Occupy Wall Street, and Saying Grace on Thanksgiving: What do they have in Common?

The following words were spoken by an Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protester:

“[Bosses] and upper management people who have these top floor offices here, they don’t work; they don’t produce anything. They sit at the top and they count money, and their money makes money for them. They don’t provide anything for society; they suck wealth out of it.”

Another protester claimed that Steve Jobs “didn’t produce anything", but merely “took in the wealth that others produced”.

Now let’s have a look at Thanksgiving:

Thanksgiving started out as a celebration of good harvest. It is an acknowledgement of production. But whom do most families thank for the food on their table? They either thank no one in particular. Or they say grace, expressing their gratitude to God.

Do you see what’s common between the OWS and saying grace?

Both attempt to discredit the real producers.

The premise behind the statements of OWS protesters is that laborers and lower-wage employees are the only people essential to production (as explicated in a pamphlet that was widely distributed among the protesters). But this cannot be farther from the truth. Those with “top floor offices” are indispensible to production. They include the CEOs, investors, and top-level managers, who exercise their judgment to discover new talents, generate the capital to incentivize them as employees, and combine the product of their efforts. It’s only because of productive men like these that we have amazing products in the marketplace, including the technology that the OWS uses to organize and popularize their protests.

Likewise, saying grace attributes production to a nonexistent. It evades the fact that every luxury and delicacy at a Thanksgiving dinner is produced by producers who are unmistakably human. A turkey might exist in nature on its own, but it must be domesticated, processed, packed, distributed, retailed, and cooked before it sits on the silverware and becomes a food product. As writer Craig Biddle has pointed out, saying grace involves an “injustice of thanking an alleged God for the productive accomplishments of actual men.”

How can the OWS and those saying grace so easily ignore the nature and source of production? The culprit is the dominant morality of altruism. Focusing on other people blinds a man to the fact that his life depends on values that must be produced. It blinds him to the fact that production requires thinking, which is not automatic, but requires conscious effort. This, in turn, disables him to identify productivity as a virtue, and a producer as someone who is profoundly moral. The result is to ignore, detest, or vilify the producers. And if the demands of OWS are met, even rob them of their possessions.

This Thanksgiving, let’s reverse the injustice committed by the OWS and by those saying grace. Let’s thank real producers, including those with “top floor offices”, who bring into existence all products and goods, including the wonderful ones on our Thanksgiving table.

Thanks to the Center for Industrial Progress, and Ari Armstrong, for the interviews of OWS protesters.

Watt and Edison Contra Determinism

A common criticism levied against innovators is: “if not him, somebody else would have done it.”

Formally described as counterfactual conditional or simply “counterfactual”, such criticism is used in a variety of contexts: to emphasize competitors, to denounce CEO salaries, to oppose patents, etc.; but, essentially, its purpose is to rob an innovator of the moral recognition that he deserves. A recent example [video] is an Occupy Wall Street protester who used the criticism against Steve Jobs, and concluded it with “To Hell with Steve Jobs!”

The philosophical doctrine underlying such criticism is determinism—the idea that your thoughts and actions are merely a consequence of external past influences. Its product is social theories such as “critical mass” theory of development, the labor theory of value, and ultimately the complete disregard for the individual under Communism.

But man has free will. The very fact that you can choose to disagree with that statement is evidence for it. Innovation requires knowledge and thought. And neither of those is automatic—they require volitional application of your mind. However, my purpose here is not to convince you that man has free will. (If you aren’t convinced, you’re determined to be doomed, anyways.) Instead, I will quote from some brilliant innovators who were, and still are, routinely charged with the “counterfactual”.

Thomas Edison, emphasizing the importance of effort, said:

None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration.¹

James Watt answered the criticism directly:

[I am] not so presumptuous as to think that there were not, and are not, numbers of mechanics in this nation, who, from the same or even fewer hints, would have completed a better engine than [I] did. [...] But [I do] not pretend that any body could have done it without thinking upon it, nor without much previous knowledge and some experience of similar things.² [Emphasis original.]

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, pointed out that sometimes even the innovators feel that they don’t deserve full recognition:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.³

Although Jobs deserves enormous moral praise for being an “insanely great” producer (and for many other reasons, perhaps), I disagree with him on the source of “little guilt”. Jobs is right that creativity requires mental integration. But the act of “seeing” a “connection” between things is a uniquely human capacity. It requires conscious effort, and is our sole means of survival. Thus, properly understood, creative activity can only be a source of pride. To the extent that a creative person feels guilt is the extent to which he accepts the premise of determinism.

¹ As per Wikiquote, the statement was made in a press conference (1929).

² A Plain Story (1796)—his account of how he came upon invention, and a response to his critics.

³ Wired (February 1995)