The New Ideas Blog

It is easy to imagine that we can do the right thing, and that we can know what the right thing to do is, but is it so? We are so influenced by desires for things and what we want to be true that it colors everything we see if we allow our minds their usual ways. Let’s look at an example.

Suppose a politician long ago said “vote for me and I’ll force future generations to pay for you to quit working and relax.” People vote for him, and the “social security program” is created. To make it look fair people pay into the plan as though it is a retirement fund. But that’s for appearances only, since the money is actually never set aside nor invested, and in any case the payout is eventually far more than what individuals pay into it.

Generations pass, and we come to today. The money is all spent - it was spent all along the way as each dollar was taken in. So there is no fund, and the only way the promise is kept to those who stop working is to make those who are working hand over ever larger chunks of what they have earned. We know this - at least intellectually.

We also can clearly see that although some people are unable to work when they get old, there is no logical reason for people to stop working and start living off of others at a specified age. Retirement age is an invented concept (I just hired a 74-year-old to dig a ditch for me). After all, 30-year-olds can be crippled and unable to work while 90-year-olds run thriving businesses. However, most of us don’t want to see nor understand what this suggests.

I have to repeat again that there is no “fund” to draw the money from. A government lending the money to itself is not an investment any more than if you lent yourself your entire 401K for a vacation and then bragged that you’re getting a great rate from yourself and so will retire rich someday. This is an important point, because it suggests that this is actually just another welfare program by which those working now have their money taken and given to others.

Even if you are in favor of some welfare, is it fair to take money from the poor young guy working at the gas station and trying to raise a family just so a couple with a million dollars in assets can quit working and sit on the beach in Florida spending it on margaritas? Should those who are relatively wealthy be allowed to feed their slot-machine addictions off of those who are relatively poor and working hard to survive?

I can guess what arguments are forming in readers’ minds. It was a promise by the government? A “social” contract? If billions in Ethiopian government bonds from the 1940s were discovered and the only way to repay them now was to enslave and starve the people living now, would that be right? Extreme example? Of course, but it’s only a matter of degree. How poor does a man have to be before it is wrong for the rich to keep taking his money to enhance their lifestyles?

Now, back to doing the right thing. Some of you might agree with what this suggests politically. You might be okay with calling the system welfare and limiting it to those who truly need it. But what about if it’s time for you to collect - or getting close to that time? I predict that it will get harder for you to remember any arguments against the system then.

There are many ways to look at this, and intelligent people can argue for or against almost anything. But it is hard to imagine a person who is about to get free money for the rest of his or her life still being able to look at this issue honestly and objectively. Is it right to take the money knowing that waitresses and blackack dealers and street cleaners have to work even harder so you can have that extra cash every month? I don’t really know.

I might argue that as long as you are paying taxes in other ways it is just a refund of sorts. See how easy it is to find a way to make it okay? Too easy, and though I am just using social security as an example here the point is that it isn’t easy to do the right thing if we can’t even trust our own minds to now what it is. It would be nice if man was the truth-seeking animal, but more often he is just the rationaliser - and so good at it.

This, by the way, is why we have the current spectacle of people yelling complaints about government health care while on medicare. Although consistency is not an automatic virtue, it does sometimes suggest sincerity in the search for truth, but it sure doesn’t exist much when direct self-interest enters the argument. Right wing Republicans think it is wrong to take money from a small businessman, for example, to pay for a poor person’s doctor visit, but they don’t mind making the working poor pay for their childrens’ education through public schools - even into college with government grants.

No, it’s not easy to do the right thing. In fact, doing the right thing requires us to know what’s right, which requires us to seriously doubt our “reasoning” and challenge anything and everything we believe (how else could we discover false beliefs?). This requires a level of self observation and self awareness that few have, and few choose to develop, but it is the only way we can begin to see truth that is not distorted by all the stuff going on below consciousness. Come to think of it, though this seems to have gone far beyond the political start of this post, a commitment to exactly that sort of self-work might be the only long-term and lasting solution to political problems that plague us.

Tags: doing the right thing, politics, Self Work

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Political Ideas, Self Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.