Category: Leftist thought

Categories
Leftist thought

Crowd(de)funding

News have been quick to spread that Andrius Tapinas of Laisvės TV has organised a 5 million Euro crowdfunding campaign of buying a Bayraktar combat aerial vehicle (commonly referred to as a drone) for the Ukraine military in support of its war with Russia. People in Lithuania were actively urged to participate and donate. The crowd-funder was a success and by 2022-05-28 the goal had been reached in 3,5 days. Here I would like to raise an issue with the current campaign that applies more broadly to “voluntary pooling” of resources.

Undoubtedly, military conflict and war demands huge resources and finances. War means destitution for many while being a lucrative opportunity for a select few. Nevertheless, this post is not regarding the general connection of money and war. Criticisms of crowdfunding a purchase of military equipment might:

  • Raise moral concerns as it is “never right to support war”;
  • That one should spend the money in peaceful, perhaps domestic, perhaps humanitarian ways;
  • That one should not support another autocratic regime of Recep Tayip Erdogan in Turkey and it’s military-industrial complex by purchasing Turkish guns.

All of the criticisms above pale in significance when compared to another issue – the lack of progressivity of financing the effort. This aspect is actually dangerous to Putin, Erdogan, Ukraine’s own oligarchs as well as Western business and economic “elites” which is why it is not and will not be widely discussed.

Hype-funding the Bayraktar in particular and crowdfunding in general is not sustainable. With inflation eating into people’s incomes and their savings, with ever-increasing prices of real estate that are reaching astronomical levels, asking those same people to donate seems obscene given the context of increasing wealth-stratification and inequality. Crowdfunding is almost always regressive as poorer people commit a larger share of their finances than richer ones. The only proper way of financing any social endeavor, including defense, is by demanding a larger share from the wealthy, which is most effectively achieved by income and wealth taxation. The focus should lay on millionaires like Matijošaitis, Numavičius and others starting at the list of the wealthiest in Lithuania.

The argument also applies to food banks that are logically, though absurdly, situated in huge supermarkets. The corporations conveniently dodge attention and get hailed as socially-responsible business for allowing social campaigns inside while regular people continue to be hounded and/or shamed into donating. This same can be said regarding platforms such as GoFundMe that cannot and must not be a substitute for a proper social support system.

Speaking more generally, social equality is a necessary condition for peace and stability. This has been known for at least a hundred years – just note the post-war policy considerations at the end of WWII for imperial Japan:

In 1943 and 1945, American researchers assessed that the low distribution of wealth to Japanese industrial workers and farmers had stunted domestic consumption and driven overseas economic expansionism. This was now to be addressed by labor reorganization with higher wages that would promote domestic consumption and facilitate demilitarization. Economic democratization and leveling were not ends in themselves: the underlying policy goal was to combat militarism by restructuring features of the economy that might be conducive to overseas aggression.

Walter Scheidel (2017, p. 67) – The Great Leveler

Thomas Piketty develops the argument further and proposes an antidote:

Whatever the wealthy of the Belle Époque (1880–1914) may have thought to the contrary, extreme inequality was not the necessary price of prosperity and industrial development. Indeed, all signs are that the excessive concentration of wealth exacerbated social and nationalist tensions while blocking the social and educational investments that made the balanced postwar development model possible. Furthermore, the increased concentration of wealth that we have seen since the 1980s in the United States, Russia, India, and China and to a lesser extent in Europe shows that extreme wealth inequality can reconstitute itself for many different reasons, from profiteering on privatizations to the fact that large portfolios earn higher returns than small ones, without necessarily yielding higher growth for the majority of the population— far from it.

To prevent a return to such extreme wealth concentration, progressive taxes on inheritances and income must again play the role that they used to play in the twentieth century when rates in the United States and United Kingdom ran as high as 70–90 percent on the highest incomes and largest fortunes for decades—decades in which growth rose to unprecedented levels. Historical experience shows, however, that inheritance and income taxes alone are not enough; they need to be complemented by a progressive annual tax on wealth, which I see as the central tool for achieving true circulation of capital.

Thomas Piketty (2020, p. 702) – Capital And Ideology

Inequality regimes do not last forever as Scheidel and Piketty explain. The wealthy will pay their fair share – this will happen either in a peaceful manner with significant (one might call exproriation-level) progressive income and wealth tax rates or in massively violent conflicts and political instability. Unfortunately, in the past levelling happened only as a consequence of great violence. I surely would like to see us going the peaceful route for once, but at the moment that prospect does not seem likely.

Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism

Coherence of behavior or how to be more Catholic than the Pope

One issue that behavioristic minded people need to come to terms with is applying the philosophical tenets to one’s own behavior. Simply put, verbal behavior regarding oneself is sometimes caused by other theoretical positions. The inconsistencies might be noticed individually as well as be pointed out by others. What is a behaviorist to do after realising that coherence was not maintained?

A direct confrontation with the current issue occurred in the debate between the renowned humanist psychologist Carl Rogers and the familiar B. F. Skinner. As recounted by Rogers:

One story I want to tell that also bears on that same issue, I believe… For more than a year now I wanted to ask Dr. Skinner about this. We were both at a conference in Boston, little more than a year ago, I think. It was quite a while ago. He had given his paper on the design of cultures and then had commented on that. After hearing his comments, I directed these remarks to him. I will read this from the tape-recorded discussion:
From what I understood Dr. Skinner to say, it is his understanding that though he might have thought he chose to come to this meeting, might have thought he had a purpose in giving this speech, such thoughts are really illusory. He actually made certain marks on paper and emitted certain sounds here simply because his genetic make-up and his past environment had operantly conditioned his behavior in such a way that it was rewarding to make these sounds; and that he as a person doesn’t enter into this. In fact, if I get his thinking correctly, from his strictly scientific point of view, he as a person perhaps doesn’t exist. I thought I would draw him out on a subjective side of why he was there but to my amazement he said he wouldn’t go into the question of whether he had any choice in the matter and added: “I do accept your characterisation of my own presence here”. [audience laughter]
I wondered ever since…

Carl Rogers (1976) – B. F. Skinner – Carl Rogers Dialogue Debate

Here, we have an example on how to gracefully accept the implications of behaviorist philosophy regarding one’s own circumstance. More generally and from personal experience, one shall find it amusing to wholeheartedly accept behavioristically consistent conclusions pointed out by interlocutors from external circles. After all, noticing and noting individual environmental and historical variables is a necessary condition for change of said variables and thus effective behavioral control.

Issues of internal consistency of behavior do not occur solely in the context of radical behaviorism. The general political left is notorious for it’s own internal squabbles and theoretical debates. Even the author of the most famous theory of the left (according to Richard Wolff) suffered his share of criticism:

Karl Marx was erratic. He changed his mind all the time, infuriating his friends and comrades. He wrote furious repudiations of his earlier ideas. And he could not stand those who called themselves… Marxist (e.g. famously saying ‘If they are Marxists, I am not’).

Yanis Varoufakis (2022) – Yanis Varoufakis on Crypto & the Left, and Techno-Feudalism

The question here is – how to be more Marxist than Marx himself? The follower and developer of Marxist thought Rosa Luxemburg voiced her opinion:

Not socialist theory or tactics, but the burning political exigencies of German democracy at the time – the practical interests of the bourgeois revolution in Western Europe – determined the viewpoint that Marx, and later Engels, adopted with respect to Russia and Poland. Even at first glance this standpoint reveals its glaring lack of inner relation to the social theory of Marxism. By failing to analyze Poland and Russia as class societies bearing economic and political contradictions in their bosoms, by viewing them not from the point of view of historical development but as if they were in a fixed, absolute condition as homogeneous, undifferentiated units, this view ran counter to the very essence of Marxism.

Rosa Luxemburg (1909, p. 14-15) – The National Question

The indictment is clear – Marx diverged from Marxist thought! In the context of verbal behavior, however, the concepts Marxism, Radical Behaviorism etc. are emitted under specific circumstances due to a particular history of conditioning. The fact that Marx’s behavior changed throughout his life poses no theoretical difficulty. In practice, nevertheless, past accomplishments cannot shield one from all criticism. Pure semanticists searching for the true “meaning” of Marxism shall not be pleased.

Retaining behavioral coherence might sometimes be regarded as staying true to oneself and others. Proper analysis will provide us with all relevant factors causing the current circumstances and behaviors. Furthermore, it is the only way to avoid oversights illustrated by the comic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/6c73ea/i_got_rich_through_hard_work/

In summary, effective behavior requires identification of its reasons. If someone points out that one is inconsistent, that one employs labels, that one disregards historical variables, at worst calls one a hypocrite by not applying the espoused principles to oneself – one is to politely thank the other party for drawing attention to the issue.

Categories
Leftist thought

Nothing new on the Eastern Front

The 24th of February, 2022 marked the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is a disturbing continuation of NATO-Russian tensions in the 21st century – previously we have seen the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, the 2014 Euromaidan protests and the Revolution of Dignity, the subsequent annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Even though I’m speaking from a Eastern European NATO country, I would like us not get sunk into the simplified mainstream narrative that NATO is “good” and Russia is “bad”. Statements that the war is caused by one “mad man” (Vladimir Putin) fulfilling personal ambitions are perhaps telling, but such psychologizations are no explanations. As painful as it is, we are dealing with human behavior and human behavior always happens because of material/physical reasons.

We cannot allow ourselves to consider the current events as a mere unfortunate sequence of events but rather we should see them as unavoidable given the socio-economic condition of western and Russian societies. I’ll try to demonstrate why.

Brief preliminaries

From the leftist point of view all wars are a disaster. The tragedy first and foremost is experienced by the people of Ukraine, both lives and cities being turned into rubble. Beyond the direct effects, any prospects for peace, equality or “green” politics fade away.

While the active belligerents in the war are Russia and Ukraine, the conflict may be seen as the collision of interests of two major blocks of capital – Russian and Western. I believe the economic dimension bears the most clarity on the situation, after all:

War is a racket.

Smedley Butler (1935)

Let’s take a closer look at the warring sides:

Russia

I would like to visit some comments from Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein regarding Russia’s socio-economic and political condition. One will find that the country is in a rather miserable state – the political dimension is under the hands of a oligarchic dictatorship, huge resources are spent on militarisation and the security apparatus while Russian society experiences deep income/wealth inequalities, rampant alcoholism, an HIV epidemic etc.

Let’s begin with Piketty’s analysis of the inequality situation in Russia:

Today, the postcommunist societies of Russia, China, and to a certain extent Eastern Europe (despite their different historical trajectories) have become hypercapitalism’s staunchest allies. (p. 13)

The world’s largest fortunes have grown since 1980 at even faster rates than the world’s top incomes <..> Great fortunes grew extremely rapidly in all parts of the world: among the leading beneficiaries were Russian oligarchs, Mexican magnates, Chinese billionaires, Indonesian financiers, Saudi investors, Indian industrialists, European rentiers, and wealthy Americans. In the period 1980–2018, large fortunes grew at rates three to four times the growth rate of the global economy. Such phenomenal growth cannot continue indefinitely, unless one is prepared to believe that nearly all global wealth is destined to end up in the hands of billionaires. Nevertheless, the gap between top fortunes and the rest continued to grow even in the decade after the financial crisis of 2008 at virtually the same rate as in the two previous decades, which suggests that we may not yet have seen the end of a massive change in the structure of the world’s wealth. (p. 26)

After three-quarters of a century as a country that had abolished private property, Russia now stood out as the home of the new oligarchs of offshore wealth—that is, wealth held in opaque entities with headquarters in foreign tax havens: in the game of global tax evasion, Russia became a world leader. More generally, postcommunism in its Russian, Chinese, and East European variants has today become hypercapitalism’s best ally. It has also inspired a new kind of disillusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement. (p. 419)

In contrast to the Soviet Union, a “society of petty thieves,” postcommunist Russia is a society of oligarchs engaged in grand larceny of public assets. (p. 431)

Thus, in less than ten years, from 1990 to 2000, postcommunist Russia went from being a country that had reduced monetary inequality to one of the lowest levels ever observed to being one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world.

The rapidity of postcommunist Russia’s transition from equality to inequality between 1990 and 2000—a transition without precedent anywhere else in the world according to the historical data in the WID.world database—attests to the uniqueness of Russia’s strategy for managing the transition from communism to capitalism. Whereas other communist countries such as China privatized in stages and preserved important elements of state control and a mixed economy (a gradualist strategy that one also finds in one form or another in Eastern Europe), Russia chose to inflict on itself the famous “shock therapy,” whose goal was to privatize nearly all public assets within a few years’ time by means of a “voucher” system (1991–1995). The idea was that Russian citizens would be given vouchers entitling them to become shareholders in a firm of their choosing. In practice, in a context of hyperinflation (prices rose by more than 2,500 percent in 1992) that left many workers and retirees with very low real incomes and forced thousands of the elderly and unemployed to sell their personal effects on the streets of Moscow while the government offered large blocks of stock on generous terms to selected individuals, what had to happen did happen. Many Russian firms, especially in the energy sector, soon fell into the hands of small groups of cunning shareholders who contrived to gain control of the vouchers of millions of Russians; within a short period of time these people became the country’s new “oligarchs.”

According to the classifications published by Forbes, Russia thus became within a few years the world leader in billionaires of all categories. In 1990, Russia quite logically had no billionaires, because all property was publicly owned. By the 2000s, the total wealth of Russian billionaires listed in Forbes amounted to 30–40 percent of the country’s national income, three or four times the level observed in the United States, Germany, France, and China. Also according to Forbes, the vast majority of these billionaires live in Russia, and they have done particularly well since Vladimir Putin came to power in the early 2000s. Note, moreover, that these figures do not include all the Russians who have accumulated not billions but merely tens or hundreds of millions of dollars; these Russians are far more numerous and more significant in macroeconomic terms. (p. 432)

Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital And Ideology

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced spectacular leaps of privatisation, where the well-known stratum of oligarchs appeared. Naomi Klein furthers these points speaking about events in the 1990s and notices how western interests were implicated:

In Russia, the referendum was widely seen as a propaganda exercise, and a failed one at that. The reality was that Yeltsin and Washington were still stuck with a parliament that had the constitutional right to do what it was doing: slowing down the shock therapy transformation. An intense pressure campaign began. Lawrence Summers, then U.S. Treasury undersecretary, warned that “the momentum for Russian reform must be reinvigorated and intensified to ensure sustained multilateral support.” The IMF got the message, and an unnamed official leaked to the press that a promised $1.5 billion loan was being rescinded because the IMF was “unhappy with Russia’s backtracking on reforms.” Pyotr Aven, the former Yeltsin minister, said, “The maniacal obsession of the IMF with budgetary and monetary policy, and its absolutely superficial and formal attitude to everything else . . . played not a small role in what happened. (p. 226)

A clear signal from Washington or the EU could have forced Yeltsin to engage in serious negotiations with the parliamentarians, but he received only encouragement. Finally, on the morning of October 4, 1993, Yeltsin fulfilled his long-prescribed destiny and became Russia’s very own Pinochet, unleashing a series of violent events with unmistakable echoes of the coup in Chile exactly twenty years earlier. In what was the third traumatic shock inflicted by Yeltsin on the Russian people, he ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian White House, setting it on fire and leaving charred the very building he had built his reputation defending just two years earlier. Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago-style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. (p. 228)

But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile —it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West. (p. 229)

When it was no longer possible to hide the failures of Russia’s shock therapy program, the spin turned to Russia’s “culture of corruption,” as well as speculation that Russians “aren’t ready” for genuine democracy because of their long history of authoritarianism. Washington’s think- tank economists hastily disavowed the Frankenstein economy they helped create in Russia, deriding it as “mafia capitalism”—supposedly a phenomenon peculiar to the Russian character. (p. 240)

Naomi Klein (2007) – The Shock Doctrine

All in all, Russia is a deeply unequal society – firstly politically but most importantly economically. Such unequal concentration of power never bodes well for citizens in the country and abroad.

Ukraine

Ukraine’s socio-economic fate following the fall of the Soviet Union was comparable to Russia. As is often the case for smaller countries, Ukraine with the rest of Eastern Europe is often discussed in the sphere of it’s dominating neighbor – Russia. The “Borderland” (literally Ukraine) is historically a heavily disputed and conflict ridden land. The local vocabulary attests to this:

To conclude our rapid schedule of the differences between the two peoples [Ukrainians and Russians], let us note that there has always been a certain animosity between them, as is often the case between Northerners and Southerners, and this has led them to give each other rather pejorative names like Katsapy (Russians) and sometimes Moscaly (Muscovites), and Khakly (Ukrainians).

Alexandre Skirda (2004, p. 9) – Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack

Speaking more widely about nationalism in the 19th century:

A different sort of nationalism arose alongside and in opposition to this old variant, propagated from above both by old monarchies and by newer capitalist rulers. So Bismarck embraced a form of German nationalism; the Russian tsars tried to ‘Russify’ their Finnish, Ukrainian, Polish, and Turkic speaking subjects; the French upper classes attempted to direct people’s energies towards ‘revenge’ against Germany and enthusiasm for the conquest of North Africa and Indochina; and Britain’s rulers proclaimed their mission to ‘rule the waves’ and ‘civilise the natives’.

Chris Harman (1999, p. 400) – A Peoples History of the World

Returning to the economic aspect:

In some cases, such as the territories of the ex-Soviet Union and those countries in central Europe that submitted to neoliberal ‘shock therapy’, there have been catastrophic losses. During the 1990s, Russian per capita income declined at the rate of 3.5 per cent annually. A large proportion of the population fell into poverty, and male life expectancy declined by five years as a result. Ukraine’s experience was similar. Only Poland, which flouted IMF advice, showed any marked improvement.

David Harvey (2005, p. 153) – A Brief History of Neoliberalism

The background for conflict between Russian and Ukraine is economic and military divergence. Since at least 2014, Ukraine has been shifting towards the west and NATO. Without de jure joining, John Mearsheimer would even go so far as saying that de facto Ukraine was already a NATO member as there were military exercises in Ukraine with NATO troops prior to the 2022 war. Another interesting point made by Mearsheimer is regarding Ukraine as a border state. What if Canada or Mexico would make a perfectly legal agreement with China to bring weapons to US borders? Would it be taken lightly? The same can be applied in Ukraine and Russia.

Speaking about specific reasons for the current war, the following may be singled out:

  • Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. As mentioned above, Ukraine was closing in on NATO membership. For Russia, having a naval base in a NATO country would be hardly possible.
  • Oil reserves in Crimea and the Black Sea.
  • Ukraine’s steppes and the famous black soil (chernozem) – Ukraine is a significant producer and exporter of wheat and other food products.
  • Coal mines in the Donbas region.
  • Shale gas reserves in the Donbas region.
  • Forests in the territory of Ukraine.
  • Nuclear power plants – among them – Zaporizhzhia which is the most powerful in Europe.
  • Oil pipeline control.

The boiling point

To put the 21st century tensions into context, we may look back at the geopolitical situation a hundred years ago. Basically, the income and wealth inequalities – first of all in the Gulf Region, South Africa, Russia, the USA – are approaching the ones on the eve of World War I. The period called Belle Epoque (1870-1914) was marked by extreme levels of wealth concenration:

It was World War I that spelled the end of the so-called Belle Époque (1880–1914), which was belle only when compared with the explosion of violence that followed. In fact, it was belle primarily for those who owned property, especially if they were white males. If we do not radically transform the present economic system to make it less inegalitarian, more equitable, and more sustainable, xenophobic “populism” could well triumph at the ballot box and initiate changes that will destroy the global, hypercapitalist, digital economy that has dominated the world since 1990.

Thomas Piketty (2020, p. 9) – Capital And Ideology

One may note that before the Great War the Balkan region was called the geopolitical boiling pot – most famously depicted in the cartoon:

https://www.glscott.org/uploads/2/1/3/3/21330938/24-3_visual_analyzing_political_cartoon.pdf

It would be naive to think that political and social issues in the Belle Epoque were not affected by wealth inequality. Given this context, imperialism, militarisation, nationalism and war seem inevitable.

In a similar vein, the western border region of Russia can be denoted as the the boiling point of our times. The current societal tensions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be understood as a consequence of income/wealth and power inequality. Even without Putin, the course of events would arguably be similar – as the Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych claims.

What does the future hold?

Turning our attention to future prospects, they should appear quite grim. In the context of vigorous spread of nationalistic rhetoric, increased military spending (e.g. 100 billion euro in Germany), widening public support in Finland and Sweden joining NATO, progressive political decisions, the ecological course and wealth redistribution does not seem upcoming.

Once again – behavior happens for a reason, including aggresive behavior. As I attempt to lay out in this post, conditions are ripe for that type of behavior. The times are worrying and without addressing fundamental economic problems we are speeding towards an abyss.

Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism

Particulars of the word “choice”

Operating by the niche yet ambitious radical behaviorist philosophy, one is apt to recognize philosophical and scientific issues with some widely employed words. Numerous examples may be identified but none shall prove to be as problematic as the peculiar “to choose”. Let’s dedicate the present post to analyse the word and hopefully take a step in removing the word completely from our collective lexicon.

Voidness of meaning

Firstly, we can view to choose from the radical behaviorist perspective. The word appears in the same situations where other phrases signifying behaving or acting or doing something prop up. Choosing peculiarly does not add power to a statement – when I say that “I choose to write the sentence in a particular way”, I might as well simplify that “I am writing the sentence in a particular way”. Behavioral analyses and translations of verbal statements are abound in Skinner’s About Behaviorism (1974) and the present word is not skipped:

Willing is close to choosing, particularly when the choice is between acting or not acting; to will or to choose is evidently as unheralded as to act.

B.F. Skinner (1974, p. 51) – About Behaviorism

The word choose, does not add anything to a sentence except for throwing a mystifying veil over the reasons of an action. From a standpoint of communication it duplicates other words and thus is useless. It can succesfully be removed or replaced in most cases without losing any power to shape behavior of others.

Unscientific

The cornerstone of science – determinism – is abruptly lost when choosing is employed. Suddenly the analysis of preceding variables and environmental conditions are not sufficient as choice is allegedly no function of mundane working.

The unscientific nature of choice stems as well from its ultimate effects on the listener. In popular as well as in psychological discourse, it is accepted that when choice is referred to, the causes for behavior are internal in the acting agent. This successfully arrests any further inquiry into the reasons for behavior as it is implied that the reason has been identified. A banal question “why one chose to do something” disarms that notion.

A further thorny issue arises here as people are conditioned to react defensively when questioned for reasons of behavior beyond the utterance of choice. We may look at this behavior from the lenses of cultural evolution as described either by Skinner or Marvin Harris. The (sometimes aggresive) defense may be recognized as one of the reasons for the survival of the word “choose”.

Idealistic

As is customary in this blog to point out, the scientific progress of philosophical materialism has not widely embraced the subject of behavior. Here the idealistic mind-body dualism of Descartes reigns on and the word to choose is the greatest proof thereof.

Both scientific discourse and lay speech are still caught in the frustrating land of mystified antiquated language. While understandable for the latter, with an established science of behavior the situation cannot remain to be accepted for the former.

Regressive and reactionary

The word is hopelessly reactionary and hinders developments for true democratic and popular power. In more traditional vocabulary one might say the word chiefly serves bourgeois interests. A short analysis how monied interests employ choice will put the point to rest.

In Lithuania, the absurd discussions regarding loosening restrictions for alcohol sales and advertising are ongoing. If one employs catchy phrases such as “Follow the money” or the “Golden Rule” (i.e. “He who holds the gold, makes the rules”), one will know what is going on. It is easy to discover that the “free enterprise” lobby and the alcohol industry are the main promoters of the restrictions lifts. One of the main strategies here is to appeal to “consumer choice” and “consumer responsibility” as if strict regulation is unnecessary while being perfectly aware that such statements are nothing more demagoguery.

The fight against restrictions has been patented by none other but the smoking industry – the most effective actions are collected in the so-called “Playbook”:

The playbook required executives to repeatedly deflect attention from diseases caused by cigarettes, to neutralize criticism, and to undercut calls for regulation. The playbook demanded endless repetition of carefully crafted statements: cigarette smoking is a matter of personal responsibility, government attempts to regulate tobacco are manifestations of a “nanny” state, restrictions on smoking infringe on freedom, and research reporting harm from smoking is “junk science.” Let us credit the tobacco industry for producing the model now followed by other industries, the food industry among them. Whatever the industry, the playbook requires repeated and relentless use of this set of strategies:

Cast doubt on the science
Fund research to produce desired results
Offer gifts and consulting arrangements
Use front groups
Promote self-regulation
Promote personal responsibility as the fundamental issue
Use the courts to challenge critics and unfavorable regulations

Marion Nestle (2018, p. 19) – Unsavory Truth. How Food Companies Skew The Science Of What We Eat

Discriminatory

As a direct extension of above, one may see how the word to choose can be used to discriminate people, minorities or more generally all vulnerable groups. Choice allows any pundit to expunge analysis of socio-economic conditions and play the blame game. Completely any hardship a person faces is allegedly a result from his “choices” and therefore only he is to be blamed (read: to be punished).

Moving forward

To sum up, the word to choose is at once useless, misleading, unscientific, reactionary and discriminatory. Luckily, radical behaviorism provides an antidote. Here are two courses of action that need to be taken – this applies to all languages as equivalents to choice appear elsewhere as well:

  1. Remove the word and its derivatives from all scientific discourse. If this word is employed – remove it and/or rephrase the sentence. The only exception is when speaking of the word as a form of verbal behavior and explicitly identifying historical reasons for saying the word.
  2. Remove the word from colloquial language. Simply getting rid of this word may widen the horizon of many because no cause can be attributed to the mysterious force of choice. Further investigation of causes will be and should be encouraged.

Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism Reviews

How Emotions Are (Not) Made

Let’s examine a book written for the wider public that discusses a common topic in psychology – emotions. Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made promotes an allegedly new and scientific outlook on the field. Following the previous post, this book will serve as an illustration of contemporary psychological literature. As with all things psychology in this blog, criticism is unavoidably imminent. Nevertheless, radical behaviorist conditioning shall always allow us to extract something useful:

Many behavioral scholars, having spent much of their professional lifetimes scrutinizing psychological literature for useful items, have grown skilled at finding them.

Lawrence Fraley & Stephen Ledoux (1997, p. 26) – Chapter 5 of Origins, Status and Mission of Behaviorology

Every sour has its sweet

The book has come to my attention while reading the 2nd quarter issue of 2020 of the Operants magazine where Joe Layng discussed a behavioral interpretation of emotions:

We experience a range of emotions which we may or may not share with others. In describing our emotions we have a problem. As B. F. Skinner pointed out, the problem lies with how we learn our emotion words. We are trained by verbal communities, that have no access to what we are privately experiencing, to use words to express our emotions. The best we can do is teach certain words occasioned by instances of observable behavior as it occurs under certain conditions.
There is no certainty that the behavior is actually accompanied by a private experience of sadness, or anxiousness, or excitement, for example. We can never know if the anger we feel is the same as what others feel, or that any particular physiological change is always experienced as anger. Since accurate discrimination training is impossible, there is no possibility of accurately tacting these inner, private events. But are there not common measurable physiological changes occurring that we can learn to describe? Neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Feldman-Barrett in her book How Emotions are Made suggests there are not.

Joe Layng (2020) – Emotions In The Time Of A Pandemic: Beyond Cognition And Behavior. in Operants Q2 2020

As was stated in Layng’s discussion, the 3 initial chapters of How Emotions Are Made provide the main take-away for the radical behaviorist: phenomena expressed by emotion words are not fixed reactions – neither physiological, nor cerebral, nor facial. Emotional vocabulary is emitted in various conditions and reflects general patterns of contingencies:

… the emotion is part of the contingency; in a sense, it describes it.

When we tell others we fear something, they readily understand there is an event where distancing ourselves from the event is a reinforcer.

We may also experience reinforcer loss, typically described by sadness. We may find we want to drive those situations away. Where behavior is reinforced by distancing the event, rather than removing oneself, we typically report feeling angry.

To change emotions we change contingencies.

Joe Layng (2020) – Emotions In The Time Of A Pandemic: Beyond Cognition And Behavior. in Operants Q2 2020

Lisa Feldman Barrett affirms in her book that emotion words are evoked by variable conditions – this leads to the realisation of the importance of cultural conditions and individual history:

It means that on different occasions, in different contexts, in different studies, within the same individual and across different individuals, the same emotion category involves different bodily responses. Variation, not uniformity, is the norm. (p. 15)

An emotion word such as “anger,” therefore, names a population of diverse instances… (p. 35) <..> In our culture, one goal in “Anger” is to overcome an obstacle that someone blameworthy has put in your path. (p. 100)

Your experiences become encoded in your brain’s wiring and can eventually change the wiring, increasing the chances that you’ll have the same experience again, or use a previous experience to create a new one (p. 281)

The human brain is structured to learn many different concepts and to invent many social realities, depending on the contingencies it is exposed to. (p. 282-283)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

A long winter after a brief summer

Beyond the refutation of objective emotional reactions, the search for useful knowledge in the book is much more troublesome. As has been previously argued for psychological literature in general, Barrett’s book in particular continues the unscientific traditions – it is ignorant of proper behavioral science, overloaded with terminology, haunted with psychologisations of behavior and generally stuck in Cartesian dualism.

Behavioral ignorance

The progress of the 20th century behavioral science is overlooked and misrepresented in the discipline of psychology. Unsurprisingly, the current author is simply not aware of Skinner’s science and philosophy:

To be sure, faces are instruments of social communication. Some facial movements have meaning, but others do not, and right now, we know precious little about how people figure out which is which, other than that context is somehow crucial (body language, social situation, cultural expectation, etc.).

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 11-12) – How Emotions Are Made

More-so we find the staple demonisation of behaviorism:

Thus began the most notorious historical period in psychology, called behaviorism. Emotions were redefined as mere behaviors for survival: fighting, fleeing, feeding, and mating, collectively known as the “four F’s.” To a behaviorist, “happiness” equaled smiling, “sadness” was crying, and “fear” was the act of freezing in place. And so, the nagging problem of finding the fingerprints of emotional feelings was, with the flick of a pen, defined out of existence.

Ultimately, most scientists rejected behaviorism because it ignores a basic fact: that each of us has a mind, and in every waking moment of life, we have thoughts and feelings and perceptions. These experiences, and their relation to behavior, must be explained in scientific terms.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 171) – How Emotions Are Made

It is obvious that Barrett has not been introduced to the definition of behavior and has not been acquainted with basics of verbal behavior. For the record, radical behaviorists regard emotional words such as sadness or fear as behavior, that follows the same operant principles as any other form of behavior – the evocation of a word is reinforced in particular contexts – this is what we refer to when we speak about “meaning” of a word.

Terminological flood

I’ve counted at least 40 different terms that are introduced in the book – mostly references to circular cognitive concepts and brain functioning. These include simulation, construction, priming, interoception, the clumsily named degeneracy, affect, valence, goals, concepts, mental inference etc. To discuss all the terms separately would simply be too tiresome and wouldn’t be particularly useful. A couple examples will have to suffice.

Throughout the book, Barrett discusses how your brain issues millions of predictions every second:

At the level of brain cells, prediction means that the neurons over here, in this part of your brain, tweak the neurons over there, in that part of your brain, without any need for a stimulus from the outside world. Intrinsic brain activity is millions and millions of nonstop predictions.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 59) – How Emotions Are Made

To understand why the author should claim such things we have to remember her neuroscientist background. The source of control are neuro-imaging studies, which show brains “lighting up” under practically any conditions, for example. Simply, the activity of the brighter areas are identified as predictions.

Primitive teleology is displayed as well:

Yet your brain lumps all these instances into the same category because they can achieve the same goal, safety from [bee] stings. In fact, the goal is the only thing that holds together the category. <..> Emotion concepts are goal-based concepts.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 92) – How Emotions Are Made

This analysis does not provide a clear and parsimonious account of human behavior. Perhaps it doesn’t have to? If we recognize psychology as a political tool, the introduction of further confusion for the layperson regarding behavior might just be instrumental. This is mostly advantageous for corporate behavioral control, where power depends not on idealistic or conceptual analysis but on power and the ability to gather huge amounts of data.

Reactionary psychologisation

The author expresses an overwhelmingly short-sighted and naive interpretation of world events:

Belief in the classical view [of emotions] can even start wars. The Gulf War in Iraq was launched, in part, because Saddam Hussein’s half-brother thought he could read the emotions of the American negotiators and informed Saddam that the United States wasn’t serious about attacking. The subsequent war claimed the lives of 175,000 Iraqis and hundreds of coalition forces. (p. xiv)

As a real-world example, pick any extended conflict in the world: Israelis versus Palestinians, Hutus versus Tutsis, Bosnians versus Serbs, Sunni versus Shia. Climbing out on a limb here, I’d like to suggest that no living member of these groups is at fault for the anger that they feel toward each other, since the conflicts in question began many generations ago. But each individual today does bear some responsibility for continuing the conflict, because it’s possible for each person to change their concepts and therefore their behavior. (p. 154)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

Once again, such psychologisation of social and political processes misses crucial factors in the persistence of mentioned conflicts and serves to divert attention from economical interests of the parties involved – relevant thoughts by Noam Chomsky and Marvin Harris have been previously cited.

Furthermore, Lisa Feldman Barrett praises the neurologist Helen S. Mayberg and believes that “mental health” problems can be treated by deep brain stimulation:

Everything you feel is based on prediction from your knowledge and past experience. You are truly an architect of your experience. Believing is feeling.
These ideas are not just speculation. Scientists with the right equipment can change people’s affect by directly manipulating body-budgeting regions that issue predictions. Helen S. Mayberg, a pioneering neurologist, has developed a deep brain stimulation therapy for people suffering from treatment-resistant depression.

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017, p. 78) – How Emotions Are Made

These statements prove to be ungrounded. The belief that behavioral problems are isolated in the activity of the brain is preposterous. Moreover, the cited methods have shown dubious results and may even include a conflict of interest.

After repeated babblings about the brain and the person as a creator or architect of one’s experience’s, the author unsurprisingly comes to a fitting conclusion:

When you’re a baby, you can’t choose the concepts that other people put into your head. But as an adult, you absolutely do have choices about what you expose yourself to and therefore what you learn, which creates the concepts that ultimately drive your actions, whether they feel willful or not. So “responsibility” means making deliberate choices to change your concepts. (p. 154)

If you grow up in a society full of anger or hate, you can’t be blamed for having the associated concepts, but as an adult, you can choose to educate yourself and learn additional concepts. (p. 155)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

The implication is that changes to social conditions will never be prescribed because adults individually always can and have to “choose” their concepts themselves.

Cartesian dualism

Finally, it has already been argued that psychology is stranded in the 17th century mindset. How Emotions Are Made neatly illustrates this point where it is still possible to separate the self from the brain and from the mind:

It also demonstrates that you’re not at the mercy of emotions that arise unbidden to control your behavior. You are an architect of these experiences. Your river of feelings might feel like it’s flowing over you, but actually you’re the river’s source. (p. 57)

The law protects the integrity of your anatomical body but not the integrity of your mind, even though your body is just a container for the organ that makes you who you are — your brain. Emotional harm is not considered real unless accompanied by physical harm. Mind and body are separate. (Let’s all raise a glass to René Descartes here.) (p. 241)

Natural selection favors a complex brain. Complexity, not rationality, makes it possible for you to be an architect of your experience. Your genes allow you, and others, to remodel your brain and therefore your mind. (p. 282)

Lisa Feldman Barrett (2017) – How Emotions Are Made

Conclusion – the bizarre impasse of psychology

To Barrett’s (or rather her individual history’s) credit, the book is an attempt to introduce a context based interpretation of emotions. Nevertheless, this movement is stunted by lifelong idealistic conditioning, by the sheer amount of cultural mentalistic notions and by the social acceptance of explanations that are mere explanatory fictions. These problems become more intelligible when psychology is understood not as a scientific endeavor, but rather a cultural and political one:

Indeed, psychology as a modern discipline of the self is a political apparatus of modern society to develop and sustain consumers. (p. 56)

Psychology has an explanation for everything because it locates the sources of everything within the self. (p. 64)

Historically, of course, psychological theories are shown to be full of inaccuracies, and new models are superimposed as corrections, only to be later discarded when the next fashionable, new theory emerges on the scene. This provisional nature of psychological ‘truth’ is not simply (as some psychologists would like to argue) a matter of improving techniques and accuracy, rather, it reflects the shifting political sense of what it is to be human and the adaptation of psychological ‘science’ to fit such shifts. Psychological theories, as we have noted, tend to mirror the political climate; for instance, cognitive ‘science’ mirrors the growing importance of information technology and the uniformity of global finance-based capitalism. (p. 64-65)

Jeremy Carrette & Richard King (2005) – Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion
Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism

Psychology as Ideology: The case of extended adolescence

The intersection between antiquated psychological theories about behavior and socioeconomic-historical processes is brilliantly identified and scrutinized by E. E. Sampson in his 1981 article “Cognitive Psychology as Ideology”. The article has already been cited multiple times in the blog and the relevant quote this time is:

Psychological reifications clothe existing social arrangements in terms of basic and inevitable characteristics of individual psychological functioning; this inadvertently authenticates the status quo, but now in a disguised psychological costume. What has been mediated by a sociohistorical process—the forms and contents of human consciousness and of individual psychological experience—is treated as though it were an “in-itself,” a reality independent of these very origins.

Sampson (1981, p. 738) – Cognitive Psychology as Ideology

In this post, I would like to present a prominent example of a psychologized affirmation of the contemporary social order – extended adolescence.

The statistical

For context let’s view the basic situation of the position of young adults in Europe.

Firstly, the percent of young adults that are still living with their parents:

https://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/40330-New-maps-showing-when-young-
adults-leave-the-parental-home

Secondly, the mean age of women at birth of first child:

Mean age of women at first child birth, 2019
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/ddn-20210224-1

If we look at historical trends for Europe or Japan, we can see that people generally move out from parental homes, marry, have children later in life and have less children overall in comparison with the 20th century. What can explain such trends?

The psychological

The idea of extended adolescence comes from a classical perspective of developmental stages in the human lifespan. Perhaps the most famous theory is Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development. The “stage” that interests us now is the 5th of the 8 stages – adolescence. Originally, i.e. in the 1950s, this period spanned the ages 10 to 19, but, presumably, it has experienced a modern extension with the higher end now reaching 25 or even later ages:

An analysis by researchers at San Diego State University and Bryn Mawr College reports that today’s teenagers are less likely to engage in adult activities like having sex and drinking alcohol than teens from older generations.

“Our results show that it’s probably not that today’s teens are more virtuous, or more lazy—it’s just that they’re less likely to do adult things.” She adds that in terms of adult behaviors, 18-year-olds now look like 15-year-olds of the past.

Bret Stetka (2017) – Extended Adolescence: When 25 Is the New 18

One may find also such statements, that young people now have more opportunities than before, that they want to explore the world and discover themselves, find out what they want to do with their lives and careers. Due to these expanded opportunities the youth doesn’t want to take on financial commitments or relationships. All sounds fine and dandy until we realise that we are missing any proper explanation of the behavior changes.

As with all things widely accepted in psychology, B.F. Skinner has an alternative explanation – developmental stages is no exception. The behavior of young adults does not change due to some strictly predetermined sequence – simply the social contingencies of reinforcement change after childhood:

It is no doubt valuable to create an environment in which a person acquires effective behaviour rapidly and continues to behave effectively. In constructing such an environment we may eliminate distractions and open opportunities, and these are key points in the metaphor of guidance or growth or development; but it is the contingencies we arrange, rather than the unfolding of some predetermined pattern, which are responsible for the changes observed.

B.F. Skinner (1971, p. 89) – Beyond Freedom and Dignity

The material

Even in the cited psychological and scientifically idealistic Stetka’s article, the author must grapple with socio-economic reality:

Domakonda adds that although parents can play a role in indulging extended youth, they are not the root cause. “Most are responding to their own anxieties about the new norm,” she says. “They recognize that now, in order for their children to succeed, they can’t simply get a job at the local factory, but may be faced with 10-plus years of postgraduate education and crippling student debt.”

Bret Stetka (2017) – Extended Adolescence: When 25 Is the New 18

Now, even a brief survey of current economic realities of young adults takes us further than any of developmental theories of psychology. Let’s see:

Thomas Piketty documents the increasing income and wealth inequality to the levels not seen since the late 19th century (The Belle Époque). This presents an ominous state of affairs. A way of experiencing this inequality is noting the ever rising real estate prices and wage stagnation. Furthermore, labour conditions have deteriorated – zero-hour contracts and “employees as partners” illustrate it neatly. Simply put, affordability of housing is a rising problem – the opportunities to move out are diminishing.

If a young person has the (mis)fortune to move out, it is likely he or she has to rent. The rent prices, quite expectedly, have not gone untouched and there is no wonder that related memes spring up:

The Labour Party on Twitter: "Is your rent too damn high? We feel your pain, that's why we want to introduce new laws that will cap rents right across the country. Tomorrow

Furthermore, high rent prices might mean that one needs to live with other people (cohabitate). Also, logically with rising property prices, people in cities experience space contraction – the living area is becoming smaller. We have articles such as “The newest trend in urban development? Micro units.”, and the new owners may have to live in so-called apodments that range only up to 30 square meters. Obviously, this can’t be considered a suitable environment for having children.

Even if the person owns the real estate, more often than not one has to take on debt for some 30 odd years. We must also not overlook the fact that one salary in a household is frequently not enough – now in all families, bar the most affluent of society, both members have to work. In a pyrrhic victory of financial independence, middle-class women had to join the workforce without the added financial security. One must note that lower income women always participated in labour relations, also that women always worked at home. The two-income trap that Elizabeth Warren discussed in 2004 has entrenched itself even further.

How do children fit into all of this? They require much care, time, and financial resources – with both parents working these things are often out of reach. Having children is basically a threat to one’s socioeconomic status and even a risk factor of poverty:

Our research eventually unearthed one stunning fact. The families in the worst financial trouble are not the usual suspects. They are not the very young, tempted by the freedom of their first credit cards. They are not the elderly, trapped by failing bodies and declining savings accounts. And they are not a random assortment of Americans who lack the self-control to keep their spending in check. Rather, the people who consistently rank in the worst financial trouble are united by one surprising characteristic. They are parents with children at home. Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.

Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi (2004, p. 17-18) – The Two-Income Trap

Do we really need a psychological theory beyond these things? Living with parents well into one’s twenties and not having children is not an “investigation” of one’s wants, is not an exploration of one’s “needs” or discovery of “oneself”. It is simply a quite mundane, dystopian reflection of the conditions people find themselves in. One might even go so far as to say that the most effective form of birth control is high and unaffordable real estate prices:

Europe is in the midst of a housing crisis. From Paris to Warsaw, Dublin to Athens, an increasing number of people in the EU are struggling to afford the rising cost of housing. Even before the start of the pandemic, one in ten Europeans were spending more than 40% of their income on housing. In urban areas in particular, many people find themselves in a dire situation and are driven out of the city. Also, the quality of housing is often deplorable. Far too many people in Europe are living in overcrowded dwellings and damp or poorly insulated homes, with unaffordable utility bills.

Kim van Sparrentak (2021) – Tackling Europe’s housing crisis

Conclusion

As the idea of extended adolescence illustrates, any political and economical circumstances may be psychologized, given a fancy name to produce credibility and to prevent further examination. When one claims that young adults “want to try something new”, “want to try different carrers”, “want to see the world”, “value experiences over material things”, one throws a veil of psychology over the socio-economic conditions that are incompatible with what a psychologist would call “independent adult life”.

We must stop seeing behavior as random, unexplainable, unorderly – humans do what they do for a reason. The psychologisation of the human condition has to be abandoned and finally interpreted through behavioral and material lenses.

Categories
Leftist thought

Beyond defending family values

In our times of economic and social inequality it is inevitable that various nationalist and religious movements that promote “traditional” or “family” values spring up. The main point of these groups is to oppose the liberal globalist establishment, that is unable to provide the majority with economic safety. These campaigns are gaining a foothold almost everywhere and Lithuania is no exception. The Great Family Defence March in Vilnius took place on the 15th of May, 2021. An examination of the movements, of the event and the propounded ideas is called for.

To start with, critical flaws haunt the traditionalist front. The nationalist movements have some valid criticisms of the liberal establishment. It is correctly stated that the globalist consensus that has prevailed for a few decades is failing the majority. Seemingly high aspirations are pursued – establishing the prosperity of the nation, state and family. This is often packaged as returning to a time when all was better – just like taking back the UK during Brexit or making America great again. Regrettably, even though economic issues are raised and wealth inequality is criticised, the solutions never include any meaningful economic reforms, such as progressive taxation, expansion of affordable housing, worker rights etc. In the end, all the proclamations result in the same impoverishment of the many with the enrichment of the few.

Focusing on Lithuania, consider a picture that is provided in the official site of the aforementioned campaign:

YES to family, NO to social gender.

The campaign to defend traditional families might sound nice, but with closer inspection we find that the ideas boil down to:

  • Establishing imaginary enemies in the LGBT community or the philosophy of “genderism”
  • Plain homophobia
  • Opposition to the Istanbul convention
  • Focus on familial duties and responsibilities
  • Paucity of economic solutions

Even more significant than the caption is the depiction of a family with 4 (!) children. Such an ideal is unrealistic. Nowadays, in most European countries fertility rates are significantly lower than 2, families of multiple children are becoming rarer. Anyone promoting such families must also comment on the most salient issues:

  • Who can provide financially for such a family?
  • Who can afford enough living space – apartment or house – to accommodate so many people?
  • What about the living costs?
  • Should the money come from one or two full-time salaries?
  • If both parents work, who is going to care for the children?

We have to look at sinking birth rates from the correct angle which is predominantly economic. I believe the main problem is real estate being too expensive for the majority. Neither mini-houses or mini-apartments, nor renting, can be considered compatible for life with children. People do not “choose” to not have children – they don’t have the conditions for children rearing. Just consider urbanization, longer average commute times (maybe reduced for some working from home in times of COVID), the same 40h or even longer work-week that has been absurdly unchanged for a century, unaffordable housing, wage stagnation, economic inequality, lack of secure and well-paying jobs. Is this a favourable environment for families?

If families are being attacked or threatened, it’s not because of “genderism”, not because of minority rights or disregard for traditional values. The threat is economic.

At this point we can visit fitting ideas of others:

The largest Lithuanian news site “Delfi” published an article on the topic – The Great Family Defense March has sown conflict in the Peasants and Green Party, where the Lithuanian MP Tomas Tomilinas had a say:

In his opinion, such an event will not help the traditional family whatsoever.

It is no better for the family, if people who speak up for it do not show any respect for the same values with their political message, which often is just banal homophobia, hate for other sexual minorities and, overall, who don’t have anything to say in politics, are ignorant of the law and do not delve into difficult social, economic problems

So, according to T. Tomilinas, “more calories do not appear on the dinner table of the family” as a result of fierce public declarations by the organisers of the march.

If you ask me, all this commotion is very favorable for the ruling parties, because it distracts attention from the essential problems, from the fact that people are losing their jobs, from the poor handling of the pandemic.

Tomas Tomilinas (2021)

Now zooming out a bit, the same issues were visited by Elizabeth Warren:

But economics are nestled at the core of family values. Any group that is serious about lowering divorce rates should focus on reducing the economic stress that strains a marriage. Any group that cares about children should be vitally interested in how home mortgages are marketed and how tens of thousands of kids are getting kicked out of their houses. And any group that thinks Mom ought to have the option to stay home with the kids should be powerfully concerned about the debt trap that chains millions of middle-class women to their offices.

Elizabeth Warren & Amelia Warren Tyagi (2004) – The Two-Income Trap (p. 110-111)

Finally, Richard Seymour explains how the traditionalist ideology serves as a foundation for regressive reforms. Furthermore, reliance on familial care ends up being sexist – unpaid labour in families is predominantly performed by women:

In the government’s attempt to reorganise production and change the balance of class forces, it is attacking the social wage, the remuneration one receives for a contribution to reproducing society that is otherwise unwaged. In doing so, it falls back on traditional ‘family values’ ideology, the ideology of patriarchy. As David Cameron put it: ‘Family is the most important thing in my life. And I think, family should be the most important thing in the country’s life, because it’s the best welfare state we ever had. The family is what looks after the children and cares for the elderly and all the rest of it.’ The changes to housing benefit, of which the ‘bedroom tax’ is only one, are justified in part by an attempt to force dispersed family back together, so that the young and old are not the responsibility of the state but of working adults.

Richard Seymour (2014) – Against Austerity: How We Can Fix the Crisis They Made (p. 147)

People often ask – who are the people in these nationalist movements? Where do they come from? Having in mind the religious wing (the Church), the Russian elements in Lithuania and of course big business interests, we can appreciate the categorisation provided by Yanis Varoufakis. He identifies that we live in an age of Twin Authoritarianism, where the twins are the Liberal Establishment on the one side and the Nationalist International on the other. The nationalist, traditionalist, “family values” movements neatly fit into the latter category.

As a rule of thumb, when family values begin to be visibly promoted, we can be sure that “shit is hitting the fan”. This means that state and social services are becoming so weak, that they are not sufficient to properly service everyone and as a result these functions are delegated to the last bastion of care in the society that is the family. This further contributes to the overburdening of the family which can only exacerbate societal problems.

To sum up, traditionalist movements are a reaction to economic inequality. The reason for participation is not necessarily complete approval but the search of political alternatives as the liberals are in the pocket of corporate interests and are unable to solve economic injustice. Thus calling the people stupid, manipulated, uneducated, hillbillies, vatniks, alcoholics is simply a refusal to recognize the deeper problem.

Categories
Leftist thought

On different predicaments: A case of a landlord and a tenant

No matter the situation, history or upbringing you are in control of your actions, your attitude, your feelings. Only you are responsible for your own life. This sounds just like a generic motivational quote or video preferred by the “business elite”. Anyway, mainstream psychology aside these statements don’t make much sense. For demonstration, let’s take a stroll through psychological territory and then think about two people in a specific social and economic relation – a landlord and tenant.

Humanistic and cognitive psychology

In psychology we find a certain kind of myopia – psychological analyses rely on pseudo-scientific concepts, individualized examination of behavior and almost complete disregard of systemic issues. Seemingly egalitarian claims that everyone may face issues or mental health problems sound plausible but fall apart under closer scrutiny.

One of the most prominent work of humanistic psychology, the widely read and respected Viktor Frankl’s (1946) Man’s Search For Meaning is illustrative:

I had wanted simply to convey to the reader by way of a concrete example that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through, for I thought it might be helpful to people who are prone to despair. (p. 12)

There is nothing in the world, I venture to say, that would so effectively help one to survive even the worst conditions as the knowledge that there is a meaning in one’s life. (p.109)

Viktor Frankl (1946) – Man’s Search For Meaning

Let’s also cite something more “scientific” because even in psychological curricula, when drawbacks of theories are discussed, an oft given problem is the unscientific nature of their foundations. This allegedly does not apply to CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy) which is beloved by mainstream psychologists as well as corporate interests. Expectedly, it is a gold mine for hot takes à la “everyone is equal” and “everything is possible”. A representative example might be David Burns (1980) – Feeling Good. The New Mood Therapy:

When you are down on yourself, you might find it helpful to ask what you actually mean when you try to define your true identity with a negative label such as “a fool,” “a sham,” “a stupid dope,” etc. Once you begin to pick these destructive labels apart, you will find they are arbitrary and meaningless. They actually cloud the issue, creating confusion and despair. Once rid of them, you can define and cope with any real problems that exist. (p. 80)

Since only distortion can rob you of self-esteem, this means that nothing in “reality” can take away your sense of worth. As evidence for this, many individuals under conditions of extreme and realistic deprivation do not experience a loss of self-esteem. Indeed, some individuals who were imprisoned by the Nazis during World War II refused to belittle themselves or buy into the persecutions of their captors. They reported an actual enhancement of self-esteem in spite of the miseries they were subjected to, and in some cases described experiences of spiritual awakening. (p. 344)

David Burns (1980) – Feeling Good

In their essence, no serious contradictions arise between the two strands of psychology. Seen from the radical behaviorist leftist perspective, the given accounts are extremely regressive. It is argued that any type of desolation is almost acceptable and one should not lose their self-esteem – one might still be able to turn things around just by thinking more effectively. Moreover, by route of internal analysis, as Thomas Paine (1794) did for the Bible in The Age of Reason, we may wonder what Burns and Frankl had in mind when they said that some prisoners have not lost their self-esteem in concentration camps. Who are these people? Are these the rare ones who survived? What about most of captives who did not? Gee, their awakened “self-esteem” really got them somewhere. We can see that by shifting focus from the material to the psychological one benefits only the ones in power.

A landlord and a tenant

To illustrate the above further, let’s examine at an example where situational differences are quite clear. To help us, we can refer to the Matthew Desmonds (2016) book Evicted. This is a investigative book on the harsh reality of the Milwaukee rental market. The account of a landlord is telling:

Woo had told Sherrena that I was “working on a book about landlords and tenants.” Sherrena agreed to an interview, at the end of which I made my pitch.
“Sherrena, I would love to be kind of like your apprentice,” I said, explaining that my goal was to “walk in [her] shoes as closely as possible.”
Sherrena was all-in. “I’m committed to this,” she said. “You have your person.” She was in love with her work and proud of it too. She wanted people to know “what landlords had to go through,” to share her world with a wider public that rarely stopped to consider it.

Matthew Desmond (2016) – Evicted (p. 288)

Nevertheless, can the things landlords go through really compare to what tenants endure?

After accounting for these expenses, vacancies, and missing payments, Tobin took home roughly $447,000 each year, half of what the alderman had reported. Still, Tobin belonged to the top 1 percent of income earners. Most of his tenants belonged to the bottom 10 percent. (p. 161)

The annual income of the landlord of perhaps the worst trailer park in the fourth-poorest city in America is 30 times that of his tenants working full-time for minimum wage and 55 times the annual income of his tenants receiving welfare or SSI. There are two freedoms at odds with each other: the freedom to profit from rents and the freedom to live in a safe and affordable home. (p. 279)

Matthew Desmond (2016) – Evicted

Let’s say both of our heroes face a similar issue in getting money. The landlord needs to receive money from their tenants who are renting their property and the tenant needs to find money to pay rent. What happens if they fail?

The landlord has a stronger foundation in owned wealth and property, i.e. other houses/apartments. Even if the landlord is indebted, he may sell of some of his wealth or use it as collateral for any loans. Anyway, there is no risk of eviction or homelessness. Furthermore, the landlord has more significant legal help – the possibility to afford legal services, time resources because of the absence of any meaningful work results in a power advantage if any case comes to court.

The tenant, on the other hand, is on shakier ground. He receives money predominantly from labor and social benefits. In the case of insufficient funds, he faces severe consequences – unpaid electricity, water, heating bills, maybe even hunger. Failure to pay rent results in legal action where possibilities to state ones case are restricted. Finally, there is eviction:

When things went her way, however, she could have the eviction squad physically remove tenants within ten days.

Matthew Desmond (2016) – Evicted (p. 91)

All problems are not equal and they can’t be treated similarly. Trying to recover money from tenants in courts while having little to lose and having the law enforcement on your side may be stressful but insignificant in comparison of being on the brink of homelessness.

The depressing thing is that such unequal relations happen daily – between landlords and tenants, employers and employees, policemen and citizens, lenders and borrowers etc. Extreme wealth and power always beget extreme poverty and powerlessness. A system that allows such inequalities makes one doubt that we live in a “democracy” and makes any motivational quote seem like a sick joke.

Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism

Noam Chomsky – a radical behaviorist?

Noam Chomsky is easily the most frustrating intellectual and public figure for a radical behaviorist leftist (RBL). He is well known among leftist circles for his decade long criticism of corporatism, US imperialism and advocacy for social justice, democratic rule, anarcho-syndicalism. Likewise, he is famous among psychological circles – he is the linguist that with one fatal stroke allegedly dismantled behaviorism, Skinner’s Verbal Behavior and started the so-called “cognitive revolution” in psychology.

Nevertheless, a reappraisal and a critical look from the RBL perspective of Chomsky’s position is warranted to find out where he truly stands in relation to behavioral theory. We will see that his social views are not irreconcilable but rather, very compatible with Skinner’s radical behaviorism.

Peer evaluation of Chomsky

Let us examine a short collection of quotes, where Noam Chomsky’s views are reviewed. First of all, Sampson (1981) notes that there is a pronounced difference between political views that are advocated by authors prone to psychologization on the one side and Chomsky who takes up a more behavioral, perhaps even dialectical materialist point of view on the other:

For example, Billig contrasts Deutsch’s with Chomsky’s account of the United States in Vietnam. He suggests that whereas Deutsch emphasized “errors of judgment made by decision-makers” (Billig, 1976, p. 229) as key factors in the conflict, Chomsky saw these psychological errors to be derivatives of certain national practices involving the “needs of capitalist production” (Billig, 1976, p. 231). By reducing conflicts to individual subjective processes, we overlook those questions of social structure that are necessary to ground both our understanding and our recommendations for resolution. When we psychologize conflicts and their resolution, we fail to test or challenge the structures and practices of the larger society within which the various subjectivisms have developed and whose interests they often both veil and serve.

Sampson (1981) – Cognitive Psychology as Ideology (p. 730)

The second quote exposes Chomsky’s conflicting views. In his psychological accounts there is a tendency to promote an agential point of view that violates behavioral principles. From scientific grounds, however, this opposition is not viable anymore and one would suspect that Chomsky is aware of this:

Thirdly, Skinner’s account in Verbal Behavior left no room for the “autonomous speaking agent,” the speaker was a “locality” rather than an “actor.” This view directly contrasts with the agent inherent in Chomsky’s formulation, a view that Chomsky in recent years has related to political and moral causes; namely, that the concept of human rights is necessarily tied to particular views of human nature. Andresen asserts to the contrary, “The power of essentializing humanism is running out of steam, and the search for those genetically-encoded, hardwired, essential absolutes of humanness must eventually be abandoned” (p. 152). For Andresen, malevolence occurs “without any theory of language (or human nature) whatever” (p. 153). She observes that Chomsky has shifted his arguments against radical behaviorism from epistemological grounds to moral ones.

Knapp (1990) – Verbal Behavior and the History of Linguistics (p. 152)

Perhaps Chomsky fears that given widespread acceptance, the technology of behavior might end up in the wrong hands. Well, we should remind him and ourselves that this already is the case:

There are those who possess the power of algorithmic analysis and data mining to navigate a world in which there are too many pieces of data to be studied individually. These include market research agencies, social media platforms and the security services. But for the rest of us, impulse and emotion have become how we orientate and simplify our decisions. <..> ‘We’ simply feel our way around, while ‘they’ observe and algorithmically analyse the results. Two separate languages are at work.

William Davies (2015) – The Happiness Industry (p. 198-199)

The third quote might be less straightforward, but it is interesting to see what the anthropologist Marvin Harris has to say on the topic. It seems that he respected Chomsky’s account insofar it deals with sociocultural processes, while distancing himself from individualized explanations:

The tenacity with which even friendly linguists cling to the idea that the word is the alpha and omega of existence is truly astonishing. Words have no measurable energy cost; sociocultural evolution must concern itself with the energy budgets of specific populations in specific environments. Chomsky’s ideas will become relevant to the study of the evolution of technology, economic organization, kinship organization, political organization, and ideology, when he relates the rules of grammar to the rules which govern techno-economic and techno-environmental adaptations. In the meantime, I leave it strictly to the linguists to evaluate Chomsky’s influences upon anthropological studies of languages.

Marvin Harris’s Reply to Marshall Durbin (1968) – The Rise Of Anthropological Theory (p. 530)

Chomsky tells us how it is

After sifting through several secondary accounts let’s turn to the primary source. Having in mind how resentfully Chomsky has commented on behaviorism, let’s appreciate some ideas from the 2011 book How the World Works:

Does that mean that the desire to kill people is innate? In certain circumstances that desire is going to come out, even if it’s your best friend. There are circumstances under which this aspect of our personality will dominate. But there are other circumstances in which other aspects will dominate. If you want to create a humane world, you change the circumstances. (p. 129)

Does that mean they’re different genetically? No. There’s something about the social conditions in which they’re growing up that makes this acceptable behavior, even natural behavior. Anyone who has grown up in an urban area must be aware of this. (p. 130)

But that aside, what people want is in part socially created—it depends on what sort of experiences they’ve had in their lives, and what sort of opportunities. Change the structure and they’ll choose different things. (p. 246)

Noam Chomsky (2011) – How The World Works

To anyone with at least cursory understanding of Chomsky’s bibliography, these thoughts might seem astounding, perhaps even shocking. We would more likely expect to find such formulations in B.F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971) rather than in any of Chomsky’s work. Additionally note that the first two quotes are taken from the chapter called Human nature and self-image (p. 127-131).

Environmentalism and the left

As is advocated in this blog, being a leftist requires one to be a clear environmentalist – this means taking individual and systemic conditions into account when evaluating human behavior. In the words of Richard Owen:

The will of man has no power whatever over his opinions; he must, and ever did, and ever will believe what has been, is, or may be impressed on his mind by his predecessors and the circumstances which surround him.

Richard Owen (1813) – A New View of Society (p. 28)

Noam Chomsky neatly reflects this. Of course, in various contexts Chomsky’s verbal behavior differs – as for linguistics we have strange ramblings about genetically determined structures and generative grammar while discussing economics and society we get an analysis of systemic problems. I guess variations of such accounts manifest from most people and public figures who identify as leftists.

One has to be aware of the problem that denial of determinism regarding behavior and reliance on individual autonomy, responsibility and choice unwittingly leads into reactionary theory. It is enough to mention the conservative pundit Ayn Rand and her wish-wash about Skinner to make a point. Anyway, we don’t need look that far for an illustration – in the same book, Chomsky provides us with already questionable and quite ironic opinions:

When you get to cultural patterns, belief systems and the like, the guess of the next guy you meet at the bus stop is about as good as that of the best scientist. Nobody knows anything. People can rant about it if they like, but they basically know almost nothing. (p. 127)

The public also hated the true prophets—they didn’t want to hear the truth either. Not because they were bad people, but for all the usual reasons—short-term interest, manipulation, dependence on power. (p. 316)

Noam Chomsky (2011) – How The World Works

Some speculation

A question begs to be asked – how has such an ardent critic of the US and its criminal imperialist politics manage to achieve widespread fame? Why shouldn’t such a deviant be muzzled?

One might call this a conspiracy theory, but I would speculate that Noam Chomsky is a net asset for the legitimacy of the establishment despite his social critique. This benefit comes exactly because of his attitude towards Skinner and radical behaviorism. While social criticism is mostly benign, a scientific account defying the attitudes beneficial to the status quo is potentially uncontrollable. The criticism of radical behaviorism and the emersion of cognitive psychology was popularized by the elites, the powerful, the “haves” and the corporate media to obstruct the development of a dialectically materialist, progressive view of human nature and behavior. That is exactly why Chomsky was and is still “allowed” to criticize the establishment – he is used to disarm proper theoretical developments. I guess there is more than one way to fall prey to the traps discussed in Manufacturing Consent (2002).

Final evaluation

It is time to answer the question of the title – can Noam Chomsky be considered a radical behaviorist?

One comes to a clear conclusion – no. Nevertheless, Chomsky, has to be at least identified as a crude environmentalist as is said in Beyond Freedom And Dignity (p. 180-181)

The evidence for a crude environmentalism is clear enough. People are extraordinarily different in different places, and possibly just because of the places.

B.F. Skinner (1971) – Beyond Freedom and Dignity (p. 180)

His ideas and views regarding societal and political issues are definitely noteworthy. For that reason, he has been and will surely be cited in the future in this blog.

P.S. An attempt to integrate Skinner and Chomsky

A quite concise overview of Skinner’s philosophy is provided by the interview called “Philosophy of Behaviorism (1988). The interviewer is Eve Segal and she has attempted to integrate Skinner’s and Chomsky’s approaches. While the piece is quite difficult to understand, one might find the experiment interesting:

The plan of this chapter is to sketch one version of generative grammatical theory, the version of Chomsky’s (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, which is often called the “standard” generative transformational theory of syntax. Then I will sketch Skinner’s (1957) theory of verbal behavior. Then I will try to show, in a general way, how the theories complement one another.

Eve Segal (1977) – Toward a Coherent Psychology of Language (p. 1)
Categories
Leftist thought Radical behaviorism

Foucault on courts and the justice system

An interesting perspective on social power and the legal system is provided by the controversial French philosopher Michel Foucault. Let’s visit his views on courts and the implementation of popular justice and see them through the lens of radical behaviorism.

We must ask whether such acts of popular justice can or cannot be organised in the form of a court. Now my hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus. (p. 1)

What is this arrangement? [Of a court] A table, and behind this table, which distances them from the two litigants, the ‘third party’, that is, the judges. Their position indicates firstly that they are neutral with respect to each litigant, and secondly this implies that their decision is not already arrived at in advance, that it will be made after an aural investigation of the two parties, on the basis of a certain conception of truth and a certain number of ideas concerning what is just and unjust, and thirdly that they have the authority to enforce their decision. This is ultimately the meaning of this simple arrangement. Now this idea that there can be people who are neutral in relation to the two parties, that they can make judgments about them on the basis of ideas of justice which have absolute validity, and that their decisions must be acted upon, I believe that all this is far removed from and quite foreign to the very idea of popular justice. (p. 8)

Here the problem becomes very difficult. It is from the point of view of property that there are thieves and stealing. (p. 36)

Michel Foucault (1980) – Power. Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977

Stated succinctly, Foucault identifies three aspects of the arrangement of a court:

  1. The court is a third neutral party besides the litigants
  2. Decisions are implemented by virtue and by reference to objective truth, justice, fairness, common sense
  3. The court has a backing – power to enforce the judgement

What can be said about these aspects from the RBL perspective?

Third neutral element

The proclaimed neutrality of courts is hardly possible. One must remember that the parties, their struggles, the court itself all don’t exist in a vacuum. The institutions, the political situation, socio-economic conditions form a system that inevitably affect the actors. One has to ask who is in power, what enables and maintains the courts and their functioning. We can see that laws in modern western “democracies” are heavily in favour for property rights – Thomas Piketty calls this neo-proprietarian ideology.

Speaking about judges, they also act in accordance to their environment and context. There is always a long individual process of education and work – this results in a significant filter in possible judge behavior. Jobs in the legal system always require a law degree and the education system tends to favor the already more well-off. The conditioning along the way, the written laws and any Constitution which form the foundation for legal judgement do not make a progressive mechanism.

Basically, a neutral side is a preposterous notion. Herman & Chomsky (2002) have something to say about this in Manufacturing Consent regarding the media, but the same can be applied to the courts:

A propaganda model also helps us to understand how media personnel adapt, and are adapted, to systemic demands. Given the imperatives of corporate organization and the workings of the various filters, conformity to the needs and interests of privileged sectors is essential to success. In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as “irresponsible,” “ideological,” or otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside. While there may be a small number of exceptions, the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who adapt, perhaps quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed free—for those who adopt the principles required for their “societal purpose.”

Herman & Chomsky (2002) – Manufacturing Consent (p. 272)

Objective justice

As with neutrality, no such thing as an all-encompassing “objective” justice, as in separate from any person or system, can exist. We are once again dealing with human behavior and only behavior. The philosophical notions, i.e. Platonian ideals are true only in the eye of the observer (or the behaver in our case). Every person has a history and behavior happens because of this history of reinforcement.

Unavoidably implicit in the objectivity scheme is the definition of “crime”, i.e. what’s legal and what’s not. The question to ask here – who determines which behavior is a punishable crime and which isn’t. Why is stealing from a store a crime while wage labour where most of the created value is appropriated by capital owners is not? An answer suggests itself – power (most often economic) dictates what is legal, objective, just, fair etc. We can once again turn to a fitting quote:

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.

Anatole France (1894) – Le Lys rouge

One may return to the last sentence of the Foucault citation above. People experience different economic conditions, different contexts, different pressures. Even though we “equally” apply the same laws to everyone, this will have non-equal effects. It is convenient for the “haves” to label some of the “have-nots” as thieves and we must see this as a defensive mechanism. Both the origin of property and the definition of property should not be overlooked. To keep things simple here, let Varoufakis do the talking:

Wealth is like a language.

Yanis Varoufakis (2020) – Another Now: Dispatches From An Alternative Present (p. 47)

Power relations

Finally, there are at least two relations of power required in the functioning of any court. I would like to designate an individual blog post on power, but for now it might be understood as the possibility of controlling not only the availability of ones own reinforcers (of course behavior is reinforced, not organisms), but also the availability of reinforcers and punishers for others – power is behavior control.

First is the power to enforce decisions – there has to be an apparatus stronger than both litigants to make sure the judgement is followed. In practice though, the court might not be stronger than a party in court, as some corporations are actually larger than individual countries. In any case, the state which requires a legal system is itself ruled by more wealthy interests and businesses (also called capital). Perhaps we need a reminder of problems with elections and their results.

The second power relation is more philosophical. In the three party arrangement, the court is placed above the litigants with it’s own set of criteria of justice. The resolution is that of the court and the parties must agree to the process and result. We already established that the criteria depend on individual context – the legal system does not allow a flexible way of contesting the rules of the court.

In the quoted interview, Foucault layed out illuminating insight into the court arrangement. These excursions into philosophy under influence of a radical behaviorist philosophy seems to me as a fruitful endeavour and I have no doubt there will be much more such commentary in the future.

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