The 25th anniversary of the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001, will arrive in a little more than two months. Any number of things could distract attention from a proper examination of that historic occurrence. So I begin a daily 9/11 TRUTH post in this space — in addition to the others linking to selected news and commentary. (For the most recent two such posts, from Feb. 15 and Feb. 9, click HERE and HERE. Scroll up for today’s UKRAINE post so far.) — MCM
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“Theories,” wrote Michael Albert* decades ago in a treatise he revisited this year for Z Network, “are collections of ideas that people use to understand the realities they encounter.
“Theories,” he continued, “have one part which describes the elements of reality and another part which talks about how those elements interact, where the latter allows predictions concerning what the elements will do in varying situations. Leave out or get an important element wrong, and you will miss its effects which might be crucial.”
(In that respect, theorizing has something in common with basic accounting, in which getting a piece of data wrong or a calculation wrong — among other mistakes — results in a solution that is way off.)
“Social theories,” Albert went on, “refer to realities of people and institutions, but are necessarily abstract: they do not focus on everything in their reference systems but only on those parts considered important. Thus ‘what is important’ and included in discussion, and ‘what is unimportant’ and abstracted out, become crucial questions in social theorizing.” . . .
Albert gives this example: “A factory owner runs his enterprise according to a certain social economic theory of business. The business produces well, profits continually rise, his business life goes according to plan, and he is reasonably content with the whole situation. He barely notices his factory’s effects on his employees’ lives, or on their families, or on the ecology, or on its consumers. His theory obscures all that, effectively removing it all from his awareness [except to the extent any of it threatens his profits]. As a result, others bear the costs of his profit-taking while he goes unaware of all that occurs outside the abstractions of his business-school theories of life.
“Then,” Albert continues, “his workers strike and he alters his views somewhat by including references to salaries in his calculations. Not the effect on his workers but only on his profits and his ability to keep collecting them. Then consumers protest and ecologists clamor and again he adapts his theories precisely to the extent to which effects on his profit and power gain his attention.
“The lesson of our capitalist’s behavior is relatively clear,” Albert avers. “Social theories are often rooted in self-interested desires. Beyond that they are often blind but nonetheless their users typically convince themselves their theories are not narrow but complete. They get away with this self-interested self-deception precisely because their theory’s narrowness obligingly hides from view, in a sense behind its own absent elements.
“Narrow theories,” Albert goes on, “often nonetheless seem complete because they are logically sound regarding the elements they include, and force their practitioners to overlook what they don’t include by steering their attentions away from the ensuing flawed results. Narrow theories appear good to their believers because they are perceived through self-created blinders especially adapted to block out all that is flawed.
“All of this,” Albert reasons, “can apply to leftists as well as to capitalists. When revolutionists use a narrow theory they too can be expected to create partially counter-productive programs that ignore certain relevant aspects of the total spectrum of effects of their implementation. Narrow-minded revolutionists function [in that respect] very similarly to narrow-minded capitalists. They too blunder on in their mistakes, blind to the realities around them, precisely because their theories so constrain their perceptions.”
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TO BE CONTINUED
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* Wikipedia calls Albert “an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic.” With Lydia Sargent he co-founded South End Press in 1977 and Z Magazine in 1987. The excerpts above were taken from something he published on July 2, “Ideology: What is it, why have it?”
