Friday, May 11, 2012

Go Find Better Friends

- What's wrong?
- These students I've been staying with. They're making me sick.
- How?
- Do you know neo-liberalism?
- I think so. What exactly is it?
- It's something like Marxism. It says, this is god's world. It's getting better. Or it's getting worse, because we are ignorantly or perversely stopping the natural process of getting better. For Marxism, it was a transformation of one kind of economic relation to another, capitalism to communism. For neo-liberalism, it is the natural development of the free market.
- I take it you don't agree.
- I don't. People are attracted to these kinds of ideas because they've been damaged, and following these ideas they are kept unaware of it.
- What do you mean?
- People adapt to the expectations to other people, don't know what is really good or bad from their own experience. They don't make their own choices in anything important. They chose their diversions, their entertainments. The chose each other as entertainments and diversions.
- Diverting themselves from what exactly?
- The unpleasant truth that in everything important they do what other people want.
- You really believe that?
- Yes.
- What's it have to do with Marxism?
- Marxism and neo-liberalism settle the question of good and bad. Good is certain social and political arrangements: the free market, or the transition from capitalism to communism. And those political arrangements on their own, without need of human choice of direction, move towards improvement, get better. Humans don't need to use personal experience to make social arrangements better, all they have to do is make the automatic work in progress more efficient. This is a technical question perfectly suited to people who have experience only with this kind of professional, specialized impersonal decision making.
- I see.
- When the Soviet Union wanted to murder there wasn't any question of good or bad, only the question, would like action make the transition to communism more efficient.
- What's the alternative?
- Making the goal human happiness, not particular schemes of social relations.
- For example?
- Love, freedom, creativity.
- Ok.
- When these are the good things you want to have, and the government says it wants to murder, torture, operate secret prisons, perform secret abductions, bypass the legal process, you ask whether these actions, which may or may not be efficient as means, lead to achieving the actual ends aimed at, freedom, love, creativity. And the answer in the case of Marxism, neo liberalism is obviously they do not. But as I said, when the end you seek is assumed to be already achieved, and getting better on its own in existing social arrangements, good and bad is an issued settled in advance.
- You're saying that only when the end we aim at is general human behavior, not specific social relations, can the means we use to obtain that end be held to any standard of human behavior at all?
- That is exactly what I am saying.
- How does this relate to the students?
- Good and bad do not enter into their lives. It is all settled by the rules they follow in a thoughtless, happy go lucky way. They didn't care about me, they didn't care about themselves. Whatever happened, that was just the way the world was arranged.
- They were unkind. Heartless. Made you lose hope.
- Yes.
- You shouldn't stay with them. Even if you have no other place. It's wrong. You have to trust.
- Trust who? Trust what?
- You'll find something better. You'll find better people.
- Even in this neo-liberal world?
- Yes. You said it yourself. Neo-liberalism is not something new. It's just another religion. Go find better friends.