John
F. Kennedy: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can
do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”[1]
Brian: This line is
probably the most famous piece of self-serving drivel a politician has ever
spoken. And yet, for some reason it’s widely considered to be some kind of
great, inspirational saying.
Here’s my translation of the statement into
its intended meaning: ‘And so, my fellow Americans, inquire not whether the
government can actually do you any good; simply inquire how to best go about
sacrificing your interests for the sake of the government.’
The message of this line is absurd on its
face. What the heck is the point of supporting a government, or a ‘country’ as
Kennedy elusively puts it, if it doesn’t actually do you any good, but simply
demands that you sacrifice for it? Kennedy is telling us that we shouldn’t even
consider the benefit side of the governmental cost/benefit analysis (perhaps
because it would seem embarrassingly small next to the costs). But this is
surely an absurd procedure; flouting all of the rules of rational
decision-making. It would be as if a doctor, when asking a patient to consider
getting surgery, said: ‘ask not whether the surgery will do you any good; ask
only about the sacrifices you will have to make to render the surgery successful.’
I think I would want a second opinion…
Franklin Roosevelt: “Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an
alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President
and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this
country.”[2]
Brian: On the contrary, let us immediately forget the
mystical and ludicrous notion that the government is ‘ourselves’. Even if we
were to temporarily bend reality and, for the sake of argument, liken
government to a voluntary club freely joined by its citizens, it would still
not be ‘ourselves’. If I join a debating club that holds annual elections for
its leadership positions, I do not somehow ‘become’ the debating club, or fuse
my essence with the debating club. I remain myself, and the debating club
remains a collective grouping of individuals, formed for a delimited purpose,
that now includes me as one of its constituent members. If the government were
a voluntary collective grouping like this, the same would apply to it.
Of course, the government is
even less ‘ourselves’ than the voluntary club is. This is because those that
control the government use aggressive force to carve out territory for
themselves, over which they claim a monopoly on the use of ‘legitimate’
aggressive force thereafter. Anyone who wants to live in that arbitrarily-claimed
territory must submit to the dictates of the claiming government, or face
violent reprisal. If they want to keep their homes, people can’t freely join or
leave different ‘government clubs’, as they could with the voluntary clubs.
Hence the personal, individualized element is even more lacking in the
government case than it was in the voluntary club case.
Ah, but Roosevelt says that
‘the voters’ are actually the ultimate rulers of the democratic government, so
the government, while perhaps not ‘ourselves’, at least shouldn’t be considered
an ‘alien power over us’, right? Wrong. Firstly, while a majority coalition of
voters may indeed have some power in the government, this certainly does not
mean that I, personally, have any power in the government. What if I want
nothing to do with these majority coalitions, whose decisions I routinely find
to be either ignorant or repugnant? In that case, I submit that these majority
coalitions of voters are powers as alien to me as any authoritarian despot.
Secondly, even the majority
coalition of voters, taken as a collective, doesn’t have all that much power in
a representative democracy. They are only in a position to really exercise
their power every few years when an election is held. In the meantime, elected
governments can do all kinds of things that wouldn’t have been supported by the
majority of voters on an issue-by-issue basis. Also, nowadays, a lot of
executive and sub-legislative (‘drafting regulations’) power is vested, for
better or for worse, in the hands of unelected government bureaucrats. If the
politicians were really serious about making voters the ‘ultimate rulers’, than
they would opt for a system of direct democracy, where individual government
measures were separately voted on by the citizens in a constant series of
mini-referenda. But that’s not how democratic governments run these days, so
even for a majority coalition of voters, let alone for the voter outside of
that coalition, the government remains an ‘alien power over us’, contrary to
Roosevelt.
Theodore Roosevelt: “To educate a man
in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”[3]
Brian: This quotation is
based on an excessively pessimistic view of human nature. As phrased, it
asserts that a smart, educated person, if not indoctrinated with dogmatic,
baseless moral commandments, will necessarily seek to harm his fellow humans living
in society with him. It implies that the non-indoctrinated man is, by nature, a
psychopath, someone with no sympathy or compassion for his fellow human beings.
Compassion and sympathy, accordingly to this view, are traits that must be
pounded into people’s heads through a process of ‘moral education’.
But this view, of course, is nonsense.
Sympathy and compassion for fellow humans living in society with you, is a
trait that is naturally hardwired into most people’s brains due to evolution.
The early hominid species that survived the Darwinian struggle in order to give
rise to us Homo sapiens were social species; species that grouped together in
order to better survive the struggle for existence. To facilitate this cooperative grouping
together, individuals who had more sympathy and compassion for their fellow
group/society members tended to survive and thrive in social settings, much
more so than individuals lacking these traits. As a result, natural selection
operated to select sympathy and compassion for group members as traits leading
to better survival chances, which explains why these traits are innate to most
modern humans. Humans for whom these traits are seemingly lacking, such as
psychopaths, were probably born with them, but lost them as a result of a very
traumatic childhood. All of this can be found in Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man, and in Peter
Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, among other
works.
But perhaps Roosevelt really meant something
else when he used the word ‘society’, something that would save his statement
from falsehood. If we substitute ‘government’ for ‘society’, then the statement
makes a lot more sense. With this modification, Roosevelt is saying that the
educated man who is not indoctrinated with moral commandments will be a menace
to government. And with this statement I would agree.
I suspect that for most people, in most
areas of interest, the costs of having a government interfere in the area
outweigh the benefits of that interference. If this were recognized by many
people in a society, the government would be in great danger of losing a
significant amount of its power over that society. But here’s where moral
indoctrination comes to the rescue of the government. If enough people are
indoctrinated with moral commandments such as ‘always obey the law’, ‘respect
authority’, ‘put the interests of the country before your individual
interests’, and others, than the government’s position and power will be a lot
more secure. I suspect that, implicitly at least, this is what Roosevelt had in
mind when he made the statement.
Jimmy
Carter: “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit
communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence
and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by
what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things
does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material
goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”[4]
Brian: According to
Carter, ‘strong families’, ‘close-knit communities’, ‘faith in God’, and ‘hard
work’ are good, while ‘self-indulgence’ and ‘consumption’ are bad. We can
identify a clear pattern here: everything that is done for your own sake is
bad, while things that are done for the sake of something else (particularly
abstract entities such as ‘families’, ‘communities’, and ‘God’) are generally
good. The ‘hard work’ that Carter lauds can’t mean working hard for your own
sake, because that would inevitably result in ‘self-indulgent consumption’.
Thus it must mean ‘hard work’ done to serve other peoples’ or other entities’
interests.
This philosophy is similar to the one behind
John F. Kennedy’s famous quote, critiqued above. This philosophy tells people
to forget about their own desires and interests, and to concern themselves only
with the interests of collective entities that are ‘higher’ than themselves,
entities which could, conveniently, include ‘countries’ or ‘governments’. This
philosophy of self-sacrifice in the name of collective entities is well suited
for maintaining the power and legitimacy of governments, which is why so many
politicians tout it.
Returning to Carter’s statement, he
continues by stating that self-indulgent, material gratification cannot satisfy
our ‘longing for meaning’. Firstly, it is highly arrogant and presumptuous of
Carter to tell every American what ‘they’ have discovered about ‘their’ longing
for meaning, or even to assume that every American has such a ‘longing’ in the
first place. What the heck does Carter know about the inner deliberations of
millions of Americans concerning the ‘meaning of life’? Maybe some of them find piling up material
goods to be quite meaningful!
Secondly, the ‘meaning’ or ‘purpose’ of
life, contrary to Carter, is to self-indulgently consume, or enjoy, that life. If
part of that self-enjoyment comes from starting and maintaining a loving
family, engaging in community life, or worshipping Gods, than that’s all well
and good, but it doesn’t take away from the fact that all of these activities
are ultimately pursued for the sake of self-enjoyment. Carter tries to dodge
this by equating ‘self-indulgence’ and ‘consumption’ with material pleasures
alone; but this simply will not do. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines
‘self-indulgence’ as: “excessive or unrestrained gratification of one’s own
appetites, desires, or whims”[5]. The Oxford dictionary
defines ‘consumption’ as: “The action of using up a resource.”[6] Neither of these
definitions is tied to material gratification alone. One can easily have an
‘appetite’ or a ‘desire’ to start a family or to engage in community life, just
as one can easily use up either material resources or other resources (such as
concentration, physical exertion, or time/a part of your lifespan) in order to
satisfy these non-material appetites or desires. Like many of its enemies,
Carter tries to smear egoism by making it appear to be narrower than it actually
is by falsely confining it to material gratification alone.
[1]
Inaugural Address, 1961, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/jfkinaugural.htm
[2]
Address at Marietta, Ohio, 1938, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=15672
[3] http://www.quotationspage.com/quote/41338.html
[4]
‘Crisis of Confidence’, July 15, 1979. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-resources/carter-crisis/
[5] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/self-indulgence
[6] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/consumption
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