Incredibly, the conservative website “Not the Bee” called that “an absolute masterclass in dealing with godless commies.” Where’s Extradimensional Cephalopod when we need him/it?
I know the EA herald of respectful disagreement would be all over this. On the other hand, Debra Lipstadt, the Holocaust historian, has maintained that engaging in debate with Holocaust deniers give them too much credibility, and I believe it is valid to hold that Communists warrant the same dismissive treatment. It is pretty funny that when asked to name an accomplishment of Communism, all the male Communist can come up with is “The Bolshevik Revolution.
However, shouting insults and talking over people is not an ethical debate practice no matter what the topic or who is involved.
Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you be like him yourself.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
lest he be wise in his own eyes.
The difference between a holocaust denier and a communist is one is a conspiracy theorist and they have a few basic characteristics-
A question is the same as a credible accusation. And they have dozens of questions. Their belief is that questions are smoke and where there’s smoke there is fire.
Except it turns out the smoke isn’t smoke after all.
Every answered question just leads to the next question, never to the theorist thinking “oh, that’s a good answer, I’d never thought of it that way”.
The questions, in many cases from JFK to 9-11, *should be asked*.
Like “how on earth can a steel and concrete building just melt”. It’s a fair question.
But the conspiracy theorists never accept the answer and move on to the next question they have elevated to the level of credible accusation.
When their line of questions begin to unravel their next characteristic is the gish gallop. A flood of questions you never have a chance to answer and the volume of which the conspiracy theorist believes is proof that the official answer is a nefarious fog to hide “the truth”.
A communist? At least that is supposedly a coherent worldview open to critique. Granted, in practice, the critique gets you shot, but in our case, you can ask the communist questions that *he* has to answer.
While I think communism relies a great deal on conspiracy theory thinking to get people scared of capitalists and entrepreneurs, it’s still a worldview that can be questioned.
Good points. I’ll add that non-one has built policy around holocaust denial, but people are building policies around communism. The fact that the philosophy has gotten as far as it has means it needs to be seriously countered.
Yep. Wrong ideas should be confronted.
I have a friend who refuses to take part in online discussions and arguments on the idea that the other side will not be convinced.
Odds are this is true- most people who take to online debates are throughly solidified in their beliefs.
However, my push back is, there are people who read the discussions who are convince-able and they need to see all sides of a debate.
That looked staged to me.
Nope. Not staged. In fact, I would say that it is a very real video of people recorded at some event/protest (possibly in Memorial Park here in Houston).
Kenny Webster, the page’s owner, is a radio guy here in the Houston market. He got his big start by working with Michael Berry, a talk radio host on AM740, in the vein of Rush Limbaugh (to a degree), Mark Levine (also, to a degree). Berry is a bit different because he was on Houston City Council but lost a bid for reelection. He concentrates his commentary in the mornings on local Houston matters but his afternoon show is more national in scope. He is conservative but not a “bomb thrower” who also brings a lot of huimor to his content. I believe Berry has some national syndication under his belt.
Webster, though, has not achieved that level of success, yet. Webster used to do the “man on the street” gigs for Michael Berry and the Walton & Johnson show but moved into his own slot on the “W&J” show (AM950) in the mornings when one of the show’s hosts passed away. They kept the W&J show name because it is a popular show and the host who passed away was very well regarded in Houston. It was a good move for Webster because it gave him a bigger platform for his routines.
Webster does these kinds of videos where he baits a target of his ire with belligerently obnoxious questions, mostly to get a rise out of the person, usually to get merriment of all listening.
This bit, though, reminds me watching Jesse Watters get his head handed to him by El-Sayyed the other day. Watters wanted to show how awful El-Sayyed is but failed miserably.
How Watter has his Fox show is a mystery to me. I have been saying for a long time the Watters is an idiot but no one listened to me. El-Sayyed ran circles around him in that interview, Watters let him get away with it, too, along with nonsequitor filibusters to Wattters’ questions. It was embarrassing to watch. For instance, Watters asked El-Sayyed a question about the antisharia law initiatives but El-Sayyed simply side-stepped and reframed the question as “well, Jesse, why don’t you have problems with canon law like you do with sharia?” Watters lacked the IQ, quick wit, and critical thinking skills to say, “wait, dumb ass. Don’t obfuscate or misdirect the question. Either answer my questions or we’re done. Canon law deals with the internal governance of the given church and/or its faith and its practices; it is not binding on local, state, or federal governments. Sharia, on the other hand, is the controlling law over local, state, and federal laws in Islamic countries and is anathema to Western culture. Answer my question or get off my show.”
jvb
A year ago Charlie Kirk was murdered for his speech. This act was the ultimate in leftist cancel culture. The AG of Virginia was elected after making sick jokes about killing the children of his opponent. You cannot have a reasoned debate and civic discourse with the hard left.
In my experience, trying to shut people down just gives them more credibility in the eyes of people who already agree with them. Think about it: If you think someone is wrong, and they mock you, does that make you more inclined to consider they may be right? Do you think other people will be more likely to side with them? (If so, do you think that returning the mockery would attract them to your side?)
If you want to kill an idea, you have to talk about it. You have to learn about the needs that the idea serves so that you can then replace it with a better idea.
Just saying “But Stalin!” doesn’t work, because they already know about Stalin. They are aware of the evidence. The issue is that while you interpret the evidence as an indication that communism is fundamentally unworkable, they don’t share that interpretation.
I find it’s easiest to start the conversation outside of the realm of evidence. People can pick whatever evidence they want to support their point of view, so evidence is not a helpful approach to lead with.
Here’s how I’d start discussing communism:
In my head, I’d reflect on my own concerns. I’m concerned that communism has no plan for distributing limited resources or incentivizing people to contribute. Those are the reasons I don’t like communism. They’re not defined by ideology or policy approach. They’re just concerns. Concerns can’t be attacked, nor do they attack others. I can open my mind knowing that I will be able to come back to these anchor values.
Next, I’d listen to the communists’ concerns. They see people accumulating large amounts of economic power and wielding it irresponsibly, with no accountability. The powerful people use their power to crush better ideas. They prevent people from developing skills and negotiating for better working conditions. Do these concerns seem reasonable?
These are concerns that lead people to want an alternative to the current form of capitalism. As long as we don’t tack on “…and therefore, we should do communism”, can you agree that it would be nice if we could address these concerns without giving up our own anchor values? You don’t need to think that it’s possible. You just need to agree that it would be a good thing if we could do that.
Now, communism doesn’t solve these problems, but that point comes later. For now, I just have to demonstrate that I get where the communists are coming from. The minimum level of success (above civility, which is level 0) is that they can tell that I understand and appreciate their anchor values.
Once they see I support their concerns, I ask to share my own concerns, my anchor values. I don’t say “and this is why we can’t do communism.” I say, “For me to support a system, it has to address these concerns.” When they understand where I’m coming from, that’s the next level of success.
Then we can work on higher levels of success by doing the work of applying constructive principles to figure out what resources, information, policies, and cultural adaptations would allow us to address all of our concerns.
If you assume that addressing everyone’s concerns is impossible and you’re dead-set on making someone else pay for your solution, then you’re entitled to your win-lose thinking. Just don’t be surprised when people oppose you because they disagree that your tradeoffs are objectively better than theirs. And definitely don’t try to stop those of us who are working on win-win solutions.
For more details on why open scorn is a counterproductive way to approach disagreements, see my article on Chihuahua Rhetoric: https://visionaryvocabularies.substack.com/p/how-can-we-stop-chihuahua-rhetoric?r=1ls051.
EC,
Whenever you mention your approach, I always have questions about applications that the approach seems to ignore. I admit this may be my not understanding the whole process, so I want to address one of my concerns. I have several, but it seems fair to address only a single one and not go for the written equivalent of the gish gallop to attack you with. Please note that I am not approving of the process that began this post at all and not contrasting your approach with it, simply looking at how I struggle to apply your approach.
How do you apply when a concern is opposed to your values and experience and you cannot agree with it? I don’t mean when a concern is so far out there that it has no basis in reality, but when the underlying values actively contradict yours. (For an example, a far out concern would be that they don’t want us attacked by the dragons that live on Freeze Out. I can agree with that concern because I don’t want that either. I just don’t think it’s much of a problem in real life as I have never seen any evidence of dragons on Freeze Out and spent much of my formative years there.)
So when I have spoken (admittedly in a limited fashion) or heard pro-communists speak, they usually admit several major concerns that I cannot understand or appreciate, so I cannot agree with them because they actively oppose my value.
The wealth disparity gap being a concern does not make a lick of sense to me. Who cares that Elon Musk is a trillionaire? That is not a concern for my life. He creates/organizes/innovates/manages/commits to do things well enough in areas that are either a)needed, or b)marketed well enough that his skills earn him whatever they are valued at. My skills and willingness to put hours in on top of my other commitments earn me a very low wage. This is because we get money based on the combination of our skills, talents, productivity, and the need for whatever it is we produce that we get what wages we get.
This to me, ties in directly to the “40 hours is too much work” complaint. We work the hours we choose to work. My job requires about 10 hours or less work from me a week. I chose this very low wage, minimal hour job because it fit with the lifestyle I want, specifically that it fits around my vocation of a stay-at-home, homeschooling mother who volunteers to lead that music at her church and tutors people with math difficulties. I can’t keep my lifestyle and work more than that, but I have a husband who works hard in a highly specialized, highly trained, and very rare position to pay the bills so I just add a little money to the budget to help out.
When I was a kid, my mother worked 35 hours a week, because that would afford us health insurance, but still give her time to take care of me and the house. My step-dad worked varying hours depending on the job and money that came in. There were times when he worked 14 hours a day 4-5 days a week. Now that I am no longer a concern, both my mom and my step-dad have their own small businesses and work the hours they feel they want to work for the business to thrive and for them to make the money they feel they need. However, they choose to have debt and worry about the fact that they have nothing saved for retirement. On the other hand, they take a large amount of vacation each year, and have many adult toys, like ATVs, snowmobiles, a boat, etc. They chose one path that got them the life they wanted at the cost of an easy future. Conversely, my dad worked 60-90 hours a week as a manager of a grocery store. He worked for small wages that, as a salaried employee, didn’t add up to minimum wage. He scrimped and saved, spending very little money, and retired early with huge savings and is now going on a number of cruises each year based on what he can afford with his RMD.
I cannot comprehend the idea that we don’t have a trade-off between wanting to work for a living and wanting to play around with our time and money. My values actually are somewhat based on that idea. I also do not understand why it seems hard for the people I have encountered to think that not every passion we have is marketable, at least for the price we want. This is where the evidence leads. There are some exceptions, like those born into very wealthy families, but the vast majority of people have to balance wants and needs with effort. The idea that we can do what we want, for the hours we want, and make the same money as someone who works many hours doing something useful or complex is ridiculous.
A main goal/idea is that someone else’s labor needs to be provided for free. They don’t want to pay for housing, but they want people like my step-dad to build more houses. Where does he get paid for his labor in this model? They want free health care, but when does my mother get paid for the hours she puts in providing that health care? They want to have food provided for them. Demeter can tell us what that takes from the farmer’s perspective. Many of the other underpinnings of life require the same basic concept. We have to pay for all of these things somehow. Evidence shows that the government doing so always seems to lead to shortages due to a combination of pressures.
As for the assertion, why not just hire more people so that everyone gets less money, but also less work, not every person can do every job. Very few people have the desire at least (perhaps not even the ability) to learn to become a chemical engineer. Then they have to get the experience to make them worth while. Unlike chemical engineering, my husband is one of only a few hundred people in our country with his set of skills and I doubt there is more than a couple score thousand people with his skills over the globe. It is a rare skill set that most people don’t even know exists, with required working conditions that are not for everyone. He is also a go-getter, finding problems to solve before they are brought to his desk, and willing to work overtime to make sure everything is working properly. As a salaried employee, this means that he does not get paid extra for this time, but in the employment contract, it is clear that overtime is expected. This is the case for pretty much his whole field. They haven’t the people to do this work, so it’s not like they can hire more. Therefore, he makes pretty good money. People in his field who don’t work the overtime, aren’t go-getters, etc are not very well respected, usually refused major raises, and often told to go somewhere far away from here. With a high value skill and a high value work ethic come more money than a low value skill or a low work ethic. There are also premiums paid for people who need to do certain jobs in certain places very few people want to live. This is very true in any technical field, but even in the less technical world, this still is a fact.
Since I cannot agree with their concerns and values and in fact find them to be opposed to my concerns and values, how do I go to the next step?
Thank you for your incisive question, Sarah! Ideas can only get better when people challenge them.
I will start by translating your concerns into anchor values. If these don’t seem accurate, please correct me.
Trust: It sounds like you trust that Elon Musk provides value to society and that what he gets paid is fairly negotiated. It’s fine that he is a trillionaire because that reflects the value he provides.
Trust: It sounds like you accept that what you get paid is fairly negotiated and reflects the value you provide.
Habits: It sounds like the people in your family feel in control of their employment, income, and finances. You are satisfied that if you wanted more, you have the ability to find employment that takes more effort and pays more.
Habits: I admit I’m a bit confused on this point: it sounds like you consider it entirely reasonable for a person to work 90-hour weeks with low pay and no overtime as the price for a comfortable retirement. Does that sound right? Was the grocery store manager position a particularly relaxing job?
Habits: It sounds like you are concerned that people expect to get money (or things they would buy with money) while avoiding any difficult and unpleasant work.
Habits: I suspect you’re concerned that communism has no incentives for people to do the work that keeps society running.
Costs: It sounds like you’re concerned that for communism to function, people have to do essential jobs without compensation.
Does that all sound right? Did I miss anything about your concerns?
These would be your anchor values. They represent concerns that you will not ignore, nor should you. Understanding our own values is essential for understanding other people’s values.
Now I’ll see if I can identify the concerns of the communists you spoke with. (I suspect they are a bit different from how you understood them; communists aren’t known for being good at communicating their values.)
Trust: If someone makes more money than someone else, people want it to be because they’re delivering more value through superior skills, work ethic, or sacrifice. They don’t want it to be because the person positioned themselves to demand more money even as other people who are able and willing do the job as well or better aren’t being given the chance. (We’re changing the assertion from “workers are interchangeable” to “if some jobs pay more than others, here are good and bad reasons for it.”)
Trust: People don’t want wealth to allow people to subvert laws and impartial governance. (One reason why people would be concerned about wealth inequality is that corrupt systems allow wealth to translate to political power.)
Habits: In a world with advanced technology, many people would like to shorten work weeks and allow people to benefit from more leisure time. They expect to be able to find jobs that are not torturous or exhausting.
Trust: People consider hard working hours and conditions to be exploitation from executives who are not willing to tolerate those conditions themselves, and who are rewarded more than the people doing the most stressful work.
Risk: In a chaotic or depressed economy, if a person cannot find a job, people do not want to fear that they’ll be abandoned to starve. They want to know they’ll still have access to basic resources.
Do those sound like underlying communist concerns that you can agree with?
I’m glad your husband is getting properly compensated for his skills and effort. I wonder if the required overtime helps dissuade more people from going into the field, which would be a vicious cycle. That said, if there are enough people who are willing to do the training and the work, it may not be a problem at the moment.
EC,
I think you mostly covered my values. There are several items and statements that I think need more attention, so I will focus on those, as well as my issues with agreeing with the communist stances.
I do find that working for 90 hours for low wages is perfectly acceptable. If a good retirement is your goal and you have limited marketable skills beyond being able to work hard, then you will have to work hard to make the money you need. A grocery store manager in a small town is very much NOT a simple job, but requires long hours of manual labor and usually 15+ hour days, with little, if any, breaks and rest. I find working for 120 hours miserable, but acceptable if that is what is needed over a short time frame. There does need to be breaks from 120 hour weeks after one or two of them. I find that being on call 24/7/365 is mostly acceptable, though I believe that you, if not a business owner, should be allowed to be off call for surgery, most funerals, and ideally weddings, though that is not the policy in the energy industry. I do find that my opinions of overtime are very influenced by the energy industry who, as a standard for most employees has high expectations of unpaid overtime, and if they were to back off of that policy, the world as we know it would LITERALLY end, and within probably a few days of ridding themselves of that policy, but with utter certainty, two months, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people would die in fiery explosions. I am not speaking in any figurative sense, as I have been uncomfortably near the fireballs and smoking ruins that have called me (before I quit to be a stay-at-home mother) and my husband to work at odd and long hours. I personally have had to work through multiple occasions of up to 5 straight days of special on-call – which means I cannot sleep through a phone call and must be at work within 30 minutes of my phone ringing – with more than half of those hours on-site working under stressful and even deadly conditions where a mistake at the wrong time will end up with, at minimum, my literal dead body and probably up to a dozen others, but not doing it will stop most of the diesel and gasoline production for a huge section of the mountain west market or an explosion that could wipe out nearly 10,000 people if the wind is blowing the wrong way. Should the energy industry lower its expectations of overtime without having plenty of trained workers able to step in the instant they drop their expectations on the current crop, our lights would go out, gas stations would be empty and dry, natural gas heaters would be cold. No food would be refrigerated or frozen. The ERs would be without power, generators would be out of fuel. This really would be the SHTF scenario all the preppers have been looking for, simply because we want to not work overtime or have dangerous or hard jobs. These jobs make the world run, and denying that is foolish to the extreme.
I also see a great many people who believe that what they want are the basics, or at least their definition of the basics goes well into my definition of luxury. Weekly date nights, spa appointments, haircuts by hair dressers, frequent restaurant visits, live entertainment, premium grade vehicles (rather than base version doing what you need – if you need a pickup or SUV then no problem, if you are a single person who only drives to the spa, I have a problem, especially if it has a sun roof and a moon roof as well as heated and vented seats). I see people complaining they can’t get jobs, but especially in my home state, I see plenty of job openings simultaneously with high unemployment. The explanation is consistently that the unemployed don’t want these jobs either for the work required or perceived insufficient wages. My favorite was a woman who was straight out of college wanting a $200,000 salary and upset because that was only for someone with her degree and 20-years of experience. She complained, “what was my college for if not to get me experience?” I also have not met anyone in dire straights who was not there by anything other than the consequences of their choices. I listen to the whole sob story and can pretty much identify all the choices that brought them to the straights they are in. I actually wonder if that is the main difference between communists and capitalists. The belief in agency. This frontloads my brain for the whole experience, which probably gives answers you did not expect.
Going on to the items from the communists:
I agree that someone who makes more money should bring more value. However, I find that people ignore risk taking and up front costs as bringing value, so I cannot agree with this statement as put forth. Sacrifice needs to be understood not as just hard work or menial labor. If the statement accepts that, then I will agree that it is frustrating when nepotism gives someone a leg up. (Now the fact that communism has strong ties to the nepotism-based job holding is an item to argue.)
I do not agree that wealth gives political power. It seems to me that political power grants wealth. There are many wealthy people who do not put their thumbs on the political scale, far more, to be sure, than those wealthy people who do. In fact, you see communists abusing wealth and political power far more often than capitalists, so I cannot agree that this is a value of communists, especially as they only complain about the capitalists doing so, rather than condemning all outright. Given the people they generally idolize tend to be extremely wealthy corrupt people with lots of political power, I believe that their claiming of this value is either hypocrisy or manipulation.
I disagree that technology can allow us to shorten work weeks. There are 168 hours a week and in energy, chemical plants, medicine, plumbing, electricians, and a great deal of manufacturing at the very least, (I can continue to pick more and more jobs that require 24/7 operation and on-call overtime work) require all of those hours to be worked by trained and experienced people. There is a shortage of people who want to do these jobs and so there has to be overtime until that shortage ends, and if overtime is driving people to not want to, the few that remain work even longer and harder. This means that people HAVE to work jobs that are tortuous and exhausting. There is NO technology that can keep someone from having to do this. I disagree with this “value” as it is simply a childish wish.
Hard working hours and conditions are not exploitative nor necessarily the most stressful. An executive usually works longer hours than we do, under far more stress. Sure, there are bad executives, but most of them are harder workers than we are, so to complain that our conditions are bad while they get all the good things is childish and unrealistic. Hard work is good for us. (Just like eating healthy, that which is good for us is not always pleasant.)
I do agree that in a troubled economy, people should not just starve. I donate to an organization that works to help that. There are many such organizations out there, enough that generally people who are struggling with true need are usually able to get quite a large amount of help. Many of the desperate cases we see are people who do not want help or at least do not want the string attached, like not actively shooting up in the shelter or not beating people up on a drug binge whilst in the facility. However, when I hear this argument, my mind front loads my experiences and evidence. If you do not want to starve, make good choices. Deny yourselves luxury, take the work that is available rather than the work that you desire. Your passion may not be marketable. This does not seem to be a value that is held by this group, as they define basic needs well into the luxury category and deny the need to just get whatever job they can. Also, if they looked around for a minute, they would know that those resources are out there if they were truly in need.
When someone claims a value and lives in direct opposition to that value, I do not agree with their “value,” and that is the case for a great many of these values you claim they have.
(Sorry for the delayed response, Sarah Beth; I’ve drafted a response but might not be able to finish it until after this weekend. Just wanted to let you know it’s still on my radar.)
Thanks for elaborating on your concerns, and sorry for the delayed response! I would like to see energy production remain safe and consistent as well. I also agree that there is a problem with people not taking responsibility for improving their situations.
Regarding the energy industry, I’m curious as to why people go into the energy field if it’s that dangerous. Are the pay and benefits that good? Are they better than those of easier and less dangerous jobs? Do they reflect the scarcity of qualified candidates? If we paid for overtime for the few who are called to it, wouldn’t that just mean that energy gets slightly more expensive? I’m also concerned that if we stop being able to attract people to the field, there’s a risk that at some point we won’t have enough people who know how to run things. Releasing energy employees from on-call obligations might end the world we know, but it seems like underpaying them for being on call 24/7/365 would also lead to that result within decades.
I was under the impression that under the principles of capitalism, if enough people demand a certain wage for a certain work, and that work really needs to be done, then the market will pay it and that wage is assumed to be what the work is worth.
“There is a shortage of people who want to do these jobs and so there has to be overtime until that shortage ends, and if overtime is driving people to not want to, the few that remain work even longer and harder.” That sounds like a vicious cycle that we have the power to break. I consider it less a childish wish and more a pragmatic reality that unless you want to enslave people through brainwashing or coercion, nobody “has” to work those jobs. If not enough people choose to, then we shall simply have to accept a standard of living that requires less infrastructure. Humans have survived for millennia on less. It seems almost communist to extract labor from a few who have the ability to maintain the infrastructure, to provide for the many who “need” it, without rewarding them for their rare skills and efforts.
Regarding people’s earnings, I’m concerned that while people are in one sense responsible for their own life situations, they are not given a good foundation for making informed decisions. In other words, people may get what they deserve, but they deserve to deserve better.
A large part of the problem, I think, is that they don’t believe they have agency. What I usually hear is that people believe that the results of their efforts are at the mercy of powerful individuals who are biased or capricious, and systems those people designed to serve themselves (or systems designed by overwhelmed people who want everything to be simple). They believe that their insights and ideas will be ignored by people who are trying to protect their own position. Why compete when the people who won the last race dug a moat around the finish line? It’s very discouraging to think that one may make sacrifices with nothing to show for it and no discernable paths forward.
(Another problem I see for the people complaining is that popular culture plants expectations in people’s heads that the job you do, the money you make, and the lifestyle you lead is a measure of your worth as a person. If they can’t measure up, then the most they can aspire to is escapism.)
I agree that a lot of executives do work hard, and that the ones who take their responsibilities seriously should be rewarded. I want to encourage more people to take responsibilities seriously. I do draw a distinction between conditions of hard work and conditions of work that burn people out.
However, I also see executives who prioritize concentrating wealth into themselves and their companies over customer wellbeing, trustworthy behavior, fair competition, and genuine innovation. Jack has described his experiences with banks and telecommunications companies. If a rich CEO were to save money by cutting corners on safety, or driving competitors out of business even if the competitors have a superior product, would the CEO have earned that money? Do they deserve it? Is that the kind of economic hustle we want to encourage, or tolerate?
It’s true that in addition to people who just can’t get a job, there are people who could develop jobs skills if they made the effort. That said, there are also people who have those skills and try for a long time to get a job, and are still unemployed. I’m sympathetic when they feel they shouldn’t have to dance to the whims of an uncaring audience. Theoretically, they’re trying to make an honest living in accordance with their values, but they perceive that what’s rewarded is allowing oneself to be toyed with and treated unfairly.
I don’t know how prevalent this problem actually is; my impression draws from personal experience at jobs where I had to play the role of duct tape and fire extinguisher for companies far less concerned about error-prevention than the energy companies you’ve worked with, plus reading other people’s accounts, and the age-old cultural trope of the clumsy juggernaut corporation that screws everything up because no one who knows how to fix problems has any authority to do so. Enough people used to comment on the accuracy of Dilbert that I am disinclined to assume rich executives are competent. I want to see evidence that they make money by skillfully helping people.
I want to live in a world where doing a good job is rewarded with some amount of input/voice/influence in the field, where people receive training to become more capable and valuable, where people listen to good ideas, and where foolish decisions are held accountable. I think that world uses capitalism, but many real-life capitalists over the centuries have gone to great effort to disable their accountability mechanisms.
I share your concern that if people are sufficiently content with a mediocre life, then they will have no incentive to learn difficult jobs. A complacent society will fail to produce the people needed for complicated maintenance that keeps it running. That said, I think we can inspire people to challenge themselves without needing the least skilled people to live in stressful poverty and instability. It will also help if we can alleviate the most stressful aspects of those jobs by training more skilled people. (And yes, I do think that there are many more people with the potential for “elite” skills than are currently trained. I’m given to understand that medical schools create an artificial scarcity of credentialed physicians.)
Regarding the communists’ concerns: on the one hand, risk-taking and up-front costs absolutely need to be compensated, or nobody would do them. That said, I find that many highly-paid executives displace risk onto the employees. From the outside, a lot of highly paid executives seem to reap the benefits of “risks” without facing consequences if they fail. Maybe they don’t get promoted, but they’re still financially stable and very comfortable. The employees are the ones who get laid off if the company has a bad quarter. The book The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies that goes into more detail about the actual issues with our implementation of capitalism, which isn’t inherent to the concept of capitalism itself. (The same goes for representative democracy.)
I agree that it doesn’t seem to make sense that wealth should translate into political power. Why should politicians seek campaign contributions, when voters should just be able to look up information about all the candidates? That said, the fact that many wealthy people do not partake in political corruption doesn’t mean that those who do aren’t a serious problem. Plenty of industries lobby for regulations (or lack thereof) that protect the industry at the expense of the consumer and fair competition, and it seems like they get what they pay for.
On the other hand, I also agree that communism has not demonstrated any way of preventing political corruption. In the values conversation, I would express my concern about corruption in general and say that whatever system we use going forward, we should make sure that we have a way of enforcing the accountability of the people who make decisions. If they secretly want a system that lets them engage in corruption, we’ll see it from their reaction. Usually I find they just assume that a government run by the workers is somehow more accountable, as if we don’t already live in a democracy. I should probably add “accountability” to my short list of article topics.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
EC, I am honestly grateful that this is the time that you could respond. This is my least busy week for eight weeks either direction. I am going to break this into a couple of replies or this could get excessively long(er). I’ll discuss energy first.
People take jobs in the energy industry because the money and benefits are fantastic. I took our finances to an expert to discuss if we were putting enough money in the retirement accounts and he, not used to the energy industry, was floored at the benefits we get, double checking with me multiple times that I hadn’t mistaken the details. The lack of overtime pay for on-call salaried employees is compensated (to those who choose to look at this logically rather than through lenses of greed and envy) by high base dollars and extremely generous benefit structures. While a lack of people is a commonly expressed concern, money isn’t the problem.
The personnel problems boil down to three distinct issues. The first are people who, through our cultural messaging, have come to believe energy jobs are “dirty” or “immoral”. Next are people who want a different work/life balance which has become exacerbated with many younger millennials and Gen Z who abhor a 40 hour work week. The final category is related to the concept of NIMBY. People don’t like living next to power plants and refineries. Oil and gas wells are placed where there is oil, not where there are shopping malls. We have lost many candidates because we are in a small town 250 miles from the nearest “good” mall, with our current shopping options being Walmart or Kroger and even those are very small with limited selection. Doctors are few and far between out here, with my family traveling 100 miles to see an eye doctor, dentist, and OB, 145 miles for a pediatrician, and 250 for specialists. Aside from the high school, we have no nearby sports teams nor do we have anything other than a movie theater, and our music scene is high school level. The height of our social season is the county fair/rodeo. There are not very many restaurants, and most people drive 100+ miles to get a haircut, so forget about a spa. This lack of cultural amenities drives away people (especially the wives) who want fancier stuff. None of this is within the control of the energy companies and no salary changes that. While true for my location, many others suffer similarly.
Your comment that “we shall simply have to accept a standard of living that requires less infrastructure” as though that were not a major threat to our survival concerns me, because part of the problem is that people are expecting so much more without a degradation of energy. When I mentioned earlier that among many young millennials and Gen Z, a forty-hour work week seems excessive, this demonstrates that part of the issue that we have is that people are expecting a high standard of living without the effort of maintaining it. To suggest that we decrease our standard of living goes against their whole paradigm and is going to make their view of the situation worse, which then makes the problems we are confronting even worse.
The other part of that is that while mankind has survived as a whole without our current paradigm for millennia, cavalierly suggesting that we go back to those circumstances is disturbing to me. To say some “need” it suggests a lack of understanding. We do NEED it. Not only would society lose the convenience of the internet and home lighting, but indoor plumbing is out. Medicine as we know it would be destroyed. No more X-rays or antibiotics can be had. Need a pacemaker, a feeding pump, oxygen, or a CPAP? Nice knowing you. Hygiene is now limited. Water can no longer be treated and is no longer safe to drink. Sewage is now uncontrolled and we are back to having routine plagues as people will daily encounter en masse the fecal matter from others. Farmers would be back to relying on subsistence methods rather than our modern methods of farming, so food production will drop dramatically. We would revert, at best, to the time where 50% of children born die before age two. This would drop the population of the earth back to the Middle Ages, with estimate ranging from six out of every ten to seven out of every eight people dying over the course of a couple years. Some estimates consider even higher percentages for death, given our lack of understanding of the medieval methods of survival and high urban concentrations.
Our society has been trained in the way things are now, not how they were, so to simply revert to an old way of doing things will cause utter destruction, without training our whole society to revert. In addition, the world as things were can not support the people on the planet. That lower bound of 60% of people dying is inescapable. They will die, but as they go hungry, they will grow desperate. This will, if nothing else, stop the conversations you want in their tracks as desperate hungry people will do many things, but few of them will be to talk about which 6 out of every ten deserve death, in case they are one of the majority.
It is also wrong to compare us to Communists. I had the privilege of learning from a man whose job consisted of going all around the world troubleshooting energy issues. He said that outside of the US, there were three main ways other countries handled their energy plants. European nations (and some others) who are still capitalist, but trending socialist gave generous salaries and benefits, and when that isn’t enough, hire Americans. Countries in less civilized parts of the world like Russia, China/East Asia, or the Middle East use the other two options. One is to get a whole group of people addicted to drugs/alcohol, and force them to work to keep up their government supply. This, he said, was prevalent in Russia. In another country he refused to mention, people were threatened either with their families, or just personally, to work. He told us of an unnamed locale where every morning started with gunfire and every evening ended with gunfire. These countries grab people, don’t care about their abilities, and accept hundreds or thousands of deaths as a necessary evil rather than the American ideal of safe operation. He reminisced of walking into work one day over piles of corpses, wishing he could go home. When things get tough, these countries recruit Americans with promises of cash, some of whom get to come and go, others, not so much. He said that after getting home from some of these sites, he told his parent company that he wasn’t going back ever again.
The energy industry has many problems, and personnel is certainly one of them, but more money is not the solution to keep them functioning. The current money/benefits attracts people, but it alone will not keep them. I have been part of a task force in the past looking to solve/improve this issue. We never came to any good solution.
Hi Sarah Beth, glad the response came at a good time, and thanks for your informative response! This does sound like a well-considered issue.
I should clarify what I mean when I say that humans as a species don’t “need” the current amount of energy production. It’s not because I take the role of the energy industry lightly. I phrase it that way to avoid the abdication of responsibility that often happens when people justify a decision as “necessary”. From an existentialist standpoint, you can’t derive an “ought” from an “is”. Nothing is necessary except to fulfill a desire. Nothing is a problem until it gets in the way of something a person wants. We have to own the consequences of following our preferences.
It’s true that the majority of civilization on today’s Earth can’t survive without tremendous energy to harvest and transport food, run utilities, manufacture and transport medicine, et cetera. Maybe we would never choose to go back to pre-industrial times due to the high human costs, but if we don’t choose to pay the costs of maintaining the energy industry then the outcome is the same, even if we didn’t fully accept the consequences of our choice. What matters is that right now, we choose not to let things fall apart. We choose to prevent mass death and turmoil, which means we’re responsible for figuring out how to pay the price.
It also means we’re responsible for looking for better options, which it sounds like you were involved with. It’s good to hear that people are working on recruiting the skilled work that energy production requires without resorting to effective slavery. If you’re allowed to share the broad strokes, I’m greatly interested in hearing about what avenues this task force explored.
It sounds like the primary issue with recruiting the necessary people is that most people who can afford the option would prefer to be physically closer to the sorts of activities found in cities. The tradeoffs here are habits and costs.
Habit: Skilled people with stressful, high-paying energy jobs are dissatisfied with the entertainment and socialization available in small towns far from the city, including that available via the internet and telecommunications. They want access to in-person friends and centers of culture, entertainment, food, et cetera. Cost: It takes a long time to travel to a place where those things can be found. People would rather not have to spend that time driving, especially if they aren’t allowed to do it very often due to being on call.
In addition to those above, we have the vicious cycle I mentioned:
Habit: People want to avoid a job that has long, stressful hours.
Cost: Jobs with a smaller applicant pool must require more hours from existing employees.
For addressing the habits, I’d be interested in exploring what sort of conditions people would want in order to take an energy job. For this purpose, we wouldn’t be judging them based on perceived realism. I’d just have people read the description of the job and the sorts of lifestyles it permits, and then ask them to wave the proverbial magic want to change as little as possible in order to make the job appealing to them. In other words, what are the deal-breakers? Is it really the remote location? Or is it the hours? If they had more time off, would it be alright that they’re farther from the city? How many years are they expecting to work? If twice as many people get hired, can they divide the hours, the stress, and the salaries?
We should also be looking at the demographics of the prospective employees who are turning down the positions. Who are they? Where did they grow up? What do they want out of life? Are there people who aren’t applying but might be a better fit? Are there people who might be a good fit except they don’t have access to good education? Et cetera.
If no immediate answers pop up, and since there’s this much money thrown around with this much at stake, I’d look at ways to transport people to where they want to go faster. If there’s not enough market to justify building the things they want where they are, and a few hours in a car is too much, it might be worth looking at a high-speed rail system. Outlandish? Quite perhaps. However, we’re brainstorming ways to prevent the collapse of civilization. High speed commuter rail may be a small price to pay compared to that BATNA. Or we might come up with something even better. If Elon Musk only did realistic things, he wouldn’t have so many admirers.
Did the task force already look at all of these questions, or did I manage to come up with some new ones?
Quick quiz everyone, since no one has invoked the rationalization list in awhile:
At least this guy isn’t recommending Pinochet’s solution to discourse with Communists!
To be clear, the AK-47 was only technically a communist development. Much like almost all communist “technology”, it was a stolen design.
Essentially copy-pasted from the German Sturmgewehr 44.