Proof of Fear

The problem with this last election cycle was not misinformation, in the sense that the fears and anxieties that people are displaying, and that others are responding to, are quite real. Therefore, they believe that they are fighting back against immoral, criminal or otherwise harmful activities directed at them. The misinformation lies in the various proofs that are offered of deliberate malfeasance; that the changes being proposed and made to society have disadvantaging them as a goal, rather than being the result of either the reality or perception of limited resources. But those proofs are not the things that allow such conspiratorial thinking to thrive. The malfeasance is taken on faith. The proofs are merely bludgeons to be applied to doubters.

To the degree that the concept is framed as one of good against evil, this is to be expected. And so is the combative response. If Evil does as Evil is, then it becomes rational to see evil people as always planning criminality and harm, and to take steps to thwart or incapacitate them before such plans come to fruition.

But again, this is a response to people's fears and anxieties, and perhaps one of the design flaws of the modern United States is the idea that fear and anxiety are intended to drive people to industry and creativity; it was not anticipated (or perhaps is was denied) that fear and anxiety undercut the belief in the efficacy of work and inventiveness. After all, American society understands that for some 200-plus years, the labor and ideas of many natives and imported Africans were summarily expropriated for the benefit of the ruling White majority. While the "peculiar institution" may have come to an end, the human impulses for intraspecies predation and parasitism didn't end with it, and I expect that many people are fully aware of this.

Tales To Astound

Imagine all the good that the tech industry and venture capital could do if they just had different shared visions of what the future looked like. What if, instead of space travel and virtual worlds, our tech billionaires had been raised on exciting stories of a future with fast, efficient mass transit or a living wage for all workers?
David Karpf "Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology"

Okay... I'll bite. Who, exactly, was writing these supposedly exciting stories of the perfect lefty future back in the 1950s through 90s, when many of "our tech billionaires" were young and supposedly reading futuristic stories? I did a good amount of science-fiction and fantasy reading back in the day, and I don't recall a single tale where excellent bus service or corporate bosses sharing the wealth were the keys to the princess being saved and the space villains being defeated. Even utopian space opera like Star Trek simply presumed a post-scarcity society, rather than hinge stories on finding pat solutions to pedestrian, if pressing, problems.

Making life better for poor and working-class people through the simple expedient of everyone else giving up some of their own standard of living simply doesn't strike me as an interesting plotline to repeat over and over. The one story of the sort that I recall reading, in a science-fiction anthology magazine, seemed like little more than a take of class warfare where the correct class won, due to some actions that people had taken in the past that the story didn't even bother to describe. In effect, control of the robots that factories used to produce goods have been given over to Unionized workers and had become proxies for them. It was apparently illegal for companies to own their own robots, but what had brought this about wasn't part of the story. Rather than change society in any interesting way, the author had simply moved the labor versus management battlefield to a slightly different venue. The story was not exciting, or worth keeping for that matter; I wound up dropping the anthology into a "take a book, give a book" type of box at work.

I'm not going to say that such stories can't be exciting. In the case of the unionized robots story, someone had found the concept worth writing about and someone else found it to be worth including in an anthology for publication. So the fact that I found the story boring and heavy-handed is clearly more of a problem with me than the writing itself. Not everyone is going to like everything that's published. And so I suppose what I'm noting here is a lack of breadth in the sub-genre. If we're going to postulate a genre of science-fiction where the shared vision of the future consists of poverty reduction, municipal transport and exciting plotlines that rely on those things, there are going to have to be enough of those stories, and for them to varied enough, for the technology thinkers of tomorrow to have a good chance of reading them today.

And this is what I find to be missing often in lamenting what people weren't reading in the past. That sense that if the 1950s through the 1990s was the best time for people's imaginations to be captured by stories that are exciting due to a focus on social, rather than technological, progress, the second best time is right now. "Virtual Reality Is the Rich White Kid of Technology" complains about what technology entrepreneurs weren't ready when they were young, but it doesn't name any titles for people to be reading in the here and now. And so it comes across as another in a long series of laments of the omissions of the past that doesn't concern itself with remedies in the present.

Working For A Living

So I was reading this LinkedIn News post on restaurants contacting people up to four years after they'd initially applied for roles, and asking them if they were still interested.

Among the various comments was this bit on living wages (note: not "family wages"):

The idea of paying everyone a living wage sounds like a great idea, but not so in practice. Certain jobs should not pay living wages because they aren’t careers - they are meant as a stepping stone to something higher skilled, for people just entering the job market to get entry level experience.

(I'm not linking directly to it, because it's not my goal to rain on someone's parade.)

I understand the sentiment. Heck, once upon a time, I thought that way. But if you reformulate that, it basically says: People with low skills, or just entering the job market, should not be paid enough to afford food, housing and other essential needs such as clothing. But those needs don't go away simply because someone doesn't have skills. So someone has to pay for them. Now, one can make the point that low wage jobs aren't meant to be able to fund an independent life: people can have roommates or whatever. But "independence" is not part of the definition of a living wage, just that people be able to feed, house and clothe themselves and manage other required costs of living... like transportation to and from work.

And so the idea that there should be jobs that don't pay a living wage, because the value is in the experience offered makes these roles into something more akin to internships. And those should be treated not as work, but as a service that businesses provide to individuals and/or their families.And if we're going to treat low-wage work and/or internships as something that either people's families or society as a whole is subsidizing, when there should be some evaluation of these programs based on their supposed goals; either giving people a useful direct experience, or giving them skills that they can market for a living wage later. And if these roles are not providing this service, then companies should either be sanctioned for offering them, in the same way that any other deceptive business practice is sanctioned, or simply be disallowed from such offers. If people are being asked to pay for something, they should be able to demand appropriate value for money.

Get Yours

"If you need to give her more things to do because you are feeling pressure about your crappy longtime record on diversity — which, by the way, I know personally from the female side of it — like, go for it," [ESPN reporter Rachel] Nichols said in the recording. "Just find it somewhere else. You are not going to find it from me or taking my thing away."
Maria Taylor Is Leaving ESPN After A Colleague's Remarks About Race Went Public

I don't know that I would leave a job that I liked over finding out that a coworker was a jackass, but perhaps that's because I'm of the opinion that not having any jackasses among one's coworkers is too much to ask for.

But more to the point, this illustrates the difficulties that the United States is going to have with reaching a broadly equitable society; people who are desperate to hold on to what they have, especially when they themselves might phrase it "what little they have," see sharing with others as an unjustified imposition. And so even when people understand that others have been denied opportunities or the like, their concerns about holding on to what they have push them to ensure that whatever the costs of equity, someone else needs to pay them.

For all that the United States is touted as being the wealthiest nation on Earth, Americans have a remarkable skill at seeing themselves as impoverished, even when they are relatively well off, since the only valid subjects for comparison tend to be those who are higher up on the income, wealth of status ladder than oneself. And this is going to be the biggest impediment to change.

Whip It Good

The same month, Pat Robertson, a former Republican presidential candidate and the host of the Christian Broadcasting Network’s flagship show, The 700 Club, said that militants are telling “people of color … to rise up and overtake their oppressors.” He worried that, “having gotten the whip handle—if I can use the term,” people of color were now in a position “to instruct their white neighbors how to behave.” Robertson warned that if this trend continues, “America is over. It is just that simple.”
Lawrence Glickman “3 Tropes of White Victimhood”

It's tempting to tackle Mr. Robertson's impression that non-Whites being in a position to instruct their White neighbors how to behave would be the end of the United States, but it's so laughable that it's something of a gimme. So, instead, let's take his concern that taking hold of the whip handle and overtaking oppressors is such a terrible thing.

If it is believed that someone, of necessity, will (if not perhaps must) always "have the whip handle" then the only question is in whose hand should it be. As the article points out, the throughline from Reconstruction to modern grievance politics is that White people deserve to wield the whip. Whether it's because they will be gentler with the it than Black people, because they have learned the lessons of their prior irresponsibility or due to their innate ethical superiority, it's best if the whip stays with them. Whether Black America (or Latin America) was or was not deserving of slavery, second-class pseudo-citizenship and deprecation, Whites have never deserved such treatment, then or now. And while commentators may argue whether or not Whites wield the whip in a way that preserves human dignity, liberty and freedom to the greatest extent possible, conservatives are in agreement that Blacks and Latinos would simply degenerate into a regime of vicious vindictiveness, powered by an unwillingness to allow the bygones of ancient history to be bygones (leaving aside the fact that the 1950s and 60s are still within living memory for Baby Boomers).

On the other hand, if non-Whites take the whip handle, and refrain from wielding it in the way that Whites did, this would point to something that Conservatives, everyday people and pundits alike. may find unsettling: the abuses of power that characterized much of American history are not facets of human nature, frailty or corruptibility in the face of power, but were specific flaws in the people who built, maintained and supported the intentionally unequal society. Listen to these arguments long enough (and I had heard them plenty prior to this article) and it's not hard to conclude that there are people with an interest in the presumption that all of humanity indulges in rampant oppression when given the chance.

In any event, one can see two unpalatable options facing conservatives; to risk having done unto them as their ancestors had done unto others, or to risk learning that said ancestors were uncommonly unjust people. A third option, which is to avoid the question by remaining on top of the heap, can seem very appealing under the circumstances, despite the risks. When vulnerability is seen as a high price to pay for a just society injustices continue, if only because they're less expensive.

While it's clear that Mr. Robertson believes that "radicals" are leading non-White people away from an idea of everyone being free and equal in the United States, many conservatives have a vision of equality that, in the minds of many other people, simply leaves the old status quo, and its associated inequities, intact. Social justice types like to say that to the privileged, equality feels like oppression. But the force of this comes mainly from the sense that all privilege is unearned, and thus, unjust. To people who understand that they have earned their exalted place in the world, a forced leveling is oppressive, just as much as a forced tilting of the playing field is considered oppressive to the people who find themselves having to play uphill. American conservatives have difficulty in seeing any changes to the current system as being fair to them. And this makes sense, given the standard view of the world as being zero-sum. Any gains for non-Whites must come at the direct expense of Whites, and to the degree that they understand that the deserve everything they have, those gains are seen as a form of aggression.

Changing that view is going to be hard. Triggering people's loss aversion, and the accompanying anxiety is a quick means to influence and leadership. Mr. Robertson knows that he's playing to the fears of his audience, as well as their self-image as good and just people. That's a dangerous combination, because few people who have wielded the whip felt wrong in doing so, regardless of the gusto they brought to the endeavor.