Epigrues

With a highly-educated population you always end up with large groups of people who understand what’s happening and feel capable of making a contribution, but who are in the losing faction and can only watch while people they despise run the show, usually disastrously badly from their point of view. That describes me and pretty much everyone I know.

How would that not lead to depression? It’s a double whammy: being personally disregarded, disrespected, and unsuccessful, and also having to watch those in power ruin the world.

Liberal arts majors, humanists,and generalists are the ones most subject to depression, whereas businessmen, politicos, and tech specialists are in the drivers’ seat and can be cheery as hell. They work at what they’re good at and are well paid for their work, and as a result most things that can be technically defined are well done — as long as they don’t conflict with some major interest. But the biggest deficiencies and dysfunctions of our society are mostly at the general level of overall system coordination, rather than at the tech specialist level — for one example, our economic and governmental systems work well enough on their own terms, but seem not to be compatible with the long-term welfare of the human race.

And of course, the conclusion economists, politicos, businessmen, and specialists draw from this is “Oh, those generalists and humanists always fuck everything up, we need to take over and do things right” — even though the generalists and humanists had never been in the loop at all. And the economists, politicos, businessmen, and tech people go on to fuck things up worse, improvising by the seat of their pants on something they’ve never thought about for more than an afternoon.

Early Dao and Sage Dao
(Daojing and Shengjing )
John Emerson
emersonj@gmail.com

A much earlier and significantly different version of my work,
from before I had seen the Guodian text: A Stratification of Laozi,
Journal of Chinese Religions, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1995, pp. 1-28.

ABSTRACT

Starting from Lau’s thesis that the Daodejing (DDJ) is an anthology of writings of diverse origin, together with the common hypothesis that the DDJ consists of a relatively more mystical layer and a relatively more political layer, in this article I divide DDJ into two parts, roughly equal in length, which I call Early Dao (the Daojing 道 經; the mystical and metaphysical part) and Sage Dao (the Shengjing 聖 經; the part speaking more of strategy and state service).

Continue reading “Early Dao and Sage Dao 道 經 與 聖 經”

Skip James and the Federal Reserve’s Killing Floor

Sometime before 1990 I was reading a story about how industry was having so much trouble finding workers that companies were sending buses to inner city Milwaukee to pick up workers who didn’t have transportation. Heartwarming! Capitalism works!

But elsewhere in that same issue there was a different story about a meeting where a group of bankers worried about overheating and inflation, and concluded that interest rates must be raised. This is the Federal Reserve’s killing floor.

One thing all this shows is the way that economic issues and race issues are closely related and not mutually exclusive. If some group is going to be sacrificed every time the Fed turns the spigot, it makes sense for them to be people that no one else else cares about. Black Americans.

Using alcohol is good for your health

I prove by science that alcohol use is good for your health. The Americans who drink least are the West Virginians, and they also die young. If you want to die young, quit drinking.

Liberalizing Lynching

But this subtlety of accommodating something that was anything but subtle reveals the dark side of constitutional flexibility. If it is the case that “Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes of emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form”, then what exactly is the point of having a Constitution?”

Daniel Kato’s book Liberalizing Lynching describes the way the Supreme Court allowed the Fourteenth Amendment (1866) to be suspended in the Southern states for the greater part of a century (1877-1965). Lynch-mob justice came to be accepted as normal in about a third of the US, and black Americans in the old Confederacy lost their voting rights, their right to the protection of the laws, their right to a fair trial, and their access to education.

The Code of Capital

Pistor’s book shows how the law, in various ways, has been tweaked to favor the biggest businessmen and often leaves everone else holding the bag. Poeple in general do not think of the law and the courts as enemies, but there are good reasons why they should.

Contracts and property rights support free markets, but capitalism requires more – the legal privileging of some assets, which gives their holders a comparative advantage in accumulating wealth over others. Not all assets are equal; the ones with superior legal coding tend to be “more equal” than others.

Not the asset itself, but its legal coding, protects the asset holder from the headwinds of ordinary business cycles and gives his wealth longevity, therefore setting the stage for sustained inequality. Fortunes can be made or lost by altering an asset’s legal coding.

Today’s entrepreneurs no longer need to seek redress at home, and the fate of their wealth is no longer tied to the communities they have left behind. Instead, they can choose among many legal systems whichever one they prefer, and can enjoy its benefits even without physically moving themselves.

(All citations from Pistor.)

People, the Devil, and Mirrors in Fitzgerald’s “This Side of Paradise”

Amory / Fitzgerald was superstitious and guilt-ridden and believed in the real presence of ghosts and the devil. He was stagey and narcissistic and acutely aware of staginess in others. Imagination was central to him as an escape from Philistines, Pharisees, the bourgeois, smelly immigrants, and People, and he was acutely aware of good and bad smells. Amory / Fitzgerald was simultaneously upwardly and downwardly mobile, and like everyone else in the America of that time, he had an obsession with success, though he did not value it entirely positively.He was acutely aware the succession of generations and promoted himself as one of the inventors of youth culture.

[From the archives]

Sigmund Freud’s shadow hung over the Twentieth Century like a dark storm cloud. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ditzy 1920 heroines were “hip to Freud” , and it was Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays who invented the science of public relations which rules us today. During WWI Bernays — along with the two other PR founders, Rockefeller press agent Ivy Lee and the neoliberal philosopher and pamphleteer Walter Lippmann — was in charge of manipulating a reluctant populace into accepting the war (with the help of the usual contingent of jackbooted thugs). From this came the American dream of world domination in the service of freedom and virtue.

After the war Ivy Lee worked for the Nazis, while Bernays worked to gain the right to smoke cigarettes for the beaten-down women of Puritan America, who were never allowed to have any fun.   As for Lippmann, already the brains behind the New Republic tabloid, he became one of the  elder statesmen of the American media and of the Democratic Party and one of the founders of neoliberalism. He convinced the Democratic powers that the general public is a mindless mass, and a detriment to wise governance which only responds to gimmicks and buzzwords. And finally, in 1956, Ivy Lee’s nephew William Burroughs revolutionized American literature and showed us America as it really is. (Burroughs got his cynicism from the source).

That’s a lot of culture to pack into 40 years, and everything you need to know is right there. Various other Americans were once thought to have been culturally important in some way, but in the long haul none of them amounted to a hill of beans.