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HELPING PEOPLE VERSUS FIXING PEOPLE |
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Written by Dr. Joel Wade
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Friday, 02 April 2010 |
Obama talks about helping people, but his goal reflects the progressive goal
of the left in general. They are not really interested in helping people, they
are interested in fixing people.
That profound difference defines the conflict between the visions of right
and left (as Thomas Sowell wrote about in A
Conflict of Visions). To help
people is to accept them as they are, to understand that we are imperfect,
flawed beings, who are capable of extraordinary goodness as well as
unfathomable evil.
To help people is to accept that human nature exists, that our human nature
is one of the givens of life, and that what any particular person needs is
unique to them.
To fix people is to hold an ideal
vision of how they should be. It is
to reject the concept of human nature, and to hold a stance of rebellion toward
a significant piece of reality. To fix people is to believe that you can
fundamentally change who they are, and how they live their lives.
This is one reason why there is so little understanding between right and
left. They hold fundamentally incompatible visions. One vision rejects a
portion of reality - human nature - while the other seeks to understand and
work with it. One attempts to make something happen that cannot, the other
tries to have what positive affect they actually can.
One tries to help real people as they are, the other tries to fix masses of
people in the abstract.
Helping implies relationship and persuasion; fixing implies abstraction and
coercion.
Research from Weinstein and Ryan (referred to here)
shows what anyone paying attention to human nature could tell about the
difference between helping people because you want to, and helping people
because your are told to:
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Those who wanted to help someone felt more
well-being, vitality, and self esteem.
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Those who were told to help either felt no
different in terms of well-being, or felt
less well-being.
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Those who wanted to help people helped more
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Those who received help from people who were told to help felt significantly less well-being.
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Those who received help from people who wanted to help felt significantly more well-being.
I look at these findings and I think of the progressive vision of coercing
people to give to others through the government in the form of more
entitlements, higher taxes, and greater regulations. I also think of the public
service requirements that kids have to participate in these days for school.
By coercing people to be helpful, you are doing two things:
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You are taking away the great human joy in being
naturally helpful and kind, as the spirit moves you to be.
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You are replacing this with a regimented,
inefficient, and joyless duty, to be performed in response to external force.
In doing so, you are sucking the humanity out of human compassion and
caring. You are killing the most important benefit to helping: the benevolent
cycle that is created when one person cares about another.
And you end up encouraging the kind of behavior we saw in France several
years ago, when thousands of elderly people died in a heat wave, while their
own families were off vacationing, leaving the caring to their coercive
government.
The only people who really benefit from such forced caring are the people
who get to feel that they have made the world a better place... by forcing other
people do things that they believe to be good. It's one big ego trip, benefiting
the egos of the progressive leaders who seek to fix people.
They are "healing the world," or "fixing our broken world." They can't be
bothered with the inconvenience of individual autonomy or human nature. They
cannot accept that there are some people who will want to help a lot, while
there are others who won't really do very much at all, but in the aggregate, it
all works out better when people are free to choose. It's not fair, it's not
equal, and it's not all pervasive.
Years ago I heard a radio interview with David Gilmore, the guitarist for
the angst-rock band Pink Floyd. It was during Margaret Thatcher's term as
Prime-Minister, and he was trashing her, talking about how he was attacking her
policies in his song "On
the Turning Away."
During Gilmore's spiel on compassion and caring for the weak and the weary,
the interviewer - quite innocently - asked Gilmore, "How do you help the poor
and disadvantaged in your personal life?"
This caught Gilmore completely off guard, and by the stunned silence and the
awkward answer (paraphrased here) - "Uh... Myself? Uh....Well, I don't really do
anything personally, I argue for the government to do these things" - It was
obvious that this great weaver of musical tales advocating social justice had
never considered that he could personally use his own substantial wealth, time
and energy to actually help real people in need.
No, this is all abstraction. It's all about who gets to move which people
around the chessboard of life, in order that the mover can feel good and worthy
and useful and proud. It's about "fixing" people; "healing" our world.
This is the difference between the conservative vision and the progressive
vision. The conservative wants to help, the progressive wants to fix.
Human nature will not be fixed. No human, or group of humans, will ever
"heal the world" - whatever that means. We can and have certainly made great
progress in our culture, but that has all been through accepting and working
with human nature as it is.
Ignoring human nature is like ignoring a dangerous predator in our yard.
Accepting and acknowledging it allows us to deal with that predator more
effectively, taking precautions that make it's more deadly impulses less
attractive, and that encourage it to move elsewhere
But if we ignore human nature, we do things that are stupid, naïve, and
dangerous - like coddling enemies and mistreating allies, and forcing people to
do things that they will never do, toward ends that will never be reached. When
we pretend that metaphoric predator does not exist, we don't take precautions,
and we don't think strategically about how to encourage human nature towards a
less dangerous and more benevolent direction.
This is the great danger that we find ourselves in today. Our leaders,
filled with progressive, idealistic zeal, want to fix us. They want to pretend
that human nature does not exist. And I fear that they are letting the
predators out of their cages.
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