Mike Schreiner Talks About Journalism

This installment of my conversation with our local MPP, Mike Schreiner, deals with the current crisis that is happening in journalism. All politicians have a symbiotic relationship with the media. News sources get their messages out, so if we are going to have a vibrant democracy we also have to have competitive journalism in order to have an informed citizenry. With a lot of traditional institutions shedding reporters and even going under, it's important to try to understand what is happening and how the problem can be solved. As usual, it's clear that Schreiner has put some thought into things.

Mike strikes a concerned pose for radio listeners.
From the GPO website. 

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Hulet: Do you have any ideas about the destruction of journalism? It's sometimes being replaced by out-and-out propaganda. I don't know if you saw the leaked memo from the Toronto Sun---. 

Schreiner: I did. What surprised me was that they would allow me to write some Op Eds because I'd been highly critical of the Ford government. 

Hulet: It's kinda frightening because Paul Godfrey controls something like 40 websites and newspapers in Ontario---just in Ontario with more in the rest of the country.

Schreiner: And there was that deal where Torstar and Post Media consolidated their local papers. 

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The event that Schreiner is referring was announced in the fall of 2017. Post Media (the company that owns the Toronto Sun and many other things besides) and Torstar (the company that owns the Toronto Star and many other news outlets) decided to divide up a lot of local markets in order to cut competition and increase revenue. They did this in November of 2017 by swapping back and forth 37 community newspapers and four free commuter papers in order to stop duplication of efforts (ie: competition) in specific communities. Once this "consolidation" had taken place, they then started shutting down the "extra" news outlets and laying off journalists. According to this National Observer story, Post Media shut down 21 businesses across the country, whereas Tor Star shut down the Barrie Examiner, Orillia Packet & Times and Northumberland Today---among others.

Of course, like any other issue, it's not quite so cut and dried as saying that all these newspapers are now "dead". As people in Guelph know, after the paper edition of a daily dies, there is often left behind a "ghost paper" on the Internet, such as TheMercuryTribune.com . Similarly, there is also the NorthumberlandNews.com, and, Simcoe.com. The important thing to remember, however, is that these website news sources are only a shadow of their former paper editions---which were often a ghost of what they had been before various waves of media consolidation and competition from emerging technologies. Every step of these transformations results in fewer journalists writing shorter stories about fewer events. News has been suffering a "death by a thousand cuts" for over 20 years and readers sometimes don't even notice when a paper finally goes under because of the "frog in the pot" syndrome.

According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, the number of daily newspapers peaked in 1911 at 143. Since then, there has been a steady erosion because of media consolidation and competition with other forms of media---first radio and "newsreels" at the cinema, then tv, and, later the Internet. Now it's a matter of different "legacy companies" fighting over the crumbs left by competition from the Internet.

Just to give the reader a context, consider the following graphic created by the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project (CMCRP).  (Click on the image to get a bigger version---good luck with a cell phone!)

This is a graphic representation of 2017 revenues for all the different elements
of the Canadian media market place. C/o the CMCRP website.
Image used under the Fair Use Copyright Provision.   

For those of you who have a hard time understanding this graphic, here are a few key points. First, Post Media controls 30% of the print media (including both newspapers and magazines), Tor Star 27%, the Globe and Mail 7%, Power Corp 6%, and, Groupe Capitale Media 5%. (These companies are only listed as being in the print media business---even though I have an on-line subscription to the Toronto Star. I can only speculate that the academics who prepared this chart have decided to list them as only being in the print media business because they have either hived-off their on-line businesses to another party, the on-line aspect is considered a "by-product" of their print business, the revenues from their on-line business are insignificant, or, some combination of all three. Moreover, this graphic is only current up to 2017---and the industry is changing very fast right now.)

Oddly enough, two companies with a big footprint in electronic media also hold significant amounts of print media: Quebecor with 7%, and, Rogers with 8%. (Presumably, the rest is in dribs and drabs too small to show up on the graph.)

The other thing to understand is the larger picture. Even the largest players---Post Media and Torstar---each only control less than 1% of the entire media market. Added together, the companies that are listed as being significant players only in the print media---75% of the entire print market---only add up to being 2.3% of the entire media market in Canada.

Interestingly enough, if you look at the Internet giants who get the most news coverage, their control of the market is much less than what you might think: Google 4.3%, Facebook 2.0%, and, Twitter 0.1%. This is surprising because the academics are looking at the total market share, not just advertising---which is more in tune with people's expectation: Google 50%, Facebook 23.3%, and, Twitter 1.4%. The key point to understand, however, is that traditionally media revenue has come from two sources: advertising and subscription. The narrative most news stories emphasize is how Google has taken away print news's advertising base. But the real story---as explained by this graph---is the way the Internet has eaten-up the subscription base.

People haven't stopped reading new stories. In fact, I would suggest that many people read more than they did when all they could do was subscribe to a newspaper. What they don't do now, though, is just read one particular news source. Instead, they pick and choose what they read through a myriad of different sources. The social media companies---like Google, FaceBook, Digg, etc---exist to help people find the specific stories on the different websites, YouTube and Podcast channels, etc, that they might want to read, see, or, listen to. They also connect advertisers with readers who will specifically interested in their products. (More about that later.)

Newspapers were the original "Internet". They were an "ISP" that supported "blogs" that we called "columns" (I know, I used to write a weekly column in a daily newspaper before I went into blogging). They also had "news aggregators" called "editors" who got to decide what stories to include in the daily "feed". There were also "entertainment channels" that published things like silly cat memes (cartoons) and serious "Netflix"-style entertainment (writers like Dickens first published their novels through serialization in newspapers.) They also had a version of "Kijiji" (classified ads) and "FaceBook" in the old birth notices, graduation announcements, "What's On" features, and, obituaries.

Yes, this is the original "silly cat meme". A panel from "Krazy Kat", a syndicated
comic strip which ran from 1913 to 1944. Image has to be public domain after all these years!

They were also the entire "community wide web" because they had "server farms" consisting of printers, and, "networks" consisting of people trucking bundles of papers to drop off points where children delivered individual newspapers to people's homes. This entire network was very expensive to operate but was paid for by both subscriptions and advertising. (There were also government subsidies---more about that later.)

The big players in the media landscape nowadays are the people who "print the paper", "truck it" to the drop off points, and, who "deliver it to your doorstep"---not the guys who write the stories (eg: Adam Donaldson and me) or even sell the advertising (eg: Google). The top five are Quebecor at 4.7%, Shaw 7.3%, Rogers 16.5%, Telus 16.5%, and, BCE (formerly "Bell Canada Enterprises") 27.5%---for a total of 72.5%. It's important to understand that the people who "ate the newspaper's lunch" weren't Google---it was the cable and phone companies. They were able to split apart the different functions of a traditional newspaper---content creation, editing, advertising, production, and, distribution---into different business models and a wide variety of companies took them over. Unfortunately, what's happened is that the foundation that everything else rests upon---content creation---is the only part of the structure that has no secure funding model. 

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That brings us to the blue type. Ahem. Yes, someone should pay the creators for what they do. That's because it's hard work researching and writing these stories. And they must be of some value, or you wouldn't be reading them, no? Anyway, if you can afford, why not sign up for a subscription on Patreon or Paypal? 

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Schreiner: What's the solution? Man, that's going to be tough.  

I don't think the industry led bail out the federal government is proposing is the solution because essentially they are just saying "we will give the mainstream, big media a little money". Should the Globe and Mail, Tor Star, and, Post Media get money and little people like yourself or Adam Donaldson not get any money? 

Because you're not big enough? 

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What Schreiner is referring to here comes from page 173 of the Liberal's 2019 budget document Investing in the Middle Class. Basically, it allows a specific type of business called a "Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization" (QCJO) access to:

• A new refundable tax credit for journalism organizations.
• A new non-refundable tax credit for subscriptions to Canadian digital news 
• Access to charitable tax incentives for not-for-profit journalism.

First question, "What's a Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization?"

For the purposes of Schreiner's comment, it has to be big. It must be a corporation, trust, or, partnership. It must have two or more full time journalists working for it besides the owners. It most assuredly cannot be a local news blog that consists of one person reporting on City Council or interviewing local politicians.

Having frozen out all the "little guys" spawned by the current destruction of local newspapers, the legislation then goes on to describe what money is available to the bigger media organizations.

The labour tax credit that the qualifying corporations get under the proposed legislation is significant. It comes to 25% of a "qualifying employee" (read "newsroom staff"), with a maximum yearly income of $55,000---or a maximum of $13,750/employee/year. Since news collection is a very labour-intensive enterprise, this is a tremendous break for the legacy media. (I suspect that this will be the lion's share of the $8 to $10 million per year that Post Media expects to make off this legislation.)

The subscription write off would allow someone to claim their payments to a digital news source that qualifies as being a "Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization". So if I qualified (which I don't), and you paid me $5/month for a year, that would come $60. You would multiply that by the lowest tax rate (currently 15%), which would come to $9 of tax you wouldn't have to pay. This write off has a maximum of $500 paid in subscriptions per year. The hope is that this will encourage more people to start paying for their on-line news. (I doubt that it will do any more good than any other "boutique tax break". How many people gave up their cars because of the ability to write off what they spent on public transit?)

As for the ability of media organizations' ability to apply for charitable status, that requires the organization again to be a "Qualified Canadian Journalism Organization"---which again freezes out the little guy. In addition, in order to get any money, the organization has to be a trust or non-profit corporation, have a board of directors, and a variety of other rules that probably make sense for a large institution---but would be impossible for a small, locally-focused news start-up to comply with.

As you can see, the Liberal government's program is specifically designed to prop-up the large players in the news media and does nothing at all to help new start-ups get off the ground. This is hardly surprising as the whole policy was created as a result of a series of closed-door meetings between the Liberals and representatives of the legacy media. (This has been documented by Jesse Brown at Canadaland---jump to about 13 minutes into the show.)

More importantly, it is geared towards provincial and federal news organizations instead of local news. That's a problem because the biggest issue in the current decline of journalism is specifically with regard to local news. We still have large newspapers like the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, but things like the Mercury have disappeared or faded into irrelevancy. And the only replacement we are seeing are the little "labour of love" projects---like the Guelph-Back-Grounder and Guelph Politico. But that's how all small market news sources ever started. Back in the day, some lunatic would decide that a village needed a newspaper and they'd buy a second-hand press. They'd write the stories, print the paper, sell advertising, and, drop off the bundles of papers at various businesses. Much of their readership never paid for a copy of the paper (they read them in a coffee shop or shared among friends) so publishers often had to subsidize their efforts with a "day job".  (I have a pension and Adam Donaldson works in retail.) Grinding out a news blog when confronted by a news desert is exactly the same thing.

Governments have always understood how thankless a vocation journalism can be, no matter how important it is to a functioning democracy. That's why they have almost always subsidized it. The primary way that it did so during the 19th century was with subsidized postal rates. As Stephen Smith writes in The Conversation,

Newspaper owners in that era had another big advantage over their counterparts of today: They could ship their papers across the U.S. at deeply discounted rates. It cost one cent to send a newspaper 100 miles; it cost 24 cents to send a letter or package — with the same weight as the newspaper — only 30 miles.

Upper Canada also had a large postal service. By 1841, there was a post office for every 1,800 inhabitants. The colony’s postal service also had a preferential rate for newspapers that was about eight to nine times lower than for a letter. On top of that, “editors could also send a copy free of charge to their colleagues.” 

These highly subsidized arrangements also applied to international newspapers. Starting in 1834, a British newspaper arriving by ship in Halifax would be shipped to its destination anywhere in Canada free of charge. 

Think about what this level of support would mean today: Unlimited free bandwidth? Free domain names? Free servers and routers? A newspaper shipping and delivering its paper across Canada for pennies on the dollar?

The difference between today's government support and that of the past is that subsidized postal rates benefited everyone---even the little guy struggling to build a readership. In contrast, a labour tax credit designed to only benefit large corporations has nothing at all for the local indie media.

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So I don't think a government bailout is the solution either. So what's it going to take? 

One is enforcing our combines laws---which is something our country has forgotten to do unless it involves some Chinese take-over of the potash industry. 

We've actually forgotten that we have tools to use that say "no, you can't consolidate a community.

Q: Or carve up a market.

Schreiner: That's technically against the law---but the law needs to be enforced. Using our combines law and things like that to say "no" to the media consolidation would preserve competition. 

The problem is that solution was a solution 15 years ago and now it's too late. There's been so much consolidation, eh? I think continuing to support public broadcasters like the CBC is critically important but then again you have questions about that all the time: "Is government funded journalism truly unbiased journalism?" 

Those are really tough questions. But I think one of them biggest ones is saying "no" to the consolidation of media and carving up markets and making monopolies and oligopolies. That shouldn't be allowed under federal law.  

Two. I think that if there's going to be any industry bail out or support of journalism I'd like it to go to the new start up entitites that are popping up. I look at what Canadaland is doing, I like what you're doing, Guelph Politico. These sorts of models are being replicated in communities across the country. Supports should be for the new start-ups---no propping up the old media giants.  

Hulet: Well certainly Canadaland has done some amazing work---their series on Thunder Bay for example.

Schreiner: Yes. That's fantastic. It's great journalism. We don't have that kind of journalism. The APTN (Aboriginal People's Television Network), the Tyee, the National Observer have all done great work. There's a lot of start-up journalism that's doing really good work.  

Maybe that's where the combines law would make a difference, though. Torstar's purchase of Ipolitics, for example. Is that something that should have set off some alarm bells around the anti-trust legislation? I don't know, but it could be a question that should be asked. 

Hulet: Your support for public broadcasting would extend to TVO?

Schreiner: Absolutely! And for CFRU. Right now I think we should be supporting CBC, TVO, and, community and campus radio and journalism.

Hulet: Last night I was listening to the CBC and when they put up the credits they had a "shout out" to CFRU and Adam Donaldson who'd helped them with the program.

Schreiner: Oh. Good for Adam Donaldson.

Hulet: So these local stations serve a useful function across the country?

Schreiner: Absolutely. If I think we need a bailout, that's where I think it should go.  

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While it's true that there should be some government effort to prevent media consolidation, I don't think enforcing anti-combine laws comes anywhere close to dealing with the whole problem. (Hence Schreiner's "Man, that's going to be tough" statement, and, his saying that anti-trust laws are "one" of the solutions.) As is evident from the graph provided by the Canadian Media Concentration Research Project, there is a greater problem than that of Torstar and Post Media vacuuming up small town newspapers. That's the way media has concentrated into both hardware (like Bell Canada Enterprises) and software (like Google) companies. One of the problems with anti-trust legislation (what Schreiner calls "combine laws"---I think that that's an "Americanism") is that there are some types of technology that create "natural monopolies".

It wouldn't make any sense at all for a new phone or cable company to go around and add another set of wires to the ones that already link houses to the Internet. That means that Bell and Rogers simply have a monopoly that's not going away. Similarly, Google has by far the largest amount of users for it's search engine, which means that unless they do something very stupid, their artificial intelligence will simply always be better than any other companies. (Sorry Bing and Duck Duck Go.)

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gets around the natural monopoly with regards to Internet Service Providers by forcing Rogers and Bell to sell bandwidth to other companies like Tek Savvy. (If you look up "ISPs in Guelph" you get a listing for an astounding 56 different options. The CRTC seems to be doing its job.) It is possible that the government could step in and regulate software utilities---like Google---but that might prove very difficult because as a transnational it can pretty much exist anywhere it wants if it wants to avoid national regulation. The wires and server farms that Bell and Rogers controls tie them to Canada in a way that the algorithms of Google's search engines do not. Hopefully the recent meetings of parliamentarians from all over the world in pursuit of information about the baleful influence of social media on elections (ie: FaceBook and Cambridge Analytic's influence on the US Presidential election and the Brexit referrendum) is a harbinger of future international treaties aimed at reeling in these transnational corporations. But right now we are nowhere near that actually happening.

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Possibly the most interesting development on this file is the recently announced creation of a union for YouTube creators.

For those of you who don't know, there is a fairly large number of "creators" who have managed to make something of a living off creating their own YouTube channel. The ones I follow range from general interest such as Today I Found Out, to special interest like Chinese Cooking Demystified, radical politics: ContraPoints, and so on. This is so much a "thing" that my smart TV uploaded new firmware last year that allows me to watch YouTube from my futon using my remote control.

I suspect that the success of this myriad of "little guys" working from their apartments has come as something of a surprise to YouTube. It tried to launch a subscription-based channel a couple years ago to compete with Netflix, but it doesn't seem to have gone much of anywhere. That means most of it's revenue still comes from advertising "tacked onto" channels created by third party "partners".  And a lot of that are these independents like Chinese Cooking Demystified and ContraPoints. Unfortunately, the executives at YouTube tend to treat these "little guys" like crap.

Just in case you don't know already, YouTube is owned by Google and it uses sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to suggest new YouTube shows to watch based on your past viewing. It also pairs specific advertisements with viewers that they think would be particularly interested in them.

Unfortunately, these programs have been found to easily divert suggestible individuals "down rabbit holes" of radicalism. This has "super-charged" and empowered a lot of individuals like incels (the guy who ran down all those people with his van in Toronto last summer), anti-Muslim types (the guy who shot up those two mosques in New Zealand), white nationalists (the tiki-torch freaks in Charlotteville---one of whom drove his car into a crowd, killing one woman), etc, etc. Google and YouTube have been under a lot of pressure to squeeze out these goofs from the YouTube mix, but the way they've done it has hurt a lot of other people who were nothing more than "collateral damage" to their changing business model. I could write a series of articles just about this, so to be brief I'm just going to post include a short YouTube clip that explains it. (This is pretty important to the future of the media in general, so I'd advise everyone to watch it.)

The key take-a-ways to remember are that YouTube is using artificial intelligence to demonetize specific YouTube channels and that they are not letting the content creators know why they are having ad revenue taken away from them.

Part of this is being justified because the company is using artificial intelligence to do the sorting, which means that there is a "black box" aspect to this process. But as the video shows, there are pieces to this system that can be identified and explained. This means that when YouTube refuses to actually talk to an individual creator and instead just sends out automated responses, someone in management is making a conscious decision to act like a Dick.

Having grown up on a farm, I recognize the situation all too well. There are three partners in this equation: giant corporations buying advertising, giant corporations selling advertising, and, thousands of "little guys" creating content and living off ad revenue. That's just like thousands of little family farms buying tractors and fertilizer from giant corporations so they can raise crops to sell to other giant corporations. In that situation the result was pretty much the same.

Agricultural "demonetization".
What farmers get paid for a bushel of wheat in constant dollars.
From the Through the Mill website, used under Fair Use provision.

A wheat pool elevator. Photo by
John Johnston, c/o Wiki Commons.
Cropped by Bill Hulet.

And in both situations, one of the solutions that comes to mind is to band together all those little producers into a larger entity that can fight for their interests on an equal footing with "the big boys". In Western Canada this resulted in the Wheat Pool and the Federated Co-ops movement.

A Co-op gas station. Image from SLD website,
used under the Fair Use provision.

The same sort of solution has come to the mind of YouTube content creators, which is why they have decided to created the YouTubers Union and made the following demands:

We are a community based movement that fights for the rights of YouTube Creators and Users. Our core demands are:

• Monetize everyone - Bring back monetization for smaller channels.
• Disable the bots - At least verified partners have the right to speak to a real person if you plan to remove their channel.
• Transparent content decisions - Open up direct communication between the censors ("content department") and the Creators.
• Pay for the views - Stop using demonetized channels as "bait" to advertise monetized videos. 
• Stop demonetization as a whole - If a video is in line with your rules, allow ads on an even scale.
• Equal treatment for all partners - Stop preferring some creators over others. No more “YouTube Preferred”. 
• Pay according to delivered value - Spread out the ad money over all YouTubers based on audience retention, not on ads next to the content.
• Clarify the rules - Bring out clear rules with clear examples about what is OK and what is a No-No.

Not to be messed with.
Logo of IG Metall. 

What really makes this unionization drive really interesting is that the Youtubers union has joined forces with the biggest union in Europe: IG Metall. This is the German equivalent of the Steelworkers (my old union) and has 2.27 million members. They have enormous amounts of money and a stable of very good lawyers who believe that the Youtube Union has very good legal grounds under EU law to go after YouTube and Google for the way that they are being treated.

Here's a 20 minute video that briefly restates the situation YouTube content creators face plus a description of the campaign that the YouTubers Union and IG Metall have planned to force YouTube to enter into honest negotiations. Again, I think it is worth watching because of the importance of the issues it raises.

The important take-aways are as follows.

European law has several features that differentiate it from North American. One of which is that it has "false self employment" laws that do not allow employers to avoid regulations governing employees by simply defining them as "sub-contractors". IG Metall lawyers can sue YouTube refuses to treat YouTubers like real partners (instead of peons). If they win, then YouTube will be forced to retroactively pay payroll deductions for social programs retroactively, which will cost them a lot of money and threaten YouTube's entire business model.

The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states that when a person requests information that a corporation has about them, they must provide it to them. This directly goes against YouTube's policy of keeping secret whatever information it has about a YouTuber's channel. The maximum fine for violating the GDPR is 4% of the international revenue for a corporation in the previous fiscal year. In Google's case, this would come to $4.9 billion. Please note, that in the case of an on-going policy (as opposed to a "one off" like the Cambridge Analytica fiasco), repeated fines would be levied until the practice stopped.

In addition, the union now has a great many members and has created a list of secret actions that would be followed to create a "shitstorm" if YouTube continues to refuse to bargain with the union past the August 23/2019 deadline.

What's fascinating about this lawsuit is that only the EU has the worker and privacy protection laws that allow IG Metall to sue it. But the EU is such a giant market that Google might find it impossible to simply break the law and ignore them. The result is that for once international commerce liberalization might actually drag big business standards up instead of pushing them down. That is to say, YouTube's business model can't be different from one nation to another, which means that they might feel forced to adhere to the best rules that they have to---even though this is not legally necessary outside of the European Union. 

Another added element is that many of the same conditions apply to other aspects of the Web-based media. Advertising has also been drawn away from bloggers and podcasters under mysterious circumstances. (That's why I dropped Google Adsense---overnight my revenue changed from a dollar a hit to a penny.) Depending on how this union battle ends, we might be seeing the emergence of a new advertising funding model for all web-based news.

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I suspect that this is more than most of my readers will want to look at for one article. Sorry about the length, but when I start to pull a thread that comes out of an interview, I never know how much is going to come off into my hands. I hope that this piece will help readers understand a little more about a very complex and important part of our modern world.

Walking in Someone Else's Moccasins

One of the more common bromides that I've heard over the years suggests you shouldn't judge someone until you've walked in his or her moccasins. A quick search on line tells me that the aphorism comes from the following 19th century poem.

Judge Softly

“Pray, don’t find fault with the man that limps,
Or stumbles along the road.
Unless you have worn the moccasins he wears,
Or stumbled beneath the same load. 

There may be tears in his soles that hurt
Though hidden away from view.
The burden he bears placed on your back
May cause you to stumble and fall, too. 

Don’t sneer at the man who is down today
Unless you have felt the same blow
That caused his fall or felt the shame
That only the fallen know. 

You may be strong, but still the blows
That were his, unknown to you in the same way,
May cause you to stagger and fall, too. 

Don’t be too harsh with the man that sins.
Or pelt him with words, or stone, or disdain.
Unless you are sure you have no sins of your own,
And it’s only wisdom and love that your heart contains.

For you know if the tempter’s voice
Should whisper as soft to you,
As it did to him when he went astray,
It might cause you to falter, too.

Just walk a mile in his moccasins
Before you abuse, criticize and accuse.
If just for one hour, you could find a way
To see through his eyes, instead of your own muse.

I believe you’d be surprised to see
That you’ve been blind and narrow-minded, even unkind.
There are people on reservations and in the ghettos
Who have so little hope, and too much worry on their minds.

Brother, there but for the grace of God go you and I.
Just for a moment, slip into his mind and traditions
And see the world through his spirit and eyes
Before you cast a stone or falsely judge his conditions.

Remember to walk a mile in his moccasins
And remember the lessons of humanity taught to you by your elders.
We will be known forever by the tracks we leave
In other people’s lives, our kindnesses and generosity.

Take the time to walk a mile in his moccasins.”

~ by Mary T. Lathrap, 1895

Mary T. Lathrap.
Public domain image from Women and Temperance,
by Frances Willard, 1888.

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I think it's a pretty impressive sentiment. And the fact that the original saying actually does refer to First Nations individuals surprised me. I'd thought that the original words were "walk a mile in someone else's shoes", and that it'd been "repurposed" in a misguided form of "cultural appropriation". (That just goes to show the value of seeking out the original source.)

But having said that, I have been thinking a lot lately about the ability to "put yourself in someone else's moccasins". What exactly does it mean? And is it possible for most people to actually do this?

The first thing to ask is whether the poem is suggesting empathy or sympathy. I suspect that the two terms have become hopelessly intermingled and robbed of much of their meaning (like "decimate" and "annihilate", or, "psychopath" and "sociopath"), so I'm just going to arbitrarily start with the Wikipedia definitions and go from there. They suggest that "empathy" refers to the ability to imagine yourself physically and emotionally in the situation of another. "Sympathy", in contrast, is about feeling what you actually think are the emotions of another.

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These two different ways of looking at another person are quite distinct, but might be hard to understand. To illustrate them, let's look at two different examples.

My wife, Misha, once had a dog named "Nik" that she had done an absolutely amazing job training. She managed this by listening to her best friend, Amber, who is a professional dog trainer and the best practical animal psychologist I have ever met. One thing that she taught my significant other is that you should never, ever comfort a dog that is in distress. The reasoning is that dogs have very different minds than humans. If you try to comfort a dog---like you would a child---you are, in effect, training it to think that being afraid is a preferred emotion. And the result won't be a "comforted" dog, but one that will become more and more easily disturbed. With regard to dogs, Amber was telling Misha that it is important to have empathy (ie: understand how he looked at the world), but a very bad thing to express sympathy (ie: try to share emotions) with him.

Another example comes from literature. In the "Parable Series" the author Octavia Butler, created a character, Lauren Oya Olamina, who was born with a psychological syndrome (caused by a parent taking a drug designed to boost her intelligence) where she would feel extreme, debilitating sympathy with anyone that she saw in any sort of pain. The result was that Lauren had to go to great lengths to avoid being around people in any sort of pain or suffering. As a literary device, Butler was---I assume---attempting to describe the horror that one feels in a society that is going down the toilet.

The late---and greatly missed--Octavia Butler, 

from her Twitter account.

In her books, The Parable of the Sower, and, The Parable of the Talents, Butler describes a very believable future USA. Climate change has created scores of internal refugees as the South West turns into a vast new desert. Canada---which has benefited agriculturally from the changes---has created a militarized border that keeps American refugees out by force. Wealth inequality has increased to the point where large swathes of the countryside are controlled by violent swarms or hordes of people who have nothing to lose and prey on anyone or anything they can get their hands on. The super-rich live in secure enclaves protected by armies of their own private guards. The declining middle class hold onto their precarious positions through ruthless competition for a declining number of good jobs. They also live in poorly-protected, gated communities which are constantly under threat by the anarchic hordes just outside the barbed wire. At one point, the government is taken over by racist "populists" who try to impose their form of fundamentalist Christianity on everyone and start a quickly-lost war attempting to regain Alaska, which has succeeded from the Union and is now under the protection of Canada. 

Throughout this turmoil, Lauren becomes the leader of a refugee community and eventually becomes a spiritual leader. Unfortunately, when the fundamentalist Christians take over she ends up branded a "witch" and has her daughter taken from her, is forced into slavery, and, spends time in a concentration camp. Through out this horrific experience, she gains the wisdom and serenity necessary to change her sympathy into a type of empathy that is able to analyze and understand what has gone wrong with her country.

Her conclusion is that America has failed because it's citizenry has lost any sense of a collective purpose. To that end, she suggests that a national resolve to travel to the stars is what is needed to bridge the gaps between the rich and poor, Christians and other faiths, and, everything else that has fallen apart. By the end of The Parable of the Talents, she is an old woman, venerated by the public, reunited with her daughter, and witness to the first launch of a star ship being sent to start a colony on a planet circling Alpha Centauri.

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I surprise myself that I can keep hammering out these op eds on a weekly basis. The only suggestion that I can make about how I do it is that I spent 31 years wandering around an academic library thinking about "life, the universe, and, everything". Well, that too was an effort.

If you want to tell the world that you support people thinking through things like this, why not subscribe through Patreon or PayPal? It's easy, and you can pay as little or as much as you like. And by doing so you will be sending a message to the world that you wish there was more than just anger and cute on the World Wide Web.

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The thing that I've been wondering about is why it is that so many people I've met over the years seem fundamentally incapable of putting themselves in the moccasins of others. As a result of these ruminations, I've come to the following conclusions.

First, you have to want to walk in those moccasins. A lot of people in our society see everything as a competition. That's hardly surprising as many families do everything short of putting a gun to the side of their children's heads forcing them to play team sports. And don't forget the schools that have become more and more competitive as parents and teachers rant and rave about the importance of getting a "good job" after graduation. It's simply the case that I've met a lot of people who are so concerned about "winning" that there's no opportunity for them to consider the other side's point of view.

A special case of this problem involves people who feel that they have a "professional obligation" to limit their point of view. Union leaders, for example, often believe that they have an obligation to "go to the wall" in defense of members no matter how outrageous their behaviour. Many police officers have a "blue wall" attitude that forbids the membership from ever putting themselves in the moccasins of any person who gets brutalized by a "bad apple". Politicians, lawyers, public relations people, bureaucrats, etc, far too often believe that they are professionally obligated to never consider the world from the vantage point of the "enemy". Quite a few times I've tried to get a "professional" to try to see some issue from someone else's point-of-view only to get a blank star and the response "I don't understand the question" as an answer---or even what I call the "X-Files answer". (That's when someone asks an uncomfortable question and the other person just looks away and doesn't say anything at all.)

It might be, but don't expect a professional to tell you unless he thinks it's in his client's interest.

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Second, you have to have some imagination. That's because it requires a fair amount of creativity to try to see the world from someone else's vantage point. We all come from very different situations, have different life experiences, and, choose different ways of living our lives. Each one of those things opens up new possibilities, but they also cut off an equal number of others. More importantly every experience we have creates, and, stunts or reinforces emotions and personality traits.

There are philosophers who say that each of us inhabits our own little "universe" of "personal culture" that has been created by our own specific experiences. That's what the "walking in someone else's moccasins" is all about. The boundaries of that experience are our "horizon". When we interact with another person we have the opportunity to either "merge our horizons" and learn from each other or "bounce off".

Years ago I read an essay by a man who'd grown up in a dirt poor Appalachian mining town. His dad had been a coal miner all his life and his mom a stay-at-home housewife. The author had managed to "pole vault" his way out of this life and ended up at university on a scholarship. He described sitting in a classroom listening to women bitterly complain about the lot of women who were "stuck" at home raising children instead of going out to work like their husbands.

The essay describes the young man's thoughts about what they had to say. At first, he simply couldn't see how raising children, growing a garden, preserving food for the winter, sewing cloths, cleaning, etc, was any worse than crawling around in a dirty, dangerous, loud, hot, nasty coal mine. He certainly didn't see how it was worse than spending your later years dying of black lung.

But then he went on and explained that he learned that the experience of the women in his class was very different from his. Their fathers had had good paying, groovy jobs where they ordered around and "used up" people like his father. And their mothers hadn't been essential to the functioning of the family. His mother's work work providing and preserving food, raising the children, making the clothes, holding the community together, etc, was just as important to the well-being of the family as the father's paltry pay cheque. Instead, their mothers had just been "birds in a gilded cage" who had become made increasingly irrelevant by labour-saving devices and isolated by the suburban tracts that they lived in. The traditional relationships that defined those women's lives ceased to make any economic sense (as it still did to some extent in Appalachia), and as a result had become in many cases nothing more than prisons.

What the essay writer was talking about was his personal experience of "merging horizons" with the women in his class, or, learning to "walk in their moccasins". But it's important to realize that he was only able to learn how to do this after he'd already developed some "distance" from his own situation. He had already learned from various sources about the ways in which society had exploited and abused his family. This freed him from the stories that we tell each other about the lives we lead. One of the more common ones that people learn is to never question the situation we find ourselves in because "that's just the way it is".

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This leads into the third issue that I think often keeps people from being able to manifest empathy: anger.

When we question why "things are the way they are", most people go through a period of anger. And anger is predominantly an inward-focused emotion, one that has very little time for "putting yourself into someone else's moccasins".

I lived through the 1970s and met a lot of women were very angry towards men at that time. They even had a name for the experience: "empowering rage". In my experience just about everyone who "gets woke" goes through this stage. It can be painful to be around people at this point because they often lash out at not the person who is the greatest cause of their pain, but more often the people who are closest to them, and---probably more importantly---the people that they feel safest with. 

That's part of the reason why some people get so outraged and freaked out at university. It's the first---and for many the only---time in their life when they are able to engage with new ideas and rethink how they fit into "the big picture". It is also probably the safest place in our society to manifest the sort of rage and anger that comes from rethinking the ways in which you have been put down and exploited by the world around you. It's a "career limiting move" to "become woke" in the vast majority of work places! And rethinking the dynamics between men and women can be dangerous if you are pregnant and have just signed onto a gigantic mortgage. Much better to wrestle with this stuff while the biggest problem you have is getting an essay on Victorian novels in on time.

People on the outside of this very traumatic experience have to remind themselves that the angry person in front of them is often trying to change their mental processes in a fundamental way. And the process of being on the outside looking into this often requires real empathy for the relationship to survive. Many people finish this transformation and the people who were able to "hang in" can end up with a much better connection as their "horizons fuse" into a greater "oneness". Unfortunately, some people get "stuck" in their anger. That sucks, but it's best to consider the person it happens to as being a "casualty" rather than an evil person who insists on making the lives of everyone around them miserable.

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This rambling mess of an editorial has gone on long enough. I freely admit that it is far from exhaustive, but I do hope that I've suggested the universe of complexities that flow from the seemingly trite saying that one should "walk a mile in someone else's moccasins". It's a profound statement about what it means to be a human being and takes a lifetime of thought and effort to actually put into practice. But we would all be better for it if we tried just a little more often to actually do what it says. 

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 Furthermore I say onto you. The climate emergency must be dealt with! 

Truthiness

One of the things that I come across on social media once in a while is someone who says that they want to see "conservative viewpoints" expressed in a specific place: university, a magazine or website, or, so on. I always find this somewhat troubling, because I personally don't care how someone identifies themselves politically so long as their ideas make some sense. But that's the whole problem, isn't it?

What makes sense?

I spent quite a few years at university studying philosophy, which resulted in a Master's degree in that subject. It is probably best defined as "an academic discipline that teaches you how to discern what makes sense from what doesn't". (Another common definition is "philosophy is the world's best bullshit detector".) Unfortunately, the vast majority of people haven't had any similar opportunity. Indeed, most people's education and life experience is aimed at learning to avoid questioning what they are being told. That's because their parents, teacher, priest, boss, etc, doesn't want them thinking about what they are told to think and do.

The clearest expression of this point of view that I know of comes from a 2012 Republican Party of Texas platform that listed the following view about public education:

Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority. (page 12)

Being upset about teachers getting the kids thinking for themselves because they then start asking hard-to-answer questions is an old, established pattern in authoritarian thinking. It started when the tyranny that replaced Athenian democracy had Socrates executed.

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Yes, it's an actual word in the Merrian/Webster dictionary.
Image "harvested" from le-Mot-Juste-en-Anglais website.
Used under the "Fair Use" copyright provision.

Most people don't really like the idea of being told what to think. Instead, they want at least a "fig leaf" covering up the nonsense that they get fed. To this end, there's quite an industry devoted to the creation of "truthiness". This is a term coined by the comedian Stephen Colbert to describe what people seek who put ideology ahead of actual facts and logic.

Truthiness is an interesting concept, because it isn't, per se, a lie. That's because creating and sustaining a lie requires more effort than just tossing around truthiness. People who respond to truthiness will never put any effort into actively looking for the truth, as they simply don't care. They don't ask that propaganda be terribly convincing, only that it doesn't make the people who support it look like complete dolts. 

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I understand that the subject of this week's editorial is depressing to read. Believe me, it was even more depressing to write. But I do think that it's important for there to be places where people can talk about issues like this. I recently heard a podcast where two very successful reporters talked parenthetically about how hard it is for conventional journalism to talk about politicians who are knowingly lying to voters. It's just against the canons of objective journalism to call an elected official a damned liar to their face. (See the Ezra Klein Show podcast titled How white identity politics won the Republican civil war.)

If you agree with me that one of the few good things to come from the decline of mainstream journalism is the "opening up" that allows "taboo" subjects---like the amorality of some politicians---to be discussed, put your money where your mouth is. Support indie media through either Patreon or directly through Pay Pal. It's easier than you might think.

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A couple weeks ago I wrote an article about the recently-unveiled federal Conservative climate emergency plan. For those of you who haven't read it, one thing I did was compare a graph from the plan that purports to show the global carbon impact of Canada. According to it, Canadians are only "bit players". I contrasted it with another one that showed that per capita Canadians have one of the largest carbon footprints in the world.

So what? Lies, damn lies, and, statistics---no?

But that's not what's going on here. The Conservatives aren't lying to people, they are creating a fog of truthiness that hides the fact that a significant percentage of people in this country simply don't give a damn. I suppose this could be explained in one of several pretty horrible ways.

First, it could be that Conservatives simply don't believe that climate change exists and are too lazy to actually put much effort into thinking about whether or not their belief is actually true. That's a pretty damning thing in and of itself. "The world could be facing a tremendous catastrophe, but I don't think so and instead of educating myself I'd rather watch the basketball game."

Second, they could believe that climate change is real, but that their own ideological worldview is more important than the survival of human civilization. That's a pretty strange thing to contemplate, but I suspect that this actually describes a number of people. They are so committed to free market capitalism and libertarian ideology that they would rather strip the gears of the ecosystem and kill off hundreds of millions of people than have to contemplate an end to the status quo.

Third, there are people who simply don't care about anyone else but themselves. I've met folks like this. As one person told me with regard to housing "I don't care about my own grandchildren's lives, why should I care about anyone else?" They simply think that they will be long dead before the effects become too drastic---so don't ask them to lift a finger to avoid a worst case scenario.

Finally, there are the total and absolute cynics who are creating this idiotic policy in the first place. I cannot believe that more than a minority of the corps of Conservative website designers, policy writers, "robo call" campaign workers, musicians, candidates, fundraisers, systems analysts, etc, actually believe the nonsense they are peddling about the climate emergency. How could they? They couldn't be that stupid and still be able to do their job. But what does that say about them if they are willing to peddle complete nonsense about an existential threat to the human race just because it's good for their career? Are these people psychopaths with no sense of morality at all? 

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Stephen Colbert is a professional comedian. And it makes perfect sense that a comedian would be the person to notice this phenomenon and bring it to the attention of the citizenry. Without the prophylactic of laughter, I doubt that anyone could look at this issue and really think through the ramifications without running the risk of developing a deep despair. The ultimate conclusion that I find myself drawn towards is the idea that one of the major political parties has been taken over by---and is supported by---people totally devoid of any sort of moral compass.

Wow! Does that ever suck.

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Furthermore I say onto you. The climate emergency must be dealt with! 

What is Life For?

When I was a teen my family went to a local farmer's co-op because it was having an event where the famous fiddler Al Cherney was the special guest. At the time I was more interested in listening to Pink Floyd than country and Western, but I understood when I was listening to a real musician. So I was glad to attend with mom and dad. (Here's a short taste of the man's music.)

Before he got into the music he gave a short story about a man who'd died. He went before Saint Peter and was told that'd he'd "made the grade" and was welcome in Heaven. He replied that he intended no offense, but he was a cautious sort of person and that he'd like to check out both places before he made a commitment. The Saint said that that was fine with him and he was welcome to check out Hell, then Heaven, before he made his final decision. 

Poof! He was in Hell. There was a large cafeteria and people were very hungry. The devils had provided what smelled like a wonderful soup, and the sub demons were handing out bowls to all and sundry. Unfortunately, the only spoons provided were a yard long and no one could get any of the soup from the bowl to the mouth---leaving everyone hungry and angry. 

This didn't look so good. 

Poof! He was in Heaven. The fellow was surprised to see the same scenario. But everyone was happy. That was because they were using their long spoons to feed the person across the table from them---and everyone had their fill. 

The point that was being made was that people's well-being comes from the help that they receive from others; and their happiness comes from offering it. 

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The other day I was listening to a CBC podcast about How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan's new book . The book, and the interview, was about hallucinogenic drugs (ie: LSD, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms, etc)---and how they affect the human mind. Among other things Pollan was talking about how these drugs give the part of the brain that creates the illusion of the self a "time out", which allows it to perceive the world in a new way. 

Michael Pollan, from a talk at Yale University.
Original picture by Ragesoss, modified by Gobonobo.
Image c/o Wiki Commons.

Both Pollan and I use the phrase "the illusion of the self" advisedly. That's because thoughtful, introspective people in different cultures at different times have independently come to the conclusion that when you carefully parse out the experience of being a human being, you come to the inescapable conclusion that the idea of an individual, concrete, persistent, "self", "soul", or, "personality" is an illusion or cultural artifact.  

Here's an example of the sort of discussion you will find in ancient texts, it comes from a conversation between a Greek king in Afghanistan (a left-over from Alexander the Great's expedition to India) and a Buddhist monk.

The Chariot Simile 

One of the King's first questions is on the nature of the self and personal identity. Nagasena greeted the King by acknowledging that Nagasena was his name, but that "Nagasena" was only a designation; no permanent individual "Nagasena" could be found. 

This amused the King. Who is it that wears robes and takes food? he asked. If there is no Nagasena, who earns merit or demerit? Who causes karma? If what you say is true, a man could kill you and there would be no murder. "Nagasena" would be nothing but a sound. 

Nagasena asked the King how he had come to his hermitage, on foot or by horseback? I came in a chariot, the King said. 

But what is a chariot? Nagasena asked. Is it the wheels, or the axles, or the reigns, or the frame, or the seat, or the draught pole? Is it a combination of those elements? Or is it found outside those elements? 

The King answered no to each question. Then there is no chariot! Nagasena said.

Now the King acknowledged the designation "chariot" depended on these constituent parts, but that "chariot" itself is a concept, or a mere name. 

Just so, Nagasena said, "Nagasena" is a designation for something conceptual. It is a mere name. When the constituent parts are present we call it a chariot; When the Five Skandhas [this is a technical term from Buddhist psychology that describes the different parts of human consciousness---sight, emotions, thoughts, etc] are present, we call it a being.

The Buddhists aren't the only people who question the existence of "the self", the enlightenment Scottish philosopher, David Hume came to the same conclusion in his A Treatise of Human Nature:

“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.  I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” – (Section VI, "Of Personal Identity") 

David Hume, portrait by Alan Ramsay,
from the Scottish National Gallery. Photo by the Google Art Project.
Image c/o Wiki Commons. 

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I'll admit that this is a bit different from my other posts, but it is a key part of my personal understanding of politics, activism, economics, and, environmentalism. It's certainly not something I'd have ever been able to sell to a newspaper when I was free-lancing Op Eds. If you think it's useful, why not support the "Back-Grounder"? It's not that hard (thanks for being so awesome, Dustin), Patreon and Pay Pal make it easy. And by doing so you'll be making it a little more easy for me to find the time and resources I need to put out these articles. You'll also be encouraging younger people to follow in my footsteps.  

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What is important for the purposes of this Op Ed is something else that Pollan talked about. He said that when people give up the idea that they are these concrete, discrete entities and instead are a diffuse collection of experiences and ideas---their lives totally change. For example, some people dying of cancer develop such a level of equanimity and joy that they start helping the people visiting them deal with their grief. Another example, some addicts give up their drug of choice overnight because they realize how inherently gobsmackingly beautiful the world can be and how being addicted screws that all up.

The point is that once one stops fixating on the illusion of the self, the enormity of life breaks through. And once you are part of the tremendous, amazing, beautiful world of both nature and human society, the only thing that can make any sense is to live your life for the entirety of it all.

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I don't just pay attention to olde tyme fiddlers, ancient Buddhist monks, and, Scottish philosophers. I also watch cheesy science fiction shows. Here's another take on the same theme from Babylon Five. 

Pollan also talked about the social implications of psychedelics. He says that if enough people have this experience of "taking a break from the ego", it has a macro effect on pop culture. If this is true, then the war on drugs that started in the 1970s and which is only starting to loosen up now might have had a tremendous impact on society. And as we loosen up opposition to them, we are at least finding that hallucinogens can be tremendously helpful in a wide variety of psychological problems---to cite one particular example.

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Meister Eckhart.
I couldn't find an attribution. Used
under the Fair Use Copyright provision

Hallucinogenic drugs are only a short cut to wisdom. A more tried-and-true gate to it comes from meditation. And as such it too has been under the thumb of another "war". One of the people that "church folks" like to quote a lot who certainly sounds like he was cut from the same cloth as the Buddhists, Polan, Al Cherney, and, the folks in Babylon Five,  is Meister Eckhart. Here're some quotes from "Good Reads":

“The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
― Meister Eckhart, Sermons of Meister Eckhart 

“Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it.”
― Meister Eckhart 

“Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow - for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage. ”
― Meister Eckhart 

“If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.”
― Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings 

“If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: 'Why are you living?' life, if it could answer, would only say, 'I live so that I may live.' That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living. ”
― Meister Eckhart

The thing that "churchy" people who like to quote Eckhart don't tell you, however, is that he died in a cell waiting to be tried for heresy. Just like there is a war on drugs, so there was a war on mystics---and they both stem from the same place. Our present society doesn't want people to really walk away from the ego, it wants people to bind themselves to it. That's pretty much what our entire economy is based upon, the base enslavement of our private and social being to a false understanding of what it means to be a human being. 

But it's all a lie. It makes people unhappy, and, it's also destroying the world. It tells us that we can destroy nature because nature isn't part of our self. It also tells us that we can treat "the Other"---be it refugees, the mentally ill, the poor, whatever---shamefully, because they are not part of our self. But if you take hallucinogenic drugs or meditate, there is a very good chance that you will experience life in a different way, one where the self isn't all that important anymore. And when you do that, then you will be willing to do things like putting opposition to climate change, or fighting for the rights of others ahead of your own investment portfolio or the size of your house or the quality of your "ride" or the latest vacation trip or whatever. It just won't be important.

That's the macro effect that Polan is talking about. It's also why there have been wars on drugs and wars on mysticism. Personally, I think that part of creating a sane, fair, and, sustainable society involves bringing the wisdom of the mystics back into our society.

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Furthermore, I say to you---the climate emergency must be dealt with!

The Art Economy

Human society is going through an unprecedented transition for the past hundred years or so, and things are quickly coming to a head. But I suspect that most people haven't really thought about it much. And that's not an accident. To understand what I'm getting at, and how I think we can deal with, I'm going to have to take people through a very quick discussion. So put on your helmet and buckle up your seat belts---because this is going to be high-velocity.

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Image by "Swiggity.Swag.YOLO.Bro", c/o Wiki Commons

This is a graphic representation of way our ecoystem generally operates. Almost all the energy that life uses comes from the sun (we'll ignore the thermal vent guys living off chemical energy.) Everything that dies decomposes (fungi rules!) The base "Primary Producers" are green plants, which harvest all the solar energy that then supports everything above them. For example: maple trees harvest sunlight--->deer eat maple buds--->a bobcat eats the deer--->a cougar eats the bobcat--->a human being eats the cougar. As you can see, each step in the pyramid involves a loss of 90% of the energy.

For most of human history human society operated as something of a analogy to the basic energy pyramid. This isn't an accident, as human society was simply operating by the same rules as every other party of the solar economy---only instead of bobcats eating deer that ate maple trees, we had aristocrats eating wheat, gathered by soldiers and scribes, who took it from peasants.

Ancient Egyption Social Pyramid. Used under the "Fair Use" provision of the
copyright act. Image from Saint Albans Secondary College.

The thing to remember about these two graphics is that they are grotesquely out of proportion to the actual shape of the pyramids. In each of these, the top positions are held by an extremely small percentage of people compared to the bottom ones. This was simply because it took a lot human labour to grow food, which left only a small amount of surplus to feed all the people higher up on the pyramid.

Science and technology have changed all of this. One farmer in Canada can produce a lot more agricultural surplus than any peasant in all of human history. I had a hard time finding a graphic to represent this fact, as there are some complexities. Agricultural production can be measured in terms of production per acre, which has gone up significantly in recent memory. Or in terms of production per man hour, which has gone up even more dramatically. Or, it can be measured in terms of output of energy versus input of energy in terms of oil, fertilizer, etc----which not only hasn't gone up, but in many cases actually declined. (This is an artifact of living in a strange period where fossil fuels were incredibly cheap and used recklessly.) There is also an issue of transitioning from family farms to corporate agriculture, which means that government "silos" end up measuring "agricultural workers" versus "farmers"---which brings "guest workers" versus "Canadian citizens" and all sorts of complexities that confuse people reading statistics.

The best way I found to explain this decline in the base of the pyramid is by showing the following graph. It shows the consolidation of land into bigger and bigger farms owned by smaller and smaller numbers of farmers.

A graph from Statistics Canada showing the decline in the number of farms.
Image used under the Fair Use copyright provision. 

As you can see, the number of Canadian farms has declined from a little under 481,000 from 1961 to 194,000 in 2016. (My family farm was part of this phenomenon---my dad bought out his neighbour, and our neighbour bought out my brother after he inherited from him.) I think you can safely assume that the decline in farmers mirrors a decline in the need for farm labour due to increased mechanization (today there are literally robots that milk cows and self-driving tractors.)

A parallel phenomenon is happening in manufacturing. When I was a teen I built a stereo receiver (which I still use) from a kit. That was because a major fraction of the price of anything electronic was the time people spent soldering the thing together in a factory. This meant that if I was willing to put in the long hours soldiering diodes, transistors, etc, to a circuit board, I could save big bucks. Nowadays all this is done by robots and labour is a trivial cost in the price of a stereo. (Do people still buy stereos? Are they a thing? My amplifier is hooked up to a computer.)

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I'm a nice guy. I work hard on this blog. If you can support me. Blah, blah, blah. Patreon and Paypal. Share the story with your pals. Have a nice day.

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What this all means is that the foundation of the pyramid is hollowing out. As robots take over our jobs, there are fewer and fewer people in society who are growing the food and making the stuff that everyone else eats or uses.

This should be a great thing for all and sundry. I can tell you from experience that shoveling manure and soldering circuits are not activities I look back upon with fond memories. But unfortunately our society has hopelessly muddled two intrinsically different things: production and distribution. The result is that instead of finding a mechanism to redistribute the wealth created by mechanization, society has instead made heroic efforts to create more jobs for the people made redundant.

Part of this just involves raising people's expectations so they spend more and more money on bigger homes, burning jet fuel flying all over the planet, and, buying more expensive crap that they really don't need. The ecological burden alone would make this a problem. But there are other elements to this effort that make it tragic.

Because society has tied distribution exclusively to employment, great efforts have been made to propagate the notion that in some metaphysical, moral sense, "work" simply as work, has some sort of merit.

My dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest-working man I ever knew. It's because of him that I learned from my youngest age to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. (Donald Trump. This and all the following come from A.Z. Quotes)

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the pre-eminence of family. (Mitt Romney.)

These are quotes from wealthy people who've never really had to work at a poorly paid, dirty, hard, dangerous job their entire lives. Contrast that with this quote from a man who'd worked as a common seaman all over the world before he became a famous novelist.

 They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure. (Herman Melville.)

One of the big problems we face right now is that we are saddled with a cultural "operating system" that no longer makes any sense. It was designed to reconcile most people to doing awful jobs simply because someone had to do them. Now that we are quickly mechanizing all of these "grunt work" jobs, that way of looking at the world is not only no longer necessary, it is positively dangerous. That's because the whole "dignity of work" schtick only works if there actually are jobs to be had that will support you. If there are no jobs at all---or they don't pay enough to keep a roof over your head---all that message does is breed resentment. And that leads to a society with masses of angry people who don't know why their world doesn't make any sense looking for someone to blame. 

Does that sound familiar?

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The problem of the discontinuity between distribution and employment has not been lost on people. That's why so many people are pushing for an extension of financial distribution beyond the Old Age Benefit and the Canada Child Benefit (which are both guaranteed annual income programs---even though most people don't think of them that way.)

I suspect, however, that a lot of people are deeply concerned about the idea of guaranteed annual income because they have bought into the whole idea of "the dignity of work". They fear that people who don't earn their bread "by the sweat of their brow" will be failures as human beings.

One of the key barriers to social change is the problem people have with actually envisioning a different way of doing things. To that end, I will introduce what I see as a better future: the art economy. 

I suppose that I'm a bit of an optimist, but I think that most people have something inside themselves that would grow into something like a vocation---if they didn't have it beaten out of them at an early age. That's why so many folks like to tinker with cars, fix up their own houses, garden, knit, cook, sew quilts, etc. The problem is, however, that no one can make any money off doing that because they can't compete with modern mass production. (That certainly defines describes me writing this blog.)

That's why the only people who can afford to have hand-made, artistic furniture---for example---are the super-rich who can afford to buy from the tiny fraction of people who manage to make a living as cabinet makers. But here's an idea. What if there was a really strong "safety net", one that was so strong that it was actually a "safety floor" that no one was allowed to fall below. Wouldn't that encourage a lot of people to do things that they really love doing---like make a beautiful piece of furniture? or grow amazing vegetables? or sew amazing quilts?

One of the really nice things about good stuff is that it generally survives a very long time. This because it's made well in the first place---solid maple instead of particle board. It's also because people love the stuff, so they take good care of it. And that means that it doesn't get tossed out after a few years. It becomes an "heirloom" that gets passed on through generations. And if you pay more for an heirloom, isn't it cheaper in the long run because you never have to buy another one? And your children inherit it for free? And their kids?

There's an added spin-off, of course. If you aren't building disposable things like crappy dining room sets, then you are putting less stress on the planet. And if you personally are building one very nice piece of furniture that you enjoy working on, then aren't you putting less stress on yourself than if you were in a factory knocking off cheap crap to sell at Walmart?

And if more people were spending their lives being creative---artists, inventors, etc---wouldn't they be less cranky and bitter about the world around them? Maybe that would help our society stop fixating on the supposed slights coming from other people and instead just be content living a peaceful life in harmony with nature.

What an idea!

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Furthermore, I say to you---the climate emergency must be dealt with!