The Time Before Elections

The few weeks leading up to an election have to be one of the most depressing times around. Those who are all right in their corners--thank you very much, Jack--are worked into fever pitch that something they believe is their "right" (no matter whether it is an entitlement from the government) will be taken from them, and those who are not all right in their corner--why isn't the government doing something for me?--all seem to get worked up into a froth of self-interest and hypocrisy wrapped in the mantle of some ill understood ideology that sounds good because it confirms personal prejudices.

I guess it all depends on whose ox is being gored. What I find personally offensive is not the naked self-interest--goes with the territory of being human, I suppose--but the delusional attempts to turn selfishness into something rational (even admirable) by finding some expedient jusitification for it (thank you Ayn Rand and your book on the virtue of selfishness).

For someone who has been reading Aristotle, Plato, and Karl Marx lately(and they're amazing congruent, at least in my viewpoint, which I'll explain later), this whole season is one of the ugliest times around because it exposes much more of my fellow citizens than I really want to know.

To recap a bit: Aristotle said quite objectively that there is a natural conflict between the rich and the poor in a democracy--it's a power struggle as he saw it, the rich wielding money and the poor countering with numbers. The only way to maintain a democracy, he said, was through balance and trust: if you favor the rich, you get revolution; if you favor the poor you get economic reprisals because the rich hoard their money (in our version, banks refuse to give loans). It seems both sides need to be somewhat unhappy for the enterprise to function.

I think the wealthy are more aware of this process than the average citizen but everyone these days seems out for themselves and most political thinkers have historically recognized this.

Plato, for example, decided that balance is all very well but that the poor and undeucated really couldn't be trusted to rule themselves because they are just too--well--poor and uneducated. What was needed was a ruling class of people bred and trained to govern. In other words, he tipped his hat toward the rich and the noble (who else got educated?). Unfortunately, our rich today tend to become civic minded only after they have accumulated more money than God can count. On the way up they are anything but noble. Someone once said that behind every great fortune there is a great crime. That may be a bit too glib for my taste, but it does seem that on the way up they tend to think of the poor as inconvenient in expecting what they consider hand-outs, except, of course, when the poor are useful in some economic way.

Now, Marx went the other way. He agreed with Aristotle that there is inevitable conflict, but he came down on the side of the poor, except he clouded the issue by insisting on calling them the workers and focusing on the means of production to the point that his ideas underpinned an unworkable and destructive system that left out the rich entirely (the only way to wealth was through political corruption), hence destroying Aristotle's thought from the other direction. Jesus Christ, incidentally, falls into this category although he never ventured into economics directly except to castigate the rich and the priests (also rich) for oppressing the poor--see what his thoughts are being used to justify these days: things like using personal wealth as a sign of personal virtue (a good Puritan belief that God rewards those He loves with material benefits). In a fit of his own despondency, Christ once blasted a fig tree because it had no fruit--a metaphor for the rich denying food to the poor; I doubt cutting off unemployment benefits and denying medical care would have appealed much to him either.

I guess the depression I feel is at the gross lack of self-understanding I see around me and, worse, the actual celebration of willful ignorance and disregarding the procession of our past. Our political elections seem designed only to fan the flames of the very qualities that make us less than we can be.

Very few among us even acknowledge the concept of balance as a political goal--I give Obama credit for being one of those few. He's been steering a careful course, trying to restore that balance. But look what he's getting for it. This country has gone overboard for the rich in the past administration, basing such things as tax cuts on the political premise that if the wealthy retain their money and spend, the economy will lift all ships. Well, it hasn't. All it did was unleash the greed and self-interest that Aristotle said it would.

I will vote for any candidate who talks seriously about Balance (and not just of the federal budget, which will inevitably cut programs that serve the poor). But my fears are real and I don't see much beyond mere reacting replacing careful thought. All I know is that if the political pundits are right and we return to the unbalanced emphasis on wealth that set us on our current path, I see trouble ahead.