Ep50 -- Excuses, Excuses

 If you are of a certain age as I am,  such that you were around and a sports fan during the Michael Jordan years, and you now have kids who are sports fans and you happen to live in or around Los Angeles as I do,  it's highly likely that at some point you and your kids have argued about who is the greatest NBA player of all time, or GOAT.  I don't have any hard data to back this up, but I guess you are more likely to believe that Jordan is the GOAT, and your kids are more likely to believe LeBron James is the GOAT.  Now, I am perfectly aware that this is a pointless argument. I mean, what difference does it make if one or the other is widely considered to be the greatest of all time?

I would suggest that one's favorite player is of much more importance to any given fan than whether or not that player is considered the GOAT.  And my primary purpose here is not to weigh in on the debate, although, full disclosure, I believe the evidence is overwhelming that it's Michael Jordan.  My point in bringing up this debate is that I've noticed a curious tactic that LeBron supporters employ to support their belief that King James is, in fact, the GOAT. 

As far as longevity, total points scored, and sheer dominating physical presence, it's hard to argue against LeBron's greatness, although Shaquille O'Neal clearly owns that last accolade. But since once you start looking at championships and MVPs and defensive awards, it's hard to argue against Jordan.

So the LeBron fans start asking, well, who were his teammates? What kind of sporting cast did he have throughout his career? How many Hall of Famers were on the same roster? Who did he play against? 

Now I get it, confirmation bias is a powerful thing in the human psyche. We desperately want to find evidence that supports our beliefs, but this is a particularly perverse form of confirmation bias, where you're not just seeking out and attending to evidence that supports your initial assumption, but rather you are carefully constructing new data sets and introducing novel logical arguments, and then elevating them in importance to support your assumptions.  For me, once you start doing this, contorting yourself into all kinds of logical pretzels to support your beliefs, it shows me that deep down inside, if you set aside your ego and are really honest with yourself, there might just be a little wiggle room in your assumed belief.  Essentially, what I'm saying is my kids know that Jordan is the GOAT. They just don't know that they know it. 

And we see this kind of thing all around us, whenever humans disagree about something, especially when it's an emotionally charged issue, we really dig in to defend our positions. And then, when our positions are challenged in a way that we can't really reconcile with our beliefs, we start working backward and looking for new ways to support our beliefs.

So if LeBron is the GOAT, but Jordan has more championships, more finals MVPs, more season MVPs, more all-defense awards, and way more scoring titles, then I better start figuring out some creative ways to define the GOAT to make it make sense.

Essentially, what I'm talking about here is assuming your belief to be true and then working backward to figure out why. And man, does this lead to some serious gaslighting within the realms of politics, economics, and international relations.  After all, your assumption creates a certain reality, and your post hoc rationalization conveniently proves that reality to be the true reality.

So on this episode, I wanna talk a little bit about some major instances of this kind of backward pretzel logic so that hopefully you can get better at recognizing it and figuring out if the person espousing a certain belief is making a good faith argument, or if they are to quote John Kenneth Galbrath,   "engaged in man's oldest exercise in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Stay tuned.

I'm Craig Boreth and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we often get conned into accepting our manmade culture when it's out of sync with our human nature, and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.

But first, a word about a non-sponsor. 

This episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by Synchrony and Bread Financial, two of the biggest players in the branded credit card sector, like those Amazon Visas or Macy's, MasterCards or whatever. 

In general, these cards tend to have looser approval requirements and higher interest rates, which means they're charging more to those people who are least likely to be able to afford it. But hey, that's life. We all need to be responsible for our own decisions, right?  But last year, remember last year, I know it's hard, but way back when the previous president was in office, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau set a limit on late fees for such credit cards at $8 per incident.

The CFPB claimed that the rule would save consumers about $10 billion a year in excess late fees.  Of course, the banks and their lobbyists were just oh, so offended that the government would even suggest such a rule that they, and this is where we begin to see American style capitalism at its exploitative finest, they would have no choice but to raise interest rates and add other junk fees, such as a new fee if you want a print version of your statement, to make up for that lost revenue. And that's what they did. Now keep in mind they did this before the new late fee limit went into effect.

Now, fast forward to this year,  we have a new administration with slightly different priorities vis-a-vis consumer protection, and they reverse the ruling. So now, credit card companies are, once again free to charge pretty much whatever they want if you're late with your payment.  But, and here's where American capitalism shows you what it really thinks of you,  now that the banks no longer have any justification for those newly record-setting interest rates and newly created junk fees, they will not be lowering those interest rates or removing those fees.  As Synchrony CEO, Brian Doubles puts it, we feel pretty comfortable that the rule has been vacated. With that said, we don't currently have plans to roll anything back in terms of the changes that we made.  After all doubles said that they haven't seen a big drop off in accounts or spending, as if that somehow justifies such guillotine behavior.

So they'll be keeping the new, completely unjustifiable windfall, thank you very much.  I guess this is what they really mean by freedom, right? It's freedom from government interference, and the more freedom the better, right? Well, sure. As long as you're okay with the freedom to be unrelentingly and unredressedly screwed.

And we are back. 

A friend of mine recently sent me a video clip of astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in conversation with longtime Murdoch bottom Piers Morgan, in which the latter says that he believes in God because there are just things that humans can't understand, such as what there was before the Big Bang. So therefore, there must have been an all knowing and all powerful creator to account for the unexplained.  This is what is sometimes derogatorily known as the God of the gaps argument. And DeGrasse Tyson has a great response to this argument.  He recalls from memory, of course, a quote from second century astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy, who said:

“...when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself.”

So back then, we didn't understand the movements of the planets, so it was explained by God. Zeus, in this case, which is a whole other argument about whether a God or the God exists or has ever existed.  But now we know why the planets move the way they do. So as deGrasse Tyson elegantly shows that gap that is filled by God is getting smaller and smaller, or as he calls it:

"God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance."

Now, by the way, that super creepy laugh that Piers Morgan involuntarily lets out at the end. That's the sound of his brain eating itself.  

I can't imagine any religious believer wanting to support an argument that logically demands that the power of God as a revelatory force is ever diminishing.

And of course, if you carry that argument out far enough into the future, the God of the gaps will very likely not exist at some point.  So this seems to me a very common example of assuming that God exists, as I'm sure Piers Morgan has done since he was a child, and then working backward to try and figure out why that must be so. And in this case, the logic that Pierce Morgan employs is very easily swatted away by Neil DeGrasse Tyson.  

Now, as I've often said, I have no problem at all with anyone believing in God or Gods or whatever you want to believe. I personally don't want to be impacted by that belief in any way, but I'd never suggest you shouldn't believe it.

So what is a believer to do? Well, in my opinion, there's a very reasonable argument for believing in God, and it's this. If doing so gives you comfort, if it keeps you guided on a path toward humility and charity, that's great. But you can kind of tell when someone goes to great lengths to prove the existence of God, to buttress their belief in fact, or what they think to be fact that they ultimately want to do so not for their own spiritual wellbeing, but rather to prove you wrong, to prove you to be misguided, inferior, or maybe even dangerous. And that kind of effort never ends particularly well.  


So let's jump from one religious topic to another. Namely the economic belief in the invisible hand of the free market. 

Cory Doctorow wrote a great piece a couple weeks ago called The Meritocracy to Eugenics Pipeline that tries to answer the question,  why as a country gets more oligarchic, does it also get more overtly racist?

The answer lies in the backward logic employed by free market true believers to justify their lofty economic positions in our society.  So, free market zealots believe that there should be no government oversight of the market because the market is, by definition, the optimal resource allocating machine.

If a person or company is really good at what it or they do, it succeeds and there will be a healthy competition to prevent unjust monopolization and keep prices in check.  The market left alone will always be best at maintaining this harmonious balance, except of course, when it fails miserably.  As with so much of modern popular economics theory, it sounds lovely, but falls apart completely with the slightest interaction with actual reality.

But let's ignore that for the moment. If the market is the ideal resource allocator, then it shouldn't really care about your background, race, sex, family background, whatever,  beyond what you do in the marketplace. But obviously that's not how things work. The single greatest predictor of being rich is having rich parents.

As Doctorow Notes, every billionaire on the Forbes under 30 list inherited their wealth.  So an honest person would look at this and say, Hey, that's not a free market either. That's rich people influencing the market to benefit their children. In other words, government interference, bad, rich person interference good. 

And that's where the eugenics comes in because free market zealots can't give up their belief in the supremacy of markets. So they've got some logical gymnastics to do to make everything fit. And here's how they do it. They simply introduce genetics into the free market. If I'm successful, it only makes sense that my kids would be successful too, based on our genetic similarity.

And if that's the case, then anyone who is not successful must have inferior genes.  As Doctorow puts it, "if power and privilege are inherited and they are ever more so every day, then either we live in an extremely unfair society in which the privileged and the powerful have rigged the game,  or the invisible hand has created a subspecies of thoroughbred humans who were literally born to rule."

BREAK

 Speaking of thoroughbred human subspecies, literally born to rule: Elon Musk.  

I for one, have never been particularly impressed with his intellect, but when it comes to rationalizing obscene personal wealth, power, and a complete and transparent disdain for pretty much the entirety of humanity, he's definitely genius level. 

And his primary tool for rationalizing his generationally awful behavior lies in his stated belief in longtermerism.  As I mentioned in a previous episode, longtermerism is an extension of effective altruism, which argues that we should all be doing the most possible good for the largest number of people. 

Sounds great. Although effective altruism, most well-known boosters have a nasty habit of enriching themselves, and when all the costs and benefits are balanced out, not actually helping all that many people. But for the sake of argument, let's say you actually want to help as many people as possible.

longtermerism says you can't just look at human beings living today. You have to take into account the endless future generations that you could save by preventing humanity's extinction.  And if you assume we humans are doomed to drive ourselves to extinction here on earth, to save the lives of countless billions of future humans, you'd want to find a way to move humans off of Earth. Thus occupy Mars. 

So it's pretty clear that long before the terms longtermerism and Occupy Mars entered his lexicon. Elon Musk didn't really care all that much for the slightly more than 8 billion of us humans currently inhabiting this third rock from the sun.  And the more powerful he got, the less he cared. This is in line with a well-established phenomenon whereby the brains of powerful people look a whole lot like the brains of psychopaths. 

Fortunately for Musk, the idea of longtermerism came along and provided a fabulous excuse for not giving a crap about other people.  Not only does it let you excuse away a pathological disdain for other people, but it allows you to pretend you're actually a really deep thinker and that you actually care about other people more than everyone else because you are trying to save the lives of those untold billions of distant future humans who would otherwise be lost if Earth is destroyed, while humans haven't yet colonized other planets.  So, as Elon will definitely tell you, ad nauseam, our Sun will eventually expand enough to swallow up the Earth. He says it will happen in about 450 million years, even though the general scientific consensus is way longer than that, like around 6 billion years. 

I assume he just made up that number so he could say things like Earth only has 10% of its lifespan left. Wow, that sounds ominous. Of course, even if that were true, and it isn't, that 10% would be 450 million years.  But let's not nitpick. Someday in the future, the Earth will most likely be destroyed by the sun. 

Pretty much an accepted fact.  Of course, we humans are doing things right now that will make it more and more difficult for us to survive on this planet in the much, much shorter term.  Whether you choose to believe this or not, it is supported by mountains of legitimate scientific evidence.

So, one way or another at some point, no more humans on earth.  Now, I'd think that a non-psychopath would look at those facts and say, well, we should do everything we can to make sure humans can survive and thrive on Earth for as long as possible.  But someone like Musk, who let me remind you, has never cared much for the rest of our current living fellow humans thinks, well, we're screwed here, so let's just write off everyone on earth now and I'll magnanimously volunteer to be the seed bank for a new colony of humans on Mars.  Now, someone who doesn't think this through for at least five seconds or so might think, Wow, what a forward-thinking genius. He wants to save our species and is actually doing things to make it happen,  while, of course, getting obscenely rich in the process, which I'm sure is just a coincidence.  

The problem with that argument, and it's a big problem, is that Mars ain't all that much further from the Sun than Earth is. So if Earth is gonna be destroyed in, let's say he's right, 450 million years, Mars is a goner not too long after that. 

 Suddenly, Occupy Mars seems less like an ambitious, beneficent endeavor to save our species and more like just another con to make a buck or a few hundred billion bucks. Either that or it's just the ravings of Megalomaniacal psychopaths intent on hastening Earth's destruction for personal gain.

And if that's the case, it kind of feels like an espoused belief in longtermerism is less a lofty goal with humanity's best interest in mind and more likely a symptom of psychopathy that should be included in the next version of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. And it definitely sounds like just the latest superior moral justification for selfishness.  

So what's the big takeaway from this episode? Well, believe it or not, I think it's that this kind of post hoc rationalization, particularly when it comes to justification of species-threatening selfishness, is not an indication that we humans are inherently evil, but rather that we are inherently good.  And I know that sounds weird, but here's why I think it's true.  If humans were inherently selfish, greedy, evil assholes, we wouldn't bother to come up with these kinds of rationalizations for hurting other people. We'd just do it, collect the spoils, and move on.  

But because way deep down inside, we know what we're doing is wrong, even though we might never feel it consciously, we need to justify our behavior in some way. We have to find a way to make it feel right because it goes against our true good nature.  

Now, of course, I may just be rationalizing a shitty behavior to help myself sleep at night, but I don't think I am.  The simple fact that we still distinguish people who don't feel the need to rationalize hurting others as sociopaths and still see that as an abnormality proves to me that the normal state of humanity is still, despite what your social media feeds may lead you to believe, decent and generous, and good. 

Well, that's it for this episode of The Great Ungaslighting. If you found it interesting, please forward along to any and all of your friends who might also appreciate it.  Until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other some slack, and use your damn turn signal.