Cobb

Why Are You Afraid of Socialism?

 

The difference between socialism and communism is not important. What is important is whether or not the ruling elite believe in the masses or not.

I am reading the book that I never learned in school which is Robert Conquest's The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Published in 1990, Conquest took materials previously unavailable for his original written in 1968 with a view to the provisional title 'I Told You So You Fucking Fools'. Conquest was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitzen. Not prophetic, merely accurate in such a way as to be practically immune to wishful thinking. 

What emerges is a picture of a society at war with itself, which is always the case of revolution. But what I am taking awy from this read is not something merely awful because of the ways and means through which Stalin himself destroyed the nation and the people, but based on the inevitable injustice of the precepts of the revolution itself. This was new, a surprising revelation to me.

You see the vanguard, be they Menshevik or Bolshevik were ultimately the leaders and definers of the revolution. As it happened, the Bolsheviks 'won'. And so great was their need, it was a revolution after all, to destroy the basis of power of the enemies, that they were willing to jail and kill their countrymen along the lines defined by the revolutionary vanguard. Ulitmately, and principly, all was done for the liberation of the peasant from their capitalist overlords. And so (being very terse here with history) it was inevitable that 'land reform' was part of the process. Collectivization: take from the rich and give to the poor, all in the name of 'the people'. But which people? Which indeed would, by revolutionary defintion, become right and proper leaders of the new ruling class, ie those in charge of collectivization? It had to be organized. It had to be scientific. It had to be orderly and disciplined in order to fulfill the goals of the revolution - otherwise there would be no need for collective power or its exercise. If you left it to *all* of the people, they would become capitalists again. No. There was a need for organized force to insure the proper level of equality.

The problem was that there were different classes of peasants over which to rule. In particular there was the matter of the Kulaks. These were those peasants of the most capable strain - those who had managed to save money and manage what little business they had, oppressed as they were by the landed gentry. And so with the coming of the revolution in 1917, the Kulak welcomed the Bolsheviks as they delivered crushing blows to the landowners. But the Kulaks were not given requisite power in the vanguard who ordered them around more arbitrarily than those bourgeios nationalists they replaced. And where did the farm products of the Kulaks and the peasants go? Well to feed the revolutionary army, and the political vanguard of course. Within one year it became civil war, and the Kulaks thus became the enemy of the people. 

Peasants were starved to feed the revolutionary army on behalf of the peasants and the vanguard could not afford to let the revolution die - after all this was not merely a solution for Russia, but for the whole of mankind. It became clear to the leaders of this revolution that Kulaks and those poltically like them would have to be suppressed until the proper new peasant could take his place. Meanwhile the vanguard would suppress the opposition. The Bolshevik party line became all the truth the system could sustain, given the peasants willingness to make war against it. It was this fundamental inversion of democracy that foreclosed any possibility of the Soviet system to produce anything even vaguely resembling justice. The ensuing cruelty, show trials, purges and pogroms were but external and inevitable expressions of the fundamental cancer within. 

What is further shocking about Stalin's rule was the extent to which the Party destroyed its own fathers. Conquest details the arrest, detention, torture, confession, trial and execution of Bolshevik after Bolshevik by the Bolsheviks and their replacement, bureau after bureau, region after region. 

Imagine, if you could, the idea that Americans for Obama would have all the Clinton Administration shot, starting with Rahm Emmanuel and anyone who supported him. This is how it went in 1930 Russia. Old heads of the 1917 revolution were being put to death in 1937, no matter how high they had been. The only survivors would be the blindly obedient, and the executors. 

 --

What is there to fear from socialism? The answers are easy to determine. You merely need to discover who is arrogating it upon themselves to call the status quo unfair and how far they would go to revolutionize. The status quo is always defined by the people who are making the decisions that the people live with. In a free market, that's everyone who participates in it. To shunt aside the market for political reasons is to find fault with the people who sustain it, who must inevitably be suppressed. Those who would take power on behalf of 'the people' will inevitably have to form a sustained, organized, scientific, disciplined new order. A new ruling class, with new powers... for the new people. 

OK & Stoic About It

 

As I move forward in this, the final third of my planned life (whatever happens after I'm 75, I basically don't care), I am discovering the ways in which all the life I've lived is different or similar to the ways people have lived throughout history. Right about now I'm discovering my stoicism.

 

About 15 years ago, I put together a 'hyperbio' which was about 300 phrases, each tied to a specific memory, that I had grouped into about 7 phases of my life. At the height of my corporate professional career and the beginning of my corporate management career I considered adding the 8th phase. In 2000 I got ganked by the Feds and in 2001 I got laid off from Hyperion and there was 9/11 of course. I still hadn't gotten full custody of my son, and I had lost my last grandmother. So thinking about how to end phase 7 and begin phase 8 meant that now that I was over 40 I was going to have to consider death, loss and failure. So what to call phase 7? Should that include the death loss and failure through 2001 to start anew with phase 8, or should it end on a high note and phase 8 be the beginning of death, loss and failure? It was a lot on my mind as I flew Southwest Airlines every week with bumpy landings at BUR. 

I didn't resolve the ontology problem, but I did change the way I think. Ever since 9/11 I have asked, as a part of my morning routine, what broke while I was sleeping? And those of you who have worked with me may recognize that hangdog look on my face, and how I actually brighten up slightly when I am working on something that's broken. Failure makes me laugh, because in some ways it is the comeuppance of incompetence. Except, of course in IT, you generally don't get to know exactly who screwed the pooch, how or when. We're all organizationally firewalled and only blame goes over the transom. So I came to expect SNAFU, even find comfort in it. It's a horrible dualism to deal with in a world of technological improvement where people want ever increasing slices of their lives digitized. It is at once progress and chaotic dissolution. 

When I was the admin at Xerox Centre, I had the audacity, just ask David Bradley, to wear a disk drive head assembly on my keychain. it was my digital red badge of courage, having mounted a disk pack incorrectly and listening to flying heads grind into the platters and then crash in a cyclone of crumbled bits of aluminum and burning FeO₂. Somewhere around that time, in the late 80s, I was losing my patriotism over the flubs of the Reagan Administration in disbelief over news reports about the runways lengths in Grenada and then finally over Iran Contra. But I was still much too young to be a stoic - I lived at the beach.

But now I understand that thing Taleb calls the Dumbell Strategy, which is to pursue seeminly contradicting aims simultaneously in recognition that he who plays both sides manages risk. But it is not being two-faced, but being antifragile, the difference between which are the stuff of wisdom. There's no easy way to explain it, and I won't until I read his book which is due out in six months or so. But I am indeed finding parallels of this thinking in history and coming to terms with what has been said by the likes of Epictetus and Cryssipus as well as the gods of OODA. 

I am of the opinion that all human folly ends in war, if the folly is big enough. That is because stupidity rarely fails from killing things and epic stupidity, that which is powerful and sustained by cowardice and/or credulity inevitably kills people. Evil *is* rather banal in that you can see it coming a mile a way. Stupidity, on the other hand, usually presents with the symptoms of inattention.  Expect Inattention; it is legion.

What does it all mean? It means that when I have a miserable week, as I had just the other week, starting with a funeral I really was unprepared for, a backlog of work I had committed to and failed to deliver, and an increasingly busified schedule full of tasks everyone hates like auto repair, tax preparation and helping kids study for finals at midnight; there is a solution. That solution is to listen to the tribulations of the thousands of Bolsheviks being falsely accused, tortured into confession, summarily tried and executed of being bourgeois nationalists, which is basically everything I ever wanted to be. Robert Conquest is my staid and sometimes deeply ironically arch guide through that horror - the details of which when I first encountered them 9 years ago sent me to sleep weeping. And now, like the whiskey I once could not stomach, I consume it for comfort.

I'm OK. I can handle it. 

I try to be both concerned and unworried. What I hate most of all is not the bad news, but being blindsided by it. I am comfortably down Miller's Alley and concerned (but not worried) about those things that are reasonably within my ambit of capacity to change. I reckon that to be a Stoic approach, but I'll let you know how Stoically correct I am. At the same time, I'm a Californian which means I do not intend to be fat or lazy or overly concerned with the quality of affairs in the public square, that which our meddlesome liberal friends insist on calling 'Zocalo', and will, I suppose until their Yankee inflected Spanish fails to deliver them from being dragged foot-first up the coming ziggurats of political human sacrifice ot the greater glory of La Raza. I'm going to the jazz concert anyway. I'm going jogging anyway. I'm going to eat in my walled garden like an Epicurean anyway. That's how I roll. 

I'm becoming convinced, as I'm sure the Stoics were, that Vulgaris populus ago in obscurum. Ordinary people live in darkness. Being OK is slightly better than that, especially for one such as I who is not likely to curse the darkness. That's part of the dumbell strategy. That is part of living up to Boyd's theory of liberty. 

“The most important thing in life is to be free to do things. There are only two ways to insure that freedom — you can be rich or you can you reduce your needs to zero.” 

But Taleb adds the kicker. He imagines, and we expect that he will describe, systems that benefit from failure - not creative destruction, but perhaps one can think of them as twin OODA loops, one for success and one for failure. Here is Taleb:

Seneca was the wealthiest man in the world. He had 500 desks, on which he wrote his letters talking about how good it was to be poor. And people found inconsistency. But they didn't realize what Seneca said. He was not against wealth. And he proved effectively that one philosopher can have wealth and be a philosopher. What he was about is dependence on wealth. He wanted the upside of wealth without its downside. And what he would do is--he had been in a shipwreck before. He would fake like he was a shipwreck and travel like he was a shipwreck once in a while. And then he would go back to his villas and feel rich. He would write off every night before going to bed his entire wealth. As a mental exercise. And then wakes up rich. So, he kept the upside. In fact, what he had, my summary of what Stoics were about is a people who really had, like Buddhists, an attitude. ...

And my definition is a Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking. Very different than the Buddhist idea of someone who is completely separated from worldly sentiments and possessions and thrills. Very different. Someone who wanted the upside without the downside. And Seneca proved it. And the way you get there, Seneca is suggesting, is through mental exertion. Through renunciation--some of it's action, but some of it is the way you look at your life and what you prepare yourself for and how you affect your expectations.

Righteous.

Startup Money After Bad

When I see reasonably intelligent and civilized young, single people who talk with upspeak my immediate reaction is 'Val'. For my international readers, a Val is short for Valley. You may be familiar with the term. If not, check out the YouTube.

So I watched this attractive young woman on television - one of those tech talk shows, and she started spewing about her experience at forgettably cutesy spelled dot com which was funded. Funded means you and 12 other twentysomethings with a cool idea managed to convinced somebody with 100 million dollars that you're worth 4.5 million and you have a year to prove it. And 85% of you fail, some spectacularly - meaning you make it for 3 years and get another 40 people and 12 million dollars and *then* fail. It's a story as old as most old dogs.

What surprised me was how instantly it occured to me that she and 12 of her friends would be an unlucky 13 as soon as she started speaking. The very idea of of spending about five million bucks on any endeavor headed by people with less than 5 years work experience, no kids, overpriced undergraduate educations and caffiene fetishes just seems ridiculous right off the bat. And yet we all know it happens. It happens a lot. It shouldn't happen much at all - but it's how a lot of us think about money and work.

There is a small part of me that wants to start a conversation: The only reason I'm not a Silicon Valley millionaire is because... But I don't want to go there or even think I'm going there. It just seems obvious to me that certain things ought to fail. I'm pessimistic today. 

Be Careful What You Wish

You might just become predictable.