Dialectical materialism and evolution

If you understand biological evolution, you understand dialectical materialism.

Dialectical materialism appears to go all the way to the "bare metal" of reality: motion is a synthesis of quanta's dialectically opposed material properties of being "smeared in a wavefunction" and "observed as an eigenstate", but quantum mechanics is weird and obscure. Evolution is much more amenable to philosophical study.

The fundamental dialectic of evolution is the opposition of heritable variation and natural selection. Both of these dialectical elements are material: heritable variation is a physical, material, independently observable change in an organism's genotype, an eminently material substance (composed mostly of DNA). Natural selection is also a material process: physical properties of an organism's physical phenotype determine whether it will run faster or slower, have more or less acute vision and hearing, stronger or weaker teeth, etc. Furthermore, an individual organism's reproductive success is directly a material property: The organism has to physically reproduce to be reproductively successful.

Because heritable variation is uncorrelated with natural selection, these two elements are in true dialectical contradiction*. Heritable variation doesn't "care" whether it makes the organism more or less susceptible to adverse selection; selection doesn't "care" whether some heritable variation might be intrinsically good. (For example, it's intrinsically bad that human beings can't internally synthesize vitamin C — whether or not we can eat it, it would be better if we could synthesize it at need — but because our ancestors' diet was abundant in vitamin C, the loss of the ability wasn't selected against.)

*A dialectical contradiction is different from a logical contradiction. The use of the term "contradiction" is mostly historical — Marx's dialectic materialism springs from Hegel's dialectical idealism, where logical contradiction powered the synthesis, but also because while "contradiction" might be too strong the alternatives — conflict, opposition, etc. — seem too weak.

It's instructive to consider Mendelian (established at conception) vs. Lamarkian (acquired during life) variation. It happens to be the case that terrestrial organisms exhibit Mendelian variation, but we might have exhibited Lamarkian variation. If so, there would have to be something uncorrelated with natural selection about how an organism acquired traits for there to be a true dialectical contradiction between Lamarkian variation and natural selection. If this contradiction didn't exist, if an organism deterministically and predictably acquired just those traits that improved its survival, we would not see the pattern of complex, emergent behavior in the long-term development of species.

There are also important dialectical relationships in biological evolution at more abstract levels. A fundamental dialectic is between predator and prey. Again, the elements are material: the predator must physically catch and eat the prey, or the prey must physically escape the predator. And the elements are in true dialectical contradiction: the predator wants to eat the prey, the prey does not want to be eaten. Yet another is the parasite-host dialectic, which often results in symbiosis.

An important consequence of evolution is that it's neither predictable nor random. In my most important quibble with canonical communist terminology, I assert that dialectical relationships and historical factors do not determine the synthesis, they constrain it. There are specific features, for example, that would make predators ineffective: lack of speed, poor vision, poor quality weapons (such as teeth and claws); we will never see a predator with a predominance of features that poorly afford predation in its usual environment. We can predict to some extent where evolution won't go, but we cannot predict where evolution will go, even retrospectively. If we took a snapshot of any historical evolutionary epoch, we could not predict with confidence much of how the contemporaneous species would change.

Indeed the parallels between dialectical materialism and biological evolution are so strong that the following bold conjecture suggests itself: all dialectical material relationships are fundamentally evolutionary: they consist of a dialectical relationship between some form of heritable variation uncorrelated with some form natural selection.

A capitalist's response to Krugman

In his op-ed piece, Krugman calls for an emergency jobs program,

You might think, then, that doing something about the employment situation would be a top policy priority. But now that total financial collapse has been averted, all the urgency seems to have vanished from policy discussion, replaced by a strange passivity. There’s a pervasive sense in Washington that nothing more can or should be done, that we should just wait for the economic recovery to trickle down to workers.

This is wrong and unacceptable. ...

Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.

Let me be blunt: Why should I care about the "cruelty" of unemployment? I kind of feel bad in a vague, abstract way, but I can live with that. Besides, suffering builds character, or so I'm told. As far as "short-sighted" goes, didn't Keynes say, "In the long run, we're all dead."

Here's the thing: I'm a big capitalist. I own shares in a lot of companies that produce things that every working person needs to consume (food, clothes, shoes, etc.) and things that the rich want (gold-plated cell-phones). I have enough money in the bank (and thanks, Obama, for protecting that money for me!) so that my family and I can live dripping in luxury for the indefinite future.

Why should I support an emergency jobs program? What's in it for me? Right now, I can get people to work for next to nothing. Sucking millions of people out of the private labor force is going to raise my labor costs. I'm willing to pay my people the bare minimum for immediate survival, and put them on an ice floe when their productivity drops. Raising the general labor cost isn't going to help me, it's only going to help my more sentimental, bleeding-heart competitors. And if I somehow did Grinch-like develop a heart, I'd just be undercut by some competitor who could resist your blandishments. And if millions of people are starving, that just raises the price for my food.

It's been a real grind for us enormously rich capitalists the last 50 years. Do you know how hard it's been to find domestic servants? And finding servants we can control and abuse at will has been literally impossible. This whole situation is a godsend. I can tell you, the next time I abuse and berate my servants for serving me coffee that's taupe instead of beige (Oh! the humanity!), they're not going to quit on me in a huff with generous unemployment benefits. What's the use of power if you can't use it arbitrarily and contrary to the will and well-being of the victim subservient?

You seem to think we're all in this together, that we have a mutual interest in creating a just, fair and equitable society in which every person can live in comfort and dignity. Bullshit. I became a successful capitalist the same way that anyone becomes a successful capitalist, the only way to become a successful capitalist. No matter how much I had, I craved more, I craved it with all my being. If you don't crave more, sooner or later you'll flinch and fall to someone who does. And the only way to get more is to take it from others: from the weak, the slow, the stupid and, most importantly, the sentimental.

Your talk of morality and ethics is laughably quaint and naive. I give my workers the most valuable gift of all: the gift of life. No one deserves to live, and if they can't serve me and my brethren, they won't live. It's not only naive but positively immoral for them to demand more.

Tell you what, I'm a generous man: I'll buy your morality. How does a million bucks sound? I'll even throw in a house in the Hamptons and an opportunity to rub shoulders with the real ruling class at cocktail parties. Not buying? You have principles? No problem. There are tons of people will will happily sell out without a second though, people just as eloquent and persuasive as you. If anyone actually starts listening to you, I'll just use the million to marginalize or discredit you. Above all you are not stupid, and martyrdom is stupid.

[Anyone who thinks the capitalist ruling class will draw back its hand when dealing with its enemies might want to have a conversation with Salvador Allende, Mohammed Mosaddeq or Huey Long, just to name a few - Ed]

Mr. Obama also knows where his self-interest is. He got to the White House on my money, and when he leaves the White House he'll live on my money. And if he's smart, he'll use my money to push his children into the real ruling class, so they can own the next president. Obama is no chump: He knows the Democratic party is there to take the fall for the ruling class when we make a mistake, to flim-flam the voters during a time of crisis and distract them from their real interests. And he's doing a magnificent job; we'll take good care of him when he's out of office, don't you worry.

Dr. Krugman, you'll never in a million years persuade me to give up my power voluntarily or stand idly by when my government, bought and paid for, tries to take it away from me. Moral arguments are useless: all morality comes from self-interest, and I know where my self-interest is. Do you? The masses of people can have sufficiency, comfort and dignity only by picking my pocket. They'll have dignity when they take power, and they will take power over my dead body, and the bodies of my well-armed, disciplined soldiers and police, who also know where their self-interest lies.

Rational self-interest and the capitalist class

Robert Reich complains about Wall Street:

Shame? If we've learned anything over the last year, it's that Wall Street has none. Ten months ago Wall Street lobbyists beat back a proposal to give bankruptcy judges the right to amend mortgages in order to pressure lenders to reduce principle owed, just like Wall Street lobbyists are now beating back tough regulations to prevent the Street from causing another meltdown. ...

Shame won't work. Only political muscle and courage will. Congress and the Obama administration should give homeowners the right to go to a bankruptcy judge and have their mortgages modified.

But if Wall Street doesn't have any shame, why should Congress and the Obama administration have any?

Reich is correct: Only political muscle and courage will work. But it has to be the political muscle and courage of the people, not the faction of the capitalist class that Obama represents.

In What is to be Done?, Lenin makes a fundamental point, a point ignored by most modern progressives: The government does not stand outside society, imposing some "Kantian" morality. The government is part of society, subject to all the same pressures of economic and political self-interest as the rest of society. It is just as delusional as belief in God to believe that the government can do what's "right" independently of the self-interest of its members.

Thus the progressives' dilemma: If the masses of people were organized and disciplined sufficiently to exercise political muscle and courage, there is no way they would tolerate the private ownership of capital: it is in the self-interest of the people to take away the economic rent that capital affords for the individual benefit of its private owners and appropriate it for social uses.

The appropriate of capital for social use is the essence of communism; everything else is the "how". If the people have sufficient political power to "regulate" capitalism, they have sufficient power to eliminate capitalism, and it is in their rational self-interest to do so.

"But," a person like Paul Krugman might argue, "we successfully regulated capitalism in the 1950's and 60's, to the mutual benefit of both the capitalists and the people."

Indeed we did, at least if we define "successful" and "mutual benefit" loosely enough to exclude black US citizens, to exclude women, and to exclude most of the rest of the world subject to our economic imperialism. (Keep in mind that the Civil Rights movement, the Feminist movement and the rebellion of middle-class youth directly against the Vietnam war and indirectly against the stultifying social conformity of the era marked the beginning of the end for New-Deal capitalism.) New-Deal capitalism was an improvement over Gilded-Age capitalism only because the latter set such a low bar.

But New-Deal capitalism is, as we have seen, not an evolutionary improvement. The sine qua non of an evolutionary improvement is that the it persists and becomes the new baseline. An improvement that eventually regresses to the status quo ante is not an evolutionary improvement. It might seem better, but it does not actually respond better to the only thing that matters in evolution: selection pressure. It is plainly apparent that New-Deal capitalism has been regressing to Gilded-Age capitalism since the 1970's.

Fundamentally, the New-Deal era resulted not from a fight between the working class and the capitalist class. It resulted from a fight between factions of the capitalist class; Roosevelt's faction successfully co-opted the political will of the people. The difference is subtle but important. The New-Deal era did not result in more power for the people themselves, it resulted in more power for a faction of the capitalist class, a faction that can be described only as somewhat less hostile to the interests of the people than their opponents.

Our "democracy" is structured to include only factions of the ruling class. We vest power in elected representatives for a period of years, which insulates their day-to-day decisions from political consequences. Supposedly, we do vest power to ensure representatives can "do the right thing" even when it's unpopular, but there's no such thing as the objectively right thing; the effect is to do what's in the interest of the capitalist ruling class when this interest is opposed to the people's interest.

Elected representatives have a standard of living greatly in excess of the ordinary person. This standard of living is not their own (we pay the President a paltry $200k modest (by capitalist standards) $400k/year); representatives achieve this standard of living through their office during their term, and after their term as a reward from the capitalist class in the form of speaking and publishing fees and directors of corporate boards.

The people are fundamentally alienated from their representatives. How often does the ordinary person actually interact with any of their representatives about public policy, even at the local level? All the communication between the people and their representatives is through institutional channels: the commercial media and polls. The only "voice" the ordinary person has is the vote, an extraordinarily low-bandwidth channel.

The effect of all of these factors is that the people have been trained for generations not to seize and hold political power for themselves, but rather to give their loyalty to some faction of the capitalist ruling class.

The interests of the capitalist class on the one hand and on the other the working and (today much more important than in the 19th and 20th century) the unemployed classes are fundamentally irreconcilable. There is only one finite, limited pie worth fighting for — the surplus labor of the working class — and there is no long-term meta-stable distribution of this pie. All the economic, social, and political feedback mechanisms lead eventually to either pure laissez-faire libertarian capitalism or communism.

A meta-stable distribution must have a robust mechanism for negative feedback: a successful attempt to increase an individual's share of workers' surplus labor would automatically create pressure to decrease that share. In much the same sense, tipping a roly-poly toy changes the distribution of forces in such a way as to push the toy upright again.

However, in capitalism, when an individual capitalist successfully increases his share of surplus labor, he has more power to affect the economic, social, and political systems to continue to increase his share. Microsoft and Bill Gates continues to be successful precisely because they have been successful in the past, not because they are inherently better at creating software (<cough> Windows Vista). We have only chance and providence to thank that Mr. Gates is predisposed to be more-or-less politically liberal rather than a gung-ho Randian.

Indeed the positive feedback mechanisms are whole point of capitalism, what caused its survival under the economic selection pressures in the 18th and 19th centuries during the struggle against feudalism. Capitalism causes exponential economic growth, which is possible only when positive feedback dominates without countervailing negative feedback. A substantial part of the political and social changes that capitalism effected were removing the negative economic feedback systems that evolved under feudalism. In Marx and Engels' words,

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

But no positive feedback system can go on forever. At some point nature will impose its draconian limits. We are human beings, we can foresee and respond to those limits, it is our choice whether we intelligently respect those limitations, or let nature impose them catastrophically.

All the mechanisms of capitalism concentrate wealth into the hands of owners of capital, regardless of the social and moral predispositions of the individual capitalists. A capitalist who forswears unlimited accumulation will eventually be defeated or absorbed by another who pursues unlimited accumulation. All the mechanisms of capitalism concentrate labor into the production of commodities, objects or services that can be exchanged for profit. But eventually we must turn our labor to the general good, to create conditions that cannot be commoditized: clean air, good health, leisure and actual happiness and satisfaction (unlike the transient pseudo-happiness of pure material accumulation, which trades a momentary rush for a greater emotional crash).

It is an open question whether capitalism represents an advance in any sense over feudalism; it may be that capitalism's only claim to success — vastly increased material productivity — affords only the opportunity for a proportionally larger population to live at the edge of starvation. But there's no going back; even if capitalism is an advance over feudalism, and even if capitalism does regress, it will regress into something very different from 17th century feudalism. But our task today is not to look backwards with regret.

Our task today is to take what we actually have — a mighty engine of material productivity — and choose to employ it in the benefit of the people. And the only way to do so is for the people themselves to decisively seize and hold economic, social political power, and forever destroy the power of the capitalist class. If we do not take up this task, we have nothing to look forward to but an ever-decreasing standard of living and eventually literal enslavement.

War is just a racket

War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.

I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.

I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.

There isn't a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its "finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a "Big Boss" Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.

It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison. Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service.

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

— Major General Smedley Butler, USMC, 1933

[via Angry Bear]

Is rational self-interest tautological?

Comrade PhysioProf claims that rational self-interest as an explanatory paradigm for human behavior is tautological:

At some level, no matter what people do it must by definition by in their self-interest, or else they wouldn't do it. I tend to see this as a reductio ad absurdum argument for the uselessness of attempting to explain human behavior in terms of individual's "interests".

I think Comrade PhysioProf is mistaken in this view.

We could, of course, formulate a truly tautological view of rational self-interest: simply label "whatever motivates people to act" as "rational self-interest". In much the same sense we could formulate a truly tautological view of evolution and physics. We could label "whatever causes changes to organisms over time" as "evolution". But that we can do so does not mean that we must necessarily do so.

We can't infer much from a label in isolation from what the label applies to. (Thoughts makes the same fallacy in a different direction by inferring specific incorrect philosophical ideas from the adoption of other elements of the label "materialist"). We have to look at the details of what the label actually applies to. If we want to look at the label "evolution", we have to look at the details of actual evolutionary theory as proposed by actual scientists.

It's impossible also to actually falsify a true hypothesis, theory or paradigm. Because evolution as a paradigm is on the whole actually true, it's unlikely that we'll actually observe anything that would falsify the paradigm (as opposed to falsifying detailed hypotheses within the paradigm). What's important, then is seeing whether a paradigm could in principle be falsified.

What is the theory of rational self-interest? It's the theory that people have ideas in their head about what's better or worse in terms of their own subjective experience. They imagine, plan and anticipate the consequences of various possible actions in terms of the quality of their subjective experience. They then choose the action among the imagined alternatives that they believe will produce the best subjective experience.

One of the things that distinguises a scientific hypothesis, theory and paradigm from a tautology or definition is that the antecedent and the consequent can be independently verified. Consider the canonical syllogism:

P1: All people are mortal
P2: Socrates is a person
C: Socrates is mortal

If we can determine that Socrates is a person and independently determine that Socrates is mortal, then P1, which can be rephrased as the condition "if X is a person then X is mortal", becomes a scientific hypothesis. P1 would be a tautology if we could not independently determine mortality, either by not being able to determine mortality at all,

P1: All people have souls
P2: Socrates is a person
C: Socrates has a soul

or by explicitly predicating by definition the determination of "person" on the determination of "mortality":

P1: All people are mortal
P2: Lazarus is not mortal
C: Lazarus is not a person

If some statement is really a scientific theory, then it should be possible to create and verify a null hypothesis, an inverse conditional. (We have to make the above conditional more specific to make its inverse observable.)

Hypothesis: All people are mortal with a lifespan not exceeding 200 years/if X is a person, X will die within 200 years of his or her birth
Contrapositive: if it's not the case that all people are mortal, etc., then some person will not die after 200 years.

We could in principle observe a person living for 200 years. When we observe a lot of people, billions of them, we actually observe all of them dying well within 200 years. Science being what it is, our observations do not deductively prove the hypothesis, they strengthen our confidence in the hypothesis. It might be the case that the trillionth person we observe does not die; it might be the case that there's some other reason — perhaps they're all hiding from us — we do not observe anyone living more than 200 years. But for all practical purposes, science is the best we can do, and the lack of absolute confidence is what makes science so much fun.

The theory of rational self-interest escapes definitional tautology because it excludes certain interpretations and, more importantly, excludes certain observations.

Ontologically, rational self-interest says, among other things, that we do not behave like traditional computer programs or Sphex wasps, nor, more importantly, do we behave like "Kantian" moralists. Empirically, the theory of rational self-interest says that we would see different observations if people did behave like traditional computer programs or Kantian moralists.

A traditional computer program — even running on an imagined computer with as much processing power as a human brain — does not act from rational self-interest. Let's say we program a very powerful computer to actively manage some horrendously complicated non-sentient physical process, such as turbulent flow. There's no way we can independently determine a computer's subjective satisfaction: we cannot ask it if is happy or sad. We can look at all the code and find nothing that can even remotely be described as subjective satisfaction. If a program does something odd, we can find the precise cause: Some line of code does the odd thing under specific circumstances. If we change only what the code does, not what it "wants to feel", we'll change the behavior of the program.

(I'm not saying that we couldn't program a computer to act from rational self-interest; I believe that's entirely possible, hence my qualification above of traditional computer programs. But we could tell both by looking at the source code as well as empirically examining the computer's behavior that it was the sort of program that acted from rational self-interest, rather than acting "sphexishly".)

More importantly, the theory of rational self-interest says that we do not act like "Kantian" moralists*. A "Kantian" moralist is someone who acts because some act is objectively good, without regard to any notion of the actor's own subjective satisfaction. If we "feel better" for doing the objectively correct thing, that's merely a happy accident. In just the same sense, we accelerate towards the center of the Earth at 10 m/s², without regard to any notion of subjective satisfaction. If we "feel better" when we experience gravity — hardly surprising as we have evolved on a world where gravity is ubiquitous — that's merely a happy accident.

*Kant was a subtle (perhaps over-subtle) philosopher, and his moral theory is more sophisticated than the caricature that a lot of people, including many philosophers, attribute to him. But still, the trope is useful.

The difference between "Kantian" morality and gravity is of course that we accelerate towards the center of the Earth even in those circumstances where we absolutely do not want to, where there's no correlation whatsoever between what we desire and how we behave when we're falling. And we do so even when we have sufficient time to deliberate and make an informed choice about whether or not to fall.

On the other hand, people never do what's right under those circumstances when they don't have some independently identifiable subjective feeling underlying the behavior. Even when a person acts against her immediate material self-interest — when, for example, they go back into a store to pay for a missed item — you'll always hear, "I would have felt bad if I hadn't." Similarly, when someone doesn't act according to what we consider to be an important moral principle, they usually don't have an elaborate philosophical account about why that principle is incorrect, they just don't personally care, they don't feel bad about contravening the principle.

These observations are true even of people who call themselves "Kantian" moralists, of people who say they do things because it's the "right" thing to do. Even among self-described "Kantian" moralists, there's always a perfect correlation between what they consider the "right" thing do and how they subjectively feel about doing the right thing.

Indeed it is the "Kantian" moralists who are guilty of definitional tautology: if it always feels good to do the "right" thing, then in what sense is doing the right thing independent of one's subjective state? How do they account for people who not to feel good doing the "right" thing?

Of course, all of the above is not to say that our subjective feelings are not enormously complicated, and operate on many levels of abstraction. It is simply to say that we can indeed independently determine how a person feels, even in complex, abstract situations, and how they feel is the best predictor of their behavior.

Rational self-interest

Hanlon's razor* says you should never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity**. But there's a related saying in economics: never attribute to stupidity what can be explained by rational self-interest. If people appear to be behaving stupidly, look for the underlying self-interest that you might have missed. Of course, people do behave stupidly, often en masse, so you won't always find an underlying rational self-interest, but you often will.

*Sometimes attributed to SF author Robert A. Heinlein.
**There's also Clarke's corollary: Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

It is becoming a trope in liberal and progressive economics and politics that the right-wing and the Republican party are acting stupidly, irrationally, that they have become literally deranged, even at the highest level. I believe, however, that this view is problematic.

Part of the problem is that there's a huge equivocation floating around the economics profession concerning the definition of "rational self-interest"; similarly in philosophy and ordinary conversation, there's a huge equivocation about "rationality". At minimum, rational self-interest in economics means that people always act to maximize their subjectively conceived self-interest, and while they may make errors and mistakes, on the whole they act effectively to maximize their subjective self-interest.

This definition seems metaphysical and unfalsifiable: however people are actually behaving, we can hypothesize some subjective self-interest that the behavior maximizes, and we conclude they are acting in their rational self-interest. We can, however, talk about subjective self-interest separately from specific behaviors: we can actually test hypotheses about rational self-interest.

For example, if a lot of people are buying Acme razors, which cost 50% more than the objectively identical Potzrebie razor, we could make any number of competing hypotheses about subjective self-interest that's causing the behavior. Most obviously, we might have missed some property of Acme razors that really is objectively superior to Potzrebie razors: perhaps they last longer, or are more effective at shaving a man's upper lip or a woman's ankle bone. It might be that using Acme razors confers social status precisely due to its higher price. Perhaps people simply don't take the name "Potzrebie" seriously, and don't have confidence in its quality. It might be simply that people are persuaded by the advertising so they simply feel better using an Acme razor.

The last case highlights the specific, technical nature of the economic definition of rational self-interest. It's not relevant in this context that Acme razors don't objectively make a person feel better than Potztrebie razors: they don't produce a closer shave, they don't reduce the frequency of nicks and cuts, they don't last any longer, they're not any more comfortable to use. What's relevant is that a choice of behavior produces a difference in subjective feeling; people are acting "rationally" by choosing the behavior that really does produce the better subjective experience.

The first equivocation, then, in the use of rational self-interest is equivocating between the objective properties of the choice and the subjective consequences. But objective properties are never anything more than a means to an end — indeed one means among many — to produce subjective experience. It's often the case that people do make choices that correlate to objective properties: fresh food is objectively superior to spoiled food, and people almost universally prefer unspoiled food. But there are cases where the subjective experience, and thus the choice, is not correlated directly to the objective properties of the choices.

Similarly in philosophy and ordinary conversation, there's a sense of "rationality" that means concerned exclusively with objective truth, ignoring or excluding subjective factors such as emotion. Again, there's no problem with this definition per se, but it's clearly inappropriate to apply this definition to motivation, which is fundamentally subjective.

In one sense, "rationality" just means the true correlation between behavior and and subjective outcome; in another sense, "rationality" means having objectively true beliefs about the real world. If a lot of people believe that Acme razors give a closer shave than Potzrebie razors, they are acting in their rational self-interest by spending more for Acme razors, but this rational self-interest is predicated on an irrational belief, a false belief about the world. There's no contradiction: we're just using the word "rationality" to mean different things in different contexts, an ordinary and routine use of natural language. The fallacy of equivocation comes in when we pick the meaning from the "wrong" context.

The second fallacy about rationality and rational self-interest concerns the nature of the self-interest. There are subjective desires that are easy to empathize with, and desires that are more difficult to empathize with, and desires no one wants to admit they empathize with. It's easy to dismiss an odd or unusual desire as simply non-existent, or attribute some odd behavior to a false idea about reality. But some people, to use Winston Rowntree's example, just like lounging about in unconventional clothing, and so they do: there's nothing at all irrational about their behavior in either sense.

Materialism and "empiricism"

Commenter Thoughts directs our attention to his (?) essay, Materialists should read this first. This essay is, however, problematic on a number of points.

In his essay, Thoughts points out a contradiction in materialism, inveighs at great length against materialism and its dogmatic adherents, and suggests the alternative of empiricism.

On one hand I can't object to a general exhortation against dogmatism and an irrational attachment to outdated ideas contradicted by modern observations. On the other hand, it's not at all clear that Thoughts intends only such a facile reading.

There is a notable difference between the ordinary, common use of terminology and its use by experts and professionals. If I gave you tickets to a classical music concert, you would probably not be too surprised to hear Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Vivaldi on the program, even though a professional musicologist would consider only one of those composers (Mozart) to actually be classical. You might even be unsurprised to hear Aaron Copland or Leonard Bernstein. (And if the tickets turned out to be to Cosi fan tutti, you might well object, "That's not classical music, it's opera!") Likewise, professional philosophers have a detailed taxonomy of philosophical ideas and writing. A professional philosopher may use "materialism" to denote something very different from what an ordinary philosophically literate person might mean.

Thoughts does not explicitly disambiguate what usage of "materialism" he intends, but his use of broad generalities to characterize materialists and their intellectual failings suggests that he's talking about the larger audience. However, he presents a technical philosophical definition: "Materialism is the belief that everything is due to matter and the flow of matter from place to place." This apposition of the general population with the technical meaning is suspicious: one might similarly criticize the Philadelphia Classical Music Appreciation Society on the basis of its name alone for ignoring Bach (Baroque) and Beethoven (Romantic).

Furthermore, for all the many denunciations of materialists' dogmatism in his essay, Thoughts does not give us any concrete examples. It's one thing to simply mention a bad argument for an incorrect position as a rhetorical springboard to a good argument for a better position, but when an author lays the anonymous denunciations on so thick as in this essay, a careful reader suspects a fallacy of the converse and an ad hominem argument. And Thoughts strengthens this suspicion with a description of his preferred alternative — "empiricism" — that is thin to the point of vapidity, consisting mostly of the banal exhortation that we should pay attention to the evidence and keep an open mind.

Also too his choice of alternative is curious in the context. Materialism (and "dualism" (technically dualistic idealism or mentalism) are ontological positions: they purport to describe how the world actually is. Empiricism is usually taken, however, as an epistemological position: a methodology to gain knowledge about how the world actually is. (Empiricism as an ontological position — that all that exists is perception — is if anything even more philosophically discredited than naive materialism.)

It is a matter of historical fact that materialism as a formal philosophy was developed in the 18th century and achieved wide currency in the 19th century as classical, non-relativistic physics made profound advances and especially as scientific biology demolished vitalism. As such, the formal definition of materialism, that everything can be characterized by matter and its interactions, or more popularly as that everything is matter in motion, reflects this early scientific view. It is also a matter of historical fact that since the development of materialism, modern science has made additional advances — notably Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics — which have changed our understanding of physical reality as much as did classical physics. Thoughts argues that these modern scientific advances fundamentally demolish materialist philosophy. But do they?

If we take the terms of 18th and 19th century philosophical materialism literally, with matter meaning specifically atoms and motion in the specifically Newtonian sense of change in an atom's position in absolute space over absolute time, then of course materialism is at least in some sense incorrect, or at least naive. But we must ask: do people today who can reasonably be described as materialists subscribe to this view of physical reality? Do they actually "deny observation" to preserve their view? Is the view of physical reality as "matter in motion" essential to materialism? And most importantly, how much does our modern understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics actually change the philosophy of materialism?

One should always be skeptical of an opponent's description of an opposing philosophy. Wikipedia describes several notable philosophers and scientists as "scientific materialists" (presumably falling in the category of materialists that Thoughts criticizes), including Daniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman Quine, Donald Davidson, John Rogers Searle, Jerry Fodor, and Richard Dawkins. If Thoughts wishes to make his charge stick that materialists deny observation and ignore well-established modern physics, we should expect the support of citations and quotations from at least the most notable advocates of materialism. It might be the case that Thaddeus Hicklehooper* of Muncie, Indiana has a naive and out-dated view of physical reality, gleaned from his C- in Introduction to Philosophy at the Adult Learning Annex, but who cares?

*Not a real person

Thoughts' choice of critique of materialism is also puzzling. He critiques materialism not on the obvious grounds that reality is more complicated than atoms moving and bouncing around, but on the basis of a specific interpretation of time:

If everything is due to the flow of matter and time is like the succession of frames in a motion picture [emphasis added] then at every instant reality is a frozen three dimensional pattern, like a single frame in a movie.

Materialism does not allow the transfer of information from the past to the present except as recorded data so the frozen instant is all that exists in the materialist paradigm. The instant is frozen because there is no time for motion to take place at an instant.

Note how Thoughts apparently extends the definition of materialism in the bolded passage. This particular view of time is certainly not part of the stated definition of even 18th century materialism, and Thoughts offers not even an argument why we should consider this definition essential to materialism. And indeed this definition seems not only unjustified but perverse: if we consider materialism to be matter in motion, then motion must be an intrinsic property of material reality; viewing time as a succession of frozen images denies motion as an intrinsic property. Furthermore, the assumption of a continuum is a fundamental part of classical (and even non-quantum-mechanical relativistic) physics; if instants in time are "frozen", there must be not only infinitely many of them, but this infinity has to be the same cardinality of the real numbers. A lot of our prosaic intuitions simply fail even at the "lesser" infinite cardinality of integers. And of course it's astonishing to suggest that philosophers, scientists, and ordinary philosophically literate people have been for three hundred years unaware of Zeno's paradox until an anonymous blogger has brought it to our attention.

It is also surprising that Thoughts lumps physicalism in with materialism. [see comment] Thoughts correctly disambiguates materialism from physicalism. But pPhysicalism is precisely the technical philosophical term denoting the "modernization" of 18th and 19th century materialism to a modern relativistic and quantum mechanical scientific understanding of physics. If materialism in the technical sense is matter in motion, then physicalism is the sole existence of "physical substance", whatever the physics du jour proclaim that is the nature of that substance. (Physicists today considered this "substance" to be a collection of relativistic quantum mechanical fields.) Worse yet, the distinction between materialism and physicalism is a technical distinction in professional philosophy; it would be perverse to insist that ordinary people make this fine distinction, or to infer only from their terminology that they necessarily and essentially rely on an outdated view of physical reality.

And indeed the fine details of physicists' ontology are not necessary to materialism. The essence of materialism is not what can be deduced from a specific ontology, but rather the rejection of idealism and dualism, an essence specifically noted by Wikipedia, materialism

is different from ontological theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality, materialism would be in contrast to idealism and to spiritualism.

In his essay, Thoughts actually notes this essential contrast: philosophers "have split into two main groups," materialists and dualists. The essential property of philosophical materialism is its monism, not the specific details of physics.

And, while they profoundly change our view of physical reality, the truth is that Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics don't much change philosophical views that rests on a classical understanding of reality. Relativity and quantum mechanics don't even change a lot of science; wide swaths of scientific and engineering endeavors can safely ignore relativity and quantum mechanics, including a lot of astrophysics, orbital mechanics, and even electronics (while transistors do depend fundamentally on quantum mechanics, most electrical engineers ignore the quantum underpinnings and work at the level of classical approximations of their emergent behavior). Newtonian classical physics might be a "special case" of relativistic quantum mechanics, if by "special case" we mean 99.999..99% of observable phenomena.

Even the 0.000.01% of "edge" cases of relativity and quantum mechanics don't affect our materialistic philosophy much. Relativity doesn't change anything important; if anything it reinforces materialism: time and space are now interactions of matter; they don't sit "outside" matter, actually eliminating a puzzling dualism within material reality. And the only aspects of quantum mechanics that pertain to a materialistic philosophy are the Copenhagen interpretation, which simply denies that science has anything to say about ontology whatsoever, and the role of the observer in quantum mechanics. But the first is just cowardice — quantum mechanics does have something to say about ontology; it's just too weird and counter-intuitive for many people, including many scientists, to believe. And the role of the observer is pure speculation; we have absolutely no evidence to prefer any special role of "consciousness" to more prosaic, materialistic (or "physicalist") views such as the Many Worlds or Transactional interpretations.

Finally, Thoughts exhortation that, "The problem of how we can experience anything will require a scientific rather than an ideological approach," falls flat. Even the relatively naive 19th century view of materialism is the result of a scientific understanding of reality, and the philosophy easily survives modern scientific knowledge just by tweaking the specifics of what we consider "substance" to be. Materialism hardly requires a massive denial of observation or a dogmatic rejection of the relevance of "any cosmology after 100 AD."

Apologism

Except for the wars and the torture and the assassinations and the extraordinary renditions and Guantanamo and Bagram and the tax cuts and the deficits and the cover-ups and the bailouts of rich bankers and ignoring Katrina victims and gay-bashing and doing nothing about unemployment and letting millions of people lose their homes and coddling CEOs and propping up dictators, Obama is awesome

— Ted Rall

Love and sacrifice

In Catholic school as vicious as Roman rule
I got my knuckles brusied by a lady in black
And I held my toungue as she told me, "Son,
"fear is the heart of love"
So I never went back

— I Will Follow You Into The Dark, Death Cab for Cutie

In his comment to Dagood's post God’s a Big Human, commenter OneSmallStep asserts that God's love does not "humanize" god. I'm not at all interested in whether anyone's imaginary friend is or is not human, or can or cannot be humanized. I'm much more interested (and appalled) by OneSmallStep's assertion that God's love expressed as the sacrifice of Jesus (presumably per John 3:16) "matches the definition of love we all have."

This assertion is arrant nonsense. OneSmallStep's definition certainly does not match the stated definition of love that atheists have, it does not match the stated definitions most non-Christians have (neither Islam, Buddhism nor Hinduism place much theological importance specifically on sacrifice, especially a deity's or supernatural power's sacrifice to humanity) and, if we look at people's actual behavior, does not match even Christians' definition of love, at least as applied to other human beings.

Love is of course a very complicated set of emotions, attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and ethical standards. But we can extract obvious commonality from observations of human behavior: love is characterized by trust, cooperation and mutual benefit. I've been married for almost six years now: I love my wife and she loves me. Before I met my present wife, I raised two children: I love them and they love me. Yet in any larger sense, I've sacrificed nothing to either my wife or my children. It is certainly the case that in every way, economically, materially, and emotionally, both my wife and I are much better off than we would be alone. To a certain extent, I made economic "sacrifices" to raise my children, but that sacrifice was not to them, it was a trade of a lesser value to a greater value of my own: my self-image and self-esteem. They certainly had no choice in the matter, and whatever I gave up for my own does not place any sort of obligation on them, not even for gratitude. Whatever love we feel for each other has nothing to do with what I sacrificed to raise them, and everything to do with the trust, cooperation and mutual benefit we gain from acting as a family.

Indeed most civilized, healthy people consider the connection between sacrifice and love in ordinary human life as at best creepy and neurotic (e.g. the stereotypical (and misogynist, racist and false) "Jewish mother" who manipulates her children with guilt) and at worst literally insane (e.g. people who commit suicide "for love"). Few think (and no one should think) that a battered wife sacrifices her own physical well-being for her "love" for her husband (she does so out of fear), and no one would or should admire her if she actually did so out of "love".

I suppose that under extraordinary circumstances, if my tail's in a crack, I would probably sacrifice my life to save my wife or children... I might even, out of "love" for humanity, sacrifice my life for a stranger. But such a sacrifice would be an act of desperation. It isn't love, not really, and it's certainly not the definition of love. As much as I love my wife, I don't want to sacrifice anything for her benefit. I could, in theory, make the "ultimate sacrifice" and commit suicide, but I don't think my wife would consider that an act of love: indeed she would be well-justified to consider it an act of hatred and violence towards her. Even if I made suicide look like an accident so she would gain considerable material benefit from my life insurance, she would consider it more loving for me (and better for her) to stay with her in poverty than kill myself for her wealth.

The narrative becomes even more absurd when we consider the "sacrifice" of Jesus in the context of the whole Bible. First, it's not really that much of a "sacrifice": death has no meaning for a deity. Secondly, the sacrifice was entirely gratuitous: an omnipotent deity by definition cannot act out of desperation. And the sacrifice was to "atone" for a "original" sin that's nothing more than a blatant frame-up. No, the resurrection of Jesus has to be seen even within the context of the Christian narrative (absent, of course, the "faith" a Christian must bring to that narrative) as nothing more than an opportunity for Yahweh to awe the masses with a cheap magic trick. OneSmallStep would have us belief that the definition of love that everyone has is exemplified by a deity sacrificing itself to itself to atone for a sin it itself engineered. This definition is not just perverse, it's completely ridiculous.

So why elevate sacrifice, at best a peripheral, accidental and extraordinary component of love, to its very definition? And why, as does OneSmallStep, blithely attribute this definition to everyone?

Guilt is a powerful human emotion, and one of the most powerful for manipulating others into doing what you want. If you can elevate sacrifice to the definition of love then you can on the one hand use sacrifice to create obligations, and on the other hand you can justify demanding other people sacrifice themselves: You're not working twelve hours a day and living in poverty? You must not love your employer.

In a follow-up comment, OneSmallStep tries to use war as a justification for his definition of love:

Our definition of love -- how we define love -- includes an aspect of sacrificing objects or even people of value (and I would say that we have instances where we do "sacrifice" people of value. Wars, for instance, if people encourage their family or friends to fight for a greater good). I'm not focusing on the morality or lack thereof of the parent sacrificing the child, I'm simply focusing on how the element of sacrifice ties to the definition of love.

(Notice how sacrifice becomes not the definition of love that everyone has, but an "aspect of" or "tied to" the definition.)

But more importantly, and more shockingly, the effect of this exposition is not to justify love in terms of war, but to justify war in terms of love. Wars are never fought "for the greater good", they are and have been from time immemorial fought to settle disputes between factions of the ruling class du jour. (We didn't, for example, fight the Germans in the Second Imperialist War because they were killing Jews, or the Japanese because they were massacring the Chinese. We fought them because they were trying to expand their colonial power at our expense. That we happened to rid the world of a few of the world's many nasty characters was just a bonus.)

We can see the fundamental and unavoidable danger of "moderate" religion. I've been reading OneSmallStep's commentary on Thoughts from a Sandwich for quite some time, and overall he (?) seems like a reasonably nice person, although — quelle suprise — somewhat fuzzy of thought. To be a "moderate" of any religion, one must buy in at least somehow to that religion's core narrative. But all religions are rotten to the core; a supernatural or "faith" justification for any principle is necessary and has any long-term legs only when that principle lacks rational support. And principles without rational support achieve persistence in any society only when those principles allow the ruling class to exploit, oppress and abuse the ruled class.

Convincing the policymakers

In order to make substantive changes to economic policy, Paul Krugman notes the obvious: "you have to ... convince current policymakers that it’s the right answer." But Krugman is being a little naive: people — policymakers included — rarely if ever do the "right" thing just because it's the right thing to do. If you want to make changes, you to convince the policymakers that those changes are in their material interest. There are two sets of policymakers: the very rich and the elected government. So we have to ask: what precisely are the material interests of these policymakers?

People tend to construct their interests in widening circles, from their individual interests to the interests of their families, work organizations, localities, nations, and regions. They also widen their construction of interests laterally to their church or religion, their profession, their social class and (sometimes) their economic class. And members of the capitalist class seem to have been especially effective at acting in their own economic class interests.

It's a mistake, I think, to see group identification as a "sacrifice" of one's personal interests to the interests of the group. First, a group isn't "really real"; doesn't have interests of its own. A group interest is some abstraction of the interests of its members.

The simplest abstraction is merely some interest that is predominantly shared by the members of the group, especially where individuals self-identify with the group explicitly on the basis of some interest. The group of poker players, for example, are all interested in — surprisingly enough — playing poker; the members of the Motion Picture Association of America are all interested in enforcing, preserving and extending intellectual property rights.

Another, more complex abstraction is mutual benefit. There are interactions where it's always in each individual's immediate benefit to one thing, but it's to both individuals' greater benefit to do the opposite but only if both individuals do the same thing. If I buy a TV from Crazy Eddie, it's in my "immediate" benefit to give him counterfeit money whether or not he gives me a real TV. Likewise, it's in Crazy Eddie's immediate benefit to give me a box with bricks in it whether or not I give him real money. This analysis means that all exchanges are of counterfeit money for empty boxes. Compared to that outcome, it's to our increased mutual benefit to exchange real TVs for real money. Compared to mutual betrayal, mutual cooperation is not a sacrifice: it's an increase in benefit. Each party must "sacrifice" only the illusory benefits of asymmetric betrayal (i.e. where one person cooperates and the other betrays).

One reason I suspect that group identification is strong in humans is precisely that group identification affords mutual cooperation for mutual benefit. It does so by changing the game, by imposing an immediate penalty — loss of group membership — on asymmetric betrayal. The dominant local strategy for each person becomes to cooperate, since asymmetric betrayal loses the more valuable group identification for the smaller immediate benefit. Group identification can evolve — it doesn't need to be planned — and group selection is much more important in social evolution than it is in biological evolution. (Although I'm hardly an expert in evolutionary biology, I suspect that we'll find that group selection plays an important part in inter-species competition.)

What are the interests of the rich?

I recently read Burn Rate, by Michael Wolff, a fascinating inside look at the Internet tech bubble of the late 1990s. In one passage Wolff, the CEO of an Internet startup, has a conversation with his primary financial backer. To paraphrase, the backer exhorts Wolff to go for a personal payout of about $30,000,000, because the people who settle for a payout of only $15,000,000 are "dead". They have enough money to live comfortably for the rest of their lives, but they don't have enough money to make large-scale investments: they cannot become members of the true ruling class. Membership of the ruling class isn't about consuming more; I doubt that even Bill Gates actually consumes more than about $500,000/year (and people who do consume more are parvenus intent on rejoining the working class). Had living well been his only goal, he would have retired and cashed out at $15 million, instead of accumulating three orders of magnitude more money, three orders of magnitude more status and power in the ruling class. No one gets into the ruling class without the burning desire to accumulate and exercise power, and those who do manage (usually by birth and inheritance) to get in without that burning desire soon fall out of it.

(It's also worth noting that the easiest and most common way of accumulating enough money to join the ruling capitalist class is to get that money from someone already in that class. It's very difficult (but not impossible, as several televangelists have demonstrated) to get that much money directly from the working class: the working class is the source of the ruling capitalist class's wealth, and pretty well sewn up.)

It seems fairly obvious that the dominant personal and immediate family interest of the members of the ruling capitalist class is the accumulation and exercise of economic power. The accumulation and exercise of any sort of power is generally a zero-sum game. It's neither in the immediate self interest of any member of the capitalist class to improve the overall state of the economy, nor is there any sense of mutual benefit by mutual cooperation. In much the same sense, it's not in football coaches' immediate or mutual self interest to increase the overall score of a game: a 2-0 win is better than a 41-72 loss.

So clearly, Krugman cannot have the members of the capitalist ruling class in mind: the only sense that the capitalist ruling class acts in its mutual self interest is to prevent, discourage and suppress threats from other classes to their own class rule, and there's no immediate danger of any kind of socialist or working class revolution. (The only immediate danger to the capitalist ruling class is that posedd by Christian theocrats, but the capitalists are handling that danger by co-option and "corruption".) Krugman can have only elected officials in mind.

Elected officials are, like capitalists, motivated by the zero-sum accumulation and exercise of power, but their method of obtaining power is different from the capitalists'. In a capitalist "democracy", the working class occasionally gets some voice in the exercise of power: to gain power (at least for now) a politician must convince millions of people to drive to a polling place and pull the lever next to her name.

We can assume that professional politicians at the national level are generally those most skilled at winning elections (or employ those who are most skilled): if there were anyone more skilled, they would have won the election. So to convince the elected policymakers to make some change, you have to convince them that supporting the change will help them win elections (or, having won elections, allow them to more strongly exercise their acquired political power).

The working class does benefit to some extent from overall improvements in the economy: jobs, employment, work, standards of living are not zero-sum games, they are usually positive-sum games, where the natural dominant strategy is cooperation for mutual benefit. However, to influence elections, the members of the working class must think of themselves as a class, with class interests. Lacking much individual power, having power only in numbers, they must also act in concert, with a certain level of organization and discipline*.

*While "authoritarians" frequently invoke the value of discipline as justification for authoritarianism, the fallacy does not lie in the value of discipline itself, but in their connection of discipline to authority.

But if the working class did conceive of itself as a class, with class interests, and if they were capable of enough organized and disciplined action to influence elections (even under the rigged capitalist "democratic" system) to their class benefit, then they would have sufficient power not just to extract concessions from the capitalist class, but to take over completely. But of course the capitalist class does conceive of itself as a class, it is itself disciplined and organized, and they fully understand that their mutual interest in preserving their own class as the ruling class.

It's going to be very difficult to convince policymakers to do the "right" thing, to choose the "correct" answer; the difference between the "right" and "wrong" answers (according to Krugman's conscience and preferences) is at the very least irrelevant (and may be contrary to) to the immediate and medium-term self interest of the entire ruling class, moneyed and elected. The only long-term threat to the ruling class is a socialist revolution, but the ruling class does not seem to consider this threat sufficiently serious to implement general economic reform — even Obama has primarily limited himself to preserving the status of owners of financial capital and making only token efforts for the working class in the ludicrously small "stimulus" (primarily targeting the professional-managerial middle class) and his woefully insufficient (and actively misogynist) "universal" health care plan.