Hellbound Alleee episode 139- Revelations

Hellbound Alleee episode 139
Revelations (June 29th 2009)
Wherein we discuss the materialist nature of Christmas, the invalidity of capitalist contracts, and the weird and twisty tale of the book of Revelations.

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The superiority complex.

The belief that one has “the answer” or “the only correct doctrine,” and that everyone else must be saved from error or immorality, has led to human beings trying to control each other on a global scale, whether it be religious doctrine, political doctrine, racial doctrine, or any other doctrine one can conjure.

Superiority complexes have many sources. For those who believe in some collectivist worldview, the belief in one’s superiority and the desire to save unbelievers comes built-in, for memetic reasons of course (belief systems that motivate their believers to spread the doctrine or kill unbelievers tend to survive).

They can also come from believers in a non-violent movement when said movement is failing. The frustration of failure turns determination into anger; anger at the people who don’t join their cause enthusiastically, anger at the authorities for successfully thwarting their efforts, anger at a world which they see as not being ready to accept their self-evident truths. Such a movement, if imbued with a sense of urgency, will eventually turn to violence, with all the mental rationalizations that this entails.

They also arise naturally from social warfare, through the same general process. People who are forever forced to fight for their values against other people who share different values will eventually become frustrated and start seeing their opponents as stubborn idiots or as deliberately evil. This objectification can lead one to a superiority complex and the desire to use the apparatus of the law for one’s own advantage. This interplay is what we naively call democratic politics (when in fact the real interplay takes place at much higher levels and much less openly).

I also mentioned objectification in my discussion of the “noble revenge” mentality. Objectification is a powerful mechanism because it occults people’s natural compassion and empathy for others, an integral part of their true self. One would not think of having compassion or empathy for a rock, and would not object to splitting it or throwing it in a furnace. In the same way, a soldier ideally sees his victims as nothing more than sophisticated targets, to be gunned down or blown up without sorrow, for the sake of objectives and orders. The religious fanatic, on the other hand, sees his enemies as demons from Hell itself, and their deaths as a cleansing of the Earth, thus proving that one can objectify in many different ways.

Why have people always killed each other for religious reasons? We know that for the true believer all other competing belief systems are threats. If one detains the Absolute Truth, then all other beliefs must necessarily be wrong and dangerous. God has set up the path to follow, and all who reject it must be killed. And since life only has meaning in submission to God, it must be the case that the unbeliever’s life has no value at all, except as an example of what not to do (to the rulers of that religion, unbelievers are extremely useful as enemies).

Political violence can also come from the superiority complex. War, in and of itself, is mostly a result of “noble revenge” rhetoric served up by the ruling class, but imperialism (whether as colonialism or as the modern neo-liberalist form of economic imperialism) is inscribed firmly within a context of superiority. In colonialism, the colonizing power has the “burden” of “civilizing” populations that are seen as inferior. In neo-liberalism, countries where the people are being uppity are called “undemocratic” and need to be imposed “democracy” (by which they mean stability for the ruling class and freedom for foreign investors) by guile or by force.

To the true believer, all other solutions are wrong, and therefore are threats. To the Catholic, the mere existence of Protestants is a menace to his own religion, and vice-versa, because they are both based on faith and thus cannot grow without some form of coercion or violence. Atheism and science are also threats, far greater threats because they deny the premises of the game condition itself. This has led, in recent times, to the creation of pan-religious alliances to fight against atheism, much like how capitalist firms in an industry will ally against outside threats and for effective lobbying.

The true believer may have other reasons to attack his fellows. He may do it out of “altruism” (he doesn’t want others to go to Hell), out of belief in the common good, out of belief in duty, and so on.

The parenting institution is another example of the superiority complex. The “parent” claims near-total control over children on the basis of having had sex which led to the child’s birth. The justification for such control, we are told (putting aside the issue of the irrationality of assigning only two adults to any given child), stems from the superiority of the “parent” over the child, the latter not being able to fend for himself. Ergo, the “parent” knows better and should enforce his values on the child who is left without recourse, far beyond the acquisition of reason, in fact all the way to his eighteenth birthday. The child and young adult must be saved from his own “immature” desires.

In psychology, the superiority complex is a defense mechanism used to compensate for one’s perceived inferiority, a form of projection. This seems reasonable in this case also. After all, someone who actually does feel confident in the superiority of his beliefs should see no need to control others. This need seems to betray a pessimism in the future and an admission of the superiority of one’s opponents (notably, for being so strong as to be able to keep us at bay). This is why the superiority complex is mostly present in collectivist belief systems, which are founded on the principle that man is inherently depraved.

Profit is not justified by entrepreneurial risk.

The “libertarian” capitalists often use risk as their rationale for accepting the profit motive. In this reasoning, profit is the reward that capitalist owners get for taking the risks that the workers aren’t taking.

For one thing, this is absolute bollocks, since the workers take just as much risk as the owners. Workers have to contend with losing their jobs and taking a major hit while looking for another one, while the rich owners benefit from lenient bankruptcy laws.

But more importantly, if it’s true that risk-taking is a skill that capitalist owners must have in order for their business to be successful, then it should be a job rewarded like any other. Just as mutual banks providing capital should be rewarded for their work, not with rent on capital but with a wage, risk assessers should be rewarded for their work, not with rent on capital but with a wage.

Let us be clear on this: the capitalist concept of profit is nothing more than a rent on capital, predicted on the concept that capital participates in the making of the full product. Benjamin Tucker has already refuted this nonsense 120 years ago. Capital is not owed a wage because only people produce, not money or tools. Profit is therefore nonsense. To use risk as a justification for it, is equally nonsense: nothing will magically turn money or tools into economic agents.

If the “entrepreneur” is providing a valuable service, then let him provide it, on the free market. If he’s not, if his job is nothing but exploitation, then let him starve.

Debtors’ prisons are making a comeback…

Just when you thought the Victorian Era was in the past, an old Victorian standby comes back to haunt us: debtors’ prisons.

“Edwina Nowlin, a poor Michigan resident, was ordered to reimburse a juvenile detention center $104 a month for holding her 16-year-old son,” the New York Times wrote in an editorial.

“When she explained to the court that she could not afford to pay, Ms. Nowlin was sent to prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan, which helped get her out last week after she spent 28 days behind bars, says it is seeing more people being sent to jail because they cannot make various court-ordered payments. That is both barbaric and unconstitutional.”

…

“Like many people in these desperate economic times, Ms. Nowlin was laid off from work, lost her home and is destitute,” said Michael Steinberg, legal director of the Michigan ACLU. “Jailing her because of her poverty is not only unconstitutional, it’s unconscionable and a shameful waste of resources. It is not a crime to be poor in this country, and the government must stop resurrecting debtor’s prisons from the dustbin of history.”

Michigan isn’t the only place where you can be imprisoned for the crime of involuntary poverty. The same Catch-22 ensnares poor defendants daily in courtrooms across the country.

Something to hold on to: the US government is evil.

At least that’s what Alderson at Directionless Bones point out, looking at the use of torture by the US government to “dismember people’s minds.”

‘Learned helplessness’ is a phrase and an idea that I know from studying psychology, in particular from the psychology of mental illness. The basic finding that the theory is based on is that if you expose someone to suffering they can’t control, then they internalise that lack of control and won’t make use of any control that they later gain – and that moreover they will develop things like passivity, lack of pleasure, lack of motivation, inward-turned aggression, and emotional disruption.

…

I never learned very much about this theory in particular, nor was I much involved in the course, but something of my reaction might be conveyed, scaled up greatly, by imagining some idealistic young doctor going into a cancer-treatment practice, and, inspired by her horror at the suffering of the cancer patients they saw each day, striving alongside other doctors to find ways of treating or curing the illness – and then finding out that those other doctors with whom she, as she saw, ’struggled against cancer’, had used their research to develop a weapon that would be used to infect target groups with cancer.

The fact that research which I had thought of as ‘how do we treat mental illness’ has effectively been used to inflict mental illness…fuck. It feels like a betrayal, a sudden pulling back of a curtain or removal of a mask. The Hippocratic oath turned upside down.

… I don’t want to ever be part of something that sets out, deliberately, calculatingly, to tear apart someone’s mind and knowingly produce, immediately and in the longer term, that kind of suffering.

Noam Chomsky v Michel Foucault