We live in a world rife with dissension - often for the sake of differentiation, or simply to stick it to opponents.
At other times, we encounter disagreement and opposition for its own sake, from persons competing with us for status, power, that next promotion or because they just don't like us. To borrow a line toward the end of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam" - they don't like us, our style, or our politics. They don't like what we say or how we say it.
Sergeant-Major Dickerson's explanation for sabotaging Adrian Kronauer's radio stint in Saigon might as well have come from the Little Red Book of Mao's Sayings. It's also standard operating procedure for our brethren on the right: Whatever your enemy wants, want something else. Whatever he does not want, want it.
All of the above are potential examples of bad will. And bad will is a pathetic foundation for any society.
We should be invoking good will instead.
More below the holy symbol of the One True Kos...
Every society has its patriotic legends. They're not simply entertaining and informative. They provide indoctrination. They state the goals of a culture, outline in broad strokes the path and means by which said goals will be achieved, dive into details of the standards by which both subjects and leaders are judged, the norms of conduct including the rights and duties of members of said society.
Divergence from said goals, standards and norms usually goes poorly for rulers and ruled alike. For some odd reason (perhaps relative weakness? Ya think?) the blowback mechanism works far more efficiently on the ruled. Regardless, sooner or later, every society lives or dies by its patriotic legends.. if some natural disaster or external adversary does not wipe them out first. (Exogenous risks don't go away.)
Alright, that's a lot to digest in two paragraphs. Let's unpack it a bit.
Patriotic legends. Crucible and trial by fire stories are full of win for such efforts. Low points in ultimately successful rebellions (Long March, Valley Forge) resonate nicely down through the ages, playing up the intrinsic toughness, martial virtue and fortune (be it secular luck or divinely ordained) of the eventual ruling class.
Often natural hardships - exposure to elements, crossing of long distances, exile, play a role as well. A couple of other examples would be the Great Trek and the Wandering in the Wilderness of the Israelites. (Going a bit further back in the biblical thread of history, the migration of Abram out of Ur tees up a host of later stories including the Sinai adventures.) In these and related legends, the distinction between divine and national destiny blurs.
Sometimes, the time in the wilderness is NOT the preferred intention of its participants, but later on becomes important. Two examples close to home are the Trail of Tears and its significance for the Cherokee nations and the experiences of the Mormon Trail, the westward exodus of the LDS Church after repeated (and deadly) clashes with neighboring communities in the Midwestern states. These latter examples are more deeply encamped in the realm of persecution myths. Oh, don't get me wrong these are REAL events. We are close enough to the historicity of the Trail of Tears to know that the Cherokee dd not evict themselves from the southern Appalachian mountains. Likewise, the town of Nauvoo, Illinois did not abandon itself.
Defeats, military defeats in particular, can produce poignant moments as well. The Serbs' Pyrhhic victory over the Turks at the Field of Blackbirds in 1389 is a powerful story to that nation, one so powerful that it led to war with NATO in 1999: the Serbian name for the battle site is Boj na Kosovu. Kosovo. The Serbs got in a tough lick against a numerically superior foe with vast reserves of manpower. With most of the strength of the Serbs wiped out, the Ottoman Empire returned in strength in subsequent years and went on to dominate the Balkans for almost five hundred years.
Speaking of the Turks, the British are rather fond of a ditty about riding into the valley of the shadow of death, hearkening to the Crimean War. Yeah, that one went well...
The British play a role in my next example. One of my favorite patriotic legends, and perhaps yours if you are an American too, is a little ditty by a fellow named Francis Scott Key. The Battle of Baltimore was perhaps the difference between our national anthem being the Star Spangled Banner and its being God Save The Queen.
Yet there's something about coming back from defeat, even total smackdowns, that finds itself into patriotic legends. Inevitability, invincibility .. that's a tough row to hoe for a regime. Few governments play up such things, and smartly so. The ones that do so don't last by definition. But bouncing back? Oh, that sells, and how. The two most prominent versions of that in the modern American canon being, of course, Pearl Harbor... and now 9/11.
Pearl Harbor was barely short of complete disaster for the United States. Had the carriers been in port, it would have been...and the Japanese with slightly better luck would have blown them out of the water (instead of the other way around) at Midway. Not really the basis for fist-pumping. And yet Americans at large are far more familiar with Pearl than with Hiroshima, which ostensibly is the moment of victory.
I think the big reasons why we recall Pearl Harbor more clearly as a society is that the outrage defined a type of martial virtue, a legend within a legend. That we do not attack, that we defend. That we do not start wars, we finish them. That we are a force for good when force must be used. The many counter examples notwithstanding; recall we are discussing legends. Yet the principle holds; we judge the conduct of our military through the lens of World War II. Where it rises to that standard, say, in the defense of the Kosovars in 1999, we are more comfortable cheering on the armed forces.
I think the role of good will comes into play here. War is an awful thing, period. Death, destruction and all hostile and harmful things are the norm. Yet we engage in it from time to time. We excuse it, sometimes we praise it - when entered into for the right reasons. When pursued with good will.
And when not... we cringe. We are ashamed. And we are not supportive, by the standard that our patriotic legends set for conduct of rulers and ruled alike.
Let's go to the other modern example. 9/11 had all the makings of a patriotic legend - surprise attack, victims completely in the right, perpetrators absolutely in the wrong, the sympathy and support of the entire planet wholly with the American cause.
And yet the wheels came off. The good will of the world was blown off. Good will for ourselves, toward the concept of all Americans, was dismissed. The attack was turned from an attack on all of us, the world included, into an excuse to attack in turn. And not only attack the Al Qaida perpetrators and their sponsors, the Taliban, but any and all who would resist the leadership.
And that came to include most other Americans - Democrats, since they were not with an "us" that was then in power, they were recast as terrorists, too.
And the patriotic legend that might have been was corrupted into a selfish, self-serving and evil thing. The depth of this corruption cannot be overstated. It went far past a will for revenge, or even a lust for blood. It went past an expanded appetite to settle old scores with already-defeated hostile regimes. It even went past a lust for American empire.
9/11 was turned into an excuse to lower the standards of civilization, to indulge in rapine and pillage for the sake of making money off a high bomb count and a high body count.
That is why every year it turns September 11, the day is less like Pearl Harbor... and more like Hiroshima. In other words, a day that everyone wants to forget about, wishes would go away.
I'm quite sure I just raised hackles. I am sensitive to that. Let me paraphrase: "Hey, now, it was Hiroshima or else we'd have to have gone through with Operation Olympic and who knows how many more lives on both sides that would have cost?" Please. We wanted a quick end to the war because the Soviets were situated to sweep into not only northern Japan but China and at the time it was not clear if China was going to go Communist.
Or, let's go the other way: "No one can excuse away that Saddam was a menace. And what would you have done, let the Taliban get off scot-free?" Er...I wasn't aware Afghanistan and Iraq were different names for the same country. "Well, they would allied anyway! And what about Al Qaida in Iraq, smart pants?" You mean the movement that did not have any leg in Iraq at all until we obliterated it as a nation-state? "Grr. Obama. Kenyan. Socialist. Go Mitt." You get the idea how that conversation goes.
My point is, why we seemingly like the dark patriotic legends, turn them into uplifting trumpets of national self-identity. I think the reason is clear: it's easier to sell patriots of whatever stripe that they're the good guys if contrasted with the wrongness of The Other, the Enemy Outside. Winning, especially if violence s involved, is a guilty pleasure. Also, it sets expectations: the leadership has to keep winning. If they don't, they're out.
Consider the sharpest example of a society that drank the Invulnerability Cool-Aid: the Third Reich. "Will" was important to that regime - likewise triumph. Why, they even made a movie about it. And yet the thousand-year imperium didn't quite go the distance. Why not?
Well, for one reason - ridiculous expectations. The Nazis set up an insane standard by which to just themselves. Even without the baggage of hyper-racism, the Reich was rife with the paranoia that creeps into a society where everyone is expected to prove themselves an exponent of supremacy, not only by achievement but by attribute. Such a society, insofar as it can be called one after a point, begins to prey on itself. There is no "good will", only pure Hobbesian competition. Your worst enemies, as an individual, are not the persons relegated to subhuman status or the concentration camps; they are the people who are competing for standing as (grimace) exemplars of racial supremacy. What happens to the member of the superior race that... isn't?
And given what we can easily demonstrate now, few people are pure... anything, especially purely super-competent at even a handful of skills. Yet this myth of supremacy carries on, with disastrous results (see: recent shooting in Milwaukee), in the minds of people who have mentally broken by the disconnection between what they imagine that they are in relation to others... and what they actually are... and (last but hardly least) what they should be in relation to others.
There's a Star Trek episode that attempts to answer the question: what if the fervor of the Nazis had been harnessed to good ends? To explain: One of Captain Kirk's former professors goes native on a primitive planet. It turns out he's decided, on his own, to introduce the template of the Third Reich to said culture, to speed up its material and social development. For a while it works; the standard of living of the society jacks up swiftly, relations with a nearby more advanced planet tick along... until the wheels come off. The aforesaid professor is ousted by power-hungry secondaries and all of the nasty aspects of the Nazis surface, all over again. The moral of the story being: good will doesn't always last, especially if the instruments of that will are intrinsically bad. Totalitarianism, for example. Worship of martial virtue. Hypernationalism. All that stuff.
So lets' route this back to real life in the here and now. Whither good will?
Well, the President has a soft-sell commercial that portrays the coming election as a choice between a program that we already tried - give the rich what they want, and they'll stay (a riff on Steven King's "Storm of the Century", if you're curious) - and taking a fairer course in terms of sacrifice for the greater good, including the good of the well-to-do.
That's a message that promotes good will.
What are the other guys putting on the airwaves? Messages that promote good will?
Eh, not so much. One of the more recent ads decries the outrage of helping out of work persons who cannot find work by relaxing the Clinton-era "workfare" requirements.
Independent of the truthiness/falseness of the principles of that campaign spot, the story being pushed by it is the notion that helping people when they need help most is unconscionable and must be stopped.
Never mind good will toward the President (they're competing to get his job, that's not happening nor expected), it's a message that has no good will at all.
It's a message that says, in as many words: Eff good will.
And as we've discussed above, bad will is a a shaky foundation for a civilization at best. Indifference is bad enough, but bad will can turn anything vile.
We've seen good legends die from it, under the watch of our brethren on the right.
They want their old job back; they want the Oval Office.
When the President says we tried it their way, he means more than fiscal policy.
He means we've tried the Republicans' will: and it's nothing short of bad for America, and bad for the world and even bad for themselves.