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LOTOPHAGIAN GREED |
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Written by Dr. Joel Wade
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Friday, 27 March 2009 |
[Dr. Wade's analysis of liberal greed
is so brilliant that we are compelled to make it "free access" so that TTPers
can easily share it with their friends.
This needs to be as widely disseminated as possible.]
In Homer's Odyssey, one day Odysseus and his men come upon an island
populated by the Lotophagians -
people who do nothing but eat the Lotus plant, "which was so delicious that
those who ate of it left off caring about home." Odysseus forced the three of
his men who had eaten this plant back onto their boat, "though they wept
bitterly."
These three men wanted to stay, to be forever under the effects of the
illusion of the lotus, to the point that they would forget everything that thus
far had given their lives meaning.
There is a desire that can be a part of human nature, to have all things
taken care of, to be free of worry, free of hardship, free of stress, free of
the toil and difficulty of life. It can be a wonderful thing to have abundance,
to live a life where you are free to do as you please, and where your needs and
desires are taken care of.
But it can also be a gentle curse, as dangerous as the rocks to which the
Sirens of that same Odyssey lured their prey.
It is this desire to which modern day liberals are appealing; it is this
curse that their agenda seeks to subject us to, and it is this temptation that
has drawn many Republicans to also indulge in liberal programs and spending.
In The Myth of
the Golden Age, I talked about how people often reflect longingly about a
time in their past when everything seemed "simpler, people were healthier, air
was cleaner, people were more prosperous on one income than they are now on
two, morality was stronger, the world was more civilized, our country was
freer, and there was greater opportunity for the innovative mind."
That time is called childhood, a time when our parents were taking care of
everything, worrying the great worries, and providing us with what we needed.
This is the myth of socialism; it is the promise that Obama and his allies
seek to create for us.
There's a real and harsh conflict here that we as a country are going to
have to wrestle with. Because we have grown so wealthy and successful, that we
are at a point where enough of us can be easily seduced into eating of this
particular lotus plant.
The current scramble of our government to bail out and control every
business in trouble is an attempt to keep the lotus supply constant; to try to
make it so that the booms and busts no longer happen, so that we can be
securely, constantly on a gentle, complacent upward path.
This is the same impulse fueling the global warming hoax. Lotus purveyors of
the environmental stripe have created a mythology that the earth's climate
should stay at some ideal constant, and any slight deviation would mean
disaster.
If we threaten to force these folks back onto the boats, to undermine their
environmental dream of saving the earth, and away from their Lotophagian
paradise, well, they weep bitterly, and call us lots of names, and attack us
for our disbelief in their precious vision.
This is where the bitter anger towards
conservatives comes from. We are telling everyone that they have to get back
onto the darned ship.
When I was with the San Bushmen in the Kalahari, I was struck by their
vibrancy, their humor, and the good life they had made for themselves in such a
harsh and primitive environment. Their lives were hard, they had none of the
comforts or services that we in the West take for granted, and they most
certainly live shorter, more hazardous lives than most of us would choose for
ourselves.
Then we traveled to Tsodillo hills, where some of the San had come to live
in a village, where their food and water were provided, and the necessary
activities of hunting, gathering, and surviving were no longer necessary. The
results were depressing. The glazed eyes, the lethargic qualities, the lack of
that sparkle in the eyes, betrayed a fundamental unhappiness to their lives.
The pull toward the villages is so very strong, even though it is obvious
that it is also a great loss. How does one decide to go back to a harder,
harsher life? Especially when one is depressed.
Depression makes such a bold move nearly impossible.
Our rate of depression in America
has risen as much as five fold it the past several decades - even while our
abundance has skyrocketed, and the very real, measurable circumstances of our
lives have improved in near miraculous fashion.
I want that kind of abundance and improvement. I want it for my kids. It is
a good thing to be healthier, wealthier, with more opportunities and
possibilities for a rich and fulfilling life. But there is a dark side to all
of this: when we see that some of our idealistic visions can come true, we can
imagine that all of them can.
That can work well for those who work to make those visions practically
possible, because there is a fulfillment and a joy that comes of making good
things happen, and by doing the work, you stay connected with the realities of
how things actually come to exist. It makes it tangible, meaningful, and
gritty.
But it is also a dangerous and seductive fantasy that we have been riding
out, where enough people can live disconnected from the means by which such
miracles are created.
Like city folk who buy a neatly wrapped steak at the grocery store, but have
never seen or participated in the raising and slaughtering of a cow, enough
people have lost a connection with where our wealth comes from. They literally
don't know that it is created by people; and
they therefore don't see that those who have created this wealth have also earned their own personal wealth through their creation.
Oil, minerals, timber, water; the basic foundation from which everything we
use every day are made, are no longer appreciated as having been brought here
to us by tough and persistent characters who are willing to do the hard and
often dangerous work of bringing these resources to us, to be used to
manufacture what too many of us take for granted.
So it's easy for environmental lotophagians to just decree that we should
not drill for oil, we should make mining restricted to only the more "earth
friendly" techniques, we should not cut down "our forests", and we should not
build dams or reservoirs to provide power and water.
We take our medical miracles so much for granted that the main public
discussion is not about how incredible it is that we can be cured and healed of
so many ailments and injuries that would have been fatal, or at least more
debilitating, just a few years ago.
The main discussion is a complaint
that it costs too much, and that complaint has become a movement that now assumes these miracles, created by
heroic and devoted hard work by men and women who spend their entire lives
making these improvements for us.
We are now told that we should take these miracles for granted, and that
this body of scientific creation is now openly and arrogantly labeled as a right.
Jack has talked about the left as motivated by envy, and liberals by fear of
envy. While true, the left and liberals have a stronger word that they use
against the producers, and this word shelters them psychologically from the
diagnosis of envy. That word is greed.
But when people demand that they be given wealth unearned; when they demand
that they be given the most cutting edge healthcare as a right; when they
demand that they be given housing, good food, clean water, without any
responsibility for even acknowledging where it comes from - this is greed.
The left is motivated by greed.
The retired schoolteacher who told me that she wants more programs from our
bankrupt California government is
greedy. She wants stuff, lots more
stuff; and she doesn't care if her greed does grave harm to our economy, and to
millions of other people. She wants her stuff.
Of course envy is greed. It is passive greed. It is greed indulged in
by people who don't believe that they can make for themselves what they would
like. Because they can't make it for
themselves, they don't want anybody else to either.
This is the greed of the lotus eaters. We have landed on the island of the
Lotophagians; and those of us who are calling for everyone to get back on the
ships are hated by our intoxicated fellow citizens, because they do not want to
leave their cursed hallucination.
p.s. NEW!!! The
San People of the Kalahari is now available. Based on a journey that I took with Dr. Jack Wheeler
20 years ago, in which we made a first contact with a band of San Bushmen, This
is the story of these delightful people written for children, that includes an
audio CD of the story, with the sounds and voices of the actual people whom we
visited.
p.p.s. Do you want to make the most of your life?
Order your copy of Mastering Happiness and receive a free download of your book,
so you can get started right away...
"A book with much practical
wisdom concerning the road to happiness. Enthusiastically recommended."
Nathaniel Branden, author of "The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem."
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