Making war on the people

We don’t need our best and our brightest involved in politics; genius should be out curing cancer and writing novels that sound the black depths of the human heart. It doesn’t take any particular talent to serve in a state legislature or even in Congress (Jefferson imagined an amateur government might be run by yeoman farmers and tradesmen); they just need to be reasonably honest and, as Harry Truman said, “work in the interests of the common people and not in the interests of the men who have all the money.”

Governance is more like medicine than music. The prime directive of its practitioners should be to do no harm to the body politic. Certainly there are times when tough measures are called for, but any scars that are inflicted should be in service of achieving a greater good. We might disagree on what actions our elected representatives should take at any particular point in time, but we have a right to expect that they govern with a degree of empathy for the folks back home.

Ha.

We all know an individual American’s worth directly correlates to the bank account size. Money buys access, money changes minds. Money warps reality in ways that are absurd until you consider who stands to benefit from the absurdity. Poor people just don’t matter to some of those who are supposed to protect us. Our government is free to make war on the poor and powerless.

Most of us have become something less than citizens. We are more like crops to be harvested or resources to be exploited. Fictive personalities have been granted a better set of rights than you have because those stateless corporations have the ability to write much bigger checks to the people who pass laws than you can. So these corporations have been given the right to sell information they’ve surreptitiously gathered by spying on you.

You might think that your information belongs to you. Too bad. You’ve been outbid.

At the same time, a lot of these lawgivers have decided that the privacy of the world’s most public self-proclaimed billionaire matters more than national security. Despite promises to comply with decades of electioneering tradition by releasing his tax returns, despite real questions about what foreign entities might hold the note on his gilded existence, our president won’t tell us about his finances.

Because, as he’s said, he’s president and you’re not.

And if you want quality health care, prepare to pay for it. Or get yourself elected to Congress. Because these people are beholden to super-citizens like insurance companies and pharmaceutical firms. Because they have bigger things to worry about than whether you can afford to get sick. (Besides, if you amounted to anything, you’d have plenty of money to pay your doctor. After all, do you really need an iPhone or a curved-screen TV?)

The world is a hard place and you probably shouldn’t expect these denizens of marble halls to help you out. Because they’ve either got theirs or are in the process of getting same.

And because you’re dumb enough to let them operate as they do, to let them get away with not doing the right thing.

To be fair, the world is a complicated and nuanced place and it’s sometimes hard to decide which course is the right one to take. So it’s not surprising that human beings might look to professional explainers, for people who can make the world seem simpler. While there are plenty of people willing to try to do this in exchange for your attention (which they can sell to advertisers), most of them are guessing just like the rest of us. And worse, their guesses are incentivized by third parties who have their own versions to propagate. Most of us prefer to hear stories that reassure us and flatter our sense of ourselves as decent and smart. Any problems we have are most decidedly not our fault—they’re the fault of whoever the professional explainer finds convenient to demonize.

Some of us understand this and take into consideration that the talking heads on television—whether they’re paid by MSNBC or Fox or by the taxpayers—are entertainers whose mission is to convince us that what their corporate sponsors would do is precisely the best thing. This is how they get you to vote contrary to your own interest.

That’s your right, and it’s sometimes a noble thing. I can think of many things I would gladly support with higher taxes. You probably can too—most of us want a government able to protect us from threats we can’t handle on our own. Most of us would prefer old people not starve, that sick people not be denied medical attention.

Most of us believe there are some legitimate functions of government. A lot of us would prefer a government that doesn’t overly intrude on our daily lives.

I don’t think it’s wise to put much trust in government. Not because everyone who seeks or holds office is venal and corrupt but because it is so easy for human beings to rationalize whatever course they’d prefer to take. For cultural and psychological reasons, lots of us desire firearms; so someone provides the rationale that lots of firearms somehow makes society safer.

For cultural and psychological reasons, lots of us feel uncomfortable around people whose sexual identities seem less rigidly defined than our own; so someone provides the rationale that these people are disturbed and morbid, that they represent a threat to the way others would live.

For cultural and psychological reasons, some of us would prefer not to deal with vocabulary and nuanced argument; so someone provides the rationale that feelings trump facts and that there’s something unreliable and effete about thinking too much about anything.

This is why so many of us believe things that are demonstrably untrue; because someone has cynically supplied us with a set of talking points with which we can argue any absurdity. They’ve set us against each other, to squabble about what scares us most. We’re playing their game.

Maybe they’re smarter than we think.