How come we're still nice to each other? The right must be wrong!

[mqbush]

The greater the disparity in wealth within a society, the greater the disparity between ability to pay in and the greater the suspicion that exists regarding who is and who isn't paying a fair share and who is and who isn't getting his fair share of the benefits. The more suspicion and distrust there is the more poorly the society functions; the society fights itself, tears itself more and more apart, becoming more and more distrustful with each suspicion of someone shirking or someone taking advantage. Distrust, suspicion, resentment, feelings of inequity and unfairness, all have real, quantifiable effects on individual and public health.

Following the world-wide collapse of laissez-faire capitalism in the early 20th century, and the shake-ups and insecurities brought about by two world wars, people did what the members of all social species do when faced with trouble,-they came together in cooperative mutual aid. General MacArthur's Japan rebuilding policies narrowed the divisive economic disparities between classes, and in doing that he created a healthy and prosperous nation out of the ashes of a sickly, suspicious dead-end of extreme disparity and its resultant economic stagnation. Europe rebuilt itself in a generous spirit of collective effort that informed their new economies and their invigorated social ethics. In the US we adopted the ideas of Douglas MacArthur and Maynard Keynes, and enjoyed a generation of belief in what worked so well for us,-a trust in mutually beneficial collectivism with government management.

Trust is self-perpetuating; it takes an egregious violation of the belief in others to erode that trust. It's looking at the effect rather than the cause to say that governments here and in Europe started betraying society's trust by re-enabling pirate capitalism. Those policy changes were the effect of the cause, the cause being a decades-long, intensive, well-financed effort by moneyed interests to attack the integrity of this trust on two fronts,-to corrupt legislators in government, and to glamorize some glorious mythos of empowered individualism and "enlightened" self-interest.

This corrupting of legislators is not proof that government is inherently an untrustworthy manager. It only proves that people in the public sector can be corrupted by the necessarily pre-existing corruption of the private sector. It only shows that the private sector will always corrupt and undermine the public sector unless prevented from doing so. This means more controls, not fewer.

The paid-for evangelizing for narrow self-interest as a moral good and magical recipe for advancement over others is a knockout punch for trust in others. Self-interested competition reinforces the concentration on individualism. Suspicion of others destroys empathy and enables a solipsistic asocial pathology of ruthlessness. Each anti-social act by others is seen as proof that people are awful creatures, and life becomes a self-protective battle against our fellow men and the danger of a tyranny of any effective organization of others.

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world....
The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity."