“And why are you so firmly and solemnly convinced that only that which is normal and positive, in a word, his well-being, is good for man? Is the reason never deceived about what is beneficial? It is possible that, as well as loving his own welfare, man is fond of suffering, even passionately fond of it...I am sure that man will never renounce the suffering that comes of ruin and chaos. Why, suffering is the one and only source of knowledge.”
You, like me, may often wonder why USA voters do things like vote for politicians who want to take away poor people's health care, or to have the obscenely rich pay less tax, or to remove environmental protections against corporate predators, or to burden students with insurmountable personal debt, or to subordinate women – in a word – to make life more difficult for everyone.
I think Dostoyevsky was on to a major part of the explanation.
There are undoubtedly many elements of the Kansas thing, but this need to confront and to act upon the inner agonies, must be central. You see USA people, right here in Dayton, living in some of the most luxurious circumstances the world has ever known but who are nonetheless as unhappy, dishonest, murderous, suffering and selfish as anyone ever. You have multi-millionaires who compare their own suffering with that of Jewish inmates of Nazi death camps. They express it, with an angry, self-righteous edge. But the killing or dispossessing of millions of people in Viet-Nam or Iraq or elsewhere, they represent, if at all, as just the way life is, unworthy of a WSJ guest editorial.
It's not like we and they don't see the real situation. Everybody knows. They are aware, probably even more than we are. This richest of the wealthy nations has the highest child-poverty rate? Trickle-down economics? Militarization of local community police? Lowered wages for the 99%? Hospitals, medicines and prisons for outlandish profit? The economics profession? The academy? Clarence Thomas? These are intelligent, experienced, “successful,” observant people. They know.
But facing up to their complicity, confessing, and enacting a remedy is a wholly other matter - the matter with Kansas, in essence.
It's like in “Crime and Punishment” or “The Scarlet Letter.” Churchill's comment that the USA will exhaust every alternative possible before doing the right thing, applies. There has to be all this suffering and agonizing falsity and evasion and blaming until their crime is publicly confessed and acknowledged.
However, they see public acknowledgement negatively as “apologizing for America,” and as a sign of “weakness.” Lyndon Johnson and his best and brightest kept on with a disastrous war because they did not want to appear “weak.” So they kept on killing year after year. George McGovern said that the walls of the senate chamber reeked with blood, during his attempt to stop the Viet-Nam war, but we weren't ready. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that the US was the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. We had to agonize some more rather than face up and admit it. The Viet-Nam war was just too big, too far-reaching, to be put behind us while we just look ahead. Almost no one now thinks the Viet-Nam war was a good idea, as Jim Webb has phrased it. Very few now think that invading Iraq was “a good idea.” But you see what they did to King and McGovern and young protesters who simply told the truth that even children at the time could see.
There is obviously a lot more for Kansas to confess besides the Viet-Nam crime before it can stop voting for villains and I want to mention before closing just one other issue, not just because it is so close to me personally, but because it fundamentally affects everyone else.
Diane Ravitch's first and most important recommendation for improving education in the USA in her recent book,“The Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools,” is that we should provide every pregnant woman with proper prenatal health care. Everyone with whom I have discussed Ravitch's prescription, gets it immediately. It's obviously, brilliantly true, and easy to do. But I believe that the USA needs to suffer a whole lot more – teacher degradation and firings, more teaching to tests, , more loss and expense, more fear and agony, more personal debt, more humiliation and discipline, more recrimination and ressentiment, and so much more - before it can admit, own up, and do this simple, necessary thing.
PS: I cross-posted this article, slightly modified, from my own blog, valscolumn.blogspot.com.