Another,

Peripatetic Philosopher’s Conversation with Himself

SECOND DIALECTIC - ECONOMICS

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 21, 2015

 Peripatetic Philosopher (PP) “As hard as you are on religion, you seem equally hard on economists.  Do you have a thing about matters in general, or are you just naturally angry about everything?”

Himself (HS) “I’ll attempt to answer the last part of your question first.  No, I’m not angry.  I’m too old for that.  I don’t have the energy.  A quarter century ago that might have been true, but now I tend to be only sad. 

“We have gravitated to a senseless dichotomy in government with Democrats chirping, “Black lives matter” to Republicans chirping, “Billionaire lives matter.”  Neither group is monolithic, but you would think they were from the rhetoric.  The deep divide in the American people is however true.   

“Meanwhile, economists operate as if a third party interventionist with neither side listening to anyone.  Since the two parties cannot agree on what are the major domestic and foreign affairs issues, they talk past each other with solutions that resonate with neither side. 

“Economists in the pristine sanctuary of their analytics and complex algorithms, earn Nobel Prizes for Economics seemingly every year.  Once they do, they write books that commoners read but the patrician class ignores, which includes politicians.  Nothing changes.  

“Nearly 200 years ago, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville noted the insular character of the American people, and inclination to infighting in his classic study, Democracy in America (1834).  He made specific reference to encroaching modernity with its centralization of authority and growing bureaucratization to moral relativism. 

“Remember this was the Age of Jackson (1829-1837).  President Andrew Jackson used the foil of “Executive Order” and "Executive Privilege" to neutralize and emasculate the Judicial and Legislative Branches of Government.  Presidents ever since have used Congress as a whipping boy with presidential vetoes, including the White House's current occupant, President Barak Obama.     

“Small wonder that three quarters of the American electorate have little use for Congress, or little idea what the Judicial Branch does.  While the electorate swirls in political correctness, Congress treats optimism as if theology and pessimism as if an incurable disease.  

"With Congress acting as a “toothless tiger,” is it any wonder that it absorbs a cascade of inanities without a modicum of push back?  That is the reason for my sadness.”

(PP) “This is not helpful.  I’m not interested in your sadness.  God!  You can be boring!  I can boil your response down to two words, ‘collective dysfunction.’ 

“So, we’re going to hell in a hand basket, as if nobody has said that before.  Do you think showing you know a little history, and have a cutting way of denigrating the distinguished profession of economics changes anything? 

“Of course you don't.  You’re just blowing hot air.  People matter.  You’re always saying that.  Where are people in this discourse?”

(HS) “Em! Where are the people?  That is a good question.

“When I look about me, I see people running faster and faster, while remaining in place, deluding themselves that they are acolytes of progress, which is everyone’s favorite word, I could be amused but am instead saddened. 

“Do I have the answer?  No.  Do I understand the problem?  Perhaps not.  Then why do I persist?  For one, I have lived too long to go quietly into the sunset, for another, it is not in my temperament. 

“At one time, when I was young, in the 1940s and 1950s, there was some gravitas to people.  It was a period of quiet, unobtrusive, unspoken grace.  You could feel it, experience it, and know that it was real if you couldn’t define it.  Alas, it was taken for granted as if native to our American character and therefore could not be extinguished.   

“Danger was in the air.  Japan had attacked the naval station in Honolulu in Hawaii, ships were sunk, nearly 3,000 American sailors and soldiers killed.  One of my favorite cousins was in the navy on a repair ships next to the USS Arizona, which was sunk with all of its crew.  My cousin broke his back but survived. 

“As a boy not yet a teenager, older boys coached and counseled us over at the courthouse diamond where we played baseball, basketball and football.  These older boys could have dominated us, but they didn’t.  They could have embarrassed us, but they didn’t.  They instead helped us to get better. 

“When they turned eighteen, they all went into military service.  They didn’t avoid that responsibility.  Nor did they complain at the sacrifice.  This may read like idealism in steroids, but it is true.  It is one of the reasons I wrote In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003). 

“Perhaps I am nostalgic for those halcyon days when our parents worked hard in factories or on the railroad or went off into the military in support of the war effort.  Kids my age were mainly on their own in a kind of Darwinian jungle which was our combat zone as playground. 

“There were no commendations, no medals of achievement, no championship trophies, although we won several, no parents involved in the coaching, counseling, or even as spectators.  We were on our own, only the best got to play, and the others found other pursuits with philosophical ease as sympathy was not a relevant commodity.

“My courthouse teammates, all working class kids went on to become chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, consultants, executives, medical doctors, Ph.D.’s, lawyers, college professors, high school teachers, college and professional athletes, cross country truck drivers, factory workers, janitors, business owners, and even an author. 

 “Now seemingly everything is self-conscious, self-centered, tactile, superficial, inconsequential and superfluous.  People today bring attention to themselves for no other reason than society has an appetite for such things.  In my day, acting so weird would get little or no attention.  

(PP) “You’re doing it again.  Do you have any idea how self-serving this sounds?  Imagine someone reading this has been molested by a priest, a sister raped, a father in prison, a mother on drugs, or a person looking for work who has no skills?”

(HS) Shrugs.

(PP) ”I didn’t think so.  That is what is wrong with you as a writer.  You sound so frickin pure as if whiter than the driven snow.”

(HS) “But I was just ..”

(PP) “No, you were just showing off.  Admit it, you can’t help yourself.  So, please, get on with this.   Next you’re going to tell me we don’t have a single television drama that doesn’t have blazing guns, car chases, or raging hormones on display.

“We all know you prefer British television dramas to American, that there isn’t an American movie cerebral enough to your satisfaction, that you’re appalled at the pyrotechnics and guns blazing and gender ambiguities in popular fiction and film as proxies for plot, that no comedian much less television situation comedy has a scintilla of humor for you, and that the laugh tracks offend you.”

(HS) Are you through?”

(PP) “Not necessarily.”

(HS) “Well, let me ask you how you think Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Paul Robeson, or Ralph Waldo Emerson would do on stage today with a general audience?  

"These people once packed the house with general audiences, not a select courtier of well-heeled patrons as is the case today.  Today screaming entertainers purporting to be singers, uttering words no one understands, pack the houses.  Everything in entertainment is now psychedelic as if on artificial stimulants.”

(PP) “You’re doing it again, you're preaching.  You skirts the subject, go off on a tangent, then expect me not to notice, me!  Can you believe that?  I see you slipped the Great Negro baritone, Paul Robeson, in this group.  What have you got to say for yourself?”

(HS) “Don’t you see, fluff drives the economy, so fluff was bound to drive entertainment, or is it the other way around?  In any case, economists give it a good push to that fluff with their sanctimonious prattle?

“In my reading on the early Christian Church, I constantly ran into the Roman Empire, its tentacles stretching across the known ancient world. 

“I have visited many of its outposts as far east as Baalbek in Lebanon and Istanbul in Turkey, and as far west as England, France and Spain, the Balkans and Algeria in North Africa, and far north as Macedonia and Greece, and as far south as Egypt.  The telltale Roman relics of coliseums were to be found everywhere.

“It didn’t register when I was experiencing much of this, but continued to reside in my head for some reason.  It now feels like that 1985 film, “Back to the Future” with Michael J. Fox.  With a writer, nothing is lost.”

(PP) “Your point?  I hope somewhere in this side trip there is a point.”

(HS)  “I cannot help but think of today without thinking about yesterday and the Roman Empire.  Rome’s economic foundation was slipping away as well as its security while the Roman Senate was entangled in political irrelevancies.  Meanwhile, sanguine Roman citizens kept right on partying as if nothing had changed.  Sound familiar?

“While our national economy has been sluggish for more than two decades, experiencing a near total economic collapse in 2008, Americans are obsessed with the National Football League, which differs little with gladiators fighting in packed coliseums while the Visigoths and Germanic tribes of the north thundered south to literally obliterate Rome and the Roman Empire from the map.  

"The dreadful ‘Dark Ages’ followed.  Fast forward to now, football fans don’t get enough of the NFL in reality, they have made fantasy football a $billion business.”  

(PP) “Wait!  You’re not answering my question.  Explain what you mean by ‘the Dark Ages.’  Some readers may have no idea what you’re talking about.”

(HS) “’The ‘Dark Middle Ages’ is a term popularized by the writer Petrarch.

“The term emphasized the cultural and economic collapse of Rome in particular and Western Europe in general after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in 476 C.E. This terrible period extended from the 5th through the 13th century.

“It was marked by a period of intellectual darkness between the extinguished ‘light of Rome’ and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century.

"The period was noted for its lack of new Roman literature, contemporary history, or cultural achievement in the arts. It was also noted for its lack of building or industrialization of any significant kind. In other words, a step backward to a more primitive time.

“Knowledge that existed was conscientiously copied by monks in Spanish monasteries and elsewhere in elegant style for posterity, while popular culture became something of a pejorative and charitably did not survive.”

(PP) “As you have predicted for today's popular culture, right?”

(HS) “Indeed. Popular culture today insults rather than uplifts the senses. No, I don’t think in 500 years readers will look on our current age as culturally or economically inspiring.”

(PP) “That cynicism is surfacing again, please explain.”

(HS) “I’ll just make one reference, and let you assume the rest, is that agreeable?”

(PP) “Such as?”

(HS) “The price for gasoline has dropped significantly from its $4.00 per gallon high to about “2.00 now. People could be saving as much as $50 a month or $600 a year on gasoline purchases, alone, in the average household. What do you think most people do with that savings?”

(PP) “I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”

(HS) “They buy more expensive gas, go out and purchase more expensive automobiles that are known gas guzzlers, spend more money eating out, or purchasing items that they want but don’t need. Paradoxically, they spend more than the $600, so have even less relative solvency than before the price of gasoline plummeted.

“This is counter intuitive to what economic textbooks say people will do when a sudden change in economic fortunes occurs. This is another reason I think behavioral economists are out to lunch.”

(PP) “So this is your roundabout way of getting back to the subject. You’re pathetic!”

(HS) “I am simply answering your question, so be patient, please.”

(PP) Shakes his head acquiescing.

(HS) “So, continuing, we are caught in a new form of socioeconomic enslavement that ubiquitously fills all the crevices of our desires.  It is as if the only way we can motivate ourselves is to be in constant debt.

“Consequently, we don’t work for a living.  We work to support a lifestyle because we are afraid to live a living. 

“We are bombarded 24/7 with subliminal marketing stimuli.  A single provocative message whispers silently in our ear like the devil on our shoulder, ‘See it now, have it now, experience it now, hoard it now, for tomorrow it may not be available, then what?’   

“We don’t see the silliness of this because everyone else is caught up in the same normal pathology. 

“To question this foolishness, as is my inclination, is to be seen as a ‘spoilsport,’ ‘pessimist,’ ‘fatalist,’ ‘pathetic introvert,’ ‘dull witted,’ ‘dead to fun,’ and other less generous terms.  Emperors don’t like to be reminded that their motivation is as nakedly apparent as is their behavior.

“Now, we have all sorts of disciplines outside of economics looking at behavior, people subject to the same pathology of normalcy such as practicing psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, politicians and physicians.  So, if we want help chances are, we need to look inside ourselves, and ask, why do I behave as I do?

“A nation doesn’t gravitate to economic insolvency to the tune of a $17 trillion national debt without a lot of enthusiastic cooperation from its constituency.  We Americans think (330 million of us) in the short term, always a dollar short of being solvent.

“I may take this matter up later, but suffice for now to limit it to economics, which finds most of us out to lunch concerning our economic health. 

“As the analytics have become more sophisticated with a bevy of economists winning Nobel Prizes for them, people continue to behave incongruous to statistical verities.    

“Consider this.  No economist prepared us for the 2008 economic crash that could have led to a second and more devastating Great Depression.  Indeed, in defense after the fact, they resorted to corporate speak as did the Federal Government, as did Wall Street, as did Corporate America.  If any learning took place during this great debacle, it is not yet apparent seven years later.”

(PP) “It is apparent you are enjoying this, but could you get to more specifics.”

(HS) “Doris Lessing, the Nobel Laureate for Literature, and a former Southern Rhodesian native, said she couldn’t write Volume Three of her autobiography because she’d have to use real names, and that would be hurtful to people. 

“No one wants to offend anyone, especially anyone in power, and so we go limply forward.  Nor do we want to hurt the tens of thousands of automotive workers who refused to see the handwriting on the wall, and develop new skills, while the union for the United Auto Workers was asleep at the switch.

“By the hollowness of American industry, denying the changing nature of the work, workers and the workplace, those in leadership positions continued to operate with infallible authority with business as usual practices. 

“When the economy was flush, no one questioned a policy of generous pay and entitlement benefits for workers irrespective of their obsolescent skills.  The assembly line requiring little skill in repetitive work was already on its way out 60 years ago with the introduction of robotics. 

“Couple this with the insatiable appetite of Americans to spend more than they make and you see why the UAW worker became the poster child of this decline.  This was aided and abetted by GM's CEO in the 1950s boasting that “As goes GM, so goes the Nation.” 

“I experienced Detroit's hubris in the 1940s when I visited my uncle in the summers during that period.  He was an economics professor at the University of Detroit.  I played baseball with the sons of GM fathers and mothers who worked on the assembly line at GM.  They lived in affluent neighborhoods alongside university professors and people in the medical and law professions.  My sense was that they were even more prosperous than their neighbors because my teammates had everything.   

“I said poster child, which is not meant to denigrate GM's or other hourly workers.  Quite the contrary, GM workers once represented a vibrant working middle class, which is now gone.

 “Although gone, Americans continue to behave as if the well-heeled working middle class still exists.  They seem overconfident and unrealistically optimistic of their capabilities and in their demands.  This is demonstrated by behaving poorly in crisis or taking naïve risks, while still being obsessed with the idea that all will come back as it was. This displays a loss aversion rather a passion to gain.   

“With this template, inequality has been growing.  Sure, economists write books about inequality, which soothes the conscience of workers as victims, but gives them no strategy to take charge of their situation.

“We celebrate the idea of the free market economy with the ‘invisible hand’ to correct when necessary.  But we don’t say much about the poorest of the poor who are likely to shop at convenient stores and pay top dollar for their potato chips, beer, cigarettes, candy, soda pop, and over the counter drugs.  We say it is their prerogative to make these unwise purchases. 

“While marketers make fools of us, we would have it no other way.  

"Isn’t it strange that the American Cancer Society has been amazingly successful at reducing the number of adults smoking cigarettes, not only showing cigarette smoking is harmful to health, but establishing that it is uncool?  But alcoholism is treated as a disease and those so addicted get our sympathy of being “sick” rather than being uncool.  

“Invariably, there is a call for the government to step in and increase regulations, when private institutions, such as the American Cancer Society, are far more successful.  ACS recognized that competition and the free market, which the cigarette industry enjoys, can cause serious problems.”

          

(PP) “Is this what you call being specific?  I think not.  It is just more of your soap box routine.  You go on and on and on.  Try to be a little less visceral and more visual, okay?”

(HS) “Fair enough.  My dissertation adviser was an Indian, who had escaped the caste system of India to earn a Ph.D. in organizational psychology.  He was surprised by my suggestion that the United States had a similar caste system albeit self-imposed.

“Like him, I had escaped this caste system of the working class by seeking and earning a university education.  Many peers, female as well as male, brighter and more able than I was, self-imposed the status of permanent working class by staying in jobs, or staying in the region, never venturing far from the base of the known, the comfortable and the familiar all of their working lives.

“Complicating this self-imposed caste system further, many sought and earned university educations, but found the demands of an unfamiliar and repressive world not to their liking, returning home, with broad marketable skills, but no such jobs in the area, becoming shadows of their hidden potential, again for all their working lives. 

“The third tier to this self-imposed caste system, and this seems endemic to the American character, is to look for heroes, for people to admire, to adore and fawn over, or fantasize about,  considering them light years beyond their own station and capacity to emulate. 

“It is easier to look up to others than to look up to oneself.  We admire the skills in others but not in ourselves.  We see this in the corporate structure of our society where knowledge workers assume subservient roles to position power. 

“Compounding this servitude, these knowledge workers acquiesce to position power earning only a fraction of what those in position power earn.  This is despite their superior knowledge and skill. 

“Little note is made of the fact that the company would surely tank without them, but could get along swimmingly well without most of its management. To question the status quo is treated as irrational.  It is insanity (I profess this in book after book) to go along with this charade.”

(PP) “Can you be a bit more specific?”

(HS) “The caste system with its involuntary unemployment, intimidating rat race and the continuing problem of personal identity has made the complex organization anachronistic and its management atavistic.  Is that specific enough?”

(PP) Waves his hand to go on.

(HS) “This departure from sanity, probity, normalcy, and the sensible is demonstrated by all the attention given to the New York Stock Exchange where irrational exuberance flourishes. 

“Investors are no more emotionally grounded than the poorest of the poor who shop daily in convenient stores.  There is a herd mentality to the stock market as there is a herd mentality to young people sporting tattoos all over their bodies. 

“People making millions behave no more wisely than people making tens of dollars.  Human psychology is a mystery even to those practicing it for a living.

“The free market system is designed to exploit human weakness, not compensate for it.  This is not because marketers are malicious or venal, but because the market makes them behave as they do.  Those who fail to exploit people will be out of a job.  Exploitation is the operational word.”

(PP) “Why, if these marketers are not necessarily bad people, why do systemic harm?”

(HS) “They don’t see it that way.  In capitalistic enterprise, marketers see it as their job to move people to act.  Marketers didn’t create this prevailing norm.  They simply set it in motion.

“A capitalistic society is driven by greed and progress, words treated as synonyms.  Given this penchant, no individual ever has enough greed; no company ever has enough progress.  The individual always needs more, the company always a greater return on its capital.  It is the nature of the beast, which is the economy.”

(PP) “That is as cynical as your take on religion.  Do you see why you are seen as a pessimist?  What in the hell do you believe in, anyway?  Please!” 

(HS) “I believe in ideas, especially the idea that people can control their own destiny by exercising discipline, making sensible choices, by seeing the world as it is, not as it is painted to be, and by trusting their experiences as their best teacher. 

“I believe in a sense of proportion, balance, a sense of true humor, not the sick humor of television comedians and situation comedies, but the humor of seeing human frailties for what they are with empathy and understanding. 

“I believe in competing only with oneself, in finding the music of the soul and the rhythm of the spirit to effectively utilize one’s inherent ability. 

“I believe in reverence of Nature, giving back to Nature what Nature has given to us by being a good custodian of Nature.

“I believe in God because God has always been there with me when I behaved poorly, or so stupidly that my life could have ended then, only to have Him come to the rescue again and again.

“I believe in my wife, Betty, as the most intelligent and balanced person I have ever known in my life, and who is so much wiser and understanding than I will ever be.

“I believe in my children who have my same strengths and weaknesses, as do their children who are the promise of tomorrow.

“I believe in life as a duty, a responsibility, and an obligation to use the gifts God has given us to make the most of our time on earth in the service of others. 

“At the same time, I believe our first loyalty is to self for any loyalty without that first loyalty is counterfeit.”

(PP) “I didn’t ask for your emotional biography.  Clearly, I must be more astute when I ask you a question.  Considering that, why do so many people go haywire?”

(HS) “People don’t actually go haywire.

“Much of what happens to people, much of what they believe is happening to them is not happening to them.  Therefore, the question as constructed does not deserve an answer.”

(PP) “Wait, I’m already confused.  Please explain.”

(HS) “It is so dangerous to step out of what is considered ‘normal behavior’ that when people do so they are immediately found to be strange, disturbed, mentally ill, confused, or moribund. Do you realize mental illness is as much an invention of man as is religion?

“Even what we call ‘morality’ is only the mind of the time.  

"We have had a dramatic shift in beliefs, tastes, ideas and values over the past one hundred years.  Yet, despite how proudly we congratulate ourselves on our urbanity and sophistication, for no longer burning witches at the stake, we still put people in mental hospitals and prisons because they are difficult and we don’t have time for the ‘why’ to that. 

“People don’t go haywire, society does, and society has been haywire for a long time, that I can attest to, but only that. 

“Our culture of panic has been driven by crisis management, in other words, a totally reactionary society.  

What is a greater madness than Wall Street with all its sophisticated analysts having nothing better to do than follow numbers on a screen all day? 

“Given our propensity to react to crises, we have an equal propensity to create crises, which we do with amazing alacrity.  

"The problems we solve are the problems we create.  We have mismanaged industrial pollution, for example, and so for the next hundred years or so, we’ll behave like busy little beavers feeding these crises with another set of busy little beavers following to solve these crises, until one day someone will recognize the insanity, and stop, or the earth will become such a wasteland that we’ll have to find another planet to do our mischief.    

“Can you imagine a more gigantic problem than nuclear waste?  We have created nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs with the waste of these nuclear materials likely to be around for 1,000 or so years.  So, what do we do?  We build more nuclear power facilities, while more nations seek the capacity to make nuclear bombs.  Why?  Fear and paranoia have become permanent house guests of the human mind that never leave.”

(PP) “I’m not saying you’re right, but if true, and I believe a lot of people, learned people, would take exception to your hyperbole, how did this start, why did it start?”

(HS) “Education wasn’t always job training.  A high school graduate in 1900 from my little town was more enlightened than a college graduate today with an advanced degree.  I’ve written about this elsewhere but suffice to say here that he learned to read German and French, as well as being comfortable in American English.  He had four years of mathematics, four years of science including geology, chemistry and practical mechanics.  He also had four years of English including British, French and American literature, and could not graduate until he could write a coherent essay  That essay had to be grammatical correct with perfect punctuation and spelling.  In other words, he was educated for living in the world.

“Now, educational institutions have become factories or job training facilities.  Since jobs constantly change as technology changes, universities are always behind with redundant curriculums.  Consequently, tens of thousands of college graduates are saddled with irrelevant training to the jobs available.   

“We launched into a paperless factory with computers being treated as if the newest god when we have no idea where that technology is going to take us, or how it will compute with our ability to absorb its vicissitudes.     

“The great irony is that society has programmed us to a culture that no longer exists with credentials that are meaningless while still promulgating that ‘everyone should have an opportunity to a free college education,’ failing to answer the question, for what or why?

“Like magicians pick pocketing the mind, politicians flippantly chant this mantra for no other reason than self-aggrandizement.  No surprise, they are controlled by lobbyists who dictate the agenda of what is important and what is not as the quintessential marketers of the nation.  Alas, it is a ‘lose-lose’ proposition for all.”

(PP) “So you see no sun over the horizon, only dark clouds?”

(HS) “No, I’m saying no such thing.  John Maynard Keynes stated in 1930 that by 2030, the standard of living of everyone would be eight times higher, and people would have to work only fifteen hours a week, time beyond that available for leisure pursuits. 

“Well, people are working more, not less, when they have jobs, but that is to keep up their ever escalating standard of living.  As for leisure, Americans treat it as if a disease.  True, the standard of living has risen substantially, but not the sophistication of those enjoying it.”

(PP) “About that sun over the horizons, according to you, there is nothing to look forward to.”

(HS) “I don’t look at it in those terms.  Americans seem only inclined to demonstrate prudence in times of danger.  That was demonstrated in WWII, but not in the Korean War, Vietnam War, or subsequent wars.  Danger has to be felt to be experienced.”

(PP) “So the sun is delayed?”

(HS) “I’m afraid so.”

(PP) “No wonder you title this a ‘dialectic.’”