New Vistas in Bourgeois Ideology

 

Classical bourgeois ideology asserted values of the rule of law, equality before the law, tolerance, openness, liberalism, individualism, and freedom.  But there was always a tension between the interests of the bourgeois class - and of capital itself - on the one hand, and the beliefs and values that support and protect the individual on the other.  Let me put my cards on the table: I'm an individualist.  I love individuals, and I want them to develop and prosper.  But this tension that has always existed between the (weak) force of individualism and the (strong) force of bourgeois morality and conformism has produced a complex history, difficult to trace, that has played out in complex and fascinating ways over the decades and centuries.  In recent times, even stranger, perhaps bizarre developments have arisen.

Now there seems to be a bourgeois epistemology, even a bourgeois ontology that subverts individual freedom.

Quite understandably, we are nowadays enjoined not to simply say that anything is "true" or "false".  Instead, we are supposed to assign a probability to potential descriptions and propositional statements about the world.  So, for instance, instead of saying that the capital of Vermont is Montpelier, we might say that there's a 99% chance that the capital of Vermont is Montpelier.  Fine.  But what is a probability? 

I remember when I was in middle school math class and I was first taught probability. In my textbook, it said that probability was a measure of confidence.  But how can you measure, or even quantify confidence?  Well, it said that ultimately this could be measured by how much money a person would be willing to bet on something.  I was a bit astonished, since it seemed like this school book was encouraging gambling, which at that point was illegal, was generally regarded as socially frowned upon, low-status, immoral, dangerous, self-destructive, and so on.  But also this seemed meaningless, or at least not well-defined.  Isn't confidence an emotion?  Can you base a mathematical principle on an emotion?  I asked the teacher about this, and his shrugging response was that it would be better defined in terms of the amout of money a rational person would be willing to bet.  Even back then, this seemed like a fairly suspicious, vague, and ultimately circular argument.  Surely, probability is about something real - and a rational person would only bet this way because that's the real probability.  It's not the probability because they're rational.  If I flip a coin, it has a 50/50 chance of landing heads, because there are two sides that are equally likely - not because I feel about halfway confident that it will do so.  That would be as backwards as if you asked an astrophysicist why stars emit light and they answered "Because you see them."  No, I see them because they emit light, not the other way around.

But if you put these two ideas together (vis. (1) that reality is merely a matter of probability, and (2) that probability is based on the amount of money one is willing to bet) you really get a baffling pretzel of logic, which would lead one to believe that reality is ultimately based on money.  Obviously, that's totally backwards.  Clearly, reality itself (which has existed for at least 13.9 billion years) must be ontologically prior to money (which has existed for a few thousand years at most), right?  Surely, no one would be so perverse as to suggest otherwise... right?

Not so fast.  As it turns out, there are in fact people who think that gambling is a way of determining the truth - and not just a way, but the best way.

Take Robin Hanson.  Robin Hanson is one of the founders of the so-called "Rationalist" movement.  Unlike many people in that movement, he is an academic.  Specifically, he is an economist.  It's pretty strange to me that one of the founders is an economist, because, as I've asserted before, economics is not a science.  One would think that people who are assiduous about rejecting untested assumptions and rejecting cognitive bias would have thrown out the nonsense that economists say long ago.  But no.  In fact, "Rationalists" of the Robin Hanson type tend to be such brainwashed, dogmatic adherents of capitalism that they take the doctrines proposed by economists to be absolute, unquestionable first principles, and cast absolutely everything else into doubt.

Robin Hanson himself has taken this to an astonishing extreme.  He was an early proponent of "prediction markets" - fora for gambling on real-world questions.  At first this was just theory, but now, of course, real prediction markets exist, like Polymarket and Kalshi, and Hanson's more radical followers tend to believe that the results of these prediction markets are more reliable than trained journalists and academics.  

Capitalism was already a social system based on gambling - what is the stock market, and especially the futures exchange and other derivatives, if not a legalized form of gambling, with massive real world consequences for everyone and not just the people betting? - but now we have systems for establishing the truth based on gambling.  (And people like Nicholas Nassim Taleb seem to think that such systems of "skin in the game" are more reliable than science itself.)  

What's crazy is that although Hanson's followers tend to see themselves as rebels against the mainstream media, the mainstream media has started incorporating results of prediction markets into their reporting, as if it were real news.  Gradually, more and more, people like Hanson seem to be winning. 

But Robin Hanson goes further.  He has come up with his own political utopia which he is constantly promoting, which he calls "futarchy".  ("Futa" is internet slang for "fu--ed up the a-s" - I wonder if that is intentional on Hanson's part?)   He thinks that democracy is unreliable and that most political issues should be resolved through prediction markets.  Of course that means that rich people, with greater means to bet, would have greater political influence.  If "futarchy" were ever implemented, say goodbye to the principle of "one person, one vote."  Instead, you would have something more approaching "one dollar, one vote.  Which means equality before the law would be out the window.  

The kind of hyper-capitalism for which Hanson advocates would be the total dominance of capital in a manner never seen before.