Recent discussions of health care, “end of life” counseling, death panels, and denial of service to the elderly in a government-managed system triggered a series of synapse dominoes, and got me thinking about things like value and motives.
First, lets look at value, in this case our nation’s “Intellectual Capital.” The accumulated wisdom of generations is reposed in “old” people. The generation currently seeing the most attrition (WW II vets, Korean vets, people from that period) includes people who lived through the Great Depression and who have had the opportunity to view the last eighty-something years through the perspective of realized results, as opposed to promises of the day.
A sane assessment of their value would include the realization that these are the people who have, literally, been there and done that. Their experience and knowledge are anchored in practical reality rather than ivory-tower theory.
There’s a vast store of economic and political wisdom to be had there. The values of our nation are appreciated, understood and, indeed, personified in these “old” folks. The nation’s greatness is their gift to us.
Hurrying their demise is at best ill-considered, at worst a dastardly contemplation.
Accelerated Attrition: The Peaceful Solution
If you have as an objective the overturning of American culture in order to replace it with something more “progressive” (nod nod, wink wink), a barrier to this sort of wholesale theft of wealth and abridgment of liberty would be those with enough remembered history to have reason to resist it.
It’s no longer fashionable to take the pillars of cultural wisdom out into the woods and just shoot them. People like Stalin gave that practice a bad name.
Nowadays, in our kinder, gentler, more progressive society, the correct way is to frame death as an obligation — something you do for the greater good. Euthanasia (the “good death”) is far preferable to the messy and loud gunfire-and-blood-spatters technique. We’re much more civilized now, you see.
The greater good. Now there’s a phrase. What’s cool about it is that you can make up whatever definition you want, in whatever context you want, and there’s really no dictionary recourse.
Whatever we tell you it is, you have to accept that definition. Because we won. And we’re in charge now. And besides, we have a law that says . . . what we want it to say. If you have a problem with that, see the Semantics Czar, Humpty Dumpty.
The Ethics of The Greatest Good
It happens that I support the concept of ethical conduct being that of acting for the greatest good. However, I have a somewhat expanded context.
The greatest good is not served by thwarting basic survival principles to “outsmart” Darwin, based on some ideology du jour. It is not served by expunging Mankind from the Earth to assuage some self-inflicted guilt complex. It is not served by eliminating the single most useful, even powerful, thing that humanity has that differentiates us from the “lower” animals: our memory, our ability to learn — at a complex and conceptual level — from those who have gone before.
While it may serve some ideology to eliminate the collected learning of an entire generation, so as to establish a sort of “tabula rasa” on which to write one’s grand narrative, what that achieves at a racial/species level is not entirely unlike performing a lobotomy to eliminate “troublesome” memories and “unwanted” behavior.
It achieves “quiet” and “peacefulness,” which might appease someone with a fixation on control. Unhappily it also renders the subject unable to cope with the demands of survival, consequently requiring constant care. Which might appease someone with a fixation on control.
Survival, and the living it brings, is a noisy, rowdy business. Complete quiet and peace are appropriate for a graveyard.
The short-term gain of eliminating wisdom in exchange for quicker acceptance of an engineered society has the longer term effect of repeating the mistakes of the past, there being no memory of past consequences.
Whether it’s merely a side effect of a foolish attempt to shortcut directly from our imperfect society to a “more perfect” one, or a darker design to eliminate resistance to oppressive control, the business of eliminating the “old & unproductive” to make room for the younger, more malleable, more durable, and more profitable is a short-sighted false economy.
When contemplating the “greatest good,” it’s not enough to reduce it to an accounting exercise, with spreadsheets of cost-benefit analysis. Spreadsheets don’t have a function for “derive action from historical experience.” That’s a field known as “heuristics” by which one learns from past mistakes. You can’t learn from them if you’ve eliminated their memory.
The “greatest good” must include the implied modifier “over the greatest time.”
Mankind has managed to muddle along for thousands of years despite repeated purges, chronic oppression, and struggles for control, including wars all the way from a couple of villages, to nation states, to collections of nations across continents. The miracle of America is that its founders really did apply the wisdom of the centuries, painstakingly extracted from histories of the world. They really did learn from the mistakes of others. They realized the potential of the transmission of learning across the ages. And they didn’t wipe out a generation to do it. They harnessed history and ignited more than two centuries of the greatest prosperity of the common man that the world has ever seen.
Prosperity of the common man aligns very nicely with a goal of the greatest good for the greatest number over the greatest time. Self sufficiency is complementary to prosperity.
Prosperity of the common man is antithetical to the goals of rulers and those who seek power and control. Control is gained by creating dependency and need. The parable of the pigs (quo vide) is the classic model for the non-violent acquiring of control. The older pigs are always the hardest to capture. They have more memories on which to draw. Which makes them troublesome in captivity.
The current promises to “take care of” the population, especially coupled with “assistance in planning for end-of-life” for those who know too much — er, ah — for those who are infirm and in need of relief from the rigors of life, further coupled with the offer (at gunpoint, if need be) to help us “raise” our children, are clearly vectored at dependency, and hint that the powers that be may, at length, outlaw self sufficiency altogether.
It should be remembered that, when capturing wild pigs, the older ones nearly always have to be slaughtered. If they won’t go quietly, then the gate is closed on the ones already inside, and the older, craftier, wiser pigs are hunted down and dispatched with whatever measure of force is required. The ones that accept the corn and the fence live longer, eat better, and are only butchered when the time is right.
Let’s not dwell too much on that.
Just know that, as you practice self-sufficiency and strive for prosperity, you are indeed working for the greatest good and, if you can preserve the knowledge, the experience, the history, you will be working for that greatest good for the greatest time possible.
Lead the younger ones away from need, teach them the dangers of dependency.
Remind them that promises of unearned benefit are universally false, and lead to enslavement.
And show them the liberty that permits prosperity requires courage, and that courage can prevail.
