David Mamet's Babbling Incoherencey

It's rare that I run across something so astoundingly wrong on every level that it just sort of lays there, like a dead fish rotting in the sun. And yet David Mamet has written just such a rambling, incoherent column as a defense of current gun law.

Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

...Actually he didn't. If you actually read the quote, in context, that is the end result of a very long series of other social actions. That's not summing up communism, but rather summing up what Marx viewed as the society that would naturally be created by communism. And that phrase predates Marx by over a century.

For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia.

Except it did. That's not even the whole sentence, that's just the last bit at the end where Marx literally says he is making a banner slogan. The effective agency are all the economic and social programs Marx listed in the first part of the sentence.

The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.”

No. Marx is very, very clear on this point. To quote the sentence itself, "...after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" There's some magical thinking here that leads Marx to conclude people will be helpful and generous and willing to fully develop themselves, but he is incredibly clear on the point that this motto is the result of individuals cooperating for mutual good out of their own innate desire to cooperate for mutual good.

All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. These, as all bureaucrats, obtain and hold their jobs by complying with directions and suppressing the desire to employ initiative, compassion, or indeed, common sense. ThThe government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences.ey are paid to follow orders.

 Which, of course, is no different from the private sector. It's actually better than the private sector, as the private sector adds "maintaining profit" on top of all those other things.

The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

Except it isn't. Mamet, in this piece, loves being vague because in being vague he could theoretically be talking about anything, therefore no one can fact check him. But let's just face the fact that he is talking about Affirmative Action. Most of the actual laws about Affirmative Action, are laws banning Affirmative Action. I'm not sure there actually are any Affirmative Action laws, virtually all Affirmative Action is merely institutional policy, policy designed to correct past injustices and disadvantages. And that's also why Mamet is wrong, Affirmative Action does not claim that black people have fewer abilities than white people, but rather that they have been systematically disadvantaged and redress to a level field.

But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining “needs”?

It's all over the constitution. It's why there is a constitution. I don't understand how anyone could possibly read the enumerated powers clause in article I and actually ask "But where in the Constitution is it written that the Government is in charge of determining 'needs'?" But then I don't suppose I should expect Mamet of reading the constitution any more closely than he read Marx.

It is not the constitutional prerogative of the Government to determine needs.

It is...

“One-size-fits-all,” and that size determined by the State has a name, and that name is “slavery.”

No, David Mamet. Slavery is an actual thing. Slavery is when one person owns another person, not when the government treats everyone equal under the law.

The Founding Fathers, far from being ideologues, were not even politicians.

As usual, this is false. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist debate knows there were plenty of ideologues, and virtually all the founding fathers were career politicians.

Their struggle to draft a set of rules acceptable to each other was based on the assumption that we human beings, in the mass, are no damned good—that we are biddable, easily confused, and that we may easily be motivated by a Politician, which is to say, a huckster, mounting a soapbox and inflaming our passions.

Again, no. They made the assumption that the masses were a mob to be protected against, and that's why they created the Electoral College and had the states elect Senators. But they trusted the elite political and social class so much that they handed control over half the legislature and the presidency to them. They set up a representative democracy with many, many checks against representative democracy. All of which pretty much proves the next extremely long section about how the founders intended for the people to control the government to guard against the consolidation of power, (which I won't repost since it is quite dull) is wrong

This next part is so astounding I have to replicate it as is...

On a lower level of abstraction, there are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms. 

The Left loves a phantom statistic that a firearm in the hands of a citizen is X times more likely to cause accidental damage than to be used in the prevention of crime...

No, seriously. He throws out that "2 million" and then complains about "phantom statistic." Seriously. Anywho, that "2 million" line actually seems to come from a report done by the Carter administration, and wasn't anything resembling an actual statistic, more like an inference made from interviewing prisoners. The fact that Mamet uses it here is just proof that he hangs out at Free Republic. As for the "accidental damage" (which is just a nice way of saying "unintentional shootings"), those aren't "phantom statistics"  but rather the results of actual police reports. Unlike many examples of social studies, these aren't even the result of sampling, but rather are every single incident that happened.

Lies, Lies, and Damnable Lies

The following statement is a lie. It comes from a blog post, but you will hear it repeated over and over.  It is a particularly pernicious lie, and one that leads into an ever deepening spiral of lies and articles, and articles about lies.

Stop blaming anybody but yourself. You are responsible for your own misery; you’re responsible for your own happiness, too.

No. You are not responsible for your own misery. You are not responsible for your own happiness. You might deserve some of the blame for your station in life, but for the most part you are blameless. These statements are designed to make you think you have control over your own life. You don't. No one does. That might be fatalistic, but it is no less true.

Your brain is a mass of tissue, chemicals, and electricity. Your body is a mass of organic compounds. You have little to no control over either. If you are depressed, it's because you have a chemical imbalance, if you are happy its because the chemicals are telling you that you are. That's simple neurology. You have no control over that, any more than you have control over being born with all your limbs. With a lot of education and a lot of excessive work, you can figure out partial control over your own brain. But if you ever actually experience depression, you'll quickly learn just how little control you really have over what your brain is doing. You might be autistic, you might be schizophrenic. You might be something that has no name yet, you might be something that no one has even thought to look for. You can try better living through chemistry, which is an abject admission of defeat to lack of control. In that case, doctors and pills and insurance companies and the government are now all in charge of your happiness and misery. Add to that complications and side effects, and suddenly your body reasserts its own control over your happiness and your misery.

You can claim that you are not autistic or in any way abnormal. But that's just the point. You had no control over if you were abnormal or not. You have no more control over your brain than anyone else. If you have no control over being autistic, then why would anyone ever believe that you have control over happiness or misery?

Now that we've already established that you are not responsible for your misery or your happiness, you really aren't responsible for your life either. In addition to all those chemicals and genes and electricity, you were also born temporally and geographically and economically and politically to particular parents with the entire weight of the history of the world crushing down upon you. You have, for your entire life, been buffeted around by large scale social pressures, some of which are incomprehensible, and all of which are out of your control. If you want the most stark indicator of just how out of your control the world is, here is an article on The National Review's post election cruise. These are the wealthiest and most powerful people in America. These are the legendary mega-financiers of SuperPACs. And the article is a eulogy of their hopes and dreams and illusion of control. These people are buffed around by large scale social pressures which they find incomprehensible and out of their control. If they aren't in control, with all the power and wealth imaginable, then you certainly aren't.

Which brings me to another quote...

That’s the thing: It’s easier to say that the system is aligned against you, or say that everything would work out if X were different, or say that you’ll just get around to whatever it is tomorrow. Change is hard. Personal growth is hard. Accepting that you are the only one who can do these things for yourself is hard.

No, it's not. That's just a lie. It's, in fact, vastly more more easy to say that everything is either your fault or your success, than it is to say the system is aligned against you. It's easier to believe that we live in a world where we have some sort of personal control, than that we live in a world that is horrible and fucked up and everything is random, meaningless noise. You can hope for a better tomorrow if you believe everything that happens to you is your fault.  You can believe that if you just did something, your tomorrow would be better. That's a comforting thought. What's not a comforting thought is the idea that your tomorrow might be better or worse, but you had nothing to do with it. Dumb luck had to do with it. A series of pointless, random circumstances stretching from the present to the dawn of time. People need to believe they have some sort of control, they have some sort of agency. But they just don't. Everyone is constantly being hammered by pressures both seen and unseen, and you can not untangle yourself from them.

Which brings us to another lie...

The thing that spoke to me in that Cracked piece is the idea that you only get out of the universe what you put into it.

No. That's the just world fallacy. Most people get far, far, far less from the universe than they put into. American's live in a capitalist society. The basic premise of capitalism is that most people get far less from the universe than they put into it. If people were not getting less from the universe (here represented by an economic system), then there would be no profit. The author can make that claim because he achieved,  from his own perspective, success. But the overwhelming majority do not achieve success. For every major success, there are thousands of unsuccessful people. No one pays attention to them because, to quote Strangers With Candy, "No one makes friends with a failure." The overwhelming majority can't achieve success. That is another basic premise of capitalism. Capitalism demands inequalities, and inequalities demand that the unsuccessful out number the successful. Capitalism also demands that some people be successful. A quirk of fate is all the divides the unsuccessful from the successful. There will always be unsuccessful people who worked harder and were more deserving than the successful. It all boils down to luck. And luck of all different kinds. Being born into the right family. Having a good day. Someone else having a good day. As Warren Buffet succinctly put it, "I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I have earned. If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru or someplace, you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil. I will be struggling 30 years later." You can work as hard as you like, but in the end, luck is everything. All of which is why it is immensely comforting for the successful to believe they deserved everything they got, and for the unsuccessful people to believe they failed for lack of trying, rather than that the universe is weird, random and fucked up and decided to be against them.

And it really is all about luck. You can lie to yourself and claim you have some measure of control, but you don't. From social studies we know that proximity is still the leading cause of marriage. Even now, with the internet in full force, most people still marry someone who happens to live near them. That's purely weird, random, fucked up universe that we have no control over. We also know that most jobs are gotten by networking. Once again, purely weird, random, fucked up universe that we have no control over. Our lives are dictated by complete chance, that we retroactively add choice and purpose to.

Which brings us back to the lie, "It’s easier to say that the system is aligned against you." This is begging the question. We must first ask, "is the system aligned against you?" And the fact is the system is aligned against a great many people. The system is both designed, and loose chaos. Certainly there are powerful political and economic interests that arrange the system to benefit themselves. But there's also quite a lot of moving parts that aren't designed in any meaningful way but operate in order to align against people. We will always need more janitors than CEOs, so the system is aligned to produce more janitors than CEOs. The system is aligned against janitors in favor of CEOs. Any tracking of economic data shows that the system is aligned against the great majority of people. The common way this lie is told is by looking at the individual and not the society. An individual can become a CEO. And you can hold that individual up and say success is possible. But if you did that, you would be missing the larger context. First off, someone was going to be that CEO, the system demanded it. Secondly in order for that CEO to exist, there has to be a large number of janitors (or employees of any stripe). In order to create that singular success, there has to be vastly larger number of unsuccessful people. The system is aligned against those people. Those people have to exist or the system ceases to exist. This has been elegantly demonstrated in our ongoing recession. Since it began, there have been more people unemployed than there have been open jobs. At one point there were over ten people per job opening. Which meant that no matter what happened, there would always be nine people who failed and one person who succeeded. That's the way the system works. It is aligned against people, and it is aligned against most people.

That's also the way social interactions work. Social interactions are a complex dance requiring massive amounts of luck in order to come to fruition. You have interacted with thousands of people, and of those people only an incredibly small number actually developed into anything. Think about all the people that could have been your friend. You probably don't remember any significant portion of them, because, obviously, they were not important to you. For whatever reason events just did not align to allow anything to develop. But the potential of friendship existed. But you did make some friends, you could talk about a subject they found interesting, or you made a joke that they found funny, or you just saw they were lonely. It is the same thing with networking and relationships. The potentials out number the actual, and luck is what creates opportunity. And then we look backwards and claim luck was really skill.

So, when we obviously and overtly have no control over our lives, why do we spend so much time lying to ourselves by telling us we do? The answer is incredibly obvious. If we are focusing on ourselves, we aren't focusing on our weird, stupid, random, fucked up world. We aren't asking why it is weird, why it is stupid, why it is random, and why it is fucked up. And we aren't asking the forbidden question, "Does the world have to be like this?" The world is not just aligned against people, it is also aligned for people. And the people who it is aligned for are desperate to prevent it from changing. Remember the National Review Cruise? That is the perfect example of people the system is aligned in favor of, and how badly they want to prevent it from changing. The goal of the system is for it to become invisible. That is why the Democrats and the Republicans have no systemic disagreements, (it's also why things that are by definition not-socialism are now labeled "socialist," to give the appearance of systemic disagreement where there is none). When everyone focuses on the individual, no one focuses on the society the individual occurs in. No one notices that it is impossible to opt out of society. The system can't be threatened when everyone focuses just on themselves. And the system can't be overthrown when everyone thinks they are actually in control of their own lives, and that it is possible for anyone to be a success. The system can't be destroyed when people just accept the premises that the system is built upon.

If you only have yourself to blame for your fate, then you can be filled with hope. But the blackest despair is realizing that you control nothing, you are just a pawn of a weird, random system.

So do what you have to do, but don't lie about it.