A couple of ideas have come to mind recently, but neither are substantial enough to occupy a full entry. But they seem worthy of consideration, so I present them here in no particular order.
Reputational Capital
A dust up between the ADL and Elon Musk in September made me think of the idea of reputational capital, and how many of our institutions are quickly squandering theirs. At the time, the ADL was attempting to paint Elon Musk and his Twitter/X acquisition as an antisemitic threat, although this plainly had no basis in fact and was instead an attempt to discredit voices the ADL disagreed with politically. Yet we were all expected to believe it because of the ADL’s (perceived) reputation as a serious institution concerned only with preventing hatred against Jews. In reality, the act revealed its unseriousness to people who previously had been willing to believe its pronouncements.
This is an example of an institution squandering its “reputational capital.”
In trade, you need currency to acquire the things you want. Ordinarily we think of currency as money, but in an abstract sense, currency could be defined as anything that a person uses up in order to get the things they want from others. In this sense, reputation is a form of currency. And one that is becoming increasingly tarnished for the most egregious abusers of political power today.
All currencies must be earned. Money is the most obvious example of this. Tangible goods for trade are earned through the labor and material required to create them. The ability to trade on threats is earned through past actions demonstrating a willingness and ability to carry out violence.
Reputational currency works the same way. It is measured by how much the public perceives an organization as reliable, honest, and trustworthy. It allows that organization to influence the public to do what it wants because its advice is deemed reliable. Reputational capital must be earned by having a history of trustworthy advice, words, and actions in the past which have been borne out as true and useful. When an organization issues new advice, it spends previously earned reputational currency, knowing that what it has “saved up” in the form of past good advice will convince the public to heed its new advice without questioning it.
Finally, the stock of currency earned minus currency spent is an organization’s capital. Reputational capital is the same. Past advice given that proved to be true increases the organization’s capital stock in reputation. As new announcements spend the organization’s existing reputational capital, they behave like investments. If the new advice again proves to be trustworthy, that expenditure was a good investment and its reputational capital stock increases by more than was spent.
But if the new advice turns out to be untrustworthy, the organization spends its reputational currency without replenishing it. (An organization’s reputation increases and decreases not by the actual goodness or badness of its pronouncements, but by whether the public perceives them to be good or bad.)
This seems to be the case for much of the modern world. Institutions are busy seeking rents on their announcements, in the form of influencing the public to act in certain ways, rather than investing in their own trustworthiness. Everywhere we turn we are being asked to act on the decrees of these institutions, yet nowhere are we being shown any truth or reliability in their advisements.
What these institutions do not realize is that this mode of operation could only work if its announcements did not expend reputational capital. Similar to how most socialists think about economics, these institutions presume the existing capital stock does not diminish and is never in need of replenishment. But they continue dwindling their supply of reserves as each new announcement is believed by fewer and fewer.
We are already converging on a world of little trust. Social media allows pictures and videos to be shared out of context. AI allows even audio and video to be convincingly faked. Clickbait media and engagement farming encourage dishonest claims to be made just for the outrage they generate. On top of this, global mass migration is busy piling people of vastly differently cultures and languages on top of one another. In most Western cities today there is a barrier of understanding between neighbors that is foreign to the human psyche and breeds distrust.
With even our institutions becoming noticeably untrustworthy, it is worth asking how much longer the current state of things will have the strength to remain in place.
When socialists are honest
The science fiction book Last and First Men was published in 1930 by English philosopher and author Olaf Stapledon. The book is unique in that it has no real protagonist or really any dialogue. It is a telling of an entire fictional history of mankind, spanning over a billion years, eighteen successive and distinct species of man, and three planets (four, including an alien Martian race).
By all accounts, Stapledon was a socialist. I have not read his philosophical works, but he referred to himself as a socialist and, when he was called a Marxist he responded essentially that he was neutral as to Marxism, having learned some things from Marxists but not adopting Marxism itself. He was a pacifist and supported the institution of a world government, which I presume would have been major points of disagreement with Marxism for him.
It has been a while since I last read this book, so the details of my summary below will be a little vague.
As the story goes in Last and First Men, we are the first species or version of men, and in fact we are part of the first major rise in civilization of the first men. This civilization eventually collapses by burning itself out with an increasingly bizarre devotion to airplane flight and goes dormant for thousands of years before a Patagonian civilization rises and also falls in time. A handful of survivors go feral for about a million years until finally reemerging as the second men.
The second men appear to be Stapledon’s blueprint for a more perfect human being, given his salubrious descriptions of them. They are described as physically larger and stronger than the first men, with larger brain capacities and longer lives. Stapledon especially describes how the second men are mentally oriented toward the good of all rather than the good of themselves as individuals. They enjoy a civilization of tens of millions of years with few wars or conflicts, little concern for inordinate wealth, and only collapsing due to repeated invasions of an essentially mindless Martian race. The fifth men are an artificially designed race and represent the next collectively oriented species of man and another obvious high point in the history of mankind. Their civilization ends only when the Earth is destroyed and they are forced to colonize Venus, where their biology is poorly suited and they degenerate into lesser subspecies.
It is not until the eighteenth men, who now inhabit Neptune, in which man’s mental powers and collective mindset are so expanded that he reaches a kind of perfection. He is not only overwhelmed with concern for his living brethren, but also for all species of men through history. He develops means of perceiving into the remote past, and the very last of them develop a means of communicating with earlier versions of men (which is how the story of the Last and First Men is transmitted to the ostensible author). Man’s final demise is not due to a self-inflicted burning out as the individualistic species did, but to the gradual change in the solar system which makes intelligent life ultimately uninhabitable with no escape possible. The last man passes his final days philosophically, with both a noble sadness for the ending of mankind and profound gratitude for the time he existed.
Now, socialists are not known for their truth telling, but here Stapledon seems to have constructed an honest stage for his philosophy. In telling a story about entire civilizations, he does not have the luxury of most socialists to simply assert that socialism is good because its intentions are good. That idea crumbles immediately upon being tested, and if one knows anything about man’s nature, this is known even without being tested. To imagine man living socialistically, Stapledon must have been confronted with the basic absurdity of mankind as it appears today living out socialistic lives. Such a society makes no sense until its members are changed in their fundamental understanding of life, themselves, and their communities.
Therefore, Stapledon envisioned new men who could live socialistic lives. His second, fifth, and eighteenth men occupy obvious focal points of his writing with stable cultures and naturally selfless values. That he had to create entirely new species to do so may be taken more literally than perhaps he intended, but I think it is closer to the truth than he probably believed. To him, his new species were metaphorical of a change he must have thought possible in us. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable admission by a socialist that man, at least as he exists today, is not fit for socialism. Thus, Last and First Men could be called a work of socialism, but its basic admission that mankind is not compatible with socialism makes it a genuine criticism of socialism in practice.