This book starts off focused on Xi Jinping, and much of it is, but it is actually a criticism of the world following Xi Jinping’s lead by using authoritarian lockdowns to fight COVID without establishing any scientific proof that lockdowns were effective.
The most troubling thing about this whole pandemic was how the media created a strict narrative and then went about persecuting anyone who questioned that narrative and accusing them of blasphemy, much like the Catholics accused people of being witches and pagans. The problem I had during the whole ordeal was the lack of intellectual and public discussions about the pandemic and ways of combatting it. When Rand Paul questioned Anthony Fauci during a Senate hearing, the media loved to replay the only part they found relevant, Fauci telling Paul that he didn’t know what he was talking about. They didn’t cover the part of Rand Paul questioning Fauci’s connections with gain-of-function research and the Clintonesque way that Fauci called into question what gain-of-function even meant.
In a modern, democratic society, you would expect free and open discussion and debate about national policy, especially when it concerns public health. There was none. There was nothing but the reinforcement of a single government, big pharma narrative. That raises alarm bells in my mind. What are you afraid will happen if there is free and open discussions? If you’re are so convinced that you are correct, then wouldn’t you welcome free and open discussions? The Amazing Randi loves to debunk magicians and healers who claim supernatural abilities, and he publicly challenges them to demonstrate their powers. What if these demonstrations were held in private? What if he refused to share his videotapes of these sessions? Wouldn’t you think he was hiding something? Wouldn’t you think that he couldn’t debunk them?
They might argue that the public is not sophisticated enough to digest scientific studies, that it would only cause more confusion and potential misinterpretations, but that’s like the Amazing Randi saying, the only way to debunk con-artists is using sophisticated scientific methods that the public would not understand. It’s absurd. Uncovering a fraud is simple. Journalists have been doing it for centuries. It doesn’t take a computer scientist to explain to you how the government illegally spies on the public using sophisticated technology. Of course, the government would love to argue that the issue is too complex for the average citizen, so Snowden shouldn’t have exposed the program in the first place. Sure.
Con-artists are renowned for their hypocritical stance on complexity. When they are trying to trick you, they will stop you from asking too many questions by saying it’s way too complicated to explain. But when they want you to make a single choice that is only in their favor, they will explain that it is the simplest choice there is, all you have to do is pick that one choice that so happens to benefit them and screw you over. I’m sure when financiers were explaining CDOs to investors, they said it was a simple instrument that converted mortgages into securities that could be sold and make huge profits. When you start asking too much about the risk properties of CDOs, they’ll explain that it’s way too complicated to explain and involves very advanced mathematics and quantitative analysis that would probably bore you to death. What are they hiding? They’re hiding the simple fact that the CDOs are incredibly risky, and that risk is hidden under layers and layers of complexity on purpose to trick you into assuming there is less risk than there actually is.
There were so many odd things about the mainstream narrative of COVID. The goal posts kept moving. First, they discussed estimated fatality rates from COVID, and then when it appeared that these rates were highly overestimated, they changed it to hospitality and then test positivity rates. This made no sense. If the test positivity rate is 100% and the fatality rate is 0%, then why would you shut down the economy and mandate vaccines? Everyone gets it, but it’s harmless. Why, all the sudden, do we care about test positivity rates over fatality rates. On top of this, there were countless cases of people dying from heart attacks, injuries, bullet wounds, and because they just happened to test positive for COVID, their cause of death was attributed to COVID. “…in 2021 the US government began paying an unprecedented $9000 for the funeral expenses of anyone whose death certificate showed he death “may have been caused by” “COVID-19-like symptoms”; if the death certificate did not show that, it could be amended.”
Today, we take for granted that lockdowns were necessary to stem the spread of COVID, but it had never been done before in the US, even in the midst of the Spanish Flu. It had been first implemented in autocratic China, and the rest of the world simply copied them, oddly enough, in the most free countries on the planet. Sweden is often used as a gleaming example of leftist, sophisticated, woke socialism, but all the sudden their darling status was revoked when they refused to shut down. While the media and government constantly beat on the drum of ‘science’ they were unwilling to actually do any scientific research into the efficacy of lockdowns. The US was a perfect experimental lab with some states in full lockdowns while other states had much more lax policies. Any evidence that government policies were not working were simply ignored or swept under the rug.
COVID was a present for authoritarianism, but the lack of any scientific research and follow through into the effectiveness of government policies has led to a backlash against authoritarianism. In China, protests have succeeded in forcing the Communist Party to relax its COVID testing and quarantine policies. Far from sighing relief and being grateful for government saving us from COVID, I think people are as suspicious and anti-authoritarian as ever. This has been one big lesson in how authoritarianism crosses the line and fails to convince the public of their single-minded narrative on pandemic policy.
“As Harvard epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff wrote: “Among infectious-disease epidemiology colleagues that I know, most favor focused protection of high-risk groups instead of lockdowns, but the media made it sound like there was a scientific consensus for general lockdowns.””
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Nobody has yet calculated the costs of the lockdowns, but some have done research. “[According to CNBC] Data showed that over 60% of business closures during the COVID-19 crisis were permanent, amounting to more than 97,000 businesses lost in the US alone. Half of Black-owned small businesses in the US were wiped out.” The poorest people suffered the most, eviction moratoriums being the only thing to keep them from going to the streets to overthrow their governments. Meanwhile, the US government and the Federal Reserve created an asset bubble dumping trillions into the coffers of the rich causing the great bubble of everything.
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Not sure anyone outside China knows what’s going on with Xi Jinping and China. China may have taken a great leap forward economically and embraced a hybrid form of Capitalism, but it is now taking a few steps back from Capitalism and freedoms. The persecution of Jack Ma is one of the biggest examples of this reactionary movement. It’s quite possible that Xi has decided that its economy has grown sufficiently to protect Chinese national interests and they have a sufficiently powerful, high tech military now. It is no longer worth it to keep the economy expanding so rapidly when such rapid expansion also comes with demands for greater freedom. This may in fact be good news for the rest of the world, because stunting their own economy, China will no longer pose a threat to the US and Europe either economically or militarily. China once had a formidable armada that could have helped it colonize the world, yet China was more concerned about domestic stability. Why introduce the rest of the world’s goods, ideas, values, and politics to China and potentially undermine the existing dynasty?
“Xi became “Chairman of Everything.” He acquired ten titles, assuming control of the Party, state, and military hierarchies, and the committees on foreign policy, the internet, the courts, and the secret police.” “By 2020, over one million officials had been sentenced [by his anticorruption campaign].”
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The problem with authoritarianism is that the rulers are given way too much power based on a faulty premise. The premise is that the welfare of the majority is predicated on the unfortunate but necessary punishment of the minority. The minority can be any group that the rulers deem a threat to the majority. In China, they’re Muslims, Falun Gong followers, and political opponents. During the pandemic, they’re anyone found positive with COVID or unvaccinated. In Nazi Germany, they’re Jews, Slavs, and people with mental disabilities. In the US, they’re people of color, immigrants, and the homeless.
But they can be anyone, and the rulers often decide that they’re people who are most threatening to their rule as opposed to the majority. In order to pull off the punishment and murder of these minorities, they use deception and secrecy. Most German citizens had no idea Hitler was exterminating Jews. Most Chinese citizens have no idea the CCP is harvesting the organs of Muslims and Falun Gong followers. Most Americans have no idea just how many black people are behind bars and used as cheap prison labor. During the pandemic, as the fatality rate came out, much lower than estimated, the US government needed to justify its Draconian lockdowns and support mass vaccinations, so they simply stopped using the fatality rate and suppressed it. They switched to hospitality and then positivity rates to maintain the hysteria. Fundamental to authoritarianism is deception, delusion, and derangement. Because we will still need colossal manufacturing industries to build microchips, drones, and robots, we unfortunately can look forward to continued areas of authoritarianism and their lies.
Imagine being the captain of a slave ship. You have hundreds of African slaves chained up below deck, many of them dying of shock or sickness from the stress and travel, many suffering wounds or injuries from trying to escape or fighting back, most are traumatized. How do you justify in your mind what you are doing? Now imagine being a US soldier. You’re scouting out a location that is supposed to house a bunch of terrorists. You spot one of them entering the building and confirm his identity. You are told a missile will strike this building and kill everyone inside, and they need the coordinates. You earlier saw women and children and unarmed men enter this building, but you go ahead and give them the coordinates, and the missile strikes the building and kills everyone inside. Mind you the suspected terrorist has never been tried in a court of law or proven to be a terrorist. You just helped commit an extrajudicial assassination, also known as criminal homicide.
What does it take to do such things? We like to think of people making these decisions as simply flawed. They were wrong. They had the wrong ideas and ideologies. The ship captain was probably an insensitive, selfish, profiteer. But they all started out just like us. What made them think and act differently from us? When you ask that question, the shocking answer you come up with is that society raised them in such a manner that it was EASY for them to do what they did. It wasn’t hard. It didn’t make them think twice or constantly feel shame or guilt. The way society raised them, it became easy for them to do what they did. So when you realize this, you come to the obvious next question. Why does society raise us to be so easily turned into evil bastards?
One answer can be found in a psychological experiment by a psychologist named Stanley Milgram. He convinced subjects that they were giving another volunteer a test in another room, and whenever the other volunteer answered wrong or failed to answer in the given time allotted, they would receive progressively greater electrical shocks. The volunteer in the other room is actually part of the experiment, and after some time, they pretend to complain that the shocks are too much, that they have a heart condition, that they simply cannot continue. Shockingly, most experiment subjects kept going, even when the person in the other room stopped responding at all. They might as well have just killed them. And for what? Not answering a question correctly or within the allotted time. How does society train people to do this?
The answer is quite simply, we are trained for 12 years to obey authority no matter what, to never question authority, to never rebel against authority, to never wonder if authority is corrupt or evil, to never consider doing anything else but what authority has told us to do. We have been trained for 12 years not to think for ourselves and not to act for ourselves. So long as we obey authority and do as they say, we are safe from punishment, scrutiny, humiliation, poor grades, failure, poverty from not graduating high school, and a lifetime of low paying jobs being bullied by uneducated supervisors.
The second answer is that people from the US and Europe, those with fair skin, have been taught for centuries, that they are superior. Humans are divided by a construct called race, which is actually a rather absurd, unscientific way to divide people up based on skin color, the width of one’s nose, eye shape, and geography. They are taught that the fair skinned people of European origin, are ‘white’ and they are the superior race. The book Guns, Germs, and Steel explains how the Europeans were lucky enough to exploit certain external advantages to conquer the world. There were many times other people were more advanced than the Europeans, but for a number of reasons, they failed to conquer the rest of the world or found a need to. China, for example, at one point had the world’s greatest navy and enough power and weaponry to conquer the world, but they simply found no reason to, as their empire was already secure and profitable.
If you were European, however, it’s hard to teach your children that you conquered the world because you were lucky and exploited many external advantages. Rather, the winner always emphasizes internal attributes while minimizing external attributes, while the loser always emphasizes external attributes while minimizing internal attributes. The Europeans conquered the world, because God favored them, and later, when Darwin discovered genetics and evolution, the whites were simply genetically better. The Europeans also needed to distinguish themselves from their victims across the world to justify their crimes against them. The justification was that the victims were subhuman. And sub-humans did not deserve the same kindness and morals as humans.
While many Americans and Europeans have since abandoned white supremacy, if you truly dug deeper, as Trump has, you uncover generational attitudes that haven’t changed. Many white people in the US still believe they are separate and superior. Giving people of color the right to vote and more job opportunities is only lip service to the idea of equality. Deep down, they believe that the white race conquered the world because they are genetically superior or favored by God.
At some point in time, as with racism, people will learn that authoritarianism is a bad thing, and all it really does is allow people on top to get everyone else to commit crimes and atrocities for them. “Why did you do it?” “I was told to. I didn’t want to get in trouble. Nobody told me I could stand up to and question authority.” But just like racism, authoritarianism will be embedded generationally. Even in a truly egalitarian society, there will many people who still can’t stand up to or question authority out of habit.
But imagine what’s going through the mind of a white supremacist or a soldier giving coordinates of a building filled with women and children to be blown up. “Hey, I’m just following orders man. I don’t make the calls. Some four-star general sitting at the Pentagon is giving the go ahead. It’s on his shoulders man.” But he doesn’t even see the building being blown up. Nobody has even told him that there are women and children in the building. Perhaps the soldier told his captain, but the captain didn’t relay that info to the colonel who didn’t relay it to the general. The soldier sees the building being demolished. Sure, he’s troubled. He may even have nightmares and feel guilty. He may even suffer PTSD later after he leaves the military. But in his mind, it wasn’t really his fault. He was just following orders. What could he do?
When someone like Edward Snowden told his superiors that he was troubled by what they were doing, he was blown off. When he went around them and leaked info to Wikileaks, the US government went after him as a traitor. If he refused to provide those coordinates, he would have been punished, an Article 15 at least, a court martial at worse. His military career would be over. Perhaps a dishonorable discharge to boot. People who don’t obey commands get punished. People who question authority get labeled as troublemakers and never get promoted and often get demoted. We live in a hierarchical pyramid scheme society. You don’t piss off people above you.
I’ll never forget hearing a story about how these parents abused their daughter but spoiled their son. You would think the son would feel guilt and shame for how they mistreated his sister while they treated him so well, but surprisingly, he sided with the parents and blamed the daughter for how poorly she was treated. Likewise, when white people see how poorly other races are treated, it’s hard for them to deal with the shame and guilt, so it’s easier to believe that people of color just deserve how they’re treated. When black people get shot and killed by police, a lot of white people invariably ask, well, did he resist, was he armed, was he committing a crime? They’re looking for some out, some rationalization for why they don’t get shot and killed by police as much as black people.
Maybe it’s poverty, they rationalize. Maybe if they lived in better neighborhoods, they wouldn’t be mistaken for all the thieves and troublemakers in their neighborhood. Maybe if they just studied hard and worked harder? They forget the centuries of discrimination and lack of opportunities. What is the point of studying hard when you’re barred from going to college? What is the point of finally getting to go to college when you’re barred from most lucrative careers and can’t get bank loans to open your own business? What is the point of saving money when banks refuse to do business with people of color, and if you put in under your mattress, your house gets broken into, and I’m not talking about other people of color breaking into your house and taking your savings, I’m talking about the police. Even today, the police will confiscate your money and accuse you of being a drug dealer if you have a large amount of cash on you, in your car, or in your house.
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Besides authoritarianism and racism, there are other beliefs which keep us obedient and stupid. One is the cult of civilization, the idea that civilized people are good and uncivilized people are bad. It is the idea that without civilization, we would all be bad people. It is the idea that humans were born evil, and humans need to be trained to be good people. Isn’t that convenient? While you’re training people to be ‘good’ people, you also train them like circus animals to be obedient and racist. The greatest lie is that northern Europeans conquered the world, because they were the most civilized of all humans on the planet. Quite the contrary, at the time, northern Europeans had been the least civilized people on the planet compared with the Native Americans, southern Europeans, Africans, Asian Indians, Chinese, Southeast Asian, etc. In fact, they were referred to as barbarians by the Romans.
When you look at the height of people around the world, it’s often a good indicator of how long their ancestors AVOIDED civilization and the shorter people are, the more likely they lived in civilizations longer than anyone else. For hundreds of generations, their ancestors were only fed grains and occasionally meat causing them to shrink in size. The Mongols are a perfect example of how northern hunter-gatherers tended to be larger, stronger, and greater physical specimens than their southern counterparts. When people wonder how a small group of Spaniards conquered so much territory in South and Central America, you just need to look at the Mongols and how easily it was for them to conquer the ‘great’ civilizations of India, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.
Only now have civilizations become more formidable than hunter-gatherers with weapons technology. In fact, Europeans embraced technology more than most other civilizations, because their civilization was young and not encumbered with the traditionalism and conservatism that civilizations ultimately succumb to. Keep in mind, for a while, European civilization succumbed to religious fervor which condemned science and technology during the Dark Ages. Imagine if Europe had never left the Dark Ages. This is exactly what happened to many civilizations of South America, Africa, India, and China. They succumbed to their own Dark Ages and never left until Europe conquered them. Civilization invariably spawns conservatism and antipathy toward discovery, exploration, and intellectual curiosity. When you think about today’s technological boom, it’s coming from the Western US, where civilization has had the least amount of time to manifest on the continent.
I’m not saying hunter-gatherers are better at technology. But they do have a better mindset that is more open to discovery, exploration, curiosity, adaptation, innovation, and trying all types of new things out. However, in order for industrial and information technology to work, you need a combination of both civilization and people who behave more like hunter-gatherers. For this reason, perhaps Europe was destined to become the first industrialized region, as their northern hunter-gatherers with their open minds settled down into southern-style civilizations. It is also notable that the northern Europeans, specifically the British and Germans, rejected the southern-style dogmatic, conservative, traditionalist, authoritarian rule of the Catholic Church while southern Europeans embraced it. It was the perfect storm for technology to blossom, civilization at its foundation for stability and occupational specialization wedded with hunter-gatherer minds that were curious, exploratory, flexible, adaptive, and open.
It is also notable that classical liberalism came from a northern European country, namely Britain and not Italy, not Spain, not Greece. The British people who embraced classical liberalism were simply embracing their heritage as freethinking, freely migrating, exploratory, open-minded hunter gathers from the north. And then it was the British and Germans who took industrialism to the next level, followed by the Japanese, a northern East Asian country. You must wonder why the Industrial Age did not come from a southern, Catholic, conservative, authoritarian nation? Why the Southeast Asians didn’t embrace industrialization like the Northeast Asians, the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and ultimately the Chinese. Could it be that those in southern climates embrace security, stability, status quo, conservatism, and traditionalism while those in northern climates living in scarcity are forced to keep an open mind, to explore, to innovate, to figure out different ways of getting or preserving food, different and more efficient ways of filling their needs with scarce resources, being more adaptable, flexible, relying more on their individual initiate and intuition than the collective.
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Another belief is in progress. Progress is always good and tradition is always bad. People a hundred years ago were stupid, a thousand years ago they were stupider, and don’t even get me started on ten thousand or a hundred thousand years ago. Never mind you that ancient people used plant medicine that had antibiotic properties well before we even knew about penicillin or microbiology. Ancient Buddhists knew about the health and mental benefits of meditation long before Western Europe created the field of psychology. Native American tribes were discussing politics in a much more sophisticated and nuanced manner than the Europeans who invaded their lands. For centuries, Europeans have gaslit the world into believing that they invented everything, and only recently.
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An enfeebling belief is in contracting government to do all your sharing, giving, and helping, that professional caregivers are superior to extended family members. Perhaps they do have more training, but because they have no genes in the game, they are far more likely to be apathetic or even abusive toward the people they care for. While nepotism is hardwired into our brains, xenophobia is also hardwired into our brains, and when a strange person exhibits weakness, our predatory drive overtakes us. Whereas a weak family member causes us to become protective and kind. Without anyone to care for and help, we don’t become more transcendent, compassionate, humane people, quite the opposite, without exercising our sharing and kindness ‘muscles’ they wither away, and we become entitled, privileged, spoiled, selfish narcissists.
Another enfeebling belief is that life shouldn’t be hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unpleasant. Somehow, we can get rid of all that nasty stuff. Right now, if you have enough money, you can hire other humans to do all your difficult, inconvenient things like shopping, waiting in lines, balancing your check book, getting your car fixed, moving your furniture, cleaning, carrying your heavy luggage, etc.
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How ironic is it that we live in a forced collectivist society where much of our wages and profits go to a small group of elites. Then they keep sending us messages that we should focus on ourselves and not others. We should improve ourselves; acquire college degrees to enhance our career opportunities; we should enhance our image with countless commercial products; we should obsess over ourselves with self-help, self-improvement, self-actualization, self-development, self-focus; individuals are glamorized and glorified instead of teams or groups, etc. Far from empowering ourselves, this narcissistic self-love, self-importance, and self-focus only enfeebles us, alienating us from other people who consider us too self-focused and lacking any kind of focus on the thoughts, feelings, needs, and concerns of others. What good does this do us? The answer is none. It does, however, enhance profits for those who feed our narcissistic anxieties. We spend vast amounts of our income and profits on our college degrees, cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, fashion, expensive status signaling objects, jewelry, bottle service, etc., and they get rich off our self-infatuation anxieties.
On the other hand, if we dispossessed ourselves of this self-obsession, we would wake up and discover true happiness, fulfillment, purpose, and meaning. We would wake up and think about others; care for others; help others; consider other ideas, thoughts, feelings, needs, and concerns. Other people would consider us to be enjoyable and fulfilling company. This is how humans existed for over two hundreds thousand years, and our primate ancestors for millions of years before that. We found our purpose and meaning and derived pleasure and fulfillment by focusing on others.
The great irony is that we didn’t need any external institutions, i.e., the state, to make us help other people. It was hardwired into our DNA. The idea of paying taxes to help others, the idea of forced collectivism, is a flimsy misdirection used to rob us of our income and profits. The further idea of paying taxes to alleviate us of our burden of helping and sharing and thinking of others is the biggest deception in history. We don’t need that burden alleviated. We require that ‘burden’ in order to feel meaning and purpose in our lives and to enjoy the feeling of joy and fulfillment when others express appreciation for our kindness. By turning us into self-absorbed narcissists, who feel alleviated from the burden of kindness and compassion toward others, we become disgusting, enfeebled, shadows of humans, programmed to bring huge profits to businesses that prey on our insecurities, existential unhappiness, and life devoid of meaning, purpose, and value to everyone except ourselves.
When I was in college studying Economics, one of the first things we learned is the idea that each individual is a rational decision-maker with perfect information and therefore pursues a transaction that completely improves his position, and the entire field of Economics is predicated on this assumption. It’s no surprise that when psychologists come along and argue that this is simply not true, the economists would throw the biggest of academic hissy fits. This touches upon one of the most fundamental problems with both Economics and Psychology. We are taught that these are the ‘social sciences’ and their researchers are scientists. What we are not taught or reminded about is that science is about predicting an outcome by controlling inputs. The social sciences have yet to predict anything except the obvious destructive predictions like dropping an atomic bomb on Miami would reduce Miami’s productive capacities in the short-term. In fact, there’s a crisis in the ‘social sciences’ of failing to reproduce their experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
If you think about it, nobody should really be surprised that non-scientists aren’t doing scientific work. What’s surprising is that so many people have fallen for their scam. The scam goes something like this. If you quack like a duck, glue feathers on to yourself, and wear a plastic duck bill, people might assume you’re a duck. What the social ‘scientists’ have done is act like real scientists in every way except the most important parts, predicting things and creating experiments you can reproduce to confirm the predictions. What they have done is nothing short of putting on a gigantic circus act to distract you from the fact that they are not really scientists doing scientific work. They use extensive, advanced mathematics and statistics; gather huge amounts of data; conduct ‘experiments’ under ‘controlled’ conditions; wear lab coats (my favorite, like a fucking commercial for anti-fungal cream); adopt complex technical jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations; and write papers inundated with formulas, graphs, tables, and a horrifically large appendix filled with data. It’s called obfuscation. You’re so inundated with the technical data and complex mathematics, that you miss the most important point of all, it’s not a real scientific experiment that can prove anything or can be reproduced.
It’s ironic that it takes a social ‘science’ to take down another social ‘science,’ but there is some value from what should actually be called social research. The psychologists correctly can demonstrate that our senses can be fooled and that we are mostly irrational actors who sometimes pursue things that are not in our best interests. However, unlike the real sciences, they can prove trends and not the actual behavior of each individual, because humans are much more complex and biased by many more factors that can’t be isolated in a lab. The very nature of social complexity means that when you isolate inputs, you’re deconstructing the entire social process that leads us to make decisions and act. You need to know all the inputs first, but then you need to reveal how each of those inputs interact with each other, and even then, emergent new processes evolve that you can’t predict. What you can surmise is that human behavior follows patterns and trends but broadly.
Unfortunately, the whole movement toward trying to make the social ‘sciences’ look more sciency has attracted rather narrow-minded, myopic technical researchers, and what you might also cynically call, drop-outs from the real sciences. So they have inferiority complexes as well as a penchant for trying to reduce human complex behavior into the most simplistic and common denominators. It’s easier if you assume that humans act like computers in fact. The last thing these sciency researchers want to do is tackle the real complexity of human behavior that someone like Shakespeare or a clinical psychologist is more familiar with. They know we’re not dealing with machines or computers. They know, profoundly, that we are dealing with emotional, irrational, dramatic, and sometimes comedic actors who create their own tragedies, because they operate on assumptions and beliefs they simply can’t abandon. They are also inextricably social beings that exist within the context of their social identities, so they’re not necessarily acting on their selfish behalf even if they could.
So why do they do it? Cynically, you can call them all charlatans, but charlatans also have a tendency of believing in their own scams. It reminds me of the last book I read about China and how many city folk go to Buddhist temples and bring all their medical issues and business problems, thinking the monks have some special power to help them. If only they commit themselves more to the Buddhist way or help build them a new temple, karma will help them overcome their problems. In a self-selection process, the ones who find some comfort or relief stick around and donate more money, so the monks start to believe in their own bullshit as well. (Also, reminds me of the chi warriors who claim they can throw people around without physical contact.)
Similarly, when the government needs to justify spending more money and going into more debt to stimulate the economy, the economists recommend more spending, more printing of money, and more debt backed by Ph.D.’s, volumes of sciency research papers, prestigious universities, etc. It’s all a big scam, but when the economy recovers (which naturally happens [just as naturally as it contracts] as people get over their panic-selling), the economists start to believe in their own bullshit and the government gives them more grant money. Economists who recommend that government just step aside and let the market naturally reset are ignore and belittled, their funding taken away. I mean really, what government agency is going to hire an economist or cite their paper that recommends the agency mind its own fucking business and wither away, because it’s actually part of the problem?
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It is also fascinating how those who assume people are more simple, predictable, and rational, tend to prefer a top-down approach to managing them. Certainly, if you’re dealing with a bunch of stupid hamsters, why not control them from above? It would be more efficient to put them all in a warehouse, stick them in cages, allot food to them evenly, certainly, they’d be happier than being out in the wild where there are predators, seasonal changes, and unpredictable forces of nature. Of course, even with hamsters, the warehouse life is oppressive to them. People who accept the fact that humans are complex, unpredictable, and irrational, interestingly enough, happen to be more humane and friendly. Unlike their myopic counterparts, they have come to accept the frailty, flaws, and crazy that is humanity, and they know that you can’t control, confine, or contain it all. If you do, you get even more dysfunctional frailty, flaws, and crazy. What they know through interacting with other humans is that often when you give them the space, freedom, and support they need, they thrive, they trust, they are happier, they are kinder, they share more, and they act more, traditionally, human.
It’s notable here that it seems the vast majority of so-called disrupters in Silicon Valley fall under the myopic, technical idiot-savant category. They are uncomfortable around the unpredictable and chaotic world of social interaction, using digital media as some sort of medium that buffers them from the chaos. They can control the digital media, therefore, they can control the chaos (in their minds). In fact, they feel like gods. Tweak a little feature here, like increase the ratio of general posts to friend posts, and viola, they control people! It’s a dream come true for them to have so much power over so many people otherwise feared, misunderstood, and avoided. Unfortunately, it’s all an illusion. They are ultimately turning people off social media as people simply sense that they are being manipulated more and more, and nothing really beats face-to-face interaction. But for many people, the top-down approach does change and corrupt them. As it forces them into pigeonholes and constricts their freedoms and self-expression, they slowly, like a boiling frog, lose their senses of self and authenticity. They become fake. They start believing in manipulation and start to crave ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ over real human interaction. They become the very simpletons and machines they’re assumed to be anyway. If the only tool you have is a hammer (top-down control), then every problem becomes a nail (an anti-social, simple-minded automaton in need of top-down control).
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It should be common knowledge by now that there’s grocery store product shrinkage. I know that my Tropicana OJ is getting smaller and smaller. What they don’t seem to understand is that consumers have a way of fighting back. There was a time I’d drink 14 ounces of OJ for breakfast. Now, I dilute the OJ in equal parts water and only have a 4 ounce shot in the morning, just enough to quench my thirst. (I also read somewhere that you’re not really supposed to drink a lot of orange juice as it’s condensed oranges and have a lot more sugar than your body can handle.)
Corporations and large private companies are caught in a cheapening trap which not only hurts them individually but also the entire reputation of corporations and large companies. A lot of people, especially young people, do everything possible to avoid buying corporate and big brand name shit now. Not only do they play pricing tricks, but they’re known to replace safe, natural, superior ingredients with cheap, chemical, toxic crap that harms you. Corporations and large companies can do all they want to trick you, but at the end of the day, consumers get their revenge by simply hating everything corporate to the point where now corporations are trying to hide their faces from their products, pawning their products now as small, independent, craft labels or just buying up actual small, independent, craft labels and then substituting all their ingredients with crap. A local example, a local independent company, Nature’s Bakery just sold to KIND for $400 million, and guess who owns KIND? Mars, Inc.
This reminds me of Walmart and how their megastores with shelf tricks is turning consumers off Walmart and on to Amazon. I don’t want to spend half the day walking all over an acre store just to buy underwear, toilet paper, and laundry detergent, all in different parts of the store. And when I go to buy electronic items, I don’t want to be tricked into buying a higher end product that is placed between a cheap product and a super high-end product making me think it’s a reasonable middle. All their tricks just ultimately turn consumers off, and consumers figure out new and better ways of getting what they want.
Unfortunately, just like the weapon and shield escalation, corporations are hiring ever more sophisticated consultants who attract researchers in cutting-edge psychology to trick consumers. We need books like this to defend ourselves.
* * *
One thing the book doesn’t cover is the decision-maker’s state of mind. In the last book I read, Street of Eternal Happiness, there’s a story of an old lady who keeps falling for investment scams. It seems illogical until the author points out that she had borrowed money from family to sue her husband for buying a $100K home for his mistress. You tend to take much bigger risks if you’re desperate, but unfortunately, this is why scams work so well. There are a lot of desperate people out there, and the more they get scammed, the more desperate they become. This would also explain why people in poverty tend to engage in more risky behavior including speeding, selling and using drugs, drunk driving, theft, and pursuing high risk-low payoff jobs like art, music, and sports. It would also explain why they also tend to take bigger risks in politics, voting for authoritarian candidates who want to consolidate power which means, either they turn out benevolent and help out the poor, or they turn out malevolent and use the poor as cannon fodder to fight wars.
* * *
The chapter on the casino made me think that all businesses in a sense are casinos. You enter and gamble with your money. You’re trying to get the maximum value of something without over-paying for it, while the business is doing the complete opposite, trying to get the most money from you. But these days, the larger the business, the more sophisticated they are at creating a house advantage. If you saw it this way, you would never shop at a large business. The odds are stacked against you. You would prefer to shop at small businesses where the owners are not as sophisticated or for that matter as motivated to cheat you out of your money. In fact, many small business owners are outright incompetent and are creating a virtual charity for workers and customers. You could also argue that they’re simply not greedy. Why would you ever shop at a large store? While you may argue that there is a lot of inconsistency in small businesses, and some are even more shadier than large companies, apps like Yelp quickly root them out as well as word-of-mouth.
* * *
One tactic businesses use to hide prices is obfuscation. On travel sites, they will tell you the hotel price, but they won’t tell you the resort fee. Good luck trying to figure out a phone or cable bill. You’ll have to download it anyway from the Internet into a pdf. Do you have Adobe? But have you ever wondered just how much your dentist or doctor visit really was? All you get is the deductible. Would it shock you if your dentist visit was really $100 or $1000? So long as you just paid $30, who cares? But don’t you really end up paying in the end? Certainly, you pay in the cost of your health plan. And when government subsidizes food, you have no idea how much you’re really paying in food. And for that matter, how much do you pay in taxes each year? Have you ever tried to calculate your payroll taxes, social security taxes, and all your sales tax on top of your federal and state income taxes? Would it surprise you that over half your income goes to taxes? Unfortunately, we live in an age where big business and government have simply outwitted us with obfuscation, hiding their true prices behind a complex web of complexity and confusion. All we see if the cheap price of cereal or soda, and we think we’re getting a deal. We don’t see the high price of obesity and heart disease and higher healthcare costs that we all wind up paying for with higher healthcare premiums not to mention the slow, agonizing boiling frog of higher and higher deductibles.
The biggest problem here lies in trust. Does anyone trust hotels and airlines these days when all their fees are hidden, and when you come back from vacation, you feel cheated and your credit card bill is astronomical? What if a hotel came along and said, we charge $100 a night, and that includes taxes, fees, and we don’t have a resort fee. What would that do for your trust in that hotel? I trust Southwest more than I trust any other airline, because Southwest doesn’t have a luggage fee. Not only do I trust them not to screw me over with a luggage fee, but I also trust them not to screw me over in any other regard, and especially in safety!
So what does it say about our government when you don’t really know exactly how much you’re paying in taxes? And what about local or state governments that really get you by charging exorbitant traffic fines, court fees, jail fee, public defender fees, administrative fees, late fees, inspection fees, license reinstatement fees, facilities fees, installment payment fees, collection fees, etc.? How do you trust government which tries to raise revenue without raising taxes by simply raising fees and fines? And since poor people are likely to take bigger risks, they wind up paying a disproportionate amount in minor infraction fees not to mention the free labor they provide doing ‘community service.’ When you think of how screwed the poor are, how they also pay the most for loans, you have to realize just how screwed society is. Blaming the poor for being poor is one way the rich convince you that everyone gets what they deserve including the rich. You’re just being a gullible idiot looking down upon the poor and worshipping the rich.
What would you think of a relative or friend who agrees to lend you $100, but he charges 17.99% interest, a $20 late fee in addition to 29.99% interest past one month, and a $9.99 administrative fee? Would you trust that relative or friend? It sounds like he’s trying to take advantage of you as opposed to doing you a friendly favor for someone in need. And what if he asks for a loan in return? You’re more likely to give him the exact same treatment in return, and you would no longer even consider him a friend or trusted family member. This is essentially how we’re started to feel about big business and government. They don’t exist to watch our backs and look out for our best interests. They exist to exploit and trick us out of our money, so why should you do business with big business? Why should you support a big government for that matter? You don’t trust them to be upfront about how much money they are taxing you, subsidizing big business, or fining you for every conceivable infraction, but they’re suddenly honest and forthright about how they treat you and look out for your best interest and national security interests? You don’t really trust big business to give you quality products you truly need at a fair price, so why do you trust government to solve society’s problems like crime, homelessness, terrorism, illiteracy, poverty, hunger, and injustice??? They’re both scams. Wake up.
* * *
I started to skim the second-half of this book. The first half is theory, and the second half is loaded with short chapters on examples of research and implementation. It gets a big repetitive and redundant. At its core is the principle that we are keen at comparing two things and terrible at estimating the absolute value of things. When we see an animal in the distance, we are terrible at estimating how far away it is, but if we see two rabbits in the distant, and one appears larger than the other, we easily determine that one rabbit is closer to us than the other. Or if we see an animal next to a tree, we are good at estimating how large that animal is and how far away it is. So how much does anything cost? We have no idea until you compare it next to something else, and this is where we can be tricked. Imagine putting a fake 12-inch tree in the distance next to a dog. We would think the dog is much closer to us than the tree. The author gives example after example of how we can be tricked when something false or misleading is juxtaposed next to something we’re trying to value.
The trick is simple but has countless variations. You walk up to a stranger and ask them what time is it. Now you’ve juxtaposed a very small favor next to a larger one. You then ask if they can spare a minute to fill out an important survey. Or you ask your boss for a raise of $10/hour when in fact you only really want $5/hour more, so when your boss refuses the $10/hour raise, you propose the 50% discount of $5/hour. You walk into a store and see an espresso machine prominently displayed for $1000. Next to it is another model for $299. Your new normal is $1000, so the $299 doesn’t seem so bad. Your parents tell you that Uncle Norm is coming over, and you’ll have to share a bedroom with your brother. Uncle Norm is a grotesque, loud, smelly character. Then you tell them Uncle Norm cancelled and Aunt Jesse is actually coming over. Now your kids are enthralled about sharing rooms! The only problem is you can only do this so many times before someone catches on. After that, you’re outed as a manipulator and deceiver. Nothing you say can be trusted anymore. Can you even believe that there are consultant companies that big business hires to scam, cheat, and deceive you? What does that say about big business? What if we hired a consultant company to scam, cheat, and deceive big business? It’s basically like they’re at war with us and don’t consider us valued customers but rather stupid marks and enemies to be conquered and exploited.
* * *
A couple chapters cover testosterone and CEO salaries, and it’s unsurprising that men love to hoard wealth. The problem with modern human men is that much like other male animals, they are driven to hoard resources as a display of fitness. Testosterone also makes them more driven to social dominance which is displayed through wealth, status, and power. Bowerbirds are a great example of how the male birds collect items to build a large display. Nature, however, has limits on individuals collecting material wealth. You can only hoard so much before you have to sleep, and competing males can easily steal or destroy your collection. There’s also so much an individual can carry away in his arms before getting tired. With the advent of money, your wealth can now be stored digitally in a safe bank account. In other words, you can hoard as never before without ever fearing your wealth being stolen. This has created the gigantic wealth discrepancy for humanity as well as a new class of living beings that have inordinate power, wealth, and influence over everyone else and nature itself. This creates unsustainable systems where resources are depleted, biodiversity is diminished, and the habitat is degraded and destroyed. Instead of working more to earn more, they rely on rent seeking, simply gaming the system to steal wealth from others without adding any value to the economy. They are essentially, harmful parasites. When rent seekers dominate the economy, as happens in most Third World Countries, the economy collapses. When applied to the world, the world collapses. Is anyone bothered by this? I love the term, ‘rent-seekers.’ They’re assholes who don’t work and live off the hard work of others by scamming them. In the past, they were called aristocrats. In the past, they were beheaded. Just saying.
It is my conjecture that if humanity is to survive much longer, we will ultimately have to forgo with males. With robots and artificial insemination, you really don’t need men. Humanlike robots could replace human males to keep women company and provide cuddling and sexual services. Hell, give them fur and make them purr like cats. Robot soldiers would provide human females with sufficient security from possible hostile beings on Earth and extraterrestrial. The opposite would be more complicated. It would take more technology to raise fetuses without a human womb, and men wouldn’t be as interested in raising children. In fact, men wouldn’t want male children which one day would become their competitors. Men would ultimately kill off each other until there was only one man left standing with all the wealth. In fact, that last man might as well kill off all the women and create robot women who didn’t talk back or think for themselves. I’m not entirely sure a super AI would allow that to happen as opposed to simply eradicating all men and allowing more collaborative women to flourish. A non-male future for humanity seems more likely than a non-female one.
Priceless: The Hidden Psychology of Value by William Poundstone
When I was in college studying Economics, one of the first things we learned is the idea that each individual is a rational decision-maker with perfect information and therefore pursues a transaction that completely improves his position, and the entire field of Economics is predicated on this assumption. It’s no surprise that when psychologists come along and argue that this is simply not true, the economists would throw the biggest of academic hissy fits. This touches upon one of the most fundamental problems with both Economics and Psychology. We are taught that these are the ‘social sciences’ and their researchers are scientists. What we are not taught or reminded about is that science is about predicting an outcome by controlling inputs. The social sciences have yet to predict anything except the obvious destructive predictions like dropping an atomic bomb on Miami would reduce Miami’s productive capacities in the short-term. In fact, there’s a crisis in the ‘social sciences’ of failing to reproduce their experiments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
If you think about it, nobody should really be surprised that non-scientists aren’t doing scientific work. What’s surprising is that so many people have fallen for their scam. The scam goes something like this. If you quack like a duck, glue feathers on to yourself, and wear a plastic duck bill, people might assume you’re a duck. What the social ‘scientists’ have done is act like real scientists in every way except the most important parts, predicting things and creating experiments you can reproduce to confirm the predictions. What they have done is nothing short of putting on a gigantic circus act to distract you from the fact that they are not really scientists doing scientific work. They use extensive, advanced mathematics and statistics; gather huge amounts of data; conduct ‘experiments’ under ‘controlled’ conditions; wear lab coats (my favorite, like a fucking commercial for anti-fungal cream); adopt complex technical jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations; and write papers inundated with formulas, graphs, tables, and a horrifically large appendix filled with data. It’s called obfuscation. You’re so inundated with the technical data and complex mathematics, that you miss the most important point of all, it’s not a real scientific experiment that can prove anything or can be reproduced.
It’s ironic that it takes a social ‘science’ to take down another social ‘science,’ but there is some value from what should actually be called social research. The psychologists correctly can demonstrate that our senses can be fooled and that we are mostly irrational actors who sometimes pursue things that are not in our best interests. However, unlike the real sciences, they can prove trends and not the actual behavior of each individual, because humans are much more complex and biased by many more factors that can’t be isolated in a lab. The very nature of social complexity means that when you isolate inputs, you’re deconstructing the entire social process that leads us to make decisions and act. You need to know all the inputs first, but then you need to reveal how each of those inputs interact with each other, and even then, emergent new processes evolve that you can’t predict. What you can surmise is that human behavior follows patterns and trends but broadly.
Unfortunately, the whole movement toward trying to make the social ‘sciences’ look more sciency has attracted rather narrow-minded, myopic technical researchers, and what you might also cynically call, drop-outs from the real sciences. So they have inferiority complexes as well as a penchant for trying to reduce human complex behavior into the most simplistic and common denominators. It’s easier if you assume that humans act like computers in fact. The last thing these sciency researchers want to do is tackle the real complexity of human behavior that someone like Shakespeare or a clinical psychologist is more familiar with. They know we’re not dealing with machines or computers. They know, profoundly, that we are dealing with emotional, irrational, dramatic, and sometimes comedic actors who create their own tragedies, because they operate on assumptions and beliefs they simply can’t abandon. They are also inextricably social beings that exist within the context of their social identities, so they’re not necessarily acting on their selfish behalf even if they could.
So why do they do it? Cynically, you can call them all charlatans, but charlatans also have a tendency of believing in their own scams. It reminds me of the last book I read about China and how many city folk go to Buddhist temples and bring all their medical issues and business problems, thinking the monks have some special power to help them. If only they commit themselves more to the Buddhist way or help build them a new temple, karma will help them overcome their problems. In a self-selection process, the ones who find some comfort or relief stick around and donate more money, so the monks start to believe in their own bullshit as well. (Also, reminds me of the chi warriors who claim they can throw people around without physical contact.)
Similarly, when the government needs to justify spending more money and going into more debt to stimulate the economy, the economists recommend more spending, more printing of money, and more debt backed by Ph.D.’s, volumes of sciency research papers, prestigious universities, etc. It’s all a big scam, but when the economy recovers (which naturally happens [just as naturally as it contracts] as people get over their panic-selling), the economists start to believe in their own bullshit and the government gives them more grant money. Economists who recommend that government just step aside and let the market naturally reset are ignore and belittled, their funding taken away. I mean really, what government agency is going to hire an economist or cite their paper that recommends the agency mind its own fucking business and wither away, because it’s actually part of the problem?
* * *
It is also fascinating how those who assume people are more simple, predictable, and rational, tend to prefer a top-down approach to managing them. Certainly, if you’re dealing with a bunch of stupid hamsters, why not control them from above? It would be more efficient to put them all in a warehouse, stick them in cages, allot food to them evenly, certainly, they’d be happier than being out in the wild where there are predators, seasonal changes, and unpredictable forces of nature. Of course, even with hamsters, the warehouse life is oppressive to them. People who accept the fact that humans are complex, unpredictable, and irrational, interestingly enough, happen to be more humane and friendly. Unlike their myopic counterparts, they have come to accept the frailty, flaws, and crazy that is humanity, and they know that you can’t control, confine, or contain it all. If you do, you get even more dysfunctional frailty, flaws, and crazy. What they know through interacting with other humans is that often when you give them the space, freedom, and support they need, they thrive, they trust, they are happier, they are kinder, they share more, and they act more, traditionally, human.
It’s notable here that it seems the vast majority of so-called disrupters in Silicon Valley fall under the myopic, technical idiot-savant category. They are uncomfortable around the unpredictable and chaotic world of social interaction, using digital media as some sort of medium that buffers them from the chaos. They can control the digital media, therefore, they can control the chaos (in their minds). In fact, they feel like gods. Tweak a little feature here, like increase the ratio of general posts to friend posts, and viola, they control people! It’s a dream come true for them to have so much power over so many people otherwise feared, misunderstood, and avoided. Unfortunately, it’s all an illusion. They are ultimately turning people off social media as people simply sense that they are being manipulated more and more, and nothing really beats face-to-face interaction. But for many people, the top-down approach does change and corrupt them. As it forces them into pigeonholes and constricts their freedoms and self-expression, they slowly, like a boiling frog, lose their senses of self and authenticity. They become fake. They start believing in manipulation and start to crave ‘likes’ and ‘friends’ over real human interaction. They become the very simpletons and machines they’re assumed to be anyway. If the only tool you have is a hammer (top-down control), then every problem becomes a nail (an anti-social, simple-minded automaton in need of top-down control).
* * *
It should be common knowledge by now that there’s grocery store product shrinkage. I know that my Tropicana OJ is getting smaller and smaller. What they don’t seem to understand is that consumers have a way of fighting back. There was a time I’d drink 14 ounces of OJ for breakfast. Now, I dilute the OJ in equal parts water and only have a 4 ounce shot in the morning, just enough to quench my thirst. (I also read somewhere that you’re not really supposed to drink a lot of orange juice as it’s condensed oranges and have a lot more sugar than your body can handle.)
Corporations and large private companies are caught in a cheapening trap which not only hurts them individually but also the entire reputation of corporations and large companies. A lot of people, especially young people, do everything possible to avoid buying corporate and big brand name shit now. Not only do they play pricing tricks, but they’re known to replace safe, natural, superior ingredients with cheap, chemical, toxic crap that harms you. Corporations and large companies can do all they want to trick you, but at the end of the day, consumers get their revenge by simply hating everything corporate to the point where now corporations are trying to hide their faces from their products, pawning their products now as small, independent, craft labels or just buying up actual small, independent, craft labels and then substituting all their ingredients with crap. A local example, a local independent company, Nature’s Bakery just sold to KIND for $400 million, and guess who owns KIND? Mars, Inc.
This reminds me of Walmart and how their megastores with shelf tricks is turning consumers off Walmart and on to Amazon. I don’t want to spend half the day walking all over an acre store just to buy underwear, toilet paper, and laundry detergent, all in different parts of the store. And when I go to buy electronic items, I don’t want to be tricked into buying a higher end product that is placed between a cheap product and a super high-end product making me think it’s a reasonable middle. All their tricks just ultimately turn consumers off, and consumers figure out new and better ways of getting what they want.
Unfortunately, just like the weapon and shield escalation, corporations are hiring ever more sophisticated consultants who attract researchers in cutting-edge psychology to trick consumers. We need books like this to defend ourselves.
* * *
One thing the book doesn’t cover is the decision-maker’s state of mind. In the last book I read, Street of Eternal Happiness, there’s a story of an old lady who keeps falling for investment scams. It seems illogical until the author points out that she had borrowed money from family to sue her husband for buying a $100K home for his mistress. You tend to take much bigger risks if you’re desperate, but unfortunately, this is why scams work so well. There are a lot of desperate people out there, and the more they get scammed, the more desperate they become. This would also explain why people in poverty tend to engage in more risky behavior including speeding, selling and using drugs, drunk driving, theft, and pursuing high risk-low payoff jobs like art, music, and sports. It would also explain why they also tend to take bigger risks in politics, voting for authoritarian candidates who want to consolidate power which means, either they turn out benevolent and help out the poor, or they turn out malevolent and use the poor as cannon fodder to fight wars.
* * *
The chapter on the casino made me think that all businesses in a sense are casinos. You enter and gamble with your money. You’re trying to get the maximum value of something without over-paying for it, while the business is doing the complete opposite, trying to get the most money from you. But these days, the larger the business, the more sophisticated they are at creating a house advantage. If you saw it this way, you would never shop at a large business. The odds are stacked against you. You would prefer to shop at small businesses where the owners are not as sophisticated or for that matter as motivated to cheat you out of your money. In fact, many small business owners are outright incompetent and are creating a virtual charity for workers and customers. You could also argue that they’re simply not greedy. Why would you ever shop at a large store? While you may argue that there is a lot of inconsistency in small businesses, and some are even more shadier than large companies, apps like Yelp quickly root them out as well as word-of-mouth.
* * *
One tactic businesses use to hide prices is obfuscation. On travel sites, they will tell you the hotel price, but they won’t tell you the resort fee. Good luck trying to figure out a phone or cable bill. You’ll have to download it anyway from the Internet into a pdf. Do you have Adobe? But have you ever wondered just how much your dentist or doctor visit really was? All you get is the deductible. Would it shock you if your dentist visit was really $100 or $1000? So long as you just paid $30, who cares? But don’t you really end up paying in the end? Certainly, you pay in the cost of your health plan. And when government subsidizes food, you have no idea how much you’re really paying in food. And for that matter, how much do you pay in taxes each year? Have you ever tried to calculate your payroll taxes, social security taxes, and all your sales tax on top of your federal and state income taxes? Would it surprise you that over half your income goes to taxes? Unfortunately, we live in an age where big business and government have simply outwitted us with obfuscation, hiding their true prices behind a complex web of complexity and confusion. All we see if the cheap price of cereal or soda, and we think we’re getting a deal. We don’t see the high price of obesity and heart disease and higher healthcare costs that we all wind up paying for with higher healthcare premiums not to mention the slow, agonizing boiling frog of higher and higher deductibles.
The biggest problem here lies in trust. Does anyone trust hotels and airlines these days when all their fees are hidden, and when you come back from vacation, you feel cheated and your credit card bill is astronomical? What if a hotel came along and said, we charge $100 a night, and that includes taxes, fees, and we don’t have a resort fee. What would that do for your trust in that hotel? I trust Southwest more than I trust any other airline, because Southwest doesn’t have a luggage fee. Not only do I trust them not to screw me over with a luggage fee, but I also trust them not to screw me over in any other regard, and especially in safety!
So what does it say about our government when you don’t really know exactly how much you’re paying in taxes? And what about local or state governments that really get you by charging exorbitant traffic fines, court fees, jail fee, public defender fees, administrative fees, late fees, inspection fees, license reinstatement fees, facilities fees, installment payment fees, collection fees, etc.? How do you trust government which tries to raise revenue without raising taxes by simply raising fees and fines? And since poor people are likely to take bigger risks, they wind up paying a disproportionate amount in minor infraction fees not to mention the free labor they provide doing ‘community service.’ When you think of how screwed the poor are, how they also pay the most for loans, you have to realize just how screwed society is. Blaming the poor for being poor is one way the rich convince you that everyone gets what they deserve including the rich. You’re just being a gullible idiot looking down upon the poor and worshipping the rich.
What would you think of a relative or friend who agrees to lend you $100, but he charges 17.99% interest, a $20 late fee in addition to 29.99% interest past one month, and a $9.99 administrative fee? Would you trust that relative or friend? It sounds like he’s trying to take advantage of you as opposed to doing you a friendly favor for someone in need. And what if he asks for a loan in return? You’re more likely to give him the exact same treatment in return, and you would no longer even consider him a friend or trusted family member. This is essentially how we’re started to feel about big business and government. They don’t exist to watch our backs and look out for our best interests. They exist to exploit and trick us out of our money, so why should you do business with big business? Why should you support a big government for that matter? You don’t trust them to be upfront about how much money they are taxing you, subsidizing big business, or fining you for every conceivable infraction, but they’re suddenly honest and forthright about how they treat you and look out for your best interest and national security interests? You don’t really trust big business to give you quality products you truly need at a fair price, so why do you trust government to solve society’s problems like crime, homelessness, terrorism, illiteracy, poverty, hunger, and injustice??? They’re both scams. Wake up.
* * *
I started to skim the second-half of this book. The first half is theory, and the second half is loaded with short chapters on examples of research and implementation. It gets a big repetitive and redundant. At its core is the principle that we are keen at comparing two things and terrible at estimating the absolute value of things. When we see an animal in the distance, we are terrible at estimating how far away it is, but if we see two rabbits in the distant, and one appears larger than the other, we easily determine that one rabbit is closer to us than the other. Or if we see an animal next to a tree, we are good at estimating how large that animal is and how far away it is. So how much does anything cost? We have no idea until you compare it next to something else, and this is where we can be tricked. Imagine putting a fake 12-inch tree in the distance next to a dog. We would think the dog is much closer to us than the tree. The author gives example after example of how we can be tricked when something false or misleading is juxtaposed next to something we’re trying to value.
The trick is simple but has countless variations. You walk up to a stranger and ask them what time is it. Now you’ve juxtaposed a very small favor next to a larger one. You then ask if they can spare a minute to fill out an important survey. Or you ask your boss for a raise of $10/hour when in fact you only really want $5/hour more, so when your boss refuses the $10/hour raise, you propose the 50% discount of $5/hour. You walk into a store and see an espresso machine prominently displayed for $1000. Next to it is another model for $299. Your new normal is $1000, so the $299 doesn’t seem so bad. Your parents tell you that Uncle Norm is coming over, and you’ll have to share a bedroom with your brother. Uncle Norm is a grotesque, loud, smelly character. Then you tell them Uncle Norm cancelled and Aunt Jesse is actually coming over. Now your kids are enthralled about sharing rooms! The only problem is you can only do this so many times before someone catches on. After that, you’re outed as a manipulator and deceiver. Nothing you say can be trusted anymore. Can you even believe that there are consultant companies that big business hires to scam, cheat, and deceive you? What does that say about big business? What if we hired a consultant company to scam, cheat, and deceive big business? It’s basically like they’re at war with us and don’t consider us valued customers but rather stupid marks and enemies to be conquered and exploited.
* * *
A couple chapters cover testosterone and CEO salaries, and it’s unsurprising that men love to hoard wealth. The problem with modern human men is that much like other male animals, they are driven to hoard resources as a display of fitness. Testosterone also makes them more driven to social dominance which is displayed through wealth, status, and power. Bowerbirds are a great example of how the male birds collect items to build a large display. Nature, however, has limits on individuals collecting material wealth. You can only hoard so much before you have to sleep, and competing males can easily steal or destroy your collection. There’s also so much an individual can carry away in his arms before getting tired. With the advent of money, your wealth can now be stored digitally in a safe bank account. In other words, you can hoard as never before without ever fearing your wealth being stolen. This has created the gigantic wealth discrepancy for humanity as well as a new class of living beings that have inordinate power, wealth, and influence over everyone else and nature itself. This creates unsustainable systems where resources are depleted, biodiversity is diminished, and the habitat is degraded and destroyed. Instead of working more to earn more, they rely on rent seeking, simply gaming the system to steal wealth from others without adding any value to the economy. They are essentially, harmful parasites. When rent seekers dominate the economy, as happens in most Third World Countries, the economy collapses. When applied to the world, the world collapses. Is anyone bothered by this? I love the term, ‘rent-seekers.’ They’re assholes who don’t work and live off the hard work of others by scamming them. In the past, they were called aristocrats. In the past, they were beheaded. Just saying.
It is my conjecture that if humanity is to survive much longer, we will ultimately have to forgo with males. With robots and artificial insemination, you really don’t need men. Humanlike robots could replace human males to keep women company and provide cuddling and sexual services. Hell, give them fur and make them purr like cats. Robot soldiers would provide human females with sufficient security from possible hostile beings on Earth and extraterrestrial. The opposite would be more complicated. It would take more technology to raise fetuses without a human womb, and men wouldn’t be as interested in raising children. In fact, men wouldn’t want male children which one day would become their competitors. Men would ultimately kill off each other until there was only one man left standing with all the wealth. In fact, that last man might as well kill off all the women and create robot women who didn’t talk back or think for themselves. I’m not entirely sure a super AI would allow that to happen as opposed to simply eradicating all men and allowing more collaborative women to flourish. A non-male future for humanity seems more likely than a non-female one.
Like many people, I discovered the Food Babe, Vani Hari, via Facebook. Probably like most guys, I started following her, because I was really into my health, that and she is rather attractive. But I had been into more natural diets before that, approximately in 2009 when I had a minor health scare when they found a benign polyp in my colon. I had also been experiencing regular indigestion from my shitty diet which included late night drunken Denny’s and greasy diner runs. I’ve been going to Whole Foods more, etc. The world is definitely changing in favor of more natural foods, but when I started in 2009, healthy food still had the health nut, hippie vibe. Today, I find more and more antibiotic-free, grass-fed, high fructose corn syrup-free foods and drinks everywhere.
What Hari accomplishes in this book is the uncovering of the big food industry, health vloggers/bloggers, and academia, an unholy trinity of profit-mongering assholes with supposedly trustworthy, independent academic researchers and health do-gooders. I already know now that big business has infiltrated universities, how they fund studies that don’t necessarily disprove a theory but rather throw sufficient doubt into the public forum that people become quickly confused and stall on deciding whether trans fats or GMO food is bad for you or whether climate change is human-caused. They’re pretty slick bastards. But even more insidious is the fact that they fund lackey attack dogs against activists, trying to discredit them with all their degrees and academic backings. Keep in mind, the entire scientific establishment doubted Isaac Newton at first, doubted the existence of tectonic plates, doubted Einstein. Science does not establish truth. Science establishes probability of cause and effect between two things given existing understanding of their properties using existing technology to measure it. What is known today as fact becomes incomplete or entirely wrong tomorrow. This is not to say that science is worthless. Science builds knowledge upon itself, and you can’t get to B without first getting to A, but A is an incomplete or incorrect theory that B corrects, and then B becomes an incomplete or incorrect theory that C corrects, etc. While Hari may not be a scientist, she often cites scientific studies, for example, linking artificial coloring with cancer or trans fats with arterial disease, etc.
It always astonishes me when people can present a simple idea, like warning people not to eat so much sugar, and then big business in collusion with some shady scientist, comes out and says, woah, wait a minute, where’s your scientific education? But there are ample simple-minded, well, let’s just come out and say it, stupid people out there who don’t read books and only consume mass mainstream media whether an ad for an SUV, a crime thriller, a Bachelor dating reality show, or an article that says, hey, eggs aren’t so bad after all, eat away! Most mass mainstream media consumers aren’t going to read past a headline, and if there’s sufficient contradicting headlines about eating eggs, they’re going to go with what makes them feel good at the moment and eat all the eggs they want. When you only have two brain cells to work with, you do the most expedient thing which is trust whatever someone with a Ph.D. says or if what they say contradicts your existing ideological beliefs, don’t trust them at all.
One of the most powerful documentaries I watched in general and specifically about food was What the Health. The most damning thing was their exposure of the American Diabetes Association, American Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association all taking money from big business and big food:
“He says the American Cancer Society has no warning about meat on its site and even has suggested recipes that include processed meat.
Andersen also finds recipes for meat dishes on the American Diabetes Association website.
There are also “heart healthy” recipes for beef dishes on the American Heart Association website.
Andersen also notes the Susan G. Komen foundation has no warning about dairy products on its site even though he quotes research linking dairy products to breast cancer.”
Just as shocking, the collusion between universities and big business, is the collusion between so-called experts and ironically, other bloggers and vloggers and big business. A lot of bloggers get free products from companies to review on their websites or YouTube or Facebook. It makes you wonder if they aren’t somehow swayed by companies. They certainly don’t disclose whether some company may have given them an all-expenses paid trip to some convention or trade show. As big business gets more and more powerful and rich, it makes you wonder who else have they bought off? Perhaps, fortunately for us, the only good way to know if someone is truly independent of big business influence is when big business conveniently attacks them. If big business is threatened by this one person, imagine that, this one person may be on to something bigger than their personal opinions, but perhaps a truth that big business knows has some serious weight that impacts their bottom line. So you know you can trust this author, simply by fact that she has been a frequent target of big food and their crony front PR company assholes.
* * *
While I already knew about the dangers of a lot of the toxic ingredients covered in this book, I also learned of a few new dangers like cellulose and emulsifiers. “In fact, a very common emulsifier in processed food is one of these hidden sources of trans fat-and maybe you’ve heard of it: “mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids,” or “monoglycerides” and “diglycerides.” … Unfortunately, these mono- and diglycerides are quickly converted by the body back into triglycerides, which are associated with heart disease. Even though mono- and diglycerides may contain trans fat, they aren’t required to be labeled as trans fats on food packages because they are classified as emulsifiers, and can even be in food labeled “no trans fat.”” Just an FYI, non-emulsifier trans fats like partially hydrogenated oils are now banned in America, but they use just hydrogenated oils instead which don’t contain trans fat, but it still doesn’t sound healthy. But even though trans fats are now banned, call it an emulsifier and you’re good to go. It’s like if I want to kill someone, “Well, your honor, I didn’t strangle him to death, I emulsified him to death.” Bailiff, release this man!
* * *
I’m not sure why anyone trusts government anymore, an institution that goes around infecting people with syphilis on purpose or purposefully exposing troops to nuclear radiation, an institution that has proven time and time again that it is in bed with big business and will poison, kill, infect, lie to, spy on, and incarcerate people so big business can make a buck. But here’s some more fun government shenanigans regarding Nutrition Facts labels: “You see, government regulations allow a margin of error of 20 percent. … That 100-calorie pack of cookies could really be 120 calories. … When the US Government Accountability Office audited certain food products, they found that a third of them were inaccurate in regard to iron content and almost half of them had the wrong vitamin A content listed.” Trust government they said. Oh, but if you only gave them more money, they’d get out of bed with big business. That’s like a spouse getting cheated on. Gee, if only you gave your husband more money, he’d stop sleeping with the nanny. Yahhhhhhhhhhhh.
I’ve sat on this review for quite some time. Perhaps I’ve mimicked the author and made everything way too complex than it has to be. Maybe I’ve successfully obfuscated myself. After a couple weeks giving my brain a rest from this exhaustive and frustrating piece of sh*t book, I’ve regained my mental balance and developed a desire to be done with this review and get this horrible thing out of my mind and off my plate. What this book has basically done is helped me relive all my intellectual nightmares from school. What I mean to say is that, I entered school, as most kids, intensely curious, passionate, and full of awe at the spectacle of learning so much about the wonderful and seemingly magical world I lived in. What happened instead was a grinding process, a process I call, manufactured obfuscation, mixed in equal parts with humiliation, manufactured stress, deadlines, exams, grades, records, red-marks, and the almost total annihilation of every ounce of curiosity, passion for learning, and inspiration. Learning became a hideous, humiliating, stressful chore. Likewise, reading this book became a hideous, stressful chore that sapped my interest in learning and reading for a couple weeks.
Why? This book is a joke. It feigns to argue that science has yet to invent an effective way to prove causality, the almighty ‘why’ of nature. We understand how nature works, what it produces, but for some reason, we have not (until now) developed the tools to understand why nature does what it does. This is all bullsh*t. What in fact the idiot-like author is saying is that the SOCIAL “sciences” have yet to prove any causality in social phenomena. What the author invented is not the first tool for science to use to prove causality. Real science, thank you very much, has the tools to prove causality. What the idiot-like author is saying is that he has invented a tool to make it look like, or make it look MORE like, the SOCIAL “sciences” can prove causality. Well, Einstein, it can’t, because social phenomena cannot be controlled and isolated like in the real sciences. Like quantum phenomena, the act of measuring it, inextricably alters it. In the case of social phenomena, when you extract one social variable, by this very act, you deactivate the emergent actuators of the phenomena. Okay, fancy talk for saying that social phenomena occur only when key social variables are mixed together, and when that occurs, they produce an emergent, new property that could not have occurred without that precise mix. Certainly, you can make causal inferences about social phenomena. If you release 100 serial killers into a community, murders will increase. But you can’t make more complex and nuanced inferences like, if you increase the number of police officers by 15%, murders will decrease by 7.5%. There are too many alternative factors and influences on murder than the number of police officers in the community. The book review ends here. What follows are just ideas that were spurred by this horrible book:
I’ve started to dwell a lot on manufactured complexity and purposeful obfuscation by social “scientists” and bureaucrats alike. I will therefore take this opportunity to digress on the matter.
Manufactured Complexities and Dangers
The modern world is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous. It is simply becoming too large for any one person or small group of people to handle and manage. For this reason, we need a strong, ubiquitous government to help protect people and manage the complexities of the modern world. Constitutional rights and freedoms worked in the age of agriculture, but in the age of industry, robber barons and industrialists have become too powerful and exploited factory labor. In exchange for rights and freedoms, a centralized powerful government can ensure that the masses are protected and coordinated in their efforts to create a just, egalitarian, and free society.
Do you believe all that crap? Evidently, this is the logic of the expansion of government since the dawn of the Industrial Age in America. The ruling class have always exploited people, from slavery to serfdom back to African slavery to exploitation of farm workers. Complex societies have always existed, especially in large ports and trading cities, and they never required a heavy-handed centralized bureaucracy to manage them. In fact, free agents and entrepreneurs were better equipped to manage the complexities of cultural diversity and trade. Large bureaucracies were actually poorly equipped to handle the complexities of diverse populations in diverse, dynamic markets. While complexities increase as more people interact and technology invents new inventions and tools, each individual is better at determining what is important to know, whom to interact with, and how to use and adapt these tools for their needs than distant, removed bureaucrats. Finally, if you wanted to control the exploitation and growth of robber barons and the ruling elite, you certainly wouldn’t construct an enormous and powerful bureaucracy that can be bought and controlled by them.
Our government, however, has perpetuated the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs by making everything more complex, obscure, secretive, confusing, and convoluted than it has to be. Most government workers are not actually involved in doing anything useful to help people but rather do nothing but learn, interpret, and manage the unbelievable manufactured complexities of countless laws, regulations, guidelines, and rules invented to perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs. Certainly if you pass enough laws and rules and purposefully make them exceptionally dense, convoluted, and obscure, then individuals would need to hire lawyers to run their own affairs, and that is exactly what they do if they can afford it. If they can’t afford it, they suffer the consequences of breaking countless laws, rules, and regulations resulting in lost freedoms and privileges and impoverishment from fines, liens, or incarceration. Instead of creating a world kinder and safer for the masses, the peasants, the poor and reeling in the rich and forcing them to redistribute their wealth to the masses, bureaucratism AKA progressivism actually makes the world a lot more brutal and unsafe for the peasants who lack lawyers to protect them and helps to redistribute wealth from everyone to the rich who can afford lawyers to navigate the manufactured complexities of the modern world.
To that end, the bureaucrat has embarked on a rather impressive journey of manufacturing complexity via widespread obfuscation, disinformation, misinformation, and data and sensory overload. They have achieved this through inventing new fields of social “science” like Political Science, Economics, Urban Planning, Psychology, and Sociology. In order to give them the same kind of credentials as the hard, real sciences, they have loaded these fields with advanced math, statistics, charts, formulas, studies, papers, and enough misdirecting babble and obscure jargon and acronyms to kid any ordinary citizen into believing they 1. Know what they’re talking about 2. Seem scientific enough, and 3. Deserve to run their lives for them.
Of course, in any con, the goal is not to shed light but rather to confuse, distract, lie, deceive, distort, overwhelm, and control. If you have ever suffered a presentation by a bureaucrat or anyone with a degree in these social “sciences,” you will be immediately put to sleep, and that is exactly the point. They are hypnotists. Their dry, monotone, verbose, overly complex and obscure style is designed to turn off your frontal lobes where you would otherwise judge and criticize what they are saying. Like Adolf Hitler, they then build up to an orgasmic climax of what must be done as a result of the comprehensive and exhaustive research conducted, “Yes, we must then build more roads to alleviate traffic and reduce traffic accidents!” The audience swoons and opens their checkbooks for another incremental, boiling the frog 1/8th-of-a-percent tax to fund more road construction.
Even worse, America has truly transformed from a society where elected officials run government to a society where bureaucrats run government, and elected officials give bureaucrats general direction or simple veto power but little else. No elected official can ever go through all the material that bureaucrats give them to make intelligent decisions about policy, practices, and procedures. Elected officials are inundated with information that is disorganized, lack prioritization, lack any form of structure or logic, and is specifically designed to overwhelm and confuse them (obfuscate). Hidden deep within the overload of information are important policy and procedural changes that make huge impacts on society.
Elected officials often feel inadequate and incompetent for questioning the deluge of information and lack a sophisticated enough staff to disseminate and dissect the information or even given the time to do so. Fact is, bureaucrats are more than capable of organizing information properly, prioritizing lists, putting important things in front and trivial administrative things in back, but what use is that to them? Bureaucrats want to control (or gently guide) the decisions made by elected officials to benefit them, their longevity, society’s dependence on them, their very existence. They have every incentive to obfuscate, confuse, and overwhelm elected officials so in despair and laziness, the officials endow the bureaucrats with an irresponsible level of trust and power. On top of all this, bureaucrats intimately know how to threaten elected officials with policies and procedures that inflame and outrage the public. For instance, when elected officials threaten to shut down government if they don’t cut spending, bureaucrats are all too happy to shut down programs that incite and outrage the public like access to parks and government buildings. They threaten to cut off pension and social security checks first well before they even consider cutting off their own salaries and benefits. Their funding gives bureaucrats a huge unfair advantage over elected officials with their limited staff and limited terms. One or two-term elected officials are no competition for lifelong bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, public education does the exact same thing with children. They overwhelm them with manufactured complexity in the most dull and monotone manner possible to put children to sleep. Is it any wonder they need to get amped on amphetamines to stay alert? Then when most children fail to regurgitate faithfully everything they have read and heard, they are convinced that they are simply too stupid to understand complex concepts. The horrifying tragedy is that most children grow up believing that they are too stupid to understand the complexities of the modern world, and they are better off leaving all the details and difficult social decisions to bureaucrats who do understand everything. Most children graduate from high school never reading another nonfiction book in their lives, and believe everything they’re fed on mainstream media which collaborates with government. Every two or four years, they’re given a simple test to determine who will run their city, state, or country. Brainwashed into thinking that they are too stupid to make their own minds up about complex social issues, they split the odds by picking one of two most popular candidates. Think about it. If the answer is A or B and never C or D, why not put down A for all your answers? At least you’ll get 50% as opposed to 0% for C or D.
Fortunately, a group of independent thinkers and iconoclasts are doing their best to present information in the most straightforward, entertaining, simple, and clear manner possible in the form of books. Whether they are doing this for profit, celebrity, or altruism, the effect is huge. Those who read their books start to realize that everything they’ve been taught in public schools is obfuscation and distraction with the truth hidden here and there to establish an air of credibility. As importantly, the way they have been taught has been inefficient, ineffective, and purposefully overwhelming, taxing and boring. The only possible way to get straight A’s is simply to turn off your critical thinking mind and just memorize and accept everything as god’s word along with gobbling obscene amounts of amphetamines. Straight-A students are not smarter than you and me; they’re either more gullible or more determined to do as they are told to make the most amount of money in life. Of course, by middle age, they have an existential crisis and wonder what they’ve done with their lives, only to snap out of it by falling back on empty mass consumerism, materialism, and status-chasing.
Once you free yourself of the yoke of “the world is too complex to understand without bureaucratic supervision,” you no longer feel inadequate and intimidated by the complexities that are thrown at you by bureaucrats or academics who pride themselves in inventing obscure jargon and acronyms to make themselves feel superior. You realize the gimmick and the con. You are not stupid for not being able to understand what they are saying. You simply know that they are being dishonestly and purposefully dense and obfuscating, manufacturing complexities to hide things just like a Collateralized Debt Obligation salesperson. You then simply ignore them and pursue knowledge from more honest sources who can better convey their knowledge concisely, colorfully, and clearly. These are the people who are excited about knowledge and truly interested in spreading it with everyone freely (or at least for the cost of a book). Bureaucrats are guarded with what little they know, because they are afraid of revealing what little they know, so they bombard you with copious misdirecting data, facts, figures, formulas, charts, diagrams, citations, notes, appendices, papers, words, and numbers. Keep in mind, the stupidest person in the room says the most, an overcompensation for knowing the least. Remember English class? The clear, concise essay that addresses one of the book’s themes creatively and intelligently, but does not necessarily prove that you read the entire book always gets a B while the rambling, nonsensical bullsh*t essay that throws in dozens of quotes from the book supposedly proving that you read and comprehended it, gets the A. Schools create regurgitating automatons not creative thinkers.
In a bureaucracy, if you believe that the goal is to provide a service and help the public, nothing makes sense and nothings gets done. Resistance will accumulate everywhere, and you will find yourself labeled a rabble-rouser or trouble-maker. However, if you simply relent to the idea that the goal is to obfuscate, misdirect, and perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to manage without government, then everything starts to make sense and everything is achieved to these ends. You embark on adding to the volumes of regulations and restrictions, increasing the complexity and obscurity of reports and procedures, and you are rewarded by your superiors who have no idea what you’re talking about but know that if it confused the hell out of them, it will confuse the hell out of the public.
The world has truly become a dangerous and dark place, but not because of industrialism or urbanization but rather the proliferation of large, powerful, centralized bureaucracies that peddle in lies, deception, self-preservation, and manufactured complexity and crises. Their whole premise is that we need them, because the world is dangerous and dark and complex, so what better way to ensure your existence and relevance than making the world increasingly dangerous, dark, and complex? Fortunately, the Information Age is all about uncovering information and in a sort of natural selection sort of way, using the most clear, concise, and simple way to convey or understand that information. What we are slowly discovering is the biggest con ever perpetrated in human history, the notion that we need a special ruling class empowered with a powerful bureaucracy to run our lives, because we are too stupid or evil to run our lives on our own.
An insidious byproduct of manufacturing complexity is the realization that you can actually better understand people and social dynamics if you take away their freedom and independence, if you basically treat them like objects and control them as you would objects in a truly scientific experiment. In fact, government-sponsored and controlled social “science” research does exactly this by inflicting incarcerated people with horrific experiments. What better way to control an experiment than use imprisoned people who have much more limited interfering variables in their lives. In fact, this is exactly where government is herding us, into pigeonhole corrals so that it may better control us. It does this by labeling us and dividing us but also by simply taking away our freedoms and independence which are the source of our complexities, unpredictability, and individual ingenuity and creativity. In a world of mindless, brainwashed automatons, government has a much easier job of controlling, managing, and predicting social behavior. Instead of reality driving research and then social policy, social policy drives the research and then the reality.
I’ve sat on this review for quite some time. Perhaps I’ve mimicked the author and made everything way too complex than it has to be. Maybe I’ve successfully obfuscated myself. After a couple weeks giving my brain a rest from this exhaustive and frustrating piece of sh*t book, I’ve regained my mental balance and developed a desire to be done with this review and get this horrible thing out of my mind and off my plate. What this book has basically done is helped me relive all my intellectual nightmares from school. What I mean to say is that, I entered school, as most kids, intensely curious, passionate, and full of awe at the spectacle of learning so much about the wonderful and seemingly magical world I lived in. What happened instead was a grinding process, a process I call, manufactured obfuscation, mixed in equal parts with humiliation, manufactured stress, deadlines, exams, grades, records, red-marks, and the almost total annihilation of every ounce of curiosity, passion for learning, and inspiration. Learning became a hideous, humiliating, stressful chore. Likewise, reading this book became a hideous, stressful chore that sapped my interest in learning and reading for a couple weeks.
Why? This book is a joke. It feigns to argue that science has yet to invent an effective way to prove causality, the almighty ‘why’ of nature. We understand how nature works, what it produces, but for some reason, we have not (until now) developed the tools to understand why nature does what it does. This is all bullsh*t. What in fact the idiot-like author is saying is that the SOCIAL “sciences” have yet to prove any causality in social phenomena. What the author invented is not the first tool for science to use to prove causality. Real science, thank you very much, has the tools to prove causality. What the idiot-like author is saying is that he has invented a tool to make it look like, or make it look MORE like, the SOCIAL “sciences” can prove causality. Well, Einstein, it can’t, because social phenomena cannot be controlled and isolated like in the real sciences. Like quantum phenomena, the act of measuring it, inextricably alters it. In the case of social phenomena, when you extract one social variable, by this very act, you deactivate the emergent actuators of the phenomena. Okay, fancy talk for saying that social phenomena occur only when key social variables are mixed together, and when that occurs, they produce an emergent, new property that could not have occurred without that precise mix. Certainly, you can make causal inferences about social phenomena. If you release 100 serial killers into a community, murders will increase. But you can’t make more complex and nuanced inferences like, if you increase the number of police officers by 15%, murders will decrease by 7.5%. There are too many alternative factors and influences on murder than the number of police officers in the community. The book review ends here. What follows are just ideas that were spurred by this horrible book:
I’ve started to dwell a lot on manufactured complexity and purposeful obfuscation by social “scientists” and bureaucrats alike. I will therefore take this opportunity to digress on the matter.
Manufactured Complexities and Dangers
The modern world is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous. It is simply becoming too large for any one person or small group of people to handle and manage. For this reason, we need a strong, ubiquitous government to help protect people and manage the complexities of the modern world. Constitutional rights and freedoms worked in the age of agriculture, but in the age of industry, robber barons and industrialists have become too powerful and exploited factory labor. In exchange for rights and freedoms, a centralized powerful government can ensure that the masses are protected and coordinated in their efforts to create a just, egalitarian, and free society.
Do you believe all that crap? Evidently, this is the logic of the expansion of government since the dawn of the Industrial Age in America. The ruling class have always exploited people, from slavery to serfdom back to African slavery to exploitation of farm workers. Complex societies have always existed, especially in large ports and trading cities, and they never required a heavy-handed centralized bureaucracy to manage them. In fact, free agents and entrepreneurs were better equipped to manage the complexities of cultural diversity and trade. Large bureaucracies were actually poorly equipped to handle the complexities of diverse populations in diverse, dynamic markets. While complexities increase as more people interact and technology invents new inventions and tools, each individual is better at determining what is important to know, whom to interact with, and how to use and adapt these tools for their needs than distant, removed bureaucrats. Finally, if you wanted to control the exploitation and growth of robber barons and the ruling elite, you certainly wouldn’t construct an enormous and powerful bureaucracy that can be bought and controlled by them.
Our government, however, has perpetuated the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs by making everything more complex, obscure, secretive, confusing, and convoluted than it has to be. Most government workers are not actually involved in doing anything useful to help people but rather do nothing but learn, interpret, and manage the unbelievable manufactured complexities of countless laws, regulations, guidelines, and rules invented to perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs. Certainly if you pass enough laws and rules and purposefully make them exceptionally dense, convoluted, and obscure, then individuals would need to hire lawyers to run their own affairs, and that is exactly what they do if they can afford it. If they can’t afford it, they suffer the consequences of breaking countless laws, rules, and regulations resulting in lost freedoms and privileges and impoverishment from fines, liens, or incarceration. Instead of creating a world kinder and safer for the masses, the peasants, the poor and reeling in the rich and forcing them to redistribute their wealth to the masses, bureaucratism AKA progressivism actually makes the world a lot more brutal and unsafe for the peasants who lack lawyers to protect them and helps to redistribute wealth from everyone to the rich who can afford lawyers to navigate the manufactured complexities of the modern world.
To that end, the bureaucrat has embarked on a rather impressive journey of manufacturing complexity via widespread obfuscation, disinformation, misinformation, and data and sensory overload. They have achieved this through inventing new fields of social “science” like Political Science, Economics, Urban Planning, Psychology, and Sociology. In order to give them the same kind of credentials as the hard, real sciences, they have loaded these fields with advanced math, statistics, charts, formulas, studies, papers, and enough misdirecting babble and obscure jargon and acronyms to kid any ordinary citizen into believing they 1. Know what they’re talking about 2. Seem scientific enough, and 3. Deserve to run their lives for them.
Of course, in any con, the goal is not to shed light but rather to confuse, distract, lie, deceive, distort, overwhelm, and control. If you have ever suffered a presentation by a bureaucrat or anyone with a degree in these social “sciences,” you will be immediately put to sleep, and that is exactly the point. They are hypnotists. Their dry, monotone, verbose, overly complex and obscure style is designed to turn off your frontal lobes where you would otherwise judge and criticize what they are saying. Like Adolf Hitler, they then build up to an orgasmic climax of what must be done as a result of the comprehensive and exhaustive research conducted, “Yes, we must then build more roads to alleviate traffic and reduce traffic accidents!” The audience swoons and opens their checkbooks for another incremental, boiling the frog 1/8th-of-a-percent tax to fund more road construction.
Even worse, America has truly transformed from a society where elected officials run government to a society where bureaucrats run government, and elected officials give bureaucrats general direction or simple veto power but little else. No elected official can ever go through all the material that bureaucrats give them to make intelligent decisions about policy, practices, and procedures. Elected officials are inundated with information that is disorganized, lack prioritization, lack any form of structure or logic, and is specifically designed to overwhelm and confuse them (obfuscate). Hidden deep within the overload of information are important policy and procedural changes that make huge impacts on society.
Elected officials often feel inadequate and incompetent for questioning the deluge of information and lack a sophisticated enough staff to disseminate and dissect the information or even given the time to do so. Fact is, bureaucrats are more than capable of organizing information properly, prioritizing lists, putting important things in front and trivial administrative things in back, but what use is that to them? Bureaucrats want to control (or gently guide) the decisions made by elected officials to benefit them, their longevity, society’s dependence on them, their very existence. They have every incentive to obfuscate, confuse, and overwhelm elected officials so in despair and laziness, the officials endow the bureaucrats with an irresponsible level of trust and power. On top of all this, bureaucrats intimately know how to threaten elected officials with policies and procedures that inflame and outrage the public. For instance, when elected officials threaten to shut down government if they don’t cut spending, bureaucrats are all too happy to shut down programs that incite and outrage the public like access to parks and government buildings. They threaten to cut off pension and social security checks first well before they even consider cutting off their own salaries and benefits. Their funding gives bureaucrats a huge unfair advantage over elected officials with their limited staff and limited terms. One or two-term elected officials are no competition for lifelong bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, public education does the exact same thing with children. They overwhelm them with manufactured complexity in the most dull and monotone manner possible to put children to sleep. Is it any wonder they need to get amped on amphetamines to stay alert? Then when most children fail to regurgitate faithfully everything they have read and heard, they are convinced that they are simply too stupid to understand complex concepts. The horrifying tragedy is that most children grow up believing that they are too stupid to understand the complexities of the modern world, and they are better off leaving all the details and difficult social decisions to bureaucrats who do understand everything. Most children graduate from high school never reading another nonfiction book in their lives, and believe everything they’re fed on mainstream media which collaborates with government. Every two or four years, they’re given a simple test to determine who will run their city, state, or country. Brainwashed into thinking that they are too stupid to make their own minds up about complex social issues, they split the odds by picking one of two most popular candidates. Think about it. If the answer is A or B and never C or D, why not put down A for all your answers? At least you’ll get 50% as opposed to 0% for C or D.
Fortunately, a group of independent thinkers and iconoclasts are doing their best to present information in the most straightforward, entertaining, simple, and clear manner possible in the form of books. Whether they are doing this for profit, celebrity, or altruism, the effect is huge. Those who read their books start to realize that everything they’ve been taught in public schools is obfuscation and distraction with the truth hidden here and there to establish an air of credibility. As importantly, the way they have been taught has been inefficient, ineffective, and purposefully overwhelming, taxing and boring. The only possible way to get straight A’s is simply to turn off your critical thinking mind and just memorize and accept everything as god’s word along with gobbling obscene amounts of amphetamines. Straight-A students are not smarter than you and me; they’re either more gullible or more determined to do as they are told to make the most amount of money in life. Of course, by middle age, they have an existential crisis and wonder what they’ve done with their lives, only to snap out of it by falling back on empty mass consumerism, materialism, and status-chasing.
Once you free yourself of the yoke of “the world is too complex to understand without bureaucratic supervision,” you no longer feel inadequate and intimidated by the complexities that are thrown at you by bureaucrats or academics who pride themselves in inventing obscure jargon and acronyms to make themselves feel superior. You realize the gimmick and the con. You are not stupid for not being able to understand what they are saying. You simply know that they are being dishonestly and purposefully dense and obfuscating, manufacturing complexities to hide things just like a Collateralized Debt Obligation salesperson. You then simply ignore them and pursue knowledge from more honest sources who can better convey their knowledge concisely, colorfully, and clearly. These are the people who are excited about knowledge and truly interested in spreading it with everyone freely (or at least for the cost of a book). Bureaucrats are guarded with what little they know, because they are afraid of revealing what little they know, so they bombard you with copious misdirecting data, facts, figures, formulas, charts, diagrams, citations, notes, appendices, papers, words, and numbers. Keep in mind, the stupidest person in the room says the most, an overcompensation for knowing the least. Remember English class? The clear, concise essay that addresses one of the book’s themes creatively and intelligently, but does not necessarily prove that you read the entire book always gets a B while the rambling, nonsensical bullsh*t essay that throws in dozens of quotes from the book supposedly proving that you read and comprehended it, gets the A. Schools create regurgitating automatons not creative thinkers.
In a bureaucracy, if you believe that the goal is to provide a service and help the public, nothing makes sense and nothings gets done. Resistance will accumulate everywhere, and you will find yourself labeled a rabble-rouser or trouble-maker. However, if you simply relent to the idea that the goal is to obfuscate, misdirect, and perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to manage without government, then everything starts to make sense and everything is achieved to these ends. You embark on adding to the volumes of regulations and restrictions, increasing the complexity and obscurity of reports and procedures, and you are rewarded by your superiors who have no idea what you’re talking about but know that if it confused the hell out of them, it will confuse the hell out of the public.
The world has truly become a dangerous and dark place, but not because of industrialism or urbanization but rather the proliferation of large, powerful, centralized bureaucracies that peddle in lies, deception, self-preservation, and manufactured complexity and crises. Their whole premise is that we need them, because the world is dangerous and dark and complex, so what better way to ensure your existence and relevance than making the world increasingly dangerous, dark, and complex? Fortunately, the Information Age is all about uncovering information and in a sort of natural selection sort of way, using the most clear, concise, and simple way to convey or understand that information. What we are slowly discovering is the biggest con ever perpetrated in human history, the notion that we need a special ruling class empowered with a powerful bureaucracy to run our lives, because we are too stupid or evil to run our lives on our own.
An insidious byproduct of manufacturing complexity is the realization that you can actually better understand people and social dynamics if you take away their freedom and independence, if you basically treat them like objects and control them as you would objects in a truly scientific experiment. In fact, government-sponsored and controlled social “science” research does exactly this by inflicting incarcerated people with horrific experiments. What better way to control an experiment than use imprisoned people who have much more limited interfering variables in their lives. In fact, this is exactly where government is herding us, into pigeonhole corrals so that it may better control us. It does this by labeling us and dividing us but also by simply taking away our freedoms and independence which are the source of our complexities, unpredictability, and individual ingenuity and creativity. In a world of mindless, brainwashed automatons, government has a much easier job of controlling, managing, and predicting social behavior. Instead of reality driving research and then social policy, social policy drives the research and then the reality.
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