http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/ideas-are-lies-tp7598884p7598885.html
This article is absolutely fascinating! I think that if we just took each sentence individually, I would disagree with around 60% of them. That is being generous and assuming the author is accurately reporting what other authors are saying. If you allow for my disagreeing with those cited (while not disputing the citation itself), that could easily bring me as high as disagreeing with 80% of the individual sentences. That is making it very hard for me to assess what I think of the overall argument. It seems quite plausible that "free-market thinking promotes power relations" in a particular historic context, which seems to be one of the main theses of the argument... but the author is covering at least a dozen deep topics that are in no way necessary to make that argument, and is not demonstrating a deep understanding of any of them.
Here are some example sentences from throughout the paper that seem confused. Some might merely be massive overgeneralizations, but even that seems pretty problematic in the context of the argument being made:
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Free-market ideology claims that to help society, we must help
ourselves. If we all act selfishly, the thinking goes, the invisible
hand will make everyone better off. So here we have an ideology that
promotes selfishness in the name of group benefit. It’s a Machiavellian
lie that should be caustic to social cohesion.
- According to the theory of multilevel selection, there is always a disconnect between the interests of a group, and the interests of individuals within the group.
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So for groups to be successful, they must suppress the selfish behavior
of individuals. There are many ways of doing this, but the most common
is probably punishment. To encourage altruistic behavior, groups punish self-serving individuals.
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But while punishing deviance is universal to all social organisms,
humans have developed a method for suppressing selfishness that is
unique. To promote prosocial behavior, we harness the power of ideas.
We lie to ourselves.
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According to evolutionary theory, Rand’s Machiavellian lie ought to be caustic to group cohesion.
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power relations qualify as a type of altruism.
In a power relation, one person submits to the will of another. Bob
submits to Alice. By doing so, Bob sacrifices his own fitness for the
benefit of Alice. That’s altruism. But if Bob’s subservience only
benefited Alice, it would be an evolutionary dead end. The Bobs of the
world would die out, having given all their resources to the Alices.
Since power relations have not died out, something more must be going
on.
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On the face of it, freedom and power seem to be opposites.
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Business firms, you may have noticed, don’t use the market to organize
their internal activities. They use hierarchy. Firms have a chain of
command that tells employees what to do. Given this fact, the growth of
large firms is as much an assault on the free market as is the growth of
government.
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To measure the growth of private hierarchy, I’ll use the size of the
management class — the portion of people employed as ‘managers’. Here’s
my reasoning. Managers work at the tops of hierarchies.
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Anthropologists Carla Handley and Sarah Mathew recently found that cultural variation between human groups is far greater than genetic variation. Put simply, this means that ideas matter. What we think probably affects our behavior more than our genes.
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The reason is that human life is marked by a fundamental tension. We
are social animals who compete as groups. For our group’s sake, it’s
best if we act altruistically. But for our own sake, it’s better to be a selfish bastard. How to suppress this selfish behavior is the fundamental problem of social life. The solution that most cultures have hit upon is to lie.
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The alternative is that free-market ideas do promote altruism …
just not the kind we’re used to thinking about. They promote altruism
through power relations. And they do so through doublespeak. Free-market
ideology uses the language of ‘freedom’ to promote the accumulation of
power.
Just for a taste of why this all seems so weird: "Free market ideology" is not the promotion of selfishness writ large, it is the idea that people should look for beneficial deals when buying and selling goods. Like, if you could buy a car for $15,000, or get an equivalent car for $12,000, you should buy the cheaper one; but if you are selling, and you could sell for $12,000 or $15,000, you should sell for the higher price. That's it. Free market ideology has nothing to do with whether you should support the local PTA or whether you should invest in your children beyond the time-corrected dollar value you expect them to give you in return. And similarly, my manager's ability to tell me what to do at work has little to do with whether I buy rice in bulk at the asian grocery where it is cheaper. (And if you want to talk about Ayn Rand as promoting selfishness writ large, then we would need a separate conversation about what "selfish" means in an "Objectivist" context, and how that has only a loose relation with "free market ideology".)
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