The Lockian subject in Lilliput

I'm recycling this post from 2005. It is certainly pertinent to my character under capitalism theme.
...

There’s a tradition in the literature about Gulliver’s Travel that extracts the Lockean Gull in Gulliver. The argument goes back to a very fine essay by W. B. Carnochan entitled, Gulliver’s Travels: An Essay on the Human Understanding?

Carnochan’s argument is straightforward: “Lemuel Gulliver, like the mad projector of the Modest Proposal, appears to be a version of the Lockean man.” Carnochan is probably on solid ground in thinking that the perceptual changes on which Swift plays like a jazz xylophonist are suggested by Locke’s theory that the human mind is shaped by sensation – ideas themselves being the end product of an experience that begins
externally (mysterious as that beginning may be) with the encounter of a sense instrument and an object. As is well known, this theory leads elsewhere in the empirical tradition – that moment of non-experience hardening into a thing that can’t be, logically, experienced, meaning that the perceived object must be usurped by the philosopher and put in the mind – some mind. Berkeley suggested God’s. This is a theory that a writer like Swift is bound to squeeze all the absurdities out of. Which is why Denis Donoghue takes the Lockean suggestion one step further,
and claims that what we are seeing, in Gulliver’s Travels, is how easily the Lockean subject falls prey to the Stockholm syndrome. He is continually captured, and continually acclimated so to the point of view of his captors that he begins to adopt it. Historically, there's also warrant for this -
Swift lived in a time when English men and women were always getting captured, by Moors, Indians and other heathen, and were continually shocking their countrymen by converting to pagan or Islamic ways.
In other words, Gulliver’s typical peripeteia is that of a man who goes from one ‘brainwashing” to another – and he gets to it by going through funk, animal fear, and his own tradesman’s capacity for fawning, with the power of the mind, here, being wholly in the power of the powers that be.

Donoghue’s thesis seems to explain a larger pattern in Gulliver’s Travels, until one notices that Gulliver seems much too aware of his brainwashing to be merely one of the brainwashed. At least in the Lilliput section, where Gulliver is critical enough of thread dancing and the like. He is not, however, critical of titles – and no matter how small the Liliputians are, the emperor carries a title as big as Louis XIV’s.

To my mind, the way to get a-hold of Gulliver is to see him as the double of M.B. Drapier.

In the first Drapier letter, the narrator (who is, after all, a fiction) says this:

“I will therefore first tell you the plain story of the fact; and then I will lay before you how you ought to act in common prudence, and according to the laws of your country.”

This is in the clear as water style of Gulliver himself. And yet, Drapier’s
letters are all warnings, and the satire runs to that point. Whereas what is
Gulliver writing for? In the letter from Captain Gulliver that prefaces the
book, he does claim that the book is intended as a warning:

“I do in the next Place complain of my own great Want of Judgment, in being prevailed upon by the Intreaties and false Reasonings of you and some others, very much against mine own Opinion, to suffer my Travels to be published.

Pray bring to your Mind how often I desired you to consider, when you
insisted on the Motive of publick good; that the Yahoos were a species
of Animals utterly incapable of Amendment by Precepts or Examples: And so it hath proved; for instead of seeing a full Stop put to all Abuses and
Corruptions, at least in this little Island, as I had Reason to expect:
Behold, after above six Months Warning, I cannot learn that my Book hath
produced one single Effect according to mine Intentions: I desired you
would let me know by a Letter, when Party and Faction were extinguished;
Judges learned and upright; Pleaders honest and modest, with some Tincture of common Sense; and Smithfield blazing with Pyramids of Law-Books; the young Nobility's Education entirely changed; the Physicians banished; the female Yahoos abounding in Virtue, Honour, Truth and good Sense; Courts and Levees of great Ministers thoroughly weeded and swept; Wit, Merit and Learning rewarded; all Disgracers of the Press in Prose and Verse condemned to eat nothing but their own Cotten, and quench their Thirst with their own Ink. These, and a Thousand other Reformations, I firmly counted upon by your Encouragement; as indeed they were plainly deducible from the Precepts delivered in my Book.”

This is a mixture of the satirist’s targets since Aristophanes and Swift’s
fictitious creatures, the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms, who are very close to making any system of virtue and vice absurd by embodying it in impossible extremities of the disgusting and ... well, it is hard to find one term to describe the Houyhnhnms, although the idea of these equine stoics is both alarming and funny. It is like the most impossibly inbred English aristocracy. And Swift adds a sentence that seems pointed at his own self: “And, it must be owned that seven Months were a sufficient Time to correct every Vice and Folly to which Yahoos are subject, if their Natures had been capable of the least Disposition to Virtue or Wisdom.”

Is this Gulliver sticking out his tongue at Mr. Drapier?
And is Mr. Drapier Jonathan Swift as tradesman?

The satirist needs a preliminary sketch, acquaintance with the primogenitive caricature. And that caricature happens to be the self.

But Mr. Drapier, too, exists – in fact, his fictiveness is oddly blurred by his entrance into the all too real exploitation of Ireland, which is forever locked in Swift’s unwavering field of vision, a thing to see, a raree show of instituted vice. He feels about it … well, as LI feels about Bush’s America. Bush’s America degrades my mockery by casting itself into forms of such pitiful tastelessness, hypocrisies that have been exposed for so long that the exposures are growing moss, bluster that wouldn’t frighten a sheep, that mockery has to seek restraint – has to seek other tangents to make indignation feel-able. If not to reform the Yahoos, at least to relieve the writer's own spleen.


Mr. Drapier’s way is simply to tell the plain story of fact.
The meta-story is that the British Prime Minister, out of every venal motive, conspires to allow William Wood the right to coin money for use
in Ireland. The contract costs Wood money, and he proposes to make up
that money and make a profit by chiseling on the composition of the coin
– in other words, creating half pence on the cheap, which could be exchanged for good coin. This was at a time when the matter of the coin
was important – a penny should contain a penny’s worth of metal. A gold coin should contain an amount of gold equal to the worth of the coin.
Of course, the coins were routinely shaved, by everybody. But to coin them
pre-shaved, so to speak, was to go one step beyond. The intro to the edition of the Drapier’s Letters on the Gutenberg site says this:

“The patent was really granted to the King's mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, who sold it to William Wood for the sum of £10,000, and (as it was reported with, probably, much truth) for a share in the profits of the coining. The job was alluded to by Swift when he wrote:

"When late a feminine magician,
Join'd with a brazen politician,
Expos'd, to blind a nation's eyes,
A parchment of prodigious size."

Coxe [a Swift commentator] endeavors to exonerate Walpole from the disgrace attached to this business, by expatiating on Carteret's opposition to Walpole, an opposition which went so far as to attempt to injure the financial minister's reputation by fomenting jealousies and using the Wood patent agitation to arouse against him the popular indignation; but this does not explain away the fact itself. He lays some blame for the agitation on Wood's indiscretion in flaunting his rights and publicly boasting of what the great minister would do for him. At the same time he takes care to censure the government for its misconduct in not consulting with the Lord Lieutenant and his Privy Council before granting the patent. His censure, however, is founded on the consideration that this want of attention was injudicious and was the cause of the spread of exaggerated rumours of the patent's evil tendency. He has nothing to say of the rights and liberties of a people which had thereby been infringed and ignored.”

If you have not read the Drapier’s letter, go to the intro to get some sense of the controversy, and then go to the fourth letter. That’s the hair-raising letter – a blow against the colonial system, a cry against the infamy, a rush at the system that’s truly in rare company. I suppose Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail is the American counterpart, except that King is never bitter. Swift’s letter begins like this:

“Having already written three letters upon so disagreeable a subject as
Mr. Wood and his halfpence; I conceived my task was at an end: But I
find, that cordials must be frequently applied to weak constitutions,
political as well as natural. A people long used to hardships, lose by
degrees the very notions of liberty, they look upon themselves as
creatures at mercy, and that all impositions laid on them by a stronger
hand, are, in the phrase of the Report, legal and obligatory. Hence
proceeds that poverty and lowness of spirit, to which a kingdom may
be subject as well as a particular person. And when Esau came fainting from the field at the point to die, it is no wonder that he sold his
birthright for a mess of pottage.”

Every blow in this letter lands. Gulliver’s Travels – with its Gull for a mockery – plays a double game with its moral points, making them and denying them in the same gesture. One remembers that the point is the wholesale reformation of Yahoo nature in seven months time. This is Jonah waiting for the fire to consume Ninevah, and being bitterly disappointed that it never comes. Or rather, this is taking that spirit of Jonah and both inhabiting the prophet’s disgust and taking up a position outside it to observe with clinical precision the prophet’s vanity. But Drapier is a character who has been transported beyond vanity. In a passage that was considered treasonable, Swift considers that Ireland is no ‘depending kingdom’ with England, but equal in its freedoms. This casts doubt on the charnel foundation of colonialism, which is currently being implemented in Iraq on just the ground that the Iraqis are incorrigible children and the Americans are paragons to be mimicked. Ireland, after all, was the template for all English colonial ventures to follow. This is the Drapier at his most intense. One wants to say that this is the crescendo of the letter, but the rhythm, here, disallows crescendos:

“For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the
very definition of slavery: But in fact, eleven men well armed will certainly
subdue one single man in his shirt. But I have done. For those who have used power to cramp liberty have gone so far as to resent even the liberty
of complaining, although a man upon the rack was never known to be refused the liberty of roaring as loud as he thought fit.”

Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for the Holocene!

In his nobel prize speech, Faulkner, at his most Polonian, said that man will ‘not only endure. He will prevail…” This may have made some sense at the dawn of the nuclear bomb age, and perhaps these words have to be set as a sort of defiant humanism against a global war that killed 50 million people.

However, the hope of man prevailing has steadily lost altitude over the last couple of decades, and will, I think, continue to seem more and more the long shot. Man prevailing has meant man creating a treadmill of production and a treadmill of consumption that now seems both unstoppable and disastrous. Parents, today, calmly expect the fish to disappear from the oceans by the time their children have achieved middle age. The elephant, the tiger, and the rain forest are all marked down to be remembered as theme park accessories.

As man prevails, he destroys the Holocene in which he was born, nourished and flourished, and he does this with the calm lack of attention with which a person, say, cleans the lint and old tickets out of his coat pocket. After all, the Holocene might go, but at least BP is back and ready for business – and has purchased its first new lease in the Gulf, thanks to the anti-Holocene Obama administration. Which, as we know, will be succeeded by the anti-Holocene Romney administration, which will basically pursue the same policies.

Thoughts of the Holocene have been with me since last night, when A. and I traveled up to the Cinema St. Michel by bus, forked over an amazing 10.5 Euros each, picked up two clunky dark glasses, and plunged, 3-d-ily, into the depths of the Chauvet cave. I’ve been looking forward to seeing the Herzog film since I first read about it, since I am a big fan of caves. One of my favorite interviews, when I still interviewed – ever since interviewing Gregory Curtis, the ex editor of Texas Monthly who wrote a fascinating book on the subject after having immersed himself in the literature (which is, by all accounts, oddly polemical – every generation seems to have a dominant theories about the Paleolithic people that are then overturned, with maximum contempt, by the next generation) and gone and visited the caves, or those he could. Oh, to go from cave to cave! What a blissful idea.

Here’s what I wrote after reading Curtis, back in 2006:

Reading it, we were struck like by 100 000 volts that during the Upper Paleolithic – that wonderful time when there were, max, 150 000 people in Europe, and life was good for around twenty thousand years - the cave artists generally didn’t draw or paint or engrave people. There were your stray vulvas, the masked bird man, many hand prints, but generally – no people. Instead, there were mammoths. There were lions. There were rhinos and horses. Oddly, much fewer reindeer, even though reindeer meat was the spam of the Paleolithic – it was always poached reindeer for breakfast, fricasseed reindeer for lunch, and reindeer pudding for dinner. We are often told how to evolution stories about this or that human habit, but in reality, the way those how to stories are formed is that evo psychologists extrapolate back from ‘primitive people’ of today to those wandering around 200,000 years ago. However, this habit is in serious disconnect from archeologists, who have long held that ethnography of people today, in no matter what state of society they live in, is essentially unhelpful when trying to reconstruct the way the inhabits of the Eurasia 30,000 years ago lived. It is impossible not to imagine back using our PBS/National Geographic images, but what tribe do we know of that doesn’t draw people? Deleuze and Guattari talk of the special faciality of the West – this seems right, on all accounts – but to show so little interest in people when one has mastered perspective, and the expressive character of animals? That seems quite significant. But of what? Well, this is where speculation is dumb, but irresistible.”

My speculative position is that the cave art of 30,000 years ago, with its absence of the human, marks the time when – just perhaps – humans did not assume they would prevail. They did not even assume they were superior, since of course they knew – the horse was superior for speed, the lion and tiger and bear was superior for strength, the bird for flight, and so on.
There wasn’t - I would speculate, in this scene still dotted with other hominid candidates for most likely to survive - the sense that homo sapiens was superior in any department at all.

Given this sense of an overwhelmingly un-human world, the Chauvet paintings are all the more incredible. But I watched not just for the painting, but for something Curtis’s book had mentioned, which is also mentioned in Judith Thurman’s account of Chauvet:
“Twenty-six thousand years ago (six millennia after the first paintings were created), a lone adolescent left his footprints and torch swipes in the furthest reaches of the western horn, the Gallery of the Crosshatching.”

I don’t know why this stray detail effects me so much, but it does. When Herzog finally showed the footprints, I got dreadfully tearful.

notes on the treason of the clerks

Let’s make a square:

Eternal ---------- Partial


Contemporary-------- Universal


These are the parameters of Benda’s conception of the clerk, or the intellectual, in the 20th century. They also fit, to a degree, Gramsci’s reflection on organic intellectuals – which runs counter to Benda’s notion of the clerk - and Mann’s 1919 idea of the Non-political intellectual.

Mann’s non-political intellectual is the most complex case, because Mann’s irony creates odd combinations, linking the partial (German values) to the eternal (transcendent cultural values), which is an inherently unstable pairing – irony, here, is not simply a rhetorical trope, but a shy conceptual synthesis, one that never quite gets made.

In fact, from the point of view of the contemporary (say, the engaged Intellectual against which Benda fought), it is rather easy to ‘unmask’ the eternal and the universal. After all, these two categories are identified, in the end, very much with a locale and a history. They are identified with the “West”, that semi-region that really designates the continual process of Westernization – a process that operates on the agricultural populations of France as well as on the Nahuatl speaking populations of Mexico.

And yet, when the contemporary critique has done its unmasking, one can, from the point of view of the eternal, unmask the unmasker – for what is this unmasking done in the name of? It is not made outside of universal history- it is, on the contrary, an event within universal history, within modernism, and is inseperable from the development of the world market. It, too, is a carrier of Westernization.

From the Marxist point of view, the contemporary develops its sense of the eternal in the concept of revolution, which is paired with a new universal – one that is made after the World market has created, indeed, a world. This would be the universal working class, which is the only class with a real interest in abolishing class – in, that is, the revolution. Again, these are uneasy pairings.

I don’t mean to imprison the topic of the ‘intellectual’ or clerk in a structural cage: but rather to show the broad semantic elements of the narrative of the intellectual as it was put together in the nineteenth and twentieth century, and its disappointments.

insurance for the wealthy, bandaids for the rest

Over at Crooked Timber, there is a short but clarifying post about the cause of the 2008 crash, put in the form of a reply to Brad Delong, who has maintained that what I will call the inequality view of the crash is not true - that is, it isn't true that “we are in a recession basically because of the disppearance of a huge amount of household sector wealth”.

The Crooked Timber post arms itself with an arresting statistic from, I suppose, the Census, recycled through Nate Silver's column in the NYT: "The median American’s non-household wealth declined by 14% between 2001 and 2007. So when household wealth evaporated, guess what happened?"

Although Brian doesn't go into it in depth, he does use this statistic to point out that the 'boom' in the 2000s covered a bust - the bust in income. Which should lead us to some reflection about the policies that were and are being pursued that contributed to that bust.

I have urged the view that it is wrong to view the housing bubble solely as an accident or a disaster - a point of view fatally colored by the bubble's bust. The housing bubble, far from being an accident, was a necessity – that is, if we were to pursue the remedies to the solution to the recession of 2000-2001 suggested by Bush, and that are being recycled, in a more pernicious form, by both Obama and the Republicans in this round. The tax cuts – the most important of which may well have been the cut to capital gains taxes – and the deficit financial policy that was enacted via war spending, an enormous increase in Medicare due to the new drug supplement package, are important factors here. The third leg of the political economy of the 2000s was Fed policy. Famously, the interest rate was used by the Fed not as an index reflecting the real state of the American economy, but increasingly as a tool to maintain financial security wealth - in fact, Bernanke became so obsessed with trying to maintain stock market values, as we saw in 2007, that he pursued an utterly bizarre policy, dictated solely by an attempt to keep the stock market from sliding. All three parts of this policy were responses to the long range crisis, which was squarely and simply one of wealth inequality. That is at the very basis of these crises, and that will continue to be at the basis of the crises as the Reps and the Dems do everything they can to ignore it. Unfortunately, this inequality crisis can only be solved politically – and no political player on the horizon even sees it.

Thus, to understand the recession of 2008, you have to understand the effects of the solution to the recession of 2001. I don’t think the name for the sum of those solutions is “Bush” – the Democrats made no attempt to make inequality an issue, because they had neutered themselves on that front in the 90s. Let’s call it, instead, neo-liberalism. The neo-liberal model is always going to lead, is structurally dedicated to, increasing wealth inequality – for which it uses the government as a backstop, as we saw in the Treasury-Fed program of feeding trillions of dollars to Wall Street in the form of 1 percent or below loans, and as a dispensor of band-aids, as we saw with the marginal increases in EITC.
French political scientists around Foucault liked to talk about l’etat providence – the welfare state, if you like. Neoliberalism does not, as its proponents like to say, break with l’etat providence – they simply change its focus. The state now operates as a Wallfare state – redistributing upwards.

Are the clerks on the barricades this time?

One day Tolstoy, who was at that time an officer in the army, confronted a fellow officer who he had seen whipping a peasant and asked him: Have you never read the New Testament? The officer replied with a question of his own: ‘have you never read the army’s rules and regulations? Julien Benda put this story as an emblem at the beginning of La Trahison des Clercs, a pamphlet that became famous in the late twenties, because to Benda, Tolstoy’s question was central to what it used to mean to be a clerk – that is, an educated person who defends humanistic values. And the nameless officer’s reply, Benda thought, was what it meant to be a clerk, as the intellectuals abandoned the side of the eternal for the side of pure doxa. The clerk now serves a political passion, and speaks for the interests of a temporal and limited group, whether economic, national, or party. The clerk now sides with the army’s rules and regulations.

I, too, am interested in the clerk as a figure, although I betray humanity, in Benda’s eyes, by thinking of the clerk as, primordially, in the Great Transformation to an industrial and market economy, an agent of circulation. On the other hand, the clerk is dialectically riven – both the promoter of those routines that, in the countryside, the factory, and the store, generated a capitalist mentality, and the first responders to the elevation of the level of alienation this entailed. The clerks are the poets of the routinized world.

It is in this sense that Benda’s fight for eternal and against the engaged ‘intellectual’ is not, as it would seem to be at first glance, simply a reactionary gesture, a Christian nostalgia.

Benda started writing for the dreyfusard part of the press – he was published in Peguy’s Cahiers – and his career lasted well into the era of the existentialists, against which he took aim with furious quotations in his long second preface to The Betrayal of the Clerks, when it was reissued after WWII.

So: I want to look at Benda, Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Non-political Man, and Russell Jacoby’s book on the last intellectuals – all in the light of the Occupy Wall Street movement – in some upcoming posts.

Don't let the Fed enact another quiet bailout!

Suggestion for a Occupy Wall Street Sign: Stop Bank of America from Getting FREE US INSURANCE on ITS DERIVATIVES!

And here's today's story:

Ben Bernanke apparently used a rear entrance in Boston, yesterday, to avoid the Occupy Boston protestors.
That's par for the course, as Bernanke and his Fed are masters of the rear entrance.
For example, take the Bank of America announcement of its 6 + billion dollars in profits for this quarter. Doesn't that mean that bailing out the banks worked? Our 16 trillion in loans for the behemoths can be criticized on many levels, but surely we can't criticize the techno genius that resulted in a solvent bank system, eh?
Well, apparently not. This is what is happening before our eyes, from the Economic populist site:

"It appears Bank of America moved Merrill Lynch derivatives to a FDIC insured subsidiary. Bloomberg:

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), hit by a credit downgrade last month, has moved derivatives from its Merrill Lynch unit to a subsidiary flush with insured deposits, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. disagree over the transfers, which are being requested by counterparties, said the people, who asked to remain anonymous because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly. The Fed has signaled that it favors moving the derivatives to give relief to the bank holding company, while the FDIC, which would have to pay off depositors in the event of a bank failure, is objecting, said the people. The bank doesn’t believe regulatory approval is needed, said people with knowledge of its position.

By moving toxic assets, i.e. derivatives, into a FDIC insured subsidiary, gives BoA's Merrill derivative holdings indirect access to the Federal Reserve discount window and also if the bank fails where the derivatives are now located, the FDIC is required to pay depositors through their insurance guarantee. It appears from Bloomberg's report that $53 trillion of BoA's derivatives are being tied into depositors*, which implies the Federal Reserve and the U.S. taxpayer have the potential to be on the hook.

Bank of America’s holding company -- the parent of both the retail bank and the Merrill Lynch securities unit -- held almost $75 trillion of derivatives at the end of June, according to data compiled by the OCC. About $53 trillion, or 71 percent, were within Bank of America NA, according to the data, which represent the notional values of the trades.

Nice huh? Bank of America just transferred risk to the taxpayer with no approval by regulators, Congress and of course the public."

I'm reminded of the scene in Chinatown in which Jack Nicholson discovers that the city has been dumping water during a drought - in the service of a land development scheme, as it turns out. He goes to the water department and talks with the head of it, a man beaufitully named Yelburton, yed there, who tells him:

"Wait -- please sit down, Mr. Gittes.
We're... well, we're not anxious
for this to get around, but we have
been diverting a little water
to irrigate avocado and walnut
groves in the northwest
valley. As you know, the farmers
there have no legal right to our
water, and since the drought we've
had to cut them off -- the city
comes first, naturally. But,
well, we've been trying to help
some of them out, keep them from
going under. Naturally when you
divert water -- you get a little
runoff."

A little runoff. That is what the 99 percent is living through! But the Fed has a beautiful system all in place to help the people who really count.



http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/bank-americas-socialize-risk-and-reap-reward-business-model

destruction is the ultimate luxury

I'm dredging this up from a post I wrote in 2002, because I think it is relevant to the psychology of the Occupy Wall Street movement. And to the psychology of the academic and policy elite who criticize the movement.

In 2002, two British professors, Andrew Oswald and Daniel Zizzo, reported on an experiment in which various subjects were gathered together and given cash, distributed – by arbitrary gift and betting – in such a way that some got more and some got less. Then, subjects were allowed to anonymously burn other people’s money – only, however, if they were willing to reduce their own.

62% of those tested chose to destroy part of other test subjects' cash, and half of all the cash was destroyed by other subjects.

A story about this experiment on the site Mindpixel contains this summing up of the burners:

"The researchers found that those who gained the most additional money at the betting stage burned poor and rich alike, while disadvantaged laboratory subjects mainly targeted those subjects they saw getting what they perceived as undeserved financial windfalls."

The libertarian magazine Reason reported on Oswald and Zizzo's experiment, too, under the headline, Burn the Rich. This is, in fact, not so far from the way Oswald and Zizzo presented their results themselves. Curiously, what the experiment clearly shows is that the rich also burned the poor and the rich. The difference is that the poor showed solidarity – they burned only those with higher amounts of cash – while the rich did not.
That the rich burned the poor and the rich seems not to have impressed itself on Reason, even though, as they correctly reported:
"Zizzo and Oswald found that nearly two-thirds of players happily paid for the privilege of impoverishing their fellow participants. Even as the price of burning went up, the percentage of people who chose to burn other players did not fall substantially."

Z. and O. had labels for two classes of burnings, depending on the rank of the burner. One they call rank egalitarianism. Most of the burners who were poorer sacrificed to burn the rich. The other they call reciprocity. Their thesis is that the rich burners were simply responding to being burned.

"In the case of our money burning experiment, advantaged and disadvantaged subjects may,
because of the existence of the advantage, perceive the game differently. This different game
perception implies that subjects prime differently two social categories, one based on deservingness and one on reciprocity. For disadvantaged subjects, what matters is the fact that advantaged subjects got the advantage undeservedly, and they did not. Advantaged subjects may think not only in terms of deservingness, but also in a different light, namely, in the light of the fact that disadvantaged subjects will burn them. They may then want to reciprocate the favour.'"

But how does this explain their earlier result, that the rich burn the rich? Moreover, hidden in the paper is an interesting paragraph about the behavior of the "undeserving" rich -- those who accrued money arbitrarily (in the experiment, money could be made by betting, but money was also randomly allocated at intervals, thus randomly favoring certain individuals).

"In the twin experiment run in Oxford, Zizzo (1999) crossed advantage and deservingness in a factorial design, and found that deservingness mattered. More specifically, he found significantly more negative interdependent preferences in sessions where the advantage was induced unfairly than when it was induced according to a relatively fair procedure. Moreover, in one condition of that experiment, stealing was possible. Zizzo then found that there was substantially more stealing by advantaged subjects if they had got the advantage undeservedly. One possible interpretation of this interaction effect was that undeservedly advantaged subjects expected themselves to be stolen or burnt significantly more, and behaved using a reciprocity logic, in defending their own gains significantly more."

It is interesting how neoclassical models and ‘rational’ choice has bent the minds of academics, which is the only reason I can think of for calling the rich burning the poor or each other a reciprocity hypothesis. After all, O. and Z. assumes that the rich are the very epitome of rationality. They are profit maximizers. Thus, they couldn’t be burning because, well, they could get away with it. Oswald and Zizzo accord the egalitarian strategy a sequential primacy that exists psychologically, even if it doesn't exist empirically. That is, the rich could be striking in the expectation that they will be struck.
However, one should notice -- or an old deconstructive veteran like myself notices -- the binary which is operating here. While the rich are operating on "intention" -- that is cognitively -- the poor are operating on "passion" -- the envy aroused by riches. Why, actually, don't we think that the poor are striking pre-emptively, like the rich? Especially as Zizzo's earlier experiment shows that the perception of the "unfair" accrual of wealth, which is prevalant among its benificiaries as well as among its victims, prompts further "unfair" action among its benificiaries. I.e., the undeserving rich steal. The unconscious bias of the experimenter consists in this: poverty denies one a full sense of self-interest. Thus, we interpret the actions of the poor, sacrificing to burn the rich, as envy, while we accord a sense of intellectual strategy to the wealthy who do the same thing. Oswald and Zizzo show themselves to be the worthy heirs of those nineteenth century economists who saw the laboring classes as so much betail, so much dangerous animality. An entity to be organized by the police, always liable to filch from the fortunate.

To put this another way -- we think the reciprocal thesis explains too much, is bounded by a circular definition, and is ultimately inseparable from passion itself. This passion expresses itself in the wealthy burning the wealthy -- surely, here, we aren't seeing a response to rank egalitarianism, but the play of pure power. Let's suggest to Z. and O. a most non-Anglo explanation for their findings, one explored by Mauss in his classic essai sur la don: one of the attributes of being rich is the ability to destroy. Destruction is the ultimate luxury. This is as true among Manhattanites as among the Kwaikutl. Zizzo and Oswald might want to reference such classics, in this vein, as various Beverly Hillbilly episodes, the tv show Dallas, and the dot com parties of 1999.
It is such power that the Occupy Wall Street people are protesting. Nobody gets wealthy just to continue getting wealthy – the miser is an obsolete figure. More and more wealth is needed to reinforce another passion, the cruel and relentless passion for power. At the heart of power is the power to destroy. Far from simply being envious, the poor are wise enough not to be deluded by the veil of rationality. The same can’t be said for many social scientists.