Sixteen Volts

A few days ago, I read an article in the newspaper about the planned tax credit for taking the public transit. To get this credit, you would have to keep your monthly transit passes that this tax credit applies to, which is somewhat of a problem since Mississauga only offers weekly bus passes. One solution would be to start issuing monthly passes, which would actually be quite convenient. But what do you know, this would be a bad thing, because the poor people who need the tax credit the most are also unable to plan ahead and buy a monthly pass instead of buying four weekly passes one at the time. When I read this article, I suddenly understood much better why some people are poor and are pretty much doomed to remain so.

In the same vein, the post "I'm pissed" at the "Den of the Biting Beaver" is very educational. The whole post is actually a total laugh riot, and not just for the little old me who always enjoys watching feminists suffer and feels no moral qualms over this, knowing that if the tables were turned, they wouldn't hesitate to behave the exact same way. But the post also nicely illustrates that things are not always what you would wish them to be, and that certain bad choices in life tend to have certain bad consequences. It's funny that me and my wife have never had any problems like those described in the above post. Could it be that we have just been lucky? Probably so, since otherwise you would have to say that we both have done good choices in our lives, and that kind of attitude would just be wrong.

It also never ceases to amaze me when people who have jobs and should therefore be in control of their lives still live hand to mouth so that an extra expense of $1000 or so would send their finances to a death spiral. (I believe that this is called being "edgy" or "punk", but I am so out of the loop of what is "cool" that I can't really be sure about this.) Even more generally, it is very revealing how often those who have the grandest schemes for the future of humanity and who hold the strongest opinions about how the whole society should be thoroughly reorganized also tend to be the least able to manage their own lives successfully. I am sure that there is some underlying explanation for this curious correlation.

Now that we are at the topic of books that I have read, I'd like to mention "Resentment Against Achievement: Understanding the Assault upon Ability" by Robert Sheaffer. I found this little gem at the local library a few years ago, read it twice and thoroughly enjoyed it. This book examines how the underclass values and leftist values are pretty much the same thing, and how these values inevitably cause poverty and misery. The book was published in 1988, and many of its observations and predictions have become even more vividly obvious since then.

People who adopt underclass values, such as their attitudes about work, money, and what is right and wrong, are unable to maintain a decent living because they cannot hold on to a job.

The second chapter of the book, "Social Classes", argues that the different social classes hold vastly different values and worldviews, and these differences alone suffice to create and sustain the inequality between classes, even if the supposed oppression of the lower classes by the evil elite was somehow ended. The misery of the poor is not because the evil upper class intentionally keeps them in shackles, but the underclass causes its own misery with its actions. For all the supposed virtuousness of the poor, the life of a member of the underclass is constant uncertainty where you can't trust anyone, not even your closest friends. For the underclass, only "here" and "now" really exist, they cannot think in abstractions or terms higher than these. Helping someone or showing friendship are signs of either weakness or trying to cheat. Only the threat of police and violence keep the underclass contained, and as soon as the power goes out or some natural disaster removes the threat of police, rampaging and looting will instantly begin.

If the student body of a school in a good suburban area were exchanged with one in a notorious slum, keeping the school and faculties the same, people would be amazed by how successful the bad school can be.

The third chapter, "Resentment and Education", examines how your values ultimately determine the social class that you end up in. Since the children of the underclass are brainwashed with underclass values on a daily basis, they have no chance of succeeding in modern postindustrial society. As soon as one of them wants to become something better and climb up from the misery by doing homework or working in some lowly service sector job, his fellow crabs will drag him back down, probably using the words "Who the fuck do you think you are, fuck let's beat that faggot up, fucking faggot." Since the underclass never gets to punish those who really are above them (the only exception to this rule are the brief periods where a small group of rebellious members of upper class organizes the underclass violence to benefit this group: the underclass will never be able to plan or execute anything that requires long-term thinking or understanding complex abstractions), they merely blindly attack those who they sense are climbing up from their shared misery.

The social class of our adult years is pretty much fixed during the elementary school, and the kids who try to be "cool" close the doors to higher education that is all the more necessary for success, since being "cool" pretty much consists of rejection of all things that could potentially help them succeed in the future. Paul Graham's excellent essay "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" examines the same issue from a different perspective.

The typical member of underclass is not really that blessed with smarts, and is therefore unable to understand the grand scheme of things. His life is out of control and he simply goes with the flow of events like a twig floating in a river, bouncing from one random crisis to another. At any moment he can become a victim of violence or theft. Having to live in circumstances where everything is basically unpredictable and where you can't really affect anything with your own choices has throughout the history led to a superstitious worldview that says that everything really is determined by luck. For example, rich people are rich only because they have had better luck in stealing things from the poor, not because they have planned for future or are better prepared for risks. When everything is determined by sheer luck, all kind of planning and long-term thinking is useless. Especially all kind of thinking is useless, and reading and appreciating art are "faggotry" that no real man should ever engage in.

Andrew Vachss has a nice essay about essentially the same phenomenon, "Serious, Violent, and Habitual Juvenile Offenders". Money quotes:

The second characteristic is lack of perception of the future. He has none. If you ask a kid like this, "What are you going to be doing next year?" you will get an absolutely blank stare. Not because he's stupid, but because he simply cannot conceptualize such a distance from right now. If you want to speak with this kid, you have to speak within his time frame, and that time frame isn't ever more than a few hours from the present.

This kid does not relate behavior to consequences. He does not see a causal connection between his acts and a response. What do I mean? To this kid, life is a lottery. Everyone rolls the dice, but not everyone pays the price. He has no perception as to how the dice will come up. In his world, everyone commits crimes. Everybody. Some smaller percentage of that number are arrested. A still smaller percentage go to court; an even smaller percentage go to trial. A smaller percentage still are actually found guilty (or "adjudicated delinquent" if you prefer), and a smaller percentage of that group are committed to a youth authority. Lastly, an even smaller percentage are actually incarcerated.

Who are his role models? Those who are, in his mind, successful criminals. He doesn't know any real successful criminals. He knows no embezzlers. He knows no computer criminals. He knows no politicians. He knows only what he perceives as success. And what tells him someone is a success? A diamond ring, fine clothes, a car. Not a home, because his perception doesn't extend that far. He focuses on the things you can carry around with you. And when he goes to jail, that perception doesn't change. So when you read about one kid stabbing another to death over a fancy pair of sneakers in a juvenile institution, don't dismiss it as insanity. It may be insane, but it's consistently so.

So who are the role models? Pimps, dope dealers, armed robbers. And when this kid thinks "armed robbery," he's thinking like a cowboy. He's thinking about the guys who kick in the door of a social club, blow away three or four people, and end up with five hundred dollars. He doesn't even conceptualize a large-scale robbery, such as an armored car job. He doesn't even conceptualize stealing anything but cash, or things readily convertible to cash.

Now tell me: does that description not sound a lot like a typical leftist intellectual, once you take away all the five-dollar words and leave only the basic essence of his worldview and philosophy? There is a reason why the leftists, whenever somebody points out that underclass commits the vast majority of crime, will immediately start angrily explaining that rich white people are just as bad because they constantly embezzle, cheat, oppress, rape and murder. A leftist intellectual cannot even comprehend things being otherwise, somebody becoming rich because they work hard and add value to the world, an activity that leftists are deeply unable to do on their own.

But enough of this interlude, let's return to Sheaffer's book.

Imagine that you had entire weeks of free time, paid for by taxpayers. Would you spend this time standing around carrying a protest sign?

Chapter four, "Resentment as Ideal", examines the way both Christianity and socialism have elevated envy, weakness and inferiority as ideals. The sheer perversity of leftists who want "a proletarian state", that is, a whole nation founded on proletarian ideals, is just as horrible in theory as it turned out to be in practice in Soviet Union. Sheaffer argues that in the end, both Christianity and socialism are based on the exact same worldview. The fact that many modern Christians tend to be right-wing and support the free markets and individual freedoms only goes to show that they have no idea about the history of Christianity and its teachings. In fact, I would claim that if, due to some quirk of history, some other religion than Christianity had spread to Europe, Europeans would have turned it into a version of their own that would have nothing in common with the original form other than the name, the same way that they did with Christianity.

Perhaps there must be a sinister conspiracy keeping knowledge of science from the proletariat? I'm joking, of course: most proletarian youth will heatedly defy or even possibly assault anyone who tries to teach them the mental discipline of science.

Chapter five, "Resentment Against Science, Technology and Medicine", was by far my personal favourite, since in this chapter Sheaffer nicely explains where the doctrines of modern humanities and liberal arts intellectuals originate from. The main issue here is to understand that not every idea and view is equally valid and valuable in the objective reality. People who long for the past and the more "natural" way of life don't seem to understand that there is a very simple reason why you never see old animals roaming in nature. When these intellectuals have lost all touch to natural sciences that they despise, they can no longer distinguish between astrology and astronomy, and all kinds of pseudosciences and superstition spread like wildfire among them. It is typical for these pseudosciences that they don't require long and hard study that only a small subset of population has enough cognitive capacity for, but anybody can with his "intuition" and "faith" to be a master. This suits well the liberal arts graduates who envy those who can read the mystic hieroglyphs of math and science and use them to bend reality to their will. In their envy, they refuse to understand that objective reality will not listen to them stomping their feet and being ignorant, so they will eventually certainly suffer for their evasion as the objective reality hits them the same way that the iceberg hit Titanic.

For today's youth who chooses to conform to the dictates of his peers, rock singers are powerful role models and the realization of every resentful ideal. Consider what happens to those youth who succeed in realizing those ideals [...] If you were an employer, and someone who dressed, acted and talked exactly like a rock singer came in to apply for a job, would you consider hiring such person, assuming you had any choice?

Chapter six, "Arts", is about beauty and art. In it, Sheaffer attacks specifically "slum rock", that is, music whose only purpose is to advance underclass values and behavioural patterns. Rock stars look and act the way they do, displaying all signs of what would normally be chronic unemployability, to signal their followers that they can afford to do so. When an underclass youth tries to emulate them without the whole organization of suavely-packaged pseudorebellion to support them, the results are predictably sad. (For example, as one conservative columnist who I already forgot once pointed out, Madonna could afford to hire a nanny to take care of her bastard child, but the life of an underclass teenage mom is nowhere near as free or glamorous.)

Chapter seven, "Politics and Conflict", examines the effect that envy and underclass values will eventually have on politics. Sheaffer predicts that in the future when talented and entrepreneurial people become more free to emigrate to nations that appreciate them more, the chasm between successful and unsuccessful states becomes wider as ideologies have to face market tests. This is pretty hard to deny when you look at the world today, with some countries passing this simple free market test and some other countries failing it.

The last chapter of the book, "Future", examines what will happen when individual success is determined by intelligence, talent and effort instead of luck and inherited wealth. Modern technology makes a real aristocracy possible in the sense of "rule of the best", instead of plutocracy or rule that is inherited instead of earned, and elitism, which simply means that some things are better than some other things. Of course, I have myself often noticed that opponents of "elitism" don't really oppose that system of elitism per se, but the fact that they are not the elite. Sheaffer's view of this issue is that the upper classes and successful people should reach out their helping hand to all those who seriously want to work and improve their position in life. And this is, of course, what they already do in real life. Very few successful people are hostile towards people who want to do the same, but successful people are usually more than willing and even enthusiastic to help and mentor people who they consider to have potential. On the other hand, the upper class must sternly reject all attempts to bring forth social equality by dragging down the upper class to the lever of the underclass and make no concessions to people making these demands, regardless of the rhetoric that they (socialists, Christians, liberal arts and humanities intellectuals) happen to use today as a smokescreen to hide their real goals.

In this respect, I very much agree with Sheaffer. The best way to defeat the left would be to let people freely decide whether they want to join whatever utopian scheme it is that the leftists want to make universal. This way, leftists could not hide behind the mask of being little flower children who preach love, but they would be forced to show their real face of totalitarianism the moment that most of those people who matter would simply say "no, thank you" to their leftist utopian schemes. Instead of accepting their defeat in the market test, the leftists would have to bring these people in the fold with explicit force, after which they would have to establish a totalitarian surveillance system and a thought police to keep them there.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Wednesday, May 10, 2006 at 9:08 AM