Sixteen Volts

I have been reading through Tommi's old posts and articles and will keep translating the best of them to this blog, at the speed of one or two per day. Here is another one of his earlier observations.

An institution that has reached a sufficiently total position no longer really needs to trade with others in the way that this term is usually understood. For example, God will not sell salvation for a fixed price, but believers must compete throughout their lives, internalize the doctrine and execute it without any motivation of benefiting from it, so that divine mercy might just fall on the lucky believer. Similarly it used to be wrong for us Finns to demand anything from the Soviet Union, but the superpower led us to believe that it might crush the small nation of Finland simply by accident, so it was our responsibility to ensure that the superpower's dark disapproval wouldn't accidentally fall on us.

In principle, this situation is trading with someone who has no need to keep up their own end. In normal trading, if I pay for something, the seller must either give it to me or at least give my money back. In certain very asymmetrical relationships one side is completely dependent on the other and has no alternatives. The strong side has something very scarce that the weaker side cannot get from anybody else, and on the other hand, the weaker side has no means of punishing the stronger side should it simply choose not to obey the agreement.

Totalitarian worship means precisely trading in a situation like this. The joke is that whereas in normal trading, in which the seller chooses the buyer who made the best offer and makes the trade with him, a seller who is in a sufficiently strong position in selling something that is sufficiently scarce gets to collect payments from everybody and still get to keep the product in the end. When either side can force the situation sufficiently hard for the other side, they no longer need to stoop for ordinary trading.

Note also that the dominant side has no need whatsoever to act reasonably. It's childish to wonder why during its whole existence the Soviet Union was a belligerent tyranny led by senile madmen, and why it didn't care for the least about its own citizens nor people in other nations. Of course it is beneficial for someone who is in a sufficiently good position to be an unpredictable monster! If the buyers who want to please the seller learn what pleases the monster, the gifts and services that the monster is able to extract are not as abundant as they would be in a situation where the buyers constantly have to stretch their inventiveness to surprise the monster with new inventions and entertainment, and can never safely assume that they have given enough and ensured that the trade will go through.

All institutions try to reach a position like this, after which they can be called total and they are free of any symmetric requirements of having to obey their contracts. This is an obvious consequence of profit maximization, and it has got nothing to do with whether people consider this institution good, evil, immoral, responsible etc. To cross this threshold, institutions bribe collaborators who gain approval of the institution. Once these collaborators have risen above their competitors thanks to this approval, they can no longer refuse it without falling back to the level where other people are. For this reason, some people just seem to have an unexplainably good (or occasionally bad) luck.

One present-day example of such attempts are certain ideological subgroups of women which attempt to corporativize and gain a monopoly of supplying sex. Women's organizations oppose prostitution, since there sex has a simple price and both sides have to follow the deal that is made. On the other hand, the idea that only women's own feelings determine what is sexual harassment raises the effective price of sex for men. Raising hysteria about rape and pedophilia similarly raises the price of joining the opposition. The goal is simple: to reach the position that religion, Soviet Union or some other total institution enjoyed. That is, women could extract all benefits of supplying sex without ever having to keep their own end of the deal. For the same reason, it is beneficial for women to advertise their unbalanced emotionalism and act like nothing is ever good enough for them, just like Soviet Union did to keep the rest of the world on its toes.

Is this some form of evil inherent in women? Of course not, since this is perfectly ordinary profit maximization. In the same situation, every bicycle repair shop, dairy farm, trade union or social democracy would behave the same way. Any sane person who thinks about how things really are instead of trying to see the difficult dynamics past the smoke screens of social philosophy, values and other fairy tales will immediately grasp this.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Monday, February 27, 2006 at 10:15 AM