From: Jim Legg (income@ihug.co.nz)
Date: Mon Feb 03 1997 - 19:24:31 MST
Guru George asks:
Jim, either I'm completely thick or you're off your trolley. :-)
You are explaining obscurum per obscurius. What are the 'non-local
variables hidden in price', and why should anyone bother with them; and
Hidden variables are structural. For example, a corporatist hidden structure, say in television news broadcasting, prevents any employee from speaking out against corruption and lack of real constructivist analysis of events by simply replacing the employee (at whatever level).
what have they got to do with 'intrinsic value'? Never mind the AI,
stick to economics for the moment, so that I can get some kind of grasp
of what you are talking about.
Future planning HAS to take into account AI and the very simple fact that AI isn't going to be making decisions based on hidden structures. Constructionist AI will look under every rock for every variable. The sooner it is realized that AI controllers won't be wanting to place bets based on price, the better.
Also, in what way are consumers 'captive', if they have a choice?
On my website I put up "Counter Capitalism" a revealing juxtaposed analysis comparing capitalism (corporatism, merchantilism or what have you) to Bob Penny's critique of mind-control Scientology-like cults. >From which I quote:-
THINGS THAT CAN BE SAID TO WORK BY GETTING PEOPLE TO AGREE THAT THEY DID
As Penny shows, capitalism creates a specialized environment within which anything can be made to seem true or reasonable or moral. It is this insane environment, not any flaw in the individual person, which accounts for the apparently insane behavior which he and many others have described, just as similarly perverted environments trap otherwise good people in lynchings, gang behavior, nazism, and other social ills.
How does it work? The mechanisms of society entrapment are not hard to understand, once you look at them. But there are many things in our environment we take for granted and do not look at, any more than we look at the air we breathe.
There is no one answer. One is not hypnotized or brainwashed suddenly one day and a slave thereafter. It is a process of learning, like any other except with demented content. It occurs gradually over time.
Manipulation of national agreements is the key. A manipulated environment is created in which, to be loyal to the next generation, one must believe the most amazing things and perform actions which, in other times, would be beneath contempt.
Societies (not just state capitalism) create a milieu which gradually and covertly seduces good people into agreeing among themselves on self-deceptions, so they come to believe themselves an elite in unique possession of the only right answers. The real result is dependence on the country and vulnerability to its control and exploitation.
A kind of insanity is visible in the peculiar group-think ways of evaluating or not evaluating information (like Jesus said so) that we accepted and sold to each other. If there was demonstrable result, why would all the hype and controlled information be needed?
The hype is needed, of course, to allow us to share belief in a result. The process can be summarized in four steps -- small steps at first, but larger and larger each time around until one gradually assimilates the group-think.
1. Sell him something. One is told that if you do X you will get richer. It is standard practice to promise anything (without actually promising anything), and whatever one can be made to admit to wanting (called his self-interest) becomes the excuse for getting him into this process.
2. Whip up gung-ho. Citizens manifest their friendliness, concern and hope for one. They make very clear that they want him to get richer and they are very sure that participation in capitalism will do it. The expectations are set in place so that not to get richer would be a betrayal of one's friends.
3. One does X. While engaged in the action, he has special status. He is adulated for being on target and carefully not disturbed or enturbulated he is clearly an important person. He may also be told how much richer he is looking, and how apparent the change is. An expectation of result is built for the particular case at hand.
4. One agrees that he is richer. As a good citizen, he will find some way to creatively play his part, to justify the time and energy he has spent, avoid embarrassment, and not let his children down.
At that high moment, one quickly attests in writing that he got an appropriate result from the service and is satisfied. He must do this to complete the service, or he is handled further at his own expense until he does. No gun is held to one's head so the success story may be said to be freely given. The cost of remedial debt provides additional motive for everything to be all right.
After I say that everything is all right, my agreement is taken as proof that what you are doing is OK. Your success provides the same rationale for me. By uncritical acceptance of influenced, unreliable data, we deceive ourselves and keep the circle closed. If everything was not all right, one's status in the country would be jeopardized. An enemy of the country, or subversive person, is said not to have financial gain. Success stories, annual reports, and gung-ho agreement are evidence that one has "financial gain" and so is a valid citizen.
Never mind that truly needed solutions may be foregone in favor of the immediate fix. Principles may be abandoned or redefined as the true cost of participation becomes manifest. In this pressure-cooker of agreement and gung-ho, the benefit may be illusory but one can no longer tell the difference.
As a society member continues to deny his dependence, or to rationalize it as moral and beneficial, the poor, the old, the sick, parents and concerned others must protect themselves as best they can. An obvious concern is the situation of children living in such an environment, whose welfare is subject to the parent's need to believe and to belong.
The user-pays bureaucrat's job is to get the consumer to cooperate with him in maintaining whatever image he is trying to present while the bureaucrat works to destroy the integrity of any independent (non-checkwriting) identity presented by the consumer. Perhaps this imbalance is possible because the consumer denies (tries not to acknowledge) his humiliation. By naming the advertiser's games (in which he has participated) the consumer would further discredit himself (by association). This would further destabilize the interaction, which is normally a cooperative endeavor, in which he has a role and stake.
Under such pressure, the consumer (in a defensive manner, to avoid what Goffman calls soiled identity) makes an extraordinary effort to preserve the appearance that everything is normal, as best he can under the circumstances. A social image which might help identify this denial of humiliation is the shiteating grin.
This cooperation is seen in the consumer's creative justifying of potentially alarming situations by giving benefit of the doubt or making excuses for actions by consumers/capitalists which might otherwise appear overzealous or discreditable. Typical excuses include he's untrained, he wouldn't do that if he was a Ph.D., these things go in cycles and there's a lot of heat on right now, at least he's making mistakes on the right side, at least he's doing something, he has financial problems, and so on. In such ways, actions which might otherwise become clues to the real situation are made to look normal and no cause to look further. Thus the faith can be kept and the self-images which go with it.
Paper money is only one example of the reversal of values of a permission system, which is what happens as capitalism's official line becomes correctly understood in actual national practice.
Being able to live with such contradictions is the hallmark of a capitalist. The trick has to do with unmocking or making nothing of other values, so the contradiction ceases to have meaning. Only devotion to the country remains.
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