Following are some essential political thoughts that will change how we understand and discuss our politics hereafter. They are in the Afterword of Human Nature: A New Theory of Psychology by Dick Minnerly, © 2014, a part of which shows, in opposition to our centuries-old traditional 'political spectrum', how we really reason about politics.
[Some terms here are used in a special sense as redefined earlier in my book. You might wish to first read the brief summary of my "Consideration Cycle" that I included in this blog in September 2015.]
Afterword
I have made some suggestions on how to achieve a sane society, and since social sanity is the broader purpose behind any psychologic work, I think I should close with some further thoughts on that subject as seen in the light of our new theory.
The first step to that goal, as I’ve said, is to
understand human nature truly. The
second step is also intellectual; it is to create sound new moral, political,
and economic theories based on that understanding of people. And the third step is practical; it is to replace
our present governments across the globe with genuine democratic governments that
observe those new principles. We can’t
reverse this order as our pragmatists might propose, for if sound new theories don’t
come first, nothing important will be changed.
In the meantime, as I said earlier, we must not vote for or follow selfish
people, we must prevent excess births and random immigration and try to halve
our present population, and we must work to set aside about a half of all the earth’s
land, air, and water as undisturbed preserves.
If we don’t make progress on some such principled plan
soon, we may not make it through the new era (2008-2254), at least not in any
way we would consider tolerable today. From
my years of practicing predictive astrology, I have no doubt that there will be
severe human and natural catastrophes in the second half of this century. We can see these disasters taking shape today,
both in nature’s wrath and in ominous political events across the world. And it may well be that even the horrors of
the first half of the twentieth century will be eclipsed by those that will
occur in our children’s lifetime if we remain as ignorant, greedy, and misgoverned
by selfish rulers as we are now.
So we have less time than we might assume, probably just
the next four decades, to establish environmental and infrastructural programs
that will mitigate the damage of the natural disasters and sane governments
that will prevent the human-caused ones.
Government is not the problem; insane government is. And that’s what we will have as long as so many
of us oppose progress, common sense, and universal fairness.
Our new understanding of human nature shows us how to
shape the better political system that we need; first with respect to the
conflicts between leftists and rightists and selfish and unselfish generations,
and then with respect to the basic economic principles that determine who gets
what in our society. I planned at first to
say little about these issues here because they require full discussion in a
separate work, but then I thought it would be helpful to conclude this work by discussing
two practical issues in particular. The
first is an ethical policy I have always supported, and the second is the solution
of a fundamental politico-economic problem that has confused all of our
intellectuals in the past in their discussions of economics. As you will see, these two discussions are
related.
Poverty and Excess Wealth
I proposed the following economic policy in my classes decades ago, and I still think we must demand it of our governments immediately, if only to show them that we know that there is a simple solution they are refusing to put on the table. I consider this proposal the sine qua non of any plan one could possibly devise to create a sane and just society. The basic idea is not new, for it was suggested by Plato in his final work, and probably by others before that. As he put it:
"In a state which is desirous of being saved from the greatest of all plagues—not faction, but rather distraction—there should exist among the citizens neither extreme poverty, nor, again, excess of wealth, for both are productive of both these evils. Now the legislator should determine what is to be the limit of poverty or wealth. Let the limit of poverty be the value of the lot;[1] this ought to be preserved, and no ruler…will allow the lot to be impaired in any case. This the legislator gives as a measure, and he will permit a man to acquire . . . as much as four times the amount of this. But if a person have yet greater riches [by any means], if he give back the surpluses to the state, and to the Gods who are the patrons of the state, he shall suffer no penalty or loss of reputation; but if he disobeys this our law, any one who likes may inform against him and receive half the value of the excess . . ." [2]
Here Plato warns that poverty and excess wealth are the
causes of the factions and distractions that can destroy a society. This warning applies in our social life, but
also in our personal life, where most people are engaged in purposeless
distractions rather than in trying to improve themselves and our world, or at
least their corner of it.
Eliminating those causes will require major political
changes, but nothing else makes sense, least of all our former and current economic
systems. It’s hard to believe that none
of the revered or prize-winning economists of the modern era (1762-2008) were
able to imagine a better economic system than those old criminal systems; all
of which perpetuate, above all else, an unfair distribution of income, of
nature’s resources, and of our individual obligations to perform labor; much of
which is so difficult, unpleasant, or dangerous that it is not willingly performed
by anyone. Indeed, that is why we have
not been able to end slavery in any of its forms—including prostitution and (in
many cultures) marriage, child labor, forced labor, and military conscription.
Poverty is just another
name for global slavery. It is not an accident,
it is intentional; designed by greedy people who will do anything to become and
stay rich and avoid the hardest work. But
if we ever do have an unselfish government, here’s how we can end poverty.
Because the state that rules us has the right to restrict
births for the common good, it is responsible for every birth it allows. Accordingly, we and it are morally obligated
to ensure that every person to whom we allow birth, regardless of age, will
live in a safe environment and will receive free and equivalent educational, health,
and legal services, and that every adult will also receive—either through work
or government subsidy as he or she alone may from time to time decide—a fair livable
income throughout life.
This stipend must exceed the poverty level of each
locality involved by a good measure, be exempt from taxation and any other
attachments, and be increased for inflation and each dependent child permitted
by law. It will of course replace all
other income support programs. And since
it is a large part of their budgets, our governments will try harder than ever
to ensure that their economy offers all of its citizens desirable work, pay,
and working conditions so that they are eager to work for extra money when they
have no reason for not doing so—such as incapacity, caring for loved ones, or
serving the public interest in ways that normal employment does not permit.
We must also eliminate excess wealth, which throughout our
history has created a tyranny of the rich that curtails our freedom, creates poverty
and an elitist class, corrodes our moral sense and social cooperation, and
trashes our ecosystem, our unique cultures, and our natural right as
individuals to decide how we will live and what work we will or won’t do. The poor don’t choose to be slaves, so it is the
rich who cause slavery, exploitation, class warfare, and political chaos across
the world.
Another cause of class conflict is the claim by the rich that they have a right to own our natural resources, including land, air, and water. This is hard to swallow, for from the realistic observation that the earth’s resources can only belong (in a sense) to all living things together, it follows that any person or collective that profits from those resources has conspired to steal our common wealth. Our natural resources cannot be the private property of any individual, collective, or species because there is no original title of ownership for them. Who could have issued such a title? An imaginary ‘god’ who is said to have been here before us? No, all such titles were issued by us, or more precisely by powerful people for powerful people. And since no one can rightly own those resources, their use hereafter should be approved, licensed, and regulated by independent elected trustees for the good of all people and other things on earth.
Plato’s proposal is correct in principle, but it is incomplete
for our times. He proposed minimum and
maximum levels for wealth, and for
free males only, but we must eliminate poverty for all individuals and then set
two annual maximums for income and
two for accumulated wealth; in each
case, one for individuals and a larger one for state-sanctioned collectives
(corporations, religions, and partnerships of any kind). We needn’t debate now how to set these levels
or other administrative rules. We could
set the annual income maximums by estimating a fair multiple between them, say,
one to five million dollars for any individual and one to five billion dollars
for any collective.
Then, in addition to regular taxes and exempting only the
antipoverty stipends, our governments would tax 100% of all annual income or accumulated
wealth that exceeds these maximums. And
judging by the vast income inequality today in nations across the world, I
suspect that these taxes on excess income and wealth will far exceed a
government’s new costs for eliminating poverty.
Note also that if the legal maximums for collectives are
fairly set, we will not have any too-big-to-fail collectives in our societies. If a business, religion, or other collective
believes that it will earn multiples of its income maximum, it may prefer to stop
growing, to divide itself into smaller independent units, to raise wages, to lower
its prices, to increase its free services to all, or to sell off income-producing
parts of its business rather than paying more taxes in a year than it earned that
year. Or it may choose to pay those taxes
knowing that now they will be serving the common good.
This leftist, decentralizing effect of our new rules will
create more businesses, increase the number of wealthy people, spread the
availability of the newest technologies more widely, lower prices, and prevent mammoth
private collectives, whether acting alone or in collusion, from controlling our
governments, our people, our industries, or our natural resources as they do
now. Their current master plan is
transparent. It is to eliminate all
present governments in which real individuals have any power, however slight,
to limit their actions and profits. As
for the maximums on individual income and wealth, these will not only produce more
rich people than we have now, they will also restrict our greediest people by
making it impossible for them to become anything close to billionaires.
If properly set, both of these maximums will greatly
expand private initiative, but they will do so without creating monopolies or a
class of wasteful, superrich individuals, and without giving the world’s
richest people or collectives other unfair advantages in society, as our current
economic systems are intentionally designed to do. And let us note especially that any economist
who has not or does not propose the elimination of poverty and of excess wealth
is serving the ruling class and not the public interest.
Capitalism vs. Socialism
Our psychologic theory tells us that we cannot create a better political system unless we also create a better economic system for it. This is so because these subjects, politics and economics, differ only in their contexts of reference; otherwise, they are equivalent ideas because we reason about them in the same part of the Consideration Cycle, our power system. In the political context, the two poles of that system are otherness and self, and in the narrower economic context, they are all other wealth and my wealth.
Our theory tells us that people who seek practical solutions
will refer first to their innate impulses, which they see as their psychologic
certainties. Thus, most individualists (+)
will favor leftist politics, most collectivists (–) will favor rightist
politics, and both will favor either capitalistic or socialistic
economics. And since they are either extremists
or moderates, the extremists will defend their favored poles vigorously and deny
the opposite poles, while the moderates will see some truths at both poles and realize
that they can’t proceed in their reasoning until they reconcile these opposed notions. This moderatism can infuriate the extremists,
but in reality it’s the only way that we can solve any practical problem, as we
can see most clearly in the case of economics.
First, though, I should clarify what I mean by the terms socialism and capitalism, which only entered our economic discussions in the
second quadrant of the modern era (1822-1913).
Since we are discussing that subject here causatively, or from a
psychologic perspective, we don’t mean these terms in their current academic
sense. Instead, we are using them as
keywords to refer to their idea referents;
that is, to the epistemic ideas at the poles of our power system. They are just two of the many words that we
use in various contexts to refer to those polar ideas that all humans have in
their power system, and when we recognize this fact, we see something very basic
about any economic proposal that might be described as ‘socialistic’ or
‘capitalistic’.
The chief benefits of pure capitalism are that it spurs
individual initiative, productivity, and entrepreneurism, and its chief failings
are that it promotes poverty, excessive wealth, all forms of slavery, corrupt
governments, selfishness, inhumanity, all kinds of criminal acts, political
deceptions, and lies and immorality in general.
The chief benefits of pure socialism are that it seeks to share a
society’s total wealth, resources, and responsibilities fairly, while its chief
failings are that it imposes collectivism, or anti-individualism, on everyone, and
immorally uses the principles of that rightist political ideology to deny many
if not all of the natural rights of real individuals.
So while both these extreme systems have benefits, neither
one is a valid system because it has fatal flaws as well, as it must because all
systemic reasoning requires two poles, the objective and the subjective pole. The
fatal flaw of capitalism is that it tolerates immoralities, or the right of the
strong to impose upon, destroy, or enslave the weak. And the fatal flaw of socialism is its anti-individualism
and rejection of the inalienable rights of all real individuals, which most people
today know was the greatest achievement of our political reasoning in the
entire modern era (1762-2008)—one that was proposed shortly before the American Revolution and
hence well before the modern era’s second-quadrant forms of socialism and
capitalism were even conceived.
Each of these extreme views, capitalism and socialism, is invalid
because it denies the other, but neither one can be totally denied because they
are both real and necessary parts of our practical reasoning. The Consideration Cycle tells us that to
reason correctly in any psychologic system, we must affirm the reality of both
its poles, acknowledge their polar opposition, and then try to find their perfect reconciliation.
This is so in all five of our psychologic systems. In our feeling system, it’s like the problem
of perfect love. Here you are the
subjective pole (+) and your potential lover is the objective pole (–), and
when everything about your relationship is right for both of you, there is no
clash or conflict; there is only perfection.
Though everything is rarely
right in a relationship, that’s the goal we seek when we search for what we
call ‘true love’. And if we see that we
can’t achieve that ideal, then we usually compromise on some of its parts; often
with the hope of making it a more perfect relationship later.
The same is so in our judgment system. We know that a morally perfect person cannot
be an egoist or an altruist, but must
be both; that is, a perfect reconciliation of selfishness (+) and unselfishness
(–). And in power, a perfect political system
is not leftism or rightism, or
individualism or collectivism; it is
the perfect reconciliation of both those poles.
Similarly, a perfect economic system is not capitalism or socialism; it is capitalism and socialism if we reconcile those extremes
perfectly. If we don’t, then we have a
corrupt economic system like the ones we’ve had throughout our history.
For example, you probably know that when an extremist
rails against either capitalism or socialism and says that everything that is
wrong in our society is due to people who favor that detested system, this is a
half-truth at best. Those who favor
socialism (–) say that everything that is wrong in our society is due to
selfishness, greed, and immorality, which are the basic faults of capitalism. And those who favor capitalism (+) say that everything
that is wrong is due to the rightist, collectivistic state and its immoral
disregard for individual rights and freedoms, which are the basic faults of
socialism. But the real and whole truth
is that both those systems have grievous faults, just as they have obvious and
necessary benefits.
The Consideration Cycle has taught us, better than any
hypothesis offered before it has, that every tangible (utterable, memorable)
thing that we do or say requires us to reconcile some state of subjectivity (+)
with some state of objectivity (–), and that the perfect reconciliation, or balance, of a psychologic system’s two
poles (which is a fleeting condition because those states change continuously) is
only achieved when none of the parts clash or are contradictory. The Cycle goes even further than that,
however. It has also taught us that those
who will perform this reconciliation best in any system are those who are
balanced (B) there, and that those who cannot or will not reconcile its poles
are those who are reversed (R) there.
The reversal aside, the chief mistake that most traditionalists
made in the past when they discussed economics is in assuming, from their
congenital or learned bias for one pole over the other, that we must replace capitalism with socialism or
vice versa. But we can’t replace either
one because they are polar ideas and are equally
parts of our psychologic process. We
can only modify them through reconciliation.
This is proven by history, for no pure form of capitalism or socialism
has ever existed in our world; all that we have ever had in our societies are
reconciled economic systems. Today, we
have mostly collectivistic governments that also use capitalistic methods, and mostly
individualistic governments, like the US, that also use socialistic methods. This transformation began early in the US when,
over the objections of the humanist progressive Jefferson (+– –BB), the elitist
liberal Hamilton (– –B+–) showed his greedy clique on Wall Street that government
intervention in their hypothetical ‘free market’ through a centralized—that is,
socialized—banking system lets them steal far more from the public than pure
capitalism does.
So the true solution is plain: it is to achieve a more perfect
reconciliation of capitalism and socialism than we have ever had. But this raises the question of what we mean by
‘more perfect’, and the Cycle answers this also. It tells us that we do all of our reasoning
about perfection, or ideals of any kind, in our preceding (or tertiary)
judgment system, and from this it follows, in the social context, that more perfect can only mean more moral. Our economic goal, then, is not to expose the
flaws of capitalism or socialism intellectually; rather, it is to eliminate by
law all of the immoralities in the reconciled economic systems that we are
actually using at any time.
Many reformers in the past understood this, so they proposed
changes that would eliminate some of their state’s immoral rules. But some is not enough; we must eliminate them
all to achieve a perfect reconciliation of the power poles, and almost all of
them to produce a mostly sane government.
But they couldn’t do this correctly, because as traditionalists they
never understood human reasoning as a whole or our moral reasoning in
particular. Also, many governments are
still corrupted by old religious institutions that claim to know everything we
need to know about morality, when in fact they could never explain how we humans
actually reach our judgments.
But we have this understanding now, so we can begin to transform
our unethical governments and economies into ethical ones. This is what I have been proposing all along,
for by definition the ethical politics that
we seek requires us to eliminate all poverty and all excess income and wealth. We have no choice here; either we do that now
or we lose all the liberties that we gained in the modern era. Today, in the new era (2008-2254), there’s no going back
to any of the old forms of political corruption and slavery. We know better now.
Of course, we need political safeguards as well as
economic ones. These include laws that
prohibit any artificial collective from participating in our political process
or institutions, and laws that require all individuals and collectives to confine
their business communications with our government officials to public letters or
public assemblies. A truly democratic
government consists of we the people,
not of we the businesses, religions, and
other fabricated collectives. In any
case, lobbyists for any cause must not be allowed to meet our officials in
person or to speak or write to them in private, and our officials must be penalized
if they permit this. This isn’t a
perfect barrier, but it’s open government that will make conspiratorial lobbying
more difficult, and that will put our politics on a more level playing field. Under any form of government, until we have such
laws, we cannot have confidence in any of our elected or appointed officials.
It should be clear to us now, even if it isn’t to the
rightist US Supreme Court, that our governments and political institutions belong
to real people only, and not to artificial ‘persons’ such as corporations,
perpetual trusts, estates, or religions that—if only because they are allowed to
outlive us all, even for centuries or millennia—can accumulate far more wealth
and political power for the selfists and elitists who rule them than real
citizens or even many governments can.
This threat was well explained in economic terms by the distinguished economist
Irving Fisher (R–B–R) in his classic work The
Theory of Interest (1930). He also showed
there the great harm that is done to us all when our state permits long-term
trusts and large inheritances.
Morally speaking, because none of us live on another
planet, the first purpose of a corporation or other artificial collective is
not to benefit any individual or family or any elite group of founders, stockholders,
heirs, ideologues, or special persons. Rather,
it is to benefit all the real persons and other living things in the world, and
if it isn’t doing that, then it has no reason for being and we must not let it exist. So we must ensure that the charter of all collectives
(other than marriages) will explicitly require that purpose, even above profit,
and will expire automatically after, say, twelve years, when their existence
and legal rights must be approved anew by the people’s elected representatives,
who in a true democracy will be unselfish humanists or otherists.
These proposed changes are reasonable and realistic, and something
like them must be implemented if we are ever to have a sane and just society. They are far more logical and moral than the
alternative: the de facto illegal rules that govern every nation today. Skeptics may say that in this insane world of
ours no such changes will ever be implemented, but that’s what the monarchists
said at the end of the classic era (1516-1762). I say that if some of them are implemented,
even in only one nation, other nations will follow in time. There’s a precedent for this in the steady
increase in the number of elective governments in the world since the American
Revolution, with the result that when the modern era ended in 2008, most governments
on earth were, like the US, pseudodemocracies with some type of elective process.
Conclusion
What I’ve proposed politically in this work is not the fear-based extremism of rightist conservatism or liberal socialism, the absurd negativism of anarchism, or the conceptual confusions of all forms of libertarianism. It is leftist individualism, or more precisely humanism, as I defined these terms earlier.
We know now, if only from the theory and empirical
evidence offered in this book, that while people may be superficially irrational
because of what they think or were taught, they are innately irrational because
of when they were born. Knowing this, we
must be astonished by all the politicians, academics, media spokespersons, and
other pontificators who claim to know our politics and how to organize our
societies and economies properly when, as their speeches and writings attest,
they haven’t the slightest idea of why and how we humans differ innately,
especially in our moral, political, and economic views. And because nothing in our traditional system
of thought and belief was able to teach them that, they never had an objective
basis for determining if any proposal made by them or others is valid or
invalid. As a result, they were all confined
to a murky world of subjective opinions and personal squabbles with others where
little is known for certain by anyone.
A deep truth that I suspect we all know is that no master
plan or social system that excludes or oppresses some kinds of people for the
benefit of other kinds of people will ever be able to prevent social and
economic turmoil and unite all people in their common goals as individual humans. That is why all people must find a way to
live together sanely and without conflict even though they are born with sharp
psychologic differences and hence conflicting moral and political
attitudes. But they can’t do this until
someone has soundly explained those differences and potential hostilities to
them.
I have tried to do that with this work, and if I have failed in any significant way, I hope that I have at least shown the best way to proceed and that some other creative leftists will pick up the challenge and succeed. If not, then all that we have now—our lives, our very few remaining liberties, and our hopes for our own and our children’s future safety and happiness—will be lost to us sooner than we now think possible. ~
