Taxing Identities
I have just listened to a discussion between Jordan Peterson and Rob Henderson. There were several points brought out in this discussion. It can be viewed at;
Now I really am not conversant with Rob Henderson. I could perhaps seek his book; but it’s not available at this time for an affordable price. I do occasionally get to read an unblocked substack post—but I do have a slightly greater (not great) acquaintance with Jordan Peterson and I can’t get into it my mind he’s this maniacal conservative he is claimed to be. Peterson frequently comments on the inequities of status creating a great deal of instability. He even has even stated (again in this podcast) that the one thing Marx got right was the concept of oppressor and oppressed. My objection to Marx is slightly different than the general tactic–which in general is that non-capitalism causes the oppression and abuses seen in many communist-type governments.
I hate to tell you this bubble bursting idea, but Marxian thought is not a means to oppress. Russian, folks, is very capitalistic, and very oppressive. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and increasingly under Modi’s, democratic India. China, although still claiming to be communist, is one of the most capitalistic nations in the world. Marxism is actually suggesting the opposite. Marx was more influenced by anarchist thinkers but of course is not necessarily socialistic at all, but like all anarchism, extremely naive in its utopian dream. If we only get rid of capitalism, Marx suggests, then we end all oppression and earth will live happily ever after.
So now I have some really bad news for Marx. Yeah, I know he’s long dead and will never hear my words. Nevertheless I’m going to tell him anyway. Capitalism did not begin with industrialization, even though I agree that industrialists were frequently oppressors. But many were still quite oppressed in non-industrial societies. Capitalism didn’t even begin with kings. No capitalism was practiced by prehistoric communities and there is tremendous evidence very vibrant intercommunity trading networks that go back as far as we can trace homo sapiens.
Capitalism, trade, whatever doesn’t necessarily need to include money,, certainly needn’t include a stock market—but it is about enriching the wealth of communities by trade. The first capitalist exchanges were about enriching one’s community through trading goods for goods, or what we tend to call bartering. Bartering is sometimes considered incompatible with money. All it really does is exchange for the value that the purchaser believes is a fair exchange value for what one has for the other. Bartering (sometimes called “haggling’) can still take place with the use of money as an easy method of trade than carrying my goods to exchange for other goods. Money can be used instead of goods for goods.
If I can purchase something for the price I wish to pay and the other accepts my price as a fair value for what I wish to purchase then that is. Now you may quibble and say I’m not really speaking of capitalism.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary however defines it thusly, “ Capitalism refers to an economic system in which a society’s means of production are held by private individuals or organizations, not the government, and where products, prices, and the distribution of goods are determined mainly by competition in a free market”. And that is exactly to what I am referring.
Most assume this means that competition in a free market has to mean the one party gets to determine the cost of an object in an exchange. But how can than be true, because if the priced is fixed by only one party in the exchange then the market is no longer free, but oppressed. If a company can thereafter monopolize a market and fix the price on an item that someone needs or wishes to purchase then competition also no longer determines the need. If you throw in middle men to stand between the goods and the purchaser, then the cost becomes fixed even higher because the middleman has no role in the exchange but to earn from brokering the connection between the purchaser and seller. Nowhere does the definition of capitalism suggest the middleman.
What the middleman does is present an insulation so the purchaser cannot deal with the producer to determine an acceptable fair value for the goods between the purchaser and the producer and free trade becomes fixed trade that only increases wealth of the party and decreases the wealth of the other. None of this fits within the definition of capitalism as we basically view it today.
But just to point out I’m not alone, this was basically how Adam Smith defined value when he speaks of use value and exchange value. Basically then capitalism, as originally defined by Smith, was what Smith thought it should be,”economic values are expressed as how much of one desirable condition or commodity will, or would be given up in exchange for some other desired condition or commodity.”
So if that is not how we see capitalism as working today, then what we are being told is capitalism may not be capitalism. And it is this view that extends beyond the era of coinage and is how exchange was historically practiced. Far from advocating whatever system we currently have, I view Smith as basically arguing against the system economists now credit him for “developing”.
But this leads me back to the Jordan Peterson, and I do have a relatively clear enough picture of his economic views. Peterson clearly feels many (and even I wouldn’t suggest all) of the economic magnates are psychopathic +++ degenerates that create much of the chaos in the world. And in the end I hope to return back to capitalism and how Peterson totally moves in the wrong direction with his views on the causes of instability after a relative “liberal” interpretation of economic instability.
But from that interpretation of economic instability. I do not follow the rationale of his emphasis on sexual degeneration and identification as related. I might follow the idea better if he framed it in terms of that degeneration (and I’m using his framework here, not suggesting I believe there is such a thing), but I don’t see the connection he is making between what he calls the masochistic hedonism of the psychopath with a great deal of status somehow correlates to the hedonism of identity politics.And of course it is that that arouses the liberal ire against Peterson. I’m fairly comfortable with much of the rest of Peterson’s paradigm of the cause of societal instability.
Henderson didn’t seem real comfortable when Peterson went off on that familiar tangent of his, although he did not verbally object, he just sort of fell silent.
Then they came together once more on the need for stability via the stability of the family. I fully understand Rob Henderson’s position, coming from a broken childhood in foster homes. But Peterson’s view is untenable.
There is just as much instability in the nuclear family, and certainly some single parent families can often be more stable. But family stability comes down to the stability of the parent(s) not to its arrangement. And I do not see identity politics as the cause of instability caused by the decline in the two parent household whatsoever.
If you ask me should there need to be black identities, LGBTQ identities, ethnic identities, I would say there should be no need for them. They exist because there is a need. Needing to identity oneself by one’s sexual preference, one’s national origin, or one’s skin color is the height of what shouldn’t need to be at all because none of that needs to be brought into the light as “diverse”. All of that should be in the closet. Not because they should try to hide it simply because there should be no disgrace in the first place that needs to be brought out of the closet it never should have been locked into.
And this brings me to the point I am trying to make, People who identify as “blacK’ or “gay” or “trans” are rebelling against the tax placed upon them for their identity. They become “identified” and taxed by that identity. Homosexuality, or specifically male homosexuals, wanted to go out and meet or party at a club. Sometimes they just wanted to not be taxed into never appearing in public or having the right to hang together as everyone else.
An off-broadway play was running in 1969, I can’t remember the name, but I believe it was one of the first, if not the first, open plays on the lives of homosexuals. I’ve only read the plot outline, but apparently a group of homosexual men are having a party at one of the group’s apartment and it is becoming a rather somber affair. One of the partyer’s proclaimed, “Why must we are always be so somber? Why can’t we just be able to have a good time and be gay!”
Stonewall, a homosexual and trans club, really had no liquor license. It was not illegal for homosexuals to be served liquor, but the Liquor Licensing Board often would deny liquor licenses to homosexual clubs. In order to operate they therefore paid a bounty (which was not just a tax that lines the police pockets, but from my understanding had been a long established pattern that went originally to bootlegging days that during the Wagner mayoralty continued as a manner to beg money off the homosexual. I’m not certain on all the details, but I believe Lindasy had supposedly stopped it after several police payout scandals had come to light. This is just mostly trying to remember stuff, so forgive me if I have it slightly off.
Despite the payoffs, Stonewall would also sometimes be raided and the workers and patrons would be carted off to jail and pay a second tax in the form of individual fines of embarrassment and possibly cash. Well on June 29, apparently the patrons refused to be herded into the police wagons, and police back-up was called. Once they started to haul the patrons out someone yelled “Gay Power” who had seen the off-broadway show, The chant was taken up and the Stonewall Riot began.
In December of ‘68 I had just finished my second (and final) stint at Tropicana in Florida. While I was there a high school mate from my last year in Stuttgart had written that he had fallen in love and asked if there was any way I could come meet his new love. He was living in Alamogordo at the time and asked if I could come visit. I decided to walk and wrote him I was coming to visit, but was going to walk. But when I arrived he and his beloved had left. His sister however informed me the beloved was a man.
I’m going to admit I was somewhat taken aback. I’d never really known such a thing existed. I had read Baldwin’s Another Country but I didn’t quite get it. Maybe that’s why I never returned to Baldwin for a long time. I had an experience where an older man and tried to touch me once, but I cast it off that he was a really perverted man. I was pretty sure he knew I was male and just thought there was something weird. But outside of the Baldwin book, I’d never even heard the word homosexual. I didn’t know anyone could be sexually inclined towards their own sex, and that’s why I guess the novel had confused me. I knew in the book there was a black man and a white man that were friends and sharing an apartment and there was tension over their relationship because of their different races, but I just couldn’t understand that this other tension that seemed like they were in love. Maybe I’d met gays in high school, obviously I had because this friend was. But if there were they kept it quiet. That’s what I would come to be see as a tax No not money. It was a tax on their identity.
So identity politics, as some say, is not causing instability in society it is simply the attempt of those so identified to quit paying the tax on being demonized into denying one’s identity. It’s a much heavier tax to be forced to pay than any percent of one’s income. It is a far more devastating tax worse than any monetary amount could possibly be. And black people in this country (for the most part) have been taxed in this country just for the color of their skin for centuries. Like the definition of capitalism being over-expanded; the definition of a tax is under-expanded to mean only dollars. If no one one wants to pay taxes in dollars, how can you expect people to suffer taxes against their identity?
Well to conclude the story, I made it to San Francisco and had been there a couple of weeks I believe, before June 29. At any rate, my friend’s partner was running a small hotel in the Tenderloin. And my classmate and his friend were the only staff. The hotel had a small restaurant, that served breakfast and dinner. It mostly catered to motel rendezvous’s for gay men and lesbians and the dinner and breakfast were included with the romantic night. They needed someone to man the desk during times they were in the kitchen and I volunteered (actually he paid me $5 a shift).
On the desk I was supposed to be on the lookout for police or someone that might be suspicious and not buzz the door open if I thought they didn’t “look right”. (Profiling for law.) That evening this guy began banging on the glass door and I thought he was going to break the glass, but instead of letting him enter, I decided to slip the key into my pocket so I could reenter, and go outside to see what was up. He said something about Stonewall and he wanted to tell everyone they were free. I made him explain a little more and decided to let him enter. In was just nearing the end of dinner hour in San Francisco, so he ran to the dining room on the second floor. Although, I’d never seen him, he must have been there before because he seemed to know his way around, but everyone began shouting, doors began opening by guests already in their rooms, and they all began exiting past me. Some had pulled on their pants, others just poured into the street naked. Several others were already in the street by now and more were rushing out of the other buildings on the block.
I put the door key back in my pocket and went outside . Men, Transvestites, maybe a few Lesbians—they were all jumping around, dancing to imaginary rhythms, in all states of dress, hugging and kissing each other, and yelling “We’re free! We’re Gay!” And indeed they were. Probably the most gay they’d ever been in their lives. Maybe the most free.
They all seemed as if the heavy tax they had been had been rescinded.
A little guy came up and threw his arms around me and the kissed me on the lips. A month ago or less, I would have not understood how a man could do that and more than likely would have thrown him to the ground. But you know what I did? I kissed him back.
I suppose it was not really very long before both sides of the block were lined with police officers and the merry partiers began fading back into the buildings. But not before I’d been kissed by more than a dozens. These were not sexual kisses, they were kisses of unity, of happiness, of GAYness. Kisses of being free from the suppressive taxation of their very identities.
I’ve never kissed another man. I never wanted to. A few times I’ve been asked, but I’ve declined. I have no interest. Thoses kisses that night were not because I was interested sexually, nor did they kiss me out of passion. It was all just kisses of joy.
But you know what I also think? Attempts at taxing their identity led to taxing my identity. Maybe I was denied exploring my own identity. Certainly I would not have reacted so violently against the man who had touched me that time. I mean I wasn’t a child. I was seventeen. I don’t want to sound like a super-snob or something, but The Scarlet Letter at ten did not confuse me in the slightest and Another World didn’t make any sense at fifteen because I had no way to comprehend a physical relationship.that I couldn’t relate to the possibility of existing.
I don’t believe I would have explored relationships with men, but I might not have understood my feelings if I had felt any for men. But how can I be sure if the opportunity was denied me. I imagine, since I tried almost everything under the sun (well of course that’s an exaggeration) but I always tried to push myself into experiencing almost everything I become aware of. If I hadn’t been twenty-two years old before I even knew there was even a possibility men could have sex with men, I might have pursued it. In fact I did pursue the thought afterwards. I don’t drink and don’t usually go to bars at all unless with a group of people. But I did go to a couple of gay bars, but when approached I just had absolutely no interest in saying yes. I also had a friend who said he was bi and wanted me to have sex with me. I really really wanted to know what it would be like and said yes and we went to the bedroom. But just looking at him led me torealize I had absolutely no desire to touch him or kiss him. So I don’t think it’s because I have repressed myself.
But if you’ve been taxed to such a degree that you can’t even comprehend the reality of an experience, how can you know for certain? This is not even a subject I talk about.
I don’t talk to other men about their experiences with women Not out of prudishness, but because I feel describing my experiences with a woman cheapens me and demeans me if I have to boast of conquests. I don’t feel any need to prove my manhood by boasting about sexual escapes any more than I believe I need to notch my manhood by having sexual escapades. If they come that’s our business, and if they don’t…love can remain. But the need to boast or conquer just lead me to weep at the insecure feelings of the man that feels the need to prove his manhood to other men about his conquests.
So Peterson’s hedonism and anti-identitism as somehow being a factor in destabilization is simply misguided, especially from an otherwise quite competent psychiatric perspective. I believe he is also incorrect in viewing his so-called hedonist behaviors as the cause of people seeking strongmen to restore order. I do believe people, when assaulted with disorder seek change. But in Iran they want to rid themselves from the strongman and have a democratic say in their lives, while in America, as of now, the strongman is to rid themselves from their dissatisfaction with the state of democracy.
Blaming LGBTQ for societal unrest is no less absurd than blaming black Americans for the death of Breonna Taylor of George Floyd. It is no less absurd than blaming the unrest caused by the Mining Wars on the miners or slave rebellions on the slaves.
When people become taxed beyond their ability to feel respect there will come a point in time they rebel against being taxed out of their human identity that denies the only thing people actually need beyond food and shelter and that is the respect of their identity of being just as valuable as the other.
If they flail into hatreds of those whose identity might be different, I would like to suggest it is only because they have been denied the reward of being recognized for themselves. If women are Mrs. John’s wife and forced to sacrifice her name, or her “bodily autonomy” there comes a point she’ll reject into hatred of men or men who try to dominate her, no matter her sexual preferences. If one has to hide his sexual identity he will hate those who deny him that identity and sometimes claim it is heterosexuality that is the abnormal.
But people can also be taxed by denying others’ identities,when they themselves feel their identities taxed and their lost identities can lead them into castigating other identities. Does the heterosexual man who needs to control his mate not taxed out of his identification as a human man and has had it to proclaimed not masculine if he is not a “successful” provider>? And is not racism a tax that destroys Human Individuals away from having their Human Identity, stolen by declaring human beings are somehow not Human but different colors of humans. And then denied of their human identity, they “blame” their loss of humanity on the person of a color that may not even be different.
While illness and age keep me from the sun, was I a race of blond hair or dark-brown-greenish blues. Was, when I spent a lot of time in the sun, I white when the parts exposed to a great deal of sun were darker than many identified as black? Was I black because parts of my skin not exposed was paler than most whites? Looking at my body, did it not have different colors? Is any body a singular color, even the most darkened person or the most lightened? Is not this an insidious tax upon each individual to deny him his human identity that once denied; in turn, out of being taxed from his identity as Human becomes threatened into needing to be a Color instead of human and who hates the other color only because he has been taxed out of his own identity as a Human?
Taxed out of our identities as an Individual and taxed out of our identity of our own Humanity, we tax each other to recoup our lost Individuality and are further taxed to deny what we have been taxed into losing by trying to recoup against those we cannot successfully tax.
So it is fruitless to claim more stability will come when all the hedonistic people are taxed into accepting the identity of the nuclear family as the only identity. You can not tell me stability of society was maintained when all families were nuclear and parents stayed together for life. Perhaps the nuclear family was so named because they were very fissive in their attempt to be fusive. They detonated into taxing the child to lose his personal identity to become identified with the parent. My nuclear family was not stable, neither was those of my mates, or the great proportion who reminisced of their childhood in later years.
Rob Henderson’s life could have been just as unstable with two parents as with the none he seems to have had. If any family is to be stable, the number of members is not going to make it so.
You are going to tell me the child with two parents won’t turn to drugs or alcohol? You’re going to tell me the child with two parents never commits suicide when the evidence shows there are more suicides occurring from two parent homes? You’re going to tell me no mass shooters or extremely insecure mass haters never come from two parent homes? No, that belies experience.
Stability comes when no one is any longer taxed from their identity; no longer taxed into classes of human kind measured by wealth or education or by any other standard, and no longer taxed by an economy that measures itself by what it can profit from another.
If you don’t wish to call it capitalism, call it what you will. But any exchange that is not based on value for value of the participating partners in the exchange, the profit that one takes is not an equal profit, but the profit of demeaning the one by the other. This is a tax on the individual who is demeaned by not allowing him to place his own value upon the exchange. Once he has been taxed in this manner, his value is lessened by the profiteer and then his labor is demeaned into submission, and then his identity is taxed into not being the individual Human that he is.
The love of the other is demeaned into sex with another. and sex with another is demeaned into owning the other. The offspring are demeaned into possessions of the nuclear family; or in Rob Henderson’s case, possessions of the state trying to atone for their sin of demeaning his mother into an instable personality unable to be a mother.
Taxing is taking from another to demean the other, and what we think of as capitalism, or profiteering by demeaning will always be unstable.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
But I would choose a different term for what we call our contemporary method of exchange, I do not believe it fits the definition of each person profiting from an exchange of goods.
I would call it slavery.