“I’m not the 1 %. I’m not the 99 %. I’m me” – Vinnie, a self-made art entrepreneur

One of these days, without wishing that fate on them, an Occupier, a cop, a pedestrian, a bystander and scores of others will have their asses kicked, heads cracked, ribs broken, limbs severed or worse, in an orgy of violence that will erupt over issues that few of them clearly grasp, and thus have little real power to influence: economic justice, income distribution, bankers’ greed, corporate power, welfare and what ever other causes of their disempowerment. Outside of providing critical mass and excitement that the liberal media loves to hype they will end up as little more than cannon fodder for clever agitators with more focused and sinister agenda, the useful fools that revolutions since time immemorial count on to do the dirty job of capturing mass movements that just as quickly fade into orgies of egoistic fantasy.  

When it happens, they will experience up close, the imperfect, miserable world. They will learn about the millions who, just like them aspire to better their lives, the pursuit of which result in making life less than ideal for themselves and everybody else. They can say “Hi’s” to the legions who day by day, suffer from unintended consequences, their best efforts and purest intentions notwithstanding. Maybe they’ll appreciate what the sordid “human condition” is, from which their efforts to escape embroil them in all manners of transference conflicts. Maybe they’ll eventually learn that the complications in their lives grow in proportion to the degree that they fantasize “how the world ought to be”, rather than “seeing it as it is” If so, then they need to sort out things before they become worse. Lest they have not yet tasted it, life once in a while clubs those who fail to heed its lessons, of all places, on the head.

Parsing Your Egalitarian Entrails

They hate it that the world is too unequal? Well, so do I, but before doing anything, start by defining what the term “inequality” means. Time magazine offers one aspect of it: the average incomes of $ 1.5 MM and $ 50,000 for the 1 % and 99 % of all Americans respectively. But do they really think that mere numerical differences are all there is to it? Sadly they can’t, because narrowing income (or wealth) gaps involve more things than simple numbers indicate. Just ask: will dragging the few 1 % down and bringing the 99 % up be better overall? The answer is no, because even if there are many more of the latter you will end up punishing the few “heavy lifters” and rewarding lots of underperformers with the result that society will become less productive; what is inequality now can easily turn to injustice in the future. So  where then does one draw the dividing line? Instead of tearing people down it is better to motivate the latter with opportunities than punish the former by taking away the fruits of their striving, which directly impact wealth creation, and through the jobs they make possible the welfare of the 99 % that they want to help. Bingo, there goes the first lesson in economic life called unanticipated consequences.

But that’s just the benign first part; what if folks’ perceptions of “just” differences are chimerical? If they only have that to go by, income and wealth will be redistributed with neither the support of givers nor the gratitude of receivers. It’ll not be easy but even assuming that it can be done, keeping it there will require constant infringements on every one’s freedom or limitless expectations, which as old, astute Machiavelli pointed out, will endear you to neither. Thus your ideal redistribution won’t last for long, especially if people are free to do what they want, from raising unwarranted hopes to refusing to create wealth altogether. Like everything else that requires tension to work, reducing differences for the sake of equality opens up a Pandora’s Box of chaos that, like sleeping dogs are better off being allowed to lie.

Even voluntary redistributions are only a tad less chaotic, requiring one to consider peoples’ differing needs for, and respective contributions to the creation of that which is sought to be equalized. Unless their owners’ bow to reason or sense of moral worth, things will revert to the old chimerical quest, but now from a worse position. Aiming for equality even with full volition means that one doesn’t care how arbitrary redistributions affect motivation and capacity to generate what is being distributed. Coercion can effect and maintain it, but eventually they’ll have to generate it, a lose-lose proposition for the 99 % who will end up with less income and no jobs. That lesson is called The Tragedy of Sublime Intentions.

This is why the most practical distribution policy (Rawls’) aims not at full equality, but the toleration of some of it in exchange for motivating those who contribute more towards wealth creation and income generation, provided that that those at the lower end of the distribution scale are not made worse off as a result of the policy. It admits that no human society – even the most truculently egalitarian - can avoid inequality; it is a matter of how well members can tolerate it, and of where they have a better chance at rectifying it if they can’t. If that approach creates too much inequality then blame those who formulated policies that produced such outcome, even if they did it in error; make them pay dearly for such outrage especially if they did it with malice. Just don’t redistribute wealth or income arbitrarily as not only would it fail to solve that problem, but will likely end up worsening it. To Proudhon’s “Wealth is theft” must be added: “Punish the thief and forego what he shares with you”. Even bad men can live exemplary lives.    

Do You Understand the Moral Roots of Greed?

As with inequality, much depends on what “greed” exactly means and whose vice it is. But if Equality is not an absolute requirement of growth, greed is central to the functioning of the modern economy, a double edged sword that can do a lot of good (when used by the right folks) and evil, if otherwise. What one can’t simply do is let his biases judge those who indulge in it, without inquiring as to why and what their roles are. Like inequality, perceptions of either one or the other way will be colored by incomplete understanding of what is required for such roles.  One reason why folks find greed by others offensive is the resentment in being excluded from the benefits especially if they don’t know whether they deserve them, or whether they can deliver what’s expected in those roles. Like inequality, greed defies analysis using incomplete, overt comparisons; greed is self-referential, never seeing what the other side wants.    

If those perceptual problems are not bad enough, one will also be held hostage by moral baggage that he acquired in the society he grew up in. There is a psychological tradition that traces origins of moral judgments to the subconscious operations of mind but let’s skip them because they make many shaky assumptions about the purpose and meaning of life. Let us focus on how thinking processes, without the individual’s awareness, are affected by language and word usage. It turns out that a lot (not all) of one’s moral judgments flow from nothing more than beliefs shaped by personal, family, tribal and community values. A lot of moral judgments (again not all) have little to back them up save for values (e.g., fairness, justice, etc) that a community holds as sacrosanct. To make matters worse, this error is compounded by carelessness in sentence construction and meaning of words.  To Vaggini many errors of moral judgment result from illogical transpositions of the subject and object in certain types of sentence structures. As astonishing as that sounds, what the above ideas mean is that irrational outrage about greed (and also inequality) can be mostly products of that remarkable feature of life called (delusional) self-awareness.       

At any rate there is no need for these iffy assumptions for there is a simpler explanation for the mental aberration that disposes one to conclude that everything that does not align with his personal ideas of what is just is greedy and ought to be immoral: an arrogant belief premised in one’s having ALL the facts needed to make that particular moral judgment. In today’s volatile and extremely complex world, that assumption reveals irrational hubris. How else to explain why, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, the cause was quickly and totally blamed on “greedy bankers” when, in light of perfect hindsight, it turns out now that their legitimate roles (as a whole, for particular behaviors can never be explained by any general theory) as maximizers of gains were enabled by bad regulation and politically tainted policies which relaxed origination standards and encouraged leverage in pursuit of a policy goal (mass housing).

In this view of things, the bankers were performing what they were trained to do, which is to generate profits within silo-like environments that were bereft of sufficient information and understanding, thus amplifying negative events occurring in the system. Save for a prescient few who “boasted” about being right early on, the character and severity of the crisis was generally not foreseeable even by economists who lacked the insights and analytical skills to predict it, let alone prove conclusively that an emergent system could not “right” itself, especially that what finally pushed the system over the cliff are not  these mistakes but the flawed judgments of the system’s finance managers who erred in dealing with a no-precedent crisis. Folks blaming greed for the crisis without any qualification (e.g., errors of judgment or irresponsible behavior under complexity), are being naïve about human behavior in dynamic systems. At worst they are idealists who can’t psychologically cope with uncertain causes for events that they are mentally incapable of grasping, so they default to the easier search for demons to exorcise. The fact that conflicted “greed”, if properly harnessed is vital to wealth and job creation should caution those inclined towards simplistic judgments to ponder the risks of demonizing a vital part of economic life. An inability to entertain two opposed ideas without dragging psychic baggage is a sign, not only of a weak mind, but of a delusion that seeks relief in transference. As ever, the psychically satisfying, is the moralistic one.   

The Harsh Dilemmas of Corporation or the Welfare State

Let’s go right to the heart of issues that protesters are correct to raise even if they can’t quite articulate them well: the legitimacy of Corporations because of the unprecedented powers they have amassed, both outside the sphere of market operations and in their ability to corrupt society through their strong influence over the political process. Who in his or her right mind would question such motive, but it is also true that luxuriating in moral airs is meaningless, if one cannot see that reconciling that conundrum comes at a stiff price. But if that isn’t bad yet, one can compound his or her woes by thinking that a non-market solution – the welfare state – can help justify the reason for their existence, which is sustainable economic growth and jobs.

A little history will be instructive: perhaps one has forgotten that the modern corporation is no longer the weak entity that it was in the last years of the 19th century or even up to the early years of the 20^th. Massive needs for capital demanded by technology, the goal to diversify markets for stability of growth, and the centralization of authority to deal with efficiency issues and control the resulting complexity – all these led to the amassing of hard power (and thus its abuse) by those who lead these organizations. That most of them were self-appointed and not at all responsible to society or even to the corporation’s owners (who got castrated in the process) is not their fault; say what you want about the Law’s failure to come up with the proper legal safeguards or about regulators’ duties to properly enforce the rulings, the fact is that the modern corporate form IS the only vehicle that has successfully delivered two of society’s most critical survival desiderata – employing the hundreds of thousands of its members who must earn a living at the least expenditure of time, money and effort; and devised the most efficient conversion of its resources into the means for sustainable growth. That many modern corporations have failed these standards or thwarted their attainment is no reason to scuttle all, at least not until one has a real choice.          

But as one scans the options available, he finds that few of those are worthwhile replacements, if there are even pretenders to that role. For the criteria boils down to what extent those vehicles’ decisions can take place within the influence (or subject to) market influences, especially as they undertake decisions that have non-market ramifications and “external” influences, such as is the character of social decisions today. The problem is that the boundaries delineating these decisions are booby-trapped with unknown costs and outcomes, which sets you back to your old nemesis, unanticipated consequences. Folks of a disposition akin to those we have met above – a moral repugnance for any inequality and the slightest hint of (unqualified) greed, prefer that non-market solutions predominate. What they claim no little or awareness of, or if they do, are uncomfortable to admit, is that such alternatives involve an explicit if seldom acknowledged tradeoff between two radical ways of thinking about modern society: a market-responsive one typified by corporations (economically successful but rapacious if uncontrolled) and a non-market driven welfare state (inefficient, wasteful, unsustainable), its only tested alternative. One can quibble about accuracies here and there but these stark characterizations are ultimately what it is.

None of this defends (let alone absolves) the modern corporation’s hideous handiwork in vital concerns as environmental degradation, unsustainable exploitation of natural reserves, manufacture and exports of death-dealing weapons or drugs, aggressive lobbying to influence regulatory and electoral outcomes, all the way to outsourcing jobs that have no logic doing other than maintaining a “market presence”.  On the other hand, one has the welfare state, ostensibly set up to take care of those with neither the means nor the knowledge to protect themselves against the vagaries of nature or the rapacity of the markets. What it succeeds in doing is to siphon off the resources that could be used to get the economy to grow faster in order to lift those at the bottom of the social pyramid, to provide politicians, bureaucrats and various parties such as labor unions, with interests vested in perpetuating inefficiency and the sense of entitlements that resist all reforms, if they threaten their hold over votes and sources of patronage. It doesn’t take much to see that on balance, in matters that affect society the most – jobs and economic security, the corporate economy wins hands down over liberal models that eschew market discipline.      

Hence the real question is: what is the beef against corporations, and why the quixotic preference for such losers as the inept, inefficient and stodgy welfare state to deliver what is important to society? Let me dish it straight: the only reason why one condemns the corporate economy and praises the welfare state is that one is psychologically insecure about competing in a world in which he can end up losing badly in spite of a pretense at being good. Well one is not THAT good if he must seek solace from his life wounds inside the womb-like comforts of a nanny, which the welfare state is. If it is not yet that obvious, here is the brute lesson: all important decisions involve choosing among different options, none of them palatable. Your inability to accept it is proof that you have not really seen the world as it is - harsh.

What Your Real Problem Is: Externalizing Inner Failures

Three years ago a young man asked to talk to me one on one. Thinking that it had to do with his long put off marriage plans, I braced for some unanticipated news: an unplanned wedding, or worse a split. As soon as he sat down gravely on the couch, I sensed that this was a devastating issue, and indeed it was: his job would not be renewed the next year when he and his fiancé had planned to finally get married. I sat down silently as I listened to him detail the reason for the painful news: that despite being a talented art teacher that he was, liked by peers and adored by his students, the artist in him just was not up to the administrative and academic demands of the job. As I watched his face turn grim and his eyes shed tears of anger, frustration and fear, I fought hard to contain my own sadness by reassuring him that being fired was not the worst thing in life. Like many others I, too, long ago faced such a defeat, which I overcame by becoming more knowledgeable in my field, facilitating my foray to opportunities beyond my mere day job. After indulging this human moment we knew that there were serious things we had to quickly do, but that one of those was not about blaming our immigrant fates or the society that gave us our breaks. It was all about coping with life as best as we can, as it unfolded in all of its stark harshness.

I wasn’t prepared to see that such a satisfying experience would be eclipsed and surpassed by my son who rose above this depressing episode, so well that in the span of less than three years, with a little less than a thousand dollars in seed money, had built a business that his peers now rate highly as a true upcoming global sports art licensing and branding business, with fans from all corners of the world some of them rabid enough to tattoo his art work on their bodies. Recently he capped this feat by co-branding and licensing his products to, and partnering as creative designer for, a leading US apparel firm that sells to 1,400 outlets. Looking at it now his dramatic turnaround owed mostly to personal discipline, adhesive perseverance, a refusal to get overwhelmed by lots of handicaps (we are outsiders), and a can-do spirit that drives him to excel amidst all odds. Instead of a loser he sees himself as a self-made American who neither gives up nor depends on others for support, and who refuses to externalize his problems by blaming society for his share of life’s trials. Recently we had occasion to watch a rowdy O.W.S protest blaming the 1 % for their problems, and here is what he said: “I’m not the 1 %. I’m not the 99 %. I’m me, doing my best to help change the world in the best way I can”. I quickly copyrighted and wrote about it.

Other than the fact that people who are terribly misled can still be useful in waking up society’s often moribund senses, there is not an iota of logic or fact to support the O.W.S. position, no matter how well meant and sincerely they are held. This explains why they cannot come up with concrete proposals, and why they prefer to relish fuzzy ambiguities because taking specific positions will force them to confront extremely painful alternatives, not the least being their inner makeups. Why suffer the weakness of a false position when in vagueness one can luxuriate in the airs of moral superiority? Could it be then that all this commotion called O.W.S. is the escapism of a bunch of badly raised losers who have succumbed to life’s harshness and blamed America for their misfortunes? Instead of occupying why not hack it?