Down With the Elitism of the Intellectuals on the BOTH the Left and the Right

For centuries the intellectuals have agreed that ordinary people suck, and only disagreed about what to do about that

For many centuries the intellectuals—be they on the left or the right—have (wrongly!!) agreed with each other that ordinary people suck—i.e., that ordinary people are the problem because they’re stupid and have nasty values—and the intellectuals have only disagreed with each other about what to do about it.

The result of this “ordinary people are the problem” framework for discourse about society is that for centuries people have been subjected to one of the most sophisticated forms of propaganda employed to make us believe that ordinary people are the problem. The propaganda works like this. Conduct a big debate in which BOTH sides accept that ordinary people suck, and focus all the attention on the opposing views about what to do about the fact that ordinary people suck. By making people take one side or the other in this debate, the propaganda surreptitiously persuades everyone to accept as uncontroversial the notion that ordinary people suck.

Here is how one author uncritically refers to this “debate”:

"The relative importance of nature and nurture, or genes and environment, is not only a scientific but also a political question. From the nineteenth century onwards it stirred up intense passions. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-73) preached a gospel of social progress, whereby political and economic reforms would change human nature through changing the environment—ideas that had a strong influence on progressive political movements like liberalism, socialism and communism.

“On the other hand, Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, made a strong scientific case for the predominance of heredity, which is often taken to support a more conservative political philosophy. In his book Hereditary Genius (1869), he argued that the prominence of Britain’s most distinguished families depended more on nature than on nurture. Galton was a pioneering advocate of eugenics, a word he coined.” [from The Science Delusion by Rupert Sheldrake, pg.192-3]

Notice what’s going on here. The intellectuals have given us two choices to debate about what to do about the sad fact that ordinary people suck. We can try to make people not suck by changing their environment, or we can try to make sure that the relatively few people who do not suck have more babies than the ordinary people who do suck (i.e., the now discredited—by association with the Nazis—eugenics plan that was formerly very enthusiastically supported by intellectuals on the right who have nowadays shifted tactics slightly by advocating ‘population control.’)

And note also that the progressive side in this debate includes not only liberalism but also socialism and communism.

Speaking of which, here’s what Karl Marx had to say about ordinary people (the proletariat and peasants). Regarding the proletariat, Marx in his Capital, Volume I, Chapter 14, "Division of Labor and Manufacture," Section 5, quotes Adam Smith (who was on the right in the left/right scheme] approvingly, with these words about how stupid working class people are:

​​[quotation of Marx begins here]​

In manufacture, in order to make the collective labourer, and through him capital, rich in social productive power, each labourer must be made poor in individual productive powers.​

“Ignorance is the mother of industry as well as of superstition. Reflection and fancy are subject to err; but a habit of moving the hand or the foot is independent of either. Manufactures, accordingly, prosper most where the mind is least consulted, and where the workshop may ... be considered as an engine, the parts of which are men.” [45]​

As a matter of fact, some few manufacturers in the middle of the 18th century preferred, for certain operations that were trade secrets, to employ half-idiotic persons. [46]​

“The understandings of the greater part of men,” says Adam Smith, “are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations ... has no occasion to exert his understanding... He generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” [My emphasis—J.S.]​

After describing the stupidity of the detail labourer he goes on:​

“The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind... It corrupts even the activity of his body and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employments than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems in this manner to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilised society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall.” [47]

45. A. Ferguson, l.c., p. 280.

46. J. D. Tuckett: “A History of the Past and Present State of the Labouring Population.” Lond., 1846.

47. A. Smith: “Wealth of Nations,” Bk. v., ch. i, art. ii. Being a pupil of A. Ferguson who showed the disadvantageous effects of division of labour, Adam Smith was perfectly clear on this point. In the introduction to his work, where he ex professo praises division of labour, he indicates only in a cursory manner that it is the source of social inequalities. It is not till the 5th Book, on the Revenue of the State, that he reproduces Ferguson. In my “Misère de la Philosophie,” I have sufficiently explained the historical connexion between Ferguson, A. Smith, Lemontey, and Say, as regards their criticisms of Division of Labour, and have shown, for the first time, that Division of Labour as practised in manufactures, is a specific form of the capitalist mode of production.

​[quotation of Marx ends here]

In the above passage, Marx is making the point that capitalism is bad because it causes the workers to become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” Intellectuals opposed to Marx invite us to disagree with Marx, but only by disagreeing with the notion that capitalism is bad, never by disagreeing with the notion that working class people are stupid.

Karl Marx, like virtually all the intellectuals of his time and of the present day, believed that the minority at the top of society (the “distinguished families” as Francis Galton so delicately phrased it in 1869) were the people who did not suck, and were the “enlightened” people. Thus in Karl Marx’s and Frederick Engels’s Communist Manifesto, (last published by Engels in 1888, after Galton’s book, by the way) we read:

“Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress.”

Regarding the peasants, Karl Marx similarly had nothing but contempt, referring famously to the “idiocy of rural life.” The Communist Manifesto says this with these words:

“The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.”

Our modern day intellectuals continue the old tradition of declaring that ordinary people suck, and that the problems of the world are due to this sad fact.

A typical example is U.S. News & World Report's article on Abu Grahib, "Sources of Sadism" [May 24, 2004] which informs its readers about the real reason such horrible acts of torture were carried out by U.S. troops in Iraq that year:

"While many theories have been advanced about the forces that tragically came together at Abu Ghraib--inadequate training, overzealous intelligence gathering, failure of leadership--none can adequately account for the hardening of heart necessary for such sadism. So the question is: Are there particular conditions in Iraq today that might shed light on why these soldiers committed these unconscionable acts?​

"The usual points of reference in psychology are two classic studies that attempted to explore the capacity for evil residing in "normal" people. In 1971, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo created a simulated prison and randomly assigned students to be either guards or prisoners. With astonishing speed, the "guards" indulged in forms of torture and humiliation not unlike those horrifying us today. This followed on earlier experiments by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram on obedience to authority. Milgram recruited volunteers to participate in what he described as a study on learning. An actor sat in a chair that students believed was wired with electricity. Each time this actor would give an incorrect answer, the students would be directed by Milgram to deliver a larger shock. As the subject in the electric chair seemed to suffer more and more, 2 out of 3 of the unwitting students administered shocks that would have been lethal in real life.​

"Every soldier? These experiments demonstrate that Everyman is a potential torturer."

You see? Everyman is a potential torturer, i.e., ordinary people suck. I wrote here about why this U.S. News & World Report article is 100% false, and I hope you will read it if you haven’t already done so. In that article I take a very close look at the famous Milgram “shock” experiment and another famous such experiment that the mass media love to cite to make the case that ordinary people suck, and I show that these experiments did no such thing.

This propaganda has even dominated our comic strips. Most famously it was promoted by the Pogo cartoon strip:

NO! Ordinary people do NOT suck. Quite the contrary

Dave Stratman wrote a free online book that opened my eyes to the fact that the intellectuals’ elitist negative view of ordinary people is flat out wrong.

I invite you to read Dave Stratman's account in this book of his conversations with striking British coal miners shortly after the total defeat of their enormous strike. Here is an excerpt from it (pg. 29-30):

This is not to underestimate the extent of the miners' defeat. Certainly in the terms in which the struggle was defined from the outset—pit closures—the miners lost badly. One year after the strike, about 40,000 miners had lost their jobs, with about 35 pits closed. But judged against a larger standard, the miners did not lose; or rather, as Jerry Parker put it, "We lost the battle but not the war." "If I Get Arrested, Send Me Knittin' Up"

Strikers and their wives were emphatic about the purpose of the strike. "We were fighting for the future generation. That's why it were so important," was a comment made to me repeatedly. "It weren't about money. It were about jobs, and about the children." In spite of their defeat, people who had been deeply involved emerged from the strike with an astonishing sense of triumph. When I asked a group of miners' wives the question, "Did you win or lose?" they all replied "We won." I asked them how they could possibly say they had won, after the hardships, after the layoffs, after being forced back without a contract. Kathleen Smythe said very simply: "We won because it taught us the meaning of life."

In this strike to save their communities, people found that they themselves created a community and family life closer than they had ever felt before. Kath Townsend, wife of an NUM member and an active member of Barnsley Women Against Pit Closures (WAPC), commented: "We went on strike to save our communities. The government were going to shut down our pits and destroy our communities. But it was on strike that we became a real community, more than we ever were. And we found that nothing the government could throw at us could take that away." For most of the people I talked with, "the community feeling" and "the solidarity of the miners" were the biggest things about the strike.

On pages 32-3 Dave reports his conversations with U.S. Hormel meatpackers who also had waged a huge but losing strike. Read what the workers told him:

The strikers fought for more than a year, through tremendous hardships. Over 200 were arrested, and hundreds more were tear-gassed or otherwise attacked by police. Many lost their homes and cars. Others lost their health and life insurance and had their utilities cut off. All lost their jobs. Like the British miners, the striking meatpackers understood that far more was at stake than their specific demands.

In a speech to supporters in Boston in February, 1986, Pete Winkels, business agent of Local P-9, made this clear: "Our people are never going to get back what we've already lost financially. We know that. But we're fighting for our families and for the next generation. And we're not going to give up." Since it was precisely the strikers and their families who suffered the economic and emotional costs of the strike, the explanation that "we're fighting for our families and for the next generation" has to be interpreted in a class context. "For the next generation" was a phrase the strikers used again and again to describe why they were fighting, as if these words encapsulated their feelings about creating a future very different from where things seem headed, not just for their immediate families, but for other people like themselves.

Karl Wroczek explained his own activity in the strike by saying, "All the working class people, the rank-and-file type people, have got to realize that they're going down the drain and pull together." The strikers' sense of family relationships and class solidarity were deeply intertwined. Edward Stafford's family has 300 total years in Hormel. "I'm more bitter than I've ever been in my lifetime," at the company and at the members of the union who scabbed on the strike, he said. "But my family ties are stronger now than they've ever been. They know I don't have a job, and they're here to support me. There's a few families that have broken up because of the strike, but that's just the excuse, not the reason."

He stayed on strike "because I made a commitment to be on strike, and I'll be on strike as long as it takes." The strikers frequently expressed their determination in terms of their sense of morality, of doing what was right from a working class standpoint. Vicki Guyette, wife of Local P-9 president Jim Guyette, said, "I hope I never have to go through another one. But if the situation was the same, I'd be all for it. It's the right thing to do, and you can't compromise on right."

Homer Frampton, a retired telephone lineman from Iowa, explained that he was on the meatpackers' picket line every day because "It's the struggle of right against corporate evil." The participants in the strike felt themselves deeply changed by it. Bill Bartels said, "Before the strike we were just workers." They knew that what they were doing was important, and, as Carol Jarvis said, "It's exciting to make history."

Where in the mass media, or even in the leftist alternative media, have you read true accounts of working class people like this?

The intellectuals have erased from the history we’re taught the facts that show that ordinary people do NOT suck. Here are some such facts.

Gerrard Winstanley, born in 1609 and a leader of the English Diggers (a peasant movement), wrote the "Declaration of the Poor Oppressed People of England" in which he said the following:​

“And we look upon that freedom promised to be the inheritance of all, without respect of persons; And this cannot be, unless the Land of England be freely set at liberty from proprietors, and become a common Treasury to all her children.”​

“So long as the earth is intagled and appropriated into particular hands and kept there by the power of the sword……so long the creation lies under bondage.”

“For though you and your Ancestors got your Propriety by murther and theft, and you keep it by the same power from us, that have an equal right to the Land with you, by the righteous Law of Creation, yet we shall have no occasion of quarrelling (as you do) about that disturbing devil, called Particular propriety: For the Earth, with all her Fruits of Corn, Cattle, and such like, was made to be a common Store-house of Livelihood to all Mankinde, friend, and foe, without exception.”​

Here is the "property is theft" idea, long before Karl Marx was born, expressed from the heart of what Marx called “the idiocy of rural life.”​

Gerrard Winstanley also wrote:​

"Money must not any longer....be the great god that hedges in some and hedges out others, for money is but part of the Earth; and after our work of the Earthly Community is advanced, we must make use of gold or silver as we do of other metals but not to buy or sell."

"Buying and Selling is an Art, whereby people endeavour to cheat one another of the Land.......and true Religion is, To let every one enjoy it."

​The peasants were far less idiotic than Karl Marx in calling for the abolition of money (the buying and selling of things), something that Marx unfortunately never did, arguing instead that the moneyless principle of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” could NOT be implemented until the far future when the economy will have been made so productive that there would be no scarcity. Marx expressed it this way in his Critique of the Gotha Program:​

"In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

The “idiotic” peasants and workers in Spain in 1936-9 did in fact abolish the use of money in many places.

"In the village of Magdalena de Pulpis a visitor asked a resident, 'How do you organize without money? Do you use barter, a coupon book, or anything else?' He replied, 'Nothing. Everyone works and everyone has a right to what he needs free of charge. He simply goes to the store where provisions and all other necessities are supplied. Everything is distributed free with only a notation of what he took.'” [From Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives, pg. 73.]

Gerrard Winstanley also wrote about the evil of wage slavery, something the oh-so-clever Marxists who ruled the Soviet Union¹ and now rule China (as I discuss here) are not smart enough to grasp, alas:​

"This declares likewise to all Labourers, or such as are called Poor people, that they shall not dare to work for Hire, for any Landlord, or any that is lifted up above others; for by their labours, they have lifted up Tyrants and Tyranny; and by denying to labor for Hire, they shall pull them down again. He that works for another, either for Wages or to pay him Rent, works unrighteously, and still lifts up the Curse; but they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury, doth joyn hands with Christ, to lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restores all things from the Curse."

​In 1676 Bacon's Rebellion broke out in the Virginia Colony. During this rebellion bonded (indentured or slave) laborers--both Africans and British--united against the upper class large property owners and rulers of the Colony. A British naval ship captain, Thomas Grantham, in his report of how he fought the rebels, indicated the solidarity between the African and British laborers this way:​

"I there met about four hundred English and Negroes in Arms who were much dissatisfied at the Surrender of the Point, saying I had betrayed them, and thereupon some were for shooting me and others were for cutting me in peeces: I told them I would willingly surrender myselfe to them, till they were satisfied from His Majestie, and did engage to the Negroes and Servants, that they were all pardoned and freed from their Slavery: And with faire promises and Rundletts of Brandy, I pacified them, giving them severall Noates under my hand that what I did was by the order of his Majestie and the Governor....Most of them I persuaded to goe to their Homes, which accordingnly they did, except about eighty Negroes and twenty English which would not deliver their Armes...."113 [reference: http://www.elegantbrain.com/edu4/classes/readings/race-allen.html ; source 113 is: Grantham's "Accompt of my Transactions," The Henry Coventry Papers, at the Longleat estate of the Marquis of Bath, reproduced on micro-film by the American Council of Leaarned Societies British Manuscript Project deposited at the Library of Congress; loc cit., vol. LXXVIII, ff. 301-2.]

​Apparently these bonded laborers possessed the idea of international (English and Africans in this case) working class solidarity, in 1676, long before Karl Marx lived and said that working class people received enlightenment from ruling class people.

Before this, in 1524-1525 peasants rose up in armed revolt against the European aristocracy in what is known as the Great Peasants War or Great Peasants Revolt. The uprising united peasants in what is now modern Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Alsace and the Czech Republic. These peasants seemed to grasp the idea of international working class solidarity too, despite what Marx insisted was the “idiocy of rural life.”

John Ball was a leader of the English Peasant Rebellion of 1381, also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion from the name of another of its leaders. Ball was a priest at a time when the feudal society consisted largely of "villeins" and "gentlefolk." Villeins were a kind of serf and "gentlefolk" were the aristocratic "lords" who lived in relative luxury by making the villeins labor for them and pay them taxes and and host of fees.​

John Ball preached that:​

"things cannot go right in England...until goods are held in common and there are no more villeins and gentlefolk, but we are all one and the same." [Life in a Medieval Village, by Frances and Joseph Gies, p. 198]

[Watch a great video about this: "The Brutal Peasants' Revolt of 1381"]​

​Quite a bit earlier (73 BCE), the slave Spartacus famously led a slave revolt of tens of thousands of slaves against the slave owners of the Roman Empire. This slave revolt united slaves from Thrace and from Gaul (mentioned specifically in the limited historical record) and no doubt from other regions as well. This too reflected the presence of the idea of international working class solidarity, more than two thousand years ago.

When, I ask you, have you ever read intellectuals praising the wisdom of ordinary workers and peasants and slaves? They just don’t do it. They think ordinary people suck.

Further reading

An excellent book is Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, by James C. Scott. This book shows that oppressed people typically hide their real values and aims from the eyes of their oppressors (and hence from the general public), and that the intellectuals who typically fail to appreciate this fact draw absolutely wrong (negative) conclusions about the values and aims of oppressed people.

"Keeping the Dark Side of Human Nature in Check—the Paradox of the Mountain"

"Ancient History Shows How We Can Create a More Equal World" by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which shows that, contrary to the "standard wisdom," there were in the past very large cities that were also egalitarian, indicating that egalitarianism does not work only in small populations.

"Egalitarianism in 17th Century Palmares (in Brazil)"

"EQUALITY AROUND AD 300 IN THE PLACE WHERE THE AXTECS MUCH LATER CAME TO OCCUPY IN WHAT IS NOW MEXICO"

Thinking about Revolution for discussion about creating a revolutionary movement for an egalitarian society.

"The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months" : it was the opposite of what the fictional and disgusting book Lord of the Flies portrayed.

​Scientific studies:

Toddlers Have Sense of Justice, Puppet Study Shows (NYT).

In this report of a scientific study, in PLOS (Public Library of Science) the authors conclude:

"We investigated 15-month-old infants' sensitivity to fairness, and their altruistic behavior, assessed via infants' reactions to a third-party resource distribution task, and via a sharing task. Our results challenge current models of the development of fairness and altruism in two ways. First, in contrast to past work suggesting that fairness and altruism may not emerge until early to mid-childhood, 15-month-old infants are sensitive to fairness and can engage in altruistic sharing. Second, infants' degree of sensitivity to fairness as a third-party observer was related to whether they shared toys altruistically or selfishly, indicating that moral evaluations and prosocial behavior are heavily interconnected from early in development. Our results present the first evidence that the roots of a basic sense of fairness and altruism can be found in infancy, and that these other-regarding preferences develop in a parallel and interwoven fashion. These findings support arguments for an evolutionary basis – most likely in dialectical manner including both biological and cultural mechanisms – of human egalitarianism given the rapidly developing nature of other-regarding preferences and their role in the evolution of human-specific forms of cooperation."

In this report of a study in the journal Child Development, the authors conclude:

"In sum, the findings of the current study reveal an important developmental transition at the end of the second year of life when toddlers' helping behavior expands to include empathic as well as instrumental helping. The results point as well to the late emergence of altruistic helping, after other-oriented helping first becomes evident, inasmuch as even two-year-olds find costly helping especially difficult. This suggests that changes in social understanding and prosocial motivation may be closely linked, with other-oriented concern developing in concert with growth in children's ability to represent and understand others' subjective internal states, and altruistic helping developing later, in concert with understanding of social and moral norms. It would be productive in future research to investigate these links more directly, possibly by including additional measures of self- and other-understanding and empathy, as well as by testing older children in situations that require various types of helping."

"We're not as selfish as we think we are. Here's the proof"

The anthropologist, David Graeber, and David Wengrow, wrote an extremely interesting article about the human species and equality/inequality, titled "How to change the course of human history (at least, the part that's already happened)." The last paragraph reads:

"The pieces are all there to create an entirely different world history. For the most part, we’re just too blinded by our prejudices to see the implications. For instance, almost everyone nowadays insists that participatory democracy, or social equality, can work in a small community or activist group, but cannot possibly ‘scale up’ to anything like a city, a region, or a nation-state. But the evidence before our eyes, if we choose to look at it, suggests the opposite. Egalitarian cities, even regional confederacies, are historically quite commonplace. Egalitarian families and households are not. Once the historical verdict is in, we will see that the most painful loss of human freedoms began at the small scale – the level of gender relations, age groups, and domestic servitude – the kind of relationships that contain at once the greatest intimacy and the deepest forms of structural violence. If we really want to understand how it first became acceptable for some to turn wealth into power, and for others to end up being told their needs and lives don’t count, it is here that we should look. Here too, we predict, is where the most difficult work of creating a free society will have to take place."

Class Domination, Social Hierarchy and the Fight for Equality, by Dr. Nayvin Gordon

Altruistic food sharing behavior by human infants after a hunger manipulation, Barragan, R.C., Brooks, R. & Meltzoff, A.N. Altruistic food sharing behavior by human infants after a hunger manipulation. Sci Rep 10, 1785 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-58645-9

Empathy and Pro-Social Behavior in Rats "Abstract: Whereas human pro-social behavior is often driven by empathic concern for another, it is unclear whether nonprimate mammals experience a similar motivational state. To test for empathically motivated pro-social behavior in rodents, we placed a free rat in an arena with a cagemate trapped in a restrainer. After several sessions, the free rat learned to intentionally and quickly open the restrainer and free the cagemate. Rats did not open empty or object-containing restrainers. They freed cagemates even when social contact was prevented. When liberating a cagemate was pitted against chocolate contained within a second restrainer, rats opened both restrainers and typically shared the chocolate. Thus, rats behave pro-socially in response to a conspecific’s distress, providing strong evidence for biological roots of empathically motivated helping behavior."

From The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham https://a.co/ddmpu8y:

“Since 1982, the Ultimatum Game has provided a standardized context for studying moral choices. The game allows investigators to study people’s choices about sharing a resource with a stranger. Conventional economic theory predicted that decisions would depend on self-interest. However, in worldwide tests in more than thirty countries, from hunter-gatherers to the Harvard Business School, both adults and children are spontaneously and routinely more generous than expected by theories of economic maximization. This result makes humans very different from chimpanzees—and probably any other nonhumans. 20

"The Ultimatum Game has two players, Donor and Decider, instructed in the rules by a researcher. Donor and Decider are told that if they play right they will be allowed to share a sum of money that the researcher will give to Donor. All that Donor and Decider have to do is to agree on how to split it. Suppose the pot is ten dollars. The game begins when Donor offers Decider any amount, from nothing to the whole ten dollars. Decider then chooses whether or not to accept the offer. If Decider accepts the offer, the deal proceeds. Decider receives the offered amount, and Donor keeps the rest. But—and this is the key—if Decider rejects Donor’s offer, neither player gets anything. Either way, that is the end of the game. It is played only once, and the two players never meet or learn each other’s identity. Self-interest theory would predict that Donors give the minimum (say, one dollar). Decider’s best interest would then be to accept the paltry amount, since nothing that Decider can do would produce a bigger reward. In fact, however, Deciders mostly reject small offers such as one dollar, or, indeed, anything less than about a quarter of the pot. When they do so, both Donors and Deciders get nothing, as Deciders are well aware. In other words, Deciders knowingly pay a price in order to punish Donors for being too tightfisted. When interviewed afterward, Deciders who reject a low offer describe having been angry at being treated unfairly by Donors. Their behavior is guided by a sense of what is morally right or wrong.

"In practice, Donors normally behave as if they anticipate Decider’s rejection of a low offer. On average, they offer around half the pot. This is big enough for Decider to accept, which leaves both Donor and Decider content. They both get something. Deciders’ rejection of small offers, thus not maximizing their self-interest, is typical of most societies. Regardless of whether they will ever meet Donors, Deciders routinely act by a different principle than economic maximization. 21”

1. A former Bolshevik [who, as a Bolshevik, wrote this in 1922, but by 1937 was exiled by Stalin to a harsh existence in Siberia and only saved from being executed by the fact that he was a well-known writer in Europe], Victor Serge, provides the following information for wages at this time (the following paragraph is partially exact quotes and partially my edited quotes from Serge's book Russia Twenty Years After [after the 1917 revolution], pg. 4-5:​

Hundreds of thousands of Soviet women workers get between 70 and 90 rubles a month (all figures are monthly here), a poverty wage entirely inadequate to feed the one who gets it. Laborers (males) get 100 to 120 rubles. Skilled workers get 250 to 400 rubles. Stakhanovist workers (i.e., those who work supposedly--it's all propaganda--absurdly hard) get 500 rubles and over. A scientific collaborator of a large establishment gets 300 to 400 rubles; a stenographer knowing foreign languages, about 200 rubles; a newspaper editor 230 rubles; miscellaneous employees, 90 to 120 rubles. A director of an enterprise or head of an office gets 400 to 800 rubles; high functionaries (communists) and big specialists get from 1,000 to 5,000 rubles. In the capitals, renowned specialists get as high as between 5,000 and 10,000 rubles per month. Writers get the same income. The great official dramatists, the official painters who do the portraits of the important leaders over and over again, the poets and novelists approved by the Central Committee, may get a million a year and more.