OpEds / America’s gun obsession: The Root Problem

By Eric Schechter

The author, attempting to convince his fellows.

This essay is my response to the shooting of children in Connecticut, the bombing of children in Pakistan, the poisoning of our water by the fuel companies, the global warming that Republicans deny and Democrats ignore, the pre-trial torture of whistle-blower Bradley Manning, and so on, though how these are all connected may not be fully apparent until much later in the essay. In fact, this essay is my response to all the many evils facing us –

alienation, apathy, authoritarianism, bullying, censorship, child abuse, corruption, cruelty, disinformation, ecocide, excessive incarceration, exploitation, foreclosures, greed, homelessness, homophobia, hunger, inadequate healthcare, Islamophobia, lies, loneliness, media consolidation, money in politics, neglect of the elderly, nuclear meltdowns, oil spills, pedophilia, plutocracy, racism, rape, sexism, spousal abuse, the Federal Reserve, the military-industrial complex, theft of the entire economy, unemployment, unverifiable ballots, war…

These problems are all getting worse, and we’ve been unable to eliminate any of these. Even while we struggle against any one of them, two more appear, like the heads of the mythical Hydra that Hercules fought against. We simply cannot deal with these problems separately; we must find a way to deal with all of them at once. In this essay I will explain that

There’s an old saying that “money is the root of all evil.” That’s actually an abridgment of 1 Timothy 6:10, in which apostle Paul said that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” Biblical scholars emphasize that word “love,” claiming that greed is the problem, not money itself. But in my opinion the abridgment is closer to the truth: the mere use of money reinforces separateness between humans, corrupting us so subtly that most would hardly notice it at first.

Money is a method of exchange. We must have some sort of exchange if each of us wants things that the other has — i.e., if your things are separate from my things. We’ve lived with private property for 10,000 years, and we’ve become so accustomed to economic separateness that most people find it hard to imagine living any other way. But for 100,000 years before that we shared everything of importance, and that’s still our genetic nature. We must return to it soon, as I’ll explain in this essay.

Keeping our material possessions separate leads us to see our lives as separate. Private property teaches us an attitude of apathy:  your well being is not my concern.

And that permits evil:  “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men, seeing evil done, do nothing about it” (attributed to Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, or Sergei Bondarchuk). But apathy not only permits poverty and wars; I will explain that that it  gives rise to them, subtly but inevitably.

(By the way, have you ever noticed that Yahweh never answered Cain’s question, “am I my brother’s keeper?”  My own answer would be yes, you should be his keeper, and he should be yours.)

In a healthy society, an isolated case of apathy would be easily dealt with: the many people who care about an uncaring person would bring him back into the fold through their gentle coaxing. But apathy is harder to uproot after it becomes widespread and metamorphoses into a symmetric form,

This attitude is not greedy — it does not ask anything from others. Indeed, with its symmetry, it can claim to be an instance of the Golden Rule, “treat others as you wish to be treated,” which is often presented as our society’s highest morality. Ayn Rand gave separateness all the legitimacy and dignity of logic and philosophy. Her followers believe that it is possible to respect other people without actually caring about them, but I think they are mistaken.

And although most people in our society see Ayn Rand for the sociopath that she was, nevertheless her ideology has won: Separateness is implicit in the way that the corporate news media portray our lives. Separateness is as ubiquitous and unquestioned as the air we breathe. Its alternative, sharing, is praised as saintly or condemned as radical, but in any case excluded from normal. This view has permeated our entire society: Meaning and cooperation are replaced by cynicism and competition. Perceiving the people around us as uncaring strangers, we grow anxious; our tranquilizers and antidepressants may numb the anxiety but they cannot address its cause.

Private property teaches us psychological separateness, as I’ve already noted. Conversely, a philosophy of unconcern justifies private property. Thus, the economic and psychological aspects of separateness generate each other; neither can be found entirely free of the other. Hereafter I will refer to them together simply as separateness.

At first glance, separateness appears to be neither constructive nor destructive, but merely neutral. Its harmless appearance is why our society doesn’t struggle against it, but that harmless appearance is deceptive, for in fact our lack of cooperation is the root of all our problems. Remove separateness, and together we will soon solve our shared problems. Leave separateness intact, and the hydra’s heads will continue to grow in number and size, regardless of our struggle to lop them off.

Economic separateness is external, and so it has plenty of room to grow; let’s look at that. Our view of markets is shaped by an incessant flood of propaganda in their favor. That propaganda is a mixture of:

• errors (some people believe what they’re saying) and
  lies (some people know better),

but it’s false either way. The truth has been hidden in plain sight, right under our noses; we just need to focus our vision a little differently. Let’s look at a few of the main falsehoods in the propaganda:

“We’ve strayed from our society’s fundamental principles, into a mutant form of capitalism. We just need a few reforms, to get back to our basic principles. The problem is just a few bad capitalists.” –

False. The horrors that we’re now seeing are consequences of our society’s fundamental principles, as I’ll explain presently; thus, the changes we need are much deeper than mere reforms. Those “few bad capitalists” are generated by the system. Capitalism itself is toxic, both materially and spiritually, even when it is honest, and it can’t be kept honest. Our economic system is not “broken” — it was built to malfunction this way, right from the start.

“Capitalism is democratic.” –

False. Very few people get to vote about how their workplaces are run. Jobs are structured to benefit the owners, not the workers or the community.

“People are basically lazy, greedy, and selfish. If they were guaranteed an income, they would stop working instantly, and the economy would totally collapse.” –

False, though both assertions are partly true. We see much laziness, greed, and selfishness around us, but that’s just the result of a sick culture; there is plenty of evidence that the true nature of humans is empathic and cooperative. And people would quit their jobs in an instant, if they were guaranteed an income and no other changes were made in our society. That’s because the jobs, structured to benefit the owners, are unsatisfying, and offer no rewards except money. There may be a few exceptions — e.g., the firefighter and the nurse might feel good about what they are accomplishing; we need to restructure our economic system so that all jobs are like those.

“Capitalism is smart, because it harnesses greed for the good of all.” –

False. Bargaining with the devil is stupid, because it always ends badly. You’re the one who will end up in the harness.

“The only alternative to separateness is coerced collectivism, i.e., Stalinism.” –

False. Admittedly, we haven’t seen any long-lasting examples of non-coercive sharing, but that’s because they’ve been crushed by outside powers. The Paris Commune of 1871 was crushed by the troops of Versailles. Revolutionary Catalonia (1936-1939) was crushed by the fascists. Early Christians (Acts 2:44) were persecuted by the Romans until they were co-opted by Emperor Constantine. And so on.

“In a capitalist society, anyone who works hard will succeed.” –

False. If that were true, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire.

“Capitalism is justified by mathematical economics.” –

False. The math only obscures what is really going on. The real ideas in economics are in the assumptions about human nature that are introduced before mathematics ever enters the reasoning. The world is in a terrible mess economically, so evidently the assumptions have all been wrong.

“The market allocates goods and services efficiently.” –

False. “Efficient” toward what goals? Hitler’s gas chambers were “efficient.” We have vacant homes in the same cities as homeless people, and discarded food in the same cities as hungry people, because a more sane distribution system would be less profitable. Cuba is not as free as I would like, but it has eliminated hunger, poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, higher education debt, and lack of healthcare, all of which are still rampant in capitalist USA. And under capitalism, “natural resources” are priced at extraction cost, not at replacement and cleanup cost; the enormous difference is externalized onto future generations. The commons has been privatized and plundered, the earth has been poisoned, the ecosystem is dying.We need to change that before it’s too late: There is no efficiency on a dead planet.

“People should simply ‘vote’ with their dollars, by boycotting bad products and bad companies; that is how market forces create altruism.” –

False. The falsehood here is in the word “simply.” We don’t have the time, money, and skills to do our own private research on every product we buy. For years, the cigarette companies knowingly concealed their own research showing that cigarettes are harmful; many other companies that have not yet been exposed are behaving similarly. All large corporations are psychopaths, compelled by competition and by their legal charters to maximize profit, disregarding or even concealing harm to workers, consumers, and the rest of the world. Any CEO who begins to show scruples will quickly be replaced. A process of natural selection thus fills the upper reaches of power with psychopathic individuals. Big businesses ride on the legitimacy of small businesses, which often behave honorably; but small ones are crushed and swallowed by big ones. And big and small can’t be separated, because they swim in the same sea of competition.

“Competition is good for us.” – 

False. I don’t even know where to begin on this one — this belief, held almost universally in our society, is the exact opposite of the truth. But I’ll recommend this hour lecture by Alfie Kohn: http://youtu.be/S4si1HaDmLg.

“To solve the jobs problem, we need (a) more stimulus spending or (b) tax cuts for the ‘job-creators’ or (c) a balanced budget.” –

ALL false. Under any economic system, people gradually figure out better ways of doing things, and so productivity rises — i.e., we get more goods and services per hour of labor, and that really ought to be a good thing. But under capitalism, the owners pocket all the gains in productivity; the workers get layoffs, not leisure. Then more unemployed are competing for fewer jobs, so wages go down. The “jobs problem” is a capitalism problem, and widespread unemployment is inevitable under late stage capitalism, regardless of stimulus, tax cuts, or a balanced budget.

“People simply need to pay off their debts.” –

False. Again, too much is concealed in the word “simply.” Nearly all the money in our economy is created as debt — it  is loaned into existence out  of thin air by banks that are authorized to do fractional reserve lending (i.e., loaning out more money than they have) — especially the Federal Reserve banks, which have the further authorization to print money. They are not part of the federal government; they create money and then loan it to the government at interest. Our system of debt is like a game of musical chairs, in which there are never enough seats for everyone. Because interest is charged, the total amount of debt in the system is greater than the total amount of money in the system; people can only pay off their debts by increasing someone else’s debts. The resulting problems might be manageable, if the economy could keep growing; but our planet is not getting any bigger.

“Voluntary exchanges benefit everyone.” –

False. The non-rich have few options, and must accept any deal that keeps them from starving; that’s why we say that the so-called “volunteer army” is maintained by the “poverty draft.” And how many people would choose to be migrant farm-workers? But the rich can afford to decline any deal that does not make them richer. Thus, every market transaction increases economic inequality.

As noted above, the owners of our workplaces and our debts enrich themselves through our efforts. A market economy inevitably concentrates wealth into few hands, like the board game of Monopoly, even if everyone plays fairly. And once wealth has become concentrated, you can say goodbye to fair play, and to any notion that separateness is “neutral.” Wealth is power, and power corrupts; that old saying has been verified by the Stanford Prison Experiment and other sociological evidence. People with power over others become less empathic, more authoritarian, more greedy.

I would speculate that this is because the people with power feel a need to justify their power to themselves with some sort of philosophical theory — e.g., that they are somehow more deserving, or that their thefts somehow are helping the world. Then they come to believe in their own theory, and it perpetuates their antisocial behavior. Lloyd Blankfein, head of Goldman-Sachs, said that he was “doing God’s work,” and perhaps he even managed to convince himself of that. (On the other hand psychopaths like the villain of the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four embrace their own lust for power without concerning themselves about justification. There is some indication that they may have been corrupted by the childhood trauma of an uncaring society.)

One justification commonly given for power is authoritarianism, the belief (held not only by leaders but also by many followers) that someone needs to be “in charge” of society or it will crash, like a ship without a helmsman. The 17th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that people are basically selfish and greedy, and people would engage in a “war of all against all” if they were not held back by the iron fist of a strong central authority, e.g., a king. (Joke: If three authoritarians are shipwrecked on an island, the first thing they will do — even before searching for food or water — is to elect a president.) Hierarchical authority structures result in dogma and one-way communication — i.e., those at the top say “we know what is good for you, and we don’t need to hear any uneducated backtalk.” If the system is malfunctioning and someone at the bottom is in pain, the people at the top may never hear about it.

The alternative to hierarchical authority is anarchy — i.e., “no rulers.”  False propaganda tells us that anarchy would mean chaos, disorder, and destruction (and the Black Bloc has reinforced that view, unfortunately). But actually, the society envisioned by most self-identified anarchists is highly ordered. It spontaneously self-organizes by consensus democracy into a peer-to-peer, horizontalist network, with two-way caring communication, which is the only effective way to really know what is going on with other people. Some of the theory of non-authoritarian organizing has been explored and explained by ex-authoritarian Carne Ross in his recent book The Leaderless Revolution. That people do self-organize, given the need and the opportunity, has been amply illustrated by Occupy Wall Street and by historical evidence collected in Rebecca Solnit’s book A Paradise Built in Hell.

After wealth becomes concentrated, it becomes self-perpetuating. It erodes through any government regulations, buying off both legislators and enforcers. Wealth twisted the USA’s 14th constitutional amendment into a justification for corporate personhood, and it is just as likely to twist into ineffectiveness the new amendment to end corporate personhood that is now being proposed by many reformists. Government and business merge, as in Mussolini’s description of fascism. Wealth rules, not primarily through secret cabals, but by buying the media, framing the issues, and distracting the public from what really matters.

And once profit has been enshrined as the ruling principle of society, it wreaks terrible damage. Lies are told to justify wars that bring profit to the sellers of military goods and services — Martin Luther King called the USA “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” decades ago, and it’s still true. Harsh and arbitrary laws are passed to fill prisons that are run for profit; the self-described “land of the free” is actually the world’s leader in incarceration. Air, water, and arable land are poisoned by big corporations who are in a hurry to extract whatever profits they can in whatever fashion they can. The profits are privatized by companies “too big to fail,” and the bailouts, subsidies, and other costs are “socialized,” i.e., borne by the taxpayers.

The only way to avoid rule by the wealthy class is to not have a wealthy class — which requires ending markets — which requires ending private property. Reform is not possible, because the changes needed are too fundamental; but the bureaucracy of brutality will fall without a shot when its workers awaken and walk out.

Perhaps we are not yet ready to act on our shared interests — perhaps we will need to go through some sort of transitional phase — but there is no need to delay in getting people to think about our shared interests. “Imagine all the people sharing all the world,” John Lennon sang, and just imagining is a good way to begin. Will sharing work? Will it avert the destruction of the ecosystem and the extinction of our species? Quite honestly, I’m not sure, but I have become entirely convinced that not sharing is destroying the world, so the time has come for us to try sharing.

We need great changes. A friend of mine, growing impatient, recently said she’d like to buy a gun and take out some of the people who are causing all our problems. I told her that, aside from any ethical considerations, her plan was entirely impractical: she would never get close enough to any of the important people — but even if she did manage to take one out, he would quickly be replaced by someone similar, and the new person would be better protected. It’s like the hydra all over again. Even if we somehow manage to overthrow the entire oligarchy, the culture will just generate a new oligarchy. We must strike at the root: we must change the culture. That’s not a matter of guns, nor even a matter of laws (though changes in law will follow changes in culture, if we still feel a need for laws after the age of Aquarius begins). We must accept the reality that people speaking of new ideas will be beaten down with violence; but we who promote the ideas will not win any recruits through violence — people will only join our side voluntarily. “I hope someday you’ll join us,” John Lennon sang.

But someday had better come soon, because there isn’t much time left. Separateness has tormented us in diverse ways for 10,000 years, but it’s finally approaching a limit. That’s most evident in global warming, which now is self-perpetuating and accelerating, due to feedback loops — i.e., some of its consequences (dying forests and phytoplankton, melting tundra and icecaps) are also causes. Already we can see increases in hurricanes, floods, droughts, and crop failures, and those will get worse. Some plants and animals are migrating to get away from the heat, but they can’t migrate fast enough; species are going extinct at a rate much faster than the planet has seen in many millions of years. Species depend on other species, and so falling biodiversity is making the whole ecosystem weak and fragile. At some point soon it may simply collapse, leaving nothing but anaerobic bacteria. Then even the rich will see the end, for they can’t eat money. We need to quickly implement carbon-negative technologies on a massive scale, but that won’t happen while the world is ruled by private profit; evidently we must end that rule.

Really, the ongoing ecocide is a special case of a still more general principle. Humanity has had its ups and downs — stock markets rise and fall, empires rise and fall, even civilizations rise and fall — but humankind’s store of information keeps increasing. That makes each of us more powerful, for good or ill — and in a society of separateness, ill predominates. Knowledge is not wisdom. Global warming is a consequence of increasingly powerful technologies used without wisdom, and there are other consequences, more direct forms of violence. Old methods of control are failing: An authoritarian bully armed with drones cannot stop a suicidal madman armed with assault rifles or improvised bombs or germ warfare.

We’ll only be made safe by a caring culture that heals bullies and madmen, a universal family that leaves no one behind. The change that I am describing here is bigger than has generally been understood by the term “revolution”; it is better summarized (metaphorically, if you like) as a move to a higher spiritual plane. Nothing less than that change will suffice to halt the ecocide and avert the extinction of our species; nothing more than that change is needed to guide us to utopia. To change the culture, we simply must see the world (including ourselves) more clearly, and react to it honestly, and spread our understanding and inspiration to many more people. Of course, we all have different trusted sources for what we believe to be facts, and trust can’t be won through debate; it’s going to take us a while to build our network. Join the conversation — we’re all on the planning committee.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Schechter is an American mathematician, currently an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University. His interests started primarily in analysis but moved into mathematical logic. His Erdős number is five.[2] Schechter is best known for his 1996 book Handbook of Analysis and its Foundations, which provides a novel approach to mathematical analysis and related topics at the graduate level.