People see the sick and twisted world of American politics, and ask, how in hell did we get here? How did a once-respected nation become a rogue nation that is feared, distrusted, and despised?
Puffed up toadies clutter the airwaves nitpick at the symptoms, without ever addressing the root cause of our troubles… selfishness.
Selfishness stains our social fabric and pollutes our political structure. It is a virulent cancer that threatens the very existence of America. It’s time to confront it, before it destroys us all.
As infants, we are the pure essence of selfishness. We have to be; we are completely helpless. We cannot walk, speak, or feed ourselves. So in that context, selfishness is a survival mechanism. But as we mature, we gradually subsume our infantile selfishness and balance it with empathy, a concern for the feelings of others. Or at least we’re supposed to.
Unfortunately, many people do not, and they employ all manner of rationalizations to justify it. The queen of pathological selfishness even wrote a book entitled, “The Virtue of Selfishness.” Her pen name was Ayn Rand, and she was a third-rate hack who was dismissed as an unhinged sociopath… until the Republicans decided they could exploit her because she was a Russian hyping the most despicable aspects of predatory capitalism during the height of the Cold War.
Today, most Republicans in Congress make her third-rate novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, required reading for staff members.
Ah, yes… Republicans in Congress. Malice, mendacity, and staggering stupidity define them, and they look to certifiable psychopaths on cable news shows and hate radio to provide them with the lies that support their despicable belief system of “I, ME, MINE!”
Republicans have tried for decades to justify pathological selfishness by institutionalizing it as a political philosophy. And then along came the Tea Party. They have completely recalibrated the standard for obscene selfishness, not to mention brazen and malicious deceit.
These people screech about freedom, but pass the most invasive, restrictive and draconian laws in recent history, violating the Constitution with tedious regularity, and infringing on the personal freedom of everyone, even to the unbelievable point of violating a woman’s right to manage her own reproductive health.
These lowest common denominators of the social equation have been encouraged to indulge their selfishness in order to fuel the “Consumer-based Economy” that grew up after Reagan sold our manufacturing-based economy down the river, and allowed companies to outsource millions of good-paying jobs to third-world countries where they could make the same products for a fraction of the cost while selling them for inflated prices back here. Prodding people to buy over-priced toys they can no longer afford was good for the credit card banksters in the short term, but the boom-and-bust cycle is unsustainable in the long term, and now the inevitable consequences of our selfishness are coming home to roost.