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_ _ | | | -- By JeffreySchatz - 26 Feb 2010 | |
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> | Work in Progress | | | Introduction | |
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< | It pleases us to celebrate the "developed world" as a testament to the success of human freedom. We like to think of ourselves as in a profoundly better and freer place than our fellow humans of the past and present who lived and live under oppressive, iron-fisted governments. However, this freedom is largely illusory. The establishment of the "free" market economy merely replaced the iron fist with an invisible one. Our governments are less actively oppressive not because the human desire to maintain stability has declined, but because this desire is sufficiently fulfilled by the Invisible Fist. | >
> | When I look back at my first attempt at this paper, I see a great deal of anxiety. I was really frightened by the prospect of a law firm career which would make me miserable and be a waste of my hard-earned law license. However, rather than try to address this fear, I tried to argue that the marketplace, through the invisible fist, was forcing me to choose between poverty and misery. I think it was easier to blame the world for causing my anxiety than it was to accept that I was the true source of it. | | | | |
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< | Humans are hostile to change | | | | |
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< | People are fundamentally hostile to change providing their current situation is tolerable. This sentiment has discernible biological roots. In the natural state, the individual's only real goal is survival. If their current strategy accomplishes this goal, it would be evolutionarily disadvantageous to change strategies and risk failure. In this way, evolution programmed people to be resistant to change. | >
> | A little background | | | | |
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< | This is pop
sociobiology. Maybe it is true, maybe it isn't. You've given no
evidence whatever, and I am not credulous. If you want to see a more
thoughtful and complex Darwinian approach to the biological sources
of social change, you should look at Frank Sulloway's extraordinary
book Born to Rebel. | >
> | Growing up, there were several adults I was close to who did not enjoy their careers. They were relatively happy people, but their happiness was very much "in spite of" rather than "because of" their work. This was true despite the fact that at least one of them was fairly successful from an objective viewpoint. I knew I didn't want to be like that. I promised myself throughout high school that I would try not to fall into the trap of engaging in a career which, while lucrative and easy to break into, would result in me being someone who can only like their life despite their job. So I went to college as a Latin major because I found the subject interesting, and didn't care when people said it wouldn't be "useful." But things change, and during my junior year I started to get nervous about what I was going to do on the other side of graduation. So I decided to give my resume to some of the banks who were coming to campus to interview for summer positions. According to many of my friends, these institutions were the greatest things in the world. If you worked their for the summer and didn't screw up, you would be given an offer for full time employment after graduation. From there, a lifetime of making tons of money awaited you. So I went to some interviews even though I still had no idea what these institutions actually did, and got a summer job. It was by far the worst summer of my life. I don't think I'm a lazy person, but I just can't be happy working around the clock on things I neither care about nor understand. One night at 4:30AM, I promised myself that after my ten weeks was up, I was saying goodbye to the investment banking world. But things change, and once I was back on campus with a job offer in hand, this was an easy promise to break. I didn't have any ideas about what other kind of jobs to pursue and nothing seemed as if it would be so lucrative in the short term. Most importantly, I really liked being the "guy with the impressive job." I was worried about going back to something I hated, but felt it was too good of an opportunity to give up. That last sentence seems like a blatant contradiction, but it is literally the best description of my thought process at the time. But things change, and the bank found itself the victim of an impressive collapse while I was on Spring Break my senior year. I got a job at an anti-hunger organization, and | | | | |
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< | In society, this hostility to change becomes directed at the actions of other individuals as well. In society, an individual is affected by the actions of others. One cannot hope to maintain the stability of one's own lifestyle in the face of changes by others. Thus, ever since societies were created, there have been systems (governments, rulers, etc.) in place to ensure this stability. | | | | |
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< | As an account of the
origins of power, this is nonsense. It's a short form of the social
contract myth. | | | | |
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< | The Iron Fist: One way to ensure stability | >
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| | | From early societies until quite recently, rulers ensured conformity to the status quo with an iron fist. Rulers are naturally even more anti-change than the people as a whole because they are the ones deriving the greatest benefit from the current system. This is why governments in early societies had a fanatical obsession with deterring changes. The Spartan law criminalizing lyres with too many strings was less the exception than the rule. | |
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< | It never makes sense to
speak of anything about Sparta as the rule rather than the exception:
Sparta was an exception to almost every rule of ancient society. And
your information about the law criminalizing lyres is unattested
here, and probably false. Cicero introduced the story of Spartan
conservatism in music in a comment in the Laws, (2.39) with the
usual mechanism by which he introduces a useful fable: "If it be true
that the Spartans, ..." He was speaking 300 years after a supposed
event (the cutting of all the strings above seven from the lyre of
Timotheos, as a protest against new musical forms), for which there
is no earlier evidence. Thereafter, Plutarch and others retold the
story, but there is no reason to believe that they had any direct
information about something that was said to have happened 500 years
earlier. You don't have any evidence to offer that Timotheos' lyre
was vandalized, much less that it was as a result of a general
criminal law, much less that this supposed law was characteristic of
Spartan law, about which you don't know anything much, much less that
this supposedly characteristic Spartan law demonstrates a "rule"
about societies. This is just sloppiness masquerading as erudition.
For some actual information, see Martha Maas, "Polychordae and the
Fourth Century Lyre," in the Journal of Musicology,
1992.
Nor did this anti-change obsession fade much with time. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was banned by his country (arguably one of the "freer" states of the time period) due to its criticism of the dominant theory of mercantilism.
This is utter nonsense.
You provide no citation and you did not check. There was no
censorship or book-banning in the United Kingdom in 1776. The
Wealth of Nations was an enormous publishing success, both at first
and afterward. Wherever this tale came from, you cannot trust the
source. That's one obvious falsity and one unverifiable factual
claim based on careless use of sources within two sentences. A
careful reader will now have acquired sufficient doubt about your
reliability to stop reading. | | | | |
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< | In retrospect, this was fairly ironic, as the Invisible Hand that Mr. Smith identified proved able to stabilize society just as well as the iron fist. | >
> | | | | The Invisible Fist: A new way to do the same thing |
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