by RP
Burnham
Because they
are they are polar opposites, the hot and cold of human nature,
empathy and egoism are human traits that cannot be discussed
separately. Empathy is as old as humanity and probably even older
since chimpanzees and apes live in bands, which is a kind of
embryonic society. Egoism likewise probably has a long lineage, for
before full human consciousness arrived our primate ancestors most
likely worked in the might-makes-right side of the ethical
scale—witness male gorillas fighting to be the big bopper who gets
the harem. Now these modern gorillas and supposed alpha males wear
swanky suits and use manipulation, money and political power to get
their way.
As to their
effects in the world, and to make an astronomical comparison, egoism
is a black hole that swallows up everything that has the misfortune
to stray too close, while empathy is a life-giving sun that gives to
everyone and everything it benignly shines upon life-sustaining
warmth and energy. There are two causes of over-weening egoism:
either an abusive childhood or an entitled, privileged childhood. Of
the two, the latter is most dangerous. The egoist at the extreme end
of the scale is a psychopath; in these extreme cases the abused and
unloved individual might become a psychopathic killer and claim a few
victims, but many of those egoists sprung from elite, privileged
childhoods are also psychopathic in their complete disregard for
others (the libertarians of these neocon neoliberal days) and are
responsible for the death of millions and the misery and desperation
of millions more.
In fine,
egoism is the most dangerous force in the world and is responsible
for most of the evil and suffering in the world. People full of
themselves and displaying in all sorts of ways how they think
everything they do is better are merely annoying, but when it comes
to the boys and girls in government, industry and finance, their
self-love is crushing the whole world.
These
powerful elites always have a justification for their obsessions. In
the past emperors, kings, and aristocrats claimed they were God’s
chosen. The plutocrats of the modern world have dispensed with God,
but they have a philosophy that justifies in their minds the evil
they do and the misery they cause: it’s called libertarianism, and
Ayn Rand is their prophet.
Objectivism
is the name she gives to this philosophy. One thing about this
pseudo-philosophy is that it is accurately named in that she
objectifies people who are not entrepreneurs. She means us to
understand the term in the sense that she is looking at the world
objectively with no wishy-washy, goodie-two-shoes wishes and hopes
obscuring her vision. She thinks human nature is purely selfish, and
that any interference in the selfish quest for money, power and
success is wrong. She divides humanity into creators and slaves. In
other words, she sees a Darwinian world where the strong devour the
weak. That’s her objective reality. It does describe capitalism,
but capitalist reality is not the whole of human reality. It takes
one aspect of the human psyche, selfishness, and in general the human
instinct of self-preservation and looking out for oneself, and
inshrines as the single necessary virtue. But what is missing from
this narrow view of reality is reality itself. No man is an island is
not just a memorable phrase that John Donne came up with. It is the
essence of human reality.
Rand is also
very much aware that she is challenging 2500 years of the western
cultural tradition. She also despises Christianity, calling it a
slave religion (Jesus’s compassion for the poor, his anger at the
money lenders in the temple, St. Paul saying that the highest virtue
is charity—the Elizabethan word for empathy— and all that). I’ve
read that she was solipsistic even at a very young age, and when she
came to America she worked in Hollywood’s dream factory where
heroes are lionized as larger than life. That as well could
contribute to her dichotomy of humanity into slaves and parasites.
She thinks
she’s being Aristotelean, but again I’ve read that it is
pseudo-Aristotelianism and largely derived from secondary sources.
Her thinking is crude, rather like high-school kids who garbles their
sources in Wikipedia, and she misses Aristotle’s real ethical
message. It is Aristotle, after all, who defined human beings as
social animals, implying that we are all part of a larger whole. I’ve
also seen in a book review or elsewhere that she is really far more
indebted to Nietzsche and his hatred of Christianity and his contempt
for the weak. (In this case she is a fellow-spirit with Hitler.)
So we have a
high-school level of thinking that throws out the golden rule, Kant’s
practical imperative (never treat a human being as a means to an end
but also as an end in him- or herself), and such stirring slogans as
Gerard Winstanley’s Diggers’ creed: “Work together, eat bread
together.” She also misses the progress human beings have made
toward a better world and a deeper humanity where the law of the
jungle is replaced by cooperation and decency (so have way too many
leaders in our world today). But the libertarians, many of them
highly educated (like Milton Friedman) remain blinded by their egoism
and greed. The belief that you are only responsible for yourself and
that other people are either cogs in your machinery (workers,
customers, etc.) or barriers to your success and are only important
to the degree they interfere with the capitalist’s quest for money
and power is a fascist ideology. I once even saw a remark by a
libertarian who maintained that not being selfish was immoral. It is
easy to see that Libertarianism is a doctrine that appeals to people
without any conscience, social or otherwise. If politics and power is
a fetid watery garbage barrel, then Libertarians are the scum that
rises to the top.
Empathy is a
danger to the power elite: that’s why they objectify ordinary
people to make them less real. But objectifying people and making
them a thing, not a fellow human being, which is now the usual way
that the power elite think, is to miss the higher reality beyond
capitalism. I am but stating the obvious when I say inter-dependence,
both sociological and ecological, is the real reality. The food you
eat, the clothes you wear, the streets you drive on, the electricity
that powers your house and all your devices, and thousands of other
things are made by other people. The air you breathe, the rain that
falls upon the earth and the sun that warms the earth are nature’s
gift to all. Even the capitalists’ profit and success depends upon
other people—the workers and staffs of companies, the very
government itself that is responsible for infrastructure—roads,
bridges, flood control, providing water and police and fire
protection—all those things and a millions other environmental and
social things are needed by all, and only those puffed up with ego
and pride cannot see this. Only misinformed citizens, stupid or
otherwise, can support plutocracy.
Question:
can people change from being an egoist to a balanced human being with
full humanity? Self-preservation and caring for others are both
inborn, and as people grow older the weight of their inherited
backgrounds and their experiences tend to calcify. Of course most
people are probably a mixture of these two extremes of human nature,
but can people at both ends of the scale change? While the extremes
are often a permanent condition, it is not impossible to grow beyond
egoism. An empathic person might experience horrific conditions (such
as having his life destroyed by war) that change him into a
misanthrope. The same is true for egomaniacs.We all start life as
babies who are pure ego, but most of us learn that we share the world
with others. So, yes, people do change, and change is always possible
even for those set in their ways. Especially important in this
process is education. The libertarians seem to realize this, for in
their manic drive to privatize education (Bill Gates, et. al) they
clearly reveal the fear they have that public education might or will
open up minds to other ways of thinking besides selfishness. Already
they have influenced education policy enough (teaching to the tests
etc.) that shows that they fear the “sheeple” might cease to be
good little servants of the rich and powerful. The plutocracy already
controls the press and media that helps indoctrinate the people to
accept as the only reality that the rich and powerful know what is
best, but colleges and high schools are dangerously still teaching
too many students how to think clearly. Even so, it is still a
minority. The majority of U.S. politicians, journalists and ordinary
Americans demonstrate how scarce and thin compassion and empathy
are, especially in the public sphere. Of course when a tragedy such
as the death of a child occurs next door, most people feel bad, and
when natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, famines and
so forth happen, most people display or at least pretend to display
some sympathy, but these same people cannot understand Moslem anger
at what the U.S. has done in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen,
and other places. Your ordinary citizen has been conditioned to think
of Arabs as uncivilized, murderous beasts—cowardly curs who toppled
the twin towers, and are responsible for numerous terrorist attacks
around Europe and the U.S.A.
These acts
are despicable, but are they really caused by Arab hatred of our
freedom and/or various other inane explanations given by the media?
Or is it a failure of imagination? For over the past twenty-five
years we have been invading Arab and Moslem countries, killing
millions and destroying the lives of millions more. We have bombed
hospitals, water treatment plants, food warehouses, millions of homes
and apartment buildings. In almost totally destroying Fallujah,
Iraq, we also used nuclear-tipped weapons that already have caused
birth effects in children born after the attack. In the first Iraqi
war we killed thousands of retreating soldiers trying to escape to
Bagdad. Before that our embargo of medicines killed half a million
children from lack of proper care. We have murdered thousands of
innocent Arabs and Afghans and others with our cowardly drones. When
a westerner is accidentally killed by one of these drones, we
apologize, but not when the innocent victims are members of a wedding
party and those unfortunate enough to nearly when a drone murders a
so-called militant. Given all this murder and mayhem we have visited
on these third world people, it should not be difficult to imagine
the bitterness and anger these victims feel. It should also not be
difficult to understand that certain young men, filled with rage and
testosterone and who are of pugnacious dispositions will want to
fight back and get revenge for this evil. If the terrorist attacks on
the twin towers made your typical America angry and chomping for
revenge at this blowback response of Arabs, how about multiplying
that by a thousand to start to understand Arab and Moslem anger?
Obviously it
is not the fault of “ordinary citizens” that they do not
understand Arab and Moslem anger. Nowhere in the mainstream media,
the servant of the rich and powerful, will one ever see any empathic
understanding of our victims’ anger. We have done to the Arabs what
the neocons and neoliberals have been trying to do to ordinary
citizens: we have made them other.
But American
blindness to the effects of our evil mania for oil and power is still
a failure of imagination. Good citizens have a duty to look into the
deeds their government do in their name. So while the ability to get
outside of yourself and see the world as it is experienced by other
people, to see and feel as they see and feel, is almost totally
lacking in America, there are ways to correct this blindness.
One place
where young people can be trained to see life from a wider
perspective than themselves and their worldly goals is education,
particularly verbal education. Why verbal? Because the lies and
misinformation that the government and elites use to bamboozle the
people are verbal lies and manipulation. The most common is an appeal
to patriotism, spoken in a tone of deep passion that implies we are
in this together. False analogies are also as common as dirt. Think
of Hilary Clinton inanely calling Putin a new “Hitler.” Many a
plutocrat or government hack makes statements along the lines of
heads I win, tails you lose, as when they pontificate on the wondrous
benefits of these trade bills (NAFTA, the TTP), implying that they
will bring great prosperity to us all when the reality is that the
common folks will get shafted with losses of jobs while the rich boys
will add a couple more billion to their hoard.
Great
literature is one place where changing perceptions of what is proper
behavior for a sentient creature that can look before and after can
happen. Literature allows the reader to enter into the lives of other
people and see the world through different eyes. Of course, good
movies also offer this opportunity, but with Hollywood being a
commercial enterprise (the “Hollywood dream machine”) most of
their offerings are manipulative drivel.
But to
repeat, since the lies of the plutocrats and their hacks are verbal
lies, the art form that is verbal and which exposes us to all kinds
of people and their motives is the best training in the world. One
simple example: Iago in Othello. All through the play he pretends to
be Othello’s dear friend who only wants what’s best for him while
of course (as his soliloquies show) he is plotting Othello’s
destruction. The way Iago speaks to Othello is the way U.S.
politicians speak to the people. Another good example of the way
elites manipulate language to suggest that they share equality and
have mutual goals with the common people while actually exploiting
them is a line from one of Bertoldt Brecht’s Plays (I forget which
one): Laß uns fischen gehen, sagte der Angler zum Wurm” (Let’s
go fishing, said the angler to the worm).
Source:
Comments
Post a Comment