[FRIAM] Enamine

Tue Mar 8 06:37:24 EST 2022

Yes, Mearsheimer’s POV is a hard one for me to get my head around, and to describe in some way that would be “fair”.

I don’t want to say it is entirely amoral or immoral.  I think, within his view that certain conclusions are foregone, he has a sense that ordinary people can work out some conditions of living under several different systems, with compensations that they decide work for them, of several different kinds.  And within that constraint, a first priority should be to avoid conflicts that kill them, destroy places to live and ways of living, etc. 

But I also have a structural problem with the way he makes arguments.  In a way, one could use argument of that form to say that any time when any powerful actor is motivated and capable of impact, that motive takes on some kind of legitimacy simply by existing.  So legitimacy gets written out of the framing of questions.  On shorter, tactical timescales, I can see that in a way.  But on longer timescales, when structure can change, it seems like an inadequate and foreshortened frame.

I should try to say this by way of an example, to try to be more explicit about what I mean by “the structure of that kind of argument”.  

CEOs like to piously worry about instability as a risk to their workers.  I largely view that as manipulation.  Workers can be retrained, as the Swedish mining industry has nicely illustrated.  To the extent that they have basic competence, some skills, and productive attitudes, they can move laterally among industries and be about as well off after the move as before.  Not exactly, not in all cases; but overall there is not a good argument that industries need to be locked forever into one form in order for workers to survive.  A society and economy that seeks to protect workers rather than specific job-roles can largely do so.  The ones whom there is not a need to transfer laterally are the CEOs.  Once, in the past, maybe they competed in some fair field, and by whatever combination of luck or skill or talents, won something.  But the river moves on, and someone who is very successful and lucky in one fair, novel event has no reason to expect to be comparably lucky in regular events afterward.  What changes is that they can dig into positions and become rentiers, as the 19th century economists used to cast it.  It is, as the Aesop fable says of the goat taunting the wolf, not they, but the roof on which they stand, that is the source of their safety.  So the main ones threatened by industry change are the ones who are shielded from competition and don’t want to go back.

Yet the Mearsheimer framing would say that, because the CEOs are highly motivated, because their motives can be articulated, and because they have the capacity for impact, that gives a kind of tautological legitimacy to their wishes to stay in power and freeze industries in place, no matter what the cost to those who wouldn’t share that choice.

A country is not one thing.  Russia has clearly identifiable four large groups (at least).  There are the former KGB, not necessarily ultra-wealthy but accumulating wealth to try to re-establish a past government where agency remains with them.  There are the oligarchs, who live as a kind of parasitic outgrowth of oligarchs worldwide, but in a less productive society.  Then there are the populist nationalists going around wearing Zs on their shirts.  And then there are the other several layers of society who could consider Boris Nemtsov a spokesman for them.  Mearsheimer’s expressions “Russia wants XYZ” are, in the sense of decision makers, "the KGB-cabal of Russia wants XYZ", and it can solidify a network of oligarchs and Zs to backstop and facilitate the decisions in which the KGB-cabal are the decisionmakers and prime movers.  That, to me, seems like a foreshortened notion of what “Russia wants”.

Of course, there is another sort of bizarre Louis XIV disease that has bothered me in those who love power and live in academic places as long as I have got to experience them directly.  Even if one wanted to fully adopt Mearsheimer’s frame, it is only sequitur if the next 100 years, ecologically and climatologically, will look more or less like the past 100.  That that will not be the case is the thing we can be surest of, in all this conversation.  But the power brokers, I think, haven’t internalized the view that there are things in the world bigger than them.  In some superficial cognitive way they have, maybe, but I feel like not really.

Eric

> On Mar 7, 2022, at 5:05 PM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:
> 
> I guess Mearsheimer would say this poor guy is brainwashed by his Western puppet masters, or an elite acting against the interests of his (non) countrymen?  
>                                                                                                               
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
> Sent: Monday, March 7, 2022 1:15 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: [FRIAM] Enamine
>  
> https://enamine.net/news-events/press-releases/1333-the-official-appeal-of-enamine-founder-and-ceo-andrey-tolmachov-to-the-drug-discovery-and-scientific-community <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fenamine.net%2fnews-events%2fpress-releases%2f1333-the-official-appeal-of-enamine-founder-and-ceo-andrey-tolmachov-to-the-drug-discovery-and-scientific-community&c=E,1,7_zuyurFyFe4I5VmXYseRz4O1YKW2dXzJUpMFUJ1uKzGzmiajeukuIw86vhfy544XC4ZzJBEG8h2kU7I0OK47-XzUD_mq3Cq3wydLhJscA,,&typo=1>
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