Economic Horse Sense and the Public Good

What is it about human nature that sets the homo sapiens' innate greed and hunger for possessions and power above the cultivated capacity to reason prudently? Wasn't it Abraham Maslow who sincerely believed that mankind has evolved to possess the natural faculties necessary to rise above a dependence on primal animalistic drives for security in a defined, yet misunderstood, hierarchy of needs? Maslow called the ascension of a person above the cravings for physical security the process of actualization. He said, and taught, that when an individual begins to care more for those around him than he does for himself, he has commenced climbing the ladder of perception to ultimately realize that what is best for all human beings is the best for one human being.

That a person born and reared in the United States can grow up and maturate within affluent familial and fraternal societies, while not experiencing any want for food, shelter, or other requirements for physical security, is a reality that invariably creates in that person an unfortunate inability to empathize with someone who has existed his entire life without any degree of physical security. Such privileged individuals may, supposedly, be educated in the most elite universities by the most prominent pudits and professors of the behavioral and social sciences and eventually graduate never understanding what it means to be poor and without the means to be physically secure. Though they might claim that they understand what it is like to be poor and without the necessities of life (food, shelter, clothing, and financial freedom from pain, disease, and suffering) these people of privilege don't have the necessary experience to empathize.

When 98 percent of the wealth in the United States remains controlled by 2 percent of a population of 300 million Americans, it is easy to see why the 299,999 people holding the wealth, approximately the same number as one-fourth the population of Seattle, are segregated in a domain far removed from the 299,700,001 who don't have a fraction of the resources. A hundred years ago, there were PhD social scientists, graduates of such universities as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and William & Mary who clamored to avow that social Darwinism was the scientific reason why a very select few in the nation were endowed with wealth while a great many more were endowed with poverty severe harship. Nature had supposedly decreed that those born to acquire wealth were innately superior to those who were born into adversity and poverty. So, by virtue of their inherent superiority, the wealthy should rule over the poor. Around the turn of the 20th Century, social Darwinism was propounded advocated despite the reluctance of its advocates to adaquately explain the Lincoln, Jackson, Garfield annomalies.

Maslow taught that a human, born into an environment of oppulance and prosperity, never having experienced any lack of physical security, would be hardpressed to deal with a sudden dispossession of wealth, or a sudden reduction to rags from riches. Fictional scenarios of the rich person's fall to poverty from affluence and the successful transition of that individual from literally one world to another, have been popular reading, but are hardly real. On the other hand, abrupt and unexpected wealth in the life of a poor person has been responsible for greater degrees of success than the effect of sudden poverty. What leads a formerlly poor person to accept a responsibility for the well-being of others, when endowed unexpectedly with wealth, is a quality not present in someone who has never experienced the plight of poverty.

The extraordinary public acceptance of social Darwinism in the early 1900's has long since diminished as an empirical explanation for the incredibly small number of wealthy and powerful people in the United States, and the very large number of the poor. Yet, I have reason to believe that this fraternal society of political land barons, within a capitalistic economy, still secretly celebrates a natural superiority over those poor individuals not endowed by nature's God with money and power. The "Skull and Bones Society" of Yale University is but one example of an affluent fraternity pledging a cohesive bond of loyalty between men and women of wealth and political affluence. Others include the "Tri-lateral Commission," the "Council on Foreign Relations," and, perhaps, certain levels of "Free-Masonry."

The degrees of progress a person makes toward actualization on Maslow's hierarchy of needs cannot apply to those who have no experiential basis for empathy. The intense hatred of the Jewish people by the Nazis, during the 2nd World War and the decade immediately preceding, and the murders of over six million European Jews, was obviously wrought through an abandonment of empathy. The small number of Gentile Germans who actively opposed Hitler's re-location and ultimate extermination of the Jews, at the risk of their own lives, were mostly the unaffluent poor. Perhaps a few priests, religionists, and ascetic moralists might have opposed the attrocities of the Nazis, but the great majority of the wealthy German capitalists, who benefitted financially from Hitler's regime, quietly went along with the horrible genocide.

This goes to show that when the majority of citizens of any nation-state are gainfully employed, whereby their ability to pay bills, buy material possessions, and sustain a particular level of comfort is maintained, their interests in the well-being of others without jobs and security substantially diminishes. This is obviously what the very small number of wealthy affluent power-brokers, presently within the United States, want. When the Middle-Class is quietly acceptive of its status quo and, as a political unit, gives no regard for the plight of the poor, the affluent ruling aristocracy does not have to worry that its financial power and control are being questioned. But when the empathy of the Middle-Class is suddenly stirred by such themes as liberty, equality, fraternity for the masses, such as what caused such a social upheaval during gthe French Revolution, the very rich are viably threatened, causing them to react conspiratorially to defend their power and control.

Some people call it voter apathy that leads a citizen of a republic to disregard the power of the ballot as a means of social change. In a capitalist society, where unbridled freedom exists to legally realize and accept greed as a motive for personal development, nearly all the people who obtain a certain amount of money, through investment, usually want increasingly more money or profit through reinvestment. The ideology of capitalism makes such a state of mind seem morally correct when the idea of freedom without responsibility is used to elicit emotional responses

The investment-reinvestment principle in capitalism usually becomes an overwhelming compulsion for the Middle-Class person who suddenly acquires unexpected wealth. In the United States, such acquisitions are few-and-far-between. There are those few, of the Middle-Class, who are born poor and within thirty years become suddenly wealthy. One person out of 500,000 experience this transition. Then there are those who spend the first thirty-years of their lives single-mindedly working two-or-more jobs, putting away a nest-egg for retirement, and eventually use their savings to acquire a more lucrative investment when they are in their 60's. During the thirty years of arduous working, they only care about themselves, their consistent life-style, and the retirement account. They have blinders on while racing toward an economic finish line. Then, abruptly, they leave the work force to spend the remaining years of their lives spending the dividends of their investments. This essentially describes the lot of the Middle-Class in the United States. What describes the much larger number of people below the Middle-Class is a hand-to-mouth existence where the future is difficult to see beyond the next day.

So, the affluent society reigns, and is totally devoid of empathy, while the Middle-Class has voluntarily abandoned empathy for the sake of focus and hedonism. And the people at-or-below the poverty level are becoming poorer every day and less capable of functioning. In New York City alone, one-out-of-every-five people living in the five Boroughs does not know from where his next meal is coming. Similar demographic figures may be stated for Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Detroit, and Chicago. This remarkable idea that a basic lack of empathy is the root cause of all social despair is hard to swallow, but is, nonetheless, true. Abraham Maslow said that you can probably count the number of truly actualized human beings, who have lived on this earth, on your fingers and toes. Such people have definitely included Jesus Christ, Buddah, Mother Teresa, and Ghandi. Others coming to mind are much more debatable.

To walk a mile in another person's shoes is something most human beings are not willing to do in order to understand the feelings and plight of other less-fortunate human beings. Some people assert that Bill and Melinda Gates are truly compassionate folks, on their way to becoming actualized by virtue of their grand philanthropy. But I see the billions of dollars spent by their foundation for the public good as more of a tax write-off for a behemoth corporation, which nets in less than three-years time the amount of money the Gates have, thus far, given to charity. Their corporation has created, in effect, a capitalistic monopoly on certain goods and services used by most of the world's Middle-Class and a few of the poor. Every bit of money given by Gates to charity is deducted from Microsoft's staggering federal tax bill. Bill Gates was a focused hedonistic Middle-Class entrepreneur before and during the rise of Microsoft to corporate grandeur. This is why I believe that he, and his partner Paul Allen, abandoned their empathy long before they became billionaires. Sam Walton was, of course, the same way, merely a small part of a smaller number of a successful Middle-Class capitalists. These type of people would never think of walking a mile in another person's shoes. They would rather buy for themselves a brand new pair which would only fit their own very unique feet.

If common sense, frequently called horse sense, exclusively applies to human conduct benefitting the individual at the sore expense of the others of a human society, the cost-benefit analysis of this approach to living is greatly skewed. True economic common sense would dictate that individual economic behavior not benefitting the whole of society is ultimately counter-productive to the greater good. I think about this aspect every time I see a person driving twenty-or-more miles to-and-from work on a freeway in an SUV. When the fact-based reality of global warming is poignantly prevalent in the news, you would think that literate, normally intelligent people would alter their behaviors for the benefit of the earth's ecological survival. Surely, this is not a true application of economic horse sense. But, then, human behavior, on the whole, is hardly reasonable.