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Pascal's Wager

By Paul Street at Mar 07, 2009

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After reading my dark essay "The Resistance Gap: On Media, Time, and the Curious Absence of Riots," a friend in lower Manhattan writes the following (received via my secret e-mail address): "you touch on the cultural indoctrination of the public, which in america is well beyond whatever succeeded in nazi germany. distorted class values are injected into every advertisement, into every program on tv, the medium par excellence for indoctrination. every minute we are unrelentingly subjected to false anti-democratic propaganda. that is what I call totalitarianism because no sliver of reality is ever allowed to penetrate this darkness of the mind. is it any wonder that despite your statistics, people remain inactive?"

No, there is no wonder. Indeed, I am often literally amazed when people DO rebel to any extent.  On the nights of March 19 and 20  2003 in Chicago (big antiwar marches both nights....vast swaths of humanilty clogging the Outer Drive and Michigan Avenue), it was to me surreal.  I couldnt'  fathom the level of protest before my eyes.  I thought I was dreaming.  It seemed impossible, like a wrinkle in the universe.
 
And then, like a dream, it was gone.  Poof.  They all went home, never (?) to return...mesmerized and repressively desublimated by their glowing blue Telescreens and stuck in their more private dramas and pain and pleasure and now subjected to the soothing centrist faux-progressive palliatives of  His Holiness the Dali Obama, Empire's New Clothes. 
 
Corporate-managed democracy, U.S.-style, is yes more effective than the Red fascist and brown fascist variants of totalitarianism when it comes to population control.

And yet... Resistance will shoot up to a degree and in ways that will surprise and go unreported until it can no longer be erased from awareness and impact. The end of history has been proclaimed and disproved again and again. 

I cling to an almost faith-based belief in the possibilities for a world turned upside down.  It is my left-secular version (hardly original) of Pascal's Wager and it is also my related existential sense that without radical-democratic revolution and evolution beyond the pre-history of class society we are truly doomed as a species.  You're a fool to believe, but a bigger fool NOT to believe.

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the irony of pascal

By McGehee, Michael at Mar 09, 2009 09:40 AM

is that his wager was a religious one that was very weak (for numerous reasons*) but extremely apt when put into a social perspective.

the intention of Pascal's Wager was to use fear to get people to believe irrational things, but in the context of social movements the wager is used to liberate people from fear (or ignorance or apathy or complacency) to achieve rational things.

In Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea he argues that if we should believe irrational things out of the fear of an eternal Hell (for not believing such irrational things) then we should look for the religion that offers the most undesirable Hell and believe in that one. Of course there is more to his argument then that but that is the gist of it.

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Re: Pascal's Wager

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2009 22:40 PM

Maybe the chance of revolution is 2 in 10 but if we act on the assumption that it is zero then of course it in fact becomes zero since we then do none of the things required to bring it about.  We lose nothing by believing but everything by not believing.  The skeptic comes back and says "wait, you risk investing your life in commitment to an ideal that will not likely be realized."  In the case of democratic social transformation toward a classless society (with transcendence of other hiearchies as well), the radical response is not just that one's own activism (however defined) may push up the statistical propabilities (however marginal) of success but also that class society (today the profits system) now seems certain to destory the human species in a long-term (but ever more proximate) sense (through ecological ruin if not first through war).  The statstical likelihood of species ruin seems very high in the absence of a fundamental radical restructuring of human institutions and values. Citing this as a reason for revolutionary politics assumes concern about the human species beyond your biological time on Earth and as it happens I've had two 60-something ex-radical liberal white middle class Obama fans tell me recently that they "dont give a fuck what happens to the human race after I die."  Exact quotes identifical - one from Illiois and the other from New Jersey.  It's a fascinating world.

 

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World turned upside down

By Andrews, John at Mar 08, 2009 10:10 AM

Paul

Thank you for pointing me in the direction of your great essay "The Resistance Gap..".

The World Turned Upside is a great song sung by Billy Bragg about the Diggers in 1649; link attached:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stmiyeLsErw

Best wishes

John Andrews

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Re: World turned upside down

By minot, Minot at Mar 08, 2009 11:12 AM
That great song written by a great unsung songwriter, Leon Rosselson.

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Re: Re: World turned upside down

By Street, Paul at Mar 08, 2009 15:07 PM
Thanks for the musical links and info. Check out the Christopher Hill book I linked - a remarkable account of the radical tendencies that were stirred up underneath the great British bourgeois revolution of the 17th century. There is an astonishing Left author from that time and period named Gerrard Winstanely (intellectual leader I think of the Diggers) who is well worth reading today - an astonishingly dead-on proto-Marxian critic of the nascent capitalist order. He is well worth reading today. Probably somem good links off his Wiki write up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrard_Winstanley

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Re: Re: Re: World turned upside down

By Frchristie, Frederic at Mar 08, 2009 16:36 PM
As always, Paul, I agree with your post's essential thrust: Our only alternative is hope, no matter the possibilities. Perhaps I'd put the matter less like Pascal's Wager and more in the idea of differential odds. Maybe the chance of sanity striking the human race without my activity is .013461 and with it is .013462, but that .000001 is worth the struggle and worth the time. I also think Tim makes a really important point in White Like Me: We owe it to ourselves to struggle. It is the only way to achieve redemption and the only way to karmically balance the scales, to behave like the black, brown and poor of this world HAVE to given their lack of alternatives.

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