What is worth? Who is a hero?

love,” but it need not mean dying but rather living for them. Such daily sacrifices create the very foundation of social life.

Speaking up for justice in public life takes altruism to a new level, but doing so is not without risk. The consequences for those who do speak up vary from country to country and age to age. Before and since the time of Christ, we manage to excel in trying to silence dissenters, rebels and saviors by any means. The means vary: execution, assassination, imprisonment, exile, censorship, ridicule or derision.

In what is called a civilized society, free speech should be respected. Nonetheless, even when free speech is respected, controversy can and should be expected. In fact, in such a society, controversy is or should be the norm. There exists, however, in the minds of many an intolerance that demands the conformity of obedience. Controversy is the enemy. It is called obstructionist and divisive. And this is when civic courage is needed.

Consider just two controversies in our recent history: civil rights and presidentially launched wars.

Anyone who has ever read the Constitution knows that American citizenship derives from constitutional allegiance and that race and religion are supposed to have nothing to do with it. The Pledge of Allegiance affirms this. If this is so obviously true beyond dispute, why were we a slave-holding nation for almost half of our history? Why did Martin Luther King Jr. and so many others of both races have to pay with their lives for witnessing to the principle of civil equality? Or does this simply and ironically explain why De Tocqueville predicted that race would always be an issue in the United States?

Since 1968, we have been engaged in presidentially chosen wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. They transpired despite votes and voices to the contrary in Congress, resistance in the public and the private sectors, and ultimately nationwide violent and nonviolent protests during the Vietnam era and prior to the illegal invasion of Iraq.

If the declaration of war is vested in Congress by the Constitution and not the presidency, and it is, why were dissenters and protesters jailed, fined, derided or otherwise maltreated for opposing an abuse of presidential power? As for those who ordered millions of soldiers, sailors and Marines to rain war and death on hundreds of thousands? They retired untried to live in private affluence.

These are but two examples in public life where genuine courage in opposing flagrant illegality happened. Dissenters rebelled in great numbers and often at great risk. Such opposition contrasted with an often resentful and docile majority to whom compliance and support were the options of choice.

Consider the public reaction to today’s president. Put aside for the moment the distracting onslaught of his daily non-language of tweeted insults, his branding climate change a “hoax,” his persistence in grossly exaggerating his estimated inaugural audience despite filmed evidence to the contrary, his self-regarding claim that he is “very intelligent,” the Jerusalem “deal” that will throw the Middle East into further turmoil and violence.

Each time the president basks among his followers, I recall a character named Don Fanucci in Francis Ford Coppala’s “The Godfather.” Fanucci is the whitesuited enforcer in the white fedora who struts through his domains expecting and receiving the “respect” of the people he exploits. Respect and obedience are what he wants and gets, not because it is deserved but because it is the price to be paid by those who do not want to offend him. Like some pharaoh, he waits for the exploited to bow and kiss his ring.

Put all this aside, if you can, and focus only on the importance attached to profit by this president’s entire administration. This is the real rot; the rest is simply distraction.

In the system known as capitalism, there is a basic equation between money and worth whenever we hear, “How much is he or she worth?” The answer usually comes in terms of dollars and cents so that the individual is reduced to a commodity — something buyable or sellable. The individual who is wealthy is seen as worth much while the one who has little or nothing is worth little or nothing.

Carried to its logical extreme, in the end this means that the man or woman who has little wealth has little value. Such a person, in effect, does not exist, has no being.

This is the ultimate capitalistic formula, and the current administration embodies it to the last decimal point in its policies and in the men and women who have been presidentially chosen to implement them.

If this servility to power is combined with the capitalistic dogma of “no worth equals no being,” we have a fairly accurate portrait of the kind of society we are being driven to become. Bottom-liners and profiteers are the prime beneficiaries.

Many citizens clearly see this. But, unless their seeing leads them to say so courageously in public ways, this devolution will probably continue.