Self-satisfied and narcissistic little careerists that many of
us are, we remain oblivious to the immense suffering we are inflicting
on the world as we gleefully pursue the American Dream, replete with
the requisite Hummer, McMansion, trophy spouse, 2.5 “perfect” children,
and all the trappings to which our American Exceptionalism entitles us
at the expense of billions of other humans, hundreds of billions of
non-human animals, and Mother Earth herself.
Sure, many of us hear Jesus’s parable and think of ourselves as the
Good Samaritans. After all, our humanitarian imperialism has made the
world safe for freemarket-dom and corporatocracy for years. And those
“ignorant savages” whom we have “rescued” by bringing them the
“stability” of ruthless dictatorships and showing them how to put their
resources we exploit to good use damn well better be thankful we
bestowed our “compassion” upon them. So in a very perverse sense, we
are Samaritans when it comes to our foreign policy because we often
involve ourselves in the affairs of others, but no argument based on a
shred of intellectual honesty would support us being “Good.”
Generally speaking, we have much more in common with the Levite than
the Good Samaritan. From the moment the doctor retrieved us from the
birth canal and severed the umbilical cord that nurtured us for nine
months, our sponge-like minds began absorbing the idiocies of the
distinctly “American” myth of rugged, hyper-individualism. We devote
such exhaustive levels of emotional and mental energy to aping the
ridiculous archetypes personified by the likes of “go it alone hard
asses” such as John Wayne, Sylvester Stallone, and Bruce Willis that
our capacity to experience empathy, compassion, and deep connections
with human and non-human animals is severely stunted.
How beguiled are we with a cultural dogma that elevates the individual
to the level of a deity and portrays collectivism as a plague of
Biblical proportions?
Let’s examine some of the contradictions and distortions to which many of us are blind.
Even the “lone wolf” legends of the silver screen can’t escape their
humanity. They were conceived by two human beings, developed in their
mother’s womb for nine months, brought into this world by doctors or
mid-wives, raised and nurtured, educated, and remain(ed) highly
interdependent with the rest of the human race.
Few people other than Ted Kaczynski can claim anything close to true
independence, and even his wasn’t life-long or absolute. Yet many of us
conduct our lives with a thinly veiled “me first and to hell with the
rest of the world” attitude, as if we are the only ones on the face of
the planet who really matter and as if we don’t need a soul to help us
as we bull-doze through life to attain our goals.
As a nation we have seriously defaulted on the social contract to which
we are each bound as long as we participate in society. Our moneyed
elite, petite bourgeoisie, and wild-eyed libertarians insist that
society provide them with Rock of Gibraltar assurance of their negative
rights to attain profit and protect their infinitely precious
property–and they want heads rolling if someone violates these
“sacrosanct” privileges. Meanwhile they struggle (often successfully)
with nearly every ounce of their being to minimize, diminish, or
obliterate the use of public, communal resources to uphold and fulfill
positive rights, such as access to health care, education, food, and
housing.
In the propagandistic jargon of the ruling class and libertarians,
negative rights are “freedom” and positive rights are “welfare.”
Associating their coveted “rights” to profit and private property with
the word freedom, a universally beloved ideal, and positive rights with
the word welfare, a pejorative term, is a clever way of keeping the
masses working against their own interests.
For instance, what decent human being would argue that we don’t have a
moral obligation to tend to our sick and dying? Even in the amoral
chaos of war soldiers do their utmost to care for their wounded
comrades. Yet as is common knowledge, Michael Moore recently made a
documentary which clearly demonstrates how depraved and grossly
inadequate our profit-driven health care system is. And there is still
incredible resistance to universal health care. In the “me first
society” we have no problem telling Christ to go to Hell with all that
compassion nonsense.
Let’s follow the twisted logic here. John Calvin told us that the
quickest way to ascend to heaven is to get rich. Universal health care
is a form of socialism. And if we begin to surrender our beloved
capitalism, ‘evil Commies’ will eliminate our freedom to think what
television tells us to think, our “right” to buy more stuff, and our
one in a billion chance to be like “The Donald.”
So, without yielding to the abject malevolence of collectivism, how do
we deal with the problem of 46 million uninsured, the tens of millions
more who are under-insured, the indigent whom the hospitals dump on
Skid Row without treatment, and the millions of seniors who choose
between having enough to eat and filling their prescriptions?
Quite simple really. We PRETEND to be the Good Samaritan while
continuing along our private little “roads to success” like the Levites
we are. We pass laws requiring that people carry health insurance
(again we can thank John Calvin—this time for imbuing us with the
tortured notion that punishment is a form of love for one’s fellow man
since it cleanses our sinful nature). We produce scandalously deceptive
commercials in which Montel Williams shills for a Big Pharma front
called the PPA and leaves viewers with the impression that the major
drug companies are going from community to community dispensing free
prescription medication (when in reality the PPA merely provides
information on public and private assistance available to the
uninsured). We push for medical savings accounts. We shift the costs to
those with insurance by raising premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. We
shout down those who decry the obscene state of health care in the
wealthiest nation in the world by telling them to quit whining about
“entitlements” and to move to France if they hate America so much.
In the 18th Century Rousseau recognized that the ruling class was
enforcing a grossly one-sided social contract which ensured that they
maintained their wealth and power. Little has changed, even in the
“land of the free.” How peculiar that we profess to be a nation of
Christians yet tenaciously cling to a system that ensures extremely
polarized socioeconomic strata, causes suffering for billions of
sentient creatures and violates nearly every principle for which Christ
was martyred.
Perhaps the most telling sign of our shattered moral compass is that
many of the millions of US Americans who are finally recognizing that
the United States is a brutish monster have stampeded to support a
libertarian reactionary from Texas. While Ron Paul is principled and
courageous in his stances against the establishment’s murderous foreign
policy, he remains wedded to the libertarian ideals which rest on the
deluded infantilism of hyper-individualism.
Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no libertarians in
homeless shelters. Libertarianism is simply a rather transparent guise
for the myopic selfishness and naked greed that accompany our obsession
with “me first and only.” To justify maintaining their negative rights
under the social contract while minimizing or eliminating positive
rights (which actually place a burden of responsibility upon all of
us–and this very jejune bunch is apparently incapable of accepting such
a load), they attack laws and regulations that “threaten” the “free”
market and the use of public monies to provide for the well-being of
society as a whole.
Some of the more rabid libertarian “thinkers” such as F.A. Hayek went
so far as to remind the poor and working class to thank their
oppressors and exploiters for their very existence.
“The proletariat which capitalism can be said to have ‘created’ was
thus not a proportion of the population which would have existed
without it and which it had degraded to a lower level; it was an
additional population which was enabled to grow up by the new
opportunities for employment which capitalism provided.”
Or in other words, forget about a living wage, safe working conditions,
or reasonable hours, you miserable ingrates. Without us, you would not
have been born. Bend over and say thank you!
Once presented with the glaringly obvious moral and practical
deficiencies of libertarianism, capitalism, and hyper-individualism
(each of which we have been conditioned to embrace as “normal,”
healthy, and inevitable), most decent human beings recoil in horror.
Objectively, we want to be the Good Samaritan, but have been
dogmatically trained to be the Levite.
While most of us aren’t evil by nature, the psychic disfigurement
caused by our dedication to hyper-individualism manifests itself in
some very ugly ways. However, we have the power to regurgitate the
intellectual manure we have been digesting since birth and focus our
time, energy, thoughts and actions to honoring the social contract as
Rousseau prescribed:
“Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the
supreme direction of the general will; and in a body we receive each
member as an indivisible part of the whole.”
It’s time to abandon the childish notion that it is “all about me.” The
world is in flames, in large part because of us. We need to be
Samaritans, not Levites.
Jason Miller is a recovering US American middle class suburbanite who
strives to remain intellectually free. He is Cyrano’s Journal Online’s
associate editor (http://www.bestcyrano.org/) and publishes Thomas
Paine’s Corner within Cyrano’s at
http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/. You can reach him at
JMiller@bestcyrano.com
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