Why Is the Cato Institute Pimping Pinker Propaganda?

I noticed that The Cato Institute is pimping Steven Pinker's obtuse analyses which, whether he intends to or not, give tacit sanction to tyranny.Consider their title: "If Everything Is Getting Better, Why Do We Remain So Pessimistic?" This is a classic loaded question, as in "When did you stop beating your wife?" If everything really seemed to be getting better, it would only be from a cherry-picking perspective that ignores the complexity of the real world. So the choice of title is apt -- it accurately conveys Pinker's obtuseness.Consider their blurb:

Evidence from academic institutions and international organizations shows dramatic improvements in human well-being. These improvements are especially striking in the developing world. Unfortunately, there is often a wide gap between reality and public perceptions, including that of many policymakers, scholars in unrelated fields, and intelligent lay persons. To make matters worse, the media emphasizes bad news, while ignoring many positive long-term trends. Please join us for a discussion of psychological, physiological, cultural, and other social reasons for the persistence of pessimism in the age of growing abundance.

Yes, it's very "unfortunate" and inconvenient that people are disgruntled -- if you are a beneficiary of the status quo and see their grumblings as a threat that it might change.However, if you want the radical improvements to society that human beings are capable of, you tend to see this as propaganda -- not because you are deluded, but because you are independent enough to think for yourself, intelligent enough to form or grasp a vision of what is truly possible for human beings in an actually free society, daring enough to contrast this possibility with the reality we must now put up with, and moral enough to be outraged. Ironically, it is only the intellectually independent who can perceive what is truly possible, and yet Cato would have you believe that those who perceive are deluded.While it is certainly true that many important areas of human life are improving, the rate of progress is abysmally retarded compared to what could be. In many aspects there is not merely stagnation but regression, and most of the improvements are expropriated and impeded by an ever-growing cobweb of vicious and convoluted mythologies and laws. So while "pessimism" isn't called for, neither is optimism. What is called for is an informed outrage over the fact what could and should be, isn't. We should indeed be optimistic about what is possible to the human race, and therefore angry that stupidity and wickedness constantly interferes. It is only through an authentic concern with injustice -- which naturally leads to anger -- that there is hope for the radical improvement we are capable of. And yet Cato would quench this anger with the coldly passionless and morally obtuse analyses of Pinker.It is too complex to survey the details of what is wrong with our society here, so let me draw an analogy:Imagine you live in a tribe where there is a group of hunters, a group of inventors (who build weapons for the hunters), and a group of leaders who presume to own virtually everyone and everything. The inventors are coming up with ways of improving the tribe's productivity, but most of these ideas are squashed by the leaders, usually because the leaders do not understand the invention, sometimes because they decided an invention is too dangerous to their authority, and sometimes just because they feel like asserting themselves. But every once and a while an improvement is permitted: a better spear, a better bow and arrow, etc.These improvements allow the hunters to catch more prey, bringing home, say, twice as much meat. Would it be a cause for celebration and optimism if the tribe's leaders take 95% of the increase and leave 5% for the hunters and inventors? A domesticated slave mentality is going to say "Well yes, of course it's better, I got 5% more." A different sort of person is going to be outraged. But the leaders are cunning: they realize that too much improvement in too short of a time span is going to be so easily perceived as to lead to just this sort of outrage, so they make sure progress is slow, or they create artificial problems to create new "work" to keep people busy and distracted -- wars, sabotage, regulations, feigned incompetence at leading the tribe, mountains of pointless paperwork -- it doesn't matter, so long as people are too busy to intensively question the system.And so, as things get "better and better," people seem to never gain much in terms of their own personal independence, quality of life, health, security and stability, or leisure time. They are just as busy and strained struggling to survive as they always have been, perhaps even more harried, anxious, and unhealthy.Sound familiar?Almost a century ago, John Maynard Keynes recognized how much time was being saved by technological progress, and predicted that in our times, we would be able to meet our needs with the breadwinner of the family working only a 15-hour workweek, leaving the rest for either the luxury of time or increased wealth. This very clearly has not happened, in fact there has been a lot of regression (unless you are in the top .1%), as exemplified for instance by the trend to have both parents in the workforce (in other words, the time-saving inventions that freed the woman from tedious housework merely changed her place of work and took away precious time with her children, it didn't actually give her more time).Instead of one member of the family working one 15-hour job, we generally have two members working a total of 80 hours, with smaller families on average than we had in the past. And often, these are not creative, fulfilling jobs; indeed, even when someone has a creative job, he often feels oppressed by the bureaucratic nonsense of Dilbert management. (There are exceptions of course, but that is the trend.)What happened?

Our health [care system has] killed more Americans than ISIS will EVER dream of killing. When I made "Sicko" I asked people to send me their health care horror stories, the stories about friends and family who died because they couldn't afford the help they needed. I received over 25,000 emails and it took my staff and I over a month to read every single one of them. By the end, we were simply crushed with sadness. It was like we were a witness to a mass murder... -- Michael Moore

Apologists for the status quo and their sycophants claim that we actually do have a higher standard of living, that we could choose to work less but we instead choose to consume more. But most everyone knows that this is mostly absurd [1] - there is no way a typical family could survive with one member working 15 hours per week. While it is true that the professional class (engineers, doctors, lawyers, etc.) can manage with one member working 40 hours per week, many struggle with providing essentials, with two members of the family working 40+ hours per week. Working less than 40 is not an option for most, if for no other reason than the rising cost of medical care and the inflexibility of employers, factors stemming not from the gluttony of employees but rather from more nefarious causes.Here again we see the apologists arguing that disgruntlement stems more from delusion than from true injustice, in this case, with people being blamed not only for being gluttons but for being essentially schizophrenic as well. Like any incompetent bureaucrat, who blames all his failures on the subordinates who actually earn his luxuries, our "intellectuals" blame people in general for consuming too much and thinking too little (of course, we could all agree that people should think more). If the people step out of line in their thinking and start to complain, they are shamed from on high. This generally works, since most people are too harried to spend much time reconsidering what these "intellectuals" are saying. But who are the real gluttons? The mother and father working 40+ hour workweeks to survive, or the politicians and bureaucrats who create endless impediments to productive work?That our society is, approximately, a form of feudalism -- a neo-feudalism -- is difficult to explain and substantiate, again, because it has been brought about by an extremely intricate cobweb of mythologies, traditions, and regulations. Analyzing this cobweb is a vast intellectual job that depends on a proper epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and an endless array of specific analysis of contemporary issues such as the patent system, the FDA, the legal system, etc. Whose job is it to do this analysis?Well, Cato Institute scholars seem to have anointed themselves as experts in these areas, and yet what do they do? Instead of making people aware of the radical disparity between how things are and how they could and should be, they invite High Priests of the status quo to tell people things are wonderful as they are and that their frustrations stem from being delusional. This is a moral outrage, and Cato should be ashamed.For liberty to prevail, we must focus our political activism on evils that need to be eradicated, not on the good things we can allegedly gloat about. We should of course enjoy and celebrate the good that our society has to offer in our private lives and in non-political venues, but the principle concern of a legitimate pro-liberty institution is with identifying and putting an end to injustice.[1] Yes we have more pixels on our TV screens and yes this is a wonderful thing -- magnificent when you consider the whole context of scientific and engineering achievements that have made it possible -- but it hardly constitutes a major increase in our living standards, at least, not by any sensible standard. At the center of a true increase of living standards is self-determination. The word "leisure" often connotes a kind of laziness, but what most people would do with this "leisure" is work on improving their lives in accord with their own standard of what "improvement" means to them personally. Being able to come home to more pixels on the screen has little to do with this, however wonderful having more pixels is. Copyright(c) 2014 Shayne Wissler. Originally published at Shayne Wissler’s website, For Individual Rights; visit this link for the latest revisions. Republished at Lions of Liberty with permission.Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!