of being beaten up or jailed? The threat of force hasn’t changed.

Until basic living expenses are reasonably proportional to wages, we can expect that increasing numbers of people will opt out of rent-paying situations.
Criticisms such as “Occupy a Job!” fall flat because there is now a much higher payoff for people to support each other in a park than to slave away in isolation for their respective landlords.

The public outrage at these encampments is to be expected. Paying for a box to live in is a standard part of the SPT(Social Participation Tax). Those who dodge this tax are not members of society.
People understand in their gut that avoidance of SPT expenses such as house and car are outright rebellion.

People who do not pay SPT:

-Cannot as easily be coerced into desired social roles. The mass society is stripped of its leverage without these enormous expenses. People are afraid of those who cannot easily be kept in line. The cycle of dependence required to maintain a social order is broken.

-Those who have spent decades of their life dutifully bleeding themselves dry for a box to live in are given a slap in the face by the very existence of “freeloading” campers.
Their rage arises from a sense of unfairness that lies deep in human nature. On some primal level they think: “I suffered to hold down this house like I was expected to without complaining! It is only fair that they do the same!”
They do not recognize that it makes no sense for others to follow their example.

As it is, there have been strong incentives to flee rents for most of history, but flouting the SPT in most cases meant ostracism, punishment, certain death. So people had to pay up no matter how impoverished it left them.

Now, better communication technologies have allowed a critical mass of people to abscond from rent paying situations at once and support each other in the process.

The prevailing social order is faced with a grave threat and indeed, this explains the degree of force used against these encampments.
On some gut level, those who are invested in the present order understand well that where there is a ragtag camp today, tomorrow there will be free houses.

As a final note: We can likewise expect an explosion in the number of squatters across the nation. If hordes of people coordinated across social media do it all at once, the authorities cannot respond as effectively. This is the same principle that has made the encampments particularly difficult to eradicate.

Builds Upon: The Dark State

There is a single most common complaint I hear about the new wave of protestors that has emerged across America and the world.

“They don’t know what they’re protesting about!”

To the consternation of many, there’s no list of universal demands or theses.
When news reporters ask “Why are you protesting?” the answers they get describe a general feeling of resentment rather than a specific list of individuals or institutions.

This leads many people who would otherwise be sympathetic with the protestors to dismiss them.

So far, many have made the mistake of confusing these protests with past movements.

This time there is no charismatic leadership organizing everything and making speeches for the history books. There is no cadre of leaders that constitutes a ‘head’ that can easily be cut off.

It is a spontaneous manifestation of the internet—a continuation of the world wide wave of dissent that broke out earlier this year in Tunisia.

There never will be specific demands, just a brooding cloud of discontent.
And this will be not a weakness, but a great strength.

A concrete agenda might merely narrow a protest’s objectives and needlessly shorten its duration. It opens the protest to more sophisticated attack and criticism from its opponents.
A token concession or empty promise has the potential send everyone home.
Most importantly, the lack of a list of grievances sends an important implicit message: the onus is no longer on the people to formulate specific objections and argue for the legitimacy of their discontent.
They are no longer on the defensive as they always have been before.

The very open-endedness of these protests allows the protesters to take the initiative.
All that matters is that they are discontent. Until someone does something that makes them not discontent or simply shoots them all, they will do whatever it is they deem suitable to address the matter.

This approach allows no room for excuses. Either something is done to make people happy or the protests continue.
Elites suddenly find themselves in the situation of the typical employee: do your job in a way we like or you’re fired.

This is not primarily a statement of principle or a polite request and this is where many people are confused.
It is an ultimatum.

Just a few years ago, there was a primordial soup brewing on some imageboards.
The topics of discussion tended to focus on anime, porn, and anime-porn, but somehow this soup began to spontaneously evolve until there was a community that could act on collective goals without formal organization or leadership. In fact, none of these people even knew each other and it did not matter. They were all Anonymous.
What started out as one nameless person inviting an entire faceless community to prank call an asshole boss developed over the next couple of years into an untraceable internet military that’s capable of taking on corporations, governments, and religions.

There is an important principle that Anonymous shares with the current protests.

A school of fish coordinates its movement to strategically reduce risk for each individual. Thus, the school can behave in ways that would be far too risky for each individual, for the benefit of all.
Until widespread, reliable, high speed internet, people did not have the ability to pull off this level of group coordination and individual people, unless truly desperate, do not often risk themselves for a better society they will not live to see.

However, this ‘school’ form of organization has reduced individual risk while increasing individual effectiveness in collective action to the point where participation is far more attractive than it once was.
Result: society’s established powers can’t ask as much or get away with as much as they used to. The balance of power is shifting towards the ruled and the rulers, understandably are reluctant to accept this.

For a few hundred years now, elites have had their own version of Anonymous that has helped them to accomplish their goals. It’s called a corporation.
Shareholders come together to in order to mitigate risk and allow them do things that would ordinarily be too risky. By acting collectively, they can do away with individual accountability.
These elites failed to understand what would happen if technology sufficiently improved the ability of the peasantry to communicate and coordinate their actions.
The result is effectively a counter-corporation.

The incarnation of these protests as of the writing of this article is known as ‘Occupy.’ These particular public actions may soon cease or they may not. It does not matter.
Authorities do not yet understand that an intelligent collective of peasants, just like a corporation of the wealthy is extremely resourceful and adaptable.
Sending some campers home from public parks accomplishes little. New forms of opposition will soon emerge taking advantage of every possible systemic weakness. The game has changed.

Builds Upon: Legitimancers

I. Scarcity Has Caused Deterioration of Social Cooperation and Codependence

No matter how policy makers might try to manipulate affairs, there are two intractable facts that drive the current trends.

1- Automation will cause a continued decrease in the number of necessary workers. Only the most skilled workers remain necessary. Much of the work very skilled workers do is finding ways to reduce the number of workers needed.

2- A higher standard of living relative to the rest of the world entails a higher price of labor. Without strict protectionist measures, the inevitable result is less exports and fewer jobs. All systems tend towards equilibrium and the world economy is no different. Any water that falls upon the high ground of prosperous industrialized economies will tend to flow downwards.
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In industrialized nations this can only mean that jobs will continue to become more scarce and scarcity of jobs will push wages downwards.
Already, jobs are becoming a luxury to be fought over.

Whenever I see articles about how people with college degrees can’t find jobs and are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, there’s always someone who shows up in the comments column who laughs at their misfortune and tells them off for being lazy fools who failed to get STEM degrees.
These critics miss the point: Whatever their errors in judgment, these students were willing participants in society who went deep in debt so that they could one day contribute…And in return, they now receive mockery for having fallen for an elaborate prank.
Critics of the ‘overeducated’ demonstrate a fundamental change in society’s attitude towards work.
The whole idea that society is open to anyone willing to cooperate and work hard is gone.
The new mentality more resembles that of a royal court full of scheming—a place where only the clever and well-connected survive.

If someone spends years in school only to see their field become saturated or obsolete they are showered with the derision of those who ‘made it.’
In previous times, even those down on their luck bore successful people little ill will. They were more likely to suppose that their own lack of fortune was temporary. Their social superiors likewise generally didn’t hold a lower social station against unfortunates so long as they were willing to work hard to contribute to society.

But in the present social climate, the less fortunate feel little reason to care about the interests of their social betters. If they could better themselves by taking from those higher up, why wouldn’t they?

In short, a trend of decreasing available wealth in Western nations has drastically increased competition and destroyed the overall cooperative spirit that had previously prevailed.

This widespread zero sum culture makes society fertile ground for unrest. The ‘losers’ have little reason to be content with losing. If all is lost, they have no reason not to take the ‘winners’ down with them.

Once the people have a certain sort of mentality, they’re like tinder lying about waiting to be lit.

II. Artificial Scarcity Undermines Systemic Legitimacy

History is full of scarcity and social inequity, but at present the scarcity and inequality are increasingly artificial in nature.

People cooperate with capitalism because the prices of goods and services reflect actual market demand.
But if money ceases to properly reflect supply and demand, why would people continue to cooperate?

I recently visited a site called The Venus Project. Its creator, Jacque Fresco, lays out a plan for a future society. Whatever one might think of Fresco’s overall vision and retro-futuristic building designs, he makes an insightful point concerning money systems.
Money systems, he observes are dependent upon scarcity to motivate people and for their continued existence.
When a good or service is not scarce enough, the general response of elites and property owners is to create artificial scarcity to protect their interests.

In everyday life,

-The person who can barely afford food after rent sees grocers and restaurants throwing out tons of food.
They might read stories of how farmers sometimes destroy tons of their crop so they can actually profit from their harvests.

-The person who can barely afford rent sees neighborhoods full of houses with telltale alarmed padlocks on the front gates.
People were forcibly driven out of homes that no one else wants. Now they just sit there empty.
The reason for this cruel irony: real estate “kept off the market” got the occupants kicked out for being unable to pay an artificially high price no one else in society was willing to pay.

It is exactly this sort of cognitive dissonance that destroys the credibility of a system.
If a system is impartial and enjoys legitimacy people will tolerate incredible hardship.
If there are real conditions of hardship and famine no one is going to complain. Everyone’s too busy surviving.

However, the present scarcity of jobs does not result from general famine or any real crisis.
On the contrary, scarcity now exists precisely because we are able to produce more resources more efficiently than ever.
As Fresco points out: abundance causes money systems to malfunction.

III. Conclusion

Because of:

-A social climate of zero sum competition.

-Conditions of artificial scarcity.

-The ubiquity of i-phones and the internet.

The trend of social unrest will both continue to spread and rise in intensity.
There will be intense struggles as those towards the top of the pyramid resort to increasingly desperate measures to protect their wealth by artificially maintaining the scarcity of abundant resources.
These measures will force increasing numbers of people to come face to face with homelessness and starvation in the midst of plenty.
And at some point, these people will realize that if they do nothing they will be gradually be phased out of existence just like any other product that doesn’t sell.

The open market is vastly overrated.

In a previous era, we spent much if not most of our time in safe refuges, coves, and harbors.
We ventured into the open market as we felt it necessary, as a fisherman periodically ventures out from a placid bay into the rough and open sea.

In our own era we have never seen land. We live our lives adrift in the open market. We’ve never known safety from the merciless storms of vast aggregate demand.

So ubiquitous is our system of liquidity that we have forgotten that for most of the human experience, the open market has supplemented our livelihood. Only for a few merchants and nobles was it ever a mainstay.

We forget that any alternative exists.

And because of this we are blinded to the inherent disadvantages of our current system.

We fail to understand why it was that mere decades ago the people easily enjoyed a much higher standard of living, a now increasingly elusive “middle” class standard of living with less income.

We will easily find the answer if we understand an important principle:
Many basic human needs are satisfied much more efficiently outside the open market.

Money is an efficient means of doing business with strangers.

But doing business with strangers is very different than collaborating with those we know.

A stranger knows nothing of our reputation, has no pre-existing obligation or relationship to us, has no incentive to help us without a cash incentive. Enlisting their help is not easy.

Let’s consider the price of some very basic life needs on the open market.

A roof over one’s head = at least $700 per month if we factor in utilities or about $50 per night at a hotel. About $8400 a year for the most modest of accommodations!

Sex = $50 minimum-hundreds or even thousands of dollars a pop depending on the service provider.
Or 5-10 dollars a pop to pay cover charges to get into clubs. 5-10 dollars a pop for overpriced drinks once inside the clubs. Hundreds of dollars for fashionable clothes to wear to the club.

Basic childcare = Hundreds of dollars per month, thousands of dollars a year.

Home-cooked meals = Private chefs cost a small fortune. They are accessories of the wealthy.

When one is totally exposed to the open market one requires a bare minimum of about $20,000 just to live a subsistence lifestyle one minor accident away from strife and privation.

On the open market, all these basic necessities are incredibly expensive.
Just staying alive costs nearly as much as a high end college tuition.

And it is taken for granted in our culture that every year, we must pay our tuition in order to eat and avoid sleeping on the streets.

Our view of life is distorted.
These necessities are all services that friends, family, significant other can easily provide to one another for a fraction of the price or even for free!

It is by its very nature cost ineffective to rely on strangers for these needs!

A stranger who provides a roof or a meal is exposed to the caprices of a thousand customers. The price of their service is determined not by the courteous and upright, but by the most troublesome and dishonest among us.

Purchasing a bed to crash in for 8 hours at a motel in no small thing.

-Because we are unknowns, we are paying for the risk we represent to the owner.
-Thus we pay for any damage, wear or tear we inflict in advance regardless of whether we inflict it or not.
-The price includes the damage caused by the most disruptive and destructive customers.

Most of the money we pay isn’t for the room or the bed we sleep in!

The major expense of purchasing these services from a stranger is compensation for the inconvenience inflicted on the stranger.

If one refrains from approaching a stranger in the first place. Most of the trouble and expense vanishes.

Furthermore, a pre-existing relationship allows multiple means of remuneration for services provided without relying on liquid capital at all! It is in the interests of someone we know to help us. They know we will help them in turn!

The pre-existing relationship provides a haven from the savage free-for-all that is the open market!

How did people several decades ago enjoy lives of luxury by present standards with less liquid capital and fewer wage earners?

The typical answers in most mainstream political and economic columns:
-Strong economic growth
-Better job market
-Traditional values etc. bla bla bla.

All of these were relevant factors, but none of them was the decisive factor.

In the now nostalgic 1950s-1960s, Western society happened upon a certain balance between the personal market and the open market that worked particularly well.

All the processes that led to our present dystopian age were already in progress, but at that point:

-Services most efficiently handled by the personal market remained mostly personal.

-Meanwhile, a whole slough of services that had been stagnant at the personal level was being transferred to the open market.
As a result, the economy was rapidly becoming more efficient. New liquid capital was constantly being created and it was flowing like water.
The result was an exciting era of growth and progress.

Sadly, the result of this trend was the eventual transfer of nearly every human need to the open market whether or not it belonged there.

The result has been the social strife, economic stagnation, systemic decay, and widespread social distrust that now defines our precarious lives.

We have learned the hard way that mere subsistence in the tumultuous open market is more expensive than prosperity in the personal realm.