Ancient
truths
and student era discussions that we had
forgotten can be given new life and relevance
when one opens Raoul Martinez’s book Creating
Freedom: The Lottery of Birth, The Illusion of
Consent, and the Fight for our Future (Allen
Lane 2016). This unusual book is philosophical
and analytical. It brings together the political
concerns about life in the Western world of
century 21 in a systematic way. It digs at the
roots of concerns. It moves to a vision for
renewing that world.
Much
of
the content is not novel. But the perspective,
tone and resultant whole is new and powerful.
The concerns resonate with my Christian
tradition: justice, equality, inclusive
communities, reaching for the outsider, and
giving to the poor. Hiding within is an implicit
daringly inclusive concept of freedom. The book
is for anyone and everyone, especially in the
West. It makes us think about who we are in
today’s world.
The
chapters
of the book fall into a three-part outline: The
Lottery of Birth; The Illusion of Consent; The
Fight for Our Freedom. The tone remains steady
but each part brings a different mood. Here is a
summarizing sampler.
The
first
part works on us to revolutionise our
thinking around the role of luck in our lives.
It is luck – not we ourselves – that played the
dominant role in making us who we are. There is
luck in the family we were born into, in our
family’s nature and its wealth or poverty. There
is luck in the nation we were born into, in the
teachers we encountered. We didn’t choose genes,
gender, wealth or brains.
Martinez
questions
that we have free will, the ideas that
individuals are responsible for what they do and
that some are deserving of reward for
accomplishments. There is a jab at religions
with myths of individual responsibility.
Martinez claims that in the world of gene pools,
family wealth, status of birth and Darwinism,
there is no way that people can blame themselves
for their situation. However he tells us we are
not powerless. “We are what we are and must work
with what we have.” This revolutionary beginning
then shifts to crime and punishment.
The
idea
that people who do bad things deserve to suffer
goes back further than the “an eye for an eye”
vengeance code. It is challenged if people can’t
be held responsible for what they do. Maybe
punishment can usefully deter others. But
evidence shows that deterrence doesn’t work.
Moreover, it brings the dubious notion that we
sacrifice someone not responsible in the hope of
preventing someone more responsible and
privileged from breaking the law. What separates
the criminal from the non-criminal is luck.
Income inequality is the most significant
predictor of social violence. You can’t be tough
on crime without being tough on inequality. Yet
the opposite is the way things are going. There
are alternatives. A Norwegian prison removes
only liberty and gives inmates an education and
job training. Restorative justice allows the
hurters and the hurt to talk to some kind of
resolution. Next Martinez comes to the third
challenge for our thinking – reward.
“Our
economic
system delivers vast rewards to the rich not for
what they do but for what they own … the greater
the fortune, the faster it tends to grow.” “Why
should the lottery of birth have such an impact
on what people own and what opportunities they
have?” Maybe we could be rewarded for
contributing like a doctor or a nurse. But that
is luck because having a good brain is luck. A
better job is luck. Moreover social mobility
depends less on training and skill than on
parents able to help children get top jobs.
That
rewards
follow the market value of one’s contribution is
myth. CEOs of major corporations cannot make
correct economic forecasts yet they are paid
millions whether their company performs well or
not. Executive salary increases come after falls
in company profits. Most work is done as a team
and power determines the distribution of
proceeds. Employers have the upper hand.
Economics assumes a world of self-interested
rational people governable by carrots and
sticks. Martinez thinks carrots and sticks can
be counter-productive. To direct our lives, to
learn and create and do better by our world and
ourselves also matter to us. People care about
survival and providing for loved ones, but they
also get satisfaction helping others. Happiness
and well-being are subjective, but “as long as
large inequalities exist there is every reason
to believe that transferring money from the rich
to the poor increases the overall welfare of
society.” Beyond a certain level, more money
makes no difference to happiness.
The
first
part ends: when the myth of responsibility is
exposed, the idea of deserving punishment or
reward disappears. Ideas like punishment for
deterrence, like reward for contribution and
like incentive do not withstand scrutiny. Power
defines the crime and its punishment. Power
shapes the rules of the market and the
bargaining hands of the players. How such vast
inequalities of power and wealth survived in the
democratic era is explored in Part II.
Part
II,
The Illusion of Consent, gives insights
and information about control and markets and
media that are depressing. Humans have a history
of slavery and exploitation that was shaped by a
social context of cultural values, by “coercive
power,” and by the individual’s identity with
society’s beliefs and desires. Without coercive
power great inequalities cannot be sustained.
Today, employment involves control. The employer
brings a vision of the future and the employed
help bring it about. Also, borrowing money locks
a person into compliance and control. “Separated
from every resource by a price tag, our options
expand and contract with our bank balance.” Poverty
limits
freedom and serves to control. Maintaining an
unequal social order requires promoting
justifying beliefs and stamping out dissent.
There
is
moulding of beliefs via propaganda and the use
of established institutions like schools and
churches. The massive state infrastructure to
shape our identity may not gain our consent, but
our compliance is enough! As Martinez says, on
the obedience of the many rests the power of the
few. Control does not impact our power to choose
as long as our behaviour is the result of what
we decide. Even when threatened we can comply or
resist. The ability to choose is essential to
any notion of freedom.
From
the
Pharaohs to the industrial revolution the
ruler’s control of the surplus arose by a mix:
making compliance seem inescapable;
divide-and-rule tactics; creating enthusiasm for
the status quo; promise of a better afterlife;
and, if required, brute force. Sophisticated
forms of control are used today when democracy
has become the legitimisation of the mandate of
a government through a vote. The
illusion of freedom to choose in politics,
products, employers and news hides manufactured
consent and conceals imbalances in power and
wealth. There is a struggle between “one dollar
one vote” and “one person one vote”. Three
chapters explore how freedom to choose has been
whittled down in elections, markets and media.
Around
WWI
governments learned to manufacture public
support. Democracy, the growth of corporate
power and the growth of corporate propaganda to
protect corporate power from democracy were the
dominant features of the twentieth century. The
1945 New Deal bill in the US was diluted by a
campaign of the National Association of
Manufacturers. In the 1980s neoliberalism
followed. It sought to free the market from
democratic controls. It is a convenient tool for
advancing corporate interests.
US
corporate
organizations in the 1970s sought to manage
thinking across the Western world including
university campuses. Inflation rather than
unemployment became the biggest enemy.. Monetary
policies hit both unions and employment. A new
global economic order emerged. New Labour in the
UK, and the Clinton democrats in the US,
accepted neoliberalism.
“One
dollar
one Vote” is now a problem. Martinez
says, “When democracy fails to regulate the
market to protect the public interest, market
power regulates democracy to protect the
corporate interest.” The domination of the US
electoral process by major industries was
extended in 2010 by a US Supreme Court decision
granting corporations the right to donate to
political candidates as if the corporations were
individuals with a right to freedom of speech.
The “free choice” of a vote has lost its
meaning. A small elite has produced the
situation in which “… the democratic process has
been rigged to ensure an outcome favourable to
corporate short-term interests and private
wealth.” Once a consensus is established among
civil servants and politicians there is no real
choice at the ballot box. There has been
corporate success in manipulating the ideals of
freedom, voluntarism, choice and efficiency to
hide their efforts to extend control.
Concentrations of power, whether State or
corporate, are always open to abuse.” With that,
Martinez’s reflection moves to “markets.”
Neoliberals
believe
economic freedom is best entrusted to “free
markets” - a social institution where people
exchange goods and services on mutually
beneficial terms. Decades of soaring inequality,
low growth rates, the takeover of the democratic
process and the destruction of the environment
are hardly a system working well – even before
the crash of 2008. A completely free market does
not exist. The issue is to what degree markets
should be regulated and in whose interests.
When
freedoms
clash, some take priority. Property rights grant
the freedom to control and profit from what is
owned - and the ownership is exclusive of
others. The history of any commodity involves a
transition from something shared to something
owned. Sordid colonial and imperial origins hang
over property rights. Yet the economist
establishment invites us to ignore the immoral
paths to today’s distribution of ownership
rights and to accept without question that some
are very rich and some very poor.
Economists
argue
that voluntary transactions in the market
entered into between two people are mutually
beneficial. But others can be affected. The
effects on everyone else are “externalities” and
these are pervasive. The economy uses energy
from fossil fuels that release greenhouse gas
that contributes to global warming.
“Externalizing costs is a form of theft. It is
taking something for nothing and leaving others
to foot the bill.” There is another problem. It
means little to say transactions are agreed upon
and mutually beneficial. If an assailant puts a
gun to your head and offers to spare your life
in return for your life savings – you agree. But
it was not free choice. Labourers will agree to
work 12 hours a day under unsafe conditions for
inadequate wages. Poverty reduces economic
freedom. “A constraint on our freedom remains a
constraint whether it arises from lack of money,
rights, strength or intelligence.”
Producing
consumers
is another facet of free markets. Immersed in
the market’s pervasive intrusive efforts to
create wants, the notion of “voluntary” choice
is hard to sustain. “The 1920s saw an explosion
and redefinition of consumption. You could now
buy an identity, a way of life, a dream.”
Advertising helps keep the masses discontented
with their mode of life – happiness harms
profits!
Saying
that
happiness and self-worth increase with material
possessions is a lie. “The policies and values
advanced by … Reagan and … Thatcher have been
correlated with extremely high rates of mental
illness.” Economic theory assumes consumers have
perfect product information. Yet corporations
hide product information and the aim of their PR
is to by-pass reason. “The … fantasy of a free
market utopia is a dangerous distraction from
the real world dynamics of politics and
control.” Setting a boundary for the market is
not a technical issue for the few. It is an
issue for everyone.
Martinez
then
takes us into a depressing analysis of the role
of media. It
is impossible to present information
objectively, neutrally or impartially. In
capitalist countries media have unaccountable
political power and the interests they serve are
hidden by the myth that that media are free. By
the 1980s only the very rich could set up media.
The owner set the tone and enjoyed a public say,
and public power, because a newspaper can shape
culture, mould public opinion and promote its
own values. Media ownership is highly focussed
among very few people. Also, these few are big
players in oil, mining, finance and leisure;
conflicts of interest arise. NBC was owned by
General Electric, a supplier of weapons, when it
was reporting on the Gulf War. Privatization
empowers those with private wealth so that
information is a commodity to be bought, sold,
distorted, disseminated or withheld to serve
those with great wealth.
Beyond
the
owners, advertisers have power to decide which
newspapers survive. Advertisers prefer
newspapers with a wealthier readership for more
sales, so papers cover matters of interest to
wealthier readers. Circulation is not the issue;
income from advertising is. There is also an
issue of how media get stories with pressure to
keep costs down. That favours corporations and
government departments with ready-made stories
and wire services like Reuters that provide
ready-made news stories. Wire services emphasise
quotes by people in authority – Presidents and
the like. Martinez says: ”Presenting the
unsupported claims of the powerful as fact is
not journalism, it’s propaganda.” Serious
investigative reports can take months and eat
limited resources. Preference goes to a free
analysis from the Pentagon or a big corporation
- allowing them to influence the media.
Media
fear
of libel makes them favour powerful sources.
Criticising those in power is risky, so they
tend to give equal time to other positions.
However, on the US and climate change, when
scientific data was clear, that approach was
disastrous. There is an issue of how balance is
used. When someone speaks against power, a
counter viewpoint is provided. When power
speaks, it is often presented as fact. Access to
influential sources can make or break a
journalist. Successful reporters trade truth for
access, avoiding tough questions and taking a
quotable quote. The future of media now links to
the future of the internet. Advertising revenues
are moving online so issues from print media
will recur there. Good investigative journalism
is a challenge. “We may all have freedom of
speech, but we don’t share the same freedom to
be heard. That is monopolized by the few who
own, fund and subsidise our media.”
Part
III,
The Fight for Our Freedom, takes a sombre
look at creating freedom in chapters on
creativity, knowledge, power survival and
empathy.
The
chapter
on creativity looks first at obedience. We need
to find what we ourselves value and make choices
in that direction. Rules are not a problem if
they coincide with our values. Deferring to
authority is all right if the authority is
legitimate, like the advice of a doctor.
Different contexts make different persons of us,
but we can find freedom to treat situations our
own way and be true to who we are. Groups
sacrificing together can change things to get
higher wages or save hospitals. Rules can be
challenged, leading others to action and making
change. People get caught up in competing
“games” for changes in society. Those pushing
for a free market argue against a collectivist
society whose government can dominate the
thinking. Yet neoliberalism produced that very
kind of society with dominant thinking -- the
profit game. Rules mark what we can do; values
tell us what we should do. Freedom means being
able to determine for ourselves what it means to
live well and to enjoy human flourishing.
Capitalism ignores the impact of inequality on
power and the imperfections of the market. If we
want freedom to be a core principle, we will
have to create it.
Freedom
thrives
on knowledge; control thrives on ignorance.
Self-knowledge can grow, allowing enough
uncertainty to question earlier beliefs and
behaviour. One can try standing outside oneself
and looking from someone else’s viewpoint and
letting one’s imagination go visiting.
Uncertainty about what reality lurks behind our
perceptions is something we just accept and it
allows us a useful curiosity. Most of what our
mind does is automatic and we are predisposed to
cling to the views we hold; our minds move to
have us like or dislike all of someone or
something or to jump to conclusions taking
limited evidence and filling the gaps
automatically! Yet when conscious self does its
hard work, it can discover and help create what
we value. Labels and symbols – like flags –
summarise a lot and capture emotions. Freedom
and justice have no nationality or religion, and
following such ideals requires avoiding labels.
Reducing a person to a label lets us ignore our
ignorance of that person. Asking what a nation
or a flag is allows ambiguities to emerge. The
truth can make us free, but it leaves us without
entitlement to advantages we were used to.
Struggling to freedom we are impeded most by our
ignorance of our ignorance.
There
are
distortions of knowledge by power. Mainstream
economists did not predict the financial
collapse of 2007, but some few economists gave
very accurate predictions that fell on deaf ears
or were derided. Myths about the past buy
legitimacy in the present. In a survey more
Britons were proud of the colonial legacy than
regretted it; they did not know the negative.
One cannot make sense of the world without
factoring in the distorting effects from
governments and corporations. Science itself is
not immune. Central to the politics of freedom
is sharing knowledge and exposing lies.
Famines
do
not occur in a democracy; they are a result of
authoritarian rule. More than 70 million people
died from avoidable famines in the twentieth
century. The same economic forces that decide
who survives in a famine are at work every day.
Whenever there is an imbalance of power, the
weaker is vulnerable to the stronger. As the
balance improves, so do the options of the
weaker. Democracy demands more than a vote. It
needs the ability of people to understand and
participate in decisions affecting their lives.
Democracy is preferable because power corrupts,
because a benevolent elite is unlikely to remain
indefinitely benevolent, and because people are
shaped by the options they have. Creating our
own future is hugely empowering. Expert
knowledge must be collected and disseminated.
Deliberative democracy is needed, with a
commitment to reason and to interacting with
different views. Beyond equal rights to vote, we
need equal conditions for equal participation –
and that calls for more economic equality. In
the past, various forms of oppression were
fought. Today “Private ownership of the world’s
resources by a tiny minority of individuals and
corporations exerts a vice-like grip over much
of humanity. People cannot control their lives
if they cannot control the resources on which
their lives depend.”
There
can
be democracy in education. Educational
institutions should have participation and
equality. Education should not relate to
parents’ wealth. It should reflect the kind of
society wanted with the practice of freedom,
with men and women who can deal critically with
reality and participate in the transformation of
their world. A stable democracy depends on
socialization that cultivates tools for its
protection and evolution. That calls for
teaching on war and peace, identity formation,
empathy and dehumanization, climate change and
survival, equality and oppression.
The
workplace
can be democratized. A huge Spanish company
evolved from a few worker owned cooperatives. It
is governed by general assemblies and by
representational councils. The highest paid
managers get 8 times the lowest paid worker.
Workers vote on work issues like executive
salaries and holidays. Workers should
participate in decisions that impact them, and
decisions about how profits they help create are
spent.
Politics
can
be democratized by ceilings in funding, and by
limiting election funding to individual
donations. In addition there is need for
progressive taxation. Requiring greater
transparency could collect on the trillions of
dollars in tax havens and the trillions from
unreported wealth. A progressive global tax on
capital would address the increasing
concentration of wealth. Market logic makes
little sense for healthcare, food, water, energy
and education. Presumptions that state-run
services are wasteful and that private
enterprise is efficient don’t withstand
scrutiny. Nationalized services play important
roles.
Democratizing
money
and its creation involves addressing private
banks that create money by bookkeeping entries
on the value of every loan they provide.
Printing money brings the government almost 100
per cent profit for this, but government
printing is only 3 percent of the money supply.
Private banks make profits on the 97 per cent of
money they “create” At
issue is why the public pay interest to private
banks for something the government can provide
for little or no cost. Most bank loans went not
to business, but to credit cards and private
loans, so the interest paid is by individuals,
not corporations. There is concern about the
“independent” central bank. Bank decisions are
no less political than any others. Bankers are
insulated from public opinion so they can hurt
the majority, especially if told to worry about
nothing except inflation! If the central bank is
to serve the majority it must be democratically
accountable and freed from private sector
pressure.
Power
takes
various forms: economic or wealth control, state
or coercive control, and the control of social
or collective action. Every modern state has a
mixture. Social power should deepen democratic
control of state power to overcome economic
power. Electoral
victory is necessary, with continuing social
pressure to hold the victors to plans once
elected.
Nine
processes
challenge survival: climate change; loss of
species; nitrogen and phosphorus cycles; ozone
depletion; acidifying oceans; fresh water use;
changes in land use; atmospheric aerosols; and
chemical pollution. Climate change comes from
greenhouse gas emissions from use of fossil
fuels. At least 80 percent of fossil fuels must
be left in the ground. But to do that owner
corporations need to write off trillions of
dollars worth of fuel. That calls for an
international legally binding carbon limit. The
UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs
estimates $1.9 trillion a year would overcome
global poverty, increase food to eradicate
hunger without degrading land and water
resources, and avert a climate change
catastrophe. Recent IMF research indicates
government subsidies of fossil fuels could
amount to $5.3 trillion a year – between 2.5 and
3 times the needed $1.9 trillion. Multinational
agribusiness is part of the problem. Meat and
dairy industries contribute 20% of greenhouse
gases. According to the UN’s Special Rapporteur
on the Right to Food, an alternative approach,
agroecology, could double or triple crop yields
and mitigate climate change.
Growth
need
not be bad. A steady state economy limits
resource use so the scale of the overall system
does not change. Renewable resources are
extracted no faster than they can be
regenerated, non-renewables no faster than they
can be replaced by renewables. Waste is put into
the environment no faster than it can be safely
absorbed. Consumption beyond a certain level
does not improve people’s lives. In the short
term, we need resource caps. In the long term,
we need retreat from the consumer culture.
A
movement responding to climate change could
expose the flaws in the present economic and
political systems. The fights for racial
justice, refugee welfare, gender equality,
disability rights, public services, economic
equality, meaningful democracy and lasting peace
are not unrelated. The links must be solidarity
with an inspiring vision.
Empathy
is
very human and very powerful. Economists have
claimed humans are greedy and concerned with
their own pleasure and comfort. Research
converges on something different. Empathy, the
ability to step into the other’s shoes, is an
integral part of being human. It sees the other
as another human being. Distance of a social
sort makes killing and torture possible. That
distance can be consciously inculcated.
Derogatory
terms
chip at the status of human beings. Describing
people as subhuman paves the way for their
persecution. Dehumanizing has long been wired
into the systems that dominate the world. States
are fictional entities that methodically
constrain empathy through the cultivation of
patriotism. Killing is not easy. Military
empathy is channelled to fellow soldiers so
compassion is for the in-group. Yet once empathy
transcends the dehumanizing distinctions of
nation states, it becomes harder to justify the
sacrifice of innocent people. Indiscriminate
empathy is a revolutionary force.
Empathy
is
inconsistent. The motto ‘help if you can’ works
for the drowning or fallen child we encounter in
our path. But the motto does not pull us in the
same way to the probably more distant child
dying from lack of medicine or clean water. It
is a useful motto to use in our consumer
society. Reason and imagination can correct
biases by allowing us to act by our principles
and to balance our instincts against our moral
reasoning.
Human
morality
has sharpened over time, but our moral instincts
still fail us.
Though things may not be clear, justice
demands that we never stop trying to see the
world through the eyes of others, especially of
those that are vulnerable, oppressed,
disadvantaged. Fear will be used against us –
fear for our children, safety, jobs if we don’t
drop more bombs, lock more up, keep more out. In
a world of division, injustice and cruelty,
empathy is creative, signalling the changes we
want. Research shows that disasters like an
earthquake, flood, or bombing bring out the
best. Spontaneous communities emerge. Altruism
becomes the norm. Resources are shared. With few
exceptions, class, race, religion, gender and
nationality are temporarily suspended in a
shared experience that makes space for greater
empathy.
Transforming
society
is daunting. At each stage we need to be
receptive to the needs of the moment and modify
strategies and priorities. Serious change
requires working on common goals beyond the
thoughts and behaviours people bring. A
revolution in belief and imagination creates a
revolution in possibility. Whatever our class,
race or gender we have the possibility of
contributing to the building of something
better. The first obstacle is ourselves. We need
to learn who we are and what we need.