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| Counting The Cost: Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose salaries depend on keeping the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing. |
WE’VE ALL MET THEM, blokes who rely on the opinions of blokes just like themselves for guidance and inspiration. The sort of men for whom evidence is much less important than what they “just know”. Tell them that they’re wrong and they’ll tell you that: “No, you’re wrong.” Provide them with evidence, and they’ll accuse you of “making it up”. Whip out your smartphone and allow Professor Google to confirm your claims and, if they don’t immediately punch you in the face, they’ll simply turn away and pretend you’re invisible. Such men are a significant and often dangerous obstacle to human progress at any time – but never more so than when your country’s government is chock full of them.
What makes these blokes so impervious to evidence-based arguments and/or expert advice? Are they simply poorly-educated? It’s tempting to think so, but that would insult all those poorly-educated people who are, nevertheless, hungry for information and always eager to learn.
Working-class people growing up in nineteenth and twentieth century communities where educational opportunities were strictly limited proved this point over and over again by reading everything they could lay their hands on. So hungry for information and knowledge were they that those who had yet to attain full literacy would often club together to pay for someone to read to them while they worked.
One of the many sad stories emerging from the Christchurch earthquake was the loss of the impressive library of socialist, economic and trade union literature collected over more than a century by the Canterbury Trades Council. With the Trades Hall severely damaged by the quake, Christchurch authorities prohibited any recovery attempt. Eventually, the library’s rare and irreplaceable volumes, many of them first editions, were simply gathered up with the rest of that broken city’s rubble and buried.
No, imperviousness to rational argument is not the consequence of an inadequate education. Those who are open to knowledge will never attempt to discourage or silence those who are ready and willing to impart it. Reliance on a narrow set of ideas and assumptions, accompanied by relentless antagonism towards any person, group, or institution daring to suggest that those ideas and assumptions might not be altogether reliable, is most often an indication that ideological diversity would pose a material threat to the impervious ones’ dominant political, economic, social and/or cultural status.
No one has ever summed up this walled-in mindset more succinctly than the “muck-raking” (i.e. scandal exposing) journalist, novelist, and socialist agitator Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Of such obdurate types he wrote: “It is hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
Such individuals simply cannot afford to be broad-minded and tolerant of difference and dissent, because if they were they would very soon come to the realisation that the ideas they cling to and the assumptions they make are utterly incompatible with recognising and upholding the rights of other human-beings. Blindness to the rights of others may be evidence of sociopathy, or even psychopathy. Certainly, a lack of empathy offers no impediment to being a successful oppressor. The principal explanation for social sadism, however, is that, having been paid to deliver it, the perpetrators feel obliged to satisfy their paymasters.
If a political party receives millions of dollars in donations from individuals and corporations with a powerful interest in the unimpeded exploitation of human-beings and the natural world, then the chances of that party taking effective measures to protect workers and the environment are slim. If a donor makes huge profits from the sale of fossil fuels, then he, she, or it will not expect the recipient politicians to prosecute the fight against global warming with excessive vigour. Almost invariably these expectations are met. Once bought, it is only right and proper that a purchased politician should stay bought.
And it’s not just politicians who find themselves in need of exculpatory ideologies. All those whose job it is to tell other people what to do and how to live would find it difficult to carry out their responsibilities without believing firmly in the idea that some people are born to be leaders and others are born to be led. By owning or operating a small business, one has already declared for the economic exploitation that makes profit possible. Salaried employees seeking rapid promotion in a large corporation are unlikely to preach socialism in the staff cafeteria. Those who have spent years (and borrowed thousands) studying for their PhD are much more likely to be meritocratic than democratic. Democracy is all very well, but the poorly educated need to be guided by those holding the appropriate qualifications.
As the British Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay, without the slightest sign of embarrassment put it in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.
Which only proves that it isn’t just those boorish right-wing blokes in the pub (and the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Cabinet) who rely for inspiration and guidance on people as morally compromised as themselves. Revolutionaries as well as reactionaries will defend their interests (and salaries) by trotting-out ideas, assumptions, and justifications unsupported by evidence, and which they will not test in open debate. Not without a bloody big fight anyway, and probably not even then.
Inequality and exploitation extract an enormous intellectual and moral toll from those burdened with their perpetuation. Being the beneficiary of an unjust system comes with a devastating psychological downside. Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose job it is to keep the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing.
Is this what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they penned the final sentences of The Communist Manifesto? That in order to win the world, one must have nothing to lose.
What makes these blokes so impervious to evidence-based arguments and/or expert advice? Are they simply poorly-educated? It’s tempting to think so, but that would insult all those poorly-educated people who are, nevertheless, hungry for information and always eager to learn.
Working-class people growing up in nineteenth and twentieth century communities where educational opportunities were strictly limited proved this point over and over again by reading everything they could lay their hands on. So hungry for information and knowledge were they that those who had yet to attain full literacy would often club together to pay for someone to read to them while they worked.
One of the many sad stories emerging from the Christchurch earthquake was the loss of the impressive library of socialist, economic and trade union literature collected over more than a century by the Canterbury Trades Council. With the Trades Hall severely damaged by the quake, Christchurch authorities prohibited any recovery attempt. Eventually, the library’s rare and irreplaceable volumes, many of them first editions, were simply gathered up with the rest of that broken city’s rubble and buried.
No, imperviousness to rational argument is not the consequence of an inadequate education. Those who are open to knowledge will never attempt to discourage or silence those who are ready and willing to impart it. Reliance on a narrow set of ideas and assumptions, accompanied by relentless antagonism towards any person, group, or institution daring to suggest that those ideas and assumptions might not be altogether reliable, is most often an indication that ideological diversity would pose a material threat to the impervious ones’ dominant political, economic, social and/or cultural status.
No one has ever summed up this walled-in mindset more succinctly than the “muck-raking” (i.e. scandal exposing) journalist, novelist, and socialist agitator Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Of such obdurate types he wrote: “It is hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”
Such individuals simply cannot afford to be broad-minded and tolerant of difference and dissent, because if they were they would very soon come to the realisation that the ideas they cling to and the assumptions they make are utterly incompatible with recognising and upholding the rights of other human-beings. Blindness to the rights of others may be evidence of sociopathy, or even psychopathy. Certainly, a lack of empathy offers no impediment to being a successful oppressor. The principal explanation for social sadism, however, is that, having been paid to deliver it, the perpetrators feel obliged to satisfy their paymasters.
If a political party receives millions of dollars in donations from individuals and corporations with a powerful interest in the unimpeded exploitation of human-beings and the natural world, then the chances of that party taking effective measures to protect workers and the environment are slim. If a donor makes huge profits from the sale of fossil fuels, then he, she, or it will not expect the recipient politicians to prosecute the fight against global warming with excessive vigour. Almost invariably these expectations are met. Once bought, it is only right and proper that a purchased politician should stay bought.
And it’s not just politicians who find themselves in need of exculpatory ideologies. All those whose job it is to tell other people what to do and how to live would find it difficult to carry out their responsibilities without believing firmly in the idea that some people are born to be leaders and others are born to be led. By owning or operating a small business, one has already declared for the economic exploitation that makes profit possible. Salaried employees seeking rapid promotion in a large corporation are unlikely to preach socialism in the staff cafeteria. Those who have spent years (and borrowed thousands) studying for their PhD are much more likely to be meritocratic than democratic. Democracy is all very well, but the poorly educated need to be guided by those holding the appropriate qualifications.
As the British Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay, without the slightest sign of embarrassment put it in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.
Which only proves that it isn’t just those boorish right-wing blokes in the pub (and the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Cabinet) who rely for inspiration and guidance on people as morally compromised as themselves. Revolutionaries as well as reactionaries will defend their interests (and salaries) by trotting-out ideas, assumptions, and justifications unsupported by evidence, and which they will not test in open debate. Not without a bloody big fight anyway, and probably not even then.
Inequality and exploitation extract an enormous intellectual and moral toll from those burdened with their perpetuation. Being the beneficiary of an unjust system comes with a devastating psychological downside. Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose job it is to keep the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing.
Is this what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they penned the final sentences of The Communist Manifesto? That in order to win the world, one must have nothing to lose.
This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Tuesday, 23 July 2024.
3 comments:
“In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.
Given that under food rationing, the diet of the average working class person in Britain improved markedly, he was probably correct in this at least. I shudder when I think about my English grandfather's diet. Vegetables were boiled until they surrendered. Fruit was regarded with suspicion. Bread and dripping was standard supper fare. (Mind you when we visited him I really loved that.)
But I agree about people not changing their minds. They often have too much of their self-worth tied up in their ideas. They'll "do their own research" which means that they will seek out sources that confirm their ideas rather than those that challenge them.
I must say, I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I think about David and his conservative idols which range from the merely racist and neofascist, to the outright lunatics. And remember his reaction when I posted critiques of their lack of qualifications and general idiocy? Just "Meh". Because he knows what he knows.
Having said that, there is a plethora of knowledge out there which is both sound and accessible about just about everything. Experts are willing to share their knowledge, because they love their field of expertise and like to pass it on. I've come across a fair few academics in my time and there wasn't one that wasn't willing to talk about their subject. I think we should take far more notice of them to be honest, particularly given the abysmal state of general knowledge in this country. But then as I have mentioned many times, "a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has got its pants on." And they usually do. The problem is partly that no one has to put in a great deal of effort to spread lies these days. In the old days they used to run it off on a band machine and stick it in an envelope and then spend their own money on stamps to circulate it. Now thanks to YouTube and various other bits and pieces they get paid to lie. Jordan Peterson is an example, has found that lying to unfortunate young men and conservatives is far more lucrative than being an academic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFi1Df6rtL4&t=909s
Still, he's providing work for this young man occasionally debunks him. It's a pity that he's degenerated so far as to be able to be put to the sword by someone so young and callow but ...
IMO Chris, the evidence based proof that you say our leaders so often disregard is often arguable, and sometimes comes from questionable sources. Misinformation. If you say it enough it becomes the truth. In many cases the MSM perpetrate that new truth. Who are these experts whose advice we should be following. The climate experts, who have calculated or miscalculated methane and carbon emissions, but not calculated, or don't want to calculate human emissions in comparison. How 7% of our exhaust is methane and about 12% carbon. Shouldn't we then be taxed on our own farts. How it's proven that boot camps don't work, but of course this new trial isn't a boot camp is it. The media and opposition say it is repeatedly although this experiment using the military will be completely different to those in the past. Will it be a terrible thing if our health system has a dozen layers of management peeled from it. We don't know, but although what we have is wasteful and inefficient, you will always find an expert to say we shouldn't do it. I agree with Chris that politicians ride roughshod over public opinion often enough and usually to save money, but they themselves take incorrect advice from the so called experts. Chris will say they employ experts who agree with them, and maybe they do, however who are these faceless bureaucrats from whom the government takes advice. What are their credentials. Who are these consultants who melt away into the shadows when things go wrong. Well one good thing this government is doing is ridding us of a few of them.
IMO Chris is correct with much of his criticism of our leaders, business owners and lets not forget Councils. But the so called experts should be scrutinised and held accountable for the self serving agendas they sometimes follow, the incorrect scenarios they come up with and the flow on effect that has on the decisions our leaders make.
Never trust anyone who calls experts "so-called experts". Or for that matter, anyone who's "done their own research." 99 times out of 100, it means they haven't got a clue. Just reading Byron Clark's "Fear" at the moment. He should be compulsory reading IMO.😇 The lunatic fringe seems much bigger than I originally thought. How we managed to let some of them into the country I have no idea. Apparently one of our provincial towns there is a museum that pays homage to "Rhodesia". God help us all, some of the nongs we seem to have let in.
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