Category: Capitalism

Trumpism is a Zero-Sum Culture

A zero-sum culture believes that in order for it to win, some other culture or persons must lose. Its inherent view of the world is that of a strict binary of predator and prey. If you are not predator, then you must be prey. There is no middle-ground in this world-view. Thus, it is preferable to be predator at all times, lest you be mistaken for prey by another predator. This is the central idea behind Trumpism. Cobra-Kai! Never show any weakness! Sweep the leg!

We know this view to be wrong through the lessons of World War 1 and World War 2 combined. But certain cultures will never let go of this idea. Trumpism seems to have captured the hearts and minds of those cultures under its political umbrella.

The domino effect1 theory of the cold war was seduced by this zero-sum idea of the free world versus the communist world2. It was a failure as a guiding political theory. Its predictive nature was nil, and its damage to America was considerable.

The greatest historical lesson from both World War 2 and the Cold War is that a culture that believes in the zero-sum game is doomed to lose to the cultures that help each other as allies in a positive-sum game. The success of the positive-sum game cannot be more stark than the difference between post-WW1 Germany and post-WW2 Germany.

Post-WW1 Germany was a zero-sum culture. But 1930s Germans had every reason to see it this way since the Treaty of Versailles punished them by saddling Germany with the costs of WW1 which directly “stole” from Germany and enriched the Allies during the post-war economy.

And this alienation of Germany after WW1 of course led to the humiliated and economically isolated Germany that ultimately gave rise to Hitler and Naziism.

Contrast that with post-WW2 Germany which is an economically and politically thriving leader in European affairs with over a half-century of peace, growth, and prosperity. That’s because true economic prosperity is not a zero-sum game; it is a positive-sum game. And post-WW2 Pax Americana is a direct consequence of that positive-sum game. If we want to make America great again, all we have to do is to dive back into that positive-sum game and lead it again.

Even during WW2, the positive-sum game of allies working together was the winning strategy over the predatory strategies of fascism and nationalistic expansionism.

And post-WW2, the allies working freely together during the cold war out-competed the communist-bloc allies who were forged artificially as a defense unit, but not as true cooperative allies. In 1989, as soon as the USSR allowed the freedom of the communist bloc countries to leave the coalition, they did so quickly with little hesitation because the USSR was predatory in their relationship with them.

And since WW2, global economies have become even more integrated and more efficient. So if it was clear that the world had become a positive-sum game during and after WW2, then it should be exponentially clear by now, in 2020, that modern national strength derives from greater interconnectedness and not from isolationism and brutal winner-take-all competitiveness.

Yet, that archaic attitude of vicious competitiveness is at the heart of Trumpism, which in itself is a relic of an imperialistic nation prior to WW2.

Trumpism is that ancient virtue of selfishness at the expense of others. It is outdated and wrong. It is a loser ideology. Nazi Germany tried it, and failed. Soviet USSR tried it and failed. America tried it in Vietnam and Korea, and failed.

But there is something still ingrained in our hunter-warrior cultures that exalts the zero-sum conqueror as a glorious hero. Winning in sports and war has only one winner and one loser, by the rules of the game. That’s why Trump’s favorite insult is “loser” because in his binary world, if the other is the loser, then he alone remains the winner by default. Winning and conquering is glory, and America is addicted to that feeling both in its sports and its war.

America is a fiercely competitive culture— in its love of sports and war. When you see the world only through the lens of winning and losing, then any third alternative such as “cooperation”, by virtue of it not being “winning”, is interpreted automatically as “losing” to you.

This is how to view the world through Trumpism. Everything is simplified down to the point-mass diagram of winning or losing on a single dimension. Anything and everything that is too complicated can be reduced to this single line and placed on the “losing” side of the ledger. There is nothing in the world that cannot be simplified to this single-dimensional explanation.

Trump, and by extension his supporters, cannot grasp the concept of a positive-sum world in which everyone can be winners. Such a multi-axis world is too confusing, so they simplify it down to the single axis of winning-losing.

This is why universal health care or climate change accords are so strange of a concept to them. Their thinking is that if they accede to any demands, then they are losing ground to someone, and thus are losing the war on their one-dimensional axis.

There is no way to explain the multi-dimensional aspects of complex topics to them that clarify how everyone can win in a net-positive-sum game. They will tend to reduce your argument down to the single dimensional axis of winner-loser because that’s what they’re comfortable with in their worldview.

In such a zero-sum worldview, they cannot comprehend the simple facts of a net-positive-sum economy such as that winning against a pandemic as a team not only saves lives but also will improve the economy faster.

The same concept is true of global climate change. We all win as a team if we maintain the environmental conditions that are best suitable for human industry and agriculture as we currently understand it. To do otherwise is simply making everything more difficult and more costly for every person as a whole.

When we’re all on the same team, we all win together. There isn’t even an enemy, except for ourselves and our inability to work together as a team. The zero-sum mentality prevents this crucial understanding about how the modern economy works. This mentality is what thwarts the pandemic response and will thwart the upcoming climate crisis response.

Rejecting immigration is also a foolish artifact of zero-sum culture. It is only looking at one side of the ledger to see what someone takes away from you. But it’s not looking at the full ledger of what immigrants contribute to America as a whole.

Considering that America has always been founded on the strength of its generous immigration, it’s naive and foolish to reject the tremendous boon that immigration offers to America. It should be obvious and clear by many objective measures that immigrants by far add a net positive contribution to America in many ways, both historically and currently.

However, to the zero-sum cultures under Trumpism, this everybody is a winner concept is alien and unnerving and unconvincing because they cannot tangibly feel it in their every day lives. And that’s because America is so viciously predatory in its capitalism that it’s impossible to feel anything other than paranoia that predators are out to get you.

In that environment, indeed, you would prefer to be the predator rather than the prey. And this is the feeling of strength that Trumpism affords these people, even if it’s an illusionary strength. It’s an illusion they can comprehend and tangibly and viscerally feel in their day-to-day economic interactions with American capitalism.

They are not wrong. American capitalism does indeed prey upon them. And it is precisely this feeling which makes them believe whole-heartedly in the zero-sum game of predator and prey. Viewed in that vein, can you really blame them?

Fundamentally, at the higher level view, the modern interconnected world is a net-positive-sum game. But on a smaller, individual level, American capitalism is predatory to such a point that it feels like a zero-sum game to individuals. Although some small amount of socialism could be the antidote to predatory capitalism, the populace have been made so paranoid of socialism that it regards it as yet another predator hungering for their paycheck.

It’s going to be very difficult to convince zero-sum mentality people that they’re not being preyed upon. Their unease about pandemic response, climate change response, and healthcare reform are all attributable to their rightful paranoia of being preyed upon by American capitalist interests in their current lives.

Ironically, they voted for a man who blatantly and openly preys upon them in Trump himself who is literally funneling their campaign contributions into his own interests!

That they should fall for such a blatant charlatan and con-artist is an indication of how deeply wounded these people are by predatory capitalism in America.

So how do we lift these people out of these grievous injuries to their psyche? For post-WW1 Germany, they turned to fascism to assuage their wounded psyches. We must not let that happen here.

Traditionally, government has been the foil to curb the excesses of capitalism. But corporate interests and government have been in alliance against the people for too long that the people can trust neither government nor corporations. The liberal Left is deeply suspicious of corporations and the conservative Right is deeply suspicious of government. Both have well-founded reasons to be suspicious!

The government needs to make a bold statement against the corporate control over American government in order to win back the people’s trust in the government. I don’t know if that’s even possible. But that’s the route away from fascism, difficult as it may be.

Corporatism is too strong of a force to be countered organically by the people. Only a government that is dedicated to curbing its excesses stands a chance of providing shelter for the people against predatory capitalism.

If people are hell-bent on framing the world as a simple zero-sum dichotomy, then I’ll present this one— either strengthen the government to curb predatory capitalism or else suffer the consequences of an angry fascist mob!

It’s important to understand how American culture is accustomed to view conflict in terms of a villain and a hero. Right now, we need to portray the government as the hero against predatory capitalism. What Trumpism has done is to portray a zero-sum world with fascist white supremacy as the hero and the net-positive-sum game of cooperation as the villain. We cannot allow this incorrect view to stand unchallenged.

Footnotes:

  1. The entire cold war hallucination of the domino effect is a zero-sum culture belief— If a country could only be either capitalist or communist, then a communist country would infect its neighbors, and capitalist countries would have one fewer ally in the world.
  2. This world view is terribly naive in so many ways. Capitalist and freedom are not automatically synonymous, as we can plainly see in modern China. Furthermore, there is the false dichotomy of either capitalism xor communism without regard to any third option— decolonization of countries that wanted freedom from British, French, or other European imperialism. This was the true reason for the spread of communism— it was the automatic choice if you wanted an anti-imperialist ideology that automatically came with other anti-imperialist allies.

What Late Stage Capitalism Can’t Sell You

I’ve heard the argument that free trade via a money supply allows the market to quickly signal through price of products what goods and services are needed. And this is true to an extent— for goods and services that are saleable and *can* be priced.

But this leaves out a vast portion of our lives which cannot so easily have bar code price stickers affixed or encased in hard clear plastic— friendship, love, civic duty, honesty, community spirit, genuine dialog and so much more.

Individuals offer those things freely to the society because people intuitively understand that they’ll receive likewise in return from their trusted friends and family. However, such an economy of these necessities in life is like a black market that is entirely outside of the “normal” economy. People who have found “their people”, whomever those people might be, are saved from the emptiness that is the life promised to them in “The American Dream”— which is an entirely materialistic one.

But in a society that values only those services and products which can command a price tag and a profit by producing a surplus, these other essential holistic elements for a satisfying human life are conspicuously absent from the marketplace, with only cheap substitutes sold in their stead.

And so, the symptoms that we see are casualties of despair due to the failure of capitalism to provide the most basic nutrients to sustain a healthy and happy human life. It is implicit in this “free market utopia” that each individual seek and satisfy the remainder of their human non-material needs through their own means. That is part of the contract of a “free society”. But people don’t always realize that and also don’t always know where to fulfill the remainder of their needs.

The problem is that the society that uses the free market as the foundation of its entire construct provides no guidance as to how and what further is necessary to obtain for a satisfying life. The recommendations that ARE given are intended for the producers to extract a profit from the people seeking something more in life. That is the nature of the foundation of this market-centric society.

In the absence of this guidance of what more to seek out in life, people have sought more meaning in their lives through the products and services that have been advertised to them. It is unsurprising that such products and services that don’t fill the holes in their souls. And when those things sold as promises fall short, people turn to other false promises from a variety of other charlatans in religion, politics, or other temporary snake-oil salves.

There is no doubt in my mind that all that is happening is a crisis of late-stage capitalism. The flaw isn’t that capitalism is terrible. It has served its part quite well— to relieve society of scarcity of material goods and services. However, it has not and cannot relieve society of the scarcity of immaterial things such as love, friendship, civic duty, respect, honesty, and so many other things that we inherently value as a social species.

We must find those things ourselves. But it’s difficult for people who are accustomed to using money to find solutions to all of their problems. When that currency is not accepted by the providers of these other immaterial needs, the people who are accustomed to being “valued customers” grow angry that their money is no good here.

That disconnect is what I see most often between people who have bought into the “material goods” worldview and the “immaterial goods” worldview. The two economies use different currencies, and there is rightfully a rejection of money being used to buy goods and services from the “immaterial goods” economy. When someone with money tries to buy from the “immaterial goods economy” without earning the currency first, there is indignation and offense, and often times rejection of their attempted purchase. And there is indignation and offense in return that their money, that they’ve worked hard for, has no value in this economy that is foreign to them.

You have to find your people, whomever they may be. That’s the missing ingredient. And for each person, that ingredient is different. So, it’s hard for capitalism to produce a surplus to satisfy this particular demand, though they certainly have no qualms about trying and profiting from it anyway.

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How I dropped Out of Society Into a Fourth Social Class

There are three social classes in America. I have chosen to be in none of them. This is not a choice normally available to people. Let me explain a little bit why I dropped out and how I’m basically classless now.

First, let me define the three classes.

There is a worker class who produces material goods. Then, secondly, there is a capitalist class who creates an organization to collect the surplus value of the workers after paying the workers. The market decides what the workers get paid. In America, we rely on the market to balance many things, and worker wages is one of these things. However, when only a single class (the capitalist class) competes in the market for workers, it is difficult for the workers to receive full value for the product of their work whose labor surplus is inevitably skimmed for profit by the capitalist class. What capitalists are competing for in “the market” is this labor surplus. However, competition for this surplus never causes the surplus to go to zero, otherwise, the capitalist has no incentive to start the company at all. Thus, by the very nature of the system of capitalism, it is guaranteed that the worker class can never receive the full total of their labors, for by nature, the capitalist must be incentivized by equity in order to risk his capital to receive the surplus.
The worker’s only choice is which capitalist they choose to skim their profits. Occasionally, workers may band together in a start-up company in hopes that their skills and labor allow them to become elevated to the capitalist class themselves. Ironically, such a gamble requires selling a significant share of their labor to the capitalist class in the form of equity to angel investors, venture capitalists, or Wall Street investors.

Aside from the worker class and the capitalist class, there is one other class that I am not a part of. That class is the incarcerated class. That is the class you fall into by design if you choose not to be a worker for the capitalist class. As a person who has chosen not to be in any of those three classes, I am constantly in danger of falling into the incarcerated class due the laws which rig it that way.

An example of a law which would put me into the incarcerated class is the law which bans sleeping in vehicles. Although you can eat in your vehicle or do just about anything else in your vehicle, many cities have outlawed sleeping in your vehicle because they don’t want homeless people living in their cars.

Our society purposely doesn’t want homeless people because they fall into a non-category of peoples who have rejected the rat-race of being a worker who has her surplus value skimmed by profiteering capitalists. Once you have decided you don’t need a home, then you certainly don’t need a job and thus you don’t need to enter the job market for various capitalists to choose how to exploit you. This is very bad for a society of capitalists. So, it is discouraged. And one way it is discouraged is to arrest you and fine you so that you remain trapped in a cycle of poverty and incarceration so that you will want to join the worker class to escape your spiraling predicament.

I have to be very careful while skirting the fringes of society not to accidentally fall into the incarcerated class. Once one tendril of poverty has grabbed you, it won’t let go until you are trapped in the incarcerated class. So far, I have managed to avoid it with previous wealth accumulated when I was a worker and by continually disguising myself as a “decent” worker class citizen.

Worker class people are afforded certain privileges in society that we take for granted, and I know how to act and present myself as a worker having been one myself for decades. Fortunately, many well-to-do technologists look poverty-stricken and disheveled; so a crazy homeless van dweller, a wealthy start-up app creator, and a math professor at Berkeley are indistinguishable to a police officer.
It is this guise of normalcy which affords my safety in society. It is not the laws which protect me. It is the disheveled appearance of my fellow Silicon Valley workers which affords me the most security.

Let me make this clear. It is not the laws which make me safe from imprisonment and harassment from police. It is my old CodeWarrior and OpenGL t-shirts from 10 years ago that allow me a disguise to slip past laws intended for homeless people. These old clothes are mostly still stored in my storage area. Ten years ago, I could not have known that they would serve me as a uniform of the worker class that I dropped out of and be as valuable as a literal license to participate in society.

There have been many times I have been told to move or threatened with a ticket or various anti-homeless measures that I have been able to thwart by convincing the police that I was “programming” or “visiting someone” in my obviously expensive van and then hastily moving away. I have had the privilege of select enforcement of the law because of the privilege or illusion of wealth, I am not ashamed to admit. I am truly sorry for the treatment that less wealthy citizens would receive due to these laws, but that is not something I am prepared to go to jail for and fight a civil liberties battle over at this point. Such a move would certainly put me into the incarceration class for good. And these laws will remain precisely because no one who is ever put into that legal position could afford to fight those laws.

One of the “solutions” to the homeless problem is to put people to work. I see this as problematic for various reasons. For one, some people may have chosen to drop out of the rigged game of workers and capitalists. I know that we in the worker class believe in the stigma of being homeless as being mentally ill or having substance abuse problems. I don’t know enough about the topic to determine whether this stigma is one of causation or correlation or whether the stigma serves more as a warning to the worker class to not become homeless and to keep maintaining a steady pace on the treadmill for their capitalist of choice.

For me, I tried to get out of the worker class by starting my own company and joining many various start ups. I didn’t quite succeed. I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a capitalist anyway. So, now, I’m adrift neither here nor there.

What I want to do is just create stories and experiences for people to enjoy using the skills that I’ve learned over a couple of decades. I think I can do that without spiraling into the incarcerated class.
But I’ve also chosen to do that without attempting to join the capitalist class or to beg them for help. This is not really a rational thing to do because what I would like to do requires resources beyond what I can muster myself.

And so, things are going slow. That’s okay. I don’t care about deadlines, and I don’t care about milestones, and I don’t care about making money. I’ll let things sort out on its own. Maybe I’ll make money, but I’m certainly not counting on it. And if I don’t count on it, I think I can properly enjoy the process of creating. I think the journey of creation is what matters to me now. Once I strip away all of the stress of starting a company that has to balance income with expenses and has to hit a market window and has to choose the right people, choose the right platform, and choose the right moment, I can truly enjoy what I always wanted to do when I first played Space Invaders in 1977 as a 7 year-old kid— to make his own game.

I only need to get back a fraction of the value of work that I put into my own game to make it worth my while. After all, I’m only getting paid a fraction of my value by any capitalist that’s making a profit anyway. So, for now, I’m not going to worry about what that fraction is going to be. I must accept that that fraction is exactly zero and go on doing what I want to do anyway. It’s not worth worrying about at this point. I’m too far from completion on any of the projects to even think that far ahead anyway.

And so I’m hoping there is a fourth social class in America that joins me. Perhaps there will be enough wealth from an automated and nearly workerless society that a fourth social class can emerge and can simply create art, literature, and entertainment while sustaining themselves with occasional gifts or purchases from the worker and capitalist classes.

This class, like me, will leverage the skills gained from years in the worker class to create novel things that could never be commercially successful enough for the capitalist class to want to exploit.

There are many small things too specific and niche and weird to ever be mass market and thus never be commercially viable to a capitalist class. Such things can be created by a mature post-worker artisan class simply because artisans love to create things and such crafts were not allowed to even be attempted when under the yoke of a capitalist.

And so that’s what I’m going to be doing— sometimes. I hope I can succeed, not so much to make money, but as to serve as an example to others that it is possible to be done. If freedom affords you this luxury, I hope you can take it as I have. I don’t think you have to be brave or anything to do this.

You have to realize that being in the worker class is merely a more comfy kind of incarcerated class. I think Fight Club touched on this a little bit. But you don’t have to be violent or disruptive to break free of the seeming stranglehold of the worker class. The prison is an illusion.

You can live just fine and be happy with less. You can be happy with your relationships without your things. It’s a matter of elevating your most important values to the top of the priority list and then shedding the rest. Once you’re accustomed to not dealing with the rest anyway, it becomes easy to focus on only the necessities.

It’s simpler and less complicated and more fun to focus only on what matters to you, even if it’s trivial or not understood by others. In fact, not being understood by others is what makes it special and enjoyable to you and only you. People might ask, “won’t you get tired of it?” I don’t think you can ever get tired of being a kid every day. Besides, if you miss any aspects of worker society, you can always put on a uniform and blend in and experience a taste every now and again.

Now, granted, I have built myself a bit of a cushion in finances in order to do this, and not everyone will have the same flexibility. But I think the fundamental concept is sound. We are really much more wealthy and capable than we think we are. We’re under an illusion that running out of money will result in homelessness or mental illness or substance abuse as if all of the latter were one thing.

I’m amazed at people who grow up poor but wind up having a huge number of kids anyway. Well, if they can do , then anybody who works in tech in Silicon Valley can also. People working tech jobs in Silicon Valley have a tremendous amount of wealth compared to people in other parts of the United States and other parts of the world. Yet, they’re always comparing themselves with each other and their neighbors which makes them feel poor.

So rather than bemoaning that you can’t buy a house in Silicon Valley, be grateful that you can do things that many people in the world cannot even begin to comprehend, like spending $5 for a cup of coffee and then not even finishing it.

Because wealth is relative like this, I have chosen to focus on how wealthy I am compared to the rest of America even though I’m not working, and to change my perspective on life to appreciate the luxuries that that wealth affords me. And what it really affords me is time. I can have time to do the things that I want to do without worrying about spiraling down into the incarcerated class. I see the danger in that for those who are closer to poverty. Perhaps I am skirting a bit close to the edge of poverty, but I have chosen to not be afraid of it and to be confident in my ability to stay out of the trap of poverty.

So, maybe for this part, you do have to be a little brave. If you or your family has fought hard to come out of poverty, I can see how this part would be scary. However, if you’ve made it into the worker class and saved up some money, have confidence in yourself that you can re-enter the worker class at some level if you so choose. It may be at a lower level than you were accustomed to, but just accept that that was part of the cost for chasing your dreams and experiencing real freedom in your life.

I understand. You don’t want to lose your place on the ladder. You’ve worked very hard to get to that rung and you don’t want to lose it, so you grip tightly. I get that. But don’t cling to the ladder just for the sake of the ladder’s position itself. Remember that you got to that rung for some reason. What was that reason? Do you still remember? You had something else you wanted to do and climbing that ladder was the way to achieve it. It’s not too late to try to achieve it. Even though you haven’t reached the top of the ladder, maybe you’ve reached a high enough rung that you can simply let go and try and achieve the original goal you had in mind. Climbing the ladder certainly wasn’t your only goal until you got onto the first rung, right? The ladder was meant to lead somewhere. Maybe you don’t need to climb the rest of the ladder to get there right now. That’s what is worth considering.