Tag: politics

“It Doesn’t Describe Them, it Infects Them”: Quick Comment on “Barry’s Economics” Episode

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I just watched another excellent “Barry’s Economics” episode from today (31/5/26) — “What Banksy Shows Us About Power”.

Barry has a great gift for making essential “negative insights” (as I insist on calling them) entertaining and clear. Subscribing to his channel is a brilliant idea.

By “negative insights” I mean unlearning the damaging lessons that have led us to this apocalypse.

One of these damaging lessons is “the tragedy of the commons”, which was (as he notes) disproven (negated) by Elinor Ostrom, earning her the Nobel Prize in 2009.

I’m going to assume you’ve watched his episode, so I don’t have to summarize everything he said. I’ll only summarize the lesson the video provides:

Even though the “tragedy” of common ownership of land and resources has been disproven, it’s still being taught widely in schools — particularly in graduate business schools. And this teaching boils down to convincing students that “human nature is selfish.”

The reason I want to call attention to this episode in particular is because he is beautifully illustrating things I keep going on about in my own less entertaining manner. So, in this scribbled note, I just want to say — Looky there! That’s what I mean when I say “everything is a story” — we act according to how we tell the story of ourselves and the “nature” of the world. We can’t hide behind the excuse of nature. Nature is not causing our problems. The way we imagine the world and ourselves is doing that.

The theory that we are selfish teaches us to be selfish. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that benefits a hierarchical system of control. And these “hierarchical systems of control” are also not written into the genes as “human nature.” There have been many cultures that operated without hierarchical control quite beautifully.

This excuse of human nature is an enchantment that numbs us into accepting a yoke and corrals us into behaving in predictable ways, which can be converted into profit-generating algorithms.

This is what my previous essay was also going on about (long and complicated as it was, I apologize, but I needed to dig into this as precisely as possible for my own sanity).

In fact, this entire website has focused on negating the story of natural human selfishness — a story which is like a mental virus that consumes our unfathomable potential; or, a kind of witchery or predatorial trick that dumbs us down and makes us susceptible to manipulation. My general point has been that if we are aware of Thought as a Story — as a helpful fiction, at best — then we can use thought without being blinded by it. Then thought becomes open-ended, metaphoric and prismatic, rather than literal, dogmatic and conclusive. And this would make us immune to positive conclusions, which can only put an end to learning and leave us with a final idea of “human nature”, which is self-fulfillig prophecy.

Or, as Barry said in the video, when referring to the selfish behavior of economics students who are taught the fake “tragedy of the commons” (or the fake (but self-fuilfilling) story of human selfishness): “The theory created the actions, not the other way around. You might think, right? Well, maybe selfish people are just drawn to economics. Maybe it’s just who applies. Well, actually, other researchers have tested that, too. They measured students before and after taking economics classes, right? The same students. And what they found was that taking economics classes, specifically learning that humans are self-interested by nature, made students measurably less generous and less interested in contributing to shared goals. Because the humans are selfish theory, it doesn’t describe them, it infects them.”

Empire Falls: Footnote to the Essay, “What Is Self-Knowledge?”

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“A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That’s how every empire falls” — John Prine (“That’s How Every Empire Falls”)

Maybe the scientific revolution (for all its magnificent insights and newfound capacities) re-imagined the human being as a kind of inanimate billiard ball bouncing mechanically along a chain of meaningless cause and effect.

This was the only Grand Narrative that science could offer the individual. A brief, inexplicable eruption from total non-animacy, which ends in non-animacy yet again.

This revolution freed the individual from the biting dogmas of religion, but left the individual feeling like a surplus ball bearing bouncing around in some inexplicable clockwork; which had the effect of leaving the non-scientist (the new lay person) desperate to find purchase in the open-ended abyss of an isolated “me,” which was all that remained in the absence of religion and monarchy (and NO, this is not a lament). But as a result, perhaps the 18th and 19th century citizen (or at least European or American citizen) colonized the world in its need to distract itself from the absence of meaningful identity that the sudden withdrawal of old certainties provoked.

I mean, the 19th century “American” mind was optimistic, because it was experiencing the “singularity” of a logarithmic upswing in personal and national power in the rising tide of colonialism, thanks to genocide and slavery.

As the empire collapses, the urge to regress towards that “old time” faith in kings and gods and tribes grows more desperate, and less euphoric. Hence, there’s a desire to return to the familiar hellscape of genocide and enslavement so as to give those who feel this way a boost of self-esteem.

So, perhaps the “rugged individual”, and the “self-made man” of an eager 19th century America became the resume-building, careerist, self-branding, cynical and self-obsessed tweeting global consumer of today. We’ve all been colonized.

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The Real Revolution Hasn’t Started Yet

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Photo by William Warby on Pexels.com

“…something that wants to rise and shake itself free” (William Carlos Williams)


I had a fairly disconcerting experience when I was a 9th grade spectator at our school’s varsity basketball game. It was a rural school, Kindergarten through 12th in the same building. Maybe 30 kids per grade, so we knew pretty much everyone, or so I thought. But as I was watching the game, one of the players, maybe two years old than myself, a member of our church, our mothers were friends, became instantly unrecognizable.

I lost the flow of the game and became hypnotically focused on this one person. It’s probably a widespread phenomenon. It’s what some call “wordnesia.” Except in this case, it’s not the word that looks suddenly mispelled or inexplicable or weird, but a human being. Someone I knew on the periphery.

And even if it’s common, I want to magnify the moment, because there’s something almost pleasantly psychedelic about the experience, and also significant in some way that otherwise I ignore.

At any rate, I had this Wordnesia experience of a person when I was in 9th grade. I tried to juggle the knowledge of his “familiarity” with his sudden alien strangeness. His bearing no longer conformed to anyone recognizable. But I was also noticing him for the first time. Noticing the discrepancy between the mask of confidence he was trying to wear (the identity he was trying to present), my interpretation of his projected identity, and the unfamiliar reality of himself, which I’d never noticed until that moment.

And the alien feeling spread to the entire gymnasium. My hometown crowd, all familiar faces, looked like they were all struggling with masks. It was as if the known character of each person was peeling from their bodies, revealing a routine pretense, which was their public persona, which also revealed something of the real human being struggling with fear and doubt.

I don’t know if that’s how I would have interpreted at the time. But I’m doing so now, because I recollect a feeling of dislocation, and alien strangement in myself, when I looked around the gym. It was like a contagious form of wordnesia, or so I feared.

In the disjointed chaos of the moment (and I think it was a close game, so the energy of the crowd was high-strung, I started to notice the chaos of myself more than anything else, because the isolation turned me inwards, where I found nothing but a bundle of herky jerky movements that I vaguely but not gladly recognized as myself.

I tried to snap out of this alternate reality, but it stuck around for a long half-hour and then perhaps a milder version never fully dissipated the rest of my life. At any rate, thereafter I became even more self-conscious, more herky-jerky, and felt more like a fraud who didn’t know how to stop being a fraud.

But at the same time – and this is far more important – the effect was not one of haughty disdain for myself or others, but an unprecedented feeling of sorrow for the real human beings I’d never noticed before. Beneath the smiles and cheers they looked sad or tired.

This self-ennobling observation can’t be fully corroborated. But I do (I insist) feeling oddly sad in the midst of this somewhat pleasant natural high.

Sheer forgetfulness may have been the accidental drug, but it did seem to open a glimpse into more subtle realities simmering beneath the surface presentation; beneath the scripts that often trap us into being people we weren’t meant to be. Where familiarity once was, now bewildered human forms could be discerned. The vague outline of a soul writhing in a spider’s web or a cocoon, depending on whether they would emerge or not.

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