Matt Huber, writing in the New York Times, argues that for a “shift among progressive Democrats on the campaign trail” that de-prioritizes climate change and focuses on affordability. Later in that piece, he writes that “If Democrats reclaim the House and Senate, their first priority must be to materially improve workers’ lives, rather than propose a grand vision of an energy transition.” The article is predictably taking some serious heat from the left, but I think this is mostly because everyone is conflating these two statements.

As a matter of campaign strategy, Huber’s argument is hard to contest. The great challenge of climate change has always been that while most Americans agree that it is happening, and while a plurality will even say that they “worry a great deal about it,” hardly anyone wants to make it a priority. Even at its peak of public concern in late 2021 only 16% of Americans considered it the most important issue, according to YouGov; today, that number is down to 5.8%. So while there is, as Huber’s critics insist, a good amount of consensus that climate change is a problem, the public just doesn’t think we should focus on it.

The economy, in contrast, remains the primary concern for most Americans. Huber is right to note that focus on this issues is significantly class driven, with more concern about climate change among the better off and more concern about the economy among poorer voters, but this point is probably overstated; even among postgrads, for example, concern about prices is currently 7 points higher than concern about climate change.

Faced with this reality, the liberal-left is faced with two choices — and ideology seems to be playing a major role in which response one prefers. Because while liberals and the left both get that campaign messaging is about winning votes, both have very different ideas for how this is done.

In liberalism, democracy isn’t just a mechanism for society to make decisions; it’s also a forum for rational deliberation. Candidates, in their campaigns, lay out their proposed agenda, and then the public evaluates the agenda that you laid out in your campaign and decides whether or not to support it. This is why debates play such a major role in the process of American elections, and it’s also why politicians are expected to stick to the policy agenda they outlined.

So liberalism’s rationalistic approach to campaigning has direct consequences for how we deal with climate change. If you want to do something about climate change, then you need to run on the issue and persuade voters that they should make it a priority. This is true whether they’re disposed to make it a priority or not; one does it not because it is convenient, but because this is what you have to do to uphold the process of rational deliberation. In that light, polling on what voters actually care about doesn’t really matter except as a way of gauging how well your persuasive efforts are going. It should not dictate what you campaign on.

The main problem with this perspective, of course, is that American politics do not actually operate as disciplined exercises in rationalistic deliberation. Because both our system of campaign finance and our mass media are dominated by capital, capitalism shapes everything from the political options we are offered to the campaign strategies they pursue. Today political campaigns largely rely on flooding propaganda rather than rational persuasion, trying to saturate voters with inflammatory or demotivational messages by pouring millions into ads, particularly near election day. The rich prefer a discourse dominated by flooding tactics because the success of flooding is a direct function of how much money one can invest into it.

In the campaign environment capitalism has created it is utter suicide to try to rely on rationalistic strategies while the opposition is shouting you down. That is why in the long term the left’s goal must be to simply dismantle capitalism so that flooding stops being a useful strategy. In the short term, however, our goal in an election is simply to get as many votes for left-wing politics as possible — and nothing more. Elections may be an opportunity to educate the public and set up a thorough referendum on competing platforms, but for now that cannot be the priority.

For this reason, the left should rely on a very different approach to elections on issues like climate change. You should tell the truth about your position on climate, and you should make it a political priority, but neither of these points imply that you should make it a central issue in your campaign. If voters say that they that what they care about is affordability then that is what you focus on. If they want to know what your plans are for climate change they can visit your website.

This is why I think both Huber’s piece and its critics are fairly misguided. Both are talking as if what someone does in office has to be dictated by their campaign messaging. As a matter of historical fact this is not how democratic politics have ever functioned in the United States, mostly just because politicians flat-out lie. But even without lying, left politicians can assure voters that they will do what the voters want on affordability — and if they’re persuasive enough on this issue then they won’t need to spend a lot of time on the others. This, as I noted a few months back, is precisely how Abigail Spanberger won in Virginia despite backing positions on trans issues that are relatively unpopular in this state: she simply focused on the economy.

Once we decouple elections from the project of liberal rationalism a lot of these apparent conflicts between political necessity and political expedience disappear. If I were running as a socialist presidential candidate in 2028, I would mention in my official platform that I plan to commit trillions to the Green Climate Fund to combat climate change — and I would spend roughly 100% of my public speaking and media engagements talking about affordability. Save political education for public schools and DSA.

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For the first time since Russia’s invasion in 2022, support for fighting “as long as necessary” has slipped below 50% in Ukraine according to recent polling from the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology.

Only 48% of respondents now support indefinite war, according to KIIS. A third of Ukrainians now say they only support another year or less of fighting, with an additional 19% expressing ambivalence.

These numbers mark an important shift in public opinion. Last August, Gallup reported that Ukrainian belief that they should “continue fighting until [they] win the war” had reached a low of 24% — yet 62% insisted that they could continue fighting indefinitely. This new drop is a more direct measure of popular morale, and suggests that the Ukrainian stance towards the war may be moving from pessimism to exhaustion.

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Yesterday marked the anniversary of Antonio Gramsci’s death, so out of respect I held off from publishing this - but now that Monday’s over, I think a word or two is in order on the man’s critique of determinism. His arguments on the matter are ones that I would say most of the modern left basically accepts, but whatever one wants to say about their role at the time, their role today seems to be to rehabilitate liberal ideas about idealism and individual freedom. They are not, in any case, very good.

The story of Marx, I have argued elsewhere, is one of a man whose philosophical outlook became demonstrably deterministic as his work matured from youthful polemic to scientific analysis. This point is only worth making because Gramsci’s reputation leans so heavily on Marxist prestige. The closest Marx ever comes to writing like Gramsci is in his (odd) doctoral dissertation where he praises Epicurus’ theory that atoms are capable of acts of free will. But within four years, Marx was already arguing that material forces were “the prime governor” of “the will and the action of man.”

Elsewhere, Marx laid out his famous theory of what would come to be known as the base and the superstructure:

The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.

Though degrees of buy-in vary, this is one of those Marxist ideas that even contemporary liberals significantly accept. It is for example a foundational premise of modern anthropology and sociology that the economic and technological foundation of society has a far reaching impact on its culture. The only real controversy these days is whether one insists that it is the only determinant of the superstructure or whether other things (like free will!) determine it too.

Without wading into that controversy, however, I’ll just make a different point: Marx’s theory of causality is completely ordinary, intuitive, and coherent. There is a cause (the base) and an effect (the superstructure) and that’s their basic relationship.

Compare this to Gramsci. In his essay on Relations of Force, Gramsci writes that

Even the geographical position of a national State does not precede but follows (logically) structural changes, although it also reacts upon them to a certain extent (to the extent prcisely to which superstructures react upon the structure, politics on economics, etc.).

Here, he begins by nodding to the Marxist position: even the boundaries of States are there for reasons that can ultimately be traced back to the economy. Again: ordinary causal relationship. But then we get an odd move: the state also “reacts upon” — by which he means influences — the economy! This is decidedly not a relationship of cause-and-effect as we ordinarily understand it. It’s circular!

Gramsci’s position is easy to defend in an utterly superficial way; it isn’t hard at all to come up with examples of some seemingly cultural phenomena having an effect on the economy. But that isn’t the problem with his position. The real problem with this analysis is that if we say that the base is determining the superstructure, and that the superstructure is determining the base, all we are really saying is that the base influences itself. And it does, but that’s just an ordinary feedback loop, something we find everywhere in nature. Confusion enters into Gramsci’s explanation because he is treating the superstructure one moment like a dependent effect (when the superstructure determines it) and the next like an independent agent acting on the base. Either one can be true, but both cannot be true.

Unfortunately, this mystification has mostly just led, in the modern age, to sloppy analysis and crypto-idealism among American Marxists. In the name of “dialectics,” an endless procession of humanities junior faculty constantly insists that liberals were right about how “ideas have legs,” which of course is a convenient thing to believe when you trade in ideas for a living.

Above, I touched on a related problem: how the belief in an autonomous superstructure smuggles in mysticism about free will. If material forces aren’t wholly determining our culture and our politics, what other cause is there but free will, which lets humans act without any cause whatsoever? To this subtle endorsement of free will, Gramsci also adds this explicit argument against determinism:

When…the struggle itself comes eventually to be identified with a series of defeats, mechanical determinism becomes a tremendous force of moral resistance, of cohesion and of patient and obstinate perserverance. “I have been defeated for the moment, but the tide of history is working for me in the longterm.” …[When this thinking becomes] responsible for the economic activity of the masses, mechanicism at a certain point becomes an imminent danger and a revision must take place in modes of thinking…

I have an article coming out in a few days that takes on this claim that determinism is demobilizing, but here it’s enough to say that the critique is irrelevant to the factual question at hand. If determinism is demobilizing and if it turns out that the universe operates deterministically, that is a problem for the left, not for the universe.

I do not want this to read like I am dismissing Gramsci’s contributions entirely, because some of his ideas — particularly, I think, his discussion of the war of manuver and positon — deserve their reputation. But his ideas about causality range from incoherent to irrelevant, and unfortunately they have significantly contributed to a kind of postmodern analytical sloppiness that remains influential in left academia. Socialists would be better off leaving them behind.

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Yair Rosenberg, writing for The Atlantic:

[Hasan Piker] speaks confidently about things that he does not know much about. And this phenomenon is not unique to Piker. It’s characteristic of the new-media landscape, which now includes smashmouth streamers and podcasters of all political persuasions who talk about everything but are experts in nothing, and whose incentives run toward incendiary virality rather than accuracy.

Would you be shocked if I told you that Yair doesn’t have an academic background in media criticsm, or even in journalism? Here’s how he explained it himself back in 2019:

I didn’t actually set out to be a journalist. I did Jewish studies and history in university. I thought maybe I’d write some things on the side when I had something to say, but it turns out, people are willing to pay you to say things you wanted to say anyway. People kept offering me opportunities, and eventually I got the job that I have now.

While this may seem like a pretty improbable story on its face, it makes a lot more sense when you notice two more points about Yair’s background. First and foremost, Yair went to Harvard. Second, Yair is a radical Zionist, advancing what Yakov Hirsch calls “a worldview that prefers endless war‑management, de facto annexation, and regional work‑arounds to any settlement that would concede equal rights to Palestinians”.

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Early this morning, Donald Trump tweeted, in clear reference to Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought again.” I have generally resisted getting too worked up about Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric, but it would be unconscionable not to take this threat serious. This is a threat to commit a war crime, and one of such magnitude that it would easily rank among history’s greatest atrocities. From a purely self-interested perspective, Americans have to understand that this would risk not just blowback but an organized international response on a scale that our country has never dealt with. More importantly, however, it would endanger nearly a hundred million lives, and with it the history of one of the world’s oldest and most important civilizations. Even threatening such a crime against humanity should be more than enough to justify immediately removing Trump from office.

So far, the standard response among Democrats — from Chuck Schumer to Bernie Sanders — has been to call for a vote on ending the war. This is not enough. Rep. Ro Khanna’s call for invoking the 25th Amendment and removing Trump from office better reflects the urgency of the situation, but this is still not enough. Members of Congress, and especially those who call themselves socialists, need to follow the lead of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and take action that will immediately impede any criminal action Trump may attempt. Specifically, they need to:

1. Clearly state that anything amounting to the destruction of Iranian civilization would be an unambiguous war crime under international and US law. There is no plausible military justification for wielding weapons of mass destruction, mass attacks on civilians, or anything on the scale that Trump is suggesting.

2. Remind military personnel that they have a legal obligation to disobey any orders to participate in the destruction of Iranian civilization. This is true from the bottom to the top of the chain of command. High ranking officials have a special responsibility to resist illegal orders, but this cannot excuse those further down who choose to participate.

3. Pledge to protect anyone who disobeys unlawful orders from political and professional retaliation. Such retaliation would also, of course, be illegal, but members of Congress need to promise to provide any aid necessary in the defense of their legal rights.

4. Pledge to prosecute anyone who participates in the destruction of Iranian civilization. Even if the president pardons any military personnel who participates in war crimes, it is within the authority of Congress to amend the American Service-Members’ Protection Act and then legislate a legal procedure for authorizing the extradition of said personnel to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court for prosecution. No member of the military should proceed under an assumption of impunity for their crimes.

As it stands, members of the military are likely facing an onslaught of misinformation about both the legality of this operation and their personal liability. Simply by stating these four points, Members of Congress can create an immediate and powerful incentive against an unthinkable crime against humanity. These measures do not end their responsibility to act, of course, but they are where every member of Congress should start.

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Tuesday evening, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pledged at a virtual candidate forum with DSA that she would not vote for “any spending on arms for Israel, including so-called defensive capabilities.” Whatever one thinks about how adequate this is, it represents an objective step forward from her previous stated position that defunding the Iron Dome would amount to “adding to the death count of innocent victims to this war”. And that she made this pledge at a forum where DSA was deciding whether or not to endorse her is a clear vindication of the argument that socialists can use their endorsement as leverage to extract important commitments from candidates.

Less than a day later, however, AOC made a second statement: on Twitter, she insisted that the “Iron Dome system…has proven critical to keep innocent civilians safe” but that “allies who need our military aid must understand that we will provide it consistent with the Leahy amendment and the foreign assistance act.” Some socialists have insisted that this is consistent with her earlier pledge since the Leahy amendment and the FAA effectively ban any military support to countries that violate human rights. Critics, however, have responded with a wide range of objections: AOC’s pledge was categorical, not conditioned on legalistic adherence to international law; AOC is still affirming the dangerous premise that military aid can be cleanly bracketed as “defensive” rather than “offensive”; and so on.

All of this, predictably, has created a meta-debate among socialists about our relationship (ugh) with AOC. Partisans of AOC have generally held that her statements are good enough and that critics are constantly ratcheting up their expectations so that they can never be met. Critics, meanwhile, are insisting that every time AOC makes some statement that would seem to pacify the left, she quickly follows it up with a statement that are at odds with left politics on Israel.

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Despite his reputation as a working-class whisperer, Platner is actually doing far better with upscale Democratic whites than with non-college Democrats. Each primary poll with regional breakdowns has shown a common theme: Mills does far better among the blue-collar Democrats in the rural north of the state, while Platner cleans up with wealthy, coastal liberals who skew college-educated.

Both parties are fighting for control of the working class...but despite national media narratives, [Platner is] a candidate whose appeal is strongest with voters they were already going to win, and whose vulnerabilities are greatest with the voters they actually need.

I can’t say that I come into Jain’s polling analysis with much confidence these days, but even before I looked at the data this argument raised more red flags for me than usual. Why is Jain just looking at who polls better in Maine’s two Congressional districts to judge who is doing better with the working class when polls like this always have much more granular data? And if we want to know which party wins control of the working class, why are we looking at who does better in the primary rather than who does better in head-to-heads with Collins?

Let’s talk about geography first. As Jain points out, primary polls show Platner beating Mills in the south and Mills beating Platner in the north. But here’s what their numbers look like in head-to-heads against Collins:

In both cases Platner doesn’t just outperform Mills against Collins — he outperforms her by near double-digits. Whatever advantage Mills has against Platner completely evaporates here.

But what if we look at the geography a little bit closer? Here’s what UNH data shows us1:

It’s true that Mills outperforms Platner in Northern Main, which has a relatively low average household income. But Platner outperforms Mills in Central Main, which has an identical average household income — but is more than twice as large. So by this measure, Platner is outperforming Mills among every income group, including the working class.

Jain writes that Platner voters “skew college-educated” — and again, I am baffled why he would use Congressional districts as a proxy for this when UNH measured it directly. Here’s what their survey says:

The real story here, of course, is that Platner is wiping the floor with Mills across the board. If you’re eager to find a trend, however, it’s the opposite of what Jain suggests: Platner actually does better with people who have very little education than he does with postgrads, who are Mills’ strongest group. Here’s how they perform against Collins:

Same trend: Platner outperforms Mills among educational group. Finally, no need for me to create a special visualization for income, because the Pan Atlantic Research poll Jain links to did it for me:

As far as I can tell, all three polls Jain sites shows Platner either tying or dramatically outperforming Mills among the working class by almost every conceivable measure. The only one that doesn’t show this is the worst one possible: a coarse comparison of districts in the primary rather than the general election. Even if he wins, and it seems like he is likely to, Platner is going to have a hard fight ahead of him if he wants to defeat Collins. But if Democrats want to win working class voters, it would be utter madness to nominate Mills instead.

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Thursday night FBI agents arrested militant Zionist Alexander Heifler as he prepared to attack Palestinian activist Nerdeen Kiswani, the Guardian reports. In the wake of the arrest, Mayor Zohran Mamdani made the statement above on Twitter, condemning the plot and pledging to protect peaceful activists in his city.

Even as I read the response above, however — and the hundreds of responses exactly like it — I can scarcely believe it. In our country, the standard reaction of the American right to any shooting or foiled act of violence is entirely predictable: blame the left or mental illness. This behavior may be odious, but it also, perversely, implies a lingering investment in conventional morality: the right still understands that assassination is wrong, or at least that it is widely perceived to be wrong, and thus they feel a need to disclaim responsibility for it. Among Zionists, however, the standard reaction has been quite different. In his response, Kalish neither distances himself from the attack or even bothers to feign regret that it happened: instead, he is simply expressing outrage that Mamdani would dare to condemn it. This is a man who simply takes for granted that Palestinians — and any opponent of the Zionist project, for that matter — deserves death. Thus, it goes without saying that anyone who would defend Kiswani’s life, even in their capacity as a mayor trying to maintain a civil peace, deserves our opposition too.

Reading this tweet, I can’t help but think of a recent interview with journalist Abby Martin. No one would accuse Martin of being ignorant or naive about Israel and the brutality of its apartheid state; she was writing about this before some younger activists were even born. Nevertheless, the psychology of Zionism is so radically alien from what we ordinarily encounter in the liberalism of civilization in the 21st century that the direct encounter with it is absolutely jarring. We are used to reactionaries who try to rationalize violence in the name of liberal committments to freedom, the rule of law, and even egalitarianism. What we do not encounter so often are reactionaries who are so disinterested in any of this that they don’t bother to bring it up.

What also strikes Martin in this interview is that the barbarism of modern Zionism isn’t some fringe divergence from a more moderate view; it’s mainstream and utterly ubiquitous. You can see this in the reaction to Mamdani as well. Kalish isn’t some anonymous teenage shitlord or even some cynical IDF soldier engaged in cyberops. He’s an accomplished and well off corporate executive posting under his real name with a real photo as his pfp. And the backlash is overrun with people who fit this exact same profile: think tank fellows like Rafael Mangual, rabbis like Elchanan Poupko, professors like CUNY’s Jeffrey Lax. One can imagine, in theory, an extremely abstract form of Zionism that sees Jews as an ethnic minority that is so uniquely persecuted that they require the special international accomodation of a dedicated security state, one that simply has not taken into account how this project has been historically implemented or the various conflicts it will inevitably have with liberal democracy. But mainstream Zionism is not naive about these questions; it is, as Martin insists, perfectly clear-eyed about the atrocities it has committed and is actively committing.

One of the clearest insights of political psychology, standing directly at odds with conventional wisdom, is that even the most radical and reactionary political movements are typically organized around a core of truth. This does not mean that their positions or platform are at all legitimate — but it does mean that these politics are responsive to something real in the lives of its partisans, and in a way that no other politics are. Consider anti-immigration politics for example. Liberalism often tells us that they are just an expression of racism, but this cannot explain why some of the most ferocious opponents of immigration are recent immigrants of the exact same race and ethnicity. What is really going on here is that workers in the United States are living lives of increasing precarity and austerity, and liberalism’s responses to this range from inadequate (meager welfare and unemployment assistance) to nonexistent (work harder!). Anti-immigration politics offer to some workers a face-saving excuse for their problems (you didn’t do anything wrong, they took your jobs) and a simple solution (all we need to do is close the borders). This is a bad diagnosis with a worse prescription, but for a lot of people it’s better than nothing.

The core of truth animating Zionism, of course, is the Holocaust and the endurance of real anti-semitism around the world. Jewish people did suffer a tragedy of apocalyptic proportions in the early twentieth century, and they do face unique danger even in the 21st century. These brute facts give the Zionist project a psychological appeal that it simply would not have if they were complete fabrications.

Left criticism of Zionism typically states the obvious: its solution to these problems has no place in liberal democracy. Instead of providing Jews with safety and justice through a regime of universal human rights, Zionism demands safety and justice through an agenda of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. What it provides, of course, is neither. Zionism has only ever made Jews less safe, and this is because, in the name of justice, it visits extraordinary injustice on the people of Palestine.

What left criticism of Zionism often neglects, however, is that the psychology we have outlined here is the textbook psychology of ressentiment. At its core, ressentiment always begins with legitimate grievance, but then a perverse logic takes hold: justice entitles one to meet injustice with more injustice. This logic is affirmed at the very foundation of Zionism, which insists that historical anti-semitism can only be met with apartheid. Once we affirm that moral premise, however, ressentiment has become legitimized, and Zionism exempts itself from any moral judgment. This is why the psychology of Zionists like Kalish feels so alien: he really does believe that he has been released from the laws, the morals, and the norms that bind the rest of humanity.

The tragic irony of Zionism is that the experience of historical anti-semitism has led many Jews to the exact opposite conclusion: instead of creating a special moral and legal regime one group, there must be a universal international regime of human rights and freedoms that protects everyone. Today’s system of international law, such as it is, was established as a direct response to the experience of the Holocaust, and if it were strengthened and upheld with any force Israeli apartheid would have no way to justify its existence.

This is why Zionism, as I have argued elsewhere, really must be understood as antithetical to the universalist project of human civilization. Its psychology is the fascist psychology of ressentiment, and its logic is the amoral logic of amoral barbarism. There is no compromise that a politics grounded in egalitarianism and universal justice can reach with apartheid and ethnic cleansing. They must simply end.

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Setting aside the merits of these particular bills I want to push back on Levitz here, but first I’d like to reframe this argument, starting with a simple claim: economic inequality is the fundamental crisis facing the modern liberal-left. If you are a socialist you will recognize this as a foundational problem of capitalism, but even if you are a liberal you should be able to notice the existential threat economic inequality poses to democracy. And this has enormous consequences across the board, because literally every challenge facing America today that could conceivably be resolved through democratic action is being fortified against remedy by vast concentrations of wealth.

What Levitz calls “99 percentism” has never just been about raising revenue. Taxing the rich (or expropriating from them, if you like) is a good in and of itself because we can use tax policy as a tool to level inequality. That said, since objections to 99 percentism lean so heavily on insisting that you can’t raise enough revenue by taxing the rich, I want to put this argument in perspective.

Read enough about the tax burden in the US and you’ll inevitably come a few standard charts; this article by the Tax Foundation has the major ones. What almost all of them have in common is that they do a terrible job of visually conveying economic inequality. Consider this one, for example:

If all you saw were the bars and the Y axis you’d think that this is an apples-to-apples comparison of like groups, with some unfairly forced to pay higher tax rates than the others. The only thing that signals otherwise is textual: the labels indicating that the group on the far left is 50x bigger than the group on the far right. And of course, this chart does absolutely nothing to convey the absolute wealth of each group. That’s how almost all these charts work: they avoid visually representing economic inequality either by omitting crucial information or by including it textually.

With that in mind, I asked: how can we visually relate economic inequality to potential revenue? And here’s what I came up with:

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I have a longstanding aversion towards the kind of pseudo-psychological commentary that dominates modern political punditry, but you don’t have to be a licensed therapist to notice something deeply unhealthy emanating from Silicon Valley this week. Here’s Marc Andreseen’s latest appearance on Tech Bro Glazing Podcast #8593:

David: You don't have any levels of introspection?

Marc: Yes, zero. As little as possible.

David: Why?

Marc: Move forward. Go! I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past…If you go back 400 years ago it never would've occurred to anybody to be introspective. All of the modern conceptions around introspection and therapy, and all the things that kind of result from that are a kind of a manufacture of the 1910s, 1920s.

And here’s Peter Thiel on Tech Bro Glazing Podcast #9105:

Thiel: We focus on changing ourselves — is this the first step to changing the world, or is it a sort of hypnotic way in which our attention is being redirected from outer space to inner space? …We stopped going from outer space because we started going to inner space.

Some folks have been reading this talking point’s sudden appearance as a “coordinated attack on introspection,” but I think this is too generous. The far more likely explanation is that this is just the latest goofy idea to infect the Silicon Valley hivemind through its primary vector: Marc Andreseen group chats. The oligarchs like to think of this as their version of “European salon culture,” but it has a lot more in common with a clique of college sophomores staying up late to argue whether the universe is, like, just an atom in another universe. When the billionaires want to do a coordinated attack they start buying up media outlets and launching dark money PACs; when they all start saying the same thing, this is just a reminder that our heterodox freethinking “makers” are mostly just a herd of semiliterate intellectual trend-chasers who never think for themselves.

This is all just posturing, of course. People who don’t introspect don’t spend a lot of time talking about it, either. Recall that when Julian Jaynes famously argued that the ancients lacked interiority, his primary evidence was that they simply never wrote about their inner lives. Homer did not demonstrate the rage of Achilles by showing him engaged in furious inner deliberation; Achilles was simply a man of action, and his rage was an outpouring of mindless raw emotion. Marc and Thiel are nothing like this. These are men who show up on three podcasts every week trying to philosophize and imbue their banal careers with cosmic significance; these men are clearly obsessed with their own minds and with what makes them tick.

So why are they pretending otherwise? Or to put it another way: what is it about contemporary corporate culture that would promote a discourse that discourages introspection?

One possible explanation is that contemporary corporate culture is dominated by actual psychopaths. This is just a clinical fact: one well-known 2010 study found that corporate managers are four times more likely to meet the criteria for psychopathy than the general population, and subsequent research has only driven that estimate upwards. Since one of the most distinct biological markers of psychopathy is reduced activity in the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex — parts of the brain that are deeply involved in introspection — it might not seem too surprising that C-suite executives would trivialize that kind of thinking.

But again, while it may be fun to diagnose Thiel and Andreseen as unwell, and while I do think there is evidence of other disorders at work here, I do not think the case for psychopathy is, for them, actually all that strong. One of the most curious characteristics of the PayPal Mafia guys is that they do not display some of the telltale signs we associate with psychopaths. None of them, for example, are especially charming; on the contrary, guys like Andreseen and Elon Musk have an unusually off-putting social tone-deafness about them. And none of them, as noted, lack the affect and interiority that psychopaths typically lack.

These men are not psychopaths — they are simply guys who want to defend psychopathic behavior. Once we make that distinction I think we can better understand what is going on here.

While the psycho-sociological literature on executive psychopaths is extensive, it almost always approaches this topic with a few narrow questions in mind:

• What are the unusual behaviors that can help us distinguish psychopaths from healthy executives?

• How is it that psychopaths manage to thrive in the workplace when so many other people afflicted with personality disorders fail?

• How can we change the workplace so as to successfully screen out psychopaths or prevent them from causing harm?

What all of these questions have in common is the way they frame psychopathy as an “externality”, as economists would put it — as a kind of foreign problem that pops up in the workplace and becomes an obstacle to business in the same way that a falling meteor or an employee with the flu might. What the research shows us, however, is that psychopaths succeed not by disrupting capitalism, but by radically conforming to its demands in a way that most people do not. Capitalism rewards extreme risk-taking that ordinary people would regard as reckless or irresponsible, but that psychopaths have no misgivings about. Capitalism rewards competitive aggression that ordinary people would see as cruel or unethical, but that psychopaths have no problem with. Capitalism even rewards criminal behavior, something that ordinary people are loathe to engage in but that psychopaths just see as business as usual.

To put this in psychoanalytic terms, if the id expresses our most primitive and fundamental drives and desires, and the superego is something like our conscience, then capitalism encourages us to throw off the superego and identify as wholly with the id as we can get away with. For psychopaths this is easy since their superego is unusually underdeveloped. For the rest of us, however, being a good capitalist means training our ego, which negotiates between the superego and the id, to ignore our conscience and focus on satisfying our desires.

Or to put it another way: being a capitalist means abandoning introspection. It means learning to not think too hard when it’s time to take risks, to not feel pity for the workers you just layed off, and to not feel guilty about what Silicon Valley calls “permissionless innovation,” and what normal people call “breaking the law.” Some psychopaths can do this naturally, but if you weren’t born with deteriorated brain functioning, capitalism means that you have to become a master of psychological avoidance, willing yourself to simply not reflect on those pangs of conscience and anxiety that would keep the rest of us up at night.

The irony here is that despite what Peter Thiel thinks, avoidance does not represent a turn from “inner space” into “outer space.” The person who gives himself over to his id is entirely defined by his inner wants, needs, desires, and psychoses. He is not some Nietzschean man of action; he is an animal living the mindless self-absorbed life of an animal. It is only through the superego that we can engage with the outer world of rationality, of the social, the political, and the moral. Introspection makes us conscious of inner drives that otherwise distort and dominate our perception of the world around us.

Capitalism is often described as an ideology of the ego, but from a psychoanalytic perspective this is entirely wrong. Capitalism is the ideology of the id. It has created a world where your best chance of success is to stop thinking about what you’re doing and give free rein to your most primitive, infantile desires. And it is true, as Andreseen says, that our society often valorizes people who do this as “great.” But it’s also tragic.

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That figure may seem like a useful point of reference when we are trying to understand how Americans see inequality, but it probably doesn’t tell us all that much. The problem is that when people say $87 million, we can’t be certain what that figure actually means to them. A poor person might look at that kind of money and have in mind something like Scrooge McDuck diving into a vault of gold, while a rich person might think of $87 million as moderate wealth, enough to buy a second mansion but not a private island.

With that disconnect in mind I decided it might be useful to try to model how Americans experience wealth. This, after all, is where much of our understanding of wealth actually comes from: our exposure to rich people in our day-to-day lives.

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At a casual glance, the chart above probably looks like an ordinary graph of wealth inequality in the United States. It captures all kinds of crucial trends that define economic life in this country — for example, that the bottom quintile has negative wealth (they’re in debt), and that 45% of the country are making less than the national cost of living.

If you’re a socialist, meanwhile, you might wonder: where is the ruling class? Clearly wealth on this chart is extremely unequal, but it doesn’t seem like there is any intuitive place to draw a line. Liberals often criticize Marxists by pointing out that most people in the US own capital, and from this chart you can see that this is basically true; but the chart also shows us that most people aren’t making much on the stock market at all. Can we say that you’re the bourgeoisie when you are making enough on your stocks to stop working? Perhaps, but the green line only tells part of the story; you aren’t exactly the ruling class if one unexpected emergency bill can instantly send you into bankruptcy. What if we draw the line where extremely rich people are earning more on stocks than they are on wages? That’s also plausible — but as Branko Marcetic often points out, capitalists are commanding such high salaries these days that this has become a major component of their net worth.

At a casual glance, these are the kinds of questions you might ask. But if you look a little closer at the graph, you’ll notice something strange: neither axis is linear. The Y scale grows first in $20k increments, then in $200k increments, then $2m increments, and finally in $60m increments. The effect, then, is to take a very close look at people who have less than six figures in wealth, and then to wildly distort the rate of growth in upper wealth ranges. The X axis, meanwhile, proceeds in ten percentile increments until the very end, where we zoom in on the top 1%, and then the top .01%, .001%, and .0001%. This also has the effect of distorting just how wealthy the wealthiest Americans actually are.

But there’s a reason I distorted the graph as I did. Here’s what a linear graph of the US economy actually looks like:

When we look at the data this way I don’t think it’s very hard to figure out who the ruling class is. They’re the giant blue spike in the top 1% — the people who are so rich that every other trend in the US economy is relatively microscopic.

Capitalist ideology has a whole arsenal of justifications for economic inequality: the rich just work harder than everyone else, they contribute more to society, violating private property rights for the sake of redistribution is counterproductive and immoral, and so on. While the public seems to accept these ideas intellectually, however, the justifications that resonate the most are the ones that maintain the possibility of upward mobility and economic leveling through the market. Past studies have shown that even Republicans and even the rich prefer a distribution of wealth that is far more equal than the distribution that actually exist. Randian narratives about the irrelevance of inequality and the entitlement of the rich may have currency among an unusually loud set of Silicon Valley oligarchs and radicalized libertarians, but among the broader population the capitalism’s load-bearing ideological narrative seem to be the ones that let people hope for a more equal society.

This, I suspect, is why the chart above has always been my surest foot in the door when talking to people about socialism. Another research finding that has been replicated on multiple occasions is that the general public radically underestimates just how unequal our economy has become. And the primary reason for this, according to a 2024 study, is that most people wildly underappreciate just how rich the rich actually are. In that paper, the authors find on average Americans tend to underestimate extreme wealth by five orders of magnitude.

There are multiple reasons for this. One reason for this is what the authors call scope insensitivity:

The mechanisms underlying scope insensitivity suggest that instead of the quantity of a target object (e.g. the exact amount of dollars owned by a rich person), the affect triggered by the prototypical image of the object (e.g. a rich person) conveys meaning to individuals (27, 31, 32). As a result, an additional amount of income in upper echelons of the income distribution may trigger a weaker affective response than the same amount of additional income in lower parts of the income distribution. That is, from the perspective of an observer, a person earning $1.3 million—the average income of the richest 1% of the US population (44)—is seen as less different from a person earning $1.4 million than the same absolute difference at lower income levels, for instance, between $50,000 and $150,000$.

We do not appreciate how rich the rich truly are, in other words, because the cultural signifiers of extreme wealth — yachts, wardrobe, mansions — look a lot like the cultural signifiers of ordinary wealth. Mathematically, politically, and economically their situations are actually quite different. NBA legend Allen Iverson famously blew through most of his fortune in just ten years by obscene amounts of money on nightclubs, luxury goods, and his entourage; but living that exact same lifestyle it would take Jeff Bezos 10,000 years to spend all of his wealth. Allen Iverson can afford to attend expensive silver plate fundraisers for a political campaign; Jeff Bezos can afford to start his own party.

A related but distinct explanation for “scope insensitivity” simply has to do with our cognitive ability to understand large numbers. Humans are very good at understanding smaller numbers and how they relate to each other, but when numbers get too big we start to lose perspective and have trouble grasping their sheer magnitude. This is a problem one encounters in other scientific fields like cosmology a lot: the human mind can easily grasp the concept of 4 and even 40 stars, but cannot even begin to conceptualize the roughly 4,000,000,000 stars that may inhabit our Milky Way galaxy. One proof of this is that even readers who are well-informed about cosmology probably didn’t notice that the above figure is incorrect: we have 400,000,000,000 stars, not 4,000,000,000 stars. The reason you didn’t notice this is that at a certain point your brain just looks at these numbers and thinks “that’s a lot of zeroes.”

Popular science writers are fond of using thought experiments and analogies to help readers understand massive numbers, and this is a habit that socialists would do well to cultivate as well. Imagine for example if we stacked the median American’s personal wealth in dollar bills. It would be about 69 feet tall, or the height of a typical medium-sized tree, which at first glance seems quite impressive. But with some careful math and considerable help from Photoshop, I’ve created a visualization of what this would look like if we did the same thing for Elon Musk:

Stacked as dollar bills, Elon Musk’s estimated wealth would literally extend well into outer space, 57,700 miles above the surface of the earth and about a quarter of the way to the moon. Even when we illustrate it like this the brain simply cannot grasp ranges of wealth that approach the $1t mark, but the visualization is striking enough to seriously challenge modest conceptions of what wealth in the 21st century really means.

Scope insensitivity is a serious and underdiscussed1 obstacle to understanding wealth, but I’d like to conclude this post by drawing attention to a point that has otherwise gone unremarked. Earlier we noted that Americans tend to underestimate how rich the rich are by about 80%. That means that if we compare the wealth composition the richest Americans to this popular estimate of their total wealth, we get something like this:

Though their correspondence is not exact, I think it’s at least interesting that the public’s estimate of the wealth of the rich is in the same order of magnitude as their non-stock wealth that the richest Americans actually hold. It’s the capital holdings of the rich that turn the public’s significant overestimate into an extreme underestimate.

It is capital, in other words, which accounts for the most egregious scope insensitivity problems that distort our understanding of the rich. If the wealthiest Americans had wealth in the $37m-87m bracket that would put them right in the wealth range of your typical NBA All-Star, somewhere between Klay Thompson and Draymond Green. This level of wealth is still extraordinary, but it is one that Americans seem to comprehend much better — in part because they have a grip on what the lifestyle of an NBA player is like, and in part because the numbers involved are easier for our brain to work with.

If socialists want to build class consciousness, we need to build a cultural intuition about extreme wealth that is categorically different from the lifestyle of basketball players. The release of the Epstein Files has played an important role in this regard, because it has given Americans a glimpse into a world that is very different from the world we are familiar with. And most Americans, I think, will find the world they live in to be utterly repulsive: it’s one where laws and basic moral norms are violated with impunity, where elites are sheltered from inconveniences so trivial that it wouldn’t even occur to you to think of them as inconveniences, and where the rest of humanity is generously regarded as cattle. Socialists need to shine a brighter light on the lives of the ruling class, but to do that we need to first build an understanding of just how rich the rich really are.

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One of online’s funniest recurring arguments made its periodic return last week, this time on Twitter:

The last time this argument came up was on TikTok in 2022, and before that on Twitter in 2018. This time, at least, there was a precipitating cause: this years’ BAFTA Awards, where Tourette’s sufferer John Davidson shouted out a racial slur as Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo presented an award. Still, it seems like once every election cycle the liberal-left is obligated to relitigate the same question. Are people diagnosed with Tourette’s who yell slurs — that is, people who are afflicted with coprolalia — engaged in racism?

I think there’s a reason we keep coming back to this question, but before I get to that a little background is in order.

One thing that makes this argument so fascinating, in my view, is that one of the most important points in controversy is scientifically uncontroversial. And I don’t mean this in the same way that we say climate change and evolutionary theory are uncontroversial; I mean that no one even claims there is an alternative scientific explanation.

As a matter of medical fact, coprolalia is completely involuntary. And though its anatomical explanation is complicated and technical, the general mechanisms at work are simple and intuitive. When our nervous system becomes too excited, humans often feel an irresistable urge to discharge all of that energy somehow. One way to do it is by vocalizing, which is why may you are likely to shout if you are startled or if you suddenly hurt yourself. Another way to quickly release energy is to do something that takes a lot of psychological effort — like saying a taboo word that your brain has been trained to avoid. This is why when we do yell when we’ve been startled or hurt, we often yell some profanity.

Tourette’s is that urge gone haywire. A kind of energy builds in the victim that can only be released by vocalizing, and sufferers of coprolalia are compelled to yell profanities precisely because overcoming their mental inhibitions against those words consumes so much energy.

Racism and capitalist individualism

There is, in other words, nothing intentional about the condition. That’s what makes comments like Leon Cole’s recent joke at the NAACP Image Awards so perverse: no amount of “reading the room” can prevent victims of coprolalia from expressing its symptoms. Ironically, in fact, this gets the problem completely backwards. It is precisely because John Davidson was so averse to using racial slurs, with such powerful psychological mechanisms of suppression in place against them, that coprolalia gravitates towards them.

This is why it is so bizarre that we keep returning to some of the debates about this condition. Some critics, like Cole, suggest that victims of coprolalia could stop themselves from using slurs if they wanted to, but this is completely at odds with uncontroversial science. Other critics suggest that the victims of this disease are afflicted with inner racism, and that coprolalia simply forces them to voice it; but this isn’t true either, as a matter of settled medical fact.

So why do we keep having this argument? One major explanation, I would argue, has to do with liberal ideas about individual responsibility.

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Democratic officials who worked on the party's still-secret autopsy of the 2024 election concluded that Kamala Harris lost significant support because of the Biden administration's approach to the war in Gaza…

Unfortunately, Otterbein doesn’t have their numbers on this, and unless something dramatic happens it seems unlikely that we’ll ever see them. So in their absence, there have been a lot of arguments today over whether Harris actually lost enough Gaza voters to cost her the election, with journalists like Corey Walker insisting that it just wasn’t a priority enough voters to have made a difference.

Is that true? Let’s look at some numbers:

1. Catalist reports that 30 million 2020 voters didn’t vote in 2024.

2. They also report that 55.7% of those voters had backed Biden, meaning that Harris lost about 16.71 million Biden voters.

3. IMEU, meanwhile found that 29% of Biden voters who didn’t back Harris said Gaza was their most important issue. Assuming that those Biden voters who didn’t back anyone look anything like those voters who voted for someone other than Harris, that means she lost around 4.85 million voters on Gaza. This figure does not include people who voted for someone other than Harris because of Gaza.

4. Harris lost the popular vote by 2.29 million.

That assumption in step three is admittedly shaky, but if Biden→non-voters cared about Gaza even half as much as Biden→third party or Biden→Trump voters, that still would have been enough to have cost Harris the election.

The stronger objection here, I think, is that this election was so close that all kinds of issues can mathematically account for her loss. For instance, making the same assumptions we made before, we can conclude that around 4 million Biden voters stayed home in 2024 because they disapproved of Harris on the economy; if she had won those votes, she would have beaten Trump despite her support of Israel. When we also account for voters who Harris lost to Trump it seems likely her positions on welfare and healthcare were difference-makers as well.

Nevertheless, looking at the numbers we do have, it seems likely that enough voters prioritized Gaza to have cost Harris the election.

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Today in The New York Review of Books, Trevor Jackson recounted what may very well be the most catastrophic Microsoft Excel error in history:

In 2010 Reinhart and Rogoff published a short essay in the American Economic Review called “Growth in a Time of Debt.” It purported to show that any time a country’s public debt exceeded 90 percent of its GDP, growth sharply declined. This claim was widely cited by politicians and accepted as a factual justification for austerity, to the extent that Paul Krugman thought it “may have had more immediate influence on public debate than any previous paper in the history of economics.” In 2013 a then Ph.D. student (now an economist at John Jay College) named Thomas Herndon attempted to replicate their study and found grievous errors in their data.

Mathematicians Jon Borwein and David H. Bailey elaborate:

The most serious was that, in their Excel spreadsheet, Reinhart and Rogoff had not selected the entire row when averaging growth figures: they omitted data from Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada and Denmark.

In other words, they had accidentally only included 15 of the 20 countries under analysis in their key calculation.

When that error was corrected, the “0.1% decline” data became a 2.2% average increase in economic growth.

This, Borwein and Bailey continue, was more than just a one-off mistake. Modern economics often relies on enormous volumes of data and elaborate computational analysis that can be difficult to replicate without going well beyond ordinary standards of documentation. As a political matter this is dangerous for reasons given: even minor errors in economic research can have unusually widespread human consequences.

As a scientific matter, meanwhile, the replication crisis facing economics is just one of many that call into question the legitimacy of the discipline. These are not mere errors or disproven hypotheses that science, as a self-correcting process, can be expected to run into from time to time; they are problems of the discipline’s compliance with science itself.

***
I found myself thinking about the Reinhart/Rogoff affair earlier today when I read another article, this one by liberalism’s favorite race scientist, Richard Hanania.1 In it, Hanania complains that Jon Stewart recently made a number of comments that treat economics not as a science, but as a political project. You can read the article if you like, but you can really get the gist of it here:

Here, Hanania thinks economics proves that if you do things to help workers like raise taxes and demand higher raises from the rich, the rich will inevitably respond by raising prices, which will get you inflation. Thus he ridicules Stewart for refusing to accept this supposedly scientific finding and suggesting that the rich did not have to do this.

There is a trivial and mostly semantic sense in which Hanania has a point: insofar as we use “economics” to mean an abstract field of scientific inquiry, it does not make sense to accuse it of having an agenda.

But that is not how Stewart is using the term, of course. Clearly, he is just using the term metonymically to refer to the discipline of economics as presently embodied in its practices, institutions, and body of work. And in that sense, it is perfectly legitimate to argue that really existing economics functions today more like a political project than a scientific project. To use an analogy that might hit close to home for Hanania, we can use the term “economics” like most people use the term “race science”: to refer to something that postures as a science, but that has historically had far more to do with politics and pseudoscience than anything resembling an epistemelogically neutral and self-correcting research program.

Here, this critique seems warranted on two grounds.

First, note that Hanania does not specify what claim of economics Stewart is at odds with. This is because what he seems to have in mind is “the law of supply and demand,” which tells us that capitalists will respond to increased demand by raising prices. Supply and demand is such a foundational point of contemporary economics that it is understandable Hanania wouldn’t even bother to specify it; to reject it would, in a significant sense, compromise much of the really existing discipline.

And yet from an actually scientific perspective, it seems that this is exactly what we must do. As Steve Keen observes in his Debunking Economics, the law of supply-and-demand has been formally disproven — and not even by some radical Marxist or heterodox economist, but by Nobel Prize winner and Chicago School icon George Stigler:

In his paper “Perfect competition, historically contemplated”, Stigler applied one of the most basic rules of mathematics, the “Chain Rule,” to show that the slope of the demand curve facing the competitive firm was exactly the same as the slope of the market demand curve...if you have [studied economics], this should shock you: a central tenet of your introductory “education” in economics is obviously false, and has been known to be so since at least 1957.

This is why Keen, who himself is an economist, titled his book Debunking Economics. That supply and demand has remained a foundational “law” of economics three quarters of a century after it was formally annihilated tells us that something isn’t just wrong with the the law — there is a real problem with the entire discipline. This is true even if subsequent work built on supply and demand has had practical value. Prescientific and even pseudoscientific work often seems to have practical value, but since it does not confirm to the basic rigors of falsification and internal coherency, we cannot call it scientific.

That said, there is also a second and simpler objection to Hanania’s critique, which is that the law of supply and demand only even hypothetically describes what is going on in conditions of perfect competition. In capitalism, this means that capitalists get to set the price, which gives them the luxury of offsetting payroll costs and taxes with markups.

But socialists have a counterproposal: instead of letting capitalists set prices, you can let workers set them through the arm of the democratic state. When you do this, no capitalist is in a position to game the system and pass expenses on to their employees.

Jon Stewart is a liberal, of course; he is not proposing nationalization. But insofar as socialism is a political solution to this problem, he is correct to politicize the fact that we let capitalists set prices however they like. And insofar as Hanania thinks that economics gives the state no way to raise wages or tax the rich, it is he who misunderstands the science.

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From the inbox:

Hi Carl, I was wondering what your view is in this debate over whether or not artificial intelligence is actually intelligent? I know you’ve made a few comments about it over the years but I can’t find your posts now.

Sadly, Elon banning my Twitter account means that more than a decade of my posts evaporated overnight, so I’m not surprised that anyone is having trouble finding various points I’ve made about intelligence over the years. Since they’re gone now (and since even when they were still up they were scattered all over the place), I might as well lay out my thoughts on the matter here.

The main obstacle that prevents most people from understanding intelligence, in my view, is profound incuriosity. On one hand, evolution has endowed humans with a powerful, pre-rational ability to recognize other human-like creatures, and this is something we usually explain as an ability to recognize intelligence; so we all have a powerful sense that we know on a deep level what intelligence is, even if we can’t explain it. On the other hand, meanwhile, our culture is full of ideas about intelligence that have nothing to do with science and everything to do with culture and ideology. It is widely believed, for example, that being intelligent means being good at math — even though calculation is one of the simplest cognitive functions there is. That belief plainly has little to do with any rigorous theory of intelligence and much more to do with cultural ideas about how useful math is in our economy.

This complex of intuition and ideology makes people so confident that they already know what intelligence is that they are often baffled that anyone would even bother investigating it, much less make counterintuitive or controversial claims about it.

The more we look into the question, however, the more complicated it gets. When we ask about what intelligence is, for example, what we are often asking about is actually human intelligence; when people ask whether AI is intelligent, what prompts the question is their intuition that it seems to be doing human-like things. But humans are plainly not the only intelligent creatures. In fact, most organic life seems to possess some form of intelligence; one might even argue that all organic life is intelligent, though this is harder to say in some cases than others. Are sponges intelligent? How about plants? Bacteria? Viruses?

Here, I think, is where we gain our first real analytical traction into the question. One way you could define whether or not a virus is intelligent is by asking whether or not it has a brain, which it clearly does not. But this answer doesn’t seem satisfactory; most people would say that jellyfish are intelligent in some sense even though they don’t have a central nervous system, and if a virus started reciting Shakespeare we would say that it is intelligent whether it had a brain or not.

The question really seems to be about how a virus “behaves.” What makes viruses so useful for this inquiry is that they are such incredibly simple creatures, barely distinguishable from inanimate strands of protein, that one point seems clear: insofar as proteins are just a complex cluster of molecules engaged in deterministic chemical reactions, it is hard to say that they are intelligent. When for example it seems like viruses were swimming around looking for a host cell to latch onto and infect, this seemed to be intelligent behavior. But once we realized that they were just drifting around in the intercellular fluid and that they were only “latching on” to cells in the same way that one piece of velcro will inevitably stick to another, this stopped seeming like intelligent behavior; it was just a complex physical process that we didn’t know enough about.

This simple insight can take us surprisingly far. Working our way back up the tree of life, we can observe bacteria, and notice that a lot of what bacteria do can be explained as “mindless” chemical reactions. But even with something as simple as bacteria, we find some processes very difficult to explain at the level of chemistry and physics. Some very primitive bacteria find food by swimming towards light sources, since in the ocean food is more abundant near the surface than in the depths; and while the details get complicated, we can trace a basic causal path from a photon hitting one of its photoreceptors to an electrochemical cascade triggering motion in its flagellum, causing it to swim. But in other bacteria the process gets so complicated that describing it in terms of chemical reactions stops being plausible or even useful from an explanatory perspective; this is especially true when multiple factors (say the presence of light and of certain trace chemicals) combine in some complex way to trigger the flagellum. When this happens we tend to start describing the physical process with metaphorical analogies to human behavior: when it gets the right kind of stimuli it will “think” about it and “decide” to whether or not to “hunt.”

Here, I think, is where we arrive at the meaning of intelligence. Some processes in the world are so simple and transparent that we can describe the causes and effects in completely physical terms. Others, however, are so complex and opaque that we have difficulty conceptualizing and describing them in terms of physical causality; at this point, we resort to metaphorical comparisons to human intelligence.

From a psychological point of view, this makes sense. When we introspect on our own behavior, we see something like “thinking” going on, an elaborate process of reasoning and observations along with insights and decisions that seem to come from some deeper part of us that we can’t directly observe. When we look at how other humans behave, we develop a “theory of mind” and assume that something similar is going on with them; that when they cry, for example, there is something going on in their minds that is similar to what we experience when we cry. We assume this precisely because we cannot see what is happening in their brains, and even if we could it would be too complex and elaborate to easily conceptualize in terms of causes and effects.

Here, then, we are simply using this strategy to tell what other creatures are doing, too. If I see a slug touch a mound of salt and instantly curl up, this may seem like a purely physical process to me because I can easily understand how dehydration make some materials change their shape. But if I see it move across the front porch towards a flower and then start nibbling on it, this is very difficult to explain terms of chemical reactions, so instead I compare whatever is going on to what happens in my head when I “decide” to walk somewhere.

One crucial point to notice here is that my recognition of “intelligence” in something seems to have as much with my own ability to conceptualize its behavior as it does with the behavior itself. One proof of this is the well-documented way in which young children explain physical behavior that they do not yet understand by anthropomorphizing it, as when Piaget documents a child explaining that the sun “decided” to “follow” him home. This was really just the child noticing that the sun seems to stay in roughly the same relative place in the sky no matter what direction he moves in, but since he had no way to explain this behavior yet, he resorted to the theory that the sun had a mind.

This brings us to another crucial point of insight, which is that our association of intelligence with life mostly just reflects the fact that even our adult brains have trouble conceptualizing the complexity of biological processes. But this fact also holds outside of biological processes: thus we are often to say things like “the weather was angry today” or “the stock market isn’t cooperating” to describe extremely complex systems like the climate and the economy.

Generally, then, we can say that “intelligence” is really just an explanatory gimmick we use to describe causal processes that are too opaque or complex. When that happens, we analogize the cause to the thing in our own minds that seems to cause our behavior — a thing that we don’t understand very well either, but that we are at least familiar with. When we say that something has “human intelligence,” all we really mean is that it engages in behavior that we can’t really explain with a causally exhaustive and rigorous way, but that resembles things only humans can do.

This insight, among other things, gives us an easy way to understand arguments over the “intelligence” of AI. When people argue that it is not intelligent, they tend to stress that the causes of its behavior are deterministic and well-understood: it is really just a kind of elaborate big data processor that dumps out lexemes based on calculations of sequential probability. When people argue that it is intelligent, meanwhile, they tend to insist that something more than that is happening; for example, one common claim is that LLMs express something called “emergent behavior,” a property of complex systems that is often misunderstood to mean “behavior that is not deterministically caused.”

Conversely, people who argue that AI is not intelligent tend to make similar quasi-mystical claims about human intelligence: that something “emergent” is happening, or something immaterial, or something that cannot be fundamentally understood. Meanwhile, people who argue that AI is intelligent often gravitate towards strong claims about how the human brain works: we know that it is just neurons firing, or that it is just a neural network, or something similar.

In my view, human intelligence only seems intelligent because we still do not have a thorough and coherent understanding of how the brain operates; but this is just an artifact of our current scientific knowledge, and could change in the future. It is conceivable to me that someday humans will tend to have a more scientific understanding of the brain, one that will probably involve both a mechanical understanding of how neural networks operate, a schematic understanding of all of the different parts of the brain and what precisely they do, and a systematic understanding of how this all fits together to create mental phenomena. When that happens, “intelligence” will mostly be remembered as the crude and inarticulate way humans conflated and talked about all kinds of different features of the brain ranging from its capacity for short-term memory recall to how densely the structures mapping its semantic network are populated. It will be a lot like how prescientific cultures would talk about “resilience” to mean everything from the body’s capacity to produce white blood cells to pain tolerance to metabolic levels; everyone will just take for granted that “intelligence” was a primitive colloquialism that we since replaced with more accurate and precise language.

This also explains why some people think AI possesses “human intelligence” even though this is, by various objective measures and based on our still early understanding of the human brain, clearly not true. A whole genre of online comedy, for example, revolves around showcasing AI’s affliction with what we would in humans call (generously) a severe learning disability: it cannot count to a million, and it cannot even learn to count to a million. AI’s visual intelligence excels in some ways (like object recognition), but in other areas (like motion recognition) it is less intelligent than your average insect. In language use AI excels at common grammatical constructions, but it also gets tripped up on simple linguistic tasks that even children excel at, like interpreting ambiguous statements and constructing sentences that rely on long-distance dependencies.

If your theory of human intelligence just comes down to “it can do some things that humans can do” and you don’t care about the causal mechanics at work then these points won’t matter to you. But in that case, you’ll also have trouble explaining why any rigor why a calculator doesn’t have human intelligence, or why an MP3 file of me reading this article doesn’t have human intelligence. Once we allow ourselves to be curious about what human intelligence actually is, however, it becomes evident quite quickly that AI doesn’t have it. This is true even though we still know very little about what human intelligence is and how it works. Someday, we may have an understanding of the brain so thorough that it seems more like an elaborate chemical reaction than like the container for some mystical property called “intelligence”; but already, all kinds of simple facts about how it works and how it behaves makes it clear that it does very different things than AI.

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Last November, a mysterious device appeared in one of The Gap’s San Francisco outlets: a metallic sphere that, with its embedded camera lens, looks mysteriously like an eyeball. For more than a year local media seemed entirely disinterested in the installation’s significance. A few weeks ago, however, Cydney Hayes at the San Franscico Gazetteer published a disturbing piece on what was actually going on: the device was called an Orb, and its entire purpose was to capture the biometric data of anyone who came near it for a billionaire.

Specifically, the Orb is a project by tech oligarch Sam Altman that is absolutely breathtaking in ambition: to built an iris-scan database of ever human in the world. This in turn will position Altman to monopolize a service that is destined to stand at the center of every economic and political institution you can imagine: human verification.

For now, Altman’s project — the World Network — seems innocuous. If it succeeds, however, the World Network is poised to end democracy as we know it, and consolidate Silicon Valley’s control of a global technofeudalist economy.

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The main problem with this debate, in my view, is that these vague ideological identifiers are still used in extremely subjective and inconsistent ways, which means that the substantive stakes are lost in semantics. Sometimes when pundits say that Harris ran too far to the left what they mean is that she was too invested in identity politics — even though Harris’s identity politics are much more strongly aligned with the Clintonian center-left. When other pundits say that she didn’t run far enough to the left, what they mean is that she failed to pursue the ambitious universal programs associated with figures like Bernie Sanders, or that she failed to position herself against the genocide in Israel. Republican aligned pundits, meanwhile, are likely to insist that she ran too far to the extreme left simply by virtue of running against Donald Trump. Obviously, arguments like these among activists who refuse to settle on consistent terms are unlikely to clarify anything.

In any case, against the backdrop of this hopeless terminological conclusion I’d like to look at a second problem: the ideology of potential voters. When centrist pundits make claims about this question, they usually rely on a simple kind of argument: since Democratic candidates are generally to the left of the broader population, and since they can generally take for granted leftward voters, they have the most to gain by competing for votes in the center and on the right. This is particularly true, they insist, since ideologies are distributed among the population in bell curve, with most voters falling somewhere in the middle.

When they’re arguing against these claims, leftists often seem to fall into the trap of insisting that most Americans are actually aligned to the left. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true, at least when it comes to self-identification — but this point is misleading. Here, based on some recent polling by YouGov and some election data1, is how various voting behaviors are ideologically distributed in the US:

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The Department of Justice’s latest release of files from its Epstein archive certainly raises all kinds of disturbing political questions, but it also poses a question that is sociologically vexing. As the scope of this conspiracy becomes clearer, it seems that pedophilia is much more common in our ruling class than it is in the broader population. How …

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I have a longer piece on the way about how capitalism created Epstein, but in the meantime I can’t resist responding to a comment by Matt Stoller:

The Jeff Epstein saga isn’t a scandal about pedophilia, it’s about a Russian word called ‘blat’, a Soviet-era word meaning “the use of personal networks for obtaining goods and services in short supply and for circumventing formal procedures.” It’s about a type of government….it’s statecraft to allow a superclass to systematically escape formalized rules…This kind of governance is particularly important in Soviet-style states, where everyone knows the rules are fake, where skirting the system IS the system.

This is, at best, an extremely misleading analogy. Blat was indeed about trading favors and black marketeering in order to circumvent the law, but in the Soviet Union this was something that literally everyone did. If you needed a light bulb, you might give a neighbor who had an extra one a new pair of socks. If you wanted tickets to a concert, you might trade your light bulb. One of the most interesting and consequential features of blat was that it was ubiquitous and accessible to everyone.

The Epstein system was very different. Its most important feature was that it leveraged extraordinary wealth and power in order to circumvent the law. To participate in blat you just had to glance over your shoulder to see if the authorities were nearby — and even if they were, you could often pay them off with a trivial bribe. To participate in the Epstein system, you generally had to fly a private jet out to his private island, or you had to be able to get someone a cushy “consultant” job at a Fortune 500 company, or you had to invest millions of dollars in one of the offshore accounting schemes that he managed. Much of what he did, it turns out, was completely legal.

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