True Enough

The truth is what everyone agrees it is. Now there are certain exceptions to this, such as math and the sciences, but for anything that involves social interaction there is no defined truth, no objective reality. This may be a controversial opinion, but I find that it holds true for the majority of the time. Social facts are decided and agreed upon constantly by all people in society. There is no rule that says I can't come to class in my robe, but if I did people would consider me weird. Conversely, if everyone wore robes to class and I showed up as I normally dress I would be weird. Truth can be defined as the most commonly held beliefe on a subject. I really like True Enough from what I've read so far. I feel like as we move farther into the book we will get a better picture of how common narratives are shaped by media echo chambers. I think what I'm really interested in is how an individual's community shapes their ideology, especially when individuals are allowed to chose their communities.

Newt Gingrich's America

There has be a paradigm shift in the way Washington works since 1994. Newt Gingrich campaigned on a platform that promised to change the Republican party from one where it was possible to get along with democrats to one that opposed every single bill, vote, or issue that a democrat proposed. There used to be standards of conduct in Congress, such as a taboo on using the filibuster or blocking a nomination. When someone did one of these two things they were considered to be quite the tool. This code of conduct has obviously failed. Congress was designed by men who thought a gentlemanly code of conduct would persist forever, but we are now seeing a Congress inhabited by people bent on manipulating the system to for their own benefit. Nothing can get done in Congress any longer due to the vitriol being slung by both sides. This era of hyper-partisanship will probably continue until there is some monumental crises that requires cooperation and when that happens there will only be two options: cooperate or have the country fall apart.

Those Poor American Banks

Jamie Dimon has been claiming that the new regulations imposed on banks are "anti-american". The new regulations would set higher standards for the capital requirements, the ratio of equity to debt, that banks have to hold. Dimon's claim is that by forcing the banks to hold high capital requirement, in essence to make them safer, is un-american because they were set by Basel III, the international banking body that determines what the adequate levels of capital requirements are. We are coming out of a time (are we?) where it is obvious that banks had very low capital requirements and so were able to leverage themselves to up to 35 times their equity. American banks were given a chance to manage themselves with little to no government regulation, and they failed spectacularly. I think what is un-american is letting a oligarchical set of banks ruin the lives of millions of Americans. In all honesty, the new capital requirements are not nearly strict enough. The Swiss have imposed a CR (capital requirement) of nearly 20% on their banks due to the powerful place they occupy in the economy and other countries like Britain are considering similar measures. The United States has let its banking sector run wild and it needs to begin to reign it in.

The Absurd Year

I have read a lot of philosophy during my life, and almost all of it left me feeling unsatisfied, that is until I discovered a branch of philosophy called Absurdism.  Absurdism has it’s roots in the writings of the 19^th century philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, but it further advanced by the French philosopher Albert Camus. In Camus’ essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus examines the problem of the Absurd: that human beings look for meaning in a universe without one. The problem of the Absurd is neither present in human beings or the universe, but in there interaction.

During my most recent reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four I examined the story through the lens of absurdism. Winston is a man who is in constant rebellion against the party, a seemingly unstoppable force that will be responsible for his death. Like the absurd man who is sure of the grand finality of his death, Winston continues to rebel against the absurdity of his life even though he realizes that “[they] can’t win” (135). Winston takes a very different approach to the knowledge of certain death than his mother did. To be fair, his mother’s loss is different than Winston’s in that she had almost everything stripped from her life before her death. However, her response was to lie in bed what resembles a crushing depression. I am not criticizing her for doing this as I can only begin to imagine the terrible grief of a person in her position; I am just highlighting her behavior as an opposite to Winston’s.  In contrast, when Winston is faced with certain death his response is to extract the most life he can from the bleak world that he inhabits. The response of a person who recognizes the absurd is not to give up and despair at the hopelessness of his or her situation, it is to rejoice in the wonder and beauty that life has to offer. With the knowledge that there is nothing but what has been and what is comes a freedom from the pain and anguish of trying to live in place distinctly inhuman, a place where Party dwells. For me, and it seemed for Winston as well, living life is finding someone you love desperately and giving him or her everything of yourself because “when you have nothing else to give, you still give [them] love” (164). To love, others and yourself, is to “[stay] human” (165). The failure to rebel would mean that Winston rejects his humanity for some Rebellion means to embrace the wonder of being human without having to anesthetizing yourself to the world.

            The knowledge of the absurd never really leaves you. It is something that, once your mind’s eye fixes upon its terrifying light, you can never unsee. Winston must cling desperately to the delusion that he loves big brother because he knows that flame of his humanity still burns in the back of his mind. 

Twisted Finance

           I have a passion for the most boring subject on earth: Finance.  But what really gets me going is the systemic failure of the United States’ financial system. Just by looking beyond the walls of Trinity’s campus, we can see how the financial system in this country has failed to benefit the majority of Americas.

I think that one of the biggest reasons for the perversion of the financial sector is that finance and politics in the United States are engaged in a very dangerous relationship.  Since 1979, there has been stagnation in the wage growth of poor and middle-income earners, leading to a shrinking percentage of total wealth controlled as the economy grows. On the other hand, those who have incomes in the top 10%, and especially those in the top 1%, have seen their share of the wealth pie grow substantially. The financial system has essentially been used to funnel wealth from those in society who need it most to those who need it the least.

This most recent corruption of the financial center is due largely to the crusade of deregulation. Before Reagan, regulation was viewed as an area for policy wonks to argue over the minutia of their respective areas, but Reagan made deregulation about morality. He saw, and convinced a sizable amount of the American people, that regulation was inherently bad, and both Republicans and Democrats have carried this sentiment to the present. In a recent blog post on the website Baseline Scenario, frequent contributor and author of 13 Bankers, James Kwak had this to say about morality politics and their influence on the financial sector:

“…For Rick Perry and people like him, there’s something immoral and unmanly about inflation and about paper money. He can stand there telling people that monetary expansion is devaluing the dollars in their pockets, and those people will nod their heads, even though (a) it isn’t—check the inflation figures—and (b) many of them are net debtors and thus stand to gain from a little more inflation. The basic problem is that Rick Perry and his audience (and probably many other people) see economic questions in primarily moral terms, and in their moral universe gold is better than paper and deflation is better than inflation. (That’s the obvious inference if you say that inflation is bad.)”

            This passage clearly explains the relationship between modern morality politics and the financial sector. The people who stand to gain the most from increased inflation, the poor, have been led to believe in a position that hurts them economically. However, this is no accident. The people that have distorted the financial sector, so that it acts to transfer wealth to the wealthy, are also the people who endorse this line of reasoning because they are net creditors. When people see inflation targets and regulation as moral questions it clouds their judgment. When you ask someone in favor of deregulation whether we should deregulate industry, the answer is generally “yes”. This is because in the minds of many people regulation and interest rates are seen as a moral question rather than an economic one. People should have opinions, it encourages participation in our society, but they should think critically about the opinions they hold instead of being conditioned to respond in a certain way to the words “regulation” and deregulation. The financial system is in a world of trouble and it is up to the American people to make sure it gets fixed.

           

Whats Truer That Truth?

Whats truer than truth? The story. History is not objective, it is the synthesis of viewpoints by those who have power and are trying to advance a certain agenda. The very language used in how historical events are described carries powerful imprints that we as readers interpret. There is nothing that is being done by the Ministry of Truth that is not being done by todays or any of yesteryear's media, the Ministry of Truth is just being more open than our current media. The debate that goes on in our society takes place in a very narrow bandwidth, and if one goes outside the that range of incredibly similar ideas they are called a heretic or crazy.  Our current media selectively chooses to ignore or report on details by how they fit into the constructed narrative rather than whether or not they are true. That's why I think that one of the most fascinating things about this book is the party's quest to control the very thoughts of its members. The creation of a new language, INGSOC, allows the party to directly control the way that party members think; complete control over the frame of the debate. All the information that we process is filtered through how we see the world, which are also known as frames. However, the Party in 1984 goes beyond merely shifting a person's frames slightly; they literally make it impossible for debate to take place outside of the frame that they define. I think this book is a very useful tool for understanding the mechanics of fascism, specifically ur-fascism, and that it will help us understand how and why the public sphere is controlled.

Finance in the Public Sphere

The theoretical purpose of finance is to channel money from those who have it to those who need it for productive means, be it opening up a factory or buying a new car so that one can travel to a better job, sadly however, reality rarely reflects reality. The current construction of financial markets and the motives of those within them serve only to increase the income disparity in the world. Instead of funneling capital into productive channels where real gains in output can be made, but what we have is in the words of Paul Krugman, "a vampire squid on the face of humanity, sticking its blood funnel into anything that smells remotely like money." I will be looking at the systemic problems present within the financial system and way of correcting them through governmental and extra-governmental organizations. I want find ways to take the financial system from its current toxic place and move it into a place that actually brings benefits the american poor and middle class instead of squeezing them dry. I will be following several sources such as The Baseline scenario, Gin and Tacos, Calculated Risk Paul Krugman, Planet Money, The Financial Times, The Wall St. Journal, as well as many more that I am sure to find I more deeply explore the subject area and uncover experts.

MBM Question #1 Response

It's nice to have hope, unless you're dead. Dr. Farmer has made an overwhelming impact on the lives of those in the developing world and he did this not by instilling hope, but by preforming hard work to improve the quality of life of the poor. Farmer is an extremely empathetic man, but he isn't doing his work in Haiti to make the Haitians feel good or hopeful; he is doing it to save their lives. Farmer is a true believer in the type of "social justice medicine" that Cuban doctors practice. (207) He knows that to "seek justice" (207) is not to say nice things and hope they get better, it is to fight zealously to end the "massive accumulation of wealth in one part of the world and abject misery in another." (218) Farmer would rather have an economic system that resembles Cuba in a place like Haiti than one more like the United States. Most people who live in the United States would consider this to be an attack on the freedoms enjoyed by the USA, however, Dr. Farmer recognizes that the freedoms enjoyed by the United States only instill a hope in the proletariat that they too can someday make it rich if they work hard enough. Farmer doesn't want hope to be the only thing keeping these people alive, he wants them to all have equal access to the essential services that they need to survive. After the earthquake in Haiti do you think that Dr. Farmer gathered people around him and expounded on the hope of the situation? Of course not, he went immediately to work by helping the injured, sick, and starving. 

After Class, Skimpy Equality

The article "After Class, Skimpy Equality" highlights a very serious problem in gender equality in the college social setting. There is a larger issue here than just woman feeling objectified; that is that one in four women will be sexually assaulted in college. I think the reasons for such a staggering statistic go far beyond the campus walls however. I think that male privilege combined with fewer men going to college creates an perceived demand for men. Men don't learn to objectify women in college, they are taught to their entire lives. 

Many of the men discussed in the article are from fraternities. This gives them power over those who want access to the services provided by frats to the student body; parties and beer. To gain the acceptance of those men in such organizations men will attempt to impress by degrading women in attempt to assert their own manhood. This alone would not have caused such a widespread problem if it were not for an increasing shortage of college educated men*. This may not seem like a problem at elite institutions like Princeton, but the shortage of any college education in men makes an Ivy league degree that much more valuable. This increase in perceived value allows fraternity men to ask more of men and women seeking the services that they provide to the college community. 

I think women should be allowed to live their lives in the way that they want and I believe the article has a very negative view of the women who participate in the male dominated culture of campus parties. These are not dumb women, they are students at Ivy league schools and so their decisions should not be treated like those of children. They are in college, how they choose to live their lives during their four years as undergraduates will probably not resemble how they live their lives once they graduate and start pursuing their careers. If there is anything that the woman's and LGBT movements have taught us is that how people choose to live their lives is their business and we cannot show them the"correct" path. 

*http://tinyurl.com/yj8s7cu