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.