Presumably, I live in a democracy, where rich people get the same one vote as me. What is this extent to which the rich have influence over the state? According to the author, vulgar materialism...
Second, we can ask: in the real world, does money give you influence over the state? To some extent, yes.
Presumably, I live in a democracy, where rich people get the same one vote as me. What is this extent to which the rich have influence over the state? According to the author, vulgar materialism is the strawman
where everything is explained by money, states are weak, democracy is a fiction, corporations and the rich run the world, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have no explanatory power and are merely covers for secret, underlying material motives.
Notices the extreme language choice: everything is explained by money, A = B and C = D, EFG have no explanatory power and are merely H.
The author doesn't then go on to explain how then does the world actually work and why some gradient of vulgar materialism stubbornly feels to be true.
Dear reader, do not fall for the obviously wrong silent opposite either, that once we accept the author's obvious strawman as false, we must then accept that nothing is explained by money, states have absolute power, democracy is sacredly upheld and fair, corporations and the rich have no more influence than anyone else, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have all the explanatory power necessary and therefore let's not eat the rich.
That, I hope, sounds as obviously stupid as the original strawman.
So then who is running the world? Even in a world where each King Baby has absolute power, they (singular) still needs to rely on the people around them (singular) to bring consorts or import exotic food or to execute a foe.
The truth is that the world has always been run by a core of people surrounded by a slightly bigger circle with less influence, surrounded by a slightly bigger circle with less influence and so on. That core can have a diameter of 1, as in a dictatorship, but that One Person must still be surrounded by a slightly bigger circle who give opinions and provide flattery for beneficial decrees and sycophantically suggest their own business/family interests for consideration during banquets and dinners and galas and whatever. In a democracy, the head of state shares decision making powers with his ministers, who can unseat him, and he is limited by those who can mobilize violence to enact laws that limit his power. We are seeing in America that checks and balances are a fiction, yes, but even if we reduce all decisions to just one man again, Trump is still surrounded by a ring of influencers, and rely on people to execute his grifts. It's the same small circle of people at the Emperor's banquets: the rich.
The oligarchs may not have absolute power, but they're still orders of magnitude closer to it than the average voter. An oligarch may not be able to draft his own law, but he's not just invited to the party during which that decision is made, he's the one throwing it.
Do voters and language and whatever have no power? Reader, we know that every single speck of dust in the universe exerts gravitational force upon even the most massive black hole at the opposite end of the universe. Go vote, go canvass, go and exert that influence, but don't listen to any distracting fiction that tells you they only just have the same one vote as you .
Also the article doesn’t properly weigh how much influence the oligarchs have over the populace through their control of media. In western countries this is Facebook and Fox News and the New York...
Also the article doesn’t properly weigh how much influence the oligarchs have over the populace through their control of media. In western countries this is Facebook and Fox News and the New York Times etc, all basically controlled by billionaires and free to manufacture consent however they want.
Even in the most authoritarian state, the leader doesn’t have unlimited power so they rely on propaganda through media controlled by oligarchs.
This short article has an interesting point of view that directly clashes with an implicit bias I've held for a very long time and never really examined. I'm going to have to spend some time...
This short article has an interesting point of view that directly clashes with an implicit bias I've held for a very long time and never really examined. I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about this. Thanks for posting it!
In 1914, before the First World War, there was this belief: “a European war would be economically disastrous, the moneyed classes won’t let it happen”. Europe went to war anyways, and the war was in fact an economic disaster as everyone knew it would be. Why were those people wrong? Because the rich were not in control: the Tsar and the Kaiser and the Emperor were in control.
I thought of this in 2022, in the lead up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, whenever I would read someone argue: “Russia invading Ukraine would be economic suicide, the oligarchs won’t let Putin do it, they want to keep their yachts and villas”. Then Putin did it anyways, and the oligarchs had their assets in the West seized. Because the oligarchs are mis-named. They have no political power whatever and live and die by Putin, who appoints them to run stuff, and they get to live well, as long as they are loyal. They are the recipients of political patronage, not the source of it. When the wars start anyways, the same cynical people change their tune, suddenly it’s the armaments industry that’s behind it all, the war was profitable after all.
The default lens through which modern people look at the world is vulgar materialism: a stylized, populist version of historical materialism where everything is explained by money, states are weak, democracy is a fiction, corporations and the rich run the world, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have no explanatory power and are merely covers for secret, underlying material motives.
Second, we can ask: in the real world, does money give you influence over the state? To some extent, yes. Some lobbying efforts succeed. America is one of the few countries in the world where it’s legal to advertise prescription drugs to the public, for example. But corporations don’t have veto power over the state. If e.g. Pfizer spends billions on a clinical trial, and some guy at the FDA says no, and wipes that investment, who wins? The FDA wins. Pfizer can’t do shit.
There’s also an invisible graveyard problem, where the success of lobbying is very salient, because it’s often shockingly offensive. But there are many contrary cases that are less salient because, well, if you ban something, it doesn’t happen. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a single nuclear reactor from its creation in 1975 until Vogtle 3+4. What has Westinghouse done about that? Nothing successful, apparently. It’s not like they’re getting paid to not build reactors.
Big Tech has a lot of smart people and a lot of money. Do tech billionaires run California like a private fiefdom? Reader, they don’t even run San Francisco. The best they can do is maybe help a slightly more moderate Democrat get elected as mayor.
Presumably, I live in a democracy, where rich people get the same one vote as me. What is this extent to which the rich have influence over the state? According to the author, vulgar materialism is the strawman
Notices the extreme language choice: everything is explained by money, A = B and C = D, EFG have no explanatory power and are merely H.
The author doesn't then go on to explain how then does the world actually work and why some gradient of vulgar materialism stubbornly feels to be true.
Dear reader, do not fall for the obviously wrong silent opposite either, that once we accept the author's obvious strawman as false, we must then accept that nothing is explained by money, states have absolute power, democracy is sacredly upheld and fair, corporations and the rich have no more influence than anyone else, ideology and religion and nationalism and language have all the explanatory power necessary and therefore let's not eat the rich.
That, I hope, sounds as obviously stupid as the original strawman.
So then who is running the world? Even in a world where each King Baby has absolute power, they (singular) still needs to rely on the people around them (singular) to bring consorts or import exotic food or to execute a foe.
The truth is that the world has always been run by a core of people surrounded by a slightly bigger circle with less influence, surrounded by a slightly bigger circle with less influence and so on. That core can have a diameter of 1, as in a dictatorship, but that One Person must still be surrounded by a slightly bigger circle who give opinions and provide flattery for beneficial decrees and sycophantically suggest their own business/family interests for consideration during banquets and dinners and galas and whatever. In a democracy, the head of state shares decision making powers with his ministers, who can unseat him, and he is limited by those who can mobilize violence to enact laws that limit his power. We are seeing in America that checks and balances are a fiction, yes, but even if we reduce all decisions to just one man again, Trump is still surrounded by a ring of influencers, and rely on people to execute his grifts. It's the same small circle of people at the Emperor's banquets: the rich.
The oligarchs may not have absolute power, but they're still orders of magnitude closer to it than the average voter. An oligarch may not be able to draft his own law, but he's not just invited to the party during which that decision is made, he's the one throwing it.
Do voters and language and whatever have no power? Reader, we know that every single speck of dust in the universe exerts gravitational force upon even the most massive black hole at the opposite end of the universe. Go vote, go canvass, go and exert that influence, but don't listen to any distracting fiction that tells you they only just have the same one vote as you .
Also the article doesn’t properly weigh how much influence the oligarchs have over the populace through their control of media. In western countries this is Facebook and Fox News and the New York Times etc, all basically controlled by billionaires and free to manufacture consent however they want.
Even in the most authoritarian state, the leader doesn’t have unlimited power so they rely on propaganda through media controlled by oligarchs.
Exactly. Every media has influence, from an underground zine to a media empire, but the degree to which that is weighted is not the same thing.
CGP Grey has a good series on this about the rules for rulers. I wish he’d stop changing the names of the videos…
This short article has an interesting point of view that directly clashes with an implicit bias I've held for a very long time and never really examined. I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about this. Thanks for posting it!
From the article:
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