What Is Blame?

- You're my teacher for lack of anyone better so I'd like to ask you a question.
- And for lack of anything better to do I'll answer, if I can.
- You always can. That's my problem with you.
- Why is that a problem?
- It's like you're playing a trick on me. Right now you've done it again because the question I want to ask you is about Giambattista Vico, the 18th century Italian philosopher who famously argued that 'the true and the made are convertible,' that 'the true is precisely what is made.'
- The same rules apply to both nature and culture: science makes/discovers abstract laws, creativity discovers/makes the truths of society and arts. When you ask me a question I am literally making up the answer and that making it up somehow makes it seem true.
- Yes.
- And like a magic trick it is not really true?
- Yes.
- We've talked about the epidemic we are living through and how a virus hijacks a living thing to reproduce it and is not really living itself. A living thing has a metabolism, a continual acting on and responding to the actions of its environment. When Vico says the truth is what is made, he means that if we want to know what a word means we need to see how it is used and try using it ourselves.
- The word being spoken is an action on the world and the world responds to that action, for example in another word being spoken to you by another person.
- There are laws regulating this constant action and response we make to the human world as we attempt to understand and live in it, just as there are laws to be discovered with science in the world of nature. Vico believed there was in operation a law of social progress where our violence, greed, and ambition would be replaced by the reasoned behavior of guardians, merchants, and leaders.
- But along the way in our progress individual nations would rise and fall. They'd relapse to a lower level, but progress would return to restart somewhere near where it left off. Which brings me to my question.
- Which is?
- Is it true that I shouldn't blame the actions of individuals who are destroying our society because it is the institutions that are at fault? In better institutions the same people wouldn't be criminals, and anyone else in the current institutions would be a criminal too? Vico seems to think this is wrong: the institutions are constantly improving, and individuals are constantly, or rather recurrently, failing to live up to them. The moral climate changes, and people who once made the best of institutions instead make the worst of them. We can't exonerate, for example, our whole empire of tens of thousands of financial criminals by the institutions, but they exonerate themselves by the moral climate. They say, and appear to actually believe, it is right that all of us serve our own interests as best we can in competition with each other,** even though that moral claim contradicts the cooperation embodied in the institutions we all participate in. What do you reply to them when they say they are not to blame for their crimes, that they and their crimes are merely an expression of the times?
- When you love a friend does that mean you know your friend?
- Yes.
- You come to know your friend in experience with your friend. The truth of your friendship and love is made in your life with your friend?
- Yes.
- And what of blame? Do we not blame people for being unlovable, for acting in a way that makes it impossible to make friends with them?
- What makes it impossible to make friends with them?
- That they do not make progress. That their truth is not in what they make but, virus-like, in the sense of power and security they derive from reproducing the act of money making.
- That a nature that begins violent, greedy, and selfishly ambitious has gone nowhere, has not been led into a careful, productive, reason directed life. But, they'll respond, they are no different from others in the tens of thousands strong class of financial criminals, the moral climate of the times....
- Is going the other direction. But we don't blame or exonerate someone for not going against the times, against the institutions of the times or the moral climate. We don't blame those who fall into any particular category.
- Who do we blame then?
- 'The truth is precisely what is made.' We blame others for making themselves unlovable.
- The truth here is in precisely what cannot be made with them.
- Yes. Blame is a kind of ostracism. In the language of our time of the epidemic, blame is quarantine.

Further Reading:
Tricked Me Again
________________
* Convergence
** The Calculus Of Consent

Science Based

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.(Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte)

- Is the lockdown really science based?
- As opposed to politics or fear based?
- Yes.
- A science based policy would be one that, for example, is in response to the evidence presented by climate change scientists? Because there is near complete agreement among them?
- Yes.
- When scientists present different views of evidence, what do we call those views?
- Theories.
- So there will be some cases where we respond to scientific knowledge, confirmed theories, when there is near universal agreement, and those cases when we respond to unconfirmed theories. When would we respond to unconfirmed theories?
- When, as now, we are faced with an epidemic of unknown characteristics.
- And the theory presents a worst case scenario.
- Because the consequences feared are so bad.
- Then we move out the realm of physical, or mostly physical, science and come to social science.
- Why?
- Because we have to determine whether the policy based on the theory that presents the worst case scenario itself is science based.
- You're asking if the lockdown policy itself is science based, whether there is good evidence it will do what is expected of it by its proponents. But the evidence for social theories is nothing like as good as for the physical world. Is that your argument?
- We have in fact a good example of a social policy that can generate near complete agreement as to its result: so-called austerity or free market policies, now tested in dozens and dozens of countries.
- Complete disconfirming results!
- That's right. So what do we say about the lockdown policy of keeping people enclosed in their residences by law? Can we say this is a social science based policy?
- How can we when it's never been done before?*
- What about common sense? What does that tell us about lockdown?
- That locking the sick in with the healthy is sure to produce more infection. If people are safely to stay at home a strong effort would have to be made to identify those who are sick and isolate them.
- To summarize and apply: The characteristics of the COVID-19 epidemic are contested by experts with equally impressive credentials. The impetus behind lockdown therefore is based not on agreed upon knowledge but contested theory.** The lockdown policy itself goes against common sense - according to an Oxford University epidemiologist it reproduces the congested conditions of the devastating 19th century outbreaks - and is without any evidence to support a theory of its efficacy.
- And we don't need science to tell us the immense economic, social, and political damage done by implementing this not science based policy.*** Would it be going too far to observe that we're following in the footsteps of the defunct Soviet Union, in which 'objective' was whatever was the policy of the government, supposedly determined by science, 'subjective' was the interests of individuals, unscientific, consequently unimportant?

Further Reading:
The Epidemic: Accounting For Death

Watch:
The Swedish Approach
COVID-19 In The UK
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* Swedish epidemiologist Johan Giesecke: During the Spanish flu epidemic of the early 20th century some American cities made attempts at lockdown in the sense of attempting to keep the epidemic out of the city (rather than the sense of keeping the population inside their residences) and imposing restrictions on public gatherings.
** See: Oxford professor Sunetra Gupta: The Epidemic Is On Its Way Out
*** From the comments section of the UK YouTube site UnHerd: '"We can't be sure," "I don't have the answers," "It might be because," "We don't know." If you are going to put the Gov. in a position of being put under intense pressure to close the NHS to all but basic care, close the whole economy, put millions of people out of work, destroy millions of businesses and careers in both the UK and the poorer countries that supply us goods, criminalize those who can't pay their bills as they have no income, cause certain collateral deaths, directly cause increase in domestic abuse, legally enforce the lockdown of the healthy people and removal of their liberty, cause a massive UK debt increase which will affect funding of the NHS and healthcare in a huge negative impact, then you better have a damned good reason and some irrefutable evidence like a nuclear fallout situation. Not just, "We think." In the USA, creating or being complicit with creating false alarm and panic in a population is a criminal offence.'

The Epidemic: Accounting For Death

Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth-century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard. Science enables the holders of power to realize their purposes more fully than they could otherwise do. If their purposes are good, this is a gain; if they are evil, it is a loss. In the present age, it seems that the purposes of the holders of power are in the main evil, in the sense that they involve a diminution, in the world at large, of the things men are agreed in thinking good. Therefore, at present, science does harm by increasing the power of rulers. Science is no substitute for virtue; the heart is as necessary for a good life as the head.

Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions in deciding upon a course of action. It has given communities more power to indulge their collective passions, but, by making society more organic, it has diminished the part played by private passions. Men's collective passions are mainly evil; far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry directed towards other groups. Therefore at present all that gives men power to indulge their collective passions is bad. That is why science threatens to cause the destruction of our civilization.

The quotes - you'll recognize them* - are from Bertrand Russell's 1924 book, Icarus Or The Future Of Science.

- And why this time do you bring them in?
- As the country in lockdown debates how we are to balance the benefits of fewer deaths with the economic and social costs of closed businesses and confinement within one's house, we are leaving out the cost of putting the power of using social technology in the hands of our leaders.
- By social technology you mean things like the lockdown, social distancing, compulsory wearing of masks.
- Yes.
- If the economic costs of the lockdown are closed and bankrupted small businesses, and tens of millions newly unemployed, and the social costs include domestic violence, stressful isolation and fear of the future, what are the costs you expect from use of social technology?
- Russell said it: increase in the use of power by our leaders to do evil.
- How?
- Giving small business little or nothing, while bailing out corporations, which had been reporting strong profits, with an amount equal to one entire year's budget of the United States government, or if you prefer, one quarter of the entire economy for a year, one quarter of the gross national product. And that is just the beginning.
- Go on.
- We can divide the countries of the world we are in closest contact with into two classes: those that acted quickly and were able to contain their outbreaks pretty much completely, with relatively few deaths, and those countries that waited to act until the virus had already widely spread through their population. Total deaths in the late to respond world are in the low to mid tenths of one tenth percent, varying between countries, but including Sweden, whose social distancing rules are mostly voluntary. The United States is up to about 3 tenths of one tenth percent so far. Deaths in these countries are now declining, perhaps indicating the epidemic is winding down.**
- Are you suggesting that the social distancing was unnecessary?
- No, I'm suggesting that making the rules law was unnecessary and extremely dangerous.
- Dangerous because they are social technology that puts power in the hands of a sort of people, our leaders, who are sure to use it to no good.
- Yes.
- The bailout of big business and abandonment of individuals to unemployment and small business to bankruptcy will insure the increase of monopoly.
- And monopoly, with mass unemployment, will result in lower wages, lesser or no benefits, poorer workplace safety. The administration has already halted all enforcement of environmental regulations, after having undermined the functioning of regulatory offices, leaving many posts unfilled, including infamously those agencies and offices with the job of managing epidemics. Even if the government's response to the epidemic had not been so pitiful, the existing poor health of the people would likely have resulted in more deaths than in other countries. Much of that poor health can be attributed to stress from economic insecurity leading to drug addictions and obesity, to adulterated foods, to environmental pollution, all certain now to increase with monopolization and deregulation. Death of what percentage of the population do you think these consequences will account for?
- Life expectancy in the US is going down, presently 78 and a half years, with the US number 46 in the world, and Hong Kong number one with an average life span of 86 years. What do you think? How much of that difference is due to our greater economic stress and environmental pollution you say are certain now to increase?
- I don't know. But we are talking about not tenths of a tenth of one percent of the population dying prematurely, but whole percentage points. Do you agree?
- I do.
- Putting the power to exercise social technology in the hands of our dangerous leaders has perhaps saved a few tenths of one tenth percent of the population - and perhaps not - at the cost of, without significant reversal of direction, many times as many deaths to be expected in the future.

Further Reading:
Totalitarianism & The Lesser Evil
_______________________
* The Future Of Science
** See: Professor Sunetra Gupta: The Epidemic Is On Its Way Out:  
'It’s the biggest question in the world right now: is Covid-19 a deadly disease that only a small fraction of our populations have so far been exposed to? Or is it a much milder pandemic that a large percentage of people have already encountered and is already on its way out? If Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College is the figurehead for the first opinion, then Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, is the representative of the second. Her group at Oxford produced a rival model to Ferguson’s back in March which speculated that as much as 50% of the population may already have been infected and the true Infection Fatality Rate may be as low as 0.01%. Since then, we have seen various antibody studies around the world indicating a disappointingly small percentage of seroprevalence — the percentage of the population has the anti-Covid-19 antibody. It was starting to seem like Ferguson’s view was the one closer to the truth. But, in her first major interview since the Oxford study was published in March, Professor Gupta is only more convinced that her original opinion was correct. As she sees it, the antibody studies, although useful, do not indicate the true level of exposure or level of immunity. First, many of the antibody tests are “extremely unreliable” and rely on hard-to-achieve representative groups. But more important, many people who have been exposed to the virus will have other kinds of immunity that don’t show up on antibody tests — either for genetic reasons or the result of pre-existing immunities to related coronaviruses such as the common cold. The implications of this are profound – it means that when we hear results from antibody tests (such as a forthcoming official UK Government study) the percentage who test positive for antibodies is not necessarily equal to the percentage who have immunity or resistance to the virus. The true number could be much higher. Observing the very similar patterns of the epidemic across countries around the world has convinced Professor Gupta that it is this hidden immunity, more than lockdowns or government interventions, that offers the best explanation of the Covid-19 progression:

 “In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with the SIR model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.” 

Asked what her updated estimate for the Infection Fatality Rate is, Professor Gupta says, “I think that the epidemic has largely come and is on its way out in this country so I think it would be definitely less than 1 in 1000 and probably closer to 1 in 10,000.” That would be somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%. Professor Gupta also remains openly critical of the Government lockdown policy:

 “The Government’s defense is that this [the Imperial College model] was a plausible worst case scenario. I agree it was a plausible — or at least a possible — worst case scenario. The question is, should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting, that case is becoming more and more fragile.” 

She recommends “a more rapid exit from lockdown based more on certain heuristics, like who is dying and what is happening to the death rates”. She does not believe that the R rate is a useful tool in making decisions about government policies, as an R rate is “principally dependent on how many people are immune” and we don’t have that information. She believes that deaths are the only reliable measure, and that the number of cases should not even be presented as it is so reliant on the amount of testing being done. She explains the flare-ups in places like New York, where the IFR seems to have been higher than 0.1%, through a combination of circumstances leading to unusually bad outbreaks, including the infection load and the layout of the population:

“When you have pockets of vulnerable people it might rip through those pockets in a way that it wouldn’t if the vulnerable people were more scattered within the general population.”

She believes that longer-term lockdown-style social distancing makes us more vulnerable, not less vulnerable, to infectious diseases, because it keeps people unprotected from pathogens: 

“Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50m people.” 

Commenting on the Government response to the virus, she suggests it erred on the side of over-reaction not under-reaction: 

“I think there’s a chance we might have done better by doing nothing at all, or at least by doing something different, which would have been to pay attention to protecting the vulnerable, to have thought about protecting the vulnerable 30 or 40 years ago when we started cutting hospital beds. The roots of this go a long, long way back.”

And she believes it is a “strong possibility” that if we return to full normal tomorrow — pubs, nightclubs, festivals — we would be fine, but accepts that is hard to prove with the current evidence: 

“So what do we do? I think we weigh that strong possibility against the costs of lockdown. I think it is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population.” 

On the politics of the question, Professor Gupta is clear that she believes that lockdowns are an affront to progressive values: 

“So I know there is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown have had our voices added to that libertarian harangue. But the truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries. It’s a very serious crisis.”' 

Totalitarianism & The Lesser Evil

- At times of crisis, we should turn our minds to what is most important. I suppose.
- What's important to me is this order to 'shelter at home,' the quarantine of the sick with the healthy, executive orders from mayors and governors taking something close to total control of our lives.
- And you are wondering what to think of it.
- Yes. It seems to have come out of nowhere. I understand the reasons given, some of them are good, but something is wrong with the calculation itself, the reasoning involved. It feels wrong to me. Help me out with this.
- There is a close relationship between totalitarianism and compromise.

- Isn't that a contradiction? Total means going all out, no compromise.
- If you are willing to use any means to achieve an end, you are right. But if you consider some means bad in themselves, there you have a compromise. The willingness to consider doing anything which is totalitarianism, when you add an awareness that some of those means are bad, gets you compromise.
- A lesser evil argument.
- Yes. But the totalitarian, in addition to having no conscience, no awareness of doing something wrong, also is choosing a wrong world; while someone compromising is choosing a world somewhat less wrong than it could be. But they have the same way of thinking. Totalitarianism: (1) An end that is completely laid out, known in advance, believed to be wholly good. (2) Anything may be used as means to achieve it. Compromise: (1) Less bad world, known in advance. (2) Means to achieve it as little bad as possible. The calculations of end justifying the means arguments, another name for choosing the lesser evil, are very likely to be wrong, or even if not, and you managed to achieve the world planned, inconsequential:

Every fifty or hundred years in recent history a revolutionary crises occurs, where the rich take more and more from the poor until the poor feel they have nothing much left to lose. After the revolutionary attempt, the poor recover some resources, and the cycle starts over again. There are also smaller cycles of boom and bust in financial speculation, and larger cycles of rise and fall of empires, where having robbed the world the leaders rob or in wars express disregard for the lives of the led of their own country, and even larger cycles are claimed, where wealthy civilization is followed by dark ages followed by a renaissance.*

If the end is uncertain, also uncertain is whether violent, lesser evil means can lead to any but the worst worlds. If you are a killer you are unfit for an imagined, cooperative utopia. Not a problem if the end you seek is inherently violent - thus the attraction to totalitarianism, which we just saw is of the same form of thought. In times of crisis you might wake up to yourself, to a sense of guilty complicity, and to escape from yourself you become susceptible to the propaganda of totalitarianism, as again, it is of the same form of thought as compromise. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt writes:

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

- The flexibility in allowed means shows totalitarianism is a type of means to end thinking.
- Yes. What would you say is the opposite to this type of thinking, opposite to bad means justified by good ends?
- Creative thinking.
- And how would you characterize creative thinking?
- I don't know. The opposite to the kind of thinking that locked down our country.

- Opposite to lesser evil arguments. Opposite to having a fixed, clearly visualized goal achieved by compromise.

- Yes. Exactly.
- Perhaps as we are living through an epidemic we should consider something Shakespeare wrote about the plague at a time he was living through it and was doing some of his best writing:

They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

Do you see what I'm getting at?
- He's calling for an open world.
- As we can look back, immersing ourselves in a remembered love, we can look ahead to a world that is opened up by kindness, in contrast to the closed, defined world of totalitarianism and means justifying end argument.
- And he's calling for submitting ourselves to the unknown.
- And thereby doing our best work, if we are lucky enough to do as Shakespeare did, working in the midst of a plague ourselves, by paying attention, practical attention, careful study of the unknown. Our means chosen are experimental, not part of an advance calculation. We try out what to do, we judge those means better that make the world more kind.
- Kindness is not a particular arrangement of the things in the world, but a relation between people that opens up the world to the infinite. Infinite are the ways to elicit love, are the practices experimented with adding to each other in possibility. Time slows down for us, the more events crowd our lives. Imagining in our lives an infinite number of events, time stops for us.
- Experiments, experimental practices are infinite in number, and like the measure of time can be stopped, the end aimed for using them - kindness - is also infinite.
- There are no matters of degree involved here. A choice between two absolutely opposed ways of thinking. Choosing the lesser evil you suggest by your behavior totalitarianism to others and stand the risk of advancing into totalitarianism yourself.

Further Reading
Means & Ends
Lockdown

____________________

* Lesser Evil Voting

Lockdown

- We know big business benefits from economic crises,* grabbing cash bailouts from the government and using them to buy up small businesses unable to sustain lost income. We know politicians love to exercise power. But what about the people? Why are they so unanimously going along with it? What's in it for them?
- They were told it was necessary. Probably it was a good idea at the beginning for lessening the pressure on hospitals.
- But why did they believe? Quarantine the sick, yes, but quarantine the healthy? In epidemics those who can, move away. But there's no precedent for this move, this enforced lockdown.**
- What's your explanation?
- Healthy people have been quarantined not only from the sick but in much larger numbers they are quarantined from each other. Think about those words. Is it going in public we fear, or the public itself, society, where we enter innocent and well but in time all are made sick with the same loss of innocence? People have been willing to lock themselves down to recapture their innocence, while power mad, mostly senile politicians and depraved with greed big business ravage the world outside their doors.
- Do we hate society that much?
- You tell me. Rousseau wrote in 1750:

Sincere friendship, real esteem and perfect confidence are banished from among men. Jealousy, suspicion, fear, coldness, reserve, hate, and fraud lie constantly concealed.***

- As true today as it was then.

Further Reading:
Jump To Repression
Totalitarianism & The Lesser Evil
Convergence
Stanford Professor Michael Levitt: 'Lockdown is a huge mistake.'

Watch:
Fun & Games
___________________
* If with hugely extended financialization - more and more income going to debt and rent, the result of higher prices themselves the result of monopolization, privitization, and speculative, fraudulent, Ponzi scheme investment on credit - a crash is on its way, why not deliberately crash the economy with a lockdown and assign the blame to the Novel Corona Virus? See: 'Despite low unemployment rates and a rising stock market, 3 out of 4 economists are expecting a recession by 2021.'  and: Wall Street Had Cut 68,000 Jobs and Received Trillions in Emergency Loans Prior to COVID-19 Anywhere in the World, and: Another Bank Bailout Under Cover of a Virus, and: Congress Sets Up Taxpayers to Eat $454 Billion of Wall Street’s Losses, Where is the Outrage?
** According to the Center For Disease Control's website: 'Isolation separates sick people with a contagious disease from people who are not sick. Quarantine separates and restricts the movement of people who were exposed to a contagious disease to see if they become sick.'
*** Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (The First Discourse)

Friendship

- Our dear president at a recent edition of his now daily press question and answer claimed he hasn't been out of the White House 'for months'. In fact, he has been out at least four times in the last month. He also claimed not to remember having held several election rallies in the month of March.
- We all know about his monstrous lying.* What's your point?
- I hope it still seems monstrous to you and that you are not becoming accustomed to it.
- I'm not.
- Glad to hear it. I want to go back to Bernie Sanders calling Joe Biden 'his good friend'. Do you think he was lying?
- No. Aristotle divides friendship into three types: for pleasure, for usefulness, and for living the best life. Bernie Sanders finds Joe Biden useful.
- No doubt. But we're talking here about more than usefulness, about the higher kind of friendship.
- Maybe that is not what he meant.
- He's said many times that he considers Biden a very moral man, a good man. That is, the kind of man that could be a friend that helps you to live the best kind of life. Is that not true?
- It's true.
- Do you think that choosing someone who leads a life of one of the worst kinds for a friend to help you live the best life is without consequences?
- No. But I don't see clearly what they would be.
- One of Sander's latest actions is his vote, with the entire Senate, for the COVID-19 stimulus law on the 27th of last month that tied together aid to individuals and small business with aid to big business. The aid to big business was unnecessary loans and grants to companies that are hugely profitable but had spent all their cash to buy back their own stock, to airlines that should have been allowed to go bankrupt and be reorganized. Protection of workers' jobs is almost entirely forgotten. The law includes a hidden provision to reduce the taxes for 43,000 very rich people who will each save 1.7 millions dollars and cost the government somewhere between 90 and 170 billion dollars. Private individuals would get a one time payment of 1,200 dollars, which now almost a month later almost no one has received. What explains his vote?
- In later rounds of stimulus aid he could, as he is doing, propose a $2,000 a month payment to all individuals, paid sick leave, paid health care for all for as long as the epidemic lasts. 
- Why didn't he hold back his vote, why didn't he protest the outrageous million dollar tax cut for millionaires, the gift of trillions of dollars to hugely profitable companies that pay little in tax, the so-called Employee Protection Loans for small business that have been already exhausted, grabbed up** by first-in-line hedge funds and large businesses?
- That's not his style. He is willing to criticize the state of affairs that results from law making, but not criticize the individuals that make the laws.
- Because they are his friends.
- Because of wanting to stay on friendly terms with them so he can be a more effective legislator.
- But Sanders was or is also a leader of a movement?
- Yes.
- Is the movement composed of people who find each other's company useful, or people who want to help each other lead the best lives?
- The latter.
- Could Sanders not have called upon his supporters to protest this perhaps largest financial crime in history, surpassing even the 2008-9 bailout?
- I think he could have. Still could do, if he wanted.
- But he doesn't. He doesn't want to offend his friends in congress.
- Your argument is that instrumental action over a period of 50 years, mechanically repeating the same words and phrases, even with the best of intentions disables one from acting for the best purposes?
- What do you think?
- I've always thought the saying correct that each lie you tell makes it harder for you to tell the truth.
- And saying a friend who is merely useful will help you live the best life is obviously a lie.

Further Reading:
COVID-19 Stimulus Law
My Friend Joe Biden
Disease Control
Convergence
______________________
* According to The Washington Post, Trump has made more than 18,000 false and misleading claims during his presidency, 350 of them on the coronavirus alone.
** List of the largest public companies taking payroll loans meant for small businesses.

Jump To Repression

- This is what we know: if you confine people in their houses you can slow the spread of the virus, prevent hospitals from being overburdened. Right?
- Yes.
- But once people are released from their homes, if the disease has not been eradicated by a policy of testing of the population, isolation of the infected, tracking of their contacts, they will infect each other as if there had been no lockdown at all. Can that possibly be true?
- Seems so. The experts say so.
- And there is the example of Sweden, which has no lockdown, only a voluntary minimalization of going into public, with the idea that 'herd immunity' will develop as people are infected and recover with an immunity which becomes a barrier to the disease spreading.
- I've been closely following what is happening in Sweden.
- No disaster. So far.
- No.
- So what we have, in the absence of testing, isolation, and tracking - the United States to date has tested less than one percent of its population* - after the hospitals have been relieved, is a jump to repression without any justification.
- If the lockdown is long enough to outlast the incubation period and time to recovery, which might be 6 or even 8 weeks, then won't the people when they are released from their houses have herd immunity?
- Yes, if they were locked down having already been infected. And if that is true, why the lockdown? What have people to risk going into the public if everyone already has the disease?
- You believe then that, with no clear justification for the lockdown, absent the testing, isolation, and tracking, and the huge economic, social, and psychological cost involved, the obvious explanation is governments seeing and taking advantage of an opportunity for repression.
- It looks that way.
- Why do governments want to repress? Ok, I know your answer: power madness on the part of the leaders, and for big business that buys the leaders an opportunity for increased monopolization and control of markets as smaller businesses and individuals go bankrupt.**

Watch:
COVID-19 In Sweden

Further Reading:
Lockdown
The Data Is In
Disease Control
In the Time of COVID-19
________________________
* Germany, population 83 million, has tested 80%. See: The US needs an 'army' of contact tracers if there's any hope of getting back to normal. Joke going around: What borders on idiocy? Canada and Mexico.
** Drug Store chains Walgreens and CVS Health are reported to be already trying to buy out rival independent pharmacies.

In the Time of COVID-19

1. Two Days Ago

Outside the supermarket, six o'clock in the morning, the beginning of senior hour, those over sixty only. A mass of guards, corporate outsourced, not supermarket employees, congregate in front of the entrance, ordering the 7 or 8 people who've been waiting on 6 am to get in line. 6 o'clock arrives, several of those in line inform the guards it's time to let them in. It is one of L.A.'s climate changed uncharacteristic cold and damp mornings. One guard, a short middle aged black woman, shouts out: Get in line! Get back in line! But it is six o clock, remonstrates a line-waiter. We'll tell you when you can get in, shouts the guard nearest, a tall middle-aged black man.

 
This enrages me. Reminds me - with the deep fog and early hour and the harmless seniors waiting in line - reminds me of movies and photos showing Jews waiting to be herded onto boxcars for Auschwitz. I know, I keep bringing this up, I can't help seeing the similarity. I, who of course is not waiting in line, approach between the two guards and shout back at them, turning from one to the other: Stop giving orders! Be polite! This is not a prison! / Let us do our job, says the short black woman. The tall black man moves menacingly closer. I answer: It is not your job to pointlessly regiment people in line when they will not be waiting to get in (this supermarket is literally the size of a football field, it takes over a minute to walk from one side to the other.) Now a young Latin guard inserts himself into the debate and himself between me and the two black guards. He orders me: 

- Step back!

- Go to hell. I mean, go anywhere, just don't be here. This part of town is still mostly civilized. I don't know where you are from but it's obvious you, with your unthinking brutality, aren't from here.  

- You are a racist. 

- No, If anything I'm a geographer, a geographist. I like the part of the town I grew up in. There are people of all races here. Unlike you they are not brutal idiots. 

- Call me an idiot again and I'll hit you. 

- Brutality proven.

I put on the mandatory mask, and walk away. The doors are open.

2. Last Night

Evening. I'm eating my Whole Foods take out dinner at the Beverly Gardens City Park that divides the two buildings of an extra high priced hotel, rumored to be owned by Arab royalty. I'm alone, except for my bike leaning against the fountain the wall of which I am using as a seat since all the chairs have been stacked up, someone there before me having conveniently moved up a table to the fountain with the same idea. I'm just closing my computer ready to go when one the Beverly Hills Ambassadors, otherwise known as the homeless police, tasked with keeping undesirables clear of the city, walks up to me: Sir! You're loitering. You can't be here. I answer:

- I'm leaving. But I can be here.
- You're trespassing.
- No. The park is open to the public.
- The park is closed.
- Where does it say that?
- Over there.
- Where?
- There.
- You mean that wet floor warning?
- Yes.
- How does that say the park is closed?
- Over there. There's a sign.
- That bronze plaque? It says Property of the City of Beverly Hills. The parks were closed for Easter weekend, but are open again.
- That's what you say. I know you. You ride your bike all day and like to dispute.
- I should simply accept what anyone tells me? I trespass? I loiter? I'm disputatious? By the way, do you know how to read?
- Are you going to go or do I have to call the police?

At this point two men appear out of the darkness but keep a distance from us. One of them says: The guests of the hotel are complaining. You have to go. I answer:

- This park is city property and I am having a conversation with a city employee. You are trespassing.
- We're calling the police.
- Call the police then go back to washing the feet of murderous princes or whatever you do inside there.

Is it only loitering, trespassing, disputatious me, or is there something going on around here?

Further Reading:
Jump To Repression
Convergence
Disease Control

Convergence

- How are the people who live on the street holding up?
- They tell me they are cold. With all restaurant dining rooms closed, movie theaters, cafes, libraries closed, there is no place indoors they can go except the supermarkets, allowed to remain open as necessary businesses. Extra guards have been posted at these places of refuge to deny entry to those too dirty or disruptively crazy, and to spray disinfectant all over the more presentable before letting them in and eject them if they stay too long inside without buying anything.
- What do they say about the closures and orders to stay at the home they don't have?
- You'd be surprised.
- Why?
- Because I think they understand better than almost anyone else.
- Understand what?
- That this worldwide epidemic represents the convergence of two separate but related epidemics, one mental, the other physical.
- The people on the street understand the convergence of a mental with a physical epidemic? Isn't that a little far-fetched?
- You be the judge. With Covid-19 we are in the midst of not just epidemic, but a viral epidemic.
- Epidemic sickness cause by a virus.
- Yes. A virus is not really a living thing. It has no metabolism, which is a give and take with the environment, taking in from outside material to be acted upon, protecting this digestion from interruptions from outside. A virus only reproduces itself, doing this by hijacking the reproductive system of the cells of hosts, we being the hosts in this case. Symptoms of suffering a viral attack are breakdowns of the organism's orderly processes of metabolism. Understand?
- Yes.
- Now what I hear, especially from those on the street who speak in the language of religion, is that what is happening to our physicals selves in this worldwide epidemic corresponds to the fait accompli in the mental.
- They don't use those words.
- My words. They talk of the worship of moneymaking, of money reproduction, money reproducing money, and the resulting disruption of the mental self caused by the atrophy of all basic human qualities such as sympathy, friendship, love, understanding, peace, etc.
- And that is the convergence you spoke of, mental life exclusively dedicated to profit, metabolism of physical life destabilized by the reproduction of the virus.
- Yes. And they understand more than that.
- Come on.
- They do. They understand, at least some of them, a lot of the paranoid schizophrenics do, that the convergence of the viral attacks, mental and physical, has resulted in attacks on as it were the social metabolism: the convergence of mental and physical viral contagions showing itself in collapse of hospital treatment capacity due to a monomaniacal pursuit of profit: lack of beds, respirators, protective equipment, testing kits, the refusal to heed warnings, the shut down of investigative and preparative authorities.* They see the money madness necessitated last ditch attempt to even out the rate of hospitalization that is the justification of business closures, they see the guards at the doors of the supermarkets, they see their exile from the world of warmth as a deliberate act of repression on the part of the virally infected minds of the leaders of society, stamping out all ways of life other than money accumulation, people in masks glaring at each other in fear as they do their shopping. The more economically sophisticated even call attention to the way small business will suffer unrecoverably in the crisis metabolism of destabilized economy, see much enlarged monopolies the result as small businesses sink or are bought out by cash rich bailed-out big business.**
- Monopoly increases as a result of viral self-reproduction and undermining of social metabolism consciously executed by a class of people, perhaps now the majority, who live for profit and only profit. Admit that these are really your ideas. The people on the street never said to you anything of the kind.
- They do talk of repression. And of the cold.

Further Reading:
Disease Control
Lockdown
Indifference
Indifference Revisited
__________________________
* Watch: Noam Chomsky Interview, April 10, 2020
** Watch: Matt Taibbi: Why This Bailout Is Worse Than 2008

Disease Control

- Someone with your background, what you've experienced, is uniquely situated to write about the people facing life on the street in the midst of this rapidly growing epidemic.
- And if I don't want to?
- Why wouldn't you?
- If I said because it is not real, you'd understand me?
- No. What do you mean?
- Not real, as an imitation is not real. Capitalism, we said,* is a form of slavery in which the part time slaves bought back the objects they made at a price higher than they had been paid to make them.
- With the consequence that the difference had to be made up by sales to colonies.
- Colonies that now are also capitalist, so the difference between wages and sales price has to be made up internally by periodic deliberate recessions (no waiting for epidemics with trillion dollar bailouts to big business and pennies for individuals) forcing bankruptcy and forfeiture of the property the slaves have accumulated over time.
- It's a theory.
- Sure. We've said also that capitalism for the capitalist has a ritual structure, in which the strain on human nature involved in having to treat each market transaction as between enemies leads to a sense of strength and security represented by the profit made out of the transaction. Something similar goes on with the slaves making the products traded, who are stressed by having the products made by them taken away from them by their masters, but acquire strength and security when consuming the same products now associated to images of power and security by advertising. It could be that the ritual nature of capitalism gives it back some of the stability it loses by being an inherently irrational, even absurd undertaking, doomed to end when all the property bought by the slaves is reacquired and there is no source in the world left to give the masters the profit they seek.
- And you want to say capitalism is not real? And that is why you don't want to write about the poor people caught with no place to live in the epidemic made worse by the late-stage, post-colonial capitalist idea that it is immoral for the government to have any other purpose than to be a useful agent for the looting of the slaves' property?
- I do, in the sense that imitation is not real. Ritual enacts in a group the story of each individual's death and rebirth, and that story becomes a picture, an imitation of the individual's stable relation to the world.
- The masters have their ritual buying and selling, the slaves have their ritual consumption. You don't want to write, make an imitation of that imitation. But really you can't think the people on the street are traders or consumers?
- They are both, thinking non-stop how they can sell the things they find or scavenge from the garbage and how best to use the money they make.
- Then what about your life and your relation to them?
- I've spent my life trying to keep away from this particular American form of unreality.
- Obviously you failed. Here you are, with them.
- New Zealand looks good.
- Why don't you take action then, get into politics like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or be a public intellectual like Noam Chomsky?
- Those people can't succeed.They pit one unreality against another. Chomsky speaks with a detachment expressive of a lifetime of security as an academic and his millionaire status from book sales. He habitually assigns blame to 'institutional factors' rather than people. Sanders (also a millionaire from book sales) and Ocasio-Cortez wave their hands around and show their passion, but what is the relation to their adversaries? Do they call them out with the contempt and disgust human beings naturally have for those who would destroy the sympathy and kindness they are capable of? Or if they do, do they not immediately afterwards compromise with them and let bygones be bygones?
- If our leaders are too involved with themselves, not real enough for you, then why don't you, as they say, get real? Get into politics, show your contempt and disgust for these capitalist ritualists, write a story about the plague we are in the midst of and what it means for those most vulnerable.
- I'll make a deal with you, my friend.
- You'll make a deal.
- Yes. I'll give a try at what you ask if I can laugh a little while I'm at it. You know when our dear leader was elected president I realized that the mystery of how anyone took Hitler seriously was daily being clarified. And then, two days ago, the mayor of L.A. issues a ten o'clock curfew, threatening to round up all those on the streets after that time and taking those who didn't have homes to tent camps in public parks.
- Like the Nazi's rounding up the Jews!
- Just my thought. I can't say I felt exactly terrified. What I felt was more like a stubborn resistance against being compelled to take as real what I had been strenuously insisting was not. And do you know what I then realized?
- What?
- That just like the Jews who had a chance to leave Germany but stayed, even after a number of very clear warning signs, I too was staying in L.A., facing being locked up in a real, honest to god concentration camp!
- And that thought made you laugh?
- It did.
- Did the roundup actually take place?
- No. Apparently the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta issued an advisory to mayors and governors not to do it as concentrating the people of the street close together would increase infections, and unless there was a willingness to bring in the national guard, conveniently already authorized by our dear leader, to patrol the camps with attack dogs, the newly infected people would each morning escape to the larger community to infect all those they came into contact with.

Further Reading:
World Of Cold
My Friend Joe Biden
Killer Metaphysics
The United States & Totalitarianism
__________________________
* What Is Capitalism?

My Friend Joe Biden

- I have to give you credit, you did warn me about Bernie Sanders four years ago.*
- Remind me. What did I say?
- You were telling me about the anarchist theory that leaders in democracies tend to form class loyalties with other leaders, then act in their class interest and against the interests of the people who elected them. Bernie Sanders had just conceded defeat in the democratic primary and instead of disputing the election when the Democratic Party was caught cheating proven by leaked emails, or running as an independent, he threw his arm around Hilary Clinton and endorsed her for president. This 2nd time around, after a set of unexpectedly disappointing results the past week in the primary, but still only ten percent in delegates behind his principle opponent Joe Biden with again as many more delegates up for grabs, instead of changing his strategy to achieve his own surprising results he speaks as if defeated. In the comments to the YouTube video of his speech you can read Sanders' supporters' complaints about his failure to attack the reactionary positions of his rival, and confusion and dismay at the description of him as "his good friend". Biden has decades of history as a U.S. Senator in which he worked towards tax breaks for the rich, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, militarization of the police, bankruptcy protection for the rich but forbidden to students who've taken out loans, job outsourcing trade agreements, wars waged on false pretenses, subsidies to bankers who through financial fraud crashed the economy, elimination and privatization of social programs, the list goes on and on. What I have trouble understanding is why Sanders can't just be amiable with the people he has to work with without actually joining in a group with them and acting in the group's interest. 
- That is of course what Sanders would say he is doing.
- You think that he is serious that he really is friends with people like Biden who pursue policies destructive to the interests of the people and in the interest of his campaign contributors?
- I do. I think he is serious. I can't see any other way to explain his betrayal of his supporters four years ago and his betrayal in progress right at this moment. 
- But why? How can he make friends with someone who acts on such different beliefs about how life should be lived? Sanders believes in cooperation, Biden in winner take all. 
- Not just winner take all: first rig the game. The kind of friendship Sanders is talking about is that expressed in group loyalty: it has no specific content or rules of conduct other than violence is never to be used within the group or against the group, only against those outside the group. We find throughout human history a basic social technique of forming groups which use violence against those who haven't protected themselves by forming groups and not practiced in or willing to use violence. Joining groups of individuals loyal to each other and violent against everyone else is what I mean by rigging the game: you are almost certain to win.
- So you think that our leaders are rigging the game in this way against us, the led? 
- Don't you?
- I guess I do. Still, it's hard for me to accept that Sanders means by friendship warmth of loyalty to those in his group of leaders engaged in war against us.
- Then you tell me what you think he can mean. 
- That he is a naturally friendly guy and his ability to like those different from himself allows him to make deals and make political progress otherwise impossible.
- Then the question is, is that possible? Is it possible to be genuinely committed to reasoned cooperation, and also friendly with someone whose concept of friendship is mere loyalty, which loyalty involves violence against those not their friends? Does such loyalty-friendship, sometimes called 'bonding', necessarily involve animosity against those outside the group?
- I know that anarchist political theory says so. Group loyalty is a sort of tool that, once possessed, possesses you with an irresistible temptation to use it against those outside the group. 

Further Reading:
Friendship
Philosophy And Science Of Betrayal
Leaders Who Betray

Watch:
Bernie's Betrayal
Biden's Lies
____________________________
* Spectacle & God

The Impeached President & Applied Mathematics

I'm sitting with coffee in the lobby at UCLA's Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics. At my table is a smiling Swiss professor of mathematics. He tells me he is in his last professional years before reaching mandatory retirement age. And me? Where am I from? From here. Los Angeles. No institution. Why am I at there, at IPAM? General interest. What sort of general interest? I ask if he happens to work on the problem machine learning has of not leaving a record of how the machine is learning. In fact, he does. He uses machine learning to complete, based on probabilities, partial body scan images. And the problem, I add, is that sometimes the probabilities assumed in completing the image gaps meet with a case of improbability, and produce false results, and because we don't know the rules used by the machine to calculate probabilities that have been constantly adjusted with experience, we don't know what sort of errors to look for. Is that an accurate statement of the case?
- You're well informed for the general public. Are you some kind of journalist?
- I like to think about things. Lately I've been thinking about the incredible, literally cannot be believed, lying of our American president and his political party. I think his kind of lying has a lot in common with what happens in machine learning. Imagine every lie is a new image used to teach an artificial intelligence, making in the case of your work the completing image supplement more accurate by comparing its results with the actual object. What if the president, and members of his party, are repeatedly making claims about the world - secret enemies are destroying us! -  and those claims are answered ritualistically by the president speaking to his followers: we are fighting back, recovering our strength now that we have woken up to our danger, and we see more and more the real weakness of our enemy. Our waking up is our correction, our education confirming the probabilities that define our danger and our capacity to face up to it. This cycle of education, scripted in advance, with no relation to truth in the world is on display in how Facebook selects what is allowed to go on users' timelines, singling out posts that are predicted to make them angry and afraid, teaching them to respond with increasing certainty and intensely to the posts they are sent. Russian false accounts in the 2016 presidential elections similarly arranged for the world to confirm the probabilities of passionate response, increasing hysteria of posts confirming increasing fears. Like you mathematicians in your machine learning world, the politicians in the midst of these educational cycles have no record, no access to the constantly adapted calculations of probability done in their training of each other, telling stories to each other of their perilous situation. Lies produce an artificial learning environment rather than function as a description of the real world; the real world doesn't enter into the calculation at all. But it can: the identified enemy can be put in a concentration camp, in conditions in which their physical state begins to conform to the previously false taught probability of unnaturalness, sight of which leads to further adjustment of probabilities, finally justifying torture and murder of the unnatural enemies within. Or again, when a political party educate themselves in the ideology of small government / no regulation, the result is the flourishing of groups willing to use power in the form of money or violence to take control of government institutions; with this accomplished they more efficiently indoctrinate the people in small government / no regulation ideology allowing them to take further control. Employment agencies find employing older people to be of improbable benefit to employers, causing older applicants stay unemployed for long periods, a further sign of their improbable benefit making it more likely they remain unemployed, and remaining unemployed they become poorer and have to move to areas with zip codes residence in which is linked to additional improbable benefit to employers.
- Vicious cycles.
- Yes. So you see we have two levels or stages here. First, the construction of group ideology of 'us and them', learned without knowing how. And then the application of this ideology to the world, changing the world, adjusting the probabilities in the direction of confirmation of the ideology. At first the enemy doesn't look so different, but there is no certainty in life, all is probability, and anyway in no time at all reality is adjusted to fantasy. You know Chomsky's theory of language acquisition? That speaking is not learned by working out the probability of particular words referring to particular things, but through listening for inborn models in our minds of word relations or logic. If the American president's people look at him and see only a statement of probability,* cues to adjustment of social relations in imagination, and also potentially in practice, a normally functioning human being looks at another with love in which there is no doubt about the beauty seen. Beauty is knowledge of something good. Error seems to enter into love because knowledge is incomplete. Maybe you look on your loved one with consciousness of her beauty and she at that moment is terribly upset and you don't see it, immersed as you are in your experience of love, only her anger at your apparent inattention wakes you up to your mistake. So what do you do? You look back on your past with her, seeking other things you know about her aside from her general lovableness. You look for models, that is, habits of perception: you did this and she did that. You look for a model that fits her present dissatisfaction. In machine learning, there is no mechanism that brings together such a history of decisions and adjustments with present decision to be made, but with us there is: the body, with its habits of perception, habits gained in the past leading us to our present perception. What you see now includes your history, is what you have learned to see developing habits of perception. There is no certainty in love, in individual moments of contemplation, but there is certainty in memory of travelling the path to love, in the history of your repeated attempts to apply models to the world. Its certainty is like the certainty of science: that models are made and improved is real, their truthful relation to the world does not end but is supplemented, improved. You could be mistaken in the timing of what you see in the one you love, but it is a fact that your love, errors and all, is teaching you to love more and more, is helping you stay close to the beauty of the world. 'All things that are, are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd.' I'm getting off the track here. To summarize: the lies of the president and his followers are social acts, first constructed to secure power relations in imagination between the president's group and all outsiders; then the lies are brought to the world, training the world to exist in accord with their self-trained selves, the at first dissonance of trained view of the world to the world as it really is being allowed to sink into the silence and uncertainty of education by probabilities rather than models. Well, you listened to me to the end. What do you think?
- Very enjoyable.

Further Reading:
Selfless
Prostitution & Torture
Technology & Magic
________________________
* See: The Love Of The People
P.S. 'To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.' - George Orwell, 1984

The Love Of The People

 Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring's 'Vermeer'  

Many are the things that man seeing must understand. Not seeing, how shall he know what lies in the hand of time to come? - Sophocles

- The populist leader of Poland, President Duda, says that populism is love, nationalism and xenophobia are hate. He wants to use laws to help the people love each other. It doesn't help the Polish people love each other to say they were complicit in the Germans killing Jews in World War II, therefore it is illegal now to say such a thing. What do you think of that?
- 'Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye;  / That’s all we shall know for truth / before we grow old and die. I lift the glass to my mouth, / I look at you, and I sigh.'* Love in populism does not come in at the eye. It is not aesthetic.
- Meaning by aesthetic?**
- The feeling that arises from seeing something being done right.
- A feeling arising from a perception of good.
- Yes. Staying in the neighborhood of Poland: one of our impeached President's Ukrainian-born fixers employed to try to force first one Ukrainian president then the next to announce their government was investigating the American president's believed principle rival, this lover of Trump says he has a sort of shrine to him in his home, that he loves the man, really loves the man, this loved man who now repeatedly falsely claims he doesn't even know him, never met him. Is this also 'populist love'? If as you say it is not a coming in at the eye, how is it getting through to people?
- The President and his Ukrainian fixer as human beings are two remarkably ugly specimens: ugly to you and me but not to each other or to the people who love them. We see expressed in their appearance all manner of depravity: lies, self-absorption, delusions of grandeur. We see their physical ugliness: their obesity, their off-kilter posture, their incompetent use of cosmetics and ill-fitting clothes increasing the appearance of deformity. What do the people who love them see? Any of that?
- None of that. I've met more than one woman in the business of personal appearance, experts in make-up and hair treatments, who actually call themselves aestheticians, who are equally blind to the ugliness of their leader.
- Their leader Trump. And your explanation?
- The Dutch painter Meegeren*** famously painted and sold fake Vermeers to, among others, Nazi leader and art collector Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring. He fooled his buyers with paintings that were remarkably unlike originals. The difference from the original, it seems, is what fooled buyers: a kind of cartoonish awkwardness in the figures and their arrangement completely unlike the subtle expression in original paintings. The populist's love, to be expressed in the lawmaking of government, was called by Rousseau 'the will of the people'. The will of the people is invisible. It is felt in ritual. In ritual, people regain strength acting together passionately, that is, with a feeling of loss of individual self. Populist love is this selfless group action. Populist laws are made against anything that would interfere with this process forming the will of the people and the people's love for each other helping each other regain strength.
- And the fake Vermeer's?
- Your experience looking at the faces in the original paintings is aesthetic. You recognize, as a result of your own trying to do good and avoid evil, knowledge of life. In populist love what do you see? Cues that reflect back not to your knowledge but to your power, or lack of it, to your being in progress to recovery of strength and security. Cues that come from outside your personal experience directing you to give yourself over with others to the guidance of a leader. Cues that are effected by painting faces and figures with simple cartoonish expressions standing out against the highly worked, detailed background of Dutch painting of the period.
- In the passionate feeling of return to power out of weakness, true aesthetic perception is not possible.
- Yes. Instead is sentimentality, being told what to feel, instructed what feeling to imitate as part of a story reenacted, and the imbalance, gracelessness that results from falsity. Awkwardness, gracelessness are themselves cues that here are to be found instructions to ritual. Aesthetics are based on individual life. In performance of ritual, individuality is replaced by selfless action in group under guidance of the beloved leader. The leader is loved not for knowing anything about how best to live, knowledge and experience visible to the eye, but out of a feeling of gratitude for identifying for followers enemies to their love, guiding them in passionate opposition and so helping them make a return to personal strength in the midst of other people doing and feeling the same.
- Though it is interesting to be able to explain what's going on in, for lack of better word, the minds of Nazis and their sympathizers and other populists, more important, I think, their absence of aesthetics in body and art tells us why it feels so bad, the world appears so ugly, having to live around these people.

Further Reading:
The Impeached President & Applied Mathematics
Einstein & Intellectual Physics
Renaissance & Palingenesis
Who This Man Is
__________________
* A Drinking Song, William Butler Yeats
** See: Trump vs. Schiller
*** Henricus Antonius "Han" van Meegeren

Call Of The Wild / The Last Day Of Hanukkah

- I'm going to tell you a story, I know I've told you many stories like it, but I have a observation to make. 
- Go on.
- I'd been to the temple a few days before for the morning service, where it was announced that the next service would be today, the last day of Hanukkah, followed by a breakfast.
- Which temple was this?
- Sinai Temple. 

Bike locked to the traffic sign at the corner, I appear at the guard station in my cold weather biking clothes, set my leather shoulder bag on the desk. The guard, a tall young black man, stands, orders:

- Empty your pockets.
- All of them? I have a dozen, or more.
- Everything. 

I describe each object as I lay it down on the desk: 

- Sunglasses. Wallet. Keys. Telephone. Reading glasses.
- That's all?
- No.
- No?

He waves his metal detecting wand over my body. 

- Empty all your pockets. 

I announce:

- Sample size bottle of perfume, half empty. Earphones: two pair. Comb, broken. Another comb, broken. Seen enough?

The guard picks up one object after another, holds it close to his eyes.

- What are you doing?
- If you don't stop talking I'll get the rabbi to ban you from here.
- I don't think you can do that. I think it's more likely you'll lose your job. And there's no chance you're going to control my language.
- There's a camera recording everything you say.
- So what?
- I'm calling my boss for back up.

He speaks into his communicator: 

- I need special search here at the door.

- A young man with shaved head arrives wearing a combat thickness bulletproof vest loaded with extra ammunition cartridges and a pistol at his hip. I greet him:

- Just in time. Your employee is going crazy. He keeps threatening me.
- How is he threatening you?
- With getting me banned from the temple.
- Why?
- He's trying and failing to bully me and he doesn't like it. He shouldn't be working here. Obviously he's not Jewish. He doesn't know a Jew when he sees one. You know I'm Jewish, don't you?

He doesn't answer. I continue:

- Ever hear of a Jewish terrorist?
- This is all routine.
- Not true. I've been here eight or nine times before and the guard never did anything more than take a glance inside my bag.
- Was he here then?
- No. Someone else.

The big subordinate guard keeps breaking in with accusations of me as committing the crime of being uncooperative, this met with his boss's 'Stand back. I'm handling this now.' But the big guard doesn't want to stand back, he goes on interrupting, he's seen me smiling at his discomfort at being reprimanded by his boss right in front of me, his intended victim. Instead of him standing back I theatrically take two long steps backwards, declaring:

- I'm standing back the better to watch this comedy. 

Finally the subordinate guard quiets down. Boss guard orders me:

- Take your jacket off. 

The removed jacket (I still have on my inner, leather jacket) is held at arm's length by the bulletproof guard with one hand while with the other it is closely rubbed with the metal detecting wand which goes off continuously. The bulletproof guard then moves the wand over my body, with it again going off continuously, especially stridently at my knees for some reason. He hand-searches my chest and back, looking for a suicide vest. He asks,

-Anything else in your pockets?
- Sure. I told you. A lot.

Once more I announce each item as it is set down on the desk: 

- Pens and pencils. Five count. Paper glue. Super glue. Foam ear plugs for bike riding. Eight or ten pair. 

The glue stick and eighth of an ounce sample bottle of perfume receive fascinated examinations.

- Alright? What about my bag?
- Set it down on the desk. Is there anything metal inside?
- Almost everything inside is metal. Computer. Computer charging cable. Telephone charging cable. Memory sticks. An old book, non-metal. Some papers, also non-metal.

The boss guard slips his hands in the bag's compartments, unzips the cloth sleeve my computer came with, looks carefully at what he sees inside, a book in a clear plastic envelope: a 117 year old first edition of Jack London's Call Of The Wild. Call of the wild? a revolutionary manifesto? 

-Ok. You can go in. Leave the bag here at security.
- No way I'm leaving anything valuable with that maniac. You can keep the bag inside at your office.
- It will be alright out here. There's a camera.
- I know all about your camera. Your employee was threatening me with it. Later when I ask to see the recording you'll tell me there was a malfunction or I need a court order.
- Fine. Go in.

- Did you get your breakfast?
- I did. Finishing off my second bagel with lox and cream cheese, the boss guard with the combat vest twice patrols the hallway past me, a third time he stops and sits down beside me. He apologizes, hopes my day hasn't been ruined by my experience there.
- So they tried to get you banned by the rabbi and he refused, instead ordered them to apologize.
- I guess.
- You're right, you're always getting yourself into these situations. You said you were going to say why you wanted to tell me the story? 
- Yes. First I want you to read this paragraph about a French historian of technology's debunking the Chinese claim to having technology superior to the West until the modern era:

In the case of printing, Gille denies that it originated in East Asia. He declares that the movable types that were invented by Pi Cheng  (990–1051), along with related technological elements, had some defects, such as insufficient hardness, low paper quality, the absence of a press, and the unsuitability of Chinese ink. Because there were no other suitable technological elements to match Pi’s movable types, it is difficult to regard the invention as a successful technical complex. The invention does not seem to have been absorbed into the technical system, and it was quickly forgotten after Pi’s death. And then, Gille declares, “true printing was really invented in Europe around the middle of the 15th century”. (Gille, 1986a, p. 397) The invention should be attributed to Gutenberg, and the Far East does not seem to have had any influence whatsoever on it... It is only in a system that a tool or machine can become a technical element and obtain its own value as something technical.* 

- Hans Jacob described modern science as a continuous cycling from model making, hypothesis forming, experiment, new technology, new experience with technology, new model making. What Gille refers to as systems could also be described as the beginnings of science cycling in the pre-modern period. Observe a leaf's impress in the mud, come up with the idea of movable type. But paper unsuitable? Examine different kinds of paper, experiment with different ways of making paper.
- Ok. Obviously you remember our previous discussion. We talked about our democracy being a kind of social technology. To be practiced it also must cycle from model, which is a description of how the parts of something relate to each other and to the world, to experiment, to technological practice. This can only be done through the constant test of disconfirmation which is dialog. And do you want to know when you can be sure there will be no practice of dialog, therefore no social technology?
- Tell me.
- When people act on the basis of statistics, probability, rules of thumb. I'm selected by the guards for special treatment because I am in many ways statistically aberrant as a visitor to the temple: arriving by bike a little too energetic for that time of the morning, not rich enough, not old enough. Yet if instead of statistics-based rules the guards were working within the cycle of technology, I would be immediately identified as conforming to the model of American Jewish Intellectual, a life-form with its own natural habitat, a classification strangers put me in all the time. Unlike statistics which offer nothing to perception, when you work with models, you can investigate each component, you can talk it through. The guard has some doubts about me being Jewish? All he has to do is ask for proof. I had in my wallet an Israeli residency passport from a few years back. Statistics, rules of thumb, cannot be disconfirmed in dialog. They are the enemy of social technology and democracy.

Further Reading:
Whole Foods
Birthday & The Man
Beverly Hills Jews
Interference
Watching
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*Transforming the Narrative of the History of Chinese Technology: East and West in Bertrand Gille’s Histoire des Techniques, Dazhi Yao & Per Hogselius, 2015

Renaissance & Palingenesis

Renaissance, the period of growth and activity in the areas of art, literature, and ideas in Europe during the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, from the French phrase renaissance des lettres, used by the 19th century historian Jules Michelet. In Old French renaissance means "rebirth." 

Palingenesis, from the Biblical Greek for “re-birth,” is increasingly used in the Anglophone human sciences to connote the reversal or transcendence of decadence in a new order. The archetypal palingenetic myth is that of the phoenix arising from its own ashes, suggesting an organic process by which degeneration is the prelude to a regeneration in which the old is subsumed within a new form. This theme is taken up in the regenerative connotations assumed by an idealized national or racial past within the fascist mindset.*  

- I've read that professor in Oxford's essay.
- And are you convinced?
- That fascism is a nationalism of rebirth? Yes. He makes a very good argument.
- What do you want to talk about?
- "Degeneration is the prelude to a regeneration." The rebirth in fascism is a ritual, ritual involves self-forgetting through passionate action in a group. The Italian Renaissance was a rebirth that involved remembering. Do you accept that distinction?
- Yes. Perhaps to avoid confusion we should speak of Renaissance as a conversion rather than rebirth, an individual's turning away from degeneration towards the truth.
- Would you also agree that the United States is ripe for fascism whenever distractions do not suffice to cover up the fact that it's every man for himself here?
- I would agree.
- That even if the government decided to take indoors the million people who sleep on the street in our country, that wouldn't change the fact that people don't like each other here, don't care about each other? It would be a practical government policy, not a conversion.
- Yes.
- Is Renaissance possible then?
- Can change here be based on remembering instead of forgetting?
- Yes. Remembering the art, literature, and ideas of another time and place, when at every moment you're in the midst of life and death struggle? Do you think that is possible?
- For some.
- Very few. So then what? Should we simply count our blessings fascism that has to come sooner or later hasn't got here yet?

Further Reading:
Killers
Who This Man Is
The Love Of The People
The United States & Totalitarianism
Eve In The Garden Of Eden
Two Kinds Of Mystery
______________________
* Roger Griffin, Modernity, Modernism, And Fascism

Who This Man Is

- I'm sure you are as tired as I am at hearing our president described as a leader of a cult, and of warnings how management of such cults historically has paved the way to totalitarian dictatorship. There clearly is some truth to these claims, but I don't think they express the significance of this president. He does lead his followers in ritual: recounting to them a story of the American people's lost greatness, of being weak now and under attack, the story of how his people, acting together under his guidance, will immediately be able to recover strength. But this cult leader also plays the clown, claims to be a lover of order while inciting to violence, that is, inciting to disorder, while he himself is openly, even joyously lying, complaining the next minute about lies being told about him by his enemies. Is there any way of understanding him that fits all that together?
- I think there is. Our previous president expressed for the people their exceptional among other nations ability to take on any new role.* We call this hypocrisy, from the Greek hypokrites, actor on a stage, when we believe roles are deliberately taken on and left behind to deceive others. Our previous president claimed to want change but kept things almost entirely as they were. Accordingly many call him a hypocrite. If in doing this with virtuosity he expressed to the American people their unique ability to take on roles at will, and was loved by them for performing this important service of aiding their self-recognition, helping them feel more comfortable with themselves, what is our current president expressing about the American people and comforting them with, if anything?
- You are going to tell me.
- Our current president expresses the American people's predilection for, not taking on roles at will, but at will writing the scripts for their own individual, self-instituted rituals of rebirth, done in the company of others at a revivalist church, or done following the script of a story told to oneself about one's personal relations, seeing an enemy to be fought, a successful fight concluding with the order of the world returned to and personal power restored. The time of fighting is left behind and forgotten with the old life of weakness. The president attacks when he's feeling weak, then calls himself a very stable genius when he feels reborn by imagining how his words have decimated his enemies and that he now lives in a world of order and safety. His lies are the scripts, the made up stories of his constant battles to reestablish order out of perceived disorder, and since the truth about these lies is that they do truly perform this function they are not really lies, truth is a feeling and personal belief. At his rallies the people follow their leader's example, along with him they self-consciously throw themselves into ritual, at times clowning out the ritual as their leader does. They follow the course of his wild swings, from his claiming he is intelligent and self-controlled and a lover of order, to his deliberately exciting fears of being under attack, to making a joke of himself because he wills himself to travel the path of ritual along with his followers and along with them is reborn god-like out of his old ridiculous self, all faults left behind. Order and disorder, violence and steady-as-it-goes confidence, lies and truth, each are phases of rituals instituted at will, each has its time and place, each phase rehearsed calling to mind its place in the ritual sequence (1. weakness 2. violent group response 3. recovered strength) much as in music a refrain gathers its feeling from its recalled and anticipated position in the song as a whole.**
- The president's supporters participate in this virtuosic show, which far from being chaotic and meaningless, comfortingly reflects back to them their personal lives.

Further Reading:
The Character Of Donald Trump
Renaissance & Palingenesis
Liars & The Free Market
Love Of The People
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* See: Killers
** “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” ― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism