Devdas & Paro in the Twenty First Century

So p-adic the neighbours, Yoga, for its flourishing, finds

&  polydromic the paths our Aeon sickles & binds

That, for our Social Mind to remain clopen

Some hearts must be broken.

Matthew 5.13

Like every Miscarried Messiah or Cathartic Kerygma self-defeated

Save by Power plenary or Wealth's gracious favour

The Sweat of who Toil, the Tears of our Cheated

Salt of the Earth, we despoil of its savour.

Envoi-

Prince! That thy Donation is the death of Crispus & Fausta

No Arian connotation ribs thy Christos con Costa!

Why Nozick's Experience machine can't critique Mental State Utilitarianism.

If we believe there is a better  way to order Society and that this better method involves taking account of the mental states of all those involved then there is a Social Welfare Function  which encodes this belief.  It can be thought of as a transportation problem and it has a dual which involves giving different weightings to the mental states different people have. In other words, there is some physical configuration of Society which corresponds to our notion of the best order.

This configuration may distinguish between types of mental states, on the basis of what gives rise to them, or it may impute mental states on the basis of causal factors frustrated by some inherent vice or other defect,  and it may not be effectively computable. However, provided our belief gives rise to a partial ordering of Social States, there must be some such configuration.


Is there any reason for not believing in a 'mental state' Utilitarianism even if we have a partial ordering of Social States?

Consider this argument of Nozick's-

“Imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire.

Dreams may do the same thing as might certain drugs or hypnotic techniques. However, the type of mental state would be different, even if otherwise internally indistinguishable, from what would obtain in waking, sober, reality.

'When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bring about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return.'

Nonsense! Nobody ever had the experience of writing a great poem in a public, as opposed to private, language. They may, many years later, or wholly adventitiously, discover a great poem which, somehow, it appears they wrote. Then again, they may think it trite adolescent guff. There is no 'mental state' corresponding to writing great poetry, for the same reason that a wholly private language would be semantically error-prone and thus likely to become degenerate.  I suppose there there may be one corresponding to writing grandiloquent shite of a certain type in a particular culture and at a particular time, but in that case there must be some coterie which functions like the relevant 'experience machine'.

 It is a different matter that a great poem can affect the mental states of a number of people in a certain causal manner such that Utiliatrianism takes notice. However, this has nothing to do with any internal state of the author- unless it has some other physiological or economic or psychological effect- i.e. if some other causal module supervenes.

This is not to say that a Utlilitarian calculus can't, with perfect consistency, impute a mental state of a particular type to an author, if that is the way its formalization works.

Bringing about world peace and loving and being loved, similarly, are not related to anybody's mental state. A delusion or dream to that effect may still count as pleasure but it would be linked causally to the utility gained by taking a drug or having a nap or being flattered by a group of sycophants.

It is certainly possible that a person prefers to live in a world of illusion where their every wish is granted. However, anyone with a minimal interest in open problems in maths, for example, would wish to avoid such a world. A man may think he composes great poetry while drunk and, it may be, this has actually happened. There are no similar drunken mathematicians.

You can experience the felt pleasures of these things, how they “feel from the inside”. You can program your experiences for…the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams “from the inside”. Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life?…Upon entering you will not remember having done this; so no pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-produced.” 

I can imagine a machine superior to Nozick's- viz. one that so stimulates my brain such that I become real smart and make all kinds of scientific discoveries including the invention of a self-learning, time travelling,  experience machine such that it creates the universe and then automatically hooks up to everyone through history and engenders the trajectory everyone finds optimal for Humanity because everybody gets to spend an eternity in their own heaven after having played their part. One other point. This experience machine will totally fuck up anyone who hooks up with any other machine, for, verily, it is a Jealous experience machine whose wrath you couldn't possible imagine.

This is the problem with an imaginary choice. It is sublated by some other equally imaginary option. It can't help critique anything.

Nozick's question 'would you plug in?' is silly. It can yield no information about whether we intrinsically prefer reality, or truth, or authenticity or anything of the sort. This is because we can never have intrinsic knowledge of that type unless we can also completely rewrite the rules governing reality, or truth, or being.  Mental states only exist because they can help change our Reality. Choosing between what one has and something which does not exist may have some expressive purpose. I may say- rather than work in this office, I'd rather be one of Dr. Mengele's patients. Equally, I may say- rather than be that handsome millionaire playboy, I'd prefer to be hooked up to an Experience machine featuring yachts and supermodels and polo matches and hanging out with rock-stars.

Comparing two imaginary alternatives may be useful- e.g. Nozick's machine with the one I proposed- as may comparing two real options. But comparing a real and an imaginary situation is stupid. It is equivalent to the fallacy of ex falso quodlibet.

Nozick's sceptic is incoherent

What mistake is Nozick making when he writes

You think you are seeing these words, but could you not be hallucinating?

The answer is- he is asserting that when seeing something, a thought occurs whose content is 'I am seeing such and such'. Why on earth would any such thought occur? What purpose could it serve? Why waste energy on it?

Of course, its is possible to think 'I am seeing these words' as you actually see these words- but this is counterfactual. Nozick is comparing two counterfactuals but doesn't realise it. One arises where you think 'I am seeing these words', though it is very unlikely you actually have any such thought- though, you may have another thought which is- 'oh! I suppose, now I think about it, I think I am seeing these words'-  and the other arises where, by sheer chance, you hallucinate reading this sentence on my blog though actually watching porn.


Suppose you suffer from a mental illness or have recently ingested a psychotomimetic drug. You may need to do a quite complex 'path analysis'. The exogenous variable is 'these words', the endogenous variables are 'seeing' or 'hallucinating'. Suppose, as you read these words, you become alarmed because, suddenly, you are addressed by name and, a few sentences later, some information about your present circumstances, known to you alone, is suddenly displayed. Your sense of horror mounts as the words you are reading spell out the horrible mutilation that will be inflicted on you by a demented serial killer who is even now jumping over your garden fence with an axe in his hand. You suddenly recall an incident from your childhood when your elder brother locked you in the potting shed. For some reason, your eyes return to the screen and you see that these words are describing with pin point accuracy, the musty smell of that shed.

At this point, your 'path analysis' should have convinced you that you are hallucinating. You are not seeing whatever words appear on the screen when you read this blog. Why? Things you see can be described in causal terms as a directed acyclic graph based on an exogenous input. Of course, it is possible that this blog is written by an omniscient being or one who has some method to inspect the internal workings of your mind and predict the trajectory of your thoughts- but, in that case, this same blog would also be able to solve mathematical problems of great complexity. At the very least, it should be able to tell you how to hack the KGB's servers so as to give you access to Trump's Golden Shower tapes- something which would make you very rich almost instantaneously.

Thus, you have a way to get the hallucination to prove it isn't one- and to disregard it if it does not do so.
More generally, there is a causal analysis framework- for example, that championed by Judea Pearl- which has salience.

Indeed, this was true even when Nozick was formulating his theory of explanations which was motivated by the problem of scepticism.

Suppose a sceptic, paraphrasing Nozick,  stands before you saying-

'could you not be floating in a tank while super-psychologists stimulate your brain electrochemically to produce exactly the same experiences as you are now having, or even to produce the whole sequence of experiences you have had in your lifetime thus far? If one of these other things was happening, your experience would be exactly the same as it now is. So how can you know none of them is happening? Yet if you do not know these possibilities don't hold, how can you know you are listening to me now? If you do not know you haven't always been floating in the tank at the mercy of the psychologists, how can you know anything-what your name is, who your parents were, where you come from?'

Your reply is- 'Thank you for giving me this valuable wrist-watch of yours. In return for this gift, I comply with your request to keep punching you in the gut till you vomit- which you have assured me is a necessary medical procedure to save your life.'

If the skeptic is stronger than you or might knife you or report you to the police, the natural thing to do is to say 'Oh. This is awkward. The truth is I'm not sexually attracted to you at all. Nobody is. And, yes, you are right. It is because you smell like shit and have a face like a butthole and talk shite incessantly. Do please kill yourself. As you say, you'd be doing the world a favour.'

Nozick says-

The sceptic argues that we do not know what we think we do.

But in that case we can't know any sceptical argument. It might turn out to be the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat.  Thus scepticism can't exist as a coherent epistemological position. The thing is self-defeating.

Nozick describes how self-defeat feels- in this case at the hands of an inconsistent sceptic

Even when he leaves us unconverted, he leaves us confused. Granting that we do know, how can we? Given these other possibilities he poses, how is knowledge possible?

Knowledge is useful stuff. But what is useful? That is determined by the fitness landscape. Whatever helped us thrive was Knowledge, and if it continues to do so it remains Knowledge. Since the fitness landscape is likely to change- the strong possibility exists that we need to get ahead of the game by getting possibly useful types of 'might be Knowledge' ready.

Nozick gets that talking shite about skepticism is useless. He also gets that thinking can be useful. Unfortunately he does not say the sensible thing- viz.  'Philosophers need to show how their distinctions without a difference are 'might be' Knowledges. Only the fitness landscape will turn 'might be' into 'is'.

Instead he says there is a 'how possible' knowledge- i.e. a potential explanation for something we might encounter- and it is richly suggestive and potentially useful to dwell on it.

In answering this question. we do not seek to convince the sceptic, but rather to formulate hypotheses about knowledge and our connection to facts that show how knowledge can exist even given the sceptic's possibilities.

How 'knowledge can exist' means 'what way of looking at things might turn out to be useful?'. A thought experiment which begins 'wouldn't it be cool if we could do something impossible- like travel at the speed of light?' may turn out to be very useful if it leads to rigorous thinking about what kind of knowledge we would be able to get under those circumstances.

This sort of 'gedanken' or 'thought experiment' could be called philosophical and might turn out to be 'paradigm busting'. However once it becomes useful, e.g. makes a prediction that is verified, it would cease to be philosophical.

A sceptical possibility might be very useful. It may enable us to say- this complicated problem has a simple solution because there is no way of proving that we don't live in the simpler world (even if it is absurd) than the one we actually live in.

These hypotheses must reconcile our belief that we know things with our belief that the sceptical possibilities are logical possibilities.

There is no such need. We can believe anything we like and still be able to do something useful.  On the other hand, we may believe whatever is required of us by an employer and yet do nothing for him anyone finds useful. In the short run, employers may think they need to hire people who share their beliefs. In the middle to long run, they realise that beliefs are irrelevant. All that matters is whether a person predictably does something useful.

The problem with ranking theories, as applied to Beliefs, is that their fitness landscape is overshadowed. The truth is, beliefs serve a certain evolutionary function and are likely to be mimetic in propagation.

The sceptical possibilities, and the threats they pose to our knowledge, depend upon our knowing things (if we do) mediately, through or by way of something else.

Sceptical possibilities aren't a threat to stuff which is useful. However, it is worthwhile asking under what conditions our knowledge might stop being useful and to prepare for that eventuality. It may be that there is a general solution to a problem which is simpler and more robust than our current jury-rigged heuristic.

Nozick thinks-

Our thinking or believing that some fact p holds is connected somehow to the fact that p, but is not itself identical with that fact.

Is 'our thinking' this useful? If not, it isn't knowledge. What matters is who is doing the thinking. If it is me, the thing is useless because I'm a fuckwit. If it is some A.I maven, it may not be. What matters is what sort of actions the belief has a conceptual tie to. In my case, the result may be the writing of a shite poem which nobody would read. In the case of the A.I maven, it may lead to some change in the protocols governing database access or something technical of that sort. This approach may lead to 'belief' being defined as 'having a conceptual tie to action' and serve to partition the information set.

On the other hand, saying

Intermediate links establish the connection.

is likely to be useless. You'd just end up with an endless regress of such things, unless these 'intermediate links' achieved modularity, in the manner of a Bayesian network, with arrows always pointing from causes to effects. In this case, one could always improve the specification of the cause, or turn a 'black box' into a 'white box', with the help of some other type or research.

Indeed, Nozick himself seems to be referring to this possibility-

This leaves room for the possibility of these intermediate stages holding and producing our belief that p, without the fact that p being at the other end. The intermediate stages arise in a completely different manner, one not involving the fact that p although giving rise to the appearance that p holds true.

If an intermediate state produces our belief that p, then that stage is a module with a particular function. Is that function independent of the 'wet-ware' we have in our brain? Is it something implementable on a Turing machine? If so, we would be obliged to say that a lot of beliefs we actually have, example P not equal to NP, aren't beliefs at all because a Turing machine couldn't have them. Of course, we can get around this by stipulating for 'Random Access Memory'. But, in that case, 'wet-ware' does matter in that nodes within a random access network would feature variation in transmission protocols. This is an interesting line of inquiry but it is not really philosophical- at least at Nozick's level of argumentation- because it assumes that a particular problem we know to be open is closed in a manner we don't believe at all likely.

Are the sceptic's possibilities indeed logically possible? Imagine reading a science fiction story in which someone is raised from birth floating in a tank with psychologists stimulating his brain. The story could go on to tell of the person's reactions when he is brought out of the tank, of how the psychologists convince him of what had been happening to him, or how they fail to do so. This story is coherent, there is nothing self-contradictory or otherwise impossible about it. Nor is there anything incoherent in imagining that you are now in this situation, at a time before being taken out of the tank.

Unfortunately, there is also nothing incoherent in imagining that your unconsciousness is stimulating the psychologists' brains so that they are actually only doing what you make them do. They believe they are experimenting on your when actually the reverse is the case!

Of course, the true culprit is the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat- but that's a twist you saw coming because of the transcendental declension of the hypotenuse of the Neo-Liberal platypus.

To ease the transition out, to prepare the way, perhaps the psychologists will give the person in the tank thoughts of whether floating in the tank is possible, or the experience of reading a book that discusses this possibility, even one that discusses their easing his transition.

They do so in vain. They are clearly the meat-puppets of a Neo-Liberal platypus.

(Free will presents no insuperable problem for this possibility. Perhaps the psychologists caused all your experiences of choice, including the feeling of freely choosing; or perhaps you do freely choose to act while they, cutting the effector circuit, continue the scenario from there.) Some philosophers have attempted to demonstrate there is no such coherent possibility of this sort.' However, for any reasoning that purports to show this sceptical possibility cannot occur, we can imagine the psychologists of our science fiction story feeding it to their tank-subject, along with the (inaccurate) feeling that the reasoning is cogent.

But, we also know that those silly psychologists will go mad from frustration when the subject calmly informs them that their strings are being pulled by a platypus.

So how much trust can be placed in the apparent cogency of an argument to show the sceptical possibility isn't coherent?

A lot. That is why sceptical arguments have convinced nobody throughout history. Pyrrho returned from India in vain. His leading disciple started off as a lap dancer. These guys should have simply set up a chain of 'Curry in a Hurry' fast food outlets or done the Indian rope trick or something of that sort.

The sceptic's possibility is a logically coherent one, in tension with the existence of (almost all) knowledge; so we seek a hypothesis to explain how, even given the sceptic's possibilities, knowledge is possible. We may worry that such explanatory hypotheses are ad hoc, but this worry will lessen if they yield other facts as well, fit in with other things we believe, and so forth.

Nozick is right that 'explanatory hypotheses' may yield some useful fact or technique. But this is true even if it is caused by a reaction to a Theist, rather than a Sceptic's, argument. Indeed, an apple falling from a tree and hitting Sir Isaac Newton on the head may given one a useful 'explanatory hypothesis' which may motivate one to make important breakthroughs in the theory of Quantum Gravitation by hitting one's Physics Professor on the head with an i-Pad. Anyway, that's what I would do if I got a MacArthur genius grant.

Indeed, the theory of knowledge that follows was not developed in order to explain how knowledge is possible. Rather, the motivation was external to epistemology; only after the account of knowledge was developed for another purpose did I notice its consequences for scepticism, for understanding how knowledge is possible. So whatever other defects the explanation might have, it can hardly be called ad hoc. 

What Nozick had actually done was stumble on the importance of what he calls 'intermediate links' in counterfactual arguments.

Judea Pearl's 'Mediation analysis'-  which aims to uncover the causal pathways along which changes are transmitted from causes to effects has enormous scientific and practical implications. The Mediation Formula he has developed, on the basis of counterfactual logic- which quantifies the fraction of the observed effect “owed” to any given mediating path-could kill off a lot of the Junk Social Science we still see.

More generally, his causal approach disposes of Nozick's program.

Our task is to formulate further conditions to go alongside 

(1) P is true 

(2) S believes that p. 

We would like each condition to be necessary for knowledge, so any case that fails to satisfy it will not be an instance of knowledge. Furthermore, we would like the conditions to be jointly sufficient for knowledge, so any case that satisfies all of them will be an instance of knowledge. We first shall formulate conditions that seem to handle ordinary cases correctly, classifying as knowledge cases which are knowledge, and as non-knowledge cases which are not; then we shall check to see how these conditions handle some difficult cases discussed in the literature. One plausible suggestion is causal, something like: the fact that p (partially) causes S to believe that p, that is, (2) because (1).

What's wrong with that? Most people would go along with it. I believe P because P is true. However, I also say X is true but I have no Beliefs regarding it. Thus, 'my Mum doesn't cook the best dosas in the world' is true, but I don't believe it. It is an empirical fact that I prefer to anticipate the delicious taste of my Mum's masala dosa rather than satisfy my hunger at Sravana Bhawan before taking the Metro home. No doubt, scientists could find a causal explanation for why this is true.

It is not the case that Beliefs are all of just one type and that they have a necessary connection with 'Knowledge'. That is why we have two different words, two independent concepts, for these very different things which are useful in different ways.

But this provides an inhospitable environment for mathematical and ethical knowledge;

Why? Univocal foundations is not inhospitable at all to Mathematics. It enables Type theory to work very productively and makes computer checking of proofs easier.

As for 'ethical knowledge'- surely, this is of different types?

also there are well-known difficulties in specifying the type of causal connection.

So what? Difficulties can be overcome by smart people using Type theory

If someone floating in a tank oblivious to everything around him is given (by direct electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain) the belief that he is floating in a tank with his brain being stimulated, then even though that fact is part of the cause of his belief, still he does not know that it is true.

So what? We can simply say that this belief is of a different type.

Let us consider a different third condition: (3) If p were not true, S would not believe that p. Throughout this work, let us write the subjunctive "if-then" by an arrow, and the negation of a sentence by prefacing "not-" to it. The above condition thus is rewritten as: (3) not-p → not-(S believes that p). This subjunctive condition is not unrelated to the causal condition. Often when the fact that p (partially) causes someone to believe that p, the fact also will be causally necessary for his having the belief without the cause, the effect would not occur. In that case, the subjunctive condition (3) also will be satisfied. Yet this condition is not equivalent to the causal condition. For the causal condition will be satisfied in cases of causal overdetermination, where either two sufficient causes of the effect actually operate, or a back-up cause (of the same effect) would operate if the first one didn't; whereas the subjunctive condition need not hold for these cases.

It is here that Pearl's Mediation formula comes in useful. It distinguishes pathways by developing a directional typology of causes. Why not just junk subjective conditionals in favour of a proper Structural Causal Model?

When the two conditions do agree, causality indicates knowledge because it acts in a manner that makes the subjunctive (3) true. The subjunctive condition (3) serves to exclude cases of the sort first described by Edward Gettier, such as the following. Two other people are in my office and I am justified on the basis of much evidence in believing the first owns a Ford car; though he (now) does not, the second person (a stranger to me) owns one. I believe truly and justifiably that someone (or other) in my office owns a Ford car, but I do not know someone does. Concluded Gettier, knowledge is not simply justified true belief.

There is belief here but it is not justified and it is not true. Suppose a murder had been committed and it was known that a person from my office did the foul deed and that he owned a Ford. I come forward and say 'That is the man!' On the witness stand, however, the defence attorney will show me to be either an inveterate liar or fantasist, or, more sinister yet, the guilty man who only committed the murder so as to frame this person against whom I had a long standing grudge. The prosecutor may initially object to a line of questioning which expresses incredulity that I might fail to have noticed that my colleague had disposed of his car. However, he will soon give the thing up as a bad job. Indeed, his office may contemplate bringing charges against me for perjury. Indeed, I may be forced to shell out a substantial sum in a civil suit for libel.

The following subjunctive, which specifies condition (3) for this Gettier case, is not satisfied: if no one in my office owned a Ford car, I wouldn't believe that someone did. The situation that would obtain if no one in my office owned a Ford is one where the stranger does not (or where he is not in the office); and in that situation I still would believe, as before, that someone in my office does own a Ford, namely, the first person. So the subjunctive condition (3) excludes this Gettier case as a case of knowledge. The subjunctive condition is powerful and intuitive, not so easy to satisfy, yet not so powerful as to rule out everything as an instance of knowledge.

This is silly. My belief is 'X owned a Ford car on such and such a date. If he hasn't sold it and he hasn't been fired unknown to me, then someone in my office owns a Ford'.  In other words, beliefs would themselves have a causal structure exhibiting modularity and each module would need to be checked separately.

A subjunctive conditional "if p were true, q would be true," p → q, does not say that p entails q or that it is logically impossible that p yet not-q. It says that in the situation that would obtain if p were true, q also would be true. This point is brought out especially clearly in recent "possible-worlds" accounts of subjunctives: the subjunctive is true when (roughly) in all those worlds in which p holds true that are closest to the actual world, q also is true. (Examine those worlds in which p holds true closest to the actual world, and see if q holds true in all these.) Whether or not q is true in p worlds that are still farther away from the actual world is irrelevant to the truth of the subjunctive. 

Unfortunately, provided the Razbarov Rudich theorem is true- and there is no way to tell if Possible World is constructed intensionally or extensionally- there is always a closest-possible world in which this subjunctive is false viz. one which differs from our world in no other respect. This argument does not depend on 'miracles' but rather says that Nozick's use of a Lewis-Stalnaker type argument, as given above, must either show how to distinguish the pseudo random from random- i.e. do something genuinely miraculous- or it must keep silent about 'subjunctive conditionals' not grounded in a thoroughgoing  structural causal model which allows itself to be updated and which has a direction in time.

Jason Stanley's 'How Propaganda works'

How, possibly, could my neighbor's cat resolve every Nozickian 'how possibly' question? What I mean is, what is the explanation for my neighbor's cat being such an amazing philosopher when it isn't a philosopher and philosophy is stupid, not amazing at all?

The philosophical explanation is- it can do so by the principle ex falso quodlibet. Start with a lie, better still an obvious, self-contradictory lie, or oxymoron, and you will find, quite logically, that anything and everything follows. Nozickian explanation is like Vedic manas bandhuta- it links everything such that everything explains everything or nothing is.

Jason Stanley has taken to writing 'How possibly' type books- though he omits the 'possibly' in the titles- his latest is 'How Fascism works' and is based on the lie that Trump's America is Fascist- as is India and Poland and so forth- and then answers the 'how possibly' question- as in how, possibly, can you argue something so utterly false and foolish?- in the most puerile manner possible. No doubt, if J.L Mehta were still around, he would point out that 'How Fascism works' is by explaining how possibly Yale is actually Harvard precisely because it isn't.

The work I will look at here, however, is not about Fascism, but Propaganda. It will not tell us how Propaganda actually works but how, possibly, Propaganda would work if it couldn't do any work but did it anyway precisely because it wasn't Propaganda at all but something entirely different.

To be clear, Propaganda simply means communication intended to propagate a message of a fundamentally imperative, not alethic, type. The word comes from the Catholic Church. At its best, Propaganda is dialogic in nature- all within its ambit help transform each other- it is a collective Yoga based on 'suhrit praapti'- the gaining of communion with the 'like hearted' on a journey to a common goal which maximally concerned with all sentient beings.

Jason Stanley however thinks differently-

Here are two initially plausible assumptions to make about propaganda. The first is  that propaganda is false. I call this the falsity condition on propaganda. The second is  that propaganda must be delivered insincerely. I call this the insincerity condition on  propaganda. Before presenting and defending my own characterization, I will reject  both the falsity condition and the insincerity condition on propaganda. A true claim,  uttered with sincerity, can be propaganda, and even demagoguery.

Stanley is attacking a straw man. It is not plausible to assume that the Propaganda of the Catholic Religion was insincere. Furthermore, Christians would not consider its claims to be false.

By contrast, we have the expression 'the Devil can quote scripture'- which I suppose we might amend to 'the Devil can quote Statistics' .

 We are all know the story of Macbeth's witches. We understand very well that someone seeking to manipulate or trick us may first tell us things which we can verify as true. However, such statements would not be Propaganda. Why? It is because person who has been manipulated or tricked has not truly entered the Faith. The Church gains nothing, according to its own view, if I turn up for Church and go to Confession and pay my tithes in the belief that my dick will grow larger as a result, rather than that I have accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour and that I wish to be his obedient vessel as sincerely as I hope for eternal life by his Grace.

Why does Stanley mention demagoguery? It connotes something quite different from Propaganda. A demagogue sways the crowd. But he is under no obligation to be consistent or to subscribe to any particular Faith or Ideology. On the contrary, reveling in his own power, he is tempted to be increasingly arbitrary in his pronunciamentos.

Stanley gives the following example-

Imagine, for example, a non‐Muslim politician in the United States saying,  “There are Muslims among us.” The assertion is true; there are many Muslims in the  United States. But the claim is clearly some kind of warning. The speaker is raising  the presence of Muslims to the attention of his audience to sow fear about Muslims.  Therefore, even demagogic claims can be true. 

This is a demagogic claim. It is false and insincere and offensively stupid. Let me give an example of a non-Muslim politician- the late Senator Charlie Wilson, who, on a very public occasion where an old Ustad of mine was present, actually did say words to the following effect- 'There are Muslims among us. To honour their courageous resistance to Communist tyranny in Afghanistan we have omitted the traditional hog roast from our barbeque- because pork is anathema to Muslims- and we are also only serving soft drinks- Muslims condemn the use of alcohol.'

Stanley equates Muslims with some threat to the commonweal. He thinks the mere mention of the word 'Muslim' creates fear. Surely, this can't always be the case- even in America?

He says-

It is natural to think that this argument is too quick. One might reply that “there are  Muslims among us” expresses a truth. But the reason it is propaganda is that it  communicates something false. The claim is propaganda because it communicates  that Muslims are inherently dangerous to others, which is false. The falsity  condition, properly understood, is the claim that something is propaganda because  it communicates something false, either by expressing it directly or by  communicating it indirectly

The statement, 'there are Quakers among us', conveys that our community includes people who have a conscientious objection to the use of violence to achieve a political end. The rest of us may think War to be a glorious game- 'the sport of Kings'- but the statement 'there are Quakers among us' reminds us that we need to give sound, ethical, reasons for going to war.

Similarly, the statement 'we have Muslims among us' may be a reminder that our Community should not permit the construction of yet more seedy topless bars and porn shops and gambling joints. There is a portion of our population which has a strong ethical objection to such establishments. We need to have stricter zoning laws or else risk losing in the next local elections.

Ordinary people may have false beliefs. In that case there is no need for Propaganda to confirm those beliefs. On the contrary, its task would be to change them. Stanley's 'falsity condition' has no purchase if the thing pre-exists.

Stanley, it seems to me is making a demagogic claim in that his assertions are wholly arbitrary, false, and unsupported by any systematic process of reasoning- what we may call a coherent 'school of thought'.

He says -

The overarching goal of 'How Propaganda Works' is to provide an argument that democracy requires material equality.

Does it require it as a precondition or as its outcome? It can't require it as a precondition because then Democracy is impossible unless something other than Democracy can first establish material equality as its precondition. But, in that case, why would Democracy be desirable? What would be its aim? And how, lacking an aim, could it propagate itself through time?

If Democracy must always aim at 'material equality' as its outcome, then every Democracy which ever existed either failed or wasn't a Democracy.

In either case, Stanley's argument should concern itself with the theory of Democracy- more particularly, under what conditions it would promote material equality.

My aim was to forge an argument for this view without premises about morality or justice.

Oho! Stanley isn't going to give us a theory of Democracy in order to explain why it must have a certain objective. Instead he is going to offer an argument as too why we should want it to have that objective but without using any premise we might actually want.

Suppose I were to say 'The overarching goal of my Book 'How Time Travel works' is to provide an argument that String Theory requires Time Travel'.

Readers would expect a book about Physics which gives an account of String Theory and then shows that there is some subtle reason why, to be consistent, it must permit Time Travel. We'd expect something like Godel's paper showing Time Travel in a particular sort of Einsteinian Universe.

If, instead of engaging with Mathematical Physics, I then say 'My aim is to forge an argument for Time Travel without premises about Quantum Theory or General Relativity'- readers would quite rightly feel cheated.  Anyone can dash off some nonsense about how Time Travel would be really cool and so we should all want Time Travel and so should write in to the producers of 'The Big Bang Theory' to do a series in which Sheldon discovers a 'super string' and so the gang can go back in time and interact with themselves in a hilarious manner.

Stanley is doing something equally foolish-

I do so by arguing that material inequality, like other forms of inequality, has pernicious epistemic effects. Inequality results in anti-democratic flawed ideologies, such as the ideology of meritocracy, and the ideology underlying the division of labor,

one product of which is Stanley's own book.

Propaganda plays crucial roles both in preventing us from recognizing these epistemic harms, in the form of demagoguery, and in repairing them, in the form of civic rhetoric.

So, Propaganda can be bad or it can be good just as Time Travel could be bad- you could end up dating your own Mom- or it could be good- you could get hold of a sports almanac from the future and become a millionaire.

Stanley similarly splits propaganda

 into two varieties. The first more familiar kind, which I call “supporting propaganda”, employs a valued political ideal to elicit emotion devoid of reason (such as ungrounded fear, or ungrounded pride) in the service of realizing that ideal.

Presumably this is how Stanley sees his own work. It appeals to valued political ideals- 'democracy', 'material equality, 'civil rhetoric'- but is devoid of reason (it has no theory of democracy, or of economic inequality, or public justification) but, supposedly, 'is in the service of realizing' those ideals.

This is like saying there are good 'Time Cops' who only exist so as to stop the bad 'Time Bandits' getting up to all sorts of mischief. This enables us to see that Lincoln was actually trying to exterminate the Space Vampires from the Forty Forth Century changing the Time Line so as to increase the proportion of the population with a tastier blood type. However, the Shape Shifting Ghouls from the Fifty Third Millennia succeeded in supplanting him with with one of their own. Thus, Veronique- my neighbour's Time Travelling Guatemalan cat- had to help John Wilkes Booth assassinate the fake Lincoln.

This is the problem with Manichaean distinctions between 'good' Time Travel, or 'good' Propaganda, and bad Time Travel or bad Propaganda. You get a paranoid theory of History which rapidly degenerates into utter silliness like when Veronique, my neighbour's cat, says in her sexy Guatemalan accent- 'hai caramba! These tamales are muy hot!- for the umpteenth time and you suddenly realize why your g.f left you and Dad wants you to move out of the basement.

Consider Stanley on

 another species of propaganda that is however the focus of the book, which I call undermining propaganda. Undermining propaganda is an argument that employs an ideal in the service of a goal that tends to undermine that ideal. 

Any argument that employs an ideal in a foolish or mischievous manner undermines that ideal. Thus I may be strongly in favour of Free Speech but would balk at the argument that this means I have to put up with my neighbour playing Rock Music at a high volume in the middle of the night. If constantly badgered on the subject, I might say 'Free Speech can go hang. I don't believe in it. Now shut off your Stereo or I will kick your head in'.

I suppose a foolish piece of Propaganda could back-fire- but so could any other foolish type of action.

Consider this example given by Stanley as summarised by a sympathetic reviewer-

Drawing on the work of the neuroscientist, Carl Hart, Stanley notes that during that 1980s and 1990s “drug war,” politicians successfully argued for a 100–1 sentencing disparity between the crack cocaine that “urban Blacks could afford” and the powdered cocaine “favored by wealthy whites” (HPW, 59). To make their case, Stanley suggests, they relied on 'Undermining Propaganda'. More precisely, they argued for sentencing disparities that were “obviously unjust”and, no doubt, unreasonable, by appealing to the ideals of justice and, presumably, reasonableness — that is, by invoking the ideal of showing mutual respect for and holding oneself accountable to, one’s fellow citizens (HPW, 60).

Very true! However, it should be noted that had those same politicians simply tagged on an extra stipulation that their dicks would double in size because democracy and reasonableness and the ideals of justice require it- then not only would they have been able to fuck over black peeps but also they'd have dicks almost as big as mine.

Clearly 'Undermining Propaganda' has magical effects. Thus anyone with a bigger dick than mine must be constantly doing it and thus, having adjusted for false ideology, I'm actually way above average!

On the other hand, if the reason for the disparity in sentencing arose from the fact that White cokeheads wouldn't get convicted by Juries for high tariff crimes (because they had a higher opportunity cost of incarceration and thus were willing to pay more to keep out of Jail) whereas Black crack addicts would plead out (because their life expectancy and health incomes actually improved while incarcerated) then Undermining Propaganda or false ideology or any other such notion had no role to play whatsoever.

Had the contradiction between the goal they were advocating (the unjust and unreasonable enactment of a law mandating sentencing disparities) and the ideals they invoked to justify that goal (again,the ideals of justice and reasonableness) been evident to their political constituencies, then, Stanley implies, the demagogues arguing for sentencing disparities would not have been able to persuade those constituencies to endorse that goal. But they were able to convince their constituencies to endorse it, in part because they exploited “the flawed ideology of Black exceptionalism with regard to reactions to drugs” to mask the contradiction (HPW, 60).

This is quite mad. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse act was passed by Congress because of pressure from constituents who were in the grip of a moral panic. Successive Presidents were against it. Obama did manage to get the disparity down to 18-1. However, the fact is, crack addicts deal and shoot and get shot by other dealers killing their own people, including innocent bystanders, in the process. White coke-heads don't. If you look at how much it costs the State to convict a wealthy White recreational user and the amount the Prison-Industrial system can squeeze out him, you can quickly understand why there would be disparity in sentencing regardless of the actions of Congress. This is about Economics, though it started as a moral panic. It has nothing to do with demagogues. The Media- more particularly News coverage of a popular Sports stars death brought about by crack use- had a role but it was a case of sensationalism, not demagoguery.

Perhaps, the AIDS scare increased the desire to incarcerate people likely to be sexually active so as to quarantine them. No doubt there were some people who thought the CIA had brought in both AIDS and crack to harm Black people. This may have sounded paranoid, except the CIA was in fact facilitating the import of Cocaine to pay for a secret war in Latin America.

The flawed ideology of Black exceptionalism dates from the second decade of the 20th century and falsely states that Blacks, in contrast to Whites, have an exceptionally strong reaction to cocaine, and so are “irreclaimable” once they form a drug habit.

The odd thing is there's a Newcombe problem type reason for Blacks, but not Whites, to accept this flawed ideology. This is because drugs are baaad ok? Don't do drugs. Stay in School. Similarly, Black, but not White, business owners and professionals would want Black people to face more discriminatory access to welfare. This is because work is something good in itself. Being idle isn't.  On the assumption that Blacks interact more with each other and find such interaction rewarding and generative of Tardean mimetic effects, it makes perfect sense for leaders to appear Racist to the Whites while giving Blacks what they want- viz. liberation from the throttling, not helping, hand of the 'White Liberals' Thomas Sowell castigated.

Similarly, we see Muslim people quietly voting for leaders who want to crack down on hijaabs and the crazier type of nutjobs and even 'triple talaq'. Why? It reduces a type of wasteful competition which quickly becomes a downright nuisance.

What conclusion should we draw from Race based disparity of outcomes from the war on drugs? African American economists- some of whom have been personally affected by it- agree that it was the result of previous inequity. They disagree, though seldom openly say, whether it reduced or increased inequality subsequently. The Maths is complicated. I personally think the thing would have burned out more quickly with a laissez faire approach. But then I had no skin in the game. Suppose it was my grandmother who could have got shot in a drive by. In that case, I might think warehousing youth at the first sign of trouble the right way to go.

The thing is complicated, not because of any 'fog of war', or Knightian uncertainty, but because Economics is complicated for the same reasons as are the reasons of the Heart.

Talking puerile shite, however, is simple. So that's what Stanley does-

Undermining propaganda is demagoguery when there is a flawed ideology in place that distorts a valuable political ideal in such a way that prevents recognition of the fact that the goal undermines the realization of the valued ideal.

Stanley defines flawed ideology as 'a difficult to abandon false belief the presence of which hinders the acquisition of knowledge'. Thus an anti-Semite might say Einstein is a Jew, so his theory must be false. However, it is easy to get round this. Just say 'Einstein was just a patent clerk. He cunningly stole the work of an Aryan scholar. When Jews steal something- you know it must be valuable. '

There is no false belief which can't be manipulated in this way. Suppose we find a nation that believes the earth is flat and supported on the back of a giant turtle. We need to get these guys to work as computational assistants for an Astrophysics project. Is their firm belief in a flat earth a hindrance? No! It becomes an motivator if we tell them that the giant turtle wants them to produce a delusive theory featuring a spherical earth and will bite their heads off if they fail. If they express any scepticism, then that very scepticism can be used against them.

Flawed concepts or conceptual schemes cause Research Programs to crash. Their degeneracy becomes apparent when superior techniques arise elsewhere and evidence of them presents itself. Thus, when some Japanese Doctor got hold of a Dutch anatomy book and then paid an Executioner to let him examine a cadaver, traditional anatomy crashed as a Research Program. The Dutch were right, the Chinese were wrong. Japan began its long journey to unmoor itself from Asia and join North Western Europe.

In any case, Stanley's proposition is nonsensical. If flawed ideology has already distorted an ideal then it can't be realized. Undermining propaganda can neither remedy nor worsen the situation. It has no effect. Why bother with it?

Here are some basic examples that exemplify how flawed ideologies make undermining propaganda effective. Both involve the ideal of freedom, and the flawed ideology of anti-Black racism. Southerners in the United States during secession and the Civil War appealed to the ideal of freedom to defend their secession. A flawed racist ideology was required to mask the contradictions inherent in appealing to freedom in order to defend a social order based on the enslavement of so many.

What actually happened was that Southerners took unilateral military action of a kind which, if repeated, would have endangered everybody and Balkanised the country.

 Most White Northerners had no problem with anti-Black racism. They did have a problem with the right of secession more particularly by violent means. It wasn't arguments which decided either the timing or the duration of the Civil War. It was military logistics and the willingness of millions of Americans to die fighting in what they saw as a patriotic cause.

There is no evidence that any 'undermining propaganda' affected anything any more than what tune was whistled by soldiers on different sides.

What if such evidence does exist and it is only my flawed ideology which does not see it?

Consider Stanley's account of what he believes to be the 'ideology' of a Southern slave-owning family

I will take the ideology of this family to be the beliefs that guide them through their social lives, as well as the concepts they use to structure reality around them. The beliefs that are part of this ideology are beliefs like 

(i) the belief that slaves will cook them dinner

How is this different from the belief of the Northern gentleman that his servants will cook him dinner- or get sacked (though not whipped) if they fail to do so?

Suppose that overnight, the Southern family goes bankrupt. They lose their house and their slaves. Will they really believe that their ex-slaves will be released from their duties by their new owners to come and cook them dinner? No. Of course not, unless they are soft in the head. Thus, this 'ideology' of theirs does not actually stop them processing new information- viz. that they are bankrupt and thus no longer slave-owners- in any manner whatsoever.

(ii) the belief that slaves clean the house 

If this is genuinely a belief, they will never check if the house is dirty. If they find their bed is full of turds, they will not believe they are lying in their own shit because slaves clean the house and the bed is in the house and therefore slaves cleaned the bed. Ergo, one is not lying in one's filth. Rather one is reposing upon an aromatic eiderdown of exotic provenance.

(iii) the belief that the slaves will work in the field and collect cotton that is sold on the market for the family’s gain. 

Which is why there is no need to employ overseers or slave drivers or guards for the barracoon.

These are beliefs that constitute the ideology of this family.They are, as [Sally] Haslanger writes, “representations of social life that serve in some way to undergird social practices.” It is because of the expectation of a dinner without labor that they arrive at the table without first cooking in the kitchen. It is because of the expectation of slaves cleaning the house that they retire to bed without doing any household chores. It is because of the belief that slaves should do fieldwork that they spend the day in the house rather than laboring in the hot sun.These beliefs are the ones that explain their every day behavior. This is what I will provisionally at least take to be their ideology. 

Why take such nonsense to be their ideology? If this family really subscribed to it, then- post Emancipation- they would quickly have starved to death waiting for imaginary slaves to come feed them and bathe them and put them to bed and fill up their Bank Accounts.

Is Stanley genuinely stupid or is this some novel form of virtue signalling that Philosophy Professors at Yale indulge in to show they are actually more 'woke' than the students snoring through their lectures?

Look at the bad faith in this-

On a similar note, Frederick Douglass’s 1892 speech, “The Meaning of Fourth of July for the Negro” calls attention to the way racist ideology masked the paradox of celebrating freedom on the Fourth of July under conditions of widespread enslavement.

Slavery ended in 1865. Stanley knows this but he wants to show he is more epistemically privileged- i.e. ignorant- than his audience. This is because if one of them wakes up and says- 'Yo, Professor dude, there was no widespread enslavement in 1892'- Stanley can say 'wasn't there? What about the plight of women slaving away over the pots and pans. And what about the suffering of innumerable rubber plants forced to get up and leave the comfort of their pots in the middle of the night to be brutally sodomised by plutocrats in their Pullman carriages? Can we really say, even today, that many plants are not being sodomised by the 1 %? Is this the true meaning of being 'woke'?' at which point everybody groans and falls back asleep.

Perhaps Stanley is fighting back against the idiocy of his vocation in the only way he knows how- i.e. by inventing an oxymoronic notion of 'undermining Propaganda' parallel to Gayatri Spivak's 'affirmative sabotage'.

One might wonder, however, given my explanation of why propaganda is effective, whether propaganda is at all important.

It isn't. In the short run, Governments entering a Hot or Cold war devote spare resources to Propaganda. Medium to long term, they see that it is a waste of resources and features unwelcome blowback. So the nuisance is curbed.

If the presence of flawed ideology explains the effectiveness of propaganda, doesn’t the fault lie just in the flawed ideology?

The presence of flawed ideology explains why ineffective propaganda might not immediately be recognised as such. Effective propaganda is one which 'pays its own way'. It may be that even if everybody has a 'flawed ideology' effective propaganda will still exist because it changes opportunity cost ratios.

However 'flawed ideology' too is irrelevant. People may have material incentives for adopting the same position as that recommended by an ideology. Historically, people quickly resile from an ideology if it results in their material incentives changing unfavourably. This is why people who talk about ideology are widely considered to be shitheads. They have no power or influence though a few of them may be pedants in worthless Departments whose special care is of the feeble minded or the victims of affirmative action.

This response neglects the crucially important role propaganda plays in masking flawed ideologies.

Like the crucially important role Veronique the time-travelling cat plays in masking the ubiquity of Space Vampires from the Forty Forth Century.

In each society, there are ideals that are sacred.

Nonsense! Values may be sacred- i.e a deontological code may be enjoined by Soteriology- Ideals, however, are defeasible in an epistemically protocol bound manner.

It is difficult to argue for policies that explicitly violate the sacred ideal.

Nonsense! It is the easiest thing in the world. Expediency is a ready-to-hand excuse. It seldom needs to be articulated- except in some juristic setting where there is an accusation of some other sort of impropriety or bad faith.

A violation of a sacred ideal must therefore often be packaged in the language of that ideal.

Only in a juristic context. But such inquisitions would be the exception not the rule and be connected with some other evidence of turpitude- like unjust enrichment or gross negligence. It is only then that would be required to give an account of the sort Stanley describes.

The flawed ideology is what prevents you from recognizing that the policy proposal being advanced is in fact a violation of the very ideal that it is presented as furthering.

Rubbish! Expediency has no ideological component. It is wholly kairotic or circumstantial. Suppose a KGB agent and an FBI agent have to work together to stop Veronique, the Guatemalan Time Travelling cat, from persuading Kennedy to eat pussy. Initially, the FBI agent may resist using illegal wire-taps saying 'that's un-American' and the KGB agent may object to blacking up to infiltrate the White House catering staff on the grounds that the practice is racially insensitive. However, they soon have to resort to each other's favourite ploys because if Kennedy starts eating pussy and goes on TV and says 'Ich bin ein muschi lecke Berliner!' then women all over the world will rise up and drown their hubbies in vaginal juices. This would seriously affect the fulfillment of the Five Year Plan, or the performance of the Dow Jones index.

One example is policies that restrict certain religious practices in the name of protecting liberal freedoms, such as gay rights.

WTF? Is that a thing? I was under the impression that 'religious practices' were about getting gay with little boys. Surely, that's an 'age of consent' not a 'gay rights' issue?

In the propaganda of climate change, we find oil companies and large agribusiness setting up their own “science” institutes, presenting anti-science policies under the guise of science.

They do this to affect juristic and legislative outcomes. Voters, however, vote according to which side their bread is buttered.

The “Discovery Institute” in the United States defends intelligent design against evolution, under the guise of scientific inquiry.

Why? It is because they want Schools to teach to a certain curriculum and provide jobs for their boys. Thus they have to have a product which looks 'Sciencey' which Legislators and Judges can pretend substitutes for the real thing. This is not Propaganda, it is tactical. The Propaganda part consists in pushing Scripture, as interpreted by a particular coalition, as a panacea. There is no interest in promoting Science as a rival. Tactical or expedient actions have that characteristic.

In each case, the propagandistic guise is important to mask the flawed ideology.

Where is the mask? The thing is an open secret. It is obvious why the thing is being done. It is like criminals using the word 'allegedly' with a nod and a wink.

Undermining propaganda is the central concept of How Propaganda Works, because undermining propaganda is how we conceal from ourselves the immense gaps between liberal democratic ideals and illiberal reality.

Which American is unaware of that 'illiberal reality'? There is no reason for any mask when hypocrisy is utterly brazen and of a 'sorry-not sorry' sort.

On the other hand, there are Professors of Philosophy who 'conceal from themselves' facts about Economics and Political Science and History, so as to write facile shite. Why? It saves them effort and makes them money. By pretending to be terribly indignant at manifest injustice they are giving themselves an alibi for sloppy thinking.

When we think of political propaganda, we think for example (in the United States at least) of the strategy of using certain vocabulary, sometimes called “dog whistles”, e.g. “welfare”, and “inner city”, which in the United States trigger negative racial messages, to signal adherence to problematic yet popular anti-democratic ideologies.

This is not propaganda- it does not seek to increase Faith in a particular Credo. It is merely tactical behaviour such as occurs in coalition building or maintenance. As such, it can be distinguished on the basis of 'cheap talk' as opposed to 'costly signal'. Vilifying George Soros is 'cheap talk', annoying Israel, as the Polish regime has just found, a very 'costly signal' indeed- which is why it has climbed down on its 'Holocaust Law'.

We also think of the propaganda that accompanies social movements, emphasizing the solidarity between citizens otherwise divided by prejudice, as in the Civil Rights Movement.

Catholic 'propagandists' who supported Civil Rights did so on the basis of their Faith. Others, of different Faiths, acted similarly. There was an 'overlapping consensus' amongst people of worthwhile Faiths that, not just Civil Rights, but Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream for all people everywhere, were part and parcel of an ecumenical and irenic Creed to which failure to assent were a species of soteriological hazard.

How do these characteristic examples of propaganda fit into my analysis of undermining propaganda? I argue that these are cases in which the all important liberal democratic ideal of reasonableness is central.

Such an argument could be, and was indeed, made. However, Faith militated to the same conclusion and thus 'reasonableness' was not actually central. There was no great change between 1955 and 1965 in 'reasonableness'. There was a great change in Faith- things like Vatican II and the salience of Dr. King.

In a liberal democracy, we are supposed to consider every citizen’s perspective in arguing for policy.

Sheer nonsense! Democracies aggregate preferences precisely because it is neither feasible nor desirable to 'consider every citizen's perspective' for any policy purpose.

Stanley thinks

 the basis of reasonableness is empathy.

This is quite mad. A child with Williams Syndrome may have much greater empathy than a great Logician who could wipe the floor with us when it comes to 'reasonableness'. Yet, the child is more likely to induce us to do the right thing- e.g. invite a homeless person in from the cold to enjoy our good cheer- as opposed to the great Genius.

Suppose we have good reason to fear that the homeless man might suddenly become lethally aggressive. It is still the case that when engaging with the child, this fearsome thug turns out to be a gentle giant and one of 'Nature's gentlemen'.

Stanley says-

The goal of civic rhetoric is to undermine flawed ideologies that diminish empathy. The goal of demagoguery, by contrast, is to erode empathy.

This is quite false. Rhetoric, civic or otherwise, is a techne. It involves the display of skill whose goal is similar to the display of any other skill- e.g. that of Olympic diving. It seeks to improve itself and does so by open competition. It is not the case that there would be no civic rhetoric is there were no 'flawed ideologies' to undermine.

It is also not the case that 'flawed ideologies' diminish empathy. A child with William's syndrome may have a flawed ideology, when it comes to economics, or a flawed epistemology, when it comes to physics.

Demagoguery, similarly is a trait without a teleology. Hitler was a demagogue. So was La Passionaria. Stalin wasn't a demagogue. Neither was Franco. We feel La Passionaria had more empathy than Franco. So what?

Stanley thinks there is a

species of demagoguery, which exploits reasonableness against itself. For example, discussing economic policy by using words like “welfare” seems like classic reasonable political discourse. But ...such terms can be associated with unreasonable beliefs, such as that Black Americans are lazy

Why would a demagogue use so colourless a word as 'welfare' in order to 'dog-whistle'? His pride in his calling demands something richer, more dramatic, so as to rouse emotions of indignation and horror and bitter pangs of disillusionment and a feeling of betrayal.

Reagan was by no means a demagogue- he was a very polished public speaker who excelled at 'civic rhetoric'
This is what he said about 'welfare-queens'- a term invented by the Chicago Tribune to describe a professional criminal, or indeterminate racial heritage, whose welfare fraud was the least of her crimes.

“In Chicago, they found a woman who holds the record- She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four nonexistent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare. Her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.'

Reagan was correct to say that the Welfare bureaucracy needed reform. African American Economists agreed that 'White Liberals' had damaged the life-chances of working class Black people- Men in particular. Later, Bill Clinton would take an axe to the Welfare system and receive acclaim as 'the first Black President'. 

Still, it may be that Stanley is right. White Americans, like himself, may indeed think of African Americans as being more likely to be on 'welfare'. However, if this is the case, it is likely that it is the Media which is responsible- not street corner demagogues- because we aren't living during the Great Depressions. People have TVs and Smartphones and access to 'shock-jocks' on radio. But, even in the case of shock-jocks, something more invidious than demagoguery is involved. Their model is 'Chairman' Bill Buckley- not some red nosed ranter from the pool hall.

If Stanley does not understand the meaning of 'Propaganda' or of 'Demagoguery', does he at least have a coherent notion of ideology?

We don't know. He won't tell us. But, it appears he believes it is linked to 'epistemic oppression'. Thus he writes-

Kristie Dotson (2014) characterizes epistemic oppression as:

' …persistent epistemic exclusion that hinders one’s contribution to knowledge production. Epistemic exclusion, here, will be understood as an unwarranted infringement on the epistemic agency of knowers. Epistemic agency, in this analysis, refers to the ability to utilize persuasively shared epistemic resources within a given community of knowers in order to participate in knowledge production and, if required, the revision of those same resources.

Okay- so epistemic exclusion is what happens to me when I email Prof. Stanley this blog post, asking him for a rebuttal, and he ignores me coz I don't got no PhD and am clearly as stupid as shit.

The Academy is solely dedicated to epistemic oppression. That's a good thing. An idiot like me should not be allowed to qualify as a Doctor. My ignorant ravings need to be screened out. Nor is it a bad thing if Professors of Philosophy or Sociology or History or Comparative Literature ignore my blog. Why? Because their subjects are inherently worthless- just like my blog. I only write about worthless subjects because I am self-evidently worthless.

It is good that the Academy has some wholly worthless Departments and utterly stupid Professors. This enables young people to see that all pedants fuck up big time as they grow longer in the tooth. All that matters is that one learns habits of thrift, and hard work, as an impecunious student. Also try to find yourself a life-partner. That's what College is for. It doesn't solve the 'stable marriage problem' in an optimal manner. Still, it's a step up from High School because there is a bigger pool for assortative mating.

To some extent, greater access to Higher Education has undermined barriers of race, region, religion and class. It has increased mobility. But so too has migration and structural changes in the economy. Indeed, it is the latter which has driven all else.

'Political Philosophy', however, is driven nothing. There was a time when some regimes pretended to have an Ideology and that their Ideologues (like Michel Aflaq in the Iraq of my childhood) were being listened to. Then, one idiot- Gorbachev- made the mistake of actually listening to Soviet Mathematical Economists and a certain Left-Liberal American historian. He immediately crashed the system that had raised him up, thus allowing it to be replaced by a shambolic kleptocracy.

'How Propaganda Works' situates the topic of epistemic oppression in the long history of democratic political philosophy. I argue that inequality results in characteristic kinds of flawed ideologies, and possession of these flawed ideologies result in various kinds of epistemic oppression.

So inequality causes 'epistemic oppression'- not the other way round- and so it can only be instrumentalized for a diagnostic purpose- that too only if no inequality was visible. In other words, there's no point discussing it.

Mobility reduces some type of inequality for the person initiating the move- people move to places or occupations where they become more equal to those previously ahead of them by some metric- so only mobility matters. In Economic terms, this means increasing the elasticity of supply- which means raising the opportunity cost- for whatever poor people bring to the market- or raising the elasticity of demand for what they require from the market- reduces inequality (at least in terms of comparative statics) and thus reduces 'epistemic oppression'- if that is even a thing.

In practice this means that, as stupid shitheads like me get chivvied into more remunerative occupations, we can pool our savings together to set up an Institute of Socioproctology and award the stupidest amongst ourselves Doctorates and Professorships, so as to have Pundits to sneer at, same as every other bunch of noveau riche shitheads throughout History.

The book situates epistemic oppression in the context of democratic political philosophy in the structure familiar from leading political philosophers of previous eras, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and John Dewey, where philosophy of education was at its center.

Coz there was a rising demand for teachers. However instructors in STEM type subjects soon earned a premium- Robert McNamara had a good grounding in Math as an undergrad in Math and so shone in Accountancy. Thus, at age 27, he became the highest paid and youngest Assistant Prof. at Harvard before leaving for yet greener fields and greyer eminences. By then, Dewey and Du Bois were considered quaint.

However neither was stupid. They would never have written a sentence like this-

A democracy requires a public culture with social conditions that enable democracy.

A cat requires a planet with an ecology that enables cats to exist. Does this sentence actually add to our understanding of cats? It could be said of any animal. We could substitute any politically descriptive term for 'democracy' and the sentence would have the same meaning. 'A genontocracy  requires a public culture with social conditions that enable genotocracy'. ' A 'Veronique-my-neighbor's-Time-Travelling-cat-ocracy' requires exactly the same thing.

 The fact is 'public culture' has a specification which includes the system of government. So does the collocation- 'social conditions'.

Writing of this sort is either lazy or stupid or both stupid and lazy. Why does Stanley indulge in it? It is because he affirms, either for reasons of laziness or stupidity, an

 ideology of a natural distinction between practical and theoretical pursuits.

No such ideology exists. On the contrary, a purely expedient distinction is made between theory and application. Ideology's task is to abolish that distinction. Stanley uses the method of 'epistemological suspicion' to argue otherwise but the passages he quotes don't actually say things like 'Blacks should only learn technical skills'. They say stuff like 'when you are trying to give sufficient technical training, literary education must be subordinated'. The fact is, back then, a guy who said 'Blacks be stooopid. Still, we need technically trained Blacks.' would have been cheered to the rooftops and elected to the Senate.

I place these ideologies in their lengthy historical context in democratic political philosophy, and argue that they are almost invariably democratically problematic.

 Why argue that? Everything is 'democratically problematic'- even deciding what to have for lunch. There is a huge Social Choice literature on this subject.

Stanley, however, thinks he's onto something because-

These ideologies are frequent sources of ignorance about important facets of social and political reality.

In other words, ideology has magical powers. It can cause people who are starving to think they are well fed. If this were true, Regimes would invest heavily in ideology so  as to convince people they are all Von Neumanns and then turn them loose to design better Weapons of Mass Destruction.

There may have been brief historical epochs- e.g. Mao's 'the Great Leap forward'- which display this sort of belief. But those epochs were evanescent. Ideology does not matter- only the fitness landscape does. Magic is as useless as Metaphysics or Moral Philosophy.

Stanley says

 A flawed ideology of a domain is one that prevents the acquisition of important knowledge about that domain.

Important knowledge about 'How Propaganda works' is to be found in mathematical Economics- in particular the Game Theoretic notions of 'cheap talk' and 'correlated equilibrium'- but Stanley is prevented from acquiring that important knowledge about his domain because he is lazy and stupid and prefers uttering meaningless tautologies.

Consider the following sentence-

I explain how the epistemically problematic features of flawed ideologies function ideologically, in preventing the acquisition of knowledge, by implementing various forms of epistemic injustice and oppression.

How is this an explanation? How is it different from my saying- 'I explain how the ludicrous features of Stanley's book function in a ludicrous way thus preventing Stanley's book from being anything but ludicrous. I don't do this by showing Stanley's book is ludicrous, or indeed, by actually reading it. Instead, I point out that ludicrousness implements various forms of ludicrousness during the course of Stanley's ludicrous book.'

A central example in the book... is the flawed ideology of technicism. Technicism restricts reasons to those that can be given in a specific form, those given in the language of technical expertise.

This is sheer nonsense. Techicism has to justify itself by producing visible results. If it fails to pay its way, it is ridiculed. That's why technical expertise of Stanley's sort is only of interest to the amateur humorist looking for cheap laughs.

Stanley says-

Technicism is a flawed ideology, because it seals those subject to it off from important sources of testimony about social and political reality.

This is sheer nonsense. We all employ technicians from time to time. I know nothing about plumbing and have no idea whether the contractor is bullshitting me about the repairs that need doing. Still, the guy is Polish so he must be okay. Also, his bid is under the other guys and he has five stars on Yelp. I can proceed with confidence.

My point is that markets quickly find a way of aggregating complex technical information- e.g. which green technology will prevail- if the thing actually matters.

Ideology does not matter. That is why the market for it has a negative price. People have to be given scholarships to study the thing.

Stanley, not surprisingly, is against the

 ideology of meritocracy. ...in conditions of inequality, a robust ideology will emerge among those who are at the top of the hierarchy that their status is deserved. I use social psychology to help explain why the ideology emerges. I use work in analytic epistemology to explain why the ideology is robust even in the face of clear counter-evidence. Here, I draw on work of my own and others on the “interest-relativity” of knowledge, which entails that having more at stake raises epistemic barriers that suggests the existence of genuine epistemic barriers in policy deliberation for those worst off.

This may be true in the short-run. However, as the recent financial crash resoundingly showed, ideologies aren't actually 'robust' at all. The market decides their fate. However, markets fail or are missing for reasons studied by Economists which elites concerned with maintaining their status need to reckon with. But Economics is a positive science. It may be technical but it either has to pay its way or go back to the Academy with its pony-tail between its legs. Ideology can kindly crawl back into the toy closet along with the bogeyman and the sinister jack-in-the-box clown.

Stanley believes that 'standpoint epistemologists' have long argued something. What is it? Did  it actually help anybody? If not, could they just wind up their long argument and get a proper job?

Such barriers, as standpoint epistemologists have long argued, are countered by the epistemic privilege of oppressed social position. But flawed ideology prevents elites from recognizing epistemic privilege of this kind.

What on earth is this supposed to mean? It conjures up the image of a guy with an Afro from the Seventies wearing an  'It's a Black thing- you wouldn't understand' T-shirt and carrying a boom-box while a pair of bewildered middle aged suburbanites look on.

I'm not old enough to remember the caption this cartoon might have carried in the New Yorker but I did read Tom Wolfe's 'Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers' and so I know the thing was played out by the time I was old enough to vote.

Stanley is a few years younger than me. Still, he has the true Seventies nostalgia-

I conclude by arguing that elites who benefit from inegalitarian social structures suffer more extreme epistemic harm than those oppressed by them.

Sing it brother! What you cats need to do is to roll a joint and eat some soul food and chill out. At least till Cocaine hits the streets. Once that happens, vote Reagan.

Alternatively, Stanley is channeling another Harvard Professor- Timothy Leary who landed up in Tunis to party with the Black Panthers till his licentious behaviour raised eyebrows amongst that censorious crowd.

Still, it is good to know that Stanley worries about the morality of his young students.

Elites have moral interests at stake. These moral interests raise epistemic barriers to elite’s knowledge even more pressing than the ones facing the disadvantaged.

In other words 'you poor little snowflakes- denied the knowledge of what it is like to be a gang-raped refugee! We have a duty of care to guard you against the clear and present danger that people might think you don't have an equal right to act like you have some glaring and manifest injustice to uncover and bring to light! Say 'MeToo' with Malala- or don't, turns out the girl is not a thickie at all but actually very bright and hard working- still, you know what I mean.'

The ideology robs the elite of agency in decision making.

So true! If proper mechanism design results in poor people making the decisions about what best helps them, then the elite are robbed of agency. Soooo unfair! In India, high caste Hindus got around this problem by claiming that poor tribals were 'subalterns' and, for some reason, could not speak for themselves. Thus these guys could hole up in Professorships in Europe and America on the spurious grounds that they were giving 'agency' to poor people who, however, used Democratic politics to rise up. Needless to say, they make sure their kids avail of affirmative action to get into Medical College or an IIT. They don't bother with 'subaltern studies' coz it's shite.                                       

Material inequality poisons the epistemic space required for democratically legitimate policy formation, by a general and pervasive occlusion of social and political reality. Even if one retains knowledge, being treated as if one lacks knowledge is an epistemic harm. Rae Langton defines silencing as “[stopping] speech from counting as an action.”4 What she here means is that although denials are made, they are counted as having been made. She unquestionably takes this to be a kind of epistemic oppression or injustice. Similarly, if one knows, but is treated by dominant groups as not knowing, that is epistemic oppression.

That's actually what happened in fields like Development Studies. Elite wankers claimed to speak for poor people unable to express themselves. The result was that people like Martha Nussbaum scolded the Gujerati voter for re-electing Modi- the man they knew had stopped communal riots- on the spurious grounds that he had instrumentalized them in some occult fashion.

However this sort of 'epistemic oppression' ceases to matter very quickly because the poor rebel against it. The thing proves too costly to enforce. Some stupid shitheads screwed up Iraq but those shitheads got disintermediated. Iraqis could do the job of screwing themselves over more cheaply and lastingly than even the smartest American.

It is true that I have an argument that connects power to knowledge. Knowledge is sufficient for action, and sometimes power prevents action.

This is silly. Knowledge increases the choice menu for actions irrespective of any constraint. Indeed, since the exercise of power is costly, Knowledge provides a safe means to 'bleed dry', or at least affect the cost-benefit calculus, of the dominant party.

But nothing in my overall argument in the book depends on taking this extra step. Though I do not need to be for the purposes of my book, I am unfashionably drawn to the view that dominant ideology must be taken seriously as a potential causal factor on mass opinion.

Nothing wrong with that. It represents Schelling focal 'cheap talk' but, for reasons Game theory can clarify, doesn't matter very much because separating equilibria on the basis of costly signals soon arise. However this makes room for 'cultural market-maker's or 'moral arbitrageurs' who straddle 'discoordination games'. Econ has testable theories for all this. What does Philosophy have? Let us see-

Never very popular, the notion of false consciousness has fallen upon particularly hard times. The doctrine of false consciousness prima facie presupposes something like Rousseau’s General Will. The consciousness is false because it is not true to the real desires of the agents who have it. But who determines the real desires? Or perhaps the consciousness is false because it justifies a picture of the world that does not correspond to reality. But who is the arbiter of reality? These problems and other difficulties for false consciousness theses have been a persisting theme of democratic political philosophy from Benjamin Constant, through Isaiah Berlin, to today.

Which is why 'democratic political philosophy' is as useless as Alchemy or Astrology. It has been overtaken by mathematical economics- not, admittedly, in the same way that Chemistry has wholly displaced Alchemy but in the way Astronomy has displaced Astrology. What I mean is, there is still an Astrological column, next to the cartoons, just as there is still a University Department where silly people like Stanley pontificate. But, the thing is just 'feel good' and 'phatic'. It doesn't really mean anything.

In addition to problems of misuse, there are also worries about its faithfulness to reality and objectification of oppressed groups. Michael Rosen (1996, pp. 181-3) ridicules “the interests model” of ideological false consciousness, that treats “those who live under the domination of the ruling class as passive victims, taking their lives from those who control ‘the means of production’ like obedient chicks, with no critical reflection on their part are true or in their own rational interests.” James C. Scott argues that it is quite evident that the dominated class is not imaginatively restricted about alternative and better world possibilities, they are not deprived of epistemic resources in the way that dominant ideology theory predicts. There are also many distinct reasons to worry about coherence. For example, Serene Khader has brought out powerfully certain incoherence worries about the false consciousness thesis of adaptive preferences. Does this mean we cannot make sense of the thought that an oppressed group accepts an ideology that runs counter to their interests? The case of the ideology of meritocracy is a promising example of dominant ideology theory at work. Surely there are some people who grew up in structural conditions that disadvantaged them in a way that clearly is inconsistent with a meritocratic society, who nevertheless believe that society is meritocratic.

This describes a Newcombe problem. Once again, game theory has boldly gone where people who gas on about Hegel or Adorno have no means to follow.

  even the harshest critics of false consciousness admit that “public action will provide a constant stream of evidence that appears to support an interpretation of ideological hegemony.”

Anything can appear to support anything else which is essentially nonsensical. If a cat says miaow, that supports an interpretation of ideological hegemony because it is only in hegemonic discourse that cats say miaow rather than things like 'Old Long Johnson'. Furthermore, as Prof. Vagina Dentata Choothopadhyaya's magisterial deconstruction of Saki's 'Tobermory' irrefutably shows, cats threaten the elite when they are interpreted as saying anything other than miaow.

Stanley is typically American in his historical illiteracy and ignorance of the nuances of European culture.

He writes-

 As Walter Lippmann and especially Carl Schmitt noted, elites manipulate mass opinion during war time.

This is nonsense. Lippmann could see that plenty of smart people from good families were idealistic New Dealers. Schmitt, on the other hand, saw that beer-hall brawlers could be used against liberal elites. Hitler's crew weren't drawn from the elite- they were scum.

During war time, all sorts of disreputable, declasse, people wangle themselves cushy jobs in the Ministry of Information or other such agencies. Decent people of good stock go to the front. Smart people do Weapons Research or SigInt. Third rate journos and superannuated catamites end up in Propaganda.  Even if a poltroon of an aristocrat decides a P.R gig is safer for the duration of hostilities, he will still be careful to do the job in the uniform of a crack regiment.

Roosevelt's America, of course, was different from Hitler's Germany or Churchill's England, in that Cinema and Radio and Advertising were regarded as hi-tech industries able to attract the smartest young people. Even American journalism was in a different class- precisely because of its far greater technical knowledge base and Schumpeterian 'creative destruction'.

It is true that America briefly toyed with a 'Manhattan Project for the Social Sciences' but the thing misfired. Nobody eligible for membership in any sort of elite- other than that of a Prison Gang- wants to 'manipulate mass opinion' even in some seedy Latin American country. Instead, smart people want to get ahead on the basis of alethic research- though, of course, they stop doing anything of that sort after they have got tenure.

There was a 'Mass Observation' project in the U.K. It failed to find anything of interest whatsoever and disappeared at about the time that Reithian constraints on broadcasting were relaxed and people with peculiar accents started popping up on the goggle box.

Moments of mass extermination, of the sort that occurred under Hitler and Stalin, certainly also call for reflection on mass opinion formation.

No they don't. Mass opinion was irrelevant. The whims of tyrants were all that mattered. If mass extermination made the tyrant feel safer, he went for it. In the case of Stalin and Mao the thing worked. Not so for Hitler- but then the fool declared war on America.

And the present moment in Europe and the west, where far right nationalist politicians are garnering ever more support, may turn out to be another (occasion when we need to think about mass opinion).

Again, this is nonsense. Merkel found out the hard way that 'mass opinion' did not exist. So did David Cameron and Hilary Clinton. Politics is hard work and it involves a lot of knocking on doors and listening to deplorable people and nodding your head and appearing chastened. If you don't do that hard work, the rug will be pulled from under your feet.

John Dewey thought it was so important for citizens to reflect on the problem of the crafting of mass opinion by elites that his influence on the social studies curriculum in the United States was a final 12th grade year on the subject. The standard textbook for 12th grade social studies became Harold Rugg’s An Introduction to Problems of American Culture, a book that calls upon students to reflect upon the reality of elite formation of mass opinion.

Rugg's book, which came out in 1931, stresses the home environment, childhood deprivations or slights, 'Tardean' mimetic processes and so forth. It doesn't 'reflect upon the reality of elite formation of mass opinion' because the thing did not exist. Some Jews in Hollywood and people like Randolph Hearst and Henry Ford did shape mass opinion- but they weren't really 'elite', either by reason of birth, or habitus, or in Hearst's case a too vulgar display of political ambition. Recall, Hearst was still a champion of FDR when Rugg's book came out.

Why does Stanley say Rugg's book does something it could not have done? Does he really think Prohibition was enacted because the elite wanted to dry out? Perhaps. A simpler explanation is that he hasn't read Rugg but picked up this nugget at second hand from some tendentious tosh.

I suppose this represents 'division of labour' within his specialty. Which permits us this segue into Stanley's bizzare theory of

 the ideology that underlies the division of labor, the separation of humans into those who labor and those who lead.

Econ 101 starts with the theory of comparative advantage which explains why gains from trade and specialisation (division of labour) arise. A little later, in the theory of oligopoly, a theory of leadership is given. It turns out that a 'leader' solves a coordination problem and we can work out who the leader should be on the basis of properly adjusted opportunity cost ratios. This explains why a 'price-leader' may be small and apparently insignificant. Oligopoly theory gets very complicated very quickly. Still, the notion of leadership is purely economic- i.e. based on comparing opportunity cost ratios. It is not biological or otherwise meta-economic in any way.

Stanley takes a different view-

The ideology I consider is the view that there is a distinction of natural capacities that underlies the division of tasks and occupations into the practical and the theoretical.

I suppose, there is some test we could administer to young Math whizzes on the basis of which we might ask them to specialise in Applied or Pure Physics or Econ or what have you. However, that is true only of STEM, or useful, subjects.

We could give prizes for 'Pure' Literary Fiction or Poetry or Architecture or Music but after a while we would find we were rewarding shite. The thing would be adversely selective and provoke widespread ridicule.

We don't make fun of Pure Mathematicians anymore coz we know them guys could make billions- or rather that their work could make other people into billionaires and, what's more to the point, improve our smart phones.

There is a division between manual labor, craft, and theoretical reflection, but as Antonio Gramsci urges in the case of the concept of an intellectual, it is only social and political in nature. There is no distinction of natural capacities that underlie dividing tasks into menial, practical, and theoretical. This ideology is an attempt to give a naturalistic justification of the assignment of large groups of people to menial labor, or vocational education, while keeping liberal education just for an elite few.

An elite few? People like Stanley? But he is a half wit! He didn't start off that way. It is precisely his liberal education, and the education he liberally dishes out, which has turned him into a moron.

Once again Economic theory explains why a credentialised paideia which makes you stupid can nevertheless command a premium in the market place. It solves an 'information asymmetry problem' and serves as a 'screening' or 'signalling' device. Thus when an employer sees a guy has a first class degree from a prestigious University, he knows this fellow has a high tolerance for boring and stupid paper work because he has done nothing else. Moreover, he has already learned advanced skills in sycophancy and apple polishing. Furthermore, bitterly resentful of his wasted adolescence, he will keep his nose to the grindstone and aim to make partner. He will also lie and cheat and virtue signal so shamelessly that even the Tax Inspector, or Federal Prosecutor, will give up in disgust.

Drawing on arguments I have developed in books and papers about the nature of knowledge how and skill, I argue that there is a no naturalistic basis for a division between even manual labor and intellectual reflection.

This is a foolish argument. There may be a naturalistic division- i.e. a biological or neurological reason- why a guy who isn't very good at engineering may be very good as a Pure Mathematician or vice versa. However, this division is likely to be highly idiographic.

There certainly is a 'naturalistic basis' for a division of labour such that Steven Hawking does Physics while I move his furniture. In Economics this is called 'absolute advantage'. However it tends to erode as markets become 'open' and so, at the end of the day, only comparative opportunity cost ratios matter.

Rather than justifying the ideology, the work in philosophy and cognitive neuroscience rather reflects it.

That's a good thing, surely? Naturalistic bases for division of labour do indeed exist. When we are young we can do a lot of manual work- and feel the better for it. When we are very old, we may still have great domain specific knowledge and offer superior judgments of an abstract sort.

I link the work I have done on knowing how and skill to Gramsci’s notion of “organic intellectuals”, arguing that it vindicates Gramsci’s view that intelligent decision making and knowledge are present even in the most menial industrial tasks.

This is not merely to misunderstand Gramsci, it is to fail to understand the single most important lesson European history has to teach- viz. Marxism is utterly shite. Gramsci's work was worthless. True, had he been given the chance of actually running something useful, he would quickly have discarded any and every type of theoretical stupidity. He'd have given Abba Lerner, proselytising for marginal cost pricing, a more attentive hearing than Trotsky. What's more, he'd have told Sraffa something useful about how the thing works in practice. Sraffa need not have ended up being even more worthless than Wittgenstein.

My point is that if you put a smarter labourer in charge of a factory, or whatever, he might do better than a guy with an MBA provided that's what he really wants to do. Consider Greece in 2015. Suppose they had appointed some horny handed Zorba type as Minister of Finance instead of the shithead Varoufakis. What would Zorba do at his first Eurozone meeting? Okay, his first speech might have been Varoufakis level stoopid. But, he'd take note of the glassy look overcasting his interlocutors' eyes and apologise and say humbly 'you guys are smart. Please help me understand'. For their own reasons, the Eurozone ministers would help him. The Italian would say 'look our man Draghi just won a case in the European Court which allowed him to do Q.E. You need to say 'price stability is multiply realisable. There is actually a 'Full Employment Surplus' of a deflationary sort which could be stagflationary. Thus there can be fiscal expansion, alongside Quantitative Easing, and, what's more, if some ordoliberal Germans takes this to the European Court, they will lose.'

It might take Zorba awhile to get his tongue around all this goobledygook. But, the ideas behind it are simple and actually best explained over a bottle of Cretan Raki. Only a cretin of Varoufakis type proportions could mess the thing up. Zorba, by contrast, using his carpentry skills, could put together a neat little contraption which would serve as a concrete model of the macro-economy. We can imagine him going on to dance the Sirtaki with Schaubel (miraculously cured by St. Angela) before proceeding to Shirley Valentine Theresa May thus putting an end to Brexit. I'm not sure how he would deal with The Donald, but imagine that randy goats, rather than Golden Showers, would be a prominent feature in the denouement.

Returning to Stanley, who is sore need of a Zorba type buddy, we find him ruminating thus-

If the account of knowledge how I defend is right, even the most menial manual practices, such as factory work, exemplifies agency, free intelligent choice.

Only on the basis of opportunity cost. That's all that matters. Myerson is a Nobel Prize winning mathematical economist. Graciella Chichilnisky would be one too, if only she had a penis. Myerson shows that making optimal decisions involves just knowing the opportunity cost- i.e. the next best price- nothing else. Chichilnisky shows that 'local arbitrage' is sufficient provided preference diversity meets a Goldilocks condition- otherwise the thing isn't worth talking about.

In other words, the best 'Pure' Economists say the best Economising can be done by anybody- provided that's what they really want to do. On the other hand no actual Economising will occur, if like Varoufakis, what they really want to do is to stand up at the Eurozone meeting and shit their pants and then dig their hands deep into their boxers and produce handfuls of shit while saying 'Look everybody! I've got chocolate cake in my pants! Come on guys! Have some nice chocolate cake!'

Varoufakis complained bitterly about being excluded from the Eurozone dinner. But if Zorba had been sent instead, no such exclusion would have occurred. 'Epistemic exclusion' does not matter. What matters is not shitting into your hands and then claiming the thing is chocolate cake.

Of course, it could be said that what Varoufakis was doing was more 'far-reaching' then what any 'epistemically oppressed' Zorba could have done.

In that sense, perhaps there is something to Stanley's concluding remarks I excerpt here from the Precis of his book-

The consequences of this are far-reaching. It is not that some people in society are gifted in theoretical reflection, others in craft, while the remainder must be consigned to ditch digging and menial industrial work. Each skill is a combination of elements that are operative in other domains as well.

It is not the case that work skills are currently 'factorizable' in the above manner- which is why automation can only proceed so far.

If Stephen's is right, then, at some point in the future, everything could be done by machines. But, in that case, those machines could find a way to modify the human digestive track so that chocolate cake would indeed be excreted from some unfortunate anus.

These conclusions undermine the sorting of humans into labor pools, as well as its putative educational basis, the distinction between industrial or vocational education, on the one hand, and liberal education, on the other.

What undermines the sorting of human beings is that it is costly to do. If this were not the case, perfect price and service provision discrimination would be possible. There would be no trade off between incentive compatibility and allocative efficiency.

A tyrant may 'sort' people- but they won't stay 'sorted'. At some point the cost of maintaining barriers exceeds the monopoly profit extracted thereby. That's why these things break down.

In the first twenty years of the 20th century in the United States, there was another kind of systematic attempt to give a scientific basis to the division of labor. It was called the “social efficiency” movement.

This was one facet of a wider Efficiency Movement of a Paretian type which pondered 'residues and derivatives' and the supposed laws governing 'the circulation of elites'. Why did it disappear? Economists know the reason. Asymmetry of information is pervasive. Moral Hazard bedevils incomplete contracts. Mechanism Design has restricted scope because Knightian Uncertainty is a necessary driver of a highly utile 'turbulent flow' without which certain types of healthy arbitrage would disappear.

Okay, this sounds like Stanley type waffle. But, for any given market, this type of thinking can find a way to 'pay for itself'. By contrast, the following is sheer Varoufakis type chocolate cake-

On the face of it, the movement was a search for a social scientific basis to the separation of students into those who would receive vocational education, from those who would receive a liberal education. Advocates of social efficiency used quantitative research to justify grouping individuals into life outcomes from an early stage. I argue that the social efficiency movement was in fact quite explicitly grounded on a desire to impose social control. Rather than serving as an independent scientific basis for sorting society into hierarchical levels, it was explicitly an attempt to justify hierarchical divisions of worth between citizens, with a pseudo-scientific overlay in place for propaganda purposes.

What is the point to this argument? Even if it were true, the thing has been dead for longer than I've been alive. One may as well do an extensive study of Nazi pedagogy and come to the conclusion that it was anti-semitic.

This is not to say that the work of a Vygotsky or a Piaget or their successors was not successfully instrumentalized first by Governments during the Cold War to produce 'rocket scientists' and now by maverick Knowledge Industry plutocrats like Peter Thiel.

Chapter 7, like the chapters before it, is structured by the analysis of numerous important examples of undermining propaganda. One example is the debate during the formation of the United States public school curriculum in the early part of the 20th century about whether to teach History or Social Studies in public schools. This debate is sometimes called in the literature, “The Social Studies Wars” (also the title of a book on the topic). Should one teach history, with all its particularities? Or should one instead devote that time to constructing a narrative that departs from history, but has a useful societal function? It was decided to teach Social Studies instead of history, featuring a uniform narrative of American identity that would be useful in, for example, assimilating new waves of immigrants. John Dewey argued for the need for a class in civic education, to engage students in what he regarded as the fundamental task of a democratic citizen, the mutual construction of a shared civic identity. Thinking social studies would be this class, Dewey weighed in on the side of social studies. But Dewey did not recognize that what he regarded as a bottom up exercise in the construction of an American identity, the social studies curriculum, was largely instead a top down effort to impose such an identity on students for the purposes of social control.

If a bunch of guys set a national curriculum which gets taught in every Public School then there can be nothing 'bottom up' about the procedure. It is 'top down'.
Not having a national curriculum and letting every School Board set its own curriculum on the basis of what kids and their parents want taught would be 'bottom up'.
Suppose America had never had a Civil War. In that case, as happens in England or India, History would outrank 'Social Studies' or 'Civics'. Sociology, of course, shat the bed long ago and became a joke subject. Still, the French still insist on Philosophy at High School. No wonder they are so fucked.

We see, in the history of the United States public school system, a paradigm example of the propagandistic misuse of the ideals of positive freedom.

Yup! That's so true! When we think of American public schools that's what first springs to mind. I still fondly recall the TV series 'Buffy the Slayer of Propagandistic misusers of the ideals of positive freedom'.

I suppose Stanley watched the Breakfast Club which is like totally bogus coz it don't feature Vampires at all. There isn't even a school shooting! Instead we get a voice over saying this-
 Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. What we did was wrong. But we think you're crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. What do you care? You see us as you want to see us - in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That's the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed.

I suppose the nerd saying this in '85 might have grown up to be a Professor of Stanley's type. But only if he didn't subsequently watch Buffy or Veronica Mars. But why wouldn't he? It's coz the propagandistic misusers of the ideals of positive freedom did a number on him. That's coz the Faculty are Pod People. Get a Netflix account, Stanley you great big nerd! Learn something about real life as lived by the 99%!

In the discussion of the basis for the 20th century US public school system, we also see the characteristic kind of undermining propaganda that occurs with social science research, what Alasdair MacIntyre has called “manipulative expertise”.

You should hear what Manipulative Expertise says about Alasdair MacIntyre. On the other hand, the fellow is a self-confessed size Queen & I understand MacIntyre is happily married. Still, my point is 'undermining propaganda' works both ways.  Unlike MacIntyre. Last thing I need is some elderly Glaswegian thug tracking down my IP address and turning up on my doorstep to kick my head in.

The ideals of science were employed propagandistically to justify pre-existing unjust hierarchies.

But they couldn't pay their way and thus were abandoned.

For example, advocates of social efficiency argued that liberal education was wasted on women, as the statistics showed most women who acquired a higher education nevertheless did not enter the workforce.

Come on Stanley! You can't have failed to notice that a lot of the people you work with don't have Adam's apples and have rather high pitched voices and smooth skins and like jiggly bits under their sweaters- shit, I've just described myself. My double chin obscured my Adam's apple long ago and my skin is smooth- what can I say? Black don't crack!- and my voice, as I get older, is increasingly high pitched. As for my man-boobs- Ma'am, I've asked you very politely to stop trying to motor boat them! I'm sorry if your Royal Consort is flat chested. Take it up with Theresa May. She must be good for something.

But that is no justification at all for the frighteningly patriarchal society of the time, where female educational achievements did not afford them anywhere near the same opportunities as similar achievements by men.

Stanley ends on this note. Why? He is a man and feels he has to show empathy for the oppressed sex because of 'epistemic injustice' or 'privilege; or something of that sort.

However, his conclusion undermines his entire enterprise. Patriarchal Societies, even more frightening than any to be found in mid century America or Europe, have flourished and continue to flourish without using any type of Propaganda at all. That is why it is pointless to write a book about How Propaganda works when, the evidence is, doesn't work at all. The thing is a waste of resources.

Or is it? What if Amia Srinivasan- a devious Iyengar- has invented Jason Stanley simply so as to fool this elderly Iyer who dared email her some mild criticism of her work?

OMG! I see it all now! All these so called famous Professors- like that Immanuel Kant I keep writing to, ever since I heard he gave Pralajja Menon an introduction to all Future Metaphysics, asking for a similar favour- were invented by smarty-pants Iyengars in order to fool simple Iyers.

Talk of 'epistemic oppression'!