Crapitalism

Crapitalism

by

Michael Faust

Published by Hyperreality Books

smashwords edition

Copyright © Michael Faust 2015

The right of Michael Faust to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.

Introduction

Throughout human history, a few individuals (the elite) have controlled humanity. Why do the rest let them? Is this not the critical question regarding the path forward for the human race? How do you solve a problem like the elite?

Originally, the tiny elite were simply the violent psychopaths (the Alphas) who intimidated and terrified everyone else into submission. You could get rid of them only by killing them, and no one was brave enough to try.

As time went on, cleverer, more psychologically manipulative psychopaths appeared on the scene. These were people who could spin fantastic stories about the supposed nature of ultimate reality – the religious prophets and gurus, figures such as Moses, the Buddha, Jesus Christ and Mohammed. They wielded tremendous power because they captured people’s imaginations, and addressed their deepest fears and hopes, especially concerning what came after death.

The violent psychopaths entered into alliance with the psychological (religious Mythos) psychopaths to create the breed of dominants known as kings (supported by their high priests). The kings were old-fashioned aggressive bullies and torturers, but now they were backed up by a religious story claiming that they ruled by divine right, that they were the Chosen Ones, the anointed ones, the Messiahs. Their high priest stood beside them, ready to back up their claims, and damn any unbelievers.

Jesus Christ, King of the Jews, appointed himself the Messiah and Son of God. However, he lacked the military resources to defeat Rome. In the end, he won a posthumous victory over Rome because St. Paul turned Christ’s story into a fantastical Mythos that morphed into Catholicism, and was embraced by the Roman Empire.

As time went on, the elite became more reliant on money rather than religious stories to sustain them, so this ensured the rise of a new elite... the psychopathic financial elite who would do anything for a profit. On the right of the King stood his religious (Mythos) adviser. On his left stood his financial (Mammon) adviser.

When kings started to fade away (mostly thanks to the French Revolution), religious power also started to fade. It still wielded tremendous power over individual families, but was less and less involved with matters of State. The stage was left to the financial elite. Like all the rest, they were devious, dangerous psychopaths, and their task was to gain more and more wealth and power for themselves so that they could control everyone else, and advance their own private agendas.

The rich elite were, naturally, those with capital, and they wanted the best vehicle to allow them to optimise their use of their capital. There was one potential obstacle, though – politics and politicians.

What capitalists realised was that politicians, via the political process, could control capital, hence control the rich. Communism in fact called for capital to be owned exclusively by the State. Mussolini’s Fascism demanded that corporations be brought under State control, as did the National Socialism (Nazism) of Hitler. Modern China continues to exert State control over capitalists. Democracy, potentially, puts rich capitalists under the power of the people, although this never happens in practice.

None of this potential or actual political interference was appetising to the psychopathic rich elite. They needed something they could control that was outside politics, hence beyond the reach of politicians. They needed an unelected and unaccountable vehicle, and they found it in the economic system of Adam Smith, i.e. free-market capitalism, the famous invisible hand. The whole point of market economics is to separate the interests of the rich elite from those of the people. The rich run the market for their own benefit, and then make all sorts of absurd claims that they are actually helping the people. They talk about such laughable things as trickle-down economics, and a rising tide lifts all boats. Despite the rhetoric, the rich just keep getting richer, while the poor are either no better off, or actually worse off.

Free-market capitalism is a system run by rich psychopaths to serve their own interests and feather their own nests. They have no interest in the welfare and progress of the people. Via the market, they have ingeniously removed the economic sphere from political control. Since the global market is much more powerful than the government of any nation state, they can dictate to every government and every nation on earth.

There is no such thing as people power (democracy). The world is run by oligarchs for oligarchs. You have all been conned. You are all slaves of capitalism. You are ruled by a psychopathic elite just as your ancestors were. Nothing has changed, except the tactics of the elite. The weak, passive, submissive masses still go on being ruled by an elite few. They love it! They refuse to be responsible for their own lives. They refuse to take control by sweeping away the tiny group that oppresses them. They are cowards.

Capitalism is Crapitalism. It’s a crap system for everyone other than the rich elite. But there is a cure – meritocracy. Meritocracy is about putting the world’s smartest people in charge, those who follow Logos rather than Mythos. They will rule via reason and logic, not via violence, religious stories, or wealth. Humanity, at last, will be free.

The question is ... does humanity actually want to be free, or does it love its chains too much? Look at the Christians. They love a God who sentenced humanity to hell because Adam and Eve ate an apple, who drowned the whole world (bar Noah’s Ark), and who ordered a father to murder his own son to prove the strength of his faith (Abraham and Isaac). Does it sound as if Christians are more attracted to freedom or abject slavery?

Crapitalism is simply the newest means of oppressing and exploiting natural-born slaves.

Production Capitalism versus Consumer Capitalism

Capitalism was once devoted to producing sturdy, robust goods that people were expected to use for many years. How well you cared for your precious goods was almost a test of your virtue. Good, God-fearing Protestants would tend their possessions with the utmost care.

In Freudian terms, production capitalism was governed by the moralistic Superego component of the psyche. The mantra was, Waste not, want not.

But capitalists began to realize they would make much more money if people revelled in waste, and kept getting rid of their existing goods, and replacing them with brand new ones. The faster their rate of replacing consumer goods, the richer the capitalists would become.

So, capitalism, once dour, dark and Presbyterian, became colourful. The Superego was replaced by the Id. Now the idea was that people should be irresponsible spendthrifts, dedicated to instant gratification. If they couldn’t afford something now, they could still get it immediately on credit (even better for the capitalists because they could charge interest too). Id capitalism is all about Me, Me, Me ... Because I’m worth it!

Id capitalism wanted people to express themselves. In fact, to express every conceivable side of themselves, and sides they’d never even dreamt of. Change your clothes, change your shoes, change your hair, change your hair colour, straighten your hair or curl your hair, or shave it all off. Who cares? – just so long as you keep changing it and paying a capitalist to do it for you. Buy a new TV, a new computer, a new cell phone, a new iPod. Buy endless gadgets and keep buying every upgrade. Just keep buying. Indulge yourself, treat yourself, pamper yourself. Buy, buy, buy. Try a new image. Keep rebranding yourself. Keep having makeovers – because then you need to buy a whole new set of goods to reflect your new self.

Free-market capitalism transmuted itself from Superego capitalism committed to values of endurance, frugality, robustness, value for money and no frills to Id capitalism based on waste, disposability, junk, cheapness, inbuilt obsolescence, triviality, self-indulgence, instant gratification, fashion, narcissism etc.

Capitalism proved that it had no interest in morality or human quality. It was delighted with Id capitalism – no matter how much it degraded people – because it created much higher profits. The profit principle is capitalism’s sole morality. Its moral code is that of Mammon. It has contempt for human beings, yet it relentlessly panders to them, because the more you can give people what they want, the higher your profits will be. Of course, what people want is not what they need, but capitalism has no interest in what is good for people, only in what makes them spend money.

Free-market capitalism = Id capitalism = the pleasure principle = the profit principle = self-indulgence = instant gratification = egotism = self expression = giving the people what they think they want.

Id capitalism is the best moneymaking machine ever devised. It cannot be bettered. Of course, its sole function is to make a small elite exceptionally rich and powerful. It has no social function or value. It relentlessly degrades human beings. It produces junk products and junk people. It does nothing but dumb down and generate a race for the bottom, for the lowest common denominator, where the highest profits exist.

Id capitalism is the ancient Roman doctrine of bread and circuses – the means for the elite to control the common herd – turned into an economic system. And the dumb masses lap it up and believe themselves free because they have endless capitalist goods from which to choose, and endless ways in which to express themselves. They haven’t realized that true self-expression involves being a high quality human being, not an incontinent consumer of capitalist goods, with an addiction to makeovers.

The beauty industry does nothing but proclaim that women are never good enough and must always be changing their image. Why? Because that’s how the owners of the beauty industry make higher profits. They don’t care about women. They care about profit. They’re delighted to make women neurotic and depressed about their appearance if it generates more dollars for their own bank accounts. What kind of morality is that? What kind of society is that? What kind of beauty is that?

Cruel Optimism

There’s a sociological hypothesis that most of us are victims of cruel optimism, meaning that from our earliest years we are given highly optimistic dreams and ambitions that are almost impossible for most of us to attain. The American Dream may be open to all Americans, yet how many Americans actually achieve it? If 1% make it, 99% don’t. That means that the 99% are compelled to regard themselves as failures. Their initial optimism yields to cruel disillusion. The American Dream turns out, for almost everyone, to be a nightmare.

Citizens Without Frontiers

There’s a group of citizens in our world who fly around in private jets to unlisted airports. They don’t go through any customs. Luxury limos await them to whisk them off to luxury hotels. Smiling flunkeys with long tongues attend to their every need. Yes, it’s another world for some people. They are global citizens, citizens without frontiers. They are the super rich.

Ponzi Scheme Economics – Free-Market Capitalism

A country becomes richer if its productivity increases. But what if people just borrow cheap money (at a low interest rate) and buy houses, which then go up in value because of market demand? People then believe themselves richer (they have a valuable asset now, after all, against which they can borrow even more). So, productivity hasn’t increased at all, yet many people imagine themselves wealthier. Clearly, this is just an illusion – a Ponzi scheme – whereby the first players in the scheme (the rich) do fantastically well, but a disaster is waiting down the road for the very large number of poor, ordinary people who arrive late in the game.

House prices could not go up forever, and, in 2008, as soon as their progress stuttered and began to decline, many late-arrivers found themselves in debt rather than in profit, and they could not borrow any more. These were the poor people least able to service debt, the sub-prime borrowers. So, they had to start defaulting on payments, and their properties were then repossessed by the lenders, and the whole Ponzi scheme collapsed. House prices melted down, confidence evaporated, and all of the debts were fully exposed. Thus we had the financial bust of 2008.

The prior boom was nothing but an illusion created by lending money incredibly cheaply. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen because productivity hadn’t risen at all. The whole thing was a sham, a farce.

But the big question is this – why did the powers-that-be allow it to happen? Why didn’t they see it was a fantasy? Expert economists, financiers, bankers – all being paid a fortune for their expertise – were silent in 99% of cases. The 1% who saw what was coming were mocked.

Well, no one said anything because the elite were earning a fortune from the whole thing. None of them had any interest in stopping the hyper-lucrative show. Pure self-interest drove the whole thing.

You might expect that all of these discredited, inept, incompetent experts would have been swept away forever – their beliefs explicitly refuted by the facts – yet they’re all still in position, many still spouting the same old nonsense. Like the Abrahamists, no amount of reason, facts or evidence can contradict them, or shake their confidence. These people represent the system of absolute privilege, of nepotism and cronyism, wholly disconnected from merit. The rich get richer no mater matter what – and the poor get shafted. Always.

The Market Society

What’s the key to markets? A few ultra dominant players – unaccountable and unelected – are able to control the markets for their own benefit. Markets thus bypass the political process and deliver decisive power to banks, corporations, celebrities, entrepreneurs and the super rich. The people don’t have any say at all. Their voice is never heard, and their interests are never represented. They are not the ones who control markets.

So, the rich and powerful thought, why not extend markets from economics to everything? That way they could have complete control of society. Isn’t that the society we live in – one completely ruled by banks and corporations? The prophets of the market say that markets should be deployed in every sphere, that only markets can deliver the public good. What they really mean is that markets give them the best control over the people. Markets don’t serve the people; the people serve markets. In fact, people in a very real sense are markets.

The dominant players – the market controllers – get the vast bulk of the profits that the markets generate, which is the whole point.

Do markets raise or lower standards? Is our culture dumbing down or smartening up? Just look around you.

In the market society, everything is for sale and everyone’s a commodity. People treat each other with a market mentality, i.e. shares in you are either going up or down; you’re either in demand, or no one cares.

Everything these days has a market solution. Leave it all to the market. That, of course, is just a code phrase for letting a tiny rich elite rule the world. They are the super class, and they are rapidly drawing the ladder up after them.

When did the market mentality take off? It was during the Cold War. A binary opposition was created where 1) communism = communalism = communitarianism = the State = Big Government = totalitarianism = inefficiency = slavery, and 2) free-market capitalism = freedom = democracy = individualism = choice = consumerism = markets.

The prevailing wisdom is that markets, choice, freedom and individualism are the same thing, while anything else is communism, slavery and totalitarianism. Of course, in a market world, the richest and the most powerful are the freest and have the most choice. That’s the point.

The market ideology is the most sinister there has ever been. It removes power from the people and from their elected representatives and transfers it instead to amoral abstractions.

If someone says, The market doesn’t like it, what does that actually mean? The market is presented as some great force – like a force of nature – that no one can contradict. To say that the market has spoken is like saying that God has spoken. Governments have to adjust their policies to accommodate these markets, but they have no control over the markets. So who’s in charge?

The markets are deliberately treated as anonymous abstractions so that no one realises that there are people behind the abstraction, powerful people behind the curtain. Markets are people. The controllers of markets are very rich, identifiable people.

Markets comprise the collective moves of an alliance of the powerful: bankers, traders, and bosses of corporations. Wall Street analysts move the markets. All the major market players are right wing, free-market capitalists, all zealously dedicated to the profit principle. There is nothing apolitical about the major players. There is nothing neutral about them.

Markets are therefore instruments of right wing political ideology that are deliberately excluded from the political process so that the people can never interfere with them. In terms of the markets, the people are the little guys who have no power to influence the direction of markets. Only the big guys have that power – and they use it to devastating political effect to advance their right wing agenda.

The market controllers dictate politics and economics, while being unelected and unaccountable. Don’t you see the sheer genius of that? We now live in a permanent right wing hegemony because markets are right wing, and there is no political mechanism for controlling them.

Under National Socialism, Hitler controlled the markets; the markets didn’t control him. What we need is a new system of Social Capitalism where the same is true: markets are controlled by politicians (the representatives of the people), and politicians are not the puppets of the market.

Right wing marketeers have engineered the most ingenious and devious political coup in history. No one even noticed because it was presented as an abstraction, to which no faces were attached. Because it was faceless, because the puppetmasters behind the curtain were never identified, it was never seen for what it was: a conspiracy by the rich against democracy, against the people. Markets were the means for permanently transferring power to the rich, without anyone noticing.

The word market ought to be replaced by right wing cabal of the super rich. All market solutions are right wing solutions. They are about hammering down costs (people’s pay), while raising profits (for the rich elite), hence why the rich are now richer than they have ever been.

All market players should be explicitly identified. All major market movements – and who caused the movements (the specific players) – should be publicly identified.

What do we need instead? Rational solutions, not market solutions. Screw markets.

The political process cannot countenance extra-political players: dominant players who are unelected and unaccountable.

The whole current financial crisis is caused by markets, and the inability of elected politicians to do what needs to be done. Their hands are tied by the markets. The markets will move directly and decisively against them if they do anything to displease them. The politicians are simultaneously being held hostage and blackmailed. Politician must wrest back control from the markets.

The Big State

Why do so many Americans hate the Big State? It’s because they’ve been brainwashed to hate it. The ultimate Big State was of course the Soviet Union – America’s arch enemy in the Cold War, the home of the Communist menace.

Big State is actually code for communism. Barack Obama is regularly portrayed as a socialist or communist. The American right wing never tires of depicting the State as the problem.

American right wingers imagine themselves as pioneers out in the Western wilderness, living in log cabins. They revere faith, family and flag. They see no need for the State to interfere in their lives, to tell them what to do, to tax them, to prevent then exercising their religious beliefs, to prevent them from hating whoever they want to hate.

The American right wing is full of anarchists, anarcho-capitalist libertarians, Randroid objectivist libertarians, free-market capitalists, religious Fundamentalists, racist Confederates, racists in general, Survivalists, Rapturists, and endless conspiracy theorists.

Almost all American conspiracies revolve around the State plotting against the people, and the people who control the State are invariably depicted as the Jewish, Communist or Reptilian Illuminati. (Take your pick; all of these versions of the Illuminati can be mixed at will to produce whatever effect the conspiracy theorists desire.)

The American right wingers are steeped in extreme Protestant individualism. They see in the Big State not only communism but a reflection of the Catholic Church with its antichrist Pope and his cardinals. The State is thus doubly bad: it’s the two worst evils as far as Protestants are concerned – a hybrid of Catholicism and Communism.

America is a WASP nation – a land of milk and honey for White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The American right wing are nearly all WASPs. Protestants only like other Protestants – the saved, the elect. They are anti-community in general. They don’t want to mix with non-Protestants.

Free-market capitalism doesn’t want anyone regulating or interfering with it. The super rich don’t want to pay any taxes. Protestants don’t like the State in any capacity. Put it all together and you get a toxic brew... a pathological hatred of the State.

The American right wing constitutes the uttermost enemy of the rational State.

The State is the only rational vehicle through which society can be changed for the better. Protestants stand absolutely opposed to the State because they do not believe in a better world. All they believe in is a Protestant world full of rich capitalist Protestants: God’s elect!

Game Theory

Economic, political and religious systems reflect core human nature. All of them can be translated into mathematical game theory, a method of studying strategic decision-making based on nothing more complex than simple but ingenious games that all of us play all the time, literally or metaphorically, and which any child could play.

Formally, game theory is defined as the study of mathematical models of conflict and cooperation between intelligent, rational decision-makers, although the use of the words intelligent and rational might be challenged. Game theory really seems to be more about the decisions of unintelligent, irrational, emotional, wilful players. An alternative label is interactive decision theory. How players conduct the game – how they develop tactics and strategies – is of course dependent on the tactics and strategies of their opponents. One major issue is whether stalemates develop, or equilibriums. Do both players simply mirror each other? Each player is trying to optimise his position given the likely moves of his opponents.

Games of pure conflict are called zero-sum games where one player’s gains exactly equal the other player’s losses; the resultant gain is always zero. In other cases, both players might be able to gain, either equally or according to an uneven split.

Consider five key examples of game theory: the ultimatum game, the bonus game, the social contract, the prisoner’s dilemma, and Hawks and Doves.

The Ultimatum Game

Two players are given a sum of money, say $100, for which neither has had to do anything. It’s a gift. The game goes like this ... one player is told that he can assign the $100 how ever he likes, i.e. he can give the other player a non-negotiable ultimatum. He can keep the money entirely for himself, give the whole lot to the other player, or anything in between (any kind of split between himself and the other player). The second player’s contribution to the game is equally simple: to accept or reject the first player’s offer. If he rejects the offer, neither player gets anything and the gift is withdrawn.

In the standard version of the game, the game is played only once so that reciprocation is not an issue, and no negotiations are possible.

Arguably, the whole of economics can be explained by this game.

Do you know any people who might want to keep all of the money for themselves? There are plenty, aren’t there? The only thing that would stop them is the certain knowledge that the other player would definitely reject the offer, hence stopping them from being allowed to keep the money.

No one at all would offer to give the whole amount to the other player. Human nature precludes such an altruistic gesture.

Theoretically, any non-zero offer should be accepted by the second player since it’s free money. Even one cent is better than nothing. It would be rational to accept. Yet not a single person would ever accept such a derisory offer. Human psychology is much more important than simple reason. The significance of the game lies in the way it addresses what value players place on themselves, and how they regard themselves with regard to the other players.

The specific question that economists probe is what offers are accepted and which ones are rejected, and the results are highly illuminating.

The offer of a minimal sum is of course as sure to be rejected as the offer of nothing: it’s an insult.

In real life versions of the game conducted by economists with ordinary people, almost no proposer ever offers less than 25% to the responder. Would you accept $25 dollars for no effort? Yet it would be in the knowledge that the other was keeping $75. How would that sit with you?

Anything below 25% is routinely rejected in real life games, but 25% is where offers start to be accepted. The offer most likely to be accepted is of course a fifty-fifty split, but many proposers seek to win by not offering an even split, and see how much they can keep for themselves.

So, the proposer is concerned with greed, selfishness, dominance, how much he can get away with. He’s in the classic position of the master, setting the agenda.

The responder is concerned with honour, fairness, status, the value he places on himself, the recognition he wants from the master. He’s in the classic position of the slave, with the major advantage that he has the option to veto any offer and sabotage any proposal he deems unfair, even if it means depriving himself of the cash. He can say to himself, I would rather deprive you of the money than take a cent from you if you have treated me with disrespect. To that extent, he inspires a certain degree of fear in the master.

Let’s apply the Ultimatum Game to economic systems, starting with capitalism. Now, however, the sum of money is no longer free, but reflects various factors, such as an initial investment, a risk taken, a brilliant idea, and hard work to make the enterprise take off.

Let’s imagine a capitalist boss who has a great business idea, risks his own money and employs a talented worker to help him grow his business. The capitalist and worker both work equally hard.

So, what offer should the capitalist make to the worker?

Historically, capitalism has got away with offering massive rewards to the bosses and owners, and insulting amounts to the workers, but usually not quite insulting enough to cause a revolt. The only deterrent for the capitalist elite is that if they go too far they risk revolution.

In ancient master-slave societies, the slaves were offered nothing but their lives. Most of the slaves accepted. Those that didn’t rebelled and were usually slaughtered with fantastic cruelty to deter others.

In medieval societies, feudal lords offered one to five percent to the serfs. In the ultra-capitalist societies of the nineteenth century, the bosses offered a similar amount to their workers (the worst offering being about five percent and the very best about ten percent).

From 1945 to 1980, when the world had a general left wing leaning because of communism and socialism, the deal offered by capitalist bosses was around 25-33%.

From 1980 to present, the capitalist offer has reversed sharply to around 15% and below.

Social capitalism is about being much fairer in respect of the offer, while still ensuring the creator of the enterprise gets a healthy reward. The offer is pitched around the 40% mark.

Communism, in theory, makes everyone the same offer, no matter what, i.e. 50-50. Therefore, good ideas, risk-taking and private investment and hard work all become irrelevant, which is exactly why communism proved so disastrous economically.

With Ayn Rand’s anarcho-capitalist libertarianism, the offer goes right back to feudal times, with the rich elite offering only about 1-5% and making it clear that the workers can like it or lump it. Randroids effectively say, Fuck you – what are you going to do about it?

In a meritocracy, a meritocrat would propose a smaller amount to the less meritocratic partner, say 45-55 or 40-60, and the less meritocratic partner will know to accept it because if he doesn’t then the meritocrat will walk away and find a new partner. If the less meritocratic partner becomes more and more valuable then the more meritocratic partner will offer him more for fear of losing him to a rival. Eventually, they might become equal partners.

The elite always want to keep the differential as high as possible (minimum offer), and workers always want the offer to be as high as possible. When bosses and unions negotiate, there will never be any surprises about their respective negotiating stances.

In a buyer’s market, where bosses are buying the labour of the workers and there’s a glut of workers (high unemployment), the bosses can make lower offers and get away with it. In a seller’s market where there’s high employment and competition for the services of workers, the workers can get away with selling their services for a higher offer.

Skilled workers can always get a higher offer than unskilled workers because their skills are in shorter supply and they are harder to replace. If you’re unskilled, it means there are plenty more like you, so you can be easily replaced, hence you have a severely limited negotiating position.

What is the ideal offer range in a healthy society? It’s probably in the 35 – 45% range. The precise number can be continually adjusted until the optimal number is found: the number that satisfies both the boss and worker to the maximum, a fair and socially stable reward for both parties.

The less talented you are, the less you should expect the offer to be. The more talented you are, the more you should expect the offer to be.

Everyone should seek to have a reserve of fuck you money, allowing them to walk out on any bad job and bad employer, and have enough to live on for about three months until they find a new job.

*****

Some players of the Ultimatum Game think they can get away with murder. They are psychopaths. They don’t think other people matter. They couldn’t care less about community and fostering good relations with others. People on the right wing of the political spectrum are those who would be highly tempted to make extremely one-sided offers, while people on the left would make much fairer offers. In fact, your offer is more or less a measure of how right or left wing you are.

Submissive, weak people of low self-esteem and spirit will allow themselves to be seduced by low offers. Dominant, strong people of high self-esteem will never accept low offers.

If a succession of Ultimatum Games are played with the same two players, the responder typically becomes more and more punitive: he will punish any attempt not to cut him his fair share.

How individual players play the game is of course altered if they see the game being played by others. If you previously accepted a low offer and then see someone turning down that offer in a subsequent game, you definitely won’t accept that low offer again. Why? Because you would be acknowledging that you have lower value than the person who turned down the low offer.

We are all engaged in the Ultimatum Game and we are all watching each other play the game. Since 1980, the extraordinary change is that the super rich have a made smaller and smaller offer to everyone else (they are keeping as much as possible for themselves), and the rest of the world – the ordinary people – have tolerated it. They have been treated as weak, pathetic, submissive trash with no ability to fight, and they have meekly gone along with it, thus proving that the rich were right all along.

The super rich have made society a derisory offer and got away with it. Now society must turn the tables and make a derisory offer in return. Otherwise we will be the slaves of the rich.

It’s time to man up. It’s time to have self-respect. It’s time to fight the rich. It’s not as if it’s much of a fight. There are thousands of them and billions of us. If we can’t win that fight, we really are pathetic.

A person of high self-respect should be willing to turn down any offer that does not value him correctly. The value you place on yourself is the most priceless thing you have. It ought to be worth more to you than anything.

So, a slave accepts a zero offer, a serf a 5% offer, a proletarian 10%, a modern worker 15%, a communist 50%.

A meritocrat will assess what contribution he makes and accept a commensurate offer, not a cent more or less.

What offer will you accept – bearing in mind that the offer you accept says everything about you?

The Bonus Game

Bankers and traders are extremely good at playing the Ultimatum Game. They refuse to do anything without being paid an enormous amount. They need, they say, to be properly incentivized, or they won’t get out of bed. Why don’t hard-working nurses and teachers need these remarkable incentives to rouse themselves? Are the bankers and traders saying they have more value than nurses and teachers?

The financial crisis has proved that it would have been far better for society if all these banking and trading masters of the universe had stayed in bed – permanently. Yet still we go on paying them their obscene bonuses, even after the whole system has collapsed and been bailed out by the taxpayers. This is madness.

The only ultimatum should be the one served by the people to these rich parasites – Fuck off and don’t come back!

The privileged elite won’t do anything without a vast bonus, yet they expect everyone else to work hard without any bonus. The privileged elite invariably say they love their jobs – and they certainly wouldn’t want to work in a coal mine, a call centre, or be flipping hamburgers – yet love doesn’t seem to be enough for these people. They want to love their job and get a vast bonus too. Why isn’t love and enjoyment incentive enough? Or is the bonus what they actually love?

Teachers and nurses don’t seem to need incentives in the form of vast bonuses. They have, or at least used to have, a vocation. Whatever happened to the concept of the vocation, the calling, the thing you did because it filled you with a feeling of well-being rather than filling your wallet? Nowadays, it’s all about the money. Money is all that counts, all that exists.

The bonus defines our Age. Bonuses are the particular mechanism chosen by rich, privileged people to give themselves excessive rewards. They get away with it because they can – because no one gives them an ultimatum. These same people would do the same jobs for a tenth of their present salaries if they lived in a society that capped their salaries. After all, what else are they going to do? They would still be paid much more than average people.

These people like to pretend they have endless choices, but they don’t. Their bluff should be called. An ultimatum should be delivered to them – if they demand an excessive bonus, they should be fired.

The Social Contract

In an aggressive society, it’s logical for everyone to be aggressive because anyone showing weakness will be destroyed as the easiest victim for a predator. Hence we arrive at Thomas Hobbes’ vision of a war of all against all, and a life which is nasty, brutish and short. The more you gain a reputation for aggression and violence, the more people will fear you. The world described by Hobbes is the perfect arena for the master-slave dialectic to unfold at its bloodiest and most savage. Everyone is continually geared up for fight or flight. Only bullies and psychopaths prosper. For everyone else, it’s the ultimate sub-optimal state. The jungle is the ultimate arena where brute force is all that matters. There is no civilisation in the jungle.

Better one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep. – Mussolini

Anarcho-capitalist libertarianism is a modern ideology in which, in the name of untrammelled freedom (never being told what to do by government or the State under any circumstances), ideological extremists wish to tear up all rules and laws of society. They naively believe that this would not lead to anarchy and chaos within hours. However, in the real world, within 24 hours a Hobbesian bloodbath would erupt if these madmen ever got their way and came to power.

Anarcho-capitalist libertarianism belongs to the extreme right wing of the political spectrum and is wholly opposed to communism, socialism, the State, government, community and society. It’s all about the family, individuals and small groups of like-minded people. It has unconditional intolerance towards anyone who doesn’t share its worldview. It’s an extreme version of social Darwinism, which is a highly attractive concept to all right wing Americans. In social Darwinism, the fittest (the rich) survive and prosper, and the unfit (the poor) perish.

Only an agreed social contract can free us from this brutal, jungle world and allow us create a meaningful civilisation. No anarcho-capitalist libertarians can be permitted to live in any society since they are fundamentally opposed to society. They would never agree to sign up to a social contract deigned to operate in the interests, and for the welfare, of all, hence they would be expelled as undesirables and anti-social elements.

Hobbes believed that everyone must submit to a sovereign power (the leviathan) – a king, dictator or assembly – in order to create a civil society. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the sovereign power was the General Will.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma

"The prisoner’s dilemma is a standard example of a game analyzed in game theory that shows why two completely ‘rational’ individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interests to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence rewards and named it, ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, presenting it as follows:

Two members of a criminal gang are arrested and imprisoned. Each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. The prosecutors lack sufficient evidence to convict the pair on the principal charge. They hope to get both sentenced to a year in prison on a lesser charge. Simultaneously, the prosecutors offer each prisoner a bargain. Each prisoner is given the opportunity either to: betray the other by testifying that the other committed the crime, or to cooperate with the other by remaining silent. The offer is:

If A and B each betray the other, each of them serves 2 years in prison.

If A betrays B but B remains silent, A will be set free and B will serve 3 years in prison (and vice versa).

If A and B both remain silent, both of them will only serve 1 year in prison (on the lesser charge).

It is implied that the prisoners will have no opportunity to reward or punish their partner other than the prison sentences they get, and that their decision will not affect their reputation in the future. Because betraying a partner offers a greater reward than cooperating with him, all purely rational self-interested prisoners would betray the other, and so the only possible outcome for two purely rational prisoners is for them to betray each other. The interesting part of this result is that pursuing individual reward logically leads both of the prisoners to betray, when they would get a better reward if they both kept silent. – Wikipedia

These are relatively benign circumstances. What if the stakes are upped? What if both serve five years if they say nothing, but are subject to the death penalty if the other betrays them?

Now, if both players act rationally, it will cause both of them to die. If they say nothing, they will get a manageable sentence and both will survive.

Given that playing the game rationally results in mutually assured destruction, Cold War analysts were profoundly drawn to this problem. The matrix of rewards and punishments for the Cold War was:

1) The Soviet Union does nothing, and the USA does nothing. Both sides require huge, permanent war machines to act as deterrents.

2) The Soviet Union launches a first strike; the USA is devastated. (But the American retaliatory wave inflicts terrible damage on the USSR.)

3) The USA launches a first strike; the Soviet Union is devastated. (But the Soviet retaliatory wave inflicts terrible damage on the USA.)

4) The USA and USSR launch more or less simultaneous first strikes: mutually assured destruction.

In this case, chillingly, the rational play, if war seemed inevitable, was for both sides to attempt a first strike. However, the stakes were now so high that the rational play was effectively insane (i.e. utterly irrational! ... Catch-22). Any nuclear engagement was sure to end in catastrophe for both sides. If neither country had the capacity for a massively destructive retaliatory strike, one country or the other would almost certainly have gone for the first strike.

In many ways, it’s astounding that humanity survived the Cold War. The Cuban Crisis ought to have led to Armageddon if humans had behaved as humans normally behave. The amount of credit that must be given to Jack Kennedy is inestimable. Had Nixon been in power in America, the world would now consist of smoking ruins. Kubrick’s film Dr Strangelove is a must-see for anyone who wants to contemplate the chilling logic of the Cold War mind.

The essence of the prisoner’s dilemma is whether or not you should cooperate with your neighbour or shaft him (screw him over) if there’s an advantage to be had for you.

Consider private education. Rather than cooperating to create an education system fit for all, the rich elite simply buy themselves out of the State system. They create fantastic private schools with fantastic facilities and teachers, and they let the State system rot. In fact, they have a direct interest in the State system failing. The wider the educational gap between the elite and the ordinary people, the more likely the elite are to establish a permanent hegemony (which they have now in fact accomplished).

The rich elite would rather dominate a shitty, monstrous society than help to create a wonderful, thriving, smart society which they can’t dominate.

The elite’s greatest pleasure comes not from cooperation but from domination. They lust after mastery, and controlling a population of slaves.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma concerns competition versus cooperation. Are you competing with your neighbour, hence trying to secure some sort of victory or advantage over them, or are you cooperating with your neighbour for a better world for both of you? This is and always has been the key question of human relations. All human institutions are about competition or cooperation. However, because we live in a fundamentally master-slave society, competition is massively emphasized over cooperation. The ruling elite have no interest whatsoever in cooperating with the rest of society. They simply wish to exercise power over them. Cooperation diminishes their power.

Abrahamic religion is about a master God and a slave population of worshippers, hence fits in perfectly with the master-slave institutions created by the elite. Free-market capitalism is about ensuring that society is controlled by those who have the vast bulk of the capital (the super rich elite).

The capitalist elite demonised communism and socialism. Why? Because these were, theoretically at least, all about cooperation, and about attacking the primary source of anti-cooperation (namely the ruling elite). It’s extraordinary how many poor, working class Americans are fanatical supporters of Abrahamism and free-market capitalism, and despise communism and socialism, despite the fact that all of them would be enormously better off under a left-wing, cooperative political system.

But these people do not think at all. They are not intended to think, or required to think. They are there simply to serve their masters, which they do dutifully. These people have had a false consciousness constructed for them by the elite. They live in bad faith and are brainwashed to a quite incredible degree. They eagerly swallow every lie fed to them. They have internalised these lies and vociferously defend them even when they are overwhelmingly hostile to their own interests. That is what constitutes perfect mind control.

We need a new humanity. We need a humanity where cooperation rather than competition is the first instinct.

Hawks and Doves

"...consider the problem of the Hawk-Dove game, analyzed by Maynard Smith and Price in ‘The Logic of Animal Conflict.’ In this game, two individuals compete for a resource of a fixed value V. (In biological contexts, the value V of the resource corresponds to an increase in the Darwinian fitness of the individual who obtains the resource; in a cultural context, the value V of the resource would need to be given an alternate interpretation more appropriate to the specific model at hand.) Each individual follows exactly one of two strategies described below:

Hawk: Initiate aggressive behaviour, not stopping until injured or until one’s opponent backs down.

Dove: Retreat immediately if one’s opponent initiates aggressive behaviour.

...(1) whenever two individuals both initiate aggressive behaviour, conflict eventually results and the two individuals are equally likely to be injured, (2) the cost of the conflict reduces individual fitness by some constant value C, (3) when a Hawk meets a Dove, the Dove immediately retreats and the Hawk obtains the resource, and (4) when two Doves meet the resource is shared equally between them... Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy

In the game of hawks and doves, hawks are characterised as fighting as hard as possible. Only severe injury to itself, or the unconditional surrender of its opponent, will cause it to stop. Hawks are dominants and are initiators of aggressive behaviour. In the Ultimatum Game, they would make a derisory offer to the other party.

Doves, in a conflict situation, do a lot of posturing and trying to call their opponent’s bluff, but retreat immediately in the face of actual aggressive behaviour. While hawks cause injury to their opponents, doves never do. In the Ultimatum Game, they would share the money equally.

If a hawk encounters another hawk, they will fight until only one is left standing. This equates to master fighting master, the most savage fight possible.

If a dove encounters a dove in a conflict situation, they will square up to each other, but no serious fighting will break out. One will eventually give up, leaving the other as the winner by default. This is a slave-slave contest, and is a non-event.

If a hawk encounters a dove and attacks, the dove flees immediately, and thus survives. This is the archetypal master-slave contest. The slave will never fight the master, to the disgust of the master who, in human terms, refuses to recognise the humanity of the slave, and to the shame of the slave, who is always terrified of the master.

A population of only hawks will result in a savage contest for mastery: the law of the jungle at its most savage.

A population of only doves will be submissive, lacking energy and assertion. They will be sheep in search of a shepherd.

A 50-50 population of hawks and doves will result in hell on earth for the doves. Each dove will be a personal slave of a hawk, but the hawks will nevertheless savagely fight each other, in search of more doves to rule over.

In a population of doves, a rogue hawk that appears will run amok and become a kind of God with total power. His genes will spread at a prodigious rate. However, eventually a huge number of hawks will be produced, and they will savagely fight each other, resulting in a steep decline in their numbers.

A few doves in a hawk world will always run away, so they will survive while the hawks are brutally killing each other. Their genes will spread almost by default since they and their offspring will stay standing (or running!) while all the others are falling.

It turns out that if there are too many hawks then they will fight and kill each other, leaving a much smaller number of ultra-tough champions.

An equilibrium is established and in human populations it turns out that there are roughly 5% hawks (masters) and 95% doves (slaves).

That’s why you have a small of elite of greedy psychopaths and 95% of sheeple.

If we want a better world, this problem of the 5% of psychopathic hawks must be addressed.

Richard Dawkins discusses an addition to the hawks and doves called a Retaliator. A retaliator has some hawk and some dove behaviour. He will behave in general like a dove (he will never initiate an attack). However, if attacked, he will not run away like a dove but will instead retaliate with full force. In other words, he behaves like a hawk when attacked by a hawk, and like a dove when he encounters a dove. In a sense, he mimics the opposition. He is called a conditional strategist since his behaviour isn’t unilateral but depends on the opponent’s behaviour. About 5% of the population are retaliators.

In feudal England, 5% of the population belonged to the brutal military caste of the nobility, and 90% to the serf caste. The remaining 5% belonged to the Logos thinkers. Because of the nature of the times, the Logos people were compelled to enter monasteries or the priesthood and use their intelligence exploring abstract religious questions such as how many angels could dance on the head of a pin!

The Church – containing most of the intelligentsia – stood up quite well to the nobility, and the religious orders certainly didn’t see themselves as slaves of the nobles.

These figures from medieval England are quite characteristic. The current stable human population consists of 5% dominant hawks (mostly extraverts) and 5% dominant retaliators (mostly introverts), and the remaining 90% are the common herd.

The 5% of dominant extraverts rule the world, and the 5% of dominant introverts have carved out a separate domain for themselves in the academic and cultural world.

In effect, we need to eradicate the 5% of dominant hawks, and, instead, have the world ruled by the 5% dominant retaliators who, in the absence of hawks, will behave like benevolent doves. The greedy, bullying psychopaths who currently reign over us are the central cause of the world’s woes. The world can become paradise only when these maniacs are removed. However, will the 90% of the sheeple stand with the 5% of retaliators to get rid of the tyrants? The tyrants will use every trick in the book, and every savage tactic available to them – after all, that’s their essence; that’s how they became so powerful in the first place. They will show no mercy, so they must be shown none. That was the lesson of the French Revolution.

It’s easy to change the world – just get rid of the people at the top! Just get rid of the predatory hawks.

*****

Other conditional strategists are the bully and the prober-retaliator. The bully behaves like a hawk unless someone fights back, when he immediately becomes a dove and runs away.

The 5% of psychopathic hawks are supported by 10% of bullies (middle managers, and the like).

A prober-retaliator is a retaliator who sometimes acts more hawkishly: he will occasionally experiment with initiating aggression, and will do more of it if his opponents run off, but will do less if his opponents resist.

Aggressive youths in gangs will often test the water by seeing how far they can take a hawkish strategy. They will keep rising in the gang hierarchy until they encounter a hawk who will immediately establish his dominance over them.

*****

A ruling cabal of hawks creates a Game Theory (or Game of Thrones) type of world where everyone takes their lead from the selfishness and ruthlessness of the hawks, and behaves purely according to the particular will rather than the cooperative General Will.

If the hawks are replaced by retaliators, we can rationally construct a meritocratic world that supports competition, but in a healthy, constructive way. This would be a world where Cooperation Theory replaces Game (Competition) Theory, and the General Will can be expressed.

Communism (and the Christianity of love thy neighbour and turn the other cheek type) corresponds to an exclusively dove world. This is the unconditional love world of hippie dreams. Unfortunately, it would also be supremely weak-willed, unambitious and unproductive.

Democracy in principle is a dove ideology but in practice is controlled by hawks (oligarchs).

Free-market capitalism is an ultra-hawk economic ideology. Libertarianism is the most extreme expression of hawk predation.

*****

Satan is the cosmic Hawk. If we want to be free of the Devil, we must be free of hawks. Hawks are the Devil’s high priests, his human archons.

They do not add anything worthwhile to the world. There is nothing at all about the world that wouldn’t be radically improved by the eradication of the hawk cabal.

Cooperation

Even in the jungle, cooperation is as evident as competition. Why? Because cooperation is frequently the best chance animals have of surviving and prospering. There’s a competition-cooperation dialectic.

Excessive cooperation leads to lack of competitive creativity. Excessive competition leads to enormous inefficiency. A successful balance is encapsulated in the scientific community. Scientists are both highly competitive and highly cooperative. Warring nations are highly competitive and extremely uncooperative. Free-market capitalism is highly competitive and, via things like the patent system and the share price, extremely uncooperative, leading to incredible waste.

*****

Game theory essentially revolves around the notion of self-interested, self-obsessed individuals ruthlessly seeking to gain an advantage over their opponents. Cooperation strategies are often deemed incomprehensible and irrational in these games. Even the very concept of game implies a contest... winners and losers.

We need a counterpart to Game theory called Cooperation theory where the benefits of cooperation are emphasized rather than diminished (as they are in Game theory).

Game theory itself reflects a highly cynical and jaundiced view of humanity. It’s a perfect tool for the elite because it perfectly reflects their mentality, how they see the world and want to see the world. Game theory flourished during the Cold War. Nobel Prize winner John Nash was one of its central figures – and he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic (as depicted in the film Beautiful Mind). That’s really all that Game theory is – paranoid schizophrenia modelled mathematically. It reflects the master-slave paradigm. It’s the savage jungle brought to life.

We desperately need Cooperation theory. This is all about symbiosis, synergy, reinforcement, positive feedback loops, win-win (gain-gain) scenarios rather than win-loss scenarios. It’s about teamwork, bonding, loyalty, friendship, respect, positive empathy, sympathy, help, assistance, compassion, kindness, altruism.

Is anyone going to argue that a world ruled according to the rules of Game theory will be superior to one ruled by Cooperation theory?

We need to deprogram the world, to get rid of all the toxins and mental illness.

We need to reprogram the world, to make it smart, healthy and sane.

Mutually Assured Destruction

In the game of chicken, two gang members drive straight at each other on a narrow road. The first one to lose his nerve (to chicken out) loses face among his peers. If neither chickens out, both die.

The Greatest Love

In a relationship with an object the addict can always come first. – Craig Nakken, The Addictive Personality

But this isn’t true. The object always comes first. The addict has become a survival machine for his addiction, in much the same way as Richard Dawkins refers to human beings as survival machines for immortal, selfish genes. The object is controlling the addict, not the other way around. The addict is always second in this relationship. My addiction exists, therefore I am, is the addict’s mantra. He’s helpless, a slave.

Addiction is a form of submissiveness – the desire to be controlled by something. If you can’t believe in others, or in God, then let alcohol or drugs or porn, or whatever else, dominate you and become the God that you must always obey and serve. You don’t have to think for yourself or take any responsibility for your life: you’ve handed over all of that to your addiction.

Addiction replaces people with the addictive substances themselves. A person’s relationship with his addiction becomes the primary relationship of his life. People become irrelevant. The 9/11 Islamic maniacs were addicted to Mohammed and Allah: innocent people meant precisely