Is America Governable?
By Robert L. Kocher
http://www.zolatimes.com/v3.11/amer_govern.htm
4-6-99
When the founders of this country and the subsequent generations who built it created the most successful nation on earth, little did they realize that in their success they were sowing the seeds for ultimate destruction of the country. The time would come when the progressively soft environment created by social and economic progress would produce progressively soft and corrupt generations that eventually could not maintain what had been passed on to them and the nation would simply crumble and collapse from within. Paradoxically, the greatest enemy of this country has turned out to be the success of the greatest vision in
history.
As part of this decay process there is universal dissatisfaction with a
government in this country that is both powerless to handle the
degeneration taking place and at the same time has become a tool of that
degeneration. Concurrently, there are demands that government "do more for
the people" while spending less money.
We now have an extensive electorate that is so mindless as to be
impossible. They seek candidates who
speak their language, then become
highly incensed when office-holders turn out to be as hopeless as the
people who elected them. It's a grim fact that the Phil Donahue cultural
axis mentality isn't likely to either recognize or support candidates of
the quality of a James Madison.
The greatest contemporary factor determining governability of the nation
is pathology and psychological decay. One aspect of this is a pathological
incapacity to separate and limit personal boundaries combined with
pathological precision-avoiding, self-protective levels of abstraction.
Since the mid-sixties there has been continuing evolution of an extensive
population that is exasperatingly psychopathological in a peculiar way.
They demand to have the authority and freedom of adults. They neither act
like intelligent responsible adults nor have any apparent intention of
doing so. They can synthesize endless highly engineered sociological
arguments and they believe they know everything. Yet, when there are
unpleasant consequences to their behavior, they demand to assume the role
of innocent little children who are somehow the victims of that unknowing
innocence. They demand the level of accountability and responsibility of
pampered children. They demand unconditionally loving parent surrogates
who will pick up after them. They are simultaneously characterized by an
infantile rebelliousness so irrational that they are prepared to defy the
law of gravity.
The Democratic Party has clearly become the force for channeling and
implementing borderline-psychotic demands into the political-governmental
structure of this country. A number of Democratic office-holders are
little more than caricatures and expressions of the contempt for the world
held by the angry children they represent. Bitterness and contempt is the
only thing they are fit to represent. Caricatures and expressions of
contempt cannot run this country.
There is a pathological conceptual pat
tern of that seen in a small child
running deep in the Democratic Party. There is an absence of the concept
of instrumentality or prudent foresight either in producing negative
consequences or its necessity to produce positive circumstances. There is,
rather, a series of unreasonable demands as to how things should be
regardless of personal behavior, of antecedent conditions, or of
resources. Within this concept, simple demands are expected to be
sufficient to produce desirable consequences. The focus of responsibility
in society is for others to meet those demands, not the personal
responsibility of individuals to conduct lives so that demands are not
necessary. There is an unconscious belief in Unconditional Entitlement
without specific direction and disciplined effort.
The "Right" to a Job
New York Governor Mario Cuomo gave what was reported as the best speech at
the 1992 Democratic convention. His delivery was flawless. But the speech
content was pathological and dangerous. It was also representative of
thought at the convention.
Cuomo made assertions that were, or should be, frightening. One of these
assertions was that everyone has a right to a job. This assertion
irrationally separates the existence of jobs from the preconditions or
instrumentality necessary to create them. Jobs are conditional. Jobs exist
if, and only if, businesses and industries successfully develop or expand
to create them. If no one creates and maintains business and industries,
then there will be no jobs. If business and industries are destroyed, then
the jobs those businesses and industries support are destroyed. It takes
ten or twenty years of effort on someone's part to build a business that
creates jobs. If the people who attempt to build business or industries
are hampered or destroyed, then jobs will not be created. If the economy
functions, jobs are maintained. If the economy is destroyed, jobs are
destroyed. If the economy is destroyed so that fewer taxes can be
collected, there won't even be any government jobs or programs. Empty
assertions that jobs are a political right do not change that.
Jobs are no different than food. If the fields are not tilled, there will
be no food. Food is not a political right. It is a consequence of
intelligent effort. Employment is like food. If people do not build
businesses and industries, there will not be employment.
Any man of character and intelligence would be embarrassed to make the
statements Mario Cuomo makes. However, the child-like mentality of modern
liberalism does not recognize the reality of necessary prerequisite
conditions to be fulfilled for the existence of employment or anything
else, but only recogniz
else what it wants unconditionally.
I don't know whether Cuomo believes what he says. He's reputed to be one
of the best minds in the Democratic Party and has been recommended as a
contender for the Supreme Court. That he even has a mind would be rejected
by anyone of authentic intellectual maturity. The belief that Cuomo is one
of the best in the Democratic Party tells the world there are great
numbers of p
eople who believe what he is saying. If they believed that
what he said was ludicrously in error, he would not be hailed as
brilliant, nor would he have been a major speaker at the convention.
If Cuomo believes what he says, he's seriously mentally defective. If he
doesn't believe it, but voices it, he's little more than a psychopath
seeking to feed social pathology for personal or ideological gain. In
either case he's pathological and dangerous. To the extent that he
reflects the view of the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party is
pathological and dangerous. To the extent the Democratic Party represents
the thinking of p
eople in this country, those people have become dangerous
to each other and to themselves.
A second point Cuomo made in his speech that brought standing applause was
that people, presumably meaning Republicans or others advocating family
values or rational morality, should not push their personal morality upon
others. Presumably, private life and private morality should be a personal
decision and be personal issues.
The problem with the so-called private morality and personal decisions
that Cuomo and th
ose like him refer to is that they have not been, and are
not being, kept private and personal. These private and personal decisions
are part of a sequence of events. While the first action in this sequence
of events is demanded to be made on the basis of private and personal
decision, meaning a person does what he or she wants to at any moment,
there is no intention to keep the subsequent events in the sequence a
private and personal matter. There are demands to make the consequences
and subsequent events a public financial responsibility through the
intermediary of government. There are demands for unconditional social
acceptance and an underwriting of the support and costs. This is not a
private morality. This is a spoiled child's demand for economic and
psychological support for cradle to grave excesses which in the name of
social sensitivity are not even permitted to be recognized as aggressive
imposition upon others and as pathology.
That attitude is killing this nation.
Someone Else Is to Blame
Consider Magic Johnson. Beneath his superficial charm, basketball player
Magic Johnson is a big spoiled kid with no personal character who feels
personal unconditional entitlement. He went through an endless stream of
women with indifference to anything but his own amusement and finally
brought home a case of AIDS. Somehow he believed that his problem, are you
ready for this, was a lack of presidential leadership and he was angry at
President Bush, who happened to be president at the time Magic contracted
the disease and issued his angry protests.
Magic is unfortunately living under a death sentence from AIDS, but it
doesn't exempt him from personal responsibility. His problem is not that
he failed to use a condom, but that he failed to use a brain. That is not
said out of meanness or vindictiveness. It is said out of simple complete
exasperation.
Magic, with the support of many others, voiced the ridiculous and
conveniently vague complaint that President Bush failed to exercise
leadership or failed to speak out on AIDS, or something. Put this in the
perspective of hundreds of magazine articles, hundreds of news pieces and
hundreds of TV spot announcements per week on AIDS. The concept that Mr.
Johnson and millions of others like him have a personal responsibility to
examine the seriousness of what they are doing has become an unacceptable
concept. Someone else is to blame.
The President didn't exercise leadership. Why is the President of the
United States responsible for explaining to an adult married man (or what
should be a man) who is indiscriminately hopping in beds with unknown
people? There is suspicion that advice of "Just say no" wouldn't have been
viewed as acceptable leadership. That advice might have been the best
advice, and it's the advice that desperately needs to be taken; but it's
not the leadership Johnson or others are looking for. It elicits a new set
of tantrums from people such as Mario Cuomo over interference into
personal decisions and private morality.
So we have the ridiculous situation of an adult man attempting to blame
the president for his sex life, or for something, and being widely
supported in that position.
So, by left wing logic, everyone is to have the president running behind
them cautioning them to use some sort of prudence in their personal lives,
while Mario Cuomo simultaneously screams about intrusion into personal
decisions and lives before hysterical crowds. The same primitive
compartmented mentality is in a state of indignant protest over opposing
sides of its own demands.
There is basically no way of pleasing immature people who refuse to make
intelligent choices in their adult lives. When they destroy themselves,
they become angry at you for the consequences. If you propose a choice,
they become angry at you for the inconvenience of having to give up an
amusement for their own survival, the survival of the nation, or the
survival of the rights of others.
This is the mind-boggling attitude. We have an extensive population in
this country, including some famous, entertaining, and powerful people,
that you can beg and plead with not to do something. You can put TV spots
and write magazine articles giving them good reason not to do it. They'll
do it anyway in spite of all reason. Then they'll blame you and the world
when they destroy themselves and they insist on being viewed as being
victims. As supposed victims they believe they are owed compensation for
their condition.
Pleas for the absolute necessity to curb personal excesses invariably
elicit several reflexive replies. "That's not realistic." "That's not
going to happen." Or, "That's not possible." Or, "This is the nineties."
These assertions are employed in such an authoritative tone as to suggest
they reference an unquestionably proven major principle that must be at
least as valid as the fundamental theorem of calculus. This tactic effects
closure of the issue while attributing a ludicrous irrationality to
desperate pleas for restoration of sensibility.
For those who need help on this, "That's not realistic" does not in this
case reference a prime pillar of philosophical wisdom. It is merely
encryption of an angry spoiled brat's declaration that he or she has every
intention of doing whatever it is, no matter what. The "no matter what" is
occurring and is serious. Yes, this IS the nineties. The nineties are in
some respects the same as any other decade. Living successfully in the
nineties requires self-discipline, foresight, appropriate respect for
others, and basic realistic intelligence. These are life prerequisites. It
doesn't make any difference whether it was life in the twenties or life in
the nineties. It hasn't and won't ever change. The difference between this
and other periods is that since the sixties we have had large proportions
of generations who refuse to acknowledge and live by that reality.
Forty-five years ago the principle issues and purpose of government were
defense, public works, roads, bridges, education, economics, the care of
widows and orphans. If those were still the problems facing government,
governing this nation would be easy. If the contemporary population of
this country were conducting their lives in such a manner that those were
still the primary issues facing the government, then governing this nation
would be easy.
Today, major issues are: how to deal with the problem of people having
out-of-wedlock children with the same seriousness as they pursue the
newest dance fad; how to prevent fops in this country from importing
hundreds of billions of dollars in recreational drugs while financing the
pathways that make the stuff available in schoolyards; how to approach
discussing the realities of abortion while people have
pathologically-induced, floridly promiscuous sex lives; how to provide
day-care for uncared-for children so irresponsible parents can continue
single life styles; what to do about babies being born addicted to heroin
or cocaine; how to keep people from killing each other with AIDS with sex
partners not known well enough to know what they have or don't have; what
to do about children of divorced couples in a nation of adults who are
incapable of, or disinterested in, maintaining genuine relationships of
depth for any period; what to do about thirteen-year-old girls having
babies in large numbers; how to induce strangers to use at least marginal
protection if they can't be talked out of indiscriminately sticking their
sex organs up each other,s behinds--sometimes at the rate of several
partners a night; and what to do about the media and people from the
entertainment fields pimping for the entire surrealistic pathological
spectrum--with help from the ex-governor of New York.
Financing Personal Self-Absorption
How in the world did we ever get into this? This is not supposed to be the
major purpose of government. It is not the function of government. At
best, it's the function of camp counselors for impossible juvenile
delinquents and mental defectives. Somewhere hidden in the back wards of
state mental hospitals there is supposed to be a minuscule number of
people wallowing around with these characteristics. Instead, the country
is now flooded with a substantial number of people militantly functioning
at this level of personal incompetence under the banner of liberation.
Much of the nightly news, the protests, the social movements, the talk
shows, the political issues and so forth read like chapters from
psychiatric texts.
The numbers of people with assorted varieties of these characteristics now
represent a large angry politically powerful group who are determined to
control the direction of the country through exercise of the democratic
process and put us in the business of supporting and financing their
personal self-absorption. The Constitution means nothing in such
circumstances because a political majority can confer upon itself the
right to devise a new constitution to be written for its on purposes while
declaring the old Constitution invalid.
This is no longer a nation of adults seeking adult government, but a huge
out-of-control mental hospital filled with borderline psychotics who
demand to play at being their own therapists, or worse yet demanding to be
my therapist, while they rotate through seven mental states:1. Ever-increasing irresponsible self-indulgent behavior.
2.) An absolutely defiant determination to do more of the same when
questioned.
3.) Periodic tearful wailing and expectation of unconditional sympathy
over consequences of their irrational self-centered behavior and the
dilapidated condition of their lives.
4.) Temper tantrums when confronted with reality or when reality confronts
them.
5.) Periods of rage when somebody treats them with the same callused
immorality that they alone feel they should be licensed to apply to others
or when somebody treats them according to their own rules established to
supposedly allow only them to do what they want.
6.) Diffuse bitterness and rage at everything and everybody because of a
vague emptiness in their lives.
7.) Exponentially escalating demands on government to solve "conditions"
or so-called "social conditions" while behavior which produces those
conditions is continued.Meanwhile, there is progressively less interest in anything else,
including progressively less participation in basic economic productivity.
Proliferating on a large scale under the labels liberation, life styles,
progressivism, pluralism or something similar, the social institutions and
the country cannot survive the mentality arising in the last several
generations. This society is being burdened with a population
disproportionately constituted by self-absorbed weaklings who are
exclusively preoccupied with their own amusements at the expense of anyone
or anything else--including the quality of their own lives.
No society can survive a widespread belief that entitlement to occurrence
of pleasant conditions or non-occurrence of unpleasant conditions, whether
they be personal conditions or economic conditions, is disconnected from
the behavior or other factors determining those conditions. No government
or politician can indulge that belief for any period without destruction
of the society. For those interested in change, that belief is what must
be changed.
It is no wonder some of the best people are reluctant to become
presidential candidates. Who would want to become a camp counselor to a
nation of runamok spoiled brats who can't even agree with each other, or
themselves, on what they want. What they don't want is adult functioning
and adult responsibility. Maybe ex-governor Maria Cuomo can exhort that
platform before thousands of people. To ask someone with intelligence and
integrity to do so and still make the country work is a clear
impossibility.
Today, there is a wide expectation of politicians to lie for people, but
not lie to people. The implicit reality, of course, is that the resultant
requirement for election is that the politician is to lie about everything
to everybody, for everybody, to accommodate public lack of integrity. The
politician is then looked upon as disgustingly dishonest by individual
constituents who resent his lying for other people as well as just
themselves. If politicians look upon the people of this country with
cynical disgust under these conditions, who could blame them?
When you see public opinion polls that show public opinions on issues or
politicians vary by ten or twenty percent from week to week or month to
month, it means we have an extensive population in this country that is
too mentally unstable to vote intelligently for anybody or anything. What
candidate of any quality wants to become subjected to such mindlessness?
Even in a direct democracy, polls show an instability such that the people
would disassemble this country at 15 day intervals if left to their own
devices making political or economic stability beyond six months a rarity.
Survival of America will depend upon:1.) Whether the pathologizing of America has progressed to a point of
irreversible dominance.
2.) Whether a clarification and confrontation of the situation from
national leaders is possible.
3.) Whether a counter-pathologizing constituency can be extracted and
aligned, then unified into a political-social force.To a great extent it depends on you.
Robert L. Kocher is the author of "The American Mind in Denial." He is an
engineer working in the area of solid-state physics, and has done graduate
study in clinical psychology. His email address is
-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), April 07, 1999