In praise of folly

“You ain't crazy. You ain't insane. It's just you got an eyeball in the center of your brain!” – The Cramps

A new publication on the state of poverty in The Netherlands has causes a small upheaval concerning the roughly 10% of the population that are caught up in a socio-behavioral prison a lack of money implies in what is foremost a mercantilist capitalist society with a touch of rent-seeking corporatism. Poverty means suffering no freedom, or at least no positive liberty and only some negative liberty. People nowadays tend to blame “capitalism” for many of every day’s evils. It’s a bit myopic to mix up a tool with its use. Nearsighted or not, let’s take a look at the macro-economic meaning of poverty. To greatly simplify the situation, let’s say economics is social science concerned with the behaviorisms where physics and psychology meet and where some lean towards the physical laws and limitations, others prefer the psychological fuzziness. Where the two overlap things get interesting, but when looking at macro-economics as a methodology it closely resembles Marx’s historical materialism, a machine analogy of the workings of society, with which he explained how society subdivided in different layered groups which feed upon each other. If you’re a macro-economist you are essentially a Marxist but without the ideology. But as modern opponents of Freudo-Marxism might agree, the crux of the matter with persistent poverty in a rich country is not so much methodological, whether physical or psychological, but ideological. A well-known assumption is that if citizens are taken care of by the state, they would have no inclination to work for a living. This is seen as some absolute truth about the nature of people and why monetary incentives are needed to be arranged in such a way that they create a stimulus for a productive uprising out of a downward spiral of substitute victimhood. As much research has already shown, at the edge of poverty and freedom things aren’t as clearcut as this simplistic solution suggests. People’s susceptibility to financial stimuli is such that artificially induced scarcity does control them, the prospect of increased earnings only acts as a stimulus for menial jobs and even then it is rather indistinguishable from the Hawthorne effect, which is questionable in its own right. All sticks, no carrots. There is something to Max Weber’s “Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism” and the quiet insistence on preserving a reserve army of labor or, even worse, maintaining a scare for a further decay into the classless lumpenproletariat. Economics hasn’t been named the “dismal science” for no reason. Thomas Carlyle, enamored by Malthus speculations on population growth, felt the need to advocate for reinstatement of slavery, partly because of the half-hearted way it was being abolished but downplaying the degradation while dehumanizing the former slaves he advocated a sort of feudal serfdom. Somewhere between the solemn piety of a prudent accountant and borderline religious delusion, he advocated for wage slavery as being beneficial. Axiologically his view wasn’t so much that of a macro-economist, or physiocrat, and he rejected the seminal work of Adam Smith, preferring a society based on “obedience,” and the “reverent relation of master to servant and of superior to inferior”. It was a rather crypto-Calvinist sort of sociology. Calvinism, for if you haven’t figured it out yet, if passive aggressive dark triad sadomasochists had to think up a religion, it would be this. Somewhere along the line love and hate got mixed up. Hey, it happens… We should honor tradition. Cherish it even. But honestly, if we take into account the Flynn effect and make a calculated guess of the average intelligence four centuries ago at the time the ‘TULIP’ doctrine was formulated in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Add to that the consideration that nowadays the average person processes about 100 GB of information per day, comparable with what a highly educated person at that time processed in a lifetime. Societally speaking, we are near-geniuses spawned from what we would now classify as [bleep]. To honor tradition we should face its rights and wrongs. It's like your sweet and loving but racist grandma who’s been gradually brainwashed by an inability to switch television channels. Those values are not just past their due date, they have grown so wrong they are evil. We should have the maturity to move forward with a hegemonic mercy killing. Remove Calvinist thought from capitalism. Otherwise we will fall into the same trap as Third Way social democracy who tried but could not escape using the balance sheet as a sort of neutral reference frame, an objective criterion, while it is not. Bookkeeping is not neutral, not from viewpoint from axiological ethics and thus not in politics, nor sociology or economics. Solving poverty in the Netherlands comes at a cost of about half a percent of GDP, a tenth of a percent of our nation’s collective wealth, or even less if we look at the amount of money involved with tax evasion that is channeled via the Netherlands we would only need to nibble of a bit less than one percent to solve local poverty. Or we could just reapply the surplus stemming from rounding errors in the government budget with which we could solve national poverty, twice a year. Poverty in a rich country is not a matter of fact. It is mean and vile, and the fact that none of the leading political parties is willing to address this in a constructive manner may be indicative of the sobering fact that party politics has had its day. We have had a quasi-technocratic government for the past fifteen years or so anyways, so why not quit the hollow gesturing, political marketing about self-aggrandizing realpolitik and move to a project organization and an eye of ethics, which would fit the Dutch mentality a lot better, if you’d ask me.