Theft at the Public Till
It was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who noted that in their economic live- lihoods, people were closely integrated with and interdependent on one another; the simple, self-reliant life of the solitary forager was a distant and forgotten bit of the past. Constitutional government, Rousseau held, was based on individuals’ self-interest rather than their mutual commitment to the ideal of freedom. It promised justice but delivered manipulation and exploitation as everyone sought to use the system to his own immediate ad- vantage. In short, Rousseau argued, the philosophy of Hobbes, Locke, and Bacon had brought forth what he called a new bourgeois society. It was based on fear of death and a new science of self-preservation and personal comfort, and amid its idealistic promises of individual freedom and social harmony, it was a recipe for hypocrisy. People professed devotion to law, freedom, and the common good. But these promises were opportunistic, based on an expectation of advantage. It was a society that taught privilege and injustice. The late Allan Bloom wrote that the bourgeois is defined by the fact that, when dealing with others, he can think only of himself and that, when trying to satisfy himself, he can think only of how others will see him. Is this different than Tocqueville’s noting of America that “the first thing that strikes the observer is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute for him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone” Two hundred years after Tocqueville, we don’t “see” the poor or the homeless or the junkie, much less feel benevolent or compassionate toward these people. We don’t see the problems of our neighbors or our fellow citizens. “They” have become different than “us.” “They” are part of the problem. The government is helping “them” and not “us.” “They” need to get out of our way. We need to change our thinking. Modern American society provides us with an opportunity to control
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