Rivers of Power

I spoke, in an earlier essay, about the power I believe the Academic World has. Don’t take me wrong, I don’t go for those kind of weird theories that say someone have some Godly power, by which they control all the events in the World like a perfect chess game, I just think that there are groups and institutions that fight for influence.

I’m also not saying all the teachers in the World are the same, obviously, or that we don’t need schools – we need – but if there is one completely dominant line of thought, then the growth of the Academy and the growth of this ideology will mean exactly the same.

It is natural that groups fight to gain more influence, but Academy should be the arena, a battlefield for different lines of thought to compete, not the headquarters of one.

The way we have things now makes it extremely easy for ideological groups that have influence, to completely obliterate other people, to point to an opinion that someone has, deem it evil, deem the person evil, then justify the complete shutting of all the doors to that person, to the point of making impossible for someone to keep earning a living in their field of work, even having committed no crime that can be proven. This is a big power.

Of course, when we speak about power of the Academy, it may sound contradictory to the vision many people have, that it is capitalism that rules the World, and if the Academy says they are against Capitalism, then Academy must to be the rebels, not part of the system, right?

Yes, money has a big power in the World, huge power. Harvard, for instance, have been receiving a billion dollars in donations every year, recently. Things are not so simple, so bidimensional, as some think.

Follow me here: If the system of capitalism is so closed and controlling everything, and the mainstream Academy is so rebellious and dangerous to it, why this “omnipotent” system allowed the Academy to be there, and be so prestigious? Why didn’t they built another Academy, more aligned with their thought, with all the money and power they have?

The Academy still benefits from the prestige they received due to the many advances that the Scientific Thinking brought to the World, the advances that physics brought to engineering, and chemistry and biology brought to medicine, and more. Why wouldn’t the powerful super rich want in on their side? Why wouldn’t they do anything to get that legitimacy to their side?

At some point in my life, I couldn’t help but start thinking that maybe the mainstream Academical thought is not so bad for the money World, or at least to a big part of it. International commerce is a huge thing, and I think a lot of people don’t want to see this business being affected by considerations about the level of democracy of countries, or even respects for human rights. There is a lot of people that deal with big money, that don’t want to displease leaders of rich authoritarian countries in the Middle East, for instance.

Our mainstream intellectuals don’t challenge these people. On the contrary, they somehow made it wrong to say too much bad things about someone who is “not white”, even if it is a bloodthirsty dictator, he can’t be the real big villain. The Marxists have their explanations for why you can’t really place blame on those people.

When you have a “logic” system of thought, with intellectual credentials printed on it, that says that a group of super rich dictators can’t be the real bad guys, a lot of greedy people will be happy with it.

Let’s think about all this logic, once again. The prestige of the Academic World, the success it showed in many areas, came from simplifying the situations to a few variables, which allows us to make predictions using plain mathematics. This works fine for phenomena of the physical World, but some thinkers hitchhiked on this success of Science to propose simplistic schemes of how Society works as a whole.

Karl Marx simplified all the process through which people produce things to very few elements, to say that a person can’t be a profiting business owner without stealing his employees. He reasoned that, if someone buys a set of things, then sells a transformed version of those things for a higher price, it means he paid less than the value of something when he bought. Then he said it can’t be the technology or the raw material, so it’s got to be the work of the employee that was underpaid  - that’s a simplified version, but the reasoning is basically this.

He didn’t say employees should be paid better, but that wherever there was profit, there was stealth, as if Civilization itself had not started and grown precisely because of the fact that the Earth can give to man more than he puts in it, and creativity has the power of multiplying things.

To be honest, the left wing economists evolved, in their language and mathematical approach, from that ultra simplistic vision Marx had of Economy, but that simplistic original Marxist thought planted a seed that is still defining the general view these people have of the Universe. The idea of a very limited World where everything that is gained creates a vacuum somewhere else, and peace cannot be built without a total rebellion.

In the Marxist World, people still see any kind of success or comfort that someone may have in Society as something gained necessarily at expense of someone else. The algorithm in the head of most people in the Academic World who say they are concerned with social causes is still very simplistic, and the main focus, that once was about workers and bosses now is about race, and a concept of race hiper simplified by the tone of color of the skin.

They take abominable facts of the past, like slavery, which is real and must not be forgotten, and say it is still the base of all that we have in the present. The past does have consequences in the present, we can’t deny, but there are always factors that they downplay, when it comes to explain the stagnation of some sectors of our society, like the pervasiveness of mass culture, and drugs, and so on. They also often disregard the many aspects in which our society already evolved in human terms, so they create a World View that justifies rebellion against absolutely anything, even violence, to no gain at all.

All this to keep the Marxist view that Society won’t evolve, won’t fix the problems that are still there without big mass movements as the main – or sometimes only – possibility of redemption. And in the end, of course, instead of giving people the tools they need as individuals to grow and do better for their families and communities, they create a World where all that matters is politics. Yes, in the end, they make political and ideological leaders our only saviors.

And they extend their view to the Global situation, oversimplifying the very complex History and present of the World to that same tone-of-color scheme. For instance, they are always kind of blind to the fact that Arabian countries are not “poor victims” of History, that those countries we always very smart players. They made huge fortunes in the time of land trade of spices and other things the Europeans wanted from the East, when they controlled the land routes and intermediated everything.

They lost their protagonism in that matter when Europe braved the sea routes, but kept making money, including with slavery. Yes, they made money with slavery of black people, and not just a little. Research it. Then, of course, when petroleum became a super powerful thing and they found they were sit on the biggest reserve of it, they gained protagonism again. And they have an interesting partnership with Russia, which has very big reserves of a lot of natural resources.

All this don’t fit the simplistic view of the World that mainstream intellectuals want us to swallow, where tone of color defines oppressed and oppressors. That’s the problem with start reducing the complex History of Humanity more and more to simple equations.

To be fair, much of the capitalist world also subscribes to a simplistic logic. Adam Smith simplified all the processes through which people trade things to very few elements, to say that the fact that, in the world of trade, each person seeks his own benefit, will bring a mathematical equilibrium that automatically will lead us always to a better place, as if the constant difference of urgency that a particular transaction has for each part didn’t require that men keep consulting the old richness of wisdom and morals that humanity gained through centuries, and is still our biggest treasure.

Of course, more and more people in the world of work and production are realizing that supply and demand don’t give us all we need for people to have satisfaction in their lives. More and more people are bringing human values to the world of work.

Think about “meritocracy”. I don’t believe in it in a Darwinist way, like, “let the non-adapted perish”, there’s no reason why not to lend a hand for people who haven’t reach their full potential yet, but in the simple sense of rewarding people who maximized their creative contribution, yes, it is necessary. But more and more people are coming to see that just saying “no to Stalin” and “yes to profit” is not enough to bring real meritocracy, there are a lot of human tendencies to cheapness that need to be overcome, and we always have more to learn about ethics. And I hope more people are realizing that the same applies to “Fair Competition”.

But the people who deal with huge scale international commerce, still seem to be guided solely by immediate numbers. It seems that these people, generally speaking, won’t do nothing to raise awareness about how some of the biggest players in International Commerce disregard democracy and even human rights.

All this may be good for “business as usual” but if we don’t make clear that we don’t approve dictators that disrespect basic freedom, and if we don’t denounce – and some of us even support – ideologies that teach people to place all the blame for all their problems on someone else, some other people, then we are encouraging the growth of armed hate groups. Terror groups, that can be used by wicked political leaders to destabilize regions and bring fear to the World, always with some pretext for refusing peace when it is offered to them.

We should be doing all our efforts to urge the Middle East countries that want to be seen as peaceful to condemn all murderous ideologies that propose the extermination of someone else as the solution. But sometimes we do the exact opposite, giving wicked leaders, that don’t care for their own people, not to mention about the other people, special sits in our “Conventions”.

So, this is how Academy can grow in power, because they are not a natural enemy of all the greedy, they are just a group that learned an algorithm, that they can increase their influence with a simplistic ideology that allows them to pose as rebels while not really setting anybody free.

I definitely don’t know the future, and sometimes it seems that these Rivers of Power have a mind of their own. I hope they don’t take us to a World where money flows freely but thought is more and more controlled. It can create a World where anyone can be banned – which feels like death – at any time, arbitrarily. It won’t do any good for our human relations, it will take us in the opposite direction of happiness.

People should realize that “big quantity” capitalism is not always opposed to social control, the “all in name of the people” kind, as you can see in China. I hope we are not going in a direction where, instead of, little by little, bringing more democracy to authoritarian countries, we end up flattening down the whole planet. Some people may not care, but people who know the meaning of joy and personal freedom have the right to be against that.

I do have faith, faith that people can make different lines of thought visible again, and to learn that things are not so black and white. That money can coexist with moral and moral can’t be replaced with the latest ideological trend.

I believe that in the future we can have a World where a person has a right to relate to a peoplehood, but also the individual has all the opportunity to grow in freedom.

I believe in the power of though. Not only logic, which requires a reduction of language, and is so many times necessary, but also the broader Reason, that dwells in all the richness of human language and sometimes even beyond.

Some people, for their immediate convenience, pretend not to see what doesn’t fit their narrative, even when it risks leading us all to a worst place. But as I always say, almost nobody wants to look in the mirror and say “I’m bad”. People like to think of themselves as good.

Let’s expand on it.