Rational Philosophy

The Invisible Hand

Ah, the invisible hand, what a fine, dark metaphor to match these dark times. Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations: The individual who “intends only his own gain is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

Wednesday’s New York Times editorial “Mr. McCain and the Economy” criticizes McCain on several fronts. 1. His claim that the economy is fundamentally sound, despite the latest cataclysms. 2. His clarification that what he meant by “fundamentally sound” was that he “believed in American workers.” and 3. His broadside that any blame that could fall fell surely on Wall Street’s “unbridled corruption and greed.”

“The crisis on Wall Street is fundamentally a failure to do the things that temper, detect and punish corruption and greed. It was a failure to police the markets, to enforce rules, to heed and sound warnings and expose questionable products and practices,” says the editorial, and with a flick of the wrist ends with a call to McCain to proffer new solutions or approaches that might correct the problems.

McCain, we’ve heard and he admits, suffers from a fundamental lack of interest in things financial (he doesn’t recall how many properties he and his wife own — eight). This is an unfortunate quality in the prospective leader of a country, especially during economic upheavals.

Record Profits in 2007 $1,300 per second

The invisible hand has another meaning here, too. McCain, intent on gaining the presidency is led by the invisible hand of greed in the Republican power-makers. It is no part of McCain’s intention to lead the country into financial disarray, to risk further dismantling of what was, prior to Bush’s presidency, a remarkably strong economy.

Economics is a complex subject. Even the experts don’t understand how economies really work. They are too vast, multi-faceted and irrational.

This last is an incredibly important point. Emotion, fear, mania, addiction, overoptimism all play significant roles in the way the economy heaves and rolls. The concept and model of a completely free market fails in the real world on this basis alone.

Subprime mortgage rescue plan (Simplified Diagram)

Subprime mortgages and the resulting current woes illustrate the second point about the illusion of the completely free market. A free market, a market without restraint, is free to collapse. If we want to prevent this (and who would argue that it’s not in the nation’s best interests to prevent occasional collapse of the economy) someone outside the market needs to be monitoring, reviewing and, if necessary, regulating such things as new financial instruments.

The last problem with the notion of a completely free market is the dangerous relationship with the seat of government. Large, wealthy corporations have deep pockets with which to influence government policy. And, worse yet, if agents of those corporations influence government thinking, policy and strategy (think Rove and Cheney) the power of government will exert an ultimately skewed and even destabilizing influence on the market.

This is exactly what has been happening, as the Times editorial points out: “The disconnect between work and reward has been especially acute during the Bush years, as workers’ incomes fell while corporate profits, which flow to investors and company executives, ballooned. For workers, that is a fundamental flaw in today’s economy. It is grounded in policies like a chronically inadequate minimum wage and an increasingly unprogressive tax system, for which Mr. McCain offers no alternatives.”

The free market is a nice idea, a useful model to illustrate one of the forces at work in an economy. But we should not forget that the invisible hand bends and shapes the market according to the will that wields it.

Related posts from around the Web:

Senate Democrats Discuss Bush-McCain Economic Policies - Senators Boxer, Stabenow, and Menendez discuss how the turmoil on Wall Street is a direct legacy of Bush-McCain economic policies that have failed this nation for eight years. Refusing to police lenders and neglecting to protect …

McCain’s Economic Solution: Hemorrhage More Money - … GOP nominee for his statement this morning — which they asserted was an announcement of support for $25 billion in government loans to the auto industry. So there we have it. McCain’s solution to our terrifyingly failing economy? …

McCain Follows Obama With Direct Economic Ad (VIDEO) - “You, the American workers, are the best in the world,” says McCain. “But your economic security has been put at risk by the greed of Wall Street. That’s unacceptable. My opponent’s only solutions are talk and taxes. …

On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.

On avoiding work and making false distinctions.

After I swam this morning, I got into a locker room discussion about the supreme wastefulness and poor management of the NY City Transit system. (Coincidentally, the subject of a recent post.) There we were, a former Transit employee (me), a current Transit employee, and a contractor to the Transit Authority, quickly finding common ground on the subjects of inefficiency and ineptness. The discussion began when the current transit employee joked that his job required him just to show up.

Barack Obama showed up when Ted Kennedy couldn’t (because of his brain tumor) to make the commencement address at Wesleyan University. Obama took the opportunity to urge the graduating class to consider the call of public service. William Kristol chastises Obama for omitting from his list of worthy public services that the Weslyan grads might consider a career in the armed forces .

Um, William, who in his right mind would encourage young people to join the armed forces right now? And particularly Obama, who opposed the war, and who wants out of the war, and who probably believes that drawing down on military spending is a good long term goal.

The report of another commencement address underscores the weakness of Kristol’s unconvincing piece. We read that President Bush gave the commencement address at Furman University in South Carolina. Bush also called for students to consider public service… and also left out the military from his list.

At the pinnacle of his rhetorical powers, Bush exhorted the Furman graduating class to adopt a “culture of responsibility” avoiding the inevitably un-fulfilling temptations of “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” (A bit late for that advice probably, Mr. President.)

And, speaking of alcohol, whenever I read Stanley Fish’s column it makes me want to tackle a shaker of Martinis. There’s something so depressingly negative about Fish’s way of thinking. He’s the worst kind of academic, it seems, seeking out reasons to accept the inevitability of problems rather than find ways to see past them.

This week Fish writes about “norms and deviations.” In a nutshell he argues that any group can be defined as a deviation from a norm, and that that group can legitimately claim that the norm is artificially determined. Deaf people, once defined as disabled, now seeks recognition as a community that rejects the term disabled. Fish rattles through the spectrum of differences from sex distinctions to the distinction between serial killers and non-serial killers. He concludes, rather smugly, that there’s no better way of looking at the endless recursive meaninglessness of these situations than to accept its endlessness and meaninglessness.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do any work in rebutting Mr. Fish — someone else had already done it for me. A poster called malnicore added this comment, which cannot be improved upon (or, maybe it can, but I’m not going to try):

Oddly, I now notice that malnicore’s last sentence echoes Bush’s call to release ourselves from any attachment to “alcohol, drugs and promiscuity.” To which list he might usefully have added “abuse of power.”

On the value of skepticism in philosophy and life.

Philosophy requires skepticism. Without the urge to doubt or question our immediate experience we cannot understand it. To Socrates, the ultimate knowing was knowing that he knew nothing. This idea, so central to the process of finding firm conceptual ground, has been taken up again and again by philosophers. A good philosopher has to be scrupulously skeptical, particularly of his own ideas. Bad philosophers tend to be bad because they have lousy ideas or because they’re not skeptical enough –

Schopenhauer, in his World As Will And Representation, spectacularly criticizes his contemporary, Hegel, for instance, because he saw Hegel as a self-aggrandizing mystic rather than a real philosopher. Here’s a sample of Schopenhauer’s delightful vitriol: “What was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make use of this privilege; Schelling at best equaled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel.”

In one of those curious NY Times pieces that hovers between information and advice, like a girl enjoying the attentions of two suitors while delicately avoiding a commitment to either, the NY Times reports on the desirability of skepticism as an asset for business leaders. The article points out that executives tend not to be as skeptical as they should be, causing them to fall on their noses more often than they should. The piece checks off a few reasons why this might be so:

1. If an executive doesn’t know the facts, he or she can’t make good decisions.

2. Hearing about the facts means being accessible and open to bad news.

3. Sometimes it’s not enough to be approachable and you need to go looking for bad news.

In everyday life, so long as we’re careful to understand the basis of our skepticism, skepticism can provide us with a helpful perspective on things. Socrates founded his skepticism on the sound philosophical ground that he knew only that he knew nothing. Such a fundamental skepticism would quickly prove impractical as we’re trying to get through the day. “Do I exist?” may be an eminently reasonable question when we first wake up, but it won’t get us into the bathroom to brush our teeth. Instead, there will be some things that it makes sense to be very skeptical about and others that we can pretty much accept at face value.

It makes sense to be skeptical of the e-mail from a complete stranger promising us a share of a vast fortune. And less sense to be skeptical about whether our schools should be teaching intelligent design.

But back to the reasons an executive may not always be as skeptical as he should be: I would add a fourth imperative to the Times’ ad hoc list — an executive may not want to admit that he is wrong. After all, he’s been making the decisions and setting the strategy, a change in direction often demonstrates that some of those prior decisions or plans were flawed. Letting go of the idea of one’s infallibility can be tough for the person in charge.

Clear thinking absolutely requires an acceptance of one’s fallibility. In my own life I’ve learned from my wife that I’m nearly always wrong. This sense of supreme fallibility has helped me immensely in my marriage. As a manager in the business world, I learned over the course of several years that my own ideas could always be improved upon; another valuable lesson.

As we wade on through this election year, I fear that we’re being too hard on the candidates as they make mistakes. The hypercritical election process, during which every statement is parsed and critiqued, only serves to drive the poor hopefuls toward the alluring but false embrace of purported infallibility. Don’t we want a president who, as the most important executive in the country, can feel comfortable with his or her fallibility?

In Iraq, two bomb attacks today killed 19. President Bush, the current national executive, had this to say yesterday about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: “By helping these young democracies grow in freedom and prosperity, we’ll lay the foundation of peace for generations to come.”

On the rise in America’s prison population, execution, and administrative wrongdoing.

The United States has a prison population far higher than anywhere else in the world. This is a recent phenomenon. About thirty years ago the US prison population started to climb and now other countries regard the US’s penal system as shocking.

The Supreme Court just upheld the use of a lethal cocktail injection for the administration of the death penalty, citing case law supporting the idea that the mere possibility of cruel and painful death isn’t a reason to put a stop to lethal injection. The constitutionality of capital punishment distracts us from whether it is a punishment worthy of an enlightened society.

And slowly but surely details of the Bush administration’s disregard for human rights and US law continue to emerge. Bush and his senior team spent a good deal of time and energy devising mechanisms that would allow them to torture detainees. (Of course, the administration’s blatant disregard for appropriate justification wasn’t limited to the abuse of prisoners. It has been a consistent pattern.)

These three examples seem to indicate a disturbing trend. Most disturbing, the Bush administration’s conviction that it is above the law, simply because it believes it is right. While Europe (much scoffed at by the likes of Bush) has moved inexorably and bumpily toward cooperation and enlightenment, the US has veered off on its own, deluded by the idea of itself as a nation that can remain fixed, or fixate, on the idea of itself as infallible.

As we’ve seen with the Catholic church in recent years, the infallible have a lot to learn. Errors of national ego punctuate the history of civilization like buckshot. The only thing that can save us from even worse transgressions and further isolation is a healthy dose of humility.

Who do you trust, Jimmy Carter or Condoleezza Rice?

And which of them is happier?

Condoleezza Rice complains that Jimmy Carter has confused the middle east peace process by meeting with Hamas and Syria. Carter claims that without talking to Hamas there won’t be a peace process, and that Syria is willing to move toward the west if given sufficient incentive.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter but he is a man of integrity and courage. I have no doubt that he has confused the Bush administration’s concept of the peace process. The key question seems to be whether he has done more harm than good. To answer this question we need to understand whether the Bush concept of the peace process ever was or is going anywhere.

I find myself asking the question: Why does Bush want peace?

And I find myself coming immediately to the answer: Because it would be an accomplishment that would make him feel good about himself.

Bush’s presidency has always been about impressing people. He’s wanted to impress Cheney and Cheney’s powerful friends in the business world. He’s wanted to impress his dad by ousting Saddam Hussein. He’s wanted to impress historians by establishing some sort of legacy. What could be better than some success in the middle east peace process?

And then to Carter. Carter, it seems to me, had no ulterior motive for remaining involved in world affairs. Just as his desire to lead the country hinged and slumped on his desire wrest a better world out of what we had, so, too, his desire to work tirelessly for the cause of good has been, so it seems, prompted by the will to do good.
I realize that opinion isn’t philosophy. But the point I’m making is that to reach conclusions on questions of better or worse one does need to explore motive.

In a process as delicate, painstaking, complex and treacherous as middle east peace it is reasonable to predict that any effort founded on the ego of the presumptive peacemaker will fail. Whereas, an effort founded on an ego-less attempt to do good, while it may also fail, at least has a chance of making progress.

What does any of this have to do with happiness?

Just look at the picture of Condoleezza Rice. Doesn’t she look miserable?

Now what about Jimmy Carter?

Daniel Gilbert has been researching happiness. When asked what makes people happy, he says this: “We know that the best predictor of human happiness is human relationships and the amount of time that people spend with family and friends.”

Carter is right to meet with Hamas. He is right to meet with Assad. Talking to someone doesn’t mean you agree with them. It means that you are willing to hear what they have to say, and that you want to convey something to them. By shunning them you give them no choice but to maintain their position of antagonism.

Rice may be happier if she had more people to talk to.

Well, I’d written a good part of a post about seasons, gas prices, and global warming before I pressed the wrong button combination and lost it.

It started with some reflection on the cost of getting around in the city: I take my son to pre-school on the subway in preference to driving him, because we like the train and because I like the idea that I’m not contributing to global warming and pollution. But this morning as I walked in the Spring sunshine I realized that it costs me $4 for a round trip on the subway, while the cost of driving him to school would only be about 54 cents. That sucks. Shouldn’t we make public transportation more economically attractive than driving to encourage people to use it?

I then lamented the defeat of mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan. I then got into the ineffectiveness of government in dealing with problems like global warming. President Bush is an extreme example. After eight years the best he could do was to make some feel good statements encouraging a voluntary reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases. But governments in general seem to be ill-matched to the situation.

Part of the problem seems to be that we’re not really very good at dealing with long term threats. Evolution has wired us to focus on the here and now in a very vivid and immediate way. We can conceptualize and prepare for what may happen today or tomorrow, but the further out the problems get, the less able we are to act in ways that recognize them and respond to them effectively.

I then had started to write about the changing seasons and the way that this affects our conceptual view of the world. I was thinking about referencing lyrics from a record I was just listening to (The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely, on which a track begins with the words “Autumn came around like a drifter to an on ramp…”). It was as I was trying to develop this idea that I pressed the fatal combination of buttons and erased the post.

But now I feel engaged by the idea of ‘the lost blog,’ or, more generally, the lost anything.

The idea of ‘no longer being’ can be juxtaposed with the idea of constant renewal. The changing cycle of the seasons reinforces our concept of the world as a place where things come around again. In the Fall the trees shed their leaves as we enter the long dead winter, but in Spring the natural world appears to be reborn. We integrate this and similar ideas of regeneration into our conceptual view of the world. (The cycle of day and night, of waking and sleeping reinforces this concept.)

It is no surprise then that many cultures and religions have conceptualized life and death as a cycle. Reincarnation, life after death. Renewal of life reflects our regular impression of the world, and it salves the pain of total loss.

But things do get lost. My original post is gone. Even if I were able to recall it word for word and write it out again, it would be something subtly different from the original post.

In reality, existence never repeats itself. The present moment is unique and new. The earth never quite rotates about the same sun, which is ever so slowly burning away and cooling. The child born today is born into a world different from the world his or her parents were born into.

This is not true of the conceptual world, in which concepts remain firm and fast and reproducible over and over, where the concept of a square remains always the concept of a square, where a logical analysis remains always logical.

As we become more sophisticated in our understanding of the world, more aware of our effect on the environment, more cognizant of the way we can improve the long term lot of humankind and a whole host of other species, we face the challenge of shedding our concept of reality and existence as something that forever renews, of life as a short term that will be repeated in the long term.

We have both the intellectual capacity to acknowledge this new conceptual world-view and the capabilities to act on it for the good of the world and for the good of humanity.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

The tricky balance between anxiety and indifference.

This morning I was walking uptown when police blocked off 54th Street in preparation for the passage of the president’s motorcade (he was on his way to acknowledge to the Economic Club of New York that the economy is going through a rough patch.) At first I was miffed to be held up at the barrier (not the one pictured to the left, which is from another day and another part of town). Inwardly I fretted about the delay, and bridled at the imposition (even though I understood, rationally, that the barricades made for an appropriate precaution). Around me, the mood of my fellow detainees ranged from bemused tolerance to indignant outrage. More than one pedestrian tried to argue their perspective with the cops who stood guard at the barriers. After I’d accepted that for a while I’d be stuck at the steel barricade, I was able to get over my short term anxiety and watch with curiosity as the police did their work and as the motorcade passed through.

Up to now, Bush has responded to the current round of economic crises with a detached kind of downhome objectivity. We’re familiar with his slow-draw approach to crises. It’s part of what’s made him so incredibly unpopular with so many. (Examples being his glacial response on September 11th, and his lack of action during and after hurricance Katrina.) His stance has been that the economy is generally sound and that this is a bumpy section of road — an analogy he used today.

On global warming, the Bush administration has taken many years to come around to accepting the science at face value, and is now entering a period of accepting the science of warming, while rejecting the facts of an effective solution. Bush would have us switch to switchgrass fuels before we think about restricting emissions. BBC News reports today that:

“One recent study investigated the impact of fertiliser on biofuel production. Using sugar cane, according to the research, does offer greenhouse gas savings of between 10% and 50%.

“But using rapeseed and corn for biofuel manufacture can actually produce between 50% and 70% more greenhouse gases than using fossil fuels.”

When Bush takes the long view one senses that it’s because he shrinks from the prospect of near term realities. But if we’re prone to short term anxiety, the long view can help us gain a more rational perspective on life by putting our short term fears into perspective.

It can be particularly hard to take the long term view. We are wired to care deeply about how we feel right now and what we anticipate will happen to us in the immediate future. Eliot Spitzer took the short term view when he acted on his desire for sexual gratification, and one can imagine that the long term view was, if not the furthest thing from his mind, then at least stuffed into a far corner, as he did.

When it comes to government, some European countries seem to be particularly good at planning for the long term. The Netherlands has for some time been planning grand but pragmatic schemes to ensure the safety of its land from the threat of flooding from rising water levels. Mentioned in the same BBC article, Sweden already has 1,000 biofuel filling stations. Ireland has effectively eradicated the use of plastic grocery bags.

For everyday life, we can use the long term perspective to help us take a more pragmatic view about things like the development of our children (worrying about how long, relatively speaking, it takes our child to walk or talk), investment woes (if we make a long term investment, the stock price only matters when buy and when we sell), relationship problems (what was that we fought about last week?), and many other things.

(Of course, if we never fret about the short term, we may be very calm but everyone around us will loath us and think us arrogant and indifferent. Not that we’ll care…)

In the long, long term (scientists have calculated about 7.59 billion years) the earth will get swallowed up by the dying sun. This puts practically everything into perspective. Even then, there’ll be hope for the human race if we’ve put the Dutch and the Swedes in charge of planning our exit strategy… Whereas, if it’s down to George Bush’s intellectual descendents, we’d better buy some margarita mix and settle back for the final descent.

 

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On asking the wrong question — science, religion, and politics.

The John Templeton Foundation has given the $1.6 million Templeton Award, encouraging scientific discovery on the “big questions” in science and philosophy, to Michael Heller (pictured left) a Polish Roman Catholic priest, cosmologist, and philosopher. Heller describes his view on the interplay between science and religion as follows: “Science gives us knowledge, and religion gives us meaning. Both are prerequisites of the decent existence.”

Rarely do we find someone working to integrate an open and inquisitive understanding of the scientific workings of the universe with a religious perspective on the meaning of existence. We tend either to find people leaning more in one direction or the other. And I’m struck by Heller’s impulse that both science and religion are prerequisites of a decent existence.

President Bush has today called for swift action on a trade pact with Columbia. Bush claims that Venezuela under Hugo Chavez has “squandered its own oil wealth in an effort to promote its hostile anti-American vision.” Bush, it seems, seeks to solidify an ally in Latin America (Columbia) at a time when Venezuela holds sway in a trend toward anti-American, left leaning sentiment in the region. But what is the truth about the use of oil wealth in Venezuela, and what does America stand to gain or lose if we follow Bush’s call for swift action unfettered by “politics”?

I take it that by saying both science and religion are required for a decent existence Heller means a fulfilling or complete sense of existence. And Heller must be referring to our experience of existence, since the judgment of decency implies awareness (existence without experience could be neither decent nor lacking decency).

Schopenhauer perceived that we have only an indirect experience of existence. We infer existence through our senses of sight, touch, smell, hearing, and through our direct awareness of our body and the impressions upon it. So, everything we know of existence is inferred through our senses. It would be quite feasible to imagine a decent life lived without any indirect knowledge of science or religion. For thousands of years human beings lived without formal, structured and conscious scientific or religious knowledge. Many people today live decent lives with only scant awareness of science or religion.

While Heller strikes me as an earnest and brilliant man courageously pursuing fascinating thoughts and ideas, I take issue with his statement about what makes a decent existence as a fundamental question. But I suspect that Heller was referring to the debate between advocates of science and religion, insisting that neither has a stronghold on the decency of existence.

In this though I think that Heller betrays a lack of objectivity. Since Heller, being both a religious and a scientific man, begins with the premise that a decent understanding of existence requires both science and religion, he will inevitably end where he began.

A more testing question would be to ask whether science in and of itself is sufficient for a decent understanding of existence, one that supports a satisfying and complete depth of feeling about life’s meaning. Or, to ask the opposite question, whether religion in and of itself is sufficient for a decent understanding of existence supporting a complete sense of the mechanics of the universe.

Back to Bush: The truth about Venezuela’s oil money seems to be that Hugo Chavez has somewhat recklessly grabbed a hold of and diverted oil profits toward social programs for two ends — to buy favor in his political war against America (and Bush), and to help lift his people out of poverty. While one can argue that his methods for raising the standard of living of poor Venezuelans are crude and short-sighted, it is difficult to argue that he has no real intent to help them. And, I would argue that if one looks at the degree of investment in each goal, his primary goal seems to be to help the Venezuelan people.

So, Bush is using emotional and misleading rhetoric to sway the US people and congress in support of a free trade pact with Columbia. His goal, as he states, is to ensure America’s national security and economic interest. But does it serve America’s national security interests to try to out-rhetoric Chavez? Bush is playing into Chavez’s hands by helping shape policy choices through defining them ideologically.

For more rational, science-based explanations of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the origin and philosophy of power: Fidel Castro’s resignation, Bush’s comments on African genocide, and Jefferson’s internal torment:

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” - Thomas Jefferson

In 1959, Fidel Castro seized power from the dictator Fulgencio Batista so that Cubans could live more freely. Forty-nine years later, having been in power ever since, Castro has finally resigned. “I will not aspire to neither will I accept — I repeat I will not aspire to neither will I accept — the position of President of the Council of State and Commander in chief,” he said in his letter of resignation. The repetition, one thinks, might have been an unnecessary emphasis for anyone but himself. After he’d kicked out Batista, Castro discovered that for a person who likes to lead, and believes himself possessed with the capacity to make good decisions, it’s easier to assume control than to let it go.

Self-awareness provides the only anti-dote to despotism, and it needs to be administered in doses proportional to the power being assumed.

President Bush has been an avid critic of Castro’s and yet Bush himself has assumed ever-more dubious, overreaching powers, relishing his self-portrayal as “the decider.” In Rwanda today, Bush leveled a general criticism at the United Nations for its glacial responsiveness to humanitarian crises. But this was simply a convenient way to set into greater relief his boast of being a fast-acting and independent problem-solver. If Bush had a fraction of Castro’s sense of conviction and vigor, he would have been an even more dangerous and destructive force in the world than he has been. And that’s a sobering thought.

As president, Thomas Jefferson, an ardent critic of the abuse of power by central government, nevertheless found himself making autocratic decisions (the Louisiana purchase, for instance). Jefferson recognized his hypocrisy, understood the ramifications of his actions, but still did what he thought was wisest in the long term, even if it went against his principles of good government in the short term.

Evolution has developed in social species the desire for power and the desire to maintain power. On a biological level, power equates to the survival of one’s genetic code. If we cede power, our genes will soon lose out to more competitive genes. Evolution, therefore, rewards competitiveness.  Ghengis Kahn, for instance, while not a pleasant man, weilded considerable power and through brutal means assured that his genes would be passed on to future generations.

But this kind of social power, on a biological level, relates directly only to influence for the purposes of procreating. But in human beings the desire for power transfers itself to all kinds of conscious and subconscious activity. Unless we consciously moderate our desire for power through self-awareness, we will attempt to exert power indiscriminately.

This leads us to be blind to our own flaws and to overestimate our own capabilities.

Castro wasn’t the worst leader Cuba could have had for the past half-century, but he wasn’t the best one either. The persistence and self-belief necessary to make a successful freedom fighter may well have been his achilles heel when it came to leading his country. And, as for Bush, he proves that even a very small aptitude and desire to lead can become hypertrophied given enough power.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

P.S.: A couple of months ago, I wrote a song inspired by the transfer of power from Fidel Castro to his brother, Raul - You can listen to “This Is Our Country” at www.myspace.com/martingwalker and purchase a download copy for just 99 cents from the SnoCap store on this page.

Here are the lyrics…

Raul, brother dear, don’t let me down
Take our country now and lead it to your fullest
Remember, Raul, how we turned out Batista

Oh, the green dawns, oh the midnight raids
We have borne the weight of the revolution
Remember, Raul, these are your people

In Biran, where the cane stands tall and strong
Along the river righting every wrong
This is our country, this is our time

Raul, my brother, do not mourn me
Mourn your Espin, but do not cry for me
Remember, Raul, I am immortal

They could not kill me then and not now either
We have borne the weight of the revolution
This is our country, this is our time