With Obama’s reelection a week ago, talk has resumed of shared sacrifice, our fair share, and a whole litany of ideas that sound wonderful while they ignore the nature of man. Men are inherently selfish. You cannot change that by changing their behavior, and their behavior betrays their true sentiments.
Most utopians talk about how wonderful it would be if everything were equal. That’s an oversimplification. If murder and stealing pens from work are equal, none of them would like to be executed for purloining a pen from the office. If being a couch potato and a sewage pipe cleaner are equal, nobody will clean the sewer pipes if they can sit at home. They begin their argument by bastardizing a philosophical principle of the revolution- that men are equal. Their behaviors are not.
Recent news stories reveal that people don’t really want things to be equal as much as they want things to be better for them. From the Obama phones to extension of unemployment checks to free Wal-Mart gift cards for just showing up to a job fair, everyone seems to be looking at advancing himself regardless of how that impacts his neighbors. Perhaps that’s because we don’t really know our neighbors; perhaps it’s because they want to sound kind when they are really something else. Everyone has skeletons in his closet; maybe if we extol our own virtues and point out the motes in another they won’t notice our flaws.
To illustrate, in the last week, we have seen some retribution from people who perceive themselves as victims of the entitlement mentality. At Hostess, workers protest an 8% paycut that has led to a prolonged strike. The CEO announced that if they do not back off, Hostess, which has filed for bankruptcy for the second time in seven years, will lay off 18,000 people. In essence, if the protestors continue to insist what they demand and keep 8% of pay, 18,000 people will take a 100% paycut. Last week, an adjunct where I work told me during the course of a conversation that “you’re paying for health care for other people. You can pay for mine too” even though I never go to a doctor. She went on to talk about how she’s paid into it and that it’s “her money” even though we can’t afford to pay for it. Like many Social Security recipients, she demands her cut, what she paid in, regardless of our ability to pay. That’s very selfish. Over the past several years, state civil servants have refused to cut their budgets to help the state, county and city fix theirs. The policemen finally bent, and the teachers bent for a year, but the teachers are back demanding an increase in pay, and the firemen never made any concessions of which I am aware. Ironically, they do not realize that we can survive without them; they cannot survive without us because if there are no neighborhoods to patrol, children to teach, or fires to put out, what need have we for their services? Then there is Jesse Jackson Jr, who has been in treatment for bipolar disorder and who has been expelled from Congress who refuses to retire without disability. Of course he makes it all about him without worrying about what’s best for the people for whom he ostensibly works.
Then there’s me. Back in 2008, when the State of Nevada first went into a budget crisis officially, I wrote Governor Gibbons a letter. I impressed upon him the fact that we cannot spend money we do not have to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like. I know full well that the state is full of employees who draw paychecks but do not do much work if any at all, and if we remove them there is plenty of money to refurbish schools, buy computers, pay bills, give raises to people who do the most work per capita (like myself). Last week, despite being defeated 67-33 on the measure for more money, the school district changed tactics asking for a business tax when the property tax request failed. The school district “found” money last year. Why didn’t they use that to fix schools? I digress.
In my letter to Governor Gibbons, I asked him to lay people off, knowing that I might lose my job because I was relatively new. I explained that it was better for us to go do something they actually need than to pay people to staff offices on the chance that someone might need them. Particularly offensive is when, as a student told me last night, the DMV employees told him he just needed to get a different smog check to pass. That’s not very helpful, and neither he nor I know what the technicians are actually paid to do. They are paid to harass us. Very few of them are qualified to let alone interested in directing our activities in ways that will benefit our lives.
That’s not the rhetoric. We are the only species on the planet that puts the well being of other species over its own. We disenable raw materials to protect obscure beetles, rodents, and weeds, until and unless of course the time comes to fast track high speed rail across California. When it comes to their pet projects, all the rules fly out the window; when it comes to the interests of Liberals, the ends always justify the means, particularly if they benefit. Liberals believe in shared sacrifice until they are asked to sacrifice, and then they pepper Congress for redress.
What these events show me is that people are selfish. They are more interested in themselves when the time comes to put up or shut up than they are in the good of the many. I have taken a 15% paycut since arriving here, and I tell people that 15% beats 100%, but some people are willing to risk losing everything in order to not lose anything at all. That’s absurd and illogical. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, and I told the Department Chair once that I only count on the money in my account already. After all, another student discovered yesterday that was a good move when, after giving a month’s notice to be nice, they told her yesterday not to bother coming back at all. People are willing to do almost anything as long as it doesn’t cost them anything personally. They are free with other people’s resources but absolutely stingy with their own.
We cannot arrive at utopia unless people really mean to do what is necessary to live that way. We cannot have utopia if people do it grudgingly. Taking from one man and giving to another does nothing to advance society, because neither has benefitted from the virtue of the other. He who has was not allowed to decide to give and he who lacks was not allowed to decide if he wanted to receive. Entropy then, rather than virtue, has increased, and perhaps resentment arises in both parties. The nature of man is not geared to serve, sacrifice, or share. We cannot change that by legislating behavior. Obama would do well to remember that all real change begins from within. First clean your own house, and then you can see more clearly to clean up the house of another.
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