When we stand back and look, we see a political economic system determined to self-immolate and take the rest of the world with it. The odd thing about it is that those trying to strike the match claim to be doing so in support of noble principles. Before they ride these delusions into the flames, perhaps we should look at some psychological reasons for their self destructive behavior and figure out why the burden of their guilt has finally reached a point where they are ready to end it all.
Societies are founded on ethical principles, the simple base of which is the notion that when we come together, I will not do to you those things that I do not want you to do to me. I will neither kill you, beat you up, take your possessions, nor deceive you and take advantage of you at your expense, because those are the things that I would not want you to do to me. This is the most basic ethical standard upon which a society of individuals may be built, and yet there is more to our ethical understanding than this simple principle. We have wisdom traditions to which we look for further guidance, which include our religions.
For our Republican relatives, the wisdom tradition to which most are drawn is the Judaic-Christian teachings in the Bible. In Genesis Chapter four, verse nine, Cain asks God the prescient and momentous question, “Am I my brother's keeper?” The entire rest of the Bible, it might be argued, seems devoted to answering that question with a resounding “YES!” It is not enough to simply adopt a live and let live ethical standard as described above. Though such a standard may be sufficient to allow the formation of a society of individuals who interact peaceably it does not achieve our full potential which requires that we love and care for one another, and in so doing, we find ourselves completely loved and cared for.
Such love cannot be an absolute requirement of law, lest it stifle our freedom, our autonomy, and our creativity. We have seen and still see extreme examples of state absolutism where members of the state, who are supposed to give all to the state, lose their freedom and their autonomy, and the result is that they also lose their creativity and productivity as well, and those states become stagnant and unsuccessful. In contrast to those failed states, we see European nations that, while enduring a far larger tax burden than we do in the United States, are able to provide their citizenry with adequate health care, education, social services, and provide for those who cannot provide for themselves.
The United States, still strongly influenced by the reactionary McCarthyism fears of the 1950's, has seen fit to try to move towards the opposite extreme of the feared state absolutism. We reject the European models of government that provide for such perceived “evils” as socialized medicine, somehow fearing that this is a slippery slope first step towards state absolutism.
We have even moved beyond the perceived goal of having a Constitutional Republic to a government whose elected representatives are more interested in appeasing their corporate and financial sponsors than they are in serving their constituents. This, of course, is not how most elected representatives perceive themselves, but their actions and their votes speak louder than their delusions of being servants of the people. Thus, when it became clear that financially sponsored deregulation had allowed unscrupulous financial executives to game the system and collapse the economy at great profit to themselves and misery to the rest of us, the congress proved incapable of reestablishing the regulations, the removal of which allowed for the economic collapse. Money, corruption and theft trump ethical standards, but not without adding a huge burden of guilt to those who have lost sight of their sworn oath to serve their electoral constituency rather than their financial sponsors.
Greed, which used to be considered one of the seven deadly sins, has now been redeemed and elevated to the high position of being a great virtue which we should all embrace. Thus have we been pandered to and assured that all taxation is theft by those for whom Greed is God and who are bent on destroying all social programs that provide for the welfare of those in the bottom 95% of the income brackets. It seems that being wealthy isn't good enough unless it means that those on the bottom are left with nothing. Eliminate Social Security. Eliminate Medicare. Eliminate public education. The ultra wealthy do not need these things; why should they be taxed to pay for them? To get rid of the programs that benefit 95% of Americans, the congress need only eliminate the taxes that would pay for them and then refuse to allow the debt ceiling to rise, and here we are with guilt laden servants of greed and corruption ready to burn the house down while most of us are still locked inside.
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After writing all of this above I was reminded of a need to differentiate between the wealthy and the greedy.
There is a Chinese Taoist saying that goes something like this:
Those who know that they have enough are rich.
People like Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates are truly wealthy as they know that they have more than enough and are using their great wealth for the good of all humanity. By contrast, the owners of right wing broadcasting empires and the major contributors to the Tea Party, while they may be billionaires simply cannot be considered wealthy when they clearly care only for themselves and their fellow billionaires.