Socialism and the Law of Effect

These posts explore the themes developed in my monograph, Narcisso-Fascism, which is itself a real-world test of the central concepts of the Biocognitive Model of Mind for psychiatry.

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In 1898, Edward Thorndike (1874-1949), one of the earliest psychologists, proposed what he called the Law of Effect. Despite its impressive title, it’s not exactly rocket science: “Responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation.” Later, the radical behaviourist, Burrhus Skinner (1904-1990), who didn’t like the mentalist idea of animals feeling satisfied, replaced “satisfying” and “discomforting” with “reinforcing” and “punishing” respectively. Even though they conveyed exactly the same meaning, these new terms sounded more objective and scientific. On this flimsy foundation, he built his “science of behaviorism" which, as time has shown, went nowhere. The idea of a non-mentalist human psychology is absurd. And, I'd say, for most animals as well.

When it comes to human behaviour, the idea behind the Law of Effect is one of the most powerful principles of all, and one of the most sorely neglected. Why do we do anything? Well, there are things we need to do in order to stay alive, including fresh air, food and water, shelter from the elements and protection from danger such as big animals, other humans and so on. With a bit of effort, we can provide for our families and the local community, build nice little homes and gardens and schools and farms and everybody should be happy. But we’re not, we soon get bored. If a cottage with three rooms feels good, a house with six will feel twice as good, so we work hard and before long, there it is, the biggest house in the village and everybody comes to have a look and say “Ooh, ah.” Which feels good.

Very soon, there is a hierarchy of houses and the man with the biggest says to the widow with her hungry brood: “Your run-down heap of rubble doesn’t look good next to my new mansion, so you’ll have to move. Where? That’s not my problem.” That sense, that feeling “I’m bigger and more important than you so you have to give me what I want” is universal. Once our basic survival needs are satisfied, it takes over and has done in every culture or society ever studied. Even hunter-gatherer societies such as Australian Aboriginal culture had their rigid, patriarchal hierarchies, brutally enforced where necessary to ensure the elders got what they wanted. This principle is invariable, and we can give it a name, call it the Law of Entitlement: The more I have, the more I feel I’m entitled to. The higher my status, the higher I want to go. The more power I have, the more I demand. The greater my privilege, the wider my sense of privilege extends until it reaches the point of slavery: actually owning another person and doing what you like with that person. The sense of entitlement is both universal and without limits. It is hard-wired into us as a species, although whether and how it is expressed is an individual matter. Once it is switched on, it is almost never switched off voluntarily. Only death can stop it, and many people would rather die than give up what they think they’re entitled to.

Today, the Law of Entitlement has taken over and is now running international affairs and economics – as though it didn’t always, except now it’s right out in the open: “Do as I say or I’ll hit you with 100% tariffs and sanctions because USA.” Macht hat recht, might is right. Trump says to the country: “We have to save money so we’ll cut back on your health insurance,” but then he saw the breathtaking Salle des Fêtes (the ballroom) in the presidential Élysée Palace in Paris and decided he needed one for the White House – at $200million. If it ever starts, it will cost five times that and Trump will be long dead before it’s finished but that’s what greed and vanity and the need to be dominant do. That’s human. It’s genetically-determined, and the human personality can be seen as the totality of the rules we have to learn in order to keep this drive under control. However, as the many gigantic palaces and cathedrals and castles and temples around the world show us, some people don’t learn the rules, and they are the people who lust for power. They want to wallow in it and rub everybody’s noses in it. Once they get power, they need more and more to get the same thrill. To a large extent, that drive explains the great bulk of human behaviour, especially the bad bit. In 1721, an unknown pamphleteer in Boston wrote:

The rich, great and potent grind the poor by learning how to oppress, cheat and overreach their neighbours... and with rapacious violence bear down all before them.

It was ever thus, as a clear-sighted observer noted: “Poverty exists not because we cannot provide for the poor. It exists because it is impossible to satisfy the rich.” Read that again: It is impossible to satisfy the rich because they make it impossible. Once the drive to acquire more and more is switched on, once the sense of privilege gets a grip on our vitals, it’s goodbye moderation. That’s not an intellectual thing, it’s not a matter that they’re smarter than us or they know something we can’t know, it’s biology pure and simple. They managed to get themselves some way up the hierarchy so their first action is to kick away the ladder they used, to block competition, and then lunge for more. Power corrupts, and it proves irresistible to the corruptible.

We’re now told that something called neoliberalism will adequately spread society’s economic benefits around, that allowing people to get very rich will result in the wealth “trickling” down to the working classes. However, that’s the basis of the well-known joke: “I could tell you a joke about trickle-down economics but 99% of you won’t get it.” As I argued last week, the entire notion of “trickle-down economics” is just propaganda with no basis in reality, typical of the nonsense the wealthy use to justify taking more. Decades after it was first implemented by the Thatcher and Reagan governments, the evidence is clear: The benefits of increasing wealth do not flow down. They go up and up, and there they stay. In the US in the 1950s and 60s, the average CEO took home something like 20-30 times the pay of his median worker. Now, after entire societies have been rebuilt according to the neoliberal plan, CEOs pull in something like 400 times their median worker’s pay.

From their point of view, neoliberalism is a brillian success but it gets worse. In the 100 Fortune 500 companies with the lowest median worker’s pay, their CEOs take home 632 times as much as their workers, with many companies much higher than that. Starbucks, that well-known union-basher, seems to have snatched the prize for corporate greed. Their CEO gets $96million a year while the median worker gets $15,000, a differential of no less than 6,667 times. That figure is the reality of neoliberal “trickle-down” economics. It authorises greed, where greed is an insatiable biological human drive, it licenses avarice and sets venality as the guiding principle of human affairs. However, and here’s the catch that all the rich people know about, greed cannot be corrected within the neoliberal system that justifies it. This is because governments are not allowed to intervene in markets, including labour markets, as it produces distortions. As though a wage differential of 6,667 times isn’t distorted, FFS (orginal figures here, have a look at them and be appalled).

None of this is new. In 1845, aged just 25, Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) published his remarkable exposé of the lives of the working class in England [1]. In searing detail, he chronicled the lives of abject misery and squalid deprivation in which workers and their families were forced to live. Unlike other authors at the time (e.g. Dickens, the Brontës), Engels described the unbelievable filth and degradation that reigned barely out of sight in the great cities. In particular, he made it come to life by describing the disgusting smells and, for anybody with half a brain, the inevitable and brutal sexual exploitation of women and children that was the norm at the time. Since that era was the forerunner of the principle behind “trickle down economics,” anybody with any interest in human affairs must read this as it explains so much of the past 200 years, Filth, squalor, brutal repression and exploitation, these are the natural outcome of “free market monopoly capitalism.” That’s what unfettered capitalism produces because Homo sapiens.

The core problem with laissez-faire or neoliberal capitalism is not private property itself, it is that this doctrine inevitably creates monopolies on power and wealth. It builds grotesque differentials between the untrammelled power of a small “elite” and the powerlessness of the great majority. It is that differential, that inequality, that produces, that constitutes, the oppression. In turn, because of the paradox of hierarchy, inequity leads to the dispossessed trying to throw off the oppression, and, of course, to the privileged fighting viciously to retain their dominance.

Over decades, Engel and so many names in the international socialist movement worked on the idea of a society where this would not/could not happen. Their solution: since monopoly capitalism breeds exploitation, abolishing capitalism should solve the problem, from which sprang their Communist Manifesto of 1848. With that, they believed, the pearly highway to earthly paradise was wide open. It failed, of course, Stalin and Mao saw to that, but the reason is quite clear. Their system of total socialism was a shell game, it didn’t abolish monopoly capitalism at all, it simply rearranged it. Thus, in place of a largely hereditary private power elite controlling production, distribution and essential services, Marxism served up a state where production, distribution and essential services, were controlled by a small and quickly entrenched power elite of politicians and bureaucrats. Needless to say, the power went to their tiny heads, and so the repressive inequality described by Engels was reborn as Stalinist and Maoist revolutionary madness. Only the names were changed, everything else remained exactly as it was. In North Korea, of course, they’ve gone the full hog with an hereditary power structure.

The problem is not private capital per se, or socialism per se; putting the blame on them locates the problem at the wrong level of human affairs. Those parts of the socio-economic system are higher order elements, products of human activity but not the motivating factors that produce just that activity. Economic systems are a means to an end, and the end is satisfying the primeval urge to accumulate power and dominance. People can use private capital to build a monopoly of power and influence, or they can use socialist systems, it’s all the same to the power-hungry. The essential point is that any capitalist system, or any socialist system, that does not have built into its very foundations safeguards against the monopolistic accumulation of power will eventually lead to gross inequality and instability. Since the people who hold the power in either capitalist or socialist systems will never voluntarily relinquish it, a form of government without such safeguards must eventually lead to a more or less violent revolution.

It is, however, important to remember that neoliberalism and Maoism are not the only economic systems available, they’re the extremes, where extreme means “the end point or limit beyond which no further progress is possible.” Conceivably, neoliberalism could end with one person controlling the entire wealth and power structure of the society, just as Mao stood at the end of every line of authority in his China. Trump would dearly love to do that. If he were a lot younger and a lot smarter, meaning not Trump at all, he could possibly manage it but fortunately, he’s on the way out. Anyway, if we’re going to set up a viable politico-economic system that will be stable in the very long term, we have to take into account not just what humans want but also their weaknesses.

Humans like a bit of private property and will look after it but, as the Soviet system showed, if nobody owns anything, nobody will look after anything. All we need to do is put limits on how much private property they can have. “Oh no,” the monopolists shriek, “you’re infringing my human rights.” True, a little, but not as much as they’re trampling the rights of people who have nothing. It’s also true that people like to know they’re safe if something goes wrong, like an accident or severe illness. They like to know they can go to hospital and not be bankrupted, and I believe that’s a very basic human right. Noblesse oblige, as is written in every religion; it is the moral duty of the wealthy to assist the not-so-wealthy. So the monopolist who owns a health insurance company and screws its customers until they’re squealing is ipso facto violating one of their most fundamental rights. The neoliberals will whine: “There’s no morality in an economic system, it’s a rational, self-correcting system and anything like moral considerations will only produce distortions.” The answer to that is: Bullshit. You people set up the neoliberal system to suit yourselves, so that you could get richer without limit at the expense of the great majority. Setting up an economic system that excludes moral considerations is itself a moral choice.

In fact, they’ve got all sorts of excuses, such as the moral hazard argument: “Socialism produces laziness. If people know they’re protected, they won’t do anything to help themselves.” There’s an element of truth in it as there’s always a few social drones who are happy to sit back and do nothing. However, they’re swamped by the numbers who, under a blood-thirsty capitalism, are unable to get anywhere and fall into despair. In the US, for example, masses of people are bankrupted each year by health costs and are forced onto social services but, overwhelmingly, they would prefer to be working and independent than pushed into dependency. Dependency is degrading, humiliating; that’s part of the paradox of hierarchy. Dependency is, however, very lucrative for greedy capitalists – and which capitalist isn’t?

As for the moral hazard argument, that should also apply to the wealthy but, because they set up the system, it doesn’t. All those companies that were bailed out during the GFC should have been allowed to go broke, that’s what capitalism says, but they were bailed out with public money. In Britain, the government partially nationalised the companies it rescued and later got most of their money back but in the US, the staggering sums of money were simply handed over with no accountability. To make it worse, the executives then awarded themselves their usual annual bonuses. Under neoliberalism, profits are privatised and losses are socialised. It’s a great system if you know how to play it.

You don’t hear it so much in more sensible countries but in the US, somebody only has to shriek: “That’s socialism!” to kill a project before it’s even launched. Starting 150 years ago with stage-managed anti-Red riots in Boston and New York, capitalists managed to lump the idea of socialised programs and services along with witchcraft, buggery and cannibalism as gross moral crimes that have to be avoided at all costs. This notion is deeply entrenched in the American psyche, not least because everybody wants to become a millionaire, and socialism will stop that, so socialism has to be stamped out before it gets its claws around the country’s throat. As a result, and to the great delight and profit of the private doctors and the owners of the private hospitals and health insurers, the very people who need a proper national health service can be relied on to vote against it. This topic, of how to convince a population to vote against their best interests, is huge. Howard Zinn (1922-2010) touched on it but there’s so much more to it, much of it carefully buried in unmarked graves. Of course, the same country that violently opposes any sort of rational social services for itself or, note well, any of its client states, also runs two of the world’s biggest social services. They’re called the US military-industrial-surveillance-incarceration complex and the Veterans’ Administration. They’re huge. Nobody actually knows how big they are but you will never hear a neoliberal capitalist say a word against them.

Anyway. My thesis is that political and economic systems have to be built on the foundation of a proper account of human psychology. They cannot hang from a skyhook. Politics is simply human psychology writ large, and a rational economic system must be constructed on the basis of constraining the worst human instincts. Of these, the worst by far is the dominance drive, the urge to stand over our fellows and control them because nature has played a cruel trick. Yes, it gave us the thrill of being dominant, of winning as something worth striving for, as in training hard, working diligently, even fighting for, but the other side of that coin is the misery of being repressed. The horror of losing independence and being reduced to a helot is such that freedom becomes worth fighting and even dying for. If these twin drives, together the paradox of hierarchy, aren’t taken into account when devising the politico-economic system, then we fall into Lord Acton’s warning, from 140 years ago:

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or certainty of corruption by full authority ... And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control.

Our politico-economic system selects for arseholes and gangsters, it encourages them and rewards their worst ambitions. Trump has the mentality of a gangster, that’s how he was brought up, that’s who he is. Netanyahu has the mentality of a monster, he’s never been any different. During his time in the KGB, Putin was trained as a gangster but he also has Russia’s interests at heart whereas Trump couldn’t give a shit about the US. If he wrecked it, if the whole country fell apart (which is no longer science fiction), he would blame somebody else and take off overseas without a backward glance.

That’s what happens when rich and powerful people are spared the “discomforting effects of their actions,” as predicted by the Law of Effect. They think it’s because they’re so clever (“a very stable genius”) but it’s actually because, convinced they can always avoid consequences, they’ve taken control of the machinery of state and are running it to suit themselves. However, the Doomsday Clock now stands at 89 seconds to midnight, having just moved one second closer to damnation. Thorndike was right: if these idiots continue on their path, there will certainly be consequences, but they could well be terminal.

Reference:

1. Engels F (1845/2010). The Condition of the Working Class in England. Marxists Internet Archive, at marxists.org:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

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My critical works are best approached in this order:

The case against mainstream psychiatry:

McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).

Development and justification of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.

Clinical application of the biocognitive model:

McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:

McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.

The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.