|
January
2010
The Dynamics of Disingenuous Dialog
© Charles D. Hayes
It’s often said that the quality of a democracy
depends upon the knowledge of its citizens. If this is true, perhaps
the reverse is also true that wisdom demands democracy. But many
years of intensive self-education have shown me that wisdom is hard
won. No matter how much a person studies, or where or how they are
educated, or how many degrees they acquire, each of us has at best
only an inkling view of objective reality—a view compounded by a
bias of expectation and political predisposition. In other words, we
see what we expect to see, and our respective cultures fill us with
partiality so effectively that, more often than not, we live unaware
of our biases. Only when we can recognize our lack of objectivity and
attempt to transcend it can we begin to approach becoming wise.
We perceive what’s going on around us through lenses
of culturally induced metaphor, color-coded for group connection.
Further, it’s an irrefutable part of our nature as human beings that
we often attempt to compensate for our lack of knowledge with
arrogance and overt expressions of ethnicity or nationalism. Science
offers clear evidence that, in matters sophisticated enough to
require serious study, most of us are wrong in our snap-judgment
perceptions of what is and isn’t true. It’s doubtful that we could
even agree on how real objectivity might be determined. Lenses of
reality may be an understatement. Think about it. We are limited by
our individual perception, our personal experience, our age,
occupation, geographical location, and too many other narrow,
restrictive circumstances to list, in a world so complex as to defy
all efforts to fully comprehend it.
A careful reading of sociology and anthropology
reveals that in societies throughout the world, a broad range of
differences in political orientation can be found among groups of
people. In short, liberals and conservatives are well represented
everywhere large groups of people exist. Moreover, human history
demonstrates beyond doubt that both liberals and conservatives are
necessary for the common good and that veering too far in either
direction is a recipe for ruin. From the beginning of civilization,
the arguments between liberals and conservatives have been
remarkably similar. The same issues arise repeatedly, with new names
and a change in context: Left/Right, liberal/conservative,
Democrat/Republican, blue state/red state, public/private, nurturing
parent/strict father. The divide goes on and on. In academic terms,
the divide is often characterized as an absolutist-versus-contextualist
orientation.
Now, if this were not enough to make matters
difficult for democracy, psychologists are increasingly finding
evidence that there is a strong genetic component for our political
outlook. While there is little agreement on the amount of influence
of genetic or environmental factors, there seems to be a growing
consensus that genetics do indeed play a role in our politics, just
as they influence our personality. The left/right range of political
differences among individuals varies from mild to extreme. At the
extreme end, individuals on the far left and the far right view the
world through such a sharply different prism that simple
communication with them can be difficult at best. Negotiating
differences at this level to be effective is painstaking slow; very
small items of contention have to be settled, to the point of
defining the words used, in order to proceed with any confidence
that both parties are even talking about the same thing. Our sense
of identity is so important and so central to our concept of self
that the far left could never accept the legitimacy of George W.
Bush as president of the United States and the far right feels the
same way about Barack Obama. This is why supporters of either
president can seem oblivious to the man’s faults or mistakes
and why arguing with them armed with facts is useless.
I’ve said many times that things are rarely ever as
they appear. As a case in point, the prevailing view since the
Enlightenment has been that we humans are primarily rational
creatures, but this assumption missed the mark by a wide margin. Our
emotions often dominate and override our ability to reason. We are
social and tribal beings. We are relational creatures. That’s what
we do. We relate. And this makes it more accurate to say that
politically we live and breathe the
politics of identity in a much more literal
way than this expression is commonly used. Simply put: We
intuitively choose sides based upon our conscious and unconscious
perceptions of identity, and we relate positively to people who we
assume are a lot like us. We relate positively to our own kind
to such degree that whenever we are with our respective groups,
we are likely to up the ante of our political rhetoric in order to
further coalesce as a group.
For these reasons, democracy is one of the most
difficult of all forms of government to establish and maintain; it
runs contrary to the instinctual tribal ways in which we relate to
one another. With this in mind, you can see why most of the informal
political dialog we engage in with those whose views contradict ours
is not only a waste of time, it’s also harmful. Indeed, the power
that relating imposes on our opinions was proved to me in the course
of writing this essay. Listening to the radio, I heard someone I
greatly admire say that he had changed his mind about an issue that
previously both he and I agreed on. Suddenly the counterargument
seemed more plausible.
To be clear, I’m making two weighty claims: First,
that truly objective knowledge independent of our identity is very
hard to come by. Second, that when it comes to politics, most of the
time we don’t let data or facts get in the way of what we are
willing to accept as truth. We accept what we do as truth because of
our identity, and when we discuss issues with those with whom we
differ politically, we rarely do anything but reaffirm
our convictions with an even stronger resolve. In other words, we
consider ourselves to be in the right based upon who we are
and not on circumstances or the validity of the argument at hand.
This is why a political candidate can say things that her opposition
thinks is outrageous and bizarre and her supporters will think she
is right-on.
Enter GOP political pollster Frank Luntz, whom I find
irritating, delusional, and disingenuous, but often correct in his
political prognostications. In his book Words That
Matter, Luntz claims to favor straightforward communication
with straightforward language. He says comprehension is his aim, and
yet what he does, in effect, is to obliterate any chance for
comprehension by pushing emotional hot buttons with such force that
reason and logic will not be a factor in a person’s decision-making
process. Luntz often fails to see that the things he claims to value
are the very things his work helps to denigrate. That he does what
he does with deceitful techniques doesn’t seem to bother him at all.
Reading between the lines, it appears that Luntz would abhor a
society that proactively produced a generation of Paris Hiltons
living extravagantly off of old money, even while he blurs the
political realties of estate taxes by reframing the issue as a
death tax. This is not the path to comprehension, but it
does enable a lifestyle of leisure for more generations made wealthy
by their parents’ and grandparents’ money.
Luntz also reports some sad truths about the state of
education in America. He tells us that only 27 percent of adults
past age 25 are college educated and that only a very few of those
who are college educated have what could be called a liberal
education. If a democracy is dependent upon the aggregate
knowledge of its citizens, this is a seriously disappointing number.
Democracy depends upon—no demands—cannot and will not exist without
advanced literacy. Liberally educated citizens are the only means of
sustaining a democracy, because rational autonomy and independence
of mind are vital prerequisites. What I see as necessary for
sustaining a democracy is an existential education.
Such an education might well compare to a liberal education that
works as intended, enabling individuals to cope with the uncertainty
of living in a hostile universe without the need to trade one’s
integrity for what appears to be a fleeting semblance of security.
This brings me to relational differences that I’ve
observed among educated and uneducated individuals. I’ve seen
countless instances where working-class parents have sent their
offspring to college with the desperate goal of getting an
education, only to be appalled by the results. They
wanted their children to get an education but did not expect it to
change them in such a way that they would no longer be able to
relate to them as one of us. And yet, if education did not
change them in some significant way, one has to ask
why it would have been worthwhile.
We have a multitude of political lines of demarcation
separating us into respective social groups in America, but nothing
is more pronounced than the knowledge gap. I’m not talking about
formal education per se here, but the thoughtful pursuit of the
humanities by people whose desire to know and to learn takes them
far beyond their restricted worldview. Knowledge is what counts—not
where it is obtained. Educated people and uneducated people do not
have enough in common to carry on a viable conversation, let alone
agree politically about anything of importance, simply because the
way they view the world is so dramatically different.
This contrast is most easily observable in what we
call the heartland: in middle, rural America. Although this is
clearly a politically incorrect observation, I will argue that
people with limited education are irrefutably more fearful of change
and uncertainty than those who are liberally educated, period. In
Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain
and What It Means for America, Patrick J. Carr and Maria
J. Kefalas profile small towns where there exists a tradition of
encouraging the most promising high school students to go on to
college and find careers in big city metropolises. They identify
these young people as achievers, others who stay put
as stayers, those who leave for economic reasons or
from boredom as seekers, and those who come back after
a time as returners. It stands to reason that when
it’s an established practice to purposely urge the best and
brightest to leave their home communities, eventually there have to
be consequences. Among populations made up primarily of less
educated and less adventurous people—people who are fearful of
change and uncertainty, is it difficult to imagine that influencing
these individuals with political scare tactics would be an easy
thing to do? And if rural America is bombarded by right-wing radio
hosts who push emotional hot buttons daily while making listeners
fearful about issues that they clearly do not understand, is it hard
to imagine the result being the town hall meetings of boisterous
citizens fearful of socialized medicine that we witnessed in the
fall of 2009?
In his book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking
Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our
Lives, science writer Michael Specter argues that denialism
occurs when we turn away from reality. Specter says this is not a
left-versus-right issue, but has more to do with getting a grip on a
kind of reality that we can understand. Indeed, the kind we can
relate to. I agree. But I believe there is something more at play
here than denialism. This realm cuts to the quick of the issue of
misrelating, although it clearly is something describable as a
turning away. It represents the depths of human anxiety,
where our reasoning capability is easily overridden and flooded with
sentiment. This gap is the epitome of disingenuousness because it’s
where our cultural biases fester and our sense of loyalty to our own
kind is strengthened. The result can be a caldron of misspent
emotions and inarticulate feelings, where angst and apprehension
intensify with enough force to redirect contrary facts and keep them
at bay.
One can’t dwell in this emotionally unstable abyss
for too long without wanting to retaliate in order to rid oneself of
the kind of otherness that appears to represent a
primordial threat to one’s very existence. Or so it seems to our
Stone Age hard-wiring. As a consequence, our engagement with those
we regard as others can easily become overly emotional. Thus,
we misrelate, upping the ante of our discontent as we alienate the
other and increase our loyalty to our own group in the
process. In this manner, disingenuous dialog can become ritualistic
and, because of the accompanying endorphin rush, addictive. If we
are not very careful, it can negatively shape our lives by tilting
us toward despair and predisposing us to be forever fearful of
change and uncertainty as well as those whose very existence brings
these subjects to mind.
We are an inherently scareable species. It is a sad
irony that humans have achieved the technological acumen to simulate
magic and yet we are still plagued with an ancient psychological
default tendency for prejudice that is easily aroused when we become
anxious and is therefore easily put to use by those who know the
political formula. Members of Germany’s Third Reich used to joke
among themselves about how easy it was to scare people into doing
practically anything, seemingly of their own free will.
Most of us who are fortunate enough to live and
prosper in a developed nation owe our good fortune to the way things
are. That our nation could and should be better than it is, and more
just, rests with our responsibility as citizens. Indeed, if we
adhere to founding principals, and if a form of our government
becomes destructive, it is both our right and responsibility to
abolish it. Injustice and the contempt that makes it possible is
most often the result of the greed of special-interest groups. The
lobbied purchase of politicians is antithetical to democracy and is
thus a practice thoughtful citizens should eliminate. Until we get
big money out of campaign politics, the interests of ordinary
citizens will continue to lose ground to the profit motives of
corporations, period.
Justice in a democracy is about accountability, and
so is citizenship. This is why disingenuous dialog is harmful. As
long as we engage in tit-for-tat nonsense, the worse things get.
Exchanging Internet emails with like-minded citizens about the
inanities of our political opposition may momentarily make us feel
superior, but it does not serve our better interests; it
accomplishes nothing except to widen the divide and keep us from
resolving serious problems with serious solutions.
We must constantly remain aware that reasoning
is much harder to do than relating, and that if we are
not very careful, we will relate emotionally by default through an
archaic coping system without realizing that’s what we are doing.
This fearful response may have served us well on the prehistoric
plains of the Savannah, but it is a threat to contemporary
civilization in a world so diverse that we can never fully
comprehend its complexity. Reasoning with those with whom we
disagree politically by striving for the better argument, as
democracy requires, is possible, but it’s exceptionally hard work.
It calls for an extraordinarily hypervigilant commitment on the part
of participants, who have to care more about solving problems than
about who is right or wrong. In other words, it requires Citizens
with a capital C.
So let’s try to navigate this terrain using a more
reasonable approach for a moment, and see if this
discussion begins to make better sense. Surely liberals whose lives
have been saved by modern miracle drugs don’t think all big
pharmaceutical companies are bastions of pure evil. And presumably
those who drive cars and fly frequently in aircraft don’t think that
oil companies are totally without merit. At the same time, can’t
anyone with a modicum of reason suppose that if the average
automobile emits over five metric tons of carbon dioxide and other
trace chemicals a year, the aggregate number of vehicles on the
planet must have some measurable effect on the environment? Surely
conservatives who rail against government inefficiency don’t think
that everyone in the government is incompetent. To my mind, the very
notion of competence brings forth the mental image of a postal clerk
named Michael in my hometown, whose professional demeanor, job
knowledge, enthusiasm, and cordial sense of humor are traits the
folks waiting in line marvel at. Our armed services are products of
government, and even though they are the most socialistic aspect of
our society, most of us seem to think they do an outstanding job.
How can the citizens in a country they imagine to be the envy of the
world, precisely because it was founded upon the notion that “we the
people” are the government, hate the very thing that makes their
lives possible?
Unfortunately, America’s greatest strength is, at
times, a debilitating weakness. The diversity from which we derive
so much creativity and innovation also yields a surplus of contempt
for a vast range of differences that can’t be reconciled without a
great deal of deliberative effort or a common cause like the coming
together during 9/11 or all-out world war. It seems a hard-wired
aspect of our nature that a tipping point exists for the degree of
difference that we can accept without becoming irrational. The
greater the differences appear between ourselves and those we view
as others, the more we seem to become obsessed with notions of
equity and the more fearful we are of not getting our fair share of
whatever largesse is at hand. One has only to watch a pride of lions
feed on a small meal to appreciate how the world of nature
predisposes the living to stay alive.
There should, however, be no mystery about where most
of the fearful and biased contempt we experience in America
originates. It’s born of political orchestration based upon many
years of practiced manipulation and the use of tried and true
tactics that work nearly every time because most of us simply don’t
get it. Washington lobbyists have practically made a science of
tweaking with our emotions, and we find it hard to accept that we
are so easily fooled by appeals to our worst instincts. The
exploitation stems from the greed of powerful interest groups and
the lobbyists they hire to create a diversion. Distraction works
like a charm, especially on uneducated people—people unaware of the
duties and responsibilities required of citizens to make a democracy
work, people who don’t recognize the need to get involved and
learn about issues instead of standing on the sidelines and
parroting the government-is-evil mantra encouraged and egged on by
the beneficiaries of the distraction.
No doubt Frank Luntz coined the term death tax
to help his wealthy GOP patrons defeat legislation that would affect
the party in general. His motive was not to benefit the Paris
Hiltons of the world, nor was it based on a firm belief that it was
the right thing to do. When we choose sides, the money to win an
election obscures many of the issues at hand. Thus, if greed and
contempt can keep participants misrelating, then no one seems to
notice that engaging in disingenuous dialog is the best kind of
diversion. The conversation looks and feels
like democracy, even though it accomplishes little but further
alienation. Luntz is a campaign consultant and a living, breathing
example that cash trumps both conscience and
democracy. We should ask those who equate money with free speech
whether they really believe that the rich should simply rule by
decree. Such a solution would save a lot of time and effort by
eliminating the need to raise campaign money or to hold elections.
When the subject is an ideological issue, such as
abortion, affirmative action, civil rights, feminism, homosexual
marriage, healthcare, global warming, capitalism, socialism, organic
food, virus immunization, or vegetarianism, millions of people are
unable to discuss it rationally because the mere mention of it
causes them to become overly defensive. Consciously or
subconsciously they deflect incoming data and tune out anything and
everything that they would prefer not to hear. Because our tendency
for misrelating instead of reasoning is so pervasive, more often
than not, the congressional action we get concerning the above
subjects is not based on the better argument, or the moral high
ground, but instead upon whose lobbyists can best orchestrate
disdain or distraction and therefore stifle any opportunity for
settling these issues rationally and equitably. The resulting
so-called bipartisan legislation is often shameful deal
making that has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue being
addressed. To call this process democratic compromise may be
technically correct, but it is also to misperceive the rational
dynamics of democracy based upon achieving the better argument and
thus the most appropriate solution. It amounts to overlooking the
overt manipulation at hand and the fact that reason
has been overridden with deceptive emotional prodding.
Of course, an overly emotional and irrational
discourse among our legislators and the general public is nothing
new, and to imagine that we were once a nation reliant on nothing
but objective reason would be to totally misunderstand our heritage.
American history is rife with raging emotional vitriol by
politicians at every level of government, who have sometimes
resorted to physical altercation. But to continue to misrelate and
to suffer egregious manipulation by moneyed interests, knowing what
we know today about the psychology of how we interact with others,
is equivalent to having physicians bleed patients, regardless of the
nature of their illness, just as they did for decades before anyone
knew any better.
Whether we call it disingenuous dialog, denialism,
childishness, or misrelating, is less important than stopping this
behavior by doing our homework as citizens. We need more dialog
between opposing points of view, not less, but it needs to be civil,
constructive and purposeful. We must recognize that a government
based upon reason requires reasonable people and that
it is the responsibility of each of us as a citizen to see that our
own level of understanding and comprehension is up to the task of
attaining, sustaining, and protecting democracy. With effort, our
default biases can be parked in neutral, our hot buttons can be
deactivated, and, if we are wise, we can be more assertive and
thoughtful than those who would push them. Serious debate in search
of the better argument is a noble enterprise and one we should
resurrect as if the future depends on it.
Charles' latest book,
September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
available January 21st can be pre-ordered on Amazon at a 33
percent discount. Click on
the title.
Click here to Pre-order from Borders Books
Click here to Pre-order from Barnes&Noble at a 32 percent discount
“In the Soviet Union,
capitalism triumphed over communism. In this country, capitalism
triumphed over democracy"
-- Fran Lebowitz
Did Atlas shrug in response to the economic credit
crisis in the fall of 2008? Don’t be too quick to answer. First
ponder this question: Do you think there is more contempt and
arrogance in the world today than ever before? About the same? Less?
Arrogance, by my definition, is an offensive display of assumed
superiority. Of course, to be fair in comparing the present with the
past, one would have to revisit Greco-Roman culture and begin with
all of the vanity and pretentiousness evinced by a long parade of
tyrants throughout history. Arrogance is, after all, a contemptuous
expression of differing degrees of power. But for my purposes here,
looking back just a half-century or so will do.
In 1957 Ayn Rand published Atlas Shrugged,
a novel that became a perennial best seller, glorifying an ethos of
selfishness and creating a cult following. Rand imagined her
Nietzschean fictional hero, John Galt, as a human incarnate of
absolute competence. The novel speculates about what would happen if
one day those extraordinarily capable people holding the world
together (the John Galts) simply walked away from their critical
career positions, letting the rest of us poor fools perish from
confusion and ineptitude. The appearance of selfishness as virtue, a
subject of messianic fascination for Rand, is, in my view, precisely
analogous to the metastasis of cancer cells, whose single-minded
selfish inclinations kill their host and themselves in the
process, even as they excel and demonstrate their apparent
but fleeting supremacy.
Randian philosophy, known as Objectivism,
is seductive in its appeal to young minds. When a rush of adolescent
hormones encounters an ideology that makes biologically
self-centered and narcissistic inclinations seem glorious, critical
thinking stops and notions of superiority blossom. It is enthralling
to think that your innermost ambition represents the pinnacle of
human morality. Yet Rand’s philosophy is utopian in the extreme and
utterly devoid of sound argument. It is instead predicated on her
romanticized view of what the ideal man would be like. The fact that
there were none who met her standards, except in her imaginary world
of fiction, never stopped her from pretending otherwise.
In Ayn Rand Contra Human Nature, Greg S.
Nyquist takes Rand’s philosophy apart, brick by brick, until there
is effectively nothing left but the whims of a very arrogant and
misanthropic individual who saw herself as the embodiment of reason
but whose understanding of human nature was wide of the mark. The
fact that so many people take her ideas to heart without thinking
through their profound contradictions is breathtaking. Rand was a
champion of unfettered capitalism, arguing that it is the only moral
means of trade and that government represents evil. Nyquist writes,
“To believe that entrepreneurial genius and moral integrity go hand
in hand and that only an entrepreneur of lesser ability would ever
stoop to seeking government help is to evince a naiveté about human
nature so staggering that it can only be accounted for on the basis
of wishful thinking.”
It’s not that Rand’s work is totally devoid of
good ideas. Self-reliance is indeed a worthy aspiration, and I would
argue that American identity is to a significant degree ensconced in
an Emersonian notion of self-reliance, although it is frequently
romanticized to the point of being at odds with the reality of
today’s profound interdependence. Capitalism is, after all, as
powerful an economic force as has ever existed. In spite of all of
the criticism it invites, it has improved the lives of millions of
human beings the world over. But capitalism without a safety net is
like an infection without an antibiotic. Rand’s disciples champion
laissez-faire trade but seem unaware of the appalling poverty that
exists in India, possibly the closest example of what free market
portends for large populations. If you are unfamiliar with poverty
in India, watch the movie Slumdog Millionaire, and keep your
eyes on the background to get a glimpse of the largest underclass on
the planet.
Capitalism’s harsh side can be vengefully immoral,
requiring those who benefit most to look the other way when instead
they should shoulder responsibility for holding up a system that
their continued success depends on. Atlas didn’t shrug, but Wall
Street did recently, and it had little to do with responsibility and
everything to do with greed. So, if systemic responsibility is
unacknowledged and is not assumed by those who benefit most, it
renders the majority of the world’s population not only as invisible
but frequently as commodities—a means of eager exploitation by some
of the world’s wealthiest people.
In The Age of Empathy, primatologist Frans
de Waal says, “A society based purely on selfish motives and market
forces may produce wealth, yet it can’t produce the unity and mutual
trust that make life worthwhile.” De Waal points to the economic
disintegration of 2008 as evidence of a trust-starved system
collapsing under the weight of predatory lending and pyramid
schemes. The very possibility for becoming financially successful in
any country depends upon infrastructure, laws, a judicial system, a
transportation system, contractual obligation, and millions of
laboring participants whose daily actions make business possible.
Total self-reliance is but an ideological aspiration; in practical
reality it does not exist because none of us can function without
society at large. Rand’s work drips with subtle contempt for people
who do not live up to her level of egotistical narcissism, and she
ignores the contributions of ordinary citizens whose daily work made
her life possible. Her followers believe that selfishness is the
moral path to freedom. I think not.
Arrogance Fosters Contempt
Today Rand’s novel still inspires an adolescent,
self-absorbed, and self-congratulatory cult-like group of
worshipers, seemingly incapable of discerning the irony of referring
to their own self-delusion as Objectivism. In the fall of
2007, C-Span featured panels of Randian devotees who reeked of
self-assured confidence that they were indeed extraordinary
people—privy to special knowledge and a kind of discipline and
reasoning that exists beyond the reach of ordinary people.
Interestingly enough, the presenters were not exceptional speakers.
Most of them were, in fact, mediocre, which ideologically should
have prevented them from taking the stage with the likes of John
Galt as their ideal spokesman. Moreover, the panel included a former
speech writer for Ken Lay of Enron fame, as if this were not an
ethical disqualifier.
But not for history, we might be content to let
these people dupe themselves as to their great superiority, do the
best we can with our lesser capacities for amusement, and laugh at
their foolishness. A cursory review of the record of human events,
however, demonstrates that militant arrogance, for whatever reason
it occurs, contains the seeds of fascism and the ever-present
potential for inhuman actions. Seething arrogance can’t always be
contained. It frequently shows itself as contempt that leads to
oppression, and if it achieves a cultural critical mass, it will
surface as a misanthropic worldview, giving rise to humanity’s worst
behavioral instincts.
Far from shrugging, Atlas, I suspect, is cursing
with indignation. Not because anything humans do will affect his
ability to hold the world in place, but because humans lack the
cooperation necessary to achieve a sustainable civilization and are
on track to destroy the very habitability of the planet. This goes
to the heart of deluded societies who view themselves as superior to
others: They think looking out only for themselves is not only all
that is practical, but all that is just and all that is required.
And yet, any first-year science student can discern that the earth’s
sustainability, under the stress of exponential population growth,
requires levels of cooperation never before experienced in human
history.
If we’ve learned nothing else from anthropology
and evolutionary psychology to date, we should recognize the ease
with which groups of people can imagine their superiority over every
other group. The Nazis thought themselves to be John Galts of the
superman Arian variety. Or consider the horrific history of colonialism
and the frequent reoccurrence of ethnic cleansing. It’s practically
impossible to find a nation in the world that does not think their
kind hung the moon and that all others are simply too dense
to comprehend their worth.
The ubiquity of arrogance in ancient Rome was in
no small part the same as it is in America today: so much good
fortune for a few citizens, and so much false attribution. Do
you recall any credit ever being given to the slaves who built Rome?
How often do we acknowledge that African-American slaves in the Deep
South long ago enabled the rise of America as an agricultural world
power? People whose inheritance catches the breeze of a bull market
fancy themselves financial geniuses. Of course, some people do make
smart investment decisions for which they are rewarded, but chance
plays a much greater role in financial fortune than most people want
to believe. As Nassim Taleb shows convincingly in The Black Swan,
free markets work not primarily from the skill of
participants but by enabling people to be lucky. One true sign of
narcissistic delusion manifests in people who imagine that if they
had been born in the slums of Bangladesh, they would have pulled
themselves up by their bootstraps so effectively that they would
indeed be where they are today.
Within every culture, we find ideological
foot-soldiers of the status quo, who strive to endear themselves to
those in power by parroting the party line, affirming that those in
power are indeed deserving of their ascendancy. Powerless to stand
up to those who have wealth and control over them personally, these
individuals, both men and women, often mask their own resentment
toward this disparity of authority by lashing out against those whom
their superiors hold in contempt. In a nutshell, their misplaced
loyalty and aggression foster a strong feeling of identity by
association with persons of power and allow them to simultaneously
demonstrate their own strength through their anger. It is a
common-sense survival tactic. People who try to become powerful
themselves by sucking up are for the most part intelligent and
articulate enough to hold an argument in the face of all who
question the hierarchy, but they are careful not to delve too far
into questioning the ethics of their superiors. They deem serious
inquiry into these matters unnecessary by nature of the very
identity of the powerful, so they avoid the dissonance altogether.
Many of these individuals qualify as Rush Limbaugh’s “ditto-heads.”
These sycophantic centurions never investigate anything in a
genealogical sense. Instead they resort to name-calling when their
shallow, parroted arguments begin to break down under scrutiny.
Kowtowing patriots are antithetical to likes of
Thomas Paine, who challenged authority whenever and wherever it
showed signs of corruption. Status quo sycophants are often
conversant in history, general science, politics, and psychology,
but they do not know enough about any of these subjects to make
clinically objective judgments about matters that are complexly
intertwined with the hierarchal powers with which they wish to
ingratiate themselves. They mistake their own emotions for
unadulterated reason. Adam Smith warned about those who try to
endear themselves to the rich and powerful as a major cause of
corruption. To her credit, Ayn Rand cautioned against a collusion of
government and business interests, but her naiveté about human
nature was, indeed, astounding.
In light of such gullibility, it should come as no
surprise that socialism, far from having been defeated, exists in
resplendent style for the John Galt pretenders, whose income allows
them the lobbied purchase of government power in the form of
subsidies and tax breaks, thereby redistributing income upward from
the poor to the rich. David Cay Johnson’s Free Lunch
documents this political reality in precise detail.
The misguided identity phenomenon of defending the
status quo by wannabe sycophants affects both the political left and
right, although there is evidence suggesting that conservatives more
than liberals are apt to relate to identity groups with a sense of
loyalty and blind obedience. The antidemocratic nature that evolves
from our Neolithic tribal inclinations is most acute when it
surfaces as arrogance. This is precisely what people do when they
take up arguments to defend their particular identity (usually
political), based not upon the best knowledge and information they
can muster, but on the belief that their side is right, even if they
are wrong, because, after all, they are who they are.
Arrogance comes easily for people who do not
presume they need to learn about the ways of the world to know that
what they know is right and just. I know this firsthand, as I was
somewhat enamored with Atlas Shrugged when I read it in my
younger years. Like all of those who are fundamentally ignorant but
loyal, I was most adamant in my opinions when I knew the least about
what I was speaking of. Unfortunately, this is the reason young men
will kill others without compunction when they perceive their kin
are threatened, regardless of whether or not they are on the ethical
side of the issue. Identity trumps all other considerations in such
cases, and only rarely—as with the actions of war criminals—are such
examples ever subject to public scrutiny. Atlas Shrugged is a
powerful treatise for the world’s ideological freshmen and
sophomores, and it’s not surprising that those whose egos are larger
than their imagination and curiosity remain forever freshmen and
sophomores after having been seduced by the book’s theme.
Without deliberation, sophomoric sycophants, who
are themselves without real power, profess to know who is worthy of
employment, who is unworthy of medical care, and which countries
should be given or denied foreign aid. One cannot help but wonder at
the ubiquity of the toxic egos that so often accompany good fortune,
causing people to think that they have earned their station in life
while most everyone else is undeserving. How do people who study so
little know so much? Where does the arrogance come from that causes
some people to be so sure of their gut feelings that they don’t see
the need to examine evidence of any kind that takes issue with their
own cursory certitude of global morality, especially when it comes
to matters that suggest their own group’s self-evident superiority?
Regrettably, it’s easy to answer
the above questions. The history of human beings on the earth is one
in which only a hair’s-breadth instant of our social experience
resembles the kind of world we live in today. For most of our
existence we were hunter-gatherers living in small groups. The
familial size of these groups was enough to garner cooperation in
ways that led members to identify with one another within the group
to the degree that issues of whether or not one deserved enough
equity to live didn’t even need to be asked. Still, it was wise to
be very wary of strangers. Today, because we are so dramatically
different from so many other groups, our diversity fosters a surplus
of suspicion and contempt that makes it possible for egotistical
narcissists to easily adopt a self-justifying stance in which
another’s misery is always preferable to their own mild discomfort.
Thus, the stage is set for assumed superiority. We relate to our
respective groups with loyalties based upon the unspoken assumption
that their identity will trump most other reasons for uniqueness,
period.
Young men and women grow up in every culture with
a willingness to protect their group without regard for any reason
other than the fact that this is, after all, their group. Of course
many of us would view it as a character flaw if they didn’t hold
that belief, but this kind of loyalty has to be examined constantly
for there to be any hope of moral objectivity. For Rand’s followers
to call themselves Objectivists is equivalent to a sharp stick in
the eye of humanity. Their Objectivism is self-admiration on
steroids; it amounts to the very embodiment and celebration of
narcissism.
Two decades of research in neuroscience have
removed all doubt that reason and self-interest exist in a
hand-in-glove relationship. More often that not, we respond
emotionally when we perceive that our self-interest is at stake,
precisely as Ayn Rand did, lashing out whenever her views were
challenged. Science tells us we often relate when we think we are
reasoning. The very notion of self-interest rests in emotional
subjectivism that, without a great deal of introspection, serves as
an obstacle to reason. Not to mention the ubiquitous prevalence of
self-deception when emotional matters are in play. In discussions
about economics, the unacknowledged reality that seldom receives
public attention is that, when all is said and done, most of the
things we value near the end of our lives have very little to do
with the notion of profit.
The Dark Side of Capitalism
Ayn Rand’s followers prize capitalism as the arrow
of virtue because they identify with it, regardless of whether or
not they actually qualify as successful capitalists. That they are
on the same side as the powerful is comforting. It gives them a
borrowed sense of identity and a sense of security, albeit a false
one, since the powerful will step on them without compunction if
they deem it necessary. No doubt, capitalism is a powerful force.
But it can also be antithetical to democracy, especially when
privileged people believe themselves to be the only folks worthy of
a say in what matters. Nor does it matter to Randian disciples that
crony capitalism is antithetical to equal opportunity. People
deluded to the point of viewing themselves as naturally superior
don’t really believe in equal opportunity to begin with.
One thing, though, that does ring true in the John
Galt fantasy is that the world is suffering egregious incompetence.
The irony is that this is due in large part to the ill-informed
decisions of people who think themselves superior at the outset.
With fanatical fervor, neoconservatives and supply-side zealots,
regardless of what they think of Ayn Rand (and there have long been
ideological differences between Libertarians and Objectivists), have
internalized the idea that they live and breathe virtue and that
lower and lower taxes will enable them to put the world on a track
for sustained excellence. Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan
Greenspan, himself an admitted Ayn Rand disciple who used to be part
of Rand’s inner circle, twiddled his thumbs while his compatriots’
greed made a shambles out of the home mortgage industry. Greenspan
clearly had the power to influence if not stem the deplorable tide
of corruption, and his excuse of having been the casualty of
unstoppable global forces is true to form. It’s indeed typical
that people who view themselves as being extraordinarily competent
and powerful seem incapable of accepting personal responsibility
when things go awry. As far as most will go when things fall apart,
is to say, “Mistakes were made.” More recently Greenspan threw up
his hands by admitting that some of his fundamental beliefs
undergirding his economic philosophy were simply wrong.
Read between the lines of cultural criticism
today, and you will find a growing consensus from the political
left, right, and center that America’s middle class is on a fast
track to the bottom. Income inequality is off the charts. Our
reputation as a nation of enviable integrity has been all but
destroyed by the actions of the 2001-2009 Bush Administration. The
world over, every avenue of human endeavor with regard to the
biological health of the planet portends doom. And yet, there are
still folks among us who are so smug and deluded in their
self-serving certitude, they are convinced that nothing serves the
future better than their own unbridled self-interest.
History is crystal clear that capitalism and
government collusion is an unholy alliance and that without constant
vigilance, corruption and oppressive policies are inevitable. Ayn
Rand’s idealized, superior fictional businesspersons abhorred
government subsidies, which in the real world of business shows that
Atlas Shrugged is at best naïve and at worst a work of
fantasy that stretches credulity. If our laws allow for oppressive
business practices, such as obscene interest rates for credit cards,
then, in effect, oppression is franchised for the unethical.
Abraham Maslow once reasoned that if the only tool
you have is a hammer then everything begins to look like a nail. In
similar fashion, if the only human consideration that runs through
one’s head is one’s own ego-centered self-interest, then henceforth
everything in the known universe is bound by nature to revolve
around oneself. If, like a cymbal struck with a drummer’s stick,
one’s head reverberates with nothing but self-inclinations, then
it’s easy to imagine oneself going through life with answers that
escape everyone else. If you simply see to your own needs and wants
with enough self-justifying force, then the rest of the world will
be pulled kicking and screaming to their own good in the wake of
your generous efforts. Or so you believe.
As Jeff Walker demonstrates in his book Ayn
Rand Cult, Rand did not walk her talk. Her biography illustrates
that she thought rules did not apply to her. She was a tyrant who
demanded political correctness and ruled her group of admirers with
an iron fist, many of whom she did not respect. She was generous
with vicious derision for those who dared question the legitimacy of
her whim-driven philosophy. She declared herself to be an equal to
Aristotle, and yet, as Walker shows in detail, she was incapable of
arguing beginner philosophy without sophomoric blunder. Rand’s
Objectivism is a fundamental misreading of Darwinism and a colossal
misunderstanding of the broad anthropological and psychological
requirements for human existence. By Rand’s measure, cancer cells
emulate perfection. Rand’s followers view themselves as fervently
rational, even as they rely on adolescent emotions to sustain their
imagined superiority. They decry the breakdown of family values,
championing unfettered consumerism without discerning a connection
that the worship of the business ethos, in which trillions of
dollars are spent to over-inflate desire, has a negative
psychological effect on the very things they pretend to revere.
That’s what cancer is: single-mindedness with a
blatant disregard for consequences. If overly ambitious cells kill
their host, so what? If greedy fishermen deplete their fishery to
the point of extinction, what’s the big deal as long as they are
employed? If entrepreneurs foul the air and poison water in the
pursuit of profit but are successful in providing jobs, what’s the
problem? If Wall Street’s best and brightest mortgage the future
with worthless paper, why the fuss? Are they not still deemed
winners worthy of extraordinary bonuses?
Capitalism without regard for consequences is
cancerous; if profit is the only thing that matters, as Rand
claimed in a forty-page opus to selfishness in Atlas Shrugged,
then to Atlas humans are just another form of temporary malignancy,
to be endured for a time, shrugged off and forgotten. Complain
though, to those who view themselves by nature of their ideology as
the only real Americans, as Objectivists do, and they are quick to
say it’s all about freedom. They are half right. Capitalism
minus thoughtful intelligence is freedom from responsibility.
Objectivism is responsibility at the cell level only—too bad about
the dead host, not to mention the inevitable suicide for the
aggressor cells. Too bad we have reached a point in history where
the very fate of the planet depends upon heretofore unheard of
levels of cooperation both locally and globally, but selfishness is
where it’s at, say Rand’s sycophants. And if one dares object to the
Objectivists, then one is at best an un-American, tree-hugging
socialist and, at worst, the very incarnation of evil. The good side
of capitalism results in sustainable equity; the bad side in
sophomoric idealists lacking the thoughtfulness needed to become
responsible adults in a complicated world.
No, Atlas has not shrugged to get the incompetents
off his back. Instead, he wails in frustration that the weight of
narcissism never lessens but rises exponentially in spite of the
growth of knowledge in the science of human behavior. There is
indeed something exceptional about people who think of themselves as
untainted examples of pure reason. What’s so extraordinary is their
sophistication at disguising their narcissism as objective
self-interest when it really amounts to grandiose
self-delusion.
In many ways, we are a more moral society today
than we have ever been. We have, though, beaten the notion of
self-interest nearly to death. We still endure the same
arguments, changing the names and players, but the dilemma always
reverts to the inherent good or ill thought to reside in the implied
virtue of unfettered capitalism, as if there really were such
a thing. Stated more simply, citizen versus consumer means
you versus you or me versus me. It’s a paradox, a
double-edged sword: making things better and worse for us at the
same time. Low price equals a bargain; low wages equal a raw deal.
But for the fact that our culture is predicated on consumers, and
not on citizens per se, we might be able to conclude that some of
the most important things in life cannot be left to economics. A
nation that cannot enlist enough goodwill to see that those at the
bottom economically receive adequate healthcare without the majority
whining about freeloaders is a nation too weak intellectually to
sustain itself long-term and too morally deficient to lay claim to
any purpose other than greed.
We grow up eager to believe that the world
revolves around us, and we perceive erroneously that whatever
actions we take as individuals serve as proof of our deservedness.
If we receive the gift of a bicycle, we are inclined to believe that
pedaling demonstrates we’ve earned it. Those who perform their jobs
poorly are often the most vociferous about the lack of initiative of
the unemployed. The notion that our uninhibited self-interest is the
Holy Grail upon which the world depends for meaningful sustenance is
intoxicating to minds insufficiently developed to see the absurdity
of an ideology modeled on malignancy.
Louis Brandeis once said something to the effect
that we can have a nation with most of its wealth in the hands of a
few, or we can have democracy, but we can’t have both. By far the
most disappointing aspect of the American middle class is that so
many have so little regard for people less fortunate than
themselves. More than one-fifth of the world’s population lives in
wretched poverty, yet for the most part, to Americans at-large,
these people are invisible. Still, there is a catch. As the
undeveloped nations of the world increasingly live by slave wages,
Americans without political and economic power and equity find their
own compensation for work in slow-motion freefall. Simply stated, if
we see ourselves as consumers first and citizens second, we set our
own course for serfdom.
Government As the Embodiment of Evil
Just before the home mortgage meltdown began in
2008, American income demographics were rapidly approaching the
rates of inequality experienced in the 1920s. Now the disparity may
be even worse because too many of those without much to lose have
lost it all. America’s middle class is not the work of an army of
John Galts; it’s a practical third-base society put in place by
progressive tax policies after the economy hit bottom in the 1930s.
It has been unraveling since the 1970s as supply-side zealots
advocated the elimination of a social safety net under the misguided
notion that triples and home runs are all they themselves are
capable of hitting.
To gain power, politicians often play to our worst
instincts with regard to social class by pitting one group against
another. Through demagoguery Ronald Reagan vilified government, even
as he expanded his administration exponentially, and even as he was
the head of government. Were it not so pitiful and predicable, we
might consider it an act of genius on the part of the financial
elite to turn those near the bottom economic rungs of society
against their own government—government being perhaps the only hope
they might have of gaining financial equity through fair wages and
just labor practices. Worse still, is the ease with which
politicians change the subject to issues like what horrors gay
marriage might bring, or runaway flag burning.
We don’t have universal healthcare in this country
because of a surplus of contempt resulting from ethnocentric and
class differences. Had it not been for the hatred of
African-Americans by bigots in the South, we would have had
universal healthcare under Harry Truman. There was a great feeling
of togetherness then from having lived through a shared wartime
sacrifice. The South wanted universal healthcare, but not if it
meant black people were going to get it too.
When I hear people whine about class warfare in
discussions on economic inequality, I say it’s class warfare all
right, and it’s being waged by John Galt pretenders, who confuse
their own ignorance with virtue, their own intentions with
competence, and whose egotism dressed up as superiority is as
undeserved as it is phony. These folks brought us derivatives and
financial paper based upon more and more distancing instruments
until the genealogy of ownership has to be unraveled by attorneys,
who themselves can find no one responsible when the house of cards
collapses of the weight of its own illegitimacy. As for those who
react with shock at the suggestion that to criticize such actions
begets notions of class warfare, one would have to wonder if they
are completely ignorant of our dreaded history of class
divisiveness.
America’s third-base middle class was a purposeful
effort. John Galt didn’t do it. Progressive tax policies enacted
with the surplus of goodwill left over from the war effort in the
1940s led the way. The GI Bill enabled thousands of returning
soldiers to go to college and made possible the purchase of
affordable homes. Millions of average people with good work habits
and purposeful goals made real what would come to be known as the
American Dream. Historians often remind us that all nations crumble
in time, and more often than not arrogance and contempt are major
contributors to what brings them down. We are not suffering today
from the overindulgence of the poor, but from the excess greed of
John Galt pretenders. Looting corporations from the top down is
viewed as a Wall Street entitlement by the participants. The
question that I find haunting is how the general public became so
dull witted as to accept the view that executive pay at five
hundred, a thousand, or fifteen hundred times or greater than that
of an hourly worker is anything but felony theft.
If Atlas shrugs at all these days, it’s likely
from disgust over the grand display of aggressive arrogance
presented as virtue by individuals who think themselves superior for
no better reason than they think it so and who share this view with
others willing to reciprocate the notion. To answer the frequent
question in Rand’s novel, “Who is John Galt?” in light of
twenty-first-century economics, future historians will likely recall
that in our time he was a greed-driven fool. In his 1776 pamphlet
Common Sense, Thomas Paine observed that while avarice may keep
one from being poor, it is likely to make one too timorous to be
wealthy. To my mind, it seems a fair warning of the kind of
sentiment that keeps a country from achieving true greatness.
In a
television interview some months ago, former national security advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski referred to host Joe Scarborough’s knowledge of the
foreign policy matter under discussion at the time as stunningly
superficial. Stunningly superficial is a near perfect
description of the whole government-is-the-enemy rhetoric of the
past three decades. And what more needs to be said of individuals
who champion democracy as patriots and then in their next
breath despise the very process that makes it possible? These are
the people who do everything in their power to dismantle government
and then use its diminished capacity as proof that it should have
been eliminated in the first place. It’s the same mentality that
warrants creating an educational system too expensive to ensure
everyone a good education and then holds uneducated people’s lack of
knowledge against them as evidence that they did not deserve to be
educated. It’s the same shallow reasoning that enables thoughtless
people to imagine the whole world exists simply to acknowledge the
virtue that they exude without effort and that every other group on
the planet is missing by genetic design. It’s classic partisan
conservatism, Karl Rove-brand, immoral, intellectually bankrupt, and
stunningly superficial.
Actually, there may be something
interesting at play here. In her fascinating book Evil Genes,
Barbara Oakley describes a particular personality type as
Machiavellian: a person whose narcissism combines with subtle
cognitive and emotional disturbances in a way that makes him believe
that achieving his own desires, and his alone, is a “genuinely
beneficial—even altruistic—activity.” It’s Objectivism personified,
and it fits to a tee the current-day blather of conservative talk
radio.
“You cannot legislate the poor
into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom. What one
person receives without working for, another person must work for
without receiving,” said the late Baptist minister Adrian Rogers,
along with such hot air as, “You cannot multiply wealth by dividing
it.” People like Rogers, who defend rampant inequality by spouting
this kind of stunningly superficial nonsense, seem oblivious to the
expectation of prerogative that Wall Street insiders demonstrate
with a level of privileged entitlement unknown to the poor. After
the recent irresponsible bonus-grabbing behavior of Wall Street
executives, whose companies were bailed out by taxpayers’ money, we
should never use the word entitlement pejoratively again with
regard to the poor; the rich have reclaimed it.
In 1969, in An Essay on
Liberation, philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote, “The entire realm
of competitive performances and standardized fun, all the symbols of
status, prestige, power, of advertised virility and charm, of
commercialized beauty–this entire realm kills in its citizens the
very disposition, the organs, for the alternative: freedom without
exploitation.” One can only wonder what Marcuse would think of
today’s reality television as it thrives on public humiliation for
profit. It would seem to have indeed become standardized fun.
Saul Bellow once said that
people learn to hate the very things that make their lives possible.
Every time I mention his assertion, people take strong exception to
it. But why then do so many people hate the government? The
governmental actions set in motion by Roosevelt’s New Deal indeed
had a multiplier effect on the American economy—making widespread
home ownership possible through the creation of the Federal Housing
Authority and yielding an upward thrust that sustained a rising
middle class for nearly three decades. Then the politicians who
leveraged their appeal by alarming their constituents that those
less deserving than themselves were about to get an undeserved break
managed to generate enough critical mass of contempt to begin the
process of dismantling the American Dream under the
government-is-the-enemy banner. How can a nation proud of the
“We the people” foundation for its very existence see the government
as them and not us? “We the people” is an opening
declaration that the government is not the enemy, and it’s
long past time for Americans to wake up and stop listening to the
dogmatists who claim it is.
A government bureaucrat between
you and your healthcare is touted as an unimaginable horror by those
oblivious to the reality that a government employee focused on
following rules as they are set forth by public policy is not to be
dreaded nearly as much as a private health insurance representative
whose company's profit is jeopardized by your medical treatment. Contrary to
Randian ideology, healthcare to most people proves to be more
important than money, especially late in life. Private health
insurance, however, works against individuals: In that industry, the
profit motive is a constant threat to adequate medical care, as
demonstrated by an unrelenting effort to deny claims by whatever
means are available, and regardless of how far the insurer has to go
to find exceptions to the rule of law. Moreover, the administrative
bureaucracy of the private health insurance industry is far greater
and more expensive than that provided by government, with Social
Security and Medicare serving as unambiguous examples.
The core ethos of what’s left of
the once honorable tradition of conservatism has been mindlessly
misconstrued and ideologically abused by people who admire success
but don’t come close to understanding the human psychology of
achievement. The only thing those who champion hard-right dogma can
come up with these days to justify the “anything business wants has
to be okay” mantra rests on an infatuation with carrot-and-stick
motivation. They rely on a B. F. Skinner behaviorist-theory
holdover, characterized most often as incentive—incentive—incentive,
as if nothing in an economic sense can occur without it, ever.
Strange, though, that the John Galt wannabes who are most strident
in making this claim seem to skip over it entirely when it comes to
raising the minimum wage as a greater incentive for poor people to work.
Millions of our citizens accept
as plain old common sense the view that everything people do in life
is directly dependent upon financial incentive. And yet, they
couldn’t be more wrong. Financial incentive is important in many
ways, and it is indeed a strong motivator. But it is not now, nor
has it ever been, an acceptable blanket explanation for human
behavior. Moreover, in spite of a perpetual chorus of warnings about
the deleterious effects of high taxes on the growth of the economy,
there is virtually no evidence that such has ever occurred. A
significant percentage of our citizens thrive on meaningful work,
helping in myriad ways others who are unable to help themselves.
Literally hundreds of thousands of individuals—doctors, nurses,
social workers, and clergy—embrace their careers, with monetary
compensation being secondary to the satisfaction derived from
offering much-needed services to their fellow citizens. Millions do
their utmost to perform their jobs to the very best of their
ability, with complete disregard for those who get by with mediocre
performance, regardless of their level of compensation.
I began working in my early
teens in the 1950s. It was possible then for nearly any able-bodied
white male adult to gain employment in many
low-skilled occupations and still earn enough to support a family,
even if his wife didn’t work, and in most cases wives did not. The
top income tax bracket in those days was around 90 percent (too
high to my thinking), but people still got rich, and many look back
on those days as a time when people really put in a day’s work for a
day’s pay. Indeed, the civil rights of women and minorities
notwithstanding, those years are celebrated as a glorious past, a
time that conservatives lament, oblivious to how it squares with the
absurdity of the incentive mantra they never tire of chanting, and
not realizing that people who never act without a financial benefit
are in a very real sense morally bankrupt. This is not surprising,
however, because people who buy in whole-cloth to adolescent ideas
like Objectivism behave as if their new-found knowledge is a
possession. As a possession it must not be altered, but rather
reinforced; it must be protected and guarded. Thus, if their own
success depends upon oppression for echelons of working poor who are
economically beneath them, then it must therefore be righteous and
most likely even ordained. Where is the morality in that?
Conservatism Gone Awry
Born in 1889, my grandfather was
a staunch conservative and one of the most honorable men that I have
ever encountered. When I grew to know him during the 1950s,
conservatism was associated with frugality, fiscal responsibility,
and a stoic resolve to do the right thing in one’s work and personal
life. Liberalism, on the other hand, seemed to incur an
extraordinary level of animosity, born of the friction of class
divisiveness and the virulent strain of bigotry still present in the
south. With ever-increasing animus, it incurred an association with
bleeding-heart compassion and excessive government spending. Come
forward to the present, and the divisiveness is still with us, but
conservatism is experiencing a schizophrenic identity crisis. For
contemporary conservatives, lower taxes are considered more
important than the deficit, which translates (whether one approves
of the spending or not) to being more important than paying your
bills. Indeed, the cry for lower taxes drowns out everything else,
as if the only real virtue in life is mysteriously associated with
cheap. Moreover, an anti-intellectual posture demonstrated by
a steady succession of ill-prepared candidates for public office has
resulted in conservatism being increasingly associated with
ignorance and egotism--traits for which my fair home city of
Wasilla, Alaska, has become infamous.
Nowhere is the residue of Ayn
Randian arrogance more prominently demonstrated than on talk radio.
Conservative radio hosts view themselves as the voice of reason,
frequently making the point that they are successful while liberal
radio shows are not. They are indeed correct, but deeply deluded as
to why. Conservative radio is successful not because it is based on
reason—precisely the opposite. Right-wing rhetoric is hot-button
speech steeped in us versus them emotion that links
metaphorically to existential dread. It’s really worse than dread,
because it’s seeded in the phenomenon of mistrust that causes us to
fear the other when uncertainty becomes increasingly
intolerable. Conservative talk radio depends upon tribalistic
contempt and the kind of vitriol that leads to ridicule and
name-calling, which at times barely hide a racist subtext going all
the way back to the Deep South and the pre-Civil Rights era.
Many talk-radio hosts are
successful because they raise the ire of ignorant people. These
talented narcissists perform emotional theater. They should not be
confused with patriots. Common ground is their enemy because the
kind of social harmony that yields credence to “We the people”
dissipates public anxiety and thereby reduces their listening
audience.
That which we mistrust, we
abhor. It’s unfortunate but a glaring reality that our primitive
inclination against otherness brings those who rail against others
closer together. And in times of great uncertainty, it is
soothing to have someone to blame, as anxiety ratchets up to higher
and higher levels, because if nothing else it changes the
subject. Looked at this way, it’s almost become a daily ritual in
which angry people (ditto-heads in particular) tune in to programs
that depend upon derision to rail against scapegoats. People who let
a buffoon like Limbaugh think for them often experience a fondness
for a kind of psychological fundamentalism that breeds a fanatic
affection for groupthink while it forbids critical inquiry with a
vengeance. People of this ilk sometimes become what Eric Hoffer
called true believers, sheltering themselves against any and
all facts and information that pose a threat to their restricted
worldview while holding on to the notion that tolerance is a sign of
weakness and that generosity is as well. In time they begin to view
everyone who is not like them as evil.
Throughout American history
there has never been a shortage of selfless people who give more to
society than they receive: they volunteer in military service, soup
kitchens, hospitals, orphanages, senior centers, relief efforts, and
myriad institutions that make life bearable for millions of people.
If you want to see examples, take a walk through Arlington National
Cemetery. What do you think the fallen heroes buried there, who were
demonstrably not overly concerned with their own self-interest,
would have to say about their descendants dying from a lack of
affordable healthcare? Those who think some ethnic minorities don’t
deserve citizenship need to read the names on the Vietnam War
Memorial. Moreover, a question critical to the very core of morality
needs to be asked: If there is not enough goodwill inherent in being
an American that would keep an American from dying for lack
of affordable healthcare, then why bother with patriotism, and what
in heaven’s name is there to be proud and boastful about in being an
American?
Socialism is not an evil word in
and of itself any more than capitalism is. The ism of the former
gives power to the group and that of the latter to the individual.
Every nation that aspires to a high quality of life for its citizens
requires a measure of both. During the taming of the American
frontier, settlers never would have survived had there not been a
sense of unheralded cooperation in neighbor helping neighbor. Their
actions were socialistic but are celebrated today by conservatives
as the epitome of rugged individualism.
The most destructive aspect of
the Ayn Randian delusion is the scorn and derision it invites aimed
at people the devotees describe as do-gooders, as if such
individuals are the scourge of humanity—these devious people, for
example, who do sinister things like helping terminally ill patients
die comfortably. Are the American service men and women who have
given their lives and those who continue to die on the battlefield
do-gooders? Did they consider self-interest the only virtue worthy
of emulation? It is deeply ironic that so many people proud to call
themselves Americans live in constant fear that other citizens
deemed unworthy of the title are going to get something for nothing
and that it is going to happen at their expense, while hundreds of
thousands of service men and women give all they have to give
without regard to the one-sidedness of their sacrifice.
In recent months Ayn Rand mania
has resurfaced with new books and essays about her legacy. Her
juvenile appeal still overshadows the absurd contradictions upon
which her ideology is based. Little attention is given the fact that
she was an emotionally driven romantic who prized fiction-based
rationality, or that she based her beliefs on a world of fantasy
that included government death-ray machines, or that she was an
amphetamine addict, or that the force of her personality is credited
more than the weight of her ideas for her ability to win arguments,
or that she denied the very existence of human instincts.
Rand based her whole ideological
philosophy on the naïve premise that man is a purely rational
animal, and yet the past two decades of neuroscience reveal that we
are nothing of the sort. Moreover, the perniciousness beneath her
appeal is lost on those who don’t comprehend the reality, explained
in Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, of the emotional relief
that comes from associating oneself with a creed that is thought to
be so complete that it absolves one eternally from further learning.
For them, if questions arise, all one has to do is find out what Ayn
Rand said about the matter.
If I have learned anything in my
many years of study it is this: If you haven’t worked very hard, and
I do mean hard, to get beyond the superficial appearances of
whatever subject you are dealing with, then chances are very high
that your opinions on the matter are seriously out of sync with
reality. Once you realize that the whole world of homo sapiens
relates primarily through shallow cultural assumptions that are
indeed stunningly superficial, it is little wonder that we kill one
another in wars in which the persons doing the fighting often don’t
even know the reasons for the conflict. When you add a little Ayn
Randian nonsense about the virtue of selfishness, which really
amounts to a kind of ignorance based narcissistic arrogance, and
spew it forth out of the mouths of contemptuous radio hosts, fearful
people—especially those who don’t read newspapers, magazines, or
books—will come together intuitively thinking of themselves as John
Galts, whose earthly destiny is to save the world through their own
moral superiority—a superiority that escapes most everyone else but
comes to them naturally.
From this milieu have emerged
Wall Street executives who view themselves as Objectivists or, by
proxy, Masters of the Universe. These types have internalized such a
strong sense of entitlement that if their companies are failing and
their stock is falling and the government has to bail them out, then
it is still blasphemy to withhold their bonuses, astronomical
salaries, and stock options because only they can multiply
wealth. It’s as if we have learned virtually nothing about the
ubiquity of arrogance and the many guises of narcissism in the past
two thousand years of recorded history.
It’s enough to make Atlas weep.
Charles' latest book,
September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
available January 21st can be pre-ordered on Amazon at a 33
percent discount. Click on
the title.
Click here to Pre-order from Borders Books
Click here to Pre-order from Barnes&Noble at a 32 percent discount
Death
Panels in Perspective
©
Charles D. Hayes
As a longtime resident of Wasilla, Alaska, I
wonder if my hometown will ever escape its current association with
partisan politics in the minds of people elsewhere. More
specifically, will the American public ever be able to engage in an
adult conversation about end-of-life medical issues? Too many
people, it seems, don’t realize that death is bipartisan. In the
recent public town-hall meetings about reforming health care, efforts
to provide end-of-life counseling have been described as “death
panels,” most notably by one of our prominent Wasilla citizens. Such
language is a blatant example of demagoguery.
In 1974, Ernest Becker won a Pulitzer Prize
for The Denial of Death, a book about a formerly taboo
subject. It was a prescient work that has become a perennial best
seller. Becker agreed with philosophers of the past who have argued
that human beings can only stand so much reality and that a total
apprehension of the precariousness of our lives would drive us
insane.
He understood that until we face up to death,
maturity is impossible and wrote in detail about the extraordinary
effort we make to avoid facing our own mortality. Becker was also
very much aware of the irony involved in the conundrum that one of
our deepest needs is to be free of apprehension about death and yet
we experience this most acutely when we are feeling fully alive.
In the decades since Becker’s own death, a new
school of psychology known as "terror management theory" has gained
momentum, arguing that any and all reminders of death have a
negative effect on our judgment. In my forthcoming book,
September University: Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life,
I discuss at length how the fear of death, coupled with intolerance
for otherness and a lack of curiosity, causes us so
much anxiety that it forever detracts from our ability to enjoy life
free of the need to blame others for life’s difficulties. The mere
mention of a word, metaphor, symbol, or example that reminds us of
dying has been shown to negatively influence our decisions.
In politics this works magically because
psychological studies show that we often respond to fearful
reminders about death with an aggressive attempt to defend our
political views. So, when a few misguided cheerleaders disparage the
need to provide medical counseling in the final stages of life,
emotion overrides our ability to reason and everyone loses.
Nowhere is it more important to set aside
partisan politics than when discussing the end of life because we
are all going to die—for most of us sooner than we think. In
politics, in particular, we identify with our political party, and
when our side loses an election we suffer a loss of stature that
bears a conscious or subconscious association with thoughts of
death. In other words, we die a little. And if you fear the future
and revere the past, here again, as the terror management
psychologists frequently demonstrate, change and uncertainty become
interchangeable with feelings that the end is near. Fear mongering
about end-of-life medical issues can win a political argument by
controlling the opposition’s fear, but when this happens, the stakes
are such that the terminally ill lose the ability to die with
dignity.
To show his contempt for the demagoguery of
calling medical counseling death panels, editor Jon Meacham, in the
September 21, 2009, issue of Newsweek, declared that he had
been a teenage death panelist and has in fact served on two such
panels, one for his grandfather and one for his father. He says, “One
answer to the health-care conundrum is painful but inescapable: we
have to become more comfortable with death.” I have served on five
such panels with my family, and I know without a shadow of doubt
that things worse than death can happen to people. My maternal
grandparents went through years of barely conscious but visibly
obvious medical torment and excruciating pain. Death in the 1980s
was a subject to be avoided, and there was no counseling available
for family members or mature guidance for them in realizing that
there are experiences more horrific than death.
The rugged beauty of the Alaska wilderness
offers frequent reminders about the harshness of reality. I often
wonder what it would be like if our migrating caribou were
consciously aware that someday, with a high degree of certainty,
each of them individually will come face-to-face with the wolf. I
think about this because we humans share a similar fate. But instead
of the wolf, we face the nursing home. And, speaking from my own
experience, I prefer the beast.
In
Nasty, Brutish, and Long,
psychologist Ira Rosofsky writes with profound seriousness, but also
with humor and compassion, about his years of experience in dealing
with patients in nursing homes. He tells us that if we reach age 65,
we have a 43 percent chance of winding up in a nursing home, and if
we reach age 85 our chances for dementia are one in two. Further,
the average nursing home resident ingests about 10 drugs per day. In
an example that speaks as loud as any about the lack of humanity in
our health care system, he characterizes the situation with what he
calls the “Rosofsky Law of Inverse Proportionality: The more
training you have, the less time you spend with patients.”
Rosofsky reminds us that the average person
aged 65 to 74 has about seven hours per day of leisure time (maybe
less with today’s economy), an observation that reminds me of one of
my reasons for writing September University. Those of us
with more than a half-century of life experience should have the
maturity and, one would hope, the will to see that end-of-life issues
are discussed without resorting to petty politics. Those of us with
experience visiting friends and family in nursing homes know that in
some cases people do better in nursing homes than they would living
alone, but that being in a nursing home and being lost in the
corridors of your own mind is a dreadful fate. Who among us would
prefer that, instead of death with dignity, we be shot full of
stupor-inducing chemicals, quietly managed by as few staff as
possible, and end up being warehoused in order to keep the Medicare
payments going? Of course, if we are drugged into mental oblivion,
we would not likely care, except you have to wonder what goes on
behind those desperate looks from the many nursing home residents
who can’t seem to bring themselves to speak a complete sentence, but
who are obviously experiencing what Rosofsky refers to as
unfocused rage.
So the next time you hear someone step up to
the podium and try to misrepresent health-care reform by making the
public fearful of impending government death panels, please ask the
speaker to stop the fear mongering or please be seated and let
someone else have a word.
Jack London, the writer that drew me
to Alaska and who died young, said he would rather be “ashes
than dust.” I, myself, would prefer a death with dignity to what
Rosofsky depicts as nasty, brutish, and long. How about
you?
September University:
Summoning Passion for an Unfinished Life
is available for preorder on Amazon.com
For more information go the
septemberuniversity.org
|