If tranquility is your goal and writing your profession, then you are well advised to march in harmony with the myths, lies and misunderstandings of the day. If you assume that fact and truth automatically win, your mistake is quickly punished. The artillery of the intellectually misbegotten and the shock troops of the Big Lie are bound to blast, crush and pillage your peace of mind. Don't look back. They are already gaining on you.
The human imagination is not satisfied with facts. People want to believe in good guys and bad guys. They want to enhance their own feelings of entitlement, of being blessed by the hand of God or the forces of history (take your pick). Better to dream of forty, fifty or sixty virgins than a workable social system. Archetypal fantasy is satisfying. Political economy is humiliating.
Recently I heard the following statement: "The rich in this country are involved in a plot [against everyone else]." If only this statement were true, then the solution to our woes would be simple. "EAT THE RICH." Unfortunately our problems are not due to the evil plotting of the rich. Our problems are due to ignorance, bungling, petty egotism and ordinary human wickedness. It is ironic as well as remarkable that nothing has proven more ignorant, or has led to worse bungling, or given greater scope to wickedness, than blaming the rich. Here is an error that has submerged Africa, plagued Latin America and has cost Eurasia dear. Wherever it has been the basis for policy, the elimination of the "rich exploiters" has not uplifted the exploited poor. Instead, it has sunk the poor in a deeper misery. Revolutionary socialism has demoralized entire regions of the earth, leaving the infrastructure in tatters and the social structure without the tools to pull itself back into the market - back into a system of property rights.
The myth of the rich plotting against the poor is the template of anti-Americanism abroad. The American presence in Afghanistan and Iraq is denounced as "neo-imperialism." The United States is somehow stealing Iraq's oil, just as it mysteriously plunders the wealth of the Third World. You can unpeel an union, but you can never unpeel the layers of misunderstanding involved in this world view. America is not stealing the world's resources. Furthermore, the elimination of America would not uplift the world's poor. The Bolshevik Revolution eliminated the entire aristocracy, clergy and bourgeoisie of Russia. Was the lot of the peasantry and urban proletariat improved?
My writing has always opposed socialism because I'm a poor man, and poor men live better under capitalism than socialism. A poor man has more freedom under the free market than a controlled market. Of course, I realize that the poor man is vulnerable. I realize that the employee is vulnerable to his employer. The renter is vulnerable to his landlord. What we seldom consider, on the other hand, is the vulnerability and fragility of wealth and ownership. Employee theft is a serious problem in the United States. A renter can trash the property he rents, and many are doing so today. The question of good and evil cannot be reduced to the wickedness of the rich and the innocence of the poor. Society itself is a structure, and wickedness infects this structure at all levels simultaneously. If the rich are losing their sense of social responsibility, the poor are losing their work ethic. The demoralization of society is progressing. The rich want to trade with communist China, setting aside the future security of the country. Meanwhile, class envy and resentment serve to excuse the lazy and irresponsible at the bottom of society. Decadence exerts its own form of "pressure from above, pressure from below." And so the squeeze is on.
A few years ago a friend of mine returned from a public function of middle class businessmen and expressed his shock at their behavior. They were uncultured, he said. They had no sense of propriety or dignity. Their knowledge was shallow, their moral sense attenuated. He had higher expectations of the middle well-to-do. I noted, at the time, that real class is not determined by wealth. A country might consist of a well-to-do rabble. My dictionary defines rabble as "a heterogeneous, disorganized, confused collection." It may or may not be a fair characterization of the American middle class today. But I think we are headed in this direction.
It is my contention that the demoralization of American society extends to all classes. The middle class in America is gradually becoming a rabble. Only it is a rabble with the illusion of order and propriety. Now consider what this means: If you take away a man's material wealth, he is left to fall back on his spiritual resources. But what if decades of prosperity have hollowed him out? What if his spiritual resources have dwindled? How will he deal with a major economic depression or war? If one lacks certain inner qualities, it may impossible to reconstitute a system of wealth that was built on those qualities.
Today's political problem does not stem from the wickedness of the rich. It grows out of the disorganization of man's inner life. The appearance of ideology as a substitute for religion, especially where ideology involves the intellectual justification of racial or class-based hatred, promises a grim future for America and the world. All too often we prefer to believe a myth, or a Big Lie, because it is more satisfying to imagine that we have a solution - in class envy, in hatred, in a policy of EAT THE RICH. America itself is the nation that signifies the "dominance of the rich over the poor." We should not be surprised that the destruction of America is a kind of prescriptive formula, unconsciously believed by millions. It is also a policy prescription for a mentality that may, indeed, prevail in Asia, Latin America and Africa.
It may be the very thing we are combating in the War Against Terror.
