If you think that America’s government has lost its way, there’s a protest for that. If you think Washington is in bed with big business and that lobbyists write our national policies, there’s a protest for that. If you think that Wall Street is a good place to indict the 1%, you’d better hurry because that protest started without you. And if you think that governments the world over are conspiring to slowly but surely encroach on our civil liberties as part of an organized scheme to enslave and suppress the governed in a vice-hold of absolute power, then (1) you’ve been spending too much time on inforwars.com, and (2) there’s a protest for that.
It’s all one protest actually.
The “Occupy Wallstreet” movement has given a voice to seemingly disgruntled, disenfranchised and disillusioned people across America. There are as many motivations behind the protesters as there is social and economic disparity amongst the 99% that is ironically represented as a united front. Yet somehow there’s unity enough to have propelled the movement out from New York’s crowded island to less cliché places for protests. If it shows anything, it shows that a significant number of people are being moved to political speech, even if what comes out is an inarticulate generalization that glosses over the causal relationship between national policies and their own current personal circumstances. It’s more along the lines of that feeling that something is wrong, although you can’t prove exactly what caused it, and you can’t exactly describe it, you know something is wrong, because what’s going on can’t be right.
Even if not everyone is saying it, there’s a fundamental principle mixed in with all the political rhetoric and pun-ridden signage that underpins the legitimacy of the protests, and the right of the protesters to demand change, or even just an explanation from our leaders as to why things are the way they are. This is the idea that the government—defined as the representative body of the people—has a purpose determined for it by the people who elect it, and that it should be accountable to those same people for its failure to achieve it.
Perhaps up to this point we might find some degree of consensus. But if there was ever a fork where the road splits, it is here. To say that Government has a purpose is one thing. To say what that purpose is, even on a broad scale, is to pick one stance in a thousand. And what’s more interesting to me than the plurality of opinions as to the government’s purpose is the reason for the plurality itself. The average voter’s perception of the government’s purpose is, in my opinion, a direct reflection of their own interests and position in society. And as there are many different interests and many different positions in society, so goes the logic.
Maybe this sounds obvious, but I don’t think everyone wants to readily admit that this is true. But just look at politicians—or more specifically—congressmen and women: they are often and necessarily torn between voting for laws and policies that help their constituencies (or the majority of voters within those constituencies) and voting in the interest of other causes. In an ideal world meeting the needs of any one constituency or community and the needs of the country would not be a mutually exclusive choice. And generally speaking what is good for the country as a whole is good for any one community, as communities are often microcosms of the nation with the same social and economic qualities. But not always. And when it comes down to choosing sides, loathe is a politician to come home from Capitol Hill bearing no gifts.
But who wants to confess that they’re more concerned about the value of their home than America’s poverty problem? Who wants to acknowledge that they’re more worried about their small business than whether the Nissan factory employing a whole town is about to close? What state employee is willing to admit that they won’t accept a pay cut and reduced pension benefits even if the state goes bankrupt? Who is going to be the first in line to refuse to support a tax increase that would create a path to national solvency? Who isn’t?
We believe the purpose of the government is to help us (or leave us alone), and we are 300 million individuals. It is only natural to assign priority to those issues that most immediately affect us. But we cannot all pursue our own ends and expect the government to pursue them all with us. And too often we overlook the connection between a problem that seems outside the scope of our interests and a problem we currently face. But even if our problems and their problems were totally unrelated, we cannot ask a government with limited resources to address ours first without acknowledging the implications: where resources go one place, they don’t go another. And where resources don’t go, they are missed.
It is difficult to escape the meddling influence of us. If the purpose of the government is to help rather than hurt, and helping means dividing resources among the people, the next question is fairness, and what is a fair division of resources and what’s not. Fairness is a judgment on the worth of human conduct, and what it entitles a person to. Valuations of human conduct evolve from a moral code. And a moral code is not without a source. And all of our answers to these questions are the product of the development of our consciousness in a certain environment, with certain internal and external forces wearing on us at all times. Yet when we come out formulated and all determined like we are, we forget the million varieties we could have been, and judge life from our point of view as if we can take credit for the whole process of our becoming, or as if we had nothing to do with it—whichever is easier to believe.
So am I saying that people more often form their political opinions around their own self-interests and prejudices than by using a set of principles that take into account the natural inequalities of existence and evaluate the needs of society based on disinterested criteria?
Guilty. But don’t worry—when I wrote this I took into account the natural inequalities of existence and evaluated the needs of society using disinterested criteria.
"Although a society is a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by conflict and by an identity of interests...there is a conflict of interests since persons are not indifferent as to how the greater benefits produced by their collaboration are distributed, for in order to pursue their ends they each prefer a larger to a lesser share."
John Rawls, Theory of Justice
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