What Happens When Our Values Change: We're Living It With Trump and It Isn't Pretty

I  get a chill when Trump goes out after John McCain, and not just because it's a pathetic sight watching a president trashing a dead senator who didn't bone spur his way out of national service. That's hypocrisy, certainly, but at least the soul he destroys is his own.

No, it's because Trump is destroying whatever lies in his path with nothing to replace it except for a dark, nihilistic burn-it-baby attitude that comes from elevating making-money into a religion. All our souls are in danger here.

Since the growth of humanism in 1600s Europe, we've been operating on the assumption that individual lives matter, that the many forms of heroism are the demonstration of the best we are capable of as a species, and that beauty and generosity matter.

These ideas are embodied in the US Constitution, the product of the 18th Century rationalism that we like to throw at the rest of the world. Even though the Constitution is not overtly religious, there has been a history of conflating it with  that other great source of ideas, the teachings of a first century, middle-Eastern sage, a man we like to quote while ignoring the path of service to our fellow man that he promotes.

This combined, jumbled, value system that we have never really sorted out, along with the ethics it calls for, is now crumbling. We are tumbling into a dark pit where making money has become the ultimate goal, and it doesn't matter how it is amassed.

It's a rather brutal philosophy, one that begs the question of whether we can live with it.

For example, if people are valued only to the extent they contribute to (or detract from) society's economic base, life by itself is not ultimately valuable unless it is making someone money. Babies are good as long as they are born healthy. Old people, the disabled, and the sick need to be helped out of existence because they cost money.  Building hospices is preferable to building hospitals (which are often religious in origin and part of the old order).

Keep going.

Health insurance should be punishingly expensive for the elderly, cheap for the children, and moderately priced for the middle-aged who, as current workers will buy the insurance and contribute to return on investment for the industry, which will therefore create jobs.

Education should be sufficient to create a workforce with basic reading and writing skills. Higher education is for an elite with the resources to pay for it since it is primarily a benefit to the individual and not the state.

It is, therefore, a waste of resources using higher education to promote social goals. Talented students will rise to the top without special assistance. The emphasis on campus should be on the professions and job preparation. New campuses should focus on teaching trades. Prestigious colleges should take the top ten percent or so of applicants without consideration for anything other than test scores because these are the most likely to make good return on investment.

And what of ethics?  Well, it certainly won't be caring for one's fellow human beings. Not when cheating comes to be seen as cleverness, and fraud is merely caveat emptor. There will be no beauty left because to create it produces no jobs. Prolific choices of products cheaply made will replace the Grecian urns. There will also be no encouragement for innovations that have no obvious commercial value except for the surprise of  curiosity and learning.  There will be few literary gems written because no one will have time to read them.

Is this our world?  I can see signs of it everywhere.

One of these days, I have to hope, people are going to look back on history and lament what we have lost. But it won't be Make American Great Again, it will be Make America Decent Again.