Saturday, December 6, 2014

Gaius Publius — The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."


The sociology of the tribe.
[HARTMANN] The Swiss bank UBS says that four one-thousandth of one percent, 0.004% of the world's adult population, controls $30 trillion. The GDP of the United States is $15 trillion. This is about 13% of the entire planet's total wealth. ...How do we deal with this in this age of globalization, when we have American corporations with hundreds of billions of dollars offshore, you've got American billionaires with trillions of dollars offshore? ... 
[ESKOW] It's not a simple problem. But one of the things we do first of all is we recognize the scope of the problem and we don't let people scare us away from talking about it, saying "It's class warfare" or "It's demonizing the wealthy" or whatever. ...
200,000 people isn't a lot. 200,000 people is a large tribe of a small town, first of all. Secondly, if you just break out the number of those people that are in Europe or the United States, you've got ... 10,000? United States maybe 4 or 5,000? ... these are the social circles. ...
 
This goes back to why I think that our political and economic system is a study in anthropology and sociology, as well as economics and political science. This is a little community, Thom. These people know each other.

These people have shared values and those values are inculcated into the Tim Geithners and the Barack Obamas and the Bill Clintons — and everybody else, or most people, who move up the political ladder do so by hobnobbing with these people. And there is a very distinct tribal kind of culture that develops, with its own folkways, its own values, its own mythology. And until we understand that and then extrapolate that out to the global scene, we're not going to be able to address it.
The fundamental problem is that they interpret as virtuous what ordinary people view as pathological. '"Ordinary people" are "normal" by definition. So the tribe sees itself as occupying the "supernormal" tail of the distributional curve rather than "subnormal". The tribe lives in a different world cognitively and affectively in addition to materially, similar to ruling elites historically. As the Vietnamese proverb goes, "The dungheap remains the same, only the flies change."

Down with Tyranny!
The Global Rich Are a Tribe with Their Own Folkways, Values & Mythology. Those Values Are "Pathological."
Gaius Publius

4 comments:

Matt Franko said...

"This is a little community,"

So is ours...

Anonymous said...

Yes, the "elite" are a tribe of parasites. After much study I have come to believe in practicing eugenics to eliminate the vermin. Spencer was idiot. It's not the cream that rises to the top but scum and shit float and accumulates on top.

Dysgenics is top down. Classic eugenics had it backwards. The common and poor people have herd immunity from the accumulation of psychopathic and parasitic traits but the wealth of elite allows for the necessary amount isolation for this kind of dysgenics.

I believe the only hope for humanity to create a system to prevent elite dysgenics. We have really the herd to exterminate the parasite contagion before the host ecosystem is destroyed beyond compare.

You may say that this is dangerous Nazi talk but humanity can survive brutal totalitarian systems but what humanity cannot survive is ecological destruction of the soil and more importantly ocean ecology and behavior sinks that drive ecological destructive behaviors and demographic collapse. The capitalist parasites must be stopped ASAP because their is on the whole driving us into such a behavioral sink.


Anonymous said...

I've had an idea for some time but currently lack the necessary resource to realize the vision but I've been thinking about the taking a cure from the paranoid libertarian preppers community.

I'm thinking that traditional model of a geographic nation-state has outlived usefulness. I believe we can create something I call a "network state." We can create a state within a state using the internet and create experimental communities that practice a non liberal economics based on functional finance, physical economics, high-tech horticulture, merit based political governance as opposed to corrupt consumerist politics and we can defeat the Imperial system of agriculture which underlies the whole the humanities current problems.



Tom Hickey said...

@ septeus7

The parasitic elites that arise in a human societies are an example the "free rider problem" in biology. Either the free ride is taken away by incorporating the parasites into the system or the immune system terminates them. This is also true in social species where a free rider problem arises. For example, a worker bee not doing its fair share of the work gets stung to death.

Economic rent, rent-seeking behavior, and rent extraction are all symptoms of a free rider problem in human social groups as much as is malingering. The way the group deals with malingering is through organization by management, e.g., foremen. Paying foremen to increase worker output is more cost efficient than permitting malingering.

The problem with elites is that they are at the top of the scale and there is often insufficient mechanism to either hold them to account or to eliminate them. Democracy is a political control but it is rather ineffective when it can be captured by class interest.

It's a bug that human social systems haven't quite worked out yet. A networked society holds promise though. How that would be organized is yet to be determined. But it seems t be in the process of evolving.