The Liberal Reward of Labour

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[A] house divided against itself shall not stand.

— Matthew 12:25 , KJV Standard, 1769.


At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

— Aristotle (384 – 322 BCE)


War can make murders out of otherwise decent people.
That may come as a shock to some of the viewers who perceive these mass murderers as horrible beasts.
Not so.

— Ben Ferencz (1920 – 2023), Prosecuting Evil, 2018.

Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790)

Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes!

(13 November 1789)


Can sweetening our tea, &c. with sugar, be a circumstance of such absolute necessity?
Can the petty pleasure thence arising to the taste, compensate for so much misery produced among our fellow creatures, and such a constant butchery of the human species by this pestilential detestable traffic in the bodies and souls of men?

(The Somersett Case and the Slave Trade, The London Chronicle, 20 June 1772)


Well, Doctor, what have we got:

• a Republic, or
• a Monarchy?

A Republic, if you can keep it.

(Mrs Powel of Philada & Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention, 1787)

The Liberal Reward of Labour

Naomi Oreskes (1958):
In recent months 14 states have introduced or passed laws weakening labor protections for minors, even in notoriously dangerous industries, such as meatpacking.
Nonenforcement of existing laws that limit the hours and types of work that can be performed by kids is also on the rise.
This past year the number of minors illegally employed—including children as young as 13—increased by 37 percent. …
Advocates of weakened protections for children claim that the states—not the federal government—should decide; that attempts to regulate the workplace represent a federal power grab; and that the defenders of strict limits on child labor are socialists …
(Child Labor Laws Under Attack, Scientific American, September 2003, p 82)

The persistence of hyperconcentrated wealth

	Europe		United States
Wealth Cohort	1913	2018	2018
Top 10%	89%	55%	74%
Middle 40%	10%	40%	14%
Bottom 50%	1%	5%	2%
Top 10% : Bottom 50%	445:1	55:1	185:1
Europe = Average of United Kingdom, France, and Sweden.

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The sharp increase of the top decile share, especially in the United States, reflects a gradual and worrisome erosion of the share owned by the rest of the population.
The lack of diffusion of wealth is a central issue for the twenty-first century, which may undermine the confidence of the lower and middle classes in the economic system …
(Figure 13.10, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Financial assets held in tax havens

Thomas Piketty (1971):
By exploiting anomalies in international financial statistics and breakdowns by country of residence from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Swiss National Bank (SNB), one can estimate that the share of financial assets held in tax havens is:

• 4 percent for the United States,
• 10 percent for Europe, and
• 50 percent for Russia.

These figures exclude nonfinancial assets (such as real estate) and financial assets unreported to BIS and SNB, and should be considered minimum estimates.
(Figure 12.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020, emphasis added)

Adam Smith (1723 – 90)

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. …

Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality.
For every rich man, you must have hundred poor.
And that rich man must live every time in fear because of the jealousy of others.
And if it is not for the firm hand of the magistrate … he would not be able to keep his capital safe. …
[Civil government,] in so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense

• of the rich against the poor, or
• of those who have some property against those who have none …

Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always prevent, marriage.
It seems even to be favourable to generation.
A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three.
Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station.
Luxury, in the fair sex, while it inflames, perhaps, the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation. …

But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children.
It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who has born twenty children not to have two alive. …
This great mortality, however will everywhere be found chiefly among the children of the common people, who cannot afford to tend them with the same care as those of better station.
Though their marriages are generally more fruitful than those of people of fashion, a smaller proportion of their children arrive at maturity. …

Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it.
But in civilized society, it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce. …

The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits.
It deserves to be remarked, too, that it necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the proportion which the demand for labour requires. …
It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men,

• quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and
• stops it when it advances too fast.

It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries …

The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population.
To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary cause and effect of the greatest public prosperity.

(The Wealth of Nations, 1776)


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Adam Smith

Blue Army: Persons of Interest

All for ourselves, and nothing for anyone else, seems, in every age, to have been the vile maxim of the Masters of Mankind.


Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality.
For every rich man, you must have hundred poor.
And that rich man must live every time in fear because of the jealousy of others.
And if it is not for the firm hand of the magistrate … he would not be able to keep his capital safe. …
[Civil government,] in so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense

• of the rich against the poor, or
• of those who have some property against those who have none …

— The Wealth of Nations, 1779.

Adam Smith (1723 – 90)

The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

[The illusion that the accumulation of possessions brings real satisfaction is the] deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. …

The great source of both the misery and disorders and disorders of human life, seems to arise from over-rating the difference between one permanent situation and another …
Some of those situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others …
[But] none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardour which drives us

• to violate the rules either:
  • of prudence, or
  • of justice; or
• to corrupt the future tranquillity of our minds, either:
  • by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or
  • by remorse from the horror of our own injustice.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (1776)

According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to …

• the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; …
• the duty of protecting, so far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice, and …
• the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and … institutions, which can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain …

In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, [the rich] are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessities of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus, without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. …

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love.

(Chapter 2, Book 1)


What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.
The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible.
The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.
In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer.
A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired.
Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. …

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. …
Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.
These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution …

(Chapter 8, Book 1)


No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. …

Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always prevent, marriage.
It seems even to be favourable to generation.
A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three.
Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station.
Luxury, in the fair sex, while it inflames, perhaps, the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation. …

But poverty, though it does not prevent the generation, is extremely unfavourable to the rearing of children.
It is not uncommon, I have been frequently told, in the Highlands of Scotland, for a mother who has born twenty children not to have two alive. …
This great mortality, however will everywhere be found chiefly among the children of the common people, who cannot afford to tend them with the same care as those of better station.
Though their marriages are generally more fruitful than those of people of fashion, a smaller proportion of their children arrive at maturity. …

Every species of animals naturally multiplies in proportion to the means of their subsistence, and no species can ever multiply beyond it.
But in civilized society, it is only among the inferior ranks of people that the scantiness of subsistence can set limits to the further multiplication of the human species; and it can do so in no other way than by destroying a great part of the children which their fruitful marriages produce. …

The liberal reward of labour, by enabling them to provide better for their children, and consequently to bring up a greater number, naturally tends to widen and extend those limits.
It deserves to be remarked, too, that it necessarily does this as nearly as possible in the proportion which the demand for labour requires. …
It is in this manner that the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men,

• quickens it when it goes on too slowly, and
• stops it when it advances too fast.

It is this demand which regulates and determines the state of propagation in all the different countries …

The liberal reward of labour, therefore, as it is the effect of increasing wealth, so it is the cause of increasing population.
To complain of it, is to lament over the necessary cause and effect of the greatest public prosperity.

(Chapter 10, Book 1)


The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it it is possible for a human creature to become.
The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment …
Of the great and extensive interests of his own country he is altogether incapable of judging …

(Part 2, Chapter 10, Book 1)


All for ourselves, and nothing for anyone else, seems, in every age, to have been the vile maxim of the Masters of Mankind.

(Chapter 4, Book 3)


The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from [the business elite] ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention.
[For it] comes from an order of men,

• whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public,
• who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and
• who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.

[The individual] is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. …
I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.
It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need be employed in dissuading them from it.

(Chapter 2, Book 4)


Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality.
For every rich man, you must have hundred poor.
And that rich man must live every time in fear because of the jealousy of others.
And if it is not for the firm hand of the magistrate … he would not be able to keep his capital safe. …
[Civil government,] in so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense

• of the rich against the poor, or
• of those who have some property against those who have none …

(Part 2, Chapter 1, Book 5)


The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.

(Part 2, Chapter 2, Book 5)

Order and Chaos

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Order and Chaos

Order, the known, appears symbolically associated with masculinity …
This is perhaps because the primary hierarchical structure of human society is masculine, as it is among most animals …
It is because men are, and throughout history have been,

• the builders of towns and cities,
• the engineers, stonemasons, bricklayers, and lumberjacks,
• the operators of heavy machinery.

Order is:

• God the Father, the eternal Judge, ledger-keeper and dispenser of rewards and punishments. …
• the peacetime army of policemen and soldiers. …

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is … the crushing force of sexual selection.

— Jordan Peterson (1962), 12 Rules for Life, 2018.


Fascists did not value masculinity per se – only that of some male members of the dominant race.
Socialists and communists (despite their own macho inclinations) were seen as the fomenters of ‘feminine’ indiscipline – while the fascist revolution was characterized by manly order.
The Nazis saw the Jews and Poles as ‘feminine’ races, achieving their goals through devious plots rather than masculine openness.

— Kevin Passmore (1962), Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, 2002.


[The] Western subjugation of the female is … a function of biblical thinking.

— Joseph Campbell (1904 – 87), Love and the Goddess, The Power of Myth, Episode 5, 1988.


The overthrow of mother right [with the advent of farming and pastoralism] was the world historic defeat of the female sex.
The man took command in the home [and] the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.
This degraded position of the woman … has gradually been palliated and glossed over, and somewhat clothed in a milder form; [but] in no sense has it been abolished.

— Friedrich Engels (1820 – 95), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884.


[Even] the most thoughtful and fair-minded of [men] fall back on conservative assumptions about the inevitability of present:

• gender relations, and
• distributions of power,

calling on precedent or sociobiology and psychobiology to demonstrate that male domination is natural and follows inevitably from evolutionary pressures.

— Peggy McIntosh (1934), White Privilege and Male Privilege, 1988.

Kevin Passmore

Proto-fascists drew on contemporary science (or rather pseudoscience) as well as irrationalism. …
Social Darwinists feared that the comforts of modern society, coupled to assistance to the poor, would lead to social degeneration and decadence.
They preached ‘eugenicism’ as the answer …

It is no accident that doctors and lawyers were prominent in the far right.
[They feared] that professions were overcrowded with Jews and women, and [disliked] government plans to introduce ‘socialist’ health-care programmes.
Doctors and lawyers espoused eugenicist theories, which they thought gave them the right to play god. …

This was all the more significant given that it was within the framework of eugenics and racism that many of the elites confronted the advance of democracy at the turn of the century – the much feared ‘age of the masses’.
Racist and eugenicist ideas represented, for some, a new, more effective means to govern and control the dangerous masses. …

[After the Great War, governments became preoccupied with ensuring that their nation was fit to survive in the difficult international situation of the post-war world. …
In its most radical form, adopted by fascists everywhere, national strength implied:

• economic self-sufficiency behind tariff walls,
• repression of socialism and incorporation of the workers into the national community,
• encouragement of women to abandon careers and equality in favour of having babies for the nation,
• assimilation or expulsion of ethnic minorities, and
• the introduction of eugenic social welfare schemes designed to improve the physical fitness of the nation.

(Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002)


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Devon Price

Green Army: Persons of Interest

Devon Price

Autism Activist.
Professor of Social Psychology.

• How "unmasking" leads to freedom for autistic and other neurodivergent people, Life Kit, NPR, 18 April 2022.
• Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity, 2022.
  
  

  Autism: From Disorder to Oppression

  
  Price reconceptualizes autism in three stages:
  1. Demedicalization: from disorder to difference.
  2. Identitarianism: from difference to identity.
  3. Politicization: from identity to oppression.
  
  Price accepts that the central problem in autism is in the domain of social communication and interpersonal functioning.
  What he rejects is that this due to an impairment or deficits in the capacity for verbal or non-verbal communication and social cognition.
  Price's frames autism as a normal human variant with a different cognitive / communication style.
  It is this mismatch of styles, he asserts, that accounts for the interactional problems between autistics and non-autistics.
  

  Devon Price:
  Autism is neurological.
  Autism is a developmental disability that … appears to be largely genetically heritable …
  
  [Much] of what researchers consider the “social deficits” of Autism aren’t really deficits at all; they’re just differences in our communication style that neurotypicals don’t adjust to. …
  Autistic people don’t actually lack communication skills, or a drive to connect. …
  
  [The] idea of pursuing a treatment “for” Autism is predicated on the idea we are broken or sick … an idea the neurodiversity movement completely rejects. …
  Where the medical model of disability fails is in making sense of disabilities that come from social exclusion or oppression. …
  
  [We] are disabled, robbed of empowerment and agency in a world that is not built for us. …
  The world actively dis-ables people by failing to provide accommodations they need.
  Naming the reality of disability shows respect for disabled people and awareness of how we are oppressed. …
  
  [Neurotypicality] is more of an oppressive cultural standard than it actually is a privileged identity a person has. …
  [There] are just so many ways in which we are punished for deviating from the norm. …
  Ableism is a pervasive social force, and one we can’t entirely escape …
  The criminal justice system and mental health system are deeply interwoven, and they both serve to perpetuate ableism.
  Ableism is a powerful force of oppression. …
  
  Almost every person with a mental illness or disability … has repeatedly tried and failed to earn acceptance by playing the rules of a game that was designed to harm us. …
  Being Autistic in a neurotypical world is often traumatizing, and being forced to mask is essentially an experience of society-driven abuse.…
  [Your] disability isn’t to blame for what happened, and neither are you.
  It was a far-reaching, centuries-old system of injustice that left you in such a difficult spot. …
  
  Almost anyone can be viewed as defective or abnormal under our current medicalized model of mental illness …
  By tearing down our current, constricting definition of mental health, and celebrating different ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving, we can improve countless lives. …
  Our caring professionals and educators must be made aware … that their prejudicial attitudes often create disability where none might otherwise be there. …
  
  When we teach children about racism, sexism, and imperialism throughout history, we should highlight how the oppressed were often branded as hysterical, paranoid, and insane.
  It’s important that all people — neurodiverse and neurotypical alike — come to realize how narrow definitions of sanity and “functioning” are used to harm and dehumanize.

  Price's conceptualization of disability is most easily understood by examining the ways in which it departs from the standard biopsychosocial model of disability as described in the public health literature:

  As the diagram indicates … disability and functioning are viewed as outcomes of interactions between health conditions (diseases, disorders and injuries) and contextual factors.
  
  Among contextual factors are

  • external environmental factors (for example, social attitudes, architectural characteristics, legal and social structures, as well as climate, terrain and so forth); and
  • internal personal factors, which include gender, age, coping styles, social background, education, profession, past and current experience, overall behaviour pattern, character and other factors that influence how disability is experienced by the individual.

  (Concepts of functioning and disability, Towards a Common Language for Functioning, Disability and Health: The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, 2002, p 10)

  
  So the standard view of disability is that it results from an interaction between individual impairment (due to a disease or disorder) and environmental conditions.
  The archetypal example someone in a wheelchair being disabled due to the absence of wheelchair access.
  The impairment is an inability to walk.
  The disability is due to impairment (due to some disease or disorder) interacting with an external environmental factor (eg a lack of accessibility).
  No impairment (ie no disorder), no disability.
  If there is impairment, whether or not there is associated disability may depend on environmental conditions (eg ramps).
  
  
  In contrast with mobility, is it likewise possible that a neurologically based social ineptitude could be severe enough to cause significant psychosocial impairment?
  The scientific community says yes.
  Price says no: autism does not cause impairment, therefore it is not a disorder.
  
  
  In what sense, then, is autism a disability?
  Here Price draws a distinction between impairment related (medical) disability and non-impairment related (social) disability; arguing that autism is a social / political / cultural / normative disability, not a medical disability.
  And the source of this social disability?
  Ablelist / neurotypical oppression.
  Though, if Price is correct about the lack of impairment, this cannot, strictly speaking, be 'ablelist' in the usual sense of the word.
  Ablelism is discrimination based on actual medical impairment.
  Since, for Price, there is no impairment in autism, one would need to expand the meaning of ableism to include the false imputation of impairment where none exists, then stigmatizing autism based on this mislabeling.
  So, these semantic contortions leave us with two novel senses of 'disability' and of 'ablelism'.
  
  
  In summary, neurotypical oppression leads to social disability based on a biological difference between non-autistics and autistics (or alternatively between the neurotypical and the neurodiverse), not a difference between health and disorder, but a difference between two normal human developmental variants.
  The source of the disability is not individual disorder / impairment but the prevailing system of oppressive societal norms.
  Ableism dis-ables autistics in the same way as slavery dis-ables the enslaved.
  According to this view autistics are being compelled to conform to unjust cultural standards only to be excluded when they (inevitably) fail.
  
  
  What are the difficulties of this theory?
  To describe severe autistics, those without language, unable to attend to their own basic self-care and protection, as being normal developmental variants, seems to deny an obvious reality, hiding it behind a screen of confusing language and political ideology.
  In any other context — perinatal anoxia, traumatic brain injury, disabling genetic syndromes — such reduced capabilities would be regarded as major psychosocial impairments .
  They require intensive professional (ie formal) assistance and support.
  
  
  Consider the definition of mental disorder:

  Mental_disorder:
  A mental disorder … is a behavioral or mental pattern that causes significant distress or impairment of personal functioning.
  (Wikipedia, 18 September 2023)

  One might add that by 'significant' is meant severe enough to be the focus of clinical / research attention ie professional (formal) intervention as distinct from subclinical, which is manageable by informal supports (self-help, peer-support, life-coaching, personal development).
  That is to say, those who fall below the clinical threshold of severity do not have a disorder in the sense of requiring formal assistance.
  Whether the 'challenges' of this population are primarily due to systematic oppression, as Price contends, is debatable.
  While there is overlap between the concepts of oppression, stigmatized difference, and discrimination, they are not the same thing and are not freely interchangeable.
  
  
  The mind-body distinction plays a role here.
  Certain physical problems, like a broken bones, are not stigmatized.
  Communicable diseases on the other hand are stigmatized, for obvious reasons.
  Problems with the brain, affecting mind and behavior, are more closely linked with moral personhood.
  Mental dysfunction naturally bleeds over into adverse judgements of the self.
  
  
  Price's seeks to demedicalize autism (presumably) in order to destigmatize it.
  Because he takes an identitarian approach to autism, demedicalization is necessary because it is unacceptable to identify with a stigmatized entity.
  If autism is identified with the self, and autism is a disorder, then the self is disordered.
  And the self has to be defended at all costs.
  There's nothing wrong with me, society's to blame.
  It's not me that needs to be fixed, but the world.
  One can address medical stigma directly, or as in Price's case, indirectly, by denying one has a disorder so as to avoid the associated stigma.
  The alternative is to directly address the stigmatizing of illness in general, and developmental disorder in particular.
  
  
  This identitarianism is expressed in the preference for disability-first over person-first terminology:
  • being an Autistic person vs a person with autism,
  • being an schizophrenic person vs a person who suffers from schizophrenia,
  • being an Asian person vs being a person of Asian descent,
  • being a gay person vs being a person who is same sex attracted.
  Identitarianism invites essentialist thinking.
  In the area of race this is especially dangerous.
  Defining people by their ethnicity is the foundation of biological racism.
  It essentializes ethnicity and conflates linguistic and cultural identity with biological descent.
  There are numerous diasporas where immigrants are fully integrated with the majority culture despite differences in physical appearance.
  One is not defined by one's ancestry any more than one is defined by one's neurology.

  Benjamin Zachariah [Historian]:
  Once upon a time, essentializing people was considered offensive, somewhat stupid, anti-liberal, anti-progressive, but now this is only so when it is done by other people.
  Self-essentializing and self-stereotyping are not only allowed but considered empowering.
  (After the Last Post: The Lives of Indian Historiography, 2019)
  
  
  Devon Price:
  [It’s] more sensible to view Autistic identity through a social lens than a strictly medical one. …
  [The] social model of disability, originally coined in the 1980s by disabled academic [sociologist] Mike Oliver.
  In his writing, Oliver described disability as a political status, one that is created by the systems that surround us, not our minds and bodies.

  While it is true that Oliver sought to draw attention to the environmental factors contributing to disability it seems he did not believe these were the only factors involved.
  That he distinguished between impairment and disability indicates he did believe that impairments existed and played a role in disability.
  As originally conceived, the social model of disability was a model of impairment-related disability, not a social model (or lens) of identity.

  Social model of disability:
  The social model of disability diverges from the dominant medical model of disability, which is a functional analysis of the body as a machine to be fixed in order to conform with normative values. …
  In this model, the word impairment is used to refer to the actual attributes (or lack of attributes) that affect a person, such as the inability to walk or breathe independently.
  It seeks to redefine disability to refer to the restrictions caused by society when it does not give equitable social and structural support according to disabled peoples' structural needs. …
  
  Oliver did not intend the social model of disability to be an all-encompassing theory of disability, but rather a starting point in reframing how society views disability.
  This model was conceived of as a tool that could be used to improve the lives of disabled people, rather than a complete explanation for every experience and circumstance.
  
  A primary criticism of the social model is its centering of the experiences of individuals with physical impairments, which has resulted in overlooking other forms of disability, such as mental health conditions. …
  
  In the late 20th century and early 21st century, the social model of disability became a dominant identity for disabled people in the UK.
  Under the social model of disability, a disability identity is created by:

  • "the presence of impairment,
  • the experience of disablism, and
  • self-identification as a disabled person."

  (Wikipedia17 September 2023)

  
  In addition to with arguing that autism is not a disorder, Price also criticizes the syndromic approach to diagnosis in general, at least when it is applied to conditions whose manifestations are 'mental' (psychological or behavioral), rather than 'physical' (neuropathic pain).
  Again, he concedes that autism has a physical cause, but not that it is a disorder.

  Devon Price:
  [For] many illnesses and disabilities, medical care and a medical lens is undeniably appropriate.
  If you’re someone who is in excruciating, daily pain due to nerve damage, medical treatment and medication can help you.
  If you have a degenerative condition that progressively gets worse, such as multiple sclerosis, you have every reason to support medical research in pursuit of a cure. …
  
  [It’s] arguable whether the disability should even be defined by the presence of clear behavioral signs, such as

  • trouble reading social cues or
  • hesitating to initiate contact with other people. …

  Instead of looking to the external signals of autism that others might pick up on, it’s important that we instead focus on

  • the neurobiological markers of the neurotype, and
  • the internal experiences and challenges that Autistic people themselves report. …

  [Autism is] diagnosed based on behavior and reported challenges the Autistic person is facing, not on a brain scan. …
  
  When it comes to mental illness and disability, diagnostic categories are really flawed things.
  A disorder is a cluster of symptoms and traits that tend to go together, but don’t always, and the way those clusters get organized tends to change over time. …
  Our understandings of these labels are constantly in flux, and who gets stuck with a particular label varies across time and cultural context. …
  This dynamic is particularly challenging for people with Autism Spectrum traits, because our neurotype is so multifaceted and so easily mistaken for other conditions. …
  
  I prefer the terms self-determination or self-realization to self-diagnosis, because I believe it’s more sensible to view Autistic identity through a social lens than a strictly medical one.
  Diagnosis is a gatekeeping process, and it slams its heavy bars in the face of anyone who is too poor, too busy, too Black, too feminine, too queer, and too gender nonconforming, among others. …
  
  [Self-definition] is a means of reclaiming our power from the medical establishment that has long sought to corral and control us.
  
  
  Neurotype:
  A type of brain, in terms of how a person interprets and responds to social cues, etc.

  • 2018, Steve Bloem, The Pastoral Handbook of Mental Illness, page 56:
    And the neurotypes aren't random.
    They align with their symptom clusters along two major axes: anxiety and anhedonia (the inability to feel pleasure).

  (Wiktionary, 23 April 2023)
  
  ('Neurotype' does not yet appear in OED online)

  If you reject expert opinion using on objective criteria (syndromal diagnosis based on patterns of signs and symptoms), how do you determine your neurotype?
  Is it something you knows instinctively, like same sex attraction?
  Do you conclude you are Autistic because you feel an affinity with others who identify as Autistic?
  How did they discover they were Autistic?
  Is it all about identification:
  • gender: male / female / non-binary?
  • race: black / white / colored?
  • neurotype: neurotypical / neurodiverse?
  
  There are no 'neurobiological markers of the neurotype'.
  There is no neuroscience or recognized classification of neurotypes.
  There are only neurobiological correlates of known clinical syndromes.
  Substituting the word 'neurotype' for 'diagnosis' is just trying to demedicalize autism by linguistic manipulation.
  This is no substitute for a rational debate about alternative ways of categorizing phenomena.
  Like using the word 'disability' in a non-impairment-related (social) sense, when in common usage it refers to disability in the impairment-related (medical) sense.
  Unless done carefully, argument by redefinition just creates confusion.
  
  
  Since it is unclear what the general properties of a neurotype are, one cannot be certain what entities should be included in this category.
  Is anyone who is neurodiverse (ie not neurotypical), possessed of a neurotype?
  Where do temperaments and personality traits fit in?
  Price mentions both:
  • a range of specific conditions apart from autism: Tourettes, ADHD, PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy, and Social Anxiety Disorder; as well as
  • certain general categories: Mental Illness / Disorder and Cognitive Disability (TBI, CTE, dementia, ID).
  Clearly many putative neurotypes are neither congenital / developmental nor permanent / unchangeable as Price asserts autism is.
  Many with PTSD were neurotypical before being traumatized, and some recover.
  Likewise, in a significant proportion of cases schizophrenia, depression, and epilepsy are not permanent conditions.
  
  
  Price's perspective echos a range of past and current intellectual traditions:
  
  
  1. Demedicalization:
     
     R D Laing:
     Laing took the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of personal experience rather than simply as symptoms of mental illness. …
     Laing regarded schizophrenia as the normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context, but he later acknowledged that his views on schizophrenia were wrong.
     (Wikipedia, 24 September 2023)
     
     Labeling Theory:
     Labeling theory holds that deviance is not inherent in an act, but instead focuses on the tendency of majorities to negatively label minorities or those seen as deviant from standard cultural norms.
     (Wikipedia, 26 September 2023)
  
  
  2. Identitarianism:
     
     Devon Price:
     … I capitalize “Autistic” … to indicate it is a part of my identity I am proud of, and to signal Autistics have our own culture, history, and community. …
     Because the neural and cognitive features of autism are so pervasive, it affects almost every aspect of a person’s body and brain. …
     autism is a core part of who we are, impossible to separate from our personalities, talents, preferences, and general outlook. …
     Without our disability (or our gender identity) we’d be entirely different people.
     They’re both core parts [of our personhood or personality …]
     
     
     Neurodiversity:
     The framework grew out of the autism rights movement and builds on the social model of disability, arguing that disability partly arises from societal barriers, rather than attributing disability purely to inherent deficits.
     It instead situates human cognitive variation in the context of biodiversity and the politics of minority groups.
     Some neurodiversity advocates and researchers argue that the neurodiversity paradigm is the middle ground between strong medical model and strong social model.
     The neurodiversity paradigm has been controversial among disability advocates, with opponents arguing it risks downplaying the suffering associated with some disabilities, and that it calls for the acceptance of things some would wish to be treated.
     (Wikipedia, 26 September 2023)
     
     
     Identity Politics:
     Many contemporary advocates of identity politics take an intersectional perspective, which accounts for the range of interacting systems of oppression that may affect their lives and come from their various identities.
     According to many who describe themselves as advocates of identity politics, it centers the lived experiences of those facing systemic oppression; the purpose is
     • to better understand the interplay of racial, economic, sex-based, and gender-based oppression (among others) and
     • to ensure no one group is disproportionately affected by political actions, present and future.
     Such contemporary applications of identity politics describe people of specific race, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, economic class, disability status, education, religion, language, profession, political party, veteran status, recovery status, and geographic location.
     These identity labels are not mutually exclusive but are in many cases compounded into one when describing hyper-specific groups.
     (Wikipedia, 14 August 2023)
  
  
  3. Politicization:
     
     
     • sexism — discrimination / oppression based on patriarchy (eg the feminist 'male gaze' recast as the 'neurotypical gaze');
     • biological racism — discrimination / oppression based on imagined biological differences between races;
     • homophobia — discrimination / oppression based on sexual taboos;
     • ableism — discrimination / oppression on physical or mental impairment.
     
     Kenneth Minogue:
     Ideology is commonly signaled by the presence of a tripartite structure of theory.
     The first stage reveals to us that the past is the history of the oppression of some abstract class of person.
     
     It is concerned
     • with workers as a class, not (as a politician might be) with workers at a particular time and place; or
     • with women in general, or
     • with this or that race.
     Specific discontents are all swept up into the symptomatology of the structurally determined oppression.
     The duty of the present is thus to mobilize the oppressed class in the struggle against the oppressive system.
     This struggle is not confined to the conventional areas of politics.
     It flares up everywhere, even in the remoter recesses of the mind.
     And the aim of this struggle is to attain a fully just society, a process generally called liberation.
     Ideology is thus a variation played on the triple theme of oppression, struggle, and liberation.
     (Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1995)

Equality of Opportunity

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Equality of Opportunity

Parental income and university access, United States, 2014

Thomas Piketty (1971):
In 2014, the rate of access to higher education (percentage of individuals age 19–21 enrolled in a college, university, or other institution of higher education) was barely 30 percent for children of the poorest 10 percent in the United States and 90 percent for the richest 10 percent.
(Figure I.8, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Robert Putnam (1941):
The class gap in college completion, which was already substantial 30 to 40 years ago, has steadily expanded. …
Kids from low-income backgrounds … are working more or less diligently to improve their prospects in life, but no matter how talented and hardworking they are, at best they are improving their play at checkers, while upper-class kids are widening their lead at three-dimensional chess. …
As the twenty-first century opened, a family’s socioeconomic status had become even more important than test scores in predicting which eighth graders would graduate from college. …
[Academically] high-scoring poor kids are now slightly less likely (29%) to get a college degree than low-scoring rich kids (30%).
(Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, 2015, emphasis added)

The fall of the bottom 50 percent share of total income in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
The share of the bottom 50 percent of the income distribution fell from about 20 percent of total income in the United States in the 1970s to 12–13 percent in the 2010s.
During the same period, the top centile share rose from 11 percent to 20–21 percent.
(Figure 11.5, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Low and high incomes in the United States, 1960–2015

Thomas Piketty (1971):
It is now well known that the explosion of inequality in the United States since 1980 was due to an unprecedented increase in very high incomes, especially the famous '1 percent'. …
In 1970, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $15,200 per year per adult, and that of the richest 1 percent was $403,000, for a ratio of 1 to 26.
In 2015, the average income of the poorest 50 percent was $16,200 and that of the richest 1 percent was $1,305,000, for a ratio of 1 to 81.
All amounts are in 2015 dollars. …

[One] of the main consequences of the extremely high marginal rates (70–90 percent) on top incomes between 1930 and 1980, especially in the United States and United Kingdom, was to put an end to the most extravagant executive pay.
By contrast, the sharp reduction of top tax rates in the 1980s strongly contributed to the skyrocketing of executive pay.
Indeed, if one looks at the evolution of executive pay in listed companies in all the developed countries since 1980, one finds that variations in tax rates explain much of the variation in executive pay — much more than other factors such as sector of activity, firm size, or performance. …
In the 1950s and 1960s, the top executives of major British and American firms had little interest in fighting for huge raises … because 80–90 percent of any raise would have gone directly to the government.
In the 1980s, however, the nature of the game changed completely.
The evidence suggests that executives began to devote considerable effort to persuading others that enormous raises were warranted, which was not always difficult to do, since it is hard to measure how much any individual executive contributes to the firm’s success.
What is more, compensation committees were often constituted in a rather incestuous fashion.
This also explains why it is so difficult to find any statistically significant correlation between executive pay and firm performance (or productivity). …

In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States had by far the highest minimum wage in the world.
In 1968–1970 the federal minimum wage was more than $10 an hour in today’s dollars.
Since 1980, however, the failure to raise the minimum wage regularly gradually eroded its value in real terms: in 2019 it was only $7.20, representing a 30 percent decline in purchasing power over half a century — remarkable for a country at peace and growing economically. …
Many works have shown that the drop in the minimum wage in the United States contributed strongly to the declining position of low-wage workers since the 1980s in a general climate of decreased worker bargaining power.
(Figure 11.7, Capital and Ideology, 2020)

Adam Smith (1723 – 90)

What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between [masters and workers], whose interests are by no means the same.
The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little, as possible.
The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms.
The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen.

We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many against combining to raise it.
In all such disputes, the masters can hold out much longer.
A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired.
Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year, without employment. …

Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. …
Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate.
These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy till the moment of execution …

(The Wealth of Nations, 1776)


The Frontier

Murder in the Pacific

Trump Takes on the World

Bruce Powell

Sana Marin

A man who would be king

Wonderland

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Wonderland

John Tolkien (1892 – 1970):
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory.
I love only that which they defend.
(The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings, 1954)

John Kipling, 1897–1915

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
My son was killed whilst laughing at some jest.
I would I knew what it was, it might serve me in a time when jests are few.
(A Son, Epitaphs of the War, 1914–18)

Josephine Kipling, 1892–99

Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936):
Her brows are bound with bracken-fronds,
And golden elf-locks fly above;
Her eyes are bright as diamonds
And bluer than the sky above.

In moccasins and deer-skin cloak,
Unfearing, free and fair she flits,
And lights her little damp-wood smoke
To show her Daddy where she flits.

For far—oh, very far behind,
So far she cannot call to him,
Comes Tegumai alone to find
The daughter that was all to him!
(Merrow Down, Just So Stories, 1902)

Alan Milne (1882 – 1956):
Don't underestimate the value of doing nothing.
Of just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering. …

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known. …

So, they went off together.
But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Christopher Milne, 1920–96

Eric Rauchway [Professor of History, University of California, Davis]:
When [Woodrow Wilson] was a university professor, he said that he feared that teaching woman was atrophying his mental muscles.

Woodrow Wilson (1856 – 1924):
We have made partners of the women in this war ...
Shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?
(Appeal for Women's Suffrage, 1918)

(The American Presidency with Bill Clinton, 2022)

James Webb Space Telescope


The Murdochs: Empire of Influence, CNN, 2022

Rupert Murdoch (1931):
[There’s] a real challenge to confront: a wave of censorship that seeks:

• to silence conversation,
• to stifle debate,
• to ultimately stop individuals and societies from realizing their potential.

This rigidly enforced conformity, aided and abetted by so-called social media, is a straitjacket on sensibility.
To many people have fought too hard, in too many places, for freedom of speech to be suppressed by this awful woke orthodoxy. …
There are many goals still to come and challenges to overcome.
Well, I'm far from done.
(Acceptance Speech, Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australia Day Foundation UK, Australia House, 23 January 2021)

The Korean Fertility Crisis

Monetizing Your Children

Rawls' Theory of Justice

Criminalizing Poverty

Think with Pinker

Bruce Powell

The Road to Freedom

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Theodore Roosevelt (1858 – 1919):
Leave it as it is.
You can not improve on it.
The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.
What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you …
(Grand Canyon, 6 May 1903)

We must handle the water, the wood, the grasses … so that we will hand them on to our children and children's children in better and not worse shape than we got them. …
(David Grubin, TR, PBS American Experience, 1996)


Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679):
In [the natural condition of mankind], there is

• no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently
• no Culture of the Earth;
• no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea;
• no commodious Building;
• no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force;
• no Knowledge of the face of the Earth;
• no account of Time;
• no Arts;
• no Letters;
• no Society; and which is worst of all,
• continuall feare, and danger of violent death;

And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
(Leviathan, 1651)


Silvia Federici is & Alice Markham-Cantor:
[The] following were the crimes of 65-year-old Margaret Harkett, who was hanged at Tyburn, England, in 1585:

Keith Thomas (1933):
She had picked a basket of peas in a neighbor’s field without permission.
Asked to return them, she flung them down in anger; since when, no peas would grow in the field.
Later, William Goodwin’s servants denied her yeast, whereupon his brewing-stand dried up.
She was struck by a bailiff who had caught her taking wood from his master’s ground; the bailiff went mad.
A neighbor refused her a horse; all his horses died.
Another paid her less for a pair of shoes than she asked; later he died.
A gentleman told his servants to refuse her buttermilk; after which they were unable to make butter or cheese.
(Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1971)

(Witch Hunts, Scientific American, May 2023, p 48)

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Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970)

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it.
If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence.


The glorification of the State, and the doctrine that it is every citizen's duty to serve the State, are radically against progress and against liberty.
The State, though at present a source of much evil, is also a means to certain good things, and will be needed so long as violent and destructive impulses remain common.
But it is MERELY a means, and a means which needs to be very carefully and sparingly used if it is not to do more harm than good.
It is not the State, but the community, the worldwide community of all human beings present and future, that we ought to serve.
And a good community does not spring from the glory of the State, but

• from the unfettered development of individuals:
• from happiness in daily life,
• from congenial work giving opportunity for whatever constructiveness each man or woman may possess,
• from free personal relations embodying love and taking away the roots of envy in thwarted capacity from affection, and above all
• from the joy of life and its expression in the spontaneous creations of art and science.

It is these things that make an age or a nation worthy of existence, and these things are not to be secured by bowing down before the State.
It is the individual in whom all that is good must be realized, and the free growth of the individual must be the supreme end of a political system which is to re-fashion the world.

(Proposed Roads to Freedom, 1918 / 2014)


Trump: My beautiful mind paper boxes

Putin and the Presidents

Blocked: The battle over youth gender care

Fox News and January 6

The American Presidency

Why Putin and Russia went to war

Kathleen Folbigg

No so black and white: a history of race from white supremacy to identity politics

The Psychologist from Hell

Non-Random Evolution

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Richard Dawkins (1941)

[Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001) compared] the spontaneous formation by ‘chance’ of a working enzyme is like a hurricane blowing through a junkyard and spontaneously having the luck to put together a Boeing 747. …


[To] invoke chance, on its own, as an explanation [for objects such as eyes and protein molecules], is equivalent to vaulting from the bottom to the top of Mount Improbable’s steepest cliff in one bound.
And what corresponds to inching up the kindly, grassy slopes on the other side of the mountain?
It is the slow, cumulative, one-step-at-a-time, non-random survival of random variants that Darwin called natural selection.
The metaphor of Mount Improbable dramatizes the mistake of the sceptics quoted at the beginning of this chapter.
Where they went wrong was to keep their eyes fixed on the vertical precipice and its dramatic height.
They assumed that the sheer cliff was the only way up to the summit on which are perched eyes and protein molecules and other supremely improbable arrangements of parts.
It was Darwin’s great achievement to discover the gentle gradients winding up the other side of the mountain. …


Darwinism is widely misunderstood as a theory of pure chance. …
One stage in the Darwinian process is indeed a chance process—mutation.
Mutation is the process by which fresh genetic variation is offered up for selection and it is usually described as random.
But Darwinians make the fuss that they do about the ‘randomness’ of mutation only in order to contrast it to the non-randomness of selection, the other side of the process.
It is not necessary that mutation should be random in order for natural selection to work.
Selection can still do its work whether mutation is directed or not.
Emphasizing that mutation can be random is our way of calling attention to the crucial fact that, by contrast, selection is sublimely and quintessentially non-random.
It is ironic that this emphasis on the contrast between mutation and the non-randomness of selection has led people to think that the whole theory is a theory of chance. …


The Darwinian explanation for why living things are so good at doing what they do is very simple.
They are good because of the accumulated wisdom of their ancestors.
But it is not wisdom that they have learned or acquired.
It is wisdom that they chanced upon by lucky random mutations, wisdom that was then selectively, non-randomly, recorded in the genetic database of the species.
In each generation the amount of luck was not very great …
But, because the luck has been accumulated over so many generations, we are eventually very impressed by the apparent improbability of the end product. …
[Heredity] the basic ingredient [of] Darwinism, and hence life, will follow, more or less inevitably, on any planet in the universe where something equivalent to heredity arises. …


The message from the mountain is threefold.
First is the message we have already introduced: there can be no sudden leaps upward—no precipitous increases in ordered complexity.
Second, there can be no going downhill—species can’t get worse as a prelude to getting better.
Third, there may be more than one peak—more than one way of solving the same problem, all flourishing in the world.

Take any part of any animal or plant, and … ask: how that part has been formed by gradual transformation from some other part of an earlier ancestor? …
A famous example is the gradual derivation of our mammalian ear bones …
Fossil evidence clearly shows that these three bones, called the hammer, the anvil and the stirrup, are lineally descended from three corresponding bones that, in our reptile ancestors, formed the jaw joint.

(Climbing Mount Improbable, 1996)

Charles Darwin (1809 – 82)

Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved.
How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods.
Can we wonder, then,

• that nature’s productions should be far ‘truer’ in character than man’s productions;
• that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?

It may be said that natural selection is daily and hourly:

• scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest;
• rejecting that which is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good;
• silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life.

We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were.

(On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1859)

The Final Victory

Christian Krause:
Where cities once bloomed, the ruins reach up to the sky.
The war is our destiny.
We must accept it.
And it is proof of our unique greatness that we are not prepared to give in to our enemies.
Better dead than a slave!
Our task is to mature for victory or death.
(1945)

Margarete Krause:
The Führer is there, where the danger is greatest.
He is true to himself.
Should we not be true to him, unto victory or ruin?
We have no choice!
We must fulfil the destiny he gies us with our bravest hearts, with the best we have, loyal, upright, without hesitating or wavering.
(1945)

Johannes Tuchal {German Resistance Memorial Centre]:
The people supported the dictatorship.
At no point did a majority of Germans ever turn against Hitler.
It was always a very, very small minority of the German people who turned against him and grasped what the dictatorship had done to Germany.

Claus von Stauffenberg (1907 – 44):
It is time for something to be done.
Anyone who dares to do something must accept that he will probably go down in German history as a traitor.
But if he fails to act, he would be a traitor to his own conscience.

Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945):
However great the crisis of the moment may be, we will master it in the end through our unbreakable will.
(30 January 1945)


Seven Days On Mars
Wagner

Soldiers of Fortune

Does language shape how we think?

I don't need a ride

The cost of speaking out on Afghanistan

Human Capital

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Kenneth Minogue (1930 – 2013):
The Greek despotes and the Roman dominus both signify the specific form of power exercised by the master of slaves. …
The essence of despotism is … the unchecked power of the master. …
The sole object of the subjects must be to please.
There is … no public voice except that of the despot.

Such powerlessness is, oddly enough, the reason why despotisms are notable generators of spiritual enlightenment.
A reaction sets in against a world governed by the caprice of power, and thoughtful subjects take up mysticism, Stoicism, and other forms of withdrawal.
The essence of life is then found in a spiritual realm beyond that of the senses, and social and political life is devalued as illusion.
The result is usually scientific and technological stagnation …

All that one can confidently say about despotism is that able rulers will sooner or later be followed by mad or feeble heirs.
(Politics: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 1995)

Thomas Piketty (1971)

Land of the Free

The total number of slaves on Euro-American plantations in the Atlantic region [peaked at] 6 million in 1860 (4 million of whom were in the southern United States, 1.6 million in Brazil, and 0.4 million in Cuba). …
[The] 4 million slaves exploited in the southern United States on the eve of the Civil War (1861–1865) constituted the largest concentration of slaves that ever existed. …
[The] market value of all slaves exceeded the value of all other private property (land, buildings, and equipment). …

[Politically,] the number of slaves played a key role in determining the number of seats assigned to each state in the House of Representatives and therefore the number of members of the Electoral College, which chooses the president: each slave counted for three-fifths of a free person. …
Of the fifteen presidents who served prior to the election of the Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, no fewer than eleven were slaveowners. …

In the 1850s, on the eve of the American Civil War, 75 percent of the cotton imported by European textile factories came from the southern United States.
[It] was this “empire of cotton,” intimately associated with slave plantations, that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution and more generally of the economic domination of Europe and the United States. …

The necessity of compensating slaveowners [for loss of their property] was obvious not only to the political and economic elites of the time but also to many thinkers and intellectuals. …
Tocqueville … proposed in 1843 that half the indemnity be paid to slaveholders in the form of government annuities (hence by increasing the public debt, to be repaid by the taxpayers) and the other half by the slaves themselves, who would work for the state for ten years at low wages, allowing the wage differential to be used to reimburse their former owners.
In that way, he argued, the solution would be “fair to all participating parties,” since the former slaveowners would, after ten years, be obliged to pay “the increased price of labor” due to emancipation. …
[He also] proposed that former slaves be deprived of property rights for a long period of time, from ten to twenty years, to give them time to acquire a taste for work and effort; this lesson might be lost if they were to discover the comforts of property too quickly (and “unnaturally”).

From Ownership Society to Social Democracy

OWNERSHIP SOCIETY (sometimes called proprietarian society):
A social order based on a quasi-religious defense of property rights as the sine qua non of social and political stability.
Ownership societies flourished in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. …
Proprietarian ideology is the ideology of ownership society, based on the sacralization of property rights.

[In] 1880 nearly 80% of the land in the United Kingdom was … owned by 7,000 noble families (less than 0.1% of the population), with more than half belonging to just 250 families (0.01% of the population), a tiny group that largely coincided with the hereditary peers who sat in the House of Lords. …

[The] House of Lords played a clearly dominant role in British becameralism until the last third of the nineteeth century. …
Specifically, all laws had to be approved in identical terms by both houses, effectively conferring a veto power over all legislation, including fiscal and budgetary matters and anything to do with property rights, on the House of Lords (and thus on a few hundred hereditary peers). …

In the early 1860s, roughly 75 percent of the seats in the House of Commons were still occupied by members of the [landed] aristocracy, which accounted for less than 0.5 percent of the British population at the time. …
[Before the] secret ballot was … introduced [in] 1872 … each individual vote was announced publicly and recorded …
Hence it was not easy for voters to make political choices that went against the wishes of their landlords or employers. …
The local member of Parliament (MP) was reelected in election after election and often in generation after generation.
In 1860 the House of Commons was still profoundly aristocratic and oligarchic. …

[The] famous Black Act of 1723 … stipulated the death penalty for anyone caught pilfering wood or poaching game on land they did not own.
Humble folk had taken to blackening their faces and trying their luck by night, and landlords in the House of Lords and their allies in the House of Commons were determined to prevent this.
Anyone who killed a deer, cut down a tree, poached fish from a breeding pond, pulled up plants, or abetted or incited such activity fell under the shadow of the act and could be sentenced to death by hanging without trial of any kind.
Initially intended to expire after three years, the law was renewed and reinforced over the next century until these acts of rebellion ceased and the proprietarian order was restored. …

Universal male suffrage was established in 1918, and the vote was finally extended to women in 1928.
This final phase of reform also witnessed the first decisive successes of the Labour Party.

The [Swedish] social democrats of the SAP came to power in the early 1920s …
The party subsequently held power more or less permanently from 1932 to 2006, and this long period in government allowed it to develop a very sophisticated welfare and tax system, which in turn achieved one of the lowest levels of inequality ever observed anywhere.
[Prior to] the early twentieth century, Sweden was a profoundly inegalitarian country …
In 1885, Sweden still had a law on the books allowing anyone without either a job or sufficient property to live on to be arrested and sentenced to a term of forced labor. …

[In] Sweden from 1865 to 1911 … the number of votes each voter could cast depended on the size of that voter’s tax payments, property, and income.
The men sufficiently wealthy to vote in elections for the lower house were divided into forty-odd groups, and each group was assigned a different electoral weight.
Specifically, each member of the least wealthy group could cast one vote, while each member of the wealthiest group could cast as many as fifty-four votes.

A similar system applied to municipal elections … with the additional wrinkle that corporations also had the right to vote in local elections, again casting a number of ballots that depended on their tax payments, property, and profits.
No voter in an urban municipal election, whether a private individual or a corporation, could cast more than one hundred ballots.
In rural towns, however, there was no such ceiling; indeed, in the municipal elections of 1871, there were 54 rural towns in Sweden where one voter cast more than 50% of the votes. …

[Yet] in the space of a few years Sweden moved from the most extreme hyper-inegalitarian proprietarian system … to a quintessential egalitarian social-democratic society once the SAP came to power in the 1920s …

People sometimes imagine that each culture or civilization has some “essence” that makes it naturally egalitarian or inegalitarian. …
In fact, everything depends on the rules and institutions that each human society establishes, and things can change very quickly depending on the balance of political and ideological power among contending social groups as well as on the logic of events and on unstable historical trajectories …
Sweden reminds us that equality is always a fragile sociopolitical construct, and nothing can be considered permanent: what was transformed in the past by institutions and the mobilization of political movements and ideologies can be transformed again by similar means, for better or for worse.

(Capital and Ideology, 2019)


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