Our technologies have collapsed the universe of political life deep questions that we tackle together down to a single one, and this time unfortunately, we picked the wrong one.
Deep political questions go beyond issues of the day. Once upon a time in America, before McConnell and god-help-us Trump, when information flows between groups and persons were more constrained and gradual, it took a whole host of deep questions to distinguish the political beliefs and consequent actions of the one major group from the other. In the last few decades, and especially in the last few years, as the lubrication at an individual level of internet-driven communication media like as Facebook grew to massive scale, and politically homogeneous television news channels captured the mind-share of millions, the matrix of questions needed to distinguish a political action plan for the two major political parties in the United States has collapsed down to one, and that question is the primacy of self versus the primacy of community.
As any thoughtful person learns well at an early stage, this question of self versus community interest does yield a single universal answer.
An absolutest view of self-interest when applied to political systems produces proposals that include anarchy or levels of power decentralization and ethnocentrism which border on the feudal or the tribal, and cannot meet the needs of complex societies of hundreds of millions of interested persons who desire levels of well being that are best met by socioeconomic models with high levels of interaction and interdependence. The current U.S. interpretation of an unbound individual right to bear arms is a case in point here. 30%+ of the gun sales in the United States take place without a required background checks of any kind, allowing the most home-front protecting rural mothers side by side with the most heinous criminals and psychotics to amass unlimited collections of deadly armaments. The predicable result of this approach is the highest death-rate from gun violence in the world, due to a simplistic reliance on the selfish right to collect unlimited deadly weapons and ammunition versus the collection value in not infusing society with such a massive uncontrolled array of death-dealing tools. Yet our political leaders refuse to change this system, even though it is rather unpopular when polled. Trump calls this winning, by the way.
Equally ludicrous are the solutions of the absolutest community-first answer, which accelerate rapidly towards totalitarian control and the near absence of individual rights whenever they might conflict with a hypothetical model of greater good. In a system where the needs of the community always come before the needs of the self,for example, there is not much room for individual ownership of property. Yet there is scant reason to believe and great reason to be skeptical of public systems taking complete ownership of all land and wealth. Few of us would want to depend on the government to authorize the resources needed for our next meal, let alone the roof over our head. We are animals that demand a certain level of control and agency over aspects of our lives that we cannot and will not in good conscious yield up to the community in abstract, to say nothing of a far away bureaucracy.
Thus the effective response to any deep question of self versus community is nuanced and invariably outcome-determinative based on an eventual consensus reached through a balancing test – sometimes it is one, and sometimes it the other, most often it is a comprise. This is a complex and slow process in all but the most simple cases. So why has our discussion been reduced to this single question that resistant to easy answers?
The unfortunate truth here is that this single question, self versus community, has emerged as the single most effective means of generating political capital and control.
By training its adherents that less taxes (the self wins) is in all cases better than the alternative, republican party leaders allow the release of strong emotions with little required thinking. Who needs to spend time analyzing the question of which is better, having more money or having less?
By training its adherents that reductions to income redistribution systems of any kind of stealing from the poor and less fortunate, the democratic leaders release strong emotions without asking their adherents to consider questions such as whether or not a given program is allocating resources fairly or efficiently, or if a given policy might indeed be undermining self reliance that could benefit the individual and the community more in the fullness of time.
This said, there is a grave asymmetry in how effective this single question, self versus community, can be used as a means of generating political capital for its proponents. Because the self is a visceral and immediately accessible concept to all, and community is abstract and easy to lose track of, a political culture that passes every issue through this single filter is likely to yield far more capital on the selfish side than the community side, at least in the near term.
A land where republicans more or less rule, or at least those who ally with the most successful proponents of self over community, which certainly also include a few others.
Over the longer time horizon, excessive political capital on selfish answers, let’s call in the McConnell model, will create a distorted political culture which under the most gentle set of assumptions brings vast inequality and widespread suffering, and following several well traveled historical roads, eventual revolt by the community whose needs, while more abstract, not quite real.
Therefore, the time has come to start asking different political questions, perhaps ones that require more thought and engagement from each of us to reach more rich and satisfying answers alone and together. Let us choose the new set wisely.
See part 2, when it/if comes.
(c) 2018 ClownTower
Clown Tower 