Nothing New

My opposition to reactionaries and socialists is perhaps a love of being different. Perhaps that is also one reason I thought of the solution to climate change without reading it in a book or on a protest sign. True, my idea, to delicense an oil major, follows logically from environmentalism, but no one comes out and says it like me. Everyone else beats around the bush, trying to phase out fossil fuel with subsidies and taxes. Subsidies will not work for the same reason taxes will not work. My reasoning there is perhaps a distortion of other mainstream ideas. Both subsidies and taxes increase GDP, and increased GDP increases fossil fuel production, and every drop produced is burnt, no matter its price. According to MMT, taxes are what gives money value, and I interpret giving money value as a boost to GDP. It's telling that MMTers want guaranteed employment; they don't want us to work less. Leftists may have given us weekends, but they still want us to identify as workers. Work and consumption are two sides of the same Orwellian coin. The problem with degrowthers is that they are invariably undemocratic. They oppose democracy by proposing to use it in corporations; that would destroy democracy as certainly as reactionaries do. Workers are habitual; they would toe the company line, just like share holders do. I even disagree with other new econonomists that I have studied even less. The idea that government causes innovation is only half true. In fact neither government nor economy causes innovation. Innovation is wasted time, plain and simple. There is zero incentive for scientific experiments, or hobbies, that all innovation comes from. If you want more innovation, you need more unemployment. Full employment is business as usual. Corporations grow because their employees, from CEO all the way down, are compassionate and want to spread the wealth that their company affords them. Corporations cannot change because they are hierarchical; if an employee changes, peers, managers, and underlings will oppose the change; it's only external threats against the existence of their company that can change every employee at once. A company's financials statement is like its skin, and like animals, their existence does not end at skin; it extends out into the environment or the economy. Oil companies, more than others, depend on the entire economy to exist. CEOs are the employees most dependent on their company, and oil companies are the companies most dependent on the economy. I don't know if eliminating a CEO would be good for a company, but I suspect eliminating an oil company would be good for the economy. It would be good because, not in spite, of increasing unemployment. Allowing a few powerful companies to exist goes hand in hand with fascism; noting is new. Fighting against fascism just makes it stronger. Instead, destroy one of its puppet masters; delicense an oil major. Why do I call Trump a fascist, and not an authoritarian? I guess fascist has fewer syllables, but also there are authoritarians that are qualitatively different from Trump. Other authoritarians were created by the USofGenocide; they exist to serve weapons corporations in the USG, not in their own country. Even petrostate authoritarians just serve the top dog oil companies, that all call USG home. Oil companies don't compete; they prop each other up in the economy, just like employees prop each other up in a company. Like Hitler, Trump serves corporations in his own country. Killing Nazis did not end the war; destroying the top dog corporations ended the war.

Strident

I've been getting more strident against extremes. Kill me now if I'm getting conservative in old age. But socialism is not better than Republicanism. Just because liberalism has not yet reached its stride on climate does not mean it is not our best hope. Of course, Biden has to fade away before we can cut fossil fuel labor loose, and delicense an oil major. But that is no reason to do anything else first. Destroying an oil major has to come first, or it will never come. Only civil rights rival climate in urgency. Classism is a distant third. Here are some of my responses to ecosocialists on youtube.

Oil companies are like animals with their backs to the wall; they will do anything to survive. Everyone knows the planet is not big enough for both us and oil companies. Some of you repress the emotions caused by the fact that to survive, we must destroy an oil company right away, and destroy them all by the time we want the climate to stop getting worse. Thus, you create elaborate metaphysical mechanisms between climate change and fascism. Hitler and Trump are merely figure heads for the top dog companies. To prevent the climate from getting worse, and incidentally prevent fascism (a lesser threat), stop demanding the end of capitalism or government, and simply delicense an oil major. You calling the problem classism is just as bad as SCOTUS calling oil companies persons. It is not us against individuals that happen to be paid the most by oil companies, it is us against the oil companies themselves. Even KochIndustries would exist without its namesake. Kill what Koch would die for, KochIndustries.

Universal healthcare is not leftist. Democrats are fighting for universal healthcare. Leftists are fighting for strong unions. Not all unions are bad; fossil fuel unions are bad; and teachers unions are good. There is no clear line between manager and worker; managers do a lot of work essential to their company. Whether the manager is good or bad depends on the company; fossil-fuel managers/workers are bad; non-fossil-fuel managers/workers are good. Republicans want less democracy. Democrats want more democracy. Leftists want less democracy. The difference between leftists and Republicans, the two sides of an Orwellian coin, is that Republicans reduce democracy with consumption, and leftists reduce democracy with labor.

There is no more a correlation between energy use and well being than there is between gdp and energy use or well being and gdp. The reason physicists have graphs is for social reasons that they don't understand, because society is not precise. I'm not an atom in a black body experiment. This is not a zero sum game. The only thing we know for certain is the one thing physicists refuse to bring to consciousness. They are afraid because of the emotion the realization brings. They are afraid of emotion because they think it is contrary to reason. In fact the emotion you feel when I propose to disband an oil company helps you to reason correctly.

Right and Wrong

 A couple of decisions throw this society's stability into question. One time a California judge ruled in a city's rights case that climate is political, not a matter of justice. Other times the justice system has ruled corporations are people. The disrespect for language those decisions demonstrate scares me about whether courts are upholding the constitution that is constituted from language. Of course climate is a matter of justice; indigenous people are the first to demand we keep the oil in the ground to protect water. Of course corporations are not people; not only are they brainless, but they don't even breathe. You could claim the courts were not being literal, but I claim that is disrespectful of the language, and therefore unconstitutional. Why would an institution ostensibly based on truth be non-literal? Math is not literal because there are not words for the things it decides. But there are plenty of words for matters of justice; there is no excuse for courts to be not literal. They are plenty literal when it suits them. If words can be taken out of context, they they can mean literally anything. It is almost certainly a more literal interpretation of the constitution to treat corporations as collectives than to treat them as persons, if only because the constitution consists of language. It is literally impossible to respect the language, and treat a corporation as person. The constitution certainly does not mean to be ignored, so it certainly does not allow collectives to be persons. Similarly with climate justice, if the constitution is not to be disregarded, then we have to interpret it to mean judges must dispense justice, and not defer it to congress. In fact, the judge is dispensing justice by deferring it to congress. I'm certain the citizens in that case felt as ruled against as I did, when there was no justice against the oil company. No justice against an oil company is injustice against the citizens; the judge cannot hide behind congress, and will go down in history as a criminal against humanity. I'm not saying the legal branch of government is inherently bad. I'm just saying that if it wants to survive, it has to rule against oil companies at every opportunity. Just because that would not be sufficient for survival is no excuse. Certainly we could vote an oil company out of existence, and no other action would be needed to stop the climate from getting worse. But we should not have to fight against other victims of oil companies to get there.

Why not Y?

 I left Twitter before the name change; those I followed did not like the change of management. How do I reconcile my premise that CEOs have no control over their company with my departure? To me, it makes sense that a brainless corporation would rebrand itself and change its CEO at the same time; both are smokescreens for the substantive changes it is making. What of the X in other companies ElonTrump has benefitted from? Again, that is more misdirection; the company wants us to believe Musk has control over the company. I suspect the substantive change it is covering up is its promotion of Trump, despite his ouster. Trump represents Republicans, and Republicans represent consumers. Before I joined, and maybe a little after, Twitter allowed underrepresented to release emotions in overrepresented, thus allowing the overrepresented to engage in more rational morality, self-interested or otherwise. An example of self-interested moral reasoning that de-repression of emotion can allow is that closing swimming pools to hurt the underprivileged hurts the privileged too. An example of other-interested moral reasoning that de-repression of emotion can allow is that theorizing about race is hurtful and unnecessary. Twitter became increasingly supportive of consumerism, not by selling us stuff, but by repressing our emotions, thus preventing us from reasoning. Prevention of reasoning can go in two ways, habituation or impulsiveness. Consumers are impulsive, and workers are habitual. Republicans like consumption, and socialists like labor. Democrats like neither of those things; they want voters to be deliberative. Unfortunately, corporations have so much control over the separation of powers, that Democrats cannot do anything surprising, so deliberation is boring; vote blue, no matter who. Corporations dislike change, because it threatens their existence. With each change, one large corporation disappears, and many small corporations take its place in the economy, if not in the industry. I measure the size of a corporation by how much power it has, not by some pretend bottom line. Just as an animal's life is not limited to its own skin, a company's actual bottom line is not restricted to its own books; it extends out into the whole economy. Thus, oil companies are the biggest, and to blame for Democrats not suggesting to eliminate one of them.

Memes

 I should probably research its origins, but I learned of memes from the Galactic Center science fiction series. Consider the meme that it is self evident how emergent properties of individuals affect the emergent properties of their collectives. This underpins the long history of socialism failing. They take as received wisdom that collectives are good, and explain their failures by denying that any bad collectives are not collectives at all. The absurdity of their axiom that individual greed explains corporate irresponsibility opens them up to stress created by the neoliberal hypothesis that greed is good. In fact, greed does not matter. All that matters is which companies do more harm than good. The reason the considered meme is so persistent is because it helps out so many other memes. By blaming the individual, corporations create stress that prevents individuals from thinking straight. The primary advantage of the scientific method meme is not finding the truth; the primary benefit is reducing stress. Reduced stress is not only directly an example of the goal of society, taking care of individuals; it is also a way to allow individuals to think of ways society can take care of them. During my embarrassing divorce, my lawyer kept saying “if wishes were horses, beggars would ride.” That went over my head, because I was stressed, and it increased my stress because I think it would be good for beggars to ride. Now, I’ve converted the beggars riding meme into “if wishes were beta, dirtbags would send.” That makes more sense to me, because dirtbags do indeed send; dirtbags are vagrant rock climbers, sending is completing a climb, and beta is how to climb. Anyway, we could replace bad positive feedback to stress caused by and benefiting oil companies. Replace it with good positive feedback from fewer oil companies leading to less stress leading to more ideas. We can’t lead with individuals consuming less because that would increase stress, and individual stress is already maxed out.

Extremism

 My opinion is that my most extreme opinion is that employees, including CEOs, have no control over their employers. Socialists like to imagine some line between human employers and human employees. I believe the employers are not human; the employers are corporations. I try to annoy socialists and capitalists alike, by calling corporations collectives. To me, a collective is a collection of humans. My extreme view, that collectives have emergent properties, is not original; it comes straight from system dynamics. Perhaps, I go further out on the limb than system dynamics does, by claiming that those emergent properties include a survival instinct for corporations. I admit I'm more metaphysical than pure system dynamics; I explain the irresponsible opposition to change of hierarchical collectives, such as corporations, by thinking of them like jello; one human employee of the corporation tries to change, but is pulled back by others that do not simultaneously change in the same way. Each employee of a company may temporarily change towards transitioning to renewables without all of them transitioning simultaneously, and the company will not change. To change the company, all employees have to change simultaneously, and that only happens with outside influence. Perhaps a more extreme idea than companies with survival instinct would be that companies have self awareness. If a company is self aware, then it could know it is against changing, and lobby government to make change unpopular. That would explain what climate activists call predatory delay. To me, predatory delay is the substitution of marginal change for actual change. Bloomberg credits itself with the reduction of coal in the USofA. Unfortunately, PeabodyEnergy still exists, so the USofA is still producing coal. In my opinion, the USofA will produce coal so long as PeabodyEnergy exists, and PeabodyEnergy will exist so long as the USofA produces coal. I say the USofA produces coal, instead of saying PeabodyEnergy produces coal, because I've established that I believe PeabodyEnergy cannot change; the existence of PeabodyEnergy is synonymous with the production of coal. PeabodyEnergy exists in the USofA, so the USofA is producing coal. Anyway, producing coal is bad, no matter how little of it is produced, because CO2, and pollution in general, is cumulative. If it's not cumulative, is it pollution? If it is not cumulative, it is being consumed by the environment, so it is nutrition, not pollution; if it kills a species, then when the species dies, it stops being consumed, and accumulates, so it is pollution. How does noise pollution accumulate? Perhaps, it drives away quietness, making the noisy things more necessary, because alternatives require quietness to think of. Anyway, the only policy that is not "blah blah blah", as GT would say, or predatory delay, as others would say, is one with a goal of making PeabodyEnergy stop existing before the time we wish the climate to stop getting worse. Policy taken on faith never works, because the collective brainpower of companies that want to exist is superior to the brainpower of individual voters, and it takes no faith to believe corporations are not afraid to lie. Even though a majority of voters want to exist, they cannot eliminate companies that threaten their existence, because corporations don't want them to. Unless an election is spelled out as a referendum on the existence of a company, instead of a popularity contest, democracy will collapse. Delicense an oil major.

Politics

Should I be open to communicate with people that have different political leanings? My politics is that we should deliberately eliminate irresponsible companies, such as ExxonKnew, from existence. The requirement that it be deliberate is at once democratic and fringe. It is so fringe that the common wisdom that diplomacy is good is laughable to me. My idea, to delicense an oil major, is so simple and unheard of that I have to assume nearly everyone is desperately repressing it. Does a psychologist keep harping on the repressed obvious truth? Should I try to convince others to picket with me? Or should I make their intransigence felt by my absence? I imagine there will be a tipping point for me when a movement is close enough to the one and only mark that I tolerate a little misdirection. But by then society will have reached its tipping point already. Are movements symptoms or causes of social change? I suppose it depends on the change. The change I want, the liberty to vote against companies I don’t like, is so consequential that I imagine the movements would be reactionary rather than revolutionary. Thus, it makes sense to trust super-national survival instinct instead of interest group survival instinct to stop climate change. Is that grandiose? I would argue a referendum against ExxonKnew would be super-historic. Hopefully it would be good, because climate change makes it necessary. Politicians are people; we vote for people, also known as characters or personalities. That is the level of democracy we have now. That is a low level because individuals, such as politicians, at best and/or worst right now, mirror collective will, instead of influencing it. Math is not made up; gdp, inflation, demand, and value are made up. California is great because it tried so many experiments, such as universities, ballot measures, and cap and trade, not because it succeeds. Democratically destroying ExxonKnew is not voting on a person or measure; it is voting on progress; in contrast, it would give individuals much more of the power they deserve. The story of the USA, California in particular, and the world in general, is one of individuals grudgingly taking on more responsibility. It is reluctance to take on the responsibility of deciding whether ExxonKnew is responsible that causes climate change.

Collectivism

 Modern monetary theory disabuses several myths about economics, but it does not go far enough. It corrects the misunderstanding about whether debt or currency came first, and it discourages the anthropomorphization of government as a household. To be fair, the story that royalty was a household might explain conservative fear of government as a royal household. RBF's story of establishments (collectives) created by, and persisting after the demise of, secretive big pirate merchants that usurped housholdish governments is more plausible. Anyway, it is obvious that today (and plausibly historically) collectives, such as ExxonKnew, are in control. The myths that MMT does not contradict include that demand is real, that gdp is different from inflation, and that technology replaced slavery. Without technology, Romans could as well have used their own muscles. After all they had Olympics, so they could have done the work too. I believe collectivism, as distinct from democracy, social or otherwise, is positively correlated with exploitation. Slavery as well as labor are ways to collectivize. Unfortunately, socialists have succumbed to collectivist language, limiting their actions to boost their collective in the process of shaming their collective's figure heads. More realist language would associate boosting the individual by tearing down collectives, such as ExxonKnew, with action such as voting. First climate scientists made the mistake of being dispassionate, then they made the mistake of imitating past movements, such as civil rights and unions. Hopefully, they will finally realize that destroying irresponsible collectives, such as ExxonKnew, is the only way to halt climate change. Half measures, such as regulation and consumer manipulation, that secretly hope for the unthinkable demise of ExxonKnew over time, will take too long and probably will not work, because collectives have innovated over time to protect their survival. One innovation is the concept of a bottom line, the lie that collectives only care about money, or the worse lie that they only care about investors. Investors are high turnover; collectives don't care about them. Another harmful idea that collectives have used to survive is the notion that executives control the collective; in fact, it is the collective will, usually in opposition to the employee will, of the collective that controls the collective. I'm not saying all collectives are bad, but they are certainly getting worse and worse. The only way to make them better is to disband the most irresponsible of them. That will motivate enough employees in other collectives to make the collective more responsible. I'm not saying employee will has no effect on the collective; it's just that the will has to be to change the collective, not to change the employees. Another benefit of eliminating an irresponsible collective is that it frees up resources for potentially responsible startup collectives. A final benefit of eliminating an irresponsible collective is that, unlike will, pollution is collective; the fewer irresponsible collectives there are, the less pollution there will be.

Diary

I disowned my brother because my emotion about climate change made him uncomfortable. My mother took that personally. My aunt claimed to observe patterns in my behavior. I'm no Buddhist; I don't put my comfort above my awareness of reality, but I do use coffee and streaming to deaden my emotions. Whether that is because of climate change or not, I don't know. I minimize my fossil fuel use, but have given up trying to reduce the fossil fuel use of other individuals. My only hope is to convince others to join me in reducing the production of fossil fuel. Individuals have emergent properties, and collectives have emergent properties, but the relation between the two is unknown. To assume the reality of such a relation is blind faith. To assume corporate speech is the same as individual speech is insanity; the law is insane, there is no hope there. To assume a desire to survive will translate into less fossil fuel purchases, and fewer fossil fuel purchase will result in less fossil fuel produced, is insane blind faith squared. Religion is harmless, but some blind faiths, such as market fundamentalism, are harmful. The closest to conformity I will admit is that fear of change is one individual emergent property that exacerbates climate change, and politics is a collective emergent property that exacerbates climate change. Those are among my blind faiths; another is blind faith in democracy. I'm not convinced that my non-conformist lack of faith in corporations is blind faith. I think the assumption that a delicense of an oil major will stop climate change is less of a reach than the assumption that it can be stopped, or even slowed, with regulation or consumer manipulation. The most thoughtful climate deniers point out that startups, surviving corporations, or extra-national corporations could take up the slack of an oil major voters chose to eliminate. I think that is less plausible than that oil majors would thrive from regulation and consumer manipulation. The consensus is very much in disagreement with me there. Since the consensus there is not scientific, it is more susceptible to corporate persons. Assuming corporations influence non-scientific consensus to preserve their existence, the consensus on what would harm corporations is likely wrong. The hope is that enough think for themselves, and realize the only way to stop climate change is to go after the most singular causes of climate change, the oil majors, and stop wasting time assuming we understand markets better than oil majors do, or that our understanding of markets is less compromised than my conviction of the link between the existence of oil majors and climate change.

The Responsibility Arc

 That fossil fuel companies are more irresponsible than nuclear weapons and gun manufacturers begs the question of how they got that way. Is irresponsibility an emergent property, sort of like self preservation? Rather, I like to think collectives became progressively more irresponsible over time, whereas they have always had the same amount of survival instinct. I think every property, including the bottom line, of collectives follows from their survival instinct. That the timescale of increasing irresponsibility of collectives is similar to the timescale of increasing morality is suggestive. I propose irresponsibility of collectives is a reaction against changes in awareness of what is or is not responsible. For example, rather than diversify into renewables, oil companies chose to sit on climate science. That is because their survival was threatened by the need to change. It is easier for a new collective to be different than for an existing one to change. Therefore, the only way the economy can keep up with increasing awareness of what constitutes responsibility, is for voters to eliminate the most irresponsible collectives, starting with an oil major.

Balanced Individualism

 That’s my ideology. Market fundamentalism is hyper collectivism. It is the hyper part of market fundamentalism that allows it to mischaracterize itself as individualism. Hyper individualism would frown upon frowning upon individuals, despite the hypocrisy. Market fundamentalism frowns upon frowning upon collectives, aka corporations in the USA. Balanced individualism frowns upon frowning with teeth upon individuals, smiles in general upon frowning without teeth and smiling without teeth, frowns upon smiling with teeth upon collectives, and smiles upon frowning with teeth upon collectives. Thus balanced individualism affords greater freedom than market fundamentalism, and is more sustainable because collectives form spontaneously. Both individuals and collectives can pollute. Both the tire noise produced by fossil fuel collectives, and the public conversation noise produced by individuals are pollution. Car tire noise is reduced by frowning with teeth against fossil fuel collectives, and social conversation noise is reduced by frowning without teeth against disrespectful individuals. In this analogy, teeth means voting. So, balanced individualism is not populism, because a majority voting against the existence of one collective does not prevent a minority voting against the existence of another collective. The effectiveness of disbanding a collective positively correlates with its morality.

Survival

 Historically it was only life that had to worry about survival. Recently civilization has to worry about survival, because of nuclear weapons and fossil fuel. Survival of civilization vs survival of corporations is one thing nuclear weapons and fossil fuel have in common. Another is how corporations distort language to survive. Because corporations cannot exist without their product, they invent phrases like mutual assured destruction or climate change to divert blame for their threat against civilization from their product to society or the individual. That difference between the scapegoat is one difference between nuclear weapons and fossil fuel. We are meant to believe elites control the number of nuclear weapons, and consumers control the amount of fossil fuel. In fact, corporations control both, and the only way to survive is to eliminate companies that threaten survival.

Competition

 Corporations are more cooperative than they would like us to believe. Their bottom line and relation to other companies in their industry are less important than survival to them. That may seem obvious to us, since we understand survival is necessary fro a bottom line, but corporations are brainless; they don’t understand necessary or sufficient. Take oil majors, for example; they just want to survive, even if it kills employees that they need to survive. And other oil majors help their survival, so calling them competitors is misleading. The only companies that threaten the survival of oil majors are new companies that don’t exist yet. But the United States of Business has prohibited us from forcing new companies into existence; that’s communism. The thing they have not thought of to prohibit yet is the removal of their license to do business, one at a time, the worst one first, as deemed by voters.

Dichotomy

 Arguably the most significant dichotomy is what the climate community calls social vs individual. Often it is couched in terms of responsibility. Should we blame individual consumers, tasking them with reducing fossil fuel purchases, or should we blame society, hoping for it to protect our survival with regulation, legislation, or litigation? What neither interpretation of that dichotomy acknowledges is the existence of corporate collectives. That businesses exist is not controversial; they have names. How they relate to individuals and society is never questioned, because the language has been perverted. The businesses themselves have, over centuries, redefined society and individual for their own purposes. The purpose of each corporation is to survive. By defining themselves out of the society individual dichotomy, they eliminate their existence from question. In fact, both corporations and society, as they define it, are collectives. So, it behooves us to trip up the corporations by ignoring their redefined individual society dichotomy, and focus on the individual collective dichotomy. That elides the natural artificial dichotomy, but that is a matter for another post. For now, it is parsimonious to distinguish between democracy and corporations; both are collectives. The difference between democratic collectives and corporate collectives is that individual members of corporations are unaware of their influence over the corporation, but individuals in democracies, also known as voters, are aware of their influence, or lack thereof, over the democracy. Awareness is important; democracy presents a better hope for survival than business as usual. The only thing businesses have not already used to put each other out of business, the only thing that is not business as usual, is to exclude particular businesses from commerce, or as it is to them, existence. If the existence of businesses is left up to businesses, the ones that threaten the fewest businesses will survive. If the existence of businesses is left up to democracy, only the responsible ones will survive. The survival of collectives must be subordinate the the survival of individuals; otherwise nothing survives, not even life itself.