They Don't Care And Can't Care

- Sir! You can't pass here. The intersection is closed.

- Everyone has to walk around the block so limos can drive up to the movie preview. Can I pass? I'm invited.
- You can pass.
- What do you think of this? All these kid trying to get to school, finding you and dozens of other guards dressed in banker's suits blocking sidewalks and streets.
- Girls! Street Closed! You have to pass on the other side.
     - Can we J-walk?
- Be careful.
- No! Bad idea! You girls are too small. We're instituting a height rule, drivers behind all those sport utility vehicles can't see you. Go to the corner.
- I know this isn't the way it should be. This is my third job. I'm struggling.
- Where are you from?
- Chicago. I came here six months ago. For the first two months I slept in my car, saved up five thousand dollars so I could get an apartment. My late night job is guarding a downtown parking lot. The job is about taking care of everyone who's slipped in to sleep, I clear them out like zombies after the apocalypse. People in government think that if they raise the minimum wage to ten dollars an hour I'd be rich. I just survive. I'm thinking about going home. Go back to school, the University of Chicago.
- Good idea. Get away from here. The people in the limos will let you die without a thought. They couldn't care less about you.
- Why don't they care? What can they do with five houses, ten cars?
- Why should they care? Why should they place importance in the life of a stranger? What is it to them? Should we all care about each other?
- Hell, yes.
- Can you convince anyone of that? What would you say? You aren't part of their lives, how are you going to convince them to make you part of their lives? What have you to offer?
- I'm a human being like they are.
- Not enough.
- We live in the same society.
- Society. Once you start arguing about better and worse society you are seeing society as a thing to be made better or worse. Try to convince someone in society to make it a better thing, and you bring to mind other things that person could be making better instead. Better possessions, better protected family, etc. Why should they care about public things more than private things?
- What's the answer?
- The answer is as old as democracy itself. People don't care about a public thing called society. People get together when they see cooperation makes each individually more powerful.
- They're thinking of themselves, not society.
- Right. We're on our way to an answer. Now I'll ask you something else. Do you know what power is?
- No. Do you?
- Power comes from self observation, self knowledge. We look at what we have done in the past, put our different kinds of actions into different categories, we look at the different kinds of results also put into different categories. For Plato, the best kind of actions were those that lead you to be able to love the beautiful. It was best to teach yourself to do those things which put you in a relation to the world we call happiness, a general readiness and confidence that problems would and could be taken care within a constant appreciation of the beauty of life. The great discovery was that people gave each other the power to be happy. Conversation and cooperation taught them to love beauty.
- We shouldn't try to make society beautiful but our lives beautiful.
- It is beautiful to know the alternatives. To know that acquiring things makes you feel safe in their protection and inattentive to, sometimes even antagonist to the important things in life when choice between them becomes necessary. It is beautiful too to know that attachment to the public thing of society brings exactly the same dangers. It is beautiful to exercise the power to chose between alternative lives based on knowing. But to someone not exercising that power of choice, to someone unacquainted with the beautiful possibilities of life, then, to get back to your question, since society is just another kind of possession it is natural that such a person prefers his own things. Let's imagine though that this person understood in theory the power that people give each other to be happy. Would he then be interested in the suffering of the unknown people around him?
- Why not?
- He doesn't need the power gained from cooperating with you. His money protects him from you and he does plenty and enough cooperation among his own people. The difference between him and you is he doesn't want to cooperate with just anyone. And in fact he doesn't really believe you do either, only circumstances force you to pretend you do. But perhaps turning his back on you harms his ability to know himself and so exercise his own power privately. Maybe in his private life he needs to be continually reminded, needs the model, the piece of art made by helping a stranger on his way to happiness. What do you think?
- Needs me for what?
- Maybe founding the power of cooperation on this division between yours and mine is no power at all.
- Why not?
- Because maybe every glance and thought of "not mine and not my problem", each act of turning away turns us back to the weaker alternative we observed when we looked at ourselves. Sets us back on the path of fearful repetition established by hiding within the same things among the same people.
- Is that true?
- We have good reason to think it is. Even a harmless lie plays havoc with memory. If it is true then we can answer our question. We know why they don't care. They would care if they knew the danger to themselves of letting themselves not care, but once they have set down on that path of not caring they are carried away, desperately holding onto private things. Inattention and fear of the public replaces sight of the beautiful and power of cooperation. Strangers are either feared or invisible, they have nothing to offer. It is better for us to care about each other, but to care we have to know ourselves, and when we don't care, we stop knowing ourselves and can't care.
- You're a real talker. You're good, I never heard this before. Say it again.
- They don't care because they can't care, it's futile to ask them to do what they can't.
- And they run our society.
- Ignore society. It is a question of our own power, of who we cooperate with and who we don't.

One Dollar Ninety Buys A Lot In Beverly Hills

- How are you today?
- Not good.
- Sorry to hear that.

- Hearing that upsets me more.
- Why?
- You appear to be my friend but you steal from me.
- I don't steal from you.
- Your company does.
- Calm down. What seems to be the problem?
- AT&T is trying to steal $1.90 from me. That was the credit I had in my account. I bought the credit here. No one warned me that unused credit would be confiscated by AT&T after 30 days.

- Those are the terms.
- You say now they are the terms. I don't accept them. I want the $1.90 you stole.
- Politeness will get you much further.
- Won't get me what I want, which is to discredit your politeness.
- Would you prefer I wasn't polite? Where would that get you?
- We'd be able to talk about your company pretending to be my friend but the moment my back is turned inventing a policy that allows it to pounce on my money.
- This is about $1.90. If I give you a refund in that amount will that make you happy?
- Very happy.
- Give me your telephone number.
- Will this take long?
- Are you trying to provoke me?
- Not any more. What's going out out there on the street?

- It's a No Parking zone in front of the store. We have a good relation with the city. 

- I bet. While we've been talking that Mercedes pulled up to the curb, the city of Beverly Hills' guy on the bike arrived in seconds, wrote him a ticket, gave the order to drive on. The Mercedes drove around the block and parked here again. 

- We called parking enforcement. We always do.

- The guy in the Mercedes doesn't seem to care much about paying a fine. What's that car cost? $100,000? $200,000? He probably owns stock in your company.  How's my refund coming?

- Sign here. That is one dollar., 25 cents, 25 cents, 25 cents, 10 cents, and five. Happy now?

- Sure. I win. 

- Have a nice day.

(from Beverly Hills Stories)

Some Plain Words About Evil

(From Beverly Hills Stories)

- Can you do me a favor?
- I'll try.
- I was told there's a car paid for in my name at Hollywood Honda. All I have to do is pick it up.
- Who told you that?
- A man on the street.
- Someone you asked for money?
- Yes. I see him every day.
- Does he know your name?
- I don't know.
- Did you tell him your name? I don't know your name.
- Can you look up the phone number anyway?
- Sure. Come to Starbucks with me for the wifi.
- Don't you have a phone?
- I told you last time I'm the poorest man in Beverly Hills.
- Are you still writing? Doesn't anyone pay you?
- No. Why should they?
- You just have to ask. That's how I got the car.
- "How you got the car." You really think there's a car waiting for you?
- You are the one who told me to ask for things.
- I remember. I said as long as you were going to spend all day standing on the street you'd be better off asking for a car than a couple of bucks. So you actually did it. I'm impressed.
- You should try it yourself. Your writing can't be that bad. What are you writing about anyway?
- Today? I'll write about evil.
- Do you think the man who told me he bought a car for me is evil?
- Should I give you my short lecture on evil? Or do you have to work?
- So many people ask for money in Beverly Hills. I make two dollars an hour. When I get two dollars I go into Rite Aid and buy a two dollar beer. I end up with nothing.
- I see. That's how you got that red face.
- Don't make fun of me.
- I wouldn't dare. So you don't have any money then?
- I have twenty dollars. I was walking in the alley way looking in the garbage containers and two guys from a reality show paid me.
- For what?
- To be pepper sprayed. I wouldn't let them spray me on the face.
- Good for you. The BattleCam* people the next street over, on Canon, right?
- Yes.
- We're on topic, then. Evil. Ever thought what evil is?
- No.
- I'll tell you. Evil is acting against our own good nature and being rewarded for it by the group we participate in.
- Is that the kind of thing you write?
- You see why I don't have a car.
- But you live somewhere. Where do you live? In Beverly Hills?
- With the Guru.
- Who?
- Another time.
- What about all the crazy psychopaths out there? How are they evil?
- They construct a group in imagination in which their role is the most powerful. If you kill someone the question of whose role is more powerful has be decided. Now this is where things become interesting. If we can blame people for actions only for which they are individually responsible we can never blame people for evil. They are never responsible, by definition. Evil is being dictated to by a group.
- Then what are we supposed to do?
- In theory, understand evil and be sure we don't act against ourselves for the sake of conformity to our group. In practice we can't do much of anything.
- Why not?
- Because every time we buy or sell something and as buyer and seller try to get the better of each other we commit evil. We deny our natural good natured wish to like and cooperate for the sake of advantage from trading according to group defined rules.
- I like your idea. We aren't violent when we buy and sell things but we're evil anyways. I've always thought something was wrong. You don't think there's a car in my name at Hollywood Honda? You think the man was just being evil? Should I give up hope?
- Well I'm the one who said ask for a car. We can't accept the evil people do, we can't blame them for it, all we can do is try to be ourselves.

Further Reading: 
Three Evils
The Future Of Evil
_______________
* BattleCam Kid

Robots At The Market

- Want your check-out at Rite-Aid to be more interesting? Leave the machine. Come with me.
- Where?
- To the register. Come on. I'm going to ask a question.
- Please, M'dame, wait behind the white line.
- Don't mind her. She's my audience.
- Rite Aid card?
- First I want you to do something for me: Prove You Are Not A Robot.
- What?
- You know how sometimes when you try to sign into a social media account a box appears ordering you to "prove you are not a robot? Have you ever stopped to think that it is a robot asking you to prove you are not a robot? And do you realize that you prove you are not a robot by acting exactly like a robot, copying a meaningless series of numbers and letters? So I ask you, a mere human being asking a human being, prove you are not a robot, by acting like a human being.  Notice her silence, her confusion.
- How is she supposed to prove she's human?
- Being confused is a good start. You can get back in line now. No. Stick around. I asked this stupid question because I've just come from Trader Joes, across the street. That's the market owned by a German conglomerate that employs Latin Americans to pretend to be South Sea Islanders. I returned a stale loaf of bread I'd just bought, was told by the cashier to see the manager, who gave me a voucher and sent me back to the cashier, who rang a bell calling the manager back to approve the voucher. I asked the cashier if she didn't think this was a little more complicated than necessary, and asked why they stopped allowing cashiers to take returns.

- We never took returns.
- How long have you worked here?
- Three and a half years.
- Well, in that time I've been given refunds many times by cashiers.
- That has never been our policy.
- Are you saying that I've imagined it happening?
- Is there anything else I can do for you?
- We can't both be right. Tell me which of us is right. Do that for me.
- Enjoy the rest of your day.

A while back there was a famous experiment in which a human being asked questions and both a human being and several computers responded. One computer was so good it was chosen as more human than the human. Do you how it was programmed?
- How?
- By having a memory filled with actual human conversations. When in the experiment a human asked a question, the program found that question or similar one in its memory and gave the corresponding recorded human response. Because of stage fright, or the recorded conversations the computer used were exceedingly human, or some other factor, human answerers couldn't come up to the standard of the recorded conversations.
- The girl at Trader Joes was doing what the winning computer did, pulling up response to frequently asked questions?
- Yes. And do you know what is even more interesting?
- What?
- I'm sure she judged her responses more human than mine.

Inequalities

Godard in the 60s, with Anna Karina

1. 

Film Director Jean-Luc Godard's solution to Europe's financial crisis: 

The Greeks gave us logic. We owe them for that. It was Aristotle who came up with the big 'therefore'. As in, 'You don't love me any more, therefore . . . ' Or, 'I found you in bed with another man, therefore . . . ' We use this word millions of times, to make our most important decisions. It's about time we started paying for it. "If every time we use the word therefore, we have to pay 10 euros to Greece, the crisis will be over in one day, and the Greeks will not have to sell the Parthenon to the Germans. We have the technology to track down all those therefores on Google. We can even bill people by iPhone. Every time Angela Merkel tells the Greeks we lent you all this money, therefore you must pay us back with interest, she must therefore first pay them their royalties.

2.

From 'The Black Book' by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk:

It was not chance that determined which world had the upper hand or how long its dominance lasted, it was logic. In "any given historical period," the winning side was that which succeeded in seeing the world as a mysterious place awash with secrets and double meanings. Whereas the side that saw the world as a simple place, devoid of mystery and ambiguity, was doomed to defeat and its inevitable consequence, slavery.

The novel's authoritative source, F.M. Ucuncu writing in The Mystery Of Letters And The Loss Of Mystery, continues:

Their existed in both the Eastern and Western traditions the idea of a center hidden from the world: the idea in ancient Greek philosophy, the deity in Neoplatonic Christianity, the Hindu's nirvana, Attar's simurgh, Rumi's beloved, the Harufi's secret treasure, Kant's neumenon, the detective novel's culprit. A civilization that lost its notion of such a center could not help but go out of kilter.

3.

- Is freedom the right to use property as you wish, or something else?
- Like what?
- To do something worth doing, for example. The problems with freedom defined as the right to dispose of property is that it cannot be a moral principle.
- Why not?
- Moral principles are universal. What applies to you also must apply to me. But if you own everything and I nothing, and you offer me food in exchange for being your slave, I cannot reasonably accept the property right you claim. You'll need threat of force to compel my acceptance. That's the first problem.
- What's the second?
- Once property is unequally distributed, it tends to get more unequal. Wealth is used to influence the government to lower taxes, allow speculation and permit monopolies to be formed. To stop this from happening requires a very intrusive government.*
- Which limits property rights!
- Exactly.
- What's the alternative?
- To make a starting point where the right to property leaves off: equal distribution of wealth. Make this a principle which, unlike the right to property, is universal, so qualifies as an ethical principle.
- But what difference does that make to end with an ethical principle or begin with one?
- When you end with the principle, you have built on the threat of violence a coercive state that enforces the principle by threat of violence.
- When it is possible simply to begin with the ethical principle which can potentially be universally agreed to. That's an example of what you mean the other kind of freedom, to do something worth while.
- We choose between two conceptions of freedom, one founded on the threat of force, the other on an idea of what is a good way to live.

4.

From 'The Black Book' by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk:

The sleepwalkers passing by on the pavement had lost all memory of this second realm, lost all knowledge of its mysteries, so they were forced to subsist on the shallow certainties of the first world - they were like people who, having lost all knowledge of love, brotherhood, and heroism, found solace in the movies that championed those virtues.

________________
* Why lessen income inequality? Bribery of the government, speculation, and monopoly result in the poor having less money to buy things and the rich not investing in producing new things. A vicious cycle results of more unemployment, lower sales, reduced production. For the rich economic depressions of low production and consumption are intervals of profit taking. The market is cleared as small businesses fail, and foreclosed property may be cheaply acquired. With this profit taking comes a danger of social revolution. Though social disruption, like economic disruption, can also be a period of opportunity, with social repression creating market openings by making business hazardous to all those without money to buy the protection of the forces of order, when those who bribe the government consider this too risky, for the time being to be avoided, they take measures to lessen income inequality. Further Reading: Bloomberg Reports Wall Street Speculators Buying Up Foreclosed Houses Lost In Crash They Caused

Freedom & Property

- Is freedom the right to use property as you wish, or something else?
- Like what?
- To do something worth doing, for example. The problems with freedom defined as the right to dispose of property is that it cannot be a moral principle.
- Why not?
- Moral principles are universal. What applies to you also must apply to me. But if you own everything and I nothing, and you offer me food in exchange for being your slave, I cannot reasonably accept the property right you claim. You'll need threat of force to compel my acceptance. That's the first problem.
- What's the second?
- Once property is unequally distributed, it tends to get more unequal. Wealth is used to influence the government to lower taxes, allow speculation and permit monopolies to be formed. To stop this from happening requires a very intrusive government.*
- Which limits property rights!
- Exactly.
- What's the alternative?
- To make a starting point where the right to property leaves off: equal distribution of wealth. Make this a principle which, unlike the right to property, is universal, so qualifies as an ethical principle.
- But what difference does that make to end with an ethical principle or begin with one?
- When you end with the principle, you have built on the threat of violence a coercive state that enforces the principle by threat of violence.
- When it is possible simply to begin with the ethical principle which can potentially be universally agreed to. That's an example of what you mean the other kind of freedom, to do something worth while.
- We choose between two conceptions of freedom, one founded on the threat of force, the other on an idea of what is a good way to live.

_______________

* Why lessen income inequality? Bribery of the government, speculation, and monopoly result in the poor having less money to buy things and the rich not investing in producing new things. A vicious cycle results of more unemployment, lower sales, reduced production. For the rich economic depressions of low production and consumption are intervals of profit taking. The market is cleared as small businesses fail, and foreclosed property may be cheaply acquired. With this profit taking comes a danger of social revolution. Though social disruption, like economic disruption, can also be a period of opportunity, with social repression creating market openings by making business hazardous to all those without money to buy the protection of the forces of order, when those who bribe the government consider this too risky, for the time being to be avoided, they take measures to lessen income inequality. (Further Reading: Bloomberg Reports Wall Street Speculators Buying Up Foreclosed Houses Lost In Crash They Caused)

Conspiracy In Beverly Hills

  

(from Beverly Hills Stories)

- Look at that thing. The new Center For The Performing Arts.
- Looks like a giant cardboard box.
- Paid for by the publisher of TV Guide.
- The box that held the garbage he dumped on the American people.
- Yes. See the cracks? Ventilation for the air conditioning equipment, the architect claims, but I think it is to taunt all the street sleepers in Beverly Hills who spend their days at the library here next door. The city will give them a box to sleep in, allow them to hang out here, but they shouldn't get too warm and comfortable.
- You have an explanation for everything.
- Sure, what else am I to do?
- You're at a library. You could read books.
- I'm at what's called a public library. You know, we are educated to go out in public and expect that something will happen, something unanticipated. The people we meet will bring out surprises in our lives. That's over. Now when we go in public we find that nothing surprising happens. Everyone, however much they've grown up to expect something good and new from meeting each other now, afraid of losing their livelihood follows strict rules of conduct, not only in work, but in private life too.
- I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.
- Ever talk to any of the hundreds that live on the street in our beautiful city of Beverly Hills?
- I've tried.
- Then maybe you found out that most have families, often wealthy families. They're street wanderers because the public economic principle of acting as if we're enemies who're making deals with each other, giving each other jobs buying and selling things to each other, has invaded family life. The people on the street came out losers in deals, didn't correctly reinvest profit, had no marketable services, so were simply ejected from their families.*
- They're mostly crazy.
- Made crazy then by the economic principle of everyone being everyone's enemy but pretending to be friends, made crazy by being the least practical of people put in circumstances that even the most practical couldn't handle.
- They're always talking of conspiracies.
- There is a conspiracy against them, but it's not secret. The people who profit most by the endless buying and selling things and renting ourselves as slaves to each other meet publicly at published times and places. The mystery is not in the actual planning to direct this system to profit the people who are meeting; the mystery is the question why, when we continue to go into public feeling anything is possible from each other, that is no longer true.
- We believe in conspiracies because we can't face up to the fact our public life is gone.
- Yes. We can't communicate to each other not only because we're all afraid for our lives and can't relax for a moment from buying and selling and renting each other out to each other, but also because the former public meeting places have become controlled by the people who openly conspire at published times and places. You can write and publish messages and be read and heard by people like yourself who already think pretty much like you do, but the newspapers, magazines, electronic broadcasting, which at one time had a more general audience are now owned by the publicly conspiring and only publish announcements of terrifying events causes for which are never investigated. Because the stories are never followed up they dull the audience into thinking that, since despite continual bad news the world doesn't end, nothing really has to be done after all.
- A conspiracy theorist went to the Los Angeles Airport this weekend and opened fire on federal security agents. What do you think about that?
- In the 19th century anarchists, despairing from the loss of public life, threw themselves into a campaign to assassinate representatives of power.
- And what happened?
- The Russian revolution.

Continued at Somebody Out There Likes You
________________
* A Big Mistake

Before Christmas In Bangkok

First stop on my trip of family reconciliation is to the house in Bangkok of an Israeli pornographer. Or internet entrepreneur. Or millionaire. My brother who is his friend and occasional employee admires his acumen, his finding the way, the trick discovering huge economies of scale, establishing a monopoly that executed with application will rain down the money. That all this is with pornography not produced by him, but drawn out of nowhere into the internet vortex created by genius, makes it comfortably distant.

I've just got off the plane from Los Angeles. Half brother not seen for 17 years meets me at the airport, tells me our first stop will be to the house of his Israeli friend, living in Thailand establishing residency to avoid paying his country's taxes. He has the distinction of living in apartment that has a balcony swimming pool high up in the sky.

Brother introduces me. The Israeli can't get over the fact that it was true after all, my Asian appearing brother was half Jewish, there were out there many of us Jewish brothers. After a short conversation, the Israeli sums me up as a spiritual sort of guy, an intellectual, and says there's room in the world for people like me too. Everything is not about money. I ask him if he thinks there's anything wrong with his making money from pornography.

Why? It's a choice, he answers. No one forces anyone to watch it, or to make it. In my weeks in Thailand I would hear this a lot when I asked about the ever present prostitution, not a business here, almost a nationality.

I mention an Italian watch dealer I knew in Budapest, an afficionado of prostitutes, who told me he believed the girls liked him, enjoyed themselves. The Israeli says I am wrong to be skeptical, the girls in Thailand like him, he knows it. They'd like me too, I have come to the right place, after, so he's heard, leaving my wife behind in Los Angeles.

Witnessing such delusion in Thailand is enough to make me a Buddhist.

We talk briefly about my Hungarian wife, anti-Semitism in her country. I have just read something in Fitzgerald's 'Beautiful and the Damned':

Down in a tall busy street he read a dozen Jewish names on a line of stores; in the door of each stood a dark little man watching the passers from intent eyes--eyes gleaming with suspicion, with pride, with clarity, with cupidity, with comprehension. New York--he could not dissociate it now from the slow, upward creep of this people--the little stores, growing, expanding, consolidating, moving, watched over with hawk's eyes and a bee's attention to detail--they slathered out on all sides. It was impressive--in perspective it was tremendous.

Slathered out on all sides: a good description of the world wide web of pornography.

The Israeli has young children, his wife publishes a magazine for expatriate mothers. He takes his little girl on his lap, she asks him when Santa is coming. There's no Santa, he says. Yes there is, she insists. No, no Santa. There is! There is! There is!

Better she learns early, he explains to us.

An Old Man & The Laws

Leo Strauss

(from Beverly Hills Stories)

- What's wrong?

- I've been fighting with a bad mood. Maybe caused by reading Plato's 'The Laws', the long dialog he wrote in his old age in which an old man specifies humorlessly the best practical form of government for a new colony. It is about 700 pages Plato seems to kept himself continuously in a bad mood to write.

- Tell me about it.

- Unlike the city Plato imagines in 'The Republic'*, this one would not have property held in common. It would be overtly religious, with four classes unequal in property ownership, and would have a fixed number of lots for a fixed number of citizens. Only one male descendent could inherit the lot, and if no male born and surviving one would have to be adopted.

- Like primogenitor in feudal times.

- Yes. It is a property arrangement meant to be stable, and unlike in 'The Republic', to respect individual desires in private life, at least the life of private ownership of property. Private feelings for other people however are not respected in the arrangement, as even if you were lucky enough to be a citizen - slaves and merchants were not - only one of your male children could become a citizen, and your female children would have to marry a citizen to acquire the privileges of citizenship.

- I think I like our society better.

- Well, the idea expressed that only one aspect of private life - property - would be respected in the political arrangements is fascinating to encounter in our times, because it is exactly the nature of our present political arrangements. Rules of property are legislated to be un-challengeable and citizens taught to consider it sacrelige to change them. For example, it is out of the question to consider application of anarchist rules of property (no one may be employed by another, no possession of property without use). On the other hand, no regular arrangements are made to respect personal relations of friendship or love. Like in our present society, if economic conditions demand then your own children are left to be propertyless, with this unquestionably assumed to be fair and right.

- Not by everyone.

- By those it is accepted by the arrangement is religiously maintained: the religious element is the sense of property relations being unquestionable, as if dictated by god as a certain and permanent form of justice. 

- I know you. Displaying your bad mood is the beginning of a talk. Maybe it was the same for Plato, his thousand page bad mood. Am I right? I'm right.

- Though an old man himself when he wrote 'The Laws', and writing mostly words voiced by a humorless old man, Plato was not lapsing into senility.  He was practicing what the philosopher Leo Strauss called esoteric writing, apparently saying one thing but meaning another: expressing the unsuitability of a society based only on religion and property by showing how that building would look when rigorously executed: joyless and fundamentally unjust. Hiding his secret message in plain sight, conceivably even laughing at the thoroughgoing boldness of his own trick, Plato goes to the extreme of having his old man propose the very dialog of dull words we are reading as a model of how citizens should speak with each other.**

* See How To Read Plato's Republic
**Critics of  'The Laws' are sensible of a want of point in the dialogue and a general inferiority in the ideas, plan, manners, and style. They miss the poetical flow, the dramatic verisimilitude, the life and variety of the characters, the dialectic subtlety, the Attic purity, the luminous order, the exquisite urbanity; instead of which they find tautology, obscurity, self-sufficiency, sermonizing, rhetorical declamation, pedantry, egotism, uncouth forms of sentences, and peculiarities in the use of words and idioms. They are unable to discover any unity in the patched, irregular structure. The speculative element both in government and education is superseded by a narrow economical or religious vein. The grace and cheerfulness of Athenian life have disappeared; and a spirit of moroseness and religious intolerance has taken their place. The charm of youth is no longer there; the mannerism of age makes itself unpleasantly felt. The connection is often imperfect; and there is a want of arrangement, exhibited especially in the enumeration of the laws towards the end of the work. The Laws are full of flaws and repetitions. The Greek is in places very ungrammatical and intractable. A cynical levity is displayed in some passages, and a tone of disappointment and lamentation over human things in others. The critics seem also to observe in them bad imitations of thoughts which are better expressed in Plato's other writings. (Benjamin Jowett)

Another Japanese Professor

1.

- Another Japanese Professor?*
- They seem to be turning up everywhere. This one was researching the Japanese massacre of Chinese that took place in 1938. Japanese researchers, himself included, were being told by indignant Chinese that Japanese work showed national bias. They weren't objective.
- And he said he could be objective?
- No. He was smarter than that. He challenged the expectation of objectivity. He spoke of historians as doing what philosophers of science say natural scientists do: have a consensus of what sort of theories are important to be pursued, the theories lead to hypotheses, which are tested by experiment. The facts that are revealed by experiment are only those that the selected theory and hypotheses lead to being looked for. In the same way, the documents historians work with are the result of selection, by the mere fact of their survival when others didn't survive, and by the interests and abilities of those responsible for producing the documents.
- Then there is no difference between the social and natural sciences?
- There is a big difference. Social sciences consistently fail to come up with theories that can survive even the beginnings of testing. That is an important experimental result in itself.
- The failure?
- Yes. Social sciences like history, economics, sociology pretend that science is about collecting facts, "objects" of perception. Facts, unlike theories and hypotheses, have a right to equal treatment, unbiased by nationality. In exactly the same way exchange of property exclusively for profit and biological change by chance are supposed to lead to economic prosperity and evolution of species, objects of history are all thought to be equivalent and all together somehow can be assembled into historical conclusions.
- Give me an example.
- The example the Professor gave was the recent book The Rape Of Nanking, criticized for suggesting Japanese isolation and nationalism as causes of the massacre. It was obvious that there was no way of telling, lacking experiments with people social science cannot do, if those Japanese national characteristics were direct causes, contributing causes, or no causes at all.
- The professor's idea was that we shouldn't imagine there were any objective facts that everyone could agree on but we should work to reach conditional consensus.
- Yes. The social science demand for objectivity, to pretend documents arise from chance or mechanical processes, an objectivity that has no place in the practice of natural science supposedly its model, reflects the influences of politics.
- How?
- Take our own country. We fight wars, crash our economy. What for? No one knows. It's not a secret, but no one is right. We have to be objective. Some say this, some say that. Everyone has a special interest to promote. Decisions are made, like trades in free market economics or adaptation in evolution, seemingly coming out of nowhere and going nowhere. There can be no progression of theory, hypothesis, experiment, new theory. One fashion replaces another. Is it really true that supporting mass murdering dictators is good for our own country? Is it really true that doing whatever makes more money for the rich also benefits everyone else? All we know is we say so now. And no one can tell us we have no right to our view.

2.

- In Darwin's theory of evolution individual organisms randomly change. In free market economics trades are impersonal, done exclusively for profit.** In the generally accepted view of how science works, researchers begin with theory which suggests hypotheses that are tested by experiment. Which theories are to be tested is decided by consensus between researchers. In order for this process to work, to produce new understanding, consensus has to be rooted in agreement on, intuition of what kind of research allows the process itself to keep moving forward.

- Consensus, when isolated from understanding of how science progresses, gives us theories like evolution and free market economics.

- Gives us the entire realm of social sciences which claim to be seeking "objectivity", looking for facts independent of theory, gives us theories which reject both personal bias and the consensus of scientific research. In the social sciences, facts are supposed to suddenly fall into patterns of meaning, one after another, like evolution appears out of chance mutation, like economic prosperity develops out of impersonal trades for profit.

- The Darwinians, the free market economists, the objective historians of social life all believe they are doing science. If their sciences are not real science, if they don't work, don't lead to new understanding, why are they still around?

- They are fundamental to our education. We are taught to assume our social habits, our way of trading with each other, our very bodies are as they are by chance. Who we marry then divorce, who we cheat in trade, who we leave behind in the struggle for existence is arbitrary, totally without meaning.

- So we don't cooperate. And the people doing the education, cooperating with each other in perfecting our education, get what they want. What do they want? 

- Money and power, what else?

* Japanese Professor Of Employment Meets His Nemesis
** Monsters

You Should Have Paid Her

 Vaci Street, Budapest

- My apartment is just there. Do you want to go up and rape my girlfriend? I'll drug her first.

- Some other time.

- You're not interested?

- Am I supposed to believe you?

- We control this whole street. Tourists think they are in civilization...

- And they go to the strip bar with you and find out how wrong they are.

- How do you know?

- I've been here a long time.

- You have. I remember you. What do you do here?

- Had a wife once from this part of the world.

- What happened to her?

- She's off on her adventures.

- What kind of adventures?

- Something like yours. Except men don't drug her, she drugs them.

- What drug does she use?

- Her beauty.

- Got a picture of her?

- At the hotel.

- Which hotel do you stay at?

- Give the Budapest mafia my address?

- There are many mafias here. Are you sure you're not a criminal?

- Like you?

- I'm a criminal. I admit it. Where are you coming from now? It's after midnight.

- The opera house.

- You go to the opera?

- I have been going all this week. A singer friend gets me in back stage.

- Why?

- Why what?

- Does he let you see the operas for free.

- At home I'm considered a criminal, here I'm considered, I don't know, romantic.

- I thought so! You are a criminal.

- A romantic.

- You don't want to meet my girlfriend?

- No.

- Do you have a girlfriend?

- I did, for a couple of weeks after I arrived.

- How old?

- Nineteen.

- And you are, twenty-five years older?

- Something like that.

- Did you take her to the hotel? Where is it?

- I'm not telling you.

- I like young girls too. Did you pay her?

- No.

- What was the attraction then?

- I'm a romantic character who goes backstage at the opera.

- You're lucky. What happened with the girl?

- She lost interest.

- You should have paid her.

 From Beatrix & Rex (a novel)