On Capitalism: The Metaphor of the School Bully

High school bully Biff Tannen (‘Back to the Future’ trilogy) was inspired by Donald Trump


Capital is like a bully at school who is supremely dominant. He goes around nicking the other kid’s lunch money. He harasses the girls and litters the place. He doesn’t do his homework but steals the work done by others. The school authorities are aware this guy is a problem for the functioning of a harmonious atmosphere, but, apart from the occasional “ooh you naughty boy”, refuse to expel the bully. Indeed, most of the time, they turn a blind eye to his behaviour, educate the other children that this is just unchangeable ‘human nature’, the only way of running a school. It would take a sea-change in the school authorities to actually expel the bully and create a nice school.

In the real world the struggle between those that want the sea-change and the lying complacent traditional authorities, is manifested as a struggle between political progressives (including the direct victims of the bully who rebel), and conservatives. So beware of the right-ward drift of the Conservative Leadership contest. Your taxes just are what lunch costs. Cutting taxes will not make you richer, it will simply remove any support you have against the bully. You will get less lunch. And allowing the bully to run amok even more will just mean he robs more and more from you. If the bully wasn’t taking part of your lunch money, taxation would not be a problem. Indeed one would see it as good for the school as a whole.

Regime change begins at home, and goal-directed regime change to expel the bully is the only consistent form of humanism. Sometimes, thinking metaphorically can be an aid to truth.

Lockdown ‘Libertarianism’: The New Fashionable Mind Sludge

This article by Sukhayl Niyazov, published in Areo magazine, is really really bad, yet reflective of the struggle freedom-lovers have in making their case under the Corona Lockdowns now engulfing 50% of the planet. Apart from citing Edmund Burke as a libertarian which he definitely wasn’t, the author imposes a harsh conservative morality on libertarianism that ought not be there.

It claims that if you are a carrier of COVID NINETEEN, even unknowingly, and by your going out, you unknowingly infect someone else accidentally, by chance, then you are still ‘responsible’ for infecting them. And that if they die, you are responsible for their death.

I can accept an element of causation there, but I do not accept ‘responsibility’. The latter is inherently a moral term. If you do not know you are a carrier, then you are not deliberately infecting anyone – morality is removed from the equation for you are not acting as an immoral agent. If I trip on a paving slab, it is not the paving slab’s ‘fault’ because the paving slab is bereft of moral agency. The paving slab, although featuring within a chain of causation, did not deliberately cause me to trip, and hence cannot be held to be ‘responsible’.

So it is with COVID NINETEEN and any other highly infectious disease for that matter. If you know you have it, STAY INDOORS, until you are better! Else you are being irresponsible like someone who is HIV positive yet goes around having unprotected sex with others.

The reason why it is irresponsible to be reckless regarding the infection of others when you knowingly have an infectious disease yourself, is that it represents an ABUSE OF TRUST. For society to function, we rely on trust. People should be able to go about their business without fearing something bad might happen. Or, more precisely, without fearing something bad might happen UNLESS YOU CONSENT TO IT. Which is why group drug taking is in a different league of moral fixture to say, being the victim of a mugging.

Ay, there’s the rub. In more normal times, people went out despite the risk of catching an illness. The risk was perceived as small, nevertheless it was actually rampant, otherwise no-one would ever catch a cold. But however the risk was perceived, people would go out under a tacit consent that they were willing to take the risk because the rewards of say, a nice meal, or few pints, were deemed to outweigh the risk. If this individual did catch something, and assuming society wasn’t behaving recklessly, and assuming tacit consent on the risk, then if that individual was to fall ill it is actually THEIR responsibility because the risk was THEIRS TO TAKE. Whoever or whatever infected them was not the moral agent, assuming non-recklessness, but the individual who caught the thing WAS.

Of course this does not mean the individual who catches the illness is morally blameworthy because the social conditional premises were all at factory settings. This is why we say ‘bad luck mate’ rather than ‘ha ha you deserve it’. Living in a social world that is embedded in nature just means we’re gonna catch stuff from time to time. But we compute the relative risks in an activity and make the judgment to go out, thereby taking moral responsibility for oneself.

Two things flow from these philosophical observations in relation to the Lockdowns:

i) someone who doesn’t have the disease is being lumped together with those that know that they do and are behaving recklessly. That is stupid and an insult to humanity.

ii) we are being denied our own right to make choices, to take moral responsibility for ourselves REGARDING THE MOST MUNDANE MATTERS.

This is why the Lockdowns must be lifted now. Intelligent advice ought still be given and things like hand gels made readily and freely available. But if the logic of the Lockdown persists too long, we will have no freedom left at all. Which is why the article linked-to is so abhorrent – libertarianism is regurgitated as an authoritarian doctrine.