All posts by Brian Martin

Brian Martin is professor of social sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and vice president of Whistleblowers Australia. He is the author of a dozen books and hundreds of articles on dissent, nonviolence, scientific controversies, democracy, information issues, education and other topics.
personality, self-development

Updating your personality

Your personality is not fixed. Would you like to improve yours?

In 2011, I had the chance to be a participant in research on personality change. The project was titled “The utility of coaching in facilitating positive personality change.” It sounded fascinating as well as beneficial.

            I didn’t have big problems with my personality, but was interested in participating due to my long-term interest in personal development, teaching a class on happiness, and attending coaching workshops the previous year.

            For a long time, most psychologists believed that a person’s personality — the way they relate to themselves and others — was mostly fixed. It might change during childhood, but as an adult you would stay pretty much the same, whether you were relaxed or nervous, cautious or adventure-seeking, pleasant or obnoxious. However, this view about personality has gradually come under question.

            The project was run by Wollongong University PhD student Sue Martin — no relation to me. I started by taking the standard questionnaire used to assess personality according to five traits: emotionality, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Then I had ten coaching sessions with a psychologist to decide what I wanted to change and develop ways to do it.


Sue Martin

            The questionnaire we filled out was the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, or NEO PI-R for short. It has 240 statements, each one to be answered with strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree or strongly disagree. Here are a few of the statements.

  • I am not a worrier.
  • I really like most people I meet.
  • I have a very active imagination.
  • I tend to be cynical and skeptical of others’ intentions.
  • I’m known for my prudence and common sense.

For the research, I ended up filling out the NEO PI-R five times, to see whether and how my personality changed. That’s a lot of responses. I even sent a note to Sue about my difficulty responding to a few of the statements. For example, one statement was

  • I’m better than most people, and I know it.

My comment: “Better in what sense? Morally? Driving a car? (Definitely far worse, because I don’t drive.) Being smarter? Swimming?”

            The way personality traits and sub-traits were derived from our responses was not revealed to us. However, some connections were obvious enough. My guess is that answering “strongly disagree” to “I am not a worrier” means being higher on emotionality, and answering “strongly agree” to “I really like most people I meet” means being higher on agreeableness — and maybe feeds into scores on emotionality and extroversion.

            My coach, Louise Turner, told me that most participants wanted to change some aspect of the trait called emotionality, also known as neuroticism. This is about feelings of anxiety, depression and self-consciousness. If you have high levels of anxiety, it would be wonderful to become less anxious.

            Each of the “big five” personality traits is broken down into six sub-traits. For example, the emotionality sub-traits are anxiety, anger, hostility, depression, self-consciousness, impulsiveness and vulnerability. Based on my questionnaire answers, I received a score for each sub-trait and an overall score for the trait. In our trait profiles, each sub-trait was explained. For example, the depression sub-trait “measures the tendency to experience depressive feelings, such as sadness, hopelessness, guilt and loneliness”, and the vulnerability sub-trait assesses vulnerability to stress.

            All up, there were 30 sub-trait assessments, providing quite a detailed picture of my personality. The five-trait tool is standard in psychology, and has been verified repeatedly, mainly in Western cultures. What if I lied in answering the questionnaire? Well, the assessments would be wrong. However, I had no reason to lie. I wanted to see how I could improve.

            Unlike most of the participants in Sue’s project, I didn’t need to reduce my emotionality score. Due to good luck — genetics and/or upbringing — it was rock bottom. Before taking these personality tests, I hadn’t fully recognised how lucky I was to have low levels of anxiety and depression.


Louise Turner

            Talking with my coach Louise, I decided to try to increase my scores on the trait called openness. Some of the statements feeding into openness sub-traits are about liking poetry, and that didn’t appeal to me. So we decided to work on a sub-trait about being aware of other people’s emotions. I had always thought I was no good at that, and my scores on that sub-trait were low, confirming my assumption. Louise suggested a task for me, which I did carefully and systematically. (I’m high on the trait of conscientiousness.)

            For this task, when I had an extended interaction with someone, I tried to notice how they were feeling. Then, to check my perception, I asked them if my assessment was right. I kept a “feelings log.” One entry, for example, was about a meeting in my office with a student of mine, who I’ll call Maria. I took note of my feelings: “relaxed; attentive.” Regarding Maria’s feelings, I wrote, “Maria was cheery and bubbly, as usual, but became more serious (with brow change visible) when discussing her thesis.” I wrote, “She agreed with my comment about her feelings.” My general observation about this was, “Maria is usually very positive; I was able to notice when she slightly changed her attitude: she seemed stressed underneath the overall positivity.”

            After two weeks of keeping a feelings log, Louise commented that I seemed to be fairly good at noticing other people’s feelings. Previously this was intuitive; now I was bringing this to conscious awareness. On retaking the NEO PI-R questionnaire, my score on the openness trait was much higher. However, Louise didn’t think my personality had changed very much. She thought I just had a better understanding of it.

            Even though my personality might have remained much the same, this experience made me appreciate the potential value of personality change, and the role of coaching in the process. Without Louise to guide me, it would have been difficult to decide what to try to change and how to go about it.

            After drafting this post, I contacted Sue, who now works as a psychologist, to check that it’s accurate. She said it was. She said her study was the first intervention study that explored whether personality could be intentionally changed, and commented that since then, there has been more exploration of this area, including by using apps. You can find her publications by searching Google Scholar for “Lesley Sue Martin personality”.

Me, but better

This experience with personality improvement stuck with me. Recently, I heard about a new book about personality change and quickly got hold of it. The author, Olga Khazan, is a US journalist who became interested in the topic and started writing about it. And what better way to connect theory and practice than by trying it out yourself?

            In her book Me, But Better, Khazan tells her readers about herself, her hang-ups, relationships and much else, in the course of one year in which she tried to improve on all five traits in the five-trait model. This wouldn’t be very interesting if she was already close to her ideal self, but — luckily for being able to describe a fascinating journey — there was much she wanted, indeed needed, to improve.

            First let me say that it’s not a good idea to follow her example by trying to change all facets of your personality over a year. It’s too much too quickly. For sustained change, it’s usually better to work on one trait at a time, cementing desirable new thoughts and behaviours over a long enough time so they become habitual, before trying to change another trait. Khazan’s major-personality-makeover approach is akin to crash dieting, which can produce impressive short-term results but is often followed by rebound weight gain. However, there’s one thing to be said for Khazan’s approach: it makes for a much more entertaining story than the slow-but-sure tortoise approach.

            In Me, But Better, we learn a lot about Khazan herself. She had severe anxiety and often behaved obnoxiously. She makes it obvious that she needed to address the traits of neuroticism and agreeableness. And not just for herself. Also for her boyfriend Rich, who she presents as amazingly loving and tolerant, and being willing to put up with her tirades. When she was upset, she verbally took it out on the nearest target: him.


Olga Khazan

            You may or may not be interested in Khazan’s personality transformation, but there’s another side to her book. Along the way she tells about research in the area in a most engaging way, by contacting leading figures in the field and describing their insights. She tells a bit about the history of beliefs about personality, and how it’s measured. The famous US psychologist William James helped solidify the belief that personality, after being established in early life, is fixed. Khazan tells how that belief gradually was whittled away, with personality-change research flourishing in recent years.

            She notes that the Myers-Briggs test, through which you are categorised as one of 16 personality types, is popular but has not been validated scientifically. I too took the Myers-Briggs test, decades ago, but it didn’t provide any guidance on improving, nor did I feel it captured who I was.

            Khazan devotes a chapter to each of the big-five traits, telling how she went about making changes. The basic technique is summed up in the slogan, “Fake it until you make it.” By behaving in the way you’d like to be, after a while — sometimes quite a while — you become a different person.

            I knew this already. As a child and through my teenage years, I was introverted and shy. Attending university, living on campus, opened me up. Being around extroverts can make a person more extroverted. But I also changed through conscious effort. Though it’s not my natural inclination, I’ve tried to initiate conversations with people I didn’t know, for example when sitting next to a stranger on the bus. Eventually I became comfortable doing this, and just needed to be careful not to intrude.

            Khazan, over the course of a year, sought to improve on all five traits, but she didn’t start out poor on all of them. She was high in conscientiousness. Instead of trying to become even higher, which might have taken her into obsessiveness, she recalled being a chronic procrastinator when she was younger. She wanted to become a journalist, and to achieve this, it’s vital to meet deadlines. So great was her desire to be a journalist that she became much more conscientious.

            Me, But Better is an engaging mix of personal anecdote and discussion of research findings. The book showcases evidence challenging the old idea that personality is fixed. Personality can be changed, though it takes time and effort, and it’s not easy to do it alone, without help. Reading Khazan’s book can provide inspiration for change. Khazan notes that some people don’t want to change — they prefer to remain disagreeable.

            Khazan writes, “The best personality-change interventions help people figure out what they want to change, tell them how to change, and remind them to continue changing.” That made me better appreciate my participation in Sue Martin’s research. Louise’s guidance helped me decide what to change and how to go about it.

            Is there a danger that by changing your personality, you will lose something vital about yourself? Khazan tackles this fear, in her case linked to a stereotype that creative geniuses are neurotic. If she reduced her usual levels of anxiety, would she become less creative? It’s reassuring to learn there’s little evidence behind the stereotype.

            On a more general level, personality change raises the threat that you will no longer be the same you. One response is to note that personality changes due to external causes, at any age. So why not take some control over the process and use it to become better at what you want to do and who you want to be? Whatever happens, your identity won’t disappear: you’ll still be you. At least that’s what Khazan indicates with her title, Me, But Better.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela and Suzzanne Gray for useful comments.

politics, social dynamics

What is it about identity?

Identity politics is a complex and challenging topic. How can we make sense of it?

For decades, I’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of war along with systems of domination like dictatorships and economic exploitation.

            Then, more recently, I started to hear more and more about identity politics, with a focus on interpersonal bias. What was it all about, and what made a person’s race, gender and sexuality so important? Well, of course, discrimination and oppression are important.

            I spent years on committees raising awareness about sexual harassment and learned about its damaging effects on targets, mostly women. But it isn’t obvious to me how prioritising one’s identity makes a difference to the problem of sexual harassment.

            Then there’s the issue of free speech. For decades, I’ve studied suppression of dissent. In the academic scene back in the 1980s, the most common targets were scholars on the left. I went out of my way to document the stories of a few right-leaning academics who came under attack. It seemed good sense to defend everyone’s right to free speech, even, or especially, those I disagreed with. A common commitment to dialogue and debate seems a good way to protect those with less power.

            But then there was a new development: cancel culture, in other words, censoring people because of their views. In many cases, the cancelling was directed at those with conservative views. The attacks were coming from the left. Or at least that’s according to media coverage. I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t see many cases up close. Meanwhile, I am in touch with whistleblowers, who continue to suffer reprisals. They speak up about corruption, which is seldom connected with identity politics.

            With this background, I tried to learn a little about the topic. With the help of friends, I came across some insightful books. I still don’t understand everything going on, but these books have helped.

            For each one, I start with a summary and then list a series of points that struck me as important. Most of this material is extracted from notes I took about each book just after I read it. The books are presented in chronological order of publication. Along the way, “politically correct” has been superseded by “woke.”

Jeff Sparrow, Trigger warnings: political correctness and the rise of the right (Melbourne: Scribe, 2018)

Sparrow provides an engaging analysis of political correctness (PC) and politics. As he writes, “This book is a polemic, a deliberate attempt to challenge conventional wisdom.” (p. 10) He argues that the right has deployed anti-PC rhetoric to its advantage. This is, he says, because so much of the left has abandoned direct action and mass participation. Instead, representatives of the left — occupying positions in politics, universities or culture — speak on behalf of the masses. Sparrow calls this “delegated politics.” And there’s something else. These left figures look down on the masses, attributing to them regressive attitudes towards women and minorities. Sparrow calls this “smug politics.”

            The main focuses here are the US and Australia, with a brief treatment of Britain and Brexit. The book proceeds as an account of developments in left and right politics in the US and Australia, covering topics familiar to anyone who has followed them over the years.

            For me, the most insightful sections are about how the right has adopted its own form of identity politics while castigating the left over PC. Sparrow’s main complaint is about how the left, in its weakness relying on delegated politics, has lost the orientation to building mass movements.

            He refers to the “delegated left” which speaks from a position of assumed ideological superiority, alienating those on the outside and preventing a more inclusive politics. Sparrow is no friend of the right but wants to understand how right populism has become so successful.


Jeff Sparrow

  • Progressives in the US supported “science” but then sometimes equated “technical expertise with political expertise — to imply that social issues had already been scientifically settled — and that anyone who disagreed was, by definition, an illiterate or a fool.” When progressives couldn’t influence society, they blamed people for being stupid. (101)
  • Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and US president Barack Obama didn’t recognise the importance of rage in the culture-war dynamics. The right was able to channel people’s feelings that their lives were coming apart into anger at cultural elites and support for candidates backing neoliberalism, which damaged traditional cultural ties, completing the circle. (113-114)
  • “Advocates of delegated politics presented identity as a fixed category, a basis for political organising. They claimed that race, gender, sexuality, and other ‘identities’ correlated with particular political ideas, attitudes, and demands that wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t be embraced by those without the lived experience of that identity.” (132)
  • Identity politics became the left’s conventional wisdom, with social change seen as coming from “wealthy and powerful figures serving as a proxy for the dispossessed.” Just when economic divisions among the oppressed were so great, the left couldn’t recognise them. (151)
  • Change agents were expected to admit their privileges before doing anything to address social problems. Privilege-checking could be endless, postponing activism and solidarity. The focus on microaggressions implied oppression resulted from individuals rather than social structures. “Intersectionality might, then, have been intended as a radical critique of identity politics, but in practice it reinterpreted identity in an even more paralysing fashion.” (159-162)
  • Call-out culture, in which activists mount campaigns over minor transgressions, often operated using social media, was a result of and contributed to the left’s marginality, in which it lacked the connection with mass struggles against which concerns could be assessed. (163-164)
  • Trigger warnings and safe spaces reflected a concern about inflaming trauma that made mass campaigns problematic: campaigns provoked bigots, whose reactions might be psychologically damaging. Therefore, only well-prepared elites were in a position to lead progressive politics. (175-176)
  • The Global Justice Movement and the Occupy movement were direct-action, participatory movements, but were not greeted with enthusiasm by the delegated-politics left, which was oriented to representation. Strikes are participatory, but are treated as a threat by those committed to representative models, because they challenge the authority of elected leaders. (230-231)
  • “For if ‘democracy’ was taken to mean representation, it was entirely democratic to prevent the sexist, racist, and homophobic masses from interfering with progressive politicians.” (234)

Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The rise of victimhood culture: microaggressions, safe spaces, and the new culture wars (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)

Campbell and Manning describe three cultures: honour, dignity and victimhood. In an honour culture, status is associated with physical bravery, personal reputation is highly important, and insults can lead to personal retribution. In a dignity culture, public reputation is less important, and people are less likely to take offence. In a victimhood culture, people are highly sensitive to insults and emphasise their victim role.

            Each culture is characteristic of particular social conditions. Victimhood culture emerged in elite US campuses and spread beyond. It arises when status differences are small, equality is prized, and appeals can be made to authorities. The social conditions for victimhood culture overlap with some aspects of honour and dignity cultures.

            Campbell and Manning provide many examples, trying to be neutral observers, noting that what seems sensible within one culture can seem harmful or ridiculous to those immersed in another. Their analysis serves as a criticism of victimhood culture, though they have a whole chapter defending a particular approach that separates sociology from pursuing social justice. This is a valuable study to help understand what’s happening in a range of domains and on various issues.


Bradley Campbell

  • Victimhood is a moral status based on suffering/need, treated as a virtue, so privilege is, in contrast, a vice. Saying “check your privilege” is like honour-culture shaming of cowards. (22-23)
  • Microaggression complaints involve going to authorities. Calling actions “aggression” makes them seem worse than “merely rude, awkward, or ignorant”, and as part of systematic oppression. This labelling is used to win over third parties. (47)
  • The social conditions for microaggression complaints are the same as victimhood culture generally: egalitarianism (also in hunter-gatherer societies), reliance on third parties (also in repressive regimes), minorities resenting slights (common but, in many situations, nothing can be done about them). Also relevant: weak ties. In universities, students see themselves as social equals, and live under the aegis of bureaucratic authorities. (65)
  • Victimhood culture’s interpretation of harm is so expansive as to be incomprehensible to many others, while those immersed in victimhood culture can’t understand other perspectives. “Not only is everything that is harmful and oppressive bad, but everything bad is harmful and oppressive.” (95)
  • “Calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces are as much of an aspect of victimhood culture as are microaggression complaints. They too evince a strong tendency to emphasize victimization and to rely on third parties. Their success illustrates a tendency to defer to victims, to accept their definition of the situation, and to privilege their requests. And they are part and parcel of a language of victimhood that exaggerates harm and emphasizes vulnerability. Words and images are violence, disagreement is a threat, and some victimized groups need special protection from it all.” (97)
  • A “purity spiral” involves infighting between activists and victim groups, as a small minority seeks to be holier than thou, displaying zealotry and condemning or expelling deviants for ever-more-minor transgressions, while most others go along with it for fear of becoming targets themselves. (168)
  • Few cultures value free speech, but victimhood culture is especially hostile to it, blurring the difference between speech and violence, scrutinising all forms of speech (far more than honour culture) and seeking retribution against anyone who causes offence. (216)
  • In victimhood culture and honour culture, there is high sensitivity to slights, but in honour culture individuals deal with it themselves whereas in victimhood culture there is appeal to authorities. However, when campus authorities refuse to act, student activists may try to prevent speakers from speaking. (229)


Jason Manning

Olúfémi O. Táíwò, Elite capture: how the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else) (London: Pluto Press, 2022).

This fascinating analysis of identity politics proceeds in a rather indirect way, by developing the concept of elite capture. This involves segments of a challenging group being brought into a privileged position, leaving the structure of oppression unchanged. Táíwò uses the concept of “rooms” in which discussions occur. Only some people are in rooms for the relatively privileged, and deference to representatives of marginalised groups (“deference politics”) in these rooms is a distraction from the more important task of challenging injustice outside, beyond these rooms. In other words, identity politics can get in the way of joining together, with all resources, to develop strategies against the major problems in the world.

            Táíwò draws heavily on Amílcar Cabral, Lilica Boal, Paulo Freire and a few other activist-writers, and devotes much space to racism and related politics. Part of the book is about the exploitation of poor countries, including structural adjustment programmes and their successors, and challenges to this exploitation.

            Elite Capture is short and hard-hitting, yet restrained in its careful intellectual exposition. Táíwò argues in favour of constructive politics, of building the alternative.


Olúfémi Táíwò

  • “We should respond to the problems of elite capture, and the racial capitalism that enables it, not with deference politics but with constructive politics. A constructive approach would focus on outcome over process: the pursuit of specific goals or results, rather than mere avoidance of ‘complicity’ in injustice or promotion of purely moral or aesthetic principles.” (12)
  • Value capture is the process of stripping the full complexity of values down to a simplified version that serves particular purposes and interests, such as capitalism stripping human values down to profit. Other examples are the gig economy and social media’s use of likes. These simplified metrics can overshadow other values such as pride in one’s work. (52-53)
  • “A prime example of deference politics is the call to ‘listen to the most affected’ or ‘center the most marginalized,’ now ubiquitous in many academic and activist circles.” Doing this means giving authority/attention to whoever is in the room that fits the designated category, regardless of their experience or knowledge. Most of the politics of deference occurs among elites in “classrooms, boardrooms, political parties.” It doesn’t address the bigger problems outside these arenas. “This discourse … directs what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.” (70-72)
  • Constructive politics focuses on goals and results, and less on “complicity” in injustices. “If it’s ‘epistemology’ or knowledge practices we’re concerned about, then a constructive politics focuses on institutions and practices of information gathering that are strategically useful for challenging social injustices themselves, not just the symptoms manifest in the room we happen to be in today.” “In general, a constructive politics is one that engages directly in the task of redistributing social resources and power, rather than pursuing intermediary goals cashed out in symbols.” (84)
  • The crucial issue is how work in groups relates to wider struggles; the operation of groups is important but not the only thing. (107)
  • Pain is a poor teacher. “Oppression is not a prep school.” Deference politics asks too much of the traumatised, putting them on a pedestal and hiding below. (120)

Susan Neiman, Left is not woke (Cambridge: Polity, 2023)

Neiman, a philosopher, challenges the assumption that if you’re on the left politically you must be woke, and that if you’re woke you must be on the left. She does this by examining three ideas that have underpinned the left for more than two centuries: committing to universalism (international solidarity), distinguishing power and justice, and believing in the possibility of progress. Wokeism rejects or neglects each of these and hence departs from the left tradition.

Neiman highlights two intellectual figures whose ideas have been used to sabotage left views about justice and progress: philosopher Michel Foucault and political theorist Carl Schmitt. They saw life as a struggle rather than pursuing a common cause. Neiman counters woke critics who suggest or allege that the Enlightenment should be rejected as an imperialistic European export. Left is not Woke is a sophisticated critique of the tribal side of woke politics, the assumption that identity trumps humanity.

            The introduction offers examples of woke politics and its shortcomings. The next three chapters are more analytical and theoretical, though breezy compared to much writing on these topics. The final chapter is a passionate plea to continue the struggle and not succumb to despair and cynicism. Overall, this is a potent intellectual counter to identity politics.


Susan Neiman

  • Being a victim used to be stigmatising but now has become a claim to authority. (16)
  • Being a victim may enable understanding but doesn’t necessarily do so, so it shouldn’t be an automatic source of authority. “I’d prefer we return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you’ve done to the world, not what the world did to you.” (19)
  • White support for Black Lives Matter was through “a common commitment to universal justice”, not being an “ally.” “To divide members of a movement into allies and others undermines the bases of deep solidarity, and destroys what standing left means.” (31)
  • The capacity to reason is a tool against elite-based authority, in that everyone can think for themselves. Enlightenment thinkers didn’t want limits on thinking imposed by authorities. (67-68)
  • “We’ve long known that the personal is political, but when only the personal is political, we have given up hope. Changing your pronouns may feel like radical change, but the vehemence of woke arguments about the importance of pronouns is the expression of people who fear they have little power to change anything else.” (140)
  • There’s a search for general explanations for how the world works, leading to ideologies. “The dominant contemporary ideologies combine to create a fraudulent universalism which reduces all the complexity of human desire to a lust for wealth and power.” (141)
  • Neiman writes, “about progressive abandonment of three principles essential to the left: commitments to universalism, a hard distinction between justice and power, and the possibility of progress.” (142)

Yascha Mounk, The identity trap: a story of ideas and power in our time (Allen Lane, 2023; Penguin, 2024)

The Identity Trap is a powerful critique of identity politics and a defence of universal values. Mounk doesn’t like the term “identity politics” and instead refers to the “identity synthesis.” It is a sprawling collection of ideas. Mounk pins it down to seven main themes: scepticism about objective truth; the use of discourse analysis for political purposes; an intensive emphasis on identity; pessimism about progress through conventional means; laws sensitive to identity; intersectionality as an imperative; and standpoint epistemology. Mounk explains each of these with examples.

            The Identity Trap is a comprehensive analysis of the problem of identity as a basis for social progress. Mounk traces the origin of the identity synthesis, analyses the factors that enabled its rapid rise, acknowledges the value of the motives behind it — and then turns to critique. He starts with the intellectual origins of the synthesis, for example the original idea of intersectionality. According to Mounk, identity advocates took these ideas and turned them into something more far-reaching, something so radical that the original theorists don’t go along with it.

            Mounk argues that the identity synthesis, by rejecting universal values, has become counterproductive to its own goals. For example, identity advocates encourage people to think of themselves in terms of their group identities, specifically race, gender and sexuality. This is in the US. Strangely, other identities aren’t emphasised, indeed seldom mentioned, notably social class, also nationality. Not only are Black children encouraged to think of themselves in terms of Blackness, but the ideology has gone so far as to encourage white people to think of themselves in terms of whiteness. Mounk says this hinders the human solidarity needed for social progress.

            Mounk endorses liberalism in the sense of a belief in universal values. He concludes his book with suggestions for avoiding the identity trap.


Yascha Mounk

  • The left historically has been committed to universalistic principles, to overcome oppression. But this commitment has changed in recent decades. (9)
  • The identity synthesis is a lure, promising to oppose injustice. Its ideas attract intelligent people with good intentions. Yet it subverts its own goals. (16)
  • The origin of the identity synthesis was in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, when Foucault and other postmodernists rejected grand narratives, became sceptical of objective truth and universal values, and argued that discourses were key to social control (rather than top-down control). (36-37)
  • The US left increasingly focused on oppression associated with race, gender and sexuality, especially after the collapse of state socialism. This new orientation began transforming campus intellectual life, including with the rise of units examining identity. The identity synthesis grew out of influences from postmodernism, postcolonialism and critical race theory. (75-76)
  • Intersectionality came to be used as a way to coerce activists to subscribe to the orthodoxy on a range of issues. (87)
  • Social media enabled the popularisation of a degraded version of the identity synthesis, by letting young people play with identity labels. Social media enabled identity groups to be information targets, and legacy media joined in, eventually affecting much of the US white, highly educated population. (96)
  • The identity synthesis entered the corporate sector, with diversity trainings, due to top companies recruiting students from elite universities steeped in the synthesis, spreading then to other companies. (107-110)
  • After Trump’s election in 2016, some activists, frustrated by not removing him from office, turned their attention towards other activists. Peer pressure can be oppressive; dissenters are needed to prevent dysfunction, but after Trump’s election, and the sense of external threat, dissenters were treated as traitors. (125-126)
  • Standpoint feminist ideas were popularised into three claims: oppressed groups share significant experiences; experience of oppression gives unique insights; and these experiences can’t be adequately communicated to outsiders. Standpoint feminists don’t necessarily accept these claims. A fourth claim is that members of dominant groups should defer to members of oppressed groups. Contrary to this, it’s not obvious who speaks on behalf of oppressed groups, and solidarity can be built through listening and empathising. (145-146)
  • When progressives censor ideas unwelcome in venues they control, they legitimise censorship in other arenas, including of their own ideas. (172)

Musa al-Gharbi, We have never been woke: the cultural contradictions of a new elite (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024)

Al-Gharbi analyses a group in the US that he calls “symbolic capitalists.” These individuals don’t do manual labour, but rather rely solely on their minds to make a living. They include academics, journalists, lawyers and managers, among others. They sit between the ruling class and the working class. Others have called them the new class or the professional-managerial class, among other names, and there have been debates among Marxists and sociologists about whether this group constitutes a class. By calling them symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi emphasises how they use their intellectual skills as a resource to gain economic and reputational returns. In the US, many symbolic capitalists are comparatively well off and/or high status.

            The curious thing about symbolic capitalists is that, while being privileged, they espouse social justice, aligning themselves with those subject to prejudice and degradation. But, al-Gharbi argues, this operates only at a rhetorical level. In terms of political practice, as a group they do little to change the system, meaning they do little that might compromise their own privilege.

            Symbolic capitalists are keen on identity issues, especially gender, race and sexuality. They are keen on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which bring some women and minorities into their ranks. What this doesn’t do is change the economic circumstances of the bulk of the population.

            Al-Gharbi argues that by endorsing progressive views on gender, race and sexuality, symbolic capitalists serve their own interests, by positioning themselves as superior to the unenlightened masses and, more importantly, to other symbolic capitalists, who can be condemned as prejudiced. He examines US history and finds periodic surges of similar alarm about prejudice.

            Not only do symbolic capitalists see themselves as allies of downtrodden groups. Many of them see themselves as members of these groups. Al-Gharbi says symbolic capitalists are disproportionately white, highly educated, and heterosexual in behaviour, yet ever more are identifying as non-white, LGBTIQ and disabled.

            These claims about intellectual workers are sweeping, and if there’s any limitation to al-Gharbi’s analysis, it’s that he makes generalisations about symbolic capitalists. But, as he accepts throughout, he is one of them himself, part of the group whose actions he analyses.

            As al-Gharbi analyses it, identity politics is a preoccupation of symbolic capitalists, but not of much concern among other sectors of the population. In the US, symbolic capitalists have found a home in the Democratic Party, where they have gradually set the agenda for the party, focusing on identity issues, not on economic inequality. This has alienated ever more poor, white, working-class voters, causing some to switch to the Republicans, which seems inexplicable to symbolic capitalists.

            Al-Gharbi explicitly says he is not making any recommendations. He simply offers his analysis. We Have Never Been Woke is massively referenced and draws on a range of theoretical perspectives, especially the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu. It’s the sort of book that only another symbolic capitalist would want to read — and that is the prime target audience.


Musa al-Gharbi

  • Symbolic capitalists participate in activities that sustain inequalities, despite their rhetoric of support for causes. Woke causes are fine, but symbolic capitalists have never been woke. They have just believed they were. (20)
  • If symbolic capitalists are seen as selfish, their interests are compromised. This leads to status competition within symbolic professions over who is the most committed to the oppressed, with those not seen as being committed becoming vulnerable. (66)
  • “Symbolic capitalists love intermediaries like Uber, Grubhub, and Amazon precisely because they carry out the requisite exploitation to enable symbolic capitalists’ idiosyncratic preferences and lifestyles, but they also help create a ‘distance’ between symbolic capitalists and the workers exploited on their behalf.” (155)
  • Woke companies are radical in their words, not their deeds. They do this to attract the right sorts of workers and appeal to their customers: “… business leaders and corporations try to demonstrate that they share symbolic capitalists’ values and politics.” (213)
  • Symbolic capitalists favour social justice compatible with meritocracy. This maintains hierarchy, while enabling minorities to become elites. (216)
  • Identities that were previously stigmatised can become holders of “totemic capital,” gaining opportunities, moral authority, self-worth, and perceptions of greater merit. “In an ostensibly meritocratic system — where prestige, opportunities, and compensation are supposed to be afforded on the grounds of merit — people therefore have a strong incentive to present themselves as disadvantaged.” (251)
  • “Conspicuous antiracism, feminism, and so on have become status markers among urban, highly educated elites …” Acknowledging one’s privilege signals one’s status and hardly ever includes efforts to reduce one’s privilege. (271)
  • “… the attitudes and dispositions associated with ‘wokeness’ are primarily embraced by symbolic capitalists. Wokeness does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviors in any meaningful sense. Instead, ‘social justice’ discourse seems to be mobilized by contemporary elites to help legitimize and obscure inequalities, to signal and reinforce their elite status, or to tear down rivals — often at the expense of those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.” (296)

Conclusion

There’s a lot of material in these books, much more than outlined here, with many different pieces of evidence and arguments. I don’t pretend to understand the nuances, but there seem to be a few commonalities. These authors are critical of identity politics in one way or another while being sympathetic to the goals of identity campaigners: they are opposed to racism, sexual and gender discrimination, and other forms of oppression. Thus, they might be considered sympathetic critics.

            They differ in their prescriptions for change. The question is how to pursue social justice. One theme is support for universal values, values that apply to all humans, without distinction.

            One of the areas motivating my interest in this area is free speech, including openness to dissenting ideas. From what I can tell, a focus on identity sometimes offers a pretext for censorship, but only for censorship for those on the other side. This is contrary to everything I’ve learned about how to defend free speech.

            Another area is sexual harassment. Gender is a key issue in identity politics. Yet despite the salience of gender in identity debates, pro and con, I’ve yet to see anything that helps in a practical sense in preventing, discouraging or dealing with sexual harassment. I doubt it would help to call it gender harassment.

            Finally, the problem of war. Is there anything in what Mounk calls the identity synthesis that helps challenge the war system? Or is there anything in the critiques of the identity synthesis that assists? If so, I haven’t seen it.

            Actually, there is one identity highly relevant to the problem of war: national identity. In wartime, nationality becomes an obsession. People are expected to support their leaders and troops, and enemies are stigmatised. They are foreigners, loyal to another state, to another set of rulers. Nationalism is linked to war preparations and warfighting, so perhaps, in this sense, identity is a big part of the problem. Yet with all the focus on race, gender and sexuality, nationality seems to be forgotten.

            For those concerned about war, and about other big issues like genocide and climate change, it could be that identity struggles are more a distraction than a help.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Jungmin Choi, Marina Granato, Olga Kuchinskaya, Julia LeMonde and Erin Twyford for useful comments.

economics, politics

The rich get richer

A new book explains how the rich organised to get their way.

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in Britain, heralding a shift to right-wing politics. One of her notorious accomplishments was taking on the trade unions. In an extended struggle, workers’ organisations were crushed, along with the workers. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected US president and set about a similar path, taking on the airline pilots and winning. These administrations are normally seen as exemplars of a new approach called neoliberalism, hollowing out government regulation and unleashing corporate power.

            That’s the story I’ve heard for a long time, taking it for granted — until reading a new book by David Gibbs, Revolt of the Rich. Gibbs, an historian at the University of Arizona, studied vast numbers of primary documents, including manuscript collections, online archives, document collections, and memoirs. He arrived at a different assessment about the politics of this period.

            Gibbs focused on the 1970s, a turbulent period in US history, and concluded that the most significant changes occurred during the administrations of Richard Nixon (1969–1974), Gerald Ford (1974-1977) and especially Jimmy Carter (1977–1981). Including Carter seems almost sacrilegious. Normally, Republicans are seen as the party of business. Carter was a Democrat, the party of the workers, or at least of unions, and subsequent to his single term as president, he supported a range of progressive causes. However, Gibbs targets Carter as a key figure in the “revolt of the rich.”


Jimmy Carter

Background

Let’s go back a few decades, to the 1930s. This was the time of the Great Depression, and in 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected US president. Under his four administrations, and as a result of popular pressure, the government took responsibility for promoting full employment, regulating the economy, and introducing a universal pension scheme (called Social Security). This was called the New Deal.

            Gibbs calls the arrangements set in place in the 1930s the “class compromise.” It was a compromise between the interests of employers and workers, so that each received a “fair” return from their contributions to economic productivity. Corporate elites mostly went along with this. Although their power was somewhat curtailed, the US economy began growing steadily, guaranteeing regular profits. It seemed like a win-win arrangement, and many corporate leaders were committed to it.

            This all came unstuck in the 1970s. Profits declined, and inflation devalued assets held by the wealthy. Behind the scenes, some businesses supported a campaign to reduce government controls on business, aided by a group of free-market economists linked to the Mont Pèlerin Society.

Finally, Nixon was committed to a conservative economic agenda. Gerald Ford continued it and, perhaps surprisingly, so did Carter. Gibbs takes special aim at Carter for completing the unravelling of the US class compromise. In its place, the rich took control.

            Since then, the rich have taken an increasing percentage of the economic pie. In 1970, the richest 1% received less than 10% of national income. In the next few decades, this increased to more than 20%, while the wages of ordinary workers stagnated.

            Gibbs provides a careful and detailed analysis of how this happened. Along the way, he offers quite a few observations that require a rethinking of conventional wisdom.

            In the usual way of economic thinking, then and now, inflation is seen as a significant problem, and central banks see it as a priority to bring down inflation when it’s too high. Gibbs says high inflation is a special threat to the wealthy, because it devalues their assets. In contrast, most ordinary workers are not so greatly affected, because typically wage rises compensate for increased costs. Gibbs’ analysis has changed how I think about the continual obsession with controlling inflation.

            In 1973, the cartel of international oil producers called OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia, dramatically raised the price of oil, causing massive economic disruption in oil-importing countries, including the US.

The “oil shock” is usually seen as completely out of the control of the importers, but Gibbs provides evidence that the US government was complicit in it. The Saudi government signalled to the Nixon administration a willingness to limit OPEC price increases, but this initiative was spurned. The reason? The Shah of Iran was a special US ally, and US corporations benefited from the Shah’s purchases of weapons. Also, oil company profits increased.

A planned revolt

According to Gibbs, the shift to the right initiated in the 1970s was not a natural consequence of economic challenges for which there was no alternative. Instead, there was a strong push for the changes, mostly out of sight. It included economists, notably Milton Friedman, who provided a rationale for “freeing the economy” from government control. It included expanded funding for thinktanks that tried to influence policy and the media. It included efforts to change public opinion. Corporate leaders still committed to the class compromise gradually came on board.


Milton Friedman

            An important part of the operation was forging a coalition. Right-wing operatives sought to bring new constituencies into their orbit. One of them was evangelical Christians, who became a new power bloc. There was no automatic connection between Christian doctrine and economic policy; building links was a political task and achievement.

            The shift to the right also involved foreign policy. The 1970s were during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was seen as the main military and political rival to the US. During the 1970s, businesses pushed for arms expenditures and anti-Communist intellectuals argued to end the policy of détente — mutual accommodation between the US and Soviet governments — and replace it with confrontation.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 provided a rationale for this switch though, according to Gibbs, Afghanistan had little strategic significance. In the process of militarisation of US foreign policy, the arms business and anti-Communist intellectuals were brought into the conservative movement.

            At various times during the 1970s, making changes that benefited the rich seemed necessary to stabilise the economy, prevent recession or otherwise stave off disaster. Gibbs argues that there were alternatives. These included taxing the wealthy, cutting military expenditure, and letting moderate levels of inflation continue. None of these were seriously considered.

Social movements

In most thinking about the 1960s in the US, the focus of attention is the rise of new social movements: students, feminists, environmentalists and others. These were movements challenging systems of power, and challenging them from below.

Gibbs redirects attention to a very different sort of social movement, one serving the rich, backed by wealthy interests, and operating not in the streets but mainly behind the scenes. According to Gibbs, this right-wing movement was crucially important in permanently changing the distribution of wealth and political power in the country, yet it was and remains far less well known. He calls it “one of the most orchestrated, carefully planned, and well-financed political campaigns in history” (p. 78).

            There were several reasons why this right-wing mobilisation was so effective. It was backed by wealthy interests and used a process called fusionism to bring together diverse groups, including businesses, politicians, intellectuals, arms manufacturers and evangelical Christians. The leaders of right-wing movement were good at strategy: they learned from their mistakes. And it was met with little resistance.

            The US left at the time was fractured, focused on several different issues, and not organised to defend collective interests. From the point of view of power-holders, this sounds like the old method of divide and rule, largely self-inflicted.

“The most noteworthy characteristic of social movements during the 1970s was the lack of strategic vision or long-term planning or any recognition that these things were even important. While the New Right and its corporate/evangelical allies were pursuing fusion in their quest to undermine the class compromise, their opponents on the left were moving in the opposite direction, dividing themselves into multiple factions that were unable to present a common front in defense of their collective interests.” (p. 97)

Whether or not you agree with Gibbs’ assessment of US politics in the 1970s, his analysis shows the value of re-examining the past and questioning conventional ideas. The rise of the right in the US is commonly attributed to the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who took office in 1981, succeeding Carter.


Ronald Reagan

Yet Gibbs suggests Reagan received most of the credit for the rightward shift due to his political style, and that Reagan cemented what Carter had started. Gibbs sums up:

“The United States experienced an extended episode of social, economic, and international crises in the 1970s, which were finally resolved during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. The end result of these crises was a redistribution of wealth and income favoring the wealthy classes, combined with renewed use of military power projection overseas. The decade produced a fundamental shift away from the regulated capitalism associated with the New Deal toward a new order of laissez-faire.” (p. 198)


David N. Gibbs

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Anu Bissoonauth-Bedford and Suzzanne Gray for helpful comments.

education

Controversy as a teaching tool

Students like learning about controversies, but there are some traps.

Decades ago, in my first year of full-time university teaching, I taught “The environmental context,” which was about the social aspects of environmental issues. Some students in the class were doing an environmental science degree; others were doing an arts degree. To appeal to both sorts of students, I built the class around several controversial topics with both scientific and social dimensions.

            One of them was nuclear power. I was an opponent, and so were nearly all the students. To challenge them, one week I invited an experienced figure from the Australian Atomic Energy Commission to give a pro-nuclear guest presentation. Several of the students tried to challenge him, but they could hardly dent his arguments.

            From this experience, I learned several things. One was that controversial topics gain students’ interest. Conflict is well known to stimulate interest. Because conflict attracts audiences, it is one of the “news values” journalists and editors use to decide what is newsworthy. In this respect, students are just another sort of audience.

            But there was a problem with nuclear power as a topic. Most of the students already knew they were opposed to it. The trouble was they felt they didn’t need to do anything further once they knew which side of the controversy they supported. They hadn’t studied pro-nuclear arguments, so the pro-nuclear speaker out-argued them.

            I watched this with some amusement. To develop rebuttals to pro-nuclear arguments, I had studied them in depth. I could readily see possible challenges to our visiting speaker, but kept quiet, which worked out well. The students learned a lesson.

            There was another problem. Many students try to figure out their teacher’s viewpoint. When doing assignments, they say what they think their teacher wants to hear. This is instrumental behaviour to get better grades. The trouble was that they knew I was anti-nuclear, so that’s the perspective most of them took in their assignments.

            I told them that if they wanted to support their views effectively, they needed to study the views of opponents. But few took this to heart. It’s pretty hard to spend hours poring over views you disagree with. It’s well documented that most people prefer to read about views that reinforce their own.

            To counter this, in a later year I introduced a different sort of controversial issue: fluoridation, the process of adding the element fluoride to public water supplies to reduce tooth decay in children. At the time, Australia was highly fluoridated but there was little attention to the issue. The students were in a quandary. They knew the official line: fluoridation was good. But they weren’t sure what an environmental perspective might be.

            Several of them tried to figure out my view, namely whether I was pro or antifluoride. I told them I didn’t have a strong view — I was just studying the debate. That was true, and conveniently it meant students couldn’t decide how to please me, their teacher, by adopting my view. Because the students didn’t all agree with each other, we had some stimulating discussions in class.

            Years later, I taught a class titled “Scientific and technological controversy.” I found a good way to stimulate student interest. They worked in groups to investigate controversies. They could choose who to work with, and each group chose what controversy to study. This general approach worked well in other classes, including ones where disagreements were not so salient.

Marking

I’ve always wanted to treat students fairly, but it’s not easy to avoid bias. When marking assignments, my judgement could be unconsciously influenced when I knew whose essay I was marking. I found a good way to counter this. I asked the students to put their student numbers on their essays but not their names. After marking all the essays, I could match each one to the student’s name.

            There remained a different problem. If students thought they knew what I wanted to hear — for example, being anti-nuclear — they might adapt their assignments accordingly. Some of them told me they did this in other classes. The solution was to get someone else to mark their assignments, such as a different tutor in the same class.

            One problem remained for which there was no obvious solution. On many controversial topics, there is a dominant perspective and a dissident perspective. Examples include fluoridation and vaccination. Few students will take the risk of supporting the dissident perspective unless they know whoever marks their assignments will be sympathetic to it.

Goals

Thinking about what students should learn about controversies raises a more general issue: what should anyone know about controversies? Time is limited, and it’s impossible to study lots of controversies in depth. Even to get to the bottom of a single one requires a major effort. What can be done?

            Some people take a shortcut. They adopt the position of authorities or the groups with the most power and influence. This makes sense in many cases. For example, is the universe expanding? Nearly all cosmologists say so, so why not believe them? But it can be useful to know that there are a few dissidents, ones with credentials and publications and university positions. One option is to accept the standard position but be open to being wrong.

            Whether the universe is expanding is contested mainly within scientific circles, and has little relevance to everyday life. It’s different with issues like climate change, abortion, nuclear power, euthanasia, GMOs and vaccination. These have obvious social, political and health implications. They raise ethical concerns.

            In each of such issues, there is evidence on each side, and sometimes there are multiple “sides.” But there is something extra. Many of those involved have a stake in the outcome. Sometimes it’s jobs and funding. Almost always, it involves status. And it involves psychological commitment. If you’ve been campaigning for or against fluoridation for years, it’s hard to admit you’ve been wrong.

            There’s so much to learn about controversies. Studying them is one way to do it. Another is to get involved, taking a side and trying to engage with those on the other side. If students ever do this, they’ll learn far more than from any class.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au
Publications on scientific and technological controversies

Thanks to Olga Kuchinskaya, Julia LeMonde, Alison Moore and Erin Twyford for useful comments.

economics, health, politics, science

Covid control: a critical view

Remember the years of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020-23. Around the world, governments imposed lockdowns, recommended social distancing and handwashing, and mandated mask-wearing and vaccines. Were these measures justified. Were they beneficial?

            Views about Covid-control measures are highly polarised. The mainstream view, supported by most governments, health authorities and major media organisations, was that the control measures were essential to deal with the deadliest infectious virus in a century. From this point of view, those who protested against lockdowns, refused to wear masks and were not vaccinated were a threat to public health.

            In the early months of the pandemic, I was disturbed by commentators who said governments and health authorities should speak with one voice. Delving into the arguments about many other issues involving public health, it is not always obvious what position is “scientific”. I thought of nuclear power, fluoridation, pesticides, vaccination and nuclear war, which I had studied in some depth. A key feature of the debates on all these issues is that they are not just about science, but also involve ethical, political and economic dimensions.

            Yet during Covid, we were repeatedly advised to “follow the science”, as if science is a single entity, indisputable and the only thing to be considered. What if “the science” is questionable? What if important human values are at stake?

Polarisation

There was something else peculiar about clashes over Covid-control measures. Opponents were often assumed to be right-wing lunatics, to be dismissed along with President Trump and his suggestion to use bleach. This was strange. Traditionally, those on the political left are critical of capital, of multinational corporations, yet suddenly they were backing vaccination mandates, which enriched several highly profitable pharmaceutical companies.

            I was surprised not to see more figures identified with the left, or with “progressive” political stances, being critical of lockdowns and vaccination mandates. Perhaps I wasn’t looking hard enough, because recently I discovered an impressive book by two scholars, self-identifying with the left, who offer a devastating critique of the mainstream response to the pandemic. The book is The Covid Consensus, written by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi, each having extensive scholarly CVs. Here I’ll spell out some of their arguments, not as an endorsement but to highlight important arguments that have been absent from most coverage of Covid politics.

WHO’s advice

Covid came to world attention early in 2020. Several experts in the spread of infectious diseases, notably British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson, forecast that this new virus was deadly, potentially with a high death rate. The virus emerged in China, and soon the Chinese government imposed draconian controls, locking down part of the city of Wuhan. Governments around the world copied the Chinese response, going beyond it to impose national lockdowns. The World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic, and supported the lockdown response.

            Here’s the strange thing, pointed out by Green and Fazi. In 2019, before anyone knew about the coronavirus, WHO prepared recommendations for responding to pandemics, and advised against lockdowns. Why? Because there was no good evidence that they worked to contain spread of the pathogen, and they had serious impacts on people’s lives. Yet within a few months, WHO basically forgot its own advice and got on board with government responses, with Chinese government impositions as the model.

A curious consensus

Green and Fazi point out the incongruity of Western governments adopting the authoritarian Chinese approach. But perhaps it wasn’t all that strange, given trends towards more authoritarian controls in many countries.

            Note the title of Green and Fazi’s book: The Covid Consensus. The “consensus” they talk about is an apparent unanimity of opinion by government officials, health authorities and the mass media. That’s exactly what disturbed me too: not only the absence of debate, but the attempt to muzzle any dissent from orthodoxy.

            How did the virus originate? The official line was that it was a “natural” process, a bat virus that was adapted to humans via an intermediate host, at a wet market in Wuhan. The fact that Wuhan was the location of a laboratory where bat viruses were being genetically modified seemed suspicious, but somehow dismissed, labelled a conspiracy theory, though if the source of the coronavirus was an accidental release from a lab, there was no conspiracy about the origin, only about insisting on it being a natural process. It was more than insisting. Soon there was a campaign to discredit and censor the lab-leak theory. Green and Fazi give details, presenting this as a revealing example of the way any questioning of the Covid consensus was treated.

            While the dangers of Covid were hyped, it seemed little account was being taken of who was in danger. From the earliest months, evidence revealed that the elderly and those with other health problems were at heightened risk. This wasn’t just a slightly increased risk. The risk of dying for people over 80 was thousands of times as great as for children. To put it another way, Covid posed little danger to healthy children. Despite this demographic discrepancy, in most countries the standard measures taken against Covid were applied across the board. Children were locked down and given vaccines, just like their grandparents.

            However, Covid control measures did pose a risk. Schooling was disrupted, especially for those less advantaged. Being kept inside, away from friends, had a detrimental psychological effect. Rates of domestic violence soared. The economic consequences were severe, especially for those without secure employment and the possibility of working from home.

“In sum, the focus on a disease which overwhelmingly affected the elderly had caused the growth of serious medical conditions among the young. The young had been assaulted from all sides: politicians had decided to take a sledgehammer to their education, their economic futures, and their mental and physical health.” (p. 372)

            In looking at any public health measure, it only makes sense to consider both the benefits and the costs, in terms of lives and wellbeing. Yet in the panic about Covid, only one side of the ledger was considered important: the benefits of reducing Covid mortality and morbidity. The costs of control measures were hardly mentioned.

Dissent

Many medical professionals were uncomfortable with this. Prominent dissent was led by three distinguished scientists who promoted what was called the Great Barrington Declaration.

Its basic idea is simple. Protect the vulnerable — the old and health-compromised — but let the young and healthy continue their lives unhindered, allowing them to contract Covid, develop immunity and thereby be safe to visit and care for those at risk. But rather than this viewpoint being seen as a basis for discussion, the response was to try to discredit its authors and censor its proponents. This is just one example of the way that the “Covid consensus” — the view of most governments and health authorities — was, in practice, the “Covid dogma,” a belief system ruthlessly promoted and imposed.

            Green and Fazi provide detailed information about several other features of this belief system. It included mask mandates despite the lack of good evidence that masks worked against a viral disease like Covid. It included treating vaccines as saviours, despite arguments that mass vaccination had never before been able to control a pandemic.

Harms

However, the most serious feature of the Covid consensus was what it didn’t address: the harms caused by control measures. The lockdowns had a drastic effect on people around the world, and it is the “around the world” part where Green and Fazi’s account excels. Lockdowns caused damage to health and welfare in affluent countries, by limiting exercise, interrupting schooling, harming mental health and exacerbating economic inequality, but elsewhere the impacts were far worse. Green and Fazi give special attention to impacts in Africa, as well as India, South America and elsewhere.

            The Covid control measures were rolled out across the world with little concern for differences in demographics, health services and livelihoods. It was a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Having pressured African nations to follow a disastrous lockdown route which was contrary to the WHO’s own 2019 report on the need to balance economic factors in responding to a pandemic, the international community abjured itself of responsibility for the debt crisis that was produced.” (p. 333)

            Covid was not nearly as great a threat in Africa, because elderly people were a smaller proportion of the population. The younger cohorts were not at great risk from Covid itself, but were devastated by control measures. A large proportion of African people live from precarious work, and suddenly their livelihoods were trashed by lockdowns. Children who normally would have spent most of their time outdoors, and healthily so, were trapped inside for months, even years, with no opportunity for education, social interaction or play. Meanwhile, many parents relied on income from selling goods in open-air markets, and these were closed down, throwing them further into poverty. Overall, the impacts of Covid-control measures were devastating.

“It’s hard to make sense of so much destruction, throwing out of the window proclaimed policy priorities such as protecting the rights of women, girls, and children, reversing inequalities, and reducing poverty which had been the cornerstone of global health for several decades. Children locked up for months at a time without being allowed out in Angola. Medical facilities shredded to target a disease which isn’t even a major factor for most Africans. Futures destroyed. Debts accrued, making the prospect of climbing out of this awful cavern ever harder. All in the name of ‘global health’.” (p. 336)

Forgone options

As soon as the pandemic began, doctors began testing drugs that seemed promising as therapies. Several repurposed drugs, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, showed promise. These had been used for decades for other conditions, with an excellent safety profile. They were non-toxic, but there was a “problem”: they were non-expensive. Soon there was a campaign by health authorities to condemn these drugs and the doctors who prescribed them, a campaign supported by much of the mass media.

            Instead, individuals who contracted Covid were advised not to treat it at all, and to stay home until they needed hospital care. Green and Fazi note that this recommendation was unprecedented for responding to an infectious disease.

            Then there was vaccination, seen as salvation. Green and Fazi note that vaccination made sense for the elderly and unhealthy, for whom the benefits could outweigh the risks, but for young and healthy people, at little risk from Covid, the potential harms from Covid vaccines might be greater. Despite this huge disparity in benefit-risk profiles, vaccines were recommended for everyone, and often mandated, with serious consequences for those who refused, including loss of jobs.

Liberty

That the authoritarian Chinese government could impose lockdowns was perhaps not surprising. What was surprising is that governments elsewhere, including those with reputations for defending civil liberties, adopted the same repressive policies. In some countries, individuals were beaten or arrested for venturing outside during lockdowns. Protesters were met with a stiff police response.

            Free speech went by the wayside. Social media platforms took it on themselves, often with government encouragement, to censor those who challenged the official line. Some dissident scientists and doctors had their accounts closed suddenly.

            Green and Fazi propose several explanations for why the Covid consensus developed, including that it represented a continuation of political trends towards authoritarianism and that it accelerated the widening of economic inequality. Explaining the Covid consensus is not a problem for those who subscribe to it: for them, it is simply a matter of protecting health.

            Green and Fazi’s critique makes most sense as a comprehensive picture, which means it’s sort of like a gestalt switch, seeing things entirely differently. Consider features of the conventional view.

  • Covid poses an extraordinary threat to human lives.
  • Urgent steps need to be taken to deal with the threat.
  • The only viable path is to limit the spread of the coronavirus, through lockdowns, masking and social distancing, until vaccines are available.
  • Anyone who questions this view is a threat to human health.

Green and Fazi’s critique challenges every one of these features.

  • The threat from Covid was exaggerated.
  • There are other viable ways to respond to the threat, including repurposed medicines and targeted protection.
  • The adverse health impacts from lockdowns and vaccines are much greater than officially acknowledged.
  • Questioning of dominant viewpoints should be welcomed.

Green and Fazi repeatedly acknowledge that they are not experts in medical matters. Still, they cite a wide range of scientists and doctors to back up their arguments. (Their references are given in an online supplement to the book.)


Toby Green

            They provide a powerful case, but it has been largely ignored. Why? The obvious explanation is the very Covid consensus that they analyse. Dissidents are typically just ignored or, if they become too influential, attacked. I can only hope Green and Fazi’s perspective gains enough attention to warrant a careful reply.


Thomas Fazi

“Some things are clear: mechanisms of social control and coercion have increased, inequality has expanded enormously, and in that context China’s exemplar of an authoritarian capitalism that neoliberalism had also been constructing for many years looms uncomfortably nearby. The winners have been massive corporations and their managers, government spooks, political autocrats and their cheerleaders, and authoritarian monopoly capitalism — and there’s nothing much that’s progressive about that as far as we can see.” (p. 434)

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

See also:
“A Covid cure?”
“Who’s afraid of The Real Anthony Fauci?”

democracy, social dynamics

Life and luck

Our lives are shaped by chance events. This has wide ramifications.


Where I didn’t get a job

            In 1974, I was finishing my PhD thesis at Sydney University and applied for a lectureship in physics at Murdoch University, in Perth, which was taking its first students the next year. Bruce, the foundation professor of physics at Murdoch, visited Sydney and interviewed me. He thought he would be able to make two appointments, and he later told me that I was his #2 choice. But when Bruce got back to Perth, it turned out he was able to make only one appointment. Instead of moving to Perth and throwing myself into creating innovative physics curricula, I was to have a very different career. Was I lucky or unlucky?

            Much of our life is outside our control. It starts with birth. As is often said, no one chooses their parents. You might be lucky to be born into an affluent, loving family, or unlucky to be born into poverty and abuse.


Would you be lucky to be this baby?

            When you meet the love of your life, your closest friends and your work colleagues, luck seems to play a big role. It often boils down to what seem to be chance meetings, chance introductions, chance opportunities.

            Think of one of your best friends. What would it mean to have met them without chance being a factor? Maybe this would involve you searching databases, across many countries, to find the ideal person to be your friend. But then you’d probably need to move far away to be with them or spend a lot of time online with them. Would they be receptive? Usually, it’s far easier to make friends with people you just happen to meet.

            Then there’s tragedy, for example a terrible car crash. I’ve heard people say, regarding a serious accident, “If only I hadn’t decided to go out that night.” Seldom do they say, “If only I had gone through that intersection ten seconds later.” A few seconds can make all the difference.

            If these sorts of thoughts interest you, there’s far more in The Random Factor by social scientist Mark Rank. He provides so many examples that you might wonder whether anything isn’t due to chance. Consider the solar system. If the earth had been a bit hotter or colder, or with a different chemical composition, life might not have developed. Rank tells of the asteroid that collided with the earth 66 million years ago, a massive catastrophe wiping out the dinosaurs and enabling mammals to proliferate. If the asteroid had missed the earth, or even just impacted in a different location, humans might never have emerged.

            Next, there’s birth. The creation of a new human is an amazing process of combining genetic materials from parents, and the result is fairly random unless you’re a test-tube baby. There are also numerous sources of randomness for each of us after birth. How you develop depends on the people around you, parents and others, and chance occurrences such as what teachers you have and what country you live in.

            In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of nuclear weapons were tested, spewing tonnes of plutonium into the atmosphere. If you happen to breathe in a microgram of insoluble plutonium oxide, you might end up with lung cancer. Bad luck!

            In some spiritual traditions, events are preordained, so what seem to be chance events are planned at some level. Perhaps past, present and future are fixed and we are just moving through the universe. Rank, however, adopts a scientific worldview in which randomness is a fundamental feature of reality.

            Random events that affect other people can also affect you. Hitler applied to attend art school but was rejected. It was a near thing. If he had been accepted, there might not have been Nazi rule in Germany, World War II or the Holocaust. Blame it on the art school!


What if Hitler had succeeded in his art career?

            In October 1962, the world came close to global nuclear war. The governments of the US and the Soviet Union clashed over Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Rank describes several crucial decisions during the crisis when Soviet personnel prevented launching nuclear missiles.

Beliefs about chance

Rank challenges some common beliefs about chance, such as that luck evens out in the long run. To the contrary, good fortune tends to lead to more good fortune, and bad to more bad, in what is called cumulative advantage or disadvantage. In the US, a person born male, black and in poverty is far more likely to be arrested, often leading to a downward spiral.

            Despite the crucial role of randomness in human lives, many people believe that hard work always pays off. Rank argues that this is misguided, giving examples of people who end up badly despite their utmost efforts. The belief in hard work paying off is especially prevalent in the US, the country with the highest level of individualism and, not coincidentally, the highest level of economic inequality among industrialised societies.

            It may be especially difficult for those who are well off, successful in their careers and admired by peers to accept that good luck played a crucial role in their lives. It is more flattering to believe good fortune is deserved. In the academic world, receiving a sizeable research grant is a source of pride and failing to obtain grants a source of disappointment, even shame, yet studies have shown that luck plays a significant role in grant success: the outcome depends sensitively on which assessors are chosen to evaluate an application. Tell that to a successful applicant!

            Rank argues that recognising the role of luck in social outcomes provides a rationale for policies to support the poor and disadvantaged, for example through a guaranteed annual income. He uses the ideas of political philosopher John Rawls to make this argument, but it is really simple: if chance events, such as who your parents are, are influential in life outcomes, then no one deserves to live in poverty. The same line of thinking leads to the conclusion that no one deserves great wealth or great fame.


Mark Rank

Uses of randomness

There’s another possible use of randomness, not addressed by Rank. It can serve as a tool for generating better social outcomes, by countering bias and self-interest.

            One example is choosing members of a court jury. Why choose jury members randomly from the population, members without special expertise, rather than rely on trained and experienced judges? One rationale is that it reduces corruption. Jury members go back to their lives outside the court after a single case, meaning they are less easy to bribe than a sitting judge. A second rationale is the process of deliberation. After hearing the evidence, jury members discuss the case and seek to arrive at a consensus. This process is valuable for raising, assessing and reconciling a variety of views.

            What about other decision-makers, like politicians? The ancient Greeks chose many of their leaders using sortition, aka random selection. In ancient Athens, they used a device called a kleroterion to randomly select jurors and public officials. According to David Van Reybrouck, author of Against Elections, random selection is the authentic form of democracy, whereas representative government serves privilege.

            The idea of sortition has been resurrected in recent decades with the use of randomly selected groups of citizens to deliberate on policy issues such as euthanasia and climate change. This is a form of participatory democracy, known as deliberative democracy, in which citizens deal with issues directly, in contrast to only relying on elected representatives. In Ireland, citizens’ assemblies help the parliament and government develop policies on contentious issues such as abortion and marriage equality. In various countries, citizen juries have helped establish government budget priorities and land use policies, as well as addressing issues such as aged care and vaccination policies.

            There’s much more going on, for example systems for selecting applicants to schools and universities and for panels to design electoral systems. The point here is that random selection can be used to overcome bias and corruption.

            Some people live in mansions while others are homeless. Barbara Goodwin in Justice by Lottery proposed that housing be assigned randomly: every five years, everyone would be reassigned to a different house.


Your house?

It sounds crazy, but it has one important feature. If you knew you might end up in terrible lodgings, you’d want to push for a basic minimum of housing quality. Randomness thus could become a motive for greater equality. Actually, Goodwin’s hypothetical society named Aleatoria is based on periodically reassigning, by chance, not just housing, but also jobs and other assets. In her “total social lottery,” the regular redistribution of roles and rewards serves to counter the initial random distribution of assets — parents, talents, etc. — at birth. Goodwin uses Aleatoria to make the case for equality.

            Randomly allocated housing isn’t coming any time soon, but as a thought experiment it is illuminating. It’s an example along the lines of Rank’s: pondering the role of chance in our lives potentially can make us more supportive of those in need and more grateful for what we have.

            After I didn’t get the physics lectureship at Murdoch University, my life followed quite a different trajectory. Decades later, by chance I talked with the fellow who obtained the one physics lectureship there back in 1975. He said, “Brian, you’re so lucky you didn’t end up here.” Well, maybe so, but there have been too many other chance events along the way to know for sure.

            Another thought. If I had gone to Murdoch, then decades later I might never have noticed or read The Random Factor or written a blog post about it, and you wouldn’t be reading it now. How lucky is that?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Paula Arvela, Lyn Carson, Mark Diesendorf and Julia LeMonde for useful feedback.

economics

The copyright monster

Copyright has gotten completely out of control, serving the rich at the expense of the poor.

            These days, it’s very easy to become a creator. Just send a brief memo to the boss, or take a photo. Automatically, you hold the copyright to these “creations,” and the associated rights last a long time, for 70 years after you die.

            Suppose your selfie happens to be in the background of a shot in a blockbuster movie. You can sue for infringement of your copyright. Good? Well, not so much, because movie producers now take precautions to avoid incidental infringements, which means they avoid real-life backgrounds, because pictures, designs, videos and much else might be seen and make them legally liable.

            It’s crazy and it keeps getting worse. Who benefits?

            Back in the 1990s, I became interested in what’s called “intellectual property” (IP), which includes copyright, patents, trademarks and trade secrets. What’s involved in all of them is that something that can be used by many people at the same time, like an image or text, is subject to restrictions. If you write a few lines of doggerel, all your friends can read it and so can you. This is unlike a pair of shoes or a bicycle, which are forms of property that can’t be used by others when you’re using them.

            The more I learn about IP, the more absurd it seems. And of all the forms of IP, copyright is the most absurd. These days, no effort is required to acquire copyright. You have it automatically, without registration, in every text you send to a friend and every photo you take. And why? What is the purpose of copyright?

Rationales

The most common justification is that authors, and creators more generally, deserve some return from their intellectual labour. On the other hand, the official justification, for example as spelled out in the US Constitution, is to stimulate the production of creative works for the good of all. The trouble is, in practice these days, copyright doesn’t achieve either of these ostensible purposes, and is more likely to work against them.

            One way to appreciate this is by studying the history of IP. For this, you need go no further than a new book by David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu titled Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs.

This is one of the most entertaining and illuminating treatments I’ve seen. You might not think that stories about English publishers in the 1700s and US court cases in the 1800s would be of interest, but they tell an amazing story of struggles over copyright. Along the way, they also tell about patents, trademarks and trade secrets, but copyright is the focus, appropriately so because it is the most ridiculous form of IP.

          Initially, in England, copyright was not about benefiting authors but rather protecting the profits of book printers. Given widespread acceptance of copyright today, this is hard to grasp. Authors were never the intended beneficiaries, but claiming that they were became a way to justify copyright.

            Bellos and Montagu present a vivid account of what they call “copyright creep.” The protection started out covering just books, then engravings and later photographs and recordings. In many countries today, murals and graffiti can be copyrighted, so if you take a photo of one, you’ve infringed its copyright. Then there are business directories and computer programs.


David Bellos

            Copyright creep also involved the spread of copyright to most of the world. In the 1800s, US copyright law only protected works by US authors, so US publishers freely printed novels by the likes of Charles Dickens and US theatre companies freely staged musicals by Gilbert and Sullivan. In the late 1900s, however, the US government realised the enormous profits to be obtained from IP and set about insisting that other governments, like China’s, introduce strict laws. Why? Because nearly all IP payments flow from the poor to the rich and from other countries to the US.


Alexandre Montagu

            IP is basically a restraint on trade. “Copyright protection flows disproportionately to large enterprises more likely to use it to stifle innovation than to promote it.” (p. 288) It’s weird that IP has been imposed via trade agreements that, in the popular mind, are about free trade. Bellos and Montagu give several examples of periods when copyright protection was limited, generating bursts of creative activity.

            One of the most significant examples of copyright creep was in 1909, when the US Congress passed a law that continues today and went further than merely permitting employers to hold the copyright of works produced by their employees. They became, legally, the authors:

“Today, the vast majority of commercially viable copyrights belong not to people, but to large, impersonal empires in the book, film, music and software fields — and in the mangled language of copyright law, these entities are now the authors of the works they distribute …” (p. 198)

            Bellos and Montagu note that creators centuries ago depended on patrons, for example the princes who sponsored figures like Mozart. Then came a period where creators could potentially make a living from royalties from their work. But things have come full circle, and most of today’s creators — think writers, composers, computer programmers, scientists — are employees. Most of their income comes from their salaries, not returns from copyright, which are skimmed off by their patrons, namely their employers.

            There is so much interesting material in Who Owns This Sentence? that it is hard to make a selection. One of my favourite chapters is “Misinformation campaigns,” in which the authors tell about the efforts by big corporations to convince consumers and school children about the importance of copyright, offering one falsehood or misleading statement after another. In recent years, there has been a flowering of efforts to counter “misinformation,” but I’ve never seen efforts to tackle IP misinformation. No prizes for guessing why.

            Although Bellos and Montagu provide copious notes on their historical sources, they give little attention to criticisms of copyright by contemporary authors. I thought for example of Peter Drahos, who argues that IP should be relabelled “monopoly privilege” to better indicate its function, Debora Halbert, whose penetrating works show the dysfunctions of IP, especially copyright, and David Vaver, whose caustic commentaries on copyright rival those of Bellos and Montagu. Who Owns This Sentence? is a wonderfully revealing history but not so much a survey of anti-copyright research.

“Copyright is now the principal regulatory tool for industries of great size that are mostly located in the ‘old rich’ countries, chiefly Britain, the E.U. and the U.S. Yet it is either an irrelevance or just an irritation to the vast majority of creators working there or anywhere else. It generates trifling income for all but a handful among them, and it limits their recourse to the works of others in arbitrary, whimsical, and often unforeseeable ways.” (p. 331)

Alternative paths

In Bellos and Montagu’s history of copyright, they identify crucial points where powerful interests benefited and henceforth fiercely protected their flow of windfall gains. If a few court decisions or international agreements had been different, today’s copyright regime might be less irrational. This is a useful perspective, but it amounts to a suggestion for copyright reform, to make a bad system somewhat less bad. Bellos and Montagu perhaps prefer to be seen as cautious.

            A more radical proposal is to abolish copyright altogether, at least in terms of making money from it. That would mean that creations would immediately enter the public domain, the commons.

How then would creators make a living? This begs the question, because the overwhelming majority of today’s creators have salaries; it is employers, who are not creators, who benefit from today’s creators, and from many other creators long dead. Nevertheless, continuing this line of thinking, an alternative is the widespread introduction of a Universal Basic Income, so everyone has enough to live. Creation could then be largely separated from financial gain. This would mean that novelists would write to express themselves and please others; programmers would write code to serve users; researchers would investigate drugs to serve human health; and so forth.

            Bellos and Montagu point to one area of human endeavour that has always remained exempt from copyright: mathematics. Formulas like E=mc2 cannot be copyrighted, or patented for that matter, which allows their unhindered use for further scientific research. Imagine how constraining it would be if scientists had to pay royalties to Einstein’s estate every time they used one of his equations. Freedom from copyright can unleash creativity. Why not allow other domains to flourish in the same way?

            How could a change towards a saner system come about? Bellos and Montagu discuss the free software movement, but there is much more going on, and many possibilities for action. On a personal level, the immediate possibility is direct action, namely using copyrighted works as a form of civil disobedience. If enough people challenge corporate owners, their powers dissipate. This is what occurred when US film producers took legal action against downloaders, generating a huge backlash.

            More generally, given that IP serves the rich and hinders creativity and social benefit in many domains, opposing IP can be considered part of a challenge to economic inequality. Perhaps a way forward is for social movements to put opposing IP on their agenda. A good start would be wider awareness of the tortured history of copyright so well canvassed in Who Owns This Sentence?

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Kelly Gates and David Vaver for valuable comments.

economics, nonviolent action, politics

Economic warfare, US style

The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was met by military resistance and by another response, an economic one, led by the US government. Russia’s foreign assets were frozen, and most banks refused to process Russian transactions. This was open economic warfare, of a scale unprecedented in recent times for an economy the size of Russia’s.

            Companies pursue profits, of course, and in times past would continue their operations despite wars. Famously, US companies like Ford and General Motors maintained operations in Nazi Germany. Since then, the world economy has been internationalised, and there is much greater mutual dependency, for example with products made from components in different countries. In most cases, trade continues between countries even when their governments clash.

            To understand what made the economic measures used against Russia possible, the go-to guide is Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman’s book Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy. It is a penetrating study of how the US government, due to historical accidents, gradually discovered ways to exploit others’ economic dependencies, and used them in an increasingly unrestrained manner.

            The story begins with electronic communication. Although the Internet is designed to be resilient to disruption, the algorithms for routeing messages favour speed, which means most of them go through a few nodes, most of which are physically in the US. This includes banking communications. The US government can exert leverage on foreign banks by threatening them with exclusion from communications. This includes Eurodollars, which are dependent on the same communication systems.

            For example, the US government pressured SWIFT, a bank-clearing system, to serve its demands.

“SWIFT had been transformed from a politically independent organization, which was supposed to help protect banks from government regulation, into an all-seeing servant of the U.S. state, whose knowledge mapped out the hidden world of international financial transactions.” (pp. 65–66)

            A US agency, OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control), can bend foreign banks to its will by blocking them from operating in the US and from working with US-regulated banks (e.g., Citibank) to make dollar-denominated transactions. Other banks avoid anything to do with a “designated” (targeted) foreign bank for fear they would also be targeted and lose access to trades in US dollars.

            Another part of the story is surveillance of electronic communication by the National Security Agency, which expanded from anti-terrorism to economic surveillance, of both enemy and ally states, and of companies like Microsoft and Google. Some of this was revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden. No one is protected from snooping and demands for access to information: “… not just foreign terrorists but American multinationals found that they fell outside the zone of protection.” (p. 153)

            The authors argue that the weaponising of economic measures was not planned but rather used in an ever-widening fashion. They go through a series of case studies. The measures taken against the Iranian economy are eye-opening. They include isolating Iran from global banking and preventing it receiving payment for exports. I was amazed to read that Brian Hook of the US State Department pressured the captain of an oil tanker carrying Iranian oil, offering him a multi-million-dollar personal payoff (a bribe) for steering the ship to where it could be impounded, furthermore threatening sanctions against him personally if he refused.


Brian Hook

After Iran, there was the response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Then there are the economic measures designed to hobble the Chinese economy, for example preventing the import of the most advanced chips produced in Taiwan.

            Underground Empire is an engaging, informative and well-referenced account. The authors write from a US perspective but are critical of weaponising the economy, in part because if such measures are overused, they encourage countermeasures and may eventually undermine US dollar dominance. As the US government has exercised its financial power, other governments and businesses have had more incentive to develop alternatives, including their own centralised networks.

“The United States had made itself too powerful to be trusted — it couldn’t credibly promise that it wouldn’t break its word to business under a different administration or a different interpretation of the rules.” (p. 76)


Henry Farrell

            In an intriguing twist, Farrell and Newman are part of their own story. In 2019, they wrote an article about “weaponised interdependence,” with the intention of warning the US government against using its leverage on global finance coercively. Instead, their ideas were used by the Trump administration as a guide to flexing its power.


Abraham Newman

Corporations squeezed

It’s not often that we can think of multinational corporations as victims. As Farrell and Newman explain, businesses built up networks to serve their interests, but then the US government used these networks for its own purposes, putting businesses in awkward situations. They tell about Microsoft’s cloud computing business and how the US government made things difficult for the corporation.

“Yet even if the cloud seemed to exist nowhere and everywhere at once, U.S. companies like Microsoft were bound by U.S. law. American authorities demanded data on foreigners, threatening harsh penalties for American companies that did not comply, while ordering them to keep their compliance secret. These authorities also believed themselves entitled to seize industrial quantities of data from these companies overseas, without warrant and without informing the businesses, let alone the users, of what was happening. That made life nearly impossible for Microsoft and its competitors. How could foreign governments and foreign businesses trust Microsoft to keep their data private in the future?” (pp. 153-154)

And it’s not just the US government. Governments in China and the European Union have joined in. In this high-level economic warfare, businesses have been caught in the crossfire. Business leaders used to think nationalisation was the biggest danger. “Now, they are coming to understand that powerful, wealthy countries present the greatest risks.” (p. 147) Businesses might like to remain neutral, to make profits in all markets, but when the pressures become too great, they feel forced to choose sides.

            The biggest story is not Iran or Russia but China, now the prime target of US government economic warfare because it is the strongest challenger to US economic dominance.

But by waging economic warfare, the US government risks strengthening its competitor.

“One of China’s great weaknesses in building its own empire was that other countries, businesses, and ordinary people couldn’t trust it: it took advantage of them whenever it suited.  … If countries and businesses believed that the United States would deploy its power ruthlessly against them, then they might see little difference between it and its adversary.” (p. 190)

            Underground Empire has a great deal of fascinating detail, and offers a deeper understanding of many world events than any number of media stories. On the other hand, Farrell and Newman examine economic warfare only at the level of governments and large corporations. They do not mention workers, trade unions or citizen campaigners. Do they have any influence?

Nothing new?

Weaponising the economy is nothing new. In the 1980s, the International Monetary Fund imposed “structural adjustment programs” on Third World countries around the world, which continue to siphon wealth from the poor to serve the rich in First World countries. Long before this, the British empire exploited its colonies through trade policies, so that, according to Shashi Tharoor in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, colonial rule led to a drastic decline in wealth in India, while benefiting British manufacturers.

            Gene Sharp in part two of his classic 1973 book The Politics of Nonviolent Action lists 198 methods of nonviolent action, in three main categories: (1) protest and persuasion; (2) noncooperation, including many types of strikes and boycotts; and (3) nonviolent intervention, for example fasts, sit-ins and alternative institutions. In the category of noncooperation are “actions to suspend economic relations”, which include actions by consumers, workers, owners, financial institutions and governments. Most relevant here are actions by governments, including embargoes by international sellers and buyers.

            Sharp’s method #89 is severance of funds and credit. He writes,

“Economic pressures can also be exerted by cutting off the opponent’s sources of money, such as salaries, appropriations, loans and investments. This may be done by individuals, firms, or governments. In certain American colonies [in the 1700s], the assemblies withheld appropriations for the salaries of governors and judges as a means of keeping them from acting too much out of line with the assemblies’ political wishes.” (p. 239)

            Sharp presented nonviolent campaigns as challenges to dictatorship, war, genocide and social oppression — not as tools by powerful groups to serve their own interests. Nevertheless, he included examples of how methods of nonviolent action have been used for other ends. The method of severance of funds and credit was used by whites in the US against blacks who pushed against segregation.


Gene Sharp

            Method #93 is blacklisting of traders.

“During wartime or during a policy of embargo, one government may seek to block indirect transfer of embargoed good through firms or individuals in a neutral country by prohibiting trade with them as well as with the enemy country itself. … These were standard United States practices during World War II.” (pp. 244-245)

They seem to have become standard more recently, though war has not been declared.

            Method #96 is international trade embargo, which

“is a combination of the international seller’s embargo and the international buyer’s embargo. It involves a total prohibition of trade with the opponent country, or a near-total ban, exempting perhaps medicines and the like.” (p. 246)

One of Sharp’s examples is the 1962 embargo of Cuba by the US government.

            In economic warfare, there is an underlying violent foundation: property, including money and the economic system generally, relies on the power of the state for protection. If banks simply cleared out deposits and said, “tough luck,” what could depositors do? They rely on governments to protect their investments, to provide compensation or impose penalties on renegade banks and any others who violate the rules of the economic game.

But what happens when powerful governments are the rule-breakers, when they seize assets without compensation, impose tariffs in violation of trade agreements, and threaten banks from trading with the “opponent,” outside of wartime? When rule-makers become blatant rule-breakers, this undermines the legitimacy of the entire system, and can provoke resistance. This is what Farrell and Newman warn about and describe.

            Sharp writes that “International embargoes of all three types have not produced many notable successes.” (p. 248) Whether US-government-initiated embargoes will succeed or be counterproductive remains to be seen.

So what’s new about the methods described by Farrell and Newman? In recent decades, multinational corporations have built up international networks unprecedented in scope and influence, networks encompassing trade, banking and technology, serving their own interests. What’s new is that the US government has found ways to exploit these corporate networks for its own ends, sometimes at the expense of the corporations, in ways not previously possible. Underground Empire is essential reading for understanding this new facet of political economy.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Susan Engel and Abe Newman for valuable comments.

emotions, media, social dynamics

Anxious young people?

A recent news story is titled “Young adulthood is no longer one of life’s happiest times“. What’s causing an increase in depression and anxiety among young people?

            Years before Covid, university support staff told me about a huge increase in the number of students with problems. What was causing it? Without a ready explanation, I assumed it was the breakdown of community, which I had read about.

            Most people used to live in families, neighbourhoods and workplaces that provided a stable structure for their lives. However, these stable social structures, which can be called community, gradually began to break down. To find jobs, people moved away from where they grew up, sometimes moving repeatedly. This meant, in many cases, moving away from childhood friends, grandparents and long-time neighbours. Arguably, the market economy has been the primary driver behind the breakdown of community. People were less connected with those around them.

            Without the moorings of old-fashioned community, what came next? For some, this was a liberation from narrow-minded conservatism, one that held people back, forcing them into rigid social roles. But for others, the new fluid society was unnerving and threatening, giving rise to mental problems.

            There are other explanations for the increase in young people’s problems. The role of the media is one. With television, children began seeing vastly more graphic images of violence. Another factor is the increasing awareness of climate change, an existential threat to human thriving, felt especially by the young who bear little responsibility for it.

            Richard Eckersley alerted me to the high levels of distress among young people, and the importance of figuring out why this is occurring despite material affluence. Through a series of publications, he has tried to raise awareness about youth unhappiness as a window into deeper problems with Western societies.

Jonathan Haidt’s view 

Years ago, when I was co-ordinating a class on happiness and doing some research in the area, I read quite a few books and articles about happiness, looking especially for ones grounded in research. One of my favourite books in this area was by Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis.


Jonathan Haidt

He surveyed “ancient wisdom” from religious and spiritual traditions in China, India and Europe, examining them in relation to current psychological research. Overall, the past ideas stand up very well. They still provide valuable guides to a life worth living.

            It was with this background that I obtained Haidt’s new book The Anxious Generation, in which he offers a bold explanation for young people’s distress. Its basic ideas are straightforward, and are in two distinct areas.

            The first idea concerns growing up in the real world, face-to-face, offline. Haidt argues that children in the US, increasingly since about the 1970s, have been overprotected. Compared to previous generations, parents are more likely to drive their children to school, oversee their play, arrange a heavy schedule of activities overseen by adults, and in general never let children out on their own without adult supervision. Haidt calls this safetyism, and argues that it prevents children from learning how to manage risks, organise activities with other children, and overcome anxiety.

            Ironically, many of the parents who hover over their children had very different upbringings, walking or cycling to school and spending hours in unsupervised play. In Wollongong, there is traffic congestion around the time schools let out in the afternoon due to parents driving to pick up their children.

            Haidt argues that children need to undertake activities on their own, including ones with some degree of danger, for full development of their capacities. By taking risks, within reason, people learn to judge what risks are worth taking. By learning from failures, people develop resilience. Haidt is not talking about big risks like jumping off a building but smaller ones like falling while riding a bicycle, and relationship risks too.

            The concept of overprotection is well known in disability circles. People with disabilities, especially intellectual disabilities, certainly need protection from dangers, but they also need opportunities to explore the world, to go shopping, ride buses and trains, meet people, get out of the house. Living a full life requires taking some risks, with one’s body, career and relationships.

Online dangers

Haidt’s second main idea is that children are being exposed to too many risks online, before they are ready. Social media companies are driven by the search for profits, mostly from online advertising. The longer users spend on a site, the more money the company makes, so they design apps to keep users hooked.

            What’s the real problem here? It’s not using a telephone to talk with a friend. It’s using a phone to go online, and this started in about 2010 to 2015, when smartphones swept the world. This is when it started to be common to see people of all ages staring at their phones while walking. It’s when people started checking their phones first thing in the morning and the last time at night, and hundreds or thousands of other times. Social media apps are designed to be addictive, and many people succumb.

            Years ago, when riding the bus or train, most passengers would be talking with friends, staring out the window, or reading. Now most of them are on their phones. I’ve seen parents wheeling a baby in a pram while staring at their phone. Sometimes the baby has a phone too.

            Haidt argues that being online, on social media apps, can be bad for mental health. There are many reasons for this, including social comparison, cyberbullying, pornography and video game addiction. But not everyone is at the same risk. Youngsters, ages 10 to 15, whose brains are still developing, may be most vulnerable.

            “My central claim in this book is that these two trends — overprotection in the real world and underprotection in the virtual world — are the major reasons why children born after 1995 became the anxious generation.” (p. 9)

            “We are misallocating our protective efforts. We should be giving children more of the practice they need in the real world and delaying their entry into the online world, where the benefits are fewer and the guardrails nearly nonexistent.” (p. 83)

What to do?

If widespread use of social media is harmful to young people, or at least some of them, what should be done? Haidt covers a range of possibilities, including government regulation, school policies and parents’ initiatives. Many of these are likely to be contentious.

            On the surface, the challenge seems impossibly large. Smartphones are widely used, including by ever younger children. Furthermore, when so many adults are addicted to their phones, modelling behaviour for their children, the task seems even more formidable.

            Haidt sees the challenge as a collective action problem. Individuals acting alone face enormous obstacles. When a young student doesn’t have a phone because their parents won’t allow it, and all the other students have one, the phoneless student becomes an outcast, and only the most psychologically strong can persist as a nonconformist. It’s far easier if a group of parents deny phones to their children, so they can form a phoneless friendship group. And easier still if the school bans phones entirely, as some have, with positive results, Haidt reports.

            Haidt presents four key reforms:

“1. No smartphones before high school
2. No social media before 16
3. Phone-free schools
4. Far more unsupervised play and childhood independence” (p. 290)

            Here I’m not going to try to assess these and other proposals presented by Haidt, many of them in collaboration with Lenore Skenazy, who deserves to have been listed as a co-author of several chapters. No doubt some will defend smartphone use and social media participation. The challenge for critics of Haidt’s proposals is to explain the many trends he reveals showing a sharp uptake in anxiety and depression among young people, especially girls. Here is one of the many graphs presented by Haidt.

            The Anxious Generation will succeed to the extent that it helps trigger a debate about young people’s mental health, and what can be done to improve it. Meanwhile, I would encourage parents and grandparents to read the book themselves. Yes, it’s a long book, but it is well written, often engaging. It might be worthwhile to obtain a print copy and spend the time to read and ponder it, all the while having a respite from staring at a screen. However, screen-lovers can turn to https://www.anxiousgeneration.com.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au

Thanks to Richard Eckersley and Anita Johnson for useful comments.

reputation

When you’re defamed

What would you say if you received a message like this?

I’m a high school teacher. A group of parents held a public meeting, which the principal attended, and made serious allegations about my performance, including uncomplimentary slurs, some even involving my family. What can I do? I thought of contacting a lawyer, but too many of them are just in it for the money. Henry

This is one of the hundreds of emails I’ve received from people distressed because their reputations have been hurt. “Defamation” is the general term for harm to someone’s reputation. Slander is the verbal variety while libel is the written or broadcast type.

            It wasn’t my intent to become an adviser to people who’ve been defamed. For years I was in contact with people at the other end of the story: they had been threatened with a legal action for defamation, or been sued. Often this served as a method of censorship.

            Suppose you discover some corrupt activity and plan to report it. The person you were going to expose threatens to sue you if you say anything. This often happens to whistleblowers.

            In 1996, I decided to write a leaflet to inform whistleblowers about defamation matters, and obtained comments from a range of individuals to make it as accurate as possible, including from a leading defamation barrister. Putting it on my website, soon it was being accessed more than anything else I had ever written. This was when the World Wide Web was becoming popular, and my leaflet provided practical information, in contrast with many legal treatments. It was titled “Defamation law and free speech.”

            Soon I was receiving queries from numerous people, with diverse and often disturbing stories about their concerns about being silenced by defamation threats and actions. But along with these messages came a different sort of query, from people who had been defamed and wanted to know what to do about it.

I’m a career coach and see clients at a room in my home. One of them wrote a comment online saying “I saw him for a consultation. What to expect? He’s obese and his place is a mess!” Admittedly, I’m a little overweight but I keep my consultation room neat and tidy. Do I have grounds to sue?

            A decade later, I wrote a short article, “What to do when you’ve been defamed.” It’s convenient to give people a link to an article rather than repeat the same advice. Each case is different but there are commonalities.

            As the years have gone by, the frequency of defamation queries has dropped off, I presume because the amount of information on the web has grown and my articles are no longer as high on web searches. Recently I was scanning my old paper files, came upon a thick folder of queries about being defamed, and decided to upload samples of my advice, with the queries anonymised. My advice is monotonous in one way: I always say something along the lines of “Don’t sue!”

            Most media attention to defamation is about high-profile cases, such as the suits launched by Ben Roberts-Smith and Bruce Lehrmann. Ironically, each of these legal actions greatly damaged the reputations of the individuals who sued, a phenomenon that can be called defamation backfire.

            Roberts-Smith and Lehrmann are exceptions. Few individuals whose reputations have been harmed ever go to court, and few members of the public are aware of a huge undercurrent of distress about being defamed. That’s what I discovered through the stories of correspondents who wanted advice on what to do about it.

            I often say, don’t sue unless you have a lot of money and don’t mind losing it. There are other options. At least that’s my advice in “Being defamed Q&A”.

Brian Martin
bmartin@uow.edu.au